Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Foreword

PART ONE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

PART TWO

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

Afterword

WE THE LIVING

published in 1936, was Ayn Rand’s first novel, and it has gone on to sell nearly two million copies in the mass market edition.

The theme of We the Living is one of the most significant of our time—the struggle of the individual against the state. It portrays the impact of the Russian Revolution on three human beings who assert the right to live their own lives and pursue their own happiness. It tells of a woman’s passionate love, held like a fortress against the corrupting evil of a totalitarian state, which demands from its citizens not independence but self-sacrifice.

New American Library

Published by New American Library, a division of

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2,

Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,

Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

New Delhi - 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632,

New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,

Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First New American Library Printing, May

Copyright © Ayn Rand O’Connor, 1936, 1959
Copyright © renewed Ayn Rand O’Connor, 1964
Copyright © Eugene Winick, Paul Gitlin, Leonard Peikoff, 1987

Introduction copyright © Leonard Peikoff, 2009

Afterword copyright © Leonard Peikoff, 1995, 2009

All rights reserved

Information about other books by Ayn Rand and her philosophy, Objectivism, may be obtained by writing to OBJECTIVISM, PO Box 51808, Irvine, California 92619.

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

Set in Adobe Garamond

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

eISBN : 978-1-101-13766-6

http://us.penguingroup.com

Introduction

AS AYN RAND SAYS IN HER FOREWORD, We the Living is not a novel about Soviet Russia, which is only the backdrop of the story. The novel’s events, characters, and outcome are selected not by their relation to history, but to philosophy, which means that the book’s theme is universal. The theme is the evil of totalitarianism, a species of depravity not restricted to any country or century.

The basic cause of totalitarianism is two ideas: men’s rejection of reason in favor of faith, and of self-interest in favor of self-sacrifice. If this is a society’s philosophical consensus, it will not be long before an all-powerful Leader rises up to direct the faith and sacrifice that everyone has been extolling. His subjects cannot resist his takeover, neither by exercising their faculty of thought nor their passion for values, because these are the two priceless possessions they have given up. The end result is thought control, starvation, and mass slaughter.

Because of the Greeks’ commitment to reason, worldly happiness, and (relative) freedom, the above causal sequence was absent for centuries from the West. Then Christianity took over, demanding of men—with full consistency for the first time—a life of faith and sacrifice. Although delayed by primitive technology, the result came soon enough: the infallible Pope, the plummeting life span, and the elimination of unapproved thought by the Inquisition.

The highest-ranking Christians in Europe were the first practitioners of Western totalitarianism. It was they who discovered the essence of a new kind of State, and offered it to the future as a possibility to consider.

At last, there was a Renaissance, and then the West’s long struggle toward the Enlightenment with its commitment to reason and the pursuit of happiness, and its ridicule of Christianity. The result was the freest country in history, America. It did not last, however, because nineteenth-century intellectuals, followers of Kant, rejected the ideas of the Enlightenment in favor of new forms of unreason and unselfishness. Within only a few generations, cause led to effect: totalitarians of every stripe sprang up, each claiming this time to be secular and scientific even as all worked diligently to reproduce the medieval model.

Totalitarian states differ in every detail, but not in their nature and cause. And in regard to details, what difference do their differences make? What does it matter to the victims if the infallible leader claims messages from the supernatural or from an unperceivable dialectic? If he demands sacrifice for Corpus Christi or for the proletariat? If the people are made to raise their hands in prayer or their feet in goose steps? If the killer troops wear black gowns or red shirts? If those out of favor are ripped open by knives in Spain or left to freezing starvation in the gulags? States like these often pose as enemies of one another, but the pose is tactics, not truth.

An eloquent example of the truth is what happened to We the Living under Mussolini. During World War II, the novel was pirated by an Italian film company, which produced a movie version without the knowledge or consent of AR. Because of its length, the picture was released in 1942 as two separate movies, Noi Vivi (We the Living) and Addio Kira (Farewell Kira). Both were enormous popular successes. The fascist government had approved the movie on the grounds that it was anti-Communist. But the public, like the director, understood at once that the movie was just as antifascist as anti-Communist. People grasped AR’s broader theme and embraced the two movies, in part as a way of protesting their oppression under Mussolini. In a takeoff on the titles, people began referring to themselves as Noi Morti (We the Dead), and to Mussolini’s economic policies as Addio, Lira. Five months after its release, the government figured out what everyone else knew and banned the movie. These events alone are eloquent proof that We the Living is not merely “about Soviet Russia.”

Nor is it merely about Europe or about the past. Witness the rise, in the United States today, of the Fundamentalist right aiming to outlaw ideas and values that conflict with the Bible; and the rise of the environmentalist left turning religious, invoking reverence for Nature’s Creator as the moral value mandating the end of capitalism; and, in more immediately practical terms, the eight-year rule of a “born-again” President, who shut down biological research he regarded as irreligious while claiming a message from beyond as a guide to foreign policy; and now his successor, of whom so far (2009) we know little, but whose campaign worked hard to prove that he is as devout as all the others. Will these developments, and many others like them, be united someday into an unstoppable religious juggernaut demanding of us the standard mind/self-emasculation, along with its standard political corollary? If it happens, its exponents are unlikely any longer to seize on economics or biology as their justification. As of now, it seems, we are headed back to the source: to the re-creation of medieval servitude—enforced by a much better-equipped secret police.

We the Living is a novel about the results of the freedom-erasing ideas you yourself probably accept. That is why it is relevant to you today. It is relevant because it tells you how to distinguish the poison the West is now greedily ingesting from the nourishment we desperately need. It is relevant because it is not about an ever-receding past, but about an ever-approaching future.

This book is not about your long-gone grandparents, but about your still-growing children.

—Leonard Peikoff
Irvine, California
December, 2008

Foreword

I HAD NOT REREAD THIS NOVEL AS a whole, since the time of its first publication in 1936, until a few months ago. I had not expected to be as proud of it as I am.

Too many writers declare that they never succeed in expressing fully what they wished to express and that their work is only some sort of approximation. It is a viewpoint for which I have never had any sympathy and which I consider excusable only when it is voiced by beginners, since no one is born with any kind of “talent” and, therefore, every skill has to be acquired. Writers are made, not born. To be exact, writers are self-made. It was mainly in regard to We the Living, my first novel (and, progressively less, in regard to my work preceding The Fountainhead), that I had felt that my means were inadequate to my purpose and that I had not said what I wanted to say as well as I wished. Now, I am startled to discover how well I did say it.

We the Living is not a novel “about Soviet Russia.” It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life—using the word “sanctity” not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of “supreme value.” The essence of my theme is contained in the words of Irina, a minor character of the story, a young girl who is sentenced to imprisonment in Siberia and knows that she will never return: “There’s something I would like to understand. And I don’t think anyone can explain it. . . . There’s your life. You begin it, feeling that it’s something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it’s like a sacred treasure. Now it’s over, and it doesn’t make any difference to anyone, and it isn’t that they are indifferent, it’s just that they don’t know, they don’t know what it means, that treasure of mine, and there’s something about it that they should understand. I don’t understand it myself, but there’s something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it? What?”

At the time, I knew a little more about this question than did Irina, but not much more. I knew that this attitude toward one’s own life should be, but is not, shared by all people—that it is the fundamental characteristics of the best among men—that its absence represents some enormous evil which had never been identified. I knew that this is the issue at the base of all dictatorships, all collectivist theories and all human evils—and that political or economic issues are merely derivatives and consequences of this basic primary. At that time, I looked at any advocates of dictatorship and collectivism with an incredulous contempt: I could not understand how any man could be so brutalized as to claim the right to dispose of the lives of others, nor how any man could be so lacking in self-esteem as to grant to others the right to dispose of his life. Today, the contempt has remained; the incredulity is gone, since I know the answer.

It was not until Atlas Shrugged that I reached the full answer to Irina’s question. In Atlas Shrugged I explain the philosophical, psychological and moral meaning of the men who value their own lives and of the men who don’t. I show that the first are the Prime Movers of mankind and that the second are metaphysical killers, working for an opportunity to become physical ones. In Atlas Shrugged, I show why men are motivated either by a life premise or a death premise. In We the Living, I show only that they are.

The rapid epistemological degeneration of our present age—when men are being brought down to the level of concrete-bound animals who are incapable of perceiving abstractions, when men are taught that they must look at trees, but never at forests—makes it necessary for me to give the following warning to my readers: do not be misled by those who might tell you that We the Living is “dated” or no longer relevant to the present, since it deals with Soviet Russia in the nineteen-twenties. Such a criticism is applicable only to the writers of the Naturalist school, and represents the viewpoint of those who, having never discovered that any other school of literature can or did exist, are unable to distinguish the function of a novel from that of a Sunday supplement article.

The Naturalist school of writing consists of substituting statistics for one’s standard of value, then cataloguing minute, photographic, journalistic details of a given country, region, city or back yard in a given decade, year, month or split-second, on the over-all premise of: “This is what men have done”—as against the premise of: “This is what men have chosen and/or should choose to do.” This last is the premise of the Romantic school of writing, which deals, above all, with human values and, therefore, with the essential and the universal in human actions, not with the statistical and the accidental. The Naturalist school records the choices which men happened to have made; the Romantic school projects the choices which men can and ought to make. I am a Romantic Realist—distinguished from the Romantic tradition in that the values I deal with pertain to this earth and to the basic problems of this era.

We the Living is not a story about Soviet Russia in 1925. It is a story about Dictatorship, any dictatorship, anywhere, at any time, whether it be Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, or—which this novel might do its share in helping to prevent—a socialist America. What the rule of brute force does to men and how it destroys the best, will be the same in 1925, in 1955 or in 1975—whether the secret police is called G.P.U. or N.K.V.D., whether men eat millet or bread, whether they live in hovels or in housing projects, whether the rulers wear red shirts or brown ones, whether the head butcher kisses a Cambodian witch doctor or an American pianist.

When, at the age of twelve, at the time of the Russian revolution, I first heard the Communist principle that Man must exist for the sake of the State, I perceived that this was the essential issue, that this principle was evil, and that it could lead to nothing but evil, regardless of any methods, details, decrees, policies, promises and pious platitudes. This was the reason for my opposition to Communism then—and it is my reason now. I am still a little astonished, at times, that too many adult Americans do not understand the nature of the fight against Communism as clearly as I understood it at the age of twelve: they continue to believe that only Communist methods are evil, while Communist ideals are noble. All the victories of Communism since the year 1917 are due to that particular belief among the men who are still free.

To those who might wonder whether the conditions of existence in Soviet Russia have changed in any essential respect since 1925, I will make a suggestion: take a look through the files of the newspapers. If you do, you will observe the following pattern: first, you will read glowing reports about the happiness, the prosperity, the industrial development, the progress and the power of the Soviet Union, and that any statements to the contrary are the lies of prejudiced reactionaries; then, about five years later, you will read admissions that things were pretty miserable in the Soviet Union five years ago, just about as bad as the prejudiced reactionaries had claimed, but now the problems are solved and the Soviet Union is a land of happiness, prosperity, industrial development, progress and power; about five years later, you will read that Trotsky (or Zinoviev or Kamenev or Litvinov or the “kulaks” or the foreign imperialists) had caused the miserable state of things five years ago, but now Stalin has purged them all and the Soviet Union has surpassed the decadent West in happiness, prosperity, industrial development, etc.; five years later, you will read that Stalin was a monster who had crushed the progress of the Soviet Union, but now it is a land of happiness, prosperity, artistic freedom, educational perfection and scientific superiority over the whole world. How many of such five-year plans will you need before you begin to understand? That depends on your intellectual honesty and your power of abstraction. But what about the Soviet possession of the atom bomb? Read the accounts of the trials of the scientists who were Soviet spies in England, Canada and the United States. But how can we explain the “Sputnik”? Read the story of “Project X” in Atlas Shrugged.

Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force? If, as a citizen of the freest country in the world, you do not know what this would actually mean—We the Living will help you to know.

Coming back to the opening remarks of this foreword, I want to account for the editorial changes which I have made in the text of this novel for its present reissue: the chief inadequacy of my literary means was grammatical—a particular kind of uncertainty in the use of the English language, which reflected the transitional state of a mind thinking no longer in Russian, but not yet fully in English. I have changed only the most awkward or confusing lapses of this kind. I have reworded the sentences and clarified their meaning, without changing their content. I have not added or eliminated anything to or from the content of the novel. I have cut out some sentences and a few paragraphs that were repetitious or so confusing in their implications that to clarify them would have necessitated lengthy additions. In brief, all the changes are merely editorial line-changes. The novel remains what and as it was.

For those readers who have expressed a personal curiosity about me, I want to say that We the Living is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write. It is not an autobiography in the literal, but only in the intellectual, sense. The plot is invented; the background is not. As a writer of the Romantic school, I would never be willing to transcribe a “real life” story, which would amount to evading the most important and most difficult part of creative writing: the construction of a plot. Besides, it would bore me to death. My view of what a good autobiography should be is contained in the title that Louis H. Sullivan gave to the story of his life: The Autobiography of an Idea. It is only in this sense that We the Living is my autobiography and that Kira, the heroine, is me. I was born in Russia, I was educated under the Soviets, I have seen the conditions of existence that I describe. The particulars of Kira’s story were not mine; I did not study engineering, as she did—I studied history; I did not want to build bridges—I wanted to write; her physical appearance bears no resemblance to mine, neither does her family. The specific events of Kira’s life were not mine; her ideas, her convictions, her values were and are.

—Ayn Rand
New York, October 1958

PART ONE

I

PETROGRAD SMELT OF CARBOLIC ACID.

A pinkish-gray banner that had been red, hung in the webbing of steel beams. Tall girders rose to a roof of glass panes gray as the steel with the dust and wind of many years; some of the panes were broken, pierced by forgotten shots, sharp edges gaping upon a sky gray as the glass. Under the banner hung a fringe of cobwebs; under the cobwebs—a huge railway clock with black figures on a yellow face and no hands. Under the clock, a crowd of pale faces and greasy overcoats waited for the train.

Kira Argounova entered Petrograd on the threshold of a box car. She stood straight, motionless, with the graceful indifference of a traveler on a luxurious ocean liner, with an old blue suit of faded cloth, with slender, sunburned legs and no stockings. She had an old piece of plaid silk around her neck, and short tousled hair, and a stockingcap with a bright yellow tassel. She had a calm mouth and slightly widened eyes with the defiant, enraptured, solemnly and fearfully expectant look of a warrior who is entering a strange city and is not quite sure whether he is entering it as a conqueror or a captive.

Behind her was a car overloaded with a freight of humans and bundles. The bundles were wrapped in bed-sheets, newspapers and flour sacks. The humans were bundled in ragged overcoats and shawls. The bundles had served as beds and had lost all shape. Dust had engraved wrinkles on the dry, cracked skin of faces that had lost all expression.

Slowly, wearily, the train pulled to a stop, the last one of a long journey across the devastated plains of Russia. It had taken two weeks to make a three days’ trip—from the Crimea to Petrograd. In 1922 the railroads, as well as everything else, had not as yet been organized. The civil war had come to an end. The last traces of the White Army had been wiped out. But as the hand of the Red rule was bridling the country, the net of steel rails and telegraph wires still hung limply, out of the hand’s grasp.

There were no schedules, no time-tables. No one knew when a train would leave or arrive. A vague rumor that it was coming rushed a mob of anxious travelers to the stations of every town along its way. They waited for hours, for days, afraid to leave the depot where the train could appear in a minute—or a week. The littered floors of the waiting rooms smelt like their bodies; they put their bundles on the floors, and their bodies on the bundles, and slept. They munched patiently dry crusts of bread and sunflower seeds; they did not undress for weeks. When at last, snorting and groaning, the train rumbled in, men besieged it with fists and feet and ferocious despair. Like barnacles, they clung to the steps, to the buffers, to the roofs. They lost their luggage and their children; without bell or notice the train started suddenly, carrying away those who had crawled aboard.

Kira Argounova had not started the journey in a box car. At the start, she had had a choice seat: the little table at the window of a third-class passenger coach; the little table was the center of the compartment, and Kira—the center of the passengers’ attention. A young Soviet official admired the line that the silhouette of her body made against the light square of a broken window. A fat lady in a fur coat was indignant that the girl’s defiant posture somehow suggested a cabaret dancer perched among champagne glasses, but a dancer with a face of such severe, arrogant calm, that the lady wondered whether she was really thinking of a cabaret table or a pedestal. For many long miles, the travelers of that compartment watched the fields and prairies of Russia roll by as a background for a haughty profile with a mass of brown hair thrown off a high forehead by the wind that whistled outside in the telegraph wires.

For lack of space Kira’s feet rested on her father’s lap. Alexander Dimitrievitch Argounov slumped wearily in his corner, his stomach a shelf for his folded hands, his red, puffed eyes half-closed, drowsing, jerking himself up with a sigh once in a while when he caught his mouth hanging open. He wore a patched khaki overcoat, high peasant boots with run-down heels and a burlap shirt on the back of which one could still read: “Ukrainian Potatoes.” This was not an intentional disguise; it was all Alexander Dimitrievitch possessed. But he was greatly worried lest someone should notice that the rim of his pince-nez was of real gold.

Crushed against his elbow, Galina Petrovna, his wife, managed to hold her body erect and her book high to the tip of her nose. She had kept her book, but lost all her hairpins in the flight for seats, when her efforts had secured the family’s entrance into the car. She was careful not to let her fellow travelers observe that her book was French.

Once in a while her foot felt cautiously under the seat to make certain that her best bundle was still there, the one wrapped in the cross-stitch embroidered table cloth. That bundle held the last remnants of her hand-made lace underwear, purchased in Vienna before the war, and the silverware with the Argounov family initials. She greatly resented, but could not prevent the fact that the bundle served as a pillow for a snoring soldier who slept under the bench, his boots protruding into the aisle.

Lydia, the Argounovs’ elder daughter, had to sit in the aisle, next to the boots, on a bundle; but she made it a point to let every passenger in the car understand that she was not used to such mode of traveling. Lydia did not condescend to hide outward signs of social superiority, of which she proudly displayed three: a jabot of tarnished gold lace on her faded velvet suit, a pair of meticulously darned silk gloves and a bottle of eau-de-cologne. She took the bottle out at rare intervals to rub a few drops on her carefully groomed hands, and hid it promptly, noticing the sidewise, yearning glance of her mother from behind the French novel.

It had been four years since the Argounov family left Petrograd. Four years ago Argounov’s textile factory on the outskirts of the capital was nationalized in the name of the people. In the name of the people the banks were declared national property. Argounov’s safe-deposit boxes were broken open and emptied. The luminous collars of rubies and diamonds, which Galina Petrovna paraded proudly in sparkling ball-rooms and kept prudently locked afterwards, passed into unknown hands, never to be seen again.

In the days when the shadow of a growing, nameless fear descended upon the city, hanging like a heavy mist on unlighted street corners, when sudden shots rang in the night, trucks bristling with bayonets rumbled down the cobblestones, and store windows crashed with a sonorous ringing of glass; when the members of the Argounovs’ social set suddenly melted away, like snowdrops over a bonfire; when the Argounov family found themselves in the halls of their stately granite mansion, with a considerable sum of cash, a few last pieces of jewelry, and a constant terror at every sound of the door bell—a flight from the city stood before them as their only course of action.

In those days the thunder of the revolutionary struggle had died in Petrograd, in the resigned hopelessness of Red victory, but in the south of Russia it still roared on the fields of civil war. The south was in the hands of the White Army. That army was thrown in disjoined troops across the vast country, divided by miles of broken railroad tracks and unknown, desolated villages; that army carried three-colored banners, an impatient, bewildered contempt of the enemy—and no realization of his importance.

The Argounovs left Petrograd for the Crimea, there to await the capital’s liberation from the Red yoke. Behind them, they left drawing rooms with tall mirrors reflecting blazing crystal chandeliers; perfumed furs and thoroughbred horses on sunny winter mornings; plate-glass windows that opened on the avenue of stately mansions, the Kamenostrovsky, Petrograd’s exclusive thorough-fare. They met four years of crowded summer shacks where piercing Crimean winds whistled through porous stone walls; of tea with saccharine, and onions fried in linseed oil; of nightly bombardments and fearful mornings when only the red flags or the three-colored banners in the streets announced into whose hands the town had passed.

The Crimea changed hands six times. Nineteen twenty-one saw the end of the struggle. From the shores of the White Sea to those of the Black, from the border of Poland to the yellow rivers of China, the red banner rose triumphantly to the sound of the “Internationale” and the clicking of keys, as the world’s doors closed on Russia.

The Argounovs had left Petrograd in autumn, calmly and almost cheerfully. They had considered their trip an unpleasant, but short annoyance. They had expected to be back in the spring. Galina Petrovna had not allowed Alexander Dimitrievitch to take a winter fur coat along. “Why, he thinks it’s going to last a year!” she had laughed, referring to the Soviet government.

It had lasted five years. In 1922, with a silent, dull resignation, the family took the train back to Petrograd, to start life all over again, if a start were still possible.

When they were in the train and the wheels screeched and tore forward for the first time, in that first jerk toward Petrograd, they looked at one another, but said nothing. Galina Petrovna was thinking of their mansion on Kamenostrovsky and whether they could get it back; Lydia was thinking of the old church where she had knelt every Easter of her childhood, and that she would visit it on her first day in Petrograd; Alexander Dimitrievitch was not thinking; Kira remembered suddenly that when she went to the theater, her favorite moment was the one when the lights went out and the curtain shivered before rising; and she wondered why she was thinking of that moment.

Kira’s table was between two wooden benches. Ten heads faced one another—like two tense, hostile walls, swaying as the train rocked—ten weary, dusty white spots in the semi-darkness: Alexander Dimitrievitch and the faint glint of his gold pince-nez, Galina Petrovna, her face whiter than the white pages of her book, a young Soviet official with glimmers of light in his new leather brief case, a bearded peasant in a smelly sheepskin coat, who scratched himself continuously, a haggard woman with sagging breasts, who was counting constantly, hysterically her packages and children; and facing them—two of the bare-footed, uncombed children, and a soldier, his head bent, his yellow bast shoes resting on the alligator suitcase of a fat lady in a fur coat, the only passenger with a suitcase and with pink, glossy cheeks, and next to her the sallow, freckled face of a dissatisfied woman with a man’s jacket, bad teeth and a red kerchief on her hair.

Through the broken window, a ray of light came in over Kira’s head. Dust danced in the ray and it stopped on three pairs of boots swinging down from the upper berth where three soldiers huddled together. Above them, high over the upper berth, a consumptive young fellow was curled on the baggage rack, his chest crushed against the ceiling, asleep, snoring raucously, breathing with effort. Under the travelers’ feet the wheels knocked as if a load of rusty iron crashed and then splinters rolled, clattering down three steps, and another crash and splinters clattering, and another crash and splinters clattering, and over the travelers’ heads a man’s breath whistled like air hissing out of a punctured balloon; the man stopped at times to moan weakly; the wheels went on clattering.

Kira was eighteen years old and she thought of Petrograd.

The faces around her spoke of Petrograd. She did not know whether the sentences hissed into the dusty air were spoken in one hour, or one day, or through the two weeks in the rocking haze of dust, sweat and fear. She did not remember—because she did not listen.

“In Petrograd they have dried fish, citizens.”

“And sunflower-seed oil.”

“Sunflower-seed oil! Not real?”

“Stepka, don’t scratch your head at me, scratch in the aisle! . . . At our co-operative in Petrograd, they gave potatoes. A bit frozen, but real potatoes.”

“Have you ever tried pancakes of coffee grounds with treacle, citizens?”

“Mud up to your knees, in Petrograd.”

“You stand in line for three hours at the co-operative and maybe you get food.”

“But they have NEP in Petrograd.”

“What’s that?”

“Never heard? You’re not a conscientious citizen.”

“Yes, comrades, Petrograd and NEP and private stores.”

“But if you’re not a speculator, you’ll starve, but if you are, you can go in and buy anything you want, but if you buy you’re a speculator, and then look out, but if you’re not a speculator you have no money for a private store and then you stand in line at the co-operative.”

“At the co-operative they give millet.”

“Empty bellies are empty bellies with everybody but the lice.”

“You stop scratching, citizen.”

Someone on the upper berth said: “I’d like buckwheat porridge when I get to Petrograd.”

“Oh, Lord,” sighed the lady in the fur coat, “if I could have a bath, a nice, hot bath with soap when I get to Petrograd.”

“Citizens,” Lydia asked boldly, “do they have ice-cream in Petrograd? I haven’t tasted it for five years. Real ice-cream, cold, so cold it takes your breath away. . . .”

“Yes,” said Kira, “so cold it takes your breath away, but then you can walk faster, and there are lights, a long line of lights, moving past you as you walk.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Lydia.

“Why, about Petrograd.” Kira looked at her, surprised. “I thought you were talking about Petrograd, and how cold it was there, weren’t you?”

“We were not. You’re off—as usual.”

“I was thinking about the streets. The streets of a big city where so much is possible and so many things can happen to you.”

Galina Petrovna remarked dryly: “You’re saying that quite happily, aren’t you? I should think we’d all be quite tired of ‘things happening,’ by now. Haven’t you had enough happen to you with the revolution, and all?”

“Oh, yes,” said Kira indifferently, “the revolution.”

The woman in the red kerchief opened a package and produced a piece of dried fish, and said to the upper berth: “Kindly take your boots away, citizen. I’m eating.”

The boots did not move. A voice answered: “You don’t eat with your nose.”

The woman bit into the fish and her elbow poked furiously into the fur coat of her neighbor, and she said: “Sure, no consideration for us proletarians. It’s not like as if I had a fur coat on. Only I wouldn’t be eating dried fish then. I’d be eating white bread.”

“White bread?” The lady in the fur coat was frightened. “Why, citizen, who ever heard of white bread? Why, I have a nephew in the Red Army, citizen, and . . . and, why, I wouldn’t dream of white bread!”

“No? I bet you wouldn’t eat dry fish, though. Want a piece?”

“Why . . . why, yes, thank you, citizen. I’m a little hungry and. . . .”

“So? You are? I know you bourgeois. You’re only too glad to get the last bite out of a toiler’s mouth. But not out of my mouth, you don’t!”

The car smelt of rotting wood, clothes that had not been changed for weeks and the odor coming from a little door open at the end of the coach.

The lady in the fur coat got up and made her way timidly toward that door, stepping over the bodies in the aisle.

“Could you please step out for a moment, citizens?” she asked humbly of the two gentlemen who were traveling comfortably in that little private compartment, one of them on the seat, the other stretched in the filth of the floor.

“Certainly, citizen,” the one who was sitting answered politely and kicked the one on the floor to awaken him.

Left alone where no one could watch her, the lady in the fur coat opened her handbag furtively and unwrapped a little bundle of oiled paper. She did not want anyone in the car to know that she had a whole boiled potato. She ate hurriedly in big, hysterical bites, choking, trying not to be heard beyond the closed door.

When she came out, she found the two gentlemen waiting by the door to retrieve their seats.

At night, two smoked lanterns trembled over the car, one at each end, over the doors, two shivering yellow spots in the darkness, with a gray night sky shaking in the squares of broken windows. Black figures, stiff and limp as dummies, swayed to the clatter of the wheels, asleep in sitting postures. Some snored. Some moaned. No one spoke.

When they passed a station, a ray of light swept across the car, and against the light Kira’s figure flashed for a second, bent, her face in her lap on folded arms, her hair hanging down, the light setting sparks in the hair, then dying again.

Somewhere in the train, a soldier had an accordion. He sang, hour after hour, through the darkness, the wheels and the moans, dully, persistently, hopelessly. No one could tell whether his song was gay or sad, a joke or an immortal monument; it was the first song of the revolution, risen from nowhere, gay, reckless, bitter, impudent, sung by millions of voices, echoing against train roofs, and village roads, and dark city pavements, some voices laughing, some voices wailing, a people laughing at its own sorrow, the song of the revolution, written on no banner, but in every weary throat, the “Song of the Little Apple.”

“Hey, little apple,
Where are you rolling?”

“Hey, little apple, where are you rolling? If you fall into German paws, you’ll never come back. . . . Hey, little apple, where are you rolling? My sweetie’s a White and I’m a Bolshevik. . . . Hey, little apple, where. . . .”

No one knew what the little apple was; but everyone understood.

Many times each night the door of the dark car was kicked open and a lantern burst in, held high in an unsteady hand, and behind the lantern came gleaming steel bands, and khaki, and brass buttons; bayonets and men with stern, imperious voices that ordered: “Your documents!”

The lantern swam slowly, shaking, down the car, stopping on pale, startled faces with blinking eyes, and trembling hands with crumpled scraps of paper.

Then Galina Petrovna smiled ingratiatingly, repeating: “Here you are, comrade. Here, comrade,” thrusting at the lantern a piece of paper with a few typewritten lines which stated that a permission for a trip to Petrograd had been granted the citizen Alexander Argounov with wife Galina and daughters: Lydia, 28, and Kira, 18.

The men behind the lantern looked at the paper, and curtly handed it back, and walked farther, stepping over Lydia’s legs stretched across the aisle.

Sometimes some men threw a quick glance back at the girl who sat on the table. She was awake and her eyes followed them. Her eyes were not frightened; they were steady, curious, hostile.

Then the men and the lantern were gone and somewhere in the train the soldier with the accordion wailed:

“And now there is no Russia,
For Russia’s all sprawled.
Hey, little apple,
Where have you rolled?”

Sometimes the train stopped at night. No one knew why it had stopped. There was no station, no sign of life in the barren waste of miles. An empty stretch of sky hung over an empty stretch of land; the sky had a few black spots of clouds; the land—a few black spots of bushes. A faint, red, quivering line divided the two; it looked like a storm or a distant fire.

Whispers crawled down the long line of cars: “The boiler exploded. . . .”

“The bridge is blown up half a mile ahead. . . .”

“They’ve found counter-revolutionaries on the train and they’re going to shoot them right here, in the bushes. . . .”

“If we stay much longer . . . the bandits . . . you know. . . .”

“They say Makhno is right in this neighborhood.”

“If he gets us, you know what that means, don’t you? No man leaves alive, but the women do and wish they didn’t. . . .”

“Stop talking nonsense, citizen. You’re making the women nervous.”

Searchlights darted into the clouds and died instantly and no one could say whether they were close by or miles away. And no one could tell whether the black spot that had seemed to move was a horseman or just a bush.

The train started as suddenly as it had stopped. Sighs of relief greeted the screeching of wheels. No one ever learned why the train had stopped.

Early one morning, some men rushed through the car. One of them had a Red Cross badge. There was the sound of a commotion outside. One of the passengers followed the men. When he came back his face made the travelers feel uneasy.

“It’s in the next car,” he explained. “A fool peasant woman. Traveled between the cars and tied her legs to the buffer so she wouldn’t fall. Fell asleep at night, too tired, I guess, and slipped off. Legs tied, it just dragged her with the train, under the car. Head cut off. Sorry I went to see.”

Halfway through the journey, at a lonely little station that had a rotting platform and bright posters and unkempt soldiers on both platform and posters, it was found that the passenger coach in which the Argounov family traveled, could go no farther. The cars had not been repaired or inspected for years; when they suddenly and finally broke down, no repairs could help. The occupants were requested to move out speedily. They had to squeeze themselves into the other over-crowded cars—if they could.

The Argounovs fought their way into a box car. Gratefully, Galina Petrovna and Lydia made the sign of the cross.

The woman with the sagging breasts could not find room for all of her children. When the train pulled out, she was seen sitting on her bundles, the bewildered children clinging to her skirt, watching the train with a dull, hopeless stare.

Across prairies and marshes, the long line of cars crawled wearily, a veil of smoke floating and melting into white puffs behind it. Soldiers huddled in groups on the sloping, slippery roofs. Some of them had harmonicas. They played and sang about the little apple. The song trailed and melted away with the smoke.

A crowd awaited the train in Petrograd. When the last panting of the engine reverberated through the terminal vaults, Kira Argounova faced the mob that met every train. Under the folds of shapeless clothes, their bodies were driven by the tense, unnatural energy of a long struggle that had become habitual; their faces were hard and worn. Behind them were tall, grilled windows; behind these was the city.

Kira was pushed forward by impatient travelers. Alighting, she stopped for one short second of hesitation, as if feeling the significance of the step. Her foot was sunburned, and she wore a home-made wooden sandal with leather straps. For one short second the foot was held in the air. Then the wooden sandal touched the wooden boards of the platform: Kira Argounova was in Petrograd.

II

PROLETARIANS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

Kira looked at the words on the bare plaster walls of the station. The plaster had crumbled off in dark blotches that made the walls look skin-diseased. But fresh signs had been printed upon them. Red letters announced: LONG LIVE THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT! WHO IS NOT WITH US—IS AGAINST US!

The letters had been made by a smudge of red paint over a stencil. Some lines were crooked. Some letters had dried with long, thin streaks of red winding down the walls.

A young fellow leaned against a wall under the signs. A crumpled lambskin hat was crushed over his pale hair that hung over his pale eyes. He stared aimlessly ahead and cracked sunflower seeds, spitting the shells out of the corner of his mouth.

Between the train and the walls, a whirlpool of khaki and red dragged Kira into the midst of soldiers’ coats, red kerchiefs, unshaved faces, mouths that opened soundlessly, their screams swallowed in a roar of boots shuffling down the platform, beating against the high steel ceiling. An old barrel with rusty hoops and a tin cup attached on a chain bore a painted inscription: “Boiled water” and a huge sign: “BEWARE OF CHOLERA. DO NOT DRINK RAW WATER.” A stray dog with ribs like a skeleton’s, its tail between its legs, was smelling the littered floor, searching for food. Two armed soldiers were fighting through the crowd, dragging a peasant woman who struggled and sobbed: “Comrades! I didn’t! Brothers, where are you taking me? Comrades dear, so help me God, I didn’t!”

From below, among the boots and swishing, mud-caked skirts, someone howled monotonously, not quite a human sound nor a barking: a woman was crawling on her knees, trying to gather a spilled sack of millet, sobbing, picking up the grain mixed with sunflower-seed shells and cigarette butts.

Kira looked at the tall windows. She heard, from the outside, the old familiar sound of the piercing tramway bell. She smiled.

At a door marked in red letters “Commandant,” a young soldier stood on guard. Kira looked at him. His eyes were austere and forbidding like caverns where a single flame burned under cold, gray vaults; there was an air of innate temerity in the lines of his tanned face, of the hand that grasped the bayonet, of the neck in the open shirt collar. Kira liked him. She looked straight into his eyes and smiled. She thought that he understood her, that he guessed the great adventure beginning for her.

The soldier looked at her coldly, indifferently, astonished. She turned away, a little disappointed, although she did not know just what she had expected.

All the soldier noticed was that the strange girl in the child’s stocking-cap had strange eyes; also that she wore a light suit and no brassiere, which fact he did not resent at all.

“Kira!” Galina Petrovna’s voice pierced the roar of the station. “Kira! Where are you? Where are your parcels? How about your parcels?”

Kira returned to the box car where her family was struggling with the luggage. She had forgotten that she had to carry three bundles, porters being a luxury out of reach. Galina Petrovna was fighting off these porters, husky loafers in ragged soldiers’ coats, who seized luggage without being asked, insolently offering their services.

Then, arms strained by the bundled remains of their fortune, the Argounov family descended upon the ground of Petrograd.

A gold sickle and hammer rose over the station’s exit door. Two posters hung by its side. One bore a husky worker whose huge boots crushed tiny palaces, while his raised arm, with muscles red as beefsteaks, waved a greeting to a rising sun red as his muscles; above the sun stood the words: COMRADES! WE ARE THE BUILDERS OF A NEW LIFE!

The other bore a huge white louse on a black background with red letters: LICE SPREAD DISEASE! CITIZENS, UNITE ON THE ANTI-TYPHUS FRONT!

The smell of carbolic acid rose higher than all the rest. Station buildings were disinfected against the diseases that poured into the city on every train. Like a breath from a hospital window, the odor hung in the air as a warning and a grim reminder.

The doors into Petrograd opened upon the Znamensky square. A sign on a post announced its new name: SQUARE OF UPRISING. A huge gray statue of Alexander III faced the station, against a gray hotel building, against a gray sky. It was not raining heavily, but a few drops fell at long intervals, slowly, monotonously, as if the sky were leaking, as if it too were in need of repairs, like the rotted wooden paving where raindrops made silver sparks on dark puddles. The raised black tops of hansom cabs looked like patent leather, swaying, quivering, wheels grunting in the mud with the sound of animals chewing. Old buildings watched the square with the dead eyes of abandoned shops in whose dusty windows the cobwebs and faded newspapers had not been disturbed for five years.

But one shop bore a cotton sign: PROVISION CENTER. A line waited at the door, stretching around the corner; a long line of feet in shoes swollen by the rain, of red, frozen hands, of raised collars that did not prevent the raindrops from rolling down many backs, for many heads were bent.

“Well,” said Alexander Dimitrievitch, “we’re back.”

“Isn’t it wonderful!” said Kira.

“Mud, as ever,” said Lydia.

“We’ll have to take a cab. Such an expense!” said Galina Petrovna.

They crowded into one cab, Kira sitting on top of the bundles. The horse jerked forward, sending a shower of mud on Kira’s legs, and turned into the Nevsky Prospect.

The long, broad avenue lay before them, as straight as if it were the spine of the city. Far away, the slender gold spire of the Admiralty gleamed faintly in the gray mist, like a long arm raised in a solemn greeting.

Petrograd had seen five years of revolution. Four of those years had closed its every artery and every store, when nationalization smeared dust and cobwebs over the plate-glass windows; the last year had brought out soap and mops, new paint and new owners, as the state’s New Economic Policy had announced a “temporary compromise” and allowed small private stores to re-open timidly.

After a long sleep, Nevsky was opening its eyes slowly. The eyes were not used to the light; they had opened in a hurry and they stared, wide, frightened, incredulous. New signs were cotton strips with glaring, uneven letters. Old signs were marble obituaries of men long since gone. Gold letters spelled forgotten names on the windows of new owners, and bullet holes with sunburst cracks still decorated the glass. There were stores without signs and signs without stores. But between the windows and over closed doors, over bricks and boards and cracked plaster, the city wore a mantle of color bright as a patchwork: there were posters of red shirts, and yellow wheat, and red banners, and blue wheels, and red kerchiefs, and gray tractors, and red smokestacks; they were wet, transparent in the rain, showing layers of old posters underneath, growing—unchecked, unrestricted—like the bright mildew of a city.

On a corner, an old lady held timidly a tray of home-made cakes, and feet hurried past without stopping; someone yelled: “Pravda! Krasnaya Gazeta! Latest news, citizens!” and someone yelled: “Saccharine, citizens!” and someone yelled: “Flints for cigarette lighters, cheap, citizens!” Below, there was mud and sunflower-seed shells; above, there were red banners bending over the street from every house, streaked and dripping little pink drops.

“I hope,” said Galina Petrovna, “that sister Marussia will be glad to see us.”

“I wonder,” said Lydia, “what these last years have done to the Dunaevs.”

“I wonder what is left of their fortune,” said Galina Petrovna, “if anything. Poor Marussia! I doubt if they have more than we do.”

“And if they have,” sighed Alexander Dimitrievitch, “what difference does it make now, Galina?”

“None,” said Galina Petrovna, “—I hope.”

“Anyway, we’re still no poor relations,” Lydia said proudly and pulled her skirt up a little to show the passersby her high-laced, olive-green shoes.

Kira was not listening; she was watching the streets.

The cab stopped at the building where, four years ago, they had seen the Dunaevs in their magnificent apartment. One half of the imposing entrance door had a huge, square glass pane; the other half was filled in with unpainted boards hastily nailed together.

The spacious lobby had had a soft carpet, Galina Petrovna remembered, and a hand-carved fireplace. The carpet was gone; the fireplace was still there, but there were penciled inscriptions on the white stomachs of its marble cupids and a long, diagonal crack in the large mirror above it.

A sleepy janitor stuck his head out of the little booth under the stairs and withdrew it indifferently.

They carried their bundles up the stairs. They stopped at a padded door; the black oilcloth was ripped and gray lumps of soiled cotton made a fringe around the door.

“I wonder,” Lydia whispered, “if they still have their magnificent butler.”

Galina Petrovna pressed the bell.

There were steps inside. A key turned. A cautious hand half opened the door, protected by a chain. Through the narrow crack, they saw an old woman’s face cut by hanging gray hair, a stomach under a dirty towel tied as an apron, and one foot in a man’s bedroom slipper. The woman looked at them silently, with hostile inquiry, with no intention of opening the door farther.

“Is Maria Petrovna in?” Galina Petrovna asked in a slightly unnatural voice.

“Who wants to know?” asked the toothless mouth.

“I’m her sister, Galina Petrovna Argounova.”

The woman did not answer; she turned and yelled into the house: “Maria Petrovna! Here’s a mob that says them’s your sister!”

A cough answered from the depths of the house, then slow steps; then a pale face peered over the old woman’s shoulder and a mouth opened with a shriek: “My Lord in Heaven!”

The door was thrown wide open. Two thin arms seized Galina Petrovna, crushing her against a trembling chest. “Galina! Darling! It’s you!”

“Marussia!” Galina Petrovna’s lips sank into the powder on a flabby cheek and her nose into the thin, dry hair sprinkled with a perfume that smelled like vanilla.

Maria Petrovna had always been the beauty of the family, the delicate, spoiled darling whose husband carried her in his arms through the snow to the carriage in winter. She looked older than Galina Petrovna now. Her skin was the color of soiled linen; her lips were not red enough, but her eyelids were too red.

A door crashed open behind her and something came flying into the anteroom; something tall, tense, with a storm of hair and eyes like automobile headlights; and Galina Petrovna recognized Irina, her niece, a young girl of eighteen with the eyes of twenty-eight and the laughter of eight. Behind her, Acia, her little sister, waddled in slowly and stood in the doorway, watching the newcomers sullenly; she was eight years old, needed a haircut and one garter.

Galina Petrovna kissed the girls; then she raised herself on tiptoe to plant a kiss on the cheek of her brother-in-law, Vasili Ivanovitch. She tried not to look at him. His thick hair was white; his tall, powerful body stooped. Had she seen the Admiralty tower stooping, Galina Petrovna would have felt less alarmed.

Vasili Ivanovitch spoke seldom. He said only: “Is that my little friend Kira?” The question was warmer than a kiss.

His sunken eyes were like a fireplace where the last blazing coals fought against slow, inevitable ashes. He said: “Sorry Victor isn’t home. He’s at the Institute. The boy works so hard.” His son’s name acted like a strong breath that revived the coals for a moment.

Before the revolution, Vasili Ivanovitch Dunaev had owned a prosperous fur business. He had started as a trapper in the wilderness of Siberia, with a gun, a pair of boots, and two arms that could lift an ox. He wore the scar of a bear’s teeth on his thigh. Once, he was found buried in the snow; he had been there for two days; his arms clutched the body of the most magnificent silver fox the frightened Siberian peasants had ever seen. His relatives heard no word from him for ten years. When he returned to St. Petersburg, he opened an office of which his relatives could not afford the door knobs; and he bought silver horseshoes for the three horses that galloped with his carriage down Nevsky.

His hands had provided the ermines that swept many marble stairways in the royal palaces; the sables that embraced many shoulders white as marble. His muscles and the long hours of the frozen Siberian nights had paid for every hair of every fur that passed through his hands.

He was sixty years old; his backbone had been as straight as his gun; his spirit—as straight as his backbone.

When Galina Petrovna raised a steaming spoonful of millet to her lips in her sister’s dining room, she threw a furtive glance at Vasili Ivanovitch. She was afraid to study him openly; but she had seen the stooped backbone; she wondered about the spirit.

She saw the changes in the dining room. The spoon she held was not the monogrammed silverware she remembered; it was of heavy tin that gave a metallic taste to the mush. She remembered crystal and silver fruit vases on the buffet; one solitary jug of Ukrainian pottery adorned it now. Big rusty nails on the walls showed the places where old paintings had hung.

Across the table, Maria Petrovna was talking with a nervous, fluttering hurry, a strange caricature of the capricious manner that had charmed every drawing room she entered. Her words were strange to Galina Petrovna, words like milestones of the years that had been parted and of what had happened in those years.

“Ration cards—they’re for Soviet employees only. And for students. We get only two ration cards. Just two cards for the family—and it isn’t easy. Victor’s student card at the Institute and Irina’s at the Academy of Arts. But I’m not employed anywhere, so I get no card, and Vasili. . . .”

She stopped short, as if her words, running, had skidded too far. She looked at her husband, furtively, a glance that seemed to cringe. Vasili Ivanovitch was staring into his plate and said nothing.

Maria Petrovna’s hands fluttered up eloquently: “These are hard times, God have pity on us, these are hard times. Galina, do you remember Lili Savinskaia, the one who never wore any jewelry except pearls? Well, she’s dead. She died in 1919. It was like this: they had nothing to eat for days, and her husband was walking in the street and he saw a horse that fell and died of hunger, and there was a mob fighting for the body. They tore it to pieces, and he got some. He brought it home and they cooked it, and ate, and I suppose the horse hadn’t died of hunger only, for they both got terribly sick. The doctors saved him, but Lili died. . . . He lost everything in 1918, of course. . . . His sugar business—it was nationalized the same day when our fur store. . . .”

She stopped short again, her eyelids trembling over a glance at Vasili Ivanovitch. Visili Ivanovitch said nothing.

“More,” said little Acia sullenly and extended her plate for a second helping of millet.

“Kira!” Irina called brightly across the table, her voice very clear and loud, as if to sweep away all that had been said. “Did you eat fresh fruit in the Crimea?”

“Yes. Some,” Kira answered indifferently.

“I’ve been dreaming, yearning and dying for grapes. Don’t you like grapes?”

“I never notice what I eat,” said Kira.

“Of course,” Maria Petrovna hurried on, “Lili Savinskaia’s husband is working now. He’s a clerk in a Soviet office. Some people are taking employment, after all. . . .” She looked openly at Vasili Ivanovitch and waited, but he did not answer.

Galina Petrovna asked timidly: “How’s . . . how’s our old house?”

“Yours? On Kamenostrovsky? Don’t even dream of it. A sign painter lives there now. A real proletarian. God knows where you’ll find an apartment, Galina. People are crowded like dogs.”

Alexander Dimitrievitch asked hesitantly: “Have you heard what . . . about the factory . . . what happened to my factory?”

“Closed,” Vasili Ivanovitch snapped suddenly. “They couldn’t run it. Closed. Like everything else.”

Maria Petrovna coughed. “Such a problem for you, Galina, such a problem! Are the girls going to school? Or—how are you going to get ration cards?”

“But—I thought—with the NEP and all, you have private stores now.”

“Sure—NEP, their New Economic Policy, sure, they allow private stores now, but where will you get the money to buy there? They charge you ten times more than the ration cooperatives. I haven’t been in a private store yet. We can’t afford it. No one can afford it. We can’t even afford the theater. Victor’s taken me to a show once. But Vasili—Vasili won’t set foot inside a theater.”

“Why not?”

Vasili Ivanovitch raised his head, his eyes stern, and said solemnly: “When your country is in agony, you don’t seek frivolous recreations. I’m in mourning—for my country.”

“Lydia,” Irina asked in her sweeping voice, “aren’t you in love yet?”

“I do not answer indecent questions,” said Lydia.

“I’ll tell you, Galina,” Maria Petrovna hurried and coughed, choked, and went on, “I’ll tell you the best thing to do: Alexander must take a job.”

Galina Petrovna sat up straight, as if she had been slapped in the face. “A Soviet job?”

“Well . . . all jobs are Soviet jobs.”

“Not as long as I live,” Alexander Dimitrievitch stated with unexpected strength.

Vasili Ivanovitch dropped his spoon and it clattered into his plate; silently, solemnly, he stretched his big fist across the table and shook Alexander Dimitrievitch’s hand and threw a dark glance at Maria Petrovna. She cringed, swallowed a spoonful of millet, coughed.

“I’m not saying anything about you, Vasili,” she protested timidly. “I know you don’t approve and . . . well, you never will. . . . But I was just thinking they get bread cards, and lard, and sugar, the Soviet employees do—sometimes.”

“When I have to take Soviet employment,” said Vasili Ivanovitch, “you’ll be a widow, Marussia.”

“I’m not saying anything, Vasili, only. . . .”

“Only stop worrying. We’ll get along. We have so far. There are still plenty of things to sell.”

Galina Petrovna looked at the nails on the walls; she looked at her sister’s hands, the famous hands that artists had painted and a poem had been written about—“Champagne and Maria’s hands.” They were frozen to a dark purple, swollen and cracked. Maria Petrovna had known the value of her hands; she had learned how to keep them in sight constantly, how to use them with the pliant grace of a ballerina. It was a habit she had not lost. Galina Petrovna wished she would lose it; the soft, fluttering gestures of those hands were only one more reminder.

Vasili Ivanovitch was speaking suddenly. He had always been reticent in the expression of his feelings. But one subject aroused him and then his expressions were not restrained: “All this is temporary. You all lose faith so easily. That’s the trouble with our spineless, snivelling, impotent, blabbering, broad-minded, drooling intelligentsia! That’s why we are where we are. No faith. No will. Thin gruel for blood. Do you think all this can go on? Do you think Russia is dead? Do you think Europe is blind? Watch Europe. She hasn’t said her last word yet. The day will come—soon—when these bloody assassins, these foul scoundrels, that Communist scum. . . .”

The door bell rang.

The old servant shuffled to open the door. They heard a man’s steps, brisk, resonant, energetic. A strong hand threw the dining-room door open.

Victor Dunaev looked like a tenor in an Italian grand opera, which was not Victor’s profession; but he had the broad shoulders, the flaming black eyes, the wavy, unruly black hair, the flashing smile, the arrogantly confident movements. As he stopped on the threshold, his eyes stopped on Kira; as she turned in her chair, they stopped on her legs.

“It’s little Kira, isn’t it?” were the first sounds of his strong, clear voice.

“It was,” she answered.

“Well, well, what a surprise! What a most pleasant surprise! . . . Aunt Galina, younger than ever!” He kissed his aunt’s hand. “And my charming cousin Lydia!” His dark hair brushed Lydia’s wrist. “Sorry to be so late. Meeting at the Institute. I’m a member of the Students’ Council. . . . Sorry, Father. Father doesn’t approve of any elections of any sort.”

“Sometimes even elections are right,” said Vasili Ivanovitch without disguising the paternal pride in his voice; and the warmth in his stern eyes suddenly made them look helpless.

Victor whirled a chair about and sat next to Kira. “Well, Uncle Alexander,” he flashed a row of sparkling white teeth at Alexander Dimitrievitch, “you’ve chosen a fascinating time to return to Petrograd. A difficult time, to be sure. A cruel time. But most fascinating, like all historical cataclysms.”

Galina Petrovna smiled with admiration: “What are you studying, Victor?”

“Institute of Technology. Electrical engineer. Greatest future in electricity. Russia’s future. . . . But Father doesn’t think so. . . . Irina, do you ever comb your hair? What are your plans, Uncle Alexander?”

“I’ll open a store,” Alexander Dimitrievitch announced solemnly, almost proudly.

“But it will take some financial resources, Uncle Alexander.”

“We’ve managed to save a little, in the south.”

“Lord in Heaven!” cried Maria Petrovna. “You’d better spend it quickly. At the rate that new paper money is going down—why, bread was sixty thousand rubles a pound last week—and it’s seventy-five thousand now!”

“New enterprises, Uncle Alexander, have a great future in this new age,” said Victor.

“Until the government squashes them under its heel,” Vasili Ivanovitch said gloomily.

“Nothing to fear, Father. The days of confiscations are past. The Soviet government has a most progressive policy outlined.”

“Outlined in blood,” said Vasili Ivanovitch.

“Victor, they’re wearing the funniest things in the south,” Irina spoke hurriedly. “Did you notice Kira’s wooden sandals?”

“All right, League of Nations. That’s her name. Trying to keep peace. I would love to see the sandals.”

Kira raised her foot indifferently. Her short skirt concealed little of her leg; she did not notice the fact, but Victor and Lydia did.

“At your age, Kira,” Lydia remarked pointedly, “it’s time to wear longer skirts.”

“If one has the material,” Kira answered indifferently. “I never notice what I wear.”

“Nonsense, Lydia darling,” Victor stated with finality, “short skirts are the height of feminine elegance and feminine elegance is the highest of the Arts.”

That night, before retiring, the family gathered in the drawing room. Maria Petrovna painfully counted out three logs, and a fire was lighted in the fireplace. Little flames flickered over the glazed abyss of darkness beyond the big, bare, curtainless windows; little sparks danced in the polished curves of the hand-carved furniture, leaving in shadows the torn brocade; golden spangles played in the heavy gold frame of the only picture in the room, leaving in shadows the picture itself: a painting of Maria Petrovna twenty years ago, with a delicate hand resting on an ivory shoulder, mocking the old knitted shawl which the living Maria Petrovna clutched convulsively over her trembling shoulders when she coughed.

The logs were damp; a fretful blue flame hissed feebly, dying and flaring up again in a burst of acrid smoke.

Kira sat in the deep, silken fur of a white bear rug at the fireplace, her arm encircling affectionately the huge monster’s ferocious head. It had been her favorite since childhood. When visiting her uncle, she had always asked for the story of how he had killed that bear, and she had laughed happily when he threatened that the bear would come back to life and bite disobedient little girls.

“Well,” said Maria Petrovna, her hands fluttering in the fire glow, “well, here you are back in Petrograd.”

“Yes,” said Galina Petrovna, “here we are.”

“Oh, Saint Mother of God!” sighed Maria Petrovna. “It makes it so hard sometimes to have a future to think about!”

“It does,” said Galina Petrovna.

“Well, what are the plans for the girls? Lydia darling, quite a young lady, aren’t you? Still heart-free?” Lydia’s smile was not a grateful one. Maria Petrovna sighed: “Men are so strange, nowadays. They don’t think of marriage. And the girls? I was carrying a son at Irina’s age. But she doesn’t think of a home and family. The Academy of Arts for her. Galina, do you remember how she used to ruin my furniture with her infernal drawings as soon as she was out of diapers? Well, Lydia, are you going to study?”

“I have no such intention,” said Lydia. “Too much education is unfeminine.”

“And Kira?”

“It’s funny to think that little Kira is of college age, isn’t it?” said Victor. “First of all, Kira, you’ll have to get a labor book—the new passport, you know. You’re over sixteen. And then. . . .”

“I think,” Maria Petrovna suggested eagerly, “that a profession is so useful nowadays. Why don’t you send Kira to a medical school? A lady doctor gets such nice rations!”

“Kira a doctor?” Galina Petrovna sneered. “Why, the selfish little thing just loathes physical injury. She wouldn’t help a wounded chicken.”

“My opinion . . .” Victor began.

A telephone rang in the next room. Irina darted out and returned, announcing aloud with a significant wink at Victor: “For you, Victor. It’s Vava.”

Victor walked out reluctantly. Through the door, left open by a draft, they heard some of his words: “. . . I know I promised to come tonight. But it’s an unexpected examination at the Institute. I have to study every minute of the evening. . . . Of course not, no one else. . . . You know I do, darling. . . .”

He returned to the fireplace and settled himself comfortably on the white bear’s back, close to Kira.

“My opinion, my charming little cousin,” he stated, “is that the most promising career for a woman is offered not by a school, but by employment in a Soviet office.”

“Victor, you don’t really mean that,” said Vasili Ivanovitch.

“One has to be practical nowadays,” Victor said slowly. “A student’s ration doesn’t provide much for a whole family—as you ought to know.”

“Employees get lard and sugar,” said Maria Petrovna.

“They are using a great many typists,” Victor insisted. “A typewriter’s keys are the stepping stones to any high office.”

“And you get shoes, and free tramway tickets,” said Maria Petrovna.

“Hell,” said Vasili Ivanovitch, “you can’t make a drayhorse out of a racing steed.”

“Why, Kira,” asked Irina, “aren’t you interested in the subject of this discussion?”

“I am,” Kira answered calmly, “but I think the discussion is superfluous. I am going to the Technological Institute.”

“Kira!”

There were seven startled voices and they all uttered one name. Then Galina Petrovna said: “Well, with a daughter like this even her own mother isn’t let in on secrets!”

“When did you decide that?” Lydia gasped.

“About eight years ago,” said Kira.

“But Kira! What will you do?” Maria Petrovna gasped.

“I’ll be an engineer.”

“Frankly,” said Victor, annoyed, “I do not believe that engineering is a profession for women.”

“Kira,” Alexander Dimitrievitch said timidly, “you’ve never liked the Communists and here you select such a modern favorite profession of theirs—a woman engineer!”

“Are you going to build for the Red State?” asked Victor.

“I’m going to build because I want to build.”

“But Kira!” Lydia stared at her, bewildered. “That will mean dirt, and iron, and rust, and blow-torches, and filthy, sweaty men and no feminine company to help you.”

“That’s why I’ll like it.”

“It is not at all a cultured profession for a woman,” said Galina Petrovna.

“It’s the only profession,” said Kira, “for which I don’t have to learn any lies. Steel is steel. Most of the other sciences are someone’s guess, and someone’s wish, and many people’s lies.”

“What you lack,” said Lydia, “are the things of the spirit.”

“Frankly,” said Victor, “your attitude is slightly anti-social, Kira. You select a profession merely because you want it, without giving a thought to the fact that, as a woman, you would be much more useful to society in a more feminine capacity. And we all have our duty to society to consider.”

“Exactly to whom is it that you owe a duty, Victor?”

“To society.”

“What is society?”

“If I may say it, Kira, this is a childish question.”

“But,” said Kira, her eyes dangerously gentle and wide, “I don’t understand it. To whom is it that I owe a duty? To your neighbor next door? Or to the militia-man on the corner? Or to the clerk in the co-operative? Or to the old man I saw in line, third from the door, with an old basket and a woman’s hat?”

“Society, Kira, is a stupendous whole.”

“If you write a whole line of zeroes, it’s still—nothing.”

“Child,” said Vasili Ivanovitch, “what are you doing in Soviet Russia?”

“That,” said Kira, “is what I’m wondering about.”

“Let her go to the Institute,” said Vasili Ivanovitch.

“I’ll have to,” Galina Petrovna agreed bitterly. “You can’t argue with her.”

“She always gets her way,” said Lydia resentfully. “I don’t see how she does it.”

Kira bent over the fire to blow at the dying flame. For one moment, as a bright tongue leaped up, a red glow tore her face out of the darkness. Her face was like that of a blacksmith bending over his forge.

“I fear for your future, Kira,” said Victor. “It’s time to get reconciled to life. You won’t get far with those ideas of yours.”

“That,” said Kira, “depends on what direction I want to go.”

III

TWO HANDS HELD A LITTLE BOOK BOUND in gray burlap. They were dry and calloused. They had seen many years of labor in the oil and the heat and the grease of roaring machines. The wrinkles were encrusted in black on a skin stiff with the dust of years. There were black tips on the cracked fingernails. One finger wore a tarnished ring with an imitation emerald.

The office had bare walls. They had served as towel to many a dirty hand, for traces left by five fingers zigzagged across the faded paint. In the old house now nationalized for government offices, it had been a washroom. The sink was removed; but a rusty outline with glaring nailholes still drew its picture on the wall, and two broken pipes hung out, like the bowels of the wounded building.

The window had an iron grate and broken panes which a spider had tried to mend. It faced a bare wall with red bricks losing the last scabs of paint which had been the advertisement of a hair-restorer.

The official sat at his desk. The desk had a blotter torn in one corner and a half-dry inkstand. The official wore a khaki suit and glasses.

Like two silent judges presiding behind their spokesman, two pictures flanked his head. They had no frames; four thumbtacks nailed each to the wall. One was of Lenin, the other of Karl Marx. Red letters above them said: IN UNION LIES OUR STRENGTH.

Head high, Kira Argounova stood before the desk.

She was there to receive her labor book. Every citizen over sixteen had to have a labor book and was ordered to carry it at all times. It had to be presented and stamped when he found employment or left it; when he moved into an apartment or out of one; when he enrolled at a school, got a bread card or was married. The new Soviet passport was more than a passport: it was a citizen’s permit to live. It was called “Labor Book,” for labor and life were considered synonymous.

The Russian Socialist Federalist Soviet Republic was about to acquire a new citizen.

The official held the little book bound in gray burlap, whose many pages he was going to fill. He had trouble with his pen; it was old and rusty, and dragged strings from the bottom of the inkstand.

On the clean open page he wrote:

Name: ARGOUNOVA, KIRA ALEXANDROVNA.

Height: MEDIUM.

Kira’s body was slender, too slender, and when she moved with a sharp, swift, geometrical precision, people were conscious of the movement alone, not of the body. Yet through any garment she wore, the unseen presence of her body made her look undressed. People wondered what made them aware of it. It seemed that the words she said were ruled by the will of her body and that her sharp movements were the unconscious reflection of a dancing, laughing soul. So that her spirit seemed physical and her body spiritual.

The official wrote:

Eyes: GRAY.

Kira’s eyes were dark gray, the gray of storm clouds from behind which the sun can be expected at any moment. They looked at people quietly, directly, with something that people called arrogance, but which was only a deep, confident calm that seemed to tell men her sight was too clear and none of their favorite binoculars were needed to help her look at life.

Mouth: ORDINARY.

Kira’s mouth was thin, long. When silent, it was cold, indomitable, and men thought of a Valkyrie with lance and winged helmet in the sweep of battle. But a slight movement made a wrinkle in the corners of her lips—and men thought of an imp perched on top of a toadstool, laughing in the faces of daisies.

Hair: BROWN.

Kira’s hair was short, thrown back off her forehead, light rays lost in its tangled mass, the hair of a primitive jungle woman over a face that had escaped from the easel of a modern artist who had been in a hurry: a face of straight, sharp lines sketched furiously to suggest an unfinished promise.

Particular Signs: NONE.

The Soviet official picked a thread off his pen, rolled it in his fingers and wiped them on his trousers.

Place and Date of Birth: PETROGRAD, APRIL 11, 1904.

Kira was born in the gray granite house on Kamenostrovsky. In that vast mansion Galina Petrovna had a boudoir where, at night, a maid in black fastened the clasps of her diamond necklaces; and a reception room where, her taffeta petticoats rustling solemnly, she entertained ladies with sables and lorgnettes. Children were not admitted into these rooms, and Galina Petrovna seldom appeared in any of the others.

Kira had an English governess, a thoughtful young lady with a lovely smile. She liked her governess, but often preferred to be alone—and was left alone. When she refused to play with a crippled relative of whom the family’s compassion had made a general idol—she was never asked to do it again. When she threw out of the window the first book she read about the good fairy rewarding an unselfish little girl—the governess never brought another one of that kind. When she was taken to church and sneaked out alone in the middle of the services, to get lost in the streets and be brought home to her frantic family—in a police wagon—she was never taken to church again.

The Argounov summer residence stood on a high hill over a river, alone in its spacious gardens, on the outskirts of a fashionable summer resort. The house turned its back upon the river and faced the grounds where the hill sloped down gracefully into a garden of lawns drawn with a ruler, bushes clipped into archways and marble fountains made by famous artists.

The other side of the hill hung over the river like a mass of rock and earth disgorged by a volcano and frozen in its chaotic tangle. Rowing downstream, people expected a dinosaur to stretch its head out of the black caves overgrown with wild ferns, between trees that grew horizontally into the air, huge roots, like spiders, grasping the rocks.

For many summers, while her parents were visiting Nice, Biarritz and Vienna, Kira was left alone to spend her days in the wild freedom of the rocky hill, as its sole, undisputed sovereign in a torn blue skirt and a white shirt whose sleeves were always missing. The sharp sand cut her bare feet. She swung from rock to rock, grasping a tree branch, throwing her body into space, the blue skirt flaring like a parachute.

She made a raft of tree branches and, clutching a long pole, sailed down the river. There were many dangerous rocks and whirlpools on the way. The thrill of the struggle rose from her bare feet, that felt the stream pulsating under the frail raft, through her body tensed to meet the wind, the blue skirt beating against her legs like a sail. Branches bending over the river brushed her forehead. She swept past, leaving threads of hair entwined in the leaves, and the trees leaving wild red berries caught in her hair.

The first thing that Kira learned about life and the first thing that her elders learned, dismayed, about Kira, was the joy of being alone.

“Born in 1904, eh?” said the Soviet official. “That makes you . . . let’s see . . . eighteen. Eighteen. You’re lucky, comrade. You’re young and have many years to give to the cause of the toilers. A whole life of discipline and hard work and useful labor for the great collective.”

He had a cold, so he took out a large checkered handkerchief and blew his nose.

Family Position: SINGLE.

“I wash my hands of Kira’s future,” Galina Petrovna had said. “Sometimes I think she’s a born old maid and sometimes a born . . . yes, bad woman.”

Kira saw her first years of lengthened skirts and high heels during their refuge in Yalta, where the strange society of emigrants from the North, families of old names and past fortunes, clung together like frightened chickens on a rock with the flood rising slowly around them. Young men of irreproachably parted hair and manicured nails, noticed the slim girl who strode down the streets swinging a twig like a whip, her body thrown into the wind that blew a short dress which hid nothing. Galina Petrovna smiled with approval when the young men called at their house. But Kira had strange eyebrows; she could lift them in such a cold, mocking smile, while her lips remained motionless—that the young men’s love poems and intentions froze at the very roots. And Galina Petrovna soon stopped wondering why the young men stopped noticing her daughter.

In the evenings Lydia read avidly, blushing, books of delicate, sinful romance, which she hid from Galina Petrovna. Kira began reading one of these books; she fell asleep and did not finish it. She never began another.

She saw no difference between weeds and flowers; she yawned when Lydia sighed at the beauty of a sunset over lonely hills. But she stood for an hour looking at the black silhouette of a tall young soldier against the roaring flame of a blazing oil well he had been posted to guard.

She stopped suddenly, as they walked down a street in the evening, and pointed at a strange angle of white wall over battered roofs, luminous on a black sky in the glare of an old lantern, with a dark, barred window like that of a dungeon, and she whispered: “How beautiful!”

“What’s beautiful about it?” Lydia asked.

“Because it’s so strange . . . promising . . . as if something could happen there. . . .”

“Happen to whom?”

“To me.”

Lydia seldom questioned Kira’s emotions; they were not feelings to her but only Kira’s feelings; and the family shrugged impatiently at what they called Kira’s feelings. She had the same feeling for eating soup without salt, and for discovering a snail slithering up her bare leg, and for young men who pleaded, broken-hearted, their eyes humid, their lips soft. She had the same feeling for white statues of ancient gods against black velvet in museums, and for steel shavings and rusty dust and hissing torches and muscles tense as electric wires in the iron roar of a building under construction. She seldom visited museums; but when they went out with Kira, her family avoided passing by any construction works: houses, and particularly roads, and most particularly bridges. She was certain to stop and stand watching, for hours, red bricks and oaken beams and steel panels growing under the will of man. But she could never be made to enter a public park on Sunday, and she stuck her fingers into her ears when she heard a chorus singing folk songs. When Galina Petrovna took her children to see a sad play depicting the sorrow of the serfs whom Czar Alexander II had magnanimously freed, Lydia sobbed over the plight of the humble, kindly peasants cringing under a whip, while Kira sat tense, erect, eyes dark in ecstasy, watching the whip cracking expertly in the hand of a tall, young overseer.

“How beautiful!” said Lydia, looking at a stage setting. “It’s almost real.”

“How beautiful!” said Kira, looking at a landscape. “It’s almost artificial.”

“In a way,” said the Soviet official, “you comrade women have an advantage over us men. You can take care of the young generation, the future of our republic. There are so many dirty, hungry children that need the loving hands of our women.”

Union Membership: NONE.

Kira went to school in Yalta. The school dining room had many tables. At luncheon, girls sat at these tables in couples, in fours, in dozens. Kira always sat at a table in a corner—alone.

One day her class declared a boycott against a little freckled girl who had incurred the displeasure of her most popular classmate, a loud-voiced young lady who had a smile, a handshake and a command ready for everyone.

That noon, at luncheon, the little table in the corner of the dining room was occupied by two students: Kira and the freckled girl. They were half through their bowls of buckwheat mush, when the indignant class leader approached them.

“Do you know what you’re doing, Argounova?” she asked, eyes blazing.

“Eating mush,” answered Kira. “Won’t you sit down?”

“Do you know what this girl here has done?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“You haven’t? Then why are you doing this for her?”

“You’re mistaken. I am not doing this for her, I am doing it against twenty-eight other girls.”

“So you think it’s smart to go against the majority?”

“I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it’s safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries. . . . May I have the salt, please?”

At the age of thirteen, Lydia fell in love with a grand opera tenor. She kept his picture on her dresser, with a single red rose in a thin crystal glass beside it. At the age of fifteen, she fell in love with Saint Francis of Assisi, who talked to the birds and helped the poor, and she dreamed of entering a convent. Kira had never been in love. The only hero she had known was a Viking whose story she had read as a child; a Viking whose eyes never looked farther than the point of his sword, but there was no boundary for the point of his sword; a Viking who walked through life, breaking barriers and reaping victories, who walked through ruins while the sun made a crown over his head, but he walked, light and straight, without noticing its weight; a Viking who laughed at kings, who laughed at priests, who looked at heaven only when he bent for a drink over a mountain brook and there, over-shadowing the sky, he saw his own picture; a Viking who lived but for the joy and the wonder and the glory of the god that was himself. Kira did not remember the books she read before that legend; she did not want to remember the ones she read after it. But through the years that followed, she remembered the end of the legend: when the Viking stood on a tower over a city he had conquered. The Viking smiled as men smile when they look up at heaven; but he was looking down. His right arm was one straight line with his lowered sword; his left arm, straight as the sword, raised a goblet of wine to the sky. The first rays of a coming sun, still unseen to the earth, struck the crystal goblet. It sparkled like a white torch. Its rays lighted the faces of those below. “To a life,” said the Viking, “which is a reason unto itself.”

“So you’re not a Union member, citizen?” said the Soviet official. “Too bad, too bad. The trade unions are the steel girders of our great state building, as said . . . well, one of our great leaders said. What’s a citizen? Only a brick and of no use unless cemented to other bricks just like it.”

Occupation: STUDENT.

From somewhere in the aristocratic Middle Ages, Kira had inherited the conviction that labor and effort were ignoble. She had gone through school with the highest grades and the sloppiest composition books. She burned her piano etudes and never darned her stockings. She climbed to the pedestals of statues in the parks to kiss the cold lips of Greek gods—but slept at symphony concerts. She sneaked out through a window when guests were expected, and she could not cook a potato. She never went to church and seldom read a newspaper.

But she had chosen a future of the hardest work and most demanding effort. She was to be an engineer. She had decided it with her first thought about the vague thing called future. And that first thought had been quiet and reverent, for her future was consecrated, because it was her future. She had played with mechanical toys, which were not intended for girls, and had built ships and bridges and towers; she had watched rising steel and bricks and steam. Over Lydia’s bed hung an ikon, over Kira’s—the picture of an American skyscraper. Even though those who listened smiled incredulously, she spoke about the houses she would build of glass and steel, about a white aluminum bridge across a blue river—“but, Kira, you can’t make a bridge of aluminum”—about men and wheels and cranes under her orders, about a sunrise on the steel skeleton of a skyscraper.

She knew she had a life and that it was her life. She knew the work which she had chosen and which she expected of life. The other thing which she expected, she did not know, for it had no name, but it had been promised to her, promised in a memory of her childhood.

When the summer sun sank behind the hills, Kira sat on a high cliff and watched the fashionable casino far down by the river. The tall spire of the music pavilion pierced the red sky. The slim, black shadows of women moved against the orange panels of the lighted glass doors. An orchestra played in the pavilion. It played gay, sparkling tunes from musical comedies. It threw the fire of electric signs, of ringing glasses, of shining limousines, of nights in Europe’s capitals—into the dark evening sky over a silent river and a rocky hill with prehistorical trees.

The light tunes of casinos and beer-gardens, sung all over Europe by girls with sparkling eyes and swaying hips, had a significance for Kira that no one else ever attached to them. She heard in them a profound joy of life, so profound that it could be as light as a dancer’s feet. And because she worshipped joy, Kira seldom laughed and did not go to see comedies in theaters. And because she felt a profound rebellion against the weighty, the tragic, the solemn, Kira had a solemn reverence for those songs of defiant gaiety.

They came from the strange world where grownups moved among colored lights and white tables, where there was so much that she could not understand and so much that was awaiting her. They came out of her future.

She had selected one song as her, Kira’s, own: it was from an old operetta and was called “The Song of Broken Glass.” It had been introduced by a famous beauty of Vienna. There had been a balustrade on the stage, overlooking a drop with the twinkling lights of a big city, and a row of crystal goblets lined along the balustrade. The beauty sang the number and one by one, lightly, hardly touching them, kicked the crystal goblets and sent them flying in tingling, glittering splinters—around the tight, sheer stockings on the most beautiful legs in Europe.

There were sharp little blows in the music, and waves of quick, fine notes that burst and rolled like the thin, clear ringing of broken glass. There were slow notes, as if the cords of the violins trembled in hesitation, tense with the fullness of sound, taking a few measured steps before the leap into the explosion of laughter.

The wind blew Kira’s hair across her eyes and sent a cold breath at the toes of her bare feet hanging over the cliff’s edge. In the twilight, the sky seemed to rise slowly to a greater height, growing darker, and the first star dropped into the river. A lonely little girl on a slippery rock listened to her own hymn and smiled at what it promised her.

Such had been Kira’s entrance into life. Some enter it from under gray temple vaults, with head bowed in awe, with the light of sacrificial candles in their hearts and eyes. Some enter it with a heart like a pavement—tramped by many feet, and with a cold skin crying for the warmth of the herd. Kira Argounova entered it with the sword of a Viking pointing the way and an operetta tune for a battle march.

The Soviet official angrily wiped his pen with his checkered handkerchief, for he had made an ink spot on the last page.

“Toil, comrade,” he said, “is the highest aim of our lives. Who does not toil, shall not eat.”

The book was filled. The official applied his rubber stamp to the last page. The stamp bore a globe overshadowed by a crossed sickle and hammer.

“Here’s your Labor Book, Citizen Argounova,” said the Soviet official. “You are now a member of the greatest republic ever established in the history of the world. May the brotherhood of workers and peasants ever be the goal of your life, as it is the goal of all Red citizens.”

He handed her the book. Across the top of the first page was printed the slogan:

PROLETARIANS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

Under it was written the name:

Kira Argounova

IV

KIRA HAD BLISTERS ON HER HANDS WHERE the sharp string had rubbed too long. It was not easy to carry packages up four floors, eight flights of stone stairs that smelled of cats and felt cold through the thin soles of her shoes. Every time she hurried down for another load, skipping briskly over the steps, sliding down the bannister, she met Lydia, climbing up slowly, heavily, clutching bundles to her breast, panting and sighing bitterly, steam blowing from her mouth with every word: “Our Lord in Heaven! . . . Saint Mother of God!”

The Argounovs had found an apartment.

They had been congratulated as if it were a miracle. The miracle had been made possible by a handshake between Alexander Dimitrievitch and the Upravdom—the manager—of that house, a handshake after which Alexander Dimitrievitch’s hand remained empty, but the Upravdom’s did not. Three rooms and a kitchen were worth a little gratitude in an over-crowded city.

“A bath?” the indignant Upravdom had repeated Galina Petrovna’s timid question. “Don’t be foolish, citizen, don’t be foolish.”

They needed furniture. Bravely, Galina Petrovna paid a visit to the gray granite mansion on Kamenostrovsky. Before the stately edifice rising to the sky, she stood for a few moments, gathering her faded coat with the shedding fur collar tightly around her thin body. Then she opened her bag and powdered her nose: she felt ashamed before the gray slabs of granite. Then she did not close her bag, but took out a handkerchief: tears were painful in the cold wind. Then she rang the bell.

“Well, well, so you’re Citizen Argounova,” said the fat, glossy-cheeked sign painter who let her in and listened patiently to her explanation. “Sure, you can have your old junk back. That which I don’t use. It’s in the coach house. Take it. We’re not so hard-hearted. We know it’s tough for all you citizens bourgeois.”

Galina Petrovna threw a wistful glance at her old Venetian mirror whose onyx stand bore a bucket of paint, but she did not argue and went down to the coach house in the back yard. She found a few chairs with missing legs, a few priceless pieces of antique porcelain, a wash stand, a rusty samovar, two beds, a chest of old clothes, and Lydia’s grand piano, all buried under a pile of books from their library, old boxes, wood shavings and rat dung.

They hired a drayman to transfer these possessions to the little flat on the fourth floor of an old brick house whose turbid windows faced the turbid Moika stream. But they could not afford a drayman twice. They borrowed a wheelbarrow—and Alexander Dimitrievitch, silently indifferent, carted the bundles left at the Dunaevs to their new home. The four of them carried the bundles up the stairs, past landings that alternated grimy doors and broken windows; the “black stairway” it used to be called, the back entrance for servants. Their new home had no front entrance. It had no electrical connections; the plumbing was out of order; they had to carry water in pails from the floor below. Yellow stains spread over the ceilings, bearing witness to past rains.

“It will be very cozy—with just a little work and artistic judgment,” Galina Petrovna had said. Alexander Dimitrievitch had sighed.

The grand piano stood in the dining room. On top of the grand piano, Galina Petrovna put a teapot without handle or nose, the only thing left of her priceless Sachs tea service. Shelves of unpainted boards carried an odd assortment of cracked dishes; Lydia’s artistry decorated the shelves with borders of paper lace. A folded newspaper supported the shortest leg of the table. A wick floating in a saucer of linseed oil threw a spot of light on the ceiling in the long, dark evenings; in the mornings, strands of soot, like cobwebs, swayed slowly in the draft, high under the ceiling.

Galina Petrovna was the first one to get up in the morning. She threw an old shawl over her shoulders and, blowing hard to make the damp logs burn, cooked millet for breakfast. After breakfast the family parted.

Alexander Dimitrievitch shuffled two miles to his business, the textile store he had opened. He never took a tramway; long lines waited for every tramway and he had no hope of fighting his way aboard. The store had been a bakery shop. He could not afford new signs. He had stretched a piece of cotton with crooked letters by the door, over one of the old black glass plates bearing a gold pretzel. He had hung two kerchiefs and an apron in the window. He had scraped the bakery labels off the old boxes and stacked them neatly on empty shelves. Then he sat all day, his freezing feet on a cast-iron stove, his arms folded on his stomach, drowsing.

When a customer came in, he shuffled behind the counter and smiled affectionately: “The best kerchiefs in town, citizen. . . . Certainly, fast colors, as fast as foreign goods. . . . Would I take lard, instead of money? Certainly, citizen peasant, certainly. . . . For half a pound? You can have two kerchiefs, citizen, and a yard of calico for good measure.”

Smiling happily, he put the lard into the large drawer that served as cash register, next to a pound of rye flour.

Lydia wound an old knitted scarf around her throat, after breakfast, put a basket over her arm, sighed bitterly and went to the co-operative. She stood in line, watching the hand of the clock on a distant tower moving slowly around its face and she spent the time reciting mentally French poems she had learned as a child.

“But I don’t need soap, citizen,” she protested when her turn came, at the unpainted counter inside the store that smelled of dill pickles and people’s breath. “And I don’t need dried herring.”

“All we’ve got today, citizen. Next!”

“All right, all right, I’ll take it,” Lydia said hastily. “We’ve got to have something.”

Galina Petrovna washed the dishes after breakfast; then she put on her glasses and sorted out two pounds of lentils from the gravel that came with them; she chopped onions, tears rolling down her wrinkles; she washed Alexander Dimitrievitch’s shirt in a tub of cold water; she chopped acorns for coffee.

If she had to go out, she sneaked hurriedly down the stairs, hoping not to meet the Upravdom. If she met him, she smiled too brightly and sang out: “Good morning, Comrade Upravdom!”

Comrade Upravdom never answered. She could read the silent accusation in his sullen eyes: “Bourgeois. Private traders.”

Kira had been admitted to the Technological Institute. She went there every morning, walking, whistling, her hands in the pockets of an old black coat with a high collar buttoned severely under her chin. At the Institute, she listened to lectures, but spoke to few people. She noticed many red kerchiefs in the crowds of students and heard a great deal about Red builders, proletarian culture and young engineers in the vanguard of the world revolution. But she did not listen, for she was thinking about her latest mathematical problem. During the lectures, she smiled suddenly, once in a while, at no one in particular; smiled at a dim, wordless thought of her own. She felt as if her ended childhood had been a cold shower, gay, hard and invigorating, and now she was entering her morning, with her work before her, with so much to be done.

At night, the Argounovs gathered around the wick on the dining room table. Galina Petrovna served lentils and millet. There was not much variety in their menus. The millet went fast; so did their savings.

After dinner, Kira brought her books into the dining room, for they had but one oil wick. She sat, the book between her elbows on the table, her fingers buried in the hair over her temples, her eyes wide, engrossed in circles, cubes, triangles, as in a thrilling romance.

Lydia sat embroidering a handkerchief and sighed bitterly: “Oh, that Soviet light! Such a light! And to think that someone has invented electricity!”

“That’s right,” Kira agreed, astonished, “it’s not a very good light, is it? Funny. I never noticed it before.”

One night, Galina Petrovna found the millet too mildewed to cook. They had no dinner. Lydia sighed over her embroidery: “These Soviet menus!”

“That’s right,” said Kira, “we didn’t have any dinner tonight, did we?”

“Where’s your mind,” Lydia raged, “if any? Do you ever notice anything?”

Through the evenings, Galina Petrovna grumbled at intervals: “A woman engineer! Such a profession for a daughter of mine! . . . Is that a way for a young girl to live? Not a boy, not a single beau to visit her. . . . Tough as a shoe-sole. No romance. No delicacy. No finer feelings. A daughter of mine!”

In the little room which Kira and Lydia shared at night, there was only one bed. Kira slept on a mattress on the floor. They retired early, to save light. Tucked under a thin blanket, with her coat thrown over it, Kira watched Lydia’s figure in a long nightgown, a white stain in the darkness, kneeling before her ikons in the corner. Lydia mumbled prayers feverishly, trembling in the cold, making the sign of the cross with a hurried hand, bowing low to the little red light and the few glimmers of stern, bronze faces.

From her corner on the floor, Kira could see the reddish-gray sky in the window and the gold spire of the Admiralty far away in the cold, foggy dusk over Petrograd, the city where so much was possible.

Victor Dunaev had taken a sudden interest in the family of his cousins. He came often, he bent over Galina Petrovna’s hand as if he were at a Court reception, and laughed cheerfully as if he were at the circus.

In his honor, Galina Petrovna served her last precious bits of sugar, instead of saccharine, with the evening tea. He brought along his resplendent smile, and the latest political gossip, and the current anecdotes, and news of the latest foreign inventions, and quotations from the latest poems, and his opinions on the theory of reflexes and the theory of relativity and the social mission of proletarian literature. “A man of culture,” he explained, “has to be, above all, a man attuned to his century.”

He smiled at Alexander Dimitrievitch and hastily offered a light for his home-made cigarettes; he smiled at Galina Petrovna and rose hastily every time she rose; he smiled at Lydia and listened earnestly to her discourses on the simple faith; but he always managed to sit next to Kira.

On the evening of October tenth, Victor came late. It was nine o’clock when the sound of the door bell made Lydia dash eagerly to the little anteroom.

“Sorry. So terribly, terribly sorry,” Victor apologized, smiling, hurling his cold overcoat on a chair, raising Lydia’s hand to his lips and patting his unruly hair with a quick glance in the mirror, all within the space of one second. “Detained at the Institute. Students’ Council. I know this is an indecent hour to visit, but I promised Kira a ride around the city and . . .”

“It’s perfectly all right, Victor dear,” Galina Petrovna called from the dining room. “Come in and have some tea.”

The tiny flame floating in linseed oil quivered with every breath, as they sat at the table. Five huge shadows rose to the ceiling; the feeble glow drew a triangle of light under the five pairs of nostrils. Tea gleamed green through heavy glasses cut out of old bottles.

“I heard, Victor,” Galina Petrovna whispered confidentially, like a conspirator, “I heard—on good authority—that this NEP of theirs is only the beginning of many changes. The beginning of the end. Next they’re going to return houses and buildings to former owners. Think of it! You know our house on Kamenostrovsky, if only. . . . The clerk in the co-operative is the one who told me about it. And he has a cousin in the Party, he ought to know.”

“It is highly probable,” Victor stated with authority, and Galina Petrovna smiled happily.

Alexander Dimitrievitch poured himself another glass of tea; he looked at the sugar, hesitated, looked at Galina Petrovna, and drank his tea without sugar. He said sullenly: “Times aren’t any better. They’ve called their secret police G.P.U. instead of Cheka, but it’s still the same thing. Do you know what I heard at the store today? They’ve just discovered another anti-Soviet conspiracy. They’ve arrested dozens of people. Today they arrested old Admiral Kovalensky, the one who was blinded in the war, and they shot him without trial.”

“Nothing but rumors,” said Victor. “People like to exaggerate.”

“Well, anyway, it’s becoming easier to get food,” said Galina Petrovna. “We got the nicest lentils today.”

“And,” said Lydia, “I got two pounds of millet.”

“And,” said Alexander Dimitrievitch, “I got a pound of lard.”

When Kira and Victor rose to go, Galina Petrovna accompanied them to the door.

“You’ll take care of my child, won’t you, Victor dear? Don’t stay out late. Streets are so unsafe these days. Do be careful. And, above all, don’t speak to any strangers. There are such odd types around nowadays.”

The cab rattled through silent streets. Wide, smooth, empty sidewalks looked like long canals of gray ice, luminous under the tall lamp posts that swam, jerking, past the cab. At times, they saw the black circle of a shadow on the bare sidewalk; over the circle, a woman in a very short skirt stood swaying a little on fat legs in tightly laced shoes. Something like the black silhouette of a windmill wavered down the sidewalk; over it—a sailor tottered unsteadily, waving his arms, spitting sunflower seeds. A heavy truck thundered by the cab, bristling with bayonets; among the bayonets, Kira saw the flash of a white face, pierced by two holes of dark, frightening eyes.

Victor was saying: “A modern man of culture must preserve an objective viewpoint which, no matter what his personal convictions, enables him to see our time as a tremendous historical drama, a moment of gigantic importance to humanity.”

“Nonsense,” said Kira. “It is an old and ugly fact that the masses exist and make their existence felt. This is a time when they make it felt with particular ugliness. That’s all.”

“This is a rash, unscientific viewpoint, Kira,” said Victor, and went on talking about the esthetic value of sculpture, about the modern ballet and about new poets whose works were published in pretty little books with glossy white paper covers; he always kept the latest poem on his desk along with the latest sociological treatise, “for balance” he explained; and he recited his favorite poem in the fashionable manner of an expressionless, nasal sing-song, slowly taking Kira’s hand. Kira withdrew her hand and looked at the street lights.

The cab turned into the quay. She knew they were driving along a river, for on one side of them the black sky had fallen below the ground into a cold, damp void, and long bands of silver shimmered lazily across that void, streaming from lonely lights that hung in the darkness somewhere very far away. On the other side of them, mansions fused into a black skyline of urns, statues, balustrades. There were no lights in the mansions. The horse’s hoofs, pounding the cobblestones, rolled in echoes through rows of empty chambers.

Victor dismissed the cab at the Summer Garden. They walked, shuffling through a carpet of dry leaves that no one swept. No lights, no other visitors disturbed the silent desolation of the famous park. Around them, the black vaults of ancient oaks had suddenly swallowed the city; and in the moist, rustling darkness, fragrant of moss, mouldy leaves and autumn, white shadows of statues outlined the wide, straight walks.

Victor took out his handkerchief and wiped an old bench wet with dew. They sat down under the statue of a Greek goddess whose nose was broken off. A leaf floated down slowly, fluttered around its head and settled in the curve of its handless arm.

Victor’s arm slowly encircled Kira’s shoulders. She moved away. Victor bent close to her and whispered, sighing, that he had waited to see her alone, that he had known romances, yes, many romances, women had been too kind to him, but he had always been unhappy and lonely, searching for his ideal, that he could understand her, that her sensitive soul was bound by conventions, un-awakened to life—and love. Kira moved farther away and tried to change the subject.

He sighed and asked: “Kira, haven’t you ever given a thought to love?”

“No, I haven’t. And I never will. And I don’t like the word. Now that you know it, we’re going home.”

She rose. He seized her wrist. “No, we’re not. Not yet.”

She jerked her head, and the violent kiss intended for her lips brushed her cheek. A swift movement of her body set her free and sent him reeling against the bench. She drew a deep breath and tightened the collar of her coat.

“Good night, Victor,” she said quietly. “I’m going home—alone.”

He rose, confused, muttering: “Kira. . . . I’m sorry. I’ll take you home.”

“I said I’m going alone.”

“Oh, but you can’t do that! You know you can’t. It’s much too dangerous. A girl can’t be alone in the streets at this hour.”

“I’m not afraid.”

She started walking. He followed. They were out of the Summer Garden. On the deserted quay, a militia-man leaned against the parapet, gravely studying the lights in the water.

“If you don’t leave me right now,” said Kira, “I’m going to tell this militia-man that you’re a stranger who’s annoying me.”

“I’ll tell him you’re lying.”

“You may prove it—tomorrow morning. In the meantime, we’ll both spend a night in jail.”

“Well, go ahead. Tell him.”

Kira approached the militia-man. “Excuse me, comrade”—she began; she saw Victor turning and hurrying away—“can you tell me please which way is the Moika?”

Kira walked alone into the dark streets of Petrograd. The streets seemed to wind through an abandoned stage setting. There were no lights in the windows. Over the roofs, a church tower rose against floating clouds; the tower looked as if it were swimming slowly across a motionless sky, menacing, ready to collapse into the street below.

Lanterns smoked over locked gates; through grilled peepholes, night-watchmen’s eyes followed the lonely girl. Militia-men glanced at her sidewise, sleepily suspicious. A cab driver awakened at the sound of her steps to offer his services. A sailor tried to follow her, but took one look at the expression of her face and changed his mind. A cat dived soundlessly into a broken basement window as she approached.

It was long past midnight when she turned suddenly into a street that seemed alive in the heart of a dead city. She saw yellow, curtained squares of light breaking stern, bare walls; squares of light on the bare sidewalk at glass entrance doors; dark roofs, far away, that seemed to meet in the black sky over that narrow crack of stone and light.

Kira stopped. A gramophone was playing. The sound burst into the silence from a blazing window. It was “The Song of Broken Glass.”

It was the song of a nameless hope that frightened her, for it promised so much, and she could not tell what it promised; she could not even say that it was a promise; it was an emotion, almost of pain, that went through her whole body.

Quick, fine notes exploded, as if the trembling cords could not hold them, as if a pair of defiant legs were kicking crystal goblets. And, in the gaps of ragged clouds above, the dark sky was sprinkled with a luminous powder that looked like splinters of broken glass.

The music ended in someone’s loud laughter. A naked arm pulled a curtain over the window.

Then Kira noticed that she was not alone. She saw women with lips painted scarlet on faces powdered snow-white, with red kerchiefs and short skirts, and legs squeezed by high shoes laced too tightly. She saw a man taking a woman’s arm and disappearing through a glass door.

She understood where she was. With a jerk, she started away hurriedly, nervously toward the nearest corner.

And then she stopped.

He was tall; his collar was raised; a cap was pulled over his eyes. His mouth, calm, severe, contemptuous, was that of an ancient chieftain who could order men to die, and his eyes were such as could watch it.

Kira leaned against a lamp post, looking straight at his face, and smiled. She did not think; she smiled, stunned, without realizing that she was hoping he would know her as she knew him.

He stopped and looked at her. “Good evening,” he said.

And Kira who believed in miracles, said: “Good evening.”

He stepped closer and looked at her with narrowed eyes, smiling. But the corners of his mouth did not go up when he smiled; they went down, raising his upper lip into a scornful arc.

“Lonely?” he asked.

“Terribly—and for such a long time,” she answered simply.

“Well, come on.”

“Yes.”

He took her arm and she followed him. He said: “We have to hurry. I want to get out of this crowded street.”

“So do I.”

“I must warn you not to ask any questions.”

“I have no questions to ask.”

She looked at the unbelievable lines of his face. She touched timidly, incredulously, the long fingers of the hand that held her arm.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked. But she did not answer. He said: “I’m afraid I’m not a very cheerful companion tonight.”

“Can I help you?”

“Well, that’s what you’re here for.” He stopped suddenly. “What’s the price?” he asked. “I haven’t much.”

Kira looked at him and understood why he had approached her. She stood looking silently into his eyes. When she spoke, her voice had lost its tremulous reverence; it was calm and firm. She said: “It won’t be much.”

“Where do we go?”

“I passed a little garden around the corner. Let’s go there first—for a while.”

“Any militia-men around?”

“No.”

They sat on the steps of an abandoned residence. Trees shielded them from a street light, and their faces and the wall behind them were dotted, checkered, sliced with shivering splinters of light. Over their heads were rows of empty windows on bare granite. The mansion bore an unhealed scar above its entrance door from where the owner’s coat of arms had been torn. The garden fence had been broken through, and its tall iron spikes bent toward the ground, like lances lowered in a grave salute.

“Take your cap off,” said Kira.

“What for?”

“I want to look at you.”

“Sent to search for someone?”

“No. Sent by whom?”

He did not answer and took off his cap. Her face was a mirror for the beauty of his. Her face reflected no admiration, but an incredulous, reverent awe. All she said was: “Do you always go around with your coat shoulder torn?”

“That’s all I have left. Do you always stare at people as if your eyes would burst?”

“Sometimes.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you. The less you see of them the better off you are. Unless you have strong nerves and a strong stomach.”

“I have.”

“And strong legs?”

His two fingers were held straight while his fingertips threw her skirt up, high above her knees, lightly, contemptuously. Her hands grasped the stone steps. She did not pull her skirt down. She forced herself to sit without movement, without breath, frozen to the steps. He looked at her; his eyes moved up and down, but the corners of his lips moved only downward.

She whispered obediently, without looking at him: “And strong legs.”

“Well, if you have strong legs, then—run.”

“From you?”

“No. From all people. But forget it. Pull your skirt down. Aren’t you cold?”

“No.” But she pulled the skirt down.

“Don’t pay any attention to what I say,” he told her. “Have you anything to drink at your place?”

“Oh, . . . yes.”

“I warn you I’m going to drink like a sponge tonight.”

“Why tonight?”

“That’s my habit.”

“It isn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I know it isn’t.”

“What else do you know about me?”

“I know that you’re very tired.”

“I am. I’ve walked all night.”

“Why?”

“I thought I told you not to ask any questions.”

He looked at the girl who sat pressed tightly against the wall. He saw only one gray eye, quiet and steady, and above it—one lock of hair; the white wrist of a hand held in a black pocket; the black, ribbed stockings on legs pressed tightly together. In the darkness, he guessed the patch of a long, narrow mouth, the dark huddle of a slender body trembling a little. His fingers closed around the black stocking. She did not move. He leaned closer to the dark mouth and whispered: “Stop staring at me as if I were something unusual. I want to drink. I want a woman like you. I want to go down, as far down as you can drag me.”

She said: “You know, you’ve very much afraid that you can’t be dragged down.”

His hand left her stocking. He looked at her a little closer and asked suddenly: “How long have you been in this business?”

“Oh . . . not very long.”

“I thought so.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve tried my best.”

“Tried what?”

“Tried to act experienced.”

“You little fool. Why should you? I’d rather have you as you are, with these strange eyes that see too much. . . . What led you into . . . this?”

“A man.”

“Was he worth that?”

“Yes.”

“What an appetite!”

“For what?”

“For life.”

“If one loses that appetite, why still sit at the table?”

He laughed. His laughter rolled into the empty windows above them, as cold and empty as the windows. “Perhaps to collect under the table a few little crumbs of refuse—like you—that can still be amusing. . . . Take your hat off.”

She took off her tam. Against the gray stone her tangled hair and the light tangled in the leaves, glittered like warm silk. He ran his fingers through her hair and jerked her head back so violently that it hurt her. “Did you love that man?” he asked.

“What man?”

“The one who led you into this?”

“Did I . . .” She was suddenly confused, surprised by an unexpected thought. “No. I didn’t love him.”

“That’s good.”

“Have you . . . ever . . .” She began a question and found that she could not finish it.

“They say I have no feeling for anyone but myself,” he answered, “and not much of that.”

“Who said it?”

“A person that didn’t like me. I know many people that don’t like me.”

“That’s good.”

“But I’ve never known one who said it was good.”

“Yes, you’ve known one.”

“And can you tell me who that is?”

“Yourself.”

He bent toward her again, his eyes searching the darkness, then moved away and shrugged: “You’re wrong. I’m nothing like what I think you think I am. I’ve always wanted to be a Soviet clerk who sells soap and smiles at the customers.”

She said: “You’re so very unhappy.”

His face was so close she could feel his breath on her lips. “Who asked you for sympathy? I suppose you think you can make me like you? Well, don’t fool yourself. I don’t give a damn what I think of you and less what you think of me. I’m just like any other man you’ve had in your bed—and like any you will have.”

She said: “You mean you would like to be like any other man. And you would like to think that there haven’t been any other men—in my bed.”

He looked at her silently. He asked abruptly: “Are you a . . . street woman?”

She answered calmly: “No.”

He jumped to his feet. “Who are you, then?”

“Sit down.”

“Answer.”

“I’m a respectable little girl who studies at the Technological Institute, whose parents would throw her out of the house if they knew she had talked to a strange man on the street.”

He looked down at her; she sat on the steps at his feet, looking up at his face. He saw no fear and no appeal in her eyes, only an insolent calm. He asked: “Why did you do it?”

“I wanted to know you.”

“Why?”

“I liked your face.”

“You little fool! If I were someone else, I might have . . . acted differently.”

“But I knew you were not someone else.”

“Don’t you know that such things are not being done?”

“I don’t care.”

He smiled suddenly. He asked: “Want a confession from me?”

“Yes.”

“This is the first time I’ve ever tried to . . . to buy a woman.”

“Why did you try it tonight?”

“I didn’t care. I’ve walked for hours. There isn’t a house in this city that I can enter tonight.”

“Why?”

“Don’t ask questions. I couldn’t make myself approach one of . . . of those women. But you—I liked your strange smile. What were you doing on such a street at such an hour?”

“I quarreled with someone and I had no carfare and I went home alone—and lost my way.”

“Well, thank you for a most unusual evening. This will be a rare memory to take with me of my last night in the city.”

“Your—last night?”

“I’m going away at dawn.”

“When are you coming back?”

“Never—I hope.”

She got up slowly. She stood facing him. She asked: “Who are you?”

“Even if I trust you, I can’t tell you that.”

“I can’t let you go away forever.”

“Well, I would like to see you again. I’m not going far. I may be back in town.”

“I’ll give you my address.”

“Don’t. You’re not living alone. I can’t enter anyone’s house.”

“Can I come to yours?”

“I haven’t any.”

“But then. . . .”

“Let’s say that we’ll meet here again—in a month. Then, if I’m still alive, if I can still enter the city, I’ll be waiting here for you.”

“I’ll come.”

“November tenth. But let’s make it in daylight. At three o’clock in the afternoon. On these steps.”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s as crazy as our whole acquaintance. And now it’s time for you to go home. You shouldn’t be out at this hour.”

“But where will you go?”

“I’ll walk until dawn. It’s only a few more hours. Come on.”

She did not argue. He took her arm. She followed. They stepped over the bowed lances of the broken fence. The street was deserted. A cab driver on a distant corner raised his head at the sound of their steps. He signaled the cab. Four horseshoes struck forward, shattering the silence.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Leo. And yours?”

“Kira.”

The cab approached. He handed the driver a bill. “Tell him where you want to go,” he said.

“Good-bye,” said Kira, “—for a month.”

“If I’m still alive,” he answered, “—and if I don’t forget.”

She climbed to the seat, kneeling and facing the back of the carriage. As it slowly started away, her hatless hair in the wind, she watched the man who stood looking after her.

When the cab turned a corner, she remained kneeling, but her head dropped. Her hand lay on the seat, helpless, palm up; and she could feel the blood beating in her fingers.

V

GALINA PETROVNA MOANED, EVERY MORNING: “WHAT’S THE matter with you, Kira? You don’t care if you eat or not. You don’t care if you’re cold. You don’t hear when people talk to you. What’s the matter?”

In the evenings, Kira walked home from the Institute, and her eyes followed every tall figure, peering anxiously behind every raised collar, her breath stopping. She did not expect to find him in the city; she did not want to find him. She never worried whether he would come or not. She never wondered whether he liked her. She never had any thought of him beyond the one that he existed. But she found it hard to remember the existence of anything else.

Once, when she came home, the door was opened by Galina Petrovna with red, swollen eyes. “Have you got the bread?” was the first question thrown into the cold draft of the open door.

“What bread?” asked Kira.

“What bread? Your bread! The Institute bread! This is the day you get it! Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten it!”

“I’ve forgotten it.”

“Oh, my Lord in Heaven!”

Galina Petrovna sat down heavily and her hands fell helplessly. “Kira, what’s the matter with you? She gets rations that aren’t enough to feed a cat and she forgets them! No bread! Oh, Lord merciful!”

In the dark dining room, Lydia sat at the window, knitting a woolen stocking by the light of the street lamp outside. Alexander Dimitrievitch drowsed, his head on the table.

“No bread,” announced Galina Petrovna. “Her highness forgot it.”

Lydia sneered. Alexander Dimitrievitch sighed and got up. “I’m going to bed,” he muttered. “You don’t feel so hungry when you sleep.”

“No dinner tonight. No millet left. The water pipes broke. No water in the house.”

“I’m not hungry,” said Kira.

“You’re the only one in the family with a bread card. But, Lord, you don’t seem to think anything of it!”

“I’m sorry, Mother. I’ll get it tomorrow.”

Kira lighted the wick. Lydia moved her knitting toward the little flame.

“Your father hasn’t sold a single thing today in that store of his,” said Galina Petrovna.

Lydia’s needles clicked in the silence.

The door bell rang sharply, insistently. Galina Petrovna shuddered nervously and hurried to open the door.

Heavy boots stamped across the anteroom. The Upravdom entered without being invited, his boots trailing mud on the dining-room floor. Galina Petrovna followed, anxiously clutching her shawl. He held a list in his hand.

“In regards to this water pipes business, Citizen Argounova,” he said, throwing the list on the table without removing his hat. “The house committee has voted a resolution to assess the tenants in proportion to their social standing, for the purpose of water pipes, to repair same, in addition to rent. Here’s a list of who pays what. Have the money in my office no later than ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Good night, citizen.”

Galina Petrovna locked the door after him and held the paper to the light, in a trembling hand.

Doubenko—Worker—in #12 . . . . . 3,000,000 rubles

Rilnikov—Soviet Employee—in #13 . . . . . 5,000,000 rubles

Argounov—Private Trader—in #14 . . . . . 50,000,000 rubles

The paper fell to the floor; Galina Petrovna’s face fell on her hands on the table.

“What’s the matter, Galina? How much is it?” Alexander Dimitrievitch’s voice called from the bedroom.

Galina Petrovna raised her head. “It’s . . . it’s not very much. Go on. Sleep. I’ll tell you tomorrow.” She had no handkerchief; she wiped her eyes with a corner of her shawl and shuffled into the bedroom.

Kira bent over a textbook. The little flame trembled, dancing on the pages. The only thing she could read or remember was not written in the book:

“. . . if I’m still alive—and if I don’t forget. . . .”

Students received bread cards and free tramway tickets. In the damp, bare offices of the Technological Institute, they waited in line to get the cards. Then, in the Students’ Co-operative, they waited in line to get the bread.

Kira had waited for an hour. The clerk at the counter shoved hunks of dried bread at the line moving slowly past him, and dipped his hand into a barrel to fish out the herring, and wiped his hand on the bread, and collected the wrinkled bills of paper money. The bread and herring disappeared, unwrapped, into brief cases filled with books. Students whistled merrily and beat tap steps in the sawdust on the floor.

The young woman who stood in line next to Kira, leaned suddenly against her shoulder with a friendly, confidential grin, although Kira had never seen her before. The young woman had broad shoulders and a masculine leather jacket; short, husky legs and flat, masculine oxfords; a red kerchief tied carelessly over short, straight hair; eyes wide apart in a round, freckled face; thin lips drawn together with so obvious and fierce a determination that they seemed weak; dandruff on the black leather of her shoulders.

She pointed at a large poster calling all students to a meeting for the election of the Students’ Council. She asked: “Going to the meeting this afternoon, comrade?”

“No,” said Kira.

“Ah, but you must go, comrade. By all means. Tremendously important. You have to vote, you know.”

“I’ve never voted in my life.”

“Your first year, comrade?”

“Yes.”

“Wonderful! Wonderful! Isn’t it wonderful?”

“What’s wonderful?”

“To start your education at a glorious time like this, when science is free and opportunity open to all. I understand, it’s all new to you and must seem very strange. But don’t be afraid, dear. I’m an old-timer here, I’ll help you.”

“I appreciate your offer, but . . .”

“What’s your name, dear?”

“Kira Argounova.”

“Mine’s Sonia. Just Comrade Sonia. That’s what everybody calls me. You know, we’re going to be great friends, I can feel it. There’s nothing I enjoy more than helping smart young students like you.”

“But,” said Kira, “I don’t remember saying anything particularly smart.”

Comrade Sonia laughed very loudly: “Ah, but I know girls. I know women. We, the new women who are ambitious to have a useful career, to take our place beside the men in the productive toil of the world—instead of the old kitchen drudgery—we must stick together. There is no sight I like better than a new woman student. Comrade Sonia will always be your friend. Comrade Sonia is everybody’s friend.”

Comrade Sonia smiled. She smiled straight into Kira’s eyes, as if taking, gently, irrevocably, those eyes and the mind behind them into her own hand. Comrade Sonia’s smile was friendly; a kindly, insistent, peremptory friendliness that took the first word and expected to keep it.

“Thank you,” said Kira. “What is it you want me to do?”

“Well, to begin with, Comrade Argounova, you must go to the meeting. We’re electing our Students’ Council for the year. It’s going to be a tough battle. There is a strong anti-proletarian element among our older students. Our class enemies, you know. Young students like you must support the candidates of our Communist Cell, who stand on guard over your interests.”

“Are you one of the Cell’s candidates, Comrade Sonia?”

Comrade Sonia laughed: “See? I told you you were smart. Yes, I’m one of them. Have been on the council for two years. Hard work. But what can I do? The comrade students seem to want me and I have to do my duty. You just come with me and I’ll tell you for whom to vote.”

“Oh,” said Kira. “And after that?”

“I’ll tell you. All Red students join some kind of social activity. You know, you don’t want to be suspected of bourgeois tendencies. I’m organizing a Marxist Circle. Just a little group of young students—and I’m the chairman—to learn the proper proletarian ideology, which we’ll all need when we go out into the world to serve the Proletarian State, since that’s what we’re all studying for, isn’t it?”

“Did it ever occur to you,” asked Kira, “that I may be here for the very unusual, unnatural reason of wanting to learn a work I like only because I like it?”

Comrade Sonia looked into the gray eyes of Comrade Argounova and realized that she had made a mistake. “Well,” said Comrade Sonia, without smiling, “as you wish.”

“I think I’ll go to the meeting,” said Kira, “and—I think I’ll vote.”

An amphitheater of crowded benches rose like a dam, and the waves of students overflowed onto the steps of the aisles, the window sills, the low cabinets, the thresholds of the open doorways.

A young speaker stood on the platform, rubbing his hands solicitously, like a sales clerk at a counter. His face looked like an advertisement that had stayed in a shop window too long: a little more color was needed to make his hair blond, his eyes blue, his skin healthy. His pale lips made no frame for the dark hole of his mouth which he opened wide as he barked words like military commands at his attentive audience.

“Comrades! The doors of science are open to us, sons of toil! Science is now in our own calloused hands. We have outgrown that old bourgeois prejudice about the objective impartiality of science. Science is not impartial. Science is a weapon of the class struggle. We’re not here to further our petty personal ambitions. We have outgrown the slobbering egoism of the bourgeois who whined for a personal career. Our sole aim and purpose in entering the Red Technological Institute is to train ourselves into efficient fighters in the vanguard of Proletarian Culture and Construction!”

The speaker left the platform, rubbing his hands. Some hands in the audience clapped noisily. Most hands remained in the pockets of old coats, under the desks, silent.

Kira leaned toward a freckled girl beside her and asked: “Who is he?”

The girl whispered: “Pavel Syerov. Of the Communist Cell. Party member. Be careful. They have spies everywhere.”

The students sat in a huddled mass rising to the ceiling, a tight mass of pale faces and old, shapeless overcoats. But there was an unseen line dividing them, a line that drew no straight boundary across the benches, but zigzagged over the room, a line no one could see, but all felt, a line as precise and merciless as a sharp knife. One side wore the green student caps of the old days, discarded by the new rulers, wore them proudly, defiantly, as an honorary badge and a challenge; the other side wore red kerchiefs and trim, military leather jackets. The first faction, the larger one, sent speakers to the platform who reminded their audience that students had always known how to fight tyranny, no matter what color that tyranny was wearing, and a thunder of applause rolled from under the ceiling, down to the platform steps, an applause too loud, too long, earnest, hostile, challenging, as the only voice left to the crowd, as if their hands said more than their voices dared to utter. The other faction watched them silently, with cold, unsmiling eyes. Its speakers bellowed belligerently about the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, ignoring the sudden laughter that seemed to burst from nowhere, and the impudent sunflower-seed shells sent expertly at the speaker’s nose.

They were young and too confident that they had nothing to fear. They were raising their voices for the first time, while the country around them had long since spoken its last. They were graciously polite to their enemies and their enemies were graciously polite and called them “comrades.” Both knew the silent struggle of life or death; but only one side, the smaller, knew whose victory was to come. Young and confident, in their leather jackets and red kerchiefs, they looked with a deadly tolerance at those others, young and confident, too, and their tolerance had the cold glint of a hidden bayonet they knew to be coming.

Pavel Syerov bent toward his neighbor, a slight young man with a narrow, consumptive face, and whispered: “So that’s the kind of speeches they make here. What a task we have awaiting us! Had anyone dared that at the front. . . .”

“The front, Comrade Syerov,” answered the soft, expressionless voice of his companion, “has changed. The external front is conquered. It’s on the internal front that we have to dig our trenches now.”

He bent closer to Comrade Syerov. His long, thin hands were pressed to the desk; he barely raised one finger and moved it slowly, indicating the auditorium from wall to wall. “On the internal front,” he whispered, “there are no bombs, no machine guns. When our enemies fall—there is no blood, no cry. The world never knows when they were killed. Sometimes, they do not know it themselves. This day, Comrade Syerov, belongs to the fighters of Red Culture.”

When the last speech had been heard, a vote was taken. Candidates left the room in turn, while others made short speeches about them; then hands were raised, and students standing on tables, waving pencils, counted the votes.

Kira saw Victor going out and heard the speech of his loyal supporter about the wisdom of Comrade Victor Dunaev who was guided by a spirit of understanding and cooperation; both factions applauded; both factions voted for Comrade Dunaev. Kira did not.

“Candidate Pavel Syerov will kindly leave now,” the chairman of the meeting announced. “Word is given to Comrade Presniakova.”

To the clatter of applause, Comrade Sonia leaped to the platform, tore off her red kerchief and shook her short, bristling mane of hair with spirited abandon.

“Just Comrade Sonia!” she greeted her audience. “Hearty proletarian greetings to all! And—particularly—particularly to our comrade women! There’s no sight I like better than a new woman student, a woman emancipated from the old slavery of dishes and diapers. So here I am—Comrade Sonia—ready to serve you all!” She waited for the applause to stop. “Comrade students! We’ve got to stand up for our rights. We’ve got to learn to speak our proletarian will and make our enemies take notice. We’ve got to stamp our proletarian boot into their white throats and their treacherous intentions. Our Red schools are for Red students. Our Students’ Council must stand on guard over proletarian interests. It’s up to you to elect those whose proletarian loyalty is beyond doubt. You’ve heard Comrade Syerov speak. I’m here to tell you that he’s an old fighter in the Communist ranks, a Party member since before the revolution, a soldier of the Red Army. Let us all vote for a good proletarian, a Red soldier, the hero of Melitopol, Comrade Pavel Syerov!”

Through the roll of applause, her heavy shoes clattered down the platform steps, her stomach shaking, her broad face open in a huge grin, the back of one hand wiping perspiration from under her nose.

Comrade Syerov was elected; so was Comrade Sonia; so was Comrade Victor Dunaev; but so were members of the green cap faction—two-thirds of the new Students’ Council.

“And to close the meeting, comrades,” shouted the chairman, “we’ll sing our old song, ‘Days of Our Life.’ ”

A discordant chorus boomed solemnly:

“Swift as the waves
Are the days of our life. . . .”

It was an old drinking song grown to the dignity of a students’ anthem; a slow, mournful tune with an artificial gaiety in the roll of its spiritless notes, born long before the revolution in the stuffy rooms where unshaved men and mannish women discussed philosophy and with forced bravado drank cheap vodka to the futility of life.

Kira frowned; she did not sing; she did not know the old song and did not want to learn it. She noticed that the students in leather jackets and red kerchiefs kept silent, too.

When the song ended, Pavel Syerov shouted: “Now, comrades, our answer!”

For the first time in Petrograd, Kira heard the “Internationale.” She tried not to listen to its words. The words spoke of the damned, the hungry, the slaves, of those who had been nothing and shall be all; in the magnificent goblet of the music, the words were not intoxicating as wine; they were not terrifying as blood; they were gray as dish water.

But the music was like the marching of thousands of feet, measured and steady, like drums beaten by unvarying, unhurried hands. The music was like the feet of soldiers marching into the dawn that is to see their battle and their victory; as if the song rose from under the soldiers’ feet, with the dust of the road, as if the soldiers’ feet played it upon the earth.

The tune sang a promise, calmly, with the calm of an immeasurable strength, and then, tense with a restrained, but uncontrollable ecstasy, the notes rose, trembling, repeating themselves, too rapt to be held still, like arms raised and waving in the sweep of banners.

It was a hymn with the force of a march, a march with the majesty of a hymn. It was the song of soldiers bearing sacred banners and of priests carrying swords. It was an anthem to the sanctity of strength.

Everyone had to rise when the “Internationale” was played.

Kira stood smiling at the music. “This is the first beautiful thing I’ve noticed about the revolution,” she said to her neighbor.

“Be careful,” the freckled girl whispered, glancing around nervously, “someone will hear you.”

“When all this is over,” said Kira, “when the traces of their republic are disinfected from history—what a glorious funeral march this will make!”

“You little fool! What are you talking about?”

A man’s hand grasped Kira’s wrist and wheeled her around.

She stared up into two gray eyes that looked like the eyes of a tamed tiger; but she was not quite sure whether it was tamed or not. There were four straight lines on his face: two eyebrows, a mouth and a scar on his right temple.

For one short second, they looked at each other, silent, hostile, startled by each other’s eyes.

“How much,” asked Kira, “are you paid for snooping around?”

She tried to disengage her wrist. He held it. “Do you know the place for little girls like you?”

“Yes—where men like you wouldn’t be let in through the back door.”

“You must be new here. I’d advise you to be careful.”

“Our stairs are slippery and there are four floors to climb, so be careful when you come to arrest me.”

He dropped her wrist. She looked at his silent mouth; it spoke of many past battles louder than the scar on his forehead; it also spoke of many more to come.

The “Internationale” rang like soldiers’ feet beating the earth.

“Are you exceedingly brave?” he asked. “Or just stupid?”

“I’ll let you find that out.”

He shrugged, turned and walked away. He was tall and young. He wore a cap and a leather jacket. He walked like a soldier, his steps deliberate and very confident.

Students sang the “Internationale,” its ecstatic notes rising, trembling, repeating themselves.

“Comrade,” the freckled girl whispered, “what have you done?”

The first thing that Kira heard when she rang the Dunaevs’ door bell, was Maria Petrovna’s cough. Then, the key turned. Then, a wave of smoke struck Kira in the face. Through the smoke, she saw Maria Petrovna’s tear-filled eyes and her swollen hand covering her mouth, shaking with a violent cough.

“Come in, come in, Kira darling,” Maria Petrovna hissed. “Don’t be afraid. It’s not a fire.”

Kira walked into the gray fog that bit her eyelids like a strong onion; Maria Petrovna shuffled after her, painfully spurting words and coughs: “It’s the stove . . . that Soviet wood . . . we got . . . won’t burn . . . so damp you could . . . breed polliwogs. . . . Don’t take your . . . coat off, Kira . . . it’s too cold. . . . We have the windows open.”

“Is Irina at home?”

“She certainly is,” Irina’s clear, bright voice came from somewhere in the fog, “if you can find her.”

In the dining room, the big double-paneled windows had been sealed for the winter; but one small panel was open; a whirlpool of smoke spun around it, fighting the cold fresh air from the street. Irina sat at the table, her winter coat thrown over her shoulders, blowing at her stiff, blue fingers.

Maria Petrovna found a trembling little shadow in the corner behind the buffet and dragged her out. “Acia, say how-do-you-do to cousin Kira.”

Acia stared up sullenly, her red eyes and little wet nose showing above the collar of her father’s fur jacket.

“Acia, do you hear me? And where’s your handkerchief? Say how-do-you-do to cousin Kira.”

“How do you do,” Acia muttered, staring at the floor.

“Why aren’t you at school today, Acia?”

“Closed,” Maria Petrovna sighed. “The school’s closed. For two weeks. No wood.”

A door banged in the fog. Victor came in. “Oh, how do you do, Kira?” he said coldly. “Mother, when is this smoke going to stop? How can one be expected to study in this infernal atmosphere? Oh, I don’t care. If I don’t pass the examinations, there’ll be no bread cards for a certain family!” The door banged louder as he went out.

Kira sat watching Irina sketch. Irina studied Art; she devoted her time to solemn research into the ancient masterpieces of the museums; but her quick hand and mischievous eyes produced the impudent art of the newspapers. She sketched cartoons whenever she was supposed to, and at any other time. A drawing board on her lap, throwing her head and hair back once in a while for a swift glance at Acia through the smoke, she was sketching her little sister. On the paper, Acia was transformed into a goblin with huge ears and stomach, riding on the back of a snail.

Vasili Ivanovitch came home from the market. He was smiling happily. He had stood at the market all day and had sold the chandelier from their drawing room. He had managed to get a good price for it.

His smile widened when he saw Kira and he nodded to her cheerfully. Maria Petrovna brought him a bowl of hot soup. She asked timidly: “Would you like some soup, Kira?”

“No, thank you, Aunt Marussia. I’ve just had my dinner.”

She knew that Maria Petrovna had but one bowl of soup left, saved for Vasili Ivanovitch; she knew that Maria Petrovna sighed with relief.

Vasili Ivanovitch ate cheerfully, talking to Kira as if she were his personal guest; he spoke to so few of their guests that Maria Petrovna and Irina did not object, watching anxiously the rare sight of his smile.

He chuckled: “Look at Irina drawing. Here she is, daubing, smudging all day long. Not bad, are they, Kira? The drawings, I mean. How’s Victor at the Institute? Not one of the last, I bet. . . . Well, we still have something left. Yes, we still have something left.” He leaned forward suddenly over his soup, his eyes sparkling, his voice low: “Have you read the papers tonight, Kira?”

“Yes, Uncle Vasili. What was it?”

“The news from abroad. Of course, there wasn’t much in the paper. They wouldn’t print it. But you have to know how to read between the lines. Just watch it. Just mark my word. Europe is doing things. And it won’t be long . . . it won’t be long now before . . .”

Maria Petrovna coughed nervously. She was used to it; for five years she had listened to what Vasili Ivanovitch read between the lines of the newspapers about the salvation coming from Europe, which never came. She sighed; she did not dare to argue. Vasili Ivanovitch was grinning happily: “. . . and when it happens, I’m all set to start again where they’ve interrupted. It won’t be difficult. Of course, they’ve closed my store and taken all the furniture away, but . . .” he leaned close to Kira, whispering, “but I’ve watched it. I know where they’ve taken it. I know where it is now.”

“You do, Uncle Vasili?”

“I’ve seen the showcases in a government shoe store on the Bolshoi Prospect; and the chairs—in a factory restaurant in the Viborgsky district; and the chandelier—the chandelier’s in the new Tobacco Trust office. I haven’t been wasting time. I’m ready. As soon as . . . as soon as things change—I’ll know where to find it all and I’ll open the old store again.”

“That’s wonderful, Uncle Vasili. I’m glad they haven’t destroyed your furniture or burned it.”

“No, that’s my luck, they haven’t. It’s still as good as new. I did see a long scratch on one of the showcases, it’s a shame, but it can be fixed. And—here’s the funniest thing,” he chuckled slyly, as if he had outwitted his enemies, “the sign boards. Do you remember my sign boards, Kira, gilded glass with black letters? Well, I’ve even found those. They’re hanging over a co-operative near the Alexandrovsky market. On one side it says: ‘State Co-operative’ but on the other—on the other side it still says: ‘Vasili Dunaev. Furs.’ ” He caught the look in Maria Petrovna’s eyes. He frowned. “Marussia doesn’t believe any more. She doesn’t think we’ll get it all back. She loses faith so easily. How about it, Kira? Do you think you’ll live your whole life under a Red boot?”

“No,” said Kira, “it can’t last forever.”

“Of course, it can’t. Certainly, it can’t. That’s what I say, it can’t.” He rose suddenly. “Come here, Kira, I’ll show you something.”

“Vasili,” Maria Petrovna sighed, “won’t you finish your soup?”

“Never mind the soup. I’m not hungry. Come on to my office, Kira.”

There was no furniture left in Vasili Ivanovitch’s office but a desk and one chair. He unlocked a desk drawer and took out a bundle wrapped in an old, yellowed handkerchief. He unfastened a tight knot and, smiling proudly, happily, straightening his stooped shoulders, showed Kira neatly tied piles of large, crisp currency bills of the Czar’s days. They were large piles; they contained a fortune of many thousands.

Kira gasped: “But, Uncle Vasili, they’re . . . they’re worthless. You’re not allowed to use . . . or even to keep them any more. It’s . . . dangerous.”

He laughed: “Sure, they’re worthless—now. But just wait and see. Wait till things change. You’ll see how much there is right here in my fist.”

“But . . . Uncle Vasili, where did you get them?”

“I bought them. Secretly, of course. From speculators. It’s dangerous, but you can get them. It cost me a lot, too. I’ll tell you why I bought so many. You see, just . . . just before it happened . . . you know, before they nationalized the store . . . I owed one large bill—for my new plate-glass windows—got them from abroad, from Sweden, no one in town had any like that. When they took the store, they kicked their boots through the glass, but it doesn’t matter, I still owe the firm for it. There’s no way I can pay now—you can’t send money abroad—but I’m waiting. I can’t pay it in that worthless Soviet paper trash . . . why, abroad they wouldn’t use it in the bathroom. And you can’t get gold. But these—these will be as good as gold. And I’ll pay my debt. I’ve checked up. The old man of the glass firm has died, but his son is alive. He’s in Berlin now. I’ll pay him. I don’t like to be in debt. I’ve never owed a ruble to any man in my life.” He weighed the paper bundle in the palm of his large hand. He said softly: “Take some advice from an old man, Kira. Don’t ever look back. The past is dead. But there is always a future. There is always a future. And—here’s mine. A good idea, wasn’t it, Kira, getting this money?”

Kira forced a smile, and looked away from him, and whispered: “Yes, Uncle Vasili, a very good idea.”

The door bell rang. Then, in the dining room, they heard a girl’s laughter that seemed clearer, louder than the bell. Vasili Ivanovitch frowned. “Here she is again,” he said sullenly. “Vava Milovskaia. A friend of Victor.”

“What’s the matter, Uncle Vasili? You don’t like her?”

He shrugged: “Oh, she’s all right, I suppose. I don’t dislike her. Only there’s nothing in her to like. Just a scatter-brained little female. Not a girl like you, Kira. Come on, I suppose you’ll have to meet her.”

Vava Milovskaia stood in the middle of the dining room like two luminous circles; the lower and larger one—a full skirt of pink starched chintz; the upper and smaller one—a tangled chrysanthemum of glistening black curls. Her dress was only chintz, but it was new, obviously expensive, and she wore a narrow diamond bracelet.

“Good evening, Vasili Ivanovitch!” she sang. “Good evening! Good evening!” She jumped up, her hands on his shoulders, her pink skirt flaring, and planted a kiss on his stern forehead. “And this is—I know—Kira! Kira Argounova. I’m so glad to see you, at last, Kira!”

Victor came out of his room. Vava repeated persistently that she had come to see Irina, but he knew, as everybody knew, the real object of her visit. He watched her, smiling. He laughed happily, and teased her, and pulled Acia’s ear, and brought a warm shawl for Maria Petrovna when she coughed, and told anecdotes, and even forced Vasili Ivanovitch, who sat gloomily in a dark corner, to smile once at a joke.

“I’ve brought something to show you all,” Vava announced mysteriously, producing a little package from her handbag. “Something . . . something marvelous. Something you’ve never seen before.”

All heads bent over the table, over a tiny, round, orange and gold box. Vava whispered the magic words: “From abroad.”

They looked at it reverently, afraid to touch it. Vava whispered proudly, breathlessly, trying to sound casual: “Face powder. French. Real French. It’s smuggled from Riga. One of Father’s patients gave it to him—in part payment.”

“You know,” said Irina, “I’ve heard that they use not only powder, abroad, but—imagine—lipstick!”

“Yes,” said Vava, “and that woman, Father’s patient, promised to get me—a lipstick, next time.”

“Vava! You won’t dare to use it!”

“Oh . . . I don’t know. Maybe . . . maybe a tiny bit . . . just once in a while.”

“No decent woman paints her lips,” said Maria Petrovna.

“But they say they do and it’s perfectly all right—abroad.”

“Abroad,” Maria Petrovna sighed wistfully. “Such a place does exist somewhere, doesn’t it? . . . Abroad. . . .”

Snow had not come; but a heavy frost glazed the mud on the sidewalks, and the first icicles grew whiskers in the mouths of drain pipes. The sky hung clear and green, lustrous with cold glints of ice. Men walked slowly, awkwardly, like beginners learning to skate; they slipped, waving one helpless leg high in the air, grasping the nearest lamp post. Horses slipped on the glassy cobblestones; sparks flew from under the hoofs scratching the ice convulsively.

Kira walked to the Institute. Through her thin soles, the frozen sidewalk sent a cold breath up her legs. She hurried uncertainly, her feet slipping at odd angles.

She heard steps behind her, very firm, resolute steps that made her turn involuntarily. She looked at the tamed tiger with the scar on his forehead. Their eyes met. He smiled. And she smiled up at him. He touched the visor of his cap. “Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning,” said Kira.

She watched his tall figure walking on hurriedly, his shoulders erect in his leather jacket, his feet steady on the ice.

Across from the Institute, he stopped suddenly and turned, waiting for her. She approached. The high sidewalk sloped down abruptly at a steep, frozen, dangerous angle. He offered his arm to help her. Her feet slipped perilously. His strong hand closed over her arm and quickly, masterfully landed her on her feet.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I thought you might need help. But then,” he looked at her with a faint smile, “I suppose you weren’t afraid.”

“On the contrary. I was very much afraid—this time,” she said, and her smile was an answer of sudden understanding.

He touched the visor of his cap and hurried away through the Institute gates, down a long corridor.

Kira saw a boy she knew. She pointed at the disappearing figure in the leather jacket, and asked: “Who is that?”

The boy looked and made a strange, warning noise with his lips. “Be careful of that,” he whispered and breathed three dreaded letters: “G.P.U.”

“Oh, is he?” said Kira.

“Is he?” said the boy with a long, indignant whistle for an answer.

VI

FOR A MONTH KIRA HAD NOT APPROACHED the neighborhood of the mansion with a broken garden fence; she had not thought of the garden, for she did not want to see it empty, even before her own closed eyes. But on November tenth she walked toward it calmly, evenly, without hurry, without doubts.

Darkness was coming, not from the gray, transparent sky, but from the corners of houses where shadows suddenly grew thicker, as if without reason. Slow whirls of smoke over chimneys were rusty in the rays of a cold, invisible sunset somewhere beyond the clouds. In store windows kerosene lamps stood on the sills, melting yellow circles on the huge, frozen panes, around little orange dots of trembling fire. It had snowed. Whipped into mud by horses’ hoofs, the first snow looked like a pale coffee with thin, melting splinters of sugar. It hushed the city into a soft, padded silence. Hoofs thumped through the mud with a clear, wet sound, as if someone were clicking his tongue loudly, rhythmically, and the sound rolled, dying, down long, darkening streets.

Kira turned a corner; she saw the black lances bowing to the snow, and the trees gathering snatches of cotton in the black net of bare branches. Then, for one second, she stopped, because she was suddenly afraid to look; then she looked into the garden.

He stood on the steps of the mansion, his hands in his pockets, his collar raised. She stopped to look at him. But he heard her and turned quickly.

He walked to meet her. He smiled at her, his mouth a scornful arc. “Allo, Kira.”

“Good evening, Leo.”

She pulled off a heavy black mitten; he held her hand for a long moment in his cold, strong fingers. Then he asked: “Foolish, aren’t we?”

“Why?”

“I didn’t think you’d come. I know I had no intention of coming.”

“But you’re here.”

“I awakened this morning and I knew that I’d be here—against my better judgment, I admit.”

“Are you living in Petrograd now?”

“No. I haven’t been here since that night I met you. We’ve often gone without food because I couldn’t drive to the city. But I’ve returned to meet a girl on a street corner. My compliments, Kira.”

“Who went without food because you couldn’t drive to the city?”

His smile told her that he understood the question and more than the question. But he said: “Let’s sit down.”

They sat down on the steps and she tapped her feet against each other, knocking off the snow. He asked: “So you want to know with whom I’m living? See? My coat is mended.”

“Yes.”

“A woman did that. A very nice woman who likes me very much.”

“She sews well.”

“Yes. But her eyesight isn’t so good any more. And her hair’s gray. She’s my old nurse and she has a shack in the country. Anything else you want to ask?”

“No.”

“Well, I dislike women’s questions, but I don’t know whether I like a woman who won’t let me have the satisfaction of refusing to answer.”

“I have nothing to ask.”

“There are a few things you don’t know about me.”

“I don’t have to know.”

“That’s another thing I want to warn you about: I don’t like women who make it obvious how much they like me.”

“Why? Do you think I want you to like me?”

“Why are you here?”

“Only because I like you. I don’t care what you think of women who like you—nor how many of them there have been.”

“Well, that was a question. And you won’t get any answer. But I’ll tell you that I like you, you arrogant little creature, whether you want to hear it or not. And I’ll also ask questions: what is a child like you doing at the Technological Institute?”

He knew nothing about her present, but she told him about her future; about the steel skeletons she was going to build, about the glass skyscraper and the aluminum bridge. He listened silently and the corners of his lips drooped, contemptuous, and amused, and sad.

He asked: “Is it worth while, Kira?”

“What?”

“Effort. Creation. Your glass skyscraper. It might have been worth while—a hundred years ago. It may be worth while again—a hundred years from now, though I doubt it. But if I were given a choice—of all the centuries—I’d select last the curse of being born in this one. And perhaps, if I weren’t curious, I’d choose never to be born at all.”

“If you weren’t curious—or if you weren’t hungry?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You have no desires?”

“Yes. One: to learn to desire something.”

“Is that hopeless?”

“I don’t know. What is worth it? What do you expect from the world for your glass skyscraper?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps—admiration.”

“Well, I’m too conceited to want admiration. But if you do want it—who can give it to you? Who is capable of it? Who can still want to be capable? It’s a curse, you know, to be able to look higher than you’re allowed to reach. One’s safer looking down, the farther down the safest—these days.”

“One can also fight.”

“Fight what? Sure, you can muster the most heroic in you to fight lions. But to whip your soul to a sacred white heat to fight lice . . . ! No, that’s not good construction, comrade engineer. The equilibrium’s all wrong.”

“Leo, you don’t believe that yourself.”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to believe anything. I don’t want to see too much. Who suffers in this world? Those who lack something? No. Those who have something they should lack. A blind man can’t see, but it’s more impossible not to see for one whose eyes are too sharp. More impossible and more of a torture. If only one could lose sight and come down, down to the level of those who never want it, never miss it.”

“You’ll never do it, Leo.”

“I don’t know. It’s funny, Kira. I found you because I thought you’d do it for me. Now I’m afraid you’ll be the one who’ll save me from it. But I don’t know whether I’ll thank you.”

They sat side by side and talked and, as the darkness rose, their voices fell lower, for a militia-man was on guard, passing up and down the street behind the bowed lances. Snow squeaked under his boots like new leather. The houses were growing blue, dark blue against a lighter sky, as if the night were rising from the pavements. Yellow stars trembled in frosted windows. A street lamp flared up on the corner, behind the trees. It threw a triangle of pink marble veined by shadows of bare twigs on the blue snow of the garden, at their feet.

Leo looked at his wristwatch, an expensive, foreign watch under a frayed shirt cuff. He rose in one swift, supple movement and she sat looking up with admiration, as if hoping to see him repeat it.

“I have to go, Kira.”

“Now?”

“There’s a train to catch.”

“So you’re going again.”

“But I’m taking something with me—this time.”

“A new sword?”

“No. A shield.”

She got up. She stood before him. She asked obediently: “Is it to be another month, Leo?”

“Yes. On these steps. At three o’clock. December tenth.”

“If you’re still alive—and if you don’t. . . .”

“No. I’ll be alive—because I won’t forget.”

He took her hand before she could extend it, tore off the black mitten, raised the hand slowly to his lips and kissed her palm.

Then he turned quickly and walked away. The snow creaked under his feet. The sound and the figure melted into the darkness, while she was still standing motionless, her hand outstretched, until a little white flake fluttered onto her palm, onto the unseen treasure she was afraid to spill.

When Alexander Dimitrievitch’s store did good business, he gave Kira money for carfare; when business fell, she had to walk to the Institute. But she walked every day and saved her carfare to buy a brief case.

She went to the Alexandrovsky market to buy it; she could get a used one—and any article that people used or had used—at the Alexandrovsky market.

She walked slowly, carefully stepping over the goods spread on the sidewalk. A little old lady with ivory hands on a black lace shawl looked at her eagerly, hopefully, as she stepped over a table cloth displaying silver forks, a blue plush album of faded photographs, and three bronze ikons. An old man with a black patch over one eye extended to her silently the picture of a young officer in a nicked gold frame. A coughing young woman thrust forward a faded satin petticoat.

Kira stopped suddenly. She saw broad shoulders towering over the long, hopeless line on the edge of the sidewalk. Vasili Ivanovitch stood silently; he did not advertise his purpose in standing there; the delicate clock of bright Sachs porcelain held in two red, frozen, gloveless hands did it for him. The dark eyes under his heavy, graying brows were fixed, expressionless, on some point above the heads of the passersby.

He saw Kira before she had a chance to run and spare him, but he did not seem to mind; he called her, his grim face smiling happily, the strange, helpless smile he had but for Kira, Victor and Irina.

“How are you, Kira? Glad to see you. Glad to see you. . . . This? Just an old clock. Doesn’t mean much. . . . I bought it for Marussia on her birthday . . . her first birthday after we were married. She saw it in a museum and wanted it. It and no other. So I had to do some diplomatic work. It took an Imperial order from the palace to get it sold out of the museum. . . . It doesn’t run any more. We’ll get along without it.”

He stopped to look hopefully at a fat peasant woman who was staring at the clock, scratching her neck. But when she met Vasili Ivanovitch’s eyes, she turned and hurried away, raising her heavy skirts high over felt boots.

Vasili Ivanovitch whispered to Kira: “You know, this is not a cheerful place. I feel so sorry for all these people here, selling the last of their possessions, with nothing to expect of life. For me, it’s different. I don’t mind. What’s a few knick-knacks more or less? I’ll have time to buy plenty of new ones. But I have something I can’t sell and can’t lose and it can’t be nationalized. I have a future. A living future. My children. You know, Irina—she’s the smartest child. She was always first in school; had she graduated in the old days she would have received a gold medal. And Victor?” The old shoulders straightened vigorously like those of a soldier at attention. “Victor is an unusual young man. Victor’s the brightest boy I’ve ever seen. Sure, we disagree a little sometimes, but that’s because he’s young, he doesn’t quite understand. You mark my word: Victor will be a great man some day.”

“And Irina will be a famous artist, Uncle Vasili.”

“And, Kira, did you read the papers this morning? Just watch England. Within the next month or two. . . .”

A fat individual in a sealskin hat stopped and eyed the Sachs clock critically.

“Give you fifty millions for it, citizen,” he said curtly, pointing at the clock with a short finger in a leather glove.

The price could not buy ten pounds of bread. Vasili Ivanovitch hesitated; he looked wistfully at the sky turning red high above the houses; at the long line of shadows on the sidewalk, that peered eagerly, hopelessly into every passing face.

“Well . . .” he muttered.

“Why, citizen,” Kira whirled on the man, her voice suddenly sharp, querulous, like an indignant housewife, “fifty millions? I’ve just offered this citizen sixty millions for the clock and he wouldn’t sell. I was going to offer. . . .”

“Seventy-five millions and I’ll take it along,” said the stranger.

Vasili Ivanovitch counted the bills carefully. He did not follow the clock with his eyes as it disappeared in the crowd, quivering against a portly hip. He looked at Kira.

“Why, child, where did you learn that?”

She laughed. “One can learn anything—in an emergency.”

Then they parted. Vasili Ivanovitch hurried home. Kira went on in search of the brief case.

Vasili Ivanovitch walked to save carfare. It was getting dark. Snow fluttered down slowly, steadily, as if saving speed for a long run. Thick white foam grew along the curbs.

On a corner, a pair of human eyes looked up at Vasili Ivanovitch from the level of his stomach. The eyes were in a young, clean-shaven face; the legs of the body to which the face belonged seemed to have fallen through the sidewalk, up to above the knees; it took Vasili Ivanovitch an effort to realize that the body had no legs, that it ended in two stumps wrapped in dirty rags, in the snow. The rest of the body wore the neat, patched tunic of an officer of the Imperial army; one of its sleeves was empty; in the other there was an arm and a hand; the hand held out a newspaper, silently, level with the knees of passersby. In the lapel of the tunic Vasili Ivanovitch noticed a tiny black and orange band, the ribbon of the Cross of St. George.

Vasili Ivanovitch stopped and bought a newspaper. The newspaper cost fifty thousand rubles; he handed down a million-ruble bill.

“I’m sorry, citizen,” the officer said in a soft, courteous voice, “I have no change.”

Vasili Ivanovitch muttered gruffly: “Keep it. And I’ll still be your debtor.”

And he hurried away without looking back.

Kira was listening to a lecture at the Institute. The auditorium was not heated; students kept on their overcoats and woolen mittens; the auditorium was overcrowded; students sat on the floor in the aisles.

A hand opened the door cautiously; a man’s head leaned in and threw a quick glance at the professor’s desk. Kira recognized the scar on the right temple. It was a lecture for beginners and he had never attended it. He had entered the auditorium by mistake. He was about to withdraw when he noticed Kira. He entered, closed the door noiselessly and took off his cap. She watched him from the corner of her eye. There was room in the aisle by the door, but he walked softly toward her and sat down on the steps in the aisle, at her feet.

She could not resist the temptation of looking down at him. He bowed silently, with the faintest hint of a smile, and turned attentively toward the professor’s desk. He sat still, his legs crossed, one hand motionless on his knee. The hand seemed all bones, skin and nerves. She noticed how hollow his cheeks were, how sharp the angles of his cheekbones. His leather jacket was more military than a gun, more communistic than a red flag. He did not look up at her once.

When the lecture ended and a mob of impatient feet rushed down the aisles, he got up; but he did not hurry to the door; he turned to Kira.

“How are you today?” he asked.

“Surprised,” she answered.

“By what?”

“Since when do conscientious Communists waste time by listening to lectures they don’t need?”

“Conscientious Communists are curious. They don’t mind listening to investigate that which they don’t understand.”

“I’ve heard they have many efficient ways of satisfying their curiosity.”

“They don’t always want to use them,” he answered calmly, “so they have to find out for themselves.”

“For themselves? Or for the Party?”

“Sometimes both. But not always.”

They were out of the auditorium, walking together down the corridor. A strong hand clapped Kira’s back; and she heard a laughter that was too loud.

“Well, well, well, Comrade Argounova!” Comrade Sonia roared into her face. “What a surprise! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Walking with Comrade Taganov, the reddest Communist we’ve got?”

“Afraid I’ll corrupt him, Comrade Sonia?”

“Corrupt? Him? Not a chance, dear, not a chance. Well, bye-bye. Have to run. Have three meetings at four o’clock—and promised to attend them all!”

Comrade Sonia’s short legs marched resonantly down the hall, her arm swinging a heavy brief case like a knapsack.

“Are you going home, Comrade Argounova?” he asked.

“Yes, Comrade Taganov.”

“Would you mind if you’re compromised by being seen with a very red Communist?”

“Not at all—if your reputation won’t be tarnished by being seen with a very white lady.”

Outside, snow melted into mud under many hurried steps and the mud froze into sharp, jagged ridges. He took Kira’s arm. He looked at her with a silent inquiry for approval. She answered by closing her eyes and nodding. They walked silently. Then she looked up at him and smiled.

She said: “I thought that Communists never did anything except what they had to do; that they never believed in doing anything but what they had to do.”

“That’s strange,” he smiled, “I must be a very poor Communist. I’ve always done only what I wanted to do.”

“Your revolutionary duty?”

“There is no such thing as duty. If you know that a thing is right, you want to do it. If you don’t want to do it—it isn’t right. If it’s right and you don’t want to do it—you don’t know what right is and you’re not a man.”

“Haven’t you ever wanted a thing for no reason save one: that you wanted it?”

“Certainly. That’s always been my only reason. I’ve never wanted things unless they could help my cause. For, you see, it is my cause.”

“And your cause is to deny yourself for the sake of millions?”

“No. To bring millions up to where I want them—for my sake.”

“And when you think you’re right, you do it at any price?”

“I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say, as so many of our enemies do, that you admire our ideals, but loathe our methods.”

“I loathe your ideals.”

“Why?”

“For one reason, mainly, chiefly and eternally, no matter how much your Party promises to accomplish, no matter what paradise it plans to bring mankind. Whatever your other claims may be, there’s one you can’t avoid, one that will turn your paradise into the most unspeakable hell: your claim that man must live for the state.”

“What better purpose can he live for?”

“Don’t you know,” her voice trembled suddenly in a passionate plea she could not hide, “don’t you know that there are things, in the best of us, which no outside hand should dare to touch? Things sacred because, and only because, one can say: ‘This is mine’? Don’t you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worthy of it? Don’t you know that there is something in us which must not be touched by any state, by any collective, by any number of millions?”

He answered: “No.”

“Comrade Taganov,” she whispered, “how much you have to learn!”

He looked down at her with his quiet shadow of a smile and patted her hand like a child’s. “Don’t you know,” he asked, “that we can’t sacrifice millions for the sake of the few?”

“Can you sacrifice the few? When those few are the best? Deny the best its right to the top—and you have no best left. What are your masses but millions of dull, shrivelled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved. Because men are not equal in ability and one can’t treat them as if they were. And because I loathe most of them.”

“I’m glad. So do I.”

“But then. . . .”

“Only I don’t enjoy the luxury of loathing. I’d rather try to make them worth looking at, to bring them up to my level. And you’d make a great little fighter—on our side.”

“I think you know I could never be that.”

“I think I do. But why don’t you fight against us, then?”

“Because I have less in common with you than the enemies who fight you, have. I don’t want to fight for the people, I don’t want to fight against the people, I don’t want to hear of the people. I want to be left alone—to live.”

“Isn’t it a strange request?”

“Is it? And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldn’t it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men?”

“And if your plumbing pipes got badly out of order, wouldn’t it be preposterous to sit still and not make an effort to mend them?”

“I wish you luck, Comrade Taganov. I hope that when you find those pipes running red with your own blood—you’ll still think they were worth mending.”

“I’m not afraid of that. I’m more afraid of what times like ours will do to a woman like you.”

“Then you do see what these times of yours are?”

“We all do. We’re not blind. I know that, perhaps, it is a living hell. Still, if I had a choice, I’d want to be born when I was born, and live the days I’m living, because now we don’t sit and dream, we don’t moan, we don’t wish—we do, we act, we build!”

Kira liked the sound of the steps next to hers, steady, unhurried; and the sound of the voice that matched the steps. He had been in the Red Army; she frowned at his battles, but smiled with admiration at the scar on his forehead. He smiled ironically at the story of Argounov’s lost factories, but frowned, worried, at Kira’s old shoes. His words struggled with hers, but his eyes searched hers for support. She said “no” to the words he spoke, and “yes” to the voice that spoke them.

She stopped at a poster of the State Academic Theaters, the three theaters that had been called “Imperial” before the revolution.

“ ‘Rigoletto,’ ” she said wistfully. “Do you like opera, Comrade Taganov?”

“I’ve never heard one.”

She walked on. He said: “But I get plenty of tickets from the Communist Cell. Only I’ve never had the time. Do you go to the theater often?”

“Not very often. Last time was six years ago. Being a bourgeois, I can’t afford a ticket.”

“Would you go with me if I asked you?”

“Try it.”

“Would you go to the opera with me, Comrade Argounova?”

Her eyebrows danced slyly. She asked: “Hasn’t your Communist Cell at the Institute a secret bureau of information about all students?”

He frowned a little, perplexed: “Why?”

“You could find out from them that my name is Kira.”

He smiled, a strangely warm smile on hard, grave lips. “But that won’t give you a way of finding out that my name is Andrei.”

“I’ll be glad to accept your invitation, Andrei.”

“Thank you, Kira.”

At the door of the red-brick house on Moika she extended her hand.

“Can you break Party discipline to shake a counter-revolutionary hand?” she asked.

He held her hand firmly. “Party discipline isn’t to be broken,” he answered, “but, oh! how far it can be stretched!”

Their eyes held each other longer than their hands, in a silent, bewildering understanding. Then he walked away with the light, precise steps of a soldier. She ran up four flights of stairs, her old tam in one hand, shaking her tousled hair, laughing.

VII

ALEXANDER DIMITRIEVITCH KEPT HIS SAVINGS SEWN IN his undershirt. He had developed the habit of raising his hand to his heart once in a while, as if he had gas pains; he felt the roll of bills; he liked the security under his fingertips. When he needed money, he cut the heavy seam of white thread and sighed as the load grew lighter. On November sixteenth, he cut the seam for the last time.

The special tax on private traders for the purpose of relieving the famine on the Volga had to be paid, even though it closed the little textile store in the bakery shop. Another private enterprise had failed.

Alexander Dimitrievitch had expected it. They opened on every corner, fresh and hopeful like mushrooms after a rain; and, like mushrooms, they faded before their first morning was over. Some men were successful. He had seen them: men in resplendent new fur coats, with white, flabby cheeks that made him think of butter for breakfast, and eyes that made him raise his hand, nervously, to the roll over his heart. These men were seen in the front rows at the theaters; they were seen leaving the new confectioners’ with round white cake boxes the price of which could keep a family for two months; they were seen hiring taxis—and paying for them. Insolent street children called them “Nepmen”; their cartoons adorned the pages of Red newspapers—with scornful denunciations of the new vultures of NEP; but their warm fur hats were seen in the windows of automobiles rocketing the highest Red officials through the streets of Petrograd. Alexander Dimitrievitch wondered dully about their secrets. But the dreaded word “speculator” gave him a cold shudder; he lacked the talents of a racketeer.

He left the empty bakery boxes; but he carried home his faded cotton sign. He folded it neatly and put it away in a drawer where he kept old stationery with the embossed letterhead of the Argounov textile factories.

“I will not become a Soviet employee if we all starve,” said Alexander Dimitrievitch.

Galina Petrovna moaned that something had to be done. Unexpected help appeared in the person of a former bookkeeper from the Argounov factory.

He wore glasses and a soldier’s coat and he was not careful about shaving. But he rubbed his hands diffidently and he knew how to respect authority under all circumstances.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk, Alexander Dimitrievitch, sir,” he wailed. “This is no life for you. Now, if we get together . . . if you just invest a little, I’ll do all the work. . . .”

They formed a partnership. Alexander Dimitrievitch was to manufacture soap; the unshaved bookkeeper was to sell it; had an excellent corner on the Alexandrovsky market.

“What? How to make it?” he enthused. “Simple as an omelet. I’ll get you the greatest little soap recipe. Soap is the stuff of the moment. The public hasn’t had any for so long they’ll tear it out of your hands. We’ll put them all out of business. I know a place where we can get spoiled pork fat. No good for eating—but just right for soap.”

Alexander Dimitrievitch spent his last money to buy spoiled pork fat. He melted it in a big brass laundry tub on the kitchen stove. He bent over the steaming fumes, blinking, his shirt sleeves rolled above his elbows, stirring the mixture with a wooden paddle. The kitchen door had to be kept open; there was no other stove to heat the apartment. The bitter, musty odor of a factory basement rose, with the whirling steam of a laundry, to the streaked ceiling. Galina Petrovna chopped the spoiled pork fat on the kitchen table, delicately crooking her little finger, clearing her throat noisily.

Lydia played the piano. Lydia had always boasted of two accomplishments: her magnificent hair, which she brushed for half an hour every morning, and her music, which she practiced for three hours each day. Galina Petrovna asked for Chopin. Lydia played Chopin. The wistful music, delicate as rose petals falling slowly in the darkness of an old park, rang softly through the haze of soap fumes. Galina Petrovna did not know why tears dropped on her knife; she thought that the pork fat hurt her eyes.

Kira sat at the table with a book. The odor from the kettle raked her throat as if with sharp little prongs. She paid no attention to it. She had to learn and remember the words in the book for that bridge she would build some day. But she stopped often. She looked at her hand, at the palm of her right hand. Stealthily, she brushed her palm against her cheek, slowly, from the temple to the chin. It seemed a surrender to everything she had always disliked. She blushed; but no one could see it through the fumes.

The soap came out in soft, soggy squares of a dirty brown. Alexander Dimitrievitch found an old brass button off his yachting jacket and imprinted an anchor in the corner of each square.

“Great idea! Trademark,” said the unshaved bookkeeper. “We’ll call it ‘Argounov’s Navy Soap.’ A good revolutionary name.”

A pound of soap cost Alexander Dimitrievitch more than it did on the market.

“That’s nothing,” said his partner. “That’s better. They’ll think more of it if they have to pay more. It’s quality soap. Not the old Jukov junk.”

He had a tray with straps to wear over his shoulders. He arranged the brown squares carefully on the tray and departed, whistling, for the Alexandrovsky market.

In a hall of the Institute Kira saw Comrade Sonia. She was making a little speech to a group of five young students. Comrade Sonia was always surrounded by a brood of youngsters; and she always talked, her short arms flapping like protective wings.

“. . . and Comrade Syerov is the best fighter in the ranks of proletarian students. Comrade Syerov’s revolutionary record is unsurpassed. Comrade Syerov, the hero of Melitopol. . . .”

A freckled boy with a soldier’s cap far on the back of his head, stopped his hurried waddle down the hall and barked at Comrade Sonia: “The hero of Melitopol? Ever heard of Andrei Taganov?”

He sent a sunflower seed straight at a button on Comrade Sonia’s leather jacket and staggered away carelessly. Comrade Sonia did not answer. Kira noticed that the look on her face was not a pleasant one.

Finding a rare moment when Comrade Sonia was alone, Kira asked her: “What kind of man is Comrade Taganov?”

Comrade Sonia scratched the back of her head, without a smile. “A perfect revolutionary, I suppose. Some call him that. However, it’s not my idea of a good proletarian if a man doesn’t unbend and be a little sociable with his fellow comrades once in a while. . . . And if you have any intentions in a bedroom direction, Comrade Argounova—well, not a chance. He’s the kind of saint that sleeps with red flags. Take it from one who knows.”

She laughed aloud at the expression on Kira’s face and waddled away, throwing over her shoulder: “Oh, a little proletarian vulgarity won’t hurt you!”

Andrei Taganov came again to the lecture for beginners, in the crowded auditorium. He found Kira in the crowd and elbowed his way toward her and whispered: “Tickets for tomorrow night. Mikhailovsky Theater. ‘Rigoletto.’ ”

“Oh, Andrei!”

“May I call for you?”

“It’s number fourteen. Fourth floor, on the back stairs.”

“I’ll be there at seven-thirty.”

“May I thank you?”

“No.”

“Sit down. I’ll make room for you.”

“Can’t. I have to go. I have another lecture to attend.”

Cautiously, noiselessly, he made his way to the door, and turned once to glance back at her smiling face.

Kira delivered her ultimatum to Galina Petrovna: “Mother, I have to have a dress. I’m going to the opera tomorrow.”

“To the . . . opera!” Galina Petrovna dropped the onion she was peeling; Lydia dropped her embroidery.

“Who is he?” gasped Lydia.

“A boy. At the Institute.”

“Good-looking?”

“In a way.”

“What’s his name?” inquired Galina Petrovna.

“Andrei Taganov.”

“Taganov? . . . Never heard. . . . Good family?”

Kira smiled and shrugged.

A dress was found at the bottom of the trunk; Galina Petrovna’s old dress of soft dark-gray silk. After three fittings and conferences between Galina Petrovna and Lydia, after eighteen hours when two pairs of shoulders bent over the oil wick and two hands feverishly worked two needles, a dress was created for Kira, a simple dress with short sleeves and a shirt collar, for there was no material to trim it.

Before dinner, Kira said: “Be careful when he comes. He’s a Communist.”

“A Com . . .” Galina Petrovna dropped the salt shaker into the pot of millet.

“Kira! You’re not . . . you’re not being friendly with a Communist?” Lydia choked. “After shouting how much you hate them?”

“I happen to like him.”

“Kira, it’s outrageous! You have no pride in your social standing. Bringing a Communist into the house! I, for one, shan’t speak to him.”

Galina Petrovna did not argue. She sighed bitterly: “Kira, you always seem to be able to make hard times harder.”

There was millet for dinner; it was mildewed and everyone noticed it; but no one said a word for fear of spoiling the others’ appetite. It had to be eaten; there was nothing else; so they ate in silence.

When the bell rang, Lydia, curious in spite of her convictions, hurried to open the door.

“May I see Kira, please?” Andrei asked, removing his cap.

“Yes, indeed,” Lydia said icily.

Kira performed the introductions. Alexander Dimitrievitch said: “Good evening,” and made no other sound, watching the guest fixedly, nervously. Lydia nodded and turned away.

But Galina Petrovna smiled eagerly: “I’m so glad, Comrade Taganov, that my daughter is going to hear a real proletarian opera in one of our great Red theaters!”

Kira’s eyes met Andrei’s over the wick. She was grateful for the calm, gracious bow with which he acknowledged the remark.

Two days a week were “Profunion days” at the State Academic Theaters. No tickets were sold to the public; they were distributed at half-price among the professional unions. In the lobby of the Mikhailovsky Theater, among trim new suits and military tunics, a few felt boots shuffled heavily and a few calloused hands timidly removed leather caps with flapping, fur-lined ears. Some were awkward, diffident; others slouched insolently, defying the impressive splendor by munching sunflower seeds. Wives of union officials ambled haughtily through the crowd, erect and resplendent in their new dresses of the latest style, with their marcelled hair, sparkling manicures and patent leather slippers. Glistening limousines drove, panting sonorously, up to the light-flooded entrance and disgorged heavy fur coats that waddled swiftly across the sidewalk, projecting gloved hands to throw coins at the ragged program peddlers. The program peddlers, livid, frozen shadows, scurried obsequiously through the free “profunion” audience, a wealthier, haughtier, better fed audience than the week-day paying guests.

The theater smelt of old velvet, marble and moth balls. Four balconies rose high to a huge chandelier of crystal chains that threw little rainbows on the distant ceiling. Five years of revolution had not touched the theater’s solemn grandeur; they had left but one sign: the Imperial eagle was removed from over the huge central box which had belonged to the royal family.

Kira remembered the long satin trains, and the bare white shoulders, and the diamonds that sparkled like the crystals of the chandelier, moving down the orange carpets of the wide aisles. There were few diamonds now; the dresses were dark, sober, with high necklines and long sleeves. Slender, erect in her soft gray satin, she walked in as she had seen those ladies walk many years ago, her arm on that of a tall young man in a leather jacket.

And when the curtain went up and music rose in the dark, silent shaft of the theater, growing, swelling, thundering against walls that could not hold it, something stopped in Kira’s throat and she opened her mouth to take a breath. Beyond the walls were linseed-oil wicks, men waiting in line for tramways, red flags and the dictatorship of the proletariat. On the stage, under the marble columns of an Italian palace, women waved their hands softly, gracefully, like reeds in the waves of music, long velvet trains rustled under a blinding light and, young, carefree, drunk on the light and the music, the Duke of Mantua sang the challenge of youth and laughter to gray, weary, cringing faces in the darkness, faces that could forget, for a while, the hour and the day and the century.

Kira glanced at Andrei once. He was not looking at the stage; he was looking at her.

During an intermission, in the foyer, they met Comrade Sonia on the arm of Pavel Syerov. Pavel Syerov was immaculate. Comrade Sonia wore a wrinkled silk dress with a tear in the right armpit. She laughed heartily, slapping Kira’s shoulder.

“So you’ve gone quite proletarian, haven’t you? Or is it Comrade Taganov who’s gone bourgeois?”

“Very unkind of you, Sonia,” Pavel Syerov remonstrated, his pale lips opening in a wide grin. “I can compliment Comrade Argounova on her wise choice.”

“How do you know my name?” Kira asked. “You’ve never met me.”

“We know a lot, Comrade Argounova,” he answered very pleasantly, “we know a lot.”

Comrade Sonia laughed and, steering Syerov’s arm masterfully, disappeared in the crowd.

On the way home, Kira asked: “Andrei, did you like the opera?”

“Not particularly.”

“Andrei, do you see what you’re missing?”

“I don’t think I do, Kira. It’s all rather silly. And useless.”

“Can’t you enjoy things that are useless, merely because they are beautiful?”

“No. But I enjoyed it.”

“The music?”

“No. The way you listened to it.”

At home, on her mattress in the corner, Kira remembered regretfully that he had said nothing about her new dress.

Kira had a headache. She sat at the window of the auditorium, her forehead propped by her hand, her elbow on a slanting desk. She could see, reflected in the window pane, a single electric bulb under the ceiling and her drawn face with dishevelled hair hanging over her eyes. The face and the bulb stood as incongruous shadows against the frozen sunset outside, beyond the window, a sunset as sinister and cold as dead blood.

Her feet felt cold in a draft from the hall. Her collar seemed too tight around her throat. No lecture had ever seemed so long. It was only December second. There were still so many days to wait, so many lectures. She found her fingers drumming softly on the window pane, and each couple of knocks was a name of two syllables, and her fingers repeated endlessly, persistently, against her will, a name that echoed somewhere in her temples, a name of three letters she did not want to hear, but heard ceaselessly, as if something within her were calling out for help.

She did not notice when the lecture ended and she was walking out, down a long, dark corridor, to a door open upon a white sidewalk. She stepped out into the snow; she drew her coat tighter against a cold wind.

“Good evening, Kira,” a voice called softly from the darkness.

She knew the voice. Her feet stood still, then her breath, then her heart.

In a dark corner by the door, Leo stood leaning against the wall, looking at her.

“Leo . . . how . . . could . . . you?”

“I had to see you.”

His face was stern, pale. He did not smile.

They heard hurried steps. Pavel Syerov rushed past them. He stopped short; he peered into the darkness; he threw a quick glance at Kira; then he shrugged and hurried away, down the street. He turned once to glance back at them.

“Let’s get away from here,” Kira whispered.

Leo called a sleigh. He helped her in, fastened the heavy fur blanket over their knees. The driver jerked forward.

“Leo . . . how could you?”

“I had no other way of finding you.”

“And you. . . .”

“Waited at the gate for three hours. Had almost given up hope.”

“But wasn’t it. . . .”

“Taking a chance? A big one.”

“And you came . . . again . . . from the country?”

“Yes.”

“What . . . what did you want to tell me?”

“Nothing. Just to see you.”

On the quay, at the Admiralty, Leo stopped the sleigh and they got out and walked along the parapet. The Neva was frozen. A solid coat of ice made a wide, white lane between its high banks. Human feet had stamped a long road across its snow. The road was deserted.

They descended down the steep, frozen bank to the ice below. They walked silently, suddenly alone in a white wilderness.

The river was a wide crack in the heart of the city. It stretched the silence of its snow under the silence of the sky. Far away, smokestacks, like little black matches, fumed a feeble brown salute of melting plumes to the sunset. And the sunset rose in a fog of frost and smoke; then it was cut by a red gash, raw and glowing, like living flesh; then the wound closed and the blood flowed slowly higher up the sky, as if under a misty skin, a dull orange, a trembling yellow, a soft purple that surrendered, flowing up into a soft irrevocable blue. The little houses high and very far away, cut brown, broken shadows into the sky; some windows gathered drops of fire from above; others answered feebly with little steely lights, cold and bluish as the snow. And the golden spire of the Admiralty held defiantly a vanished sun high over the dark city.

Kira whispered: “I . . . I was thinking about you . . . today.”

“Were you thinking about me?”

His fingers hurt her arm; he leaned close to her, his eyes wide, menacing, mocking in their haughty understanding, caressing and masterful.

She whispered: “Yes.”

They stood alone in the middle of the river. A tramway clattered, rising up the bridge, shaking the steel beams to their roots in the water far below. Leo’s face was grim. He said: “I thought of you, too. But I didn’t want to think of you. I fought it this long.”

She did not answer. She stood straight, tense, still.

“You know what I wanted to tell you,” he said, his face very close to hers.

And, without thought, without will or question, in a voice that was someone’s order to her, not her voice, she answered: “Yes.”

His kiss felt like a wound.

Her arms closed around the frightening wonder of a man’s body. She heard him whisper, so close that it seemed her lips heard it first: “Kira, I love you. . . .”

And someone’s order to her repeated through her lips, persistently, hungrily, insanely: “Leo, I love you. . . . I love you. . . . I love you. . . .”

A man passed by. The little spark of a cigarette jerked up and down in the darkness.

Leo took her arm and led her away, on perilous ground, through the deep, unbroken snow, to the bridge.

They stood in the darkness of steel vaults. Through the black webbing above, they saw the red sky dying out slowly.

She did not know what he was saying; she knew that his lips were on hers. She did not know that her coat collar was unbuttoned; she knew that his hand was on her breast.

When a tramway rose up the bridge over their heads, the steel clattered convulsively, a dull thunder rolling through its joints; and for a long time after it was gone, the bridge moaned feebly.

The first words she remembered were: “I’ll come tomorrow.”

Then she found her voice and stood straight and said: “No. It’s too dangerous. I’m afraid someone saw you. There are spies at the Institute. Wait for a week.”

“Not that long?”

“Yes.”

“Here?”

“No. Our old place. At night. Nine o’clock.”

“It will be hard to wait.”

“Yes, Leo . . . Leo. . . .”

“What?”

“Nothing. I like to hear your name.”

That night, on the mattress in the corner of her room, she lay motionless and saw the blue square of the window turn pink.

VIII

IN THE INSTITUTE CORRIDOR, ON THE NEXT day, a student with a red badge stopped her.

“Citizen Argounova, you’re wanted in the Communist Cell. At once.”

In the room of the Communist Cell, at a long bare table, sat Pavel Syerov.

He asked: “Citizen Argounova, who was the man at the gate with you last night?”

Pavel Syerov was smoking. He held the cigarette firmly at his lips and looked at Kira through the smoke.

She asked: “What man?”

“Comrade Argounova having trouble with her memory? The man I saw at the gate with you last night.”

A picture of Lenin hung on the wall, behind Pavel Syerov. Lenin looked sidewise, winking slyly, his face frozen in half a smile.

“Oh, yes, I do remember,” said Kira. “There was a man. But I don’t know who he was. He asked me how to find some street.”

Pavel Syerov shook the ashes off his cigarette into a broken ashtray. He said pleasantly: “Comrade Argounova, you’re a student of the Technological Institute. Undoubtedly you wish to continue to be.”

“Undoubtedly,” said Kira.

“Who was that man?”

“I wasn’t interested enough to ask him.”

“Very well. I won’t ask you that. I’m sure we both know his name. All I want is his address.”

“Well, let me see, . . . yes, he asked the way to Sadovaia Street. You might look there.”

“Comrade Argounova, I’ll remind you that the gentlemen of your faction have always accused us proletarian students of belonging to a secret police organization. And, of course, that might be true, you know.”

“Well, may I ask you a question, then?”

“Certainly. Always pleased to accommodate a lady.”

“Who was that man?”

Pavel Syerov’s fist came down on the table. “Citizen Argounova, do you have to be reminded that this is no joke?”

“If it isn’t, will you tell me what it is?”

“You’ll understand what it is and damn quick. You’ve lived in Soviet Russia long enough to know how serious it is to protect counter-revolutionaries.”

A hand opened the door without knocking. Andrei Taganov came in. His face showed no astonishment or emotion. Syerov’s did; he raised the cigarette to his lips a little too quickly.

“Good morning, Kira,” Andrei said calmly.

“Good morning, Andrei,” she answered.

He walked to the table. He took a cigarette and bent toward the one in Syerov’s hand. Syerov held it out to him hastily. Syerov waited; but Andrei said nothing; he stood by the table, the smoke of his cigarette rising in a straight column. He looked at Kira and Syerov, silently.

“Comrade Argounova, I do not doubt your political trustworthiness,” Comrade Syerov said gently. “I’m sure that the single question of one address will not be hard for you to answer.”

“I told you I don’t know him. I’ve never seen him before. I can’t know his address.”

Pavel Syerov tried surreptitiously to observe Andrei’s reaction; but Andrei did not move. Pavel Syerov leaned forward and spoke softly, confidentially. “Comrade Argounova, I want you to understand that this man is wanted by the State. Perhaps it’s not our assignment to search for him. But if you can help us to find him, it will be very valuable to you and to me—and to all of us,” he added significantly.

“And if I can’t help you—what am I to do?”

“You’re to go home, Kira,” said Andrei.

Syerov dropped his cigarette.

“That is,” Andrei added, “unless you have lectures to attend. If we need you again—I’ll send for you.”

Kira turned and left the room. Andrei sat down on the corner of the table and crossed his legs.

Pavel Syerov smiled; Andrei was not looking at him. Pavel Syerov cleared his throat. Pavel Syerov said: “Of course, Andrei, old pal, I hope you don’t think that I . . . because she is a friend of yours and. . . .”

“I don’t think it,” said Andrei.

“I’d never question or criticize your actions. Not even if I did think that it’s not good discipline to cancel a fellow Communist’s order before an outsider.”

“What discipline permitted you to call her for questioning?”

“Sorry, pal. My fault. Of course, I was only trying to help you.”

“I have not asked for help.”

“It was like this, Andrei. I saw her with him at the door last night. I’ve seen his pictures. The G.P.U. has been searching for him for almost two months.”

“Why didn’t you report it to me?”

“Well, I wasn’t sure it was the man. I might have been mistaken . . . and . . .”

“And your help in the matter would have been—valuable to you.”

“Why, old pal, you’re not accusing me of any personal motives, are you? Maybe I did overstep my authority in these little G.P.U. matters that belong to your job, but I was only thinking of helping a fellow proletarian in his duty. You know that nothing can stop me in fulfilling my duty, not even any . . . sentimental attachments.”

“A breach of Party discipline is a breach of Party discipline, no matter by whom committed.”

Pavel Syerov was looking at Andrei Taganov too fixedly, as he answered slowly: “That’s what I’ve always said.”

“It is never advisable to be overzealous in one’s duty.”

“Certainly not. It’s as bad as being lax.”

“In the future—any political questioning in this unit is to be done by me.”

“As you wish, pal.”

“And if you ever feel that I cannot perform that task—you may report it to the Party and ask for my dismissal.”

“Andrei! How can you say that! You don’t think that I question for a single minute your invaluable importance to the Party? Haven’t I always been your greatest admirer—you, the hero of Melitopol? Aren’t we old friends? Haven’t we fought in the trenches together, under the red flag, you and I, shoulder to shoulder?”

“Yes,” said Andrei, “we have.”

In the year 1896, the red-brick house in the Putilovsky factory district of St. Petersburg had no plumbing. The fifty worker families that clotted its three floors had fifty barrels in which to keep their water. When Andrei Taganov was born, a kindly neighbor brought a barrel from the stair-landing; the water was frozen; the neighbor broke the ice with an ax, and emptied the barrel. The pale, shivering hands of the young mother stuffed an old pillow into the barrel. Such was Andrei’s first bed.

His mother bent over the barrel and laughed, laughed happily, hysterically, until tears fell into the dimples of the tiny, red hands. His father did not hear of his birth for three days. His father had been away for a week and the neighbors spoke about it in whispers.

In the year 1905, the neighbors did not need to whisper about the father any longer. He made no secret of the red flag he carried through the streets of St. Petersburg, nor of the little white pamphlets he sowed into the dark soil of crowds, nor of the words his powerful voice sent like a powerful wind to carry the seeds—the flaming words to the glory of Russia’s first revolution.

It was Andrei’s tenth year. He stood in a corner of the kitchen and looked at the brass buttons on the gendarmes’ coats. The gendarmes had black moustaches and real guns. His father was putting his coat on slowly. His father kissed him and kissed his mother. The gendarmes’ boots grated the last paint off the kitchen floor. His mother’s arms clung to his father’s shoulders like tentacles. A strong hand tore her off. She fell across the threshold. They left the door open. Their steps rang down the stairs. His mother’s hair was spilled over the bricks of the stair-landing.

Andrei wrote his mother’s letters. Neither of them had been taught to write, but Andrei had learned it by himself. The letters went to his father and the address bore, in Andrei’s big, awkward handwriting, the name of a town in Siberia. After a while his mother stopped dictating letters. His father never came back.

Andrei carried the baskets with the laundry his mother washed. He could have hidden himself, head and toes, in one of the baskets, but he was strong. In their new room in the basement there was a white, billowing, sour foam, like clouds, in the wooden trough under his mother’s purple hands and a white, billowing, sour steam, like clouds, under the ceiling. They could not see that it was spring outside. But they could not have seen it, even without the steam: for the window opened upon the sidewalk and they could watch only the shiny new galoshes grunting through the mud of melting snow, and, once, someone dropped a young green leaf right by the window.

Andrei was twelve years old when his mother died. Some said it was the wooden trough that had killed her, for it had always been too full; and some said it was the kitchen cupboard, for it had always been too empty.

Andrei went to work in a factory. In the daytime, he stood at a machine and his eyes were cold as its steel, his hands steady as its levers, his nerves tense as its belts. At night, he crouched on the floor behind a barricade of empty boxes in the corner he rented; he needed the barricade because the three other corner tenants in the room objected to candle light when they wanted to sleep, and Agrafena Vlassovna, the landlady, did not approve of book reading. So he kept the candle on the floor, and he held the book to the candle, and he read very slowly, and he wrapped his feet in newspapers because they were very cold; and the snow wailed battering the window, the three corner tenants snored, Agrafena Vlassovna spat in her sleep, the candle dripped, and everybody was asleep but Andrei and the cockroaches.

He talked very little, smiled very slowly and never gave coins to beggars.

Sometimes, on Sundays, he passed Pavel Syerov in the street. They knew each other, as all children did in the neighborhood, but they did not talk often. Pavel did not like Andrei’s clothes. Pavel’s hair was greased neatly and his mother was taking him to church. Andrei never went to church.

Pavel’s father was a clerk in the corner dry-goods store and waxed his moustache six days a week. On Sundays, he drank and beat his wife. Little Pavel liked perfumed soap, when he could steal it from the apothecary shop; and he studied God’s Law—his best white collar on—with the parish priest.

In the year 1915, Andrei stood at the machine, and his eyes were colder than its steel, his hands steadier than its levers, his nerves colder and steadier than both. His skin was tanned by the fire of the furnaces; his muscles and the will behind his muscles were tempered like the metal he had handled. And the little white pamphlets his father had sown, reappeared in the son’s hands. But he did not throw them into crowds on the wings of fiery speeches; he passed them stealthily into stealthy hands and the words that went with them were whispers. His name was on the list of a party about which not many dared to whisper and he sent through the mysterious, unseen veins of the Putilovsky factory messages from a man named Lenin.

Andrei Taganov was nineteen. He walked fast, talked slowly, never went to dances. He took orders and gave orders, and had no friends. He looked at superintendents in fur coats and at beggars in felt boots, with the same level, unflinching eyes, and had no pity.

Pavel Syerov was clerking in a haberdashery. On Sundays he entertained a noisy crowd of friends in the corner saloon, leaned back in his chair and swore at the waiter if service was too slow. He loaned money freely and no one refused a loan to “Pavlusha.” He put on his patent leather shoes when he took a girl to a dance, and put eau-de-cologne on his handkerchief. He liked to hold the girl’s waist and to say: “We’re not a commoner, dearie. We’re a gentleman.”

In the year 1916, Pavel Syerov lost his job in the haberdashery, owing to a fight over a girl. It was the third year of the war; prices were high; jobs were scarce. Pavel Syerov found himself trudging through the gates of the Putilovsky factory on winter mornings, when it was so dark and so early that the lights over the gate cut his puffed, sleepy eyes and he yawned into his raised collar. At first, he avoided his old crowd, for he was ashamed to admit where he was working. After a while, he avoided them because he was ashamed to admit they had been his friends. He circulated little white pamphlets, made speeches at secret meetings and took orders from Andrei Taganov only because “Andrei’s been in it longer, but wait till I catch up with him.” The workers liked “Pavlusha.” When he happened to meet one of his old friends, he passed by haughtily, as if he had inherited a title; and he spoke of the superiority of the proletariat over the paltry petty bourgeoisie, according to Karl Marx.

In February of the year 1917, Andrei Taganov led crowds through the streets of Petrograd. He carried his first red flag, received his first wound and killed his first man—a gendarme. The only thing that impressed him was the flag.

Pavel Syerov did not see the February Revolution rise, triumphant, from the city pavements. He stayed at home: he had a cold.

But in October, 1917, when the Party whose membership cards Andrei and Pavel carried reverently, rose to seize the power, they were both in the streets. Andrei Taganov, his hair in the wind, fought at the siege of the Winter Palace. Pavel Syerov received credit for stopping—after most of the treasures were gone—the looting of a Grand Duke’s mansion.

In the year 1918, Andrei Taganov, in the uniform of the Red Army, marched with rows of other uniforms, from shops and factories, through the streets of Petrograd, to the tune of the Internationale, to the depot, to the front of civil war. He marched solemnly, with silent triumph, as a man walks to his wedding.

Andrei’s hand carried a bayonet as it had fashioned steel; it pulled a trigger as it had pushed a lever. His body was young, supple, as a vine ripe in the sun, on the voluptuous couch of a trench’s mud. He smiled slowly and shot fast.

In the year 1920, Melitopol hung by a thread between the White Army and the Red. The thread broke on a dark spring night. It had been expected to break. The two armies held their last stand in a narrow, silent valley. On the side of the White Army was a desperate desire to hold Melitopol, a division numbering five to one of their adversaries, and a vague, grumbling resentment of the soldiers against their officers, a sullen, secret sympathy for the red flag in the trenches a few hundred feet away. On the side of the Red Army was an iron discipline and a desperate task.

They stood still, a few hundred feet apart, two trenches of bayonets shimmering faintly, like water, under a dark sky, of men ready and silent, tense, waiting. Black rocks rose to the sky in the north and black rocks rose to the sky in the south; but between them was a narrow valley, with a few blades of grass still left among the torn clots of earth, and enough space to shoot, to scream, to die—and to decide the fate of those beyond the rocks on both sides. The bayonets in the trenches did not move. And the blades of grass did not move, for there was no wind and no breath from the trenches to stir them.

Andrei Taganov stood at attention, very straight, and asked the Commander’s permission for the plan he had explained. The Commander said: “It’s your death, ten to one, Comrade Taganov.”

Andrei said: “It does not matter, Comrade Commander.”

“Are you sure you can do it?”

“It has been done, Comrade Commander. They’re ripe. They need but one kick.”

“The Proletariat thanks you, Comrade Taganov.”

Then those in the other trenches saw him climb over the top. He raised his arms, against the dark sky; his body looked tall and slender. Then he walked, arms raised, toward the White trenches; his steps were steady and he did not hurry. The blades of grass creaked, breaking under his feet, and the sound filled the valley. The Whites watched him and waited in silence.

He stopped but a few steps from their trenches. He could not see the many guns aimed at his breast; but he knew they were there. Swiftly, he took the holster at his belt and threw it to the ground. “Brothers!” he cried. “I have no weapons. I’m not here to shoot. I just want to say a few words to you. If you don’t want to hear them—shoot me.”

An officer raised a gun; another stopped his hand. He didn’t like the looks of their soldiers; they were holding bayonets; but they were not aiming at the stranger; it was safer to let him speak.

“Brothers! Why are you fighting us? Are you killing us because we want you to live? Because we want you to have bread and give you land to grow it? Because we want to open a door from your pigsty into a state where you’ll be men, as you were born to be, but have forgotten it? Brothers, it’s your lives that we’re fighting for—against your guns! When our red flag, ours and yours, rises . . .”

There was a shot, a short, sharp sound like a pipe breaking in the valley, and a little blue flame from an officer’s gun held close under blue lips. Andrei Taganov whirled and his arms circled against the sky, and he fell on the clotted earth.

Then there were more shots and fire hissing down the White trenches, but it did not come from those on the other side. An officer’s body was hurled out of the trench, and a soldier waved his arms to the Red soldiers, yelling: “Comrades!” There were loud hurrahs, and feet stamping across the valley, and red banners waving, and hands lifting Andrei’s body, his face white on the black earth, his chest hot and sticky.

Then Pavel Syerov of the Red Army jumped into the White trenches where Red and White soldiers were shaking hands, and he shouted, standing on a pile of sacks:

“Comrades! Let me greet in you the awakening of class consciousness! Another step in the march of history toward Communism! Down with the damn bourgeois exploiters! Loot the looters, comrades! Who does not toil, shall not eat! Proletarians of the world, unite! As Comrade Karl Marx has said, if we, the class of . . .”

Andrei Taganov recovered from his wound in a few months. It left a scar on his chest. The scar on his temple he acquired later, in another battle. He did not like to talk about that other battle; and no one knew what had happened after it.

It was the battle of Perekop in 1920 that surrendered the Crimea for the third and last time into Soviet hands. When Andrei opened his eyes he saw a white fog flat upon his chest, pressing him down like a heavy weight. Behind the fog, there was something red and glowing, cutting its way toward him. He opened his mouth and saw a white fog escaping from his lips, melting into the one above. Then he thought that it was cold and that it was the cold which held him chained to the ground, with pain like pine needles through his every muscle. He sat up; then he knew that it was not only the cold in his muscles, but a dark hole and blood on his thigh; and blood on his right temple. He knew, also, that the white fog was not close to his chest; there was enough room under it for him to stand up; it was far away in the sky and the red dawn was cutting a thin thread through it, far away.

He stood up. The sound of his feet on the ground seemed too loud in a bottomless silence. He brushed the hair out of his eyes and thought that the white fog above was the frozen breath of the men around him. But he knew that the men were not breathing any longer. Blood looked purple and brown and he could not tell where bodies ended and earth began, nor whether the white blotches were clots of fog or faces.

He saw a body under his feet and a canteen on its hip. The canteen was intact; the body was not. He bent and a red drop fell on the canteen from his temple. He drank.

A voice said: “Give me a drink, brother.”

What was left of a man was crawling toward him across a rut in the ground. It had no coat, but a shirt that had been white; and boots that followed the shirt, although there did not seem to be anything to make them follow.

Andrei knew it was one of the Whites. He held the man’s head and forced the canteen between lips that were the color of the blood on the ground. The man’s chest gurgled and heaved convulsively. No one else moved around them.

Andrei did not know who had won last night’s battle; he did not know whether they had won the Crimea; nor whether—more important to many of them—they had captured Captain Karsavin, one of the last names to fear in the White Army, a man who had taken many Red lives, a man whose head was worth a big price in Red money. Andrei would walk. Somewhere this silence must end. He would find men, somewhere; Red or White—he did not know, but he started walking toward the sunrise.

He had stepped into a soft earth, damp with cold dew, but clear and empty, a road leading somewhere, when he heard a sound behind him, a rustling as of heavy skis dragged through the mud. The White man was following him. He was leaning on a piece of stick and his feet walked without leaving the ground. Andrei stopped and waited for him. The man’s lips parted and it was a smile. He said: “May I follow you, brother? I’m not very . . . steady to find my own direction.”

Andrei said: “You and I aren’t going the same way, buddy. When we find men—it will be the end for either you or me.”

“We’ll take a chance,” said the man.

“We’ll take a chance,” said Andrei.

So they walked together toward the sunrise. High banks guarded the road, and shadows of dry bushes hung motionless over their heads, with thin branches like a skeleton’s fingers spread wide apart, webbed by the fog. Roots wound across the road and their four feet crossed them slowly, with a silent effort. Ahead of them, the sky was burning the fog. There was a rosy shadow over Andrei’s forehead; on his left temple little beads of sweat were transparent as glass; on his right temple the beads were red. The other man breathed as if he were rattling dice deep inside his chest.

“As long as one can walk—” said Andrei.

“—one walks,” finished the man.

Their eyes met as if to hold each other up.

Little red drops followed their steps in the soft, damp earth—on the right side of the road and on the left.

Then, the man fell. Andrei stopped. The man said: “Go on.”

Andrei threw the man’s arm over his shoulder and went on, staggering a little under the load.

The man said: “You’re a fool.”

“One doesn’t leave a good soldier, no matter what color he’s wearing,” said Andrei.

The man said: “If it’s my comrades that we come upon—I’ll see that they go easy on you.”

“I’ll see that you get off with a prison hospital and a good bed—if it’s mine,” said Andrei.

Then, Andrei walked carefully, because he could not allow himself to fall with his burden. And he listened attentively to the heart beating feebly against his back.

The fog was gone and the sky blazed like a huge furnace where gold was not melted into liquid, but into burning air. Against the gold, they saw the piled black boxes of a village far away. A long pole among the boxes pointed straight at a sky green and fresh, as if washed clean with someone’s huge mop in the night. There was a flag on the pole and it beat in the morning wind like a little black wing against the sunrise. And Andrei’s eyes and the tearless eyes on his shoulder looked fixedly at the little flag, with the same question. But they were still too far away.

When they saw the color of the flag, Andrei stopped and put the man down cautiously and stretched his arms to rest and in greeting. The flag was red.

The man said strangely: “Leave me here.”

“Don’t be afraid,” said Andrei, “we’re not so hard on fellow soldiers.”

“No,” said the man, “not on fellow soldiers.”

Then Andrei saw a torn coat sleeve hanging at the man’s belt and on the sleeve the epaulet of a captain.

“If you have pity,” said the man, “leave me here.”

But Andrei had brushed the man’s sticky hair off his forehead and was looking attentively, for the first time, at a young, indomitable face he had seen in photographs.

“No,” said Andrei, very slowly, “I can’t do that, Captain Karsavin.”

“I’m sure to die here,” said the captain.

“One doesn’t take chances,” said Andrei, “with enemies like you.”

“No,” said the captain, “one doesn’t.”

He propped himself up on one hand, and his forehead, thrown back, was very white. He was looking at the dawn.

He said: “When I was young, I always wanted to see a sunrise. But Mother never let me go out so early. She was afraid I’d catch a cold.”

“I’ll let you rest for a while,” said Andrei.

“If you have pity,” said Captain Karsavin, “you’ll shoot me.”

“No,” said Andrei, “I can’t.”

Then they were silent.

“Are you a man?” asked Captain Karsavin.

“What do you want?” asked Andrei.

The captain said: “Your gun.”

Andrei looked straight into the dark, calm eyes and extended his hand. The captain shook it. When he took his hand out of the captain’s, Andrei left his gun in it.

Then he straightened his shoulders and walked toward the village. When he heard the shot, he did not turn. He walked steadily, his head high, his eyes on the red flag beating against the sunrise. Little red drops followed the steps in the soft, damp earth—on one side of the road only.

IX

“ARGOUNOV’S NAVY SOAP” WAS A FAILURE.

The unshaven bookkeeper scratched his neck, muttered something about unprincipled bourgeois competition and disappeared with the price of the three pieces he had sold.

Alexander Dimitrievitch was left with a tray full of soap and a black despair.

Galina Petrovna’s energy found their next business venture.

Their new patron had a black astrakhan hat and a high astrakhan collar. He panted after climbing four flights of stairs, produced from the mysterious depths of his vast, fur-lined coat a heavy roll of crinkling bills, counted them off, spitting on his fingers, and was always in a hurry.

“Two kinds,” he explained, “the crystals in glass tubes and the tablets in paper boxes. I furnish the materials. You—pack. Remember, eighty-seven tablets is all you have to put into a box labeled ‘One Hundred.’ Great future in saccharine.”

The gentleman in the astrakhan hat had a large staff; a net of families packing his merchandise; a net of peddlers carrying his trays on street corners; a net of smugglers miraculously procuring saccharine from far-away Berlin.

Four heads bent around the wick in the Argounov dining room and eight hands counted carefully, monotonously, despairingly: six little crystals from a bright foreign tin can into each little glass tube, eighty-seven tiny white tablets into each tiny white box. The boxes came in long sheets; they had to be cut out and folded; they bore German inscriptions in green letters—“Genuine German Saccharine”; the other side of the sheet bore the bright colors of old Russian advertisements.

“Sorry, it’s too bad about your studies, Kira,” Galina Petrovna said, “but you’ll just have to help. You have to eat, you know.”

That evening, there were only three heads and six hands around the wick: Alexander Dimitrievitch had been mobilized. There had been snow storms; snow lay deep and heavy on Petrograd’s sidewalks; a mobilization of all private traders and unemployed bourgeois had been effected for the purpose of shoveling snow. They had to report for duty at dawn; they grunted and bent in the frost, steam rising to blue noses, old woolen mittens clutching shovels, red flesh in the slits of the mittens; they worked, bending and grunting, shovels biting wearily into white walls. They were given shovels, but no pay.

Maria Petrovna came to visit. She unrolled yards of scarfs from around her neck, shaking snow off her felt boots in the anteroom, coughing.

“No, no, Marussia,” Galina Petrovna protested. “Thanks, but you can’t help. The powder’ll make you cough. Sit by the stove. Get yourself warm.”

“. . . seventy-four, seventy-five, seventy-six . . . What news, Aunt Marussia?” Lydia asked.

“Heavy are our sins,” Maria Petrovna sighed. “Is that stuff poisonous?”

“No, it’s harmless. Just sweet. The dessert of the revolution.”

“Vasili sold the mosaic table from the drawing room. . . . Fifty million rubles and four pounds of lard. I made an omelet with the egg powder we got at the co-operative. They can’t tell me they made that powder out of fresh eggs.”

“. . . sixteen, seventeen, eighteen . . . they say their NEP is a failure, Marussia . . . nineteen, twenty . . . they’re going to return houses to owners before long.”

Maria Petrovna took a little nail buffer out of her bag and went on talking, polishing her nails mechanically; her hands had always been her pride; she was not going to neglect them, even though she did think, at times, that they had changed a little.

“Did you hear about Boris Koulikov? He was in a hurry and he tried to jump into a crowded tramway at full speed. Both legs cut off.”

“Marussia! What’s the matter with your eyes?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been crying so much lately . . . and for no reason at all.”

“There’s no spiritual comfort these days, Aunt Marussia,” Lydia sighed, “. . . fifty-eight, fifty-nine. . . . Those pagans! Those sacrilegious apostates! They’ve taken the gold ikons from the churches—to feed their famine somewhere. They’ve opened the sacred relics . . . sixty-three, sixty-four, sixty-five . . . We’ll all be punished, for they defy God.”

“Irina lost her ration card,” sighed Maria Petrovna. “She gets nothing for the rest of this month.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Lydia coldly. “Irina is not to be trusted.”

Lydia disliked her cousin ever since Irina, following her custom of expressing her character judgments in sketches, had drawn Lydia in the shape of a mackerel.

“What’s that on your handkerchief, Marussia?” Galina Petrovna asked.

“Oh . . . nothing . . . sorry . . . it’s a dirty one. . . . I can’t sleep at night any more, it seems. Seems my nightgown is always so hot and sticky. I’m so worried about Victor. Now he’s bringing the strangest fellows into the house. They don’t remove their caps in the drawing room and they shake ashes all over the carpet. I think they’re . . . Communists. Vasili hasn’t said a word. And it frightens me. I know what he thinks. . . . Communists in the house!”

“You’re not the only ones,” said Lydia and threw a dark glance at Kira. Kira was stuffing crystals into a glass tube.

“You try and speak to Victor and he says: ‘Diplomacy is the highest of the Arts.’ . . . Heavy are our sins!”

“You’d better do something about that cough, Marussia.”

“Oh, it’s nothing. Nothing at all. Just the cold weather. Doctors are fools and don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Kira counted the little crystals in the palm of her hand. She tried not to breathe or swallow; when she did, the white powder, seeping through her lips and nostrils, bit her throat with the pain of a piercing, metallic sweetness.

Maria Petrovna was coughing: “Yes, Nina Mirskaia. . . . Imagine! Not even a Soviet registration wedding. And her father, God rest his soul, was a bishop. . . . Just sleeping together like cats.”

Lydia cleared her throat and blushed.

Galina Petrovna said: “It’s a disgrace. This new love freedom will ruin the country. But, thank God, nothing like this will ever happen to us. There still are some families with some standards left.”

The bell rang.

“It’s Father,” said Lydia and hurried to open the door. It was Andrei Taganov.

“May I see Kira?” he asked, shaking snow off his shoulders.

“Oh! . . . Well, I can’t stop you,” Lydia answered haughtily.

Kira rose, when he entered the dining room, her eyes wide in the darkness.

“Ah! . . . Well, what a surprise!” said Galina Petrovna, her hand holding a half-filled box, trembling, the saccharine tablets rolling out. “That is . . . yes . . . a most pleasant. . . . How are you tonight? . . . Ah! . . . Yes. . . . May I present? Andrei Fedorovitch Taganov—my sister, Maria Petrovna Dunaeva.”

Andrei bowed; Maria Petrovna looked, astonished, at the box in her sister’s hand.

“May I speak to you, Kira?” Andrei asked. “Alone?”

“Excuse us,” said Kira. “This way, Andrei.”

“I daresay,” gasped Maria Petrovna, “to your room? Why, modern youth behaves almost like . . . like Communists.”

Galina Petrovna dropped the box; Lydia kicked her aunt’s ankle. Andrei followed Kira to her room.

“We have no light,” said Kira, “just that street lamp outside. Sit down here, on Lydia’s bed.”

Andrei sat down. She sat on her mattress on the floor, facing him. The street light from beyond the window made a white square on the floor, with Andrei’s shadow in the square. A little red tongue flickered in space, high in the corner of Lydia’s ikons.

“It’s about this morning,” said Andrei. “About Syerov.”

“Yes?”

“I wanted to tell you that you don’t have to worry. He had no authority to question you. No one can issue an order to question you—but me. The order won’t be issued.”

“Thank you, Andrei.”

“I know what you think of us. You’re honest. But you’re not interested in politics. You’re not an active enemy. I trust you.”

“I don’t know his address, Andrei.”

“I’m not asking whom you know. Just don’t let them drag you into anything.”

“Andrei, do you know who that man is?”

“Do you mind if we don’t discuss it, Kira?”

“No. But will you allow me one question?”

“Yes. What is it?”

“Why are you doing this for me?”

“Because I trust you and I think we’re friends. Though don’t ask me why we are, because I don’t know that myself.”

“I know that. It’s because . . . you see, if we had souls, which we haven’t, and if our souls met—yours and mine—they’d fight to the death. But after they had torn each other to pieces, to the very bottom, they’d see that they had the same root. I don’t know if you can understand it, because, you see, I don’t believe in souls.”

“I don’t either. But I understand. And what is the root?”

“Do you believe in God, Andrei?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. But that’s a favorite question of mine. An upside-down question, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if I asked people whether they believed in life, they’d never understand what I meant. It’s a bad question. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they say they do—then, I know they don’t believe in life.”

“Why?”

“Because, you see, God—whatever anyone chooses to call God—is one’s highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It’s a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it.”

“You’re a strange girl.”

“You see, you and I, we believe in life. But you want to fight for it, to kill for it, even to die—for life. I only want to live it.”

Behind the closed door, Lydia, tired of counting saccharine, rested by playing the piano. She played Chopin.

Andrei said suddenly: “You know, that’s beautiful.”

“What’s beautiful, Andrei?”

“That music.”

“I thought you didn’t care for music.”

“I never have. But, somehow, I like this, now, here.”

They sat in the darkness and listened. Somewhere below, a truck turned a corner. The window panes trembled with a thin, tense shudder. The light square with Andrei’s shadow rose from the floor, swept, like a fan, across the walls, and froze at their feet again.

When the music ended, they returned to the dining room. Lydia still sat at the piano. Andrei said hesitantly: “It was beautiful, Lydia Alexandrovna. Would you play it again?”

Lydia jerked her head proudly. “I’m sorry,” she said, rising brusquely. “I’m tired.” And she left the room with the step of a Jeanne d’Arc.

Maria Petrovna cringed in her chair, as if trying to squeeze herself out of Andrei’s sight. When her cough attracted his eyes, she muttered: “I’ve always said that our modern youth does not follow sufficiently the example of the Communists.”

When Kira accompanied him to the door, Andrei said: “I don’t think I should call on you, Kira. It makes your family uncomfortable. It’s all right, I understand. Will I see you at the Institute?”

“Yes,” said Kira. “Thank you, Andrei. Good night.”

Leo stood on the steps of the empty mansion. He did not move when he heard Kira’s feet hurrying across the snow; he stood motionless, his hands in his pockets.

When she was beside him, their eyes met in a glance that was more than a kiss. Then, his arms crushed her with the violence of hatred, as if he wanted to grind their coats into shreds against each other.

Then he said: “Kira. . . .”

There was some odd, disturbing quality in the sound of his voice. She tore his cap off; she raised herself on tiptoe to reach his lips again, her fingers in his hair.

He said: “Kira, I’m going away.”

She looked at him, very quietly, her head bent a little to one shoulder, in her eyes—a question, but no understanding.

“I’m going away tonight. Forever. To Germany.”

She said: “Leo. . . .” Her eyes were wide, but not frightened.

He spoke as if biting into every word, as if all his hatred and despair came from these sounds, not their meaning: “I’m a fugitive, Kira. A counter-revolutionary. I have to leave Russia before they find me. I’ve just received the money—from my aunt in Berlin. That’s what I’ve been waiting for. They smuggled it to me.”

She asked: “The boat leaves tonight?”

“A smugglers’ boat. They smuggle human flesh out of this wolf-trap. And desperate souls, like mine. If we’re not caught—we land in Germany. If we’re caught—well, I don’t suppose it’s a death sentence for everybody, but I’ve never heard of a man who was spared.”

“Leo, you don’t want to leave me.”

He looked at her with a hatred more eloquent than tenderness. “Sometimes I’ve found myself wishing they would catch the boat and bring me back.”

“I’m going with you, Leo.”

He was not startled. He asked: “Do you understand the chance you’re taking?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know that it’s your life at stake if we don’t reach Germany, and perhaps also if we do?”

“Yes.”

“The boat leaves in an hour. It’s far. We have to start right away. From here. No time to get any luggage.”

“I’m ready.”

“You can’t tell anyone. You can’t telephone any farewells.”

“I don’t have to.”

“All right. Come on.”

He picked up his cap and walked to the street, swiftly, silently, without looking at her or noticing her presence. He called a sleigh. The only words he spoke were an address to the driver. The sharp runners cut into the snow, and the sharp wind into their faces.

They turned a corner, past a house that had collapsed; snow-dusted bricks had rolled far out into the street; the ray of a lamp post behind the house pierced the empty rooms; the skeleton of an iron bed hung high somewhere in the ray of light. A newsboy barked hoarsely: “Pravda! . . . Krasnaya Gazeta!” to an empty street.

Leo whispered: “Over there . . . there are automobiles . . . and boulevards . . . and lights. . . .”

An old man stood in a doorway, snow gathering in the brim of his frayed hat, his head hanging down on his breast, asleep over a tray of home-made cookies.

Kira whispered: “. . . lipstick and silk stockings. . . .”

A stray dog sniffed at a barrel of refuse under the dark window of a co-operative.

Leo whispered: “. . . champagne . . . radios . . . jazz bands.”

Kira whispered: “. . . like the ‘Song of Broken Glass’ . . .”

A man moaned, blowing on his hands: “Saccharine, citizens!”

A soldier cracked sunflower seeds and sang about the little apple.

Posters followed them, as if streaming slowly from house to house, red, orange, white, arms, hammers, wheels, levers, lice, airplanes.

The noise of the city was dying behind them. A factory raised tall black chimneys to the sky. Over the street, on a rope from roof to roof, like a barrier, a huge banner clicked, fighting the wind, twisting in furious contortions, yelling to the street and the wind:

PROLETAR . . . OUR COLLECTI . . . CLASS WELD . . . STRUG . . . FREED . . . FUTURE . . .

Then their eyes met, and the glance was like a handshake. Leo smiled; he said: “I couldn’t ask you to do this. But I think I knew you’d come.”

They stopped at a fence on an unpaved street. Leo paid the driver. They started to walk slowly. Leo watching cautiously till the sleigh disappeared around a corner. Then he said: “We have two miles to walk to the sea. Are you cold?”

“No.”

He took her hand. They followed the fence down a wooden sidewalk. A dog howled somewhere. A bare tree whistled in the wind.

They left the sidewalk. Snow rose to their ankles. They were in an open field, walking toward a bottomless darkness.

She moved with quiet precision, as one moves in the face of the inevitable. He held her hand. Behind them, the red glow of the city breathed into the sky. Ahead of them, the sky bent to the earth, or the earth rose to the sky, and their bodies were cutting the two apart.

Snow rose to their calves. The wind blew against them. They walked bent forward, their coats like sails fighting a storm, cold tightening the skin of their cheeks.

Beyond the snow was the world; beyond the snow was that consummate entity to which the country behind them bowed reverently, wistfully, tragically: Abroad. Life began beyond the snow.

When they stopped, the snow ended abruptly. They looked into a black void without horizon or sky. From somewhere far below, they heard a swishing, slapping sound, as if someone were emptying pails of water at regular intervals. Leo whispered: “Keep quiet.”

He was leading her down a narrow, slippery path, in someone’s footprints. She distinguished a vague shape floating on the void, a mast, a tiny spark, like a dying match.

There were no lights on the ship. She did not notice the husky figure in their path until the ray of a flashlight struck Leo’s face, licked his shoulder, stopped on hers, and was gone. She saw a black beard and a hand holding a gun. But the gun was lowered.

Leo’s hand crinkled in his pocket and slipped something to the man. “Another fare,” Leo whispered. “This girl goes with me.”

“We have no cabins left.”

“That’s all right. Mine’s enough.”

They stepped onto boards that rocked softly. Another figure rustled up from nowhere and led them to a door. Leo helped Kira down the companion-way. There was a light below deck and furtive shadows; a man with a trim beard and the Cross of St. George on his breast looked at them silently; in a doorway, a woman wrapped in a coat of tarnished brocade watched them fearfully, clutching a little wooden box in her hands, the hands trembling.

Their guide opened a door and pointed inside with a jerk of his head.

Their cabin was only a bed and a narrow strip of space between cracked, unpainted walls. A board cut a corner off as a table. A smoked lantern hung over the table, and a yellow, shivering spot of light. The floor rose and fell softly, as if breathing. A shutter was locked over the porthole.

Leo closed the door and said: “Take your coat off.”

She obeyed. He took his coat off and threw his cap down on the table. He wore a heavy black sweater, tight around his arms and shoulders. It was the first time that they had seen each other without overcoats. She felt undressed. She moved away a little.

The cabin was so small that even the air enveloping her seemed a part of him. She backed slowly to the table in the corner.

He looked down at her heavy felt boots, too heavy for her slim figure. She followed his glance. She took her boots off and threw them across the cabin.

He sat down on the bed. She sat at the table, hiding her legs with their tight black cotton stockings under the bench, her arms pressed closely to her sides, her shoulders hunched, her body gathered tightly, as if cringing from the cold, the white triangle of her open collar luminous in the semi-darkness.

Leo said: “My aunt in Berlin hates me. But she loved my father. My father . . . is dead.”

“Shake the snow off your shoes, Leo. It’s melting on the floor.”

“If it weren’t for you, I’d have taken a boat three days ago. But I could not go away without seeing you. So I waited for this one. The other boat disappeared. Shipwrecked or caught—no one knows. They didn’t reach Germany. So you’ve saved my life—perhaps.”

When they heard a low rumble and the boards creaked louder and the flame in the lantern fluttered against the smoked glass, Leo sprang up, blew out the light and opened the shutter over the porthole. Their faces close together in the little circle, they watched the red glow of the city moving away. The red glow died; then there were only a few lights left between earth and sky; and the lights did not move, but shrank slowly into stars, then into sparks, then into nothing. She looked at Leo; his eyes were wide with an emotion she had never seen in them before. He asked slowly, triumphantly:

“Do you know what we’re leaving?”

Then his hands closed over her shoulder and his lips forced hers apart, and she felt as if she were leaning back against the air, her muscles feeling the weight of his. Her arms moved slowly over his sweater, as if she wanted to feel his body with the skin of her arms.

Then he released her, closed the shutter and lighted the lantern. The match spluttered with a blue flame. He lighted a cigarette and stood by the door, without looking at her, smoking.

She sat down by the table, obediently, without a word or a question, her eyes not leaving him.

Then he crushed the cigarette against the wall and approached her, and stood silently, his hands in his pockets, his mouth a scornful arc, his face expressionless.

She rose slowly, obediently, looking up at him. She stood still as if his eyes were holding her on a leash.

He said: “Take your clothes off.”

She said nothing, and did not move her glance away from his, and obeyed.

He stood watching her. She did not think of the code of her parents’ world. But that code came back once, for an instant, when she saw her skirt on the floor; then, in defiance, she regretted that her underwear was not silk, but only heavy cotton.

She unfastened the strap of her slip and let it fall under her breast. She was about to unfasten the other strap, but he tore her off the ground, and then she was arched limply in space, her hair hanging over his arm, her breast at his mouth.

Then they were on the bed, her whole weight on his hand spread wide between her naked shoulder blades. Then he blew out the lantern. She heard his sweater falling to the floor.

Then she felt his legs like a warm liquid against hers. Her hair fell over the edge of the bed. Her lips parted as in a snarl.

X

WHEN KIRA AWAKENED, LEO’S HEAD WAS RESTING on her one breast; a sailor was looking at the other.

She jerked the blanket up to her chin and Leo awakened. They stared up together.

It was morning. The door was open. The sailor stood on the threshold; his shoulders were too wide for the door and his fist was closed over a gun at his belt; his leather jacket was open over a striped sweater and his mouth was open in a wide grin over two resplendent white stripes of teeth; he stooped a little, for his blue cap touched the top of the doorway; the cap bore a red five-pointed Soviet star.

He chuckled: “Sorry to disturb you, citizens.”

Kira, her eyes glued to the red star, the star that filled her eyes, but could not reach her brain, muttered foolishly, softly, as a child: “Please go away. This is our first . . .” Her voice choked, as the red star reached her brain.

The sailor chuckled: “Well, you couldn’t have selected a worse time, citizen. You couldn’t have.”

Leo said: “Get out of here and let us dress.”

His voice was not arrogant, nor pleading; it was such an implacable command that the sailor obeyed as if at the order of a superior officer. He closed the door behind him.

Leo said: “Lie still till I gather your things. It’s cold.”

He got out of bed and bent for her clothes, naked as a statue and as unconcerned. A gray light came through a crack of the closed shutter.

They dressed silently. The ceiling trembled under hurrying steps above. Somewhere a woman’s voice was howling in sobs, like a demented animal. When they were dressed, Leo said: “It’s all right, Kira. Don’t be afraid.”

He was so calm that for an instant she welcomed the disaster that let her see it. Their eyes met for a second; it was a silent sanction of what they both remembered.

He flung the door open. The sailor was waiting outside. Leo said evenly: “Any confessions you want. I’ll sign anything you write—if you let her go.” Kira opened her mouth; Leo’s hand closed it brutally. He continued: “She had nothing to do with it. I’ve kidnapped her. I’ll stand trial for it, if you wish.”

Kira screamed: “He’s lying!”

Leo said: “Shut up.”

The sailor said: “Shut up, both of you.”

They followed him. The woman’s howls were deafening. They saw her crawling on her knees after two sailors who held her little wooden box; the box was open; the jewels sparkled through the sailors’ fingers; the woman’s hair hung over her eyes and she howled into space.

At an open cabin door, Leo suddenly jerked Kira forward so that she passed without seeing it. Inside the cabin, men were bending over a motionless body on the floor; the body’s hand was clutching the handle of a dagger in the heart, under the Cross of St. George.

On deck, the gray sky descended to the tip of the mast and steam breathed with commands from the lips of men who had taken control of the boat, men from the coast guard ship that rose and fell as a huge shadow in the fog, a red flag stirring feebly on its mast.

Two sailors held the arms of the black-bearded smugglers’ captain. The captain was staring at his shoes.

The sailors looked up at the giant in the leather jacket, waiting for orders. The giant took a list out of his pocket and held it under the captain’s beard; he pointed with his thumb, behind his shoulder, at Leo, and asked: “Which one is him?”

The captain’s nose pointed to a name. Kira saw the giant’s eyes widen in a strange expression she could not understand.

“Who’s the girl?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” the captain answered. “She’s not on our passenger list. She came at the last minute—with him.”

“Seventeen of them counter-revolutionary rats that tried to sneak out of the country, Comrade Timoshenko,” said a sailor.

Comrade Timoshenko chuckled, and his fist struck the muscles under his striped sweater. “Thought you could get away, eh?—from Stepan Timoshenko of the Red Baltfleet?”

The captain stared at his shoes.

“Keep your eyes and your guns ready,” said Comrade Timoshenko. “Any funny business—shoot their guts out.”

He grinned up at the fog, his teeth gleaming, his tanned neck open to the cold, and walked away, whistling.

When the two ships began to move, Comrade Timoshenko came back. He passed by Leo and Kira in the crowd of prisoners on the wet, glistening deck, and stopped, looking at them for a second, an inexplicable expression in his dark, round eyes. He passed and came back and said aloud to no one in particular, his thumb pointing at Kira: “The girl’s all right. He kidnapped her.”

“But I’m telling you . . .” Kira began.

“Make your little whore keep quiet,” Timoshenko said slowly; and there was something like understanding in the glance he exchanged with Leo.

They saw the skyline of Petrograd rise like a long, low string of houses stretched in a single row at the edge of an immense, frozen sky. The dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, a pale gold ball sliced in half, looked like a weary moon setting in the smoke of chimneys.

Leo and Kira sat on a coil of ropes. Behind them, a pock-marked sailor smoked a cigarette, his hand on his gun.

They did not hear the sailor move away. Stepan Timoshenko approached them. He looked at Kira and whispered:

“When we land—there’ll be a truck waiting. The boys will be busy. I just have a hunch they’ll have their backs turned. When they do—you start going—and keep going.”

“No,” said Kira, “I’ll stay with him.”

“Kira! You . . .”

“Don’t be a damn little fool. You can’t help him.”

“You won’t get any confessions from him—for my sake.”

Timoshenko chuckled: “He has no confessions to make. And I don’t want children mixed in with something they don’t understand a damn about. See that she’s gone when we reach the truck, citizen.”

Kira looked into the dark, round eyes; they leaned close to her and words hissed, in a whisper, through the white teeth: “It’s easier to get one—than two—out of the G.P.U. I’ll be there around four this afternoon. Come and ask for Stepan Timoshenko. Maybe I’ll have news for you. No one’ll hurt you. Gorokhovaia 2.”

He did not wait for an answer. He walked away and slapped the pock-marked sailor in the jaw for leaving the prisoners alone.

Leo whispered: “Do you want to make it harder for me? You’ll go. Also—you’ll stay away from Gorokhovaia 2.”

When houses rose close over the mast, he kissed her. It was hard to tear her lips off his, as hard as off frozen glass.

“Kira, what’s your name?” he whispered.

“Kira Argounova. And yours?”

“Leo Kovalensky.”

“At Irina’s. We talked and didn’t notice the time and it was too late to come home.”

Galina Petrovna sighed indifferently, her nightgown trembling on her shoulders in the cold anteroom. “And why this homecoming at seven in the morning? I suppose you awakened your Aunt Marussia and poor Marussia with her cough. . . .”

“I couldn’t sleep. Aunt Marussia didn’t hear me.”

Galina Petrovna yawned and shuffled back to her bedroom. Kira had stayed overnight at her cousin’s several times; Galina Petrovna had not been worried.

Kira sat down and her hands fell limply. There were so many hours to wait till four in the afternoon. She should be terrified, she thought, and she was; but under the terror there was something without name or words, a hymn without sound, something that laughed, even though Leo was locked in a cell on Gorokhovaia 2. Her body still felt as if it were holding him close to her.

House number 2 on Gorokhovaia Street was a pale green, the color of pea soup. Its paint and plaster were peeling. Its windows had no curtains and no iron bars. The windows looked quietly upon a quiet side street. It was the Petrograd Headquarters of the G.P.U.

There were words that people did not like to mention; they felt a superstitious fear in uttering their sounds, as when they spoke of a desolate cemetery, a haunted house, the Spanish Inquisition, Gorokhovaia 2. Many nights had passed over Petrograd; in the nights there had been many steps, many ringing door bells, many people gone never to be seen again; the flow of a silent terror swelled over the city, hushing voices to whispers; the flow had a heart, from which it came, to which it returned; that heart was Gorokhovaia 2.

It was a building like any of its neighbors; across the street, behind similar windows, families were cooking millet and playing the gramophone; at its corner, a woman was selling cakes; the woman had pink cheeks and blue eyes; the cakes had a golden crust and smelt of warm grease; a poster on a lamp post advertised the new cigarette of the Tobacco Trust. But as Kira walked toward that building, she saw people passing by its green walls without looking up, with tensely casual expressions, their steps hurrying involuntarily, as if afraid of their presence, of their eyes, of their thoughts. Behind the green walls was that which no one wanted to know.

The door was open. Kira walked in, her hands in her pockets, slouching deliberately, indifferently. There was a wide stairway inside, and corridors, and offices. There were many people, hurrying and waiting, as in all Soviet government buildings; there were many feet shuffling down bare floors, but not many voices. On the faces—there were no tears. Many doors were closed; the faces were set and closed like the doors.

Kira found Stepan Timoshenko sitting on a desk in an office and he grinned at her.

“It’s just as I thought,” he said. “They have nothing on him. It’s just his father. Well, that’s past. Had they got him two months ago—it would’ve been the firing squad and not many questions asked. But now—well, we’ll see.”

“What has he done?”

“Him? Nothing. It’s his father. Heard of the conspiracy of Professor Gorsky, two months ago? The old fool wasn’t in it—how could he, being blind?—but he hid Gorsky in his house. Well, he paid for it.”

“Who was Leo’s father?”

“Old Admiral Kovalensky.”

“The one who . . .” Kira gasped and stopped.

“Yeah. The one who was blinded in the war—and was shot.”

“Oh!”

“Well, I wouldn’t have done it—not that time. But I’m not the only one to have the say. Well, you don’t make a revolution with white gloves on.”

“But if Leo had nothing to do with it, why . . .”

“At the time—they’d have shot anyone that knew anyone in the conspiracy. Now—they’ve cooled off. It’s past. He’s lucky that way. . . . Don’t stare like a little fool. If you’d worked here, you’d know what difference time, and days, and hours can make here. Well, that’s the way we work. Well, what damn fool thinks that a revolution is all perfumed with cologne?”

“Then—you can let him . . .”

“I don’t know. I’ll try. We’ll investigate. Then there’s the business of trying to leave the country illegally. But that—I think I can. . . . We don’t fight children. Especially fool children who find time for love right on a spewing volcano.”

Kira looked into the round eyes; they had no expression; but the big mouth was grinning; he had a short nose that turned up, and wide, insolent nostrils.

“You’re very kind,” she said.

“Who’s kind?” he laughed. “Stepan Timoshenko of the Red Baltfleet? Do you remember the October days of 1917? Ever heard of what went on in the Baltic fleet? Don’t shudder like a cat. Stepan Timoshenko was a Bolshevik before a lot of these new punks had time to dry the milk behind their ears.”

“Can I see him?”

“No. Not a chance. No visitors allowed to that bunch.”

“But then . . .”

“But then you go home and stay there. And don’t worry. That’s all I wanted to tell you.”

“I have a friend who has connections, I think, who could . . .”

“You keep your mouth shut and don’t drag no connections into this. Sit still for two or three days.”

“That long!”

“Well, that’s not as long as never seeing him again. And don’t worry, we’ll keep him locked up for you—with no women around.”

He got off the desk, and grinned. Then his lips fell into a straight line; he towered over Kira, looking straight into her eyes, and his eyes were not gay. He said: “When you get him back, keep your claws on him. If you haven’t any—grow some. He’s not an easy stud. And don’t try to leave the country. You’re in this Soviet Russia; you may hate it, and you may choke, but in Soviet Russia you’ll stay. I think you have the claws for him. Watch him. His father loved him.”

Kira extended her hand. It disappeared in Stepan Timoshenko’s tanned fist.

At the door she turned and asked softly: “Why are you doing this?”

He was not looking at her; he was looking out the window. He answered: “I’ve gone through the war in the Baltic Fleet. Admiral Kovalensky was blinded in service in the Baltic Fleet. He was not the worst commander we had. . . . Get out of here!”

Lydia said: “She twists on her mattress all night long. You’d think we had mice in the house. I can’t sleep.”

Galina Petrovna said: “I believe you’re a student, Kira Alexandrovna? Or am I mistaken? You haven’t been at the Institute for three days. Victor said so. Would you condescend to inform us what kind of new foolishness is this that’s come over you?”

Alexander Dimitrievitch said nothing. He awakened with a start, for he had dozed off, a half-filled saccharine tube in his hand.

Kira said nothing.

Galina Petrovna said: “Look at those circles under her eyes. No respectable girl looks like that.”

“I knew it!” Lydia yelled. “I knew it! She’s put eight saccharine crystals into that tube again!”

On the evening of the fourth day, the door bell rang.

Kira did not raise her eyes from the saccharine tube. Lydia, curious about every ringing bell, went to open the door.

Kira heard a voice asking: “Is Kira at home?”

Then the saccharine tube clattered to the floor, breaking into splinters, and Kira was at the anteroom doorway, her hand at her throat.

He smiled, the corners of his lips drooping arrogantly. “Good evening, Kira,” he said calmly.

“Good evening, Leo.”

Lydia stared at them.

Kira stood at the door, her eyes holding his, her lips paralyzed. Galina Petrovna and Alexander Dimitrievitch stopped counting the saccharine.

Leo said: “Get your coat, Kira, and come on.”

She said: “Yes, Leo,” and took her coat off the hanger on the wall, moving like a somnambulist.

Lydia coughed discreetly. Leo looked at her. His glance brought a warm, wistful smile to Lydia’s lips; it always did that to women; yet there was nothing in his eyes except that when he glanced at a woman his eyes told her that he was a man and she was a woman and he remembered it.

Lydia gathered courage to disregard the lack of an introduction; but she did not know how to start and she gazed helplessly at the handsomest male ever to appear in their anteroom, and she threw bluntly the question that was on her mind: “Where do you come from?”

“From jail,” Leo answered with a courteous smile.

Kira had buttoned her coat. Her eyes were fixed on him, as if she did not know that others were present. He took her arm with the gesture of an owner, and they were gone.

“Well, of all the unmannered . . .” Galina Petrovna gasped, jumping up. But the door was closed.

To the sleigh driver outside, Leo gave an address.

“Where is that?” he repeated her question, his lips in her fur collar, as the sleigh jerked forward. “That’s my home. . . . Yes, I got it back. They had it sealed since my father’s arrest.”

“When did you . . .”

“This afternoon. Went to the Institute to get your address; then—home and made a fire in the fireplace. It was like a grave, hadn’t been heated for two months. It will be warm for us by now.”

The door they entered bore the red seal of the G.P.U. The seal had been broken; two red scabs of wax remained, parting to let them enter.

They walked through a dark drawing room. The fireplace blazed, throwing a red glow on their feet and over their reflection in the mirror of a parquet floor. The apartment had been searched. There were papers strewn over the parquet, and overturned chairs. There were crystal vases on malachite stands; one vase was broken; the splinters sparkled on the floor in the darkness, little red flames dancing and winking through them, as if live coals had rolled out of the fireplace.

In Leo’s bedroom, a light was burning, a single lamp with a silver shade, over a black onyx fireplace. A last blue flame quivered on dying coals and made a purple glow on the silver bedspread.

Leo threw his coat in a corner. He unbuttoned her coat and took it off; without a word, he unbuttoned her dress; she stood still and let him undress her.

He whispered into the little warm hollow under her chin: “It was torture. Waiting. Three days—and three nights.”

He threw her across the bed. The purple glow quivered over her body. He did not undress. He did not turn out the light.

Kira looked at the ceiling; it was a silvery white far away. Light was coming in through the gray satin curtains. She sat up in bed, her breasts stiff in the cold. She said: “I think it’s already tomorrow.”

Leo was asleep, his head thrown back, one arm hanging over the edge of the bed. Her stockings were on the floor, her dress—on a bed post. Leo’s eyelashes moved slowly; he looked up and said: “Good morning, Kira.”

She stretched her arms and crossed them behind her head, and threw her head back, shaking the hair off her face, and said: “I don’t think my family will like it. I think they’ll throw me out.”

“You’re staying here.”

“I’ll go to say good-bye.”

“Why go back at all?”

“I suppose I must tell them something.”

“Well, go. But don’t take long. I want you here.”

They stood like three pillars, towering and silent, at the dining-room table. They had the red, puffed eyes of a sleepless night. Kira stood facing them, leaning against the door, indifferent and patient.

“Well?” said Galina Petrovna.

“Well what?” said Kira.

“You won’t tell us again that you were at Irina’s.”

“No.”

Galina Petrovna straightened her shoulders and her faded flannel bathrobe. “I don’t know how far your foolish innocence can go. But do you realize that people might think that . . .”

“Certainly, I’ve slept with him.”

The cry came from Lydia.

Galina Petrovna opened her mouth and closed it.

Alexander Dimitrievitch opened his mouth and it remained open.

Galina Petrovna’s arm pointed at the door. “You’ll leave my house,” she said. “And you’ll never come back.”

“All right,” said Kira.

“How could you? A daughter of mine! How can you stand there and stare at us? Have you no conception of the shame, the disgrace, the depraved . . .”

“We won’t discuss that,” said Kira.

“Did you stop to think it was a mortal sin? . . . Eighteen years old and a man from jail! . . . And the Church . . . for centuries . . . for your fathers and grandfathers . . . all our Saints have told us that no sin is lower! You hear about those things, but God, my own daughter! . . . The Saints who, for our sins . . .”

“May I take my things,” Kira asked, “or do you want to keep them?”

“I don’t want one single thing of yours left here! I don’t want your breath in this room! I don’t want your name mentioned in this house!”

Lydia was sobbing hysterically, her head in her arms on the table. “Tell her to go, Mother!” she cried through sobs like hiccoughs. “I can’t stand it! Such women should not be allowed to live!”

“Get your things and hurry!” Galina Petrovna hissed. “We have but one daughter left! You little tramp! You filthy little street . . .”

Lydia was staring with incredulous awe, at Kira’s legs.

Leo opened the door and took the bundle she had wrapped in an old bed sheet.

“There are three rooms,” he said. “You can rearrange things any way you want. Is it cold outside? Your cheeks are frozen.”

“It’s a little cold.”

“I have some hot tea for you—in the drawing room.”

He had set a table by the fireplace. Little red tongues flickered in the old silver. A crystal chandelier hung against the gray sky of a huge window. Across the street, a line stood at the door of a co-operative, heads bent; it was snowing.

Kira held her hands against the hot silver teapot and rubbed them across her cheeks. She said: “I’ll have to gather that glass. And sweep the floor. And . . .”

She stopped. She stood in the middle of the huge room. She spread her arms out, and threw her head back, and laughed. She laughed defiantly, rapturously, triumphantly. She cried: “Leo! . . .”

He held her. She looked up into his face and felt as if she were a priestess, her soul lost in the corners of a god’s arrogant mouth; as if she were a priestess and a sacrificial offering, both and beyond both, shameless in her laughter, choking, something rising within her, too hard to bear.

Then his eyes looked at her, wide and dark, and he answered a thought they had not spoken: “Kira, think what we have against us.”

She bent her head a little to one shoulder, her eyes round, her lips soft, her face serene and confident as a child’s; she looked at the window where, in the slanting mist of snow, men stood in line, motionless, hopeless, broken. She shook her head.

“We’ll fight it, Leo. Together. We’ll fight all of it. The country. The century. The millions. We can stand it. We can do it.”

He said without hope: “We’ll try.”

XI

THE REVOLUTION HAD COME TO A COUNTRY that had lived three years of war. Three years and the Revolution had broken railroad tracks, and scorched fields, and blown smokestacks into showers of bricks, and sent men to stand in line with their old baskets, waiting at the little trickle of life still dripping from provision centers. Forests stood in a silence of snow, but in the cities wood was a luxury; kerosene was the only fuel to burn; there was only one device to burn kerosene. The gifts of the Revolution were to come. But one—and the first—had been granted; that which in countless cities countless stomachs had learned to beg for the fire of their sustenance to keep the fire of their souls, the first badge of a new life, the first ruler of a free country: the PRIMUS.

Kira knelt by the table and pumped the handle of the little brass burner that bore the words: “Genuine Primus. Made in Sweden.” She watched the thin jet of kerosene filling a cup; then she struck a match and set fire to the kerosene in the cup, and pumped, and pumped, her eyes very attentive, the fire licking the black tubes with a tongue of soot, sending the odor of kerosene into her nostrils, until something hissed in the tubes and a wreath of blue flames sprang up, tense and hissing like a blow-torch. She set a pot of millet over the blue flames.

Then, kneeling by the fireplace, she gathered tiny logs, damp and slippery in her fingers, with an acrid odor of swamp and mildew; she opened the little door of the “Bourgeoise” and stacked the logs inside, and stuffed crumpled newspapers over them, and struck a match, blowing hard, bending low to the floor, her hair hanging over her eyes, whirls of smoke blowing back at her, rising high to the white ceiling, the crystals of the chandelier sparkling through gray fumes, gray ashes fluttering into her nostrils, catching on her eyelashes.

The “Bourgeoise” was a square iron box with long pipes that rose to the ceiling and turned at a straight angle into a hole cut over the fireplace. They had had to install a “Bourgeoise” in the drawing room, because they could not afford wood for the fireplace. The logs hissed in the box and, through the cracks in the corners, red flames danced and little whiffs of smoke fluttered once in a while, and the iron walls blazed a dull, overheated red, smelling of burned paint. The new little stoves were called “Bourgeoise,” for they had been born in the homes of those who could not afford full-sized logs to heat the full-sized stoves in their once luxurious homes.

Admiral Kovalensky’s apartment had seven rooms, but four of them had to be rented long ago. Admiral Kovalensky had had a partition built across a hall, which cut them off from the tenants. Now Leo owned three rooms, the bathroom and the front door; the tenants owned four rooms, the back door and the kitchen. Kira cooked on the Primus and washed dishes in the bathroom. At times, she heard steps and voices behind the partition, and a cat meowing; three families lived there, but she never had to meet them.

When Leo got up in the morning, he found a table set in the dining room, with a snow-white cloth and hot tea steaming, and Kira flitting about the table, her cheeks glowing, her eyes laughing, light and unconcerned, as if these things had happened all by themselves. From their first day together in her new home, she had stated her ultimatum: “When I cook—you’re not to see me. When you see me—you’re not to know that I’ve been cooking.”

She had always known that she was alive; she had never given much thought to the necessity of keeping alive. She found suddenly that that mere fact of keeping alive had grown into a complicated problem which required many hours of effort, the simple keeping alive which she had always haughtily, contemptuously taken for granted. She found that she could fight it only by keeping, fiercer than ever, that very contempt; the contempt which, once dropped, would bring all of life down to the little blue flame of the Primus slowly cooking millet for dinner. She found she could sacrifice all the hours the struggle required, if only it would never rise between Leo and her, if only life itself, the life that was Leo, were kept intact and untouched. Those wasted hours did not count; she would keep silent about them. She kept silent, a hidden spark in her eyes twinkling with the exhilaration of battle. It was a battle, the first blows of a vague, immense battle she could not name, but felt, the battle of the two of them, alone, against something huge and nameless, something rising, like a tide, around the walls of their house, something in those countless weary steps on the pavements outside, in those lines at the doors of co-operatives, the something that invaded their home with the Primus and the “Bourgeoise,” that held millet and damp logs and the hunger of millions of strange, distorted stomachs against two lives fighting for their right to their future.

After breakfast Leo buttoned his overcoat and asked: “Going to the Institute today?”

“Yes.”

“Need change?”

“A little.”

“Back for dinner?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be back at six.”

He went to the University, she went to the Institute. She ran, sliding along the frozen sidewalks, laughing at strangers, blowing at a red finger in the hole of her glove, jumping on tramways at full speed, disarming with a smile the husky conductoresses who growled: “You oughta be fined, citizen. You’ll get your legs cut off some day.”

She fidgeted at the lectures, and glanced at her neighbor’s wristwatch, when she could find a neighbor with a wristwatch. She was impatient to return home, as she had been when, a child in school, on her birthdays, she had known that presents awaited her at home. Nothing awaited her there now, but the Primus, and millet, and cabbage to chop for soup, and, when Leo returned, a voice that said behind the closed door: “I’m home,” and she answered indifferently: “I’m busy,” and laughed soundlessly, rapturously, in the soup steam.

After dinner he brought his books to the “Bourgeoise” and she brought hers. He was studying history and philosophy at the Petrograd State University. He also had a job. When, after two months, he returned to pick up the life his father’s execution had broken, he found the job still awaiting him. He was valuable to the “Gossizdat”—that State Publishing House. In the evenings, over a fire crackling in the “Bourgeoise,” he translated books from the English, German and French. He did not like the books. They were novels by foreign authors in which a poor, honest worker was always sent to jail for stealing a loaf of bread to feed the starving mother of his pretty, young wife who had been raped by a capitalist and committed suicide thereafter, for which the all-powerful capitalist fired her husband from the factory, so that their child had to beg on the streets and was run over by the capitalist’s limousine with sparkling fenders and a chauffeur in uniform.

But Leo could do the work at home, and it paid well, although when he received his money at the Gossizdat, it was accompanied by the remark: “We have deducted two and a half percent as your contribution to the new Red Chemical Society of Proletarian Defense. This is in addition to the five percent deduction for the Red Air Fleet, and three percent for the Liquidation of Illiteracy, and five percent for your Social Insurance, and . . .”

When Leo worked, Kira moved soundlessly through the room, or sat silently over her drafts and charts and blueprints, and never interrupted him.

Sometimes they were interrupted by the Upravdom. He came in, his hat on the back of his head, and demanded their share of the house collection for frozen pipes, stuffed chimneys, electric bulbs for the stairs—“and someone’s swiped ‘em again”—leaking roof, broken cellar steps, and the house’s voluntary subscription to the Red Air Fleet.

When Kira and Leo spoke to each other, their words were brief, impersonal, their indifference exaggerated, their expressionless faces guarding a secret they both remembered.

But when they were alone in the gray and silver bedroom, they laughed together; their eyes, and their lips, and their bodies met hungrily. She did not know how many times they awakened in the night; nor where she felt his lips, nor whether his lips hurt her. She heard nothing in the silence but the sound of his breath. She crushed her body against his; then she laughed lazily and hid her face in the curve of her arm, and listened to his breath on her neck, on the lashes of her closed eyes. Then she lay still, her teeth in a muscle of his arm, drunk on the smell of his skin.

Leo had no relatives in Petrograd.

His mother had died before the revolution. He was an only son. His father had stood over vast wheat fields under a blue sky dropping into dark forests far away, and thought that some day these fields and the forests would be laid at the feet of a dark-haired, dark-eyed boy, and in his heart there was a glow brighter than the sun in the ripe wheat.

Admiral Kovalensky seldom appeared at Court functions; the deck of a ship felt steadier under his feet than the parquet of the royal palace. But when he appeared, the eyes of stunned, eager, envious faces followed the woman who moved slowly on his arm. His wife, born a countess of an ancient name, had the beauty of centuries gathered, line by line, in her perfect body. When she died, Admiral Kovalensky noticed the first gray on his temples; but deep in his heart, in words he dared not utter, he thanked God that death had chosen to take his wife rather than his son.

Admiral Kovalensky had but one voice with which he issued commands to his sailors and spoke to his son. Some said he was too kind with his sailors, and some said he was too stern with his son. But he worshipped the boy whose name foreign tutors had changed to “Leo” from the Russian “Lev”; and he was helpless before the slightest flicker of a wish in the boy’s dark, haughty eyes.

The tutors, and the servants, and the guests looked at Leo as they looked at the statue of Apollo in the Admiral’s study, with the same reverent hopelessness they felt from the white marble of a distant age. Leo smiled; it was the only order he had to give, the only excuse for any of his orders.

When his young friends related, in whispers, the latest French stories, Leo quoted Spinoza and Nietzsche; he quoted Oscar Wilde at the prim gatherings of his stern aunt’s Ladies’ Charity Club; he described the superiority of Western culture over that of Russia to the austere, gray-haired diplomats, friends of his father, rabid Slavophiles, and he greeted them with an impudent foreign “Allo”; once, when he went to confession, he made the old priest blush by revelations, at eighteen, which that venerable dignitary had not learned in his seventy years.

Resenting the portrait of the Czar in his father’s study and the Admiral’s unflinching, unreasoning loyalty, Leo attended a secret meeting of young revolutionists. But when an unshaved young man made a speech about men’s brotherhood and called him “comrade,” Leo whistled “God Save the Czar,” and went home.

He spent his first night in a woman’s bed at the age of sixteen. When he met her in sparkling drawing rooms, his face remained courteously expressionless while he bent to kiss her hand; and her stately, gray-haired husband did not suspect what lessons the cold, disdainful beauty he owned was giving to that slender, dark-haired boy.

Many others followed. The Admiral had to interfere once, to remind Leo that his own career could be compromised if his son were seen again leaving, at dawn, the palace of a famous ballerina whose royal patron’s name was mentioned in whispers.

The revolution found Admiral Kovalensky with black glasses over his unseeing eyes and St. George’s ribbon in his lapel; it found Leo Kovalensky with a slow, contemptuous smile, and a swift gait, and in his hand a lost whip he had been born to carry.

For two weeks Kira had no visitors and paid no visits. Then she called on Irina.

Maria Petrovna opened the door and muttered a greeting, confused, frightened, stepping back uncertainly.

The family was gathered in the dining room around a newly installed “Bourgeoise.” Irina jumped up with a glowing smile and kissed her cousin, which she had never done before.

“Kira, I’m so glad to see you! I thought you didn’t want to see any of us any more.”

Kira looked at a tall figure that had risen suddenly in a corner of the room. “How are you, Uncle Vasili?” she smiled.

Vasili Ivanovitch did not answer; he did not look at her; he turned and left the room.

A dark red flushed Irina’s cheeks and she bit her lips. Maria Petrovna twisted a handkerchief. Little Acia stared at Kira from behind a chair. Kira stood looking at the closed door.

“Those are nice felt boots you’re wearing, Kira,” Maria Petrovna muttered, although she had seen them many times. “Nice for cold weather. Such weather we’re having!”

“Yes,” said Kira, “it’s snowing outside.”

Victor came in, shuffling lazily in bedroom slippers, with a bathrobe thrown open over his pajamas; it was late afternoon, but his uncombed hair hung over red eyelids swollen by an interrupted sleep.

“Kira! What a pleasant surprise!” He bowed effusively, with outstretched hand. He held her hand and looked into her eyes with a bold, mocking stare as if the two of them shared a secret. “We didn’t expect you, Kira. But then, so many unexpected things happen, these days.” He did not apologize for his appearance; his careless swagger seemed to say that such an appearance could not be shocking to her. “Well, Kira, it isn’t Comrade Taganov, after all? Oh, don’t look surprised. One hears things at the Institute. However, Comrade Taganov is a useful friend to have. He has such an influential position. It’s handy, in case you have any friends—in jail.”

“Victor,” said Irina, “you look like a swine and talk it. Go wash your face.”

“When I’ll take orders from you, my dear sister, you may tell the news to the papers.”

“Children, children,” Maria Petrovna sighed helplessly.

“I have to go,” said Kira, “I just dropped in on my way to the Institute.”

“Oh, Kira!” Irina begged. “Please don’t go.”

“I have to. I have a lecture to attend.”

“Oh, hell!” said Irina. “They’re all afraid to ask you, but I’ll ask it before you go; what’s his name?”

“Leo Kovalensky.”

“Not the son of . . .” gasped Maria Petrovna.

“Yes,” said Kira.

When the door closed after Kira, Vasili Ivanovitch came back. Maria Petrovna fumbled nervously for her nail buffer and busied herself with her manicure, avoiding his eyes. He added a log to the fire in the “Bourgeoise.” He said nothing.

“Father, what has Kira . . .” Irina began.

“Irina, the subject is not open to argument.”

“The world’s all upside down,” said Maria Petrovna and coughed.

Victor looked at his father with a bright glance of mutual understanding. But Vasili Ivanovitch did not respond; he turned away deliberately; he had been avoiding Victor for many weeks.

Acia crouched in a corner behind the buffet, sniveling softly, hopelessly.

“Acia, come here,” Vasili Ivanovitch ordered.

She waddled toward him slowly, cringing, looking down at the tip of her nose, wiping her nose with her collar.

“Acia, why are your school reports as bad as ever?” Vasili Ivanovitch asked.

Acia did not answer and sniffled.

“What is it that’s happened to you again in arithmetic?”

“It’s the tractors.”

“The what?”

“The tractors. I didn’t know.”

“What didn’t you know?”

“The Selskosoyuz had twelve tractors and they divided them among six poor villages and how many did each village get?”

“Acia, how much is twelve divided by six?”

Acia stared at her nose and sniffled.

“At your age, Irina was always first in her class,” said Vasili Ivanovitch bitterly and turned away.

Acia ran to hide behind Maria Petrovna’s chair.

Vasili Ivanovitch left the room. Victor followed him to the kitchen. If Vasili Ivanovitch heard his steps following, he paid no attention. It was dark in the kitchen; the window pane was broken and the window had been covered with boards. Three narrow slits of light added three bright stripes to the long cracks of the floor. Vasili Ivanovitch’s shirts were piled under the sink. He bent slowly, and stuffed the shirts into a brass pan, and filled the pan with cold water. His big fist closed over a cake of bluish soap. Slowly, awkwardly, he rubbed the collar of a shirt. They had had to let the servant go; and Maria Petrovna was too weak to work.

“What’s the matter, Father?” Victor asked.

Vasili Ivanovitch answered without turning: “You know it.”

Victor protested too eagerly: “Why, Father, I haven’t the slightest idea! Have I done anything wrong lately?”

“Did you see that girl?”

“Kira? Yes. Why?”

“I thought I could trust in her as in my own soul. But it got her. The revolution got her. And—you’re next.”

“But, Father . . .”

“In my days, a woman’s virtue wasn’t dragged in the gutter for every passerby.”

“But Kira . . .”

“I suppose I’m old-fashioned. I was born that way and that’s the way I’ll die. But all of you young people are rotted before you’re ripe. Socialism, Communism, Marxism, and to hell with decency!”

“But I, Father . . .”

“You. . . . It will get you in another way. I’ve been watching. Your friends for the last few weeks have been. . . . You came from a party this morning.”

“But surely you don’t object to a little party?”

“Who were the guests?”

“Some charming girls.”

“To be sure. Who else?”

Victor flicked a speck of dust off his sleeve and said: “A Communist or two.”

Vasili Ivanovitch said nothing.

“Father, let us be broad-minded. A little vodka with them can’t hurt me. But it can help me—a lot.”

Vasili Ivanovitch’s voice was stern as a prophet’s; bubbles gurgled in the cold water under his hands: “There are things with which one does not compromise.”

Victor laughed cheerfully and slipped his arm around the powerful, stooped shoulders: “Come on, old man, you and I can understand things together. You wouldn’t want me to sit down and fold my hands and surrender—because they hold the power, would you? Beat them at their own game—that’s what I’m going to do. Diplomacy—that’s the best philosophy of our days. It’s the century of diplomacy. You can’t object to that, can you? But you know me. It can’t touch me. It won’t get me. I’m still too much of a gentleman.”

Vasili Ivanovitch turned to him. A crack of light from the boarded window fell across his face. The face was not that of a prophet; the eyes under the heavy white brows were weary, helpless; the smile was timid. The smile was an effort; so were the words: “I know it, son. I trust you. I suppose—well, you know best. But these are strange days. And you—well, Irina and you are all I have left.”

Irina was the first visitor from Kira’s old world to her new home. Leo bowed gracefully, diffidently, but Irina looked straight at him, grinned and said openly:

“Well, I like you. But then, I expected to like you. And I hope you like me, because I’m the only one of your in-laws that you’ll see—for a long time. But they’ll all question me about you, you can be sure.”

They sat in the shadows of the large drawing room and talked about Rembrandt, whom Irina was studying; and about the new perfume Vava Milovskaia had received from a smuggler—real French perfume. Coty’s and fifty million rubles a bottle—and Irina had stolen a drop of it on her handkerchief—and Maria Petrovna had cried, smelling it; and about the American movie Irina had seen, in which women wore spangled gowns without sleeves—and there had been a shot of New York at night—real skyscrapers, floors and floors of lighted windows on the black sky—and she had stayed through two shows to see that shot, but it had been so brief—just a flash—she would like to draw New York.

She had picked up a book from the table and was sketching busily on the back of its white paper cover, her pencil flashing. When she finished, she threw the book to Kira across the room. Kira looked at the drawing: it was a sketch of Leo—standing erect, full figure, naked.

“Irina!”

“You may show it to him.”

Leo smiled, his lips drooping, looking at Irina inquisitively.

“That’s the state that fits you best,” she explained. “And don’t tell me that my imagination has flattered you—because it hasn’t. Clothes hide nothing from a—well, yes, an artist. Any objections?”

“Yes,” said Leo, “this book belongs to the Gossizdat.”

“Oh, well,” she tore the cover off swiftly, “tell them you’ve used the cover for a revolutionary poster.”

Alone with Kira for a moment, before leaving, Irina looked at her earnestly, curiously, almost timidly, and whispered: “Are you . . . happy?”

Kira said indifferently: “I’m happy.”

Kira seldom spoke of what she thought; and more seldom—of what she felt. There was a man, however, for whom she made an exception, both exceptions. She made other exceptions for him as well, and wondered dimly why she made them. Communists awakened fear in her, a fear of her own degradation if she associated, talked or even looked at them; a fear not of their guns, their jails, their secret, watchful eyes—but of something behind their furrowed foreheads, something they had—or, perhaps, it was something they didn’t have, which made her feel as if she were alone in the presence of a beast, its jaws gaping; whom she could never force to understand. But she smiled confidently up at Andrei Taganov; and pressed tightly against the wall of an empty auditorium at the Institute, her eyes radiant, her smile timid and trusting, like a child appealing to a guiding hand, she said: “I’m happy, Andrei.”

He had not seen her for many weeks. He smiled warmly, quietly, looking down into her eager eyes. “I’ve missed you, Kira.”

“I’ve missed you, Andrei. I . . . I’ve been busy.”

“I didn’t want to call on you. I thought you would prefer it if I never called at your house.”

“You see . . .” Then she stopped. She could not tell him. She could not bring him to her new home—to Leo’s home. Andrei could be dangerous; he was a member of the G.P.U.; he had a duty to fulfill; it was best not to tempt that duty. So she said only: “Yes, Andrei, I’d rather you would never call . . . at my house.”

“I won’t. But will you be more regular about your lectures? So that I can see you once in a while—and hear you say that you’re happy? I like to hear that.”

“Andrei, have you ever been happy?”

“I’ve never been unhappy.”

“Is that enough?”

“Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want—you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don’t know. I’ve forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn’t matter, so long as you move.”

“And if you want something toward which you can’t move?”

“I never did.”

“And if—on your way—you find a barrier that you don’t want to break?”

“I never have.”

She remembered suddenly: “Andrei, you haven’t even asked me why I’m happy.”

“Does it make any difference—so long as you are?”

He held her two hands, thin and trusting, in his five strong fingers.

The first signs of spring in Petrograd were tears and smiles: the men smiled, the houses dropped the tears. High on the roofs, the snow was melting, gray with city dust like dirty cotton, brittle and shining like wet sugar, and twinkling drops dripped slowly, trickled in little gurgling brooks from the mouths of drain pipes, and across the sidewalks, and into the gutters, rocking gently cigarette stubs and sunflower-seed shells. Men walked out of the houses and breathed deeply, and smiled, and did not know why they smiled, until they looked up and saw that above the roofs the sky was a feeble, hesitant, incredulous blue, a very pale blue, as if a painter had washed the color off his brush in a huge tub of water, and the water held only a drop of a promise.

Icy mush crunched under galoshes and the sun made white sparks in the black rubber toes; sleigh-runners grunted, cutting brown ridges; a voice yelled: “Saccharine, citizens!”; drops tapped the sidewalks steadily, persistently, like a soft, distant machine gun; a voice yelled: “Violets, citizens!”

Pavel Syerov bought a pair of new boots. He blinked in the sun down at Comrade Sonia and bought her a hot, shiny cabbage cake from a woman on a corner. She chewed it, smiling. She said: “At three o’clock—giving lecture at the Komsomol on ‘Our drive on the NEP front.’ At five o’clock—giving talk at the Club of the Rabfac, on ‘Proletarian Women and Illiteracy.’ At seven— discussion at the Party Club on ‘Spirit of the Collective.’ Why don’t you drop in at nine? Seems I never see you.”

He said: “Sonia, old pal, can’t take up your valuable time. People like you and me have no private life but that of our class duty.”

Lines stood at the doors of shoe stores; the trade unions were giving out cards for the purchase of galoshes.

Maria Petrovna stayed in bed most of the day and watched the sun on the glass of a closed window, and hid her handkerchiefs from the sight of all.

Comrade Lenin had had a second stroke and had lost his power of speech. Pravda said: “. . . no higher sacrifice to the cause of the Proletariat than a leader burning out his will, health and body in the superhuman effort of the responsibility placed upon his shoulders by the Workers and Peasants.”

Victor invited three Communist students to his room and they discussed the future of Proletarian Electrification. He let them out through the back door to avoid Vasili Ivanovitch.

England had treacherous designs on the Republic of Workers and Peasants. Teaching of English was prohibited in schools.

Acia had to study German, sniveling over the difference of “der,” “die,” “das,” trying to remember what it was that our German class brothers had done at Rapallo.

The boss at the Gossizdat said: “The city proletariat is marching tomorrow in a demonstration of protest against France’s policy in the Ruhr. I expect all our employees to take part, Comrade Kovalensky.”

Leo said: “I’ll stay in bed. I’m having a headache—tomorrow.”

Vasili Ivanovitch sold the shade off the lamp in the drawing room; he kept the lamp because it was the last one.

In the dark, warm evenings, churches overflowed with bowed heads, incense and candle light. Lydia prayed for Holy Russia and for the dull fear in her heart.

Andrei took Kira to the Marinsky Theater and they saw Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty” ballet. He left her at the house on Moika and she took a tramway to her other home. A light snow melted on her face, like rain.

Leo asked: “How’s your Communist boy friend?”

She asked: “Have you been lonely?”

He brushed the hair off her forehead and looked at her lips, in the deliberate tension of refusing himself a kiss. He answered: “I would like to say no. But you know it’s yes.”

His warm lips gathered the cold spring rain off hers.

The year 1923, like any other, had a spring.

XII

KIRA HAD WAITED IN LINE for three hours to get the bread at the Institute Co-operative. It was dark when she stepped down from the tramway, her loaf pressed tightly under her arm. At distant corners, lanterns made snakes of light wiggle in black puddles. She walked straight ahead, her shoes splashing through the water, kicking little icicles that clinked like glass. When she turned the corner of her street, a hurrying shadow whistled to her in the darkness.

“Allo!” called Irina’s voice. “And whom do I remind you of when I say that?”

“Irina! What are you doing here at this hour?”

“Just left your house. Waited for you for an hour. Had given up hope.”

“Well, come on back.”

“No,” said Irina, “maybe it’s better if I tell you here. I . . . well, I came to tell you something. And . . . well, maybe Leo won’t like it, and he’s home, and . . .” Irina hesitated, which was unusual for her.

“What is it?”

“Kira, how’s . . . how’re your finances?”

“Why, splendid. Why do you ask that?”

“It’s just . . . you see . . . well, if I’m too presumptuous, tell me to shut up. . . . Don’t be angry. . . . You know I’ve never mentioned them before . . . but it’s your family.”

Kira peered in the darkness at Irina’s worried face. “What about them?”

“They’re desperate, Kira. Just desperate. I know Aunt Galina’d kill me if she knew I told you, but. . . . You see, the saccharine man got arrested as a speculator. They sent him to jail for six years. And your folks . . . well, what is there left to do? You know. Last week Father brought them a pound of millet. If we only could. . . . But you know how things are with us. Mother so sick. And nothing much left for the Alexandrovsky market but the wallpaper. I don’t think they have a thing in the house—your folks. I thought maybe you . . . maybe you would like to know.”

“Here,” said Kira, “take this bread. We don’t need it. We’ll buy some from a private store. Tell them you’ve found, borrowed or stolen it, or anything. But don’t tell them it’s from me.”

On the following day, Galina Petrovna rang the door bell. Kira was not at home. Leo opened the door and bowed graciously.

“I believe it is my . . . mother-in-law?” he asked.

“That’s what it would like to be,” Galina Petrovna stated.

His smile disarmed her; it was infectious; she smiled.

When Kira came in, there were tears. Galina Petrovna crushed her in her arms, before a word was said, and sobbed: “Kira, my child! . . . . My dear child! . . . God forgive us our sins! . . . These are hard days. . . . These are very hard days. . . . After all, who are we to judge? . . . Everything’s gone to pieces. . . . What difference does it all make? If we can just forget, and pull the pieces together, and . . . God show us the way. We’ve lost it. . . .”

When she released Kira, and powdered her nose from a little envelope full of potato flour, she muttered: “About that bread, Kira. We didn’t use it all. I hid it. I was afraid—maybe you need it yourself. I’ll bring it back if you do. We took only a small slice; your father was so hungry.”

“Irina talks too much,” said Kira. “We don’t need the bread, Mother. Don’t worry. Keep it.”

“You must come and see us,” said Galina Petrovna. “Both of you. Let by-gones be by-gones. Of course, I don’t see why you two don’t get . . . Oh, well, it’s your business. Things aren’t what they were ten years ago. . . . You must visit us, Leo—I may call you Leo, may I not? Lydia is so anxious to meet you.”

One could buy bread in the private stores. But the price made Kira hesitate. “Let’s go to a railroad station,” she said to Leo.

Railroad terminals were the cheapest and most dangerous markets of the city. There were strict rules against private “speculators” who smuggled food from the villages. But the speculators in ragged overcoats dared long rides on roofs and buffers, miles on foot down slimy mud roads, lice and typhus on trains, and—on return—the vigilance of government agents. Food slinked into the city in dusty boots, in the linings of vermin-infested coats, in bundles of soiled underwear. The starved city awaited every train. After its arrival, in the dark side streets around the depot, crystal goblets and lace chemisettes were exchanged furtively for hunks of lard and mouldy sacks of flour.

Arm in arm, Kira and Leo walked to the Nikolaevsky station. Drops tapped the sidewalk. The sun dripped to the sidewalk with every drop. Leo bought a bunch of violets on a corner. He pinned it to Kira’s shoulder, a purple tuft, young and fragrant on her old black coat. She smiled happily and kicked an icicle in a puddle, splashing water at the passersby, laughing.

The train had arrived. They made their way through an eager crowd that pushed them aside and drove them forward, and stuck elbows into their stomachs, and heels on their toes. Soldiers watched the descending passengers, silent, alert, suspicious.

A man stepped down from the train. He had a peculiar nose; it was so short and turned up so sharply that his two wide, slanting nostrils were almost vertical; under the nostrils there was a wide space and a heavy mouth. His stomach shivered like gelatin as he stepped down. His coat seemed too ragged, his boots too dirty.

Soldiers seized his arms. They were going to search him. He whined softly: “Comrades, brothers! So help me God, you’re wrong. I’m nothing but a poor peasant, brothers, nothing but the poorest peasant. Never heard of speculating. But I’m a responsible citizen, too. I’ll tell you something. If you let me go, I’ll tell you something.”

“What can you tell, you son of a bitch?”

“See that woman there? She’s a speculator. I know. I’ll tell you where she’s hiding food. I seen her.”

Strong hands seized the woman. Her arms were like a skeleton’s in the soldiers’ fists; gray hair hung over her eyes from under an old hat with a black feather; the shawl held on her sunken chest by an ancient mosaic pin shook silently, convulsively, a thin, nervous shudder, like that of a window at the distant sound of an explosion. She moaned, showing three yellow teeth in a dark mouth: “Comrades. . . . It’s my grandson. . . . I wasn’t going to sell. . . . It’s for my grandson. . . . Please, let me go, comrades . . . my grandson—he’s got the scurvy. . . . Has to eat. . . . Please, comrades. . . . The scurvy. . . . Please. . . .”

The soldiers dragged her away. Her hat was knocked off. They did not stop to pick it up. Someone stepped on the black feather.

The man with the vertical nostrils watched them go. His wide red lips grinned.

Then he turned and saw Kira looking at him. He winked mysteriously, in understanding, and pointed with a jerk of his head to the exit. He went out; Kira and Leo followed him, puzzled.

In a dark alley by the station, he looked cautiously, winked again and opened his coat. The ragged coat had a smooth lining of heavy, expensive fur, with the suffocating odor of carnation oil used by all travelers of means as protection against lice on trains. He unfastened some unseen hooks in the depth of the fur. His arm disappeared in the lining and returned with a loaf of bread and a smoked ham. He smiled. His lips and the lower part of his face smiled; the upper part—the short nose, the light, narrow eyes—remained strangely immobile, as if paralyzed.

“Here you are, citizens,” he said boastfully. “Bread, ham, anything you wish. No trouble. We know our business.”

The next moment, Kira was running down the street, fleeing wildly, senselessly from a feeling she could not explain.

“Just a little party, Kira darling,” said Vava Milovskaia over the telephone. “Saturday night. . . . Shall we say about ten o’clock? . . . And you’ll bring Leo Kovalensky, of course? I’m simply dying to meet him. . . . Oh, just fifteen or twenty people. . . . And Kira, here’s something a little difficult: I’m inviting Lydia, and . . . could you bring a boy for her? You see, I have just so many boys and girls on my list, and they’re all in couples, and—well, boys are so hard to get nowadays . . . and . . . well, you know how it is, and I thought maybe you knew someone—anyone. . . .”

“Anyone? Do you care if he’s a Communist?”

“A Communist? How thrilling! Is he good-looking? . . . Certainly, bring him. . . . We’re going to dance. . . . And we’re going to have refreshments. Yes, food. Oh, yes. . . . And, oh, Kira, I’m asking every guest to bring one log of wood. One apiece. . . . To heat the drawing room. It’s so large we couldn’t affo . . . You don’t mind? . . . So sweet of you. See you Saturday night.”

Parties were rare in Petrograd in 1923. It was Kira’s first. She decided to invite Andrei. She was a little tired of the deception, a little bewildered that it had gone so far. Leo knew all about Andrei; Andrei knew nothing about Leo. She had told Leo of her friendship; he had not objected; he smiled disdainfully when she spoke of Andrei, and inquired about her “Communist boy friend.” Andrei knew no one in Kira’s circle and no gossip had reached him. He never asked questions. He kept his promise and never called on her. They met at the Institute. They talked of mankind, and its future, and its leaders; they talked of ballet, tramways and atheism. By a silent agreement, they never spoke of Soviet Russia. It was as if an abyss separated them, but their hands and their spirits were strong enough to clasp over the abyss.

The grim lines of his tanned face were like an effigy of a medieval saint; from the age of the Crusades he had inherited the ruthlessness, the devotion, and also the austere chastity. She could not speak of love to him; she could not think of love in his presence; not because she feared a stern condemnation; but because she feared his sublime indifference.

She did not want to conceal it forever. The two men had to meet. She feared that meeting, a little. She remembered that one of them was the son of an executed father; the other one—a member of the G.P.U. Vava’s party was a convenient occasion: the two would meet; she would watch their reac tions; then, perhaps, she could bring Andrei to her house; and if, at the party, he heard the truth about her—well, she thought, so much the better.

Meeting him in the library of the Institute, she asked: “Andrei, would a bourgeois party frighten you?”

“Not if you’ll be there to protect me—if that’s an invitation.”

“I’ll be there. And it is an invitation. Saturday night. Lydia and I are going. And two men. You’re one of them.”

“Fine—if Lydia is not too afraid of me.”

“The other one—is Leo Kovalensky.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t know his address then, Andrei.”

“I didn’t ask you, Kira. And it does not matter.”

“Call for us at nine-thirty, at the house on Moika.”

“I remember your address.”

“My . . . oh, yes, of course.”

Vava Milovskaia met her guests in the anteroom.

Her smile was radiant; her black eyes and black curls sparkled like the patent leather of the narrow belt around her slim waistline; and the delicate patent leather flowers on her shoulder—the latest Soviet fashion—sparkled like her eyes.

The guests entered, logs of wood under their arms. A tall, stern maid in black, with stiff white apron and cap, silently received the logs.

“Kira! Lydia! Darlings! So glad! How are you?” Vava fluttered.

“I’ve heard so much about you, Leo, that I’m really frightened,” she acknowledged the introduction, her hand in Leo’s; even Lydia understood Leo’s answering glance; as to Vava, she caught her breath and stepped back a little, and looked at Kira. But Kira paid no attention.

To Andrei, Vava said: “So you’re a Communist? I think that’s charming. I’ve always said that Communists were just like other people.”

The large drawing room had not been heated all winter. The fire had just been lit. A fretful smoke struggled up the chimney, escaping back into the room once in a while. A gray fog hung over the neatly polished mirrors, the freshly dusted tables proudly displaying careful rows of worthless knick-knacks; a damp odor of mildewed wood rose to destroy the painful dignity of a room too obviously prepared for guests.

The guests sat huddled in corners, shivering under old shawls and sweaters, tense and self-conscious and too carelessly nonchalant in their old best clothes. They kept their arms pressed to their sides to hide the holes in their armpits; elbows motionless on their knees—to hide rubbed patches; feet deep under chairs—to hide worn felt boots. They smiled vacantly without purpose, laughed too loudly at nothing in particular, timid and uncomfortable and guiltily conscious of a forbidden purpose, the forgotten purpose of gaiety. They eyed the fireplace wistfully, longing and reluctant to seize upon the best seats by the fire. Everybody was cold and everybody wanted desperately to be gay.

The only one whose bright, loud gaiety seemed effortless was Victor. His wide stride bounced from group to group, offering the tonic of a ringing voice and a resplendent smile: “This way, ladies and gentlemen. . . . Move over to this lovely fire. We’ll be warm in an instant. . . . Ah! my charming cousins, Kira and Lydia! . . . Delighted, Comrade Taganov, delighted! . . . Here’s a lovely armchair, Lydia darling, I save it specially for you. . . . Rita dear, you remind me of the heroine in the new Smirnov novel. Read it? Magnificent! Literature emancipated from outworn conceptions of form. A new woman—the free woman of the future. . . . Comrade Taganov, that project for the electrification of the entire R.S.F.S.R. is the most stupendous undertaking in the history of mankind. When we consider the amount of electrical power per citizen to be found in our natural resources. . . . Vava, these patent leather flowers are the latest word in feminine elegance. I understand that the most famous couturier of Paris has . . . I quite agree with you, Boris. Schopenhauer’s pessimism is entirely outmoded in the face of the healthy, practical philosophical conceptions of the rising proletariat and, no matter what our personal political convictions may be, we must all be objective enough to agree that the proletariat is the ruling class of the future. . . .”

With perfect assurance, Victor assumed the role of host. Vava’s dark eyes, that rested on him every time she flitted through the room, sanctioned his right by a long, adoring glance. She flew into the anteroom at every sound of the door bell, returning with a couple that smiled shyly, rubbing their cold hands, hiding the worn seams of their clothes. The solemn maid followed silently, carrying the logs as if she were serving a dish, and piled them neatly by the fireplace.

Kolya Smiatkin, a blond, chubby young man with a pleasant smile, who was filing clerk in the Tobacco Trust, said timidly: “They say . . . er . . . I heard . . . I’m afraid there’s going to be a reduction of staffs in our office—next month. Everybody’s whispering about it. Maybe I’ll get fired this time. Maybe not. Makes you feel sort of uncomfortable.”

A tall gentleman with a gold pince-nez and the intense eyes of an undernourished philosopher said lugubriously: “I have an excellent job in the archives. Bread almost every week. Only I’m afraid there’s a woman after the job—a Communist’s mistress—and . . .”

Someone nudged him and pointed at Andrei, who stood by the fireplace, smoking. The tall gentleman coughed and looked uncomfortable.

Rita Eksler was the only woman in the room who smoked. She lay stretched on a davenport, her legs high on its arm, her skirt high above her knees, red bangs low over pale green eyes, painted lips puckered insolently around a cigarette. Many things were whispered about her. Her parents had been killed in the revolution. She had married a commander of the Red Army and divorced him two months later. She was homely and used her homeliness with such skillful, audacious emphasis that the most beautiful girls feared her competition.

She stretched lazily and said, her voice slow, husky: “I’ve heard something amusing. A boy friend of mine wrote from Berlin . . .” All eyes turned to her, eagerly, reverently. “. . . and he tells me they have cafés in Berlin that are open all night—all night, elegant, eh?—they call them ‘Nacht Local.’ And in a famous, very naughty ‘Nacht Local,’ a famous dancer—Rikki Rey—danced with sixteen girls and with nothing on. I mean, positively nothing. So she got arrested. And the next night, she and her girls appeared in a military number, and they wore little chiffon trunks, two gold strings crossed over their breasts, and huge fur hats. And they were considered dressed. Elegant, eh?”

She laughed huskily at the awed crowd, but her eyes were on Leo; they had been on Leo ever since he had entered the room. Leo’s answer was a straight, mocking glance of understanding that insulted and encouraged Rita at the same time.

An anemic girl who sat sulkily in a corner, miserably hiding her feet and heavy felt boots, said with a dull stare, incredulous of her own words: “Abroad . . . I heard . . . they say they don’t have provision cards, or cooperatives, or anything, you just go into a store just when you feel like it and just buy bread or potatoes or anything, even sugar. Me, I don’t believe it myself.”

“And they say you buy your clothes without a trade-union order—abroad.”

“We have no future,” said the philosopher with the gold pince-nez. “We have lost it in materialistic pursuits. Russia’s destiny has ever been of the spirit. Holy Russia has lost her God and her Soul.”

“Did you hear about poor Mitya Vessiolkin? He tried to jump off a moving tramway, and he fell under, but he was lucky: just one hand cut off.”

“The West,” said Victor, “has no inner significance. The old civilization is doomed. It is filling new forms with a worn-out content that can no longer satisfy anyone. We may suffer hardships, but we are building something new. On our side—we have the future.”

“I have a cold,” said the anemic girl. “Mother got a union order for galoshes and there were none my size and we lost our turn and we have to wait three months and I got a cold.”

“Vera Borodina had her Primus explode on her. And she’s blind. And her face—you’d think she’d been in the war.”

“I bought myself a pair of galoshes in a private store,” Kolya Smiatkin said with a touch of pride. “And now I’m afraid but what I was too hasty. What with the reductions of staffs and. . . .”

“Vava, may I add wood to the fire? It’s still rather . . . cold.”

“The trouble with these days,” said Lydia, “is that there’s no spiritual enlightenment. People have forgotten the simple faith.”

“We had a reduction of staffs last month, but they didn’t touch me. I’m socially active. I’m teaching a class of illiterates—free—an hour every evening—as club duty—and they know I’m a conscientious citizen.”

“I’m vice-secretary of our club library,” said Kolya Smiatkin. “Takes three evenings a week—and no pay—but that kept me through the last reduction. But this time, I’m afraid it’s me or another guy—and the other guy, he’s vice-secretary of two libraries.”

“When we have a reduction of staffs,” said the anemic girl, “I’m afraid they’re going to throw out all the wives or husbands whose mates have employment. And Misha has such a fine job with the Food Trust. So we’re thinking . . . I’m afraid we’ll have to get divorced. Oh, that’s nothing. We can still go on living together. It’s being done.”

“My career is my duty to society,” said Victor. “I have selected engineering as the profession most needed by our great republic.”

He threw a glance at the fireplace to make sure that Andrei had heard.

“I’m studying philosophy,” said Leo, “because it’s a science that the proletariat of the R.S.F.S.R. does not need at all.”

“Some philosophers,” said Andrei slowly, in the midst of a sudden, stunned silence, “may need the proletariat of the R.S.F.S.R.”

“Maybe,” said Leo. “And maybe I’ll escape abroad, and sell my services to the biggest exploiter of a millionaire—and have an affair with his beautiful wife.”

“Without a doubt,” said Victor, “you’ll succeed in that.”

“Really,” Vava said hastily, “I think it’s still cold and we had better dance. Lydia darling?”

She threw a cajoling glance of inquiry at Lydia. Lydia sighed with resignation, rose and took the seat at the upright piano. She was the only accomplished musician in the crowd. She had a suspicion about the reason of her popularity at all the rare parties that were still being given. She rubbed her cold fingers and struck the piano keys with ferocious determination. She played “John Gray.”

Historians will write of the “Internationale” as the great anthem of the revolution. But the cities of the revolution had their own hymn. In days to come, the men of Petrograd will remember those years of hunger and struggle and hope—to the convulsive rhythm of “John Gray.”

It was called a fox-trot. It had a tune and a rhythm such as those of the new dances far across the border, abroad. It had very foreign lyrics about a very foreign John Gray whose sweetheart Kitty spurned his love for fear of having children, as she told him plainly. Petrograd had known sweeping epidemics of cholera; it had known epidemics of typhus, which were worse; the worst of its epidemics was that of “John Gray.”

Men stood in line at the co-operatives—and whistled “John Gray.” At the recreation hour in school, young couples danced in the big hall, and an obliging pupil played “John Gray.” Men hung on the steps of speeding tramways, humming desperately “John Gray.” Workers’ clubs listened attentively to a lecture on Marxism, then relaxed while a comrade showed his skill on a piano out of tune, playing “John Gray.”

Its gaiety was sad; its abrupt rhythm was hysterical; its frivolity was a plea, a moan for that which existed somewhere, forever out of reach. Through winter nights red flags whistled in the snowdrifts and the city prayed hopelessly with the short, sharp notes of “John Gray.”

Lydia played fiercely. Couples shuffled slowly across the drawing room in an old-fashioned two-step. Irina, who had no voice, sang the words, half singing, half coughing them out, in a husky moan, as she had heard a German singer do in vaudeville:

“John Gray
Was brave and daring,
Kitty
Was very pretty.
Wildly
John fell in love with
Kitty.
Passion’s
Hard to restrain—
He made
His feelings plain,
But Kat
Said ‘No’ to that!”

Kira danced in Leo’s arms. He whispered, looking down at her: “We would dance—like this—in a place of champagne glasses—and spangled gowns—and bare arms—a place called ‘Nacht Local.’ ”

She closed her eyes, and the strong body that led her expertly, imperiously, seemed to carry her to that other world she had seen, long ago, by a dark river that murmured the “Song of Broken Glass.”

Vava undertook to teach Andrei to dance and dragged him out into the crowd. He followed obediently, smiling, like a tiger that could not hurt a kitten. He was not a bad pupil, she thought. She felt very brave, very daring at the thought that she was actually corrupting a stern Communist. She regretted that the corruption could go no further. It was annoying to meet a man in whom her beauty awakened no response, who looked at her with calm, steady eyes, as he looked at Lydia, as he looked at the anemic girl in the felt boots.

Lydia played “Destiny Waltz.” Andrei asked Kira to dance. Leo glanced at him with his cold smile, but said nothing and walked away from them.

“Vava’s a good teacher,” Kira whispered, as Andrei whirled her into the crowd, “but hold me tighter. Oh, yes, much tighter.”

“Destiny Waltz” was slow and soft; it stopped for a breathless second once in a while and swung into rhythm again, slowly, rocking a little, as if expecting soft, billowing satin skirts to murmur gently in answer, in a ball-room such as did not exist any longer.

Kira looked up into a grave face that was smiling half ironically, half shyly. She pressed her head to his breast; her eyes flashed up at him one swift glance, like a spark; then she jerked her head back; her tousled hair caught on a button of his coat and a few strands remained entwined around the button.

Andrei felt a very soft silk in his arms and, under the silk, a very slender body. He looked down at her open collar and saw a faint shadow parting the flesh. He did not look down again.

Leo danced with Rita, their eyes meeting in a silent understanding, her body pressed to his expertly, professionally. Vava whirled, smiling proudly at every couple she passed, her hand resting triumphantly, possessively on Victor’s shoulder. Kolya Smiatkin watched Vava timidly, wistfully; he was afraid to ask her for a dance: he was shorter than Vava. He knew that everybody knew of his hopeless, doggish devotion to her and that they laughed at him; he could not help it. The anemic girl’s felt boots made the chandelier tremble, its fringe of glass beads ringing softly; once she stepped on Vava’s sparkling patent leather pump. A thoughtful guest added a log to the fire; it hissed and smoked; someone had not been conscientious and had brought a damp log.

At two A.M. Vava’s mother stuck a timid, pallid face through the crack of a half-opened door and asked the guests if they would “Like to have some refreshments.” The eager rush to the dining room cut a waltz short in the middle.

In the dining room, a long table stood frozen in a solemn splendor of white and silver, crystal sparkling in a blinding light, delicate forks laid out with formal precision. Costly dishes of milky-white porcelain offered slices of black bread with a suspicion of butter, slices of dried fish, potato-skin cookies, sauerkraut and tea with sticky brown candy instead of sugar.

Vava’s mother smiled hospitably: “Please take one of everything. Don’t be afraid. There’s enough. I’ve counted them.”

Vava’s father sat, beaming broadly, at the head of the table. He was a doctor who specialized in gynecology. He had not been successful before the revolution; after the revolution, two facts had helped his rise: the fact that, as a doctor, he belonged to the “Free Professions” and was not considered an exploiter, and the fact that he performed certain not strictly legal operations. Within a couple of years he had found himself suddenly the most prosperous member of his former circle and of many circles above.

He sat, his two fists holding his lapels, leaning back comfortably, his round stomach bulging under a heavy gold chain, costly watch-charms tinkling and shuddering with the muscles of his stomach. His narrow eyes disappeared in the thick folds of a white flesh. He smiled warmly at his guests; he was very proud of the rare, enviable position of host, a host who could afford to offer food; he relished the feeling of a patron and benefactor to the children of those before whom he had bowed in the old days, the children of the industrial magnate Argounov, of Admiral Kovalensky. He made a mental note to donate some more to the Red Air Fleet in the morning.

His smile widened when the maid entered sullenly, carrying a silver tray with six bottles of rare old wine—a token of gratitude from one of his influential patients. He poured, filling crystal glasses, chuckling amiably: “Good old stuff. Real prewar stuff. Bet you kids never tasted anything like it.” The glasses were passed down the long table, from hand to hand.

Kira sat between Leo and Andrei. Andrei raised his glass gravely, steadily, like a warrior. “Your health, Kira,” he said.

Leo raised his glass lightly, gracefully, like a diplomat at a foreign bar. “Since you’re toasted by my class superior, Kira,” he said, “I’ll drink to our charming hostess.”

Vava answered with a warm, grateful smile. Leo raised his glass to her and drank looking at Rita.

When they returned to the drawing room, the dying fire had to be revived. Lydia played again. A few couples danced lazily. Vava sang a song about a dead lady whose fingers smelt of incense. Kolya Smiatkin gave an impersonation of a drunk. Victor told anecdotes. Others followed his example; some of the anecdotes were political; cautious glances were thrown at Andrei; words stopped halfway and the teller stammered, blushing.

At five A.M. everyone was exhausted; but no one could go home before daylight; it was too dangerous. The city militia was helpless against burglars and holdup men. No citizen dared to cross a street after midnight.

Doctor Milovsky and his wife retired, leaving the young guests to await the dawn. The stern, starched maid dragged into the drawing room mattresses borrowed from all the neighbors. The mattresses were lined up against the wall. The maid left. Vava turned out the light.

The guests settled down comfortably, in couples. Nothing pierced the darkness but a last glow of the fireplace, a few red dots of cigarettes, a few whispers, a few suspicious sounds that were not whispers. The unwritten law of parties dictated that no one should be too curious in these last, weary and most exciting hours of a party.

Kira felt Andrei’s hand on her arm. “I think they have a balcony,” he whispered. “Let’s go out.”

Following him, Kira heard a sigh and something that sounded like a very passionate kiss from the corner where Vava nestled in Victor’s arms.

It was cold on the balcony. The street lay silent like a tunnel under a vault slowly turning gray. Frozen puddles looked like splinters of glass panes on the pavement. Windows looked like puddles frozen on the walls. A militia-man leaned against a lamp post. A flag bent over the street. The flag did not move; neither did the man.

“It’s funny,” said Andrei, “I never thought I would, but I do like dancing.”

“Andrei, I’m angry at you.”

“Why?”

“This is the second time that you haven’t noticed my best dress.”

“It’s beautiful.”

The door behind them squealed on its rusty hinges. Leo stepped out on the balcony, a cigarette hanging in the corner of his mouth. He asked: “Is Kira nationalized state property, too?”

Andrei answered slowly: “Sometimes I think it would be better for her if she were.”

“Well, until the Party passes the proper resolution,” said Leo, “she isn’t.”

They returned into the warm darkness of the drawing room. Leo drew Kira down on the mattress by his side; he said nothing; she drowsed, her head on his shoulder. Rita moved away with a little shrug. Andrei stood by the balcony door, smoking.

At eight A.M. the window curtains were pulled aside. A dull white sky spread over the roofs, like soapy water. Vava muttered good-byes to her guests at the door; she swayed a little, weary circles under her eyes, one dark lock hanging to the tip of her nose, her lipstick smeared over her chin. The guests divided into groups, to walk together in clusters as long as possible.

In the cold dawn, ice breaking under their feet, Andrei took Kira aside for a moment. He pointed at Leo, who was helping Lydia over a puddle a few steps ahead of them. “Do you see him often?” he asked.

The question told her that he had not learned the truth; the tone of the question—that she would not tell him.

Lights burned in the windows of barred, padlocked shops. Many doors carried a notice:

“Comrade burglars, please don’t bother. There’s nothing inside.”

XIII

IN THE SUMMER, PETROGRAD WAS A FURNACE.

The wooden bricks of the pavements cracked into black gashes, dry as an empty river bed. The walls seemed to breathe of fever and the roofs smelt of burned paint. Through eyes hazy in a white glare, men looked hopelessly for a tree in the city of stone. When they found a tree, they turned away: its motionless leaves were gray with parched dust. Hair stuck to foreheads. Horses shook flies off their foaming nostrils. The Neva lay still; little drops of fire played lazily on the water, like clusters of spangles, and made the men on the bridges feel hotter.

Whenever they could, Kira and Leo went away for a day in the country.

They walked hand in hand in the stripes of sun and pine shadows. Like columns of dark brick, like sinewy bodies sunburnt to bronze and peeling in strips of light bark, the pines guarded the road and dropped, jealously, through a heavy tangle of malachite, a few rays, a few strips of soft blue. On the green slopes of ditches, little purple dots of violets bent to a patch of yellow sand; and only the crystal luster of the sand showed water over it. Kira took off her shoes and stockings. Soft dust and pine needles between her toes, she kicked the little black balls of fallen pine cones. Leo swung her slippers at the end of a dry branch, his white shirt unbuttoned, his sleeves rolled above his elbows. Her bare feet pattered over the boards of an old bridge. Through the wide cracks, she saw sparks swimming like fish scales down the stream and polliwogs wiggling in swarms of little black commas.

They sat alone in a meadow. Tall grass rose like a wall around them, over their heads; a hot blue sky descended to the sharp, green tips; the sky seemed to smell of clover. A cricket droned like an electric engine. She sat on the ground; Leo lay stretched, his head on her lap. He chewed the end of a long grass stem; the movement of his hand, holding it, had the perfection of a foreign cigarette ad. Once in a while, she bent down to kiss him.

They sat on a huge tree root over a river. The spreading stars of ferns on the slope below looked like a jungle of dwarf palms. The white trunk of a birch tree sparkled in the sun, its leaves like a waterfall that streamed down, green drops remaining suspended in the air, trembling, turning silver and white and green again, dropping once in a while to be swept away by the current. Kira leaped over the rocks, roots and ferns as swift, agile and joyous as an animal. Leo watched her. Her movements were sharp, angular, inexpressibly graceful in that contradiction of all grace, not the soft, fluent movements of a woman, but the broken, jerking, precise, geometrical movements of a futuristic dancer. He watched her perched on a dead tree trunk, looking down into the water, her hands at straight angles to her arms, her elbows at straight angles to her body, her body at a straight angle to her legs, a wild, broken little figure, tense, living, like a lightning in shape. Then he sprang up, and ran after her, and held her, breaking the straight angles into a straight line crushed against him. The dead trunk hanging over the stream creaked perilously. She laughed, that strange laughter of hers which was too joyous to be gay, a laughter that held a challenge, and triumph, and ecstasy. Her lips were moist, glistening.

When they returned to the city, the stifling dusk met them with posters, and banners, and headlines, four letters flaming over the streets:

U.S.S.R.

The country had a new name and a new constitution. The All-Union Congress of Soviets had just decided so. Banners said:

THE UNION OF SOCIALIST SOVIET REPUBLICS IS THE KERNEL FOR THE FUTURE GROWTH OF A WORLD STATE

Demonstrations marched through the hot, dusty streets, red kerchiefs mopping sweating foreheads.

OUR POWER IS IN THE TIGHT WELDING OF THE COLLECTIVE!

A column of children, drums beating, marched into the sunset: a layer of bare legs, and a layer of blue trunks, and a layer of white shirts, and a layer of red ties; the kindergarten of the Party, the “Pioneers.” Their high, young voices sang:

“To the greedy bourgeois’ sorrow
We shall light our fire tomorrow,
Our world fire of blood. . . .”

Once, Kira and Leo attempted to spend a night in the country.

“Certainly,” said the landlady. “Certainly, citizens, I can let you have a room for the night. But first you must get a certificate from your Upravdom as to where you live in the city, and a permit from your militia department, and then you must bring me your labor books, and I must register them with our Soviet here, and our militia department, and get a permit for you as transient guests, and there’s a tax to pay, and then you can have the room.”

They stayed in the city.

Galina Petrovna had made a bold decision and taken a job. She taught sewing in a school for workers’ children. She rocked through dusty miles in a tramway across the city to the factory district; she watched little grimy hands fashioning shirts and aprons and, sometimes, letters on a red banner; she talked of the importance of needlework and of the Soviet government’s constructive policy in the field of education.

Alexander Dimitrievitch slept most of the day. When he was awake, he played solitaire on the ironing board in the kitchen—and mixed painstakingly an imitation milk of water, starch and saccharine for Plutarch, the cat he had found in a gutter.

When Kira and Leo came to visit them, there was nothing to talk about. Galina Petrovna spoke too shrilly and too fast—about the education of the masses and the sacred calling of the intelligentsia in serving their less enlightened brothers. Lydia talked about the things of the spirit. Alexander Dimitrievitch said nothing. Galina Petrovna had long since dropped all hints related to the institution of marriage. Only Lydia was flustered when Leo spoke to her; she blushed, embarrassed and thrilled.

Kira visited them because Alexander Dimitrievitch watched her silently when she came, with a feeble shadow of a smile as if, had it not been for a dull haze suddenly grown between him and the life around him, he would have been glad to see her.

Kira sat on a window sill and watched the first autumn rain on the sidewalk. Glass bubbles sprang up in an ink puddle, a ring around each bubble, and floated for a brief second, and burst helplessly like little volcanoes. Rain drummed dully against all the pavements of the city; it sounded like the distant purring of a slow engine with just one thin trickle of water through the rumble, like a faucet leaking somewhere close by.

One single figure walked in the street below. An old collar raised between hunched shoulders, hands in pockets, arms pressed tightly to his sides, he walked away—a lonely shadow, swaying a little—into the city of glistening roofs under a fog of thin, slanting rain.

Kira did not turn on the light. Leo found her in the darkness by the window. He pressed his cheek to hers and asked: “What’s the matter?”

She said softly: “Nothing. Just winter coming. A new year starting.”

“You’re not afraid, are you, Kira? We’ve stood it so far.”

“No,” said Kira. “I’m not afraid.”

The new year was started by the Upravdom.

“It’s like this, Citizen Kovalensky,” he said, shifting from foot to foot, crumpling his cap in both hands and avoiding Leo’s eyes. “It’s on account of the Domicile Norm. There’s a law about as how it’s illegal for two citizens to have three rooms, on account of overcrowding conditions seeing as there are too many people in the city, and there are overcrowding conditions and no place to live. The Gilotdel sent me a tenant with an order for a room, and he’s a good proletarian, and I got to give him one of your rooms. He can take the dining room and you can keep the other two. Also, this ain’t the time when people could live in seven rooms as some people used to.”

The new tenant was a meek, elderly little man who stammered, wore glasses and worked as bookkeeper for the shoe factory “Red Skorohod.” He left early in the morning and came home late at night. He cooked on his own Primus and never had any visitors.

“I won’t be in the way, Citizen Argounova,” he had said. “I won’t be in the way at all. It’s just only as regards the bathroom. If you’ll let me take a bath once a month—I’ll be most grateful. As to the other necessities, there’s a privy in the back yard, if you’ll excuse the mention. I won’t mind. I won’t annoy a lady.”

They moved their furniture out of the dining room into their remaining quarters and nailed the connecting door. When Kira cooked, in the drawing room, she asked Leo to remain in the bedroom.

“Self-preservation,” she told him, “for both of us.”

Andrei had spent the summer on a Party mission in the villages of the Volga.

He met Kira again at the Institute on the first day of the new semester. His suntan was a little deeper; the lines at the corners of his mouth were not a wound nor a scar, but looked like both.

“Kira, I knew I’d be glad to see you again. But I didn’t know that I’d be so . . . happy.”

“You’ve had a hard summer, haven’t you, Andrei?”

“Thank you for your letters. They’ve kept me cheerful.”

She looked at the grimness of his lips. “What have they done to you, Andrei?”

“Who?” But he knew that she knew. He did not look at her, but he answered: “Well, I guess everybody knows it. The villages—that’s the dark spot on our future. They’re not conquered. They’re not with us. They have a red flag over the local Soviet and a knife behind their backs. They bow, and they nod, and they snicker in their beards. They stick pictures of Lenin over the barns where they hide their grain from us. You’ve read in the papers about the Clubhouse they burned and the three Communists they burned in it—alive. I was there the next day.”

“Andrei! I hope you got them!”

He could not restrain a smile: “Why, Kira! Are you saying that about men who fight Communism?”

“But . . . but they could have done it to you.”

“Well, nothing happened to me, as you see. Don’t look at that scar on my neck. Just grazed. The fool wasn’t used to firearms. His aim wasn’t very good.”

The boss of the Gossizdat had five pictures on the walls of his office: one of Karl Marx, one of Trotsky, one of Zinoviev and two of Lenin. On his desk stood two small plaster busts: of Lenin and Karl Marx. He wore a high-collared peasant blouse of expensive black satin.

He looked at his manicured fingernails; then he looked at Leo. “I feel certain, Comrade Kovalensky, that you will welcome this opportunity to do your duty in our great cultural drive, as we all do.”

Leo asked: “What do you want?”

“This organization has taken the honorary post of ‘Cultchef ’ to a division of the Baltfleet. You understand what I mean, of course? In line with the new—and brilliant—move of the Party toward a wider spread of education and Proletarian Culture, we have accepted the position of ‘Cultural Chief’ to a less enlightened unit, as all institutions of note have done. We are thus responsible for the cultural advancement of our brave brothers of the Baltic Fleet. Such is our modest contribution to the gigantic rise of the new civilization for the new ruling class.”

“Fine,” said Leo. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“I think it is obvious, Comrade Kovalensky. We are organizing a free night school for our protégés. With your knowledge of foreign languages—I had a class of German in mind, twice a week—Germany is the cornerstone of our future diplomacy and the next step of the world revolution—and a class of English, once a week. Of course, you are not to expect any financial remuneration for this work, your services are to be donated, inasmuch as this is not an undertaking of the government, but our strictly voluntary gift to the State.”

“Since the beginning of the revolution,” said Leo, “I haven’t been buying gifts for anyone, neither for my friends—nor otherwise. I can’t afford them.”

“Comrade Kovalensky, did it ever occur to you to consider what we think of men who merely work for their pay and take no part in social activity in their spare time?”

“Did it ever occur to you that I have a life to live—in my spare time?”

The man at the desk looked at the five pictures on his walls. “The Soviet State recognizes no life but that of a social class.”

“I don’t think we shall go into a discussion of the subject.”

“In other words, you refuse to do your share?”

“I do.”

“Very well. This service is not compulsory. Oh, not in the least. Its meaning and novelty is the free will of those participating. I was merely thinking of your own good when I made the offer. I thought, in view of certain events in your past, that you’d be only too glad to. . . . Never mind. However, I must call to your attention the fact that Comrade Zoubikov of the Communist Cell had been rather unpleasant about a man of your social past on our pay roll. And when he hears about this. . . .”

“When he does,” said Leo, “tell him to come to me. I’ll give him a free lesson—if he cares for the subject.”

Leo came home earlier than usual.

The blue flame of the Primus hissed in the gathering dusk. Kira’s white apron was a white spot bending over the Primus.

Leo threw his cap and brief case on the table. “That’s that,” he said. “I’m out.”

Kira stood holding a spoon. She asked: “You mean . . . the Gossizdat?”

“Yes. Fired. Reduction of staffs. Getting rid of the undesirable element. Told me I had a bourgeois attitude. I’m not social-minded.”

“Well . . . well, it’s all right. We’ll get along.”

“Of course, it’s all right. Think I care about their damn job? This affects me no more than a change in weather.”

“Certainly. Now take your coat off and wash your hands, and we’ll have dinner.”

“Dinner? What do you have there?”

“Beet soup. You like it.”

“When did I say I liked it? I don’t want any dinner. I’m not hungry. I’m going to the bedroom to study. Please don’t disturb me.”

“I won’t.”

Left alone, Kira took a towel and lifted the cover of the pan and stirred the soup, slowly, deliberately, longer than it required. Then she took a plate from the shelf. As she was carrying it to the table, she saw that the plate was trembling. She stopped and, in the dusk, whispered, addressing herself for the first time in her life, as if speaking to a person she had never met before: “Now, Kira, you don’t. You don’t. You don’t.”

She stood and held the plate over the table and stared down, all her will in her eyes, as if a great issue depended on the plate. Presently the plate stopped trembling.

When he had stood in line for an hour, he smoked a cigarette.

When he had stood for two hours, he began to feel that his legs were numb.

When he had stood for three hours, he felt that the numbness had risen to his throat, and he had to lean against a wall.

When his turn came, the editor looked at Leo and said: “I don’t see how we can use you, citizen. Of course, our publication is strictly artistic. But—Proletarian Art, I may remind you. Strictly class viewpoint. You do not belong to the Party—nor is your social standing suitable, you must agree. I have ten experienced reporters—Party members—on my waiting list.”

She really didn’t have to fry fish in lard, Kira decided. She could use sunflower-seed oil. If she bought good oil it would leave no odor and it was cheaper. She counted the money out carefully over the co-operative counter and walked home, cautiously watching the heavy yellow liquid in a greasy bottle.

The secretary said to Leo: “Sorry you had to wait so long, citizen, but the comrade editor is a very busy man. You can go in now.”

The comrade editor leaned back in his chair; he held a bronze paper knife; the knife tapped the edge of a desk calendar bearing a picture of Lunacharsky, People’s Commissar of Education and Art; the editor’s voice sounded like a knife cutting paper:

“No. No opening. None expected. Plenty of proletarians starving and you bourgeois asking for a job. I’m a proletarian myself. Straight from the work-bench. I’ve been jobless—in the old days. But your bourgeois class brothers had no pity. It’ll do you good to learn how it feels on your own hide.”

“It’s a misunderstanding, citizens. Help interview hours are from nine to eleven, Thursday only. . . . An hour and a half? Well, how did I know what you were sitting here for? Nobody asked you to sit.”

When he came home in the evenings, he was silent.

Kira served dinner and he sat down at the table and ate. She had given great care to the dinner. He said nothing. He did not look into the steady gray eyes across the table, nor at the lips that smiled gently. He offered no complaint and no consolation.

Sometimes, for many long moments, he stood before the crystal vase on the malachite stand, the one that had not been broken, and looked at it, his eyes expressionless, his hands in his pockets, a cigarette hanging in the corner of his mouth; he stood without moving, without blinking, the smoke alone stirring slowly, swaying. Then he smiled and the cigarette fell to the floor, and burned, smoking, a dark ring widening on the parquet; but he did not notice it; and Kira did not notice it, for her eyes were fixed, wide and frightened, on Leo’s icy, sardonic smile.

“Any past experience, citizen?”

“No.”

“Party member?”

“No.”

“Sorry. No opening. Next.”

It was Monday and the job had been promised to him for Monday. Leo stood before the little wizened office manager and knew that he should smile gratefully. But Leo never smiled when he knew he should. And perhaps it would have been useless. The office manager met him with a worried, apologetic look and avoided his eyes.

“So sorry, citizen. Yes, I promised you this job, but—you see, the big boss’s cousin came from Moscow and she’s unemployed, and. . . . Unforeseen circumstances, citizen. You know—man proposes and God disposes. . . . Come again, citizen.”

Kira went to the Institute less frequently.

But when she sat in a long, cold room and listened to lectures about steel, and bolts, and kilowatts, she straightened her shoulders as if a wrench had tightened the wires of her nerves. She looked at the man who sat beside her; at times she wondered whether those words about steel beams and girders were not about his bones and muscles, a man for whom steel had been created, or, perhaps, it was he that had been created for steel, and concrete, and white heat; she had long since forgotten where Andrei Taganov’s life ended and that of engines began.

When he questioned her solicitously, she answered: “Andrei, any circles under my eyes are nothing but your own imagination. And you’ve never been in the habit of thinking about my eyes.”

When Leo sat down at the table, Kira’s smile was a little forced.

“You see, there’s no dinner tonight,” she explained softly. “That is, no real dinner. Just this bread. The co-operative ran out of millet before my turn came. But I got the bread. That’s your portion. And I’ve fried some onions in sunflower-seed oil. They’re very good on the bread.”

“Where’s your portion?”

“I’ve . . . eaten it already. Before you came.”

“How much did you get this week?”

“Oh . . . well . . . they gave us a whole pound, imagine? Instead of the usual half. Nice, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Very. Only I’m not hungry. I’m going to bed.”

The little man next to Leo in line had an uncomfortable laugh, a servile, hissing sound at his palate, that did not reach his throat, as if he repeated mirthlessly the printed letters: “h-ee-h-ee.”

“I see you’re looking at the red handkerchief in my breast pocket, citizen, hee-hee,” he whispered confidentially into Leo’s ear. “I’ll let you in on a secret. It’s no handkerchief at all. See? Just a little silk rag. When you go in, they think at first glance that it’s a Party badge or something, hee-hee. Then they see it ain’t, but still there’s the psychological effect, hee-hee. Helps—if they have an opening for a job. . . . Go on. Your turn. Lord Jesus Christ! It’s dark outside already. How time flies in lines, citizen. Hee-hee.”

At the University co-operative, the student in line ahead of Leo said aloud to a companion, both wearing Party badges: “Funny, isn’t it? the way some citizens neglect their lectures, but you’re sure to find them in line for food rations.”

Leo said to the clerk behind the counter, trying to make his voice pleading and making it only wooden, expressionless: “Comrade clerk, would you mind if I tear next week’s coupon off, too? I’ll keep it and present it to you for my bread next week. You see, I have . . . there’s someone at home and I want to tell her that I got a two weeks’ ration and ate my half on the way home, so that she’ll eat all of this piece. . . . Thank you, comrade.”

The burly office manager led Leo down a narrow corridor into an empty office with Lenin’s picture on the wall, and closed the door carefully. He had a friendly smile and heavy cheeks.

“More privacy here, citizen. It’s like this, citizen. A job’s a rare thing, nowadays. A very rare thing. Now, a comrade that’s got a responsible position and has jobs to hand out—he’s got something valuable to hand out, hasn’t he? Now then, a comrade that’s got a responsible position isn’t making much of a salary these days. And things are expensive. One’s got to live. A fellow that gets a job has something to be grateful for, hasn’t he? . . . Near broke, you say? Well, what do you want here, you bum? Expecting us proletarians to give jobs to every stray bourgeois?”

“English, German and French? Valuable, very valuable, citizen. We do need teachers for classes of languages. Are you a Union member? . . . Not any Trade Union? . . . Sorry, citizen, we employ only Union members.”

“So you want to join the Union of Pedagogues? Very well, citizen. Where are you working?”

“I’m not working.”

“You cannot join the Union if you’re not working.”

“I can’t get a job if I’m not a Union member.”

“If you have no job, you can’t become a Union member. Next!”

“Half a pound of linseed oil, please. The one that’s not too rancid, please, if you can. . . . No, I can’t take sunflower-seed oil, it’s too expensive.”

“Kira! What are you doing here in your nightgown?”

He raised his head from the book. A single bulb over the table left shadows in the corners of the drawing room and in the circles under Leo’s eyes. Kira’s white nightgown trembled in the darkness.

“It’s after three . . .” she whispered.

“I know it. But I have to study. There’s a draft here. Please go back to bed. You’re trembling.”

“Leo, you’ll wear yourself out.”

“Well, and if I do? That’ll be the end of it, so much the quicker.”

He guessed the look of the eyes he could not see in the darkness. He got up and gathered the trembling white shadow in his arms.

“Kira, of course I don’t mean it. . . . Just one kiss, if you go back to bed. . . . Even your lips are cold. . . . If you don’t go, I’ll carry you back.”

He lifted her in two arms, still strong and firm and warm through her nightgown. He carried her back into the bedroom, his head pressed close to hers, whispering: “Just a few more pages and I’ll be with you. Go to sleep. Good night. Don’t worry.”

“In my duty of Upravdom, Citizen Argounova, I gotta tell you. Laws is laws. The rent’s raised on account of neither of you citizens being a Soviet employee. That puts you in the category of persons living off an income. . . . How do I know what income? Laws is laws.”

Behind him, men stood in line; men cringing, shrinking, crouching; hollow chests and hunched shoulders; yellow hands clasped and trembling; a few last convulsions in the depths of extinguished souls; eyes staring with a forlorn hopelessness, a dull horror, a crushed plea; a line like that at a stock yard. He stood among them, tall, straight, young, a god’s form with lips that were still proud.

A streetwalker passed by and stopped; and looked, startled, at that man among the others; and winked an invitation. He did not move, only turned his head away.

XIV

A HOUSE COLLAPSED, EARLY ONE afternoon. The front wall crashed, with a shower of bricks, in a white cloud of limey dust. Coming back from work, the inhabitants saw their bedrooms exposed to the cold light of the street, like tiers of stage settings; an upright piano, caught by a naked beam, hung precariously high over the pavement. There were a few weary moans, but no astonishment; houses, long since in need of repair, collapsed without warning all over the city. Old bricks were piled high over the tramway rails and stopped traffic. Leo got a job for two days, clearing the street. He worked, bending and rising, bending and rising, through many hours, a numb ache in his spine, red dust on bleeding fingers stiff and raw in the cold.

The Museum of the Revolution had an exhibition in honor of the visiting delegates of a Swedish Trade Union. Kira got a job lettering cardboard inscriptions. She bent through four long evenings, eyes dull, hands trembling over a ruler, painfully tracing even black letters that said: “WORKERS STARVING IN THE TENEMENTS OF THE CAPITALISTIC EXPLOITERS OF 1910,” “WORKERS EXILED TO SIBERIA BY THE CZARIST GENDARMES OF 1905.”

Snow grew in white drifts in the gutters, under basement windows. Leo shovelled snow for three nights, his breath fluttering in spurts of white vapor, icicles sparkling on the old scarf wound tightly around his neck.

A citizen of no visible means of support, who owned an automobile and a five-room apartment, and who held long, whispered conversations with officials of the Food Trust, decided that his children had to speak French. Kira gave lessons twice a week, dully explaining the “passé imparfait” to two haggard brats who wiped their noses with their fingers, her voice hoarse, her head swimming, her eyes avoiding the buffet where glossy white muffins sparkled with brown, well-buttered crusts.

Leo helped a proletarian student who had an examination to pass. He explained slowly the laws of capital and interest to a sleepy fellow who scratched his knuckles, for he had the itch.

Kira washed dishes two hours a day, bending over a greasy tub that smelt of old fish, in a private restaurant—until it failed.

They disappeared for hours every day and when they came home they never asked each other in what lines they had stood, what streets they had trudged wearily to what doors closed brusquely before them. At night, Kira lighted the “Bourgeoise” and they sat silently, bent over their books. They still had things to study and one goal to remember, if all the others had to be forgotten: to graduate. “It doesn’t matter,” Kira had said. “Nothing matters. We mustn’t think. We mustn’t think at all. We must remember only that we have to be ready and then . . . maybe . . . maybe we’ll find a way to go abro. . . .” She had not finished. She could not pronounce the word. That word was like a silent, secret wound deep in both of them.

Sometimes they read the newspapers. Comrade Zinoviev, president of the Petrograd Soviet, said: “The world revolution is not a matter of years, comrades, not a matter of months, but a matter of days now. The flame of a Proletarian Uprising will sweep the Earth, wiping out forever the Curse of World Capitalism.”

There was also an interview with Comrade Biriuchin, third stoker on a Red battleship. Comrade Biriuchin said: “Well, and then we gotta keep the machines oiled, and again we gotta look out for rust, seeing as how it’s up to us to watch over the people’s engines, and we being conscientious proletarians, we do our share, on account of we don’t care for no nonsense outside of good, practical work, and again, there’s the foreign bourgeois watching us, and . . .”

Sometimes they read the magazines.

“. . . Masha looked at him coldly.

“ ‘I fear that our ideologies are too far apart. We are born into different social classes. The bourgeois prejudices are too deep-rooted in your consciousness. I am a daughter of the toiling masses. Individual love is a bourgeois prejudice.’

“ ‘Is this the end, Masha?’ he asked hoarsely, a deathly pallor spreading on his handsome, but bourgeois face.

“ ‘Yes, Ivan,’ said she, ‘it is the end. I am the new woman of a new day.’ ”

There was also poetry to read:

“. . . My heart is a tractor raking the soil,
My soul is smoke from the factory oil. . . .”

Once they went to a motion picture.

It was an American film. In the bright glare of showcases, clusters of shadows stood gazing wistfully at the breath-taking, incredible, foreign stills; big snowflakes crashed into the glass; the eager faces smiled faintly, as if with the same thought, the thought that glass—and more than glass—protected this distant, miraculous world from the hopeless Russian winter.

Kira and Leo waited, jammed in the crowd of the foyer. When a show ended and the doors were opened, the crowd tore forward, knocking aside those who tried to come out, squeezing in through the two narrow doors, painfully, furiously, with a brutal despair, like meat ground through a tight grinder.

The title of the picture shivered in huge white letters:

“THE GOLDEN OCTOPUS” DIRECTED BY REGINALD MOORE CENSORED BY COMRADE M. ZAVADKOV

The picture was puzzling. It trembled and flickered, showing a hazy office where blurred shadows of people jerked convulsively. An English sign on the office wall was misspelled. The office was that of an American Trade Union where a stern comrade entrusted the hero—a blondish, dark-eyed young man—with the recovery of documents of vast importance to the Union, stolen by a capitalist.

“Hell!” whispered Leo. “Do they also make pictures like that in America?”

Suddenly, as if a fog had lifted, the photography cleared. They could see the soft line of lipstick and every hair of the long lashes of a beautiful, smiling leading lady. Men and women in magnificently foreign clothes moved gracefully through a story that made no sense. The subtitles did not match the action. The subtitles clamored in glaring white letters about the suffering of “our American brothers under the capitalistic yoke.” On the screen, gay people laughed happily, danced in sparkling halls, ran down sandy beaches, their hair in the wind, the muscles of their young arms taut, glistening, monstrously healthy. A woman left her room wearing a white dress and emerged on the street in a black suit. The hero had suddenly grown taller, thinner, very blond and blue-eyed. His trim full-dress suit was surprising on a toiling Trade Union member; and the papers he was seeking through the incoherent jumble of events seemed suspiciously close to something like a will for his uncle’s inheritance.

A subtitle said: “I hate you. You are a blood-sucking capitalistic exploiter. Get out of my room!”

On the screen, a man was bending over the hand of a delicate lady, pressing it slowly to his lips, while she looked at him sadly, and gently stroked his hair.

The end of the picture was not shown. It finished abruptly, as if torn off. A subtitle concluded: “Six months later the bloodthirsty capitalist met his death at the hands of striking workers. Our hero renounced the joys of a selfish love into which the bourgeois siren had tried to lure him, and he dedicated his life to the cause of the World Revolution.”

“I know,” said Kira, when they were leaving the theater. “I know what they’ve done! They’ve shot that beginning here, themselves. They’ve cut the picture to pieces!”

An usher who heard her, chuckled.

Sometimes the door bell rang and the Upravdom came in to remind them of the house meeting of all tenants on an urgent matter. He said: “No exceptions, citizens. Social duty comes above all. Every tenant gotta attend the meeting.”

Then Kira and Leo filed into the largest room of the house, a long, bare room with one electric bulb in the ceiling, in the apartment of a street-car conductor who had offered it graciously for the social duty. Tenants came bringing their own chairs and sat chewing sunflower seeds. Those who brought no chairs sat on the floor and chewed sunflower seeds.

“Seeing as how I’m the Upravdom,” said the Upravdom, “I declare this meeting of the tenants of the house Number—on Sergievskaia Street open. On the order of the day is the question as regards the chimneys. Now, comrade citizens, seeing as how we are all responsible citizens and conscious of the proper class consciousness, we gotta understand that this ain’t the old days when we had landlords and didn’t care what happened to the house we lived in. Now this is different, comrades. Owing to the new régime and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and seeing as how the chimneys are clogged, we gotta do something about it, seeing as how we’re the owners of the house. Now if the chimneys are clogged, we’ll have the house full of smoke, and if we have the house full of smoke, it’s sloppy, and if we’re sloppy, that’s not true proletarian discipline. And so, comrade citizens . . .”

Housewives fidgeted nervously, sniffing the odor of burning food. A fat man in a red shirt was twiddling his thumbs. A young man with a mouth hanging open, was scratching his head.

“. . . and the special assessment will be divided in proportion to the. . . . Is that you, Comrade Kira Argounova, trying to sneak out? Well, you better don’t. You know what we think of people that sabotage their social duties. . . . And the special assessment will be divided in proportion to the social standing of the tenants. The workers pay three per cent and the Free Professions ten, and the Private Traders and unemployed—the rest. Who’s for—raise your hands. . . . Comrade secretary, count the citizens’ hands. . . . Who’s against—raise your hands. . . . Comrade Michliuk, you can’t raise your hand for and against on the one and same proposition. . . .”

Victor’s visit was unexpected and inexplicable.

He stretched his hands to the “Bourgeoise,” rubbed them energetically, smiled cheerfully at Kira and Leo.

“Just passing by and thought I’d drop in. . . . It’s a charming place you have here. Irina’s been telling me about it. . . . She’s fine, thank you. . . . No, Mother’s not so well. The doctor said there’s nothing he can do if we don’t send her south. And who can think of affording a trip these days? . . . Been busy at the Institute. Re-elected to Students’ Council. . . . Do you read poetry? Just read some verses by a woman. Exquisite delicacy of feeling. . . . Yes, it’s a lovely place you have here. Pre-revolutionary luxury. . . . You two are quite the bourgeois, aren’t you. Two huge rooms like these. No trouble with the Domicile Norm? We’ve had two tenants forced upon us last week. One’s a Communist. Father’s just gritting his teeth. Irina has to share her room with Acia, and they fight like dogs. . . . What can one do? People have to have a roof over their heads. . . . Yes, Petrograd is an overcrowded city, Petrograd certainly is.”

She came in, a red bandana on her hair, streaks of powder on her nose, a bundle tied in a white sheet in her hand, one black stocking hanging out of the bundle. She asked: “Where’s that drawing room?”

Kira asked, startled: “What do you want, citizen?”

The girl did not answer. She opened the first door she saw, which led to the tenant’s room. She slammed it shut. She opened the other door and walked into the drawing room.

“That’s it,” she said. “You can get your ‘Bourgeoise’ out—and your dishes and other trash. I have my own.”

“What do you want, citizen?” Kira repeated.

“Oh, yes,” said the girl. “Here.”

She handed to Kira a crumpled scrap of paper with a big official stamp. It was an order from the Gilotdel, giving Citizen Marina Lavrova the right to occupy the room known as “drawing room” in apartment Number 22, house Number—on Sergievskaia Street; it requested the present occupants to vacate the room immediately, removing only “personal effects of immediate necessity.”

“Why, it’s impossible!” Kira gasped.

The girl laughed. “Get going, citizen, get going.”

“Listen, you. Get out of here peacefully. You won’t get this room.”

“No? Who’s going to stop me? You?”

She walked to a chair, saw Kira’s apron on it, threw it to the floor and put her bundle on the chair.

Slamming the door behind her, Kira raced up the stairs, three floors up, to the Upravdom’s apartment, and stood panting, knocking at the door ferociously.

The Upravdom opened the door and listened to her story, frowning.

“Order from the Gilotdel?” he said. “That’s funny they didn’t notify me. That’s irregular. I’ll put the citizen in her proper place.”

“Comrade Upravdom, you know very well it’s against the law. Citizen Kovalensky and I are not married. We’re entitled to separate rooms.”

“You sure are.”

Kira had been paid for a month of lessons the day before. She took the little roll of bills from her pocket and, without looking at it, without counting, thrust it all into the Upravdom’s hand.

“Comrade Upravdom, I’m not in the habit of begging for help, but please, oh! please, get her out. It would . . . it would simply mean the end for us.”

The Upravdom slipped the bills into his pocket furtively, then looked straight at Kira, openly and innocently, as if nothing had happened. “Don’t you worry, Citizen Argounova. We know our duty. We’ll fix the lady. We’ll throw her out on her behind in the gutter where she belongs.”

He slammed his hat over one ear and followed Kira downstairs.

“Look here, citizen, what’s all this about?” the Upravdom asked sternly.

Citizen Marina Lavrova had taken her coat off and opened her bundle. She wore a tailored white shirt, an old skirt, a necklace of imitation pearls, and slippers with very high heels. She had piled underwear, books and a teapot in a jumble on the table.

“How do you do, Comrade Upravdom?” she smiled pleasantly. “We might as well get acquainted.”

She took a little wallet from her pocket and handed it to him, open, showing a little card. It was a membership card of the Communist Union of Youth—the Komsomol.

“Oh,” said the Upravdom. “Oh.” He turned to Kira: “What do you want, citizen? You have two rooms and you want a toiling girl to be thrown out on the streets? The time is past for bourgeois privileges, citizen. People like you had better watch their step.”

Kira and Leo appealed the case in the People’s Court.

They sat in a bare room that smelt of sweat and of an unswept floor. Lenin and Karl Marx, without frames, bigger than life-size, looked at them from the wall. A cotton strip said: “Proletarians of the wo . . .” The rest was not to be seen, for the end of the strip had become untacked and swayed, curled like a snake, in a draft.

The president magistrate yawned and asked Kira: “What’s your social position, citizen?”

“Student.”

“Employed?”

“No.”

“Member of a Trade Union?”

“No.”

The Upravdom testified that although Citizen Argounova and Citizen Kovalensky were not in the state of legal matrimony, their relations were those of “sexual intimacy,” there being only one bed in their rooms, of which, he, the Upravdom, had made certain, and which made them for all purposes “same as married,” and the Domicile Norm allowed but one room to a married couple, as the Comrade Judge well knew; furthermore, “the room known as drawing room” together with their bedroom gave the citizens in question three square feet of living space over the prescribed norm; furthermore, the citizens in question had been, of late, quite irregular about their rent.

“Who was your father, Citizen Argounova?”

“Alexander Argounov.”

“The former textile manufacturer and factory owner?”

“Yes.”

“I see. Who was your father, Citizen Kovalensky?”

“Admiral Kovalensky.”

“Executed for counter-revolutionary activities?”

“Executed—yes.”

“Who was your father, Citizen Lavrova?”

“Factory worker, Comrade Judge. Exiled to Siberia by the Czar in 1913. My mother’s a peasant, from the plow.”

“It is the verdict of the People’s Court that the room in question rightfully belongs to Citizen Lavrova.”

“Is this a court of justice or a musical comedy?” Leo asked.

The presiding magistrate turned to him solemnly: “So-called impartial justice, citizen, is a bourgeois prejudice. This is a court of class justice. It is our official attitude and platform. Next case!”

“Comrade Judge!” Kira appealed. “How about the furniture—our furniture?”

“You can’t pull all that furniture into one room.”

“No, but we could sell it. We’re . . . we’re quite hard up.”

“So? You would sell it for profit and a proletarian girl, who didn’t happen to accumulate any furniture, would have to sleep on the floor? . . . Next case!”

“Tell me one thing,” Kira asked Citizen Lavrova. “How did you happen to get an order for that particular room of ours? Who told you about it?”

Citizen Lavrova gave an abrupt giggle with a vague stare. “One has friends,” was all she answered.

She had a pale face with a short nose and small, pouting lips that looked chronically discontented. She had light, bluish eyes, cold and suspicious. Her hair curled in vague ringlets on her forehead and she always wore tiny earrings, a brass circle close around the lobe of her ear, with a tiny imitation turquoise. She was not sociable and talked little. But the door bell rang continuously in the hands of visitors to Comrade Lavrova. Her friends called her Marisha.

In Leo’s gray and silver bedroom, a hole was pierced over the black onyx fireplace—for the pipe of the “Bourgeoise.” Two shelves on his wardrobe were emptied for dishes, silverware and food. Bread crumbs rolled down into their underwear and the bed sheets smelt of linseed oil. Leo’s books were stacked on the dresser; Kira’s—under the bed. Leo whistled a fox-trot, arranging his books. Kira did not look at him.

After some hesitation, Marisha surrendered the painting of Leo’s mother, which hung in the drawing room. But she kept the frame; she put a picture of Lenin in it. She also had pictures of Trotsky, Marx, Engels and Rosa Luxemburg; also—a poster representing the Spirit of the Red Air Fleet. She had a gramophone. Late into the night, she played old records, of which her favorite was a song about Napoleon’s defeat in Russia—“It roared, it flamed, the fire of Moscow.” When she was tired of the gramophone, she played the “Dog’s Waltz” on the grand piano.

The bathroom had to be reached through the bedroom. Marisha kept shuffling in and out, wearing a faded, unfastened bathrobe.

“When you have to go through, I wish you’d knock,” Kira told her.

“What for? It’s not your bathroom.”

Marisha was a student of the University Rabfac.

The Rabfacs were special workers’ faculties with an academic program a little less exacting than that of the University, with a program of revolutionary sciences a great deal more exacting, and with an admission on the strictest proletarian basis.

Marisha disliked Kira, but spoke to Leo at times. She flung the door open so that her posters rustled on the walls, and yelled imperiously: “Citizen Kovalensky, can you help me with this damn French history? What century did they burn Martin Luther in? Or was that Germany? Or did they burn him?”

At other times she flung the door open and announced to no one in particular: “I’m going to the Komsomol Club to meeting. If Comrade Rilenko comes, tell him he’ll find me at the Club. But if that louse Mishka Gvozdev comes, tell him I’ve gone to America. You know who he is—the little one with the wart on his nose.”

She came in, a cup in her hand: “Citizen Argounova, can I borrow some lard? Didn’t know I was all out of it. . . . Nothing but linseed oil? How can you eat that stinking stuff? Well, gimme half a cup.”

Going out at seven in the morning, passing through her room, Leo found Marisha asleep, her head on a table littered with books. Marisha jerked, awakening with a start at the sound of his steps.

“Oh, damnation!” she yawned, stretching. “It’s this paper I have to read at the Marxist Circle tonight, for our less enlightened comrades—on the ‘Social Significance of Electricity as a Historical Factor.’ Citizen Kovalensky, who the hell is Edison?”

Late at night they could hear her coming home. She slammed the door and threw her books on a chair, and they could hear the books scattering over the floor, and her voice intermingled with the deep, adolescent basso of Comrade Rilenko: “Aleshka, pal, be an angel. Light that damn Primus. I’m starving.”

Aleshka’s steps shuffled across the room, and the Primus hissed.

“You’re an angel, Aleshka. Always said you were an angel. I’m tired like a dray-horse. The Rabfac this morning; the Komsomol Club at noon; a committee on day-nurseries in factories at one-thirty; the Marxist Circle at two; demonstration against Illiteracy at three—and do my feet sweat!—lecture on Electrification at four; at seven—editors’ board of the Wall Newspaper—I’m gonna be editor; meeting of the women houseworkers at seven-thirty or something; conference on our comrades in Hungary at. . . . You can’t say your girl friend ain’t class-minded and socially active, Aleshka, you really can’t say it.”

Aleshka sat at the piano and played, “John Gray.”

Once, in the middle of the night, Kira was awakened by someone slinking furtively into the bathroom. She caught a glimpse of an undressed boy with blond hair. There was no light in Marisha’s room.

One evening, Kira heard a familiar voice behind the door. A man was saying: “Of course, we’re friends. You know we are. Perhaps—perhaps there’s more—on my part—but I do not dare to hope. I’ve proven my devotion to you. You know the favor I’ve done you. Now, do one for me. I want to meet that Party friend of yours.”

Passing through Marisha’s room, on her way out, Kira stopped short. She saw Victor sitting on the davenport, holding Marisha’s hand. He jumped up, his temples reddened.

“Victor! Were you coming to see me or . . .” Her voice broke off; she understood.

“Kira, I don’t want you to think that I . . .” Victor was saying.

Kira was running out of the room, out of the lobby, down the stairs.

When she told Leo about it, he threatened to break every bone in Victor’s body. She begged him to keep quiet. “If you raise this issue, his father will know. It will break Uncle Vasili and he’s so unhappy as it is. What’s the use? We won’t get the room back.”

In the Institute co-operative, Kira met Comrade Sonia and Pavel Syerov. Comrade Sonia was chewing a crust of bread broken off the loaf she had received, Pavel Syerov looked as trim as a military fashion plate. He smiled effusively: “How are you, Comrade Argounova? We don’t see you so often at the Institute these days.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“We don’t see you with Comrade Taganov any more. You two haven’t quarreled, have you?”

“Why does that interest you?”

“Oh, it’s of no particular interest to me personally.”

“But it does interest us as a Party duty,” Comrade Sonia remarked sternly. “Comrade Taganov is a valuable Party worker. Naturally, we are concerned, for his friendship with a woman of your social origin might hurt his Party standing.”

“Nonsense, Sonia, nonsense,” Pavel Syerov protested with sudden eagerness. “Andrei’s Party standing is too high. Nothing can hurt it. Comrade Argounova doesn’t have to worry and break off a lovely friendship.”

Kira looked at him fixedly and asked: “But his Party standing does worry you because it’s so high, doesn’t it?”

“Why, Comrade Taganov is a very good friend of mine and . . .”

“Are you a very good friend of his?”

“A peculiar question, Comrade Argounova.”

“One does hear peculiar things nowadays, doesn’t one? Good day, Comrade Syerov.”

Marisha came in when Kira was alone. Her little pouting mouth was swollen: her eyes were red, swollen with tears. She asked sullenly: “Citizen Argounova, what do you use to keep from having children?”

Kira looked at her, startled.

“I’m afraid I’m in trouble,” Marisha wailed. “It’s that damn louse Aleshka Rilenko. Said I’d be bourgeois if I didn’t let him. . . . Said he’d be careful. What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?”

Kira said she didn’t know.

For three weeks, Kira worked secretly on a new dress. It was only her old dress, but slowly, painfully, awkwardly, she managed to turn it inside out. The blue wool was smooth and silky on the inside; it looked almost fresh. It was to be a surprise for Leo; she worked on it at night when he had gone to bed. She put a candle on the floor and opened the big mirror door of the wardrobe and used it as a screen, crouching on the floor behind it, by the candle. She had never learned how to sew. Her fingers moved slowly, helplessly. She wiped drops of blood on her petticoat, when she pricked her finger with the needle. Her eyes felt as if tiny needles pricked them continuously from behind the lids; and her lids felt so heavy that when she blinked they stayed closed and it took an effort to pull them open to the huge yellow glare of the candle. Somewhere in the darkness, behind the yellow glare, Leo breathed heavily in his sleep.

The dress was ready on the day when she met Vava in the street. Vava was smiling happily, mysteriously once in a while, for no apparent reason, smiling at a secret thought of her own. They walked home together, and Vava could not resist it any longer: “Won’t you come in, Kira?” she begged. “For just a second? I have something to show you. Something—from abroad.”

Vava’s room smelt of perfume and clean linen. A big teddy-bear with a pink bow sat on the white lace cover of her bed.

Vava opened a parcel carefully wrapped in tissue paper. She handled the objects inside with a frightened reverence, with delicate, trembling fingers. The parcel contained two pairs of silk stockings and a black celluloid bracelet.

Kira gasped. She extended her hand. She hesitated. She touched a stocking with her finger tips, caressing it timidly, like the fur of a priceless animal.

“It’s smuggled,” Vava whispered. “A lady—father’s patient—her husband’s in the business—they smuggled it from Riga. And the bracelet—that’s their latest fashion abroad. Imagine? Fake jewelry. Isn’t it fascinating?”

Kira held the bracelet reverently on the palm of her hand; she did not dare to slip it on.

Vava asked suddenly, timidly, without smiling: “Kira, how’s Victor?”

“He’s fine.”

“I . . . I haven’t seen him for some time. Well, I know, he’s so busy. I’ve given up all my dates, waiting for him to. . . . Oh, well, he’s such an active person. . . . I’m so happy over these stockings. I’ll wear them when . . . when he comes. I just had to throw out my last silk pair this morning.”

“You . . . threw them out?”

“Why, yes. I think they’re still in the waste basket. They’re ruined. One has a big run in the back.”

“Vava . . . could I have them?”

“What? The torn ones? But they’re no good.”

“It’s just . . . just for a joke.”

Kira went home, clutching a soft little ball in her pocket. She kept her hand in her pocket. She could not let it go.

When Leo came in, that evening, his hand opened the door and flung his brief case into the room. The brief case opened, spilling the books over the floor. Then he came in.

He did not take his coat off; he walked straight to the “Bourgeoise” and stood, his blue hands extended to the fire, rubbing them furiously. Then he took his coat off and threw it across the room at a chair; it missed the chair and fell to the floor; he didn’t pick it up. Then he asked: “Anything to eat?”

Kira stood facing him, silent, motionless in the splendor of her new dress and carefully mended real silk stockings. She said softly: “Yes. Sit down. Everything’s ready.”

He sat down. He had looked at her several times. He had not noticed. It was the same old blue dress; but she had trimmed it carefully with bands and buttons of black oilcloth which looked almost like patent leather. When she served the millet and he dipped his spoon hungrily into the steaming yellow mush, she stood by the table and, raising her skirt a little, swung her leg forward into the circle of light, watching happily the shimmering, tight silk. She said timidly: “Leo, look.”

He looked and asked curtly: “Where did you get them?”

“I . . . Vava gave them to me. They . . . they were torn.”

“I wouldn’t wear other people’s discarded junk.”

He did not mention the new dress. She did not call it to his attention. They ate silently.

Marisha had had an abortion. She moaned, behind the closed door. She shuffled heavily across the room, cursing aloud the midwife who did not know her business.

“Citizen Lavrova, will you please clean the bathroom? There’s blood all over the floor.”

“Leave me alone. I’m sick. Clean it yourself, if you’re so damn bourgeois about your bathroom.”

Marisha slammed the door, then opened it again, cautiously: “Citizen Argounova, you won’t tell your cousin on me, will you? He doesn’t know about . . . my trouble. He’s—a gentleman.”

Leo came home at dawn. He had worked all night. He had worked in caissons for a bridge under construction, deep on the bottom of a river on the point of freezing.

Kira had waited for him. She had kept a fire in the “Bourgeoise.”

He came in, oil and mud on his coat, oil and sweat on his face, oil and blood on his hands. He swayed a little and held onto the door. A strand of hair was glued across his forehead.

He went into the bathroom. He came out, asking: “Kira, do I have any clean underwear?”

He was naked. His hands were swollen. His head drooped to one shoulder. His eyelids were blue.

His body was white as marble and as hard and straight; the body of a god, she thought, that should climb a mountainside at dawn, young grass under his feet, a morning mist on his muscles in a breath of homage.

The “Bourgeoise” was smoking. An acrid fog hung under the electric bulb. The gray rug under his feet smelt of kerosene. Black drops of soot fell slowly, with a soft thud, from a joint of the stove pipes to the gray rug.

Kira stood before him. She could say nothing. She took his hand and raised it to her lips.

He swayed a little. He threw his head back and coughed.

Leo was late. He had been detained at a University lecture. Kira waited, the Primus hissing feebly, keeping his dinner hot.

The telephone rang. She heard a child’s voice, trembling, panicky, gulping tears between words: “Is that you, Kira? . . . It’s Acia . . . Kira, please come over immediately, right away. . . . I’m scared. . . . There’s something wrong. . . . I think it’s Mother. . . . There’s no one home but Father—and he won’t call, and he won’t speak, and I’m scared. . . . There’s nothing to eat in the house. . . . Please, Kira, I’m so scared. . . . Please come over. Please, Kira. . . .”

With all the money she had, Kira bought a bottle of milk and two pounds of bread in a private store, on her way over.

Acia opened the door. Her eyes were slits in a purple, swollen face. She grabbed Kira’s skirt and sobbed dully, convulsively, her shoulders shaking, her nose buried in Kira’s hem.

“Acia! What happened? Where’s Irina? Where’s Victor?”

“Victor’s not home. Irina’s gone for the doctor. I called a tenant and he said to get the hell out. I’m scared. . . .”

Vasili Ivanovitch sat by his wife’s bed. His hands hung limply between his knees and he did not move. Maria Petrovna’s hair was spilled over the white pillow. She breathed, hissing, the white coverlet rising and falling jerkily. On the white coverlet there was a wide, dark stain.

Kira stood helplessly, clutching the milk bottle in one hand, the bread in the other. Vasili Ivanovitch raised his head slowly and looked at her.

“Kira . . .” he said indifferently. “. . . Milk. . . . Would you mind heating it? . . . It might help. . . .”

Kira found the Primus. She heated the milk. She held a cup to the trembling blue lips. Maria Petrovna swallowed twice and pushed the cup away.

“Hemorrhage . . .” said Vasili Ivanovitch. “Irina’s gone for the doctor. He has no phone. No other doctor will come. I have no money. The hospital won’t send anyone—we’re not Trade Union members.”

A candle burned on the table. Through a sickly, yellow haze, a dusty fog more than a light, three tall, bare, curtainless windows stared like black gashes. A white pitcher lay upturned on a table, slowly dripping a few last drops into a dark puddle on the floor. A yellow circle shivered on the ceiling, over the candle, and a yellow glow shivered on Maria Petrovna’s hands, as if her skin were trembling.

Maria Petrovna whined softly: “I’m all right . . . I’m all right . . . I know I’m all right. . . . Vasili just wants to frighten me. . . . No one can say I’m not all right. . . . I want to live . . . I’ll live. . . . Who said I won’t live?”

“Of course, you will, Aunt Marussia. You’re all right. Just lie still. Relax.”

“Kira, where’s my nail buffer? Find my nail buffer. Irina’s lost it again. I told her not to touch it. Where’s my nail buffer?”

Kira opened a drawer in search of the buffer. A sound stopped her. It was like pebbles rolling on a hard floor, like water gurgling through a clogged pipe and like an animal howling. Maria Petrovna was coughing. A dark froth ran down her white chin.

“Ice, Kira!” Vasili Ivanovitch cried. “Have we any ice?”

She ran, stumbling, down a dark corridor, to the kitchen. A thick coating of ice was frozen over the edge of the sink. She broke some off with the sharp, rusty blade of an old knife, cutting her hands. She came back, running, water dripping from the ice between her fingers.

Maria Petrovna howled, coughing: “Help me! Help me! Help me!”

They rolled the ice into a towel and put it on her chest. Red stains spread on her nightgown.

Suddenly she jerked herself up. The ice rolled, clattering, to the floor. A long pink strand of froth hung on her lower lip. Her eyes were wide with a horror beyond all human dignity. She was staring at Kira. She screamed:

“Kira! I want to live! I want to live!”

She fell back. Her hair jerked like snakes on the pillow and lay still. Her arm fell over the edge of the bed and lay still. A red bubble grew over her open mouth and burst in a spurt of something black and heavy, gurgling like the last drop through the clogged pipe. She did not move. Nothing moved on the bed but the black that slithered slowly down the skin of her throat.

Kira stood still.

Someone seized her hand. Vasili Ivanovitch buried his face in her hip and sobbed. He sobbed without a sound. She saw the gray hair shaking on his neck.

Behind a chair in a corner, Acia crouched on the floor and whined softly, monotonously.

Kira did not cry.

When she came home, Leo was sitting by the Primus, heating her dinner. He was coughing.

They sat at a small table in a dark corner of the restaurant. Kira had met Andrei at the Institute and he had invited her for a cup of tea with “real French pastry.” The restaurant was almost empty. From the sidewalk outside, a few faces stared through the window, dull, incredulous faces watching those who could afford to sit in a restaurant. At a table in the center, a man in a huge fur coat was holding a dish of pastry for a smiling woman who hesitated in her choice, her fingers fluttering over the glistening chocolate frostings, a diamond glistening on her finger. The restaurant smelt of old rubber and stale fish. A long, sticky paper tube dangled from the central chandelier, brown with glue, black-dotted with dead flies. The tube swayed every time the kitchen door was opened. Over the kitchen door hung a picture of Lenin trimmed with bows of red crêpe paper.

“Kira, I almost broke my word. I was going to call on you. I was worried. I still am. You look so . . . pale. Anything wrong, Kira?”

“Some . . . trouble . . . at home.”

“I had tickets for the ballet—‘Swan Lake.’ I waited for you, but you missed all your lectures.”

“I’m sorry. Was it beautiful?”

“I didn’t go.”

“Andrei, I think Pavel Syerov is trying to make trouble for you in the Party.”

“He probably is. I don’t like Pavel Syerov. While the Party is fighting speculators, he patronizes them. He’s been known to buy a foreign sweater from a smuggler.”

“Andrei, why doesn’t your Party believe in the right to live while one is not killed?”

“Do you mean Syerov or—yourself?”

“Myself.”

“In our fight, Kira, there is no neutrality.”

“You may claim the right to kill, as all fighters do. But no one before you has ever thought of forbidding life to those still living.”

She looked at the pitiless face before her; she saw two dark triangles in the sunken cheeks; the muscles of his face were taut. He was saying: “When one can stand any suffering, one can also see others suffer. This is martial law. Our time is dawn. There is a new sun rising, such as the world has never seen before. We are in the path of its first rays. Every pain, every cry of ours will be carried by these rays, as on a gigantic radius, down the centuries; every little figure will grow into an enormous shadow that will wipe out decades of future sorrow for every minute of ours.”

The waiter brought the tea and pastry.

There was a convulsive little jerk in Kira’s fingers as she raised a piece of pastry to her mouth, an involuntary, frightened hurry which was not mere greed for a rare delicacy.

“Kira!” Andrei gasped and dropped his fork. “Kira!”

She stared at him, frightened.

“Kira! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Andrei . . . I don’t know what you’re talking ab . . .” she tried to say, but knew what he had guessed.

“Wait! Don’t eat that. Waiter! A bowl of hot soup right away. Then—dinner. Everything you have. Hurry! . . . Kira, I didn’t know . . . I didn’t know it was that bad.”

She smiled feebly, helplessly: “I tried to find work. . . .”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I know you don’t believe in using Party influence to help friends.”

“Oh, but this . . . Kira . . . this!” It was the first time she had ever seen him frightened. He jumped up: “Excuse me a moment.”

He strode across the room to a telephone. She could hear splinters of conversation: “Comrade Voronov. Urgent. . . . Andrei Taganov. . . . Conference? Interrupt it! . . . Comrade Voronov? . . . who has to be . . . immediately. . . . Yes . . . I don’t care. Make one. . . . Yes . . . No . . . No! . . . Tomorrow morning. . . . Yes. . . . Thank you, comrade. Good-bye.”

Andrei came back to the table. He smiled down at her startled, incredulous face. “Well, you go to work tomorrow. In the office of the ‘House of the Peasant. ’ It’s not very much of a job, but it’s one I could get for you right away—and it won’t be hard. Be there at nine. Ask for Comrade Voronov. He’ll know who you are. And—here.” He opened his wallet and, emptying it, pressed a roll of bills into her hand.

“Oh, Andrei! I can’t!”

“Well, maybe you can’t—for yourself. But you can—for someone else. Isn’t there someone at home who needs it—your family?”

She thought of someone at home who needed it. She took the money.

XV

WHEN KIRA SLEPT, HER HEAD FELL BACK on the pillow, so that the faint starlight outside made a white triangle under her chin. Her lashes lay still on pale, calm cheeks. Her lips breathed softly, half open, like a child’s, with the hint of a smile in the corners, trusting and expectant, timid and radiantly young.

The alarm clock rang at six-thirty A.M. It had been ringing at six-thirty A.M. for the last two months.

Her first movement of the day was a convulsive leap into an icy precipice. She seized the alarm clock after its first hysterical shriek and turned it off—to let Leo sleep; then stood swaying, shivering, the sound of the alarm still ringing in her ears like an insult, a dark hatred in her body, a cry rising in every muscle like the pain of a great illness, calling her back into bed, her head too heavy for her body, the cold floor like fire under her bare feet.

Then she staggered blindly, groping in the darkness, into the bathroom. Her eyes wouldn’t open. She reached for the bathtub faucet; it had been running slowly, gurgling in the darkness, all night; it had to be left running or the pipes would freeze. Eyes closed, she slapped cold water over her face with one hand; with the other, she leaned unsteadily on the edge of the bathtub, to keep from falling forward head first.

Then her eyes opened and she pulled her nightgown off, steam rising from her wet arms in the frozen air, while she tried to smile, her teeth chattering, telling herself that she was awake now and the worst was over.

She dressed and slipped back into the bedroom. She did not turn on the light. She could see the black silhouette of the Primus on the table against the dark blue of the window. She struck a match, her body shielding the bed from the little flare of light. She pumped the handle nervously. The Primus wouldn’t light. The clock ticked in the darkness, the precious fleeting seconds hurrying her on. She pumped furiously, biting her lips. The blue flame sprang up at last. She put a pan of water over the flame.

She drank tea with saccharine and chewed slowly a piece of dry bread. The window before her was frozen into a solid pattern of white ferns that sparkled softly; beyond the window it was still night. She sat huddled by the table, afraid to move, trying to chew without a sound. Leo slept restlessly. He turned uneasily; he coughed, a dry, choking cough smothered by the pillow; he sighed once in a while in his sleep, a raucous sigh that was almost a moan.

She pulled on her felt boots, her winter coat, wound an old scarf around her throat. She tiptoed to the door, threw a last glance at the pale blue in the darkness that was Leo’s face, and brushed her lips with her finger tips in a soundless kiss. Then she opened the door very slowly and as slowly closed it again behind her.

The snow was still blue outside. Above the roofs, the blue darkness receded in circles, so that far away down the sky one could guess a paler blue if one looked hard. Somewhere beyond the houses, a tramway shrieked like an early bird of prey.

Kira bent forward, gathered her hands into her armpits, in a tight, shivering huddle against the wind. The cold caught her breath with a sharp pain in her nostrils. She ran, slipping on the frozen sidewalks, toward the distant tramway.

A line waited for the tramway. She stood, bent to the wind and silent as the others. When the tramway came, yellow squares of light in space, shaking toward them through the darkness, the line broke. There was a swift whirlpool at the narrow door, a rustle of crushed bodies; the yellow squares of lighted windows filled speedily with shadows pressed tightly together, and Kira was left outside as the bell rang and the tramway tore forward. There was half an hour to wait for the next one; she would be late; if she were late, she would be fired; she ran after the tramway, leaped, caught a brass handle; but there was no room on the steps; her feet were dragged down the frozen ground as the tramway gained speed; someone’s strong arm seized her shoulder blade and pulled her up; her one foot found space on the steps; a hoarse voice roared into her ear: “You—insane, citizen? That’s how so many get killed!”

She hung in a cluster of men on the tramway steps, holding on with one hand and one foot, watching the streaked snow speed by on the ground, pressing herself with all her strength into the cluster of bodies, when a passing truck came too close and threatened to grind her off the tramway steps.

The “House of the Peasant” occupied someone’s former mansion. It had a stairway of pale pink marble with a bronze balustrade, lighted by a huge stained-glass window where purple grapes and pink peaches rolled out of golden cornucopias. A sign was posted over the stairs: COMRADES! DO NOT SPIT ON THE FLOOR.

There were other signs: a huge sickle and hammer of gilded papier-mâché, a poster with a peasant woman and a sheaf of wheat, more posters of sheafs, golden sheafs, green sheafs, red sheafs, a picture of Lenin, a peasant grinding under foot a spider with the head of a priest, a picture of Trotsky, a peasant and a red tractor, a picture of Karl Marx, “Proletarians of the World, Unite!” “Who does not toil, shall not eat!” “Long live the reign of workers and poor peasants!” “Comrade peasants, crush the hoarders in your midst!”

A new movement had been started in a blare of newspapers and posters for “a closer understanding between workers and peasants, a wider spread of city ideas through the country,” a movement called “The Clamping of City and Village.” The “House of the Peasant” was dedicated to such clamping. There were posters of workers and peasants shaking hands, of a worker and a peasant woman, also of a peasant and a working woman, of work bench and plow, of smokestacks and wheat fields, “Our future lies in the Clamping of City and Village!,” “Comrades, strengthen the Clamping!,” “Comrades, do your share for the Clamping!,” “Comrades, what have you done for the Clamping?”

The posters rose like foam from the entrance door, up the stairway, to the office. In the office there were carved marble columns and partitions of unpainted wood; also—desks, files, pictures of proletarian leaders and a typewriter; also—Comrade Bitiuk, the office manager, and five office workers, among them Kira Argounova.

Comrade Bitiuk was a tall woman, thin, gray-haired, military and in strict sympathy with the Soviet Government; her chief aim in life was to give constant evidence of how strict that sympathy was, even though she had graduated from a women’s college and wore on her breast an old-fashioned watch on a bow of burnished silver.

Her four office workers were: a tall girl with a long nose and a leather jacket, who was a Party member and could make Comrade Bitiuk shudder at her slightest whim, and knew it; a young man with a bad complexion, who was not a Party member yet, but had made an application and was a candidate, and never missed a chance to mention it; and two young girls who worked merely because they needed the wages: Nina and Tina. Nina wore earrings and answered the telephone; Tina powdered her nose and ran the typewriter. A habit which had sprung from nowhere and spread over the country, which even Party members could not check or resist, for which no one was responsible nor could be punished, referred to all products of local inefficiency as “Soviet”; there were “Soviet matches” that did not light, “Soviet kerchiefs” that tore the first time worn, “Soviet shoes” with cardboard soles. Young women like Nina and Tina were called “Soviet girls.”

There were many floors and many offices in the “House of the Peasant.” Many feet hurried up and down its many corridors in a steady drone of activity. Kira never learned just what that activity was, nor who worked in the building, besides those in her office and the imposing Comrade Voronov whom she had seen once on her first day in the “House of the Peasant.”

As Comrade Bitiuk reminded them constantly, the “House of the Peasant” was “the heart of a gigantic net whose veins poured the beneficial light of the new Proletarian Culture into the darkest corners of our farthest villages.” It represented the hospitable arms of the city open wide in welcome to all peasant delegations, all comrades from the villages who came to the city. It stood there as their guide and teacher, as the devoted servant of their cultural and spiritual needs.

From her desk, Kira watched Comrade Bitiuk gushing into the telephone: “Yes, yes, comrade, it’s all arranged. At one o’clock the comrade peasants of the Siberian delegation go to the Museum of the Revolution—the history of our Revolutionary movement from its first days—an easy, visualized course in Proletarian history—within two hours—very valuable—and we have made arrangements for a special guide. At three o’clock the comrade peasants go to our Marxist Club where we have arranged a special lecture on the ‘Problems of the Soviet City and Village.’ At five o’clock the comrade peasants are expected at a club of the Pioneers where the children have called a special meeting in their honor—there will be a display of physical culture drills by the dear little tots. At seven o’clock the comrade peasants go to the opera—we have reserved two boxes at the Marinsky Theater—where they will hear ‘Aïda.’ ”

When Comrade Bitiuk hung up the receiver, she whirled around in her chair, snapping a military command: “Comrade Argounova! Do you have the requisition for the special lecturer?”

“No, Comrade Bitiuk.”

“Comrade Ivanova! Have you typed that requisition?!”

“What requisition, Comrade Bit . . . ?”

“The requisition for the special lecturer for the delegation of the comrade peasants from Siberia!”

“But you didn’t tell me to type any requisitions, Comrade Bitiu . . .”

“I wrote it myself and put it on your desk.”

“Oh, yes, sure, oh, that’s what it was for? Oh, well, I saw it, but I didn’t know I was to type it, Comrade Bitiuk. And my typewriter ribbon is torn.”

“Comrade Argounova, do you have the approved requisition for a new typewriter ribbon for Comrade Ivanova’s typewriter?”

“No, Comrade Bitiuk.”

“Where is it?”

“In Comrade Voronov’s office.”

“What is it doing there?”

“Comrade Voronov hasn’t signed it yet.”

“Have the others signed?”

“Yes, Comrade Bitiuk. Comrade Semenov has signed it, and Comrade Vlassova, and Comrade Pereverstov. But Comrade Voronov has not returned it yet.”

“Some people do not realize the tremendous cultural importance of the work we’re doing!” Comrade Bitiuk raged, but noticing the cold, suspicious stare of the girl in the leather jacket, who heard this criticism of a higher official, she hastened to correct herself. “I meant you, Comrade Argounova. You do not show sufficient interest in your work nor any proletarian consciousness. It’s up to you to see that this requisition is signed.”

“Yes, Comrade Bitiuk.”

Through the hours, thin and pale in her faded dress, Kira filed documents, typewritten documents, certificates, reports, accounts, requisitions that had to be filed where no one ever looked at them again; she counted books, columns of books, mountains of books, fresh from the printers, ink staining her fingers, books in red and white paper covers to be sent to Peasant Clubs all over the country: “What you can do for the Clamping,” “The Red Peasant,” “The work-bench and the plow,” “The ABC of Communism,” “Comrade Lenin and Comrade Marx.” There were many telephone calls; there were many people coming in and going out, to be called “comrades” and “citizens”; there were many times to repeat mechanically, like a well-wound gramophone, imitating Comrade Bitiuk’s enthusiastic inflations: “Thus, comrade, you will be doing your share for the Clamping,” and “The cultural progress of the Proletariat, comrade, requires that . . .”

Sometimes a comrade peasant came into the office in person. He stood behind the low, unpainted partition, timidly crumpling his fur cap in one hand, scratching his head with the other. He nodded slowly, his bewildered eyes staring at Kira without comprehension, as she told him: “. . . and we have arranged an excursion for the comrades of your delegation through the Winter Palace where you can see how the Czar lived—an easy, visualized lesson in class tyranny—and then . . .”

The peasant mumbled in his blond beard: “Now, about that grain shortage matter, comrade. . . .”

“Then, after the excursion, we have a special lecture arranged for you on ‘The Doom of Capitalism.’ ”

When the comrade peasant left, Nina or Tina snooped cautiously around the place where he had stood, inspecting the wooden railing. Once, Kira saw Nina cracking something on her thumb nail.

This morning, on her way up to the office, Kira stopped on the stair landing and looked at the Wall Newspaper. The “House of the Peasant,” like all institutions, had a Wall Newspaper written by the employees, edited by the local Communist Cell, pasted in a prominent spot for all comrades to read; the Wall Newspapers were to “stimulate the social spirit and the consciousness of collective activity”; they were devoted to “local news of social importance and constructive proletarian criticism.”

The Wall Newspaper of the “House of the Peasant” was a square meter of typewritten strips pasted on a blackboard with headlines in red and blue pencil. There was a prominent editorial on “What each one of us comrades here does for the Clamping,” there was a humorous article on “How we’ll puncture the foreign Imperialist’s belly,” there was a poem by a local poet about “The Rhythm of Toil,” there was a cartoon by a local artist, representing a fat man in a high silk hat sitting on a toilet. There were many items of constructive proletarian criticism:

“Comrade Nadia Chernova is wearing silk stockings. Time to be reminded that such flaunting of luxury is unproletarian, Comrade Chernova.”

“A certain comrade in a high position has lately allowed his position to go to his head. He has been known to be curt and rude to young members of the Komsomol. This is a warning, comrade * * * Many a better head has been known to fall when the time came for a reduction of staffs.”

“Comrade E. Ovsov indulges in too much talk when asked about business. This leads to a waste of valuable time and is not at all in the spirit of proletarian efficiency.”

“A certain comrade whom many will recognize, neglects to turn off the light when leaving the rest-room. Electricity costs money to the Soviet State, comrade.”

“We hear that Comrade Kira Argounova is lacking in social spirit. The time is past, Comrade Argounova, for arrogant bourgeois attitudes.”

She stood very still and heard her heart beating. No one dared to ignore the mighty pointing finger of the Wall Newspaper. All watched it carefully and a little nervously, all bowed reverently to its verdict, from Nina and Tina up to Comrade Voronov himself. The Wall Newspaper was the voice of Social Activity. No one could save those branded as “anti-social element,” not even Andrei Taganov. There had been talk of a reduction of staffs. Kira felt cold. She thought that Leo had had nothing but millet for dinner the night before. She thought of Leo’s cough.

At her desk, she watched the others in the room, wondering who had reported her to the Wall Newspaper, who and why. She had been so very careful. She had never uttered a word of criticism against the Soviets. She had been as loyally enthusiastic in her work as Comrade Bitiuk herself, or as nearly as she could imitate her. She had been careful never to argue, nor to answer sharply, nor to make an enemy of anyone. Her fingers counting rapidly volumes of the works of Karl Marx, she asked herself helplessly, desperately: “Am I still different? Am I different from them? How do they know I’m different? What have I done? What is it I haven’t done?”

When Comrade Bitiuk left the office, which happened frequently, work stopped. The staff congregated around Tina’s typewriter. There were eager whispered conferences about the co-operative that gave the loveliest printed calico that made the loveliest blouses, about the Nepman’s stand in the market that sold cotton stockings “so thin it’s just like silk,” and about lovers, particularly Tina’s lovers. Tina was considered the prettiest in the office, and the most successful with men. No one had ever seen her little nose without its whitish coat of powder; there was a strong suspicion in the office that she blackened her eyelashes; and several different masculine figures had been seen waiting to take her home after work. The girl with the leather jacket, being a Party member, was the undisputed leader and final authority in all their discussions; but in matters of romance, she conceded first rank to Tina. She listened with a superior, condescending smile that did not hide her eager curiosity, while Tina whispered breathlessly:

“. . . And Mishka rang the bell and here was Ivashka in his underdrawers and I hear Elena Maximovna—that’s the tenant in the next room—I hear Elena Maximovna say: ‘A guest for you, Tina,’ and before I know it, here’s Mishka walking right in and Ivashka in his underdrawers—and you should’ve seen Mishka’s face, honest, it was better than a comedy show—and I think quick and I say: ‘Mishka dear, this is Ivan, the neighbor, he lives with Elena Maximovna and he wasn’t feeling well, so he came in for an aspirin tablet,’ and you should’ve seen Ivashka’s face, and Elena Maximovna she says: ‘Sure, he lives with me. Come on back to my room, darling.’ And do you think that louse Ivashka refused?”

The young man who was a Party candidate did not join these conversations, but stayed modestly at his desk, listening intently and remarking once in a while: “You comrades women! I bet you say things that a serious citizen who is a Party candidate shouldn’t even hear.”

They giggled, flattered, and rewarded him with friendly glances.

Kira stayed at her desk and went on with her work, and did not listen. She never talked to anyone outside of business matters. If any glances were thrown at her occasionally, they were not friendly.

She wondered with a cold feeling of panic whether that was what they resented, whether that was her arrogant bourgeois attitude. She needed this job. Leo needed this job. She had made up her mind to keep it. She would keep it.

She rose and walked casually to Tina’s desk. The little group noticed her presence by a few cold, astonished glances and went on with their whispers.

She waited for a pause and said suddenly, irrelevantly, forcing all of the artificial enthusiasm she had learned into her flat, unsteady voice: “Funny thing happened last night. My boy friend—he quarreled with me because . . . because he had seen me coming home with another man . . . and he . . . he bawled me out terribly . . . and I told him it was an old-fashioned bourgeois attitude of proprietorship, but he . . . well . . . he quarreled with me. . . .”

She felt her blouse sticking to the cold spot between her shoulder blades. She tried to make her voice as gaily flippant as Tina’s. She tried to believe the story she was inventing; it was strange to think of the fantastic boy friend offered to those prying, hostile eyes, and of the Leo whom Irina had drawn naked as a god.

“. . . and he bawled me out terribly. . . .”

“Uh-huh,” said Nina.

The girl in the leather jacket said nothing.

“In the Kouznetzky market,” said Tina, “I’ve seen them selling lipstick, the new Soviet lipstick of the Cosmetic Trust. Cheap, too. Only they say it’s dangerous to use it. It’s made from horse fat and the horses died of glanders.”

At twelve-thirty the office closed for lunch. At twelve-twenty-five, Comrade Bitiuk said: “I shall remind you once more, comrades, that at one-thirty, instead of reporting back to the office, you are to report at the Smolny Institute to take part in the demonstration of all the workers of Petrograd in honor of the delegation of the British Trade Unions. The office will be closed this afternoon.”

Kira spent her lunch hour standing in line at the co-operative to get bread on her employee’s ration card. She stood motionless, in a blank stupor; a movement or a thought seemed too far away, far in a world where she did not belong any longer. The locks of hair under her old hat were white with frost. She thought that somewhere beyond all these many things which did not count, was her life and Leo. She closed her eyes for one swift second of rest with nothing but his name. Then she opened her eyes and watched dully, through lids heavy with white-frosted lashes, puffy sparrows picking horse dung in the snow.

She had brought her lunch with her—a piece of dried fish wrapped in paper. She ate it, because she knew she had to eat. When she got the bread—a two-pound brown square that was still fresh—she smelled its comforting, warm odor and chewed slowly a piece of crust; the rest, tucked firmly under her arm, was for Leo.

She ran after a tramway and leaped on just in time for the long ride to the Smolny Institute at the other end of the city, for the demonstration of all the workers of Petrograd in honor of the delegation of the British Trade Unions.

Nevsky looked as if it were a solid spread of heads motionless on a huge belt that rolled slowly, carrying them forward. It looked as if red banners, swollen like sails between two poles, were swimming slowly over motionless heads, the same heads of khaki caps, fur caps, red kerchiefs, hats, khaki caps, red kerchiefs. A dull beating filled the street from wall to wall, up to the roofs, the crunching, creaking, drumming roll of many feet against frozen cobblestones.

Tramways stopped and trucks waited on corners to let the demonstration pass. A few heads appeared at windows, stared indifferently at the heads below and disappeared again: Petrograd was used to demonstrations.

WE, TOILERS OF PETROGRAD, GREET OUR BRITISH CLASS BROTHERS! WELCOME TO THE LAND OF THE SOVIETS WHERE LABOR IS FREE!

THE WOMEN OF THE STATE TEXTILE PLANT NUMBER 2 PLEDGE THEIR SUPPORT TO ENGLAND’S PROLETARIAT IN ITS STRUGGLE WITH IMPERIALISTS

Kira marched between Nina and Comrade Bitiuk. Comrade Bitiuk had changed her hat to a red kerchief for the occasion. Kira marched steadily, shoulders thrown back, head high. She had to march here to keep her job; she had to keep her job for Leo; she was not a traitor, she was marching for Leo—even though the banner above her, carried by Tina and the Party candidates, said:

WE, SOVIET PEASANTS, STAND AS ONE FOR OUR BRITISH CLASS BROTHERS!

Kira could not feel her feet any longer; but she knew that she was walking, for she was moving ahead like the others. Her hands felt as if her mittens were filled with boiling water. She had to walk. She was walking.

Somewhere in the long snake that uncoiled slowly down Nevsky, someone’s hoarse, loud voice began to sing the “Internationale.” Others joined. It rolled in raucous, discordant waves down the long column of weary throats choked by frost.

On the Palace Square, now called Square of Uritzki, a wooden amphitheater had been erected. Against the red walls and mirror-like windows of the Winter Palace, on the wooden stand draped in red bunting, stood the delegation of the British Trade Unions. The workers of Petrograd slowly marched past. The British class brothers stood, a little stiff, a little embarrassed, a little bewildered.

Kira’s eyes saw but one person: the woman delegate of the British Trade Unions. She was tall, thin, not young, with the worried face of a school teacher. But she wore a tan sports coat and that coat yelled louder than the hurrahs of the crowd, louder than the “Internationale,” that it was foreign. With firm, pressed folds of rich material, trim, well-fitted, serene, that coat did not moan, like all those others around Kira, of the misery of the muscles underneath. The British comrade wore silk stockings; a rich, brownish sheen, tight on feet in trim, new, well-polished brown shoes.

And suddenly Kira wanted to scream and to hurl herself at the stand, and to grab these thin, glittering legs and hang on with her teeth as to an anchor, and be carried away with them into their world which was possible somewhere, which was now here, close, within hearing of a cry for help.

But she only swayed a little and closed her eyes.

The demonstration stopped. It stood, knocking heels together to keep warm, listening to speeches. There were many speeches. The comrade woman of the British Trade Unions spoke. A hoarse interpreter bellowed her words into the Square red and khaki with heads packed tightly together.

“This is a thrilling sight. We were sent here by England’s workers to see for ourselves and to tell the world the truth about the great experiment you are conducting. We shall tell them that we saw the great masses of Russian toilers in a free and magnificent expression of loyalty to the Soviet Government.”

For one insane second, Kira wondered if she could tear through the crowd, rush up to that woman and yell to her, to England’s workers, to the world, the truth they were seeking. But she thought of Leo at home, marble pale, coughing. It was Leo against the truth to a world which would not listen. Leo won.

At five P.M. a glittering limousine whisked the delegates away and the demonstration broke up. It was growing dark. Kira had time for a lecture at the Institute.

The cold, badly lighted auditoriums were a tonic to her, with the charts, drafts and prints on the walls, showing beams and girders and cross sections that looked precise, impersonal and unsullied. For a short hour, even though her stomach throbbed with hunger, she could remember that she was to be a builder who would build aluminum bridges and towers of steel and glass; and that there was a future.

After the lecture, hurrying out through dim corridors, she met Comrade Sonia.

“Ah, Comrade Argounova,” said Comrade Sonia. “We haven’t seen you for a long time. Not so active in your studies any more, are you? And as to social activity—why, you’re the most privately individualistic student we’ve got.”

“I . . .” Kira began.

“None of my business, Comrade Argounova, I know, none of my business. I was just thinking of things one hears nowadays about things the Party may do about students who are not social-minded. Don’t give it a thought.”

“I . . . you see . . .” Kira knew it wiser to explain. “I’m working and I’m very active socially in our Marxist Club.”

“So? You are, are you? We know you bourgeois. All you’re active for is to keep your measly jobs. You’re not fooling anyone.”

When Kira entered the room, Marisha jumped up like a spring unwinding: “Citizen Argounova! You keep your damn cat in your own room or I’ll wring her neck!”

“My cat? What cat? I have no cat.”

“Well, who’s done this? Your boy friend?” Marisha was pointing to a puddle in the middle of her room. “And what’s that? An elephant?” She raged as a meow and a pair of gray, furry ears emerged from under a chair.

“It’s not my cat,” said Kira.

“Where’s she come from, then?”

“How do I know?”

“You never know anything!”

Kira did not answer and went to her room. She heard Marisha in the little hall off the lobby, pounding at the partition that separated them from the other tenants. She heard her yelling: “Hey, you there! Your God-damn cat’s torn a board loose and here she is, crapping all over the place! You take her away or I’ll gut her alive and report you to the Upravdom!”

Leo was not at home. The room was dark, cold as a cellar. Kira switched on the light. The bed was not made; the blanket was on the floor. She lighted the “Bourgeoise,” blowing at the damp logs, her eyes swelling. The pipes were leaking. She hung a tin can on a wire to catch the dripping soot.

She pumped the Primus. It would not light; its tubes were clogged again. She searched all over the room for the special wire cleaner. She could not find it. She knocked at the door.

“Citizen Lavrova, have you taken my Primus cleaner again?” There was no answer. She flung the door open. “Citizen Lavrova, have you taken my Primus cleaner?”

“Aw, hell,” said Marisha. “Stingy, aren’t you, of a little Primus cleaner? Here it is.”

“How many times do I have to ask you, Citizen Lavrova, not to touch any of my things in my absence?”

“What are you gonna to do about it? Report me?”

Kira took the Primus cleaner and slammed the door.

She was peeling potatoes when Leo came in.

“Oh,” he said, “you’re home?”

“Yes. Where have you been, Leo?”

“Any of your business?”

She did not answer. His shoulders were drooping and his lips were blue. She knew where he had been; and that he had not succeeded.

She went on peeling the potatoes. He stood with his hands extended to the “Bourgeoise,” his lips twisted with pain. He coughed. Then he turned abruptly and said: “Same thing. You know. Since eight this morning. No opening. No job. No work.”

“It’s all right, Leo. We don’t have to worry.”

“No? We don’t, do we? You’re enjoying it, aren’t you, to see me living off you? You’re glad to remind me that I don’t have to worry while you’re working yourself into a scarecrow of a martyr?”

“Leo!”

“Well, I don’t want to see you work! I don’t want to see you cook! I don’t . . . Oh, Kira!” He seized her and put his head on her shoulder, and buried his face in her neck, over the blue flame of the Primus. “Kira, you forgive me, don’t you?”

She patted his hair with her cheek, for her hands were sticky with potato peelings. “Of course. . . . Dearest. . . . Why don’t you lie down and rest? Dinner will be ready in just a little while.”

“Why don’t you let me help you?”

“Now there’s an argument that we’ve closed long ago.”

He bent down to her, lifting her chin. She whispered, shuddering a little: “Don’t, Leo. Don’t kiss me—here.” She held out her dirty hands over the Primus.

He did not kiss her. A bitter little smile of understanding jerked one corner of his mouth. He walked to the bed and fell down.

He lay so still, his head thrown back, one arm hanging to the floor, that she felt uncomfortable. Once in a while, she called softly: “Leo,” just to see him open his eyes. Then she wished she hadn’t called: she did not want his eyes to stay open, watching her fixedly. She—who had so carefully closed the door between them so that he might not see her as she did not want to be seen—she stood before him now, bent over a Primus, in an aura of kerosene and onion smell, her hands slimy with raw mud, her hair hanging down in sticky strands over a nose shiny without powder, her eyes and nostrils red on a white face, her body sagging limply under a filthy apron she had no time to wash, her movements heavy and slurred, not the sharp play of muscles, but the slothful fall of limbs pushed by a weariness beyond control.

And when dinner was ready and they sat facing each other across the table, she thought with a pain which would not become a habit, that he—whom she wanted to face, looking young, erect, vibrant with all of her worship—he now looked into eyes swollen with smoke and at a pale mouth that smiled an effort she could not hide.

They had millet, potatoes, and onions fried in linseed oil. She was so hungry that her arms were limp. But she could not touch the millet. She felt suddenly an uncontrollable revulsion, a hatred that could let her starve rather than swallow one more spoonful of the bitter stuff she had eaten, it seemed, all her life. She wondered dully whether there was a place on earth where one could eat without being sick of every mouthful; a place where eggs and butter and sugar were not a sublime ideal longed for agonizingly, never attained.

She washed the dishes in cold water, grease floating over the pan. Then she pulled on her felt boots. “I have to go out, Leo,” she said with resignation. “It’s the Marxist Club night. Social activity, you know.”

He did not answer; he did not look at her as she went out.

The Marxist Club held its sessions in the library of the “House of the Peasant.” The library was like all the other rooms in the building except that it had more posters and fewer books; and the books were lined on shelves, instead of being stacked in tall columns ready for shipping.

The girl in the leather jacket was chairman of the Club; the employees of the “House of the Peasant” were members. The Club was dedicated to “political self-education” and the study of “historical revolutionary philosophy”; it met twice a week; one member read a thesis he had prepared, the others discussed it.

It was Kira’s turn. She read her thesis on “Marxism and Leninism.”

“Leninism is Marxism adapted to Russian reality. Karl Marx, the great founder of Communism, believed that Socialism was to be the logical outcome of Capitalism in a country of highly developed Industrialism and with a proletariat attuned to a high degree of class-consciousness. But our great leader, Comrade Lenin, proved that . . .”

She had copied her thesis, barely changing the words, from the “ABC of Communism,” a book whose study was compulsory in every school in the country. She knew that all her listeners had read it, that they had also read her thesis, time and time again, in every editorial of every newspaper for the last six years. They sat around her, hunched, legs stretched out limply, shivering in their overcoats. They knew she was there for the same reason they were. The girl in the leather jacket presided, yawning once in a while.

When Kira finished, a few hands clapped drowsily.

“Who desires to make comments, comrades?” the chairman inquired.

A young girl with a very round face and forlorn eyes, said lisping, showing eagerly her active interest: “I think it was a very nice thesis, and very valuable and instructive, because it was very nice and clear and explained a valuable new theory.”A consumptive and intellectual young man with blue eyelids and a pince-nez, said in the professional manner of a scientist: “I would make the following criticism, Comrade Argounova: when you speak of the fact that Comrade Lenin allowed a place for the peasant beside the industrial worker in the scheme of Communism, you should specify that it is a poor peasant, not just any kind of a peasant, because it is well known that there are rich peasants in the villages, who are hostile to Leninism.”

Kira knew that she had to argue and defend her thesis; she knew that the consumptive young man had to argue to show his activity; she knew that he was no more interested in the discussion than she was, that his blue eyelids were weary with sleeplessness, that he clasped his thin hands nervously, not daring to glance at his wristwatch, not daring to let his thoughts wander to the home and its cares that awaited him somewhere.

She said dully: “When I mention the peasant beside the worker in Comrade Lenin’s theory, it is to be taken for granted that I mean the poor peasant, as no other has a place in Communism.”

The young man said drowsily: “Yes, but I think we should be scientifically methodical and say: poor peasant.”

The chairman said: “I agree with the last speaker. The thesis should be corrected to read: poor peasant. Any other comments, comrades?”

There were none.

“We shall thank Comrade Argounova for her valuable work,” said the chairman. “Our next meeting will be devoted to a thesis by Comrade Leskov on ‘Marxism and Collectivism.’ I now declare this meeting closed.”

With a convulsive jerk and a clatter of chairs, they rushed out of the library, down the dark stairs, into the dark streets. They had done their duty. The evening—or what was left of it—belonged to them now.

Kira walked fast and listened to her own footsteps, listened blankly, without thought; she could think now, but after so many hours of such a tremendous effort not to think, not to think, to remember only not to think, thoughts seemed slow to return; she knew only that her steps were beating, fast, firm, precise, until their strength and their hope rose to her body, to her heart, to the throbbing haze in her temples. She threw her head back, as if she were resting, swimming on her back, close under a clear black sky, with stars at the tip of her nose, and roof tops with snow clean in the frozen starlight like white virgin mountain peaks.

Then she swung forward with the sharp, light movements of Kira Argounova’s body and she whispered to herself, as she had talked to herself often in the last two months: “Well, it’s war. It’s war. You don’t give up, do you, Kira? It’s not dangerous so long as you don’t give up. And the harder it gets the happier you should be that you can stand it. That’s it. The harder—the happier. It’s war. You’re a good soldier, Kira Argounova.”

When Leo put his arms around her and whispered into her hair: “Oh, yes, yes, Kira. Tonight. Please!” she knew that she could not refuse any longer. Her body, suddenly limp again, cried for nothing but sleep, an endless sleep. It horrified her, that reluctant surrender, numb, lifeless, without response.

He held her body close to his, and his skin was warm under the cold blanket. His skin was warm, and soothing, and she closed her eyes.

“What’s the matter, Kira?”

She smiled and forced all of her last strength into her lips in the hollow of his collar bone, into her arms locked around his body. Her arms relaxed and one hand slipped, soft and weak, over the edge of the bed. She jerked her eyes open, she loved him, she wanted him, she wanted to want him—she screamed to herself almost aloud. He was kissing her body, but she was thinking of what they thought of her thesis, of Tina and the girl in the leather jacket, of the probable reduction of staffs—and suddenly she was seized with revulsion for his soft, hungry lips, because something in her, or of her, or around her was too unworthy of him. But she could keep awake a little while longer and she stiffened her body as for an ordeal, all her thoughts of love reduced to a tortured hurry to get it over with.

It was past midnight and she did not know whether she had been asleep or not. Leo breathed painfully on the pillow beside her, his forehead clammy with cold perspiration. In the haze of her mind, one thought stood out clearly: the apron. That apron of hers was filthy; it was loathsome; she could not let Leo see her wearing it another day; not another day.

She crawled out of bed and slipped her coat over her nightgown; it was too cold and she was too tired to dress. She put the pan of cold water on the bathroom floor, and fell down by its side and crammed the apron, the soap and her hands into a liquid that felt like acid.

She did not know whether she was quite awake and she did not care. She knew only that the big yellow grease spot wouldn’t come off, and she rubbed, and she rubbed, and she rubbed, with the dry, acrid, yellow soap, with her nails, with her knuckles, soap suds on the fur cuffs of her coat, huddled on the floor, her breasts panting against the tin edge of the pan, her hair falling down, down into the suds, beyond the narrow crack of the bathroom door a tall blue window sparkling with frost, her knuckles raw, the skin rubbed off, beyond the bedroom door someone in Marisha’s room playing “John Gray” on a piano with a missing key, the pain growing in her back, the soap suds brown and greasy over purple hands.

They saved the money for many months and on a Sunday evening they bought two tickets to see “Bajadere,” advertised as the “latest sensation of Vienna, Berlin and Paris.”

They sat, solemn, erect, reverent as at a church service, Kira a little paler than usual in her gray silk dress, Leo trying not to cough, and they listened to the wantonest operetta from over there, from abroad.

It was very gay nonsense. It was like a glance straight through the snow and the flags, through the border, into the heart of that other world. There were colored lights, and spangles, and crystal goblets, and a real foreign bar with a dull glass archway where a green light moved slowly upward, preceding every entrance—a real foreign elevator. There were women in shimmering satin from a place where fashions existed, and people dancing a funny foreign dance called “Shimmy,” and a woman who did not sing, but barked words out, spitting them contemptuously at the audience, in a flat, hoarse voice that trailed suddenly into a husky moan—and a music that laughed defiantly, panting, gasping, hitting one’s ears and throat and breath, an impudent, drunken music, like the challenge of a triumphant gaiety, like the “Song of Broken Glass,” a promise that existed somewhere, that was, that could be.

The public laughed, and applauded, and laughed. When the lights went on after the final curtain, in the procession of cheerful grins down the aisles many noticed with astonishment a girl in a gray silk dress, who sat in an emptying row, bent over, her face in her hands, sobbing.

XVI

AT FIRST THERE WERE WHISPERS.

Students gathered in groups in dark corners and jerked their heads nervously at every approaching newcomer, and in their whispers one heard the words: “The Purge.”

In lines at co-operatives and in tramways people asked: “Have you heard about the Purge?”

In the columns of Pravda there appeared many mentions of the deplorable state of Red colleges and of the coming Purge.

And then, at the end of the winter semester, in the Technological Institute, in the University and in all the institutes of higher education, there appeared a large notice with huge letters in red pencil:

THE PURGE

The notice directed all students to call at the office, receive questionnaires, fill them out promptly, have their Upravdom certify to the truth of the answers and return them to the Purging Committee. The schools of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics were to be cleaned of all socially undesirable persons. Those found socially undesirable were to be expelled, never to be admitted to any college again.

Newspapers roared over the country like trumpets: “Science is a weapon of the class struggle! Proletarian schools are for the Proletariat! We shall not educate our class enemies!”

There were those who were careful not to let these trumpets be heard too loudly across the border.

Kira received her questionnaire at the Institute, and Leo—his at the University. They sat silently at their dinner table, filling out the answers. They did not each much dinner that night. When they signed the questionnaires, they knew they had signed the death warrant of their future; but they did not say it aloud and they did not look at each other.

The main questions were:

Who were your parents?

What was your father’s occupation prior to the year 1917?

What was your father’s occupation from the year 1917 to the year 1921?

What is your father’s occupation now?

What is your mother’s occupation?

What did you do during the civil war?

What did your father do during the civil war?

Are you a Trade Union member?

Are you a member of the All-Union Communist Party?

Any attempt to give a false answer was futile; the answers were to be investigated by the Purging Committee and the G.P.U. A false answer was to be punished by arrest, imprisonment or any penalty up to the supreme one.

Kira’s hand trembled a little when she handed to the Purge Committee the questionnaire that bore the answer:

What was your father’s occupation prior to the year 1917?

Owner of the Argounov Textile Factory.

What awaited those who were to be expelled, no one dared to think; no one mentioned it; the questionnaires were turned in and the students waited for a call from the committee, waited silently, nerves tense as wires. In the long corridors of the colleges, where the troubled stream of students clotted into restless clusters, they whispered that one’s “social origin” was most important—that if you were of “bourgeois descent,” you didn’t have a chance—that if your parents had been wealthy, you were still a “class enemy,” even though you were starving—and that you must try, if you could, at the price of your immortal soul, if you had one, to prove your “origin from the work-bench or the plough.” There were more leather jackets, and red kerchiefs, and sunflower-seed shells in the college corridors, and jokes about: “My parents? Why, they were a peasant woman and two workers.”

It was spring again, and melting snow drilled the sidewalks, and blue hyacinths were sold on street corners. But those who were young had no thought left for spring and those who still thought were not young any longer.

Kira Argounova, head high, stood before the Purge Committee of the Technological Institute. At the table, among the men of the committee whom she did not know, sat three persons she knew: Comrade Sonia, Pavel Syerov, Andrei Taganov.

It was Pavel Syerov who did most of the questioning. Her questionnaire lay on the table before him. “So, Citizen Argounova, your father was a factory owner?”

“Yes.”

“I see. And your mother? Did she work before the revolution?”

“No.”

“I see. Did you employ servants in your home?”

“Yes.”

“I see.”

Comrade Sonia asked: “And you’ve never joined a Trade Union, Citizen Argounova? Didn’t find it desirable?”

“I have never had the opportunity.”

“I see.”

Andrei Taganov listened. His face did not move. His eyes were cold, steady, impersonal, as if he had never seen Kira before. And suddenly she felt an inexplicable pity for him, for that immobility and what it hid, although he showed not the slightest sign of what it hid.

But when he asked her a question suddenly, even though his voice was hard and his eyes empty, the question was a plea: “But you’ve always been in strict sympathy with the Soviet Government, Citizen Argounova, haven’t you?”

She answered very softly: “Yes.”

Somewhere, around a lamp, late in the night, amid rustling papers, reports and documents, a committee was holding a conference.

“Factory owners were the chief exploiters of the Proletariat.”

“Worse than landowners.”

“Most dangerous of class enemies.”

“We are performing a great service to the cause of the Revolution and no personal feelings are to interfere with our duty.”

“Order from Moscow—children of former factory owners are in the first category to be expelled.”

A voice asked, weighing every word: “Any exceptions to that rule, Comrade Taganov?”

He stood by a window, his hands clasped behind his back. He answered: “None.”

The names of those expelled were typewritten on a long sheet of paper and posted on a blackboard in the office of the Technological Institute.

Kira had expected it. But when she saw the name on the list: “Argounova, Kira,” she closed her eyes and looked again and read the long list carefully, to make sure.

Then she noticed that her brief case was open; she clasped the catch carefully; she looked at the hole in her glove and stuck her finger out, trying to see how far it would go, and twisted an unraveled thread into a little snake and watched it uncoil.

Then she felt that someone was watching her. She turned. Andrei stood alone in a window niche. He was looking at her, but he did not move forward, he did not say a word, he did not incline his head in greeting. She knew what he feared, what he hoped, what he was waiting for. She walked to him, and looked up at him, and extended her hand with the same trusting smile he had known on the same young lips, only the lips trembled a little.

“It’s all right, Andrei. I know you couldn’t help it.”

She had not expected the gratitude, a gratitude like pain, in his low voice when he answered: “I’d give you my place—if I could.”

“Oh, it’s all right. . . . Well . . . I guess I won’t be a builder after all. . . . I guess I won’t build any aluminum bridges.” She tried to laugh. “It’s all right, because everybody always told me one can’t build a bridge of aluminum anyway.” She noticed that it was harder for him to smile than for her. “And Andrei,” she said softly, knowing that he did not dare to ask it, “this doesn’t mean that we won’t see each other any more, does it?”

He took her hand in both of his. “It doesn’t, Kira, if . . .”

“Well, then, it doesn’t. Give me your phone number and address, so I can call you, because we . . . we won’t meet here . . . any more. We’re such good friends that—isn’t it funny?—I’ve never even known your address. All’s for the best. Maybe . . . maybe we’ll be better friends now.”

When she came home, Leo was sprawled across the bed, and he didn’t get up. He looked at her and laughed. He laughed dryly, monotonously, senselessly.

She stood still, looking at him.

“Thrown out?” he asked, rising on a wavering elbow, his hair falling over his face. “Don’t have to tell me. I know. You’re kicked out. Like a dog. So am I. Like two dogs. Congratulations, Kira Alexandrovna. Hearty proletarian congratulations!”

“Leo, you’ve . . . you’ve been drinking!”

“Sure. To celebrate. All of us did. Dozens and dozens of us at the University.

A toast to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. . . . Many toasts to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. . . . Don’t stare at me like that. . . . It’s a good old custom to drink at births, and weddings, and funerals. . . . Well, we weren’t born together, Comrade Argounova. . . . And we’ve never had a wedding, Comrade Argounova. . . . But we might yet see the other. . . . We might . . . yet . . . the other . . . Kira. . . .”

She was on her knees by the bed, gathering to her breast a pale face with a contorted wound of a mouth, she was brushing damp hair off his forehead, she was whispering: “Leo . . . dearest . . . you shouldn’t do that. . . . Now’s the time you shouldn’t. . . . We have to think clearly now. . . .” She was whispering without conviction. “It’s not dangerous so long as we don’t give up. . . . You must take care of yourself, Leo. . . . You must spare yourself. . . .”

His mouth spat out: “For what?”

Kira met Vasili Ivanovitch in the street.

It took an effort not to let her face show the change of his. She had seen him but once since Maria Petrovna’s death, and he had not looked like that. He walked like an old man. His clear, proud eyes darted at every face, a bitter look of suspicion, and hatred, and shame. His wrinkled, sinewy hands tottered uncertainly in useless movements, like an old woman’s. Two lines were slashed from the corners of his lips to his chin, lines of such suffering that one felt guilty of intrusion for having seen and guessed.

“Kira, glad to see you again, glad to see you,” he muttered, his voice, his words clinging to her helplessly. “Why don’t you come over any more? It’s sort of lonesome, at home. Or . . . or maybe you’ve heard . . . and don’t want to come?”

She had not heard. But something in his voice told her not to ask him what it was that she could have heard. She said with her warmest smile: “Why, no, Uncle Vasili, I’ll be glad to come. It’s just that I’ve been working so hard. But I’ll be over tonight, may I?”

She did not ask about Irina and Victor, and whether they, too, had been expelled. As after an earthquake, all were looking around cautiously, counting the victims, afraid to ask questions.

That night, after dinner, she called on the Dunaevs. She had persuaded Leo to go to bed; he had a fever; his cheekbones flamed with bright red spots; she had left a jug of cold tea by the bed and told him that she would be back early.

At a bare table without table cloth, under a lamp without a shade, Vasili Ivanovitch sat reading an old volume of Chekhov. Irina, her hair uncombed, sat drawing senseless figures on a huge sheet of paper. Acia slept, fully dressed, curled in an armchair in a dark corner. A rusty “Bourgeoise” smoked.

“Allo,” said Irina, her lips twisting. Kira had never seen her smile like that.

“Would you like some tea, Kira? Hot tea? Only . . . only we have no saccharine left.”

“No, thank you, Uncle Vasili, I’ve just had dinner.”

“Well?” said Irina. “Why don’t you say it? Expelled?”

Kira nodded.

“And Leo, too?”

Kira nodded.

“Well? Why don’t you ask? Oh, I’ll tell you myself: sure, I’m out. What could you expect? Daughter of the wealthy Court Furrier!”

“And—Victor?”

Irina and Vasili Ivanovitch exchanged a glance, a strange glance. “No,” Irina answered slowly, “Victor is not expelled.”

“I’m glad, Uncle Vasili. That’s good news, isn’t it?” She knew the best way to cheer her uncle: “Victor’s such a talented young man, I’m glad they’ve spared his future.”

“Yes,” Vasili Ivanovitch said slowly, bitterly. “Victor is such a talented young man.”

“She had a white lace gown,” Irina said hysterically, “and, really, she has a gorgeous voice—oh—I mean—I’m speaking of the new production of ‘La Traviata’ at the Mikhailovsky Theater—and you’ve seen it, of course? Oh, well, you must see it. Old classics are . . . old classics are . . .”

“Yes,” said Vasili Ivanovitch, “old classics are still the best. In those days, they had culture, and moral values, and . . . and integrity. . . .”

“Really,” said Kira, nervous and bewildered, “I’ll have to see ‘La Traviata.’ ”

“In the last act,” said Irina, “in the last act, she. . . . Oh, hell!” She threw her drawing board down with a crash that awakened Acia, who sat up staring, blinking. “You’ll hear it sooner or later: Victor has joined the Party!”

Kira was holding the book of Chekhov and it clattered down to the floor. “He . . . what?”

“He joined the Party. The All-Union Communist Party. With a red star, a Party ticket, a bread card, and his hand in all the blood spilled, in all the blood to come!”

“Irina! How . . . how could he get admitted?”

She was afraid to look at Vasili Ivanovitch. She knew she should not ask questions, questions that were like knives turned in a wound; but she could not resist it.

“Oh, it seems he had it planned for a long time. He’s been making friends—carefully and judiciously. He’s been a candidate for months—and we never knew it. Then—he got admitted. Oh, they accepted him all right—with the kind of sponsors he had selected to vouch for his proletarian spirit, even though his father did sell furs to the Czar!”

“Did he know this—the purge, I mean—was coming?”

“Oh, don’t be silly. It isn’t that. Of course, he didn’t know that in advance. He’s aiming higher than merely to keep his place at the Institute. Oh, my brother Victor is a brilliant young man. When he wants to climb—he knows the stepping stones.”

“Well,” Kira tried to smile, to say for Vasili Ivanovitch’s sake, without looking at him, “it’s Victor’s business. He knows what he wants. Is he . . . is he still here?”

“If it were up to me, he . . .” Irina checked herself abruptly. “Yes. The swine’s still here.”

“Irina,” Vasili Ivanovitch said wearily, “he’s your brother.”

Kira changed the subject; but it was not easy to keep up a conversation. Half an hour later, Victor came in. The dignity of his expression and the red star in his lapel were very much in evidence.

“Victor,” Kira said. “I hear you’re a good Communist, now.”

“I have had the honor of joining the All-Union Communist Party,” Victor answered, “and I’ll have it understood that the Party is not to be referred to lightly.”

“Oh,” said Kira. “I see.”

But it happened that she did not see Victor’s extended hand when she was leaving.

At the door, in the lobby, Irina whispered to her: “At first, I thought Father would throw him out. But . . . with Mother gone . . . and all . . . and you know how he’s always been crazy about Victor . . . well, he thinks he’ll try to be broad-minded. I think it will break him. . . . For God’s sake, Kira, come often. He likes you.”

Because there was no future, they hung on to the present.

There were days when Leo sat for hours reading a book, and hardly spoke to Kira, and when he spoke his smile held a bitter, endless contempt for himself, for the world, for eternity.

Once, she found him drunk, leaning against the table, staring intently at a broken glass on the floor.

“Leo! Where did you get it?”

“Borrowed it. Borrowed it from our dear neighbor Comrade Marisha. She always has plenty.”

“Leo, why do you?”

“Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I? Who in this whole damn world can tell me why I shouldn’t?”

But there were days when a new calm suddenly cleared his eyes and his smile. He waited for Kira to come home from work and when she entered he drew her hastily into his arms. They could sit through an evening without a word, their presence, a glance, the pressure of a hand drugging them into security, making them forget the coming morning, all the coming mornings.

Arm in arm, they walked through silent, luminous streets in the white nights of spring. The sky was like dull glass glowing with a sunless radiance from somewhere beyond. The could look at each other, at the still, sleepless city, in the strange, milky light. He pressed her arm close to his, and when they were alone on a long street dawn-bright and empty, he bent to kiss her.

Kira’s steps were steady. There were too many questions ahead; but here, beside her, were the things that gave her certainty: his straight, tense body, his long, thin hands, his haughty mouth with the arrogant smile that answered all questions. And, sometimes, she felt pity for those countless nameless ones somewhere around them who, in a feverish quest, were searching for some answer, and in their search crushed others, perhaps even her; but she could not be crushed, for she had the answer. She did not wonder about the future. The future was Leo.

Leo was too pale and he was silent too often. The blue on his temples looked like veins in marble. He coughed, choking. He took cough medicine, which did not help, and refused to see a doctor.

Kira saw Andrei frequently. She had asked Leo if he minded it. “Not at all,” he had answered, “if he’s your friend. Only—would you mind?—don’t bring him here. I’m not sure I can be polite . . . to one of them.”

She did not bring Andrei to the house. She telephoned him on Sundays and smiled cheerfully into the receiver: “Feel like seeing me, Andrei? Two o’clock—Summer Garden—the quay entrance.”

They sat on a bench, with the oak leaves fighting the glare of the sun above their heads, and they talked of philosophy. She smiled sometimes when she realized that Andrei was the only one with whom she could think and talk about thoughts.

They had no reason for meeting each other. Yet they met, and made dates to meet again, and she felt strangely comfortable, and he laughed at her short summer dresses, and his laughter was strangely happy.

Once, he invited her to spend a Sunday in the country. She had stayed in the city all summer; she could not refuse. Leo had found a job for Sunday: breaking the wooden bricks of pavements, with a gang repairing the streets. He did not object to her excursion.

In the country, she found a smooth sea sparkling in the sun; and a golden sand wind-pleated into faint, even waves; and the tall red candles of pines, their convulsed roots naked to the sand and wind, pine cones rolling to meet the sea shells.

Kira and Andrei had a swimming race, which she won. But when they raced down the beach in their bathing suits, sand flying from under their heels, spurting sand and water at the peaceful Sunday tourists, Andrei won. He caught her and they rolled down together, a whirl of legs, arms and mud, into the lunch basket of a matron who shrieked with terror. They disentangled themselves from each other and sat there screaming with laughter. And when the matron struggled to her feet, gathered her lunch and waddled away, grumbling something about “this vulgar modern youth that can’t keep their love-affairs to themselves,” they laughed louder.

They had dinner in a dirty little country restaurant, and Kira spoke English to the waiter who could not understand a word, but bowed low and stuttered and spilled water all over the table in his eagerness to serve the first comrade foreigner in their forgotten corner. When they were leaving, Andrei gave him twice the price of their dinner. The waiter bowed to the ground, convinced that he was dealing with genuine foreigners. Kira could not help looking a little startled. Andrei laughed when they went out: “Why not? Might as well make a waiter happy. I make more money than I can spend on myself anyway.”

In the train, as it clattered into the evening and the smoke of the city, Andrei asked: “Kira, when will I see you again?”

“I’ll call you.”

“No. I want to know now.”

“In a few days.”

“No. I want a definite day.”

“Well, then, Wednesday night?”

“All right.”

“After work, at five-thirty, at the Summer Garden.”

“All right.”

When she came home, she found Leo asleep in a chair, his hands dust-streaked, smears of dust on his damp, flushed face, his dark lashes blond with dust, his body limp with exhaustion.

She washed his face and helped him to undress. He coughed.

The two evenings that followed were long, furious arguments, but Leo surrendered: He promised to visit a doctor on Wednesday.

Vava Milovskaia had a date with Victor for Wednesday night. Wednesday afternoon, Victor telephoned her, his voice impatiently apologetic: he was detained on urgent business at the Institute and would not be able to see her. Urgent business had detained him the last three times he had promised to come. Vava had heard rumors; she had heard a name; she knew what to suspect.

In the evening, she dressed carefully; she pulled a wide black patent leather belt tight around the slim waist of her best new white coat; she touched her lips faintly, cautiously, with her new foreign lipstick; she slipped on her foreign celluloid bracelet. She tilted her white hat recklessly over her black curls and told her mother that she was going out to call on Kira Argounova.

She hesitated on the stair landing before Kira’s apartment, and her hand trembled a little when she pressed the bell.

The tenant opened the door. “To see Citizen Argounova? This way, comrade,” he told her. “You have to pass through Citizen Lavrova’s room. This door here.”

Resolutely, Vava jerked the door open without knocking.

They were there—together—Marisha and Victor—bending over the gramophone that played “The Fire of Moscow.”

Victor’s face was cold, silent fury. But Vava did not look at him. She tossed her head up and said to Marisha, as proudly, as dramatically as she could, in a shaking voice, swallowing tears: “I beg your pardon, citizen, I’m just calling on Citizen Argounova.”

Surprised and suspecting nothing, Marisha pointed to Kira’s door with her thumb. Head high, Vava walked across the room. Marisha could not understand why Victor left in such a hurry.

Kira was not at home, but Leo was.

Kira had had a restless day. Leo had promised to telephone her at the office and tell her the doctor’s diagnosis. He had not called. She telephoned him three times. There was no answer. On her way home, she remembered that it was Wednesday night and that she had a date with Andrei.

She could not keep him waiting indefinitely at a public park gate. She would drop by the Summer Garden and tell him that she couldn’t stay. She reached the Garden on time.

Andrei was not there. She looked up and down the darkening quay. She peered into the trees and shadows of the garden. She waited. Twice, she asked a militia-man what time it was. She waited. She could not understand it.

He did not come.

When she finally went home, she had waited for an hour.

She clutched her hands angrily in her pockets. She could not worry about Andrei when she thought of Leo, and the doctor, and of what she still had to hear. She hurried up the stairs. She darted through Marisha’s room and flung the door open. On the davenport, her white coat trailing to the floor, Vava was clasped in Leo’s arms, their lips locked together.

Kira stood looking at them calmly, an amazed question in her lifted eyebrows.

They jumped up. Leo was not very steady. He had been drinking again. He stood swaying, with his bitter, contemptuous smile.

Vava’s face went a dark, purplish red. She opened her mouth, choking, without a sound. And as no one said a word, she screamed suddenly into the silence: “You think it’s terrible, don’t you? Well, I think so too! It’s terrible, it’s vile! Only I don’t care! I don’t care what I do! I don’t care any more! I’m rotten? Well, I’m not the only one! Only I don’t care! I don’t care! I don’t care!”

She burst into hysterical sobs and rushed out, slamming the door. The two others did not move.

He sneered: “Well, say it.”

She answered slowly: “I have nothing to say.”

“Listen, you might as well get used to it. You might as well get used to it that you can’t have me. Because you can’t have me. You won’t have me. You won’t have me long.”

“Leo, what did the doctor say?”

He laughed: “Plenty.”

“What is it you have?”

“Nothing. Not a thing.”

“Leo!”

“Not a thing—yet. But I’m going to have it. Just a few weeks longer. I’m going to have it.”

“What, Leo?”

He swayed with a grand gesture: “Nothing much. Just—tuberculosis.”

The doctor asked: “Are you his wife?”

Kira hesitated, then answered: “No.”

The doctor said: “I see.” Then, he added: “Well, I suppose you have a right to know it. Citizen Kovalensky is in a very bad condition. We call it incipient tuberculosis. It can still be stopped—now. In a few weeks—it will be too late.”

“In a few weeks—he’ll have—tuberculosis?”

“Tuberculosis is a serious disease, citizen. In Soviet Russia—it is a fatal disease. It is strongly advisable to prevent it. If you let it start—you will not be likely to stop it.”

“What . . . does he need?”

“Rest. Plenty of it. Sunshine. Fresh air. Food. Human food. He needs a sanatorium for this coming winter. One more winter in Petrograd would be as certain as a firing squad. You’ll have to send him south.”

She did not answer; but the doctor smiled ironically, for he heard the answer without words and he looked at the patches on her shoes.

“If that young man is dear to you,” he said, “send him south. If you have a human possibility—or an inhuman one—send him south.”

Kira was very calm when she walked home.

When she came in, Leo was standing by the window. He turned slowly. His face was so profoundly, serenely tranquil that he looked younger; he looked as if he had had his first night of rest; he asked quietly: “Where have you been, Kira?”

“At the doctor’s.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to know all that.”

“He told me.”

“Kira, I’m sorry about last night. About that little fool. I hope you didn’t think that I . . .”

“Of course, I didn’t. I understand.”

“I think it’s because I was frightened. But I’m not—now. Everything seems so much simpler—when there’s a limit set. . . . The thing to do now, Kira, is not to talk about it. Don’t let’s think about it. There’s nothing we can do—as the doctor probably told you. We can still be together—for a while. When it becomes contagious—well . . .”

She was watching him. Such was his manner of accepting his death sentence.

She said, and her voice was hard: “Nonsense, Leo. You’re going south.”

In the first State hospital she visited, the official in charge told her: “A place in a sanatorium in the Crimea? He’s not a member of the Party? And he’s not a member of a Trade Union? And he’s not a State employee? You’re joking, citizen.”

In the second hospital, the official said: “We have hundreds on our waiting list, citizen. Trade Union members. Advanced cases. . . . No, we cannot even register him.”

In the third hospital, the official refused to see her.

There were lines to wait in, ghastly lines of deformed creatures, of scars, and slings, and crutches, and open sores, and green, mucous patches of eyes, and grunts, and groans, and—over a line of the living—the smell of the morgue.

There were State Medical headquarters to visit, long hours of waiting in dim, damp corridors that smelt of carbolic acid and soiled linen. There were secretaries who forgot appointments, and assistants who said: “So sorry, citizen. Next, please”; there were young executives who were in a hurry, and attendants who groaned: “I tell you he’s gone, it’s after office hours, we gotta close, you can’t sit here all night.”

At the end of the first two weeks she learned, as firmly as if it were some mystic absolute, that if one had consumption one had to be a member of a Trade Union and get a Trade Union despatchment to a Trade Union Sanatorium.

There were officials to be seen, names mentioned, letters of recommendation offered, begging for an exception. There were Trade Union heads to visit, who listened to her plea with startled, ironic glances. Some laughed; some shrugged; some called their secretaries to escort the visitor out; one said he could and he would, but he named a sum she could not earn in a year.

She was firm, erect, and her voice did not tremble, and she was not afraid to beg. It was her mission, her quest, her crusade.

She wondered sometimes why the words: “But he’s going to die,” meant so little to them, and the words: “But he’s not a registered worker,” meant so little to her, and why it seemed so hard to explain.

She made Leo do his share of inquiries. He obeyed without arguing, without complaining, without hope.

She tried everything she could. She asked Victor for help. Victor said with dignity: “My dear cousin, I want you to realize that my Party membership is a sacred trust not to be used for purposes of personal advantage.”

She asked Marisha. Marisha laughed. “With all our sanatoriums stuffed like herring-barrels, and waiting lists till the next generation, and comrade workers rotting alive waiting—and here he’s not even sick yet! You don’t realize reality, Citizen Argounova.”

She could not call on Andrei. Andrei had failed her.

For several days after the date he had missed, she called on Lydia with the same question: “Has Andrei Taganov been here? Have you had any letters for me?”

The first day, Lydia said: “No.” The second day, she giggled and wanted to know what was this, a romance? and she’d tell Leo, and with Leo so handsome! and Kira interrupted impatiently: “Oh, stop this rubbish, Lydia! It’s important. Let me know the minute you hear from him, will you?”

Lydia did not hear from him.

One evening, at the Dunaevs’, Kira asked Victor casually if he had seen Andrei Taganov at the Institute. “Sure,” said Victor, “he’s there every day.”

She was hurt. She was angry. She was bewildered. What had she done? For the first time, she questioned her own behavior. Had she acted foolishly that Sunday in the country? She tried to remember every word, every gesture. She could find no fault. He had seemed happier than ever before. After a while, she decided that she must trust their friendship and give him a chance to explain.

She telephoned him. She heard the old landlady’s voice yelling into the house: “Comrade Taganov!” with a positive inflection that implied his presence; there was a long pause; the landlady returned and asked: “Who’s calling him?” and before she had pronounced the last syllable of her name, Kira heard the landlady barking: “He ain’t home!” and slamming her receiver.

Kira slammed hers, too. She decided to forget Andrei Taganov.

It took a month, but at the end of a month, she was convinced that the door of the State sanatoriums was locked to Leo and that she could not unlock it.

There were private sanatoriums in the Crimea. Private sanatoriums cost money. She would get the money.

She made an appointment to see Comrade Voronov and asked for an advance on her salary, an advance of six months—just enough to start him off. Comrade Voronov smiled faintly and asked her how she could be certain that she would be working there another month, let alone six.

She called on Doctor Milovsky, Vava’s father, her wealthiest acquaintance, whose bank account had been celebrated by many envious whispers. Doctor Milovsky’s face got very red and his short, pudgy hands waved at Kira hysterically, as if shooing off a ghost: “My dear little girl, why, my dear little girl, what on earth made you think that I was rich or something? Heh-heh. Very funny indeed. A capitalist or something—heh-heh. Why, we’re just existing, from hand to mouth, living by my own toil like proletarians one would say, barely existing, as one would say—that’s it—from hand to mouth.”

She knew her parents had nothing. She asked if they could try to help. Galina Petrovna cried.

She asked Vasili Ivanovitch. He offered her his last possession—Maria Petrovna’s old fur jacket. The price of the jacket would not buy a ticket to the Crimea. She did not take it.

She knew Leo would resent it, but she wrote to his aunt in Berlin. She said in her letter: “I am writing, because I love him so much—to you, because I think you must love him a little.” No answer came.

Through mysterious, stealthy whispers, more mysterious and stealthy than the G.P.U. who watched them sharply, she learned that there was private money to be lent, secretly and on a high percentage, but there was. She learned a name and an address. She went to the booth of a private trader in a market, where a fat man bent down to her nervously across a counter loaded with red kerchiefs and cotton stockings. She whispered a name. She named a sum.

“Business?” he breathed. “Speculation?”

She knew it best to say yes. Well, he told her, it could be arranged. The rates were twenty-five per cent a month. She nodded eagerly. What security did the citizen have to offer? Security? Surely she knew they didn’t lend it on her good looks? Furs or diamonds would do; good furs and any kind of diamonds. She had nothing to offer. The man turned away as if he had never spoken to her in his life.

On her way back to the tramway, through the narrow, muddy passages between the market stalls, she stopped, startled; in a little prosperous-looking booth, behind a counter heavy with fresh bread loaves, smoked hams, yellow circles of butter, she saw a familiar face: a heavy red mouth under a short nose with wide, vertical nostrils. She remembered the train speculator of the Nikolaevsky station, with the fur-lined coat and the smell of carnation oil. He had progressed in life. He was smiling at the customers, from under a fringe of salami.

On her way home, she remembered someone who had said: “I make more money than I can spend on myself.” Did anything really matter now? She would go to the Institute and try to see Andrei.

She changed tramways for the Institute. She saw Andrei. She saw him coming down the corridor and he was looking straight at her, so that her lips moved in a smile of greeting; but he turned abruptly and slammed the door of an auditorium behind him.

She stood frozen to the spot for a long time.

When she came home, Leo was standing in the middle of the room, a crumpled paper in his hand, his face distorted by anger.

“So you would?” he cried. “So you’re meddling in my affairs now? So you’re writing letters? Who asked you to write?”

On the table, she saw an envelope with a German stamp. It was addressed to Leo. “What does she say, Leo?”

“You want to know? You really want to know?”

He threw the letter at her face.

She remembered only the sentence: “There is no reason why you should expect any help from us; the less reason since you are living with a brazen harlot who has the impudence to write to respectable people.”

On the first rainy day of autumn, a delegation from a Club of Textile Women Workers visited the “House of the Peasant.” Comrade Sonia was an honorary member of the delegation. When she saw Kira at the filing cabinet in Comrade Bitiuk’s office, Comrade Sonia roared with laughter: “Well, well, well! A loyal citizen like Comrade Argounova in the Red ‘House of the Peasant’!”

“What’s the matter, comrade?” Comrade Bitiuk inquired nervously, obsequiously. “What’s the matter?”

“A joke,” roared Comrade Sonia, “a good joke!”

Kira shrugged with resignation; she knew what to expect.

When a reduction of staffs came to the “House of the Peasant” and she saw her name among those dismissed as “anti-social element,” she was not surprised. It made no difference now. She spent most of her last salary to buy eggs and milk for Leo, which he would not touch.

In the daytime, Kira was calm, with the calm of an empty face, an empty heart, a mind empty of all thoughts but one. She was not afraid: because she knew that Leo had to go south, and he would go, and she could not doubt it, and so she had nothing to fear.

But there was the night.

She felt his body, icy and moist, close to hers. She heard him coughing. Sometimes in his sleep, his head fell on her shoulder, and he lay there, trusting and helpless as a child, and his breathing was like a moan.

She saw the red bubble on Maria Petrovna’s dying lips, and she heard her screaming: “Kira! I want to live! I want to live!”

She could feel Leo’s breath in hot, panting gasps on her neck.

Then, she was not sure whether it was Maria Petrovna or Leo screaming when it was too late: “Kira! I want to live! I want to live!”

Was she going insane? It was so simple. She just needed money; a life, his life—and money.

“I make more money than I can spend on myself.”

“Kira! I want to live! I want to live!”

She made one last attempt to get money.

She was walking down a street slippery with autumn rain, yellow lights melting on black sidewalks. The doctor had said every week counted; every day counted now. She saw a resplendent limousine stopping in the orange cube of light at a theater entrance. A man stepped out; his fur coat glistened like his automobile fenders. She stood in his path. Her voice was firm and clear:

“Please! I want to speak to you. I need money. I don’t know you. I have nothing to offer you. I know it isn’t being done like this. But you’ll understand, because it’s so important. It’s to save a life.”

The man stopped. He had never heard a plea that was a command. He asked, squinting one eye appraisingly: “How much do you need?”

She told him.

“What?” he gasped. “For one night? Why, your sisters don’t make that in a whole career!”

He could not understand why the strange girl whirled around and ran across the street, straight through the puddles, as if he were going to run after her.

She made one last plea to the State.

It took many weeks of calls, letters, introductions, secretaries and assistants, but she got an appointment with one of Petrograd’s most powerful officials. She was to see him in person, face to face. He could do it. Between him and the power he could use stood only her ability to convince him.

The official sat at his desk. A tall window rose behind him, admitting a narrow shaft of light, creating the atmosphere of a cathedral. Kira stood before him. She looked straight at him; her eyes were not hostile, nor pleading; they were clear, trusting, serene; her voice was very calm, very simple, very young.

“Comrade Commissar, you see, I love him. And he is sick. You know what sickness is? It’s something strange that happens in your body and then you can’t stop it. And then he dies. And now his life—it depends on some words and a piece of paper—and it’s so simple when you just look at it as it is—it’s only something made by us, ourselves, and perhaps we’re right, and perhaps we’re wrong, but the chance we’re taking on it is frightful, isn’t it? They won’t send him to a sanatorium because they didn’t write his name on a piece of paper with many other names and call it a membership in a Trade Union. It’s only ink, you know, and paper, and something we think. You can write it and tear it up, and write it again. But the other—that which happens in one’s body—you can’t stop that. You don’t ask questions about that. Comrade Commissar, I know they are important, those things, money, and the Unions, and those papers, and all. And if one has to sacrifice and suffer for them, I don’t mind. I don’t mind if I have to work every hour of the day. I don’t mind if my dress is old—like this—don’t look at my dress, Comrade Commissar, I know it’s ugly, but I don’t mind. Perhaps, I haven’t always understood you, and all those things, but I can be obedient and learn. Only—only when it comes to life itself, Comrade Commissar, then we have to be serious, don’t we? We can’t let those things take life. One signature of your hand—and he can go to a sanatorium, and he doesn’t have to die. Comrade Commissar, if we just think of things, calmly and simply—as they are—do you know what death is? Do you know that death is—nothing at all, not at all, never again, never, no matter what we do? Don’t you see why he can’t die? I love him. We all have to suffer. We all have things we want, which are taken away from us. It’s all right. But—because we are living beings—there’s something in each of us, something like the very heart of life condensed—and that should not be touched. You understand, don’t you? Well, he is that to me, and you can’t take him from me, because you can’t let me stand here, and look at you, and talk, and breathe, and move, and then tell me you’ll take him—we’re not insane, both of us, are we, Comrade Commissar?”

The Comrade Commissar said: “One hundred thousand workers died in the civil war. Why—in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics—can’t one aristocrat die?”

Kira walked home very slowly and looked at the dark city; she looked at the glistening pavements built for many thousands of old shoes; at the tramways for men to ride in; at the stone cubes into which men crawled at night; at the posters that cried of what men dreamed and of what men ate; and she wondered whether any of those thousands of eyes around her saw what she saw, and why it had been given her to see.

Because:

In a kitchen on the fifth floor, a woman bent over a smoking stove and stirred cabbage in a kettle, and the cabbage smelt, and the woman blinked, and groaned with the pain in her back, and scratched her head with the spoon,

Because:

In a corner saloon, a man leaned against the bar and raised a foaming glass of beer, and the foam spilled over the floor and over his trousers, and he belched and sang a gay song,

Because:

In a white bed, on white sheets stained with yellow, a child slept and sniveled in its sleep, its nose wet,

Because:

On a sack of flour in the basement, a man tore a woman’s pants off, and bit into her throat, and they rolled, moaning, over the sacks of flour and potatoes,

Because:

In the silence of stone walls slowly dripping frozen dampness, a figure knelt before a gilded cross, and raised trembling arms in exaltation, and knocked a pale forehead against a cold stone floor,

Because:

In the roar of machines whirling lightnings of steel and drops of burning grease, men swung vigorous arms, and panted, heaving chests of muscles glistening with sweat, and made soap,

Because:

In a public bath, steam rose from brass pans, and red, gelatinous bodies shook scrubbing themselves with the soap, sighing and grunting, trying to scratch steaming backs, and murky water and soap suds ran down the floor into the drain—

—Leo Kovalensky was sentenced to die.

XVII

IT WAS HER LAST CHANCE AND SHE HAD TO TAKE IT.

A modest house stood before her, on a modest street that lay deserted in the darkness. An old landlady opened the door and looked at Kira suspiciously: Comrade Taganov did not receive women visitors. But she said nothing and shuffled, leading Kira down a corridor, then stopped, pointed at a door and shuffled away.

Kira knocked.

His voice said: “Come in.”

She entered.

He was sitting at his desk and he was about to rise, but he didn’t. He sat looking at her, and then rose very slowly, so slowly that she wondered how long she stood there, at the door, while he was rising, his eyes never leaving her.

Then, he said: “Good evening, Kira.”

“Good evening, Andrei.”

“Take your coat off.”

She was suddenly frightened, uncomfortable, uncertain; she lost all the bitter, hostile assurance that had brought her here; obediently, she took off her coat and threw her hat on the bed. It was a large, bare room with whitewashed walls, a narrow iron bed, one desk, one chair, one chest of drawers, no pictures, no posters, but books, an ocean of books and papers and newspapers, running over the desk, over the chest, over the floor.

He said: “It’s cold tonight, isn’t it?”

“It’s cold.”

“Sit down.”

She sat by the desk. He sat on the bed, his hands clasping his knees. She wished he would not look at her like that, every second of every long minute. But he said calmly: “How have you been, Kira? You look tired.”

“I am a little tired.”

“How is your job?”

“It isn’t.”

“What?”

“Reduction of staffs.”

“Oh, Kira, I’m sorry. I’ll get you another one.”

“Thanks. But I don’t know whether I need one. How is your job?”

“The G.P.U.? I’ve been working hard. Searches, arrests. You still aren’t afraid of me, are you?”

“No.”

“I don’t like searches.”

“Do you like arrests?”

“I don’t mind—when it’s necessary.”

They were silent, and then she said: “Andrei, if I make you uncomfortable—I’ll go.”

“No! Don’t go. Please don’t go.” He tried to laugh. “Make me uncomfortable? What makes you say that? I’m just . . . just a little embarrassed . . . this room of mine . . . it’s in no condition to receive such a guest.”

“Oh, it’s a nice room. Big. Light.”

“You see, I’m home so seldom, and when I am, I just have time to fall in bed, without noticing what’s around me.”

“Oh.”

They were silent.

“How is your family, Kira?”

“They are fine, thank you.”

“I often see your cousin, Victor Dunaev, at the Institute. Do you like him?”

“No.”

“Neither do I.”

They were silent.

“Victor has joined the Party,” said Kira.

“I voted against him. But most of them were eager to admit him.”

“I’m glad you voted against him. He’s the kind of Party man I despise.”

“What kind of Party man don’t you despise, Kira?”

“Your kind, Andrei.”

“Kira . . .” It began as a sentence, but stopped on the first word.

She said resolutely: “Andrei, what have I done?”

He looked at her, and frowned, and looked aside, shaking his head slowly: “Nothing.” Then he asked suddenly: “Why did you come here?”

“It’s been such a long time since I saw you last.”

“Two months, day after tomorrow.”

“Unless you saw me at the Institute three weeks ago.”

“I saw you.”

She waited, but he did not explain, and she tried to ignore it, her words almost a plea: “I came because I thought . . . because I thought maybe you wanted to see me.”

“I didn’t want to see you.”

She rose to her feet.

“Don’t go, Kira!”

“Andrei, I don’t understand!”

He stood facing her. His voice was flat, harsh as an insult: “I didn’t want you to understand. I didn’t want you to know. But if you want to hear it—you’ll hear it. I never wanted to see you again. Because . . .” His voice was like a dull whip. “Because I love you.”

Her hands fell limply against the wall behind her. He went on: “Don’t say it. I know what you’re going to say. I’ve said it to myself again and again and again. I know every word. But it’s useless. I know I should be ashamed, and I am, but it’s useless. I know that you liked me, and trusted me, because we were friends. It was beautiful and rare, and you have every right to despise me.”

She stood pressed to the wall, not moving.

“When you came in, I thought ‘Send her away.’ But I knew that if you went away, I’d run after you. I thought ‘I won’t say a word.’ But I knew that you’d know it before you left. I love you. I know you’d think kindlier of me if I said that I hate you.”

She said nothing; she cringed against the wall, her eyes wide, her glance holding no pity for him, but a plea for his pity.

“You’re frightened? Do you see why I couldn’t face you? I knew what you felt for me and what you could never feel. I knew what you’d say, how your eyes would look at me. When did it start? I don’t know. I knew only that it must end—because I couldn’t stand it. To see you, and laugh with you, and talk of the future of humanity—and think only of when your hand would touch mine, of your feet in the sand, the little shadow on your throat, your skirt blowing in the wind. To discuss the meaning of life—and wonder if I could see the line of your breast in your open collar!”

She whispered: “Andrei . . . don’t. . . .”

It was not an admission of love, it was the confession of a crime: “Why am I telling you all this? I don’t know. I’m not sure I’m really saying it to you. I’ve been crying it to myself so often, for such a long time! You shouldn’t have come here. I’m not your friend. I don’t care if I hurt you. All you are to me is only this: I want you.”

She whispered: “Andrei . . . I didn’t know. . . .”

“I didn’t want you to know. I tried to stay away from you, to break it. You don’t know what it’s done to me. There was one search. There was a woman. We arrested her. She rolled on the floor, in her nightgown, at my feet, crying for mercy. I thought of you. I thought of you there, on the floor, in your nightgown, crying for pity as I have been crying to you so many months. I’d take you—and I wouldn’t care if it were the floor, and if those men stood looking. Afterward, perhaps I’d shoot you, and shoot myself—but I wouldn’t care—because it would be afterward. I thought I could arrest you—in the middle of the night—and carry you wherever I wanted—and have you. I could do it, you know. I laughed at the woman and kicked her. My men stared at me—they had never seen me do that. They took the woman to jail—and I found an excuse to run away, to walk home alone—thinking of you. . . . Don’t look at me like that. You don’t have to be afraid that I’d do it. . . . I have nothing to offer you. I cannot offer you my life. My life is twenty-eight years of that for which you feel contempt. And you—you’re everything I’ve always expected to hate. But I want you. I’d give everything I have—everything I could ever have—Kira—for something you can’t give me!”

He saw her eyes open wide at a thought he could not guess. She breathed: “What did you say, Andrei?”

“I said, everything I have for something you can’t. . . .”

It was terror in her eyes, a terror of the thought she had seen for a second so very clearly. She whispered, trembling: “Andrei . . . I’d better go. . . . I’d better go now.”

But he was looking at her fixedly, approaching her, asking in a voice suddenly very soft and low: “Or is it something you . . . can . . . Kira?”

She was not thinking of him; she was not thinking of Leo; she was thinking of Maria Petrovna and of the red bubble on dying lips. She was pressed to the wall, cornered, her ten fingers spread apart on the white plaster. His voice, his hope were driving her on. Her body rose slowly against the wall, to her full height, higher, on tiptoe, her head thrown back, so that her throat was level with his mouth when she threw at him:

“I can! I love you.”

She wondered how strange it was to feel a man’s lips that were not Leo’s.

She was saying: “Yes . . . for a long time . . . but I didn’t know that you, too . . .” and she felt his hands and his mouth, and she wondered whether this was joy or torture to him and how strong his arms were. She hoped it would be quick.

The street light beyond the window made a white square and a black cross on the wall above the bed. Against the white square, she could see his face on the pillow; he did not move. Her arm, stretched limply against his naked body, felt no movement but the beating of his heart.

She threw the blanket off, and sat up, crossing her arms over her breasts, her hands clutching her bare shoulders.

“Andrei, I’m going home.”

“Kira! Not now. Not tonight.”

“I have to go.”

“I want you here. Till morning.”

“I have to go. There’s . . . there’s my family. . . . Andrei, we’ll have to keep this very secret.”

“Kira, will you marry me?”

She did not answer. He felt her trembling. He pulled her down and tucked the blanket under her chin.

“Kira, why does that frighten you?”

“Andrei . . . Andrei . . . I can’t. . . .”

“I love you.”

“Andrei . . . there’s my family. You’re a Communist. You know what they are. You must understand. They’ve suffered so much. If I marry you—it would be too much for them. Or if they learn—about this. We can spare them. Does it . . . does it make any difference to us?”

“No. Not if you want it that way.”

“Andrei!”

“Yes, Kira?”

“You’ll do anything I want?”

“Anything.”

“I want only one thing: secrecy. Complete secrecy. You promise?”

“Yes.”

“You see . . . with me—there’s my family. With you—there’s the Party. I’m not . . . I’m not the kind of a . . . mistress your Party would approve. So it’s better . . . You see, it’s a dangerous thing we’re doing. A very dangerous thing. I want to try not to let it . . . not to let it break our lives.”

“Break our lives? Kira!” He was laughing happily, pressing her hand to his lips.

“It’s better if no one—not a soul anywhere—knows this, but you and I.”

“No, Kira, I promise, no one will know but you and I.”

“And now I’ll go.”

“No. Please don’t go tonight. Just tonight. You can explain to them somehow—make up a reason. But stay. I can’t let you go. . . . Please, Kira. . . . Just to see you here when I awaken. . . . Good night . . . Kira. . . .”

She lay very still for a very long time, until he was asleep. Then she slipped noiselessly out of bed and, holding her breath, her bare feet soundless on the cold floor, she dressed hurriedly. He did not hear her open the door and slip out.

There was a wind whistling down the long, empty streets and a sky like pencil lead. She walked very fast. She knew there was something she had to escape and she tried to hurry. The dead, dark glass panes were watching her, following her, rows and rows of them, on guard along her way. She walked faster. Her steps beat too loudly and the houses of the whole city threw echoes back at her, echoes screaming something. She walked faster. The wind whirled her coat, raising it high over her knees, hurling it between her legs. She walked faster. She passed the poster of a worker with a red banner; the worker was laughing.

Suddenly she was running, like a shivering streak between dark shop windows and lamp posts, her coat whistling, her steps beating like a machine gun, her legs flashing and blending, like the spokes of a wheel, into one circle of motion carrying her forward. She was running or flying or being rocketed through space by something outside her body, and she knew it was all right, everything was all right if only she could run faster and faster and faster.

She came panting up the stairs. At the door, she stopped. She stopped and stood looking at the door knob, panting. And suddenly she knew that she could not go in; that she could not take her body into Leo’s room, into his bed, close to his body. She ran her finger tips over the door, feeling it, caressing it uncertainly, for she could come no closer to him.

She sat down on the steps. She felt as if she could hear him—somewhere behind that door—sleeping, breathing with effort. She sat there for a long time, her eyes empty.

When she turned her head and saw that the square of the window on the landing was a dark, bright blue which was not night any longer, she got up, took her key and went in. Leo was asleep. She sat by the window, gathered into a tight huddle. He would not know what time she had come home.

Leo was leaving for the south.

His bag was packed. His ticket was bought. His place was reserved in a private sanatorium in Yalta and a month paid for in advance.

She had explained about the money: “You see, when I wrote to your aunt in Berlin, I also wrote to my uncle in Budapest. Oh, yes, I have an uncle in Budapest. You’ve never heard him mentioned because . . . you see . . . there’s a family quarrel behind it—and he left Russia before the war, and my father forbade us ever to mention his name. But he’s not a bad fellow, and he always liked me, so I wrote him, and that’s what he sent, and he said he’d help me as long as I need it. But please don’t ever mention it to my family, because Father would—you understand.”

She wondered dimly how simple and easy it was to lie.

To Andrei, she had mentioned her starving family. She did not have to ask: he gave her his whole monthly salary and told her to leave him only what she could spare. She had expected it, but it was not an easy moment when she saw the bills in her hand; then, she remembered the comrade commissar and why one aristocrat could die in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics—and she kept most of the money, with a hard, bright smile.

It had not been easy to convince Leo to go. He said he would not let her—or her uncle—keep him. He said it tenderly and he said it furiously. It took many hours and many evenings. “Leo—your money or my money or anyone’s money—does it really matter? Who made it matter? But you want to live. I want you to live. So much is still possible to us. You love me. Don’t you love me enough to live for me? I know it will be hard. Six months. All winter. I’ll miss you. But we can do it. . . . Leo, I love you. I love you. I love you. So much is still possible!”

She won.

His train was to leave at eight-fifteen in the evening. At nine, she would meet Andrei; she had asked him to take her to the opening of a new cabaret.

Leo was silent when they left their room, and in the cab on the way to the station. She went into the car with him to see the wooden bench on which he was to sleep for many nights; she had brought a pillow for him and a warm plaid blanket. Then, they stepped out again and waited on the platform by the car. They had nothing to say.

When the first bell rang, Leo said: “Please, Kira, don’t let’s have any nonsense when the train starts. I won’t look out of the window. No waving, or running after the train, or anything like that.”

“No, Leo.”

She looked at a poster on a steel pillar; it promised a huge orchestra, foreign fox-trots and delicious food at the grand opening of the new cabaret, at nine o’clock tonight. She said, wondering, bewildered, a little frightened, as if realizing it for the first time: “Leo . . . at nine o’clock tonight . . . you won’t be here any more.”

“No. I won’t.”

The third bell rang.

He seized her roughly and held her lips in a long, choking kiss, as long as the train whistle that wailed shrilly. He whispered: “Kira . . . my own only one. . . . I love you. . . . I love you so much. . . .”

He leaped to the steps of the car as it started moving, and disappeared inside. He did not come to the window.

She stood and heard iron chains stretching, wheels grinding rails, the engine panting far ahead, white steam spreading slowly under the steel vaults. The yellow squares of windows were suddenly pulled past her. The station smelt of carbolic acid. A faded red banner hung on a steel girder. The windows were streaming faster and faster, melting into a yellow line. There was nothing ahead but steel, steam, smoke and, under an arch very far away, a piece of sky black as a hole.

And suddenly she understood that it was a train, and that Leo was on the train, and that the train was leaving her. And something beyond terror, immense and unnameable, something which was not a human feeling, seized her. She ran after the train. She grasped an iron handle. She wanted to stop it. She knew that there was something huge and implacable moving over her, which she had to stop, which she alone was to stop, and couldn’t. She was jerked forward, falling, she was whirled along down the wooden planks of the platform, and then a husky soldier in a peaked khaki cap with a red star grabbed her by the shoulders, and tore her off the handle, and threw her aside, pushing her away from the train with his elbow in her breast.

He roared:

“What do you think you’re doing, citizen?”

PART TWO

I

IT WAS ST. PETERSBURG; THE WAR MADE it Petrograd; the revolution made it Leningrad.

It is a city of stone, and those living in it think not of stone brought upon a green earth and piled block on block to raise a city, but of one huge rock carved into streets, bridges, houses, and earth brought in handfuls, scattered, ground into the stone to remind them of that which lies beyond the city.

Its trees are rare strangers, sickly foreigners in a climate of granite, forlorn and superfluous. Its parks are reluctant concessions. In spring, a rare dandelion sticks a bright yellow head through the stones of its embankments, and men smile at it incredulously and condescendingly as at an impudent child. Its spring does not rise from the soil; its first violets, and very red tulips, and very blue hyacinths come in the hands of men, on street corners.

Petrograd was not born; it was created. The will of a man raised it where men did not choose to settle. An implacable emperor commanded into being the city and the ground under the city. Men brought earth to fill a swamp where no living thing existed but mosquitoes. And like mosquitoes, men died and fell into the grunting mire. No willing hands came to build the new capital. It rose by the labor of soldiers, thousands of soldiers, regiments who took orders and could not refuse to face a deadly foe, a gun or a swamp. They fell, and the earth they brought and their bones made the ground for the city. “Petrograd,” its residents say, “stands on skeletons.”

Petrograd is not in a hurry; it is not lazy; it is gracious and leisurely, as befits the freedom of its vast streets. It is a city that threw itself down amid the marshes and pine forests, luxuriously, both arms outflung. Its squares are paved fields; its streets are as broad as tributaries to the Neva, the widest river to cross a great city.

On Nevsky, the capital of the capital’s streets, the houses were built by generations past for generations to come. They are set and unchangeable like fortresses; their walls are thick and their windows are tiers of deep niches, rising over wide sidewalks of reddish-brown granite. From the statue of Alexander III, a huge gray man on a huge gray horse, silver rails stretch tense and straight to the Admiralty building far away, its white colonnade and thin golden spire raised like the crown, the symbol, the trade mark of Nevsky, over the broken skyline where every turret and balcony and gargoyle bending over the street are ageless features of a frozen stone face.

A golden cross on a small golden cupola rises to the clouds halfway down Nevsky, over the Anichkovsky palace, a bare red cube slashed by bare gray windows. And further, beyond the palace, a chariot raises to the clouds the black heads of its rearing horses, their hoofs hanging high over the street, over the stately columns of the Alexandrinsky theater. The palace looks like a barracks; the theater looks like a palace.

At the foot of the palace, Nevsky is cut by a stream, and a bridge arches over its swirling, muddy water. Four black statues stand at the four corners of the bridge. They may be only an accident and an ornament; they may be the very spirit of Petrograd, the city raised by man against the will of nature. Each statue is of a man and a horse. In the first one, the furious hoofs of a rearing beast are swung high in the air, ready to crush the naked, kneeling man, his arm stretched in a first effort toward the bridle of the monster. In the second, the man is up on one knee, his torso leaning back, the muscles of his legs, of his arms, of his body ready to burst through his skin, as he pulls at the bridle, in the supreme moment of the struggle. In the third, they are face to face, the man up on his feet, his head at the nostrils of a beast bewildered by a first recognition of its master. In the fourth, the beast is tamed; it steps obediently, led by the hand of the man who is tall, erect, calm in his victory, stepping forward with serene assurance, his head held straight, his eyes looking steadily into an unfathomable future.

On winter nights, strings of large white globes flare up over Nevsky—and snow sparkles over the white lights like salt crystals—and the colored lanterns of tramways, red, green, yellow, wink far away swimming over a soft darkness—and through lashes moist with frost the white globes look like crosses of long white searchlights on a black sky.

Nevsky starts on the shore of the Neva, at a quay as trim and perfect as a drawing room, with a red-granite parapet and a row of palaces, of straight angles, tall windows, chaste columns and balustrades, severe, harmonious and luxuriously stern in their masculine grace.

Divided by the river, Petrograd’s greatest mansion, the Winter Palace, faces Petrograd’s greatest prison, the Peter-Paul Fortress. The Czars lived in the Winter Palace; when they died, they crossed the Neva: in the cathedral of the Fortress, white slabs rose over the graves of the Czars. The prison stood behind the cathedral. The walls of the Fortress guarded the dead Czars and the Czar’s living enemies. In the long, silent halls of the palace, tall mirrors reflected the ramparts behind which men were forgotten, alive for decades in lonely stone graves.

Bridges rise over the river, as long humps of steel, with tramways crawling slowly up to the middle and rolling swiftly, clattering, down to the other shore. The right bank, beyond the Fortress, is a gradual surrender of the city to that earth, that countryside it has driven out; the Kamenostrovsky, a broad, quiet, endless avenue, is like a stream full of the fragrance of a future sea, a street where each step is a forecast of the country to come. The avenue and the city and the river end at the Islands, where the Neva breaks among bits of land held together by delicate bridges, where heavy white cones rise in tiers edged with dark green, over a deep silence of snow, and fir branches and bird footprints alone break the white desolation, and beyond the last island, the sky and sea are an unfinished water color of pale gray with a faint greenish band smeared across to mark a future horizon.

But Petrograd also has side streets. Petrograd’s side streets are of colorless stone rain-washed into the gray of the clouds above and of the mud below. They are bare as jail corridors; they cut each other in naked corners of square buildings that look like prisons. Old gateways are locked at night over mud-swollen ruts. Little shops frown with faded signs over turbid windows. Little parks choke with consumptive grass into which mud and dust and mud again have been ground for a century. Iron parapets guard canals of refuse-thickened water. On dark corners, rusty ikons of the Madonna are nailed over forgotten tin boxes, begging coppers for orphanages.

And farther up the Neva, rise forests of red-brick chimneys, spewing a black cloud that hangs over old, stooping, wooden houses, over an embankment of rotting logs at the placid, indifferent river. Rain falls slowly through the smoke; rain, smoke and stone are the theme-song of the city.

Petrograd’s residents wonder, sometimes, at the strange bonds that hold them. After the long winter, they curse the mud and the stone, and cry for pine forests; they flee from the city as from a hated stepmother; they flee to green grass and sand and to the sparkling capitals of Europe. And, as to an unconquerable mistress, they return in the fall, hungry for the wide streets, the shrieking tramways and the cobblestones, serene and relieved, as if life were beginning again. “Petrograd,” they say, “is the only City.”

Cities grow like forests, like weeds. Petrograd did not grow. It was born finished and complete. Petrograd is not acquainted with nature. It was the work of man.

Nature makes mistakes and takes chances; it mixes its colors and knows little of straight lines. But Petrograd is the work of man who knows what he wants.

Petrograd’s grandeur is unmarred, its squalor unrelieved. Its facets are cut clearly, sharply; they are deliberate, perfect with the straight-forward perfection of man’s work.

Cities grow with a people, and fight for the place at the head of cities, and rise slowly up the steps of years. Petrograd did not rise. It came to be at the height. It was commanded to command. It was a capital before its first stone was laid. It was a monument to the spirit of man.

Peoples know nothing of the spirit of man, for peoples are only nature, and man is a word that has no plural. Petrograd is not of the people. It has no legend, no folklore; it is not glorified in nameless songs down nameless roads. It is a stranger, aloof, incomprehensible, forbidding. No pilgrims ever traveled to its granite gates. The gates had never been opened in warm compassion to the meek, the hurt and the maimed, like the doors of the kindly Moscow. Petrograd does not need a soul; it has a mind.

And perhaps it is only a coincidence that in the language of the Russians, Moscow is “she,” while Petrograd has ever been “he.”

And perhaps it is only a coincidence that those who seized on the power in the name of the people, transferred their capital to the meek Moscow from the haughty aristocrat of cities.

In 1924, a man named Lenin died and the city was ordered to be called Leningrad. The revolution also brought posters to the city’s walls, and red banners to its houses, and sunflower-seed shells to its cobblestones. It cut a proletarian poem into the pedestal of the statue of Alexander III, and put a red rag on a stick into the hand of Catherine II in a small garden off Nevsky. It called Nevsky “Prospect of October 25th,” and Sadovaia, a cross street—”Street of July 3rd,” in honor of dates it wanted remembered; and at the intersection, hefty conductoresses yell in the crowded tramways: “Corner of October twenty-fifth and July third! Terminal for yellow tickets. New fare, citizens!”

In the early summer of 1925 the State Textile Trust put out new cotton prints. And women smiled in the streets of Petrograd, women wearing dresses made of new materials for the first time in many years.

But there were only half-a-dozen patterns of prints in the city. Women in black and white checks passed women in black and white checks; women in red-dotted white met women in green-dotted white; women with spirals of blue on a gray dress met women with the same spirals of brown on a tan dress. They passed by like inmates of a huge orphanage, frowning, sullen, uncomfortable, losing all joy in their new garments.

In a store on Nevsky, the State Porcelain Trust displayed a glistening window of priceless china, a white tea service with odd, fuzzy, modern flowers engraved in thin black by the hand of a famous new artist. The service had stood there for months; no one could afford to buy it.

Windows sparkled with foreign imitation jewelry—strings of flowered wax beads, earrings of bright celluloid circles, the latest fashion, protected by a stupendous price from the wistful women who stopped to admire them.

In a street off Nevsky, a foreign book store had been opened; a window two floors high flaunted the glossy, radiant, incredible covers of volumes that had come from across the border.

Bright awnings spread over Nevsky’s wide, dry sidewalks, and barometers sparkled in the sun with the clear, piercing fire of clean glass.

A huge cotton billboard stood leaning against a building, presenting the tense face, enormous eyes and long, thin hands of a famous actor painted in bold brush strokes under the name of a German film.

Pictures of Lenin looked down at the passersby, a suspicious face with a short beard and narrow Oriental eyes, draped in red bunting and mourning crêpe.

On street corners, in the sun, ragged men sold saccharine and plaster busts of Lenin. Sparrows chirped on telephone wires. Lines stood at the doors of cooperatives; women took off their jackets and, in short-sleeved, wrinkled blouses, offered flabby white arms to the first heat of the summer sun.

A poster hung high on a wall. On the poster, a huge worker swung a hammer toward the sky, and the shadow of the hammer fell like a huge black cross over the little buildings of the city under his boots.

Kira Argounova stopped by the poster to light a cigarette.

She took a paper box from the pocket of her old coat and, with two straight fingers, swiftly, without looking, swung a cigarette into her mouth. Then she opened her old handbag of imitation leather and took out an expensive foreign lighter ingraved with her initials. She flicked a brief little flame, hurled a jet of smoke from the corner of her mouth and slammed the bag shut over the lighter. She jerked the frayed cuff of her coat sleeve and glanced at a sparkling watch on a narrow gold band. She swung forward; the high heels of her slippers rang hurriedly, resonantly down the granite sidewalk. Her slippers were patched; her legs displayed the tight, sheer luster of foreign silk stockings.

She walked toward an old palace that bore a red, five-pointed star over the entrance and an inscription in gold letters:

DISTRICT CLUB OF THE ALL-UNION COMMUNIST PARTY

Its glass door was severely, immaculately polished, but the latch on its garden gate was broken. Weeds grew over what had been gravelled walks, and cigarette stubs rocked softly in an abandoned fountain, around a dejected marble cupid with a greenish patch of rust across its stomach, at the dry mouth of an urn.

Kira hurried down deserted walks, through a thick, neglected green tangle that drowned the clatter of tramways outside; blue pigeons fluttered lazily into the branches at the sound of her steps, and a bee rocked on a heavy purple tuft of clover. A giant regiment of oaks stood with arms outstretched, hiding the palace from the eyes of the street.

In the depths of the garden stood a small two-storied wing linked to the palace by the bridge of a short gallery. The windows of the first floor were broken and a sparrow sat on a sharp glass edge, jerking its head sidewise to look into the mouldy, deserted rooms. But on a window sill of the second floor lay a pile of books.

The heavy, hand-carved door was not locked. Kira went in and swung impatiently up the long stairway. It was a very long stairway. It rose to the second floor in a straight line, an endless flight of bare stone steps, cracked and crumbling in little trails of gravel. The stairway had had a magnificent white balustrade; but the balustrade was broken; empty holes gaped over the jagged stumps of marble columns and their white bodies still lay at the foot of the stairs. Hollow echoes rolled against the walls, against the murals of graceful white swans on blue lakes, of rose garlands, of sensual nymphs fleeing from grinning satyrs; the murals were faded and cut by gashes of peeling plaster.

Kira knocked at the door on the top of the stairs.

Andrei Taganov opened it and stepped back, astonished; his eyes widened in the slow, incredulous glance of a man looking at a miracle that could not become habitual; he forgot to move, he stood before her, the collar of a white shirt thrown open at his sunburnt throat.

“Kira!”

She laughed, a clear, metallic laughter: “How are you, Andrei?”

His hands closed slowly, softly over her shoulders, so softly that she could not feel his hands, only their strength, their will holding her, bending her backward; but his lips on hers were brutal, uncontrollable. His eyes were closed; hers were open, looking indifferently up at the ceiling.

“Kira, I didn’t expect you till tonight.”

“I know. But you won’t throw me out, will you?”

She stepped aside, preceding him through the dim little lobby into his room, throwing her bag on a chair, her hat on a table, with imperious familiarity.

She alone knew why Andrei Taganov had had to economize, that winter; why he had given up his room and moved into an abandoned wing of the palace, which the Party Club could not use and had given to him free of rent.

It had been the secret love nest of a prince. Many years ago, a forgotten sovereign had waited there for the light, stealthy footsteps and the rustle of a silk skirt up the long marble stairway. His magnificent furniture was gone; but the walls, the fireplace and the ceiling remained.

The walls were covered with a white brocade hand-embroidered in delicate little wreaths of blue and silver leaves. A marble row of cupids with garlands and cornucopias spouting frozen white flowers encircled the cornice. A marble Leda reclined voluptuously in the embrace of white wings over the fireplace. And from the soft blue of a sky painted on the ceiling, among pale, downy clouds, white doves—that had watched long nights of luxurious orgies—now looked at an iron bed, broken-down chairs, a long unpainted table loaded with books in bright red covers, wooden boxes piled as a dresser, posters of Red Army soldiers hiding the splits in the white brocade, and a leather jacket hanging on a nail in a corner.

Kira said peremptorily: “I came now to tell you that I can’t come tonight.”

“Oh! . . . You can’t, Kira?”

“No. I can’t. Now don’t look tragic. Here, I brought you something to cheer you up.”

She took a small toy from her pocket, a glass tube that ended in a bulb filled with a red liquid in which a little black figure floated, trembling.

“What’s that?”

She held the bulb in her closed fist, but the little figure did not move. “I can’t do it. You try. Hold it this way.”

She closed his fingers over the bulb. No expression, no movement of his told it to her, but she knew that he was not indifferent to the touch of her fingers on his, that all of the past winter had not made him accustomed and indifferent. The red liquid in the sealed tube spurted up suddenly in furious, boiling bubbles; the little black, horned figure jumped ecstatically up and down through the storm.

“See? They call it American Resident. I bought it on a street corner. Cute, isn’t it?”

He smiled and watched the imp dancing. “Very cute. . . . Kira, why can’t you come tonight?”

“It’s . . . some business that I have to attend. Nothing important. Do you mind?”

“No. Not if it’s inconvenient for you. Can you stay now?”

“Only for a little while.” She tore her coat off and threw it on the bed.

“Oh, Kira!”

“Like it? It’s your own fault. You insisted on a new dress.”

The dress was red, very plain, very short, trimmed in black patent leather: a belt, four buttons, a flat round collar and a huge bow. She stood, leaning against the door, slouching a little, suddenly very fragile and young, a child’s dress clinging to a body that looked as helpless and innocent as a child’s, her tangled hair thrown back, her skirt high over slender legs pressed closely together, her eyes round and candid, but her smile mocking and confident, her lips moist, wide. He stood looking at her, frightened by a woman who looked more dangerous, more desirable than he had ever known.

She jerked her head impatiently: “Well? You don’t like it?”

“Kira, you are . . . the dress is . . . so lovely. I’ve never seen a woman’s dress like that.”

“What do you know about women’s dresses?”

“I looked through a whole magazine of Paris fashions at the Censorship bureau yesterday.”

“You looking through a fashion magazine?”

“I was thinking of you. I wanted to know what women liked.”

“And what did you learn?”

“Things I’d like you to have. Funny little hats. And slippers like sandals—with nothing but straps. And jewelry. Diamonds.”

“Andrei! You didn’t tell that to your comrades at the Censorship bureau, did you?”

He laughed, still looking at her intently, incredulously: “No. I didn’t.”

“Stop staring at me like that. What’s the matter? Are you afraid to come near me?”

His fingers touched the red dress. Then his lips sank suddenly into the hollow of her naked elbow.

He sat in the deep niche of the window sill and she stood beside him, in the tight circle of his arms. His face was expressionless, and only his eyes laughed soundlessly, cried to her soundlessly what he could not say.

Then he was talking, his face buried in the red dress: “You know, I’m glad you came now, instead of tonight. There were still so many hours to wait. . . . I’ve never seen you like this. . . . I’ve tried to read and I couldn’t. . . . Will you wear this dress next time? Was that your own idea, this leather bow? . . . Why do you look so . . . so much more grownup in a childish dress like this? . . . I like that bow. . . . Kira, you know, I’ve missed you so terribly. . . . Even when I’m working I . . .”

Her eyes were soft, pleading, a little frightened: “Andrei, you shouldn’t think of me when you’re working.”

He said slowly, without smiling: “Sometimes, it’s only thoughts of you that help me—through my work.”

“Andrei! What’s the matter?”

But he was smiling again: “Why don’t you want me to think of you? Remember, last time you were here, you told me about that book you read with a hero called Andrei and you said you thought of me? I’ve been repeating it to myself ever since, and I bought the book. I know it isn’t much, Kira, but . . . well . . . you don’t say them often, things like that.”

She leaned back, her hands crossed behind her head, mocking and irresistible: “Oh, I think of you so seldom I’ve forgotten your last name. Hope I read it in a book. Why, I’ve even forgotten that scar, right there, over your eye.” Her finger was following the line of the scar, sliding down his forehead, erasing his frown; she was laughing, ignoring the plea she had understood.

“Kira, would it cost so very much to install a telephone in your house?”

“But they . . . we . . . have no electrical connections in the apartment. It’s really impossible.”

“I’ve wished so often that you had a phone. Then I could call you . . . once in a while. Sometimes, it’s so hard to wait, just wait for you.”

“Don’t I come here as often as you wish, Andrei?”

“It isn’t that. Sometimes . . . you see . . . I want just a look at you . . . the same day you’ve been here . . . sometimes even a minute after you’ve left. It’s that feeling that you’re gone and I have no way of calling, of finding you, no right to approach the house where you live, as if you had left the city. Sometimes, I look at all the people in the streets—and it frightens me—that feeling that you’re lost somewhere among them—and I can’t get to you, I can’t scream to you over all those heads.”

She said, implacably: “Andrei, you’ve promised never to call at my house.”

“But wouldn’t you allow me to telephone, if we could arrange it?”

“No. My parents might guess. And . . . oh, Andrei, we have to be careful. We have to be so careful—particularly now.”

“Why particularly now?”

“Oh, no more than usual. It isn’t so hard, is it, that one condition, just to be careful—for my sake?”

“No, dear.”

“I’ll come often. I’ll still be here when you’ll become tired of me.”

“Kira, why do you say that?”

“Well, you’ll be tired of me, some day, won’t you?”

“You don’t think that, do you?”

She said hastily: “No, of course not. . . . Well, of course, I love you. You know it. But I don’t want you to feel . . . to feel that you’re tied to me . . . that your life . . .”

“Kira, why don’t you want me to say that my life . . .”

“This is why I don’t want you to say anything.”

She bent and closed his mouth with a kiss that hurt it.

Beyond the window, some club member in the palace was practicing the “Internationale,” slowly, with one hand, on a sonorous concert piano.

Andrei’s lips moved hungrily over her throat, her hands, her shoulders. He tore himself away with an effort. He made himself say lightly, gaily, as an escape, rising: “I have something for you, Kira. It was for tonight. But then . . .”

He took a tiny box from a drawer of his desk, and pressed it into her hand. She protested helplessly: “Oh, Andrei, you shouldn’t. I’ve asked you not to. With all you’ve done for me and . . .”

“I’ve done nothing for you. I think you’re too unselfish. It has always been your family. I’ve had to fight to have you get this dress.”

“And the stockings, and the lighter, and . . . Oh, Andrei, I’m so grateful to you, but . . .”

“But don’t be afraid to open it.”

It was a small, flat bottle of real French perfume. She gasped. She wanted to protest. But she looked at his smile and she could only laugh happily: “Oh, Andrei!”

His hand moved slowly in the air, without touching her, following the line of her neck, her breast, her body, cautiously, attentively, as if modeling a statue.

“What are you doing, Andrei?”

“Trying to remember.”

“What?”

“Your body. As you stand—just now. Sometimes when I’m alone, I try to draw you in the air—like this—to feel as if you were standing before me.”

She pressed herself closer to him. Her eyes were growing darker; her smile seemed slow and heavy. She said, extending the perfume bottle: “You must open it. I want you to give me the first drop—yourself.” She drew him down to her side, on the bed. She asked: “Where will you put it?”

His finger tips moist with the bewildering fragrance from another world, he pressed them timidly into her hair.

She laughed defiantly: “Where else?”

His finger tips brushed her lips.

“Where else?”

His hand drew a soft line down her throat, stopping abruptly at the black patent leather collar.

Her eyes holding his, she jerked her collar, tearing the snaps of her dress open. “Where else?”

He was whispering, his lips on her breast: “Oh, Kira, Kira, I wanted you—here—tonight. . . .”

She leaned back, her face dark, challenging, pitiless, her voice low: “I’m here—now.”

“But . . .”

“Why not?”

“If you don’t . . .”

“I do. That’s why I came.”

And as he tried to rise, her arms pulled him down imperiously. She whispered: “Don’t bother to undress. I haven’t the time.”

He could forgive her the words, for he had forgotten them, when he saw her exhausted, breathing jerkily, her eyes closed, her head limp in the curve of his arm. He was grateful to her for the pleasure he had given her.

He could forgive anything, when she turned to him suddenly at the door, gathering her coat over the wrinkled red dress, when she whispered, her voice pleading, wistful and tender: “You won’t miss me too much till next time, will you? . . . I . . . I’ve made you happy, haven’t I?”

She ran swiftly up the stairs to her apartment, the home that had been Admiral Kovalensky’s. She unlocked the door, looking impatiently at her wristwatch.

In the former drawing room, Marisha Lavrova was busy, standing over a Primus, stirring a kettle of soup with one hand, holding a book in the other, memorizing aloud: “The relationships of social classes can be studied on the basis of the distribution of the economic means of production at any given historical . . .”

Kira stopped beside her. “How’s the Marxist theory, Marisha?” she interrupted loudly, tearing her hat off, shaking her hair. “Do you have a cigarette? Smoked my last one on the way home.”

Marisha nodded with her chin toward the dresser. “In the drawer,” she answered. “Light one for me, too, will you? How’s things?”

“Fine. Wonderful weather outside. Real summer. Busy?”

“Uh-uh. Have to give a lecture at the Club tomorrow—on Historical Materialism.”

Kira lighted two cigarettes and stuck one into Marisha’s mouth.

“Thanks,” Marisha acknowledged, swirling the spoon in the thick mixture. “Historical Materialism and noodle soup. That’s for a guest,” she winked slyly. “Guess you know him. Name’s Victor Dunaev.”

“I wish you luck. You and Victor both.”

“Thanks. How’s everything with you? Heard from the boy friend lately?”

Kira answered reluctantly: “Yes. I received a letter. . . . And a telegram.”

“How’s he getting along? When’s he coming back?”

It was as if Kira’s face had frozen suddenly into a stern, reverent calm, as if Marisha were looking again at the austere Kira of eight months ago. She answered:

“Tonight.”

II

A TELEGRAM LAY ON THE TABLE BEFORE Kira. It contained four words:

“Arriving June fifth. Leo.”

She had read it often; but two hours remained till the arrival of the Crimean train and she could still re-read it many times. She spread it out on the gray, faded satin cover of the bed and knelt by its side, carefully smoothing every wrinkle of the paper. It had four words: a word for every two months past; she wondered how many days she had paid for every letter, she did not try to think of how many hours and of what the hours had been.

But she remembered how many times she had cried to herself: “It doesn’t matter. He’ll come back—saved.” It had become so simple and so easy: if one could reduce one’s life to but one desire—life could be cold, clear and bearable. Perhaps others still knew that there were people, streets, and feelings; she didn’t; she knew only that he would come back saved. It had been a drug and a disinfectant; it had burned everything out and left her icy, limpid, smiling.

There had been her room—suddenly grown so empty that she wondered, bewildered, how four walls could hold such an enormous void. There had been mornings when she awakened to stare at a day as dim and hopeless as the gray square of snow clouds in the window, and it took her a tortured effort to rise; days when each step across the room was a conquest of will, when all the objects around her, the Primus, the cupboard, the table, were enemies screaming to her of what they had shared with her, of what they had lost.

But Leo was in the Crimea where every minute was a ray of sunlight, and every ray of sunlight—a new drop of life.

There had been days when she fled from her room to people and voices, and fled from the people, for she found herself suddenly still lonelier, and she fled to wander through the streets, her hands in her pockets, her shoulders hunched, watching the sleigh runners, the sparrows, the snow around the lights, begging of them something she could not name. Then she returned home, and lighted the “Bourgeoise,” and ate a half-cooked dinner on a bare table, lost in a dim room, crushed under the huge sound of the logs crackling, the clock ticking on a shelf, hoofs crunching snow beyond the window.

But Leo drank milk and ate fruit with skins bursting into fresh, sparkling juice.

There had been nights when she buried her head under the blanket and her face in the pillow, as if trying to escape from her own body, a body burning with the touch of a stranger’s hands—in the bed that had been Leo’s.

But Leo was lying on a beach by the sea and his body was growing suntanned.

There had been moments when she saw, in sudden astonishment, as if she had not grasped it before, just what she was doing to her own body; then she closed her eyes, for behind that thought was another one, more frightening, forbidden: of what she was doing to another man’s soul.

But Leo had gained five pounds and the doctors were pleased.

There had been moments when she felt as if she were actually seeing the downward movement of a smiling mouth, the swift, peremptory wave of a long, thin hand, seeing them for a second briefer than lightning, and then her every muscle screamed with pain, so that she thought that she was not alone to hear it.

But Leo wrote to her.

She read his letters, trying to remember the inflection of his voice as it would pronounce each word. She spread the letters around her and sat in the room as with a living presence.

He was coming back, cured, strong, saved. She had lived eight months for one telegram. She had never looked beyond it. Beyond the telegram, there was no future.

The train from the Crimea was late.

Kira stood on the platform, motionless, looking at the empty track, two long bands of steel that turned to brass far away, in the clear, summer sunset beyond the terminal vaults. She was afraid to look at the clock and learn that which she had feared: that the train was hopelessly, indefinitely late. The platform trembled under the grating wheels of a heavy baggage truck. Somewhere in the long steel tunnel, a voice cried mournfully at regular intervals, the same words that blended into one, like the call of a bird in the dusk: “Grishka shove it over.” Boots shuffled lazily, aimlessly past her. Across the tracks a woman sat on a bundle, her head drooping. The glass panes above were turning a desolate orange. The voice called plaintively: “Grishka shove it over. . . .”

When Kira went to the office of the station commandant, the executive answered briskly that the train would be quite late; unavoidable delay; a misunderstanding at a junction; the train was not expected till tomorrow morning.

She stood on the platform for a little while longer, aimlessly, reluctant to leave the place where she had almost felt his presence. Then she walked out slowly, walked down the stairs, her arms limp, her feet lingering unsteadily on every step she descended.

Far down at the end of the street, the sky was a flat band of bright, pure, motionless yellow, like the spilled yoke of an egg, and the street looked brown and wide in a warm twilight. She walked away slowly.

She saw a familiar corner, passed it, then came back and swerved into another direction, toward the house of the Dunaevs. She had an evening that had to be filled.

Irina opened the door. Her hair was wild, uncombed, but she wore a new dress of black and white striped batiste, and her tired face was powdered neatly.

“Well, Kira! Of all people! What a rare surprise! Come in. Take your coat off. I have something—someone—to show you. And how do you like my new dress?”

Kira was laughing suddenly. She took off her coat: she wore a new dress of black and white striped batiste. Irina gasped: “Oh . . . oh, hell! When did you get it?”

“About a week ago.”

“I thought that if I got the plain stripes, I wouldn’t see so many of them around, but the first time I wore it, I met three ladies in the same dress, within fifteen minutes. . . . Oh, what’s the use? . . . Oh, well, come on!”

In the dining room the windows were open, and the room felt spacious, fresh with the soft clatter of the street. Vasili Ivanovitch got up hastily, smiling, dropping tools and a piece of wood on the table. Victor rose gracefully, bowing. A tall, blond, husky young man jumped up and stood stiffly, while Irina announced: “Two little twins from the Soviet reformatory! . . . Kira, may I present Sasha Chernov? Sasha—my cousin, Kira Argounova.”

Sasha’s hand was big and firm, and his handshake too strong. He grinned shyly, a timid, candid, disarming grin.

“Sasha, this is a rare treat for you,” said Irina. “A rare guest. The recluse of Petrograd.”

“Of Leningrad,” Victor corrected.

“Of Petrograd,” Irina repeated. “How are you, Kira? I hate to admit how glad I am to see you.”

“I’m delighted to meet you,” Sasha muttered. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

“Without a doubt,” said Victor, “Kira is the most talked about woman in the city—and even in Party circles.” Kira glanced at him sharply; but he was smiling pleasantly: “Glamorous women have always been an irresistible theme for admiring whispers. Like Madame de Pompadour, for instance. Charm refutes the Marxist theory: it knows no class distinctions.”

“Shut up,” said Irina. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m sure it’s something rotten.”

“Not at all,” said Kira quietly, holding Victor’s eyes. “Victor is very complimentary, even though he does exaggerate.”

Awkwardly, diffidently, Sasha moved a chair for Kira, offering it to her silently with a wave of his hand and a helpless grin.

“Sasha is studying history,” said Irina, “that is, he was. He’s been thrown out of the University for trying to think in a country of free thought.”

“I will have you understand, Irina,” said Victor, “that I won’t tolerate such remarks in my presence. I expect the Party to be respected.”

“Oh, stop acting!” Irina snapped. “The Party Collective won’t hear you.”

Kira noticed Sasha’s long, silent glance at Victor; Sasha’s steely blue eyes were neither bashful nor friendly.

“I’m sorry about the University, Sasha,” said Kira, feeling suddenly that she liked him.

“I did not mind it,” Sasha drawled in a quiet, measured tone of conviction. “It, really, was not essential. There are some outward circumstances which an autocratic power can control. There are some values it can never reach nor subjugate.”

“You will discover, Kira,” Victor smiled coldly, “that you and Sasha have much in common. You are both inclined to disregard the rudiments of caution.”

“Victor, will you . . .” Vasili Ivanovitch began.

“Father, I have a right to expect, as long as I’m feeding this family, that my views . . .”

“You’re feeding whom?” a shrill voice asked from the next room. Acia appeared on the threshold, her stockings loose around her ankles, the shreds of a torn magazine in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. “I wish someone’d feed someone. I’m still hungry and Irina wouldn’t give me a second helping of soup.”

“Father, I expect something to be done about this child,” said Victor. “She’s growing up like a bum. If she were to join a children’s organization, such as the Pioneers . . .”

“Victor, we won’t discuss that again,” Vasili Ivanovitch interrupted firmly, quietly.

“Who wants to be a stinking Pioneer?” asked Acia.

“Acia, you go back to your room,” Irina ordered, “or I’ll put you to bed.”

“You and who else?” stated Acia, disappearing behind a slammed door.

“Really,” Victor observed, “if I’m able to study as I do and work besides and provide for this household, I don’t see why Irina can’t take proper care of one brat.”

No one answered.

Vasili Ivanovitch bent over the piece of wood he had been carving. Irina drew pictures with a spoon handle on the old table cloth. Victor rose to his feet: “Sorry, Kira, to desert such a rare guest, but I have to go. I have a dinner engagement.”

“Sure,” said Irina. “See that the hostess doesn’t borrow any silverware from Kira’s room.”

Victor left. Kira noticed that the tools were trembling in Vasili Ivanovitch’s wrinkled fingers.

“What are you doing, Uncle Vasili?”

“Making a frame,” Vasili Ivanovitch raised his head, showing his work proudly, “for one of Irina’s pictures. They’re good pictures. It’s a shame to let them get crumpled and ruined in a drawer.”

“It’s beautiful, Uncle Vasili. I didn’t know you could do that.”

“Oh, I used to be good at it. I haven’t done it for years. But I used to be good in the . . . in the old days, when I was a young man, in Siberia.”

“How’s your job, Uncle Vasili?”

“No more,” said Irina. “How long do you think one can keep a job in a private store?”

“What happened?”

“Haven’t you heard? They closed the store for back taxes. And the boss, himself, is now more broke than we are. . . . Would you like some tea, Kira? I’ll fix it. The tenants stole our Primus, but Sasha will help me to light the samovar in the kitchen. Come on!” she threw at him imperiously, and Sasha rose obediently. “I don’t know why I ask him to help,” she winked at Kira, “he’s the most helpless, useless, awkward thing born.” But her eyes were sparkling happily. She took his arm and wheeled him out of the room.

It was growing dark, and the open window was a sharp, bright blue. Vasili Ivanovitch did not light a lamp. He bent lower over his carving.

“Sasha is a nice boy,” he said suddenly, “and I’m worried.”

“Why?” asked Kira.

He whispered: “Politics. Secret societies. Poor doomed little fool.”

“And Victor suspects?”

“I think so.”

It was Irina who switched on the light, returning with a sparkling tray of cups, preceding Sasha with a steaming samovar.

“Here’s the tea. And some cookies. I made them. See how you like them, Kira, for an artist’s cooking.”

“How’s the art, Irina?”

“The job, you mean? Oh, I still have it. But I’m afraid I’m not too good at drawing posters. I’ve been reprimanded twice in the Wall Newspaper. They said my peasant women looked like cabaret dancers and my workers were too graceful. My bourgeois ideology, you know. Well, what do they want? It’s not my specialty. I could scream, sometimes, I can’t get any ideas at all for one more of those damn posters.”

“And now they have that competition,” Vasili Ivanovitch said mournfully.

“What competition?”

Irina spilled tea on the table cloth. “An inter-club competition. Who’ll make the most, the best and the reddest posters. Have to work two hours extra every day—free—for the glory of the Club.”

“Under the Soviets,” drawled Sasha, “there is no exploitation.”

“I thought,” said Irina, “that I had a good idea for a winner: a real proletarian wedding—a worker and a peasant woman on a tractor, God damn them! But I heard that the Club of Red Printers is making a symbolic one—the union of an airplane and a tractor—sort of the spirit of Electrification and Proletarian State Construction.”

“And the wages,” sighed Vasili Ivanovitch. “She spent all of her last month’s salary on shoes for Acia.”

“Well,” said Irina, “she couldn’t go barefooted.”

“Irina, you work too hard,” Sasha remarked, “and you take the work too seriously. Why waste your nerves? It’s all temporary.”

“It is,” said Vasili Ivanovitch.

“I hope it is,” said Kira.

“Sasha’s my life-saver.” Irina’s weary mouth smiled tremulously and sarcastically at once, as if trying to deny the involuntary tenderness in her voice. “He took me to the theater last week. And week before last, we went to the Museum of Alexander III, and we wandered there for hours, looking at the paintings.”

“Leo’s coming back tomorrow,” Kira said suddenly, irrelevantly, as if she could not keep it any longer.

“Oh!” Irina’s spoon clattered down. “You never told us. I’m so glad! And he’s quite well?”

“Yes. He was to return tonight, but the train is late.”

“How is his aunt in Berlin?” asked Vasili Ivanovitch. “Still helping you? There’s an example of family loyalty. I have the greatest admiration for that lady, even though I’ve never seen her. Anyone who’s safe, away, free and can still understand us, buried alive in this Soviet graveyard, must be a wonderful person. She’s saved Leo’s life.”

“Uncle Vasili,” said Kira, “when you see Leo, will you remember never to mention it? His aunt’s help, I mean. You remember I explained to you how sensitive he is about being under obligation to her, and so we’ll all be careful not to remind him of it, will we?”

“Certainly, I understand, child. Don’t worry. . . . But that’s Europe for you. That’s abroad. That’s what a human life does to a human being. I think it’s hard for us to understand kindness and what used to be called ethics. We’re all turning into beasts in a beastly struggle. But we’ll be saved. We’ll be saved before it gets us all.”

“We don’t have long to wait,” said Sasha.

Kira noticed a frightened, pleading look in Irina’s eyes.

It was late when Kira and Sasha rose to go. He lived far on the other side of the city, but he offered to escort her home, for the streets were dark. He wore an old coat and he walked fast, slouching. They hurried together through a soft, transparent twilight, through the city full of the fragrance of a warm earth somewhere far under the pavements and cobblestones.

“Irina isn’t happy,” he said suddenly.

“No,” said Kira, “she isn’t. No one is.”

“We’re living in difficult times. But things will change. Things are changing. There still are men to whom freedom is more than a word on posters.”

“Do you think they have a chance, Sasha?”

His voice was low, tense with a passionate conviction, a quiet strength that made her wonder why she had ever thought him bashful: “Do you think the Russian worker is a beast that licks its yoke while his mind is being battered out of him? Do you think he’s fooled by the clatter of a very noisy gang of tyrants? Do you know what he reads? Do you know the books that are hidden in the factories? The papers that pass secretly through many hands? Do you know that the people is awakening and . . .”

“Sasha,” she interrupted, “aren’t you playing a very dangerous game?”

He did not answer. He looked at the old roofs of the city against a milky, bluish sky.

“The people,” she said, “has claimed too many victims already—of your kind.”

“Russia has a long revolutionary history,” he said. “They know it. They’re even teaching it in their schools, but they think it’s ended. It isn’t. It’s just beginning. And it has never lacked men who did not think of the danger. In the Czar’s days—or at any other time.”

She stopped and looked at him in the dusk, and said desperately, forgetting that she had met him for the first time but a few hours ago: “Oh, Sasha, is it worth the chance you’re taking?”

He towered over her, strands of blond hair sticking out from under his cap, his mouth grinning slowly over the raised collar of his coat. “You mustn’t worry, Kira. And Irina mustn’t worry. I’m not in danger. They won’t get me. They won’t have the time.”

In the morning, Kira had to go to work.

She had insisted on working; Andrei had found a job for her—the job of lecturer and excursion guide in the Museum of the Revolution. The job consisted of sitting at home and waiting for a call from the Excursion Center. When they called, she hurried to the Museum and led a group of bewildered people through the halls of what had been the Winter Palace. She received a few rubles for each excursion; she was listed as a Soviet employee by the Upravdom of her house; it saved her from an exorbitant rent and from the suspicion of being bourgeois.

In the morning, she had telephoned the Nikolaevsky station; the train from the Crimea was not expected until early in the afternoon. Then the Excursion Center called her; she had to go.

The halls of the Winter Palace displayed faded photographs of revolutionary leaders, yellowed proclamations, maps, diagrams, models of Czarist prisons, rusty guns, splinters of leg irons. Thirty workers were waiting in the Palace lobby for the “comrade guide.” They were on vacation, but their Educational Club had arranged the excursion and they could not ignore its command. They removed their caps respectfully, and shuffled timidly, obediently after Kira, and listened attentively, scratching their heads.

“. . . and this photograph, comrades, was taken just before his execution. He was hanged for the assassination of a tyrant, one of the Czar’s henchmen. Such was the end of another glorious victim on the tortuous path of the Worker-Peasant Revolution.”

“. . . and this diagram, comrades, gives us a clear, visual illustration of the strike movement in Czarist Russia. You will note that the red line drops sharply after the year 1905. . . .”

Kira recited her lecture evenly, mechanically; she was no longer conscious of words; it was nothing but a succession of memorized sounds, each dragging the next one automatically, without any assistance of will; she did not know what she was going to say; she knew that her hand would rise at a given word and point at the right picture; she knew at which word the gray, impersonal blot that was her audience would laugh and at which word it would gasp and grunt with social indignation. She knew that her listeners wanted her to hurry and that the Excursion Center wanted the lecture to be long and detailed.

“. . . and this, comrades, is the genuine carriage in which Alexander II was riding on the day of his assassination. This shattered back was torn by the bomb in the hands of . . .”

But she was thinking of the train from the Crimea; perhaps it had arrived; perhaps the lonely room she hated had now become a temple.

“Comrade guide, can you tell me if Alexander II was paid by International Imperialists?”

The room was empty when she came home.

“No,” said Marisha, “he hasn’t arrived.”

“No,” said the gruff voice over the telephone, “the train isn’t in. Is that you again, citizen? What’s the matter with you? Trains aren’t run for your personal convenience. It’s not expected until tonight.”

She took off her coat. She raised her hand and glanced at her wristwatch; her hand froze in midair; she remembered whose gift it was; she took the watch off and threw it into a drawer.

She curled in an armchair by the window and tried to read a newspaper; the newspaper slipped to the floor; she sat still, her head on her arm.

It was an hour later that she heard steps behind the door, and the door was thrown open without a knock. The first thing she saw was a dusty suitcase. Then she saw the smile, the drooping lips arched over very white teeth in a tanned face. Then she stood with the back of her hand at her mouth and could not move.

He said: “Allo, Kira.”

She did not kiss him. Her hands fell on his shoulders and moved down his arms, all her weight in her fingers, for she was sagging suddenly and her face was sliding slowly down his chest, down the cloth of his coat; and as he tried to lift her head, she pressed her mouth to his hand and held it; her shoulders jerked; she was sobbing.

“Kira, you little fool!”

He was laughing softly; his fingers caressed her hair; the fingers were trembling. He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the armchair, and sat down, holding her on his lap, forcing her lips to meet his.

“And that’s the strong Kira who never cries. You shouldn’t be so glad to see me, Kira. . . . Stop it, Kira. . . . You little fool. . . . My dearest, dearest . . .”

She tried to get up: “Leo. . . . You must take your coat off and . . .”

“Stay still.”

He held her, and she leaned back, and she felt suddenly that she had no strength to lift her arms, that she had no strength ever to move again; and the Kira who despised femininity, smiled a tender, radiant, trusting smile, weaker than a woman’s, the smile of a lost, bewildered child, her lashes heavy and sparkling with tears.

He looked at her, his eyes half-closed, and his glance was insulting in its open, mocking understanding of his power, a glance more voluptuous than a lover’s caress.

Then he turned away and asked: “Was it terribly hard for you—this winter?”

“A little. But we don’t have to talk about it. It’s past. Do you cough any more, Leo?”

“No.”

“And you’re well? Quite, quite, completely well? Free to live again?”

“I am well—yes. As to living again. . . .”

He shrugged. His face was tanned, his arms were strong, his cheeks were not hollow any longer; but she noticed something in his eyes that had not been cured; something that, perhaps, had grown beyond cure.

She said: “Leo, isn’t the worst of it over? Aren’t we ready now to begin. . . .”

“Begin with what? I have nothing to bring back to you—but a healthy body.”

“What else can I want?”

“Nothing else—from a gigolo.”

“Leo!”

“Well, am I not one?”

“Leo, don’t you love me?”

“I love you. I love you too much. I wish I didn’t. It would all be so simple if I didn’t. But to love a woman and to see her dragging herself through this hell they call life here, and not to help her, but to let her drag you instead . . . Did you really think I’d bless this health you gave back to me? I hate it because you gave it back to me. And because I love you.”

She laughed softly: “Would you rather hate me, too?”

“Yes. I’d rather. You are that which I’ve lost long ago. But I love you so much that I’m trying to hold on to it, to that which you think I am, which I know I was, even though I can’t hold on much longer. And that’s all I have to offer you, Kira.”

She looked up at him quietly, and her eyes were dry, and her smile was not a child’s and stronger than a woman’s. She said: “There is only one thing that matters and that we’ll remember. The rest doesn’t matter. I don’t care what life is to be nor what it does to us. But it won’t break us. Neither you nor me. That’s our only weapon. That’s the only banner we can hold against all those others around us. That’s all we have to know about the future.”

He said more tenderly, more earnestly than she had ever heard him say: “Kira, I wish you weren’t what you are.”

Then she buried her face on his shoulder and whispered: “And we won’t ever talk about it again. And now we don’t have to talk at all, do we? I have to get up and powder my nose, and you have to take that coat off, and take a bath, and I’ll fix you some lunch. . . . But first let me sit with you, for just a few moments, just sit still . . . don’t move . . . Leo. . . .”

Her head slid slowly to his breast, to his knees, to his feet.

III

IN THE AFTERNOON, THREE DAYS LATER, THE door bell rang and Kira went to answer it.

She threw the door half-open, protected by a chain. On the stair-landing stood a heavy woman in a smart, expensive overcoat. Her face, slanting back from a prominent, pointed chin, was raised with a studied movement of graceful inquiry, revealing a stout, white neck; her full lips, smeared with a violent magenta, were half-open, revealing strong white teeth. Her hand poised on a broad expanse of green silk scarf, she drawled in a self-consciously gracious voice: “Does Leo Kovalensky live here?”

Kira looked incredulously at the diamond rings sparkling on the short, white fingers. She answered: “Why . . . yes.”

She did not remove the chain; she stood staring at the woman. The woman said with a little accent of gentle firmness: “I want to see him.”

Kira let her enter. The woman looked at Kira curiously, inquisitively, narrowing her eyes.

Leo rose with a surprised frown when they entered the room. The woman extended both hands to him in a dramatic greeting. “Leo! So delightful to see you again! I’ve remembered my threat to find you. I really intend to be a nuisance!”

Leo did not smile in answer to her expectant giggle; he bowed graciously; he said: “Kira, this is Antonina Pavlovna Platoshkina—Kira Alexandrovna Argounova.”

“Oh! . . . Argounova? . . . Oh . . .” said Antonina Pavlovna, as if noting the fact that Kira’s name was not Leo’s; she sounded almost relieved. She extended her arm, in a straight line, her fingers drooping, as if she were giving her hand to a man and expecting him to kiss it.

“Antonina Pavlovna and I were neighbors in the sanatorium,” Leo explained.

“And he was a perfectly ungracious neighbor, I must complain,” Antonina Pavlovna laughed huskily. “He wouldn’t wait for me—and I wanted so much to leave on the same train. And, Leo, you didn’t give me your apartment number and I had a perfectly terrible time trying to get it out of the Upravdom. Upravdoms are one of the unavoidable nuisances of our era, and all we of the intelligentsia can do is bear with it with a sense of humor.”

She took off her coat. She wore a plain black dress of new, expensive silk in the latest fashion, and foreign earrings of green celluloid circles. Her hair was combed back severely off her forehead and two trim, sleek coils were flattened against her cheeks smeared with a very white powder. Her hair was an incredible orange, the color of a magnificent string of amber that swung like a pendulum, striking her stomach, when she moved. Her dress fitted tightly, slanting sharply from very wide hips down to heavy legs with very thin ankles and very small feet that seemed crushed under their disproportionate burden. She sat down and her stomach settled in a wide fold over her lap.

“When did you return, Tonia?” Leo asked.

“Yesterday. And oh, what a trip!” she sighed. “These Soviet trains! Really, I believe I lost everything I accomplished in the sanatorium. I was taking a rest cure for my nerves,” she explained, pointing her chin at Kira. “And what sensitive person isn’t a nervous wreck these days? But the Crimea! That place saved my life.”

“It was beautiful,” Leo agreed.

“But, really, it lost all its charm after you left, Leo. You know, he was the most charming patient in that dull sanatorium and everybody admired him so much—oh, purely platonically, my dear, if you’re worried,” she winked at Kira.

“I’m not,” said Kira.

“Leo was so kind as to help me with my French lessons. I was learning . . . that is, brushing up on my French. It is such a relief, in these drab days, to stumble upon a person like Leo. You must forgive me, Leo. I realize that I may be an unwelcome guest, but it would be too much to expect of a woman if you asked her to give up a beautiful friendship in this revolting city where real people are so rare!”

“Why, no, Tonia, I’m glad you took the trouble to find me.”

“Ah, these people here! I know so many of them. We meet, we talk, we shake hands. What does it mean? Nothing. Nothing but an empty physical gesture. Who among them knows the deeper significance of the spirit or the real meaning of our lives?”

Leo’s slow, faint smile was not one of understanding; but he said: “One could forget one’s troubles in some engrossing activity—if it were permitted these days.”

“How profoundly true! Of course, the modern woman of culture is organically incapable of remaining inactive. I have a tremendous program outlined for myself for this coming winter. I’m going to study. I propose to master ancient Egypt.”

“What?” asked Kira.

“Ancient Egypt,” said Antonina Pavlovna. “I want to recapture its spirit in all its entirety. There is a profound significance in these far-away cultures, a mysterious bond with the present, which we moderns do not appreciate fully. I am certain that in a former incarnation . . . You are not interested in theosophy, are you, Leo?”

“No.”

“I can appreciate your viewpoint, of course, but I have given it a thorough study and a great deal of thought. There is a transcendental truth in it, an explanation for so many of the baffling phenomena of our existence. Of course, I have one of those natures that long for the mystical. However, you must not think me old-fashioned. You mustn’t be surprised if I tell you that I’m studying political economy.”

“You are, Tonia? Why?”

“One cannot be out of tune with one’s time, you know. To criticize, we must understand. I find it surprisingly thrilling. There is a certain peculiar romance in labor and markets and machines. Apropos, have you read the latest volume of verse by Valentina Sirkina?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Thoroughly delightful. Such depth of emotion, and yet—completely modern, so essentially modern! There is a verse about—how does it go?—about my heart is asbestos that remains cool over the blast-furnace of my emotions—or something like that—it is really superb.”

“I must admit I don’t read modern poets.”

“I’ll bring you that book, Leo. I know you’ll understand and appreciate it. And I’m sure Kira Alexandrovna will enjoy it.”

“Thank you,” said Kira, “but I never read poetry.”

“Indeed? How peculiar! I’m sure you care for music?”

“Fox-trots,” said Kira.

“Really?” Antonina Pavlovna smiled condescendingly. When she smiled, her chin pointed further forward and her forehead slanted back; her lips opened slowly, uncomfortably, as if slithering apart. “Speaking of music,” she turned to Leo, “it is another essential item on my winter’s program. I’ve made Koko promise me a box for every concert at the State Philharmony. Poor Koko! He’s really very artistic at heart, if one knows how to approach him, but I’m afraid that his unfortunate early upbringing has not trained him for an appreciation of symphonic music. I shall, probably, have to be alone in my box. Oh—here’s a happy thought!—you may share it with me, Leo. . . . And Kira Alexandrovna, of course,” she nodded to Kira and turned to Leo again.

“Thank you, Tonia,” he answered, “but I’m afraid we won’t have much time for that, this winter.”

“Leo, my dear!” she spread her arms in a wide gesture of sympathy, “don’t you think I understand? Your financial position is. . . . Ah, these are not times for men like you. However, do not lose courage. With my connections . . . Koko cannot refuse me anything. He hated to see me leave for the Crimea. He missed me so much—you wouldn’t believe how glad he was to see me back. He could not be more devoted if he were my husband. In fact, he couldn’t be as devoted as he is. Marriage is an outmoded prejudice—as you know.” She smiled at Kira.

“I’m sure the Crimea has helped your health,” Leo said hastily, coldly.

“Ah, there’s no other place like it! It is a bit of paradise. The dark, velvet sky, the diamond stars, the sea, and that divine moonlight! You know, I’ve wondered why you remained so indifferent to its magic spell. I thought you were essentially unromantic. Of course, I can understand the reason—now.”

She threw a swift glance at Kira. The glance froze, as if seized and held by Kira’s fixed eyes. Then Antonina Pavlovna’s lips slithered into a cold smile and she turned away, sighing: “You men are strange creatures. To understand you is a whole science in itself and the first duty of every real woman. I’ve mastered it thoroughly in the bitter classroom of experience!” She sighed wearily, with a deprecatory shrug. “I’ve known heroic officers of the White Army. I’ve known brutal, iron commissars.” She laughed shrilly. “I confess it openly. Why not? We are all moderns here. . . . I’ve known many people who misunderstood me. But I do not mind. I can forgive them. You know—noblesse oblige.”

Kira sat on the arm of a chair, watching the toes of her old slippers, studying her fingernails, while they talked. It was dark beyond the window, when Antonina Pavlovna glanced at a diamond-studded wristwatch.

“Oh, how late it is! It’s been so delightful that I haven’t noticed the time at all. I must hurry home. Koko is probably getting melancholy without me, the poor child.”

She opened her bag, took out a little mirror and, holding it delicately in two straight fingers, inspected her face carefully through narrowed eyes. She took out a little scarlet bottle with a tiny brush and smeared a purplish blot over her lips.

“Delightful stuff,” she explained, showing the bottle to Kira, “infinitely better than lipstick. I notice you don’t use much lipstick, Kira Alexandrovna. I would recommend it strongly. As woman to woman, one should never neglect one’s appearance, you know. Particularly,” she laughed, a friendly, intimate laughter, “particularly when one has such valuable property to guard.”

At the door in the lobby, Antonina Pavlovna turned to Leo: “Don’t worry about this coming winter, Leo. With my connections . . . Koko, of course, knows the highest . . . why, I’d be afraid to whisper some of the names he knows and . . . of course, Koko is putty in my hands. You must meet him, Leo. We can do a lot for you. I shall see to it that a magnificent young man like you is not lost in this Soviet swamp.”

“Thank you, Tonia. I appreciate your offer. But I hope that I’m not quite lost—yet.”

“Just what is his position?” Kira asked suddenly.

“Koko? He’s assistant manager of the Food Trust—officially,” Antonina Pavlovna winked mysteriously with a brief chuckle, lowering her voice; then, waving a hand with a diamond that flashed a swift spark in the light of an electric bulb, she drawled: “Au revoir, mes amis. I shall see you soon.”

Slamming the chain over the door, Kira gasped: “Leo, I’m surprised!”

“By what?”

“That you can be acquainted with such an unspeakable . . .”

“I do not presume to criticize your friends.”

They were passing through Marisha’s room. In a corner by the window, Marisha raised her head from her book and looked at Leo curiously, startled by the tone of his voice. They crossed the room and Leo slammed the door behind them.

“You could have been civil, at least,” he stated.

“What do you mean?”

“You could have said a couple of words—every other hour.”

“She didn’t come to hear me talk.”

“I didn’t invite her. And she’s not a friend of mine. You didn’t have to be so tragic about it.”

“But, Leo, where did you pick that up?”

“That was in the same sanatorium and it happened to have foreign books, which is a rare treat when you have to spend your days reading Soviet trash. That’s how we got acquainted. What’s wrong with that?”

“But, Leo, don’t you see what she’s after?”

“Of course I do. Are you really afraid she’ll get it?”

“Leo!”

“Well, then, why can’t I speak to her? She’s a harmless fool who’s trying to amount to something. And she really does have connections.”

“But to associate with that type of person. . . .”

“She’s no worse than the Red trash one has to associate with, these days. And, at least, she’s not Red.”

“Well, as you wish.”

“Oh, forget it, Kira. She’ll never come again.”

He was smiling at her, suddenly, warmly, his eyes bright, as if nothing had happened, and she surrendered, her hands on his shoulders, whispering: “Leo, don’t you see? Nothing of that type should even dare to look at you.”

He laughed, patting her cheek: “Let her look. It won’t hurt me.”

Leo had said: “Write to your uncle in Budapest at once. Thank him and tell him not to send us money any longer. I’m well. We’ll struggle on our own. I have written down the exact sum of everything you sent me. Have you kept track of what you spent here, as I asked? We’ll have to start repaying him—if he’s patient, for the devil alone knows how long it will take.”

She had whispered: “Yes, Leo,” without looking at him.

He had noticed her gold wristwatch and frowned: “Where did that come from?”

She had said: “It’s a present. From . . . Andrei Taganov.”

“Oh, really? So you’re accepting presents from him?”

“Leo!” She had whirled upon him defiantly, then she had pleaded: “Why not, Leo? It was my birthday and I couldn’t hurt his feelings.”

He had shrugged contemptuously: “Oh, I don’t mind. It’s your own business. Personally, I wouldn’t feel comfortable wearing something paid for with G.P.U. money.”

She had hidden the cigarette lighter, and the silk stockings, and the perfume. She had told Leo that the red dress had been made for his return. He wondered why she did not like to wear it.

She spent most of her days in the halls of the Winter Palace, saying to the gaping excursionists: “. . . and it is the duty of every conscientious citizen to be acquainted with the history of our revolutionary movement in order to become a trained, enlightened fighter in the ranks of the World Revolution—our highest goal.”

In the evenings, she tried to tell Leo: “I have to go out tonight. I’ve promised Irina . . .” or: “I really must go out tonight. It’s a meeting of Excursion Workers.” But he made her stay at home.

She looked into the mirror, sometimes, and wondered about the eyes people had told her were so clear, so honest.

She did not go out at night. She could not tear herself away. She could not satisfy the hunger of looking at him, of sitting silently, huddled in an armchair, watching him move across the room. She would watch the lines of his body as he stood at a window, turned away from her, his hands spread on his waistline, holding his back, his body leaning lightly backward against his hands, one tense, sunburned muscle of his neck showing under dark, dishevelled hair, thrilling as a suggestion, a promise of his face which she could not see. Then she would rise and walk hesitantly toward him and let her hand run slowly down the hard tendon of his neck, without a word, without a kiss.

Then she could think, with a cold wonder, of another man who was waiting for her somewhere.

But she knew that she had to see Andrei. One evening, she put on the red dress and told Leo that she had promised to call on her family.

“May I go with you?” he asked. “I haven’t seen them since my return and I owe them a visit.”

“No, not this time, Leo,” she answered calmly. “I’d rather you wouldn’t. Mother is . . . she’s so changed . . . I know you won’t get along with her.”

“Do you have to go tonight, Kira? I hate to let you go and to stay here alone. I’ve been without you for such a long time.”

“I’ve promised them I’d come tonight. I won’t stay late. I’ll be back soon.”

She was putting on her coat when the door bell rang.

It was Marisha who went to open the door and they heard Galina Petrovna’s voice sweeping through the room, approaching: “Well, I’m glad they’re home. Well, if I thought they were visiting others and neglecting their old parents and . . .”

Galina Petrovna entered first; Lydia followed; Alexander Dimitrievitch shuffled in behind them.

“Leo, my dear child!” Galina Petrovna swept toward him and kissed him on both cheeks. “I’m so glad to see you! Welcome back to Leningrad.”

Lydia shook hands limply; she removed her old hat, sat down heavily, as if collapsing, and fumbled with her hairpins: a long strand of hair was falling loosely out of the careless roll at the back of her neck. She was very pale and used no powder; her nose was shiny; she stared mournfully at the floor.

Alexander Dimitrievitch muttered: “I’m glad you’re well, my boy,” and patted Leo’s shoulder uncertainly, with the timid, frightened look of an animal expecting to be hurt.

Kira faced them calmly and said with cold assurance: “Why did you come? I was just starting for your house, as I promised.”

“As you . . .” Galina Petrovna began, but Kira interrupted:

“Well, since you’re here, take your coats off.”

“I’m so happy you’re well again, Leo,” said Galina Petrovna. “I feel as if you were my son. You really are my son. Everything else is just bourgeois prejudices.”

“Mother!” Lydia remonstrated feebly, hopelessly.

Galina Petrovna settled down in a comfortable armchair. Alexander Dimitrievitch sat apologetically on the edge of a chair by the door.

“Thank you for coming,” Leo smiled graciously. “My only excuse for neglecting to call, as I should have, is . . .”

“Kira,” Galina Petrovna finished for him. “Do you know that we haven’t seen her more than three times while you were away?”

“I have a letter for you, Kira,” Lydia said suddenly.

“A letter?” Kira’s voice jerked slightly.

“Yes. It came today.”

There was no return address on the envelope; but Kira knew the handwriting. She threw the letter indifferently down on the table.

“Don’t you want to open it?” Leo asked.

“No hurry,” she said evenly. “Nothing important.”

“Well, Leo?” Galina Petrovna’s voice boomed; her voice had become louder, clearer. “What are your plans for the winter? This is such an interesting year we’re entering. So many opportunities, particularly for the young.”

“So many . . . what?” Leo asked.

“Such a wide field of activity! It’s not like in the dying, decadent cities of Europe where people slave all their lives for measly wages and a pitiful little existence. Here—each one of us has an opportunity to be a useful, creative member of a stupendous whole. Here—one’s work is not merely a wasted effort to satisfy one’s petty hunger, but a contribution to the gigantic building of humanity’s future.”

“Mother,” Kira asked, “who wrote all that down for you?”

“Really, Kira,” Galina Petrovna drew her shoulders up, “you’re not only impertinent to your mother, but I think you’re also a bad influence on Leo’s future.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that, Galina Petrovna,” said Leo.

“And of course, Leo, I hope that you’re modern enough to outlive the prejudices we’ve all shared. We must admit that the Soviet Government is the only progressive government in the world. It utilizes all its human resources. Even an old person like me, who has been useless all her life, can find an opportunity for creative toil. And as for young people like you . . .”

“Where are you working, Galina Petrovna?” Leo asked.

“Oh, don’t you know? I’m teaching in a Labor School—they used to be called High Schools, you know. Sewing and fancy needlework. We all realize that a practical subject like sewing is much more important to our little future citizens than the dead, useless things, such as Latin, which were taught in the old bourgeois days. And our methods? We’re centuries ahead of Europe. For instance, take the complex method that we’re . . .”

“Mother,” Lydia said wearily, “Leo may not be interested.”

“Nonsense! Leo is a modern young man. Now, this method we’re using at present. . . . For instance, what did they do in the old days? The children had to memorize mechanically so many dry, disjoined subjects—history, physics, arithmetic—with no connection between them at all. What do we do now? We have the complex method. Take last week, for instance. Our subject was Factory. So every teacher had to build his course around that central subject. In the history class they taught the growth and development of factories; in the physics class they taught all about machinery; the arithmetic teacher gave them problems about production and consumption; in the art class they drew factory interiors. And in my class—we made overalls and blouses. Don’t you see the advantage of the method? The indelible impression it will leave in the children’s minds? Overalls and blouses—practical, concrete, instead of teaching them a lot of dry, theoretical seams and stitches.”

Lydia’s head drooped listlessly; she had heard it all many times.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying your work, Galina Petrovna,” said Leo.

“I’m glad you get your rations,” said Kira.

“I do, indeed,” Galina Petrovna stated proudly. “Of course, our distribution of commodities has not as yet reached a level of perfection and, really, the sunflower-seed oil I got last week was so rancid we couldn’t use it . . . but then, this is a transitional period of . . .”

“. . . State Construction!” Alexander Dimitrievitch yelled suddenly, hastily, as a well-memorized lesson.

“And what are you doing, Alexander Dimitrievitch?” Leo asked.

“Oh, I’m working!” Alexander Dimitrievitch jerked as if ready to jump forward, as if defending himself hastily against a dangerous accusation. “Yes, I’m working. I’m a Soviet employee. I am.”

“Of course,” Galina Petrovna drawled, “Alexander’s position is not as responsible as mine. He’s a bookkeeper in a district office somewhere way on the Vasilievsky Island—such a long trip every day!—and just what kind of an office is it, Alexander? But, anyway, he does have a bread card—though he doesn’t get enough even for himself alone.”

“But I’m working,” Alexander Dimitrievitch said meekly.

“Of course,” said Galina Petrovna, “I get better ration cards because I’m in a preferred class of pedagogues. I’m very active socially. Why, do you know, Leo, that I’ve been elected assistant secretary of the Teachers’ Council? It is gratifying to know that the present regime appreciates qualities of leadership. I even gave a speech on the methodology of modern education at an inter-club meeting where Lydia played the ‘Internationale’ so beautifully.”

“Sure,” Lydia said mournfully, “the ‘Internationale.’ I’m working, too. Musical director and accompanist in a Workers’ Club. A pound of bread a week and carfare and, sometimes, money, what’s left after the contributions each month.”

“Lydia is not pliable,” sighed Galina Petrovna.

“But I play the ‘Internationale,’ ” said Lydia, “and the Red funeral march—‘You fell as a victim’—and the Club songs. I even got applauded when I played the ‘Internationale’ at the meeting where Mother made the speech.”

Kira rose wearily to make tea. She pumped the Primus and put the kettle on, and watched it thoughtfully—and through the hissing of the flame, Galina Petrovna’s voice boomed loudly, rhythmically, as if addressing a class: “. . . yes, twice, imagine? Two honorable mentions in our students’ Wall Newspaper, as one of the three most modern and conscientious pedagogues. . . . Yes, I do have some influence. When that insolent young teacher tried to run the school, she was dismissed fast enough. And you can be sure I had something to say about that. . . .”

Kira did not hear the rest. She was watching the letter on the table, wondering. When she heard a voice again, it was Lydia’s and it was saying shrilly: “. . . spiritual consolation. I know. It has been revealed to me. There are secrets beyond our mortal minds. Holy Russia’s salvation will come from faith. It has been predicted. Through patience and long suffering shall we redeem our sins. . . .”

Behind the door, Marisha wound her gramophone and played “John Gray.” It was a new record and the swift little notes jerked gaily, clicking in sharp, short knocks.

“John Gray
Was brave and daring,
Kitty
Was very pretty . . .”

Kira sat, her chin in her hands, the glow of the Primus flame flickering under her nostrils, and she smiled suddenly, very softly, and said: “I like that song.”

“That awful, vulgar thing, so overplayed that I’m sick of it?” Lydia gasped.

“Yes. . . . Even if it is overplayed. . . . It has such a nice rhythm . . . clicking . . . like rivets driven into steel. . . .” She was speaking softly, simply, a little helplessly, as she seldom spoke to her family. She raised her head and looked at them, and—they had never seen it before—her eyes were pleading and hurt.

“Still thinking of your engineering, aren’t you?” asked Lydia.

“Sometimes . . .” Kira whispered.

“I can’t understand what’s wrong with you, Kira,” Galina Petrovna boomed. “You’re never satisfied. You have a perfectly good job, easy and well-paid, and you mope over some childish idea of yours. Excursion guides, like pedagogues, are considered no less important than engineers, these days. It is quite an honorary and responsible position, and contributes a great deal to social construction—and isn’t it more fascinating to build with living minds and ideologies rather than with bricks and steel?”

“It’s your own fault, Kira,” said Lydia. “You’ll always be unhappy since you refuse the consolation of faith.”

“What’s the use, Kira?” sighed Alexander Dimitrievitch.

“Who said anything about being unhappy?” Kira asked loudly, sharply, jerking her shoulders; she got up, took a cigarette and lighted it, bending, from the Primus flame.

“Kira has always been unmanageable,” said Galina Petrovna, “but one would think that these are times to make one come down to earth.”

“What are your plans for the winter, Leo?” Alexander Dimitrievitch asked, suddenly, indifferently, as if he expected no answer.

“None,” said Leo. “Nor for any winter to come.”

“I had a dream,” said Lydia, “about a crow and a hare. The hare crossed the road—and that’s an unlucky omen. But the crow sat on a tree that looked like a huge white chalice.”

“You take my nephew Victor, for instance,” said Galina Petrovna. “There’s a smart, modern young man. He’s graduating from the Institute this fall and he has an excellent job already. Supporting his whole family. Now there’s nothing sentimental about him. He has his eyes open to modern reality. He’ll go far, that boy.”

“But Vasili isn’t working,” Alexander Dimitrievitch remarked with a dull, quiet wonder.

“Vasili has never been practical,” stated Galina Petrovna.

Alexander Dimitrievitch said suddenly, irrelevantly: “It’s a pretty red dress you have, Kira.”

She smiled wearily: “Thank you, Father.”

“You don’t look so well, child. Tired?”

“No. Not particularly. I’m fine.”

Then Galina Petrovna’s voice drowned out the roar of the Primus: “. . . and, you know, it’s only the best teachers who are praised in the Wall Newspaper. Our students are very severe and . . .”

Late at night, when the guests had gone, Kira took the letter into the bathroom and opened it. It contained two lines:

Kira dearest,

Please forgive me for writing. But won’t you telephone me? Andrei

She led two excursions on the following day. Coming home, she told Leo that she would be dismissed if she did not attend a guides’ meeting that evening. She put on her red dress. On the stair-landing, she kissed Leo lightly, as he stood watching her go: she waved to him, vaulting down the stairs, with a cold, gay chuckle. On a street corner, she opened her purse, took out the little French bottle and pressed a few drops of perfume into her hair. She leaped into a tramway at full speed and stood hanging onto a leather strap, watching the lights swim past. When she got off, she walked, lightly, swiftly, with a cold, precise determination, toward the palace that was a Party Club.

She ran soundlessly up the crumbling marble stairway of the pavilion. She knocked sharply at the door.

When Andrei opened the door, she laughed, kissing him: “I know, I know, I know. . . . Don’t say it . . . I want to be forgiven first, and then I’ll explain.”

He whispered happily: “You’re forgiven. You don’t have to explain.”

She did not explain. She did not let him utter a complaint. She whirled around the room, and he tried to catch her, and the cloth of her coat felt cold in his hands, cold and fragrant of summer night air. He could whisper only: “Do you know that it’s been two weeks since . . .” But he did not finish the sentence.

Then she noticed that he was dressed for the street. “Were you going out, Andrei?”

“Oh . . . yes, I was, but it’s not important.”

“Where were you going?”

“Just to a Party Cell meeting.”

“A Party Cell meeting? And you say it’s not important? But you can’t miss that.”

“Yes, I can. I’m not going.”

“Andrei, I’d rather come tomorrow and let you . . .”

“No.”

“Well, then, let’s go out together. Take me to the European roof.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes. Now.”

He did not want to refuse. She did not want to notice the look in his eyes.

They sat at a white table in the roof garden on top of the European Hotel. They sat in a dim corner, and they could see nothing of the long room but the naked white back of a woman a few tables away, with a little strand of golden hair curling at the nape of her neck, escaping from the trim, lustrous waves of her coiffure, with a little golden shadow between her shoulder blades, her long fingers holding a glass with a liquid the color of her hair, swaying slowly; and beyond the woman, beyond a haze of yellow lights and bluish, rippling smoke, an orchestra played fox-trots from “Bajadere,” and the violinists swayed to the rhythm of the golden glass.

Andrei said: “It’s been two weeks, Kira, and . . . and you probably need it.” He slipped a roll of bills into her hand, his monthly salary.

She whispered, pushing it back, closing his fingers over the bills: “No, Andrei. . . . Thank you. . . . But I don’t need it. And . . . and I don’t think I’ll need it again. . . .”

“But . . .”

“You see, I get so many excursions to lead, and Mother got more classes at the school, and we all have clothes and everything we need, so that . . .”

“But, Kira, I want you to . . .”

“Please, Andrei! Don’t let’s argue. Not about that. . . . Please. . . . Keep it. . . . If . . . if I need it, I’ll tell you.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

The violins rumbled dully, heavily, and suddenly the music burst out like a firecracker, so that the swift, laughing notes could almost be seen as sparks shooting to the ceiling.

“You know,” said Kira, “I shouldn’t ask you to bring me here. It’s not a place for you. But I like it. It’s only a caricature and a very poor little one at that, but still it’s a caricature of what Europe is. Do you know that music they’re playing? It’s from ‘Bajadere.’ I saw it. They’re playing it in Europe, too. Like here . . . almost like here.”

“Kira,” Andrei asked, “that Leo Kovalensky, is he in love with you or something?”

She looked at him, and the reflection of an electric light stood still as two sparks in her eyes and as a bright little oval on her patent leather collar. “Why do you ask that?”

“I saw your cousin, Victor Dunaev, at a club meeting and he told me that Leo Kovalensky was back, and he smiled as if the news should mean something to me. I didn’t even know that Kovalensky had been away.”

“Yes, he’s back. He’s been away somewhere in the Crimea, for his health, I think. I don’t know whether he’s in love with me, but Victor was in love with me once, and he’s never forgiven me for that.”

“I see. I don’t like that man.”

“Victor?”

“Yes. And Leo Kovalensky, too. I hope you don’t see him often. I don’t trust that type of man.”

“Oh, I see him occasionally.”

The orchestra had stopped playing.

“Andrei, ask them to play something for me. Something I like. It’s called the ‘Song of Broken Glass.’ ”

He watched her as the music burst out again, splattering sparks of sound. It was the gayest music he had ever heard; and he had never seen her look sad; but she sat, motionless, staring helplessly, her eyes forlorn, bewildered.

“It’s very beautiful, this music, Kira,” he whispered, “why do you look like that?”

“It’s something I liked . . . long ago . . . when I was a child. . . . Andrei, did you ever feel as if something had been promised to you in your childhood, and you look at yourself and you think ‘I didn’t know, then, that this is what would happen to me’—and it’s strange, and funny, and a little sad?”

“No, I was never promised anything. There were so many things that I didn’t know, then, and it’s so strange to be learning them now. . . . You know, the first time I brought you here, I was ashamed to enter. I thought it was no place for a Party man. I thought . . .” he laughed softly, apologetically, “I thought I was making a sacrifice for you. And now I like it.”

“Why?”

“Because I like to sit in a place where I have no reason to be, no reason but to sit and look at you across the table. Because I like those lights on your collar. Because you have a very stern mouth—and I like that—but when you listen to that music, your mouth is gay, as if it were listening, too. And all those things, they have no meaning for anyone on earth but me, and when I’ve lived a life where every hour had to have a purpose, and suddenly I discover what it’s like to feel things that have no purpose but myself, and I see suddenly how sacred a purpose that can be, so that I can’t even argue, I can’t doubt, I can’t fight it, and I know, then, that a life is possible whose only justification is my own joy—then everything, everything else suddenly seems very different to me.”

She whispered: “Andrei, you shouldn’t talk like that. I feel as if I were taking you away from your own life, from everything that has been your life.”

“Don’t you want to feel it?”

“But doesn’t it frighten you? Don’t you think sometimes that it may bring you to a choice you have no right to make?”

He answered with so quiet a conviction that the word sounded light, unconcerned, with a calm beyond earnestness: “No.” He leaned toward her across the table, his eyes serene, his voice soft and steady: “Kira, you look frightened. And, really, you know, it’s not a serious question. I’ve never had many questions to face in my life. People create their own questions, because they’re afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don’t sit looking at it—walk. I joined the Party because I knew I was right. I love you because I know I’m right. In a way, you and my work are the same. Things are really very simple.”

“Not always, Andrei. You know your road. I don’t belong on it.”

“That’s not in the spirit of what you taught me.”

She whispered helplessly: “What did I teach you?”

The orchestra was playing the “Song of Broken Glass.” No one sang it. Andrei’s voice sounded like the words of that music. He was saying: “You remember, you said once that we had the same root somewhere in both of us, because we both believed in life? It’s a rare capacity and it can’t be taught. And it can’t be explained to those in whom that word—life—doesn’t awaken the kind of feeling that a temple does, or a military march, or the statue of a perfect body. It is for that feeling that I joined a Party which, at the time, could lead me only to Siberia. It is for that feeling that I wanted to fight against the most senseless and useless of monsters standing in the way of human life—and that’s something we call now humanity’s politics. And so my own existence was only the fight and the future. You taught me the present.”

She made a desperate attempt. She said slowly, watching him: “Andrei, when you told me you loved me, for the first time, you were hungry. I wanted to satisfy that hunger.”

“And that’s all?”

“That’s all.”

He laughed quietly, so quietly that she had to give up. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Kira. Women like you don’t love only like that.”

“What are women like me?”

“What temples are, and military marches, and . . .”

“Let’s have a drink, Andrei.”

“You want a drink?”

“Yes. Now.”

“All right.”

He ordered the drinks. He watched the glow of the glass at her lips, a long, thin, shivering line of liquid light between fingers that looked golden in its reflection. He said: “Let’s drink a toast to something I could never offer but in a place like this: to my life.”

“Your new life?”

“My only one.”

“Andrei, what if you lose it?”

“I can’t lose it.”

“But so many things can happen. I don’t want to hold your life in my hands.”

“But you’re holding it.”

“Andrei, you must think . . . once in a while . . . that it’s possible that . . . What if anything should happen to me?”

“Why think about it?”

“But it’s possible.”

She felt suddenly as if the words of his answer were the links of a chain she would never be able to break: “It’s also possible for every one of us to have to face a death sentence some day. Does it mean that we have to prepare for it?”

IV

THEY LEFT THE ROOF GARDEN EARLY, AND Kira asked Andrei to take her home; she was tired; she did not look at him.

He said: “Certainly, dearest,” and called a cab, and let her sit silently, her head on his shoulder, while he held her hand and kept silent, not to disturb her.

He left her at her parents’ house. She waited on a dark stair-landing and heard his cab driving away; she waited longer; for ten minutes, she stood in the darkness, leaning against a cold glass pane; beyond the pane there was a narrow airshaft and a bare brick wall with one window; in the window, a yellow candle shivered convulsively and the huge shadow of a woman’s arm kept rising and falling, senselessly, monotonously.

After ten minutes, Kira walked downstairs and hurried to a tramway.

Passing through Marisha’s room, she heard a stranger’s voice behind the door of her own room, a slow, deep, drawling voice that paused carefully, meticulously on every letter “o” and then rolled on as if on buttered hinges. She threw the door open.

The first person she saw was Antonina Pavlovna in a green brocaded turban, pointing her chin forward inquisitively; then she saw Leo; then she saw the man with the drawling voice—and her eyes froze, while he lumbered up, throwing at her a swift glance of appraisal and suspicion.

“Well, Kira, I thought you were spending the night with the excursion guides. And you said you’d be back early,” Leo greeted her sharply, while Antonina Pavlovna drawled:

“Good evening, Kira Alexandrovna.”

“I’m sorry. I got away as soon as I could,” Kira answered, her eyes staring at the stranger’s face.

“Kira, may I present? Karp Karpovitch Morozov—Kira Alexandrovna Argounova.”

She did not notice that Karp Karpovitch’s big fist was shaking her hand. She was looking at his face. His face had large blond freckles, light, narrow eyes, a heavy red mouth and a short nose with wide, vertical nostrils. She had seen it twice before; she remembered the speculator of the Nikolaevsky station, the food trader of the market.

She stood without removing her coat, without saying a word, cold with a feeling of sudden, inexplicable panic.

“What’s the matter, Kira?” Leo asked.

“Leo, haven’t we met Citizen Morozov before?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Never had the pleasure, Kira Alexandrovna,” Morozov drawled, his eyes at once shrewd and naïve and complacently friendly.

While Kira was removing her coat slowly, he turned to Leo: “And the store, Lev Sergeievitch, we’ll have it in the neighborhood of the Kouznetzky market. Best neighborhood. I have my eyes on a vacant store—just what we need. One window, narrow room—not many square meters to pay for—and I slipped a couple of tens to the Upravdom, and he’ll let us have a good, big basement thrown in—just what we need. I can take you there tomorrow, you’ll be most pleased.”

Kira’s coat dropped to the floor. A lamp stood on the table; in its glow, she could see Morozov’s face leaning toward Leo’s, his slow words muffled on his heavy lips to a sly, guilty whisper. She stared at Leo. He was not looking at her; his eyes were cold, widened slightly by a strange eagerness. She stood in the semi-darkness, beyond the circle of lamp light. The men paid no attention to her. Antonina Pavlovna threw a slow, expressionless glance at her and turned to the table, flicking ashes off her cigarette.

“How’s the Upravdom?” Leo asked.

“Couldn’t be better,” Morozov chuckled. “A friendly fellow, easy-going and . . . practical. A few ten-ruble bills and some vodka once in a while—with careful handling, he won’t cost us much. I told him to have the store cleaned for you. And we’ll order new signs—‘Lev Kovalensky. Food Products.’ ”

“What are you talking about?” Kira threw the words at Morozov with the violence of a slap in the face. She stood over him, the lamp light scattering broken shadows across her face. Morozov leaned away from her, closer to the table, startled.

“It’s a little business deal we’re discussing, Kira Alexandrovna,” he explained in a soft, conciliating drawl.

“I’ve promised you that Koko would do a great deal for Leo,” Antonina Pavlovna smiled.

“Kira, I’ll explain later,” Leo said slowly. The words were a command.

Silently, she pulled a chair to the table and sat facing Morozov, leaning forward on her crossed elbows. Morozov continued, trying not to look at her fixed eyes that seemed to register his every word: “You understand the advantage of the arrangement, Lev Sergeievitch. A private trader is no easy title to bear these days. Consider the rent on your living quarters, for instance. That alone could swallow all the profits. Now if we say you’re the sole owner—well, the rent won’t be so much since you have just this one room here to pay for. Now me, for instance, we have three large rooms, Tonia and me, and if they brand me a private trader—Good Lord Almighty!—the rent on that will wreck the whole business.”

“That’s all right,” said Leo. “I’ll carry it. I don’t mind if I’m called private trader or Nicholas II or Mephistopheles.”

“That’s it,” Morozov chuckled too loudly, his chin and stomach shaking. “That’s it. And, Lev Sergeievitch, sir, you won’t regret it. The profits—Lord bless us!—the profits will make the old what-they-called-bourgeois look like beggars. With our little scheme, we’ll sweep in the rubles, easy as picking ’em off the street. A year or two and we’re our own masters. A few hundreds slipped where necessary and we can fly abroad—to Paris, or Nice or Monte Carlo, or any of the foreign places that are pleasant and artistic.”

“Yes,” said Leo wearily. “Abroad.” Then he shook his head, as if breaking off an unbearable thought, and turned imperiously, throwing orders to the man who was hiring him: “But that friend of yours—the Communist—that’s the danger point of the whole scheme. Are you sure of him?”

Morozov spread his fat arms wide, shaking his head gently, reproachfully, his smile as soothing as Vaseline: “Lev Sergeievitch, soul of mine, you don’t think I’m a helpless babe making my first steps in business, do you? I’m as sure of him as of the eternal salvation of our souls, that’s how sure I am. He’s as smart a young man as ever you could hope to find. Quick and reasonable. And not one of those windbags that like to hear themselves talk. He’s not aiming to get nothing but big words and dried herring out of his life, no, sir. He knows when he has bread and butter in his hands—and he won’t let it slip through. And then again, he’s the one who takes the big chance. One of us common folks, if caught, might wiggle out with ten years in Siberia, but for one of them Party men—it’s the firing squad and no time to say good-bye.”

“You don’t have to worry, Leo,” Antonina Pavlovna smiled, “I’ve met the young man. We entertained him at a little tea—champagne and caviar, to be exact. He is smart and thoroughly dependable. You can have absolute faith in Koko’s business judgment.”

“And it’s not so difficult for him, either,” Morozov lowered his voice to a barely audible whisper. “He’s got one of those engineering positions with the railroad—and he’s got pull in all directions, like a river with tributaries. All he has to do is see that the food shipment is damaged a bit—dropped accidentally, or dampened a little, or something—and see that it’s pronounced worthless. That’s all. The rest is simple. The shipment goes quietly to the basement of our little store—‘Lev Kovalensky. Food Products.’ Nothing suspicious in that—is there?—just supplies for the store. The State co-operatives are short a load of stuff and the good citizens get nothing on their ration cards but an excuse and a promise. We wait a couple of weeks and we break up the load and ship it to our own customers—private dealers all over three provinces, a whole net of them, reasonable and discreet—I have all the addresses. And that’s all. Who has to know? If anyone comes snooping around the store—well, we’ll have some punk clerk there and he’ll sell them half a pound of butter if they ask for it, and that’s all we’re doing, for all they know—retail trade—open and legal.”

“And furthermore . . .” Antonina Pavlovna whispered, “if anything should go wrong, that young Communist has . . .”

“Yes,” Morozov whispered, and looked around furtively, and paused to listen for any suspicious sound from behind the door, and, reassured, murmured, his lips at Leo’s ear: “He has connections in the G.P.U. A powerful friend and protector. I’d be scared to mention the name.”

“Oh, we’ll be safe from that quarter,” Leo said contemptuously, “if we have enough money.”

“Money? Why, Lev Sergeievitch, soul of mine, we’ll have so much money you’ll be rolling ten-ruble bills to make cigarettes. We split it three ways, you understand; me, yourself and the Communist pal. We’ll have to slip a little to his friends at the railroad, and to the Upravdom, and we’ll pay your rent here—that’ll go under expenses. But then you must remember that on the face of it, you’re the sole owner. It’s your store, in your name. I have my position with the State Food Trust to think about. If I had a private store registered to my name, they’d kick me out. And I’ve got to keep that job. You can see how useful it will be to us.”

He winked at Leo. Leo did not smile in answer, but said: “You don’t have to worry. I’m not afraid.”

“Then, it’s settled, eh? Why, pal, in a month from now you won’t believe you ever lived like this. You’ll put some flesh on those sunken cheeks of yours, and some pretty clothes on Kira Alexandrovna, and a diamond bracelet or two, and then maybe a motor-car and . . .”

“Leo, are you insane?”

Kira’s chair clattered against the wall, and the lamp rocked and settled, shivering with a thin, glassy tinkle. She stood, the three startled faces turned to her.

“This isn’t a joke you’re playing on me, is it? Or have you lost your mind entirely?”

Leo leaned back slowly, looking straight at her, and asked coldly: “When did you assume the privilege of talking to me like that?”

“Leo! If that’s a new way of committing suicide, there are much simpler ones!”

“Really, Kira Alexandrovna, you are unnecessarily tragic about it,” Antonina Pavlovna remarked coolly.

“Now, now, Kira Alexandrovna, soul of mine,” Morozov said amicably, “sit down and calm yourself and let’s talk it over quietly. There’s nothing to be excited about.”

She cried: “Leo, don’t you see what they’re doing? You’re nothing but a living screen for them! They’re investing money. You’re investing your life!”

“I’m glad to find some use for it,” Leo said evenly.

“Leo, listen, I’ll be calm. Here. I’ll sit down. Listen to me: you don’t want to do a thing like that with your eyes closed. Look at it, think it over: you know how hard life is these days. You don’t want to make it harder, do you? You know the government we’re facing. It’s difficult enough to keep from under its wheels. Do you want to invite it to grind you? Don’t you know that it’s the firing squad for anyone caught in a crooked, criminal speculation?”

“I believe Leo has made it clear that he did not need advice,” said Antonina Pavlovna, holding her cigarette poised gracefully in mid-air.

“Kira Alexandrovna,” Morozov protested, “why use such strong names for a simple business proposition which is perfectly permissible and almost legal and . . .”

“You keep quiet,” Leo interrupted him and turned to Kira. “Listen, Kira, I know that this is as rotten and crooked a deal as could be made. And I know I’m taking a chance on my life. And I still want to do it. You understand?”

“Even if I begged you not to?”

“Nothing you can say will change things. It’s a filthy, low, disgraceful business. Certainly. But who forced me into it? Do you think I’ll spend the rest of my life crawling, begging for a job, starving, dying slowly? I’ve been back two weeks. Have I found work? Have I found a promise of work? So they shoot food speculators? Why don’t they give us a chance at something else? You don’t want me to risk my life. And what is my life? I have no career. I have no future. I couldn’t do what Victor Dunaev is doing if I were boiled in oil for punishment! I’m not risking much when I risk my life.”

“Lev Sergeievitch, soul of mine,” Morozov sighed with admiration, “how you can talk!”

“You two can go now,” Leo ordered. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Morozov, and we’ll look at the store.”

“Indeed, Leo, I’m surprised,” Antonina Pavlovna remarked, rising with dignity. “If you let yourself be influenced and do not seem to be gracious about appreciating an opportunity, when I thought you’d be grateful and . . .”

“Who’s to be grateful?” he threw at her sharply, rudely. “You need me and I need you. It’s a business deal. That’s all.”

“Sure, sure, that’s what it is,” said Morozov, “and I appreciate your help, Lev Sergeievitch. It’s all right, Tonia, soul of mine, you come along now and we’ll settle all the details tomorrow.”

He spread his legs wide apart and got up with effort, his hands leaning on his knees. His heavy stomach shivered when he moved, making his body seem uncomfortably close and apparent under the wrinkles of his suit.

At the door, he turned to Leo: “Well, Lev Sergeievitch, shall we shake on it? We can’t sign a contract, of course, you understand, but we’ll depend on your word.”

His mouth arched contemptuously, Leo extended his hand, as if the gesture were a victory over himself. Morozov shook it warmly, lengthily—and bowed low, in the old peasant manner, on his way out. Antonina Pavlovna followed without looking at Kira.

Leo accompanied them to the lobby. When he came back, Kira still stood as he had left her. He said before she had turned to him: “Kira, we won’t argue about it.”

“There’s only one thing, Leo,” she whispered, “and I couldn’t say it in front of them. You said you had nothing left in life. I thought you had . . . me.”

“I haven’t forgotten it. And that’s one of the reasons for what I’m doing. Listen, do you think I’m going to live off you for the rest of my days? Do you think I’m going to stand by and watch you dragging excursions and swallowing soot over the Primus? That fool Antonina doesn’t have to lead excursions. She wouldn’t wear your kind of dresses to scrub floors in—only she doesn’t have to scrub floors. Well, you won’t have to, either. You poor little fool! You don’t know what life can be. You’ve never seen it. But you’re going to see it. And I’m going to see it before they finish me. Listen, if I knew for certain that it’s the firing squad in six months—I’d still do it!”

She leaned against the table, because she felt faint. She whispered: “Leo, if I begged you, for all of my love for you, for all of yours, if I told you that I’d bless every hour of every excursion, every floor I’d scrub, every demonstration I’d have to attend, and every Club, and every red flag—if only you wouldn’t do this—would you still do it?”

He answered: “Yes.”

Citizen Karp Morozov met Citizen Pavel Syerov in a restaurant. They sat at a table in a dark corner. Citizen Morozov ordered cabbage soup. Citizen Syerov ordered tea and French pastry. Then Citizen Morozov leaned forward and whispered through the soup steam: “All settled, Pavlusha. I got the man. Saw him yesterday.”

Pavel Syerov held his cup at his lips, and his pale mouth barely moved, so that Morozov guessed rather than heard the question: “Who?”

“Lev Kovalensky is the name. Young. Hasn’t got a brass coin in the world and doesn’t give a damn. Desperate. Ready for anything.”

The white lips formed without sound: “Dependable?”

“Thoroughly.”

“Easy to handle?”

“Like a child.”

“Will keep his mouth shut?”

“Like a tomb.”

Morozov unloaded a heavy spoonful of cabbage into his mouth; one strand remained hanging out; he drew it in with a resounding smack. He leaned closer and breathed: “Besides, he’s got a social past. Father executed for counter-revolution. In case of anything . . . he’ll be the right person to blame. A treacherous aristocrat, you know.”

Syerov whispered: “All right.” His spoon cut into a chocolate éclair, and a soft, yellow custard spurted, spreading over his plate. He hissed through white lips, low, even sounds without expression: “Now listen here. I want my share in advance—on every load. I don’t want any delays. I don’t want to ask twice.”

“So help me God, Pavlusha, you’ll get it, you don’t have to tell me, you . . .”

“And another thing, I want caution. Understand? Caution. From now on, you don’t know me, see? If we meet by chance—we’re strangers. Antonina delivers the money to me in that whorehouse, as agreed.”

“Sure. Sure. I remember everything, Pavlusha.”

“Tell that Kovalensky bum to keep away. I don’t want to meet him.”

“Sure. You don’t have to.”

“Got the store?”

“Renting it today.”

“All right. Now sit still. I go first. You sit here for twenty minutes. Understand?”

“Sure. The Lord bless us.”

“Keep that for yourself. Good day.”

A secretary sat at a desk in the office of the railroad terminal. She sat behind a low wooden railing and typed, concentrating intently, drawing her upper lip in and biting her lower one. In front of the railing, there was an empty stretch of unswept floor and two chairs; six visitors waited patiently, two of them sitting. A door behind the secretary was marked: “Comrade Syerov.”

Comrade Syerov returned from lunch. He strode swiftly through the outer office, his tight, shiny military boots creaking. The six heads of the visitors jerked anxiously, following him with timid, pleading glances. He crossed the room as if it were empty. The secretary followed him into his inner office.

A picture of Lenin hung on the wall of the inner office, over a broad, new desk; it hung between a diagram showing the progress of the railroads, and a sign with red letters saying: COMRADES, STATE YOUR BUSINESS BRIEFLY. PROLETARIAN EFFICIENCY IS THE DISCIPLINE OF PEACE-TIME REVOLUTIONARY CONSTRUCTION.

Pavel Syerov took a flat, gold cigarette case from his pocket, lighted a cigarette, sat down at the desk and looked through a stack of papers. The secretary stood waiting diffidently.

Then he raised his head and asked: “What’s doing?”

“There are those citizens outside, Comrade Syerov, waiting to see you.”

“What about?”

“Mostly jobs.”

“Can’t see anyone today. Got to hurry to the Club meeting in half-an-hour. Have you typed my Club report on ‘Railroads as the blood vessels of the Proletarian State’?”

“Yes, Comrade Syerov. Here it is.”

“Fine.”

“Those citizens out there, Comrade Syerov, they’ve been waiting for three hours.”

“Tell them to go to hell. They can come tomorrow. If anything important comes up, call me at the Railroad Workers’ Union headquarters. I’ll be there after the Club. . . . And, by the way, I’ll be in late tomorrow.”

“Yes, Comrade Syerov.”

Pavel Syerov walked home from the Railroad Workers’ Union headquarters, with a Party friend. Syerov was in a cheerful mood. He whistled merrily and winked at passing girls. He said: “Think I’m going to throw a party tonight. Haven’t had any fun for three weeks. Feel like dissipating. What do you say?”

“Swell,” said the friend.

“Just a little crowd, our own bunch. At my place?”

“Swell.”

“I know a fellow who can get vodka—the real stuff. And let’s go to Des Gourmets and buy up everything they have in the joint.”

“I’m with you, pal.”

“Let’s celebrate.”

“What’ll we celebrate?”

“Never mind. Just celebrate. And we don’t have to worry about expenses. Hell! I’m not worrying about expenses when I want a good time.”

“That’s right, comrade.”

“Whom’ll we call? Let’s see: Grishka and Maxim, with their girls.”

“And Lizaveta.”

“Sure, I’ll call your Lizaveta. And Valka Dourova—there’s a girl!—she’ll bring half a dozen fellows along. And, I guess, Victor Dunaev with his girl, Marisha Lavrova. Victor’s a nit that’s going to be a big louse some day—have to keep on the good side of him. And . . . say, pal, do you think I should invite Comrade Sonia?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Oh, hell. That cow’s after me. Has been for over a year. Trying to make me. And I’ll be damned if I . . . No appetite.”

“But then, Pavlusha, you’ve got to be careful. If you hurt her feelings, with Comrade Sonia’s position . . .”

“I know. Hell! Two profunions and five women’s clubs wrapped around her little finger. Oh, hell! Oh, all right. I’ll call her.”

Pavel Syerov had pulled the curtains down over the three windows of his room. One of the girls had draped an orange scarf over the lamp, and it was almost dark. The guests’ faces were whitish blots strewn over the chairs, the davenport, the floor. In the middle of the floor stood a dish with a chocolate cake from Des Gourmets; someone had stepped on the cake. A broken bottle lay on the pillow of Syerov’s bed; Victor and Marisha sat on the bed. Victor’s hat lay on the floor by the davenport; it was being used as an ashtray. A gramophone played “John Gray”; the record was stuck, whirling, repeating persistently the same hoarse, grating notes; no one noticed it. A young man sat on the floor, leaning against a bed post, trying to sing; he muttered a tuneless, mournful chant into his collar; once in a while, he jerked his head up and screeched a high note, so that the others shuddered and someone flung a shoe or a pillow at him, yelling: “Grishka, shut up!” then his head drooped again. A girl lay in a corner, by the cuspidor, asleep, her hair glued in sticky strands to a glistening, flushed face.

Pavel Syerov staggered across the room, waving an empty bottle, muttering in an offended, insistent voice: “A drink. . . . Who wants a drink? . . . Doesn’t anyone want a drink? . . .”

“Hell, Pavel, your bottle’s empty . . .” someone called from the darkness.

He stopped, swaying, held the bottle up to the light, spat, and threw the bottle under the bed. “So you think I haven’t any more?” he waved his fist menacingly at the room. “Think I’m a piker, don’t you? . . . A measly piker who can’t afford enough vodka? . . . A measly piker, that’s what you think, don’t you? . . . Well, I’ll show you. . . .”

He fumbled in a box under the table and rose, swaying, brandishing an unopened bottle over his head. He laughed: “I can’t afford it, can I?” and reeled toward the corner from where the voice had come. He giggled at the white spots that turned to look up at him; he swung the bottle in a huge circle and brought it down to smash with a ringing blast against a book case. A girl screamed; glass splattered in a tinkling rain. A man swore violently.

“My stockings, Pavel, my stockings!” the girl sobbed, pulling her skirt high over drenched legs.

A man’s arms reached for her from the darkness: “Never mind, sweetheart. Take ’em off.”

Syerov giggled triumphantly: “So I can’t afford it, can I? . . . Can I? . . . Pavel Syerov can afford anything now! . . . Anything on this God-damn earth! . . . He can buy you all, guts and souls!”

Someone had crawled under the table and was fumbling in the box, looking for more bottles.

A hand knocked at the door.

“Come in!” roared Syerov. No one came in. The hand knocked again. “What the hell? What do you want?” He tottered to the door and threw it open.

His next-door neighbor, a fat, pallid woman, stood in the corridor, shivering in a long, flannel nightgown, clutching an old shawl over her shoulders, brushing strands of gray hair out of her sleepy eyes.

“Citizen Syerov,” she whined with indignation, “won’t you please stop that noise? At such an indecent hour . . . you young people have no shame left these days . . . no fear of God . . . no . . .”

“On your way, grandma, on your way!” Syerov ordered. “You crawl under your pillow and keep your damn mouth shut. Or would you like to take a ride to the G.P.U.?”

The woman wheeled about hastily and shuffled away, making the sign of the cross.

Comrade Sonia sat in a corner by the window, smoking. She wore a tailored khaki tunic with pockets on her hips and breast; it was made of expensive foreign cloth, but she kept dropping ashes on her skirt. A girl’s voice pleaded in a plaintive whisper at her elbow: “Say, Sonia, why did you have Dashka fired from the office? She needed the job, she did, and honest . . .”

“I do not discuss business matters outside of office hours,” Comrade Sonia answered coldly. “Besides, my actions are always motivated by the good of the collective.”

“Oh, sure, I don’t doubt it, but, listen, Sonia. . . .”

Comrade Sonia noticed Pavel Syerov swaying at the door. She rose and walked to him, cutting the girl off in the middle of a sentence.

“Come here, Pavel,” said Comrade Sonia, her strong arm supporting him, leading him to a chair. “You’d better sit down. Here. Let me make you comfortable.”

“You’re a pal, Sonia,” he muttered, while she stuffed a pillow between his shoulder blades, “you’re a real pal. Now you wouldn’t holler at me if I made a little noise, would you?”

“Of course not.”

“You don’t think that I can afford a little vodka, like some skunks here think, do you, Sonia?”

“Of course not, Pavel. Some people don’t know how to appreciate you.”

“That’s it. That’s just the trouble. I’m not appreciated. I’m a great man. I’m going to be a very great man. But they don’t know it. No one knows it. . . . I’m going to be a very, very powerful man. I’m going to make the foreign capitalists look like mice. . . . That’s what: mice. . . . I’m going to give orders to Comrade Lenin himself.”

“Pavel, our great chief is dead.”

“That’s right. So he is. Comrade Lenin’s dead. . . . Oh, what’s the use? . . . I’ve got to have a drink, Sonia. I feel very sad. Comrade Lenin’s dead.”

“That’s very nice of you, Pavel. But you’d better not have another drink just now.”

“But I’m very sad, Sonia. No one appreciates me.”

“I do, Pavel.”

“You’re a pal. You’re a real, real pal, Sonia. . . .”

On the bed, Victor held Marisha in his arms. She giggled, counting the buttons on his tunic; she lost count after the third one and started over again. She was whispering: “You’re a gentleman, Victor, that’s what you are, a gentleman. . . . That’s why I love you, because you’re a gentleman. . . . And I’m only a gutter brat. My mother, she was a cook before . . . before. . . . Well, anyway, before. I remember, many, many years ago, she used to work in a big, big house, they had horses and carriages and a bathroom, and I used to peel vegetables for her, in their kitchen. And there was an elegant young man, their son, oh, he had such pretty uniforms and he spoke all sorts of foreign languages, he looked just like you. And I didn’t even dare to look at him. And now I have a gentleman of my own,” she giggled happily, “isn’t it funny? I, Marishka the vegetable peeler!”

Victor said: “Oh, shut up!” and kissed her, his head drooping sleepily.

A girl giggled, standing over them in the darkness: “When are you two going to get registered at the marriage office?”

“Go ’way,” Marisha waved at her. “We’ll be registered. We’re engaged.”

Comrade Sonia had pulled a chair close to Syerov’s, and he sprawled, his head on her lap, while she stroked his hair. He was muttering: “You’re a rare woman, Sonia. . . . You’re a wonderful woman. . . . You understand me. . . .”

“I do, Pavel. I’ve always said that you were the most talented, the most brilliant young man in our collective.”

“You’re a wonderful woman, Sonia.” He was kissing her, moaning: “No one appreciates me.”

He had pulled her down to the floor, leaning over her soft, heavy body, whispering: “A fellow needs a woman. . . . A smart, understanding, strong and hefty woman. . . . Who cares for those skinny scarecrows? . . . I like a woman like you, Sonia. . . .”

He did not know how he found himself suddenly in the little storage closet between his room and that of his neighbors. A cobwebbed window high under the ceiling threw a dusty ray of moonlight on a towering pile of boxes and baskets. He was leaning against Comrade Sonia’s shoulder, stammering: “They think Pavel Syerov’s just gonna be another stray mongrel eating outta slop pails all his life. . . . Well, I’ll show ’em! Pavel Syerov’ll show ’em who’s got the whip. . . . I’ve got a secret . . . a great secret, Sonia. . . . But I can’t tell you. . . . But I’ve always liked you, Sonia. . . . I’ve always needed a woman like you, Sonia . . . soft and comfortable. . . .”

When he tried to stretch himself on the flat top of a large wicker basket, the piled tower shuddered, swayed and came down with a thundering crash. The neighbors knocked furiously, protesting, against the wall.

Comrade Sonia and Pavel Syerov, on the floor, paid no attention.

V

THE CLERK WIPED HIS NOSE WITH THE back of his hand and wrapped a pound of butter in a newspaper. He had cut the butter from a soggy, yellow circle that stood on a wooden barrel top on the counter before him; he wiped the knife on his apron that had once been white. His pale eyes watered; his lips were a concavity on a crumpled face; his long chin hovered uncomfortably over a counter too high for the wizened skeleton under his old blue sweater. He sniffled and, showing two broken, blackened teeth, grinned at the pretty customer in the blue hat trimmed with cherries:

“Best butter in town, citizen, very best butter in town.”

On the counter stood a pyramid of square bread loaves, dusty black and grayish white. Above the counter hung a fringe of salami, bagels and dried mushrooms. Flies hovered at the greasy brass bowls of old weighing scales and crawled up the dusty panes of a single, narrow window. Over the window, smeared by the first rain of September, hung a sign:

LEV KOVALENSKY. FOOD PRODUCTS

The customer threw some silver coins on the counter and took her package. She was turning to go when she stopped involuntarily, for a brief, startled moment, looking at the young man who had entered. She did not know that he was the owner of the store; but she knew that she could not have many occasions to see that kind of young man on the streets of Petrograd. Leo wore a new, foreign overcoat with a belt pulled tightly across his trim, slender waistline; he wore a gray foreign felt hat, one side of its brim turned up over an arrogant profile with a cigarette held in the corner of his mouth by two long, straight fingers in a tight, glistening, foreign leather glove. He moved with the swift, confident, unconscious grace of a body that seemed born for these clothes, like the body of an animal for its regal fur, like the body of a foreign fashion plate.

The girl looked straight at him, softly, defiantly. He answered with a glance that was an invitation, and a mocking insult, and almost a promise. Then he turned and walked to the counter, as she went out slowly.

The clerk bowed low, so that his chin touched the circle of butter: “Good day, Lev Sergeievitch, good day, sir.”

Leo flicked the ashes off his cigarette into an empty can on the counter and asked: “Any cash in the register?”

“Yes, sir, can’t complain, business was good today, sir, and . . .”

“Let me have it.”

The man’s gnarled hand fingered his chin uncertainly; he muttered: “But, sir, Karp Karpovitch said last time you . . .”

“I said let me have it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Leo stuffed the bills carelessly into his wallet. He asked, lowering his voice: “Did that shipment arrive last night?”

The clerk nodded, blinking confidentially, with an intimate little giggle. “Shut up,” said Leo. “And be careful.”

“Why, yes, sir, yes indeed, sir, you know I’m the soul of discretion, as they say in society, if I may say so, sir. Karp Karpovitch knows that he can trust a loyal old servant who has worked for him for . . .”

“You could use some flypaper here once in a while.”

“Yes, sir, I . . .”

“I won’t be in again today. Keep the store open till the usual hour.”

“Yes, sir. Good day, sir.”

Leo walked out without answering.

On the corner, the girl in the blue hat rimmed with cherries was waiting for him. She smiled hopefully, uncertainly. He hesitated for a second; then he smiled and turned away; his smile spread a flush of red on the cheeks and nose under the blue brim. But she stood, watching him jump into a cab and drive away.

He drove to the Alexandrovsky market. He walked swiftly past the old wares spread on the sidewalk, ignoring the eager, pleading eyes of their owners. He stopped at a little booth displaying porcelain vases, marble clocks, bronze candlesticks, a priceless loot that had found its way from some demolished palace into the dusty twilight of the market.

“I want something for a gift,” he threw at the clerk who bowed solicitously. “A wedding gift.”

“Yes, indeed,” the clerk bowed. “Ah . . . for your bride, sir?”

“Certainly not. For a friend.”

He looked indifferently, contemptuously at the delicate, cracked dusty treasures that should have reposed on velvet cushions in a museum showcase.

“I want something better,” he ordered.

“Yes, indeed, sir,” the clerk bowed, “something beautiful for a beloved friend.”

“No. For someone I hate.” He pointed at a vase of blue and gold porcelain in a corner. “What’s that?”

“Ah, sir, that!” The clerk reached timidly for the vase and brought it slowly, cautiously to the counter; its price had made him hesitate to show it even to a customer in a foreign overcoat. “Genuine Sèvres, sir,” he whispered, brushing cobwebs out of the vase, upturning it to show the delicate mark on the bottom. “A royal object, sir,” he breathed, “a truly royal object.”

“I’ll take it,” said Leo.

The clerk swallowed and fumbled at his tie, watching the wallet in the gloved fingers of a customer who had not even asked the price.

“Comrades, in these days of peaceful State Construction, the workers of Proletarian culture are the shock battalion in the vanguard of the Revolution. The education of the Worker-Peasant masses is the great problem of our Red weekdays. We, excursion leaders, are a part of the great peace-time army of educators, imbued with the practical methodology of historical materialism, attuned to the spirit of Soviet reality, dedicated to . . .”

Kira sat in the ninth row, on a chair that threatened to fold under her at any moment. The meeting of excursion guides was coming to an end. Around her, heads drooped wearily and eyes looked furtively, hopefully at a large clock on the wall, over the speaker’s head. But Kira tried to listen; she held her eyes fixed on the speaker’s mouth to catch every word; she wished the words were louder. But the words could not drown out the voices ringing in her mind: a voice over the telephone, pleading, trying not to sound pleading: “Kira, why do I see you so seldom?”; an imperious voice in the darkness of her room at night: “What are those visits of yours, Kira? You said you were at Irina’s yesterday. But you weren’t.” How long could she keep it up? She had not seen Andrei for three weeks.

The chairs around her clattered; the meeting was over. She hurried down the stairway. She was saying to a fellow guide: “. . . yes, a splendid speech. Of course, our cultural duty to the proletariat is our primary goal . . .” It was easy to say. It was easy, after she had looked straight at Leo and laughed: “Leo, why those foolish questions? Don’t you trust me?” pressing her hand to her breast to hide the mark of Andrei’s teeth.

She hurried home. In Marisha’s room, two trunks and a wicker basket stood in the middle of the floor; empty drawers gaped open; posters were torn off the walls and piled on the trunks. Marisha was not at home.

In Kira’s room, a maid hurried from the hissing Primus by the window to take her coat.

“Leo hasn’t returned yet, has he?” Kira asked.

“No, ma’am.”

Kira’s coat was old, with rubbed patches on the elbows. Her dress had grease stains on the collar and threads hanging out of its frayed hem. With one swift movement, Kira pulled it off over her head and threw it to the maid, shaking her dishevelled hair. Then she fell on the bed, kicking off her old shoes with run-down heels, tearing off her darned, cotton stockings. The maid knelt by the bed, pulling thin silk stockings up Kira’s slender legs, slipping delicate, high-heeled pumps on her feet; then she rose to help her into a trim dark woolen dress. The maid put the old coat and shoes into a wardrobe that contained four new coats and six pairs of new shoes.

But Kira had to keep her job for the protection of the title of Soviet employee; and she had to wear her old clothes to protect her job.

An extravagant bouquet of white lilies, Leo’s latest gift, stood on the table. The white petals had caught a few specks of soot from the Primus. Kira had a maid, but no kitchen. The maid came for five hours every day and cooked their meals on the Primus by the window.

Leo came home, carrying the Sèvres vase wrapped in newspapers.

“Isn’t dinner ready yet?” he asked. “How many times have I told you that I hate to have that thing smoking when I come home?”

“It’s ready, sir.” The maid hurried to turn off the Primus, her young, round face obedient and frightened.

“Have you bought the present?” Kira asked.

“There it is. Don’t unwrap it. It’s fragile. Let’s have dinner. We’ll be late.”

After dinner, the maid washed the dishes and left. Kira sat at her mirror, carefully outlining her lips with a real French lipstick.

“You’re not wearing that dress, are you?” Leo asked.

“Why, yes.”

“No, you’re not. Put on the black velvet one.”

“But I don’t feel like dressing up. Not for Victor’s wedding. I wouldn’t go at all, if it weren’t for Uncle Vasili.”

“Well, since we’re going, I want you to look your best.”

“But, Leo, is it wise? He’s going to have many of his Party friends there. Why show them that we have money?”

“Why not? Certainly, we have money. Let them see that we have money. I’m not going to act like trash for the benefit of trash.”

“All right, Leo. As you wish.”

He looked at her appraisingly when she stood before him, severe as a nun, graceful as a Marquise of two centuries past, her hands very white and thin on the soft black velvet. He smiled with approval and took her hand, as if she were a lady at a Court reception, and kissed her palm, as if she were a courtesan.

“Leo, what did you buy for them?” she asked.

“Oh, just a vase. You may see it, if you wish.”

She unwrapped the newspapers and gasped. “Leo! But this . . . this cost a fortune!”

“Certainly. It’s Sèvres.”

“Leo, we can’t give it to them. We can’t let them see that we can afford it. Really, it’s dangerous.”

“Oh, nonsense.”

“Leo, you’re playing with fire. Why bring such a present for all the Communists to see?”

“That’s exactly why.”

“But they know that a regular private trader couldn’t afford gifts like this.”

“Oh, stop being foolish!”

“Take that thing back and exchange it.”

“I won’t.”

“Then I’m not going to the party.”

“Kira . . .”

“Leo, please!”

“Oh, very well!”

He seized the vase and flung it to the floor. It burst into glittering splinters. She gasped. He laughed: “Well, come on. You can buy them something else on our way there.”

She stood looking at the splinters. She said dully: “Leo, all that money . . .”

“Will you ever forget that word? Can’t we live without thinking of it all the time?”

“But you promised to save. We’ll need it. Things may not last as they are.”

“Oh, nonsense! We have plenty of time to start saving.”

“But don’t you know what they mean, all those hundreds, there, on the floor? Don’t you remember it’s your life that you’re gambling for every one of those rubles?”

“Certainly, I remember. That’s just what I do remember. How do I know I have a future? Why save? I may never need it. I’ve trembled over money long enough. Can’t I throw it away if I want to—while I can?”

“All right, Leo. Come on. We’ll be late.”

“Come on. Stop frowning. You look too lovely to frown.”

In the Dunaev dining room, a bunch of asters stood in a bowl on the table, and a bunch of daisies on the buffet, and a bunch of nasturtiums on an upright piano. The piano had been borrowed from the tenants; long streaks remained on the parquet, following its trail from the door.

Victor wore a modest dark suit and a modest expression of youthful happiness. He shook hands and smiled and bowed graciously, acknowledging congratulations. Marisha wore a purple woolen dress, and a white rose on her shoulder. She looked bewildered; she watched Victor’s movements with a timid, incredulous pride; she blushed and nodded hastily to the compliments of guests, and shook hands without knowing whose hands they were, her eyes vague, roving, searching for Victor.

The guests shuffled in, and muttered best wishes, and settled down uncomfortably. The friends of the family were strained, suspicious and cautiously, elaborately polite to the Party members. The Party members were awkward, uncertain and helplessly polite to the friends of Victor’s bourgeois past. The guests did not sound quite natural in their loud assurances of happiness, when they looked at the silent, stooped figure of Vasili Ivanovitch with a quiet, anguished question frozen in his eyes; at Irina in her best patched dress, with her jerky movements and her strident voice of unnatural gaiety.

Little Acia wore a pink bow on a stiff strand of hair, that kept slipping toward her nose. She giggled, once in a while, glancing up at a guest, biting her knuckles. She stared at Marisha with insolent curiosity. She snooped around the table that displayed the wedding gifts, an odd assortment of objects: a bronze clock, a China ashtray in the shape of a skull, a new Primus, a complete set of Lenin’s works in red paper covers. Irina watched her closely, to drag her away in time from the buffet and the dishes of pastry.

Galina Petrovna followed Victor persistently, patting him on the shoulder, repeating: “I’m so happy, so happy, my dear boy!” The muscles of Victor’s face were fixed in a wide grin, over his sparkling white teeth; he did not have to smile; he merely turned his head to her and nodded without a change of expression.

When Victor escaped from her, Galina Petrovna patted Vasili Ivanovitch’s shoulder, repeating: “I’m so happy, so happy, Vasili. You have a son to be proud of.” Vasili Ivanovitch nodded as if he had not heard.

When Kira entered, the first person she saw, standing alone by a window, was Andrei.

She stopped short at the door. His eyes met hers and moved slowly to the man who held her arm. Leo smiled faintly, contemptuously.

Kira walked straight to Andrei; she looked graceful, erect, supremely confident, in her regal black gown; she extended her hand, saying aloud: “Good evening, Andrei. I’m so glad to see you.”

His eyes told her silently that he understood, that he would be cautious, while he shook her hand with a friendly, impersonal smile.

Leo approached them slowly, indifferently. He bowed to Andrei and asked, his voice courteous, his smile insolent: “So you’re a friend of Victor’s, too?”

“As yourself,” Andrei answered.

Kira walked on, without hurry, to congratulate Victor and Marisha. She nodded to acquaintances, and smiled, and talked to Irina. She knew that the eyes of the man by the window were following her; she did not turn to look at him.

She had talked to many guests before she approached Andrei again, as if by chance; Leo was busy listening to Lydia at the other end of the room.

Andrei whispered eagerly: “Victor has always been inviting me. This is the first time that I’ve accepted. I knew you’d be here. Kira, it has been three weeks . . .”

“I know. I’m sorry, Andrei. But I couldn’t. I’ll explain later. I’m glad to see you—if you’re careful.”

“I’ll be careful. What a lovely dress, Kira. New?”

“Oh . . . yes. It’s a present from Mother.”

“Kira, do you always go to parties with him?”

“Do you mean Leo?”

“Yes.”

“I hope you don’t presume to dictate the friends with whom I may . . .”

“Kira!” He was startled by the icy firmness of her voice; he was apologizing: “Kira, I’m sorry. Of course I didn’t mean . . . Forgive me. I know I have no right to say . . . But you see, I’ve always disliked him.”

She smiled gaily, as if nothing had happened, and leaning into the shadow of the window niche, pressed his fingers swiftly.

“Don’t worry,” she whispered and, moving away from him, turned, shaking her hair, throwing at him through the tousled locks a glance of such warm, sparkling understanding that he caught his breath, thrilled by the secret they were guarding together, among strangers, for the first time.

Vasili Ivanovitch sat alone in a corner, under a lamp, and the light of a rose satin shade made his white hair pink. He looked at the shuffling feet, at the military boots of young Communists, at the blue fog of smoke streaks that billowed halfway up to the ceiling, in soft, round waves, like a heavy, transparent mixture boiling slowly, at a gold cross on a black velvet ribbon around Lydia’s throat, a bright spark piercing the fog across the room.

Kira approached and sat down beside him. He patted her hand, and said nothing, and knew that she knew. Then he said, as if she had followed his unspoken thoughts: “. . . I wouldn’t mind so much if he loved her. But he doesn’t. . . . Kira, you know, when he was a little boy with such big black eyes, I used to look at my customers, those ladies that were like paintings of empresses, and I wondered which one of them was the mother of the little beauty, growing up somewhere, who, some day, would be my daughter, too. . . . Have you met Marisha’s parents, Kira?”

Galina Petrovna had cornered Leo; she was saying enthusiastically: “. . . so glad you’re successful, Leo. I’ve always said that a brilliant young man, like you, would have no trouble at all. That dress of Kira’s is magnificent. I’m so happy to see what good care you take of my little girl. . . .”

Victor sat on the arm of a chair occupied by red-headed Rita Eksler. He leaned close to her, holding his cigarette to light the one at her lips. Rita had just divorced her third husband; she narrowed her eyes under the long red bangs and whispered confidential advice. They were laughing softly.

Marisha approached timidly and took Victor’s hand with a clumsy movement of coquetry. He jerked his hand away; he said impatiently: “We can’t neglect our guests, Marisha. Look, Comrade Sonia is alone. Go and talk to her.”

Marisha obeyed humbly. Rita’s glance followed her through a jet of smoke; Rita pulled her short skirt up and crossed her long, thin legs.

“Indeed,” said Comrade Sonia coldly with an accent of final authority, “I cannot say that I congratulate you upon your choice, Comrade Lavrova. A true proletarian does not marry out of her class.”

“But, Comrade Sonia,” Marisha protested, stupefied, “Victor is a Party member.”

“I’ve always said that the rules of Party admission were not sufficiently strict,” said Comrade Sonia.

Marisha wandered dejectedly through the crowd of guests. No one looked at her and she had nothing to say. She saw Vasili Ivanovitch alone by the buffet, lining up bottles and glasses. She approached him and smiled hesitantly. He looked at her, astonished. She said with determination, very quickly, bluntly, running her words together, blushing: “I know you don’t like me, Vasili Ivanovitch. But, you see, I . . . I love him so much.”

Vasili Ivanovitch looked at her, then said: “It’s very nice, child,” his voice expressionless.

Marisha’s family sat in a dark corner, solemn, morose, uncomfortable. Her father—a stooped, gray-haired man in a worker’s blouse and patched trousers—clasped long, calloused hands over his knee; his face, with a bitter slash of a mouth, leaned forward, his fierce, brilliant eyes studying the room fixedly; his eyes were dark and young on a withered face. His wife huddled timidly behind him, pallid and shapeless in a flowered calico dress, her face like a sandy shore washed by many rains into a dull, quiet gray. Marisha’s young brother, a lanky boy of eight, stood holding onto his mother’s skirt, throwing angry, suspicious glances at little Acia.

Victor joined Pavel Syerov and a group of three men in leather jackets. He threw one arm around Syerov’s shoulders and the other around those of the secretary of their Party Cell; he leaned on them both, intimately, confidentially, his dark eyes smiling. Comrade Sonia, approaching, heard him whisper: “. . . yes, I’m proud of my wife’s family and their revolutionary record. Her father—you know—he was exiled to Siberia, under the Czar.”

Comrade Sonia remarked: “Comrade Dunaev is a very smart man.”

Neither Victor nor Syerov liked the tone of her voice. Syerov protested: “Victor’s one of our best workers, Sonia.”

“I said Comrade Dunaev is very smart,” she repeated, and added: “I wouldn’t doubt his class loyalty. I’m sure he had nothing in common with patrician gentlemen such as that Citizen Kovalensky over there.”

Pavel Syerov looked fixedly at Leo’s tall figure bending over Rita Eksler. He asked: “Say, Victor, that man’s name—it’s Lev Kovalensky, isn’t it?”

“Leo Kovalensky, yes. He’s a very dear friend of my cousin’s. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. Nothing at all.”

Leo noticed Kira and Andrei sitting side by side on a window sill. He bowed to Rita, who shrugged impatiently, and walked toward them slowly.

“Am I intruding?” he asked.

“Not at all,” said Kira.

He sat down beside her. He took out his gold cigarette case and, opening it, held it out to her. She shook her head. He held it over to Andrei. Andrei took a cigarette. Leo bent forward to light it, leaning over Kira.

“Sociology being the favorite science of your Party,” said Leo, “don’t you find this wedding an occasion of particular interest, Comrade Taganov?”

“Why, Citizen Kovalensky?”

“As an opportunity to observe the essential immutability of human nature. A marriage for reasons of state is one of the oldest customs of mankind. It had always been advisable to marry into the ruling class.”

“You must remember,” said Andrei, “the social class to which the person concerned belongs.”

“Oh, nonsense!” said Kira. “They’re in love with each other.”

“Love,” said Leo, “is not part of the philosophy of Comrade Taganov’s Party. Is it?”

“It is a question that has no reason to interest you,” Andrei answered.

“Hasn’t it?” Leo asked slowly, looking at him. “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“Is it a question that contradicts your . . . theory on the subject?” Andrei asked.

“No. I think it supports my theory. You see, my theory is that members of your Party have a tendency to place their sexual desires high above their own class.” He was looking straight at Andrei, but he pointed lightly, with his cigarette, at Marisha across the room.

“If they do,” Andrei answered slowly, “they’re not always unsuccessful.” He was looking straight at Kira, but he pointed at Victor.

“Marisha looks happy,” said Kira. “Why do you resent it, Leo?”

“I resent the arrogant presumption of friends—” Leo began.

“—who do not know the limit of a friendship’s rights,” Andrei finished.

“Andrei,” said Kira, “we’re not being gallant to . . . Marisha.”

“I’m sorry,” he said hastily. “I’m sure Citizen Kovalensky won’t misunderstand me.”

“I don’t,” said Leo.

Irina had lined glasses on trays and Vasili Ivanovitch had filled them. She passed them to the guests, smiling vaguely at the hands that took the glasses; her smile was resigned, indifferent; she was silent, which was unusual for her.

The trays were emptied swiftly; the guests held the glasses eagerly, impatiently. Victor rose and the clatter of voices stopped short in a solemn silence.

“My dear friends,” Victor’s voice was clear, vibrant with his warmest persuasiveness, “I have no words to describe my deep gratitude to all of you for your kindness on this great day of my life. Let us all join in a toast to a person who is very dear to my heart, not only as a relative, but as a man who symbolizes a splendid example to us, young revolutionaries starting out on our lives of service to the cause of the Proletariat. A man who has devoted his life to that cause, who had risen bravely against the tyranny of the Czar, who has sacrificed his best years in the cold wastes of a Siberian exile, fighting for the great goal of the people’s freedom. And since that goal is ever paramount for all of us, since it is higher than all thoughts of personal happiness, let us drink our first toast to one of the first fighters for the triumph of the Worker-Peasant Soviets, my beloved father-in-law, Glieb Ilyitch Lavrov!”

Hands applauded noisily; glasses rose, clinking; all eyes turned to the corner where the gaunt, stooped figure of Marisha’s father got up slowly. Lavrov was holding his glass, but he did not smile; his gnarled hand motioned for silence. He said slowly, firmly, evenly:

“Listen here, you young whelps. I spent four years in Siberia. I spent them because I saw the people starved and ragged and crushed under a boot, and I asked for freedom. I still see the people starved and ragged and crushed under a boot. Only the boot is red. I didn’t go to Siberia to fight for a crazed, power-drunk, bloodthirsty gang that strangles the people as they’ve never been strangled before, that knows less of freedom than any Czar ever did! Go ahead and drink all you want, drink till you drown the last rag of conscience in your fool brains, drink to anything you wish. But when you drink to the Soviets, don’t drink to me!”

In the dead silence of the room, a man laughed suddenly, a loud, ringing, resonant laughter. It was Andrei Taganov.

Pavel Syerov jumped up and, throwing his arm around Victor’s shoulders, yelled, waving his glass: “Comrades, there are traitors even in the ranks of the workers! Let’s drink to those who are loyal!”

Then there was much noise, too much noise, glasses clinked, voices rose, hands slapped shoulders, everybody yelled at once. No one looked at Lavrov.

Only Vasili Ivanovitch approached him slowly and stood looking at him. Their eyes met. Vasili Ivanovitch extended his glass and said: “Let us drink to our children’s happiness, even though you don’t think that they will be happy, and I don’t, either.”

They drank.

At the other end of the room, Victor seized Marisha’s wrist, dragging her aside, and whispered, his white lips at her ear: “You damn fool! Why didn’t you tell me about him?”

She muttered, blinking, her eyes full of tears: “I was scared. I knew you wouldn’t like it, darling. . . . Oh, darling, you shouldn’t have . . .”

“Shut up!”

There were many drinks to follow. Victor had provided a good supply of bottles and Pavel Syerov helped to open them speedily. The trays of pastry were emptied. Dirty dishes were stacked on the tables. A few glasses were broken. Cigarette smoke hung as a motionless blue cloud under the ceiling.

Marisha’s family had left. Galina Petrovna sat sleepily, trying to keep her head erect. Alexander Dimitrievitch snored softly, his head on the arm of his chair. Little Acia had fallen asleep on a trunk in the corridor, her face smeared with chocolate frosting. Irina sat in a corner, watching the crowd indifferently. Comrade Sonia bent under the pink lamp, reading a newspaper. Victor and Pavel Syerov were the center of a group at the buffet that clinked glasses and tried to sing revolutionary songs in muffled voices. Marisha wandered about listlessly, her nose shiny, the white rose wilted and brownish on her shoulder.

Lydia staggered to the piano and put an arm around Marisha’s waist. “It’s beautiful,” said Lydia in a thick, sad voice, “it’s beautiful.”

“What’s beautiful?” Marisha asked.

“Love,” said Lydia. “Romance. That’s it: romance. . . . Ah, love is rare in this world. They are few, the chosen few. . . . We wander through a barren existence without romance. There are no beautiful feelings left in the world. Has it ever occurred to you that there are no beautiful feelings left in the world?”

“That’s too bad,” said Marisha.

“It’s sad,” Lydia sighed. “That’s what it is: sad. . . . You’re a very lucky girl. . . . But it’s sad. . . . Listen, I’m going to play something beautiful for you. . . . Something beautiful and sad. . . .”

She struck the keys uncertainly. She played a gypsy love song, her fingers rushing suddenly into quick, sharp trills, then lingering on long, sad chords, then slipping on the wrong notes, her head nodding.

Andrei whispered to Kira: “Let’s go, Kira. Let me take you home.”

“I can’t, Andrei. I . . .”

“I know. You came with him. But I don’t think he’s in a condition to take you home.”

He pointed at Leo across the room. Leo’s head, thrown back, was leaning heavily against an armchair. His one arm encircled Rita’s waist; the other was thrown across the shoulders of a pretty blonde who giggled softly at something he was muttering. Rita’s head rested on his shoulder and her hand caressed his dishevelled hair.

Kira rose silently, leaving Andrei, and walked to Leo. She stood before him and said softly: “Leo, we had better go home.”

He waved sleepily. “Leave me alone. Get out of here.”

She noticed suddenly that Andrei stood behind her. He said: “You’d better be careful of what you say, Kovalensky.”

Leo pushed Rita aside and the blonde slid, giggling, to the floor. He said, frowning, pointing at Kira: “And you’d better keep away from her. And you’d better stop sending her gifts and watches and such. I resent it.”

“What right have you to resent it?”

Leo stood up, swaying, smiling ominously: “What right? I’ll tell you what right. I’ll . . .”

“Leo,” Kira interrupted firmly, weighing her every word, her voice loud, her eyes holding his, “people are looking at you. Now what is it you wanted to say?”

“Nothing,” said Leo.

“If you weren’t drunk . . .” Andrei began.

“If I weren’t drunk, you’d what? You seem sober. And yet not sober enough not to be making a fool of yourself over a woman you have no right to approach.”

“Well, listen to me, you . . .”

“You’d better listen, Leo,” Kira interrupted again. “Andrei finds this the proper time to tell you something.”

“What is it, Comrade G.P.U.?”

“Nothing,” said Andrei.

“Then you’d better leave her alone.”

“Not while you seem to forget the respect that you owe to . . .”

“Are you defending her against me?” Leo burst out laughing. Leo’s laughter could be more insulting than his smile, more insulting than a slap in the face.

“Come on, Kira,” said Andrei, “I’ll take you home.”

“Yes,” said Kira.

“You’re not taking her anywhere!” Leo roared. “You’re . . .”

“Yes, he is!” Irina interrupted, stepping suddenly between them. Leo stared at her, amazed. With sudden strength, she whirled him about, pushing him into a window niche, while she nodded to Andrei, ordering him to hurry. He took Kira’s arm and led her out; she followed silently, obediently.

Irina hissed into Leo’s face: “Are you insane? What were you trying to do? Yell for all of them to hear that she’s your mistress?”

Leo shrugged and laughed indifferently: “All right. Let her go with anyone she pleases. If she thinks I’m jealous, she’s mistaken.”

Kira sat silently in the cab, her head thrown back, her eyes closed.

“Kira,” Andrei whispered, “that man is no friend of yours. You shouldn’t be seen with him.”

She did not answer.

When they were driving by the palace garden, he asked: “Kira, are you too tired to . . . stop at my house?”

She said indifferently: “No. I’m not. Let’s stop.”

When she came home, Leo was sprawled on the bed, fully dressed, asleep. He raised his head and looked at her.

“Where have you been, Kira?” he asked softly, helplessly.

“Just . . . just driving around,” she answered.

“I thought you had gone. Forever. . . . What was it I said tonight, Kira?”

“Nothing,” she whispered, kneeling by his side.

“You should leave me, Kira. . . . I wish you could leave me. . . . But you won’t. . . . You won’t leave me, Kira . . . Kira . . . will you?”

“No,” she whispered. “Leo, will you leave that business of yours?”

“No. It’s too late. But before . . . before they get me . . . I still have you, Kira . . . Kira . . . Kira . . . I love you . . . I still have you. . . .”

She whispered: “Yes,” pressing his face, white as marble, to the black velvet of her dress.

VI

“COMRADES! THE UNION OF SOCIALIST SOVIET REPUBLICS is surrounded by a hostile ring of enemies who watch and plot for its downfall. But no external enemy, no heinous plot of world imperialists is as dangerous to us as the internal enemy of dissension within our own ranks.”

Tall windows checkered into small square panes were closed against the gray void of an autumn sky. Columns of pale golden marble rose spreading into dim vaults. Five portraits of Lenin, somber as ikons, looked down upon a motionless crowd of leather jackets and red kerchiefs. A tall lectern, like the high, thin stem of a torch, stood at the head of the hall; above the lectern, like the flame of the torch spurting high to the ceiling, hung a banner of scarlet velvet with gold letters: “The All-Union Communist Party is the leader of the world fight for Freedom!” The hall had been a palace; it looked like a temple; those in it looked like an army, stern, silent and tense, receiving its orders. It was a Party meeting.

A speaker stood at the lectern. He had a little black beard, and wore a pince-nez that sparkled in the twilight; he waved long arms with very small hands. Nothing moved in the hall before him, but drops of rain rolling slowly down the window panes.

“Comrades! A grave new danger has been growing among us in the last year. I call it the danger of over-idealism. We’ve all heard the accusations of its deluded victims. They cry that Communism has failed, that we’ve surrendered our principles, that since the introduction of NEP—our New Economic Policy—the Communist Party has been retreating, fleeing before a new form of private profiteering which now rules our country. They claim that we are holding power for the sake of power and have forgotten our ideals. Such is the whining of weaklings and cowards who cannot face practical reality. It is true that we’ve had to abandon the policy of Military Communism, which had brought us to the brink of total starvation. It is true that we’ve had to make concessions to private traders. What of it? A retreat is not a defeat. A temporary compromise is not a surrender. We were betrayed by the spineless, weak-kneed, anemic socialists of foreign countries who sold out their working masses to their bourgeois masters. The World Revolution, which was to make a pure world Communism possible, has been delayed. We, therefore, have had to compromise, for the time being. We have had to abandon our theories of pure Communism and come down to earth, to the prosaic task of economic reconstruction. Some may think it a slow, drab, uninspiring process; but loyal Communists know the epic grandeur of our new economic front. Loyal Communists know the revolutionary value and significance of our ration cards, our Primuses, the lines at our co-operatives. Our great leader, Comrade Lenin, with his usual farsightedness, warned us several years ago against the danger of being ‘over-idealistic.’ That perilous fallacy has smitten some of our best heads. It has taken from us the man who had been one of our first leaders—Leon Trotsky. None of his past services to the Proletariat could redeem the treachery of his assertion that we’ve betrayed Communism. His followers have been thrown out of our ranks. That is why we’ve had Party purges. That is why these purges will continue. We must follow, with absolute discipline, the program dictated by our Party—and not the petty doubts and personal opinions of the few who still think of themselves and of their so-called conscience in terms of bourgeois individualism. We don’t need those who take a selfish, old-fashioned pride in the purity of their own convictions. We need those who are not afraid of a little compromise. We don’t need the obstinate, unbending Communist of iron. The new Communist is of rubber! Idealism, comrades, is a good thing in its proper amount. Too much of it is like too much of a good old wine: one’s liable to lose one’s head. Let this be a warning to any of Trotsky’s secret sympathizers who might still remain within the Party: no past services, no past record will save them from the axe of the next Party purge. They are traitors and they will be kicked out, no matter who they are or what they’ve been!”

Hands applauded clamorously. Then the still, black rows of jackets broke into motion; men rose; the meeting was closed.

They gathered in groups, whispering excitedly. They giggled, muffling the sound with a hand pressed to a mouth. They pointed furtively at a few solitary figures. Behind the huge checkered windows, the lead of the sky was turning to a dark blue steel.

“Congratulations, pal,” someone slapped Pavel Syerov’s shoulder. “I heard you’ve been elected vice-president of the Railroad Workers Union’s Club of Leninism.”

“Yes,” Syerov answered modestly.

“Good luck, Pavlusha. You’re an example of activity for all of us to follow. No worries about Party purges for you.”

“I’ve always striven to keep my Party loyalty above suspicion,” Syerov answered modestly.

“Say, pal, you see, it’s still two weeks till the first of the month and I’ve . . . well . . . I’m slightly in need of cash . . . and . . . well . . . I thought maybe. . . .”

“Sure,” said Syerov, opening his wallet, “with pleasure.”

“You never turn a friend down, Pavlusha. And you always seem to have enough to . . .”

“Just being economical with my salary,” Syerov said modestly.

Comrade Sonia was waving her short arms, trying to plough her way through an eager group that followed her persistently. She was snapping at them: “I’m sorry, comrade, that’s out of the question. . . . Yes, comrade, I’ll be glad to give you an appointment. Call my secretary at the Zhenotdel. . . . You will find it wise to follow my suggestion, comrade. . . . I’d be happy to address your Circle, comrade, but unfortunately, I’m giving a lecture at a Rabfac Club at that hour. . . .”

Victor had taken the bearded speaker of the meeting aside and was whispering eagerly, persuasively: “I received my diploma at the Institute two weeks ago, comrade. . . . You understand that the job I’m holding at present is quite unsatisfactory for a full-fledged engineer and . . .”

“I know, Comrade Dunaev, I know the position you desire. Personally, I know of no better man to fill it. And I’d do anything in my power for the husband of my friend Marisha Lavrova. But . . .” He looked around cautiously, over the rim of his pince-nez, and drew closer to Victor, lowering his voice. “Just between you and me, comrade, there’s a grave obstacle in your way. You understand that that hydroelectric project is the most stupendous undertaking of the republic at present, and every job connected with it is assigned with particular caution and . . .” his voice dropped to a whisper, “your Party record is magnificent, Comrade Dunaev, but you know how it is, there are always those inclined to suspicion, and . . . Frankly, I’ve heard it said that your social past . . . your father and family, you know . . . But don’t give up hope. I’ll do all I can for you.”

Andrei Taganov stood alone in an emptying row of chairs. He was buttoning his leather jacket slowly. His eyes were fixed on the flaming scarlet banner above the lectern.

At the top of the stairs, on his way out, he was stopped by Comrade Sonia.

“Well, Comrade Taganov,” she asked loudly, so that others turned to look at them, “what did you think of the speech?”

“It was explicit,” Andrei answered slowly, all the syllables of his voice alike, as grains of lead.

“Don’t you agree with the speaker?”

“I prefer not to discuss it.”

“Oh, you don’t have to,” she smiled pleasantly. “You don’t have to. I know—we know—what you think. But what I’d like you to answer is this: why do you think you are entitled to your own thoughts? Against those of the majority of your Collective? Or is the majority’s will sufficient for you, Comrade Taganov? Or is Comrade Taganov becoming an individualist?”

“I’m very sorry, Comrade Sonia, but I’m in a hurry.”

“It’s all right with me, Comrade Taganov. I have nothing more to say. Just a little advice, from a friend: remember that the speech has made it plain what awaits those who think themselves smarter than the Party.”

Andrei walked slowly down the stairs. It was dark. Far below, a bluish gleam showed a floor of polished marble. A street lamp beyond the tall window threw a blue square of light, checkered into panes, on the wall by the staircase; little shadows of raindrops rolled slowly down the wall. Andrei walked down, his body slender, erect, unhurried, steady, the kind of body that in centuries past had worn the armor of a Roman, the mail of a crusader; it wore a leather jacket now.

Its tall, black shadow moved slowly across the blue square of light and raindrops on the wall.

Victor came home. He flung his coat on a chair in the lobby and kicked his galoshes into a corner. The galoshes upset an umbrella stand that clattered down to the floor. Victor did not stop to pick it up.

In the dining room, Marisha sat before a pile of opened volumes, bending her head to one side, writing studiously, biting her pencil. Vasili Ivanovitch sat by a window, carving a wooden box. Acia sat on the floor, mixing sawdust, potato peelings and sunflower-seed shells in a broken bowl.

“Dinner ready?” snapped Victor.

Marisha fluttered up to throw her arms around him. “Not . . . not quite, darling,” she apologized. “Irina’s been busy and I have this thesis to write for tomorrow and . . .”

He threw her arms off impatiently and walked out, slamming the door. He went down a dim corridor to Irina’s room. He threw the door open without knocking. Irina stood by the window, in Sasha’s arms, his lips on hers. She jerked away from him; she cried: “Victor!”, her voice choked with indignation. Victor wheeled about without a word and slammed the door behind him.

He returned to the dining room. He roared at Marisha: “Why the hell isn’t the bed made in our room? The room’s like a pigsty. What have you been doing all day?”

“But darling,” she faltered, “I . . . I’ve been at the Rabfac, and then at the Lenin’s Library meeting, and the Wall Newspaper’s Editorial Board, and then there’s this thesis on Electrification I have to read tomorrow at the Club, and I don’t know a thing about Electrification and I’ve had to read so much and . . .”

“Well, go and see if you can heat something on the Primus. I expect to be fed when I come home.”

“Yes, dear.”

She gathered her books swiftly, nervously. She hurried, pressing the heavy pile to her breast, dropped two books by the door, bent awkwardly to pick them up, and went out.

“Father,” said Victor, “why don’t you get a job?”

Vasili Ivanovitch raised his head slowly and looked at him. “What’s the matter, Victor?” he asked.

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Only it’s rather foolish to be registered as an unemployed bourgeois and be constantly under suspicion.”

“Victor, we haven’t discussed our political views for a long time, you know. But if you want to hear it—I will not work for your government so long as I live.”

“But surely, Father, you’re not hoping still that . . .”

“What I’m hoping is not to be discussed with a Party man. And if you’re tired of the expense . . .”

“Oh, no, Father, of course it isn’t that.”

Sasha passed through the dining room on his way out. He shook hands with Vasili Ivanovitch. He patted Acia’s head. He went out without a word or a glance at Victor.

“Irina, I want to speak to you,” said Victor.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I want to speak to you—alone.”

“Anything you have to say, Father may hear it.”

“Very well. It’s about that man,” he pointed at the door that had closed behind Sasha.

“Yes?”

“I hope you realize the infernal situation.”

“No. I don’t. What situation?”

“Do you know with what type of man you’re carrying on an affair?”

“I’m not carrying on any affair. Sasha and I are engaged.”

Victor jerked forward, opening his mouth and closing it again, then said slowly, with an effort to control himself: “Irina, that’s utterly impossible.”

She stood before him, her eyes steady, menacing, scornful. She asked: “Is it? Just exactly why?”

He leaned toward her, his mouth twitching. “Listen,” he hissed, “don’t make any useless denials. I know what your Sasha Chernov is. He’s up to his neck in counter-revolutionary plots. It’s none of my business. I’m keeping my mouth shut. But it won’t be long before others in the Party discover it. You know the end for bright lads like him. Do you expect me to stand by and watch my sister marrying a counter-revolutionary? What do you think it will do to my Party standing?”

“What it will do to your Party standing or to yourself,” Irina said with meticulous precision, “concerns me less than the cat’s leavings on the back stairs.”

“Irina!” Vasili Ivanovitch gasped. Victor whirled upon him.

“You tell her!” Victor roared. “It’s hard enough to get anywhere with the millstone of this family tied around my neck! You can roll straight down to hell, if you all enjoy it so nobly, but I’ll be damned if you’re going to drag me along!”

“But, Victor,” Vasili Ivanovitch said quietly, “there’s nothing either you or I can do about it. Your sister loves him. She has a right to her own happiness. God knows, she’s had little enough of it these last few years.”

“If you’re so afraid for your damn Party hide,” said Irina, “I’ll get out of here. I’m making enough for myself. I could starve on my own on what one of your Red clubs considers a living salary! I’ve have gone long ago, if it weren’t for Father and Acia!”

“Irina,” Vasili Ivanovitch moaned, “you won’t do that!”

“In other words,” Victor asked, “you refuse to give up that young fool?”

“And also,” Irina answered, “I refuse to discuss him with you.”

“Very well,” said Victor, “I’ve warned you.”

“Victor!” Vasili Ivanovitch cried. “You’re—you’re not going to harm Sasha, are you?”

“Don’t worry,” Irina hissed, “he won’t. It would be too compromising for his Party standing!”

Kira met Vava Milovskaia in the street, but could hardly recognize her, and it was Vava who approached timidly, muttering: “How are you, Kira?”

Vava wore an old felt hat made over from her father’s derby, with a broken brim that looked as if it had not been brushed for days. One black curl hung carelessly over her right cheek, her mouth was smeared unevenly with a faded, purplish lipstick, and her little nose was shiny, but her eyes were dull; her eyes looked swollen, aged, indifferent.

“Vava, I haven’t seen you for such a long time. How are you?”

“I’m . . . I’m married, Kira.”

“You . . . Why, congratulations. . . . When?”

“Thanks. Two weeks ago.” Vava’s eyes were looking away; she muttered, staring at the street: “I . . . we . . . we didn’t have a big wedding, so we didn’t invite anyone. Just the family. You see, it was a church wedding, and Kolya didn’t want that known at the office where he works.”

“Kolya . . . ?”

“Yes, Kolya Smiatkin, you probably don’t remember him, you met him at my party, though. . . . That’s what I am now: Citizen Smiatkina. . . . He works at the Tobacco Trust, and it’s not a very big job, but they say he’ll get a raise. . . . He’s a very nice boy . . . he . . . he loves me very much. . . . Why shouldn’t I have married him?”

“I didn’t say you shouldn’t have, Vava.”

“What is there to wait for? What can one do with oneself, these days, if one isn’t . . . if one isn’t a. . . . What I like about you, Kira, is that you’re the first person who didn’t say she wished me to be happy!”

“But I do wish it, Vava.”

“Well, I’m happy!” She tossed her head defiantly. “I’m perfectly happy!”

Vava’s hand in a soiled glove rested on Kira’s arm; she hesitated, as if she feared Kira’s presence, and closed her fingers tighter over Kira’s arm, as if she were afraid to let her go, as if she were hanging on desperately to something she did not want to utter. Then she whispered, looking away: “Kira . . . do you think . . . he’s happy?”

“Victor is not a person who cares about being happy,” Kira answered slowly.

“I wouldn’t mind . . .” Vava whispered, “I wouldn’t mind . . . if she were pretty. . . . But I saw her. . . . Oh, well, anyway, it doesn’t concern me at all. Not in the least. . . . I’d like you to come over and visit us, Kira, you and Leo. Only . . . only we haven’t found a place to live yet. I moved into Kolya’s room, because . . . because my old room . . . well, Father didn’t approve, you see, so I thought it would be better to move out. And Kolya’s room—it’s a former storage closet in a big apartment, and it’s so small that we . . . But when we find a room, I’ll invite you to come over and . . . Well, I have to run along. . . . Good-bye, Kira.”

“Good-bye, Vava.”

“He’s not in,” said the gray-haired woman.

“I’ll wait,” said Comrade Sonia.

The woman shuffled uncomfortably from foot to foot and chewed her lips. Then she said: “Don’t see how you can wait, citizen. We’ve got no reception room. I’m only Citizen Syerov’s neighbor and my quarters . . .”

“I’ll wait in Citizen Syerov’s room.”

“But, citizen . . .”

“I said I’ll wait in Citizen Syerov’s room.”

Comrade Sonia walked resolutely down the corridor. The old neighbor followed, nodding dejectedly, watching the swift heels of Comrade Sonia’s flat, masculine shoes.

Pavel Syerov jumped up when Comrade Sonia entered. He threw his arms wide in a gesture of surprise and welcome.

“Sonia, my dear!” he laughed very loudly. “It’s you! My dear, I’m so sorry. I was busy and I had given orders . . . but had I known . . .”

“It’s quite all right,” Comrade Sonia dismissed the subject. She threw a heavy brief case on the table and unbuttoned her coat, unwinding a thick, masculine scarf from her neck. She glanced at her wristwatch. “I have half an hour to spare,” she said. “I’m on my way to the Club. We’re opening a Lenin’s Nook today. I had to see you about something important.”

Syerov offered her a chair and pulled on his coat, adjusting his tie before a mirror, smoothing his hair, smiling ingratiatingly.

“Pavel,” said Comrade Sonia, “we’re going to have a baby.”

Syerov’s hand dropped. His mouth fell open. “A . . . ?”

“A baby,” Comrade Sonia said firmly.

“What the . . .”

“It’s been three months, I know,” said Comrade Sonia.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“But hell! You’ll have to . . .”

“It’s too late to do anything now.”

“Why the devil didn’t you . . .”

“I said it was too late.”

Syerov fell on a chair before her and stared intently at her unruffled calm. “Are you sure it’s mine?” he asked hoarsely.

“Pavel,” she said without raising her voice, “you’re insulting me.”

He jumped up, and walked to the door, and came back, and sat down again, and jumped up. “Well, what in hell are we to do about it?”

“We’re going to be married, Pavel.”

He bent toward her, his closed fist on the table. “You’ve gone crazy,” he said heavily.

She looked at him, silently, waiting.

“You’re crazy, I tell you! I have no such intention.”

“But you’ll have to do it.”

“I will, will I ? You get out of here, you . . .”

“Pavel,” she said softly, “don’t say anything you may regret.”

“Listen . . . what the . . . we’re not living in a bourgeois country. Hell! There’s no such thing as a betrayed virgin . . . and you were no virgin anyway . . . and. . . . Well, if you want to go to court—try and collect for its support—and the devil take you—but there’s no law to make me marry you! Marry! Hell! You’d think we lived in England or something!”

“Sit down, Pavel,” said Comrade Sonia, adjusting a button on her cuff, “and don’t misunderstand me. My attitude on the subject is not old-fashioned in the least. I am not concerned over morals or public disgrace or any such nonsense. It is merely a matter of our duty.”

“Our . . . what?”

“Our duty, Pavel. To a future citizen of our republic.”

Syerov laughed; it sounded as if he were blowing his nose. “Cut that out!” he said. “You’re not addressing a Club meeting.”

“Indeed,” said Comrade Sonia, “so loyalty to our principles is not part of your private life?”

He jumped up again. “Now, Sonia, don’t misunderstand me. Of course, I am always loyal and our principles . . . of course, it is a fine sentiment and I appreciate it . . . but then, what’s the difference to the . . . future citizen?”

“The future of our republic is in the coming generation. The upbringing of our youth is a vital problem. Our child shall have the advantage of a Party mother—and father—to guide its steps.”

“Hell, Sonia! That’s not at all up to date. There are day-nurseries and, you know, collective training, one big family, the spirit of the collective learned early in life, and . . .”

“State nurseries are to be the great accomplishment of the future. At present—they are imperfect. Our child shall be brought up as a perfect citizen of our great republic. Our child . . .”

“Our child! Oh, hell! how do I know . . .”

“Pavel, are you intimating that . . .”

“Oh, no, no, I didn’t mean anything, but . . . Hell! Sonia, I was drunk. You should have known better than . . .”

“Then you regret it, Pavel?”

“Oh, no, no, of course not. You know I love you, Sonia. . . . Sonia, listen, honest, I can’t get married right now. Really, I’d like nothing better and I’d be proud to marry you, but look here, I’m just starting, I’ve got a career to think about. I’ve just made such a fine beginning, and . . . and it’s my duty to the Party to train and perfect myself and rise . . .”

“I could help you, Pavel, or . . .” She said it slowly, looking at him. She did not have to finish; he understood.

“But, Sonia . . .” he moaned helplessly.

“I’m as upset about it as you are,” she said calmly. “It was a more painful surprise to me than it is to you. But I’m prepared to do what I consider my duty.”

He fell heavily on his chair and said dully, without raising his head: “Listen, Sonia, give me two days, will you? To think it over and get sort of used to the idea and . . .”

“Certainly,” she answered, rising, “think it over. My time’s up anyway. Have to run. So long.”

“So long,” he muttered, without looking at her.

Pavel Syerov got drunk, that evening. On the following day, he called at the Railroad Workers Union’s Club. The president said: “Congratulations, Comrade Syerov. I hear you’re going to marry Comrade Sonia. You couldn’t make a better match.” At the Party Cell, the secretary said: “Well, Pavlusha, all set to go far in this world? With such a wife . . .” At the Marxist Club, an imposing official, whom he had never met before, smiled, slapping his shoulder: “Come and see me any time, Comrade Syerov. I’m always in to a friend of your future wife.”

That evening, Pavel Syerov called Antonina Pavlovna and swore at Morozov and requested a larger share than he had been getting, and demanded it in advance—and, receiving it, bought drinks for a girl he met on the street.

Three days later, Pavel Syerov and Comrade Sonia were married. They stood before a clerk in the bare room of the Zags and signed a large register. Comrade Sonia signified her intention of retaining her maiden name.

That evening, Comrade Sonia moved into Syerov’s room, which was larger than her own. “Oh, darling,” she said, “we must think of a good revolutionary name for our child.”

A hand knocked on Andrei’s door, a weighty knock followed by a thud, as if a fist had leaned heavily against the panel.

Andrei sat on the floor, studying, with a lamp by his side, with the huge white sheets of drafts spread before him. He raised his head and asked impatiently: “Who’s there?”

“It’s me, Andrei,” a man’s voice answered heavily. “Open the door. It’s me, Stepan Timoshenko.”

Andrei jumped up and threw the door open. Stepan Timoshenko, who had served in the Baltic Fleet and in the Coast Guard of the G.P.U., stood on the stair-landing, swaying a little, leaning against the wall. He wore a sailor’s cap, but its band bore no star, no ship’s name; he wore civilian clothes, a short jacket with a mangy rabbit fur collar, with rubbed spots on the elbows of sleeves too tight for his huge arms; the fur collar was unfastened; his tanned neck with bulging cords was open to the cold. He grinned, the light glistening on his white teeth, in his dark eyes.

“Good evening, Andrei. Mind if I butt in?”

“Come in. I’m glad to see you. I thought you had forgotten your old friends.”

“No,” said Timoshenko. “No, I haven’t.” He lumbered in, and closed the door behind him, reeling a little. “No, I haven’t. . . . but some of the old friends are only too damn glad to forget me. . . . I don’t mean you, Andrei. No. Not you.”

“Sit down,” said Andrei. “Take that coat off. Aren’t you cold?”

“Who, me? No. I’m never cold. And if I was, it would do me no good because this here is all I’ve got. . . . I’ll take the damn thing off. . . . Here. . . . Sure, all right, I’ll sit down. I bet you want me to sit down because you think I’m drunk.”

“No,” said Andrei, “but . . .”

“Well, I am drunk. But not very much. You don’t mind if I’m a little drunk, do you?”

“Where have you been, Stepan? I haven’t seen you for months.”

“Oh, around. I was kicked out of the G.P.U., you know that, don’t you?”

Andrei nodded slowly, looking down at his drafts on the floor.

“Yep,” said Timoshenko, stretching his feet out comfortably, “I was kicked out. Not reliable. No. Not reliable. Not revolutionary enough. Stepan Timoshenko of the Red Baltfleet.”

“I’m sorry,” said Andrei.

“Shut up. Who’s asking you for sympathy? That’s funny, that’s what it is. . . . Very, very humorous. . . .” He looked up at the Cupids on the cornice. “And you’ve got a funny place here. It’s a hell of a place for a Communist to live in.”

“I don’t mind,” said Andrei. “I could move, but rooms are so hard to get these days.”

“Sure,” said Timoshenko and laughed suddenly, loudly, senselessly. “Sure. It’s hard for Andrei Taganov. It wouldn’t be hard for little Comrade Syerov, for instance. It wouldn’t be hard for any bastard that uses a Party card as a butcher knife. It wouldn’t be hard to throw some poor devil out on the ice of the Neva.”

“You’re talking nonsense, Stepan. Would you . . . would you like something to eat?”

“No. Hell, no. . . . What are you driving at, you little fool? Think I’m starving?”

“Why, no, I didn’t even . . .”

“Well, don’t. I still have enough to eat. And to drink. Plenty to drink. . . . I just came around because I thought little Andrei needed someone to look after him. Little Andrei needs it badly. He will need it very badly.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Nothing, pal. Just talking. Can’t I talk? Are you like the rest of them? Want everybody to talk, order them to talk, talk, talk, without the right to say anything?”

“Here,” said Andrei, “put that pillow under your neck and take it easy. Rest. You’re not feeling well.”

“Who, me?” Timoshenko took the pillow and flung it at the wall and laughed. “I’ve never felt better in my life. I feel grand. Free and finished. No worries. No worries of any kind any more.”

“Stepan, why don’t you come here more often? We used to be friends. We could still help each other.”

Timoshenko leaned forward, and stared at Andrei, and grinned somberly: “I can’t help you, kid. I could help you only if you could take me by the scruff of my neck and kick me out and with me kick out everything that goes with me, and then go and bow very low and lick a very big boot. But you won’t do it. And that’s why I hate you, Andrei. And that’s why I wish you were my son. Only I’ll never have a son. My sons are strewn all over the whorehouses of the U.S.S.R.”

He looked down at the white drafts on the floor, and kicked a book, and asked: “What are you doing here, Andrei?”

“I was studying. I haven’t had much time to study. I’ve been busy at the G.P.U.”

“Studying, eh? How many years you got left at the Institute?”

“Three years.”

“Uh-huh. Think you’ll need it?”

“Need what?”

“The learning.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Say, pal, did I tell you they kicked me out of the G.P.U.? Oh, yes, I told you. But they haven’t kicked me out of the Party. Not yet. But they will. At the next purge—I go.”

“I wouldn’t think of that in advance. You can still . . .”

“I know what I’m talking about. And you do, too. And do you know who’ll go next?”

“No,” said Andrei.

“You,” said Stepan Timoshenko.

Andrei rose, crossed his arms, looked at Timoshenko, and said quietly: “Maybe.”

“Listen, pal,” Timoshenko asked, “have you got something to drink here?”

“No,” said Andrei. “And you’re drinking too much, Stepan.”

“Oh, am I?” Timoshenko chuckled, and his head rocked slowly, mechanically, so that its huge shadow on the wall swung like a pendulum. “Am I drinking too much? And have I no reason to drink? Say, I’ll tell you,” he rose, swaying, towering over Andrei, his shadow hitting the doves on the ceiling. “I’ll tell you the reason and then you’ll say I don’t drink enough, you poor little pup in the rain, that’s what you’ll say!”

He pulled at his sweater, too tight under the arms, and scratched his shoulder blades, and roared suddenly: “Once upon a time, we made a revolution. We said we were tired of hunger, of sweat and of lice. So we cut throats, and broke skulls, and poured blood, our blood, their blood, to wash a clean road for freedom. Now look around you. Look around you, Comrade Taganov, Party member since 1915! Do you see where men live, men, our brothers? Do you see what they eat? Have you ever seen a woman falling on the street, vomiting blood on the cobblestones, dying of hunger? I have. Did you see the limousines speeding at night? Did you see who’s in them? There’s a nice little comrade we have in the Party. A smart young man with a brilliant future. Pavel Syerov’s the name. Have you ever seen him open his wallet to pay for a whore’s champagne? Did you ever wonder where he gets the money? Did you ever go to the European roof garden? Not often, I bet. But if you had, you’d see the respectable Citizen Morozov getting indigestion on caviar. Who is he? Just assistant manager of the Food Trust. The State Food Trust of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. We’re the leaders of the world proletariat and we’ll bring freedom to all suffering humanity! Look at our Party. Look at the loyal members with ink still wet on their Party tickets. Watch them reaping the harvest from the soil that our blood had fertilized. But we’re not red enough for them. We’re not revolutionaries. We’re kicked out as traitors. We’re kicked out for Trotskyism. We’re kicked out because we didn’t lose our sight and our conscience when the Czar lost his throne, the sight and the conscience that made him lose it. We’re kicked out because we yelled to them that they’ve lost the battle, strangled the revolution, sold out the people, and there’s nothing left now but power, brute power. They don’t want us. Not me nor you. There’s no place for men like you, Andrei, not anywhere on this earth. Well, you don’t see it. And I’m glad you don’t. Only I hope I’m not there on the day when you will!”

Andrei stood, silent, his arms crossed. Timoshenko seized his jacket and pulled it on hastily, reeling.

“Where are you going?” asked Andrei.

“Going. Anywhere. I don’t want to stay here.”

“Stepan, don’t you think that I see it, too? But screaming about it won’t help. And drinking yourself to death won’t help. One can still fight.”

“Sure. Go on fighting. It’s none of my business. I’m going to have a drink.”

Andrei watched him buttoning the jacket, pulling the starless sailor cap over one ear. “Stepan, what are you going to do?”

“Now?”

“No. In the years to come.”

“The years to come?” Timoshenko laughed, throwing his head back, the mangy rabbit collar shaking on his huge shoulders. “That’s a cute sentence: the years to come. Why are you so sure they’re coming?” He leaned toward Andrei, and winked slyly, mysteriously. “Did it ever occur to you, Comrade Taganov, what a peculiar thing it is that so many of our Party comrades are dying of overwork? You’ve read it in the papers, haven’t you? Another glorious victim fallen on the path of the revolution, a life burned out in a ceaseless task. . . . You know what they are, don’t you, those comrades dying of a ceaseless task? Suicides. That’s what they are. Suicides. Only the papers will never say it. Funny how many of them are killing themselves these days. Wonder why.”

“Stepan,” Andrei took a huge, hot, clammy hand into his strong, cold ones, “you’re not thinking of . . .”

“I’m not thinking of anything. Hell, no. All I want is a drink. And, anyway, if I do think, I’ll come to say good-bye. I promise.”

At the door, Andrei stopped him once again: “Stepan, why don’t you stay here? For a while?”

Stepan Timoshenko waved with the majesty of sweeping a mantle over his shoulders, and shook his head, reeling out to the landing of the long marble stairway:

“No. Not here. I don’t want to see you, Andrei. I don’t want to see that damn face of yours. Because . . . you see, I’m an old battleship, ready for the scrap heap, with all its guts rusted and rotted. But I don’t mind that. And I’d give the last of these rotted guts to help the only man I know left in the world—and that’s you. But I don’t mind that. What I mind is that I know that could I take my guts out and give them for you—it still wouldn’t save you!”

VII

KIRA STOOD LOOKING AT A BUILDING UNDER construction.

Jagged walls of red bricks, new and raw, checkered by a net of fresh, white cement, rose to a gray sky darkening slowly in an early twilight. High against the clouds, workers knelt on the walls, and iron hammers knocked, ringing sonorously over the street, and engines roared hoarsely, and steam whistled somewhere in a tangled forest of planks, beams, scaffoldings splattered with lime. She stood watching, her eyes wide, her lips smiling. A young man, with a tanned face and a pipe in the corner of his mouth, walked swiftly up the narrow planks in the perilous framework, and the movements of his hands were brusque, precise, implacable like the blows of a hammer. She did not know how long she had been standing there. She had forgotten all but the work before her. Then, suddenly, her world returning to her with a jolt, in a blinding second of clear, sharp perception—as if new eyes were taking a first glance at a new world and saw it as she had forgotten to see it—she wondered, astonished, why she was not there, on the scaffolding, giving orders like the man with the pipe, what reason could possibly keep her from her work, her life work, her only desire. It was one swift second, so swift that she felt it only after it was over; and after it was over, she saw the world again as she had grown accustomed to see it, and she remembered why she was not on the scaffolding, what reason had closed to her, forever, the only work she wanted. And in her mind, four words filled the void she felt rising from somewhere in her breast: “Perhaps . . . Some day . . . Abroad . . .”

A hand touched her shoulder: “What are you doing here, citizen?”

A militia-man was staring suspiciously down at her. He wore a peaked khaki cap, with a red star, over a low forehead. He squinted, opening soft lips that had no shape, like pillows: “You have been standing here for half an hour, citizen. What do you want?”

“Nothing,” said Kira.

“Well, then, on your way, citizen.”

“I was just looking,” said Kira.

“You,” decreed the militia-man, opening lips shapeless as pillows, “have no business looking.”

She turned silently and walked away.

Against her skin, sewn on to her skirt, a little pocket was growing thicker, slowly, week by week. She kept in it the money she managed to save from Leo’s reckless spending. It was a foundation rising for their future and perhaps—some day—abroad. . . .

She was returning home from a meeting of excursion guides. There had been a political examination at the Excursion Center. A man with a close-cropped head had sat at a broad desk, and trembling, white-lipped guides had stood before him, one after the other, answering questions in jerking, unnaturally bright voices. Kira had recited adequately the appropriate sounds about the importance of historical excursions for the political education and class-consciousness of the working masses; she had been able to answer the question about the state of the latest strike of textile workers in Great Britain; she had known all about the latest decree of the Commissar of People’s Education in regard to the Schools for the Illiterates of the Turkestan; but she could not name the latest amount of coal produced by the mines of the Don basin.

“Don’t you read the newspapers, comrade?” the examining official had asked sternly.

“Yes, comrade.”

“I would suggest that you read them more thoroughly. We do not need limited specialists and old-fashioned academicians who know nothing outside their narrow professions. Our modern educators must be politically enlightened and show an active interest in our Soviet reality, in all the details of our state construction. . . . Next!”

She might be dismissed, Kira thought indifferently, walking home. She would not worry. She could not worry any longer. She would not allow herself to reach the state of Comrade Nesterova, an elderly guide who had been a school teacher for thirty years. Comrade Nesterova, between excursions, school classes, clubs, and cooking for a paralyzed mother, spent all her time reading the newspapers, memorizing every item word for word, preparing herself for the examination. Comrade Nesterova needed her job badly. But when she had stood before the examiner, Comrade Nesterova had not been able to utter a word; she had opened her mouth senselessly, without a sound, and collapsed suddenly, shrieking, in hysterical tears; she had had to be carried out of the room and a nurse had been called. Comrade Nesterova’s name had been crossed off the list of excursion guides.

Kira had forgotten the examination by the time she reached her house: she was thinking of Leo; she was wondering how she would find him that evening. The question arose, with a small twist of anxiety, every time she came home late and knew that she would find him there. He would leave in the morning, smiling and cheerful and brisk with energy; but she never knew what to expect at the end of the day. Sometimes she found him reading a foreign book, barely answering her greeting, refusing to eat, chuckling coldly once in a while at the bright lines of a world so far from their own. Sometimes she found him drunk, staggering across the room, laughing bitterly, tearing banknotes before her eyes when she spoke of the money he had spent. Sometimes she found him discussing art with Antonina Pavlovna, yawning, talking as if he did not hear his own words. Sometimes—rarely—he smiled at her, his eyes young and clear as they had been long ago, on their first meetings, and he pressed money into her hand, whispering: “Hide it from me. . . . For the escape. For Europe. . . . We’ll do it . . . some day . . . if you can keep me from thinking . . . until then. . . . If we can only keep from thinking. . . .”

She had learned to keep from thinking; she remembered only that he was Leo and that she had no life beyond the sound of his voice, the movements of his hands, the lines of his body—and that she had to stand on guard between him and the something immense, unnameable which was moving slowly toward him, which had swallowed so many. She would stand on guard; nothing else mattered; she never thought of the past; the future—no one around her thought of the future.

She never thought of Andrei; she never allowed herself to wonder what the days, perhaps the years, ahead of them would have to be. She knew that she had gone too far and could not retreat. She was wise enough to know that she could not leave him; she was brave enough not to attempt it. In averting a blow he would not be able to stand, she was paying him, silently, for what she had done. Some day, she felt dimly, she would have to end the payment; the day when, perhaps, a passage abroad would open for Leo and her; then she would end it without hesitation, since Leo would need her; then Leo would be safe; nothing else mattered.

“Kira?” a gay voice called from the bathroom, when she entered their room.

Leo came out, a towel in his hand, naked from the waist up, shaking drops of water off his face, throwing tangled hair off his forehead, smiling.

“I’m glad you’re back, Kira. I hate to come home and not find you here.”

He looked as if he had just stepped out of a stream on a hot summer day, and one could almost see the sun sparkling in the drops of water on his shoulders. He moved as if his whole body were a living will, straight, arrogant, commanding, a will and a body that could never bend because both had been born without the capacity to conceive of bending.

She stood still, afraid to approach him, afraid to shatter one of the rare moments when he looked what he could have been, what he was intended to be.

He approached her and his hand closed over her throat and he jerked her head back to hold her lips to his. There was a contemptuous tenderness in his movement, and a command, and hunger; he was not a lover, but a slave owner. Her arms holding him, her mouth drinking the glistening drops on his skin, she knew the answer, the motive for all her days, for all she had to bear and forget in those days, the only motive she needed.

Irina came to visit Kira, once in a while, on the rare evenings she could spare from her work at the Club. Irina laughed sonorously, and scattered cigarette ashes all over the room, and related the latest, most dangerous political anecdotes, and drew caricatures of all their acquaintances on the white table cloth.

But on the evenings when Leo was busy at the store, when Kira and Irina sat alone at a lighted fireplace, Irina did not always laugh. Sometimes, she sat silently for long minutes and when she raised her head and looked at Kira, her eyes were bewildered, pleading for help. Then she whispered, looking into the fire:

“Kira, I . . . I’m afraid. . . . I don’t know why, it’s only at times, but I’m so afraid. . . . What’s going to happen to all of us? That’s what frightens me. Not the question itself, but that it’s a question you can’t ask anyone. You ask it and watch people, and you’ll see their eyes, and you’ll know that they feel the same thing, the same fear, and you can’t question them about it, but if you did, they couldn’t explain it, either . . . You know, we’re all trying so hard not to think at all, not to think beyond the next day, and sometimes even not beyond the next hour. . . . Do you know what I believe? I believe they’re doing it deliberately. They don’t want us to think. That’s why we have to work as we do. And because there’s still time left after we’ve worked all day and stood in a few lines, we have the social activities to attend, and then the newspapers. Do you know that I almost got fired from the Club, last week? I was asked about the new oil wells near Baku and I didn’t know a damn thing about them. Why should I know about the oil wells near Baku if I want to earn my millet drawing rotten posters? Why do I have to memorize newspapers like poems? Sure, I need the kerosene for the Primus. But does it mean that in order to have kerosene in order to cook millet, I have to know the name of every stinking worker in every stinking well where the kerosene comes from? Two hours a day of reading news of state construction for fifteen minutes of cooking on the Primus? . . . Well, and there’s nothing we can do about it. If we try, it’s worse. Take Sasha, for instance . . . Oh, Kira! I’m . . . I’m so afraid! . . . He . . . he . . . Well, I don’t have to lie to you. You know what he’s doing. It’s a secret organization of some kind and they think they can overthrow the government. Set the people free. His duty to the people, Sasha says. And you and I know that any one of that great people would be only too glad to betray them all to the G.P.U. for an extra pound of linseed oil. They have secret meetings and they print things and distribute them in the factories. Sasha says we can’t expect help from abroad, it’s up to us to fight for our own freedom. . . . Oh, what can I do? I would like to stop him and I have no right to stop him. But I know they’ll get him. Remember the students they sent to Siberia last spring? Hundreds, thousands of them. You’ll never hear from any of them again. He’s an orphan, hasn’t a soul in the world, but me. I would try to stop him, but he won’t listen, and he’s right, only I love him. I love him. And he’ll go to Siberia some day. And what’s the use? Kira! What’s the use?”

Sasha Chernov turned the corner of his street, hurrying home. It was a dark October evening and the little hand that seized his coat belt seemed to have shot suddenly out of nowhere. Then he distinguished a shawl thrown over a little head and a pair of eyes staring up at him, huge, unblinking, terrified.

“Citizen Chernov,” the girl whispered, her trembling body pressed to his legs, stopping him, “don’t go home.”

He recognized his neighbor’s daughter. He smiled and patted her head, but, instinctively, stepped aside, into the shadow of a wall. “What’s the matter, Katia?”

“Mother said . . .” the girl gulped, “mother said to tell you not to come home. . . . There are strange men there. . . . They’ve thrown your books all over the room. . . .”

“Thank your mother for me, kid,” Sasha whispered and whirled about and disappeared behind the corner. He had had time to catch sight of a black limousine standing at the door of his house.

He raised his collar and walked swiftly. He walked into a restaurant and telephoned. A strange man’s voice answered gruffly. Sasha hung up without a word; his friend had been arrested.

They had had a secret meeting, that night. They had discussed plans, agitation among the workers, a new printing press. He grinned a little at the thought of the G.P.U. agents looking at the huge pile of anti-Soviet proclamations in his room. He frowned; tomorrow the proclamations would have been distributed into countless hands in Petrograd’s factories.

He jumped into a tramway and rode to another friend’s house. Turning the corner, he saw a black limousine at the door. He hurried away.

He rode to a railroad terminal and telephoned again, a different number. No one answered.

He walked, shuffling through a heavy slush, to another address. He saw no light in the window of his friend’s room. But he saw the janitor’s wife at the back yard gate, whispering excitedly to a neighbor. He did not approach the house.

He blew at his frozen, gloveless hands. He hurried to one more address. There was a light in the window for which he was looking. But on the window sill stood a vase of peculiar shape and that had been the danger signal agreed upon.

He took another tramway. It was late and the tramway was almost empty; it was lighted too brightly. A man in a military tunic entered at the next stop. Sasha got out.

He leaned against a dark lamp post and wiped his forehead. His forehead was burning with a sweat colder than the melting snow drops.

He was hurrying down a dark street when he saw a man in an old derby hat strolling casually on the other side. Sasha turned a corner, and walked two blocks, and turned again, and walked a block, and turned once more. Then he looked cautiously over his shoulder. The man in the old derby was studying the window of an apothecary shop three houses behind him.

Sasha walked faster. A gray snow fluttered over yellow lights over closed gates. The street was deserted. He heard no sound but that of his own steps crunching mud. But through the sounds, and through the distant grating of wheels, and through the muffled, rumbling, rising knocks somewhere in his chest, he heard the shuffling, soft as a breath, of steps following him.

He stopped short and looked back. The man in the derby was bending to tie a shoe lace. Sasha looked up. He was at the door of a house he knew well. It took the flash of a second. He was behind the door and, pressed to a wall in a dark lobby, without movement, without breath, he watched the square of the glass pane in the door. He saw the man in the derby pass by. He heard his steps crunching away, slowing down, stopping, hesitating, coming back. The derby swam past the glass square again. The steps creaked, louder and lower, back and forth, somewhere close by.

Sasha swung noiselessly up the stairs and knocked at a door.

Irina opened it.

He pressed a finger to his lips and whispered: “Is Victor home?”

“No,” she breathed.

“Is his wife?”

“She’s asleep.”

“May I come in? They’re after me.”

She pulled him in and closed the door slowly, steadily, taking a long, patient minute. The door touched the jamb without a sound.

Galina Petrovna came in with a bundle under her arm.

“Good evening, Kira. . . . My Lord, Kira, what a smell in this room!”

Kira rose indifferently, dropping a book. “Good evening, Mother. It’s the Lavrovs next door. They’re making sauerkraut.”

“My Lord! So that’s what he was mixing in the big barrel. He’s certainly uncivil, that old Lavrov. He didn’t even greet me. And after all, we’re relatives, in a way.”

Behind the door, a wooden paddle grated in a barrel of cabbage. Lavrov’s wife sighed monotonously: “Heavy are our sins . . . heavy are our sins. . . .” The boy was chipping wood in a corner and the crystal chandelier tinkled, shuddering, with every blow. The Lavrovs had moved into the room vacated by their daughter; they had shared a garret with two other families in a workers’ tenement; they had been glad to make the change.

Galina Petrovna asked: “Isn’t Leo home?”

“No,” said Kira, “I’m expecting him.”

“I’m on my way to evening classes,” said Galina Petrovna, “and I just dropped in for a minute . . .” She hesitated, fingered her bundle, smiled apologetically, and said too casually: “I just dropped in to show you something, see if you like it . . . maybe you’ll want to . . . buy it.”

“To buy it?” Kira repeated, astonished. “What is it, Mother?”

Galina Petrovna had unwrapped the bundle; she was holding an old-fashioned gown of flowing white lace; its long train touched the floor; Galina Petrovna’s hesitant smile was almost shy.

“Why, Mother!” Kira gasped. “Your wedding gown!”

“You see,” Galina Petrovna explained very quickly, “it’s the school. I got my salary yesterday and . . . and they had deducted so much for my membership in the Proletarian Society of Chemical Defense—and I didn’t even know I was a member—that I haven’t . . . You see, your father needs new shoes—the cobbler’s refused to mend his old ones—and I was going to buy them this month . . . but with the Chemical Defense and . . . You see, you could alter it nicely—the dress, I mean—it’s good material, I’ve only worn it . . . once. . . . And I thought, if you liked it, for an evening gown, maybe, or . . .”

“Mother,” Kira said almost severely, and wondered at the little jerking break in her voice, “you know very well that if you need anything . . .”

“I know, child, I know,” Galina Petrovna interrupted, and the wrinkles on her face were suddenly flushed with pink. “You’ve been a wonderful daughter, but . . . with all you’ve given us already . . . I didn’t feel I could ask . . . and I thought I’d rather . . . but then, if you don’t like the dress . . .”

“Yes,” Kira said resolutely, “I like it. I’ll buy it, Mother.”

“I really don’t need it,” Galina Petrovna muttered, “and I don’t mind at all.”

“I was going to buy an evening gown, anyway,” Kira lied.

She found her pocketbook. It was stretched, stuffed full, bursting with crisp new bills. The night before, coming home late, kissing her, staggering, Leo had slipped his hand into his pocket and dropped crumpled bills all over the floor, and stuffed her pocketbook, laughing: “Go on, spend it! Plenty more coming. Just another little deal with Comrade Syerov. Brilliant Comrade Syerov. Spend it, I say!”

She emptied the pocketbook into Galina Petrovna’s hands. “Why, child!” Galina Petrovna protested. “Not all that! I didn’t want that much. It isn’t worth that!”

“Of course, it’s worth it. All that lovely lace. . . . Don’t let’s argue, Mother. . . . And thank you so much.”

Galina Petrovna crammed the bills into her old bag, with a frightened hurry. She looked at Kira and shook her head wisely, very sadly, and muttered: “Thank you, child. . . .”

When she had gone, Kira tried on the wedding gown. It was long and plain as a medieval garment; its tight sleeves were low over the backs of her hands; its tight collar was high under her chin; it was all lace with no ornaments of any kind.

She stood before a tall mirror, her arms at her sides, palms up, her head thrown back, her hair tumbling down on her white shoulders, her body suddenly tall and too thin, fragile in the long, solemn folds of a lace delicate as a cobweb. She looked at herself as at a strange figure from somewhere many centuries away. And her eyes seemed suddenly very large, very dark, frightened.

She took the dress off and threw it into a corner of her wardrobe.

Leo came home with Antonina Pavlovna. She wore a sealskin coat and a turban of violet satin. Her heavy French perfume floated through the odor of sauerkraut from Lavrov’s quarters.

“Where’s the maid?” Leo asked.

“She had to go. We waited, but you’re late, Leo.”

“That’s all right. We had dinner at a restaurant, Tonia and I. You haven’t changed your mind, have you, Kira? Will you go with us to that opening?”

“I’m sorry, Leo, I can’t. I have a guides’ meeting tonight. . . . And, Leo, are you sure you want to go? This is the third night club opening in two weeks.”

“This is different,” said Antonina Pavlovna. “This is a real casino, just like abroad. Just like Monte Carlo.”

“Leo,” Kira sighed helplessly, “gambling again?”

He laughed: “Why not? We don’t have to worry if we lose a few hundreds, do we, Tonia?”

Antonina Pavlovna smiled, pointing her chin forward: “Certainly not. We just left Koko, Kira Alexandrovna.” She lowered her voice confidentially. “There’s another shipment of white flour coming from Syerov day after tomorrow. How that boy can handle his business! I admire him tremendously.”

“I’ll jump into my dinner jacket,” Leo said. “It won’t take me a second. Do you mind turning to the window for a moment, Tonia?”

“Certainly,” Antonina Pavlovna smiled coquettishly, “I do mind. But I promise not to peek, no matter how much I’d love to.”

She stood at the window, putting a friendly hand on Kira’s shoulder. “Poor Koko!” Antonina Pavlovna sighed. “He works so much. He has a meeting tonight—the Food Trust’s Employees’ Educational Circle. He’s vice-secretary. He has to keep up his social activity, you know.” She winked significantly. “He has so many meetings and sessions and things. I’d positively wilt of loneliness if our dear Leo wasn’t gallant enough to take me out once in a while.”

Kira looked at Leo’s tall black figure in his immaculate dinner clothes, as she had looked at herself in the medieval wedding gown: as if he were a being from many centuries away, and it seemed strange to see him standing by the table with the Primus.

He took Antonina Pavlovna’s arm with a gesture that belonged in a foreign film scene, and they left. When the door had closed behind them in Lavrov’s room, Kira heard Lavrov’s wife grunting: “And they say private traders don’t make no money.”

“Dictatorship of the Proletariat!” Lavrov growled and spat loudly.

Kira put on her old coat. She was not going to the excursion guides’ meeting. She was going to the pavilion in a lonely palace garden.

A fire was burning in Andrei’s fireplace. The logs creaked with sharp little explosions, long hulks broken into checks of an even, transparent, luminous red, and little orange flames swayed, fluttering, meeting, curving softly, dying suddenly, leaping up again, little blue tongues licking glowing coals; over the logs, as if suspended motionless in the air, long red flames tapered into the darkness of the chimney; yellow sparks shot upward, dying against black sooted bricks. An orange glow danced, trembling, on the white brocaded walls, on the posters of Red soldiers, smokestacks and tractors. One of Leda’s feet drooped over the edge of the mantelpiece, its toes pink in the glow.

Kira sat on a box before the fireplace. Andrei sat at her feet, his face was buried in her knees; his hand caressed slowly the silken arch of her foot; his fingers dropped to the floor and came back to her tight silk stocking.

“. . . and then, when you’re here,” he whispered, “it’s worth all the torture, all the waiting. . . . And then I don’t have to think any more. . . .”

He raised his head. He looked at her and pronounced words she had never heard from him before: “I’m so tired. . . .”

She held his head, her two hands spread on his temples. She asked: “What’s the matter, Andrei?”

He turned away, to the fire. He said: “My Party.” Then he whirled back to her. “You know it, Kira. Perhaps you knew it long ago. You were right. Perhaps you’re right about many things, those things we’ve tried not to discuss.”

She whispered: “Andrei, do you want to discuss it—with me? I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You can’t hurt me. Don’t you think I can see it all, myself? Don’t you think I know what that great revolution of ours has come to? We shoot one speculator and a hundred others hire taxis on Nevsky every evening. We raze villages to the ground, we fire machine guns into rows of peasants crazed with misery, when they kill a Communist. And ten of the avenged victim’s Party brothers drink champagne at the home of a man with diamond studs in his shirt. Where did he get the diamonds? Who’s paying for the champagne? We don’t look into that too closely.”

“Andrei, did you ever think that it was you—your Party—who drove the men you call speculators into what they are doing—because you left them no choice?”

“I know it. . . . We were to raise men to our own level. But they don’t rise, the men we’re ruling, they don’t grow, they’re shrinking. They’re shrinking to a level no human creatures ever reached before. And we’re sliding slowly down into their ranks. We’re crumbling, like a wall, one by one. Kira, I’ve never been afraid. I’m afraid, now. It’s a strange feeling. I’m afraid to think. Because . . . because I think, at times, that perhaps our ideals have had no other result.”

“That’s true! The fault was not in men, but in the nature of your ideals. And I . . . No, Andrei, I won’t speak about it. I wish I could help you. But of all people, I’m the one who can help you least. You know it.”

He laughed softly: “But you are helping me, Kira. You’re the only one in this whole world who’s helping me.”

She whispered: “Why?”

“Because, no matter what happens, I still have you. Because, no matter what human wreckage I see around me, I still have you. And—in you—I still know what a human being can be.”

“Andrei,” she whispered, “are you sure you know me?”

He whispered, his lips in her hand so that she heard the words as if she were gathering them, one by one, in the hollow of her palm: “Kira, the highest thing in a man is not his god. It’s that in him which knows the reverence due a god. And you, Kira, are my highest reverence. . . .”

“It’s me,” a voice whispered behind the door, “Marisha. Let me in, Irina.”

Irina unlocked the door, cautiously, uncertainly. Marisha stood on the threshold with a loaf of bread in her hand.

“Here,” she whispered, “I brought you something to eat. Both of you.”

“Marisha!” Irina screamed.

“Keep quiet!” Marisha whispered with a cautious glance down the corridor. “Sure, I know. But don’t worry. My mouth’s shut. Here, take this. It’s my own bread ration. No one will notice. I know why you didn’t eat any breakfast this morning. But you can’t keep that up.”

Irina seized her arm, jerked her into the room, closed the door and giggled hysterically: “I . . . You see . . . oh, Marisha, I didn’t expect it of you to . . .” Her hair hung over one eye, the other eye was full of tears.

Marisha whispered: “I know how it is. Hell! You love him. . . . Well, I don’t know anything officially, so I don’t have to tell anything, if they ask me. But for God’s sake don’t keep him here long. I’m not so sure about Victor.”

“Do you think he . . . suspects?”

“I don’t know. He’s acting mighty queer. And if he knows—I’m afraid of him, Irina.”

“It’s just till tonight,” Irina whispered, “he’s leaving . . . tonight.”

“I’ll try to watch Victor for you.”

“Marisha . . . I can’t thank you . . . I . . .”

“Oh, hell! Nothing to cry about.”

“I’m not crying . . . I . . . It’s just . . . I haven’t slept for two nights and . . . Marisha, you’re so . . . I thank you and . . .”

“Oh, that’s all right. Well, so long. I won’t hang around here.”

When the door closed, Irina listened cautiously till Marisha’s steps died down the corridor; then she stood listening for other sounds, trembling; the house was silent. She locked the door and tiptoed across the room, and slipped noiselessly into the little storage closet that opened by her bed. Sasha sat on an old trunk in the closet, watching a sparrow behind a dusty glass pane on the sill of a tiny window high under the ceiling.

“Irina,” he whispered, his eyes on the window, “I think I’d better go now.”

“Why, of course not! I won’t let you.”

“Listen, I’ve been here for two days. I didn’t intend to do that. I’m sorry I gave in to you. If anything happens—do you know what they’ll do to you for this?”

“If anything happens to you,” she whispered, slipping her arm around his big, stooped shoulders, “I don’t care what they do to me.”

“I was to expect it some day. But you . . . I don’t want to drag you into it.”

“Listen, nothing will happen. I have your ticket for Baku. And the clothes. Victor has a Party meeting tonight. We’ll sneak out safely. And, anyway, you can’t go now, in broad daylight. The street is watched.”

“I almost wish I had let them take me without ever coming here. Irina, I’m so sorry!”

“Darling, I’m so glad!” She laughed soundlessly. “I really think I’ve saved you. They’ve arrested everyone of your group. I’ve pumped that out of Victor. Everyone but you.”

“But if . . .”

“Oh, we’re safe now. Just a few more hours to wait.” She crouched on a box by his side, dropping her head on his shoulder, brushing the hair out of her feverish, sparkling eyes. “Then, when you get abroad, be sure and write to me the very first day, remember? The very first.”

“Sure,” he said dully.

“Then I’ll manage to get out somehow. And just think of it! Abroad! We’ll go to a night club and you’ll look so funny in full dress clothes! Really, I think the tailors will refuse to fit you.”

“Probably,” he said, trying to smile.

“And then we’ll see girls dancing in funny costumes, just like the ones I draw. And think! I can get a job designing fashions and costumes and stage sets. No more posters for me. Not a single poster! I won’t draw another proletarian so long as I live!”

“I hope so.”

“But, you know, I must warn you. I’m a very bad housekeeper. Really, I’ll be impossible to live with. Your steak will be burned for dinner—oh, yes, we’ll have steak every day!—and your socks won’t be darned, and I won’t let you complain. If you try to—I’ll batter the life out of you, your poor little helpless, delicate creature!” She laughed hysterically, and buried her face on his shoulder, and bit his shirt, for her laughter was slipping into sounds that were not laughter.

He kissed her hair; he whispered bravely: “I won’t complain at all if you can go ahead with your drawing. That’s one more crime I’ll never forgive this country. I think you could be a great artist. And listen, do you know that you’ve never given me a drawing, and I’ve asked you so often?”

“Oh, yes!” she sighed. “I’ve promised them to so many people, but I never concentrate long enough to finish one properly. Here’s a promise, though: I’ll draw two dozen pictures—there, abroad—and you can stick them all over the walls of our house. Sasha, our house !”

His arms closed tightly over a trembling body with a tousled head turned away from him.

“This mush,” said Victor, “is burned.”

“I’m sorry,” Irina muttered, “I guess I didn’t watch it closely and I . . .”

“Is there anything else for lunch?”

“No, Victor, I’m sorry. There’s nothing in the house and . . .”

“There’s never anything in this house! Funny, how the food seems to have disappeared—these last few days.”

“No more than usual,” said Marisha. “And remember, I didn’t get my bread ration this week.”

“Well, why didn’t you?”

“I was too busy to stand in line and . . .”

“Why couldn’t Irina get it?”

“Victor,” said Vasili Ivanovitch, “your sister is not feeling well.”

“So I notice.”

“I’ll eat your mush, if you don’t want it,” said Acia, reaching for his plate.

“You’ve had enough, Acia,” Irina protested. “You have to hurry back to school.”

“Oh, hell!” said Acia.

“Acia! Where did you learn such language?”

“I don’t wanna go back,” Acia whined. “We’ve gotta decorate Lenin’s Nook this afternoon. Oh, I hate gluing pictures outta magazines on their old red blotters. I got bawled out twice, ‘cause I get them on crooked.”

“You hurry and get your coat. You’ll be late.”

Acia sighed with a resigned glance at the empty lunch dishes and shuffled out.

Victor leaned back in his chair, his hands in his pockets, and looked at Irina closely. “Not going to work today, Irina?” he asked casually.

“No. I’ve telephoned them. I don’t feel well. I think I have a temperature.”

“It’s better not to take the chance of going out in this awful weather,” said Marisha. “Look at it snowing.”

“No,” said Victor, “Irina shouldn’t take chances.”

“I’m not afraid,” said Irina, “only I think it’s safe to stay in.”

“No,” said Victor, “you’ve never been afraid of anything. A commendable trait—sometimes. And sometimes—it may go too far.”

“Just what do you mean?”

“You really should be more careful—of your health. Why don’t you call a doctor?”

“Oh, it’s not necessary. I’m not that bad. I’ll be all right in a few days.”

“Yes, I think so,” said Victor, rising.

“Where are you going today, Victor?” Marisha asked.

“Why do you have to know?”

“Oh, nothing . . . I . . . well . . . You see, I thought if you weren’t too busy, I’d like you to come over to my Club and say a few words about something. They’ve all heard about my prominent husband and I’ve promised to bring you to address them—you know, something on Electrification or modern airplanes or something.”

“Sorry,” said Victor, “some other time. I’ve got to see a man today. About a job. About that job on the dam.”

“May I go with you, Victor?”

“Certainly not. What’s this? Checking up on me? Jealous or something?”

“Oh, no, no, darling. No. Nothing.”

“Well, then, shut up. I’m not going to have a wife tagging me around.”

“Are you looking for a new job, Victor?” Vasili Ivanovitch asked.

“Well, what do you think? Think I’ll settle down to a ration-card slave’s drudgery for the rest of my life? Well, you’ll see.”

“Are you sure?” the official asked.

“I’m sure,” said Victor.

“Who else is responsible?”

“No one. Just my sister.”

“Who else lives in your apartment, Comrade Dunaev?”

“My wife, my father, and my little sister—she’s just a child. My father doesn’t suspect a thing. My wife is a scatter-brained creature who wouldn’t notice anything right under her nose. And anyway, she’s a member of the Komsomol. There are also tenants, but they never come in contact with our side of the apartment.”

“I see. Thank you, Comrade Dunaev.”

“I’m merely doing my duty.”

The official rose and extended his hand. “Comrade Dunaev, in the name of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, I thank you for your courage. They are still few, those whose devotion to the State rises above all personal ties of blood and family. That is an attitude of the future, toward which we are trying to educate our backward people. That is the highest proof of loyalty a Party man can give. I shall see to it that your heroism does not remain unknown.”

“I do not deserve this high praise, comrade,” said Victor. “The only value of my example is in showing our Party that the family is an institution of the past, which should not be considered when judging a member’s loyalty to our great Collective.”

VIII

THE DOOR BELL RANG.

Irina shuddered and dropped her newspaper. Marisha lowered her book.

“I’ll open it,” said Victor, rising.

Irina looked at the dining-room clock. One hour was left before the train’s departure. And Victor had not gone to the Party meeting; and he would not leave the house.

Vasili Ivanovitch was carving a paper knife, sitting by the window. Acia yelled from somewhere under the table, rustling old magazines: “Say, is this a picture of Lenin? I gotta cut out ten of them for the Nook and I can’t find that many. Is this Lenin or is it a Czechoslovakian general? I’ll be damned if I can . . .”

They heard the steps of many heavy boots in the lobby. The door was thrown open. A man in a leather jacket stood on the threshold, a slip of paper in his hand. Two soldiers in peaked caps stood behind him, their hands on the butts of the guns at their belts. A third one stood at the entrance door in the lobby, holding a bayonet.

They heard a scream; it came from Marisha. She jumped up, pressing both hands to her mouth. Vasili Ivanovitch rose slowly. Acia stared up from under the table, her mouth hanging open. Irina stood very straight, too straight, leaning back a little.

“Search warrant,” said the man in the leather jacket, throwing the paper on the table, and motioning to his soldiers. “This way!”

They walked down the corridor to Irina’s room.

They threw the closet door open. Sasha stood on the threshold, looking at them with a somber grin.

Vasili Ivanovitch gasped, in the corridor, behind the soldiers. Acia yelled: “Oh, God! That’s why she wouldn’t let me open . . .” Marisha kicked her ankles. A drawing on the edge of a table slid down, rustling, fluttering to the floor.

“Which one is the Citizen Irina Dunaeva?” asked the man in the leather jacket.

“I am,” said Irina.

“Listen,” Sasha jerked forward. “She had nothing to do with it . . . she . . . it’s not her fault. . . . I threatened her and . . .”

“With what?” the man in the leather jacket asked, his voice expressionless.

A soldier ran his hands swiftly down Sasha’s clothes. “No weapons,” he reported.

“All right,” said the man in the leather jacket. “Take him down to the car. The Citizen Dunaeva, too. And the old man. Search the apartment.”

“Comrade,” Vasili Ivanovitch approached the leader, his voice steady, his hands shaking. “Comrade, my daughter couldn’t be guilty of . . .”

“You’ll have a chance to talk later,” said the man and turned to Victor. “Are you a Party member?”

“Yes,” said Victor.

“Your card?” Victor showed his Party card. The man pointed to Marisha: “Your wife?”

“Yes.”

“All right. These two can stay. Get your coats, citizens.”

On the floor, melting snow trailed the soldiers’ boots. A lamp with a shade that had slipped sidewise, threw a broken patch of light into the corridor, on Marisha’s face, greenish-white, with sunken eyes staring at Victor.

The soldier on guard in the lobby opened the door to admit the Upravdom. The Upravdom’s coat was thrown hurriedly over his shoulders, over a dirty, unbuttoned shirt. He wailed, clutching his fingers with a dry little crackle of stretched joints: “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! . . . Comrade Commissar, I knew nothing about this. Comrade Commissar, I swear. . . .” The soldier slammed the door in the faces of curious neighbors gathered on the stair-landing.

Irina kissed Acia and Marisha. Victor approached her, his face frozen in anxious concern: “Irina, I’m so sorry. . . . I don’t understand. . . . I’ll see what I can do and . . .”

Her eyes stopped him; they were looking at him fixedly; they looked suddenly like the eyes of Maria Petrovna in the old portrait. She turned and followed the soldiers, without a word. She went first; Sasha and Vasili Ivanovitch followed.

Vasili Ivanovitch was released in three days.

Sasha Chernov was sentenced to ten years in a Siberian prison, for counter-revolutionary activity.

Irina Dunaeva was sentenced to ten years in a Siberian prison, for assisting a counter-revolutionary.

Vasili Ivanovitch tried to see officials, got a few letters of introduction to a few assistant secretaries, spent hours huddled in the corners of unheated waiting rooms, made telephone calls, trying to keep his voice from trembling. Nothing could be done and he knew it.

When he came home, he did not speak to Victor. He did not look at Victor. He did not ask for Victor’s help.

Marisha, alone, greeted Vasili Ivanovitch when he came home. She said timidly: “Here, Vasili Ivanovitch, have some dinner. I cooked the noodle soup you like—for you, specially.” She blushed, grateful and embarrassed, when he answered with a silent, absent-minded smile.

Vasili Ivanovitch saw Irina in a cell of the G.P.U. He locked himself in his room for many hours and cried silently, happily, on the day when he arranged for her last request to be granted. She had asked permission to marry Sasha before they were sent away.

The wedding was performed in a bare hall of the G.P.U. Armed guards stood at the door. Vasili Ivanovitch and Kira were the witnesses. Sasha’s lips twitched. Irina was very calm. She had been calm ever since her arrest. She looked a little thinner, a little paler; her skin seemed transparent; her eyes too big; her fingers were steady on Sasha’s arm. She raised her face for his kiss after the ceremony, with a tender, compassionate smile.

The official whom Vasili Ivanovitch saw on the following day said: “Well, you got what you wanted. Only I don’t see what good that fool rigmarole will do them. Don’t you know that their prisons are three hundred and fifty kilometers apart?”

“No,” said Vasili Ivanovitch and sat down heavily. “I didn’t know that.”

But Irina had expected it. That had been the reason for the wedding; she had hoped it would influence the decision. It had not.

It was Vasili Ivanovitch’s last crusade. No one could appeal a sentence of the G.P.U. But a prison assignment could be changed; if he could get the proper influence, the proper connections. . . . Vasili Ivanovitch rose at dawn. Marisha forced him to swallow a cup of black coffee, stopping him in the lobby on his way out, pushing the mug into his hands, trembling in her long nightgown. Night found him in a casino lobby, pushing his way through a crowd, crumpling his hat in both hands, stopping an imposing figure he had been expecting for hours, saying softly: “Comrade Commissar . . . just a few words . . . please . . . Comrade Commissar . . .” He was thrown out by an attendant in uniform, once, and lost his hat.

He made appointments and obtained interviews. He entered a solemn office, his old, patched coat brushed thoroughly, his shoes shined, his white hair parted neatly. He stood before a desk, and his tall shoulders that had carried a heavy rifle through many dark nights, through many Siberian forests, many years ago, sagged helplessly. He looked into a stern face and said:

“Comrade Commissar, that’s all I ask. Just that. It’s not much, is it? Just send them to the same place. I know they’ve been counter-revolutionaries and you have a right to punish them. I’m not complaining, Comrade Commissar. It’s ten years, you know, but that’s all right. Only send them to the same place. What difference does it make to you? What difference does it make to the State? They’re so young. They love each other. It’s ten years, but you know and I know that they’ll never come back—it’s Siberia, and the cold and the hunger, and the conditions . . .”

“What’s that?” a stern voice interrupted him.

“Comrade Commissar, I . . . I didn’t mean anything . . . No . . . I didn’t mean . . . Only suppose they get sick or something? Irina is not very strong. They’re not sentenced to death. And while they’re alive—couldn’t you let them be together? It would mean so much to them—and so little to anyone else. I’m an old man, Comrade Commissar, and she’s my daughter. I know Siberia. It would help me, if I knew that she wasn’t alone—there—that she had a man with her, her husband. I’m not sure I know how to ask you, Comrade Commissar, but you must forgive me. You see, I’ve never asked a favor in my life. You probably think that I’m indignant and hate you all in my heart. But I don’t. I won’t. Just do that one thing—that last thing—send them to the same prison—and I’ll bless you as long as I live.”

He was refused.

“I heard the whole story,” said Andrei, when Kira spoke to him about it. “Do you know who denounced Irina?”

“No,” said Kira, and turned away, and added: “I suspect it, though. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear it.”

“I won’t.”

“I didn’t want to ask for your help, Andrei. I know I can’t expect you to intercede for a counter-revolutionary, but couldn’t you ask them to change her prison assignment and have them sent to the same place? It wouldn’t be treason on your part, and it really makes no difference to your officials.”

He held her hand and said: “Certainly. I’ll try.”

In an office of the G.P.U., the executive looked at Andrei coldly and asked:

“Pleading for a . . . relative, aren’t you, Comrade Taganov?”

“I don’t understand you, comrade,” Andrei answered slowly, looking straight at him.

“Oh, yes, I think you do. And I think you should understand that keeping a mistress who is the daughter of a former factory owner, is not the best way to strengthen your Party standing. . . . Don’t look startled, Comrade Taganov. You really didn’t think it was unknown to us, did you? And you working in the G.P.U.! You surprise me.”

“My personal affairs . . .”

“Your what kind of affairs, Comrade Taganov?”

“If you’re speaking of Citizen Argounova . . .”

“I am speaking of Citizen Argounova. And I’d suggest that you use some of the methods and authority which your position gives you, to investigate Citizen Argounova a little—for your own sake, while we’re on the subject.”

“I know everything I have to know about Citizen Argounova. You don’t have to bring her into this. She is absolutely blameless politically.”

“Oh, politically? And in other respects?”

“If you’re speaking as my superior, I refuse to listen to anything about Citizen Argounova except her political standing.”

“Very well. I don’t have to say anything. I was speaking merely as a friend. You should be careful, Comrade Taganov. You don’t have many friends left—in the Party.”

Andrei could do nothing to change Irina’s sentence.

“Hell!” said Leo, dipping his head into a basin of cold water, for he had come home very late the night before, “I’m going to see that skunk Syerov. He has a big boy friend in the G.P.U. He’ll have to do something if I tell him to.”

“I wish you’d try, Leo,” said Kira.

“The damned sadists! What difference should it make to them if the poor kids rot together in their infernal prison? They know they’ll never come back alive.”

“Don’t tell him that, Leo. Ask him nicely.”

“I’ll ask him nicely!”

In Pavel Syerov’s outer office, the secretary sat typing intently, biting her lower lip. Ten visitors were waiting before the wooden railing. Leo walked straight through the office, swung the little gate open and threw at the secretary:

“I want to see Comrade Syerov. At once.”

“But, citizen,” the secretary gasped, “you’re not allowed to . . .”

“I said I want to see him at once.”

“Comrade Syerov is very busy, citizen, and there are all these citizens here waiting, and he can’t see you out of turn . . .”

“You go and tell him it’s Lev Kovalensky. He’ll see me fast enough.”

The secretary rose and backed into Syerov’s office, staring at Leo, as if she expected him to draw a gun. She returned, looking more frightened, and said, gulping: “Go right in, Citizen Kovalensky.”

When the door closed and they were alone, Pavel Syerov jumped up and hissed at Leo, his voice a muffled roar: “You damn fool! Are you insane? How dare you come here?”

Leo laughed, his icy laughter that was like a master’s hand slapping an insolent slave’s face. “You’re not speaking to me, are you?” he asked. “Particularly when you’re worried about caution?”

“Get out of here! I can’t talk to you here!”

“You don’t have to,” said Leo, sitting down comfortably. “I’ll do the talking.”

“Do you realize whom you’re talking to? You’re demented or else I’ve never seen insolence in my life!”

“Repeat that to yourself,” said Leo, “with my compliments.”

“Hell!” said Syerov, dropping into his chair. “What do you want?”

“You have a friend in the G.P.U.”

“I’m glad you remember that.”

“I do. That’s why I’m here. I have two friends sentenced to ten years in Siberia. They’ve just been married. They’re being sent to prisons hundreds of kilometers apart. I want you to see that they’re sent together, to the same place.”

“Uh-huh,” said Pavel Syerov. “I’ve heard about the case. A beautiful example of Party loyalty on the part of Comrade Victor Dunaev.”

“Don’t you think it’s slightly ludicrous, you talking of Party loyalty to me?”

“Well, what are you going to do, if I don’t lift a finger about the case?”

“You know,” said Leo. “I could do a lot.”

“Sure,” said Syerov complaisantly. “I know you could. I also know you won’t. Because, you see, to drown me, you’d have to be the stone tied around my neck, and I don’t think you’ll go that far in your noble unselfishness.”

“Listen,” said Leo, “drop the official pose. We’re both crooks, and you know it, and we hate each other, and we both know it, but we’re in the same boat and it’s not a very steady one. Don’t you think it would be wiser if we helped each other as much as we could?”

“Yes, I sure do. And your part of it is to keep as far away from here as you can. And if you weren’t so damn blinded by your old patrician arrogance, which it’s about time to forget, you’d know better than to ask me to intercede for any cousins of yours, which would be as good as posting on a poster my exact connection with you.”

“You damn coward!”

“Well, maybe I am. And maybe it would do you good to acquire some of the same quality. You’d better not come around demanding any favors from me. You’d better remember that even if we are chained together—for the time being—I have more opportunities than you to break the chain.”

Leo rose. At the door he turned and said: “As you wish. Only it would have been wiser of you—in case the chain is ever in my hands. . . .”

“Yes. And it would have been wiser of you if you hadn’t come here—in case it’s ever in mine. . . . And listen,” he lowered his voice, “you can do something for me and you’d better do it. Tell that hog Morozov to send the money. He’s late again on the last deal. I told him I’m not to be kept waiting.”

Marisha said hesitantly, trying not to look at Victor: “Listen, don’t you think that if I saw someone and asked . . . You know, just to send them to the same prison . . . it wouldn’t make any difference to anyone . . . and . . .”

Victor seized her wrist and swung her around so savagely that she squealed with pain. “Listen,” he said through his teeth, “you should keep as far out of it as your fool legs will carry you. It would be fine for me, wouldn’t it? My wife begging for counter-revolutionaries!”

“But it’s only . . .”

“Listen! You breathe only one word—understand?—just one to any friend of yours—and you’ll get a divorce notice the next morning!”

That night, Vasili Ivanovitch came home, looking calmer than usual. He took off his coat and folded his gloves neatly, meticulously on the mirror-stand in the lobby. He did not look at the dinner Marisha had set out for him in the dining room. He said: “Victor, I want to speak to you.”

Victor followed him reluctantly to his office.

Vasili Ivanovitch did not sit down. He stood, his hands hanging limply by his sides, and looked at his son.

“Victor,” said Vasili Ivanovitch, “you know what I might say. But I won’t say it. I won’t ask questions. It’s a strange time we’re living in. Many years ago, I felt sure of what I thought. I knew when I was right and I knew when to condemn. I can’t do it now. I don’t know whether I can condemn anyone for anything. There’s so much horror and suffering around us that I don’t want to brand anyone as guilty. We’re poor, bewildered creatures—all of us—who suffer so much and know so little! I can’t blame you for anything you might have done. I don’t know your reasons. I won’t ask. I know I won’t understand. No one understands each other these days. You’re my son, Victor. I love you. I can’t help it, as you can’t help being what you are. You see, I’ve wanted a son ever since I was younger than you are now. I’ve never trusted men. And so I wanted a man of my own, at whom I could look proudly, directly, as I’m looking at you now. When you were a little boy, Victor, you cut your finger, once, a deep cut, clear to the bone. You came in from the garden to have it bandaged. Your lips were blue, but you didn’t cry. You didn’t make a sound. Your mother was so angry at me because I laughed happily. But, you see, I was proud of you. I knew I would always be proud of you. . . . You know, you were so funny, when your mother made you wear a velvet suit with a big lace collar. You were so angry—and so pretty! You had curly hair . . . Well, all that doesn’t matter. It’s only that I can’t say anything against you, Victor. I can’t think anything against you. So I won’t question you. I’ll only ask you for one favor: you can’t save your sister, I know it; but ask your friends—I know you have friends who can do it—just ask them to have her sent to the same prison with Sasha. Just that. It won’t interfere with the sentence and it won’t compromise you. It’s one last favor to her—a death-bed favor, Victor, for you know you’ll never see her again. Just do that—and the book will be closed. I’ll never look back. I’ll never try to read some of the pages which I don’t want to see. That will settle all our accounts. I’ll still go on having a son, and even if it’s hard, sometimes, not to think, one can do it, these days, one has to, and you’ll help me. Just one favor, in exchange for . . . in exchange for all that’s past.”

“Father,” said Victor, “you must believe me, I’d do anything in my power, if I could. . . . I’ve tried, but . . .”

“Victor, we won’t argue. I’m not asking whether you can do it. I know you can. Don’t explain. Just say yes or no. Only, if it’s no, Victor, then it’s the end for you and me. Then I have no son any longer. There’s a limit, Victor, to how much I can forgive.”

“But, Father, it is thoroughly impossible, and . . .”

“Victor, I said if it’s no, I have no son any longer. Think of how much I’ve lost these last few years. Now what is the answer?”

“I can do nothing.”

Vasili Ivanovitch straightened his shoulders slowly, the two lines that cut his cheeks, from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth, looked set, firm, emotionless. He turned and walked to the door.

“Where are you going?” Victor asked.

“That,” said Vasili Ivanovitch, “does not concern you any longer.”

In the dining room, Marisha and Acia were sitting at the table, staring at the plates of a cold dinner they had not touched.

“Acia,” said Vasili Ivanovitch, “get your coat and hat.”

“Father!” Marisha’s chair clattered back as she leaped to her feet; it was the first time she had ever addressed that word to Vasili Ivanovitch.

“Marisha,” Vasili Ivanovitch said gently, “I’ll telephone you in a few days . . . when I find a place to live. Will you then send my things over . . . what’s left of mine here?”

“You can’t go!” said Marisha, her voice breaking. “With no job and no money and . . . This is your house.”

“This is your husband’s house,” said Vasili Ivanovitch. “Come on, Acia.”

“May I take my stamp collection along?” Acia muttered.

“Take your stamp collection along.”

Marisha knelt on the window sill, her nose flattened against the glass, her back heaving in silent sobs, and watched them go. Vasili Ivanovitch’s shoulders drooped and, under the street lantern, she could see the white patch of his bare neck, between the collar of his old coat and the black fur cap on his bowed head; he held Acia’s hand, and her arm was stretched up to his, and she seemed very small next to his huge bulk; she shuffled obediently, heels first, through a brown slush, and clutched the big stamp album to her breast.

Kira saw Irina in a cell of the G.P.U. on the evening of her departure. Irina smiled calmly; her smile was soft, wondering; her eyes, in a face that looked like wax, stared at Kira gently, vaguely, as if fixed, with quiet astonishment, on something distant that she was struggling to understand.

“I’ll send you mittens,” said Kira, trying to smile, “woolen ones. Only I warn you, I’ll knit them myself, so don’t be surprised if you won’t be able to wear them.”

“No,” said Irina, “but you can send me a snapshot. It will look nice: Kira Argounova knitting!”

“And you know,” said Kira, “you’ve never given me that drawing you promised.”

“That’s right, I haven’t. Father has them all. Tell him to let you select any that you want. Tell him I said so. Still, it’s not what I promised you. I promised a real portrait of Leo.”

“Well, we’ll have to wait for that till you come back.”

“Yes.” Then she jerked her head and laughed. “It’s nice of you, Kira, only you don’t have to fool me. I’m not afraid. But I know. Remember, when they sent those University students to Siberia? You don’t hear of any of them coming back. It’s the scurvy or consumption, or both. . . . Oh, it’s all right. I know it.”

“Irina . . .”

“Come on, we don’t have to be emotional, even if it is the last time. . . . There’s something I wanted to ask you, Kira. You don’t have to answer, if you don’t want to, it’s just curiosity: what is there between you and Andrei Taganov?”

“I’ve been his mistress for over a year,” said Kira. “You see, Leo’s aunt in Berlin didn’t . . .”

“It’s just as I thought. Well, kid, I don’t know which one of us needs more courage to face the future.”

“I’ll be afraid only on a day that will never come,” said Kira. “The day when I give up.”

“I’ve given up,” said Irina, “and I’m not afraid. Only there’s something I would like to understand. And I don’t think anyone can explain it. You see, I know it’s the end for me. I know it, but I can’t quite believe it, I can’t feel it. It’s so strange. There’s your life. You begin it, feeling that it’s something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it’s like a sacred treasure. Now it’s over, and it doesn’t make any difference to anyone, and it isn’t that they are indifferent, it’s just that they don’t know, they don’t know what it means, that treasure of mine, and there’s something about it that they should understand. I don’t understand it myself, but there’s something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it, Kira? What?”

Political convicts traveled in a separate car; men with bayonets stood at its doors. Irina and Sasha sat facing each other on hard wooden benches; they had traveled together part of the way, but they were approaching a junction where Irina was to be transferred to another train. The car windows were black and lustrous, as if sheets of dusty patent leather had been pasted behind the glass panes; only the fluffy, wet stars of snow, smashing against the glass, showed that there was an earth beyond the panes, and wind, and a black sky. A lantern trembled high under the ceiling, as if every knock of the wheels under the floor kicked the yellow flame out, and it fluttered and came back again, shivering, clutching the little stub of candle. A boy in an old green student’s cap, alone by a window, sang softly, monotonously, through his teeth, and his voice sounded as if he were grinning, although his cheeks were motionless:

“Hey, little apple!
Where are you rolling?”

Sasha held Irina’s hands. She was smiling, her chin buried in an old woolen scarf. Her hands were cold. A white vapor fluttered at her lips as she whispered: “We must not think of it as ten years. It sounds so long, doesn’t it? But it really isn’t. You know, some philosopher said that time is only an illusion or something like that. Who was it that said it? Well, it doesn’t matter. Time can pass very quickly, if one stops thinking of it. We’ll still be young, when we’ll . . . when we’ll be free. So let’s promise each other not to think of anything else. Now, promise?”

“Yes,” he whispered, looking at her hands. “Irina, if only I hadn’t . . .”

“And that’s something you’ve already promised me never to mention again, not even to yourself. Darling, don’t you see that it’s really easier for me—this way—than to have remained at home, with you sent here alone? This way, I’ll feel that we have something in common, that we’re sharing something. Aren’t we?”

He buried his face in her hands and said nothing.

“And listen,” she whispered, bending down to his blond hair, “I know it won’t always be easy to remain cheerful. Sometimes one thinks: oh, what’s the use of remaining brave just for one’s pride’s sake? So let’s agree on this: we’ll both be brave for each other. When you feel the worst, just smile—and think that you’re doing something for me. And I’ll do the same. That will keep us together. And you know, it’s very important to remain cheerful. We’ll last longer.”

“What for?” he asked. “We won’t last long enough anyway.”

“Sasha, what nonsense!” She pulled his head up by a strand of hair, looking straight into his eyes, as if she believed her every word. “Two strong, healthy creatures like us! And, anyway, I’m sure those stories are exaggerated—if you mean the hunger and the consumption. Nothing is ever as bad as it’s painted.”

The wheels grated under the floor, slowing down.

“Oh, God!” Sasha moaned. “Is that the station?”

The car jerked forward and the wheels went on knocking under the floor, like a mallet striking faster and faster.

“No,” Irina whispered breathlessly, “not yet.”

The student by the window wailed, as if he were grinning, to the rhythm of the wheels:

“Hey, little apple,
Where are you rolling?”

And he repeated, slowly, biting into every word, as if the words were an answer to a question, and the question itself, and a deadly certainty of some silent thought of his own: “Hey . . . little . . . apple . . . where . . . are . . . you . . . rolling?”

Irina was whispering: “Listen, here’s something we can do: we can look at the moon, sometimes—and, you know, it’s the same moon everywhere—and we would be looking at the same thing together that way, you see?”

“Yes,” said Sasha, “it will be nice.”

“I was going to say the sun, but I don’t suppose there will be much sun there, so . . .” A cough interrupted her; she coughed dully, shaking, pressing her hand to her mouth.

“Irina!” he cried. “What’s that?”

“Nothing,” she smiled, blinking, catching her breath. “Just a little cold I caught. Those G.P.U. cells weren’t heated too well.”

A lantern swam past the window. Then there was nothing but the silent snowflakes splattering against the glass, but they sat, frozen, staring at the window.

Irina whispered: “I think we’re approaching.”

Sasha sat up, erect, his face the color of brass, darker than his hair, and said, his voice changed, firm: “If they let us write to each other, Irina, will you . . . every day?”

“Of course,” she answered gaily.

“Will you . . . draw things in your letters, too?”

“With pleasure. . . . Here,” she picked a small splinter of coal from the window ledge, “here, I’ll draw something for you, right now.”

With a few strokes, swift and sure as a surgeon’s scalpel, she sketched a face on the back of her seat, an imp’s face that grinned at them with a wide, crescent mouth, with eyebrows flung up, with one eye winking mischievously, a silly, infectious, irresistible grin that one could not face without grinning in answer.

“Here,” said Irina, “he’ll keep you company after . . . after the station. . . .”

Sasha smiled, answering the imp’s smile. And suddenly throwing his head back, clenching his fists, he cried, so that the student by the window shuddered and looked at him: “Why do they talk of honor, and ideals, and duty to one’s country? Why do they teach us . . .”

“Darling, not so loud! Don’t think useless thoughts. There are so many useless thoughts in the world!”

At the station, another train was waiting on a parallel track. Guards with bayonets escorted some of the prisoners out. Sasha held Irina, and her bones creaked in his huge arms, and he kissed her lips, her chin, her hair, her neck, and he made a sound that was not quite a moan and not quite a beast’s growl. He whispered hoarsely, furiously, into her scarf, blushing, choking, words he had always been reluctant to utter: “I . . . I . . . I love you. . . .”

A guard touched her elbow; she tore herself away from Sasha and followed the guard down the aisle. At the door, Sasha pushed the guard aside, savagely, insanely, and seized Irina again, and held her, not kissing her, looking at her stupidly, his long hands crushing the body of the wife he had never possessed.

The guard tore her away from him and pushed her out through the door. She leaned back for a second, for a last look at Sasha. She grinned at him, the homely, silly grin of her imp, her nose wrinkled, one eye winking mischievously. Then the door closed.

The two trains started moving at once. Pressed tightly to the glass pane, Sasha could see the black outline of Irina’s head in the yellow square of a window in the car on the next track. The two trains rolled together, iron mallets striking faster and faster under the floor, the glow of the station swimming slowly back over the dark floor of the car that Sasha was watching. Then the grayish patch of snow between them grew wider. He could still touch the other train with his outstretched arm if the window were open, he thought; then he could still touch it if he were to fling his whole body straight to the other train; then he could reach it no longer, even were he to leap out. He tore his eyes from that other window and watched the white stretch that was growing between them, his fingers on the glass, as if he wanted to seize that white stretch and hold it, and pull with his whole strength, and stop it. The tracks were flying farther and farther apart. At the level of his eyes he could now see the bluish, steely gleams of wheels whirling down narrow bands in the snow. Then he did not look at the snow any longer. His glance clung to the tiny yellow square with a black dot that was a human figure, far away. And as the yellow square shrank swiftly, his eyes would not let it go, and he felt his glance being pulled, stretched, with a pain as excruciating as a wrenched nerve. Across an endless waste of snow, two long caterpillars crawled apart; two thin, silvery threads preceded each; the threads led, disappearing, into a black void. Sasha lost sight of the window; but he could still see a string of yellow spots that still looked square, and above them something black moving against the sky, that looked like car roofs. Then there was only a string of yellow beads, dropping into a black well. Then, there was only the dusty glass pane with patent leather pasted behind it, and he was not sure whether he still saw a string of sparks somewhere or whether it was something burned into his unblinking, dilated eyes.

Then there was only the imp left, on the back of the empty seat before him, grinning with a wide, crescent mouth, one eye winking.

IX

COMRADE VICTOR DUNAEV, ONE OF OUR YOUNGEST and most brilliant engineers, has been assigned to a job on the Volkhovstroy, the great hydroelectric project of the Soviet Union. It is a responsible post, never held previously by one of his years.

The clipping from Pravda lay in Victor’s glistening new brief case, along with a similar one from the Krasnaya Gazeta, and, folded carefully between them, a clipping from the Moscow Izvestia, even though it was only one line about “Comrade V. Dunaev.”

Victor carried the brief case when he left for the construction site on Lake Volkhov, a few hours ride from Petrograd. A delegation from his Party Club came to see him off at the station. He made a short, effective speech about the future of proletarian construction, from the platform of the car, and forgot to kiss Marisha when the train started moving. The speech was reproduced in the Club’s Wall Newspaper on the following day.

Marisha had to remain in Petrograd; she had her course at the Rabfac to finish and her social activities; she had suggested timidly that she would be willing to give them up and accompany Victor; but he had insisted on her remaining in the city. “My dear, we must not forget,” he had told her, “that our social duties come first, above all personal considerations.”

He had promised to come home whenever he was back in the city. She saw him once, unexpectedly, at a Party meeting. He explained hurriedly that he could not come home with her, for he had to take the midnight train back to the construction site. She said nothing, even though she knew that there was no midnight train.

She had developed a tendency to be too silent. At the Komsomol meetings, she made her reports in a strident, indifferent voice. When caught off guard, she sat staring vacantly ahead, her eyes puzzled.

She was left alone in the big, empty rooms of the Dunaev apartment. Victor had talked intimately to a few influential officials, and no tenants had been ordered to occupy their vacant rooms. But the silence of the apartment frightened Marisha, so she spent her evenings with her family, in her old room, next to Kira’s.

When Marisha appeared, her mother sighed and muttered some complaint about the rations at the co-operative, and bent silently over her mending. Her father said: “Good evening,” and gave no further sign of noticing her presence. Her little brother said: “You here again?” She had nothing to say. She sat in a corner behind the grand piano, reading a book until late at night; then she said: “Guess I’ll be going,” and went home.

One evening, she saw Kira crossing the room hurriedly on her way out. Marisha leaped to her feet, smiling eagerly, hopefully, although she did not know why, nor what she hoped for, nor whether she had anything to say to Kira. She made a timid step forward and stopped: Kira had not noticed her and had gone out. Marisha sat down slowly, still smiling vacantly.

Snow had come early. It grew by Petrograd’s sidewalks in craggy mountain ranges, veined with thin, black threads of soot, spotted with brown clods and cigarette stubs and greenish, fading rags of newspapers. But under the walls of the houses, snow grew slowly, undisturbed, soft, white, billowing, pure as cotton, rising to the top panes of basement windows.

Above the streets, window sills hung as white, overloaded shelves. Cornices sparkled, trimmed with the glass lace of long icicles. Into an icy, summer-blue sky little billows of pink smoke rose slowly, melting like petals of apple blossoms.

High on the roofs, snow gathered into menacing white walls behind iron railings. Men in heavy mittens swung shovels high over the city and hurled huge, frozen white clods, as rocks, down to the pavements below; they crashed with a dull thud and a thin white cloud. Sleighs whirled sharply to avoid them; hungry sparrows, their feathers fluffed, scattered from under the muffled, thumping hoofs.

On street corners, huge cauldrons stood encased in boxes of unpainted boards. Men with shovels swung the snow up into the cauldrons, and narrow streams of dirty water gurgled from under the furnaces, running by the curb, long black threads cutting white streets.

At night, the furnaces blazed open in the darkness, little purplish-orange fires low over the ground, and ragged men slipped out of the night, bending to extend frozen hands into the red glow.

Kira walked soundlessly through the palace garden. A narrow track of footprints, half-buried under a fresh white powder, led through the deep snow to the pavilion; Andrei’s footprints, she knew; few visitors ever crossed that garden. Tree trunks stood bare, black and dead like telegraph poles. The palace windows were dark; but, far at the end of the garden, showing through the stiff, naked branches, a bright yellow square hung in the darkness and a little patch of snow was golden-pink under Andrei’s window.

She rose slowly up the long marble stairway. There was no light; her foot searched uncertainly for every frozen, slippery step. It was colder than in the street outside, the dead, damp, still cold of a mausoleum. Hesitantly, her hand followed the broken marble rail. She could see nothing ahead; it seemed as if the steps would never end.

When she came to a break in the railing, she stopped. She called helplessly, with a little note of laughter in her frightened voice: “Andrei!”

A wedge of light split the darkness above as he flung the door open. “Oh, Kira!” He rushed down to her, laughing apologetically: “I’m so sorry! It’s those broken electric wires.”

He swung her up into his arms and carried her to his room, while she laughed: “I’m sorry, Andrei, I’m getting to be such a helpless coward!”

He carried her to the blazing fireplace. He took off her coat and hat, his fingers wet with snow melting on her fur collar. He made her sit down by the fire, removed her mittens and rubbed her cold fingers between his strong palms; he unfastened her new felt overshoes, and took them off, shaking snow that sizzled on the bright red coals.

Then he turned silently, took a long, narrow box, dropped it in her lap and stood watching her, smiling. She asked: “What is this, Andrei?”

“Something from abroad.”

She tore the paper and opened the box. Her mouth fell open without a sound. The box held a nightgown of black chiffon, so transparent that she saw the flames of the fireplace dancing through its thin black folds, as she held it high in frightened, incredulous fingers. “Andrei . . . where did you get that?”

“From a smuggler.”

“Andrei! You—buying from a smuggler?”

“Why not?”

“From an . . . illegal speculator?”

“Oh, why not? I wanted it. I knew you’d want it.”

“But there was a time when . . .”

“There was. Not now.” Her fingers wrinkled the black chiffon as if they were empty. “Well?” he asked. “Don’t you like it?”

“Oh, Andrei!” she moaned. “Andrei! Do they wear things like that abroad?”

“Evidently.”

“Black underwear? How—oh, how silly and how lovely!”

“That’s what they do abroad. They’re not afraid of doing silly things that are lovely. They consider it reason enough to do things because they’re lovely.”

She laughed: “Andrei, they’d throw you out of the Party if they heard you say that.”

“Kira, would you like to go abroad?”

The black nightgown fell to the floor. He smiled calmly, bending to pick it up: “I’m sorry. Did I frighten you, Kira?”

“What . . . what did you say?”

“Listen!” He was kneeling suddenly by her side, his arms around her, his eyes intent with a reckless eagerness she had never seen in them before. “It’s an idea I’ve had for some time . . . at first, I thought it was insane, but it keeps coming back to me. . . . Kira, we could . . . You understand? Abroad . . . forever. . . .”

“But, Andrei . . .”

“It can be done. I could still manage to be sent there, get an assignment, some secret mission for the G.P.U. I’d get you a passport to go as my secretary. Once across the border—we’d drop the assignment, and our Red passports, and our names. We’d run away so far they’d never find us.”

“Andrei, do you know what you’re saying?”

“Yes. Only I don’t know what I’d do there. I don’t know—yet. I don’t dare to think about it, when I’m alone. But I can think of it, I can talk of it when you’re here with me. I want to escape before I see too much of what I see around us. To break with all of it at once. It would be like starting again, from the beginning, from a total void. But I’d have you. The rest doesn’t matter. I’d grow to understand what I’m just beginning to learn from you now.”

“Andrei,” she stammered, “you, who were the best your Party had to offer the world . . .”

“Well, say it. Say I’m a traitor. Maybe I am. And maybe I’ve just stopped being one. Maybe I’ve been a traitor all these years—to something greater than what the Party ever offered the world. I don’t know. I don’t care. I feel as if I were naked, naked and empty and clear. Because, you see, I feel certain of nothing in that involved mess they call existence, of nothing but you.” He noticed the look in her eyes and asked softly: “What’s the matter, Kira? Have I said anything to frighten you?”

She whispered without looking at him: “No, Andrei.”

“It’s only what I said once—about my highest reverence—remember?”

“Yes . . .”

“Kira, will you marry me?”

Her hands fell limply. She looked at him, silently, her eyes wide and pleading.

“Kira, dearest, don’t you see what we’re doing? Why do we have to hide and lie? Why do I have to live in this agony of counting hours, days, weeks between out meetings. Why have I no right to call you in those hours when I think I’ll go insane if I don’t see you? Why do I have to keep silent? Why can’t I tell them all, tell men like Leo Kovalensky, that you’re mine, that you’re my . . . my wife?”

She did not look frightened any longer; the name he had pronounced had given her courage, her greatest, coldest battlefield courage. She said: “Andrei, I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Would you do something for me, if I asked you very urgently?”

“Anything.”

“Don’t ask me why.”

“All right.”

“And I can’t go abroad. But if you want to go alone . . .”

“Let’s forget it, Kira. I won’t ask any questions. But as for my going alone—don’t you think you shouldn’t say that?”

She laughed, jumping up: “Yes, let’s forget it. Let’s have our own bit of Europe right here. I’m going to try your gift on. Turn around and don’t look.”

He obeyed. When he turned again, she was standing at the fireplace, her arms crossed behind her head, fire flickering behind the black silhouette of her body, through a thin, black mist.

He was bending her backward, so that the locks of her hair, tumbling down, looked red in the glow of the fire; he was whispering: “Kira . . . I wasn’t complaining tonight . . . I’m happy . . . happy that I have nothing left but you. . . .”

She moaned: “Andrei, don’t say it! Please, please, don’t say it!”

He did not say it again. But his eyes, his arms, the body she felt against her body, cried to her without sound: “I have nothing left but you . . . nothing . . . but you. . . .”

She came home long after midnight. Her room was dark, empty. She sat wearily down on the bed, to wait for Leo. She fell asleep, exhausted, her hair spilled over the foot of the bed, her body huddled in her crumpled red dress.

The telephone awakened her; it was ringing fiercely, insistently. She jumped up. It was daylight. The lamp was still burning on the table; she was alone.

She staggered to the telephone, her eyes closing heavily, her eyelids leaden. “Allo?” she muttered, leaning against the wall, her eyes closed.

“Is that you, Kira Alexandrovna?” an unctuous masculine voice asked, drawing vowels meticulously, with an anxious note in the pleasant inflection.

“Yes,” said Kira. “Who . . .”

“It’s Karp Morozov speaking, Kira Alexandrovna. Kira Alexandrovna, soul of mine, can you come over and take that . . . that Lev Sergeievitch home? Really, he shouldn’t be seen at my house so often. It seems there was a party and . . .”

“I’ll be right over,” said Kira, her eyes open wide, dropping the receiver.

She dressed hurriedly. She could not fasten her coat; her fingers would not slip the buttons through the buttonholes: her fingers were trembling.

It was Morozov who opened the door when she arrived. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and a vest was fastened too tightly, pulled in taut little wrinkles, across his broad stomach. He bowed low, like a peasant: “Ah, Kira Alexandrovna, soul of mine, how are we today? Sorry I had to trouble you, but . . . Come right in, come right in.”

The wide, white-paneled lobby smelled of lilac and mothballs. Behind a half-open door, she heard Leo laughing, a gay, ringing, carefree laughter.

She walked straight into the dining room, without waiting for Morozov’s invitation. In the dining room, a table was set for three. Antonina Pavlovna held a teacup, her little finger crooked delicately over its handle; she wore an Oriental kimono; powder was caked in white patches on her nose; lipstick was smeared in a blot between her nose and chin; her eyes seemed very small without make-up, puffed and weary. Leo sat at the table in his black trousers and dress shirt, his collar thrown open, his tie loose, his hair disheveled. He was laughing sonorously, trying to balance an egg on the edge of a knife.

He raised his head and looked at Kira, astonished. His face was fresh, young, radiant as on an early spring morning, a face that nothing, it seemed, could mar or alter. “Kira! What are you doing here?”

“Kira Alexandrovna just happened to . . .” Morozov began timidly, but Kira interrupted bluntly:

“He called me.”

“Why, you . . .” Leo whirled on Morozov, his face turned into a vicious snarl; then he shook his head and laughed again, as swiftly and suddenly: “Oh, hell, that’s a good one! So they all think that I have a wet-nurse to watch me!”

“Lev Sergeievitch, soul of mine, I didn’t mean to . . .”

“Shut up!” Leo ordered and turned to Kira. “Well, since you’re here, take your coat off and sit down and have some breakfast. Tonia, see if you have another couple of eggs.”

“We’re going home, Leo,” Kira said quietly.

He looked at her and shrugged: “If you insist . . .” and rose slowly.

Morozov picked up his unfinished cup of tea; he poured it into his saucer and held the saucer on the tips of his fingers and drank, sucking loudly. He said, looking at Kira, then at Leo, hesitantly, over the edge of the saucer: “I . . . you see . . . it was like this: I called Kira Alexandrovna because I was afraid that you . . . you weren’t well, Lev Sergeievitch, and you . . .”

“. . . were drunk,” Leo finished for him.

“Oh, no, but . . .”

“I was. Yesterday. But not this morning. You had no business . . .”

“It was just a little party, Kira Alexandrovna,” Antonina Pavlovna interrupted soothingly. “I suppose we did stay a little too late, and . . .”

“It was five o’clock when you crawled into bed,” Morozov growled. “I know, because you bumped into my bed and upset the water pitcher.”

“Well, Leo brought me home,” Antonina Pavlovna continued, ignoring him, “and I presume he must have been a little tired. . . .”

“A little . . .” Morozov began.

“. . . drunk,” Leo finished for him, shrugging.

“Plenty drunk, if you ask me.” Morozov’s freckles disappeared in a red flush of anger. “Just so drunk that I get up this morning and find him sprawled on the davenport in the lobby, full dress and all, and you couldn’t have awakened him with an earthquake.”

“Well,” Leo asked indifferently, “what of it?”

“It was a grand party,” said Antonina Pavlovna. “And how Leo can spend money! It was thrilling to watch. Really, Leo darling, you were too reckless, though.”

“What did I do? I don’t remember.”

“Well, I didn’t mind it when you lost so much on the roulette, and it was cute when you paid them ten rubles for every cheap glass you broke, but really you didn’t have to give the waiters hundred-ruble tips.”

“Why not? Let them see the difference between a gentleman and the Red trash of today.”

“Yes, but you didn’t have to pay the orchestra fifty rubles to shut up every time they played something you didn’t like. And then, when you chose the prettiest girl in the crowd, whom you’d never seen before, and you offered her any price she named to undress before the guests, and you stuck those hundreds down her décolleté . . .”

“Well,” Leo shrugged, “she had a beautiful body.”

“Let’s go, Leo,” said Kira.

“Wait a minute, Lev Sergeievitch,” Morozov said slowly, putting his saucer down. “Just where did you get all that money?”

“I don’t know,” said Leo. “Tonia gave it to me.”

“Antonina, where did you . . .”

“Oh?” Antonina Pavlovna raised her eyebrows and looked bored. “I took that package you had under the waste basket.”

“Tonia!” Morozov roared, jumping up, so that the dishes rattled on the table. “You didn’t take that!”

“Certainly I took it,” Antonina Pavlovna tilted her chin defiantly. “And I’m not accustomed to being reproached about money. I took it and that’s that, so what are you going to do about it?”

“My God! Oh, my God! Oh, my Lord in Heaven!” Morozov grasped his head and nodded, rocking like a toy with a broken spring. “What are we going to do? That was the money we owe Syerov. It was due yesterday. And we haven’t got another ruble on hand . . . and Syerov . . . well, if I don’t deliver it today, he’ll kill me. . . . What am I going to do? . . . He won’t be kept waiting and . . .”

“Oh, he won’t, eh?” Leo chuckled coldly. “Well, he’ll wait and he’ll like it. Stop whining like a mutt. What are you afraid of? He can do nothing to us and he knows it.”

“I’m surprised at you, Lev Sergeievitch,” Morozov growled, his freckles drowned in red. “You get your fair share, don’t you? Do you think it was honorable to take . . .”

“Honorable?” Leo laughed resonantly, his gayest, lightest, most insulting laughter. “Are you speaking to me? My dear friend, I’ve acquired the great privilege of not having to worry about that word at all. Not at all. In fact, if you find something particularly dishonorable—you may be sure I’ll do it. The lower—the better. I wish you a good day. . . . Come on, Kira.” He looked around uncertainly: “Where the hell’s my hat?”

“Don’t you remember, Leo?” Antonina Pavlovna reminded him gently. “You lost it on the way home.”

“That’s right, I did. Well, I’ll buy another one. Buy three of them. So long.”

Kira called a sleigh and they rode home in silence.

When they were alone in their room, Leo said brusquely: “I won’t have any criticism from you or anybody else. And you, particularly, have no complaints to make. I haven’t slept with any other woman, if that’s what you’re worried about, and that’s all you have to know.”

“I wasn’t worried, Leo. I have no complaints to make and no criticism. But I want to speak to you. Will you listen?”

He said: “Sure,” indifferently, and sat down.

She knelt before him and slipped her arms around him and shook her hair back, her eyes wide, intent, her voice tense with the calm of a last effort: “Leo, I can’t reproach you. I can’t blame you. I know what you’re doing. I know why you’re doing it. But listen: it’s not too late; they haven’t caught you; you still have time. Let’s make an effort, a last one: let’s save all we can and apply for a foreign passport. Let’s run to the point of the earth that’s the farthest from this damned country.”

He looked into her flaming eyes with eyes that were like mirrors which could not reflect a flame any longer. “Why bother?” he asked.

“Leo, I know what you’ll say. You have no desire to live. You don’t care any more. But listen: do it without desire. Even if you don’t believe you’ll ever care again. Just postpone your final judgment on yourself; postpone it till you get there. When you’re free in a human country again—then see if you still want to live.”

“You little fool! Do you think they give foreign passports to men with my record?”

“Leo, we have to try. We can’t give up. We can’t go on for one minute without that hope ahead of us. Leo, it can’t get you! I won’t let it get you!”

“Who? The G.P.U.? How are you going to stop it?”

“No! Not the G.P.U. Forget the G.P.U. There’s something worse, much worse. It got Victor. It got Andrei. It got Mother. It won’t get you.”

“What do you mean, it got Victor? Are you comparing me to that bootlicking rat, that . . .”

“Leo, the bootlicking and all those things—that’s nothing. There’s something much worse that it’s done to Victor, underneath, deeper, more final—and the bootlicking, it’s only a consequence. It does that. It kills something. Have you ever seen plants grown without sunlight, without air? I won’t let it do that to you. Let it take a hundred and fifty million living creatures. But not you, Leo! Not you, my highest reverence . . .”

“What an exaggerated expression! Where did you get that?”

She stared at him, repeating: “Where did I . . .”

“Really, Kira, sometimes I wonder why you’ve never outgrown that tendency to be so serious about everything. Nothing is getting me. Nothing is doing anything to me. I’m doing what I please, which is more than you can say about anyone else these days.”

“Leo, listen! There’s something I want to do—to try. We have a lot of things to untangle, you and I both. And it’s not easy. Let’s try to slash it all off, at once.”

“By doing what?”

“Leo, let’s get married.”

“Huh?” He stared at her incredulously.

She repeated: “Let’s get married.”

He threw his head back and laughed. He laughed resonantly, a clear, light, icy laughter, as he had laughed at Andrei Taganov, as he had laughed at Morozov. “What’s this, Kira? The make-an-honest-woman-of-you nonsense?”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Rather late for the two of us, isn’t it?”

“Why not, Leo?”

“What for? Do we need it?”

“No.”

“Then why do it?”

“I don’t know. But I’m asking it.”

“That’s not reason enough to do something senseless. I’m not in a mood to become a respectable husband. If you’re afraid of losing me—no scrap of paper, scribbled by a Red clerk, is going to hold me.”

“I’m not afraid of losing you. I’m afraid that you will lose yourself.”

“But a couple of rubles at the Zags and the Upravdom’s blessing will save my soul, is that it?”

“Leo, I have no reasons to offer. But I’m asking it.”

“Are you delivering an ultimatum?”

She said softly, with a quiet smile of surrender and resignation: “No.”

“Then we’ll forget about it.”

“Yes, Leo.”

He slipped his hands under her armpits and pulled her up into his arms, and said wearily: “You crazy, hysterical child! You drive yourself into a fit over some weird fears. Now forget about it. We’ll save every ruble from now on, if that’s what you want. You can put it away for a trip to Monte Carlo or San Francisco or the planet Jupiter. And we won’t talk about it again. All right?”

He was smiling, his arrogant smile on a face that remained incredibly beautiful, a face that was like a drug to her, inexplicable, unconditional, consummate like music. She buried her head on his shoulder, repeating helplessly, hopelessly, a name as a drug: “Leo . . . Leo . . . Leo . . .”

X

PAVEL SYEROV HAD A DRINK BEFORE HE came to his office. He had another drink in the afternoon. He had telephoned Morozov and a voice he knew to be Morozov’s had told him that the Citizen Morozov was not at home. He paced up and down his office and smashed an inkstand. He found a misspelled word in a letter he had dictated, and threw the letter, crumpled into a twisted ball, at his secretary’s face. He telephoned Morozov and got no answer. A woman telephoned him and her soft, lisping voice said sweetly, insistently: “But, Pavlusha darling, you promised me that bracelet!” A speculator brought a bracelet tied in the corner of a dirty handkerchief, and refused to leave it without the full amount in cash. Syerov telephoned Morozov at the Food Trust; a secretary demanded to know who was calling; Syerov slammed the receiver down without answering. He roared at a ragged applicant for a job that he would turn him over to the G.P.U. and ordered his secretary to throw out all those waiting to see him. He left the office an hour earlier than usual and slammed the door behind him.

He walked past Morozov’s house on his way home and hesitated, but saw a militia-man on the corner and did not enter.

At dinner—which had been sent from a communal kitchen two blocks away, and was cold, with grease floating over the cabbage soup—Comrade Sonia said: “Really, Pavel, I’ve got to have a fur coat. I can’t allow myself to catch a cold—you know—for the child’s sake. And no rabbit fur, either. I know you can afford it. Oh, I’m not saying anything about anyone’s little activities, but I’m just keeping my eyes open.”

He threw his napkin into the soup and left the table without eating.

He called Morozov’s house and let the telephone ring for five minutes. There was no answer. He sat on the bed and emptied a bottle of vodka. Comrade Sonia left for a meeting of the Teachers’ Council of an Evening School for Illiterate Women House Workers. He emptied a second bottle.

Then he rose resolutely, swaying a little, pulled his belt tight across his fur jacket and went to Morozov’s house.

He rang three times. There was no answer. He kept his finger on the bell button, leaning indifferently against the wall. He heard no sound behind the door, but he heard steps rising up the stairs and he flung himself into the darkest corner of the landing. The steps died on the floor below and he heard a door opening and closing. He could not let himself be seen waiting there, he remembered dimly. He reached for his notebook and wrote, pressing the notebook to the wall, in the light of a street lamp outside:

Morozov, you Goddamn bastard!

If you don’t come across with what’s due me before tomorrow morning, you’ll eat breakfast at the G.P.U., and you know what that means.

Affectionately, Pavel Syerov.

He folded the note and slipped it under the door.

Fifteen minutes later, Morozov stepped noiselessly out of his bathroom and tiptoed to the lobby. He listened nervously, but heard no sound on the stair-landing. Then he noticed the faint blur of white in the darkness, on the floor.

He picked up the note and read it, bending under the dining-room lamp. His face looked gray.

The telephone rang. He shuddered, frozen to the spot, as if the eyes somewhere behind that ringing bell could see him with the note in his hand. He crammed the note deep into his pocket and answered the telephone, trembling.

It was an old aunt of his and she sniffled into the receiver, asking to borrow some money. He called her an old bitch and hung up.

Through the open bedroom door, Antonina Pavlovna, sitting at her dressing table, brushing her hair, called out in a piercing voice, objecting to the use of such language. He whirled upon her ferociously: “If it weren’t for you and that damn lover of yours . . .”

Antonina Pavlovna shrieked: “He’s not my lover—yet! If he were, do you think I’d be squatting around a sloppy old fool like you?”

They had a quarrel.

Morozov forgot about the note in his pocket.

The European roof garden had a ceiling of glass panes; it looked like a black void staring down, crushing those below more implacably than a steel vault. There were lights; yellow lights that looked dimmed in an oppressive haze which was cigarette smoke, or heat, or the black abyss above. There were white tables and yellow glints in the silverware.

Men sat at the tables. Yellow sparks flashed in their diamond studs and in the beads of moisture on their red, flushed faces. They ate; they bent eagerly over their plates; they chewed hurriedly, incredulously; they were not out on a carefree evening in a gay night spot; they were eating.

In a corner, a yellowish bald head bent over a red steak on a white plate; the man cut the steak, smacking his fleshy red lips. Across the table, a red-headed girl of fifteen ate hastily, her head drawn into her shoulders; when she raised her head, she blushed from the tip of her short, freckled nose to her white, freckled neck, and her mouth was twisted as if she were going to scream.

A fierce jet of smoke swayed by a dark window pane; a thin individual, with a long face that betrayed too closely its future appearance as a skull, rocked monotonously on the back legs of his chair, and smoked without interruption, holding a cigarette in long, yellow fingers, spouting smoke out of wide nostrils frozen in a sardonic, unhealthy grin.

Women moved among the tables, with an awkward, embarrassed insolence. A head of soft, golden waves nodded unsteadily under a light, wide eyes in deep blue rings, a young mouth open in a vicious, sneering smile. In the middle of the room, a gaunt, dark woman with knobs on her shoulders, holes under her collar-bones and a skin the color of muddy coffee, was laughing too loudly, opening painted lips like a gash over strong white teeth and very red gums.

The orchestra played “John Gray.” It flung brief, blunt notes out into space, as if tearing them off the strings before they were ripe, hiding the gap of an uncapturable gaiety under a convulsive rhythm.

Waiters glided soundlessly through the crowd and bent over the tables, obsequious and exaggerated, and their flabby jowls conveyed expressions of respect, and mockery, and pity for those guilty, awkward ones who made such an effort to be gay.

Morozov did remember that he had to raise money before morning. He came to the European roof garden, alone. He sat at three different tables, smoked four different cigars and whispered confidentially into five different ears that belonged to corpulent men who did not seem to be in a hurry. At the end of two hours, he had the money in his wallet.

He mopped his forehead with relief, sat alone at a table in a dark corner and ordered cognac.

Stepan Timoshenko leaned so far across a white table cloth that he seemed to be lying on, rather than sitting at, the table. His head was propped on his elbow, his fingers on the nape of his broad neck; he had a glass in his other hand. When the glass was empty, he held it uncertainly in the air, wondering how to refill it with one hand; he solved the problem by dropping the glass with a sonorous crash and lifting the bottle to his lips. The maitre d’hotel looked at him nervously, sidewise, frowning; he frowned at the jacket with the rabbit fur collar, at the crumpled sailor cap sliding over one ear, at the muddy shoes flung out onto the satin train of a woman at the next table. But the maitre d’hotel had to be cautious; Stepan Timoshenko had been there before; everyone knew that he was a Party member.

A waiter slid unobtrusively up to his table and gathered the broken glass into a dust-pan. Another waiter brought a sparkling clean glass and slipped his fingers gently over Timoshenko’s bottle, whispering: “May I help you, citizen?”

“Go to hell!” said Timoshenko and pushed the glass across the table with the back of his hand. The glass vacillated on the edge and crashed down. “I’ll do as I please!” Timoshenko roared, and heads turned to look at him. “I’ll drink out of a bottle if I please. I’ll drink out of two bottles!”

“But, citizen . . .”

“Want me to show you how?” Timoshenko asked, his eyes gleaming ominously.

“No, indeed, citizen,” the waiter said hastily.

“Go to hell,” said Timoshenko with soft persuasion. “I don’t like your snoot. I don’t like any of the snoots around here.” He rose, swaying, roaring: “I don’t like any of the damn snoots around here!”

He staggered among the tables. The maitre d’hotel whispered gently at his elbow: “If you’re not feeling well, citizen . . .”

“Out of my way!” bellowed Timoshenko, tripping over a woman’s slippers.

He had almost reached the door, when he stopped suddenly and his face melted into a wide, gentle smile. “Ah,” he said. “A friend of mine. A dear friend of mine!”

He staggered to Morozov, swung a chair high over someone’s head, planted it with a resounding smash at Morozov’s table and sat down.

“I beg your pardon, citizen?” Morozov gasped, rising.

“Sit still, pal,” said Timoshenko and his huge tanned paw pressed Morozov’s shoulder down, like a sledge hammer, so that Morozov fell back on his chair with a thud. “Can’t run away from a friend, Comrade Morozov. We’re friends, you know. Old friends. Well, maybe you don’t know me. Stepan Timoshenko’s the name. Stepan Timoshenko. . . . Of the Red Baltfleet,” he added as an after-thought.

“Oh,” said Morozov. “Oh.”

“Yep,” said Timoshenko, “an old friend and admirer of yours. And you know what?”

“No,” said Morozov.

“We gotta have a drink together. Like good pals. We gotta have a drink. Waiter!” he roared so loudly that a violinist missed a note of “John Gray.”

“Bring us two bottles!” Timoshenko ordered when a waiter bowed hesitantly over his shoulder. “No! Bring us three bottles!”

“Three bottles of what, citizen?” the waiter asked timidly.

“Of anything,” said Timoshenko. “No! Wait! What’s the most expensive? What is it that the good, fat capitalists guzzle in proper style?”

“Champagne, citizen?”

“Make it champagne and damn quick! Three bottles and two glasses!”

When the waiter brought the champagne, Timoshenko poured it and planted a glass before Morozov. “There!” said Timoshenko with a friendly smile. “Going to drink with me, pal?”

“Yes, co . . . comrade,” said Morozov meekly. “Thank you, comrade.”

“Your health, Comrade Morozov!” said Timoshenko, solemnly, raising his glass. “To Comrade Morozov, citizen of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics!”

They clinked their glasses. Morozov glanced around furtively, helplessly, but no help was coming. He drank, the glass trembling at his lips. Then he smiled ingratiatingly: “This was very nice of you, comrade,” he muttered, rising. “And I appreciate it very much, comrade. Now if you don’t mind. I’ve got to be going and . . .”

“Sit still,” ordered Timoshenko. He refilled his glass and raised it, leaning back, smiling, but his smile did not seem friendly any longer and his dark eyes were looking at Morozov steadily, sardonically. “To the great Citizen Morozov, the man who beat the revolution!” he said and laughed resonantly, and emptied the glass in one gulp, his head thrown back.

“Comrade . . .” Morozov muttered through lips he could barely force open, “comrade . . . what do you mean?”

Timoshenko laughed louder and leaned across the table toward Morozov, his elbows crossed, his cap far back on his head, over sticky ringlets of dark hair. The laughter stopped abruptly, as if slashed off. Timoshenko said softly, persuasively, with a smile that frightened Morozov more than the laughter: “Don’t look so scared, Comrade Morozov. You don’t have to be afraid of me. I’m nothing but a beaten wretch, beaten by you, Comrade Morozov, and all I want is to tell you humbly that I know I’m beaten and I hold no grudge. Hell, I hold a profound admiration for you, Comrade Morozov. You’ve taken the greatest revolution the world has ever seen and patched the seat of your pants with it!”

“Comrade,” said Morozov with a blue-lipped determination, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, yes,” said Timoshenko ruefully. “Oh, yes, you do. You know more about it than I do, more than millions of young fools do, that watch us from all over the world with worshipping eyes. You must tell them, Comrade Morozov. You have a lot to tell them.”

“Honestly, comrade, I . . .”

“For instance, you know how you made us do it. I don’t. All I know is that we’ve done it. We made a revolution. We had red banners. The banners said that we made it for the world proletariat. We had fools who thought in their doomed hearts that we made it for all those downtrodden ones who suffer on this earth. But you and me, Comrade Morozov, we have a secret. We know, but we won’t tell. Why tell? The world doesn’t want to hear it. We know that the revolution—it was made for you, Comrade Morozov, and hats off to you!”

“Comrade whoever you are, comrade,” Morozov moaned, “what do you want?”

“Just to tell you it’s yours, Comrade Morozov.”

“What?” Morozov asked, wondering if he was going insane.

“The revolution,” said Timoshenko pleasantly. “The revolution. Do you know what a revolution is? I’ll tell you. We killed. We killed men in the streets, and in the cellars, and aboard our ships. . . . Aboard our ships . . . I remember . . . There was one boy—an officer—he couldn’t have been more than twenty. He made the sign of the cross—his mother must’ve taught him that. He had blood running out of his mouth. He looked at me. His eyes—they weren’t frightened any more. They were kind of astonished. About something his mother hadn’t taught him. He looked at me. That was the last thing. He looked at me.”

Drops were rolling down Timoshenko’s jowls. He filled a glass and it tottered uncertainly in his hand, trying to find his mouth, and he drank without knowing that he was drinking, his eyes fixed on Morozov’s.

“That’s what we did in the year nineteen-hundred-and-seventeen. Now I’ll tell you what we did it for. We did it so that the Citizen Morozov could get up in the morning and scratch his belly, because the mattress wasn’t soft enough and it made his navel itch. We did it so that he could ride in a big limousine with a down pillow on the seat and a little glass tube for flowers by the window, lilies-of-the-valley, you know. So that he could drink cognac in a place like this. So that he could scramble up, on holidays, to a stand all draped in red bunting and make a speech about the proletariat. We did it, Comrade Morozov, and we take a bow. Don’t glare at me like that, Comrade Morozov, I’m only your humble servant, I’ve done my best for you, and you should reward me with a smile, really, you have a lot to thank me for!”

“Comrade!” Morozov panted. “Let me go!”

“Sit still!” Timoshenko roared. “Pour yourself a glass and drink. Do you hear me? Drink, you bastard! Drink and listen!”

Morozov obeyed; his glass tinkled, shaking, against the bottle.

“You see,” said Timoshenko, as if each word were tearing his throat on its way out, “I don’t mind that we’re beaten. I don’t mind that we’ve taken the greatest of crimes on our shoulders and then let it slip through our fingers. I wouldn’t mind it if we had been beaten by a tall warrior in a steel helmet, a human dragon spitting fire. But we’re beaten by a louse. A big, fat, slow, blond louse. Ever seen lice? The blond ones are the fattest. . . . It was our own fault. Once, men were ruled with a god’s thunder. Then they were ruled with a sword. Now they’re ruled with a Primus. Once, they were held by reverence. Then they were held by fear. Now they’re held by their stomachs. Men have worn chains on their necks, and on their wrists, and on their ankles. Now they’re enchained by their rectums. Only you don’t hold heroes by their rectums. It was our own fault.”

“Comrade, for God’s sake, comrade, why tell it all to me?”

“We started building a temple. Do we end with a chapel? No! And we don’t even end with an outhouse. We end with a musty kitchen with a second-hand stove! We set fire under a kettle and we brewed and stirred and mixed blood and fire and steel. What are we fishing now out of the brew? A new humanity? Men of granite? Or at least a good and horrible monster? No! Little puny things that wiggle. Little things that can bend both ways, little double-jointed spirits. Little things that don’t even bow humbly to be whipped. No! They take the lash obediently and whip themselves! Ever sat at a social-activity club meeting? Should. Do you good. Learn a lot about the human spirit.”

“Comrade!” Morozov breathed. “What do you want? Is it money you want? I’ll pay. I’ll . . .”

Timoshenko laughed so loudly that heads turned and Morozov cringed, trying not to be noticed. “You louse!” Timoshenko roared, laughing. “You fool, near-sighted, demented louse! Who do you think you’re talking to? Comrade Victor Dunaev? Comrade Pavel Syerov? Comrade . . .”

“Comrade!” Morozov roared, so that heads turned to him, but he did not care any longer. “You . . . you . . . you have no right to say that! I have nothing whatever to do with Comrade Syerov! I . . .”

“Say,” Timoshenko remarked slowly, “I didn’t say you had. Why the excitement?”

“Well, I thought . . . I . . . you . . .”

“I didn’t say you had,” Timoshenko repeated. “I only said you should have. You and he and Victor Dunaev. And about one million others—with Party cards and stamps affixed. The winners and the conquerors. Those who crawl. That, pal, is the great slogan of the men of the future: those who crawl. Listen, do you know how many millions of eyes are watching us across lands and oceans? They’re not very close and they can’t see very well. They see a big shadow rising. They think it’s a huge beast. They’re too far to see that it’s soft and brownish and fuzzy. You know, fuzzy, a glistening sort of fuzz. They don’t know that it’s made of cockroaches. Little, glossy, brown cockroaches, packed tight, one on the other, into a huge wall. Little cockroaches that keep silent and wiggle their whiskers. But the world is too far to see the whiskers. That’s what’s wrong with the world, Comrade Morozov: they don’t see the whiskers!”

“Comrade! Comrade, what are you talking about?”

“They see a black cloud and they hear thunder. They’ve been told that behind the cloud, blood is running freely, and men fight, and men kill, and men die. Well, what of it? They, those who watch, are not afraid of blood. There’s an honor in blood. But do they know that it’s not blood we’re bathed in, it’s pus? Listen, I’ll give you advice. If you want to keep this land in your tentacles, tell the world that you’re chopping heads off for breakfast and shooting men by the regiment. Let the world think that you’re a huge monster to be feared and respected and fought honorably. But don’t let them know that yours is not an army of heroes, nor even of fiends, but of shriveled bookkeepers with a rupture who’ve learned to be arrogant. Don’t let them know that you’re not to be shot, but to be disinfected. Don’t let them know that you’re not to be fought with cannons, but with carbolic acid!”

Morozov’s napkin was crumpled into a drenched ball in his fist. He wiped his forehead once more. He said, trying to make his voice gentle and soothing, trying to rise imperceptibly: “You’re right, comrade. Those are very fine sentiments. I agree with you absolutely. Now if you’ll allow . . .”

“Sit down!” roared Timoshenko. “Sit down and drink a toast. Drink it or I’ll shoot you like a mongrel. I still carry a gun, you know. Here . . .” he poured and a pale golden trickle ran down the table cloth to the floor. “Drink to the men who took a red banner and wiped their ass with it!”

Morozov drank.

Then he put his hand in his pocket and took out a handkerchief to mop his forehead. A crumpled piece of paper fell to the floor.

It was the swift, ferocious jerk, with which Morozov plunged down for it, that made Timoshenko’s fist dart out and seize Morozov’s hand. “What’s that, pal?” asked Timoshenko.

Morozov’s foot kicked the paper out of reach and it rolled under an empty table. Morozov said indifferently, little damp beads sparkling under his wide nostrils: “Oh, that? Nothing, comrade. Nothing at all. Just some scrap of waste paper.”

“Oh,” said Timoshenko, watching him with eyes that were alarmingly sober. “Oh, just a scrap of waste paper. Well, we’ll let it lie there. We’ll let the janitor throw it in the waste basket.”

“Yes,” Morozov nodded eagerly, “that’s it. In the waste basket. Very well put, comrade.” He giggled, mopping his forehead. “We’ll let the janitor throw it in the waste basket. Would you like another drink, comrade? The bottle’s empty. The next one’s on me. Waiter! Another bottle of the same.”

“Sure,” said Timoshenko without moving. “I’ll have another drink.”

The waiter brought the bottle. Morozov filled the glasses, leaning solicitously over the table. He said, regaining his voice syllable by syllable: “You know, comrade, I think you misunderstood me, but I don’t blame you. I can see your motives and I sympathize thoroughly. There are so many objectionable—er—shall we say dishonorable?—types these days. One has to be careful. We must get better acquainted, comrade. It’s hard to tell at a glance, you know, and particularly in a place like this. I bet you thought I was a—a speculator, or something. Didn’t you? Very funny, isn’t it?”

“Very,” said Timoshenko. “What are you looking down at, Comrade Morozov?”

“Oh!” Morozov giggled, jerking his head up. “I was just looking at my shoes, comrade. They’re sort of tight, you know. Uncomfortable. Guess it’s because I’m on my feet so much, you know, in the office.”

“Uh-huh,” said Timoshenko. “Shouldn’t neglect your feet. Should take a hot bath when you come home, a pan of hot water with a little vinegar. That’s good for sore feet.”

“Oh, indeed? I’m glad you told me. Yes, indeed, thank you very much. I’ll be sure and try it. First thing when I get home.”

“About time you were getting home, isn’t it, Comrade Morozov?”

“Oh! . . . well, I guess . . . well, it’s not so late yet and . . .”

“I thought you were in a hurry a little while ago.”

“I . . . well, no, I can’t say that I’m in any particular hurry, and besides, such a pleasant . . .”

“What’s the matter, Comrade Morozov? Anything you don’t want to leave around here?”

“Who, me? I don’t know what that could be, comrade . . . comrade . . . what did you say your name was, comrade?”

“Timoshenko. Stepan Timoshenko. It isn’t that little scrap of waste paper down there under the table, by any chance?”

“Oh, that? Why, Comrade Timoshenko, I’d forgotten all about that. What would I want with it?”

“I don’t know,” said Timoshenko slowly.

“That’s just it, Comrade Timoshenko, nothing. Nothing at all. Another drink, Comrade Timoshenko?”

“Thanks.”

“Here you are, comrade.”

“Anything wrong under the table, Comrade Morozov?”

“Why no, Comrade Timoshenko. I was just bending to tie my shoe lace. The shoe lace is unfastened.”

“Where?”

“Well, isn’t that funny? It really isn’t unfastened at all. See? And I thought it was. You know how it is, these Soviet . . . these shoe laces nowadays. Not solid at all. Not dependable.”

“No,” said Timoshenko, “they tear like twine.”

“Yes,” said Morozov, “just like twine. Just, as you would say, like—like twine. . . . What are you leaning over for, Comrade Timoshenko? You’re not comfortable. Why don’t you move over here like this, you’ll be more . . .”

“No,” said Timoshenko, “I’m just fine here where I am. With a fine view of the table there. I like that table. Nice legs it has. Hasn’t it? Sort of artistic, you know.”

“Quite right, comrade, very artistic. Now on the other hand, comrade, there, on our left, isn’t that a pretty blonde there, by the orchestra? Quite a figure, eh?”

“Yes, indeed, comrade. . . . It’s nice shoes you have, Comrade Morozov. Patent leather, too. Bet you didn’t get those in a co-operative.”

“No . . . that is . . . to tell you the truth . . . well, you see . . .”

“What I like about them is that bulb. Right there, on the toes. Like a bump on someone’s forehead. And shiny, too. Yep, those foreigners sure know how to make shoes.”

“Speaking of the efficiency of production, comrade, take for instance, in the capitalistic countries . . . in the . . . in the . . .”

“Yes, Comrade Morozov, in the capitalistic countries?”

It was Morozov who leaped for the letter. It was Timoshenko who caught his wrist with fingers like talons, and for one brief moment they were on their hands and knees on the floor, and their eyes met silently like those of two beasts in deadly battle. Then Timoshenko’s other hand seized the letter, and he rose slowly, releasing Morozov, and sat down at the table. He was reading the letter, while Morozov was still on his hands and knees, staring up at him with the eyes of a man awaiting the verdict of a court-martial.

Morozov, you Goddamn bastard!

If you don’t come across with what’s due me before tomorrow morning, you’ll eat breakfast at the G.P.U., and you know what that means,

Affectionately, Pavel Syerov.

Morozov was sitting at the table when Timoshenko raised his head from the letter. Timoshenko laughed as Morozov had never heard a man laugh.

Timoshenko rose slowly, laughing. His stomach shook, and his rabbit fur collar, and the sinews of his bare throat. He swayed a little and he held the letter in both hands. Then his laughter died down slowly, smoothly, like a gramophone record unwinding, to a low, coughing chuckle on a single dry note. He slipped the letter into his pocket and turned slowly, his shoulders stooped, his movements suddenly awkward, humble. He shuffled heavily, uncertainly to the door. At the door, the maitre d’hotel glanced at him sidewise. Timoshenko returned the glance; Timoshenko’s glance was gentle.

Morozov sat at the table, one hand frozen in mid-air in an absurd, twisted position, like the hand of a paralytic. He heard Timoshenko’s chuckles dropping down the stairway; monotonous, disjoined chuckles that sounded like hiccoughs, like barks, like sobs.

He jumped up suddenly. “Oh my God!” he moaned. “Oh, my God!”

He ran, forgetting his hat and coat, down the long stairs, out into the snow. In the broad, white, silent street, Timoshenko was nowhere in sight.

Morozov did not send the money to Pavel Syerov. He did not go to his own office at the Food Trust. He sat all the following morning and all of the afternoon at home, in his room, and drank vodka. Whenever he heard the telephone or the door bell ringing, he crouched, his head in his shoulders, and bit his knuckles. Nothing happened.

At dinner time, Antonina Pavlovna brought the evening paper and threw it to him, snapping: “What the hell’s the matter with you today?”

He glanced through the paper. There were news items on the front page:

In the village Vasilkino, in the Kama region, the peasants, goaded by the counter-revolutionary hoarder element, burned the local Club of Karl Marx. The bodies of the Club president and secretary, Party comrades from Moscow, were found in the charred ruins. A G.P.U. squad is on its way to Vasilkino.

In the village Sverskoe, twenty-five peasants were executed last night for the murder of the Village Correspondent, a young comrade from the staff of a Communist Union of Youth newspaper in Samara. The peasants refused to divulge the name of the murderer.

On the last page was a short item:

The body of Stepan Timoshenko, former sailor of the Baltic Fleet, was found early this morning under a bridge, on the ice of Obukhovsky Canal. He had shot himself through the mouth. No papers, save his Party card, were found on the body to explain the reason for his suicide.

Morozov wiped his forehead, as if a noose had been slipped off his throat, and drank two glasses of vodka.

When the telephone rang, he swaggered boldly to take the receiver, and Antonina Pavlovna wondered why he was chuckling.

“Morozov?” a muffled voice whispered over the wire.

“That you, Pavlusha?” Morozov asked. “Listen, pal, I’m awfully sorry, but I have the money and . . .”

“Forget the money,” Syerov hissed. “It’s all right. Listen . . . did I leave you a note yesterday?”

“Why, yes, but I guess I deserved it and . . .”

“Have you destroyed it?”

“Why?”

“Nothing. Only you understand what it could . . . Have you destroyed it?”

Morozov looked at the evening paper, grinned and said: “Sure. I have. Forget about it, pal.”

He held the paper in his hand all evening long.

“The fool!” he muttered under his breath, so that Antonina Pavlovna looked at him inquisitively, chin forward. “The damn fool! He lost it. Wandered about all night, God knows where, the drunken fool. He lost it!”

Morozov did not know that Stepan Timoshenko had come home from the European roof garden and sat at a rickety table in his unheated garret and written painstakingly a letter on a piece of brown wrapping paper, in the light of a dying candle in a green bottle; that he had folded the letter carefully and slipped it into an old envelope and slipped another scrap of paper, wrinkled and creased, into the envelope, and written Andrei Taganov’s address on it; that he had sealed the letter and had gone, steadily, unhurriedly, down the creaking stairs into the street.

The letter on the brown wrapping paper said:

Dear friend Andrei,

I promised to say good-bye and here it is. It’s not quite what I promised, but I guess you’ll forgive me. I’m sick of seeing what I see and I can’t stand to see it any longer. To you—as my only legacy—I’m leaving the letter you will find enclosed. It’s a hard legacy, I know. I only hope that you won’t follow me—too soon.

Your friend, Stepan Timoshenko.

XI

PAVEL SYEROV SAT AT THE DESK IN his office, correcting the typewritten copy of his next speech on “Railroads and the Class Struggle.” His secretary stood by the desk, watching anxiously the pencil in his hand. The window of his office opened upon one of the terminal platforms. He raised his head just in time to notice a tall figure in a leather jacket disappearing down the platform. Syerov jerked forward, but the man was gone.

“Hey, did you see that man?” he snapped at the secretary.

“No, Comrade Syerov. Where?”

“Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I just thought it was someone I knew. Wonder what he’s doing around here?”

An hour later, Pavel Syerov left his office, and—walking down the stairs, on his way to the street, chewing sunflower seeds and spitting out their shells—saw the man in the leather jacket again. He had not been mistaken: it was Andrei Taganov.

Pavel Syerov stopped, and his brows moved closer together, and he spit one more shell out of the corner of his mouth. Then he approached Andrei casually and said: “Good evening, Comrade Taganov.”

Andrei answered: “Good evening, Comrade Syerov.”

“Thinking of taking a trip, Andrei?”

“No.”

“Hunting train speculators?”

“No.”

“Been shifted to the G.P.U. transport section?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m glad to see you. A rare person to see, aren’t you? So busy you have no time for old friends any more. Have some sunflower seeds?”

“No, thank you.”

“Don’t have the dirty habit? Don’t dissipate at all, do you? No vices, but one, eh? Well, I’m glad to see you taking an interest in this old station which is my home, so to speak. Been around for an hour or so, haven’t you?”

“Any more questions to ask?”

“Who, me? I wasn’t asking any questions. What would I be questioning you for? I was just being sociable, so to speak. One must be sociable once in a while, if one doesn’t want to be branded as an individualist, you know. Why don’t you drop in to see me while you’re in these parts?”

“I may,” said Andrei slowly. “Good-bye, Comrade Syerov.”

Syerov stood, frowning, an unbroken sunflower seed between his teeth, and watched Andrei descending the stairs.

The clerk wiped his nose with his thumb and forefinger, wiped the linseed oil off the bottle’s neck with his apron, and asked: “That all today, citizen?”

“That’s all,” said Andrei Taganov.

The clerk tore a piece of newspaper and wrapped the bottle, greasy stains spreading on the paper.

“Doing good business?” Andrei asked.

“Rotten,” the clerk answered, shrugging his shoulders in an old blue sweater. “You’re the first customer in three hours, I guess. Glad to hear a human voice. Nothing to do here but sit and scare mice off.”

“That’s too bad. Taking a loss, then?”

“Who, me? I don’t own the joint.”

“Then I guess you’ll lose your job soon. The boss will be coming to do his own clerking.”

“Who? My boss?” The clerk made a hoarse, cackling sound that was laughter, opening a wide hole with two broken, blackened teeth. “Not my boss, he won’t. I’d like to see the elegant Citizen Kovalensky slinging herrings and linseed oil.”

“Well, he won’t be elegant long with such poor business.”

“Maybe he won’t,” said the clerk, “and maybe he will.”

“Maybe,” said Andrei Taganov.

“Fifty kopeks, citizen.”

“Here you are. Good night, citizen.”

Antonina Pavlovna had tickets for the new ballet at the Marinsky Theater. It was a “profunion” show and Morozov had received the tickets at the Food Trust. But Morozov did not care for ballet and he had a school meeting to attend, where he was to make a speech on the “Proletarian Distribution of Food Products,” so he gave the tickets to Antonina Pavlovna. She invited Leo and Kira to accompany her. “Well, of course, it’s supposed to be a revolutionary ballet,” she explained. “The first Red ballet. And, of course, you know my attitude on politics, but then, one should be broad-minded artistically, don’t you think so? At least, it’s an interesting experiment.”

Kira refused the invitation. Leo left with Antonina Pavlovna. Antonina Pavlovna wore a jade green gown embroidered in gold, too tight across her stomach, and carried mother-of-pearl opera glasses on a long gold handle.

Kira had made a date with Andrei. But when she left the tramway and walked through the dark streets to the palace garden, she noticed her feet slowing down of their own will, her body tense, unyielding, fighting her, as if she were walking forward against a strong wind. It was as if her body remembered that which she was trying to forget: the night before, a night such as her first one in the gray and silver room she had shared with Leo for over three years. Her body felt pure and hallowed; her feet were slowing down to retard her progress toward that which seemed a sacrilege because she did desire it and did not wish to desire it tonight.

When she reached the top of the long, dark stairs and Andrei opened the door, she asked: “Andrei, will you do something for me?”

“Before I kiss you?”

“No. But right after. Will you take me to a motion picture tonight?”

He kissed her, his face showing nothing but the ever-incredulous joy of seeing her again, then said: “All right.”

They walked out together, arm in arm, fresh snow squeaking under their feet. The three largest film theaters on Nevsky displayed huge cotton signs with red letters:

THE HIT OF THE SEASON!
NEW MASTERPIECE OF THE SOVIET CINEMA!
“RED WARRIORS”
A gigantic epic of the struggle of red heroes in the civil war!
A SAGA OF THE PROLETARIAT!
A titanic drama of the heroic unknown masses
of Workers and Soldiers!

One theater also bore the sign:

COMRADE LENIN SAID: “OF ALL THE ARTS, THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE FOR RUSSIA IS THE CINEMA!”

The theater entrances blazed in streams of white light. The cashiers watched the passersby wistfully and yawned. No one stopped to look at the display of stills.

“You don’t want to see that,” said Andrei.

“No,” said Kira.

The fourth and smaller theater played a foreign picture. It was an old, unknown picture with no stars, no actors’ names announced; three faded stills were pasted in the show window, presenting a lady with too much make-up and a dress fashionable ten years ago.

“We might as well see that,” said Kira.

The box office was closed.

“Sorry, citizens,” said the usher, “no seats left. All sold out for this show and the next one. The foyer’s jammed with people waiting.”

“Well,” said Kira, as they turned away with resignation, “it may as well be ‘The Red Warriors.’ ”

The foyer of the huge, white-columned “Parisiana” was empty. The picture was on, and no one was allowed to enter in the middle of a show. But the usher bowed eagerly and let them enter.

The theater was dark, cold, and seemed silent under the roar of the orchestra, with the echoing silence of a huge, empty room. A few heads dotted the waste of grayish, empty rows.

On the screen, a mob of ragged gray uniforms ran through mud, waving bayonets. A mob of ragged gray uniforms sat around fires, cooking soup. A long train crawled slowly through endless minutes, open box cars loaded with a mob of ragged gray uniforms. “A MONTH LATER” said a title. A mob of ragged gray uniforms ran through mud, waving bayonets. A sea of arms waved banners. A mob of ragged gray uniforms crawled down trench tops, against a black sky. “THE BATTLE OF ZAVRASHINO” said a title. A mob in patent leather boots shot a mob in bast shoes lined against a wall. “THE BATTLE OF SAMSONOVO” said a title. A mob of ragged gray uniforms ran through mud, waving bayonets. “THREE WEEKS LATER” said a title. A long train crawled into a sunset. “THE PROLETARIAT STAMPED ITS MIGHTY BOOT DOWN THE TREACHEROUS THROAT OF DEPRAVED ARISTOCRATS” said a title. A mob in patent leather boots danced in a gaudy brothel, amid broken bottles and half-naked women who looked at the camera. “BUT THE SPIRIT OF OUR RED WARRIORS FLAMED WITH LOYALTY TO THE PROLETARIAN CAUSE” said a title. A mob of ragged gray uniforms ran through mud, waving bayonets. There was no plot, no hero. “THE AIM OF PROLETARIAN ART,” a poster in the foyer had explained, “IS THE DRAMA AND COLOR OF MASS LIFE.”

In the intermission before the second show, Andrei asked: “Do you want to see the beginning of that?”

“Yes,” said Kira. “It’s still early.”

“I know you don’t like it.”

“I know you don’t, either. It’s funny, Andrei, I had a chance to go to the new ballet at the Marinsky tonight, and I didn’t go because it was revolutionary, and here I am looking at this epic.”

“You had a chance to go with whom?”

“Oh—a friend of mine.”

“Not Leo Kovalensky?”

“Andrei! Don’t you think you’re being presumptuous?”

“Kira, of all your friends he’s the one . . .”

“. . . that you don’t like. I know. Still, don’t you think that you’re mentioning it too often?”

“Kira, you’re not interested in politics, are you?”

“No. Why?”

“You’ve never wanted to sacrifice your life senselessly, to have years torn out of it for no good reason, years of jail or exile? Have you?”

“What are you driving at?”

“Keep away from Leo Kovalensky.”

Her mouth was open and her hand was lifted in the air and she did not move for a long second. Then she asked, and no words had ever been so hard to utter:

“What—do—you—mean—Andrei?”

“You don’t want to be known as the friend of a man who is friendly with the wrong kind of people.”

“What people?”

“Several. Our own Comrade Syerov, for one.”

“But what has Leo . . .”

“He owns a certain private food store, doesn’t he?”

“Andrei, are you being the G.P.U. agent with me and . . .”

“No, I’m not questioning you. I have nothing to learn from you. I’m just wondering how much you know about his affairs—for your own protection.”

“What . . . what affairs?”

“That’s all I can tell you. I shouldn’t have told you even that much. But I want to be sure that you don’t let your name be implicated, by chance, in any way.”

“Implicated—in what?”

“Kira, I’m not a G.P.U. agent—with you or to you.”

The lights went out and the orchestra struck up the “Internationale.”

On the screen, a mob of dusty boots marched down a dry, clotted earth. A huge, gray, twinkling, shivering rectangle of boots hung before them, boots without bodies, thick, cobbled soles, old leather gnarled, warped into creases by the muscles and the sweat inside; the boots were not slow and they were not in a hurry; they were not hoofs and they did not seem to be human feet; they rolled forward, from heels to toes, from heels to toes, like gray tanks waddling, crushing, sweeping all before them, clots of earth crumbling into dust, gray boots, dead, measured, endless, lifeless, inexorable.

Kira whispered through the roar of the “Internationale”: “Andrei, are you working on a new case for the G.P.U.?”

He answered: “No. On a case of my own.”

On the screen, shadows in gray uniforms sat around fires under a black sky. Calloused hands stirred iron kettles; a mouth grinned wide over crooked teeth; a man played a harmonica, rocking from side to side with a lewd grin; a man twirled in a Cossack dance, his feet flashing, his hands clapping in time; a man scratched his beard; a man scratched his neck; a man scratched his head; a man chewed a crust of bread, crumbs rolling into the open collar of his tunic, into a black, hairy chest. They were celebrating a victory.

Kira whispered: “Andrei, do you have something to report to the G.P.U.?”

He answered: “Yes.”

On the screen, a demonstration marched down a city street, celebrating a victory. Banners and faces swam slowly past the camera. They moved as wax figures pulled by invisible wires, young faces in dark kerchiefs, old faces in knitted shawls, faces in soldiers’ caps, faces in leather hats, faces that looked alike, set and humorless, eyes flat as if painted on, lips soft and shapeless, marching without stirring, marching without muscles, with no will but that of the cobblestones pulled forward under their motionless feet, with no energy but that of the red banners as sails in the wind, no fuel but the stuffy warmth of millions of skins, millions of flaccid, doughy muscles, no breath but the smell of patched armpits, of warm, weary, bowed necks, marching, marching, marching in an even, ceaseless movement, a movement that did not seem alive.

Kira jerked her head with a shudder that ran down to her knees and gasped: “Andrei, let’s go!”

He rose swiftly, obediently.

When he motioned to a sleigh driver in the street outside, she said: “No. Let’s walk. Walk. With both feet.”

He took her arm, asking: “What’s the matter, Kira?”

“Nothing,” she walked, listening to the living sound of her heels crunching snow. “I . . . I didn’t like the picture.”

“I’m sorry, dear. I don’t blame you. I wish they wouldn’t make those things, for their own sake.”

“Andrei, you wanted to leave it all, to go abroad, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then why are you starting something . . . against someone . . . to help the masters you no longer want to serve?”

“I’m going to find out whether they’re still worth serving.”

“What difference would that make to you?”

“A difference on which the rest of my life may depend.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m giving myself a last chance. I have something to put before them. I know what they should do about it. I’m afraid I know also what they’re going to do about it. I’m still a member of the Party. In a very short while, I’ll know whether I’ll remain a member of the Party.”

“You’re making a test, Andrei? At the cost of several lives?”

“At the cost of several lives that should be ended.”

“Andrei!”

He looked at her white face, astonished: “Kira, what’s the matter? You’ve never questioned me about my work. We’ve never discussed it. You know that my work deals with lives—and death, when necessary. It has never frightened you like this. It’s something the two of us must keep silent about.”

“Are you forbidding me to break that silence?”

“Yes. And there’s something I have to tell you. Please listen carefully and don’t answer me, because, you see, I don’t want to know the answer. I want you to keep silent because I don’t want to learn how much you know about the case I’m investigating. I’m afraid I know already that you’re not quite ignorant about it. I’m expecting the highest integrity from the men I’m going to face. Don’t make me face them with less than that on my part.”

She said, trying to be calm, her voice quivering, a voice with a life and a terror of its own which she could not control: “Andrei, I won’t answer. Now listen and don’t question me. Please don’t question me! I have nothing to tell you but this: I’m begging you—you understand—begging you with all there is in me, if I ever meant anything to you, this is the only time I want to claim it, I’m begging you, while it’s still in your hands, to drop this case, Andrei! for one reason only, for me!”

He turned to her and she looked into a face she had never seen before, the implacable face of Comrade Taganov of the G.P.U., a face that could have watched secret executions in dark, secret cellars. He asked slowly: “Kira, what is that man to you?”

The tone of his voice made her realize that she could protect Leo best by remaining silent. She answered, shrugging: “Just a friend. We’ll keep silent, Andrei. It’s late. Will you take me home?”

But when he left her at her parents’ house, she waited only to hear his steps dying around the corner. Then she ran through dark streets to the first taxi she could find and leaped in, ordering: “Marinsky Theater! As fast as you can go!”

In the dim, deserted lobby of the theater, she heard the thunder of the orchestra behind closed doors, a tuneless, violent jumble of sound.

“Can’t go in now, citizen,” said a stern usher.

She slipped a crumpled bill into his hand, whispering: “I have to find someone, comrade. . . . It’s a matter of life and death . . . his mother is dying. . . .”

She slipped noiselessly between blue velvet curtains into a dark, half-empty theater. On the glittering stage a chorus of fragile ballerinas in short, flame-red tulle skirts fluttered, waving thin, powdered arms with gilded chains of papier-mâché, in a “Dance of the Toilers.”

She found Leo and Antonina Pavlovna in comfortable armchairs in an empty row. They jumped up when they saw Kira slipping toward them down the long row of chairs, and someone behind them hissed: “Sit down!”

“Leo!” Kira whispered. “Come on! Right away! Something’s happened!”

“What?”

“Come on! I’ll tell you! Let’s get out of here!”

He followed her up the dark aisle. Antonina Pavlovna waddled hurriedly after them, her chin pointing forward.

In a corner of the empty foyer, Kira whispered: “It’s the G.P.U., Leo, they’re after your store. They know something.”

“What? How did you find out?”

“I just saw Andrei Taganov and he . . .”

“You saw Andrei Taganov? Where? I thought you were going to visit your parents.”

“Oh, I met him on the street and . . .”

“What street?”

“Leo! Stop that nonsense! Don’t you understand? We have no time to waste!”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t say much. Just a few hints. He told me to keep away from you if I didn’t want to be arrested. He said you had a private food store, and he mentioned Pavel Syerov. He said he had a report to make to the G.P.U. I think he knows everything.”

“So he told you to keep away from me?”

“Leo! You refuse to . . .”

“I refuse to be frightened by some jealous fool!”

“Leo, you don’t know him! He doesn’t joke about G.P.U. matters. And he’s not jealous of you. Why should he be?”

“What department of the G.P.U. is he in?”

“Secret service department.”

“Not the Economic Section, then?”

“No. But he’s doing it on his own.”

“Well, come on. We’ll call Morozov and Pavel Syerov. Let Syerov call his friend of the Economic Section and find out what your Taganov’s doing. Don’t get hysterical. Nothing to be afraid of. Syerov’s friend will take care of it. Come on.”

“Leo,” Antonina Pavlovna panted, running after them, as they hurried to a taxi outside, “Leo, I had nothing to do with the store! If there’s an investigation, remember, I had nothing to do with it! I only carried money to Syerov and I knew nothing about where it came from! Leo, remember!”

An hour later, a sleigh drove noiselessly up to the back entrance of the store that carried the sign “Lev Kovalensky. Food Products.” Two men slipped silently down frozen, unlighted stairs to the basement, where Leo and the clerk were waiting with a dim old lantern. The newcomers made no sound. Leo pointed silently to the sacks and boxes. The men carried them swiftly up the stairs to the sleigh. The sleigh was covered with a large fur blanket. In less than ten minutes the basement was empty.

“Well?” Kira asked anxiously, when Leo came home.

“Go to bed,” said Leo, “and don’t dream of any G.P.U. agents.”

“What did you do?”

“It’s all done. We got rid of everything. It’s on its way out of Red Leningrad this very minute. We had another load coming from Syerov tomorrow night, but we’ve cancelled that. We’ll be running a pure little food store—for a while. Till Syerov checks up on things.”

“Leo, I . . .”

“You won’t start any arguments again. I’ve told you once: I’m not going to leave town. That would be the most dangerous, the most suspicious thing to do. And we have nothing to worry about. Syerov’s too strong at the G.P.U. for any . . .”

“Leo, you don’t know Andrei Taganov.”

“No, I don’t. But you seem to know him too well.”

“Leo, they can’t bribe him.”

“Maybe not. But they can make him shut up.”

“If you’re not afraid . . .”

“Of course I’m not afraid!”

But his face was paler than usual and she noticed his hands, unbuttoning his coat, trembling.

“Leo, please! Listen!” she begged. “Leo, please! I . . .”

“Shut up!” said Leo.

XII

THE EXECUTIVE OF THE ECONOMIC SECTION OF the G.P.U. called Andrei Taganov into his office.

The office was in a part of the G.P.U. headquarters’ building which no visitors ever approached and into which few employees were ever admitted. Those who were admitted spoke in low, respectful voices and never felt at ease.

The executive sat at his desk. He wore a military tunic, tight breeches, high boots and a gun on his hip. He had close-cropped hair and a clean-shaved face that betrayed no age. When he smiled, he showed short teeth and very wide, brownish gums. His smile betrayed no mirth, no meaning; one knew it was a smile only because the muscles of his cheeks creased and his gums showed.

He said: “Comrade Taganov, I understand you’ve been conducting some investigations in a case which comes under the jurisdiction of the Economic Section.”

Andrei said: “I have.”

“Who gave you the authority to do it?”

Andrei said: “My Party card.”

The executive smiled, showing his gums, and asked: “What made you begin the investigation?”

“A piece of incriminating evidence.”

“Against a Party member?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you turn it over to us?”

“I wanted to have a complete case to report.”

“Have you?”

“Yes.”

“You intend to report it to the chief of your department?”

“Yes.”

The executive smiled and said: “I suggest that you drop the entire matter.”

Andrei said: “If this is an order, I’ll remind you that you are not my chief. If it is advice, I do not need it.”

The executive looked at him silently, then said: “Strict discipline and a straightforward loyalty are commendable traits, Comrade Taganov. However, as Comrade Lenin said, a Communist must be adaptable to reality. Have you considered the consequences of what you plan to expose?”

“I have.”

“Do you find it advisable to make public a scandal involving a Party member—at this time?”

“That should have been the concern of the Party member involved.”

“Do you know my . . . interest in that person?”

“I do.”

“Does the knowledge make any difference in your plans?”

“None.”

“Have you ever thought that I could be of service to you?”

“No. I haven’t.”

“Don’t you think that it is an idea worth considering?”

“No. I don’t.”

“How long have you held your present position, Comrade Taganov?”

“Two years and three months.”

“At the same salary?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think a promotion desirable?”

“No.”

“You do not believe in a spirit of mutual help and cooperation with your Party comrades?”

“Not above the spirit of the Party.”

“You are devoted to the Party?”

“Yes.”

“Above all things?”

“Yes.”

“How many times have you faced a Party Purge Committee?”

“Three times.”

“Do you know that there is another purge coming?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re going to make your report on that case you’ve investigated—to your chief?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“At four o’clock this afternoon.”

The executive looked at his wristwatch: “Very well. In an hour and a half then.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s all, Comrade Taganov.”

A few days later, Andrei’s chief called him into his office. The chief was a tall, thin man with a pointed blond beard and a gold pince-nez on a high, thin nose. He wore the expensive, blondish-brown suit of a foreign tourist; he had the long, knotty hands of a skeleton and the appearance of an unsuccessful college professor.

“Sit down,” said the chief, and rose, and closed the door.

Andrei sat down.

“Congratulations, Comrade Taganov,” said the chief.

Andrei inclined his head.

“You have done a valuable piece of work and rendered a great service to the Party, Comrade Taganov. You could not have chosen a better time for it. You have put into our hands just the case we needed. With the present difficult economic situation and the dangerous trend of public sentiment, the government has to show the masses who is responsible for their suffering, and show it in a manner that will not be forgotten. The treacherous counter-revolutionary activities of speculators, who deprive our toilers of their hard-earned food rations, must be brought into the full light of proletarian justice. The workers must be reminded that their class enemies are plotting day and night to undermine the only workers’ government in the world. Our toiling masses must be told that they have to bear their temporary hardships patiently and lend their full support to the government which is fighting for their interests against such heavy odds, as the case you’ve discovered will display to the public. This, in substance, was the subject of my conversation with the editor of the Pravda this morning, in regard to the campaign we are starting. We shall make an example of this case. Every newspaper, every club, every public pulpit will be mobilized for the task. The trial of Citizen Kovalensky will be broadcast into every hamlet of the U.S.S.R.”

“Whose trial, comrade?”

“The trial of Citizen Kovalensky. Oh, yes, of course, by the way, that letter of Comrade Syerov which you attached to your report on the case—was that the only copy of it in existence?”

“Yes, comrade.”

“Who has read it besides yourself?”

“No one.”

The chief folded his long, thin hands, the tips of his fingers meeting, and said slowly: “Comrade Taganov, you will forget that you’ve ever read that letter.”

Andrei looked at him silently.

“This is an order from the committee which investigated your report. However, I shall take the time to explain, for I appreciate your efforts in the matter. Do you read the newspapers, Comrade Taganov?”

“Yes, comrade.”

“Do you know what is going on in our villages at the present time?”

“Yes, comrade.”

“Are you aware of the mood in our factories?”

“Yes, comrade.”

“Do you realize the precarious equilibrium of our public opinion?”

“Yes, comrade.”

“In that case, I do not have to explain to you why a Party member’s name must be kept from any connection with a case of counter-revolutionary speculation. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly, comrade.”

“You must be very careful to remember that you know nothing about Comrade Pavel Syerov. Am I understood?”

“Thoroughly, comrade.”

“Citizen Morozov will resign from his position with the Food Trust—by reason of ill health. He will not be brought into the case, for it would throw an unfavorable light on our Food Trust and create a great deal of unnecessary comment. But the real culprit and dominant spirit of the conspiracy, Citizen Kovalensky, will be arrested tonight. Does that meet with your approval, Comrade Taganov?”

“My position does not allow me to approve, comrade. Only to take orders.”

“Very well said, Comrade Taganov. Of course, Citizen Kovalensky is the sole legal, registered owner of that food store, as we’ve checked. He is an aristocrat by birth and the son of a father executed for counter-revolution. He has been arrested before—for an illegal attempt to leave the country. He is a living symbol of the class which our working masses know to be the bitterest enemy of the Soviets. Our working masses, justly angered by lengthy privations, by long hours of waiting in lines at our co-operatives, by lack of the barest necessities, will know who is to blame for their hardships. They will know who strikes deadly blows at the very heart of our economic life. The last descendant of a greedy, exploiting aristocracy will pay the penalty due every member of his class.”

“Yes, comrade. A public trial with headlines in the papers and a radio microphone in the courtroom?”

“Precisely, Comrade Taganov.”

“And what if Citizen Kovalensky talks too much and too near the microphone? What if he mentions names?”

“Oh, nothing to fear, Comrade Taganov. Those gentlemen are easy to handle. He’ll be promised life to say only what he’s told to say. He’ll be expecting a pardon even when he hears his death sentence. One can make promises, you know. One doesn’t always have to keep them.”

“And when he faces the firing squad—there will be no microphone on hand?”

“Precisely.”

“And, of course, it won’t be necessary to mention that he was jobless and starving at the time he entered the employ of those unnamed persons.”

“What’s that, Comrade Taganov?”

“A helpful suggestion, comrade. It will also be important to explain how a penniless aristocrat managed to lay his hands on the very heart of our economic life.”

“Comrade Taganov, you have a remarkable gift for platform oratory. Too remarkable a gift. It is not always an asset to an agent of the G.P.U. You should be careful lest it be appreciated and you find yourself sent to a nice post—in the Turkestan, for instance—where you will have full opportunity to display it. Like Comrade Trotsky, for instance.”

“I have served in the Red Army under Comrade Trotsky.”

“I wouldn’t remember that too often, Comrade Taganov, if I were you.”

“I won’t, comrade. I shall do my best to forget it.”

“At six o’clock tonight, Comrade Taganov, you will report for duty to search Citizen Kovalensky’s apartment for any additional evidence or documents pertaining to this case. And you will arrest Citizen Kovalensky.”

“Yes, comrade.”

“That’s all, Comrade Taganov.”

“Yes, comrade.”

The executive of the Economic Section of the G.P.U. smiled, showing his gums, at Comrade Pavel Syerov and said coldly: “Hereafter, Comrade Syerov, you will confine your literary efforts to matters pertaining to your job on the railroad.”

“Oh, sure, pal,” said Pavel Syerov. “Don’t worry.”

“I’m not the one to worry in this case, I’ll remind you.”

“Oh, hell, I’ve worried till I’m seasick. What do you want? One has only so many hairs to turn gray.”

“But only one head under the hair.”

“What . . . what do you mean? You have the letter, haven’t you?”

“Not any more.”

“Where is it?”

“In the furnace.”

“Thanks, pal.”

“You have good reason to be grateful.”

“Oh, sure. Sure, I’m grateful. A good turn deserves another. An eye for an eye . . . how does the saying go? I keep my mouth shut about some things and you keep others shut for me about my little sins. Like good pals.”

“It’s not as simple as that, Syerov. For instance, your aristocratic playmate, Citizen Kovalensky, will have to go on trial and . . .”

“Hell, do you think that will make me cry? I’ll be only too glad to see that arrogant bum get his white neck twisted.”

“Your health, Comrade Morozov, requires a long rest and a trip to a warmer climate,” said the official. “That is why, in acknowledgment of your resignation, we are giving you this assignment to a place in a House of Rest. You understand?”

“Yes,” said Morozov, mopping his forehead, “I understand.”

“It is a pleasant sanatorium in the Crimea. Restful and quiet. Far from the noise of the cities. It will help your health a great deal. I would suggest that you take full advantage of the privilege for, let us say, six months. I would not advise you to hurry back, Comrade Morozov.”

“No,” said Morozov, “I won’t hurry.”

“And there’s another advice I would like to give you, Comrade Morozov. You are going to hear a great deal, from the newspapers, about the trial of a certain Citizen Kovalensky for counter-revolutionary speculation. It would be wise to let your fellow patients in the sanatorium understand that you know nothing about the case.”

“Of course, comrade. I don’t know a thing about it. Not a thing.”

The official bent toward Morozov and whispered bluntly, confidentially: “And if I were you, I wouldn’t try to pull any wires for Kovalensky, even though he’s going to the firing squad.”

Morozov looked up into the official’s face and drawled, his soft vowels blurring, trailing off into a whine, his wide, vertical nostrils quivering: “Who, me, pull any wires? For him? Why should I, comrade? Why should I? I had nothing to do with him. He owned that store. He alone. You can look up the registration. He alone. He can’t prove I knew anything about . . . about anything. He alone. Sole owner. Lev Kovalensky—you can look it up.”

Lavrov’s wife opened the door.

She made a choked sound, like a hiccough, somewhere in her throat, and clamped her hand over her mouth, when she saw Andrei Taganov’s leather jacket and the holster on his hip, and behind him—the steel blades of four bayonets.

Four soldiers entered, following Andrei. The last one slammed the door shut imperiously.

“Lord merciful! Oh, my Lord merciful!” wailed the woman, clasping a faded apron in both hands.

“Keep still!” ordered Andrei. “Where’s Citizen Kovalensky’s room?”

The woman pointed with a shaking finger and kept on pointing, foolishly, persistently, while the soldiers followed Andrei. She stared stupidly at the clothes rack in the lobby, at the old coats that seemed warm and creased to the lines of human bodies, hanging there while three thin, steel blades moved slowly past, and six boots stamped heavily, the floor sounding like a muffled drum. The soldier with the fourth bayonet remained standing at the door.

Lavrov jumped up when he saw them. Andrei crossed the room swiftly, without looking at him. A short, sharp movement of Andrei’s hand, brusque and imperious as a lash, made one of the soldiers remain stationed at the door. The others followed Andrei into Leo’s room.

Leo was alone. He sat in a deep armchair by the lighted fireplace, in his shirt sleeves, reading a book. The book was the first thing to move when the door was flung open; it descended slowly to the arm of the chair and a steady hand closed it. Then, Leo rose unhurriedly, the glow of the fire flickering on the white shirt on his straight shoulders.

He said, smiling, his smile a scornful arc: “Well, Comrade Taganov, didn’t you know that some day we would meet like this?”

Andrei’s face had no expression. It was set and motionless like a passport photograph; as if lines and muscles were hardened into something which had no human meaning, something which was a human face in shape only. He handed to Leo a paper bearing official stamps; he said, in a voice which was a human voice only because it made sounds that were of the human alphabet: “Search warrant, Citizen Kovalensky.”

“Go ahead,” said Leo, bowing sternly, graciously, as if to a guest at a formal reception. “You’re quite welcome.”

Two swift movements of Andrei’s hand sent one soldier to a chest of drawers and the other to the bed. Drawers clattered open; white stacks of underwear fell to the floor, from under huge, dark fists that dug swiftly, expertly and slammed the drawers shut with a bang, one after the other. A white pile grew on the floor, around black boots glistening with melting snow. A quick hand ripped the satin cover off the bed, then the quilt and the sheets; the thrust of a bayonet split the mattress open and two fists disappeared in the cut.

Andrei opened the drawers of a desk. He went through them swiftly, mechanically, his thumb running the pages of books in a quick, fan-shaped whirl, with a swishing rustle like the shuffling of a pack of cards; he threw the books aside, gathering all notes and letters, shoving them into his brief case.

Leo stood alone in the middle of the room. The men took no notice of his presence, as if their actions did not concern him, as if he were only a piece of furniture, the last one to be torn open. He was half-sitting, half-leaning against a table, his two hands on the edge, his shoulders hunched, his long legs sliding forward. The logs creaked in the silence, and things thudded against the floor, and the papers rustled in Andrei’s fingers.

“I’m sorry I can’t oblige you,” said Leo, “by letting you find secret plans to blow up the Kremlin and overthrow the Soviets, Comrade Taganov.”

“Citizen Kovalensky,” said Andrei, as if they had never met before, “you are speaking to a representative of the G.P.U.”

“You didn’t think I had forgotten that, did you?” said Leo.

A soldier stuck a bayonet into a pillow, and little white flakes of down fluttered up like snowdrops. Andrei jerked the door of a cabinet open; the dishes and glasses tinkled, as he piled them swiftly, softly on the carpet.

Leo opened his gold cigarette case and extended it to Andrei.

“No, thank you,” said Andrei.

Leo lighted a cigarette. The match quivered in his fingers for an instant, then grew steady. He sat on the edge of the table, swinging one leg, smoke rising slowly in a thin, blue column.

“The survival,” said Leo, “of the fittest. However, not all philosophers are right. I’ve always wanted to ask them one question: the fittest—for what? . . . You should be able to answer it, Comrade Taganov. What are your philosophical convictions? We’ve never had a chance to discuss that—and this would be an appropriate time.”

“I would suggest,” said Andrei, “that you keep silent.”

“And when a representative of the G.P.U. suggests,” said Leo, “it’s a command, isn’t it? I realize that one should know how to respect the grandeur of authority under all circumstances, no matter how trying to the self-respect of those in power.”

One of the soldiers raised his head and made a step toward Leo. A glance from Andrei stopped him. The soldier opened a wardrobe and took Leo’s suits out, one by one, running his hand through the pockets and linings.

Andrei opened another wardrobe.

The wardrobe smelled of a fine French perfume. He saw a woman’s dresses hanging in a row.

“What’s the matter, Comrade Taganov?” asked Leo.

Andrei was holding a red dress.

It was a plain red dress with a patent leather belt, four buttons, a round collar and a huge bow.

Andrei held it spread out in his two hands and looked at it. The red cloth spurted in small puffs between his fingers.

Then his eyes moved, slowly, a glance like a weight grating through space, to the line of clothes in the wardrobe. He saw a black velvet dress he knew, a coat with a fur collar, a white blouse.

He asked: “Whose are these?”

“My mistress’s,” Leo answered, his eyes fixed on Andrei’s face, pronouncing the word with a mocking contempt that suggested the infamy of obscenity.

Andrei’s face had no expression, no human meaning. He looked down at the dress, his lashes like two black crescents on his sunken cheeks. Then he straightened the dress slowly and, cautiously, a little awkwardly, as if it were of breakable glass, hung it back in the wardrobe.

Leo chuckled, his eyes dark, his mouth twisted: “A disappointment, isn’t it, Comrade Taganov?”

Andrei did not answer. He took the dresses out slowly, one by one, and ran his fingers through the pockets, through the soft folds that smelled of a French perfume.

“I say you can’t, citizen!” The guard’s voice roared suddenly behind the door. “You can’t go in now!”

There was the sound of a struggle behind the door, as if an arm had pushed a body aside.

A voice screamed, and it was not a woman’s voice, it was not a female’s voice, it was the ferocious howl of an animal in mortal agony: “Let me in there! Let me in!”

Andrei looked at the door and walked to it slowly and threw it open.

Andrei Taganov and Kira Argounova stood face to face.

He asked slowly, evenly, the syllables falling like measured drops of water: “Citizen Argounova, do you live here?”

She answered, her head high, her eyes holding his, the sound of her voice like his: “Yes.”

She stepped into the room; the soldier closed the door.

Andrei Taganov turned very slowly, his right shoulder drooping, every tendon of his body pulled to the effort of the motion, very cautiously, as if a knife had been thrust between his shoulder blades and he had to move carefully, not to disturb it. His left arm hung unnaturally, bent at the elbow, his fingers half-closed as if holding something they could not spill.

He turned to the soldiers and said: “Search that cabinet—and the boxes in the corner.”

Then he walked back to the open wardrobe; his steps and the logs of the fireplace creaked in the silence.

Kira leaned against the wall, her hat in her hand. The hat slipped out of her fingers and fell to the floor, unnoticed.

“I’m sorry, dearest,” said Leo. “I hoped it would be over before you came back.”

She was not looking at Leo. She was looking at the tall figure in a leather jacket with a holster on his hip.

Andrei walked to her dresser, and opened the drawers, and she saw her underwear in his hands, white batiste nightgowns, lace ruffles crumpled in his steady, unhurried fingers.

“Look through the davenport pillows,” Andrei ordered the soldiers, “and lift that rug.”

Kira stood pressed against the wall, her knees sagging, her hips, arms and shoulder blades holding her upright.

“That will be all,” Andrei ordered the soldiers. He closed the last drawer, evenly, without sound.

He took his brief case from the table and turned to Leo. He said, his mouth opening strangely, his upper lip motionless and only the lower one moving to form the sounds: “Citizen Kovalensky, you’re under arrest.”

Leo shrugged and reached silently for his coat. His mouth was drooping contemptuously, but he noticed that his fingers were trembling. He threw his head up, and flung his words at Andrei: “I’m sure this is the most pleasant duty you’ve ever performed, Comrade Taganov.”

The soldiers picked up their bayonets, kicking aside the things on the cluttered floor.

Leo walked to the mirror and adjusted his tie, his coat, his hair, with the meticulous precision of a man dressing for an important social engagement. His fingers were not trembling any longer. He folded his handkerchief neatly and slipped it into his breast pocket.

Andrei stood waiting.

Leo stopped before Kira on his way out. “Aren’t you going to say good-bye, Kira?” he asked.

He took her in his arms and kissed her. It was a long kiss. Andrei stood waiting.

“I have only one last favor to ask, Kira,” Leo whispered. “I hope you’ll forget me.”

She did not answer.

A soldier threw the door open. Andrei walked out and Leo followed. The soldier closed the door behind them.

XIII

LEO HAD BEEN LOCKED IN a cell at the G.P.U. Andrei had come home. At the gate of the palace garden, a Party comrade, hurrying into the Club, had stopped him.

“You’re giving us a report on the agrarian situation tonight, Comrade Taganov, aren’t you?” he had asked.

“Yes,” Andrei had answered.

“At nine o’clock, isn’t it? We’re all looking forward to it, Comrade Taganov. See you at nine.”

“Yes,” Andrei had answered.

He had walked slowly through the deep snow of the garden, up the long stairs, to his dark room.

A Club window was lighted in the palace and a yellow square fell across the floor. Andrei took off his cap, his leather jacket, his gun. He stood by the fireplace, kicking gray coals with his toe. He threw a log on the coals and struck a match.

He sat on a box by the fire, his hands hanging limply between his knees, his hands and his forehead pink in the darkness.

He heard steps on the landing outside, then a hand knocking sharply. He had not locked the door. He said: “Come in.”

Kira came in. She slammed the door behind her and stood in the archway of his room. He could not see her eyes in the darkness; black shadows swallowed her eyes and forehead; but the red glow fell on her mouth, and her mouth was wide, loose, brutal.

He rose and stood silently, looking at her.

“Well?” she threw at him savagely. “What are you going to do about it?”

He said slowly: “If I were you, I’d get out of here.”

She leaned against the archway, asking: “And if I don’t?”

“Get out of here,” he repeated.

She tore her hat off and flung it aside, she threw her coat off and dropped it to the floor.

“Get out, you—”

“—whore?” she finished for him. “Certainly. I just want to be sure you know that that’s what I am.”

He asked: “What do you want? I have nothing to say to you.”

“But I have. And you’ll listen. So you’ve caught me, haven’t you, Comrade Taganov? And you’re going to have your revenge? You came with your soldiers, with a gun on your hip, Comrade Taganov of the G.P.U., and you arrested him? And now you’re going to use all your influence, all your great Party influence, to see that he’s put before the firing squad, aren’t you? Perhaps you’ll even ask for the privilege of giving the order to fire? Go ahead! Have your revenge. And this is mine. I’m not pleading for him. I have nothing to fear any more. But, at least, I can speak. And I’ll speak. I have so much to say to you, to all of you, and I’ve kept silent for so long that it’s going to tear me to pieces! I have nothing to lose. But you have.”

He said: “Don’t you think it’s useless? Why say anything? If you have any excuses to offer . . .”

She laughed, a human laughter that did not sound human, that did not sound like laughter: “You fool! I’m proud of what I’ve done! Hear me! I don’t regret it! I’m proud of it! So you think I loved you, don’t you? I loved you, but I was unfaithful to you, on the side, as most women are? Well, then, listen: all you were to me, you and your great love, and your kisses, and your body, all they meant was only a pack of crisp, white, square, ten-ruble bills with a sickle and hammer printed in the corner! Do you know where those bills went? To a tubercular sanatorium in the Crimea. Do you know what they paid for? For the life of a man I loved long before I ever saw you, for the life of a body that had possessed mine before you ever touched it—and now you’re holding him in one of your cells and you’re going to shoot him. Why not? It’s fair enough. Shoot him. Take his life. You’ve paid for it.”

She saw his eyes, and they were not hurt, they were not angry. They were frightened. He said: “Kira . . . I . . . I . . . I didn’t know.”

She leaned back, and crossed her arms, and rocked softly, laughing: “So you loved me? So I was the highest of women, a woman like a temple, like a military march, like a god’s statue? Remember who told me that? Well, look at me! I’m only a whore and you’re the one who made the first payment! I sold myself—for money—and you paid it. Down in the gutter, that’s where I belong, and your great love put me there. I thought you’d be glad to know that. Aren’t you? So you think I loved you? I thought of Leo when you held me in your arms! When I spoke of love—I was speaking to him. Every kiss you got, every word, every hour was given to him, for him. I’ve never loved him as I loved him in your bed! . . . No, I won’t leave you your memories. They’re his. I love him. Do you hear me? I love him! Go ahead! Kill him. Nothing you can do to him will compare with what I’ve done to you. You know that, don’t you?”

She stood, swaying, and her shadow rose to the ceiling, and the shadow rocked as if it were going to crash down.

He repeated helplessly, as if she were not present, as if he were hanging on to the syllables for support: “I didn’t know. . . .”

“No, you didn’t know. But it was very simple. And not very unusual. Go through the garrets and basements where men live in your Red cities and see how many cases like this you can find. He wanted to live. You think everything that breathes can live? You’ve learned differently, I know. But he was one who could have lived. There aren’t many of them, so they don’t count with you. The doctor said he was going to die. And I loved him. You’ve learned what that means, too, haven’t you? He didn’t need much. Only rest, and fresh air, and food. He had no right to that, had he? Your State said so. We tried to beg. We begged humbly. Do you know what they said? There was a doctor in a hospital and he said he had hundreds on his waiting list.”

She leaned forward, her voice soft, confidential, she spread her hands out, trying to explain, suddenly gentle and businesslike and childishly insistent, her lips soft and a little bewildered, and only her eyes fixed and in her eyes, alone, a horror that did not belong in a room where human beings lived but only in a morgue:

“You see, you must understand this thoroughly. No one does. No one sees it, but I do, I can’t help it, I see it, you must see it, too. You understand? Hundreds. Thousands. Millions. Millions of what? Stomachs, and heads, and legs, and tongues, and souls. And it doesn’t even matter whether they fit together. Just millions. Just flesh. Human flesh. And they—it—had been registered and numbered, you know, like tin cans on a store shelf. I wonder if they’re registered by the person or by the pound? And they had a chance to go on living. But not Leo. He was only a man. All stones are cobblestones to you. And diamonds—they’re useless, because they sparkle too brightly in the sun, and it’s too hard on the eyes, and it’s too hard under the hoofs marching into the proletarian future. You don’t pave roads with diamonds. They may have other uses in the world, but of those you’ve never learned. That is why you had sentenced him to death, and others like him, an execution without a firing squad. There was a big commissar and I went to see him. He told me that a hundred thousand workers had died in the civil war and why couldn’t one aristocrat die—in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics? And what is the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics in the face of one man? But that is a question not for you to answer. I’m grateful to that commissar. He gave me permission to do what I’ve done. I don’t hate him. You should hate him. What I’m doing to you—he did it first!”

He stood looking down at her. He said nothing. He did not move. He did not take his eyes off hers.

She walked toward him, her legs crossing each other, with a slow, unsteady deliberation, her body slouching back. She stood looking at him, her face suddenly empty and calm, her eyes like slits, her mouth a thin incision into a flesh without color. She spoke, and he thought that her mouth did not open, words sliding out, crushed, from between closed lips, a voice frightening because it sounded too even and natural:

“That’s the question, you know, don’t you? Why can’t one aristocrat die in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics? You don’t understand that, do you? You and your great commissar, and a million others, like you, like him, that’s what you brought to the world, that question and your answer to it! A great gift, isn’t it? But one of you has been paid. I paid it. In you and to you. For all the sorrow your comrades brought to a living world. How do you like it, Comrade Andrei Taganov of the All-Union Communist Party? If you taught us that our life is nothing before that of the State—well then, are you really suffering? If I brought you to the last hell of despair—well then, why don’t you say that one’s own life doesn’t really matter?” Her voice was rising, like a whip, lashing him ferociously on both cheeks. “You loved a woman and she threw your love in your face? But the proletarian mines in the Don Basin have produced a hundred tons of coal last month! You had two altars and you saw suddenly that a harlot stood on one of them, and Citizen Morozov on the other? But the Proletarian State has exported ten thousand bushels of wheat last month! You’ve had every beam knocked from under your life? But the Proletarian Republic is building a new electric plant on the Volga! Why don’t you smile and sing hymns to the toil of the Collective? It’s still there, your Collective. Go and join it. Did anything really happen to you? It’s nothing but a personal problem of a private life, the kind that only the dead old world could worry about, isn’t it? Don’t you have something greater—greater is the word your comrades use—left to live for? Or do you, Comrade Taganov?”

He did not answer.

Her arms were thrown wide, and her breasts stood out under her old dress, panting, and he thought he could see every muscle of her body, a female’s body in the last convulsion of rage. She screamed:

“Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think I’m alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which knows how to want—isn’t that life itself? And who—in this damned universe—who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want? Who can answer that in human sounds that speak for human reason? . . . But you’ve tried to tell us what we should want. You came as a solemn army to bring a new life to men. You tore that life you knew nothing about, out of their guts—and you told them what it had to be. You took their every hour, every minute, every nerve, every thought in the farthest corners of their souls—and you told them what it had to be. You came and you forbade life to the living. You’ve driven us all into an iron cellar and you’ve closed all doors, and you’ve locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst! Then you stare and wonder what it’s doing to us. Well, then, look! All of you who have eyes left—look!”

She laughed, her shoulders shaking, stepping close to him. She screamed at his face:

“Why do you stand there? Why don’t you speak? Are you wondering why you’ve never known what I was? Well, here I am! Here’s what’s left after you took him, after you reached for the heart of my life—and do you know what that is? Do you know what it meant when you reached for my highest reverence . . .”

She stopped short. She gasped, a choked little sound, as if he had slapped her. She slammed the back of her hand against her mouth. She stood in silence, her eyes staring at something she had seen suddenly, clearly, full for the first time.

He smiled, very slowly, very gently. He stretched out his hands, palms up, shrugging sadly an explanation she did not need.

She moaned: “Oh, Andrei! . . .”

She backed away from him, her terrified eyes holding his.

He said slowly: “Kira, had I been in your place, I would have done the same—for the person I loved—for you.”

She moaned, her hand at her mouth: “Oh, Andrei, Andrei, what have I done to you?”

She stood before him, her body sagging, looking suddenly like a frightened child with eyes too big for its white face.

He approached her and took her hand from her mouth and held it in his steady fingers. He said, and his words were like the steps of a man making an immense effort to walk too steadily: “You’re done me a great favor by coming here and telling me what you’ve told. Because, you see, you’ve given me back what I thought I’d lost. You’re still what I thought you were. More than I thought you were. Only . . . it’s not anything you’ve done to me . . . it’s what you had to suffer and I . . . I gave you that suffering, and all those moments were to you . . . to you . . .”

His voice broke. Then he shook his head, and his voice was firm as a doctor’s: “Listen, child, we won’t talk any more. I want you to keep silent for a little while, quite silent, even silent inside, you understand? Don’t think. Try not to think. You’re trembling. You have to rest. Here. I want you to sit down and just sit still for a few minutes.”

He led her to a chair, and her head fell on his shoulder, and she whispered: “But . . . Andrei . . . You . . .”

“Forget that. Forget everything. Everything will be all right. Just sit still and don’t think.”

He lifted her gently and put her down on a chair by the fire. She did not resist. Her body was limp; her dress was pulled high above her knees. He saw her legs trembling. He took his leather jacket and wrapped it around her legs. He said: “This will keep you warm. It’s cold here. The fire hasn’t been on long enough. Now sit still.”

She did not move. Her head fell back against the edge of the chair; her eyes were closed; one arm hung limply by her side, and the pink glow of the fire twinkled softly on her motionless hand.

He stood in the darkness by the fireplace and looked at her. Somewhere in the Club someone was playing the “Internationale.”

He did not know how long he had stood there, when she stirred and raised her head. He asked: “Do you feel better now?”

Her head moved feebly, trying to nod.

He said: “Now let’s put your coat on and I’ll take you home. I want you to go to bed. Rest and don’t think of anything.”

She did not resist. Her head bent, she watched his fingers buttoning her coat. Then she raised her head, and her eyes looked into his. His eyes smiled at her, in quiet understanding, as he had smiled on their first meetings at the Institute.

He helped her down the long, frozen stairs. He called a sleigh at the garden gate and gave the address of her home, Leo’s home. He buttoned the fur blanket over her knees, and his arm held her as the sleigh tore forward. They rode in silence.

When the sleigh stopped, he said: “Now I want you to rest for a few days. Don’t go anywhere. There’s nothing you can do. Don’t worry about . . . him. Leave that to me.”

The snow was deep at the curb by the sidewalk. He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the door and up the stairs. She whispered, and there was no sound, but he saw the movements of her lips: “. . . Andrei. . . .”

He said: “Everything will be all right.”

He returned to the sleigh, alone. He gave the driver the address of the Party Club, where his comrades were waiting for a report on the agrarian situation.

“. . . and you’ve locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst! You’ve taken upon your shoulders a burden such as no shoulders in history have ever carried! You said that your end justified your means. But your end, comrades? What is your end?”

The chairman of the Club struck his desk with his gavel. “Comrade Taganov, I’m calling you to order!” he cried. “You will kindly confine your speech to the report on the agrarian situation.”

A wave of motion rippled through the crowded heads, down the long, dim hall, and whispers rose, and somewhere in the back row someone giggled.

Andrei Taganov stood on the speaker’s platform. The hall was dark. A single bulb burned over the chairman’s desk. Andrei’s black leather jacket merged into the black wall behind him. Three white spots stood out, luminous in the darkness: his two long, thin hands and his face. His hands moved slowly over a black void; his face had dark shadows in the eyesockets, in the hollows of the cheekbones. He said, his voice dull, as if he could not hear his own words:

“Yes, the agrarian situation, comrades . . . In the last two months, twenty-six Party members have been assassinated in our outlying village districts. Eight clubhouses have been burned. Also three schools and a Communal Farm storehouse. The counter-revolutionary element of village hoarders has to be crushed without mercy. Our Moscow chief cites the example of the village Petrovshino where, upon their refusal to surrender their leaders, the peasants were lined in a row and every third one was shot, while the rest stood waiting. The peasants had locked three Communists from the city in the local Club of Lenin and boarded the windows on the outside and set fire to the house. . . . The peasants stood and watched it burn and sang, so they would hear no cries. . . . They were wild beasts. . . . They were beasts run amuck, beasts crazed with misery. . . . Perhaps there, too—in those lost villages somewhere so far away—there, too, they have girls, young and straight and more precious than anything on earth, who are driven into the last hell of despair, and men who love them more than life itself, who have to stand by and see it and watch it and have no help to offer! Perhaps they too . . .”

“Comrade Taganov!” roared the chairman. “I’m calling you to order!”

“Yes, Comrade Chairman. . . . Our Moscow chief cites the . . . What was I saying, Comrade Chairman? . . . Yes, the hoarders’ element in the villages . . . Yes . . . The Party has to take extraordinary measures against the counter-revolutionary element in the villages, that threatens the progress of our great work among the peasant masses. . . . Our great work. . . . We came as a solemn army and forbade life to the living. We thought everything that breathed knew how to live. Does it? And aren’t those who know how to live, aren’t they too precious to be sacrificed in the name of any cause? What cause is greater than those who fight for it? And aren’t those who know how to fight, aren’t they the cause itself and not the means?”

“Comrade Taganov!” roared the chairman. “I’m calling you to order!”

“I’m here to make a report to my Party comrades, Comrade Chairman. It’s a very crucial report and I think they should hear it. Yes, it’s about our work in the villages, and in the cities, and among the millions, the living millions. Only there are questions. There are questions that must be answered. Why should we be afraid if we can answer them? But if we can’t. . . ? If we can’t? . . . Comrades! Brothers! Listen to me! Listen, you consecrated warriors of a new life! Are we sure we know what we are doing? No one can tell men what they must live for. No one can take that right—because there are things in men, in the best of us, which are above all states, above all collectives! Do you ask: what things? Man’s mind and his values. Look into yourself, honestly and fearlessly. Look and don’t tell me, don’t tell any one, just tell yourself: what are you living for? Aren’t you living for yourself and only for yourself? Call it your aim, your love, your cause—isn’t it still your cause? Give your life, die for your ideal—isn’t it still your ideal? Every honest man lives for himself. Every man worth calling a man lives for himself. The one who doesn’t—doesn’t live at all. You cannot change it. You cannot change it because that’s the way man is born, alone, complete, an end in himself. No laws, no Party, no G.P.U. will ever kill that thing in man which knows how to say ‘I.’ You cannot enslave man’s mind, you can only destroy it. You have tried. Now look at what you’re getting. Look at those whom you allow to triumph. Deny the best in men—and see what will survive. Do we want the crippled, creeping, crawling, broken monstrosities that we’re producing? Are we not castrating life in order to perpetuate it?”

“Comrade Ta . . .”

“Brothers! Listen! We have to answer this!” The two luminous white hands flew up over a black void, and his voice rose, ringing, as it had risen in a dark valley over the White trenches many years ago. “We have to answer this! If we don’t—history will answer it for us. And we shall go down with a burden on our shoulders that will never be forgiven! What is our goal, comrades? What are we doing? Do we want to feed a starved humanity in order to let it live? Or do we want to strangle its life in order to feed it?”

“Comrade Taganov!” roared the chairman. “I deprive you of speech!”

“I . . . I . . .” panted Andrei Taganov, staggering down the platform steps. “I have nothing more to say. . . .”

He walked out, down the long aisle, a tall, gaunt, lonely figure. Heads turned to look at him. Somewhere in the back row someone whistled through his teeth, a long, low, sneering triumphant sound.

When the door closed after him, someone whispered:

“Let Comrade Taganov wait for the next Party purge!”

XIV

COMRADE SONIA SAT AT THE TABLE, IN a faded lavender kimono, with a pencil behind her ear. The kimono did not meet in front, for she had grown to proportions that could not be concealed any longer. She bent under the lamp, running through the pages of a calendar; she seized the pencil once in a while, jotting hurried notes down on a scrap of paper, and bit the pencil, a purple streak spreading on her lower lip, for the pencil was indelible.

Pavel Syerov lay on the davenport, his stocking feet high on its arm, reading a newspaper, chewing sunflower seeds. He spat the shells into a pile on a newspaper spread on the floor by the davenport. The shells made a little sizzling sound, leaving his lips. Pavel Syerov looked bored.

“Our child,” said Comrade Sonia, “will be a new citizen of a new state. It will be brought up in the free, healthy ideology of the proletariat, without any bourgeois prejudices to hamper its natural development.”

“Yeah,” said Pavel Syerov without looking up from his newspaper.

“I shall have it registered with the Pioneers, the very day it’s born. Won’t you be proud of your living contribution to the Soviet future, when you see it marching with other little citizens, in blue trunks and with a red kerchief around its neck?”

“Sure,” said Pavel Syerov, spitting a shell down on the newspaper.

“We’ll have a real Red christening. You know, no priests, only our Party comrades, a civil ceremony, and appropriate speeches. I’m trying to decide on a name and . . . Are you listening to me, Pavel?”

“Sure,” said Syerov, sticking a seed between his teeth.

“There are many good suggestions for new, revolutionary names here in the calendar, instead of the foolish old saints’ names. I’ve copied some good ones. Now what do you think? If it’s a boy, I think Ninel would be nice.”

“What the hell’s that?”

“Pavel, I won’t tolerate such language and such ignorance! You haven’t given a single thought to your child’s name, have you?”

“Well, say, I still have time, haven’t I?”

“You’re not interested, that’s all, don’t you fool me, Pavel Syerov, and don’t you fool yourself thinking I’ll forget it!”

“Aw, come on, now, Sonia, really, you know, I’m leaving the name up to you. You know best.”

“Yes. As usual. Well, Ninel is our great leader Lenin’s name—reversed. Very appropriate. Or we could call him Vil—that’s for our great leader’s initials—Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin. See?”

“Yeah. Well, either one’s good enough for me.”

“Now, if it’s a girl—and I hope it’s a girl, because the new woman is coming into her own and the future belongs, to a greater extent than you men imagine, to the free woman of the proletariat—well, if it’s a girl, I have some good names here, but the one I like best is Octiabrina, because that would be a living monument to our great October Revolution.”

“Sort of . . . long, isn’t it?”

“What of it? It’s a very good name and very popular. You know, Fimka Popova, she had a Red christening week before last and that’s what she called her brat—Octiabrina. Even got a notice in the paper about it. Her husband was so proud—the blind fool!”

“Now, Sonia, you shouldn’t insinuate . . .”

“Listen to the respectable moralist! That bitch Fimka is known as a . . . Oh, to hell with her! But if she thinks she’s the only one to get a notice in the paper about her litter I’ll . . . I’ve copied some other names here, too. Good modern ones. There’s Marxina, for Karl Marx. Or else Communara. Or . . .”

Something clattered loudly under the table.

“Oh, hell!” said Comrade Sonia. “Those damn slippers of mine!” She wriggled uncomfortably on her chair, stretching out one leg, her foot groping under the table. She found the slipper and bent painfully over her abdomen, pulling the slipper on by a flat, wornout heel. “Look at the old junk I have to wear! And I need so many things, and with the child coming . . . You would choose a good time to write certain literary compositions and ruin everything, you drunken fool!”

“Now we won’t bring that up again, Sonia. You know I was lucky to get out of it as I did.”

“Yeah! Well, I hope your Kovalensky gets the firing squad and a nice, loud trial. I’ll see to it that the women of the Zhenotdel stage a demonstration of protest against Speculators and Aristocrats!” She fingered the pages of the calendar and cried: “Here’s another good one for a girl: Tribuna. Or—Barricada. Or, if we prefer something in the spirit of modern science: Universiteta.”

“That’s too long,” said Syerov.

“I prefer Octiabrina. More symbol to that. I hope it’s a girl. Octiabrina Syerova—the leader of the future. What do you want it to be, Pavel, a boy or a girl?”

“I don’t care,” said Syerov, “so long as it isn’t twins.”

“Now I don’t like that remark at all. It shows that you . . .”

They heard a knock at the door. The knock seemed too loud, too peremptory. Syerov, his head up, dropped the newspaper and said: “Come in.”

Andrei Taganov entered and closed the door. Comrade Sonia dropped her calendar. Pavel Syerov rose slowly to his feet.

“Good evening,” said Andrei.

“Good evening,” said Syerov, watching him fixedly.

“What’s the big idea, Taganov?” Comrade Sonia asked, her voice low, husky, menacing.

Andrei did not turn to her. He said: “I want to speak to you, Syerov.”

“Go ahead,” said Syerov without moving.

“I said I want to speak to you alone.”

“I said go ahead,” Syerov repeated.

“Tell your wife to get out.”

“My husband and I,” said Comrade Sonia, “have no secrets from each other.”

“You get out of here,” said Andrei, without raising his voice, “and wait in the corridor.”

“Pavel! If he . . .”

“You’d better go, Sonia,” said Syerov slowly, without looking at her, his eyes fixed on Andrei.

Comrade Sonia coughed out a single chuckle from the corner of her mouth: “Comrade Taganov still going strong, eh? Well, we shall see what we shall see and we don’t have long to wait.”

She gathered her lavender kimono, pulling it tightly across her abdomen, stuck a cigarette into her mouth and walked out, the slippers flapping against her heels.

“I thought,” said Pavel Syerov, “that you had learned a lesson in the last few days.”

“I have,” said Andrei.

“What else do you want?”

“You’d better put your shoes on while I’m talking. You’re going out and you haven’t much time to lose.”

“Am I? Glad you let me in on the little secret. Otherwise I might have said that I had no such intention. And maybe I’ll still say it. Where am I going, according to Comrade Mussolini Taganov?”

“To release Leo Kovalensky.”

Pavel Syerov sat down heavily and his feet scattered the pile of sunflower-seed shells over the floor. “What are you up to, Taganov? Gone insane, have you?”

“You’d better keep still and listen. I’ll tell you what you have to do.”

“You’ll tell me what I have to do? Why?”

“And after that, I’ll tell you why you will do it. You’ll dress right now and go to see your friend. You know what friend I mean. The one at the G.P.U.”

“At this hour?”

“Get him out of bed, if necessary. What you’ll tell him and how you’ll tell it, is none of my business. All I have to know is that Leo Kovalensky is released within forty-eight hours.”

“Now will you let me in on the little magic wand that will make me do it?”

“It’s a little paper wand, Syerov. Two of them.”

“Written by whom?”

“You.”

“Huh?”

“Photographed from one written by you, to be exact.”

Syerov rose slowly and leaned with both hands on the table. “Taganov, you God-damn rat!” he hissed. “It’s a rotten time to be joking.”

“Am I?”

“Well, I’ll go to see my friend all right. And you’ll see Leo Kovalensky all right—and it won’t take you forty-eight hours, either. I’ll see to it that you get the cell next to his and then we’ll find out what documents . . .”

“There are two photostats of it, as I said. Only I don’t happen to have either one of them.”

“What . . . what did you . . .”

“They’re in the possession of two friends I can trust. It would be useless to try to find out their names. You know me well enough to discard any idea of the G.P.U. torture chamber, if that idea occurs to you. Their instructions are that if anything happens to me before Leo Kovalensky is out—the photostats go to Moscow. Also—if anything happens to him after he’s out.”

“You God-d . . .”

“You don’t want those photostats to reach Moscow. Your friend won’t be able to save your neck, then, nor his own, perhaps. You don’t have to worry about my becoming a nuisance. All you have to do is release Leo Kovalensky and hush up this whole case. You’ll never hear of those photostats again. You’ll never see them, either.”

Syerov reached for his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. “You’re lying,” he said hoarsely. “You’ve never taken any photostats.”

“Maybe,” said Andrei. “Want to take a chance on that?”

“Sit down,” said Syerov, falling on the davenport.

Andrei sat down on the edge of the table and crossed his legs.

“Listen, Andrei,” said Syerov. “Let’s talk sense. All right, you’re holding the whip. Still, do you know what you’re asking?”

“No more than you can do.”

“But, good Lord in Heaven, Andrei! It’s such a big case and we’re all set with a first-class propaganda campaign and the newspapers are getting headlines ready to . . .”

“Stop them.”

“But how can I? How can I ask him? What am I going to tell him?”

“That’s none of my business.”

“But after he’s already saved my . . .”

“Don’t forget it’s in his interests, too. He may have friends in Moscow. And he may have some who aren’t friends.”

“But, listen . . .”

“And when Party members can no longer be saved, they’re the ones who get it worse than the private speculators, you know. Also a good occasion for first-class propaganda.”

“Andrei, one of us has gone insane. I can’t figure it out. Why do you want Kovalensky released?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“And if you’ve appointed yourself his guardian angel, then why the hell did you start the whole damn case? You started it, you know.”

“You said that I had learned a lesson.”

“Andrei, haven’t you got any Party honor left? We need a good smashing bang at the speculators right now, with food conditions as they are and all the . . .”

“That doesn’t concern me any longer.”

“You damn traitor! You said it was the only copy of the letter in existence, when you turned it in!”

“Maybe I was lying then.”

“Listen, let’s talk business. Here—have a cigarette.”

“No, thank you.”

“Listen, let’s talk as friend to friend. I take back all those things I said to you. I apologize. You can’t blame me, you know how it is, you can see it’s enough to make a fellow lose his mind a little. All right, you have your own game to play, I had mine and I made a misstep, but then we’re both no innocent angels, as I can see, so we can understand each other. We used to be good friends, childhood friends, remember? So we can talk sensibly.”

“About what?”

“I have an offer to make to you, Andrei. A good one. That friend of mine, he can do a lot if I slip a couple of words to him, as you know, I guess. I guess you know that I have enough on him for a firing squad, too. You’re learning the same game, I see, and doing it brilliantly, I must hand it to you. All right, we understand each other. Now I can talk plain. I guess you know that your spot in the Party isn’t so good any more. Not so good at all. And particularly after that little speech you made tonight—really, you know, it won’t be so easy on you at the next Party purge.”

“I know it.”

“In fact, you’re pretty sure to get the axe, you know.”

“I do.”

“Well, then, what do you say if we make a bargain? You drop this case and I’ll see to it that you keep your Party card and not only that, but you can have any job you choose at the G.P.U. and name your own salary. No questions asked and no ill feeling. We all have our own way to make. You and I—we can help each other a lot. What do you say?”

“What makes you think that I want to remain in the Party?”

“Andrei! . . .”

“You don’t have to worry about helping me at the next purge. I may be kicked out of the Party or I may be shot or I may be run over by a truck. That won’t make any difference to you. Understand? But don’t touch Leo Kovalensky. See that no one touches him. Watch him as you would watch your own child, no matter what happens to me. I am not his guardian angel. You are.”

“Andrei,” Syerov moaned, “what is that damned aristocrat to you?”

“I’ve answered that question once.”

Syerov rose unsteadily and drew himself up for a last, desperate effort: “Listen, Andrei, I have something to tell you. I thought you knew it, but I guess you don’t. Only pull yourself together and listen, and don’t kill me on the first word. I know there’s a name you don’t want to be mentioned, but I’ll mention it. It’s Kira Argounova.”

“Well?”

“Listen, we’re not mincing words, are we? Hell, not now we aren’t. Well, then, listen: you love her and you’ve been sleeping with her for over a year. And. . . . Wait! Let me finish. . . . Well, she’s been Leo Kovalensky’s mistress all that time. . . . Wait! You don’t have to take my word for it. Just check up on it and see for yourself.”

“Why check up on it? I know it.”

“Oh!” said Pavel Syerov.

He stood, rocking slowly from heels to toes, looking at Andrei. Then he laughed. “Well,” he said, “I should have known.”

“Get your coat,” said Andrei, rising.

“I should have known,” laughed Syerov, “why the saint of the Comm-party would go in for blackmail. You fool! You poor, virtuous, brainless fool! So that’s the kind of grandstand you’re playing! I should have known that the lofty heroics are a disease one never gets cured of! Come on, Andrei! Haven’t you any sense left? Any pride?”

“We’ve talked long enough,” said Andrei. “You seem to know a lot about me. You should know that I don’t change my mind.”

Pavel Syerov reached for his overcoat and pulled it on slowly, his pale lips grinning.

“All right, Sir Galahad or whatever it’s called,” he said. “Sir Galahad of the blackmail sword. You win—this time. It’s no use threatening you with any retaliation. Fellows like you get theirs without any help from fellows like me. In a year—this little mess will be forgotten. I’ll be running the railroads of the U.S.S.R. and buying satin diapers for my brat. You’ll be standing in line for a pot of soup—and maybe you’ll get it. But you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that your sweetheart is being . . . by a man you hate!”

“Yes,” said Andrei. “Good luck, Comrade Syerov.”

“Good luck, Comrade Taganov.”

Kira sat on the floor, folding Leo’s underwear, putting it back into the drawer. Her dresses were still piled in a heap before her open wardrobe. Papers rustled all over the room when she moved. Down from the torn pillows fluttered like snow over the furniture.

She had not been out for two days. She had heard no sound from the world beyond the walls of her room. Galina Petrovna had telephoned once and wailed into the receiver; Kira had told her not to worry and please not to come over; Galina Petrovna had not come.

The Lavrovs had decided that their neighbor was not shaken by her tragedy; they heard no tears; they noticed nothing unusual in the frail little figure whom they watched sidewise when they crossed her room on their way to the bathroom. They noticed only that she seemed lazy, for her limbs fell and remained in any position, and it took her an effort to move them; and her eyes remained fixed on one spot and it took a bigger effort to shift her glance, and her glance was like a forty-pound sack of sand being dragged by a child’s fist.

She sat on the floor and folded shirts neatly, creasing every pleat, slipping them cautiously into the drawer on the palms of her two hands. One shirt had Leo’s initials embroidered on the breast pocket; she sat staring at it, without moving.

She did not raise her head when she heard the door opening.

“Allo, Kira,” said a voice.

She fell back against the open drawer and it slammed shut with a crash. Leo was looking down at her. His lips drooped, but it was not a smile; his lips had no color; the circles under his eyes were blue and sharp, as if painted on by an amateur actor.

“Kira . . . please . . . no hysterics . . .” he said wearily.

She rose slowly, her arms swinging limply. She stood, her fingers crumpling the hair on her right temple, looking at him incredulously, afraid to touch him.

“Leo . . . Leo . . . you’re not . . . free, are you?”

“Yes. Free. Released. Kicked out.”

“Leo . . . how . . . how could it . . . happen . . . ?”

“How do I know? I thought you knew something about that.”

She was kissing his lips, his neck, the muscles exposed by his torn shirt collar, his hands, his palms. He patted her hair and looked indifferently over her head, at the wrecked room.

“Leo . . .” she whispered, looking up into his dead eyes, “what have they done to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Did they . . . did they . . . I heard they sometimes . . .”

“No, they didn’t torture me. They say they have a room for that, but I didn’t have the privilege. . . . I had a nice cell all to myself and three meals a day, although the soup was rotten. I just sat there for two days and thought of what last words I could say before the firing squad. As good a pastime as any.”

She took his coat off; she pushed him into an armchair; she knelt, pulling off his overshoes; she pressed her head to his knees for a second and jerked it away, and bent lower, to hide her face, and tied his unfastened shoestring with trembling fingers.

He asked: “Have I any clean underwear left?”

“Yes . . . I’ll get it . . . only . . . Leo . . . I want to know . . . you haven’t told me . . .”

“What is there to tell? I guess it’s all over. The case is closed. They told me to see that I don’t get into the G.P.U. for a third time.” He added indifferently: “I think your friend Taganov had something to do with my release.”

“He . . .”

“You didn’t ask him to?”

“No,” she said, rising. “No, I didn’t ask him.”

“Did they ruin the furniture completely, and the bed, too?”

“Who? . . . Oh, the search . . . No . . . Yes, I guess they have. . . . Leo!” she cried suddenly, so that he shuddered and looked at her, lifting his eyelids with effort. “Leo, have you nothing to say?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Aren’t you . . . aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Sure. You look nice. Your hair needs combing.”

“Leo, did you think of me . . . there?”

“No.”

“You . . . didn’t?”

“No. What for? To make it easier?”

“Leo, do you . . . love me?”

“Oh, what a question. . . . What a question at what a time. . . . You’re getting feminine, Kira. . . . Really, it’s not becoming. . . . Not becoming at all. . . .”

“I’m sorry, dear. I know it’s foolish. I don’t know why I had to ask it just then. . . . You’re so tired. I’ll get your underwear and I’ll fix your dinner. You haven’t had dinner, have you?”

“No. I don’t want any. Is there anything to drink in the house?”

“Leo . . . you’re not going . . . again . . . to . . .”

“Leave me alone, will you? Get the hell out, please could you? Go to your parents . . . or something . . .”

“Leo!” She stood, her hands in her hair, staring down at him incredulously. “Leo, what have they done to you?”

His head was leaning back against the chair and she looked at the quivering white triangle of his neck and chin; he spoke, his eyes closed, only his lips moving, his voice even and flat: “Nothing. . . . No one’s going to do anything to me any more. . . . No one. . . . Not you nor anyone else. . . . No one can hurt me but you—and now you can’t either. . . . No one. . . .”

“Leo!” She seized his limp, white-faced head and shook it furiously, pitilessly. “Leo! It can’t get you like this! It won’t get you!”

He seized her hand and flung it aside. “Will you ever come down to earth? What do you want? Want me to sing of life with little excursions to the G.P.U. between hymns? Afraid they’ve broken me? Afraid they’ll get me? Want me to keep something that the mire can’t reach, the more to suffer while it sucks me under? You’re being kind to me, aren’t you, because you love me so much? Don’t you think you’d be kinder if you’d let me fall into the mire? So that I’d be one with our times and would feel nothing any longer . . . nothing . . . ever . . .”

A hand knocked at the door.

“Come in,” said Kira.

Andrei Taganov came in. “Good evening, Kira,” he said and stopped, seeing Leo.

“Good evening, Andrei,” said Kira.

Leo raised his head with effort. His eyes looked faintly startled.

“Good evening,” said Andrei, turning to him. “I didn’t know you were out already.”

“I’m out. I thought you had reason to expect it.”

“I did. But I didn’t know they’d hurry. I’m sorry to intrude like this. I know you don’t want to see any visitors.”

“It’s all right, Andrei,” said Kira. “Sit down.”

“There’s something I have to tell you, Kira.” He turned to Leo: “Would you mind if I took Kira out—for a few minutes?”

“I certainly would,” Leo answered slowly. “Have you any secrets to discuss with Kira?”

“Leo!” Her voice was almost a scream. She added, quietly, her voice still trembling: “Come on, Andrei.”

“No,” said Andrei calmly, sitting down. “It isn’t really necessary. It’s not a secret.” He turned to Leo. “I just wanted to spare you the necessity of . . . of feeling indebted to me, but perhaps it would be better if you heard it, too. Sit down, Kira. It’s perfectly all right. It’s about his release from the G.P.U.”

Leo was looking at him fixedly, silently, leaning forward. Kira stood, her shoulders hunched, her hands clasped behind her back, as if they were tied. She looked at Andrei; his eyes were clear, serene.

“Sit down, Kira,” he said almost gently.

She obeyed.

“There’s something you should know, both of you,” said Andrei, “for your own protection. I couldn’t tell you sooner, Kira. I had to be sure that it had worked. Well, it has. I suppose you know who’s really behind your release. It’s Pavel Syerov. I want you to know what’s behind him—in case you ever need it.”

“It’s you, isn’t it?” asked Leo, a faint edge of sharpness in his voice.

“Leo, keep quiet. Please!” said Kira, turning away not to see his eyes watching her.

“It’s a letter,” Andrei continued calmly. “A letter he wrote and you know what that was. The letter had been sent to me . . . by someone else. Syerov has powerful friends. That saved him. But he’s not very brave. That saved you. The letter had been destroyed. But I told him that I had photostats of it and that they were in the possession of friends who would send them to higher authorities in Moscow—unless you were released. The case is killed. I don’t think they’ll ever bother you again. But I want you to know this, so that you can hold it over Syerov’s head—if you need it. Let him think that you know the photostats are in good hands—and on their way to Moscow, if he makes one step in your direction. That’s all. I don’t think you’ll ever need it. But it’s a useful protection to have, in these times—and with your social record.”

“And . . . the photostats?” Kira whispered. “Where are they actually?”

“There are no photostats,” said Andrei.

A truck thundered in the street below and the window panes trembled in the silence.

Andrei’s eyes met Kira’s. Their eyes met and parted swiftly, for Leo was watching them.

It was Leo who spoke first. He rose and walked to Andrei, and stood looking down at him. Then he said: “I suppose I should thank you. Well, consider me grateful. Only I won’t say that I thank you from the bottom of my heart, because in the bottom of my heart I wish you had left me where I was.”

“Why?” Andrei asked, looking up at him.

“Do you suppose Lazarus was grateful when Christ brought him back from the grave—if He did? No more than I am to you, I think.”

Andrei looked at him steadily; Andrei’s face was stern; his words were a threat: “Pull yourself together. You have so much to live for.”

Leo shrugged and did not answer.

“You’ll have to close that store of yours. Try to get a job. Better not a very prominent one. You’ll hate it. But you’ll have to stick to it.”

“If I can.”

“You can. You have to.”

“Do I?” said Leo, and Kira saw his eyes watching Andrei closely.

She asked: “Andrei, why did you want to tell us about Syerov’s letter?” “So that you’d know in case . . . in case anything happened to me.”

“What is going to happen to you, Andrei?”

“Nothing . . . Nothing that I know of.” He added, rising: “Except that I’m going to be thrown out of the Party, I think.”

“It . . . it meant a lot to you, didn’t it . . . your Party?”

“It did.”

“And . . . and when you lose something that meant a lot to you, does it . . . make any difference?”

“No. It still means a lot to me.”

“Will you . . . hate them for it . . . for throwing you out?”

“No.”

“Will you . . . forgive them . . . some day?”

“I have nothing to forgive. Because, you see, I have a lot to be grateful for, in the past, when I belonged to—to the Party. I don’t want them to feel that they had been . . . unjust. Or that I blame them. I can never tell them that I understand. But I would like them to know it.”

“Perhaps they may be worried . . . although they have no right to question you any longer . . . about a life they may have broken . . .”

“If I could ask a favor—when they throw me out—I’d ask them not to worry about me. So that . . . in the Party annals . . . I won’t become a wound, but a bearable memory. Then, my memories will be bearable, too.”

“I think they’d grant you that . . . if they knew.”

“I’d thank them . . . if I could.”

He turned and took his cap from the table and said, buttoning his jacket: “Well, I have to go. Oh, yes, another thing: keep away from Morozov. I understand he’s leaving town, but he’ll be back and starting some new scheme. Keep away. He’ll always get out of it and leave you to take the blame.”

“Shall we . . . see you again, Andrei?” asked Kira.

“Sure. I’ll be very busy—for a while. But I’ll be around . . . Well, good night.”

“Good night, Andrei.”

“Wait a minute,” said Leo suddenly. “There’s something I want to ask you.”

He walked to Andrei, and stood, his hands in his pockets, his lips spitting the words out slowly: “Just why did you do all this? Just what is Kira to you?”

Andrei looked at Kira. She stood, silent, erect, looking at them. She was leaving it up to him. He turned to Leo and answered: “Just a friend.”

“Good night,” said Leo.

The door had closed, and the door in Lavrov’s room, and in the silence they heard the door in the lobby opening and closing behind Andrei. Then Kira tore forward suddenly. Leo could not see her face. He heard only a sound that was not a moan and not quite a cry. She ran out of the room, and the door slammed shut behind her, and the crystals of the chandelier tinkled softly.

She ran down the stairs, out into the street. It was snowing. She felt the air like a scalding jet of steam striking her bare neck. Her feet felt very light and thin in their open slippers in the snow. She saw his tall figure walking away and she ran after him, calling: “Andrei!”

He wheeled about and gasped: “Kira! In the snow without a coat!”

He seized her arm and jerked her back into the house, into the dim little lobby at the foot of the stairs.

“Go back! Immediately!” he ordered.

“Andrei . . .” she stammered. “I . . . I . . .”

In the light of a lamp post from across the street, she saw him smiling slowly, gently, and his hand brushed the wet snowflakes off her hair. “Kira, don’t you think it’s better—like this?” he whispered. “If we don’t say anything—and just leave it to . . . to our silence, knowing that we both understand, and that we still have that much in common?”

“Yes, Andrei,” she whispered.

“Don’t worry about me. You’ve promised that, you know. Go back now. You’ll catch cold.”

She raised her hand, and her fingers brushed his cheek slowly, barely touching it, from the scar on his temple to his chin, as if her trembling finger tips could tell him something she could not say. He took her hand and pressed it to his lips and held it for a long time. A car passed in the street outside; through the glass door, the sharp beam of a headlight swept over their faces, licked the wall and vanished.

He dropped her hand. She turned and walked slowly up the stairs. She heard the door opening and closing behind her. She did not look back.

When she returned to her room, Leo was telephoning. She heard him saying: “Allo, Tonia? . . . Yes, I just got out. . . . I’ll tell you all about it. . . . Sure, come right over. . . . Bring some. I haven’t got a drop in the house. . . .”

Andrei Taganov was transferred from the G.P.U. to the job of librarian in the library of the Lenin’s Nook of the Club of Women Houseworkers in the suburb Lesnoe.

The clubhouse was a former church. It had old wooden walls that let the wind through, to rustle the bright posters inside; a slanting beam of unpainted wood in the center, supporting a roof ready to cave in; a window covered with boards over the dusty remnants of a glass pane; and a cast-iron “Bourgeoise” that filled the room with smoke. There was a banner of red calico over the former altar, and pictures of Lenin on the walls, pictures without frames, cut out of magazines: Lenin as a child, Lenin as a student, Lenin addressing the Petrograd Soviet, Lenin in a cap, Lenin without a cap, Lenin in the Council of People’s Commissars, Lenin in his coffin. There were shelves of books in paper covers, a sign that read: “Proletarians of the World, Unite!” and a plaster bust of Lenin with a scar of glue across his chin.

Andrei Taganov tried to hold on.

At five o’clock, when store windows made yellow squares in the snow and the lights of tramways rolled like colored beads high over the dark streets, he left the Technological Institute and rode to Lesnoe, sitting at the window of a crowded tramway, eating a sandwich, for he had no time to eat dinner. From six to nine, he sat alone in the library of the Lenin’s Nook of the Club of Women Houseworkers, wrote card indexes, glued torn covers, added wood to the “Bourgeoise,” numbered books, dusted shelves, and said when a woman’s figure in a gray shawl waddled in, shaking snow off her heavy felt-boots:

“Good evening, comrade. . . . No, ‘The A B C of Communism’ is not in. I have your reservation, comrade. . . . Yes, this is a very good book, Comrade Samsonova, very instructive and strictly proletarian. . . . Yes, Comrade Danilova, it is recommended by the Party Council as indispensable to the political education of a conscientious worker. . . . Please, comrade, do not draw pictures on library books in the future. . . . Yes, I know, comrade, the stove isn’t very good, it always smokes this way. . . . No, we don’t carry any books on birth control. . . . Yes, Comrade Selivanova, it is advisable to get acquainted with all of Comrade Lenin’s works in order to understand our great leader’s ideology. . . . Please close the door, comrade. . . . Sorry, comrade, we have no rest-room. . . . No, we have no books by Mussolini. . . . No, we carry no love stories, Comrade Ziablova. . . . No, Comrade Ziablova, I can’t take you to the Club dance Sunday. . . . No, ‘The A B C of Communism’ is not in, comrade. . . .”

In the offices of the G.P.U. they whispered: “Let Comrade Taganov wait for the next Party purge.”

Comrade Taganov did not wait for the next Party purge.

On a Saturday evening, he stood in line at the district co-operative for his food rations. The co-operative smelled of kerosene and rotted onions. There was a barrel of sauerkraut by the counter, a sack of dried vegetables, a can of linseed oil, and bars of bluish Joukov soap. A kerosene lamp smoked on the counter. A line of customers stretched across the long, bare room. There was only one clerk; he had a sty over his left eye and he looked sleepy.

A little man stood in line ahead of Andrei. His coat collar was loose, with a greenish, greasy patch at the nape of his neck. His neck was thin and wrinkled, with an Adam’s apple like a chicken’s craw. He fingered his ration card nervously and fidgeted, peering past the line at the counter. He sniffled sonorously, for he had a cold, and scratched his Adam’s apple.

He turned and grinned amicably up at Andrei. “Party comrade?” he asked, pointing a gnarled finger at the red star on Andrei’s lapel. “Me, too, comrade. Sure, Party member. Here’s my star, too. Cold weather we’re having, comrade. Awfully cold weather. I hope the dried vegetables aren’t all gone before our turn comes, comrade. They’re wonderful for making soup Julienne. Really should have meat for it, though, but I’ll tell you a nice little trick: just let them soak overnight, then boil them in plain water, and when it’s almost ready drop in a spoonful of sunflower-seed oil, just one spoonful, and it makes such nice grease spots float on the surface, just the same as if you had meat, never tell the difference. Yes, I sure like soup Julienne. Hope they’re not all gone before our turn comes. He’s not very fast, that clerk. Only I’m not complaining. No, please, don’t think I’m complaining, comrade.”

He peered at the counter, fingered his card, counted the coupons, scratched his Adam’s apple, and whispered confidentially: “Only I hope the vegetables aren’t all gone. And another thing: I wish they would give us all the stuff in the same place. We wait for the general products here, and tomorrow two hours at the bread store, and day after-tomorrow here again for kerosene. Still, I don’t mind. Next week, they say, we’re going to get lard. That will be a holiday, won’t it? That’s something to look forward to, isn’t it?”

When Andrei’s turn came, the clerk shoved the rations at him, seized his card impatiently and growled: “What the hell’s the matter, citizen? Your coupon’s half torn off.”

“I don’t know,” said Andrei. “I must have torn it accidentally.”

“Well, I could have refused to accept it, you know. Not supposed to be half torn off. I got no time to check on all of you mugs. See that it’s right, next month.”

“Next . . . month?” said Andrei.

“Yeah, and next year, too, or else go empty-bellied. . . . Next!”

Andrei walked out of the co-operative with a pound of sauerkraut, a pound of linseed oil, a bar of soap and two pounds of dried vegetables for soup Julienne.

He walked slowly, and the streets were white with a hard, polished snow, and men’s heels cut sharp ridges, creaking. Snow sparkled like salt crystals in the white circles of lamp posts; and in the yellow cones of light at store windows, snow twinkled like splinters of powdered fire. Under a soft, glassy fuzz of frost, a poster showed a husky giant in a red blouse, raising two arms imperiously, triumphantly to the red letters:

WE ARE THE BUILDERS OF A NEW HUMANITY!

Andrei’s steps were steady, calm. Andrei Taganov was always calm when he had reached a decision.

He turned on the light, when he entered his room, and put his packages on the table. He took off his cap and jacket, and hung them on a nail in the corner. A strand of hair fell across his forehead; he brushed it back with a long, slow movement. He had left a few coals smouldering in the fireplace and the room was hot. He took off his coat and straightened the wrinkled sleeves of his shirt.

He looked around slowly. He saw some books on the floor, and picked them up, and put them neatly into a pile on the table.

He lighted a cigarette and stood in the middle of the room, his elbow pressed to his side, like a wax figure in a store window, motionless but for the slow movement of one forearm with a hand tracing an even line in the air, carrying to his lips a cigarette held in two long, straight fingers. Nothing moved in the room but that arm with a motionless hand, and the smoke rising slowly, at his lips, then at his shoulder, then at his lips again, the ashes falling to the floor.

When he felt a hot breath on his fingers and saw that the cigarette had burned, he threw the stub into the fireplace and walked to his table. He sat down and opened the drawers, one by one, and looked through their contents. He took out a few papers and gathered them into a pile on the table.

Then he rose and walked to the fireplace. He knelt and stuffed newspapers into the coals and blew at them until bright orange tongues leaped up. He threw two logs into the fire and stood, watching them until he saw white flames spurt from the creaking bark. Then he walked to the table, took the pile of papers he had selected and threw it into the fire.

Then he opened the old boxes that served as his wardrobe. There were the things he did not want to be found in his room. He took a girl’s black satin robe and threw it into the fire. He watched the cloth shriveling slowly in red, glowing, flameless patches, with long, thin columns of smoke, with a heavy, acrid odor. He watched it, his eyes quiet, astonished.

Then he threw in a pair of black satin slippers, and a little lace handkerchief, and a lace jacket with white ribbons. A sleeve of the jacket rolled out on the blackened bricks by the fireplace; he bent and, lifting it delicately, placed it back over the flames.

Then he found “The American Resident,” the little glass toy with a black imp in a red liquid. He looked at it, and hesitated, and put it cautiously down into the smouldering lace. The glass tube cracked, and the liquid sizzled on the coals with a sharp little puff of steam, and “The Resident” rolled into a crack among the coals.

Then he took out the black chiffon nightgown.

He stood at the fireplace and held the gown in both hands, and his fingers crumpled slowly, softly the light silk that felt like a handful of smoke. He held it on his two palms, and looked at his fingers through the thin black film, and moved his fingers slowly.

Then he knelt and spread it over the fire. For a second, the red coals were dimmed as under a clouded black glass; then the gown shuddered, as in a gust of wind, and a corner of the hem curled up, and a thin blue flame shot out of a fold at the neckline.

He rose and stood watching it; he watched glowing red threads running down the black cloth, and the black film twisting, as if it were breathing, curling, shrinking slowly into a smoke light as the cloth.

He stood for a long time, looking at the motionless black thing with twinkling red edges, that still had the shape of a gown, but it was not transparent any longer.

Then he touched it softly with his foot. It crumbled almost before it was touched, and little black flames fluttered up into the chimney.

He turned away and sat down at the table. He sat with one forearm resting on the table and the other on his knee, his hands hanging down, ten fingers motionless, straight, broken only by the small angles of the joints, so still that they seemed grown fast to the air. An old alarm clock ticked on a shelf. His face was grave, quiet. His eyes were gentle, astonished, wondering. . . .

Then he turned, and took a piece of paper from the drawer, and wrote: “No one is to be held responsible for my death.” And signed: “Andrei Taganov.”

There was only one shot, and because the frozen marble stairway was long and dark and led to a garden buried in deep snow, no one came up to investigate.

XV

ON THE FRONT PAGES OF THE Pravda, a square in a heavy black frame carried the words:

The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party expresses its profound grief at the death of a heroic fighter of the Revolution, former member of the Red Army, member of the Party since 1915,

COMRADE ANDREI TAGANOV

Under it, another square in a heavy black frame said:

The Leningrad Committee of the All-Union Communist Party sorrowfully announces the death of

COMRADE ANDREI TAGANOV

The funeral will take place tomorrow, on the Field of Victims of the Revolution. The procession will start from the Smolny Institute at 10 o’clock in the morning.

An editorial of the Pravda said:

Another name has been added to the glorious list of victims fallen on the field of honor of the Revolution. That name may not be known to many, but it represents and symbolizes the common ranks of our Party, the unsung heroes of our weekdays. In the person of Comrade Andrei Taganov, we pay a last tribute to the unknown warriors of the Army of the Proletariat. Comrade Taganov is dead. He committed suicide under the strain of a nervous collapse caused by overwork. His health and body were broken by the demanding, ceaseless task which his Party membership imposed upon him. Such was his sacrifice to the Revolution. Such is the sacrifice of a Party that rules, not for the sake of personal loot and fame, like the rulers of capitalistic countries, but for the sake of assuming the hardest work, the most pitiless tasks in the service of the Collective. And if, in these days of struggle and privation, some of us may weaken in spirit, let us look up to the great All-Union Communist Party that leads us, that spares not its strength, its energy, its lives. Let us make the Red funeral of a Party hero an occasion of tribute to our leaders. Let all toilers of Leningrad join in the process that will escort Comrade Taganov to his last place of rest.

In an office of the G.P.U., a man with a smile that showed his gums, said to Pavel Syerov: “Well, he gave us a good opportunity for a lot of useful noise, after all. You making the opening speech?”

“Yeah,” said Syerov.

“Don’t forget his Red Army record and all that. Well, I hope this will shut them up, those damn fools, some of those old dotards of the 1905 vintage, who showed an inclination to talk too much about his pre-October Party card and other things, the Kovalensky case among other things.”

“Forget it,” said Pavel Syerov.

The toilers of Leningrad marched behind a red coffin.

Row after row, like walls, like the rungs of an endless ladder, they moved forward, swallowing Nevsky in the slow, rumbling, growing tide of bodies and banners, thousands of feet stepping in time, as if one gigantic pair of boots made Nevsky shudder in rhythm, from the statue of Alexander III to the columns of the Admiralty. Thousands of human bodies marched gravely, flaming banners raised high in a last salute.

Soldiers of the Red Army came as khaki ramparts, row after row of straight, husky shoulders, of boots firm and steady in the snow, of peaked caps with a red star on each forehead, and over them—a red banner with gold letters:

GLORY ETERNAL TO A FALLEN COMRADE

Workers of the Putilovsky factory came in gray, unbroken ranks, moving slowly under a red banner held high in sturdy fists:

HE CAME FROM THE WORKERS’ RANKS HE GAVE HIS LIFE TO THE WORKERS OF THE WORLD. THE PROLETARIAT THANKS ITS FALLEN FIGHTER.

Students of the Technological Institute followed, rows of young, earnest faces, of grave, clear eyes, of straight, taut bodies, of boys in black caps and girls in red kerchiefs, red as the banner that said:

THE STUDENTS OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL INSTITUTE ARE PROUD OF THEIR SACRIFICE TO THE CAUSE OF THE REVOLUTION

Members of his Party Collective, rows of black leather jackets, marched gravely, austere as monks, stately as warriors, their banner spread high and straight, without a wrinkle, a narrow red band with black letters, as sharp and plain as the men who carried it:

THE ALL-UNION COMMUNIST PARTY OFFERS ALL AND EVERY ONE OF ITS LIVES TO THE SERVICE OF THE WORLD REVOLUTION

Every factory of Petrograd, every club, every office, every Union, every small, forgotten Cell rolled in a single stream, gray, black and red, through a single artery of the great city, three miles of caps and red kerchiefs and feet crunching snow and banners like red gashes in the mist. And the gray walls of Nevsky were like the sides of a huge canal where human waves played a funeral dirge on a snow hard as granite.

It was cold; a piercing, motionless cold hung over the city, heavy as a mist that cut into the walls, into the cracks of sealed windows, into the bones and skins under the heavy clothes. The sky was torn into gray layers of rags, and clouds were smeared on, like patches of ink badly blotted, with a paler ink under them, and a faded ink beneath, and then a water turbid with soap suds, under which no blue could ever have existed. Smoke rose from old chimneys, gray as the clouds, as if that smoke had spread over the city, or the clouds had belched gray coils into the chimneys and the houses were spitting them back, and the smoke made the houses seem unheated. Snowflakes fluttered down lazily, once in a while, to melt on indifferent, moving foreheads.

An open coffin was carried at the head of the procession.

The coffin was red. A banner of scarlet, regal velvet was draped over a still body; a white face lay motionless on a red pillow, a clear, sharp profile swimming slowly past the gray walls, black strands of hair scattered on the red cloth, black strands of hair hiding a dark little hole on the right temple. The face was calm. Snowflakes did not melt on the still, white forehead.

Four honorary pall-bearers, his best Party comrades, carried the coffin on their shoulders. Four bowed heads were bared to the cold. The coffin seemed very red between the blond hair of Pavel Syerov and the black curls of Victor Dunaev.

A military band followed the coffin. The big brass tubes were trimmed with bows of black crêpe. The band played “You fell as a victim.”

Many years ago, in secret cellars hidden from the eyes of the Czar’s gendarmes, on the frozen roads of Siberian prison camps, a song had been born to the memory of those who had fallen in the fight for freedom. It was sung in muffled, breathless whispers to the clanking of chains, in honor of nameless heroes. It traveled down dark sidelanes; it had no author, and no copy of it had ever been printed. The Revolution brought it into every music store window and into the roar of every band that followed a Communist to his grave. The Revolution brought the “Internationale” to its living and “You fell as a victim” to its dead. It became the official funeral dirge of the new republic.

The toilers of Leningrad sang solemnly, marching behind the open red coffin:

“You fell as a victim
In our fateful fight,
A victim of endless devotion.
You gave all you had to the people you loved,
Your honor, your life and your freedom.”

The music began with the majesty of that hopelessness which is beyond the need of hope. It mounted to an ecstatic cry, which was not joy nor sorrow, but a military salute. It fell, breaking into a pitiless tenderness, the reverent tenderness that honors a warrior without tears. It was a resonant smile of sorrow.

And feet marched in the snow, and the brass tubes thundered, and brass cymbals pounded each step into the earth, and gray ranks unrolled upon gray ranks, and scarlet banners swayed to the grandeur of the song in a solemn farewell.

“The tyrant shall fall and the people shall rise,
Sublime, almighty, unchained!
So farewell, our brother,
You’ve gallantly made
Your noble and valiant journey!”

Far beyond the rows of soldiers and students and workers, in the ranks of nameless stragglers that carried no banners, a girl walked alone, her unblinking eyes fixed ahead, even though she was too far away to see the red coffin. Her hands hung limply by her sides; above the heavy woolen mittens, her wrists were bare to the cold, frozen to a dark, purplish red. Her face had no expression; her eyes had: they seemed astonished.

Those marching around her paid no attention to her. But at the start of the demonstration, someone had noticed her. Comrade Sonia, leading a detachment of women workers from the Zhenotdel, had hurried past to take her place at the head of the procession, where she had to carry a banner; Comrade Sonia had stopped short and chuckled aloud: “Really, Comrade Argounova, you—here? I should think you’d be the one person to stay away!”

Kira Argounova had not answered.

Some women in red kerchiefs had passed by. One had pointed at her and whispered something, eagerly, furtively, to her comrades; someone had giggled.

Kira walked slowly, looking ahead. Those around her sang “You fell as a victim.” She did not sing.

A red banner said:

PROLETARIANS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

A freckled woman with strands of rusty hair under a man’s cap, whispered to her neighbor: “Mashka, did you get the buckwheat at the co-operative this week?”

“No. They giving any?”

“Yeah. Two pounds per card. Better get it before it’s all gone.”

A red banner said:

FORWARD INTO THE SOCIALISTIC FUTURE UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF LENIN’S PARTY!

A woman hissed through blackened stumps of teeth: “Oh, hell! They would choose a cold day like this to make us march in another one of their cursed parades!”

“You fell a-a-as a vic-ti-i-im
Inour fate—fullfight,
A vic-tim of e-end-less de-vo-o-otion. . . .”

“. . . stood in line for two hours yesterday, but best onions you ever hope to see. . . .”

“Dounka, don’t miss the sunflower-seed oil at the co-operative. . . .”

“If they don’t get shot by someone, they shoot themselves—just to make us walk. . . .”

“Yougave a-a-all you had fo-o-or the people you loved . . .”

A red banner said:

TIGHTEN THE BONDS OF CLASS SOLIDARITY UNDER THE STANDARD OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY!

“God! I left soup cooking on the Primus. It will boil all over the house. . . .”

“Stop scratching, comrade.”

“Your ho-nor, yourli-ife and your free-ee-ee-edom. . . .”

“Comrade, stop chewing sunflower seeds. It’s disrespectful. . . .”

“It’s like this, Praskovia: you peel the onions and add a dash of flour, just any flour you can get, and then a dash of linseed oil and . . .”

“What do they have to commit suicide about?”

A red banner said:

THE COMMUNIST PARTY SPARES NO VICTIMS IN ITS FIGHT FOR THE FREEDOM OF MANKIND

“There’s a little closet under the back stairs and some straw and no one can hear us in there. . . . My husband? The poor sap will never get wise. . . .”

“Let the millet soak for a coupla hours before cooking. . . .”

“God! It’s the seventh month, it is, and you can’t expect me to have a figure like a match stick, and here I have to walk like this. . . . Yeah, it’s my fifth one. . . .”

“Thety-rant shall fall and thepeo-ple shallrise, Sublime, al-mighty, unchai-ai-ai-ned! . . .”

“Lord Jesus Christ! I bet the newspaper’s grown fast to my skin. Ever use newspapers to keep your feet warm, comrade? Under the socks?”

“Makes your feet stink.”

“Cover your mouth when you yawn like that, comrade.”

“Damn those demonstrations! Who the hell was he, anyway?”

“Yougave a-a-all youhad fo-o-or thepeople you loved . . .”

The Field of Victims of the Revolution was a huge square in the heart of the city, on the shore of the Neva, a vast, white desert, stretching for half a mile, like a bald spot on the scalp of Petrograd. The iron lances of the Summer Garden fence stood on guard at one side of the Field, and behind them lay the white desolation of a park with bare trees that seemed made of black iron like the lances.

Before the revolution, it had been called the Field of Mars and long ranks of gray uniforms had crossed it in military drills. The revolution had erected a small square of rose granite slabs, a little island lost in the center of the Field. Under the slabs were buried the first victims fallen in the streets of Petrograd in February of 1917. The days since February of 1917 had added more granite slabs to the little island. The names carved on the granite had belonged to those whose death had been the occasion for a demonstration, whose last reward had been the honor of the title of “The Revolution’s Victim.”

Pavel Syerov mounted a block of red granite over a red coffin. His slender figure in a tight, new leather jacket and breeches and tall military boots stood sharply, proudly against the gray sky, his blond hair waved in the wind, and his arms rose solemnly, in blessing and exhortation, over a motionless sea of heads and banners.

“Comrades!” Pavel Syerov’s voice thundered over the solemn silence of thousands. “We are here, united by a common sorrow, by the common duty of paying a last tribute to a fallen hero. We have lost a great man. We have lost a great fighter. Perhaps, I may be permitted to say that I feel the loss more keenly than many who join me in honoring his death, but who knew him not while he lived. I was one of his closest friends—and it was a privilege which I must share with all of you. Andrei Taganov was not a famous man, but he bore, proudly and gallantly, one title: that of a Communist. He came from the toilers’ ranks. His childhood was spent at the proletarian work bench. He and I, we grew up together, and together we shared the long years of toil in the Putilovsky factory. We joined the Party together, long before the Revolution, in those dark days when a Party card was a ticket to Siberia or a mark for the Czar’s hangman’s noose. Side by side, Comrade Taganov and I fought in the streets of this city in the glorious days of October, 1917. Side by side, we fought in the ranks of the Red Army. And in the years of peace and reconstruction that followed our victory, the years which are harder and, perhaps, more heroic than any warfare, he did more than his share of the silent, modest, self-sacrificing work which your Party carries on for you, toilers of the U.S.S.R.! He fell as a victim to that work. But our sorrow at his death shall also be joy at his achievement. He is dead, but his work, our work, goes on. The individual may fall, but the Collective lives forever. Under the guidance of the Soviets, under the leadership of the great All-Union Communist Party, we are marching into a radiant tomorrow when the honest toil of free toilers will rule the world! Then labor will no longer be slavery, as it is in capitalistic countries, but a free and happy duty to that which is greater than our petty concerns, greater than our petty sorrows, greater than our very lives—the eternal Collective of a Proletarian Society! Our glorious dead shall be remembered forever, but we are marching on. Andrei Taganov is dead, but we remain. Life and victory are ours. Ours is the future!”

The applause rolled like a dull thunder to the houses of the city far away, to the snow of the Summer Garden, and red banners waved in the roar of clapping hands, rising to the gray sky. When the hands dropped and the heads turned their eyes to the red granite slab, Comrade Syerov was gone—and against the gray sky stood the trim, proud, resolute figure of Victor Dunaev, black curls waving in the wind, eyes sparkling, mouth open wide over lustrous white teeth, throwing into the silence the clear, ringing notes of a young, powerful voice:

“Comrade workers! Thousands of us are gathered here to honor one man. But one man means nothing in the face of the mighty Proletarian Collective, no matter how worthy his achievements. We would not be here, if that man were not more than a single individual, if he were not a symbol of something greater, which we are gathered here to honor. This is not a funeral, comrades, but a birthday party! We are not celebrating the death of a comrade, but the birth of a new humanity. Of that new humanity, he was one of the first, but not the last. The Soviets, comrades, are creating a new race of men. That new race terrifies the old world, for it brings death to all its outworn standards. What, then, are the standards of our new humanity? The first and basic one is that we have lost a word from our language, the most dangerous, the most insidious, the most evil of human words: the word ‘I.’ We have outgrown it. ‘We’ is the slogan of the future. The Collective stands in our hearts where the old monster—‘self ’—had stood. We have risen beyond the worship of the pocketbook, of personal power and personal vanity. We do not long for gold coins and gold medals. Our only badge of honor is the honor of serving the Collective. Our only aim is the honest toil which profits not one, but all. What is the lesson we are to learn here today and to teach our enemies beyond the borders? The lesson of a Party comrade dying for the Collective. The lesson of a Party that rules but to sacrifice itself to those it rules. Look at the world around you, comrades! Look at the fat, slobbering ministers of the capitalistic countries, who fight and stab one another in the back in their bloody scramble for power! Then look at those who rule you, who consecrate their lives to the unselfish service of the Collective, who carry the tremendous responsibility of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat! If you do, you will understand me when I say that the All-Union Communistic Party is the only honest, fearless, idealistic body of men in the politics of the world today!”

The applause thundered as if the old cannons of the Peter-Paul Fortress across the river had been fired all at once. And it thundered again when Victor’s black curls disappeared in the crowd, and the straight, stubby mane of Comrade Sonia waved high in the air, while she roared with all the power of her broad chest about the new duties of the new woman of the Proletariat. Then another face rose over the crowd, a thin, consumptive, unshaved face that wore glasses and opened a pale mouth wide, coughing words which no one could hear. Then another mouth spoke, and it could be heard far beyond the crowd, a mouth that bellowed sonorously through a thick, black beard. A freckled boy from the Communist Union of Youth spoke, stuttering, scratching his head. A tall spinster in a crumpled, old-fashioned hat spoke ferociously, opening her small mouth as if she were at the dentist’s, shaking her thin finger at the crowd as at a school-room of disobedient pupils. A tall sailor spoke, his fists on his hips, and those in the back rows laughed occasionally when they heard the front rows laughing, even though the words did not reach them.

Thousands stood, fidgeting nervously, knocking their heels together to keep them warm, burying their hands in their armpits, in their sleeves, in their fur lapels, breathing little wet icicles on the old scarfs high under their noses. They took turns in holding the red banners, and those who held them pressed the poles tightly to their sides with their elbows, blowing on their frozen fingers. A few sneaked away, hurrying furtively down side streets.

Kira Argounova stood without moving and listened attentively. She listened to every word. Her eyes held a question she hoped the world could answer.

Over the vast field, the sky was turning a dark, dirty, grayish blue, and in a window far away the first little yellow spark of light twinkled, greeting the early winter dusk. The voice of the last speaker had died, smothered in the thick mist of frost which one could not see, but felt flowing down heavily from the darkness above. The red coffin had been closed and had disappeared in the earth, and the grave had been filled, and a slab of red granite had risen over it. And suddenly the gray sea had shuddered, and the ranks were broken, and dark streams of men rolled swiftly into side streets, as if a dam had burst open. And far away, dying in the frozen twilight, the military band struck up the “Internationale,” the song of the living, like the marching of thousands of feet, measured and steady, like soldiers’ feet drumming a song upon the earth.

Then Kira Argounova walked slowly toward the new grave.

The Field was empty. The sky was descending, locking a frozen blue vault over the city. Through a crack in the vault, a single steely dot twinkled feebly. The houses far away were not houses any longer but flat, broken shadows of thin black paper pasted in a narrow strip against a brownish glow that had been red. Little lights trembled in little holes pierced through the paper. The Field was not in a city. The empty, quiet silence of a countryside hung over a white desert where whirls of snow rose in the wind, melting into thin white powder.

A lonely little figure stood over a granite tombstone.

Snowflakes fluttered lazily down on her bowed head, on the lashes of her eyes. Her lashes glistened with snowflakes, but without tears. She looked at the words cut into the red granite:

GLORY ETERNAL TO THE VICTIMS OF THE REVOLUTION
ANDREI TAGANOV
1896-1925

She wondered whether she had killed him, or the revolution had, or both.

XVI

LEO SAT ALONE BY THE FIREPLACE, SMOKING. A cigarette hung limply in his hand, then slipped out of his fingers; he did not notice it. He took another cigarette and held it unlighted for a long time, not noticing it. Then he glanced around for a match, and could not find it, even though the box lay on the arm of his chair. Then he picked up the match box and stared at it, puzzled, for he had forgotten what he wanted.

He had spoken little in the past two weeks. He had kissed Kira violently, once in a while, too violently, and she had felt his effort, and she had avoided his lips and his arms.

He had left home often and she had never asked him where he went. He had been drinking too often and too much, and she had not said whether she noticed it. When they had been alone together, they had sat silently, and the silence had spoken to her, louder than any words, of something which was an end. He had been spending the last of their money and she had not questioned him about the future. She had not questioned him about anything, for she had been afraid of the answer she knew: that her fight was lost.

When Kira came home from the funeral, Leo did not rise to his feet, but sat by the fireplace, not moving. He looked at her with a slow, curious, heavy glance between heavy eyelids.

Silently, she took off her coat and hung it in her wardrobe. She was taking off her hat when a sound made her turn: Leo was laughing; it was a hard, bitter, brutal laughter.

She looked at him, her eyes wide: “Leo, what’s the matter?”

He asked her fiercely: “Don’t you know?”

She shook her head.

“Well, then,” he asked, “do you want to know how much I know?”

“How much . . . you know . . . about what, Leo?”

“I don’t suppose this is a good time to tell you, is it? Right after your lover’s funeral?”

“My . . .”

He rose and approached her, and stood, his hands in his pockets, looking down at her with the arrogantly contemptuous look she worshipped, with the scornful, drooping smile; but his arched lips moved slowly to form three words: “You little bitch!”

She stood straight, without moving, her face white. “Leo . . .”

“Shut up! I don’t want to hear a sound out of you! You rotten little . . . I wouldn’t mind it, if you were like the rest of us! But you, with your saintly airs, with your heroic speeches, trying to make me walk straight, while you were . . . you were rolling under the first Communist bum who took the trouble to push you!”

“Leo, who . . .”

“Shut up! . . . No! I’ll give you a chance to speak. I’ll give you a chance to answer just one word. Were you Taganov’s mistress? Were you? Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“All the time I was away?”

“Yes.”

“And all the time since I came back?”

“Yes. What else did they tell you, Leo?”

“What else did you want them to tell me?”

“Nothing.”

He looked at her; his eyes were suddenly cold, clear, weary.

“Who told you, Leo?”

“A friend of yours. Of his. Our dear comrade, Pavel Syerov. He dropped in on his way back from the funeral. He just wanted to congratulate me on the loss of my rival.”

“Was it . . . was it a hard blow to you, Leo?”

“It was the best piece of news I’d heard since the revolution. We shook hands and had a drink together, Comrade Syerov and I. Drank to you and your lover, and any other lovers you may have. Because, you see, that sets me free.”

“Free . . . from what, Leo?”

“From a little fool who was my last hold on self-esteem! A little fool I was afraid to face, afraid to hurt! Really, you know, it’s funny. You and your Communist hero. I thought he had lied, making a great sacrifice by saving me for you. And he was just tired of you, he probably wanted to get you off his hands, for some other whore. So much for the sublime in the human race.”

“Leo, we don’t have to discuss him, do we?”

“Still love him?”

“That doesn’t make any difference to you—now—does it?”

“None. None whatever. I won’t even ask whether you had ever loved me. That, too, doesn’t make any difference. I’d rather think you hadn’t. That will make it easier for the future.”

“The future, Leo?”

“Well, what did you plan it to be?”

“I . . .”

“Oh, I know! Get a respectable Soviet job and rot over a Primus and a ration card, and keep holy something in your fool imagination—your spirit or soul or honor—something that never existed, that shouldn’t exist, that is the worst of all curses if it ever did exist! Well, I’m through with it. If it’s murder—well—I don’t see any blood. But I’m going to have champagne, and white bread, and silk shirts, and limousines, and no thoughts of any kind, and long live the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!”

“Leo . . . what . . . are you going to do?”

“I’m going away.”

“Where?”

“Sit down.”

He sat down at the table. His one hand lay in the circle of light under the lamp, and she noticed how still and white it was, with a net of blue veins that did not seem alive. She stood, watching it, until one finger moved. Then she sat down. Her face was expressionless. Her eyes were a little wide. He noticed her lashes—little needles of shadow on her cheeks—and the lashes were dry.

“Citizen Morozov,” said Leo, “has left town.”

“Well?”

“He’s left Tonia—he wants no connections that could be investigated. But he’s left her a nice little sum of money—oh, quite nice. She’s going for a rest and vacation in the Caucasus. She has asked me to go with her. I’ve accepted the job. Leo Kovalensky, the great gigolo of the U.S.S.R.!”

“Leo!”

She stood before him—and he saw terror in her eyes, such naked, raw terror that he opened his mouth, but could not laugh.

“Leo . . . not that!”

“She’s an old bitch. I know. I like it better that way. She has the money and she wants me. Just a business deal.”

“Leo . . . you . . . like a . . .”

“Don’t bother about the names. You can’t think of any as good as the ones I’ve thought of myself.”

He noticed that the folds of her dress were shivering and that her hands were flung back unnaturally, as if leaning on space, and he asked, rising: “You’re not going to be fool enough to faint, are you?”

She said, drawing her shoulders together: “No, of course not. . . . Sit down. . . . I’m all right. . . .”

She sat on the edge of the table, her hands clutching it tightly, and she looked at him. His eyes were dead and she turned away, for she felt that those eyes should be closed. She whispered: “Leo . . . if you had been killed in the G.P.U. . . . or if you had sold yourself to some magnificent woman, a foreigner, young and fresh and . . .”

“I wouldn’t sell myself to a magnificent woman, young and fresh. I couldn’t. Not yet. In a year—I probably will.”

He rose and looked at her and laughed softly, indifferently: “Really, you know, don’t you think it’s not for you to express any depths of moral indignation? And since we both are what we are, would you mind telling me just why you kept me on while you had him? Just liked to sleep with me, like all the other females? Or was it my money and his position?”

Then she rose, and stood very straight, very still, and asked: “Leo, when did you tell her that you’d go with her?”

“Three days ago.”

“Before you knew anything about Andrei and me?”

“Yes.”

“While you still thought that I loved you?”

“Yes.”

“And that made no difference to you?”

“No.”

“If Syerov had not come here today, you’d still go with her?”

“Yes. Only then I’d have to face the problem of telling you. He spared me that. That’s why I was glad to hear it. Now we can say good-bye without any unnecessary scenes.”

“Leo . . . please listen carefully . . . it’s very important . . . please do me a last favor and answer this one question honestly, to the best of your knowledge: if you were to learn suddenly—it doesn’t matter how—but if you were to learn that I love you, that I’ve always loved you, that I’ve been loyal to you all these years—would you still go with her?”

“Yes.”

“And . . . if you had to stay with me? If you learned something that . . . that bound you to stay and . . . and to struggle on—would you try it once more?”

“If I were bound to—well, who knows? I might do what your other lover did. That’s also a solution.”

“I see.”

“And why do you ask that? What is there to bind me?”

She looked straight at him, her face raised to his, and her hair fell back off a very white forehead, and only her lips moved as she answered with the greatest calm of her life: “Nothing, Leo.”

He sat down again and clasped his hands and stretched them out, shrugging: “Well, that’s that. Really, I still think you’re wonderful. I was afraid of hysterics and a lot of noise. It’s ended as it should have ended. . . . I’m leaving in three days. Until then—I can move out of here, if you want me to.”

“No. I’d rather go. Tonight.”

“Why tonight?”

“I’d rather. I can share Lydia’s room, for a while.”

“I haven’t much money left, but what there is, I want you to . . .”

“No.”

“But . . .”

“Please, don’t. I’ll take my clothes. That’s all I need.”

She was packing a suitcase, her back turned to him, when he asked suddenly: “Aren’t you going to say anything? Have you nothing to say?”

She turned and looked at him calmly, and answered: “Only this, Leo: it was I against a hundred and fifty million people. I lost.”

When she was ready to go, he rose and asked suddenly, involuntarily: “Kira . . . you loved me, once, didn’t you?”

She answered: “When a person dies, one does not stop loving him, does one?”

“Do you mean Taganov or . . . me?”

“Does it make any difference, Leo?”

“No. May I help you to carry the suitcase downstairs?”

“No, thank you. It’s not heavy. Good-bye, Leo.”

He took her hand, and his face moved toward hers, but she shook her head, and he said only: “Good-bye, Kira.”

She walked out into the street, leaning slightly to her left, her right arm pulled down by the weight of the suitcase. A frozen fog hung like cotton over the street, and a lamp post made a sickly, yellow blot spilled in the fog. She straightened her shoulders and walked slowly, and the white earth cracked under her feet, and the line of her chin was parallel with the earth, and the line of her glance parallel with her chin.

To her family, three silent, startled faces, Kira explained quietly and Galina Petrovna gasped: “But what happened to . . .”

“Nothing. We’re just tired of each other.”

“My poor, dear child! I . . .”

“Please don’t worry about me, Mother. If you’ll forgive me the inconvenience, Lydia, it will be only for a little while. I couldn’t have found another room for just a few weeks.”

“Why certainly! Why, I’ll be only too glad to have you, Kira, after all you’ve done for us. But why for a few weeks? Where are you going after that?”

She answered and her voice had the intensity of a maniac’s:

“Abroad.”

On the following morning, Citizen Kira Argounova filed an application for a foreign passport. She had several weeks to wait for an answer.

Galina Petrovna moaned: “It’s insanity, Kira! Sheer insanity! In the first place, they won’t give it to you. You have no reasons to show why you want to go abroad, and with your father’s social past and all. . . . And even if you do get the passport—then what? No foreign country will admit a Russian and I can’t say that I blame them. And if they admit you—what are you going to do? Have you thought of that?”

“No,” said Kira.

“You have no money. You have no profession. How are you going to live?”

“I don’t know.”

“What will happen to you?”

“I don’t care.”

“But why are you doing it?”

“I want to get out.”

“But you’ll be all alone, lost in a wide world, with not a . . .”

“I want to get out.”

“. . . with not a single friend to help you, with no aim, no future, no . . .”

“I want to get out.”

On the evening of his departure, Leo came to say good-bye. Lydia left them alone in her room.

Leo said: “I couldn’t go, Kira, after parting as we did. I wanted to say good-bye and . . . Unless you’d rather . . .”

She said: “No. I’m glad you came.”

“I wanted to apologize for some of the things I said to you. I had no right to say them. It’s not up to me to blame you. Will you forgive me?”

“It’s all right, Leo. I have nothing to forgive.”

“I wanted to tell you that . . . that . . . Well, no, there’s nothing to tell you. Only that . . . we have a great deal to . . . remember, haven’t we?”

“Yes, Leo.”

“You’ll be better off without me.”

“Don’t worry about me, Leo.”

“I’ll be back in Petrograd. We’ll meet again. We’ll meet when years have passed, and years make such a difference, don’t they?”

“Yes, Leo.”

“Then we won’t have to be so serious any more. It will be strange to look back, won’t it? We’ll meet again, Kira. I’ll be back.”

“If you’re still alive—and if you don’t forget.”

It was as if she had kicked a dead animal in the road and saw it jerking in a last convulsion. He whispered: “Kira . . . don’t . . .”

But she knew it was only a last convulsion and she said: “I won’t.”

He kissed her and her lips were soft and tender and yielding to his. Then he went.

She had several weeks to wait.

In the evenings, Alexander Dimitrievitch came home from work and shook snow off his galoshes in the lobby, and wiped them carefully with a special rag, for the galoshes were new and expensive.

After dinner, when he had no meeting to attend, he sat in a corner with an unpainted wooden screen frame and worked patiently, pasting match box labels on the frame. He collected the labels and guarded them jealously in a locked box. At night, he spread them cautiously on the table, and moved them slowly into patterns, trying out color combinations. He had a whole panel completed, and he muttered, squinting at it appraisingly: “It’s a beauty. A beauty. I bet no one in Petrograd has anything like it. What do you think, Kira, shall I use two yellow ones and a green one in this corner, or just three yellows?”

She answered quietly: “The green one will be nice, Father.”

Galina Petrovna thundered in, at night, and flung a heavy brief case on a chair in the lobby. She had had a telephone installed, and she tore the receiver off the hook and spoke hurriedly, still removing her gloves, unbuttoning her coat: “Comrade Fedorov? . . . Comrade Argounova speaking. I have an idea for that number in the Living Newspaper, for our next Club show. . . . Now when we present Lord Chamberlain crushing the British Proletariat, we’ll have one of the pupils, a good husky one, wearing a red blouse, lie down on the floor and we’ll put a table on him—oh, just the front legs—and we’ll have the fat one, playing Lord Chamberlain, in a high silk hat, sit at the table and eat steak. . . . Oh, it doesn’t have to be a real steak, just papier-mâché. . . .”

Galina Petrovna ate her dinner hurriedly, reading the evening paper. She jumped up, looking at the clock, before she had finished, dabbed a smear of powder on her nose and, seizing her brief case, rushed out again to a Council meeting. On the rare evenings when she stayed at home, she spread books and newspaper clippings over the dining-room table, and sat writing a thesis for her Marxist Club. She asked, raising her head, blinking absent-mindedly: “Kira, do you happen to know, the Paris Commune, what year was that?”

“Eighteen seventy-one, Mother,” Kira answered quietly.

Lydia worked at night. In the daytime, she practiced the “Internationale” and “You fell as a victim” and the Red Cavalry song on her old grand piano that had not been tuned for over a year. When she was asked to play the old classics she loved, she refused flatly, her mouth set in a thin, foolish, stubborn line. But once in a while, she sat down at the piano suddenly and played for hours, fiercely, violently, without stopping between pieces; she played Chopin and Bach and Tchaikovsky, and when her fingers were numb she cried, sobbing aloud in broken hiccoughs, senselessly, monotonously, like a child. Galina Petrovna paid no attention to it, saying: “Just another one of Lydia’s fits.”

Kira was lying on her mattress on the floor, when Lydia came home from work. Lydia took a long time to undress and a longer time to whisper endless prayers before the ikons in her corner. Some evenings, she came over to Kira and sat down on the mattress, and shivering in the darkness, in her long white nightgown, her hair falling in a thick braid down her back, whispered confidentially, a ray of the street lamp beyond the window falling on her tired face with swollen eyes and dry little wrinkles in the corners of the mouth, on her dry, knotty hands that did not look young any longer: “I had a vision again, Kira, a call from above. Truly, a prophetic vision, and the voice told me that salvation shall not be long in coming. It is the end of the world and the reign of the Anti-Christ. But Judgment Day is approaching. I know. It has been revealed to me.”

She whispered feverishly, she expected nothing but a peal of laughter from her sister, she was not looking at Kira, she was not certain whether Kira heard it; but she had to talk and she had to think that some human ears were listening.

“There is an old man, Kira, God’s wanderer. I’ve been to see him. Please don’t mention this to anyone, or they’ll fire me from the Club. He is the Chosen One of the Lord and he knows. He says it has been predicted in the Scriptures. We are punished for our sins, as Sodom and Gomorrah were punished. But hardships and sorrows are only a trial for the soul of the righteous. Only through suffering and long-bearing patience shall we become worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Kira said quietly: “I won’t tell anyone, Lydia. And now you’d better go to bed, because you’re tired and it’s so cold here.”

In the daytime, Kira led excursions through the Museum of the Revolution. In the evening, she sat in the dining room and read old books. She spoke seldom. When anyone addressed her, she answered evenly, quietly. Her voice seemed frozen on a single note. Galina Petrovna wished, uncomfortably, to see her angry, at least once; she did not see it. One evening, when Lydia dropped a vase in the silence of the dining room, and it broke with a crash, and Galina Petrovna jumped up with a startled little scream, and Alexander Dimitrievitch shuddered, blinking—Kira raised her head slowly, as if nothing had happened.

But there was a flicker of life in her eyes when, on her way home from the Excursion Center, she stopped at the window of a foreign book store on Liteiny, and stood looking thoughtfully at the bright covers with gay, broken, foreign letters, with chorus girls kicking long, glistening legs, with columns and searchlights and long, black automobiles. There was a jerk of life in her fingers when, every evening, as methodically as a bookkeeper, with a dull little stub of a pencil, she crossed another date off an old calendar on the wall over her mattress.

The foreign passport was refused.

Kira received the news with a quiet indifference that frightened Galina Petrovna, who would have preferred a stormy outbreak.

“Listen, Kira,” said Galina Petrovna vehemently, slamming the door of her room to be left alone with her daughter, “let’s talk sense. If you have any insane ideas of . . . of . . . Now, I want you to know that I won’t permit it. After all, you’re my daughter, I have some say in the matter. You know what it means, if you attempt . . . if you even dare to think of leaving the country illegally.”

“I’ve never mentioned that,” said Kira.

“No, you haven’t. But I know you. I know what you’re thinking. I know how far your foolish recklessness can . . . Listen, it’s a hundred to one that you don’t get out. And you’ll be lucky if you’re just shot at the border. It will be worse if you’re caught and brought back. And if you’re lucky enough to draw the one chance and slip out, it’s a hundred to one that you’ll die in a blizzard in those forests around the border.”

“Mother, why discuss it?”

“Listen, I’ll keep you here if I have to chain you. After all, one can be allowed to be crazy just so far. What are you after? What’s wrong with this country? We don’t have any luxuries, that’s true, but you won’t get any over there, either. A chambermaid is all you can hope to be, there, if you’re lucky. This is the country for young people. I know your crazy stubbornness, but you’ll get over it. Look at me. I’ve adapted myself, at my age, and, really, I can’t say that I’m unhappy. You’re only a pup and you can’t make decisions to ruin your whole life before you’ve even started it. You’ll outgrow your foolish notions. There is a chance for everyone in this new country of ours.”

“Mother, I’m not arguing, am I? So let’s drop the subject.”

Kira returned home later than usual from her excursions. There were people she had to see in dark side streets, slipping furtively up dark stairs through unlighted doorways. There were bills to be slipped into stealthy hands and whispers to be heard from lips close to her ear. It would cost more than she could ever save to be smuggled out on a boat, she learned, and it would be more dangerous. She had a better chance if she tried it alone, on foot, across the Latvian border. She would need white clothes. People had done it, dressed all in white, crawling through the snow in the winter darkness. She sold her watch and paid for the name of the station and the village, and for a square inch of tissue paper with the map of the place where a crossing was possible. She sold the fur coat Leo had given her and paid for a forged permit to travel.

She sold her cigarette lighter, her silk stockings, her French perfume. She sold all her new shoes and her dresses. Vava Milovskaia came to buy the dresses. Vava waddled in, shuffling heavily in worn-out felt boots. Vava’s dress had a greasy patch across the chest, and her matted hair looked uncombed. Her face was puffed, a coarse white powder had dried in patches on her nose, and her eyes were encircled in heavy blue bags. When she took off her clothes, slowly, awkwardly, to try on the dresses, Lydia noticed the swelling at her once slender waistline.

“Vava, darling! What, already?” Lydia gasped.

“Yes,” said Vava indifferently, “I’m going to have a baby.”

“Oh, darling! Oh, congratulations!” Lydia clasped her hands.

“Yes,” said Vava, “I’m going to have a baby. I have to be careful about eating and I take a walk every day. When it’s born, we’re going to register it with the Pioneers.”

“Oh, no, Vava!”

“Oh, why not? Why not? It has to have a chance, doesn’t it? It has to go to school, and to the University, maybe. What do you want me to do? Bring it up as an outcast? . . . Oh, what’s the difference? Who knows who’s right? . . . I don’t know any more. I don’t care.”

“But, Vava, your child!”

“Lydia, what’s the use? . . . I’ll get a job after it’s born, I’ll have to. Kolya is working. It will be the child of Soviet employees. Then, later, maybe they’ll admit it into the Communist Union of Youth. . . . Kira, that black velvet dress—it’s so lovely. It looks almost . . . almost foreign. I know it’s too tight for me now . . . but afterwards . . . maybe I’ll get my figure back. They say you do. . . . Of course, you know, Kolya isn’t making very much, and I don’t want to take anything from Father, and . . . But Father gave me a present for my birthday, fifty rubles, and I think I should . . . I could never buy anything like it anywhere.”

She bought the velvet dress and two others.

To Galina Petrovna, Kira had explained: “I don’t need those dresses. I don’t go anywhere. And I don’t like to keep them.”

“Memories?” Galina Petrovna had asked.

“Yes,” Kira had said. “Memories.”

She did not have much money after everything was sold. She knew that she would need every ruble. She could not buy a white coat. But she had the white bear rug that she had bought from Vasili Ivanovitch long ago. She took it secretly to a tailor and ordered it made into a coat. The coat came out as a short jacket that did not reach down to her knees. She would need a white dress. She could not buy one. But she still had Galina Petrovna’s white lace wedding gown. When she was alone at home, she took her old felt boots into the kitchen and painted them white with lime. She bought a pair of white mittens and a white woolen scarf. She bought a ticket to a town far out of the way, far from the Latvian border.

When everything was ready, she sewed her little roll of money into the lining of the white fur jacket. She would need it there—if she crossed the border.

On a gray winter afternoon, she left the house when no one was at home. She did not say good-bye. She left no letter. She walked down the stairs and out into the street as if she were going to the corner store. She wore an old coat with a matted fur collar. She carried a small suitcase. The suitcase contained a white fur jacket, a wedding gown, a pair of boots, a pair of mittens, a scarf.

She walked to the station. A brownish mist hung over the roof tops, and men walked, bent to the wind, huddled, their hands in their armpits. A white frost glazed the posters, and the bronze cupolas of churches were dimmed in a silvery gray. The wind whirled little coils in the snow, and kerosene lamps stood in store windows, melting streaks on the frozen white panes.

“Kira,” a voice called softly on a corner.

She turned. It was Vasili Ivanovitch. He stood under a lamp post, hunched, the collar of his old coat raised to his red ears, an old scarf twisted around his neck, two leather straps slung over his shoulders, holding a tray of saccharine tubes.

“Good evening, Uncle Vasili.”

“Where are you going, Kira, with that suitcase?”

“How have you been, Uncle Vasili?”

“I’m all right, child. It may seem a strange business to find me in, I know, but it’s all right. Really, it’s not as bad as it looks. I don’t mind it at all. Why don’t you come to see us, sometimes, Kira?”

“I . . .”

“It’s not a grand place, ours, and there’s another family in the same room, but we’re getting along. Acia will be glad to see you. We don’t have many visitors. Acia is a nice child.”

“Yes, Uncle Vasili.”

“It’s such a joy to watch her growing, day by day. She’s getting better at school, too. I help her with her lessons. I don’t mind standing here all day, because then I go home, and there she is. Everything isn’t lost, yet. I still have Acia’s future before me. Acia is a bright child. She’ll go far.”

“Yes, Uncle Vasili.”

“I read the papers, too, when I have time. There’s a lot going on in the world. One can wait, if one has faith and patience.”

“Uncle Vasili . . . I’ll tell them . . . over there . . . where I’m going . . . I’ll tell them about everything . . . it’s like an S.O.S. . . . And maybe . . . someone . . . somewhere . . . will understand. . . .”

“Child, where are you going?”

“Will you sell me a tube of saccharine, Uncle Vasili?”

“Why, no, I won’t sell it to you. Take it, child, if you need it.”

“Certainly not. I was going to buy it anyway from someone else,” she lied. “Don’t you want me for a customer? It may bring you luck.”

“All right, child.”

“I’ll take this nice big one with the big crystals. Here you are.”

She slipped the coin into his hand and the tube of saccharine into her pocket.

“Well, good-bye, Uncle Vasili.”

“Good-bye, Kira.”

She walked away without looking back. She walked through the dusk, through gray and white streets, under grayish banners bending down from old walls, grayish banners that had been red. She walked through a wide square where the tramway lights twinkled, springing out of the mist. She walked up the frozen steps of the station, without looking back.

XVII

THE TRAIN WHEELS KNOCKED AS if an iron chain were jerked twice, then rumbled dully, clicking, then gave two sharp broken jerks again. The wheels tapped like an iron clock ticking swiftly, knocking off seconds and minutes and miles.

Kira Argounova sat on a wooden bench by the window. She had her suitcase on her lap and held it with both hands, her fingers spread wide apart. Her head leaned back against the wooden seat and trembled in a thin little shudder, like the dusty glass pane. Her lids drooped heavily over her eyes fixed on the window. She did not close her eyes. She sat for hours without moving, and her muscles did not feel the immobility, or she did not feel her muscles any longer.

Beyond the window, nothing moved in the endless stretches of snow but black smears of telegraph poles, as if the train were suspended, stationary, between two slices of white and gray, and the wheels shrieked as if grating in a void. Once in a while, a white blot on a white desert, a blot with black edges shaped as fir branches, sprang up suddenly beyond the window and whirled like lightning across the pane.

When she remembered that she had not eaten for a long time, dimly uncertain whether it was hours or days, dimly conscious that she had to eat, even though she had forgotten hunger, she broke a chunk off a stale loaf of bread, which she had bought at the station, and chewed it slowly, with effort, her jaws moving monotonously, like a machine.

Around her, men left the car, when the train stopped at stations, and came back with steaming tea kettles. Once, someone put a cup into her hands, and she drank, the hot tin edge pressed to her lips.

Telegraph wires raced the train, crossing and parting and crossing again, thin black threads flying faster, faster than the shuddering car could follow.

In the daytime, the sky seemed lighter than the earth, a pale stretch of translucent gray over a heavy white. At night, the earth seemed lighter than the sky, a pale blue band under a black void.

She slept, sitting in her corner, her head on her arms, her arms on her suitcase. She tied the suitcase handle to her wrists, with a piece of string, at night. There were many moans around her about stolen luggage. She slept, her consciousness frozen on a single thought—of her suitcase. She awakened with a jolt whenever the motion of the car made the suitcase slip a little.

She had no thoughts left. She felt empty, clear and quiet, as if her body were only an image of her will, and her will—only an arrow, tense and hard, pointing at a border that had to be crossed. The only living thing she felt was the suitcase on her lap. Her will was knocking with the wheels of the train. Her heart beat there, under the floor.

She noticed dimly, once, on the bench before her, a woman pressed a cold white breast into a child’s lips. There still were people and there still were lives. She was not dead. She was only waiting to be born.

At night, she sat for hours, staring at the window. She could see nothing but the dim reflection of the candle-glow and benches and boarded walls shuddering in space, and the tousled shadow of her own head. There was no earth, no world beyond the window. Only far down, by the track, yellow squares of snow raced the train in the glow of the windows, and black clots whirled past as long, thin streaks. Once in a while, a spark of light pierced the darkness, somewhere far away, at the edge of the sky, and brought suddenly into existence a blue waste of snow beyond the glass. The light died and the earth went with it, leaving nothing in the window but the boarded walls and the candle and the tousled head.

There were stations where she had to get out, and stand at a ticket window on a windswept platform, and buy a new ticket, and wait for another train to come rushing through the dusk, a black engine spewing showers of red sparks.

Then there were wheels again, knocking under the floor, and another station, and another ticket, and another train. There were many days and nights, but she did not notice them. The men in khaki peaked caps, who examined the tickets, could not know that the girl in the old coat with the matted fur collar was going toward the Latvian border.

The last station, where she did not buy another ticket, was a dark little platform of rotted wooden planks, the last stop before the train’s terminal, before the border town.

It was getting dark. Brown wheel-tracks in the snow led far away into a glowing red patch. A few sleepy soldiers on the platform paid no attention to her. A large wicker hamper rattled as husky fists lowered it to the ground from a baggage car. At the station door, someone begged loudly for hot water. Lights twinkled in the car windows.

She walked away, clutching her suitcase, following the wheel tracks in the snow.

She walked, a slender black figure, leaning faintly backward, alone in a vast field rusty in the sunset.

It was dark when she saw the village houses ahead and yellow dots of candles in windows low over the ground. She knocked at a door. A man opened it; his hair and beard were a bushy blond tangle from which two bright eyes peered inquisitively. She slipped a bill into his hand and tried to explain as fast as she could, in a choked whisper. She did not have to explain much. Those in the house knew and understood.

Behind a low wooden partition, her feet in the straw where two pigs slept huddled together, she changed her clothes, while those in the room sat around a table, as if she were not present, five blond heads, one of them in a blue kerchief. Wooden spoons knocked in the wooden bowls on the table, and the sound of another spoon came from the shelf of a brick stove in the corner, where a gray head bent, sighing, over a wooden bowl. A candle stood on the table, and three little red tongues flickered before a bronze triangle of ikons in a corner, little glimmers of red in the bronze halos.

She put on the white boots and took off her dress; her naked arms shuddered a little, even though the room was hot and stuffy. She put on the white wedding gown, and its long train rustled in the straw, and a pig opened one slit of an eye. She lifted the train and pinned it carefully to her waistline, with big safety-pins. She wound the white scarf tightly about her hair, and put on the white fur jacket. She felt cautiously the little lump in the lining over her left breast, where she had sewn the bills; it was the last and only weapon she would need.

When she approached the table, the blond giant said, his voice expressionless: “Better wait for an hour or so, till the moon sets. The clouds ain’t so steady.”

He moved, making room for her on the bench, pointing to it silently, imperatively. She raised the lace dress, stepped over the bench and sat down. She took off the jacket and held it over her arm, pressed tightly to her body. Two pairs of feminine eyes stared at her high lace collar, and the girl in the blue kerchief whispered something to the older woman, her eyes awed, incredulous.

Silently, the man put a steaming wooden bowl before the guest.

“No, thank you,” she said. “I’m not hungry.”

“Eat,” he ordered. “You’ll need it.”

She ate obediently a thick cabbage soup that smelled of hot lard.

The man said suddenly in the silence, without looking at her: “It’s pretty near a whole night’s walk.”

She nodded.

“Pretty young,” said the woman across the table, shaking her head, and sighed.

When she was ready to go, the man opened the door to a cold wind whining over an empty darkness, and muttered in his blond beard: “Walk as long as you can. When you see a guard—crawl.”

“Thank you,” she said, as the door closed.

Snow rose to her knees, and each step was like a fall forward, and she held her skirt high, clutched in her fist. Around her, a blue that did not seem blue, a color that was no color, that had never existed in the world she had known, stretched without end, and sometimes she thought she was standing alone, very tall, very high over a flat circle, and sometimes she thought the bluish whiteness was a huge wall closing in over her head.

The sky hung low, in grayish patches, and black patches, and streaks of a blue that one could never remember in the daytime; and blots of something which was not a color and not quite a light ray, flowed from nowhere, trickling once in a while among the clouds, and she bent her head not to see it.

There were no lights ahead; she knew that the lights behind her had long since vanished, even though she did not look back. She carried nothing: she had left her suitcase and her old clothes in the village; she would need nothing—there—ahead—but the little roll in the lining of her jacket, and she touched it cautiously once in a while.

Her knees hurt with the piercing pain of stretched sinews, as if she were climbing a long stairway. She watched the pain, a little curiously, like an outsider. Scalding needles pierced her cheeks, and they itched, and she scratched them once in a while with a white mitten, but it did not help.

She heard nothing but the rustle of the snow under her boots, and she tried to walk faster, not to listen beyond the sound of her feet, not to notice the slurred shadows of sounds hanging around her, floating from nowhere.

She knew she had been walking for hours, that which she had once called hours. There were no hours here; there were only steps, only legs rising and falling deep into the snow, and a snow that had no end. Or had it an end? That, really, did not matter. She did not have to think of that. She had to think only that she had to walk. She had to walk west. That was the only problem, that was the total of all the problems. Had she any problems? Had she any questions to be answered? If she had—they would be answered—there. She did not have to think. She had to get out. She would think—then—if there were thoughts to be faced. Only she had to get out. Only to get out.

In the white mittens, her fingers ached, her bones drawn tight, her joints squeezed as in a vise. She must be cold, she thought; she wondered dimly whether it was a very cold night.

Before her, the blue snow was luminous, the snow lighting the sky. There was nothing but a haze, ahead of her, where the earth was smeared into the clouds, and she was not sure whether the clouds were close to her face and she would knock against them, or many miles away.

She had left nothing behind. She was walking out of a void, a void white and unreal as that earth around her. She could not give up. She still had them—those two legs that could move—and something lost somewhere within her, that told them to move. She would not give up. She was alive; alive and alone in a desert which was not a living earth. She had to walk, because she was still alive. She had to get out.

Long spirals of snow rose in the wind, brushing the low sky, far ahead. She saw strips of a shiny black above her and specks of bright dust twinkling at her from between the clouds. She huddled tighter, hunching her shoulders; she did not want to be seen.

Something hurt in her waistline, as if each step jerked her spine forward, and something throbbed, rising up her back. She pressed her fingers to the roll in her jacket. She had to watch that. She could not lose it. She had to watch that and her legs. The rest did not matter.

She stopped short when she saw a tree, the long white pyramid of a giant fir, rising suddenly out of the snow, and she stood without breath, her knees bent, crouching like an animal, listening. She heard nothing. Nothing moved behind the low branches. She went on. She did not know how long she had waited.

She did not know whether she was moving forward. Perhaps she was only stamping her feet, up and down, on the same spot. Nothing changed in that white immensity around her. Would it ever change? She was like an ant crawling over a white table, a hard, bright, lustrous, enameled table. She threw her arms wide, suddenly feeling the space around her. She looked up at the sky. She looked, her head and shoulders thrown back. Those twinkling splinters above—they were endless worlds, people said. Wasn’t there room for her in the world? Who was moving her feet off the small space they held in that vast universe? Who were they and why were they doing it? She had forgotten. She had to get out.

Those legs were not hers any longer. They moved like a wheel, like levers, rising, bending, falling, up and down, down with a jerk that reverberated up to her scalp.

She felt, suddenly, that she was not tired, she had no pain, she was light and free, she was well, too well, she could walk like this through years to come. Then, a sudden jolt of pain shot through her shoulder blades, and she wavered, and she felt as if hours went by while a motionless leg rose, rose the space of an atom at a time and fell down again, cutting the snow, and she was walking again. She bent, her arms huddled over her stomach, drawing herself into a little ball, so that her legs would have less to carry.

Somewhere there was a border and it had to be crossed. She thought, suddenly, of a restaurant she had seen, for the flash of a second, in a German film. It had a sign over the door, with plain, thin letters, nickel-plated letters, insolent in their simplicity, on dull white glass—“Café Diggy-Daggy.” They had no signs like that in the country she was leaving. They had no pavements lustrous as a ball-room floor. She repeated senselessly, without hearing the sounds, as a charm, as a prayer: “Café Diggy-Daggy . . . Ca . . . fé . . . Dig . . . gy . . . Dag . . . gy . . .” and she tried to walk in rhythm with the syllables.

She did not have to tell her legs to move any longer. She thought they were running. An instinct was driving her, the instinct of an animal, whipping her blindly into the battle of self-preservation.

She was whispering through frozen lips: “You’re a good soldier, Kira Argounova, you’re a good soldier. . . .”

Ahead of her, the blue snow billowed dimly against the sky. The waves did not change as she came closer; they stood out, sharper, harder, low hills undulating in the darkness. White cones rose to the sky, with black edges of branches.

Then she saw a black figure. The figure was moving. It was moving in a straight line across the hills, across the horizon. She saw the legs, like scissors, opening and closing. She saw a small black spike on his shoulder, and it gleamed sharply, once, against the sky.

She fell down on her stomach. She felt, dimly, as through an anesthetic, snow biting the wrists under her sleeves, rolling into her boots. She lay still, her heart pounding against the snow.

Then she raised her head a little and crawled slowly forward, on her stomach. She stopped and lay still, watching the black figure in the distance, and crawled again, and stopped, and watched, and crawled again.

Citizen Ivan Ivanov was six feet tall. He had a wide mouth and a short nose, and when he was puzzled, he blinked, scratching his neck.

Citizen Ivan Ivanov was born in the year 1900, in a basement, in a side street of the town of Vitebsk. He was the ninth child of the family. At the age of six, he started in as apprentice to a shoemaker. The shoemaker beat him with leather suspenders and fed him buckwheat gruel. At the age of ten, he made his first pair of shoes, all by himself, and he wore them proudly down the street, the leather squeaking. That was the first day Citizen Ivan Ivanov remembered all through his life.

At the age of fifteen, he lured the neighborhood’s grocer’s daughter into a vacant lot and raped her. She was twelve years old, with a chest as flat as a boy’s, and she whined shrilly. He made her promise not to tell anyone, and he gave her fifteen kopeks and a pound of sugar candy. That was the second day he remembered.

At the age of sixteen, he made his first pair of military boots for a real general, and he polished them thoroughly, spitting on the flannel rag, and he delivered them to the general himself, who patted him on the shoulder and gave him a tip of a ruble. That was the third day he remembered.

There was a gay bunch of fellows around the shoemaker’s shop. They rose at dawn and they worked hard and their shirts stuck to their backs with sweat, but they had a good time at night. There was a saloon on the corner of the street, and they sang gay songs, their arms about one another’s shoulders. There was a house around the corner, where a wizened little man played the piano, and Ivan’s favorite was a fat blonde in a pink kimono; she was a foreigner called Gretchen. And those were the nights Citizen Ivan Ivanov remembered.

He served in the Red Army, and, shells roaring overhead, made bets on lice races with the soldiers in the bottom of the trench.

He was wounded and told he would die. He stared dully at the wall, for it did not make any difference.

He recovered and married a servant girl with round cheeks and round breasts, because he had gotten her in trouble. Their son was blond and husky, and they named him Ivan. They went to church on Sundays, and his wife cooked onions with roasted mutton, when they could get it. She raised her skirt high over her fat legs, and knelt, and scrubbed the white pine floor of their room. And she sent him to a public bath once every month. And Citizen Ivan Ivanov was happy.

Then he was transferred to the border patrols, and his wife went back to live with her parents in the village, and took their son with her.

Citizen Ivan Ivanov had never learned to read.

Citizen Ivan Ivanov was guarding the border of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.

He walked slowly through the snow, his rifle on his shoulder, blowing at his frozen fingers, cursing the cold. He did not mind going down hill, but going up hill was hard, and he scrambled, groaning, to stand there alone on the summit, with the wind biting his nose, and not a living soul for miles around.

Then, Citizen Ivan Ivanov saw something moving in the snow, far away.

He was not sure it had moved. He peered into the darkness, but the wind raised whirls of snow dust over the plain and he thought he might have been mistaken; only it had seemed as if something had moved, which was not snow dust. He yelled, cupping his hands over his mouth: “Who goes there?”

Nothing answered. Nothing moved in the plain under the hill.

He yelled: “You’d better come out or I’ll shoot!”

There was no answer.

He hesitated, scratching his neck. He stared far out into the night. But he had to be safe.

Citizen Ivan Ivanov raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired.

A blue flame streaked through the darkness and a dull echo rolled in the distance, far away. There was no sound after the echo had died, no movement in the white plain under the hill.

Citizen Ivan Ivanov scratched his neck. He should go down there and investigate, he thought. But it was too far, and the snow was too deep, and the wind was too cold. He waved his hand and turned away. “Just a rabbit, most likely,” he muttered, descending the hill to continue his route.

Kira Argounova lay very still in the snow, on her stomach, her arms thrown forward, and only a lock of hair moved, falling from under the white scarf, and her eyes followed the black figure walking away across the hills, disappearing in the distance. She lay still for a long time, watching a red spot widening slowly under her in the snow.

She thought, clearly, sharply, in words she could almost hear: “Well, I’m shot. Well, that’s how it feels to be shot. It’s not so frightful, is it?”

She rose slowly to her knees. She took off a mitten and slipped her hand into her jacket to find the roll of bills over her left breast. She hoped the bullet had not gone through the bills. It hadn’t. The little hole in the jacket was just under them. And her fingers felt something hot and sticky.

It did not hurt much. It felt like a sharp little burn in her side, with less pain than in her tired legs. She tried to stand up. She swayed a little, but she could stand. There was a dark patch on her jacket and the fur was drawn into red, warm clusters. It did not bleed much; just a few drops she could feel slithering down her skin.

She could walk. She would keep her hand on it and it would not bleed. She was not far from the border now. Over there, beyond, she would have it bandaged. It was not serious and she could stand it. She had to go on.

She staggered forward and wondered at the weakness in her knees. She whispered to herself through lips that were turning blue: “Of course, you’re wounded and you’re a little weak. That’s to be expected. Nothing to worry about.”

Swaying, her shoulders drooping forward, her hand at her side, she went on, through the snow, stumbling, her knees meeting, faltering as if she were drunk. She watched little dark drops falling off the hem of her lace gown, slowly, once in a while. Then the drops stopped falling. She smiled.

She felt no pain. The last of her consciousness had gone into one will into two legs that were growing weaker and weaker. She had to go on. She had to get out. She had to get out.

She whispered to herself, as if the sound of her voice were a living fluid giving her strength: “You’re a good soldier, Kira Argounova, you’re a good soldier and now’s the time to prove it. . . . Now. . . . Just one effort. . . . One last effort. . . . It’s not so very bad yet, is it? . . . You can make it. . . . Just walk. . . . Please, walk. . . . You have to get out . . . get out . . . get out . . . get out . . .”

She pressed her hand to the roll of bills in her jacket. She could not lose that. She had to watch that. She could not see things clearly any longer. She had to remember that.

Her head was drooping forward. She closed her eyes, leaving slits open between her lashes to watch her legs, her legs that should not stop.

She opened her eyes suddenly to find herself lying in the snow. She raised her head slowly, wondering, for she did not remember having fallen.

She must have fainted, she thought, wondering curiously how it felt to faint, for she did not remember.

It took a long time to rise. She noticed a red spot in the snow where she had fallen. She must have lain there for some time. She staggered forward, then stopped, some thought forming itself slowly in her dull eyes, and she came back and covered the red spot with snow, with her foot.

She went on, wondering dimly why the weather had become so hot and why the snow did not melt when it was so hot, so hot that she could hardly breathe, and what if the snow did melt? She would have to swim, then, well, she was a good swimmer and that would be easier than walking, for her legs could rest, then.

She went reeling forward. She did not know whether she was walking in the right direction. She had forgotten that she had to think of a direction. She remembered only that she had to walk.

She did not notice that the hill ended sharply on the edge of a ravine, and she fell and rolled down the white slope in a whirl of legs, arms and snow.

She could move nothing but one hand, at first, to rub the wet snow off her face, off her lips, off her frozen lashes. She lay huddled in a white heap on the bottom of a white gulch. The time it took to rise again seemed like hours, like years: just to draw her hands to her body, at first, palms down, to press her elbows to her body, turn her legs, push her feet out, then rise to her knees, leaning on tense, trembling arms, and breathe, with a breath like a knife inside, then rise a little further, leaning on one hand, then tear that hand, too, off the snow, and rise, and stand erect, panting.

She made a few steps. But she could not walk up the other side of the gulch. She fell and crawled up the hill on her hands and knees, digging her burning face into the snow to cool her cheeks.

She rose to her feet again on the top of the hill. She had lost her mittens. She felt something in the corners of her mouth and she rubbed her lips and looked at her fingers: her fingers were pink with froth.

She felt too hot. She tore the white scarf off her hair and threw it down into the gulch. The wind was a relief, blowing her hair back in a straight, shivering line.

She went on, raising her face to the wind.

She felt too hot and it was so difficult to breathe. She tore off her fur jacket and dropped it into the snow, and went on, without looking back.

In the sky, the clouds were rolling away in whirls of blue and gray and dark green. Ahead of her, above the snow, a pale line glowed, rising, and it was a transparent white, but above the snow it looked like a very pale green.

She pitched forward and jerked back again, brushing the hair out of her eyes, and faltered, and went on, a trembling, swaying, reeling, drunken figure in a long wedding gown of lace white as the snow around her.

The train was torn off her waistline and it dragged behind her, her legs getting tangled in the long lace. She staggered blindly, the wind waving her hair, her arms swinging, as if they, too, were loose in the wind. She leaned back and her breasts stood out under the white lace, and from under her left breast a little stream of red trickled down slowly, and long dark patches spread down to the train, and delicate flowers of lace were red on the white satin.

And suddenly her dry lips, caked and sealed with froth, opened again, and she called softly, one name, as a plea for help from over there, from across the border, as a caress, her voice tender and almost joyous:

“Leo! . . .”

She repeated, louder and louder, without despair, as if the sound, that one sound in the world, were giving her life: “Leo! . . . Leo! . . . Leo! . . .”

She was calling him, the Leo that could have been, that would have been had he lived there, where she was going, across the border. He was awaiting her there, and she had to go on. She had to walk. There, in that world, across the border, a life was waiting for her to which she had been faithful her every living hour, her only banner that had never been lowered, that she had held high and straight, a life she could not betray, she would not betray now by stopping while she was still living, a life she could still serve, by walking, by walking forward a little longer, just a little longer.

Then she heard a song, a tune not loud enough to be a human sound, a song as a last battle-march. And it was not a funeral dirge, it was not a hymn, it was not a prayer. It was a tune from an old operetta, the “Song of Broken Glass.”

Little notes of music trembled in hesitation, and burst, and rolled in quick, fine waves, like the thin, clear ringing of glass. Little notes leaped and exploded and laughed, laughed with a full, unconditional, consummate human joy.

She did not know whether she was singing. Perhaps she was only hearing the music somewhere.

But the music had been a promise; a promise at the dawn of her life. That which had been promised then, could not be denied to her now. She had to go on.

She went on, a fragile girl in the flowing, medieval gown of a priestess, red stains spreading on the white lace.

At dawn, she fell on the edge of the slope. She lay very still, for she knew that she could not rise again.

Far down, below her, an endless snow plain stretched into the sunrise. The sun had not come. A band of pink, pale and young, like the breath of a color, like the birth of a color, rose over the snow and glowed, trembling, flowing up into a pale blue, a blue immensity of sparks twinkling under a thin veil, like the faint, fading ghost of a lake in a summer sun, like the still surface of a lake with a sun drowned far in its depths. And the snow, at the rise of that liquid flame, seemed to quiver, breathing, glittering softly. Long bands stretched across the plain, shadows that seemed light itself, a heavier, bluer light with edges ready to burst into dancing fires.

A lonely little tree stood far away in the plain. It had no leaves. Its slim, rare twigs had gathered no snow. It stretched, tense with the life of a future spring, thin black branches, like arms, into the dawn rising over an endless earth where so much had been possible.

She lay on the edge of a hill and looked down at the sky. One hand, white and still, hung over the edge, and little red drops rolled slowly in the snow, down the slope.

She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little hole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.

She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible.

Afterword

AS A YOUNGSTER, AYN RAND CONTINUALLY IMAGINED ideas for plays and novels to write when she grew up. Not a single one of her stories pertained to Russia, which she hated. It was something of a paradox to her, therefore, that she set her first novel in Soviet Russia.

Part of the explanation is that, having finally escaped to the United States, she had to get Russia out of her system—by telling the world what was actually happening there. Her husband, Frank O’Connor, and his brother Nick urged her to write the novel. Both were horrified by her experiences in Russia, and they convinced her that Americans had no idea of the truth. A young Russian had said to her at a party in 1926, just before she left for America: “When you get there, tell them that Russia is a huge cemetery and that we are all dying.” We the Living told them.

Her novel, AR wrote on its completion, is “the first story written by a Russian who knows the living conditions of the new Russia and who has actually lived under the Soviets in the period described . . . the first one by a person who knows the facts and also having escaped can tell them.”¹

Another part of the explanation for a Russian novel is that, being an immigrant and a beginner, AR did not feel ready yet for anything else. She did have in mind the idea for a novel set in an airship orbiting the earth, and she debated between the two projects. But the Russian novel had a great advantage: no research was necessary for We the Living; she already knew the background—whereas she did not know the conditions, the people, or the language well enough to do a story set in America (or in an airship).

Further, since AR was only twenty-five in 1930, when she started the book, “I thought I was too young to write about adults.”² She was not yet ready to present her kind of hero or broad, philosophical theme—she had not defined her ideas fully enough or acquired the necessary literary skill—and the Russian story did not require these developments.

The theme of We the Living—identified by AR in the Foreword—is indicated by its original title, Airtight, the meaning being that under dictatorship man cannot survive. Dictatorship, she writes in her journal, “crushes a whole country and smothers every bit of life, action, and air. . . . It makes the atmosphere choking, airtight. . . .”

The plot of the novel occurred to her initially as a twist on a standard plot, the story of the virtuous girl who sells herself to a villain in order to save the hero, whom she loves. AR thought: Wouldn’t it be interesting if “the man to whom the girl sells herself is not a villain but a hero—and the man for whom she makes her sacrifice is the villain in the end”? With this twist, the heroine’s conflict deepens immeasurably, while the final tragedy becomes in a sense even greater for the “villain” than for the other two.³

When she started to project the story, the first scene in AR’s mind was the arrest scene, when Andrei, the GPU agent who loves Kira, comes to take Leo away to jail—and discovers that Kira is Leo’s mistress. The drama of this kind of scene was AR’s personal motivation to do the novel. She then constructed the story backward, by deciding what events had to be presented to lead to this climax.

Several of the characters were suggested by people whom AR had known in Russia. Kira, of course, though not intended as a self-portrait, is AR intellectually and morally; she has all of AR’s ideas and values. Irina is based on her youngest sister, Nora, who drew the very same kind of caricatures. Uncle Vasili was taken, in essence and appearance, from her own father. As to the two men, Andrei is a pure invention, but Leo is real; he is a romanticized version of the first man AR ever loved, a student she had met in college at the age of seventeen and gone out with many times. His name was Leo. She disliked the name, but felt that she had no choice about using it: in her mind, the character was inseparable from the man.

I have often heard people argue about who is superior: Andrei or Leo (Kira is superior to both). Despite the book’s hero-villain plot twist, there is no doubt as to AR’s answer, which I heard her state on several occasions. Her favorite was Leo, not only for the personal reason mentioned but also for a philosophical reason: the fact that Leo, by conscious premises, is an egoist, an individualist, a man of arrogant self-esteem who lives for his values. Andrei, by contrast, is a man explicitly committed to the opposite ideas; he accepts the principles of selflessness and collectivism as his moral ideal, and then acts on them, down to spilling all the blood they require. Given the plot twist, AR worked hard to make Andrei as noble as possible; but his nobility exists basically on the subconscious level. It lies in his soul, his unidentified individualistic premises, which are at war with his actions and conscious viewpoint. AR judged people, essentially, by these last.

When Andrei discovers his error, he commits suicide; he is totally honest. But the point is: what he discovers is that he gave his life to a lie. Leo knew better from the start (even if he breaks in the end).

If Leo had been born in America, he would have become Francisco D’Anconia of Atlas Shrugged; that is, the measure of his heroic potential. In Russia, however, he is crushed. To the extent that an individual is rational, independent, uncompromising, passionate—to the extent that he tries to act according to his own mind and value judgments—his life under the rule of physical force becomes unendurable. The only answer he sees to his questions and ambitions is the muzzle of a gun. In principle, such a man has three choices.

One is to commit suicide. This is the choice Andrei makes, when he grasps the depravity of his “ideal.”

Another is to attempt to make the clash between mind and force endurable by nullifying one of the two clashing elements, the only one in the victim’s power: his own mind. This means: drowning his mind, and thereby losing the ability to know or care any longer what is being done to him. This is Leo’s choice; it is living death, or drawn-out suicide, as against immediate self-destruction. In her journal, AR does not regard Leo’s choice as evil. Rather, she describes him as a man who is “too strong to compromise, but too weak to withstand the pressure, who cannot bend, but only break.”

The third choice is that of Kira—to flee abroad. In real life the attempt to flee might well be successful, as it was in AR’s own case. In the context of the novel, however, Kira had to die in the attempt. If the book’s theme is the fate of the living under the rule of killers, there is no place for the accident of escape. The essence of such a political system is destruction, whether the individual is within the borders or trying to run across them.

In her journal AR summarized, in characterological terms, the three forms of destruction depicted in the novel: “The higher and stronger individual is broken, but not conquered; she falls on the battlefield, still the same individual, untouched: Kira. The one with less resistance is broken and conquered; he disintegrates under an unbearable strain: Leo. And the best of those who believed in the ideal is broken by the realization of what that ideal really means: Andrei.”

AR finished We the Living in 1933. The principal reaction of the manuscript’s early readers, she wrote in a 1934 letter, “is one of complete amazement at the revelation of Soviet life as it is actually lived.”⁴ Almost sixty years later, I cannot resist adding, the grandchildren of such readers were still being amazed by Soviet life, this time as they watched it lead to the collapse of the entire Soviet structure.

AR knew that the American public did not understand the nature of communism, but she did not know that she was trying to publish the truth at the start of the Red Decade, as it was later called. An anti-communist librarian had told her, when she was still working on the novel, that “the communists have a tremendous influence” on American intellectuals, “and you will find a lot of people opposing you.” “I was indignant,” AR recalled years later. “I didn’t believe her. I thought that she is a typical Russian and is, in effect, panic mongering.”⁵

For nearly three years, We the Living was rejected by New York publishers. It was rejected by more than a dozen houses. A typical rejection said that the author did not understand socialism. Gradually, AR came to see how accurate the librarian had been. By 1936, she herself was writing to a friend that “New York is full of people sold bodies and souls to the Soviets.”⁶

At last the book came to Macmillan, whose editorial board was divided about it. One of the associate editors, who fought against the book “violently” (AR’s word), was Granville Hicks. Several years later, Hicks admitted publicly that he had been a member of the Communist Party. After a bitter struggle Hicks was overruled by the owner of the company, an elderly gentleman who said that he did not know whether the book would make any money, but that it was important and ought to be published. (It is instructive to note that in 1957, the New York Times chose the same man, Granville Hicks, to review Atlas Shrugged for the Sunday Book Review.)

We the Living did poorly at first. A year after publication, however, in 1937, thanks to word of mouth, the novel started to take off. But it was too late: Macmillan had set the book from type, not plates, and had destroyed the type in the first months. As a result, while the book was achieving great success in England, Denmark, and Italy, it went out of print in America, and had to wait a quarter of a century to reach its audience. In 1958, after the triumph of Atlas Shrugged, a new American edition was finally brought out by Random House; a year later, a mass-market paperback was published by New American Library.

By now We the Living has sold over three million copies in the United States. To bring the book to a wider audience, AR in 1939 turned it into a play, which opened on Broadway under the title of The Unconquered. She did not think the book was “proper stage material,” she said later, but she tried her best to adapt it—under impossible circumstances, with a producer (George Abbott) who fought her every step of the way, and a country full of acting talents afraid to come near anything so controversial. One famous actress, Bette Davis, read the script and declared that she loved it and would be honored to play the part of Kira. Her agent forbade her to do it, on the grounds that such an anti-communist role would destroy her career. This is a small indication of the country’s intellectual state at the time—and of what AR was up against. The play closed after five performances.

As to the pirated Italian movie of it, AR finally got hold of it some twenty years after its original release. Apart from a few scenes, she was very favorably impressed; she regarded Alida Valli in particular as ideal casting. Under her supervision, the two parts were condensed into a single, tightly focused three-hour film. In 1986 (four years after her death) the new version, in black-and-white with English subtitles, was finally completed and began a successful run in the U.S. In my own opinion, the movie is superior to the much more famous Hollywood movie of The Fountainhead.a

In 1934, two years before the book was published, AR showed the manuscript to H. L. Mencken, the well-known individualist, who liked it. Thanking him for his interest, AR wrote back on July 28:

This book is only my first step and above all a means of acquiring a voice, of making myself heard. What I shall have to say when I acquire that voice does not need an explanation, for I know that you can understand it. Perhaps it may seem a lost cause, at present, and there are those who will say that I am too late, that I can only hope to be the last fighter for a mode of thinking which has no place in the future. But I do not think so. I intend to be the first one in a new battle which the world needs as it has never needed before, the first to answer the many too many advocates of collectivism, and answer them in a manner which will not be forgotten.

I know that you may smile when you read this. I fully realize that I am a very green, very helpless beginner who has the arrogance of embarking, single-handed, against what many call the irrevocable trend of our century. I know that I am only a would-be David starting out against Goliath, and what a fearful, ugly Goliath! I say “single-handed,” because I have heard so much from that other side, the collectivist side, and so little in defense of man against men, and yet so much has to be said. I have attempted to say it in my book. I do not know of a better way to make my entrance into the battle. I believe that man will always be an individualist, whether he knows it or not, and I want to make it my duty to make him know it.

Do we know it yet, even this late? Do we know the nature of a dictatorship as it grows ever more visible in the land of the free? If we do at all, it is thanks in large part to the works of Ayn Rand.

—Leonard Peikoff
Irvine, California
December, 2008

NOTES

1 Letter to Jean Wick, March 1934.

2 Recorded biographical interviews, 1960-61.

3 Screen treatment for We the Living, 1947.

4 Letter to Jean Wick, October 1934.

5 Recorded biographical interviews, 1960-61.

6 Letter to Gouverneur Morris, April 1936.

a

We the Living is still available on video from the Ayn Rand Book Store, 2121 Alton Parkway, Suite 250, Irvine, California 92606, USA.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Foreword

PART ONE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

PART TWO

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

Afterword

Table of Contents

Epigraph

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Foreword

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

Teaser chapter

They existed only to serve the state. They were conceived in controlled Palaces of Mating. They died in the Home of the Useless. From cradle to grave, the crowd was one—the great WE.

In all that was left of humanity there was only one man who dared to think, seek, and love. He, Equality 7-2521, came close to losing his life because his knowledge was regarded as a treacherous blasphemy ... he had rediscovered the lost and holy word—I.

“I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities.”

—Ayn Rand

The Ayn Rand Institute

The Ayn Rand Institute offers various educational resources to high school and college students.

Our programs include:

• essay contests on Ayn Rand’s novels for high school and college students

• campus club programs

• courses on Ayn Rand’s novels and ideas

• free classroom books for high school instructors

• internships for students

• and much more

For more information, please visit our Web site at
www.aynrandnovels.com

SIGNET
Published by New American Library, a division of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2,
Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,
Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Pancbsheel Park,
New Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745,
Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Signet Printing, September 1961

Introduction and Appendix copyright © Leonard Peikoff and the Estate of Ayn Rand, 1995

All rights reserved

Permission requests for college or textbook use should be addressed to the Estate of Ayn Rand, PO Box 51808, Irvine, California 92619.

Information about other books by Ayn Rand and her philosophy, Objectivism, may be obtained by writing to OBJECTIVISM, PO Box 51808, Irvine, California 92619.

REGISTERED TRADEMARK-MARCA REGISTRADA

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

eISBN : 978-1-101-13717-8

http://us.penguingroup.com

INTRODUCTION

Ayn Rand’s working title for this short novel was Ego. “I used the word in its exact, literal meaning,” she wrote to one correspondent. “I did not mean a symbol of the self—but specifically and actually Man’s Self.”¹

Man’s self, Ayn Rand held, is his mind or conceptual faculty, the faculty of reason. All man’s spiritually distinctive attributes derive from this faculty. For instance, it is reason (man’s value judgments) that leads to man’s emotions. And it is reason which possesses volition, the ability to make choices.

But reason is a property of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain.

The term ego combines the above points into a single concept: it designates the mind (and its attributes) considered as an individual possession. The ego, therefore, is that which constitutes the essential identity of a human being. As one dictionary puts it, the ego is “the ‘I’ or self of any person; [it is] a person as thinking, feeling, and willing, and distinguishing itself from the selves of others and from the objects of its thought.”²

It is obvious why Ayn Rand exalts man’s ego. In doing so, she is (implicitly) upholding the central principles of her philosophy and of her heroes: reason, values, volition, individualism. Her villains, by contrast, do not think, judge, and will; they are second-handers, who allow themselves to be run by others. Having renounced their minds, they are, in a literal sense, selfless.

How does this novella about man’s ego, first published in England in 1938, relate to The Fountainhead (1943)? Anthem, Miss Rand wrote in 1946, is like “the preliminary sketches which artists draw for their future big canvases. I wrote [Anthem] while working on The Fountainhead—it has the same theme, spirit and intention, although in quite a different form.”³

One correspondent at the time warned Miss Rand that there are people for whom the word ego is “too strong—even, immoral.” She replied: “Why, of course there are. Against whom do you suppose the book was written?”⁴

Although the word ego remains essential to the text, the title was changed to Anthem for publication. This was not an attempt to soften the book; it was a step that Ayn Rand took on every novel. Her working titles were invariably blunt and unemotional, naming explicitly, for her own clarity, the central issue of the book; such titles tend to give away to the reader too much too soon and too dryly. Her final titles still pertain to the central issue, but in an indirect and evocative way; they intrigue and even touch the reader while leaving him to discover for himself the book’s meaning. (As another example, The Strike became in due course Atlas Shrugged.)

The present novel, in Miss Rand’s mind, was from the outset an ode to man’s ego. It was not difficult, therefore, to change the working title: to move from “ego” to “ode” or “anthem,” leaving the object celebrated by the ode to be discovered by the reader. “The last two chapters,” Miss Rand writes in a letter, “are the actual anthem.”⁵ The rest is the build-up to it.

There is another reason, I think, for the choice of anthem (as against “ode,” say, or “celebration”). Anthem is a religiously toned word; its second definition is “a piece of sacred vocal music, usually with words taken from the Scriptures.”⁶ This does not mean that Ayn Rand conceived her book as religious. The opposite is true.

Ayn Rand explains the point in her Introduction to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition of The Fountainhead. Protesting religion’s monopoly in the field of ethics, she writes, in part:

Just as religion has preempted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man’s reach. “Exaltation” is usually taken to mean an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. “Worship” means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man. “Reverence” means the emotion of a sacred respect, to be experienced on one’s knees. “Sacred” means superior to and not-to-be-touched-by any concerns of man or of this earth. Etc.

But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions. What, then, is their source or referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man’s dedication to a moral ideal....

It is this highest level of man’s emotions that has to be redeemed from the murk of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.

It is in this sense, with this meaning and intention, that I would identify the sense of life dramatized in The Fountainhead as man-worship.⁷

For the same reason, Ayn Rand chose the esthetic-moral concept “anthem” for her present title. In doing so, she was not surrendering to mysticism, but waging war against it. She was claiming for man and his ego the sacred respect that is actually due not to Heaven, but to life on earth. An “anthem to the ego” is blasphemy to the pious, because it implies that reverence pertains not to God, but to man and, above all, to that fundamental and inherently selfish thing within him that enables him to deal with reality and survive.

There have been plenty of egoists in human history, and there have been plenty of worshipers, too. The egoists were generally cynical “realists” (à la Hobbes), who despised morality; the worshipers, by their own statement, were out of this world. Their clash was an instance of the fact-value dichotomy, which has plagued Western philosophy for many centuries, making facts seem meaningless and values baseless. Ayn Rand’s concept of an “anthem to the ego” throws out this vicious dichotomy. Her Objectivist philosophy integrates facts with values—in this instance, the actual nature of man with an exalted and secular admiration for it.

The genre of Anthem is determined by its theme. As an anthem, or hymn of praise, the novel is not typical of Ayn Rand in form or in style (although it is typical in content). As Miss Rand has said, Anthem has a story, but not a plot, i.e., not a progression of events leading inexorably to an action-climax and a resolution. The closest thing to a climax in Anthem, the hero’s discovery of the word I, is not an existential action, but an internal event, a process of cognition—which is, besides, partly accidental (it is not fully necessitated by the earlier events of the story).⁸

Similarly, Anthem does not exemplify Ayn Rand’s usual artistic approach, which she called “Romantic Realism.” In contrast to her other novels, there is no realistic, contemporary background and relatively little attempt to re-create perceptual, conversational, or psychological detail; the story is set in a remote, primitive future and told in the simple, quasi-biblical terms that befit such a time and world. To Cecil B. De Mille, Ayn Rand described the book as a “dramatic fantasy.”⁹ To Rose Wilder Lane, in answer to a question, she classified it officially as a “poem.”¹⁰

She held the same view of the book in regard to its adaptation to other media. To Walt Disney, she wrote in 1946 that if a screen version were possible, “I would like to see it done in stylized drawings, rather than with living actors.”¹¹

Then—in the mid-1960s, as I recall—she received a request from Rudolf Nureyev, who wanted to create a ballet based on Anthem. Ordinarily, Miss Rand turned down requests of this kind. But because of the special nature of Anthem (and because of her admiration for Nureyev’s dancing), she was enthusiastically in favor of his idea. (Unfortunately, neither a movie nor a ballet ever materialized.)

The point is that animation or ballet can capture a fantasy—but not Soviet Russia or the struggles of Roark or the strike of the men of the mind.

Anthem was initially conceived in the early 1920s (or perhaps a bit earlier) as a play. At the time, Ayn Rand was a teenager in Soviet Russia. Some forty years later, she discussed the work’s development with an interviewer.

It was to be a play about a collectivist society of the future in which they lost the word “I.” They were all calling each other “we” and it was worked out as much more of a story. There were many characters. It was to be four acts, I think. One of the things I remember about it is that the characters couldn’t stand the society. Once in a while, someone would scream and go insane in the middle of one of their collective meetings. The only touch of this left is the people who scream at night.¹²

The play was not specifically anti-Russian:

I wasn’t taking my revenge on my background. Because if it were that I would have been writing stories laid in Russia or projecting them. It was my intention to wipe out that kind of world totally; I mean I wouldn’t want to include Russia or have anything to do with it. My feeling toward Russia at that time was simply an intensified feeling that I’ve had from childhood and from before the revolutions. I felt that this was so mystical, depraved, rotten a country that I wasn’t surprised that they got a Communist ideology—and I felt that one has to get out and find the civilized world.¹³

Ayn Rand got out to the United States in 1926, at the age of twenty-one. But she didn’t think of writing Anthem here—until she read in the Saturday Evening Post a story laid in the future:

It didn’t have any particular theme, only the fact that some kind of war had destroyed civilization, and that there is a last survivor in the ruins of New York who rebuilds something. No particular plot. It was just an adventure story, but what interested me was the fact that it was the first time I saw a fantastic story in print—rather than the folks-next-door sort of serials. What impressed me was the fact that they would publish such a story. And so I thought that if they didn’t mind fantasy, I would like to try Anthem.

I was working on the plot of The Fountainhead at that time, which was the worst part of any of my struggles. There was nothing I could do except sit and think—which was miserable. I was doing architectural research, but there was no writing I could do yet, and I had to take time off once in a while to write something. So I wrote Anthem that summer of 1937.¹⁴

What followed was a long struggle to get it published—not a struggle in England, where it was published at once, but in America, where intellectuals, intoxicated by Communism, were at the height (or nadir) of the Red Decade:

I intended Anthem at first as a magazine story or serial ... but I think my agent said it would not be for the magazines, and she was probably right. Or if she tried them, she didn’t succeed. She told me that it should be published as a book, which I hadn’t thought of. She submitted it simultaneously to Macmillan in America, who had published We The Living and whom I had not left yet, and to the English publisher Cassell. Cassell accepted it immediately; the owner said he was not sure whether it would sell but it was beautiful, and he appreciated it literarily, and he wanted to publish it. Macmillan turned it down; their comment was: the author does not understand socialism.¹⁵

For the next eight years, nothing was done about Anthem in the United States. Then, in 1945, Leonard Read of Pamphleteers, a small conservative outfit in Los Angeles that published nonfiction essays, decided that Anthem had to have an American audience; Read brought it out as a pamphlet in 1946. Another conservative house with a meager audience, Caxton, took the book over as a hardcover in 1953. At last, in 1961, about a quarter of a century after it had been written, New American Library issued it as a mass-market paperback.

By such agonizingly drawn-out steps, the country of individualism was finally allowed to discover Ayn Rand’s novel of individualism. Anthem has now sold nearly 2.5 million copies.

For the first American edition, Ayn Rand rewrote the book. “I have edited [the story] for this publication,” she said in her 1946 Foreword, “but have confined the editing to its style.... No idea or incident was added or omitted.... The story remains as it was. I have lifted its face, but not its spine or spirit; these did not need lifting.”¹⁶

Until her late thirties, when she had mastered English and finished writing The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand was not completely satisfied with her command of style. One problem was a degree of overwriting in her earlier work; she was still uncertain at times, she told me once, as to when a point (or an emotion) had been communicated fully and objectively. After 1943, when she was an assured professional both in art and in English, she went back to Anthem and (later) to We The Living, and revised them in accordance with her mature knowledge.

In editing Anthem, she said years later, her main concerns were:

Precision, clarity, brevity, and eliminating any editorial or slightly purple adjectives. You see, the attempt to have that semi-archaic style was very difficult. Some of the passages were exaggerated. In effect, I was sacrificing content for style—in some places, simply because I didn’t know how to say it. By the time I rewrote it after The Fountainhead, I was in full control of my style and I knew how to achieve the same effect, but by simple and direct means, without getting too biblical.¹⁷

For those who want some idea of how in their own work to achieve “precision, clarity, brevity”—and, I might add, beauty, the beauty of a perfect marriage between sound and meaning—I am including as an Appendix to this edition a facsimile of the original British edition of Anthem, with Ayn Rand’s editorial changes for the American edition written on each page in her own hand. If (ignoring the concrete issue of biblical style) you study her changes and ask “Why?” as you proceed, there is virtually no limit to what you can learn about writing—Ayn Rand’s or your own.

Ayn Rand learned a great deal about her art (and about much else, including the applications of her philosophy) during the years of her hard-thinking life. But in essence and as a person, she was immutable. The child who imagined Anthem in Russia had the same soul as the woman who edited it nearly thirty years later—and who was still proud of it thirty-five years after that.

A small example of Ayn Rand’s constancy can be found in a publicity form she had to fill out for We The Living in 1936, a year before she wrote Anthem. The form asked authors to state their own philosophy. Her answer, at the age of thirty-one, begins: “To make my life a reason unto itself. I know what I want up to the age of two hundred. Know what you want in life and go after it. I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities....”¹⁸

When I come across such characteristic Ayn Rand entries dating as early as 1936 (and even earlier), I think irresistibly of a comment made about Roark by his friend Austen Heller:

I often think that he’s the only one of us who’s achieved immortality. I don’t mean in the sense of fame and I don’t mean he won’t die someday. But he’s living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes.... They change, they deny, they contradict—and they call it growth. At the end there’s nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out of an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they have never held for a single moment? But Howard—one can imagine him existing forever.¹⁹

One can imagine it of Ayn Rand, too. She herself was immortal in the above sense—and she achieved fame, besides. I expect her works, therefore, to live as long as civilization does. Perhaps, like Aristotle’s Logic, they will even survive another Dark Ages, if and when it comes.

Anthem, in any event, has lived—and I am happy to have had the opportunity to introduce its fiftieth anniversary edition in America.

Some of you reading my words will be here to celebrate its hundredth anniversary. As an atheist, I cannot ask you to “keep the faith” in years to come. What I ask instead is: Hold on to reason.

Or, in the style of Anthem: Love thine Ego as thyself. Because that’s what it is.

—Leonard Peikoff
Irvine, California
October 1994

NOTES

1 Letter to Richard de Mille, November, 1946.

2 Random House Dictionary of the English Language, College Edition, 1968.

3 Letter to Lorine Pruette, September, 1946.

4 Letter to Richard de Mille, November, 1946.

5 Letter to Lorine Pruette, October, 1946.

6 Random House Dictionary of the English Language, College Edition, 1968.

7 Miss Rand’s Introduction to 25th Anniversary Edition of The Fountainhead, p. ix, paperback.

8 Personal communication.

9 Letter to Cecil B. De Mille, September, 1946.

10 Letter to Rose Wilder Lane, July, 1946.

11 Letter to Walt Disney, September, 1946.

12 Recorded biographical interviews, 1960-61.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Foreword, 1946 edition of Anthem, p. v.

17 Recorded biographical interviews, 1960-61.

18 A Candid Camera of Ayn Rand, June, 1936.

19 The Fountainhead, p. 453 paperback.

AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

THIS STORY WAS WRITTEN IN 1937.

I have edited it for this publication, but have confined the editing to its style; I have reworded some passages and cut out some excessive language. No idea or incident was added or omitted; the theme, content and structure are untouched. The story remains as it was. I have lifted its face, but not its spine or spirit; these did not need lifting.

Some of those who read the story when it was first written, told me that I was unfair to the ideals of collectivism; this was not, they said, what collectivism preaches or intends; collectivists do not mean or advocate such things; nobody advocates them.

I shall merely point out that the slogan “Production for use and not for profit” is now accepted by most men as a commonplace, and a commonplace stating a proper, desirable goal. If any intelligible meaning can be discerned in that slogan at all, what is it, if not the idea that the motive of a man’s work must be the need of others, not his own need, desire or gain?

Compulsory labor conscription is now practiced or advocated in every country on earth. What is it based on, if not the idea that the state is best qualified to decide where a man can be useful to others, such usefulness being the only consideration, and that his own aims, desires or happiness should be ignored as of no importance?

We have Councils of Vocations, Councils of Eugenics, every possible kind of Council, including a World Council—and if these do not as yet hold total power over us, is it from lack of intention?

“Social gains,” “social aims,” “social objectives” have become the daily bromides of our language. The necessity of a social justification for all activities and all existence is now taken for granted. There is no proposal outrageous enough but what its author can get a respectful hearing and approbation if he claims that in some undefined way it is for “the common good.”

Some might think—though I don’t—that nine years ago there was some excuse for men not to see the direction in which the world was going. Today, the evidence is so blatant that no excuse can be claimed by anyone any longer. Those who refuse to see it now are neither blind nor innocent.

The greatest guilt today is that of people who accept collectivism by moral default; the people who seek protection from the necessity of taking a stand, by refusing to admit to themselves the nature of that which they are accepting; the people who support plans specifically designed to achieve serfdom, but hide behind the empty assertion that they are lovers of freedom, with no concrete meaning attached to the word; the people who believe that the content of ideas need not be examined, that principles need not be defined, and that facts can be eliminated by keeping one’s eyes shut. They expect, when they find themselves in a world of bloody ruins and concentration camps, to escape moral responsibility by wailing: “But I didn’t mean this!”

Those who want slavery should have the grace to name it by its proper name. They must face the full meaning of that which they are advocating or condoning; the full, exact, specific meaning of collectivism, of its logical implications, of the principles upon which it is based, and of the ultimate consequences to which these principles will lead.

They must face it, then decide whether this is what they want or not.

—Ayn Rand

April 1946

I

IT IS A SIN TO WRITE THIS. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. We have broken the laws. The laws say that men may not write unless the Council of Vocations bid them so. May we be forgiven!

But this is not the only sin upon us. We have committed a greater crime, and for this crime there is no name. What punishment awaits us if it be discovered we know not, for no such crime has come in the memory of men and there are no laws to provide for it.

It is dark here. The flame of the candle stands still in the air. Nothing moves in this tunnel save our hand on the paper. We are alone here under the earth. It is a fearful word, alone. The laws say that none among men may be alone, ever and at any time, for this is the great transgression and the root of all evil. But we have broken many laws. And now there is nothing here save our one body, and it is strange to see only two legs stretched on the ground, and on the wall before us the shadow of our one head.

The walls are cracked and water runs upon them in thin threads without sound, black and glistening as blood. We stole the candle from the larder of the Home of the Street Sweepers. We shall be sentenced to ten years in the Palace of Corrective Detention if it be discovered. But this matters not. It matters only that the light is precious and we should not waste it to write when we need it for that work which is our crime. Nothing matters save the work, our secret, our evil, our precious work. Still, we must also write, for—may the Council have mercy on us!—we wish to speak for once to no ears but our own.

Our name is Equality 7-2521, as it is written on the iron bracelet which all men wear on their left wrists with their names upon it. We are twenty-one years old. We are six feet tall, and this is a burden, for there are not many men who are six feet tall. Ever have the Teachers and the Leaders pointed to us and frowned and said: “There is evil in your bones, Equality 7-2521, for your body has grown beyond the bodies of your brothers.” But we cannot change our bones nor our body.

We were born with a curse. It has always driven us to thoughts which are forbidden. It has always given us wishes which men may not wish. We know that we are evil, but there is no will in us and no power to resist it. This is our wonder and our secret fear, that we know and do not resist.

We strive to be like all our brother men, for all men must be alike. Over the portals of the Palace of the World Council, there are words cut in the marble, which we repeat to ourselves whenever we are tempted:

“We are one in all and all in one.
There are no men but only the great WE,
One, indivisible and forever.”

We repeat this to ourselves, but it helps us not.

These words were cut long ago. There is green mould in the grooves of the letters and yellow streaks on the marble, which come from more years than men could count. And these words are the truth for they are written on the Palace of the World Council, and the World Council is the body of all truth. Thus has it been ever since the Great Rebirth, and farther back than that no memory can reach.

But we must never speak of the times before the Great Rebirth, else we are sentenced to three years in the Palace of Corrective Detention. It is only the Old Ones who whisper about it in the evenings, in the Home of the Useless. They whisper many strange things, of the towers which rose to the sky, in those Unmentionable Times, and of the wagons which moved without horses, and of the lights which burned without flame. But those times were evil. And those times passed away, when men saw the Great Truth which is this: that all men are one and that there is no will save the will of all men together.

All men are good and wise. It is only we, Equality 7-2521, we alone who were born with a curse. For we are not like our brothers. And as we look back upon our life, we see that it has ever been thus and that it has brought us step by step to our last, supreme transgression, our crime of crimes hidden here under the ground.

We remember the Home of Infants where we lived till we were five years old, together with all the children of the City who had been born in the same year. The sleeping halls there were white and clean and bare of all things save one hundred beds. We were just like all our brothers then, save for the one transgression: we fought with our brothers. There are few offenses blacker than to fight with our brothers, at any age and for any cause whatsoever. The Council of the Home told us so, and of all the children of that year, we were locked in the cellar most often.

When we were five years old, we were sent to the Home of the Students, where there are ten wards, for our ten years of learning. Men must learn till they reach their fifteenth year. Then they go to work. In the Home of the Students we arose when the big bell rang in the tower and we went to our beds when it rang again. Before we removed our garments, we stood in the great sleeping hall, and we raised our right arms, and we said all together with the three Teachers at the head:

“We are nothing. Mankind is all. By the grace of our brothers are we allowed our lives. We exist through, by and for our brothers who are the State. Amen.”

Then we slept. The sleeping halls were white and clean and bare of all things save one hundred beds.

We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those years in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked upon us.

So we fought against this curse. We tried to forget our lessons, but we always remembered. We tried not to understand what the Teachers taught, but we always understood it before the Teachers had spoken. We looked upon Union 5-3992, who were a pale boy with only half a brain, and we tried to say and do as they did, that we might be like them, like Union 5-3992, but somehow the Teachers knew that we were not. And we were lashed more often than all the other children.

The Teachers were just, for they had been appointed by the Councils, and the Councils are the voice of all justice, for they are the voice of all men. And if sometimes, in the secret darkness of our heart, we regret that which befell us on our fifteenth birthday, we know that it was through our own guilt. We had broken a law, for we had not paid heed to the words of our Teachers. The Teachers had said to us all:

“Dare not choose in your minds the work you would like to do when you leave the Home of the Students. You shall do that which the Council of Vocations shall prescribe for you. For the Council of Vocations knows in its great wisdom where you are needed by your brother men, better than you can know it in your unworthy little minds. And if you are not needed by your brother men, there is no reason for you to burden the earth with your bodies.”

We knew this well, in the years of our childhood, but our curse broke our will. We were guilty and we confess it here: we were guilty of the great Transgression of Preference. We preferred some work and some lessons to the others. We did not listen well to the history of all the Councils elected since the Great Rebirth. But we loved the Science of Things. We wished to know. We wished to know about all the things which make the earth around us. We asked so many questions that the Teachers forbade it.

We think that there are mysteries in the sky and under the water and in the plants which grow. But the Council of Scholars has said that there are no mysteries, and the Council of Scholars knows all things. And we learned much from our Teachers. We learned that the earth is flat and that the sun revolves around it, which causes the day and the night. We learned the names of all the winds which blow over the seas and push the sails of our great ships. We learned how to bleed men to cure them of all ailments.

We loved the Science of Things. And in the darkness, in the secret hour, when we awoke in the night and there were no brothers around us, but only their shapes in the beds and their snores, we closed our eyes, and we held our lips shut, and we stopped our breath, that no shudder might let our brothers see or hear or guess, and we thought that we wished to be sent to the Home of the Scholars when our time would come.

All the great modern inventions come from the Home of the Scholars, such as the newest one, which we found only a hundred years ago, of how to make candles from wax and string; also, how to make glass, which is put in our windows to protect us from the rain. To find these things, the Scholars must study the earth and learn from the rivers, from the sands, from the winds and the rocks. And if we went to the Home of the Scholars, we could learn from these also. We could ask questions of these, for they do not forbid questions.

And questions give us no rest. We know not why our curse makes us seek we know not what, ever and ever. But we cannot resist it. It whispers to us that there are great things on this earth of ours, and that we can know them if we try, and that we must know them. We ask, why must we know, but it has no answer to give us. We must know that we may know.

So we wished to be sent to the Home of the Scholars. We wished it so much that our hands trembled under the blankets in the night, and we bit our arm to stop that other pain which we could not endure. It was evil and we dared not face our brothers in the morning. For men may wish nothing for themselves. And we were punished when the Council of Vocations came to give us our life Mandates which tell those who reach their fifteenth year what their work is to be for the rest of their days.

The Council of Vocations came on the first day of spring, and they sat in the great hall. And we who were fifteen and all the Teachers came into the great hall. And the Council of Vocations sat on a high dais, and they had but two words to speak to each of the Students. They called the Students’ names, and when the Students stepped before them, one after another, the Council said: “Carpenter” or “Doctor” or “Cook” or “Leader.” Then each Student raised their right arm and said: “The will of our brothers be done.”

Now if the Council has said “Carpenter” or “Cook,” the Students so assigned go to work and they do not study any further. But if the Council has said “Leader,” then those Students go into the Home of the Leaders, which is the greatest house in the City, for it has three stories. And there they study for many years, so that they may become candidates and be elected to the City Council and the State Council and the World Council—by a free and general vote of all men. But we wished not to be a Leader, even though it is a great honor. We wished to be a Scholar.

So we waited our turn in the great hall and then we heard the Council of Vocations call our name: “Equality 7-2521.” We walked to the dais, and our legs did not tremble, and we looked up at the Council. There were five members of the Council, three of the male gender and two of the female. Their hair was white and their faces were cracked as the clay of a dry river bed. They were old. They seemed older than the marble of the Temple of the World Council. They sat before us and they did not move. And we saw no breath to stir the folds of their white togas. But we knew that they were alive, for a finger of the hand of the oldest rose, pointed to us, and fell down again. This was the only thing which moved, for the lips of the oldest did not move as they said: “Street Sweeper.”

We felt the cords of our neck grow tight as our head rose higher to look upon the faces of the Council, and we were happy. We knew we had been guilty, but now we had a way to atone for it. We would accept our Life Mandate, and we would work for our brothers, gladly and willingly, and we would erase our sin against them, which they did not know, but we knew. So we were happy, and proud of ourselves and of our victory over ourselves. We raised our right arm and we spoke, and our voice was the clearest, the steadiest voice in the hall that day, and we said:

“The will of our brothers be done.”

And we looked straight into the eyes of the Council, but their eyes were as cold blue glass buttons.

So we went into the Home of the Street Sweepers. It is a grey house on a narrow street. There is a sundial in its courtyard, by which the Council of the Home can tell the hours of the day and when to ring the bell. When the bell rings, we all arise from our beds. The sky is green and cold in our windows to the east. The shadow on the sundial marks off a half-hour while we dress and eat our breakfast in the dining hall, where there are five long tables with twenty clay plates and twenty clay cups on each table. Then we go to work in the streets of the City, with our brooms and our rakes. In five hours, when the sun is high, we return to the Home and we eat our midday meal, for which one-half hour is allowed. Then we go to work again. In five hours, the shadows are blue on the pavements, and the sky is blue with a deep brightness which is not bright. We come back to have our dinner, which lasts one hour. Then the bell rings and we walk in a straight column to one of the City Halls, for the Social Meeting. Other columns of men arrive from the Homes of the different Trades. The candles are lit, and the Councils of the different Homes stand in a pulpit, and they speak to us of our duties and of our brother men. Then visiting Leaders mount the pulpit and they read to us the speeches which were made in the City Council that day, for the City Council represents all men and all men must know. Then we sing hymns, the Hymn of Brotherhood, and the Hymn of Equality, and the Hymn of the Collective Spirit. The sky is a soggy purple when we return to the Home. Then the bell rings and we walk in a straight column to the City Theatre for three hours of Social Recreation. There a play is shown upon the stage, with two great choruses from the Home of the Actors, which speak and answer all together, in two great voices. The plays are about toil and how good it is. Then we walk back to the Home in a straight column. The sky is like a black sieve pierced by silver drops that tremble, ready to burst through. The moths beat against the street lanterns. We go to our beds and we sleep, till the bell rings again. The. sleeping halls are white and clean and bare of all things save one hundred beds.

Thus we lived each day of four years, until two springs ago when our crime happened. Thus must all men live until they are forty. At forty, they are worn out. At forty, they are sent to the Home of the Useless, where the Old Ones live. The Old Ones do not work, for the State takes care of them. They sit in the sun in summer and they sit by the fire in winter. They do not speak often, for they are weary. The Old Ones know that they are soon to die. When a miracle happens and some live to be forty-five, they are the Ancient Ones, and children stare at them when passing by the Home of the Useless. Such is to be our life, as that of all our brothers and of the brothers who came before us.

Such would have been our life, had we not committed our crime which changed all things for us. And it was our curse which drove us to our crime. We had been a good Street Sweeper and like all our brother Street Sweepers, save for our cursed wish to know. We looked too long at the stars at night, and at the trees and the earth. And when we cleaned the yard of the Home of the Scholars, we gathered the glass vials, the pieces of metal, the dried bones which they had discarded. We wished to keep these things to study them, but we had no place to hide them. So we carried them to the City Cesspool. And then we made the discovery.

It was on a day of the spring before last. We Street Sweepers work in brigades of three, and we were with Union 5-3992, they of the half-brain, and with International 4-8818. Now Union 5- 3992 are a sickly lad and sometimes they are stricken with convulsions, when their mouth froths and their eyes turn white. But International 4- 8818 are different. They are a tall, strong youth and their eyes are like fireflies, for there is laughter in their eyes. We cannot look upon International 4-8818 and not smile in answer. For this they were not liked in the Home of the Students, as it is not proper to smile without reason. And also they were not liked because they took pieces of coal and they drew pictures upon the walls, and they were pictures which made men laugh. But it is only our brothers in the Home of the Artists who are permitted to draw pictures, so International 4-8818 were sent to the Home of the Street Sweepers, like ourselves.

International 4-8818 and we are friends. This is an evil thing to say, for it is a transgression, the great Transgression of Preference, to love any among men better than the others, since we must love all men and all men are our friends. So International 4-8818 and we have never spoken of it. But we know. We know, when we look into each other’s eyes. And when we look thus without words, we both know other things also, strange things for which there are no words, and these things frighten us.

So on that day of the spring before last, Union 5-3992 were stricken with convulsions on the edge of the City, near the City Theatre. We left them to lie in the shade of the Theatre tent and we went with International 4-8818 to finish our work. We came together to the great ravine behind the Theatre. It is empty save for trees and weeds. Beyond the ravine there is a plain, and beyond the plain there lies the Uncharted Forest, about which men must not think.

We were gathering the papers and the rags which the wind had blown from the Theatre, when we saw an iron bar among the weeds. It was old and rusted by many rains. We pulled with all our strength, but we could not move it. So we called International 4-8818, and together we scraped the earth around the bar. Of a sudden the earth fell in before us, and we saw an old iron grill over a black hole.

International 4-8818 stepped back. But we pulled at the grill and it gave way. And then we saw iron rings as steps leading down a shaft into a darkness without bottom.

“We shall go down,” we said to International 4-8818.

“It is forbidden,” they answered.

We said: “The Council does not know of this hole, so it cannot be forbidden.”

And they answered: “Since the Council does not know of this hole, there can be no law permitting to enter. And everything which is not permitted by law is forbidden.”

But we said: “We shall go, nonetheless.”

They were frightened, but they stood by and watched us go.

We hung on the iron rings with our hands and our feet. We could see nothing below us. And above us the hole open upon the sky grew smaller and smaller, till it came to be the size of a button. But still we went down. Then our foot touched the ground. We rubbed our eyes, for we could not see. Then our eyes became used to the darkness, but we could not believe what we saw.

No men known to us could have built this place, nor the men known to our brothers who lived before us, and yet it was built by men. It was a great tunnel. Its walls were hard and smooth to the touch; it felt like stone, but it was not stone. On the ground there were long thin tracks of iron, but it was not iron; it felt smooth and cold as glass. We knelt, and we crawled forward, our hand groping along the iron line to see where it would lead. But there was an unbroken night ahead. Only the iron tracks glowed through it, straight and white, calling us to follow. But we could not follow, for we were losing the puddle of light behind us. So we turned and we crawled back, our hand on the iron line. And our heart beat in our fingertips, without reason. And then we knew.

We knew suddenly that this place was left from the Unmentionable Times. So it was true, and those Times had been, and all the wonders of those Times. Hundreds upon hundreds of years ago men knew secrets which we have lost. And we thought: “This is a foul place. They are damned who touch the things of the Unmentionable Times.” But our hand which followed the track, as we crawled, clung to the iron as if it would not leave it, as if the skin of our hand were thirsty and begging of the metal some secret fluid beating in its coldness.

We returned to the earth. International 4-8818 looked upon us and stepped back.

“Equality 7-2521,” they said, “your face is white.”

But we could not speak and we stood looking upon them.

They backed away, as if they dared not touch us. Then they smiled, but it was not a gay smile; it was lost and pleading. But still we could not speak. Then they said:

“We shall report our find to the City Council and both of us will be rewarded.”

And then we spoke. Our voice was hard and there was no mercy in our voice. We said:

“We shall not report our find to the City Council. We shall not report it to any men.”

They raised their hands to their ears, for never had they heard such words as these.

“International 4-8818,” we asked, “will you report us to the Council and see us lashed to death before your eyes?”

They stood straight of a sudden and they answered:

“Rather would we die.”

“Then,” we said, “keep silent. This place is ours. This place belongs to us, Equality 7-2521, and to no other men on earth. And if ever we surrender it, we shall surrender our life with it also.”

Then we saw that the eyes of International 4-8818 were full to the lids with tears they dared not drop. They whispered, and their voice trembled, so that their words lost all shape:

“The will of the Council is above all things, for it is the will of our brothers, which is holy. But if you wish it so, we shall obey you. Rather shall we be evil with you than good with all our brothers. May the Council have mercy upon both our hearts!”

Then we walked away together and back to the Home of the Street Sweepers. And we walked in silence.

Thus did it come to pass that each night, when the stars are high and the Street Sweepers sit in the City Theatre, we, Equality 7-2521, steal out and run through the darkness to our place. It is easy to leave the Theatre; when the candles are blown and the Actors come onto the stage, no eyes can see us as we crawl under our seat and under the cloth of the tent. Later, it is easy to steal through the shadows and fall in line next to International 4-8818, as the column leaves the Theatre. It is dark in the streets and there are no men about, for no men may walk through the City when they have no mission to walk there. Each night, we run to the ravine, and we remove the stones which we have piled upon the iron grill to hide it from men. Each night, for three hours, we are under the earth, alone.

We have stolen candles from the Home of the Street Sweepers, we have stolen flints and knives and paper, and we have brought them to this place. We have stolen glass vials and powders and acids from the Home of the Scholars. Now we sit in the tunnel for three hours each night and we study. We melt strange metals, and we mix acids, and we cut open the bodies of the animals which we find in the City Cesspool. We have built an oven of the bricks we gathered in the streets. We burn the wood we find in the ravine. The fire flickers in the oven and blue shadows dance upon the walls, and there is no sound of men to disturb us.

We have stolen manuscripts. This is a great of fense. Manuscripts are precious, for our brothers in the Home of the Clerks spend one year to copy one single script in their clear handwriting. Manuscripts are rare and they are kept in the Home of the Scholars. So we sit under the earth and we read the stolen scripts. Two years have passed since we found this place. And in these two years we have learned more than we had learned in the ten years of the Home of the Students.

We have learned things which are not in the scripts. We have solved secrets of which the Scholars have no knowledge. We have come to see how great is the unexplored, and many lifetimes will not bring us to the end of our quest. But we wish no end to our quest. We wish nothing, save to be alone and to learn, and to feel as if with each day our sight were growing sharper than the hawk’s and clearer than rock crystal.

Strange are the ways of evil. We are false in the faces of our brothers. We are defying the will of our Councils. We alone, of the thousands who walk this earth, we alone in this hour are doing a work which has no purpose save that we wish to do it. The evil of our crime is not for the human mind to probe. The nature of our punishment, if it be discovered, is not for the human heart to ponder. Never, not in the memory of the Ancient Ones’ Ancients, never have men done that which we are doing.

And yet there is no shame in us and no regret. We say to ourselves that we are a wretch and a traitor. But we feel no burden upon our spirit and no fear in our heart. And it seems to us that our spirit is clear as a lake troubled by no eyes save those of the sun. And in our heart—strange are the ways of evil!—in our heart there is the first peace we have known in twenty years.

II

LIBERTY 5-3000 ... Liberty five-three thousand ... Liberty 5-3000....

We wish to write this name. We wish to speak it, but we dare not speak it above a whisper. For men are forbidden to take notice of women, and women are forbidden to take notice of men. But we think of one among women, they whose name is Liberty 5- 3000, and we think of no others.

The women who have been assigned to work the soil live in the Home of the Peasants beyond the City. Where the City ends there is a great road winding off to the north, and we Street Sweepers must keep this road clean to the first mile-post. There is a hedge along the road, and beyond the hedge lie the fields. The fields are black and ploughed, and they lie like a great fan before us, with their furrows gathered in some hand beyond the sky, spreading forth from that hand, opening wide apart as they come toward us, like black pleats that sparkle with thin, green spangles. Women work in the fields, and their white tunics in the wind are like the wings of sea-gulls beating over the black soil.

And there it was that we saw Liberty 5-3000 walking along the furrows. Their body was straight and thin as a blade of iron. Their eyes were dark and hard and glowing, with no fear in them, no kindness and no guilt. Their hair was golden as the sun; their hair flew in the wind, shining and wild, as if it defied men to restrain it. They threw seeds from their hand as if they deigned to fling a scornful gift, arid the earth was as a beggar under their feet.

We stood still; for the first time did we know fear, and then pain. And we stood still that we might not spill this pain more precious than pleasure.

Then we heard a voice from the others call their name: “Liberty 5-3000,” and they turned and walked back. Thus we learned their name, and we stood watching them go, till their white tunic was lost in the blue mist.

And the following day, as we came to the northern road, we kept our eyes upon Liberty 5-3000 in the field. And each day thereafter we knew the illness of waiting for our hour on the northern road. And there we looked at Liberty 5-3000 each day. We know not whether they looked at us also, but we think they did.

Then one day they came close to the hedge, and suddenly they turned to us. They turned in a whirl and the movement of their body stopped, as if slashed off, as suddenly as it had started. They stood still as a stone, and they looked straight upon us, straight into our eyes. There was no smile on their face, and no welcome. But their face was taut, and their eyes were dark. Then they turned as swiftly, and they walked away from us.

But the following day, when we came to the road, they smiled. They smiled to us and for us. And we smiled in answer. Their head fell back, and their arms fell, as if their arms and their thin white neck were stricken suddenly with a great lassitude. They were not long looking upon us, but upon the sky. Then they glanced at us over their shoulder, and we felt as if a hand had touched our body, slipping softly from our lips to our feet.

Every morning thereafter, we greeted each other with our eyes. We dared not speak. It is a transgression to speak to men of other Trades, save in groups at the Social Meetings. But once, standing at the hedge, we raised our hand to our forehead and then moved it slowly, palm down, toward Liberty 5-3000. Had the others seen it, they could have guessed nothing, for it looked only as if we were shading our eyes from the sun. But Liberty 5-3000 saw it and understood. They raised their hand to their forehead and moved it as we had. Thus, each day, we greet Liberty 5-3000, and they answer, and no men can suspect.

We do not wonder at this new sin of ours. It is our second Transgression of Preference, for we do not think of all our brothers, as we must, but only of one, and their name is Liberty 5-3000. We do not know why we think of them. We do not know why, when we think of them, we feel of a sudden that the earth is good and that it is not a burden to live.

We do not think of them as Liberty 5-3000 any longer. We have given them a name in our thoughts. We call them the Golden One. But it is a sin to give men names which distinguish them from other men. Yet we call them the Golden One, for they are not like the others. The Golden One are not like the others.

And we take no heed of the law which says that men may not think of women, save at the Time of Mating. This is the time each spring when all the men older than twenty and all the women older than eighteen are sent for one night to the City Palace of Mating. And each of the men have one of the women assigned to them by the Council of Eugenics. Children are born each winter, but women never see their children and children never know their parents. Twice have we been sent to the Palace of Mating, but it is an ugly and shameful matter, of which we do not like to think.

We had broken so many laws, and today we have broken one more. Today, we spoke to the Golden One.

The other women were far off in the field, when we stopped at the hedge by the side of the road. The Golden One were kneeling alone at the moat which runs through the field. And the drops of water falling from their hands, as they raised the water to their lips, were like sparks of fire in the sun. Then the Golden One saw us, and they did not move, kneeling there, looking at us, and circles of light played upon their white tunic, from the sun on the water of the moat, and one sparkling drop fell from a finger of their hand held as frozen in the air.

Then the Golden One rose and walked to the hedge, as if they had heard a command in our eyes. The two other Street Sweepers of our brigade were a hundred paces away down the road. And we thought that International 4-8818 would not betray us, and Union 5-3992 would not understand. So we looked straight upon the Golden One, and we saw the shadows of their lashes on their white cheeks and the sparks of sun on their lips. And we said:

“You are beautiful, Liberty 5-3000.”

Their face did not move and they did not avert their eyes. Only their eyes grew wider, and there was triumph in their eyes, and it was not triumph over us, but over things we could not guess.

Then they asked:

“What is your name?”

“Equality 7-2521,” we answered.

“You are not one of our brothers, Equality 7-2521, for we do not wish you to be.”

We cannot say what they meant, for there are no words for their meaning, but we know it without words and we knew it then.

“No,” we answered, “nor are you one of our sisters.”

“If you see us among scores of women, will you look upon us?”

“We shall look upon you, Liberty 5-3000, if we see you among all the women of the earth.”

Then they asked:

“Are the Street Sweepers sent to different parts of the City or do they always work in the same places?”

“They always work in the same places,” we answered, “and no one will take this road away from us.

“Your eyes,” they said, “are not like the eyes of any among men.”

And suddenly, without cause for the thought which came to us, we felt cold, cold to our stomach.

“How old are you?” we asked.

They understood our thought, for they lowered their eyes for the first time.

“Seventeen,” they whispered.

And we sighed, as if a burden had been taken from us, for we had been thinking without reason of the Palace of Mating. And we thought that we would not let the Golden One be sent to the Palace. How to prevent it, how to bar the will of the Councils, we knew not, but we knew suddenly that we would. Only we do not know why such thought came to us, for these ugly matters bear no relation to us and the Golden One. What relation can they bear?

Still, without reason, as we stood there by the hedge, we felt our lips drawn tight with hatred, a sudden hatred for all our brother men. And the Golden One saw it and smiled slowly, and there was in their smile the first sadness we had seen in them. We think that in the wisdom of women the Golden One had understood more than we can understand.

Then three of the sisters in the field appeared, coming toward the road, so the Golden One walked away from us. They took the bag of seeds, and they threw the seeds into the furrows of earth as they walked away. But the seeds flew wildly, for the hand of the Golden One was trembling.

Yet as we walked back to the Home of the Street Sweepers, we felt that we wanted to sing, without reason. So we were reprimanded tonight, in the dining hall, for without knowing it we had begun to sing aloud some tune we had never heard. But it is not proper to sing without reason, save at the Social Meetings.

“We are singing because we are happy,” we answered the one of the Home Council who reprimanded us.

“Indeed you are happy,” they answered. “How else can men be when they live for their brothers?”

And now, sitting here in our tunnel, we wonder about these words. It is forbidden, not to be happy. For, as it has been explained to us, men are free and the earth belongs to them; and all things on earth belong to all men; and the will of all men together is good for all; and so all men must be happy.

Yet as we stand at night in the great hall, removing our garments for sleep, we look upon our brothers and we wonder. The heads of our brothers are bowed. The eyes of our brothers are dull, and never do they look one another in the eyes. The shoulders of our brothers are hunched, and their muscles are drawn, as if their bodies were shrinking and wished to shrink out of sight. And a word steals into our mind, as we look upon our brothers, and that word is fear.

There is fear hanging in the air of the sleeping halls, and in the air of the streets. Fear walks through the City, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare to speak.

We feel it also, when we are in the Home of the Street Sweepers. But here, in our tunnel, we feel it no longer. The air is pure under the ground. There is no odor of men. And these three hours give us strength for our hours above the ground.

Our body is betraying us, for the Council of the Home looks with suspicion upon us. It is not good to feel too much joy nor to be glad that our body lives. For we matter not and it must not matter to us whether we live or die, which is to be as our brothers will it. But we, Equality 7-2521, are glad to be living. If this is a vice, then we wish no virtue.

Yet our brothers are not like us. All is not well with our brothers. There are Fraternity 2-5503, a quiet boy with wise, kind eyes, who cry suddenly, without reason, in the midst of day or night, and their body shakes with sobs they cannot explain. There are Solidarity 9-6347, who are a bright youth, without fear in the day; but they scream in their sleep, and they scream: “Help us! Help us! Help us!” into the night, in a voice which chills our bones, but the Doctors cannot cure Solidarity 9-6347.

And as we all undress at night, in the dim light of the candles, our brothers are silent, for they dare not speak the thoughts of their minds. For all must agree with all, and they cannot know if their thoughts are the thoughts of all, and so they fear to speak. And they are glad when the candles are blown for the night. But we, Equality 7-2521, look through the window upon the sky, and there is peace in the sky, and cleanliness, and dignity. And beyond the City there lies the plain, and beyond the plain, black upon the black sky, there lies the Uncharted Forest.

We do not wish to look upon the Uncharted Forest. We do not wish to think of it. But ever do our eyes return to that black patch upon the sky. Men never enter the Uncharted Forest, for there is no power to explore it and no path to lead among its ancient trees which stand as guards of fearful secrets. It is whispered that once or twice in a hundred years, one among the men of the City escape alone and run to the Uncharted Forest, without call or reason. These men do not return. They perish from hunger and from the claws of the wild beasts which roam the Forest. But our Councils say that this is only a legend. We have heard that there are many Uncharted Forests over the land, among the Cities. And it is whispered that they have grown over the ruins of many cities of the Unmentionable Times. The trees have swallowed the ruins, and the bones under the ruins, and all the things which perished.

And as we look upon the Uncharted Forest far in the night, we think of the secrets of the Unmentionable Times. And we wonder how it came to pass that these secrets were lost to the world. We have heard the legends of the great fighting, in which many men fought on one side and only a few on the other. These few were the Evil Ones and they were conquered. Then great fires raged over the land. And in these fires the Evil Ones and all the things made by the Evil Ones were burned. And the fire which is called the Dawn of the Great Rebirth, was the Script Fire where all the scripts of the Evil Ones were burned, and with them all the words of the Evil Ones. Great mountains of flame stood in the squares of the Cities for three months. Then came the Great Rebirth.

The words of the Evil Ones ... The words of the Unmentionable Times ... What are the words which we have lost?

May the Council have mercy upon us! We had no wish to write such a question, and we knew not what we were doing till we had written it. We shall not ask this question and we shall not think it. We shall not call death upon our head.

And yet ... And yet ...

There is some word, one single word which is not in the language of men, but which had been. And this is the Unspeakable Word, which no men may speak nor hear. But sometimes, and it is rare, sometimes, somewhere, one among men find that word. They find it upon scraps of old manuscripts or cut into the fragments of ancient stones. But when they speak it they are put to death. There is no crime punished by death in this world, save this one crime of speaking the Unspeakable Word.

We have seen one of such men burned alive in the square of the City. And it was a sight which has stayed with us through the years, and it haunts us, and follows us, and it gives us no rest. We were a child then, ten years old. And we stood in the great square with all the children and all the men of the City, sent to behold the burning. They brought the Transgressor out into the square and they led him to the pyre. They had torn out the tongue of the Transgressor, so that they could speak no longer. The Transgressor were young and tall. They had hair of gold and eyes of blue as morning. They walked to the pyre, and their step did not falter. And of all the faces on that square, of all the faces which shrieked and screamed and spat curses upon them, theirs was the calmest and the happiest face.

As the chains were wound over their body at the stake, and a flame set to the pyre, the Transgressor looked upon the City. There was a thin thread of blood running from the corner of their mouth, but the lips were smiling. And a monstrous thought came to us then, which has never left us. We had heard of Saints. There are the Saints of Labor, and the Saints of the Councils, and the Saints of the Great Rebirth. But we had never seen a Saint nor what the likeness of a Saint should be. And we thought then, standing in the square, that the likeness of a Saint was the face we saw before us in the flames, the face of the Transgressor of the Unspeakable Word.

As the flames rose, a thing happened which no eyes saw but ours, else we would not be living today. Perhaps it had only seemed to us. But it seemed to us that the eyes of the Transgressor had chosen us from the crowd and were looking straight upon us. There was no pain in their eyes and no knowledge of the agony of their body. There was only joy in them, and pride, a pride holier than it is fit for human pride to be. And it seemed as if these eyes were trying to tell us something through the flames, to send into our eyes some word without sound. And it seemed as if these eyes were begging us to gather that word and not to let it go from us and from the earth. But the flames rose and we could not guess the word ...

What—even if we have to burn for it like the Saint of the pyre—what is the Unspeakable Word?

III

WE, Equality 7-2521, HAVE discovered a new power of nature. And we have discovered it alone, and we are alone to know it.

It is said. Now let us be lashed for it, if we must. The Council of Scholars has said that we all know the things which exist and therefore the things which are not known by all do not exist. But we think that the Council of Scholars is blind. The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them. We know, for we have found a secret unknown to all our brothers.

We know not what this power is nor whence it comes. But we know its nature, we have watched it and worked with it. We saw it first two years ago. One night, we were cutting open the body of a dead frog when we saw its leg jerking. It was dead, yet it moved. Some power unknown to men was making it move. We could not understand it. Then, after many tests, we found the answer. The frog had been hanging on a wire of copper; and it had been the metal of our knife which had sent a strange power to the copper through the brine of the frog’s body. We put a piece of copper and a piece of zinc into a jar of brine, we touched a wire to them, and there, under our fingers, was a miracle which had never occurred before, a new miracle and a new power.

This discovery haunted us. We followed it in preference to all our studies. We worked with it, we tested it in more ways than we can describe, and each step was as another miracle unveiling before us. We came to know that we had found the greatest power on earth. For it defies all the laws known to men. It makes the needle move and turn on the compass which we stole from the Home of the Scholars; but we had been taught, when still a child, that the lodestone points to the north and that this is a law which nothing can change; yet our new power defies all laws. We found that it causes lightning, and never have men known what causes lightning. In thunderstorms, we raised a tall rod of iron by the side of our hole, and we watched it from below. We have seen the lightning strike it again and again. And now we know that metal draws the power of the sky, and that metal can be made to give it forth.

We have built strange things with this discovery of ours. We used for it the copper wires which we found here under the ground. We have walked the length of our tunnel, with a candle lighting the way. We could go no farther than half a mile, for earth and rock had fallen at both ends. But we gathered all the things we found and we brought them to our work place. We found strange boxes with bars of metal inside, with many cords and strands and coils of metal. We found wires that led to strange little globes of glass on the walls; they contained threads of metal thinner than a spider’s web.

These things help us in our work. We do not understand them, but we think that the men of the Unmentionable Times had known our power of the sky, and these things had some relation to it. We do not know, but we shall learn. We cannot stop now, even though it frightens us that we are alone in our knowledge.

No single one can possess greater wisdom than the many Scholars who are elected by all men for their wisdom. Yet we can. We do. We have fought against saying it, but now it is said. We do not care. We forget all men, all laws and all things save our metals and our wires. So much is still to be learned! So long a road lies before us, and what care we if we must travel it alone!

IV

MANY DAYS PASSED BEFORE we could speak to the Golden One again. But then came the day when the sky turned white, as if the sun had burst and spread its flame in the air, and the fields lay still without breath, and the dust of the road was white in the glow. So the women of the field were weary, and they tarried over their work, and they were far from the road when we came. But the Golden One stood alone at the hedge, waiting. We stopped and we saw that their eyes, so hard and scornful to the world, were looking at us as if they would obey any word we might speak.

And we said:

“We have given you a name in our thoughts, Liberty 5-3000.”

“What is our name?” they asked.

“The Golden One.”

“Nor do we call you Equality 7-2521 when we think of you.”

“What name have you given us?”

They looked straight into our eyes and they held their head high and they answered:

“The Unconquered.”

For a long time we could not speak. Then we said:

“Such thoughts as these are forbidden, Golden One.”

“But you think such thoughts as these and you wish us to think them.”

We looked into their eyes and we could not lie.

“Yes,” we whispered, and they smiled, and then we said: “Our dearest one, do not obey us.”

They stepped back, and their eyes were wide and still.

“Speak these words again,” they whispered.

“Which words?” we asked. But they did not answer, and we knew it.

“Our dearest one,” we whispered.

Never have men said this to women.

The head of the Golden One bowed slowly, and they stood still before us, their arms at their sides, the palms of their hands turned to us, as if their body were delivered in submission to our eyes. And we could not speak.

Then they raised their head, and they spoke simply and gently, as if they wished us to forget some anxiety of their own.

“The day is hot,” they said, “and you have worked for many hours and you must be weary.”

“No,” we answered.

“It is cooler in the fields,” they said, “and there is water to drink. Are you thirsty?”

“Yes,” we answered, “but we cannot cross the hedge.”

“We shall bring the water to you,” they said.

Then they knelt by the moat, they gathered water in their two hands, they rose and they held the water out to our lips.

We do not know if we drank that water. We only knew suddenly that their hands were empty, but we were still holding our lips to their hands, and that they knew it, but did not move.

We raised our head and stepped back. For we did not understand what had made us do this, and we were afraid to understand it.

And the Golden One stepped back, and stood looking upon their hands in wonder. Then the Golden One moved away, even though no others were coming, and they moved stepping back, as if they could not turn from us, their arms bent before them, as if they could not lower their hands.

V

WE MADE IT. WE CREATED IT. We brought it forth from the night of the ages. We alone. Our hands. Our mind. Ours alone and only.

We know not what we are saying. Our head is reeling. We look upon the light which we have made. We shall be forgiven for anything we say tonight....

Tonight, after more days and trials than we can count, we finished building a strange thing, from the remains of the Unmentionable Times, a box of glass, devised to give forth the power of the sky of greater strength than we had ever achieved before. And when we put our wires to this box, when we closed the current—the wire glowed! It came to life, it turned red, and a circle of light lay on the stone before us.

We stood, and we held our head in our hands. We could not conceive of that which we had created. We had touched no flint, made no fire. Yet here was light, light that came from nowhere, light from the heart of metal.

We blew out the candle. Darkness swallowed us. There was nothing left around us, nothing save night and a thin thread of flame in it, as a crack in the wall of a prison. We stretched our hands to the wire, and we saw our fingers in the red glow. We could not see our body nor feel it, and in that moment nothing existed save our two hands over a wire glowing in a black abyss.

Then we thought of the meaning of that which lay before us. We can light our tunnel, and the City, and all the Cities of the world with nothing save metal and wires. We can give our brothers a new light, cleaner and brighter, than any they have ever known. The power of the sky can be made to do men’s bidding. There are no limits to its secrets and its might, and it can be made to grant us anything if we but choose to ask.

Then we knew what we must do. Our discovery is too great for us to waste our time in sweeping the streets. We must not keep our secret to ourselves, not buried under the ground. We must bring it into the sight of men. We need all our time, we need the work rooms of the Home of the Scholars, we want the help of our brother Scholars and their wisdom joined to ours. There is so much work ahead for all of us, for all the Scholars of the world.

In a month, the World Council of Scholars is to meet in our City. It is a great Council, to which the wisest of all lands are elected, and it meets once a year in the different Cities of the earth. We shall go to this Council and we shall lay before them, as our gift, the glass box with the power of the sky. We shall confess everything to them. They will see, understand and forgive. For our gift is greater than our transgression. They will explain it to the Council of Vocations, and we shall be assigned to the Home of the Scholars. This has never been done before, but neither has a gift such as ours ever been offered to men.

We must wait. We must guard our tunnel as we had never guarded it before. For should any men save the Scholars learn of our secret, they would not understand it, nor would they believe us. They would see nothing, save our crime of working alone, and they would destroy us and our light. We care not about our own body, but our light is ...

Yes, we do care. For the first time do we care about our body. For this wire is as a part of our body, as a vein torn from us, glowing with our blood. Are we proud of this thread of metal, or of our hands which made it, or is there a line to divide these two?

We stretch out our arms. For the first time do we know how strong our arms are. And a strange thought comes to us: we wonder, for the first time in our life, what we look like. Men never see their own faces and never ask their brothers about it, for it is evil to have concern for their own faces or bodies. But tonight, for a reason we cannot fathom, we wish it were possible to us to know the likeness of our own person.

VI

WE HAVE NOT WRITTEN for thirty days. For thirty days we have not been here, in our tunnel. We had been caught.

It happened on that night when we wrote last. We forgot, that night, to watch the sand in the glass which tells us when three hours have passed and it is time to return to the City Theatre. When we remembered it, the sand had run out.

We hastened to the Theatre. But the big tent stood grey and silent against the sky. The streets of the City lay before us, dark and empty. If we went back to hide in our tunnel, we would be found and our light found with us. So we walked to the Home of the Street Sweepers.

When the Council of the Home questioned us, we looked upon the faces of the Council, but there was no curiosity in those faces, and no anger, and no mercy. So when the oldest of them asked us: “Where have you been?” we thought of our glass box and of our light, and we forgot all else. And we answered:

“We will not tell you.”

The oldest did not question us further. They turned to the two youngest, and said, and their voice was bored:

“Take our brother Equality 7-2521 to the Palace of Corrective Detention. Lash them until they tell.”

So we were taken to the Stone Room under the Palace of Corrective Detention. This room has no windows and it is empty save for an iron post. Two men stood by the post, naked but for leather aprons and leather hoods over their faces. Those who had brought us departed, leaving us to the two Judges who stood in a corner of the room. The Judges were small, thin men, grey and bent. They gave the signal to the two strong hooded ones.

They tore our clothes from our body, they threw us down upon our knees and they tied our hands to the iron post.

The first blow of the lash felt as if our spine had been cut in two. The second blow stopped the first, and for a second we felt nothing, then the pain struck us in our throat and fire ran in our lungs without air. But we did not cry out.

The lash whistled like a singing wind. We tried to count the blows, but we lost count. We knew that the blows were falling upon our back. Only we felt nothing upon our back any longer. A gaming grill kept dancing before our eyes, and we thought of nothing save that grill, a grill, a grill of red squares, and then we knew that we were looking at the squares of the iron grill in the door, and there were also the squares of stone on the walls, and the squares which the lash was cutting upon our back, crossing and re-crossing itself in our flesh.

Then we saw a fist before us. It knocked our chin up, and we saw the red froth of our mouth on the withered fingers, and the Judge asked:

“Where have you been?”

But we jerked our head away, hid our face upon our tied hands, and bit our lips.

The lash whistled again. We wondered who was sprinkling burning coal dust upon the floor, for we saw drops of red twinkling on the stones around us.

Then we knew nothing, save two voices snarling steadily, one after the other, even though we knew they were speaking many minutes apart:

“Where have you been where have you been where have you been where have you been? ...”

And our lips moved, but the sound trickled back into our throat, and the sound was only:

“The light ... The light ... The light....”

Then we knew nothing.

We opened our eyes, lying on our stomach on the brick floor of a cell. We looked upon two hands lying far before us on the bricks, and we moved them, and we knew that they were our hands. But we could not move our body. Then we smiled, for we thought of the light and that we had not betrayed it.

We lay in our cell for many days. The door opened twice each day, once for the men who brought us bread and water, and once for the Judges. Many Judges came to our cell, first the humblest and then the most honored Judges of the City. They stood before us in their white togas, and they asked:

“Are you ready to speak?”

But we shook our head, lying before them on the floor. And they departed.

We counted each day and each night as it passed. Then, tonight, we knew that we must escape. For tomorrow the World Council of Scholars is to meet in our City.

It was easy to escape from the Palace of Corrective Detention. The locks are old on the doors and there are no guards about. There is no reason to have guards, for men have never defied the Councils so far as to escape from whatever place they were ordered to be. Our body is healthy and strength returns to it speedily. We lunged against the door and it gave way. We stole through the dark passages, and through dark streets, and down our tunnel.

We lit the candle and we saw that our place had not been found and nothing had been touched. And our glass box stood before us on the cold oven, as we had left it. What matter they now, the scars upon our back!

Tomorrow, in the full light of day, we shall take our box, and leave our tunnel open, and walk through the streets to the Home of the Scholars. We shall put before them the greatest gift ever offered to men. We shall tell them the truth. We shall hand to them, as our confession, these pages we have written. We shall join our hands to theirs, and we shall work together, with the power of the sky, for the glory of mankind. Our blessing upon you, our brothers! Tomorrow, you will take us back into your fold and we shall be an outcast no longer. Tomorrow we shall be one of you again. Tomorrow ...

VII

IT IS DARK HERE IN THE FOREST. The leaves rustle over our head, black against the last gold of the sky. The moss is soft and warm. We shall sleep on this moss for many nights, till the beasts of the forest come to tear our body. We have no bed now, save the moss, and no future, save the beasts.

We are old now, yet we were young this morning, when we carried our glass box through the, streets of the City to the Home of the Scholars. No men stopped us, for there were none about from the Palace of Corrective Detention, and the others knew nothing. No men stopped us at the gate. We walked through empty passages and into the great hall where the World Council of Scholars sat in solemn meeting.

We saw nothing as we entered, save the sky in the great windows, blue and glowing. Then we saw the Scholars who sat around a long table; they were as shapeless clouds huddled at the rise of the great sky. There were men whose famous names we knew, and others from distant lands whose names we had not heard. We saw a great painting on the wall over their heads, of the twenty illustrious men who had invented the candle.

All the heads of the Council turned to us as we entered. These great and wise of the earth did not know what to think of us, and they looked upon us with wonder and curiosity, as if we were a miracle. It is true that our tunic was torn and stained with brown stains which had been blood. We raised our right arm and we said:

“Our greeting to you, our honored brothers of the World Council of Scholars!”

The Collective 0-0009, the oldest and wisest of the Council, spoke and asked:

“Who are you, our brother? For you do not look like a Scholar.”

“Our name is Equality 7-2521,” we answered, “and we are a Street Sweeper of this City.”

Then it was as if a great wind had stricken the hall, for all the Scholars spoke at once, and they were angry and frightened.

“A Street Sweeper! A Street Sweeper walking in upon the World Council of Scholars! It is not to be believed! It is against all the rules and all the laws!”

But we knew how to stop them.

“Our brothers!” we said. “We matter not, nor our transgression. It is only our brother men who matter. Give no thought to us, for we are nothing, but listen to our words, for we bring you a gift such as has never been brought to men. Listen to us, for we hold the future of mankind in our hands.”

Then they listened.

We placed our glass box upon the table before them. We spoke of it, and of our long quest, and of our tunnel, and of - our escape from the Palace of Corrective Detention. Not a hand moved in that hall, as we spoke, nor an eye. Then we put the wires to the box, and they all bent forward and sat still, watching. And we stood still, our eyes upon the wire. And slowly, slowly as a flush of blood, a red flame trembled in the wire. Then the wire glowed.

But terror struck the men of the Council. They leapt to their feet, they ran from the table, and they stood pressed against the wall, huddled together, seeking the warmth of one another’s bodies to give them courage.

We looked upon them and we laughed and said:

“Fear nothing, our brothers. There is a great power in these wires, but this power is tamed. It is yours. We give it to you.”

Still they would not move.

“We give you the power of the sky!” we cried. “We give you the key to the earth! Take it, and let us be one of you, the humblest among you. Let us all work together, and harness this power, and make it ease the toil of men. Let us throw away our candles and our torches. Let us flood our cities with light. Let us bring a new light to men!”

But they looked upon us, and suddenly we were afraid. For their eyes were still, and small, and evil.

“Our brothers!” we cried. “Have you nothing to say to us?”

Then Collective 0-0009 moved forward. They moved to the table and the others followed.

“Yes,” spoke Collective 0-0009, “we have much to say to you.”

The sound of their voice brought silence to the hall and to the beat of our heart.

“Yes,” said Collective 0-0009, “we have much to say to a wretch who have broken all the laws and who boast of their infamy! How dared you think that your mind held greater wisdom than the minds of your brothers? And if the Councils had decreed that you should be a Street Sweeper, how dared you think that you could be of greater use to men than in sweeping the streets?”

“How dared you, gutter cleaner,” spoke Fraternity 9-3452, “to hold yourself as one alone and with the thoughts of the one and not of the many?”

“You shall be burned at the stake,” said Democracy 4-6998.

“No, they shall be lashed,” said Unanimity 7-3304, “till there is nothing left under the lashes.”

“No,” said Collective 0-0009, “we cannot decide upon this, our brothers. No such crime has ever been committed, and it is not for us to judge. Nor for any small Council. We shall deliver this creature to the World Council itself and let their will be done.”

We looked upon them and we pleaded:

“Our brothers! You are right. Let the will of the Council be done upon our body. We do not care. But the light? What will you do with the light?”

Collective 0-0009 looked upon us, and they smiled.

“So you think that you found a new power,” said Collective 0-0009. “Do all your brothers think that?”

“No,” we answered.

“What is not thought by all men cannot be true,” said Collective 0-0009.

“You have worked on this alone?” asked International 1-5537.

“Yes,” we answered.

“What is not done collectively cannot be good,” said International 1-5537.

“Many men in the Homes of the Scholars have had strange new ideas in the past,” said Solidarity 8-1164, “but when the majority of their brother Scholars voted against them, they abandoned their ideas, as all men must.”

“This box is useless,” said Alliance 6-7349.

“Should it be what they claim of it,” said Harmony 9-2642, “then it would bring ruin to the Department of Candles. The Candle is a great boon to mankind, as approved by all men. Therefore it cannot be destroyed by the whim of one.”

“This would wreck the Plans of the World Council,” said Unanimity 2-9913, “and without the Plans of the World Council the sun cannot rise. It took fifty years to secure the approval of all the Councils for the Candle, and to decide upon the number needed, and to re-fit the Plans so as to make candles instead of torches. This touched upon thousands and thousands of men working in scores of States. We cannot alter the Plans again so soon”.

“And if this should lighten the toil of men,” said Similarity 5-0306, “then it is a great evil, for men have no cause to exist save in toiling for other men.”

Then Collective 0-0009 rose and pointed at our box.

“This thing,” they said, “must be destroyed.”

And all the others cried as one:

“It must be destroyed!”

Then we leapt to the table.

We seized our box, we shoved them aside, and we ran to the window. We turned and we looked at them for the last time, and-a rage, such as it is not fit for humans to know, choked our voice in our throat.

“You fools!” we cried. “You fools! You thrice-damned fools!”

We swung our fist through the windowpane, and we leapt out in a ringing rain of glass.

We fell, but we never let the box fall from our hands. Then we ran. We ran blindly, and men and houses streaked past us in a torrent without shape. And the road seemed not to be flat before us, but as if it were leaping up to meet us, and we waited for the earth to rise and strike us in the face. But we ran. We knew not where we were going. We knew only that we must run, run to the end of the world, to the end of our days.

Then we knew suddenly that we were lying on a soft earth and that we had stopped. Trees taller than we had ever seen before stood over us in a great silence. Then we knew. We were in the Uncharted Forest. We had not thought of coming here, but our legs had carried our wisdom, and our legs had brought us to the Uncharted Forest against our will.

Our glass box lay beside us. We crawled to it, we fell upon it, our face in our arms, and we lay still.

We lay thus for a long time. Then we rose, we took our box and walked on into the forest.

It mattered not where we went. We knew that men would not follow us, for they never enter the Uncharted Forest. We had nothing to fear from them. The forest disposes of its own victims. This gave us no fear either. Only we wished to be away, away from the City and from the air that touches upon the air of the City. So we walked on, our box in our arms, our heart empty.

We are doomed. Whatever days are left to us, we shall spend them alone. And we have heard of the corruption to be found in solitude. We have torn ourselves from the truth which is our brother men, and there is no road back for us, and no redemption.

We know these things, but we do not care. We care for nothing on earth. We are tired.

Only the glass box in our arms is like a living heart that gives us strength. We have lied to ourselves. We have not built this box for the good of our brothers. We built it for its own sake. It is above all our brothers to us, and its truth above their truth. Why wonder about this? We have not many days to live. We are walking to the fangs awaiting us somewhere among the great, silent trees. There is not a thing behind us to regret.

Then a blow of pain struck us, our first and our only. We thought of the Golden One. We thought of the Golden One whom we shall never see again. Then the pain passed. It is best. We are one of the Damned. It is best if the Golden One forget our name and the body which bore that name.

VIII

IT HAS BEEN A DAY OF WONDER, this, our first day in the forest.

We awoke when a ray of sunlight fell across our face. We wanted to leap to our feet, as we have had to leap every morning of our life, but we remembered suddenly that no bell had rung and that there was no bell to ring anywhere. We lay on our back, we threw our arms out, and we looked up at the sky. The leaves had edges of silver that trembled and rippled like a river of green and fire flowing high above us.

We did not wish to move. We thought suddenly that we could lie thus as long as we wished, and we laughed aloud at the thought. We could also rise, or run, or leap, or fall down again. We were thinking that these were thoughts without sense, but before we knew it our body had risen in one leap. Our arms stretched out of their own will, and our body whirled and whirled, till it raised a wind to rustle through the leaves of the bushes. Then our hands seized a branch and swung us high into a tree, with no aim save the wonder of learning the strength of our body. The branch snapped under us and we fell upon the moss that was soft as a cushion. Then our body, losing all sense, rolled over and over on the moss, dry leaves in our tunic, in our hair, in our face. And we heard suddenly that we were laughing, laughing aloud, laughing as if there were no power left in us save laughter.

Then we took our glass box, and we went on into the forest. We went on, cutting through the branches, and it was as if we were swimming through a sea of leaves, with the bushes as waves rising and falling and rising around us, and flinging their green sprays high to the treetops. The trees parted before us, calling us forward. The forest seemed to welcome us. We went on, without thought, without care, with nothing to feel save the song of our body.

We stopped when we felt hunger. We saw birds in the tree branches, and flying from under our footsteps. We picked a stone and we sent it as an arrow at a bird. It fell before us. We made a fire, we cooked the bird, and we ate it, and no meal had ever tasted better to us. And we thought suddenly that there was a great satisfaction to be found in the food which we need and obtain by our own hand. And we wished to be hungry again and soon, that we might know again this strange new pride in eating.

Then we walked on. And we came to a stream which lay as a streak of glass among the trees. It lay so still that we saw no water but only a cut in the earth, in which the trees grew down, upturned, and the sky lay at the bottom. We knelt by the stream and we bent down to drink. And then we stopped. For, upon the blue of the sky below us, we saw our own face for the first time.

We sat still and we held our breath. For our face and our body were beautiful. Our face was not like the faces of our brothers, for we felt no pity when looking upon it. Our body was not like the bodies of our brothers, for our limbs were straight and thin and hard and strong. And we thought that we could trust this being who looked upon us from the stream, and that we had nothing to fear with this being.

We walked on till the sun had set. When the shadows gathered among the trees, we stopped in a hollow between the roots, where we shall sleep tonight. And suddenly, for the first time this day, we remembered that we are the Damned. We remembered it, and we laughed.

We are writing this on the paper we had hidden in our tunic together with the written pages we had brought for the World Council of Scholars, but never given to them. We have much to speak of to ourselves, and we hope we shall find the words for it in the days to come. Now, we cannot speak, for we cannot understand.

IX

WE HAVE NOT written for many days. We did not ish to speak. For we needed no words to remember at which has happened to us.

It was on our second day in the forest that we eard steps behind us. We hid in the bushes, and we aited. The steps came closer. And then we saw the old of a white tunic among the trees, and a gleam gold.

We leapt forward, we ran to them, and we stood oking upon the Golden One.

They saw us, and their hands closed into fists, and he fists pulled their arms down, as if they wished heir arms to hold them, while their body swayed. nd they could not speak.

We dared not come too close to them. We asked, and our voice trembled:

“How come you to be here, Golden One?”

But they whispered only:

“We have found you....”

“How come you to be in the forest?” we asked.

They raised their head, and there was a great p in their voice; they answered:

“We have followed you.”

Then we could not speak, and they said:

“We heard that you had gone to the Uncha Forest, for the whole City is speaking of it. Sc the night of the day when we heard it, we ran a from the Home of the Peasants. We found the m of your feet across the plain where no men walk we followed them, and we went into the forest, we followed the path where the branches were bro by your body.”

Their white tunic was torn, and the branches cut the skin of their arms, but they spoke as if i had never taken notice of it, nor of weariness, of fear.

“We have followed you,” they said, “and we follow you wherever you go. If danger threatens we shall face it also. If it be death, we shall with you. You are damned, and we wish to s your damnation.”

They looked upon us, and their voice was low, there was bitterness and triumph in their voice:

“Your eyes are as a flame, but our brothers I neither hope nor fire. Your mouth is cut of granite, but our brothers are soft and humble. Your head is high, but our brothers cringe. You walk, but our brothers crawl. We wish to be damned with you, rather than blessed with all our brothers. Do as you please with us, but do not send us away from you.”

Then they knelt, and bowed their golden head before us.

We had never thought of that which we did. We bent to raise the Golden One to their feet, but when we touched them, it was as if madness had stricken us. We seized their body and we pressed our lips to theirs. The Golden One breathed once, and their breath was a moan, and then their arms closed around us.

We stood together for a long time. And we were frightened that we had lived for twenty-one years and had never known what joy is possible to men.

Then we said:

“Our dearest one. Fear nothing of the forest. There is no danger in solitude. We have no need of our brothers. Let us forget their good and our evil, let us forget all things save that we are together and that there is joy as a bond between us. Give us your hand. Look ahead. It is our own world, Golden One, a strange unknown world, but our own.”

Then we walked on into the forest, their hand in ours.

And that night we knew that to hold the body of women in our arms is neither ugly nor shameful, but the one ecstasy granted to the race of men.

We have walked for many days. The forest has no end, and we seek no end. But each day added to the chain of days between us and the City is like an added blessing.

We have made a bow and many arrows. We can kill more birds than we need for our food; we find water and fruit in the forest. At night, we choose a clearing, and we build a ring of fires around it. We sleep in the midst of that ring, and the beasts dare not attack us. We can see their eyes, green and yellow as coals, watching us from the tree branches beyond. The fires smolder as a crown of jewels around us, and smoke stands still in the air, in columns made blue by the moonlight. We sleep together in the midst of the ring, the arms of the Golden One around us, their head upon our breast.

Some day, we shall stop and build a house, when we shall have gone far enough. But we do not have to hasten. The days before us are without end, like the forest.

We cannot understand this new life which we have found, yet it seems so clear and so simple. When questions come to puzzle us, we walk faster, then turn and forget all things as we watch the Golden One following. The shadows of leaves fall upon their arms, as they spread the branches apart, but their shoulders are in the sun. The skin of their arms is like a blue mist, but their shoulders are white and glowing, as if the light fell not from above, but rose from under their skin. We watch the leaf which has fallen upon their shoulder, and it lies at the curve of their neck, and a drop of dew glistens upon it like a jewel. They approach us, and they stop, laughing, knowing what we think, and they wait obediently, without questions, till it pleases us to turn and go on.

We go on and we bless the earth under our feet. But questions come to us again, as we walk in silence. If that which we have found is the corruption of solitude, then what can men wish for save corruption? If this is the great evil of being alone, then what is good and what is evil?

Everything which comes from the many is good. Everything which comes from one is evil. Thus have we been taught with our first breath. We have broken the law, but we have never doubted it. Yet now, as we walk through the forest, we are learning to doubt.

There is no life for men, save in useful toil for the good of all their brothers. But we lived not, when we toiled for our brothers, we were only weary. There is no joy for men, save the joy shared with all their brothers. But the only things which taught us joy were the power we created in our wires, and the Golden One. And both these joys belong to us alone, they come from us alone, they bear no relation to our brothers, and they do not concern our brothers in any way. Thus do we wonder.

There is some error, one frightful error, in the thinking of men. What is that error? We do not know, but the knowledge struggles within us, struggles to be born.

Today, the Golden One stopped suddenly and said:

“We love you.”

But then they frowned and shook their head and looked at us helplessly.

“No,” they whispered, “that is not what we wished to say.”

They were silent, then they spoke slowly, and their words were halting, like the words of a child learning to speak for the first time:

“We are one ... alone ... and only ... and we love you who are one ... alone ... and only.”

We looked into each other’s eyes and we knew that the breath of a miracle had touched us, and fled, and left us groping vainly.

And we felt torn, torn for some word we could not find.

X

WE ARE SITTING AT A TABLE and we are writing this upon paper made thousands of years ago. The light is dim, and we cannot see the Golden One, only one lock of gold on the pillow of an ancient bed. This is our home.

We came upon it today, at sunrise. For many days we had been crossing a chain of mountains. The forest rose among the cliffs, and whenever we walked out upon a barren stretch of rock we saw great peaks before us in the west, and to the north of us, and to the south, as far as our eyes could see. The peaks were red and brown, with the green streaks of forests as veins upon them, with blue mists as veils over their heads. We had never heard of these mountains, nor seen them marked on any map. The Uncharted Forest has protected them from the Cities and from the men of the Cities.

We climbed paths where the wild goat dared not follow. Stones rolled from under our feet, and we heard them striking the rocks below, farther and farther down, and the mountains rang with each stroke, and long after the strokes had died. But we went on, for we knew that no men would ever follow our track nor reach us here.

Then today, at sunrise, we saw a white flame among the trees, high on a sheer peak before us. We thought that it was a fire and we stopped. But the flame was unmoving, yet blinding as liquid metal. So we climbed toward it through the rocks. And there, before us, on a broad summit, with the mountains rising behind it, stood a house such as we had never seen, and the white fire came from the sun on the glass of its windows.

The house had two stories and a strange roof flat as a floor. There was more window than wall upon its walls, and the windows went on straight around the corners, though how this kept the house standing we could not guess. The walls were hard and smooth, of that stone unlike stone which we had seen in our tunnel.

We both knew it without words: this house was left from the Unmentionable Times. The trees had protected it from time and weather, and from men who have less pity than time and weather. We turned to the Golden One and we asked:

“Are you afraid?”

But they shook their head. So we walked to the door, and we threw it open, and we stepped together into the house of the Unmentionable Times.

We shall need the days and the years ahead, to look, to learn and to understand the things of this house. Today, we could only look and try to believe the sight of our eyes. We pulled the heavy curtains from the windows and we saw that the rooms were small, and we thought that not more than twelve men could have lived here. We thought it was strange that men had been permitted to build a house for only twelve.

Never had we seen rooms so full of light. The sunrays danced upon colors, colors, more colors than we thought possible, we who had seen no houses save the white ones, the brown ones and the grey. There were great pieces of glass on the walls, but it was not glass, for when we looked upon it we saw our own bodies and all the things behind us, as on the face of a lake. There were strange things which we had never seen and the use of which we do not know. And there were globes of glass everywhere, in each room, the globes with the metal cobwebs inside, such as we had seen in our tunnel.

We found the sleeping hall and we stood in awe upon its threshold. For it was a small room and there were only two beds in it. We found no other beds in the house, and then we knew that only two had lived here, and this passes understanding. What kind of world did they have, the men of the Unmentionable Times?

We found garments, and the Golden One gasped at the sight of them. For they were not white tunics, nor white togas; they were of all colors, no two of them alike. Some crumbled to dust as we touched them. But others were of heavier cloth, and they felt soft and new in our fingers.

We found a room with walls made of shelves, which held rows of manuscripts, from the floor to the ceiling. Never had we seen such a number of them, nor of such strange shape. They were not soft and rolled, they had hard shells of cloth and leather; and the letters on their pages were so small and so even that we wondered at the men who had such handwriting. We glanced through the pages, and we saw that they were written in our language, but we found many words which we could not understand. Tomorrow, we shall begin to read these scripts.

When we had seen all the rooms of the house, we looked at the Golden One and we both knew the thought in our minds.

“We shall never leave this house,” we said, “nor let it be taken from us. This is our home and the end of our journey. This is your house, Golden One, and ours, and it belongs to no other men whatever as far as the earth may stretch. We shall not share it with others, as we share not our joy with them, nor our love, nor our hunger. So be it to the end of our days.”

“Your will be done,” they said.

Then we went out to gather wood for the great hearth of our home. We brought water from the stream which runs among the trees under our windows. We killed a mountain goat, and we brought its flesh to be cooked in a strange copper pot we found in a place of wonders, which must have been the cooking room of the house.

We did this work alone, for no words of ours could take the Golden One away from the big glass which is not glass. They stood before it and they looked and looked upon their own body.

When the sun sank beyond the mountains, the Golden One fell asleep on the floor, amidst jewels, and bottles of crystal, and flowers of silk. We lifted the Golden One in our arms and we carried them to a bed, their head falling softly upon our shoulder. Then we lit a candle, and we brought paper from the room of the manuscripts, and we sat by the window, for we knew that we could not sleep tonight.

And now we look upon the earth and sky. This spread of naked rock and peaks and moonlight is like a world ready to be born, a world that waits. It seems to us it asks a sign from us, a spark, a first commandment. We cannot know what word we are to give, nor what great deed this earth expects to witness. We know it waits. It seems to say it has great gifts to lay before us, but it wishes a greater gift from us. We are to speak. We are to give its goal, its highest meaning to all this glowing space of rock and sky.

We look ahead, we beg our heart for guidance in answering this call no voice has spoken, yet we have heard. We look upon our hands. We see the dust of centuries, the dust which hid great secrets and perhaps great evils. And yet it stirs no fear within our heart, but only silent reverence and pity.

May knowledge come to us! What is the secret our heart has understood and yet will not reveal to us, although it seems to beat as if it were endeavoring to tell it?

XI

I AM. I THINK. I WILL.

My hands ... My spirit ... My sky ... My forest ... This earth of mine....

What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer.

I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.

It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear, and the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world. It is my mind which thinks, and the judgment of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth. It is my will which chooses, and the choice of my will is the only edict I must respect.

Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: “I will it!”

Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the lodestone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.

I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.

Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars.

I am a man. This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before!

I do not surrender my treasures, nor do I share them. The fortune of my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of the spirit. I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.

I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others. I covet no man’s soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.

I am neither foe nor friend to my brothers, but such as each of them shall deserve of me. And to earn my love, my brothers must do more than to have been born. I do not grant my love without reason, nor to any chance passer-by who may wish to claim it. I honor men with my love. But honor is a thing to be earned.

I shall choose my friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire. For in the temple of his spirit, each man is alone. Let each man keep his temple untouched and undefiled. Then let him join hands with others if he wishes, but only beyond his holy threshold.

For the word “We” must never be spoken, save by one’s choice and as a second thought. This word must never be placed first within man’s soul, else it becomes a monster, the root of all the evils on earth, the root of man’s torture by men, and of an unspeakable lie.

The word “We” is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages.

What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and the impotent, are my masters? What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree and to obey?

But I am done with this creed of corruption.

I am done with the monster of “We,” the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame.

And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride.

This god, this one word:

“I.”

XII

IT WAS WHEN I READ the first of the books I found in my house that I saw the word “I.” And when I understood this word, the book fell from my hands, and I wept, I who had never known tears. I wept in deliverance and in pity for all mankind.

I understood the blessed thing which I had called my curse. I understood why the best in me had been my sins and my transgressions; and why I had never felt guilt in my sins. I understood that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him.

I read many books for many days. Then I called the Golden One, and I told her what I had read and what I had learned. She looked at me and the first words she spoke were:

“I love you.”

Then I said:

“My dearest one, it is not proper for men to be without names. There was a time when each man had a name of his own to distinguish him from all other men. So let us choose our names. I have read of a man who lived many thousands of years ago, and of all the names in these books, his is the one I wish to bear. He took the light of the gods and he brought it to men, and he taught men to be gods. And he suffered for his deed as all bearers of light must suffer. His name was Prometheus.”

“It shall be your name,” said the Golden One.

“And I have read of a goddess,” I said, “who was the mother of the earth and of all the gods. Her name was Gaea. Let this be your name, my Golden One, for you are to be the mother of a new kind of gods.”

“It shall be my name,” said the Golden One.

Now I look ahead. My future is clear before me. The Saint of the pyre had seen the future when he chose me as his heir, as the heir of all the saints and all the martyrs who came before him and who died for the same cause, for the same word, no matter what name they gave to their cause and their truth.

I shall live here, in my own house. I shall take my food from the earth by the toil of my own hands. I shall learn many secrets from my books. Through the years ahead, I shall rebuild the achievements of the past, and open the way to carry them further, the achievements which are open to me, but closed forever to my brothers, for their minds are shackled to the weakest and dullest ones among them.

I have learned that my power of the sky was known to men long ago; they called it Electricity. It was the power that moved their greatest inventions. It lit this house with light which came from those globes of glass on the walls. I have found the engine which produced this light. I shall learn how to repair it and how to make it work again. I shall learn how to use the wires which carry this power. Then I shall build a barrier of wires around my home, and across the paths which lead to my home; a barrier light as a cobweb, more impassable than a wall of granite; a barrier my brothers will never be able to cross. For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute forces of their numbers. I have my mind.

Then here, on this mountain top, with the world below me and nothing above me but the sun, I shall live my own truth. Gaea is pregnant with my child. Our son will be raised as a man. He will be taught to say “I” and to bear the pride of it. He will be taught to walk straight and on his own feet. He will be taught reverence for his own spirit.

When I shall have read all the books and learned my new way, when my home will be ready and my earth tilled, I shall steal one day, for the last time, into the cursed City of my birth. I shall call to me my friend who has no name save International 4- 8818, and all those like him, Fraternity 2-5503, who cries without reason, and Solidarity 9-6347 who calls for help in the night, and a few others. I shall call to me all the men and the women whose spirit has not been killed within them and who suffer under the yoke of their brothers. They will follow me and I shall lead them to my fortress. And here, in this uncharted wilderness, I and they, my chosen friends, my fellow-builders, shall write the first chapter in the new history of man.

These are the things before me. And as I stand here at the door of glory, I look behind me for the last time. I look upon the history of men, which I have learned from the books, and I wonder. It was a long story, and the spirit which moved it was the spirit of man’s freedom. But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. This and nothing else.

At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of the freedom for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled.

But then he gave up all he had won, and fell lower than his savage beginning.

What brought it to pass? What disaster took their reason away from men? What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word “We.”

When men accepted that worship, the structure of centuries collapsed about them, the structure whose every beam had come from the thought of some one man, each in his day down the ages, from the depth of some one spirit, such spirit as existed but for its own sake. Those men who survived—those eager to obey, eager to live for one another, since they had nothing else to vindicate them—those men could neither carry on, nor preserve what they had received. Thus did all thought, all science, all wisdom perish on earth. Thus did men—men with nothing to offer save their great number—lose the steel towers, the flying ships, the power wires, all the things they had not created and could never keep. Perhaps, later, some men had been born with the mind and the courage to recover these things which were lost; perhaps these men came before the Councils of Scholars. They were answered as I have been answered—and for the same reasons.

But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate. I wonder, for it is hard for me to conceive how men who knew the word “I,” could give it up and not know what they lost. But such has been the story, for I have lived in the City of the damned, and I know what horror men permitted to be brought upon them.

Perhaps, in those days, there were a few among men, a few of clear sight and clean soul, who refused to surrender that word. What agony must have been theirs before that which they saw coming and could not stop! Perhaps they cried out in protest and in warning. But men paid no heed to their warning. And they, these few, fought a hopeless battle, and they perished with their banners smeared by their own blood. And they chose to perish, for they knew. To them, I send my salute across the centuries, and my pity.

Theirs is the banner in my hand. And I wish I had the power to tell them that the despair of their hearts was not to be final, and their night was not without hope. For the battle they lost can never be lost. For that which they died to save can never perish. Through all the darkness, through all the shame of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this earth. It may sleep, but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but it will break through. And man will go on. Man, not men.

Here, on this mountain, I and my sons and my chosen friends shall build our new land and our fort. And it will become as the heart of the earth, lost and hidden at first, but beating, beating louder each day. And word of it will reach every corner of the earth. And the roads of the world will become as veins which will carry the best of the world’s blood to my threshold. And all my brothers, and the Councils of my brothers, will hear of it, but they will be impotent against me. And the day will come when I shall break all the chains of the earth, and raze the cities of the enslaved, and my home will become the capital of a world where each man will be free to exist for his own sake.

For the coming of that day shall I fight, I and my sons and my chosen friends. For the freedom of Man. For his rights. For his life. For his honor.

And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which will not die, should we all perish in battle. The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory.

The sacred word:

EGO

READER’S GUIDE TO THE WRITINGS AND PHILOSOPHY OF AYN RAND

About Ayn Rand
The Essentials of Objectivism
Writings of Ayn Rand
Books about Ayn Rand and Objectivism
About the Ayn Rand Institute

ABOUT AYN RAND

Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia on February 2, 1905. At age six, she taught herself to read and two years later discovered her first fictional hero in a French magazine for children, thus capturing the heroic vision which sustained her throughout her life. At the age of nine, she decided to make fiction-writing her career. Thoroughly opposed to the mysticism and collectivism of Russian culture, she thought of herself as a European writer, especially after encountering authors such as Walter Scott and—in 1918—Victor Hugo, the writer she most admired.

During her high-school years, she was eyewitness to both the Kerensky Revolution, which she supported, and—in 1917—the Bolshevik Revolution, which she denounced from the outset. In order to escape the fighting, her family went to the Crimea, where she finished high school The final Communist victory brought the confiscation of her father’s pharmacy and periods of near-starvation. When introduced to American history in her last year of high school, she immediately took America as her model of what a nation of free men could be.

When her family returned from the Crimea, she entered the University of Petrograd to study philosophy and history. Graduating in 1924, she experienced the disintegration of free inquiry and the takeover of the university by communist thugs. Amidst the increasingly gray life, her one great pleasure was Western films and plays. Long a movie fan, she entered the State Institute for Cinema Arts in 1924 to study screen writing.

In late 1925, she obtained permission to leave the USSR for a visit to relatives in the United States. Although she told Soviet authorities that her visit would be short, she was determined never to return to Russia. Arriving in New York City in February 1926, she spent six months with her relatives in Chicago, obtained extensions to her visa, and then left for Hollywood to pursue a career as a screenwriter.

On her second day in Hollywood, Cecil B. DeMifle saw her standing at the gate of his studio. offered her a ride to the set of his movie The King of Kings, and gave her a job, first as an extra, then as a script reader. During the next week at the studio she met an actor, Frank O’Connor, whom she married in 1929; they were married until his death fifty years later.

After struggling for several years at various non-writing jobs, including one in the wardrobe department at RKO, she sold her first screenplay, Red Pawn, to Universal Studios in 1932 and saw her first stage play, Night of January 16th, produced in Hollywood and then on Broadway. Her first novel, We the Living, was completed in 1933 but was rejected by publishers for years, until Macmillan in the U.S. and Cassell in England published the book in 1936. The most autobiographical of her novels—it was based on her years under Soviet tyranny—We the Living was not well received by American intellectuals and reviewers. Ayn Rand was up against the pro-communism dominating the culture during “the Red Decade.”

She began writing The Fountainhead in 1935. In the character of the architect Howard Roark, she presented for the first time the kind of hero whose depiction was the chief goal of her writing: the ideal man, man as “he could be and ought to be.” The Fountainhead was rejected by twelve publishers but finally accepted by Bobbs-Merrill. When published in 1943 it made history by becoming a best seller through word-of-mouth two years later, and gained for its author lasting recognition as a champion of individualism.

Ayn Rand returned to Hollywood in late 1943 to write the screenplay for The Fountainhead, but war-time restrictions delayed production until 1948. Working part time as a screenwriter for producer Hal Wallis, she began her major novel, Atlas Shrugged, in 1946. In 1951, she moved back to New York City and devoted full time to the completion of Atlas Shrugged.

Published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged was her greatest achievement and last work of fiction. In this novel, she dramatized her unique philosophy in an intellectual mystery story that integrated ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, economics, and sex. Although she considered herself primarily a fiction writer, she realized that in order to create heroic fictional characters, she had to identify the philosophic principles which make such individuals possible. She needed to formulate “a philosophy for living on earth.”

Thereafter, Ayn Rand wrote and lectured on her philosophy—Objectivism. She published and edited her own periodicals from 1962 to 1976, her essays providing much of the material for nine books on Objectivism and its application to the culture. Ayn Rand died on March 6, 1982, in her New York City apartment.

Every book by Ayn Rand published in her lifetime is still in print, and hundreds of thousands of copies are sold each year, so far totalling more than twenty million. Several new volumes have been published posthumously. Her vision of man and her philosophy for living on earth have changed the lives of thousands of readers and launched a philosophic movement with a growing impact on American culture.

THE ESSENTIALS OF OBJECTMSM

“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand named her philosophy “Objectivism” and described it as a philosophy for living on earth. Objectivism is an integrated system of thought that defines the abstract principles by which a man must think and act if he is to live the life proper to man. Ayn Rand first portrayed her philosophy in the form of the heroes of her best-selling novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). She later expressed her philosophy in non-fiction form.

Ayn Rand was once asked if she could present the essence of Objectivism while standing on one foot. Her answer was:

1. Metaphysics: Objective Reality

2. Epistemology: Reason

3. Ethics: Self-interest

4. Politics: Capitalism

She then translated those terms into familiar language:

1. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

2. “You can’t eat your cake and have it too.”

3. “Man is an end in himself.”

4. “Give me liberty or give me death.”

The basic principles of Objectivism can be summarized as follows:

1. Metaphysics: “Reality, the external world, exists independent of man’s consciousness, independent of any observer’s knowledge, beliefs, feelings, desires or fears. This means that A is A, that facts are facts, that things are what they are—and that the task of man’s consciousness is to perceive reality, not to create or invent it.” Thus Objectivism rejects any belief in the supernatural—and any claim that individuals or groups create their own reality.

2. Epistemology: “Man’s reason is fully competent to know the facts of reality. Reason, the conceptual faculty, is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. Reason is man’s only means of acquiring knowledge.” Thus Objectivism rejects mysticism (any acceptance of faith or feeling as a means of knowledge), and it rejects skepticism (the claim that certainty or knowledge is impossible).

3. Human Nature: Man is a rational being. Reason, as man’s only means of knowledge, is his basic means of survival. But the exercise of reason depends on each individual’s choice. “Man is a being of volitional consciousness.” “That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call ‘free will’ is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom. [This is] the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and character.” Thus Objectivism rejects any form of determinism, the belief that man is a victim of forces beyond his control (such as God, fate, upbringing, genes or economic conditions).

4. Ethics: “Reason is man’s only proper judge of values and his only proper guide to action. The proper standard of ethics is: man’s survival qua man—i.e.. that which is required by man’s nature for his survival as a rational being (not his momentary physical survival as a mindless brute). Rationality is man’s basic virtue, and his three fundamental values are: reason, purpose, self-esteem. Man—every man—is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake. neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life.” Thus Objectivism rejects any form of altruism—the claim that morality consists in living for others or for society.

5. Politics: “The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that no man has the right to seek values from others by means of physical force—i.e.. no man or group has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others. Men have the right to use force only in self-defense and only against those who initiate its use. Men must deal with one another as traders, giving value for value, by free, mutual consent to mutual benefit. The only social system that bars physical force from human relationships is laissezfaire capitalism. Capitalism is a system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which the only function of the government is to protect individual rights, i.e., to protect men from those who initiate the use of physical force.” Thus Objectivism rejects any form of collectivism, such as fascism or socialism. It also rejects the current “mixed economy” notion that the government should regulate the economy and redistribute wealth.

6. Esthetics: “Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.” The purpose of art is to concretize the artist’s fundamental view of existence. Ayn Rand described her own approach to art as “Romantic Realism”: “I am a Romantic in the sense that I present men as they ought to be. I am Realistic in the sense that I place them here and now and on this earth.” The goal of Ayn Rand’s novels is not didactic but artistic: the projection of an ideal man: “My purpose, first cause and prime mover is the portrayal of Howard Roark or John Galt or Hank Reardan or Francisco d’Anconia as an end in himsetf— not as a means to any further end.”

GUIDE TO THE WRITINGS OF AYN RAND

NOVELS:

Atlas Shrugged (1957): Ayn Rand’s masterpiece. It integrates the basic elements of an entire philosophy into a highly complex, yet dramatically compelling plot—set in a near-future U.S.A. whose economy is collapsing as a result of the mysterious disappearance of leading innovators and industrialists. The theme is: “the role of the mind in man’s existence—and, as corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest.”

The Fountainhead (1943): The story of an innovator—architect Howard Roark—and his battle against the tradition-worshipping establishment. Its theme : “individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul; the psychological motivations and the basic premises that produce the character of an individualist or a collectivist.” Ayn Rand presented here for the first time her projection of the ideal man. Roark’s independence, self-esteem, and integrity have inspired millions of readers for more than half a century.

Anthem (1938): This novelette depicts a world of the future, a society so collectivized that even the word “I” has vanished from the language. Anthem’s theme is: the meaning and glory of man’s ego.

We the Living (1936): Set in Soviet Russia, this is Ayn Rand’s first and most autobiographical novel. Its theme is: “the individual against the state, the supreme value of a human life and the evil of the totalitarian state that claims the right to sacrifice it.”

OTHER FICTION:

Night of January 16th (1934): This play is a murder trial abounding in plot twists and original devices. The play has two different endings available—to reflect the actual verdict of a jury selected each performance from the audience.

The Early Ayn Rand (1984): This collection includes the first fiction Ayn Rand ever sold—the synopsis of an original 1932 screenplay, Red Pawn. It also contains unpolished, but charming short stories which she wrote in the late 1920s and early 1930s while she was still learning English, and mature works such as the stage plays Think Twice and Ideal and scenes cut from the published edition of The Fountainhead.

GENERAL PHILOSOPHY:

For the New Intellectual (1961): A collection of the most challenging philosophical statements by the characters in her novels. The 48-page title essay sweeps over the history of thought, showing how ideas control civilization and how philosophy has served for the most part as an engine of destruction.

Philosophy: Who Needs it (1982): Everybody needs philosophy—that is the theme of this book. It demonstrates that philosophy is essential in each person’s life, and how those who do not think philosophically are the helpless victims of the ideas they passively accept from others. Essays include the title essay, “Philosophical Detection,” and “Causality Versus Duty.”

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (1989): Philosophy and cultural analysis, including “Who Is the Final Authority in Ethics?” Also ”Religion Versus America” by Leonard Peikoff. and a critique of Libertarianism by Peter Schwartz.

EPISTEMOLOGY:

Intrøductiøn to Objectivist Epistemology (Second Edition, 1990): The Objectivist theory of concepts, with Ayn Rand’s solution to “the problem of universals,” identifying the relationship of abstractions to concretes. Includes an essay by Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” and, as an appendix, transcripts of Ayn Rand’s workshops—containing her answers to questions about her theory raised by philosophers and other academics.

ETHICS:

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964): Ayn Rand’s revolutionary concept of egoism. Essays, on the morality of rational selfishness and the political and social implications of such a moral philosophy. Essays include: “The Objectivist Ethics,” “Man’s Rights,” “The Nature of Government,” “The ‘Conflicts’ of Men’s Interests,” and “Racism.”

POLITICS:

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966): Essays on the theory and history of capitalism arguing that it is the only moral economic system, i.e., the only one consistent with individual rights and a free society. Includes: “What Is Capitalism?” “The Roots of War,” “Conservatism : An Obituary,” and “The Anatomy of Compromise.”

The Retum of the Primitive (1971): Ayn Rand’s answer to environmentalism, “progressive” education, and other anti-reason movements.

ART AND LITERATURE:

The Romantic Manifesto (1969): Ayn Rand’s philosophy of art, with a new analysis of the Romantic school of literature. Essays include: “Philosophy and Sense of Life,” “The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” and “What Is Romanticism?”

BOOKS ABOUT AYN RAND AND OBJECTIVISM

The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z (1986): A mini-encyclopedia of Objectivism, covering 400 alphabetized topics in philosophy and related fields. Edited by Harry Binswanger.

The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom In America (1982): By Leonard Peikoff. The Objectivist philosophy of history—through an analysis of the philosophical causes of Nazism, and their parallels in contemporary America.

Objectivism: The Philosophy ol Ayn Rand (1991): By Leonard Peikoff. This is the definitive, systematic statement of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, based on Dr. Peikoff thirty years of philosophical discussions with her. All of the key principles of Objectivism—from metaphysics to art—are presented in a logical, hierarchical structure.

Letters of Ayn Rand (1995): This collection of more than 500 letters written by Ayn Rand offers much new information on her life as philosopher, novelist, political activist, and Hollywood screenwriter. Includes letters to fans, friends, Hollywood celebrities, business leaders, and philosophers. Edited by Michael S. Berliner.

The Art of Fiction (2000): The edited version of an informal series of lectures given by Ayn Rand on the essentials of fiction writing. Edited by Tore Boeckmann.

The Art of Nonfiction (2001): Edited transcripts of Ayn Rand’s lectures on writing effective nonfiction—a skill she believed could be learned and mastered by any rational person.

ABOUT THE AYN RAND INSTITUTE

The Ayn Rand Institute, a nonprofit educational organization, was established in 1985 to serve as the center for the advancement of Objectivism.

Objectivism holds that historical trends are the product of philosophy. To reverse today’s destructive political and cultural trends we must reverse men’s fundamental philosophy.

The Institute brings Ayn Rand’s ideas to the attention of students, scholars, businessmen, professionals, and the general public. Its educational programs include graduate training in philosophy, essay contests for high school and college students, a network of campus Objectivist clubs, a campus speakers bureau, and scholarly research and publications.

For more information about the activities of the Institute, please contact:

THE AYN RAND INSTITUE
P.O. Box 51808
Irvine, CA 92619-1808
Web site: www.aynrand.org

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

Part 1

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

Part 2

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

Part 3

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

Part 4

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

AFTERWORD

THE WRITINGS OF AYN RAND

FICTION
Atlas Shrugged
The Fountainhead
We the Living
Anthem
The Early Ayn Rand
Night of January 16th

PHILOSOPHY

General
Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
The Ayn Rand Lexicon
The Ayn Rand Reader
Philosophy: Who Needs It?
The Voice of Reason
For the New Intellectual
The Ominous Parallels by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
The Virtue of Selfishness

Epistemology
An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

Politics/Economics
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
Return of the Primitive

Art, Literature, and Letters
The Romantic Manifesto
The Art of Fiction
The Art of Nonfiction
Journals of Ayn Rand
Letters of Ayn Rand

PLUME
Published by Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto,
Ontario M4V 3B2, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2,
Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,
Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,
New Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany,
Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Originally published by
Bobbs-Merrill.

First Plume Printing, November 1994
First Plume Printing (Centennial Edition), May 2005

Copyright The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1943 Copyright Ayn Rand, 1968 Copyright renewed Ayn Rand, 1971 Copyright renewed Leonard Peikoff, Paul Gitlin and Eugene Winick, 1996 Afterword copyright © Leonard Peikoff, 1993 All rights reserved

Permission requests for college or textbook use should be addressed to the Estate of
Ayn Rand, Box 177, Murray Hill Station, New York, New York 10157

CIP data is available.

eISBN : 978-1-101-13718-5

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

http://us.penguingroup.com

To Frank O’Connor

I offer my profound gratitude to the great profession of architecture and its heroes who have given us some of the highest expressions of man’s genius, yet have remained unknown, undiscovered by the majority of men. And to the architects who gave me their generous assistance in the technical matters of this book.

No person or event in this story is intended as a reference to any real person or event. The titles of the newspaper columns were invented and used by me in the first draft of this novel. They were not taken from and have no reference to any actual newspaper columns or features.

Ayn Rand

March 10, 1943

AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION to the 1968 Edition

Many people have asked me how I feel about the fact that The Fountainhead has been in print for twenty-five years. I cannot say that I feel anything in particular, except a kind of quiet satisfaction. In this respect, my attitude toward my writing is best expressed by a statement of Victor Hugo: “If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.”

Certain writers, of whom I am one, do not live, think or write on the range of the moment. Novels, in the proper sense of the word, are not written to vanish in a month or a year. That most of them do, today, that they are written and published as if they were magazines, to fade as rapidly, is one of the sorriest aspects of today’s literature, and one of the clearest indictments of its dominant esthetic philosophy: concrete-bound, journalistic Naturalism which has now reached its dead end in the inarticulate sounds of panic.

Longevity—predominantly, though not exclusively—is the prerogative of a literary school which is virtually non-existent today: Romanticism. This is not the place for a dissertation on the nature of Romantic fiction, so let me state—for the record and for the benefit of those college students who have never been allowed to discover it—only that Romanticism is the conceptual school of art. It deals, not with the random trivia of the day, but with the timeless, fundamental, universal problems and values of human existence. It does not record or photograph; it creates and projects. It is concerned—in the words of Aristotle—not with things as they are, but with things as they might be and ought to be.

And for the benefit of those who consider relevance to one’s own time as of crucial importance, I will add, in regard to our age, that never has there been a time when men have so desperately needed a projection of things as they ought to be.

I do not mean to imply that I knew, when I wrote it, that The Fountainhead would remain in print for twenty-five years. I did not think of any specific time period. I knew only that it was a book that ought to live. It did.

But that I knew it over twenty-five years ago—that I knew it while The Fountainhead was being rejected by twelve publishers, some of whom declared that it was “too intellectual,” “too controversial” and would not sell because no audience existed for it—that was the difficult part of its history; difficult for me to bear. I mention it here for the sake of any other writer of my kind who might have to face the same battle—as a reminder of the fact that it can be done.

I will not retell here the story of the publication of The Fountainhead. But it would be impossible for me to discuss The Fountainhead or any part of its history without mentioning the man who made it possible for me to write it: my husband, Frank O’Connor.

In a play I wrote in my early thirties, Ideal, the heroine, a screen star, speaks for me when she says: “I want to see, real, living, and in the hours of my own days, that glory I create as an illusion. I want it real. I want to know that there is someone, somewhere, who wants it, too. Or else what is the use of seeing it, and working, and burning oneself for an impossible vision? A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry.”

Frank was the fuel. He gave me, in the hours of my own days, the reality of that sense of life which created The Fountainhead—and he helped me to maintain it over a long span of years when there was nothing around us but a gray desert of people and events that evoked nothing but contempt and revulsion. The essence of the bond between us is the fact that neither of us has ever wanted or been tempted to settle for anything less than the world presented in The Fountainhead. We never will.

If there is in me any touch of the Naturalistic writer who records “real-life” dialogue for use in a novel, it has been exercised only in regard to Frank. For instance, one of the most effective lines in The Fountainhead comes at the end of Part II, when, in reply to Toohey’s question: “Why don’t you tell me what you think of me?” Roark answers: “But I don’t think of you.” That line was Frank’s answer to a different type of person, in a somewhat similar context. “You’re casting pearls without getting even a pork chop in return,” was said by Frank to me, in regard to my professional position. I gave that line to Dominique at Roark’s trial.

I did not feel discouragement very often, and when I did, it did not last longer than overnight. But there was one evening, during the writing of The Fountainhead, when I felt so profound an indignation at the state of “things as they are” that it seemed as if I would never regain the energy to move one step farther toward “things as they ought to be.” Frank talked to me for hours, that night. He convinced me of why one cannot give up the world to those one despises. By the time he finished, my discouragement was gone; it never came back in so intense a form.

I had been opposed to the practice of dedicating books; I had held that a book is addressed to any reader who proves worthy of it. But, that night, I told Frank that I would dedicate The Fountainhead to him because he had saved it. And one of my happiest moments, about two years later, was given to me by the look on his face when he came home, one day, and saw the page-proofs of the book, headed by the page that stated in cold, clear, objective print: To Frank O’Connor.

These are some of the reasons why, for me, the most profound personal meaning of this new, anniversary edition is the fact that its jacket carries the reproduction of a painting by Frank. It is like the completion, the proper climax of this book’s history.

That painting was not done for The Fountainhead. It represents Frank’s version of a sunrise we had seen once in San Francisco. His title for the painting is Man Also Rises.

I have been asked whether I have changed in these past twenty-five years. No, I am the same—only more so. Have my ideas changed? No, my fundamental convictions, my view of life and of man, have never changed, from as far back as I can remember, but my knowledge of their applications has grown, in scope and in precision. What is my present evaluation of The Fountainhead? I am as proud of it as I was on the day when I finished writing it.

Was The Fountainhead written for the purpose of presenting my philosophy? Here, I shall quote from The Goal of My Writing, an address I gave at Lewis and Clark College, on October 1, 1963: “This is the motive and purpose of my writing: the projection of an ideal man. The portrayal of a moral ideal, as my ultimate literary goal, as an end in itself—to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means.

“Let me stress this: my purpose is not the philosophical enlightenment of my readers ... My purpose, first cause and prime mover is the portrayal of Howard Roark [or the heroes of Atlas Shrugged] as an end in himself ...

“I write—and read—for the sake of the story.... My basic test for any story is: ‘Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life? Is this story an experience worth living through for its own sake? Is the pleasure of contemplating these characters an end in itself?’

“Since my purpose is the presentation of an ideal man, I had to define and present the conditions which make him possible and which his existence requires. Since man’s character is the product of his premises, I had to define and present the kinds of premises and values that create the character of an ideal man and motivate his actions; which means that I had to define and present a rational code of ethics. Since man acts among and deals with other men, I had to present the kind of social system that makes it possible for ideal men to exist and to function—a free, productive, rational system which demands and rewards the best in every man, and which is, obviously, laissez-faire capitalism.

“But neither politics nor ethics nor philosophy is an end in itself, neither in life nor in literature. Only Man is an end in himself.”

Are there any substantial changes I would want to make in The Fountainhead? No—and, therefore, I have left its text untouched. I want it to stand as it was written. But there is one minor error and one possibly misleading sentence which I should like to clarify, so I shall mention them here.

The error is semantic: the use of the word “egotist” in Roark’s courtroom speech, while actually the word should have been “egoist.” The error was caused by my reliance on a dictionary which gave such misleading definitions of these two words that “egotist” seemed closer to the meaning I intended (Webster’s Daily Use Dictionary, 1933). (Modern philosophers, however, are guiltier than lexicographers in regard to these two terms.)

The possibly misleading sentence is in Roark’s speech: “From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.”

This could be misinterpreted to mean an endorsement of religion or religious ideas. I remember hesitating over that sentence, when I wrote it, and deciding that Roark’s and my atheism, as well as the overall spirit of the book, were so clearly established that no one would misunderstand it, particularly since I said that religious abstractions are the product of man’s mind, not of supernatural revelation.

But an issue of this sort should not be left to implications. What I was referring to was not religion as such, but a special category of abstractions, the most exalted one, which, for centuries, had been the near-monopoly of religion: ethics—not the particular content of religious ethics, but the abstraction “ethics,” the realm of values, man’s code of good and evil, with the emotional connotations of height, uplift, nobility, reverence, grandeur, which pertain to the realm of man’s values, but which religion has arrogated to itself.

The same meaning and considerations were intended and are applicable to another passage of the book, a brief dialogue between Roark and Hopton Stoddard, which may be misunderstood if taken out of context:

“ ‘You’re a profoundly religious man, Mr. Roark—in your own way. I can see that in your buildings.’

“ ‘That’s true,’ said Roark.”

In the context of that scene, however, the meaning is clear: it is Roark’s profound dedication to values, to the highest and best, to the ideal, that Stoddard is referring to (see his explanation of the nature of the proposed temple). The erection of the Stoddard Temple and the subsequent trial state the issue explicitly.

This leads me to a wider issue which is involved in every line of The Fountainhead and which has to be understood if one wants to understand the causes of its lasting appeal.

Religion’s monopoly in the field of ethics has made it extremely difficult to communicate the emotional meaning and connotations of a rational view of life. Just as religion has pre-empted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man’s reach. “Exaltation” is usually taken to mean an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. “Worship” means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man. “Reverence” means the emotion of a sacred respect, to be experienced on one’s knees. “Sacred” means superior to and not-to-be-touched-by any concerns of man or of this earth. Etc.

But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions. What, then, is their source or referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man’s dedication to a moral ideal. Yet apart from the man-degrading aspects introduced by religion, that emotional realm is left unidentified, without concepts, words or recognition.

It is this highest level of man’s emotions that has to be redeemed from the murk of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.

It is in this sense, with this meaning and intention, that I would identify the sense of life dramatized in The Fountainhead as man-worship.

It is an emotion that a few—a very few—men experience consistently ; some men experience it in rare, single sparks that flash and die without consequences; some do not know what I am talking about; some do and spend their lives as frantically virulent spark-extinguishers.

Do not confuse “man-worship” with the many attempts, not to emancipate morality from religion and bring it into the realm of reason, but to substitute a secular meaning for the worst, the most profoundly irrational elements of religion. For instance, there are all the variants of modern collectivism (communist, fascist, Nazi, etc.), which preserve the religious-altruist ethics in full and merely substitute “society” for God as the beneficiary of man’s self-immolation. There are the various schools of modern philosophy which, rejecting the law of identity, proclaim that reality is an indeterminate flux ruled by miracles and shaped by whims—not God’s whims, but man’s or “society’s.” These neo-mystics are not man-worshipers; they are merely the secularizers of as profound a hatred for man as that of their avowedly mystic predecessors.

A cruder variant of the same hatred is represented by those concrete-bound, “statistical” mentalities who—unable to grasp the meaning of man’s volition—declare that man cannot be an object of worship, since they have never encountered any specimens of humanity who deserved it.

The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man’s highest potential and strive to actualize it. The man-haters are those who regard man as a helpless, depraved, contemptible creature -and struggle never to let him discover otherwise. It is important here to remember that the only direct, introspective knowledge of man anyone possesses is of himself.

More specifically, the essential division between these two camps is: those dedicated to the exaltation of man’s self-esteem and the sacred-ness of his happiness on earth—and those determined not to allow either to become possible. The majority of mankind spend their lives and psychological energy in the middle, swinging between these two, struggling not to allow the issue to be named. This does not change the nature of the issue.

Perhaps the best way to communicate The Fountainhead’s sense of life is by means of the quotation which had stood at the head of my manuscript, but which I removed from the final, published book. With this opportunity to explain it, I am glad to bring it back.

I removed it, because of my profound disagreement with the philosophy of its author, Friedrich Nietzsche. Philosophically, Nietzsche is a mystic and an irrationalist. His metaphysics consists of a somewhat “Byronic” and mystically “malevolent” universe; his epistemology subordinates reason to “will,” or feeling or instinct or blood or innate virtues of character. But, as a poet, he projects at times (not consistently) a magnificent feeling for man’s greatness, expressed in emotional, not intellectual, terms.

This is especially true of the quotation I had chosen. I could not endorse its literal meaning: it proclaims an indefensible tenet—psychological determinism. But if one takes it as a poetic projection of an emotional experience (and if, intellectually, one substitutes the concept of an acquired “basic premise” for the concept of an innate “fundamental certainty”), then that quotation communicates the inner state of an exalted self-esteem-and sums up the emotional consequences for which The Fountainhead provides the rational, philosophical base:

“It is not the works, but the belief which is here decisive and determines the order of rank—to employ once more an old religious formula with a new and deeper meaning,—it is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost. -The noble soul has reverence for itself.—” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.)

This view of man has rarely been expressed in human history. Today, it is virtually non-existent. Yet this is the view with which—in various degrees of longing, wistfulness, passion and agonized confusion -the best of mankind’s youth start out in life. It is not even a view, for most of them, but a foggy, groping, undefined sense made of raw pain and incommunicable happiness. It is a sense of enormous expectation, the sense that one’s life is important, that great achievements are within one’s capacity, and that great things lie ahead.

It is not in the nature of man—nor of any living entity—to start out by giving up, by spitting in one’s own face and damning existence; that requires a process of corruption whose rapidity differs from man to man. Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it. Then all of these vanish in the vast swamp of their elders who tell them persistently that maturity consists of abandoning one’s mind; security, of abandoning one’s values; practicality, of losing self-esteem. Yet a few hold on and move on, knowing that that fire is not to be betrayed, learning how to give it shape, purpose and reality. But whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man’s nature and of life’s potential.

There are very few guideposts to find. The Fountainhead is one of them.

This is one of the cardinal reasons of The Fountainhead’s lasting appeal: it is a confirmation of the spirit of youth, proclaiming man’s glory, showing how much is possible.

It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man’s proper stature—and that the rest will betray it. It is those few that move the world and give life its meaning—and it is those few that I have always sought to address. The rest are no concern of mine; it is not me or The Fountainhead that they will betray: it is their own souls.

AYN RAND

New York, May 1968

Part 1

PETER KEATING

I

HOWARD ROARK LAUGHED. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable, the stone flowing. The stone had the stillness of one brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion. The stone glowed, wet with sunrays.

The lake below was only a thin steel ring that cut the rocks in half. The rocks went on into the depth, unchanged. They began and ended in the sky. So that the world seemed suspended in space, an island floating on nothing, anchored to the feet of the man on the cliff.

His body leaned back against the sky. It was a body of long straight lines and angles, each curve broken into planes. He stood, rigid, his hands hanging at his sides, palms out. He felt his shoulder blades drawn tight together, the curve of his neck, and the weight of the blood in his hands. He felt the wind behind him, in the hollow of his spine. The wind waved his hair against the sky. His hair was neither blond nor red, but the exact color of ripe orange rind.

He laughed at the thing which had happened to him that morning and at the things which now lay ahead.

He knew that the days ahead would be difficult. There were questions to be faced and a plan of action to be prepared. He knew that he should think about it. He knew also that he would not think, because everything was clear to him already, because the plan had been set long ago, and because he wanted to laugh.

He tried to consider it. But he forgot. He was looking at the granite.

He did not laugh as his eyes stopped in awareness of the earth around him. His face was like a law of nature—a thing one could not question, alter or implore. It had high cheekbones over gaunt, hollow cheeks; gray eyes, cold and steady; a contemptuous mouth, shut tight, the mouth of an executioner or a saint.

He looked at the granite. To be cut, he thought, and made into walls. He looked at a tree. To be split and made into rafters. He looked at a streak of rust on the stone and thought of iron ore under the ground. To be melted and to emerge as girders against the sky.

These rocks, he thought, are here for me; waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them.

Then he shook his head, because he remembered that morning and that there were many things to be done. He stepped to the edge, raised his arms, and dived down into the sky below.

He cut straight across the lake to the shore ahead. He reached the rocks where he had left his clothes. He looked regretfully about him. For three years, ever since he had lived in Stanton, he had come here for his only relaxation, to swim, to rest, to think, to be alone and alive, whenever he could find one hour to spare, which had not been often. In his new freedom the first thing he had wanted to do was to come here, because he knew that he was coming for the last time. That morning he had been expelled from the Architectural School of the Stanton Institute of Technology.

He pulled his clothes on: old denim trousers, sandals, a shirt with short sleeves and most of its buttons missing. He swung down a narrow trail among the boulders, to a path running through a green slope, to the road below.

He walked swiftly, with a loose, lazy expertness of motion. He walked down the long road, in the sun. Far ahead Stanton lay sprawled on the coast of Massachusetts, a little town as a setting for the gem of its existence—the great institute rising on a hill beyond.

The township of Stanton began with a dump. A gray mound of refuse rose in the grass. It smoked faintly. Tin cans glittered in the sun. The road led past the first houses to a church. The church was a Gothic monument of shingles painted pigeon blue. It had stout wooden buttresses supporting nothing. It had stained-glass windows with heavy traceries of imitation stone. It opened the way into long streets edged by tight, exhibitionist lawns. Behind the lawns stood wooden piles tortured out of all shape: twisted into gables, turrets, dormers; bulging with porches; crushed under huge, sloping roofs. White curtains floated at the windows. A garbage can stood at a side door, flowing over. An old Pekinese sat upon a cushion on a door step, its mouth drooling. A line of diapers fluttered in the wind between the columns of a porch.

People turned to look at Howard Roark as he passed. Some remained staring after him with sudden resentment. They could give no reason for it: it was an instinct his presence awakened in most people. Howard Roark saw no one. For him, the streets were empty. He could have walked there naked without concern.

He crossed the heart of Stanton, a broad green edged by shop windows. The windows displayed new placards announcing: WELCOME TO THE CLASS OF ‘22! GOOD LUCK, CLASS OF ’22! The Class of ’22 of the Stanton Institute of Technology was holding its commencement exercises that afternoon.

Roark swung into a side street, where at the end of a long row, on a knoll over a green ravine, stood the house of Mrs. Keating. He had boarded at that house for three years.

Mrs. Keating was out on the porch. She was feeding a couple of canaries in a cage suspended over the railing. Her pudgy little hand stopped in mid-air when she saw him. She watched him with curiosity. She tried to pull her mouth into a proper expression of sympathy; she succeeded only in betraying that the process was an effort.

He was crossing the porch without noticing her. She stopped him.

“Mr. Roark!”

“Yes?”

“Mr. Roark, I’m so sorry about—” she hesitated demurely “—about what happened this morning.”

“What?” he asked.

“Your being expelled from the Institute. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I only want you to know that I feel for you.”

He stood looking at her. She knew that he did not see her. No, she thought, it was not that exactly. He always looked straight at people and his damnable eyes never missed a thing, it was only that he made people feel as if they did not exist. He just stood looking. He would not answer.

“But what I say,” she continued, “is that if one suffers in this world, it’s on account of error. Of course, you’ll have to give up the architect profession now, won’t you? But then a young man can always earn a decent living clerking or selling or something.”

He turned to go.

“Oh, Mr. Roark!” she called.

“Yes?”

“The Dean phoned for you while you were out.”

For once, she expected some emotion from him; and an emotion would be the equivalent of seeing him broken. She did not know what it was about him that had always made her want to see him broken.

“Yes?” he asked.

“The Dean,” she repeated uncertainly, trying to recapture her effect. “The Dean himself through his secretary.”

“Well?”

“She said to tell you that the Dean wanted to see you immediately the moment you got back.”

“Thank you.”

“What do you suppose he can want now?”

“I don’t know.”

He had said: “I don’t know.” She had heard distinctly: “I don’t give a damn.” She stared at him incredulously.

“By the way,” she said, “Petey is graduating today.” She said it without apparent relevance.

“Today? Oh, yes.”

“It’s a great day for me. When I think of how I skimped and slaved to put my boy through school. Not that I’m complaining. I’m not one to complain. Petey’s a brilliant boy.”

She stood drawn up. Her stout little body was corseted so tightly under the starched folds of her cotton dress that it seemed to squeeze the fat out to her wrists and ankles.

“But of course,” she went on rapidly, with the eagerness of her favorite subject, “I’m not one to boast. Some mothers are lucky and others just aren’t. We’re all in our rightful place. You just watch Petey from now on. I’m not one to want my boy to kill himself with work and I’ll thank the Lord for any small success that comes his way. But if that boy isn’t the greatest architect of this U.S.A., his mother will want to know the reason why!”

He moved to go.

“But what am I doing, gabbing with you like that!” she said brightly. “You’ve got to hurry and change and run along. The Dean’s waiting for you. ”

She stood looking after him through the screen door, watching his gaunt figure move across the rigid neatness of her parlor. He always made her uncomfortable in the house, with a vague feeling of apprehension, as if she were waiting to see him swing out suddenly and smash her coffee tables, her Chinese vases, her framed photographs. He had never shown any inclination to do so. She kept expecting it, without knowing why.

Roark went up the stairs to his room. It was a large, bare room, made luminous by the clean glow of whitewash. Mrs. Keating had never had the feeling that Roark really lived there. He had not added a single object to the bare necessities of furniture which she had provided; no pictures, no pennants, no cheering human touch. He had brought nothing to the room but his clothes and his drawings; there were few clothes and too many drawings; they were stacked high in one corner; sometimes she thought that the drawings lived there, not the man.

Roark walked now to these drawings; they were the first things to be packed. He lifted one of them, then the next, then another. He stood looking at the broad sheets.

They were sketches of buildings such as had never stood on the face of the earth. They were as the first houses built by the first man born, who had never heard of others building before him. There was nothing to be said of them, except that each structure was inevitably what it had to be. It was not as if the draftsman had sat over them, pondering laboriously, piecing together doors, windows and columns, as his whim dictated and as the books prescribed. It was as if the buildings had sprung from the earth and from some living force, complete, unalterably right. The hand that had made the sharp pencil lines still had much to learn. But not a line seemed superfluous, not a needed plane was missing. The structures were austere and simple, until one looked at them and realized what work, what complexity of method, what tension of thought had achieved the simplicity. No laws had dictated a single detail. The buildings were not Classical, they were not Gothic, they were not Renaissance. They were only Howard Roark.

He stopped, looking at a sketch. It was one that had never satisfied him. He had designed it as an exercise he had given himself, apart from his schoolwork; he did that often when he found some particular site and stopped before it to think of what building it should bear. He had spent nights staring at this sketch, wondering what he had missed. Glancing at it now, unprepared, he saw the mistake he had made.

He flung the sketch down on the table, he bent over it, he slashed lines straight through his neat drawing. He stopped once in a while and stood looking at it, his finger tips pressed to the paper; as if his hands held the building. His hands had long fingers, hard veins, prominent joints and wristbones.

An hour later he heard a knock at his door.

“Come in!” he snapped, without stopping.

“Mr. Roark!” gasped Mrs. Keating, staring at him from the threshold. “What on earth are you doing?”

He turned and looked at her, trying to remember who she was.

“How about the Dean?” she moaned. “The Dean that’s waiting for you?”

“Oh,” said Roark. “Oh, yes. I forgot.”

“You ... forgot?”

“Yes.” There was a note of wonder in his voice, astonished by her astonishment.

“Well, all I can say,” she choked, “is that it serves you right! It just serves you right. And with the commencement beginning at four-thirty, how do you expect him to have time to see you?”

“I’ll go at once, Mrs. Keating.”

It was not her curiosity alone that prompted her to action; it was a secret fear that the sentence of the Board might be revoked. He went to the bathroom at the end of the hall; she watched him washing his hands, throwing his loose, straight hair back into a semblance of order. He came out again, he was on his way to the stairs before she realized that he was leaving.

“Mr. Roark!” she gasped, pointing at his clothes. “You’re not going like this?”

“Why not?”

“But it’s your Dean!”

“Not any more, Mrs. Keating.”

She thought, aghast, that he said it as if he were actually happy.

The Stanton Institute of Technology stood on a hill, its crenelated walls raised as a crown over the city stretched below. It looked like a medieval fortress, with a Gothic cathedral grafted to its belly. The fortress was eminently suited to its purpose, with stout, brick walls, a few slits wide enough for sentries, ramparts behind which defending archers could hide, and corner turrets from which boiling oil could be poured upon the attacker—should such an emergency arise in an institute of learning. The cathedral rose over it in lace splendor, a fragile defense against two great enemies: light and air.

The Dean’s office looked like a chapel, a pool of dreamy twilight fed by one tall window of stained glass. The twilight flowed in through the garments of stiff saints, their arms contorted at the elbows. A red spot of light and a purple one rested respectively upon two genuine gargoyles squatting at the corners of a fireplace that had never been used. A green spot stood in the center of a picture of the Parthenon, suspended over the fireplace.

When Roark entered the office, the outlines of the Dean’s figure swam dimly behind his desk, which was carved like a confessional. He was a short, plumpish gentleman whose spreading flesh was held in check by an indomitable dignity.

“Ah, yes, Roark,” he smiled. “Do sit down, please.”

Roark sat down. The Dean entwined his fingers on his stomach and waited for the plea he expected. No plea came. The Dean cleared his throat.

“It will be unnecessary for me to express my regret at the unfortunate event of this morning,” he began, “since I take it for granted that you have always known my sincere interest in your welfare.”

“Quite unnecessary,” said Roark.

The Dean looked at him dubiously, but continued:

“Needless to say, I did not vote against you. I abstained entirely. But you may be glad to know that you had quite a determined little group of defenders at the meeting. Small, but determined. Your professor of structural engineering acted quite the crusader on your behalf. So did your professor of mathematics. Unfortunately, those who felt it their duty to vote for your expulsion quite outnumbered the others. Professor Peterkin, your critic of design, made an issue of the matter. He went so far as to threaten us with his resignation unless you were expelled. You must realize that you have given Professor Peterkin great provocation.”

“I do,” said Roark.

“That, you see, was the trouble. I am speaking of your attitude towards the subject of architectural design. You have never given it the attention it deserves. And yet, you have been excellent in all the engineering sciences. Of course, no one denies the importance of structural engineering to a future architect, but why go to extremes? Why neglect what may be termed the artistic and inspirational side of your profession and concentrate on all those dry, technical, mathematical subjects? You intended to become an architect, not a civil engineer.”

“Isn’t this superfluous?” Roark asked. “It’s past. There’s no point in discussing my choice of subjects now.”

“I am endeavoring to be helpful, Roark. You must be fair about this. You cannot say that you were not given many warnings before this happened.”

“I was.”

The Dean moved in his chair. Roark made him uncomfortable. Roark’s eyes were fixed on him politely. The Dean thought, there’s nothing wrong with the way he’s looking at me, in fact it’s quite correct, most properly attentive; only, it’s as if I were not here.

“Every problem you were given,” the Dean went on, “every project you had to design—what did you do with it? Every one of them done in that—well, I cannot call it a style—in that incredible manner of yours. It is contrary to every principle we have tried to teach you, contrary to all established precedents and traditions of Art. You may think you are what is called a modernist, but it isn’t even that. It is ... it is sheer insanity, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind.”

“When you were given projects that left the choice of style up to you and you turned in one of your wild stunts—well, frankly, your teachers passed you because they did not know what to make of it. But, when you were given an exercise in the historical styles, a Tudor chapel or a French opera house to design—and you turned in something that looked like a lot of boxes piled together without rhyme or reason—would you say it was an answer to an assignment or plain insubordination?”

“It was insubordination,” said Roark.

“We wanted to give you a chance—in view of your brilliant record in all other subjects. But when you turn in this—” the Dean slammed his fist down on a sheet spread before him—“this as a Renaissance villa for your final project of the year—really, my boy, it was too much!”

The sheet bore a drawing—a house of glass and concrete. In the corner there was a sharp, angular signature: Howard Roark.

“How do you expect us to pass you after this?”

“I don’t.”

“You left us no choice in the matter. Naturally, you would feel bitterness toward us at this moment, but ...”

“I feel nothing of the kind,” said Roark quietly. “I owe you an apology. I don’t usually let things happen to me. I made a mistake this time. I shouldn’t have waited for you to throw me out. I should have left long ago.”

“Now, now, don’t get discouraged. This is not the right attitude to take. Particularly in view of what I am going to tell you.”

The Dean smiled and leaned forward confidentially, enjoying the overture to a good deed.

“Here is the real purpose of our interview. I was anxious to let you know as soon as possible. I did not wish to leave you disheartened. Oh, I did, personally, take a chance with the President’s temper when I mentioned this to him, but ... Mind you, he did not commit himself, but ... Here is how things stand: now that you realize how serious it is, if you take a year off, to rest, to think it over—shall we say to grow up?—there might be a chance of our taking you back. Mind you, I cannot promise anything—this is strictly unomcial—it would be most unusual, but in view of the circumstances and of your brilliant record, there might be a very good chance.”

Roark smiled. It was not a happy smile, it was not a grateful one. It was a simple, easy smile and it was amused.

“I don’t think you understood me,” said Roark. “What made you suppose that I want to come back?”

“Eh?”

“I won’t be back. I have nothing further to learn here.”

“I don’t understand you,” said the Dean stiffly.

“Is there any point in explaining? It’s of no interest to you any longer.”

“You will kindly explain yourself.”

“If you wish. I want to be an architect, not an archeologist. I see no purpose in doing Renaissance villas. Why learn to design them, when I’ll never build them?”

“My dear boy, the great style of the Renaissance is far from dead. Houses of that style are being erected every day.”

“They are. And they will be. But not by me.”

“Come, come, now, this is childish.”

“I came here to learn about building. When I was given a project, its only value to me was to learn to solve it as I would solve a real one in the future. I did them the way I’ll build them. I’ve learned all I could learn here—in the structural sciences of which you don’t approve. One more year of drawing Italian post cards would give me nothing.”

An hour ago the Dean had wished that this interview would proceed as calmly as possible. Now he wished that Roark would display some emotion; it seemed unnatural for him to be so quietly natural in the circumstances.

“Do you mean to tell me that you’re thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?”

“Yes.”

“My dear fellow, who will let you?”

“That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”

“Look here, this is serious. I am sorry that I haven’t had a long, earnest talk with you much earlier.... I know, I know, I know, don’t interrupt me, you’ve seen a modernistic building or two, and it gave you ideas. But do you realize what a passing fancy that whole so-called modern movement is? You must learn to understand—and it has been proved by all authorities—that everything beautiful in architecture has been done already. There is a treasure mine in every style of the past. We can only choose from the great masters. Who are we to improve upon them? We can only attempt, respectfully, to repeat.”

“Why?” asked Howard Roark.

No, thought the Dean, no, he hasn’t said anything else; it’s a perfectly innocent word; he’s not threatening me.

“But it’s self-evident!” said the Dean.

“Look,” said Roark evenly, and pointed at the window. “Can you see the campus and the town? Do you see how many men are walking and living down there? Well, I don’t give a damn what any or all of them think about architecture—or about anything else, for that matter. Why should I consider what their grandfathers thought of it?”

“That is our sacred tradition.”

“Why?”

“For heaven’s sake, can’t you stop being so naive about it?”

“But I don’t understand. Why do you want me to think that this is great architecture?” He pointed to the picture of the Parthenon.

“That,” said the Dean, “is the Parthenon.”

“So it is.”

“I haven’t the time to waste on silly questions.”

“All right, then.” Roark got up, he took a long ruler from the desk, he walked to the picture. “Shall I tell you what’s rotten about it?”

“It’s the Parthenon!” said the Dean.

“Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon!”

The ruler struck the glass over the picture.

“Look,” said Roark. “The famous flutings on the famous columns—what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood—when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?”

The Dean sat watching him curiously. Something puzzled him, not in the words, but in Roark’s manner of saying them.

“Rules?” said Roark. “Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn’t borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn’t borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it.”

“But all the proper forms of expression have been discovered long ago.”

“Expression—of what? The Parthenon did not serve the same purpose as its wooden ancestor. An airline terminal does not serve the same purpose as the Parthenon. Every form has its own meaning. Every man creates his meaning and form and goal. Why is it so important—what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right—so long as it’s not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic—and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else? There must be some reason. I don’t know. I’ve never known it. I’d like to understand.”

“For heaven’s sake,” said the Dean. “Sit down.... That’s better.... Would you mind very much putting that ruler down? ... Thank you.... Now listen to me. No one has ever denied the importance of modern technique to an architect. We must learn to adapt the beauty of the past to the needs of the present. The voice of the past is the voice of the people. Nothing has ever been invented by one man in architecture. The proper creative process is a slow, gradual, anonymous, collective one, in which each man collaborates with all the others and subordinates himself to the standards of the majority.”

“But you see,” said Roark quietly, “I have, let’s say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.”

“How old are you?” asked the Dean.

“Twenty-two,” said Roark.

“Quite excusable,” said the Dean; he seemed relieved. “You’ll outgrow all that.” He smiled. “The old standards have lived for thousands of years and nobody has been able to improve upon them. What are your modernists? A transient mode, exhibitionists trying to attract attention. Have you observed the course of their careers? Can you name one who has achieved any permanent distinction? Look at Henry Cameron. A great man, a leading architect twenty years ago. What is he today? Lucky if he gets—once a year—a garage to remodel. A bum and a drunkard, who ...”

“We won’t discuss Henry Cameron.”

“Oh? Is he a friend of yours?”

“No. But I’ve seen his buildings.”

“And you found them ...”

“I said we won’t discuss Henry Cameron.”

“Very well. You must realize that I am allowing you a great deal of ... shall we say, latitude? I am not accustomed to hold a discussion with a student who behaves in your manner. However, I am anxious to forestall, if possible, what appears to be a tragedy, the spectacle of a young man of your obvious mental gifts setting out deliberately to make a mess of his life.”

The Dean wondered why he had promised the professor of mathematics to do all he could for this boy. Merely because the professor had said: “This,” and pointed to Roark’s project, “is a great man.” A great man, thought the Dean, or a criminal. The Dean winced. He did not approve of either.

He thought of what he had heard about Roark’s past. Roark’s father had been a steel puddler somewhere in Ohio and had died long ago. The boy’s entrance papers showed no record of nearest relatives. When asked about it, Roark had said indifferently: “I don’t think I have any relatives. I may have. I don’t know.” He had seemed astonished that he should be expected to have any interest in the matter. He had not made or sought a single friend on the campus. He had refused to join a fraternity. He had worked his way through high school and through the three years here at the Institute. He had worked as a common laborer in the building trades since childhood. He had done plastering, plumbing, steel work, anything he could get, going from one small town to another, working his way east, to the great cities. The Dean had seen him, last summer, on his vacation, catching rivets on a skyscraper in construction in Boston; his long body relaxed under greasy overalls, only his eyes intent, and his right arm swinging forward, once in a while, expertly, without effort, to catch the flying ball of fire at the last moment, when it seemed that the hot rivet would miss the bucket and strike him in the face.

“Look here, Roark,” said the Dean gently. “You have worked hard for your education. You had only one year left to go. There is something important to consider, particularly for a boy in your position. There’s the practical side of an architect’s career to think about. An architect is not an end in himself. He is only a small part of a great social whole. Co-operation is the key word to our modern world and to the profession of architecture in particular. Have you thought of your potential clients ?”

“Yes,” said Roark.

“The Client,” said the Dean. “The Client. Think of that above all. He’s the one to live in the house you build. Your only purpose is to serve him. You must aspire to give the proper artistic expression to his wishes. Isn’t that all one can say on the subject?”

“Well, I could say that I must aspire to build for my client the most comfortable, the most logical, the most beautiful house that can be built. I could say that I must try to sell him the best I have and also teach him to know the best. I could say it, but I won’t. Because I don’t intend to build in order to serve or help anyone. I don’t intend to build in order to have clients. I intend to have clients in order to build.”

“How do you propose to force your ideas on them?”

“I don’t propose to force or be forced. Those who want me will come to me.”

Then the Dean understood what had puzzled him in Roark’s manner.

“You know,” he said, “you would sound much more convincing if you spoke as if you cared whether I agreed with you or not.”

“That’s true,” said Roark. “I don’t care whether you agree with me or not.” He said it so simply that it did not sound offensive, it sounded like the statement of a fact which he noticed, puzzled, for the first time.

“You don’t care what others think—which might be understandable. But you don’t care even to make them think as you do?”

“No.”

“But that’s ... that’s monstrous.”

“Is it? Probably. I couldn’t say.”

“I’m glad of this interview,” said the Dean, suddenly, too loudly. “It has relieved my conscience. I believe, as others stated at the meeting, that the profession of architecture is not for you. I have tried to help you. Now I agree with the Board. You are a man not to be encouraged. You are dangerous.”

“To whom?” asked Roark.

But the Dean rose, indicating that the interview was over.

Roark left the room. He walked slowly through the long halls, down the stairs, out to the lawn below. He had met many men such as the Dean; he had never understood them. He knew only that there was some important difference between his actions and theirs. It had ceased to disturb him long ago. But he always looked for a central theme in buildings and he looked for a central impulse in men. He knew the source of his actions; he could not discover theirs. He did not care. He had never learned the process of thinking about other people. But he wondered, at times, what made them such as they were. He wondered again, thinking of the Dean. There was an important secret involved somewhere in that question, he thought. There was a principle which he must discover.

But he stopped. He saw the sunlight of late afternoon, held still in the moment before it was to fade, on the gray limestone of a stringcourse running along the brick wall of the Institute building. He forgot men, the Dean and the principle behind the Dean, which he wanted to discover. He thought only of how lovely the stone looked in the fragile light and of what he could have done with that stone.

He thought of a broad sheet of paper, and he saw, rising on the paper, bare walls of gray limestone with long bands of glass, admitting the glow of the sky into the classrooms. In the corner of the sheet stood a sharp, angular signature—HOWARD ROARK.

II

“ ... ARCHITECTURE, MY FRIENDS, IS A GREAT ART BASED on two cosmic principles: Beauty and Utility. In a broader sense, these are but part of the three eternal entities: Truth, Love and Beauty. Truth—to the traditions of our Art, Love—for our fellow men whom we are to serve, Beauty—ah. Beauty is a compelling goddess to all artists, be it in the shape of a lovely woman or a building.... Hm.... Yes.... In conclusion, I should like to say to you, who are about to embark upon your careers in architecture, that you are now the custodians of a sacred heritage.... Hm.... Yes.... So, go forth into the world, armed with the three eternal enti—armed with courage and vision, loyal to the standards this great school has represented for many years. May you all serve faithfully, neither as slaves to the past nor as those parvenus who preach originality for its own sake, which attitude is only ignorant vanity. May you all have many rich, active years before you and leave, as you depart from this world, your mark on the sands of time!”

Guy Francon ended with a flourish, raising his right arm in a sweeping salute; informal, but with an air, that gay, swaggering air which Guy Francon could always permit himself. The huge hall before him came to life in applause and approval.

A sea of faces, young, perspiring and eager, had been raised solemnly -for forty-five minutes—to the platform where Guy Francon had held forth as the speaker at the commencement exercises of the Stanton Institute of Technology, Guy Francon who had brought his own person from New York for the occasion; Guy Francon, of the illustrious firm of Francon & Heyer, vice-president of the Architects’ Guild of America, member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, member of the National Fine Arts Commission, Secretary of the Arts and Crafts League of New York, chairman of the Society for Architectural Enlightenment of the U.S.A.; Guy Francon, knight of the Legion of Honor of France, decorated by the governments of Great Britain, Belgium, Monaco and Siam; Guy Francon, Stanton’s greatest alumnus, who had designed the famous Frink National Bank Building of New York City, on the top of which, twenty-five floors above the pavements, there burned in a miniature replica of the Hadrian Mausoleum a wind-blown torch made of glass and the best General Electric bulbs.

Guy Francon descended from the platform, fully conscious of his timing and movements. He was of medium height and not too heavy, with just an unfortunate tendency to stoutness. Nobody, he knew, would give him his real age, which was fifty-one. His face bore not a wrinkle nor a single straight line; it was an artful composition in globes, circles, arcs and ellipses, with bright little eyes twinkling wittily. His clothes displayed an artist’s infinite attention to details. He wished, as he descended the steps, that this were a co-educational school.

The hall before him, he thought, was a splendid specimen of architecture, made a bit stuffy today by the crowd and by the neglected problem of ventilation. But it boasted green marble dados, Corinthian columns of cast iron painted gold, and garlands of gilded fruit on the walls; the pineapples particularly, thought Guy Francon, had stood the test of years very well. It is, thought Guy Francon, touching; it was I who built this annex and this very hall, twenty years ago; and here I am.

The hall was packed with bodies and faces, so tightly that one could not distinguish at a glance which faces belonged to which bodies. It was like a soft, shivering aspic made of mixed arms, shoulders, chests and stomachs. One of the heads, pale, dark haired and beautiful, belonged to Peter Keating.

He sat, well in front, trying to keep his eyes on the platform, because he knew that many people were looking at him and would look at him later. He did not glance back, but the consciousness of those centered glances never left him. His eyes were dark, alert, intelligent. His mouth, a small upturned crescent faultlessly traced, was gentle and generous, and warm with the faint promise of a smile. His head had a certain classical perfection in the shape of the skull, in the natural wave of black ringlets about finely hollowed temples. He held his head in the manner of one who takes his beauty for granted, but knows that others do not. He was Peter Keating, star student of Stanton, president of the student body, captain of the track team, member of the most important fraternity, voted the most popular man on the campus.

The crowd was there, thought Peter Keating, to see him graduate, and he tried to estimate the capacity of the hall. They knew of his scholastic record and no one would beat his record today. Oh, well, there was Shlinker. Shlinker had given him stiff competition, but he had beaten Shlinker this last year. He had worked like a dog, because he had wanted to beat Shlinker. He had no rivals today.... Then he felt suddenly as if something had fallen down, inside his throat, to his stomach, something cold and empty, a blank hole rolling down and leaving that feeling on its way: not a thought, just the hint of a question asking him whether he was really as great as this day would proclaim him to be. He looked for Shlinker in the crowd; he saw his yellow face and gold-rimmed glasses. He stared at Shlinker warmly, in relief, in reassurance, in gratitude. It was obvious that Shlinker could never hope to equal his own appearance or ability; he had nothing to doubt; he would always beat Shlinker and all the Shlinkers of the world; he would let no one achieve what he could not achieve. Let them all watch him. He would give them good reason to stare. He felt the hot breaths about him and the expectation, like a tonic. It was wonderful, thought Peter Keating, to be alive.

His head was beginning to reel a little. It was a pleasant feeling. The feeling carried him, unresisting and unremembering, to the platform in front of all those faces. He stood—slender, trim, athletic—and let the deluge break upon his head. He gathered from its roar that he had graduated with honors, that the Architects’ Guild of America had presented him with a gold medal and that he had been awarded the Prix de Paris by the Society for Architectural Enlightenment of the U.S.A.—a four-year scholarship at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.

Then he was shaking hands, scratching the perspiration off his face with the end of a rolled parchment, nodding, smiling, suffocating in his black gown and hoping that people would not notice his mother sobbing with her arms about him. The President of the Institute shook his hand, booming: “Stanton will be proud of you, my boy.” The Dean shook his hand, repeating: “... a glorious future ... a glorious future ... a glorious future ...” Professor Peterkin shook his hand, and patted his shoulder, saying: “... and you’ll find it absolutely essential; for example, I had the experience when I built the Peabody Post Office ...” Keating did not listen to the rest, because he had heard the story of the Peabody Post Office many times. It was the only structure anyone had ever known Professor Peterkin to have erected, before he sacrificed his practice to the responsibilities of teaching. A great deal was said about Keating’s final project—a Palace of Fine Arts. For the life of him, Keating could not remember at the moment what that project was.

Through all this, his eyes held the vision of Guy Francon shaking his hand, and his ears held the sounds of Francon’s mellow voice: “... as I have told you, it is still open, my boy. Of course, now that you have this scholarship ... you will have to decide ... a Beaux-Arts diploma is very important to a young man ... but I should be delighted to have you in our office....”

The banquet of the class of ’22 was long and solemn. Keating listened to the speeches with interest; when he heard the endless sentences about “young men as the hope of American Architecture” and “the future opening its golden gates,” he knew that he was the hope and his was the future, and it was pleasant to hear this confirmation from so many eminent lips. He looked at the gray-haired orators and thought of how much younger he would be when he reached their positions, theirs and beyond them.

Then he thought suddenly of Howard Roark. He was surprised to find that the flash of that name in his memory gave him a sharp little twinge of pleasure, before he could know why. Then he remembered: Howard Roark had been expelled this morning. He reproached himself silently; he made a determined effort to feel sorry. But the secret glow came back, whenever he thought of that expulsion. The event proved conclusively that he had been a fool to imagine Roark a dangerous rival; at one time, he had worried about Roark more than about Shlinker, even though Roark was two years younger and one class below him. If he had ever entertained any doubts on their respective gifts, hadn’t this day settled it all? And, he remembered, Roark had been very nice to him, helping him whenever he was stuck on a problem ... not stuck, really, just did not have the time to think it out, a plan or something. Christ! how Roark could untangle a plan, like pulling a string and it was open ... well, what if he could? What did it get him? He was done for now. And knowing this, Peter Keating experienced at last a satisfying pang of sympathy for Howard Roark.

When Keating was called upon to speak, he rose confidently. He could not show that he was terrified. He had nothing to say about architecture. But he spoke, his head high, as an equal among equals, just subtly diffident, so that no great name present could take offense. He remembered saying: “Architecture is a great art ... with our eyes to the future and the reverence of the past in our hearts ... of all the crafts, the most important one sociologically ... and, as the man who is an inspiration to us all has said today, the three eternal entities are: Truth, Love and Beauty....”

Then, in the corridors outside, in the noisy confusion of leave-taking, a boy had thrown an arm about Keating’s shoulders and whispered: “Run on home and get out of the soup-and-fish, Pete, and it’s Boston for us tonight, just our own gang; I’ll pick you up in an hour.” Ted Shlinker had urged: “Of course you’re coming, Pete. No fun without you. And, by the way, congratulations and all that sort of thing. No hard feelings. May the best man win.” Keating had thrown his arm about Shlinker’s shoulders; Keating’s eyes had glowed with an insistent kind of warmth, as if Shlinker were his most precious friend; Keating’s eyes glowed like that on everybody. He had said: “Thanks, Ted, old man. I really do feel awful about that A.G.A. medal—I think you were the one for it, but you never can tell what possesses those old fogies.” And now Keating was on his way home through the soft darkness, wondering how to get away from his mother for the night.

His mother, he thought, had done a great deal for him. As she pointed out frequently, she was a lady and had graduated from high school; yet she had worked hard, had taken boarders into their home, a concession unprecedented in her family.

His father had owned a stationery store in Stanton. Changing times had ended the business and a hernia had ended Peter Keating, Sr., twelve years ago. Louisa Keating had been left with the home that stood at the end of a respectable street, an annuity from an insurance kept up accurately—she had seen to that—and her son. The annuity was a modest one, but with the help of the boarders and of a tenacious purpose Mrs. Keating had managed. In the summers her son helped, clerking in hotels or posing for hat advertisements. Her son, Mrs. Keating had decided, would assume his rightful place in the world, and she had clung to this as softly, as inexorably as a leech.... It’s funny, Keating remembered, at one time he had wanted to be an artist. It was his mother who had chosen a better field in which to exercise his talent for drawing. “Architecture,” she had said, “is such a respectable profession. Besides, you meet the best people in it.” She had pushed him into his career, he had never known when or how. It’s funny, thought Keating, he had not remembered that youthful ambition of his for years. It’s funny that it should hurt him now—to remember. Well, this was the night to remember it—and to forget it forever.

Architects, he thought, always made brilliant careers. And once on top, did they ever fail? Suddenly, he recalled Henry Cameron; builder of skyscrapers twenty years ago; old drunkard with offices on some waterfront today. Keating shuddered and walked faster.

He wondered, as he walked, whether people were looking at him. He watched the rectangles of lighted windows; when a curtain fluttered and a head leaned out, he tried to guess whether it had leaned to watch his passing; if it hadn’t, some day it would; some day, they all would.

Howard Roark was sitting on the porch steps when Keating approached the house. He was leaning back against the steps, propped up on his elbows, his long legs stretched out. A morning-glory climbed over the porch pillars, as a curtain between the house and the light of a lamppost on the corner.

It was strange to see an electric globe in the air of a spring night. It made the street darker and softer; it hung alone, like a gap, and left nothing to be seen but a few branches heavy with leaves, standing still at the gap’s edges. The small hint became immense, as if the darkness held nothing but a flood of leaves. The mechanical ball of glass made the leaves seem more living; it took away their color and gave the promise that in daylight they would be a brighter green than had ever existed; it took away one’s sight and left a new sense instead, neither smell nor touch, yet both, a sense of spring and space.

Keating stopped when he recognized the preposterous orange hair in the darkness of the porch. It was the one person whom he had wanted to see tonight. He was glad to find Roark alone, and a little afraid of it.

“Congratulations, Peter,” said Roark.

“Oh ... Oh, thanks....” Keating was surprised to find that he felt more pleasure than from any other compliment he had received today. He was timidly glad that Roark approved, and he called himself inwardly a fool for it. “... I mean ... do you know or ...” He added sharply: “Has mother been telling you?”

“She has.”

“She shouldn’t have!”

“Why not?”

“Look, Howard, you know that I’m terribly sorry about your being ...”

Roark threw his head back and looked up at him.

“Forget it,” said Roark.

“I ... there’s something I want to speak to you about, Howard, to ask your advice. Mind if I sit down?”

“What is it?”

Keating sat down on the steps beside him. There was no part that he could ever play in Roark’s presence. Besides, he did not feel like playing a part now. He heard a leaf rustling in its fall to the earth; it was a thin, glassy, spring sound.

He knew, for the moment, that he felt affection for Roark; an affection that held pain, astonishment and helplessness.

“You won’t think,” said Keating gently, in complete sincerity, “that it’s awful of me to be asking about my business, when you’ve just been ... ?”

“I said forget about that. What is it?”

“You know,” said Keating honestly and unexpectedly even to himself, “I’ve often thought that you’re crazy. But I know that you know many things about it—architecture, I mean—which those fools never knew. And I know that you love it as they never will.”

“Well?”

“Well, I don’t know why I should come to you, but—Howard, I’ve never said it before, but you see, I’d rather have your opinion on things than the Dean‘s—I’d probably follow the Dean’s, but it’s just that yours means more to me myself, I don’t know why. I don’t know why I’m saying this, either.”

Roark turned over on his side, looked at him, and laughed. It was a young, kind, friendly laughter, a thing so rare to hear from Roark that Keating felt as if someone had taken his hand in reassurance; and he forgot that he had a party in Boston waiting for him.

“Come on,” said Roark, “you’re not being afraid of me, are you? What do you want to ask about?”

“It’s about my scholarship. The Paris prize I got.”

“Yes?”

“It’s for four years. But, on the other hand, Guy Francon offered me a job with him some time ago. Today he said it’s still open. And I don’t know which to take.”

Roark looked at him; Roark’s fingers moved in slow rotation, beating against the steps.

“If you want my advice, Peter,” he said at last, “you’ve made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don’t you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?”

“You see, that’s what I admire about you, Howard. You always know.”

“Drop the compliments.”

“But I mean it. How do you always manage to decide?”

“How can you let others decide for you?”

“But you see, I’m not sure, Howard. I’m never sure of myself. I don’t know whether I’m as good as they all tell me I am. I wouldn’t admit that to anyone but you. I think it’s because you’re always so sure that I ...”

“Petey!” Mrs. Keating’s voice exploded behind them. “Petey, sweetheart! What are you doing there?”

She stood in the doorway, in her best dress of burgundy taffeta, happy and angry.

“And here I’ve been sitting all alone, waiting for you! What on earth are you doing on those filthy steps in your dress suit? Get up this minute! Come on in the house, boys. I’ve got hot chocolate and cookies ready for you.”

“But, Mother, I wanted to speak to Howard about something important,” said Keating. But he rose to his feet.

She seemed not to have heard. She walked into the house. Keating followed.

Roark looked after them, shrugged, rose and went in also.

Mrs. Keating settled down in an armchair, her stiff skirt crackling.

“Well?” she asked. “What were you two discussing out there?”

Keating fingered an ash tray, picked up a matchbox and dropped it, then, ignoring her, turned to Roark.

“Look, Howard, drop the pose,” he said, his voice high. “Shall I junk the scholarship and go to work, or let Francon wait and grab the Beaux-Arts to impress the yokels? What do you think?”

Something was gone. The one moment was lost.

“Now, Petey, let me get this straight ...” began Mrs. Keating.

“Oh, wait a minute, Mother! ... Howard, I’ve got to weigh it carefully. It isn’t everyone who can get a scholarship like that. You’re pretty good when you rate that. A course at the Beaux Arts—you know how important that is.”

“I don’t,” said Roark.

“Oh, hell, I know your crazy ideas, but I’m speaking practically, for a man in my position. Ideals aside for a moment, it certainly is ...”

“You don’t want my advice,” said Roark.

“Of course I do! I’m asking you!”

But Keating could never be the same when he had an audience, any audience. Something was gone. He did not know it, but he felt that Roark knew; Roark’s eyes made him uncomfortable and that made him angry.

“I want to practice architecture,” snapped Keating, “not talk about it! Gives you a great prestige—the old Ecole. Puts you above the rank and file of the ex-plumbers who think they can build. On the other hand, an opening with Francon—Guy Francon himself offering it!”

Roark turned away.

“How many boys will match that?” Keating went on blindly. “A year from now they’ll be boasting they’re working for Smith or Jones if they find work at all. While I’ll be with Francon & Heyer!”

“You’re quite right, Peter,” said Mrs. Keating, rising. “On a question like that you don’t want to consult your mother. It’s too important. I’ll leave you to settle it with Mr. Roark.”

He looked at his mother. He did not want to hear what she thought of this; he knew that his only chance to decide was to make the decision before he heard her; she had stopped, looking at him, ready to turn and leave the room; he knew it was not a pose—she would leave if he wished it; he wanted her to go; he wanted it desperately. He said:

“Why, Mother, how can you say that? Of course I want your opinion. What ... what do you think?”

She ignored the raw irritation in his voice. She smiled.

“Petey, I never think anything. It’s up to you. It’s always been up to you.”

“Well ...” he began hesitantly, watching her, “if I go to the Beaux-Arts ...”

“Fine,” said Mrs. Keating, “go to the Beaux-Arts. It’s a grand place. A whole ocean away from your home. Of course, if you go, Mr. Francon will take somebody else. People will talk about that. Everybody knows that Mr. Francon picks out the best boy from Stanton every year for his office. I wonder how it’ll look if some other boy gets the job? But I guess that doesn’t matter.”

“What ... what will people say?”

“Nothing much, I guess. Only that the other boy was the best man of his class. I guess he’ll take Shlinker.”

“No!” he gulped furiously. “Not Shlinker!”

“Yes,” she said sweetly. “Shlinker.”

“But...”

“But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.”

“And you think that Francon ...”

“Why should I think of Mr. Francon? It’s nothing to me.”

“Mother, you want me to take the job with Francon?”

“I don’t want anything, Petey. You’re the boss.”

He wondered whether he really liked his mother. But she was his mother and this fact was recognized by everybody as meaning automatically that he loved her, and so he took for granted that whatever he felt for her was love. He did not know whether there was any reason why he should respect her judgment. She was his mother; this was supposed to take the place of reasons.

“Yes, of course, Mother.... But ... Yes, I know, but ... Howard?”

It was a plea for help. Roark was there, on a davenport in the corner, half lying, sprawled limply like a kitten. It had often astonished Keating; he had seen Roark moving with the soundless tension, the control, the precision of a cat; he had seen him relaxed, like a cat, in shapeless ease, as if his body held no single solid bone. Roark glanced up at him. He said:

“Peter, you know how I feel about either one of your opportunities. Take your choice of the lesser evil. What will you learn at the Beaux-Arts? Only more Renaissance palaces and operetta settings. They’ll kill everything you might have in you. You do good work, once in a while, when somebody lets you. If you really want to learn, go to work. Francon is a bastard and a fool, but you will be building. It will prepare you for going on your own that much sooner.”

“Even Mr. Roark can talk sense sometimes,” said Mrs. Keating, “even if he does talk like a truck driver.”

“Do you really think that I do good work?” Keating looked at him, as if his eyes still held the reflection of that one sentence—and nothing else mattered.

“Occasionally,” said Roark. “Not often.”

“Now that it’s all settled ...” began Mrs. Keating.

“I ... I’ll have to think it over, Mother.”

“Now that it’s all settled, how about the hot chocolate? I’ll have it out to you in a jiffy!”

She smiled at her son, an innocent smile that declared her obedience and gratitude, and she rustled out of the room.

Keating paced nervously, stopped, lighted a cigarette, stood spitting the smoke out in short jerks, then looked at Roark.

“What are you going to do now, Howard?”

“I?”

“Very thoughtless of me, I know, going on like that about myself. Mother means well, but she drives me crazy.... Well, to hell with that. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to New York.”

“Oh, swell. To get a job?”

“To get a job.”

“In... in architecture?”

“In architecture, Peter.”

“That’s grand. I’m glad. Got any definite prospects?”

“I’m going to work for Henry Cameron.”

“Oh, no, Howard!”

Roark smiled slowly, the corners of his mouth sharp, and said nothing.

“Oh, no, Howard!”

“Yes.”

“But he’s nothing, nobody any more! Oh, I know he has a name, but he’s done for! He never gets any important buildings, hasn’t had any for years! They say he’s got a dump for an office. What kind of future will you get out of him? What will you learn?”

“Not much. Only how to build.”

“For God’s sake, you can’t go on like that, deliberately ruining yourself! I thought ... well, yes, I thought you’d learned something today!”

“I have.”

“Look, Howard, if it’s because you think that no one else will have you now, no one better, why, I’ll help you. I’ll work old Francon and I’ll get connections and...”

“Thank you, Peter. But it won’t be necessary. It’s settled.”

“What did he say?”

“Who?”

“Cameron.”

“I’ve never met him.”

Then a horn screamed outside. Keating remembered, started off to change his clothes, collided with his mother at the door and knocked a cup off her loaded tray.

“Petey!”

“Never mind, Mother!” He seized her elbows. “I’m in a hurry, sweetheart. A little party with the boys—now, now, don’t say anything—I won’t be late and—look! We’ll celebrate my going with Francon & Heyer!”

He kissed her impulsively, with the gay exuberance that made him irresistible at times, and flew out of the room, up the stairs. Mrs. Keating shook her head, flustered, reproving and happy.

In his room, while flinging his clothes in all directions, Keating thought suddenly of a wire he would send to New York. That particular subject had not been in his mind all day, but it came to him with a sense of desperate urgency; he wanted to send that wire now, at once. He scribbled it down on a piece of paper:

“Katie dearest coming New York job Francon love ever “Peter”

That night Keating raced toward Boston, wedged in between two boys, the wind and the road whistling past him. And he thought that the world was opening to him now, like the darkness fleeing before the bobbing headlights. He was free. He was ready. In a few years—so very soon, for time did not exist in the speed of that car—his name would ring like a horn, ripping people out of sleep. He was ready to do great things, magnificent things, things unsurpassed in ... in ... oh, hell ... in architecture.

III

PETER KEATING LOOKED AT THE STREETS OF NEW YORK. THE people, he observed, were extremely well dressed.

He had stopped for a moment before the building on Fifth Avenue, where the office of Francon & Heyer and his first day of work awaited him. He looked at the men who hurried past. Smart, he thought, smart as hell. He glanced regretfully at his own clothes. He had a great deal to learn in New York.

When he could delay it no longer, he turned to the door. It was a miniature Doric portico, every inch of it scaled down to the exact proportions decreed by the artists who had worn flowing Grecian tunics; between the marble perfection of the columns a revolving door sparkled with nickel-plate, reflecting the streaks of automobiles flying past. Keating walked through the revolving door, through the lustrous marble lobby, to an elevator of gilt and red lacquer that brought him, thirty floors later, to a mahogany door. He saw a slender brass plate with delicate letters:

FRANCON & HEYER, ARCHITECTS.

The reception room of the office of Francon & Heyer, Architects, looked like a cool, intimate ballroom in a Colonial mansion. The silver white walls were paneled with flat pilasters; the pilasters were fluted and curved into Ionic snails; they supported little pediments broken in the middle to make room for half a Grecian urn plastered against the wall. Etchings of Greek temples adorned the panels, too small to be distinguished, but presenting the unmistakable columns, pediments and crumbling stone.

Quite incongruously, Keating felt as if a conveyer belt was under his feet, from the moment he crossed the threshold. It carried him to the reception clerk who sat at a telephone switchboard behind the white balustrade of a Florentine balcony. It transferred him to the threshold of a huge drafting room. He saw long, flat tables, a forest of twisted rods descending from the ceiling to end in green-shaded lamps, enormous blueprint files, towers of yellow drawers, papers, tin boxes, sample bricks, pots of glue and calendars from construction companies, most of them bearing pictures of naked women. The chief draftsman snapped at Keating, without quite seeing him. He was bored and crackling with purpose simultaneously. He jerked his thumb in the direction of a locker room, thrust his chin out toward the door of a locker, and stood, rocking from heels to toes, while Keating pulled a pearl-gray smock over his stiff, uncertain body. Francon had insisted on that smock. The conveyor belt stopped at a table in a corner of the drafting room, where Keating found himself with a set of plans to expand, the scraggy back of the chief draftsman retreating from him in the unmistakable manner of having forgotten his existence.

Keating bent over his task at once, his eyes fixed, his throat rigid. He saw nothing but the pearly shimmer of the paper before him. The steady lines he drew surprised him, for he felt certain that his hand was jerking an inch back and forth across the sheet. He followed the lines, not knowing where they led or why. He knew only that the plan was someone’s tremendous achievement which he could neither question nor equal. He wondered why he had ever thought of himself as a potential architect.

Much later, he noticed the wrinkles of a gray smock sticking to a pair of shoulder blades over the next table. He glanced about him, cautiously at first, then with curiosity, then with pleasure, then with contempt. When he reached this last, Peter Keating became himself again and felt love for mankind. He noticed sallow cheeks, a funny nose, a wart on a receding chin, a stomach squashed against the edge of a table. He loved these sights. What these could do, he could do better. He smiled. Peter Keating needed his fellow men.

When he glanced at his plans again, he noticed the flaws glaring at him from the masterpiece. It was the floor of a private residence, and he noted the twisted hallways that sliced great hunks of space for no apparent reason, the long, rectangular sausages of rooms doomed to darkness. Jesus, he thought, they’d have flunked me for this in the first term. After which, he proceeded with his work swiftly, easily, expertly—and happily.

Before lunchtime, Keating had made friends in the room, not any definite friends, but a vague soil spread and ready from which friendships would spring. He had smiled at his neighbors and winked in understanding over nothing at all. He had used each trip to the water cooler to caress those he passed with the soft, cheering glow of his eyes, the brilliant eyes that seemed to pick each man in turn out of the room, out of the universe, as the most important specimen of humanity and as Keating’s dearest friend. There goes—there seemed to be left in his wake—a smart boy and a hell of a good fellow.

Keating noticed that a tall blond youth at the next table was doing the elevation of an office building. Keating leaned with chummy respect against the boy’s shoulder and looked at the laurel garlands entwined about fluted columns three floors high.

“Pretty good for the old man,” said Keating with admiration.

“Who?” asked the boy.

“Why, Francon,” said Keating.

“Francon hell,” said the boy placidly. “He hasn’t designed a dog-house in eight years.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, at a glass door behind them. “Him.”

“What?” asked Keating, turning.

“Him,” said the boy. “Stengel. He does all these things.”

Behind the glass door Keating saw a pair of bony shoulders above the edge of a desk, a small, triangular head bent intently, and two blank pools of light in the round frames of glasses.

It was late in the afternoon when a presence seemed to have passed beyond the closed door, and Keating learned from the rustle of whispers around him that Guy Francon had arrived and had risen to his office on the floor above. Half an hour later the glass door opened and Stengel came out, a huge piece of cardboard dangling between his fingers.

“Hey, you,” he said, his glasses stoppping on Keating’s face. “You doing the plans for this?” He swung the cardboard forward. “Take this up to the boss for the okay. Try to listen to what he’ll say and try to look intelligent. Neither of which matters anyway.”

He was short and his arms seemed to hang down to his ankles; arms swinging like ropes in the long sleeves, with big, efficient hands. Keating’s eyes froze, darkening, for one-tenth of a second, gathered in a tight stare at the blank lenses. Then Keating smiled and said pleasantly:

“Yes, sir.”

He carried the cardboard on the tips of his ten fingers, up the crimson-plushed stairway to Guy Francon’s office. The cardboard displayed a water-color perspective of a gray granite mansion with three tiers of dormers, five balconies, four bays, twelve columns, one flagpole and two lions at the entrance. In the corner, neatly printed by hand, stood: “Residence of Mr. and Mrs. James S. Whattles. Francon & Heyer, Architects.” Keating whistled softly: James S. Whattles was the multimillionaire manufacturer of shaving lotions.

Guy Francon’s office was polished. No, thought Keating, not polished, but shellacked; no, not shellacked, but liquid with mirrors melted and poured over every object. He saw splinters of his own reflection let loose like a swarm of butterflies, following him across the room, on the Chippendale cabinets, on the Jacobean chairs, on the Louis XV mantelpiece. He had time to note a genuine Roman statue in a corner, sepia photographs of the Parthenon, of Rheims Cathedral, of Versailles and of the Frink National Bank Building with the eternal torch.

He saw his own legs approaching him in the side of the massive mahogany desk. Guy Francon sat behind the desk. Guy Francon’s face was yellow and his cheeks sagged. He looked at Keating for an instant as if he had never seen him before, then remembered and smiled expansively.

“Well, well, well, Kittredge, my boy, here we are, all set and at home! So glad to see you. Sit down, boy, sit down, what have you got there? Well, there’s no hurry, no hurry at all. Sit down. How do you like it here?”

“I’m afraid, sir, that I’m a little too happy,” said Keating, with an expression of frank, boyish helplessness. “I thought I could be business-like on my first job, but starting in a place like this ... I guess it knocked me out a little.... I’ll get over it, sir,” he promised.

“Of course,” said Guy Francon. “It might be a bit overwhelming for a boy, just a bit. But don’t you worry. I’m sure you’ll make good.”

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

“Of course you will. What’s this they sent me?” Francon extended his hand to the drawing, but his fingers came to rest limply on his forehead instead. “It’s so annoying, this headache.... No, no, nothing serious—” he smiled at Keating’s prompt concern—“just a little mal de tête. One works so hard.”

“Is there anything I can get for you, sir?”

“No, no, thank you. It’s not anything you can get for me, it’s if only you could take something away from me.” He winked. “The champagne. Entre nous, that champagne of theirs wasn’t worth a damn last night. I’ve never cared for champagne anyway. Let me tell you, Kittredge, it’s very important to know about wines, for instance when you’ll take a client out to dinner and will want to be sure of the proper thing to order. Now I’ll tell you a professional secret. Take quail, for instance. Now most people would order Burgundy with it. What do you do? You call for Clos Vougeot 1904. See? Adds that certain touch. Correct, but original. One must always be original.... Who sent you up, by the way?”

“Mr. Stengel, sir.”

“Oh, Stengel.” The tone in which he pronounced the name clicked like a shutter in Keating’s mind: it was a permission to be stored away for future use. “Too grand to bring his own stuff up, eh? Mind you, he’s a great designer, the best designer in New York City, but he’s just getting to be a bit too grand lately. He thinks he’s the only one doing any work around here, just because I give him ideas and let him work them out for me. Just because he smudges at a board all day long. You’ll learn, my boy, when you’ve been in the business longer, that the real work of an office is done beyond its walls. Take last night, for instance. Banquet of the Clarion Real Estate Association. Two hundred guests—dinner and champagne—oh, yes, champagne!” He wrinkled his nose fastidiously, in self-mockery. “A few words to say informally in a little after-dinner speech—you know, nothing blatant, no vulgar sales talk—only a few well-chosen thoughts on the responsibility of realtors to society, on the importance of selecting architects who are competent, respected and well established. You know, a few bright little slogans that will stick in the mind.”

“Yes, sir, like ‘Choose the builder of your home as carefully as you choose the bride to inhabit it.’ ”

“Not bad. Not bad at all, Kittredge. Mind if I jot it down?”

“My name is Keating, sir,” said Keating firmly. “You are very welcome to the idea. I’m very happy if it appeals to you.”

“Keating, of course! Why, of course, Keating,” said Francon with a disarming smile. “Dear me, one meets so many people. How did you say it? Choose the builder ... It was very well put.”

He made Keating repeat it and wrote it down on a pad, picking a pencil from an array before him, new, many-colored pencils, sharpened to a professional needle point, ready, unused.

Then he pushed the pad aside, sighed, patted the smooth waves of his hair and said wearily:

“Well, all right, I suppose I’ll have to look at the thing.”

Keating extended the drawing respectfully. Francon leaned back, held the cardboard out at arm’s length and looked at it. He closed his left eye, then his right eye, then moved the cardboard an inch farther. Keating expected wildly to see him turn the drawing upside down. But Francon just held it and Keating knew suddenly that he had long since stopped seeing it. Francon was studying it for his, Keating’s benefit; and then Keating felt light, light as air, and he saw the road to his future, clear and open.

“Hm ... yes,” Francon was saying, rubbing his chin with the tips of two soft fingers. “Hm ... yes ...”

He turned to Keating.

“Not bad,” said Francon. “Not bad at all.... Well ... perhaps ... it could have been more distinguished, you know, but ... well, the drawing is done so neatly.... What do you think, Keating?”

Keating thought that four of the windows faced four mammoth granite columns. But he looked at Francon’s fingers playing with a petunia-mauve necktie, and decided not to mention it. He said instead:

“If I may make a suggestion, sir, it seems to me that the cartouches between the fourth and fifth floors are somewhat too modest for so imposing a building. It would appear that an ornamented stringcourse would be so much more appropriate.”

“That’s it. I was just going to say it. An ornamented stringcourse.... But ... but look, it would mean diminishing the fenestration, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Keating, a faint coating of diffidence over the tone he had used in discussions with his classmates, “but windows are less important than the dignity of a building’s façade.”

“That’s right. Dignity. We must give our clients dignity above all. Yes, definitely, an ornamented stringcourse.... Only ... look, I’ve approved the preliminary drawings, and Stengel has had this done up so neatly.”

“Mr. Stengel will be delighted to change it if you advise him to.”

Francon’s eyes held Keating’s for a moment. Then Francon’s lashes dropped and he picked a piece of lint off his sleeve.

“Of course, of course ...” he said vaguely. “But ... do you think the stringcourse is really important?”

“I think,” said Keating slowly, “it is more important to make changes you find necessary than to okay every drawing just as Mr. Stengel designed it.”

Because Francon said nothing, but only looked straight at him, because Francon’s eyes were focused and his hands limp, Keating knew that he had taken a terrible chance and won; he became frightened by the chance after he knew he had won.

They looked silently across the desk, and both saw that they were two men who could understand each other.

“We’ll have an ornamented stringcourse,” said Francon with calm, genuine authority. “Leave this here. Tell Stengel that I want to see him.”

He had turned to go. Francon stopped him. Francon’s voice was gay and warm:

“Oh, Keating, by the way, may I make a suggestion? Just between us, no offense intended, but a burgundy necktie would be so much better than blue with your gray smock, don’t you think so?”

“Yes, sir,” said Keating easily. “Thank you. You’ll see it tomorrow.”

He walked out and closed the door softly.

On his way back through the reception room, Keating saw a distinguished, gray-haired gentleman escorting a lady to the door. The gentleman wore no hat and obviously belonged to the office; the lady wore a mink cape, and was obviously a client.

The gentleman was not bowing to the ground, he was not unrolling a carpet, he was not waving a fan over her head; he was only holding the door for her. It merely seemed to Keating that the gentleman was doing all of that.

The Frink National Bank Building rose over Lower Manhattan, and its long shadow moved, as the sun traveled over the sky, like a huge clock hand across grimy tenements, from the Aquarium to Manhattan Bridge. When the sun was gone, the torch of Hadrian’s Mausoleum flared up in its stead, and made glowing red smears on the glass of windows for miles around, on the top stories of buildings high enough to reflect it. The Frink National Bank Building displayed the entire history of Roman art in well-chosen specimens; for a long time it had been considered the best building of the city, because no other structure could boast a single Classical item which it did not possess. It offered so many columns, pediments, friezes, tripods, gladiators, urns and volutes that it looked as if it had not been built of white marble, but squeezed out of a pastry tube. It was, however, built of white marble. No one knew that but the owners who had paid for it. It was now of a streaked, blotched, leprous color, neither brown nor green but the worst tones of both, the color of slow rot, the color of smoke, gas fumes and acids eating into a delicate stone intended for clean air and open country. The Frink National Bank Building, however, was a great success. It had been so great a success that it was the last structure Guy Francon ever designed; its prestige spared him the bother from then on.

Three blocks east of the Frink National Bank stood the Dana Building. It was some stories lower and without any prestige whatever. Its lines were hard and simple, revealing, emphasizing the harmony of the steel skeleton within, as a body reveals the perfection of its bones. It had no other ornament to offer. It displayed nothing but the precision of its sharp angles, the modeling of its planes, the long streaks of its windows like streams of ice running down from the roof to the pavements. New Yorkers seldom looked at the Dana Building. Sometimes, a rare country visitor would come upon it unexpectedly in the moonlight and stop and wonder from what dream that vision had come. But such visitors were rare. The tenants of the Dana Building said that they would not exchange it for any structure on earth; they appreciated the light, the air, the beautiful logic of the plan in their halls and offices. But the tenants of the Dana Building were not numerous; no prominent man wished his business to be located in a building that looked “like a warehouse.”

The Dana Building had been designed by Henry Cameron.

In the eighteen-eighties, the architects of New York fought one another for second place in their profession. No one aspired to the first. The first was held by Henry Cameron. Henry Cameron was hard to get in those days. He had a waiting list two years in advance; he designed personally every structure that left his office. He chose what he wished to build. When he built, a client kept his mouth shut. He demanded of all people the one thing he had never granted anybody: obedience. He went through the years of his fame like a projectile flying to a goal no one could guess. People called him crazy. But they took what he gave them, whether they understood it or not, because it was a building “by Henry Cameron.”

At first, his buildings were merely a little different, not enough to frighten anyone. He made startling experiments, once in a while, but people expected it and one did not argue with Henry Cameron. Something was growing in him with each new building, struggling, taking shape, rising dangerously to an explosion. The explosion came with the birth of the skyscraper. When structures began to rise not in tier on ponderous tier of masonry, but as arrows of steel shooting upward without weight or limit, Henry Cameron was among the first to understand this new miracle and to give it form. He was among the first and the few who accepted the truth that a tall building must look tall. While architects cursed, wondering how to make a twenty-story building look like an old brick mansion, while they used every horizontal device available in order to cheat it of its height, shrink it down to tradition, hide the shame of its steel, make it small, safe and ancient—Henry Cameron designed skyscrapers in straight, vertical lines, flaunting their steel and height. While architects drew friezes and pediments, Henry Cameron decided that the skyscraper must not copy the Greeks. Henry Cameron decided that no building must copy any other.

He was thirty-nine years old then, short, stocky, unkempt; he worked like a dog, missed his sleep and meals, drank seldom but then brutally, called his clients unprintable names, laughed at hatred and fanned it deliberately, behaved like a feudal lord and a longshoreman, and lived in a passionate tension that stung men in any room he entered, a fire neither they nor he could endure much longer. It was the year 1892.

The Columbian Exposition of Chicago opened in the year 1893.

The Rome of two thousand years ago rose on the shores of Lake Michigan, a Rome improved by pieces of France, Spain, Athens and every style that followed it. It was a “Dream City” of columns, triumphal arches, blue lagoons, crystal fountains and popcorn. Its architects competed on who could steal best, from the oldest source and from the most sources at once. It spread before the eyes of a new country every structural crime ever committed in all the old ones. It was white as a plague, and it spread as such.

People came, looked, were astounded, and carried away with them, to the cities of America, the seeds of what they had seen. The seeds sprouted into weeds; into shingled post offices with Doric porticos, brick mansions with iron pediments, lofts made of twelve Parthenons piled on top of one another. The weeds grew and choked everything else.

Henry Cameron had refused to work for the Columbian Exposition, and had called it names that were unprintable, but repeatable, though not in mixed company. They were repeated. It was repeated also that he had thrown an inkstand at the face of a distinguished banker who had asked him to design a railroad station in the shape of the temple of Diana at Ephesus. The banker never came back. There were others who never came back.

Just as he reached the goal of long, struggling years, just as he gave shape to the truth he had sought—the last barrier fell closed before him. A young country had watched him on his way, had wondered, had begun to accept the new grandeur of his work. A country flung two thousand years back in an orgy of Classicism could find no place for him and no use.

It was not necessary to design buildings any longer, only to photograph them; the architect with the best library was the best architect. Imitators copied imitations. To sanction it there was Culture; there were twenty centuries unrolling in moldering ruins; there was the great Exposition ; there was every European post card in every family album.

Henry Cameron had nothing to offer against this; nothing but a faith he held merely because it was his own. He had nobody to quote and nothing of importance to say. He said only that the form of a building must follow its function; that the structure of a building is the key to its beauty; that new methods of construction demand new forms; that he wished to build as he wished and for that reason only. But people could not listen to him when they were discussing Vitruvius, Michelangelo and Sir Christopher Wren.

Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake : he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost.

People said he never knew that he had lost. If he did, he never let them see it. As his clients became rarer, his manner to them grew more overbearing. The less the prestige of his name, the more arrogant the sound of his voice pronouncing it. He had had an astute business manager, a mild, self-effacing little man of iron who, in the days of his glory, faced quietly the storms of Cameron’s temper and brought him clients; Cameron insulted the clients, but the little man made them accept it and come back. The little man died.

Cameron had never known how to face people. They did not matter to him, as his own life did not matter, as nothing mattered but buildings. He had never learned to give explanations, only orders. He had never been liked. He had been feared. No one feared him any longer.

He was allowed to live. He lived to loathe the streets of the city he had dreamed of rebuilding. He lived to sit at the desk in his empty office, motionless, idle, waiting. He lived to read in a well-meaning newspaper account a reference to “the late Henry Cameron.” He lived to begin drinking, quietly, steadily, terribly, for days and nights at a time; and to hear those who had driven him to it say, when his name was mentioned for a commission: “Cameron? I should say not. He drinks like a fish. That’s why he never gets any work.” He lived to move from the offices that occupied three floors of a famous building to one floor on a less expensive street, then to a suite farther downtown, then to three rooms facing an air shaft, near the Battery. He chose these rooms because, by pressing his face to the window of his office, he could see, over a brick wall, the top of the Dana Building.

Howard Roark looked at the Dana Building beyond the windows, stopping at each landing, as he mounted the six flights of stairs to Henry Cameron’s office; the elevator was out of order. The stairs had been painted a dirty file-green a long time ago; a little of the paint remained to grate under shoe soles in crumbling patches. Roark went up swiftly, as if he had an appointment, a folder of his drawings under his arm, his eyes on the Dana Building. He collided once with a man descending the stairs; this had happened to him often in the last two days; he had walked through the streets of the city, his head thrown back, noticing nothing but the buildings of New York.

In the dark cubbyhole of Cameron’s anteroom stood a desk with a telephone and a typewriter. A gray-haired skeleton of a man sat at the desk, in his shirt sleeves, with a pair of limp suspenders over his shoulders. He was typing specifications intently, with two fingers and incredible speed. The light from a feeble bulb made a pool of yellow on his back, where the damp shirt stuck to his shoulder blades.

The man raised his head slowly, when Roark entered. He looked at Roark, said nothing and waited, his old eyes weary, unquestioning, incurious.

“I should like to see Mr. Cameron,” said Roark.

“Yeah?” said the man, without challenge, offense or meaning. “About what?”

“About a job.”

“What job?”

“Drafting.”

The man sat looking at him blankly. It was a request that had not confronted him for a long time. He rose at last, without a word, shuffled to a door behind him and went in.

He left the door half open. Roark heard him drawling:

“Mr. Cameron, there’s a fellow outside says he’s looking for a job here.”

Then a voice answered, a strong, clear voice that held no tones of age:

“Why, the damn fool! Throw him out ... Wait! Send him in!”

The old man returned, held the door open and jerked his head at it silently. Roark went in. The door closed behind him.

Henry Cameron sat at his desk at the end of a long, bare room. He sat bent forward, his forearms on the desk, his two hands closed before him. His hair and his beard were coal black, with coarse threads of white. The muscles of his short, thick neck bulged like ropes. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbows; the bare arms were hard, heavy and brown. The flesh of his broad face was rigid, as if it had aged by compression. The eyes were dark, young, living.

Roark stood on the threshold and they looked at each other across the long room.

The light from the air shaft was gray, and the dust on the drafting table, on the few green files, looked like fuzzy crystals deposited by the light. But on the wall, between the windows, Roark saw a picture. It was the only picture in the room. It was the drawing of a skyscraper that had never been erected.

Roark’s eyes moved first and they moved to the drawing. He walked across the office, stopped before it and stood looking at it. Cameron’s eyes followed him, a heavy glance, like a long, thin needle held fast at one end, describing a slow circle, its point piercing Roark’s body, keeping it pinned firmly. Cameron looked at the orange hair, at the hand hanging by his side, its palm to the drawing, the fingers bent slightly, forgotten not in a gesture but in the overture to a gesture of asking or seizing something.

“Well?” said Cameron at last. “Did you come to see me or did you come to look at pictures?”

Roark turned to him.

“Both,” said Roark.

He walked to the desk. People had always lost their sense of existence in Roark’s presence; but Cameron felt suddenly that he had never been as real as in the awareness of the eyes now looking at him.

“What do you want?” snapped Cameron.

“I should like to work for you,” said Roark quietly. The voice said: “I should like to work for you.” The tone of the voice said: “I’m going to work for you.”

“Are you?” said Cameron, not realizing that he answered the unpronounced sentence. “What’s the matter? None of the bigger and better fellows will have you?”

“I have not applied to anyone else.”

“Why not? Do you think this is the easiest place to begin? Think anybody can walk in here without trouble? Do you know who I am?”

“Yes. That’s why I’m here.”

“Who sent you?”

“No one.”

“Why the hell should you pick me?”

“I think you know that.”

“What infernal impudence made you presume that I’d want you? Have you decided that I’m so hard up that I’d throw the gates open for any punk who’d do me the honor? ‘Old Cameron,’ you’ve said to yourself, ‘is a has-been, a drunken ...’ Come on, you’ve said it! ... ‘a drunken failure who can’t be particular!’ Is that it? ... Come on, answer me! Answer me, damn you! What are you staring at? Is that it? Go on! Deny it!”

“It’s not necessary.”

“Where have you worked before?”

“I’m just beginning.”

“What have you done?”

“I’ve had three years at Stanton.”

“Oh? The gentleman was too lazy to finish?”

“I have been expelled.”

“Great!” Cameron slapped the desk with his fist and laughed. “Splendid! You’re not good enough for the lice nest at Stanton, but you’ll work for Henry Cameron! You’ve decided this is the place for refuse! What did they kick you out for? Drink? Women? What?”

“These,” said Roark, and extended his drawings.

Cameron looked at the first one, then at the next, then at every one of them to the bottom. Roark heard the paper rustling as Cameron slipped one sheet behind another. Then Cameron raised his head.

“Sit down.”

Roark obeyed. Cameron stared at him, his thick fingers drumming against the pile of drawings.

“So you think they’re good?” said Cameron. “Well, they’re awful. It’s unspeakable. It’s a crime. Look,” he shoved a drawing at Roark’s face, “look at that. What in Christ’s name was your idea? What possessed you to indent that plan here? Did you just want to make it pretty, because you had to patch something together? Who do you think you are? Guy Francon, God help you? ... Look at this building, you fool! You get an idea like this and you don’t know what to do with it! You stumble on a magnificent thing and you have to ruin it! Do you know how much you’ve got to learn?”

“Yes. That’s why I’m here.”

“And look at that one! I wish I’d done that at your age! But why did you have to botch it? Do you know what I’d do with that? Look, to hell with your stairways and to hell with your furnace room! When you lay the foundations ...”

He spoke furiously for a long time. He cursed. He did not find one sketch to satisfy him. But Roark noticed that he spoke as of buildings that were in construction.

He broke off abruptly, pushed the drawings aside, and put his fist over them. He asked:

“When did you decide to become an architect?”

“When I was ten years old.”

“Men don’t know what they want so early in life, if ever. You’re lying.”

“Am I?”

“Don’t stare at me like that! Can’t you look at something else? Why did you decide to be an architect?”

“I didn’t know it then. But it’s because I’ve never believed in God.”

“Come on, talk sense.”

“Because I love this earth. That’s all I love. I don’t like the shape of things on this earth. I want to change them.”

“For whom?”

“For myself.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Where did you hear all that?”

“I didn’t.”

“Men don’t talk like that at twenty-two. You’re abnormal.”

“Probably.”

“I didn’t mean it as a compliment.”

“I didn’t either.”

“Got any family?”

“ No.”

“Worked through school?”

“Yes.”

“At what?”

“In the building trades.”

“How much money have you got left?”

“Seventeen dollars and thirty cents.”

“When did you come to New York?”

“Yesterday.”

Cameron looked at the white pile under his fist.

“God damn you,” said Cameron softly.

“God damn you!” roared Cameron suddenly, leaning forward. “I didn’t ask you to come here! I don’t need any draftsmen! There’s nothing here to draft! I don’t have enough work to keep myself and my men out of the Bowery Mission! I don’t want any fool visionaries starving around here! I don’t want the responsibility. I didn’t ask for it. I never thought I’d see it again. I’m through with it. I was through with that many years ago. I’m perfectly happy with the drooling dolts I’ve got here, who never had anything and never will have and it makes no difference what becomes of them. That’s all I want. Why did you have to come here? You’re setting out to ruin yourself, you know that, don’t you? And I’ll help you to do it. I don’t want to see you. I don’t like you. I don’t like your face. You look like an insufferable egotist. You’re impertinent. You’re too sure of yourself. Twenty years ago I’d have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure. You’re coming to work here tomorrow at nine o’clock sharp.”

“Yes,” said Roark, rising.

“Fifteen dollars a week. That’s all I can pay you.”

“Yes.”

“You’re a damn fool. You should have gone to someone else. I’ll kill you if you go to anyone else. What’s your name?”

“Howard Roark.”

“If you’re late, I’ll fire you.”

“Yes.”

Roark extended his nand for the drawings.

“Leave these here!” bellowed Cameron. “Now get out!”

IV

“TOOHEY,” SAID GUY FRANCON, “ELLSWORTH TOOHEY. PRETTY decent of him, don’t you think? Read it, Peter.”

Francon leaned jovially across his desk and handed to Keating the August issue of New Frontiers. New Frontiers had a white cover with a black emblem that combined a palette, a lyre, a hammer, a screw driver and a rising sun; it had a circulation of thirty thousand and a following that described itself as the intellectual vanguard of the country; no one had ever risen to challenge the description. Keating read from an article entitled “Marble and Mortar,” by Ellsworth M. Toohey:

“... And now we come to another notable achievement of the metropolitan skyline. We call the attention of the discriminating to the new Melton Building by Francon & Heyer. It stands in white serenity as an eloquent witness to the triumph of Classical purity and common sense. The discipline of an immortal tradition has served here as a cohesive factor in evolving a structure whose beauty can reach, simply and lucidly, the heart of every man in the street. There is no freak exhibitionism here, no perverted striving for novelty, no orgy of unbridled egotism. Guy Francon, its designer, has known how to subordinate himself to the mandatory canons which generations of craftsmen behind him have proved inviolate, and at the same time how to display his own creative originality, not in spite of, but precisely because of the classical dogma he has accepted with the humility of a true artist. It may be worth mentioning, in passing, that dogmatic discipline is the only thing which makes true originality possible....

“More important, however, is the symbolic significance of a building such as this rising in our imperial city. As one stands before its southern façade, one is stricken with the realization that the stringcourses, repeated with deliberate and gracious monotony from the third to the eighteenth story, these long, straight, horizontal lines are the moderating, leveling principle, the lines of equality. They seem to bring the towering structure down to the humble level of the observer. They are the lines of the earth, of the people, of the great masses. They seem to tell us that none may rise too high above the restraint of the common human level, that all is held and shall be checked, even as this proud edifice, by the stringcourses of men’s brotherhood....”

There was more. Keating read it all, then raised his head. “Gee!” he said, awed.

Francon smiled happily.

“Pretty good, eh? And from Toohey, no less. Not many people might have heard the name, but they will, mark my word, they will. I know the signs.... So he doesn’t think I’m so bad? And he’s got a tongue like an icepick, when he feels like using it. You should see what he says about others, more often than not. You know Durkin’s latest mousetrap? Well, I was at a party where Toohey said—” Francon chuckled—“he said: ‘If Mr. Durkin suffers under the delusion that he is an architect, someone should mention to him the broad opportunities offered by the shortage of skilled plumbers.’ That’s what he said, imagine, in public!”

“I wonder,” said Keating wistfully, “what he’ll say about me, when the time comes.”

“What on earth does he mean by that symbolic significance stuff and the stringcourses of men’s brotherhood? ... Oh, well, if that’s what he praises us for, we should worry!”

“It’s the critic’s job to interpret the artist, Mr. Francon, even to the artist himself. Mr. Toohey has merely stated the hidden significance that was subconsciously in your own mind.”

“Oh,” said Francon vaguely. “Oh, do you think so?” he added brightly. “Quite possible.... Yes, quite possible.... You’re a smart boy, Peter.”

“Thank you, Mr. Francon,” Keating made a movement to rise.

“Wait. Don’t go. One more cigarette and then we’ll both return to the drudgery.”

Francon was smiling over the article, reading it again. Keating had never seen him so pleased; no drawing in the office, no work accomplished had ever made him as happy as these words from another man on a printed page to be read by other eyes.

Keating sat easily in a comfortable chair. His month with the firm had been well spent. He had said nothing and done nothing, but the impression had spread through the office that Guy Francon liked to see this particular boy sent to him whenever anyone had to be sent. Hardly a day passed without the pleasant interlude of sitting across the desk from Guy Francon, in a respectful, growing intimacy, listening to Francon’s sighs about the necessity of being surrounded by men who understood him.

Keating had learned all he could learn about Guy Francon, from his fellow draftsmen. He had learned that Guy Francon ate moderately and exquisitely, and prided himself on the title of gourmet; that he had graduated with distinction from the Ecole des Beaux Arts; that he had married a great deal of money and that the marriage had not been a happy one; that he matched meticulously his socks with his handkerchiefs, but never with his neckties; that he had a great preference for designing buildings of gray granite; that he owned a quarry of gray granite in Connecticut, which did a thriving business; that he maintained a magnificent bachelor apartment done in plum-colored Louis XV; that his wife, of a distinguished old name, had died, leaving her fortune to their only daughter; that the daughter, now nineteen, was away at college.

These last facts interested Keating a great deal. He mentioned to Francon, tentatively, in passing, the subject of his daughter. “Oh, yes ...” Francon said thinly. “Yes, indeed ...” Keating abandoned all further research into the matter, for the time being; Francon’s face had declared that the thought of his daughter was painfully annoying to him, for some reason which Keating could not discover.

Keating had met Lucius N. Heyer, Francon’s partner, and had seen him come to the office twice in three weeks, but had been unable to learn what service Heyer rendered to the firm. Heyer did not have haemophilia, but looked as though he should have it. He was a withered aristocrat, with a long, thin neck, pale, bulging eyes and a manner of frightened sweetness toward everyone. He was the relic of an ancient family, and it was suspected that Francon had taken him into partnership for the sake of his social connections. People felt sorry for poor dear Lucius, admired him for the effort of undertaking a professional career, and thought it would be nice to let him build their homes. Francon built them and required no further service from Lucius. This satisfied everybody.

The men in the drafting rooms loved Peter Keating. He made them feel as if he had been there for a long time; he had always known how to become part of any place he entered; he came soft and bright as a sponge to be filled, unresisting, with the air and the mood of the place. His warm smile, his gay voice, the easy shrug of his shoulders seemed to say that nothing weighed too much within his soul and so he was not one to blame, to demand, to accuse anything.

As he sat now, watching Francon read the article, Francon raised his head to glance at him. Francon saw two eyes looking at him with immense approval—and two bright little points of contempt in the corners of Keating’s mouth, like two musical notes of laughter visible the second before they were to be heard. Francon felt a great wave of comfort. The comfort came from the contempt. The approval, together with that wise half-smile, granted him a grandeur he did not have to earn; a blind admiration would have been precarious; a deserved admiration would have been a responsibility; an undeserved admiration was precious.

“When you go, Peter, give this to Miss Jeffers to put in my scrapbook.”

On his way down the stairs, Keating flung the magazine high in the air and caught it smartly, his lips pursed to whistle without sound.

In the drafting room he found Tim Davis, his best friend, slouched despondently over a drawing. Tim Davis was the tall, blond boy at the next table, whom Keating had noticed long ago, because he had known, with no tangible evidence, but with certainty, as Keating always knew such things, that this was the favored draftsman of the office. Keating managed to be assigned, as frequently as possible, to do parts of the projects on which Davis worked. Soon they were going out to lunch together, and to a quiet little speak-easy after the day’s work, and Keating was listening with breathless attention to Davis’ talk about his love for one Elaine Duffy, not a word of which Keating ever remembered afterward.

He found Davis now in black gloom, his mouth chewing furiously a cigarette and a pencil at once. Keating did not have to question him. He merely bent his friendly face over Davis’ shoulder. Davis spit out the cigarette and exploded. He had just been told that he would have to work overtime tonight, for the third time this week.

“Got to stay late, God knows how late! Gotta finish this damn tripe tonight!” He slammed the sheets spread before him. “Look at it! Hours and hours and hours to finish it! What am I going to do?”

“Well, it’s because you’re the best man here, Tim, and they need you.”

“To hell with that! I’ve got a date with Elaine tonight! How’m I going to break it? Third time! She won’t believe me! She told me so last time! That’s the end! I’m going up to Guy the Mighty and tell him where he can put his plans and his job! I’m through!”

“Wait,” said Keating, and leaned closer to him. “Wait! There’s another way. I’ll finish them for you.”

“Huh?”

“I’ll stay. I’ll do them. Don’t be afraid. No one’ll tell the difference.”

“Pete! Would you?”

“Sure. I’ve nothing to do tonight. You just stay till they all go home, then skip.”

“Oh, gee, Pete!” Davis sighed, tempted. “But look, if they find out, they’ll can me. You’re too new for this kind of job.”

“They won’t find out.”

“I can’t lose my job, Pete. You know I can’t. Elaine and I are going to be married soon. If anything happens ...”

“Nothing will happen.”

Shortly after six, Davis departed furtively from the empty drafting room, leaving Keating at his table.

Bending under a solitary green lamp, Keating glanced at the desolate expanse of three long rooms, oddly silent after the day’s rush, and he felt that he owned them, that he would own them, as surely as the pencil moved in his hand.

It was half past nine when he finished the plans, stacked them neatly on Davis’ table, and left the office. He walked down the street, glowing with a comfortable, undignified feeling, as though after a good meal. Then the realization of his loneliness struck him suddenly. He had to share this with someone tonight. He had no one. For the first time he wished his mother were in New York. But she had remained in Stanton, awaiting the day when he would be able to send for her. He had nowhere to go tonight, save to the respectable little boarding house on West Twenty-Eighth Street, where he could climb three flights of stairs to his clean, airless little room. He had met people in New York, many people, many girls, with one of whom he remembered spending a pleasant night, though he could not remember her last name; but he wished to see none of them. And then he thought of Catherine Halsey.

He had sent her a wire on the night of his graduation and forgotten her ever since. Now he wanted to see her; the desire was intense and immediate with the first sound of her name in his memory. He leaped into a bus for the long ride to Greenwich Village, climbed to the deserted top and, sitting alone on the front bench, cursed the traffic lights whenever they turned to red. It had always been like this where Catherine was concerned; and he wondered dimly what was the matter with him.

He had met her a year ago in Boston, where she had lived with her widowed mother. He had found Catherine homely and dull, on that first meeting, with nothing to her credit but her lovely smile, not a sufficient reason ever to see her again. He had telephoned her the next evening. Of the countless girls he had known in his student years she was the only one with whom he had never progressed beyond a few kisses. He could have any girl he met and he knew it; he knew that he could have Catherine; he wanted her; she loved him and had admitted it simply, openly, without fear or shyness, asking nothing of him, expecting nothing; somehow, he had never taken advantage of it. He had felt proud of the girls whom he escorted in those days, the most beautiful girls, the most popular, the best dressed, and he had delighted in the envy of his schoolmates. He had been ashamed of Catherine’s thoughtless sloppiness and of the fact that no other boy would look at her twice. But he had never been as happy as when he took her to fraternity dances. He had had many violent loves, when he swore he could not live without this girl or that; he forgot Catherine for weeks at a time and she never reminded him. He had always come back to her, suddenly, inexplicably, as he did tonight.

Her mother, a gentle little schoolteacher, had died last winter. Catherine had gone to live with an uncle in New York. Keating had answered some of her letters immediately, others—months later. She had always replied at once, and never written during his long silences, waiting patiently. He had felt, when he thought of her, that nothing would ever replace her. Then, in New York, within reach of a bus or a telephone, he had forgotten her again for a month.

He never thought, as he hurried to her now, that he should have announced his visit. He never wondered whether he would find her at home. He had always come back like this and she had always been there. She was there again tonight.

She opened the door for him, on the top floor of a shabby, pretentious brownstone house. “Hello, Peter,” she said, as if she had seen him yesterday.

She stood before him, too small, too thin for her clothes. The short black skirt flared out from the slim band of her waist; the boyish shirt collar hung loosely, pulled to one side, revealing the knob of a thin collarbone; the sleeves were too long over the fragile hands. She looked at him, her head bent to one side; her chestnut hair was gathered carelessly at the back of her neck, but it looked as though it were bobbed, standing, light and fuzzy, as a shapeless halo about her face. Her eyes were gray, wide and nearsighted; her mouth smiled slowly, delicately, enchantingly, her lips glistening.

“Hello, Katie,” he said.

He felt at peace. He felt he had nothing to fear, in this house or anywhere outside. He had prepared himself to explain how busy he’d been in New York; but explanations seemed irrelevant now.

“Give me your hat,” she said, “be careful of that chair, it’s not very steady, we have better ones in the living room, come in.”

The living room, he noticed, was modest but somehow distinguished, and in surprisingly good taste. He noticed the books; cheap shelves rising to the ceiling, loaded with precious volumes; the volumes stacked carelessly, actually being used. He noticed, over a neat, shabby desk, a Rembrandt etching, stained and yellow, found, perhaps, in some junk shop by the eyes of a connoisseur who had never parted with it, though its price would have obviously been of help to him. He wondered what business her uncle could be in; he had never asked.

He stood looking vaguely at the room, feeling her presence behind him, enjoying that sense of certainty which he found so rarely. Then he turned and took her in his arms and kissed her; her lips met his softly, eagerly; but she was neither frightened nor excited, too happy to accept this in any way save by taking it for granted.

“God, I’ve missed you!” he said, and knew that he had, every day since he’d seen her last and most of all, perhaps, on the days when he had not thought of her.

“You haven’t changed much,” she said. “You look a little thinner. It’s becoming. You’ll be very attractive when you’re fifty, Peter.”

“That’s not very complimentary—by implication.”

“Why? Oh, you mean I think you’re not attractive now? Oh, but you are.”

“You shouldn’t say that right out to me like that.”

“Why not? You know you are. But I’ve been thinking of what you’ll look like at fifty. You’ll have gray temples and you’ll wear a gray suit—I saw one in a window last week and I thought that would be the one-and you’ll be a very great architect.”

“You really think so?”

“Why, yes.” She was not flattering him. She did not seem to realize that it could be flattery. She was merely stating a fact, too certain to need emphasis.

He waited for the inevitable questions. But instead, they were talking suddenly of their old Stanton days together, and he was laughing, holding her across his knees, her thin shoulders leaning against the circle of his arm, her eyes soft, contented. He was speaking of their old bathing suits, of the runs in her stockings, of their favorite ice-cream parlor in Stanton, where they had spent so many summer evenings together—and he was thinking dimly that it made no sense at all; he had more pertinent things to tell and to ask her; people did not talk like that when they hadn’t seen each other for months. But it seemed quite normal to her; she did not appear to know that they had been parted.

He was first to ask finally:

“Did you get my wire?”

“Oh, yes. Thanks.”

“Don’t you want to know how I’m getting along in the city?”

“Sure. How are you getting along in the city?”

“Look here, you’re not terribly interested.”

“Oh, but I am! I want to know everything about you.”

“Why don’t you ask?”

“You’ll tell me when you want to.”

“It doesn’t matter much to you, does it?”

“What?”

“What I’ve been doing.”

“Oh ... Yes, it does, Peter. No, not too much.”

“That’s sweet of you!”

“But, you see, it’s not what you do that matters really. It’s only you.”

“Me what?”

“Just you here. Or you in the city. Or you somewhere in the world. I don’t know. Just that.”

“You know, you’re a fool, Katie. Your technique is something awful.”

“My what?”

“Your technique. You can’t tell a man so shamelessly, like that, that you’re practically crazy about him.”

“But I am.”

“But you can’t say so. Men won’t care for you.”

“But I don’t want men to care for me.”

“You want me to, don’t you?”

“But you do, don’t you?”

“I do,” he said, his arms tightening about her. “Damnably. I’m a bigger fool than you are.”

“Well, then it’s perfectly all right,” she said, her fingers in his hair, “isn’t it?”

“It’s always been perfectly all right, that’s the strangest part about it. ... But look, I want to tell you about what’s happened to me, because it’s important.”

“I’m really very interested, Peter.”

“Well, you know I’m working for Francon & Heyer and ... Oh, hell, you don’t even know what that means!”

“Yes, I do. I’ve looked them up in Who’s Who in Architecture. It said some very nice things about them. And I asked Uncle. He said they were tops in the business.”

“You bet they are. Francon—he’s the greatest designer in New York, in the whole country, in the world maybe. He’s put up seventeen skyscrapers, eight cathedrals, six railroad terminals and God knows what else.... Of course, you know, he’s an old fool and a pompous fraud who oils his way into everything and ...”

He stopped, his mouth open, staring at her. He had not intended to say that. He had never allowed himself to think that before.

She was looking at him serenely.

“Yes?” she asked. “And ... ?”

“Well ... and ...” he stammered, and he knew that he could not speak differently, not to her, “and that’s what I really think of him. And I have no respect for him at all. And I’m delighted to be working for him. See?”

“Sure,” she said quietly. “You’re ambitious, Peter.”

“Don’t you despise me for it?”

“No. That’s what you wanted.”

“Sure, that’s what I wanted. Well, actually, it’s not as bad as that. It’s a tremendous firm, the best in the city. I’m really doing work, and Francon is very pleased with me. I’m getting ahead. I think I can have any job I want in the place eventually.... Why, only tonight I took over a man’s work and he doesn’t know that he’ll be useless soon, because ... Katie! What am I saying?”

“It’s all right, dear. I understand.”

“If you did, you’d call me the names I deserve and make me stop it.”

“No, Peter. I don’t want to change you. I love you, Peter.”

“God help you!”

“I know that.”

“You know that? And you say it like this? Like you’d say, ‘Hello, it’s a beautiful evening’?”

“Well, why not? Why worry about it? I love you.”

“No, don’t worry about it! Don’t ever worry about it! ... Katie.... I’ll never love anyone else....”

“I know that too.”

He held her close, anxiously, afraid that her weightless little body would vanish. He did not know why her presence made him confess things unconfessed in his own mind. He did not know why the victory he came here to share had faded. But it did not matter. He had a peculiar sense of freedom—her presence always lifted from him a pressure he could not denne—he was alone—he was himself. All that mattered to him now was the feeling of her coarse cotton blouse against his wrist.

Then he was asking her about her own life in New York and she was speaking happily about her uncle.

“He’s wonderful, Peter. He’s really wonderful. He’s quite poor, but he took me in and he was so gracious about it, he gave up his study to make a room for me and now he has to work here, in the living room. You must meet him, Peter. He’s away now, on a lecture tour, but you must meet him when he comes back.”

“Sure, I’d love to.”

“You know, I wanted to go to work and be on my own, but he wouldn’t let me. ‘My dear child,’ he said, ‘not at seventeen. You don’t want me to be ashamed of myself, do you? I don’t believe in child labor.’ That was kind of a funny idea, don’t you think? He has so many funny ideas—I don’t understand them all, but they say he’s a brilliant man. So he made it look as if I were doing him a favor by letting him keep me, and I think that was really very decent of him.”

“What do you do with yourself all day long?”

“Nothing much of anything now. I read books. On architecture. Uncle has tons of books on architecture. But when he’s here I type his lectures for him. I really don’t think he likes me to do it, he prefers the typist he had, but I love it and he lets me. And he pays me her salary. I didn’t want to take it, but he made me.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“Oh, so many things, I don’t know, I can’t keep track of them. He teaches art history, for one thing, he’s a kind of professor.”

“And when are you going to college, by the way?”

“Oh ... Well ... well, you see, I don’t think Uncle approves of the idea. I told him how I’d always planned to go and that I’d work my own way through, but he seems to think it’s not for me. He doesn’t say much, only: ‘God made the elephant for toil and the mosquito for flitting about, and it’s not advisable, as a rule, to experiment with the laws of nature, however, if you want to try it, my dear child ...’ But he’s not objecting really, it’s up to me, only ...”

“Well, don’t let him stop you.”

“Oh, he wouldn’t want to stop me. Only, I was thinking, I was never any great shakes in high school, and, darling, I’m really quite utterly lousy at mathematics, and so I wonder ... But then, there’s no hurry, I’ve got plenty of time to decide.”

“Listen, Katie, I don’t like that. You’ve always planned on college. If that uncle of yours ...”

“You shouldn’t say it like this. You don’t know him. He’s the most amazing man. I’ve never met anyone quite like him. He’s so kind, so understanding. And he’s such fun, always joking, he’s so clever at it, nothing that you thought was serious ever seems to be when he’s around, and yet he’s a very serious man. You know, he spends hours talking to me, he’s never too tired and he’s not bored with my stupidity, he tells me all about strikes, and conditions in the slums, and the poor people in sweatshops, always about others, never about himself. A friend of his told me that Uncle could be a very rich man if he tried, he’s so clever, but he won’t, he just isn’t interested in money.”

“That’s not human.”

“Wait till you see him. Oh, he wants to meet you, too. I’ve told him about you. He calls you ‘the T-square Romeo.’ ”

“Oh, he does, does he?”

“But you don’t understand. He means it kindly. It’s the way he says things. You’ll have a lot in common. Maybe he could help you. He knows something about architecture, too. You’ll love Uncle Ellsworth.”

“Who?” said Keating.

“My uncle.”

“Say,” Keating asked, his voice a little husky, “what’s your uncle’s name?”

“Ellsworth Toohey. Why?”

His hands fell limply. He sat staring at her.

“What’s the matter, Peter?”

He swallowed. She saw the jerking motion of his throat. Then he said, his voice hard:

“Listen, Katie, I don’t want to meet your uncle.”

“But why?”

“I don’t want to meet him. Not through you.... You see, Katie, you don’t know me. I’m the kind that uses people. I don’t want to use you. Ever. Don’t let me. Not you.”

“Use me how? What’s the matter? Why?”

“It’s just this: I’d give my eyeteeth to meet Ellsworth Toohey, that’s all.” He laughed harshly. “So he knows something about architecture, does he? You little fool! He’s the most important man in architecture. Not yet, maybe, but that’s what he’ll be in a couple of years—ask Francon, that old weasel knows. He’s on his way to becoming the Napoleon of all architectural critics, your Uncle Ellsworth is, just watch him. In the first place, there aren’t many to bother writing about our profession, so he’s the smart boy who’s going to corner the market. You should see the big shots in our office lapping up every comma he puts out in print! So you think maybe he could help me? Well, he could make me, and he will, and I’m going to meet him some day, when I’m ready for him, as I met Francon, but not here, not through you. Understand? Not from you!”

“But, Peter, why not?”

“Because I don’t want it that way! Because it’s filthy and I hate it, all of it, my work and my profession, and what I’m doing and what I’m going to do! It’s something I want to keep you out of. You’re all I really have. Just keep out of it, Katie!”

“Out of what?”

“I don’t know!”

She rose and stood in the circle of his arms, his face hidden against her hip; she stroked his hair, looking down at him.

“All right, Peter. I think I know. You don’t have to meet him until you want to. Just tell me when you want it. You can use me, if you have to. It’s all right. It won’t change anything.”

When he raised his head, she was laughing softly.

“You’ve worked too hard, Peter. You’re a little unstrung. Suppose I make you some tea?”

“Oh, I’d forgotten all about it, but I’ve had no dinner today. Had no time.”

“Well, of all things! Well, how perfectly disgusting! Come on to the kitchen, this minute, I’ll see what I can fix up for you!”

He left her two hours later, and he walked away feeling light, clean, happy, his fears forgotten, Toohey and Francon forgotten. He thought only that he had promised to come again tomorrow and that it was an unbearably long time to wait. She stood at the door, after he had gone, her hand on the knob he had touched, and she thought that he might come tomorrow—or three months later.

“When you finish tonight,” said Henry Cameron, “I want to see you in my office.”

“Yes,” said Roark.

Cameron veered sharply on his heels and walked out of the drafting room. It had been the longest sentence he had addressed to Roark in a month.

Roark had come to this room every morning, had done his task, and had heard no word of comment. Cameron would enter the drafting room and stand behind Roark for a long time, looking over his shoulder. It was as if his eyes concentrated deliberately on trying to throw the steady hand off its course on the paper. The two other draftsmen botched their work from the mere thought of such an apparition standing behind them. Roark did not seem to notice it. He went on, his hand unhurried, he took his time about discarding a blunted pencil and picking out another. “Uh-huh,” Cameron would grunt suddenly. Roark would turn his head then, politely attentive. “What is it?” he would ask. Cameron would turn away without a word, his narrowed eyes underscoring contemptuously the fact that he considered an answer unnecessary, and would leave the drafting room. Roark would go on with his drawing.

“Looks bad,” Loomis, the young draftsman, confided to Simpson, his ancient colleague. “The old man doesn’t like this guy. Can’t say that I blame him, either. Here’s one that won’t last long.”

Simpson was old and helpless; he had survived from Cameron’s three-floor office, had stuck and had never understood it. Loomis was young, with the face of a drugstore-corner lout; he was here because he had been fired from too many other places.

Both men disliked Roark. He was usually disliked, from the first sight of his face, anywhere he went. His face was closed like the door of a safety vault; things locked in safety vaults are valuable; men did not care to feel that. He was a cold, disquieting presence in the room; his presence had a strange quality: it made itself felt and yet it made them feel that he was not there; or perhaps that he was and they weren’t.

After work he walked the long distance to his home, a tenement near the East River. He had chosen that tenement because he had been able to get, for two-fifty a week, its entire top floor, a huge room that had been used for storage: it had no ceiling and the roof leaked between its naked beams. But it had a long row of windows, along two of its walls, some panes filled with glass, others with cardboard, and the windows opened high over the river on one side and the city on the other.

A week ago Cameron had come into the drafting room and had thrown down on Roark’s table a violent sketch of a country residence. “See if you can make a house out of this!” he had snapped and gone without further explanation. He had not approached Roark’s table during the days that followed. Roark had finished the drawings last night and left them on Cameron’s desk. This morning, Cameron had come in, thrown some sketches of steel joints to Roark, ordered him to appear in his office later and had not entered the drafting room again for the rest of the day.

The others were gone. Roark pulled an old piece of oil cloth over his table and went to Cameron’s office. His drawings of the country house were spread on the desk. The light of the lamp fell on Cameron’s cheek, on his beard, the white threads glistening, on his fist, on a corner of the drawing, its black lines bright and hard as if embossed on the paper.

“You’re fired,” said Cameron.

Roark stood, halfway across the long room, his weight on one leg, his arms hanging by his sides, one shoulder raised.

“Am I?” he asked quietly, without moving.

“Come here,” said Cameron. “Sit down.”

Roark obeyed.

“You’re too good,” said Cameron. “You’re too good for what you want to do with yourself. It’s no use, Roark. Better now than later.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s no use wasting what you’ve got on an ideal that you’ll never reach, that they’ll never let you reach. It’s no use, taking that marvelous thing you have and making a torture rack for yourself out of it. Sell it, Roark. Sell it now. It won’t be the same, but you’ve got enough in you. You’ve got what they’ll pay you for, and pay plenty, if you use it their way. Accept them, Roark. Compromise. Compromise now, because you’ll have to later, anyway, only then you’ll have gone through things you’ll wish you hadn’t. You don’t know. I do. Save yourself from that. Leave me. Go to someone else.”

“Did you do that?”

“You presumptuous bastard! How good do you think I said you were? Did I tell you to compare yourself to ...” He stopped because he saw that Roark was smiling.

He looked at Roark, and suddenly smiled in answer, and it was the most painful thing that Roark had ever seen.

“No,” said Cameron softly, “that won’t work, huh? No, it won’t ... Well, you’re right. You’re as good as you think you are. But I want to speak to you. I don’t know exactly how to go about it. I’ve lost the habit of speaking to men like you. Lost it? Maybe I’ve never had it. Maybe that’s what frightens me now. Will you try to understand?”

“I understand. I think you’re wasting your time.”

“Don’t be rude. Because I can’t be rude to you now. I want you to listen. Will you listen and not answer me?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t intend it as rudeness.”

“You see, of all men, I’m the last one to whom you should have come. I’ll be committing a crime if I keep you here. Somebody should have warned you against me. I won’t help you at all. I won’t discourage you. I won’t teach you any common sense. Instead, I’ll push you on. I’ll drive you the way you’re going now. I’ll beat you into remaining what you are, and I’ll make you worse.... Don’t you see? In another month I won’t be able to let you go. I’m not sure I can now. So don’t argue with me and go. Get out while you can.”

“But can I? Don’t you think it’s too late for both of us? It was too late for me twelve years ago.”

“Try it, Roark. Try to be reasonable for once. There’s plenty of big fellows who’ll take you, expulsion or no expulsion, if I say so. They may laugh at me in their luncheon speeches, but they steal from me when it suits them, and they know that I know a good draftsman when I see one. I’ll give you a letter to Guy Francon. He worked for me once, long ago. I think I fired him, but that wouldn’t matter. Go to him. You won’t like it at first, but you’ll get used to it. And you’ll thank me for it many years from now.”

“Why are you saying all this to me? That’s not what you want to say. That’s not what you did.”

“That’s why I’m saying it! Because that’s not what I did! ... Look, Roark, there’s one thing about you, the thing I’m afraid of. It’s not just the kind of work you do; I wouldn’t care, if you were an exhibitionist who’s being different as a stunt, as a lark, just to attract attention to himself. It’s a smart racket, to oppose the crowd and amuse it and collect admission to the side show. If you did that, I wouldn’t worry. But it’s not that. You love your work. God help you, you love it! And that’s the curse. That’s the brand on your forehead for all of them to see. You love it, and they know it, and they know they have you. Do you ever look at the people in the street? Aren’t you afraid of them? I am. They move past you and they wear hats and they carry bundles. But that’s not the substance of them. The substance of them is hatred for any man who loves his work. That’s the only kind they fear. I don’t know why. You’re opening yourself up, Roark, for each and every one of them.”

“But I never notice the people in the streets.”

“Do you notice what they’ve done to me?”

“I notice only that you weren’t afraid of them. Why do you ask me to be?”

“That’s just why I’m asking it!” He leaned forward, his fists closing on the desk before him. “Roark, do you want me to say it? You’re cruel, aren’t you? All right, I’ll say it: do you want to end up like this? Do you want to be what I am?”

Roark got up and stood against the edge of light on the desk.

“If,” said Roark, “at the end of my life, I’ll be what you are today, here, in this office, I shall consider it an honor that I could not have deserved.”

“Sit down!” roared Cameron. “I don’t like demonstrations!”

Roark looked down at himself, at the desk, astonished to find himself standing. He said: “I’m sorry. I didn’t know I got up.”

“Well, sit down. Listen. I understand. And it’s very nice of you. But you don’t know. I thought a few days here would be enough to take the hero worship out of you. I see it wasn’t. Here you are, saying to yourself how grand old Cameron is, a noble fighter, a martyr to a lost cause, and you’d just love to die on the barricades with me and to eat in dime lunchwagons with me for the rest of your life. I know, it looks pure and beautiful to you now, at your great old age of twenty-two. But do you know what it means? Thirty years of a lost cause, that sounds beautiful, doesn’t it? But do you know how many days there are in thirty years? Do you know what happens in those days? Roark! Do you know what happens?”

“You don’t want to speak of that.”

“No! I don’t want to speak of that! But I’m going to. I want you to hear. I want you to know what’s in store for you. There will be days when you’ll look at your hands and you’ll want to take something and smash every bone in them, because they’ll be taunting you with what they could do, if you found a chance for them to do it, and you can’t find that chance, and you can’t bear your living body because it has failed those hands somewhere. There will be days when a bus driver will snap at you as you enter a bus, and he’ll be only asking for a dime, but that won’t be what you’ll hear; you’ll hear that you’re nothing, that he’s laughing at you, that it’s written on your forehead, that thing they hate you for. There will be days when you’ll stand in the corner of a hall and listen to a creature on a platform talking about buildings, about that work which you love, and the things he’ll say will make you wait for somebody to rise and crack him open between two thumbnails; and then you’ll hear the people applauding him, and you’ll want to scream, because you won’t know whether they’re real or you are, whether you’re in a room full of gored skulls, or whether someone has just emptied your own head, and you’ll say nothing, because the sounds you could make—they’re not a language in that room any longer; but if you’d want to speak, you won’t anyway, because you’ll be brushed aside, you who have nothing to tell them about buildings! Is that what you want?”

Roark sat still, the shadows sharp on his face, a black wedge on a sunken cheek, a long triangle of black cutting across his chin, his eyes on Cameron.

“Not enough?” asked Cameron. “All right. Then, one day, you’ll see on a piece of paper before you a building that will make you want to kneel; you won’t believe that you’ve done it, but you will have done it; then you’ll think that the earth is beautiful and the air smells of spring and you love your fellow men, because there is no evil in the world. And you’ll set out from your house with this drawing, to have it erected, because you won’t have any doubt that it will be erected by the first man to see it. But you won’t get very far from your house. Because you’ll be stopped at the door by the man who’s come to turn off the gas. You hadn’t had much food, because you saved money to finish your drawing, but still you had to cook something and you hadn’t paid for it.... All right, that’s nothing, you can laugh at that. But finally you’ll get into a man’s office with your drawing, and you’ll curse yourself for taking so much space of his air with your body, and you’ll try to squeeze yourself out of his sight, so that he won’t see you, but only hear your voice begging him, pleading, your voice licking his knees; you’ll loathe yourself for it, but you won’t care, if only he’d let you put up that building, you won’t care, you’ll want to rip your insides open to show him, because if he saw what’s there he’d have to let you put it up. But he’ll say that he’s very sorry, only the commission has just been given to Guy Francon. And you’ll go home, and do you know what you’ll do there? You’ll cry. You’ll cry like a woman, like a drunkard, like an animal. That’s your future, Howard Roark. Now, do you want it?”

“Yes,” said Roark.

Cameron’s eyes dropped; then his head moved down a little, then a little farther; his head went on dropping slowly, in long, single jerks, then stopped; he sat still, his shoulders hunched, his arms huddled together in his lap.

“Howard,” whispered Cameron, “I’ve never told it to anyone....”

“Thank you....” said Roark.

After a long time, Cameron raised his head.

“Go home now,” said Cameron, his voice flat. “You’ve worked too much lately. And you have a hard day ahead.” He pointed to the drawings of the country house. “This is all very well, and I wanted to see what you’d do, but it’s not good enough to build. You’ll have to do it over. I’ll show you what I want tomorrow.”

V

A YEAR WITH THE FIRM OF FRANCON & HEYER HAD GIVEN KEATING the whispered title of crown prince without portfolio. Still only a draftsman, he was Francon’s reigning favorite. Francon took him out to lunch—an unprecedented honor for an employee. Francon called him to be present at interviews with clients. The clients seemed to like seeing so decorative a young man in an architect’s office.

Lucius N. Heyer had the annoying habit of asking Francon suddenly: “When did you get the new man?” and pointing to an employee who had been there for three years. But Heyer surprised everybody by remembering Keating’s name and by greeting him, whenever they met, with a smile of positive recognition. Keating had had a long conversation with him, one dreary November afternoon, on the subject of old porcelain. It was Heyer’s hobby; he owned a famous collection, passionately gathered. Keating displayed an earnest knowledge of the subject, though he had never heard of old porcelain till the night before, which he had spent at the public library. Heyer was delighted; nobody in the office cared about his hobby, few ever noticed his presence. Heyer remarked to his partner: “You’re certainly good at picking your men, Guy. There’s one boy I wish we wouldn’t lose, what’s his name?—Keating.” “Yes, indeed,” Francon answered, smiling, “yes, indeed.”

In the drafting room, Keating concentrated on Tim Davis. Work and drawings were only unavoidable details on the surface of his days; Tim Davis was the substance and the shape of the first step in his career.

Davis let him do most of his own work; only night work, at first, then parts of his daily assignments as well; secretly, at first, then openly. Davis had not wanted it to be known. Keating made it known, with an air of naïve confidence which implied that he was only a tool, no more than Tim’s pencil or T-square, that his help enhanced Tim’s importance rather than diminished it and, therefore, he did not wish to conceal it.

At first, Davis relayed instructions to Keating; then the chief draftsman took the arrangement for granted and began coming to Keating with orders intended for Davis. Keating was always there, smiling, saying: “I’ll do it, don’t bother Tim with those little things, I’ll take care of it.” Davis relaxed and let himself be carried along; he smoked a great deal, he lolled about, his legs twisted loosely over the rungs of a stool, his eyes closed, dreaming of Elaine; he uttered once in a while: “Is the stuff ready, Pete?”

Davis had married Elaine that spring. He was frequently late for work. He had whispered to Keating: “You’re in with the old man, Pete, slip a good word for me, once in a while, will you?—so they’ll overlook a few things. God, do I hate to have to be working right now!” Keating would say to Francon: “I’m sorry, Mr. Francon, that the Murray job subbasement plans were so late, but Tim Davis had a quarrel with his wife last night, and you know how newlyweds are, you don’t want to be too hard on them,” or: “It’s Tim Davis again, Mr. Francon, do forgive him, he can’t help it, he hasn’t got his mind on his work at all!”

When Francon glanced at the list of his employees’ salaries, he noticed that his most expensive draftsman was the man least needed in the office.

When Tim Davis lost his job, no one in the drafting room was surprised but Tim Davis. He could not understand it. He set his lips defiantly in bitterness against a world he would hate forever. He felt he had no friend on earth save Peter Keating.

Keating consoled him, cursed Francon, cursed the injustice of humanity, spent six dollars in a speak-easy, entertaining the secretary of an obscure architect of his acquaintance and arranged a new job for Tim Davis.

Whenever he thought of Davis afterward, Keating felt a warm pleasure; he had influenced the course of a human being, had thrown him off one path and pushed him into another; a human being—it was not Tim Davis to him any longer, it was a living frame and a mind, a conscious mind—why had he always feared that mysterious entity of consciousness within others?—and he had twisted that frame and that mind to his own will. By a unanimous decision of Francon, Heyer and the chief draftsman, Tim’s table, position and salary were given to Peter Keating. But this was only part of his satisfaction; there was another sense of it, warmer and less real—and more dangerous. He said brightly and often: “Tim Davis? Oh yes, I got him his present job.”

He wrote to his mother about it. She said to her friends: “Petey is such an unselfish boy.”

He wrote to her dutifully, each week; his letters were short and respectful; hers, long, detailed and full of advice which he seldom finished reading.

He saw Catherine Halsey occasionally. He had not gone to her on that following evening, as he had promised. He had awakened in the morning and remembered the things he had said to her, and hated her for his having said them. But he had gone to her again, a week later; she had not reproached him and they had not mentioned her uncle. He saw her after that every month or two; he was happy when he saw her, but he never spoke to her of his career.

He tried to speak of it to Howard Roark; the attempt failed. He called on Roark twice; he climbed, indignantly, the five flights of stairs to Roark’s room. He greeted Roark eagerly; he waited for reassurance, not knowing what sort of reassurance he needed nor why it could come only from Roark. He spoke of his job and he questioned Roark, with sincere concern, about Cameron’s office. Roark listened to him, answered all his questions willingly, but Keating felt that he was knocking against a sheet of iron in Roark’s unmoving eyes, and that they were not speaking about the same things at all. Before the visit was over, Keating was taking notice of Roark’s frayed cuffs, of his shoes, of the patch on the knee of his trousers, and he felt satisfied. He went away chuckling, but he went away miserably uneasy, and wondered why, and swore never to see Roark again, and wondered why he knew that he would have to see him.

“Well,” said Keating, “I couldn’t quite work it to ask her to lunch, but she’s coming to Mawson’s exhibition with me day after tomorrow. Now what?”

He sat on the floor, his head resting against the edge of a couch, his bare feet stretched out, a pair of Guy Francon’s chartreuse pyjamas floating loosely about his limbs.

Through the open door of the bathroom he saw Francon standing at the washstand, his stomach pressed to its shining edge, brushing his teeth.

“That’s splendid,” said Francon, munching through a thick foam of toothpaste. “That’ll do just as well. Don’t you see?”

“No.”

“Lord, Pete, I explained it to you yesterday before we started. Mrs. Dunlop’s husband’s planning to build a home for her.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Keating weakly, brushing the matted black curls off his face. “Oh, yeah... I remember now ... Jesus, Guy, I got a head on me! ...”

He remembered vaguely the party to which Francon had taken him the night before, he remembered the caviar in a hollow iceberg, the black net evening gown and the pretty face of Mrs. Dunlop, but he could not remember how he had come to end up in Francon’s apartment. He shrugged; he had attended many parties with Francon in the past year and had often been brought here like this.

“It’s not a very large house,” Francon was saying, holding the toothbrush in his mouth; it made a lump on his cheek and its green handle stuck out. “Fifty thousand or so, I understand. They’re small fry anyway. But Mrs. Dunlop’s brother-in-law is Quimby—you know, the big real estate fellow. Won’t hurt to get a little wedge into that family, won’t hurt at all. You’re to see where that commission ends up, Pete. Can I count on you, Pete?”

“Sure,” said Keating, his head drooping. “You can always count on me, Guy....”

He sat still, watching his bare toes and thinking of Stengel, Francon’s designer. He did not want to think, but his mind leaped to Stengel automatically, as it always did, because Stengel represented his next step.

Stengel was impregnable to friendship. For two years, Keating’s attempts had broken against the ice of Stengel’s glasses. What Stengel thought of him was whispered in the drafting rooms, but few dared to repeat it save in quotes; Stengel said it aloud, even though he knew that the corrections his sketches bore, when they returned to him from Francon’s office, were made by Keating’s hand. But Stengel had a vulnerable point: he had been planning for some time to leave Francon and open an office of his own. He had selected a partner, a young architect of no talent but of great inherited wealth. Stengel was waiting only for a chance. Keating had thought about this a great deal. He could think of nothing else. He thought of it again, sitting there on the floor of Francon’s bedroom.

Two days later, when he escorted Mrs. Dunlop through the gallery exhibiting the paintings of one Frederic Mawson, his course of action was set. He piloted her through the sparse crowd, his fingers closing over her elbow once in a while, letting her catch his eyes directed at her young face more often than at the paintings.

“Yes,” he said as she stared obediently at a landscape featuring an auto dump and tried to compose her face into the look of admiration expected of her, “magnificent work. Note the colors, Mrs. Dunlop.... They say this fellow Mawson had a terribly hard time. It’s an old story—trying to get recognition. Old and heartbreaking. It’s the same in all the arts. My own profession included.”

“Oh, indeed?” said Mrs. Dunlop, who quite seemed to prefer architecture at the moment.

“Now this,” said Keating, stopping before the depiction of an old hag picking at her bare toes on a street curb, “this is art as a social document. It takes a person of courage to appreciate this.”

“It’s simply wonderful,” said Mrs. Dunlop.

“Ah, yes, courage. It’s a rare quality.... They say Mawson was starving in a garret when Mrs. Stuyvesant discovered him. It’s glorious to be able to help young talent on its way.”

“It must be wonderful,” agreed Mrs. Dunlop.

“If I were rich,” said Keating wistfully, “I’d make it my hobby: to arrange an exhibition for a new artist, to finance the concert of a new pianist, to have a house built by a new architect....”

“Do you know, Mr. Keating?—my husband and I are planning to build a little home on Long Island.”

“Oh, are you? How very charming of you, Mrs. Dunlop, to confess such a thing to me. You’re so young, if you’ll forgive my saying this. Don’t you know that you run the danger of my becoming a nuisance and trying to interest you in my firm? Or are you safe and have chosen an architect already?”

“No, I’m not safe at all,” said Mrs. Dunlop prettily, “and I wouldn’t mind the danger really. I’ve thought a great deal about the firm of Francon & Heyer in these last few days. And I’ve heard they are so terribly good.”

“Why, thank you, Mrs. Dunlop.”

“Mr. Francon is a great architect.”

“Oh, yes.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Nothing really.”

“No, what’s the matter?”

“Do you really want me to tell you?”

“Why, certainly.”

“Well, you see, Guy Francon—it’s only a name. He would have nothing to do with your house. It’s one of those professional secrets that I shouldn’t divulge, but I don’t know what it is about you that makes me want to be honest. All the best buildings in our office are designed by Mr. Stengel.”

“Who?”

“Claude Stengel. You’ve never heard the name, but you will, when someone has the courage to discover him. You see, he does all the work, he’s the real genius behind the scenes, but Francon puts his signature on it and gets all the credit. That’s the way it’s done everywhere.”

“But why does Mr. Stengel stand for it?”

“What can he do? No one will give him a start. You know how most people are, they stick to the beaten path, they pay three times the price for the same thing, just to have the trademark. Courage, Mrs. Dunlop, they lack courage. Stengel is a great artist, but there are so few discerning people to see it. He’s ready to go on his own, if only he could find some outstanding person like Mrs. Stuyvesant to give him a chance.”

“Really?” said Mrs. Dunlop. “How very interesting! Tell me more about it.”

He told her a great deal more about it. By the time they had finished the inspection of the works of Frederic Mawson, Mrs. Dunlop was shaking Keating’s hand and saying:

“It’s so kind, so very unusually kind of you. Are you sure that it won’t embarrass you with your office if you arrange for me to meet Mr. Stengel? I didn’t quite dare to suggest it and it was so kind of you not to be angry at me. It’s so unselfish of you and more than anyone else would have done in your position.”

When Keating approached Stengel with the suggestion of a proposed luncheon, the man listened to him without a word. Then he jerked his head and snapped:

“What’s in it for you?”

Before Keating could answer, Stengel threw his head back suddenly.

“Oh,” said Stengel. “Oh, I see.”

Then he leaned forward, his mouth drawn thin in contempt:

“Okay. I’ll go to that lunch.”

When Stengel left the firm of Francon & Heyer to open his own office and proceed with the construction of the Dunlop house, his first commission, Guy Francon smashed a ruler against the edge of his desk and roared to Keating:

“The bastard! The abysmal bastard! After all I’ve done for him.”

“What did you expect?” said Keating, sprawled in a low armchair before him. “Such is life.”

“But what beats me is how did that little skunk ever hear of it? To snatch it right from under our nose!”

“Well, I’ve never trusted him anyway.” Keating shrugged. “Human nature ...”

The bitterness in his voice was sincere. He had received no gratitude from Stengel. Stengel’s parting remark to him had been only: “You’re a worse bastard than I thought you were. Good luck. You’ll be a great architect some day.”

Thus Keating achieved the position of chief designer for Francon & Heyer.

Francon celebrated the occasion with a modest little orgy at one of the quieter and costlier restaurants. “In a coupla years,” he kept repeating, “in a coupla years you’ll see things happenin’, Pete.... You’re a good boy and I like you and I’ll do things for you.... Haven’t I done things for you? ... You’re going places, Pete ... in a coupla years....” “Your tie’s crooked, Guy,” said Keating dryly, “and you’re spilling brandy all over your vest....”

Facing his first task of designing, Keating thought of Tim Davis, of Stengel, of many others who had wanted it, had struggled for it, had tried, had been beaten—by him. It was a triumphant feeling. It was a tangible affirmation of his greatness. Then he found himself suddenly in his glass-enclosed office, looking down at a blank sheet of paper—alone. Something rolled in his throat down to his stomach, cold and empty, his old feeling of the dropping hole. He leaned against the table, closing his eyes. It had never been quite real to him before that this was the thing actually expected of him—to fill a sheet of paper, to create something on a sheet of paper.

It was only a small residence. But instead of seeing it rise before him, he saw it sinking; he saw its shape as a pit in the ground; and as a pit within him; as emptiness, with only Davis and Stengel rattling uselessly within it. Francon had said to him about the building: “It must have dignity, you know, dignity ... nothing freaky ... a structure of elegance ... and stay within the budget,” which was Francon’s conception of giving his designer ideas and letting him work them out. Through a cold stupor, Keating thought of the clients laughing in his face; he heard the thin, omnipotent voice of Ellsworth Toohey calling his attention to the opportunities open to him in the field of plumbing. He hated every piece of stone on the face of the earth. He hated himself for having chosen to be an architect.

When he began to draw, he tried not to think of the job he was doing; he thought only that Francon had done it, and Stengel, even Heyer, and all the others, and that he could do it, if they could.

He spent many days on his preliminary sketches. He spent long hours in the library of Francon & Heyer, selecting from Classic photographs the appearance of his house. He felt the tension melting in his mind. It was right and it was good, that house growing under his hand, because men were still worshiping the masters who had done it before him. He did not have to wonder, to fear or to take chances; it had been done for him.

When the drawings were ready, he stood looking at them uncertainly. Were he to be told that this was the best or the ugliest house in the world, he would agree with either. He was not sure. He had to be sure. He thought of Stanton and of what he had relied upon when working on his assignments there. He telephoned Cameron’s office and asked for Howard Roark.

He came to Roark’s room, that night, and spread before him the plans, the elevations, the perspective of his first building. Roark stood over it, his arms spread wide, his hands holding the edge of the table, and he said nothing for a long time.

Keating waited anxiously; he felt anger growing with his anxiety—because he could see no reason for being so anxious. When he couldn’t stand it, he spoke:

“You know, Howard, everybody says Stengel’s the best designer in town, and I don’t think he was really ready to quit, but I made him and I took his place. I had to do some pretty fine thinking to work that, I ...”

He stopped. It did not sound bright and proud, as it would have sounded anywhere else. It sounded like begging.

Roark turned and looked at him. Roark’s eyes were not contemptuous; only a little wider than usual, attentive and puzzled. He said nothing and turned back to the drawings.

Keating felt naked. Davis, Stengel, Francon meant nothing here. People were his protection against people. Roark had no sense of people. Others gave Keating a feeling of his own value. Roark gave him nothing. He thought that he should seize his drawings and run. The danger was not Roark. The danger was that he, Keating, remained.

Roark turned to him.

“Do you enjoy doing this sort of thing, Peter?” he asked.

“Oh, I know,” said Keating, his voice shrill, “I know you don’t approve of it, but this is business, I just want to know what you think of this practically, not philosophically, not ...”

“No, I’m not going to preach to you. I was only wondering.”

“If you could help me, Howard, if you could just help me with it a little. It’s my first house, and it means so much to me at the office, and I’m not sure. What do you think? Will you help me, Howard?”

“All right.”

Roark threw aside the sketch of the graceful façade with the fluted pilasters, the broken pediments, the Roman fasces over the windows and the two eagles of Empire by the entrance. He picked up the plans. He took a sheet of tracing paper, threw it over the plan and began to draw. Keating stood watching the pencil in Roark’s hand. He saw his imposing entrance foyer disappearing, his twisted corridors, his lightless corners; he saw an immense living room growing in the space he had thought too limited; a wall of giant windows facing the garden, a spacious kitchen. He watched for a long time.

“And the façade?” he asked, when Roark threw the pencil down.

“I can’t help you with that. If you must have it Classic, have it good Classic at least. You don’t need three pilasters where one will do. And take those ducks off the door, it’s too much.”

Keating smiled at him gratefully, when he was leaving, his drawings under his arm; he descended the stairs, hurt and angry; he worked for three days making new plans from Roark’s sketches, and a new, simpler elevation; and he presented his house to Francon with a proud gesture that looked like a flourish.

“Well,” said Francon, studying it, “well, I declare! ... What an imagination you have, Peter ... I wonder ... It’s a bit daring, but I wonder ...” He coughed and added: “It’s just what I had in mind.”

“Of course,” said Keating. “I studied your buildings, and I tried to think of what you’d do, and if it’s good, it’s because I think I know how to catch your ideas.”

Francon smiled. And Keating thought suddenly that Francon did not really believe it and knew that Keating did not believe it, and yet they were both contented, bound tighter together by a common method and a common guilt.

The letter on Cameron’s desk informed him regretfully that after earnest consideration, the board of directors of the Security Trust Company had not been able to accept his plans for the building to house the new Astoria branch of the Company and that the commission had been awarded to the firm of Gould & Pettingill. A check was attached to the letter, in payment for his preliminary drawings, as agreed; the amount was not enough to cover the expense of making those drawings.

The letter lay spread out on the desk. Cameron sat before it, drawn back, not touching the desk, his hands gathered in his lap, the back of one in the palm of the other, the fingers tight. It was only a small piece of paper, but he sat huddled and still, because it seemed to be a supernatural thing, like radium, sending forth rays that would hurt him if he moved and exposed his skin to them.

For three months, he had awaited the commission of the Security Trust Company. One after another, the chances that had loomed before him at rare intervals, in the last two years, had vanished, looming in vague promises, vanishing in firm refusals. One of his draftsmen had had to be discharged long ago. The landlord had asked questions, politely at first, then dryly, then rudely and openly. But no one in the office had minded that nor the usual arrears in salaries: there had been the commission of the Security Trust Company. The vice-president, who had asked Cameron to submit drawings, had said: “I know, some of the directors won’t see it as I do. But go ahead, Mr. Cameron. Take the chance with me and I’ll fight for you.”

Cameron had taken the chance. He and Roark had worked savagely -to have the plans ready on time, before time, before Gould & Pettingill could submit theirs. Pettingill was a cousin of the Bank president’s wife and a famous authority on the ruins of Pompeii; the Bank president was an ardent admirer of Julius Caesar and had once, while in Rome, spent an hour and a quarter in reverent inspection of the Colosseum.

Cameron and Roark and a pot of black coffee had lived in the office from dawn till frozen dawn for many days, and Cameron had thought involuntarily of the electric bill, but made himself forget it. The lights still burned in the drafting room in the early hours when he sent Roark out for sandwiches, and Roark found gray morning in the streets while it was still night in the office, in the windows facing a high brick wall. On the last day, it was Roark who had ordered Cameron home after midnight, because Cameron’s hands were jerking and his knees kept seeking the tall drafting stool for support, leaning against it with a slow, cautious, sickening precision. Roark had taken him down to a taxi and in the light of a street lamp Cameron had seen Roark’s face, drawn, the eyes kept wide artificially, the lips dry. The next morning Cameron had entered the drafting room, and found the coffee pot on the floor, on its side over a black puddle, and Roark’s hand in the puddle, palm up, fingers half closed, Roark’s body stretched out on the floor, his head thrown back, fast asleep. On the table, Cameron had found the plans, finished....

He sat looking at the letter on his desk. The degradation was that he could not think of those nights behind him, he could not think of the building that should have risen in Astoria and of the building that would now take its place; it was that he thought only of the bill unpaid to the electric company....

In these last two years Cameron had disappeared from his office for weeks at a time, and Roark had not found him at home, and had known what was happening, but could only wait, hoping for Cameron’s safe return. Then, Cameron had lost even the shame of his agony, and had come to his office reeling, recognizing no one, openly drunk and flaunting it before the walls of the only place on earth he had respected.

Roark learned to face his own landlord with the quiet statement that he could not pay him for another week; the landlord was afraid of him and did not insist. Peter Keating heard of it somehow, as he always heard everything he wanted to know. He came to Roark’s unheated room, one evening, and sat down, keeping his overcoat on. He produced a wallet, pulled out five ten-dollar bills, and handed them to Roark. “You need it, Howard. I know you need it. Don’t start protesting now. You can pay me back any time.” Roark looked at him, astonished, took the money, saying: “Yes, I need it. Thank you, Peter.” Then Keating said: “What in hell are you doing, wasting yourself on old Cameron? What do you want to live like this for? Chuck it, Howard, and come with us. All I have to do is say so. Francon’ll be delighted. We’ll start you at sixty a week.” Roark took the money out of his pocket and handed it back to him. “Oh, for God’s sake, Howard! I ... I didn’t mean to offend you.” “I didn’t either.” “But please, Howard, keep it anyway.” “Good night, Peter.”

Roark was thinking of that when Cameron entered the drafting room, the letter from the Security Trust Company in his hand. He gave the letter to Roark, said nothing, turned and walked back to his office. Roark read the letter and followed him. Whenever they lost another commission Roark knew that Cameron wanted to see him in the office, but not to speak of it; just to see him there, to talk of other things, to lean upon the reassurance of his presence.

On Cameron’s desk Roark saw a copy of the New York Banner.

It was the leading newspaper of the great Wynand chain. It was a paper he would have expected to find in a kitchen, in a barbershop, in a third-rate drawing room, in the subway; anywhere but in Cameron’s office. Cameron saw him looking at it and grinned.

“Picked it up this morning, on my way here. Funny, isn’t it? I didn’t know we’d ... get that letter today. And yet it seems appropriate together—this paper and that letter. Don’t know what made me buy it. A sense of symbolism, I suppose. Look at it, Howard. It’s interesting.”

Roark glanced through the paper. The front page carried the picture of an unwed mother with thick glistening lips, who had shot her lover; the picture headed the first installment of her autobiography and a detailed account of her trial. The other pages ran a crusade against utility companies; a daily horoscope; extracts from church sermons; recipes for young brides; pictures of girls with beautiful legs; advice on how to hold a husband; a baby contest; a poem proclaiming that to wash dishes was nobler than to write a symphony; an article proving that a woman who had borne a child was automatically a saint.

“That’s our answer, Howard. That’s the answer given to you and to me. This paper. That it exists and that it’s liked. Can you fight that? Have you any words to be heard and understood by that? They shouldn’t have sent us the letter. They should have sent a copy of Wynand’s Banner. It would be simpler and clearer. Do you know that in a few years that incredible bastard, Gail Wynand, will rule the world? It will be a beautiful world. And perhaps he’s right.”

Cameron held the paper outstretched, weighing it on the palm of his hand.

“To give them what they want, Howard, and to let them worship you for it, for licking their feet—or ... or what? What’s the use? ... Only it doesn’t matter, nothing matters, not even that it doesn’t matter to me any more....”

Then he looked at Roark. He added:

“If only I could hold on until I’ve started you on your own, Howard....”

“Don’t speak of that.”

“I want to speak of that.... It’s funny, Howard, next spring it will be three years that you’ve been here. Seems so much longer, doesn’t it? Well, have I taught you anything? I’ll tell you: I’ve taught you a great deal and nothing. No one can teach you anything, not at the core, at the source of it. What you’re doing—it’s yours, not mine, I can only teach you to do it better. I can give you the means, but the aim—the aim’s your own. You won’t be a little disciple putting up anemic little things in early Jacobean or late Cameron. What you’ll be ... if only I could live to see it!”

“You’ll live to see it. And you know it now.”

Cameron stood looking at the bare walls of his office, at the white piles of bills on his desk, at the sooty rain trickling slowly down the windowpanes.

“I have no answer to give them, Howard. I’m leaving you to face them. You’ll answer them. All of them, the Wynand papers and what makes the Wynand papers possible and what lies behind that. It’s a strange mission to give you. I don’t know what our answer is to be. I know only that there is an answer and that you’re holding it, that you’re the answer, Howard, and some day you’ll find the words for it.”

VI

SERMONS IN STONE BY ELLSWORTH M. TOOHEY WAS PUBLISHED IN January of the year 1925.

It had a fastidious jacket of midnight blue with plain silver letters and a silver pyramid in one corner. It was subtitled “Architecture for Everybody” and its success was sensational. It presented the entire history of architecture, from mud hut to skyscraper, in the terms of the man in the street, but it made these terms appear scientific. Its author stated in his preface that it was an attempt “to bring architecture where it belongs—to the people.” He stated further that he wished to see the average man “think and speak of architecture as he speaks of baseball.” He did not bore his readers with the technicalities of the Five Orders, the post and lintel, the flying buttress or reinforced concrete. He filled his pages with homey accounts of the daily life of the Egyptian housekeeper, the Roman shoe-cobbler, the mistress of Louis XIV, what they ate, how they washed, where they shopped and what effect their buildings had upon their existence. But he gave his readers the impression that they were learning all they had to know about the Five Orders and the reinforced concrete. He gave his readers the impression that there were no problems, no achievements, no reaches of thought beyond the common daily routine of people nameless in the past as they were in the present; that science had no goal and no expression beyond its influence on this routine; that merely by living through their own obscure days his readers were representing and achieving all the highest objectives of any civilization. His scientific precision was impeccable and his erudition astounding; no one could refute him on the cooking utensils of Babylon or the doormats of Byzantium. He wrote with the flash and the color of a first-hand observer. He did not plod laboriously through the centuries; he danced, said the critics, down the road of the ages, as a jester, a friend and a prophet.

He said that architecture was truly the greatest of the arts, because it was anonymous, as all greatness. He said that the world had many famous buildings, but few renowned builders, which was as it should be, since no one man had ever created anything of importance in architecture, or elsewhere, for that matter. The few whose names had lived were really impostors, expropriating the glory of the people as others expropriated its wealth. “When we gaze at the magnificence of an ancient monument and ascribe its achievement to one man, we are guilty of spiritual embezzlement. We forget the army of craftsmen, unknown and unsung, who preceded him in the darkness of the ages, who toiled humbly—all heroism is humble—each contributing his small share to the common treasure of his time. A great building is not the private invention of some genius or other. It is merely a condensation of the spirit of a people.”

He explained that the decadence of architecture had come when private property replaced the communal spirit of the Middle Ages, and that the selfishness of individual owners—who built for no purpose save to satisfy their own bad taste, “all claim to an individual taste is bad taste”—had ruined the planned effect of cities. He demonstrated that there was no such thing as free will, since men’s creative impulses were determined, as all else, by the economic structure of the epoch in which they lived. He expressed admiration for all the great historical styles, but admonished against their wanton mixture. He dismissed modern architecture, stating that: “So far, it has represented nothing but the whim of isolated individuals, has borne no relation to any great, spontaneous mass movement, and as such is of no consequence.” He predicted a better world to come, where all men would be brothers and their buildings would become harmonious and all alike, in the great tradition of Greece, “the Mother of Democracy.” When he wrote this, he managed to convey—with no tangible break in the detached calm of his style—that the words now seen in ordered print had been blurred in manuscript by a hand unsteady with emotion. He called upon architects to abandon their selfish quest for individual glory and dedicate themselves to the embodiment of the mood of their people. “Architects are servants, not leaders. They are not to assert their little egos, but to express the soul of their country and the rhythm of their time. They are not to follow the delusions of their personal fancy, but to seek the common denominator, which will bring their work close to the heart of the masses. Architects -ah, my friends, theirs is not to reason why. Theirs is not to command, but to be commanded.”

The advertisements for Sermons in Stone carried quotations from critics: “Magnificent!” “A stupendous achievement!” “Unequaled in all art history!” “Your chance to get acquainted with a charming man and a profound thinker.” “Mandatory reading for anyone aspiring to the title of intellectual.”

There seemed to be a great many aspiring to that title. Readers acquired erudition without study, authority without cost, judgment without effort. It was pleasant to look at buildings and criticize them with a professional manner and with the memory of page 439; to hold artistic discussions and exchange the same sentences from the same paragraphs. In distinguished drawing rooms one could soon hear it said: “Architecture? Oh, yes, Ellsworth Toohey.”

According to his principles, Ellsworth M. Toohey listed no architect by name in the text of his book—“the myth-building, hero-worshiping method of historical research has always been obnoxious to me.” The names appeared only in footnotes. Several of these referred to Guy Francon, “who has a tendency to the overornate, but must be commended for his loyalty to the strict tradition of Classicism.” One note referred to Henry Cameron, “prominent once as one of the fathers of the so-called modern school of architecture and relegated since to a well-deserved oblivion. Vox populi vox dei.”

In February of 1925 Henry Cameron retired from practice.

For a year, he had known that the day would come. He had not spoken of it to Roark, but they both knew and went on, expecting nothing save to go on as long as it was still possible. A few commissions had dribbled into their office in the past year, country cottages, garages, remodeling of old buildings. They took anything. But the drops stopped. The pipes were dry. The water had been turned off by a society to whom Cameron had never paid his bill.

Simpson and the old man in the reception room had been dismissed long ago. Only Roark remained, to sit still through the winter evenings and look at Cameron’s body slumped over his desk, arms flung out, head on arms, a bottle glistening under the lamp.

Then, one day in February, when Cameron had touched no alcohol for weeks, he reached for a book on a shelf and collapsed at Roark’s feet, suddenly, simply, finally. Roark took him home and the doctor stated that an attempt to leave his bed would be all the death sentence Cameron needed. Cameron knew it. He lay still on his pillow, his hands dropped obediently one at each side of his body, his eyes unblinking and empty. Then he said:

“You’ll close the office for me, Howard, will you?”

“Yes,” said Roark.

Cameron closed his eyes, and would say nothing else, and Roark sat all night by his bed, not knowing whether the old man slept or not.

A sister of Cameron’s appeared from somewhere in New Jersey. She was a meek little old lady with white hair, trembling hands and a face one could never remember, quiet, resigned and gently hopeless. She had a meager little income and she assumed the responsibility of taking her brother to her home in New Jersey; she had never married and had no one else in the world; she was neither glad nor sorry of the burden; she had lost all capacity for emotion many years ago.

On the day of his departure Cameron handed to Roark a letter he had written in the night, written painfully, an old drawing board on his knees, a pillow propping his back. The letter was addressed to a prominent architect; it was Roark’s introduction to a job. Roark read it and, looking at Cameron, not at his own hands, tore the letter across, folded the pieces and tore it again.

“No,” said Roark. “You’re not going to ask them for anything. Don’t worry about me.”

Cameron nodded and kept silent for a long time.

Then he said:

“You’ll close up the office, Howard. You’ll let them keep the furniture for their rent. But you’ll take the drawing that’s on the wall in my room there and you’ll ship it to me. Only that. You’ll burn everything else. All the papers, the files, the drawings, the contracts, everything.”

“Yes,” said Roark.

Miss Cameron came with the orderlies and the stretcher, and they rode in an ambulance to the ferry. At the entrance to the ferry, Cameron said to Roark:

“You’re going back now.” He added: “You’ll come to see me, Howard.... Not too often ...”

Roark turned and walked away, while they were carrying Cameron to the pier. It was a gray morning and there was the cold, rotting smell of the sea in the air. A gull dipped low over the street, gray like a floating piece of newspaper, against a corner of damp, streaked stone.

That evening, Roark went to Cameron’s closed office. He did not turn on the lights. He made a fire in the Franklin heater in Cameron’s room, and emptied drawer after drawer into the fire, not looking down at them. The papers rustled dryly in the silence, a thin odor of mold rose through the dark room, and the fire hissed, crackling, leaping in bright streaks. At times a white flake with charred edges would flutter out of the flames. He pushed it back with the end of a steel ruler.

There were drawings of Cameron’s famous buildings and of buildings unbuilt; there were blueprints with the thin white lines that were girders still standing somewhere; there were contracts with famous signatures; and at times, from out of the red glow, there flashed a sum of seven figures written on yellowed paper, flashed and went down, in a thin burst of sparks.

From among the letters in an old folder, a newspaper clipping fluttered to the floor. Roark picked it up. It was dry, brittle and yellow, and it broke at the folds, in his fingers. It was an interview given by Henry Cameron, dated May 7, 1892. It said: “Architecture is not a business, not a career, but a crusade and a consecration to a joy that justifies the existence of the earth.” He dropped the clipping into the fire and reached for another folder.

He gathered every stub of pencil from Cameron’s desk and threw them in also.

He stood over the heater. He did not move, he did not look down; he felt the movement of the glow, a faint shudder at the edge of his vision. He looked at the drawing of the skyscraper that had never been built, hanging on the wall before him.

It was Peter Keating’s third year with the firm of Francon & Heyer. He carried his head high, his body erect with studied uprightness; he looked like the picture of a successful young man in advertisements for high-priced razors or medium-priced cars.

He dressed well and watched people noticing it. He had an apartment off Park Avenue, modest but fashionable, and he bought three valuable etchings as well as a first edition of a classic he had never read nor opened since. Occasionally, he escorted clients to the Metropolitan Opera. He appeared, once, at a fancy-dress Arts Ball and created a sensation by his costume of a medieval stonecutter, scarlet velvet and tights; he was mentioned in a society-page account of the event—the first mention of his name in print—and he saved the clipping.

He had forgotten his first building, and the fear and doubt of its birth. He had learned that it was so simple. His clients would accept anything, so long as he gave them an imposing façade, a majestic entrance and a regal drawing room, with which to astound their guests. It worked out to everyone’s satisfaction: Keating did not care so long as his clients were impressed, the clients did not care so long as their guests were impressed, and the guests did not care anyway.

Mrs. Keating rented her house in Stanton and came to live with him in New York. He did not want her; he could not refuse—because she was his mother and he was not expected to refuse. He met her with some eagerness; he could at least impress her by his rise in the world. She was not impressed; she inspected his rooms, his clothes, his bank books and said only: “It’ll do, Petey—for the time being.”

She made one visit to his office and departed within a half-hour. That evening he had to sit still, squeezing and cracking his knuckles, for an hour and a half, while she gave him advice. “That fellow Whithers had a much more expensive suit than yours, Petey. That won’t do. You’ve got to watch your prestige before those boys. The little one who brought in those blueprints—I didn’t like the way he spoke to you.... Oh, nothing, nothing, only I’d keep my eye on him.... The one with the long nose is no friend of yours.... Never mind, I just know.... Watch out for the one they called Bennett. I’d get rid of him if I were you. He’s ambitious. I know the signs....”

Then she asked:

“Guy Francon ... has he any children?”

“One daughter.”

“Oh ...” said Mrs. Keating. “What is she like?”

“I’ve never met her.”

“Really, Peter,” she said, “it’s downright rude to Mr. Francon if you’ve made no effort to meet his family.”

“She’s been away at college, Mother. I’ll meet her some day. It’s getting late, Mother, and I’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow....”

But he thought of it that night and the following day. He had thought of it before and often. He knew that Francon’s daugher had graduated from college long ago and was now working on the Banner, where she wrote a small column on home decoration. He had been able to learn nothing else about her. No one in the office seemed to know her. Francon never spoke of her.

On that following day, at luncheon, Keating decided to face the subject.

“I hear such nice things about your daughter,” he said to Francon.

“Where did you hear nice things about her?” Francon asked ominously.

“Oh, well, you know how it is, one hears things. And she writes brilliantly.”

“Yes, she writes brilliantly.” Francon’s mouth snapped shut.

“Really, Guy, I’d love to meet her.”

Francon looked at him and sighed wearily.

“You know she’s not living with me,” said Francon. “She has an apartment of her own—I’m not sure that I even remember the address. ... Oh, I suppose you’ll meet her some day. You won’t like her, Peter.”

“Now, why do you say that?”

“It’s one of those things, Peter. As a father I’m afraid I’m a total failure.... Say, Peter, what did Mrs. Mannering say about that new stairway arrangement?”

Keating felt angry, disappointed—and relieved. He looked at Francon’s squat figure and wondered what appearance his daughter must have inherited to earn her father’s so obvious disfavor. Rich and ugly as sin—like most of them, he decided. He thought that this need not stop him—some day. He was glad only that the day was postponed. He thought, with new eagerness, that he would go to see Catherine tonight.

Mrs. Keating had met Catherine in Stanton. She had hoped that Peter would forget. Now she knew that he had not forgotten, even though he seldom spoke of Catherine and never brought her to his home. Mrs. Keating did not mention Catherine by name. But she chatted about penniless girls who hooked brilliant young men, about promising boys whose careers had been wrecked by marriage to the wrong woman; and she read to him every newspaper account of a celebrity divorcing his plebeian wife who could not live up to his eminent position.

Keating thought, as he walked toward Catherine’s house that night, of the few times he had seen her; they had been such unimportant occasions, but they were the only days he remembered of his whole life in New York.

He found, in the middle of her uncle’s living room, when she let him in, a mess of letters spread all over the carpet, a portable typewriter, newspapers, scissors, boxes and a pot of glue.

“Oh dear!” said Catherine, flopping limply down on her knees in the midst of the litter. “Oh dear!”

She looked up at him, smiling disarmingly, her hands raised and spread over the crinkling white piles. She was almost twenty now and looked no older than she had looked at seventeen.

“Sit down, Peter. I thought I’d be through before you came, but I guess I’m not. It’s Uncle’s fan mail and his press clippings. I’ve got to sort it out, and answer it and file it and write notes of thanks and ... Oh, you should see some of the things people write to him! It’s wonderful. Don’t stand there. Sit down, will you? I’ll be through in a minute.”

“You’re through right now,” he said, picking her up in his arms, carrying her to a chair.

He held her and kissed her and she laughed happily, her head buried on his shoulder. He said:

“Katie, you’re an impossible little fool and your hair smells so nice!”

She said: “Don’t move, Peter. I’m comfortable.”

“Katie, I want to tell you, I had a wonderful time today. They opened the Bordman Building officially this afternoon. You know, down on Broadway, twenty-two floors and a Gothic spire. Francon had indigestion, so I went there as his representative. I designed that building anyway and ... Oh, well, you know nothing about it.”

“But I do, Peter. I’ve seen all your buildings. I have pictures of them. I cut them out of the papers. And I’m making a scrapbook, just like Uncle’s. Oh, Peter, it’s so wonderful!”

“What?”

“Uncle’s scrapbooks, and his letters ... all this ...” She stretched her hands out over the papers on the floor, as if she wanted to embrace them. “Think of it, all these letters coming from all over the country, perfect strangers and yet he means so much to them. And here I am, helping him, me, just nobody, and look what a responsibility I have! It’s so touching and so big, what do they matter—all the little things that can happen to us?—when this concerns a whole nation!”

“Yeah? Did he tell you that?”

“He told me nothing at all. But you can’t live with him for years without getting some of that ... that wonderful selflessness of his.”

He wanted to be angry, but he saw her twinkling smile, her new kind of fire, and he had to smile in answer.

“I’ll say this, Katie: it’s becoming to you, becoming as hell. You know, you could look stunning if you learned something about clothes. One of these days, I’ll take you bodily and drag you down to a good dressmaker. I want you to meet Guy Francon some day. You’ll like him.”

“Oh? I thought you said once that I wouldn’t.”

“Did I say that? Well, I didn’t really know him. He’s a grand fellow. I want you to meet them all. You’d be ... hey, where are you going?” She had noticed the watch on his wrist and was edging away from him.

“I ... It’s almost nine o’clock, Peter, and I’ve got to have this finished before Uncle Ellsworth gets home. He’ll be back by eleven, he’s making a speech at a labor meeting tonight. I can work while we’re talking, do you mind?”

“I certainly do! To hell with your dear uncle’s fans! Let him untangle it all himself. You stay just where you are.”

She sighed, but put her head on his shoulder obediently. “You mustn’t talk like that about Uncle Ellsworth. You don’t understand him at all. Have you read his book?”

“Yes! I’ve read his book and it’s grand, it’s stupendous, but I’ve heard nothing but talk of his damn book everywhere I go, so do you mind if we change the subject?”

“You still don’t want to meet Uncle Ellsworth?”

“Why? What makes you say that? I’d love to meet him.”

“Oh ...”

“What’s the matter?”

“You said once that you didn’t want to meet him through me.”

“Did I? How do you always remember all the nonsense I happen to say?”

“Peter, I don’t want you to meet Uncle Ellsworth.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. It’s kind of silly of me. But now I just don’t want you to. I don’t know why.”

“Well, forget it then. I’ll meet him when the time comes. Katie, listen, yesterday I was standing at the window in my room, and I thought of you, and I wanted so much to have you with me, I almost called you, only it was too late. I get so terribly lonely for you like that, I ...”

She listened, her arms about his neck. And then he saw her looking suddenly past him, her mouth opened in consternation; she jumped up, dashed across the room, and crawled on her hands and knees to reach a lavender envelope lying under a desk.

“Now what on earth?” he demanded angrily.

“It’s a very important letter,” she said, still kneeling, the envelope held tightly in her little fist, “it’s a very important letter and there it was, practically in the wastebasket, I might have swept it out without noticing. It’s from a poor widow who has five children and her eldest son wants to be an architect and Uncle Ellsworth is going to arrange a scholarship for him.”

“Well,” said Keating, rising, “I’ve had just about enough of this. Let’s get out of here, Katie. Let’s go for a walk. It’s beautiful out tonight. You don’t seem to belong to yourself in here.”

“Oh, fine! Let’s go for a walk.”

Outside, there was a mist of snow, a dry, fine, weightless snow that hung still in the air, filling the narrow tanks of streets. They walked together, Catherine’s arm pressed to his, their feet leaving long brown smears on the white sidewalks.

They sat down on a bench in Washington Square. The snow enclosed the Square, cutting them off from the houses, from the city beyond. Through the shadow of the arch, little dots of light rolled past them, steel-white, green and smeared red.

She sat huddled close to him. He looked at the city. He had always been afraid of it and he was afraid of it now; but he had two fragile protections: the snow and the girl beside him.

“Katie,” he whispered, “Katie ...”

“I love you, Peter....”

“Katie,” he said, without hesitation, without emphasis, because the certainty of his words allowed no excitement, “we’re engaged, aren’t we?”

He saw her chin move faintly as it dropped and rose to form one word.

“Yes,” she said calmly, so solemnly that the word sounded indifferent.

She had never allowed herself to question the future, for a question would have been an admission of doubt. But she knew, when she pronounced the “yes,” that she had waited for this and that she would shatter it if she were too happy.

“In a year or two,” he said holding her hand tightly, “we’ll be married. Just as soon as I’m on my feet and set with the firm for good. I have mother to take care of, but in another year it will be all right.” He tried to speak as coldly, as practically as he could, not to spoil the wonder of what he felt.

“I’ll wait, Peter,” she whispered. “We don’t have to hurry.”

“We won’t tell anyone, Katie.... It’s our secret, just ours until ...” And suddenly a thought came to him, and he realized, aghast, that he could not prove it had never occurred to him before; yet he knew, in complete honesty, even though it did astonish him, that he had never thought of this before. He pushed her aside. He said angrily: “Katie! You won’t think that it’s because of that great, damnable uncle of yours?”

She laughed; the sound was light and unconcerned, and he knew that he was vindicated.

“Lord, no, Peter! He won’t like it, of course, but what do we care?”

“He won’t like it? Why?”

“Oh, I don’t think he approves of marriage. Not that he preaches anything immoral, but he’s always told me marriage is old-fashioned, an economic device to perpetuate the institution of private property, or something like that or anyway that he doesn’t like it.”

“Well, that’s wonderful! We’ll show him.”

In all sincerity, he was glad of it. It removed, not from his mind which he knew to be innocent, but from all other minds where it could occur, the suspicion that there had been in his feeling for her any hint of such considerations as applied to ... to Francon’s daughter, for instance. He thought it was strange that this should seem so important; that he should wish so desperately to keep his feeling for her free from ties to all other people.

He let his head fall back, he felt the bite of snowflakes on his lips. Then he turned and kissed her. The touch of her mouth was soft and cold with the snow.

Her hat had slipped to one side, her lips were half open, her eyes round, helpless, her lashes glistening. He held her hand, palm up, and looked at it: she wore a black woolen glove and her fingers were spread out clumsily like a child’s; he saw beads of melted snow in the fuzz of the glove; they sparkled radiantly once in the light of a car flashing past.

VII

THE BULLETIN OF THE ARCHITECTS’ GUILD OF AMERICA CARRIED, IN its Miscellaneous Department, a short item announcing Henry Cameron’s retirement. Six lines summarized his achievements in architecture and misspelled the names of his two best buildings.

Peter Keating walked into Francon’s office and interrupted Francon’s well-bred bargaining with an antique dealer over a snuffbox that had belonged to Madame Pompadour. Francon was precipitated into paying nine dollars and twenty-five cents more than he had intended to pay. He turned to Keating testily, after the dealer had left, and asked:

“Well, what is it, Peter, what is it?”

Keating threw the bulletin down on Francon’s desk, his thumbnail underscoring the paragraph about Cameron.

“I’ve got to have that man,” said Keating.

“What man?”

“Howard Roark.”

“Who the hell,” asked Francon, “is Howard Roark?”

“I’ve told you about him. Cameron’s designer.”

“Oh ... oh, yes, I believe you did. Well, go and get him.”

“Do you give me a free hand on how I hire him?”

“What the hell? What is there about hiring another draftsman? Incidentally, did you have to interrupt me for that?”

“He might be difficult. And I want to get him before he decides on anyone else.”

“Really? He’s going to be difficult about it, is he? Do you intend to beg him to come here after Cameron’s? Which is not great recommendation for a young man anyway.”

“Come on, Guy. Isn’t it?”

“Oh well ... well, speaking structurally, not esthetically, Cameron does give them a thorough grounding and ... Of course, Cameron was pretty important in his day. As a matter of fact, I was one of his best draftsmen myself once, long ago. There’s something to be said for old Cameron when you need that sort of thing. Go ahead. Get your Roark if you think you need him.”

“It’s not that I really need him. But he’s an old friend of mine, and out of a job, and I thought it would be a nice thing to do for him.”

“Well, do anything you wish. Only don’t bother me about it.... Say, Peter, don’t you think this is as lovely a snuffbox as you’ve ever seen?”

That evening, Keating climbed, unannounced, to Roark’s room and knocked, nervously, and entered cheerfully. He found Roark sitting on the window sill, smoking.

“Just passing by,” said Keating, “with an evening to kill and happened to think that that’s where you live, Howard, and thought I’d drop in to say hello, haven’t seen you for such a long time.”

“I know what you want,” said Roark. “All right. How much?”

“What do you mean, Howard?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Sixty-five a week,” Keating blurted out. This was not the elaborate approach he had prepared, but he had not expected to find that no approach would be necessary. “Sixty-five to start with. If you think it’s not enough, I could maybe ...”

“Sixty-five will do.”

“You ... you’ll come with us, Howard?”

“When do you want me to start?”

“Why ... as soon as you can! Monday?”

“All right.”

“Thanks, Howard!”

“On one condition,” said Roark. “I’m not going to do any designing. Not any. No details. No Louis XV skyscrapers. Just keep me off esthetics if you want to keep me at all. Put me in the engineering department. Send me on inspections, out in the field. Now, do you still want me?”

“Certainly. Anything you say. You’ll like the place, just wait and see. You’ll like Francon. He’s one of Cameron’s men himself.”

“He shouldn’t boast about it.”

“Well ...”

“No. Don’t worry. I won’t say it to his face. I won’t say anything to anyone. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“Why, no, I wasn’t worried, I wasn’t even thinking of that.”

“Then it’s settled. Good night. See you Monday.”

“Well, yes ... but I’m in no special hurry, really I came to see you and...”

“What’s the matter, Peter? Something bothering you?”

“No ... I...”

“You want to know why I’m doing it?” Roark smiled, without resentment or interest. “Is that it? I’ll tell you, if you want to know. I don’t give a damn where I work next. There’s no architect in town that I’d want to work for. But I have to work somewhere, so it might as well be your Francon—if I can get what I want from you. I’m selling myself, and I’ll play the game that way—for the time being.”

“Really, Howard, you don’t have to look at it like that. There’s no limit to how far you can go with us, once you get used to it. You’ll see, for a change, what a real office looks like. After Cameron’s dump ...”

“We’ll shut up about that, Peter, and we’ll do it damn fast.”

“I didn’t mean to criticize or ... I didn’t mean anything.” He did not know what to say nor what he should feel. It was a victory, but it seemed hollow. Still, it was a victory and he felt that he wanted to feel affection for Roark.

“Howard, let’s go out and have a drink, just sort of to celebrate the occasion.”

“Sorry, Peter. That’s not part of the job.”

Keating had come here prepared to exercise caution and tact to the limit of his ability; he had achieved a purpose he had not expected to achieve; he knew he should take no chances, say nothing else and leave. But something inexplicable, beyond all practical considerations, was pushing him on. He said unheedingly:

“Can’t you be human for once in your life?”

“What?”

“Human! Simple. Natural.”

“But I am.”

“Can’t you ever relax?”

Roark smiled, because he was sitting on the window sill, leaning sloppily against the wall, his long legs hanging loosely, the cigarette held without pressure between limp fingers.

“That’s not what I mean!” said Keating. “Why can’t you go out for a drink with me?”

“What for?”

“Do you always have to have a purpose? Do you always have to be so damn serious? Can’t you ever do things without reason, just like everybody else? You’re so serious, so old. Everything’s important with you, everything’s great, significant in some way, every minute, even when you keep still. Can’t you ever be comfortable—and unimportant?”

“No.”

“Don’t you get tired of the heroic?”

“What’s heroic about me?”

“Nothing. Everything. I don’t know. It’s not what you do. It’s what you make people feel around you.”

“What?”

“The un-normal. The strain. When I’m with you—it’s always like a choice. Between you—and the rest of the world. I don’t want that kind of a choice. I don’t want to be an outsider. I want to belong. There’s so much in the world that’s simple and pleasant. It’s not all fighting and renunciation. It is—with you.”

“What have I ever renounced?”

“Oh, you’ll never renounce anything! You’d walk over corpses for what you want. But it’s what you’ve renounced by never wanting it.”

“That’s because you can’t want both.”

“Both what?”

“Look, Peter. I’ve never told you any of those things about me. What makes you see them? I’ve never asked you to make a choice between me and anything else. What makes you feel that there is a choice involved? What makes you uncomfortable when you feel that—since you’re so sure I’m wrong?”

“I ... I don’t know.” He added: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And then he asked suddenly:

“Howard, why do you hate me?”

“I don’t hate you.”

“Well, that’s it! Why don’t you hate me at least?”

“Why should I?”

“Just to give me something. I know you can’t like me. You can’t like anybody. So it would be kinder to acknowledge people’s existence by hating them.”

“I’m not kind, Peter.”

And as Keating found nothing to say, Roark added:

“Go home, Peter. You got what you wanted. Let it go at that. See you Monday.”

Roark stood at a table in the drafting room of Francon & Heyer, a pencil in his hand, a strand of orange hair hanging down over his face, the prescribed pearl-gray smock like a prison uniform on his body.

He had learned to accept his new job. The lines he drew were to be the clean lines of steel beams, and he tried not to think of what these beams would carry. It was difficult, at times. Between him and the plan of the building on which he was working stood the plan of that building as it should have been. He saw what he could make of it, how to change the lines he drew, where to lead them in order to achieve a thing of splendor. He had to choke the knowledge. He had to kill the vision. He had to obey and draw the lines as instructed. It hurt him so much that he shrugged at himself in cold anger. He thought: difficult?—well, learn it.

But the pain remained—and a helpless wonder. The thing he saw was so much more real than the reality of paper, office and commission. He could not understand what made others blind to it, and what made their indifference possible. He looked at the paper before him. He wondered why ineptitude should exist and have its say. He had never known that. And the reality which permitted it could never become quite real to him.

But he knew that this would not last—he had to wait—it was his only assignment, to wait—what he felt didn’t matter—it had to be done—he had to wait.

“Mr. Roark, are you ready with the steel cage for the Gothic lantern for the American Radio Corporation Building?”

He had no friends in the drafting room. He was there like a piece of furniture, as useful, as impersonal and as silent. Only the chief of the engineering department, to which Roark was assigned, had said to Keating after the first two weeks: “You’ve got more sense than I gave you credit for, Keating. Thanks.” “For what?” asked Keating. “For nothing that was intentional, I’m sure,” said the chief.

Once in a while, Keating stopped by Roark’s table to say softly: “Will you drop in at my office when you’re through tonight, Howard? Nothing important.”

When Roark came, Keating began by saying: “Well, how do you like it here, Howard? If there’s anything you want, just say so and I’ll ...” Roark interrupted to ask: “Where is it, this time?” Keating produced sketches from a drawer and said: “I know it’s perfectly right, just as it is, but what do you think of it, generally speaking?” Roark looked at the sketches, and even though he wanted to throw them at Keating’s face and resign, one thought stopped him: the thought that it was a building and that he had to save it, as others could not pass a drowning man without leaping in to the rescue.

Then he worked for hours, sometimes all night, while Keating sat and watched. He forgot Keating’s presence. He saw only a building and his chance to shape it. He knew that the shape would be changed, torn, distorted. Still, some order and reason would remain in its plan. It would be a better building than it would have been if he refused.

Sometimes, looking at the sketch of a structure simpler, cleaner, more honest than the others, Roark would say: “That’s not so bad, Peter. You’re improving.” And Keating would feel an odd little jolt inside, something quiet, private and precious, such as he never felt from the compliments of Guy Francon, of his clients, of all others. Then he would forget it and feel much more substantially pleased when a wealthy lady murmured over a teacup: “You’re the coming architect of America, Mr. Keating,” though she had never seen his buildings.

He found compensations for his submission to Roark. He would enter the drafting room in the morning, throw a tracing boy’s assignment down on Roark’s table and say: “Howard, do this up for me, will you?—and make it fast.” In the middle of the day, he would send a boy to Roark’s table to say loudly: “Mr. Keating wishes to see you in his office at once.” He would come out of the office and walk in Roark’s direction and say to the room at large: “Where the hell are those Twelfth Street plumbing specifications? Oh, Howard, will you look through the files and dig them up for me?”

At first, he was afraid of Roark’s reaction. When he saw no reaction, only a silent obedience, he could restrain himself no longer. He felt a sensual pleasure in giving orders to Roark; and he felt also a fury of resentment at Roark’s passive compliance. He continued, knowing that he could continue only so long as Roark exhibited no anger, yet wishing desperately to break him down to an explosion. No explosion came.

Roark liked the days when he was sent out to inspect buildings in construction. He walked through the steel hulks of buildings more naturally than on pavements. The workers observed with curiosity that he walked on narrow planks, on naked beams hanging over empty space, as easily as the best of them.

It was a day in March, and the sky was a faint green with the first hint of spring. In Central Park, five hundred feet below, the earth caught the tone of the sky in a shade of brown that promised to become green, and the lakes lay like splinters of glass under the cobwebs of bare branches. Roark walked through the shell of what was to be a gigantic apartment hotel, and stopped before an electrician at work.

The man was toiling assiduously, bending conduits around a beam. It was a task for hours of strain and patience, in a space overfilled against all calculations. Roark stood, his hands in his pockets, watching the man’s slow, painful progress.

The man raised his head and turned to him abruptly. He had a big head and a face so ugly that it became fascinating; it was neither old nor flabby, but it was creased in deep gashes and the powerful jowls drooped like a bulldog’s; the eyes were startling—wide, round and china-blue.

“Well?” the man asked angrily, “What’s the matter, Bricktop?”

“You’re wasting your time,” said Roark.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t say!”

“It will take you hours to get your pipes around that beam.”

“Know a better way to do it?”

“Sure.”

“Run along, punk. We don’t like college smarties around here.”

“Cut a hole in that beam and put your pipes through.”

“What?”

“Cut a hole through the beam.”

“The hell I will!”

“The hell you won’t.”

“It ain’t done that way.”

“I’ve done it.”

“You?”

“It’s done everywhere.”

“It ain’t gonna be done here. Not by me.”

“Then I’ll do it for you.”

The man roared. “That’s rich! When did office boys learn to do a man’s work?”

“Give me your torch.”

“Look out, boy! It’ll burn your pretty pink toes!”

Roark took the man’s gloves and goggles, took the acetylene torch, knelt, and sent a thin jet of blue fire at the center of the beam. The man stood watching him. Roark’s arm was steady, holding the tense, hissing streak of flame in leash, shuddering faintly with its violence, but holding it aimed straight. There was no strain, no effort in the easy posture of his body, only in his arm. And it seemed as if the blue tension eating slowly through metal came not from the flame but from the hand holding it.

He finished, put the torch down, and rose.

“Jesus!” said the electrician. “Do you know how to handle a torch!”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” He removed the gloves, the goggles, and handed them back. “Do it that way from now on. Tell the foreman I said so.”

The electrician was staring reverently at the neat hole cut through the beam. He muttered: “Where did you learn to handle it like that, Red?”

Roark’s slow, amused smile acknowledged this concession of victory. “Oh, I’ve been an electrician, and a plumber, and a rivet catcher, and many other things.”

“And went to school besides?”

“Well, in a way.”

“Gonna be an architect?”

“ Yes.”

“Well, you’ll be the first one that knows something besides pretty pictures and tea parties. You should see the teacher’s pets they send us down from the office.”

“If you’re apologizing, don’t. I don’t like them either. Go back to the pipes. So long.”

“So long, Red.”

The next time Roark appeared on that job, the blue-eyed electrician waved to him from afar, and called him over, and asked advice about his work which he did not need; he stated that his name was Mike and that he had missed Roark for several days. On the next visit the day shift was leaving, and Mike waited outside for Roark to finish the inspection. “How about a glass of beer, Red?” he invited, when Roark came out. “Sure,” said Roark, “thanks.”

They sat together at a table in the corner of a basement speak-easy, and they drank beer, and Mike related his favorite tale of how he had fallen five stories when a scaffolding gave way under him, how he had broken three ribs but lived to tell it, and Roark spoke of his days in the building trades. Mike did have a real name, which was Sean Xavier Donnigan, but everyone had forgotten it long ago; he owned a set of tools and an ancient Ford, and existed for the sole purpose of traveling around the country from one big construction job to another. People meant very little to Mike, but their performance a great deal. He worshiped expertness of any kind. He loved his work passionately and had no tolerance for anything save for other single-track devotions. He was a master in his own field and he felt no sympathy except for mastery. His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent; he was not concerned with the latter. He loved buildings. He despised, however, all architects.

“There was one, Red,” he said earnestly, over his fifth beer, “one only and you’d be too young to know about him, but that was the only man that knew building. I worked for him when I was your age.”

“Who was that?”

“Henry Cameron was his name. He’s dead, I guess, these many years.”

Roark looked at him for a long time, then said: “He’s not dead, Mike,” and added: “I’ve worked for him.”

“You did?”

“For almost three years.”

They looked at each other silently, and that was the final seal on their friendship.

Weeks later, Mike stopped Roark, one day, at the building, his ugly face puzzled, and asked:

“Say, Red, I heard the super tell a guy from the contractor’s that you’re stuck-up and stubborn and the lousiest bastard he’s ever been up against. What did you do to him?”

“Nothing.”

“What the hell did he mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Roark. “Do you?”

Mike looked at him, shrugged and grinned.

“No,” said Mike.

VIII

EARLY IN MAY, PETER KEATING DEPARTED FOR WASHINGTON, TO supervise the construction of a museum donated to the city by a great philanthropist easing his conscience. The museum building, Keating pointed out proudly, was to be decidedly different: it was not a reproduction of the Parthenon, but of the Maison Carrée at Nimes.

Keating had been away for some time when an office boy approached Roark’s table and informed him that Mr. Francon wished to see him in his office. When Roark entered the sanctuary, Francon smiled from behind the desk and said cheerfully: “Sit down, my friend. Sit down ...” but something in Roark’s eyes, which he had never seen at close range before, made Francon’s voice shrink and stop, and he added dryly: “Sit down.”

Roark obeyed. Francon studied him for a second, but could reach no conclusion beyond deciding that the man had a most unpleasant face, yet looked quite correctly attentive.

“You’re the one who’s worked for Cameron, aren’t you?” Francon asked.

“Yes,” said Roark.

“Mr. Keating has been telling me very nice things about you,” Francon tried pleasantly and stopped. It was wasted courtesy; Roark just sat looking at him, waiting.

“Listen ... what’s your name?”

“Roark.”

“Listen, Roark. We have a client who is a little ... odd, but he’s an important man, a very important man, and we have to satisfy him. He’s given us a commission for an eight-million-dollar office building, but the trouble is that he has very definite ideas on what he wants it to look like. He wants it—” Francon shrugged apologetically, disclaiming all blame for the preposterous suggestion—“he wants it to look like this.” He handed Roark a photograph. It was a photograph of the Dana Building.

Roark sat quite still, the photograph hanging between his fingers.

“Do you know that building?” asked Francon.

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s what he wants. And Mr. Keating’s away. I’ve had Bennett and Cooper and Williams make sketches, but he’s turned them down. So I thought I’d give you a chance.”

Francon looked at him, impressed by the magnanimity of his own offer. There was no reaction. There was only a man who still looked as if he’d been struck on the head.

“Of course,” said Francon, “it’s quite a jump for you, quite an assignment, but I thought I’d let you try. Don’t be afraid. Mr. Keating and I will go over it afterward. Just draw up the plans and a good sketch of it. You must have an idea of what the man wants. You know Cameron’s tricks. But of course, we can’t let a crude thing like this come out of our office. We must please him, but we must also preserve our reputation and not frighten all our other clients away. The point is to make it simple and in the general mood of this, but also artistic. You know, the more severe kind of Greek. You don’t have to use the Ionic order, use the Doric. Plain pediments and simple moldings, or something like that. Get the idea? Now take this along and show me what you can do. Bennett will give you all the particulars and ... What’s the mat—”

Francon’s voice cut itself off.

“Mr. Francon, please let me design it the way the Dana Bulding was designed.”

“Huh?”

“Let me do it. Not copy the Dana Building, but design it as Henry Cameron would have wanted it done, as I will.”

“You mean modernistic?”

“I ... well, call it that.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Mr. Francon, please listen to me.” Roark’s words were like the steps of a man walking a tightwire, slow, strained, groping for the only right spot, quivering over an abyss, but precise. “I don’t blame you for the things you’re doing. I’m working for you, I’m taking your money, I have no right to express objections. But this time ... this time the client is asking for it. You’re risking nothing. He wants it. Think of it, there’s a man, one man who sees and understands and wants it and has the power to build it. Are you going to fight a client for the first time in your life—and fight for what? To cheat him and to give him the same old trash, when you have so many others asking for it, and one, only one, who comes with a request like this?”

“Aren’t you forgetting yourself?” asked Francon, coldly.

“What difference would it make to you? Just let me do it my way and show it to him. Only show it to him. He’s already turned down three sketches, what if he turns down a fourth? But if he doesn’t ... if he doesn’t ...”

Roark had never known how to entreat and he was not doing it well; his voice was hard, toneless, revealing the effort, so that the plea became an insult to the man who was making him plead. Keating would have given a great deal to see Roark in that moment. But Francon could not appreciate the triumph he was the first ever to achieve; he recognized only the insult.

“Am I correct in gathering,” Francon asked, “that you are criticizing me and teaching me something about architecture?”

“I’m begging you,” said Roark, closing his eyes.

“If you weren’t a protégé of Mr. Keating’s, I wouldn’t bother to discuss the matter with you any further. But since you are quite obviously naïve and inexperienced, I shall point out to you that I am not in the habit of asking for the esthetic opinions of my draftsmen. You will kindly take this photograph—and I do not wish any building as Cameron might have designed it, I wish the scheme of this adapted to our site—and you will follow my instructions as to the Classic treatment of the façade.”

“I can’t do it,” said Roark, very quietly.

“What? Are you speaking to me? Are you actually saying: ‘Sorry, I can’t do it’?”

“I haven’t said ‘sorry,’ Mr. Francon.”

“What did you say?”

“That I can’t do it.”

“Why?”

“You don’t want to know why. Don’t ask me to do any designing. I’ll do any other kind of job you wish. But not that. And not to Cameron’s work.”

“What do you mean, no designing? You expect to be an architect some day—or do you?”

“Not like this.”

“Oh ... I see ... So you can’t do it? You mean you won’t?”

“If you prefer.”

“Listen, you impertinent fool, this is incredible!”

Roark got up.

“May I go, Mr. Francon?”

“In all my life,” roared Francon, “in all my experience, I’ve never seen anything like it! Are you here to tell me what you’ll do and what you won’t do? Are you here to give me lessons and criticize my taste and pass judgment?”

“I’m not criticizing anything,” said Roark quietly. “I’m not passing judgment. There are some things that I can’t do. Let it go at that. May I leave now?”

“You may leave this room and this firm now and from now on! You may go straight to the devil! Go and find yourself another employer! Try and find him! Go get your check and get out!”

“Yes, Mr. Francon.”

That evening Roark walked to the basement speak-easy where he could always find Mike after the day’s work. Mike was now employed on the construction of a factory by the same contractor who was awarded most of Francon’s biggest jobs. Mike had expected to see Roark on an inspection visit to the factory that afternoon, and greeted him angrily:

“What’s the matter, Red? Lying down on the job?”

When he heard the news, Mike sat still and looked like a bulldog baring its teeth. Then he swore savagely.

“The bastards,” he gulped between stronger names, “the bastards ...”

“Keep still, Mike.”

“Well ... what now, Red?”

“Someone else of the same kind, until the same thing happens again.”

When Keating returned from Washington he went straight up to Francon’s office. He had not stopped in the drafting room and had heard no news. Francon greeted him expansively:

“Boy, it’s great to see you back! What’ll you have? A whisky-and-soda or a little brandy?”

“No, thanks. Just give me a cigarette.”

“Here.... Boy, you look fine! Better than ever. How do you do it, you lucky bastard? I have so many things to tell you! How did it go down in Washington? Everything all right?” And before Keating could answer, Francon rushed on: “Something dreadful’s happened to me. Most disappointing. Do you remember Lili Landau? I thought I was all set with her, but last time I saw her, did I get the cold shoulder! Do you know who’s got her? You’ll be surprised. Gail Wynand, no less! The girl’s flying high. You should see her pictures and her legs all over his newspapers. Will it help her show or won’t it! What can I offer against that? And do you know what he’s done? Remember how she always said that nobody could give her what she wanted most—her childhood home, the dear little Austrian village where she was born? Well, Wynand bought it, long ago, the whole damn village, and had it shipped here—every bit of it!—and had it assembled again down on the Hudson, and there it stands now, cobbles, church, apple trees, pigsties and all! Then he springs it on Lili, two weeks ago. Wouldn’t you just know it? If the King of Babylon could get hanging gardens for his homesick lady, why not Gail Wynand? Lili’s all smiles and gratitude—but the poor girl was really miserable. She’d have much preferred a mink coat. She never wanted the damn village. And Wynand knew it, too. But there it stands, on the Hudson. Last week, he gave a party for her, right there, in that village—a costume party, with Mr. Wynand dressed as Cesare Borgia—wouldn’t he, though?—and what a party!—if you can believe what you hear, but you know how it is, you can never prove anything on Wynand. Then what does he do the next day but pose up there himself with little schoolchildren who’d never seen an Austrian village—the philanthropist! —and plasters the photos all over his papers with plenty of sob stuff about educational values, and gets mush notes from women’s clubs! I’d like to know what he’ll do with the village when he gets rid of Lili! He will, you know, they never last long with him. Do you think I’ll have a chance with her then?”

“Sure,” said Keating. “Sure, you will. How’s everything here in the office?”

“Oh, fine. Same as usual. Lucius had a cold and drank up all of my best Bas Armagnac. It’s bad for his heart, and a hundred dollars a case! ...Besides, Lucius got himself caught in a nasty little mess. It’s that phobia of his, his damn porcelain. Seems he went and bought a teapot from a fence. He knew it was stolen goods, too. Took me quite a bit of bother to save us from a scandal.... Oh, by the way, I fired that friend of yours, what’s his name?—Roark.”

“Oh,” said Keating, and let a moment pass, then asked: “Why?”

“The insolent bastard! Where did you ever pick him up?”

“What happened?”

“I thought I’d be nice to him, give him a real break. I asked him to make a sketch for the Farrell Building—you know, the one Brent finally managed to design and we got Farrell to accept, you know, the simplified Doric—and your friend just up and refused to do it. It seems he has ideals or something. So I showed him the gate.... What’s the matter? What are you smiling at?”

“Nothing. I can just see it.”

“Now don’t you ask me to take him back!”

“No, of course not.”

For several days, Keating thought that he should call on Roark. He did not know what he would say, but felt dimly that he should say something. He kept postponing it. He was gaining assurance in his work. He felt that he did not need Roark, after all. The days went by, and he did not call on Roark, and he felt relief in being free to forget him.

Beyond the windows of his room Roark saw the roofs, the water tanks, the chimneys, the cars speeding far below. There was a threat in the silence of his room, in the empty days, in his hands hanging idly by his sides. And he felt another threat rising from the city below, as if each window, each strip of pavement, had set itself closed grimly, in wordless resistance. It did not disturb him. He had known and accepted it long ago.

He made a list of the architects whose work he resented least, in the order of their lesser evil, and he set out upon the search for a job, coldly, systematically, without anger or hope. He never knew whether these days hurt him; he knew only that it was a thing which had to be done.

The architects he saw differed from one another. Some looked at him across the desk, kindly and vaguely, and their manner seemed to say that it was touching, his ambition to be an architect, touching and laudable and strange and attractively sad as all the delusions of youth. Some smiled at him with thin, drawn lips and seemed to enjoy his presence in the room, because it made them conscious of their own accomplishment. Some spoke coldly, as if his ambition were a personal insult. Some were brusque, and the sharpness of their voices seemed to say that they needed good draftsmen, they always needed good draftsmen, but this qualification could not possibly apply to him, and would he please refrain from being rude enough to force them to express it more plainly.

It was not malice. It was not a judgment passed upon his merit. They did not think he was worthless. They simply did not care to find out whether he was good. Sometimes, he was asked to show his sketches; he extended them across a desk, feeling a contraction of shame in the muscles of his hand; it was like having the clothes torn off his body, and the shame was not that his body was exposed, but that it was exposed to indifferent eyes.

Once in a while he made a trip to New Jersey, to see Cameron. They sat together on the porch of a house on a hill, Cameron in a wheel chair, his hands on an old blanket spread over his knees. “How is it, Howard? Pretty hard?” “No.” “Want me to give you a letter to one of the bastards?” “No.”

Then Cameron would not speak of it any more, he did not want to speak of it, he did not want the thought of Roark rejected by their city to become real. When Roark came to him, Cameron spoke of architecture with the simple confidence of a private possession. They sat together, looking at the city in the distance, on the edge of the sky, beyond the river. The sky was growing dark and luminous as blue-green glass; the buildings looked like clouds condensed on the glass, gray-blue clouds frozen for an instant in straight angles and vertical shafts, with the sunset caught in the spires....

As the summer months passed, as his list was exhausted and he returned again to the places that had refused him once, Roark found that a few things were known about him and he heard the same words—spoken bluntly or timidly or angrily or apologetically—“You were kicked out of Stanton. You were kicked out of Francon’s office.” All the different voices saying it had one note in common: a note of relief in the certainty that the decision had been made for them.

He sat on the window sill, in the evening, smoking, his hand spread on the pane, the city under his fingers, the glass cold against his skin.

In September, he read an article entitled “Make Way For Tomorrow” by Gordon L. Prescott, A.G.A., in the Architectural Tribune. The article stated that the tragedy of the profession was the hardships placed in the way of its talented beginners; that great gifts had been lost in the struggle, unnoticed; that architecture was perishing from a lack of new blood and new thought, a lack of originality, vision and courage; that the author of the article made it his aim to search for promising beginners, to encourage them, develop them and give them the chance they deserved. Roark had never heard of Gordon L. Prescott, but there was a tone of honest conviction in the article. He allowed himself to start for Prescott’s office with the first hint of hope.

The reception room of Gordon L. Prescott’s office was done in gray, black and scarlet; it was correct, restrained and daring all at once. A young and very pretty secretary informed Roark that one could not see Mr. Prescott without an appointment, but that she would be very glad to make an appointment for next Wednesday at two-fifteen. On Wednesday at two-fifteen, the secretary smiled at Roark and asked him please to be seated for just a moment. At four forty-five he was admitted into Gordon L. Prescott’s office.

Gordon L. Prescott wore a brown checkered tweed jacket and a white turtle-neck sweater of angora wool. He was tall, athletic and thirty-five, but his face combined a crisp air of sophisticated wisdom with the soft skin, the button nose, the small, puffed mouth of a college hero. His face was sun-scorched, his blond hair clipped short, in a military Prussian haircut. He was frankly masculine, frankly unconcerned about elegance and frankly conscious of the effect.

He listened to Roark silently, and his eyes were like a stop watch registering each separate second consumed by each separate word of Roark’s. He let the first sentence go by; on the second he interrupted to say curtly: “Let me see your drawings,” as if to make it clear that anything Roark might say was quite well known to him already.

He held the drawings in his bronzed hands. Before he looked down at them, he said: “Ah, yes, so many young men come to me for advice, so many.” He glanced at the first sketch, but raised his head before he had seen it. “Of course, it’s the combination of the practical and the transcendental that is so hard for beginners to grasp.” He slipped the sketch to the bottom of the pile. “Architecture is primarily a utilitarian conception, and the problem is to elevate the principle of pragmatism into the realm of esthetic abstraction. All else is nonsense.” He glanced at two sketches and slipped them to the bottom. “I have no patience with visionaries who see a holy crusade in architecture for architecture’s sake. The great dynamic principle is the common principle of the human equation.” He glanced at a sketch and slipped it under. “The public taste and the public heart are the final criteria of the artist. The genius is the one who knows how to express the general. The exception is to tap the unexceptional.” He weighed the pile of sketches in his hand, noted that he had gone through half of them and dropped them down on the desk.

“Ah, yes,” he said, “your work. Very interesting. But not practical. Not mature. Unfocused and undisciplined. Adolescent. Originality for originality’s sake. Not at all in the spirit of the present day. If you want an idea of the sort of thing for which there is a crying need—here—let me show you.” He took a sketch out of a drawer of the desk. “Here’s a young man who came to me totally unrecommended, a beginner who had never worked before. When you can produce stuff like this, you won’t find it necessary to look for a job. I saw this one sketch of his and I took him on at once, started him at twenty-five a week, too. There’s no question but that he is a potential genius.” He extended the sketch to Roark. The sketch represented a house in the shape of a grain silo incredibly merged with the simplified, emaciated shadow of the Parthenon.

“That,” said Gordon L. Prescott, “is originality, the new in the eternal. Try toward something like this. I can’t really say that I predict a great deal for your future. We must be frank, I wouldn’t want to give you illusions based on my authority. You have a great deal to learn. I couldn’t venture a guess on what talent you might possess or develop later. But with hard work, perhaps ... Architecture is a difficult profession, however, and the competition is stiff, you know, very stiff ... And now, if you’ll excuse me, my secretary has an appointment waiting for me....”

Roark walked home late on an evening in October. It had been another of the many days that stretched into months behind him, and he could not tell what had taken place in the hours of that day, whom he had seen, what form the words of refusal had taken. He concentrated fiercely on the few minutes at hand, when he was in an office, forgetting everything else; he forgot these minutes when he left the office; it had to be done, it had been done, it concerned him no longer. He was free once more on his way home.

A long street stretched before him, its high banks coming close together ahead, so narrow that he felt as if he could spread his arms, seize the spires and push them apart. He walked swiftly, the pavements as a springboard throwing his steps forward.

He saw a lighted triangle of concrete suspended somewhere hundreds of feet above the ground. He could not see what stood below, supporting it; he was free to think of what he’d want to see there, what he would have made to be seen. Then he thought suddenly that now, in this moment, according to the city, according to everyone save that hard certainty within him, he would never build again, never—before he had begun. He shrugged. Those things happening to him, in those offices of strangers, were only a kind of sub-reality, unsubstantial incidents in the path of a substance they could not reach or touch.

He turned into side streets leading to the East River. A lonely traffic light hung far ahead, a spot of red in a bleak darkness. The old houses crouched low to the ground, hunched under the weight of the sky. The street was empty and hollow, echoing to his footsteps. He went on, his collar raised, his hands in his pockets. His shadow rose from under his heels, when he passed a light, and brushed a wall in a long black arc, like the sweep of a windshield wiper.

IX

JOHN ERIK SNYTE LOOKED THROUGH ROARK’S SKETCHES, FLIPPED three of them aside, gathered the rest into an even pile, glanced again at the three, tossed them down one after another on top of the pile, with three sharp thuds, and said:

“Remarkable. Radical, but remarkable. What are you doing tonight?”

“Why?” asked Roark, stupefied.

“Are you free? Mind starting in at once? Take your coat off, go to the drafting room, borrow tools from somebody and do me up a sketch for a department store we’re remodeling. Just a quick sketch, just a general idea, but I must have it tomorrow. Mind staying late tonight? The heat’s on and I’ll have Joe send you up some dinner. Want black coffee or Scotch or what? Just tell Joe. Can you stay?”

“Yes,” said Roark, incredulously. “I can work all night.”

“Fine! Splendid! That’s just what I’ve always needed—a Cameron man. I’ve got every other kind. Oh, yes, what did they pay you at Francon’s?”

“Sixty-five.”

“Well, I can’t splurge like Guy the Epicure. Fifty’s tops. Okay? Fine. Go right in. I’ll have Billings explain about the store to you. I want something modern. Understand? Modern, violent, crazy, to knock their eye out. Don’t restrain yourself. Go the limit. Pull any stunt you can think of, the goofier the better. Come on!”

John Erik Snyte shot to his feet, flung a door open into a huge drafting room, flew in, skidded against a table, stopped, and said to a stout man with a grim moon-face: “Billings—Roark. He’s our modernist. Give him the Benton store. Get him some instruments. Leave him your keys and show him what to lock up tonight. Start him as of this morning. Fifty. What time was my appointment with Dolson Brothers? I’m late already. So long, I won’t be back tonight.”

He skidded out, slamming the door. Billings evinced no surprise. He looked at Roark as if Roark had always been there. He spoke impassively, in a weary drawl. Within twenty minutes, he left Roark at a drafting table with paper, pencils, instruments, a set of plans and photographs of the department store, a set of charts and a long list of instructions.

Roark looked at the clean white sheet before him, his fist closed tightly about the thin stem of a pencil. He put the pencil down, and picked it up again, his thumb running softly up and down the smooth shaft; he saw that the pencil was trembling. He put it down quickly, and he felt anger at himself for the weakness of allowing this job to mean so much to him, for the sudden knowledge of what the months of idleness behind him had really meant. His finger tips were pressed to the paper, as if the paper held them, as a surface charged with electricity will hold the flesh of a man who has brushed against it, hold and hurt. He tore his fingers off the paper. Then he went to work....

John Erik Snyte was fifty years old; he wore an expression of quizzical amusement, shrewd and unwholesome, as if he shared with each man he contemplated a lewd secret which he would not mention because it was so obvious to them both. He was a prominent architect; his expression did not change when he spoke of this fact. He considered Guy Francon an impractical idealist; he was not restrained by any Classic dogma; he was much more skillful and liberal; he built anything. He had no distaste for modern architecture and built cheerfully, when a rare client asked for it, bare boxes with flat roofs, which he called progressive; he built Roman mansions which he called fastidious; he built Gothic churches which he called spiritual. He saw no difference among any of them. He never became angry, except when somebody called him eclectic.

He had a system of his own. He employed five designers of various types and he staged a contest among them on each commission he received. He chose the winning design and improved it with bits of the four others. “Six minds,” he said, “are better than one.”

When Roark saw the final drawing of the Benton Department Store, he understood why Snyte had not been afraid to hire him. He recognized his own planes of space, his windows, his system of circulation; he saw, added to it, Corinthian capitals, Gothic vaulting, Colonial chandeliers and incredible moldings, vaguely Moorish. The drawing was done in water color, with miraculous delicacy, mounted on cardboard, covered with a veil of tissue paper. The men in the drafting room were not allowed to look at it, except from a safe distance; all hands had to be washed, all cigarettes discarded. John Erik Snyte attached a great importance to the proper appearance of a drawing for submission to clients, and kept a young Chinese student of architecture employed solely upon the execution of these masterpieces.

Roark knew what to expect of his job. He would never see his work erected, only pieces of it, which he preferred not to see; but he would be free to design as he wished and he would have the experience of solving actual problems. It was less than he wanted and more than he could expect. He accepted it at that. He met his fellow designers, the four other contestants, and learned that they were unofficially nicknamed in the drafting room as “Classic,” “Gothic,” “Renaissance” and “Miscellaneous.” He winced a little when he was addressed as “Hey, Modernistic.”

The strike of the building-trades unions infuriated Guy Francon. The strike had started against the contractors who were erecting the Noyes-Belmont Hotel, and had spread to all the new structures of the city. It had been mentioned in the press that the architects of the Noyes-Belmont were the firm of Francon & Heyer.

Most of the press helped the fight along, urging the contractors not to surrender. The loudest attacks against the strikers came from the powerful papers of the great Wynand chain.

“We have always stood,” said the Wynand editorials, “for the rights of the common man against the yellow sharks of privilege, but we cannot give our support to the destruction of law and order.” It had never been discovered whether the Wynand papers led the public or the public led the Wynand papers; it was known only that the two kept remarkably in step. It was not known to anyone, however, save to Guy Francon and a very few others, that Gail Wynand owned the corporation which owned the corporation which owned the Noyes-Belmont Hotel.

This added greatly to Francon’s discomfort. Gail Wynand’s real-estate operations were rumored to be vaster than his journalistic empire. It was the first chance Francon had ever had at a Wynand commission and he grasped it avidly, thinking of the possibilities which it could open. He and Keating had put their best efforts into designing the most ornate of all Rococo palaces for future patrons who could pay twenty-five dollars per day per room and who were fond of plaster flowers, marble cupids and open elevator cages of bronze lace. The strike had shattered the future possibilities; Francon could not be blamed for it, but one could never tell whom Gail Wynand would blame and for what reason. The unpredictable, unaccountable shifts of Wynand’s favor were famous, and it was well known that few architects he employed once were ever employed by him again.

Francon’s sullen mood led him to the unprecedented breach of snapping over nothing in particular at the one person who had always been immune from it—Peter Keating. Keating shrugged, and turned his back to him in silent insolence. Then Keating wandered aimlessly through the halls, snarling at young draftsmen without provocation. He bumped into Lucius N. Heyer in a doorway and snapped: “Look where you’re going!” Heyer stared after him, bewildered, blinking.

There was little to do in the office, nothing to say and everyone to avoid. Keating left early and walked home through a cold December twilight.

At home, he cursed aloud the thick smell of paint from the overheated radiators. He cursed the chill, when his mother opened a window. He could find no reason for his restlessness, unless it was the sudden inactivity that left him alone. He could not bear to be left alone.

He snatched up the telephone receiver and called Catherine Halsey. The sound of her clear voice was like a hand pressed soothingly against his hot forehead. He said: “Oh, nothing important, dear, I just wondered if you’d be home tonight. I thought I’d drop in after dinner.” “Of course, Peter. I’ll be home.” “Swell. About eight-thirty?” “Yes ... Oh, Peter, have you heard about Uncle Ellsworth?” “Yes, God damn it, I’ve heard about your Uncle Ellsworth! ... I’m sorry, Katie... Forgive me, darling, I didn’t mean to be rude, but I’ve been hearing about your uncle all day long. I know, it’s wonderful and all that, only look, we’re not going to talk about him again tonight!” “No, of course not. I’m sorry. I understand. I’ll be waiting for you.” “So long, Katie.”

He had heard the latest story about Ellsworth Toohey, but he did not want to think of it because it brought him back to the annoying subject of the strike. Six months ago, on the wave of his success with Sermons in Stone, Ellsworth Toohey had been signed to write “One Small Voice,” a daily syndicated column for the Wynand papers. It appeared in the Banner and had started as a department of art criticism, but grown into an informal tribune from which Ellsworth M. Toohey pronounced verdicts on art, literature, New York restaurants, international crises and sociology—mainly sociology. It had been a great success. But the building strike had placed Ellsworth M. Toohey in a difficult position. He made no secret of his sympathy with the strikers, but he had said nothing in his column, for no one could say what he pleased on the papers owned by Gail Wynand save Gail Wynand. However, a mass meeting of strike sympathizers had been called for this evening. Many famous men were to speak, Ellsworth Toohey among them. At least, Toohey’s name had been announced.

The event caused a great deal of curious speculation and bets were made on whether Toohey would dare to appear. “He will,” Keating had heard a draftsman insist vehemently, “he’ll sacrifice himself. He’s that kind. He’s the only honest man in print.” “He won’t,” another had said. “Do you realize what it means to pull a stunt like that on Wynand? Once Wynand gets it in for a man, he’ll break the guy sure as hell’s fire. Nobody knows when he’ll do it or how he’ll do it, but he’ll do it, and nobody’ ll prove a thing on him, and you’re done for once you get Wynand after you.” Keating did not care about the issue one way or another, and the whole matter annoyed him.

He ate his dinner, that evening, in grim silence and when Mrs. Keating began, with an “Oh, by the way ...” to lead the conversation in a direction he recognized, he snapped: “You’re not going to talk about Catherine. Keep still.” Mrs. Keating said nothing further and concentrated on forcing more food on his plate.

He took a taxi to Greenwich Village. He hurried up the stairs. He jerked at the bell. He waited. There was no answer. He stood, leaning against the wall, ringing, for a long time. Catherine wouldn’t be out when she knew he was coming; she couldn’t be. He walked incredulously down the stairs, out to the street, and looked up at the windows of her apartment. The windows were dark.

He stood, looking up at the windows as at a tremendous betrayal. Then came a sick feeling of loneliness, as if he were homeless in a great city; for the moment, he forgot his own address or its existence. Then he thought of the meeting, the great mass meeting where her uncle was publicly to make a martyr of himself tonight. That’s where she went, he thought, the damn little fool! He said aloud: “To hell with her!”... And he was walking rapidly in the direction of the meeting hall.

There was one naked bulb of light over the square frame of the hall’s entrance, a small, blue-white lump glowing ominously, too cold and too bright. It leaped out of the dark street, lighting one thin trickle of rain from some ledge above, a glistening needle of glass, so thin and smooth that Keating thought crazily of stories where men had been killed by being pierced with an icicle. A few curious loafers stood indifferently in the rain around the entrance, and a few policemen. The door was open. The dim lobby was crowded with people who could not get into the packed hall; they were listening to a loud-speaker installed there for the occasion. At the door three vague shadows were handing out pamphlets to passers-by. One of the shadows was a consumptive, unshaved young man with a long, bare neck; the other was a trim youth with a fur collar on an expensive coat; the third was Catherine Halsey.

She stood in the rain, slumped, her stomach jutting forward in weariness, her nose shiny, her eyes bright with excitement. Keating stopped, staring at her.

Her hand shot toward him mechanically with a pamphlet, then she raised her eyes and saw him. She smiled without astonishment, and said happily:

“Why, Peter! How sweet of you to come here!”

“Katie ...” he choked a little. “Katie, what the hell ...”

“But I had to, Peter.” Her voice had no trace of apology. “You don’t understand, but I ...”

“Get out of the rain. Get inside.”

“But I can’t! I have to ...”

“Get out of the rain at least, you fool!” He pushed her roughly through the door, into a corner of the lobby.

“Peter darling, you’re not angry, are you? You see, it was like this: I didn’t think Uncle would let me come here tonight, but at the last minute he said I could if I wanted to, and that I could help with the pamphlets. I knew you’d understand, and I left you a note on the living room table, explaining, and ...”

“You left me a note? Inside?”

“Yes ... Oh ... Oh, dear me, I never thought of that, you couldn’t get in of course, how silly of me, but I was in such a rush! No, you’re not going to be angry, you can’t! Don’t you see what this means to him? Don’t you know what he’s sacrificing by coming here? And I knew he would. I told them so, those people who said not a chance, it’ll be the end of him—and it might be, but he doesn’t care. That’s what he’s like. I’m frightened and I’m terribly happy, because what he’s done—it makes me believe in all human beings. But I’m frightened, because you see, Wynand will ...”

“Keep still! I know it all. I’m sick of it. I don’t want to hear about your uncle or Wynand or the damn strike. Let’s get out of here.”

“Oh, no, Peter! We can’t! I want to hear him and ...”

“Shut up over there!” someone hissed at them from the crowd.

“We’re missing it all,” she whispered. “That’s Austen Heller speaking. Don’t you want to hear Austen Heller?”

Keating looked up at the loud-speaker with a certain respect, which he felt for all famous names. He had not read much of Austen Heller, but he knew that Heller was the star columnist of the Chronicle, a brilliant, independent newspaper, arch-enemy of the Wynand publications; that Heller came from an old, distinguished family and had graduated from Oxford; that he had started as a literary critic and ended by becoming a quiet fiend devoted to the destruction of all forms of compulsion, private or public, in heaven or on earth; that he had been cursed by preachers, bankers, clubwomen and labor organizers; that he had better manners than the social elite whom he usually mocked, and a tougher constitution than the laborers whom he usually defended; that he could discuss the latest play on Broadway, medieval poetry or international finance; that he never donated to charity, but spent more of his own money than he could afford, on defending political prisoners anywhere.

The voice coming from the loud-speaker was dry, precise, with the faint trace of a British accent.

“... and we must consider,” Austen Heller was saying unemotionally, “that since—unfortunately—we are forced to live together, the most important thing for us to remember is that the only way in which we can have any law at all is to have as little of it as possible. I see no ethical standard by which to measure the whole unethical conception of a State, except in the amount of time, of thought, of money, of effort and of obedience, which a society extorts from its every member. Its value and its civilization are in inverse ratio to that extortion. There is no conceivable law by which a man can be forced to work on any terms except those he chooses to set. There is no conceivable law to prevent him from setting them—just as there is none to force his employer to accept them. The freedom to agree or disagree is the foundation of our kind of society—and the freedom to strike is a part of it. I am mentioning this as a reminder to a certain Petronius from Hell’s Kitchen, an exquisite bastard who has been rather noisy lately about telling us that this strike represents a destruction of law and order.”

The loud-speaker coughed out a high, shrill sound of approval and a clatter of applause. There were gasps among the people in the lobby. Catherine grasped Keating’s arm. “Oh, Peter!” she whispered. “He means Wynand! Wynand was born in Hell’s Kitchen. He can afford to say that, but Wynand will take it out on Uncle Ellsworth!”

Keating could not listen to the rest of Heller’s speech, because his head was swimming in so violent an ache that the sound hurt his eyes and he had to keep his eyelids shut tightly. He leaned against the wall.

He opened his eyes with a jerk, when he became aware of the peculiar silence around him. He had not noticed the end of Heller’s speech. He saw the people in the lobby standing in tense, solemn expectation, and the blank rasping of the loud-speaker pulled every glance into its dark funnel. Then a voice came through the silence, loudly and slowly:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I have the great honor of presenting to you now Mr. Ellsworth Monkton Toohey!”

Well, thought Keating, Bennett’s won his six bits down at the office. There were a few seconds of silence. Then the thing which happened hit Keating on the back of the head; it was not a sound nor a blow, it was something that ripped time apart, that cut the moment from the normal one preceding it. He knew only the shock, at first; a distinct, conscious second was gone before he realized what it was and that it was applause. It was such a crash of applause that he waited for the loud-speaker to explode; it went on and on and on, pressing against the walls of the lobby, and he thought he could feel the walls buckling out to the street. The people around him were cheering. Catherine stood, her lips parted, and he felt certain that she was not breathing at all.

It was a long time before silence came suddenly, as abrupt and shocking as the roar; the loud-speaker died, choking on a high note. Those in the lobby stood still. Then came the voice.

“My friends,” it said, simply and solemnly. “My brothers,” it added softly, involuntarily, both full of emotion and smiling apologetically at the emotion. “I am more touched by this reception than I should allow myself to be. I hope I shall be forgiven for a trace of the vain child which is in all of us. But I realize—and in that spirit I accept it—that this tribute was paid not to my person, but to a principle which chance has granted me to represent in all humility tonight.”

It was not a voice, it was a miracle. It unrolled as a velvet banner. It spoke English words, but the resonant clarity of each syllable made it sound like a new language spoken for the first time. It was the voice of a giant.

Keating stood, his mouth open. He did not hear what the voice was saying. He heard the beauty of the sounds without meaning. He felt no need to know the meaning; he could accept anything, he would be led blindly anywhere.

“... and so, my friends,” the voice was saying, “the lesson to be learned from our tragic struggle is the lesson of unity. We shall unite or we shall be defeated. Our will—the will of the disinherited, the forgotten, the oppressed—shall weld us into a solid bulwark, with a common faith and a common goal. This is the time for every man to renounce the thoughts of his petty little problems, of gain, of comfort, of self-gratification. This is the time to merge his self in a great current, in the rising tide which is approaching to sweep us all, willing or unwilling, into the future. History, my friends, does not ask questions or acquiescence. It is irrevocable, as the voice of the masses that determine it. Let us listen to the call. Let us organize, my brothers. Let us organize. Let us organize. Let us organize.”

Keating looked at Catherine. There was no Catherine; there was only a white face dissolving in the sounds of the loud-speaker. It was not that she heard her uncle; Keating could feel no jealousy of him; he wished he could. It was not affection. It was something cold and impersonal that left her empty, her will surrendered and no human will holding hers, but a nameless thing in which she was being swallowed.

“Let’s get out of here,” he whispered. His voice was savage. He was afraid.

She turned to him, as if she were emerging from unconsciousness. He knew that she was trying to recognize him and everything he implied. She whispered:

“Yes. Let’s get out.”

They walked through the streets, through the rain, without direction. It was cold, but they went on, to move, to feel the movement, to know the sensation of their own muscles moving.

“We’re getting drenched,” Keating said at last, as bluntly and naturally as he could; their silence frightened him; it proved that they both knew the same thing and that the thing had been real. “Let’s find some place where we can have a drink.”

“Yes,” said Catherine, “let’s. It’s so cold.... Isn’t it stupid of me? Now I’ve missed Uncle’s speech and I wanted so much to hear it.” It was all right. She had mentioned it. She had mentioned it quite naturally, with a healthy amount of proper regret. The thing was gone. “But I wanted to be with you, Peter ... I want to be with you always.” The thing gave a last jerk, not in the meaning of what she said, but in the reason that had prompted her to say it. Then it was gone, and Keating smiled; his fingers sought her bare wrist between her sleeve and glove, and her skin was warm against his....

Many days later Keating heard the story that was being told all over town. It was said that on the day after the mass meeting Gail Wynand had given Ellsworth Toohey a raise in salary. Toohey had been furious and had tried to refuse it. “You cannot bribe me, Mr. Wynand,” he had said. “I’m not bribing you,” Wynand had answered; “don’t flatter yourself.”

When the strike was settled, interrupted construction went forward with a spurt throughout the city, and Keating found himself spending days and nights at work, with new commissions pouring into the office. Francon smiled happily at everybody and gave a small party for his staff, to erase the memory of anything he might have said. The palatial residence of Mr. and Mrs. Dale Ainsworth on Riverside Drive, a pet project of Keating’s, done in Late Renaissance and gray granite, was completed at last. Mr. and Mrs. Dale Ainsworth gave a formal reception as a housewarming, to which Guy Francon and Peter Keating were invited, but Lucius N. Heyer was ignored, quite accidentally, as always happened to him of late. Francon enjoyed the reception, because every square foot of granite in the house reminded him of the stupendous payment received by a certain granite quarry in Connecticut. Keating enjoyed the reception, because the stately Mrs. Ainsworth said to him with a disarming smile: “But I was certain that you were Mr. Francon’s partner! It’s Francon and Heyer, of course! How perfectly careless of me! All I can offer by way of excuse is that if you aren’t his partner, one would certainly say you were entitled to be!” Life in the office rolled on smoothly, in one of those periods when everything seemed to go well.

Keating was astonished, therefore, one morning shortly after the Ainsworth reception, to see Francon arrive at the office with a countenance of nervous irritation. “Oh, nothing,” he waved his hand at Keating impatiently, “nothing at all.” In the drafting room Keating noticed three draftsmen, their heads close together, bent over a section of the New York Banner, reading with a guilty kind of avid interest; he heard an unpleasant chuckle from one of them. When they saw him the paper disappeared, too quickly. He had no time to inquire into this; a contractor’s job runner was waiting for him in his office, also a stack of mail and drawings to be approved.

He had forgotten the incident three hours later in a rush of appointments. He felt light, clear-headed, exhilarated by his own energy. When he had to consult his library on a new drawing which he wished to compare with its best prototypes, he walked out of his office, whistling, swinging the drawing gaily.

His motion had propelled him halfway across the reception room, when he stopped short; the drawing swung forward and flapped back against his knees. He forgot that it was quite improper for him to pause there like that in the circumstances.

A young woman stood before the railing, speaking to the reception clerk. Her slender body seemed out of all scale in relation to a normal human body; its lines were so long, so fragile, so exaggerated that she looked like a stylized drawing of a woman and made the correct proportions of a normal being appear heavy and awkward beside her. She wore a plain gray suit; the contrast between its tailored severity and her appearance was deliberately exorbitant—and strangely elegant. She let the finger tips of one hand rest on the railing, a narrow hand ending the straight imperious line of her arm. She had gray eyes that were not ovals, but two long, rectangular cuts edged by parallel lines of lashes; she had an air of cold serenity and an exquisitely vicious mouth. Her face, her pale gold hair, her suit seemed to have no color, but only a hint, just on the verge of the reality of color, making the full reality seem vulgar. Keating stood still, because he understood for the first time what it was that artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty.

“I’ll see him now, if I see him at all,” she was saying to the reception clerk. “He asked me to come and this is the only time I have.” It was not a command; she spoke as if it were not necessary for her voice to assume the tones of commanding.

“Yes, but ...” A light buzzed on the clerk’s switchboard; she plugged the connection through, hastily. “Yes, Mr. Francon ...” She listened and nodded with relief. “Yes, Mr. Francon.” She turned to the visitor: “Will you go right in, please?”

The young woman turned and looked at Keating as she passed him on her way to the stairs. Her eyes went past him without stopping. Something ebbed from his stunned admiration. He had had time to see her eyes; they seemed weary and a little contemptuous, but they left him with a sense of cold cruelty.

He heard her walking up the stairs, and the feeling vanished, but the admiration remained. He approached the reception clerk eagerly.

“Who was that?” he asked.

The clerk shrugged:

“That’s the boss’s little girl.”

“Why, the lucky stiff!” said Keating. “He’s been holding out on me.”

“You misunderstood me,” the clerk said coldly. “It’s his daughter. It’s Dominique Francon.”

“Oh,” said Keating. “Oh, Lord!”

“Yeah?” the girl looked at him sarcastically. “Have you read this morning’s Banner?”

“No. Why?”

“Read it.”

Her switchboard buzzed and she turned away from him.

He sent a boy for a copy of the Banner and turned anxiously to the column, “Your House,” by Dominique Francon. He had heard that she’d been quite successful lately with descriptions of the homes of prominent New Yorkers. Her field was confined to home decoration, but she ventured occasionally into architectural criticism. Today her subject was the new residence of Mr. and Mrs. Dale Ainsworth on Riverside Drive. He read, among many other things, the following:

“You enter a magnificent lobby of golden marble and you think that this is the City Hall or the Main Post Office, but it isn’t. It has, however, everything: the mezzanine with the colonnade and the stairway with a goitre and the cartouches in the form of looped leather belts. Only it’s not leather, it’s marble. The dining room has a splendid bronze gate, placed by mistake on the ceiling, in the shape of a trellis entwined with fresh bronze grapes. There are dead ducks and rabbits hanging on the wall panels, in bouquets of carrots, petunias and string beans. I do not think these would have been very attractive if real, but since they are bad plaster imitations, it is all right.... The bedroom windows face a brick wall, not a very neat wall, but nobody needs to see the bedrooms. ... The front windows are large enough and admit plenty of light, as well as the feet of the marble cupids that roost on the outside. The cupids are well fed and present a pretty picture to the street, against the severe granite of the façade; they are quite commendable, unless you just can’t stand to look at dimpled soles every time you glance out to see whether it’s raining. If you get tired of it, you can always look out of the central windows of the third floor, and into the cast-iron rump of Mercury who sits on top of the pediment over the entrance. It’s a very beautiful entrance. Tomorrow, we shall visit the home of Mr. and Mrs. Smythe-Pickering.”

Keating had designed the house. But he could not help chuckling through his fury when he thought of what Francon must have felt reading this, and of how Francon was going to face Mrs. Dale Ainsworth. Then he forgot the house and the article. He remembered only the girl who had written it.

He picked three sketches at random from his table and started for Francon’s office to ask his approval of the sketches, which he did not need.

On the stair landing outside Francon’s closed door he stopped. He heard Francon’s voice behind the door, loud, angry and helpless, the voice he always heard when Francon was beaten.

“... to expect such an outrage! From my own daughter! I’m used to anything from you, but this beats it all. What am I going to do? How am I going to explain? Do you have any kind of a vague idea of my position?”

Then Keating heard her laughing; it was a sound so gay and so cold that he knew it was best not to go in. He knew he did not want to go in, because he was afraid again, as he had been when he’d seen her eyes.

He turned and descended the stairs. When he had reached the floor below, he was thinking that he would meet her, that he would meet her soon and that Francon would not be able to prevent it now. He thought of it eagerly, laughing in relief at the picture of Francon’s daughter as he had imagined her for years, revising his vision of his future; even though he felt dimly that it would be better if he never met her again.

X

RALSTON HOLCOMBE HAD NO VISIBLE NECK, BUT HIS CHIN TOOK care of that. His chin and jaws formed an unbroken arc, resting on his chest. His cheeks were pink, soft to the touch, with the irresilient softness of age, like the skin of a peach that has been scalded. His rich white hair rose over his forehead and fell to his shoulders in the sweep of a medieval mane. It left dandruff on the back of his collar.

He walked through the streets of New York, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, a dark business suit, a pale green satin shirt, a vest of white brocade, a huge black bow emerging from under his chin, and he carried a staff, not a cane, but a tall ebony staff surmounted by a bulb of solid gold. It was as if his huge body were resigned to the conventions of a prosaic civilization and to its drab garments, but the oval of his chest and stomach sallied forth, flying the colors of his inner soul.

These things were permitted to him, because he was a genius. He was also president of the Architects’ Guild of America.

Ralston Holcombe did not subscribe to the views of his colleagues in the organization. He was not a grubbing builder nor a businessman. He was, he stated firmly, a man of ideals.

He denounced the deplorable state of American architecture and the unprincipled eclecticism of its practitioners. In any period of history, he declared, architects built in the spirit of their own time, and did not pick designs from the past; we could be true to history only in heeding her law, which demanded that we plant the roots of our art firmly in the reality of our own life. He decried the stupidity of erecting buildings that were Greek, Gothic or Romanesque; let us, he begged, be modern and build in the style that belongs to our days. He had found that style. It was Renaissance.

He stated his reasons clearly. Inasmuch, he pointed out, as nothing of great historical importance had happened in the world since the Renaissance, we should consider ourselves still living in that period; and all the outward forms of our existence should remain faithful to the examples of the great masters of the sixteenth century.

He had no patience with the few who spoke of a modern architecture in terms quite different from his own; he ignored them; he stated only that men who wanted to break with all of the past were lazy ignoramuses, and that one could not put originality above Beauty. His voice trembled reverently on that last word.

He accepted nothing but stupendous commissions. He specialized in the eternal and the monumental. He built a great many memorials and capitols. He designed for International Expositions.

He built like a composer improvising under the spur of a mystic guidance. He had sudden inspirations. He would add an enormous dome to the flat roof of a finished structure, or encrust a long vault with gold-leaf mosaic, or rip off a façade of limestone to replace it with marble. His clients turned pale, stuttered—and paid. His imperial personality carried him to victory in any encounter with a client’s thrift; behind him stood the stern, unspoken, overwhelming assertion that he was an Artist. His prestige was enormous.

He came from a family listed in the Social Register. In his middle years he had married a young lady whose family had not made the Social Register, but made piles of money instead, in a chewing-gum empire left to an only daughter.

Ralston Holcombe was now sixty-five, to which he added a few years, for the sake of his friends’ compliments on his wonderful physique; Mrs. Ralston Holcombe was forty-two, from which she deducted considerably.

Mrs. Ralston Holcombe maintained a salon that met informally every Sunday afternoon. “Everybody who is anybody in architecture drops in on us,” she told her friends. “They’d better,” she added.

On a Sunday afternoon in March, Keating drove to the Holcombe mansion—a reproduction of a Florentine palazzo—dutifully, but a little reluctantly. He had been a frequent guest at these celebrated gatherings and he was beginning to be bored, for he knew everybody he could expect to find there. He felt, however, that he had to attend this time, because the occasion was to be in honor of the completion of one more capitol by Ralston Holcombe in some state or another.

A substantial crowd was lost in the marble ballroom of the Holcombes, scattered in forlorn islets through an expanse intended for court receptions. The guests stood about, self-consciously informal, working at being brilliant. Steps rang against the marble with the echoing sound of a crypt. The flames of tall candles clashed desolately with the gray of the light from the street; the light made the candles seem dimmer, the candles gave to the day outside a premonitory tinge of dusk. A scale model of the new state capitol stood displayed on a pedestal in the middle of the room, ablaze with tiny electric bulbs.

Mrs. Ralston Holcombe presided over the tea table. Each guest accepted a fragile cup of transparent porcelain, took two delicate sips and vanished in the direction of the bar. Two stately butlers went about collecting the abandoned cups.

Mrs. Ralston Holcombe, as an enthusiastic girl friend had described her, was “petite, but intellectual.” Her diminutive stature was her secret sorrow, but she had learned to find compensations. She could talk, and did, of wearing dresses size ten and of shopping in the junior departments. She wore high-school garments and short socks in summer, displaying spindly legs with hard blue veins. She adored celebrities. That was her mission in life. She hunted them grimly; she faced them with wide-eyed admiration and spoke of her own insignificance, of her humility before achievement; she shrugged, tight-lipped and rancorous, whenever one of them did not seem to take sufficient account of her own views on life after death, the theory of relativity, Aztec architecture, birth control and the movies. She had a great many poor friends and advertised the fact. If a friend happened to improve his financial position, she dropped him, feeling that he had committed an act of treason. She hated the wealthy in all sincerity: they shared her only badge of distinction. She considered architecture her private domain. She had been christened “Constance” and found it awfully clever to be known as “Kiki,” a nickname she had forced on her friends when she was well past thirty.

Keating had never felt comfortable in Mrs. Holcombe’s presence, because she smiled at him too insistently and commented on his remarks by winking and saying: “Why, Peter, how naughty of you!” when no such intention had been in his mind at all. He bowed over her hand, however, this afternoon as usual, and she smiled from behind the silver teapot. She wore a regal gown of emerald velvet, and a magenta ribbon in her bobbed hair with a cute little bow in front. Her skin was tanned and dry, with enlarged pores showing on her nostrils. She handed a cup to Keating, a square-cut emerald glittering on her finger in the candlelight.

Keating expressed his admiration for the capitol and escaped to examine the model. He stood before it for a correct number of minutes, scalding his lips with the hot liquid that smelled of cloves. Holcombe, who never looked in the direction of the model and never missed a guest stopping before it, slapped Keating’s shoulder and said something appropriate about young fellows learning the beauty of the style of the Renaissance. Then Keating wandered off, shook a few hands without enthusiasm, and glanced at his wrist watch, calculating the time when it would be permissible to leave. Then he stopped.

Beyond a broad arch, in a small library, with three young men beside her, he saw Dominique Francon.

She stood leaning against a column, a cocktail glass in her hand. She wore a suit of black velvet; the heavy cloth, which transmitted no light rays, held her anchored to reality by stopping the light that flowed too freely through the flesh of her hands, her neck, her face. A white spark of fire flashed like a cold metallic cross in the glass she held, as if it were a lens gathering the diffused radiance of her skin.

Keating tore forward and found Francon in the crowd.

“Well, Peter!” said Francon brightly. “Want me to get you a drink? Not so hot,” he added, lowering his voice, “but the Manhattans aren’t too bad.”

“No,” said Keating, “thanks.”

“Entre nous,” said Francon, winking at the model of the capital, “it’s a holy mess, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Keating. “Miserable proportions.... That dome looks like Holcombe’s face imitating a sunrise on the roof....” They had stopped in full view of the library and Keating’s eyes were fixed on the girl in black, inviting Francon to notice it; he enjoyed having Francon in a trap.

“And the plan! The plan! Do you see that on the second floor ... oh,” said Francon, noticing.

He looked at Keating, then at the library, then at Keating again.

“Well,” said Francon at last, “don’t blame me afterward. You’ve asked for it. Come on.”

They entered the library together. Keating stopped, correctly, but allowing his eyes an improper intensity, while Francon beamed with unconvincing cheeriness:

“Dominique, my dear! May I present?—this is Peter Keating, my own right hand. Peter—my daughter.”

“How do you do,” said Keating, his voice soft.

Dominique bowed gravely.

“I have waited to meet you for such a long time, Miss Francon.”

“This will be interesting,” said Dominique. “You will want to be nice to me, of course, and yet that won’t be diplomatic.”

“What do you mean, Miss Francon?”

“Father would prefer you to be horrible with me. Father and I don’t get along at all.”

“Why, Miss Francon, I ...”

“I think it’s only fair to tell you this at the beginning. You may want to redraw some conclusions.” He was looking for Francon, but Francon had vanished. “No,” she said softly, “Father doesn’t do these things well at all. He’s too obvious. You asked him for the introduction, but he shouldn’t have let me notice that. However, it’s quite all right, since we both admit it. Sit down.”

She slipped into a chair and he sat down obediently beside her. The young men whom he did not know stood about for a few minutes, trying to be included in the conversation by smiling blankly, then wandered off. Keating thought with relief that there was nothing frightening about her; there was only a disquieting contrast between her words and the candid innocence of the manner she used to utter them; he did not know which to trust.

“I admit I asked for the introduction,” he said. “That’s obvious anyway, isn’t it? Who wouldn’t ask for it? But don’t you think that the conclusions I’ll draw may have nothing to do with your father?”

“Don’t say that I’m beautiful and exquisite and like no one you’ve ever met before and that you’re very much afraid that you’re going to fall in love with me. You’ll say it eventually, but let’s postpone it. Apart from that, I think we’ll get along very nicely.”

“But you’re trying to make it very difficult for me, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Father should have warned you.”

“He did.”

“You should have listened. Be very considerate of Father. I’ve met so many of his own right hands that I was beginning to be skeptical. But you’re the first one who’s lasted. And who looks like he’s going to last. I’ve heard a great deal about you. My congratulations.”

“I’ve been looking forward to meeting you for years. And I’ve been reading your column with so much ...” He stopped. He knew he shouldn’t have mentioned that; and, above all, he shouldn’t have stopped.

“So much ... ?” she asked gently.

“... so much pleasure,” he finished, hoping that she would let it go at that.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “The Ainsworth house. You designed it. I’m sorry. You just happened to be the victim of one of my rare attacks of honesty. I don’t have them often. As you know, if you’ve read my stuff yesterday.”

“I’ve read it. And—well, I’ll follow your example and I’ll be perfectly frank. Don’t take it as a complaint—one must never complain against one’s critics. But really that capitol of Holcombe’s is much worse in all those very things that you blasted us for. Why did you give him such a glowing tribute yesterday? Or did you have to?”

“Don’t flatter me. Of course I didn’t have to. Do you think anyone on the paper pays enough attention to a column on home decoration to care what I say in it? Besides, I’m not even supposed to write about capitols. Only I’m getting tired of home decorations.”

“Then why did you praise Holcombe?”

“Because that capitol of his is so awful that to pan it would have been an anticlimax. So I thought it would be amusing to praise it to the sky. It was.”

“Is that the way you go about it?”

“That’s the way I go about it. But no one reads my column, except housewives who can never afford to decorate their homes, so it doesn’t matter at all.”

“But what do you really like in architecture?”

“I don’t like anything in architecture.”

“Well, you know of course that I won’t believe that. Why do you write if you have nothing you want to say?”

“To have something to do. Something more disgusting than many other things I could do. And more amusing.”

“Come on, that’s not a good reason.”

“I never have any good reasons.”

“But you must be enjoying your work.”

“I am. Don’t you see that I am?”

“You know, I’ve actually envied you. Working for a magnificent enterprise like the Wynand papers. The largest organization in the country, commanding the best writing talent and ...”

“Look,” she said, leaning toward him confidentially, “let me help you. If you had just met Father, and he were working for the Wynand papers, that would be exactly the right thing to say. But not with me. That’s what I’d expect you to say and I don’t like to hear what I expect. It would be much more interesting if you said that the Wynand papers are a contemptible dump heap of yellow journalism and all their writers put together aren’t worth two bits.”

“Is that what you really think of them?”

“Not at all. But I don’t like people who try to say only what they think I think.”

“Thanks. I’ll need your help. I’ve never met anyone ... oh, no, of course, that’s what you didn’t want me to say. But I really meant it about your papers. I’ve always admired Gail Wynand. I’ve always wished I could meet him. What is he like?”

“Just what Austen Heller called him—an exquisite bastard.”

He winced. He remembered where he had heard Austen Heller say that. The memory of Catherine seemed heavy and vulgar in the presence of the thin white hand he saw hanging over the arm of the chair before him.

“But, I mean,” he asked, “what’s he like in person?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never met him.”

“You haven’t?”

“No.”

“Oh, I’ve heard he’s so interesting!”

“Undoubtedly. When I’m in a mood for something decadent I’ll probably meet him.”

“Do you know Toohey?”

“Oh,” she said. He saw what he had seen in her eyes before, and he did not like the sweet gaiety of her voice. “Oh, Ellsworth Toohey. Of course I know him. He’s wonderful. He’s a man I always enjoy talking to. He’s such a perfect blackguard.”

“Why, Miss Francon! You’re the first person who’s ever ...”

“I’m not trying to shock you. I meant all of it. I admire him. He’s so complete. You don’t meet perfection often in this world one way or the other, do you? And he’s just that. Sheer perfection in his own way. Everyone else is so unfinished, broken up into so many different pieces that don’t fit together. But not Toohey. He’s a monolith. Sometimes, when I feel bitter against the world, I find consolation in thinking that it’s all right, that I’ll be avenged, that the world will get what’s coming to it—because there’s Ellsworth Toohey.”

“What do you want to be avenged for?”

She looked at him, her eyelids lifted for a moment, so that her eyes did not seem rectangular, but soft and clear.

“That was very clever of you,” she said. “That was the first clever thing you’ve said.”

“Why?”

“Because you knew what to pick out of all the rubbish I uttered. So I’ll have to answer you. I’d like to be avenged for the fact that I have nothing to be avenged for. Now let’s go on about Ellsworth Toohey.”

“Well, I’ve always heard, from everybody, that he’s a sort of saint, the one pure idealist, utterly incorruptible and ...”

“That’s quite true. A plain grafter would be much safer. But Toohey is like a testing stone for people. You can learn about them by the way they take him.”

“Why? What do you actually mean?”

She leaned back in her chair, and stretched her arms down to her knees, twisting her wrists, palms out, the fingers of her two hands entwined. She laughed easily.

“Nothing that one should make a subject of discussion at a tea party. Kiki’s right. She hates the sight of me, but she’s got to invite me once in a while. And I can’t resist coming, because she’s so obvious about not wanting me. You know, I told Ralston tonight what I really thought of his capitol, but he wouldn’t believe me. He only beamed and said that I was a very nice little girl.”

“Well, aren’t you?”

“What?”

“A very nice little girl.”

“No. Not today. I’ve made you thoroughly uncomfortable. So I’ll make up for it. I’ll tell you what I think of you, because you’ll be worrying about that. I think you’re smart and safe and obvious and quite ambitious and you’ll get away with it. And I like you. I’ll tell Father that I approve of his right hand very much, so you see you have nothing to fear from the boss’s daughter. Though it would be better if I didn’t say anything to Father, because my recommendation would work the other way with him.”

“May I tell you only one thing that I think about you?”

“Certainly. Any number of them.”

“I think it would have been better if you hadn’t told me that you liked me. Then I would have had a better chance of its being true.”

She laughed.

“If you understand that,” she said, “then we’ll get along beautifully. Then it might even be true.”

Gordon L. Prescott appeared in the arch of the ballroom, glass in hand. He wore a gray suit and a turtle-neck sweater of silver wool. His boyish face looked freshly scrubbed, and he had his usual air of soap, tooth paste and the outdoors.

“Dominique, darling!” he cried, waving his glass. “Hello, Keating,” he added curtly. “Dominique, where have you been hiding yourself? I heard you were here and I’ve had a hell of a time looking for you!”

“Hello, Gordon,” she said. She said it quite correctly; there was nothing offensive in the quiet politeness of her voice; but following his high note of enthusiasm, her voice struck a tone that seemed flat and deadly in its indifference—as if the two sounds mingled into an audible counterpoint around the melodic thread of her contempt.

Prescott had not heard. “Darling,” he said, “you look lovelier every time I see you. One wouldn’t think it were possible.”

“Seventh time,” said Dominique.

“What?”

“Seventh time that you’ve said it when meeting me, Gordon. I’m counting them.”

“You simply won’t be serious, Dominique. You’ll never be serious.”

“Oh, yes, Gordon. I was just having a very serious conversation here with my friend Peter Keating.”

A lady waved to Prescott and he accepted the opportunity, escaping, looking very foolish. And Keating delighted in the thought that she had dismissed another man for a conversation she wished to continue with her friend Peter Keating.

But when he turned to her, she asked sweetly: “What was it we were talking about, Mr. Keating?” And then she was staring with too great an interest across the room, at the wizened figure of a little man coughing over a whisky glass.

“Why,” said Keating, “we were ...”

“Oh, there’s Eugene Pettingill. My great favorite. I must say hello to Eugene.”

And she was up, moving across the room, her body leaning back as she walked, moving toward the most unattractive septuagenarian present.

Keating did not know whether he had been made to join the brotherhood of Gordon L. Prescott, or whether it had been only an accident.

He returned to the ballroom reluctantly. He forced himself to join groups of guests and to talk. He watched Dominique Francon as she moved through the crowd, as she stopped in conversation with others. She never glanced at him again. He could not decide whether he had succeeded with her or failed miserably.

He managed to be at the door when she was leaving.

She stopped and smiled at him enchantingly.

“No,” she said, before he could utter a word, “you can’t take me home. I have a car waiting. Thank you just the same.”

She was gone and he stood at the door, helpless and thinking furiously that he believed he was blushing.

He felt a soft hand on his shoulder and turned to find Francon beside him.

“Going home, Peter? Let me give you a lift.”

“But I thought you had to be at the club by seven.”

“Oh, that’s all right, I’ll be a little late, doesn’t matter, I’ll drive you home, no trouble at all.” There was a peculiar expression of purpose on Francon’s face, quite unusual for him and unbecoming.

Keating followed him silently, amused, and said nothing when they were alone in the confortable twilight of Francon’s car.

“Well?” Francon asked ominously.

Keating smiled. “You’re a pig, Guy. You don’t know how to appreciate what you’ve got. Why didn’t you tell me? She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

“Oh, yes,” said Francon darkly. “Maybe that’s the trouble.”

“What trouble? Where do you see any trouble?”

“What do you really think of her, Peter? Forget the looks. You’ll see how quickly you’ll forget that. What do you think?”

“Well, I think she has a great deal of character.”

“Thanks for the understatement.”

Francon was gloomily silent, and then he said with an awkward little note of something like hope in his voice:

“You know, Peter, I was surprised. I watched you, and you had quite a long chat with her. That’s amazing. I fully expected her to chase you away with one nice, poisonous crack. Maybe you could get along with her, after all. I’ve concluded that you just can’t tell anything about her. Maybe ... You know, Peter, what I wanted to tell you is this: Don’t pay any attention to what she said about my wanting you to be horrible with her.”

The heavy earnestness of that sentence was such a hint that Keating’s lips moved to shape a soft whistle, but he caught himself in time. Francon added heavily: “I don’t want you to be horrible with her at all.”

“You know, Guy,” said Keating, in a tone of patronizing reproach, “you shouldn’t have run away like that.”

“I never know how to speak to her.” He sighed. “I’ve never learned to. I can’t understand what in blazes is the matter with her, but something is. She just won’t behave like a human being. You know, she’s been expelled from two finishing schools. How she ever got through college I can’t imagine, but I can tell you that I dreaded to open my mail for four solid years, waiting for word of the inevitable. Then I thought, well, once she’s on her own I’m through and I don’t have to worry about it, but she’s worse than ever.”

“What do you find to worry about?”

“I don’t. I try not to. I’m glad when I don’t have to think of her at all. I can’t help it, I just wasn’t cut out for a father. But sometimes I get to feel that it’s my responsibility after all, though God knows I don’t want it, but still there it is, I should do something about it, there’s no one else to assume it.”

“You’ve let her frighten you, Guy, and really there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“You don’t think so?”

“No.”

“Maybe you’re the man to handle her. I don’t regret your meeting her now, and you know that I didn’t want you to. Yes, I think you’re the one man who could handle her. You ... you’re quite determined—aren’t you, Peter?—when you’re after something?”

“Well,” said Keating, throwing one hand up in a careless gesture, “I’m not afraid very often.”

Then he leaned back against the cushions, as if he were tired, as if he had heard nothing of importance, and he kept silent for the rest of the drive. Francon kept silent also.

“Boys,” said John Erik Snyte, “don’t spare yourselves on this. It’s the most important thing we’ve had this year. Not much money, you understand, but the prestige, the connections! If we do land it, won’t some of those great architects turn green! You see, Austen Heller has told me frankly that we’re the third firm he’s approached. He would have none of what those big fellows tried to sell him. So it’s up to us, boys. You know, something different, unusual, but in good taste, and you know, different. Now do your best.”

His five designers sat in a semicircle before him. “Gothic” looked bored and “Miscellaneous” looked discouraged in advance; “Renaissance” was following the course of a fly on the ceiling. Roark asked:

“What did he actually say, Mr. Snyte?”

Snyte shrugged and looked at Roark with amusement, as if he and Roark shared a shameful secret about the new client, not worth mentioning.

“Nothing that makes great sense—quite between us, boys,” said Snyte. “He was somewhat inarticulate, considering his great command of the English language in print. He admitted he knew nothing about architecture. He didn’t say whether he wanted it modernistic or period or what. He said something to the effect that he wanted a house of his own, but he’s hesitated for a long time about building one because all houses look alike to him and they all look like hell and he doesn’t see how anyone can become enthusiastic about any house, and yet he has the idea that he wants a building he could love. ‘A building that would mean something’ is what he said, though he added that he ‘didn’t know what or how.’ There. That’s about all he said. Not much to go on, and I wouldn’t have undertaken to submit sketches if it weren’t Austen Heller. But I grant you that it doesn’t make sense.... What’s the matter, Roark? ”

“Nothing,” said Roark.

This ended the first conference on the subject of a residence for Austen Heller.

Later that day Snyte crowded his five designers into a train, and they went to Connecticut to see the site Heller had chosen. They stood on a lonely, rocky stretch of shore, three miles beyond an unfashionable little town; they munched sandwiches and peanuts, and they looked at a cliff rising in broken ledges from the ground to end in a straight, brutal, naked drop over the sea, a vertical shaft of rock forming a cross with the long, pale horizontal of the sea.

“There,” said Snyte. “That’s it.” He twirled a pencil in his hand. “Damnable, eh?” He sighed. “I tried to suggest a more respectable location, but he didn’t take it so well so I had to shut up.” He twirled the pencil. “That’s where he wants the house, right on the top of that rock.” He scratched the tip of his nose with the point of the pencil. “I tried to suggest setting it farther back from the shore and keeping the damn rock for a view, but that didn’t go so well either.” He bit the eraser between the tips of his teeth. “Just think of the blasting, the leveling one’s got to do on that top.” He cleaned his fingernail with the lead, leaving a black mark. “Well, that’s that.... Observe the grade, and the quality of the stone. The approach will be difficult.... I have all the surveys and the photographs in the office.... Well ... Who’s got a cigarette? ... Well, I think that’s about all.... I’ll help you with suggestions anytime.... Well ... What time is that damn train back?”

Thus the five designers were started on their task. Four of them proceeded immediately at their drawing boards. Roark returned alone to the site, many times.

Roark’s five months with Snyte stretched behind him like a blank. Had he wished to ask himself what he had felt, he would have found no answer, save in the fact that he remembered nothing of these months. He could remember each sketch he had made. He could, if he tried, remember what had happened to those sketches; he did not try.

But he had not loved any of them as he loved the house of Austen Heller. He stayed in the drafting room through evening after evening, alone with a sheet of paper and the thought of a cliff over the sea. No one saw his sketches until they were finished.

When they were finished, late one night, he sat at his table, with the sheets spread before him, sat for many hours, one hand propping his forehead, the other hanging by his side, blood gathering in the fingers, numbing them, while the street beyond the window became deep blue, then pale gray. He did not look at the sketches. He felt empty and very tired.

The house on the sketches had been designed not by Roark, but by the cliff on which it stood. It was as if the cliff had grown and completed itself and proclaimed the purpose for which it had been waiting. The house was broken into many levels, following the ledges of the rock, rising as it rose, in gradual masses, in planes flowing together up into one consummate harmony. The walls, of the same granite as the rock, continued its vertical lines upward; the wide, projecting terraces of concrete, silver as the sea, followed the line of the waves, of the straight horizon.

Roark was still sitting at his table when the men returned to begin their day in the drafting room. Then the sketches were sent to Snyte’s office.

Two days later, the final version of the house to be submitted to Austen Heller, the version chosen and edited by John Erik Snyte, executed by the Chinese artist, lay swathed in tissue paper on a table. It was Roark’s house. His competitors had been eliminated. It was Roark’s house, but its walls were now of red brick, its windows were cut to conventional size and equipped with green shutters, two of its projecting wings were omitted, the great cantilevered terrace over the sea was replaced by a little wrought-iron balcony, and the house was provided with an entrance of Ionic columns supporting a broken pediment, and with a little spire supporting a weather vane.

John Erik Snyte stood by the table, his two hands spread in the air over the sketch, without touching the virgin purity of its delicate colors.

“That is what Mr. Heller had in mind, I’m sure,” he said. “Pretty good ... Yes, pretty good ... Roark, how many times do I have to ask you not to smoke around a final sketch? Stand away. You’ll get ashes on it.”

Austen Heller was expected at twelve o’clock. But at half past eleven Mrs. Symington arrived unannounced and demanded to see Mr. Snyte immediately. Mrs. Symington was an imposing dowager who had just moved into her new residence, designed by Mr. Snyte; besides, Snyte expected a commission for an apartment house from her brother. He could not refuse to see her and he bowed her into his office, where she proceeded to state without reticence of expression that the ceiling of her library had cracked and the bay windows of her drawing room were hidden under a perpetual veil of moisture which she could not combat. Snyte summoned his chief engineer and they launched together into detailed explanations, apologies and damnations of contractors. Mrs. Symington showed no sign of relenting when a signal buzzed on Snyte’s desk and the reception clerk’s voice announced Austin Heller.

It would have been impossible to ask Mrs. Symington to leave or Austin Heller to wait. Snyte solved the problem by abandoning her to the soothing speech of his engineer and excusing himself for a moment. Then he emerged into the reception room, shook Heller’s hand and suggested: “Would you mind stepping into the drafting room, Mr. Heller? Better light in there, you know, and the sketch is all ready for you, and I didn’t want to take the chance of moving it.”

Heller did not seem to mind. He followed Snyte obediently into the drafting room, a tall, broad-shouldered figure in English tweeds, with sandy hair and a square face drawn in countless creases around the ironical calm of the eyes.

The sketch lay on the Chinese artist’s table, and the artist stepped aside diffidently, in silence. The next table was Roark’s. He stood with his back to Heller; he went on with his drawing, and did not turn. The employees had been trained not to intrude on the occasions when Snyte brought a client into the drafting room.

Snyte’s finger tips lifted the tissue paper, as if raising the veil of a bride. Then he stepped back and watched Heller’s face. Heller bent down and stood hunched, drawn, intent, saying nothing for a long time.

“Listen, Mr. Snyte,” he began at last. “Listen, I think ...” and stopped.

Snyte waited patiently, pleased, sensing the approach of something he didn’t want to disturb.

“This,” said Heller suddenly, loudly, slamming his fist down on the drawing, and Snyte winced, “this is the nearest anyone’s ever come to it!”

“I knew you’d like it, Mr. Heller,” said Snyte.

“I don’t,” said Heller.

Snyte blinked and waited.

“It’s so near somehow,” said Heller regretfully, “but it’s not right. I don’t know where, but it’s not. Do forgive me, if this sounds vague, but I like things at once or I don’t. I know that I wouldn’t be comfortable, for instance, with that entrance. It’s a lovely entrance, but you won’t even notice it because you’ve seen it so often.”

“Ah, but allow me to point out a few considerations, Mr. Heller. One wants to be modern, of course, but one wants to preserve the appearance of a home. A combination of stateliness and coziness, you understand, a very austere house like this must have a few softening touches. It is strictly correct architecturally.”

“No doubt,” said Heller. “I wouldn’t know about that. I’ve never been strictly correct in my life.”

“Just let me explain this scheme and you’ll see that it’s ...”

“I know,” said Heller wearily. “I know. I’m sure you’re right. Only ...” His voice had a sound of the eagerness he wished he could feel. “Only, if it had some unity, some ... some central idea ... which is there and isn’t ... if it seemed to live ... which it doesn’t ... It lacks something and it has too much.... If it were cleaner, more clear-cut ... what’s the word I’ve heard used?—if it were integrated....”

Roark turned. He was at the other side of the table. He seized the sketch, his hand flashed forward and a pencil ripped across the drawing, slashing raw black lines over the untouchable water-color. The lines blasted off the Ionic columns, the pediment, the entrance, the spire, the blinds, the bricks; they flung up two wings of stone; they rent the windows wide; they splintered the balcony and hurled a terrace over the sea.

It was being done before the others had grasped the moment when it began. Then Snyte jumped forward, but Heller seized his wrist and stopped him. Roark’s hand went on razing walls, splitting, rebuilding in furious strokes.

Roark threw his head up once, for a flash of a second, to look at Heller across the table. It was all the introduction they needed; it was like a handshake. Roark went on, and when he threw the pencil down, the house—as he had designed it—stood completed in an ordered pattern of black streaks. The performance had not lasted five minutes.

Snyte made an attempt at a sound. As Heller said nothing, Snyte felt free to whirl on Roark and scream: “You’re fired, God damn you! Get out of here! You’re fired!”

“We’re both fired,” said Austen Heller, winking to Roark. “Come on. Have you had any lunch? Let’s go some place. I want to talk to you.”

Roark went to his locker to get his hat and coat. The drafting room witnessed a stupefying act and all work stopped to watch it: Austen Heller picked up the sketch, folded it over four times, cracking the sacred cardboard, and slipped it into his pocket.

“But, Mr. Heller ...” Snyte stammered, “let me explain ... It’s perfectly all right if that’s what you want, we’ll do the sketch over ... let me explain ...”

“Not now,” said Heller. “Not now.” He added at the door: “I’ll send you a check.”

Then Heller was gone, and Roark with him; and the door, as Heller swung it shut behind them, sounded like the closing paragraph in one of Heller’s articles.

Roark had not said a word.

In the softly lighted booth of the most expensive restaurant that Roark had ever entered, across the crystal and silver glittering between them, Heller was saying:

“... because that’s the house I want, because that’s the house I’ve always wanted. Can you build it for me, draw up the plans and supervise the construction?”

“Yes,” said Roark.

“How long will it take if we start at once?”

“About eight months.”

“I’ll have the house by late fall?”

“Yes.”

“Just like that sketch?”

“Just like that.”

“Look, I have no idea what kind of a contract one makes with an architect and you must know, so draw up one and let my lawyer okay it this afternoon, will you?”

“Yes.”

Heller studied the man who sat facing him. He saw the hand lying on the table before him. Heller’s awareness became focused on that hand. He saw the long fingers, the sharp joints, the prominent veins. He had the feeling that he was not hiring this man, but surrendering himself into his employment.

“How old are you,” asked Heller, “whoever you are?”

“Twenty-six. Do you want any references?”

“Hell, no. I have them, here in my pocket. What’s your name?”

“Howard Roark.”

Heller produced a checkbook, spread it open on the table and reached for his fountain pen.

“Look,” he said, writing, “I’ll give you five hundred dollars on account. Get yourself an office or whatever you have to get, and go ahead.”

He tore off the check and handed it to Roark, between the tips of two straight fingers, leaning forward on his elbow, swinging his wrist in a sweeping curve. His eyes were narrowed, amused, watching Roark quizzically. But the gesture had the air of a salute.

The check was made out to “Howard Roark, Architect.”

XI

HOWARD ROARK OPENED HIS OWN OFFICE. It was one large room on the top of an old building, with a broad window high over the roofs. He could see the distant band of the Hudson at his window sill, with the small streaks of ships moving under his finger tips when he pressed them to the glass. He had a desk, two chairs, and a huge drafting table. The glass entrance door bore the words: “Howard Roark, Architect.” He stood in the hall for a long time, looking at the words. Then he went in, and slammed his door; he picked up a T-square from the table and flung it down again, as if throwing an anchor.

John Erik Snyte had objected. When Roark came to the office for his drawing instruments Snyte emerged into the reception room, shook his hand warmly and said: “Well, Roark! Well, how are you? Come in, come right in, I want to speak to you!”

And with Roark seated before his desk Snyte proceeded loudly:

“Look, fellow, I hope you’ve got sense enough not to hold it against me, anything that I might’ve said yesterday. You know how it is, I lost my head a little, and it wasn’t what you did, but that you had to go and do it on that sketch, that sketch ... well, never mind. No hard feelings?”

“No,” said Roark. “None at all.”

“Of course, you’re not fired. You didn’t take me seriously, did you? You can go right back to work here this very minute.”

“What for, Mr. Snyte?”

“What do you mean, what for? Oh, you’re thinking of the Heller house? But you’re not taking Heller seriously, are you? You saw how he is, that madman can change his mind sixty times a minute. He won’t really give you that commission, you know, it isn’t as simple as that, it isn’t being done that way.”

“We’ve signed the contract yesterday.”

“Oh, you have? Well, that’s splendid! Well, look, Roark, I’ll tell you what we’ll do: you bring the commission back to us and I’ll let you put your name on it with mine—‘John Erik Snyte & Howard Roark.’ And we’ll split the fee. That’s in addition to your salary—and you’re getting a raise, incidentally. Then we’ll have the same arrangement on any other commission you bring in. And ... Lord, man, what are you laughing at?”

“Excuse me, Mr. Snyte. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t believe you understand,” said Snyte, bewildered. “Don’t you see? It’s your insurance. You don’t want to break loose just yet. Commissions won’t fall into your lap like this. Then what will you do? This way, you’ll have a steady job and you’ll be building toward independent practice, if that’s what you’re after. In four or five years, you’ll be ready to take the leap. That’s the way everybody does it. You see?”

“Yes.”

“Then you agree?”

“No.”

“But, good Lord, man, you’ve lost your mind! To set up alone now? Without experience, without connections, without ... well, without anything at all! I never heard of such a thing. Ask anybody in the profession. See what they’ll tell you. It’s preposterous!”

“Probably.”

“Listen, Roark, won’t you please listen?”

“I’ll listen if you want me to, Mr. Snyte. But I think I should tell you now that nothing you can say will make any difference. If you don’t mind that, I don’t mind listening.”

Snyte went on speaking for a long time and Roark listened, without objecting, explaining or answering.

“Well, if that’s how you are, don’t expect me to take you back when you find yourself on the pavement.”

“I don’t expect it, Mr. Snyte.”

“Don’t expect anyone else in the profession to take you in, after they hear what you’ve done to me.”

“I don’t expect that either.”

For a few days Snyte thought of suing Roark and Heller. But he decided against it, because there was no precedent to follow under the circumstances; because Heller had paid him for his efforts, and the house had been actually designed by Roark; and because no one ever sued Austen Heller.

The first visitor to Roark’s office was Peter Keating.

He walked in, without warning, one noon, walked straight across the room and sat down on Roark’s desk, smiling gaily, spreading his arms wide in a sweeping gesture:

“Well, Howard!” he said. “Well, fancy that!”

He had not seen Roark for a year.

“Hello, Peter,” said Roark.

“You’re own office, your own name and everything! Already! Just imagine!”

“Who told you, Peter?”

“Oh, one hears things. You wouldn’t expect me not to keep track of your career, now would you? You know what I’ve always thought of you. And I don’t have to tell you that I congratulate you and wish you the very best.”

“No, you don’t have to.”

“Nice place you got here. Light and roomy. Not quite as imposing as it should be, perhaps, but what can one expect at the beginning? And then, the prospects are uncertain, aren’t they, Howard?”

“Quite.”

“It’s an awful chance you’ve taken.”

“Probably.”

“Are you really going to go through with it? I mean, on your own?”

“Looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“Well, it’s not too late, you know. I thought, when I heard the story, that you’d surely turn it over to Snyte and make a smart deal with him. ”

“I didn’t.”

“Aren’t you really going to?”

“No.”

Keating wondered why he should experience that sickening feeling of resentment; why he had come here hoping to find the story untrue, hoping to find Roark uncertain and willing to surrender. That feeling had haunted him ever since he’d heard the news about Roark; the sensation of something unpleasant that remained after he’d forgotten the cause. The feeling would come back to him, without reason, a blank wave of anger, and he would ask himself: now what the hell?—what was it I heard today? Then he would remember: Oh, yes, Roark—Roark’s opened his own office. He would ask himself impatiently: So what?—and know at the same time that the words were painful to face, and humiliating like an insult.

“You know, Howard, I admire your courage. Really, you know, I’ve had much more experience and I’ve got more of a standing in the profession, don’t mind saying it—I’m only speaking objectively—but I wouldn’t dare take such a step.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

“So you’ve made the jump first. Well, well. Who would have thought it? ... I wish you all the luck in the world.”

“Thank you, Peter.”

“I know you’ll succeed. I’m sure of it.”

“Are you?”

“Of course! Of course, I am. Aren’t you?”

“I haven’t thought of it.”

“You haven’t thought of it?”

“Not much.”

“Then you’re not sure, Howard? You aren’t?”

“Why do you ask that so eagerly?”

“What? Why ... no, not eagerly, but of course, I’m concerned. Howard, it’s bad psychology not to be certain now, in your position. So you have doubts?”

“None at all.”

“But you said ...”

“I’m quite sure of things, Peter.”

“Have you thought about getting your registration?”

“I’ve applied for it.”

“You’ve got no college degree, you know. They’ll make it difficult for you at the examination.”

“Probably.”

“What are you going to do if you don’t get the license?”

“I’ll get it.”

“Well, I guess I’ll be seeing you now at the A.G.A., if you don’t go high hat on me, because you’ll be a full-fledged member and I’m only a junior.”

“I’m not joining the A.G.A.”

“What do you mean, you’re not joining? You’re eligible now.”

“Possibly.”

“You’ll be invited to join.”

“Tell them not to bother.”

“What!”

“You know, Peter, we had a conversation just like this seven years ago, when you tried to talk me into joining your fraternity at Stanton. Don’t start it again.”

“You won’t join the A.G.A. when you have a chance to?”

“I won’t join anything, Peter, at any time.”

“But don’t you realize how it helps?”

“In what?”

“In being an architect.”

“I don’t like to be helped in being an architect.”

“You’re just making things harder for yourself.”

“I am.”

“And it will be plenty hard, you know.”

“I know.”

“You’ll make enemies of them if you refuse such an invitation.”

“I’ll make enemies of them anyway.”

The first person to whom Roark had told the news was Henry Cameron. Roark went to New Jersey the day after he signed the contract with Heller. It had rained and he found Cameron in the garden, shuffling slowly down the damp paths, leaning heavily on a cane. In the past winter, Cameron had improved enough to walk a few hours each day. He walked with effort, his body bent. He looked at the first shoots of green on the earth under his feet. He lifted his cane, once in a while, bracing his legs to stand firm for a moment; with the tip of the cane, he touched a folded green cup and watched it spill a glistening drop in the twilight. He saw Roark coming up the hill, and frowned. He had seen Roark only a week ago, and because these visits meant too much to both of them, neither wished the occasions to be too frequent.

“Well?” Cameron asked gruffly. “What do you want here again?”

“I have something to tell you.”

“It can wait.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well?”

“I’m opening my own office. I’ve just signed for my first building.”

Cameron rotated his cane, the tip pressed into the earth, the shaft describing a wide circle, his two hands bearing down on the handle, the palm of one on the back of the other. His head nodded slowly, in rhythm with the motion, for a long time, his eyes closed. Then he looked at Roark and said:

“Well, don’t brag about it.”

He added: “Help me to sit down.” It was the first time Cameron had ever pronounced this sentence; his sister and Roark had long since learned that the one outrage forbidden in his presence was any intention of helping him to move.

Roark took his elbow and led him to a bench. Cameron asked harshly, staring ahead at the sunset:

“What? For whom? How much?”

He listened silently to Roark’s story. He looked for a long time at the sketch on cracked cardboard with the pencil lines over the water color. Then he asked many questions about the stone, the steel, the roads, the contractors, the costs. He offered no congratulations. He made no comment.

Only when Roark was leaving, Cameron said suddenly:

“Howard, when you open your office, take snapshots of it—and show them to me.”

Then he shook his head, looked away guiltily, and swore.

“I’m being senile. Forget it.”

Roark said nothing.

Three days later he came back. “You’re getting to be a nuisance,” said Cameron. Roark handed him an envelope, without a word. Cameron looked at the snapshots, at the one of the broad, bare office, of the wide window, of the entrance door. He dropped the others, and held the one of the entrance door for a long time.

“Well,” he said at last, “I did live to see it.”

He dropped the snapshot.

“Not quite exactly,” he added. “Not in the way I had wanted to, but I did. It’s like the shadows some say we’ll see of the earth in that other world. Maybe that’s how I’ll see the rest of it. I’m learning.”

He picked up the snapshot.

“Howard,” he said. “Look at it.”

He held it between them.

“It doesn’t say much. Only ‘Howard Roark, Architect.’ But it’s like those mottoes men carved over the entrance of a castle and died for. It’s a challenge in the face of something so vast and so dark, that all the pain on earth—and do you know how much suffering there is on earth?—al! the pain comes from that thing you are going to face. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know why it should be unleashed against you. I know only that it will be. And I know that if you carry these words through to the end, it will be a victory, Howard, not just for you, but for something that should win, that moves the world—and never wins acknowledgment. It will vindicate so many who have fallen before you, who have suffered as you will suffer. May God bless you—or whoever it is that is alone to see the best, the highest possible to human hearts. You’re on your way into hell, Howard.”

Roark walked up the path to the top of the cliff where the steel hulk of the Heller house rose into a blue sky. The skeleton was up and the concrete was being poured; the great mats of the terraces hung over the silver sheet of water quivering far below; plumbers and electricians had started laying their conduits.

He looked at the squares of sky delimited by the slender lines of girders and columns, the empty cubes of space he had torn out of the sky. His hands moved involuntarily, filling in the planes of walls to come, enfolding the future rooms. A stone clattered from under his feet and went bouncing down the hill, resonant drops of sound rolling in the sunny clarity of the summer air.

He stood on the summit, his legs planted wide apart, leaning back against space. He looked at the materials before him, the knobs of rivets in steel, the sparks in blocks of stone, the weaving spirals in fresh, yellow planks.

Then he saw a husky figure enmeshed in electric wires, a bulldog face spreading into a huge grin and china-blue eyes gloating in a kind of unholy triumph.

“Mike!” he said incredulously.

Mike had left for a big job in Philadelphia months ago, long before the appearance of Heller in Snyte’s office, and Mike had never heard the news—or so he supposed.

“Hello, Red,” said Mike, much too casually, and added: “Hello, boss.”

“Mike, how did you ... ?”

“You’re a hell of an architect. Neglecting the job like that. It’s my third day here, waiting for you to show up.”

“Mike, how did you get here? Why such a come-down?” He had never known Mike to bother with small private residences.

“Don’t play the sap. You know how I got here. You didn’t think I’d miss it, your first house, did you? And you think it’s a come-down? Well, maybe it is. And maybe it’s the other way around.”

Roark extended his hand and Mike’s grimy fingers closed about it ferociously, as if the smudges he left implanted in Roark’s skin said everything he wanted to say. And because he was afraid that he might say it, Mike growled:

“Run along, boss, run along. Don’t clog up the works like that.”

Roark walked through the house. There were moments when he could be precise, impersonal, and stop to give instructions as if this were not his house but only a mathematical problem; when he felt the existence of pipes and rivets, while his own person vanished.

There were moments when something rose within him, not a thought nor a feeling, but a wave of some physical violence, and then he wanted to stop, to lean back, to feel the reality of his person heightened by the frame of steel that rose dimly about the bright, outstanding existence of his body as its center. He did not stop. He went on calmly. But his hands betrayed what he wanted to hide. His hands reached out, ran slowly down the beams and joints. The workers in the house had noticed it. They said: “That guy’s in love with the thing. He can’t keep his hands off.”

The workers liked him. The contractor’s superintendents did not. He had had trouble in finding a contractor to erect the house. Several of the better firms had refused the commission. “We don’t do that kinda stuff.” “Nah, we won’t bother. Too complicated for a small job like that.” “Who the hell wants that kind of a house? Most likely we’ll never collect from the crank afterwards. To hell with it.” “Never did anything like it. Wouldn’t know how to go about it. I’ll stick to construction that is construction.” One contractor had looked at the plans briefly and thrown them aside, declaring with finality: “It won’t stand.” “It will,” said Roark. The contractor drawled indifferently. “Yeah? And who are you to tell me, Mister?”

He had found a small firm that needed the work and undertook it, charging more than the job warranted—on the ground of the chance they were taking with a queer experiment. The construction went on, and the foremen obeyed sullenly, in disapproving silence, as if they were waiting for their predictions to come true and would be glad when the house collapsed about their heads.

Roark had bought an old Ford and drove down to the job more often than was necessary. It was difficult to sit at a desk in his office, to stand at a table, forcing himself to stay away from the construction site. At the site there were moments when he wished to forget his office and his drawing board, to seize the men’s tools and go to work on the actual erection of the house, as he had worked in his childhood, to build that house with his own hands.

He walked through the structure, stepping lightly over piles of planks and coils of wire, he made notes, he gave brief orders in a harsh voice. He avoided looking in Mike’s direction. But Mike was watching him, following his progress through the house. Mike winked at him in understanding, whenever he passed by. Mike said once:

“Control yourself, Red. You’re open like a book. God, it’s indecent to be so happy!”

Roark stood on the cliff, by the structure, and looked at the countryside, at the long, gray ribbon of the road twisting past along the shore. An open car drove by, fleeing into the country. The car was overfilled with people bound for a picnic. There was a jumble of bright sweaters, and scarfs fluttering in the wind; a jumble of voices shrieking without purpose over the roar of the motor, and overstressed hiccoughs of laughter; a girl sat sidewise, her legs flung over the side of the car; she wore a man’s straw hat slipping down to her nose and she yanked savagely at the strings of a ukelele, ejecting raucous sounds, yelling “Hey!” These people were enjoying a day of their existence; they were shrieking to the sky their release from the work and the burdens of the days behind them; they had worked and carried the burdens in order to reach a goal—and this was the goal.

He looked at the car as it streaked past. He thought that there was a difference, some important difference, between the consciousness of this day in him and in them. He thought that he should try to grasp it. But he forgot. He was looking at a truck panting up the hill, loaded with a glittering mound of cut granite.

Austen Heller came to look at the house frequently, and watched it grow, curious, still a little astonished. He studied Roark and the house with the same meticulous scrutiny; he felt as if he could not quite tell them apart.

Heller, the fighter against compulsion, was baffled by Roark, a man so impervious to compulsion that he became a kind of compulsion himself, an ultimatum against things Heller could not define. Within a week, Heller knew that he had found the best friend he would ever have; and he knew that the friendship came from Roark’s fundamental indifference. In the deeper reality of Roark’s existence there was no consciousness of Heller, no need for Heller, no appeal, no demand. Heller felt a line drawn, which he could not touch; beyond that line, Roark asked nothing of him and granted him nothing. But when Roark looked at him with approval, when Roark smiled, when Roark praised one of his articles, Heller felt the strangely clean joy of a sanction that was neither a bribe nor alms.

In the summer evenings they sat together on a ledge halfway up the hill, and talked while darkness mounted slowly up the beams of the house above them, the last sunrays retreating to the tips of the steel uprights.

“What is it that I like so much about the house you’re building for me, Howard?”

“A house can have integrity, just like a person,” said Roark, “and just as seldom.”

“In what way?”

“Well, look at it. Every piece of it is there because the house needs it—and for no other reason. You see it from here as it is inside. The rooms in which you’ll live made the shape. The relation of masses was determined by the distribution of space within. The ornament was determined by the method of construction, an emphasis of the principle that makes it stand. You can see each stress, each support that meets it. Your own eyes go through a structural process when you look at the house, you can follow each step, you see it rise, you know what made it and why it stands. But you’ve seen buildings with columns that support nothing, with purposeless cornices, with pilasters, mouldings, false arches, false windows. You’ve seen buildings that look as if they contained a single large hall, they have solid columns and single, solid windows six floors high. But you enter and find six stories inside. Or buildings that contain a single hall, but with a façade cut up into floor lines, band courses, tiers of windows. Do you understand the difference? Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the other is in the audience.”

“Do you know that that’s what I’ve felt in a way? I’ve felt that when I move into this house, I’ll have a new sort of existence, and even my simple daily routine will have a kind of honesty or dignity that I can’t quite define. Don’t be astonished if I tell you that I feel as if I’ll have to live up to that house.”

“I intended that,” said Roark.

“And, incidentally, thank you for all the thought you seem to have taken about my comfort. There are so many things I notice that had never occurred to me before, but you’ve planned them as if you knew all my needs. For instance, my study is the room I’ll need most and you’ve given it the dominant spot—and, incidentally, I see where you’ve made it the dominant mass from the outside, too. And then the way it connects with the library, and the living room well out of my way, and the guest rooms where I won’t hear too much of them—and all that. You were very considerate of me.”

“You know,” said Roark, “I haven’t thought of you at all. I thought of the house.” He added: “Perhaps that’s why I knew how to be considerate of you.”

The Heller house was completed in November of 1926.

In January of 1927 the Architectural Tribune published a survey of the best American homes erected during the past year. It devoted twelve large, glossy pages to photographs of the twenty-four houses its editors had selected as the worthiest architectural achievements. The Heller house was not mentioned.

The real-estate sections of the New York papers presented, each Sunday, brief accounts of the notable new residences in the vicinity. There was no account of the Heller house.

The year book of the Architects’ Guild of America, which presented magnificent reproductions of what it chose as the best buildings of the country, under the title “Looking Forward,” gave no reference to the Heller house.

There were many occasions when lecturers rose to platforms and addressed trim audiences on the subject of the progress of American architecture. No one spoke of the Heller house.

In the club rooms of the A.G.A. some opinions were expressed.

“It’s a disgrace to the country,” said Ralston Holcombe, “that a thing like that Heller house is allowed to be erected. It’s a blot on the profession. There ought to be a law.”

“That’s what drives clients away,” said John Erik Snyte. “They see a house like that and they think all architects are crazy.”

“I see no cause for indignation,” said Gordon L. Prescott. “I think it’s screamingly funny. It looks like a cross between a filling station and a comic-strip idea of a rocket ship to the moon.”

“You watch it in a couple of years,” said Eugene Pettingill, “and see what happens. The thing’ll collapse like a house of cards.”

“Why speak in terms of years?” said Guy Francon. “Those modernistic stunts never last more than a season. The owner will get good and sick of it and he’ll come running home to a good old early Colonial.”

The Heller house acquired fame throughout the countryside surrounding it. People drove out of their way to park on the road before it, to stare, point and giggle. Gas-station attendants snickered when Heller’s car drove past. Heller’s cook had to endure the derisive glances of shopkeepers when she went on her errands. The Heller house was known in the neighborhood as “The Booby Hatch.”

Peter Keating told his friends in the profession, with an indulgent smile: “Now, now, you shouldn’t say that about him. I’ve known Howard Roark for a long time, and he’s got quite a talent, quite. He’s even worked for me once. He’s just gone haywire on that house. He’ll learn. He has a future.... Oh, you don’t think he has? You really don’t think he has?”

Ellsworth M. Toohey, who let no stone spring from the ground of America without his comment, did not know that the Heller house had been erected, as far as his column was concerned. He did not consider it necessary to inform his readers about it, if only to damn it. He said nothing.

XII

A COLUMN ENTITLED “OBSERVATIONS AND MEDITATIONS” BY ALVAH Scarret appeared daily on the front page of the New York Banner. It was a trusted guide, a source of inspiration and a molder of public philosophy in small towns throughout the country. In this column there had appeared, years ago, the famous statement: “We’d all be a heap sight better off if we’d forget the highfalutin notions of our fancy civilization and mind more what the savages knew long before us: to honor our mother.” Alvah Scarret was a bachelor, had made two million dollars, played golf expertly and was editor-in-chief of the Wynand papers.

It was Alvah Scarret who conceived the idea of the campaign against living conditions in the slums and “Landlord Sharks,” which ran in the Banner for three weeks. This was material such as Alvah Scarret relished. It had human appeal and social implications. It lent itself to Sunday-supplement illustrations of girls leaping into rivers, their skirts flaring well above their knees. It boosted circulation. It embarrassed the sharks who owned a stretch of blocks by the East River, selected as the dire example of the campaign. The sharks had refused to sell these blocks to an obscure real-estate company; at the end of the campaign they surrendered and sold. No one could prove that the real-estate company was owned by a company owned by Gail Wynand.

The Wynand papers could not be left without a campaign for long. They had just concluded one on the subject of modern aviation. They had run scientific accounts of the history of aviation in the Sunday Family Magazine supplement, with pictures ranging from Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of flying machines to the latest bomber; with the added attraction of Icarus writhing in scarlet flames, his nude body blue-green, his wax wings yellow and the smoke purple; also of a leprous hag with flaming eyes and a crystal ball, who had predicted in the XIth century that man would fly; also of bats, vampires and werewolves.

They had run a model plane construction contest; it was open to all boys under the age of ten who wished to send in three new subscriptions to the Banner. Gail Wynand, who was a licensed pilot, had made a solo flight from Los Angeles to New York, establishing a transcontinental speed record, in a small, specially built craft costing one hundred thousand dollars. He had made a slight miscalculation on reaching New York and had been forced to land in a rocky pasture; it had been a hair-raising landing, faultlessly executed; it had just so happened that a battery of photographers from the Banner were present in the neighborhood. Gail Wynand had stepped out of the plane. An ace pilot would have been shaken by the experience. Gail Wynand had stood before the cameras, an immaculate gardenia in the lapel of his flying jacket, his hand raised with a cigarette held between two fingers that did not tremble. When questioned about his first wish on returning to earth, he had expressed the desire to kiss the most attractive woman present, had chosen the dowdiest old hag from the crowd and bent to kiss her gravely on the forehead, explaining that she reminded him of his mother.

Later, at the start of the slum campaign, Gail Wynand had said to Alvah Scarret: “Go ahead. Squeeze all you can out of the thing,” and had departed on his yacht for a world cruise, accompanied by an enchanting aviatrix of twenty-four to whom he had made a present of his transcontinental plane.

Alvah Scarret went ahead. Among many other steps of his campaign he assigned Dominique Francon to investigate the condition of homes in the slums and to gather human material. Dominique Francon had just returned from a summer in Biarritz; she always took a whole summer’s vacation and Alvah Scarret granted it, because she was one of his favorite employees, because he was baffled by her and because he knew that she could quit her job whenever she pleased.

Dominique Francon went to live for two weeks in the hall bedroom of an East-Side tenement. The room had a skylight, but no windows; there were five flights of stairs to climb and no running water. She cooked her own meals in the kitchen of a numerous family on the floor below; she visited neighbors, she sat on the landings of fire escapes in the evenings and went to dime movies with the girls of the neighborhood.

She wore frayed skirts and blouses. The abnormal fragility of her normal appearance made her look exhausted with privation in these surroundings; the neighbors felt certain that she had T.B. But she moved as she had moved in the drawing room of Kiki Holcombe—with the same cold poise and confidence. She scrubbed the floor of her room, she peeled potatoes, she bathed in a tin pan of cold water. She had never done these things before; she did them expertly. She had a capacity for action, a competence that clashed incongruously with her appearance. She did not mind this new background; she was indifferent to the slums as she had been indifferent to the drawing rooms.

At the end of two weeks she returned to her penthouse apartment on the roof of a hotel over Central Park, and her articles on life in the slums appeared in the Banner. They were a merciless, brilliant account.

She heard baffled questions at a dinner party. “My dear, you didn’t actually write those things?” “Dominique, you didn’t really live in that place?” “Oh, yes,” she answered. “The house you own on East Twelfth Street, Mrs. Palmer,” she said, her hand circling lazily from under the cuff of an emerald bracelet too broad and heavy for her thin wrist, “has a sewer that gets clogged every other day and runs over, all through the courtyard. It looks blue and purple in the sun, like a rainbow.” “The block you control for the Claridge estate, Mr. Brooks, has the most attractive stalactites growing on all the ceilings,” she said, her golden head leaning to her corsage of white gardenias with drops of water sparkling on the lusterless petals.

She was asked to speak at a meeting of social workers. It was an important meeting, with a militant, radical mood, led by some of the most prominent women in the field. Alvah Scarret was pleased and gave her his blessing. “Go to it, kid,” he said, “lay it on thick. We want the social workers.” She stood in the speaker’s pulpit of an unaired hall and looked at a flat sheet of faces, faces lecherously eager with the sense of their own virtue. She spoke evenly, without inflection. She said, among many other things: “The family on the first floor rear do not bother to pay their rent, and the children cannot go to school for lack of clothes. The father has a charge account at a corner speak-easy. He is in good health and has a good job.... The couple on the second floor have just purchased a radio for sixty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents cash. In the fourth-floor front, the father of the family has not done a whole day’s work in his life, and does not intend to. There are nine children, supported by the local parish. There is a tenth one on its way....” When she finished there were a few claps of angry applause. She raised her hand and said: “You don’t have to applaud. I don’t expect it.” She asked politely: “Are there any questions?” There were no questions.

When she returned home she found Alvah Scarret waiting for her. He looked incongruous in the drawing room of her penthouse, his huge bulk perched on the edge of a delicate chair, a hunched gargoyle against the glowing spread of the city beyond a solid wall of glass. The city was like a mural designed to illuminate and complete the room: the fragile lines of spires on a black sky continued the fragile lines of the furniture; the lights glittering in distant windows threw reflections on the bare, lustrous floor; the cold precision of the angular structures outside answered the cold, inflexible grace of every object within. Alvah Scarret broke the harmony. He looked like a kindly country doctor and like a cardsharp. His heavy face bore the benevolent, paternal smile that had always been his passkey and his trademark. He had the knack of making the kindliness of his smile add to, not detract from his solemn appearance of dignity ; his long, thin, hooked nose did detract from the kindliness, but it added to the dignity; his stomach, cantilevered over his legs, did detract from the dignity, but it added to the kindliness.

He rose, beamed and held Dominique’s hand.

“Thought I’d drop in on my way home,” he said. “I’ve got something to tell you. How did it go, kid?”

“As I expected it.”

She tore her hat off and threw it down on the first chair in sight. Her hair slanted in a flat curve across her forehead and fell in a straight line to her shoulders; it looked smooth and tight, like a bathing cap of pale, polished metal. She walked to the window and stood looking out over the city. She asked without turning: “What did you want to tell me?”

Alvah Scarret watched her pleasurably. He had long since given up any attempts beyond holding her hand when not necessary or patting her shoulder; he had stopped thinking of the subject, but he had a dim, half-conscious feeling which he summed up to himself in the words: You never can tell.

“I’ve got good news for you, child,” he said. “I’ve been working out a little scheme, just a bit of reorganization, and I’ve figured where I’ll consolidate a few things together into a Women’s Welfare Department. You know, the schools, the home economics, the care of babies, the juvenile delinquents and all the rest of it—all to be under one head. And I see no better woman for the job than my little girl.”

“Do you mean me?” she asked, without turning.

“No one else but. Just as soon as Gail comes back, I’ll get his okay.”

She turned and looked at him, her arms crossed, her hands holding her elbows. She said:

“Thank you, Alvah. But I don’t want it.”

“What do you mean, you don’t want it?”

“I mean that I don’t want it.”

“For heaven’s sake, do you realize what an advance that would be?”

“Toward what?”

“Your career.”

“I never said I was planning a career.”

“But you don’t want to be running a dinky back-page column forever!”

“Not forever. Until I get bored with it.”

“But think of what you could do in the real game! Think of what Gail could do for you once you come to his attention!”

“I have no desire to come to his attention.”

“But, Dominique, we need you. The women will be for you solid after tonight.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why, I’ve ordered two columns held for a yarn on the meeting and your speech.”

She reached for the telephone and handed the receiver to him. She said:

“You’d better tell them to kill it.”

“Why?”

She searched through a litter of papers on a desk, found some typewritten sheets and handed them to him. “Here’s the speech I made tonight,” she said.

He glanced through it. He said nothing, but clasped his forehead once. Then he seized the telephone and gave orders to run as brief an account of the meeting as possible, and not to mention the speaker by name.

“All right,” said Dominique, when he dropped the receiver. “Am I fired?”

He shook his head dolefully. “Do you want to be?”

“Not necessarily.”

“I’ll squash the business,” he muttered. “I’ll keep it from Gail.”

“If you wish. I really don’t care one way or the other.”

“Listen, Dominque—oh I know, I’m not to ask any questions—only why on earth are you always doing things like that?”

“For no reason on earth.”

“Look, you know, I’ve heard about that swank dinner where you made certain remarks on this same subject. And then you go and say things like these at a radical meeting.”

“They’re true, though, both sides of it, aren’t they?”

“Oh, sure, but couldn’t you have reversed the occasions when you chose to express them?”

“There wouldn’t have been any point in that.”

“Was there any in what you’ve done?”

“No. None at all. But it amused me.”

“I can’t figure you out, Dominique. You’ve done it before. You go along so beautifully, you do brilliant work and just when you’re about to make a real step forward—you spoil it by pulling something like this. Why?”

“Perhaps that is precisely why.”

“Will you tell me—as a friend, because I like you and I’m interested in you—what are you really after?”

“I should think that’s obvious. I’m after nothing at all.”

He spread his hands open, shrugging helplessly.

She smiled gaily.

“What is there to look so mournful about? I like you, too, Alvah, and I’m interested in you. I even like to talk to you, which is better. Now sit still and relax and I’ll get you a drink. You need a drink, Alvah.”

She brought him a frosted glass with ice cubes ringing in the silence. “You’re just a nice child, Dominique,” he said.

“Of course. That’s what I am.”

She sat down on the edge of a table, her hands flat behind her, leaning back on two straight arms, swinging her legs slowly. She said:

“You know, Alvah, it would be terrible if I had a job I really wanted.”

“Well, of all things! Well, of all fool things to say! What do you mean?”

“Just that. That it would be terrible to have a job I enjoyed and did not want to lose.”

“Why?”

“Because I would have to depend on you—you’re a wonderful person, Alvah, but not exactly inspiring and I don’t think it would be beautiful to cringe before a whip in your hand—oh, don’t protest, it would be such a polite little whip, and that’s what would make it uglier. I would have to depend on our boss Gail—he’s a great man, I’m sure, only I’d just as soon never set eyes on him.”

“Whatever gives you such a crazy attitude? When you know that Gail and I would do anything for you, and I personally ...”

“It’s not only that, Alvah. It’s not you alone. If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted—I’d have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We’re all so tied together. We’re all in a net, the net is waiting, and we’re pushed into it by one single desire. You want a thing and it’s precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can’t know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you’re afraid of them all. And you cringe and you crawl and you beg and you accept them—just so they’ll let you keep it. And look at whom you come to accept.”

“If I’m correct in gathering that you’re criticizing mankind in general ...”

“You know, it’s such a peculiar thing—our idea of mankind in general. We all have a sort of vague, glowing picture when we say that, something solemn, big and important. But actually all we know of it is the people we meet in our lifetime. Look at them. Do you know any you’d feel big and solemn about? There’s nothing but housewives haggling at pushcarts, drooling brats who write dirty words on the sidewalks, and drunken debutantes. Or their spiritual equivalents. As a matter of fact, one can feel some respect for people when they suffer. They have a certain dignity. But have you ever looked at them when they’re enjoying themselves? That’s when you see the truth. Look at those who spend the money they’ve slaved for—at amusement parks and side shows. Look at those who’re rich and have the whole world open to them. Observe what they pick out for enjoyment. Watch them in the smarter speak-easies. That’s your mankind in general. I don’t want to touch it.”

“But hell! That’s not the way to look at it. That’s not the whole picture. There’s some good in the worst of us. There’s always a redeeming feature.”

“So much the worse. Is it an inspiring sight to see a man commit a heroic gesture, and then learn that he goes to vaudeville shows for relaxation? Or see a man who’s painted a magnificent canvas—and learn that he spends his time sleeping with every slut he meets?”

“What do you want? Perfection?”

“—or nothing. So, you see, I take the nothing.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom.”

“You call that freedom?”

“To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.”

“What if you found something you wanted?”

“I won’t find it. I won’t choose to see it. It would be part of that lovely world of yours. I’d have to share it with all the rest of you—and I wouldn’t. You know, I never open again any great book I’ve read and loved. It hurts me to think of the other eyes that have read it and of what they were. Things like that can’t be shared. Not with people like that.”

“Dominique, it’s abnormal to feel so strongly about anything.”

“That’s the only way I can feel. Or not at all.”

“Dominique, my dear,” he said, with earnest, sincere concern, “I wish I’d been your father. What kind of a tragedy did you have in your childhood?”

“Why, none at all. I had a wonderful childhood. Free and peaceful and not bothered too much by anybody. Well, yes, I did feel bored very often. But I’m used to that.”

“I suppose you’re just an unfortunate product of our times. That’s what I’ve always said. We’re too cynical, too decadent. If we went back in all humility to the simple virtues ...”

“Alvah, how can you start on that stuff? That’s only for your editorials and ...” She stopped, seeing his eyes; they looked puzzled and a little hurt. Then she laughed. “I’m wrong. You really do believe all that. If it’s actually believing, or whatever it is you do that takes its place. Oh, Alvah! That’s why I love you. That’s why I’m doing again right now what I did tonight at the meeting.”

“What?” he asked, bewildered.

“Talking as I am talking—to you as you are. It’s nice, talking to you about such things. Do you know, Alvah, that primitive people made statues of their gods in man’s likeness? Just think of what a statue of you would look like—of you nude, your stomach and all.”

“Now what’s that in relation to?”

“To nothing at all, darling. Forgive me.” She added: “You know, I love statues of naked men. Don’t look so silly. I said statues. I had one in particular. It was supposed to be Helios. I got it out of a museum in Europe. I had a terrible time getting it—it wasn’t for sale, of course. I think I was in love with it, Alvah. I brought it home with me.”

“Where is it? I’d like to see something you like, for a change.”

“It’s broken.”

“Broken? A museum piece? How did that happen?”

“I broke it.”

“How?”

“I threw it down the air shaft. There’s a concrete floor below.”

“Are you totally crazy? Why?”

“So that no one else would ever see it.”

“Dominique!”

She jerked her head, as if to shake off the subject; the straight mass of her hair stirred in a heavy ripple, like a wave through a half-liquid pool of mercury. She said:

“I’m sorry, darling. I didn’t want to shock you. I thought I could speak to you because you’re the one person who’s impervious to any sort of shock. I shouldn’t have. It’s no use, I guess.”

She jumped lightly off the table.

“Run on home, Alvah,” she said. “It’s getting late. I’m tired. See you tomorrow.”

Guy Francon read his daughter’s articles; he heard of the remarks she had made at the reception and at the meeting of social workers. He understood nothing of it, but he understood that it had been precisely the sequence of events to expect from his daughter. It preyed on his mind, with the bewildered feeling of apprehension which the thought of her always brought him. He asked himself whether he actually hated his daughter.

But one picture came back to his mind, irrelevantly, whenever he asked himself that question. It was a picture of her childhood, of a day from some forgotten summer on his country estate in Connecticut long ago. He had forgotten the rest of that day and what had led to the one moment he remembered. But he remembered how he stood on the terrace and saw her leaping over a high green hedge at the end of the lawn. The hedge seemed too high for her little body; he had time to think that she could not make it, in the very moment when he saw her flying triumphantly over the green barrier. He could not remember the beginning nor the end of that leap; but he still saw, clearly and sharply, as on a square of movie film cut out and held motionless forever, the one instant when her body hung in space, her long legs flung wide, her thin arms thrown up, hands braced against the air, her white dress and blond hair spread in two broad, flat mats on the wind, a single moment, the flash of a small body in the greatest burst of ecstatic freedom he had ever witnessed in his life.

He did not know why that moment remained with him, what significance, unheeded at the time, had preserved it for him when so much else of greater import had been lost. He did not know why he had to see that moment again whenever he felt bitterness for his daughter, nor why, seeing it, he felt that unbearable twinge of tenderness. He told himself merely that his paternal affection was asserting itself quite against his will. But in an awkward, unthinking way he wanted to help her, not knowing, not wanting to know what she had to be helped against.

So he began to look more frequently at Peter Keating. He began to accept the solution which he never quite admitted to himself. He found comfort in the person of Peter Keating, and he felt that Keating’s simple, stable wholesomeness was just the support needed by the unhealthy inconstancy of his daughter.

Keating would not admit that he had tried to see Dominique again, persistently and without results. He had obtained her telephone number from Francon long ago, and he had called her often. She had answered, and laughed gaily, and told him that of course she’d see him, she knew she wouldn’t be able to escape it, but she was so busy for weeks to come and would he give her a ring by the first of next month?

Francon guessed it. He told Keating he would ask Dominique to lunch and bring them together again. “That is,” he added, “I’ll try to ask her. She’ll refuse, of course.” Dominique surprised him again: she accepted, promptly and cheerfully.

She met them at a restaurant, and she smiled as if this were a reunion she welcomed. She talked gaily, and Keating felt enchanted, at ease, wondering why he had ever feared her. At the end of a half hour she looked at Francon and said:

“It was wonderful of you to take time off to see me, Father. Particularly when you’re so busy and have so many appointments.”

Francon’s face assumed a look of consternation.

“My God, Dominique, that reminds me!”

“You have an appointment you forgot?” she asked gently.

“Confound it, yes! It slipped my mind entirely. Old Andrew Colson phoned this morning and I forgot to make a note of it and he insisted on seeing me at two o’clock, you know how it is, I just simply can’t refuse to see Andrew Colson, confound it!—today of all ...” He added, suspiciously: “How did you know it?”

“Why, I didn’t know it at all. It’s perfectly all right, Father. Mr. Keating and I will excuse you, and we’ll have a lovely luncheon together, and I have no appointments at all for the day, so you don’t have to be afraid that I’ll escape from him.”

Francon wondered whether she knew that that had been the excuse he’d prepared in advance in order to leave her alone with Keating. He could not be sure. She was looking straight at him; her eyes seemed just a bit too candid. He was glad to escape.

Dominique turned to Keating with a glance so gentle that it could mean nothing but contempt.

“Now let’s relax,” she said. “We both know what Father is after, so it’s perfectly all right. Don’t let it embarrass you. It doesn’t embarrass me. It’s nice that you’ve got Father on a leash. But I know it’s not helpful to you to have him pulling ahead of the leash. So let’s forget it and eat our lunch.”

He wanted to rise and walk out; and knew, in furious helplessness, that he wouldn’t. She said:

“Don’t frown, Peter. You might as well call me Dominique, because we’ll come to that anyway, sooner or later. I’ll probably see a great deal of you, I see so many people, and if it will please Father to have you as one of them—why not?”

For the rest of the luncheon she spoke to him as to an old friend, gaily and openly; with a disquieting candor which seemed to show that there was nothing to conceal, but showed that it was best to attempt no probe. The exquisite kindliness of her manner suggested that their relationship was of no possible consequence, that she could not pay him the tribute of hostility. He knew that he disliked her violently. But he watched the shape of her mouth, the movements of her lips framing words; he watched the way she crossed her legs, a gesture smooth and exact, like an expensive instrument being folded; and he could not escape the feeling of incredulous admiration he had experienced when he had seen her for the first time.

When they were leaving, she said:

“Will you take me to the theater tonight, Peter? I don’t care what play, any one of them. Call for me after dinner. Tell Father about it. It will please him.”

“Though, of course, he should know better than to be pleased,” said Keating, “and so should I, but I’ll be delighted just the same, Dominique.”

“Why should you know better?”

“Because you have no desire to go to a theater or to see me tonight.”

“None whatever. I’m beginning to like you, Peter. Call for me at half past eight.”

When Keating returned to the office, Francon called him upstairs at once.

“Well?” Francon asked anxiously.

“What’s the matter, Guy?” said Keating, his voice innocent. “Why are you so concerned?”

“Well, I ... I’m just... frankly, I’m interested to see whether you two could get together at all. I think you’d be a good influence for her. What happened?”

“Nothing at all. We had a lovely time. You know your restaurants—the food was wonderful... Oh, yes, I’m taking your daughter to a show tonight.”

“No!”

“Why, yes.”

“How did you ever manage that?”

Keating shrugged. “I told you one mustn’t be afraid of Dominique.”

“I’m not afraid, but ... Oh, is it ‘Dominique’ already? My congratulations, Peter.... I’m not afraid, it’s only that I can’t figure her out. No one can approach her. She’s never had a single girl friend, not even in kindergarten. There’s always a mob around her, but never a friend. I don’t know what to think. There she is now, living all alone, always with a crowd of men around and ...”

“Now, Guy, you mustn’t think anything dishonorable about your own daughter.”

“I don’t! That’s just the trouble—that I don’t. I wish I could. But she’s twenty-four, Peter, and she’s a virgin—I know, I’m sure of it. Can’t you tell just by looking at a woman? I’m no moralist, Peter, and I think that’s abnormal. It’s unnatural at her age, with her looks, with the kind of utterly unrestricted existence that she leads. I wish to God she’d get married. I honestly do.... Well, now, don’t repeat that, of course, and don’t misinterpret it, I didn’t mean it as an invitation.”

“Of course not.”

“By the way, Peter, the hospital called while you were out. They said poor Lucius is much better. They think he’ll pull through.” Lucius N. Heyer had had a stroke, and Keating had exhibited a great deal of concern for his progress, but had not gone to visit him at the hospital.

“I’m so glad,” said Keating.

“But I don’t think he’ll ever be able to come back to work. He’s getting old, Peter.... Yes, he’s getting old.... One reaches an age when one can’t be burdened with business any longer.” He let a paper knife hang between two fingers and tapped it pensively against the edge of a desk calendar. “It happens to all of us, Peter, sooner or later.... One must look ahead....”

Keating sat on the floor by the imitation logs in the fireplace of his living room, his hands clasped about his knees, and listened to his mother’s questions on what did Dominique look like, what did she wear, what had she said to him and how much money did he suppose her mother had actually left her.

He was meeting Dominique frequently now. He had just returned from an evening spent with her on a round of night clubs. She always accepted his invitations. He wondered whether her attitude was deliberate proof that she could ignore him more completely by seeing him often than by refusing to see him. But each time he met her, he planned eagerly for the next meeting. He had not seen Catherine for a month. She was busy with research work which her uncle had entrusted to her, in preparation for a series of his lectures.

Mrs. Keating sat under a lamp, mending a slight tear in the lining of Peter’s dinner jacket, reproaching him, between questions, for sitting on the floor in his dress trousers and best formal shirt. He paid no attention to the reproaches or the questions. But under his bored annoyance he felt an odd sense of relief; as if the stubborn stream of her words were pushing him on and justifying him. He answered once in a while: “Yes.... No.... I don’t know.... Oh, yes, she’s lovely. She’s very lovely.... It’s awfully late, Mother. I’m tired. I think I’ll go to bed....”

The doorbell rang.

“Well,” said Mrs. Keating. “What can that be, at this hour?”

Keating rose, shrugging, and ambled to the door.

It was Catherine. She stood, her two hands clasped on a large, old, shapeless pocketbook. She looked determined and hesitant at once. She drew back a little. She said: “Good evening, Peter. Can I come in? I’ve got to speak to you.”

“Katie! Of course! How nice of you! Come right in. Mother, it’s Katie.”

Mrs. Keating looked at the girl’s feet which stepped as if moving on the rolling deck of a ship; she looked at her son, and she knew that something had happened, to be handled with great caution.

“Good evening, Catherine,” she said softly.

Keating was conscious of nothing save the sudden stab of joy he had felt on seeing her; the joy told him that nothing had changed, that he was safe in certainty, that her presence resolved all doubts. He forgot to wonder about the lateness of the hour, about her first, uninvited appearance in his apartment.

“Good evening, Mrs. Keating,” she said, her voice bright and hollow. “I hope I’m not disturbing you, it’s late probably, is it?”

“Why, not at all, child,” said Mrs. Keating.

Catherine hurried to speak, senselessly, hanging on to the sound of words:

“I’ll just take my hat off.... Where can I put it, Mrs. Keating? Here on the table? Would that be all right? ... No, maybe I’d better put it on this bureau, though it’s a little damp from the street, the hat is, it might hurt the varnish, it’s a nice bureau, I hope it doesn’t hurt the varnish....”

“What’s the matter, Katie?” Keating asked, noticing at last.

She looked at him and he saw that her eyes were terrified. Her lips parted; she was trying to smile.

“Katie!” he gasped.

She said nothing.

“Take your coat off. Come here, get yourself warm by the fire.”

He pushed a low bench to the fireplace, he made her sit down. She was wearing a black sweater and an old black skirt, schoolgirlish house garments which she had not changed for her visit. She sat hunched, her knees drawn tight together. She said, her voice lower and more natural, with the first released sound of pain in it:

“You have such a nice place.... So warm and roomy.... Can you open the windows any time you want to?”

“Katie darling,” he said gently, “what happened?”

“Nothing. It’s not that anything really happened. Only I had to speak to you. Now. Tonight.”

He looked at Mrs. Keating. “If you’d rather ...”

“No. It’s perfectly all right. Mrs. Keating can hear it. Maybe it’s better if she hears it.” She turned to his mother and said very simply: “You see, Mrs. Keating, Peter and I are engaged.” She turned to him and added, her voice breaking: “Peter, I want to be married now, tomorrow, as soon as possible.”

Mrs. Keating’s hand descended slowly to her lap. She looked at Catherine, her eyes expressionless. She said quietly, with a dignity Keating had never expected of her:

“I didn’t know it. I am very happy, my dear.”

“You don’t mind? You really don’t mind at all?” Catherine asked desperately.

“Why, child, such things are to be decided only by you and my son.”

“Katie!” he gasped, regaining his voice. “What happened? Why as soon as possible?”

“Oh! oh, it did sound as if... as if I were in the kind of trouble girls are supposed to ...” She blushed furiously. “Oh, my God! No! It’s not that! You know it couldn’t be! Oh, you couldn’t think, Peter, that I ... that ...”

“No, of course not,” he laughed, sitting down on the floor by her side, slipping an arm around her. “But pull yourself together. What is it? You know I’d marry you tonight if you wanted me to. Only what happened?”

“Nothing. I’m all right now. I’ll tell you. You’ll think I’m crazy. I just suddenly had the feeling that I’d never marry you, that something dreadful was happening to me and I had to escape from it.”

“What was happening to you?”

“I don’t know. Not a thing. I was working on my research notes all day, and nothing had happened at all. No calls or visitors. And then suddenly tonight, I had that feeling, it was like a nightmare, you know, the kind of horror that you can’t describe, that’s not like anything normal at all. Just the feeling that I was in mortal danger, that something was closing in on me, that I’d never escape it, because it wouldn’t let me and it was too late.”

“That you’d never escape what?”

“I don’t know exactly. Everything. My whole life. You know, like quicksand. Smooth and natural. With not a thing that you can notice about it or suspect. And you walk on it easily. When you’ve noticed, it’s too late.... And I felt that it would get me, that I’d never marry you, that I had to run, now, now or never. Haven’t you ever had a feeling like that, just fear that you couldn’t explain?”

“Yes,” he whispered.

“You don’t think I’m crazy?”

“No, Katie. Only what was it exactly that started it? Anything in particular?”

“Well ... it seems so silly now.” She giggled apologetically. “It was like this: I was sitting in my room and it was a little chilly, so I didn’t open the window. I had so many papers and books on the table, I hardly had room to write and every time I made a note my elbow’d push something off. There were piles of things on the floor all around me, all paper, and it rustled a little, because I had the door to the living room half open and there was a little draft, I guess. Uncle was working too, in the living room. I was getting along fine, I’d been at it for hours, didn’t even know what time it was. And then suddenly it got me. I don’t know why. Maybe the room was stuffy, or maybe it was the silence. I couldn’t hear a thing, not a sound in the living room, and there was that paper rustling, so softly, like somebody being choked to death. And then I looked around and... and I couldn’t see Uncle in the living room, but I saw his shadow on the wall, a huge shadow, all hunched, and it didn’t move, only it was so huge!”

She shuddered. The thing did not seem silly to her any longer. She whispered:

“That’s when it got me. It wouldn’t move, that shadow, but I thought all that paper was moving, I thought it was rising very slowly off the floor, and it was going to come to my throat and I was going to drown. That’s when I screamed. And, Peter, he didn’t hear. He didn’t hear it! Because the shadow didn’t move. Then I seized my hat and coat and I ran. When I was running through the living room, I think he said: ‘Why, Catherine, what time is it?—Where are you going?’ Something like that, I’m not sure. But I didn’t look back and I didn’t answer—I couldn’t. I was afraid of him. Afraid of Uncle Ellsworth who’s never said a harsh word to me in his life! ... That was all, Peter. I can’t understand it, but I’m afraid. Not so much any more, not here with you, but I’m afraid....”

Mrs. Keating spoke, her voice dry and crisp:

“Why, it’s plain what happened to you, my dear. You worked too hard and overdid it, and you just got a mite hysterical.”

“Yes ... probably ...”

“No,” said Keating dully, “no, it wasn’t that....” He was thinking of the loud-speaker in the lobby of the strike meeting. Then he added quickly: “Yes, Mother’s right. You’re killing yourself with work, Katie. That uncle of yours—I’ll wring his neck one of these days.”

“Oh, but it’s not his fault! He doesn’t want me to work. He often takes the books away from me and tells me to go to the movies. He’s said that himself, that I work too hard. But I like it. I think that every note I make, every little bit of information—it’s going to be taught to hundreds of young students, all over the country, and I think it’s me who’s helping to educate people, just my own little bit in such a big cause—and I feel proud and I don’t want to stop. You see? I’ve really got nothing to complain about. And then ... then, like tonight... I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

“Look, Katie, we’ll get the license tomorrow morning and then we’ll be married at once, anywhere you wish.”

“Let’s, Peter,” she whispered. “You really don’t mind? I have no real reasons, but I want it. I want it so much. Then I’ll know that everything’s all right. We’ll manage. I can get a job if you... if you’re not quite ready or ...”

“Oh, nonsense. Don’t talk about that. We’ll manage. It doesn’t matter. Only let’s get married and everything else will take care of itself.”

“Darling, you understand? You do understand?”

“Yes, Katie.”

“Now that it’s all settled,” said Mrs. Keating, “I’ll fix you a cup of hot tea, Catherine. You’ll need it before you go home.”

She prepared the tea, and Catherine drank it gratefully and said, smiling:

“I ... I’ve often been afraid that you wouldn’t approve, Mrs. Keating.”

“Whatever gave you that idea,” Mrs. Keating drawled, her voice not in the tone of a question. “Now you run on home like a good girl and get a good night’s sleep.”

“Mother, couldn’t Katie stay here tonight? She could sleep with you.”

“Well, now, Peter, don’t get hysterical. What would her uncle think?”

“Oh, no, of course not. I’ll be perfectly all right, Peter. I’ll go home.”

“Not if you ...”

“I’m not afraid. Not now. I’m fine. You don’t think that I’m really scared of Uncle Ellsworth?”

“Well, all right. But don’t go yet.”

“Now, Peter,” said Mrs. Keating, “you don’t want her to be running around the streets later than she has to.”

“I’ll take her home.”

“No,” said Catherine. “I don’t want to be sillier than I am. No, I won’t let you.”

He kissed her at the door and he said: “I’ll come for you at ten o’clock tomorrow morning and we’ll go for the license.” “Yes, Peter,” she whispered.

He closed the door after her and he stood for a moment, not noticing that he was clenching his fists. Then he walked defiantly back to the living room, and he stopped, his hands in his pockets, facing his mother. He looked at her, his glance a silent demand. Mrs. Keating sat looking at him quietly, without pretending to ignore the glance and without answering it.

Then she asked:

“Do you want to go to bed, Peter?”

He had expected anything but that. He felt a violent impulse to seize the chance, to turn, leave the room and escape. But he had to learn what she thought; he had to justify himself.

“Now, Mother, I’m not going to listen to any objections.”

“I’ve made no objections,” said Mrs. Keating.

“Mother, I want you to understand that I love Katie, that nothing can stop me now, and that’s that.”

“Very well, Peter.”

“I don’t see what it is that you dislike about her.”

“What I like or dislike is of no importance to you any more.”

“Oh yes, Mother, of course it is! You know it is. How can you say that?”

“Peter, I have no likes or dislikes as far as I’m concerned. I have no thought for myself at all, because nothing in the world matters to me, except you. It might be old-fashioned, but that’s the way I am. I know I shouldn’t be, because children don’t appreciate it nowadays, but I can’t help it.”

“Oh, Mother, you know that I appreciate it! You know that I wouldn’t want to hurt you.”

“You can’t hurt me, Peter, except by hurting yourself. And that ... that’s hard to bear.”

“How am I hurting myself?”

“Well, if you won’t refuse to listen to me ...”

“I’ve never refused to listen to you!”

“If you do want to hear my opinion, I’ll say that this is the funeral of twenty-nine years of my life, of all the hopes I’ve had for you.”

“But why? Why?”

“It’s not that I dislike Catherine, Peter. I like her very much. She’s a nice girl—if she doesn’t let herself go to pieces often and pick things out of thin air like that. But she’s a respectable girl and I’d say she’d make a good wife for anybody. For any nice, plodding, respectable boy. But to think of it for you, Peter! For you!”

“But...”

“You’re modest, Peter. You’re too modest. That’s always been your trouble. You don’t appreciate yourself. You think you’re just like anybody else.”

“I certainly don’t! And I won’t have anyone think that!”

“Then use your head! Don’t you know what’s ahead of you? Don’t you see how far you’ve come already and how far you’re going? You have a chance to become—well, not the very best, but pretty near the top in the architectural profession, and ...”

“Pretty near the top? Is that what you think? If I can’t be the very best, if I can’t be the one architect of this country in my day—I don’t want any damn part of it!”

“Ah, but one doesn’t get to that, Peter, by falling down on the job. One doesn’t get to be first in anything without the strength to make some sacrifices.”

“But ...”

“Your life doesn’t belong to you, Peter, if you’re really aiming high. You can’t allow yourself to indulge every whim, as ordinary people can, because with them it doesn’t matter anyway. It’s not you or me or what we feel, Peter. It’s your career. It takes strength to deny yourself in order to win other people’s respect.”

“You just dislike Katie and you let your own prejudice ...”

“Whatever would I dislike about her? Well, of course, I can’t say that I approve of a girl who has so little consideration for her man that she’ll run to him and upset him over nothing at all, and ask him to chuck his future out the window just because she gets some crazy notion. That shows what help you can expect from a wife like that. But as far as I’m concerned, if you think that I’m worried about myself—well, you’re just blind, Peter. Don’t you see that for me personally it would be a perfect match? Because I’d have no trouble with Catherine, I could get along with her beautifully, she’d be respectful and obedient to her mother-in-law. While, on the other hand, Miss Francon ...”

He winced. He had known that this would come. It was the one subject he had been afraid to hear mentioned.

“Oh yes, Peter,” said Mrs. Keating quietly, firmly, “we’ve got to speak of that. Now, I’m sure I could never manage Miss Francon, and an elegant society girl like that wouldn’t even stand for a dowdy, uneducated mother like me. She’d probably edge me out of the house. Oh, yes, Peter. But you see, it’s not me that I’m thinking of.”

“Mother,” he said harshly, “that part of it is pure drivel—about my having a chance with Dominique. That hell-cat—I’m not sure she’d ever look at me.”

“You’re slipping, Peter. There was a time when you wouldn’t have admitted that there was anything you couldn’t get.”

“But I don’t want her, Mother.”

“Oh, you don’t, don’t you? Well, there you are. Isn’t that what I’ve been saying? Look at yourself! There you’ve got Francon, the best architect in town, just where you want him! He’s practically begging you to take a partnership—at your age, over how many other, older men’s heads? He’s not permitting, he’s asking you to marry his daughter! And you’ll walk in tomorrow and you’ll present to him the little nobody you’ve gone and married! Just stop thinking of yourself for a moment and think of others a bit! How do you suppose he’ll like that? How will he like it when you show him the little guttersnipe that you’ve preferred to his daughter?”

“He won’t like it,” Keating whispered.

“You bet your life he won’t! You bet your life he’ll kick you right out on the street! He’ll find plenty who’ll jump at the chance to take your place. How about that Bennett fellow?”

“Oh, no!” Keating gasped so furiously that she knew she had struck right. “Not Bennett!”

“Yes,” she said triumphantly. “Bennett! That’s what it’ll be—Francon & Bennett, while you’ll be pounding the pavements looking for a job! But you’ll have a wife! Oh, yes, you’ll have a wife!”

“Mother, please ...” he whispered, so desperately that she could allow herself to go on without restraint.

“This is the kind of wife you’ll have. A clumsy little girl who won’t know where to put her hands or feet. A sheepish little thing who’ll run and hide from any important person that you’ll want to bring to the house. So you think you’re so good? Don’t kid yourself, Peter Keating! No great man ever got there alone. Don’t you shrug it off, how much the right woman’s helped the best of them. Your Francon didn’t marry a chambermaid, you bet your life he didn’t! Just try to see things through other people’s eyes for a bit. What will they think of your wife? What will they think of you? You don’t make your living building chicken coops for soda jerkers, don’t you forget that! You’ve got to play the game as the big men of this world see it. You’ve got to live up to them. What will they think of a man who’s married to a common little piece of baggage like that? Will they admire you? Will they trust you? Will they respect you?”

“Shut up!” he cried.

But she went on. She spoke for a long time, while he sat, cracking his knuckles savagely, moaning once in a while; “But I love her.... I can’t, Mother! I can’t.... I love her....”

She released him when the streets outside were gray with the light of morning. She let him stumble off to his room, to the accompaniment of the last, gentle, weary sounds of her voice:

“At least, Peter, you can do that much. Just a few months. Ask her to wait just a few months. Heyer might die any moment and then, once you’re a partner, you can marry her and you might get away with it. She won’t mind waiting just that little bit longer, if she loves you.... Think it over, Peter.... And while you’re thinking it over, think just a bit that if you do this now, you’ll be breaking your mother’s heart. It’s not important, but take just a tiny notice of that. Think of yourself for an hour, but give one minute to the thought of others....”

He did not try to sleep. He did not undress, but sat on his bed for hours, and the thing clearest in his mind was the wish to find himself transported a year ahead when everything would have been settled, he did not care how.

He had decided nothing when he rang the door bell of Catherine’s apartment at ten o’clock. He felt dimly that she would take his hand, that she would lead him, that she would insist—and thus the decision would be made.

Catherine opened the door and smiled, happily and confidently, as if nothing had happened. She led him to her room, where broad shafts of sunlight flooded the columns of books and papers stacked neatly on her desk. The room was clean, orderly, the pile of the rug still striped in bands left by a carpet sweeper. Catherine wore a crisp organdy blouse, with sleeves standing stiffly, cheerfully about her shoulders; little fluffy needles glittered through her hair in the sunlight. He felt a brief wrench of disappointment that no menace met him in her house; a wrench of relief also, and of disappointment.

“I’m ready, Peter,” she said. “Get me my coat.”

“Did you tell your uncle?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. I told him last night. He was still working when I got back.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing. He just laughed and asked me what I wanted for a wedding present. But he laughed so much!”

“Where is he? Didn’t he want to meet me at least?”

“He had to go to his newspaper office. He said he’d have plenty of time to see more than enough of you. But he said it so nicely!”

“Listen, Katie, I ... there’s one thing I wanted to tell you.” He hesitated, not looking at her. His voice was flat. “You see, it’s like this: Lucius Heyer, Francon’s partner, is very ill and they don’t expect him to live. Francon’s been hinting quite openly that I’m to take Heyer’s place. But Francon has the crazy idea that he wants me to marry his daughter. Now don’t misunderstand me, you know there’s not a chance, but I can’t tell him so. And I thought ... I thought that if we waited... for just a few weeks... I’d be set with the firm and then Francon could do nothing to me when I come and tell him that I’m married.... But, of course it’s up to you.” He looked at her and his voice was eager. “If you want to do it now, we’ll go at once.”

“But, Peter,” she said calmly, serene and astonished. “But of course. We’ll wait.”

He smiled in approval and relief. But he closed his eyes.

“Of course, we’ll wait,” she said firmly. “I didn’t know this and it’s very important. There’s really no reason to hurry at all.”

“You’re not afraid that Francon’s daughter might get me?”

She laughed. “Oh, Peter! I know you too well.”

“But if you’d rather ...”

“No, it’s much better. You see, to tell you the truth, I thought this morning that it would be better if we waited, but I didn’t want to say anything if you had made up your mind. Since you’d rather wait, I’d much rather too, because, you see, we got word this morning that Uncle’s invited to repeat this same course of lectures at a terribly important university on the West Coast this summer. I felt horrible about leaving him flat, with the work unfinished. And then I thought also that perhaps we were being foolish, we’re both so young. And Uncle Ellsworth laughed so much. You see, it’s really wiser to wait a little.”

“Yes. Well, that’s fine. But, Katie, if you feel as you did last night...”

“But I don’t! I’m so ashamed of myself. I can’t imagine what ever happened to me last night. I try to remember it and I can’t understand. You know how it is, you feel so silly afterward. Everything’s so clear and simple the next day. Did I say a lot of awful nonsense last night?”

“Well, forget it. You’re a sensible little girl. We’re both sensible. And we’ll wait just a while, it won’t be long.”

“Yes, Peter.”

He said suddenly, fiercely:

“Insist on it now, Katie.”

And then he laughed stupidly, as if he had not been quite serious.

She smiled gaily in answer. “You see?” she said, spreading her hands out.

“Well ...” he muttered. “Well, all right, Katie. We’ll wait. It’s better, of course. I ... I’ll run along then. I’ll be late at the office.” He felt he had to escape her room for the moment, for that day. “I’ll give you a ring. Let’s have dinner together tomorrow.”

“Yes, Peter. That will be nice.”

He went away, relieved and desolate, cursing himself for the dull, persistent feeling that told him he had missed a chance which would never return; that something was closing in on them both and they had surrendered. He cursed, because he could not say what it was that they should have fought. He hurried on to his office where he was being late for an appointment with Mrs. Moorehead.

Catherine stood in the middle of the room, after he had left, and wondered why she suddenly felt empty and cold; why she hadn’t known until this moment that she had hoped he would force her to follow him. Then she shrugged, and smiled reproachfully at herself, and went back to the work on her desk.

XIII

ON A DAY IN OCTOBER, WHEN THE HELLER HOUSE WAS NEARING completion, a lanky young man in overalls stepped out of a small group that stood watching the house from the road and approached Roark.

“You the fellow who built the Booby Hatch?” he asked, quite diffidently.

“If you mean this house, yes,” Roark answered.

“Oh, I beg your pardon, sir. It’s only that that’s what they call the place around here. It’s not what I’d call it. You see, I’ve got a building job... well, not exactly, but I’m going to build a filling station of my own about ten miles from here, down on the Post Road. I’d like to talk to you.”

Later, on a bench in front of the garage where he worked, Jimmy Gowan explained in detail. He added: “And how I happened to think of you, Mr. Roark, is that I like it, that funny house of yours. Can’t say why, but I like it. It makes sense to me. And then again I figured everybody’s gaping at it and talking about it, well, that’s no use to a house, but that’d be plenty smart for a business, let them giggle, but let them talk about it. So I thought I’d get you to build it, and then they’ll all say I’m crazy, but do you care? I don’t.”

Jimmy Gowan had worked like a mule for fifteen years, saving money for a business of his own. People voiced indignant objections to his choice of architect; Jimmy uttered no word of explanation or self-defense; he said politely: “Maybe so, folks, maybe so,” and proceeded to have Roark build his station.

The station opened on a day in late December. It stood on the edge of the Boston Post Road, two small structures of glass and concrete forming a semicircle among the trees: the cylinder of the office and the long, low oval of the diner, with the gasoline pumps as the colonnade of a forecourt between them. It was a study in circles; there were no angles and no straight lines; it looked like shapes caught in a flow, held still at the moment of being poured, at the precise moment when they formed a harmony that seemed too perfect to be intentional. It looked like a cluster of bubbles hanging low over the ground, not quite touching it, to be swept aside in an instant on a wind of speed; it looked gay, with the hard, bracing gaity of efficiency, like a powerful airplane engine.

Roark stayed at the station on the day of its opening. He drank coffee in a clean, white mug, at the counter of the diner, and he watched the cars stopping at the door. He left late at night. He looked back once, driving down the long, empty road. The lights of the station winked, flowing away from him. There it stood, at the crossing of two roads, and cars would be streaming past it day and night, cars coming from cities in which there was no room for buildings such as this, going to cities in which there would be no buildings such as this. He turned his face to the road before him, and he kept his eyes off the mirror which still held, glittering softly, dots of light that moved away far behind him....

He drove back to months of idleness. He sat in his office each morning, because he knew that he had to sit there, looking at a door that never opened, his fingers forgotten on a telephone that never rang. The ash trays he emptied each day, before leaving, contained nothing but the stubs of his own cigarettes.

“What are you doing about it, Howard?” Austen Heller asked him at dinner one evening.

“Nothing.”

“But you must.”

“There’s nothing I can do.”

“You must learn how to handle people.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know how. I was born without some one particular sense.”

“It’s something one acquires.”

“I have no organ to acquire it with. I don’t know whether it’s something I lack, or something extra I have that stops me. Besides, I don’t like people who have to be handled.”

“But you can’t sit still and do nothing now. You’ve got to go after commissions.”

“What can I tell people in order to get commissions? I can only show my work. If they don’t hear that, they won’t hear anything I say. I’m nothing to them, but my work—my work is all we have in common. And I have no desire to tell them anything else.”

“Then what are you going to do? You’re not worried?”

“No. I expected it. I’m waiting.”

“For what?”

“My kind of people.”

“What kind is that?”

“I don’t know. Yes, I do know, but I can’t explain it. I’ve often wished I could. There must be some one principle to cover it, but I don’t know what it is.”

“Honesty?”

“Yes ... no, only partly. Guy Francon is an honest man, but it isn’t that. Courage? Ralston Holcombe has courage, in his own manner.... I don’t know. I’m not that vague on other things. But I can tell my kind of people by their faces. By something in their faces. There will be thousands passing by your house and by the gas station. If out of those thousands, one stops and sees it—that’s all I need.”

“Then you do need other people, after all, don’t you, Howard?”

“Of course. What are you laughing at?”

“I’ve always thought that you were the most anti-social animal I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.”

“I need people to give me work. I’m not building mausoleums. Do you suppose I should need them in some other way? In a closer, more personal way?”

“You don’t need anyone in a very personal way.”

“No.”

“You’re not even boasting about it.”

“Should I?”

“You can’t. You’re too arrogant to boast.”

“Is that what I am?”

“Don’t you know what you are?”

“No. Not as far as you’re seeing me, or anyone else.”

Heller sat silently, his wrist describing circles with a cigarette. Then Heller laughed, and said:

“That was typical.”

“What?”

“That you didn’t ask me to tell you what you are as I see you. Anybody else would have.”

“I’m sorry. It wasn’t indifference. You’re one of the few friends I want to keep. I just didn’t think of asking.”

“I know you didn’t. That’s the point. You’re a self-centered monster, Howard. The more monstrous because you’re utterly innocent about it.”

“That’s true.”

“You should show a little concern when you admit that.”

“Why?”

“You know, there’s a thing that stumps me. You’re the coldest man I know. And I can’t understand why—knowing that you’re actually a fiend in your quiet sort of way—why I always feel, when I see you, that you’re the most life-giving person I’ve ever met.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Just that.”

The weeks went by, and Roark walked to his office each day, sat at his desk for eight hours, and read a great deal. At five o’clock, he walked home. He had moved to a better room, near the office; he spent little; he had enough money for a long time to come.

On a morning in February the telephone rang in his office. A brisk, emphatic feminine voice asked for an appointment with Mr. Roark, the architect. That afternoon, a brisk, small, dark-skinned woman entered the office; she wore a mink coat and exotic earrings that tinkled when she moved her head. She moved her head a great deal, in sharp little birdlike jerks. She was Mrs. Wayne Wilmot of Long Island and she wished to build a country house. She had selected Mr. Roark to build it, she explained, because he had designed the home of Austen Heller. She adored Austen Heller; he was, she stated, an oracle to all those pretending just the tiniest bit to the title of progressive intellectual, she thought—“don’t you?”—and she followed Heller like a zealot, “yes, literally, like a zealot.” Mr. Roark was very young, wasn’t he?—but she didn’t mind that, she was very liberal and glad to help youth. She wanted a large house, she had two children, she believed in expressing their individuality—“don’t you?”—and each had to have a separate nursery, she had to have a library—“I read to distraction”—a music room, a conservatory—“we grow lilies-of-the-valley, my friends tell me it’s my flower”—a den for her husband, who trusted her implicitly and let her plan the house—“because I’m so good at it, if I weren’t a woman I’m sure I’d be an architect”—servants’ rooms and all that, and a three-car garage. After an hour and a half of details and explanations, she said:

“And of course, as to the style of the house, it will be English Tudor. I adore English Tudor.”

He looked at her. He asked slowly:

“Have you seen Austen Heller’s house?”

“No, though I did want to see it, but how could I?—I’ve never met Mr. Heller, I’m only his fan, just that, a plain, ordinary fan, what is he like in person?—you must tell me, I’m dying to hear it—no, I haven’t seen his house, it’s somewhere up in Maine, isn’t it?”

Roark took photographs out of the desk drawer and handed them to her.

“This,” he said, “is the Heller house.”

She looked at the photographs, her glance like water skimming off their glossy surfaces, and threw them down on the desk.

“Very interesting,” she said. “Most unusual. Quite stunning. But, of course, that’s not what I want. That kind of a house wouldn’t express my personality. My friends tell me I have the Elizabethan personality.”

Quietly, patiently, he tried to explain to her why she should not build a Tudor house. She interrupted him in the middle of a sentence.

“Look here, Mr. Roark, you’re not trying to teach me something, are you? I’m quite sure that I have good taste, and I know a great deal about architecture, I’ve taken a special course at the club. My friends tell me that I know more than many architects. I’ve quite made up my mind that I shall have an English Tudor house. I do not care to argue about it.”

“You’ll have to go to some other architect, Mrs. Wilmot.”

She stared at him incredulously.

“You mean, you’re refusing the commission?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want my commission?”

“No.”

“But why?”

“I don’t do this sort of thing.”

“But I thought architects ...”

“Yes. Architects will build you anything you ask for. Any other architect in town will.”

“But I gave you first chance.”

“Will you do me a favor, Mrs. Wilmot? Will you tell me why you came to me if all you wanted was a Tudor house?”

“Well, I certainly thought you’d appreciate the opportunity. And then, I thought I could tell my friends that I had Austen Heller’s architect.”

He tried to explain and to convince. He knew, while he spoke, that it was useless, because his words sounded as if they were hitting a vacuum. There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture postcards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton.

“I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Wayne Wilmot, “but I’m not accustomed to dealing with a person utterly incapable of reason. I’m quite sure I shall find plenty of bigger men who’ll be glad to work for me. My husband was opposed to my idea of having you, in the first place, and I’m sorry to see that he was right. Good day, Mr. Roark.”

She walked out with dignity, but she slammed the door. He slipped the photographs back into the drawer of his desk.

Mr. Robert L. Mundy, who came to Roark’s office in March, had been sent by Austen Heller. Mr. Mundy’s voice and hair were gray as steel, but his eyes were blue, gentle and wistful. He wanted to build a house in Connecticut, and he spoke of it tremulously, like a young bridegroom and like a man groping for his last, secret goal.

“It’s not just a house, Mr. Roark,” he said with timid diffidence, as if he were speaking to a man older and more prominent than himself, “it’s like ... like a symbol to me. It’s what I’ve been waiting and working for all these years. It’s so many years now.... I must tell you this, so you’ll understand. I have a great deal of money now, more than I care to think about. I didn’t always have it. Maybe it came too late. I don’t know. Young people think that you forget what happens on the way when you get there. But you don’t. Something stays. I’ll always remember how I was a boy—in a little place down in Georgia, that was—and how I ran errands for the harness maker, and the kids laughed when carriages drove by and splashed mud all over my pants. That’s how long ago I decided that some day I’d have a house of my own, the kind of a house that carriages stop before. After that, no matter how hard it got to be at times, I’d always think of that house, and it helped. Afterward, there were years when I was afraid of it—I could have built it, but I was afraid. Well, now the time has come. Do you understand, Mr. Roark? Austen said you’d be just the man who’d understand.”

“Yes,” said Roark eagerly, “I do.”

“There was a place,” said Mr. Mundy, “down there, near my home town. The mansion of the whole county. The Randolph place. An old plantation house, as they don’t build them any more. I used to deliver things there sometimes, at the back door. That’s the house I want, Mr. Roark. Just like it. But not back there in Georgia. I don’t want to go back. Right here, near the city. I’ve bought the land. You must help me to have it landscaped just like the Randolph place. We’ll plant trees and shrubs, the kind they have in Georgia, the flowers and everything. We’ll find a way to make them grow. I don’t care how much it costs. Of course, we’ll have electric lights and garages now, not carriages. But I want the electric lights made like candles and I want the garages to look like the stables. Everything, just as it was. I have photographs of the Randolph place. And I’ve bought some of their old furniture.”

When Roark began to speak Mr. Mundy listened, in polite astonishment. He did not seem to resent the words. They did not penetrate.

“Don’t you see?” Roark was saying. “It’s a monument you want to build, but not to yourself. Not to your life or your own achievement. To other people. To their supremacy over you. You’re not challenging that supremacy. You’re immortalizing it. You haven’t thrown it off—you’re putting it up forever. Will you be happy if you seal yourself for the rest of your life in that borrowed shape? Or if you strike free, for once, and build a new house, your own? You don’t want the Randolph place. You want what it stood for. But what it stood for is what you’ve fought all your life.”

Mr. Mundy listened blankly. And Roark felt again a bewildered helplessness before unreality: there was no such person as Mr. Mundy; there were only the remnants, long dead, of the people who had inhabited the Randolph place; one could not plead with remnants or convince them.

“No,” said Mr. Mundy, at last. “No. You may be right, but that’s not what I want at all. I don’t say you haven’t got your reasons, and they sound like good reasons, but I like the Randolph place.”

“Why?”

“Just because I like it. Just because that’s what I like.”

When Roark told him that he would have to select another architect, Mr. Mundy said unexpectedly:

“But I like you. Why can’t you build it for me? What difference would it make to you?”

Roark did not explain.

Later, Austen Heller said to him: “I expected it. I was afraid you’d turn him down. I’m not blaming you, Howard. Only he’s so rich. It could have helped you so much. And, after all, you’ve got to live.”

“Not that way,” said Roark.

In April Mr. Nathaniel Janss, of the Janss-Stuart Real Estate Company, called Roark to his office. Mr. Janss was frank and blunt. He stated that his company was planning the erection of a small office building—thirty stories—on lower Broadway, and that he was not sold on Roark as the architect, in fact he was more or less opposed to him, but his friend Austen Heller had insisted that he should meet Roark and talk to him about it; Mr. Janss did not think very much of Roark’s stuff, but Heller had simply bullied him and he would listen to Roark before deciding on anyone, and what did Roark have to say on the subject?

Roark had a great deal to say. He said it calmly, and this was difficult, at first, because he wanted that building, because what he felt was the desire to wrench that building out of Mr. Janss at the point of a gun, if he’d had one. But after a few minutes, it became simple and easy, the thought of the gun vanished, and even his desire for the building; it was not a commission to get and he was not there to get it; he was only speaking of buildings.

“Mr. Janss, when you buy an automobile, you don’t want it to have rose garlands about the windows, a lion on each fender and an angel sitting on the roof. Why don’t you?”

“That would be silly,” stated Mr. Janss.

“Why would it be silly? Now I think it would be beautiful. Besides, Louis the Fourteenth had a carriage like that and what was good enough for Louis is good enough for us. We shouldn’t go in for rash innovations and we shouldn’t break with tradition.”

“Now you know damn well you don’t believe anything of the sort!”

“I know I don’t. But that’s what you believe, isn’t it? Now take a human body. Why wouldn’t you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don’t you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn’t a single muscle which doesn’t serve its purpose; that there’s not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man. Will you tell me why, when it comes to a building, you don’t want it to look as if it had any sense or purpose, you want to choke it with trimmings, you want to sacrifice its purpose to its envelope—not knowing even why you want that kind of an envelope? You want it to look like a hybrid beast produced by crossing the bastards of ten different species until you get a creature without guts, without heart or brain, a creature all pelt, tail, claws and feathers? Why? You must tell me, because I’ve never been able to understand it.”

“Well,” said Mr. Janss, “I’ve never thought of it that way.” He added, without great conviction: “But we want our building to have dignity, you know, and beauty, what they call real beauty.”

“What who calls what beauty?”

“Well-1-1 ...”

“Tell me, Mr. Janss, do you really think that Greek columns and fruit baskets are beautiful on a modern, steel office building?”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever thought anything about why a building was beautiful, one way or another,” Mr. Janss confessed, “but I guess that’s what the public wants.”

“Why do you suppose they want it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why should you care what they want?”

“You’ve got to consider the public.”

“Don’t you know that most people take most things because that’s what’s given them, and they have no opinion whatever? Do you wish to be guided by what they expect you to think they think or by your own judgment?”

“You can’t force it down their throats.”

“You don’t have to. You must only be patient. Because on your side you have reason—oh, I know, it’s something no one really wants to have on his side—and against you, you have just a vague, fat, blind inertia.”

“Why do you think that I don’t want reason on my side?”

“It’s not you, Mr. Janss. It’s the way most people feel. They have to take a chance, everything they do is taking a chance, but they feel so much safer when they take it on something they know to be ugly, vain and stupid.”

“That’s true, you know,” said Mr. Janss.

At the conclusion of the interview, Mr. Janss said thoughtfully:

“I can’t say that it doesn’t make sense, Mr. Roark. Let me think it over. You’ll hear from me shortly.”

Mr. Janss called him a week later. “It’s the Board of Directors that will have to decide. Are you willing to try, Roark? Draw up the plans and some preliminary sketches. I’ll submit them to the Board. I can’t promise anything. But I’m for you and I’ll fight them on it.”

Roark worked on the plans for two weeks of days and nights. The plans were submitted. Then he was called before the board of directors of the Janss-Stuart Real Estate Company. He stood at the side of a long table and he spoke, his eyes moving slowly from face to face. He tried not to look down at the table, but on the lower rim of his vision there remained the white spot of his drawings spread before the twelve men. He was asked a great many questions. Mr. Janss jumped up at times to answer instead, to pound the table with his fist, to snarl: “Don’t you see? Isn’t it clear? ... What of it, Mr. Grant? What if no one has ever built anything like it? ... Gothic, Mr. Hubbard? Why must we have Gothic? ... I’ve a jolly good mind to resign if you turn this down!”

Roark spoke quietly. He was the only man in the room who felt certain of his own words. He felt also that he had no hope. The twelve faces before him had a variety of countenances, but there was something, neither color nor feature, upon all of them, as a common denominator, something that dissolved their expressions, so that they were not faces any longer but only empty ovals of flesh. He was addressing everyone. He was addressing no one. He felt no answer, not even the echo of his own words striking against the membrane of an eardrum. His words were falling down a well, hitting stone salients on their way, and each salient refused to stop them, threw them farther, tossed them from one another, sent them to seek a bottom that did not exist.

He was told that he would be informed of the Board’s decision. He knew that decision in advance. When he received the letter, he read it without feeling. The letter was from Mr. Janss and it began: “Dear Mr. Roark, I am sorry to inform you that our Board of Directors find themselves unable to grant you the commission for ...” There was a plea in the letter’s brutal, offensive formality: the plea of a man who could not face him.

John Fargo had started in life as a pushcart peddler. At fifty he owned a modest fortune and a prosperous department store on lower Sixth Avenue. For years he had fought successfully against a larger store across the street, one of many inherited by a numerous family. In the fall of last year the family had moved that particular branch to new quarters, farther uptown. They were convinced that the center of the city’s retail business was shifting north and they had decided to hasten the downfall of their former neighborhood by leaving their old store vacant, a grim reminder and embarrassment to their competitor across the street. John Fargo had answered by announcing that he would build a new store of his own, on the very same spot, next door to his old one; a store newer and smarter than any the city had seen; he would, he declared, keep the prestige of his old neighborhood.

When he called Roark to his office he did not say that he would have to decide later or think things over. He said: “You’re the architect.” He sat, his feet on his desk, smoking a pipe, snapping out words and puffs of smoke together. “I’ll tell you what space I need and how much I want to spend. If you need more—say so. The rest is up to you. I don’t know much about buildings. But I know a man who knows when I see him. Go ahead.”

Fargo had chosen Roark because Fargo had driven, one day, past Gowan’s Service Station, and stopped, and gone in, and asked a few questions. After that, he bribed Heller’s cook to show him through the house in Heller’s absence. Fargo needed no further argument.

Late in May, when the drafting table in Roark’s office was buried deep in sketches for the Fargo store, he received another commission.

Mr. Whitford Sanborn, the client, owned an office building that had been built for him many years ago by Henry Cameron. When Mr. Sanborn decided that he needed a new country residence he rejected his wife’s suggestions of other architects; he wrote to Henry Cameron. Cameron wrote a ten-page letter in answer; the first three lines of the letter stated that he had retired from practice; the rest of it was about Howard Roark. Roark never learned what had been said in that letter; Sanborn would not show it to him and Cameron would not tell him. But Sanborn signed him to build the country residence, in spite of Mrs. Sanborn’s violent objections.

Mrs. Sanborn was the president of many charity organizations and this had given her an addiction to autocracy such as no other avocation could develop. Mrs. Sanborn wished a French chateau built upon their new estate on the Hudson. She wished it to look stately and ancient, as if it had always belonged to the family; of course, she admitted, people would know that it hadn’t, but it would appear as if it had.

Mr. Sanborn signed the contract after Roark had explained to him in detail the kind of a house he was to expect; Mr. Sanborn had agreed to it readily, had not wished even to wait for sketches. “But of course, Fanny,” Mr. Sanborn said wearily, “I want a modern house. I told you that long ago. That’s what Cameron would have designed.” “What in heaven’s name does Cameron mean now?” she asked. “I don’t know, Fanny. I know only that there’s no building in New York like the one he did for me.”

The arguments continued for many long evenings in the dark, cluttered, polished mahogany splendor of the Sanborns’ Victorian drawing room. Mr. Sanborn wavered. Roark asked, his arm sweeping out at the room around them: “Is this what you want?” “Well, if you’re going to be impertinent ...” Mrs. Sanborn began, but Mr. Sanborn exploded: “Christ, Fanny! He’s right! That’s just what I don’t want! That’s just what I’m sick of!”

Roark saw no one until his sketches were ready. The house—of plain field stone, with great windows and many terraces—stood in the gardens over the river, as spacious as the spread of water, as open as the gardens, and one had to follow its lines attentively to find the exact steps by which it was tied to the sweep of the gardens, so gradual was the rise of the terraces, the approach to and the full reality of the walls; it seemed only that the trees flowed into the house and through it; it seemed that the house was not a barrier against sunlight, but a bowl to gather it, to concentrate it into brighter radiance than that of the air outside.

Mr. Sanborn was first to see the sketches. He studied them, and then he said: “I ... I don’t know quite how to say it, Mr. Roark. It’s great. Cameron was right about you.”

After others had seen the sketches Mr. Sanborn was not certain of this any longer. Mrs. Sanborn said that the house was awful. And the long evening arguments were resumed. “Now why, why can’t we add turrets there, on the corners?” Mrs. Sanborn asked. “There’s plenty of room on those flat roofs.” When she had been talked out of the turrets, she inquired: “Why can’t we have mullioned windows? What difference would that make? God knows, the windows are large enough—though why they have to be so large I fail to see, it gives one no privacy at all—but I’m willing to accept your windows, Mr. Roark, if you’re so stubborn about it, but why can’t you put mullions on the panes? It will soften things, and it gives a regal air, you know, a feudal sort of mood.”

The friends and relatives to whom Mrs. Sanborn hurried with the sketches did not like the house at all. Mrs. Walling called it preposterous, and Mrs. Hooper—crude. Mr. Melander said he wouldn’t have it as a present. Mrs. Applebee stated that it looked like a shoe factory. Miss Davitt glanced at the sketches and said with approval: “Oh, how very artistic, my dear! Who designed it? ... Roark? ... Roark? ... Never heard of him.... Well, frankly, Fanny, it looks like something phony.”

The two children of the family were divided on the question. June Sanborn, aged nineteen, had always thought that all architects were romantic, and she had been delighted to learn that they would have a very young architect; but she did not like Roark’s appearance and his indifference to her hints, so she declared that the house was hideous and she, for one, would refuse to live in it. Richard Sanborn, aged twenty-four, who had been a brilliant student in college and was now slowly drinking himself to death, startled his family by emerging from his usual lethargy and declaring that the house was magnificent. No one could tell whether it was esthetic appreciation or hatred of his mother or both.

Whitford Sanborn swayed with every new current. He would mutter: “Well, now, not mullions, of course, that’s utter rubbish, but couldn’t you give her a cornice, Mr. Roark, to keep peace in the family? Just a kind of a crenelated cornice, it wouldn’t spoil anything. Or would it?”

The arguments ended when Roark declared that he would not build the house unless Mr. Sanborn approved the sketches just as they were and signed his approval on every sheet of the drawings. Mr. Sanborn signed.

Mrs. Sanborn was pleased to learn, shortly afterward, that no reputable contractor would undertake the erection of the house. “You see?” she started triumphantly. Mr. Sanborn refused to see. He found an obscure firm that accepted the commission grudgingly and as a special favor to him. Mrs. Sanborn learned that she had an ally in the contractor, and she broke social precedent to the extent of inviting him for tea. She had long since lost all coherent ideas about the house; she merely hated Roark. Her contractor hated all architects on principle.

The construction of the Sanborn house proceeded through the months of summer and fall, each day bringing new battles. “But, of course, Mr. Roark, I told you I wanted three closets in my bedroom, I remember distinctly, it was on a Friday and we were sitting in the drawing room and Mr. Sanborn was sitting in the big chair by the window and I was ... What about the plans? What plans? How do you expect me to understand plans?” “Aunt Rosalie says she can’t possibly climb a circular stairway, Mr. Roark. What are we going to do? Select our guests to fit your house?” “Mr. Hulburt says that kind of a ceiling won’t hold.... Oh, yes, Mr. Hulburt knows a lot about architecture. He’s spent two summers in Venice.” “June, poor darling, says her room will be dark as a cellar.... Well, that’s the way she feels, Mr. Roark. Even if it isn’t dark, but if it makes her feel dark, it’s the same thing.” Roark stayed up nights, redrafting the plans for the alterations which he could not avoid. It meant days of tearing down floors, stairways, partitions already erected; it meant extras piling up on the contractor’s budget. The contractor shrugged and said: “I told you so. That’s what always happens when you get one of those fancy architects. You wait and see what this thing will cost you before he gets through.”

Then, as the house took shape, it was Roark who found that he wanted to make a change. The eastern wing had never quite satisfied him. Watching it rise, he saw the mistake he had made and the way to correct it; he knew it would bring the house into a more logical whole. He was making his first steps in building and they were his first experiments. He could admit it openly. But Mr. Sanborn refused to allow the change; it was his turn. Roark pleaded with him; once the picture of that new wing had become clear in Roark’s mind he could not bear to look at the house as it stood. “It’s not that I disagree with you,” Mr. Sanborn said coldly, “in fact, I do think you’re right. But we cannot afford it. Sorry.” “It will cost you less than the senseless changes Mrs. Sanborn has forced me to make.” “Don’t bring that up again.” “Mr. Sanborn,” Roark asked slowly, “will you sign a paper that you authorize this change provided it costs you nothing?” “Certainly. If you can conjure up a miracle to work that.”

He signed. The eastern wing was rebuilt. Roark paid for it himself. It cost him more than the fee he received. Mr. Sanborn hesitated: he wanted to repay it. Mrs. Sanborn stopped him. “It’s just a low trick,” she said, “just a form of high-pressure. He’s blackmailing you on your better feelings. He expects you to pay. Wait and see. He’ll ask for it. Don’t let him get away with that.” Roark did not ask for it. Mr. Sanborn never paid him.

When the house was completed, Mrs. Sanborn refused to live in it. Mr. Sanborn looked at it wistfully, too tired to admit that he loved it, that he had always wanted a home just like it. He surrendered. The house was not furnished. Mrs. Sanborn took herself, her husband and her daughter off to Florida for the winter, “where,” she said, “we have a house that’s a decent Spanish, thank God!—because we bought it ready-made. This is what happens when you venture to build for yourself, with some half-baked idiot of an architect!” Her son, to everybody’s amazement, exhibited a sudden burst of savage will power: he refused to go to Florida; he liked the new house, he would live nowhere else. So three of the rooms were furnished for him. The family left and he moved alone into the house on the Hudson. At night, one could see from the river a single rectangle of yellow, small and lost, among the windows of the huge, dead house.

The bulletin of the Architects’ Guild of America carried a small item:

“A curious incident, which would be amusing if it were not deplorable, is reported to us about a home recently built by Mr. Whitford Sanborn, noted industrialist. Designed by one Howard Roark and erected at a cost of well over $100,000, this house was found by the family to be uninhabitable. It stands now, abandoned, as an eloquent witness to professional incompetence.”

XIV

LICIUS N. HEYER STUBBORNLY REFUSED TO DIE. HE HAD RECOVERED from the stroke and returned to his office, ignoring the objections of his doctor and the solicitous protests of Guy Francon. Francon offered to buy him out. Heyer refused, his pale, watering eyes staring obstinately at nothing at all. He came to his office every two or three days; he read the copies of correspondence left in his letter basket according to custom; he sat at his desk and drew flowers on a clean pad; then he went home. He walked, dragging his feet slowly; he held his elbows pressed to his sides and his forearms thrust forward, with the fingers half closed, like claws; the fingers shook; he could not use his left hand at all. He would not retire. He liked to see his name on the firm’s stationery.

He wondered dimly why he was no longer introduced to prominent clients, why he never saw the sketches of their new buildings, until they were half erected. If he mentioned this, Francon protested: “But Lucius, I couldn’t think of bothering you in your condition. Any other man would have retired, long ago.”

Francon puzzled him mildly. Peter Keating baffled him. Keating barely bothered to greet him when they met, and then as an afterthought; Keating walked off in the middle of a sentence addressed to him; when Heyer issued some minor order to one of the draftsmen, it was not carried out and the draftsman informed him that the order had been countermanded by Mr. Keating. Heyer could not understand it; he always remembered Keating as the diffident boy who had talked to him so nicely about old porcelain. He excused Keating at first; then he tried to mollify him, humbly and clumsily; then he conceived an unreasoning fear of Keating. He complained to Francon. He said, petulantly, assuming the tone of an authority he could never have exercised: “That boy of yours, Guy, that Keating fellow, he’s getting to be impossible. He’s rude to me. You ought to get rid of him.” “Now you see, Lucius,” Francon answered dryly, “why I say that you should retire. You’re overstraining your nerves and you’re beginning to imagine things.”

Then came the competition for the Cosmo-Slotnick Building.

Cosmo-Slotnick Pictures of Hollywood, California, had decided to erect a stupendous home office in New York, a skyscraper to house a motion-picture theater and forty floors of offices. A world-wide competition for the selection of the architect had been announced a year in advance. It was stated that Cosmo-Slotnick were not merely the leaders in the art of the motion picture, but embraced all the arts, since all contributed to the creation of the films; and architecture being a lofty, though neglected, branch of esthetics, Cosmo-Slotnick were ready to put it on the map.

With the latest news of the casting of I’ll Take a Sailor and the shooting of Wives for Sale, came stories about the Parthenon and the Pantheon. Miss Sally O’Dawn was photographed on the steps of the Rheims Cathedral—in a bathing suit, and Mr. Pratt (“Pardner”) Purcell gave an interview, stating that he had always dreamed of being a master builder, if he hadn’t been a movie actor. Ralston Holcombe, Guy Francon and Gordon L. Prescott were quoted on the future of American architecture—in an article written by Miss Dimples Williams, and an imaginary interview quoted what Sir Christopher Wren would have said about the motion picture. In the Sunday supplements there were photographs of Cosmo-Slotnick starlets in shorts and sweaters, holding T-squares and slide-rules, standing before drawing boards that bore the legend: “Cosmo-Slotnick Building” over a huge question mark.

The competition was open to all architects of all countries; the building was to rise on Broadway and to cost ten million dollars; it was to symbolize the genius of modern technology and the spirit of the American people; it was announced in advance as “the most beautiful building in the world.” The jury of award consisted of Mr. Shupe, representing Cosmo, Mr. Slotnick, representing Slotnick, Professor Peterkin of the Stanton Institute of Technology, the Mayor of the City of New York, Ralston Holcombe, president of the A.G.A., and Ellsworth M. Toohey.

“Go to it, Peter!” Francon told Keating enthusiastically. “Do your best. Give me all you’ve got. This is your great chance. You’ll be known the world over if you win. And here’s what we’ll do: we’ll put your name on our entry, along with the firm’s. If we win, you’ll get one fifth of the prize. The grand prize is sixty thousand dollars, you know.”

“Heyer will object,” said Keating cautiously.

“Let him object. That’s why I’m doing it. He might get it through his head what’s the decent thing for him to do. And I ... well, you know how I feel, Peter. I think of you as my partner already. I owe it to you. You’ve earned it. This might be your key to it.”

Keating redrew his project five times. He hated it. He hated every girder of that building before it was born. He worked, his hand trembling. He did not think of the drawing under his hand. He thought of all the other contestants, of the man who might win and be proclaimed publicly as his superior. He wondered what that other one would do, how the other would solve the problem and surpass him. He had to beat that man; nothing else mattered; there was no Peter Keating, there was only a suction chamber, like the kind of tropical plant he’d heard about, a plant that drew an insect into its vacuum and sucked it dry and thus acquired its own substance.

He felt nothing but immense uncertainty when his sketches were ready and the delicate perspective of a white marble edifice lay, neatly finished, before him. It looked like a Renaissance palace made of rubber and stretched to the height of forty stories. He had chosen the style of the Renaissance because he knew the unwritten law that all architectural juries liked columns, and because he remembered Ralston Holcombe on the jury. He had borrowed from all of Holcombe’s favorite Italian palaces. It looked good ... it might be good... he was not sure. He had no one to ask.

He heard these words in his own mind and he felt a wave of blind fury. He felt it before he knew the reason, but he knew the reason almost in the same instant: there was someone whom he could ask. He did not want to think of that name; he would not go to him; the anger rose to his face and he felt the hot, tight patches under his eyes. He knew that he would go.

He pushed the thought out of his mind. He was not going anywhere. When the time came, he slipped his drawings into a folder and went to Roark’s office.

He found Roark alone, sitting at the desk in the large room that bore no signs of activity.

“Hello, Howard!” he said brightly. “How are you? I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

“Hello, Peter,” said Roark. “You aren’t.”

“Not awfully busy, are you?”

“No.”

“Mind if I sit down for a few minutes?”

“Sit down.”

“Well, Howard, you’ve been doing great work. I’ve seen the Fargo Store. It’s splendid. My congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ve been forging straight ahead, haven’t you? Had three commissions already?”

“Four.”

“Oh, yes, of course, four. Pretty good. I hear you’ve been having a little trouble with the Sanborns.”

“I have.”

“Well, it’s not all smooth sailing, not all of it, you know.... No new commissions since? Nothing?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Well, it will come. I’ve always said that architects don’t have to cut one another’s throat, there’s plenty of work for all of us, we must develop a spirit of professional unity and co-operation. For instance, take that competition—have you sent your entry in already?”

“What competition?”

“Why, the competition. The Cosmo-Slotnick competition.”

“I’m not sending any entry.”

“You’re ... not? Not at all?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I don’t enter competitions.”

“Why, for heaven’s sake?”

“Come on, Peter. You didn’t come here to discuss that.”

“As a matter of fact I did think I’d show you my own entry, you understand I’m not asking you to help me, I just want your reaction, just a general opinion.”

He hastened to open the folder.

Roark studied the sketches. Keating snapped: “Well? Is it all right?”

“No. It’s rotten. And you know it.”

Then, for hours, while Keating watched and the sky darkened and lights flared up in the windows of the city, Roark talked, explained, slashed lines through the plans, untangled the labyrinth of the theater’s exits, cut windows, unraveled halls, smashed useless arches, straightened stairways. Keating stammered once: “Jesus, Howard! Why don’t you enter the competition, if you can do it like this?” Roark answered: “Because I can’t. I couldn’t if I tried. I dry up. I go blank. I can’t give them what they want. But I can straighten someone else’s damn mess when I see it.”

It was morning when he pushed the plans aside. Keating whispered:

“And the elevation?”

“Oh, to hell with your elevation! I don’t want to look at your damn Renaissance elevations!” But he looked. He could not prevent his hand from cutting lines across the perspective. “All right, damn you, give them good Renaissance if you must and if there is such a thing! Only I can’t do that for you. Figure it out yourself. Something like this. Simpler, Peter, simpler, more direct, as honest as you can make of a dishonest thing. Now go home and try to work out something on this order.”

Keating went home. He copied Roark’s plans. He worked out Roark’s hasty sketch of the elevation into a neat, finished perspective. Then the drawings were mailed, properly addressed, to:

“The Most Beautiful Building in the World” Competition
Cosmo-Slotnick Pictures, Inc.
New York City.

The envelope, accompanying the entry, contained the names: “Francon & Heyer, architects, Peter Keating, associated designer.”

Through the months of that winter Roark found no other chances, no offers, no prospects of commissions. He sat at his desk and forgot, at times, to turn on the lights in the early dusk. It was as if the heavy immobility of all the hours that had flowed through the office, of its door, of its air, were beginning to seep into his muscles. He would rise and fling a book at the wall, to feel his arm move, to hear the burst of sound. He smiled, amused, picked up the book, and laid it neatly back on the desk. He turned on the desk lamp. Then he stopped, before he had withdrawn his hands from the cone of light under the lamp, and he looked at his hands; he spread his fingers out slowly. Then he remembered what Cameron had said to him long ago. He jerked his hands away. He reached for his coat, turned the lights off, locked the door and went home.

As spring approached he knew that his money would not last much longer. He paid the rent on his office promptly on the first of each month. He wanted the feeling of thirty days ahead, during which he would still own the office. He entered it calmly each morning. He found only that he did not want to look at the calendar when it began to grow dark and he knew that another day of the thirty had gone. When he noticed this, he made himself look at the calendar. It was a race he was running now, a race between his rent money and... he did not know the name of the other contestant. Perhaps it was every man whom he passed on the street.

When he went up to his office, the elvator operators looked at him in a queer, lazy, curious sort of way; when he spoke, they answered, not insolently, but in an indifferent drawl that seemed to say it would become insolent in a moment. They did not know what he was doing or why; they knew only that he was a man to whom no clients ever came. He attended, because Austen Heller asked him to attend, the few parties Heller gave occasionally; he was asked by guests: “Oh, you’re an architect? You’ll forgive me, I haven’t kept up with architecture—what have you built?” When he answered, he heard them say: “Oh, yes, indeed,” and he saw the conscious politeness of their manner tell him that he was an architect by presumption. They had never seen his buildings; they did not know whether his buildings were good or worthless; they knew only that they had never heard of these buildings.

It was a war in which he was invited to fight nothing, yet he was pushed forward to fight, he had to fight, he had no choice—and no adversary.

He passed by buildings under construction. He stopped to look at the steel cages. He felt at times as if the beams and girders were shaping themselves not into a house, but into a barricade to stop him; and the few steps on the sidewalk that separated him from the wooden fence enclosing the construction were the steps he would never be able to take. It was pain, but it was a blunted, unpenetrating pain. It’s true, he would tell himself; it’s not, his body would answer, the strange, untouchable healthiness of his body.

The Fargo Store had opened. But one building could not save a neighborhood; Fargo’s competitors had been right, the tide had turned, was flowing uptown, his customers were deserting him. Remarks were made openly on the decline of John Fargo, who had topped his poor business judgment by an investment in a preposterous kind of a building; which proved, it was stated, that the public would not accept these architectural innovations. It was not stated that the store was the cleanest and brightest in the city; that the skill of its plan made its operation easier than had ever been possible; that the neighborhood had been doomed before its erection. The building took the blame.

Athelstan Beasely, the wit of the architectural profession, the court jester of the A.G.A., who never seemed to be building anything, but organized all the charity balls, wrote in his column entitled “Quips and Quirks” in the A.G.A. Bulletin:

“Well, lads and lassies, here’s a fairy tale with a moral: seems there was, once upon a time, a little boy with hair the color of a Hallowe’en pumpkin, who thought that he was better than all you common boys and girls. So to prove it, he up and built a house, which is a very nice house, except that nobody can live in it, and a store, which is a very lovely store, except that it’s going bankrupt. He also erected a very eminent structure, to wit: a dogcart on a mud road. This last is reported to be doing very well indeed, which, perhaps, is the right field of endeavor for that little boy.”

At the end of March Roark read in the papers about Roger Enright. Roger Enright possessed millions, an oil concern and no sense of restraint. This made his name appear in the papers frequently. He aroused a half-admiring, half-derisive awe by the incoherent variety of his sudden ventures. The latest was a project for a new type of residential development—an apartment building, with each unit complete and isolated like an expensive private home. It was to be known as the Enright House. Enright had declared that he did not want it to look like anything anywhere else. He had approached and rejected several of the best architests in town.

Roark felt as if this newspaper item were a personal invitation; the kind of chance created expressly for him. For the first time he attempted to go after a commission. He requested an interview with Roger Enright. He got an interview with a secretary. The secretary, a young man who looked bored, asked him several questions about his experience; he asked them slowly, as if it required an effort to decide just what it would be appropriate to ask under the circumstances, since the answers would make no difference whatever; he glanced at some photographs of Roark’s buildings, and declared that Mr. Enright would not be interested.

In the first week of April, when Roark had paid his last rental for one more month at the office, he was asked to submit drawings for the new building of the Manhattan Bank Company. He was asked by Mr. Weidler, a member of the board of directors, who was a friend of young Richard Sanborn. Weidler told him: “I’ve had a stiff fight, Mr. Roark, but I think I’ve won. I’ve taken them personally through the Sanborn house, and Dick and I explained a few things. However, the board must see the drawings before they make a decision. So it’s not quite certain as yet, I must tell you frankly, but it’s almost certain. They’ve turned down two other architects. They’re very much interested in you. Go ahead. Good luck!”

Henry Cameron had had a relapse and the doctor warned his sister that no recovery could be expected. She did not believe it. She felt a new hope, because she saw that Cameron, lying still in bed, looked serene and—almost happy, a word she had never found it possible to associate with her brother.

But she was frightened, one evening, when he said suddenly: “Call Howard. Ask him to come here.” In the three years since his retirement he had never called for Roark, he had merely waited for Roark’s visits.

Roark arrived within an hour. He sat by the side of Cameron’s bed, and Cameron talked to him as usual. He did not mention the special invitation and did not explain. The night was warm and the window of Cameron’s bedroom stood open to the dark garden. When he noticed, in a pause between sentences, the silence of the trees outside, the unmoving silence of late hours, Cameron called his sister and said: “Fix the couch in the living room for Howard. He’s staying here.” Roark looked at him and understood. Roark inclined his head in agreement; he could acknowledge what Cameron had just declared to him only by a quiet glance as solemn as Cameron’s.

Roark remained at the house for three days. No reference was made to his staying there—nor to how long he would have to stay. His presence was accepted as a natural fact requiring no comment. Miss Cameron understood—and knew that she must say nothing. She moved about silently, with the meek courage of resignation.

Cameron did not want Roark’s continuous presence in his room. He would say: “Go out, take a walk through the garden, Howard. It’s beautiful, the grass is coming up.” He would lie in bed and watch, with contentment, through the open window, Roark’s figure moving among the bare trees that stood against a pale blue sky.

He asked only that Roark eat his meals with him. Miss Cameron would put a tray on Cameron’s knees, and serve Roark’s meal on a small table by the bed. Cameron seemed to take pleasure in what he had never had nor sought: a sense of warmth in performing a daily routine, the sense of family.

On the evening of the third day Cameron lay back on his pillow, talking as usual, but the words came slowly and he did not move his head. Roark listened and concentrated on not showing that he knew what went on in the terrible pauses between Cameron’s words. The words sounded natural, and the strain they cost was to remain Cameron’s last secret, as he wished.

Cameron spoke about the future of building materials. “Watch the light metals industry, Howard.... In a few... years... you’ll see them do some astounding things.... Watch the plastics, there’s a whole new era... coming from that.... You’ll find new tools, new means, new forms.... You’ll have to show... the damn fools... what wealth the human brain has made for them... what possibilities.... Last week I read about a new kind of composition tile ... and I’ve thought of a way to use it where nothing... else would do ... take, for instance, a small house... about five thousand dollars ...”

After a while he stopped and remained silent, his eyes closed. Then Roark heard him whisper suddenly:

“Gail Wynand ...”

Roark leaned closer to him, bewildered.

“I don’t... hate anybody any more... only Gail Wynand ... No, I’ve never laid eyes on him.... But he represents ... everything that’s wrong with the world... the triumph... of overbearing vulgarity.... It’s Gail Wynand that you’ll have to fight, Howard....”

Then he did not speak for a long time. When he opened his eyes again, he smiled. He said:

“I know... what you’re going through at your office just now....” Roark had never spoken to him of that. “No ... don’t deny and ... don’t say anything.... I know.... But... it’s all right.... Don’t be afraid.... Do you remember the day when I tried to fire you? ... Forget what I said to you then.... It was not the whole story.... This is ... Don’t be afraid.... It was worth it....”

His voice failed and he could not use it any longer. But the faculty of sight remained untouched and he could lie silently and look at Roark without effort. He died half an hour later.

Keating saw Catherine often. He had not announced their engagement, but his mother knew, and it was not a precious secret of his own any longer. Catherine thought, at times, that he had dropped the sense of significance in their meetings. She was spared the loneliness of waiting for him; but she had lost the reassurance of his inevitable returns.

Keating had told her: “Let’s wait for the results of that movie competition, Katie. It won’t be long, they’ll announce the decision in May. If I win—I’ll be set for life. Then we’ll be married. And that’s when I’ll meet your uncle—and he’ll want to meet me. And I’ve got to win.”

“I know you’ll win.”

“Besides, old Heyer won’t last another month. The doctor told us that we can expect a second stroke at any time and that will be that. If it doesn’t get him to the graveyard, it’ll certainly get him out of the office.”

“Oh, Peter, I don’t like to hear you talk like that. You mustn’t be so ... so terribly selfish.”

“I’m sorry, dear. Well ... yes, I guess I’m selfish. Everybody is.”

He spent more time with Dominique. Dominique watched him complacently, as if he presented no further problem to her. She seemed to find him suitable as an inconsequential companion for an occasional, inconsequential evening. He thought that she liked him. He knew that this was not an encouraging sign.

He forgot at times that she was Francon’s daughter; he forgot all the reasons that prompted him to want her. He felt no need to be prompted. He wanted her. He needed no reasons now but the excitement of her presence.

Yet he felt helpless before her. He refused to accept the thought that a woman could remain indifferent to him. But he was not certain even of her indifference. He waited and tried to guess her moods, to respond as he supposed she wished him to respond. He received no answer.

On a spring night they attended a ball together. They danced, and he drew her close, he stressed the touch of his fingers on her body. He knew that she noticed and understood. She did not withdraw; she looked at him with an unmoving glance that was almost expectation. When they were leaving, he held her wrap and let his fingers rest on her shoulders; she did not move or draw the wrap closed; she waited; she let him lift his hands. Then they walked together down to the cab.

She sat silently in a corner of the cab; she had never before considered his presence important enough to require silence. She sat, her legs crossed, her wrap gathered tightly, her finger tips beating in slow rotation against her knee. He closed his hand softly about her forearm. She did not resist; she did not answer; only her fingers stopped beating. His lips touched her hair; it was not a kiss, he merely let his lips rest against her hair for a long time.

When the cab stopped, he whispered: “Dominique ... let me come up ... for just a moment ...”

“Yes,” she answered. The word was flat, impersonal, with no sound of invitation. But she had never allowed it before. He followed her, his heart pounding.

There was one fragment of a second, as she entered her apartment, when she stopped, waiting. He stared at her helplessly, bewildered, too happy. He noticed the pause only when she was moving again, walking away from him, into the drawing room. She sat down, and her hands fell limply one at each side, her arms away from her body, leaving her unprotected. Her eyes were half closed, rectangular, empty.

“Dominique ...” he whispered, “Dominique ... how lovely you are! ...”

Then he was beside her, whispering incoherently:

“Dominique ... Dominique, I love you ... Don’t laugh at me, please don’t laugh! ... My whole life ... anything you wish ... Don’t you know how beautiful you are? ... Dominique ... I love you ...”

He stopped, with his arms around her and his face over hers, to catch some hint of response or resistance; he saw nothing. He jerked her violently against him and kissed her lips.

His arms fell open. He let her body fall back against the seat, and he stared at her, aghast. It had not been a kiss; he had not held a woman in his arms; what he had held and kissed had not been alive. Her lips had not moved in answer against his; her arms had not moved to embrace him; it was not revulsion—he could have understood revulsion. It was as if he could hold her forever or drop her, kiss her again or go further to satisfy his desire—and her body would not know it, would not notice it. She was looking at him, past him. She saw a cigarette stub that had fallen off a tray on a table beside her, she moved her hand and slipped the cigarette back into the tray.

“Dominique,” he whispered stupidly, “didn’t you want me to kiss you?”

“Yes.” She was not laughing at him; she was answering simply and helplessly.

“Haven’t you ever been kissed before?”

“Yes. Many times.”

“Do you always act like that?”

“Always. Just like that.”

“Why did you want me to kiss you?”

“I wanted to try it.”

“You’re not human, Dominique.”

She lifted her head, she got up and the sharp precision of the movement was her own again. He knew he would hear no simple, confessing helplessness in her voice; he knew the intimacy was ended, even though her words, when she spoke, were more intimate and revealing than anything she had said; but she spoke as if she did not care what she revealed or to whom:

“I suppose I’m one of those freaks you hear about, an utterly frigid woman. I’m sorry, Peter. You see? You have no rivals, but that includes you also. A disappointment, darling?”

“You ... you’ll outgrow it... some day ...”

“I’m really not so young, Peter. Twenty-five. It must be an interesting experience to sleep with a man. I’ve wanted to want it. I should think it would be exciting to become a dissolute woman. I am, you know, in everything but in fact.... Peter, you look as if you were going to blush in a moment, and that’s very amusing.”

“Dominique! Haven’t you ever been in love at all? Not even a little?”

“I haven’t. I really wanted to fall in love with you. I thought it would be convenient. I’d have no trouble with you at all. But you see? I can’t feel anything. I can’t feel any difference, whether it’s you or Alvah Scarret or Lucius Heyer.”

He got up. He did not want to look at her. He walked to a window and stood, staring out, his hands clasped behind his back. He had forgotten his desire and her beauty, but he remembered now that she was Francon’s daughter.

“Dominique, will you marry me?”

He knew he had to say it now; if he let himself think of her, he would never say it; what he felt for her did not matter any longer; he could not let it stand between him and his future; and what he felt for her was growing into hatred.

“You’re not serious?” she asked.

He turned to her. He spoke rapidly, easily; he was lying now, and so he was sure of himself and it was not difficult:

“I love you, Dominique. I’m crazy about you. Give me a chance. If there’s no one else, why not? You’ll learn to love me—because I understand you. I’ll be patient. I’ll make you happy.”

She shuddered suddenly, and then she laughed. She laughed simply, completely; he saw the pale foam of her dress trembling; she stood straight, her head thrown back, like a string shaking with the vibrations of a blinding insult to him; an insult, because her laughter was not bitter or mocking, but quite simply gay.

Then it stopped. She stood looking at him. She said earnestly:

“Peter, if I ever want to punish myself for something terrible, if I ever want to punish myself disgustingly—I’ll marry you.” She added: “Consider it a promise.”

“I’ll wait—no matter what reason you choose for it.”

Then she smiled gaily, the cold, gay smile he dreaded.

“Really, Peter, you don’t have to do it, you know. You’ll get that partnership anyway. And we’ll always be good friends. Now it’s time for you to go home. Don’t forget, you’re taking me to the horse show Wednesday. Oh, yes, we’re going to the horse show Wednesday. I adore horse shows. Good night, Peter.”

He left and walked home through the warm spring night. He walked savagely. If, at that moment, someone had offered him sole ownership of the firm of Francon & Heyer at the price of marrying Dominique, he would have refused it. He knew also, hating himself, that he would not refuse, if it were offered to him on the following morning.

XV

THIS WAS FEAR. THIS WAS WHAT ONE FEELS IN NIGHTMARES, THOUGHT Peter Keating, only then one awakens when it becomes unbearable, but he could neither awaken nor bear it any longer. It had been growing, for days, for weeks, and now it had caught him: this lewd, unspeakable dread of defeat. He would lose the competition, he was certain that he would lose it, and the certainty grew as each day of waiting passed. He could not work; he jerked when people spoke to him; he had not slept for nights.

He walked toward the house of Lucius Heyer. He tried not to notice the faces of the people he passed, but he had to notice; he had always looked at people; and people looked at him, as they always did. He wanted to shout at them and tell them to turn away, to leave him alone. They were staring at him, he thought, because he was to fail and they knew it.

He was going to Heyer’s house to save himself from the coming disaster in the only way he saw left to him. If he failed in that competition—and he knew he was to fail—Francon would be shocked and disillusioned; then if Heyer died, as he could die at any moment, Francon would hesitate—in the bitter aftermath of a public humiliation—to accept Keating as his partner; if Francon hesitated, the game was lost. There were others waiting for the opportunity: Bennett, whom he had been unable to get out of the office; Claude Stengel, who had been doing very well on his own, and had approached Francon with an offer to buy Heyer’s place. Keating had nothing to count on, except Francon’s uncertain faith in him. Once another partner replaced Heyer, it would be the end of Keating’s future. He had come too close and had missed. That was never forgiven.

Through the sleepless nights the decision had become clear and hard in his mind: he had to close the issue at once; he had to take advantage of Francon’s deluded hopes before the winner of the competition was announced; he had to force Heyer out and take his place; he had only a few days left.

He remembered Francon’s gossip about Heyer’s character. He looked through the files in Heyer’s office and found what he had hoped to find. It was a letter from a contractor, written fifteen years ago; it stated merely that the contractor was enclosing a check for twenty thousand dollars due Mr. Heyer. Keating looked up the records for that particular building; it did seem that the structure had cost more than it should have cost. That was the year when Heyer had started his collection of porcelain.

He found Heyer alone in his study. It was a small, dim room and the air in it seemed heavy, as if it had not been disturbed for years. The dark mahogany paneling, the tapestries, the priceless pieces of old furniture were kept faultlessly clean, but the room smelt, somehow, of indigence and of decay. There was a single lamp burning on a small table in a corner, and five delicate, precious cups of ancient porcelain on the table. Heyer sat hunched, examining the cups in the dim light, with a vague, pointless enjoyment. He shuddered a little when his old valet admitted Keating, and he blinked in vapid bewilderment, but he asked Keating to sit down.

When he heard the first sounds of his own voice, Keating knew he had lost the fear that had followed him on his way through the streets; his voice was cold and steady. Tim Davis, he thought, Claude Stengel, and now just one more man to be removed.

He explained what he wanted, spreading upon the still air of the room one short, concise, complete paragraph of thought, perfect as a gem with clean edges.

“And so, unless you inform Francon of your retirement tomorrow morning,” he concluded, holding the letter by a corner between two fingers, “this goes to the A.G.A.”

He waited. Heyer sat still, with his pale, bulging eyes blank and his mouth open in a perfect circle. Keating shuddered and wondered whether he was speaking to an idiot.

Then Heyer’s mouth moved and his pale pink tongue showed, flickering against his lower teeth.

“But I don’t want to retire.” He said it simply, guilelessly, in a little petulant whine.

“You will have to retire.”

“I don’t want to. I’m not going to. I’m a famous architect. I’ve always been a famous architect. I wish people would stop bothering me. They all want me to retire. I’ll tell you a secret.” He leaned forward; he whispered slyly: “You may not know it, but I know, he can’t deceive me: Guy wants me to retire. He thinks he’s outwitting me, but I can see through him. That’s a good one on Guy.” He giggled softly.

“I don’t think you understood me. Do you understand this?” Keating pushed the letter into Heyer’s half-closed fingers.

He watched the thin sheet trembling as Heyer held it. Then it dropped to the table and Heyer’s left hand with the paralyzed fingers jabbed at it blindly, purposelessly, like a hook. He said, gulping:

“You can’t send this to the A.G.A. They’ll have my license taken away.”

“Certainly,” said Keating, “they will.”

“And it will be in the papers.”

“In all of them.”

“You can’t do that.”

“I’m going to—unless you retire.”

Heyer’s shoulders drew down to the edge of the table. His head remained above the edge, timidly, as if he were ready to draw it also out of sight.

“You won’t do that please you won’t,” Heyer mumbled in one long whine without pauses. “You’re a nice boy you’re a very nice boy you won’t do it will you?”

The yellow square of paper lay on the table. Heyer’s useless left hand reached for it, crawling slowly over the edge. Keating leaned forward and snatched the letter from under his hand.

Heyer looked at him, his head bent to one side, his mouth open. He looked as if he expected Keating to strike him; with a sickening, pleading glance that said he would allow Keating to strike him.

“Please,” whispered Heyer, “you won’t do that, will you? I don’t feel very well. I’ve never hurt you. I seem to remember, I did something very nice for you once.”

“What?” snapped Keating. “What did you do for me?”

“Your name’s Peter Keating ... Peter Keating ... remember ... I did something nice for you.... You’re the boy Guy has so much faith in. Don’t trust Guy. I don’t trust him. But I like you. We’ll make you a designer one of these days.” His mouth remained hanging open on the word. A thin strand of saliva trickled down from the corner of his mouth. “Please ... don’t ...”

Keating’s eyes were bright with disgust; aversion goaded him on; he had to make it worse because he couldn’t stand it.

“You’ll be exposed publicly,” said Keating, the sounds of his voice glittering. “You’ll be denounced as a grafter. People will point at you. They’ll print your picture in the papers. The owners of that building will sue you. They’ll throw you in jail.”

Heyer said nothing. He did not move. Keating heard the cups on the table tinkling suddenly. He could not see the shaking of Heyer’s body. He heard a thin, glassy ringing in the silence of the room, as if the cups were trembling of themselves.

“Get out!” said Keating, raising his voice, not to hear that sound. “Get out of the firm! What do you want to stay for? You’re no good. You’ve never been any good.”

The yellow face at the edge of the table opened its mouth and made a wet, gurgling sound like a moan.

Keating sat easily, leaning forward, his knees spread apart, one elbow resting on his knee, the hand hanging down, swinging the letter.

“I ...” Heyer choked. “I ...”

“Shut up! You’ve got nothing to say, except yes or no. Think fast now. I’m not here to argue with you.”

Heyer stopped trembling. A shadow cut diagonally across his face. Keating saw one eye that did not blink, and half a mouth, open, the darkness flowing in through the hole, into the face, as if it were drowning.

“Answer me!” Keating screamed, frightened suddenly. “Why don’t you answer me?”

The half-face swayed and he saw the head lurch forward; it fell down on the table, and went on, and rolled to the floor, as if cut off; two of the cups fell after it, cracking softly to pieces on the carpet. The first thing Keating felt was relief to see that the body had followed the head and lay crumpled in a heap on the floor, intact. There had been no sound; only the muffled, musical bursting of porcelain.

He’ll be furious, thought Keating, looking down at the cups. He had jumped to his feet, he was kneeling, gathering the pieces pointlessly; he saw that they were broken beyond repair. He knew he was thinking also, at the same time, that it had come, that second stroke they had been expecting, and that he would have to do something about it in a moment, but that it was all right, because Heyer would have to retire now.

Then he moved on his knees closer to Heyer’s body. He wondered why he did not want to touch it. “Mr. Heyer,” he called. His voice was soft, almost respectful. He lifted Heyer’s head, cautiously. He let it drop. He heard no sound of its falling. He heard the hiccough in his own throat. Heyer was dead.

He sat beside the body, his buttocks against his heels, his hands spread on his knees. He looked straight ahead; his glance stopped on the folds of the hangings by the door; he wondered whether the gray sheen was dust or the nap of velvet and was it velvet and how old-fashioned it was to have hangings by a door. Then he felt himself shaking. He wanted to vomit. He rose, walked across the room and threw the door open, because he remembered that there was the rest of the apartment somewhere and a valet in it, and he called, trying to scream for help.

Keating came to the office as usual. He answered questions, he explained that Heyer had asked him, that day, to come to his house after dinner; Heyer had wanted to discuss the matter of his retirement. No one doubted the story and Keating knew that no one ever would. Heyer’s end had come as everybody had expected it to come. Francon felt nothing but relief. “We knew he would, sooner or later,” said Francon. “Why regret that he spared himself and all of us a prolonged agony?”

Keating’s manner was calmer than it had been for weeks. It was the calm of blank stupor. The thought followed him, gentle, unstressed, monotonous, at his work, at home, at night: he was a murderer ... no, but almost a murderer ... almost a murderer ... He knew that it had not been an accident; he knew he had counted on the shock and the terror; he had counted on that second stroke which would send Heyer to the hospital for the rest of his days. But was that all he had expected? Hadn’t he known what else a second stroke could mean? Had he counted on that? He tried to remember. He tried, wringing his mind dry. He felt nothing. He expected to feel nothing, one way or another. Only he wanted to know. He did not notice what went on in the office around him. He forgot that he had but a short time left to close the deal with Francon about the partnership.

A few days after Heyer’s death Francon called him to his office.

“Sit down, Peter,” he said with a brighter smile than usual. “Well, I have some good news for you, kid. They read Lucius’ will this morning. He had no relatives left, you know. Well, I was surprised, I didn’t give him enough credit, I guess, but it seems he could make a nice gesture on occasion. He’s left everything to you.... Pretty grand, isn’t it? Now you won’t have to worry about investment when we make arrangements for ... What’s the matter, Peter? ... Peter, my boy, are you sick?”

Keating’s face fell upon his arm on the corner of the desk. He could not let Francon see his face. He was going to be sick; sick, because through the horror, he had caught himself wondering how much Heyer had actually left....

The will had been made out five years ago; perhaps in a senseless spurt of affection for the only person who had shown Heyer consideration in the office; perhaps as a gesture against his partner; it had been made and forgotten. The estate amounted to two hundred thousand dollars, plus Heyer’s interest in the firm and his porcelain collection.

Keating left the office early, that day, not hearing the congratulations. He went home, told the news to his mother, left her gasping in the middle of the living room, and locked himself in his bedroom. He went out, saying nothing, before dinner. He had no dinner that night, but he drank himself into a ferocious lucidity, at his favorite speak-easy. And in that heightened state of luminous vision, his head nodding over a glass but his mind steady, he told himself that he had nothing to regret; he had done what anyone would have done; Catherine had said it, he was selfish; everybody was selfish; it was not a pretty thing, to be selfish, but he was not alone in it; he had merely been luckier than most; he had been, because he was better than most; he felt fine; he hoped the useless questions would never come back to him again; every man for himself, he muttered, falling asleep on the table.

The useless questions never came back to him again. He had no time for them in the days that followed. He had won the Cosmo-Slotnick competition.

Peter Keating had known it would be a triumph, but he had not expected the thing that happened. He had dreamed of a sound of trumpets; he had not foreseen a symphonic explosion.

It began with the thin ringing of a telephone, announcing the names of the winners. Then every phone in the office joined in, screaming, bursting from under the fingers of the operator who could barely control the switchboard; calls from every paper in town, from famous architects, questions, demands for interviews, congratulations. Then the flood rushed out of the elevators, poured through the office doors, the messages, the telegrams, the people Keating knew, the people he had never seen before, the reception clerk losing all sense, not knowing whom to admit or refuse, and Keating shaking hands, an endless stream of hands like a wheel with soft moist cogs flapping against his fingers. He did not know what he said at that first interview, with Francon’s office full of people and cameras; Francon had thrown the doors of his liquor cabinet wide-open. Francon gulped to all these people that the Cosmo-Slotnick building had been created by Peter Keating alone; Francon did not care; he was magnanimous in a spurt of enthusiasm; besides, it made a good story.

It made a better story than Francon had expected. From the pages of newspapers the face of Peter Keating looked upon the country, the handsome, wholesome, smiling face with the brilliant eyes and the dark curls; it headed columns of print about poverty, struggle, aspiration and unremitting toil that had won their reward; about the faith of a mother who had sacrificed everything to her boy’s success; about the “Cinderella of Architecture.”

Cosmo-Slotnick were pleased; they had not thought that prize-winning architects could also be young, handsome and poor—well, so recently poor. They had discovered a boy genius; Cosmo-Slotnick adored boy geniuses; Mr. Slotnick was one himself, being only forty-three.

Keating’s drawings of the “most beautiful skyscraper on earth” were reproduced in the papers, with the words of the award underneath: “... for the brilliant skill and simplicity of its plan ... for its clean, ruthless efficiency ... for its ingenious economy of space ... for the masterful blending of the modern with the traditional in Art ... to Francon & Heyer and Peter Keating ...”

Keating appeared in newsreels, shaking hands with Mr. Shupe and Mr. Slotnick, and the subtitle announced what these two gentlemen thought of his building. Keating appeared in newsreels, shaking hands with Miss Dimples Williams, and the subtitle announced what he thought of her current picture. He appeared at architectural banquets and at film banquets, in the place of honor, and he had to make speeches, forgetting whether he was to speak of buildings or of movies. He appeared at architectural clubs and at fan clubs. Cosmo-Slotnick put out a composite picture of Keating and of his building, which could be had for a self-addressed, stamped envelope, and two bits. He made a personal appearance each evening, for a week, on the stage of the Cosmo Theater, with the first run of the latest Cosmo-Slotnick special; he bowed over the footlights, slim and graceful in a black tuxedo, and he spoke for two minutes on the significance of architecture. He presided as judge at a beauty contest in Atlantic City, the winner to be awarded a screen test by Cosmo-Slotnick. He was photographed with a famous prizefighter, under the caption: “Champions.” A scale model of his building was made and sent on tour, together with the photographs of the best among the other entries, to be exhibited in the foyers of Cosmo-Slotnick theaters throughout the country.

Mrs. Keating had sobbed at first, clasped Peter in her arms and gulped that she could not believe it. She had stammered, answering questions about Petey and she had posed for pictures, embarrassed, eager to please. Then she became used to it. She told Peter, shrugging, that of course he had won, it was nothing to gape at, no one else could have won. She acquired a brisk little tone of condescension for the reporters. She was distinctly annoyed when she was not included in the photographs taken of Petey. She acquired a mink coat.

Keating let himself be carried by the torrent. He needed the people and the clamor around him. There were no questions and no doubts when he stood on a platform over a sea of faces; the air was heavy, compact, saturated with a single solvent—admiration; there was no room for anything else. He was great; great as the number of people who told him so. He was right; right as the number of people who believed it. He looked at the faces, at the eyes; he saw himself born in them, he saw himself being granted the gift of life. That was Peter Keating, that, the reflection in those staring pupils, and his body was only its reflection.

He found time to spend two hours with Catherine, one evening. He held her in his arms and she whispered radiant plans for their future; he glanced at her with contentment; he did not hear her words; he was thinking of how it would look if they were photographed like this together and in how many papers it would be syndicated.

He saw Dominque once. She was leaving the city for the summer. Dominque was disappointing. She congratulated him, quite correctly; but she looked at him as she had always looked, as if nothing had happened. Of all architectural publications, her column had been the only one that had never mentioned the Cosmo-Slotnick competition or its winner.

“I’m going to Connecticut,” she told him. “I’m taking over Father’s place down there for the summer. He’s letting me have it all to myself. No, Peter, you can’t come to visit me. Not even once. I’m going there so I won’t have to see anybody.” He was disappointed, but it did not spoil the triumph of his days. He was not afraid of Dominique any longer. He felt confident that he could bring her to change her attitude, that he would see the change when she came back in the fall.

But there was one thing which did spoil his triumph; not often and not too loudly. He never tired of hearing what was said about him; but he did not like to hear too much about his building. And when he had to hear it, he did not mind the comments on “the masterful blending of the modern with the traditional” in its façade; but when they spoke of the plan—and they spoke so much of the plan—when he heard about “the brilliant skill and simplicity ... the clean, ruthless efficiency ... the ingenious economy of space ...” when he heard it and thought of ... He did not think it. There were no words in his brain. He would not allow them. There was only a heavy, dark feeling—and a name.

For two weeks after the award he pushed this thing out of his mind, as a thing unworthy of his concern, to be buried as his doubting, humble past was buried. All winter long he had kept his own sketches of the building with the pencil lines cut across them by another’s hand; on the evening of the award he had burned them; it was the first thing he had done.

But the thing would not leave him. Then he grasped suddenly that it was not a vague threat, but a practical danger; and he lost all fear of it. He could deal with a practical danger, he could dispose of it quite simply. He chuckled with relief, he telephoned Roark’s office, and made an appointment to see him.

He went to that appointment confidently. For the first time in his life he felt free of the strange uneasiness which he had never been able to explain or escape in Roark’s presence. He felt safe now. He was through with Howard Roark.

Roark sat at the desk in his office, waiting. The telephone had rung once, that morning, but it had been only Peter Keating asking for an appointment. He had forgotten now that Keating was coming. He was waiting for the telephone. He had become dependent on that telephone in the last few weeks. He was to hear at any moment about his drawings for the Manhattan Bank Company.

His rent on the office was long since overdue. So was the rent on the room where he lived. He did not care about the room; he could tell the landlord to wait; the landlord waited; it would not have mattered greatly if he had stopped waiting. But it mattered at the office. He told the rental agent that he would have to wait; he did not ask for the delay; he only said flatly, quietly, that there would be a delay, which was all he knew how to do. But his knowledge that he needed this alms from the rental agent, that too much depended on it, had made it sound like begging in his own mind. That was torture. All right, he thought, it’s torture. What of it?

The telephone bill was overdue for two months. He had received the final warning. The telephone was to be disconnected in a few days. He had to wait. So much could happen in a few days.

The answer of the bank board, which Weidler had promised him long ago, had been postponed from week to week. The board could reach no decision; there had been objectors and there had been violent supporters; there had been conferences; Weidler told him eloquently little, but he could guess much; there had been days of silence, of silence in the office, of silence in the whole city, of silence within him. He waited.

He sat, slumped across the desk, his face on his arm, his fingers on the stand of the telephone. He thought dimly that he should not sit like that; but he felt very tired today. He thought that he should take his hand off that phone; but he did not move it. Well, yes, he depended on that phone; he could smash it, but he would still depend on it; he and every breath in him and every bit of him. His fingers rested on the stand without moving. It was this and the mail; he had lied to himself also about the mail; he had lied when he had forced himself not to leap, as a rare letter fell through the slot in the door, not to run forward, but to wait, to stand looking at the white envelope on the floor, then to walk to it slowly and pick it up. The slot in the door and the telephone—there was nothing else left to him of the world.

He raised his head, as he thought of it, to look down at the door, at the foot of the door. There was nothing. It was late in the afternoon, probably past the time of the last delivery. He raised his wrist to glance at his watch; he saw his bare wrist; the watch had been pawned. He turned to the window; there was a clock he could distinguish on a distant tower; it was half past four; there would be no other delivery today.

He saw that his hand was lifting the telephone receiver. His fingers were dialing the number.

“No, not yet,” Weidler’s voice told him over the wire. “We had that meeting scheduled for yesterday, but it had to be called off.... I’m keeping after them like a bulldog.... I can promise you that we’ll have a definite answer tomorrow. I can almost promise you. If not tomorrow, then it will have to wait over the week end, but by Monday I promise it for certain.... You’ve been wonderfully patient with us, Mr. Roark. We appreciate it.” Roark dropped the receiver. He closed his eyes. He thought he would allow himself to rest, just to rest blankly like this for a few minutes, before he would begin to think of what the date on the telephone notice had been and in what way he could manage to last until Monday.

“Hello, Howard,” said Peter Keating.

He opened his eyes. Keating had entered and stood before him, smiling. He wore a light tan spring coat, thrown open, the loops of its belt like handles at his sides, a blue cornflower in his button hole. He stood, his legs apart, his fists on his hips, his hat on the back of his head, his black curls so bright and crisp over his pale forehead that one expected to see drops of spring dew glistening on them as on the cornflower.

“Hello, Peter,” said Roark.

Keating sat down comfortably, took his hat off, dropped it in the middle of the desk, and clasped one hand over each knee with a brisk little slap.

“Well, Howard, things are happening, aren’t they?”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks. What’s the matter, Howard? You look like hell. Surely, you’re not overworking yourself, from what I hear?”

This was not the manner he had intended to assume. He had planned the interview to be smooth and friendly. Well, he decided, he’d switch back to that later. But first he had to show that he was not afraid of Roark, that he’d never be afraid again.

“No, I’m not overworking.”

“Look, Howard, why don’t you drop it?”

That was something he had not intended saying at all. His mouth remained open a little, in atonishment.

“Drop what?”

“The pose. Oh, the ideals, if you prefer. Why don’t you come down to earth? Why don’t you start working like everybody else? Why don’t you stop being a damn fool?” He felt himself rolling down a hill, without brakes. He could not stop.

“What’s the matter, Peter?”

“How do you expect to get along in the world? You have to live with people, you know. There are only two ways. You can join them or you can fight them. But you don’t seem to be doing either.”

“No. Not either.”

“And people don’t want you. They don’t want you! Aren’t you afraid?”

“No.”

“You haven’t worked for a year. And you won’t. Who’ll ever give you work? You might have a few hundreds left—and then it’s the end.”

“That’s wrong, Peter. I have fourteen dollars left, and fifty-seven cents.”

“Well? And look at me! I don’t care if it’s crude to say that myself. That’s not the point. I’m not boasting. It doesn’t matter who says it. But look at me! Remember how we started? Then look at us now. And then think that it’s up to you. Just drop that fool delusion that you’re better than everybody else—and go to work. In a year, you’ll have an office that’ll make you blush to think of this dump. You’ll have people running after you, you’ll have clients, you’ll have friends, you’ll have an army of draftsmen to order around! ... Hell, Howard, it’s nothing to me—what can it mean to me?—but this time I’m not fishing for anything for myself, in fact I know that you’d make a dangerous competitor, but I’ve got to say this to you. Just think, Howard, think of it! you’ll be rich, you’ll be famous, you’ll be respected, you’ll be praised, you’ll be admired —you’ll be one of us! ... Well? ... Say something! Why don’t you say something?”

He saw that Roark’s eyes were not empty and scornful, but attentive and wondering. It was close to some sort of surrender for Roark, because he had not dropped the iron sheet in his eyes, because he allowed his eyes to be puzzled and curious—and almost helpless.

“Look, Peter. I believe you. I know that you have nothing to gain by saying this. I know more than that. I know that you don’t want me to succeed—it’s all right, I’m not reproaching you, I’ve always known it—you don’t want me ever to reach these things you’re offering me. And yet you’re pushing me on to reach them, quite sincerely. And you know that if I take your advice, I’ll reach them. And it’s not love for me, because that wouldn’t make you so angry—and so frightened.... Peter, what is it that disturbs you about me as I am?”

“I don’t know ...” whispered Keating.

He understood that it was a confession, that answer of his, and a terrifying one. He did not know the nature of what he had confessed and he felt certain that Roark did not know it either. But the thing had been bared; they could not grasp it, but they felt its shape. And it made them sit silently, facing each other, in astonishment, in resignation.

“Pull yourself together, Peter,” said Roark gently, as to a comrade. “We’ll never speak of that again.”

Then Keating said suddenly, his voice clinging in relief to the bright vulgarity of its new tone:

“Aw hell, Howard, I was only talking good plain horse sense. Now if you wanted to work like a normal person—”

“Shut up!” snapped Roark.

Keating leaned back, exhausted. He had nothing else to say. He had forgotten what he had come here to discuss.

“Now,” said Roark, “what did you want to tell me about the competition?”

Keating jerked forward. He wondered what had made Roark guess that. And then it became easier, because he forgot the rest in a sweeping surge of resentment.

“Oh, yes!” said Keating crisply, a bright edge of irritation in the sound of his voice. “Yes, I did want to speak to you about that. Thanks for reminding me. Of course, you’d guess it, because you know that I’m not an ungrateful swine. I really came here to thank you, Howard. I haven’t forgotten that you had a share in that building, you did give me some advice on it. I’d be the first one to give you part of the credit.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Oh, it’s not that I’d mind, but I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to say anything about it. And I’m sure you don’t want to say anything yourself, because you know how it is, people are so funny, they misinterpret everything in such a stupid way.... But since I’m getting part of the award money, I thought it’s only fair to let you have some of it. I’m glad that it comes at a time when you need it so badly.”

He produced his billfold, pulled from it a check he had made out in advance and put it down on the desk. It read: “Pay to the order of Howard Roark—the sum of five hundred dollars.”

“Thank you, Peter,” said Roark, taking the check.

Then he turned it over, took his fountain pen, wrote on the back: “Pay to the order of Peter Keating,” signed and handed the check to Keating.

“And here’s my bribe to you, Peter,” he said. “For the same purpose. To keep your mouth shut.”

Keating stared at him blankly.

“That’s all I can offer you now,” said Roark. “You can’t extort anything from me at present, but later, when I’ll have money, I’d like to ask you please not to blackmail me. I’m telling you frankly that you could. Because I don’t want anyone to know that I had anything to do with that building.”

He laughed at the slow look of comprehension on Keating’s face.

“No?” said Roark. “You don’t want to blackmail me on that? ... Go home, Peter. You’re perfectly safe. I’ll never say a word about it. It’s yours, the building and every girder of it and every foot of plumbing and every picture of your face in the papers.”

Then Keating jumped to his feet. He was shaking.

“God damn you!” he screamed. “God damn you! Who do you think you are? Who told you that you could do this to people? So you’re too good for that building? You want to make me ashamed of it? You rotten, lousy, conceited bastard! Who are you? You don’t even have the wits to know that you’re a flop, an incompetent, a beggar, a failure, a failure, a failure! And you stand there pronouncing judgment! You, against the whole country! You against everybody! Why should I listen to you? You can’t frighten me. You can’t touch me. I have the whole world with me! ... Don’t stare at me like that! I’ve always hated you! You didn’t know that, did you? I’ve always hated you! I always will! I’ll break you some day, I swear I will, if it’s the last thing I do!”

“Peter,” said Roark, “why betray so much?”

Keating’s breath failed on a choked moan. He slumped down on a chair, he sat still, his hands clasping the sides of the seat under him.

After a while he raised his head. He asked woodenly:

“Oh God, Howard, what have I been saying?”

“Are you all right now? Can you go?”

“Howard, I’m sorry. I apologize, if you want me to.” His voice was raw and dull, without conviction. “I lost my head. Guess I’m just unstrung. I didn’t mean any of it. I don’t know why I said it. Honestly, I don’t.”

“Fix your collar. It’s unfastened.”

“I guess I was angry about what you did with that check. But I suppose you were insulted, too. I’m sorry. I’m stupid like that sometimes. I didn’t mean to offend you. We’ll just destroy the damn thing.”

He picked up the check, struck a match, cautiously watched the paper burn till he had to drop the last scrap.

“Howard, we’ll forget it?”

“Don’t you think you’d better go now?”

Keating rose heavily, his hands poked about in a few useless gestures, and he mumbled:

“Well ... well, goodnight, Howard. I ... I’ll see you soon.... It’s because so much’s happened to me lately.... Guess I need a rest.... So long, Howard....”

When he stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind him, Keating felt an icy sense of relief. He felt heavy and very tired, but drearily sure of himself. He had acquired the knowledge of one thing: he hated Roark. It was not necessary to doubt and wonder and squirm in uneasiness any longer. It was simple. He hated Roark. The reasons? It was not necessary to wonder about the reasons. It was necessary only to hate, to hate blindly, to hate patiently, to hate without anger; only to hate, and let nothing intervene, and not let oneself forget, ever.

The telephone rang late on Monday afternoon.

“Mr. Roark?” said Weidler. “Can you come right over? I don’t want to say anything over the phone, but get here at once.” The voice sounded clear, gay, radiantly premonitory.

Roark looked at the window, at the clock on the distant tower. He sat laughing at that clock, as at a friendly old enemy; he would not need it any longer, he would have a watch of his own again. He threw his head back in defiance to that pale, gray dial hanging high over the city.

He rose and reached for his coat. He threw his shoulders back, slipping the coat on; he felt pleasure in the jolt of his muscles.

In the street outside, he took a taxi which he could not afford.

The chairman of the board was waiting for him in his office, with Weidler and with the vice-president of the Manhattan Bank Company. There was a long conference table in the room, and Roark’s drawings were spread upon it. Weidler rose when he entered and walked to meet him, his hand outstretched. It was in the air of the room, like an overture to the words Weidler uttered, and Roark was not certain of the moment when he heard them, because he thought he had heard them the instant he entered.

“Well, Mr. Roark, the commission’s yours,” said Weidler.

Roark bowed. It was best not to trust his voice for a few minutes.

The chairman smiled amiably, inviting him to sit down. Roark sat down by the side of the table that supported his drawings. His hand rested on the table. The polished mahogany felt warm and living under his fingers; it was almost as if he were pressing his hand against the foundations of his building; his greatest building, fifty stories to rise in the center of Manhattan.

“I must tell you,” the chairman was saying, “that we’ve had a hell of a fight over that building of yours. Thank God it’s over. Some of our members just couldn’t swallow your radical innovations. You know how stupidly conservative some people are. But we’ve found a way to please them, and we got their consent. Mr. Weidler here was really magnificently convincing on your behalf.”

A great deal more was said by the three men. Roark barely heard it. He was thinking of the first bite of machine into earth that begins an excavation. Then he heard the chairman saying: “... and so it’s yours, on one minor condition.” He heard that and looked at the chairman.

“It’s a small compromise, and when you agree to it we can sign the contract. It’s only an inconsequential matter of the building’s appearance. I understand that you modernists attach no great importance to a mere façade, it’s the plan that counts with you, quite rightly, and we wouldn’t think of altering your plan in any way, it’s the logic of the plan that sold us on the building. So I’m sure you won’t mind.”

“What do you want?”

“It’s only a matter of a slight alteration in the façade. I’ll show you. Our Mr. Parker’s son is studying architecture and we had him draw us up a sketch, just a rough sketch to illustrate what we had in mind and to show the members of the board, because they couldn’t have visualized the compromise we offered. Here it is.”

He pulled a sketch from under the drawings on the table and handed it to Roark.

It was Roark’s building on the sketch, very neatly drawn. It was his building, but it had a simplified Doric portico in front, a cornice on top, and his ornament was replaced by a stylized Greek ornament.

Roark got up. He had to stand. He concentrated on the effort of standing. It made the rest easier. He leaned on one straight arm, his hand closed over the edge of the table, the tendons showing under the skin of his wrist.

“You see the point?” said the chairman soothingly. “Our conservatives simply refused to accept a queer stark building like yours. And they claim that the public won’t accept it either. So we hit upon a middle course. In this way, though it’s not traditional architecture of course, it will give the public the impression of what they’re accustomed to. It adds a certain air of sound, stable dignity—and that’s what we want in a bank, isn’t it? It does seem to be an unwritten law that a bank must have a Classic portico—and a bank is not exactly the right institution to parade law-breaking and rebellion. Undermines that intangible feeling of confidence, you know. People don’t trust novelty. But this is the scheme that pleased everybody. Personally, I wouldn’t insist on it, but I really don’t see that it spoils anything. And that’s what the board has decided. Of course, we don’t mean that we want you to follow this sketch. But it gives you our general idea and you’ll work it out yourself, make your own adaptation of the Classic motive to the façade.”

Then Roark answered. The men could not classify the tone of his voice; they could not decide whether it was too great a calm or too great an emotion. They concluded that it was calm, because the voice moved forward evenly, without stress, without color, each syllable spaced as by a machine; only the air in the room was not the air that vibrates to a calm voice.

They concluded that there was nothing abnormal in the manner of the man who was speaking, except the fact that his right hand would not leave the edge of the table, and when he had to move the drawings, he did it with his left hand, like a man with one arm paralyzed.

He spoke for a long time. He explained why this structure could not have a Classic motive on its façade. He explained why an honest building, like an honest man, had to be of one piece and one faith; what constituted the life source, the idea in any existing thing or creature, and why—if one smallest part committed treason to that idea—the thing or the creature was dead; and why the good, the high and the noble on earth was only that which kept its integrity.

The chairman interrupted him:

“Mr. Roark, I agree with you. There’s no answer to what you’re saying. But unfortunately, in practical life, one can’t always be so flawlessly consistent. There’s always the incalculable human element of emotion. We can’t fight that with cold logic. This discussion is actually superfluous. I can agree with you, but I can’t help you. The matter is closed. It was the board’s final decision—after more than usually prolonged consideration, as you know.”

“Will you let me appear before the board and speak to them?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Roark, but the board will not re-open the question for further debate. It was final. I can only ask you to state whether you agree to accept the commission on our terms or not. I must admit that the board has considered the possibility of your refusal. In which case, the name of another architect, one Gordon L. Prescott, has been mentioned most favorably as an alternative. But I told the board that I felt certain you would accept.”

He waited. Roark said nothing.

“You understand the situation, Mr. Roark?”

“Yes,” said Roark. His eyes were lowered. He was looking down at the drawings.

“Well?”

Roark did not answer.

“Yes or no, Mr. Roark?”

Roark’s head leaned back. He closed his eyes.

“No,” said Roark.

After a while the chairman asked:

“Do you realize what you’re doing?”

“Quite,” said Roark.

“Good God!” Weidler cried suddenly. “Don’t you know how big a commission this is? You’re a young man, you won’t get another chance like this. And ... all right, damn it all, I’ll say it! You need this! I know how badly you need it!”

Roark gathered the drawings from the table, rolled them together and put them under his arm.

“It’s sheer insanity!” Weidler moaned. “I want you. We want your building. You need the commission. Do you have to be quite so fanatical and selfless about it?”

“What?” Roark asked incredulously.

“Fanatical and selfless.”

Roark smiled. He looked down at his drawings. His elbow moved a little, pressing them to his body. He said:

“That was the most selfish thing you’ve ever seen a man do.”

He walked back to his office. He gathered his drawing instruments and the few things he had there. It made one package and he carried it under his arm. He locked the door and gave the key to the rental agent. He told the agent that he was closing his office. He walked home and left the package there. Then he went to Mike Donnigan’s house.

“No?” Mike asked, after one look at him.

“No,” said Roark.

“What happened?”

“I’ll tell you some other time.”

“The bastards!”

“Never mind that, Mike.”

“How about the office now?”

“I’ve closed the office.”

“For good?”

“For the time being.”

“God damn them all, Red! God damn them!”

“Shut up. I need a job, Mike. Can you help me?”

“Me?”

“I don’t know anyone in those trades here. Not anyone that would want me. You know them all.”

“In what trades? What are you talking about?”

“In the building trades. Structural work. As I’ve done before.”

“You mean—a plain workman’s job?”

“I mean a plain workman’s job.”

“You’re crazy, you God-damn fool!”

“Cut it, Mike. Will you get me a job?”

“But why in hell? You can get a decent job in an architect’s office. You know you can.”

“I won’t, Mike. Not ever again.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to touch it. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to help them do what they’re doing.”

“You can get a nice clean job in some other line.”

“I would have to think on a nice clean job. I don’t want to think. Not their way. It will have to be their way, no matter where I go. I want a job where I won’t have to think.”

“Architects don’t take workmen’s jobs.”

“That’s all this architect can do.”

“You can learn something in no time.”

“I don’t want to learn anything.”

“You mean you want me to get you into a construction gang, here, in town?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“No, God damn you! I can‘t! I won’t! I won’t do it!”

“Why?”

“Red, to be putting yourself up like a show for all the bastards in this town to see? For all the sons of bitches to know they brought you down like that? For all of them to gloat?”

Roark laughed.

“I don’t give a damn about that, Mike. Why should you?”

“Well, I’m not letting you. I’m not giving the sons of bitches that kinda treat.”

“Mike,” Roark said softly, “there’s nothing else for me to do.”

“Hell, yes, there is. I told you before. You’ll be listening to reason now. I got all the dough you need until ...”

“I’ll tell you what I’ve told Austen Heller: If you ever offer me money again, that’ll be the end between us.”

“But why?”

“Don’t argue, Mike.”

“But ...”

“I’m asking you to do me a bigger favor. I want that job. You don’t have to feel sorry for me. I don’t.”

“But ... but what’ll happen to you, Red?”

“Where?”

“I mean ... your future?”

“I’ll save enough money and I’ll come back. Or maybe someone will send for me before then.”

Mike looked at him. He saw something in Roark’s eyes which he knew Roark did not want to be there.

“Okay, Red,” said Mike softly.

He thought it over for a long time. He said:

“Listen, Red, I won’t get you a job in town. I just can’t. It turns my stomach to think of it. But I’ll get you something in the same line.”

“All right. Anything. It doesn’t make any difference to me.”

“I’ve worked for all of that bastard Francon’s pet contractors for so long I know everybody ever worked for him. He’s got a granite quarry down in Connecticut. One of the foremen’s a great pal of mine. He’s in town right now. Ever worked in a quarry before?”

“Once. Long ago.”

“Think you’ll like that?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll go see him. We won’t be telling him who you are, just a friend of mine, that’s all.”

“Thanks, Mike.”

Mike reached for his coat, and then his hands fell back, and he looked at the floor.

“Red ...”

“It will be all right, Mike.”

Roark walked home. It was dark and the street was deserted. There was a strong wind. He could feel the cold, whistling pressure strike his cheeks. It was the only evidence of the flow ripping the air. Nothing moved in the stone corridor about him. There was not a tree to stir, no curtains, no awnings; only naked masses of stone, glass, asphalt and sharp corners. It was strange to feel that fierce movement against his face. But in a trash basket on a corner a crumpled sheet of newspaper was rustling, beating convulsively against the wire mesh. It made the wind real.

In the evening, two days later, Roark left for Connecticut.

From the train, he looked back once at the skyline of the city as it flashed into sight and was held for some moments beyond the windows. The twilight had washed off the details of the buildings. They rose in thin shafts of a soft, porcelain blue, a color not of real things, but of evening and distance. They rose in bare outlines, like empty molds waiting to be filled. The distance had flattened the city. The single shafts stood immeasurably tall, out of scale to the rest of the earth. They were of their own world, and they held up to the sky the statement of what man had conceived and made possible. They were empty molds. But man had come so far; he could go farther. The city on the edge of the sky held a question—and a promise.

Little pinheads of light flared up about the peak of one famous tower, in the windows of the Star Roof Restaurant. Then the train swerved around a bend and the city vanished.

That evening, in the banquet hall of the Star Roof Restaurant, a dinner was held to celebrate the admittance of Peter Keating to partnership in the firm to be known henceforward as Francon & Keating.

At the long table that seemed covered, not with a tablecloth, but with a sheet of light, sat Guy Francon. Somehow, tonight, he did not mind the streaks of silver that appeared on his temples; they sparkled crisply against the black of his hair and they gave him an air of cleanliness and elegance, like the rigid white of his shirt against his black evening clothes. In the place of honor sat Peter Keating. He leaned back, his shoulders straight, his hand closed about the stem of a glass. His black curls glistened against his white forehead. In that one moment of silence, the guests felt no envy, no resentment, no malice. There was a grave feeling of brotherhood in the room, in the presence of the pale, handsome boy who looked solemn as at his first communion. Ralston Holcombe had risen to speak. He stood, his glass in hand. He had prepared his speech, but he was astonished to hear himself saying something quite different, in a voice of complete sincerity. He said:

“We are the guardians of a great human function. Perhaps of the greatest function among the endeavors of man. We have achieved much and we have erred often. But we are willing in all humility to make way for our heirs. We are only men and we are only seekers. But we seek for truth with the best there is in our hearts. We seek with what there is of the sublime granted to the race of men. It is a great quest. To the future of American Architecture!”

Part 2

ELLSWORTH M. TOOHEY

I

TO HOLD HIS FISTS CLOSED TIGHT, AS IF THE SKIN OF HIS PALMS had grown fast to the steel he clasped—to keep his feet steady, pressed down hard, the flat rock an upward thrust against his soles—not to feel the existence of his body, but only a few clots of tension: his knees, his wrists, his shoulders and the drill he held—to feel the drill trembling in a long convulsive shudder—to feel his stomach trembling, his lungs trembling, the straight lines of the stone ledges before him dissolving into jagged streaks of trembling—to feel the drill and his body gathered into the single will of pressure, that a shaft of steel might sink slowly into granite—this was all of life for Howard Roark, as it had been in the days of the two months behind him.

He stood on the hot stone in the sun. His face was scorched to bronze. His shirt stuck in long, damp patches to his back. The quarry rose about him in flat shelves breaking against one another. It was a world without curves, grass or soil, a simplified world of stone planes, sharp edges and angles. The stone had not been made by patient centuries welding the sediment of winds and tides; it had come from a molten mass cooling slowly at unknown depth; it had been flung, forced out of the earth, and it still held the shape of violence against the violence of the men on its ledges.

The straight planes stood witness to the force of each cut; the drive of each blow had run in an unswerving line; the stone had cracked open in unbending resistance. Drills bored forward with a low, continuous drone, the tension of the sound cutting through nerves, through skulls, as if the quivering tools were shattering slowly both the stone and the men who held them.

He liked the work. He felt at times as if it were a match of wrestling between his muscles and the granite. He was very tired at night. He liked the emptiness of his body’s exhaustion.

Each evening he walked the two miles from the quarry to the little town where the workers lived. The earth of the woods he crossed was soft and warm under his feet; it was strange, after a day spent on the granite ridges; he smiled as at a new pleasure, each evening, and looked down to watch his feet crushing a surface that responded, gave way and conceded faint prints to be left behind.

There was a bathroom in the garret of the house where he roomed; the paint had peeled off the floor long ago and the naked boards were gray-white. He lay in the tub for a long time and let the cool water soak the stone dust out of his skin. He let his head hang back, on the edge of the tub, his eyes closed. The greatness of the weariness was its own relief: it allowed no sensation but the slow pleasure of the tension leaving his muscles.

He ate his dinner in a kitchen, with other quarry workers. He sat alone at a table in a corner; the fumes of the grease, crackling eternally on the vast gas range, hid the rest of the room in a sticky haze. He ate little. He drank a great deal of water; the cold, glittering liquid in a clean glass was intoxicating.

He slept in a small wooden cube under the roof. The boards of the ceiling slanted down over his bed. When it rained, he could hear the burst of each drop against the roof, and it took an effort to realize why he did not feel the rain beating against his body.

Sometimes, after dinner, he would walk into the woods that began behind the house. He would stretch down on the ground, on his stomach, his elbows planted before him, his hands propping his chin, and he would watch the patterns of veins on the green blades of grass under his face; he would blow at them and watch the blades tremble then stop again. He would roll over on his back and lie still, feeling the warmth of the earth under him. Far above, the leaves were still green, but it was a thick, compressed green, as if the color were condensed in one last effort before the dusk coming to dissolve it. The leaves hung without motion against a sky of polished lemon yellow; its luminous pallor emphasized that its light was failing. He pressed his hips, his back into the earth under him; the earth resisted, but it gave way; it was a silent victory; he felt a dim, sensuous pleasure in the muscles of his legs.

Sometimes, not often, he sat up and did not move for a long time; then he smiled, the slow smile of an executioner watching a victim. He thought of his days going by, of the buildings he could have been doing, should have been doing and, perhaps, never would be doing again. He watched the pain’s unsummoned appearance with a cold, detached curiosity; he said to himself: Well, here it is again. He waited to see how long it would last. It gave him a strange, hard pleasure to watch his fight against it, and he could forget that it was his own suffering; he could smile in contempt, not realizing that he smiled at his own agony. Such moments were rare. But when they came, he felt as he did in the quarry: that he had to drill through granite, that he had to drive a wedge and blast the thing within him which persisted in calling to his pity.

Dominique Francon lived alone, that summer, in the great Colonial mansion of her father’s estate, three miles beyond the quarry town. She received no visitors. An old caretaker and his wife were the only human beings she saw, not too often and merely of necessity; they lived some distance from the mansion, near the stables; the caretaker attended to the grounds and the horses; his wife attended to the house and cooked Dominique’s meals.

The meals were served with the gracious severity the old woman had learned in the days when Dominique’s mother lived and presided over the guests in that great dining room. At night Dominique found her solitary place at the table laid out as for a formal banquet, the candles lighted, the tongues of yellow flame standing motionless like the shining metal spears of a guard of honor. The darkness stretched the room into a hall, the big windows rose like a flat colonnade of sentinels. A shallow crystal bowl stood in a pool of light in the center of the long table, with a single water lily spreading white petals about a heart yellow like a drop of candle fire.

The old woman served the meal in unobtrusive silence, and disappeared from the house as soon as she could afterward. When Dominique walked up the stairs to her bedroom, she found the fragile lace folds of her nightgown laid out on the bed. In the morning she entered her bathroom and found water in the sunken bathtub, the hyacinth odor of her bath salts, the aquamarine tiles polished, shining under her feet, the huge towels spread out like snowdrifts to swallow her body—yet she heard no steps and felt no living presence in the house. The old woman’s treatment of Dominique had the same reverent caution with which she handled the pieces of Venetian glass in the drawing-room cabinets.

Dominique had spent so many summers and winters, surrounding herself with people in order to feel alone, that the experiment of actual solitude was an enchantment to her and a betrayal into a weakness she had never allowed herself: the weakness of enjoying it. She stretched her arms and let them drop lazily, feeling a sweet, drowsy heaviness above her elbows, as after a first drink. She was conscious of her summer dresses, she felt her knees, her thighs encountering the faint resistance of cloth when she moved, and it made her conscious not of the cloth, but of her knees and thighs.

The house stood alone amidst vast grounds, and the woods stretched beyond; there were no neighbors for miles. She rode on horseback down long, deserted roads, down hidden paths leading nowhere. Leaves glittered in the sun and twigs snapped in the wind of her flying passage. She caught her breath at times from the sudden feeling that something magnificent and deadly would meet her beyond the next turn of the road; she could give no identity to what she expected, she could not say whether it was a sight, a person or an event; she knew only its quality—the sensation of a defiling pleasure.

Sometimes she started on foot from the house and walked for miles, setting herself no goal and no hour of return. Cars passed her on the road; the people of the quarry town knew her and bowed to her; she was considered the chatelaine of the countryside, as her mother had been long ago. She turned off the road into the woods and walked on, her arms swinging loosely, her head thrown back, watching the tree tops. She saw clouds swimming behind the leaves; it looked as if a giant tree before her were moving, slanting, ready to fall and crush her; she stopped, she waited, her head thrown back, her throat pulled tight; she felt as if she wanted to be crushed. Then she shrugged and went on. She flung thick branches impatiently out of her way and let them scratch her bare arms. She walked on long after she was exhausted, she drove herself forward against the weariness of her muscles. Then she fell down on her back and lay still, her arms and legs flung out like a cross on the ground, breathing in release, feeling empty and flattened, feeling the weight of the air like a pressure against her breasts.

Some mornings, when she awakened in her bedroom, she heard the explosions of blasting at the granite quarry. She stretched, her arms flung back above her head on the white silk pillow, and she listened. It was the sound of destruction and she liked it.

Because the sun was too hot, that morning, and she knew it would be hotter at the granite quarry, because she wanted to see no one and knew she would face a gang of workers, Dominique walked to the quarry. The thought of seeing it on that blazing day was revolting; she enjoyed the prospect.

When she came out of the woods to the edge of the great stone bowl, she felt as if she were thrust into an execution chamber filled with scalding steam. The heat did not come from the sun, but from that broken cut in the earth, from the reflectors of flat ridges. Her shoulders, her head, her back, exposed to the sky, seemed cool while she felt the hot breath of the stone rising up her legs, to her chin, to her nostrils. The air shimmered below, sparks of fire shot through the granite; she thought the stone was stirring, melting, running in white trickles of lava. Drills and hammers cracked the still weight of the air. It was obscene to see men on the shelves of the furnace. They did not look like workers, they looked like a chain gang serving an unspeakable penance for some unspeakable crime. She could not turn away.

She stood, as an insult to the place below. Her dress—the color of water, a pale green-blue, too simple and expensive, its pleats exact like edges of glass—her thin heels planted wide apart on the boulders, the smooth helmet of her hair, the exaggerated fragility of her body against the sky—flaunted the fastidious coolness of the gardens and drawing rooms from which she came.

She looked down. Her eyes stopped on the orange hair of a man who raised his head and looked at her.

She stood very still, because her first perception was not of sight, but of touch: the consciousness, not of a visual presence, but of a slap in the face. She held one hand awkwardly away from her body, the fingers spread wide on the air, as against a wall. She knew that she could not move until he permitted her to.

She saw his mouth and the silent contempt in the shape of his mouth; the planes of his gaunt, hollow cheeks; the cold, pure brilliance of the eyes that had no trace of pity. She knew it was the most beautiful face she would ever see, because it was the abstraction of strength made visible. She felt a convulsion of anger, of protest, of resistance—and of pleasure. He stood looking up at her; it was not a glance, but an act of ownership. She thought she must let her face give him the answer he deserved. But she was looking, instead, at the stone dust on his burned arms, the wet shirt clinging to his ribs, the lines of his long legs. She was thinking of those statues of men she had always sought; she was wondering what he would look like naked. She saw him looking at her as if he knew that. She thought she had found an aim in life—a sudden, sweeping hatred for that man.

She was first to move. She turned and walked away from him. She saw the superintendent of the quarry on the path ahead, and she waved. The superintendent rushed forward to meet her. “Why, Miss Francon!” he cried. “Why, how do you do, Miss Francon!”

She hoped the words were heard by the man below. For the first time in her life, she was glad of being Miss Francon, glad of her father’s position and possessions, which she had always despised. She thought suddenly that the man below was only a common worker, owned by the owner of this place, and she was almost the owner of this place.

The superintendent stood before her respectfully. She smiled and said:

“I suppose I’ll inherit the quarry some day, so I thought I should show some interest in it once in a while.”

The superintendent preceded her down the path, displayed his domain to her, explained the work. She followed him far to the other side of the quarry; she descended to the dusty green dell of the work sheds; she inspected the bewildering machinery. She allowed a convincingly sufficient time to elapse. Then she walked back, alone, down the edge of the granite bowl.

She saw him from a distance as she approached. He was working. She saw one strand of red hair that fell over his face and swayed with the trembling of the drill. She thought—hopefully—that the vibrations of the drill hurt him, hurt his body, everything inside his body.

When she was on the rocks above him, he raised his head and looked at her; she had not caught him noticing her approach; he looked up as if he expected her to be there, as if he knew she would be back. She saw the hint of a smile, more insulting than words. He sustained the insolence of looking straight at her, he would not move, he would not grant the concession of turning away—of acknowledging that he had no right to look at her in such manner. He had not merely taken that right, he was saying silently that she had given it to him.

She turned sharply and walked on, down the rocky slope, away from the quarry.

It was not his eyes, not his mouth that she remembered, but his hands. The meaning of that day seemed held in a single picture she had noted: the simple instant of his one hand resting against granite. She saw it again: his finger tips pressed to the stone, his long fingers continuing the straight lines of the tendons that spread in a fan from his wrist to his knuckles. She thought of him, but the vision present through all her thoughts was the picture of that hand on the granite. It frightened her; she could not understand it.

He’s only a common worker, she thought, a hired man doing a convict’s labor. She thought of that, sitting before the glass shelf of her dressing table. She looked at the crystal objects spread before her; they were like sculptures in ice—they proclaimed her own cold, luxurious fragility; and she thought of his strained body, of his clothes drenched in dust and sweat, of his hands. She stressed the contrast, because it degraded her. She leaned back, closing her eyes. She thought of the many distinguished men whom she had refused. She thought of the quarry worker. She thought of being broken—not by a man she admired, but by a man she loathed. She let her head fall down on her arm; the thought left her weak with pleasure.

For two days she made herself believe that she would escape from this place; she found old travel folders in her trunk, studied them, chose the resort, the hotel and the particular room in that hotel, selected the train she would take, the boat and the number of the stateroom. She found a vicious amusement in doing that, because she knew she would not take this trip she wanted; she would go back to the quarry.

She went back to the quarry three days later. She stopped over the ledge where he worked and she stood watching him openly. When he raised his head, she did not turn away. Her glance told him that she knew the meaning of her action, but did not respect him enough to conceal it. His glance told her only that he had expected her to come. He bent over his drill and went on with his work. She waited. She wanted him to look up. She knew that he knew it. He would not look again.

She stood, watching his hands, waiting for the moments when he touched stone. She forgot the drill and the dynamite. She liked to think of the granite being broken by his hands.

She heard the superintendent calling her name, hurrying to her up the path. She turned to him when he approached.

“I like to watch the men working,” she explained.

“Yes, quite a picture, isn’t it?” the superintendent agreed. “There’s the train starting over there with another load.”

She was not watching the train. She saw the man below looking at her, she saw the insolent hint of amusement tell her that he knew she did not want him to look at her now. She turned her head away. The superintendent’s eyes traveled over the pit and stopped on the man below them.

“Hey, you down there!” he shouted. “Are you paid to work or to gape?”

The man bent silently over his drill. Dominique laughed aloud.

The superintendent said: “It’s a tough crew we got down here, Miss Francon.... Some of ’em even with jail records.”

“Has that man a jail record?” she asked, pointing down.

“Well, I couldn’t say. Wouldn’t know them all by sight.”

She hoped he had. She wondered whether they whipped convicts nowadays. She hoped they did. At the thought of it, she felt a sinking gasp such as she had felt in childhood, in dreams of falling down a long stairway; but she felt the sinking in her stomach.

She turned brusquely and left the quarry.

She came back many days later. She saw him, unexpectedly, on a flat stretch of stone before her, by the side of the path. She stopped short. She did not want to come too close. It was strange to see him before her, without the defense and excuse of distance.

He stood looking straight at her. Their understanding was too offensively intimate, because they had never said a word to each other. She destroyed it by speaking to him.

“Why do you always stare at me?” she asked sharply.

She thought with relief that words were the best means of estrangement. She had denied everything they both knew by naming it. For a moment, he stood silently, looking at her. She felt terror at the thought that he would not answer, that he would let his silence tell her too clearly why no answer was necessary. But he answered. He said:

“For the same reason you’ve been staring at me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“If you didn’t, you’d be much more astonished and much less angry, Miss Francon.”

“So you know my name?”

“You’ve been advertising it loudly enough.”

“You’d better not be insolent. I can have you fired at a moment’s notice, you know.”

He turned his head, looking for someone among the men below. He asked: “Shall I call the superintendent?”

She smiled contemptuously.

“No, of course not. It would be too simple. But since you know who I am, it would be better if you stopped looking at me when I come here. It might be misunderstood.”

“I don’t think so.”

She turned away. She had to control her voice. She looked over the stone ledges. She asked: “Do you find it very hard to work here?”

“Yes. Terribly.”

“Do you get tired?”

“Inhumanly.”

“How does that feel?”

“I can hardly walk when the day’s ended. I can’t move my arms at night. When I lie in bed, I can count every muscle in my body by the number of separate, different pains.”

She knew suddenly that he was not telling her about himself; he was speaking of her, he was saying the things she wanted to hear and telling her that he knew why she wanted to hear these particular sentences.

She felt anger, a satisfying anger because it was cold and certain. She felt also a desire to let her skin touch his; to let the length of her bare arm press against the length of his; just that; the desire went no further.

She was asking calmly:

“You don’t belong here, do you? You don’t talk like a worker. What were you before?”

“An electrician. A plumber. A plasterer. Many things.”

“Why are you working here?”

“For the money you’re paying me, Miss Francon.”

She shrugged. She turned and walked away from him up the path. She knew that he was looking after her. She did not glance back. She continued on her way through the quarry, and she left it as soon as she could, but she did not go back down the path where she would have to see him again.

II

DOMINIQUE AWAKENED EACH MORNING TO THE PROSPECT OF A DAY made significant by the existence of a goal to be reached: the goal of making it a day on which she would not go to the quarry.

She had lost the freedom she loved. She knew that a continuous struggle against the compulsion of a single desire was compulsion also, but it was the form she preferred to accept. It was the only manner in which she could let him motivate her life. She found a dark satisfaction in pain—because that pain came from him.

She went to call on her distant neighbors, a wealthy, gracious family who had bored her in New York; she had visited no one all summer. They were astonished and delighted to see her. She sat among a group of distinguished people at the edge of a swimming pool. She watched the air of fastidious elegance around her. She watched the deference of these people’s manner when they spoke to her. She glanced at her own reflection in the pool: she looked more delicately austere than any among them.

And she thought, with a vicious thrill, of what these people would do if they read her mind in this moment; if they knew that she was thinking of a man in a quarry, thinking of his body with a sharp intimacy as one does not think of another’s body but only of one’s own. She smiled; the cold purity of her face prevented them from seeing the nature of that smile. She came back again to visit these people—for the sake of such thoughts in the presence of their respect for her.

One evening, a guest offered to drive her back to her house. He was an eminent young poet. He was pale and slender; he had a soft, sensitive mouth, and eyes hurt by the whole universe. She had not noticed the wistful attention with which he had watched her for a long time. As they drove through the twilight she saw him leaning hesitantly closer to her. She heard his voice whispering the pleading, incoherent things she had heard from many men. He stopped the car. She felt his lips pressed to her shoulder.

She jerked away from him. She sat still for an instant, because she would have to brush against him if she moved and she could not bear to touch him. Then she flung the door open, she leaped out, she slammed the door behind her as if the crash of sound could wipe him out of existence, and she ran blindly. She stopped running after a while, and she walked on, shivering, walked down the dark road until she saw the roof line of her own house.

She stopped, looking about her with her first coherent thought of astonishment. Such incidents had happened to her often in the past; only then she had been amused; she had felt no revulsion; she had felt nothing.

She walked slowly across the lawn, to the house. On the stairs to her room she stopped. She thought of the man in the quarry. She thought, in clear, formed words, that the man in the quarry wanted her. She had known it before; she had known it with his first glance at her. But she had never stated the knowledge to herself.

She laughed. She looked about her, at the silent splendor of her house. The house made the words preposterous. She knew what would never happen to her. And she knew the kind of suffering she could impose on him.

For days she walked with satisfaction through the rooms of her house. It was her defense. She heard the explosions of blasting from the quarry and smiled.

But she felt too certain and the house was too safe. She felt a desire to underscore the safety by challenging it.

She chose the marble slab in front of the fireplace in her bedroom. She wanted it broken. She knelt, hammer in hand, and tried to smash the marble. She pounded it, her thin arm sweeping high over her head, crashing down with ferocious helplessness. She felt the pain in the bones of her arms, in her shoulder sockets. She succeeded in making a long scratch across the marble.

She went to the quarry. She saw him from a distance and walked straight to him.

“Hello,” she said casually.

He stopped the drill. He leaned against a stone shelf. He answered:

“Hello.”

“I have been thinking of you,” she said softly, and stopped, then added, her voice flowing on in the same tone of compelling invitation, “because there’s a bit of a dirty job to be done at my house. Would you like to make some extra money?”

“Certainly, Miss Francon.”

“Will you come to my house tonight? The way to the servants’ entrance is off Ridgewood Road. There’s a marble piece at a fireplace that’s broken and has to be replaced. I want you to take it out and order a new one made for me.”

She expected anger and refusal. He asked:

“What time shall I come?”

“At seven o’clock. What are you paid here?”

“Sixty-two cents an hour.”

“I’m sure you’re worth that. I’m quite willing to pay you at the same rate. Do you know how to find my house?”

“No, Miss Francon.”

“Just ask anyone in the village to direct you.”

“Yes, Miss Francon.”

She walked away, disappointed. She felt that their secret understanding was lost; he had spoken as if it were a simple job which she could have offered to any other workman. Then she felt the sinking gasp inside, that feeling of shame and pleasure which he always gave her: she realized that their understanding had been more intimate and flagrant than ever—in his natural acceptance of an unnatural offer; he had shown her how much he knew—by his lack of astonishment.

She asked her old caretaker and his wife to remain in the house that evening. Their diffident presence completed the picture of a feudal mansion. She heard the bell of the servants’ entrance at seven o’clock. The old woman escorted him to the great front hall where Dominique stood on the landing of a broad stairway.

She watched him approaching, looking up at her. She held the pose long enough to let him suspect that it was a deliberate pose deliberately planned; she broke it at the exact moment before he could become certain of it. She said: “Good evening.” Her voice was austerely quiet.

He did not answer, but inclined his head and walked on up the stairs toward her. He wore his work clothes and he carried a bag of tools. His movements had a swift, relaxed kind of energy that did not belong here, in her house, on the polished steps, between the delicate, rigid banisters. She had expected him to seem incongruous in her house; but it was the house that seemed incongruous around him.

She moved one hand, indicating the door of her bedroom. He followed obediently. He did not seem to notice the room when he entered. He entered it as if it were a workshop. He walked straight to the fireplace.

“There it is,” she said, one finger pointing to the marble slab.

He said nothing. He knelt, took a thin metal wedge from his bag, held its point against the scratch on the slab, took a hammer and struck one blow. The marble split in a long, deep cut.

He glanced up at her. It was the look she dreaded, a look of laughter that could not be answered, because the laughter could not be seen, only felt. He said:

“Now it’s broken and has to be replaced.”

She asked calmly:

“Would you know what kind of marble this is and where to order another piece like it?”

“Yes, Miss Francon.”

“Go ahead, then. Take it out.”

“Yes, Miss Francon.”

She stood watching him. It was strange to feel a senseless necessity to watch the mechanical process of the work as if her eyes were helping it. Then she knew that she was afraid to look at the room around them. She made herself raise her head.

She saw the shelf of her dressing table, its glass edge like a narrow green satin ribbon in the semidarkness, and the crystal containers; she saw a pair of white bedroom slippers, a pale blue towel on the floor by a mirror, a pair of stockings thrown over the arm of a chair; she saw the white satin cover of her bed. His shirt had damp stains and gray patches of stone dust; the dust made streaks on the skin of his arms. She felt as if each object in the room had been touched by him, as if the air were a heavy pool of water into which they had been plunged together, and the water that touched him carried the touch to her, to every object in the room. She wanted him to look up. He worked, without raising his head.

She approached him and stood silently over him. She had never stood so close to him before. She looked down at the smooth skin on the back of his neck; she could distinguish single threads of his hair. She glanced down at the tip of her sandal. It was there, on the floor, an inch away from his body; she needed but one movement, a very slight movement of her foot, to touch him. She made a step back.

He moved his head, but not to look up, only to pick another tool from the bag, and bent over his work again.

She laughed aloud. He stopped and glanced at her.

“Yes?” he asked.

Her face was grave, her voice gentle when she answered:

“Oh, I’m sorry. You might have thought that I was laughing at you. But I wasn’t, of course.”

She added:

“I didn’t want to disturb you. I’m sure you’re anxious to finish and get out of here. I mean, of course, because you must be tired. But then, on the other hand, I’m paying you by the hour, so it’s quite all right if you stretch your time a little, if you want to make more out of it. There must be things you’d like to talk about.”

“Oh, yes, Miss Francon.”

“Well?”

“I think this is an atrocious fireplace.”

“Really? This house was designed by my father.”

“Yes, of course, Miss Francon.”

“There’s no point in your discussing the work of an architect.”

“None at all.”

“Surely we could choose some other subject.”

“Yes, Miss Francon.”

She moved away from him. She sat down on the bed, leaning back on straight arms, her legs crossed and pressed close together in a long, straight line. Her body, sagging limply from her shoulders, contradicted the inflexible precision of the legs; the cold austerity of her face contradicted the pose of her body.

He glanced at her occasionally, as he worked. He was speaking obediently. He was saying:

“I shall make certain to get a piece of marble of precisely the same quality, Miss Francon. It is very important to distinguish between the various kinds of marble. Generally speaking, there are three kinds. The white marbles, which are derived from the recrystallization of limestone, the onyx marbles which are chemical deposits of calcium carbonate, and the green marbles which consist mainly of hydrous magnesium silicate or serpentine. This last must not be considered as true marble. True marble is a metamorphic form of limestone, produced by heat and pressure. Pressure is a powerful factor. It leads to consequences which, once started, cannot be controlled.”

“What consequences?” she asked, leaning forward.

“The recrystallization of the particles of limestone and the infiltration of foreign elements from the surrounding soil. These constitute the colored streaks which are to be found in most marbles. Pink marble is caused by the presence of manganese oxides, gray marble is due to carbonaceous matter, yellow marble is attributed to a hydrous oxide of iron. This piece here is, of course, white marble. There are a great many varieties of white marble. You should be very careful, Miss Francon ...”

She sat leaning forward, gathered into a dim black huddle; the lamp light fell on one hand she had dropped limply on her knees, palm up, the fingers half-closed, a thin edge of fire outlining each finger, the dark cloth of her dress making the hand too naked and brilliant.

“... to make certain that I order a new piece of precisely the same quality. It would not be advisable, for instance, to substitute a piece of white Georgia marble which is not as fine-grained as the white marble of Vermont, which is not as fine-grained as the white marble of Alabama. This is Alabama marble. Very high grade. Very expensive.”

He saw her hand close and drop down, out of the light. He continued his work in silence.

When he had finished, he rose, asking:

“Where shall I put the stone?”

“Leave it there. I’ll have it removed.”

“I’ll order a new piece cut to measure and delivered to you C.O.D. Do you wish me to set it?”

“Yes, certainly. I’ll let you know when it comes. How much do I owe you?” She glanced at a clock on her bedside table. “Let me see, you’ve been here three quarters of an hour. That’s forty-eight cents.” She reached for her bag, she took out a dollar bill, she handed it to him. “Keep the change,” she said.

She hoped he would throw it back in her face. He slipped the bill into his pocket. He said:

“Thank you, Miss Francon.”

He saw the edge of her long black sleeve trembling over her closed fingers.

“Good night,” she said, her voice hollow in anger.

He bowed: “Good night, Miss Francon.”

He turned and walked down the stairs, out of the house.

She stopped thinking of him. She thought of the piece of marble he had ordered. She waited for it to come, with the feverish intensity of a sudden mania; she counted the days; she watched the rare trucks on the road beyond the lawn.

She told herself fiercely that she merely wanted the marble to come; just that; nothing else; no hidden reasons; no reasons at all. It was a last, hysterical aftermath; she was free of everything else. The stone would come and that would be the end.

When the stone came, she barely glanced at it. The delivery truck had not left the grounds, when she was at her desk, writing a note on a piece of exquisite stationery. She wrote:

“The marble is here. I want it set tonight.”

She sent her caretaker with the note to the quarry. She ordered it delivered to: “I don’t know his name. The redheaded workman who was here.”

The caretaker came back and brought her a scrap torn from a brown paper bag, bearing in pencil:

“You’ll have it set tonight.”

She waited, in the suffocating emptiness of impatience, at the window of her bedroom. The servants’ entrance bell rang at seven o’clock. There was a knock at her door. “Come in,” she snapped—to hide the strange sound of her own voice. The door opened and the caretaker’s wife entered, motioning for someone to follow. The person who followed was a short, squat, middle-aged Italian with bow legs, a gold hoop in one ear and a frayed hat held respectfully in both hands.

“The man sent from the quarry, Miss Francon,” said the caretaker’s wife.

Dominique asked, her voice not a scream and not a question:

“Who are you?”

“Pasquale Orsini,” the man answered obediently, bewildered.

“What do you want?”

“Well, I ... Well, Red down at the quarry said fireplace gotta be fix, he said you wanta I fix her.”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” she said, rising. “I forgot. Go ahead.”

She had to get out of the room. She had to run, not to be seen by anyone, not to be seen by herself if she could escape it.

She stopped somewhere in the garden and stood trembling, pressing her fists against her eyes. It was anger. It was a pure, single emotion that swept everything clean; everything but the terror under the anger; terror, because she knew that she could not go near the quarry now and that she would go.

It was early evening, many days later, when she went to the quarry. She returned on horseback from a long ride through the country, and she saw the shadows lengthening on the lawn; she knew that she could not live through another night. She had to get there before the workers left. She wheeled about. She rode to the quarry, flying, the wind cutting her cheeks.

He was not there when she reached the quarry. She knew at once that he was not there, even though the workers were just leaving and a great many of them were filing down the paths from the stone bowl. She stood, her lips tight, and she looked for him. But she knew that he had left.

She rode into the woods. She flew at random between walls of leaves that melted ahead in the gathering twilight. She stopped, broke a long, thin branch off a tree, tore the leaves off, and went on, using the flexible stick as a whip, lashing her horse to fly faster. She felt as if the speed would hasten the evening on, force the hours ahead to pass more quickly, let her leap across time to catch the coming morning before it came. And then she saw him walking alone on the path before her.

She tore ahead. She caught up with him and stopped sharply, the jolt throwing her forward then back like the release of a spring. He stopped.

They said nothing. They looked at each other. She thought that every silent instant passing was a betrayal; this wordless encounter was too eloquent, this recognition that no greeting was necessary.

She asked, her voice flat:

“Why didn’t you come to set the marble?”

“I didn’t think it would make any difference to you who came. Or did it, Miss Francon?”

She felt the words not as sounds, but as a blow flat against her mouth. The branch she held went up and slashed across his face. She started off in the sweep of the same motion.

Dominique sat at the dressing table in her bedroom. It was very late. There was no sound in the vast, empty house around her. The French windows of the bedroom were open on a terrace and there was no sound of leaves in the dark garden beyond.

The blankets on her bed were turned down, waiting for her, the pillow white against the tall, black windows. She thought she would try to sleep. She had not seen him for three days. She ran her hands over her head, the curves of her palms pressing against the smooth planes of hair. She pressed her finger tips, wet with perfume, to the hollows of her temples, and held them there for a moment; she felt relief in the cold, contracting bite of the liquid on her skin. A spilled drop of perfume remained on the glass of the dressing table, a drop sparkling like a gem and as expensive.

She did not hear the sound of steps in the garden. She heard them only when they rose up the stairs to the terrace. She sat up, frowning. She looked at the French windows.

He came in. He wore his work clothes, the dirty shirt with rolled sleeves, the trousers smeared with stone dust. He stood looking at her. There was no laughing understanding in his face. His face was drawn, austere in cruelty, ascetic in passion, the cheeks sunken, the lips pulled down, set tight. She jumped to her feet, she stood, her arms thrown back, her fingers spread apart. He didn’t move. She saw a vein of his neck rise, beating, and fall down again.

Then he walked to her. He held her as if his flesh had cut through hers and she felt the bones of his arms on the bones of her ribs, her legs jerked tight against his, his mouth on hers.

She did not know whether the jolt of terror shook her first and she thrust her elbows at his throat, twisting her body to escape, or whether she lay still in his arms, in the first instant, in the shock of feeling his skin against hers, the thing she had thought about, had expected, had never known to be like this, could not have known, because this was not part of living, but a thing one could not bear longer than a second.

She tried to tear herself away from him. The effort broke against his arms that had not felt it. Her fists beat against his shoulders, against his face. He moved one hand, took her two wrists, pinned them behind her, under his arm, wrenching her shoulder blades. She twisted her head back. She felt his lips on her breast. She tore herself free.

She fell back against the dressing table, she stood crouching, her hands clasping the edge behind her, her eyes wide, colorless, shapeless in terror. He was laughing. There was the movement of laughter on his face, but no sound. Perhaps he had released her intentionally. He stood, his legs apart, his arms hanging at his sides, letting her be more sharply aware of his body across the space between them than she had been in his arms. She looked at the door behind him, he saw the first hint of movement, no more than a thought of leaping toward that door. He extended his arm, not touching her, and she fell back. Her shoulders moved faintly, rising. He took a step forward and her shoulders fell. She huddled lower, closer to the table. He let her wait. Then he approached. He lifted her without effort. She let her teeth sink into his hand and felt blood on the tip of her tongue. He pulled her head back and he forced her mouth open against his.

She fought like an animal. But she made no sound. She did not call for help. She heard the echoes of her blows in a gasp of his breath, and she knew that it was a gasp of pleasure. She reached for the lamp on the dressing table. He knocked the lamp out of her hand. The crystal burst to pieces in the darkness.

He had thrown her down on the bed and she felt the blood beating in her throat, in her eyes, the hatred, the helpless terror in her blood. She felt the hatred and his hands; his hands moving over her body, the hands that broke granite. She fought in a last convulsion. Then the sudden pain shot up, through her body, to her throat, and she screamed. Then she lay still.

It was an act that could be performed in tenderness, as a seal of love, or in contempt, as a symbol of humiliation and conquest. It could be the act of a lover or the act of a soldier violating an enemy woman. He did it as an act of scorn. Not as love, but as defilement. And this made her lie still and submit. One gesture of tenderness from him—and she would have remained cold, untouched by the thing done to her body. But the act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted. Then she felt him shaking with the agony of a pleasure unbearable even to him, she knew that she had given that to him, that it came from her, from her body, and she bit his lips and she knew what he had wanted her to know.

He lay still across the bed, away from her, his head hanging back over the edge. She heard the slow, ending gasps of his breath. She lay on her back, as he had left her, not moving, her mouth open. She felt empty, light and flat.

She saw him get up. She saw his silhouette against the window. He went out, without a word or a glance at her. She noticed that, but it did not matter. She listened blankly to the sound of his steps moving away in the garden.

She lay still for a long time. Then she moved her tongue in her open mouth. She heard a sound that came from somewhere within her, and it was the dry, short, sickening sound of a sob, but she was not crying, her eyes were held paralyzed, dry and open. The sound became motion, a jolt running down her throat to her stomach. It flung her up, she stood awkwardly, bent over, her forearms pressed to her stomach. She heard the small table by the bed rattling in the darkness, and she looked at it, in empty astonishment that a table should move without reason. Then she understood that she was shaking. She was not frightened; it seemed foolish to shake like that, in short, separate jerks, like soundless hiccoughs. She thought she must take a bath. The need was unbearable, as if she had felt it for a long time. Nothing mattered, if only she would take a bath. She dragged her feet slowly to the door of her bathroom.

She turned the light on in the bathroom. She saw herself in a tall mirror. She saw the purple bruises left on her body by his mouth. She heard a moan muffled in her throat, not very loud. It was not the sight, but the sudden flash of knowledge. She knew that she would not take a bath. She knew that she wanted to keep the feeling of his body, the traces of his body on hers, knowing also what such a desire implied. She fell on her knees, clasping the edge of the bathtub. She could not make herself crawl over that edge. Her hands slipped, she lay still on the floor. The tiles were hard and cold under her body. She lay there till morning.

Roark awakened in the morning and thought that last night had been like a point reached, like a stop in the movement of his life. He was moving forward for the sake of such stops; like the moments when he had walked through the half-finished Heller house; like last night. In some unstated way, last night had been what building was to him; in some quality of reaction within him, in what it gave to his consciousness of existence.

They had been united in an understanding beyond the violence, beyond the deliberate obscenity of his action; had she meant less to him, he would not have taken her as he did; had he meant less to her, she would not have fought so desperately. The unrepeatable exaltation was in knowing that they both understood this.

He went to the quarry and he worked that day as usual. She did not come to the quarry and he did not expect her to come. But the thought of her remained. He watched it with curiosity. It was strange to be conscious of another person’s existence, to feel it as a close, urgent necessity; a necessity without qualifications, neither pleasant nor painful, merely final like an ultimatum. It was important to know that she existed in the world; it was important to think of her, of how she had awakened this morning, of how she moved, with her body still his, now his forever, of what she thought.

That evening, at dinner in the sooted kitchen, he opened a newspaper and saw the name of Roger Enright in the lines of a gossip column. He read the short paragraph:

“It looks like another grand project on its way to the wastebasket. Roger Enright, the oil king, seems to be stumped this time. He’ll have to call a halt to his latest pipe dream of an Enright House. Architect trouble, we are told. Seems as if half a dozen of the big building boys have been shown the gate by the unsatisfiable Mr. Enright. Top-notch-ers, all of them.”

Roark felt the wrench he had tried so often to fight, not to let it hurt him too much: the wrench of helplessness before the vision of what he could do, what should have been possible and was closed to him. Then, without reason, he thought of Dominique Francon. She had no relation to the things in his mind; he was shocked only to know that she could remain present even among these things.

A week passed. Then, one evening, he found a letter waiting for him at home. It had been forwarded from his former office to his last New York address, from there to Mike, from Mike to Connecticut. The engraved address of an oil company on the envelope meant nothing to him. He opened the letter. He read:

“Dear Mr. Roark,

“I have been endeavoring for some time to get in touch with you, but have been unable to locate you. Please communicate with me at your earliest convenience. I should like to discuss with you my proposed Enright House, if you are the man who built the Fargo Store.

“Sincerely yours,
“Roger Enright.”

Half an hour later Roark was on a train. When the train started moving, he remembered Dominique and that he was leaving her behind. The thought seemed distant and unimportant. He was astonished only to know that he still thought of her, even now.

She could accept, thought Dominique, and come to forget in time everything that had happened to her, save one memory: that she had found pleasure in the thing which had happened, that he had known it, and more: that he had known it before he came to her and that he would not have come but for that knowledge. She had not given him the one answer that would have saved her: an answer of simple revulsion—she had found joy in her revulsion, in her terror and in his strength. That was the degradation she had wanted and she hated him for it.

She found a letter one morning, waiting for her on the breakfast table. It was from Alvah Scarret. “... When are you coming back, Dominique? I can’t tell you how much we miss you here. You’re not a comfortable person to have around, I’m actually scared of you, but I might as well inflate your inflated ego some more, at a distance, and confess that we’re all waiting for you impatiently. It will be like the homecoming of an Empress.”

She read it and smiled. She thought, if they knew ... those people ... that old life and that awed reverence before her person ... I’ve been raped.... I’ve been raped by some redheaded hoodlum from a stone quarry.... I, Dominique Francon.... Through the fierce sense of humiliation, the words gave her the same kind of pleasure she had felt in his arms.

She thought of it when she walked through the countryside, when she passed people on the road and the people bowed to her, the chatelaine of the town. She wanted to scream it to the hearing of all.

She was not conscious of the days that passed. She felt content in a strange detachment, alone with the words she kept repeating to herself. Then, one morning, standing on the lawn in her garden, she understood that a week had passed and that she had not seen him for a week. She turned and walked rapidly across the lawn to the road. She was going to the quarry.

She walked the miles to the quarry, down the road, bareheaded in the sun. She did not hurry. It was not necessary to hurry. It was inevitable. To see him again.... She had no purpose. The need was too great to name a purpose.... Afterward ... There were other things, hideous, important things behind her and rising vaguely in her mind, but first, above all, just one thing: to see him again ...

She came to the quarry and she looked slowly, carefully, stupidly about her, stupidly because the enormity of what she saw would not penetrate her brain: she saw at once that he was not there. The work was in full swing, the sun was high over the busiest hour of the day, there was not an idle man in sight, but he was not among the men. She stood, waiting numbly, for a long time.

Then she saw the foreman and she motioned for him to approach.

“Good afternoon, Miss Francon.... Lovely day, Miss Francon, isn’t it? Just like the middle of summer again and yet fall’s not far away, yes, fall’s coming, look at the leaves, Miss Francon.”

She asked:

“There was a man you had here ... a man with very bright orange hair ... where is he?”

“Oh yes. That one. He’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“Quit. Left for New York, I think. Very suddenly too.”

“When? A week ago?”

“Why, no. Just yesterday.”

“Who was ...”

Then she stopped. She was going to ask: “Who was he?” She asked instead:

“Who was working here so late last night? I heard blasting.”

“That was for a special order for Mr. Francon’s building. The Cosmo-Slotnick Building, you know. A rush job.”

“Yes ... I see....”

“Sorry it disturbed you, Miss Francon.”

“Oh, not at all....”

She walked away. She would not ask for his name. It was her last chance of freedom.

She walked swiftly, easily, in sudden relief. She wondered why she had never noticed that she did not know his name and why she had never asked him. Perhaps because she had known everything she had to know about him from that first glance. She thought, one could not find some nameless worker in the city of New York. She was safe. If she knew his name, she would be on her way to New York now.

The future was simple. She had nothing to do except never to ask for his name. She had a reprieve. She had a chance to fight. She would break it—or it would break her. If it did, she would ask for his name.

III

WHEN PETER KEATING ENTERED THE OFFICE, THE OPENING OF the door sounded like a single high blast on a trumpet. The door flew forward as if it had opened of itself to the approach of a man before whom all doors were to open in such manner.

His day in the office began with the newspapers. There was a neat pile of them waiting, stacked on his desk by his secretary. He liked to see what new mentions appeared in print about the progress of the Cosmo-Slotnick Building or the firm of Francon & Keating.

There were no mentions in the papers this morning, and Keating frowned. He saw, however, a story about Ellsworth M. Toohey. It was a startling story. Thomas L. Foster, noted philanthropist, had died and had left, among larger bequests, the modest sum of one hundred thousand dollars to Ellsworth M. Toohey, “my friend and spiritual guide—in appreciation of his noble mind and true devotion to humanity.” Ellsworth M. Toohey had accepted the legacy and had turned it over, intact, to the “Workshop of Social Study,” a progressive institute of learning where he held the post of lecturer on “Art as a Social Symptom.” He had given the simple explanation that he “did not believe in the institution of private inheritance.” He had refused all further comment. “No, my friends,” he had said, “not about this.” And had added, with his charming knack for destroying the earnestness of his own moment: “I like to indulge in the luxury of commenting solely upon interesting subjects. I do not consider myself one of these.”

Peter Keating read the story. And because he knew that it was an action which he would never have committed, he admired it tremendously.

Then he thought, with a familiar twinge of annoyance, that he had not been able to meet Ellsworth Toohey. Toohey had left on a lecture tour shortly after the award in the Cosmo-Slotnick competition, and the brilliant gatherings Keating had attended ever since were made empty by the absence of the one man he’d been most eager to meet. No mention of Keating’s name had appeared in Toohey’s column. Keating turned hopefully, as he did each morning, to “One Small Voice” in the Banner. But “One Small Voice” was subtitled “Songs and Things” today, and was devoted to proving the superiority of folk songs over any other form of musical art, and of choral singing over any other manner of musical rendition.

Keating dropped the Banner. He got up and paced viciously across the office, because he had to turn now to a disturbing problem. He had been postponing it for several mornings. It was the matter of choosing a sculptor for the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. Months ago the commission for the giant statue of “Industry” to stand in the main lobby of the building had been awarded—tentatively—to Steven Mallory. The award had puzzled Keating, but it had been made by Mr. Slotnick, so Keating had approved of it. He had interviewed Mallory and said: “... in recognition of your unusual ability ... of course you have no name, but you will have, after a commission like this ... they don’t come every day like this building of mine.”

He had not liked Mallory. Mallory’s eyes were like black holes left after a fire not quite put out, and Mallory had not smiled once. He was twenty-four years old, had had one show of his work, but not many commissions. His work was strange and too violent. Keating remembered that Ellsworth Toohey had said once, long ago, in “One Small Voice”: “Mr. Mallory’s human figures would have been very fine were it not for the hypothesis that God created the world and the human form. Had Mr. Mallory been entrusted with the job, he might, perhaps, have done better than the Almighty, if we are to judge by what he passes as human bodies in stone. Or would he?”

Keating had been baffled by Mr. Slotnick’s choice, until he heard that Dimples Williams had once lived in the same Greenwich Village tenement with Steven Mallory, and Mr. Slotnick could refuse nothing to Dimples Williams at the moment. Mallory had been hired, had worked and had submitted a model of his statue of “Industry.” When he saw it, Keating knew that the statue would look like a raw gash, like a smear of fire in the neat elegance of his lobby. It was the slender naked body of a man who looked as if he coud break through the steel plate of a battleship and through any barrier whatever. It stood like a challenge. It left a strange stamp on one’s eyes. It made the people around it seem smaller and sadder than usual. For the first time in his life, looking at that statue, Keating thought he understood what was meant by the word “heroic.”

He said nothing. But the model was sent on to Mr. Slotnick and many people said, with indignation, what Keating had felt. Mr. Slotnick asked him to select another sculptor and left the choice in his hands.

Keating flopped down in an armchair, leaned back and clicked his tongue against his palate. He wondered whether he should give the commission to Bronson, the sculptor who was a friend of Mrs. Shupe, wife of the president of Cosmo; or to Palmer, who had been recommended by Mr. Huseby who was planning the erection of a new five-million dollar cosmetic factory. Keating discovered that he liked this process of hesitation; he held the fate of two men and of many potential others; their fate, their work, their hope, perhaps even the amount of food in their stomachs. He could choose as he pleased, for any reason, without reasons; he could flip a coin, he could count them off on the buttons of his vest. He was a great man—by the grace of those who depended on him.

Then he noticed the envelope.

It lay on top of a pile of letters on his desk. It was a plain, thin, narrow envelope, but it bore the small masthead of the Banner in one corner. He reached for it hastily. It contained no letter; only a strip of proofs for tomorrow’s Banner. He saw the familiar “One Small Voice” by Ellsworth M. Toohey, and under it a single word as subtitle, in large, spaced letters, a single word, blatant in its singleness, a salute by dint of omission:

“KEATING”

He dropped the paper strip and seized it again and read, choking upon great unchewed hunks of sentences, the paper trembling in his hand, the skin on his forehead drawing into tight pink spots. Toohey had written:

“Greatness is an exaggeration, and like all exaggerations of dimension it connotes at once the necessary corollary of emptiness. One thinks of an inflated toy balloon, does one not? There are, however, occasions when we are forced to acknowledge the promise of an approach—brilliantly close—to what we designate loosely by the term of greatness. Such a promise is looming on our architectural horizon in the person of a mere boy named Peter Keating.

“We have heard a great deal—and with justice—about the superb Cosmo-Slotnick Building which he has designed. Let us glance, for once, beyond the building, at the man whose personality is stamped upon it.

“There is no personality stamped upon that building—and in this, my friends, lies the greatness of the personality. It is the greatness of a selfless young spirit that assimilates all things and returns them to the world from which they came, enriched by the gentle brilliance of its own talent. Thus a single man comes to represent, not a lone freak, but the multitude of all men together, to embody the reach of all aspirations in his own....

“... Those gifted with discrimination will be able to hear the message which Peter Keating addresses to us in the shape of the Cosmo-Slotnick Building, to see that the three simple, massive ground floors are the solid bulk of our working classes which support all of society; that the rows of identical windows offering their panes to the sun are the souls of the common people, of the countless anonymous ones alike in the uniformity of brotherhood, reaching for the light; that the graceful pilasters rising from their firm base in the ground floors and bursting into the gay effervescence of their Corinthian capitals, are the flowers of Culture which blossom only when rooted in the rich soil of the broad masses....

“... In answer to those who consider all critics as fiends devoted solely to the destruction of sensitive talent, this column wishes to thank Peter Keating for affording us the rare—oh, so rare!—opportunity to prove our delight in our true mission, which is to discover young talent -when it is there to be discovered. And if Peter Keating should chance to read these lines, we expect no gratitude from him. The gratitude is ours.”

It was when Keating began to read the article for the third time that he noticed a few lines written in red pencil across the space by its title:

“Dear Peter Keating,

“Drop in to see me at my office one of these days. Would love to discover what you look like.

“E.M.T.”

He let the clipping flutter down to his desk, and he stood over it, running a strand of hair between his fingers, in a kind of happy stupor. Then he whirled around to his drawing of the Cosmo-Slotnick Building, that hung on the wall between a huge photograph of the Parthenon and one of the Louvre. He looked at the pilasters of his building. He had never thought of them as Culture flowering from out of the broad masses, but he decided that one could very well think that and all the rest of the beautiful stuff.

Then he seized the telephone, he spoke to a high, flat voice which belonged to Ellsworth Toohey’s secretary, and he made an appointment to see Toohey at four-thirty of the next afternoon.

In the hours that followed, his daily work assumed a new relish. It was as if his usual activity had been only a bright, flat mural and had now become a noble bas-relief, pushed forward, given a three-dimensional reality by the words of Ellsworth Toohey.

Guy Francon descended from his office once in a while, for no ascertainable purpose. The subtler shades of his shirts and socks matched the gray of his temples. He stood smiling benevolently in silence. Keating flashed past him in the drafting room and acknowledged his presence, not stopping, but slowing his steps long enough to plant a crackling bit of newspaper into the folds of the mauve handkerchief in Francon’s breast-pocket, with “Read that when you have time, Guy.” He added, his steps half-way across the next room: “Want to have lunch with me today, Guy? Wait for me at the Plaza.”

When he came back from lunch, Keating was stopped by a young draftsman who asked, his voice high with excitement:

“Say, Mr. Keating, who’s it took a shot at Ellsworth Toohey?”

Keating managed to gasp out:

“Who is it did what?”

“Shot Mr. Toohey.”

“Who?”

“That’s what I want to know, who.”

“Shot ... Ellsworth Toohey?”

“That’s what I saw in the paper in the restaurant a guy had. Didn’t have time to get one.”

“He’s ... killed?”

“That’s what I don’t know. Saw only it said about a shot.”

“If he’s dead, does that mean they won’t publish his column tomorrow?”

“Dunno. Why, Mr. Keating?”

“Go get me a paper.”

“But I’ve got to ...”

“Get me that paper, you damned idiot!”

The story was there, in the afternoon papers. A shot had been fired at Ellsworth Toohey that morning, as he stepped out of his car in front of a radio station where he was to deliver an address on “The Voiceless and the Undefended.” The shot had missed him. Ellsworth Toohey had remained calm and sane throughout. His behavior had been theatrical only in too complete an absence of anything theatrical. He had said: “We cannot keep a radio audience waiting,” and had hurried on upstairs to the microphone where, never mentioning the incident, he delivered a half-hour’s speech from memory, as he always did. The assailant had said nothing when arrested.

Keating stared—his throat dry—at the name of the assailant. It was Steven Mallory.

Only the inexplicable frightened Keating, particularly when the inexplicable lay, not in tangible facts, but in that causeless feeling of dread within him. There was nothing to concern him directly in what had happened, except his wish that it had been someone else, anyone but Steven Mallory; and that he didn’t know why he should wish this.

Steven Mallory had remained silent. He had given no explanation of his act. At first, it was supposed that he might have been prompted by despair at the loss of his commission for the Cosmo-Slotnick Building, since it was learned that he lived in revolting poverty. But it was learned, beyond any doubt, that Ellsworth Toohey had had no connection whatever with his loss. Toohey had never spoken to Mr. Slotnick about Steven Mallory. Toohey had not seen the statue of “Industry.” On this point Mallory had broken his silence to admit that he had never met Toohey nor seen him in person before, nor known any of Toohey’s friends. “Do you think that Mr. Toohey was in some way responsible for your losing that commission?” he was asked. Mallory had answered: “No.” “Then why?” Mallory said nothing.

Toohey had not recognized his assailant when he saw him seized by policemen on the sidewalk outside the radio station. He did not learn his name until after the broadcast. Then, stepping out of the studio into an anteroom full of waiting newsmen, Toohey said: “No, of course I won’t press any charges. I wish they’d let him go. Who is he, by the way?” When he heard the name, Toohey’s glance remained fixed somewhere between the shoulder of one man and the hat brim of another. Then Toohey—who had stood calmly while a bullet struck an inch from his face against the glass of the entrance door below—uttered one word and the word seemed to fall at his feet, heavy with fear: “Why?”

No one could answer. Presently, Toohey shrugged, smiled, and said: “If it was an attempt at free publicity—well, what atrocious taste!” But nobody believed this explanation, because all felt that Toohey did not believe it either. Through the interviews that followed, Toohey answered questions gaily. He said: “I had never thought myself important enough to warrant assassination. It would be the greatest tribute one could possibly expect—if it weren’t so much in the style of an operetta.” He managed to convey the charming impression that nothing of importance had happened because nothing of importance ever happened on earth.

Mallory was sent to jail to await trial. All efforts to question him failed.

The thought that kept Keating uneasily awake for many hours, that night, was the groundless certainty that Toohey felt exactly as he did. He knows, thought Keating, and I know, that there is—in Steven Mallory’s motive—a greater danger than in his murderous attempt. But we shall never know his motive. Or shall we? ... And then he touched the core of fear: it was the sudden wish that he might be guarded, through the years to come, to the end of his life, from ever learning that motive.

Ellsworth Toohey’s secretary rose in a leisurely manner, when Keating entered, and opened for him the door into Ellsworth Toohey’s office.

Keating had grown past the stage of experiencing anxiety at the prospect of meeting a famous man, but he experienced it in the moment when he saw the door opening under her hand. He wondered what Toohey really looked like. He remembered the magnificent voice he had heard in the lobby of the strike meeting, and he imagined a giant of a man, with a rich mane of hair, perhaps, just turning gray, with bold, broad features of an ineffable benevolence, something vaguely like the countenance of God the Father.

“Mr. Peter Keating—Mr. Toohey,” said the secretary and closed the door behind him.

At a first glance upon Ellsworth Monkton Toohey one wished to offer him a heavy, well-padded overcoat—so frail and unprotected did his thin little body appear, like that of a chicken just emerging from the egg, in all the sorry fragility of unhardened bones. At a second glance one wished to be sure that the overcoat should be an exceedingly good one—so exquisite were the garments covering that body. The lines of the dark suit followed frankly the shape within it, apologizing for nothing: they sank with the concavity of the narrow chest, they slid down from the long, thin neck with the sharp slope of the shoulders. A great forehead dominated the body. The wedge-shaped face descended from the broad temples to a small, pointed chin. The hair was black, lacquered, divided into equal halves by a thin white line. This made the skull look tight and trim, but left too much emphasis to the ears that flared out in solitary nakedness, like the handles of a bouillon cup. The nose was long and thin, prolonged by the small dab of a black mustache. The eyes were dark and startling. They held such a wealth of intellect and of twinkling gaiety that his glasses seemed to be worn not to protect his eyes but to protect other men from their excessive brilliance.

“Hello, Peter Keating,” said Ellsworth Monkton Toohey in his compelling, magical voice. “What do you think of the temple of Nike Apteros?”

“How ... do you do, Mr. Toohey,” said Keating, stopped, stupefied. “What do I think ... of what?”

“Sit down, my friend. Of the temple of Nike Apteros.”

“Well ... Well ... I ...”

“I feel certain that you couldn’t have overlooked that little gem. The Parthenon has usurped the recognition which—and isn’t that usually the case? the bigger and stronger appropriating all the glory, while the beauty of the unprepossessing goes unsung—which should have been awarded to that magnificent little creation of the great free spirit of Greece. You’ve noted, I’m sure, the fine balance of its mass, the supreme perfection of its modest proportions—ah, yes, you know, the supreme in the modest—the delicate craftsmanship of detail?”

“Yes, of course,” muttered Keating, “that’s always been my favorite —the temple of Nike Apteros.”

“Really?” said Ellsworth Toohey, with a smile which Keating could not quite classify. “I was certain of it. I was certain you’d say it. You have a very handsome face, Peter Keating, when you don’t stare like this—which is really quite unnecessary.”

And Toohey was laughing suddenly, laughing quite obviously, quite insultingly, at Keating and at himself; it was as if he were underscoring the falseness of the whole procedure. Keating sat aghast for an instant; and then he found himself laughing easily in answer, as if at home with a very old friend.

“That’s better,” said Toohey. “Don’t you find it advisable not to talk too seriously in an important moment? And this might be a very important moment—who knows?—for both of us. And, of course, I knew you’d be a little afraid of me and—oh, I admit—I was quite a bit afraid of you, so isn’t this much better?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Toohey,” said Keating happily. His normal assurance in meeting people had vanished; but he felt at ease, as if all responsibility were taken away from him and he did not have to worry about saying the right things, because he was being led gently into saying them without any effort on his part. “I’ve always known it would be an important moment when I met you, Mr. Toohey. Always. For years.”

“Really?” said Ellsworth Toohey, the eyes behind the glasses attentive. “Why?”

“Because I’d always hoped that I would please you, that you’d approve to me ... of my work ... when the time came ... why, I even ...”

“Yes?”

“... I even thought, so often, when drawing, is this the kind of a building that Ellsworth Toohey would say is good? I tried to see it like that, through your eyes ... I ... I’ve ...” Toohey listened watchfully. “I’ve always wanted to meet you because you’re such a profound thinker and a man of such cultural distinc—”

“Now,” said Toohey, his voice kindly but a little impatient; his interest had dropped on that last sentence. “None of that. I don’t mean to be ungracious, but we’ll dispense with that sort of thing, shall we? Unnatural as this may sound, I really don’t like to hear personal praise.”

It was Toohey’s eyes, thought Keating, that put him at ease. There was such a vast understanding in Toohey’s eyes and such an unfastidious kindness—no, what a word to think of—such an unlimited kindness. It was as if one could hide nothing from him, but it was not necessary to hide it, because he would forgive anything. They were the most unaccusing eyes that Keating had ever seen.

“But, Mr. Toohey,” he muttered, “I did want to ...”

“You wanted to thank me for my article,” said Toohey and made a little grimace of gay despair. “And here I’ve been trying so hard to prevent you from doing it. Do let me get away with it, won’t you? There’s no reason why you should thank me. If you happened to deserve the things I said—well, the credit belongs to you, not to me. Doesn’t it?”

“But I was so happy that you thought I’m ...”

“... a great architect? But surely, my boy, you knew that. Or weren’t you quite sure? Never quite sure of it?”

“Well, I ...”

It was only a second’s pause. And it seemed to Keating that this pause was all Toohey had wanted to hear from him; Toohey did not wait for the rest, but spoke as if he had received a full answer, and an answer that pleased him.

“And as for the Cosmo-Slotnick Building, who can deny that it’s an extraordinary achievement? You know, I was greatly intrigued by its plan. It’s a most ingenious plan. A brilliant plan. Very unusual. Quite different from what I have observed in your previous work. Isn’t it?”

“Naturally,” said Keating, his voice clear and hard for the first time, “the problem was different from anything I’d done before, so I worked out that plan to fit the particular requirements of the problem.”

“Of course,” said Toohey gently. “A beautiful piece of work. You should be proud of it.”

Keating noticed that Toohey’s eyes stood centered in the middle of the lenses and the lenses stood focused straight on his pupils, and Keating knew suddenly that Toohey knew he had not designed the plan of the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. This did not frighten him. What frightened him was that he saw approval in Toohey’s eyes.

“If you must feel—no, not gratitude, gratitude is such an embarrassing word—but, shall we say, appreciation?” Toohey continued, and his voice had grown softer, as if Keating were a fellow conspirator who would know that the words used were to be, from now on, a code for a private meaning, “you might thank me for understanding the symbolic implications of your building and for stating them in words as you stated them in marble. Since, of course, you are not just a common mason, but a thinker in stone.”

“Yes,” said Keating, “that was my abstract theme, when I designed the building—the great masses and the flowers of culture. I’ve always believed that true culture springs from the common man. But I had no hope that anyone would ever understand me.”

Toohey smiled. His thin lips slid open, his teeth showed. He was not looking at Keating. He was looking down at his own hand, the long slender, sensitive hand of a concert pianist, moving a sheet of paper on the desk. Then he said: “Perhaps we’re brothers of the spirit, Keating. The human spirit. That is all that matters in life”—not looking at Keating, but past him, the lenses raised flagrantly to a line over Keating’s face.

And Keating knew that Toohey knew he had never thought of any abstract theme until he’d read that article, and more: that Toohey approved again. When the lenses moved slowly to Keating’s face, the eyes were sweet with affection, an affection very cold and very real. Then Keating felt as if the walls of the room were moving gently in upon him, pushing him into a terrible intimacy, not with Toohey, but with some unknown guilt. He wanted to leap to his feet and run. He sat still, his mouth half open.

And without knowing what prompted him, Keating heard his own voice in the silence:

“And I did want to say how glad I was that you escaped that maniac’s bullet yesterday, Mr. Toohey.”

“Oh? ... Oh, thanks. That? Well! Don’t let it upset you. Just one of the minor penalties one pays for prominence in public life.”

“I’ve never liked Mallory. A strange sort of person. Too tense. I don’t like people who’re tense. I’ve never liked his work either.”

“Just an exhibitionist. Won’t amount to much.”

“It wasn’t my idea, of course, to give him a try. It was Mr. Slotnick’s. Pull, you know. But Mr. Slotnick knew better in the end.”

“Did Mallory ever mention my name to you?”

“No. Never.”

“I haven’t even met him, you know. Never saw him before. Why did he do it?”

And then it was Toohey who sat still, before what he saw on Keating’s face; Toohey, alert and insecure for the first time. This was it, thought Keating, this was the bond between them, and the bond was fear, and more, much more than that, but fear was the only recognizable name to give it. And he knew, with unreasoning finality, that he liked Toohey better than any man he had ever met.

“Well, you know how it is,” said Keating brightly, hoping that the commonplace he was about to utter would close the subject. “Mallory is an incompetent and knows it and he decided to take it out on you as on a symbol of the great and the able.”

But instead of a smile, Keating saw the shot of Toohey’s sudden glance at him; it was not a glance, it was a fluoroscope, he thought he could feel it crawling searchingly inside his bones. Then Toohey’s face seemed to harden, drawing together again in composure, and Keating knew that Toohey had found relief somewhere, in his bones or in his gaping, bewildered face, that some hidden immensity of ignorance within him had given Toohey reassurance. Then Toohey said slowly, strangely, derisively:

“You and I, we’re going to be great friends, Peter.”

Keating let a moment pass before he caught himself to answer hastily:

“Oh, I hope so, Mr. Toohey!”

“Really, Peter! I’m not as old as all that, am I? ‘Ellsworth’ is the monument to my parents’ peculiar taste in nomenclature.”

“Yes ... Ellsworth.”

“That’s better. I really don’t mind the name, when compared to some of the things I’ve been called privately—and publicly—these many years. Oh, well. Flattering. When one makes enemies one knows that one’s dangerous where it’s necessary to be dangerous. There are things that must be destroyed—or they’ll destroy us. We’ll see a great deal of each other, Peter.” The voice was smooth and sure now, with the finality of a decision tested and reached, with the certainty that never again would anything in Keating be a question mark to him. “For instance, I’ve been thinking for some time of getting together a few young architects—I know so many of them—just an informal little organization, to exchange ideas, you know, to develop a spirit of co-operation, to follow a common line of action for the common good of the profession if necessity arises. Nothing as stuffy as the A.G.A. Just a youth group. Think you’d be interested?”

“Why, of course! And you’d be the chairman?”

“Oh dear, no. I’m never chairman of anything, Peter. I dislike titles. No, I rather thought you’d make the right chairman for us, can’t think of anyone better.”

“Me?”

“You, Peter. Oh, well, it’s only a project—nothing definite—just an idea I’ve been toying with in odd moments. We’ll talk about it some other time. There’s something I’d like you to do—and that’s really one of the reasons why I wanted to meet you.”

“Oh, sure, Mr. Too—sure, Ellsworth. Anything I can do for you ...”

“It’s not for me. Do you know Lois Cook?”

“Lois ... who?”

“Cook. You don’t. But you will. That young woman is the greatest literary genius since Goethe. You must read her, Peter. I don’t suggest that as a rule except to the discriminating. She’s so much above the heads of the middle-class who love the obvious. She’s planning to build a house. A little private residence on the Bowery. Yes, on the Bowery. Just like Lois, She’s asked me to recommend an architect. I’m certain that it will take a person like you to understand a person like Lois. I’m going to give her your name—if you’re interested in what is to be a small, though quite costly, residence.”

“But of course! That’s . . . very kind of you, Ellsworth! You know, I thought when you said ... and when I read your note, that you wanted —well, some favor from me, you know, a good turn for a good turn, and here you’re ...”

“My dear Peter, how naive you are!”

“Oh, I suppose I shouldn’t have said that! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you, I ...”

“I don’t mind. You must learn to know me better. Strange as it may sound, a totally selfless interest in one’s fellow men is possible in this world, Peter.”

Then they talked about Lois Cook and her three published works—“Novels? No, Peter, not exactly novels.... No, not collections of stories either ... that’s just it, just Lois Cook—a new form of literature entirely ...”—about the fortune she had inherited from a long line of successful tradesmen, and about the house she planned to build.

It was only when Toohey had risen to escort Keating to the door—and Keating noted how precariously erect he stood on his very small feet—that Toohey paused suddenly to say:

“Incidentally, it seems to me as if I should remember some personal connection between us, though for the life of me I can’t quite place ... oh, yes, of course. My niece. Little Catherine.”

Keating felt his face tighten, and knew he must not allow this to be discussed, but smiled awkwardly instead of protesting.

“I understand you’re engaged to her?”

“Yes.”

“Charming,” said Toohey. “Very charming. Should enjoy being your uncle. You love her very much?”

“Yes,” said Keating. “Very much.”

The absence of stress in his voice made the answer solemn. It was, laid before Toohey, the first bit of sincerity and of importance within Keating’s being.

“How pretty,” said Toohey. “Young love. Spring and dawn and heaven and drugstore chocolates at a dollar and a quarter a box. The prerogative of the gods and of the movies.... Oh, I do approve, Peter. I think it’s lovely. You couldn’t have made a better choice than Catherine. She’s just the kind for whom the world is well lost—the world with all its problems and all its opportunities for greatness—oh, yes, well lost because she’s innocent and sweet and pretty and anemic.”

“If you’re going to ...” Keating began, but Toohey smiled with a luminous sort of kindliness.

“Oh, Peter, of course I understand. And I approve. I’m a realist. Man has always insisted on making an ass of himself. Oh, come now, we must never lose our sense of humor. Nothing’s really sacred but a sense of humor. Still, I’ve always loved the tale of Tristan and Isolde. It’s the most beautiful story ever told—next to that of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.”

IV

“... TOOTHBRUSH IN THE JAW TOOTHBRUSH BRUSH BRUSH tooth jaw foam dome in the foam Roman dome come home home in the jaw Rome dome tooth toothbrush toothpick pickpocket socket rocket ...”

Peter Keating squinted his eyes, his glance unfocused as for a great distance, but put the book down. The book was thin and black, with scarlet letters forming: Clouds and Shrouds by Lois Cook. The jacket said that it was a record of Miss Cook’s travels around the world.

Keating leaned back with a sense of warmth and well-being. He liked this book. It had made the routine of his Sunday morning breakfast a profound spiritual experience; he was certain that it was profound, because he didn’t understand it.

Peter Keating had never felt the need to formulate abstract convictions. But he had a working substitute. “A thing is not high if one can reach it; it is not great if one can reason about it; it is not deep if one can see its bottom”—this had always been his credo, unstated and unquestioned. This spared him any attempt to reach, reason or see; and it cast a nice reflection of scorn on those who made the attempt. So he was able to enjoy the work of Lois Cook. He felt uplifted by the knowledge of his own capacity to respond to the abstract, the profound, the ideal. Toohey had said: “That’s just it, sound as sound, the poetry of words as words, style as a revolt against style. But only the finest spirit can appreciate it, Peter.” Keating thought he could talk of this book to his friends, and if they did not understand he would know that he was superior to them. He would not need to explain that superiority—that’s just it, “superiority as superiority”—automatically denied to those who asked for explanations. He loved the book.

He reached for another piece of toast. He saw, at the end of the table, left there for him by his mother, the heavy pile of the Sunday paper. He picked it up, feeling strong enough, in this moment, in the confidence of his secret spiritual grandeur, to face the whole world contained in that pile. He pulled out the rotogravure section. He stopped. He saw the reproduction of a drawing: the Enright House by Howard Roark.

He did not need to see the caption or the brusque signature in the comer of the sketch; he knew that no one else had conceived that house and he knew the manner of drawing, serene and violent at once, the pencil lines like high-tension wires on the paper, slender and innocent to see, but not to be touched. It was a structure on a broad space by the East River. He did not grasp it as a building, at first glance, but as a rising mass of rock crystal. There was the same severe, mathematical order holding together a free, fantastic growth; straight lines and clean angles, space slashed with a knife, yet in a harmony of formation as delicate as the work of a jeweler; an incredible variety of shapes, each separate unit unrepeated, but leading inevitably to the next one and to the whole; so that the future inhabitants were to have, not a square cage out of a square pile of cages, but each a single house held to the other houses like a single crystal to the side of a rock.

Keating looked at the sketch. He had known for a long time that Howard Roark had been chosen to build the Enright House. He had seen a few mentions of Roark’s name in the papers; not much, all of it to be summed up only as “some young architect chosen by Mr. Enright for some reason, probably an interesting young architect.” The caption under the drawing announced that the construction of the project was to begin at once. Well, thought Keating, and dropped the paper, so what? The paper fell beside the black and scarlet book. He looked at both. He felt dimly as if Lois Cook were his defense against Howard Roark.

“What’s that, Petey?” his mother’s voice asked behind him.

He handed the paper to her over his shoulder. The paper fell past him back to the table in a second.

“Oh,” shrugged Mrs. Keating. “Huh ...”

She stood beside him. Her trim silk dress was fitted too tightly, revealing the solid rigidity of her corset; a small pin glittered at her throat, small enough to display ostentatiously that it was made of real diamonds. She was like the new apartment into which they had moved: conspicuously expensive. The apartment’s decoration had been Keating’s first professional job for himself. It had been furnished in fresh, new mid-Victorian. It was conservative and stately. Over the fireplace in the drawing room hung a large old painting of what was not but looked like an illustrious ancestor.

“Petey sweetheart, I do hate to rush you on a Sunday morning, but isn’t it time to dress up? I’ve got to run now and I’d hate you to forget the time and be late, it’s so nice of Mr. Toohey asking you to his house!”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Any famous guests coming too?”

“No. No guests. But there will be one other person there. Not famous.” She looked at him expectantly. He added: “Katie will be there.”

The name seemed to have no effect on her whatever. A strange assurance had coated her lately, like a layer of fat through which that particular question could penetrate no longer.

“Just a family tea,” he emphasized. “That’s what he said.”

“Very nice of him. I’m sure Mr. Toohey is a very intelligent man.”

“Yes, Mother.”

He rose impatiently and went to his room.

It was Keating’s first visit to the distinguished residential hotel where Catherine and her uncle had moved recently. He did not notice much about the apartment, beyond remembering that it was simple, very clean and smartly modest, that it contained a great number of books and very few pictures, but these authentic and precious. One never remembered the apartment of Ellsworth Toohey, only its host. The host, on this Sunday afternoon, wore a dark gray suit, correct as a uniform, and bedroom slippers of black patent leather trimmed with red; the slippers mocked the severe elegance of the suit, yet completed the elegance as an audacious anti-climax. He sat in a broad, low chair and his face wore an expression of cautious gentleness, so cautious that Keating and Catherine felt, at times, as if they were insignificant soap bubbles.

Keating did not like the way Catherine sat on the edge of a chair, hunched, her legs drawn awkwardly together. He wished she would not wear the same suit for the third season, but she did. She kept her eyes on one point somewhere in the middle of the carpet. She seldom looked at Keating. She never looked at her uncle. Keating found no trace of that joyous admiration with which she had always spoken of Toohey, which he had expected to see her display in his presence. There was something heavy and colorless about Catherine, and very tired.

Toohey’s valet brought in the tea tray.

“You will pour, won’t you please, my dear?” said Toohey to Catherine. “Ah, there’s nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization—this tea ritual and the detective novel. Catherine, my dear, do you have to grasp that pot handle as if it were a meat axe? But never mind, it’s charming, it’s really what we love you for, Peter and I, we wouldn’t love you if you were graceful as a duchess -who wants a duchess nowadays?”

Catherine poured the tea and spilled it on the glass table top, which she had never done before.

“I did want to see you two together for once,” said Toohey, holding a delicate cup balanced nonchalantly. “Perfectly silly of me, isn’t it? There’s really nothing to make an occasion of, but then I’m silly and sentimental at times, like all of us. My compliments on your choice, Catherine. I owe you an apology, I never suspected you of such good taste. You and Peter make a wonderful couple. You’ll do a great deal for him. You’ll cook his Cream of Wheat, launder his handkerchiefs and bear his children, though of course the children will all have measles at one time or another, which is a nuisance.”

“But, after all, you ... you do approve of it?” Keating asked anxiously.

“Approve of it? Of what, Peter?”

“Of our marriage ... eventually.”

“What a superfluous question, Peter! Of course, I approve of it. But how young you are! That’s the way of young people—they make an issue where none exists. You asked that as if the whole thing were important enough to disapprove of.”

“Katie and I met seven years ago,” said Keating defensively.

“And it was love at first sight of course!”

“Yes,” said Keating and felt himself being ridiculous.

“It must have been spring,” said Toohey. “It usually is. There’s always a dark movie theater, and two people lost to the world, their hands clasped together—but hands do perspire when held too long, don’t they? Still, it’s beautiful to be in love. The sweetest story ever told—and the tritest. Don’t turn away like that, Catherine. We must never allow ourselves to lose our sense of humor.”

He smiled. The kindliness of his smile embraced them both. The kindliness was so great that it made their love seem small and mean, because only something contemptible could evoke such immensity of compassion. He asked:

“Incidentally, Peter, when do you intend to get married?”

“Oh, well ... we’ve never really set a definite date, you know how it’s been, all the things happening to me and now Katie has this work of hers and ... And, by the way,” he added sharply, because that matter of Katie’s work irritated him without reason, “when we’re married, Katie will have to give that up. I don’t approve of it.”

“But of course,” said Toohey, “I don’t approve of it either, if Catherine doesn’t like it.”

Catherine was working as day nursery attendant at the Clifford Settlement House. It had been her own idea. She had visited the settlement often with her uncle, who conducted classes in economics there, and she had become interested in the work.

“But I do like it!” she said with sudden excitement. “I don’t see why you resent it, Peter!” There was a harsh little note in her voice, defiant and unpleasant. “I’ve never enjoyed anything so much in my life. Helping people who’re helpless and unhappy. I went there this morning—I didn’t have to, but I wanted to—and then I rushed so on my way home, I didn’t have time to change my clothes, but that doesn’t matter, who cares what I look like? And”—the harsh note was gone, she was speaking eagerly and very fast—“Uncle Ellsworth, imagine! little Billy Hansen had a sore throat—you remember Billy? And the nurse wasn’t there, and I had to swab his throat with Argyrol, the poor thing! He had the most awful white mucous patches down in his throat!”

Her voice seemed to shine, as if she were speaking of great beauty. She looked at her uncle. For the first time Keating saw the affection he had expected. She went on speaking about her work, the children, the settlement. Toohey listened gravely. He said nothing. But the earnest attention in his eyes changed him, his mocking gaiety vanished and he forgot his own advice, he was being serious, very serious indeed. When he noticed that Catherine’s plate was empty, he offered her the sandwich tray with a simple gesture and made it, somehow, a gracious gesture of respect.

Keating waited impatiently till she paused for an instant. He wanted to change the subject. He glanced about the room and saw the Sunday papers. This was a question he had wanted to ask for a long time. He asked cautiously:

“Ellsworth ... what do you think of Roark?”

“Roark? Roark?” asked Toohey. “Who is Roark?”

The too innocent, too trifling manner in which he repeated the name, with the faint, contemptuous question mark quite audible at the end, made Keating certain that Toohey knew the name well. One did not stress total ignorance of a subject if one were in total ignorance of it. Keating said:

“Howard Roark. You know, the architect. The one who’s doing the Enright House.”

“Oh? Oh, yes, someone’s doing that Enright House at last, isn’t he?”

“There’s a picture of it in the Chronicle today.”

“Is there? I did glance through the Chronicle.”

“And ... what do you think of that building?”

“If it were important, I should have remembered it.”

“Of course!” Keating’s syllables danced, as if his breath caught at each one in passing: “It’s an awful, crazy thing! Like nothing you ever saw or want to see!”

He felt a sense of deliverance. It was as if he had spent his life believing that he carried a congenital disease, and suddenly the words of the greatest specialist on earth had pronounced him healthy. He wanted to laugh, freely, stupidly, without dignity. He wanted to talk.

“Howard’s a friend of mine,” he said happily.

“A friend of yours? You know him?”

“Do I know him! Why we went to school together—Stanton, you know—why, he lived at our house for three years, I can tell you the color of his underwear and how he takes a shower—I’ve seen him!”

“He lived at your house in Stanton?” Toohey repeated. Toohey spoke with a kind of cautious precision. The sounds of his voice were small and dry and final, like the cracks of matches being broken.

It was very peculiar, thought Keating. Toohey was asking him a great many questions about Howard Roark. But the questions did not make sense. They were not about buildings, they were not about architecture at all. They were pointless personal questions—strange to ask about a man of whom he had never heard before.

“Does he laugh often?”

“Very rarely.”

“Does he seem unhappy?”

“Never.”

“Did he have many friends at Stanton?”

“He’s never had any friends anywhere.”

“The boys didn’t like him?”

“Nobody can like him.”

“Why?”

“He makes you feel it would be an impertinence to like him.”

“Did he go out, drink, have a good time?”

“Never.”

“Does he like money?”

“No.”

“Does he like to be admired?”

“No.”

“Does he believe in God?”

“No.”

“Does he talk much?”

“Very little.”

“Does he listen if others discuss any ... idea with him?”

“He listens. It would be better if he didn’t.”

“Why?”

“It would be less insulting—if you know what I mean, when a man listens like that and you know it hasn’t made the slightest bit of difference to him.”

“Did he always want to be an architect?”

“He..,”

“What’s the matter, Peter?”

“Nothing. It just occurred to me how strange it is that I’ve never asked myself that about him before. Here’s what’s strange: you can’t ask that about him. He’s a maniac on the subject of architecture. It seems to mean so damn much to him that he’s lost all human perspective. He just has no sense of humor about himself at all—now there’s a man without a sense of humor, Ellsworth. You don’t ask what he’d do if he didn’t want to be an architect.”

“No,” said Toohey. “You ask what he’d do if he couldn’t be an architect.”

“He’d walk over corpses. Any and all of them. All of us. But he’d be an architect.”

Toohey folded his napkin, a crisp little square of cloth on his knee; he folded it accurately, once across each way, and he ran his fingernail along the edges to make a sharp crease.

“Do you remember our little youth group of architects, Peter?” he asked. “I’m making arrangements for a first meeting soon. I’ve spoken to many of our future members and you’d be flattered by what they said about you as our prospective chairman.”

They talked pleasantly for another half hour. When Keating rose to go, Toohey declared:

“Oh, yes. I did speak to Lois Cook about you. You’ll hear from her shortly.”

“Thank you so much, Ellsworth. By the way, I’m reading Clouds and Shrouds.”

“And?”

“Oh, it’s tremendous. You know, Ellsworth, it ... it makes you think so differently about everything you’ve thought before.”

“Yes,” said Toohey, “doesn’t it?”

He stood at the window, looking out at the last sunshine of a cold, bright afternoon. Then he turned and said:

“It’s a lovely day. Probably one of the last this year. Why don’t you take Catherine out for a little walk, Peter?”

“Oh, I’d love to!” said Catherine eagerly.

“Well, go ahead.” Toohey smiled gaily. “What’s the matter, Catherine? Do you have to wait for my permission?”

When they walked out together, when they were alone in the cold brilliance of streets flooded with late sunlight, Keating felt himself recapturing everything Catherine had always meant to him, the strange emotion that he could not keep in the presence of others. He closed his hand over hers. She withdrew her hand, took off her glove and slipped her fingers into his. And then he thought suddenly that hands did perspire when held too long, and he walked faster in irritation. He thought that they were walking there like Mickey and Minnie Mouse and that they probably appeared ridiculous to the passers-by. To shake himself free of these thoughts he glanced down at her face. She was looking straight ahead at the gold light, he saw her delicate profile and the faint crease of a smile in the corner of her mouth, a smile of quiet happiness. But he noticed that the edge of her eyelid was pale and he began to wonder whether she was anemic.

Lois Cook sat on the floor in the middle of her living room, her legs crossed Turkish fashion, showing large bare knees, gray stockings rolled over tight garters, and a piece of faded pink drawers. Peter Keating sat on the edge of a violet satin chaise longue. Never before had he felt uncomfortable at a first interview with a client.

Lois Cook was thirty-seven. She had stated insistently, in her publicity and in private conversation, that she was sixty-four. It was repeated as a whimsical joke and it created about her name a vague impression of eternal youth. She was tall, dry, narrow-shouldered and broad-hipped. She had a long, sallow face, and eyes set close together. Her hair hung about her ears in greasy strands. Her fingernails were broken. She looked offensively unkempt, with studied slovenliness as careful as grooming—and for the same purpose.

She talked incessantly, rocking back and forth on her haunches:

“... yes, on the Bowery. A private residence. The shrine on the Bowery. I have the site, I wanted it and I bought it, as simple as that, or my fool lawyer bought it for me, you must meet my lawyer, he has halitosis. I don’t know what you’ll cost me, but it’s unessential, money is commonplace. Cabbage is commonplace too. It must have three stories and a living room with a tile floor.”

“Miss Cook, I’ve read Clouds and Shrouds and it was a spiritual revelation to me. Allow me to include myself among the few who understand the courage and significance of what you’re achieving singlehanded while ...”

“Oh, can the crap,” said Lois Cook and winked at him.

“But I mean it!” he snapped angrily. “I loved your book. I ...”

She looked bored.

“It is so commonplace,” she drawled, “to be understood by everybody.”

“But Mr. Toohey said ...”

“Ah, yes. Mr. Toohey.” Her eyes were alert now, insolently guilty, like the eyes of a child who has just perpetrated some nasty little joke. “Mr. Toohey. I’m chairman of a little youth group of writers in which Mr. Toohey is very interested.”

“You are?” he said happily. It seemed to be the first direct communication between them. “Isn’t that interesting! Mr. Toohey is getting together a little youth group of architects, too, and he’s kind enough to have me in mind for chairman.”

“Oh,” she said and winked. “One of us?”

“Of whom?”

He did not know what he had done, but he knew that he had disappointed her in some way. She began to laugh. She sat there, looking up at him, laughing deliberately in his face, laughing ungraciously and not gaily.

“What the ... !” He controlled himself. “What’s the matter, Miss Cook?”

“Oh my!” she said. “You’re such a sweet, sweet boy and so pretty!”

“Mr. Toohey is a great man,” he said angrily. “He’s the most ... the noblest personality I’ve ever ...”

“Oh, yes. Mr. Toohey is a wonderful man.” Her voice was strange by omission, it was flagrantly devoid of respect. “My best friend. The most wonderful man on earth. There’s the earth and there’s Mr. Toohey—a law of nature. Besides, think how nicely you can rhyme it: Toohey—gooey—phooey—hooey. Nevertheless, he’s a saint. That’s very rare. As rare as genius. I’m a genius. I want a living room without windows. No windows at all, remember that when you draw up the plans. No windows, a tile floor and a black ceiling. And no electricity. I want no electricity in my house, just kerosene lamps. Kerosene lamps with chimneys, and candles. To hell with Thomas Edison! Who was he anyway?”

Her words did not disturb him as much as her smile. It was not a smile, it was a permanent smirk raising the corners of her long mouth, making her look like a sly, vicious imp.

“And, Keating, I want the house to be ugly. Magnificently ugly. I want it to be the ugliest house in New York.”

“The ... ugliest, Miss Cook?”

“Sweetheart, the beautiful is so commonplace!”

“Yes, but ... but I ... well, I don’t see how I could permit myself to ...”

“Keating, where’s your courage? Aren’t you capable of a sublime gesture on occasion? They all work so hard and struggle and suffer, trying to achieve beauty, trying to surpass one another in beauty. Let’s surpass them all! Let’s throw their sweat in their face. Let’s destroy them at one stroke. Let’s be gods. Let’s be ugly.”

He accepted the commission. After a few weeks he stopped feeling uneasy about it. Wherever he mentioned this new job, he met a respectful curiosity. It was an amused curiosity, but it was respectful. The name of Lois Cook was well known in the best drawing rooms he visited. The titles of her books were flashed in conversation like the diamonds in the speaker’s intellectual crown. There was always a note of challenge in the voices pronouncing them. It sounded as if the speaker were being very brave. It was a satisfying bravery; it never aroused antagonism. For an author who did not sell, her name seemed strangely famous and honored. She was the standard-bearer of a vanguard of intellect and revolt. Only it was not quite clear to him just exactly what the revolt was against. Somehow, he preferred not to know.

He designed the house as she wished it. It was a three-floor edifice, part marble, part stucco, adorned with gargoyles and carriage lanterns. It looked like a structure from an amusement park.

His sketch of it was reproduced in more publications than any other drawing he had ever made, with the exception of the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. One commentator expressed the opinion that “Peter Keating is showing a promise of being more than just a bright young man with a knack for pleasing stuffy moguls of big business. He is venturing into the field of intellectual experimentation with a client such as Lois Cook.” Toohey referred to the house as “a cosmic joke.”

But a peculiar sensation remained in Keating’s mind: the feeling of an aftertaste. He would experience a dim flash of it while working on some important structure he liked; he would experience it in the moments when he felt proud of his work. He could not identify the quality of the feeling; but he knew that part of it was a sense of shame.

Once, he confessed it to Ellsworth Toohey. Toohey laughed. “That’s good for you, Peter. One must never allow oneself to acquire an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance. There’s no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes.”

V

DOMINIQUE HAD RETURNED TO NEW YORK. SHE RETURNED WITHOUT purpose, merely because she could not stay in her country house longer than three days after her last visit to the quarry. She had to be in the city; it was a sudden necessity, irresistible and senseless. She expected nothing of the city. But she wanted the feeling of the streets and the buildings holding her there. In the morning, when she awakened and heard the muffled roar of traffic far below, the sound was a humiliation, a reminder of where she was and why. She stood at the window, her arms spread wide, holding on to each side of the frame; it was as if she held a piece of the city, all the streets and rooftops outlined on the glass between her two hands.

She went out alone for long walks. She walked fast, her hands in the pockets of an old coat, its collar raised. She had told herself that she was not hoping to meet him. She was not looking for him. But she had to be out in the streets, blank, purposeless, for hours at a time.

She had always hated the streets of a city. She saw the faces streaming past her, the faces made alike by fear—fear as a common denominator, fear of themselves, fear of all and of one another, fear making them ready to pounce upon whatever was held sacred by any single one they met. She could not define the nature or the reason of that fear. But she had always felt its presence. She had kept herself clean and free in a single passion—to touch nothing. She had liked facing them in the streets, she had liked the impotence of their hatred, because she offered them nothing to be hurt.

She was not free any longer. Each step through the streets hurt her now. She was tied to him—and he was tied to every part of the city. He was a nameless worker doing some nameless job, lost in these crowds, dependent on them, to be hurt by any one of them, to be shared by her with the whole city. She hated the thought of him on the sidewalks people had used. She hated the thought of a clerk handing to him a package of cigarettes across a counter. She hated the elbows touching his elbows in a subway train. She came home, after these walks, shaking with fever. She went out again the next day.

When the term of her vacation expired, she went to the office of the Banner in order to resign. Her work and her column did not seem amusing to her any longer. She stopped Alvah Scarret’s effusive greetings. She said: “I just came back to tell you that I’m quitting, Alvah.” He looked at her stupidly. He uttered only: “Why?”

It was the first sound from the outside world to reach her in a long time. She had always acted on the impulse of the moment, proud of the freedom to need no reasons for her actions. Now she had to face a “why?” that carried an answer she could not escape. She thought: Because of him, because she was letting him change the course of her life. It would be another violation; she could see him smiling as he had smiled on the path in the woods. She had no choice. Either course taken would be taken under compulsion: she could leave her work, because he had made her want to leave it, or she could remain, hating it, in order to keep her life unchanged, in defiance of him. The last was harder.

She raised her head. She said: “Just a joke, Alvah. Just wanted to see what you’d say. I’m not quitting.”

She had been back at work for a few days when Ellsworth Toohey walked into her office.

“Hello, Dominique,” he said. “Just heard you’re back.”

“Hello, Ellsworth.”

“I’m glad. You know, I’ve always had the feeling that you’ll walk out on us some morning without any reason.”

“The feeling, Ellsworth? Or the hope?”

He was looking at her, his eyes as kindly, his smile as charming as ever; but there was a tinge of self-mockery in the charm, as if he knew that she did not approve of it, and a tinge of assurance, as if he were showing that he would look kindly and charming just the same.

“You know, you’re wrong there,” he said, smiling peacefully. “You’ve always been wrong about that.”

“No. I don’t fit, Ellsworth. Do I?”

“I could, of course, ask: Into what? But supposing I don’t ask it. Supposing I just say that people who don’t fit have their uses also, as well as those who do? Would you like that better? Of course, the simplest thing to say is that I’ve always been a great admirer of yours and always will be.”

“That’s not a compliment.”

“Somehow, I don’t think we’ll ever be enemies, Dominique, if that’s what you’d like.”

“No, I don’t think we’ll ever be enemies, Ellsworth. You’re the most comforting person I know.”

“Of course.”

“In the sense I mean?”

“In any sense you wish.”

On the desk before her lay the rotogravure section of the Sunday Chronicle. It was folded on the page that bore the drawing of the Enright House. She picked it up and held it out to him, her eyes narrowed in a silent question. He looked at the drawing, then his glance moved to her face and returned to the drawing. He let the paper drop back on the desk.

“As independent as an insult, isn’t it?” he said.

“You know, Ellsworth, I think the man who designed this should have committed suicide. A man who can conceive a thing as beautiful as this should never allow it to be erected. He should not want it to exist. But he will let it be built, so that women will hang diapers on his terraces, so that men will spit on his stairways and draw dirty pictures on his walls. He’s given it to them and he’s made it part of them, part of everything. He shouldn’t have offered it for men like you to look at. For men like you to talk about. He’s defiled his own work by the first word you’ll utter about it. He’s made himself worse than you are. You’ll be committing only a mean little indecency, but he’s committed a sacrilege. A man who knows what he must have known to produce this should not have been able to remain alive.”

“Going to write a piece about this?” he asked.

“No. That would be repeating his crime.”

“And talking to me about it?”

She looked at him. He was smiling pleasantly.

“Yes of course,” she said, “that’s part of the same crime also.”

“Let’s have dinner together one of these days, Dominique,” he said. “You really don’t let me see enough of you.”

“All right,” she said. “Any time you wish.”

At his trial for the assault on Ellsworth Toohey, Steven Mallory refused to disclose his motive. He made no statement. He seemed indifferent to any possible sentence. But Ellsworth Toohey created a minor sensation when he appeared, unsolicited, in Mallory’s defense. He pleaded with the judge for leniency; he explained that he had no desire to see Mallory’s future and career destroyed. Everybody in the courtroom was touched—except Steven Mallory. Steven Mallory listened and looked as if he were enduring some special process of cruelty. The judge gave him two years and suspended the sentence.

There was a great deal of comment on Toohey’s extraordinary generosity. Toohey dismissed all praise, gaily and modestly. “My friends,” was his remark—the one to appear in all the papers—“I refuse to be an accomplice in the manufacturing of martyrs.”

At the first meeting of the proposed organization of young architects Keating concluded that Toohey had a wonderful ability for choosing people who fitted well together. There was an air about the eighteen persons present which he could not define, but which gave him a sense of comfort, a security he had not experienced in solitude or in any other gathering; and part of the comfort was the knowledge that all the others felt the same way for the same unaccountable reason. It was a feeling of brotherhood, but somehow not of a sainted or noble brotherhood; yet this precisely was the comfort—that one felt, among them, no necessity for being sainted or noble.

Were it not for this kinship, Keating would have been disappointed in the gathering. Of the eighteen seated about Toohey’s living room, none was an architect of distinction, except himself and Gordon L. Prescott, who wore a beige turtle-neck sweater and looked faintly patronizing, but eager. Keating had never heard the names of the others. Most of them were beginners, young, poorly dressed and belligerent. Some were only draftsmen. There was one woman architect who had built a few small private homes, mainly for wealthy widows; she had an aggressive manner, a tight mouth and a fresh petunia in her hair. There was a boy with pure, innocent eyes. There was an obscure contractor with a fat, expressionless face. There was a tall, dry woman who was an interior decorator, and another woman of no definite occupation at all.

Keating could not understand what exactly was to be the purpose of the group, though there was a great deal of talk. None of the talk was too coherent, but all of it seemed to have the same undercurrent. He felt that the undercurrent was the one thing clear among all the vague generalities, even though nobody would mention it. It held him there, as it held the others, and he had no desire to define it.

The young men talked a great deal about injustice, unfairness, the cruelty of society toward youth, and suggested that everyone should have his future commissions guaranteed when he left college. The woman architect shrieked briefly something about the iniquity of the rich. The contractor barked that it was a hard world and that “fellows gotta help one another.” The boy with the innocent eyes pleaded that “we could do so much good ...” His voice had a note of desperate sincerity which seemed embarrassing and out of place. Gordon L. Prescott declared that the A.G.A. was a bunch of old fogies with no conception of social responsibility and not a drop of virile blood in the lot of them, and that it was time to kick them in the pants anyway. The woman of indefinite occupation spoke about ideals and causes, though nobody could gather just what these were.

Peter Keating was elected chairman, unanimously. Gordon L. Prescott was elected vice-chairman and treasurer. Toohey declined all nominations. He declared that he would act only as an unofficial advisor. It was decided that the organization would be named the “Council of American Builders.” It was decided that membership would not be restricted to architects, but would be open to “allied crafts” and to “all those holding the interests of the great profession of building at heart.”

Then Toohey spoke. He spoke at some length, standing up, leaning on the knuckles of one hand against a table. His great voice was soft and persuasive. It filled the room, but it made his listeners realize that it could have filled a Roman amphitheater; there was something subtly flattering in this realization, in the sound of the powerful voice being held in check for their benefit.

“... and thus, my friends, what the architectural profession lacks is an understanding of its own social importance. This lack is due to a double cause: to the anti-social nature of our entire society and to your own inherent modesty. You have been conditioned to think of yourselves merely as breadwinners with no higher purpose than to earn your fees and the means of your own existence. Isn’t it time, my friends, to pause and to redefine your position in society? Of all the crafts, yours is the most important. Important, not in the amount of money you might make, not in the degree of artistic skill you might exhibit, but in the service you render to your fellow men. You are those who provide mankind’s shelter. Remember this and then look at our cities, at our slums, to realize the gigantic task awaiting you. But to meet this challenge you must be armed with a broader vision of yourselves and of your work. You are not hired lackeys of the rich. You are crusaders in the cause of the underprivileged and the unsheltered. Not by what we are shall we be judged, but by those we serve. Let us stand united in this spirit. Let us—in all matters—be faithful to this new, broader, higher perspective. Let us organize—well, my friends, shall I say—a nobler dream?”

Keating listened avidly. He had always thought of himself as a bread-winner bent upon earning his fees, in a profession he had chosen because his mother had wanted him to choose it. It was gratifying to discover that he was much more than this; that his daily activity carried a nobler significance. It was pleasant and it was drugging. He knew that all the others in the room felt it also.

“... and when our system of society collapses, the craft of builders will not be swept under, it will be swept up to greater prominence and greater recognition ...”

The doorbell rang. Then Toohey’s valet appeared for an instant, holding the door of the living room open to admit Dominique Francon.

By the manner in which Toohey stopped, on a half-uttered word, Keating knew that Dominique had not been invited or expected. She smiled at Toohey, shook her head and moved one hand in a gesture telling him to continue. He managed a faint bow in her direction, barely more than a movement of his eyebrows, and went on with his speech. It was a pleasant greeting and its informality included the guest in the intimate brotherhood of the occasion, but it seemed to Keating that it had come just one beat too late. He had never before seen Toohey miss the right moment.

Dominique sat down in a corner, behind the others. Keating forgot to listen for a while, trying to attract her attention. He had to wait until her eyes had traveled thoughtfully about the room, from face to face, and stopped on his. He bowed and nodded vigorously, with the smile of greeting a private possession. She inclined her head, he saw her lashes touching her cheeks for an instant as her eyes closed, and then she looked at him again. She sat looking at him for a long moment, without smiling, as if she were rediscovering something in his face. He had not seen her since spring. He thought that she looked a little tired and lovelier than his memory of her.

Then he turned to Ellsworth Toohey once more and he listened. The words he heard were as stirring as ever, but his pleasure in them had an edge of uneasiness. He looked at Dominique. She did not belong in this room, at this meeting. He could not say why, but the certainty of it was enormous and oppressive. It was not her beauty, it was not her insolent elegance. But something made her an outsider. It was as if they had all been comfortably naked, and a person had entered fully clothed, suddenly making them self-conscious and indecent. Yet she did nothing. She sat listening attentively. Once, she leaned back, crossing her legs, and lighted a cigarette. She shook the flame off the match with a brusque little jerk of her wrist and she dropped the match into an ash tray on a table beside her. He saw her drop the match into the ash tray; he felt as if that movement of her wrist had tossed the match into all their faces. He thought that he was being preposterous. But he noticed that Ellsworth Toohey never looked at her as he spoke.

When the meeting ended, Toohey rushed over to her.

“Dominique, my dear!” he said brightly. “Shall I consider myself flattered?”

“If you wish.”

“Had I known that you were interested, I would have sent you a very special invitation.”

“But you didn’t think I’d be interested?”

“No, frankly, I ...”

“That was a mistake, Ellsworth. You discounted my newspaper-woman’s instinct. Never miss a scoop. It’s not often that one has the chance to witness the birth of a felony.”

“Just exactly what do you mean, Dominique?” asked Keating, his voice sharp.

She turned to him. “Hello, Peter.”

“You know Peter Keating of course?” Toohey smiled at her.

“Oh, yes. Peter was in love with me once.”

“You’re using the wrong tense, Dominique,” said Keating.

“You must never take seriously anything Dominique chooses to say, Peter. She does not intend us to take it seriously. Would you like to join our little group, Dominique? Your professional qualifications make you eminently eligible.”

“No, Ellsworth. I wouldn’t like to join your little group. I really don’t hate you enough to do that.”

“Just why do you disapprove of it?” snapped Keating.

“Why, Peter!” she drawled. “Whatever gave you that idea? I don’t disapprove of it at all. Do I, Ellsworth? I think it’s a proper undertaking in answer to an obvious necessity. It’s just what we all need—and deserve.”

“Can we count on your presence at our next meeting?” Toohey asked. “It is pleasant to have so understanding a listener who will not be in the way at alt—at our next meeting, I mean.”

“No, Ellsworth. Thank you. It was merely curiosity. Though you do have an interesting group of people here. Young builders. By the way, why didn’t you invite that man who designed the Enright House—what’s his name?—Howard Roark?”

Keating felt his jaw snap tight. But she looked at them innocently, she had said it lightly, in the tone of a casual remark—surely, he thought, she did not mean ... what? he asked himself and added: she did not mean whatever it was he’d thought for a moment she meant, whatever had terrified him in that moment.

“I have never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Roark,” Toohey answered gravely.

“Do you know him?” Keating asked her.

“No,” she answered. “I’ve merely seen a sketch of the Enright House.”

“And?” Keating insisted. “What do you think of it?”

“I don’t think of it,” she answered.

When she turned to leave, Keating accompanied her. He looked at her in the elevator, on their way down. He saw her hand, in a tight black glove, holding the flat corner of a pocketbook. The limp carelessness of her fingers was insolent and inviting at once. He felt himself surrendering to her again.

“Dominique, why did you actually come here today?”

“Oh, I haven’t been anywhere for a long time and I decided to start in with that. You know, when I go swimming I don’t like to torture myself getting into cold water by degrees. I dive right in and it’s a nasty shock, but after that the rest is not so hard to take.”

“What do you mean? What do you really see that’s so wrong with that meeting? After all, we’re not planning to do anything definite. We don’t have any actual program. I don’t even know what we were there for.”

“That’s it, Peter. You don’t even know what you were there for.”

“It’s only a group for fellows to get together. Mostly to talk. What harm is there in that?”

“Peter, I’m tired.”

“Well, did your appearance tonight mean at least that you’re coming out of your seclusion?”

“Yes. Just that ... My seclusion?”

“I’ve tried and tried to get in touch with you, you know.”

“Have you?”

“Shall I begin to tell you how happy I am to see you again?”

“No. Let’s consider that you’ve told me.”

“You know, you’ve changed, Dominique. I don’t know exactly in what way, but you’ve changed.”

“Have I?”

“Let’s consider that I’ve told you how lovely you are, because I can’t find words to say it.”

The streets were dark. He called a cab. Sitting close to her, he turned and looked at her directly, his glance compelling like an open hint, hoping to make the silence significant between them. She did not turn away. She sat studying his face. She seemed to be wondering, attentive to some thought of her own which he could not guess. He reached over slowly and took her hand. He felt an effort in her hand, he could feel through her rigid fingers the effort of her whole arm, not an effort to withdraw her hand, but to let him hold it. He raised the hand, turned it over and pressed his lips to her wrist.

Then he looked at her face. He dropped her hand and it remained suspended in the air for an instant, the fingers stiff, half closed. This was not the indifference he remembered. This was revulsion, so great that it became impersonal, it could not offend him, it seemed to include more than his person. He was suddenly aware of her body; not in desire or resentment, but just aware of its presence close to him, under her dress. He whispered involuntarily:

“Dominique, who was he?”

She whirled to face him. Then he saw her eyes narrowing. He saw her lips relaxing, growing fuller, softer, her mouth lengthening slowly into a faint smile, without opening. She answered, looking straight at him:

“A workman in the granite quarry.”

She succeeded; he laughed aloud.

“Serves me right, Dominique. I shouldn’t suspect the impossible.”

“Peter, isn’t it strange? It was you that I thought I could make myself want, at one time.”

“Why is that strange?”

“Only in thinking how little we know about ourselves. Some day you’ll know the truth about yourself too, Peter, and it will be worse for you than for most of us. But you don’t have to think about it. It won’t come for a long time.”

“You did want me, Dominique?”

“I thought I could never want anything and you suited that so well.”

“I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know what you ever think you’re saying. I know that I’ll always love you. And I won’t let you disappear again. Now that you’re back ...”

“Now that I’m back, Peter, I don’t want to see you again. Oh, I’ll have to see you when we run into each other, as we will, but don’t call on me. Don’t come to see me. I’m not trying to offend you, Peter. It’s not that. You’ve done nothing to make me angry. It’s something in myself that I don’t want to face again. I’m sorry to choose you as the example. But you suit so well. You—Peter, you’re everything I despise in the world and I don’t want to remember how much I despise it. If I let myself remember—I’ll return to it. This is not an insult to you, Peter. Try to understand that. You’re not the worst of the world. You’re its best. That’s what’s frightening. If I ever come back to you—don’t let me come. I’m saying this now because I can, but if I come back to you, you won’t be able to stop me, and now is the only time when I can warn you.”

“I don’t know,” he said in cold fury, his lips stiff, “what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t try to know. It doesn’t matter. Let’s just stay away from each other. Shall we?”

“I’ll never give you up.”

She shrugged. “All right, Peter. This is the only time I’ve ever been kind to you. Or to anyone.”

VI

ROGER ENRIGHT HAD STARTED LIFE AS A COAL MINER IN PENNSYLVANIA. On his way to the millions he now owned, no one had ever helped him. “That,” he explained, “is why no one has ever stood in my way.” A great many things and people had stood in his way, however; but he had never noticed them. Many incidents of his long career were not admired; none was whispered about. His career had been glaring and public like a billboard. He made a poor subject for blackmailers or debunking biographers. Among the wealthy he was disliked for having become wealthy so crudely.

He hated bankers, labor unions, women, evangelists and the stock exchange. He had never bought a share of stock nor sold a share in any of his enterprises, and he owned his fortune singlehanded, as simply as if he carried all his cash in his pocket. Beside his oil business he owned a publishing house, a restaurant, a radio shop, a garage, a plant manufacturing electric refrigerators. Before each new venture he studied the field for a long time, then proceeded to act as if he had never heard of it, upsetting all precedent. Some of his ventures were successful, others failed. He continued running them all with ferocious energy. He worked twelve hours a day.

When he decided to erect a building, he spent six months looking for an architect. Then he hired Roark at the end of their first interview, which lasted half an hour. Later, when the drawings were made, he gave orders to proceed with construction at once. When Roark began to speak about the drawings, Enright interrupted him: “Don’t explain. It’s no use explaining abstract ideals to me. I’ve never had any ideals. People say I’m completely immoral. I go only by what I like. But I do know what I like.”

Roark never mentioned the attempt he had made to reach Enright, nor his interview with the bored secretary. Enright learned of it somehow. Within five minutes the secretary was discharged, and within ten minutes he was walking out of the office, as ordered, in the middle of a busy day, a letter left half typed in his machine.

Roark reopened his office, the same big room on the top of an old building. He enlarged it by the addition of an adjoining room—for the draftsmen he hired in order to keep up with the planned lightning schedule of construction. The draftsmen were young and without much experience. He had never heard of them before and he did not ask for letters of recommendation. He chose them from among many applicants, merely by glancing at their drawings for a few minutes.

In the crowded tension of the days that followed he never spoke to them, except of their work. They felt, entering the office in the morning, that they had no private lives, no significance and no reality save the overwhelming reality of the broad sheets of paper on their tables. The place seemed cold and soulless like a factory, until they looked at him; then they thought that it was not a factory, but a furnace fed on their bodies, his own first.

There were times when he remained in the office all night. They found him still working when they returned in the morning. He did not seem tired. Once he stayed there for two days and two nights in succession. On the afternoon of the third day he fell asleep, half lying across his table. He awakened in a few hours, made no comment and walked from one table to another, to see what had been done. He made corrections, his words sounding as if nothing had interrupted a thought begun some hours ago.

“You’re unbearable when you’re working, Howard,” Austen Heller told him one evening, even though he had not spoken of his work at all.

“Why?” he asked astonished.

“It’s uncomfortable to be in the same room with you. Tension is contagious, you know.”

“What tension? I feel completely natural only when I’m working.”

“That’s it. You’re completely natural only when you’re one inch from bursting into pieces. What in hell are you really made of, Howard? After all, it’s only a building. It’s not the combination of holy sacrament, Indian torture and sexual ecstasy that you seem to make of it.”

“Isn’t it?”

He did not think of Dominique often, but when he did, the thought was not a sudden recollection, it was the acknowledgment of a continuous presence that needed no acknowledgment. He wanted her. He knew where to find her. He waited. It amused him to wait, because he knew that the waiting was unbearable to her. He knew that his absence bound her to him in a manner more complete and humiliating than his presence could enforce. He was giving her time to attempt an escape, in order to let her know her own helplessness when he chose to see her again. She would know that the attempt itself had been of his choice, that it had been only another form of mastery. Then she would be ready either to kill him or to come to him of her own will. The two acts would be equal in her mind. He wanted her brought to this. He waited.

The construction of the Enright House was about to begin, when Roark was summoned to the office of Joel Sutton. Joel Sutton, a successful businessman, was planning the erection of a huge office building. Joel Sutton had based his success on the faculty of understanding nothing about people. He loved everybody. His love admitted no distinctions. It was a great leveler; it could hold no peaks and no hollows, as the surface of a bowl of molasses could not hold them.

Joel Sutton met Roark at a dinner given by Enright. Joel Sutton liked Roark. He admired Roark. He saw no difference between Roark and anyone else. When Roark came to his office, Joel Sutton declared:

“Now I’m not sure, I’m not sure, I’m not sure at all, but I thought that I might consider you for that little building I have in mind. Your Enright House is sort of ... peculiar, but it’s attractive, all buildings are attractive, love buildings, don’t you?—and Rog Enright is a very smart man, an exceedingly smart man, he coins money where nobody else’d think it grew. I’ll take a tip from Rog Enright any time, what’s good enough for Rog Enright is good enough for me.”

Roark waited for weeks after that first interview. Joel Sutton never made up his mind in a hurry.

On an evening in December Austen Heller called on Roark without warning and declared that he must accompany him next Friday to a formal party given by Mrs. Ralston Holcombe.

“Hell, no, Austen,” said Roark.

“Listen, Howard, just exactly why not? Oh, I know, you hate that sort of thing, but that’s not a good reason. On the other hand, I can give you many excellent ones for going. The place is a kind of house of assignation for architects and, of course, you’d sell anything there is to you for a building—oh, I know, for your kind of a building, but still you’d sell the soul you haven’t got, so can’t you stand a few hours of boredom for the sake of future possibilities?”

“Certainly. Only I don’t believe that this sort of thing ever leads to any possibilities.”

“Will you go this time?”

“Why particularly this time?”

“Well, in the first place, that infernal pest Kiki Holcombe demands it. She spent two hours yesterday demanding it and made me miss a luncheon date. It spoils her reputation to have a building like the Enright House going up in town and not be able to display its architect in her salon. It’s a hobby. She collects architects. She insisted that I must bring you and I promised I would.”

“What for?”

“Specifically, she’s going to have Joel Sutton there next Friday. Try, if it kills you, to be nice to him. He’s practically decided to give you that building, from what I hear. A little personal contact might be all that’s needed to set it. He’s got a lot of others after him. They’ll all be there. I want you there. I want you to get that building. I don’t want to hear anything about granite quarries for the next ten years. I don’t like granite quarries.”

Roark sat on a table, his hands clasping the table’s edge to keep himself still. He was exhausted after fourteen hours spent in his office, he thought he should be exhausted, but he could not feel it. He made his shoulders sag in an effort to achieve a relaxation that would not come; his arms were tense, drawn, and one elbow shuddered in a thin, continuous quiver. His long legs were spread apart, one bent and still, with the knee resting on the table, the other hanging down straight from the hip over the table’s edge, swinging impatiently. It was so difficult these days to force himself to rest.

His new home was one large room in a small, modern apartment house on a quiet street. He had chosen the house because it had no cornices over the windows and no paneling on the walls inside. His room contained a few pieces of simple furniture; it looked clean, vast and empty; one expected to hear echoes from its corners.

“Why not go, just once?” said Heller. “It won’t be too awful. It might even amuse you. You’ll see a lot of your old friends there. John Erik Snyte, Peter Keating, Guy Francon and his daughter—you should meet his daughter. Have you ever read her stuff?”

“I’ll go,” said Roark abruptly.

“You’re unpredictable enough even to be sensible at times. I’ll call for you at eight-thirty Friday. Black tie. Do you own a tux, by the way?”

“Enright made me get one.”

“Enright is a very sensible man.”

When Heller left, Roark remained sitting on the table for a long time. He had decided to go to the party, because he knew that it would be the last of all places where Dominique could wish to meet him again.

“There is nothing as useless, my dear Kiki,” said Ellsworth Toohey, “as a rich woman who makes herself a profession of entertaining. But then, all useless things have charm. Like aristocracy, for instance, the most useless conception of all.”

Kiki Holcombe wrinkled her nose in a cute little pout of reproach, but she liked the comparison to aristocracy. Three crystal chandeliers blazed over her Florentine ballroom, and when she looked up at Toohey the lights stood reflected in her eyes, making them a moist collection of sparks between heavy, beaded lashes.

“You say disgusting things, Ellsworth. I don’t know why I keep on inviting you.”

“That is precisely why, my dear. I think I shall be invited here as often as I wish.”

“What can a mere woman do against that?”

“Never start an argument with Mr. Toohey,” said Mrs. Gillespie, a tall woman wearing a necklace of large diamonds, the size of the teeth she bared when she smiled. “It’s no use. We’re beaten in advance.”

“Argument, Mrs. Gillespie,” he said, “is one of the things that has neither use nor charm. Leave it to the men of brains. Brains, of course, are a dangerous confession of weakness. It had been said that men develop brains when they have failed in everything else.”

“Now you don’t mean that at all,” said Mrs. Gillespie, while her smile accepted it as a pleasant truth. She took possession of him triumphantly and led him away as a prize stolen from Mrs. Holcombe who had turned aside for a moment to greet new guests. “But you men of intellect are such children. You’re so sensitive. One must pamper you.”

“I wouldn’t do that, Mrs. Gillespie. We’ll take advantage of it. And to display one’s brains is so vulgar. It’s even more vulgar than to display one’s wealth.”

“Oh dear, you would get that in, wouldn’t you? Now of course I’ve heard that you’re some sort of a radical, but I won’t take it seriously. Not one bit. How do you like that?”

“I like it very much,” said Toohey.

“You can’t kid me. You can’t make me think that you’re one of the dangerous kind. The dangerous kind are all dirty and use bad grammar. And you have such a beautiful voice!”

“Whatever made you think that I aspired to be dangerous, Mrs. Gillespie? I’m merely—well, shall we say? that mildest of all things, a conscience. Your own conscience, conveniently personified in the body of another person and attending to your concern for the less fortunate of this world, thus leaving you free not to attend to it.”

“Well, what a quaint idea! I don’t know whether it’s horrible or very wise indeed.”

“Both, Mrs. Gillespie. As all wisdom.”

Kiki Holcombe surveyed her ballroom with satisfaction. She looked up at the twilight of the ceiling, left untouched above the chandeliers, and she noted how far it was above the guests, how dominant and undisturbed. The huge crowd of guests did not dwarf her hall; it stood over them like a square box of space, grotesquely out of scale; and it was this wasted expanse of air imprisoned above them that gave the occasion an aspect of regal luxury; it was like the lid of a jewel case, unnecessarily large over a flat bottom holding a single small gem.

The guests moved in two broad, changing currents that drew them all, sooner or later, toward two whirlpools; at the center of one stood Ellsworth Toohey, of the other—Peter Keating. Evening clothes were not becoming to Ellsworth Toohey; the rectangle of white shirt front prolonged his face, stretching him out into two dimensions; the wings of his tie made his thin neck look like that of a plucked chicken, pale, bluish and ready to be twisted by a single movement of some strong fist. But he wore his clothes better than any man present. He wore them with the careless impertinence of utter ease in the unbecoming, and the very grotesqueness of his appearance became a declaration of his superiority, superiority great enough to warrant disregard of so much ungainliness.

He was saying to a somber young female who wore glasses and a lowcut evening gown: “My dear, you will never be more than a dilettante of the intellect, unless you submerge yourself in some cause greater than yourself.”

He was saying to an obese gentleman with a face turning purple in the heat of an argument: “But, my friend, I might not like it either. I merely said that such happens to be the inevitable course of history. And who are you or I to oppose the course of history?”

He was saying to an unhappy young architect: “No, my boy, what I have against you is not the bad building you designed, but the bad taste you exhibited in whining about my criticism of it. You should be careful. Someone might say that you can neither dish it out nor take it.”

He was saying to a millionaire’s widow: “Yes, I do think it would be a good idea if you made a contribution to the Workshop of Social Study. It would be a way of taking part in the great human stream of cultural achievement, without upsetting your routine or your digestion.”

Those around him were saying: “Isn’t he witty? And such courage!”

Peter Keating smiled radiantly. He felt the attention and admiration flowing toward him from every part of the ballroom. He looked at the people, all these trim, perfumed, silk-rustling people lacquered with light, dripping with light, as they had all been dripping with shower water a few hours ago, getting ready to come here and stand in homage before a man named Peter Keating. There were moments when he forgot that he was Peter Keating and he glanced at a mirror, at his own figure, he wanted to join in the general admiration for it.

Once the current left him face to face with Ellsworth Toohey. Keating smiled like a boy emerging from a stream on a summer day, glowing, invigorated, restless with energy. Toohey stood looking at him; Toohey’s hands had slipped negligently into his trouser pockets, making his jacket flare out over his thin hips; he seemed to teeter faintly on his small feet; his eyes were attentive in enigmatic appraisal.

“Now this, Ellsworth ... this ... isn’t it a wonderful evening?” said Keating, like a child to a mother who would understand, and a little like a drunk.

“Being happy, Peter? You’re quite the sensation tonight. Little Peter seems to have crossed the line into a big celebrity. It happens like this, one can never tell exactly when or why ... There’s someone here, though, who seems to be ignoring you quite flagrantly, doesn’t she?”

Keating winced. He wondered when and how Toohey had had the time to notice that.

“Oh, well,” said Toohey, “the exception proves the rule. Regrettable, however. I’ve always had the absurd idea that it would take a most unusual man to attract Dominique Francon. So of course I thought of you. Just an idle thought. Still, you know, the man who’ll get her will have something you won’t be able to match. He’ll beat you there.”

“No one’s got her,” snapped Keating.

“No, undoubtedly not. Not yet. That’s rather astonishing. Oh, I suppose it will take an extraordinary kind of man.”

“Look here, what in hell are you doing? You don’t like Dominique Francon. Do you?”

“I never said I did.”

A little later Keating heard Toohey saying solemnly in the midst of some earnest discussion: “Happiness? But that is so middle-class. What is happiness? There are so many things in life so much more important than happiness.”

Keating made his way slowly toward Dominique. She stood leaning back, as if the air were a support solid enough for her thin, naked shoulder blades. Her evening gown was the color of glass. He had the feeling that he should be able to see the wall behind her, through her body. She seemed too fragile to exist; and that very fragility spoke of some frightening strength which held her anchored to existence with a body insufficient for reality.

When he approached, she made no effort to ignore him; she turned to him, she answered; but the monotonous precision of her answers stopped him, made him helpless, made him leave her in a few moments.

When Roark and Heller entered, Kiki Holcombe met them at the door. Heller presented Roark to her, and she spoke as she always did, her voice like a shrill rocket sweeping all opposition aside by sheer speed.

“Oh, Mr. Roark, I’ve been so eager to meet you! We’ve all heard so much about you! Now I must warn you that my husband doesn’t approve of you—oh, purely on artistic grounds, you understand—but don’t let that worry you, you have an ally in this household, an enthusiastic ally!”

“It’s very kind, Mrs. Holcombe,” said Roark. “And perhaps unnecessary.”

“Oh, I adore your Enright House! of course, I can’t say that it represents my own esthetic convictions, but people of culture must keep their minds open to anything, I mean, to include any viewpoint in creative art, we must be broad-minded above all, don’t you think so?”

“I don’t know,” said Roark. “I’ve never been broad-minded.”

She was certain that he intended no insolence; it was not in his voice nor his manner; but insolence had been her first impression of him. He wore evening clothes and they looked well on his tall, thin figure, but somehow it seemed that he did not belong in them; the orange hair looked preposterous with formal dress; besides, she did not like his face; that face suited a work gang or an army, it had no place in her drawing room. She said:

“We’ve all been so interested in your work. Your first building?”

“My fifth.”

“Oh, indeed? Of course. How interesting.”

She clasped her hands, and turned to greet a new arrival. Heller said:

“Whom do you want to meet first? ... There’s Dominique Francon looking at us. Come on.”

Roark turned; he saw Dominique standing alone across the room. There was no expression on her face, not even an effort to avoid expression; it was strange to see a human face presenting a bone structure and an arrangement of muscles, but no meaning, a face as a simple anatomical feature, like a shoulder or an arm, not a mirror of sensate perception any longer. She looked at them as they approached. Her feet stood posed oddly, two small triangles pointed straight and parallel, as if there were no floor around her but the few square inches under her soles and she were safe so long as she did not move or look down. He felt a violent pleasure, because she seemed too fragile to stand the brutality of what he was doing; and because she stood it so well.

“Miss Francon, may I present Howard Roark?” said Heller.

He had not raised his voice to pronounce the name; he wondered why it had sounded so stressed; then he thought that the silence had caught the name and held it still; but there had been no silence: Roark’s face was politely blank and Dominique was saying correctly:

“How do you do, Mr. Roark.”

Roark bowed: “How do you do, Miss Francon.”

She said: “The Enright House ...”

She said it as if she had not wanted to pronounce these three words; and as if they named, not a house, but many things beyond it.

Roark said: “Yes, Miss Francon.”

Then she smiled, the correct, perfunctory smile with which one greets an introduction. She said:

“I know Roger Enright. He is almost a friend of the family.”

“I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting many friends of Mr. Enright.”

“I remember once Father invited him to dinner. It was a miserable dinner. Father is called a brilliant conversationalist, but he couldn’t bring a sound out of Mr. Enright. Roger just sat there. One must know Father to realize what a defeat it was for him.”

“I have worked for your father”—her hand had been moving and it stopped in mid-air—“a few years ago, as a draftsman.”

Her hand dropped. “Then you can see that Father couldn’t possibly get along with Roger Enright.”

“No. He couldn’t.”

“I think Roger almost liked me, though, but he’s never forgiven me for working on a Wynand paper.”

Standing between them, Heller thought that he had been mistaken; there was nothing strange in this meeting; in fact, there simply was nothing. He felt annoyed that Dominique did not speak of architecture, as one would have expected her to do; he concluded regretfully that she disliked this man, as she disliked most people she met.

Then Mrs. Gillespie caught hold of Heller and led him away. Roark and Dominique were left alone. Roark said:

“Mr. Enright reads every paper in town. They are all brought to his office—with the editorial pages cut out.”

“He’s always done that. Roger missed his real vocation. He should have been a scientist. He has such a love for facts and such contempt for commentaries.”

“On the other hand, do you know Mr. Fleming?” he asked.

“No.”

“He’s a friend of Heller’s. Mr. Fleming never reads anything but editorial pages. People like to hear him talk.”

She watched him. He was looking straight at her, very politely, as any man would have looked, meeting her for the first time. She wished she could find some hint in his face, if only a hint of his old derisive smile; even mockery would be an acknowledgment and a tie; she found nothing. He spoke as a stranger. He allowed no reality but that of a man introduced to her in a drawing room, flawlessly obedient to every convention of deference. She faced this respectful formality, thinking that her dress had nothing to hide from him, that he had used her for a need more intimate than the use of the food he ate—while he stood now at a distance of a few feet from her, like a man who could not possibly permit himself to come closer. She thought that this was his form of mockery, after what he had not forgotten and would not acknowledge. She thought that he wanted her to be first to name it, he would bring her to the humiliation of accepting the past—by being first to utter the word recalling it to reality; because he knew that she could not leave it unrecalled.

“And what does Mr. Fleming do for a living?” she asked.

“He’s a manufacturer of pencil sharpeners.”

“Really? A friend of Austen’s?”

“Austen knows many people. He says that’s his business.”

“Is he successful?”

“Who, Miss Francon? I’m not sure about Austen, but Mr. Fleming is very successful. He has branch factories in New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island.”

“You’re wrong about Austen, Mr. Roark. He’s very successful. In his profession and mine you’re successful if it leaves you untouched.”

“How does one achieve that?”

“In one of two ways: by not looking at people at all or by looking at everything about them.”

“Which is preferable, Miss Francon?”

“Whichever is hardest.”

“But a desire to choose the hardest might be a confession of weakness in itself.”

“Of course, Mr. Roark. But it’s the least offensive form of confession.”

“If the weakness is there to be confessed at all.”

Then someone came flying through the crowd, and an arm fell about Roark’s shoulders. It was John Erik Snyte.

“Roark, well of all people to see here!” he cried. “So glad, so glad! Ages, hasn’t it been? Listen, I want to talk to you! Let me have him for a moment, Dominique.”

Roark bowed to her, his arms at his sides, a strand of hair falling forward, so that she did not see his face, but only the orange head bowed courteously for a moment, and he followed Snyte into the crowd.

Snyte was saying: “God, how you’ve come up these last few years! Listen, do you know whether Enright’s planning to go into real estate in a big way, I mean; any other buildings up his sleeve?”

It was Heller who forced Snyte away and brought Roark to Joel Sutton. Joel Sutton was delighted. He felt that Roark’s presence here removed the last of his doubts; it was a stamp of safety on Roark’s person. Joel Sutton’s hand closed about Roark’s elbow, five pink, stubby fingers on the black sleeve. Joel Sutton gulped confidentially:

“Listen, kid, it’s all settled. You’re it. Now don’t squeeze the last pennies out of me, all you architects are cutthroats and highway robbers, but I’ll take a chance on you, you’re a smart boy, snared old Rog, didn’t you? So here you’ve got me swindled too, just about almost, that is, I’ll give you a ring in a few days and we’ll have a dogfight over the contract!”

Heller looked at them and thought that it was almost indecent to see them together: Roark’s tall, ascetic figure, with that proud cleanliness peculiar to long-lined bodies, and beside him the smiling ball of meat whose decision could mean so much.

Then Roark began to speak about the future building, but Joel Sutton looked up at him, astonished and hurt. Joel Sutton had not come here to talk about buildings; parties were given for the purpose of enjoying oneself, and what greater joy could there be but to forget the important things of one’s life? So Joel Sutton talked about badminton; that was his hobby; it was a patrician hobby, he explained, he was not being common like other men who wasted time on golf. Roark listened politely. He had nothing to say.

“You do play badminton, don’t you?” Joel Sutton asked suddenly.

“No,” said Roark.

“You don’t?” gulped Joel Sutton. “You don’t? Well, what a pity, oh what a rotten pity! I thought sure you did, with that lanky frame of yours you’d be good, you’d be a wow, I thought sure we’d beat the pants off of old Tompkins anytime while that building’s being put up.”

“While that building’s being put up, Mr. Sutton, I wouldn’t have the time to play anyway.”

“What d’you mean, wouldn’t have the time? What’ve you got draftsmen for? Hire a couple extra, let them worry, I’ll be paying you enough, won’t I? But then, you don’t play, what a rotten shame, I thought sure ... The architect who did my building down on Canal Street was a whiz at badminton, but he died last year, got himself cracked up in an auto accident, damn him, was a fine architect, too. And here you don’t play.”

“Mr. Sutton, you’re not really upset about it, are you?”

“I’m very seriously disappointed, my boy.”

“But what are you actually hiring me for?”

“What am I what?”

“Hiring me for?”

“Why, to do a building of course.”

“Do you really think it would be a better building if I played badminton?”

“Well, there’s business and there’s fun, there’s the practical and there’s the human end of it, oh, I don’t mind, still I thought with a skinny frame like yours you’d surely ... but all right, all right, we can’t have everything....”

When Joel Sutton left him, Roark heard a bright voice saying: “Congratulations, Howard,” and turned to find Peter Keating smiling at him radiantly and derisively.

“Hello, Peter. What did you say?”

“I said, congratulations on landing Joel Sutton. Only, you know, you didn’t handle that very well.”

“What?”

“Old Joel. Oh, of course, I heard most of it—why shouldn’t I?—it was very entertaining. That’s no way to go about it, Howard. You know what I would have done? I’d have sworn I’d played badminton since I was two years old and how it’s the game of kings and earls and it takes a soul of rare distinction to appreciate it and by the time he’d put me to the test I’d have made it my business to play like an earl, too. What would it cost you?”

“I didn’t think of it.”

“It’s a secret, Howard. A rare one. I’ll give it to you free of charge with my compliments: always be what people want you to be. Then you’ve got them where you want them. I’m giving it free because you’ll never make use of it. You’ll never know how. You’re brilliant in some respects, Howard, I’ve always said that—and terribly stupid in others.”

“Possibly.”

“You ought to try and learn a few things, if you’re going in for playing the game through the Kiki Holcombe salon. Are you? Growing up, Howard? Though it did give me a shock to see you here of all places. Oh, and yes, congratulations on the Enright job, beautiful job as usual -where have you been all summer?—remind me to give you a lesson on how to wear a tux, God, but it looks silly on you! That’s what I like, I like to see you looking silly, we’re old friends, aren’t we, Howard?”

“You’re drunk, Peter.”

“Of course I am. But I haven’t touched a drop tonight, not a drop. What I’m drunk on—you’ll never learn, never, it’s not for you, and that’s also part of what I’m drunk on, that it’s not for you. You know, Howard, I love you. I really do. I do—tonight.”

“Yes, Peter. You always will, you know.”

Roark was introduced to many people and many people spoke to him. They smiled and seemed sincere in their efforts to approach him as a friend, to express appreciation, to display good will and cordial interest. But what he heard was: “The Enright House is magnificent. It’s almost as good as the Cosmo-Slotnick Building.” “I’m sure you have a great future, Mr. Roark, believe me, I know the signs, you’ll be another Ralston Holcombe.” He was accustomed to hostility; this kind of benevolence was more offensive than hostility. He shrugged; he thought that he would be out of here soon and back in the simple, clean reality of his own office.

He did not look at Dominique again for the rest of the evening. She watched him in the crowd. She watched those who stopped him and spoke to him. She watched his shoulders stooped courteously as he listened. She thought that this, too, was his manner of laughing at her; he let her see him being delivered to the crowd before her eyes, being surrendered to any person who wished to own him for a few moments. He knew that this was harder for her to watch than the sun and the drill in the quarry. She stood obediently, watching. She did not expect him to notice her again; she had to remain there as long as he was in this room.

There was another person, that night, abnormally aware of Roark’s presence, aware from the moment Roark had entered the room. Ellsworth Toohey had seen him enter. Toohey had never set eyes on him before and did not know him. But Toohey stood looking at him for a long time.

Then Toohey moved through the crowd, and smiled at his friends. But between smiles and sentences, his eyes went back to the man with the orange hair. He looked at the man as he looked occasionally at the pavement from a window on the thirtieth floor, wondering about his own body were it to be hurled down and what would happen when it struck against that pavement. He did not know the man’s name, his profession or his past; he had no need to know; it was not a man to him, but only a force; Toohey never saw men. Perhaps it was the fascination of seeing that particular force so explicitly personified in a human body.

After a while he asked John Erik Snyte, pointing:

“Who is that man?”

“That?” said Snyte. “Howard Roark. You know, the Enright House.”

“Oh,” said Toohey.

“What?”

“Of course. It would be.”

“Want to meet him?”

“No,” said Toohey. “No, I don’t want to meet him.”

For the rest of the evening, whenever some figure obstructed Toohey’s view of the hall, his head would jerk impatiently to find Roark again. He did not want to look at Roark; he had to look; just as he always had to look down at that distant pavement, dreading the sight.

That evening, Ellsworth Toohey was conscious of no one but Roark. Roark did not know that Toohey existed in the room.

When Roark left, Dominique stood counting the minutes, to be certain that he would be lost to sight in the streets before she could trust herself to go out. Then she moved to leave.

Kiki Holcombe’s thin, moist fingers clasped her hand in parting, clasped it vaguely and slipped up to hold her wrist for a moment.

“And, my dear,” asked Kiki Holcombe, “what did you think of that new one, you know, I saw you talking to him, that Howard Roark?”

“I think,” said Dominique firmly, “that he is the most revolting person I’ve ever met.”

“Oh, now, really?”

“Do you care for that sort of unbridled arrogance? I don’t know what one could say for him, unless it’s that he’s terribly good-looking, if that matters.”

“Good-looking? Are you being funny, Dominique?”

Kiki Holcombe saw Dominique being stupidly puzzled for once. And Dominique realized that what she saw in his face, what made it the face of a god to her, was not seen by others; that it could leave them indifferent; that what she had thought to be the most obvious, inconsequential remark was, instead, a confession of something within her, some quality not shared by others.

“Why, my dear,” said Kiki, “he’s not good-looking at all, but extremely masculine.”

“Don’t let it astonish you, Dominique,” said a voice behind her. “Kiki’s esthetic judgment is not yours—nor mine.”

Dominique turned. Ellsworth Toohey stood there, smiling, watching her face attentively.

“You ...” she began and stopped.

“Of course,” said Toohey, bowing faintly in understanding affirmative of what she had not said. “Do give me credit for discernment, Dominique, somewhat equal to yours. Though not for esthetic enjoyment. I’ll leave that part of it to you. But we do see things, at times, which are not obvious, don’t we—you and I?”

“What things?”

“My dear, what a long philosophical discussion that would take, and how involved, and how—unnecessary. I’ve always told you that we should be good friends. We have so much in common intellectually. We start from opposite poles, but that makes no difference, because you see, we meet in the same point. It was a very interesting evening, Dominique.”

“What are you driving at?”

“For instance, it was interesting to discover what sort of thing appears good-looking to you. It’s nice to have you classified firmly, concretely. Without words—just with the aid of a certain face.”

“If ... if you can see what you’re talking about, you can’t be what you are.”

“No, my dear. I must be what I am, precisely because of what I see.”

“You know, Ellsworth, I think you’re much worse than I thought you were.”

“And perhaps much worse than you’re thinking now. But useful. We’re all useful to one another. As you will be to me. As, I think, you will want to be.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That’s bad, Dominique. Very bad. So pointless. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I couldn’t possibly explain it. If you do—I have you, already, without saying anything further.”

“What kind of a conversation is this?” asked Kiki, bewildered.

“Just our way of kidding each other,” said Toohey brightly. “Don’t let it bother you, Kiki. Dominique and I are always kidding each other. Not very well, though, because you see—we can’t.”

“Some day, Ellsworth,” said Dominique, “you’ll make a mistake.”

“Quite possible. And you, my dear, have made yours already.”

“Good night, Ellsworth.”

“Good night, Dominique.”

Kiki turned to him when Dominique had gone.

“What’s the matter with both of you, Ellsworth? Why such talk—over nothing at all? People’s faces and first impressions don’t mean a thing.”

“That, my dear Kiki,” he answered, his voice soft and distant, as if he were giving an answer, not to her, but to a thought of his own, “is one of our greatest common fallacies. There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge. Have you ever thought about the style of a soul, Kiki?”

“The ... what?”

“The style of a soul. Do you remember the famous philosopher who spoke of the style of a civilization? He called it ‘style.’ He said it was the nearest word he could find for it. He said that every civilization has its one basic principle, one single, supreme, determining conception, and every endeavor of men within that civilization is true, unconsciously and irrevocably, to that one principle.... I think, Kiki, that every human soul has a style of its own, also. Its one basic theme. You’ll see it reflected in every thought, every act, every wish of that person. The one absolute, the one imperative in that living creature. Years of studying a man won’t show it to you. His face will. You’d have to write volumes to describe a person. Think of his face. You need nothing else.”

“That sounds fantastic, Ellsworth. And unfair, if true. It would leave people naked before you.”

“It’s worse than that. It also leaves you naked before them. You betray yourself by the manner in which you react to a certain face. To a certain kind of face.... The style of your soul ... There’s nothing important on earth, except human beings. There’s nothing as important about human beings as their relations to one another....”

“Well, what do you see in my face?”

He looked at her, as if he had just noticed her presence.

“What did you say?”

“I said, what do you see in my face?”

“Oh ... yes ... well, tell me the movie stars you like and I’ll tell you what you are.”

“You know, I just love to be analyzed. Now let’s see. My greatest favorite has always been ...”

But he was not listening. He had turned his back on her, he was walking away without apology. He looked tired. She had never seen him being rude before—except by intention.

A little later, from among a group of friends, she heard his rich, vibrant voice saying:

“... and, therefore, the noblest conception on earth is that of men’s absolute equality.”

VII

“... AND THERE IT WILL STAND, AS A MONUMENT TO nothing but the egotism of Mr. Enright and of Mr. Roark. It will stand between a row of brownstone tenements on one side and the tanks of a gashouse on the other. This, perhaps, is not an accident, but a testimonial to fate’s sense of fitness. No other setting could bring out so eloquently the essential insolence of this building. It will rise as a mockery to all the structures of the city and to the men who built them. Our structures are meaningless and false; this building will make them more so. But the contrast will not be to its advantage. By creating the contrast it will have made itself a part of the great ineptitude, its most ludicrous part. If a ray of light falls into a pigsty, it is the ray that shows us the muck and it is the ray that is offensive. Our structures have the great advantage of obscurity and timidity. Besides, they suit us. The Enright House is bright and bold. So is a feather-boa. It will attract attention—but only to the immense audacity of Mr. Roark’s conceit. When this building is erected, it will be a wound on the face of our city. A wound, too, is colorful.”

This appeared in the column “Your House” by Dominique Francon, a week after the party at the home of Kiki Holcombe.

On the morning of its appearance Ellsworth Toohey walked into Dominique’s office. He held a copy of the Banner, with the page bearing her column turned toward her. He stood silently, rocking a little on his small feet. It seemed as if the expression of his eyes had to be heard, not seen: it was a visual roar of laughter. His lips were folded primly, innocently.

“Well?” she asked.

“Where did you meet Roark before that party?”

She sat looking at him, one arm flung over the back of her chair, a pencil dangling precariously between the tips of her fingers. She seemed to be smiling. She said:

“I had never met Roark before that party.”

“My mistake. I was just wondering about ...” he made the paper rustle, “... the change of sentiment.”

“Oh, that? Well, I didn’t like him when I met him—at the party.”

“So I noticed.”

“Sit down, Ellsworth. You don’t look your best standing up.”

“Do you mind? Not busy?”

“Not particularly.”

He sat down on the corner of her desk. He sat, thoughtfully tapping his knee with the folded paper.

“You know, Dominique,” he said, “it’s not well done. Not well at all.”

“Why?”

“Don’t you see what can be read between the lines? Of course, not many will notice that. He will. I do.”

“It’s not written for him or for you.”

“But for the others?”

“For the others.”

“Then it’s a rotten trick on him and me.”

“You see? I thought it was well done.”

“Well, everyone to his own methods.”

“What are you going to write about it?”

“About what?”

“About the Enright House.”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

He threw the paper down on the desk, without moving, just flicking his wrist forward. He said:

“Speaking of architecture, Dominique, why haven’t you ever written anything about the Cosmo-Slotnick Building?”

“Is it worth writing about?”

“Oh, decidedly. There are people whom it would annoy very much.”

“And are those people worth annoying?”

“So it seems.”

“What people?”

“Oh, I don’t know. How can we know who reads our stuff? That’s what makes it so interesting. All those strangers we’ve never seen before, have never spoken to, or can’t speak to—and here’s this paper where they can read our answer, if we want to give an answer. I really think you should dash off a few nice things about the Cosmo-Slotnick Building.”

“You do seem to like Peter Keating very much.”

“I? I’m awfully fond of Peter. You will be, too—eventually, when you know him better. Peter is a useful person to know. Why don’t you take time, one of these days, to get him to tell you the story of his life. You’ll learn many interesting things.”

“For instance?”

“For instance, that he went to Stanton.”

“I know that.”

“You don’t think it’s interesting? I do. Wonderful place, Stanton. Remarkable example of Gothic architecture. The stained-glass window in the Chapel is really one of the finest in this country. And then, think, so many young students. All so different. Some graduating with high honors. Others being expelled.”

“Well?”

“Did you know that Peter Keating is an old friend of Howard Roark?”

“No. Is he?”

“He is.”

“Peter Keating is an old friend of everybody.”

“Quite true. A remarkable boy. But this is different. You didn’t know that Roark went to Stanton?”

“No.”

“You don’t seem to know very much about Mr. Roark.”

“I don’t know anything about Mr. Roark. We weren’t discussing Mr. Roark.”

“Weren’t we? No, of course, we were discussing Peter Keating. Well, you see, one can make one’s point best by contrast, by comparison. As you did in your pretty little article today. To appreciate Peter as he should be appreciated, let’s follow up a comparison. Let’s take two parallel lines. I’m inclined to agree with Euclid, I don’t think these two parallels will ever meet. Well, they both went to Stanton. Peter’s mother ran a sort of boardinghouse and Roark lived with them for three years. This doesn’t really matter, except that it makes the contrast more eloquent and—well—more personal, later on. Peter graduated with high honors, the highest of his class. Roark was expelled. Don’t look like that. I don’t have to explain why he was expelled, we understand, you and I. Peter went to work for your father and he’s a partner now. Roark worked for your father and got kicked out. Yes, he did. Isn’t that funny, by the way?—he did, without any help from you at all—that time. Peter has the Cosmo-Slotnick Building to his credit—and Roark has a hot-dog stand in Connecticut. Peter signs autographs—and Roark is not known even to all the bathroom fixtures manufacturers. Now Roark’s got an apartment house to do and it’s precious to him like an only son—while Peter wouldn’t even have noticed it had he got the Enright House, he gets them every day. Now, I don’t think that Roark thinks very much of Peter’s work. He never has and he never will, no matter what happens. Follow this a step further. No man likes to be beaten. But to be beaten by the man who has always stood as the particular example of mediocrity in his eyes, to start by the side of this mediocrity and to watch it shoot up, while he struggles and gets nothing but a boot in his face, to see the mediocrity snatch from him, one after another, the chances he’d give his life for, to see the mediocrity worshiped, to miss the place he wants and to see the mediocrity enshrined upon it, to lose, to be sacrificed, to be ignored, to be beaten, beaten, beaten—not by a greater genius, not by a god, but by a Peter Keating—well, my little amateur, do you think the Spanish Inquisition ever thought of a torture to equal this?”

“Ellsworth!” she screamed. “Get out of here!”

She had shot to her feet. She stood straight for a moment, then she slumped forward, her two palms flat on the desk, and she stood, bent over; he saw her smooth mass of hair swinging heavily, then hanging still, hiding her face.

“But, Dominique,” he said pleasantly, “I was only telling you why Peter Keating is such an interesting person.”

Her hair flew back like a mop, and her face followed, she dropped down on her chair, looking at him, her mouth loose and very ugly.

“Dominique,” he said softly, “you’re obvious. Much too obvious.”

“Get out of here.”

“Well, I’ve always said that you underestimated me. Call on me next time you need some help.”

At the door, he turned to add:

“Of course, personally, I think Peter Keating is the greatest architect we’ve got.”

That evening, when she came home, the telephone rang.

“Dominique, my dear,” a voice gulped anxiously over the wire, “did you really mean all that?”

“Who is this?”

“Joel Sutton. I ...”

“Hello, Joel. Did I mean what?”

“Hello, dear, how are you? How is your charming father? I mean, did you mean all that about the Enright House and that fellow Roark? I mean, what you said in your column today. I’m quite a bit upset, quite a bit. You know about my building? Well, we’re all ready to go ahead and it’s such a bit of money, I thought I was very careful about deciding, but I trust you of all people, I’ve always trusted you, you’re a smart kid, plenty smart, if you work for a fellow like Wynand I guess you know your stuff. Wynand knows buildings, why, that man’s made more in real estate than on all his papers, you bet he did, it’s not supposed to be known, but I know it. And you working for him, and now I don’t know what to think. Because, you see, I had decided, yes, I had absolutely and definitely decided—almost—to have this fellow Roark, in fact I told him so, in fact he’s coming over tomorrow afternoon to sign the contract, and now ... Do you really think it will look like a feather-boa?”

“Listen, Joel,” she said, her teeth set tight together, “can you have lunch with me tomorrow?”

She met Joel Sutton in the vast, deserted dining room of a distinguished hotel. There were few, solitary guests among the white tables, so that each stood out, the empty tables serving as an elegant setting that proclaimed the guest’s exclusiveness. Joel Sutton smiled broadly. He had never escorted a woman as decorative as Dominique.

“You know, Joel,” she said, facing him across a table, her voice quiet, set, unsmiling, “it was a brilliant idea, your choosing Roark.”

“Oh, do you think so?”

“I think so. You’ll have a building that will be beautiful, like an anthem. A building that will take your breath away—also your tenants. A hundred years from now they will write about you in history—and search for your grave in Potter’s Field.”

“Good heavens, Dominique, what are you talking about?”

“About your building. About the kind of building that Roark will design for you. It will be a great building, Joel.”

“You mean, good?”

“I don’t mean good. I mean great.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“No, Joel, no, it’s not the same thing.”

“I don’t like this ‘great’ stuff.”

“No. You don’t. I didn’t think you would. Then what do you want with Roark? You want a building that won’t shock anybody. A building that will be folksy and comfortable and safe, like the old parlor back home that smells of clam chowder. A building that everybody will like, everybody and anybody. It’s very uncomfortable to be a hero, Joel, and you don’t have the figure for it.”

“Well, of course I want a building that people will like. What do you think I’m putting it up for, for my health?”

“No, Joel. Nor for your soul.”

“You mean, Roark’s no good?”

She sat straight and stiff, as if all her muscles were drawn tight against pain. But her eyes were heavy, half closed, as if a hand were caressing her body. She said:

“Do you see many buildings that he’s done? Do you see many people hiring him? There are six million people in the city of New York. Six million people can’t be wrong. Can they?”

“Of course not.”

“Of course.”

“But I thought Enright ...”

“You’re not Enright, Joel. For one thing, he doesn’t smile so much. Then, you see, Enright wouldn’t have asked my opinion. You did. That’s what I like you for.”

“Do you really like me, Dominique?”

“Didn’t you know that you’ve always been one of my great favorites?”

“I ... I’ve always trusted you. I’ll take your word anytime. What do you really think I should do?”

“It’s simple. You want the best that money can buy—of what money can buy. You want a building that will be—what it deserves to be. You want an architect whom other people have employed, so that you can show them that you’re just as good as they are.”

“That’s right. That’s exactly right.... Look, Dominique, you’ve hardly touched your food.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Well, what architect would you recommend?’

“Think, Joel. Who is there, at the moment, that everybody’s talking about? Who gets the pick of all commissions? Who makes the most money for himself and his clients? Who’s young and famous and safe and popular?”

“Why, I guess ... I guess Peter Keating.”

“Yes, Joel. Peter Keating.”

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Roark, so terribly sorry, believe me, but after all, I’m not in business for my health ... not for my health nor for my soul ... that is, I mean, well, I’m sure you can understand my position. And it’s not that I have anything against you, quite the contrary, I think you’re a great architect. You see that’s just the trouble, greatness is fine but it’s not practical. That’s the trouble, Mr. Roark, not practical, and after all you must admit that Mr. Keating has much the better name and he’s got that ... that popular touch which you haven’t been able to achieve.”

It disturbed Mr. Sutton that Roark did not protest. He wished Roark would try to argue; then he could bring forth the unanswerable justifications which Dominique had taught him a few hours ago. But Roark said nothing; he had merely inclined his head when he heard the decision. Mr. Sutton wanted desperately to utter the justifications, but it seemed pointless to try to convince a man who seemed convinced. Still, Mr. Sutton loved people and did not want to hurt anyone.

“As a matter of fact, Mr. Roark, I’m not alone in this decision. As a matter of fact, I did want you, I had decided on you, honestly I had, but it was Miss Dominique Francon, whose judgment I value most highly, who convinced me that you were not the right choice for this commission—and she was fair enough to allow me to tell you that she did.”

He saw Roark looking at him suddenly. Then he saw the hollows of Roark’s cheeks twisted, as if drawn in deeper and his mouth open: he was laughing, without sound but for one sharp intake of breath.

“What on earth are you laughing at, Mr. Roark?”

“So Miss Francon wanted you to tell me this?”

“She didn’t want me to, why should she?—she merely said that I could tell you if I wished.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Which only shows her honesty and that she has good reasons for her convictions and will stand by them openly.”

“Yes.”

“Well, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing, Mr. Sutton.”

“Look, it’s not decent to laugh like that.”

“No.”

His room was half dark around him. A sketch of the Heller house was tacked, unframed, on a long, blank wall; it made the room seem emptier and the wall longer. He did not feel the minutes passing, but he felt time as a solid thing enclosed and kept apart within the room; time clear of all meaning save the unmoving reality of his body.

When he heard the knock at the door, he said: “Come in,” without rising.

Dominique came in. She entered as if she had entered this room before. She wore a black suit of heavy cloth, simple like a child’s garment, worn as mere protection, not as ornament; she had a high masculine collar raised to her cheeks, and a hat cutting half her face out of sight. He sat looking at her. She waited to see the derisive smile, but it did not come. The smile seemed implicit in the room itself, in her standing there, halfway across that room. She took her hat off, like a man entering a house, she pulled it off by the brim with the tips of stiff fingers and held it hanging down at the end of her arm. She waited, her face stern and cold; but her smooth pale hair looked defenseless and humble. She said:

“You are not surprised to see me.”

“I expected you tonight.”

She raised her hand, bending her elbow with a tight economy of motion, the bare minimum needed, and flung her hat across to a table. The hat’s long flight showed the violence in that controlled jerk of her wrist.

He asked: “What do you want?”

She answered: “You know what I want,” her voice heavy and flat.

“Yes. But I want to hear you say it. All of it.”

“If you wish.” Her voice had the sound of efficiency, obeying an order with metallic precision. “I want to sleep with you. Now, tonight, and at any time you may care to call me. I want your naked body, your skin. your mouth, your hands. I want you—like this—not hysterical with desire—but coldly and consciously—without dignity and without regrets —I want you—I have no self-respect to bargain with me and divide me—I want you—I want you like an animal, or a cat on a fence, or a whore.”

She spoke on a single, level tone, as if she were reciting an austere catechism of faith. She stood without moving, her feet in flat shoes planted apart, her shoulders thrown back, her arms hanging straight at her sides. She looked impersonal, untouched by the words she pronounced, chaste like a young boy.

“You know that I hate you, Roark. I hate you for what you are, for wanting you, for having to want you. I’m going to fight you—and I’m going to destroy you—and I tell you this as calmly as I told you that I’m a begging animal. I’m going to pray that you can’t be destroyed—I tell you this, too—even though I believe in nothing and have nothing to pray to. But I will fight to block every step you take. I will fight to tear every chance you want away from you. I will hurt you through the only thing that can hurt you—through your work. I will fight to starve you, to strangle you on the things you won’t be able to reach. I have done it to you today—and that is why I shall sleep with you tonight.”

He sat deep in his chair, stretched out, his body relaxed, and taut in relaxation, a stillness being filled slowly with the violence of future motion.

“I have hurt you today. I’ll do it again. I’ll come to you whenever I have beaten you—whenever I know that I have hurt you—and I’ll let you own me. I want to be owned, not by a lover, but an an adversary who will destroy my victory over him, not with honorable blows, but with the touch of his body on mine. That is what I want of you, Roark. That is what I am. You wanted to hear it all. You’ve heard it. What do you wish to say now?”

“Take your clothes off.”

She stood still for a moment; two hard spots swelled and grew white under the corners of her mouth. Then she saw a movement in the cloth of his shirt, one jolt of controlled breath—and she smiled in her turn, derisively, as he had always smiled at her.

She lifted her two hands to her collar and unfastened the buttons of her jacket, simply, precisely, one after another. She threw the jacket down on the floor, she took off a thin white blouse, and she noticed the tight black gloves on the wrists of her naked arms. She took the gloves off, pulling at each finger in turn. She undressed indifferently, as if she were alone in her own bedroom.

Then she looked at him. She stood naked, waiting, feeling the space between them like a pressure against her stomach, knowing that it was torture for him also and that it was as they both wanted it. Then he got up, he walked to her, and when he held her, her arms rose willingly and she felt the shape of his body imprinted into the skin on the inside of her arm as it encircled him, his ribs, his armpit, his back, his shoulder blade under her fingers, her mouth on his, in a surrender more violent than her struggle had been.

Afterward, she lay in bed by his side, under his blanket, looking at his room, and she asked:

“Roark, why were you working in that quarry?”

“You know it.”

“Yes. Anyone else would have taken a job in an architect’s office.”

“And then you’d have no desire at all to destroy me.”

“You understand that?”

“Yes. Keep still. It doesn’t matter now.”

“Do you know that the Enright House is the most beautiful building in New York?”

“I know that you know it.”

“Roark, you worked in that quarry when you had the Enright House in you, and many other Enright Houses, and you were drilling granite like a ...”

“You’re going to weaken in a moment, Dominique, and then you’ll regret it tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“You’re very lovely, Dominique.”

“Don’t.”

“You’re lovely.”

“Roark, I ... I’ll still want to destroy you.”

“Do you think I would want you if you didn’t?”

“Roark ...”

“You want to hear that again? Part of it? I want you, Dominique. I want you. I want you.”

“I ...” She stopped, the word on which she stopped almost audible in her breath.

“No,” he said. “Not yet. You won’t say that yet. Go to sleep.”

“Here? With you?”

“Here. With me. I’ll fix breakfast for you in the morning. Did you know that I fix my own breakfast? You’ll like seeing that. Like the work in the quarry. Then you’ll go home and think about destroying me. Good night, Dominique.”

VIII

THE BLINDS RAISED OVER THE WINDOWS OF HER LIVING ROOM, THE lights of the city rising to a black horizon halfway up the glass panes, Dominique sat at her desk, correcting the last sheets of an article, when she heard the doorbell. Guests did not disturb her without warning -and she looked up, the pencil held in mid-air, angry and curious. She heard the steps of the maid in the hall, then the maid came in, saying: “A gentleman to see you, madam,” a faint hostility in her voice explaining that the gentleman had refused to give his name.

A man with orange hair?—Dominique wanted to ask, but didn’t; the pencil jerked stiffly and she said: “Have him come in.”

Then the door opened; against the light of the hall she saw a long neck and sloping shoulders, like the silhouette of a bottle; a rich, creamy voice said, “Good evening, Dominique,” and she recognized Ellsworth Toohey whom she had never asked to her house.

She smiled. She said: “Good evening, Ellsworth. I haven’t seen you for such a long time.”

“You should have expected me now, don’t you think so?” He turned to the maid: “Cointreau, please, if you have it, and I’m sure you do.”

The maid glanced at Dominique, wide-eyed; Dominique nodded silently, and the maid went out, closing the door.

“Busy, of course?” said Toohey, glancing at the littered desk. “Very becoming, Dominique. Gets results, too. You’ve been writing much better lately.”

She let the pencil fall, and threw an arm over the back of her chair, half turning to him, watching him placidly. “What do you want, Ellsworth?”

He did not sit down, but stood examining the place with the unhurried curiosity of an expert.

“Not bad, Dominique. Just about as I’d expect you to have it. A little cold. You know, I wouldn’t have that ice-blue chair over there. Too obvious. Fits in too well. Just what people would expect in just that spot. I’d have it carrot red. An ugly, glaring, outrageous red. Like Mr. Howard Roark’s hair. That’s quite en passant—merely a convenient figure of speech—nothing personal at all. Just one touch of the wrong color would make the whole room. The sort of thing that gives a place elegance. Your flower arrangements are nice. The pictures, too—not bad.”

“All right, Ellsworth, all right, what is it?”

“But don’t you know that I’ve never been here before? Somehow, you’ve never asked me. I don’t know why.” He sat down comfortably, resting an ankle on a knee, one thin leg stretched horizontally across the other, the full length of a tight, gun-metal sock exposed under the trouser cuff, and a patch of skin showing above the sock, bluish-white with a few black hairs. “But then, you’ve been so unsociable. The past tense, my dear, the past tense. Did you say that we haven’t seen each other for a long time? That’s true. You’ve been so busy—in such an unusual way. Visits, dinners, speak-easies and giving tea parties. Haven’t you?”

“I have.”

“Tea parties—I though that was tops. This is a good room for parties -large-plenty of space to stuff people into—particularly if you’re not particular whom you stuff it with—and you’re not. Not now. What do you serve them? Anchovy paste and minced egg cut out like hearts?”

“Caviar and minced onion cut out like stars.”

“What about the old ladies?”

“Cream cheese and chopped walnuts—in spirals.”

“I’d like to have seen you taking care of things like that. It’s wonderful how thoughtful you’ve become of old ladies. Particularly the filthy rich—with sons-in-law in real estate. Though I don’t think that’s as bad as going to see Knock Me Flat with Commodore Higbee who has false teeth and a nice vacant lot on the corner of Broadway and Chambers.”

The maid came in with the tray. Toohey took a glass and held it delicately, inhaling, while the maid went out.

“Will you tell me why the secret service department—I won’t ask who—and why the detailed reports on my activities?” Dominique said indifferently.

“You can ask who. Anyone and everyone. Don’t you suppose people are talking about Miss Dominique Francon in the role of famous hostess -so suddenly? Miss Dominique Francon as a sort of second Kiki Holcombe, but much better—oh much!—much subtler, much abler, and then, just think, how much more beautiful. It’s about time you made some use of that superlative appearance of yours that any woman would cut your throat for. It’s still being wasted, of course, if one thinks of form in relation to its proper function, but at least some people are getting some good out of it. Your father, for instance. I’m sure he’s delighted with this new life of yours. Little Dominique being friendly to people. Little Dominique who’s become normal at last. He’s wrong, of course, but it’s nice to make him happy. A few others, too..Me, for instance. Though you’d never do anything just to make me happy, but then, you see, that’s my lucky faculty—to extract joy from what was not intended for me at all, in a purely selfless way.”

“You’re not answering my question.”

“But I am. You asked why the interest in your activities—and I answer: because they make me happy. Besides, look, one could be astonished—though shortsightedly—if I were gathering information on the activities of my enemies. But not to be informed about the actions of my own side—really, you know, you didn’t think I’d be so unskilled a general, and whatever else you might think of me, you’ve never thought me unskilled.”

“Your side, Ellsworth?”

“Look, Dominique, that’s the trouble with your written—and spoken —style: you use too many question marks. Bad, in any case. Particularly bad when unnecessary. Let’s drop the quiz technique—and just talk. Since we both understand and there aren’t any questions to be asked between us. If there were—you’d have thrown me out. Instead, you gave me a very expensive liqueur.”

He held the rim of the glass under his nose and inhaled with a loose kind of sensual relish, which, at a dinner table, would have been equivalent to a loud lip-smacking, vulgar there, superlatively elegant here, over a cut-crystal edge pressed to a neat little mustache.

“All right,” she said. “Talk.”

“That’s what I’ve been doing. Which is considerate of me—since you’re not ready to talk. Not yet, for a while. Well, let’s talk—in a purely contemplative manner—about how interesting it is to see people welcoming you into their midst so eagerly, accepting you, flocking to you. Why is it, do you suppose? They do plenty of snubbing on their own, but just let someone who’s snubbed them all her life suddenly break down and turn gregarious—and they all come rolling on their backs with their paws folded, for you to rub their bellies. Why? There could be two explanations, I think. The nice one would be that they are generous and wish to honor you with their friendship. Only the nice explanations are never the true ones. The other one is that they know you’re degrading yourself by needing them, you’re coming down off a pinnacle—every loneliness is a pinnacle—and they’re delighted to drag you down through their friendship. Though, of course, none of them knows it consciously, except yourself. That’s why you go through agonies, doing it, and you’d never do it for a noble cause, you’d never do it except for the end you’ve chosen, an end viler than the means and making the means endurable.”

“You know, Ellsworth, you’ve said a sentence there you’d never use in your column.”

“Did I? Undoubtedly. I can say a great many things to you that I’d never use in my column. Which one?”

“Every loneliness is a pinnacle.”

“That? Yes, quite right. I wouldn’t. You’re welcome to it—though it’s not too good. Fairly crude. I’ll give you better ones some day, if you wish. Sorry, however, that that’s all you picked out of my little speech.”

“What did you want me to pick?”

“Well, my two explanations, for instance. There’s an interesting question there. What is kinder—to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance—or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable? Kindness being more important than justice, of course.”

“I don’t give a damn, Ellsworth.”

“Not in a mood for abstract speculation? Interested only in concrete results? All right. How many commissions have you landed for Peter Keating in the last three months?”

She rose, walked to the tray which the maid had left, poured herself a drink, and said: “Four,” raising the glass to her mouth. Then she turned to look at him, standing, glass in hand, and added: “And that was the famous Toohey technique. Never place your punch at the beginning of a column nor at the end. Sneak it in where it’s least expected. Fill a whole column with drivel, just to get in that one important line.”

He bowed courteously. “Quite. That’s why I like to talk to you. It’s such a waste to be subtle and vicious with people who don’t even know that you’re being subtle and vicious. But the drivel is never accidental, Dominique. Also, I didn’t know that the technique of my column was becoming obvious. I will have to think of a new one.”

“Don’t bother. They love it.”

“Of course. They’ll love anything I write. So it’s four? I missed one. I counted three.”

“I can’t understand why you had to come here if that’s all you wanted to know. You’re so fond of Peter Keating, and I’m helping him along beautifully, better than you could, so if you wanted to give me a pep talk about Petey—it wasn’t necessary, was it?”

“You’re wrong there twice in one sentence, Dominique. One honest error and one lie. The honest error is the assumption that I wish to help Petey Keating—and, incidentally, I can help him much better than you can, and I have and will, but that’s long-range contemplation. The lie is that I came here to talk about Peter Keating—you knew what I came here to talk about when you saw me enter. And—oh my!—you’d allow someone more obnoxious than myself to barge in on you, just to talk about that subject. Though I don’t know who could be more obnoxious to you than myself, at the moment.”

“Peter Keating,” she said.

He made a grimace, wrinkling his nose: “Oh, no. He’s not big enough for that. But let’s talk about Peter Keating. It’s such a convenient coincidence that he happens to be your father’s partner. You’re merely working your head off to procure commissions for your father, like a dutiful daughter, nothing more natural. You’ve done wonders for the firm of Francon & Keating in these last three months. Just by smiling at a few dowagers and wearing stunning models at some of our better gatherings. Wonder what you’d accomplish if you decided to go all the way and sell your matchless body for purposes other than esthetic contemplation—in exchange for commissions for Peter Keating.” He paused, she said nothing, and he added: “My compliments, Dominique, you’ve lived up to my best opinion of you—by not being shocked at this.”

“What was that intended for, Ellsworth? Shock value or hint value?”

“Oh, it could have been a number of things—a preliminary feeler, for instance. But, as a matter of fact, it was nothing at all. Just a touch of vulgarity. Also the Toohey technique—you know, I always advise the wrong touch at the right time. I am—essentially—such an earnest, single-toned Puritan that I must allow myself another color occasionally—to relieve the monotony.”

“Are you, Ellsworth? I wonder what you are—essentially. I don’t know.”

“I dare say nobody does,” he said pleasantly. “Although really, there’s no mystery about it at all. It’s very simple. All things are simple when you reduce them to fundamentals. You’d be surprised if you knew how few fundamentals there are. Only two, perhaps. To explain all of us. It’s the untangling, the reducing that’s dimcult—that’s why people don’t like to bother. I don’t think they’d like the results, either.”

“I don’t mind. I know what I am. Go ahead and say it. I’m just a bitch.”

“Don’t fool yourself, my dear. You’re much worse than a bitch. You’re a saint. Which shows why saints are dangerous and undesirable.”

“And you?”

“As a matter of fact, I know exactly what I am. That alone can explain a great deal about me. I’m giving you a helpful hint—if you care to use it. You don’t, of course. You might, though—in the future.”

“Why should I?” “You need me, Dominique. You might as well understand me a little. You see, I’m not afraid of being understood. Not by you.”

“I need you?”

“Oh, come on, show a little courage, too.”

She sat up and waited coldly, silently. He smiled, obviously with pleasure, making no effort to hide the pleasure.

“Let’s see,” he said, studying the ceiling with casual attention, “those commissions you got for Peter Keating. The Cryson office building was mere nuisance value—Howard Roark never had a chance at that. The Lindsay home was better—Roark was definitely considered, I think he would have got it but for you. The Stonebrook Clubhouse also—he had a chance at that, which you ruined.” He looked at her and chuckled softly. “No comments on techniques and punches, Dominique?” The smile was like cold grease floating over the fluid sounds of his voice. “You slipped up on the Norris country house—he got that last week, you know. Well, you can’t be a hundred per cent successful. After all, the Enright House is a big job; it’s creating a lot of talk, and quite a few people are beginning to show interest in Mr. Howard Roark. But you’ve done remarkably well. My congratulations. Now don’t you think I’m being nice to you? Every artist needs appreciation—and there’s nobody to compliment you, since nobody knows what you’re doing, but Roark and me, and he won’t thank you. On second thought, I don’t think Roark knows what you’re doing, and that spoils the fun, doesn’t it?”

She asked: “How do you know what I’m doing?”—her voice tired.

“My dear, surely you haven’t forgotten that it was I who gave you the idea in the first place?”

“Oh, yes,” she said absently. “Yes.”

“And now you know why I came here. Now you know what I meant when I spoke about my side.”

“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”

“This is a pact, my dear. An alliance. Allies never trust each other, but that doesn’t spoil their effectiveness. Our motives might be quite opposite. In fact, they are. But it doesn’t matter. The result will be the same. It is not necessary to have a noble aim in common. It is necessary only to have a common enemy. We have.”

“Yes.”

“That’s why you need me. I’ve been helpful once.”

“Yes.”

“I can hurt your Mr. Roark much better than any tea party you’ll ever give.”

“What for?”

“Omit the what-fors, I don’t inquire into yours.”

“All right.”

“Then it’s to be understood between us? We’re allies in this?”

She looked at him, she slouched forward, attentive, her face empty. Then she said: “We’re allies.”

“Fine, my dear. Now listen. Stop mentioning him in your column every other day or so. I know, you take vicious cracks at him each time, but it’s too much. You’re keeping his name in print, and you don’t want to do that. Further: you’d better invite me to those parties of yours. There are things I can do which you can’t. Another tip: Mr. Gilbert Colton—you know, the California pottery Coltons—is planning a branch factory in the east. He’s thinking of a good modernist. In fact, he’s thinking of Mr. Roark. Don’t let Roark get it. It’s a huge job—with lots of publicity. Go and invent a new tea sandwich for Mrs. Colton. Do anything you wish. But don’t let Roark get it.”

She got up, dragged her feet to a table, her arms swinging loosely, and took a cigarette. She lighted it, turned to him, and said indifferently: “You can talk very briefly and to the point—when you want to.”

“When I find it necessary.”

She stood at the window, looking out over the city. She said: “You’ve never actually done anything against Roark. I didn’t know you cared quite so much.”

“Oh, my dear. Haven’t I?”

“You’ve never mentioned him in print.”

“That, my dear, is what I’ve done against Mr. Roark. So far.”

“When did you first hear of him?”

“When I saw drawings of the Heller house. You didn’t think I’d miss that, did you? And you?”

“When I saw drawings of the Enright House.”

“Not before?”

“Not before.”

She smoked in silence; then she said, without turning to him:

“Ellsworth, if one of us tried to repeat what we said here tonight, the other would deny it and it could never be proved. So it doesn’t matter if we’re sincere with each other, does it? It’s quite safe. Why do you hate him?”

“I never said I hated him.”

She shrugged.

“As for the rest,” he added, “I think you can answer that yourself.”

She nodded slowly to the bright little point of her cigarette’s reflection on the glass pane.

He got up, walked over to her, and stood looking at the lights of the city below them, at the angular shapes of buildings, at the dark walls made translucent by the glow of the windows, as if the walls were only a checkered veil of thin black gauze over a solid mass of radiance. And Ellsworth Toohey said softly:

“Look at it. A sublime achievement, isn’t it? A heroic achievement. Think of the thousands who worked to create this and of the millions who profit by it. And it is said that but for the spirit of a dozen men, here and there down the ages, but for a dozen men—less, perhaps—none of this would have been possible. And that might be true. If so, there are—again—two possible attitudes to take. We can say that these twelve were great benefactors, that we are all fed by the overflow of the magnificent wealth of their spirit, and that we are glad to accept it in gratitude and brotherhood. Or, we can say that by the splendor of their achievement which we can neither equal nor keep, these twelve have shown us what we are, that we do not want the free gifts of their grandeur, that a cave by an oozing swamp and a fire of sticks rubbed together are preferable to skyscrapers and neon lights—if the cave and the sticks are the limit of our own creative capacities. Of the two attitudes, Dominique, which would you call the truly humanitarian one? Because, you see, I’m a humanitarian.”

After a while Dominique found it easier to associate with people. She learned to accept self-torture as an endurance test, urged on by the curiosity to discover how much she could endure. She moved through formal receptions, theater parties, dinners, dances—gracious and smiling, a smile that made her face brighter and colder, like the sun on a winter day. She listened emptily to empty words uttered as if the speaker would be insulted by any sign of enthusiastic interest from his listener, as if oily boredom were the only bond possible between people, the only preservative of their precarious dignity. She nodded to everything and accepted everything.

“Yes, Mr. Holt, I think Peter Keating is the man of the century—our century.”

“No, Mr. Inskip, not Howard Roark, you don’t want Howard Roark. ... A phony? Of course, he’s a phony—it takes your sensitive honesty to evaluate the integrity of a man.... Nothing much? No, Mr. Inskip, of course, Howard Roark is nothing much. It’s all a matter of size and distance—and distance.... No, I don’t drink very much, Mr. Inskip—I’m glad you like my eyes—yes, they always look like that when I’m enjoying myself—and it made me so happy to hear you say that Howard Roark is nothing much.”

“You’ve met Mr. Roark, Mrs. Jones? And you didn’t like him? ... Oh, he’s the type of man for whom one can feel no compassion? How true. Compassion is a wonderful thing. It’s what one feels when one looks at a squashed caterpillar. An elevating experience. One can let oneself go and spread—you know, like taking a girdle off. You don’t have to hold your stomach, your heart or your spirit up—when you feel compassion. All you have to do is look down. It’s much easier. When you look up, you get a pain in the neck. Compassion is the greatest virtue. It justifies suffering. There’s got to be suffering in the world, else how would we be virtuous and feel compassion? ... Oh, it has an antithesis—but such a hard, demanding one.... Admiration, Mrs. Jones, admiration. But that takes more than a girdle.... So I say that anyone for whom we can’t feel sorry is a vicious person. Like Howard Roark.”

Late at night, often, she came to Roark’s room. She came unannounced, certain of finding him there and alone. In his room, there was no necessity to spare, lie, agree and erase herself out of being. Here she was free to resist, to see her resistance welcomed by an adversary too strong to fear a contest, strong enough to need it; she found a will granting her the recognition of her own entity, untouched and not to be touched except in clean battle, to win or to be defeated, but to be preserved in victory or defeat, not ground into the meaningless pulp of the impersonal.

When they lay in bed together it was—as it had to be, as the nature of the act demanded—an act of violence. It was surrender, made the more complete by the force of their resistance. It was an act of tension, as the great things on earth are things of tension. It was tense as electricity, the force fed on resistance, rushing through wires of metal stretched tight; it was tense as water made into power by the restraining violence of a dam. The touch of his skin against hers was not a caress, but a wave of pain, it became pain by being wanted too much, by releasing in fulfillment all the past hours of desire and denial. It was an act of clenched teeth and hatred, it was the unendurable, the agony, an act of passion—the word born to mean sunering—it was the moment made of hatred, tension, pain—the moment that broke its own elements, inverted them, triumphed, swept into a denial of all suffering, into its antithesis, into ecstasy.

She came to his room from a party, wearing an evening gown expensive and fragile like a coating of ice over her body—and she leaned against the wall, feeling the rough plaster under her skin, glancing slowly at every object around her, at the crude kitchen table loaded with sheets of paper, at the steel rulers, at the towels smudged by the black prints of five fingers, at the bare boards of the floor—and she let her glance slide down the length of her shining satin, down to the small triangle of a silver sandal, thinking of how she would be undressed here. She liked to wander about the room, to throw her gloves down among a litter of pencils, rubber erasers and rags, to put her small silver bag on a stained, discarded shirt, to snap open the catch of a diamond bracelet and drop it on a plate with the remnant of a sandwich, by an unfinished drawing.

“Roark,” she said, standing behind his chair, her arms over his shoulders, her hand under his shirt, fingers spread and pressed flat against his chest, “I made Mr. Symons promise his job to Peter Keating today. Thirty-five floors, and anything he’ll wish to make it cost, money no object, just art, free art.” She heard the sound of his soft chuckle, but he did not turn to look at her, only his fingers closed over her wrist and he pushed her hand farther down under his shirt, pressing it hard against his skin. Then she pulled his head back, and she bent down to cover his mouth with hers.

She came in and found a copy of the Banner spread out on his table, open at the page bearing “Your House” by Dominique Francon. Her column contained the line: “Howard Roark is the Marquis de Sade of architecture. He’s in love with his buildings—and look at them.” She knew that he disliked the Banner, that he put it there only for her sake, that he watched her noticing it, with the half-smile she dreaded on his face. She was angry; she wanted him to read everything she wrote, yet she would have preferred to think that it hurt him enough to make him avoid it. Later, lying across the bed, with his mouth on her breast, she looked past the orange tangle of his head, at that sheet of newspaper on the table, and he felt her trembling with pleasure.

She sat on the floor, at his feet, her head pressed to his knees, holding his hand, closing her fist in turn over each of his fingers, closing it tight and letting it slide slowly down the length of his finger, feeling the hard, small stops at the joints, and she asked softly: “Roark, you wanted to get the Colton Factory? You wanted it very badly?” “Yes, very badly,” he answered, without smiling and without pain. Then she raised his hand to her lips and held it there for a long time.

She got out of bed in the darkness, and walked naked across his room to take a cigarette from the table. She bent to the light of a match, her flat stomach rounded faintly in the movement. He said: “Light one for me,” and she put a cigarette between his lips; then she wandered through the dark room, smoking, while he lay in bed, propped up on his elbow, watching her.

Once she came in and found him working at his table. He said: “I’ve got to finish this. Sit down. Wait.” He did not look at her again. She waited silently, huddled in a chair at the farthest end of the room. She watched the straight lines of his eyebrows drawn in concentration, the set of his mouth, the vein beating under the tight skin of his neck, the sharp, surgical assurance of his hand. He did not look like an artist, he looked like the quarry worker, like a wrecker demolishing walls, and like a monk. Then she did not want him to stop or glance at her, because she wanted to watch the ascetic purity of his person, the absence of all sensuality; to watch that—and to think of what she remembered.

There were nights when he came to her apartment, as she came to his, without warning. If she had guests, he said: “Get rid of them,” and walked into the bedroom while she obeyed. They had a silent agreement, understood without mention, never to be seen together. Her bedroom was an exquisite place of glass and pale ice-green. He liked to come in wearing clothes stained by a day spent on the construction site. He liked to throw back the covers of her bed, then to sit talking quietly for an hour or two, not looking at the bed, not mentioning her writing or buildings or the latest commission she had obtained for Peter Keating, the simplicity of being at ease, here, like this, making the hours more sensual than the moments they delayed.

There were evenings when they sat together in her living room, at the huge window high over the city. She liked to see him at that window. He would stand, half turned to her, smoking, looking at the city below. She would move away from him and sit down on the floor in the middle of the room and watch him.

Once, when he got out of bed, she switched the light on and saw him standing there, naked; she looked at him, then she said, her voice quiet and desperate with the simple despair of complete sincerity: “Roark, everything I’ve done all my life is because it’s the kind of a world that made you work in a quarry last summer.”

“I know that.”

He sat down at the foot of the bed. She moved over, she pressed her face against his thigh, curled up, her feet on the pillow, her arm hanging down, letting her palm move slowly up the length of his leg, from the ankle to the knee and back again. She said: “But, of course, if it had been up to me, last spring, when you were broke and jobless, I would have sent you precisely to that kind of a job in that particular quarry.”

“I know that too. But maybe you wouldn’t have. Maybe you’d have had me as washroom attendant in the clubhouse of the A.G.A.”

“Yes. Possibly. Put your hand on my back, Roark. Just hold it there. Like that.” She lay still, her face buried against his knees, her arm hanging down over the side of the bed, not moving, as if nothing in her were alive but the skin between her shoulder blades under his hand.

In the drawing rooms she visited, in the restaurants, in the offices of the A.G.A. people talked about the dislike of Miss Dominique Francon of the Banner for Howard Roark, that architectural freak of Roger Enright’s. It gave him a sort of scandalous fame. It was said: “Roark? You know, the guy Dominique Francon can’t stand the guts of.” “The Francon girl knows her architecture all right, and if she says he’s no good, he must be worse than I thought he was.” “God, but these two must hate each other! Though I understand they haven’t even met.” She liked to hear these things. It pleased her when Athelstan Beasely wrote in his column in the A.G.A. Bulletin, discussing the architecture of medieval castles: “To understand the grim ferocity of these structures, we must remember that the wars between feudal lords were a savage business—something like the feud between Miss Dominique Francon and Mr. Howard Roark.”

Austen Heller, who had been her friend, spoke to her about it. He was angrier than she had ever seen him; his face lost all the charm of his usual sarcastic poise.

“What in hell do you think you’re doing, Dominique?” he snapped. “This is the greatest exhibition of journalistic hooliganism I’ve ever seen swilled out in public print. Why don’t you leave that sort of thing to Ellsworth Toohey?”

“Ellsworth is good, isn’t he?” she said.

“At least, he’s had the decency to keep his unsanitary trap shut about Roark—though, of course, that too is an indecency. But what’s happened to you? Do you realize who and what you’re talking about? It was all right when you amused yourself by praising some horrible abortion of Grandpaw Holcombe’s or panning the pants off your own father and that pretty butcher’s-calendar boy that he’s got himself for a partner. It didn’t matter one way or another. But to bring that same intellectual manner to the appraisal of someone like Roark.... You know, I really thought you had integrity and judgment—if ever given a chance to exercise them. In fact, I thought you were behaving like a tramp only to emphasize the mediocrity of the saps whose works you had to write about. I didn’t think that you were just an irresponsible bitch.”

“You were wrong,” she said.

Roger Enright entered her office, one morning, and said, without greeting: “Get your hat. You’re coming to see it with me.”

“Good morning, Roger,” she said. “To see what?”

“The Enright House. As much of it as we’ve got put up.”

“Why, certainly, Roger,” she smiled, rising, “I’d love to see the Enright House.”

On their way, she asked: “What’s the matter, Roger? Trying to bribe me?”

He sat stiffly on the vast, gray cushions of his limousine, not looking at her. He answered: “I can understand stupid malice. I can understand ignorant malice. I can’t understand deliberate rottenness. You are free, of course, to write anything you wish—afterward. But it won’t be stupidity and it won’t be ignorance.”

“You overestimate me, Roger,” she shrugged, and said nothing else for the rest of the ride.

They walked together past the wooden fence, into the jungle of naked steel and planks that was to be the Enright House. Her high heels stepped lightly over lime-spattered boards and she walked, leaning back, in careless, insolent elegance. She stopped and looked at the sky held in a frame of steel, the sky that seemed more distant than usual, thrust back by the sweeping length of beams. She looked at the steel cages of future projections, at the insolent angles, at the incredible complexity of this shape coming to life as a simple, logical whole, a naked skeleton with planes of air to form the walls, a naked skeleton on a cold winter day, with a sense of birth and promise, like a bare tree with a first touch of green.

“Oh, Roger!”

He looked at her and saw the kind of face one should expect to see in church at Easter.

“I didn’t underestimate either one,” he said dryly. “Neither you nor the building.”

“Good morning,” said a low, hard voice beside them.

She was not shocked to see Roark. She had not heard him approaching, but it would have been unnatural to think of this building without him. She felt that he simply was there, that he had been there from the moment she crossed the outside fence, that this structure was he, in a manner more personal than his body. He stood before them, his hands thrust into the pockets of a loose coat, his hair hatless in the cold.

“Miss Francon—Mr. Roark,” said Enright.

“We have met once,” she said, “at the Holcombes. If Mr. Roark remembers.”

“Of course, Miss Francon,” said Roark.

“I wanted Miss Francon to see it,” said Enright.

“Shall I show you around?” Roark asked him.

“Yes, do, please,” she answered first.

The three of them walked together through the structure, and the workers stared curiously at Dominique. Roark explained the layout of future rooms, the system of elevators, the heating plant, the arrangement of windows—as he would have explained it to a contractor’s assistant. She asked questions and he answered. “How many cubic feet of space, Mr. Roark?” “How many tons of steel?” “Be careful of these pipes, Miss Francon. Step this way.” Enright walked along, his eyes on the ground, looking at nothing. But then he asked: “How’s it going, Howard?” and Roark smiled, answering: “Two days ahead of schedule,” and they stood talking about the job, like brothers, forgetting her for a moment, the clanging roar of machines around them drowning out their words.

She thought, standing there in the heart of the building, that if she had nothing of him, nothing but his body, here it was, offered to her, the rest of him, to be seen and touched, open to all; the girders and the conduits and the sweeping reaches of space were his and could not have been anyone else’s in the world; his, as his face, as his soul; here was the shape he had made and the thing within him which had caused him to make it, the end and the cause together, the motive power eloquent in every line of steel, a man’s self, hers for this moment, hers by grace of her seeing it and understanding.

“Are you tired, Miss Francon?” asked Roark, looking at her face.

“No,” she said, “no, not at all. I have been thinking—what kind of plumbing fixtures are you going to use here, Mr. Roark?”

A few days later, in his room, sitting on the edge of his drafting table, she looked at a newspaper, at her column and the lines: “I have visited the Enright construction site. I wish that in some future air raid a bomb would blast this house out of existence. It would be a worthy ending. So much better than to see it growing old and soot-stained, degraded by the family photographs, the dirty socks, the cocktail shakers and the grapefruit rinds of its inhabitants. There is not a person in New York City who should be allowed to live in this building.”

Roark came to stand beside her, close to her, his legs pressed to her knees, and he looked down at the paper, smiling.

“You have Roger completely bewildered by this,” he said.

“Has he read it?”

“I was in his office this morning when he read it. At first, he called you some names I’d never heard before. Then he said, Wait a moment, and he read it again, he looked up, very puzzled, but not angry at all, and he said, if you read it one way ... but on the other hand ...”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. You know, Dominique, I’m very grateful, but when are you going to stop handing me all that extravagant praise? Someone else might see it. And you won’t like that.”

“Someone else?”

“You knew that I got it, from that first article of yours about the Enright House. You wanted me to get it. But don’t you think someone else might understand your way of doing things?”

“Oh yes. But the effect—for you—will be worse than if they didn’t. They’ll like you the less for it. However, I don’t know who’ll even bother to understand. Unless it’s ... Roark, what do you think of Ellsworth Toohey?”

“Good God, why should anyone think of Ellsworth Toohey?”

She liked the rare occasions when she met Roark at some gathering where Heller or Enright had brought him. She liked the polite, impersonal “Miss Francon” pronounced by his voice. She enjoyed the nervous concern of the hostess and her efforts not to let them come together. She knew that the people around them expected some explosion, some shocking sign of hostility which never came. She did not seek Roark out and she did not avoid him. They spoke to each other if they happened to be included in the same group, as they would have spoken to anyone else. It required no effort; it was real and right; it made everything right, even this gathering. She found a deep sense of fitness in the fact that here, among people, they should be strangers; strangers and enemies. She thought, these people can think of many things he and I are to each other—except what we are. It made the moments she remembered greater, the moments not touched by the sight of others, by the words of others, not even by their knowledge. She thought, it has no existence here, except in me and in him. She felt a sense of possession, such as she could feel nowhere else. She could never own him as she owned him in a room among strangers when she seldom looked in his direction.

If she glanced at him across the room and saw him in conversation with blank, indifferent faces, she turned away, unconcerned; if the faces were hostile, she watched for a second, pleased; she was angry when she saw a smile, a sign of warmth or approval on a face turned to him. It was not jealousy; she did not care whether the face was a man’s or a woman’s; she resented the approval as an impertinence.

She was tortured by peculiar things: by the street where he lived, by the doorstep of his house, by the cars that turned the corner of his block. She resented the cars in particular; she wished she could make them drive on to the next street. She looked at the garbage pail by the stoop next door, and she wondered whether it had stood there when he passed by, on his way to his office this morning, whether he had looked at that crumpled cigarette package on top. Once, in the lobby of his house, she saw a man stepping out of the elevator; she was shocked for a second; she had always felt as if he were the only inhabitant of that house. When she rode up in the small, self-operating elevator, she stood leaning against the wall, her arms crossed over her breast, her hands hugging her shoulders, feeling huddled and intimate, as in a stall under a warm shower.

She thought of that, while some gentleman was telling her about the latest show on Broadway, while Roark was sipping a cocktail at the other end of the room, while she heard the hostess whispering to somebody: “My Lord, I didn’t think Gordon would bring Dominique—I know Austen will be furious at me, because of his friend Roark being here, you know.”

Later, lying across his bed, her eyes closed, her cheeks flushed, her lips wet, losing the sense of the rules she herself had imposed, losing the sense of her words, she whispered: “Roark, there was a man talking to you out there today, and he was smiling at you, the fool, the terrible fool, last week he was looking at a pair of movie comedians and loving them, I wanted to tell that man: don’t look at him, you’ll have no right to want to look at anything else, don’t like him, you’ll have to hate the rest of the world, it’s like that, you damn fool, one or the other, not together, not with the same eyes, don’t look at him, don’t like him, don’t approve, that’s what I wanted to tell him, not you and the rest of it, I can’t bear to see that, I can’t stand it, anything to take you away from it, from their world, from all of them, anything, Roark ...” She did not hear herself saying it, she did not see him smiling, she did not recognize the full understanding in his face, she saw only his face close over hers, and she had nothing to hide from him, nothing to keep unstated, everything was granted, answered, found.

Peter Keating was bewildered. Dominique’s sudden devotion to his career seemed dazzling, flattering, enormously profitable; everybody told him so; but there were moments when he did not feel dazzled or flattered; he felt uneasy.

He tried to avoid Guy Francon. “How did you do it, Peter? How did you do it?” Francon would ask. “She must be crazy about you! Who’d ever think that Dominique of all people would ...? And who’d think she could? She’d have made me a millionaire if she’d done her stuff five years ago. But then, of course, a father is not the same inspiration as a ...” He caught an ominous look on Keating’s face and changed the end of his sentence to: “as her man, shall we say?”

“Listen, Guy,” Keating began, and stopped, sighing, and muttered: “Please, Guy, we mustn’t ...”

“I know, I know, I know. We mustn’t be premature. But hell, Peter, entre nous, isn’t it all as public as an engagement? More so. And louder.” Then the smile vanished, and Francon’s face looked earnest, peaceful, frankly aged, in one of his rare flashes of genuine dignity. “And I’m glad, Peter,” he said simply. “That’s what I wanted to happen. I guess I always did love Dominique, after all. It makes me happy. I know I’ll be leaving her in good hands. Her and everything else eventually ...”

“Look, old man, will you forgive me? I’m so terribly rushed—had two hours sleep last night, the Colton factory, you know, Jesus, what a job!—thanks to Dominique—it’s a killer, but wait till you see it! Wait till you see the check, too!”

“Isn’t she wonderful? Will you tell me, why is she doing it? I’ve asked her and I can’t make head or tail of what she says, she gives me the craziest gibberish, you know how she talks.”

“Oh well, we should worry, so long as she’s doing it!”

He could not tell Francon that he had no answer; he couldn’t admit that he had not seen Dominique alone for months; that she refused to see him.

He remembered his last private conversation with her—in the cab on their way from Toohey’s meeting. He remembered the indifferent calm of her insults to him—the utter contempt of insults delivered without anger. He could have expected anything after that—except to see her turn into his champion, his press agent, almost—his pimp. That’s what’s wrong, he thought, that I can think of words like that when I think about it.

He had seen her often since she started on her unrequested campaign; he had been invited to her parties—and introduced to his future clients; he had never been allowed a moment alone with her. He had tried to thank her and to question her. But he could not force a conversation she did not want continued, with a curious mob of guests pressing all around them. So he went on smiling blandly—her hand resting casually on the black sleeve of his dinner jacket, her thigh against his as she stood beside him, her pose possessive and intimate, made flagrantly intimate by her air of not noticing it, while she told an admiring circle what she thought of the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. He heard envious comments from all his friends. He was, he thought bitterly, the only man in New York City who did not think that Dominique Francon was in love with him.

But he knew the dangerous instability of her whims, and this was too valuable a whim to disturb. He stayed away from her and sent her flowers; he rode along and tried not to think of it; the little edge remained—a thin edge of uneasiness.

One day, he met her by chance in a restaurant. He saw her lunching alone and grasped the opportunity. He walked straight to her table, determined to act like an old friend who remembered nothing but her incredible benevolence. After many bright comments on his luck, he asked: “Dominique, why have you been refusing to see me?”

“What should I have wanted to see you for?”

“But good Lord Almighty! ...” That came out involuntarily, with too sharp a sound of long-suppressed anger, and he corrected it hastily, smiling: “Well, don’t you think you owed me a chance to thank you?”

“You’ve thanked me. Many times.”

“Yes, but didn’t you think we really had to meet alone? Didn’t you think that I’d be a little ... bewildered?”

“I haven’t thought of it. Yes, I suppose you could be.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“What is it all about?”

“About ... fifty thousand dollars by now, I think.”

“You’re being nasty.”

“Want me to stop?”

“Oh no! That is, not ...”

“Not the commissions. Fine. I won’t stop them. You see? What was there for us to talk about? I’m doing things for you and you’re glad to have me do them—so we’re in perfect agreement.”

“You do say the funniest things! In perfect agreement. That’s sort of a redundancy and an understatement at the same time, isn’t it? What else could we be under the circumstances? You wouldn’t expect me to object to what you’re doing, would you?”

“No. I wouldn’t.”

“But agreeing is not the word for what I feel. I’m so terribly grateful to you that I’m simply dizzy—I was bowled over—don’t let me get silly now—I know you don’t like that—but I’m so grateful I don’t know what to do with myself.”

“Fine, Peter. Now you’ve thanked me.”

“You see, I’ve never flattered myself by thinking that you thought very much of my work or cared or took any notice. And then you ... That’s what makes me so happy and ... Dominique,” he asked, and his voice jerked a little, because the question was like a hook pulling at a line, long and hidden, and he knew that this was the core of his uneasiness, “do you really think that I’m a great architect?”

She smiled slowly. She said: “Peter, if people heard you asking that, they’d laugh. Particularly, asking that of me.”

“Yes, I know, but ... but do you really mean them, all those things you say about me?”

“They work.”

“Yes, but is that why you picked me? Because you think I’m good?”

“You sell like hot cakes. Isn’t that the proof?”

“Yes ... No ... I mean ... in a different way ... I mean ... Dominique, I’d like to hear you say once, just once, that I ...”

“Listen, Peter, I’ll have to run along in a moment, but before I go I must tell you that you’ll probably hear from Mrs. Lonsdale tomorrow or the next day. Now remember that she’s a prohibitionist, loves dogs, hates women who smoke, and believes in reincarnation. She wants her house to be better than Mrs. Purdee‘s—Holcombe did Purdee’s—so if you tell her that Mrs. Purdee’s house looks ostentatious and that true simplicity costs much more money, you’ll get along fine. You might discuss petit point, too. That’s her hobby.”

He went away, thinking happily about Mrs. Lonsdale’s house, and he forgot his question. Later, he remembered it resentfully, and shrugged, and told himself that the best part of Dominique’s help was her desire not to see him.

As a compensation, he found pleasure in attending the meetings of Toohey’s Council of American Builders. He did not know why he should think of it as compensation, but he did and it was comforting. He listened attentively when Gordon L. Prescott made a speech on the meaning of architecture.

“And thus the intrinsic significance of our craft lies in the philosophical fact that we deal in nothing. We create emptiness through which certain physical bodies are to move—we shall designate them for convenience as humans. By emptiness I mean what is commonly known as rooms. Thus it is only the crass layman who thinks that we put up stone walls. We do nothing of the kind. We put up emptiness, as I have proved. This leads us to a corollary of astronomical importance: to the unconditional acceptance of the premise that ‘absence’ is superior to ‘presence.’ That is, to the acceptance of non-acceptance. I shall state this in simpler terms—for the sake of clarity: ‘nothing’ is superior to ‘something.’ Thus it is clear that the architect is more than a bricklayer -since the fact of bricks is a secondary illusion anyway. The architect is a metaphysical priest dealing in basic essentials, who has the courage to face the primal conception of reality as nonreality—since there is nothing and he creates nothingness. If this sounds like a contradiction, it is not a proof of bad logic, but of a higher logic, the dialectics of all life and art. Should you wish to make the inevitable deductions from this basic conception, you may come to conclusions of vast sociological importance. You may see that a beautiful woman is inferior to a non-beautiful one, that the literate is inferior to the illiterate, that the rich is inferior to the poor, and the able to the incompetent. The architect is the concrete illustration of a cosmic paradox. Let us be modest in the vast pride of this realization. Everything else is twaddle.”

One could not worry about one’s value or greatness when listening to this. It made self-respect unnecessary.

Keating listened in thick contentment. He glanced at the others. There was an attentive silence in the audience; they all liked it as he liked it. He saw a boy chewing gum, a man cleaning his fingernails with the corner of a match folder, a youth stretched out loutishly. That, too, pleased Keating; it was as if they said: We are glad to listen to the sublime, but it’s not necessary to be too damn reverent about the sublime.

The Council of American Builders met once a month and engaged in no tangible activity, beyond listening to speeches and sipping an inferior brand of root beer. Its membership did not grow fast, either in quantity or in quality. There were no concrete results achieved.

The meetings of the Council were held in a huge, empty room over a garage on the West Side. A long, narrow, unventilated stairway led to a door bearing the Council’s name; there were folding chairs inside, a table for the chairman, and a wastebasket. The A.G.A. considered the Council of American Builders a silly joke. “What do you want to waste time on those cranks for?” Francon asked Keating in the rose-lit, satin-stuffed rooms of the A.G.A., wrinkling his nose with fastidious amusement. “Damned if I know,” Keating answered gaily. “I like them.” Ellsworth Toohey attended every meeting of the Council, but did not speak. He sat in a corner and listened.

One night Keating and Toohey walked home together after the meeting, down the dark, shabby streets of the West Side, and stopped for a cup of coffee at a seedy drugstore. “Why not a drugstore?” Toohey laughed when Keating reminded him of the distinguished restaurants made famous by Toohey’s patronage. “At least, no one will recognize us here and bother us.”

He sent a jet of smoke from his Egyptian cigarette at a faded Coca-Cola sign over their booth, he ordered a sandwich, he nibbled daintily a slice of pickle which was not flyspecked but looked it, and he talked to Keating. He talked at random. What he said did not matter, at first; it was his voice, the matchless voice of Ellsworth Toohey. Keating felt as if he were standing in the middle of a vast plain, under the stars, held and owned, in assurance, in security.

“Kindness, Peter,” said the voice softly, “kindness. That is the first commandment, perhaps the only one. That is why I had to pan that new play, in my column yesterday. That play lacked essential kindness. We must be kind, Peter, to everybody around us. We must accept and forgive—there is so much to be forgiven in each one of us. If you learn to love everything, the humblest, the least, the meanest, then the meanest in you will be loved. Then we’ll find the sense of universal equality, the great peace of brotherhood, a new world, Peter, a beautiful new world....”

IX

ELLSWORTH MONKTON TOOHEY WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD WHEN HE turned the hose upon Johnny Stokes, as Johnny was passing by the Toohey lawn, dressed in his best Sunday suit. Johnny had waited for that suit a year and a half, his mother being very poor. Ellsworth did not sneak or hide, but committed his act openly, with systematic deliberation: he walked to the tap, turned it on, stood in the middle of the lawn and directed the hose at Johnny, his aim faultless—with Johnny’s mother just a few steps behind him down the street, with his own mother and father and the visiting minister in full view on the Toohey porch. Johnny Stokes was a bright kid with dimples and golden curls; people always turned to look at Johnny Stokes. Nobody had ever turned to look at Ellsworth Toohey.

The shock and amazement of the grownups present were such that nobody rushed to stop Ellsworth for a long moment. He stood, bracing his thin little body against the violence of the nozzle jerking in his hands, never allowing it to leave its objective until he felt satisfied; then he let it drop, the water hissing through the grass, and made two steps toward the porch, and stopped, waiting, his head high, delivering himself for punishment. The punishment would have come from Johnny if Mrs. Stokes had not seized her boy and held him. Ellsworth did not turn to the Stokeses behind him, but said, slowly, distinctly, looking at his mother and the minister: “Johnny is a dirty bully. He beats up all the boys in school.” This was true.

The question of punishment became an ethical problem. It was difficult to punish Ellsworth under any circumstances, because of his fragile body and delicate health; besides, it seemed wrong to chastise a boy who had sacrificed himself to avenge injustice, and done it bravely, in the open, ignoring his own physical weakness; somehow, he looked like a martyr. Ellsworth did not say so; he said nothing further; but his mother said it. The minister was inclined to agree with her. Ellsworth was sent to his room without supper. He did not complain. He remained there meekly—refused the food his mother sneaked up to him, late at night, disobeying her husband. Mr. Toohey insisted on paying Mrs. Stokes for Johnny’s suit. Mrs. Toohey let him do it, sullenly; she did not like Mrs. Stokes.

Ellsworth’s father managed the Boston branch of a national chain of shoe stores. He earned a modest, comfortable salary and owned a modest, comfortable home in an undistinguished suburb of Boston. The secret sorrow of his life was that he did not head a business of his own. But he was a quiet, conscientious, unimaginative man, and an early marriage had ended all his ambition.

Ellsworth’s mother was a thin, restless woman who adopted and discarded five religions in nine years. She had delicate features, the kind that made her look beautiful for a few years of her life, at the one period of full flower, never before and never afterward. Ellsworth was her idol. His sister Helen, five years older, was a good-natured, unremarkable girl, not beautiful but pretty and healthy; she presented no problem. Ellsworth, however, had been born puny in health. His mother adored him from the moment the doctor pronounced him unfit to survive; it made her grow in spiritual stature—to know the extent of her own magnanimity in her love for so uninspiring an object; the bluer and uglier baby Ellsworth looked, the more passionate grew her love for him. She was almost disappointed when he survived without becoming an actual cripple. She took little interest in Helen; there was no martyrdom in loving Helen. The girl was so obviously more deserving of love that it seemed just to deny it to her.

Mr. Toohey, for reasons which he could not explain, was not too fond of his son. Ellsworth, however, was the ruler of the household, by a tacit, voluntary submission of both parents, though his father could never understand the cause of his own share in that submission.

In the evenings, under the lamp of the family sitting room, Mrs. Toohey would begin, in a tense, challenging voice, angry and defeated in advance: “Horace, I want a bicycle. A bicycle for Ellsworth. All the boys his age have them, Willie Lovett just got a new one the other day, Horace. Horace, I want a bicycle for Ellsworth.”

“Not right now, Mary,” Mr. Toohey would answer wearily. “Maybe next summer.... Just now we can’t afford ...”

Mrs. Toohey would argue, her voice rising in jerks toward a shriek.

“Mother, what for?” said Ellsworth, his voice soft, rich and clear, lower than the voices of his parents, yet cutting across them, commanding, strangely persuasive. “There’s many things we need more than a bicycle. What do you care about Willie Lovett? I don’t like Willie. Willie’s a dumbbell. Willie can afford it, because his pa’s got his own drygoods store. His pa’s a show-off. I don’t want a bicycle.”

Every word of this was true, and Ellsworth did not want a bicycle. But Mr. Toohey looked at him strangely, wondering what had made him say that. He saw his son’s eyes looking at him blankly from behind the small glasses; the eyes were not ostentatiously sweet, not reproachful, not malicious; just blank. Mr. Toohey felt that he should be grateful for his son’s understanding—and wished to hell the boy had not mentioned that part about the private store.

Ellsworth did not get the bicycle. But he got a polite attention in the house, a respectful solicitude—tender and guilty, from his mother, uneasy and suspicious from his father. Mr. Toohey would do anything rather than be forced into a conversation with Ellsworth—feeling, at the same time, foolish and angry at himself for his fear.

“Horace, I want a new suit. A new suit for Ellsworth. I saw one in a window today and I’ve ...”

“Mother, I’ve got four suits. What do I need another one for? I don’t want to look silly like Pat Noonan who changes them every day. That’s because his pa’s got his own ice-cream parlor. Pat’s stuck up like a girl about his clothes. I don’t want to be a sissy.”

Ellsworth, thought Mrs. Toohey at times, happy and frightened, is going to be a saint; he doesn’t care about material things at all; not one bit. This was true. Ellsworth did not care about material things.

He was a thin, pale boy with a bad stomach, and his mother had to watch his diet, as well as his tendency to frequent colds in the head. His sonorous voice was astonishing in his puny frame. He sang in the choir, where he had no rivals. At school he was a model pupil. He always knew his lessons, had the neatest copybooks, the cleanest fingernails, loved Sunday school and preferred reading to athletic games, in which he had no chance. He was not too good at mathematics—which he disliked—but excellent at history, English, civics and penmanship; later, at psychology and sociology.

He studied conscientiously and hard. He was not like Johnny Stokes, who never listened in class, seldom opened a book at home, yet knew everything almost before the teacher had explained it. Learning came to Johnny automatically, as did all things: his able little fists, his healthy body, his startling good looks, his overexuberant vitality. But Johnny did the shocking and the unexpected; Ellsworth did the expected, better than anyone had ever seen it done. When they came to compositions, Johnny would stun the class by some brilliant display of rebellion. Given the theme of “School Days—The Golden Age,” Johnny came through with a masterly essay on how he hated school and why. Ellsworth delivered a prose poem on the glory of school days, which was reprinted in a local newspaper.

Besides, Ellsworth had Johnny beaten hollow when it came to names and dates; Ellsworth’s memory was like a spread of liquid cement: it held anything that fell upon it. Johnny was a shooting geyser; Ellsworth was a sponge.

The children called him “Elsie Toohey.” They usually let him have his way, and avoided him when possible, but not openly; they could not figure him out. He was helpful and dependable when they needed assistance with their lessons; he had a sharp wit and could ruin any child by the apt nickname he coined, the kind that hurt; he drew devastating cartoons on fences; he had all the earmarks of a sissy, but somehow he could not be classified as one; he had too much self-assurance and quiet, disturbingly wise contempt for everybody. He was afraid of nothing.

He would march right up to the strongest boys, in the middle of the street, and state, not yell, in a clear voice that carried for blocks, state without anger—no one had ever seen Ellsworth Toohey angry—“Johnny Stokes’s got a patch on his ass. Johnny Stokes lives in a rented flat. Willie Lovett is a dunce. Pat Noonan is a fish eater.” Johnny never gave him a beating, and neither did the other boys, because Ellsworth wore glasses.

He could not take part in ball games, and was the only child who boasted about it, instead of feeling frustrated or ashamed like the other boys with substandard bodies. He considered athletics vulgar and said so; the brain, he said, was mightier than the brawn; he meant it.

He had no close personal friends. He was considered impartial and incorruptible. There were two incidents in his childhood of which his mother was very proud.

It happened that the wealthy, popular Willie Lovett gave a birthday party on the same day as Drippy Munn, son of a widowed seamstress, a whining boy whose nose was always running. Nobody accepted Drippy’s invitation, except the children who were never invited anywhere. Of those asked for both occasions, Ellsworth Toohey was the only one who snubbed Willie Lovett and went to Drippy Munn’s party, a miserable affair from which he expected and received no pleasure. Willie Lovett’s enemies howled and taunted Willie for months afterward—about being passed up in favor of Drippy Munn.

It happened that Pat Noonan offered Ellsworth a bag of jelly beans in exchange for a surreptitious peek at his test paper. Ellsworth took the jelly beans and allowed Pat to copy his test. A week later, Ellsworth marched up to the teacher, laid the jelly beans, untouched, upon her desk and confessed his crime, without naming the other culprit. All her efforts to extract that name could not budge him; Ellsworth remained silent; he explained only that the guilty boy was one of the best students, and he could not sacrifice the boy’s record to the demands of his own conscience. He was the only one punished—kept after school for two hours. Then the teacher had to drop the matter and let the test marks remain as they were. But it threw suspicion on the grades of Johnny Stokes, Pat Noonan, and all the best pupils of the class, except Ellsworth Toohey.

Ellsworth was eleven years old when his mother died. Aunt Adeline, his father’s maiden sister, came to live with them and run the Toohey household. Aunt Adeline was a tall, capable woman to whom the word “horse” clung in conjunction with the words “sense” and “face.” The secret sorrow of her life was that she had never inspired romance. Helen became her immediate favorite. She considered Ellsworth an imp out of hell. But Ellsworth never wavered in his manner of grave courtesy toward Aunt Adeline. He leaped to pick up her handkerchief, to move her chair, when they had company, particularly masculine company. He sent her beautiful Valentines on the appropriate day—with paper lace, rosebuds and love poems. He sang “Sweet Adeline” at the top of his town crier’s voice. “You’re a maggot, Elsie,” she told him once. “You feed on sores.” “Then I’ll never starve,” he answered. After a while they reached a state of armed neutrality. Ellsworth was left to grow up as he pleased.

In high school Ellsworth became a local celebrity—the star orator. For years the school did not refer to a promising boy as a good speaker, but as “a Toohey.” He won every contest. Afterward, members of the audience spoke about “that beautiful boy”; they did not remember the sorry little figure with the sunken chest, inadequate legs and glasses; they remembered the voice. He won every debate. He could prove anything. Once, after beating Willie Lovett with the affirmative of “The Pen is Mightier than the Sword,” he challenged Willie to reverse their positions, took the negative and won again.

Until the age of sixteen Ellsworth felt himself drawn to the career of a minister. He thought a great deal about religion. He talked about God and the spirit. He read extensively on the subject. He read more books on the history of the church than on the substance of faith. He brought his audience to tears in one of his greatest oratorical triumphs with the theme of “The meek shall inherit the earth.”

At this period he began to acquire friends. He liked to speak of faith and he found those who liked to listen. Only, he discovered that the bright, the strong, the able boys of his class felt no need of listening, felt no need of him at all. But the suffering and the ill-endowed came to him. Drippy Munn began to follow him about with the silent devotion of a dog. Billy Wilson lost his mother, and came wandering to the Toohey house in the evenings, to sit with Ellsworth on the porch, listening, shivering once in a while, saying nothing, his eyes wide, dry and pleading. Skinny Dix got infantile paralysis—and would lie in bed, watching the street corner beyond the window, waiting for Ellsworth. Rusty Hazelton failed to pass in his grades, and sat for many hours, crying, with Ellsworth’s cold, steady hand on his shoulder.

It was never clear whether they all discovered Ellsworth or Ellsworth discovered them. It seemed to work more like a law of nature: as nature allows no vacuum, so pain and Ellsworth Toohey drew each other. His rich, beautiful voice said to them:

“It’s good to suffer. Don’t complain. Bear, bow, accept—and be grateful that God has made you suffer. For this makes you better than the people who are laughing and happy. If you don’t understand this, don’t try to understand. Everything bad comes from the mind, because the mind asks too many questions. It is blessed to believe, not to understand. So if you didn’t get passing grades, be glad of it. It means that you are better than the smart boys who think too much and too easily.”

People said it was touching, the way Ellsworth’s friends clung to him. After they had taken him for a while, they could not do without him. It was like a drug habit.

Ellsworth was fifteen, when he astonished the Bible-class teacher by an odd question. The teacher had been elaborating upon the text: “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Ellsworth asked: “Then, in order to be truly wealthy, a man should collect souls?” The teacher was about to ask him what the hell did he mean, but controlled himself and asked what did he mean. Ellsworth would not eludicate.

At the age of sixteen, Ellsworth lost interest in religion. He discovered socialism.

His transition shocked Aunt Adeline. “In the first place, it is blasphemous and drivel,” she said. “In the second place, it doesn’t make sense. I’m surprised at you, Elsie. ‘The poor in spirit’—that was fine, but just ‘the poor’—that doesn’t sound respectable at all. Besides, it’s not like you. You’re not cut out to make big trouble—only little trouble. Something’s crazy somewhere, Elsie. It just don’t fit. It’s not like you at all.” “In the first place, my dear aunt,” he answered, “don’t call me Elsie. In the second place, you’re wrong.”

The change seemed to be good for Ellsworth. He did not become an aggressive zealot. He became gentler, quieter, milder. He became more attentively considerate of people. It was as if something had taken the nervous edges off his personality and given him new confidence. Those around him began to like him. Aunt Adeline stopped worrying. Nothing actual seemed to come of his preoccupation with revolutionary theories. He joined no political party. He read a great deal and he attended a few dubious meetings, where he spoke once or twice, not too well, but mostly sat in a corner, listening, watching, thinking.

Ellsworth went to Harvard. His mother had willed her life insurance for that specific purpose. At Harvard his scholastic record was superlative. He majored in history. Aunt Adeline had expected to see him go in for economics and sociology; she half feared that he would end up as a social worker. He didn’t. He became absorbed in literature and the fine arts. It baffled her a little; it was a new trait in him; he had never shown any particular tendency in that direction. “You’re not the arty kind, Elsie,” she stated. “It don’t fit.” “You’re wrong, auntie,” he said.

Ellsworth’s relations with his fellow students were the most unusual of his achievements at Harvard. He made himself accepted. Among the proud young descendants of proud old names, he did not hide the fact of his humble background; he exaggerated it. He did not tell them that his father was the manager of a shoe store; he said that his father was a shoe cobbler. He said it without defiance, bitterness or proletarian arrogance; he said it as if it were a joke on him and—if one looked closely into his smile—on them. He acted like a snob; not a flagrant snob, but a natural, innocent one who tries very hard not to be snobbish. He was polite, not in the manner of one seeking favor, but in the manner of one granting it. His attitude was contagious. People did not question the reasons of his superiority; they took it for granted that such reasons existed. It became amusing, at first, to accept “Monk” Toohey; then it became distinctive and progressive. If this was a victory Ellsworth did not seem conscious of it as such; he did not seem to care. He moved among all these unformed youths, with the assurance of a man who has a plan, a long-range plan set in every detail, and who can spare nothing but amusement for the small incidentals of his way. His smile had a secret, closed quality, the smile of a shopkeeper counting profits—even though nothing in particular seemed to be happening.

He did not talk about God and the nobility of suffering. He talked about the masses. He proved to a rapt audience, at bull sessions lasting till dawn, that religion bred selfishness; because, he stated, religion overemphasized the importance of the individual spirit; religion preached nothing but a single concern—the salvation of one’s own soul.

“To achieve virtue in the absolute sense,” said Ellsworth Toohey, “a man must be willing to take the foulest crimes upon his soul—for the sake of his brothers. To mortify the flesh is nothing. To mortify the soul is the only act of virtue. So you think you love the broad mass of mankind? You know nothing of love. You give two bucks to a strike fund and you think you’ve done your duty? You poor fools! No gift is worth a damn, unless it’s the most precious thing you’ve got. Give your soul. To a lie? Yes, if others believe it. To deceit? Yes, if others need it. To treachery, knavery, crime? Yes! To whatever it is that seems lowest and vilest in your eyes. Only when you can feel contempt for your own priceless little ego, only then can you achieve the true, broad peace of selflessness, the merging of your spirit with the vast collective spirit of mankind. There is no room for the love of others within the tight, crowded miser’s hole of a private ego. Be empty in order to be filled. ‘He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.’ The opium peddlers of the church had something there, but they didn’t know what they had. Self-abnegation? Yes, my friends, by all means. But one doesn’t abnegate by keeping one’s self pure and proud of its own purity. The sacrifice that includes the destruction of one’s soul—ah, but what am I talking about? This is only for heroes to grasp and to achieve.”

He did not have much success among the poor boys working their way through college. He acquired a sizable following among the young heirs, the second and third generation millionaires. He offered them an achievement of which they felt capable.

He graduated with high honors. When he came to New York, he was preceded by a small, private fame; a few trickles of rumor had seeped down from Harvard about an unusual person named Ellsworth Toohey; a few people, among the extreme intellectuals and the extremely wealthy, heard these rumors and promptly forgot what they heard, but remembered the name; it remained in their minds with a vague connotation of such things as brilliance, courage, idealism.

People began to ooze toward Ellsworth Toohey; the right kind of people, those who soon found him to be a spiritual necessity. The other kind did not come; there seemed to be an instinct about it. When someone commented on the loyalty of Toohey’s following—he had no title, program or organization, but somehow his circle was called a following from the first—an envious rival remarked: “Toohey draws the sticky kind. You know the two things that stick best: mud and glue.” Toohey overheard it and shrugged, smiling, and said: “Oh, come, come, there are many more: adhesive plaster, leeches, taffy, wet socks, rubber girdles, chewing gum and tapioca pudding.” Moving away, he added over his shoulder, without smiling: “And cement.”

He took his Master’s degree from a New York university and wrote a thesis on “Collective Patterns in the City Architecture of the XIVth Century.” He earned his living in a busy, varied, scattered way: no one could keep track of all his activities. He held the post of vocational adviser at the university, he reviewed books, plays, art exhibitions, he wrote articles, gave a few lectures to small, obscure audiences. Certain tendencies were apparent in his work. When reviewing books, he leaned toward novels about the soil rather than the city, about the average rather than the gifted, about the sick rather than the healthy; there was a special glow in his writing when he referred to stories about “little people”; “human” was his favorite adjective; he preferred character study to action, and description to character study; he preferred novels without a plot and, above all, novels without a hero.

He was considered outstanding as a vocational adviser. His tiny office at the university became an informal confessional where students brought all their problems, academic as well as personal. He was willing to discuss—with the same gentle, earnest concentration—the choice of classes, or love affairs, or—most particularly—the selection of a future career.

When consulted on love affairs, Toohey counseled surrender, if it concerned a romance with a charming little pushover, good for a few drunken parties—“let us be modern”; and renunciation, if it concerned a deep, emotional passion—“let us be grown-up.” When a boy came to confess a feeling of shame after some unsavory sexual experience, Toohey told him to snap out of it: “It was damn good for you. There are two things we must get rid of early in life: a feeling of personal superiority and an exaggerated reverence for the sexual act.”

People noticed that Ellsworth Toohey seldom let a boy pursue the career he had chosen. “No, I wouldn’t go in for law if I were you. You’re much too tense and passionate about it. A hysterical devotion to one’s career does not make for happiness or success. It is wiser to select a profession about which you can be calm, sane and matter-of-fact. Yes, even if you hate it. It makes for down-to-earthness.” ... “No, I wouldn’t advise you to continue with your music. The fact that it comes to you so easily is a sure sign that your talent is only a superficial one. That’s just the trouble—that you love it. Don’t you think that sounds like a childish reason? Give it up. Yes, even if it hurts like hell.” ... “No, I’m sorry, I would like so much to say that I approve, but I don’t. When you thought of architecture, it was a purely selfish choice, wasn’t it? Have you considered anything but your own egotistical satisfaction? Yet a man’s career concerns all society. The question of where you could be most useful to your fellow men comes first. It’s not what you can get out of society, it’s what you can give. And where opportunities for service are concerned, there’s no endeavor comparable to that of a surgeon. Think it over.”

After leaving college some of his protégés did quite well, others failed. Only one committed suicide. It was said that Ellsworth Toohey had exercised a beneficent influence upon them—for they never forgot him: they came to consult him on many things, years later, they wrote him, they clung to him. They were like machines without a self-starter, that had to be cranked up by an outside hand. He was never too busy to give them his full attention.

His life was crowded, public and impersonal as a city square. The friend of humanity had no single private friend. People came to him; he came close to no one. He accepted all. His affection was golden, smooth and even, like a great expanse of sand; there was no wind of discrimination to raise dunes; the sands lay still and the sun stood high.

Out of his meager income he donated money to many organizations. He was never known to have loaned a dollar to an individual. He never asked his rich friends to assist a person in need; but he obtained from them large sums and endowments for charitable institutions: for settlement houses, recreation centers, homes for fallen girls, schools for defective children. He served on the boards of all these institutions—without salary. A great many philanthropic undertakings and radical publications, run by all sorts of people, had a single connecting link among them, one common denominator: the name of Ellsworth M. Toohey on their stationery. He was a sort of one-man holding company of altruism.

Women played no part in his life. Sex had never interested him. His furtive, infrequent urges drew him to the young, slim, full-bosomed, brainless girls—the giggling little waitresses, the lisping manicurists, the less efficient stenographers, the kind who wore pink or orchid dresses and little hats on the back of their heads with gobs of blond curls in front. He was indifferent to women of intellect.

He contended that the family was a bourgeois institution; but he made no issue of it and did not crusade for free love. The subject of sex bored him. There was, he felt, too much fuss made over the damn thing; it was of no importance; there were too many weightier problems in the world.

The years passed, with each busy day of his life like a small, neat coin dropped patiently into a gigantic slot machine, without a glance at the combination of symbols, without return. Gradually, one of his many activities began to stand out among the others: he became known as an eminent critic of architecture. He wrote about buildings for three successive magazines that limped on noisily for a few years and failed, one after the other: New Voices, New Pathways, New Horizons. The fourth, New Frontiers, survived. Ellsworth Toohey was the only thing salvaged from the successive wrecks. Architectural criticism seemed to be a neglected field of endeavor; few people bothered to write about buildings, fewer to read. Toohey acquired a reputation and an unofficial monopoly. The better magazines began calling upon him whenever they needed anything connected with architecture.

In the year 1921 a small change occurred in Toohey’s private life; his niece Catherine Halsey, the daughter of his sister Helen, came to live with him. His father had long since died, and Aunt Adeline had vanished into the obscure poverty of some small town; at the death of Catherine’s parents there was no one else to take care of her. Toohey had not intended to keep her in his own home. But when she stepped off the train in New York, her plain little face looked beautiful for a moment, as if the future were opening before her and its glow were already upon her forehead, as if she were eager and proud and ready to meet it. It was one of those rare moments when the humblest person knows suddenly what it means to feel as the center of the universe, and is made beautiful by the knowledge, and the world—in the eyes of witnesses—looks like a better place for having such a center. Ellsworth Toohey saw this—and decided that Catherine would remain with him.

In the year 1925 came Sermons in Stone—and fame.

Ellsworth Toohey became a fashion. Intellectual hostesses fought over him. Some people disliked him and laughed at him. But there was little satisfaction in laughing at Ellsworth Toohey, because he was always first to make the most outrageous remarks about himself. Once, at a party, a smug, boorish businessman listened to Toohey’s earnest social theories for a while and said complacently: “Well, I wouldn’t know much about all that intellectual stuff. I play the stock market.” “I,” said Toohey, “play the stock market of the spirit. And I sell short.”

The most important consequence of Sermons in Stone was Toohey’s contract to write a daily column for Gail Wynand’s New York Banner.

The contract came as a surprise to the followers of both sides involved, and, at first, it made everybody angry. Toohey had referred to Wynand frequently and not respectfully; the Wynand papers had called Toohey every name fit to print. But the Wynand papers had no policy, save that of reflecting the greatest prejudices of the greatest number, and this made for an erratic direction, but a recognizable direction, nevertheless: toward the inconsistent, the irresponsible, the trite and the maudlin. The Wynand papers stood against Privilege and for the Common Man, but in a respectable manner that could shock nobody; they exposed monopolies, when they wished; they supported strikes, when they wished, and vice versa. They denounced Wall Street and they denounced socialism and they hollered for clean movies, all with the same gusto. They were strident and blatant—and, in essence, lifelessly mild. Ellsworth Toohey was a phenomenon much too extreme to fit behind the front page of the Banner.

But the staff of the Banner was as unfastidious as its policy. It included everybody who could please the public or any large section thereof. It was said: “Gail Wynand is not a pig. He’ll eat anything.” Ellsworth Toohey was a great success and the public was suddenly interested in architecture; the Banner had no authority on architecture; the Banner would get Ellsworth Toohey. It was a simple syllogism.

Thus “One Small Voice” came into existence.

The Banner explained its appearance by announcing: “On Monday the Banner will present to you a new friend—ELLSWORTH M. TOOHEY—whose scintillating book Sermons in Stone you have all read and loved. The name of Mr. Toohey stands for the great profession of architecture. He will help you to understand everything you want to know about the wonders of modern building. Watch for ‘ONE SMALL VOICE’ on Monday. To appear exclusively in the Banner in New York City.” The rest of what Mr. Toohey stood for was ignored.

Ellsworth Toohey made no announcement or explanation to anyone. He disregarded the friends who cried that he had sold himself. He simply went to work. He devoted “One Small Voice” to architecture—once a month. The rest of the time it was the voice of Ellsworth Toohey saying what he wished said—to syndicated millions.

Toohey was the only Wynand employee who had a contract permitting him to write anything he pleased. He had insisted upon it. It was considered a great victory, by everybody except Ellsworth Toohey. He realized that it could mean one of two things: either Wynand had surrendered respectfully to the prestige of his name—or Wynand considered him too contemptible to be worth restraining.

“One Small Voice” never seemed to say anything dangerously revolutionary, and seldom anything political. It merely preached sentiments with which most people felt in agreement: unselfishness, brotherhood, equality. “I’d rather be kind than right.” “Mercy is superior to justice, the shallow-hearted to the contrary notwithstanding.” “Speaking anatomically—and perhaps otherwise—the heart is our most valuable organ. The brain is a superstition.” “In spiritual matters there is a simple, infallible test: everything that proceeds from the ego is evil; everything that proceeds from love for others is good.” “Service is the only badge of nobility. I see nothing offensive in the conception of fertilizer as the highest symbol of man’s destiny: it is fertilizer that produces wheat and roses.” “The worst folk song is superior to the best symphony.” “A man braver than his brothers insults them by implication. Let us aspire to no virtue which cannot be shared.” “I have yet to see a genius or a hero who, if stuck with a burning match, would feel less pain than his undistinguished average brother.” “Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.” “We are all brothers under the skin—and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it.”

In the offices of the Banner Ellsworth Toohey was treated respectfully and left alone. It was whispered that Gail Wynand did not like him—because Wynand was always polite to him. Alvah Scarret unbent to the point of cordiality, but kept a wary distance. There was a silent, watchful equilibrium between Toohey and Scarret: they understood each other.

Toohey made no attempt to approach Wynand in any way. Toohey seemed indifferent to all the men who counted on the Banner. He concentrated on the others, instead.

He organized a club of Wynand employees. It was not a labor union; it was just a club. It met once a month in the library of the Banner. It did not concern itself with wages, hours or working conditions; it had no concrete program at all. People got acquainted, talked, and listened to speeches. Ellsworth Toohey made most of the speeches. He spoke about new horizons and the press as the voice of the masses. Gail Wynand appeared at a meeting once, entering unexpectedly in the middle of a session. Toohey smiled and invited him to join the club, declaring that he was eligible. Wynand did not join. He sat listening for half an hour, yawned, got up, and left before the meeting was over.

Alvah Scarret appreciated the fact that Toohey did not try to reach into his field, into the important matters of policy. As a kind of return courtesy, Scarret let Toohey recommend new employees, when there was a vacancy to fill, particularly if the position was not an important one; as a rule, Scarret did not care, while Toohey always cared, even when it was only the post of copy boy. Toohey’s selections got the jobs. Most of them were young, brash, competent, shifty-eyed and shook hands limply. They had other things in common, but these were not so apparent.

There were several monthly meetings which Toohey attended regularly; the meetings of: the Council of American Builders, the Council of American Writers, the Council of American Artists. He had organized them all.

Lois Cook was chairman of the Council of American Writers. It met in the drawing room of her home on the Bowery. She was the only famous member. The rest included a woman who never used capitals in her books, and a man who never used commas; a youth who had written a thousand-page novel without a single letter o, and another who wrote poems that neither rhymed nor scanned; a man with a beard, who was sophisticated and proved it by using every unprintable four-letter word in every ten pages of his manuscript; a woman who imitated Lois Cook, except that her style was less clear; when asked for explanations she stated that this was the way life sounded to her, when broken by the prism of her subconscious—“You know what a prism does to a ray of light, don’t you?” she said. There was also a fierce young man known simply as Ike the Genius, though nobody knew just what he had done, except that he talked about loving all of life.

The council signed a declaration which stated that writers were servants of the proletariat—but the statement did not sound as simple as that; it was more involved and much longer. The declaration was sent to every newspaper in the country. It was never published anywhere, except on page 32 of New Frontiers.

The Council of American Artists had, as chairman, a cadaverous youth who painted what he saw in his nightly dreams. There was a boy who used no canvas, but did something with bird cages and metronomes, and another who discovered a new technique of painting: he blackened a sheet of paper and then painted with a rubber eraser. There was a stout middle-aged lady who drew subconsciously, claiming that she never looked at her hand and had no idea of what the hand was doing; her hand, she said, was guided by the spirit of the departed lover whom she had never met on earth. Here they did not talk so much about the proletariat, but merely rebelled against the tyranny of reality and of the objective.

A few friends pointed out to Ellsworth Toohey that he seemed guilty of inconsistency; he was so deeply opposed to individualism, they said, and here were all these writers and artists of his, and every one of them was a rabid individualist. “Do you really think so?” said Toohey, smiling blandly.

Nobody took these Councils seriously. People talked about them, because they thought it made good conversation; it was such a huge joke, they said, certainly there was no harm in any of it. “Do you really think so?” said Toohey.

Ellsworth Toohey was now forty-one years old. He lived in a distinguished apartment that seemed modest when compared to the size of the income he could have commanded if he wished. He liked to apply the adjective “conservative” to himself in one respect only: in his conservative good taste for clothes. No one had ever seen him lose his temper. His manner was immutable; it was the same in a drawing room, at a labor meeting, on a lecture platform, in the bathroom or during sexual intercourse: cool, self-possessed, amused, faintly patronizing.

People admired his sense of humor. He was, they said, a man who could laugh at himself. “I’m a dangerous person. Somebody ought to warn you against me,” he said to people, in the tone of uttering the most preposterous thing in the world.

Of all the many titles bestowed upon him, he preferred one: Ellsworth Toohey, the Humanitarian.

X

THE ENRIGHT HOUSE WAS OPENED IN JUNE OF 1929. There was no formal ceremony. But Roger Enright wanted to mark the moment for his own satisfaction. He invited a few people he liked and he unlocked the great glass entrance door, throwing it open to the sun-filled air. Some press photographers had arrived, because the story concerned Roger Enright and because Roger Enright did not want to have them there. He ignored them. He stood in the middle of the street, looking at the building, then he walked through the lobby, stopping short without reason and resuming his pacing. He said nothing. He frowned fiercely, as if he were about to scream with rage. His friends knew that Roger Enright was happy.

The building stood on the shore of the East River, a structure rapt as raised arms. The rock crystal forms mounted in such eloquent steps that the building did not seem stationary, but moving upward in a continuous flow—until one realized that it was only the movement of one’s glance and that one’s glance was forced to move in that particular rhythm. The walls of pale gray limestone looked silver against the sky, with the clean, dulled luster of metal, but a metal that had become a warm, living substance, carved by the most cutting of all instruments—a purposeful human will. It made the house alive in a strange, personal way of its own, so that in the minds of spectators five words ran dimly, without object or clear connection: “... in His image and likeness ...”

A young photographer from the Banner noticed Howard Roark standing alone across the street, at the parapet of the river. He was leaning back, his hands closed over the parapet, hatless, looking up at the building. It was an accidental, unconscious moment. The young photographer glanced at Roark’s face—and thought of something that had puzzled him for a long time: he had always wondered why the sensations one felt in dreams were so much more intense than anything one could experience in waking reality—why the horror was so total and the ecstasy so complete—and what was that extra quality which could never be recaptured afterward; the quality of what he felt when he walked down a path through tangled green leaves in a dream, in an air full of expectation, of causeless, utter rapture—and when he awakened he could not explain it, it had been just a path through some woods. He thought of that because he saw that extra quality for the first time in waking existence, he saw it in Roark’s face lifted to the building. The photographer was a young boy, new to his job; he did not know much about it; but he loved his work; he had been an amateur photographer since childhood. So he snapped a picture of Roark in that one moment.

Later the Art Editor of the Banner saw the picture and barked: “What the hell’s that?” “Howard Roark,” said the photographer. “Who’s Howard Roark?” “The architect.” “Who the hell wants a picture of the architect?” “Well, I only thought ...” “Besides, it’s crazy. What’s the matter with the man?” So the picture was thrown into the morgue.

The Enright House rented promptly. The tenants who moved in were people who wanted to live in sane comfort and cared about nothing else. They did not discuss the value of the building; they merely liked living there. They were the sort who lead useful, active private lives in public silence.

But others talked a great deal of the Enright House, for about three weeks. They said that it was preposterous, exhibitionist and phony. They said: “My dear, imagine inviting Mrs. Moreland if you lived in a place like that! And her home is in such good taste!” A few were beginning to appear who said: “You know, I rather like modern architecture, there are some mighty interesting things being done that way nowadays, there’s quite a school of it in Germany that’s rather remarkable—but this is not like it at all. This is a freak.”

Ellsworth Toohey never mentioned the Enright House in his column. A reader of the Banner wrote to him: “Dear Mr. Toohey: What do you think of this place they call the Enright House? I have a friend who is an interior decorator and he talks a lot about it and he says it’s lousy. Architecture and such various arts being my hobby, I don’t know what to think. Will you tell us in your column?” Ellsworth Toohey answered in a private letter: “Dear Friend: There are so many important buildings and great events going on in the world today that I cannot devote my column to trivialities.”

But people came to Roark—the few he wanted. That winter, he had received a commission to build the Norris house, a modest country home. In May he signed another contract—for his first office building, a fifty-story skyscraper in the center of Manhattan. Anthony Cord, the owner, had come from nowhere and made a fortune in Wall Street within a few brilliant, violent years. He wanted a building of his own and he went to Roark.

Roark’s office had grown to four rooms. His staff loved him. They did not realize it and would have been shocked to apply such a term as love to their cold, unapproachable, inhuman boss. These were the words they used to describe Roark, these were the words they had been trained to use by all the standards and conceptions of their past; only, working with him, they knew that he was none of these things, but they could not explain, neither what he was nor what they felt for him.

He did not smile at his employees, he did not take them out for drinks, he never inquired about their families, their love lives or their church attendance. He responded only to the essence of a man: to his creative capacity. In this office one had to be competent. There were no alternatives, no mitigating considerations. But if a man worked well, he needed nothing else to win his employer’s benevolence: it was granted, not as a gift, but as a debt. It was granted, not as affection, but as recognition. It bred an immense feeling of self-respect within every man in that office.

“Oh, but that’s not human,” said somebody when one of Roark’s draftsmen tried to explain this at home, “such a cold, intellectual approach!” One boy, a younger sort of Peter Keating, tried to introduce the human in preference to the intellectual in Roark’s office; he did not last two weeks. Roark made mistakes in choosing his employees occasionally, not often; those whom he kept for a month became his friends for life. They did not call themselves friends; they did not praise him to outsiders; they did not talk about him. They knew only, in a dim way, that it was not loyalty to him, but to the best within themselves.

Dominique remained in the city all summer. She remembered, with bitter pleasure, her custom to travel; it made her angry to think that she could not go, could not want to go. She enjoyed the anger; it drove her to his room. On the nights which she did not spend with him she walked through the streets of the city. She walked to the Enright House or to the Fargo Store, and stood looking at the building for a long time. She drove alone out of town—to see the Heller house, the Sanborn house, the Gowan Service Station. She never spoke to him about that.

Once, she took the Staten Island ferry at two o’clock in the morning; she rode to the Island, standing alone at the rail of an empty deck. She watched the city moving away from her. In the vast emptiness of sky and ocean, the city was only a small, jagged solid. It seemed condensed, pressed tight together, not a place of streets and separate buildings, but a single sculptured form. A form of irregular steps that rose and dropped without ordered continuity, long ascensions and sudden drops, like the graph of a stubborn struggle. But it went on mounting—toward a few points, toward the triumphant masts of skyscrapers raised out of the struggle.

The boat went past the Statue of Liberty—a figure in a green light, with an arm raised like the skyscrapers behind it.

She stood at the rail, while the city diminished, and she felt the motion of growing distance as a growing tightness within her, the pull of a living cord that could not be stretched too far. She stood in quiet excitement, when the boat sailed back and she saw the city growing again to meet her. She stretched her arms wide. The city expanded, to her elbows, to her wrists, beyond her finger tips. Then the skyscrapers rose over her head, and she was back.

She came ashore. She knew where she had to go, and wanted to get there fast, but felt she must get there herself, like this, on her own feet. So she walked half the length of Manhattan, through long, empty, echoing streets. It was four-thirty when she knocked at his door. He had been asleep. She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Go back to sleep. I just want to be here.” She did not touch him. She took off her hat and shoes, huddled into an armchair, and fell asleep, her arm hanging over the chair’s side, her head on her arm. In the morning he asked no questions. They fixed breakfast together, then he hurried away to his office. Before leaving, he took her in his arms and kissed her. He walked out, and she stood for a few moments, then left. They had not exchanged twenty words.

There were weekends when they left the city together and drove in her car to some obscure point on the coast. They stretched out in the sun, on the sand of a deserted beach, they swam in the ocean. She liked to watch his body in the water. She would remain behind and stand, the waves hitting her knees, and watch him cutting a straight line through the breakers. She liked to lie with him at the edge of the water; she would lie on her stomach, a few feet away from him, facing the shore, her toes stretched to the waves; she would not touch him, but she would feel the waves coming up behind them, breaking against their bodies, and she would see the backwash running in mingled streams off her body and his.

They spent the night at some country inn, taking a single room. They never spoke of the things left behind them in the city. But it was the unstated that gave meaning to the relaxed simplicity of these hours; their eyes laughed silently at the preposterous contrast whenever they looked at each other.

She tried to demonstrate her power over him. She stayed away from his house; she waited for him to come to her. He spoiled it by coming too soon; by refusing her the satisfaction of knowing that he waited and struggled against his desire; by surrendering at once. She would say: “Kiss my hand, Roark.” He would kneel and kiss her ankle. He defeated her by admitting her power; she could not have the gratification of enforcing it. He would lie at her feet, he would say: “Of course I need you. I go insane when I see you. You can do almost anything you wish with me. Is that what you want to hear? Almost, Dominique. And the things you couldn’t make me do—you could put me through hell if you demanded them and I had to refuse you, as I would. Through utter hell, Dominique. Does that please you? Why do you want to know whether you own me? It’s so simple. Of course you do. All of me that can be owned. You’ll never demand anything else. But you want to know whether you could make me suffer. You could. What of it?” The words did not sound like surrender, because they were not torn out of him, but admitted simply and willingly. She felt no thrill of conquest; she felt herself owned more than ever, by a man who could say these things, know them to be true, and still remain controlled and controlling—as she wanted him to remain.

Late in June a man named Kent Lansing came to see Roark. He was forty years old, he was dressed like a fashion plate and looked like a prize fighter, though he was not burly, muscular or tough: he was thin and angular. He merely made one think of a boxer and of other things that did not fit his appearance: of a battering ram, of a tank, of a submarine torpedo. He was a member of a corporation formed for the purpose of erecting a luxurious hotel on Central Park South. There were many wealthy men involved and the corporation was ruled by a numerous board; they had purchased their site; they had not decided on an architect. But Kent Lansing had made up his mind that it would be Roark.

“I won’t try to tell you how much I’d like to do it,” Roark said to him at the end of their first interview. “But there’s not a chance of my getting it. I can get along with people—when they’re alone. I can do nothing with them in groups. No board has ever hired me—and I don’t think one ever will.”

Kent Lansing smiled. “Have you ever known a board to do anything?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that: have you ever known a board to do anything at all?”

“Well, they seem to exist and function.”

“Do they? You know, there was a time when everyone thought it self-evident that the earth was flat. It would be entertaining to speculate upon the nature and causes of humanity’s illusions. I’ll write a book about it some day. It won’t be popular. I’ll have a chapter on boards of directors. You see, they don’t exist.”

“I’d like to believe you, but what’s the gag?”

“No, you wouldn’t like to believe me. The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They’re either vicious or tragic. This one is both. Mainly vicious. And it’s not a gag. But we won’t go into that now. All I mean is that a board of directors is one or two ambitious men—and a lot of ballast. I mean that groups of men are vacuums. Great big empty nothings. They say we can’t visualize a total nothing. Hell, sit at any committee meeting. The point is only who chooses to fill that nothing. It’s a tough battle. The toughest. It’s simple enough to fight any enemy, so long as he’s there to be fought. But when he isn’t ... Don’t look at me like that, as if I were crazy. You ought to know. You’ve fought a vacuum all your life.”

“I’m looking at you like that because I like you.”

“Of course you like me. As I knew I’d like you. Men are brothers, you know, and they have a great instinct for brotherhood—except in boards, unions, corporations and other chain gangs. But I talk too much. That’s why I’m a good salesman. However, I have nothing to sell you. You know. So we’ll just say that you’re going to build The Aquitania—that’s the name of our hotel—and we’ll let it go at that.”

If the violence of the battles which people never hear about could be measured in material statistics, the battle of Kent Lansing against the board of directors of the Aquitania Corporation would have been listed among the great carnages of history. But the things he fought were not solid enough to leave anything as substantial as corpses on the battlefield.

He had to fight phenomena such as: “Listen, Palmer, Lansing’s talking about somebody named Roark, how’re you going to vote, do the big boys approve of him or not?” “I’m not going to decide till I know who’s voted for or against.” “Lansing says ... but on the other hand, Thorpe tells me ...” “Talbot’s putting up a swank hotel on Fifth up in the sixties—and he’s got Francon & Keating.” “Harper swears by this young fellow—Gordon Prescott.” “Listen, Betsy says we’re crazy.” “I don’t like Roark’s face—he doesn’t look co-operative.” “I know, I feel it, Roark’s the kind that don’t fit in. He’s not a regular fellow.” “What’s a regular fellow?” “Aw hell, you know very well what I mean: regular.” “Thompson says that Mrs. Pritchett says that she knows for certain because Mr. Macy told her that if ...” “Well, boys, I don’t give a damn what anybody says, I make up my own mind, and I’m here to tell you that I think this Roark is lousy. I don’t like the Enright House.” “Why?” “I don’t know why. I just don’t like it, and that’s that. Haven’t I got a right to an opinion of my own?”

The battle lasted for weeks. Everybody had his say, except Roark. Lansing told him: “It’s all right. Lay off. Don’t do anything. Let me do the talking. There’s nothing you can do. When facing society, the man most concerned, the man who is to do the most and contribute the most, has the least say. It’s taken for granted that he has no voice and the reasons he could offer are rejected in advance as prejudiced—since no speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It’s so much easier to pass judgment on a man than on an idea. Though how in hell one passes judgment on a man without considering the content of his brain is more than I’ll ever understand. However, that’s how it’s done. You see, reasons require scales to weigh them. And scales are not made of cotton. And cotton is what the human spirit is made of—you know, the stuff that keeps no shape and offers no resistance and can be twisted forward and backward and into a pretzel. You could tell them why they should hire you so very much better than I could. But they won’t listen to you and they’ll listen to me. Because I’m the middleman. The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line—it’s a middleman. And the more middlemen, the shorter. Such is the psychology of a pretzel.”

“Why are you fighting for me like that?” Roark asked.

“Why are you a good architect? Because you have certain standards of what is good, and they’re your own, and you stand by them. I want a good hotel, and I have certain standards of what is good, and they’re my own, and you’re the one who can give me what I want. And when I fight for you, I’m doing—on my side of it—just what you’re doing when you design a building. Do you think integrity is the monopoly of the artist? And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor’s pocket? No, it’s not as easy as that. If that were all, I’d say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren’t. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think. Thinking is something one doesn’t borrow or pawn. And yet, if I were asked to choose a symbol for humanity as we know it, I wouldn’t choose a cross nor an eagle nor a lion and unicorn. I’d choose three gilded balls.”

And as Roark looked at him, he added: “Don’t worry. They’re all against me. But I have one advantage: they don’t know what they want. I do.”

At the end of July, Roark signed a contract to build the Aquitania.

Ellsworth Toohey sat in his office, looking at a newspaper spread out on his desk, at the item announcing the Aquitania contract. He smoked, holding the cigarette propped in the corner of his mouth, supported by two straight fingers; one finger tapped against the cigarette, slowly, rhythmically, for a long time.

He heard the sound of his door thrown open, and he glanced up to see Dominique standing there, leaning against the doorjamb, her arms crossed on her chest. Her face looked interested, nothing more, but it was alarming to see an expression of actual interest on her face.

“My dear,” he said, rising, “this is the first time you’ve taken the trouble to enter my office—in the four years that we’ve worked in the same building. This is really an occasion.”

She said nothing, but smiled gently, which was still more alarming. He added, his voice pleasant: “My little speech, of course, was the equivalent of a question. Or don’t we understand each other any longer?”

“I suppose we don’t—if you find it necessary to ask what brought me here. But you know it, Ellsworth, you know it; there it is on your desk.” She walked to the desk and flipped a corner of the newspaper. She laughed. “Do you wish you had it hidden somewhere? Of course you didn’t expect me to come. Not that it makes any difference. But I just like to see you being obvious for once. Right on your desk, like that. Open at the real-estate page, too.”

“You sound as if that little piece of news had made you happy.”

“It did, Ellsworth. It does.”

“I thought you had worked hard to prevent that contract.”

“I had.”

“If you think this is an act you’re putting on right now, Dominique, you’re fooling yourself. This isn’t an act.”

“No, Ellsworth. This isn’t.”

“You’re happy that Roark got it?”

“I’m so happy, I could sleep with this Kent Lansing, whoever he is, if I ever met him and if he asked me.”

“Then the pact is off?”

“By no means. I shall try to stop any job that comes his way. I shall continue trying. It’s not going to be so easy as it was, though. The Enright House, the Cord Building—and this. Not so easy for me—and for you. He’s beating you, Ellsworth. Ellsworth, what if we were wrong about the world, you and I?”

“You’ve always been, my dear. Do forgive me. I should have known better than to be astonished. It would make you happy, of course, that he got it. I don’t even mind admitting that it doesn’t make me happy at all. There, you see? Now your visit to my office has been a complete success. So we shall just write the Aquitania off as a major defeat, forget all about it and continue as we were.”

“Certainly, Ellsworth. Just as we were. I’m cinching a beautiful new hospital for Peter Keating at a dinner party tonight.”

Ellsworth Toohey went home and spent the evening thinking about Hopton Stoddard.

Hopton Stoddard was a little man worth twenty million dollars. Three inheritances had contributed to that sum, and seventy-two years of a busy life devoted to the purpose of making money. Hopton Stoddard had a genius for investment; he invested in everything—houses of ill fame, Broadway spectacles on the grand scale, preferably of a religious nature, factories, farm mortgages and contraceptives. He was small and bent. His face was not disfigured; people merely thought it was, because it had a single expression: he smiled. His little mouth was shaped like a v in eternal good cheer; his eyebrows were tiny v’s inverted over round, blue eyes; his hair, rich, white and waved, looked like a wig, but was real.

Toohey had known Hopton Stoddard for many years and exercised a strong influence upon him. Hopton Stoddard had never married, had no relatives and no friends; he distrusted people, believing that they were always after his money. But he felt a tremendous respect for Ellsworth Toohey, because Toohey represented the exact opposite of his own life; Toohey had no concern whatever for worldly wealth; by the mere fact of this contrast, he considered Toohey the personification of virtue; what this estimate implied in regard to his own life never quite occurred to him. He was not easy in his mind about his life, and the uneasiness grew with the years, with the certainty of an approaching end. He found relief in religion—in the form of a bribe. He experimented with several different creeds, attended services, donated large sums and switched to another faith. As the years passed, the tempo of his quest accelerated; it had the tone of panic.

Toohey’s indifference to religion was the only flaw that disturbed him in the person of his friend and mentor. But everything Toohey preached seemed in line with God’s law: charity, sacrifice, help to the poor. Hopton Stoddard felt safe whenever he followed Toohey’s advice. He donated handsomely to the institutions recommended by Toohey, without much prompting. In matters of the spirit he regarded Toohey upon earth somewhat as he expected to regard God in heaven.

But this summer Toohey met defeat with Hopton Stoddard for the first time.

Hopton Stoddard decided to realize a dream which he had been planning slyly and cautiously, like all his other investments, for several years: he decided to build a temple. It was not to be the temple of any particular creed, but an interdenominational, non-sectarian monument to religion, a cathedral of faith, open to all. Hopton Stoddard wanted to play safe.

He felt crushed when Ellsworth Toohey advised him against the project. Toohey wanted a building to house a new home for subnormal children; he had an organization set up, a distinguished committee of sponsors, an endowment for operating expenses—but no building and no funds to erect one. If Hopton Stoddard wished a worthy memorial to his name, a grand climax of his generosity, to what nobler purpose could he dedicate his money than to the Hopton Stoddard Home for Subnormal Children, Toohey pointed out to him emphatically; to the poor little blighted ones for whom nobody cared. But Hopton Stoddard could not be aroused to any enthusiasm for a Home nor for any mundane institution. It had to be “The Hopton Stoddard Temple of the Human Spirit.”

He could offer no arguments against Toohey’s brilliant array; he could say nothing except: “No, Ellsworth, no, it’s not right, not right.” The matter was left unsettled. Hopton Stoddard would not budge, but Toohey’s disapproval made him uncomfortable and he postponed his decision from day to day. He knew only that he would have to decide by the end of summer, because in the fall he was to depart on a long journey, a world tour of the holy shrines of all faiths, from Lourdes to Jerusalem to Mecca to Benares.

A few days after the announcement of the Aquitania contract Toohey came to see Hopton Stoddard, in the evening, in the privacy of Stoddard’s vast, overstuffed apartment on Riverside Drive.

“Hopton,” he said cheerfully, “I was wrong. You were right about that temple.”

“No!” said Hopton Stoddard, aghast.

“Yes,” said Toohey, “you were right. Nothing else would be quite fitting. You must build a temple. A Temple of the Human Spirit.”

Hopton Stoddard swallowed, and his blue eyes became moist. He felt that he must have progressed far upon the path of righteousness if he had been able to teach a point of virtue to his teacher. After that, nothing else mattered; he sat, like a meek, wrinkled baby, listening to Ellsworth Toohey, nodding, agreeing to everything.

“It’s an ambitious undertaking, Hopton, and if you do it, you must do it right. It’s a little presumptuous, you know—offering a present to God—and unless you do it in the best way possible, it will be offensive, not reverent.”

“Yes, of course. It must be right. It must be right. It must be the best. You’ll help me, won’t you, Ellsworth? You know all about buildings and art and everything—it must be right.”

“I’ll be glad to help you, if you really want me to.”

“If I want you to! What do you mean—if I want ... ! Goodness gracious, what would I do without you? I don’t know anything about ... about anything like that. And it must be right.”

“If you want it right, will you do exactly as I say?”

“Yes, Yes. Yes, of course.”

“First of all, the architect. That’s very important.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“You don’t want one of those satin-lined commercial boys with the dollar sign all over them. You want a man who believes in his work as—as you believe in God.”

“That’s right. That’s absolutely right.”

“You must take the one I name.”

“Certainly. Who’s that?”

“Howard Roark.”

“Huh?” Hopton Stoddard looked blank. “Who’s he?”

“He’s the man who’s going to build the Temple of the Human Spirit.”

“Is he any good?”

Ellsworth Toohey turned and looked straight into his eyes.

“By my immortal soul, Hopton,” he said slowly, “he’s the best there is.”

“Oh! ...”

“But he’s difficult to get. He doesn’t work except on certain conditions. You must observe them scrupulously. You must give him complete freedom. Tell him what you want and how much you want to spend, and leave the rest up to him. Let him design it and build it as he wishes. He won’t work otherwise. Just tell him frankly that you know nothing about architecture and that you chose him because you felt he was the only one who could be trusted to do it right without advice or interference.”

“Okay, if you vouch for him.”

“I vouch for him.”

“That’s fine. And I don’t care how much it costs me.”

“But you must be careful about approaching him. I think he will refuse to do it, at first. He will tell you that he doesn’t believe in God.”

“What!”

“Don’t believe him. He’s a profoundly religious man—in his own way. You can see that in his buildings.”

“Oh.”

“But he doesn’t belong to any established church. So you won’t appear partial. You won’t offend anyone.”

“That’s good.”

“Now, when you deal in matters of faith, you must be the first one to have faith. Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Don’t wait to see his drawings. They will take some time—and you mustn’t delay your trip. Just hire him—don’t sign a contract, it’s not necessary—make arrangements for your bank to take care of the financial end and let him do the rest. You don’t have to pay him his fee until you return. In a year or so, when you come back after seeing all those great temples, you’ll have a better one of your own, waiting here for you.”

“That’s just what I wanted.”

“But you must think of the proper unveiling to the public, the proper dedication, the right publicity.”

“Of course ... That is, publicity?”

“Certainly. Do you know of any great event that’s not accompanied by a good publicity campaign? One that isn’t, can’t be much. If you skimp on that, it will be downright disrespectful.”

“That’s true.”

“Now if you want the proper publicity, you must plan it carefully, well in advance. What you want, when you unveil it, is one grand fanfare, like an opera overture, like a blast on Gabriel’s horn.”

“That’s beautiful, the way you put it.”

“Well, to do that you mustn’t allow a lot of newspaper punks to dissipate your effect by dribbling out premature stories. Don’t release the drawings of the temple. Keep them secret. Tell Roark that you want them kept secret. He won’t object to that. Have the contractor put up a solid fence all around the site while it’s being built. No one’s to know what it’s like until you come back and preside at the unveiling in person. Then—pictures in every damn paper in the country!”

“Ellsworth!”

“I beg your pardon.”

“The idea’s right. That’s how we put over The Legend of the Virgin, ten years ago that was, with a cast of ninety-seven.”

“Yes. But in the meantime, keep the public interested. Get yourself a good press agent and tell him how you want it handled. I’ll give you the name of an excellent one. See to it that there’s something about the mysterious Stoddard Temple in the papers every other week or so. Keep ‘em guessing. Keep ’em waiting. They’ll be good and ready when the time comes.”

“Right.”

“But, above all, don’t let Roark know that I recommended him. Don’t breathe a word to anyone about my having anything to do with it. Not to a soul. Swear it.”

“But why?”

“Because I have too many friends who are architects, and it’s such an important commission, and I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.”

“Yes. That’s true.”

“Swear it.”

“Oh, Ellsworth!”

“Swear it. By the salvation of your soul.”

“I swear it. By ... that.”

“All right. Now you’ve never dealt with architects, and he’s an unusual kind of architect, and you don’t want to muff it. So I’ll tell you exactly what you’re to say to him.”

On the following day Toohey walked into Dominique’s office. He stood at her desk, smiled and said, his voice unsmiling:

“Do you remember Hopton Stoddard and that temple of all faith that he’s been talking about for six years?”

“Vaguely.”

“He’s going to build it.”

“Is he?”

“He’s giving the job to Howard Roark.”

“Not really!”

“Really.”

“Well, of all the incredible ... Not Hopton!”

“Hopton.”

“Oh, all right. I’ll go to work on him.”

“No. You’ll lay off. I told him to give it to Roark.”

She sat still, exactly as the words caught her, the amusement gone from her face. He added:

“I wanted you to know that I did it, so there won’t be any tactical contradictions. No one else knows it or is to know it. I trust you to remember that.”

“She asked, her lips moving tightly: “What are you after?”

He smiled. He said:

“I’m going to make him famous.”

Roark sat in Hopton Stoddard’s office and listened, stupefied. Hopton Stoddard spoke slowly; it sounded earnest and impressive, but was due to the fact that he had memorized his speeches almost verbatim. His baby eyes looked at Roark with an ingratiating plea. For once, Roark almost forgot architecture and placed the human element first; he wanted to get up and get out of the office; he could not stand the man. But the words he heard held him; the words did not match the man’s face or voice.

“So you see, Mr. Roark, though it is to be a religious edifice, it is also more than that. You notice that we call it the Temple of the Human Spirit. We want to capture—in stone, as others capture in music—not some narrow creed, but the essence of all religion. And what is the essence of religion? The great aspiration of the human spirit toward the highest, the noblest, the best. The human spirit as the creator and the conqueror of the ideal. The great life-giving force of the universe. The heroic human spirit. That is your assignment, Mr. Roark.”

Roark rubbed the back of his hand against his eyes, helplessly. It was not possible. It simply was not possible. That could not be what the man wanted; not that man. It seemed horrible to hear him say that.

“Mr. Stoddard, I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake,” he said, his voice slow and tired. “I don’t think I’m the man you want. I don’t think it would be right for me to undertake it. I don’t believe in God.”

He was astonished to see Hopton Stoddard’s expression of delight and triumph. Hopton Stoddard glowed in appreciation—in appreciation of the clairvoyant wisdom of Ellsworth Toohey who was always right. He drew himself up with new confidence, and he said firmly, for the first time in the tone of an old man addressing a youth, wise and gently patronizing:

“That doesn’t matter. You’re a profoundly religious man, Mr. Roark -in your own way. I can see that in your buildings.”

He wondered why Roark stared at him like that, without moving, for such a long time.

“That’s true,” said Roark. It was almost a whisper.

That he should learn something about himself, about his buildings, from this man who had seen it and known it before he knew it, that this man should say it with that air of tolerant confidence implying full understanding—removed Roark’s doubts. He told himself that he did not really understand people; that an impression could be deceptive; that Hopton Stoddard would be far on another continent anyway; that nothing mattered in the face of such an assignment; that nothing could matter when a human voice—even Hopton Stoddard’s—was going on, saying:

“I wish to call it God. You may choose any other name. But what I want in that building is your spirit. Your spirit, Mr. Roark. Give me the best of that—and you will have done your job, as I shall have done mine. Do not worry about the meaning I wish conveyed. Let it be your spirit in the shape of a building—and it will have that meaning, whether you know it or not.”

And so Roark agreed to build the Stoddard Temple of the Human Spirit.

XI

IN DECEMBER THE COSMO-SLOTNICK BUILDING WAS OPENED WITH great ceremony. There were celebrities, flower horseshoes, newsreel cameras, revolving searchlights and three hours of speeches, all alike.

I should be happy, Peter Keating told himself—and wasn’t. He watched from a window the solid spread of faces filling Broadway from curb to curb. He tried to talk himself into joy. He felt nothing. He had to admit that he was bored. But he smiled and shook hands and let himself be photographed. The Cosmo-Slotnick Building rose ponderously over the street, like a big white bromide.

After the ceremonies Ellsworth Toohey took Keating away to the retreat of a pale-orchid booth in a quiet, expensive restaurant. Many brilliant parties were being given in honor of the opening, but Keating grasped Toohey’s offer and declined all the other invitations. Toohey watched him as he seized his drink and slumped in his seat.

“Wasn’t it grand?” said Toohey. “That, Peter, is the climax of what you can expect from life.” He lifted his glass delicately. “Here’s to the hope that you shall have many triumphs such as this. Such as tonight.”

“Thanks,” said Keating, and reached for his glass hastily, without looking, and lifted it, to find it empty.

“Don’t you feel proud, Peter?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“That’s good. That’s how I like to see you. You looked extremely handsome tonight. You’ll be splendid in those newsreels.”

A flicker of interest snapped in Keating’s eyes. “Well, I sure hope so.”

“It’s too bad you’re not married, Peter. A wife would have been most decorative tonight. Goes well with the public. With the movie audiences, too.”

“Katie doesn’t photograph well.”

“Oh, that’s right, you’re engaged to Katie. So stupid of me. I keep forgetting it. No, Katie doesn’t photograph well at all. Also, for the life of me, I can’t imagine Katie being very effective at a social function. There are a great many nice adjectives one could use about Katie, but ‘poised’ and ‘distinguished’ are not among them. You must forgive me, Peter. I let my imagination run away with me. Dealing with art as much as I do, I’m inclined to see things purely from the viewpoint of artistic fitness. And looking at you tonight, I couldn’t help thinking of the woman who would have made such a perfect picture by your side.”

“Who?”

“Oh, don’t pay attention to me. It’s only an esthetic fancy. Life is never as perfect as that. People have too much to envy you for. You couldn’t add that to your other achievements.”

“Who?”

“Drop it, Peter. You can’t get her. Nobody can get her. You’re good, but you’re not good enough for that.”

“Who?”

“Dominique Francon, of course.”

Keating sat up straight and Toohey saw wariness in his eyes, rebellion, actual hostility. Toohey held his glance calmly. It was Keating who gave in; he slumped again and he said, pleading:

“Oh, God, Ellsworth, I don’t love her.”

“I never thought you did. But I do keep forgetting the exaggerated importance which the average man attaches to love—sexual love.”

“I’m not an average man,” said Keating wearily; it was an automatic protest—without fire.

“Sit up, Peter. You don’t look like a hero, slumped that way.”

Keating jerked himself up—anxious and angry. He said:

“I’ve always felt that you wanted me to marry Dominique. Why? What’s it to you?”

“You’ve answered your own question, Peter. What could it possibly be to me? But we were speaking of love. Sexual love, Peter, is a profoundly selfish emotion. And selfish emotions are not the ones that lead to happiness. Are they? Take tonight for instance. That was an evening to swell an egotist’s heart. Were you happy, Peter? Don’t bother, my dear, no answer is required. The point I wish to make is only that one must mistrust one’s most personal impulses. What one desires is actually of so little importance! One can’t expect to find happiness until one realizes this completely. Think of tonight for a moment. You, my dear Peter, were the least important person there. Which is as it should be. It is not the doer that counts but those for whom things are done. But you were not able to accept that—and so you didn’t feel the great elation that should have been yours.”

“That’s true,” whispered Keating. He would not have admitted it to anyone else.

“You missed the beautiful pride of utter selflessness. Only when you learn to deny your ego, completely, only when you learn to be amused by such piddling sentimentalities as your little sex urges—only then will you achieve the greatness which I have always expected of you.”

“You ... you believe that about me, Ellsworth? You really do?”

“I wouldn’t be sitting here if I didn’t. But to come back to love. Personal love, Peter, is a great evil—as everything personal. And it always leads to misery. Don’t you see why? Personal love is an act of discrimination, of preference. It is an act of injustice—to every human being on earth whom you rob of the affection arbitrarily granted to one. You must love all men equally. But you cannot achieve so noble an emotion if you don’t kill your selfish little choices. They are vicious and futile—since they contradict the first cosmic law—the basic equality of all men.”

“You mean,” said Keating, suddenly interested, “that in a ... in a philosophical way, deep down, I mean, we’re all equal? All of us?”

“Of course,” said Toohey.

Keating wondered why the thought was so warmly pleasant to him. He did not mind that this made him the equal of every pickpocket in the crowd gathered to celebrate his building tonight; it occurred to him dimly—and left him undisturbed, even though it contradicted the passionate quest for superiority that had driven him all his life. The contradiction did not matter; he was not thinking of tonight nor of the crowd; he was thinking of a man who had not been there tonight.

“You know, Ellsworth,” he said, leaning forward, happy in an uneasy kind of way, “I ... I’d rather talk to you than do anything else, anything at all. I had so many places to go tonight—and I’m so much happier just sitting here with you. Sometimes I wonder how I’d ever go on without you.”

“That,” said Toohey, “is as it should be. Or else what are friends for?”

That winter the annual costume Arts Ball was an event of greater brilliance and orginality than usual. Athelstan Beasely, the leading spirit of its organization, had had what he called a stroke of genius: all the architects were invited to come dressed as their best buildings. It was a huge success.

Peter Keating was the star of the evening. He looked wonderful as the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. An exact papier-mâché replica of his famous structure covered him from head to knees; one could not see his face, but his bright eyes peered from behind the windows of the top floor, and the crowning pyramid of the roof rose over his head; the colonnade hit him somewhere about the diaphragm, and he wagged a finger through the portals of the great entrance door. His legs were free to move with his usual elegance, in faultless dress trousers and patent-leather pumps.

Guy Francon was very impressive as the Frink National Bank Building, although the structure looked a little squatter than in the original, in order to allow for Francon’s stomach; the Hadrian torch over his head had a real electric bulb lit by a miniature battery. Ralston Holcombe was magnificent as a state capitol, and Gordon L. Prescott was very masculine as a grain elevator. Eugene Pettingill waddled about on his skinny, ancient legs, small and bent, an imposing Park Avenue hotel, with horn-rimmed spectacles peering from under the majestic tower. Two wits engaged in a duel, butting each other in the belly with famous spires, great landmarks of the city that greet the ships approaching from across the ocean. Everybody had lots of fun.

Many of the architects, Athelstan Beasely in particular, commented resentfully on Howard Roark who had been invited and did not come. They had expected to see him dressed as the Enright House.

Dominique stopped in the hall and stood looking at the door, at the inscription: “HOWARD ROARK, ARCHITECT.”

She had never seen his office. She had fought against coming here for a long time. But she had to see the place where he worked.

The secretary in the reception room was startled when Dominique gave her name, but announced the visitor to Roark. “Go right in, Miss Francon,” she said.

Roark smiled when she entered his office; a faint smile without surprise.

“I knew you’d come here some day,” he said. “Want me to show you the place?”

“What’s that?” she asked.

His hands were smeared with clay; on a long table, among a litter of unfinished sketches, stood the clay model of a building, a rough study of angles and terraces.

“The Aquitania?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Do you always do that?”

“No. Not always. Sometimes. There’s a hard problem here. I like to play with it for a while. It will probably be my favorite building—it’s so difficult.”

“Go ahead. I want to watch you doing that. Do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

In a moment, he had forgotten her presence. She sat in a corner and watched his hands. She saw them molding walls. She saw them smash a part of the structure, and begin again, slowly, patiently, with a strange certainty even in his hesitation. She saw the palm of his hand smooth a long, straight plane, she saw an angle jerked across space in the motion of his hand before she saw it in clay.

She rose and walked to the window. The buildings of the city far below looked no bigger than the model on his table. It seemed to her that she could see his hands shaping the setbacks, the corners, the roofs of all the structures below, smashing and molding again. Her hand moved absently, following the form of a distant building in rising steps, feeling a physical sense of possession, feeling it for him.

She turned back to the table. A strand of hair hung down over his face bent attentively to the model; he was not looking at her, he was looking at the shape under his fingers. It was almost as if she were watching his hands moving over the body of another woman. She leaned against the wall, weak with a feeling of violent, physical pleasure.

At the beginning of January, while the first steel columns rose from the excavations that were to become the Cord Building and the Aquitania Hotel, Roark worked on the drawings for the Temple.

When the first sketches were finished, he said to his secretary:

“Get me Steven Mallory.”

“Mallory, Mr. Roark? Who ... Oh, yes, the shooting sculptor.”

“The what?”

“He took a shot at Ellsworth Toohey, didn’t he?”

“Did he? Yes, that’s right.”

“Is that the one you want, Mr. Roark?”

“That’s the one.”

For two days the secretary telephoned art dealers, galleries, architects, newspapers. No one could tell her what had become of Steven Mallory or where he could be found. On the third day she reported to Roark: “I’ve found an address, in the Village, which I’m told might be his. There’s no telephone.” Roark dictated a letter asking Mallory to telephone his office.

The letter was not returned, but a week passed without answer. Then Steven Mallory telephoned.

“Hello?” said Roark, when the secretary switched the call to him.

“Steven Mallory speaking,” said a young, hard voice, in a way that left an impatient, belligerent silence after the words.

“I should like to see you, Mr. Mallory. Can we make an appointment for you to come to my office?”

“What do you want to see me about?”

“About a commission, of course. I want you to do some work for a building of mine.”

There was a long silence.

“All right,” said Mallory; his voice sounded dead. He added: “Which building?”

“The Stoddard Temple. You may have heard ... ”

“Yeah, I heard. You’re doing it. Who hasn’t heard? Will you pay me as much as you’re paying your press agent?”

“I’m not paying the press agent. I’ll pay you whatever you wish to ask.”

“You know that can’t be much.”

“What time would it be convenient for you to come here?”

“Oh, hell, you name it. You know I’m not busy.”

“Two o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”

“All right.” He added: “I don’t like your voice.”

Roark laughed. “I like yours. Cut it out and be here tomorrow at two.”

“Okay.” Mallory hung up.

Roark dropped the receiver, grinning. But the grin vanished suddenly, and he sat looking at the telephone, his face grave.

Mallory did not keep the appointment. Three days passed without a word from him. Then Roark went to find him in person.

The rooming house where Mallory lived was a dilapidated brownstone in an unlighted street that smelled of a fish market. There was a laundry and a cobbler on the ground floor, at either side of a narrow entrance. A slatternly landlady said: “Mallory? Fifth floor rear,” and shuffled away indifferently. Roark climbed sagging wooden stairs lighted by bulbs stuck in a web of pipes. He knocked at a grimy door.

The door opened. A gaunt young man stood on the threshold; he had disheveled hair, a strong mouth with a square lower lip, and the most expressive eyes that Roark had ever seen.

“What do you want?” he snapped.

“Mr. Mallory?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m Howard Roark.”

Mallory laughed, leaning against the doorjamb, one arm stretched across the opening, with no intention of stepping aside. He was obviously drunk.

“Well, well!” he said. “In person.”

“May I come in?”

“What for?”

Roark sat down on the stair banister. “Why didn’t you keep your appointment?”

“Oh, the appointment? Oh, yes. Well, I’ll tell you,” Mallory said gravely. “It was like this: I really intended to keep it, I really did, and started out for your office, but on my way there I passed a movie theater that was showing Two Heads on a Pillow, so I went in. I just had to see Two Heads on a Pillow.” He grinned, sagging against his stretched arm.

“You’d better let me come in,” said Roark quietly.

“Oh what the hell, come in.”

The room was a narrow hole. There was an unmade bed in a corner, a litter of newspapers and old clothes, a gas ring, a framed landscape from the five-and-ten, representing some sort of sick brown meadows with sheep; there were no drawings or figures, no hints of the occupant’s profession.

Roark pushed some books and a skillet off the only chair, and sat down. Mallory stood before him, grinning, swaying a little.

“You’re doing it all wrong,” said Mallory. “That’s not the way it’s done. You must be pretty hard up to come running after a sculptor. The way it’s done is like this: You make me come to your office, and the first time I come you mustn’t be there. The second time you must keep me waiting for an hour and a half, then come out into the reception room and shake hands and ask me whether I know the Wilsons of Podunk and say how nice that we have mutual friends, but you’re in an awful hurry today and you’ll call me up for lunch soon and then we’ll talk business. Then you keep this up for two months. Then you give me the commission. Then you tell me that I’m no good and wasn’t any good in the first place, and you throw the thing into the ash can. Then you hire Valerian Bronson and he does the job. That’s the way it’s done. Only not this time.”

But his eyes were studying Roark intently, and his eyes had the certainty of a professional. As he spoke, his voice kept losing its swaggering gaiety, and it slipped to a dead flatness on the last sentences.

“No,” said Roark, “not this time.”

The boy stood looking at him silently.

“You’re Howard Roark?” he asked. “I like your buildings. That’s why I didn’t want to meet you. So I wouldn’t have to be sick every time I looked at them. I wanted to go on thinking that they had been done by somebody who matched them.”

“What if I do?”

“That doesn’t happen.”

But he sat down on the edge of the crumpled bed and slumped forward, his glance like a sensitive scale weighing Roark’s features, impertinent in its open action of appraisal.

“Listen,” said Roark, speaking clearly and very carefully, “I want you to do a statue for the Stoddard Temple. Give me a piece of paper and I’ll write you a contract right now, stating that I will owe you a million dollars damages if I hire another sculptor or if your work is not used.”

“You can speak normal. I’m not drunk. Not all the way. I understand.”

“Well?”

“Why did you pick me?”

“Because you’re a good sculptor.”

“That’s not true.”

“That you’re good?”

“No. That it’s your reason. Who asked you to hire me?”

“Nobody.”

“Some woman I laid?”

“I don’t know any women you laid.”

“Stuck on your building budget?”

“No. The budget’s unlimited.”

“Feel sorry for me?”

“No. Why should I?”

“Want to get publicity out of that shooting-Toohey business?”

“Good God, no!”

“Well, what then?”

“Why do you fish for all that nonsense instead of the simplest reason?”

“Which?”

“That I like your work.”

“Sure. That’s what they all say. That’s what we’re all supposed to say and to believe. Imagine what would happen if somebody blew the lid off that one! So, all right, you like my work. What’s the real reason?”

“I like your work.”

Mallory spoke earnestly, his voice sober.

“You mean you saw the things I’ve done, and you liked them—you—yourself—alone—without anyone telling you that you should like them or why you should like them—and you decided that you wanted me, for that reason—only for that reason—without knowing anything about me or giving a damn—only because of the things I’ve done and ... and what you saw in them—only because of that, you decided to hire me, and you went to the bother of finding me, and coming here, and being insulted—only because you saw—and what you saw made me important to you, made you want me? Is that what you mean?”

“Just that,” said Roark.

The things that pulled Mallory’s eyes wide were frightening to see. Then he shook his head, and said very simply, in the tone of soothing himself:

“No.”

He leaned forward. His voice sounded dead and pleading.

“Listen, Mr. Roark. I won’t be mad at you. I just want to know. All right, I see that you’re set on having me work for you, and you know you can get me, for anything you say, you don’t have to sign any million-dollar contract, look at this room, you know you’ve got me, so why shouldn’t you tell me the truth? It won’t make any difference to you-and it’s very important to me.”

“What’s very important to you?”

“Not to ... not to ... Look. I didn’t think anybody’d ever want me again. But you do. All right. I’ll go through it again. Only I don’t want to think again that I’m working for somebody who ... who likes my work. That, I couldn’t go through any more. I’ll feel better if you tell me. I’ll ... I’ll feel calmer. Why should you put on an act for me? I’m nothing. I won’t think less of you, if that’s what you’re afraid of. Don’t you see? It’s much more decent to tell me the truth. Then it will be simple and honest. I’ll respect you more. Really, I will.”

“What’s the matter with you, kid? What have they done to you? Why do you want to say things like that?”

“Because ...” Mallory roared suddenly, and then his voice broke, and his head dropped, and he finished in a flat whisper: “because I’ve spent two years”—his hand circled limply indicating the room—“that’s how I’ve spent them—trying to get used to the fact that what you’re trying to tell me doesn’t exist....”

Roark walked over to him, lifted his chin, knocking it upward, and said:

“You’re a God-damn fool. You have no right to care what I think of your work, what I am or why I’m here. You’re too good for that. But if you want to know it—I think you’re the best sculptor we’ve got. I think it, because your figures are not what men are, but what men could be—and should be. Because you’ve gone beyond the probable and made us see what is possible, but possible only through you. Because your figures are more devoid of contempt for humanity than any work I’ve ever seen. Because you have a magnificent respect for the human being. Because your figures are the heroic in man. And so I didn’t come here to do you a favor or because I felt sorry for you or because you need a job pretty badly. I came for a simple, selfish reason—the same reason that makes a man choose the cleanest food he can find. It’s a law of survival, isn’t it?—to seek the best. I didn’t come for your sake. I came for mine.”

Mallory jerked himself away from him, and dropped face down on the bed, his two arms stretched out, one on each side of his head, hands closed into two fists. The thin trembling of the shirt cloth on his back showed that he was sobbing; the shirt cloth and the fists that twisted slowly, digging into the pillow. Roark knew that he was looking at a man who had never cried before. He sat down on the side of the bed and could not take his eyes off the twisting wrists, even though the sight was hard to bear.

After a while Mallory sat up. He looked at Roark and saw the calmest, kindest face—a face without a hint of pity. It did not look like the countenance of men who watch the agony of another with a secret pleasure, uplifted by the sight of a beggar who needs their compassion; it did not bear the cast of the hungry soul that feeds upon another’s humiliation. Roark’s face seemed tired, drawn at the temples, as if he had just taken a beating. But his eyes were serene and they looked at Mallory quietly, a hard, clean glance of understanding—and respect.

“Lie down now,” said Roark. “Lie still for a while.”

“How did they ever let you survive?”

“Lie down. Rest. We’ll talk afterward.”

Mallory got up. Roark took him by the shoulders, forced him down, lifted his legs off the floor, lowered his head on the pillow. The boy did not resist.

Stepping back, Roark brushed against a table loaded with junk. Something clattered to the floor. Mallory jerked forward, trying to reach it first. Roark pushed his arm aside and picked up the object.

It was a small plaster plaque, the kind sold in cheap gift shops. It represented a baby sprawled on its stomach, dimpled rear forward, peeking coyly over its shoulder. A few lines, the structure of a few muscles showed a magnificent talent that could not be hidden, that broke fiercely through the rest; the rest was a deliberate attempt to be obvious, vulgar and trite, a clumsy effort, unconvincing and tortured. It was an object that belonged in a chamber of horrors.

Mallory saw Roark’s hand begin to shake. Then Roark’s arm went back and up, over his head, slowly, as if gathering the weight of air in the crook of his elbow; it was only a flash, but it seemed to last for minutes, the arm stood lifted and still—then it slashed forward, the plaque shot across the room and burst to pieces against the wall. It was the only time anyone had ever seen Roark murderously angry.

“Roark.”

“Yes?”

“Roark, I wish I’d met you before you had a job to give me.” He spoke without expression, his head lying back on the pillow, his eyes closed. “So that there would be no other reason mixed in. Because, you see, I’m very grateful to you. Not for giving me a job. Not for coming here. Not for anything that you’ll ever do for me. Just for what you are.”

Then he lay without moving, straight and limp, like a man long past the stage of suffering. Roark stood at the window, looking at the wretched room and at the boy on the bed. He wondered why he felt as if he were waiting. He was waiting for an explosion over their heads. It seemed senseless. Then he understood. He thought, This is how men feel, trapped in a shell hole; this room is not an accident of poverty, it’s the footprint of a war; it’s the devastation torn by explosives more vicious than any stored in the arsenals of the world. A war ... against? ... The enemy had no name and no face. But this boy was a comrade-in-arms, hurt in battle, and Roark stood over him, feeling a strange new thing, a desire to lift him in his arms and carry him to safety ... Only the hell and the safety had no known designations ... He kept thinking of Kent Lansing, trying to remember something Kent Lansing had said ...

Then Mallory opened his eyes, and lifted himself up on one elbow. Roark pulled the chair over to the bed and sat down.

“Now,” he said, “talk. Talk about the things you really want said. Don’t tell me about your family, your childhood, your friends or your feelings. Tell me about the things you think.”

Mallory looked at him incredulously and whispered:

“How did you know that?”

Roark smiled and said nothing. “How did you know what’s been killing me? Slowly, for years, driving me to hate people when I don’t want to hate.... Have you felt it, too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you—except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them, nothing, not even a sound they can recognize. You mean, you want to hear? You want to know what I do and why I do it, you want to know what I think? It’s not boring to you? It’s important?”

“Go ahead,” said Roark.

Then he sat for hours, listening, while Mallory spoke of his work, of the thoughts behind his work, of the thoughts that shaped his life, spoke gluttonously, like a drowning man flung out to shore, getting drunk on huge, clean snatches of air.

Mallory came to Roark’s office on the following morning, and Roark showed him the sketches of the Temple. When he stood at a drafting table, with a problem to consider, Mallory changed; there was no uncertainty in him, no remembrance of pain; the gesture of his hand taking the drawing was sharp and sure, like that of a soldier on duty. The gesture said that nothing ever done to him could alter the function of the thing within him that was now called into action. He had an unyielding, impersonal confidence; he faced Roark as an equal.

He studied the drawings for a long time, then raised his head. Everything about his face was controlled, except his eyes.

“Like it?” Roark asked.

“Don’t use stupid words.”

He held one of the drawings, walked to the window, stood looking from the sketch to the street to Roark’s face and back again.

“It doesn’t seem possible,” he said. “Not this—and that.” He waved the sketch at the street.

There was a poolroom on the corner of the street below; a rooming house with a Corinthian portico; a billboard advertising a Broadway musical; a line of pink-gray underwear fluttering on a roof.

“Not in the same city. Not on the same earth,” said Mallory. “But you made it happen. It’s possible.... I’ll never be afraid again.”

“Of what?”

Mallory put the sketch down on the table, cautiously. He answered:

“You said something yesterday about a first law. A law demanding that man seek the best.... It was funny.... The unrecognized genius—that’s an old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one—the genius recognized too well? ... That a great many men are poor fools who can’t see the best—that’s nothing. One can’t get angry at that. But do you understand about the men who see it and don’t want it?”

“No.”

“No. You wouldn’t. I spent all night thinking about you. I didn’t sleep at all. Do you know what your secret is? It’s your terrible innocence.”

Roark laughed aloud, looking at the boyish face.

“No,” said Mallory, “it’s not funny. I know what I’m talking about—and you don’t. You can’t know. It’s because of that absolute health of yours. You’re so healthy that you can’t conceive of disease. You know of it. But you don’t really believe it. I do. I’m wiser than you are about some things, because I’m weaker. I understand—the other side. That’s what did it to me ... what you saw yesterday.”

“That’s over.”

“Probably. But not quite. I’m not afraid any more. But I know that the terror exists. I know the kind of terror it is. You can’t conceive of that kind. Listen, what’s the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me—it’s being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who’s had some disease that’s eaten his brain out. You’d have nothing then but your voice—your voice and your thought. You’d scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you’d have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you’d become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you’d see living eyes watching you and you’d know that the thing can’t hear you, that it can’t be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it’s breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That’s horror. Well, that’s what’s hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through mankind, that same thing, something closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and a cunning of its own. I don’t think I’m a coward, but I’m afraid of it. And that’s all I know—only that it exists. I don’t know its purpose, I don’t know its nature.”

“The principle behind the Dean,” said Roark.

“What?”

“It’s something I wonder about once in a while.... Mallory, why did you try to shoot Ellsworth Toohey?” He saw the boy’s eyes, and he added: “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t like to talk about it.”

“I don’t like to talk about it,” said Mallory, his voice tight. “But it was the right question to ask.”

“Sit down,” said Roark. “We’ll talk about your commission.”

Then Mallory listened attentively while Roark spoke of the building and of what he wanted from the sculptor. He concluded:

“Just one figure. It will stand here.” He pointed to a sketch. “The place is built around it. The statue of a naked woman. If you understand the building, you understand what the figure must be. The human spirit. The heroic in man. The aspiration and the fulfillment, both. Uplifted in its quest—and uplifting by its own essence. Seeking God—and finding itself. Showing that there is no higher reach beyond its own form.... You’re the only one who can do it for me.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll work as I work for my clients. You know what I want—the rest is up to you. Do it any way you wish. I’d like to suggest the model, but if she doesn’t fit your purpose, choose anyone you prefer.”

“Who’s your choice?”

“Dominique Francon.”

“Oh, God!”

“Know her?”

“I’ve seen her. If I could have her ... Christ! there’s no other woman so right for this. She ...” He stopped. He added, deflated: “She won’t pose. Certainly not for you.”

“She will.”

Guy Francon tried to object when he heard of it.

“Listen, Dominique,” he said angrily, “there is a limit. There really is a limit—even for you. Why are you doing it? Why—for a building of Roark’s, of all things? After everything you’ve said and done against him—do you wonder people are talking? Nobody’d care or notice if it were anyone else. But you—and Roark! I can’t go anywhere without having somebody ask me about it. What am I to do?”

“Order yourself a reproduction of the statue, Father. It’s going to be beautiful.”

Peter Keating refused to discuss it. But he met Dominique at a party and he asked, having intended not to ask it:

“Is it true that you’re posing for a statue for Roark’s temple?”

“Yes.”

“Dominique, I don’t like it.”

“No?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I know I have no right ... It’s only ... It’s only that of all people, I don’t want to see you being friendly with Roark. Not Roark. Anybody but Roark.”

She looked interested: “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

Her glance of curious study worried him.

“Maybe,” he muttered, “maybe it’s because it has never seemed right that you should have such contempt for his work. It made me very happy that you had, but ... but it never seemed right—for you.”

“It didn’t, Peter?”

“No. But you don’t like him as a person, do you?”

“No, I don’t like him as a person.”

Ellsworth Toohey was displeased. “It was most unwise of you, Dominique,” he said in the privacy of her office. His voice did not sound smooth.

“I know it was.”

“Can’t you change your mind and refuse?”

“I won’t change my mind, Ellsworth.”

He sat down, and shrugged; after a while he smiled. “All right, my dear, have it your own way.”

She ran a pencil through a line of copy and said nothing.

Toohey lighted a cigarette. “So he’s chosen Steven Mallory for the job,” he said.

“Yes. A funny coincidence, wasn’t it?”

“It’s no coincidence at all, my dear. Things like that are never a coincidence. There’s a basic law behind it. Though I’m sure he doesn’t know it and nobody helped him to choose.”

“I believe you approve?”

“Wholeheartedly. It makes everything just right. Better than ever.”

“Ellsworth, why did Mallory try to kill you?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. I don’t know. I think Mr. Roark does. Or should. Incidentally, who selected you to pose for that statue? Roark or Mallory?”

“That’s none of your business, Ellsworth.”

“I see. Roark.”

“Incidentally, I’ve told Roark that it was you who made Hopton Stoddard hire him.”

He stopped his cigarette in mid-air; then moved again and placed it in his mouth.

“You did? Why?”

“I saw the drawings of the temple.”

“That good?”

“Better, Ellsworth.”

“What did he say when you told him?”

“Nothing. He laughed.”

“He did? Nice of him. I daresay many people will join him after a while.”

Through the months of that winter Roark seldom slept more than three hours a night. There was a swinging sharpness in his movements, as if his body fed energy to all those around him. The energy ran through the walls of his office to three points of the city: to the Cord Building, in the center of Manhattan, a tower of copper and glass; to the Aquitania Hotel on Central Park South; and to the Temple on a rock over the Hudson, far north on Riverside Drive.

When they had time to meet, Austen Heller watched him, amused and pleased. “When these three are finished, Howard,” he said, “nobody will be able to stop you. Not ever again. I speculate occasionally upon how far you’ll go. You see, I’ve always had a weakness for astronomy.”

On an evening in March Roark stood within the tall enclosure that had been erected around the site of the Temple, according to Stoddard’s orders. The first blocks of stone, the base of future walls, rose above the ground. It was late and the workers had left. The place lay deserted, cut off from the world, dissolved in darkness; but the sky glowed, too luminous for the night below, as if the light had remained past the normal hour, in announcement of the coming spring. A ship’s siren cried out once, somewhere on the river, and the sound seemed to come from a distant countryside, through miles of silence. A light still burned in the wooden shack built as a studio for Steven Mallory, where Dominique posed for him.

The Temple was to be a small building of gray limestone. Its lines were horizontal, not the lines reaching to heaven, but the lines of the earth. It seemed to spread over the ground like arms outstretched at shoulder-height, palms down, in great, silent acceptance. It did not cling to the soil and it did not crouch under the sky. It seemed to lift the earth, and its few vertical shafts pulled the sky down. It was scaled to human height in such a manner that it did not dwarf man, but stood as a setting that made his figure the only absolute, the gauge of perfection by which all dimensions were to be judged. When a man entered this temple, he would feel space molded around him, for him, as if it had waited for his entrance, to be completed. It was a joyous place, with the joy of exaltation that must be quiet. It was a place where one would come to feel sinless and strong, to find the peace of spirit never granted save by one’s own glory.

There was no ornamentation inside, except the graded projections of the walls, and the vast windows. The place was not sealed under vaults, but thrown open to the earth around it, to the trees, the river, the sun—and to the skyline of the city in the distance, the skyscrapers, the shapes of man’s achievement on earth. At the end of the room, facing the entrance, with the city as background, stood the figure of a naked human body.

There was nothing before him now in the darkness except the first stones, but Roark thought of the finished building, feeling it in the joints of his fingers, still remembering the movements of his pencil that had drawn it. He stood thinking of it. Then he walked across the rough, torn earth to the studio shack.

“Just a moment,” said Mallory’s voice when he knocked.

Inside the shack Dominique stepped down from the stand and pulled a robe on. Then Mallory opened the door.

“Oh, it’s you?” he said. “We thought it was the watchman. What are you doing here so late?”

“Good evening, Miss Francon,” said Roark, and she nodded curtly. “Sorry to interrupt, Steve.”

“It’s all right. We haven’t been doing so well. Dominique can’t get quite what I want tonight. Sit down, Howard. What the hell time is it?”

“Nine-thirty. If you’re going to stay longer, want me to have some dinner sent up?”

“I don’t know. Let’s have a cigarette.”

The place had an unpainted wooden floor, bare wooden rafters, a cast-iron stove glowing in a corner. Mallory moved about like a feudal host, with smudges of clay on his forehead. He smoked nervously, pacing up and down.

“Want to get dressed, Dominique?” he asked. “I don’t think we’ll do much more tonight.” She didn’t answer. She stood looking at Roark. Mallory reached the end of the room, whirled around, smiled at Roark: “Why haven’t you ever come in before, Howard? Of course, if I’d been really busy, I’d have thrown you out. What, by the way, are you doing here at this hour?’ ’

“I just wanted to see the place tonight. Couldn’t get here earlier.”

“Is this what you want, Steve?” Dominique asked suddenly. She took her robe off and walked naked to the stand. Mallory looked from her to Roark and back again. Then he saw what he had been struggling to see all day. He saw her body standing before him, straight and tense, her head thrown back, her arms at her sides, palms out, as she had stood for many days; but now her body was alive, so still that it seemed to tremble, saying what he had wanted to hear: a proud, reverent, enraptured surrender to a vision of her own, the right moment, the moment before the figure would sway and break, the moment touched by the reflection of what she saw.

Mallory’s cigarette went flying across the room.

“Hold it, Dominique!” he cried. “Hold it! Hold it!”

He was at his stand before the cigarette hit the ground.

He worked, and Dominique stood without moving, and Roark stood facing her, leaning against the wall.

In April the walls of the Temple rose in broken lines over the ground. On moonlit nights they had a soft, smeared, underwater glow. The tall fence stood on guard around them.

After the day’s work, four people would often remain at the site—Roark, Mallory, Dominique and Mike Donnigan. Mike had not missed employment on a single building of Roark’s.

The four of them sat together in Mallory’s shack, after all the others had left. A wet cloth covered the unfinished statue. The door of the shack stood open to the first warmth of a spring night. A tree branch hung outside, with three new leaves against the black sky, stars trembling like drops of water on the edges of the leaves. There were no chairs in the shack. Mallory stood at the cast-iron stove, fixing hot dogs and coffee. Mike sat on the model’s stand, smoking a pipe. Roark lay stretched out on the floor, propped up on his elbows. Dominique sat on a kitchen stool, a thin silk robe wrapped about her, her bare feet on the planks of the floor.

They did not speak about their work. Mallory told outrageous stories and Dominique laughed like a child. They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in the warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation. They were simply four people who liked being there together. The walls rising in the darkness beyond the open door gave sanction to their rest, gave them the right to lightness, the building on which they had all worked together, the building that was like a low, audible harmony to the sound of their voices. Roark laughed as Dominique had never seen him laugh anywhere else, his mouth loose and young.

They stayed there late into the night. Mallory poured coffee into a mongrel assortment of cracked cups. The odor of coffee met the odor of the new leaves outside.

In May work was stopped on the construction of the Aquitania Hotel.

Two of the owners had been cleaned out in the stock market; a third got his funds attached by a lawsuit over an inheritance disputed by someone; a fourth embezzled somebody else’s shares. The corporation blew up in a tangle of court cases that were to require years of untangling. The building had to wait, unfinished.

“I’ll straighten it out, if I have to murder a few of them,” Kent Lansing told Roark. “I’ll get it out of their hands. We’ll finish it some day, you and 1. But it will take time. Probably a long time. I won’t tell you to be patient. Men like you and me would not survive beyond their first fifteen years if they did not acquire the patience of a Chinese executioner. And the hide of a battleship.”

Ellsworth Toohey laughed, sitting on the edge of Dominique’s desk. “The Unfinished Symphony—thank God,” he said.

Dominique used that in her column. “The Unfinished Symphony on Central Park South,” she wrote. She did not say, “thank God.” The nickname was repeated. Strangers noticed the odd sight of an expensive structure on an important street, left gaping with empty windows, half-covered walls, naked beams; when they asked what it was, people who had never heard of Roark or of the story behind the building, snickered and answered: “Oh, that’s the Unfinished Symphony.”

Late at night Roark would stand across the street, under the trees of the Park, and look at the black, dead shape among the glowing structures of the city’s skyline. His hands would move as they had moved over the clay model; at that distance, a broken projection could be covered by the palm of his hand; but the instinctive completing motion met nothing but air.

He forced himself sometimes to walk through the building. He walked on shivering planks hung over emptiness, through rooms without ceilings and rooms without floors, to the open edges where girders stuck out like bones through a broken skin.

An old watchman lived in a cubbyhole at the back of the ground floor. He knew Roark and let him wander around. Once, he stopped Roark on the way out and said suddenly: “I had a son once—almost. He was born dead.” Something had made him say that, and he looked at Roark, not quite certain of what he had wanted to say. But Roark smiled, his eyes closed, and his hand covered the old man’s shoulder, like a handshake, and then he walked away.

It was only the first few weeks. Then he made himself forget the Aquitania.

On an evening in October Roark and Dominique walked together through the completed Temple. It was to be opened publicly in a week, the day after Stoddard’s return. No one had seen it except those who had worked on its construction.

It was a clear, quiet evening. The site of the Temple lay empty and silent. The red of the sunset on the limestone walls was like the first light of morning.

They stood looking at the Temple, and then stood inside, before the marble figure, saying nothing to each other. The shadows in the molded space around them seemed shaped by the same hand that had shaped the walls. The ebbing motion of light flowed in controlled discipline, like the sentences of a speech giving voice to the changing facets of the walls.

“Roark ...”

“Yes, my dearest?”

“No ... nothing ...”

They walked back to the car together, his hand clasping her wrist.

XII

THE OPENING OF THE STODDARD TEMPLE WAS ANNOUNCED FOR THE afternoon of November first.

The press agent had done a good job. People talked about the event, about Howard Roark, about the architectural masterpiece which the city was to expect.

On the morning of October 31 Hopton Stoddard returned from his journey around the world. Ellsworth Toohey met him at the pier.

On the morning of November 1 Hopton Stoddard issued a brief statement announcing that there would be no opening. No explanation was given.

On the morning of November 2 the New York Banner came out with the column “One Small Voice” by Ellsworth M. Toohey subtitled “Sacrilege.” It read as follows:

“The time has come, the walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of ships—and shoes—and Howard Roark—
And cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether Roark has wings.

“It is not our function—paraphrasing a philosopher whom we do not like—to be a fly swatter, but when a fly acquires delusions of grandeur, the best of us must stoop to do a little job of extermination.

“There has been a great deal of talk lately about somebody named Howard Roark. Since freedom of speech is our sacred heritage and includes the freedom to waste one’s time, there would have been no harm in such talk—beyond the fact that one could find so many endeavors more profitable than discussions of a man who seems to have nothing to his credit except a building that was begun and could not be completed. There would have been no harm, if the ludicrous had not become the tragic—and the fraudulent.

“Howard Roark—as most of you have not heard and are not likely to hear again—is an architect. A year ago he was entrusted with an assignment of extraordinary responsibility. He was commissioned to erect a great monument in the absence of the owner who believed in him and gave him complete freedom of action. If the terminology of our criminal law could be applied to the realm of art, we would have to say that what Mr. Roark delivered constitutes the equivalent of spiritual embezzlement.

“Mr. Hopton Stoddard, the noted philanthropist, had intended to present the City of New York with a Temple of Religion, a non-sectarian cathedral symbolizing the spirit of human faith. What Mr. Roark has built for him might be a warehouse—though it does not seem practical. It might be a brothel—which is more likely, if we consider some of its sculptural ornamentation. It is certainly not a temple.

“It seems as if a deliberate malice had reversed in this building every conception proper to a religious structure. Instead of being austerely enclosed, this alleged temple is wide open, like a western saloon. Instead of a mood of deferential sorrow, befitting a place where one contemplates eternity and realizes the insignificance of man, this building has a quality of loose, orgiastic elation. Instead of the soaring lines reaching for heaven, demanded by the very nature of a temple, as a symbol of man’s quest for something higher than his little ego, this building is flauntingly horizontal, its belly in the mud, thus declaring its allegiance to the carnal, glorifying the gross pleasures of the flesh above those of the spirit. The statue of a nude female in a place where men come to be uplifted speaks for itself and requires no further comment.

“A person entering a temple seeks release from himself. He wishes to humble his pride, to confess his unworthiness, to beg forgiveness. He finds fulfillment in a sense of abject humility. Man’s proper posture in a house of God is on his knees. Nobody in his right mind would kneel within Mr. Roark’s temple. The place forbids it. The emotions it suggests are of a different nature: arrogance, audacity, defiance, self-exaltation. It is not a house of God, but the cell of a megalomaniac. It is not a temple, but its perfect antithesis, an insolent mockery of all religion. We would call it pagan but for the fact that the pagans were notoriously good architects.

“This column is not the supporter of any particular creed, but simple decency demands that we respect the religious convictions of our fellow men. We felt we must explain to the public the nature of this deliberate attack on religion. We cannot condone an outrageous sacrilege.

“If we seem to have forgotten our function as a critic of purely architectural values, we can say only that the occasion does not call for it. It is a mistake to glorify mediocrity by an effort at serious criticism. We seem to recall something or other that this Howard Roark has built before, and it had the same ineptitude, the same pedestrian quality of an overambitious amateur. All God’s chillun may have wings, but, unfortunately, this is not true of all God’s geniuses.

“And that, my friends, is that. We are glad today’s chore is over. We really do not enjoy writing obituaries.”

On November 3 Hopton Stoddard filed suit against Howard Roark for breach of contract and malpractice, asking damages; he asked a sum sufficient to have the temple altered by another architect.

It had been easy to persuade Hopton Stoddard. He had returned from his journey, crushed by the universal spectacle of religion, most particularly by the various forms in which the promise of hell confronted him all over the earth. He had been driven to the conclusion that his life qualified him for the worst possible hereafter under any system of faith. It had shaken what remained of his mind. The ship stewards, on his return trip, had felt certain that the old gentleman was senile.

On the afternoon of his return Ellsworth Toohey took him to see the temple. Toohey said nothing. Hopton Stoddard stared, and Toohey heard Stoddard’s false teeth clicking spasmodically. The place did not resemble anything Stoddard had seen anywhere in the world; nor anything he had expected. He did not know what to think. When he turned a glance of desperate appeal upon Toohey, Stoddard’s eyes looked like Jello. He waited. In that moment, Toohey could have convinced him of anything. Toohey spoke and said what he said later in his column.

“But you told me this Roark was good!” Stoddard moaned in panic.

“I had expected him to be good,” Toohey answered coldly.

“But then—why?”

“I don’t know,” said Toohey—and his accusing glance gave Stoddard to understand that there was an ominous guilt behind it all, and that the guilt was Stoddard’s.

Toohey said nothing in the limousine, on their way back to Stoddard’s apartment, while Stoddard begged him to speak. He would not answer. The silence drove Stoddard to terror. In the apartment, Toohey led him to an armchair and stood before him, somber as a judge.

“Hopton, I know why it happened.”

“Oh, why?”

“Can you think of any reason why I should have lied to you?”

“No, of course not, you’re the greatest expert and the most honest man living, and I don’t understand, I just simply don’t understand at all!”

“I do. When I recommended Roark, I had every reason to expect—to the best of my honest judgment—that he would give you a masterpiece. But he didn’t. Hopton, do you know what power can upset all the calculations of men?”

“W-what power?”

“God has chosen this way to reject your offering. He did not consider you worthy of presenting Him with a shrine. I guess you can fool me, Hopton, and all men, but you can’t fool God. He knows that your record is blacker than anything I suspected.”

He went on speaking for a long time, calmly, severely, to a silent huddle of terror. At the end, he said:

“It seems obvious, Hopton, that you cannot buy forgiveness by starting at the top. Only the pure in heart can erect a shrine. You must go through many humbler steps of expiation before you reach that stage. You must atone to your fellow men before you can atone to God. This building was not meant to be a temple, but an institution of human charity. Such as a home for subnormal children.”

Hopton Stoddard would not commit himself to that. “Afterward, Ellsworth, afterward,” he moaned. “Give me time.” He agreed to sue Roark, as Toohey suggested, for recovery of the costs of alterations, and later to decide what these alterations would be.

“Don’t be shocked by anything I will say or write about this,” Toohey told him in parting. “I shall be forced to state a few things which are not quite true. I must protect my own reputation from a disgrace which is your fault, not mine. Just remember that you have sworn never to reveal who advised you to hire Roark.”

On the following day “Sacrilege” appeared in the Banner and set the fuse. The announcement of Stoddard’s suit lighted it.

Nobody would have felt an urge to crusade about a building; but religion had been attacked; the press agent had prepared the ground too well, the spring of public attention was wound, a great many people could make use of it.

The clamor of indignation that rose against Howard Roark and his temple astonished everyone, except Ellsworth Toohey. Ministers damned the building in sermons. Women’s clubs passed resolutions of protest. A Committee of Mothers made page eight of the newspapers, with a petition that shrieked something about the protection of their children. A famous actress wrote an article on the essential unity of all the arts, explained that the Stoddard Temple had no sense of structural diction, and spoke of the time when she had played Mary Magdalene in a great Biblical drama. A society woman wrote an article on the exotic shrines she had seen in her dangerous jungle travels, praised the touching faith of the savages and reproached modern man for cynicism; the Stoddard Temple, she said, was a symptom of softness and decadence; the illustration showed her in breeches, one slim foot on the neck of a dead lion. A college professor wrote a letter to the editor about his spiritual experiences and stated that he could not have experienced them in a place like the Stoddard Temple. Kiki Holcombe wrote a letter to the editor about her views on life and death.

The A.G.A. issued a dignified statement denouncing the Stoddard Temple as a spiritual and artistic fraud. Similar statements, with less dignity and more slang, were issued by the Councils of American Builders, Writers and Artists. Nobody had ever heard of them, but they were Councils and this gave weight to their voice. One man would say to another: “Do you know that the Council of American Builders has said this temple is a piece of architectural tripe?” in a tone suggesting intimacy with the best of the art world. The other wouldn’t want to reply that he had not heard of such a group, but would answer: “I expected them to say it. Didn’t you?”

Hopton Stoddard received so many letters of sympathy that he began to feel quite happy. He had never been popular before. Ellsworth, he thought, was right; his brother men were forgiving him; Ellsworth was always right.

The better newspapers dropped the story after a while. But the Banner kept it going. It had been a boon to the Banner. Gail Wynand was away, sailing his yacht through the Indian Ocean, and Alvah Scarret was stuck for a crusade. This suited him. Ellsworth Toohey needed to make no suggestions; Scarret rose to the occasion all by himself.

He wrote about the decline of civilization and deplored the loss of the simple faith. He sponsored an essay contest for high-school students on “Why I Go to Church.” He ran a series of illustrated articles on “The Churches of Our Childhood.” He ran photographs of religious sculpture through the ages—the Sphinx, gargoyles, totem poles—and gave great prominence to pictures of Dominique’s statue, with proper captions of indignation, but omitting the model’s name. He ran cartoons of Roark as a barbarian with bearskin and club. He wrote many clever things about the Tower of Babel that could not reach heaven and about Icarus who flopped on his wax wings.

Ellsworth Toohey sat back and watched. He made two minor suggestions : he found, in the Banner’s morgue, the photograph of Roark at the opening of the Enright House, the photograph of a man’s face in a moment of exaltation, and he had it printed in the Banner, over the caption: “Are you happy, Mr. Superman?” He made Stoddard open the Temple to the public while awaiting the trial of his suit. The Temple attracted crowds of people who left obscene drawings and inscriptions on the pedestal of Dominique’s statue.

There were a few who came, and saw, and admired the building in silence. But they were the kind who do not take part in public issues. Austen Heller wrote a furious article in defense of Roark and of the Temple. But he was not an authority on architecture or religion, and the article was drowned in the storm.

Howard Roark did nothing.

He was asked for a statement, and he received a group of reporters in his office. He spoke without anger. He said: “I can’t tell anyone anything about my building. If I prepared a hash of words to stuff into other people’s brains, it would be an insult to them and to me. But I am glad you came here. I do have something to say. I want to ask every man who is interested in this to go and see the building, to look at it and then to use the words of his own mind, if he cares to speak.”

The Banner printed the interview as follows: “Mr. Roark, who seems to be a publicity hound, received reporters with an air of swaggering insolence and stated that the public mind was hash. He did not choose to talk, but he seemed well aware of the advertising angles in the situation. All he cared about, he explained, was to have his building seen by as many people as possible.”

Roark refused to hire an attorney to represent him at the coming trial. He said he would handle his own defense and refused to explain how he intended to handle it, in spite of Austen Heller’s angry protests.

“Austen, there are some rules I’m perfectly willing to obey. I’m willing to wear the kind of clothes everybody wears, to eat the same food and use the same subways. But there are some things which I can’t do their way—and this is one of them.”

“What do you know about courtrooms and law? He’s going to win.”

“To win what?”

“His case.”

“Is the case of any importance? There’s nothing I can do to stop him from touching the building. He owns it. He can blast if off the face of the earth or make a glue factory out of it. He can do it whether I win that suit or lose it.”

“But he’ll take your money to do it with.”

“Yes. He might take my money.”

Steven Mallory made no comment on anything. But his face looked as it had looked on the night Roark met him for the first time.

“Steve, talk about if, if it will make it easier for you,” Roark said to him one evening.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Mallory answered indifferently. “I told you I didn’t think they’d let you survive.”

“Rubbish. You have no right to be afraid for me.”

“I’m not afraid for you. What would be the use? It’s something else.”

Days later, sitting on the window sill in Roark’s room, looking out at the street, Mallory said suddenly:

“Howard, do you remember what I told you about the beast I’m afraid of? I know nothing about Ellsworth Toohey. I had never seen him before I shot at him. I had only read what he writes. Howard, I shot at him because I think he knows everything about that beast.”

Dominique came to Roark’s room on the evening when Stoddard announced his lawsuit. She said nothing. She put her bag down on a table and stood removing her gloves, slowly, as if she wished to prolong the intimacy of performing a routine gesture here, in his room; she looked down at her fingers. Then she raised her head. Her face looked as if she knew his worst suffering and it was hers and she wished to bear it like this, coldly, asking no words of mitigation.

“You’re wrong,” he said. They could always speak like this to each other, continuing a conversation they had not begun. His voice was gentle. “I don’t feel that.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“I want you to know. What you’re thinking is much worse than the truth. I don’t believe it matters to me—that they’re going to destroy it. Maybe it hurts so much that I don’t even know I’m hurt. But I don’t think so. If you want to carry it for my sake, don’t carry more than I do. I’m not capable of suffering completely. I never have. It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it’s not really pain. You mustn’t look like that.”

“Where does it stop?”

“Where I can think of nothing and feel nothing except that I designed that temple. I built it. Nothing else can seem very important.”

“You shouldn’t have built it. You shouldn’t have delivered it to the sort of thing they’re doing.”

“That doesn’t matter. Not even that they’ll destroy it. Only that it had existed.”

She shook her head. “Do you see what I was saving you from when I took commissions away from you? ... To give them no right to do this to you.... No right to live in a building of yours ... No right to touch you ... not in any way....”

When Dominique walked into Toohey’s office, he smiled, an eager smile of welcome, unexpectedly sincere. He forgot to control it while his eyebrows moved into a frown of disappointment; the frown and the smile remained ludicrously together for a moment. He was disappointed, because it was not her usual dramatic entrance; he saw no anger, no mockery; she entered like a bookkeeper on a business errand. She asked:

“What do you intend to accomplish by it?”

He tried to recapture the exhilaration of their usual feud. He said:

“Sit down, my dear. I’m delighted to see you. Quite frankly and helplessly delighted. It really took you too long. I expected you here much sooner. I’ve had so many compliments on that little article of mine, but, honestly, it was no fun at all, I wanted to hear what you’d say.”

“What do you intend to accomplish by it?”

“Look, darling, I do hope you didn’t mind what I said about that uplifting statue of yours. I thought you’d understand I just couldn’t pass up that one.”

“What is the purpose of that lawsuit?”

“Oh well, you want to make me talk. And I did so want to hear you. But half a pleasure is better than none. I want to talk. I’ve waited for you so impatiently. But I do wish you’d sit down, I’ll be more comfortable.... No? Well, as you prefer, so long as you don’t run away. The lawsuit? Well, isn’t it obvious?”

“How is it going to stop him?” she asked in the tone one would use to recite a list of statistics. “It will prove nothing, whether he wins or loses. The whole thing is just a spree for great numbers of louts, filthy but pointless. I did not think you wasted your time on stink bombs. All of it will be forgotten before next Christmas.”

“My God, but I must be a failure! I never thought of myself as such a poor teacher. That you should have learned so little in two years of close association with me! It’s really discouraging. Since you are the most intelligent woman I know, the fault must be mine. Well, let’s see, you did learn one thing: that I don’t waste my time. Quite correct. I don’t. Right, my dear, everything will be forgotten by next Christmas. And that, you see, will be the achievement. You can fight a live issue. You can’t fight a dead one. Dead issues, like all dead things, don’t just vanish, but leave some decomposing matter behind. A most unpleasant thing to carry on your name. Mr. Hopton Stoddard will be thoroughly forgotten. The Temple will be forgotten. The lawsuit will be forgotten. But here’s what will remain: ‘Howard Roark? Why, how could you trust a man like that? He’s an enemy of religion. He’s completely immoral. First thing you know, he’ll gyp you on your construction costs.’ ‘Roark? He’s no good—why, a client had to sue him because he made such a botch of a building.’ ‘Roark? Roark? Wait a moment, isn’t that the guy who got into all the papers over some sort of mess? Now what was it? Some rotten kind of scandal, the owner of the building—I think the place was a disorderly house—anyway the owner had to sue him. You don’t want to get involved with a notorious character like that. What for, when there are so many decent architects to choose from?’ Fight that, my dear. Tell me a way to fight it. Particularly when you have no weapons except your genius, which is not a weapon but a great liability.”

Her eyes were disappointing; they listened patiently, an unmoving glance that would not become anger. She stood before his desk, straight, controlled, like a sentry in a storm who knows that he has to take it and has to remain there even when he can take it no longer.

“I believe you want me to continue,” said Toohey. “Now you see the peculiar effectiveness of a dead issue. You can’t talk your way out of it, you can’t explain, you can’t defend yourself. Nobody wants to listen. It is difficult enough to acquire fame. It is impossible to change its nature once you’ve acquired it. No, you can never ruin an architect by proving that he’s a bad architect. But you can ruin him because he’s an atheist, or because somebody sued him, or because he slept with some woman, or because he pulls wings off bottleflies. You’ll say it doesn’t make sense? Of course it doesn’t. That’s why it works. Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don’t have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy. But if you can make it become your ally—ah, my dear! ... Look, Dominique, I will stop talking the moment you show a sign of being frightened.”

“Go on,” she said.

“I think you should now ask me a question. Or perhaps you don’t like to be obvious and feel that I must guess the question myself? I think you’re right. The question is, why did I choose Howard Roark? Because -to quote my own article—it is not my function to be a fly swatter. I quote this now with a somewhat different meaning, but we’ll let that pass. Also, this has helped me to get something I wanted from Hopton Stoddard, but that’s only a minor side-issue, an incidental, just pure gravy. Principally, however, the whole thing was an experiment. Just a test skirmish, shall we say? The results are most gratifying. If you were not involved as you are, you’d be the one person who’d appreciate the spectacle. Really, you know, I’ve done very little when you consider the extent of what followed. Don’t you find it interesting to see a huge, complicated piece of machinery, such as our society, all levers and belts and interlocking gears, the kind that looks as if one would need an army to operate it—and you find that by pressing your little finger against one spot, the one vital spot, the center of all its gravity, you can make the thing crumble into a worthless heap of scrap iron? It can be done, my dear. But it takes a long time. It takes centuries. I have the advantage of many experts who came before me. I think I shall be the last and the successful one of the line, because—though not abler than they were—I see more clearly what we’re after. However, that’s abstraction. Speaking of concrete reality, don’t you find anything amusing in my little experiment? I do. For instance, do you notice that all the wrong people are on the wrong sides? Mr. Alvah Scarret, the college professors, the newspaper editors, the respectable mothers and the Chambers of Commerce should have come flying to the defense of Howard Roark—if they value their own lives. But they didn’t. They are upholding Hopton Stoddard. On the other hand I heard that some screwy bunch of cafeteria radicals called ‘The New League of Proletarian Art’ tried to enlist in support of Howard Roark—they said he was a victim of capitalism—when they should have known that Hopton Stoddard is their champion. Roark, by the way, had the good sense to decline. He understands. You do. I do. Not many others. Oh, well. Scrap iron has its uses.”

She turned to leave the room.

“Dominique, you’re not going?” He sounded hurt. “You won’t say anything? Not anything at all?”

“No.”

“Dominique, you’re letting me down. And how I waited for you! I’m a very self-sufficient person, as a rule, but I do need an audience once in a while. You’re the only person with whom I can be myself. I suppose it’s because you have such contempt for me that nothing I say can make any difference. You see, I know that, but I don’t care. Also, the methods I use on other people would never work on you. Strangely enough, only my honesty will. Hell, what’s the use of accomplishing a skillful piece of work if nobody knows that you’ve accomplished it? Had you been your old self, you’d tell me, at this point, that that is the psychology of a murderer who’s committed the perfect crime and then confesses because he can’t bear the idea that nobody knows it’s a perfect crime. And I’d answer that you’re right. I want an audience. That’s the trouble with victims—they don’t even know they’re victims, which is as it should be, but it does become monotonous and takes half the fun away. You’re such a rare treat—a victim who can appreciate the artistry of its own execution.... For God’s sake, Dominique, are you leaving when I’m practically begging you to remain?”

She put her hand on the doorknob. He shrugged and settled back in his chair.

“All right,” he said. “Incidentally, don’t try to buy Hopton Stoddard out. He’s eating out of my hand just now. He won’t sell.” She had opened the door, but she stopped and pulled it shut again. “Oh, yes, of course I know that you’ve tried. It’s no use. You’re not that rich. You haven’t enough to buy that temple and you couldn’t raise enough. Also, Hopton won’t accept any money from you to pay for the alterations. I know you’ve offered that, too. He wants it from Roark. By the way, I don’t think Roark would like it if I let him know that you’ve tried.”

He smiled in a manner that demanded a protest. Her face gave no answer. She turned to the door again.

“Just one more question, Dominique. Mr. Stoddard’s attorney wants. to know whether he can call you as a witness. An expert on architecture. You will testify for the plaintiff, of course?”

“Yes. I will testify for the plaintiff.”

The case of Hopton Stoddard versus Howard Roark opened in February of 1931.

The courtroom was so full that mass reactions could be expressed only by a slow motion running across the spread of heads, a sluggish wave like the ripple under the tight-packed skin of a sea lion.

The crowd, brown and streaked with subdued color, looked like a fruitcake of all the arts, with the cream of the A.G.A. rich and heavy on top. There were distinguished men and well-dressed, tight-lipped women; each woman seemed to feel an exclusive proprietorship of the art practiced by her escort, a monopoly guarded by resentful glances at the others. Almost everybody knew almost everybody else. The room had the atmosphere of a convention, an opening night and a family picnic. There was a feeling of “our bunch,” “our boys,” “our show.”

Steven Mallory, Austen Heller, Roger Enright, Kent Lansing and Mike sat together in one corner. They tried not to look around them. Mike was worried about Steven Mallory. He kept close to Mallory, insisted on sitting next to him and glanced at him whenever a particularly offensive bit of conversation reached them. Mallory noticed it at last, and said:

“Don’t worry, Mike. I won’t scream. I won’t shoot anyone.”

“Watch your stomach, kid,” said Mike, “just watch your stomach. A man can’t get sick just because he oughta.”

“Mike, do you remember the night when we stayed so late that it was almost daylight, and Dominique’s car was out of gas, and there were no busses, and we all decided to walk home, and there was sun on the rooftops by the time the first one of us got to his house?”

“That’s right. You think about that, and I’ll think about the granite quarry.”

“What granite quarry?”

“It’s something made me very sick once, but then it turned out it made no difference at all, in the long run.”

Beyond the windows the sky was white and flat like frosted glass. The light seemed to come from the banks of snow on roofs and ledges, an unnatural light that made everything in the room look naked.

The judge sat hunched on his high bench as if he were roosting. He had a small face, wizened into virtue. He kept his hands upright in front of his chest, the finger tips pressed together. Hopton Stoddard was not present. He was represented by his attorney, a handsome gentleman, tall and grave as an ambassador.

Roark sat alone at the defense table. The crowd had stared at him and given up angrily, finding no satisfaction. He did not look crushed and he did not look defiant. He looked impersonal and calm. He was not like a public figure in a public place; he was like a man alone in his own room, listening to the radio. He took no notes; there were no papers on the table before him, only a large brown envelope. The crowd would have forgiven anything, except a man who could remain normal under the vibrations of its enormous collective sneer. Some of them had come prepared to pity him; all of them hated him after the first few minutes.

The plaintiff’s attorney stated his case in a simple opening address: it was true, he admitted, that Hopton Stoddard had given Roark full freedom to design and build the Temple; the point was, however, that Mr. Stoddard had clearly specified and expected a temple; the building in question could not be considered a temple by any known standards; as the plaintiff proposed to prove with the help of the best authorities in the field.

Roark waived his privilege to make an opening statement to the jury.

Ellsworth Monkton Toohey was the first witness called by the plaintiff. He sat on the edge of the witness chair and leaned back, resting on the end of his spine: he lifted one leg and placed it horizontally across the other. He looked amused—but managed to suggest that his amusement was a well-bred protection against looking bored.

The attorney went through a long list of questions about Mr. Toohey’s professional qualifications, including the number of copies sold of his book Sermons in Stone. Then he read aloud Toohey’s column “Sacrilege” and asked him to state whether he had written it. Toohey replied that he had. There followed a list of questions in erudite terms on the architectural merits of the Temple. Toohey proved that it had none. There followed an historical review. Toohey, speaking easily and casually, gave a brief sketch of all known civilizations and of their outstanding religious monuments—from the Incas to the Phoenicians to the Easter Islanders—including, whenever possible, the dates when these monuments were begun and the dates when they were completed, the number of workers employed in the construction and the approximate cost in modern American dollars. The audience listened punch-drunk.

Toohey proved that the Stoddard Temple contradicted every brick, stone and precept of history. “I have endeavored to show,” he said in conclusion, “that the two essentials of the conception of a temple are a sense of awe and a sense of man’s humility. We have noted the gigantic proportions of religious edifices, the soaring lines, the horrible grotesques of monsterlike gods, or, later, gargoyles. All of it tends to impress upon man his essential insignificance, to crush him by sheer magnitude, to imbue him with that sacred terror which leads to the meekness of virtue. The Stoddard Temple is a brazen denial of our entire past, an insolent ‘No’ flung in the face of history. I may venture a guess as to the reason why this case has aroused such public interest. All of us have recognized instinctively that it involves a moral issue much beyond its legal aspects. This building is a monument to a profound hatred of humanity. It is one man’s ego defying the most sacred impulses of all mankind, of every man on the street, of every man in this courtroom!”

This was not a witness in court, but Ellsworth Toohey addressing a meeting—and the reaction was inevitable: the audience burst into applause. The judge struck his gavel and made a threat to have the courtroom cleared. Order was restored, but not to the faces of the crowd: the faces remained lecherously self-righteous. It was pleasant to be singled out and brought into the case as an injured party. Three-fourths of them had never seen the Stoddard Temple.

“Thank you, Mr. Toohey,” said the attorney, faintly suggesting a bow. Then he turned to Roark and said with delicate courtesy: “Your witness.”

“No questions,” said Roark.

Ellsworth Toohey raised one eyebrow and left the stand regretfully.

“Mr. Peter Keating!” called the attorney.

Peter Keating’s face looked attractive and fresh, as if he had had a good night’s sleep. He mounted the witness stand with a collegiate sort of gusto, swinging his shoulders and arms unnecessarily. He took the oath and answered the first questions gaily. His pose in the witness chair was strange: his torso slumped to one side with swaggering ease, an elbow on the chair’s arm; but his feet were planted awkwardly straight, and his knees were pressed tight together. He never looked at Roark.

“Will you please name some of the outstanding buildings which you have designed, Mr. Keating?” the attorney asked.

Keating began a list of impressive names; the first few came fast, the rest slower and slower, as if he wished to be stopped; the last one died in the air, unfinished.

“Aren’t you forgetting the most important one, Mr. Keating?” the attorney asked. “Didn’t you design the Cosmo-Slotnick Building?”

“Yes,” whispered Keating.

“Now, Mr. Keating, you attended the Stanton Institute of Technology at the same period as Mr. Roark?”

“Yes.”

“What can you tell us about Mr. Roark’s record there?”

“He was expelled.”

“He was expelled because he was unable to live up to the Institute’s high standard of requirements?”

“Yes. Yes, that was it.”

The judge glanced at Roark. A lawyer would have objected to this testimony as irrelevant. Roark made no objection.

“At that time, did you think he showed any talent for the profession of architecture?”

“No.”

“Will you please speak a little louder, Mr. Keating?”

“I didn’t ... think he had any talent.”

Queer things were happening to Keating’s verbal punctuation: some words came out crisply, as if he dropped an exclamation point after each; others ran together, as if he would not stop to let himself hear them. He did not look at the attorney. He kept his eyes on the audience. At times, he looked like a boy out on a lark, a boy who has just drawn a mustache on the face of a beautiful girl on a subway tooth-paste ad. Then he looked as if he were begging the crowd for support—as if he were on trial before them.

“At one time you employed Mr. Roark in your office?”

“Yes.”

“And you found yourself forced to fire him?”

“Yes ... we did.”

“For incompetence?”

“Yes.”

“What can you tell us about Mr. Roark’s subsequent career?”

“Well, you know, ‘career’ is a relative term. In volume of achievement any draftsman in our office has done more than Mr. Roark. We don’t call one or two buildings a career. We put up that many every month or so.”

“Will you give us your professional opinion of his work?”

“Well, I think it’s immature. Very startling, even quite interesting at times, but essentially—adolescent.”

“Then Mr. Roark cannot be called a full-fledged architect?”

“Not in the sense in which we speak of Mr. Ralston Holcombe, Mr. Guy Francon, Mr. Gordon Prescott—no. But, of course, I want to be fair. I think Mr. Roark had definite potentialities, particularly in problems of pure engineering. He could have made something of himself. I’ve tried to talk to him about it—I’ve tried to help him—I honestly did. But it was like talking to one of his pet pieces of reinforced concrete. I knew that he’d come to something like this. I wasn’t surprised when I heard that a client had had to sue him at last.”

“What can you tell us about Mr. Roark’s attitude toward clients?”

“Well, that’s the point. That’s the whole point. He didn’t care what the clients thought or wished, what anyone in the world thought or wished. He didn’t even understand how other architects could care. He wouldn’t even give you that, not even understanding, not even enough to ... respect you a little just the same. I don’t see what’s so wrong with trying to please people. I don’t see what’s wrong with wanting to be friendly and liked and popular. Why is that a crime? Why should anyone sneer at you for that, sneer all the time, all the time, day and night, not giving you a moment’s peace, like the Chinese water torture, you know where they drop water on your skull drop by drop?”

People in the audience began to realize that Peter Keating was drunk. The attorney frowned; the testimony had been rehearsed; but it was getting off the rails.

“Well, now, Mr. Keating, perhaps you’d better tell us about Mr. Roark’s views on architecture.”

“I’ll tell you, if you want to know. He thinks you should take your shoes off and kneel, when you speak of architecture. That’s what he thinks. Now why should you? Why? It’s a business like any other, isn’t it? What’s so damn sacred about it? Why do we have to be all keyed up? We’re only human. We want to make a living. Why can’t things be simple and easy? Why do we have to be some sort of God-damn heroes?”

“Now, now, Mr. Keating, I think we’re straying slightly from the subject. We’re . . .”

“No, we’re not. I know what I’m talking about. You do, too. They all do. Every one of them here. I’m talking about the temple. Don’t you see? Why pick a fiend to build a temple? Only a very human sort of man should be chosen to do that. A man who understands ... and forgives. A man who forgives ... That’s what you go to church for—to be ... forgiven ...”

“Yes, Mr. Keating, but speaking of Mr. Roark ...”

“Well, what about Mr. Roark? He’s no architect. He’s no good. Why should I be afraid to say that he’s no good? Why are you all afraid of him?”

“Mr. Keating, if you’re not well and wish to be dismissed ...” Keating looked at him, as if awakening. He tried to control himself. After a while he said, his voice flat, resigned:

“No. I’m all right. I’ll tell you anything you want. What is it you want me to say?”

“Will you tell us—in professional terms—your opinion of the structure known as the Stoddard Temple?”

“Yes. Sure. The Stoddard Temple ... The Stoddard Temple has an improperly articulated plan, which leads to spatial confusion. There is no balance of masses. It lacks a sense of symmetry. Its proportions are inept.” He spoke in a monotone. His neck was stiff; he was making an effort not to let it drop forward. “It’s out of scale. It contradicts the elementary principles of composition. The total effect is that of ...”

“Louder please, Mr. Keating.”

“The total effect is that of crudeness and architectural illiteracy. It shows ... it shows no sense of structure, no instinct for beauty, no creative imagination, no ...” he closed his eyes, “... artistic integrity ...”

“Thank you, Mr. Keating. That is all.”

The attorney turned to Roark and said nervously:

“Your witness.”

“No questions,” said Roark.

This concluded the first day of the trial.

That evening Mallory, Heller, Mike, Enright and Lansing gathered in Roark’s room. They had not consulted one another, but they all came, prompted by the same feeling. They did not talk about the trial, but there was no strain and no conscious avoidance of the subject. Roark sat on his drafting table and talked to them about the future of the plastics industry. Mallory laughed aloud suddenly, without apparent reason. “What’s the matter, Steve?” Roark asked. “I just thought ... Howard, we all came here to help you, to cheer you up. But it’s you who’re helping us, instead. You’re supporting your supporters, Howard.”

That evening, Peter Keating lay half-stretched across a table in a speakeasy, one arm extended along the table top, his face on his arm.

In the next two days a succession of witnesses testified for the plaintiff. Every examination began with questions that brought out the professional achievements of the witness. The attorney gave them leads like an expert press agent. Austen Heller remarked that architects must have fought for the privilege of being called to the witness stand, since it was the grandest spree of publicity in a usually silent profession.

None of the witnesses looked at Roark. He looked at them. He listened to the testimony. He said: “No questions,” to each one.

Ralston Holcombe on the stand, with flowing tie and gold-headed cane, had the appearance of a Grand Duke or a beer-garden composer. His testimony was long and scholarly, but it came down to:

“It’s all nonsense. It’s all a lot of childish nonsense. I can’t say that I feel much sympathy for Mr. Hopton Stoddard. He should have known better. It is a scientific fact that the architectural style of the Renaissance is the only one appropriate to our age. If our best people, like Mr. Stoddard, refuse to recognize this, what can you expect from all sorts of parvenus, would-be architects and the rabble in general? It has been proved that Renaissance is the only permissible style for all churches, temples and cathedrals. What about Sir Christopher Wren? Just laugh that off. And remember the greatest religious monument of all time—St. Peter’s in Rome. Are you going to improve upon St. Peter’s? And if Mr. Stoddard did not specifically insist on Renaissance, he got just exactly what he deserved. It serves him jolly well right.”

Gordon L. Prescott wore a turtle-neck sweater under a plaid coat, tweed trousers and heavy golf shoes.

“The correlation of the transcendental to the purely spatial in the building under discussion is entirely screwy,” he said. “If we take the horizontal as the one-dimensional, the vertical as the two-dimensional, the diagonal as the three-dimensional, and the interpenetration of spaces as the fourth-dimensional-architecture being a fourth-dimensional art —we can see quite simply that this building is homaloidal, or—in the language of the layman—nat. The flowing life which comes from the sense of order in chaos, or, if you prefer, from unity in diversity, as well as vice versa, which is the realization of the contradiction inherent in architecture, is here absolutely absent. I am really trying to express myself as clearly as I can, but it is impossible to present a dialectic state by covering it up with an old fig leaf of logic just for the sake of the mentally lazy layman.”

John Erik Snyte testified modestly and unobtrusively that he had employed Roark in his office, that Roark had been an unreliable, disloyal and unscrupulous employee, and that Roark had started his career by stealing a client from him.

On the fourth day of the trial the plaintiff’s attorney called his last witness.

“Miss Dominique Francon,” he announced solemnly.

Mallory gasped, but no one heard it; Mike’s hand clamped down on his wrist and made him keep still.

The attorney had reserved Dominique for his climax, partly because he expected a great deal from her, and partly because he was worried: she was the only unrehearsed witness; she had refused to be coached. She had never mentioned the Stoddard Temple in her column; but he had looked up her earlier writings on Roark; and Ellsworth Toohey had advised him to call her.

Dominique stood for a moment on the elevation of the witness stand, looking slowly over the crowd. Her beauty was startling but too impersonal, as if it did not belong to her; it seemed present in the room as a separate entity. People thought of a vision that had not quite appeared, of a victim on a scaffold, of a person standing at night at the rail of an ocean liner.

“What is your name?”

“Dominique Francon.”

“And your occupation, Miss Francon?”

“Newspaper woman.”

“You are the author of the brilliant column ‘Your House’ appearing in the New York Banner?”

“I am the author of ‘Your House.’ ”

“Your father is Guy Francon, the eminent architect?”

“Yes. My father was asked to come here to testify. He refused. He said he did not care for a building such as the Stoddard Temple, but he did not think that we were behaving like gentlemen.”

“Well, now, Miss Francon, shall we confine our answers to our questions? We are indeed fortunate to have you with us, since you are our only woman witness, and women have always had the purest sense of religious faith. Being, in addition, an outstanding authority on architecture, you are eminently qualified to give us what I shall call, with all deference, the feminine angle on this case. Will you tell us in your own words what you think of the Stoddard Temple?”

“I think that Mr. Stoddard has made a mistake. There would have been no doubt about the justice of his case if he had sued, not for alteration costs, but for demolition costs.”

The attorney looked relieved. “Will you explain your reasons, Miss Francon?”

“You have heard them from every witness at this trial.”

“Then I take it that you agree with the preceding testimony?”

“Completely. Even more completely than the persons who testified. They were very convincing witnesses.”

“Will you ... clarify that, Miss Francon? Just what do you mean?”

“What Mr. Toohey said: that this temple is a threat to all of us.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Mr. Toohey understood the issue so well. Shall I clarify it—in my own words?”

“By all means.”

“Howard Roark built a temple to the human spirit. He saw man as strong, proud, clean, wise and fearless. He saw man as a heroic being. And he built a temple to that. A temple is a place where man is to experience exaltation. He thought that exaltation comes from the consciousness of being guiltless, of seeing the truth and achieving it, of living up to one’s highest possibility, of knowing no shame and having no cause for shame, of being able to stand naked in full sunlight. He thought that exaltation means joy and that joy is man’s birthright. He thought that a place built as a setting for man is a sacred place. That is what Howard Roark thought of man and of exaltation. But Ellsworth Toohey said that this temple was a monument to a profound hatred of humanity. Ellsworth Toohey said that the essence of exaltation was to be scared out of your wits, to fall down and to grovel. Ellsworth Toohey said that man’s highest act was to realize his own worthlessness and to beg forgiveness. Ellsworth Toohey said it was depraved not to take for granted that man is something which needs to be forgiven. Ellsworth Toohey saw that this building was of man and of the earth—and Ellsworth Toohey said that this building had its belly in the mud. To glorify man, said Ellsworth Toohey, was to glorify the gross pleasures of the flesh, for the realm of the spirit is beyond the grasp of man. To enter that realm, said Ellsworth Toohey, man must come as a beggar, on his knees. Ellsworth Toohey is a lover of mankind.”

“Miss Francon, we are not really discussing Mr. Toohey, so if you will confine yourself to ...”

“I do not condemn Ellsworth Toohey. I condemn Howard Roark. A building, they say, must be part of its site. In what kind of world did Roark build his temple? For what kind of men? Look around you. Can you see a shrine becoming sacred by serving as a setting for Mr. Hopton Stoddard? For Mr. Ralston Holcombe? For Mr. Peter Keating? When you look at them all, do you hate Ellsworth Toohey—or do you damn Howard Roark for the unspeakable indignity which he did commit? Ellsworth Toohey is right, that temple is a sacrilege, though not in the sense he meant. I think Mr. Toohey knows that, however. When you see a man casting pearls without getting even a pork chop in return—it is not against the swine that you feel indignation. It is against the man who valued his pearls so little that he was willing to fling them into the muck and to let them become the occasion for a whole concert of grunting, transcribed by the court stenographer.”

“Miss Francon, I hardly think that this line of testimony is relevant or admissible ...”

“The witness must be allowed to testify,” the judge declared unexpectedly. He had been bored and he liked to watch Dominique’s figure. Besides, he knew that the audience was enjoying it, in the sheer excitement of scandal, even though their sympathies were with Hopton Stoddard.

“Your Honor, some misunderstanding seems to have occurred,” said the attorney. “Miss Francon, for whom are you testifying? For Mr. Roark or Mr. Stoddard?”

“For Mr. Stoddard, of course. I am stating the reasons why Mr. Stoddard should win this case. I have sworn to tell the truth.”

“Proceed,” said the judge.

“All the witnesses have told the truth. But not the whole truth. I am merely filling in the omissions. They spoke of a threat and of hatred. They were right. The Stoddard Temple is a threat to many things. If it were allowed to exist, nobody would dare to look at himself in the mirror. And that is a cruel thing to do to men. Ask anything of men. Ask them to achieve wealth, fame, love, brutality, murder, self-sacrifice. But don’t ask them to achieve self-respect. They will hate your soul. Well, they know best. They must have their reasons. They won’t say, of course, that they hate you. They will say that you hate them. It’s near enough, I suppose. They know the emotion involved. Such are men as they are. So what is the use of being a martyr to the impossible? What is the use of building for a world that does not exist?”

“Your Honor, I don’t see what possible bearing this can have on ...”

“I am proving your case for you. I am proving why you must go with Ellsworth Toohey, as you will anyway. The Stoddard Temple must be destroyed. Not to save men from it, but to save it from men. What’s the difference, however? Mr. Stoddard wins. I am in full agreement with everything that’s being done here, except for one point. I didn’t think we should be allowed to get away with that point. Let us destroy, but don’t let us pretend that we are committing an act of virtue. Let us say that we are moles and we object to mountain peaks. Or, perhaps, that we are lemmings, the animals who cannot help swimming out to self-destruction. I realize fully that at this moment I am as futile as Howard Roark. This is my Stoddard Temple—my first and my last.” She inclined her head to the judge. “That is all, Your Honor.”

“Your witness,” the attorney snapped to Roark.

“No questions,” said Roark.

Dominique left the stand.

The attorney bowed to the bench and said: “The plaintiff rests.”

The judge turned to Roark and made a vague gesture, inviting him to proceed.

Roark got up and walked to the bench, the brown envelope in hand. He took out of the envelope ten photographs of the Stoddard Temple and laid them on the judge’s desk. He said:

“The defense rests.”

XIII

HOPTON STODDARD WON THE SUIT. Ellsworth Toohey wrote in his column: “Mr. Roark pulled a Phryne in court and didn’t get away with it. We never believed that story in the first place.”

Roark was instructed to pay the costs of the Temple’s alterations. He said that he would not appeal the case. Hopton Stoddard announced that the Temple would be remodeled into the Hopton Stoddard Home for Subnormal Children.

On the day after the end of the trial Alvah Scarret gasped when he glanced at the proofs of “Your House” delivered to his desk: the column contained most of Dominique’s testimony in court. Her testimony had been quoted in the newspaper accounts of the case but only in harmless excerpts. Alvah Scarret hurried to Dominique’s office.

“Darling, darling, darling,” he said, “we can’t print that.”

She looked at him blankly and said nothing.

“Dominique, sweetheart, be reasonable. Quite apart from some of the language you use and some of your utterly unprintable ideas, you know very well the stand this paper has taken on the case. You know the campaign we’ve conducted. You’ve read my editorial this morning—‘A Victory for Decency.’ We can’t have one writer running against our whole policy.”

“You’ll have to print it.”

“But, sweetheart ...”

“Or I’ll have to quit.”

“Oh, go on, go on, go on, don’t be silly. Now don’t get ridiculous. You know better than that. We can’t get along without you. We can’t ...”

“You’ll have to choose, Alvah.”

Scarret knew that he would get hell from Gail Wynand if he printed the thing, and might get hell if he lost Dominique Francon whose column was popular. Wynand had not returned from his cruise. Scarret cabled him in Bali, explaining the situation.

Within a few hours Scarret received an answer. It was in Wynand’s private code. Translated it read: FIRE THE BITCH. G. W.

Scarret stared at the cable, crushed. It was an order that allowed no alternative, even if Dominique surrendered. He hoped she would resign. He could not face the thought of having to fire her.

Through an office boy whom he had recommended for the job, Toohey obtained the decoded copy of Wynand’s cable. He put it in his pocket and went to Dominique’s office. He had not seen her since the trial. He found her engaged in emptying the drawers of her desk.

“Hello,” he said curtly. “What are you doing?”

“Waiting to hear from Alvah Scarret.”

“Meaning?”

“Waiting to hear whether I’ll have to resign.”

“Feel like talking about the trial?”

“No.”

“I do. I think I owe you the courtesy of admitting that you’ve done what no one has ever done before: you proved me wrong.” He spoke coldly; his face looked flat; his eyes had no trace of kindness. “I had not expected you to do what you did on the stand. It was a scurvy trick. Though up to your usual standard. I simply miscalculated the direction of your malice. However, you did have the good sense to admit that your act was futile. Of course, you made your point. And mine. As a token of appreciation, I have a present for you.”

He laid the cable on her desk.

She read it and stood holding it in her hand.

“You can’t even resign, my dear,” he said. “You can’t make that sacrifice to your pearl-casting hero. Remembering that you attach such great importance to not being beaten except by your own hand, I thought you would enjoy this.”

She folded the cable and slipped it into her purse.

“Thank you, Ellsworth.”

“If you’re going to fight me, my dear, it will take more than speeches.”

“Haven’t I always?”

“Yes. Yes, of course you have. Quite right. You’re correcting me again. You have always fought me—and the only time you broke down and screamed for mercy was on that witness stand.”

“That’s right.”

“That’s where I miscalculated.”

“Yes.”

He bowed formally and left the room.

She made a package of the things she wanted to take home. Then she went to Scarret’s office. She showed him the cable in her hand, but she did not give it to him.

“Okay, Alvah,” she said.

“Dominique, I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t help it, it was—How the hell did you get that?”

“It’s all right, Alvah. No, I won’t give it back to you. I want to keep it.” She put the cable back in her bag. “Mail me my check and anything else that has to be discussed.”

“You ... you were going to resign anyway, weren’t you?”

“Yes, I was. But I like it better—being fired.”

“Dominique, if you knew how awful I feel about it. I can’t believe it. I simply can’t believe it.”

“So you people made a martyr out of me, after all. And that is the one thing I’ve tried all my life not to be. It’s so graceless, being a martyr. It’s honoring your adversaries too much. But I’ll tell you this, Alvah—I’ll tell it to you, because I couldn’t find a less appropriate person to hear it: nothing that you do to me—or to him—will be worse than what I’ll do myself. If you think I can’t take the Stoddard Temple, wait till you see what I can take.”

On an evening three days after the trial Ellsworth Toohey sat in his room, listening to the radio. He did not feel like working and he allowed himself a rest, relaxing luxuriously in an armchair, letting his fingers follow the rhythm of a complicated symphony. He heard a knock at his door. “Co-ome in,” he drawled.

Catherine came in. She glanced at the radio by way of apology for her entrance.

“I knew you weren’t working, Uncle Ellsworth. I want to speak to you.”

She stood slumped, her body thin and curveless. She wore a skirt of expensive tweed, unpressed. She had smeared some make-up on her face; the skin showed lifeless under the patches of powder. At twenty-six she looked like a woman trying to hide the fact of being over thirty.

In the last few years, with her uncle’s help, she had become an able social worker. She held a paid job in a settlement house, she had a small bank account of her own; she took her friends out to lunch, older women of her profession, and they talked about the problems of unwed mothers, self-expression for the children of the poor and the evils of industrial corporations.

In the last few years Toohey seemed to have forgotten her existence. But he knew that she was enormously aware of him in her silent, self-effacing way. He was seldom first to speak to her. But she came to him continuously for minor advice. She was like a small motor running on his energy, and she had to stop for refueling once in a while. She would not go to the theater without consulting him about the play. She would not attend a lecture course without asking his opinion. Once she developed a friendship with a girl who was intelligent, capable, gay and loved the poor, though a social worker. Toohey did not approve of the girl. Catherine dropped her.

When she needed advice, she asked for it briefly, in passing, anxious not to delay him: between the courses of a meal, at the elevator door on his way out, in the living room when some important broadcast stopped for station identification. She made it a point to show that she would presume to claim nothing but the waste scraps of his time.

So Toohey looked at her, surprised, when she entered his study. He said:

“Certainly, pet. I’m not busy. I’m never too busy for you, anyway. Turn the thing down a bit, will you?”

She softened the volume of the radio, and she slumped down in an armchair facing him. Her movements were awkward and contradictory, like an adolescent’s: she had lost the habit of moving with assurance, and yet, at times, a gesture, a jerk of her head, would show a dry, overbearing impatience which she was beginning to develop.

She looked at her uncle. Behind her glasses, her eyes were still and tense, but unrevealing. She said:

“What have you been doing, Uncle Ellsworth? I saw something in the papers about winning some big lawsuit that you were connected with. I was glad. I haven’t read the papers for months. I’ve been so busy ... No, that’s not quite true. I’ve had the time, but when I came home I just couldn’t make myself do anything, I just fell in bed and went to sleep. Uncle Ellsworth, do people sleep a lot because they’re tired or because they want to escape from something?”

“Now, my dear, this doesn’t sound like you at all. None of it.”

She shook her head helplessly: “I know.”

“What is the matter?”

She said, looking at the toes of her shoes, her lips moving with effort:

“I guess I’m no good, Uncle Ellsworth.” She raised her eyes to him. “I’m so terribly unhappy.”

He looked at her silently, his face earnest, his eyes gentle. She whispered:

“You understand?” He nodded. “You’re not angry at me? You don’t despise me?”

“My dear, how could I?”

“I didn’t want to say it. Not even to myself. It’s not just tonight, it’s for a long time back. Just let me say everything, don’t be shocked, I’ve got to tell it. It’s like going to confession as I used to—oh, don’t think I’m returning to that, I know religion is only a ... a device of class exploitation, don’t think I’d let you down after you explained it all so well. I don’t miss going to church. But it’s just—it’s just that I’ve got to have somebody listen.”

“Katie, darling, first of all, why are you so frightened? You mustn’t be. Certainly not of speaking to me. Just relax, be yourself and tell me what happened.”

She looked at him gratefully. “You’re ... so sensitive, Uncle Ellsworth. That’s one thing I didn’t want to say, but you guessed. I am frightened. Because—well, you see, you just said, be yourself. And what I’m afraid of most is of being myself. Because I’m vicious.”

He laughed, not offensively, but warmly, the sound destroying her statement. But she did not smile.

“No, Uncle Ellsworth, it’s true. I’ll try to explain. You see, always, since I was a child, I wanted to do right. I used to think everybody did, but now I don’t think so. Some people try their best, even if they do make mistakes, and others just don’t care. I’ve always cared. I took it very seriously. Of course I knew that I’m not a brilliant person and that it’s a very big subject, good and evil. But I felt that whatever is the good—as much as it would be possible for me to know—I would do my honest best to live up to it. Which is all anybody can try, isn’t it? This probably sounds terribly childish to you.”

“No, Katie, it doesn’t. Go on, my dear.”

“Well, to begin with, I knew that it was evil to be selfish. That much I was sure of. So I tried never to demand anything for myself. When Peter would disappear for months ... No, I don’t think you approve of that.”

“Of what, my dear?”

“Of Peter and me. So I won’t talk about that. It’s not important anyway. Well, you can see why I was so happy when I came to live with you. You’re as close to the ideal of unselfishness as anyone can be. I tried to follow you the best I could. That’s how I chose the work I’m doing. You never actually said that I should choose it, but I came to feel that you thought so. Don’t ask me how I came to feel it—it was nothing tangible, just little things you said. I felt very confident when I started. I knew that unhappiness comes from selfishness, and that one can find true happiness only in dedicating oneself to others. You said that. So many people have said that. Why, all the greatest men in history have been saying that for centuries.”

“And?”

“Well, look at me.”

His face remained motionless for a moment, then he smiled gaily and said:

“What’s wrong with you, pet? Apart from the fact that your stockings don’t match and that you could be more careful about your make-up?”

“Don’t laugh, Uncle Ellsworth. Please don’t laugh. I know you say we must be able to laugh at everything, particularly at ourselves. Only—I can’t.”

“I won’t laugh, Katie. But what is the matter?”

“I’m unhappy. I’m unhappy in such a horrible, nasty, undignified way. In a way that seems ... unclean. And dishonest. I go for days, afraid to think, to look at myself. And that’s wrong. It’s ... becoming a hypocrite. I always wanted to be honest with myself. But I’m not, I’m not, I’m not!”

“Hold on, my dear. Don’t shout. The neighbors will hear you.”

She brushed the back of her hand against her forehead. She shook her head. She whispered:

“I’m sorry.... I’ll be all right....”

“Just why are you unhappy, my dear?”

“I don’t know. I can’t understand it. For instance, it was I who arranged to have the classes in prenatal care down at the Clifford House —it was my idea-I raised the money—I found the teacher. The classes are doing very well. I tell myself that I should be happy about it. But I’m not. It doesn’t seem to make any difference to me. I sit down and I tell myself: It was you who arranged to have Marie Gonzales’ baby adopted into a nice family—now, be happy. But I’m not. I feel nothing. When I’m honest with myself, I know that the only emotion I’ve felt for years is being tired. Not physically tired. Just tired. It’s as if ... as if there were nobody there to feel any more.”

She took off her glasses, as if the double barrier of her glasses and his prevented her from reaching him. She spoke, her voice lower, the words coming with greater effort:

“But that’s not all. There’s something much worse. It’s doing something horrible to me. I’m beginning to hate people, Uncle Ellsworth. I’m beginning to be cruel and mean and petty in a way I’ve never been before. I expect people to be grateful to me. I ... I demand gratitude. I find myself pleased when slum people bow and scrape and fawn over me. I find myself liking only those who are servile. Once ... once I told a woman that she didn’t appreciate what people like us did for trash like her. I cried for hours afterward, I was so ashamed. I begin to resent it when people argue with me. I feel that they have no right to minds of their own, that I know best, that I’m the final authority for them. There was a girl we were worried about, because she was running around with a very handsome boy who had a bad reputation. I tortured her for weeks about it, telling her how he’d get her in trouble and that she should drop him. Well, they got married and they’re the happiest couple in the district. Do you think I’m glad? No, I’m furious and I’m barely civil to the girl when I meet her. Then there was a girl who needed a job desperately—it was really a ghastly situation in her home, and I promised that I’d get her one. Before I could find it, she got a good job all by herself. I wasn’t pleased. I was sore as hell that somebody got out of a bad hole without my help. Yesterday, I was speaking to a boy who wanted to go to college and I was discouraging him, telling him to get a good job, instead. I was quite angry, too. And suddenly I realized that it was because I had wanted so much to go to college—you remember, you wouldn’t let me—and so I wasn’t going to let that kid do it either.... Uncle Ellsworth, don’t you see? I’m becoming selfish. I’m becoming selfish in a way that’s much more horrible than if I were some petty chiseler pinching pennies off these people’s wages in a sweatshop!”

He asked quietly:

“Is that all?”

She closed her eyes, and then she said, looking down at her hands:

“Yes ... except that I’m not the only one who’s like that. A lot of them are, most of the women I work with.... I don’t know how they got that way.... I don’t know how it happened to me.... I used to feel happy when I helped somebody. I remember once—I had lunch with Peter that day—and on my way back I saw an old organ-grinder and I gave him five dollars I had in my bag. It was all the money I had; I’d saved it to buy a bottle of ‘Christmas Night,’ I wanted ‘Christmas Night’ very badly, but afterward every time I thought of that organ-grinder I was happy.... I saw Peter often in those days.... I’d come home after seeing him and I’d want to kiss every ragged kid on our block.... I think I hate the poor now.... I think all the other women do, too.... But the poor don’t hate us, as they should. They only despise us.... You know, it’s funny: it’s the masters who despise the slaves, and the slaves who hate the masters. I don’t know who is which. Maybe it doesn’t fit here. Maybe it does. I don’t know ...”

She raised her head with a last spurt of rebellion.

“Don’t you see what it is that I must understand? Why is it that I set out honestly to do what I thought was right and it’s making me rotten? I think it’s probably because I’m vicious by nature and incapable of leading a good life. That seems to be the only explanation. But ... but sometimes I think it doesn’t make sense that a human being is completely sincere in good will and yet the good is not for him to achieve. I can’t be as rotten as that. But ... but I’ve given up everything, I have no selfish desire left, I have nothing of my own—and I’m miserable. And so are the other women like me. And I don’t know a single selfless person in the world who’s happy—except you.”

She dropped her head and she did not raise it again; she seemed indifferent even to the answer she was seeking.

“Katie,” he said softly, reproachfully, “Katie darling.”

She waited silently.

“Do you really want me to tell you the answer?” She nodded. “Because, you know, you’ve given the answer yourself, in the things you said.” She lifted her eyes blankly. “What have you been talking about? What have you been complaining about? About the fact that you are unhappy. About Katie Halsey and nothing else. It was the most egotistical speech I’ve ever heard in my life.”

She blinked attentively, like a schoolchild disturbed by a difficult lesson.

“Don’t you see how selfish you have been? You chose a noble career, not for the good you could accomplish, but for the personal happiness you expected to find in it.”

“But I really wanted to help people.”

“Because you thought you’d be good and virtuous doing it.”

“Why—yes. Because I thought it was right. Is it vicious to want to do right?”

“Yes, if it’s your chief concern. Don’t you see how egotistical it is? To hell with everybody so long as I’m virtuous.”

“But if you have no ... no self-respect, how can you be anything?”

“Why must you be anything?”

She spread her hands out, bewildered.

“If your first concern is for what you are or think or feel or have or haven’t got—you’re still a common egotist.”

“But I can’t jump out of my own body.”

“No. But you can jump out of your narrow soul.”

“You mean, I must want to be unhappy?”

“No. You must stop wanting anything. You must forget how important Miss Catherine Halsey is. Because, you see, she isn’t. Men are important only in relation to other men, in their usefulness, in the service they render. Unless you understand that completely, you can expect nothing but one form of misery or another. Why make such a cosmic tragedy out of the fact that you’ve found yourself feeling cruel toward people? So what? It’s just growing pains. One can’t jump from a state of animal brutality into a state of spiritual living without certain transitions. And some of them may seem evil. A beautiful woman is usually a gawky adolescent first. All growth demands destruction. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You must be willing to suffer, to be cruel, to be dishonest, to be unclean—anything, my dear, anything to kill the most stubborn of roots, the ego. And only when it is dead, when you care no longer, when you have lost your identity and forgotten the name of your soul—only then will you know the kind of happiness I spoke about, and the gates of spiritual grandeur will fall open before you.”

“But, Uncle Ellsworth,” she whispered, “when the gates fall open, who is it that’s going to enter?”

He laughed aloud, crisply. It sounded like a laugh of appreciation. “My dear,” he said, “I never thought you could surprise me.”

Then his face became earnest again.

“It was a smart crack, Katie, but you know, I hope, that it was only a smart crack?”

“Yes,” she said uncertainly, “I suppose so. Still ...”

“We can’t be too literal when we deal in abstractions. Of course it’s you who’ll enter. You won’t have lost your identity—you will merely have acquired a broader one, an identity that will be part of everybody else and of the whole universe.”

“How? In what way? Part of what?”

“Now you see how difficult it is to discuss these things when our entire language is the language of individualism, with all its terms and superstitions. ‘Identity’—it’s an illusion, you know. But you can’t build a new house out of crumbling old bricks. You can’t expect to understand me completely through the medium of present-day conceptions. We are poisoned by the superstition of the ego. We cannot know what will be right or wrong in a selfless society, nor what we’ll feel, nor in what manner. We must destroy the ego first. That is why the mind is so unreliable. We must not think. We must believe. Believe, Katie, even if your mind objects. Don’t think. Believe. Trust your heart, not your brain. Don’t think. Feel. Believe.”

She sat still, composed, but somehow she looked like something run over by a tank. She whispered obediently:

“Yes, Uncle Ellsworth ... I ... I didn’t think of it that way. I mean, I always thought that I must think ... But you’re right, that is, if right is the word I mean, if there is a word ... Yes, I will believe.... I’ll try to understand.... No, not to understand. To feel. To believe, I mean.... Only I’m so weak.... I always feel so small after talking to you.... I suppose I was right in a way—I am worthless ... but it doesn’t matter ... it doesn’t matter....”

When the doorbell rang on the following evening Toohey went to open the door himself.

He smiled when he admitted Peter Keating. After the trial he had expected Keating to come to him; he knew that Keating would need to come. But he had expected him sooner.

Keating walked in uncertainly. His hands seemed too heavy for his wrists. His eyes were puffed, and the skin of his face looked slack.

“Hello, Peter,” said Toohey brightly. “Want to see me? Come right in. Just your luck. I have the whole evening free.”

“No,” said Keating. “I want to see Katie.”

He was not looking at Toohey and he did not see the expression behind Toohey’s glasses.

“Katie? But of course!” said Toohey gaily. “You know, you’ve never come here to call on Katie, so it didn’t occur to me, but ... Go right in, I believe she’s home. This way—you don’t know her room?—second door.”

Keating shuffled heavily down the hall, knocked on Catherine’s door and went in when she answered. Toohey stood looking after him, his face thoughtful.

Catherine jumped to her feet when she saw her guest. She stood stupidly, incredulously for a moment, then she dashed to her bed to snatch a girdle she had left lying there and stuff it hurriedly under the pillow. Then she jerked off her glasses, closed her whole fist over them, and slipped them into her pocket. She wondered which would be worse: to remain as she was or to sit down at her dressing table and make up her face in his presence.

She had not seen Keating for six months. In the last three years, they had met occasionally, at long intervals, they had had a few luncheons together, a few dinners, they had gone to the movies twice. They had always met in a public place. Since the beginning of his acquaintance with Toohey, Keating would not come to see her at her home. When they met, they talked as if nothing had changed. But they had not spoken of marriage for a long time.

“Hello, Katie,” said Keating softly. “I didn’t know you wore glasses now.”

“It’s just ... it’s only for reading.... I ... Hello, Peter.... I guess I look terrible tonight.... I’m glad to see you, Peter....”

He sat down heavily, his hat in his hand, his overcoat on. She stood smiling helplessly. Then she made a vague, circular motion with her hands and asked:

“Is it just for a little while or ... or do you want to take your coat off?”

“No, it’s not just for a little while.” He got up, threw his coat and hat on the bed, then he smiled for the first time and asked: “Or are you busy and want to throw me out?”

She pressed the heels of her hands against her eye sockets, and dropped her hands again quickly; she had to meet him as she had always met him, she had to sound light and normal: “No, no, I’m not busy at all.”

He sat down and stretched out his arm in silent invitation. She came to him promptly, she put her hand in his, and he pulled her down to the arm of his chair.

The lamplight fell on him, and she had recovered enough to notice the appearance of his face.

“Peter,” she gasped, “what have you been doing to yourself? You look awful.”

“Drinking.”

“Not ... like that!”

“Like that. But it’s over now.”

“What was it?”

“I wanted to see you, Katie. I wanted to see you.”

“Darling ... what have they done to you?”

“Nobody’s done anything to me. I’m all right now. I’m all right. Because I came here ... Katie, have you ever heard of Hopton Stoddard?”

“Stoddard? ... I don’t know. I’ve seen the name somewhere.”

“Well, never mind, it doesn’t matter. I was only thinking how strange it is. You see, Stoddard’s an old bastard who just couldn’t take his own rottenness any more, so to make up for it he built a big present to the city. But when I ... when I couldn’t take it any more, I felt that the only way I could make up for it was by doing the thing I really wanted to do most—by coming here.”

“When you couldn’t take—what, Peter?”

“I’ve done something very dirty, Katie. I’ll tell you about it some day, but not now.... Look, will you say that you forgive me—without asking what it is? I’ll think ... I’ll think that I’ve been forgiven by someone who can never forgive me. Someone who can’t be hurt and so can’t forgive—but that makes it worse for me.”

She did not seem perplexed. She said earnestly:

“I forgive you, Peter.”

He nodded his head slowly several times and said:

“Thank you.”

Then she pressed her head to his and she whispered:

“You’ve gone through hell, haven’t you?”

“Yes. But it’s all right now.”

He pulled her into his arms and kissed her. Then he did not think of the Stoddard Temple any longer, and she did not think of good and evil. They did not need to; they felt too clean.

“Katie, why haven’t we married?”

“I don’t know,” she said. And added hastily, saying it only because her heart was pounding, because she could not remain silent and because she felt called upon not to take advantage of him: “I guess it’s because we know we don’t have to hurry.”

“But we do. If we’re not too late already.”

“Peter, you ... you’re not proposing to me again?”

“Don’t look so stunned, Katie. If you do, I’ll know that you’ve doubted it all these years. And I couldn’t stand to think that just now. That’s what I came here to tell you tonight. We’re going to get married. We’re going to get married right away.”

“Yes, Peter.”

“We don’t need announcements, dates, preparations, guests, any of it. We’ve let one of those things or another stop us every time. I honestly don’t know just how it happened that we’ve let it all drift like that.... We won’t say anything to anyone. We’ll just slip out of town and get married. We’ll announce and explain afterward, if anyone wants explanations. And that means your uncle, and my mother, and everybody.”

“Yes, Peter.”

“Quit your damn job tomorrow. I’ll make arrangements at the office to take a month off. Guy will be sore as hell—I’ll enjoy that. Get your things ready—you won’t need much—don’t bother about the make-up, by the way—did you say you looked terrible tonight?—you’ve never looked lovelier. I’ll be here at nine o’clock in the morning, day after tomorrow. You must be ready to start then.”

“Yes, Peter.”

After he had gone, she lay on her bed, sobbing aloud, without restraint, without dignity, without a care in the world.

Ellsworth Toohey had left the door of his study open. He had seen Keating pass by the door without noticing it and go out. Then he heard the sound of Catherine’s sobs. He walked to her room and entered without knocking. He asked:

“What’s the matter, my dear? Has Peter done something to hurt you?”

She half lifted herself on the bed, she looked at him, throwing her hair back off her face, sobbing exultantly. She said without thinking the first thing she felt like saying. She said something which she did not understand, but he did: “I’m not afraid of you, Uncle Ellsworth!”

XIV

“WHO?” GASPED KEATING. “Miss Dominique Francon,” the maid repeated. “You’re drunk, you damn fool!”

“Mr. Keating! ...”

He was on his feet, he shoved her out of the way, he flew into the living room, and saw Dominique Francon standing there, in his apartment.

“Hello, Peter.”

“Dominique! ... Dominique, how come?” In his anger, apprehension, curiosity and flattered pleasure, his first conscious thought was gratitude to God that his mother was not at home.

“I phoned your office. They said you had gone home.”

“I’m so delighted, so pleasantly sur ... Oh, hell, Dominique, what’s the use? I always try to be correct with you and you always see through it so well that it’s perfectly pointless. So I won’t play the poised host. You know that I’m knocked silly and that your coming here isn’t natural and anything I say will probably be wrong.”

“Yes, that’s better, Peter.”

He noticed that he still held a key in his hand and he slipped it into his pocket; he had been packing a suitcase for his wedding trip of tomorrow. He glanced at the room and noted angrily how vulgar his Victorian furniture looked beside the elegance of Dominique’s figure. She wore a gray suit, a black fur jacket with a collar raised to her cheeks, and a hat slanting down. She did not look as she had looked on the witness stand, nor as he remembered her at dinner parties. He thought suddenly of that moment, years ago, when he stood on the stair landing outside Guy Francon’s office and wished never to see Dominique again. She was what she had been then: a stranger who frightened him by the crystal emptiness of her face.

“Well, sit down, Dominique. Take your coat off.”

“No, I shan’t stay long. Since we’re not pretending anything today, shall I tell you what I came for—or do you want some polite conversation first?”

“No, I don’t want polite conversation.”

“All right. Will you marry me, Peter?”

He stood very still; then he sat down heavily—because he knew she meant it.

“If you want to marry me,” she went on in the same precise, impersonal voice, “you must do it right now. My car is downstairs. We drive to Connecticut and we come back. It will take about three hours.”

“Dominique ...” He didn’t want to move his lips beyond the effort of her name. He wanted to think that he was paralyzed. He knew that he was violently alive, that he was forcing the stupor into his muscles and into his mind, because he wished to escape the responsibility of consciousness.

“We’re not pretending, Peter. Usually, people discuss their reasons and their feelings first, then make the practical arrangements. With us, this is the only way. If I offered it to you in any other form, I’d be cheating you. It must be like this. No questions, no conditions, no explanations. What we don’t say answers itself. By not being said. There is nothing for you to ponder—only whether you want to do it or not.”

“Dominique,” he spoke with the concentration he used when he walked down a naked girder in an unfinished building, “I understand only this much: I understand that I must try to imitate you, not to discuss it, not to talk, just answer.”

“Yes.”

“Only—I can’t—quite.”

“This is one time, Peter, when there are no protections. Nothing to hide behind. Not even words.”

“If you’d just say one thing ...”

“No.”

“If you’d give me time ...”

“No. Either we go downstairs together now or we forget it.”

“You mustn’t resent it if I ... You’ve never allowed me to hope that you could ... that you ... no, no, I won’t say it ... but what can you expect me to think? I’m here, alone, and ...”

“And I’m the only one present to give you advice. My advice is to refuse. I’m honest with you, Peter. But I won’t help you by withdrawing the offer. You would prefer not to have had the chance of marrying me. But you have the chance. Now. The choice will be yours.”

Then he could not hold on to his dignity any longer; he let his head drop, he pressed his fist to his forehead.

“Dominique—Why?”

“You know the reasons. I told them to you once, long ago. If you haven’t the courage to think of them, don’t expect me to repeat them.”

He sat still, his head down. Then he said:

“Dominique, two people like you and me getting married, it’s almost a front-page event.”

“Yes.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to do it properly, with an announcement and a real wedding ceremony?”

“I’m strong, Peter, but I’m not that strong. You can have your receptions and your publicity afterward.”

“You don’t want me to say anything now, except yes or no?”

“That’s all.”

He sat looking up at her for a long time. Her glance was on his eyes, but it had no more reality than the glance of a portrait. He felt alone in the room. She stood, patient, waiting, granting him nothing, not even the kindness of prompting him to hurry.

“All right, Dominique. Yes,” he said at last.

She inclined her head gravely in acquiescence.

He stood up. “I’ll get my coat,” he said. “Do you want to take your car?”

“Yes.”

“It’s an open car, isn’t it? Should I wear my fur coat?”

“No. Take a warm muffler, though. There’s a little wind.”

“No luggage? We’re coming right back to the city?”

“We’re coming right back.”

He left the door to the hall open, and she saw him putting on his coat, throwing a muffler around his throat, with the gesture of flinging a cape over his shoulder. He stepped to the door of the living room, hat in hand, and invited her to go, with a silent movement of his head. In the hall outside he pressed the button of the elevator and he stepped back to let her enter first. He was precise, sure of himself, without joy, without emotion. He seemed more coldly masculine than he had ever been before.

He took her elbow firmly, protectively, to cross the street where she had left her car. He opened the car’s door, let her slide behind the wheel and got in silently beside her. She leaned over across him and adjusted the glass wind screen on his side. She said: “If it’s not right, fix it any way you want when we start moving, so it won’t be too cold for you.” He said: “Get to the Grand Concourse, fewer lights there.” She put her handbag down on his lap while she took the wheel and started the car. There was suddenly no antagonism between them, but a quiet, hopeless feeling of comradeship, as if they were victims of the same impersonal disaster, who had to help each other.

She drove fast, as a matter of habit, an even speed without a sense of haste. They sat silently to the level drone of the motor, and they sat patiently, without shifting the positions of their bodies, when the car stopped for a light. They seemed caught in a single streak of motion, an imperative direction like the flight of a bullet that could not be stopped on its course. There was a first hint of twilight in the streets of the city. The pavements looked yellow. The shops were still open. A movie theater had lighted its sign, and the red bulbs whirled jerkily, sucking the last daylight out of the air, making the street look darker.

Peter Keating felt no need of speech. He did not seem to be Peter Keating any longer. He did not ask for warmth and he did not ask for pity. He asked nothing. She thought of that once, and she glanced at him, a glance of appreciation that was almost gentle. He met her eyes steadily; she saw understanding, but no comment. It was as if his glance said: “Of course,” nothing else.

They were out of the city, with a cold brown road flying to meet them, when he said:

“The traffic cops are bad around here. Got your press card with you, just in case?”

“I’m not the press any longer.”

“You’re not what?”

“I’m not a newspaper woman any more.”

“You quit your job?”

“No, I was fired.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Where have you been the last few days? I thought everybody knew it. ”

“Sorry. I didn’t follow things very well the last few days.”

Miles later, she said: “Give me a cigarette. In my bag.”

He opened her bag, and he saw her cigarette case, her compact, her lipstick, her comb, a folded handkerchief too white to touch, smelling faintly of her perfume. Somewhere within him he thought that this was almost like unbuttoning her blouse. But most of him was not conscious of the thought nor of the intimate proprietorship with which he opened the bag. He took a cigarette from her case, lighted it and put it from his lips to hers. “Thanks,” she said. He lighted one for himself and closed the bag.

When they reached Greenwich, it was he who made the inquiries, told her where to drive, at what block to turn, and said, “Here it is,” when they pulled up in front of the judge’s house. He got out first and helped her out of the car. He pressed the button of the doorbell.

They were married in a living room that displayed armchairs of faded tapestry, blue and purple, and a lamp with a fringe of glass beads. The witnesses were the judge’s wife and someone from next door named Chuck, who had been interrupted at some household task and smelled faintly of Clorox.

Then they came back to their car and Keating asked: “Want me to drive if you’re tired?” She said: “No, I’ll drive.”

The road to the city cut through brown fields where every rise in the ground had a shade of tired red on the side facing west. There was a purple haze eating away the edges of the fields, and a motionless streak of fire in the sky. A few cars came toward them as brown shapes, still visible; others had their lights on, two disquieting spots of yellow.

Keating watched the road; it looked narrow, a small dash in the middle of the windshield, framed by earth and hills, all of it held within the rectangle of glass before him. But the road spread as the windshield flew forward. The road filled the glass, it ran over the edges, it tore apart to let them pass, streaming in two gray bands on either side of the car. He thought it was a race and he waited to see the windshield win, to see the car hurtle into that small dash before it had time to stretch.

“Where are we going to live now, at first?” he asked. “Your place or mine?”

“Yours, of course.”

“I’d rather move to yours.”

“No. I’m closing my place.”

“You can’t possibly like my apartment.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t fit you.”

“I’ll like it.”

They were silent for a while, then he asked: “How are we going to announce this now?”

“In any way you wish. I’ll leave it up to you.”

It was growing darker and she switched on the car’s headlights. He watched the small blurs of traffic signs, low by the side of the road, springing suddenly into life as they approached, spelling out: “Left turn,” “Crossing ahead,” in dots of light that seemed conscious, malevolent, winking.

They drove silently, but there was no bond in their silence now; they were not walking together toward disaster; the disaster had come; their courage did not matter any longer. He felt disturbed and uncertain as he always felt in the presence of Dominique Francon.

He half turned to look at her. She kept her eyes on the road. Her profile in the cold wind was serene and remote and lovely in a way that was hard to bear. He looked at her gloved hands resting firmly, one on each side of the wheel. He looked down at her slender foot on the accelerator, then his eyes rose up the line of her leg. His glance remained on the narrow triangle of her tight gray skirt. He realized suddenly that he had a right to think what he was thinking.

For the first time this implication of marriage occurred to him fully and consciously. Then he knew that he had always wanted this woman, that it was the kind of feeling he would have for a whore, only lasting and hopeless and vicious. My wife, he thought for the first time, without a trace of respect in the word. He felt so violent a desire that had it been summer he would have ordered her to drive into the first side lane and he would have taken her there.

He slipped his arm along the back of the seat and encircled her shoulders, his fingers barely touching her. She did not move, resist or turn to look at him. He pulled his arm away, and he sat staring straight ahead.

“Mrs. Keating,” he said flatly, not addressing her, just as a statement of fact.

“Mrs. Peter Keating,” she said.

When they stopped in front of his apartment house, he got out and held the door for her, but she remained sitting behind the wheel.

“Good night, Peter,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She added, before the expression of his face had turned into an obscene swearword: “I’ll send my things over tomorrow and we’ll discuss everything then. Everything will begin tomorrow, Peter.”

“Where are you going?”

“I have things to settle.”

“But what will I tell people tonight?”

“Anything you wish, if at all.”

She swung the car into the traffic and drove away.

When she entered Roark’s room, that evening, he smiled, not his usual faint smile of acknowledging the expected, but a smile that spoke of waiting and pain.

He had not seen her since the trial. She had left the courtroom after her testimony and he had heard nothing from her since. He had come to her house, but her maid had told him that Miss Francon could not see him.

She looked at him now and she smiled. It was, for the first time, like a gesture of complete acceptance, as if the sight of him solved everything, answered all questions, and her meaning was only to be a woman who looked at him.

They stood silently before each other for a moment, and she thought that the most beautiful words were those which were not needed.

When he moved, she said: “Don’t say anything about the trial. Afterward.”

When he took her in his arms, she turned her body to meet his straight on, to feel the width of his chest with the width of hers, the length of his legs with the length of hers, as if she were lying against him, and her feet felt no weight, and she was held upright by the pressure of his body.

They lay in bed together that night, and they did not know when they slept, the intervals of exhausted unconsciousness as intense an act of union as the convulsed meetings of their bodies.

In the morning, when they were dressed, she watched him move about the room. She saw the drained relaxation of his movements; she thought of what she had taken from him, and the heaviness of her wrists told her that her own strength was now in his nerves, as if they had exchanged their energy.

He was at the other end of the room, his back turned to her for a moment, when she said, “Roark,” her voice quiet and low.

He turned to her, as if he had expected it and, perhaps, guessed the rest.

She stood in the middle of the floor, as she had stood on her first night in this room, solemnly composed to the performance of a rite.

“I love you, Roark.”

She had said it for the first time.

She saw the reflection of her next words on his face before she had pronounced them.

“I was married yesterday. To Peter Keating.”

It would have been easy, if she had seen a man distorting his mouth to bite off sound, closing his fists and twisting them in defense against himself. But it was not easy, because she did not see him doing this, yet knew that this was being done, without the relief of a physical gesture.

“Roark ...” she whispered, gently, frightened.

He said: “I’m all right.” Then he said: “Please wait a moment ... All right. Go on.”

“Roark, before I met you, I had always been afraid of seeing someone like you, because I knew that I’d also have to see what I saw on the witness stand and I’d have to do what I did in that courtroom. I hated doing it, because it was an insult to you to defend you—and it was an insult to myself that you had to be defended.... Roark, I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the halfway, the almost, the just-about, the in-between. They may have their justifications. I don’t know. I don’t care to inquire. I know that it is the one thing not given me to understand. When I think of what you are, I can’t accept any reality except a world of your kind. Or at least a world in which you have a fighting chance and a fight on your own terms. That does not exist. And I can’t live a life torn between that which exists—and you. It would mean to struggle against things and men who don’t deserve to be your opponents. Your fight, using their methods—and that’s too horrible a desecration. It would mean doing for you what I did for Peter Keating: lie, flatter, evade, compromise, pander to every ineptitude—in order to beg of them a chance for you, beg them to let you live, to let you function, to beg them, Roark, not to laugh at them, but to tremble because they hold the power to hurt you. Am I too weak because I can’t do this? I don’t know which is the greater strength: to accept all this for you—or to love you so much that the rest is beyond acceptance. I don’t know. I love you too much.”

He looked at her, waiting. She knew that he had understood this long ago, but that it had to be said.

“You’re not aware of them. I am. I can’t help it. I love you. The contrast is too great. Roark, you won’t win, they’ll destroy you, but I won’t be there to see it happen. I will have destroyed myself first. That’s the only gesture of protest open to me. What else could I offer you? The things people sacrifice are so little. I’ll give you my marriage to Peter Keating. I’ll refuse to permit myself happiness in their world. I’ll take suffering. That will be my answer to them, and my gift to you. I shall probably never see you again. I shall try not to. But I will live for you, through every minute and every shameful act I take, I will live for you in my own way, in the only way I can.”

He made a movement to speak, and she said:

“Wait. Let me finish. You could ask, why not kill myself then. Because I love you. Because you exist. That alone is so much that it won’t allow me to die. And since I must be alive in order to know that you are, I will live in the world as it is, in the manner of life it demands. Not halfway, but completely. Not pleading and running from it, but walking out to meet it, beating it to the pain and the ugliness, being first to choose the worst it can do to me. Not as the wife of some half-decent human being, but as the wife of Peter Keating. And only within my own mind, only where nothing can touch it, kept sacred by the protecting wall of my own degradation, there will be the thought of you and the knowledge of you, and I shall say ‘Howard Roark’ to myself once in a while, and I shall feel that I have deserved to say it.”

She stood before him, her face raised; her lips were not drawn, but closed softly, yet the shape of her mouth was too definite on her face, a shape of pain and tenderness, and resignation.

In his face she saw suffering that was made old, as if it had been part of him for a long time, because it was accepted, and it looked not like a wound, but like a scar.

“Dominique, if I told you now to have that marriage annulled at once—to forget the world and my struggle—to feel no anger, no concern, no hope—just to exist for me, for my need of you—as my wife—as my property ... ?”

He saw in her face what she had seen in his when she told him of her marriage; but he was not frightened and he watched it calmly. After a while, she answered and the words did not come from her lips, but as if her lips were forced to gather the sounds from the outside:

“I’d obey you.”

“Now you see why I won’t do it. I won’t try to stop you. I love you, Dominique.”

She closed her eyes, and he said:

“You’d rather not hear it now? But I want you to hear it. We never need to say anything to each other when we’re together. This is—for the time when we won’t be together. I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breathe air. I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival. I’ve given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need. This is the only way you can wish to be loved. This is the only way I can want you to love me. If you married me now, I would become your whole existence. But I would not want you then. You would not want yourself—and so you would not love me long. To say ‘I love you’ one must know first how to say the ‘I.’ The kind of surrender I could have from you now would give me nothing but an empty hulk. If I demanded it, I’d destroy you. That’s why I won’t stop you. I’ll let you go to your husband. I don’t know how I’ll live through tonight, but I will. I want you whole, as I am, as you’ll remain in the battle you’ve chosen. A battle is never selfless.”

She heard, in the measured tension of his words, that it was harder for him to speak them than for her to listen. So she listened.

“You must learn not to be afraid of the world. Not to be held by it as you are now. Never to be hurt by it as you were in that courtroom. I must let you learn it. I can’t help you. You must find your own way. When you have, you’ll come back to me. They won’t destroy me, Dominique. And they won’t destroy you. You’ll win, because you’ve chosen the hardest way of fighting for your freedom from the world. I’ll wait for you. I love you. I’m saying this now for all the years we’ll have to wait. I love you, Dominique.”

Then he kissed her and he let her go.

XV

AT NINE O‘CLOCK THAT MORNING PETER KEATING WAS PACING the floor of his room, his door locked. He forgot that it was nine o’clock and that Catherine was waiting for him. He had made himself forget her and everything she implied.

The door of his room was locked to protect him from his mother. Last night, seeing his furious restlessness, she had forced him to tell her the truth. He had snapped that he was married to Dominique Francon, and he had added some sort of explanation about Dominique going out of town to announce the marriage to some old relative. His mother had been so busy with gasps of delight and questions, that he had been able to answer nothing and to hide his panic; he was not certain that he had a wife and that she would come back to him in the morning.

He had forbidden his mother to announce the news, but she had made a few telephone calls last night, and she was making a few more this morning, and now their telephone was ringing constantly, with eager voices asking: “Is it true?” pouring out sounds of amazement and congratulations. Keating could see the news spreading through the city in widening circles, by the names and social positions of the people who called. He refused to answer the telephone. It seemed to him that every corner of New York was flooded with celebration and that he alone, hidden in the watertight caisson of his room, was cold and lost and horrified.

It was almost noon when the doorbell rang, and he pressed his hands to his ears, not to know who it was and what they wanted. Then he heard his mother’s voice, so shrill with joy that it sounded embarrassingly silly: “Petey darling, don’t you want to come out and kiss your wife?” He flew out into the hall, and there was Dominique, removing her soft mink coat, the fur throwing to his nostrils a wave of the street’s cold air touched by her perfume. She was smiling correctly, looking straight at him, saying: “Good morning, Peter.”

He stood drawn up, for one instant, and in that instant he relived all the telephone calls and felt the triumph to which they entitled him. He moved as a man in the arena of a crowded stadium, he smiled as if he felt the ray of an arc light playing in the creases of his smile, and he said: “Dominique my dear, this is like a dream come true!”

The dignity of their doomed understanding was gone and their marriage was what it had been intended to be.

She seemed glad of it. She said: “Sorry you didn’t carry me over the threshold, Peter.” He did not kiss her, but took her hand and kissed her arm above the wrist, in casual, intimate tenderness.

He saw his mother standing there, and he said with a dashing gesture of triumph: “Mother—Dominique Keating.”

He saw his mother kissing her. Dominique returned the kiss gravely. Mrs. Keating was gulping: “My dear, I’m so happy, so happy, God bless you, I had no idea you were so beautiful!”

He did not know what to do next, but Dominique took charge, simply, leaving them no time for wonder. She walked into the living room and she said: “Let’s have lunch first, and then you’ll show me the place, Peter. My things will be here in an hour or so.”

Mrs. Keating beamed: “Lunch is all ready for three, Miss Fran ...” She stopped. “Oh, dear, what am I to call you, honey? Mrs. Keating or ...”

“Dominique, of course,” Dominique answered without smiling.

“Aren’t we going to announce, to invite anyone, to ... ?” Keating began, but Dominique said:

“Afterward, Peter. It will announce itself.”

Later, when her luggage arrived, he saw her walking into his bedroom without hesitation. She instructed the maid how to hang up her clothes, she asked him to help her rearrange the contents of the closets.

Mrs. Keating looked puzzled. “But aren’t you children going to go away at all? It’s all so sudden and romantic, but—no honeymoon of any kind?”

“No,” said Dominique, “I don’t want to take Peter away from his work.”

He said: “This is temporary of course, Dominique. We’ll have to move to another apartment, a bigger one. I want you to choose it.”

“Why, no,” she said. “I don’t think that’s necessary. We’ll remain here.”

“I’ll move out,” Mrs. Keating offered generously, without thinking, prompted by an overwhelming fear of Dominique. “I’ll take a little place for myself.”

“No,” said Dominique. “I’d rather you wouldn’t. I want to change nothing. I want to fit myself into Peter’s life just as it is.”

“That’s sweet of you!” Mrs. Keating smiled, while Keating thought numbly that it was not sweet of her at all.

Mrs. Keating knew that when she had recovered she would hate her daughter-in-law. She could have accepted snubbing. She could not forgive Dominique’s grave politeness.

The telephone rang. Keating’s chief designer at the office delivered his congratulations and said: “We just heard it, Peter, and Guy’s pretty stunned. I really think you ought to call him up or come over here or something.”

Keating hurried to the office, glad to escape from his house for a while. He entered the office like a perfect figure of a radiant young lover. He laughed and shook hands in the drafting room, through noisy congratulations, gay shouts of envy and a few smutty references. Then he hastened to Francon’s office.

For an instant he felt oddly guilty when he entered and saw the smile on Francon’s face, a smile like a blessing. He tugged affectionately at Francon’s shoulders and he muttered: “I’m so happy, Guy, I’m so happy ...”

“I’ve always expected it,” said Francon quietly, “but now I feel right. Now it’s right that it should be all yours, Peter, all of it, this room, everything, soon.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Come, you always understand. I’m tired, Peter. You know, there comes a time when you get tired in a way that’s final and then ... No, you wouldn’t know, you’re too young. But hell, Peter, of what use am I around here? The funny part of it is that I don’t care any more even about pretending to be of any use.... I like to be honest sometimes. It’s a nice sort of feeling.... Well, anyway, it might be another year or two, but then I’m going to retire. Then it’s all yours. It might amuse me to hang on around here just a little longer—you know, I actually love the place—it’s so busy, it’s done so well, people respect us—it was a good firm, Francon & Heyer, wasn’t it?—What the hell am I saying? Francon & Keating. Then it will be just Keating.... Peter,” he asked softly, “why don’t you look happy?”

“Of course I’m happy, I’m very grateful and all that, but why in blazes should you think of retiring now?”

“I don’t mean that. I mean—why don’t you look happy when I say that it will be yours? I ... I’d like you to be happy about that, Peter.”

“For God’s sake, Guy, you’re being morbid, you’re ...”

“Peter, it’s very important to me—that you should be happy at what I’m leaving you. That you should be proud of it. And you are, aren’t you, Peter? You are?”

“Well, who wouldn’t be?” He did not look at Francon. He could not stand the sound of pleading in Francon’s voice.

“Yes, who wouldn’t be? Of course.... And you are, Peter?”

“What do you want?” snapped Keating angrily.

“I want you to feel proud of me, Peter,” said Francon humbly, simply, desperately. “I want to know that I’ve accomplished something. I want to feel that it had some meaning. At the last summing up, I want to be sure that it wasn’t all—for nothing.”

“You’re not sure of that? You’re not sure?” Keating’s eyes were murderous, as if Francon were a sudden danger to him.

“What’s the matter, Peter?” Francon asked gently, almost indifferently.

“God damn you, you have no right—not to be sure! At your age, with your name, with your prestige, with your ...”

“I want to be sure, Peter. I’ve worked very hard.”

“But you’re not sure!” He was furious and frightened, and so he wanted to hurt, and he flung out the one thing that could hurt most, forgetting that it hurt him, not Francon, that Francon wouldn’t know, had never known, wouldn’t even guess: “Well, I know somebody who’ll be sure, at the end of his life, who’ll be so God-damn sure I’d like to cut his damn throat for it!”

“Who?” asked Francon quietly, without interest.

“Guy! Guy, what’s the matter with us? What are we talking about?”

“I don’t know,” said Francon. He looked tired.

That evening Francon came to Keating’s house for dinner. He was dressed jauntily, and he twinkled with his old gallantry as he kissed Mrs. Keating’s hand. But he looked grave when he congratulated Dominique and he found little to say to her; there was a pleading look in his eyes when he glanced up at her face. Instead of the bright, cutting mockery he had expected from her, he saw a sudden understanding. She said nothing, but bent down and kissed him on the forehead and held her lips pressed gently to his head a second longer than formality required. He felt a warm flood of gratitude—and then he felt frightened. “Dominique,” he whispered—the others could not hear him—“how terribly unhappy you must be....” She laughed gaily, taking his arm: “Why, no, Father, how can you say that!” “Forgive me,” he muttered, “I’m just stupid.... This is really wonderful....”

Guests kept coming in all evening, uninvited and unannounced, anyone who had heard the news and felt privileged to drop in. Keating did not know whether he was glad to see them or not. It seemed all right, so long as the gay confusion lasted. Dominique behaved exquisitely. He did not catch a single hint of sarcasm in her manner.

It was late when the last guest departed and they were left alone among the filled ash trays and empty glasses. They sat at opposite ends of the living room, and Keating tried to postpone the moment of thinking what he had to think now.

“All right, Peter,” said Dominique, rising, “let’s get it over with.”

When he lay in the darkness beside her, his desire satisfied and left hungrier than ever by the unmoving body that had not responded, not even in revulsion, when he felt defeated in the one act of mastery he had hoped to impose upon her, his first whispered words were: “God damn you!”

He heard no movement from her.

Then he remembered the discovery which the moments of passion had wiped off his mind.

“Who was he?” he asked.

“Howard Roark,” she answered.

“All right,” he snapped, “you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to!”

He switched on the light. He saw her lying still, naked, her head thrown back. Her face looked peaceful, innocent, clean. She said to the ceiling, her voice gentle: “Peter, if I could do this ... I can do anything now....”

“If you think I’m going to bother you often, if that’s your idea of...”

“As often or as seldom as you wish, Peter.”

Next morning, entering the dining room for breakfast, Dominique found a florist’s box, long and white, resting across her plate.

“What’s that?” she asked the maid. “It was brought this morning, madam, with instructions to be put on the breakfast table.”

The box was addressed to Mrs. Peter Keating. Dominique opened it. It contained a few branches of white lilac, more extravagantly luxurious than orchids at this time of the year. There was a small card with a name written upon it in large letters that still held the quality of a hand’s dashing movement, as if the letters were laughing on the pasteboard: “Ellsworth M. Toohey.”

“How nice!” said Keating. “I wondered why we hadn’t heard from him at all yesterday.”

“Please put them in water, Mary,” said Dominique, handing the box to the maid.

In the afternoon Dominique telephoned Toohey and invited him for dinner.

The dinner took place a few days later. Keating’s mother had pleaded some previous engagement and escaped for the evening; she explained it to herself by believing that she merely needed time to get used to things. So there were only three places set on the dining-room table, candles in crystal holders, a centerpiece of blue flowers and glass bubbles.

When Toohey entered he bowed to his hosts in a manner proper to a court reception. Dominique looked like a society hostess who had always been a society hostess and could not possibly be imagined as anything else.

“Well, Ellsworth? Well?” Keating asked, with a gesture that included the hall, the air and Dominique.

“My dear Peter,” said Toohey, “let’s skip the obvious.”

Dominique led the way into the living room. She wore a dinner dress—a white satin blouse tailored like a man’s, and a long black skirt, straight and simple as the polished planes of her hair. The narrow band of the skirt about her waistline seemed to state that two hands could encircle her waist completely or snap her figure in half without much effort. The short sleeves left her arms bare, and she wore a plain gold bracelet, too large and heavy for her thin wrist. She had an appearance of elegance become perversion, an appearance of wise, dangerous maturity achieved by looking like a very young girl.

“Ellsworth, isn’t it wonderful?” said Keating, watching Dominique as one watches a fat bank account.

“No less than I expected,” said Toohey. “And no more.”

At the dinner table Keating did most of the talking. He seemed possessed by a talking jag. He turned over in words with the sensuous abandon of a cat rolling in catnip.

“Actually, Ellsworth, it was Dominique who invited you. I didn’t ask her to. You’re our first formal guest. I think that’s wonderful. My wife and my best friend. I’ve always had the silly idea that you two didn’t like each other. God knows where I get those notions. But this is what makes me so damn happy—the three of us, together.”

“Then you don’t believe in mathematics, do you, Peter?” said Toohey. “Why the surprise? Certain figures in combination have to give certain results. Granting three entities such as Dominique, you and I—this had to be the inevitable sum.”

“They say three’s a crowd,” laughed Keating. “But that’s bosh. Two are better than one, and sometimes three are better than two, it all depends.”

“The only thing wrong with that old cliché,” said Toohey, “is the erroneous implication that ‘a crowd’ is a term of opprobrium. It is quite the opposite. As you are so merrily discovering. Three, I might add, is a mystic key number. As for instance, the Holy Trinity. Or the triangle, without which we would have no movie industry. There are so many variations upon the triangle, not necessarily unhappy. Like the three of us—with me serving as understudy for the hypotenuse, quite an appropriate substitution, since I’m replacing my antipode, don’t you think so, Dominique?”

They were finishing dessert when Keating was called to the telephone. They could hear his impatient voice in the next room, snapping instructions to a draftsman who was working late on a rush job and needed help. Toohey turned, looked at Dominique and smiled. The smile said everything her manner had not allowed to be said earlier. There was no visible movement on her face, as she held his glance, but there was a change of expression, as if she were acknowledging his meaning instead of refusing to understand it. He would have preferred the closed look of refusal. The acceptance was infinitely more scornful.

“So you’ve come back to the fold, Dominique?”

“Yes, Ellsworth.”

“No more pleas for mercy?”

“Does it appear as if they will be necessary?”

“No. I admire you, Dominique.... How do you like it? I should imagine Peter is not bad, though not as good as the man we’re both thinking of, who’s probably superlative, but you’ll never have a chance to learn.”

She did not look disgusted; she looked genuinely puzzled.

“What are you talking about, Ellsworth?”

“Oh, come, my dear, we’re past pretending now, aren’t we? You’ve been in love with Roark from that first moment you saw him in Kiki Holcombe’s drawing room—or shall I be honest?—you wanted to sleep with him—but he wouldn’t spit at you—hence all your subsequent behavior.”

“Is that what you thought?” she asked quietly.

“Wasn’t it obvious? The woman scorned. As obvious as the fact that Roark had to be the man you’d want. That you’d want him in the most primitive way. And that he’d never know you existed.”

“I overestimated you, Ellsworth,” she said. She had lost all interest in his presence, even the need of caution. She looked bored. He frowned, puzzled.

Keating came back. Toohey slapped his shoulder as he passed by on the way to his seat.

“Before I go, Peter, we must have a chat about the rebuilding of the Stoddard Temple. I want you to bitch that up, too.”

“Ellsworth ... !” he gasped.

Toohey laughed. “Don’t be stuffy, Peter. Just a little professional vulgarity. Dominique won’t mind. She’s an ex-newspaper woman.”

“What’s the matter, Ellsworth?” Dominique asked. “Feeling pretty desperate? The weapons aren’t up to your usual standard.” She rose. “Shall we have coffee in the drawing room?”

Hopton Stoddard added a generous sum to the award he had won from Roark, and the Stoddard Temple was rebuilt for its new purpose by a group of architects chosen by Ellsworth Toohey: Peter Keating, Gordon L. Prescott, John Erik Snyte and somebody named Gus Webb, a boy of twenty-four who liked to utter obscenities when passing well-bred women on the street, and who had never handled an architectural commission of his own. Three of these men had social and professional standing; Gus Webb had none; Toohey included him for that reason. Of the four Gus Webb had the loudest voice and the greatest self-assurance. Gus Webb said he was afraid of nothing; he meant it. They were all members of the Council of American Builders.

The Council of American Builders had grown. After the Stoddard trial many earnest discussions were held informally in the club rooms of the A.G.A. The attitude of the A.G.A. toward Ellsworth Toohey had not been cordial, particularly since the establishment of his Council. But the trial brought a subtle change; many members pointed out that the article in “One Small Voice” had actually brought about the Stoddard lawsuit; and that a man who could force clients to sue was a man to be treated with caution. So it was suggested that Ellsworth Toohey should be invited to address the A.G.A. at one of its luncheons. Some members objected, Guy Francon among them. The most passionate objector was a young architect who made an eloquent speech, his voice trembling with the embarrassment of speaking in public for the first time; he said that he admired Ellsworth Toohey and had always agreed with Toohey’s social ideals, but if a group of people felt that some person was acquiring power over them, that was the time to fight such person. The majority overruled him. Ellsworth Toohey was asked to speak at the luncheon, the attendance was enormous and Toohey made a witty, gracious speech. Many members of the A.G.A. joined the Council of American Builders, John Erik Snyte among the first.

The four architects in charge of the Stoddard reconstruction met in Keating’s office, around a table on which they spread blueprints of the temple, photographs of Roark’s original drawings, obtained from the contractor, and a clay model which Keating had ordered made. They talked about the depression and its disastrous effect on the building industry; they talked about women, and Gordon L. Prescott told a few jokes of a bathroom nature. Then Gus Webb raised his fist and smacked it plump upon the roof of the model which was not quite dry and spread into a flat mess. “Well, boys,” he said, “let’s go to work.” “Gus, you son of a bitch,” said Keating, “the thing cost money.” “Balls!” said Gus, “we’re not paying for it.”

Each of them had a set of photographs of the original sketches with the signature “Howard Roark” visible in the comer. They spent many evenings and many weeks, drawing their own versions right on the originals, remaking and improving. They took longer than necessary. They made more changes than required. They seemed to find pleasure in doing it. Afterward, they put the four versions together and made a co-operative combination. None of them had ever enjoyed a job quite so much. They had long, friendly conferences. There were minor dissensions, such as Gus Webb saying: “Hell, Gordon, if the kitchen’s going to be yours, then the johns’ve got to be mine,” but these were only surface ripples. They felt a sense of unity and an anxious affection for one another, the kind of brotherhood that makes a man withstand the third degree rather than squeal on the gang.

The Stoddard Temple was not torn down, but its framework was carved into five floors, containing dormitories, schoolrooms, infirmary, kitchen, laundry. The entrance hall was paved with colored marble, the stairways had railings of hand-wrought aluminum, the shower stalls were glass-enclosed, the recreation rooms had gold-leafed Corinthian pilasters. The huge windows were left untouched, merely crossed by floorlines.

The four architects had decided to achieve an effect of harmony and therefore not to use any historical style in its pure form. Peter Keating designed the white marble semi-Doric portico that rose over the main entrance, and the Venetian balconies for which new doors were cut. John Erik Snyte designed the small semi-Gothic spire surmounted by a cross, and the bandcourses of stylized acanthus leaves which were cut into the limestone of the walls. Gordon L. Prescott designed the semi-Renaissance cornice, and the glass-enclosed terrace projecting from the third floor. Gus Webb designed a cubistic ornament to frame the original windows, and the modern neon sign on the roof, which read: “The Hopton Stoddard Home for Subnormal Children.”

“Comes the revolution,” said Gus Webb, looking at the completed structure, “and every kid in the country will have a home like that!”

The original shape of the building remained discernible. It was not like a corpse whose fragments had been mercifully scattered; it was like a corpse hacked to pieces and reassembled.

In September the tenants of the Home moved in. A small, expert staff was chosen by Toohey. It had been harder to find the children who qualified as inmates. Most of them had to be taken from other institutions. Sixty-five children, their ages ranging from three to fifteen, were picked out by zealous ladies who were full of kindness and so made a point of rejecting those who could be cured and selecting only the hopeless cases. There was a fifteen-year-old boy who had never learned to speak; a grinning child who could not be taught to read or write; a girl born without a nose, whose father was also her grandfather; a person called “Jackie” of whose age or sex nobody could be certain. They marched into their new home, their eyes staring vacantly, the stare of death before which no world existed.

On warm evenings children from the slums nearby would sneak into the park of the Stoddard Home and gaze wistfully at the playrooms, the gymnasium, the kitchen beyond the big windows. These children had filthy clothes and smudged faces, agile little bodies, impertinent grins, and eyes bright with a roaring, imperious, demanding intelligence. The ladies in charge of the Home chased them away with angry exclamations about “little gangsters.”

Once a month a delegation from the sponsors came to visit the Home. It was a distinguished group whose names were in many exclusive registers, though no personal achievement had ever put them there. It was a group of mink coats and diamond clips; occasionally, there was a dollar cigar and a glossy derby from a British shop among them. Ellsworth Toohey was always present to show them through the Home. The inspection made the mink coats seem warmer and their wearers’ rights to them incontestable, since it established superiority and altruistic virtue together, in a demonstration more potent than a visit to a morgue. On the way back from such an inspection Ellsworth Toohey received humbled compliments on the wonderful work he was doing, and had no trouble in obtaining checks for his other humanitarian activities, such as publications, lecture courses, radio forums and the Workshop of Social Study.

Catherine Halsey was put in charge of the children’s occupational therapy, and she moved into the Home as a permanent resident. She took up her work with a fierce zeal. She spoke about it insistently to anyone who would listen. Her voice was dry and arbitrary. When she spoke, the movements of her mouth hid the two lines that had appeared recently, cut from her nostrils to her chin; people preferred her not to remove her glasses; her eyes were not good to see. She spoke belligerently about her work not being charity, but “human reclamation.”

The most important time of her day was the hour assigned to the children’s art activities, known as the “Creative Period.” There was a special room for the purpose—a room with a view of the distant city skyline—where the children were given materials and encouraged to create freely, under the guidance of Catherine who stood watch over them like an angel presiding at a birth.

She was elated on the day when Jackie, the least promising one of the lot, achieved a completed work of imagination. Jackie picked up fistfuls of colored felt scraps and a pot of glue, and carried them to a corner of the room. There was, in the corner, a slanting ledge projecting from the wall—plastered over and painted green—left from Roark’s modeling of the Temple interior that had once controlled the recession of the light at sunset. Catherine walked over to Jackie and saw, spread out on the ledge, the recognizable shape of a dog, brown, with blue spots and five legs. Jackie wore an expression of pride. “Now you see, you see?” Catherine said to her colleagues. “Isn’t it wonderful and moving! There’s no telling how far the child will go with proper encouragement. Think of what happens to their little souls if they are frustrated in their creative instincts! It’s so important not to deny them a chance for self-expression. Did you see Jackie’s face?”

Dominique’s statue had been sold. No one knew who bought it. It had been bought by Ellsworth Toohey.

Roark’s office had shrunk back to one room. After the completion of the Cord Building he found no work. The depression had wrecked the building trade; there was little work for anyone; it was said that the skyscraper was finished; architects were closing their offices.

A few commissions still dribbled out occasionally, and a group of architects hovered about them with the dignity of a bread line. There were men like Ralston Holcombe among them, men who had never begged, but had demanded references before they accepted a client. When Roark tried to get a commission, he was rejected in a manner implying that if he had no more sense than that, politeness would be a wasted effort. “Roark?” cautious businessmen said. “The tabloid hero? Money’s too scarce nowadays to waste it on lawsuits afterwards.”

He got a few jobs, remodeling rooming houses, an assignment that involved no more than erecting partitions and rearranging the plumbing. “Don’t take it, Howard,” Austen Heller said angrily. “The infernal gall of offering you that kind of work! After a skyscraper like the Cord Building. After the Enright House.” “I’ll take anything,” said Roark.

The Stoddard award had taken more than the amount of his fee for the Cord Building. But he had saved enough to exist on for a while. He paid Mallory’s rent and he paid for most of their frequent meals together.

Mallory had tried to object. “Shut up, Steve,” Roark had said. “I’m not doing it for you. At a time like this I owe myself a few luxuries. So I’m simply buying the most valuable thing that can be bought—your time. I’m competing with a whole country—and that’s quite a luxury, isn’t it? They want you to do baby plaques and I don’t, and I like having my way against theirs.”

“What do you want me to work on, Howard?”

“I want you to work without asking anyone what he wants you to work on.”

Austen Heller heard about it from Mallory, and spoke of it to Roark in private.

“If you’re helping him, why don’t you let me help you?”

“I’d let you if you could,” said Roark. “But you can’t. All he needs is his time. He can work without clients. I can’t.”

“It’s amusing, Howard, to see you in the role of an altruist.”

“You don’t have to insult me. It’s not altruism. But I’ll tell you this: most people say they’re concerned with the suffering of others. I’m not. And yet there’s one thing I can’t understand. Most of them would not pass by if they saw a man bleeding in the road, mangled by a hit-and-run driver. And most of them would not turn their heads to look at Steven Mallory. But don’t they know that if suffering could be measured, there’s more suffering in Steven Mallory when he can’t do the work he wants to do, than in a whole field of victims mowed down by a tank? If one must relieve the pain of this world, isn’t Mallory the place to begin? ... However, that’s not why I’m doing it.”

Roark had never seen the reconstructed Stoddard Temple. On an evening in November he went to see it. He did not know whether it was surrender to pain or victory over the fear of seeing it.

It was late and the garden of the Stoddard Home was deserted. The building was dark, a single light showed in a back window upstairs. Roark stood looking at the building for a long time.

The door under the Greek portico opened and a slight masculine figure came out. It hurried casually down the steps—and then stopped.

“Hello, Mr. Roark,” said Ellsworth Toohey quietly.

Roark looked at him without curiosity. “Hello,” said Roark.

“Please don’t run away.” The voice was not mocking, but earnest.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“I think I knew that you’d come here some day and I think I wanted to be here when you came. I’ve kept inventing excuses for myself to hang about this place.” There was no gloating in the voice; it sounded drained and simple.

“Well?”

“You shouldn’t mind speaking to me. You see, I understand your work. What I do about it is another matter.”

“You are free to do what you wish about it.”

“I understand your work better than any living person—with the possible exception of Dominique Francon. And, perhaps, better than she does. That’s a great deal, isn’t it, Mr. Roark? You haven’t many people around you who can say that. It’s a greater bond than if I were your devoted, but blind supporter.”

“I knew you understood.”

“Then you won’t mind talking to me.”

“About what?”

In the darkness it sounded almost as if Toohey had sighed. After a while he pointed to the building and asked:

“Do you understand this?”

Roark did not answer.

Toohey went on softly: “What does it look like to you? Like a senseless mess? Like a chance collection of driftwood? Like an imbecile chaos? But is it, Mr. Roark? Do you see no method? You who know the language of structure and the meaning of form. Do you see no purpose here?”

“I see none in discussing it.”

“Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us.”

“But I don’t think of you.”

Toohey’s face had an expression of attentiveness, of listening quietly to something as simple as fate. He remained silent, and Roark asked:

“What did you want to say to me?”

Toohey looked at him, and then at the bare trees around them, at the river far below, at the great rise of the sky beyond the river.

“Nothing,” said Toohey.

He walked away, his steps creaking on the gravel in the silence, sharp and even, like the cracks of an engine’s pistons.

Roark stood alone in the empty driveway, looking at the building.

Part 3

GAIL WYNAND

I

GAIL WYNAND RAISED A GUN TO HIS TEMPLE. He felt the pressure of a metal ring against his skin—and nothing else. He might have been holding a lead pipe or a piece of jewelry; it was just a small circle without significance. “I am going to die,” he said aloud—and yawned.

He felt no relief, no despair, no fear. The moment of his end would not grant him even the dignity of seriousness. It was an anonymous moment; a few minutes ago, he had held a toothbrush in that hand; now he held a gun with the same casual indifference.

One does not die like this, he thought. One must feel a great joy or a healthy terror. One must salute one’s own end. Let me feel a spasm of dread and I’ll pull the trigger. He felt nothing.

He shrugged and lowered the gun. He stood tapping it against the palm of his left hand. People always speak of a black death or a red death, he thought; yours, Gail Wynand, will be a gray death. Why hasn’t anyone ever said that this is the ultimate horror? Not screams, pleas or convulsions. Not the indifference of a clean emptiness, disinfected by the fire of some great disaster. But this—a mean, smutty little horror, impotent even to frighten. You can’t do it like that, he told himself, smiling coldly; it would be in such bad taste.

He walked to the wall of his bedroom. His penthouse was built above the fifty-seventh floor of a great residential hotel which he owned, in the center of Manhattan; he could see the whole city below him. The bedroom was a glass cage on the roof of the penthouse, its walls and ceiling made of huge glass sheets. There were dust-blue suede curtains to be pulled across the walls and enclose the room when he wished; there was nothing to cover the ceiling. Lying in bed, he could study the stars over his head, or see flashes of lightning, or watch the rain smashed into furious, glittering sunburst in mid-air above him, against the unseen protection. He liked to extinguish the lights and pull all the curtains open when he lay in bed with a woman. “We are fornicating in the sight of six million people,” he would tell her.

He was alone now. The curtains were open. He stood looking at the city. It was late and the great riot of lights below him was beginning to die down. He thought that he did not mind having to look at the city for many more years and he did not mind never seeing it again.

He leaned against the wall and felt the cold glass through the thin, dark silk of his pyjamas. A monogram was embroidered in white on his breast pocket: GW, reproduced from his handwriting, exactly as he signed his initials with a single imperial motion.

People said that Gail Wynand’s greatest deception, among many, was his appearance. He looked like the decadent, overperfected end product of a long line of exquisite breeding—and everybody knew that he came from the gutter. He was tall, too slender for physical beauty, as if all his flesh and muscle had been bred away. It was not necessary for him to stand erect in order to convey an impression of hardness. Like a piece of expensive steel, he bent, slouched and made people conscious, not of his pose, but of the ferocious spring that could snap him straight at any moment. This hint was all he needed; he seldom stood quite straight; he lounged about. Under any clothes he wore, it gave him an air of consummate elegance.

His face did not belong to modern civilization, but to ancient Rome; the face of an eternal patrician. His hair, streaked with gray, was swept smoothly back from a high forehead. His skin was pulled tight over the sharp bones of his face; his mouth was long and thin; his eyes, under slanting eyebrows, were pale blue and photographed like two sardonic white ovals. An artist had asked him once to sit for a painting of Mephistopheles; Wynand had laughed, refusing, and the artist had watched sadly, because the laughter made the face perfect for his purpose.

He slouched casually against the glass pane of his bedroom, the weight of a gun on his palm. Today, he thought; what was today? Did anything happen that would help me now and give meaning to this moment?

Today had been like so many other days behind him that particular features were hard to recognize. He was fifty-one years old, and it was the middle of October in the year 1932; he was certain of this much; the rest took an effort of memory.

He had awakened and dressed at six o’clock this morning; he had never slept more than four hours on any night of his adult life. He descended to his dining room where breakfast was served to him. His penthouse, a small structure, stood on the edge of a vast roof landscaped as a garden. The rooms were a superlative artistic achievement; their simplicity and beauty would have aroused gasps of admiration had this house belonged to anyone else; but people were shocked into silence when they thought that this was the home of the publisher of the New York Banner, the most vulgar newspaper in the country.

After breakfast he went to his study. His desk was piled with every important newspaper, book and magazine received that morning from all over the country. He worked alone at his desk for three hours, reading and making brief notes with a large blue pencil across the printed pages. The notes looked like a spy’s shorthand; nobody could decipher them except the dry, middle-aged secretary who entered the study when Wynand left it. He had not heard her voice in five years, but no communication between them was necessary. When he returned to his study in the evening, the secretary and the pile of papers were gone; on his desk he found neatly typed pages containing the things he had wished to be recorded from his morning’s work.

At ten o’clock he arrived at the Banner Building, a plain, grimy structure in an undistinguished neighborhood of lower Manhattan. When he walked through the narrow halls of the building, the employees he met wished him a good morning. The greeting was correct and he answered courteously; but his passage had the effect of a death ray that stopped the motor of living organisms.

Among the many hard rules imposed upon the employees of all Wynand enterprises, the hardest was the one demanding that no man pause in his work if Mr. Wynand entered the room, or notice his entrance. Nobody could predict what department he would choose to visit or when. He could appear at any moment in any part of the building—and his presence was as unobtrusive as an electric shock. The employees tried to obey the rule as best they could; but they preferred three hours of overtime to ten minutes of working under his silent observation.

This morning, in his office, he went over the proofs of the Banner’s Sunday editorials. He slashed blue lines across the spreads he wished eliminated. He did not sign his initials; everybody knew that only Gail Wynand could make quite that kind of blue slashes, lines that seemed to rip the authors of the copy out of existence.

He finished the proofs, then asked to be connected with the editor of the Wynand Herald, in Springville, Kansas. When he telephoned his provinces, Wynand’s name was never announced to the victim. He expected his voice to be known to every key citizen of his empire.

“Good morning, Cummings,” he said when the editor answered.

“My God!” gasped the editor. “It isn’t ...”

“It is,” said Wynand. “Listen, Cummings. One more piece of crap like yesterday’s yarn on the Last Rose of Summer and you can go back to the high school Bugle.”

“Yes, Mr. Wynand.”

Wynand hung up. He asked to be connected with an eminent Senator in Washington.

“Good morning, Senator,” he said when the gentleman came on the wire within two minutes. “It is so kind of you to answer this call. I appreciate it. I do not wish to impose on your time. But I felt I owed you an expression of my deepest gratitude. I called to thank you for your work in passing the Hayes-Langston Bill.”

“But ... Mr. Wynand!” The Senator’s voice seemed to squirm. “It’s so nice of you, but ... the Bill hasn’t been passed.”

“Oh, that’s right. My mistake. It will be passed tomorrow.”

A meeting of the board of directors of the Wynand Enterprises, Inc., had been scheduled for eleven-thirty that morning. The Wynand Enterprises consisted of twenty-two newspapers, seven magazines, three news services and two newsreels. Wynand owned seventy-five percent of the stock. The directors were not certain of their functions or purpose. Wynand had ordered meetings of the board always to start on time, whether he was present or not. Today he entered the board room at twelve twenty-five. A distinguished old gentleman was making a speech. The directors were not allowed to stop or notice Wynand’s presence. He walked to the empty chair at the head of the long mahogany table and sat down. No one turned to him; it was as if the chair had just been occupied by a ghost whose existence they dared not admit. He listened silently for fifteen minutes. He got up in the middle of a sentence and left the room as he had entered.

On a large table in his office he spread out maps of Stoneridge, his new real-estate venture, and spent half an hour discussing it with two of his agents. He had purchased a vast tract of land on Long Island, which was to be converted into the Stoneridge Development, a new community of small home owners, every curbstone, street and house to be built by Gail Wynand. The few people who knew of his real-estate activities had told him that he was crazy. It was a year when no one thought of building. But Gail Wynand had made his fortune on decisions which people called crazy.

The architect to design Stoneridge had not been chosen. News of the project had seeped into the starved profession. For weeks Wynand had refused to read letters or answer calls from the best architects of the country and their friends. He refused once more when, at the end of his conference, his secretary informed him that Mr. Ralston Holcombe most urgently requested two minutes of his time on the telephone.

When the agents were gone, Wynand pressed a button on his desk, summoning Alvah Scarret. Scarret entered the office, smiling happily. He always answered that buzzer with the flattered eagerness of an office boy.

“Alvah, what in hell is the Gallant Gallstone?”

Scarret laughed. “Oh, that? It’s the title of a novel. By Lois Cook.”

“What kind of a novel?”

“Oh, just a lot of drivel. It’s supposed to be a sort of prose poem. It’s all about a gallstone that thinks that it’s an independent entity, a sort of a rugged individualist of the gall bladder, if you see what I mean, and then the man takes a big dose of castor oil—there’s a graphic description of the consequences—I’m not sure it’s correct medically, but anyway that’s the end of the gallant gallstone. It’s all supposed to prove that there’s no such thing as free will.”

“How many copies has it sold?”

“I don’t know. Not very many, I think. Just among the intelligentsia. But I hear it’s picked up some, lately, and ...”

“Precisely. What’s going on around here, Alvah?”

“What? Oh, you mean you noticed the few mentions which ...”

“I mean I’ve noticed it all over the Banner in the last few weeks. Very nicely done, too, if it took me that long to discover that it wasn’t accidental.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean? Why should that particular title appear continuously, in the most inappropriate places? One day it’s in a police story about the execution of some murderer who ‘died bravely like the Gallant Gallstone.’ Two days later it’s on page sixteen, in a state yam from Albany. ‘Senator Hazleton thinks he’s an independent entity, but it might turn out that he’s only a Gallant Gallstone.’ Then it’s in the obituaries. Yesterday it was on the women’s page. Today, it’s in the comics. Snooxy calls his rich landlord a Gallant Gallstone.”

Scarret chortled peacefully. “Yes, isn’t it silly?”

“I thought it was silly. At first. Now I don’t.”

“But what the hell, Gail! It’s not as if it were a major issue and our by-liners plugged it. It’s just the small fry, the forty-dollar-a-week ones.”

“That’s the point. One of them. The other is that the book’s not a famous best-seller. If it were, I could understand the title popping into their heads automatically. But it isn’t. So someone’s doing the popping. Why?”

“Oh, come, Gail! Why would anyone want to bother? And what do we care? If it were a political issue ... But hell, who can get any gravy out of plugging for free will or against free will?”

“Did anyone consult you about this plugging?”

“No. I tell you, nobody’s behind it. It’s just spontaneous. Just a lot of people who thought it was a funny gag.”

“Who was the first one that you heard it from?”

“I don’t know.... Let me see.... It was ... yes, I think it was Ellsworth Toohey.”

“Have it stopped. Be sure to tell Mr. Toohey.”

“Okay, if you say so. But it’s really nothing. Just a lot of people amusing themselves.”

“I don’t like to have anyone amusing himself on my paper.”

“Yes, Gail.”

At two o’clock Wynand arrived, as guest of honor, at a luncheon given by a National Convention of Women’s Clubs. He sat at the right of the chairwoman, in an echoing banquet hall filled with the odors of corsages—gardenias and sweet peas—and of fried chicken. After luncheon Wynand spoke. The Convention advocated careers for married women; the Wynand papers had fought against the employment of married women for many years. Wynand spoke for twenty minutes and said nothing at all; but he conveyed the impression that he supported every sentiment expressed at the meeting. Nobody had ever been able to explain the effect of Gail Wynand on an audience, particularly an audience of women. He did nothing spectacular; his voice was low, metallic, inclined to sound monotonous; he was too correct, in a manner that was almost deliberate satire on correctness. Yet he conquered all listeners. People said it was his subtle, enormous virility; it made the courteous voice speaking about school, home and family sound as if he were making love to every old hag present.

Returning to his office, Wynand stopped in the city room. Standing at a tall desk, a big blue pencil in his hand, he wrote on a huge sheet of plain print stock, in letters an inch high, a brilliant, ruthless editorial denouncing all advocates of careers for women. The GW at the end stood like a streak of blue flame. He did not read the piece over—he never needed to—but threw it on the desk of the first editor in sight and walked out of the room.

Late in the afternoon, when Wynand was ready to leave his office, his secretary announced that Ellsworth Toohey requested the privilege of seeing him. “Let him in,” said Wynand.

Toohey entered, a cautious half-smile on his face, a smile mocking himself and his boss, but with a delicate sense of balance, sixty percent of the mockery directed at himself. He knew that Wynand did not want to see him, and being received was not in his favor.

Wynand sat behind his desk, his face courteously blank. Two diagonal ridges stood out faintly on his forehead, parallel with his slanting eyebrows. It was a disconcerting peculiarity which his face assumed at times; it gave the effect of a double exposure, an ominous emphasis.

“Sit down, Mr. Toohey. Of what service can I be to you?”

“Oh, I’m much more presumptuous than that, Mr. Wynand,” said Toohey gaily. “I didn’t come to ask for your services, but to offer you mine.”

“In what matter?”

“Stoneridge.”

The diagonal lines stood out sharper on Wynand’s forehead.

“Of what use can a newspaper columnist be to Stoneridge?”

“A newspaper columnist—none, Mr. Wynand. But an architectural expert ...” Toohey let his voice trail into a mocking question mark.

If Toohey’s eyes had not been fixed insolently on Wynand’s, he would have been ordered out of the office at once. But the glance told Wynand that Toohey knew to what extent he had been plagued by people recommending architects and how hard he had tried to avoid them; and that Toohey had outwitted him by obtaining this interview for a purpose Wynand had not expected. The impertinence of it amused Wynand, as Toohey had known it would.

“All right, M. Toohey. Whom are you selling?”

“Peter Keating.”

“Well?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Well, sell him to me.”

Toohey was stopped, then shrugged brightly and plunged in:

“You understand, of course, that I’m not connected with Mr. Keating in any way. I’m acting only as his friend—and yours.” The voice sounded pleasantly informal, but it had lost some of its certainty. “Honestly, I know it does sound trite, but what else can I say? It just happens to be the truth.” Wynand would not help him out. “I presumed to come here because I felt it was my duty to give you my opinion. No, not a moral duty. Call it an esthetic one. I know that you demand the best in anything you do. For a project of the size you have in mind there’s not another architect living who can equal Peter Keating in efficiency, taste, originality, imagination. That, Mr. Wynand, is my sincere opinion.”

“I quite believe you.”

“You do?”

“Of course. But, Mr. Toohey, why should I consider your opinion?”

“Well, after all, I am your architectural expert!” He could not keep the edge of anger out of his voice.

“My dear Mr. Toohey, don’t confuse me with my readers.”

After a moment, Toohey leaned back and spread his hands out in laughing helplessness.

“Frankly, Mr. Wynand, I didn’t think my word would carry much weight with you. So I didn’t intend trying to sell you Peter Keating.”

“No? What did you intend?”

“Only to ask that you give half an hour of your time to someone who can convince you of Peter Keating’s ability much better than I can.”

“Who is that?”

“Mrs. Peter Keating.”

“Why should I wish to discuss this matter with Mrs. Peter Keating?”

“Because she is an exceedingly beautiful woman and an extremely difficult one.”

Wynand threw his head back and laughed aloud.

“Good God, Toohey, am I as obvious as that?”

Toohey blinked, unprepared.

“Really, Mr. Toohey, I owe you an apology, if, by allowing my tastes to become so well known, I caused you to be so crude. But I had no idea that among your many other humanitarian activities you were also a pimp.”

Toohey rose to his feet.

“Sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Toohey. I have no desire whatever to meet Mrs. Peter Keating.”

“I didn’t think you would have, Mr. Wynand. Not on my unsupported suggestion. I foresaw that several hours ago. In fact, as early as this morning. So I took the liberty of preparing for myself another chance to discuss this with you. I took the liberty of sending you a present. When you get home tonight, you will find my gift there. Then, if you feel that I was justified in expecting you to do so, you can telephone me and I shall come over at once so that you will be able to tell me whether you wish to meet Mrs. Peter Keating or not.”

“Toohey, this is unbelievable, but I believe you’re offering me a bribe.”

“I am.”

“You know, that’s the sort of stunt you should be allowed to get away with completely—or lose your job for.”

“I shall rest upon your opinion of my present tonight.”

“All right, Mr. Toohey, I’ll look at your present.”

Toohey bowed and turned to go. He was at the door when Wynand added:

“You know, Toohey, one of these days you’ll bore me.”

“I shall endeavor not to do so until the right time,” said Toohey, bowed again and went out.

When Wynand returned to his home, he had forgotten all about Ellsworth Toohey.

That evening, in his penthouse, Wynand had dinner with a woman who had a white face, soft brown hair and, behind her, three centuries of fathers and brothers who would have killed a man for a hint of the things which Gail Wynand had experienced with her.

The line of her arm, when she raised a crystal goblet of water to her lips, was as perfect as the lines of the silver candelabra produced by a matchless talent—and Wynand observed it with the same appreciation. The candlelight flickering on the planes of her face made a sight of such beauty that he wished she were not alive, so that he could look, say nothing and think what he pleased.

“In a month or two, Gail,” she said, smiling lazily, “when it gets really cold and nasty, let’s take the I Do and sail somewhere straight into the sun, as we did last winter.”

I Do was the name of Wynand’s yacht. He had never explained that name to anyone. Many women had questioned him about it. This woman had questioned him before. Now, as he remained silent, she asked it again:

“By the way, darling, what does it mean—the name of that wonderful mud-scow of yours?”

“It’s a question I don’t answer,” he said. “One of them.”

“Well, shall I get my wardrobe ready for the cruise?”

“Green is your best color. It looks well at sea. I love to watch what it does to your hair and your arms. I shall miss the sight of your naked arms against green silk. Because tonight is the last time.”

Her fingers lay still on the stem of the glass. Nothing had given her a hint that tonight was to be the last time. But she knew that these words were all he needed to end it. All of Wynand’s women had known that they were to expect an end like this and that it was not to be discussed. After a while, she asked, her voice low:

“What reason, Gail?”

“The obvious one.”

He reached into his pocket and took out a diamond bracelet; it flashed a cold, brilliant fire in the candlelight; its heavy links hung limply in his fingers. It had no case, no wrapper. He tossed it across the table.

“A memorial, my dear,” he said. “Much more valuable than that which it commemorates.”

The bracelet hit the goblet and made it ring, a thin, sharp cry, as if the glass had screamed for the woman. The woman made no sound. He knew that it was horrible, because she was the kind to whom one did not offer such gifts at such moments, just as all those other women had been; and because she would not refuse, as all the others had not refused.

“Thank you, Gail,” she said, clasping the bracelet about her wrist, not looking at him across the candles.

Later, when they had walked into the drawing room, she stopped and the glance between her long eyelashes moved toward the darkness where the stairway to his bedroom began.

“To let me earn the memorial, Gail?” she asked, her voice flat.

He shook his head.

“I had really intended that,” he said. “But I’m tired.”

When she had gone, he stood in the hall and thought that she suffered, that the suffering was real, but after a while none of it would be real to her, except the bracelet. He could no longer remember the time when such a thought had the power to give him bitterness. When he recalled that he, too, was concerned in the event of this evening, he felt nothing, except wonder why he had not done this long ago.

He went to his library. He sat reading for a few hours. Then he stopped. He stopped short, without reason, in the middle of an important sentence. He had no desire to read on. He had no desire ever to make another effort.

Nothing had happened to him—a happening is a positive reality, and no reality could ever make him helpless; this was some enormous negative—as if everything had been wiped out, leaving a senseless emptiness, faintly indecent because it seemed so ordinary, so unexciting, like murder wearing a homey smile.

Nothing was gone—except desire; no, more than that—the root, the desire to desire. He thought that a man who loses his eyes still retains the concept of sight; but he had heard of a ghastlier blindness—if the brain centers controlling vision are destroyed, one loses even the memory of visual perception.

He dropped the book and stood up. He had no wish to remain on that spot; he had no wish to move from it. He thought that he should go to sleep. It was much too early for him, but he could get up earlier tomorrow. He went to his bedroom, he took a shower, he put on his pyjamas. Then he opened a drawer of his dresser and saw the gun he always kept there. It was the immediate recognition, the sudden stab of interest, that made him pick it up.

It was the lack of shock, when he thought he would kill himself, that convinced him he should. The thought seemed so simple, like an argument not worth contesting. Like a bromide.

Now he stood at the glass wall, stopped by that very simplicity. One could make a bromide of one’s life, he thought; but not of one’s death.

He walked to the bed and sat down, the gun hanging in his hand. A man about to die, he thought, is supposed to see his whole life in a last flash. I see nothing. But I could make myself see it. I could go over it again, by force. Let me find in it either the will to live on or the reason to end it now.

Gail Wynand, aged twelve, stood in the darkness under a broken piece of wall on the shore of the Hudson, one arm swung back, the fist closed, ready to strike, waiting.

The stones under his feet rose to the remnant of a corner; one side of it hid him from the street; there was nothing behind the other side but a sheer drop to the river. An unlighted, unpaved stretch of waterfront lay before him, sagging structures and empty spaces of sky, warehouses, a crooked cornice hanging somewhere over a window with a malignant light.

In a moment he would have to fight—and he knew it would be for his life. He stood still. His closed fist, held down and back, seemed to clutch invisible wires that stretched to every key spot of his lanky, fleshless body, under the ragged pants and shirt, to the long, swollen tendon of his bare arm, to the taut cords of his neck. The wires seemed to quiver; the body was motionless. He was like a new sort of lethal instrument; if a finger were to touch any part of him, it would release the trigger.

He knew that the leader of the boys’ gang was looking for him and that the leader would not come alone. Two of the boys he expected fought with knives; one had a killing to his credit. He waited for them, his own pockets empty. He was the youngest member of the gang and the last to join. The leader had said that he needed a lesson.

It had started over the looting of the barges on the river, which the gang was planning. The leader had decided that the job would be done at night. The gang had agreed; all but Gail Wynand. Gail Wynand had explained, in a slow, contemptuous voice, that the Little Plug-Uglies, farther down the river, had tried the same stunt last week and had left six members in the hands of the cops, plus two in the cemetery; the job had to be done at daybreak, when no one would expect it. The gang hooted him. It made no difference. Gail Wynand was not good at taking orders. He recognized nothing but the accuracy of his own judgment. So the leader wished to settle the issue once and for all.

The three boys walked so softly that the people behind the thin walls they passed could not hear their steps. Gail Wynand heard them a block away. He did not move in his corner; only his wrist stiffened a little.

When the moment was right, he leaped. He leaped straight into space, without thought of landing, as if a catapult had sent him on a flight of miles. His chest struck the head of one enemy, his stomach another, his feet smashed into the chest of the third. The four of them went down. When the three lifted their faces, Gail Wynand was unrecognizable; they saw a whirl suspended in the air above them, and something darted at them out of the whirl with a scalding touch.

He had nothing but his two fists; they had five fists and a knife on their side; it did not seem to count. They heard their blows landing with a thud as on hard rubber; they felt the break in the thrust of their knife, which told that it had been stopped and had cut its way out. But the thing they were fighting was invulnerable. He had no time to feel; he was too fast; pain could not catch up with him; he seemed to leave it hanging in the air over the spot where it had hit him and where he was no longer in the next second.

He seemed to have a motor between his shoulder blades to propel his arms in two circles; only the circles were visible; the arms had vanished like the spokes of a speeding wheel. The circle landed each time, and stopped whatever it had landed upon, without a break in its spin. One boy saw his knife disappear in Wynand’s shoulder; he saw the jerk of the shoulder that sent the knife slicing down through Wynand’s side and flung it out at the belt. It was the last thing the boy saw. Something happened to his chin and he did not feel it when the back of his head struck against a pile of old bricks.

For a long time the two others fought the centrifuge that was now spattering red drops against the walls around them. But it was no use. They were not fighting a man. They were fighting a bodiless human will.

When they gave up, groaning among the bricks, Gail Wynand said in a normal voice: “We’ll pull it off at daybreak,” and walked away. From that moment on, he was the leader of the gang.

The looting of the barges was done at daybreak, two days later, and came off with brilliant success.

Gail Wynand lived with his father in the basement of an old house in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen. His father was a longshoreman, a tall, silent, illiterate man who had never gone to school. His own father and his grandfather were of the same kind, and they knew of nothing but poverty in their family. But somewhere far back in the line there had been a root of aristocracy, the glory of some noble ancestor and then some tragedy, long since forgotten, that had brought the descendants to the gutter. Something about all the Wynands—in tenement, saloon and jail —did not fit their surroundings. Gail’s father was known on the waterfront as the Duke.

Gail’s mother had died of consumption when he was two years old. He was an only son. He knew vaguely that there had been some great drama in his father’s marriage; he had seen a picture of his mother; she did not look and she was not dressed like the women of their neighborhood; she was very beautiful. All life had gone out of his father when she died. He loved Gail; but it was the kind of devotion that did not require two sentences a week.

Gail did not look like his mother or father. He was a throwback to something no one could quite figure out; the distance had to be reckoned, not in generations, but in centuries. He was always too tall for his age, and too thin. The boys called him Stretch Wynand. Nobody knew what he used for muscles; they knew only that he used it.

He had worked at one job after another since early childhood. For a long while he sold newspapers on street corners. One day he walked up to the press-room boss and stated that they should start a new service—delivering the paper to the reader’s door in the morning; he explained how and why it would boost circulation. “Yeah?” said the boss. “I know it will work,” said Wynand. “Well, you don’t run things around here,” said the boss. “You’re a fool,” said Wynand. He lost the job.

He worked in a grocery store. He ran errands, he swept the soggy wooden floor, he sorted out barrels of rotting vegetables, he helped to wait on customers, patiently weighing a pound of flour or filling a pitcher with milk from a huge can. It was like using a steamroller to press handkerchiefs. But he set his teeth and stuck to it. One day, he explained to the grocer what a good idea it would be to put milk up in bottles, like whisky. “You shut your trap and go wait on Mrs. Sullivan there,” said the grocer, “don’t you tell me nothing I don’t know about my business. You don’t run things around here.” He waited on Mrs. Sullivan and said nothing.

He worked in a poolroom. He cleaned spittoons and washed up after drunks. He heard and saw things that gave him immunity from astonishment for the rest of his life. He made his greatest effort and learned to keep silent, to keep the place others described as his place, to accept ineptitude as his master—and to wait. No one had ever heard him speak of what he felt. He felt many emotions toward his fellow men, but respect was not one of them.

He worked as bootlack on a ferryboat. He was shoved and ordered around by every bloated horse trader, by every drunken deck hand aboard. If he spoke, he heard some thick voice answering: “You don’t run things around here.” But he liked this job. When he had no customers, he stood at the rail and looked at Manhattan. He looked at the yellow boards of new houses, at the vacant lots, at the cranes and derricks, at the few towers rising in the distance. He thought of what should be built and what should be destroyed, of the space, the promise and what could be made of it. A hoarse shout—“Hey, boy!”—interrupted him. He went back to his bench and bent obediently over some muddy shoe. The customer saw only a small head of light brown hair and two thin, capable hands.

On foggy evenings, under a gas lantern on a street corner, nobody noticed the slender figure leaning against a lamppost, the aristocrat of the Middle Ages, the timeless patrician whose every instinct cried that he should command, whose swift brain told him why he had the right to do so, the feudal baron created to rule—but born to sweep floors and take orders.

He had taught himself to read and write at the age of five, by asking questions. He read everything he found. He could not tolerate the inexplicable. He had to understand anything known to anyone. The emblem of his childhood—the coat-of-arms he devised for himself in place of the one lost for him centuries ago—was the question mark. No one ever needed to explain anything to him twice. He learned his first mathematics from the engineers laying sewer pipes. He learned geography from the sailors on the waterfront. He learned civics from the politicians at a local club that was a gangsters’ hang-out. He had never gone to church or to school. He was twelve when he walked into a church. He listened to a sermon on patience and humility. He never came back. He was thirteen when he decided to see what education was like and enrolled at a public school. His father said nothing about this decision, as he said nothing whenever Gail came home battered after a gang fight.

During his first week at school the teacher called on Gail Wynand constantly—it was sheer pleasure to her, because he always knew the answers. When he trusted his superiors and their purpose, he obeyed like a Spartan, imposing on himself the kind of discipline he demanded of his own subjects in the gang. But the force of his will was wasted: within a week he saw that he needed no effort to be first in the class. After a month the teacher stopped noticing his presence; it seemed pointless, he always knew his lesson and she had to concentrate on the slower, duller children. He sat, unflinching, through hours that dragged like chains, while the teacher repeated and chewed and rechewed, sweating to force some spark of intellect from vacant eyes and mumbling voices. At the end of two months, reviewing the rudiments of history which she had tried to pound into her class, the teacher asked: “And how many original states were there in the Union?” No hands were raised. Then Gail Wynand’s arm went up. The teacher nodded to him. He rose. “Why,” he asked, “should I swill everything down ten times? I know all that.” “You are not the only one in the class,” said the teacher. He uttered an expression that struck her white and made her blush fifteen minutes later, when she grasped it fully. He walked to the door. On the threshold he turned to add: “Oh yes. There were thirteen original states.”

That was the last of his formal education.

There were people in Hell’s Kitchen who never ventured beyond its boundaries, and others who seldom stepped out of the tenement in which they were born. But Gail Wynand often went for a walk through the best streets of the city. He felt no bitterness against the world of wealth, no envy and no fear. He was simply curious and he felt at home on Fifth Avenue, just as anywhere else. He walked past the stately mansions, his hands in his pockets, his toes sticking out of flat-soled shoes. People glared at him, but it had no effect. He passed by and left behind him the feeling that he belonged on this street and they didn’t. He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand.

He wanted to know what made these people different from those in his neighborhood. It was not the clothes, the carriages or the banks that caught his notice; it was the books. People in his neighborhood had clothes, horse wagons and money; degrees were inessential; but they did not read books. He decided to learn what was read by the people on Fifth Avenue. One day, he saw a lady waiting in a carriage at the curb; he knew she was a lady—his judgment on such matters was more acute than the discrimination of the Social Register; she was reading a book. He leaped to the steps of the carriage, snatched the book and ran away. It would have taken swifter, slimmer men than the cops to catch him.

It was a volume of Herbert Spencer. He went through a quiet agony trying to read it to the end. He read it to the end. He understood one quarter of what he had read. But this started him on a process which he pursued with a systematic, fist-clenched determination. Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another on that subject. He branched out erratically in all directions; he read volumes of specialized erudition first, and high-school primers afterward. There was no order in his reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind.

He discovered the reading room of the Public Library and he went there for a while—to study the layout. Then, one day, at various times, a succession of young boys, painfully combed and unconvincingly washed, came to visit the reading room. They were thin when they came, but not when they left. That evening Gail Wynand had a small library of his own in the corner of his basement. His gang had executed his orders without protest. It was a scandalous assignment; no self-respecting gang had ever looted anything as pointless as books. But Stretch Wynand had given the orders—and one did not argue with Stretch Wynand.

He was fifteen when he was found, one morning, in the gutter, a mass of bleeding pulp, both legs broken, beaten by some drunken longshoreman. He was unconsious when found. But he had been conscious that night, after the beating. He had been left alone in a dark alley. He had seen a light around the corner. Nobody knew how he could have managed to drag himself around that comer; but he had; they saw the long smear of blood on the pavement afterward. He had crawled, able to move nothing but his arms. He had knocked against the bottom of a door. It was a saloon, still open. The saloonkeeper came out. It was the only time in his life that Gail Wynand asked for help. The saloonkeeper looked at him with a flat, heavy glance, a glance that showed full consciousness of agony, of injustice—and a stolid, bovine indifference. The saloonkeeper went inside and slammed the door. He had no desire to get mixed up with gang fights.

Years later, Gail Wynand, publisher of the New York Banner, still knew the names of the longshoreman and the saloonkeeper, and where to find them. He never did anything to the longshoreman. But he caused the saloonkeeper’s business to be ruined, his home and savings to be lost, and drove the man to suicide.

Gail Wynand was sixteen when his father died. He was alone, jobless at the moment, with sixty-five cents in his pocket, an unpaid rent bill and a chaotic erudition. He decided that the time had come to decide what he would make of his life. He went, that night, to the roof of his tenement and looked at the lights of the city, the city where he did not run things. He let his eyes move slowly from the windows of the sagging hovels around him to the windows of the mansions in the distance. There were only lighted squares hanging in space, but he could tell from them the quality of the structures to which they belonged; the lights around him looked muddy, discouraged; those in the distance were clean and tight. He asked himself a single question: what was there that entered all those houses, the dim and the brilliant alike, what reached into every room, into every person? They all had bread. Could one rule men through the bread they bought? They had shoes, they had coffee, they had ... The course of his life was set.

Next morning, he walked into the office of the editor of the Gazette, a fourth-rate newspaper in a run-down building, and asked for a job in the city room. The editor looked at his clothes and inquired, “Can you spell cat?” “Can you spell anthropomorphology?” asked Wynand. “We have no jobs here,” said the editor. “I’ll hang around,” said Wynand. “Use me when you want to. You don’t have to pay me. You’ll put me on salary when you’ll feel you’d better.”

He remained in the building, sitting on the stairs outside the city room. He sat there every day for a week. No one paid any attention to him. At night he slept in doorways. When most of his money was gone, he stole food, from counters or from garbage pails, before returning to his post on the stairs.

One day a reporter felt sorry for him and, walking down the stairs, threw a nickel into Wynand’s lap, saying: “Go buy yourself a bowl of stew, kid.” Wynand had a dime left in his pocket. He took the dime and threw it at the reporter, saying: “Go buy yourself a screw.” The man swore and went on down. The nickel and the dime remained lying on the steps. Wynand would not touch them. The story was repeated in the city room. A pimply-faced clerk shrugged and took the two coins.

At the end of the week, in a rush hour, a man from the city room called Wynand to run an errand. Other small chores followed. He obeyed with military precision. In ten days he was on salary. In six months he was a reporter. In two years he was an associate editor.

Gail Wynand was twenty when he fell in love. He had known everything there was to know about sex since the age of thirteen. He had had many girls. He never spoke of love, created no romantic illusion and treated the whole matter as a simple animal transaction; but at this he was an expert—and women could tell it, just by looking at him. The girl with whom he fell in love had an exquisite beauty, a beauty to be worshiped, not desired. She was fragile and silent. Her face told of the lovely mysteries within her, left unexpressed.

She became Gail Wynand’s mistress. He allowed himself the weakness of being happy. He would have married her at once, had she mentioned it. But they said little to each other. He felt that everything was understood between them.

One evening he spoke. Sitting at her feet, his face raised to her, he allowed his soul to be heard. “My darling, anything you wish, anything I am, anything I can ever be ... That’s what I want to offer you—not the things I’ll get for you, but the thing in me that will make me able to get them. That thing—a man can’t renounce it—but I want to renounce it—so that it will be yours—so that it will be in your service—only for you.” The girl smiled and asked: “Do you think I’m prettier than Maggy Kelly?”

He got up. He said nothing and walked out of the house. He never saw that girl again. Gail Wynand, who prided himself on never needing a lesson twice, did not fall in love again in the years that followed.

He was twenty-one when his career on the Gazette was threatened, for the first and only time. Politics and corruption had never disturbed him; he knew all about it; his gang had been paid to help stage beatings at the polls on election days. But when Pat Mulligan, police captain of his precinct, was framed, Wynand could not take it; because Pat Mulligan was the only honest man he had ever met in his life.

The Gazette was controlled by the powers that had framed Mulligan. Wynand said nothing. He merely put in order in his mind such items of information he possessed as would blow the Gazette into hell. His job would be blown with it, but that did not matter. His decision contradicted every rule he had laid down for his career. But he did not think. It was one of the rare explosions that hit him at times, throwing him beyond caution, making of him a creature possessed by the single impulse to have his way, because the rightness of his way was so blindingly total. But he knew that the destruction of the Gazette would be only a first step. It was not enough to save Mulligan.

For three years Wynand had kept one small clipping, an editorial on corruption, by the famous editor of a great newspaper. He had kept it, because it was the most beautiful tribute to integrity he had ever read. He took the clipping and went to see the great editor. He would tell him about Mulligan and together they would beat the machine.

He walked far across town, to the building of the famous paper. He had to walk. It helped to control the fury within him. He was admitted into the office of the editor—he had a way of getting admitted into places against all rules. He saw a fat man at a desk, with thin slits of eyes set close together. He did not introduce himself, but laid the clipping down on the desk and asked: “Do you remember this?” The editor glanced at the clipping, then at Wynand. It was a glance Wynand had seen before: in the eyes of the saloonkeeper who had slammed the door. “How do you expect me to remember every piece of swill I write?” asked the editor.

After a moment, Wynand said : “Thanks.” It was the only time in his life that he felt gratitude to anyone. The gratitude was genuine—a payment for a lesson he would never need again. But even the editor knew there was something very wrong in that short “Thanks,” and very frightening. He did not know that it had been an obituary on Gail Wynand.

Wynand walked back to the Gazette, feeling no anger toward the editor or the political machine. He felt only a furious contempt for himself, for Pat Mulligan, for all integrity; he felt shame when he thought of those whose victims he and Mulligan had been willing to become. He did not think “victims”—he thought “suckers.” He got back to the office and wrote a brilliant editorial blasting Captain Mulligan. “Why, I thought you kinda felt sorry for the poor bastard,” said his editor, pleased. “I don’t feel sorry for anyone,” said Wynand.

Grocers and deck hands had not appreciated Gail Wynand; politicians did. In his years on the paper he had learned how to get along with people. His face had assumed the expression it was to wear for the rest of his life: not quite a smile, but a motionless look of irony directed at the whole world. People could presume that his mockery was intended for the particular things they wished to mock. Besides, it was pleasant to deal with a man untroubled by passion or sanctity.

He was twenty-three when a rival political gang, intent on winning a municipal election and needing a newspaper to plug a certain issue, bought the Gazette. They bought it in the name of Gail Wynand, who was to serve as a respectable front for the machine. Gail Wynand became editor-in-chief. He plugged the issue, he won the election for his bosses. Two years later, he smashed the gang, sent its leaders to the penitentiary, and remained as sole owner of the Gazette.

His first act was to tear down the sign over the door of the building and to throw out the paper’s old masthead. The Gazette became the New York Banner. His friends objected. “Publishers don’t change the name of a paper,” they told him. “This one does,” he said.

The first campaign of the Banner was an appeal for money for a charitable cause. Displayed side by side, with an equal amount of space, the Banner ran two stories: one about a struggling young scientist, starving in a garret, working on a great invention; the other about a chambermaid, the sweetheart of an executed murderer, awaiting the birth of her illegitimate child. One story was illustrated with scientific diagrams; the other—with the picture of a loose-mouth girl wearing a tragic expression and disarranged clothes. The Banner asked its readers to help both these unfortunates. It received nine dollars and forty-five cents for the young scientist; it received one thousand and seventy-seven dollars for the unwed mother. Gail Wynand called a meeting of his staff. He put down on the table the paper carrying both stories and the money collected for both funds. “Is there anyone here who doesn’t understand?” he asked. No one answered. He said: “Now you all know the kind of paper the Banner is to be.”

The publishers of his time took pride in stamping their individual personalities upon their newspapers. Gail Wynand delivered his paper, body and soul, to the mob. The Banner assumed the appearance of a circus poster in body, of a circus performance in soul. It accepted the same goal—to stun, to amuse and to collect admission. It bore the imprint, not of one, but of a million men. “Men differ in their virtues, if any,” said Gail Wynand, explaining his policy, “but they are alike in their vices.” He added, looking straight into the questioner’s eyes: “I am serving that which exists on this earth in greatest quantity. I am representing the majority—surely an act of virtue?”

The public asked for crime, scandal and sentiment. Gail Wynand provided it. He gave people what they wanted, plus a justification for indulging the tastes of which they had been ashamed. The Banner presented murder, arson, rape, corruption—with an appropriate moral against each. There were three columns of details to one stick of moral. “If you make people perform a noble duty, it bores them,” said Wynand. “If you make them indulge themselves, it shames them. But combine the two—and you’ve got them.” He ran stories about fallen girls, society divorces, foundling asylums, red-light districts, charity hospitals. “Sex first,” said Wynand. “Tears second. Make them itch and make them cry—and you’ve got them.”

The Banner led great, brave crusades—on issues that had no opposition. It exposed politicians—one step ahead of the Grand Jury; it attacked monopolies—in the name of the downtrodden; it mocked the rich and the successful—in the manner of those who could never be either. It overstressed the glamour of society—and presented society news with a subtle sneer. This gave the man on the street two satisfactions: that of entering illustrious drawing rooms and that of not wiping his feet on the threshold.

The Banner was permitted to strain truth, taste and credibility, but not its readers’ brain power. Its enormous headlines, glaring pictures and oversimplified text hit the senses and entered men’s consciousness without any necessity for an intermediary process of reason, like food shot through the rectum, requiring no digestion.

“News,” Gail Wynand told his staff, “is that which will create the greatest excitement among the greatest number. The thing that will knock them silly. The sillier the better, provided there’s enough of them.”

One day he brought into the office a man he had picked off the street. It was an ordinary man, neither well-dressed nor shabby, neither tall nor short, neither dark nor quite blond; he had the kind of face one could not remember even while looking at it. He was frightening by being so totally undifferentiated; he lacked even the positive distinction of a half-wit. Wynand took him through the building, introduced him to every member of the staff and let him go. Then Wynand called his staff together and told them: “When in doubt about your work, remember that man’s face. You’re writing for him.” “But, Mr. Wynand,” said a young editor, “one can’t remember his face.” “That’s the point,” said Wynand.

When the name of Gail Wynand became a threat in the publishing world, a group of newspaper owners took him aside—at a city charity affair which all had to attend—and reproached him for what they called his debasement of the public taste. “It is not my function,” said Wynand, “to help people preserve a self-respect they haven’t got. You give them what they profess to like in public. I give them what they really like. Honesty is the best policy, gentlemen, though not quite in the sense you were taught to believe.”

It was impossible for Wynand not to do a job well. Whatever his aim, his means were superlative. All the drive, the force, the will barred from the pages of his paper went into its making. An exceptional talent was burned prodigally to achieve perfection in the unexceptional. A new religious faith could have been founded on the energy of spirit which he spent upon collecting lurid stories and smearing them across sheets of paper.

The Banner was always first with the news. When an earthquake occurred in South America and no communications came from the stricken area, Wynand chartered a liner, sent a crew down to the scene and had extras on the streets of New York days ahead of his competitors, extras with drawings that represented flames, chasms and crushed bodies. When an S.O.S. was received from a ship sinking in a storm off the Atlantic coast, Wynand himself sped to the scene with his crew, ahead of the Coast Guard; Wynand directed the rescue and brought back an exclusive story with photographs of himself climbing a ladder over raging waves, a baby in his arms. When a Canadian village was cut off from the world by an avalanche, it was the Banner that sent a balloon to drop food and Bibles to the inhabitants. When a coal-mining community was paralyzed by a strike, the Banner opened soup-kitchens and printed tragic stories on the perils confronting the miners’ pretty daughters under the pressure of poverty. When a kitten got trapped on the top of a pole, it was rescued by a Banner photographer.

“When there’s no news, make it,” was Wynand’s order. A lunatic escaped from a state institution for the insane. After days of terror for miles around—terror fed by the Banner’s dire predictions and its indignation at the inefficiency of the local police—he was captured by a reporter of the Banner. The lunatic recovered miraculously two weeks after his capture, was released, and sold to the Banner an exposé of the ill-treatment he had suffered at the institution. It led to sweeping reforms. Afterward, some people said that the lunatic had worked on the Banner before his commitment. It could never be proved.

A fire broke out in a sweatshop employing thirty young girls. Two of them perished in the disaster. Mary Watson, one of the survivors, gave the Banner an exclusive story about the exploitation they had suffered. It led to a crusade against sweatshops, headed by the best women of the city. The origin of the fire was never discovered. It was whispered that Mary Watson had once been Evelyn Drake who wrote for the Banner. It could not be proved.

In the first years of the Banner’s existence Gail Wynand spent more nights on his office couch than in his bedroom. The effort he demanded of his employees was hard to perform; the effort of himself was hard to believe. He drove them like an army; he drove himself like a slave. He paid them well; he got nothing but his rent and meals. He lived in a furnished room at the time when his best reporters lived in suites at expensive hotels. He spent money faster than it came in—and he spent it all on the Banner. The paper was like a luxurious mistress whose every need was satisfied without inquiry about the price.

The Banner was first to get the newest typographical equipment. The Banner was last to get the best newspapermen—last, because it kept them. Wynand raided his competitors’ city rooms; nobody could meet the salaries he offered. His procedure evolved into a simple formula. When a newspaperman received an invitation to call on Wynand, he took it as an insult to his journalistic integrity, but he came to the appointment. He came, prepared to deliver a set of offensive conditions on which he would accept the job, if at all. Wynand began the interview by stating the salary he would pay. Then he added: “You might wish, of course, to discuss other conditions—” and seeing the swallowing movement in the man’s throat, concluded: “No? Fine. Report to me on Monday.”

When Wynand opened his second paper—in Philadelphia—the local publishers met him like European chieftains united against the invasion of Attila. The war that followed was as savage. Wynand laughed over it. No one could teach him anything about hiring thugs to highjack a paper’s delivery wagons and beat up news vendors. Two of his competitors perished in the battle. The Wynand Philadelphia Star survived.

The rest was swift and simple like an epidemic. By the time he reached the age of thirty-five there were Wynand papers in all the key cities of the United States. By the time he was forty there were Wynand magazines, Wynand newsreels and most of the Wynand Enterprises, Inc.

A great many activities, not publicized, helped to build his fortune. He had forgotten nothing of his childhood. He remembered the things he had thought, standing as a bootblack at the rail of a ferryboat—the chances offered by a growing city. He bought real estate where no one expected it to become valuable, he built against all advice—and he ran hundreds into thousands. He bought his way into a great many enterprises of all kinds. Sometimes they crashed, ruining everybody concerned, save Gail Wynand. He staged a crusade against a shady streetcar monopoly and caused it to lose its franchise; the franchise was granted to a shadier group, controlled by Gail Wynand. He exposed a vicious attempt to corner the beef market in the Middle West—and left the field clear for another gang, operating under his orders.

He was helped by a great many people who discovered that young Wynand was a bright fellow, worth using. He exhibited a charming complaisance about being used. In each case, the people found that they had been used instead—like the men who bought the Gazette for Gail Wynand.

Sometimes he lost money on his investments, coldly and with full intention. Through a series of untraceable steps he ruined many powerful men: the president of a bank, the head of an insurance company, the owner of a steamship line, and others. No one could discover his motives. The men were not his competitors and he gained nothing from their destruction.

“Whatever that bastard Wynand is after,” people said, “it’s not after money.”

Those who denounced him too persistently were run out of their professions: some in a few weeks, others many years later. There were occasions when he let insults pass unnoticed; there were occasions when he broke a man for an innocuous remark. One could never tell what he would avenge and what he would forgive.

One day he noticed the brilliant work of a young reporter on another paper and sent for him. The boy came, but the salary Wynand mentioned had no effect on him. “I can’t work for you, Mr. Wynand,” he said with desperate earnestness, “because you ... you have no ideals.” Wynand’s thin lips smiled. “You can’t escape human depravity, kid,” he said gently. “The boss you work for may have ideals, but he has to beg money and take orders from many contemptible people. I have no ideals -but I don’t beg. Take your choice. There’s no other.” The boy went back to his paper. A year later he came to Wynand and asked if his offer were still open. Wynand said that it was. The boy had remained on the Banner ever since. He was the only one on the staff who loved Gail Wynand.

Alvah Scarret, sole survivor of the original Gazette, had risen with Wynand. But one could not say that he loved Wynand—he merely clung to his boss with the automatic devotion of a rug under Wynand’s feet. Alvah Scarret had never hated anything, and so was incapable of love. He was shrewd, competent and unscrupulous in the innocent manner of one unable to grasp the conception of a scruple. He believed everything he wrote and everything written in the Banner. He could hold a belief for all of two weeks. He was invaluable to Wynand—as a barometer of public reaction.

No one could say whether Gail Wynand had a private life. His hours away from the office had assumed the style of the Banner’s front page—but a style raised to a grand plane, as if he were still playing circus, only to a gallery of kings. He bought out the entire house for a great opera performance—and sat alone in the empty auditorium with his current mistress. He discovered a beautiful play by an unknown playwright and paid him a huge sum to have the play performed once and never again; Wynand was the sole spectator at the single performance; the script was burned next morning. When a distinguished society woman asked him to contribute to a worthy charity cause, Wynand handed her a signed blank check—and laughed, confessing that the amount she dared to fill in was less than he would have given otherwise. He bought some kind of Balkan throne for a penniless pretender whom he met in a speak-easy and never bothered to see afterward; he often referred to “my valet, my chauffeur and my king.”

At night, dressed in a shabby suit bought for nine dollars, Wynand would often ride the subways and wander through the dives of slum districts, listening to his public. Once, in a basement beer joint, he heard a truck driver denouncing Gail Wynand as the worst exponent of capitalistic evils, in a language of colorful accuracy. Wynand agreed with him and helped him out with a few expressions of his own, from his Hell’s Kitchen vocabulary. Then Wynand picked up a copy of the Banner left by someone on a table, tore his own photograph from page 3, clipped it to a hundred-dollar bill, handed it to the truck driver and walked out before anyone could utter a word.

The succession of his mistresses was so rapid that it ceased to be gossip. It was said that he never enjoyed a woman unless he had bought her—and that she had to be the kind who could not be bought.

He kept the details of his life secret by making it glaringly public as a whole. He had delivered himself to the crowd; he was anyone’s property, like a monument in a park, like a bus stop sign, like the pages of the Banner. His photographs appeared in his papers more often than pictures of movie stars. He had been photographed in all kinds of clothes, on every imaginable occasion. He had never been photographed naked, but his readers felt as if he had. He derived no pleasure from personal publicity; it was merely a matter of policy to which he submitted. Every corner of his penthouse had been reproduced in his papers and magazines. “Every bastard in the country knows the inside of my icebox and bathtub,” he said.

One phase of his life, however, was little known and never mentioned. The top floor of the building under his penthouse was his private art gallery. It was locked. He had never admitted anyone, except the caretaker. A few people knew about it. Once a French ambassador asked him for permission to visit it. Wynand refused. Occasionally, not often, he would descend to his gallery and remain there for hours. The things he collected were chosen by standards of his own. He had famous masterpieces; he had canvases by unknown artists; he rejected the works of immortal names for which he did not care. The estimates set by collectors and the matter of great signatures were of no concern to him. The art dealers whom he patronized reported that his judgment was that of a master.

One night his valet saw Wynand returning from the art gallery below and was shocked by the expression of his face; it was a look of suffering, yet the face seemed ten years younger. “Are you ill, sir?” he asked. Wynand looked at him indifferently and said: “Go to bed.”

“We could make a swell spread for the Sunday scandal sheet out of your art gallery,” said Alvah Scarret wistfully. “No,” said Wynand. “But why, Gail?” “Look, Alvah. Every man on earth has a soul of his own that nobody can stare at. Even the convicts in a penitentiary and the freaks in a side show. Everybody but me. My soul is spread in your Sunday scandal sheet—in three-color process. So I must have a substitute—even if it’s only a locked room and a few objects not to be pawed.”

It was a long process and there had been premonitory signs, but Scarret did not notice a certain new trait in Gail Wynand’s character until Wynand was forty-five. Then it became apparent to many. Wynand lost interest in breaking industrialists and financiers. He found a new kind of victim. People could not tell whether it was a sport, a mania or a systematic pursuit. They thought it was horrible, because it seemed so vicious and pointless.

It began with the case of Dwight Carson. Dwight Carson was a talented young writer who had achieved the spotless reputation of a man passionately devoted to his convictions. He upheld the cause of the individual against the masses. He wrote for magazines of great prestige and small circulation, which were no threat to Wynand. Wynand bought Dwight Carson. He forced Carson to write a column on the Banner, dedicated to preaching the superiority of the masses over the man of genius. It was a bad column, dull and unconvincing; it made many people angry. It was a waste of space and of a big salary. Wynand insisted on continuing it.

Even Alvah Scarret was shocked by Carson’s apostasy. “Anybody else, Gail,” he said, “but, honest, I didn’t expect it of Carson.” Wynand laughed; he laughed too long, as if he could not stop it; his laughter had an edge of hysteria. Scarret frowned; he did not like the sight of Wynand being unable to control an emotion; it contradicted everything he knew of Wynand; it gave Scarret a funny feeling of apprehension, like the sight of a tiny crack in a solid wall; the crack could not possibly endanger the wall—except that it had no business being there.

A few months later Wynand bought a young writer from a radical magazine, a man known for his honesty, and put him to work on a series of articles glorifying exceptional men and damning the masses. That, too, made a great many of his readers angry. He continued it. He seemed not to care any longer about the delicate signs of effect on circulation.

He hired a sensitive poet to cover baseball games. He hired an art expert to handle financial news. He got a socialist to defend factory owners and a conservative to champion labor. He forced an atheist to write on the glories of religion. He made a disciplined scientist proclaim the superiority of mystical intuition over the scientific method. He gave a great symphony conductor a munificent yearly income, for no work at all, on the sole condition that he never conduct an orchestra again.

Some of these men had refused, at first. But they surrendered when they found themselves on the edge of bankruptcy through a series of untraceable circumstances within a few years. Some of the men were famous, others obscure. Wynand showed no interest in the previous standing of his prey. He showed no interest in men of glittering success who had commercialized their careers and held no particular beliefs of any kind. His victims had a single attribute in common: their immaculate integrity.

Once they were broken, Wynand continued to pay them scrupulously. But he felt no further concern for them and no desire to see them again. Dwight Carson became a dipsomaniac. Two men became drug addicts. One committed suicide. This last was too much for Scarret. “Isn’t it going too far, Gail?” he asked. “That was practically murder.” “Not at all,” said Wynand, “I was merely an outside circumstance. The cause was in him. If lightning strikes a rotten tree and it collapses, it’s not the fault of the lightning.” “But what do you call a healthy tree?” “They don’t exist, Alvah,” said Wynand cheerfully, “they don’t exist.”

Alvah Scarret never asked Wynand for an explanation of this new pursuit. By some dim instinct Scarret guessed a little of the reason behind it. Scarret shrugged and laughed, telling people that it was nothing to worry about, it was just “a safety valve.” Only two men understood Gail Wynand: Alvah Scarret—partially; Ellsworth Toohey—completely.

Ellsworth Toohey—who wished, above all, to avoid a quarrel with Wynand at that time—could not refrain from a feeling of resentment, because Wynand had not chosen him as a victim. He almost wished Wynand would try to corrupt him, no matter what the consequences. But Wynand seldom noticed his existence.

Wynand had never been afraid of death. Through the years the thought of suicide had occurred to him, not as an intention, but as one of the many possibilities among the chances of life. He examined it indifferently, with polite curiosity, as he examined any possibility—and then forgot it. He had known moments of blank exhaustion when his will deserted him. He had always cured himself by a few hours in his art gallery.

Thus he reached the age of fifty-one, and a day when nothing of consequence happened to him, yet the evening found him without desire to make a step farther.

Gail Wynand sat on the edge of the bed, slumped forward, his elbows on his knees, the gun on the palm of his hand.

Yes, he told himself, there’s an answer there somewhere. But I don’t want to know it. I don’t want to know it.

And because he felt a pang of dread at the root of this desire not to examine his life further, he knew that he would not die tonight. As long as he still feared something, he had a foothold on living; even if it meant only moving forward to an unknown disaster. The thought of death gave him nothing. The thought of living gave him a slender alms—the hint of fear.

He moved his hand, weighing the gun. He smiled, a faint smile of derision. No, he thought, that’s not for you. Not yet. You still have the sense of not wanting to die senselessly. You were stopped by that. Even that is a remnant—of something.

He tossed the gun aside on the bed, knowing that the moment was past and the thing was of no danger to him any longer. He got up. He felt no elation; he felt tired; but he was back in his normal course. There were no problems, except to finish this day quickly and go to sleep.

He went down to his study to get a drink.

When he switched on the light in the study, he saw Toohey’s present. It was a huge, vertical crate, standing by his desk. He had seen it earlier in the evening. He had thought “What the hell,” and forgotten all about it.

He poured himself a drink and stood sipping it slowly. The crate was too large to escape his field of vision, and as he drank he tried to guess what it could possibly contain. It was too tall and slender for a piece of furniture. He could not imagine what material property Toohey could wish to send him; he had expected something less tangible—a small envelope containing a hint at some sort of blackmail; so many people had tried to blackmail him so unsuccessfully; he did think Toohey would have more sense than that.

By the time he finished his drink, he had found no plausible explanation for the crate. It annoyed him, like a stubborn crossword puzzle. He had a kit of tools somewhere in a drawer of his desk. He found it and broke the crate open.

It was Steven Mallory’s statue of Dominique Francon.

Gail Wynand walked to his desk and put down the pliers he held as if they were of fragile crystal. Then he turned and looked at the statue again. He stood looking at it for an hour.

Then he went to the telephone and dialed Toohey’s number.

“Hello?” said Toohey’s voice, its hoarse impatience confessing that he had been awakened out of sound sleep.

“All right. Come over,” said Wynand and hung up.

Toohey arrived half an hour later. It was his first visit to Wynand’s home. Wynand himself answered the door bell, still dressed in his pyjamas. He said nothing and walked into the study, Toohey following.

The naked marble body, its head thrown back in exaltation, made the room look like a place that did not exist any longer: like the Stoddard Temple. Wynand’s eyes rested on Toohey expectantly, a heavy glance of suppressed anger.

“You want, of course, to know the name of the model?” Toohey asked, with just a hint of triumph in his voice.

“Hell, no,” said Wynand. “I want to know the name of the sculptor.”

He wondered why Toohey did not like the question; there was something more than disappointment in Toohey’s face.

“The sculptor?” said Toohey. “Wait ... let me see ... I think I did know it.... It’s Steven ... or Stanley ... Stanley something or other.... Honestly, I don’t remember.”

“If you knew enough to buy this, you knew enough to ask the name and never forget it.”

“I’ll look it up, Mr. Wynand.”

“Where did you get this?”

“In some art shop, you know, one of those places on Second Avenue.”

“How did it get there?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I bought it because I knew the model.”

“You’re lying about that. If that were all you saw in it, you wouldn’t have taken the chance you took. You know that I’ve never let anyone see my gallery. Did you think I’d allow you the presumption of contributing to it? Nobody has ever dared offer me a gift of that kind. You wouldn’t have risked it, unless you were sure, terribly sure, of how great a work of art this is. Sure that I’d have to accept it. That you’d beat me. And you have.”

“I’m glad to hear it, Mr. Wynand.”

“If you wish to enjoy that, I’ll tell you also that I hate seeing this come from you. I hate your having been able to appreciate it. It doesn’t fit you. Though I was obviously wrong about you: you’re a greater art expert than I thought you were.”

“Such as it is, I’ll have to accept this as a compliment and thank you, Mr. Wynand.”

“Now what was it you wanted? You intended me to understand that you won’t let me have this unless I grant an interview to Mrs. Peter Keating?”

“Why, no, Mr. Wynand. I’ve made you a present of it. I intended you only to understand that this is Mrs. Peter Keating.”

Wynand looked at the statue, then back at Toohey.

“Oh you damn fool!” said Wynand softly.

Toohey stared at him, bewildered.

“So you really did use this as a red lamp in a window?” Wynand seemed relieved; he did not find it necessary to hold Toohey’s glance now. “That’s better, Toohey. You’re not as smart as I thought for a moment.”

“But, Mr. Wynand, what ...?”

“Didn’t you realize that this statue would be the surest way to kill any possible appetite I might have for your Mrs. Keating?”

“You haven’t seen her, Mr. Wynand.”

“Oh, she’s probably beautiful. She might be more beautiful than this. But she can’t have what that sculptor has given her. And to see that same face, but without any meaning, like a dead caricature—don’t you think one would hate the woman for that?”

“You haven’t seen her.”

“Oh, all right, I’ll see her. I told you you should be allowed to get away with your stunt completely or not at all. I didn’t promise you to lay her, did I? Only to see her.”

“That is all I wanted, Mr. Wynand.”

“Have her telephone my office and make an appointment.”

“Thank you, Mr. Wynand.”

“Besides, you’re lying about not knowing the name of that sculptor. But it’s too much bother to make you tell me. She’ll tell me.”

“I’m sure she’ll tell you. Though why should I lie?”

“God knows. By the way, if it had been a lesser sculptor, you’d have lost your job over this.”

“But, after all, Mr. Wynand, I have a contract.”

“Oh, save that for your labor unions, Elsie! And now I think you should wish me a good night and get out of here.”

“Yes, Mr. Wynand. I wish you a good night.”

Wynand accompanied him to the hall. At the door Wynand said:

“You’re a poor businessman, Toohey. I don’t know why you’re so anxious to have me meet Mrs. Keating. I don’t know what your racket is in trying to get a commission for that Keating of yours. But whatever it is, it can’t be so valuable that you should have been willing to part with a thing like this in exchange.”

II

“WHY DIDN’T YOU WEAR YOUR EMERALD BRACELET?” ASKED Peter Keating. “Gordon Prescott’s so-called fiancée had everybody gaping at her star sapphire.”

“I’m sorry, Peter. I shall wear it next time,” said Dominique.

“It was a nice party. Did you have a good time?”

“I always have a good time.”

“So did I ... Only ... Oh God, do you want to know the truth?”

“No.”

“Dominique, I was bored to death. Vincent Knowlton is a pain in the neck. He’s such a damn snob. I can’t stand him.” He added, cautiously: “I didn’t show it, did I?”

“No. You behaved very well. You laughed at all his jokes—even when no one else did.”

“Oh, you noticed that? It always works.”

“Yes, I noticed that.”

“You think I shouldn’t, don’t you?”

“I haven’t said that.”

“You think it’s ... low, don’t you?”

“I don’t think anything is low.”

He slumped farther in his armchair; it made his chin press uncomfortably against his chest; but he did not care to move again. A fire crackled in the fireplace of his living room. He had turned out all the lights, save one lamp with a yellow silk shade; but it created no air of intimate relaxation, it only made the place look deserted, like a vacant apartment with the utilities shut off. Dominique sat at the other end of the room, her thin body fitted obediently to the contours of a straight-backed chair; she did not look stiff, only too poised for comfort. They were alone, but she sat like a lady at a public function; like a lovely dress dummy in a public show window—a window facing a busy intersection.

They had come home from a tea party at the house of Vincent Knowlton, a prominent young society man, Keating’s new friend. They had had a quiet dinner together, and now their evening was free. There were no other social engagements till tomorrow.

“You shouldn’t have laughed at theosophy when you spoke to Mrs. Marsh,” he said. “She believes in it.”

“I’m sorry. I shall be more careful.”

He waited to have her open a subject of conversation. She said nothing. He thought suddenly that she had never spoken to him first—in the twenty months of their marriage. He told himself that that was ridiculous and impossible; he tried to recall an occasion when she had addressed him. Of course he had; he remembered her asking him: “What time will you be back tonight?” and “Do you wish to include the Dixons for Tuesday’s dinner?” and many things like that.

He glanced at her. She did not look bored or anxious to ignore him. She sat there, alert and ready, as if his company held her full interest; she did not reach for a book, she did not stare at some distant thought of her own. She looked straight at him, not past him, as if she were waiting for a conversation. He realized that she had always looked straight at him, like this; and now he wondered whether he liked it. Yes, he did, it allowed him no cause to be jealous, not even of her hidden thoughts. No, he didn’t, not quite, it allowed no escape, for either one of them.

“I’ve just finished The Gallant Gallstone,” he said. “It’s a swell book. It’s the product of a scintillating brain, a Puck with tears streaming down his face, a golden-hearted clown holding for a moment the throne of God.”

“I read the same book review. In the Sunday Banner.”

“I read the book itself. You know I did.”

“That was nice of you.”

“Huh?” He heard approval and it pleased him.

“It was considerate toward the author. I’m sure she likes to have people read her book. So it was kind to take the time—when you knew in advance what you’d think of it.”

“I didn’t know. But I happen to agree with the reviewer.”

“The Banner has the best reviewers.”

“That’s true. Of course. So there’s nothing wrong in agreeing with them, is there?”

“Nothing whatever. I always agree.”

“With whom?”

“With everybody.”

“Are you making fun of me, Dominique?”

“Have you given me reason to?”

“No. I don’t see how. No, of course I haven’t.”

“Then I’m not.”

He waited. He heard a truck rumbling past, in the street below, and that filled a few seconds; but when the sound died, he had to speak again:

“Dominique, I’d like to know what you think.”

“Of what?”

“Of ... of ...” He searched for an important subject and ended with: “... of Vincent Knowlton.”

“I think he’s a man worth kissing the backside of.”

“For Christ’s sake, Dominique!”

“I’m sorry. That’s bad English and bad manners. It’s wrong, of course. Well, let’s see: Vincent Knowlton is a man whom it’s pleasant to know. Old families deserve a great deal of consideration, and we must have tolerance for the opinions of others, because tolerance is the greatest virtue, therefore it would be unfair to force your views on Vincent Knowlton, and if you just let him believe what he pleases, he will be glad to help you too, because he’s a very human person.”

“Now, that’s sensible,” said Keating; he felt at home in recognizable language. “I think tolerance is very important, because ...” He stopped. He finished, in an empty voice: “You said exactly the same thing as before.”

“Did you notice that,” she said. She said it without question mark, indifferently, as a simple fact. It was not sarcasm; he wished it were; sarcasm would have granted him a personal recognition—the desire to hurt him. But her voice had never carried any personal relation to him—not for twenty months.

He stared into the fire. That was what made a man happy—to sit looking dreamily into a fire, at his own hearth, in his own home; that’s what he had always heard and read. He stared at the flames, unblinking, to force himself into a complete obedience to an established truth. Just one more minute of it and I will feel happy, he thought, concentrating. Nothing happened.

He thought of how convincingly he could describe this scene to friends and make them envy the fullness of his contentment. Why couldn’t he convince himself? He had everything he’d ever wanted. He had wanted superiority—and for the last year he had been the undisputed leader of his profession. He had wanted fame—and he had five thick albums of clippings. He had wanted wealth—and he had enough to insure luxury for the rest of his life. He had everything anyone ever wanted. How many people struggled and suffered to achieve what he had achieved? How many dreamed and bled and died for this, without reaching it? “Peter Keating is the luckiest fellow on earth.” How often had he heard that?

This last year had been the best of his life. He had added the impossible to his possessions—Dominique Francon. It had been such a joy to laugh casually when friends repeated to him: “Peter, how did you ever do it?” It had been such a pleasure to introduce her to strangers, to say lightly: “My wife,” and to watch the stupid, uncontrolled look of envy in their eyes. Once at a large party an elegant drunk had asked him, with a wink declaring unmistakable intentions: “Say, do you know that gorgeous creature over there?” “Slightly,” Keating had answered, gratified, “she’s my wife.”

He often told himself gratefully that their marriage had turned out much better than he had expected. Dominique had become an ideal wife. She devoted herself completely to his interests: pleasing his clients, entertaining his friends, running his home. She changed nothing in his existence: not his hours, not his favorite menus, not even the arrangement of his furniture. She had brought nothing with her, except her clothes; she had not added a single book or ash tray to his house. When he expressed his views on any subject, she did not argue—she agreed with him. Graciously, as a matter of natural course, she took second place, vanishing in his background.

He had expected a torrent that would lift him and smash him against some unknown rocks. He had not found even a brook joining his peaceful river. It was more as if the river went on and someone came to swim quietly in his wake; no, not even to swim—that was a cutting, forceful action—but just to float behind him with the current. Had he been offered the power to determine Dominique’s attitude after their marriage, he would have asked that she behave exactly as she did.

Only their nights left him miserably unsatisfied. She submitted whenever he wanted her. But it was always as on their first night: an indifferent body in his arms, without revulsion, without answer. As far as he was concerned, she was still a virgin: he had never made her experience anything. Each time, burning with humiliation, he decided never to touch her again. But his desire returned, aroused by the constant presence of her beauty. He surrendered to it, when he could resist no longer; not often.

It was his mother who stated the thing he had not admitted to himself about his marriage. “I can’t stand it,” his mother said, six months after the wedding. “If she’d just get angry at me once, call me names, throw things at me, it would be all right. But I can’t stand this.” “What, Mother?” he asked, feeling a cold hint of panic. “It’s no use, Peter,” she answered. His mother, whose arguments, opinions, reproaches he had never been able to stop, would not say another word about his marriage. She took a small apartment of her own and moved out of his house. She came to visit him often and she was always polite to Dominique, with a strange, beaten air of resignation. He told himself that he should be glad to be free of his mother; but he was not glad.

Yet he could not grasp what Dominique had done to inspire that mounting dread within him. He could find no word or gesture for which to reproach her. But for twenty months it had been like tonight: he could not bear to remain alone with her—yet he did not want to escape her and she did not want to avoid him.

“Nobody’s coming tonight?” he asked tonelessly, turning away from the fire.

“No,” she said, and smiled, the smile serving as connection to her next words: “Shall I leave you alone, Peter?”

“No!” It was almost a cry. I must not sound so desperate, he thought, while he was saying aloud: “Of course not. I’m glad to have an evening with my wife all to myself.”

He felt a dim instinct telling him that he must solve this problem, must learn to make their moments together endurable, that he dare not run from it, for his own sake more than hers.

“What would you like to do tonight, Dominique?”

“Anything you wish.”

“Want to go to a movie?”

“Do you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It kills time.”

“All right. Let’s kill time.”

“No. Why should we? That sounds awful.”

“Does it?”

“Why should we run from our own home? Let’s stay here.”

“Yes, Peter.”

He waited. But the silence, he thought, is a flight too, a worse kind of flight.

“Want to play a hand of Russian Bank?” he asked.

“Do you like Russian Bank?”

“Oh, it kills ti—” He stopped. She smiled.

“Dominique,” he said, looking at her, “you’re so beautiful. You’re always so ... so utterly beautiful. I always want to tell you how I feel about it.”

“I’d like to hear how you feel about it, Peter.”

“I love to look at you. I always think of what Gordon Prescott said. He said that you are God’s perfect exercise in structural mathematics. And Vincent Knowlton said you’re a spring morning. And Ellsworth—Ellsworth said you’re a reproach to every other female shape on earth.”

“And Ralston Holcombe?” she asked.

“Oh, never mind!” he snapped, and turned back to the fire.

I know why I can’t stand the silence, he thought. It’s because it makes no difference to her at all whether I speak or not; as if I didn’t exist and never had existed ... the thing more inconceivable than one’s death—never to have been born.... He felt a sudden, desperate desire which he could identify—a desire to be real to her.

“Dominique, do you know what I’ve been thinking?” he asked eagerly.

“No. What have you been thinking?”

“I’ve thought of it for some time—all by myself—I haven’t mentioned it to anyone. And nobody suggested it. It’s my own idea.”

“Why, that’s fine. What is it?”

“I think I’d like to move to the country and build a house of our own. Would you like that?”

“I’d like it very much. Just as much as you would. You want to design a home for yourself?”

“Hell, no. Bennett will dash one off for me. He does all our country homes. He’s a whiz at it.”

“Will you like commuting?”

“No, I think that will be quite an awful nuisance. But you know, everybody that’s anybody commutes nowadays. I always feel like a damn proletarian when I have to admit that I live in the city.”

“Will you like to see trees and a garden and the earth around you?”

“Oh, that’s a lot of nonsense. When will I have the time? A tree’s a tree. When you’ve seen a newsreel of the woods in spring, you’ve seen it all.”

“Will you like to do some gardening? People say it’s very nice, working the soil yourself.”

“Good God, no! What kind of grounds do you think we’d have? We can afford a gardener, and a good one—so the place will be something for the neighbors to admire.”

“Will you like to take up some sport?”

“Yes, I’ll like that.”

“Which one?”

“I think I’ll do better with my golf. You know, belonging to a country club right where you’re one of the leading citizens in the community is different from occasional week ends. And the people you meet are different. Much higher class. And the contacts you make ...” He caught himself, and added angrily: “Also, I’ll take up horseback riding.”

“I like horseback riding. Do you?”

“I’ve never had much time for it. Well, it does shake your insides unmercifully. But who the hell is Gordon Prescott to think he’s the only he-man on earth and plaster his photo in riding clothes right in his reception room?”

“I suppose you will want to find some privacy?”

“Well, I don’t believe in that desert-island stuff. I think the house should stand in sight of a major highway, so people would point it out, you know, the Keating estate. Who the hell is Claude Stengel to have a country home while I live in a rented flat? He started out about the same time I did, and look where he is and where I am, why, he’s lucky if two and a half men ever heard of him, so why should he park himself in Westchester and ...”

And he stopped. She sat looking at him, her face serene.

“Oh God damn it!” he cried. “If you don’t want to move to the country, why don’t you just say so?”

“I want very much to do anything you want, Peter. To follow any idea you get all by yourself.”

He remained silent for a long time.

“What do we do tomorrow night?” he asked, before he could stop himself.

She rose, walked to a desk and picked up her calendar.

“We have the Palmers for dinner tomorrow night,” she said.

“Oh, Christ!” he moaned. “They’re such awful bores! Why do we have to have them?”

She stood holding the calendar forward between the tips of her fingers, as if she were a photograph with the focus on the calendar and her own figure blurred in its background.

“We have to have the Palmers,” she said, “so that we can get the commission for their new store building. We have to get that commission so that we can entertain the Eddingtons for dinner on Saturday. The Eddingtons have no commissions to give, but they’re in the Social Register. The Palmers bore you and the Eddingtons snub you. But you have to flatter people whom you despise in order to impress other people who despise you.”

“Why do you have to say things like that?”

“Would you like to look at this calendar, Peter?”

“Well, that’s what everybody does. That’s what everybody lives for.”

“Yes, Peter. Almost everybody.”

“If you don’t approve, why don’t you say so?”

“Have I said anything about not approving?”

He thought back carefully. “No,” he admitted. “No, you haven’t.... But it’s the way you put things.”

“Would you rather I put it in a more involved way—as I did about Vincent Knowlton?”

“I’d rather ...” Then he cried: “I’d rather you’d express an opinion, God damn it, just once!”

She asked, in the same level monotone: “Whose opinion, Peter? Gordon Prescott’s? Ralston Holcombe’s? Ellsworth Toohey’s?”

He turned to her, leaning on the arm of his chair, half rising, suddenly tense. The thing between them was beginning to take shape. He had a first hint of words that would name it.

“Dominique,” he said, softly, reasonably, “that’s it. Now I know. I know what’s been the matter all the time.”

“Has anything been the matter?”

“Wait. This is terribly important. Dominique, you’ve never said, not once, what you thought. Not about anything. You’ve never expressed a desire. Not of any kind.”

“What’s wrong about that?”

“But it’s ... it’s like death. You’re not real. You’re only a body. Look, Dominique, you don’t know it, I’ll try to explain. You understand what death is? When a body can’t move any more, when it has no ... no will, no meaning. You understand? Nothing. The absolute nothing. Well, your body moves—but that’s all. The other, the thing inside you, your—oh, don’t misunderstand me, I’m not talking religion, but there’s no other word for it, so I’ll say: your soul—your soul doesn’t exist. No will, no meaning. There’s no real you any more.”

“What’s the real me?” she asked. For the first time, she looked attentive; not compassionate; but, at least, attentive.

“What’s the real anyone?” he said, encouraged. “It’s not just the body. It’s ... it’s the soul.”

“What is the soul?”

“It’s—you. The thing inside you.”

“The thing that thinks and values and makes decisions?”

“Yes! Yes, that’s it. And the thing that feels. You’ve—you’ve given it up.”

“So there are two things that one can’t give up: one’s thoughts and one’s desires?”

“Yes! Oh, you do understand! So you see, you’re like a corpse to everybody around you. A kind of walking death. That’s worse than any active crime. It’s ...”

“Negation?”

“Yes. Just blank negation. You’re not here. You’ve never been here. If you’d tell me that the curtains in this room are ghastly and if you’d rip them off and put up some you like—something of you would be real, here, in this room. But you never have. You’ve never told the cook what dessert you liked for dinner. You’re not here, Dominique. You’re not alive. Where’s your I?”

“Where’s yours, Peter?” she asked quietly.

He sat still, his eyes wide. She knew that his thoughts, in this moment, were clear and immediate like visual perception, that the act of thinking was an act of seeing a procession of years behind him.

“It’s not true,” he said at last, his voice hollow. “It’s not true.”

“What is not true?”

“What you said.”

“I’ve said nothing. I asked you a question.”

His eyes were begging her to speak, to deny. She rose, stood before him, and the taut erectness of her body was a sign of life, the life he had missed and begged for, a positive quality of purpose, but the quality of a judge.

“You’re beginning to see, aren’t you, Peter? Shall I make it clearer? You never wanted me to be real. You never wanted anyone to be. But you didn’t want me to show it. You wanted an act to help your act—a beautiful, complicated act, all twists, trimmings and words. All words. You didn’t like what I said about Vincent Knowlton. You liked it when I said the same thing under cover of virtuous sentiments. You didn’t want me to believe. You only wanted me to convince you that I believed. My real soul, Peter? It’s real only when it’s independent—you’ve discovered that, haven’t you? It’s real only when it chooses curtains and desserts—you’re right about that—curtains, desserts and religions, Peter, and the shapes of buildings. But you’ve never wanted that. You wanted a mirror. People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they’re reflecting too. You know, like the senseless infinity you get from two mirrors facing each other across a narrow passage. Usually in the more vulgar kind of hotels. Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose. I gave you what you wanted. I became what you are, what your friends are, what most of humanity is so busy being—only without the trimmings. I didn’t go around spouting book reviews to hide my emptiness of judgment—I said I had no judgment. I didn’t borrow designs to hide my creative impotence—I created nothing. I didn’t say that equality is a noble conception and unity the chief goal of mankind—I just agreed with everybody. You call it death, Peter? That kind of death—I’ve imposed it on you and on everyone around us. But you-you haven’t done that. People are comfortable with you, they like you, they enjoy your presence. You’ve spared them the blank death. Because you’ve imposed it—on yourself.”

He said nothing. She walked away from him, and sat down again, waiting.

He got up. He made a few steps toward her. He said: “Dominique ...”

Then he was on his knees before her, clutching her, his head buried against her legs.

“Dominique, it’s not true—that I never loved you. I love you, I always have, it was not ... just to show the others—that was not all—I loved you. There were two people—you and another person, a man, who always made me feel the same thing—not fear exactly, but like a wall, a steep wall to climb—like a command to rise—I don’t know where—but a feeling going up—I’ve always hated that man—but you, I wanted you—always—that’s why I married you—when I knew you despised me—so you should have forgiven me that marriage—you shouldn’t have taken your revenge like this—not like this, Dominique—Dominique, I can’t fight back, I——”

“Who is the man you hated, Peter?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Who is he?”

“Nobody. I ...”

“Name him.”

“Howard Roark.”

She said nothing for a long time. Then she put her hand on his hair. The gesture had the form of gentleness.

“I never wanted to take a revenge on you, Peter,” she said softly.

“Then—why?”

“I married you for my own reasons. I acted as the world demands one should act. Only I can do nothing halfway. Those who can, have a fissure somewhere inside. Most people have many. They lie to themselves—not to know that. I’ve never lied to myself. So I had to do what you all do—only consistently and completely. I’ve probably destroyed you. If I could care, I’d say I’m sorry. That was not my purpose.”

“Dominique, I love you. But I’m afraid. Because you’ve changed something in me, ever since our wedding, since I said yes to you—even if I were to lose you now, I couldn’t go back to what I was before—you took something I had ...”

“No. I took something you never had. I grant you that’s worse.”

“What?”

“It’s said that the worst thing one can do to a man is to kill his self-respect. But that’s not true. Self-respect is something that can’t be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man’s pretense at it.”

“Dominique, I ... I don’t want to talk.”

She looked down at his face resting against her knees, and he saw pity in her eyes, and for one moment he knew what a dreadful thing true pity is, but he kept no knowledge of it, because he slammed his mind shut before the words in which he was about to preserve it.

She bent down and kissed his forehead. It was the first kiss she had ever given him.

“I don’t want you to suffer, Peter,” she said gently. “This, now, is real—it’s I—it’s my own words—I don’t want you to suffer—I can’t feel anything else—but I feel that much.”

He pressed his lips to her hand.

When he raised his head, she looked at him as if, for a moment, he was her husband. She said: “Peter, if you could hold on to it—to what you are now——”

“I love you,” he said.

They sat silently together for a long time. He felt no strain in the silence.

The telephone rang.

It was not the sound that destroyed the moment; it was the eagerness with which Keating jumped up and ran to answer it. She heard his voice through the open door, a voice indecent in its relief:

“Hello? ... Oh, hello, Ellsworth! ... No, not a thing.... Free as a lark.... Sure, come over, come right over! ... Okey-doke!”

“It’s Ellsworth,” he said, returning to the living room. His voice was gay and it had a touch of insolence. “He wants to drop in.”

She said nothing.

He busied himself emptying ash trays that contained a single match or one butt, gathering newspapers, adding a log to the fire that did not need it, lighting more lamps. He whistled a tune from a screen operetta.

He ran to open the door when he heard the bell.

“How nice,” said Toohey, coming in. “A fire and just the two of you. Hello, Dominique. Hope I’m not intruding.”

“Hello, Ellsworth,” she said.

“You’re never intruding,” said Keating. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you.” He pushed a chair to the fire. “Sit down here, Ellsworth. What’ll you have? You know, when I heard your voice on the phone ... well, I wanted to jump and yelp like a pup.”

“Don’t wag your tail, though,” said Toohey. “No, no drinks, thanks. How have you been, Dominique?”

“Just as I was a year ago,” she said.

“But not as you were two years ago?”

“No.”

“What did we do two years ago this time?” Keating asked idly.

“You weren’t married,” said Toohey. “Prehistorical period. Let me see—what happened then? I think the Stoddard Temple was just being completed.”

“Oh that,” said Keating.

Toohey asked: “Hear anything about your friend Roark ... Peter?”

“No. I don’t think he’s worked for a year or more. He’s finished, this time.”

“Yes, I think so.... What have you been doing, Peter?”

“Nothing much.... Oh, I’ve just read The Gallant Gallstone.”

“Liked it?”

“Yes! You know, I think it’s a very important book. Because it’s true that there’s no such thing as free will. We can’t help what we are or what we do. It’s not our fault. Nobody’s to blame for anything. It’s all in your background and ... and your glands. If you’re good, that’s no achievement of yours—you were just lucky in your glands. If you’re rotten, nobody should punish you—you were unlucky, that’s all.” He was saying it defiantly, with a violence inappropriate to a literary discussion. He was not looking at Toohey nor at Dominique, but speaking to the room and to what that room had witnessed.

“Substantially correct,” said Toohey. “To be logical, however, we should not think of punishment for those who are rotten. Since they suffered through no fault of their own, since they were unlucky and underendowed, they should deserve a compensation of some sort—more like a reward.”

“Why—yes!” cried Keating. “That’s ... that’s logical.”

“And just,” said Toohey.

“Got the Banner pretty much where you want it, Ellsworth?” asked Dominique.

“What’s that in reference to?”

“The Gallant Gallstone.”

“Oh. No, I can’t say I have. Not quite. There are always the—imponderables.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Keating.

“Professional gossip,” said Toohey. He stretched his hands to the fire and flexed his fingers playfully. “By the way, Peter, are you doing anything about Stoneridge?”

“God damn it,” said Keating.

“What’s the matter?”

“You know what’s the matter. You know the bastard better than I do. To have a project like that going up, now, when its manna in the desert, and of all people to have that son of a bitch Wynand doing it!”

“What’s the matter with Mr. Wynand?”

“Oh come, Ellsworth! You know very well if it were anyone else, I’d get that commission just like that”—he snapped his fingers—“I wouldn’t even have to ask, the owner’d come to me. Particularly when he knows that an architect like me is practically sitting on his fanny now, compared to the work our office could handle. But Mr. Gail Wynand! You’d think he was a holy Lama who’s just allergic to the air breathed by architects!”

“I gather you’ve tried?”

“Oh, don’t talk about it. It makes me sick. I think I’ve spent three hundred dollars feeding lunches and pouring liquor into all sorts of crappy people who said they could get me to meet him. All I got is hangovers. I think it’d be easier to meet the Pope.”

“I gather you do want to get Stoneridge?”

“Are you baiting me, Ellsworth? I’d give my right arm for it.”

“That wouldn’t be advisable. You couldn’t make any drawings then—or pretend to. It would be preferable to give up something less tangible.”

“I’d give my soul.”

“Would you, Peter?” asked Dominique.

“What’s on your mind, Ellsworth?” Keating snapped.

“Just a practical suggestion,” said Toohey. “Who has been your most effective salesman in the past and got you some of your best commissions?”

“Why—Dominique I guess.”

“That’s right. And since you can’t get to Wynand and it wouldn’t do you any good if you did, don’t you think Dominique is the one who’ll be able to persuade him?”

Keating stared at him. “Are you crazy, Ellsworth?”

Dominique leaned forward. She seemed interested.

“From what I’ve heard,” she said, “Gail Wynand does not do favors for a woman, unless she’s beautiful. And if she’s beautiful, he doesn’t do it as a favor.”

Toohey looked at her, underscoring the fact that he offered no denial.

“It’s silly,” snapped Keating angrily. “How would Dominique ever get to see him?”

“By telephoning his office and making an appointment,” said Toohey.

“Who ever told you he’d grant it?”

“He did.”

“When?!”

“Late last night. Or early this morning, to be exact.”

“Ellsworth!” gasped Keating. He added: “I don’t believe it.”

“I do,” said Dominique, “or Ellsworth wouldn’t have started this conversation.” She smiled at Toohey. “So Wynand promised you to see me?”

“Yes, my dear.”

“How did you work that?”

“Oh, I offered him a convincing argument. However, it would be advisable not to delay it. You should telephone him tomorrow—if you wish to do it.”

“Why can’t she telephone now?” said Keating. “Oh, I guess it’s too late. You’ll telephone first thing in the morning.”

She looked at him, her eyes half closed, and said nothing.

“It’s a long time since you’ve taken any active interest in Peter’s career,” said Toohey. “Wouldn’t you like to undertake a difficult feat like that—for Peter’s sake?”

“If Peter wants me to.”

“If I want you to?” cried Keating. “Are you both crazy? It’s the chance of a lifetime, the ...” He saw them both looking at him curiously. He snapped: “Oh, rubbish!”

“What is rubbish, Peter?” asked Dominique.

“Are you going to be stopped by a lot of fool gossip? Why, any other architect’s wife’d crawl on her hands and knees for a chance like that to ...”

“No other architect’s wife would be offered the chance,” said Toohey. “No other architect has a wife like Dominique. You’ve always been so proud of that, Peter.”

“Dominique can take care of herself in any circumstances.”

“There’s no doubt about that.”

“All right, Ellsworth,” said Dominique. “I’ll telephone Wynand tomorrow.”

“Ellsworth, you’re wonderful!” said Keating, not looking at her.

“I believe I’d like a drink now,” said Toohey. “We should celebrate.”

When Keating hurried out to the kitchen, Toohey and Dominique looked at each other. He smiled. He glanced at the door through which Keating had gone, then nodded to her faintly, amused.

“You expected it,” said Dominique.

“Of course.”

“Now what’s the real purpose, Ellsworth?”

“Why, I want to help you get Stoneridge for Peter. It’s really a terrific commission.”

“Why are you so anxious to have me sleep with Wynand?”

“Don’t you think it would be an interesting experience for all concerned?”

“You’re not satisfied with the way my marriage has turned out, are you, Ellsworth?”

“Not entirely. Just about fifty percent. Well, nothing’s perfect in this world. One gathers what one can and then one tries further.”

“You were very anxious to have Peter marry me. You knew what the result would be, better than Peter or I.”

“Peter didn’t know it at all.”

“Well, it worked—fifty percent. You got Peter Keating where you wanted him—the leading architect of the country who’s now mud clinging to your galoshes.”

“I’ve never liked your style of expression, but it’s always been accurate. I should have said: who’s now a soul wagging its tail. Your style is gentler.”

“But the other fifty percent, Ellsworth? A failure?”

“Approximately total. My fault. I should have known better than to expect anyone like Peter Keating, even in the role of husband, to destroy you.”

“Well, you’re frank.”

“I told you once it’s the only method that will work with you. Besides, surely it didn’t take you two years to discover what I wanted of that marriage?”

“So you think Gail Wynand will finish the job?”

“Might. What do you think?”

“I think I’m only a side issue again. Didn’t you call it ‘gravy’ once? What have you got against Wynand?”

He laughed; the sound betrayed that he had not expected the question. She said contemptuously: “Don’t show that you’re shocked, Ellsworth.”

“All right. We’re taking it straight. I have nothing specific against Mr. Gail Wynand. I’ve been planning to have him meet you, for a long time. If you want minor details, he did something that annoyed me yesterday morning. He’s too observant. So I decided the time was right.”

“And there was Stoneridge.”

“And there was Stoneridge. I knew that part of it would appeal to you. You’d never sell yourself to save your country, your soul or the life of a man you loved. But you’ll sell yourself to get a commission he doesn’t deserve for Peter Keating. See what will be left of you afterward. Or of Gail Wynand. I’ll be interested to see it, too.”

“Quite correct, Ellsworth.”

“All of it? Even the part about a man you loved—if you did?”

“Yes.”

“You wouldn’t sell yourself for Roark? Though, of course, you don’t like to hear that name pronounced.”

“Howard Roark,” she said evenly.

“You have a great deal of courage, Dominique.”

Keating returned, carrying a tray of cocktails. His eyes were feverish and he made too many gestures.

Toohey raised his glass. He said:

“To Gail Wynand and the New York Banner!”

III

GAIL WYNAND ROSE AND MET HER HALFWAY ACROSS HIS OFFICE. “How do you do, Mrs. Keating,” he said.

“How do you do, Mr. Wynand,” said Dominique.

He moved a chair for her, but when she sat down he did not cross to sit behind his desk, he stood studying her professionally, appraisingly. His manner implied a self-evident necessity, as if his reason were known to her and there could be nothing improper in this behavior.

“You look like a stylized version of your own stylized version,” he said. “As a rule seeing the models of art works tends to make one atheistic. But this time it’s a close one between that sculptor and God.”

“What sculptor?”

“The one who did that statue of you.”

He had felt that there was some story behind that statue and he became certain of it now, by something in her face, a tightening that contradicted, for a second, the trim indifference of her self-control.

“Where and when did you see that statue, Mr. Wynand?”

“In my art gallery, this morning.”

“Where did you get it?”

It was his turn to show perplexity. “But don’t you know that?”

“No.”

“Your friend Ellsworth Toohey sent it to me. As a present.”

“To get this appointment for me?”

“Not through as direct a motivation as I believe you’re thinking. But in substance—yes.”

“He hasn’t told me that.”

“Do you mind my having that statue?”

“Not particularly.”

“I expected you to say that you were delighted.”

“I’m not.”

He sat down, informally, on the outer edge of his desk, his legs stretched out, his ankles crossed. He asked:

“I gather you lost track of that statue and have been trying to find it?”

“For two years.”

“You can’t have it.” He added, watching her: “You might have Stoneridge.”

“I shall change my mind. I’m delighted that Toohey gave it to you.”

He felt a bitter little stab of triumph—and of disappointment, in thinking that he could read her mind and that her mind was obvious, after all. He asked:

“Because it gave you this interview?”

“No. Because you’re the person before last in the world whom I’d like to have that statue. But Toohey is last.”

He lost the triumph; it was not a thing which a woman intent on Stoneridge should have said or thought. He asked:

“You didn’t know that Toohey had it?”

“No.”

“We should get together on our mutual friend, Mr. Ellsworth Toohey. I don’t like being a pawn and I don’t think you do or could ever be made to. There are too many things Mr. Toohey chose not to tell. The name of that sculptor, for instance.”

“He didn’t tell you that?”

“No.”

“Steven Mallory.”

“Mallory? ... Not the one who tried to ...” He laughed aloud.

“What’s the matter?”

“Toohey told me he couldn’t remember the name. That name.”

“Does Mr. Toohey still astonish you?”

“He has, several times, in the last few days. There’s a special kind of subtlety in being as blatant as he’s been. A very difficult kind. I almost like his artistry.”

“I don’t share your taste.”

“Not in any field? Not in sculpture—or architecture?”

“I’m sure not in architecture.”

“Isn’t that the utterly wrong thing for you to say?”

“Probably.”

He looked at her. He said: “You’re interesting.”

“I didn’t intend to be.”

“That’s your third mistake.”

“Third?”

“The first was about Mr. Toohey. In the circumstances, one would expect you to praise him to me. To quote him. To lean on his great prestige in matters of architecture.”

“But one would expect you to know Ellsworth Toohey. That should disqualify any quotations.”

“I intended to say that to you—had you given me the chance you won’t give me.”

“That should make it more entertaining.”

“You expected to be entertained?”

“I am.”

“About the statue?” It was the only point of weakness he had discovered.

“No.” Her voice was hard. “Not about the statue.”

“Tell me, when was it made and for whom?”

“Is that another thing Mr. Toohey forgot?”

“Apparently.”

“Do you remember a scandal about a building called the Stoddard Temple? Two years ago. You were away at the time.”

“The Stoddard Temple.... How do you happen to know where I was two years ago? ... Wait, the Stoddard Temple. I remember: a sacrilegious church or some such object that gave the Bible brigade a howling spree.”

“Yes.”

“There was ...” He stopped. His voice sounded hard and reluctant—like hers. “There was the statue of a naked woman involved.”

“Yes.”

“I see.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, his voice harsh, as if he were holding back some anger whose object she could not guess:

“I was somewhere around Bali at the time. I’m sorry all New York saw that statue before I did. But I don’t read newspapers when I’m sailing. There’s a standing order to fire any man who brings a Wynand paper aboard the yacht.”

“Have you ever seen pictures of the Stoddard Temple?”

“No. Was the building worth the statue?”

“The statue was almost worthy of the building.”

“It has been destroyed, hasn’t it?”

“Yes. With the help of the Wynand papers.”

He shrugged. “I remember Alvah Scarret had a good time with it. A big story. Sorry I missed it. But Alvah did very well. Incidentally, how did you know that I was away and why has the fact of my absence remained in your memory?”

“It was the story that cost me my job with you.”

“Your job? With me?”

“Didn’t you know my name was Dominique Francon?”

Under the trim jacket his shoulders made a sagging movement forward; it was surprise—and helplessness. He stared at her, quite simply. After a while, he said:

“No.”

She smiled indifferently. She said: “It appears that Toohey wanted to make it as difficult for both of us as he could.”

“To hell with Toohey. This has to be understood. It doesn’t make sense. You’re Dominique Francon?”

“I was.”

“You worked here, in this building, for years?”

“For six years.”

“Why haven’t I met you before?”

“I’m sure you don’t meet every one of your employees.”

“I think you understand what I mean.”

“Do you wish me to state it for you?”

“Yes.”

“Why haven’t I tried to meet you before?”

“Yes.”

“I had no desire to.”

“That, precisely, doesn’t make sense.”

“Shall I let this go by or understand it?”

“I’ll spare you the choice. With the kind of beauty you possess and with knowledge of the kind of reputation I am said to possess—why didn’t you attempt to make a real career for yourself on the Banner?”

“I never wanted a real career on the Banner.”

“Why?”

“Perhaps for the same reason that makes you forbid Wynand papers on your yacht.”

“It’s a good reason,” he said quietly. Then he asked, his voice casual again: “Let’s see, what was it you did to get fired? You went against our policy, I believe?”

“I tried to defend the Stoddard Temple.”

“Didn’t you know better than to attempt sincerity on the Banner?”

“I intended to say that to you—if you’d given me the chance.”

“Are you being entertained?”

“I wasn’t, then. I liked working here.”

“You’re the only one who’s ever said that in this building.”

“I must be one of two.”

“Who’s the other?”

“Yourself, Mr. Wynand.”

“Don’t be too sure of that.” Lifting his head, he saw the hint of amusement in her eyes and asked: “You said it just to trap me into that kind of a statement?”

“Yes, I think so,” she answered placidly.

“Dominique Francon ...” he repeated, not addressing her. “I used to like your stuff. I almost wish you were here to ask for your old job.”

“I’m here to discuss Stoneridge.”

“Ah, yes, of course.” He settled back, to enjoy a long speech of persuasion. He thought it would be interesting to hear what arguments she’d choose and how she’d act in the role of petitioner. “Well, what do you wish to tell me about that?”

“I should like you to give that commission to my husband. I understand, of course, that there’s no reason why you should do so—unless I agree to sleep with you in exchange. If you consider that a sufficient reason—I am willing to do it.”

He looked at her silently, allowing no hint of personal reaction in his face. She sat looking up at him, faintly astonished by his scrutiny, as if her words had deserved no special attention. He could not force on himself, though he was seeking it fiercely, any other impression of her face than the incongruous one of undisturbed purity.

He said:

“That is what I was to suggest. But not so crudely and not on our first meeting.”

“I have saved you time and lies.”

“You love your husband very much?”

“I despise him.”

“You have a great faith in his artistic genius?”

“I think he’s a third-rate architect.”

“Then why are you doing this?”

“It amuses me.”

“I thought I was the only one who acted on such motives.”

“You shouldn’t mind. I don’t believe you’ve ever found originality a desirable virtue, Mr. Wynand.”

“Actually, you don’t care whether your husband gets Stoneridge or not?”

“No.”

“And you have no desire to sleep with me?”

“None at all.”

“I could admire a woman who’d put on an act like that. Only it’s not an act.”

“It’s not. Please don’t begin admiring me. I have tried to avoid it.”

Whenever he smiled no obvious movement was required of his facial muscles; the hint of mockery was always there and it merely came into sharper focus for a moment, to recede imperceptibly again. The focus was sharper now.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “your chief motive is I, after all. The desire to give yourself to me.” He saw the glance she could not control and added: “No, don’t enjoy the thought that I have fallen into so gross an error. I didn’t mean it in the usual sense. But in its exact opposite. Didn’t you say you considered me the person before last in the world? You don’t want Stoneridge. You want to sell yourself for the lowest motive to the lowest person you can find.”

“I didn’t expect you to understand that,” she said simply.

“You want—men do that sometimes, not women—to express through the sexual act your utter contempt for me.”

“No, Mr. Wynand. For myself.”

The thin line of his mouth moved faintly, as if his lips had caught the first hint of a personal revelation—an involuntary one and, therefore, a weakness—and were holding it tight while he spoke:

“Most people go to very great length in order to convince themselves of their self-respect.”

“Yes.”

“And, of course, a quest for self-respect is proof of its lack.”

“Yes.”

“Do you see the meaning of a quest for self-contempt?”

“That I lack it?”

“And that you’ll never achieve it.”

“I didn’t expect you to understand that either.”

“I won’t say anything else—or I’ll stop being the person before last in the world and I’ll become unsuitable to your purpose.” He rose. “Shall I tell you formally that I accept your offer?”

She inclined her head in agreement.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I don’t care whom I choose to build Stoneridge. I’ve never hired a good architect for any of the things I’ve built. I give the public what it wants. I was stuck for a choice this time, because I’m tired of the bunglers who’ve worked for me, and it’s hard to decide without standards or reason. I’m sure you don’t mind my saying this. I’m really grateful to you for giving me a much better motive than any I could hope to find.”

“I’m glad you didn’t say that you’ve always admired the work of Peter Keating.”

“You didn’t tell me how glad you were to join the distinguished list of Gail Wynand’s mistresses.”

“You may enjoy my admitting it, if you wish, but I think we’ll get along very well together.”

“Quite likely. At least, you’ve given me a new experience: to do what I’ve always done—but honestly. Shall I now begin to give you my orders? I won’t pretend they’re anything else.”

“If you wish.”

“You’ll go with me for a two months’ cruise on my yacht. We’ll sail in ten days. When we come back, you’ll be free to return to your husband -with the contract for Stoneridge.”

“Very well.”

“I should like to meet your husband. Will you both have dinner with me Monday night?”

“Yes, if you wish.”

When she rose to leave, he asked:

“Shall I tell you the difference between you and your statue?”

“No.”

“But I want to. It’s startling to see the same elements used in two compositions with opposite themes. Everything about you in that statue is the theme of exaltation. But your own theme is suffering.”

“Suffering? I’m not conscious of having shown that.”

“You haven’t. That’s what I meant. No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain.”

Wynand telephoned his art dealer and asked him to arrange a private showing of Steven Mallory’s work. He refused to meet Mallory in person; he never met those whose work he liked. The art dealer executed the order in great haste. Wynand bought five of the pieces he saw—and paid more than the dealer had hoped to ask. “Mr. Mallory would like to know,” said the dealer, “what brought him to your attention.” “I saw one of his works.” “Which one?” “It doesn’t matter.”

Toohey had expected Wynand to call for him after the interview with Dominique. Wynand had not called. But a few days later, meeting Toohey by chance in the city room, Wynand asked aloud:

“Mr. Toohey, have so many people tried to kill you that you can’t remember their names?”

Toohey smiled and said: “I’m sure quite so many would like to.”

“You flatter your fellow men,” said Wynand, walking away.

Peter Keating stared at the brilliant room of the restaurant. It was the most exclusive place in town, and the most expensive. Keating gloated, chewing the thought that he was here as the guest of Gail Wynand.

He tried not to stare at the gracious elegance of Wynand’s figure across the table. He blessed Wynand for having chosen to give this dinner in a public place. People were gaping at Wynand—discreetly and with practiced camouflage, but gaping nevertheless—and their attention included the two guests at Wynand’s table.

Dominique sat between the two men. She wore a white silk dress with long sleeves and a cowl neck, a nun’s garment that acquired the startling effect of an evening gown only by being so flagrantly unsuited to that purpose. She wore no jewelry. Her gold hair looked like a hood. The dull white silk moved in angular planes with the movements of her body, revealing it in a manner of cold innocence, the body of a sacrificial object publicly offered, beyond the need of concealment or desire. Keating found it unattractive. He noticed that Wynand seemed to admire it.

Someone at a distant table stared in their direction insistently, someone tall and bulky. Then the big shape rose to its feet—and Keating recognized Ralston Holcombe hurrying toward them.

“Peter, my boy, so glad to see you,” boomed Holcombe, shaking his hand, bowing to Dominique, conspicuously ignoring Wynand. “Where have you been hiding? Why don’t we see you around any more?” They had had luncheon together three days ago.

Wynand had risen and stood leaning forward a little, courteously. Keating hesitated; then, with obvious reluctance, said:

“Mr. Wynand—Mr. Holcombe.”

“Not Mr. Gail Wynand?” said Holcombe, with splendid innocence.

“Mr. Holcombe, if you saw one of the cough-drop Smith brothers in real life, would you recognize him?” asked Wynand.

“Why—I guess so,” said Holcombe, blinking.

“My face, Mr. Holcombe, is just as much of a public bromide.”

Holcombe muttered a few benevolent generalities and escaped.

Wynand smiled affectionately. “You didn’t have to be afraid of introducing Mr. Holcombe to me, Mr. Keating, even though he is an architect.”

“Afraid, Mr. Wynand?”

“Unnecessarily, since it’s all settled. Hasn’t Mrs. Keating told you that Stoneridge is yours?”

“I ... no, she hasn’t told me ... I didn’t know....” Wynand was smiling, but the smile remained fixed, and Keating felt compelled to go on talking until some sign stopped him. “I hadn’t quite hoped ... not so soon ... of course, I thought this dinner might be a sign ... help you to decide ...” He blurted out involuntarily: “Do you always throw surprises like that—just like that?”

“Whenever I can,” said Wynand gravely.

“I shall do my best to deserve this honor and live up to your expectations, Mr. Wynand.”

“I have no doubt about that,” said Wynand.

He had said little to Dominique tonight. His full attention seemed centered on Keating.

“The public has been kind to my past endeavors,” said Keating, “but I shall make Stoneridge my best achievement.”

“That is quite a promise, considering the distinguished list of your works.”

“I had not hoped that my works were of sufficient importance to attract your attention, Mr. Wynand.”

“But I know them quite well. The Cosmo-Slotnick Building, which is pure Michelangelo.” Keating’s face spread in incredulous pleasure; he knew that Wynand was a great authority on art and would not make such comparisons lightly. “The Prudential Bank Building, which is genuine Palladio. The Slottern Department Store, which is snitched Christopher Wren.” Keating’s face had changed. “Look what an illustrious company I get for the price of one. Isn’t it quite a bargain?”

Keating smiled, his face tight, and said:

“I’ve heard about your brilliant sense of humor, Mr. Wynand.”

“Have you heard about my descriptive style?”

“What do you mean?”

Wynand half turned in his chair and looked at Dominique, as if he were inspecting an inanimate object.

“Your wife has a lovely body, Mr. Keating. Her shoulders are too thin, but admirably in scale with the rest of her. Her legs are too long, but that gives her the elegance of line you’ll find in a good yacht. Her breasts are beautiful, don’t you think?”

“Architecture is a crude profession, Mr. Wynand,” Keating tried to laugh. “It doesn’t prepare one for the superior sort of sophistication.”

“You don’t understand me, Mr. Keating?”

“If I didn’t know you were a perfect gentleman, I might misunderstand it, but you can’t fool me.”

“That is just what I am trying not to do.”

“I appreciate compliments, Mr. Wynand, but I’m not conceited enough to think that we must talk about my wife.”

“Why not, Mr. Keating? It is considered good form to talk of the things one has—or will have—in common.”

“Mr. Wynand, I ... I don’t understand.”

“Shall I be more explicit?”

“No, I...”

“No? Shall we drop the subject of Stoneridge?”

“Oh, let’s talk about Stoneridge! I ...”

“But we are, Mr. Keating.”

Keating looked at the room about them. He thought that things like this could not be done in such a place; the fastidious magnificence made it monstrous; he wished it were a dank cellar. He thought: blood on paving stones—all right, but not blood on a drawing-room rug....

“Now I know this is a joke, Mr. Wynand,” he said.

“It is my turn to admire your sense of humor, Mr. Keating.”

“Things like ... like this aren’t being done ...”

“That’s not what you mean at all, Mr. Keating. You mean, they’re being done all the time, but not talked about.”

“I didn’t think ...”

“You thought it before you came here. You didn’t mind. I grant you I’m behaving abominably. I’m breaking all the rules of charity. It’s extremely cruel to be honest.”

“Please, Mr. Wynand, let’s ... drop it. I don’t know what ... I’m supposed to do.”

“That’s simple. You’re supposed to slap my face.” Keating giggled. “You were supposed to do that several minutes ago.”

Keating noticed that his palms were wet and that he was trying to support his weight by holding on to the napkin on his lap. Wynand and Dominique were eating, slowly and graciously, as if they were at another table. Keating thought that they were not human bodies, either one of them; something had vanished; the light of the crystal fixtures in the room was the radiance of X-rays that ate through, not to the bones, but deeper; they were souls, he thought, sitting at a dinner table, souls held within evening clothes, lacking the intermediate shape of flesh, terrifying in naked revelation—terrifying, because he expected to see torturers, but saw a great innocence. He wondered what they saw, what his own clothes contained if his physical shape had gone.

“No?” said Wynand. “You don’t want to do that, Mr. Keating? But of course you don’t have to. Just say that you don’t want any of it. I won’t mind. There’s Mr. Ralston Holcombe across the room. He can build Stoneridge as well as you could.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Wynand,” whispered Keating. His eyes were fixed upon the tomato aspic on his salad plate; it was soft and shivering; it made him sick.

Wynand turned to Dominique.

“Do you remember our conversation about a certain quest, Mrs. Keating? I said it was a quest at which you would never succeed. Look at your husband. He’s an expert—without effort. That is the way to go about it. Match that, sometime. Don’t bother to tell me that you can’t. I know it. You’re an amateur, my dear.”

Keating thought that he must speak again, but he couldn’t, not as long as that salad was there before him. The terror came from that plate, not from the fastidious monster across the table; the rest of the room was warm and safe. He lurched forward and his elbow swept the plate off the table.

He made a kind of sound expressing regrets. Somebody’s shape came up, there were polite voices of apology, and the mess vanished from the carpet.

Keating heard a voice saying: “Why are you doing this?” saw two faces turned to him and knew that he had said it.

“Mr. Wynand is not doing it to torture you, Peter,” said Dominique calmly. “He’s doing it for me. To see how much I can take.”

“That’s true, Mrs. Keating,” said Wynand. “Partly true. The other part is: to justify myself.”

“In whose eyes?”

“Yours. And my own, perhaps.”

“Do you need to?”

“Sometimes. The Banner is a contemptible paper, isn’t it? Well, I have paid with my honor for the privilege of holding a position where I can amuse myself by observing how honor operates in other men.”

His own clothes, thought Keating, contained nothing now, because the two faces did not notice him any longer. He was safe; his place at that table was empty. He wondered, from a great, indifferent distance, why the two were looking at each other quietly, not like enemies, not like fellow executioners, but like comrades.

Two days before they were to sail, Wynand telephoned Dominique late in the evening.

“Could you come over right now?” he asked, and hearing a moment’s silence, added: “Oh, not what you’re thinking. I live up to my agreements. You’ll be quite safe. I just would like to see you tonight.”

“All right,” she said, and was astonished to hear a quiet: “Thank you.”

When the elevator door slid open in the private lobby of his penthouse, he was waiting there, but did not let her step out. He joined her in the elevator.

“I don’t want you to enter my house,” he said. “We’re going to the floor below.”

The elevator operator looked at him, amazed.

The car stopped and opened before a locked door. Wynand unlocked it and let her step out first, following her into the art gallery. She remembered that this was the place no outsider ever entered. She said nothing. He offered no explanation.

For hours she walked silently through the vast rooms, looking at the incredible treasures of beauty. There was a deep carpet and no sound of steps, no sounds from the city outside, no windows. He followed her, stopping when she stopped. His eyes went with hers from object to object. At times his glance moved to her face. She passed, without stopping, by the statue from the Stoddard Temple.

He did not urge her to stay nor to hurry, as if he had turned the place over to her. She decided when she wished to leave, and he followed her to the door. Then she asked:

“Why did you want me to see this? It won’t make me think better of you. Worse, perhaps.”

“Yes, I’d expect that,” he said quietly, “if I had thought of it that way. But I didn’t. I just wanted you to see it.”

IV

THE SUN HAD SET WHEN THEY STEPPED OUT OF THE CAR. IN THE spread of sky and sea, a green sky over a sheet of mercury, tracings of fire remained at the edges of the clouds and in the brass fittings of the yacht. The yacht was like a white streak of motion, a sensitive body strained against the curb of stillness.

Dominique looked at the gold letters—I Do—on the delicate white bow.

“What does that name mean?” she asked.

“It’s an answer,” said Wynand, “to people long since dead. Though perhaps they are the only immortal ones. You see, the sentence I heard most often in my childhood was ‘You don’t run things around here.’ ”

She remembered hearing that he had never answered this question before. He had answered her at once; he had not seemed conscious of making an exception. She felt a sense of calm in his manner, strange and new to him, an air of quiet finality.

When they went aboard, the yacht started moving, almost as if Wynand’s steps on deck had served as contact. He stood at the rail, not touching her, he looked at the long, brown shore that rose and fell against the sky, moving away from them. Then he turned to her. She saw no new recognition in his eyes, no beginning, but only the continuation of a glance—as if he had been looking at her all the time.

When they went below he walked with her into her cabin. He said: “Please let me know if there’s anything you wish,” and walked out through an inside door. She saw that it led to his bedroom. He closed the door and did not return.

She moved idly across the cabin. A smear of reflection followed her on the lustrous surfaces of the pale satinwood paneling. She stretched out in a low armchair, her ankles crossed, her arms thrown behind her head, and watched the porthole turning from green to a dark blue. She moved her hand, switched on a light; the blue vanished and became a glazed black circle.

The steward announced dinner. Wynand knocked at her door and accompanied her to the dining salon. His manner puzzled her: it was gay, but the sense of calm in the gaiety suggested a peculiar earnestness.

She asked, when they were seated at the table:

“Why did you leave me alone?”

“I thought you might want to be alone.”

“To get used to the idea?”

“If you wish to put it that way.”

“I was used to it before I came to your office.”

“Yes, of course. Forgive me for implying any weakness in you. I know better. By the way, you haven’t asked me where we’re going.”

“That, too, would be weakness.”

“True. I’m glad you don’t care. Because I never have any definite destination. This ship is not for going to places, but for getting away from them. When I stop at a port, it’s only for the sheer pleasure of leaving it. I always think: Here’s one more spot that can’t hold me.”

“I used to travel a great deal. I always felt just like that. I’ve been told it’s because I’m a hater of mankind.”

“You’re not foolish enough to believe that, are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Surely you’ve seen through that particular stupidity. I mean the one that claims the pig is the symbol of love for humanity—the creature that accepts anything. As a matter of fact, the person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him.”

“You mean the person who says that there’s some good in the worst of us?”

“I mean the person who has the filthy insolence to claim that he loves equally the man who made that statue of you and the man who makes a Mickey Mouse balloon to sell on street corners. I mean the person who loves the men who prefer the Mickey Mouse to your statue—and there are many of that kind. I mean the person who loves Joan of Arc and the salesgirls in dress shops on Broadway—with an equal fervor. I mean the person who loves your beauty and the women he sees in a subway—the kind that can’t cross their knees and show flesh hanging publicly over their garters—with the same sense of exaltation. I mean the person who loves the clean, steady, unfrightened eyes of man looking through a telescope and the white stare of an imbecile—equally. I mean quite a large, generous, magnanimous company. Is it you who hate mankind, Mrs. Keating?”

“You’re saying all the things that—since I can remember—since I began to see and think—have been ...” She stopped.

“Have been torturing you. Of course. One can’t love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name. It’s one or the other. One doesn’t love God and sacrilege impartially. Except when one doesn’t know that sacrilege has been committed. Because one doesn’t know God.”

“What will you say if I give you the answer people usually give me—that love is forgiveness?”

“I’ll say it’s an indecency of which you’re not capable—even though you think you’re an expert in such matters.”

“Or that love is pity.”

“Oh, keep still. It’s bad enough to hear things like that. To hear them from you is revolting—even as a joke.”

“What’s your answer?”

“That love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don’t know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who’ve never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you’ve felt what it means to love as you and I know it—the total passion for the total height—you’re incapable of anything less.”

“As—you and I—know it?”

“It’s what we feel when we look at a thing like your statue. There’s no forgiveness in that, and no pity. And I’d want to kill the man who claims that there should be. But, you see, when he looks at your statue—he feels nothing. That—or a dog with a broken paw—it’s all the same to him. He even feels that he’s done something nobler by bandaging the dog’s paw than by looking at your statue. So if you seek a glimpse of greatness, if you want exaltation, if you ask for God and refuse to accept the washing of wounds as substitute—you’re called a hater of humanity, Mrs. Keating, because you’ve committed the crime of knowing a love humanity has not learned to deserve.”

“Mr. Wynand, have you read what I got fired for?”

“No. I didn’t then. I don’t dare to now.”

“Why?”

He ignored the question. He said, smiling: “And so, you came to me and said ‘You’re the vilest person on earth—take me so that I’ll learn self-contempt. I lack that which most people live by. They find life endurable, while I can’t.’ Do you see now what you’ve shown?”

“I didn’t expect it to be seen.”

“No. Not by the publisher of the New York Banner, of course. That’s all right. I expected a beautiful slut who was a friend of Ellsworth Toohey.”

They laughed together. She thought it was strange that they could talk without strain—as if he had forgotten the purpose of this journey. His calm had become a contagious sense of peace between them.

She watched the unobtrusively gracious way their dinner was served, she looked at the white tablecloth against the deep red of the mahogany walls. Everything on the yacht had an air that made her think it was the first truly luxurious place she had ever entered: the luxury was secondary, a background so proper to him that it could be ignored. The man humbled his own wealth. She had seen people of wealth, stiff and awed before that which represented their ultimate goal. The splendor of this place was not the aim, not the final achievement of the man who leaned casually across the table. She wondered what his aim had been.

“This ship is becoming to you,” she said.

She saw a look of pleasure in his eyes—and of gratitude.

“Thank you.... Is the art gallery?”

“Yes. Only that’s less excusable.”

“I don’t want you to make excuses for me.” He said it simply, without reproach.

They had finished dinner. She waited for the inevitable invitation. It did not come. He sat smoking, talking about the yacht and the ocean.

Her hand came to rest accidentally on the tablecloth, close to his. She saw him looking at it. She wanted to jerk her hand away, but forced herself to let it lie still. Now, she thought.

He got up. “Let’s go on deck,” he said.

They stood at the rail and looked at a black void. Space was not to be seen, only felt by the quality of the air against their faces. A few stars gave reality to the empty sky. A few sparks of white fire in the water gave life to the ocean.

He stood, slouched carelessly, one arm raised, grasping a stanchion. She saw the sparks flowing, forming the edges of waves, framed by the curve of his body. That, too, was becoming to him.

She said:

“May I name another vicious bromide you’ve never felt?”

“Which one?”

“You’ve never felt how small you were when looking at the ocean.”

He laughed. “Never. Nor looking at the planets. Nor at mountain peaks. Nor at the Grand Canyon. Why should I? When I look at the ocean, I feel the greatness of man. I think of man’s magnificent capacity that created this ship to conquer all that senseless space. When I look at mountain peaks, I think of tunnels and dynamite. When I look at the planets, I think of airplanes.”

“Yes. And that particular sense of sacred rapture men say they experience in contemplating nature—I’ve never received it from nature, only from ...” She stopped.

“From what?”

“Buildings,” she whispered. “Skyscrapers.”

“Why didn’t you want to say that?”

“I ... don’t know.”

“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. Particularly when one can’t see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window—no, I don’t feel how small I am—but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.”

“Gail, I don’t know whether I’m listening to you or to myself.”

“Did you hear yourself just now?”

She smiled. “Actually not. But I won’t take it back, Gail.”

“Thank you—Dominique.” His voice was soft and amused. “But we weren’t talking about you or me. We were talking about other people.” He leaned with both forearms on the rail, he spoke watching the sparks in the water. “It’s interesting to speculate on the reasons that make men so anxious to debase themselves. As in that idea of feeling small before nature. It’s not a bromide, it’s practically an institution. Have you noticed how self-righteous a man sounds when he tells you about it? Look, he seems to say, I’m so glad to be a pigmy, that’s how virtuous I am. Have you heard with what delight people quote some great celebrity who’s proclaimed that he’s not so great when he looks at Niagara Falls? It’s as if they were smacking their lips in sheer glee that their best is dust before the brute force of an earthquake. As if they were sprawling on all fours, rubbing their foreheads in the mud to the majesty of a hurricane. But that’s not the spirit that leashed fire, steam, electricity, that crossed oceans in sailing sloops, that built airplanes and dams ... and skyscrapers. What is it they fear? What is it they hate so much, those who love to crawl? And why?”

“When I find the answer to that,” she said, “I’ll make my peace with the world.”

He went on talking—of his travels, of the continents beyond the darkness around them, the darkness that made of space a soft curtain pressed against their eyelids. She waited. She stopped answering. She gave him a chance to use the brief silences for ending this, for saying the words she expected. He would not say them.

“Are you tired, my dear?” he asked.

“No.”

“I’ll get you a deck chair, if you want to sit down.”

“No, I like standing here.”

“It’s a little cold. But by tomorrow we’ll be far south and then you’ll see the ocean on fire, at night. It’s very beautiful.”

He was silent. She heard the ship’s speed in the sound of the water, the rustling moan of protest against the thing that cut a long wound across the water’s surface.

“When are we going below?” she asked.

“We’re not going below.”

He had said it quietly, with an odd kind of simplicity, as if he were standing helpless before a fact he could not alter.

“Will you marry me?” he asked.

She could not hide the shock; he had seen it in advance, he was smiling quietly, understanding.

“It would be best to say nothing else.” He spoke carefully. “But you prefer to hear it stated—because that kind of silence between us is more than I have a right to expect. You don’t want to tell me much, but I’ve spoken for you tonight, so let me speak for you again. You’ve chosen me as the symbol of your contempt for men. You don’t love me. You wish to grant me nothing. I’m only your tool of self-destruction. I know all that, I accept it and I want you to marry me. If you wish to commit an unspeakable act as your revenge against the world, such an act is not to sell yourself to your enemy, but to marry him. Not to match your worst against his worst, but your worst against his best. You’ve tried that once, but your victim wasn’t worthy of your purpose. You see, I’m pleading my case in your own terms. What mine are, what I want to find in that marriage is of no importance to you and I shall regard it in that manner. You don’t have to know about it. You don’t have to consider it. I exact no promises and impose no obligations on you. You’ll be free to leave me whenever you wish. Incidentally—since it is of no concern to you—I love you.”

She stood, one arm stretched behind her, finger tips pressed to the rail. She said:

“I did not want that.”

“I know. But if you’re curious about it, I’ll tell you that you’ve made a mistake. You let me see the cleanest person I’ve ever seen.”

“Isn’t that ridiculous, after the way we met?”

“Dominique, I’ve spent my life pulling the strings of the world. I’ve seen all of it. Do you think I could believe any purity—unless it came to me twisted in some such dreadful shape as the one you chose? But what I feel must not affect your decision.”

She stood looking at him, looking incredulously at all the hours past. Her mouth had the shape of gentleness. He saw it. She thought that every word he said today had been of her language, that this offer and the form he gave it were of her own world—and that he had destroyed his purpose by it, taken away from her the motive he suggested, made it impossible to seek degradation with a man who spoke as he did. She wanted suddenly to reach for him, to tell him everything, to find a moment’s release in his understanding, then ask him never to see her again.

Then she remembered.

He noticed the movement of her hand. Her fingers were not leaning tensely against the rail, betraying a need of support, giving importance to the moment; they relaxed and closed about the rail; as if she had taken hold of some reins, carelessly, because the occasion required no earnest effort any longer.

She remembered the Stoddard Temple. She thought of the man before her, who spoke about the total passion for the total height and about protecting skyscrapers with his body—and she saw a picture on a page of the New York Banner, the picture of Howard Roark looking up at the Enright House, and the caption: “Are you happy, Mr. Superman?”

She raised her face to him. She asked:

“To marry you? To become Mrs. Wynand-Papers?”

She heard the effort in his voice as he answered: “If you wish to call it that—yes.”

“I will marry you.”

“Thank you, Dominique.”

She waited indifferently.

When he turned to her, he spoke as he had spoken all day, a calm voice with an edge of gaiety.

“We’ll cut the cruise short. We’ll take just a week—I want to have you here for a while. You’ll leave for Reno the day after we return. I’ll take care of your husband. He can have Stoneridge and anything else he wants and may God damn him. We’ll be married the day you come back.”

“Yes, Gail. Now let’s go below.”

“Do you want it?”

“No. But I don’t want our marriage to be important.”

“I want it to be important, Dominique. That’s why I won’t touch you tonight. Not until we’re married. I know it’s a senseless gesture. I know that a wedding ceremony has no significance for either one of us. But to be conventional is the only abnormality possible between us. That’s why I want it. I have no other way of making an exception.”

“As you wish, Gail.”

Then he pulled her to him and he kissed her mouth. It was the completion of his words, the finished statement, a statement of such intensity that she tried to stiffen her body, not to respond, and felt her body responding, forced to forget everything but the physical fact of a man who held her.

He let her go. She knew he had noticed. He smiled and said:

“You’re tired, Dominique. Shall I say good night? I want to remain here for a while.”

She turned obediently and walked alone down to her cabin.

V

“WHAT’S THE MATTER? DON’T I GET STONERIDGE?” SNAPPED Peter Keating.

Dominique walked into the living room. He followed, waiting in the open door. The elevator boy brought in her luggage, and left. She said, removing her gloves:

“You’ll get Stoneridge, Peter. Mr. Wynand will tell you the rest himself. He wants to see you tonight. At eight-thirty. At his home.”

“Why in hell?”

“He’ll tell you.”

She slapped her gloves softly against her palm, a small gesture of finality, like a period at the end of a sentence. She turned to leave the room. He stood in her way.

“I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t give a damn. I can play it your way. You’re great, aren’t you?—because you act like truck drivers, you and Mr. Gail Wynand? To hell with decency, to hell with the other fellow’s feelings? Well, I can do that too. I’ll use you both and I’ll get what I can out of it—and that’s all I care. How do you like it? No point when the worm refuses to be hurt? Spoils the fun?”

“I think that’s much better, Peter. I’m glad.”

He found himself unable to preserve this attitude when he entered Wynand’s study that evening. He could not escape the awe of being admitted into Gail Wynand’s home. By the time he crossed the room to the seat facing the desk he felt nothing but a sense of weight, and he wondered whether his feet had left prints on the soft carpet; like the leaded feet of a deep-sea diver.

“What I have to tell you, Mr. Keating, should never have needed to be said or done,” said Wynand. Keating had never heard a man speak in a manner so consciously controlled. He thought crazily that it sounded as if Wynand held his fist closed over his voice and directed each syllable. “Any extra word I speak will be offensive, so I shall be brief. I am going to marry your wife. She is leaving for Reno tomorrow. Here is the contract for Stoneridge. I have signed it. Attached is a check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It is in addition to what you will receive for your work under the contract. I’ll appreciate it if you will now make no comment of any kind. I realize that I could have had your consent for less, but I wish no discussion. It would be intolerable if we were to bargain about it. Therefore, will you please take this and consider the matter settled?”

He extended the contract across the desk. Keating saw the pale blue rectangle of the check held to the top of the page by a paper clip. The clip flashed silver in the light of the desk lamp.

Keating’s hand did not reach to meet the paper. He said, his chin moving awkwardly to frame the words:

“I don’t want it. You can have my consent for nothing.”

He saw a look of astonishment—and almost of kindness—on Wynand’s face.

“You don’t want it? You don’t want Stoneridge either?”

“I want Stoneridge!” Keating’s hand rose and snatched the paper. “I want it all! Why should you get away with it? Why should I care?”

Wynand got up. He said, relief and regret in his voice:

“Right, Mr. Keating. For a moment, you had almost justified your marriage. Let it remain what it was. Good night.”

Keating did not go home. He walked to the apartment of Neil Dumont, his new designer and best friend. Neil Dumont was a lanky, anemic society youth, with shoulders stooped under the burden of too many illustrious ancestors. He was not a good designer, but he had connections; he was obsequious to Keating in the office, and Keating was obsequious to him after office hours.

He found Dumont at home. Together, they got Gordon Prescott and Vincent Knowlton, and started out to make a wild night of it. Keating did not drink much. He paid for everything. He paid more than necessary. He seemed anxious to find things to pay for. He gave exorbitant tips. He kept asking: “We’re friends—aren’t we friends?—aren’t we?” He looked at the glasses around him and he watched the lights dancing in the liquid. He looked at the three pairs of eyes; they were blurred, but they turned upon him occasionally with contentment. They were soft and comforting.

That evening, her bags packed and ready in her room, Dominique went to see Steven Mallory.

She had not seen Roark for twenty months. She had called on Mallory once in a while. Mallory knew that these visits were breakdowns in a struggle she would not name; he knew that she did not want to come, that her rare evenings with him were time torn out of her life. He never asked any questions and he was always glad to see her. They talked quietly, with a feeling of companionship such as that of an old married couple; as if he had possessed her body, and the wonder of it had long since been consumed, and nothing remained but an untroubled intimacy. He had never touched her body, but he had possessed it in a deeper kind of ownership when he had done her statue, and they could not lose the special sense of each other it had given them.

He smiled when he opened the door and saw her.

“Hello, Dominique.”

“Hello, Steve. Interrupting you?”

“No. Come in.”

He had a studio, a huge, sloppy place in an old building. She noticed the change since her last visit. The room had an air of laughter, like a breath held too long and released. She saw second-hand furniture, an Oriental rug of rare texture and sensuous color, jade ash trays, pieces of sculpture that came from historical excavations, anything he had wished to seize, helped by the sudden fortune of Wynand’s patronage. The walls looked strangely bare above the gay clutter. He had bought no paintings. A single sketch hung over his studio—Roark’s original drawing of the Stoddard Temple.

She looked slowly about her, noting every object and the reason for its presence. He kicked two chairs toward the fireplace and they sat down, one at each side of the fire.

He said, quite simply:

“Clayton, Ohio.”

“Doing what?”

“A new building for Janer’s Department Store. Five stories. On Main Street.”

“How long has he been there?”

“About a month.”

It was the first question he answered whenever she came here, without making her ask it. His simple ease spared her the necessity of explanation or pretense; his manner included no comment.

“I’m going away tomorrow, Steve.”

“For long?”

“Six weeks. Reno.”

“I’m glad.”

“I’d rather not tell you now what I’ll do when I come back. You won’t be glad.”

“I’ll try to be—if it’s what you want to do.”

“It’s what I want to do.”

One log still kept its shape on the pile of coals in the fireplace; it was checkered into small squares and it glowed without flame, like a solid string of lighted windows. He reached down and threw a fresh log on the coals. It cracked the string of windows in half and sent sparks shooting up against the sooted bricks.

He talked about his own work. She listened, as if she were an emigrant hearing her homeland’s language for a brief while.

In a pause, she asked:

“How is he, Steve?”

“As he’s always been. He doesn’t change, you know.”

He kicked the log. A few coals rolled out. He pushed them back. He said:

“I often think that he’s the only one of us who’s achieved immortality. I don’t mean in the sense of fame and I don’t mean that he won’t die some day. But he’s living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they’re not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict—and they call it growth. At the end there’s nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been any entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they have never held for a single moment? But Howard—one can imagine him existing forever.”

She sat looking at the fire. It gave a deceptive semblance of life to her face. After a while he asked:

“How do you like all the new things I got?”

“I like them. I like your having them.”

“I didn’t tell you what happened to me since I saw you last. The completely incredible. Gail Wynand ...”

“Yes, I know about that.”

“You do? Wynand, of all people—what on earth made him discover me?”

“I know that too. I’ll tell you when I come back.”

“He has an amazing judgment. Amazing for him. He bought the best.”

“Yes, he would.”

Then she asked, without transition, yet he knew that she was not speaking of Wynand:

“Steve, has he ever asked you about me?”

“No.”

“Have you told him about my coming here?”

“No.”

“Is that—for my sake, Steve?”

“No. For his.”

He knew he had told her everything she wanted to know.

She said, rising:

“Let’s have some tea. Show me where you keep your stuff. I’ll fix it.”

Dominique left for Reno early in the morning. Keating was still asleep and she did not awaken him to say good-by.

When he opened his eyes, he knew that she was gone, before he looked at the clock, by the quality of the silence in the house. He thought he should say “Good riddance,” but he did not say it and he did not feel it. What he felt was a vast, flat sentence without subject—“It’s no use”—related neither to himself nor to Dominique. He was alone and there was no necessity to pretend anything. He lay in bed, on his back, his arms flung out helplessly. His face looked humble and his eyes bewildered. He felt that it was an end and a death, but he did not mean the loss of Dominique.

He got up and dressed. In the bathroom he found a hand towel she had used and discarded. He picked it up, he pressed his face to it and held it for a long time, not in sorrow, but in nameless emotion, not understanding, knowing only that he had loved her twice—on that evening when Toohey telephoned, and now. Then he opened his fingers and let the towel slip down to the floor, like a liquid running between his fingers.

He went to his office and worked as usual. Nobody knew of his divorce and he felt no desire to inform anyone. Neil Dumont winked at him and drawled: “I say, Pete, you look peaked.” He shrugged and turned his back. The sight of Dumont made him sick today.

He left the office early. A vague instinct kept pulling at him, like hunger, at first, then taking shape. He had to see Ellsworth Toohey. He had to reach Toohey. He felt like the survivor of a shipwreck swimming toward a distant light.

That evening he dragged himself to Ellsworth Toohey’s apartment. When he entered, he felt dimly glad of his self-control, because Toohey seemed to notice nothing in his face,

“Oh, hello, Peter,” said Toohey airily. “Your sense of timing leaves much to be desired. You catch me on the worst possible evening. Busy as all hell. But don’t let that bother you. What are friends for but to inconvenience one? Sit down, sit down, I’ll be with you in a minute.”

“I’m sorry, Ellsworth. But ... I had to.”

“Make yourself at home. Just ignore me for a minute, will you?”

Keating sat down and waited. Toohey worked, making notes on sheets of typewritten copy. He sharpened a pencil, the sound grating like a saw across Keating’s nerves. He bent over his copy again, rustling the pages once in a while.

Half an hour later he pushed the papers aside and smiled at Keating. “That’s that,” he said. Keating made a small movement forward. “Sit tight,” said Toohey, “just one telephone call I’ve got to make.”

He dialed the number of Gus Webb. “Hello, Gus,” he said gaily. “How are you, you walking advertisement for contraceptives?” Keating had never heard that tone of loose intimacy from Toohey, a special tone of brotherhood that permitted sloppiness. He heard Webb’s piercing voice say something and laugh in the receiver. The receiver went on spitting out rapid sounds from deep down in its tube, like a throat being cleared. The words could not be recognized, only their quality; the quality of abandon and insolence, with high shrieks of mirth once in a while.

Toohey leaned back in his chair, listening, half smiling. “Yes,” he said occasionally, “uh-huh.... You said it, boy.... Surer’n hell....” He leaned back farther and put one foot in a shining, pointed shoe on the edge of the desk. “Listen, boy, what I wanted to tell you is go easy on old Bassett for a while. Sure he liked your work, but don’t shock hell out of him for the time being. No rough-house, see? Keep that big facial cavity of yours buttoned up.... You know damn well who I am to tell you.... That’s right.... That’s the stuff, kid.... Oh, he did? Good, angel-face.... Well, bye-bye—oh, say, Gus, have you heard the one about the British lady and the plumber?” There followed a story. The receiver yelled raucously at the end. “Well, watch your step and your digestion, angel-face. Nighty-night.”

Toohey dropped the receiver, said: “Now, Peter,” stretched, got up, walked to Keating and stood before him, rocking a little on his small feet, his eyes bright and kindly.

“Now, Peter, what’s the matter? Has the world crashed about your nose?”

Keating reached into his inside pocket and produced a yellow check, crumpled, much handled. It bore his signature and the sum of ten thousand dollars, made out to Ellsworth M. Toohey. The gesture with which he handed it to Toohey was not that of a donor, but of a beggar.

“Please, Ellsworth ... here ... take this ... for a good cause ... for the Workshop of Social Study ... or for anything you wish ... you know best ... for a good cause ...”

Toohey held the check with the tips of his fingers, like a soiled penny, bent his head to one side, pursing his lips in appreciation, and tossed the check on his desk.

“Very handsome of you, Peter. Very handsome indeed. What’s the occasion?”

“Ellsworth, you remember what you said once—that it doesn’t matter what we are or do, if we help others? That’s all that counts? That’s good, isn’t it? That’s clean?”

“I haven’t said it once. I’ve said it a million times.”

“And it’s really true?”

“Of course it’s true. If you have the courage to accept it.”

“You’re my friend, aren’t you? You’re the only friend I’ve got. I ... I’m not even friendly with myself, but you are. With me, I mean, aren’t you, Ellsworth?”

“But of course. Which is of more value than your own friendship with yourself—a rather queer conception, but quite valid.”

“You understand. Nobody else does. And you like me.”

“Devotedly. Whenever I have the time.”

“Ah?”

“Your sense of humor, Peter, where’s your sense of humor? What’s the matter? A bellyache? Or a soul-indigestion?”

“Ellsworth, I ...”

“Yes?”

“I can’t tell you. Even you.”

“You’re a coward, Peter.”

Keating stared helplessly: the voice had been severe and gentle, he did not know whether he should feel pain, insult or confidence.

“You come here to tell me that it doesn’t matter what you do—and then you go to pieces over something or other you’ve done. Come on, be a man and say it doesn’t matter. Say you’re not important. Mean it. Show some guts. Forget your little ego.”

“I’m not important, Ellsworth. I’m not important. Oh God, if only everybody’d say it like you do! I’m not important. I don’t want to be important.”

“Where did that money come from?”

“I sold Dominique.”

“What are you talking about? The cruise?”

“Only it seems as if it’s not Dominique that I sold.”

“What do you care if ...”

“She’s gone to Reno.”

“What?”

He could not understand the violence of Toohey’s reaction, but he was too tired to wonder. He told everything, as it had happened to him; it had not taken long to happen or to tell.

“You damn fool! You shouldn’t have allowed it!”

“What could I do? Against Wynand?”

“But to let him marry her!”

“Why not, Ellsworth? It’s better than ...”

“I didn’t think he’d ever ... but ... Oh, God damn it, I’m a bigger fool than you are!”

“But it’s better for Dominique if ...”

“To hell with your Dominique! It’s Wynand I’m thinking about!”

“Ellsworth, what’s the matter with you? ... Why should you care?”

“Keep still, will you? Let me think.”

In a moment, Toohey shrugged, sat down beside Keating and slipped his arm about his shoulders.

“I’m sorry, Peter,” he said. “I apologize. I’ve been inexcusably rude to you. It was just the shock. But I understand how you feel. Only you mustn’t take it too seriously. It doesn’t matter.” He spoke automatically. His mind was far away. Keating did not notice that. He heard the words. They were the spring in the desert. “It doesn’t matter. You’re only human. That’s all you want to be. Who’s any better? Who has the right to cast the first stone? We’re all human. It doesn’t matter.”

“My God!” said Alvah Scarret. “He can’t! Not Dominique Francon!”

“He will,” said Toohey. “As soon as she returns.”

Scarret had been surprised that Toohey should invite him to lunch, but the news he heard wiped out the surprise in a greater and more painful one.

“I’m fond of Dominique,” said Scarret, pushing his plate aside, his appetite gone. “I’ve always been very fond of her. But to have her as Mrs. Gail Wynand!”

“These, exactly, are my own sentiments,” said Toohey.

“I’ve always advised him to marry. It helps. Lends an air. An insurance of respectability, sort of, and he could do with one. He’s always skated on pretty thin ice. Got away with it, so far. But Dominique!”

“Why do you find such a marriage unsuitable?”

“Well... well, it’s not ... Damn it, you know it’s not right!”

“I know it. Do you?”

“Look, she’s a dangerous kind of woman.”

“She is. That’s your minor premise. Your major premise, however, is: he’s a dangerous kind of man.”

“Well ... in some ways ... yes.”

“My esteemed editor, you understand me quite well. But there are times when it’s helpful to formulate things. It tends toward future—cooperation. You and I have a great deal in common—though you have been somewhat reluctant to admit it. We are two variations on the same theme, shall we say? Or we play two ends against the same middle, if you prefer your own literary style. But our dear boss is quite another tune. A different leitmotif entirely—don’t you think so, Alvah? Our dear boss is an accident in our midst. Accidents are unreliable phenomena. You’ve been sitting on the edge of your seat for years—haven’t you? —watching Mr. Gail Wynand. So you know exactly what I’m talking about. You know also that Miss Dominique Francon is not our tune either. And you do not wish to see that particular influence enter the life of our boss. Do I have to state the issue any plainer?”

“You’re a smart man, Ellsworth,” said Scarret heavily.

“That’s been obvious for years.”

“I’ll talk to him. You’d better not—he hates your guts, if you’ll excuse me. But I don’t think I’d do much good either. Not if he’s made up his mind.”

“I don’t expect you to. You may try, if you wish, though it’s useless. We can’t stop that marriage. One of my good points is the fact that I admit defeat when it has to be admitted.”

“But then, why did you——”

“Tell you this? In the nature of a scoop, Alvah. Advance information.”

“I appreciate it, Ellsworth. I sure do.”

“It would be wise to go on appreciating it. The Wynand papers, Alvah, are not to be given up easily. In unity there is strength. Your style.”

“What do you mean?”

“Only that we’re in for a difficult time, my friend. So we’d do better to stick together.”

“Why, I’m with you, Ellsworth. I’ve always been.”

“Inaccurate, but we’ll let it pass. We’re concerned only with the present. And the future. As a token of mutual understanding, how about getting rid of Jimmy Kearns at the first opportunity?”

“I thought you’ve been driving at that for months! What’s the matter with Jimmy Kearns? He’s a bright kid. The best drama critic in town. He’s got a mind. Smart as a whip. Most promising.”

“He’s got a mind—of his own. I don’t think you want any whips around the place—except the one you hold. I think you want to be careful about what the promise promises.”

“Whom’ll I stick in his spot?”

“Jules Fougler.”

“Oh, hell, Ellsworth!”

“Why not?”

“That old son of a ... We can’t afford him.”

“You can if you want to. And look at the name he’s got.”

“But he’s the most impossible old ...”

“Well, you don’t have to take him. We’ll discuss it some other time. Just get rid of Jimmy Kearns.”

“Look, Ellsworth, I don’t play favorites; it’s all the same to me. I’ll give Jimmy the boot if you say so. Only I don’t see what difference it makes and what it’s got to do with what we were talking about.”

“You don’t,” said Toohey. “You will.”

“Gail, you know that I want you to be happy,” said Alvah Scarret, sitting in a comfortable armchair in the study of Wynand’s penthouse that evening. “You know that. I’m thinking of nothing else.”

Wynand lay stretched out on a couch, one leg bent, with the foot resting on the knee of the other. He smoked and listened silently.

“I’ve known Dominique for years,” said Scarret. “Long before you even heard of her. I love her. I love her, you might say, like a father. But you’ve got to admit that she’s not the kind of woman your public would expect to see as Mrs. Gail Wynand.”

Wynand said nothing.

“Your wife is a public figure, Gail. Just automatically. A public property. Your readers have a right to demand and expect certain things of her. A symbol value, if you know what I mean. Like the Queen of England, sort of. How do you expect Dominique to live up to that? How do you expect her to preserve any appearances at all? She’s the wildest person I know. She has a terrible reputation. But worst of all—think, Gail!—a divorcee! And here we spend tons of good print, standing for the sanctity of the home and the purity of womanhood! How are you going to make your public swallow that one? How am I going to sell your wife to them?”

“Don’t you think this conversation had better be stopped, Alvah?”

“Yes, Gail,” said Scarret meekly.

Scarret waited, with a heavy sense of aftermath, as if after a violent quarrel, anxious to make up.

“I know, Gail!” he cried happily. “I know what we can do. We’ll put Dominique back on the paper and we’ll have her write a column—a different one—a syndicated column on the home. You know, household hints, kitchen, babies and all that. It’ll take the curse off. Show what a good little homebody she really is, her youthful mistakes notwithstanding. Make the women forgive her. We’ll have a special department—‘Mrs. Gail Wynand’s recipes.’ A few pictures of her will help—you know, gingham dresses and aprons and her hair done up in a more conventional way.”

“Shut up, Alvah, before I slap your face,” said Wynand without raising his voice.

“Yes, Gail.”

Scarret made a move to get up.

“Sit still. I haven’t finished.”

Scarret waited obediently.

“Tomorrow morning,” said Wynand, “you will send a memo to every one of our papers. You will tell them to look through their files and find any pictures of Dominique Francon they might have in connection with her old column. You will tell them to destroy the pictures. You will tell them that henceforward any mention of her name or the use of her picture in any of my papers will cost the job of the entire editorial staff responsible. When the proper time comes, you will have an announcement of my marriage appear in all our papers. That cannot be avoided. The briefest announcement you can compose. No commentaries. No stories. No pictures. Pass the word around and make sure it’s understood. It’s any man’s job, yours included, if this is disobeyed.”

“No stories—when you marry her?”

“No stories, Alvah.”

“But good God! That’s news! The other papers ...”

“I don’t care what the other papers do about it.”

“But—why, Gail?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

Dominique sat at the window, listening to the train wheels under the floor. She looked at the countryside of Ohio flying past in the fading daylight. Her head lay back against the seat and her hands lay limply at each side of her on the seat cushion. She was one with the structure of the car, she was carried forward just as the window frame, the floor, the walls of the compartment were carried forward. The corners blurred, gathering darkness; the window remained luminous, evening light rising from the earth. She let herself rest in that faint illumination; it entered the car and ruled it, so long as she did not turn on the light to shut it out.

She had no consciousness of purpose. There was no goal to this journey, only the journey itself, only the motion and the metal sound of motion around her. She felt slack and empty, losing her identity in a painless ebb, content to vanish and let nothing remain defined save that particular earth in the window.

When she saw, in the slowing movement beyond the glass, the name “Clayton” on a faded board under the eaves of a station building, she knew what she had been expecting. She knew why she had taken this train, not a faster one, why she had looked carefully at the timetable of its stops—although it had been just a column of meaningless names to her then. She seized her suitcase, coat and hat. She ran. She could not take time to dress, afraid that the floor under her feet would carry her away from here. She ran down the narrow corridor of the car, down the steps. She leaped to the station platform, feeling the shock of winter cold on her bare throat. She stood looking at the station building. She heard the train moving behind her, clattering away.

Then she put on her coat and hat. She walked across the platform, into the waiting room, across a wooden floor studded with lumps of dry chewing gum, through the heavy billows of heat from an iron stove, to the square beyond the station.

She saw a last band of yellow in the sky above the low roof lines. She saw a pitted stretch of paving bricks, and small houses leaning against one another; a bare tree with twisted branches, skeletons of weeds at the doorless opening of an abandoned garage, dark shop fronts, a drugstore still open on a corner, its lighted window dim, low over the ground.

She had never been here before, but she felt this place proclaiming its ownership of her, closing in about her with ominous intimacy. It was as if every dark mass exercised a suction like the pull of the planets in space, prescribing her orbit. She put her hand on a fire hydrant and felt the cold seeping through her glove into her skin. This was the way the town held her, a direct penetration which neither her clothes nor her mind could stop. The peace of the inevitable remained. Only now she had to act, but the actions were simple, set in advance. She asked a passer-by: “Where is the site of the new building of Janer’s Department Store?”

She walked patiently through the dark streets. She walked past desolate winter lawns and sagging porches; past vacant lots where weeds rustled against tin cans; past closed grocery stores and a steaming laundry; past an uncurtained window where a man in shirtsleeves sat by a fire, reading a paper. She turned corners and crossed streets, with the feel of cobblestones under the thin soles of her pumps. Rare passers-by looked, astonished, at her air of foreign elegance. She noticed it; she felt an answering wonder. She wanted to say: But don’t you understand?—I belong here more than you do. She stopped, once in a while, closing her eyes; she found it difficult to breathe.

She came to Main Street and walked slower. There were a few lights, cars parked diagonally at the curb, a movie theater, a store window displaying pink underwear among kitchen utensils. She walked stiffly, looking ahead.

She saw a glare of light on the side of an old building, on a blind wall of yellow bricks showing the sooted floor lines of a neighboring structure that had been torn down. The light came from an excavation pit. She knew this was the site. She hoped it was not. If they worked late, he would be here. She did not want to see him tonight. She had wanted only to see the place and the building; she was not ready for more; she had wanted to see him tomorrow. But she could not stop now. She walked to the excavation. It lay on a corner, open to the street, without fence. She heard the grinding clatter of iron, she saw the arm of a derrick, the shadows of men on the slanting sides of fresh earth, yellow in the light. She could not see the planks that led up to the sidewalk, but she heard the sound of steps and then she saw Roark coming up to the street. He was hatless, he had a loose coat hanging open.

He stopped. He looked at her. She thought that she was standing straight; that it was simple and normal, she was seeing the gray eyes and the orange hair as she had always seen them. She was astonished that he moved toward her with a kind of urgent haste, that his hand closed over her elbow too firmly and he said: “You’d better sit down.”

Then she knew she could not have stood up without that hand on her elbow. He took her suitcase. He led her across the dark side street and made her sit down on the steps of a vacant house. She leaned back against a closed door. He sat down beside her. He kept his hand tight on her elbow, not a caress, but an impersonal hold of control over both of them.

After a while he dropped his hand. She knew that she was safe now. She could speak.

“That’s your new building?”

“Yes. You walked here from the station?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a long walk.”

“I think it was.”

She thought that they had not greeted each other and that it was right. This was not a reunion, but just one moment out of something that had never been interrupted. She thought how strange it would be if she ever said “Hello” to him; one did not greet oneself each morning.

“What time did you get up today?” she asked.

“At seven.”

“I was in New York then. In a cab, going to Grand Central. Where did you have breakfast?”

“In a lunch wagon.”

“The kind that stays open all night?”

“Yes. Mostly for truck drivers.”

“Do you go there often?”

“Whenever I want a cup of coffee.”

“And you sit at a counter? And there are people around, looking at you?”

“I sit at a counter when I have the time. There are people around. I don’t think they look at me much.”

“And afterward? You walk to work?”

“Yes.”

“You walk every day? Down any of these streets? Past any window? So that if one just wanted to reach and open the window ...”

“People don’t stare out of windows here.”

From the vantage of the high stoop they could see the excavation across the street, the earth, the workmen, the rising steel columns in a glare of harsh light. She thought it was strange to see fresh earth in the midst of pavements and cobblestones; as if a piece had been torn from the clothing of a town, showing naked flesh. She said:

“You’ve done two country homes in the last two years.”

“Yes. One in Pennsylvania and one near Boston.”

“They were unimportant houses.”

“Inexpensive, if that’s what you mean. But very interesting to do.”

“How long will you remain here?”

“Another month.”

“Why do you work at night?”

“It’s a rush job.”

Across the street the derrick was moving, balancing a long girder in the air. She saw him watching it, and she knew he was not thinking of it, but there was the instinctive response in his eyes, something physically personal, intimacy with any action taken for his building.

“Roark ...”

They had not pronounced each other’s names. It had the sensuous pleasure of a surrender long delayed—to pronounce the name and to have him hear it.

“Roark, it’s the quarry again.”

He smiled. “If you wish. Only it isn’t.”

“After the Enright House? After the Cord Building?”

“I don’t think of it that way.”

“How do you think of it?”

“I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.”

He was looking across the street. He had not changed. There was the old sense of lightness in him, of ease in motion, in action, in thought. She said, her sentence without beginning or end:

“... doing five-story buildings for the rest of your life ...”

“If necessary. But I don’t think it will be like that.”

“What are you waiting for?”

“I’m not waiting.”

She closed her eyes, but she could not hide her mouth; her mouth held bitterness, anger and pain.

“Roark, if you’d been in the city, I wouldn’t have come to see you.”

“I know it.”

“But it was you—in another place—in some nameless hole of a place like this. I had to see it. I had to see the place.”

“When are you going back?”

“You know I haven’t come to remain?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“You’re still afraid of lunch wagons and windows.”

“I’m not going back to New York. Not at once.”

“No?”

“You haven’t asked me anything, Roark. Only whether I walked from the station.”

“What do you want me to ask you?”

“I got off the train when I saw the name of the station,” she said, her voice dull. “I didn’t intend coming here. I was on my way to Reno.”

“And after that?”

“I will marry again.”

“Do I know your fiancé?”

“You’ve heard of him. His name is Gail Wynand.”

She saw his eyes. She thought she should want to laugh; she had brought him at last to a shock she had never expected to achieve. But she did not laugh. He thought of Henry Cameron; of Cameron saying: “I have no answer to give them, Howard. I’m leaving you to face them. You’ll answer them. All of them, the Wynand papers and what makes the Wynand papers possible and what lies behind that.”

“Roark.”

He didn’t answer.

“That’s worse than Peter Keating, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Much worse.”

“Do you want to stop me?”

“No.”

He had not touched her since he had released her elbow, and that had been only a touch proper in an ambulance. She moved her hand and let it rest against his. He did not withdraw his fingers and he did not pretend indifference. She bent over, holding his hand, not raising it from his knee, and she pressed her lips to his hand. Her hat fell off, he saw the blond head at his knees, he felt her mouth kissing his hand again and again. His fingers held hers, answering, but that was the only answer.

She raised her head and looked at the street. A lighted window hung in the distance, behind a grillwork of bare branches. Small houses stretched off into the darkness, and trees stood by the narrow sidewalks.

She noticed her hat on the steps below and bent to pick it up. She leaned with her bare hand flat against the steps. The stone was old, worn smooth, icy. She felt comfort in the touch. She sat for a moment, bent over, palm pressed to the stone; to feel these steps—no matter how many feet had used them—to feel them as she had felt the fire hydrant.

“Roark, where do you live?”

“In a rooming house.”

“What kind of room?”

“Just a room.”

“What’s in it? What kind of walls?”

“Some sort of wallpaper. Faded.”

“What furniture?”

“A table, chairs, a bed.”

“No, tell me in detail.”

“There’s a clothes closet, then a chest of drawers, the bed in the corner by the window, a large table at the other side——”

“By the wall?”

“No, I put it across the corner, to the window—I work there. Then there’s a straight chair, an armchair with a bridge lamp and a magazine rack I never use. I think that’s all.”

“No rugs? Or curtains?”

“I think there’s something at the window and some kind of rug. The floor is nicely polished, it’s beautiful old wood.”

“I want to think of your room tonight—on the train.”

He sat looking across the street. She said:

“Roark, let me stay with you tonight.”

“No.”

She let her glance follow his to the grinding machinery below. After a while she asked:

“How did you get this store to design?”

“The owner saw my buildings in New York and liked them.”

A man in overalls stepped out of the excavation pit, peered into the darkness at them and called: “Is that you up there, boss?”

“Yes,” Roark called back.

“Come here a minute, will you?”

Roark walked to him across the street. She could not hear their conversation, but she heard Roark saying gaily: “That’s easy,” and then they both walked down the planks to the bottom. The man stood talking, pointing up, explaining. Roark threw his head back, to glance up at the rising steel frame; the light was full on his face, and she saw his look of concentration, not a smile, but an expression that gave her a joyous feeling of competence, of disciplined reason in action. He bent, picked up a piece of board, took a pencil from his pocket. He stood with one foot on a pile of planks, the board propped on his knee, and drew rapidly, explaining something to the man who nodded, pleased. She could not hear the words, but she felt the quality of Roark’s relation to that man, to all the other men in that pit, an odd sense of loyalty and of brotherhood, but not the kind she had ever heard named by these words. He finished, handed the board to the man, and they both laughed at something. Then he came back and sat down on the steps beside her.

“Roark,” she said, “I want to remain here with you for all the years we might have.”

He looked at her, attentively, waiting.

“I want to live here.” Her voice had the sound of pressure against a dam. “I want to live as you live. Not to touch my money—I’ll give it away, to anyone, to Steve Mallory, if you wish, or to one of Toohey’s organizations, it doesn’t matter. We’ll take a house here—like one of these—and I’ll keep it for you—don’t laugh, I can—I’ll cook, I’ll wash your clothes, I’ll scrub the floor. And you’ll give up architecture.”

He had not laughed. She saw nothing but an unmoving attention prepared to listen on.

“Roark, try to understand, please try to understand. I can’t bear to see what they’re doing to you, what they’re going to do. It’s too great—you and building and what you feel about it. You can’t go on like that for long. It won’t last. They won’t let you. You’re moving to some terrible kind of disaster. It can’t end any other way. Give it up. Take some meaningless job—like the quarry. We’ll live here. We’ll have little and we’ll give nothing. We’ll live only for what we are and for what we know.”

He laughed. She heard, in the sound of it, a surprising touch of consideration for her—the attempt not to laugh; but he couldn’t stop it.

“Dominique.” The way he pronounced the name remained with her and made it easier to hear the words that followed: “I wish I could tell you that it was a temptation, at least for a moment. But it wasn’t.” He added: “If I were very cruel, I’d accept it. Just to see how soon you’d beg me to go back to building.”

“Yes ... Probably ...”

“Marry Wynand and stay married to him. It will be better than what you’re doing to yourself right now.”

“Do you mind ... if we just sit here for a little while longer ... and not talk about that ... but just talk, as if everything were right ... just an armistice for half an hour out of years.... Tell me what you’ve done every day you’ve been here, everything you can remember....”

Then they talked, as if the stoop of the vacant house were an airplane hanging in space, without sight of earth or sky; he did not look across the street.

Then he glanced at his wrist watch and said:

“There’s a train for the West in an hour. Shall I go with you to the station?”

“Do you mind if we walk there?”

“All right.”

She stood up. She asked:

“Until—when, Roark?”

His hand moved over the streets. “Until you stop hating all this, stop being afraid of it, learn not to notice it.”

They walked together to the station. She listened to the sound of his steps with hers in the empty streets. She let her glance drag along the walls they passed, like a clinging touch. She loved this place, this town and everything that was part of it.

They were walking past a vacant lot. The wind blew an old sheet of newspaper against her legs. It clung to her with a tight insistence that seemed conscious, like the peremptory caress of a cat. She thought, anything of this town had that intimate right to her. She bent, picked up the paper and began folding it, to keep it.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Something to read on the train,” she said stupidly.

He snatched the paper from her, crumpled it and flung it away into the weeds. She said nothing and they walked on.

A single light bulb hung over the empty station platform. They waited. He stood looking up the tracks, where the train was to appear. When the tracks rang, shuddering, when the white ball of a headlight spurted out of the distance and stood still in the sky, not approaching, only widening, growing in furious speed, he did not move or turn to her. The rushing beam flung his shadow across the platform, made it sweep over the planks and vanish. For an instant she saw the tall, straight line of his body against the glare. The engine passed them and the cars rattled, slowing down. He looked at the windows rolling past. She could not see his face, only the outline of his cheekbone.

When the train stopped, he turned to her. They did not shake hands, they did not speak. They stood straight, facing each other for a moment, as if at attention; it was almost like a military salute. Then she picked up her suitcase and went aboard the train. The train started moving a minute later.

VI

CHUCK: AND WHY NOT A MUSKRAT? WHY SHOULD MAN IMAGINE himself superior to a muskrat? Life beats in all the small creatures of field and wood. Life singing of eternal sorrow. An old sorrow. The Song of Songs. We don’t understand—but who cares about understanding? Only public accountants and chiropodists. Also mailmen. We only love. The Sweet Mystery of Love. That’s all there is to it. Give me love and shove all your philosophers up your stovepipe. When Mary took the homeless muskrat, her heart broke open and life and love rushed in. Muskrats make good imitation mink coats, but that’s not the point. Life is the point.

“Jake: (rushing in) Say, folks, who’s got a stamp with a picture of George Washington on it?

“Curtain.”

Ike slammed his manuscript shut and took a long swig of air. His voice was hoarse after two hours of reading aloud and he had read the climax of his play on a single long breath. He looked at his audience, his mouth smiling in self-mockery, his eyebrows raised insolently, but his eyes pleading.

Ellsworth Toohey, sitting on the floor, scratched his spine against a chair leg and yawned. Gus Webb, stretched out on his stomach in the middle of the room, rolled over on his back. Lancelot Clokey, the foreign correspondent, reached for his highball glass and finished it off. Jules Fougler, the new drama critic of the Banner, sat without moving; he had not moved for two hours. Lois Cook, hostess, raised her arms, twisting them, stretching, and said:

“Jesus, Ike, it’s awful.”

Lancelot Clokey drawled, “Lois, my girl, where do you keep your gin? Don’t be such a damn miser. You’re the worst hostess I know.”

Gus Webb said, “I don’t understand literature. It’s nonproductive and a waste of time. Authors will be liquidated.”

Ike laughed shrilly. “A stinker, huh?” He waved his script. “A real super-stinker. What do you think I wrote it for? Just show me anyone who can write a bigger flop. Worst play you’ll ever hear in your life.”

It was not a formal meeting of the Council of American Writers, but an unofficial gathering. Ike had asked a few of his friends to listen to his latest work. At twenty-six he had written eleven plays, but had never had one produced.

“You’d better give up the theater, Ike,” said Lancelot Clokey. “Writing is a serious business and not for any stray bastard that wants to try it.” Lancelot Clokey’s first book—an account of his personal adventures in foreign countries—was in its tenth week on the best-seller list.

“Why, isn’t it, Lance?” Toohey drawled sweetly.

“All right,” snapped Clokey, “all right. Give me a drink.”

“It’s awful,” said Lois Cook, her head lolling wearily from side to side. “It’s perfectly awful. It’s so awful it’s wonderful.”

“Balls,” said Gus Webb. “Why do I ever come here?”

Ike flung his script at the fireplace, it struck against the wire screen and landed, face down, open, the thin pages crushed.

“If Ibsen can write plays, why can’t I?” he asked. “He’s good and I’m lousy, but that’s not a sufficient reason.”

“Not in the cosmic sense,” said Lancelot Clokey. “Still, you’re lousy.”

“You don’t have to say it. I said so first.”

“This is a great play,” said a voice.

The voice was slow, nasal and bored. It had spoken for the first time that evening, and they all turned to Jules Fougler. A cartoonist had once drawn a famous picture of him; it consisted of two sagging circles, a large one and a small one: the large one was his stomach, the small one—his lower lip. He wore a suit, beautifully tailored, of a color to which he referred as “merde d’oie.” He kept his gloves on at all times and he carried a cane. He was an eminent drama critic.

Jules Fougler stretched out his cane, caught the playscript with the hook of the handle and dragged it across the floor to his feet. He did not pick it up, but he repeated, looking at it:

“This is a great play.”

“Why?” asked Lancelot Clokey.

“Because I say so,” said Jules Fougler.

“Is that a gag, Jules?” asked Lois Cook.

“I never gag,” said Jules Fougler. “It is vulgar.”

“Send me a coupla seats to the opening,” sneered Lancelot Clokey.

“Eight-eighty for two seats to the opening,” said Jules Fougler. “It will be the biggest hit of the season.”

Jules Fougler turned and saw Toohey looking at him. Toohey smiled but the smile was not light or careless; it was an approving commentary upon something he considered as very serious indeed. Fougler’s glance was contemptuous when turned to the others, but it relaxed for a moment of understanding when it rested on Toohey.

“Why don’t you join the Council of American Writers, Jules?” asked Toohey.

“I am an individualist,” said Fougler. “I don’t believe in organizations. Besides, is it necessary?”

“No, not necessary at all,” said Toohey cheerfully. “Not for you, Jules. There’s nothing I can teach you.”

“What I like about you, Ellsworth, is that it’s never necessary to explain myself to you.”

“Hell, why explain anything here? We’re six of a kind.”

“Five,” said Fougler. “I don’t like Gus Webb.”

“Why don’t you?” asked Gus. He was not offended.

“Because he doesn’t wash his ears,” answered Fougler, as if the question had been asked by a third party.

“Oh, that,” said Gus.

Ike had risen and stood staring at Fougler, not quite certain whether he should breathe.

“You like my play, Mr. Fougler?” he asked at last, his voice small.

“I haven’t said I like it,” Fougler answered coldly. “I think it smells. That is why it’s great.”

“Oh,” said Ike. He laughed. He seemed relieved. His glance went around the faces in the room, a glance of sly triumph.

“Yes,” said Fougler, “my approach to its criticism is the same as your approach to its writing. Our motives are identical.”

“You’re a grand guy, Jules.”

“Mr. Fougler, please.”

“You’re a grand guy and the swellest bastard on earth, Mr. Fougler.”

Fougler turned the pages of the script at his feet with the tip of his cane.

“Your typing is atrocious, Ike,” he said.

“Hell, I’m not a stenographer. I’m a creative artist.”

“You will be able to afford a secretary after this show opens. I shall be obliged to praise it—if for no other reason than to prevent any further abuse of a typewriter, such as this. The typewriter is a splendid instrument, not to be outraged.”

“All right, Jules,” said Lancelot Clokey, “it’s all very witty and smart and you’re sophisticated and brilliant as all get-out-but what do you actually want to praise that crap for?”

“Because it is—as you put it—crap.”

“You’re not logical, Lance,” said Ike. “Not in the cosmic sense you aren’t. To write a good play and to have it praised is nothing. Anybody can do that. Anybody with talent—and talent is only a glandular accident. But to write a piece of crap and have it praised—well, you match that.”

“He has,” said Toohey.

“That’s a matter of opinion,” said Lancelot Clokey. He upturned his empty glass over his mouth and sucked at a last piece of ice.

“Ike understands things much better than you do, Lance,” said Jules Fougler. “He has just proved himself to be a real thinker—in that little speech of his. Which, incidentally, was better than his whole play.”

“I’ll write my next play about that,” said Ike.

“Ike has stated his reasons,” Fougler continued. “And mine. And also yours, Lance. Examine my case, if you wish. What achievement is there for a critic in praising a good play? None whatever. The critic is then nothing but a kind of glorified messenger boy between author and public. What’s there in that for me? I’m sick of it. I have a right to wish to impress my own personality upon people. Otherwise I shall become frustrated—and I do not believe in frustration. But if a critic is able to put over a perfectly worthless play—ah, you do perceive the difference! Therefore, I shall make a hit out of—what’s the name of your play, Ike?”

“No skin off your ass,” said Ike.

“I beg your pardon?”

“That’s the title.”

“Oh, I see. Therefore, I shall make a hit out of No Skin Off Your Ass.”

Lois Cook laughed loudly.

“You all make too damn much fuss about everything,” said Gus Webb, lying flat, his hands entwined under his head.

“Now if you wish to consider your own case, Lance,” Fougler went on. “What satisfaction is there for a correspondent in reporting on world events? The public reads about all sorts of international crises and you’re lucky if they even notice your by-line. But you’re every bit as good as any general, admiral or ambassador. You have a right to make people conscious of yourself. So you’ve done the wise thing. You’ve written a remarkable collection of bilge—yes, bilge—but morally justified. A clever book. World catastrophes used as a backdrop for your own nasty little personality. How Lancelot Clokey got drunk at an international conference. What beauties slept with Lancelot Clokey during an invasion. How Lancelot Clokey got dysentery in a land of famine. Well, why not, Lance? It went over, didn’t it? Ellsworth put it over, didn’t he?”

“The public appreciates good human-interest stuff,” said Lancelot Clokey, looking angrily into his glass.

“Oh, can the crap, Lance!” cried Lois Cook. “Who’re you acting for here? You know damn well it wasn’t any kind of a human interest, but plain Ellsworth Toohey.”

“I don’t forget what I owe Ellsworth,” said Clokey sullenly. “Ellsworth’s my best friend. Still, he couldn’t have done it if he didn’t have a good book to do it with.”

Eight months ago Lancelot Clokey had stood with a manuscript in his hand before Ellsworth Toohey, as Ike stood before Fougler now, not believing it when Toohey told him that his book would top the best-seller list. But two hundred thousand copies sold had made it impossible for Clokey ever to recognize any truth again in any form.

“Well, he did it with The Gallant Gallstone,” said Lois Cook placidly, “and a worse piece of trash never was put down on paper. I ought to know. But he did it.”

“And almost lost my job doing it,” said Toohey indifferently.

“What do you do with your liquor, Lois?” snapped Clokey. “Save it to take a bath in?”

“All right, blotter,” said Lois Cook, rising lazily.

She shuffled across the room, picked somebody’s unfinished drink off the floor, drank the remnant, walked out and came back with an assortment of expensive bottles. Clokey and Ike hurried to help themselves.

“I think you’re unfair to Lance, Lois,” said Toohey. “Why shouldn’t he write an autobiography?”

“Because his life wasn’t worth living, let alone recording.”

“Ah, but that is precisely why I made it a best-seller.”

“You’re telling me?”

“I like to tell someone.”

There were many comfortable chairs around him, but Toohey preferred to remain on the floor. He rolled over to his stomach, propping his torso upright on his elbows, and he lolled pleasurably, switching his weight from elbow to elbow, his legs spread out in a wide fork on the carpet. He seemed to enjoy unrestraint.

“I like to tell someone. Next month I’m pushing the autobiography of a small-town dentist who’s really a remarkable person—because there’s not a single remarkable day in his life nor sentence in his book. You’ll like it, Lois. Can you imagine a solid bromide undressing his soul as if it were a revelation?”

“The little people,” said Ike tenderly. “I love the little people. We must love the little people of this earth.”

“Save that for your next play,” said Toohey.

“I can’t,” said Ike. “It’s in this one.”

“What’s the big idea, Ellsworth?” snapped Clokey.

“Why, it’s simple, Lance. When the fact that one is a total nonentity who’s done nothing more outstanding than eating, sleeping and chatting with neighbors becomes a fact worthy of pride, of announcement to the world and of diligent study by millions of readers—the fact that one has built a cathedral becomes unrecordable and unannounceable. A matter of perspectives and relativity. The distance permissible between the extremes of any particular capacity is limited. The sound perception of an ant does not include thunder.”

“You talk like a decadent bourgeois, Ellsworth,” said Gus Webb.

“Pipe down, Sweetie-pie,” said Toohey without resentment.

“It’s all very wonderful,” said Lois Cook, “except that you’re doing too well, Ellsworth. You’ll run me out of business. Pretty soon if I still want to be noticed, I’ll have to write something that’s actually good.”

“Not in this century, Lois,” said Toohey. “And perhaps not in the next. It’s later than you think.”

“But you haven’t said ... !” Ike cried suddenly, worried.

“What haven’t I said?”

“You haven’t said who’s going to produce my play!”

“Leave that to me,” said Jules Fougler.

“I forgot to thank you, Ellsworth,” said Ike solemnly. “So now I thank you. There are lots of bum plays, but you picked mine. You and Mr. Fougler.”

“Your bumness is serviceable, Ike.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“It’s a great deal.”

“How—for instance?”

“Don’t talk too much, Ellsworth,” said Gus Webb. “You’ve got a talking jag.”

“Shut your face, Kewpie-doll. I like to talk. For instance, Ike? Well, for instance, suppose I didn’t like Ibsen——”

“Ibsen is good,” said Ike.

“Sure he’s good, but suppose I didn’t like him. Suppose I wanted to stop people from seeing his plays. It would do me no good whatever to tell them so. But if I sold them the idea that you’re just as great as Ibsen—pretty soon they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”

“Jesus, can you?”

“It’s only an example, Ike.”

“But it would be wonderful!”

“Yes. It would be wonderful. And then it wouldn’t matter what they went to see at all. Then nothing would matter—neither the writers nor those for whom they wrote.”

“How’s that, Ellsworth?”

“Look, Ike, there’s no room in the theater for both Ibsen and you. You do understand that, don’t you?”

“In a manner of speaking—yes.”

“Well, you do want me to make room for you, don’t you?”

“All of this useless discussion has been covered before and much better,” said Gus Webb. “Shorter. I believe in functional economy.”

“Where’s it covered, Gus?” asked Lois Cook.

“ ‘Who had been nothing shall be all,’ sister.”

“Gus is crude, but deep,” said Ike. “I like him.”

“Go to hell,” said Gus.

Lois Cook’s butler entered the room. He was a stately, elderly man and he wore full-dress evening clothes. He announced Peter Keating.

“Pete?” said Lois Cook gaily. “Why, sure, shove him in, shove him right in.”

Keating entered and stopped, startled, when he saw the gathering.

“Oh ... hello, everybody,” he said bleakly. “I didn’t know you had company, Lois.”

“That’s not company. Come in, Pete, sit down, grab yourself a drink, you know everybody.”

“Hello, Ellsworth,” said Keating, his eyes resting on Toohey for support.

Toohey waved his hand, scrambled to his feet and settled down in an armchair, crossing his legs gracefully. Everybody in the room adjusted himself automatically to a sudden control: to sit straighter, to bring knees together, to pull in a relaxed mouth. Only Gus Webb remained stretched as before.

Keating looked cool and handsome, bringing into the unventilated room the freshness of a walk through cold streets. But he was pale and his movements were slow, tired.

“Sorry if I intrude, Lois,” he said. “Had nothing to do and felt so damn lonely, thought I’d drop in.” He slurred over the word “lonely,” throwing it away with a self-deprecatory smile. “Damn tired of Neil Dumont and the bunch. Wanted more uplifting company—sort of spiritual food, huh?”

“I’m a genius,” said Ike. “I’ll have a play on Broadway. Me and Ibsen. Ellsworth said so.”

“Ike has just read his new play to us,” said Toohey. “A magnificent piece of work.”

“You’ll love it, Peter,” said Lancelot Clokey. “It’s really great.”

“It is a masterpiece,” said Jules Fougler. “I hope you will prove yourself worthy of it, Peter. It is the kind of play that depends upon what the members of the audience are capable of bringing with them into the theater. If you are one of those literal-minded people, with a dry soul and a limited imagination, it is not for you. But if you are a real human being with a big, big heart full of laughter, who has preserved the uncorrupted capacity of his childhood for pure emotion—you will find it an unforgettable experience.”

“Except as ye become as little children ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven,” said Ellsworth Toohey.

“Thanks, Ellsworth,” said Jules Fougler. “That will be the lead of my review.”

Keating looked at Ike, at the others, his eyes eager. They all seemed remote and pure, far above him in the safety of their knowledge, but their faces had hints of smiling warmth, a benevolent invitation extended downward.

Keating drank the sense of their greatness, the spiritual food he sought in coming here, and felt himself rising through them. They saw their greatness made real by him. A circuit was established in the room and the circle closed. Everybody was conscious of that, except Peter Keating.

Ellsworth Toohey came out in support of the cause of modern architecture.

In the past ten years, while most of the new residences continued to be built as faithful historical copies, the principles of Henry Cameron had won the field of commercial structures: the factories, the office buildings, the skyscrapers. It was a pale, distorted victory; a reluctant compromise that consisted of omitting columns and pediments, allowing a few stretches of wall to remain naked, apologizing for a shape—good through accident—by finishing it off with an edge of simplified Grecian volutes. Many stole Cameron’s forms; few understood his thinking. The sole part of his argument irresistible to the owners of new structures was financial economy; he won to that extent.

In the countries of Europe, most prominently in Germany, a new school of building had been growing for a long time: it consisted of putting up four walls and a flat top over them, with a few openings. This was called new architecture. The freedom from arbitrary rules, for which Cameron had fought, the freedom that imposed a great new responsibility on the creative builder, became a mere elimination of all effort, even the effort of mastering historical styles. It became a rigid set of new rules—the discipline of conscious incompetence, creative poverty made into a system, mediocrity boastfully confessed.

“A building creates its own beauty, and its ornament is derived from the rules of its theme and its structure,” Cameron had said. “A building needs no beauty, no ornament and no theme,” said the new architects. It was safe to say it. Cameron and a few men had broken the path and paved it with their lives. Other men, of whom there were greater numbers, the men who had been safe in copying the Parthenon, saw the danger and found a way to security: to walk Cameron’s path and make it lead them to a new Parthenon, an easier Parthenon in the shape of a packing crate of glass and concrete. The palm tree had broken through; the fungus came to feed on it, to deform it, to hide, to pull it back into the common jungle.

The jungle found its words.

In “One Small Voice,” sub-titled “I Swim with the Current,” Ellsworth Toohey wrote:

“We have hesitated for a long time to acknowledge the powerful phenomenon known as Modern Architecture. Such caution is requisite in anyone who stands in the position of mentor to the public taste. Too often, isolated manifestations of anomaly can be mistaken for a broad popular movement, and one should be careful not to ascribe to them a significance they do not deserve. But Modem Architecture has stood the test of time, has answered a demand of the masses, and we are glad to salute it.

“It is not amiss to offer a measure of recognition to the pioneers of this movement, such as the late Henry Cameron. Premonitory echoes of the new grandeur can be found in some of his work. But like all pioneers he was still bound by the inherited prejudices of the past, by the sentimentality of the middle class from which he came. He succumbed to the superstition of beauty and ornament, even though the ornament was of his own devising, and, consequently, inferior to that of established historical forms.

“It remained for the power of a broad, collective movement to bring Modern Architecture to its full and true expression. Now it can be seen—growing throughout the world—not as a chaos of individual fancies, but as a cohesive, organized discipline which makes severe demands upon the artist, among them the demand to subordinate himself to the collective nature of his craft.

“The rules of this new architecture have been formulated by the vast process of popular creation. They are as strict as the rules of Classicism. They demand unadorned simplicity—like the honesty of the unspoiled common man. Just as in the passing age of international bankers every building had to have an ostentatious cornice, so now the coming age ordains that every building have a flat roof. Just as the imperialist era required a Roman portico on every house, so the era of humanity requires that every house have corner windows—symbol of the sunshine distributed equally to all.

“The discriminating will see the social significance eloquent in the forms of this new architecture. Under the old system of exploitation, the most useful social elements—the workers—were never permitted to realize their importance; their practical functions were kept hidden and disguised; thus a master had his servants dressed up in fancy gold-braided livery. This was reflected in the architecture of the period; the functional elements of a building—its doors, windows, stairways—were hidden under the scrolls of pointless ornamentation. But in a modern building, it is precisely these useful elements—symbols of toil—that come starkly in the open. Do we not hear in this the voice of a new world where the worker shall come into his own?

“As the best example of Modern Architecture in America, we call to your attention the new plant of the Bassett Brush Company, soon to be completed. It is a small building, but in its modest proportions it embodies all the grim simplicity of the new discipline and presents an invigorating example of the Grandeur of the Little. It was designed by Augustus Webb, a young architect of great promise.”

Meeting Toohey a few days later, Peter Keating asked, disturbed:

“Say, Ellsworth, did you mean it?”

“What?”

“About modern architecture.”

“Of course I meant it. How did you like my little piece?”

“Oh, I thought it was very beautiful. Very convincing. But say, Ellsworth, why ... why did you pick Gus Webb? After all, I’ve done some modernistic things in the last few years. The Palmer Building was quite bare, and the Mowry Building was nothing but roof and windows, and the Sheldon Warehouse was ...”

“Now, Peter, don’t be a hog. I’ve done pretty well by you, haven’t I? Let me give somebody else a boost once in a while.”

At a luncheon where he had to speak on architecture, Peter Keating stated:

“In reviewing my career to date, I came to the conclusion that I have worked on a true principle: the principle that constant change is a necessity of life. Since buildings are an indispensable part of life, it follows that architecture must change constantly. I have never developed any architectural prejudices for myself, but insisted on keeping my mind open to all the voices of the times. The fanatics who went around preaching that all structures must be modern were just as narrow-minded as the hidebound conservatives who demanded that we employ nothing but historical styles. I do not apologize for those of my buildings which were designed in the Classical tradition. They were an answer to the need of their era. Neither do I apologize for the buildings which I designed in the modern style. They represent the coming better world. It is my opinion that in the humble realization of this principle lies the reward and the joy of being an architect.”

There was gratifying publicity, and many flattering comments of envy in professional circles, when the news of Peter Keating’s selection to build Stoneridge was made public. He tried to recapture his old pleasure in such manifestations. He failed. He still felt something that resembled gladness, but it was faded and thin.

The effort of designing Stoneridge seemed a load too vast to lift. He did not mind the circumstances through which he had obtained it; that, too, had become pale and weightless in his mind, accepted and almost forgotten. He simply could not face the task of designing the great number of houses that Stoneridge required. He felt very tired. He felt tired when he awakened in the morning, and he found himself waiting all day for the time when he would be able to go back to bed.

He turned Stoneridge over to Neil Dumont and Bennett. “Go ahead,” he said wearily, “do what you want.” “What style, Pete?” Dumont asked. “Oh, make it some sort of period—the small home owners won’t go for it otherwise. But trim it down a little—for the press comments. Give it historical touches and a modern feeling. Any way you wish. I don’t care.”

Dumont and Bennett went ahead. Keating changed a few roof lines on their sketches, a few windows. The preliminary drawings were approved by Wynand’s office. Keating did not know whether Wynand had approved in person. He did not see Wynand again.

Dominique had been away a month, when Guy Francon announced his retirement. Keating had told him about the divorce, offering no explanation. Francon had taken the news calmly. He had said: “I expected it. It’s all right, Peter. It’s probably not your fault nor hers.” He had not mentioned it since. Now he gave no explanation of his retirement, only: “I told you it was coming, long ago. I’m tired. Good luck, Peter.”

The responsibility of the firm on his lonely shoulders and the prospect of his solitary name on the office door left Keating uneasy. He needed a partner. He chose Neil Dumont. Neil had grace and distinction. He was another Lucius Heyer. The firm became Peter Keating & Cornelius Dumont. Some sort of drunken celebration of the event was held by a few friends, but Keating did not attend it. He had promised to attend, but he forgot about it, went for a solitary weekend in the snowbound country, and did not remember the celebration until the morning after it was held, when he was walking alone down a frozen country road.

Stoneridge was the last contract signed by the firm of Francon & Keating.

VII

WHEN DOMINIQUE STEPPED OFF THE TRAIN IN NEW YORK, Wynand was there to meet her. She had not written to him nor heard from him during the weeks of her residence in Reno; she had notified no one of her return. But his figure standing on the platform, standing calmly, with an air of finality, told her that he had kept in touch with her lawyers, had followed every step of the divorce proceedings, had known the date when the decree was granted, the hour when she took the train and the number of her compartment.

He did not move forward when he saw her. It was she who walked to him, because she knew that he wanted to see her walking, if only the short space between them. She did not smile, but her face had the lovely serenity that can become a smile without transition.

“Hello, Gail.”

“Hello, Dominique.”

She had not thought of him in his absence, not sharply, not with a personal feeling of his reality, but now she felt an immediate recognition, a sense of reunion with someone known and needed.

He said: “Give me your baggage checks, I’ll have it attended to later; my car is outside.”

She handed him the checks and he slipped them into his pocket. They knew they must turn and walk up the platform to the exit, but the decisions both had made in advance broke down in the same instant, because they did not turn, but remained standing, looking at each other.

He made the first effort to correct the breach. He smiled lightly.

“If I had the right to say it, I’d say that I couldn’t have endured the waiting had I known that you’d look as you do. But since I have no such right, I’m not going to say it.”

She laughed. “All right, Gail. That was a form of pretense, too—our being too casual. It makes things more important, not less, doesn’t it? Let’s say whatever we wish.”

“I love you,” he said, his voice expressionless, as if the words were a statement of pain and not addressed to her.

“I’m glad to be back with you, Gail. I didn’t know I would be, but I’m glad.”

“In what way, Dominique?”

“I don’t know. In a way of contagion from you, I think. In a way of finality and peace.”

Then they noticed that this was said in the middle of a crowded platform, with people and baggage racks hurrying past.

They walked out to the street, to his car. She did not ask where they were going; and did not care. She sat silently beside him. She felt divided, most of her swept by a wish not to resist, and a small part of her left to wonder about it. She felt a desire to let him carry her—a feeling of confidence without appraisal, not a happy confidence, but confidence. After a while, she noticed that her hand lay in his, the length of her gloved fingers held to the length of his, only the spot of her bare wrist pressed to his skin. She had not noticed him take her hand; it seemed so natural and what she had wanted from the moment of seeing him. But she would not allow herself to want it.

“Where are we going, Gail?” she asked.

“To get the license. Then to the judge’s office. To be married.”

She sat up slowly, turning to face him. She did not withdraw her hand, but her fingers became rigid, conscious, taken away from him.

“No,” she said.

She smiled and held the smile too long, in deliberate, fixed precision. He looked at her calmly.

“I want a real wedding, Gail. I want it at the most ostentatious hotel in town. I want engraved invitations, guests, mobs of guests, celebrities, flowers, flash bulbs and newsreel cameras. I want the kind of wedding the public expects of Gail Wynand.”

He released her fingers, simply, without resentment. He looked abstracted for a moment, as if he were calculating a problem in arithmetic, not too difficult. Then he said:

“All right. That will take a week to arrange. I could have it done tonight, but if it’s engraved invitations, we must give the guests a week’s notice at the least. Otherwise it would look abnormal and you want a normal Gail Wynand wedding. I’ll have to take you to a hotel now, where you can live for a week. I had not planned for this, so I’ve made no reservations. Where would you like to stay?”

“At your penthouse.”

“No.”

“The Nordland, then.”

He leaned forward and said to the chauffeur:

“The Nordland, John.”

In the lobby of the hotel, he said to her:

“I will see you a week from today, Tuesday, at the Noyes-Belmont, at four o’clock in the afternoon. The invitations will have to be in the name of your father. Let him know that I’ll get in touch with him. I’ll attend to the rest.”

He bowed, his manner unchanged, his calm still holding the same peculiar quality made of two things: the mature control of a man so certain of his capacity for control that it could seem casual, and a childlike simplicity of accepting events as if they were subject to no possible change.

She did not see him during that week. She found herself waiting impatiently.

She saw him again when she stood beside him, facing the judge who pronounced the words of the marriage ceremony over the silence of six hundred people in the floodlighted ballroom of the Noyes-Belmont Hotel.

The background she had wished was set so perfectly that it became its own caricature, not a specific society wedding, but an impersonal prototype of lavish, exquisite vulgarity. He had understood her wish and obeyed scrupulously; he had refused himself the relief of exaggeration, he had not staged the event crudely, but made it beautiful in the exact manner Gail Wynand, the publisher, would have chosen had he wished to be married in public. But Gail Wynand did not wish to be married in public.

He made himself fit the setting, as if he were part of the bargain, subject to the same style. When he entered, she saw him looking at the mob of guests as if he did not realize that such a mob was appropriate to a Grand Opera premiere or a royal rummage sale, not to the solemn climax of his life. He looked correct, incomparably distinguished.

Then she stood with him, the mob becoming a heavy silence and a gluttonous stare behind him, and they faced the judge together. She wore a long, black dress with a bouquet of fresh jasmine, his present, attached by a black band to her wrist. Her face in the halo of a black lace hat was raised to the judge who spoke slowly, letting his words hang one by one in the air.

She glanced at Wynand. He was not looking at her nor at the judge. Then she knew that he was alone in that room. He held this moment and he made of it, of the glare, of the vulgarity, a silent height of his own. He had not wished a religious ceremony, which he did not respect, and he could have less respect for the state’s functionary reciting a formula before him—but he made the rite an act of pure religion. She thought, if she were being married to Roark in such a setting, Roark would stand like this.

Afterward, the mockery of the monster reception that followed, left him immune. He posed with her for the battery of press cameras and he complied gracefully with all the demands of the reporters, a special, noisier mob within the mob. He stood with her in the receiving line, shaking an assembly belt of hands that unrolled past them for hours. He looked untouched by the lights, the haystacks of Easter lilies, the sounds of a string orchestra, the river of people flowing on and breaking into a delta when it reached the champagne; untouched by these guests who had come here driven by boredom, by an envious hatred, a reluctant submission to an invitation bearing his dangerous name, a scandal-hungry curiosity. He looked as if he did not know that they took his public immolation as their rightful due, that they considered their presence as the indispensable seal of sacrament upon the occasion, that of all the hundreds he and his bride were the only ones to whom the performance was hideous.

She watched him intently. She wanted to see him take pleasure in all this, if only for a moment. Let him accept and join, just once, she thought, let him show the soul of the New York Banner in its proper element. She saw no acceptance. She saw a hint of pain, at times; even the pain did not reach him completely. And she thought of the only other man she knew who had spoken about suffering that went down only to a certain point.

When the last congratulations had drifted past them, they were free to leave by the rules of the occasion. But he made no move to leave. She knew he was waiting for her decision. She walked away from him into the currents of guests; she smiled, bowed and listened to offensive nonsense, a glass of champagne in her hand.

She saw her father in the throng. He looked proud and wistful; he seemed bewildered. He had taken the announcement of her marriage quietly; he had said: “I want you to be happy, Dominique. I want it very much. I hope he’s the right man.” His tone had said that he was not certain.

She saw Ellsworth Toohey in the crowd. He noticed her looking at him and turned away quickly. She wanted to laugh aloud; but the matter of Ellsworth Toohey caught off guard did not seem important enough to laugh about now.

Alvah Scarret pushed his way toward her. He was making a poor effort at a suitable expression, but his face looked hurt and sullen. He muttered something rapid about his wishes for her happiness, but then he said distinctly and with a lively anger:

“But why, Dominique? Why?”

She could not quite believe that Alvah Scarret would permit himself the crudeness of what the question seemed to mean. She asked coldly:

“What are you talking about, Alvah?”

“The veto, of course.”

“What veto?”

“You know very well what veto. Now I ask you, with every sheet in the city here, every damn one of them, the lousiest tabloid included, and the wire services too—everything but the Banner! Everything but the Wynand papers! What am I to tell people? How am I to explain? Is that a thing for you to do to a former comrade of the trade?”

“You’d better repeat that, Alvah.”

“You mean you didn’t know that Gail wouldn’t allow a single one of our boys here? That we won’t have any stories tomorrow, not a spread, not a picture, nothing but two lines on page eighteen?”

“No,” she said, “I didn’t know it.”

He wondered at the sudden jerk of her movement as she turned away from him. She handed the champagne glass to the first stranger in sight, whom she mistook for a waiter. She made her way through the crowd to Wynand.

“Let’s go, Gail.”

“Yes, my dear.”

She stood, incredulously, in the middle of the drawing room of his penthouse, thinking that this place was now her home and how right it looked to be her home.

He watched her. He showed no desire to speak or touch her, only to observe her here, in his house, brought here, lifted high over the city; as if the significance of the moment were not to be shared, not even with her.

She moved slowly across the room, took off her hat, leaned against the edge of a table. She wondered why her normal desire to say little, to hold things closed, broke down before him, why she felt compelled to simple frankness, such as she could offer no one else.

“You’ve had your way after all, Gail. You were married as you wanted to be married.

“Yes, I think so.”

“It was useless to try to torture you.”

“Actually, yes. But I didn’t mind it too much.”

“You didn’t?”

“No. If that’s what you wanted it was only a matter of keeping my promise.”

“But you hated it, Gail.”

“Utterly. What of it? Only the first moment was hard—when you said it in the car. Afterward, I was rather glad of it.” He spoke quietly, matching her frankness; she knew he would leave her the choice—he would follow her manner—he would keep silent or admit anything she wished to be admitted.

“Why?”

“Didn’t you notice your own mistake—if it was a mistake? You wouldn’t have wanted to make me suffer if you were completely indifferent to me.”

“No. It was not a mistake.”

“You’re a good loser, Dominique.”

“I think that’s also contagion from you, Gail. And there’s something I want to thank you for.”

“What?”

“That you barred our wedding from the Wynand papers.”

He looked at her, his eyes alert in a special way for a moment, then he smiled.

“It’s out of character—your thanking me for that.”

“It was out of character for you to do it.”

“I had to. But I thought you’d be angry.”

“I should have been. But I wasn’t. I’m not. I thank you.”

“Can one feel gratitude for gratitude? It’s a little hard to express, but that’s what I feel, Dominique.”

She looked at the soft light on the walls around her. That lighting was part of the room, giving the walls a special texture of more than material or color. She thought that there were other rooms beyond these walls, rooms she had never seen which were hers now. And she found that she wanted them to be hers.

“Gail, I haven’t asked what we are to do now. Are we going away? Are we having a honeymoon? Funny, I haven’t even wondered about it. I thought of the wedding and nothing beyond. As if it stopped there and you took over from then on. Also out of character, Gail.”

“But not in my favor, this time. Passivity is not a good sign. Not for you.”

“It might be—if I’m glad of it.”

“Might. Though it won’t last. No, we’re not going anywhere. Unless you wish to go.”

“No.”

“Then we stay here. Another peculiar manner of making an exception. The proper manner for you and me. Going away has always been running—for both of us. This time, we don’t run.”

“Yes, Gail.”

When he held her and kissed her, her arm lay bent, pressed between her body and his, her hand at her shoulder—and she felt her cheek touching the faded jasmine bouquet on her wrist, its perfume still intact, still a delicate suggestion of spring.

When she entered his bedroom, she found that it was not the place she had seen photographed in countless magazines. The glass cage had been demolished. The room built in its place was a solid vault without a single window. It was lighted and air-conditioned, but neither light nor air came from the outside.

She lay in his bed and she pressed her palms to the cold, smooth sheet at her sides, not to let her arms move and touch him. But her rigid indifference did not drive him to helpless anger. He understood. He laughed. She heard him say—his voice rough, without consideration, amused—“It won’t do, Dominique.” And she knew that this barrier would not be held between them, that she had no power to hold it. She felt the answer in her body, an answer of hunger, of acceptance, of pleasure. She thought that it was not a matter of desire, not even a matter of the sexual act, but only that man was the life force and woman could respond to nothing else; that this man had the will of life, the prime power, and this act was only its simplest statement, and she was responding not to the act nor to the man, but to that force within him.

“Well?” asked Ellsworth Toohey. “Now do you get the point?”

He stood leaning informally against the back of Scarret’s chair, and Scarret sat staring down at a hamper full of mail by the side of his desk.

“Thousands,” sighed Scarret, “thousands, Ellsworth. You ought to see what they call him. Why didn’t he print the story of his wedding? What’s he ashamed of? What’s he got to hide? Why didn’t he get married in church, like any decent man. How could he marry a divorcee? That’s what they’re all asking. Thousands. And he won’t even look at the letters. Gail Wynand, the man they called the seismograph of public opinion.”

“That’s right,” said Toohey. “That kind of a man.”

“Here’s a sample,” Scarret picked up a letter from his desk and read aloud: “ ‘I’m a respectable woman and mother of five children and I certainly don’t think I want to bring up my children with your newspaper. Have taken same for fourteen years, but now that you show that you’re the kind of man that has no decency and making a mockery of the holy institution of marriage which is to commit adultery with a fallen woman also another man’s wife who gets married in a black dress as she jolly well ought to, I won’t read your newspaper any more as you’re not a man fit for children, and I’m certainly disappointed in you. Very truly yours. Mrs. Thomas Parker.’ I read it to him. He just laughed.”

“Uh-huh,” said Toohey.

“What’s got into him?”

“It’s nothing that got into him, Alvah. It’s something that got out at last.”

“By the way, did you know that many papers dug up their old pictures of Dominique’s nude statue from that goddamn temple and ran it right with the wedding story—to show Mrs. Wynand’s interest in art, the bastards! Are they glad to get back at Gail! Are they giving it to him, the lice! Wonder who reminded them of that one.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Well, of course, it’s just one of those storms in a teacup. They’ll forget all about it in a few weeks. I don’t think it will do much harm.”

“No. Not this incident alone. Not by itself.”

“Huh? Are you predicting something?”

“Those letters predict it, Alvah. Not the letters as such. But that he wouldn’t read them.”

“Oh, it’s no use getting too silly either. Gail knows where to stop and when. Don’t make a mountain out of a mo——” He glanced up at Toohey and his voice switched to: “Christ, yes, Ellsworth, you’re right. What are we going to do?”

“Nothing, my friend, nothing. Not for a long time yet.”

Toohey sat down on the edge of Scarret’s desk and let the tip of his pointed shoe play among the envelopes in the hamper, tossing them up, making them rustle. He had acquired a pleasant habit of dropping in and out of Scarret’s office at all hours. Scarret had come to depend on him.

“Say, Ellsworth,” Scarret asked suddenly, “are you really loyal to the Banner?”

“Alvah, don’t talk in dialect. Nobody’s really that stuffy.”

“No, I mean it.... Well, you know what I mean.”

“Haven’t the faintest idea. Who’s ever disloyal to his bread and butter?”

“Yeah, that’s so.... Still, you know, Ellsworth, I like you a lot, only I’m never sure when you’re just talking my language or when it’s really yours.”

“Don’t go getting yourself into psychological complexities. You’ll get all tangled up. What’s on your mind?”

“Why do you still write for the New Frontiers?”

“For money.”

“Oh, come, that’s chicken feed to you.”

“Well, it’s a prestige magazine. Why shouldn’t I write for them? You haven’t got an exclusive on me.”

“No, and I don’t care who you write for on the side. But the New Frontiers has been damn funny lately.”

“About what?”

“About Gail Wynand.”

“Oh, rubbish, Alvah!”

“No sir, this isn’t rubbish. You just haven’t noticed, guess you don’t read it close enough, but I’ve got an instinct about things like that and I know. I know when it’s just some smart young punk taking pot-shots or when a magazine means business.”

“You’re nervous, Alvah, and you’re exaggerating. The New Frontiers is a liberal magazine and they’ve always sniped at Gail Wynand. Everybody has. He’s never been any too popular in the trade, you know. Hasn’t hurt him, though, has it?”

“This is different. I don’t like it when there’s a system behind it, a kind of special purpose, like a lot of little trickles dribbling along, all innocently, and pretty soon they make a little stream, and it all fits pat, and pretty soon ...”

“Getting a persecution mania, Alvah?”

“I don’t like it. It was all right when people took cracks at his yachts and women and a few municipal election scandals—which were never proved,” he added hastily. “But I don’t like it when it’s that new intelligentsia slang that people seem to be going for nowadays: Gail Wynand, the exploiter, Gail Wynand, the pirate of capitalism, Gail Wynand, the disease of an era. It’s still crap, Ellsworth, only there’s dynamite in that kind of crap.”

“It’s just the modern way of saying the same old things, nothing more. Besides, I can’t be responsible for the policy of a magazine just because I sell them an article once in a while.”

“Yeah, but ... That’s not what I hear.”

“What do you hear?”

“I hear you’re financing the damn thing.”

“Who, me? With what?”

“Well, not you yourself exactly. But I hear it was you who got young Ronny Pickering, the booze hound, to give them a shot in the arm to the tune of one hundred thousand smackers, just about when New Frontiers was going the way of all frontiers.”

“Hell, that was just to save Ronny from the town’s more expensive gutters. The kid was going to the dogs. Gave him a sort of higher purpose in life. And put one hundred thousand smackers to better use than the chorus cuties who’d have got it out of him anyway.”

“Yeah, but you could’ve attached a little string to the gift, slipped word to the editors that they’d better lay off Gail or else.”

“The New Frontiers is not the Banner, Alvah. It’s a magazine of principles. One doesn’t attach strings to its editors and one doesn’t tell them ‘or else.’ ”

“In this game, Ellsworth? Whom are you kidding?”

“Well, if it will set your mind at rest, I’ll tell you something you haven’t heard. It’s not supposed to be known—it was done through a lot of proxies. Did you know that I got Mitchell Layton to buy a nice fat chunk of the Banner?”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“Christ, Ellsworth, that’s great! Mitchell Layton? We can use a reservoir like that and ... Wait a minute. Mitchell Layton?”

“Yes. What’s wrong with Mitchell Layton?”

“Isn’t he the little boy who couldn’t digest grandpaw’s money?”

“Grandpaw left him an awful lot of money.”

“Yeah, but he’s a crackpot. He’s the one who’s been a Yogi, then a vegetarian, then a Unitarian, then a nudist—and now he’s gone to build a palace of the proletariat in Moscow.”

“So what?”

“But Jesus!—a Red among our stockholders?”

“Mitch isn’t a Red. How can one be a Red with a quarter of a billion dollars? He’s just a pale tea-rose. Mostly yellow. But a nice kid at heart.”

“But—on the Banner!”

“Alvah, you’re an ass. Don’t you see? I’ve made him put some dough into a good, solid, conservative paper. That’ll cure him of his pink notions and set him in the right direction. Besides, what harm can he do? Your dear Gail controls his papers, doesn’t he?”

“Does Gail know about this?”

“No. Dear Gail hasn’t been as watchful in the last five years as he used to be. And you’d better not tell him. You see the way Gail’s going. He’ll need a little pressure. And you’ll need the dough. Be nice to Mitch Layton. He can come in handy.”

“That’s so.”

“It is. You see? My heart’s in the right place. I’ve helped a puny little liberal mag like the New Frontiers, but I’ve also brought a much more substantial hunk of cash to a big stronghold of arch-conservatism such as the New York Banner.”

“So you have. Damn decent of you, too, considering that you’re a kind of radical yourself.”

“Now are you going to talk about any disloyalty?”

“Guess not. Guess you’ll stand by the old Banner.”

“Of course I will. Why, I love the Banner. I’d do anything for it. Why, I’d give my life for the New York Banner.”

VIII

WALKING THE SOIL OF A DESERT ISLAND HOLDS ONE ANCHORED to the rest of the earth; but in their penthouse, with the telephone disconnected, Wynand and Dominique had no feeling of the fifty-seven floors below them, of steel shafts braced against granite—and it seemed to them that their home was anchored in space, not an island, but a planet. The city became a friendly sight, an abstraction with which no possible communication could be established, like the sky, a spectacle to be admired, but of no direct concern in their lives.

For two weeks after their wedding they never left the penthouse. She could have pressed the button of the elevator and broken these weeks any time she wished; she did not wish it. She had no desire to resist, to wonder, to question. It was enchantment and peace.

He sat talking to her for hours when she wanted. He was content to sit silently, when she preferred, and look at her as he looked at the objects in his art gallery, with the same distant, undisturbing glance. He answered any question she put to him. He never asked questions. He never spoke of what he felt. When she wished to be alone, he did not call for her. One evening she sat reading in her room and saw him standing at the frozen parapet of the dark roof garden outside, not looking back at the house, only standing in the streak of light from her window.

When the two weeks ended, he went back to his work, to the office of the Banner. But the sense of isolation remained, like a theme declared and to be preserved through all their future days. He came home in the evening and the city ceased to exist. He had no desire to go anywhere. He invited no guests.

He never mentioned it, but she knew that he did not want her to step out of the house, neither with him nor alone. It was a quiet obsession which he did not expect to enforce. When he came home, he asked: “Have you been out?”—never: “Where have you been?” It was not jealousy—the “where” did not matter. When she wanted to buy a pair of shoes, he had three stores send a collection of shoes for her choice—it prevented her visit to a store. When she said she wanted to see a certain picture, he had a projection room built on the roof.

She obeyed, for the first few months. When she realized that she loved their isolation, she broke it at once. She made him accept invitations and she invited guests to their home. He complied without protest.

But he maintained a wall she could not break—the wall he had erected between his wife and his newspapers. Her name never appeared in their pages. He stopped every attempt to draw Mrs. Gail Wynand into public life—to head committees, sponsor charity drives, endorse crusades. He did not hesitate to open her mail—if it bore an official letterhead that betrayed its purpose—to destroy it without answer and to tell her that he had destroyed it. She shrugged and said nothing.

Yet he did not seem to share her contempt for his papers. He did not allow her to discuss them. She could not discover what he thought of them, nor what he felt. Once, when she commented on an offensive editorial, he said coldly:

“I’ve never apologized for the Banner. I never will.”

“But this is really awful, Gail.”

“I thought you married me as the publisher of the Banner.”

“I thought you didn’t like to think of that.”

“What I like or dislike doesn’t concern you. Don’t expect me to change the Banner or sacrifice it. I wouldn’t do that for anyone on earth.”

She laughed. “I wouldn’t ask it, Gail.”

He did not laugh in answer.

In his office in the Banner Building, he worked with a new energy, a kind of elated, ferocious drive that surprised the men who had known him in his most ambitious years. He stayed in the office all night when necessary, as he had not done for a long time. Nothing changed in his methods and policy. Alvah Scarret watched him with satisfaction. “We were wrong about him, Ellsworth,” said Scarret to his constant companion, “it’s the same old Gail, God bless him. Better than ever.” “My dear Alvah,” said Toohey, “nothing is ever as simple as you think—nor as fast.” “But he’s happy. Don’t you see that he’s happy?” “To be happy is the most dangerous thing that could have happened to him. And, as a humanitarian for once, I mean this for his own sake.”

Sally Brent decided to outwit her boss. Sally Brent was one of the proudest possessions of the Banner, a stout, middle-aged woman who dressed like a model for a style show of the twenty-first century and wrote like a chambermaid. She had a large personal following among the readers of the Banner. Her popularity made her overconfident.

Sally Brent decided to do a story on Mrs. Gail Wynand. It was just her type of story and there it was, simply going to waste. She gained admittance to Wynand’s penthouse, using the tactics of gaining admittance to places where one is not wanted which she had been taught as a well-trained Wynand employee. She made her usual dramatic entrance, wearing a black dress with a fresh sunflower on her shoulder -her constant ornament that had become a personal trade-mark-and she said to Dominique breathlessly: “Mrs. Wynand, I’ve come here to help you deceive your husband!”

Then she winked at her own naughtiness and explained: “Our dear Mr. Wynand has been unfair to you, my dear, depriving you of your rightful fame, for some reason which I just simply can’t understand. But we’ll fix him, you and I. What can a man do when we girls get together? He simply doesn’t know what good copy you are. So just give me your story, and I’ll write it, and it will be so good that he just simply won’t be able not to run it.”

Dominique was alone at home, and she smiled in a manner which Sally Brent had never seen before, so the right adjectives did not occur to Sally’s usually observant mind. Dominique gave her the story. She gave the exact kind of story Sally had dreamed about.

“Yes, of course I cook his breakfast,” said Dominique. “Ham and eggs is his favorite dish, just plain ham and eggs ... Oh yes, Miss Brent, I’m very happy. I open my eyes in the morning and I say to myself, it can’t be true, it’s not poor little me who’s become the wife of the great Gail Wynand who had all the glamorous beauties of the world to choose from. You see, I’ve been in love with him for years. He was just a dream to me, a beautiful, impossible dream. And now it’s like a dream come true.... Please, Miss Brent, take this message from me to the women of America: Patience is always rewarded and romance is just around the corner. I think it’s a beautiful thought and perhaps it will help other girls as it has helped me.... Yes, all I want of life is to make Gail happy, to share his joys and sorrows, to be a good wife and mother.”

Alvah Scarret read the story and liked it so much that he lost all caution. “Run it off, Alvah,” Sally Brent urged him, “just have a proof run off and leave it on his desk. He’ll okay it, see if he won’t.” That evening Sally Brent was fired. Her costly contract was bought off—it had three more years to run—and she was told never to enter the Banner Building again for any purpose whatsoever.

Scarret protested in panic: “Gail, you can’t fire Sally! Not Sally!”

“When I can’t fire anyone I wish on my paper, I’ll close it and blow up the God-damn building,” said Wynand calmly.

“But her public! We’ll lose her public!”

“To hell with her public.”

That night, at dinner, Wynand took from his pocket a crumpled wad of paper—the proof cut of the story—and threw it, without a word, at Dominique’s face across the table. It hit her cheek and fell to the floor. She picked it up, unrolled it, saw what it was and laughed aloud.

Sally Brent wrote an article on Gail Wynand’s love life. In a gay, intellectual manner, in the terms of a sociological study, the article presented material such as no pulp magazine would have accepted. It was published in the New Frontiers.

Wynand brought Dominique a necklace designed at his special order. It was made of diamonds without visible settings, spaced wide apart in an irregular pattern, like a handful scattered accidentally, held together by platinum chains made under a microscope, barely noticeable. When he clasped it about her neck, it looked like drops of water fallen at random.

She stood before a mirror. She slipped her dressing gown off her shoulders and let the raindrops glitter on her skin. She said:

“That life story of the Bronx housewife who murdered her husband’s young mistress is pretty sordid, Gail. But I think there’s something dirtier—the curiosity of the people who pander to that curiosity. Actually, it was that housewife—she has piano legs and such a baggy neck in her pictures—who made this necklace possible. It’s a beautiful necklace. I shall be proud to wear it.”

He smiled; the sudden brightness of his eyes had an odd quality of courage.

“That’s one way of looking at it,” he said. “There’s another. I like to think that I took the worst refuse of the human spirit—the mind of that housewife and the minds of the people who like to read about her—and I made of it this necklace on your shoulders. I like to think that I was an alchemist capable of performing so great a purification.”

She saw no apology, no regret, no resentment as he looked at her. It was a strange glance; she had noticed it before; a glance of simple worship. And it made her realize that there is a stage of worship which makes the worshiper himself an object of reverence.

She was sitting before her mirror when he entered her dressing room on the following night. He bent down, he pressed his lips to the back of her neck—and he saw a square of paper attached to the corner of her mirror. It was the decoded copy of the cablegram that had ended her career on the Banner. FIRE THE BITCH. G W

He lifted his shoulders, to stand erect behind her. He asked:

“How did you get that?”

“Ellsworth Toohey gave it to me. I thought it was worth preserving. Of course, I didn’t know it would ever become so appropriate.”

He inclined his head gravely, acknowledging the authorship, and said nothing else.

She expected to find the cablegram gone next morning. But he had not touched it. She would not remove it. It remained displayed on the comer of her mirror. When he held her in his arms, she often saw his eyes move to that square of paper. She could not tell what he thought.

In the spring, a publishers’ convention took him away from New York for a week. It was their first separation. Dominique surprised him by coming to meet him at the airport when he returned. She was gay and gentle; her manner held a promise he had never expected, could not trust, and found himself trusting completely.

When he entered the drawing room of their penthouse and slumped down, half stretching on the couch, she knew that he wanted to lie still here, to feel the recaptured safety of his own world. She saw his eyes, open, delivered to her, without defense. She stood straight, ready. She said:

“You’d better dress, Gail. We’re going to the theater tonight.”

He lifted himself to a sitting posture. He smiled, the slanting ridges standing out on his forehead. She had a cold feeling of admiration for him: the control was perfect, all but these ridges. He said:

“Fine. Black tie or white?”

“White. I have tickets for No Skin Off Your Nose. They were very hard to get.”

It was too much; it seemed too ludicrous to be part of this moment’s contest between them. He broke down by laughing frankly, in helpless disgust.

“Good God, Dominique, not that one!”

“Why, Gail, it’s the biggest hit in town. Your own critic, Jules Fougler”—he stopped laughing. He understood—“said it was the greatest play of our age. Ellsworth Toohey said it was the fresh voice of the coming new world. Alvah Scarret said it was not written in ink, but in the milk of human kindness. Sally Brent—before you fired her—said it made her laugh with a lump in her throat. Why, it’s the godchild of the Banner. I thought you would certainly want to see it.”

“Yes, of course,” he said.

He got up and went to dress.

No Skin Off Your Nose had been running for many months. Ellsworth Toohey had mentioned regretfully in his column that the title of the play had had to be changed slightly—“as a concession to the stuffy prudery of the middle class which still controls our theater. It is a crying example of interference with the freedom of the artist. Now don’t let’s hear any more of that old twaddle about ours being a free society. Originally, the title of this beautiful play was an authentic line drawn from the language of the people, with the brave, simple eloquence of folk expression.”

Wynand and Dominique sat in the center of the fourth row, not looking at each other, listening to the play. The things being done on the stage were merely trite and crass; but the undercurrent made them frightening. There was an air about the ponderous inanities spoken, which the actors had absorbed like an infection; it was in their smirking faces, in the slyness of their voices, in their untidy gestures. It was an air of inanities uttered as revelations and insolently demanding acceptance as such; an air, not of innocent presumption, but of conscious effrontery; as if the author knew the nature of his work and boasted of his power to make it appear sublime in the minds of his audience and thus destroy the capacity for the sublime within them. The work justified the verdict of its sponsors: it brought laughs, it was amusing; it was an indecent joke, acted out not on the stage but in the audience. It was a pedestal from which a god had been torn, and in his place there stood, not Satan with a sword, but a corner lout sipping a bottle of Coca-Cola.

There was silence in the audience, puzzled and humble. When someone laughed, the rest joined in, with relief, glad to learn that they were enjoying themselves. Jules Fougler had not tried to influence anybody; he had merely made clear—well in advance and through many channels—that anyone unable to enjoy this play was, basically, a worthless human being. “It’s no use asking for explanations,” he had said. “Either you’re fine enough to like it or you aren’t.”

In the intermission Wynand heard a stout woman saying: “It’s wonderful. I don’t understand it, but I have the feeling that it’s something very important.” Dominique asked him: “Do you wish to go, Gail?” He said: “No. We’ll stay to the end.”

He was silent in the car on their way home. When they entered their drawing room, he stood waiting, ready to hear and accept anything. For a moment she felt the desire to spare him. She felt empty and very tired. She did not want to hurt him; she wanted to seek his help.

Then she thought again what she had thought in the theater. She thought that this play was the creation of the Banner, this was what the Banner had forced into life, had fed, upheld, made to triumph. And it was the Banner that had begun and ended the destruction of the Stoddard Temple.... The New York Banner, November 2, 1930—“One Small Voice”—“Sacrilege” by Ellsworth M. Toohey—“The Churches of our Childhood” by Alvah Scarret—“Are you happy, Mr. Superman?” ... And now that destruction was not an event long since past—this was not a comparison between two mutually unmeasurable entities, a building and a play—it was not an accident, nor a matter of persons, of Ike, Fougler, Toohey, herself ... and Roark. It was a contest without time, a struggle of two abstractions, the thing that had created the building against the things that made the play possible—two forces, suddenly naked to her in their simple statement—two forces that had fought since the world began—and every religion had known of them—and there had always been a God and a Devil—only men had been so mistaken about the shapes of their Devil—he was not single and big, he was many and smutty and small. The Banner had destroyed the Stoddard Temple in order to make room for this play—it could not do otherwise—there was no middle choice, no escape, no neutrality—it was one or the other—it had always been—and the contest had many symbols, but no name and no statement.... Roark, she heard herself screaming inside, Roark ... Roark ... Roark ...

“Dominique ... what’s the matter?”

She heard Wynand’s voice. It was soft and anxious. He had never allowed himself to betray anxiety. She grasped the sound as a reflection of her own face, of what he had seen in her face.

She stood straight, and sure of herself, and very silent inside.

“I’m thinking of you, Gail,” she said.

He waited.

“Well, Gail? The total passion for the total height?” She laughed, letting her arms swing sloppily in the manner of the actors they had seen. “Say, Gail, have you got a two-cent stamp with a picture of George Washington on it? ... How old are you, Gail? How hard have you worked? Your life is more than half over, but you’ve seen your reward tonight. Your crowning achievement. Of course, no man is ever quite equal to his highest passion. Now if you strive and make a great effort, some day you’ll rise to the level of that play!”

He stood quietly, hearing it, accepting.

“I think you should take a manuscript of that play and place it on a stand in the center of your gallery downstairs. I think you should rechristen your yacht and call her No Skin Off Your Nose. I think you should take me——”

“Keep still.”

“—and put me in the cast and make me play the role of Mary every evening, Mary who adopts the homeless muskrat and ...”

“Dominique, keep still.”

“Then talk. I want to hear you talk.”

“I never justified myself to anyone.”

“Well, boast then. That would do just as well.”

“If you want to hear it, it made me sick, that play. As you knew it would. That was worse than the Bronx housewife.”

“Much worse.”

“But I can think of something worse still. Writing a great play and offering it for tonight’s audience to laugh at. Letting oneself be martyred by the kind of people we saw frolicking tonight.”

He saw that something had reached her; he could not tell whether it was an answer of surprise or of anger. He did not know how well she recognized these words. He went on:

“It did make me sick. But so have a great many things which the Banner has done. It was worse tonight, because there was a quality about it that went beyond the usual. A special kind of malice. But if this is popular with fools, it’s the Banner’s legitimate province. The Banner was created for the benefit of fools. What else do you want me to admit?”

“What you felt tonight.”

“A minor kind of hell. Because you sat there with me. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? To make me feel the contrast. Still, you miscalculated. I looked at the stage and I thought, this is what people are like, such are their spirits, but I—I’ve found you, I have you—and the contrast was worth the pain. I did suffer tonight, as you wanted, but it was a pain that went only down to a certain point and then ...”

“Shut up!” she screamed. “Shut up, God damn you!”

They stood for a moment, both astonished. He moved first; he knew she needed his help; he grasped her shoulders. She tore herself away. She walked across the room, to the window; she stood looking at the city, at the great buildings spread in black and fire below her.

After a while she said, her voice toneless:

“I’m sorry, Gail.”

He did not answer.

“I had no right to say those things to you.” She did not turn, her arms raised, holding the frame of the window. “We’re even, Gail. I’m paid back, if that will make it better for you. I broke first.”

“I don’t want you to be paid back.” He spoke quietly. “Dominique, what was it?”

“Nothing.”

“What did I make you think of? It wasn’t what I said. It was something else. What did the words mean to you?”

“Nothing.”

“A pain that went only down to a certain point. It was that sentence. Why?” She was looking at the city. In the distance she could see the shaft of the Cord Building. “Dominique, I’ve seen what you can take. It must be something very terrible if it could do that to you. I must know. There’s nothing impossible. I can help you against it, whatever it is.” She did not answer. “At the theater, it was not just that fool play. There was something else for you tonight. I saw your face. And then it was the same thing again here. What is it?”

“Gail,” she said softly, “will you forgive me?”

He let a moment pass; he had not been prepared for that.

“What have I to forgive you?”

“Everything. And tonight.”

“That was your privilege. The condition on which you married me. To make me pay for the Banner.”

“I don’t want to make you pay for it.”

“Why don’t you want it any more?”

“It can’t be paid for.”

In the silence she listened to his steps pacing the room behind her.

“Dominique. What was it?”

“The pain that stops at a certain point? Nothing. Only that you had no right to say it. The men who have, pay for that right, a price you can’t afford. But it doesn’t matter now. Say it if you wish. I have no right to say it either.”

“That wasn’t all.”

“I think we have a great deal in common, you and I. We’ve committed the same treason somewhere. No, that’s a bad word.... Yes, I think it’s the right word. It’s the only one that has the feeling of what I mean.”

“Dominique, you can’t feel that.” His voice sounded strange. She turned to him.

“Why?”

“Because that’s what I felt tonight. Treason.”

“Toward whom?”

“I don’t know. If I were religious, I’d say ‘God.’ But I’m not religious.”

“That’s what I meant, Gail.”

“Why should you feel it? The Banner is not your child.”

“There are other forms of the same guilt.”

Then he walked to her across the long room, he held her in his arms, he said:

“You don’t know the meaning of the kind of words you use. We have a great deal in common, but not that. I’d rather you went on spitting at me than trying to share my offenses.”

She let her hand rest against the length of his cheek, her finger tips at his temple.

He asked:

“Will you tell me—now—what it was?”

“Nothing. I undertook more than I could carry. You’re tired, Gail. Why don’t you go on upstairs? Leave me here for a little while. I just want to look at the city. Then I’ll join you and I’ll be all right.”

IX

DOMINIQUE STOOD AT THE RAIL OF THE YACHT, THE DECK WARM under her flat sandals, the sun on her bare legs, the wind blowing her thin white dress. She looked at Wynand stretched in a deck chair before her.

She thought of the change she noticed in him again aboard ship. She had watched him through the months of their summer cruise. She had seen him once running down a companionway; the picture remained in her mind; a tall white figure thrown forward in a streak of speed and confidence; his hand grasped a railing, risking deliberately the danger of a sudden break, gaining a new propulsion. He was not the corrupt publisher of a popular empire. He was an aristocrat aboard a yacht. He looked, she thought, like what one believes aristocracy to be when one is young: a brilliant kind of gaiety without guilt.

She looked at him in the deck chair. She thought that relaxation was attractive only in those for whom it was an unnatural state; then even limpness acquired purpose. She wondered about him; Gail Wynand, famous for his extraordinary capacity; but this was not merely the force of an ambitious adventurer who had created a chain of newspapers; this—the quality she saw in him here—the thing stretched out under the sun, like an answer—this was greater, a first cause, a faculty out of universal dynamics.

“Gail,” she said suddenly, involuntarily.

He opened his eyes to look at her.

“I wish I had taken a recording of that,” he said lazily. “You’d be startled to hear what it sounded like. Quite wasted here. I’d like to play it back in a bedroom.”

“I’ll repeat it there if you wish.”

“Thank you, dearest. And I promise not to exaggerate or presume too much. You’re not in love with me. You’ve never loved anyone.”

“Why do you think that?”

“If you loved a man, it wouldn’t be just a matter of a circus wedding and an atrocious evening in the theater. You’d put him through total hell.”

“How do you know that, Gail?”

“Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I’m not the Gail Wynand you’d heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you’d want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, because that’s the impossible, the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you’d want to offer the man you loved. But it wouldn’t be easy for you.”

“If that’s true, then you ...”

“Then I become gentle and humble—to your great astonishment—because I’m the worst scoundrel living.”

“I don’t believe that, Gail.”

“No? I’m not the person before last any more?”

“Not any more.”

“Well, dearest, as a matter of fact, I am.”

“Why do you want to think that?”

“I don’t want to. But I like to be honest. That has been my only private luxury. Don’t change your mind about me. Go on seeing me as you saw me before we met.”

“Gail, that’s not what you want.”

“It doesn’t matter what I want. I don’t want anything—except to own you. Without answer from you. It has to be without answer. If you begin to look at me too closely, you’ll see things you won’t like at all.”

“What things?”

“You’re so beautiful, Dominique. Its such a lovely accident on God’s part that there’s one person who matches inside and out.”

“What things, Gail?”

“Do you know what you’re actually in love with? Integrity. The impossible. The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art. That’s the only field where it can be found—art. But you want it in the flesh. You’re in love with it. Well, you see, I’ve never had any integrity.”

“How sure are you of that, Gail?”

“Have you forgotten the Banner?”

“To hell with the Banner.”

“All right, to hell with the Banner. It’s nice to hear you say that. But the Banner’s not the major symptom. That I’ve never practiced any sort of integrity is not so important. What’s important is that I’ve never felt any need for it. I hate the conception of it. I hate the presumptuousness of the idea.”

“Dwight Carson ...” she said. He heard the sound of disgust in her voice.

He laughed. “Yes, Dwight Carson. The man I bought. The individualist who’s become a mob-glorifier and, incidentally, a dipsomaniac. I did that. That was worse than the Banner, wasn’t it? You don’t like to be reminded of that?”

“No.”

“But surely you’ve heard enough screaming about it. All the giants of the spirit whom I’ve broken. I don’t think anybody ever realized how much I enjoyed doing it. It’s a kind of lust. I’m perfectly indifferent to slugs like Ellsworth Toohey or my friend Alvah, and quite willing to leave them in peace. But just let me see a man of a slightly higher dimension—and I’ve got to make a sort of Toohey out of him. I’ve got to. It’s like a sex urge.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Incidentally, you misunderstand Ellsworth Toohey.”

“Possibly. You don’t expect me to waste mental effort to untangle that snail’s shell?”

“And you contradict yourself.”

“Where?”

“Why didn’t you set out to destroy me?”

“The exception-making, Dominique. I love you. I had to love you. God help you if you were a man.”

“Gail—why?”

“Why have I done all that?”

“Yes.”

“Power, Dominique. The only thing I ever wanted. To know that there’s not a man living whom I can’t force to do—anything. Anything I choose. The man I couldn’t break would destroy me. But I’ve spent years finding out how safe I am. They say I have no sense of honor, I’ve missed something in life. Well, I haven’t missed very much, have I? The thing I’ve missed—it doesn’t exist.”

He spoke in a normal tone of voice, but he noticed suddenly that she was listening with the intent concentration needed to hear a whisper of which one can afford to lose no syllable.

“What’s the matter, Dominique? What are you thinking about?”

“I’m listening to you, Gail.”

She did not say she was listening to his words and to the reason behind them. It was suddenly so clear to her that she heard it as an added clause to each sentence, even though he had no knowledge of what he was confessing.

“The worst thing about dishonest people is what they think of as honesty,” he said. “I know a woman who’s never held to one conviction for three days running, but when I told her she had no integrity, she got very tight-lipped and said her idea of integrity wasn’t mine; it seems she’d never stolen any money. Well, she’s one that’s in no danger from me whatever. I don’t hate her. I hate the impossible conception you love so passionately, Dominique.”

“Do you?”

“I’ve had a lot of fun proving it.”

She walked to him and sat down on the deck beside his chair, the planks smooth and hot under her bare legs. He wondered why she looked at him so gently. He frowned. She knew that some reflection of what she had understood remained in her eyes—and she looked away from him.

“Gail, why tell me all that? It’s not what you want me to think of you.”

“No. It isn’t. Why tell you now? Want the truth? Because it has to be told. Because I wanted to be honest with you. Only with you and with myself. But I wouldn’t have the courage to tell you anywhere else. Not at home. Not ashore. Only here—because here it doesn’t seem quite real. Does it?”

“No.”

“I think I hoped that here you’d accept it—and still think of me as you did when you spoke my name in that way I wanted to record.”

She put her head against his chair, her face pressed to his knees, her hands dropped, fingers half-curled, on the glistening planks of the deck. She did not want to show what she had actually heard him saying about himself today.

On a night of late fall they stood together at the roof-garden parapet, looking at the city. The long shafts made of lighted windows were like streams breaking out of the black sky, flowing down in single drops to feed the great pools of fire below.

“There they are, Dominique—the great buildings. The skyscrapers. Do you remember? They were the first link between us. We’re both in love with them, you and I.”

She thought she should resent his right to say it. But she felt no resentment.”

“Yes, Gail. I’m in love with them.”

She looked at the vertical threads of light that were the Cord Building, she raised her fingers off the parapet, just enough to touch the place of its unseen form on the distant sky. She felt no reproach from it.

“I like to see a man standing at the foot of a skyscraper,” he said. “It makes him no bigger than an ant—isn’t that the correct bromide for the occasion? The God-damn fools! It’s man who made it—the whole incredible mass of stone and steel. It doesn’t dwarf him, it makes him greater than the structure. It reveals his true dimensions to the world. What we love about these buildings, Dominique, is the creative faculty, the heroic in man.”

“Do you love the heroic in man, Gail?”

“I love to think of it. I don’t believe it.”

She leaned against the parapet and watched the green lights stretched in a long straight line far below. She said:

“I wish I could understand you.”

“I thought I should be quite obvious. I’ve never hidden anything from you.”

He watched the electric signs that flashed in disciplined spasms over the black river. Then he pointed to a blurred light, far to the south, a faint reflection of blue.

“That’s the Banner Building. See, over there?—that blue light. I’ve done so many things, but I’ve missed one, the most important. There’s no Wynand Building in New York. Some day I’ll build a new home for the Banner. It will be the greatest structure of the city and it will bear my name. I started in a miserable dump, and the paper was called the Gazette. I was only a stooge for some very filthy people. But I thought, then, of the Wynand Building that would rise some day. I’ve thought of it all the years since.”

“Why haven’t you built it?”

“I wasn’t ready for it.”

“Why?”

“I’m not ready for it now. I don’t know why. I know only that it’s very important to me. It will be the final symbol. I’ll know the right time when it comes.”

He turned to look out to the west, to a patch of dim scattered lights. He pointed:

“That’s where I was born. Hell’s Kitchen.” She listened attentively; he seldom spoke of his beginning. “I was sixteen when I stood on a roof and looked at the city, like tonight. And decided what I would be.”

The quality of his voice became a line underscoring the moment, saying: Take notice, this is important. Not looking at him, she thought this was what she had waited for, this should give her the answer, the key to him. Years ago, thinking of Gail Wynand, she had wondered how such a man faced his life and his work; she expected boasting and a hidden sense of shame, or impertinence flaunting its own guilt. She looked at him. His head lifted, his eyes level on the sky before him, he conveyed none of the things she had expected; he conveyed a quality incredible in this connection: a sense of gallantry.

She knew it was a key, but it made the puzzle greater. Yet something within her understood, knew the use of that key and made her speak.

“Gail, fire Ellsworth Toohey.”

He turned to her, bewildered.

“Why?”

“Gail, listen.” Her voice had an urgency she had never shown in speaking to him. “I’ve never wanted to stop Toohey. I’ve even helped him. I thought he was what the world deserved. I haven’t tried to save anything from him ... or anyone. I never thought it would be the Banner—the Banner which he fits best—that I’d want to save from him.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“Gail, when I married you, I didn’t know I’d come to feel this kind of loyalty to you. It contradicts everything I’ve done, it contradicts so much more than I can tell you—it’s a sort of catastrophe for me, a turning point—don’t ask me why—it will take me years to understand —I know only that this is what I owe you. Fire Ellsworth Toohey. Get him out before it’s too late. You’ve broken many much less vicious men and much less dangerous. Fire Toohey, go after him and don’t rest until you’ve destroyed every last bit of him.”

“Why? Why should you think of him just now?”

“Because I know what he’s after.”

“What is he after?”

“Control of the Wynand papers.”

He laughed aloud; it was not derision or indignation; just pure gaiety greeting the point of a silly joke.

“Gail ...” she said helplessly.

“Oh for God’s sake, Dominique! And here I’ve always respected your judgment.”

“You’ve never understood Toohey.”

“And I don’t care to. Can you see me going to Ellsworth Toohey? A tank to eliminate a bedbug? Why should I fire Elsie? He’s the kind that makes money for me. People love to read his twaddle. I don’t fire good booby-traps like that. He’s as valuable to me as a piece of flypaper.”

“That’s the danger. Part of it.”

“His wonderful following? I’ve had bigger and better sob-sisters on my payroll. When a few of them had to be kicked out, that was the end of them. Their popularity stopped at the door of the Banner. But the Banner went on.”

“It’s not his popularity. It’s the special nature of it. You can’t fight him on his terms. You’re only a tank—and that’s a very clean, innocent weapon. An honest weapon that goes first, out in front, and mows everything down or takes every counterblow. He’s a corrosive gas. The kind that eats lungs out. I think there really is a secret to the core of evil and he has it. I don’t know what it is. I know how he uses it and what he’s after.”

“Control of the Wynand papers?”

“Control of the Wynand papers—as one of the means to an end.”

“What end?”

“Control of the world.”

He said with patient disgust: “What is this, Dominique? What sort of gag and what for?”

“I’m serious, Gail. I’m terribly serious.”

“Control of the world, my dear, belongs to men like me. The Tooheys of this earth wouldn’t know how to dream about it.”

“I’ll try to explain. It’s very difficult. The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see. But if you’ll listen ...”

“I won’t listen. You’ll forgive me, but discussing the idea of Ellsworth Toohey as a threat to me is ridiculous. Discussing it seriously is offensive.”

“Gail, I ...”

“No. Darling, I don’t think you really understand much about the Banner. And I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to take any part in it. Forget it. Leave the Banner to me.”

“Is it a demand, Gail?”

“It’s an ultimatum.”

“All right.”

“Forget it. Don’t go acquiring horror complexes about anyone as big as Ellsworth Toohey. It’s not like you.”

“All right, Gail. Let’s go in. It’s too cold for you here without an overcoat.”

He chuckled softly—it was the kind of concern she had never shown for him before. He took her hand and kissed her palm, holding it against his face.

For many weeks, when left alone together, they spoke little and never about each other. But it was not a silence of resentment; it was the silence of an understanding too delicate to limit by words. They would be in a room together in the evening, saying nothing, content to feel each other’s presence. They would look at each other suddenly—and both would smile, the smile like hands clasped.

Then, one evening, she knew he would speak. She sat at her dressing-table. He came in and leaned against the wall beside her. He looked at her hands, at her naked shoulders, but she felt as if he did not see her; he was looking at something greater than the beauty of her body, greater than his love for her; he was looking at himself—and this, she knew, was the one incomparable tribute.

“I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival ... I’ve given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need ...” She heard Roark’s words, Roark’s voice speaking for Gail Wynand—and she felt no sense of treason to Roark in using the words of his love for the love of another man.

“Gail,” she said gently, “some day I’ll have to ask your forgiveness for having married you.”

He shook his head slowly, smiling. She said:

“I wanted you to be my chain to the world. You’ve become my defense, instead. And that makes my marriage dishonest.”

“No. I told you I would accept any reason you chose.”

“But you’ve changed everything for me. Or was it I that changed it? I don’t know. We’ve done something strange to each other. I’ve given you what I wanted to lose. That special sense of living I thought this marriage would destroy for me. The sense of life as exaltation. And you—you’ve done all the things I would have done. Do you know how much alike we are?”

“I knew that from the first.”

“But it should have been impossible. Gail, I want to remain with you now—for another reason. To wait for an answer. I think when I learn to understand what you are, I’ll understand myself. There is an answer. There is a name for the thing we have in common. I don’t know it. I know it’s very important.”

“Probably. I suppose I should want to understand it. But I don’t. I can’t care about anything now. I can’t even be afraid.”

She looked up at him and said very calmly:

“I am afraid, Gail.”

“Of what, dearest?”

“Of what I’m doing to you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t love you, Gail.”

“I can’t care even about that.”

She dropped her head and he looked down at the hair that was like a pale helmet of polished metal.

“Dominique.”

She raised her face to him obediently.

“I love you, Dominique. I love you so much that nothing can matter to me—not even you. Can you understand that? Only my love—not your answer. Not even your indifference. I’ve never taken much from the world. I haven’t wanted much. I’ve never really wanted anything. Not in the total, undivided way, not with the kind of desire that becomes an ultimatum, ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and one can’t accept the ‘no’ without ceasing to exist. That’s what you are to me. But when one reaches that stage, it’s not the object that matters, it’s the desire. Not you, but I. The ability to desire like that. Nothing less is worth feeling or honoring. And I’ve never felt that before. Dominique, I’ve never known how to say ‘mine’ about anything. Not in the sense I say it about you. Mine. Did you call it a sense of life as exaltation? You said that. You understand. I can’t be afraid. I love you, Dominique—I love you—you’re letting me say it now—I love you.”

She reached over and took the cablegram off the mirror. She crumpled it, her fingers twisting slowly in a grinding motion against her palm. He stood listening to the crackle of the paper. She leaned forward, opened her hand over the wastebasket, and let the paper drop. Her hand remained still for a moment, the fingers extended, slanting down, as they had opened.

Part 4

HOWARD ROARK

I

THE LEAVES STREAMED DOWN, TREMBLING IN THE SUN. THEY were not green; only a few, scattered through the torrent, stood out in single drops of a green so bright and pure that it hurt the eyes; the rest were not a color, but a light, the substance of fire on metal, living sparks without edges. And it looked as if the forest were a spread of light boiling slowly to produce this color, this green rising in small bubbles, the condensed essence of spring. The trees met, bending over the road, and the spots of sun on the ground moved with the shifting of the branches, like a conscious caress. The young man hoped he would not have to die.

Not if the earth could look like this, he thought. Not if he could hear the hope and the promise like a voice, with leaves, tree trunks and rocks instead of words. But he knew that the earth looked like this only because he had seen no sign of men for hours; he was alone, riding his bicycle down a forgotten trail through the hills of Pennsylvania where he had never been before, where he could feel the fresh wonder of an untouched world.

He was a very young man. He had just graduated from college—in the spring of the year 1935—and he wanted to decide whether life was worth living. He did not know that this was the question in his mind. He did not think of dying. He thought only that he wished to find joy and reason and meaning in life—and that none had been offered to him anywhere.

He had not liked the things taught to him in college. He had been taught a great deal about social responsibility, about a life of service and self-sacrifice. Everybody had said it was beautiful and inspiring. Only he had not felt inspired. He had felt nothing at all.

He could not name the thing he wanted of life. He felt it here, in this wild loneliness. But he did not face nature with the joy of a healthy animal—as a proper and final setting; he faced it with the joy of a healthy man—as a challenge; as tools, means and material. So he felt anger that he should find exaltation only in the wilderness, that this great sense of hope had to be lost when he would return to men and men’s work. He thought that this was not right; that man’s work should be a higher step, an improvement on nature, not a degradation. He did not want to despise men; he wanted to love and admire them. But he dreaded the sight of the first house, poolroom and movie poster he would encounter on his way.

He had always wanted to write music, and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto—or the last movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second. Men have not found the words for it nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don’t help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don’t work for my happiness, my brothers—show me yours—show me that it is possible—show me your achievement—and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.

He saw a blue hole ahead, where the road ended on the crest of a ridge. The blue looked cool and clean like a film of water stretched in the frame of green branches. It would be funny, he thought, if I came to the edge and found nothing but that blue beyond; nothing but the sky ahead, above and below. He closed his eyes and went on, suspending the possible for a moment, granting himself a dream, a few instants of believing that he would reach the crest, open his eyes and see the blue radiance of the sky below.

His foot touched the ground, breaking his motion; he stopped and opened his eyes. He stood still.

In the broad valley, far below him, in the first sunlight of early morning, he saw a town. Only it was not a town. Towns did not look like that. He had to suspend the possible for a while longer, to seek no questions or explanations, only to look.

There were small houses on the ledges of the hill before him, flowing down to the bottom. He knew that the ledges had not been touched, that no artifice had altered the unplanned beauty of the graded steps. Yet some power had known how to build on these ledges in such a way that the houses became inevitable, and one could no longer imagine the hills as beautiful without them—as if the centuries and the series of chances that produced these ledges in the struggle of great blind forces had waited for their final expression, had been only a road to a goal—and the goal was these buildings, part of the hills, shaped by the hills, yet ruling them by giving them meaning.

The houses were of plain field stone—like the rocks jutting from the green hillsides—and of glass, great sheets of glass used as if the sun were invited to complete the structures, sunlight becoming part of the masonry. There were many houses, they were small, they were cut off from one another, and no two of them were alike. But they were like variations on a single theme, like a symphony played by an inexhaustible imagination, and one could still hear the laughter of the force that had been let loose on them, as if that force had run, unrestrained, challenging itself to be spent, but had never reached its end. Music, he thought, the promise of the music he had invoked, the sense of it made real—there it was before his eyes—he did not see it—he heard it in chords—he thought that there was a common language of thought, sight and sound—was it mathematics?—the discipline of reason—music was mathematics—and architecture was music in stone—he knew he was dizzy because this place below him could not be real.

He saw trees, lawns, walks twisting up the hillsides, steps cut in the stone, he saw fountains, swimming pools, tennis courts—and not a sign of life. The place was uninhabited.

It did not shock him, not as the sight of it had shocked him. In a way, it seemed proper; this was not part of known existence. For the moment he had no desire to know what it was.

After a long time he glanced about him—and then he saw that he was not alone. Some steps away from him a man sat on a boulder, looking down at the valley. The man seemed absorbed in the sight and had not heard his approach. The man was tall and gaunt and had orange hair.

He walked straight to the man, who turned his eyes to him; the eyes were gray and calm; the boy knew suddenly that they felt the same thing, and he could speak as he would not speak to a stranger anywhere else.

“That isn’t real, is it?” the boy asked, pointing down.

“Why, yes, it is, now,” the man answered.

“It’s not a movie set or a trick of some kind?”

“No. It’s a summer resort. It’s just been completed. It will be opened in a few weeks.”

“Who built it?”

“I did.”

“What’s your name?”

“Howard Roark.”

“Thank you,” said the boy. He knew that the steady eyes looking at him understood everything these two words had to cover. Howard Roark inclined his head, in acknowledgment.

Wheeling his bicycle by his side, the boy took the narrow path down the slope of the hill to the valley and the houses below. Roark looked after him. He had never seen the boy before and he would never see him again. He did not know that he had given someone the courage to face a lifetime.

Roark had never understood why he was chosen to build the summer resort at Monadnock Valley.

It had happened a year and a half ago, in the fall of 1933. He had heard of the project and gone to see Mr. Caleb Bradley, the head of some vast company that had purchased the valley and was doing a great deal of loud promotion. He went to see Bradley as a matter of duty, without hope, merely to add another refusal to his long list of refusals. He had built nothing in New York since the Stoddard Temple.

When he entered Bradley’s office, he knew that he must forget Monadnock Valley because this man would never give it to him. Caleb Bradley was a short, pudgy person with a handsome face between rounded shoulders. The face looked wise and boyish, unpleasantly ageless; he could have been fifty or twenty; he had blank blue eyes, sly and bored.

But it was difficult for Roark to forget Monadnock Valley. So he spoke of it, forgetting that speech was useless here. Mr. Bradley listened, obviously interested, but obviously not in what Roark was saying. Roark could almost feel some third entity present in the room. Mr. Bradley said little, beyond promising to consider it and to get in touch with him. But then he said a strange thing. He asked, in a voice devoid of all clue to the purpose of the question, neither in approval nor scorn: “You’re the architect who built the Stoddard Temple, aren’t you, Mr. Roark?” “Yes,” said Roark. “Funny that I hadn’t thought of you myself,” said Mr. Bradley. Roark went away, thinking that it would have been funny if Mr. Bradley had thought of him.

Three days later, Bradley telephoned and invited him to his office. Roark came and met four other men—the Board of the Monadnock Valley Company. They were well-dressed men, and their faces were as closed as Mr. Bradley’s. “Please tell these gentlemen what you told me, Mr. Roark,” Bradley said pleasantly.

Roark explained his plan. If what they wished to build was an unusual summer resort for people of moderate incomes—as they had announced—then they should realize that the worst curse of poverty was the lack of privacy; only the very rich or the very poor of the city could enjoy their summer vacations; the very rich, because they had private estates; the very poor, because they did not mind the feel and smell of one another’s flesh on public beaches and public dance floors; the people of good taste and small income had no place to go, if they found no rest or pleasure in herds. Why was it assumed that poverty gave one the instincts of cattle? Why not offer these people a place where, for a week or a month, at small cost, they could have what they wanted and needed? He had seen Monadnock Valley. It could be done. Don’t touch those hillsides, don’t blast and level them down. Not one huge ant pile of a hotel—but small houses hidden from one another, each a private estate, where people could meet or not, as they pleased. Not one fish-market tank of a swimming-pool-but many private swimming pools, as many as the company wished to afford—he could show them how it could be done cheaply. Not one stock-farm corral of tennis courts for exhibitionists—but many private tennis courts. Not a place where one went to meet “refined company” and land a husband in two weeks—but a resort for people who enjoyed their own presence well enough and sought only a place where they would be left free to enjoy it.

The men listened to him silently. He saw them exchanging glances once in a while. He felt certain that they were the kind of glances people exchange when they cannot laugh at the speaker aloud. But it could not have been that—because he signed a contract to build the Monadnock Valley summer resort, two days later.

He demanded Mr. Bradley’s initials on every drawing that came out of his drafting room; he remembered the Stoddard Temple. Mr. Bradley initialed, signed, okayed; he agreed to everything; he approved everything. He seemed delighted to let Roark have his way. But this eager complaisance had a peculiar undertone—as if Mr. Bradley were humoring a child.

He could learn little about Mr. Bradley. It was said that the man had made a fortune in real estate, in the Florida boom. His present company seemed to command unlimited funds, and the names of many wealthy backers were mentioned as shareholders. Roark never met them. The four gentlemen of the Board did not appear again, except on short visits to the construction site, where they exhibited little interest. Mr. Bradley was in full charge of everything—but beyond a close watch over the budget he seemed to like nothing better than to leave Roark in full charge.

In the eighteen months that followed, Roark had no time to wonder about Mr. Bradley. Roark was building his greatest assignment.

For the last year he lived at the construction site, in a shanty hastily thrown together on a bare hillside, a wooden enclosure with a bed, a stove and a large table. His old draftsmen came to work for him again, some abandoning better jobs in the city, to live in shacks and tents, to work in naked plank barracks that served as architect’s office. There was so much to build that none of them thought of wasting structural effort on their own shelters. They did not realize, until much later, that they had lacked comforts; and then they did not believe it—because the year at Monadnock Valley remained in their minds as the strange time when the earth stopped turning and they lived through twelve months of spring. They did not think of the snow, the frozen clots of earth, wind whistling through the cracks of planking, thin blankets over army cots, stiff fingers stretched over coal stoves in the morning, before a pencil could be held steadily. They remembered only the feeling which is the meaning of spring—one’s answer to the first blades of grass, the first buds on tree branches, the first blue of the sky—the singing answer, not to grass, trees and sky, but to the great sense of beginning, of triumphant progression, of certainty in an achievement that nothing will stop. Not from leaves and flowers, but from wooden scaffoldings, from steam shovels, from blocks of stone and sheets of glass rising out of the earth they received the sense of youth, motion, purpose, fulfillment.

They were an army and it was a crusade. But none of them thought of it in these words, except Steven Mallory. Steven Mallory did the fountains and all the sculpture work of Monadnock Valley. But he came to live at the site long before he was needed. Battle, thought Steven Mallory, is a vicious concept. There is no glory in war, and no beauty in crusades of men. But this was a battle, this was an army and a war—and the highest experience in the life of every man who took part in it. Why? Where was the root of the difference and the law to explain it?

He did not speak of it to anyone. But he saw the same feeling in Mike’s face, when Mike arrived with the gang of electricians. Mike said nothing, but he winked at Mallory in cheerful understanding. “I told you not to worry,” Mike said to him once, without preamble, “at the trial that was. He can’t lose, quarries or no quarries, trials or no trials. They can’t beat him, Steve, they just can’t, not the whole goddamn world.”

But they had really forgotten the world, thought Mallory. This was a new earth, their own. The hills rose to the sky around them, as a wall of protection. And they had another protection—the architect who walked among them, down the snow or the grass of the hillsides, over the boulders and the piled planks, to the drafting tables, to the derricks, to the tops of rising walls—the man who had made this possible—the thought in the mind of that man—and not the content of that thought, nor the result, not the vision that had created Monadnock Valley, nor the will that had made it real—but the method of his thought, the rule of its function—the method and rule which were not like those of the world beyond the hills. That stood on guard over the valley and over the crusaders within it.

And then he saw Mr. Bradley come to visit the site, to smile blandly and depart again. Then Mallory felt anger without reason—and fear.

“Howard,” Mallory said one night, when they sat together at a fire of dry branches on the hillside over the camp, “it’s the Stoddard Temple again.”

“Yes,” said Roark, “I think so. But I can’t figure out in just what way or what they’re after.”

He rolled over on his stomach and looked down at the panes of glass scattered through the darkness below; they caught reflections from somewhere and looked like phosphorescent, self-generated springs of light rising out of the ground. He said:

“It doesn’t matter, Steve, does it? Not what they do about it nor who comes to live here. Only that we’ve made it. Would you have missed this, no matter what price they make you pay for it afterward?”

“No,” said Mallory.

Roark had wanted to rent one of the houses for himself and spend the summer there, the first summer of Monadnock Valley’s existence. But before the resort was open, he received a wire from New York:

“I told you I would, didn’t I? It took five years to get rid of my friends and brothers, but the Aquitania is now mine—and yours. Come to finish it. Kent Lansing.”

So he went back to New York—to see the rubble and cement dust cleared away from the hulk of the Unfinished Symphony, to see derricks swing girders high over Central Park, to see the gaps of windows filled, the broad decks spread over the roofs of the city, the Aquitania Hotel completed, glowing at night in the Park’s skyline.

He had been very busy in the last two years. Monadnock Valley had not been his only commission. From different states, from unexpected parts of the country, calls had come for him: private homes, small office buildings, modest shops. He had built them—snatching a few hours of sleep on trains and planes that carried him from Monadnock Valley to distant small towns. The story of every commission he received was the same: “I was in New York and I liked the Enright House.” “I saw the Cord Building.” “I saw a picture of that temple they tore down.” It was as if an underground stream flowed through the country and broke out in sudden springs that shot to the surface at random, in unpredictable places. They were small, inexpensive jobs—but he was kept working.

That summer, with Monadnock Valley completed, he had no time to worry about its future fate. But Steven Mallory worried about it. “Why don’t they advertise it, Howard? Why the sudden silence? Have you noticed? There was so much talk about their grand project, so many little items in print—before they started. There was less and less while we were doing it. And now? Mr. Bradley and company have gone deaf-mute. Now, when you’d expect them to stage a press agent’s orgy. Why?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Roark. “I’m an architect, not a rental agent. Why should you worry? We’ve done our job, let them do theirs in their own way.”

“It’s a damn queer way. Did you see their ads—the few they’ve let dribble out? They say all the things you told them, about rest, peace and privacy—but how they say it! Do you know what those ads amount to in effect? ‘Come to Monadnock Valley and be bored to death.’ It sounds—it actually sounds as if they were trying to keep people away.”

“I don’t read ads, Steve.”

But within a month of its opening every house in Monadnock Valley was rented. The people who came were a strange mixture: society men and women who could have afforded more fashionable resorts, young writers and unknown artists, engineers and newspapermen and factory workers. Suddenly, spontaneously, people were talking about Monadnock Valley. There was a need for that kind of a resort, a need no one had tried to satisfy. The place became news, but it was private news; the papers had not discovered it. Mr. Bradley had no press agents; Mr. Bradley and his company had vanished from public life. One magazine, unsolicited, printed four pages of photographs of Monadnock Valley, and sent a man to interview Howard Roark. By the end of summer the houses were leased in advance for the following year.

In October, early one morning, the door of Roark’s reception room flew open and Steven Mallory rushed in, making straight for Roark’s office. The secretary tried to stop him; Roark was working and no interruptions were allowed. But Mallory shoved her aside and tore into the office, slamming the door behind. She noticed that he held a newspaper in his hand.

Roark glanced up at him, from the drafting table, and dropped his pencil. He knew that this was the way Mallory’s face had looked when he shot at Ellsworth Toohey.

“Well, Howard? Do you want to know why you got Monadnock Valley?”

He threw the newspaper down on the table. Roark saw the heading of a story on the third page: “Caleb Bradley arrested.”

“It’s all there,” said Mallory. “Don’t read it. It will make you sick.”

“All right, Steve, what is it?”

“They sold two hundred percent of it.”

“Who did? Of what?”

“Bradley and his gang. Of Monadnock Valley.” Mallory spoke with a forced, vicious, self-torturing precision. “They thought it was worthless —from the first. They got the land practically for nothing—they thought it was no place for a resort at all—out of the way, with no bus lines or movie theaters around—they thought the time wasn’t right and the public wouldn’t go for it. They made a lot of noise and sold shares to a lot of wealthy suckers—it was just a huge fraud. They sold two hundred percent of the place. They got twice what it cost them to build it. They were certain it would fail. They wanted it to fail. They expected no profits to distribute. They had a nice scheme ready for how to get out of it when the place went bankrupt. They were prepared for anything—except for seeing it turn into the kind of success it is. And they couldn’t go on—because now they’d have to pay their backers twice the amount the place earned each year. And it’s earning plenty. And they thought they had arranged for certain failure. Howard, don’t you understand? They chose you as the worst architect they could find!”

Roark threw his head back and laughed.

“God damn you, Howard! It’s not funny!”

“Sit down, Steve. Stop shaking. You look as if you’d just seen a whole field of butchered bodies.”

“I have. I’ve seen worse. I’ve seen the root. I’ve seen what makes such fields possible. What do the damn fools think of as horror? Wars, murders, fires, earthquakes? To hell with that! This is horror—that story in the paper. That’s what men should dread and fight and scream about and call the worst shame on their record. Howard, I’m thinking of all the explanations of evil and all the remedies offered for it through the centuries. None of them worked. None of them explained or cured anything. But the root of evil—my drooling beast—it’s there, Howard, in that story. In that—and in the souls of the smug bastards who’ll read it and say: ‘Oh well, genius must always struggle, it’s good for ’em’—and then go and look for some village idiot to help, to teach him how to weave baskets. That’s the drooling beast in action. Howard, think of Monadnock. Close your eyes and see it. And then think that the men who ordered it, believed it was the worst thing they could build! Howard, there’s something wrong, something very terribly wrong in the world if you were given your greatest job—as a filthy joke!”

“When will you stop thinking about that? About the world and me? When will you learn to forget it? When will Dominique ...”

He stopped. They had not mentioned that name in each other’s presence for five years. He saw Mallory’s eyes, intent and shocked. Mallory realized that his words had hurt Roark, hurt him enough to force this admission. But Roark turned to him and said deliberately:

“Dominique used to think just as you do.”

Mallory had never spoken of what he guessed about Roark’s past. Their silence had always implied that Mallory understood, that Roark knew it, and that it was not to be discussed. But now Mallory asked:

“Are you still waiting for her to come back? Mrs. Gail Wynand—God damn her!”

Roark said without emphasis:

“Shut up, Steve.”

Mallory whispered: “I’m sorry.”

Roark walked to his table and said, his voice normal again:

“Go home, Steve, and forget about Bradley. They’ll all be suing one another now, but we won’t be dragged in and they won’t destroy Monadnock. Forget it, and get out, I have to work.”

He brushed the newspaper off the table, with his elbow, and bent over the sheets of drafting paper.

There was a scandal over the revelations of the financing methods behind Monadnock Valley, there was a trial, a few gentlemen sentenced to the penitentiary, and a new management taking Monadnock over for the shareholders. Roark was not involved. He was busy, and he forgot to read the accounts of the trial in the papers. Mr. Bradley admitted—in apology to his partners—that he would be damned if he could have expected a resort built on a crazy, unsociable plan ever to become successful. “I did all I could—I chose the worst fool I could find.”

Then Austen Heller wrote an article about Howard Roark and Monadnock Valley. He spoke of all the buildings Roark had designed, and he put into words the things Roark had said in structure. Only they were not Austen Heller’s usual quiet words—they were a ferocious cry of admiration and of anger. “And may we be damned if greatness must reach us through fraud!”

The article started a violent controversy in art circles.

“Howard,” Mallory said one day, some months later, “you’re famous.”

“Yes,” said Roark, “I suppose so.”

“Three-quarters of them don’t know what it’s all about, but they’ve heard the other one-quarter fighting over your name and so now they feel they must pronounce it with respect. Of the fighting quarter, four-tenths are those who hate you, three-tenths are those who feel they must express an opinion in any controversy, two-tenths are those who play safe and herald any ‘discovery,’ and one-tenth are those who understand. But they’ve all found out suddenly that there is a Howard Roark and that he’s an architect. The A.G.A. Bulletin refers to you as a great but unruly talent—and the Museum of the Future has hung up photographs of Monadnock, the Enright House, the Cord Building and the Aquitania, under beautiful glass—next to the room where they’ve got Gordon L. Prescott. And still—I’m glad.”

Kent Lansing said, one evening: “Heller did a grand job. Do you remember, Howard, what I told you once about the psychology of a pretzel? Don’t despise the middleman. He’s necessary. Someone had to tell them. It takes two to make every great career: the man who is great, and the man—almost rarer—who is great enough to see greatness and say so.”

Ellsworth Toohey wrote: “The paradox in all this preposterous noise is the fact that Mr. Caleb Bradley is the victim of a grave injustice. His ethics are open to censure, but his esthetics were unimpeachable. He exhibited sounder judgment in matters of architectural merit than Mr. Austen Heller, the outmoded reactionary who has suddenly turned art critic. Mr. Caleb Bradley was martyred by the bad taste of his tenants. In the opinion of this column his sentence should have been commuted in recognition of his artistic discrimination. Monadnock Valley is a fraud -but not merely a financial one.”

There was little response to Roark’s fame among the solid gentlemen of wealth who were the steadiest source of architectural commissions. The men who had said: “Roark? Never heard of him,” now said: “Roark? He’s too sensational.”

But there were men who were impressed by the simple fact that Roark had built a place which made money for owners who didn’t want to make money; this was more convincing than abstract artistic discussions. And there was the one-tenth who understood. In the year after Monadnock Valley Roark built two private homes in Connecticut, a movie theater in Chicago, a hotel in Philadelphia.

In the spring of 1936 a western city completed plans for a World’s Fair to be held next year, an international exposition to be known as “The March of the Centuries.” The committee of distinguished civic leaders in charge of the project chose a council of the country’s best architects to design the fair. The civic leaders wished to be conspicuously progressive. Howard Roark was one of the eight architects chosen.

When he received the invitation, Roark appeared before the committee and explained that he would be glad to design the fair—alone.

“But you can’t be serious, Mr. Roark,” the chairman declared. “After all, with a stupendous undertaking of this nature, we want the best that can be had. I mean, two heads are better than one, you know, and eight heads ... why, you can see for yourself—the best talents of the country, the brightest names—you know, friendly consultation, co-operation and collaboration—you know what makes great achievements.”

“I do.”

“Then you realize ...”

“If you want me, you’ll have to let me do it all, alone. I don’t work with councils.”

“You wish to reject an opportunity like this, a spot in history, a chance of world fame, practically a chance of immortality ...”

“I don’t work with collectives. I don’t consult, I don’t co-operate, I don’t collaborate.”

There was a great deal of angry comment on Roark’s refusal, in architectural circles. People said: “The conceited bastard!” The indignation was too sharp and raw for a mere piece of professional gossip; each man took it as a personal insult; each felt himself qualified to alter, advise and improve the work of any man living.

“The incident illustrates to perfection,” wrote Ellsworth Toohey, “the antisocial nature of Mr. Howard Roark’s egotism, the arrogance of the unbridled individualism which he has always personified.”

Among the eight chosen to design “The March of the Centuries” were Peter Keating, Gordon L. Prescott, Ralston Holcombe. “I won’t work with Howard Roark,” said Peter Keating, when he saw the list of the council, “you’ll have to choose. It’s he or I.” He was informed that Mr. Roark had declined. Keating assumed leadership over the council. The press stories about the progress of the fair’s construction referred to “Peter Keating and his associates.”

Keating had acquired a sharp, intractable manner in the last few years. He snapped orders and lost his patience before the smallest difficulty; when he lost his patience, he screamed at people; he had a vocabulary of insults that carried a caustic, insidious, almost feminine malice; his face was sullen.

In the fall of 1936 Roark moved his office to the top floor of the Cord Building. He had thought, when he designed that building, that it would be the place of his office some day. When he saw the inscription: “Howard Roark, Architect,” on his new door, he stopped for a moment; then he walked into the office. His own room, at the end of a long suite, had three walls of glass, high over the city. He stopped in the middle of the room. Through the broad panes, he could see the Fargo Store, the Enright House, the Aquitania Hotel. He walked to the windows facing south and stood there for a long time. At the tip of Manhattan, far in the distance, he could see the Dana Building by Henry Cameron.

On an afternoon of November, returning to his office after a visit to the site of a house under construction on Long Island, Roark entered the reception room, shaking his drenched raincoat, and saw a look of suppressed excitement on the face of his secretary; she had been waiting impatiently for his return.

“Mr. Roark, this is probably something very big,” she said. “I made an appointment for you for three o’clock tomorrow afternoon. At his office.”

“Whose office?”

“He telephoned half an hour ago. Mr. Gail Wynand.”

II

A SIGN HUNG OVER THE ENTRANCE DOOR, A REPRODUCTION OF THE paper’s masthead:

THE NEW YORK BANNER

The sign was small, a statement of fame and power that needed no emphasis; it was like a fine, mocking smile that justified the building’s bare ugliness; the building was a factory scornful of all ornament save the implications of that masthead.

The entrance lobby looked like the mouth of a furnace; elevators drew a stream of human fuel and spat it out. The men did not hurry, but they moved with subdued haste, the propulsion of purpose; nobody loitered in that lobby. The elevator doors clicked like valves, a pulsating rhythm in their sound. Drops of red and green light flashed on a wall board, signaling the progress of cars high in space.

It looked as if everything in that building were run by such control boards in the hands of an authority aware of every motion, as if the building were flowing with channeled energy, functioning smoothly, soundlessly, a magnificent machine that nothing could destroy. Nobody paid any attention to the redheaded man who stopped in the lobby for a moment.

Howard Roark looked up at the tiled vault. He had never hated anyone. Somewhere in this building was its owner, the man who had made him feel his nearest approach to hatred.

Gail Wynand glanced at the small clock on his desk. In a few minutes he had an appointment with an architect. The interview, he thought, would not be difficult; he had held many such interviews in his life; he merely had to speak, he knew what he wanted to say, and nothing was required of the architect except a few sounds signifying understanding.

His glance went from the clock back to the sheets of proofs on his desk. He read an editorial by Alvah Scarret on the public feeding of squirrels in Central Park, and a column by Ellsworth Toohey on the great merits of an exhibition of paintings done by the workers of the City Department of Sanitation. A buzzer rang on his desk, and his secretary’s voice said: “Mr. Howard Roark, Mr. Wynand.”

“Okay,” said Wynand, flicking the switch off. As his hand moved back, he noticed the row of buttons at the edge of his desk, bright little knobs with a color code of their own, each representing the end of a wire that stretched to some part of the building, each wire controlling some man, each man controlling many men under his orders, each group of men contributing to the final shape of words on paper to go into millions of homes, into millions of human brains—these little knobs of colored plastic, there under his fingers. But he had no time to let the thought amuse him, the door of his office was opening, he moved his hand away from the buttons.

Wynand was not certain that he missed a moment, that he did not rise at once as courtesy demanded, but remained seated, looking at the man who entered; perhaps he had risen immediately and it only seemed to him that a long time preceded his movement. Roark was not certain that he stopped when he entered the office, that he did not walk forward, but stood looking at the man behind the desk; perhaps there had been no break in his steps and it only seemed to him that he had stopped. But there had been a moment when both forgot the terms of immediate reality, when Wynand forgot his purpose in summoning this man, when Roark forgot that this man was Dominique’s husband, when no door, desk or stretch of carpet existed, only the total awareness, for each, of the man before him, only two thoughts meeting in the middle of the room—“This is Gail Wynand”—“This is Howard Roark.”

Then Wynand rose, his hand motioned in simple invitation to the chair beside his desk, Roark approached and sat down, and they did not notice that they had not greeted each other.

Wynand smiled, and said what he had never intended to say. He said very simply:

“I don’t think you’ll want to work for me.”

“I want to work for you,” said Roark, who had come here prepared to refuse.

“Have you seen the kind of things I’ve built?”

“Yes.”

Wynand smiled. “This is different. It’s not for my public. It’s for me.”

“You’ve never built anything for yourself before?”

“No—if one doesn’t count the cage I have up on a roof and this old printing factory here. Can you tell me why I’ve never built a structure of my own, with the means of erecting a city if I wished? I don’t know. I think you’d know.” He forgot that he did not allow men he hired the presumption of personal speculation upon him.

“Because you’ve been unhappy,” said Roark.

He said it simply, without insolence; as if nothing but total honesty were possible to him here. This was not the beginning of an interview, but the middle; it was like a continuation of something begun long ago. Wynand said:

“Make that clear.”

“I think you understand.”

“I want to hear you explain it.”

“Most people build as they live—as a matter of routine and senseless accident. But a few understand that building is a great symbol. We live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life. If he doesn’t build, when he has the means, it’s because his life has not been what he wanted.”

“You don’t think it’s preposterous to say that to me of all people?”

“No.”

“I don’t either.” Roark smiled. “But you and I are the only two who’d say it. Either part of it: that I didn’t have what I wanted or that I could be included among the few expected to understand any sort of great symbols. You don’t want to retract that either?”

“No.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-six.”

“I owned most of the papers I have now—when I was thirty-six.” He added: “I didn’t mean that as any kind of a personal remark. I don’t know why I said that. I just happened to think of it.”

“What do you wish me to build for you?”

“My home.”

Wynand felt that the two words had some impact on Roark apart from any normal meaning they could convey; he sensed it without reason; he wanted to ask: “What’s the matter?” but couldn’t, since Roark had really shown nothing.

“You were right in your diagnosis,” said Wynand, “because you see, now I do want to build a house of my own. Now I’m not afraid of a visible shape for my life. If you want it said directly, as you did, now I’m happy.”

“What kind of a house?”

“In the country. I’ve purchased the site. An estate in Connecticut, five hundred acres. What kind of a house? You’ll decide that.”

“Did Mrs. Wynand choose me for the job?”

“No. Mrs. Wynand knows nothing about this. It was I who wanted to move out of the city, and she agreed. I did ask her to select the architect -my wife is the former Dominique Francon; she was once a writer on architecture. But she preferred to leave the choice to me. You want to know why I picked you? I took a long time to decide. I felt rather lost, at first. I had never heard of you. I didn’t know any architects at all. I mean this literally—and I’m not forgetting the years I’ve spent in real estate, the things I’ve built and the imbeciles who built them for me. This is not a Stoneridge, this is—what did you call it?—a statement of my life? Then I saw Monadnock. It was the first thing that made me remember your name. But I gave myself a long test. I went around the country, looking at homes, hotels, all sort of buildings. Every time I saw one I liked and asked who had designed it, the answer was always the same: Howard Roark. So I called you.” He added: “Shall I tell you how much I admire your work?”

“Thank you,” said Roark. He closed his eyes for an instant.

“You know, I didn’t want to meet you.”

“Why?”

“Have you heard about my art gallery?”

“Yes.”

“I never meet the men whose work I love. The work means too much to me. I don’t want the men to spoil it. They usually do. They’re an anticlimax to their own talent. You’re not. I don’t mind talking to you. I told you this only because I want you to know that I respect very little in life, but I respect the things in my gallery, and your buildings, and man’s capacity to produce work like that. Maybe it’s the only religion I’ve ever had.” He shrugged. “I think I’ve destroyed, perverted, corrupted just about everything that exists. But I’ve never touched that. Why are you looking at me like this?”

“I’m sorry. Please tell me about the house you want.”

“I want it to be a palace—only I don’t think palaces are very luxurious. They’re so big, so promiscuously public. A small house is the true luxury. A residence for two people only—for my wife and me. It won’t be necessary to allow for a family, we don’t intend to have children. Nor for visitors, we don’t intend to entertain. One guest room—in case we should need it—but not more than that. Living room, dining room, library, two studies, one bedroom. Servants’ quarters, garage. That’s the general idea. I’ll give you the details later. The cost—whatever you need. The appearance—” he smiled, shrugging. “I’ve seen your buildings. The man who wants to tell you what a house should look like must either be able to design it better—or shut up. I’ll say only that I want my house to have the Roark quality.”

“What is that?”

“I think you understand.”

“I want to hear you explain it.”

“I think some buildings are cheap show-offs, all front, and some are cowards, apologizing for themselves in every brick, and some are the eternal unfit, botched, malicious and false. Your buildings have one sense above all—a sense of joy. Not a placid joy. A difficult, demanding kind of joy. The kind that makes one feel as if it were an achievement to experience it. One looks and thinks: I’m a better person if I can feel that.”

Roark said slowly, not in the tone of an answer:

“I suppose it was inevitable.”

“What?”

“That you would see that.”

“Why do you say it as if you ... regretted my being able to see it?”

“I don’t regret it.”

“Listen, don’t hold it against me—the things I’ve built before.”

“I don’t.”

“It’s all those Stoneridges and Noyes-Belmont Hotels—and Wynand papers—that made it possible for me to have a house by you. Isn’t that a luxury worth achieving? Does it matter how? They were the means. You’re the end.”

“You don’t have to justify yourself to me.”

“I wasn’t jus ... Yes, I think that’s what I was doing.”

“You don’t need to. I wasn’t thinking of what you’ve built.”

“What were you thinking?”

“That I’m helpless against anyone who sees what you saw in my buildings.”

“You felt you wanted help against me?”

“No. Only I don’t feel helpless as a rule.”

“I’m not prompted to justify myself as a rule, either. Then—it’s all right, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I must tell you much more about the house I want. I suppose an architect is like a father confessor—he must know everything about the people who are to live in his house, since what he gives them is more personal than their clothes or food. Please consider it in that spirit—and forgive me if you notice that this is difficult for me to say—I’ve never gone to confession. You see, I want this house because I’m very desperately in love with my wife.... What’s the matter? Do you think it’s an irrelevant statement?”

“No. Go on.”

“I can’t stand to see my wife among other people. It’s not jealousy. It’s much more and much worse. I can’t stand to see her walking down the streets of a city. I can’t share her, not even with shops, theaters, taxicabs or sidewalks. I must take her away. I must put her out of reach—where nothing can touch her, not in any sense. This house is to be a fortress. My architect is to be my guard.”

Roark sat looking straight at him. He had to keep his eyes on Wynand in order to be able to listen. Wynand felt the effort in that glance; he did not recognize it as effort, only as strength; he felt himself supported by the glance; he found that nothing was hard to confess.

“This house is to be a prison. No, not quite that. A treasury—a vault to guard things too precious for sight. But it must be more. It must be a separate world, so beautiful that we’ll never miss the one we left. A prison only by the power of its own perfection. Not bars and ramparts -but your talent standing as a wall between us and the world. That’s what I want of you. And more. Have you ever built a temple?”

For a moment, Roark had no strength to answer; but he saw that the question was genuine; Wynand didn’t know.

“Yes,” said Roark.

“Then think of this commission as you would think of a temple. A temple to Dominique Wynand.... I want you to meet her before you design it.”

“I met Mrs. Wynand some years ago.”

“You have? Then you understand.”

“I do.”

Wynand saw Roark’s hand lying on the edge of his desk, the long fingers pressed to the glass, next to the proofs of the Banner. The proofs were folded carelessly; he saw the heading “One Small Voice” inside the page. He looked at Roark’s hand. He thought he would like to have a bronze paperweight made of it and how beautiful it would look on his desk.

“Now you know what I want. Go ahead. Start at once. Drop anything else you’re doing. I’ll pay whatever you wish. I want that house by summer.... Oh, forgive me. Too much association with bad architects. I haven’t asked whether you want to do it.”

Roark’s hand moved first; he took it off the desk.

“Yes,” said Roark. “I’ll do it.”

Wynand saw the prints of the fingers left on the glass, distinct as if the skin had cut grooves in the surface and the grooves were wet.

“How long will it take you?” Wynand asked.

“You’ll have it by July.”

“Of course you must see the site. I want to show it to you myself. Shall I drive you down there tomorrow morning?”

“If you wish.”

“Be here at nine.”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to draw up a contract? I have no idea how you prefer to work. As a rule, before I deal with a man in any matter, I make it a point to know everything about him from the day of his birth or earlier. I’ve never checked up on you. I simply forgot. It didn’t seem necessary.”

“I can answer any question you wish.”

Wynand smiled and shook his head:

“No. There’s nothing I need to ask you. Except about the business arrangements.”

“I never make any conditions, except one: if you accept the preliminary drawings of the house, it is to be built as I designed it, without any alterations of any kind.”

“Certainly. That’s understood. I’ve heard you don’t work otherwise. But will you mind if I don’t give you any publicity on this house? I know it would help you professionally, but I want this building kept out of the newspapers.”

“I won’t mind that.”

“Will you promise not to release pictures of it for publication?”

“I promise.”

“Thank you. I’ll make up for it. You may consider the Wynand papers as your personal press service. I’ll give you all the plugging you wish on any other work of yours.”

“I don’t want any plugging.”

Wynand laughed aloud. “What a thing to say in what a place! I don’t think you have any idea how your fellow architects would have conducted this interview. I don’t believe you were actually conscious at any time that you were speaking to Gail Wynand.”

“I was,” said Roark.

“This was my way of thanking you. I don’t always like being Gail Wynand.”

“I know that.”

“I’m going to change my mind and ask you a personal question. You said you’d answer anything.”

“I will.”

“Have you always liked being Howard Roark?”

Roark smiled. The smile was amused, astonished, involuntarily contemptuous.

“You’ve answered,” said Wynand.

Then he rose and said: “Nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” extending his hand.

When Roark had gone, Wynand sat behind his desk, smiling. He moved his hand toward one of the plastic buttons—and stopped. He realized that he had to assume a different manner, his usual manner, that he could not speak as he had spoken in the last half-hour. Then he understood what had been strange about the interview: for the first time in his life he had spoken to a man without feeling the reluctance, the sense of pressure, the need of disguise he had always experienced when he spoke to people; there had been no strain and no need of strain; as if he had spoken to himself.

He pressed the button and said to his secretary:

“Tell the morgue to send me everything they have on Howard Roark.”

“Guess what,” said Alvah Scarret, his voice begging to be begged for his information.

Ellsworth Toohey waved a hand impatiently in a brushing-off motion, not raising his eyes from his desk.

“Go ’way, Alvah. I’m busy.”

“No, but this is interesting, Ellsworth. Really, it’s interesting. I know you’ll want to know.”

Toohey lifted his head and looked at him, the faint contraction of boredom in the corners of his eyes letting Scarret understand that this moment of attention was a favor; he drawled in a tone of emphasized patience:

“All right. What is it?”

Scarret saw nothing to resent in Toohey’s manner. Toohey had treated him like that for the last year or longer. Scarret had not noticed the transition in their relationship; by the time he noticed the change, it was too late to resent it—it had become normal to them both.

Scarret smiled like a bright pupil who expects the teacher to praise him for discovering an error in the teacher’s own textbook.

“Ellsworth, your private F.B.I. is slipping.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Bet you don’t know what Gail’s been doing—and you always make such a point of keeping yourself informed.”

“What don’t I know?”

“Guess who was in his office today.”

“My dear Alvah, I have no time for quiz games.”

“You wouldn’t guess in a thousand years.”

“Very well, since the only way to get rid of you is to play the vaudeville stooge, I shall ask the proper question: Who was in dear Gail’s office today?”

“Howard Roark.”

Toohey turned to him full face, forgetting to dole out his attention, and said incredulously:

“No!”

“Yes!” said Scarret, proud of the effect.

“Well!” said Toohey and burst out laughing.

Scarret half smiled tentatively, puzzled, anxious to join in, but not quite certain of the cause for amusement.

“Yes, it’s funny. But ... just exactly why, Ellsworth?”

“Oh, Alvah, it would take so long to tell you.”

“I had an idea it might ...”

“Haven’t you any sense of the spectacular, Alvah? Don’t you like fireworks? If you want to know what to expect, just think that the worst wars are religious wars between sects of the same religion or civil wars between brothers of the same race.”

“I don’t quite follow you.”

“Oh, dear, I have so many followers. I brush them out of my hair.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re so cheerful about it, but I thought it’s bad.”

“Of course it’s bad. But not for us.”

“But look: you know how we’ve gone out on a limb, you particularly, on how this Roark is just about the worst architect in town, and if now our own boss hires him—isn’t it going to be embarrassing?”

“Oh that? ... Oh, maybe ...”

“Well, I’m glad you take it that way.”

“What was he doing in Wynand’s office? Is it a commission?”

“That’s what I don’t know. Can’t find out. Nobody knows.”

“Have you heard of Mr. Wynand planning to build anything lately?”

“No. Have you?”

“No. I guess my F.B.I. is slipping. Oh, well, one does the best one can.”

“But you know, Ellsworth, I had an idea. I had an idea where this might be very helpful to us indeed.”

“What idea?” “Ellsworth, Gail’s been impossible lately.”

Scarret uttered it solemnly, with the air of imparting a discovery. Toohey sat half smiling.

“Well, of course, you predicted it, Ellsworth. You were right. You’re always right. I’ll be damned if I can figure out just what’s happening to him, whether it’s Dominique or some sort of a change of life or what, but something’s happening. Why does he get fits suddenly and start reading every damn line of every damn edition and raise hell for the silliest reasons? He’s killed three of my best editorials lately—and he’s never done that to me before. Never. You know what he said to me? He said: ‘Motherhood is wonderful, Alvah, but for God’s sake go easy on the bilge. There’s a limit even for intellectual depravity.’ What depravity? That was the sweetest Mother’s Day editorial I ever put together. Honest, I was touched myself. Since when has he learned to talk about depravity? The other day, he called Jules Fougler a bargain-basement mind, right to his face, and threw his Sunday piece into the wastebasket. A swell piece, too—on the Workers’ theater. Jules Fougler, our best writer! No wonder Gail hasn’t got a friend left in the place. If they hated his guts before, you ought to hear them now!”

“I’ve heard them.”

“He’s losing his grip, Ellsworth. I don’t know what I’d do if it weren’t for you and the swell bunch of people you picked. They’re practically our whole actual working staff, those youngsters of yours, not our old sacred cows who’re writing themselves out anyway. Those bright kids will keep the Banner going. But Gail ... Listen, last week he fired Dwight Carson. Now you know, I think that was significant. Of course Dwight was just a deadweight and a damn nuisance, but he was the first one of those special pets of Gail’s, the boys who sold their souls. So, in a way, you see, I liked having Dwight around, it was all right, it was healthy, it was a relic of Gail’s best days. I always said it was Gail’s safety valve. And when he suddenly let Carson go—I didn’t like it, Ellsworth. I didn’t like it at all.”

“What is this, Alvah? Are you telling me things I don’t know, or is this just in the nature of letting off steam—do forgive the mixed metaphor—on my shoulder?”

“I guess so. I don’t like to knock Gail, but I’ve been so damn mad for so long I’m fit to be tied. But here’s what I’m driving at: This Howard Roark, what does he make you think of?”

“I could write a volume on that, Alvah. This is hardly the time to launch into such an undertaking.”

“No, but I mean, what’s the one thing we know about him? That he’s a crank and a freak and a fool, all right, but what else? That he’s one of those fools you can’t budge with love or money or a sixteen-inch gun. He’s worse than Dwight Carson, worse than the whole lot of Gail’s pets put together. Well? Get my point? What’s Gail going to do when he comes up against that kind of a man?”

“One of several possible things.”

“One thing only, if I know Gail, and I know Gail. That’s why I feel kind of hopeful. This is what he’s needed for a long time. A swig of his old medicine. The safety valve. He’ll go out to break that guy’s spine—and it will be good for Gail. The best thing in the world. Bring him back to normal.... That was my idea, Ellsworth.” He waited, saw no complimentary enthusiasm on Toohey’s face and finished lamely: “Well, I might be wrong.... I don’t know.... It might mean nothing at all. ... I just thought that was psychology....”

“That’s what it was, Alvah.”

“Then you think it’ll work that way?”

“It might. Or it might be much worse than anything you imagine. But it’s of no importance to us any more. Because you see, Alvah, as far as the Banner is concerned, if it came to a showdown between us and our boss, we don’t have to be afraid of Mr. Gail Wynand any longer.”

When the boy from the morgue entered, carrying a thick envelope of clippings, Wynand looked up from his desk and said:

“That much? I didn’t know he was so famous.”

“Well, it’s the Stoddard trial, Mr. Wynand.”

The boy stopped. There was nothing wrong—only the ridges on Wynand’s forehead, and he did not know Wynand well enough to know what these meant. He wondered what made him feel as if he should be afraid. After a moment, Wynand said:

“All right. Thank you.”

The boy deposited the envelope on the glass surface of the desk, and walked out.

Wynand sat looking at the bulging shape of yellow paper. He saw it reflected in the glass, as if the bulk had eaten through the surface and grown roots to his desk. He looked at the walls of his office and he wondered whether they contained a power which could save him from opening that envelope.

Then he pulled himself erect, he put both forearms in a straight line along the edge of the desk, his fingers stretched and meeting, he looked down, past his nostrils, at the surface of the desk, he sat for a moment, grave, proud, collected, like the angular mummy of a Pharaoh, then he moved one hand, pulled the envelope forward, opened it and began to read.

“Sacrilege” by Ellsworth M. Toohey—“The Churches of our Childhood” by Alvah Scarret—editorials, sermons, speeches, statements, letters to the editor, the Banner unleashed full-blast, photographs, cartoons, interviews, resolutions of protest, letters to the editor.

He read every word, methodically, his hands on the edge of the desk, fingers meeting, not lifting the clippings, not touching them, reading them as they lay on top of the pile, moving a hand only to turn a clipping over and read the one beneath, moving the hand with a mechanical perfection of timing, the fingers rising as his eyes took the last word, not allowing the clipping to remain in sight a second longer than necessary. But he stopped for a long time to look at the photographs of the Stoddard Temple. He stopped longer to look at one of Roark’s pictures, the picture of exultation captioned “Are you happy, Mr. Superman?” He tore it from the story it illustrated, and slipped it into his desk drawer. Then he continued reading.

The trial—the testimony of Ellsworth M. Toohey—of Peter Keating -of Ralston Holcombe—of Gordon L. Prescott—no quotations from the testimony of Dominique Francon, only a brief report. “The defense rests.” A few mentions in “One Small Voice”—then a gap—the next clipping dated three years later—Monadnock Valley.

It was late when he finished reading. His secretaries had left. He felt the sense of empty rooms and halls around him. But he heard the sound of the presses: a low, rumbling vibration that went through every room. He had always liked that—the sound of the building’s heart, beating. He listened. They were running off tomorrow’s Banner. He sat without moving for a long time.

III

ROARK AND WYNAND STOOD ON THE TOP OF A HILL, LOOKING OVER a spread of land that sloped away in a long gradual curve. Bare trees rose on the hilltop and descended to the shore of a lake, their branches geometrical compositions cut through the air. The color of the sky, a clear, fragile blue-green, made the air colder. The cold washed the colors of the earth, revealing that they were not colors but only the elements from which color was to come, the dead brown not a full brown but a future green, the tired purple an overture to flame, the gray a prelude to gold. The earth was like the outline of a great story, like the steel frame of a building—to be filled and finished, holding all the splendor of the future in naked simplification.

“Where do you think the house should stand?” asked Wynand.

“Here,” said Roark.

“I hoped you’d choose this.”

Wynand had driven his car from the city, and they had walked for two hours down the paths of his new estate, through deserted lanes, through a forest, past the lake, to the hill. Now Wynand waited, while Roark stood looking at the countryside spread under his feet. Wynand wondered what reins this man was gathering from all the points of the landscape into his hand.

When Roark turned to him, Wynand asked:

“May I speak to you now?”

“Of course.” Roark smiled, amused by the deference which he had not requested.

Wynand’s voice sounded clear and brittle, like the color of the sky above them, with the same quality of ice-green radiance:

“Why did you accept this commission?”

“Because I’m an architect for hire.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“Don’t you hate my guts?”

“No. Why should I?”

“You want me to speak of it first?”

“Of what?”

“The Stoddard Temple.”

Roark smiled. “So you did check up on me since yesterday.”

“I read our clippings.” He waited, but Roark said nothing. “All of them.” His voice was harsh, half defiance, half plea. “Everything we said about you.” The calm of Roark’s face drove him to fury. He went on, giving slow, full value to each word: “We called you an incompetent fool, a tyro, a charlatan, a swindler, an egomaniac ...”

“Stop torturing yourself.”

Wynand closed his eyes, as if Roark had struck him. In a moment, he said:

“Mr. Roark, you don’t know me very well. You might as well learn this: I don’t apologize. I never apologize for any of my actions.”

“What made you think of apology? I haven’t asked for it.”

“I stand by every one of those descriptive terms. I stand by every word printed in the Banner.”

“I haven’t asked you to repudiate it.”

“I know what you think. You understood that I didn’t know about the Stoddard Temple yesterday. I had forgotten the name of the architect involved. You concluded it wasn’t I who led that campaign against you. You’re right, it wasn’t I, I was away at the time. But you don’t understand that the campaign was in the true and proper spirit of the Banner. It was in strict accordance with the Banner’s function. No one is responsible for it but me. Alvah Scarret was doing only what I taught him. Had I been in town, I would have done the same.”

“That’s your privilege.”

“You don’t believe I would have done it?”

“No.”

“I haven’t asked you for compliments and I haven’t asked you for pity.”

“I can’t do what you’re asking for.”

“What do you think I’m asking?”

“That I slap your face.”

“Why don’t you?”

“I can’t pretend an anger I don’t feel,” said Roark. “It’s not pity. It’s much more cruel than anything I could do. Only I’m not doing it in order to be cruel. If I slapped your face, you’d forgive me for the Stoddard Temple.”

“Is it you who should seek forgiveness?”

“No. You wish I did. You know that there’s an act of forgiveness involved. You’re not clear about the actors. You wish I would forgive you—or demand payment, which is the same thing—and you believe that that would close the record. But, you see, I have nothing to do with it. I’m not one of the actors. It doesn’t matter what I do or feel about it now. You’re not thinking of me. I can’t help you. I’m not the person you’re afraid of just now.”

“Who is?”

“Yourself.”

“Who gave you the right to say all this?”

“You did.”

“Well, go on.”

“Do you wish the rest?”

“Go on.”

“I think it hurts you to know that you’ve made me suffer. You wish you hadn’t. And yet there’s something that frightens you more. The knowledge that I haven’t suffered at all.”

“Go on.”

“The knowledge that I’m neither kind nor generous now, but simply indifferent. It frightens you, because you know that things like the Stoddard Temple always require payment—and you see that I’m not paying for it. You were astonished that I accepted this commission. Do you think my acceptance required courage? You needed far greater courage to hire me. You see, this is what I think of the Stoddard Temple. I’m through with it. You’re not.”

Wynand let his fingers fall open, palms out. His shoulders sagged a little, relaxing. He said very simply:

“All right. It’s true. All of it.”

Then he stood straight, but with a kind of quiet resignation, as if his body were consciously made vulnerable.

“I hope you know you’ve given me a beating in your own way,” he said.

“Yes. And you’ve taken it. So you’ve accomplished what you wanted. Shall we say we’re even and forget the Stoddard Temple?”

“You’re very wise or I’ve been very obvious. Either is your achievement. Nobody’s ever caused me to become obvious before.”

“Shall I still do what you want?”

“What do you think I want now?”

“Personal recognition from me. It’s my turn to give in, isn’t it?”

“You’re appallingly honest, aren’t you?”

“Why shouldn’t I be? I can’t give you the recognition of having made me suffer. But you’ll take the substitute of having given me pleasure, won’t you? All right, then. I’m glad you like me. I think you know this is as much an exception for me as your taking a beating. I don’t usually care whether I’m liked or not. I do care this time. I’m glad.”

Wynand laughed aloud. “You’re as innocent and presumptuous as an emperor. When you confer honors you merely exalt yourself. What in hell made you think I liked you?”

“Now you don’t want any explanations of that. You’ve reproached me once for causing you to be obvious.”

Wynand sat down on a fallen tree trunk. He said nothing; but his movement was an invitation and a demand. Roark sat down beside him; Roark’s face was sober, but the trace of a smile remained, amused and watchful, as if every word he heard were not a disclosure but a confirmation.

“You’ve come up from nothing, haven’t you?” Wynand asked. “You came from a poor family.”

“Yes. How did you know that?”

“Just because it feels like a presumption—the thought of handing you anything: a compliment, an idea or a fortune. I started at the bottom, too. Who was your father?”

“A steel puddler.”

“Mine was a longshoreman. Did you hold all sorts of funny jobs when you were a child?”

“All sorts. Mostly in the building trades.”

“I did worse than that. I did just about everything. What job did you like best?”

“Catching rivets, on steel structures.”

“I liked being a bootblack on a Hudson ferry. I should have hated that, but I didn’t. I don’t remember the people at all. I remember the city. The city—always there, on the shore, spread out, waiting, as if I were tied to it by a rubber band. The band would stretch and carry me away, to the other shore, but it would always snap back and I would return. It gave me the feeling that I’d never escape from that city—and it would never escape from me.”

Roark knew that Wynand seldom spoke of his childhood, by the quality of his words: they were bright and hesitant, untarnished by usage, like coins that had not passed through many hands.

“Were you ever actually homeless and starving?” Wynand asked.

“A few times.”

“Did you mind that?”

“No.”

“I didn’t either. I minded something else. Did you want to scream, when you were a child, seeing nothing but fat ineptitude around you, knowing how many things could be done and done so well, but having no power to do them? Having no power to blast the empty skulls around you? Having to take orders—and that’s bad enough—but to take orders from your inferiors! Have you felt that?”

“Yes.”

“Did you drive the anger back inside of you, and store it, and decide to let yourself be torn to pieces if necessary, but reach the day when you’d rule those people and all people and everything around you?”

“No.”

“You didn’t? You let yourself forget?”

“No. I hate incompetence. I think it’s probably the only thing I do hate. But it didn’t make me want to rule people. Nor to teach them anything. It made me want to do my own work in my own way and let myself be torn to pieces if necessary.”

“And you were?”

“No. Not in any way that counts.”

“You don’t mind looking back? At anything?”

“No.”

“I do. There was one night. I was beaten and I crawled to a door—I remember the pavement—it was right under my nostrils—I can still see it—there were veins in the stone and white spots—I had to make sure that that pavement moved—I couldn’t feel whether I was moving or not—but I could tell by the pavement—I had to see that those veins and spots changed—I had to reach the next pattern or the crack six inches away—it took a long time—and I knew it was blood under my stomach ...”

His voice had no tone of self-pity; it was simple, impersonal, with a faint sound of wonder.

Roark said: “I’d like to help you.”

Wynand smiled slowly, not gaily. “I believe you could. I even believe that it would be proper. Two days ago I would have murdered anyone who’d think of me as an object for help.... You know, of course, that that night’s not what I hate in my past. Not what I dread to look back on. It was only the least offensive to mention. The other things can’t be talked about.”

“I know. I meant the other things.”

“What are they? You name them.”

“The Stoddard Temple.”

“You want to help me with that?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a damn fool. Don’t you realize ...”

“Don’t you realize I’m doing it already?”

“How?”

“By building this house for you.”

Roark saw the slanting ridges on Wynand’s forehead. Wynand’s eyes seemed whiter than usual, as if the blue had ebbed from the iris, two white ovals, luminous on his face. He said:

“And getting a fat commission check for it.”

He saw Roark’s smile, suppressed before it appeared fully. The smile would have said that this sudden insult was a declaration of surrender, more eloquent than the speeches of confidence; the suppression said that Roark would not help him over this particular moment.

“Why, of course,” said Roark calmly.

Wynand got up. “Let’s go. We’re wasting time. I have more important things to do at the office.”

They did not speak on their way back to the city. Wynand drove his car at ninety miles an hour. The speed made two solid walls of blurred motion on the sides of the road; as if they were flying down a long, closed, silent corridor.

He stopped at the entrance to the Cord Building and let Roark out. He said:

“You’re free to go back to that site as often as you wish, Mr. Roark. I don’t have to go with you. You can get the surveys and all the information you need from my office. Please do not call on me again until it is necessary. I shall be very busy. Let me know when the first drawings are ready.”

When the drawings were ready, Roark telephoned Wynand’s office. He had not spoken to Wynand for a month. “Please hold the wire, Mr. Roark,” said Wynand’s secretary. He waited. The secretary’s voice came back and informed him that Mr. Wynand wished the drawings brought to his office that afternoon; she gave the hour; Wynand would not answer in person.

When Roark entered the office, Wynand said: “How do you do, Mr. Roark,” his voice gracious and formal. No memory of intimacy remained on his blank, courteous face.

Roark handed him the plans of the house and a large perspective drawing. Wynand studied each sheet. He held the drawing for a long time. Then he looked up.

“I am very much impressed, Mr. Roark.” The voice was offensively correct. “I have been quite impressed by you from the first. I have thought it over and I want to make a special deal with you.”

His glance was directed at Roark with a soft emphasis, almost with tenderness; as if he were showing that he wished to treat Roark cautiously, to spare him intact for a purpose of his own.

He lifted the sketch and held it up between two fingers, letting the light hit it straight on; the white sheet glowed as a reflector for a moment, pushing the black pencil lines eloquently forward.

“You want to see this house erected?” Wynand asked softly. “You want it very much?”

“Yes,” said Roark.

Wynand did not move his hand, only parted his fingers and let the cardboard drop face down on the desk.

“It will be erected, Mr. Roark. Just as you designed it. Just as it stands on this sketch. On one condition.”

Roark sat leaning back, his hands in his pockets, attentive, waiting.

“You don’t want to ask me what condition, Mr. Roark? Very well, I’ll tell you. I shall accept this house on condition that you accept the deal I offer you. I wish to sign a contract whereby you will be sole architect for any building I undertake to erect in the future. As you realize, this would be quite an assignment. I venture to say I control more structural work than any other single person in the country. Every man in your profession has wanted to be known as my exclusive architect. I am offering it to you. In exchange, you will have to submit yourself to certain conditions. Before I name them, I’d like to point out some of the consequences, should you refuse. As you may have heard, I do not like to be refused. The power I hold can work two ways. It would be easy for me to arrange that no commission be available to you anywhere in this country. You have a small following of your own, but no prospective employer can withstand the kind of pressure I am in a position to exert. You have gone through wasted periods of your life before. They were nothing, compared to the blockade I can impose. You might have to go back to a granite quarry—oh yes, I know about that, summer of 1928, the Francon quarry in Connecticut—how?—private detectives, Mr. Roark—you might have to go back to a granite quarry, only I shall see to it that the quarries also will be closed to you. Now I’ll tell you what I want of you.”

In all the gossip about Gail Wynand, no one had ever mentioned the expression of his face as it was in this moment. The few men who had seen it did not talk about it. Of these men, Dwight Carson had been the first. Wynand’s lips were parted, his eyes brilliant. It was an expression of sensual pleasure derived from agony—the agony of his victim or his own, or both.

“I want you to design all my future commercial structures—as the public wishes commercial structures to be designed. You’ll build Colonial houses, Rococo hotels and semi-Grecian office buildings. You’ll exercise your matchless ingenuity within forms chosen by the taste of the people -and you’ll make money for me. You’ll take your spectacular talent and make it obedient. Originality and subservience together. They call it harmony. You’ll create in your sphere what the Banner is in mine. Do you think it took no talent to create the Banner? Such will be your future career. But the house you’ve designed for me shall be erected as you designed it. It will be the last Roark building to rise on earth. Nobody will have one after mine. You’ve read about ancient rulers who put to death the architect of their palace, that no others might equal the glory he had given them. They killed the architect or cut his eyes out. Modern methods are different. For the rest of your life you’ll obey the will of the majority. I shan’t attempt to offer you any arguments. I am merely stating an alternative. You’re the kind of man who can understand plain language. You have a simple choice: if you refuse, you’ll never build anything again; if you accept, you’ll build this house which you want so much to see erected, and a great many other houses which you won’t like, but which will make money for both of us. For the rest of your life you’ll design rental developments, such as Stoneridge. That is what I want.”

He leaned forward, waiting for one of the reactions he knew well and enjoyed: a look of anger, or indignation, or ferocious pride.

“Why, of course,” said Roark gaily. “I’ll be glad to do it. That’s easy.”

He reached over, took a pencil and the first piece of paper he saw on Wynand’s desk—a letter with an imposing letterhead. He drew rapidly on the back of the letter. The motion of his hand was smooth and confident. Wynand looked at his face bent over the paper; he saw the unwrinkled forehead, the straight line of the eyebrows, attentive, but untroubled by effort.

Roark raised his head and threw the paper to Wynand across the desk.

“Is this what you want?”

Wynand’s house stood drawn on the paper—with Colonial porches, a gambrel roof, two massive chimneys, a few little pilasters, a few porthole windows. It was not a parody, it was a serious job of adaptation in what any professor would have called excellent taste.

“Good God, no!” The gasp was instinctive and immediate.

“Then shut up,” said Roark, “and don’t ever let me hear any architectural suggestions.”

Wynand slumped down in his chair and laughed. He laughed for a long time, unable to stop. It was not a happy sound.

Roark shook his head wearily. “You knew better than that. And it’s such an old one to me. My antisocial stubbornness is so well-known that I didn’t think anyone would waste time trying to tempt me again.”

“Howard. I meant it. Until I saw this.”

“I knew you meant it. I didn’t think you could be such a fool.”

“You knew you were taking a terrible kind of chance?”

“None at all. I had an ally I could trust.”

“What? Your integrity?”

“Yours, Gail.”

Wynand sat looking down at the surface of his desk. After a while he said:

“You’re wrong about that.”

“I don’t think so.”

Wynand lifted his head; he looked tired; he sounded indifferent.

“It was your method of the Stoddard trial again, wasn’t it? ‘The defense rests.’ ... I wish I had been in the courtroom to hear that sentence.... You did throw the trial back at me again, didn’t you?”

“Call it that.”

“But this time, you won. I suppose you know I’m not glad that you won.”

“I know you’re not.”

“Don’t think it was one of those temptations when you tempt just to test your victim and are happy to be beaten, and smile and say, well, at last, here’s the kind of man I want. Don’t imagine that. Don’t make that excuse for me.”

“I’m not. I know what you wanted.”

“I wouldn’t have lost so easily before. This would have been only the beginning. I know I can try further. I don’t want to try. Not because you’d probably hold out to the end. But because I wouldn’t hold out. No, I’m not glad and I’m not grateful to you for this.... But it doesn’t matter....”

“Gail, how much lying to yourself are you actually capable of?”

“I’m not lying. Everything I just told you is true. I thought you understood it.”

“Everything you just told me—yes. I wasn’t thinking of that.”

“You’re wrong in what you’re thinking. You’re wrong in remaining here.”

“Do you wish to throw me out?”

“You know I can’t.”

Wynand’s glance moved from Roark to the drawing of the house lying face down on his desk. He hesitated for a moment, looking at the blank cardboard, then turned it over. He asked softly:

“Shall I tell you now what I think of this?”

“You’ve told me.”

“Howard, you spoke about a house as a statement of my life. Do you think my life deserves a statement like this?”

“Yes.”

“Is this your honest judgment?”

“My honest judgment, Gail. My most sincere one. My final one. No matter what might happen between us in the future.”

Wynand put the drawing down and sat studying the plans for a long time. When he raised his head, he looked calm and normal.

“Why did you stay away from here?” he asked.

“You were busy with private detectives.”

Wynand laughed. “Oh that? I couldn’t resist my old bad habits and I was curious. Now I know everything about you—except the women in your life. Either you’ve been very discreet or there haven’t been many. No information available on that anywhere.”

“There haven’t been many.”

“I think I missed you. It was a kind of substitute—gathering the details of your past. Why did you actually stay away?”

“You told me to.”

“Are you always so meek about taking orders?”

“When I find it advisable.”

“Well, here’s an order—hope you place it among the advisable ones: come to have dinner with us tonight. I’ll take this drawing home to show my wife. I’ve told her nothing about the house so far.”

“You haven’t told her?”

“No. I want her to see this. And I want you to meet her. I know she hasn’t been kind to you in the past—I read what she wrote about you. But it’s so long ago. I hope it doesn’t matter now.”

“No, it doesn’t matter.”

“Then will you come?”

“Yes.”

IV

DOMINIQUE STOOD AT THE GLASS DOOR OF HER ROOM. WYNAND saw the starlight on the ice sheets of the roof garden outside. He saw its reflection touching the outline of her profile, a faint radiance on her eyelids, on the planes of her cheeks. He thought that this was the illumination proper to her face. She turned to him slowly, and the light became an edge around the pale straight mass of her hair. She smiled as she had always smiled at him, a quiet greeting of understanding.

“What’s the matter, Gail?”

“Good evening, dear. Why?”

“You look happy. That’s not the word. But it’s the nearest.”

“ ‘Light’ is nearer. I feel light, thirty years lighter. Not that I’d want to be what I was thirty years ago. One never does. What the feeling means is only a sense of being carried back intact, as one is now, back to the beginning. It’s quite illogical and impossible and wonderful.”

“What the feeling usually means is that you’ve met someone. A woman as a rule.”

“I have. Not a woman. A man. Dominique, you’re very beautiful tonight. But I always say that. It’s not what I wanted to say. It’s this: I am very happy tonight that you’re so beautiful.”

“What is it, Gail?”

“Nothing. Only a feeling of how much is unimportant and how easy it is to live.”

He took her hand and held it to his lips.

“Dominique, I’ve never stopped thinking it’s a miracle that our marriage has lasted. Now I believe that it won’t be broken. By anything or anyone.” She leaned back against the glass pane. “I have a present for you—don’t remind me it’s the sentence I use more often than any other. I will have a present for you by the end of this summer. Our house.”

“The house? You haven’t spoken of it for so long, I thought you had forgotten.”

“I’ve thought of nothing else for the last six months. You haven’t changed your mind? You do want to move out of the city?”

“Yes, Gail, if you want it so much. Have you decided on an architect?”

“I’ve done more than that. I have the drawing of the house to show you.”

“Oh, I’d like to see it.”

“It’s in my study. Come on. I want you to see it.”

She smiled and closed her fingers over his wrist, a brief pressure, like a caress of encouragement, then she followed him. He threw the door of his study open and let her enter first. The light was on and the drawing stood propped on his desk, facing the door.

She stopped, her hands behind her, palms flattened against the doorjamb. She was too far away to see the signature, but she knew the work and the only man who could have designed that house.

Her shoulders moved, describing a circle, twisting slowly, as if she were tied to a pole, had abandoned hope of escape, and only her body made a last, instinctive gesture of protest.

She thought, were she lying in bed in Roark’s arms in the sight of Gail Wynand, the violation would be less terrible; this drawing, more personal than Roark’s body, created in answer to a matching force that came from Gail Wynand, was a violation of her, of Roark, of Wynand -and yet, she knew suddenly that it was the inevitable.

“No,” she whispered, “things like that are never a coincidence.”

“What?”

But she held up her hand, softly pushing back all conversation, and she walked to the drawing, her steps soundless on the carpet. She saw the sharp signature in the corner—“Howard Roark.” It was less terrifying than the shape of the house; it was a thin point of support, almost a greeting.

“Dominique?”

She turned her face to him. He saw her answer. He said:

“I knew you’d like it. Forgive the inadequacy. We’re stuck for words tonight.”

She walked to the davenport and sat down; she let her back press against the cushions; it helped to sit straight. She kept her eyes on Wynand. He stood before her, leaning on the mantelpiece, half turned away, looking at the drawing. She could not escape that drawing; Wynand’s face was like a mirror of it.

“You’ve seen him, Gail?”

“Whom?”

“The architect.”

“Of course I’ve seen him. Not an hour ago.”

“When did you first meet him?”

“Last month.”

“You knew him all this time? ... Every evening ... when you came home ... at the dinner table ...”

“You mean, why didn’t I tell you? I wanted to have the sketch to show you. I saw the house like this, but I couldn’t explain it. I didn’t think anyone would ever understand what I wanted and design it. He did.”

“Who?”

“Howard Roark.”

She had wanted to hear the name pronounced by Gail Wynand.

“How did you happen to choose him, Gail?”

“I looked all over the country. Every building I liked had been done by him.”

She nodded slowly.

“Dominique, I take it for granted you don’t care about it any more, but I know that I picked the one architect you spent all your time denouncing when you were on the Banner.”

“You read that?”

“I read it. You had an odd way of doing it. It was obvious that you admired his work and hated him personally. But you defended him at the Stoddard trial.”

“Yes.”

“You even worked for him once. That statue, Dominique, it was made for his temple.”

“Yes.”

“It’s strange. You lost your job on the Banner for defending him. I didn’t know it when I chose him. I didn’t know about that trial. I had forgotten his name. Dominique, in a way, it’s he who gave you to me. That statue—from his temple. And now he’s going to give me this house. Dominique, why did you hate him?”

“I didn’t hate him.... It was so long ago ...”

“I suppose none of that matters now, does it?” He pointed to the drawing.

“I haven’t seen him for years.”

“You’re going to see him in about an hour. He’s coming here for dinner.”

She moved her hand, tracing a spiral on the arm of the davenport, to convince herself that she could.

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve asked him for dinner?”

He smiled; he remembered his resentment against the presence of guests in their house. He said: “This is different. I want him here. I don’t think you remember him well—or you wouldn’t be astonished.”

She got up.

“All right, Gail. I’ll give the orders. Then I’ll get dressed.”

They faced each other across the drawing room of Gail Wynand’s penthouse. She thought how simple it was. He had always been here. He had been the motive power of every step she had taken in these rooms. He had brought her here and now he had come to claim this place. She was looking at him. She was seeing him as she had seen him on the morning when she awakened in his bed for the last time. She knew that neither his clothes nor the years stood between her and the living intactness of that memory. She thought this had been inevitable from the first, from the instant when she had looked down at him on the ledge of a quarry—it had to come like this, in Gail Wynand’s house—and now she felt the peace of finality, knowing that her share of decision had ended; she had been the one who acted, but he would act from now on.

She stood straight, her head level; the planes of her face had a military cleanliness of precision and a feminine fragility; her hands hung still, composed by her sides, parallel with the long straight lines of her black dress.

“How do you do, Mr. Roark.”

“How do you do, Mrs. Wynand.”

“May I thank you for the house you have designed for us? It is the most beautiful of your buildings.”

“It had to be, by the nature of the assignment, Mrs. Wynand.”

She turned her head slowly.

“How did you present the assignment to Mr. Roark, Gail?”

“Just as I spoke of it to you.”

She thought of what Roark had heard from Wynand, and had accepted. She moved to sit down; the two men followed her example. Roark said:

“If you like the house, the first achievement was Mr. Wynand’s conception of it.”

She asked: “Are you sharing the credit with a client?”

“Yes, in a way.”

“I believe this contradicts what I remember of your professional convictions.”

“But supports my personal ones.”

“I’m not sure I ever understood that.”

“I believe in conflict, Mrs. Wynand.”

“Was there a conflict involved in designing this house?”

“The desire not to be influenced by my client.”

“In what way?”

“I have liked working for some people and did not like working for others. But neither mattered. This time, I knew that the house would be what it became only because it was being done for Mr. Wynand. I had to overcome this. Or rather, I had to work with it and against it. It was the best way of working. The house had to surpass the architect, the client and the future tenant. It did.”

“But the house—it’s you, Howard,” said Wynand. “It’s still you.”

It was the first sign of emotion on her face, a quiet shock, when she heard the “Howard.” Wynand did not notice it. Roark did. He glanced at her—his first glance of personal contact. She could read no comment in it—only a conscious affirmation of the thought that had shocked her.

“Thank you for understanding that, Gail,” he answered.

She was not certain whether she had heard him stressing the name.

“It’s strange,” said Wynand. “I am the most offensively possessive man on earth. I do something to things. Let me pick up an ash tray from a dime-store counter, pay for it and put it in my pocket—and it becomes a special kind of ash tray, unlike any on earth, because it’s mine. It’s an extra quality in the thing, like a sort of halo. I feel that about everything I own. From my overcoat—to the oldest linotype in the composing room—to the copies of the Banner on newsstands—to this penthouse—to my wife. And I’ve never wanted to own anything as much as I want this house you’re going to build for me, Howard. I will probably be jealous of Dominique living in it—I can be quite insane about things like that. And yet—I don’t feel that I’ll own it, because no matter what I do or pay, it’s still yours. It will always be yours.”

“It has to be mine,” said Roark. “But in another sense, Gail, you own that house and everything else I’ve built. You own every structure you’ve stopped before and heard yourself answering.”

“In what sense?”

“In the sense of that personal answer. What you feel in the presence of a thing you admire is just one word—‘Yes.’ The affirmation, the acceptance, the sign of admittance. And that ‘Yes’ is more than an answer to one thing, it’s a kind of ‘Amen’ to life, to the earth that holds this thing, to the thought that created it, to yourself for being able to see it. But the ability to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ is the essence of all ownership. It’s your ownership of your own ego. Your soul, if you wish. Your soul has a single basic function—the act of valuing. ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ ‘I wish’ or ‘I do not wish.’ You can’t say ‘Yes’ without saying ‘I.’ There’s no affirmation without the one who affirms. In this sense, everything to which you grant your love is yours.”

“In this sense, you share things with others?”

“No. It’s not sharing. When I listen to a symphony I love, I don’t get from it what the composer got. His ‘Yes’ was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience. I’m alone when I design a house, Gail, and you can never know the way in which I own it. But if you said your own ‘Amen’ to it—it’s also yours. And I’m glad it’s yours.”

Wynand said, smiling:

“I like to think that. That I own Monadnock and the Enright House and the Cord Building ...”

“And the Stoddard Temple,” said Dominique.

She had listened to them. She felt numb. Wynand had never spoken like this to any guest in their house; Roark had never spoken like this to any client. She knew that the numbness would break into anger, denial, indignation later; now it was only a cutting sound in her voice, a sound to destroy what she had heard.

She thought that she succeeded. Wynand answered, the word dropping heavily:

“Yes.”

“Forget the Stoddard Temple, Gail,” said Roark. There was such a simple, careless gaiety in his voice that no solemn dispensation could have been more effective.

“Yes, Howard,” said Wynand, smiling.

She saw Roark’s eyes turned to her.

“I have not thanked you, Mrs. Wynand, for accepting me as your architect. I know that Mr. Wynand chose me and you could have refused my services. I wanted to tell you that I’m glad you didn’t.”

She thought, I believe it because none of this can be believed; I’ll accept anything tonight; I’m looking at him.

She said, courteously indifferent: “Wouldn’t it be a reflection on my judgment to suppose that I would wish to reject a house you had designed, Mr. Roark?” She thought that nothing she said aloud could matter tonight.

Wynand asked:

“Howard, that Yes’—once granted, can it be withdrawn?”

She wanted to laugh in incredulous anger. It was Wynand’s voice that had asked this; it should have been hers. He must look at me when he answers, she thought; he must look at me.

“Never,” Roark answered, looking at Wynand.

“There’s so much nonsense about human inconstancy and the transience of all emotions,” said Wynand. “I’ve always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place. There are books I liked at the age of sixteen. I still like them.”

The butler entered, carrying a tray of cocktails. Holding her glass, she watched Roark take his off the tray. She thought: At this moment the glass stem between his fingers feels just like the one between mine; we have this much in common.... Wynand stood, holding a glass, looking at Roark with a strange kind of incredulous wonder, not like a host, like an owner who cannot quite believe his ownership of his prize possession.

... She thought: I’m not insane, I’m only hysterical, but it’s quite all right, I’m saying something, I don’t know what it is, but it must be all right, they are both listening and answering, Gail is smiling, I must be saying the proper things....

Dinner was announced and she rose obediently; she led the way to the dining room, like a graceful animal given poise by conditioned reflexes. She sat at the head of the table, between the two men facing each other at her sides. She watched the silverware in Roark’s fingers, the pieces of polished metal with the initials “D. W.” She thought: I have done this so many times—I am the gracious Mrs. Gail Wynand—they were Senators, judges, presidents of insurance companies, sitting at dinner in that place at my right—and this is what I was being trained for, this is why Gail has been rising through tortured years to the position of entertaining Senators and judges at dinner—for the purpose of reaching an evening when the guest facing him would be Howard Roark.

Wynand spoke about the newspaper business; he showed no reluctance to discuss it with Roark, and she pronounced a few sentences when it seemed necessary. Her voice had a luminous simplicity; she was being carried along, unresisting, any personal reaction would be superfluous, even pain or fear. She thought, if in the flow of conversation Wynand’s next sentence should be: “You’ve slept with him,” she would answer: “Yes, Gail, of course,” just as simply. But Wynand seldom looked at her; when he did, she knew by his face that hers was normal.

Afterward, they were in the drawing room again, and she saw Roark standing at the window, against the lights of the city. She thought: Gail built this place as a token of his own victory—to have the city always before him—the city where he did run things at last. But this is what it had really been built for—to have Roark stand at that window—and I think Gail knows it tonight—Roark’s body blocking miles out of that perspective, with only a few dots of fire and a few cubes of lighted glass left visible around the outline of his figure. He was smoking and she watched his cigarette moving slowly against the black sky, as he put it between his lips, then held it extended in his fingers, and she thought: they are only sparks from his cigarette, those points glittering in space behind him.

She said softly: “Gail always liked to look at the city at night. He was in love with skyscrapers.”

Then she noticed she had used the past tense, and wondered why.

She did not remember what she said when they spoke about the new house. Wynand brought the drawings from his study, spread the plans on a table, and the three of them stood bent over the plans together. Roark’s pencil moved, pointing, across the hard geometrical patterns of thin black lines on white sheets. She heard his voice, close to her, explaining. They did not speak of beauty and affirmation, but of closets, stairways, pantries, bathrooms. Roark asked her whether she found the arrangements convenient. She thought it was strange that they all spoke as if they really believed she would ever live in this house.

When Roark had gone, she heard Wynand asking her:

“What do you think of him?”

She felt something angry and dangerous, like a single, sudden twist within her, and she said, half in fear, half in deliberate invitation:

“Doesn’t he remind you of Dwight Carson?”

“Oh, forget Dwight Carson!”

Wynand’s voice, refusing earnestness, refusing guilt, had sounded exactly like the voice that had said: “Forget the Stoddard Temple.”

The secretary in the reception room looked, startled, at the patrician gentleman whose face she had seen so often in the papers.

“Gail Wynand,” he said, inclining his head in self-introduction. “I should like to see Mr. Roark. If he is not busy. Please do not disturb him if he is. I had no appointment.”

She had never expected Wynand to come to an office unannounced and to ask admittance in that tone of grave deference.

She announced the visitor. Roark came out into the reception room, smiling, as if he found nothing unusual in this call.

“Hello, Gail. Come in.”

“Hello, Howard.”

He followed Roark to the office. Beyond the broad windows, the darkness of late afternoon dissolved the city; it was snowing; black specks whirled furiously across the lights.

“I don’t want to interrupt if you’re busy, Howard. This is not important.” He had not seen Roark for five days, since the dinner.

“I’m not busy. Take your coat off. Shall I have the drawings brought in?”

“No. I don’t want to talk about the house. Actually, I came without any reason at all. I was down at my office all day, got slightly sick of it, and felt like coming here. What are you grinning about?”

“Nothing. Only you said that it wasn’t important.”

Wynand looked at him, smiled and nodded.

He sat down on the edge of Roark’s desk, with an ease which he had never felt in his own office, his hands in his pockets, one leg swinging.

“It’s almost useless to talk to you, Howard. I always feel as if I were reading to you a carbon copy of myself and you’ve already seen the original. You seem to hear everything I say a minute in advance. We’re unsynchronized.”

“You call that unsynchronized?”

“All right. Too well synchronized.” His eyes were moving slowly over the room. “If we own the things to which we say ‘Yes,’ then I own this office?”

“Then you own it.”

“You know what I feel here? No, I won’t say I feel at home—I don’t think I’ve ever felt at home anywhere. And I won’t say I feel as I did in the palaces I’ve visited or in the great European cathedrals. I feel as I did when I was still in Hell’s Kitchen—in the best days I had there—there weren’t many. But sometimes—when I sat like this—only it was some piece of broken wall by the wharf—and there were a lot of stars above and dump heaps around me and the river smelt of rotting shells. ... Howard, when you look back, does it seem to you as if all your days had rolled forward evenly, like a sort of typing exercise, all alike? Or were there stops—points reached—and then the typing rolled on again?”

“There were stops.”

“Did you know them at the time—did you know that that’s what they were?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t. I knew afterward. But I never knew the reasons. There was one moment—I was twelve and I stood behind a wall, waiting to be killed. Only I knew I wouldn’t be killed. Not what I did afterward, not the fight I had, but just that one moment when I waited. I don’t know why that was a stop to be remembered or why I feel proud of it. I don’t know why I have to think of it here.”

“Don’t look for the reason.”

“Do you know it?”

“I said don’t look for it.”

“I have been thinking about my past—ever since I met you. And I had gone for years without thinking of it. No, no secret conclusions for you to draw from that. It doesn’t hurt me to look back this way, and it doesn’t give me pleasure. It’s just looking. Not a quest, not even a journey. Just a kind of walk at random, like wandering through the countryside in the evening, when one’s a little tired.... If there’s any connection to you at all, it’s only one thought that keeps coming back to me. I keep thinking that you and I started in the same way. From the same point. From nothing. I just think that. Without any comment. I don’t seem to find any particular meaning in it at all. Just ‘we started in the same way’ ... Want to tell me what it means?”

“No.”

Wynand glanced about the room—and noticed a newspaper on top of a filing cabinet.

“Who the hell reads the Banner around here?”

“I do.”

“Since when?”

“Since about a month ago.”

“Sadism?”

“No. Just curiosity.”

Wynand rose, picked up the paper and glanced through the pages. He stopped at one and chuckled. He held it up: the page bore photographed drawings of the buildings for “The March of the Centuries” exposition.

“Awful, isn’t it?” said Wynand. “It’s disgusting that we have to plug that stuff. But I feel better about it when I think of what you did to those eminent civic leaders.” He chuckled happily. “You told them you don’t co-operate or collaborate.”

“But it wasn’t a gesture, Gail. It was plain common sense. One can’t collaborate on one’s own job. I can co-operate, if that’s what they call it, with the workers who erect my buildings. But I can’t help them to lay bricks and they can’t help me to design the house.”

“It was the kind of gesture I’d like to make. I’m forced to give those civic leaders free space in my papers. But it’s all right. You’ve slapped their faces for me.” He tossed the paper aside, without anger. “It’s like that luncheon I had to attend today. A national convention of advertisers. I must give them publicity—all wiggling, wriggling and drooling. I got so sick of it I thought I’d run amuck and bash somebody’s skull. And then I thought of you. I thought that you weren’t touched by any of it. Not in any way. The national convention of advertisers doesn’t exist as far as you’re concerned. It’s in some sort of fourth dimension that can never establish any communication with you at all. I thought of that-and I felt a peculiar kind of relief.”

He leaned against the filing cabinet, letting his feet slide forward, his arms crossed, and he spoke softly:

“Howard, I had a kitten once. The damn thing attached itself to me—a flea-bitten little beast from the gutter, just fur, mud and bones—followed me home, I fed it and kicked it out, but the next day there it was again, and finally I kept it. I was seventeen then, working for the Gazette, just learning to work in the special way I had to learn for life. I could take it all right, but not all of it. There were times when it was pretty bad. Evenings, usually. Once I wanted to kill myself. Not anger—anger made me work harder. Not fear. But disgust, Howard. The kind of disgust that made it seem as if the whole world were under water and the water stood still, water that had backed up out of the sewers and ate into everything, even the sky, even my brain. And then I looked at that kitten. And I thought that it didn’t know the things I loathed, it could never know. It was clean—clean in the absolute sense, because it had no capacity to conceive of the world’s ugliness. I can’t tell you what relief there was in trying to imagine the state of consciousness inside that little brain, trying to share it, a living consciousness, but clean and free. I would lie down on the floor and put my face on that cat’s belly, and hear the beast purring. And then I would feel better.... There, Howard. I’ve called your office a rotting wharf and yourself an alley cat. That’s my way of paying homage.”

Roark smiled. Wynand saw that the smile was grateful.

“Keep still,” Wynand said sharply. “Don’t say anything.” He walked to a window and stood looking out. “I don’t know why in hell I should speak like that. These are the first happy years of my life. I met you because I wanted to build a monument to my happiness. I come here to find rest, and I find it, and yet these are the things I talk about.... Well, never mind.... Look at the filthy weather. Are you through with your work here? Can you call it a day?”

“Yes. Just about.”

“Let’s go and have dinner together somewhere close by.”

“All right.”

“May I use your phone? I’ll tell Dominique not to expect me for dinner.”

He dialed the number. Roark moved to the door of the drafting room—he had orders to give before leaving. But he stopped at the door. He had to stop and hear it.

“Hello, Dominique? ... Yes.... Tired? ... No, you just sounded like it.... I won’t be home for dinner, will you excuse me, dearest? ... I don’t know, it might be late.... I’m eating downtown.... No. I’m having dinner with Howard Roark.... Hello, Dominique? ... Yes.... What? ... I’m calling from his office.... So long, dear.” He replaced the receiver.

In the library of the penthouse Dominique stood with her hand on the telephone, as if some connection still remained.

For five days and nights, she had fought a single desire—to go to him. To see him alone—anywhere—his home or his office or the street—for one word or only one glance—but alone. She could not go. Her share of action was ended. He would come to her when he wished. She knew he would come, and that he wanted her to wait. She had waited, but she had held on to one thought—of an address, an office in the Cord Building.

She stood, her hand closed over the stem of the telephone receiver. She had no right to go to that office. But Gail Wynand had.

When Ellsworth Toohey entered Wynand’s office, as summoned, he made a few steps, then stopped. The walls of Wynand’s office—the only luxurious room in the Banner Building—were made of cork and copper paneling and had never borne any pictures. Now, on the wall facing Wynand’s desk, he saw an enlarged photograph under glass: the picture of Roark at the opening of the Enright House; Roark standing at the parapet of the river, his head thrown back.

Toohey turned to Wynand. They looked at each other.

Wynand indicated a chair and Toohey sat down. Wynand spoke, smiling:

“I never thought I would come to agree with some of your social theories, Mr. Toohey, but I find myself forced to do so. You have always denounced the hypocrisy of the upper caste and preached the virtue of the masses. And now I find that I regret the advantages I enjoyed in my former proletarian state. Were I still in Hell’s Kitchen, I would have begun this interview by saying: Listen, louse!—but since I am an inhibited capitalist, I shall not do so.”

Toohey waited; he looked curious.

“I shall begin by saying: Listen, Mr. Toohey. I do not know what makes you tick. I do not care to dissect your motives. I do not have the stomach required of medical students. So I shall ask no questions and I wish to hear no explanations. I shall merely tell you that from now on there is a name you will never mention in your column again.” He pointed to the photograph. “I could make you reverse yourself publicly and I would enjoy it, but I prefer to forbid the subject to you entirely. Not a word, Mr. Toohey. Not ever again. Now don’t mention your contract or any particular clause of it. It would not be advisable. Go on writing your column, but remember its title and devote it to commensurate subjects. Keep it small, Mr. Toohey. Very small.”

“Yes, Mr. Wynand,” said Toohey easily. “I don’t have to write about Mr. Roark at present.”

“That’s all.”

Toohey rose. “Yes, Mr. Wynand.”

V

GAIL WYNAND SAT AT HIS DESK IN HIS OFFICE AND READ THE proofs of an editorial on the moral value of raising large families. Sentences like used chewing gum, chewed and rechewed, spat out and picked up again, passing from mouth to mouth to pavement to shoe sole to mouth to brain.... He thought of Howard Roark and went on reading the Banner; it made things easier.

“Daintiness is a girl’s greatest asset. Be sure to launder your undies every night, and learn to talk on some cultured subject, and you will have all the dates you want.” “Your horoscope for tomorrow shows a beneficent aspect. Application and sincerity will bring rewards in the fields of engineering, public accounting and romance.” “Mrs. Huntington-Cole’s hobbies are gardening, the opera and early American sugar bowls. She divides her time between her little son ‘Kit’ and her numerous charitable activities.” “I’m jus’ Millie, I’m jus’ a orphan.” “For the complete diet send ten cents and a self-addressed, stamped envelope.” ... He turned the pages, thinking of Howard Roark.

He signed the advertising contract with Kream-O Pudding—for five years, on the entire Wynand chain, two full pages in every paper every Sunday. The men before his desk sat like triumphal arches in flesh, monuments to victory, to evenings of patience and calculation, restaurant tables, glasses emptied into throats, months of thought, his energy, his living energy flowing like the liquid in the glasses into the opening of heavy lips, into stubby fingers, across a desk, into two full pages every Sunday, into drawings of yellow molds trimmed with strawberries and yellow molds trimmed with butterscotch sauce. He looked, over the heads of the men, at the photograph on the wall of his office: the sky, the river and a man’s face, lifted.

But it hurts me, he thought. It hurts me every time I think of him. It makes everything easier—the people, the editorials, the contracts—but easier because it hurts so much. Pain is a stimulant also. I think I hate that name. I will go on repeating it. It is a pain I wish to bear.

Then he sat facing Roark in the study of his penthouse—and he felt no pain; only a desire to laugh without malice.

“Howard, everything you’ve done in your life is wrong according to the stated ideals of mankind. And here you are. And somehow it seems a huge joke on the whole world.”

Roark sat in an armchair by the fireplace. The glow of the fire moved over the study; the light seemed to curve with conscious pleasure about every object in the room, proud to stress its beauty, stamping approval upon the taste of the man who had achieved this setting for himself. They were alone. Dominique had excused herself after dinner. She had known that they wanted to be alone.

“A joke on all of us,” said Wynand. “On every man in the street. I always look at the men in the street. I used to ride in the subways just to see how many of them carried the Banner. I used to hate them and, sometimes, to be afraid. But now I look at every one of them and I want to say: ‘Why, you poor fool!’ That’s all.”

He telephoned Roark’s office one morning.

“Can you have lunch with me, Howard? ... Meet me at the Nordland in half an hour.”

He shrugged, smiling, when he faced Roark across the restaurant table.

“Nothing at all, Howard. No special reason. Just spent a revolting half-hour and wanted to take the taste of it out of my mouth.”

“What revolting half-hour?”

“Had my picture taken with Lancelot Clokey.”

“Who’s Lancelot Clokey?”

Wynand laughed aloud, forgetting his controlled elegance, forgetting the startled glance of the waiter.

“That’s it, Howard. That’s why I had to have lunch with you. Because you can say things like that.”

“Now what’s the matter?”

“Don’t you read books? Don’t you know that Lancelot Clokey is ‘our most sensitive observer of the international scene’? That’s what the critic said—in my own Banner. Lancelot Clokey has just been chosen author of the year or something by some organization or other. We’re running his biography in the Sunday supplement, and I had to pose with my arm around his shoulders. He wears silk shirts and smells of gin. His second book is about his childhood and how it helped him to understand the international scene. It sold a hundred thousand copies. But you’ve never heard of him. Go on, eat your lunch, Howard. I like to see you eating. I wish you were broke, so that I could feed you this lunch and know you really needed it.”

At the end of a day, he would come, unannounced, to Roark’s office or to his home. Roark had an apartment in the Enright House, one of the crystal-shaped units over the East River: a workroom, a library, a bedroom. He had designed the furniture himself. Wynand could not understand for a long time why the place gave him an impression of luxury, until he saw that one did not notice the furniture at all: only a clean sweep of space and the luxury of an austerity that had not been simple to achieve. In financial value it was the most modest home that Wynand had entered as a guest in twenty-five years.

“We started in the same way, Howard,” he said, glancing about Roark’s room. “According to my judgment and experience, you should have remained in the gutter. But you haven’t. I like this room. I like to sit here.”

“I like to see you here.”

“Howard, have you ever held power over a single human being?”

“No. And I wouldn’t take it if it were offered to me.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“It was offered to me once, Gail. I refused it.”

Wynand looked at him with curiosity; it was the first time that he heard effort in Roark’s voice.

“Why?”

“I had to.”

“Out of respect for the man?”

“It was a woman.”

“Oh, you damn fool! Out of respect for a woman?”

“Out of respect for myself.”

“Don’t expect me to understand. We’re as opposite as two men can be.”

“I thought that once. I wanted to think that.”

“And now you don’t?”

“No.”

“Don’t you despise every act I’ve ever committed?”

“Just about every one I know of.”

“And you still like to see me here?”

“Yes. Gail, there was a man who considered you the symbol of the special evil that destroyed him and would destroy me. He left me his hatred. And there was another reason. I think I hated you, before I saw you.”

“I knew you did. What made you change your mind?”

“I can’t explain that to you.”

They drove together to the estate in Connecticut where the walls of the house were rising out of the frozen ground. Wynand followed Roark through the future rooms, he stood aside and watched Roark giving instructions. Sometimes, Wynand came alone. The workers saw the black roadster twisting up the road to the top of the hill, saw Wynand’s figure standing at a distance, looking at the structure. His figure always carried with it all the implications of his position; the quiet elegance of his overcoat, the angle of his hat, the confidence of his posture, tense and casual together, made one think of the Wynand empire; of the presses thundering from ocean to ocean, of the papers, the lustrous magazine covers, the light rays trembling through newsreels, the wires coiling over the world, the power flowing into every palace, every capital, every secret, crucial room, day and night, through every costly minute of this man’s life. He stood still against a sky gray as laundry water, and snowflakes fluttered lazily past the brim of his hat.

On a day in April he drove alone to Connecticut after an absence of many weeks. The roadster flew across the countryside, not an object, but a long streak of speed. He felt no jolting motion inside his small cube of glass and leather; it seemed to him that his car stood still, suspended over the ground, while the control of his hands on the wheel made the earth fly past him, and he merely had to wait until the place he desired came rolling to him. He loved the wheel of a car as he loved his desk in the office of the Banner: both gave him the same sense of a dangerous monster let loose under the expert direction of his fingers.

Something tore past across his vision, and he was a mile away before he thought how strange it was that he should have noticed it, because it had been only a clump of weeds by the road; a mile later he realized that it was stranger still: the weeds were green. Not in the middle of winter, he thought, and then he understood, surprised, that it was not winter any longer. He had been very busy in the last few weeks; he had not had time to notice. Now he saw it, hanging over the fields around him, a hint of green, like a whisper. He heard three statements in his mind, in precise succession, like interlocking gears: It’s spring—I wonder if I have many left to see—I am fifty-five years old.

They were statements, not emotions; he felt nothing, neither eagerness nor fear. But he knew it was strange that he should experience a sense of time; he had never thought of his age in relation to any measure, he had never defined his position on a limited course, he had not thought of a course nor of limits. He had been Gail Wynand and he had stood still, like this car, and the years had sped past him, like this earth, and the motor within him had controlled the flight of the years.

No, he thought, I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered—and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life. But I loved it.

If it were true, that old legend about appearing before a supreme judge and naming one’s record, I would offer, with all my pride, not any act I committed, but one thing I have never done on this earth: that I never sought an outside sanction. I would stand and say: I am Gail Wynand, the man who has committed every crime except the foremost one: that of ascribing futility to the wonderful fact of existence and seeking justification beyond myself. This is my pride: that now, thinking of the end, I do not cry like all the men of my age: but what was the use and the meaning? I was the use and the meaning, I, Gail Wynand. That I lived and that I acted.

He drove to the foot of the hill and slammed the brakes on, startled, looking up. In his absence the house had taken shape; it could be recognized now—it looked like the drawing. He felt a moment of childish wonder that it had really come out just as on the sketch, as if he had never quite believed it. Rising against the pale blue sky, it still looked like a drawing, unfinished, the planes of masonry like spreads of water-color filled in, the naked scaffolding like pencil lines; a huge drawing on a pale blue sheet of paper.

He left the car and walked to the top of the hill. He saw Roark among the men. He stood outside and watched the way Roark walked through the structure, the way he turned his head or raised his hand, pointing. He noticed Roark’s manner of stopping: his legs apart, his arms straight at his sides, his head lifted; an instinctive pose of confidence, of energy held under effortless control, a moment that gave to his body the structural cleanliness of his own building. Structure, thought Wynand, is a solved problem of tension, of balance, of security in counterthrusts.

He thought: There’s no emotional significance in the act of erecting a building; it’s just a mechanical job, like laying sewers or making an automobile. And he wondered why he watched Roark, feeling what he felt in his art gallery. He belongs in an unfinished building, thought Wynand, more than in a completed one, more than at a drafting table, it’s his right setting, it’s becoming to him—as Dominique said a yacht was becoming to me.

Afterward Roark came out and they walked together along the crest of the hill, among the trees. They sat down on a fallen tree trunk, they saw the structure in the distance through the stems of the brushwood. The stems were dry and naked, but there was a quality of spring in the cheerful insolence of their upward thrust, the stirring of a self-assertive purpose.

Wynand asked:

“Howard, have you ever been in love?”

Roark turned to look straight at him and answer quietly:

“I still am.”

“But when you walk through a building, what you feel is greater than that?”

“Much greater, Gail.”

“I was thinking of people who say that happiness is impossible on earth. Look how hard they all try to find some joy in life. Look how they struggle for it. Why should any living creature exist in pain? By what conceivable right can anyone demand that a human being exist for anything but for his own joy? Every one of them wants it. Every part of him wants it. But they never find it. I wonder why. They whine and say they don’t understand the meaning of life. There’s a particular kind of people that I despise. Those who seek some sort of a higher purpose or ‘universal goal,’ who don’t know what to live for, who moan that they must ‘find themselves.’ You hear it all around us. That seems to be the official bromide of our century. Every book you open. Every drooling self-confession. It seems to be the noble thing to confess. I’d think it would be the most shameful one.”

“Look, Gail.” Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. “Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That’s the meaning of life.”

“Your strength?”

“Your work.” He tossed the branch aside. “The material the earth offers you and what you make of it ... What are you thinking of, Gail?”

“The photograph on the wall of my office.”

To remain controlled, as he wished, to be patient, to make of patience an active duty executed consciously each day, to stand before Roark and let her serenity tell him: “This is the hardest you could have demanded of me, but I’m glad, if it’s what you want”—such was the discipline of Dominique’s existence.

She stood by, as a quiet spectator of Roark and Wynand. She watched them silently. She had wanted to understand Wynand. This was the answer.

She accepted Roark’s visits to their house and the knowledge that in the hours of these evenings he was Wynand’s property, not hers. She met him as a gracious hostess, indifferent and smiling, not a person but an exquisite fixture of Wynand’s home, she presided at the dinner table, she left them in the study afterward.

She sat alone in the drawing room, with the lights turned off and the door open; she sat erect and quiet, her eyes on the slit of light under the door of the study across the hall. She thought: This is my task, even when alone, even in the darkness, within no knowledge but my own, to look at that door as I looked at him here, without complaint.... Roark, if it’s the punishment you chose for me, I’ll carry it completely, not as a part to play in your presence, but as a duty to perform alone—you know that violence is not hard for me to bear, only patience is, you chose the hardest, and I must perform it and offer it to you ... my ... dearest one...

When Roark looked at her, there was no denial of memory in his eyes. The glance said simply that nothing had changed and nothing was needed to state it. She felt as if she heard him saying: Why are you shocked? Have we ever been parted? Your drawing room, your husband and the city you dread beyond the windows, are they real now, Dominique? Do you understand? Are you beginning to understand? “Yes,” she would say suddenly, aloud, trusting that the word would fit the conversation of the moment, knowing that Roark would hear it as his answer.

It was not a punishment he had chosen for her. It was a discipline imposed on both of them, the last test. She understood his purpose when she found that she could feel her love for him proved by the room, by Wynand, even by his love for Wynand and hers, by the impossible situation, by her enforced silence—the barriers proving to her that no barriers could exist.

She did not see him alone. She waited.

She would not visit the site of construction. She had said to Wynand: “I’ll see the house when it’s finished.” She never questioned him about Roark. She let her hands lie in sight on the arms of her chair, so that the relief of any violent motion would be denied her, her hands as her private barometer of endurance, when Wynand came home late at night and told her that he had spent the evening at Roark’s apartment, the apartment she had never seen.

Once she broke enough to ask:

“What is this, Gail? An obsession?”

“I suppose so.” He added: “It’s strange that you don’t like him.”

“I haven’t said that.”

“I can see it. I’m not really surprised. It’s your way. You would dislike him—precisely because he’s the type of man you should like.... Don’t resent my obsession.”

“I don’t resent it.”

“Dominique, would you understand it if I told you that I love you more since I’ve met him? Even—I want to say this—even when you lie in my arms, it’s more than it was. I feel a greater right to you.”

He spoke with the simple confidence they had given each other in the last three years. She sat looking at him as she always did; her glance had tenderness without scorn and sadness without pity.

“I understand, Gail.”

After a moment she asked:

“What is he to you, Gail? In the nature of a shrine?”

“In the nature of a hair shirt,” said Wynand.

When she had gone upstairs, he walked to a window and stood looking up at the sky. His head thrown back, he felt the pull of his throat muscles and he wondered whether the peculiar solemnity of looking at the sky comes, not from what one contemplates, but from that uplift of one’s head.

VI

“THE BASIC TROUBLE WITH THE MODERN WORLD,” SAID ELLSWORTH Toohey, ”is the intellectual fallacy that freedom and compulsion are opposites. To solve the gigantic problems crushing the world today, we must clarify our mental confusion. We must acquire a philosophical perspective. In essence, freedom and compulsion are one. Let me give you a simple illustration. Traffic lights restrain your freedom to cross a street whenever you wish. But this restraint gives you the freedom from being run over by a truck. If you were assigned to a job and prohibited from leaving it, it would restrain the freedom of your career. But it would give you freedom from the fear of unemployment. Whenever a new compulsion is imposed upon us, we automatically gain a new freedom. The two are inseparable. Only by accepting total compulsion can we achieve total freedom.

“That’s right!” shrieked Mitchell Layton.

It was an actual shriek, thin and high. It had come with the startling suddenness of a fire siren. His guests looked at Mitchell Layton.

He sat in a tapestry armchair of his drawing room, half lying, legs and stomach forward, like an obnoxious child flaunting his bad posture. Everything about the person of Mitchell Layton was almost and not quite, just short of succeeding: his body had started out to be tall, but changed its mind, leaving him with a long torso above short, stocky legs; his face had delicate bones, but the flesh had played a joke on them, puffing out, not enough to achieve obesity, just enough to suggest permanent mumps. Mitchell Layton pouted. It was not a temporary expression nor a matter of facial arrangement. It was a chronic attribute, pervading his entire person. He pouted with his whole body.

Mitchell Layton had inherited a quarter of a billion dollars and had spent the thirty-three years of his life trying to make amends for it.

Ellsworth Toohey, in dinner clothes, stood lounging against a cabinet. His nonchalance had an air of gracious informality and a touch of impertinence, as if the people around him did not deserve the preservation of rigid good manners.

His eyes moved about the room. The room was not exactly modern, not quite Colonial and just a little short of French Empire; the furnishings presented straight planes and swan-neck supports, black mirrors and electric hurricane lamps, chromium and tapestry; there was unity in a single attribute: in the expensiveness of everything.

“That’s right,” said Mitchell Layton belligerently, as if he expected everyone to disagree and was insulting them in advance. “People make too damn much fuss about freedom. What I mean is it’s a vague, over-abused word. I’m not even sure it’s such a God-damn blessing. I think people would be much happier in a regulated society that had a definite pattern and a unified form—like a folk dance. You know how beautiful a folk dance is. And rhythmic too. That’s because it took generations to work it out and they don’t let just any chance fool come along to change it. That’s what we need. Pattern, I mean, and rhythm. Also beauty.”

“That’s an apt comparison, Mitch,” said Ellsworth Toohey. “I’ve always told you that you had a creative mind.”

“What I mean is, what makes people unhappy is not too little choice, but too much,” said Mitchell Layton. “Having to decide, always to decide, torn every which way all of the time. Now in a society of pattern, a man could feel safe. Nobody would come to him all the time pestering him to do something. Nobody would have to do anything. What I mean is, of course, except working for the common good.”

“It’s spiritual values that count,” said Homer Slottern. “Got to be up to date and keep up with the world. This is a spiritual century.”

Homer Slottern had a big face with drowsy eyes. His shirt studs were made of rubies and emeralds combined, like gobs of salad dripping down his starched white shirt front. He owned three department stores.

“There ought to be a law to make everybody study the mystical secrets of the ages,” said Mitchell Layton. “It’s all been written out in the pyramids in Egypt.”

“That’s true, Mitch,” Homer Slottern agreed. “There’s a lot to be said for mysticism. On the one hand. On the other hand, dialectic materialism ...”

“It’s not a contradiction,” Mitchell Layton drawled contemptuously. “The world of the future will combine both.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Ellsworth Toohey, “the two are superficially varied manifestations of the same thing. Of the same intention.” His eyeglasses gave a spark, as if lighted from within; he seemed to relish this particular statement in his own way.

“All I know is, unselfishness is the only moral principle,” said Jessica Pratt, “the noblest principle and a sacred duty and much more important than freedom. Unselfishness is the only way to happiness. I would have everybody who refused to be unselfish shot. To put them out of their misery. They can’t be happy anyway.”

Jessica Pratt spoke wistfully. She had a gentle, aging face; her powdery skin, innocent of make-up, gave the impression that a finger touching it would be left with a spot of white dust.

Jessica Pratt had an old family name, no money, and a great passion: her love for her younger sister Renée. They had been left orphaned at an early age, and she had dedicated her life to Renée’s upbringing. She had sacrificed everything; she had never married; she had struggled, plotted, schemed, defrauded through the years—and achieved the triumph of Renée’s marriage to Homer Slottern.

Renée Slottern sat curled up on a footstool, munching peanuts. Once in a while she reached up to the crystal dish on a side table and took another. She exhibited no further exertion. Her pale eyes stared placidly out of her pale face.

“That’s going too far, Jess,” said Homer Slottern. “You can’t expect everybody to be a saint.”

“I don’t expect anything,” said Jessica Pratt meekly. “I’ve given up expecting long ago. But it’s education that we all need. Now I think Mr. Toohey understands. If everybody were compelled to have the proper kind of education, we’d have a better world. If we force people to do good, they will be free to be happy.”

“This is a perfectly useless discussion,” said Eve Layton. “No intelligent person believes in freedom nowadays. It’s dated. The future belongs to social planning. Compulsion is a law of nature. That’s that. It’s self-evident.”

Eve Layton was beautiful. She stood under the light of a chandelier, her smooth black hair clinging to her skull, the pale green satin of her gown alive like water about to stream off and expose the rest of her soft, tanned skin. She had the special faculty of making satin and perfume appear as modern as an aluminum table top. She was Venus rising out of a submarine hatch.

Eve Layton believed that her mission in life was to be the vanguard—it did not matter of what. Her method had always been to take a careless leap and land triumphantly far ahead of all others. Her philosophy consisted of one sentence—“I can get away with anything.” In conversation she paraphrased it to her favorite line: “I? I’m the day after tomorrow.” She was an expert horsewoman, a racing driver, a stunt pilot, a swimming champion. When she saw that the emphasis of the day had switched to the realm of ideas, she took another leap, as she did over any ditch. She landed well in front, in the latest. Having landed, she was amazed to find that there were people who questioned her feat. Nobody had ever questioned her other achievements. She acquired an impatient anger against all those who disagreed with her political views. It was a personal issue. She had to be right, since she was the day after tomorrow.

Her husband, Mitchell Layton, hated her.

“It’s a perfectly valid discussion,” he snapped. “Everybody can’t be as competent as you, my dear. We must help the others. It’s the moral duty of intellectual leaders. What I mean is we ought to lose that bugaboo of being scared of the word compulsion. It’s not compulsion when it’s for a good cause. What I mean is in the name of love. But I don’t know how we can make this country understand it. Americans are so stuffy.”

He could not forgive his country because it had given him a quarter of a billion dollars and then refused to grant him an equal amount of reverence. People would not take his views on art, literature, history, biology, sociology and metaphysics as they took his checks. He complained that people identified him with his money too much; he hated them because they did not identify him enough.

“There’s a great deal to be said for compulsion,” stated Homer Slottern. “Provided it’s democratically planned. The common good must always come first, whether we like it or not.”

Translated into language, Homer Slottern’s attitude consisted of two parts; they were contradictory parts, but this did not trouble him, since they remained untranslated in his mind. First, he felt that abstract theories were nonsense, and if the customers wanted this particular kind, it was perfectly safe to give it to them, and good business, besides. Second, he felt uneasy that he had neglected whatever it was people called spiritual life, in the rush of making money; maybe men like Toohey had something there. And what if his stores were taken away from him? Wouldn’t it really be easier to live as manager of a State-owned Department Store? Wouldn’t a manager’s salary give him all the prestige and comfort he now enjoyed, without the responsibility of ownership?

“Is it true that in the future society any woman will sleep with any man she wants,” asked Renée Slottern. It had started as a question, but it petered out. She did not really want to know. She merely felt a vapid wonder about how it felt to have a man one really wanted and how one went about wanting.

“It’s stupid to talk about personal choice,” said Eve Layton. “It’s old-fashioned. There’s no such thing as a person. There’s only a collective entity. It’s self-evident.”

Ellsworth Toohey smiled and said nothing.

“Something’s got to be done about the masses,” Mitchell Layton declared. “They’ve got to be led. They don’t know what’s good for them. What I mean is, I can’t understand why people of culture and position like us understand the great ideal of collectivism so well and are willing to sacrifice our personal advantages, while the working man who has everything to gain from it remains so stupidly indifferent. I can’t understand why the workers in this country have so little sympathy with collectivism.”

“Can’t you?” said Ellsworth Toohey. His glasses sparkled.

“I’m bored with this,” snapped Eve Layton, pacing the room, light streaming off her shoulders.

The conversation switched to art and its acknowledged leaders of the day in every field.

“Lois Cook said that words must be freed from the oppression of reason. She said the stranglehold of reason upon words is like the exploitation of the masses by the capitalists. Words must be permitted to negotiate with reason through collective bargaining. That’s what she said. She’s so amusing and refreshing.”

“Ike—what’s his name again?—says that the theater is an instrument of love. It’s all wrong, he says, about a play taking place on the stage—it takes place in the hearts of the audience.”

“Jules Fougler said in last Sunday’s Banner that in the world of the future the theater will not be necessary at all. He says that the daily life of the common man is as much a work of art in itself as the best Shakespearean tragedy. In the future there will be no need for a dramatist. The critic will simply observe the life of the masses and evaluate its artistic points for the public. That’s what Jules Fougler said. Now I don’t know whether I agree with him, but he’s got an interesting fresh angle there.”

“Lancelot Clokey says the British Empire is doomed. He says there will be no war, because the workers of the world won’t allow it, it’s international bankers and munition makers who start wars and they’ve been kicked out of the saddle. Lancelot Clokey says that the universe is a mystery and that his mother is his best friend. He says the Premier of Bulgaria eats herring for breakfast.”

“Gordon Prescott says that four walls and a ceiling is all there is to architecture. The floor is optional. All the rest is capitalistic ostentation. He says nobody should be allowed to build anything anywhere until every inhabitant of the globe has a roof over his head ... Well, what about the Patagonians? It’s our job to teach them to want a roof. Prescott calls it dialectic trans-spatial interdependence.”

Ellsworth Toohey said nothing. He stood smiling at the vision of a huge typewriter. Each famous name he heard was a key of its keyboard, each controlling a special field, each hitting, leaving its mark, and the whole making connected sentences on a vast blank sheet. A typewriter, he thought, presupposes the hand that punches its keys.

He snapped to attention when he heard Mitchell Layton’s sulking voice say:

“Oh, yes, the Banner, God damn it!”

“I know,” said Homer Slottern.

“It’s slipping,” said Mitchell Layton. “It’s definitely slipping. A swell investment it turned out to be for me. It’s the only time Ellsworth’s been wrong.”

“Ellsworth is never wrong,” said Eve Layton.

“Well, he was, that time. It was he who advised me to buy a piece of that lousy sheet.” He saw Toohey’s eyes, patient as velvet, and he added hastily: “What I mean is, I’m not complaining, Ellsworth. It’s all right. It may even help me to slice something off my damned income tax. But that filthy reactionary rag is sure going downhill.”

“Have a little patience, Mitch,” said Toohey.

“You don’t think I should sell and get out from under?”

“No, Mitch, I don’t.”

“Okay, if you say so. I can afford it. I can afford anything.”

“But I jolly well can’t!” Homer Slottern cried with surprising vehemence. “It’s coming to where one can’t afford to advertise in the Banner. It’s not their circulation—that’s okay—but there’s a feeling around—a funny kind of feeling.... Ellsworth, I’ve been thinking of dropping my contract.”

“Why?”

“Do you know about the ‘We Don’t Read Wynand’ movement?”

“I’ve heard about it.”

“It’s run by somebody named Gus Webb. They paste stickers on parked windshields and in public privies. They hiss Wynand newsreels in theaters. I don’t think it’s a large group, but ... Last week an unappetizing female threw a fit in my store—the one on Fifth Avenue—calling us enemies of labor because we advertised in the Banner. You can ignore that, but it becomes serious when one of our oldest customers, a mild little old lady from Connecticut and a Republican for three generations, calls us to say that perhaps maybe she should cancel her charge account, because somebody told her that Wynand is a dictator.”

“Gail Wynand knows nothing about politics, except of the most primitive kind,” said Toohey. “He still thinks in terms of the Democratic Club of Hell’s Kitchen. There was a certain innocence about the political corruption of those days, don’t you think so?”

“I don’t care. That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean, the Banner is becoming a kind of liability. It hurts business. One’s got to be so careful nowadays. You get tied up with the wrong people and first thing you know there’s a smear campaign going on and you get splashed too. I can’t afford that sort of thing.”

“It’s not entirely an unjustified smear.”

“I don’t care. I don’t give a damn whether it’s true or not. Who am I to stick my neck out for Gail Wynand? If there’s a public sentiment against him, my job is to get as far away as I can, pronto. And I’m not the only one. There’s a bunch of us who’re thinking the same. Jim Ferris of Ferris & Symes, Billy Shultz of Vimo Flakes, Bud Harper of Toddler Togs, and ... hell, you know them all, they’re all your friends, our bunch, the liberal businessmen. We all want to yank our ads out of the Banner.”

“Have a little patience, Homer. I wouldn’t hurry. There’s a proper time for everything. There’s such a thing as a psychological moment.”

“Okay, I’ll take your word for it. But there’s—there’s a kind of feeling in the air. It will become dangerous some day.”

“It might. I’ll tell you when it will.”

“I thought Ellsworth worked on the Banner,” said Renée Slottern vacantly, puzzled.

The others turned to her with indignation and pity.

“You’re naive, Renée,” shrugged Eve Layton.

“But what’s the matter with the Banner?”

“Now, child, don’t you bother with dirty politics,” said Jessica Pratt. “The Banner is a wicked paper. Mr. Wynand is a very evil man. He represents the selfish interests of the rich.”

“I think he’s good-looking,” said Renée. “I think he has sex appeal.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” cried Eve Layton.

“Now, after all, Renée is entitled to express her opinion,” Jessica Pratt said with immediate rage.

“Somebody told me Ellsworth is the president of the Union of Wynand Employees,” drawled Renée.

“Oh dear me, no, Renée. I’m never president of anything. I’m just a rank-and-file member. Like any copy boy.”

“Do they have a Union of Wynand Employees?” asked Homer Slottern.

“It was just a club, at first,” said Toohey. “It became a union last year.”

“Who organized it?”

“How can one tell? It was more or less spontaneous. Like all mass movements.”

“I think Wynand is a bastard,” declared Mitchell Layton. “Who does he think he is anyway? I come to a meeting of stockholders and he treats us like flunkies. Isn’t my money as good as his? Don’t I own a hunk of his damn paper? I could teach him a thing or two about journalism. I have ideas. What’s he so damn arrogant about? Just because he made that fortune himself? Does he have to be such a damn snob just because he came from Hell’s Kitchen? It isn’t other people’s fault if they weren’t lucky enough to be born in Hell’s Kitchen to rise out of! Nobody understands what a terrible handicap it is to be born rich. Because people just take for granted that because you were born that way you’d just be no good if you weren’t. What I mean is if I’d had Gail Wynand’s breaks, I’d be twice as rich as he is by now and three times as famous. But he’s so conceited he doesn’t realize this at all!”

Nobody said a word. They heard the rising inflection of hysteria in Mitchell Layton’s voice. Eve Layton looked at Toohey, silently appealing for help. Toohey smiled and made a step forward.

“I’m ashamed of you, Mitch,” he said.

Homer Slottern gasped. One did not rebuke Mitchell Layton on this subject; one did not rebuke Mitchell Layton on any subject.

Mitchell Layton’s lower lip vanished.

“I’m ashamed of you, Mitch,” Toohey repeated sternly, “for comparing yourself to a man as contemptible as Gail Wynand.”

Mitchell Layton’s mouth relaxed in the equivalent of something almost as gentle as a smile.

“That’s true,” he said humbly.

“No, you would never be able to match Gail Wynand’s career. Not with your sensitive spirit and humanitarian instincts. That’s what’s holding you down, Mitch, not your money. Who cares about money? The age of money is past. It’s your nature that’s too fine for the brute competition of our capitalistic system. But that, too, is passing.”

“It’s self-evident,” said Eve Layton.

It was late when Toohey left. He felt exhilarated and he decided to walk home. The streets of the city lay gravely empty around him, and the dark masses of the buildings rose to the sky, confident and unprotected. He remembered what he had said to Dominique once: “A complicated piece of machinery, such as our society ... and by pressing your little finger against one spot ... the center of all its gravity ... you can make the thing crumble into a worthless heap of scrap iron ...” He missed Dominique. He wished she could have been with him to hear this evening’s conversation.

The unshared was boiling up within him. He stopped in the middle of a silent street, threw his head back and laughed aloud, looking at the tops of skyscrapers.

A policeman tapped him on the shoulder, asking: “Well, Mister?”

Toohey saw buttons and blue cloth tight over a broad chest, a stolid face, hard and patient; a man as set and dependable as the buildings around them.

“Doing your duty, officer?” Toohey asked, the echoes of laughter like jerks in his voice. “Protecting law and order and decency and human lives?” The policeman scratched the back of his head. “You ought to arrest me, officer.”

“Okay, pal, okay,” said the policeman. “Run along. We all take one too many once in a while.”

VII

IT WAS ONLY WHEN THE LAST PAINTER HAD DEPARTED THAT PETER Keating felt a sense of desolation and a numb weakness in the crook of his elbows. He stood in the hall, looking up at the ceiling. Under the harsh gloss of paint he could still see the outline of the square where the stairway had been removed and the opening closed over. Guy Francon’s old office was gone. The firm of Keating & Dumont had a single floor left now.

He thought of the stairway and how he had walked up its red-plushed steps for the first time, carrying a drawing on the tips of his fingers. He thought of Guy Francon’s office with the glittering butterfly reflections. He thought of the four years when that office had been his own.

He had known what was happening to his firm, in these last years; he had known it quite well while men in overalls removed the stairway and closed the gap in the ceiling. But it was that square under the white paint that made it real to him, and final.

He had resigned himself to the process of going down, long ago. He had not chosen to resign himself—that would have been a positive decision—it had merely happened and he had let it happen. It had been simple and almost painless, like drowsiness carrying one down to nothing more sinister than a welcome sleep. The dull pain came from wishing to understand why it had happened.

There was “The March of the Centuries” exposition, but that alone could not have mattered. “The March of the Centuries” had opened in May. It was a flop. What’s the use, thought Keating, why not say the right word? Flop. It was a ghastly flop. “The title of this venture would be most appropriate,” Ellsworth Toohey had written, “if we assume that the centuries had passed by on horseback.” Everything else written about the architectural merits of the exposition had been of the same order.

Keating thought, with wistful bitterness, of how conscientiously they had worked, he and the seven other architects, designing those buildings. It was true that he had pushed himself forward and hogged the publicity, but he certainly had not done that as far as designing was concerned. They had worked in harmony, through conference after conference, each giving in to the others, in true collective spirit, none trying to impose his personal prejudices or selfish ideas. Even Ralston Holcombe had forgotten Renaissance. They had made the buildings modern, more modern than anything ever seen, more modern than the show windows of Slottern’s Department Store. He did not think that the buildings looked like “coils of toothpaste when somebody steps on the tube or stylized versions of the lower intestine,” as one critic had said.

But the public seemed to think it, if the public thought at all. He couldn’t tell. He knew only that tickets to “The March of the Centuries” were being palmed off at Screeno games in theaters, and that the sensation of the exposition, the financial savior, was somebody named Juanita Fay who danced with a live peacock as sole garment.

But what if the Fair did flop? It had not hurt the other architects of its council. Gordon L. Prescott was going stronger than ever. It wasn’t that, thought Keating. It had begun before the Fair. He could not say when.

There could be so many explanations. The depression had hit them all; others had recovered to some extent, Keating & Dumont had not. Something had gone out of the firm and out of the circles from which it drew its clients, with the retirement of Guy Francon. Keating realized that there had been art and skill and its own kind of illogical energy in the career of Guy Francon, even if the art consisted only of his social charm and the energy was directed at snaring bewildered millionaires. There had been a twisted sort of sense in people’s response to Guy Francon.

He could see no hint of rationality in the things to which people responded now. The leader of the profession—on a mean scale, there was no grand scale left in anything—was Gordon L. Prescott, Chairman of the Council of American Builders; Gordon L. Prescott who lectured on the transcendental pragmatism of architecture and social planning, who put his feet on tables in drawing rooms, attended formal dinners in knickerbockers and criticized the soup aloud. Society people said they liked an architect who was a liberal. The A.G.A. still existed, in stiff, hurt dignity, but people referred to it as the Old Folks’ Home. The Council of American Builders ruled the profession and talked about a closed shop, though no one had yet devised a way of achieving that. Whenever an architect’s name appeared in Ellsworth Toohey’s column, it was always that of Augustus Webb. At thirty-nine, Keating heard himself described as old-fashioned.

He had given up trying to understand. He knew dimly that the explanation of the change swallowing the world was of a nature he preferred not to know. In his youth he had felt an amicable contempt for the works of Guy Francon or Ralston Holcombe, and emulating them had seemed no more than innocent quackery. But he knew that Gordon L. Prescott and Gus Webb represented so impertinent, so vicious a fraud that to suspend the evidence of his eyes was beyond his elastic capacity. He had believed that people found greatness in Holcombe and there had been a reasonable satisfaction in borrowing his borrowed greatness. He knew that no one saw anything whatever in Prescott. He felt something dark and leering in the manner with which people spoke of Prescott’s genius; as if they were not doing homage to Prescott, but spitting upon genius. For once, Keating could not follow people; it was too clear, even to him, that public favor had ceased being a recognition of merit, that it had become almost a brand of shame.

He went on, driven by inertia. He could not afford his large floor of offices and he did not use half the rooms, but he kept them and paid the deficit out of his own pocket. He had to go on. He had lost a large part of his personal fortune in careless stock speculation; but he had enough left to insure some comfort for the rest of his life. This did not disturb him; money had ceased to hold his attention as a major concern. It was inactivity he dreaded; it was the question mark looming beyond, if the routine of his work were to be taken away from him.

He walked slowly, his arms pressed to his body, his shoulders hunched, as if drawn against a permanent chill. He was gaining weight. His face was swollen; he kept it down, and the pleat of a second chin was flattened against the knot of his necktie. A hint of his beauty remained and made him look worse; as if the lines of his face had been drawn on a blotter and had spread, blurring. The gray threads on his temples were becoming noticeable. He drank often, without joy.

He had asked his mother to come back to live with him. She had come back. They sat through long evenings together in the living room, saying nothing; not in resentment, but seeking reassurance from each other. Mrs. Keating offered no suggestions, no reproaches. There was, instead, a new, panic-shaped tenderness in her manner toward her son. She would cook his breakfast, even though they had a maid; she would prepare his favorite dish—French pancakes, the kind he had liked so much when he was nine years old and sick with the measles. If he noticed her efforts and made some comment of pleasure, she nodded, blinking, turning away, asking herself why it should make her so happy and if it did, why should her eyes fill with tears.

She would ask suddenly, after a silence: “It will be all right, Petey? Won’t it?” And he would not ask what she meant, but answer quietly: “Yes, Mother, it will be all right,” putting the last of his capacity for pity into an effort to make his voice sound convincing.

Once, she asked him: “You’re happy, Petey? Aren’t you?” He looked at her and saw that she was not laughing at him; her eyes were wide and frightened. And as he could not answer, she cried: “But you’ve got to be happy! Petey, you’ve got to! Else what have I lived for?” He wanted to get up, gather her in his arms and tell her that it was all right—and then he remembered Guy Francon saying to him on his wedding day: “I want you to feel proud of me, Peter.... I want to feel that it had some meaning.” Then he could not move. He felt himself in the presence of something he must not grasp, must never allow into his mind. He turned away from his mother.

One evening, she said without preamble: “Petey, I think you should get married. I think it would be much better if you were married.” He found no answer, and while he groped for something gay to utter, she added: “Petey, why don’t you ... why don’t you marry Catherine Halsey?” He felt anger filling his eyes, he felt pressure on his swollen lids, while he was turning slowly to his mother; then he saw her squat little figure before him, stiff and defenseless, with a kind of desperate pride, offering to take any blow he wished to deliver, absolving him in advance—and he knew that it had been the bravest gesture she had ever attempted. The anger went, because he felt her pain more sharply than the shock of his own, and he lifted one hand, to let it fall limply, to let the gesture cover everything, saying only: “Mother, don’t let’s ...”

On weekends, not often, but once or twice a month, he vanished out of town. No one knew where he went. Mrs. Keating worried about it, but asked no questions. She suspected that there was a woman somewhere, and not a nice one, or he would not be so glumly silent on the subject. Mrs. Keating found herself hoping that he had fallen into the clutches of the worst, greediest slut who would have sense enough to make him marry her.

He went to a shack he had rented in the hills of an obscure village. He kept paints, brushes and canvas in the shack. He spent his days in the hills, painting. He could not tell why he had remembered that unborn ambition of his youth, which his mother had drained and switched into the channel of architecture. He could not tell by what process the impulse had become irresistible; but he had found the shack and he liked going there.

He could not say that he liked to paint. It was neither pleasure nor relief, it was self-torture, but, somehow, that didn’t matter. He sat on a canvas stool before a small easel and he looked at an empty sweep of hills, at the woods and the sky. He had a quiet pain as sole conception of what he wanted to express, a humble, unbearable tenderness for the sight of the earth around him—and something tight, paralyzed, as sole means to express it. He went on. He tried. He looked at his canvases and knew that nothing was captured in their childish crudeness. It did not matter. No one was to see them. He stacked them carefully in a corner of the shack, and he locked the door before he returned to town. There was no pleasure in it, no pride, no solution; only—while he sat alone before the easel—a sense of peace.

He tried not to think of Ellsworth Toohey. A dim instinct told him that he could preserve a precarious security of spirit so long as he did not touch upon that subject. There could be but one explanation of Toohey’s behavior toward him—and he preferred not to formulate it.

Toohey had drifted away from him. The intervals between their meetings had grown longer each year. He accepted it and told himself that Toohey was busy. Toohey’s public silence about him was baffling. He told himself that Toohey had more important things to write about. Toohey’s criticism of “The March of the Centuries” had been a blow. He told himself that his work had deserved it. He accepted any blame. He could afford to doubt himself. He could not afford to doubt Ellsworth Toohey.

It was Neil Dumont who forced him to think of Toohey again. Neil spoke petulantly about the state of the world, about crying over spilt milk, change as a law of existence, adaptability, and the importance of getting in on the ground floor. Keating gathered, from a long, confused speech, that business, as they had known it, was finished, that government would take over whether they liked it or not, that the building trade was dying and the government would soon be the sole builder and they might as well get in now, if they wanted to get in at all. “Look at Gordon Prescott,” said Neil Dumont, “and what a sweet little monopoly he’s got himself in housing projects and post offices. Look at Gus Webb muscling in on the racket.”

Keating did not answer. Neil Dumont was throwing his own unconfessed thoughts at him; he had known that he would have to face this soon and he had tried to postpone the moment.

He did not want to think of Cortlandt Homes.

Cortlandt Homes was a government housing project to be built in Astoria, on the shore of the East River. It was planned as a gigantic experiment in low-rent housing, to serve as model for the whole country; for the whole world. Keating had heard architects talking about it for over a year. The appropriation had been approved and the site chosen; but not the architect. Keating would not admit to himself how desperately he wanted to get Cortlandt and how little chance he had of getting it.

“Listen, Pete, we might as well call a spade a spade,” said Neil Dumont. “We’re on the skids, pal, and you know it. All right, we’ll last another year or two, coasting on your reputation. And then? It’s not our fault. It’s just that private enterprise is dead and getting deader. It’s a historical process. The wave of the future. So we might as well get our surfboard while we can. There’s a good, sturdy one waiting for the boy who’s smart enough to grab it. Cortlandt Homes.”

Now he had heard it pronounced. Keating wondered why the name had sounded like the muffled stroke of a bell; as if the sound had opened and closed a sequence which he would not be able to stop.

“What do you mean, Neil?”

“Cortlandt Homes. Ellsworth Toohey. Now you know what I mean.”

“Neil, I ...”

“What’s the matter with you, Pete? Listen, everybody’s laughing about it. Everybody’s saying that if they were Toohey’s special pet, like you are, they’d get Cortlandt Homes like that”—he snapped his manicured fingers—“just like that, and nobody can understand what you’re waiting for. You know it’s friend Ellsworth who’s running this particular housing show.”

“It’s not true. He is not. He has no official position. He never has any official position.”

“Whom are you kidding? Most of the boys that count in every office are his boys. Damned if I know how he got them in, but he did. What’s the matter, Pete? Are you afraid of asking Ellsworth Toohey for a favor?”

This was it, thought Keating; now there was no retreat. He could not admit to himself that he was afraid of asking Ellsworth Toohey.

“No,” he said, his voice dull, “I’m not afraid, Neil. I’ll ... All right, Neil. I’ll speak to Ellsworth.”

Ellsworth Toohey sat spread out on a couch, wearing a dressing gown. His body had the shape of a sloppy letter X—arms stretched over his head, along the edge of the back pillows, legs open in a wide fork. The dressing gown was made of silk bearing the trademarked pattern of Coty’s face powder, white puffs on an orange background; it looked daring and gay, supremely elegant through sheer silliness. Under the gown, Toohey wore sleeping pyjamas of pistachio-green linen, crumpled. The trousers floated about the thin sticks of his ankles.

This was just like Toohey, thought Keating; this pose amidst the severe fastidiousness of his living room; a single canvas by a famous artist on the wall behind him—and the rest of the room unobtrusive like a monk’s cell; no, thought Keating, like the retreat of a king in exile, scornful of material display.

Toohey’s eyes were warm, amused, encouraging. Toohey had answered the telephone in person; Toohey had granted him the appointment at once. Keating thought: It’s good to be received like this, informally. What was I afraid of? What did I doubt? We’re old friends.

“Oh dear me,” said Toohey, yawning, “one gets so tired! There comes a moment into every man’s day when he gets the urge to relax like a stumble bum. I got home and just felt I couldn’t keep my clothes on another minute. Felt like a damn peasant—just plain itchy—and had to get out. You don’t mind, do you, Peter? With some people it’s necessary to be stiff and formal, but with you it’s not necessary at all.”

“No, of course not.”

“Think I’ll take a bath after a while. There’s nothing like a good hot bath to make one feel like a parasite. Do you like hot baths, Peter?”

“Why ... yes ... I guess so ...”

“You’re gaining weight, Peter. Pretty soon you’ll look revolting in a bathtub. You’re gaining weight and you look peaked. That’s a bad combination. Absolutely wrong esthetically. Fat people should be happy and jolly.”

“I ... I’m all right, Ellsworth. It’s only that ...”

“You used to have a nice disposition. You mustn’t lose that. People will get bored with you.”

“I haven’t changed, Ellsworth.” Suddenly he stressed the words. “I haven’t really changed at all. I’m just what I was when I designed the Cosmo-Slotnick Building.”

He looked at Toohey hopefully. He thought this was a hint crude enough for Toohey to understand; Toohey understood things much more delicate than that. He waited to be helped out. Toohey went on looking at him, his eyes sweet and blank.

“Why, Peter, that’s an unphilosophical statement. Change is the basic principle of the universe. Everything changes. Seasons, leaves, flowers, birds, morals, men and buildings. The dialectic process, Peter.”

“Yes, of course. Things change, so fast, in such a funny way. You don’t even notice how, and suddenly one morning there it is. Remember, just a few years ago, Lois Cook and Gordon Prescott and Ike and Lance—they were nobody at all. And now—why, Ellsworth, they’re on top and they’re all yours. Anywhere I look, any big name I hear—it’s one of your boys. You’re amazing, Ellsworth. How anybody can do that—in just a few years—”

“It’s much simpler than it appears to you, Peter. That’s because you think in terms of personalities. You think it’s done piecemeal. But dear me, the lifetimes of a hundred press agents wouldn’t be enough. It can be done much faster. This is the age of time-saving devices. If you want something to grow, you don’t nurture each seed separately. You just spread a certain fertilizer. Nature will do the rest. I believe you think I’m the only one responsible. But I’m not. Goodness, no. I’m just one figure out of many, one lever in a very vast movement. Very vast and very ancient. It just so happened that I chose the field that interests you—the field of art—because I thought that it focused the decisive factors in the task we had to accomplish.”

“Yes, of course, but I mean, I think you were so clever. I mean, that you could pick young people who had talent, who had a future. Damned if I know how you guessed in advance. Remember the awful loft we had for the Council of American Builders? And nobody took us seriously. And people used to laugh at you for wasting time on all kinds of silly organizations.”

“My dear Peter, people go by so many erroneous assumptions. For instance, that old one—divide and conquer. Well, it has its applications. But it remained for our century to discover a much more potent formula. Unite and rule.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing that you could possibly grasp. And I must not overtax your strength. You don’t look as if you had much to spare.”

“Oh, I’m all right. I might look a little worried, because ...”

“Worry is a waste of emotional reserves. Very foolish. Unworthy of an enlightened person. Since we are merely the creatures of our chemical metabolism and of the economic factors of our background, there’s not a damn thing we can do about anything whatever. So why worry? There are, of course, apparent exceptions. Merely apparent. When circumstances delude us into thinking that free action is indicated. Such, for instance, as your coming here to talk about Cortlandt Homes.”

Keating blinked, then smiled gratefully. He thought it was just like Toohey to guess and spare him the embarrassing preliminaries.

“That’s right, Ellsworth. That’s just what I wanted to talk to you about. You’re wonderful. You know me like a book.”

“What kind of a book, Peter? A dime novel? A love story? A crime thriller? Or just a plagiarized manuscript? No, let’s say: like a serial. A good, long, exciting serial—with the last installment missing. The last installment got mislaid somewhere. There won’t be any last installment. Unless, of course, it’s Cortlandt Homes. Yes, that would be a fitting closing chapter.” Keating waited, eyes intent and naked, forgetting to think of shame, of pleading that should be concealed. “A tremendous project, Cortlandt Homes. Bigger than Stoneridge. Do you remember Stoneridge, Peter?”

He’s just relaxed with me, thought Keating, he’s tired, he can’t be tactful all the time, he doesn’t realize what he ...

“Stoneridge. The great residential development by Gail Wynand. Have you ever thought of Gail Wynand’s career, Peter? From wharf rat to Stoneridge—do you know what a step like that means? Would you care to compute the effort, the energy, the suffering with which Gail Wynand has paid for every step of his way? And here I am, and I hold a project much bigger than Stoneridge in the palm of my hand, without any effort at all.” He dropped his hand and added: “If I do hold it. Might be only a figure of speech. Don’t take me literally, Peter.”

“I hate Wynand,” said Keating, looking down at the floor, his voice thick. “I hate him more than any man living.”

“Wynand? He’s a very naïve person. He’s naive enough to think that men are motivated primarily by money.”

“You aren’t, Ellsworth. You’re a man of integrity. That’s why I believe in you. It’s all I’ve got. If I stopped believing in you, there would be nothing ... anywhere.”

“Thank you, Peter. That’s sweet of you. Hysterical, but sweet.”

“Ellsworth ... you know how I feel about you.”

“I have a fair idea.”

“You see, that’s why I can’t understand.”

“What?”

He had to say it. He had decided, above all, never to say it, but he had to.

“Ellsworth, why have you dropped me? Why don’t you ever write anything about me any more? Why is it always—in your column and everywhere—and on any commission you have a chance to swing—why is it always Gus Webb?”

“But, Peter, why shouldn’t it be?”

“But... I...”

“I’m sorry to see that you haven’t understood me at all. In all these years, you’ve learned nothing of my principles. I don’t believe in individualism, Peter. I don’t believe that any one man is any one thing which everybody else can’t be. I believe we’re all equal and interchangeable. A position you hold today can be held by anybody and everybody tomorrow. Equalitarian rotation. Haven’t I always preached that to you? Why do you suppose I chose you? Why did I put you where you were? To protect the field from men who would become irreplaceable. To leave a chance for the Gus Webbs of this world. Why do you suppose I fought against—for instance—Howard Roark?”

Keating’s mind was a bruise. He thought it would be a bruise, because it felt as if something flat and heavy had smashed against it, and it would be black and blue and swollen later; now he felt nothing, except a sweetish numbness. Such chips of thought as he could distinguish told him that the ideas he heard were of a high moral order, the ones he had always accepted, and therefore no evil could come to him from that, no evil could be intended. Toohey’s eyes looked straight at him, dark, gentle, benevolent. Maybe later ... he would know later ... But one thing had pierced through and remained caught on some fragment of his brain. He had understood that. The name.

And while his sole hope of grace rested in Toohey, something inexplicable twisted within him, he leaned forward, knowing that this would hurt, wishing it to hurt Toohey, and his lips curled incredibly into a smile, baring his teeth and gums:

“You failed there, didn’t you, Ellsworth? Look where he is now—Howard Roark.”

“Oh dear me, how dull it is to discuss things with minds devoted to the obvious. You are utterly incapable of grasping principles, Peter. You think only in terms of persons. Do you really suppose that I have no mission in life save to worry over the specific fate of your Howard Roark? Mr. Roark is merely one detail out of many. I have dealt with him when it was convenient. I am still dealing with him—though not directly. I do grant you, however, that Mr. Howard Roark is a great temptation to me. At times I feel it would be a shame if I never came up against him personally again. But it might not be necessary at all. When you deal in principles, Peter, it saves you the trouble of individual encounters.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you can follow one of two procedures. You can devote your life to pulling out each single weed as it comes up—and then ten lifetimes won’t be enough for the job. Or you can prepare your soil in such a manner—by spreading a certain chemical, let us say—that it will be impossible for weeds to grow. This last is faster. I say ‘weed’ because it is the conventional symbolism and will not frighten you. The same technique, of course, holds true in the case of any other living plant you may wish to eliminate: buckwheat, potatoes, oranges, orchids or morning glories.”

“Ellsworth, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“But of course you don’t. That’s my advantage. I say these things publicly every single day—and nobody knows what I’m talking about.”

“Have you heard that Howard Roark is doing a house, his own home, for Gail Wynand?”

“My dear Peter, did you think I had to wait to learn it from you?”

“Well, how do you like that?”

“Why should it concern me one way or another?”

“Have you heard that Roark and Wynand are the best of friends? And what friendship, from what I hear! Well? You know what Wynand can do. You know what he can make of Roark. Try and stop Roark now! Try and stop him! Try ...”

He choked on a gulp and kept still. He found himself staring at Toohey’s bare ankle between the pyjama trouser and the rich fur of a sheepskin-lined slipper. He had never visualized Toohey’s nudity; somehow, he had never thought of Toohey as possessing a physical body. There was something faintly indecent about that ankle: just skin, too bluish-white, stretched over bones that looked too brittle. It made him think of chicken bones left on a plate after dinner, dried out; if one touches them, it takes no effort at all, they just snap. He found himself wishing to reach out, to take that ankle between thumb and forefinger, and just twist the pads of his fingertips.

“Ellsworth, I came here to talk about Cortlandt Homes!” He could not take his eyes off the ankle. He hoped the words would release him.

“Don’t shout like that. What’s the matter? ... Cortlandt Homes? Well, what did you want to say about it?”

He had to lift his eyes now, in astonishment. Toohey waited innocently.

“I want to design Cortlandt Homes,” he said, his voice coming like a paste strained through a cloth. “I want you to give it to me.”

“Why should I give it to you?”

There was no answer. If he were to say now: Because you’ve written that I’m the greatest architect living, the reminder would prove that Toohey believed it no longer. He dared not face such proof, nor Toohey’s possible reply. He was staring at two long black hairs on the bluish knob of Toohey’s ankle; he could see them quite clearly: one straight, the other twisted into a curlicue. After a long time, he answered :

“Because I need it very badly, Ellsworth.”

“I know you do.”

There was nothing further to say. Toohey shifted his ankle, raised his foot and put it flat upon the arm of the couch, spreading his legs comfortably.

“Sit up, Peter. You look like a gargoyle.”

Keating did not move.

“What made you assume that the selection of an architect for Cortlandt Homes was up to me?”

Keating raised his head; it was a stab of relief. He had presumed too much and offended Toohey; that was the reason; that was the only reason.

“Why, I understand ... it’s being said ... I was told that you have a great deal of influence on this particular project ... with those people ... and in Washington ... and places ...”

“Strictly in an unofficial capacity. As something of an expert in architectural matters. Nothing else.”

“Yes, of course.... That’s ... what I meant.”

“I can recommend an architect. That’s all. I can guarantee nothing. My word is not final.”

“That’s all I wanted, Ellsworth. A word of recommendation from you...”

“But, Peter, if I recommend someone, I must give a reason. I can’t use such influence as I might have, just to push a friend, can I?”

Keating stared at the dressing gown, thinking: powder puffs, why powder puffs? That’s what’s wrong with me, if he’d only take the thing off.

“Your professional standing is not what it used to be, Peter.”

“You said ‘to push a friend,’ Ellsworth ...” It was a whisper.

“Well, of course I’m your friend. I’ve always been your friend. You’re not doubting that, are you?”

“No ... I can’t, Ellsworth....”

“Well, cheer up, then. Look, I’ll tell you the truth. We’re stuck on that damn Cortlandt. There’s a nasty little sticker involved. I’ve tried to get it for Gordon Prescott and Gus Webb—I thought it was more in their line, I didn’t think you’d be so interested. But neither of them could make the grade. Do you know the big problem in housing? Economy, Peter. How to design a decent modern unit that could rent for fifteen dollars a month. Ever tried to figure out that one? Well, that’s what’s expected of the architect who’ll do Cortlandt—if they ever find him. Of course, tenant selection helps, they stagger the rents, the families who make twelve hundred a year pay more for the same apartment to help carry the families who make six hundred a year—you know, underdog milked to help somebody underdoggier—but still, the cost of the building and the upkeep must be as low as humanly possible. The boys in Washington don’t want another one of those—you heard about it, a little government development where the homes cost ten thousand dollars apiece, while a private builder could have put them up for two thousand. Cortlandt is to be a model project. An example for the whole world. It must be the most brilliant, the most efficient exhibit of planning ingenuity and structural economy ever achieved anywhere. That’s what the big boys demand. Gordon and Gus couldn’t do it. They tried and were turned down. You’d be surprised to know how many people have tried. Peter, I couldn’t sell you to them even at the height of your career. What can I tell them about you? All you stand for is plush, gilt and marble, old Guy Francon, the Cosmo-Slotnick Building, the Frink National Bank, and that little abortion of the Centuries that will never pay for itself. What they want is a millionaire’s kitchen for a. share-cropper’s income. Think you can do it?”

“I ... I have ideas, Ellsworth. I’ve watched the field ... I’ve ... studied new methods.... I could ...”

“If you can, it’s yours. If you can’t, all my friendship won’t help you. And God knows I’d like to help you. You look like an old hen in the rain. Here’s what I’ll do for you, Peter: come to my office tomorrow, I’ll give you all the dope, take it home and see if you wish to break your head over it. Take a chance, if you care to. Work me out a preliminary scheme. I can’t promise anything. But if you come anywhere near it, I’ll submit it to the right people and I’ll push it for all I’m worth. That’s all I can do for you. It’s not up to me. It’s really up to you.”

Keating sat looking at him. Keating’s eyes were anxious, eager and hopeless.

“Care to try, Peter?”

“Will you let me try?”

“Of course I’ll let you. Why shouldn’t I? I’d be delighted if you, of all people, turned out to be the one to turn the trick.”

“About the way I look, Ellsworth,” he said suddenly, “about the way I look ... it’s not because I mind so much that I’m a failure ... it’s because I can’t understand why I slipped like that ... from the top ... without any reason at all ...”

“Well, Peter, that could be terrifying to contemplate. The inexplicable is always terrifying. But it wouldn’t be so frightening if you stopped to ask yourself whether there’s ever been any reason why you should have been at the top.... Oh, come, Peter, smile, I’m only kidding. One loses everything when one loses one’s sense of humor.”

On the following morning Keating came to his office after a visit to Ellsworth Toohey’s cubbyhole in the Banner Building. He brought with him a briefcase containing the data on the Cortlandt Homes project. He spread the papers on a large table in his office and locked the door. He asked a draftsman to bring him a sandwich at noon, and he ordered another sandwich at dinner time. “Want me to help, Pete?” asked Neil Dumont. “We could consult and discuss it and ...” Keating shook his head.

He sat at his table all night. After a while he stopped looking at the papers; he sat still, thinking. He was not thinking of the charts and figures spread before him. He had studied them. He had understood what he could not do.

When he noticed that it was daylight, when he heard steps behind his locked door, the movement of men returning to work, and knew that office hours had begun, here and everywhere else in the city—he rose, walked to his desk and reached for the telephone book. He dialed the number.

“This is Peter Keating speaking. I should like to make an appointment to see Mr. Roark.”

Dear God, he thought while waiting, don’t let him see me. Make him refuse. Dear God, make him refuse and I will have the right to hate him to the end of my days. Don’t let him see me.

“Will four o’clock tomorrow afternoon be convenient for you, Mr. Keating?” said the calm, gentle voice of the secretary. “Mr. Roark will see you then.”

VIII

ROARK KNEW THAT HE MUST NOT SHOW THE SHOCK OF HIS FIRST glance at Peter Keating—and that it was too late: he saw a faint smile on Keating’s lips, terrible in its resigned acknowledgment of disintegration.

“Are you only two years younger than I am, Howard?” was the first thing Keating asked, looking at the face of the man he had not seen for six years.

“I don’t know, Peter, I think so. I’m thirty-seven.”

“I’m thirty-nine—that’s all.”

He moved to the chair in front of Roark’s desk, groping for it with his hand. He was blinded by the band of glass that made three walls of Roark’s office. He stared at the sky and the city. He had no feeling of height here, and the buildings seemed to lie under his toes, not a real city, but miniatures of famous landmarks, incongruously close and small; he felt he could bend and pick any one of them up in his hand. He saw the black dashes which were automobiles and they seemed to crawl, it took them so long to cover a block the size of his finger. He saw the stone and plaster of the city as a substance that had soaked light and was throwing it back, row upon row of flat, vertical planes grilled with dots of windows, each plane a reflector, rose-colored, gold and purple—and jagged streaks of smoke-blue running among them, giving them shape, angles and distance. Light streamed from the buildings into the sky and made of the clear summer blue a humble second thought, a spread of pale water over living fire. My God, thought Keating, who are the men that made all this?—and then remembered that he had been one of them.

He saw Roark’s figure for an instant, straight and gaunt against the angle of two glass panes behind the desk, then Roark sat down facing him.

Keating thought of men lost in the desert and of men perishing at sea, when, in the presence of the silent eternity of the sky, they have to speak the truth. And now he had to speak the truth, because he was in the presence of the earth’s greatest city.

“Howard, is this the terrible thing they meant by turning the other cheek—your letting me come here?”

He did not think of his voice. He did not know that it had dignity.

Roark looked at him silently for a moment; this was a greater change than the swollen face.

“I don’t know, Peter. No, if they meant actual forgiveness. Had I been hurt, I’d never forgive it. Yes, if they meant what I’m doing. I don’t think a man can hurt another, not in any important way. Neither hurt him nor help him. I have really nothing to forgive you.”

“It would be better if you felt you had. It would be less cruel.”

“I suppose so.”

“You haven’t changed, Howard.”

“I guess not.”

“If this is the punishment I must take—I want you to know that I’m taking it and that I understand. At one time I would have thought I was getting off easy.”

“You have changed, Peter.”

“I know I have.”

“I’m sorry if it has to be punishment.”

“I know you are. I believe you. But it’s all right. It’s only the last of it. I really took it night before last.”

“When you decided to come here?”

“Yes.”

“Then don’t be afraid now. What is it?”

Keating sat straight, calm, not as he had sat facing a man in a dressing gown three days ago, but almost in confident repose. He spoke slowly and without pity:

“Howard, I’m a parasite. I’ve been a parasite all my life. You designed my best projects at Stanton. You designed the first house I ever built. You designed the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. I have fed on you and on all the men like you who lived before we were born. The men who designed the Parthenon, the Gothic cathedrals, the first skyscrapers. If they hadn’t existed, I wouldn’t have known how to put stone on stone. In the whole of my life, I haven’t added a new doorknob to what men have done before me. I have taken that which was not mine and given nothing in return. I had nothing to give. This is not an act, Howard, and I’m very conscious of what I’m saying. And I came here to ask you to save me again. If you wish to throw me out, do it now.”

Roark shook his head slowly, and moved one hand in silent permission to continue.

“I suppose you know that I’m finished as an architect. Oh, not actually finished, but near enough. Others could go on like this for quite a few years, but I can’t, because of what I’ve been. Or was thought to have been. People don’t forgive a man who’s slipping. I must live up to what they thought. I can do it only in the same way I’ve done everything else in my life. I need a prestige I don’t deserve for an achievement I didn’t accomplish to save a name I haven’t earned the right to bear. I’ve been given a last chance. I know it’s my last chance. I know I can’t do it. I won’t try to bring you a mess and ask you to correct it. I’m asking you to design it and let me put my name on it.”

“What’s the job?”

“Cortlandt Homes.”

“The housing project?”

“Yes. You’ve heard about it?”

“I know everything about it.”

“You’re interested in housing projects, Howard?”

“Who offered it to you? On what conditions?”

Keating explained, precisely, dispassionately, relating his conversation with Toohey as if it were the summary of a court transcript he had read long ago. He pulled the papers out of his briefcase, put them down on the desk and went on speaking, while Roark looked at them. Roark interrupted him once: “Wait a moment, Peter. Keep still.” He waited for a long time. He saw Roark’s hand moving the papers idly, but he knew that Roark was not looking at the papers. Roark said: “Go on,” and Keating continued obediently, allowing himself no questions.

“I suppose there’s no reason why you should do it for me,” he concluded. “If you can solve their problem, you can go to them and do it on your own.”

Roark smiled. “Do you think I could get past Toohey?”

“No. No, I don’t think you could.”

“Who told you I was interested in housing projects?”

“What architect isn’t?”

“Well, I am. But not in the way you think.”

He got up. It was a swift movement, impatient and tense. Keating allowed himself his first opinion: he thought it was strange to see suppressed excitement in Roark.

“Let me think this over, Peter. Leave that here. Come to my house tomorrow night. I’ll tell you then.”

“You’re not ... turning me down?”

“Not yet.”

“You might ... after everything that’s happened ... ?”

“To hell with that.”

“You’re going to consider ...”

“I can’t say anything now, Peter. I must think it over. Don’t count on it. I might want to demand something impossible of you.”

“Anything you ask, Howard. Anything.”

“We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

“Howard, I ... how can I try to thank you, even for ...”

“Don’t thank me. If I do it, I’ll have my own purpose. I’ll expect to gain as much as you will. Probably more. Just remember that I don’t do things on any other terms.”

Keating came to Roark’s house on the following evening. He could not say whether he had waited impatiently or not. The bruise had spread. He could act; he could weigh nothing.

He stood in the middle of Roark’s room and looked about slowly. He had been grateful for all the things Roark had not said to him. But he gave voice to the things himself when he asked:

“This is the Enright House, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You built it?”

Roark nodded, and said: “Sit down, Peter,” understanding too well.

Keating had brought his briefcase; he put it down on the floor, propping it against his chair. The briefcase bulged and looked heavy; he handled it cautiously. Then he spread his hands out and forgot the gesture, holding it, asking:

“Well?”

“Peter, can you think for a moment that you’re alone in the world?”

“I’ve been thinking that for three days.”

“No. That’s not what I mean. Can you forget what you’ve been taught to repeat, and think, think hard, with your own brain? There are things I’ll want you to understand. It’s my first condition. I’m going to tell you what I want. If you think of it as most people do, you’ll say it’s nothing. But if you say that, I won’t be able to do it. Not unless you understand completely, with your whole mind, how important it is.”

“I’ll try, Howard. I was ... honest with you yesterday.”

“Yes. If you hadn’t been, I would have turned you down yesterday. Now I think you might be able to understand and do your part of it.”

“You want to do it?”

“I might. If you offer me enough.”

“Howard—anything you ask. Anything. I’d sell my soul ...”

“That’s the sort of thing I want you to understand. To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That’s what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul—would you understand why that’s much harder?”

“Yes ... Yes, I think so.”

“Well? Go on. I want you to give me a reason why I should wish to design Cortlandt. I want you to make me an offer.”

“You can have all the money they pay me. I don’t need it. You can have twice the money. I’ll double their fee.”

“You know better than that, Peter. Is that what you wish to tempt me with?”

“You would save my life.”

“Can you think of any reason why I should want to save your life?”

“No.”

“Well?”

“It’s a great public project, Howard. A humanitarian undertaking. Think of the poor people who live in slums. If you can give them decent comfort within their means, you’ll have the satisfaction of performing a noble deed.”

“Peter, you were more honest than that yesterday.”

His eyes dropped, his voice low, Keating said:

“You will love designing it.”

“Yes, Peter. Now you’re speaking my language.”

“What do you want?”

“Now listen to me. I’ve been working on the problem of low-rent housing for years. I never thought of the poor people in slums. I thought of the potentialities of our modern world. The new materials, the means, the chances to take and use. There are so many products of man’s genius around us today. There are such great possibilities to exploit. To build cheaply, simply, intelligently. I’ve had a lot of time to study. I didn’t have much to do after the Stoddard Temple. I didn’t expect results. I worked because I can’t look at any material without thinking: What could be done with it? And the moment I think that, I’ve got to do it. To find the answer, to break the thing. I’ve worked on it for years. I loved it. I worked because it was a problem I wanted to solve. You wish to know how to build a unit to rent for fifteen dollars a month? I’ll show you how to build it for ten.”

Keating made an involuntary movement forward.

“But first, I want you to think and tell me what made me give years to this work. Money? Fame? Charity? Altruism?” Keating shook his head slowly. “All right. You’re beginning to understand. So whatever we do, don’t let’s talk about the poor people in the slums. They have nothing to do with it, though I wouldn’t envy anyone the job of trying to explain that to fools. You see, I’m never concerned with my clients, only with their architectural requirements. I consider these as part of my building’s theme and problem, as my building’s material—just as I consider bricks and steel. Bricks and steel are not my motive. Neither are the clients. Both are only the means of my work. Peter, before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people. Your own action, not any possible object of your charity. I’ll be glad if people who need it find a better manner of living in a house I designed. But that’s not the motive of my work. Nor my reason. Nor my reward.”

He walked to a window and stood looking out at the lights of the city trembling in the dark river.

“You said yesterday: ‘What architect isn’t interested in housing?’ I hate the whole blasted idea of it. I think it’s a worthy undertaking—to provide a decent apartment for a man who earns fifteen dollars a week. But not at the expense of other men. Not if it raises the taxes, raises all the other rents and makes the man who earns forty live in a rat hole. That’s what’s happening in New York. Nobody can afford a modern apartment—except the very rich and the paupers. Have you seen the converted brownstones in which the average self-supporting couple has to live? Have you seen their closet kitchens and their plumbing? They’re forced to live like that—because they’re not incompetent enough. They make forty dollars a week and wouldn’t be allowed into a housing project. But they’re the ones who provide the money for the damn project. They pay the taxes. And the taxes raise their own rent. And they have to move from a converted brownstone into an unconverted one and from that into a railroad flat. I’d have no desire to penalize a man because he’s worth only fifteen dollars a week. But I’ll be damned if I can see why a man worth forty must be penalized—and penalized in favor of the one who’s less competent. Sure, there are a lot of theories on the subject and volumes of discussion. But just look at the results. Still, architects are all for government housing. And have you ever seen an architect who wasn’t screaming for planned cities? I’d like to ask him how he can be so sure that the plan adopted will be his own. And if it is, what right has he to impose it on the others? And if it isn‘t, what happens to his work? I suppose he’ll say that he wants neither. He wants a council, a conference, co-operation and collaboration. And the result will be ‘The March of the Centuries.’ Peter, every single one of you on that committee has done better work alone than the eight of you produced collectively. Ask yourself why, sometime.”

“I think I know it ... But Cortlandt ...”

“Yes. Cortlandt. Well, I’ve told you all the things in which I don’t believe, so that you’ll understand what I want and what right I have to want it. I don’t believe in government housing. I don’t want to hear anything about its noble purposes. I don’t think they’re noble. But that, too, doesn’t matter. That’s not my first concern. Not who lives in the house nor who orders it built. Only the house itself. If it has to be built, it might as well be built right.”

“You ... want to build it?”

“In all the years I’ve worked on this problem, I never hoped to see the results in practical application. I forced myself not to hope. I knew I couldn’t expect a chance to show what could be done on a large scale. Your government housing, among other things, has made all building so expensive that private owners can’t afford such projects, nor any type of low-rent construction. And I will never be given any job by any government. You’ve understood that much yourself. You said I couldn’t get past Toohey. He’s not the only one. I’ve never been given a job by any group, board, council or committee, public or private, unless some man fought for me, like Kent Lansing. There’s a reason for that, but we don’t have to discuss it now. I want you to know only that I realize in what manner I need you, so that what we’ll do will be a fair exchange.”

“You need me?”

“Peter, I love this work. I want to see it erected. I want to make it real, living, functioning, built. But every living thing is integrated. Do you know what that means? Whole, pure, complete, unbroken. Do you know what constitutes an integrating principle? A thought. The one thought, the single thought that created the thing and every part of it. The thought which no one can change or touch. I want to design Cortlandt. I want to see it built. I want to see it built exactly as I design it.”

“Howard ... I won’t say ‘it’s nothing.’ ”

“You understand?”

“Yes.”

“I like to receive money for my work. But I can pass that up this time. I like to have people know my work is done by me. But I can pass that up. I like to have tenants made happy by my work. But that doesn’t matter too much. The only thing that matters, my goal, my reward, my beginning, my end is the work itself. My work done my way. Peter, there’s nothing in the world that you can offer me, except this. Offer me this and you can have anything I’ve got to give. My work done my way. A private, personal, selfish, egotistical motivation. That’s the only way I function. That’s all I am.”

“Yes, Howard. I understand. With my whole mind.”

“Then here’s what I’m offering you: I’ll design Cortlandt. You’ll put your name on it. You’ll keep all the fees. But you’ll guarantee that it will be built exactly as I design it.”

Keating looked at him and held the glance deliberately, quietly, for a moment.

“All right, Howard.” He added: “I waited, to show you that I know exactly what you’re asking and what I’m promising.”

“You know it won’t be easy?”

“I know it will be very terribly difficult.”

“It will. Because it’s such a large project. Most particularly because it’s a government project. There will be so many people involved, each with authority, each wanting to exercise it in some way or another. You’ll have a hard battle. You will have to have the courage of my convictions.”

“I’ll try to live up to that, Howard.”

“You won’t be able to, unless you understand that I’m giving you a trust which is more sacred—and nobler, if you like the word—than any altruistic purpose you could name. Unless you understand that this is not a favor, that I’m not doing it for you nor for the future tenants, but for myself, and that you have no right to it except on these terms.”

“Yes, Howard.”

“You’ll have to devise your own way of accomplishing it. You’ll have to get yourself an ironclad contract with your bosses and then fight every bureaucrat that comes along every five minutes for the next year or more. I will have no guarantee except your word. Wish to give it to me?”

“I give you my word.”

Roark took two typewritten sheets of paper from his pocket and handed them to him.

“Sign it.”

“What’s that?”

“A contract between us, stating the terms of our agreement. A copy for each of us. It would probably have no legal validity whatever. But I can hold it over your head. I couldn’t sue you. But I could make this public. If it’s prestige you want, you can’t allow this to become known. If your courage fails you at any point, remember that you’ll lose everything by giving in. But if you’ll keep your word—I give you mine—it’s written there—that I’ll never betray this to anyone. Cortlandt will be yours. On the day when it’s finished, I’ll send this paper back to you and you can burn it if you wish.”

“All right, Howard.”

Keating signed, handed the pen to him, and Roark signed.

Keating sat looking at him for a moment, then said slowly, as if trying to distinguish the dim form of some thought of his own:

“Everybody would say you’re a fool.... Everybody would say I’m getting everything....”

“You’ll get everything society can give a man. You’ll keep all the money. You’ll take any fame or honor anyone might want to grant. You’ll accept such gratitude as the tenants might feel. And I—I’ll take what nobody can give a man, except himself. I will have built Cortlandt.”

“You’re getting more than I am, Howard.”

“Peter!” The voice was triumphant. “You understand that?”

“Yes....”

Roark leaned back against a table, and laughed softly; it was the happiest sound Keating had ever heard.

“This will work, Peter. It will work. It will be all right. You’ve done something wonderful. You haven’t spoiled everything by thanking me.”

Keating nodded silently.

“Now relax, Peter. Want a drink? We won’t discuss any details tonight. Just sit here and get used to me. Stop being afraid of me. Forget everything you said yesterday. This wipes it off. We’re starting from the beginning. We’re partners now. You have your share to do. It’s a legitimate share. This is my idea of co-operation, by the way. You’ll handle people. I’ll do the building. We’ll each do the job we know best, as honestly as we can.”

He walked to Keating and extended his hand.

Sitting still, not raising his head, Keating took the hand. His fingers tightened on it for a moment.

When Roark brought him a drink, Keating swallowed three long gulps and sat looking at the room. His fingers were closed firmly about the glass, his arm steady; but the ice tinkled in the liquid once in a while, without apparent motion.

His eyes moved heavily over the room, over Roark’s body. He thought, it’s not intentional, not just to hurt me, he can’t help it, he doesn’t even know it—but it’s in his whole body, that look of a creature glad to be alive. And he realized he had never actually believed that any living thing could be glad of the gift of existence.

“You’re ... so young, Howard.... You’re so young ... Once I reproached you for being too old and serious ... Do you remember when you worked for me at Francon’s?”

“Drop it, Peter. We’ve done so well without remembering.”

“That’s because you’re kind. Wait, don’t frown. Let me talk. I’ve got to talk about something. I know, this is what you didn’t want to mention. God, I didn’t want you to mention it! I had to steel myself against it, that night—against all the things you could throw at me. But you didn’t. If it were reversed now and this were my home—can you imagine what I’d do or say? You’re not conceited enough.”

“Why, no. I’m too conceited. If you want to call it that. I don’t make comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse to measure myself as part of anything. I’m an utter egotist.”

“Yes. You are. But egotists are not kind. And you are. You’re the most egotistical and the kindest man I know. And that doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe the concepts don’t make sense. Maybe they don’t mean what people have been taught to think they mean. But let’s drop that now. If you’ve got to talk of something, let’s talk of what we’re going to do.” He leaned out to look through the open window. “It will stand down there. That dark stretch—that’s the site of Cortlandt. When it’s done, I’ll be able to see it from my window. Then it will be part of the city. Peter, have I ever told you how much I love this city?”

Keating swallowed the rest of the liquid in his glass.

“I think I’d rather go now, Howard. I’m ... no good tonight.”

“I’ll call you in a few days. We’d better meet here. Don’t come to my office. You don’t want to be seen there—somebody might guess. By the way, later, when my sketches are done, you’ll have to copy them yourself, in your own manner. Some people would recognize my way of drawing.”

“Yes.... All right....”

Keating rose and stood looking uncertainly at his briefcase for a moment, then picked it up. He mumbled some vague words of parting, he took his hat, he walked to the door, then stopped and looked down at his briefcase.

“Howard ... I brought something I wanted to show you.”

He walked back into the room and put the briefcase on the table.

“I haven’t shown it to anyone.” His fingers fumbled, opening the straps. “Not to mother or Ellsworth Toohey ... I just want you to tell me if there’s any ...”

He handed to Roark six of his canvases.

Roark looked at them, one after another. He took a longer time than he needed. When he could trust himself to lift his eyes, he shook his head in silent answer to the word Keating had not pronounced.

“It’s too late, Peter,” he said gently.

Keating nodded. “Guess I ... knew that.”

When Keating had gone, Roark leaned against the door, closing his eyes. He was sick with pity.

He had never felt this before—not when Henry Cameron collapsed in the office at his feet, not when he saw Steven Mallory sobbing on a bed before him. Those moments had been clean. But this was pity—this complete awareness of a man without worth or hope, this sense of finality, of the not to be redeemed. There was shame in this feeling—his own shame that he should have to pronounce such judgment upon a man, that he should know an emotion which contained no shred of respect.

This is pity, he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.

IX

THEY SAT ON THE SHORE OF THE LAKE-WYNAND SLOUCHED ON A boulder—Roark stretched out on the ground—Dominique sitting straight, her body rising stiffly from the pale blue circle of her skirt on the grass.

The Wynand house stood on the hill above them. The earth spread out in terraced fields and rose gradually to make the elevation of the hill. The house was a shape of horizontal rectangles rising toward a slashing vertical projection; a group of diminishing setbacks, each a separate room, its size and form making the successive steps in a series of interlocking floor lines. It was as if from the wide living room on the first level a hand had moved slowly, shaping the next steps by a sustained touch, then had stopped, had continued in separate movements, each shorter, brusquer, and had ended, torn off, remaining somewhere in the sky. So that it seemed as if the slow rhythm of the rising fields had been picked up, stressed, accelerated and broken into the staccato chords of the finale.

“I like to look at it from here,” said Wynand. “I spent all day here yesterday, watching the light change on it. When you design a building, Howard, do you know exactly what the sun will do to it at any moment of the day from any angle? Do you control the sun?”

“Sure,” said Roark without raising his head. “Unfortunately, I can’t control it here. Move over, Gail. You’re in my way. I like the sun on my back.”

Wynand let himself flop down into the grass. Roark lay stretched on his stomach, his face buried on his arm, the orange hair on the white shirt sleeve, one hand extended before him, palm pressed to the ground. Dominique looked at the blades of grass between his fingers. The fingers moved once in a while, crushing the grass with lazy, sensuous pleasure.

The lake spread behind them, a flat sheet darkening at the edges, as if the distant trees were moving in to enclose it for the evening. The sun cut a glittering band across the water. Dominique looked up at the house and thought that she would like to stand there at a window and look down and see this one white figure stretched on a deserted shore, his hand on the ground, spent, emptied, at the foot of that hill.

She had lived in the house for a month. She had never thought she would. Then Roark had said: “The house will be ready for you in ten days, Mrs. Wynand,” and she had answered: “Yes, Mr. Roark.”

She accepted the house, the touch of the stair railings under her hand, the walls that enclosed the air she breathed. She accepted the light switches she pressed in the evening, and the light firm wires he had laid out through the walls; the water that ran when she turned a tap, from conduits he had planned; the warmth of an open fire on August evenings, before a fireplace built stone by stone from his drawing. She thought: Every moment ... every need of my existence ... She thought: Why not? It’s the same with my body—lungs, blood vessels, nerves, brain—under the same control. She felt one with the house.

She accepted the nights when she lay in Wynand’s arms and opened her eyes to see the shape of the bedroom Roark had designed, and she set her teeth against a racking pleasure that was part answer, part mockery of the unsatisfied hunger in her body, and surrendered to it, not knowing what man gave her this, which one of them, or both.

Wynand watched her as she walked across a room, as she descended the stairs, as she stood at a window. She had heard him saying to her: “I didn’t know a house could be designed for a woman, like a dress. You can’t see yourself here as I do, you can’t see how completely this house is yours. Every angle, every part of every room is a setting for you. It’s scaled to your height, to your body. Even the texture of the walls goes with the texture of your skin in an odd way. It’s the Stoddard Temple, but built for a single person, and it’s mine. This is what I wanted. The city can’t touch you here. I’ve always felt that the city would take you away from me. It gave me everything I have. I don’t know why I feel at times that it will demand payment some day. But here you’re safe and you’re mine.” She wanted to cry: Gail, I belong to him here as I’ve never belonged to him.

Roark was the only guest Wynand allowed in their new home. She accepted Roark’s visits to them on weekends. That was the hardest to accept. She knew he did not come to torture her, but simply because Wynand asked him and he liked being with Wynand. She remembered saying to him in the evening, her hand on the stair railing, on the steps of the stairs leading up to her bedroom: “Come down to breakfast whenever you wish, Mr. Roark. Just press the button in the dining room.” “Thank you, Mrs. Wynand. Good night.”

Once, she saw him alone, for a moment. It was early morning; she had not slept all night, thinking of him in a room across the hall; she had come out before the house was awake. She walked down the hill and she found relief in the unnatural stillness of the earth around her, the stillness of full light without sun, of leaves without motion, of a luminous, waiting silence. She heard steps behind her, she stopped, she leaned against a tree trunk. He had a bathing suit thrown over his shoulder, he was going down to swim in the lake. He stopped before her, and they stood still with the rest of the earth, looking at each other. He said nothing, turned, and went on. She remained leaning against the tree, and after a while she walked back to the house.

Now, sitting by the lake, she heard Wynand saying to him:

“You look like the laziest creature in the world, Howard.”

“I am.”

“I’ve never seen anyone relax like that.”

“Try staying awake for three nights in succession.”

“I told you to get here yesterday.”

“Couldn’t.”

“Are you going to pass out right here?”

“I’d like to. This is wonderful.” He lifted his head, his eyes laughing, as if he had not seen the building on the hill, as if he were not speaking of it. “This is the way I’d like to die, stretched out on some shore like this, just close my eyes and never come back.”

She thought: He thinks what I’m thinking—we still have that together —Gail wouldn’t understand—not he and Gail, for this once—he and I.

Wynand said: “You damn fool. This is not like you, not even as a joke. You’re killing yourself over something. What?”

“Ventilator shafts, at the moment. Very stubborn ventilator shafts.”

“For whom?”

“Clients.... I have all sorts of clients right now.”

“Do you have to work nights?”

“Yes—for these particular people. Very special work. Can’t even bring it into the office.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Don’t pay any attention. I’m half asleep.”

She thought: This is the tribute to Gail, the confidence of surrender—he relaxes like a cat—and cats don’t relax except with people they like.

“I’ll kick you upstairs after dinner and lock the door,” said Wynand, “and leave you there to sleep twelve hours.”

“All right.”

“Want to get up early? Let’s go for a swim before sunrise.”

“Mr. Roark is tired, Gail,” said Dominique, her voice sharp.

Roark raised himself on an elbow to look at her. She saw his eyes, direct, understanding.

“You’re acquiring the bad habits of all commuters, Gail,” she said, “imposing your country hours on guests from the city who are not used to them.” She thought: Let it be mine—that one moment when you were walking to the lake—don’t let Gail take that also, like everything else. “You can’t order Mr. Roark around as if he were an employee of the Banner.”

“I don’t know anyone on earth I’d rather order around than Mr. Roark,” said Wynand gaily, “whenever I can get away with it.”

“You’re getting away with it.”

“I don’t mind taking orders, Mrs. Wynand,” said Roark. “Not from a man as capable as Gail.”

Let me win this time, she thought, please let me win this time—it means nothing to you—it’s senseless and it means nothing at all—but refuse him, refuse him for the sake of the memory of a moment’s pause that had not belonged to him.

“I think you should rest, Mr. Roark. You should sleep late tomorrow. I’ll tell the servants not to disturb you.”

“Why, no, thanks, I’ll be all right in a few hours, Mrs. Wynand. I like to swim before breakfast. Knock at the door when you’re ready, Gail, and we’ll go down together.”

She looked over the spread of lake and hills, with not a sign of men, not another house anywhere, just water, trees and sun, a world of their own, and she thought he was right—they belonged together—the three of them.

The drawings of Cortlandt Homes presented six buildings, fifteen stories high, each made in the shape of an irregular star with arms extending from a central shaft. The shafts contained elevators, stairways, heating systems and all the utilities. The apartments radiated from the center in the form of extended triangles. The space between the arms allowed light and air from three sides. The ceilings were pre-cast; the inner walls were of plastic tile that required no painting or plastering; all pipes and wires were laid out in metal ducts at the edge of the floors, to be opened and replaced, when necessary, without costly demolition; the kitchens and bathrooms were prefabricated as complete units; the inner partitions were of light metal that could be folded into the walls to provide one large room or pulled out to divide it; there were few halls or lobbies to clean, a minimum of cost and labor required for the maintenance of the place. The entire plan was a composition in triangles. The buildings, of poured concrete, were a complex modeling of simple structural features; there was no ornament; none was needed; the shapes had the beauty of sculpture.

Ellsworth Toohey did not look at the plans which Keating had spread out on his desk. He stared at the perspective drawing. He stared, his mouth open.

Then he threw his head back and howled with laughter.

“Peter,” he said, “you’re a genius.”

He added: “I think you know exactly what I mean.” Keating looked at him blankly, without curiosity. “You’ve succeeded in what I’ve spent a lifetime trying to achieve, in what centuries of men and bloody battles behind us have tried to achieve. I take my hat off to you, Peter, in awe and admiration.”

“Look at the plans,” said Keating listlessly. “It will rent for ten dollars a unit.”

“I haven’t the slightest doubt that it will. I don’t have to look. Oh yes, Peter, this will go through. Don’t worry. This will be accepted. My congratulations, Peter.”

“You God-damn fool!” said Gail Wynand. “What are you up to?”

He threw to Roark a copy of the Banner, folded at an inside page. The page bore a photograph captioned: “Architects’ drawing of Cortlandt Homes, the $15,000,000 Federal Housing Project to be built in Astoria, L. I., Keating & Dumont, architects.”

Roark glanced at the photograph and asked: “What do you mean?”

“You know damn well what I mean. Do you think I picked the things in my art gallery by their signatures? If Peter Keating designed this, I’ll eat every copy of today’s Banner.”

“Peter Keating designed this, Gail.”

“You fool. What are you after?”

“If I don’t want to understand what you’re talking about, I won’t understand it, no matter what you say.”

“Oh, you might, if I run a story to the effect that a certain housing project was designed by Howard Roark, which would make a swell exclusive story and a joke on one Mr. Toohey who’s the boy behind the boys on most of those damn projects.”

“You publish that and I’ll sue hell out of you.”

“You really would?”

“I would. Drop it, Gail. Don’t you see I don’t want to discuss it?”

Later, Wynand showed the picture to Dominique and asked:

“Who designed this?”

She looked at it. “Of course,” was all she answered.

“What kind of ‘changing world,’ Alvah? Changing to what? From what? Who’s doing the changing?”

Parts of Alvah Scarret’s face looked anxious, but most of it was impatient, as he glanced at the proofs of his editorial on “Motherhood in a Changing World,” which lay on Wynand’s desk.

“What the hell, Gail,” he muttered indifferently.

“That’s what I want to know—what the hell?” He picked up the proof and read aloud: “ ‘The world we have known is gone and done for and it’s no use kidding ourselves about it. We cannot go back, we must go forward. The mothers of today must set the example by broadening their own emotional view and raising their selfish love for their own children to a higher plane, to include everybody’s little children. Mothers must love every kid in their block, in their street, in their city, county, state, nation and the whole wide, wide world—just exactly as much as their own little Mary or Johnny.’ ” Wynand wrinkled his nose fastidiously. “Alvah? ... It’s all right to dish out crap. But—this kind of crap?”

Alvah Scarret would not look at him.

“You’re out of step with the times, Gail,” he said. His voice was low; it had a tone of warning—as of something baring its teeth, tentatively, just for future reference.

This was so odd a behavior for Alvah Scarret that Wynand lost all desire to pursue the conversation. He drew a line across the editorial, but the blue pencil stroke seemed tired and ended in a blur. He said: “Go and bat out something else, Alvah.”

Scarret rose, picked up the strip of paper, turned and left the room without a word.

Wynand looked after him, puzzled, amused and slightly sick.

He had known for several years the trend which his paper had embraced gradually, imperceptibly, without any directive from him. He had noticed the cautious “slanting” of news stories, the half-hints, the vague allusions, the peculiar adjectives peculiarly placed, the stressing of certain themes, the insertion of political conclusions where none was needed. If a story concerned a dispute between employer and employee, the employer was made to appear guilty, simply through wording, no matter what the facts presented. If a sentence referred to the past, it was always “our dark past” or “our dead past.” If a statement involved someone’s personal motive, it was always “goaded by selfishness” or “egged by greed.” A crossword puzzle gave the definition of “obsolescent individuals” and the word came out as “capitalists.”

Wynand had shrugged about it, contemptuously amused. His staff, he thought, was well trained: if this was the popular slang of the day, his boys assumed it automatically. It meant nothing at all. He kept it off the editorial page and the rest did not matter. It was no more than a fashion of the moment—and he had survived many changing fashions.

He felt no concern over the “We Don’t Read Wynand” campaign. He obtained one of their men’s-room stickers, pasted it on the windshield of his own Lincoln, added the words: “We don’t either,” and kept it there long enough to be discovered and snapped by a photographer from a neutral paper. In the course of his career he had been fought, damned, denounced by the greatest publishers of his time, by the shrewdest coalitions of financial power. He could not summon any apprehension over the activities of somebody named Gus Webb.

He knew that the Banner was losing some of its popularity. “A temporary fad,” he told Scarret, shrugging. He would run a limerick contest, or a series of coupons for victrola records, see a slight spurt of circulation and promptly forget the matter.

He could not rouse himself to full action. He had never felt a greater desire to work. He entered his office each morning with impatient eagerness. But within an hour he found himself studying the joints of the paneling on the walls and reciting nursery rhymes in his mind. It was not boredom, not the satisfaction of a yawn, but more like the gnawing pull of wishing to yawn and not quite making it. He could not say that he disliked his work. It had merely become distasteful; not enough to force a decision; not enough to make him clench his fists; just enough to contract his nostrils.

He thought dimly that the cause lay in that new trend of the public taste. He saw no reason why he should not follow it and play on it as expertly as he had played on all other fads. But he could not follow. He felt no moral scruples. It was not a positive stand rationally taken; not defiance in the name of a cause of importance; just a fastidious feeling, something pertaining almost to chastity: the hesitation one feels before putting one’s foot down into muck. He thought: It doesn’t matter—it will not last—I’ll be back when the wave swings on to another theme—I think I’d just rather sit this one out.

He could not say why the encounter with Alvah Scarret gave him a feeling of uneasiness, sharper than usual. He thought it was funny that Alvah should have switched to that line of tripe. But there had been something else; there had been a personal quality in Alvah’s exit; almost a declaration that he saw no necessity to consider the boss’s opinion any longer.

I ought to fire Alvah, he thought—and then laughed at himself, aghast: fire Alvah Scarret?—one might as well think of stopping the earth—or—of the unthinkable—of closing the Banner.

But through the months of that summer and fall, there were days when he loved the Banner. Then he sat at his desk, with his hand on the pages spread before him, fresh ink smearing his palm, and he smiled as he saw the name of Howard Roark in the pages of the Banner.

The word had come down from his office to every department concerned : Plug Howard Roark. In the art section, the real-estate section, the editorials, the columns, mentions of Roark and his buildings began to appear regularly. There were not many occasions when one could give publicity to an architect, and buildings had little news value, but the Banner managed to throw Roark’s name at the public under every kind of ingenious pretext. Wynand edited every word of it. The material was startling on the pages of the Banner: it was written in good taste. There were no sensational stories, no photographs of Roark at breakfast, no human interest, no attempt to sell a man; only a considered, gracious tribute to the greatness of an artist.

He never spoke of it to Roark, and Roark never mentioned it. They did not discuss the Banner.

Coming home to his new house in the evening, Wynand saw the Banner on the living-room table every night. He had not allowed it in his home since his marriage. He smiled, when he saw it for the first time, and said nothing.

Then he spoke of it, one evening. He turned the pages until he came to an article on the general theme of summer resorts, most of which was a description of Monadnock Valley. He raised his head to glance at Dominique across the room; she sat on the floor by the fireplace. He said:

“Thank you, dear.”

“For what, Gail?”

“For understanding when I would be glad to see the Banner in my house.”

He walked to her and sat down on the floor beside her. He held her thin shoulders in the curve of his arm. He said:

“Think of all the politicians, movie stars, visiting grand dukes and sashweight murderers whom the Banner has trumpeted all these years. Think of my great crusades about streetcar companies, red-light districts and home-grown vegetables. For once, Dominique, I can say what I believe.”

“Yes, Gail ...”

“All this power I wanted, reached and never used ... Now they’ll see what I can do. I’ll force them to recognize him as he should be recognized. I’ll give him the fame he deserves. Public opinion? Public opinion is what I make it.”

“Do you think he wants this?”

“Probably not. I don’t care. He needs it and he’s going to get it. I want him to have it. As an architect, he’s public property. He can’t stop a newspaper from writing about him if it wants to.”

“All that copy on him—do you write it yourself?”

“Most of it.”

“Gail, what a great journalist you could have been.”

The campaign brought results, of a kind he had not expected. The general public remained blankly indifferent. But in the intellectual circles, in the art world, in the profession, people were laughing at Roark. Comments were reported to Wynand: “Roark? Oh yes, Wynand’s pet.” “The Banner’s glamour boy.” “The genius of the yellow press.” “The Banner is now selling art—send two box tops or a reasonable facsimile.” “Wouldn’t you know it? That’s what I’ve always thought of Roark—the kind of talent fit for the Wynand papers.”

“We’ll see,” said Wynand contemptuously—and continued his private crusade.

He gave Roark every commission of importance whose owners were open to pressure. Since spring, he had brought to Roark’s office the contracts for a yacht club on the Hudson, an office building, two private residences. “I’ll get you more than you can handle,” he said. “I’ll make you catch up with all the years they’ve made you waste.”

Austen Heller said to Roark one evening: “If I may be so presumptuous, I think you need advice, Howard. Yes, of course, I mean this preposterous business of Mr. Gail Wynand. You and he as inseparable friends upsets every rational concept I’ve ever held. After all, there are distinct classes of humanity—no, I’m not talking Toohey’s language—but there are certain boundary lines among men which cannot be crossed.”

“Yes, there are. But nobody has ever given the proper statement of where they must be drawn.”

‘Well, the friendship is your own business. But there’s one aspect of it that must be stopped—and you’re going to listen to me for once.”

“I’m listening.”

“I think it’s fine, all those commissions he’s dumping on you. I’m sure he’ll be rewarded for that and lifted several rungs in hell, where he’s certain to go. But he must stop that publicity he’s splashing you with in the Banner. You’ve got to make him stop. Don’t you know that the support of the Wynand papers is enough to discredit anyone?” Roark said nothing. “It’s hurting you professionally, Howard.”

“I know it is.”

“Are you going to make him stop?”

“No.”

“But why in blazes?”

“I said I’d listen, Austen. I didn’t say I’d speak about him.”

Late one afternoon in the fall Wynand came to Roark’s office, as he often did at the end of a day, and when they walked out together, he said: “It’s a nice evening. Let’s go for a walk, Howard. There’s a piece of property I want you to see.”

He led the way to Hell’s Kitchen. They walked around a great rectangle—two blocks between Ninth Avenue and Eleventh, five blocks from north to south. Roark saw a grimy desolation of tenements, sagging hulks of what had been red brick, crooked doorways, rotting boards, strings of gray underclothing in narrow air shafts, not as a sign of life, but as a malignant growth of decomposition.

“You own that?” Roark asked.

“All of it.”

“Why show it to me? Don’t you know that making an architect look at that is worse than showing him a field of unburied corpses?”

Wynand pointed to the white-tiled front of a new diner across the street: “Let’s go in there.”

They sat by the window, at a clean metal table, and Wynand ordered coffee. He seemed as graciously at home as in the best restaurants of the city; his elegance had an odd quality here—it did not insult the place, but seemed to transform it, like the presence of a king who never alters his manner, yet makes a palace of any house he enters. He leaned forward with his elbows on the table, watching Roark through the steam of the coffee, his eyes narrowed, amused. He moved one finger to point across the street.

“That’s the first piece of property I ever bought, Howard. It was a long time ago. I haven’t touched it since.”

“What were you saving it for?”

“You.”

Roark raised the heavy white mug of coffee to his lips, his eyes holding Wynand’s, narrowed and mocking in answer. He knew that Wynand wanted eager questions and he waited patiently instead.

“You stubborn bastard,” Wynand chuckled, surrendering. “All right. Listen. This is where I was born. When I could begin to think of buying real estate, I bought this piece. House by house. Block by block. It took a long time. I could have bought better property and made money fast, as I did later, but I waited until I had this. Even though I knew I would make no use of it for years. You see, I had decided then that this is where the Wynand Building would stand some day.... All right, keep still all you want—I’ve seen what your face looked like just now.”

“Oh, God, Gail! ...”

“What’s the matter? Want to do it? Want it pretty badly?”

“I think I’d almost give my life for it—only then I couldn’t build it. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“Something like that. I won’t demand your life. But it’s nice to shock the breath out of you for once. Thank you for being shocked. It means you understood what the Wynand Building implies. The highest structure in the city. And the greatest.”

“I know that’s what you’d want.”

“I won’t build it yet. But I’ve waited for it all these years. And now you’ll wait with me. Do you know that I really like to torture you, in a way? That I always want to?”

“I know.”

“I brought you here only to tell you that it will be yours when I build it. I have waited, because I felt I was not ready for it. Since I met you, I knew I was ready—and I don’t mean because you’re an architect. But we’ll have to wait a little longer, just another year or two, till the country gets back on its feet. This is the wrong time for building. Of course, everybody says that the day of the skyscraper is past. That it’s obsolete. I don’t give a damn about that. I’ll make it pay for itself. The Wynand Enterprises have offices scattered all over town. I want them all in one building. And I hold enough over the heads of enough important people to force them to rent all the rest of the space. Perhaps, it will be the last skyscraper built in New York. So much the better. The greatest and the last.”

Roark sat looking across the street, at the streaked ruins.

“To be torn down, Howard. All of it. Razed off. The place where I did not run things. To be supplanted by a park and the Wynand Building.... The best structures of New York are wasted because they can’t be seen, squeezed against one another in blocks. My building will be seen. It will reclaim the whole neighborhood. Let the others follow. Not the right location, they’ll say? Who makes right locations? They’ll see. This might become the new center of the city—when the city starts living again. I planned it when the Banner was nothing but a fourth-rate rag. I haven’t miscalculated, have I? I knew what I would become ... A monument to my life, Howard. Remember what you said when you came to my office for the first time? A statement of my life. There were things in my past which I have not liked. But all the things of which I was proud will remain. After I am gone that building will be Gail Wynand.... I knew I’d find the right architect when the time came. I didn’t know he would be much more than just an architect I hired. I’m glad it happened this way. It’s a kind of reward. It’s as if I had been forgiven. My last and greatest achievement will also be your greatest. It will be not only my monument but the best gift I could offer to the man who means most to me on earth. Don’t frown, you know that’s what you are to me. Look at that horror across the street. I want to sit here and watch you looking at it. That’s what we’re going to destroy—you and I. That’s what it will rise from—the Wynand Building by Howard Roark. I’ve waited for it from the day I was born. From the day you were born, you’ve waited for your one great chance. There it is, Howard, across the street. Yours—from me.”

X

IT HAD STOPPED RAINING, BUT PETER KEATING WISHED IT WOULD start again. The pavements glistened, there were dark blotches on the walls of buildings, and since it did not come from the sky, it looked as if the city were bathed in cold sweat. The air was heavy with untimely darkness, disquieting like premature old age, and there were yellow puddles of light in windows. Keating had missed the rain, but he felt wet, from his bones out.

He had left his office early, and he walked home. The office seemed unreal to him, as it had for a long time. He could find reality only in the evenings, when he slipped furtively up to Roark’s apartment. He did not slip and it was not furtive, he told himself angrily—and knew that it was; even though he walked through the lobby of the Enright House and rode up in an elevator, like any man on a legitimate errand. It was the vague anxiety, the impulse to glance around at every face, the fear of being recognized; it was a load of anonymous guilt, not toward any person, but the more frightening sense of guilt without a victim.

He took from Roark rough sketches for every detail of Cortlandt—to have them translated into working drawings by his own staff. He listened to Roark’s instructions. He memorized arguments to offer his employers against every possible objection. He absorbed like a recording machine. Afterward, when he gave explanations to his draftsmen, his voice sounded like a disk being played. He did not mind. He questioned nothing.

Now he walked slowly, through the streets full of rain that would not come. He looked up and saw empty space where the towers of familiar buildings had been; it did not look like fog or clouds, but like a solid spread of gray sky that had worked a gigantic, soundless destruction. That sight of buildings vanishing through the sky had always made him uneasy. He walked on, looking down.

It was the shoes that he noticed first. He knew that he must have seen the woman’s face, that the instinct of self-preservation had jerked his glance away from it and let his conscious perception begin with the shoes. They were flat, brown oxfords, offensively competent, too well shined on the muddy pavement, contemptuous of rain and of beauty. His eyes went to the brown skirt, to the tailored jacket, costly and cold like a uniform, to the hand with a hole in the finger of an expensive glove, to the lapel that bore a preposterous ornament—a bow-legged Mexican with red-enameled pants—stuck there in a clumsy attempt at pertness; to the thin lips, to the glasses, to the eyes.

“Katie,” he said.

She stood by the window of a bookstore; her glance hesitated halfway between recognition and a book title she had been examining; then, with recognition evident in the beginning of a smile, the glance went back to the book title, to finish and make an efficient note of it. Then her eyes returned to Keating. Her smile was pleasant; not as an effort over bitterness, and not as welcome; just pleasant.

“Why, Peter Keating,” she said. “Hello, Peter.”

“Katie ...” He could not extend his hand or move closer to her.

“Yes, imagine running into you like this, why, New York is just like any small town, though I suppose without the better features.” There was no strain in her voice.

“What are you doing here? I thought ... I heard ...” He knew she had a good job in Washington and had moved there two years ago.

“Just a business trip. Have to dash right back tomorrow. Can’t say that I mind it, either. New York seems so dead, so slow.”

“Well, I’m glad you like your job ... if you mean ... isn’t that what you mean?”

“Like my job? What a silly thing to say. Washington is the only grown-up place in the country. I don’t see how people can live anywhere else. What have you been doing, Peter? I saw your name in the paper the other day, it was something important.”

“I ... I’m working.... You haven’t changed much, Katie, not really, have you?—I mean, your face—you look like you used to—in a way ...”

“It’s the only face I’ve got. Why do people always have to talk about changes if they haven’t seen each other for a year or two? I ran into Grace Parker yesterday and she had to go into an inventory of my appearance. I could just hear every word before she said it—‘You look so nice—not a day older, really, Catherine.’ People are provincial.”

“But ... you do look nice.... It’s ... nice to see you ...”

“I’m glad to see you, too. How is the building industry?”

“I don’t know.... What you read about must have been Cortlandt ... I’m doing Cortlandt Homes, a housing ...”

“Yes, of course. That was it. I think it’s very good for you, Peter. To do a job, not just for private profit and a fat fee, but with a social purpose. I think architects should stop money grubbing and give a little time to government work and broader objectives.”

“Why, most of them would grab it if they could get it, it’s one of the hardest rackets to break into, it’s a closed ...”

“Yes, yes, I know. It’s simply impossible to make the laymen understand our methods of working, and that’s why all we hear are all those stupid, boring complaints. You mustn’t read the Wynand papers, Peter.”

“I never read the Wynand papers. What on earth has it got to do with ... Oh, I ... I don’t know what we’re talking about, Katie.”

He thought that she owed him nothing, or every kind of anger and scorn she could command; and yet there was a human obligation she still had toward him: she owed him an evidence of strain in this meeting. There was none.

“We really should have a great deal to talk about, Peter.” The words would have lifted him, had they not been pronounced so easily. “But we can’t stand here all day.” She glanced at her wrist watch. “I’ve got an hour or so, suppose you take me somewhere for a cup of tea, you could use some hot tea, you look frozen.”

That was her first comment on his appearance; that, and a glance without reaction. He thought, even Roark had been shocked, had acknowledged the change.

“Yes, Katie. That will be wonderful. I ...” He wished she had not been the one to suggest it; it was the right thing for them to do; he wished she had not been able to think of the right thing; not so quickly. “Let’s find a nice, quiet place....”

“We’ll go to Thorpe’s. There’s one around the corner. They have the nicest watercress sandwiches.”

It was she who took his arm to cross the street, and dropped it again on the other side. The gesture had been automatic. She had not noticed it.

There was a counter of pastry and candy inside the door of Thorpe’s. A large bowl of sugar-coated almonds, green and white, glared at Keating. The place smelled of orange icing. The lights were dim, a stuffy orange haze; the odor made the light seem sticky. The tables were too small, set close together.

He sat, looking down at a paper lace doily on a black glass table top. But when he lifted his eyes to Catherine, he knew that no caution was necessary: she did not react to his scrutiny; her expression remained the same, whether he studied her face or that of the woman at the next table; she seemed to have no consciousness of her own person.

It was her mouth that had changed most, he thought; the lips were drawn in, with only a pale edge of flesh left around the imperious line of their opening; a mouth to issue orders, he thought, but not big orders or cruel orders; just mean little ones—about plumbing and disinfectants. He saw the fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes—a skin like paper that had been crumpled and then smoothed out.

She was telling him about her work in Washington, and he listened bleakly. He did not hear the words, only the tone of her voice, dry and crackling.

A waitress in a starched orchid uniform came to take their orders. Catherine snapped:

“The tea sandwiches special. Please.”

Keating said:

“A cup of coffee.” He saw Catherine’s eyes on him, and in a sudden panic of embarrassment, feeling he must not confess that he couldn’t swallow a bite of food now, feeling that the confession would anger her, he added: “A ham and swiss on rye, I guess.”

“Peter, what ghastly food habits! Wait a minute, waitress. You don’t want that, Peter. It’s very bad for you. You should have a fresh salad. And coffee is bad at this time of the day. Americans drink too much coffee.”

“All right,” said Keating.

“Tea and a combination salad, waitress.... And—oh, waitress!—no bread with the salad—you’re gaining weight, Peter—some diet crackers. Please.”

Keating waited until the orchid uniform had moved away, and then he said, hopefully:

“I have changed, haven’t I, Katie? I do look pretty awful?” Even a disparaging comment would be a personal link.

“What? Oh, I guess so. It isn’t healthy. But Americans know nothing whatever about the proper nutritional balance. Of course, men do make too much fuss over mere appearance. They’re much vainer than women. It’s really women who’re taking charge of all productive work now, and women will build a better world.”

“How does one build a better world, Katie?”

“Well, if you consider the determining factor, which is, of course, economic ...”

“No, I ... I didn’t ask it that way.... Katie, I’ve been very unhappy.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. One hears so many people say that nowadays. That’s because it’s a transition period and people feel rootless. But you’ve always had a bright disposition, Peter.”

“Do you ... do you remember what I was like?”

“Goodness, Peter, you talk as if it had been sixty-five years ago.”

“But so many things happened. I ...” He took the plunge; he had to take it; the crudest way seemed the easiest. “I was married. And divorced.”

“Yes, I read about that. I was glad when you were divorced.” She leaned forward. “If your wife was the kind of woman who could marry Gail Wynand, you were lucky to get rid of her.”

The tone of chronic impatience that ran words together had not altered to pronounce this. He had to believe it: this was all the subject meant to her.

“Katie, you’re very tactful and kind ... but drop the act,” he said, knowing in dread that it was not an act. “Drop it.... Tell me what you thought of me then.... Say everything.... I don’t mind.... I want to hear it.... Don’t you understand? I’ll feel better if I hear it.”

“Surely, Peter, you don’t want me to start some sort of recriminations ? I’d say it was conceited of you, if it weren’t so childish.”

“What did you feel—that day—when I didn’t come—and then you heard I was married?” He did not know what instinct drove him, through numbness, to be brutal as the only means left to him. “Katie, you suffered then?”

“Yes, of course I suffered. All young people do in such situations. It seems foolish afterward. I cried, and I screamed some dreadful things at Uncle Ellsworth, and he had to call a doctor to give me a sedative, and then weeks afterward I fainted on the street one day without any reason, which was really disgraceful. All the conventional things, I suppose, everybody goes through them, like measles. Why should I have expected to be exempt?—as Uncle Ellsworth said.” He thought that he had not known there was something worse than a living memory of pain: a dead one. “And of course we knew it was for the best. I can’t imagine myself married to you.”

“You can’t imagine it, Katie?”

“That is, nor to anyone else. It wouldn’t have worked, Peter. I’m temperamentally unsuited to domesticity. It’s too selfish and narrow. Of course, I understand what you feel just now and I appreciate it. It’s only human that you should feel something like remorse, since you did what is known as jilted me.” He winced. “You see how stupid those things sound. It’s natural for you to be a little contrite—a normal reflex—but we must look at it objectively, we’re grown-up, rational people, nothing is too serious, we can’t really help what we do, we’re conditioned that way, we just charge it off to experience and go on from there.”

“Katie! You’re not talking some fallen girl out of her problem. You’re speaking about yourself.”

“Is there any essential difference? Everybody’s problems are the same, just like everybody’s emotions.”

He saw her nibbling a thin strip of bread with a smear of green, and noticed that his order had been served. He moved his fork about in his salad bowl, and he made himself bite into a gray piece of diet cracker. Then he discovered how strange it was when one lost the knack of eating automatically and had to do it by full conscious effort; the cracker seemed inexhaustible; he could not finish the process of chewing ; he moved his jaws without reducing the amount of gritty pulp in his mouth.

“Katie ... for six years ... I thought of how I’d ask your forgiveness some day. And now I have the chance, but I won’t ask it. It seems ... it seems beside the point. I know it’s horrible to say that, but that’s how it seems to me. It was the worst thing I ever did in my life—but not because I hurt you. I did hurt you, Katie, and maybe more than you know yourself. But that’s not my worst guilt.... Katie, I wanted to marry you. It was the only thing I ever really wanted. And that’s the sin that can’t be forgiven—that I hadn’t done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because there’s no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain—and wasted pain.... Katie, why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world—to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want. As I wanted to marry you. Not as I want to sleep with some woman or get drunk or get my name in the papers. Those things—they’re not even desires—they’re things people do to escape from desires—because it’s such a big responsibility, really to want something.”

“Peter, what you’re saying is very ugly and selfish.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve always had to tell you the truth. About everything. Even if you didn’t ask. I had to.”

“Yes. You did. It was a commendable trait. You were a charming boy, Peter.”

It was the bowl of sugar-coated almonds on the counter that hurt him, he thought in dull anger. The almonds were green and white; they had no business being green and white at this time of the year; the colors of St. Patrick’s Day—then there was always candy like that in all the store windows—and St. Patrick’s Day meant spring—no, better than spring, that moment of wonderful anticipation just before spring is to begin.

“Katie, I won’t say that I’m still in love with you. I don’t know whether I am or not. I’ve never asked myself. It wouldn’t matter now. I’m not saying this because I hope for anything or think of trying or ... I know only that I loved you, Katie, I loved you, whatever I made of it, even if this is how I’ve got to say it for the last time, I loved you, Katie.”

She looked at him—and she seemed pleased. Not stirred, not happy, not pitying; but pleased in a casual way. He thought: If she were completely the spinster, the frustrated social worker, as people think of those women, the kind who would scorn sex in the haughty conceit of her own virtue, that would still be recognition, if only in hostility. But this—this amused tolerance seemed to admit that romance was only human, one had to take it, like everybody else, it was a popular weakness of no great consequence—she was gratified as she would have been gratified by the same words from any other man—it was like that red-enamel Mexican on her lapel, a contemptuous concession to people’s demand of vanity.

“Katie ... Katie, let’s say that this doesn’t count—this, now—it’s past counting anyway, isn’t it? This can’t touch what it was like, can it, Katie? ... People always regret that the past is so final, that nothing can change it—but I’m glad it’s so. We can’t spoil it. We can think of the past, can’t we? Why shouldn’t we? I mean, as you said, like grown-up people, not fooling ourselves, not trying to hope, but only to look back at it.... Do you remember when I came to your house in New York for the first time? You looked so thin and small, and your hair hung every which way. I told you I would never love anyone else. I held you on my lap, you didn’t weigh anything at all, and I told you I would never love anyone else. And you said you knew it.”

“I remember.”

“When we were together ... Katie, I’m ashamed of so many things, but not of one moment when we were together. When I asked you to marry me—no, I never asked you to marry me—I just said we were engaged—and you said ‘yes’—it was on a park bench—it was snowing ...”

“Yes.”

“You had funny woolen gloves. Like mittens. I remember—there were drops of water in the fuzz—round—like crystal—they nashed—it was because a car passed by.”

“Yes, I think it’s agreeable to look back occasionally. But one’s perspective widens. One grows richer spiritually with the years.”

He kept silent for a long time. Then he said, his voice flat:

“I’m sorry.”

“Why? You’re very sweet, Peter. I’ve always said men are the sentimentalists.”

He thought: It’s not an act—one can’t put on an act like that—unless it’s an act inside, for oneself, and then there is no limit, no way out, no reality....

She went on talking to him, and after a while it was about Washington again. He answered when it was necessary.

He thought that he had believed it was a simple sequence, the past and the present, and if there was loss in the past one was compensated by pain in the present, and pain gave it a form of immortality—but he had not known that one could destroy like this, kill retroactively—so that to her it had never existed.

She glanced at her wrist watch and gave a little gasp of impatience.

“I’m late already. I must run along.”

He said heavily:

“Do you mind if I don’t go with you, Katie? It’s not rudeness. I just think it’s better.”

“But of course. Not at all. I’m quite able to find my way in the streets and there’s no need for formalities among old friends.” She added, gathering her bag and gloves, crumpling a paper napkin into a ball, dropping it neatly into her teacup: “I’ll give you a ring next time I’m in town and we’ll have a bite together again. Though I can’t promise when that will be. I’m so busy, I have to go so many places, last month it was Detroit and next week I’m flying to St. Louis, but when they shoot me out to New York again, I’ll ring you up, so long, Peter, it was ever so nice.”

XI

GAIL WYNAND LOOKED AT THE SHINING WOOD OF THE YACHT DECK. The wood and a brass doorknob that had become a smear of fire gave him a sense of everything around him: the miles of space filled with sun, between the burning spreads of sky and ocean. It was February, and the yacht lay still, her engines idle, in the southern Pacific.

He leaned on the rail and looked down at Roark in the water. Roark floated on his back, his body stretched into a straight line, arms spread, eyes closed. The tan of his skin implied a month of days such as this. Wynand thought that this was the way he liked to apprehend space and time: through the power of his yacht, through the tan of Roark’s skin or the sunbrown of his own arms folded before him on the rail.

He had not sailed his yacht for several years. This time he had wanted Roark to be his only guest. Dominique was left behind.

Wynand had said: “You’re killing yourself, Howard. You’ve been going at a pace nobody can stand for long. Ever since Monadnock, isn’t it? Think you’d have the courage to perform the feat most difficult for you—to rest?”

He was astonished when Roark accepted without argument. Roark laughed:

“I’m not running away from my work, if that’s what surprises you. I know when to stop—and I can’t stop, unless it’s completely. I know I’ve overdone it. I’ve been wasting too much paper lately and doing awful stuff.”

“Do you ever do awful stuff?”

“Probably more of it than any other architect and with less excuse. The only distinction I can claim is that my botches end up in my own wastebasket.”

“I warn you, we’ll be away for months. If you begin to regret it and cry for your drafting table in a week, like all men who’ve never learned to loaf, I won’t take you back. I’m the worst kind of dictator aboard my yacht. You’ll have everything you can imagine, except paper or pencils. I won’t even leave you any freedom of speech. No mention of girders, plastics or reinforced concrete once you step on board. I’ll teach you to eat, sleep and exist like the most worthless millionaire.”

“I’d like to try that.”

The work in the office did not require Roark’s presence for the next few months. His current jobs were being completed. Two new commissions were not to be started until spring.

He had made all the sketches Keating needed for Cortlandt. The construction was about to begin. Before sailing, on a day in late December, Roark went to take a last look at the site of Cortlandt. An anonymous spectator in a group of the idle curious, he stood and watched the steam shovels biting the earth, breaking the way for future foundations. The East River was a broad band of sluggish black water; and beyond, in a sparse haze of snowflakes, the towers of the city stood softened, half suggested in watercolors of orchid and blue.

Dominique did not protest when Wynand told her that he wanted to sail on a long cruise with Roark. “Dearest, you understand that it’s not running away from you? I just need some time taken out of everything. Being with Howard is like being alone with myself, only more at peace.”

“Of course, Gail. I don’t mind.”

But he looked at her, and suddenly he laughed, incredulously pleased. “Dominique, I believe you’re jealous. It’s wonderful, I’m more grateful to him than ever—if it could make you jealous of me.”

She could not tell him that she was jealous or of whom.

The yacht sailed at the end of December. Roark watched, grinning, Wynand’s disappointment when Wynand found that he needed to enforce no discipline. Roark did not speak of buildings, lay for hours stretched out on deck in the sun, and loafed like an expert. They spoke little. There were days when Wynand could not remember what sentences they had exchanged. It would have seemed possible to him that they had not spoken at all. Their serenity was their best means of communication.

Today they had dived together to swim and Wynand had climbed back first. As he stood at the rail, watching Roark in the water, he thought of the power he held in this moment: he could order the yacht to start moving, sail away and leave that redheaded body to sun and ocean. The thought gave him pleasure: the sense of power and the sense of surrender to Roark in the knowledge that no conceivable force could make him exercise that power. Every physical instrumentality was on his side: a few contractions of his vocal chords giving the order and someone’s hand opening a valve—and the obedient machine would move away. He thought: It’s not just a moral issue, not the mere horror of the act, one could conceivably abandon a man if the fate of a continent depended on it. But nothing would enable him to abandon this man. He, Gail Wynand, was the helpless one in this moment, with the solid planking of the deck under his feet. Roark, floating like a piece of driftwood, held a power greater than that of the engine in the belly of the yacht. Wynand thought: Because that is the power from which the engine has come.

Roark climbed back on deck; Wynand looked at Roark’s body, at the threads of water running down the angular planes. He said:

“You made a mistake on the Stoddard Temple, Howard. That statue should have been, not of Dominique, but of you.”

“No. I’m too egotistical for that.”

“Egotistical? An egotist would have loved it. You use words in the strangest way.”

“In the exact way. I don’t wish to be the symbol of anything. I’m only myself.”

Stretched in a deck chair, Wynand glanced up with satisfaction at the lantern, a disk of frosted glass on the bulkhead behind him: it cut off the black void of the ocean and gave him privacy within solid walls of light. He heard the sound of the yacht’s motion, he felt the warm night air on his face, he saw nothing but the stretch of deck around him, enclosed and final.

Roark stood before him at the rail; a tall white figure leaning back against black space, his head lifted as Wynand had seen it lifted in an unfinished building. His hands clasped the rail. The short shirt sleeves left his arms in the light; vertical ridges of shadow stressed the tensed muscles of his arms and the tendons of his neck. Wynand thought of the yacht’s engine, of skyscrapers, of transatlantic cables, of everything man had made.

“Howard, this is what I wanted. To have you here with me.”

“I know.”

“Do you know what it really is? Avarice. I’m a miser about two things on earth: you and Dominique. I’m a millionaire who’s never owned anything. Do you remember what you said about ownership? I’m like a savage who’s discovered the idea of private property and run amuck on it. It’s funny. Think of Ellsworth Toohey.”

“Why Ellsworth Toohey?”

“I mean, the things he preaches. I’ve been wondering lately whether he really understands what he’s advocating. Selflessness in the absolute sense? Why, that’s what I’ve been. Does he know that I’m the embodiment of his ideal? Of course, he wouldn’t approve of my motive, but motives never alter facts. If it’s true selflessness he’s after, in the philosophical sense—and Mr. Toohey is a philosopher—in a sense much beyond matters of money, why, let him look at me. I’ve never owned anything. I’ve never wanted anything. I didn’t give a damn—in the most cosmic way Toohey could ever hope for. I made myself into a barometer subject to the pressure of the whole world. The voice of his masses pushed me up and down. Of course, I collected a fortune in the process. Does that change the intrinsic reality of the picture? Suppose I gave away every penny of it. Suppose I had never wished to take any money at all, but had set out in pure altruism to serve the people. What would I have to do? Exactly what I’ve done. Give the greatest pleasure to the greatest number. Express the opinions, the desires, the tastes of the majority. The majority that voted me its approval and support freely, in the shape of a three-cent ballot dropped at the corner newsstand every morning. The Wynand papers? For thirty-one years they have represented everybody except Gail Wynand. I erased my ego out of existence in a way never achieved by any saint in a cloister. Yet people call me corrupt. Why? The saint in a cloister sacrifices only material things. It’s a small price to pay for the glory of his soul. He hoards his soul and gives up the world. But I—I took automobiles, silk pyjamas, a penthouse, and gave the world my soul in exchange. Who’s sacrificed more -if sacrifice is the test of virtue? Who’s the actual saint?”

“Gail ... I didn’t think you’d ever admit that to yourself.”

“Why not? I knew what I was doing. I wanted power over a collective soul and I got it. A collective soul. It’s a messy kind of concept, but if anyone wishes to visualize it concretely, let him pick up a copy of the New York Banner.”

“Yes...”

“Of course, Toohey would tell me that this is not what he means by altruism. He means I shouldn’t leave it up to the people to decide what they want. I should decide it. I should determine, not what I like nor what they like, but what I think they should like, and then ram it down their throats. It would have to be rammed, since their voluntary choice is the Banner. Well, there are several such altruists in the world today.”

“You realize that?”

“Of course. What else can one do if one must serve the people? If one must live for others? Either pander to everybody’s wishes and be called corrupt; or impose on everybody by force your own idea of everybody’s good. Can you think of any other way?”

“No.”

“What’s left then? Where does decency start? What begins where altruism ends? Do you see what I’m in love with?”

“Yes, Gail.” Wynand had noticed that Roark’s voice had a reluctance that sounded almost like sadness.

“What’s the matter with you? Why do you sound like that?”

“I’m sorry. Forgive me. It’s just something I thought. I’ve been thinking of this for a long time. And particularly all these days when you’ve made me lie on deck and loaf.”

“Thinking about me?”

“About you—among many other things.”

“What have you decided?”

“I’m not an altruist, Gail. I don’t decide for others.”

“You don’t have to worry about me. I’ve sold myself, but I’ve held no illusions about it. I’ve never become an Alvah Scarret. He really believes whatever the public believes. I despise the public. That’s my only vindication. I’ve sold my life, but I got a good price. Power. I’ve never used it. I couldn’t afford a personal desire. But now I’m free. Now I can use it for what I want. For what I believe. For Dominique. For you.”

Roark turned away. When he looked back at Wynand, he said only:

“I hope so, Gail.”

“What have you been thinking about, these past weeks?”

“The principle behind the dean who fired me from Stanton.”

“What principle?”

“The thing that is destroying the world. The thing you were talking about. Actual selflessness.”

“The ideal which they say does not exist?”

“They’re wrong. It does exist—though not in the way they imagine. It’s what I couldn’t understand about people for a long time. They have no self. They live within others. They live second-hand. Look at Peter Keating.”

“You look at him. I hate his guts.”

“I’ve looked at him—at what’s left of him—and it’s helped me to understand. He’s paying the price and wondering for what sin and telling himself that he’s been too selfish. In what act or thought of his has there ever been a self? What was his aim in life? Greatness—in other people’s eyes. Fame, admiration, envy—all that which comes from others. Others dictated his convictions, which he did not hold, but he was satisfied that others believed he held them. Others were his motive power and his prime concern. He didn’t want to be great, but to be thought great. He didn’t want to build, but to be admired as a builder. He borrowed from others in order to make an impression on others. There’s your actual selflessness. It’s his ego that he’s betrayed and given up. But everybody calls him selfish.”

“That’s the pattern most people follow.”

“Yes! And isn’t that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he’s honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he’s great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison. The man whose sole aim is to make money. Now I don’t see anything evil in a desire to make money. But money is only a means to some end. If a man wants it for a personal purpose—to invest in his industry, to create, to study, to travel, to enjoy luxury—he’s completely moral. But the men who place money first go much beyond that. Personal luxury is a limited endeavor. What they want is ostentation: to show, to stun, to entertain, to impress others. They’re second-handers. Look at our so-called cultural endeavors. A lecturer who spouts some borrowed rehash of nothing at all that means nothing at all to him—and the people who listen and don’t give a damn, but sit there in order to tell their friends that they have attended a lecture by a famous name. All second-handers.”

“If I were Ellsworth Toohey, I’d say: aren’t you making out a case against selfishness? Aren’t they all acting on a selfish motive—to be noticed, liked, admired?”

“—by others. At the price of their own self-respect. In the realm of greatest importance—the realm of values, of judgment, of spirit, of thought—they place others above self, in the exact manner which altruism demands. A truly selfish man cannot be affected by the approval of others. He doesn’t need it.”

“I think Toohey understands that. That’s what helps him spread his vicious nonsense. Just weakness and cowardice. It’s so easy to run to others. It’s so hard to stand on one’s own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can’t fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It’s easier to donate a few thousands to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It’s simple to seek substitutes for competence—such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.”

“That, precisely, is the deadliness of second-handers. They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people. They don’t ask: ‘Is this true?’ They ask: ‘Is this what others think is true?’ Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull. What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egotists. You don’t think through another’s brain and you don’t work through another’s hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life. Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation—anchored to nothing. That’s the emptiness I couldn’t understand in people. That’s what stopped me whenever I faced a committee. Men without an ego. Opinion without a rational process. Motion without brakes or motor. Power without responsibility. The second-hander acts, but the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person. It’s everywhere and nowhere and you can’t reason with him. He’s not open to reason. You can’t speak to him—he can’t hear. You’re tried by an empty bench. A blind mass running amuck, to crush you without sense or purpose. Steve Mallory couldn’t define the monster, but he knew. That’s the drooling beast he fears. The second-hander.”

“I think your second-handers understand this, try as they might not to admit it to themselves. Notice how they’ll accept anything except a man who stands alone. They recognize him at once. By instinct. There’s a special, insidious kind of hatred for him. They forgive criminals. They admire dictators. Crime and violence are a tie. A form of mutual dependence. They need ties. They’ve got to force their miserable little personalities on every single person they meet. The independent man kills them—because they don’t exist within him and that’s the only form of existence they know. Notice the malignant kind of resentment against any idea that propounds independence. Notice the malice toward an independent man. Look back at your own life, Howard, and at the people you’ve met. They know. They’re afraid. You’re a reproach.”

“That’s because some sense of dignity always remains in them. They’re still human beings. But they’ve been taught to seek themselves in others. Yet no man can achieve the kind of absolute humility that would need no self-esteem in any form. He wouldn’t survive. So after centuries of being pounded with the doctrine that altruism is the ultimate ideal, men have accepted it in the only way it could be accepted. By seeking self-esteem through others. By living second-hand. And it has opened the way for every kind of horror. It has become the dreadful form of selfishness which a truly selfish man couldn’t have conceived. And now, to cure a world perishing from selflessness, we’re asked to destroy the self. Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You’ve wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he’s ever held a truly personal desire, he’d find the answer. He’d see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He’s not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander’s delusion—prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can’t say about a single thing: ‘This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me.’ Then he wonders why he’s unhappy. Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched. The things which are sacred or precious to us are the things we withdraw from promiscuous sharing. But now we are taught to throw everything within us into public light and common pawing. To seek joy in meeting halls. We haven’t even got a word for the quality I mean—for the self-sufficiency of man’s spirit. It’s difficult to call it selfishness or egotism, the words have been perverted, they’ve come to mean Peter Keating. Gail, I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I’ve always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I’ve always recognized it at once—and it’s the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that. Now I know what it is. A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.”

“I’m glad you admit that you have friends.”

“I even admit that I love them. But I couldn’t love them if they were my chief reason for living. Do you notice that Peter Keating hasn’t a single friend left? Do you see why? If one doesn’t respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others.”

“To hell with Peter Keating. I’m thinking of you—and your friends.”

Roark smiled. “Gail, if this boat were sinking, I’d give my life to save you. Not because it’s any kind of duty. Only because I like you, for reasons and standards of my own. I could die for you. But I couldn’t and wouldn’t live for you.”

“Howard, what were the reasons and standards?”

Roark looked at him and realized that he had said all the things he had tried not to say to Wynand. He answered:

“That you weren’t born to be a second-hander.”

Wynand smiled. He heard the sentence—and nothing else.

Afterward, when Wynand had gone below to his cabin, Roark remained alone on deck. He stood at the rail, staring out at the ocean, at nothing.

He thought: I haven’t mentioned to him the worst second-hander of all—the man who goes after power.

XII

IT WAS APRIL WHEN ROARK AND WYNAND RETURNED TO THE CITY. The skyscrapers looked pink against the blue sky, an incongruous shade of porcelain on masses of stone. There were small tufts of green on the trees in the streets.

Roark went to his office. His staff shook hands with him and he saw the strain of smiles self-consciously repressed, until a young boy burst out: “What the hell! Why can’t we say how glad we are to see you back, boss?” Roark laughed. “Go ahead. I can’t tell you how damn glad I am to be back.” Then he sat on a table in the drafting room, while they all reported to him on the past three months, interrupting one another; he played with a ruler in his hands, not noticing it, like a man with the feel of his farm’s soil under his fingers, after an absence.

In the afternoon, alone at his desk, he opened a newspaper. He had not seen a newspaper for three months. He noticed an item about the construction of Cortlandt Homes. He saw the line: “Peter Keating, architect. Gordon L. Prescott and Augustus Webb, associate designers.”

He sat very still.

That evening, he went to see Cortlandt.

The first building was almost completed. It stood alone on the large, empty tract. The workers had left for the day; a small light showed in the shack of the night watchman. The building had the skeleton of what Roark had designed, with the remnants of ten different breeds piled on the lovely symmetry of the bones. He saw the economy of plan preserved, but the expense of incomprehensible features added; the variety of modeled masses gone, replaced by the monotony of brutish cubes; a new wing added, with a vaulted roof, bulging out of a wall like a tumor, containing a gymnasium; strings of balconies added, made of metal stripes painted a violent blue; corner windows without purpose; an angle cut off for a useless door, with a round metal awning supported by a pole, like a haberdashery in the Broadway district; three vertical bands of brick, leading from nowhere to nowhere; the general style of what the profession called “Bronx Modern”; a panel of bas-relief over the main entrance, representing a mass of muscle which could be discerned as either three or four bodies, one of them with an arm raised, holding a screwdriver.

There were white crosses on the fresh panes of glass in the windows, and it looked appropriate, like an error x’ed out of existence. There was a band of red in the sky, to the west, beyond Manhattan, and the buildings of the city rose straight and black against it.

Roark stood across the space of the future road before the first house of Cortlandt. He stood straight, the muscles of his throat pulled, his wrists held down and away from his body, as he would have stood before a firing squad.

No one could tell how it had happened. There had been no deliberate intention behind it. It had just happened.

First, Toohey told Keating one morning that Gordon L. Prescott and Gus Webb would be put on the payroll as associate designers. “What do you care, Peter? It won’t come out of your fee. It won’t cut your prestige at all, since you’re the big boss. They won’t be much more than your draftsmen. All I want is to give the boys a boost. It will help their reputation, to be tagged with this project in some way. I’m very interested in building up their reputation.”

“But what for? There’s nothing for them to do. It’s all done.”

“Oh, any kind of last-minute drafting. Save time for your own staff. You can share the expense with them. Don’t be a hog.”

Toohey had told the truth; he had no other purpose in mind.

Keating could not discover what connections Prescott and Webb possessed, with whom, in what office, on what terms—among the dozens of officials involved in the project. The entanglement of responsibility was such that no one could be quite certain of anyone’s authority. It was clear only that Prescott and Webb had friends, and that Keating could not keep them off the job.

The changes began with the gymnasium. The lady in charge of tenant selection demanded a gymnasium. She was a social worker and her task was to end with the opening of the project. She acquired a permanent job by getting herself appointed Director of Social Recreation for Cortlandt. No gymnasium had been provided in the original plans; there were two schools and a Y.M.C.A. within walking distance. She declared that this was an outrage against the children of the poor. Prescott and Webb supplied the gymnasium. Other changes followed, of a purely esthetic nature. Extras piled on the cost of construction so carefully devised for economy. The Director of Social Recreation departed for Washington to discuss the matter of a Little Theater and a Meeting Hall she wished added to the next two buildings of Cortlandt.

The changes in the drawings came gradually, a few at a time. The orders okaying the changes came from headquarters. “But we’re ready to start!” cried Keating. “What the hell,” drawled Gus Webb, “set ‘em back just a coupla thousand bucks more, that’s all.” “Now as to the balconies,” said Gordon L. Prescott, “they lend a certain modern style. You don’t want the damn thing to look so bare. It’s depressing. Besides, you don’t understand psychology. The people who’ll live here are used to sitting out on fire-escapes. They love it. They’ll miss it. You gotta give ’em a place to sit on in the fresh air.... The cost? Hell, if you’re so damn worried about the cost, I’ve got an idea where we can save plenty. We’ll do without closet doors. What do they need doors for on closets? It’s old-fashioned.” All the closet doors were omitted.

Keating fought. It was the kind of battle he had never entered, but he tried everything possible to him, to the honest limit of his exhausted strength. He went from office to office, arguing, threatening, pleading. But he had no influence, while his associate designers seemed to control an underground river with interlocking tributaries. The officials shrugged and referred him to someone else. No one cared about an issue of esthetics. “What’s the difference?” “It doesn’t come out of your pocket, does it?” “Who are you to have it all your way? Let the boys contribute something.”

He appealed to Ellsworth Toohey, but Toohey was not interested. He was busy with other matters and he had no desire to provoke a bureaucratic quarrel. In all truth, he had not prompted his protégés to their artistic endeavor, but he saw no reason for attempting to stop them. He was amused by the whole thing. “But it’s awful, Ellsworth! You know it’s awful!” “Oh, I suppose so. What do you care, Peter? Your poor but unwashed tenants won’t be able to appreciate the finer points of architectural art. See that the plumbing works.”

“But what for? What for? What for?” Keating cried to his associate designers. “Well, why shouldn’t we have any say at all?” asked Gordon L. Prescott. “We want to express our individuality too.”

When Keating invoked his contract, he was told: “All right, go ahead, try to sue the government. Try it.” At times, he felt a desire to kill. There was no one to kill. Had he been granted the privilege, he could not have chosen a victim. Nobody was responsible. There was no purpose and no cause. It had just happened.

Keating came to Roark’s house on the evening after Roark’s return. He had not been summoned. Roark opened the door and said: “Good evening, Peter,” but Keating could not answer. They walked silently into the work room. Roark sat down, but Keating remained standing in the middle of the floor and asked, his voice dull:

“What are you going to do?”

“You must leave that up to me now.”

“I couldn’t help it, Howard.... I couldn’t help it!”

“I suppose not.”

“What can you do now? You can’t sue the government.”

“No.”

Keating thought that he should sit down, but the distance to a chair seemed too great. He felt he would be too conspicuous if he moved.

“What are you going to do to me, Howard?”

“Nothing.”

“Want me to confess the truth to them? To everybody?”

“No.”

After a while Keating whispered:

“Will you let me give you the fee ... everything ... and ...”

Roark smiled.

“I’m sorry ...” Keating whispered, looking away.

He waited, and then the plea he knew he must not utter came out as:

“I’m scared, Howard ...”

Roark shook his head.

“Whatever I do, it won’t be to hurt you, Peter. I’m guilty, too. We both are.”

“You’re guilty?”

“It’s I who’ve destroyed you, Peter. From the beginning. By helping you. There are matters in which one must not ask for help nor give it. I shouldn’t have done your projects at Stanton. I shouldn’t have done the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. Nor Cortlandt. I loaded you with more than you could carry. It’s like an electric current too strong for the circuit. It blows the fuse. Now we’ll both pay for it. It will be hard on you, but it will be harder on me.”

“You’d rather ... I went home now, Howard?”

“Yes.”

At the door Keating said:

“Howard! They didn’t do it on purpose.”

“That’s what makes it worse.”

Dominique heard the sound of the car rising up the hill road. She thought it was Wynand coming home. He had worked late in the city every night of the two weeks since his return.

The motor filled the spring silence of the countryside. There was no sound in the house; only the small rustle of her hair as she leaned her head back against a chair cushion. In a moment she was not conscious of hearing the car’s approach, it was so familiar at this hour, part of the loneliness and privacy outside.

She heard the car stop at the door. The door was never locked; there were no neighbors or guests to expect. She heard the door opening, and steps in the hall downstairs. The steps did not pause, but walked with familiar certainty up the stairs. A hand turned the knob of her door.

It was Roark. She thought, while she was rising to her feet, that he had never entered her room before; but he knew every part of this house; as he knew everything about her body. She felt no moment of shock, only the memory of one, a shock in the past tense, the thought: I must have been shocked when I saw him, but not now. Now, by the time she was standing before him, it seemed very simple.

She thought: The most important never has to be said between us. It has always been said like this. He did not want to see me alone. Now he’s here. I waited and I’m ready.

“Good evening, Dominique.”

She heard the name pronounced to fill the space of five years. She said quietly :

“Good evening, Roark.”

“I want you to help me.”

She was standing on the station platform of Clayton, Ohio, on the witness stand of the Stoddard trial, on the ledge of a quarry, to let herself—as she had been then—share this sentence she heard now.

“Yes, Roark.”

He walked across the room he had designed for her, he sat down, facing her, the width of the room between them. She found herself seated too, not conscious of her own movements, only of his, as if his body contained two sets of nerves, his own and hers.

“Next Monday night, Dominique, exactly at eleven-thirty, I want you to drive up to the site of Cortlandt Homes.”

She noticed that she was conscious of her eyelids; not painfully, but just conscious; as if they had tightened and would not move again. She had seen the first building of Cortlandt. She knew what she was about to hear.

“You must be alone in your car and you must be on your way home from some place where you had an appointment to visit, made in advance. A place that can be reached from here only by driving past Cortlandt. You must be able to prove that afterward. I want your car to run out of gas in front of Cortlandt, at eleven-thirty. Honk your horn. There’s an old night watchman there. He will come out. Ask him to help you and send him to the nearest garage, which is a mile away.”

She said steadily, “Yes, Roark.”

“When he’s gone, get out of your car. There’s a big stretch of vacant land by the road, across from the building, and a kind of trench beyond. Walk to that trench as fast as you can, get to the bottom and lie down on the ground. Lie flat. After a while, you can come back to the car. You will know when to come back. See that you’re found in the car and that your condition matches its condition—approximately.”

“Yes, Roark.”

“Have you understood?”

“Yes.”

“Everything?”

“Yes. Everything.”

They were standing. She saw only his eyes and that he was smiling.

She heard him say: “Good night, Dominique,” he walked out and she heard his car driving away. She thought of his smile.

She knew that he did not need her help for the thing he was going to do, he could find other means to get rid of the watchman; that he had let her have a part in this, because she would not survive what was to follow if he hadn’t; that this had been the test.

He had not wanted to name it; he had wanted her to understand and show no fear. She had not been able to accept the Stoddard trial, she had run from the dread of seeing him hurt by the world, but she had agreed to help him in this. Had agreed in complete serenity. She was free and he knew it.

The road ran flat across the dark stretches of Long Island, but Dominique felt as if she were driving uphill. That was the only abnormal sensation: the sensation of rising, as if her car were speeding vertically. She kept her eyes on the road, but the dashboard on the rim of her vision looked like the panel of an airplane. The clock on the dashboard said 11:10.

She was amused, thinking: I’ve never learned to fly a plane and now I know how it feels; just like this, the unobstructed space and no effort. And no weight. That’s supposed to happen in the stratosphere—or is it the interplanetary space?—where one begins to float and there’s no law of gravity. No law of any kind of gravity at all. She heard herself laughing aloud.

Just that sense of rising.... Otherwise, she felt normal. She had never driven a car so well. She thought: It’s a dry, mechanical job, to drive a car, so I know I’m very clearheaded; because driving seemed easy, like breathing or swallowing, an immediate function requiring no attention. She stopped for red lights that hung in the air over crossings of anonymous streets in unknown suburbs, she turned corners, she passed other cars, and she was certain that no accident could happen to her tonight; her car was directed by remote control—one of those automatic rays she’d read about—was it a beacon or a radio beam?—and she only sat at the wheel.

It left her free to be conscious of nothing but small matters, and to feel careless and ... unserious, she thought; so completely unserious. It was a kind of clarity, being more normal than normal, as crystal is more transparent than empty air. Just small matters: the thin silk of her short, black dress and the way it was pulled over her knee, the flexing of her toes inside her pump when she moved her foot, “Danny’s Diner” in gold letters on a dark window that flashed past.

She had been very gay at the dinner given by the wife of some banker, important friends of Gail’s, whose names she could not quite remember now. It had been a wonderful dinner in a huge Long Island mansion. They had been so glad to see her and so sorry that Gail could not come. She had eaten everything she had seen placed before her. She had had a splendid appetite—as on rare occasions of her childhood when she came running home after a day spent in the woods and her mother was so pleased, because her mother was afraid that she might grow up to be anemic.

She had entertained the guests at the dinner table with stories of her childhood, she had made them laugh, and it had been the gayest dinner party her hosts could remember. Afterward, in the drawing room, with the windows open wide to a dark sky—a moonless sky that stretched out beyond the trees, beyond the towns, all the way to the banks of the East River—she had laughed and talked, she had smiled at the people around her with a warmth that made them all speak freely of the things dearest to them, she had loved those people, and they had known they were loved, she had loved every person anywhere on earth, and some woman had said: “Dominique, I didn’t know you could be so wonderful!” and she had answered: “I haven’t a care in the world.”

But she had really noticed nothing except the watch on her wrist and that she must be out of that house by 10:50. She had no idea of what she would say to take her leave, but by 10:45 it had been said, correctly and convincingly, and by 10: 50 her foot was on the accelerator.

It was a closed roadster, black with red leather upholstery. She thought how nicely John, the chauffeur, had kept that red leather polished. There would be nothing left of the car, and it was proper that it should look its best for its last ride. Like a woman on her first night. I never dressed for my first night—I had no first night—only something ripped off me and the taste of quarry dust in my teeth.

When she saw black vertical strips with dots of light filling the glass of the car’s side window, she wondered what had happened to the glass. Then she realized that she was driving along the East River and that this was New York, on the other side. She laughed and thought: No, this is not New York, this is a private picture pasted to the window of my car, all of it, here, on one small pane, under my hand, I own it, it’s mine now—she ran one hand across the buildings from the Battery to Queensborough Bridge—Roark, it’s mine and I’m giving it to you.

The figure of the night watchman was now fifteen inches tall in the distance. When it gets to be ten inches, I’ll start, thought Dominique. She stood by the side of her car and wished the watchman would walk faster.

The building was a black mass that propped the sky in one spot. The rest of the sky sagged, intimately low over a flat stretch of ground. The closest streets and houses were years away, far on the rim of space, irregular little dents, like the teeth of a broken saw.

She felt a large pebble under the sole of her pump; it was uncomfortable, but she would not move her foot; it would make a sound. She was not alone. She knew that he was somewhere in that building, the width of a street away from her. There was no sound and no light in the building; only white crosses on black windows. He would need no light; he knew every hall, every stairwell.

The watchman had shrunk away. She jerked the door of her car open. She threw her hat and bag inside, and flung the door shut. She heard the slam of sound when she was across the road, running over the empty tract, away from the building.

She felt the silk of her dress clinging to her legs, and it served as a tangible purpose of flight, to push against that, to tear past that barrier as fast as she could. There were pits and dry stubble on the ground. She fell once, but she noticed it only when she was running again.

She saw the trench in the darkness. Then she was on her knees, at the bottom, and then stretched flat on her stomach, face down, her mouth pressed to the earth.

She felt the pounding in her thighs and she twisted her body once in a long convulsion, to feel the earth with her legs, her breasts, the skin of her arms. It was like lying in Roark’s bed.

The sound was the crack of a fist on the back of her head. She felt the thrust of the earth against her, flinging her up, to her feet, to the edge of the trench. The upper part of the Cortlandt building had tilted and hung still while a broken streak of sky grew slowly across it. As if the sky were slicing the building in half. Then the streak became turquoise blue light. Then there was no upper part, but only window frames and girders flying through the air, the building spreading over the sky, a long, thin tongue of red shooting from the center, another blow of a fist, and then another, a blinding flash and the glass panes of the skyscrapers across the river glittering like spangles.

She did not remember that he had ordered her to lie flat, that she was standing, that glass and twisted iron were raining around her. In the flash when the walls rose outward and a building opened like a sunburst, she thought of him there, somewhere beyond, the builder who had to destroy, who knew every crucial point of that structure, who had made the delicate balance of stress and support; she thought of him selecting these key spots, placing the blast, a doctor turned murderer, expertly cracking heart, brain and lungs at once. He was there, he saw it and what it did to him was worse than what it did to the building. But he was there and he welcomed it.

She saw the city enveloped in the light for half a second, she could see window ledges and cornices miles away, she thought of dark rooms and ceilings licked by this fire, she saw the peaks of towers lighted against the sky, her city now and his. “Roark!” she screamed. “Roark! Roark!” She did not know she screamed. She could not hear her voice in the blast.

Then she was running across the field to the smoking ruin, running over broken glass, planting her feet down full with each step, because she enjoyed the pain. There was no pain left ever to be felt by her again. A spread of dust stood over the field like an awning. She heard the shriek of sirens starting far away.

It was still a car, though the rear wheels were crushed under a piece of furnace machinery, and an elevator door lay over the hood. She crawled to the seat. She had to look as if she had not moved from here. She gathered handfuls of glass off the floor and poured it over her lap, over her hair. She took a sharp splinter and slashed the skin of her neck, her legs, her arms. What she felt was not pain. She saw blood shooting out of her arm, running down on her lap, soaking the black silk, trickling between her thighs. Her head fell back, mouth open, panting. She did not want to stop. She was free. She was invulnerable. She did not know she had cut an artery. She felt so light. She was laughing at the law of gravity.

When she was found by the men of the first police car to reach the scene, she was unconscious, a few minutes’ worth of life left in her body.

XIII

DOMINIQUE GLANCED ABOUT THE BEDROOM OF THE PENTHOUSE. IT was her first contact with surroundings she was ready to recognize. She knew she had been brought here after many days in a hospital. The bedroom seemed lacquered with light. It’s that clarity of crystal over everything, she thought; that has remained; it will remain forever. She saw Wynand standing by her bed. He was watching her. He looked amused.

She remembered seeing him at the hospital. He had not looked amused then. She knew the doctor had told him she would not survive, that first night. She had wanted to tell them all that she would, that she had no choice now but to live; only it did not seem important to tell people anything, ever.

Now she was back. She could feel bandages on her throat, her legs, her left arm. But her hands lay before her on the blanket, and the gauze had been removed; there were only a few thin red scars left.

“You blasted little fool!” said Wynand happily. “Why did you have to make such a good job of it?”

Lying on the white pillow, with her smooth gold hair and a white, high-necked hospital gown, she looked younger than she had ever looked as a child. She had the quiet radiance presumed and never found in childhood: the full consciousness of certainty, of innocence, of peace.

“I ran out of gas,” she said, “and I was waiting there in my car when suddenly ...”

“I’ve already told that story to the police. So has the night watchman. But didn’t you know that glass must be handled with discretion?”

Gail looks rested, she thought, and very confident. It has changed everything for him, too; in the same way.

“It didn’t hurt,” she said.

“Next time you want to play the innocent bystander, let me coach you.”

“They believe it though, don’t they?”

“Oh yes, they believe it. They have to. You almost died. I don’t see why he had to save the watchman’s life and almost take yours.”

“Who?”

“Howard, my dear. Howard Roark.”

“What has he to do with it?”

“Darling, you’re not being questioned by the police. You will be, though, and you’ll have to be more convincing than that. However, I’m sure you’ll succeed. They won’t think of the Stoddard trial.”

“Oh.”

“You did it then and you’ll always do it. Whatever you think of him, you’ll always feel what I feel about his work.”

“Gail, you’re glad I did it?”

“Yes.”

She saw him looking down at her hand that lay on the edge of the bed. Then he was on his knees, his lips pressed to her hand, not raising it, not touching it with his fingers, only with his mouth. That was the sole confession he would permit himself of what her days in the hospital had cost him. She lifted her other hand and moved it over his hair. She thought: It will be worse for you than if I had died, Gail, but it will be all right, it won’t hurt you, there’s no pain left in the world, nothing to compare with the fact that we exist: he, you and I—you’ve understood all that matters, though you don’t know you’ve lost me.

He lifted his head and got up.

“I didn’t intend to reproach you in any way. Forgive me.”

“I won’t die, Gail. I feel wonderful.”

“You look it.”

“Have they arrested him?”

“He’s out on bail.”

“You’re happy?”

“I’m glad you did it and that it was for him. I’m glad he did it. He had to.”

“Yes. And it will be the Stoddard trial again.”

“Not quite.”

“You’ve wanted another chance, Gail? All these years?”

“Yes.”

“May I see the papers?”

“No. Not until you’re up.”

“Not even the Banner?”

“Particularly not the Banner.”

“I love you, Gail. If you stick to the end ...”

“Don’t offer me any bribes. This is not between you and me. Not even between him and me.”

“But between you and God?”

“If you want to call it that. But we won’t discuss it. Not until after it’s over. You have a visitor waiting for you downstairs. He’s been here every day.”

“Who?”

“Your lover. Howard Roark. Want to let him thank you now?”

The gay mockery, the tone of uttering the most preposterous thing he could think of, told her how far he was from guessing the rest. She said:

“Yes. I want to see him. Gail, if I decide to make him my lover?”

“I’ll kill you both. Now don’t move, lie flat, the doctor said you must take it easy, you’ve got twenty-six assorted stitches all over you.”

He walked out and she heard him descending the stairs.

When the first policeman had reached the scene of the explosion, he had found, behind the building, on the shore of the river, the plunger that had set off the dynamite. Roark stood by the plunger, his hands in his pockets, looking at the remnants of Cortlandt.

“What do you know about this, buddy?” the policeman asked.

“You’d better arrest me,” said Roark. “I’ll talk at the trial.”

He had not added another word in reply to all the official questions that followed.

It was Wynand who got him released on bail, in the early hours of the morning. Wynand had been calm at the emergency hospital where he had seen Dominique’s wounds and had been told she would not live. He had been calm while he telephoned, got a county judge out of bed and arranged Roark’s bail. But when he stood in the warden’s office of a small county jail, he began to shake suddenly. “You bloody fools!” he said through his teeth and there followed every obscenity he had learned on the waterfront. He forgot all the aspects of the situation save one: Roark being held behind bars. He was Stretch Wynand of Hell’s Kitchen again and this was the kind of fury that had shattered him in sudden flashes in those days, the fury he had felt when standing behind a crumbling wall, waiting to be killed. Only now he knew that he was also Gail Wynand, the owner of an empire, and he couldn’t understand why some sort of legal procedure was necessary, why he didn’t smash this jail, with his fists or through his papers, it was all one to him at the moment, he wanted to kill, he had to kill, as that night behind the wall, in defense of his life.

He managed to sign papers, he managed to wait until Roark was brought out to him. They walked out together, Roark leading him by the wrist, and by the time they reached the car, Wynand was calm. In the car, Wynand asked:

“You did it, of course?”

“Of course.”

“We’ll fight it out together.”

“If you want to make it your battle.”

“At the present estimate, my personal fortune amounts to forty million dollars. That should be enough to hire any lawyer you wish or the whole profession.”

“I won’t use a lawyer.”

“Howard! You’re not going to submit photographs again?”

“No. Not this time.”

Roark entered the bedroom and sat down on a chair by the bed. Dominique lay still, looking at him. They smiled at each other. Nothing has to be said, not this time either, she thought.

She asked:

“You were in jail?”

“For a few hours.”

“What was it like?”

“Don’t start acting about it as Gail did.”

“Gail took it very badly?”

“Very.”

“I won’t.”

“I might have to go back to a cell for years. You knew that when you agreed to help me.”

“Yes. I knew that.”

“I’m counting on you to save Gail, if I go.”

“Counting on me?”

He looked at her and shook his head. “Dearest ...” It sounded like a reproach.

“Yes?” she whispered.

“Don’t you know by now that it was a trap I set for you?”

“How?”

“What would you do if I hadn’t asked you to help me?”

“I’d be with you, in your apartment, at the Enright House, right now, publicly and openly.”

“Yes. But now you can’t. You’re Mrs. Gail Wynand, you’re above suspicion, and everyone believes you were at the scene by accident. Just let it be known what we are to each other—and it will be a confession that I did it.”

“I see.”

“I want you to keep quiet. If you had any thoughts of wanting to share my fate, drop them. I won’t tell you what I intend to do, because that’s the only way I have of controlling you until the trial. Dominique, if I’m convicted, I want you to remain with Gail. I’m counting on that. I want you to remain with him, and never tell him about us, because he and you will need each other.”

“And if you’re acquitted?”

“Then ...” He glanced about the room, Wynand’s bedroom. “I don’t want to say it here. But you know it.”

“You love him very much?”

“Yes.”

“Enough to sacrifice ...”

He smiled. “You’ve been afraid of that ever since I came here for the first time?”

“Yes.”

He looked straight at her. “Did you think that possible?”

“No.”

“Not my work nor you, Dominique. Not ever. But I can do this much for him: I can leave it to him if I have to go.”

“You’ll be acquitted.”

“That’s not what I want to hear you say.”

“If they convict you—if they lock you in jail or put you in a chain gang—if they smear your name in every filthy headline—if they never let you design another building—if they never let me see you again—it will not matter. Not too much. Only down to a certain point.”

“That’s what I’ve waited to hear for seven years, Dominique.”

He took her hand, he raised it and held it to his lips, and she felt his lips where Wynand’s had been. Then he got up.

“I’ll wait,” she said. “I’ll keep quiet. I won’t come near you. I promise.”

He smiled and nodded. Then he left.

“It happens, upon rare occasions, that world forces too great to comprehend become focused in a single event, like rays gathered by a lens to one point of superlative brightness, for all of us to see. Such an event is the outrage of Cortlandt. Here, in a microcosm, we can observe the evil that has crushed our poor planet from the day of its birth in cosmic ooze. One man’s Ego against all the concepts of mercy, humanity and brotherhood. One man destroying the future home of the disinherited. One man condemning thousands to the horror of the slums, to filth, disease and death. When an awakening society, with a new sense of humanitarian duty, made a mighty effort to rescue the underprivileged, when the best talents of society united to create a decent home for them—the egotism of one man blew the achievement of others to pieces. And for what? For some vague matter of personal vanity, for some empty conceit. I regret that the laws of our state allow nothing more than a prison sentence for this crime. That man should forfeit his life. Society needs the right to rid itself of men such as Howard Roark.”

Thus spoke Ellsworth M. Toohey in the pages of the New Frontiers.

Echoes answered him from all over the country. The explosion of Cortlandt had lasted half a minute. The explosion of public fury went on and on, with a cloud of powdered plaster filling the air, with glass, rust and refuse raining out of the cloud.

Roark had been indicted by a grand jury, had pleaded “Not guilty” and had refused to make any other statement. He had been released on a bond furnished by Gail Wynand, and he awaited trial.

There were many speculations on his motive. Some said it was professional jealousy. Others declared that there was a certain similarity between the design of Cortlandt and Roark’s style of building, that Keating, Prescott and Webb might have borrowed a little from Roark—“a legitimate adaptation”—“there’s no property rights on ideas”—“in a democracy, art belongs to all the people”—and that Roark had been prompted by the vengeance lust of an artist who had believed himself plagiarized.

None of it was too clear, but nobody cared too much about the motive. The issue was simple: one man against many. He had no right to a motive.

A home, built in charity, for the poor. Built upon ten thousand years in which men had been taught that charity and self-sacrifice are an absolute not to be questioned, the touchstone of virtue, the ultimate ideal. Ten thousand years of voices speaking of service and sacrifice—sacrifice is the prime rule of life—serve or be served—crush or get crushed—sacrince is noble—make what you can of it, at the one end or the other—serve and sacrifice—serve and serve and serve ...

Against that—one man who wished neither to serve nor to rule. And had thereby committed the only unforgivable crime.

It was a sensational scandal, and there was the usual noise and the usual lust of righteous anger, such as is proper to all lynchings. But there was a fierce, personal quality in the indignation of every person who spoke about it.

“He’s just an egomaniac devoid of all moral sense”—

—said the society woman dressing for a charity bazaar, who dared not contemplate what means of self-expression would be left to her and how she could impose her ostentation on her friends, if charity were not the all-excusing virtue—

—said the social worker who had found no aim in life and could generate no aim from within the sterility of his soul, but basked in virtue and held an unearned respect from all, by grace of his fingers on the wounds of others—

—said the novelist who had nothing to say if the subject of service and sacrifice were to be taken away from him, who sobbed in the hearing of attentive thousands that he loved them and loved them and would they please love him a little in return—

—said the lady columnist who had just bought a country mansion because she wrote so tenderly about the little people-

-said all the little people who wanted to hear of love, the great love, the unfastidious love, the love that embraced everything, forgave everything and permitted them everything—

—said every second-hander who could not exist except as a leech on the souls of others.

Ellsworth Toohey sat back, watched, listened and smiled.

Gordon L. Prescott and Gus Webb were entertained at dinners and cocktail parties; they were treated with tender, curious solicitude, like survivors of disaster. They said that they could not understand what possible motive Roark could have had, and they demanded justice.

Peter Keating went nowhere. He refused to see the press. He refused to see anyone. But he issued a written statement that he believed Roark was not guilty. His statement contained one curious sentence, the last. It said: “Leave him alone, please can’t you leave him alone?”

Pickets from the Council of American Builders paced in front of the Cord Building. It served no purpose, because there was no work in Roark’s office. The commissions he was to start had been canceled.

This was solidarity. The debutante having her toenails pedicured—the housewife buying carrots from a pushcart—the bookkeeper who had wanted to be a pianist, but had the excuse of a sister to support—the businessman who hated his business—the worker who hated his work—the intellectual who hated everybody—all were united as brothers in the luxury of common anger that cured boredom and took them out of themselves, and they knew well enough what a blessing it was to be taken out of themselves. The readers were unanimous. The press was unanimous.

Gail Wynand went against the current.

“Gail!” Alvah Scarret had gasped. “We can’t defend a dynamiter!”

“Keep still, Alvah,” Wynand had said, “before I bash your teeth in.”

Gail Wynand stood alone in the middle of his office, his head thrown back, glad to be living, as he had stood on a wharf on a dark night facing the lights of a city.

“In the filthy howling now going on all around us,” said an editorial in the Banner, signed “Gail Wynand” in big letters, “nobody seems to remember that Howard Roark surrendered himself of his own free will. If he blew up that building—did he have to remain at the scene to be arrested? But we don’t wait to discover his reasons. We have convicted him without a hearing. We want him to be guilty. We are delighted with this case. What you hear is not indignation—it’s gloating. Any illiterate maniac, any worthless moron who commits some revolting murder, gets shrieks of sympathy from us and marshals an army of humanitarian defenders. But a man of genius is guilty by definition. Granted that it is a vicious injustice to condemn a man simply because he is weak and small. To what level of depravity has a society descended when it condemns a man simply because he is strong and great? Such, however, is the whole moral atmosphere of our century—the century of the second-rater.”

“We hear it shouted,” said another Wynand editorial, “that Howard Roark spends his career in and out of courtrooms. Well, that is true. A man like Roark is on trial before society all his life. Whom does that indict—Roark or society?”

“We have never made an effort to understand what is greatness in man and how to recognize it,” said another Wynand editorial. “We have come to hold, in a kind of mawkish stupor, that greatness is to be gauged by self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, we drool, is the ultimate virtue. Let’s stop and think for a moment. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feeling? The independence of his thought? But these are a man’s supreme possessions. Anything he gives up for them is not a sacrifice but an easy bargain. They, however, are above sacrificing to any cause or consideration whatsoever. Should we not, then, stop preaching dangerous and vicious nonsense? Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. It is the unsacrificed self that we must respect in man above all.”

This editorial was quoted in the New Frontiers and in many newspapers, reprinted in a box under the heading: “Look who’s talking!”

Gail Wynand laughed. Resistance fed him and made him stronger. This was a war, and he had not engaged in a real war for years, not since the time when he laid the foundations of his empire amid cries of protest from the whole profession. He was granted the impossible, the dream of every man: the chance and intensity of youth, to be used with the wisdom of experience. A new beginning and a climax, together. I have waited and lived, he thought, for this.

His twenty-two newspapers, his magazines, his newsreels were given the order: Defend Roark. Sell Roark to the public. Stem the lynching.

“Whatever the facts,” Wynand explained to his staff, “this is not going to be a trial by facts. It’s a trial by public opinion. We’ve always made public opinion. Let’s make it. Sell Roark. I don’t care how you do it. I’ve trained you. You’re experts at selling. Now show me how good you are.”

He was greeted by silence, and his employees glanced at one another. Alvah Scarret mopped his forehead. But they obeyed.

The Banner printed a picture of the Enright House, with the caption: “Is this the man you want to destroy?” A picture of Wynand’s home: “Match this, if you can.” A picture of Monadnock Valley: “Is this the man who has contributed nothing to society?”

The Banner ran Roark’s biography, under the byline of a writer nobody had ever heard of; it was written by Gail Wynand. The Banner ran a series on famous trials in which innocent men had been convicted by the majority prejudice of the moment. The Banner ran articles on men martyred by society: Socrates, Galileo, Pasteur, the thinkers, the scientists, a long, heroic line—each a man who stood alone, the man who defied men.

“But, Gail, for God’s sake, Gail, it was a housing project!” wailed Alvah Scarret.

Wynand looked at him helplessly: “I suppose it’s impossible to make you fools understand that that has nothing to do with it. All right. We’ll talk about housing projects.”

The Banner ran an expose of the housing racket: the graft, the incompetence, the structures erected at five times the cost a private builder would have needed, the settlements built and abandoned, the horrible performance accepted, admired, forgiven, protected by the sacred cow of altruism. “Hell is said to be paved with good intentions,” said the Banner. “Could it be because we’ve never learned to distinguish what intentions constitute the good? Is it not time to learn? Never have there been so many good intentions so loudly proclaimed in the world. And look at it.”

The Banner editorials were written by Gail Wynand as he stood at a table in the composing room, written as always on a huge piece of print stock, with a blue pencil, in letters an inch high. He slammed the G W at the end, and the famous initials had never carried such an air of reckless pride.

Dominique had recovered and returned to their country house. Wynand drove home late in the evening. He brought Roark along as often as he could. They sat together in the living room, with the windows open to the spring night. The dark stretches of the hill rolled gently down to the lake from under the walls of the house, and the lake glittered through the trees far below. They did not talk of the case or of the coming trial. But Wynand spoke of his crusade, impersonally, almost as if it did not concern Roark at all. Wynand stood in the middle of the room, saying:

“All right, it was contemptible—the whole career of the Banner. But this will vindicate everything. Dominique, I know you’ve never been able to understand why I’ve felt no shame in my past. Why I love the Banner. Now you’ll see the answer. Power. I hold a power I’ve never tested. Now you’ll see the test. They’ll think what I want them to think. They’ll do as I say. Because it is my city and I do run things around here. Howard, by the time you come to trial, I’ll have them all twisted in such a way there won’t be a jury who’ll dare convict you.”

He could not sleep at night. He felt no desire to sleep. “Go on to bed,” he would say to Roark and Dominique, “I’ll come up in a few minutes.” Then, Dominique from the bedroom, Roark from the guest room across the hall, would hear Wynand’s steps pacing the terrace for hours, a kind of joyous restlessness in the sound, each step like a sentence anchored, a statement pounded into the floor.

Once, when Wynand dismissed them, late at night, Roark and Dominique went up the stairs together and stopped on the first landing; they heard the violent snap of a match in the living room below, a sound that carried the picture of a hand jerked recklessly, lighting the first of the cigarettes that would last till dawn, a small dot of fire crossing and recrossing the terrace to the pounding of steps.

They looked down the stairs and then looked at each other.

“It’s horrible,” said Dominique.

“It’s great,” said Roark.

“He can’t help you, no matter what he does.”

“I know he can’t. That’s not the point.”

“He’s risking everything he has to save you. He doesn’t know he’ll lose me if you’re saved.”

“Dominique, which will be worse for him—to lose you or to lose his crusade?” She nodded, understanding. He added: “You know that it’s not me he wants to save. I’m only the excuse.”

She lifted her hand. She touched his cheekbone, a faint pressure of her finger tips. She could allow herself nothing else. She turned and went on to her bedroom, and heard him closing the guest-room door.

“Is it not appropriate,” wrote Lancelot Clokey in a syndicated article, “that Howard Roark is being defended by the Wynand papers? If anyone doubts the moral issues involved in this appalling case, here is the proof of what’s what and who stands where. The Wynand papers—that stronghold of yellow journalism, vulgarity, corruption and muckraking, that organized insult to public taste and decency, that intellectual underworld ruled by a man who has less conception of principles than a cannibal—the Wynand papers are the proper champions of Howard Roark, and Howard Roark is their rightful hero. After a lifetime devoted to blasting the integrity of the press, it is only fit that Gail Wynand should now support a cruder fellow dynamiter.”

“All this fancy talk going ’round,” said Gus Webb in a public speech, “is a lot of bull. Here’s the plain dope. That guy Wynand’s salted away plenty, and I mean plenty, by skinning suckers in the real-estate racket all these years. Does he like it when the government muscles in and shoves him out, so’s the little fellows can get a clean roof over their heads and a modern John for their kids? You bet your boots he don’t like it, not one bit. It’s a put-up job between the two of them, Wynand and that redheaded boy friend of his, and if you ask me the boy friend got a good hunk of cash out of Mr. Wynand for pulling the job.”

“We have it from an unimpeachable source,” wrote a radical newspaper, “that Cortlandt was only the first step in a gigantic plot to blow up every housing project, every public power plant, post office and school house in the U.S.A. The conspiracy is headed by Gail Wynand-as we can see—and by other bloated capitalists of his kind, including some of our biggest moneybags.”

“Too little attention has been paid to the feminine angle of this case,” wrote Sally Brent in the New Frontiers. “The part played by Mrs. Gail Wynand is certainly highly dubious, to say the least. Isn’t it just the cutest coincidence that it was Mrs. Wynand who just so conveniently sent the watchman away at just the right time? And that her husband is now raising the roof to defend Mr. Roark? If we weren’t blinded by a stupid, senseless, old-fashioned sense of gallantry where a so-called beautiful woman is concerned, we wouldn’t allow that part of the case to be hushed up. If we weren’t overawed by Mrs. Wynand’s social position and the so-called prestige of her husband—who’s making an utter fool of himself—we’d ask a few questions about the story that she almost lost her life in the disaster. How do we know she did? Doctors can be bought, just like anybody else, and Mr. Gail Wynand is an expert in such matters. If we consider all this, we might well see the outlines of something that looks like a most revolting ‘design for living.’ ”

“The position taken by the Wynand press,” wrote a quiet, conservative newspaper, “is inexplicable and disgraceful.”

The circulation of the Banner dropped week by week, the speed accelerating in the descent, like an elevator out of control. Stickers and buttons inscribed “We Don’t Read Wynand” grew on walls, subway posts, windshields and coat lapels. Wynand newsreels were booed off the theater screens. The Banner vanished from corner newsstands; the news vendors had to carry it, but they hid it under their counters and produced it grudgingly, only upon request. The ground had been prepared, the pillars eaten through long ago; the Cortlandt case provided the final impact.

Roark was almost forgotten in the storm of indignation against Gail Wynand. The angriest protests came from Wynand’s own public: from the Women’s Clubs, the ministers, the mothers, the small shopkeepers. Alvah Scarret had to be kept away from the room where hampers of letters to the editor were being filled each day; he started by reading the letters—and his friends on the staff undertook to prevent a repetition of the experience, fearing a stroke.

The staff of the Banner worked in silence. There were no furtive glances, no whispered cuss words, no gossip in washrooms any longer. A few men resigned. The rest worked on, slowly, heavily, in the manner of men with life belts buckled, waiting for the inevitable.

Gail Wynand noticed a kind of lingering tempo in every action around him. When he entered the Banner Building, his employees stopped at sight of him; when he nodded to them, their greeting came a second too late; when he walked on and turned, he found them staring after him. The “Yes, Mr. Wynand,” that had always answered his orders without a moment’s cut between the last syllable of his voice and the first letter of the answer, now came late, and the pause had a tangible shape, so that the answer sounded like a sentence not followed but preceded by a question mark.

“One Small Voice” kept silent about the Cortlandt case. Wynand had summoned Toohey to his office, the day after the explosion, and had said: “Listen, you. Not a word in your column. Understand? What you do or yell outside is none of my business—for the time being. But if you yell too much, I’ll take care of you when this is over.”

“Yes, Mr. Wynand.”

“As far as your column is concerned, you’re deaf, dumb and blind. You’ve never heard of any explosion. You’ve never heard of anyone named Roark. You don’t know what the word Cortlandt means. So long as you’re in this building.”

“Yes, Mr. Wynand.”

“And don’t let me see too much of you around here.”

“Yes, Mr. Wynand.”

Wynand’s lawyer, an old friend who had served him for years, tried to stop him.

“Gail, what’s the matter? You’re acting like a child. Like a green amateur. Pull yourself together, man.”

“Shut up,” said Wynand.

“Gail, you are ... you were the greatest newspaperman on earth. Do I have to tell you the obvious? An unpopular cause is a dangerous business for anyone. For a popular newspaper—it’s suicide.”

“If you don’t shut your mouth, I’ll send you packing and get myself another shyster.”

Wynand began to argue about the case—with the prominent men he met at business luncheons and dinners. He had never argued before on any subject; he had never pleaded. He had merely tossed final statements to respectful listeners. Now he found no listeners. He found an indifferent silence, half boredom, half resentment. The men who had gathered every word he cared to drop about the stock market, real estate, advertising, politics, had no interest in his opinion on art, greatness and abstract justice.

He heard a few answers:

“Yes, Gail, yes, sure. But on the other hand, I think it was damn selfish of the man. And that’s the trouble with the world today—selfish-ness. Too much selfishness everywhere. That’s what Lancelot Clokey said in his book—swell book, all about his childhood, you read it, saw your picture with Clokey. Clokey’s been all over the world, he knows what he’s talking about.”

“Yes, Gail, but aren’t you kind of old-fashioned about it? What’s all that great man stuff? What’s great about a glorified bricklayer? Who’s great anyway? We’re all just a lot of glands and chemicals and whatever we ate for breakfast. I think Lois Cook explained it very well in that beautiful little—what’s its name?—yes, The Gallant Gallstone. Yes, sir. Your own Banner plugged like blazes for that little book.”

“But look, Gail, he should’ve thought of other people before he thought of himself. I think if a man’s got no love in his heart he can’t be much good. I heard that in a play last night—that was a grand play—the new one by Ike—what the hell’s his last name?—you ought to see it—your own Jules Fougler said it’s a brave and tender stage poem.”

“You make out a good case, Gail, and I wouldn’t know what to say against it, I don’t know where you’re wrong, but it doesn’t sound right to me, because Ellsworth Toohey—now don’t misunderstand me, I don’t agree with Toohey’s political views at all, I know he’s a radical, but on the other hand you’ve got to admit that he’s a great idealist with a heart as big as a house—well, Ellsworth Toohey said ...”

These were the millionaires, the bankers, the industrialists, the businessmen who could not understand why the world was going to hell, as they moaned in all their luncheon speeches.

One morning when Wynand stepped out of his car in front of the Banner Building, a woman rushed up to him as he crossed the sidewalk. She had been waiting by the entrance. She was fat and middle-aged. She wore a filthy cotton dress and a crushed hat. She had a pasty, sagging face, a shapeless mouth and black, round, brilliant eyes. She stood before Gail Wynand and she flung a bunch of rotted beet leaves at his face. There were no beets, just the leaves, soft and slimy, tied with a string. They hit his cheek and rolled down to the sidewalk.

Wynand stood still. He looked at the woman. He saw the white flesh, the mouth hanging open in triumph, the face of self-righteous evil. Passers-by had seized the woman and she was screaming unspeakable obscenities. Wynand raised his hand, shook his head, gesturing for them to let the creature go, and walked into the Banner Building, a smear of greenish-yellow across his cheek.

“Ellsworth, what are we going to do?” moaned Alvah Scarret. “What are we going to do?”

Ellsworth Toohey sat perched on the edge of his desk, and smiled as if he wished he could kiss Alvah Scarret.

“Why don’t they drop the damn thing, Ellsworth? Why doesn’t something break to take it off the front pages? Couldn’t we scare up an international situation or something? In all my born days I’ve never seen people go so wild over so little. A dynamiting job! Christ, Ellsworth, it’s a back-page story. We get them every month, practically with every strike, remember?—the furriers’ strike, the dry cleaners’ strike ... oh what the hell! Why all this fury? Who cares? Why do they care?”

“There are occasions, Alvah, when the issues at stake are not the ostensible facts at all. And the public reaction seems out of all proportion, but isn’t. You shouldn’t be so glum about it. I’m surprised at you. You should be thanking your stars. You see, this is what I meant by waiting for the right moment. The right moment always comes. Damned if I expected it to be handed to me on a platter like that, though. Cheer up, Alvah. This is where we take over.”

“Take over what?”

“The Wynand papers.”

“You’re crazy, Ellsworth. Like all of them. You’re crazy. What do you mean? Gail holds fifty-one per cent of ...”

“Alvah, I love you. You’re wonderful, Alvah. I love you, but I wish to God you weren’t such a God-damn fool, so I could talk to you! I wish I could talk to somebody.”

Ellsworth Toohey tried to talk to Gus Webb, one evening, but it was disappointing. Gus Webb drawled:

“Trouble with you, Ellsworth, is you’re too romantic. Too God-damn metaphysical. What’s all the gloating about? There’s no practical value to the thing. Nothing to get your teeth into, except for a week or two. I wish he’d blasted it when it was full of people—a few children blown to pieces—then you’d have something. Then I’d love it. The movement could use it. But this? Hell, they’ll send the fool to the clink and that’s that. You—a realist? You’re an incurable specimen of the intelligentsia, Ellsworth, that’s all you are. You think you’re the man of the future? Don’t kid yourself, sweetheart. I am.”

Toohey sighed. “You’re right, Gus,” he said.

XIV

“IT’S KIND OF YOU, MR. TOOHEY,” SAID MRS. KEATING HUMBLY. “I’M glad you came. I don’t know what to do with Petey. He won’t see anyone. He won’t go to his office. I’m scared, Mr. Toohey. Forgive me, I mustn’t whine. Maybe you can help, pull him out of it. He thinks so much of you, Mr. Toohey.”

“Yes, I’m sure. Where is he?”

“Right here. In his room. This way, Mr. Toohey.”

The visit was unexpected. Toohey had not been here for years. Mrs. Keating felt very grateful. She led the way down the hall and opened a door without knocking, afraid to announce the visitor, afraid of her son’s refusal. She said brightly:

“Look, Petey, look what a guest I have for you!”

Keating lifted his head. He sat at a littered table, bent under a squat lamp that gave a poor light; he was doing a crossword puzzle torn out of a newspaper. There was a tall glass on the table, with a dried red rim that had been tomato juice; a box containing a jigsaw puzzle; a deck of cards; a Bible.

“Hello, Ellsworth,” he said, smiling. He leaned forward to rise, but forgot the effort, halfway.

Mrs. Keating saw the smile and stepped out hastily, relieved, closing the door.

The smile went, not quite completed. It had been an instinct of memory. Then he remembered many things which he had tried not to understand.

“Hello, Ellsworth,” he repeated helplessly.

Toohey stood before him, examining the room, the table, with curiosity.

“Touching, Peter,” he said. “Very touching. I’m sure he’d appreciate it if he saw it.”

“Who?”

“Not very talkative these days, are you, Peter? Not very sociable?”

“I wanted to see you, Ellsworth. I wanted to talk to you.”

Toohey grasped a chair by the back, swung it through the air, in a broad circle like a flourish, planted it by the table and sat down.

“Well, that’s what I came here for,” he said. “To hear you talk.”

Keating said nothing.

“Well?”

“You mustn’t think I didn’t want to see you, Ellsworth. It was only ... what I told mother about not letting anyone in ... it was on account of the newspaper people. They won’t leave me alone.”

“My, how times change, Peter. I remember when one couldn’t keep you away from newspaper people.”

“Ellsworth, I haven’t any sense of humor left. Not any at all.”

“That’s lucky. Or you’d die laughing.”

“I’m so tired, Ellsworth.... I’m glad you came.”

The light glanced off Toohey’s glasses and Keating could not see his eyes; only two circles filled with a metallic smear, like the dead headlights of a car reflecting the approach of something from a distance.

“Think you can get away with it?” asked Toohey.

“With what?”

“The hermit act. The great penance. The loyal silence.”

“Ellsworth, what’s the matter with you?”

“So he’s not guilty, is he? So you want us to please leave him alone, do you?”

Keating’s shoulders moved, more an intention than the reality of sitting up straight, but still an intention, and his jaw moved enough to ask:

“What do you want?”

“The whole story.”

“What for?”

“Want me to make it easier for you? Want a good excuse, Peter? I could, you know. I could give you thirty-three reasons, all noble, and you’d swallow any one of them. But I don’t feel like making it easier for you. So I’ll just tell you the truth: to send him to the penitentiary, your hero, your idol, your generous friend, your guardian angel!”

“I have nothing to tell you, Ellsworth.”

“While you’re being shocked out of the last of your wits you’d better hang on to enough to realize that you’re no match for me. You’ll talk if I want you to talk and I don’t feel like wasting time. Who designed Cortlandt?”

“I did.”

“Do you know that I’m an architectural expert?”

“I designed Cortlandt.”

“Like the Cosmo-Slotnick Building?”

“What do you want from me?”

“I want you on the witness stand, Petey. I want you to tell the story in court. Your friend isn’t as obvious as you are. I don’t know what he’s up to. That remaining at the scene was a bit too smart. He knew he’d be suspected and he’s playing it subtle. God knows what he intends to say in court. I don’t intend to let him get away with it. The motive is what they’re all stuck on. I know the motive. Nobody will believe me if I try to explain it. But you’ll state it under oath. You’ll tell the truth. You’ll tell them who designed Cortlandt and why.”

“I designed it.”

“If you want to say that on the stand, you’d better do something about your muscular control. What are you shaking for?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Too late, Petey. Ever read Faust?”

“What do you want?”

“Howard Roark’s neck.”

“He’s not my friend. He’s never been. You know what I think of him.”

“I know, you God-damn fool! I know you’ve worshiped him all your life. You’ve knelt and worshiped, while stabbing him in the back. You didn’t even have the courage of your own malice. You couldn’t go one way or the other. You hated me—oh, don’t you suppose I knew it? -and you followed me. You loved him and you’ve destroyed him. Oh, you’ve destroyed him all right, Petey, and now there’s no place to run, and you’ll have to go through with it!”

“What’s he to you? What difference does it make to you?”

“You should have asked that long ago. But you didn’t. Which means that you knew it. You’ve always known it. That’s what’s making you shake. Why should I help you lie to yourself? I’ve done that for ten years. That’s what you came to me for. That’s what they all come to me for. But you can’t get something for nothing. Ever. My socialistic theories to the contrary notwithstanding. You got what you wanted from me. It’s my turn now.”

“I won’t talk about Howard. You can’t make me talk about Howard.”

“No? Why don’t you throw me out of here? Why don’t you take me by the throat and choke me? You’re much stronger than I am. But you won’t. You can’t. Do you see the nature of power, Petey? Physical power? Muscle or guns or money? You and Gail Wynand should get together. You have a lot to tell him. Come on, Peter. Who designed Cortlandt?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Who designed Cortlandt?”

“Let me go!”

“Who designed Cortlandt?”

“It’s worse ... what you’re doing ... it’s much worse ...”

“Than what?”

“Than what I did to Lucius Heyer.”

“What did you do to Lucius Heyer?”

“I killed him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That’s why it was better. Because I let him die.”

“Stop raving.”

“Why do you want to kill Howard?”

“I don’t want to kill him. I want him in jail. You understand? In jail. In a cell. Behind bars. Locked, stopped, strapped—and alive. He’ll get up when they tell him to. He’ll eat what they give him. He’ll move when he’s told to move and stop when he’s told. He’ll walk to the jute mill, when he’s told, and he’ll work as he’s told. They’ll push him, if he doesn’t move fast enough, and they’ll slap his face when they feel like it, and they’ll beat him with rubber hose if he doesn’t obey. And he’ll obey. He’ll take orders. He’ll take orders!”

“Ellsworth!” Keating screamed. “Ellsworth!”

“You make me sick. Can’t you take the truth? No, you want your sugar-coating. That’s why I prefer Gus Webb. There’s one who has no illusions.”

Mrs. Keating threw the door open. She had heard the scream.

“Get out of here!” Toohey snapped at her.

She backed out, and Toohey slammed the door.

Keating raised his head. “You have no right to talk to Mother that way. She had nothing to do with you.”

“Who designed Cortlandt?”

Keating got up. He dragged his feet to a dresser, opened a drawer, took out a crumpled piece of paper and handed it to Toohey. It was his contract with Roark.

Toohey read it and chuckled once, a dry snap of sound. Then he looked at Keating.

“You’re a complete success, Peter, as far as I’m concerned. But at times I have to want to turn away from the sight of my successes.”

Keating stood by the dresser, his shoulders slumped, his eyes empty.

“I didn’t expect you to have it in writing like that, with his signature. So that’s what he’s done for you—and this is what you do in return.... No, I take back the insults, Peter. You had to do it. Who are you to reverse the laws of history? Do you know what this paper is? The impossible perfect, the dream of the centuries, the aim of all of mankind’s great schools of thought. You harnessed him. You made him work for you. You took his achievement, his reward, his money, his glory, his name. We only thought and wrote about it. You gave a practical demonstration. Every philosopher from Plato up should thank you. Here it is, the philosopher’s stone—for turning gold into lead. I should be pleased, but I guess I’m human and I can’t help it, I’m not pleased, I’m just sick. The others, Plato and all the rest, they really thought it would turn lead into gold. I knew the truth from the first. I’ve been honest with myself, Peter, and that’s the hardest form of honesty. The one you all run from at any price. And right now I don’t blame you, it is the hardest one, Peter.”

He sat down wearily and held the paper by the corners in both hands. He said:

“If you want to know how hard it is, I’ll tell you: right now I want to burn this paper. Make what you wish of that. I don’t claim too great a credit, because I know that tomorrow I’ll send this to the district attorney. Roark will never know it—and it would make no difference to him if he knew—but in the truth of things, there was one moment when I wanted to burn this paper.”

He folded the paper cautiously and slipped it into his pocket. Keating followed his gestures, moving his whole head, like a kitten watching a ball on a string.

“You make me sick,” said Toohey. “God, how you make me sick, all you hypocritical sentimentalists! You go along with me, you spout what I teach you, you profit by it—but you haven’t the grace to admit to yourself what you’re doing. You turn green when you see the truth. I suppose that’s in the nature of your natures and that’s precisely my chief weapon—but God! I get tired of it. I must allow myself a moment free of you. That’s what I have to put on an act for all my life—for mean little mediocrities like you. To protect your sensibilities, your posturings, your conscience and the peace of the mind you haven’t got. That’s the price I pay for what I want—but at least I know that I’ve got to pay it. And I have no illusions about the price or the purchase.”

“What do you ... want ... Ellsworth?”

“Power, Petey.”

There were steps in the apartment above, someone skipping gaily, a few sounds on the ceiling as of four or five tap beats. The light fixture jingled and Keating’s head moved up in obedience. Then it came back to Toohey. Toohey was smiling, almost indifferently.

“You ... always said ...” Keating began thickly, and stopped.

“I’ve always said just that. Clearly, precisely and openly. It’s not my fault if you couldn’t hear. You could, of course. You didn’t want to. Which was safer than deafness—for me. I said I intended to rule. Like all my spiritual predecessors. But I’m luckier than they were. I inherited the fruit of their efforts and I shall be the one who’ll see the great dream made real. I see it all around me today. I recognize it. I don’t like it. I didn’t expect to like it. Enjoyment is not my destiny. I shall find such satisfaction as my capacity permits. I shall rule.”

“Whom ... ?”

“You. The world. It’s only a matter of discovering the lever. If you learn how to rule one single man’s soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It’s the soul, Peter, the soul. Not whips or swords or fire or guns. That’s why the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons were fools and did not last. We will. The soul, Peter, is that which can’t be ruled. It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it—and the man is yours. You won’t need a whip—he’ll bring it to you and ask to be whipped. Set him in reverse—and his own mechanism will do your work for you. Use him against himself. Want to know how it’s done? See if I ever lied to you. See if you haven’t heard all this for years, but didn’t want to hear, and the fault is yours, not mine. There are many ways. Here’s one. Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity. That’s difficult. The worst among you gropes for an ideal in his own twisted way. Kill integrity by internal corruption. Use it against itself. Direct it toward a goal destructive of all integrity. Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. Tell men that altruism is the ideal. Not a single one of them has ever achieved it and not a single one ever will. His every living instinct screams against it. But don’t you see what you accomplish? Man realizes that he’s incapable of what he’s accepted as the noblest virtue—and it gives him a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness. Since the supreme ideal is beyond his grasp, he gives up eventually all ideals, all aspiration, all sense of his personal value. He feels himself obliged to preach what he can’t practice. But one can’t be good halfway or honest approximately. To preserve one’s integrity is a hard battle. Why preserve that which one knows to be corrupt already? His soul gives up its self-respect. You’ve got him. He’ll obey. He’ll be glad to obey—because he can’t trust himself, he feels uncertain, he feels unclean. That’s one way. Here’s another. Kill man’s sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognize greatness or to achieve it. Great men can’t be ruled. We don’t want any great men. Don’t deny the conception of greatness. Destroy it from within. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept—and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. Laugh at Roark and hold Peter Keating as a great architect. You’ve destroyed architecture. Build up Lois Cook and you’ve destroyed literature. Hail Ike and you’ve destroyed the theater. Glorify Lancelot Clokey and you’ve destroyed the press. Don’t set out to raze all shrines—you’ll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity—and the shrines are razed. Then there’s another way. Kill by laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction. Turn it into a sneer. It’s simple. Tell them to laugh at everything. Tell them that a sense of humor is an unlimited virtue. Don’t let anything remain sacred in a man’s soul—and his soul won’t be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you’ve killed the hero in man. One doesn’t reverence with a giggle. He’ll obey and he’ll set no limits to his obedience—anything goes—nothing is too serious. Here’s another way. This is most important. Don’t allow men to be happy. Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men. So kill their joy in living. Take away from them whatever is dear or important to them. Never let them have what they want. Make them feel that the mere fact of a personal desire is evil. Bring them to a state where saying ‘I want’ is no longer a natural right, but a shameful admission. Altruism is of great help in this. Unhappy men will come to you. They’ll need you. They’ll come for consolation, for support, for escape. Nature allows no vacuum. Empty man’s soul—and the space is yours to fill. I don’t see why you should look so shocked, Peter. This is the oldest one of all. Look back at history. Look at any great system of ethics, from the Orient up. Didn’t they all preach the sacrifice of personal joy? Under all the complications of verbiage, haven’t they all had a single leitmotif: sacrifice, renunciation, self-denial? Haven’t you been able to catch their theme song—‘Give up, give up, give up, give up’? Look at the moral atmosphere of today. Everything enjoyable, from cigarettes to sex to ambition to the profit motive, is considered depraved or sinful. Just prove that a thing makes men happy—and you’ve damned it. That’s how far we’ve come. We’ve tied happiness to guilt. And we’ve got mankind by the throat. Throw your first-born into a sacrificial furnace—lie on a bed of nails—go into the desert to mortify the flesh—don’t dance—don’t go to the movies on Sunday—don’t try to get rich—don’t smoke—don’t drink. It’s all the same line. The great line. Fools think that taboos of this nature are just nonsense. Something left over, old-fashioned. But there’s always a purpose in nonsense. Don’t bother to examine a folly—ask yourself only what it accomplishes. Every system of ethics that preached sacrifice grew into a world power and ruled millions of men. Of course, you must dress it up. You must tell people that they’ll achieve a superior kind of happiness by giving up everything that makes them happy. You don’t have to be too clear about it. Use big vague words. ‘Universal Harmony’—‘Eternal Spirit’—‘Divine Purpose’ —‘Nirvana’—‘Paradise’—‘Racial Supremacy’—‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.’ Internal corruption, Peter. That’s the oldest one of all. The farce has been going on for centuries and men still fall for it. Yet the test should be so simple: just listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice—run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it’s your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself—that will be the man who’s not after your soul. That will be the man who has nothing to gain from you. But let him come and you’ll scream your empty heads off, howling that he’s a selfish monster. So the racket is safe for many, many centuries. But here you might have noticed something. I said, ‘It stands to reason.’ Do you see? Men have a weapon against you. Reason. So you must be very sure to take it away from them. Cut the props from under it. But be careful. Don’t deny outright. Never deny anything outright, you give your hand away. Don’t say reason is evil—though some have gone that far and with astonishing success. Just say that reason is limited. That there’s something above it. What? You don’t have to be too clear about it either. The field’s inexhaustible. ‘Instinct’—‘Feeling’—‘Revelation’—‘Divine Intuition’—‘Dialectic Materialism.’ If you get caught at some crucial point and somebody tells you that your doctrine doesn’t make sense—you’re ready for him. You tell him that there’s something above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel. He must believe. Suspend reason and you play it deuces wild. Anything goes in any manner you wish whenever you need it. You’ve got him. Can you rule a thinking man? We don’t want any thinking men.”

Keating had sat down on the floor, by the side of the dresser; he had felt tired and he had simply folded his legs. He did not want to abandon the dresser; he felt safer, leaning against it; as if it still guarded the letter he had surrendered.

“Peter, you’ve heard all this. You’ve seen me practicing it for ten years. You see it being practiced all over the world. Why are you disgusted? You have no right to sit there and stare at me with the virtuous superiority of being shocked. You’re in on it. You’ve taken your share and you’ve got to go along. You’re afraid to see where it’s leading. I’m not. I’ll tell you. The world of the future. The world I want. A world of obedience and of unity. A world where the thought of each man will not be his own, but an attempt to guess the thought in the brain of his neighbor who’ll have no thought of his own but an attempt to guess the thought of the next neighbor who’ll have no thought—and so on, Peter, around the globe. Since all must agree with all. A world where no man will hold a desire for himself, but will direct all his efforts to satisfy the desires of his neighbor who’ll have no desires except to satisfy the desires of the next neighbor who’ll have no desires—around the globe, Peter. Since all must serve all. A world in which man will not work for so innocent an incentive as money, but for that headless monster—prestige. The approval of his fellows—their good opinion—the opinion of men who’ll be allowed to hold no opinion. An octopus, all tentacles and no brain. Judgment, Peter? Not judgment, but public polls. An average drawn upon zeroes—since no individuality will be permitted. A world with its motor cut off and a single heart, pumped by hand. My hand—and the hands of a few, a very few other men like me. Those who know what makes you tick—you great, wonderful average, you who have not risen in fury when we called you the average, the little, the common, you who’ve liked and accepted those names. You’ll sit enthroned and enshrined, you, the little people, the absolute ruler to make all past rulers squirm with envy, the absolute, the unlimited, God and Prophet and King combined. Vox populi. The average, the common, the general. Do you know the proper antonym for Ego? Bromide, Peter. The rule of the bromide. But even the trite has to be originated by someone at some time. We’ll do the originating. Vox dei. We’ll enjoy unlimited submission—from men who’ve learned nothing except to submit. We’ll call it ‘to serve.’ We’ll give out medals for service. You’ll fall over one another in a scramble to see who can submit better and more. There will be no other distinction to seek. No other form of personal achievement. Can you see Howard Roark in the picture? No? Then don’t waste time on foolish questions. Everything that can’t be ruled, must go. And if freaks persist in being born occasionally, they will not survive beyond their twelfth year. When their brain begins to function, it will feel the pressure and it will explode. The pressure gauged to a vacuum. Do you know the fate of deep-sea creatures brought out to sunlight? So much for future Roarks. The rest of you will smile and obey. Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles? Man’s first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought. But we’ll have neither God nor thought. Only voting by smiles. Automatic levers—all saying yes ... Now if you were a little more intelligent—like your ex-wife, for instance—you’d ask: What of us, the rulers? What of me, Ellsworth Monkton Toohey? And I’d say, Yes, you’re right. I’ll achieve no more than you will. I’ll have no purpose save to keep you contented. To lie, to flatter you, to praise you, to inflate your vanity. To make speeches about the people and the common good. Peter, my poor old friend, I’m the most selfless man you’ve ever known. I have less independence than you, whom I just forced to sell your soul. You’ve used people at least for the sake of what you could get from them for yourself, I want nothing for myself. I use people for the sake of what I can do to them. It’s my only function and satisfaction. I have no private purpose. I want power. I want my world of the future. Let all live for all. Let all sacrifice and none profit. Let all suffer and none enjoy. Let progress stop. Let all stagnate. There’s equality in stagnation. All subjugated to the will of all. Universal slavery—without even the dignity of a master. Slavery to slavery. A great circle—and a total equality. The world of the future.”

“Ellsworth ... you’re ...”

“Insane? Afraid to say it? There you sit and the word’s written all over you, your last hope. Insane? Look around you. Pick up any newspaper and read the headlines. Isn’t it coming? Isn’t it here? Every single thing I told you? Isn’t Europe swallowed already and we’re stumbling on to follow? Everything I said is contained in a single word—collectivism. And isn’t that the god of our century? To act together. To think—together. To feel—together. To unite, to agree, to obey. To obey, to serve, to sacrifice. Divide and conquer—nrst. But then—unite and rule. We’ve discovered that one at last. Remember the Roman Emperor who said he wished humanity had a single neck so he could cut it? People have laughed at him for centuries. But we’ll have the last laugh. We’ve accomplished what he couldn’t accomplish. We’ve taught men to unite. This makes one neck ready for one leash. We’ve found the magic word. Collectivism. Look at Europe, you fool. Can’t you see past the guff and recognize the essence? One country is dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the collective is all. The individual held as evil, the mass—as God. No motive and no virtue permitted—except that of service to the proletariat. That’s one version. Here’s another. A country dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the State is all. The individual held as evil, the race—as God. No motive and no virtue permitted—except that of service to the race. Am I raving or is this the cold reality of two continents already? Watch the pincer movement. If you’re sick of one version, we push you into the other. We get you coming and going. We’ve closed the doors. We’ve fixed the coin. Heads —collectivism, and tails—collectivism. Fight the doctrine which slaughters the individual with a doctrine which slaughters the individual. Give up your soul to a council—or give it up to a leader. But give it up, give it up, give it up. My technique, Peter. Offer poison as food and poison as antidote. Go fancy on the trimmings, but hang on to the main objective. Give the fools a choice, let them have their fun—but don’t forget the only purpose you have to accomplish. Kill the individual. Kill man’s soul. The rest will follow automatically. Observe the state of the world as of the present moment. Do you still think I’m crazy, Peter?” Keating sat on the floor, his legs spread out. He lifted one hand and studied his finger tips, then put it to his mouth and bit off a hangnail. But the movement was deceptive; the man was reduced to a single sense, the sense of hearing, and Toohey knew that no answer could be expected.

Keating waited obediently; it seemed to make no difference; the sounds had stopped and it was now his function to wait until they started again.

Toohey put his hands on the arms of his chair, then lifted his palms, from the wrists, and clasped the wood again, a little slap of resigned finality. He pushed himself up to his feet.

“Thank you, Peter,” he said gravely. “Honesty is a hard thing to eradicate. I have made speeches to large audiences all my life. This was the speech I’ll never have a chance to make.”

Keating lifted his head. His voice had the quality of a down payment on terror; it was not frightened, but it held the advance echoes of the next hour to come:

“Don’t go, Ellsworth.”

Toohey stood over him, and laughed softly.

“That’s the answer, Peter. That’s my proof. You know me for what I am, you know what I’ve done to you, you have no illusions of virtue left. But you can’t leave me and you’ll never be able to leave me. You’ve obeyed me in the name of ideals. You’ll go on obeying me without ideals. Because that’s all you’re good for now.... Good night, Peter.”

XV

“THIS IS A TEST CASE. WHAT WE THINK OF IT WILL DETERMINE what we are. In the person of Howard Roark, we must crush the forces of selfishness and antisocial individualism—the curse of our modern world—here shown to us in ultimate consequences. As mentioned at the beginning of this column, the district attorney now has in his possession a piece of evidence—we cannot disclose its nature at this moment—which proves conclusively that Roark is guilty. We, the people, shall now demand justice.”

This appeared in “One Small Voice” on a morning late in May. Gail Wynand read it in his car, driving home from the airport. He had flown to Chicago in a last attempt to hold a national advertiser who had refused to renew a three-million dollar contract. Two days of skillful effort had failed; Wynand lost the advertiser. Stepping off the plane in Newark, he picked up the New York papers. His car was waiting to take him to his country house. Then he read “One Small Voice.”

He wondered for a moment what paper he held. He looked at the name on the top of the page. But it was the Banner, and the column was there, in its proper place, column one, first page, second section.

He leaned forward and told the chauffeur to drive to his office. He sat with the page spread open on his lap, until the car stopped before the Banner Building.

He noticed it at once, when he entered the building. In the eyes of two reporters who emerged from an elevator in the lobby; in the pose of the elevator man who fought a desire to turn and stare back at him; in the sudden immobility of all the men in his anteroom, in the break of a typewriter’s clicking on the desk of one secretary, in the lifted hand of another—he saw the waiting. Then he knew that all the implications of the unbelievable were understood by everyone on his paper.

He felt a first dim shock; because the waiting around him contained wonder, and something was wrong if there could be any wonder in anyone’s mind about the outcome of an issue between him and Ellsworth Toohey.

But he had no time to take notice of his own reactions. He had no attention to spare for anything except a sense of tightness, a pressure against the bones of his face, his teeth, his cheeks, the bridge of his nose—and he knew he must press back against that, keep it down, hold it.

He greeted no one and walked into his office. Alvah Scarret sat slumped in a chair before his desk. Scarret had a bandage of soiled white gauze on his throat, and his cheeks were flushed. Wynand stopped in the middle of the room. The people outside had felt relieved: Wynand’s face looked calm. Alvah Scarret knew better.

“Gail, I wasn’t here,” he gulped in a cracked whisper that was not a voice at all. “I haven’t been here for two days. Laryngitis, Gail. Ask my doctor. I wasn’t here. I just got out of bed, look at me, I’ve got a hundred and three, fever, I mean, the doctor didn’t want me to, but I ... to get up, I mean, Gail, I wasn’t here, I wasn’t here!”

He could not be certain that Wynand heard. But Wynand let him finish, then assumed the appearance of listening, as if the sounds were reaching him, delayed. After a moment, Wynand asked:

“Who was on the copy desk?”

“It ... it went through Allen and Falk.”

“Fire Harding, Allen, Falk and Toohey. Buy off Harding’s contract. But not Toohey’s. Have them all out of the building in fifteen minutes.”

Harding was the managing editor; Falk, a copyreader; Allen, the slot man, head of the copy desk; all had worked on the Banner for more than ten years. It was as if Scarret had heard a news flash announcing the impeachment of a President, the destruction of New York City by a meteor and the sinking of California into the Pacific Ocean.

“Gail!” he screamed. “We can’t!”

“Get out of here.”

Scarret got out.

Wynand pressed a switch on his desk and said in answer to the trembling voice of the woman outside:

“Don’t admit anyone.”

“Yes, Mr. Wynand.”

He pressed a button and spoke to the circulation manager.

“Stop every copy on the street.”

“Mr. Wynand, it’s too late! Most of them are ...”

“Stop them.”

“Yes, Mr. Wynand.”

He wanted to put his head down on the desk, lie still and rest, only the form of rest he needed did not exist, greater than sleep, greater than death, the rest of having never lived. The wish was like a secret taunt against himself, because he knew that the splitting pressure in his skull meant the opposite, an urge to action, so strong that he felt paralyzed. He fumbled for some sheets of clean paper, forgetting where he kept them. He had to write the editorial that would explain and counteract. He had to hurry. He felt no right to any minute that passed with the thing unwritten.

The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought—while his hand moved rapidly—what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have never discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words.

He heard the rumble, the vibration in the walls of his office, in the floor. The presses were running off his afternoon paper, a small tabloid, the Clarion. He smiled at the sound. His hand went faster, as if the sound were energy pumped into his fingers.

He had dropped his usual editorial “we.” He wrote: “... And if my readers or my enemies wish to laugh at me over this incident, I shall accept it and consider it the payment of a debt incurred. I have deserved it. ”

He thought: It’s the heart of this building, beating—what time is it?—do I really hear it or is it my own heart?—once, a doctor put the ends of his stethoscope into my ears and let me hear my own heartbeats -it sounded just like this—he said I was a healthy animal and good for many years—for many ... years ...

“I have foisted upon my readers a contemptible blackguard whose spiritual stature is my only excuse. I had not reached a degree of contempt for society such as would have permitted me to consider him dangerous. I am still holding on to a respect for my fellow men sufficient to let me say that Ellsworth Toohey cannot be a menace.”

They say sound never dies, but travels on in space—what happens to a man’s heartbeats?—so many of them in fifty-six years—could they be gathered again, in some sort of condenser, and put to use once more? If they were re-broadcast, would the result be the beating of those presses?

“But I have sponsored him under the masthead of my paper, and if public penance is a strange, humiliating act to perform in our modern age, such is the punishment I impose upon myself hereby.”

Not fifty-six years of those soft little drops of sound a man never hears, each single and final, not like a comma, but like a period, a long string of periods on a page, gathered to feed those presses—not fifty-six, but thirty-one, the other twenty-five went to make me ready—I was twenty-five when I raised the new masthead over the door—Publishers don’t change the name of a paper—This one does—The New York Banner—Gail Wynand’s Banner ...

“I ask the forgiveness of every man who has ever read this paper.”

A healthy animal—and that which comes from me is healthy—I must bring that doctor here and have him listen to those presses—he’ll grin in his good, smug, satisfied way, doctors like a specimen of perfect health occasionally, it’s rare enough—I must give him a treat—the healthiest sound he ever heard—and he’ll say the Banner is good for many years....

The door of his office opened and Ellsworth Toohey came in.

Wynand let him cross the room and approach the desk, without a gesture of protest. Wynand thought that what he felt was curiosity—if curiosity could be blown into the dimensions of a thing from the abyss -like those drawings of beetles the size of a house advancing upon human figures in the pages of the Banner’s Sunday supplement—curiosity, because Ellsworth Toohey was still in the building, because Toohey had gained admittance past the orders given, and because Toohey was laughing.

“I came to take my leave of absence, Mr. Wynand,” said Toohey. His face was composed; it expressed no gloating; the face of an artist who knew that overdoing was defeat and achieved the supreme of offensive-ness by remaining normal. “And to tell you that I’ll be back. On this job, on this column, in this building. In the interval you will have seen the nature of the mistake you’ve made. Do forgive me, I know this is in utterly bad taste, but I’ve waited for it for thirteen years and I think I can permit myself five minutes as a reward. So you were a possessive man, Mr. Wynand, and you loved your sense of property? Did you ever stop to think what it rested upon? Did you stop to secure the foundations? No, because you were a practical man. Practical men deal in bank accounts, real estate, advertising contracts and gilt-edged securities. They leave to the impractical intellectuals, like me, the amusements of putting the gilt edges through a chemical analysis to learn a few things about the nature and the source of gold. They hang on to Kream-O Pudding, and leave us such trivia as the theater, the movies, the radio, the schools, the book reviews and the criticism of architecture. Just a sop to keep us quiet if we care to waste our time playing with the inconsequentials of life, while you’re making money. Money is power. Is it, Mr. Wynand? So you were after power, Mr. Wynand? Power over men? You poor amateur! You never discovered the nature of your own ambition or you’d have known that you weren’t fit for it. You couldn’t use the methods required and you wouldn’t want the results. You’ve never been enough of a scoundrel. I don’t mind handing you that, because I don’t know which is worse: to be a great scoundrel or a gigantic fool. That’s why I’ll be back. And when I am, I’ll run this paper.”

Wynand said quietly:

“When you are. Now get out of here.”

The city room of the Banner walked out on strike.

The Union of Wynand Employees walked out in a body. A great many others, non-members, joined them. The typographical staff remained.

Wynand had never given a thought to the Union. He paid higher wages than any other publisher and no economic demands had ever been made upon him. If his employees wished to amuse themselves by listening to speeches, he saw no reason to worry about it. Dominique had tried to warn him once: “Gail, if people want to organize for wages, hours or practical demands, it’s their proper right. But when there’s no tangible purpose, you’d better watch closely.” “Darling, how many times do I have to ask you? Keep off the Banner.”

He had never taken the trouble to learn who belonged to the Union. He found now that the membership was small—and crucial; it included all his key men, not the big executives, but the rank below, expertly chosen, the active ones, the small, indispensable spark plugs: the best leg men, the general assignment men, the rewrite men, the assistant editors. He looked up their records: most of them had been hired in the last eight years; recommended by Mr. Toohey.

Non-members walked out for various reasons: some, because they hated Wynand; others, because they were afraid to remain and it seemed easier than to analyze the issue. One man, a timid little fellow, met Wynand in the hall and stopped to shriek: “We’ll be back, sweetheart, and then it’ll be a different tune!” Some left, avoiding the sight of Wynand. Others played safe. “Mr. Wynand, I hate to do it, I hate it like hell, I had nothing to do with that Union, but a strike’s a strike and I can’t permit myself to be a scab.” “Honest, Mr. Wynand, I don’t know who’s right or wrong, I do think Ellsworth pulled a dirty trick and Harding had no business letting him get away with it, but how can one be sure who’s right about anything nowadays? And one thing I won’t do is I won’t cross a picket line. No, sir. The way I feel is, pickets right or wrong.”

The strikers presented two demands: the reinstatement of the four men who had been discharged; a reversal of the Banner’s stand on the Cortlandt case.

Harding, the managing editor, wrote an article explaining his position; it was published in the New Frontiers. “I did ignore Mr. Wynand’s orders in a matter of policy, perhaps an unprecedented action for a managing editor to take. I did so with full realization of the responsibility involved. Mr. Toohey, Allen, Falk and I wished to save the Banner for the sake of its employees, its stockholders and its readers. We wished to bring Mr. Wynand to reason by peaceful means. We hoped he would give in with good grace, once he had seen the Banner committed to the stand shared by most of the press of the country. We knew the arbitrary, unpredictable and unscrupulous character of our employer, but we took the chance, willing to sacrifice ourselves to our professional duty. While we recognize an owner’s right to dictate the policy of his paper on political, sociological or economic issues, we believe that a situation has gone past the limits of decency when an employer expects self-respecting men to espouse the cause of a common criminal. We wish Mr. Wynand to realize that the day of dictatorial one-man rule is past. We must have some say in the running of the place where we make our living. It is a fight for the freedom of the press.”

Mr. Harding was sixty years old, owned an estate on Long Island, and divided his spare time between skeet-shooting and breeding pheasants. His childless wife was a member of the Board of Directors of the Workshop for Social Study; Toohey, its star lecturer, had introduced her to the Workshop. She had written her husband’s article.

The two men off the copy desk were not members of Toohey’s Union. Allen’s daughter was a beautiful young actress starred in all of Ike’s plays. Falk’s brother was secretary to Lancelot Clokey.

Gail Wynand sat at the desk in his office and looked down at a pile of paper. He had many things to do, but one picture kept coming back to him and he could not get rid of it and the sense of it clung to all his actions—the picture of a ragged boy standing before the desk of an editor: “Can you spell cat?”—“Can you spell anthropomorphology?” The identities cracked and became mixed, it seemed to him that the boy stood here, at his desk, waiting, and once he said aloud: “Go away!” He caught himself in anger, he thought: You’re cracking, you fool, now’s not the time. He did not speak aloud again, but the conversation went on silently while he read, checked and signed papers: “Go away! We have no jobs here.” “I’ll hang around. Use me when you want to. You don’t have to pay me.” “They’re paying you, don’t you understand, you little fool? They’re paying you.” Aloud, his voice normal, he said into a telephone: “Tell Manning that we’ll have to fill in with mat stuff.... Send up the proofs as soon as you can.... Send up a sandwich. Any kind.”

A few had remained with him: the old men and the copy boys. They came in, in the morning, often with cuts on their faces and blood on their collars; one stumbled in, his skull open, and had to be sent away in an ambulance. It was neither courage nor loyalty; it was inertia; they had lived too long with the thought that the world would end if they lost their jobs on the Banner. The old ones did not understand. The young ones did not care.

Copy boys were sent out on reporters’ beats. Most of the stuff they sent in was of such quality that Wynand was forced past despair into howls of laughter: he had never read such highbrow English; he could see the pride of the ambitious youth who was a journalist at last. He did not laugh when the stories appeared in the Banner as written; there were not enough rewrite men.

He tried to hire new men. He offered extravagant salaries. The people he wanted refused to work for him. A few men answered his call, and he wished they hadn’t, though he hired them. They were men who had not been employed by a reputable newspaper for ten years; the kind who would not have been allowed, a month ago, into the lobby of his building. Some of them had to be thrown out in two days; others remained. They were drunk most of the time. Some acted as if they were granting Wynand a favor. “Don’t you get huffy, Gail, old boy,” said one—and was tossed bodily down two flights of stairs. He broke an ankle and sat on the bottom landing, looking up at Wynand with an air of complete astonishment. Others were subtler; they merely stalked about and looked at Wynand slyly, almost winking, implying that they were fellow criminals tied together in a dirty deal.

He appealed to schools of journalism. No one responded. One student body sent him a resolution signed by all its members: “... Entering our careers with a high regard for the dignity of our profession, dedicating ourselves to uphold the honor of the press, we feel that none among us could preserve his self-respect and accept an offer such as yours.”

The news editor had remained at his desk; the city editor had gone. Wynand filled in as city editor, managing editor, wire man, rewrite man, copy boy. He did not leave the building. He slept on a couch in his office—as he had done in the first years of the Banner’s existence. Coatless, tieless, his shirt collar torn open, he ran up and down the stairs, his steps like the rattle of a machine gun. Two elevator boys had remained; the others had vanished, no one knew just when or why, whether prompted by sympathy for the strike, fear or plain discouragement.

Alvah Scarret could not understand Wynand’s calm. The brilliant machine—and that, thought Scarret, was really the word which had always stood for Wynand in his mind—had never functioned better. His words were brief, his orders rapid, his decisions immediate. In the confusion of machines, lead, grease, ink, waste paper, unswept offices, untenanted desks, glass crashing in sudden showers when a brick was hurled from the street below, Wynand moved like a figure in double-exposure, superimposed on his background, out of place and scale. He doesn’t belong here, thought Scarret, because he doesn’t look modern—that’s what it is—he doesn’t look modern, no matter what kind of pants he’s wearing—he looks like something out of a Gothic cathedral. The patrician head, held level, the fleshless face that had shrunk tighter together. The captain of a ship known by all, save the captain, to be sinking.

Alvah Scarret had remained. He had not grasped that the events were real; he shuffled about in a stupor; he felt a fresh jolt of bewilderment each morning when he drove up to the building and saw the pickets. He suffered no injury beyond a few tomatoes hurled at his windshield. He tried to help Wynand; he tried to do his work and that of five other men, but he could not complete a normal day’s task. He was going quietly to pieces, his joints wrenched loose by a question mark. He wasted everybody’s time, interrupting anything to ask: “But why? Why? How, just like that all of a sudden?”

He saw a nurse in white uniform walking down the hall—an emergency first-aid station had been established on the ground floor. He saw her carrying a wastebasket to the incinerator, with wadded clumps of gauze, bloodstained. He turned away; he felt sick. It was not the sight, but the greater terror of an implication grasped by his instinct: this civilized building—secure in the neatness of waxed floors, respectable with the strict grooming of modern business, a place where one dealt in such rational matters as written words and trade contracts, where one accepted ads for baby garments and chatted about golf—had become, in the span of a few days, a place where one carried bloody refuse through the halls. Why?—thought Alvah Scarret.

“I can’t understand it,” he droned in an accentless monotone to anyone around him, “I can’t understand how Ellsworth got so much power. ... And Ellsworth’s a man of culture, an idealist, not a dirty radical off a soapbox, he’s so friendly and witty, and what an erudition!—a man who jokes all the time is not a man of violence—Ellsworth didn’t mean this, he didn’t know what it would lead to, he loves people, I’d stake my shirt on Ellsworth Toohey.”

Once, in Wynand’s office, he ventured to say:

“Gail, why don’t you negotiate? Why don’t you meet with them at least?”

“Shut up.”

“But, Gail, there might be a bit of truth on their side, too. They’re newspapermen. You know what they say, the freedom of the press ...”

Then he saw the fit of fury he had expected for days and had thought safely sidetracked—the blue irises vanishing in a white smear, the blind, luminous eyeballs in a face that was all cavities, the trembling hands. But in a moment, he saw what he had never witnessed before: he saw Wynand break the fit, without sound, without relief. He saw the sweat of the effort on the hollow temples, and the fists on the edge of the desk.

“Alvah ... if I had not sat on the stairs of the Gazette for a week ... where would be the press for them to be free on?”

There were policemen outside, and in the halls of the building. It helped, but not much. One night acid was thrown at the main entrance. It burned the big plate glass of the ground floor windows and left leprous spots on the walls. Sand in the bearings stopped one of the presses. An obscure delicatessen owner got his shop smashed for advertising in the Banner. A great many small advertisers withdrew. Wynand delivery trucks were wrecked. One driver was killed. The striking Union of Wynand Employees issued a protest against acts of violence; the Union had not instigated them; most of its members did not know who had. The New Frontiers said something about regrettable excesses, but ascribed them to “spontaneous outbursts of justifiable popular anger.”

Homer Slottern, in the name of a group who called themselves the liberal businessmen, sent Wynand a notice canceling their advertising contracts. “You may sue us if you wish. We feel we have a legitimate cause for cancellation. We signed to advertise in a reputable newspaper, not in a sheet that has become a public disgrace, brings pickets to our doors, ruins our business and is not being read by anybody.” The group included most of the Banner’s wealthiest advertisers.

Gail Wynand stood at the window of his office and looked at his city.

“I have supported strikes at a time when it was dangerous to do so. I have fought Gail Wynand all my life. I had never expected to see the day or the issue when I would be forced to say—as I say now—that I stand on the side of Gail Wynand,” wrote Austen Heller in the Chronicle.

Wynand sent him a note: “God damn you, I didn’t ask you to defend me. G W”

The New Frontiers described Austen Heller as “a reactionary who has sold himself to Big Business.” Intellectual society ladies said that Austen Heller was old-fashioned.

Gail Wynand stood at a desk in the city room and wrote editorials as usual. His derelict staff saw no change in him; no haste, no outbursts of anger. There was nobody to notice that some of his actions were new: he would go to the pressroom and stand looking at the white stream shot out of the roaring giants, and listen to the sound. He would pick up a lead slug off the composing room floor, and finger it absently on the palm of his hand, like a piece of jade, and lay it carefully on a table, as if he did not want it to be wasted. He fought other forms of such waste, not noticing it, the gestures instinctive: he retrieved pencils, he spent a half-hour, while telephones shrieked unanswered, repairing a typewriter that had broken down. It was not a matter of economy; he signed checks without looking at the figures; Scarret was afraid to think of the amounts each passing day cost him. It was a matter of things that were part of the building where he loved every doorknob, things that belonged to the Banner that belonged to him.

Late each afternoon he telephoned Dominique in the country. “Fine. Everything under control. Don’t listen to panic-mongers.... No, to hell with it, you know I don’t want to talk about the damn paper. Tell me what the garden looks like.... Did you go swimming today? ... Tell me about the lake.... What dress are you wearing? ... Listen to WLX tonight, at eight, they’ll have your pet—Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto.... Of course I have time to keep informed about everything.... Oh, all right, I see one can’t fool an ex-newspaper woman, I did go over the radio page.... Of course we have plenty of help, it’s just that I can’t quite trust some of the new boys and I had a moment to spare.... Above all, don’t come to town. You promised me that.... Good night, dearest....”

He hung up and sat looking at the telephone, smiling. The thought of the countryside was like the thought of a continent beyond an ocean that could not be crossed; it gave him a sense of being locked in a besieged fortress and he liked that—not the fact, but the feeling. His face looked like a throwback to some distant ancestor who had fought on the ramparts of a castle.

One evening he went out to the restaurant across the street; he had not eaten a complete meal for days. The streets were still light when he came back—the placid brown haze of summer, as if dulled sunrays remained stretched too comfortably on the warm air to undertake a movement of withdrawal, even though the sun had long since gone; it made the sky look fresh and the street dirty; there were patches of brown and tired orange in the corners of old buildings. He saw pickets pacing in front of the Banner’s entrance. There were eight of them and they marched around and around in a long oval on the sidewalk. He recognized one boy—a police reporter; he had never seen any of the others. They carried signs: “Toohey, Harding, Allen, Falk ...” “The Freedom of the Press ...” “Gail Wynand Tramples Human Rights ...”

His eyes kept following one woman. Her hips began at her ankles, bulging over the tight straps of her shoes; she had square shoulders and a long coat of cheap brown tweed over a huge square body. She had small white hands, the kind that would drop things all over the kitchen. She had an incision of a mouth, without lips, and she waddled as she moved, but she moved with surprising briskness. Her steps defied the whole world to hurt her, with a malicious slyness that seemed to say she would like nothing better, because what a joke it would be on the world if it tried to hurt her, just try it and see, just try it. Wynand knew she had never been employed on the Banner; she never could be; it did not appear likely that she could be taught to read; her steps seemed to add that she jolly well didn’t have to. She carried a sign: “We demand ...”

He thought of the nights when he had slept on the couch in the old Banner Building, in the first years, because the new presses had to be paid for and the Banner had to be on the streets before its competitors, and he coughed blood one night and refused to see a doctor, but it turned out to be nothing, just exhaustion.

He hurried into the building. The presses were rolling. He stood and listened for a while.

At night the building was quiet. It seemed bigger, as if sound took space and vacated it; there were panels of light at open doors, between long stretches of dim hallways. A lone typewriter clicked somewhere, evenly, like a dripping faucet. Wynand walked through the halls. He thought that men had been willing to work for him when he plugged known crooks for municipal elections, when he glamorized red-light districts, when he ruined reputations by scandalous libel, when he sobbed over the mothers of gangsters. Talented men, respected men had been eager to work for him. Now he was being honest for the first time in his career. He was leading his greatest crusade—with the help of finks, drifters, drunkards, and humble drudges too passive to quit. The guilt, he thought, was not perhaps with those who now refused to work for him.

The sun hit the square crystal inkstand on his desk. It made Wynand think of a cool drink on a lawn, white clothes, the feel of grass under bare elbows. He tried not to look at the gay glitter and went on writing. It was a morning in the second week of the strike. He had retreated to his office for an hour and given orders not to be disturbed; he had an article to finish; he knew he wanted the excuse, one hour of not seeing what went on in the building.

The door of his office opened without announcement, and Dominique came in. She had not been allowed to enter the Banner Building since their marriage.

He got up, a kind of quiet obedience in his movement, permitting himself no questions. She wore a coral linen suit, she stood as if the lake were behind her and the sunlight rose from the surface to the folds of her clothes. She said:

“Gail, I’ve come for my old job on the Banner.”

He stood looking at her silently; then he smiled; it was a smile of convalescence.

He turned to the desk, picked up the sheets he had written, handed them to her and said:

“Take this to the back room. Pick up the wire flimsies and bring them to me. Then report to Manning at the city desk.”

The impossible, the not to be achieved in word, glance or gesture, the complete union of two beings in complete understanding, was done by a small stack of paper passing from his hand to hers. Their fingers did not touch. She turned and walked out of the office.

Within two days, it was as if she had never left the staff of the Banner. Only now she did not write a column on houses, but kept busy wherever a competent hand was needed to fill a gap. “It’s quite all right, Alvah,” she said to Scarret, “it’s a proper feminine job to be a seamstress. I’m here to slap on patches where necessary—and boy! is this cloth ripping fast! Just call me when one of your new journalists runs amuck more than usual.”

Scarret could not understand her tone, her manner or her presence. “You’re a lifesaver, Dominique,” he mumbled sadly. “It’s like the old days, seeing you here—and oh! how I wish it were the old days! Only I can’t understand. Gail wouldn’t allow a photo of you in the place, when it was a decent, respectable place—and now when it’s practically as safe as a penitentiary during a convict riot, he lets you work here!”

“Can the commentaries, Alvah. We haven’t the time.”

She wrote a brilliant review of a movie she hadn’t seen. She dashed off a report on a convention she hadn’t attended. She batted out a string of recipes for the “Daily Dishes” column, when the lady in charge failed to show up one morning. “I didn’t know you could cook,” said Scarret. “I didn’t either,” said Dominique. She went out one night to cover a dock fire, when it was found that the only man on duty had passed out on the floor of the men’s room. “Good job,” Wynand told her when he read the story, “but try that again and you’ll get fired. If you want to stay, you’re not to step out of the building.”

This was his only comment on her presence. He spoke to her when necessary, briefly and simply, as to any other employee. He gave orders. There were days when they did not have time to see each other. She slept on a couch in the library. Occasionally, in the evening, she would come to his office, for a short rest, when they could take it, and then they talked, about nothing in particular, about small events of the day’s work, gaily, like any married couple gossiping about the normal routine of their common life.

They did not speak of Roark or Cortlandt. She had noticed Roark’s picture on the wall of his office and asked: “When did you hang that up?” “Over a year ago.” It had been their only reference to Roark. They did not discuss the growing public fury against the Banner. They did not speculate on the future. They felt relief in forgetting the question beyond the walls of the building; it could be forgotten because it stood no longer as a question between them; it was solved and answered; what remained was the peace of the simplified: they had a job to do—the job of keeping a newspaper going—and they were doing it together.

She would come in, unsummoned, in the middle of the night, with a cup of hot coffee, and he would snatch it gratefully, not pausing in his work. He would find fresh sandwiches left on his desk when he needed them badly. He had no time to wonder where she got things. Then he discovered that she had established an electric plate and a stock of supplies in a closet. She cooked breakfast for him, when he had to work all night, she came in carrying dishes on a piece of cardboard for a tray, with the silence of empty streets beyond the windows and the first light of morning on the rooftops.

Once he found her, broom in hand, sweeping an office; the maintenance department had fallen apart, charwomen appeared and disappeared, no one had time to notice.

“Is that what I’m paying you for?” he asked.

“Well, we can’t work in a pigsty. I haven’t asked you what you’re paying me, but I want a raise.”

“Drop this thing, for God’s sake! It’s ridiculous.”

“What’s ridiculous? It’s clean now. It didn’t take me long. Is it a good job?”

“It’s a good job.”

She leaned on the broom handle and laughed. “I believe you thought, like everybody else, that I’m just a kind of luxury object, a high-class type of kept woman, didn’t you, Gail?”

“Is this the way you can keep going when you want to?”

“This is the way I’ve wanted to keep going all my life—if I could find a reason for it.”

He learned that her endurance was greater than his. She never showed a sign of exhaustion. He supposed that she slept, but he could not discover when.

At any time, in any part of the building, not seeing him for hours, she was aware of him, she knew when he needed her most. Once, he fell asleep, slumped across his desk. He awakened and found her looking at him. She had turned off the lights, she sat on a chair by the window, in the moonlight, her face turned to him, calm, watching. Her face was the first thing he saw. Lifting his head painfully from his arm, in the first moment, before he could return fully to control and reality, he felt a sudden wrench of anger, helplessness and desperate protest, not remembering what had brought them here, to this, remembering only that they were both caught in some vast, slow process of torture and that he loved her.

She had seen it in his face, before he had completed the movement of straightening his body. She walked to him, she stood by his chair, she took his head and let it rest against her, she held him, and he did not resist, slumped in her arms, she kissed his hair, she whispered: “It will be all right, Gail, it will be all right.”

At the end of three weeks Wynand walked out of the building one evening, not caring whether there would be anything left of it when he returned, and went to see Roark.

He had not telephoned Roark since the beginning of the siege. Roark telephoned him often; Wynand answered, quietly, just answering, originating no statement, refusing to prolong the conversation. He had warned Roark at the beginning: “Don’t try to come here. I’ve given orders. You won’t be admitted.” He had to keep out of his mind the actual form which the issue of his battle could take; he had to forget the fact of Roark’s physical existence; because the thought of Roark’s person brought the thought of the county jail.

He walked the long distance to the Enright House; walking made the distance longer and safer; a ride in a cab would pull Roark too close to the Banner Building. He kept his glance slanted toward a point six feet ahead of him on the sidewalk; he did not want to look at the city.

“Good evening, Gail,” Roark said calmly when he came in.

“I don’t know what’s a more conspicuous form of bad discipline,” said Wynand, throwing his hat down on a table by the door, “to blurt things right out or to ignore them blatantly. I look like hell. Say it.”

“You do look like hell. Sit down, rest and don’t talk. Then I’ll run you a hot bath—no, you don’t look that dirty, but it will be good for you for a change. Then we’ll talk.”

Wynand shook his head and remained standing at the door.

“Howard, the Banner is not helping you. It’s ruining you.”

It had taken him eight weeks to prepare himself to say that.

“Of course,” said Roark. “What of it?”

Wynand would not advance into the room.

“Gail, it doesn’t matter, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not counting on public opinion, one way or the other.”

“You want me to give in?”

“I want you to hold out if it takes everything you own.”

He saw that Wynand understood, that it was the thing Wynand had tried not to face, and that Wynand wanted him to speak.

“I don’t expect you to save me. I think I have a chance to win. The strike won’t make it better or worse. Don’t worry about me. And don’t give in. If you stick to the end—you won’t need me any longer.”

He saw the look of anger, protest—and agreement. He added:

“You know what I’m saying. We’ll be better friends than ever—and you’ll come to visit me in jail, if necessary. Don’t wince, and don’t make me say too much. Not now. I’m glad of this strike. I knew that something like that had to happen, when I saw you for the first time. You knew it long before that.”

“Two months ago, I promised you ... the one promise I wanted to keep ...”

“You’re keeping it.”

“Don’t you really want to despise me? I wish you’d say it now. I came here to hear it.”

“All right. Listen. You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated. There was Henry Cameron who died for my own cause. And you’re the publisher of filthy tabloids. But I couldn’t say this to him, and I’m saying it to you. There’s Steve Mallory who’s never compromised with his soul. And you’ve done nothing but sell yours in every known way. But I couldn’t say this to him and I’m saying it to you. Is that what you’ve always wanted to hear from me? But don’t give in.”

He turned away, and added: “That’s all. We won’t talk about your damn strike again. Sit down, I’ll get you a drink. Rest, get yourself out of looking like hell.”

Wynand returned to the Banner late at night. He took a cab. It did not matter. He did not notice the distance.

Dominique said: “You’ve seen Roark.”

“Yes. How do you know?”

“Here’s the Sunday makeup. It’s fairly lousy, but it’ll have to do. I sent Manning home for a few hours—he was going to collapse. Jackson quit, but we can do without him. Alvah’s column was a mess—he can’t even keep his grammar straight any more—I rewrote it, but don’t tell him, tell him you did.”

“Go to sleep. I’ll take Manning’s place. I’m good for hours.”

They went on, and the days passed, and in the mailing room the piles of returns grew, running over into the corridor, white stacks of paper like marble slabs. Fewer copies of the Banner were run off with every edition, but the stacks kept growing. The days passed, days of heroic effort to put out a newspaper that came back unbought and unread.

XVI

IN THE GLASS-SMOOTH MAHOGANY OF THE LONG TABLE RESERVED FOR the board of directors there was a monogram in colored wood—G W—reproduced from his signature. It had always annoyed the directors. They had no time to notice it now. But an occasional glance fell upon it—and then it was a glance of pleasure.

The directors sat around the table. It was the first meeting in the board’s history that had not been summoned by Wynand. But the meeting had convened and Wynand had come. The strike was in its second month.

Wynand stood by his chair at the head of the table. He looked like a drawing from a men’s magazine, fastidiously groomed, a white handkerchief in the breast pocket of his dark suit. The directors caught themselves in peculiar thoughts: some thought of British tailors, others -of the House of Lords—of the Tower of London—of the executed English King—or was it a Chancellor?—who had died so well.

They did not want to look at the man before them. They leaned upon visions of the pickets outside—of the perfumed, manicured women who shrieked their support of Ellsworth Toohey in drawing-room discussions -of the broad, flat face of a girl who paced Fifth Avenue with a placard “We Don’t Read Wynand”—for support and courage to say what they were saying.

Wynand thought of a crumbling wall on the edge of the Hudson. He heard steps approaching blocks away. Only this time there were no wires in his hand to hold his muscles ready.

“It’s gone beyond all sense. Is this a business organization or a charitable society for the defense of personal friends?”

“Three hundred thousand dollars last week.... Never mind how I know it, Gail, no secret about it, your banker told me. All right, it’s your money, but if you expect to get that back out of the sheet, let me tell you we’re wise to your smart tricks. You’re not going to saddle the corporation with that one, not a penny of it, you don’t get away with it this time, it’s too late, Gail, the day’s past for your bright stunts.”

Wynand looked at the fleshy lips of the man making sounds, and thought: You’ve run the Banner, from the beginning, you didn’t know it, but I know, it was you, it was your paper, there’s nothing to save now.

“Yes, Slottern and his bunch are willing to come back at once, all they ask is that we accept the Union’s demands, and they’ll pick up the balance of their contracts, on the old terms, even without waiting for you to rebuild circulation—which will be some job, friend, let me tell you-and I think that’s pretty white of them. I spoke to Homer yesterday and he gave me his word—care to hear me name the sums involved, Wynand, or do you know it without my help?”

“No, Senator Eldridge wouldn’t see you.... Aw, skip it, Gail, we know you flew to Washington last week. What you don’t know is that Senator Eldridge is going around saying he wouldn’t touch this with a ten-foot pole. And Boss Craig suddenly got called out to Florida, did he?—to sit up with a sick aunt? None of them will pull you out of this one, Gail. This isn’t a road-paving deal or a little watered-stock scandal. And you ain’t what you used to be.”

Wynand thought: I never used to be, I’ve never been here, why are you afraid to look at me? Don’t you know that I’m the least among you? The half-naked women in the Sunday supplement, the babies in the rotogravure section, the editorials on park squirrels, they were your souls given expression, the straight stuff of your souls—but where was mine?

“I’ll be damned if I can see any sense to it. Now, if they were demanding a raise in wages, that I could understand, I’d say fight the bastards for all we’re worth. But what’s this—a God-damn intellectual issue of some kind? Are we losing our shirts for principles or something?”

“Don’t you understand? The Banner’s a church publication now. Mr. Gail Wynand, the evangelist. We’re over a barrel, but we’ve got ideals.”

“Now if it were a real issue, a political issue—but some fool dynamiter who’s blown up some dump! Everybody’s laughing at us. Honest, Wynand, I’ve tried to read your editorials and if you want my honest opinion, it’s the lousiest stuff ever put in print. You’d think you were writing for college professors!”

Wynand thought: I know you—you’re the one who’d give money to a pregnant slut, but not to a starving genius—I’ve seen your face before—I picked you and I brought you in—when in doubt about your work, remember that man’s face, you’re writing for him—but, Mr. Wynand, one can’t remember his face—one can, child, one can, it will come back to remind you—it will come back and demand payment—and I’ll pay—I signed a blank check long ago and now it’s presented for collection—but a blank check is always made out to the sum of everything you’ve got.

“The situation is medieval and a disgrace to democracy.” The voice whined. It was Mitchell Layton speaking. “It’s about time somebody had some say around here. One man running all those papers as he damn pleases—what is this, the nineteenth century?” Layton pouted; he looked somewhere in the direction of a banker across the table. “Has anybody here ever bothered to inquire about my ideas? I’ve got ideas. We’ve all got to pool ideas. What I mean is teamwork, one big orchestra. It’s about time this paper had a modern, liberal, progressive policy! For instance, take the question of the share-croppers ...”

“Shut up, Mitch,” said Alvah Scarret. Scarret had drops of sweat running down his temples; he didn’t know why; he wanted the board to win; there was just something in the room ... it’s too hot in here, he thought, I wish somebody’d open a window.

“I won’t shut up!” shrieked Mitchell Layton. “I’m just as good as . . .”

“Please, Mr. Layton,” said the banker. “All right,” said Layton, “all right. Don’t forget who holds the biggest hunk of stock next to Superman here.” He jerked his thumb at Wynand, not looking at him. “Just don’t forget it. Just you guess who’s going to run things around here.”

“Gail,” said Alvah Scarret, looking up at Wynand, his eyes strangely honest and tortured, “Gail, it’s no use. But we can save the pieces. Look, if we just admit that we were wrong about Cortlandt and ... and if we just take Harding back, he’s a valuable man, and ... maybe Toohey ...”

“No one is to mention the name of Toohey in this discussion,” said Wynand.

Mitchell Layton snapped his mouth open and dropped it shut again.

“That’s it, Gail!” cried Alvah Scarret. “That’s great! We can bargain and make them an offer. We’ll reverse our policy on Cortlandt—that, we’ve got to, not for the damn Union, but we’ve got to rebuild circulation, Gail—so we’ll offer them that and we’ll take Harding, Allen and Falk, but not To ... not Ellsworth. We give in and they give in. Saves everybody’s face. Is that it, Gail?”

Wynand said nothing.

“I think that’s it, Mr. Scarret,” said the banker. “I think that’s the solution. After all, Mr. Wynand must be allowed to maintain his prestige. We can sacrifice . . . a columnist and keep peace among ourselves.”

“I don’t see it!” yelled Mitchell Layton. “I don’t see it at all! Why should we sacrifice Mr.... a great liberal, just because ...”

“I stand with Mr. Scarret,” said the man who had spoken of Senators, and the voices of the others seconded him, and the man who had criticized the editorials said suddenly, in the general noise: “I think Gail Wynand was a hell of a swell boss after all!” There was something about Mitchell Layton which he didn’t want to see. Now he looked at Wynand, for protection. Wynand did not notice him.

“Gail?” asked Scarret. “Gail, what do you say?”

There was no answer.

“God damn it, Wynand, it’s now or never! This can’t go on!”

“Make up your mind or get out!”

“I’ll buy you out!” shrieked Layton. “Want to sell? Want to sell and get the hell out of it?”

“For God’s sake, Wynand, don’t be a fool!”

“Gail, it’s the Banner ...” whispered Scarret. “It’s our Banner....”

“We’ll stand by you, Gail, we’ll all chip in, we’ll pull the old paper back on its feet, we’ll do as you say, you’ll be the boss—but for God’s sake, act like a boss now!”

“Quiet, gentlemen, quiet! Wynand, this is final: we switch policy on Cortlandt, we take Harding, Allen and Falk back, and we save the wreck. Yes or no?”

There was no answer.

“Wynand, you know it’s that—or you have to close the Banner. You can’t keep this up, even if you bought us all out. Give in or close the Banner. You had better give in.”

Wynand heard that. He had heard it through all the speeches. He had heard it for days before the meeting. He knew it better than any man present. Close the Banner.

He saw a single picture: the new masthead rising over the door of the Gazette.

“You had better give in.”

He made a step back. It was not a wall behind him. It was only the side of his chair.

He thought of the moment in his bedroom when he had almost pulled a trigger. He knew he was pulling it now.

“All right,” he said.

It’s only a bottle cap, thought Wynand looking down at a speck of glitter under his feet; a bottle cap ground into the pavement. The pavements of New York are full of things like that—bottle caps, safety pins, campaign buttons, sink chains; sometimes—lost jewels; it’s all alike now, flattened, ground in; it makes the pavements sparkle at night. The fertilizer of a city. Someone drank the bottle empty and threw the cap away. How many cars have passed over it? Could one retrieve it now? Could one kneel and dig with bare hands and tear it out again? I had no right to hope for escape. I had no right to kneel and seek redemption. Millions of years ago, when the earth was being born, there were living things like me: flies caught in resin that became amber, animals caught in ooze that became rock. I am a man of the twentieth century and I became a bit of tin in the pavements, for the trucks of New York to roll over.

He walked slowly, the collar of his topcoat raised. The street stretched before him, empty, and the buildings ahead were like the backs of books lining a shelf, assembled without order, of all sizes. The corners he passed led to black channels; street lamps gave the city a protective cover, but it cracked in spots. He turned a corner when he saw a slant of light ahead; it was a goal for three or four blocks.

The light came from the window of a pawnshop. The shop was closed, but a glaring bulb hung there to discourage looters who might be reduced to this. He stopped and looked at it. He thought, the most indecent sight on earth, a pawnshop window. The things which had been sacred to men, and the things which had been precious, surrendered to the sight of all, to the pawing and the bargaining, trash to the indifferent eyes of strangers, the equality of a junk heap, typewriters and violins—the tools of dreams, old photographs and wedding rings—the tags of love, together with soiled trousers, coffee pots, ash trays, pornographic plaster figures; the refuse of despair, pledged, not sold, not cut off in clean finality, but hocked to a stillborn hope, never to be redeemed. “Hello, Gail Wynand,” he said to the things in the window, and walked on.

He felt an iron grate under his feet and an odor struck him in the face, an odor of dust, sweat and dirty clothing, worse than the smell of stockyards, because it had a homey, normal quality, like decomposition made routine. The grating of a subway. He thought, this is the residue of many people put together, of human bodies pressed into a mass, with no space to move, with no air to breathe. This is the sum, even though down there, among the packed flesh, one can find the smell of starched white dresses, of clean hair, of healthy young skin. Such is the nature of sums and of quests for the lowest common denominator. What, then, is the residue of many human minds put together, unaired, unspaced, undifferentiated? The Banner, he thought, and walked on.

My city, he thought, the city I loved, the city I thought I ruled.

He had walked out of the board meeting, he had said: “Take over, Alvah, until I come back.” He had not stopped to see Manning drunk with exhaustion at the city desk, nor the people in the city room, still functioning, waiting, knowing what was being decided in the board room; nor Dominique. Scarret would tell them. He had walked out of the building and gone to his penthouse and sat alone in the bedroom without windows. Nobody had come to disturb him.

When he left the penthouse, it was safe to go out: it was dark. He passed a newsstand and saw late editions of the afternoon papers announcing the settlement of the Wynand strike. The Union had accepted Scarret’s compromise. He knew that Scarret would take care of all the rest. Scarret would replate the front page of tomorrow’s Banner. Scarret would write the editorial that would appear on the front page. He thought, the presses are rolling right now. Tomorrow morning’s Banner will be out on the streets in an hour.

He walked at random. He owned nothing, but he was owned by any part of the city. It was right that the city should now direct his way and that he should be moved by the pull of chance corners. Here I am, my masters, I am coming to salute you and acknowledge, wherever you want me, I shall go as I’m told. I’m the man who wanted power.

That woman sitting on the stoop of an old brownstone house, her fat white knees spread apart—the man pushing the white brocade of his stomach out of a cab in front of a great hotel—the little man sipping root beer at a drugstore counter—the woman leaning over a stained mattress on the sill of a tenement window—the taxi driver parked on a corner—the lady with orchids, drunk at the table of a sidewalk cafe—the toothless woman selling chewing gum—the man in shirt sleeves, leaning against the door of a poolroom—they are my masters. My owners, my rulers without a face.

Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs, one over another, to the sky—under each bulb—down to there, see that spark over the river which is not a star?—there are people whom you will never see and who are your masters. At the supper tables, in the drawing rooms, in their beds and in their cellars, in their studies and in their bathrooms. Speeding in the subways under your feet. Crawling up in elevators through vertical cracks around you. Jolting past you in every bus. Your masters, Gail Wynand. There is a net—longer than the cables that coil through the walls of this city, larger than the mesh of pipes that carry water, gas and refuse—there is another hidden net around you; it is strapped to you, and the wires lead to every hand in the city. They jerked the wires and you moved. You were a ruler of men. You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends.

My masters, the anonymous, the unselected. They gave me a penthouse, an office, a yacht. To them, to any one of them who wished, for the sum of three cents, I sold Howard Roark.

He walked past an open marble court, a cave cut deep into a building, filled with light, spurting the sudden cold of air-conditioning. It was a movie theater and the marquee had letters made of rainbows: Romeo and Juliet. A placard stood by the glass column of the box office: “Bill Shakespeare’s immortal classic! But there’s nothing highbrow about it! Just a simple human love story. A boy from the Bronx meets a girl from Brooklyn. Just like the folks next door. Just like you and me.”

He walked past the door of a saloon. There was a smell of stale beer. A woman sat slumped, breasts flattened against the table top. A juke box played Wagner’s “Song to the Evening Star,” adapted, in swing time.

He saw the trees of Central Park. He walked, his eyes lowered. He was passing by the Aquitania Hotel.

He came to a corner. He had escaped other corners like it, but this one caught him. It was a dim corner, a slice of sidewalk trapped between the wall of a closed garage and the pillars of an elevated station. He saw the rear end of a truck disappearing down the street. He had not seen the name on it, but he knew what truck it was. A newsstand crouched under the iron stairs of the elevated. He moved his eyes slowly. The fresh pile was there, spread out for him. Tomorrow’s Banner.

He did not come closer. He stood, waiting. He thought, I still have a few minutes in which not to know.

He saw faceless people stopping at the stand, one after another. They came for different papers, but they bought the Banner also, when they noticed its front page. He stood pressed to the wall, waiting. He thought, it is right that I should be the last to learn what I have said.

Then he could delay no longer: no customers came, the stand stood deserted, papers spread in the yellow light of a bulb, waiting for him. He could see no vendor in the black hovel beyond the bulb. The street was empty. A long corridor filled by the skeleton of the elevated. Stone paving, blotched walls, the interlacing of iron pillars. There were lighted windows, but they looked as if no people moved inside the walls. A train thundered over his head, a long roll of clangor that went shuddering down the pillars into the earth. It looked like an aggregation of metal rushing without human driver through the night.

He waited for the sound to die, then he walked to the stand. “The Banner,” he said. He did not see who sold him the paper, whether it was a man or a woman. He saw only a gnarled brown hand pushing the copy forward.

He started walking away, but stopped while crossing the street. There was a picture of Roark on the front page. It was a good picture. The calm face, the sharp cheekbones, the implacable mouth. He read the editorial, leaning against a pillar of the elevated.

“We have always endeavored to give our readers the truth without fear or prejudice ...

“... charitable consideration and the benefit of the doubt even to a man charged with an outrageous crime ...

“... but after conscientious investigation and in the light of new evidence placed before us, we find ourselves obliged honestly to admit that we might have been too lenient ...

“... A society awakened to a new sense of responsibility toward the underprivileged ...

“... We join the voice of public opinion ... “... The past, the career, the personality of Howard Roark seem to support the widespread impression that he is a reprehensible character, a dangerous, unprincipled, antisocial type of man ...

“... If found guilty, as seems inevitable, Howard Roark must be made to bear the fullest penalty the law can impose on him.”

It was signed “Gail Wynand.”

When he looked up, he was in a brightly lighted street, on a trim sidewalk, looking at a wax figure exquisitely contorted on a satin chaise longue in a shop window; the figure wore a salmon-colored negligee, lucite sandals and a string of pearls suspended from one raised finger.

He did not know when he had dropped the paper. It was not in his hands any longer. He glanced back. It would be impossible to find a discarded paper lying on some street he did not know he had passed. He thought, what for? There are other papers like it. The city is full of them.

“You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated ...”

Howard, I wrote that editorial forty years ago. I wrote it one night when I was sixteen and stood on the roof of a tenement.

He walked on. Another street lay before him, a sudden cut of long emptiness and a chain of green traffic lights strung out to the horizon. Like a rosary without end. He thought, now walk from green bead to green bead. He thought, these are not the words; but the words kept ringing with his steps: Mea culpa—mea culpa—mea maxima culpa.

He went past a window of old shoes corroded by wear—past the door of a mission with a cross above it—past the peeling poster of a political candidate who ran two years ago—past a grocery store with barrels of rotting greens on the sidewalk. The streets were contracting, walls drawing closer together. He could smell the odor of the river, and there were wads of fog over the rare lights.

He was in Hell’s Kitchen.

The façades of the buildings around him were like the walls of secret backyards suddenly exposed; decay without reticence, past the need of privacy or shame. He heard shrieks coming from a saloon on a corner; he could not tell whether it was joy or brawling.

He stood in the middle of a street. He looked slowly down the mouth of every dark crevice, up the streaked walls, to the windows, to the roofs.

I never got out of here.

I never got out. I surrendered to the grocery man—to the deck hands on the ferryboat—to the owner of the poolroom. You don’t run things around here. You don’t run things around here. You’ve never run things anywhere, Gail Wynand. You’ve only added yourself to the things they ran.

Then he looked up, across the city, to the shapes of the great skyscrapers. He saw a string of lights rising unsupported in black space, a glowing pinnacle anchored to nothing, a small, brilliant square hanging detached in the sky. He knew the famous buildings to which these belonged, he could reconstruct their forms in space. He thought, you’re my judges and witnesses. You rise, unhindered, above the sagging roofs. You shoot your gracious tension to the stars, out of the slack, the tired, the accidental. The eyes one mile out on the ocean will see none of this and none of this will matter, but you will be the presence and the city. As down the centuries, a few men stand in lonely rectitude that we may look and say, there is a human race behind us. One can’t escape from you; the streets change, but one looks up and there you stand, unchanged. You have seen me walking through the streets tonight. You have seen all my steps and all my years. It’s you that I’ve betrayed. For I was born to be one of you.

He walked on. It was late. Circles of light lay undisturbed on the empty sidewalks under the lampposts. The horns of taxis shrieked once in a while like doorbells ringing through the corridors of a vacant interior. He saw discarded newspapers, as he passed: on the pavements, on park benches, in the wire trash-baskets on corners. Many of them were the Banner. Many copies of the Banner had been read in the city tonight. He thought, we’re building circulation, Alvah.

He stopped. He saw a paper spread out in the gutter before him, front page up. It was the Banner. He saw Roark’s picture. He saw the gray print of a rubber heel across Roark’s face.

He bent, his body folding itself down slowly, with both knees, both arms, and picked up the paper. He folded the front page and put it in his pocket. He walked on.

An unknown rubber heel, somewhere in the city, on an unknown foot that I released to march.

I released them all. I made every one of those who destroyed me. There is a beast on earth, dammed safely by its own impotence. I broke the dam. They would have remained helpless. They can produce nothing. I gave them the weapon. I gave them my strength, my energy, my living power. I created a great voice and let them dictate the words. The woman who threw the beet leaves in my face had a right to do it. I made it possible for her.

Anything may be betrayed, anyone may be forgiven. But not those who lack the courage of their own greatness. Alvah Scarret can be forgiven. He had nothing to betray. Mitchell Layton can be forgiven. But not I. I was not born to be a second-hander.

XVII

IT WAS A SUMMER DAY, CLOUDLESS AND COOL, AS IF THE SUN WERE screened by an invisible film of water, and the energy of heat had been transformed into a sharper clarity, an added brilliance of outline for the buildings of the city. In the streets, scattered like scraps of gray foam, there were a great many copies of the Banner. The city read, chuckling, the statement of Wynand’s renunciation.

“That’s that,” said Gus Webb, chairman of the “We Don’t Read Wynand” Committee. “It’s slick,” said Ike. “I’d like one peek, just one peek, at the great Mr. Gail Wynand’s face today,” said Sally Brent. “It’s about time,” said Homer Slottern. “Isn’t it splendid? Wynand’s surrendered,” said a tight-lipped woman; she knew little about Wynand and nothing about the issue, but she liked to hear of people surrendering. In a kitchen, after dinner, a fat woman scraped the remnants off the dishes onto a sheet of newspaper; she never read the front page, only the installments of a love serial in the second section; she wrapped onion peelings and lamb-chop bones in a copy of the Banner.

“It’s stupendous,” said Lancelot Clokey, “only I’m really sore at that Union, Ellsworth. How could they double-cross you like that?” “Don’t be a sap, Lance,” said Ellsworth Toohey. “What do you mean?” “I told them to accept the terms.” “You did?” “Yep.” “But Jesus! ‘One Small Voice’ ...” “You can wait for ‘One Small Voice’ another month or so, can’t you? I’ve filed suit with the labor board today, to be reinstated in my job on the Banner. There are more ways than one to skin a cat, Lance. The skinning isn’t important once you’ve broken its spine.”

That evening Roark pressed the bell button at the door of Wynand’s penthouse. The butler opened the door and said: “Mr. Wynand cannot see you, Mr. Roark.” From the sidewalk across the street Roark looked up and saw a square of light high over the roofs, in the window of Wynand’s study.

In the morning Roark came to Wynand’s office in the Banner Building. Wynand’s secretary told him: “Mr. Wynand cannot see you, Mr. Roark.” She added, her voice polite, disciplined: “Mr. Wynand has asked me to tell you that he does not wish ever to see you again.”

Roark wrote him a long letter: “... Gail, I know. I hoped you could escape it, but since it had to happen, start again from where you are. I know what you’re doing to yourself. You’re not doing it for my sake, it’s not up to me, but if this will help you I want to say that I’m repeating, now, everything I’ve ever said to you. Nothing has changed for me. You’re still what you were. I’m not saying that I forgive you, because there can be no such question between us. But if you can’t forgive yourself, will you let me do it? Let me say that it doesn’t matter, it’s not the final verdict on you. Give me the right to let you forget it. Go on just on my faith until you’ve recovered. I know it’s something no man can do for another, but if I am what I’ve been to you, you’ll accept it. Call it a blood transfusion. You need it. Take it. It’s harder than fighting that strike. Do it for my sake, if that will help you. But do it. Come back. There will be another chance. What you think you’ve lost can neither be lost nor found. Don’t let it go.”

The letter came back to Roark, unopened.

Alvah Scarret ran the Banner. Wynand sat in his office. He had removed Roark’s picture from the wall. He attended to advertising contracts, expenses, accounts. Scarret took care of the editorial policy. Wynand did not read the contents of the Banner.

When Wynand appeared in any department of the building, the employees obeyed him as they had obeyed him before. He was still a machine and they knew that it was a machine more dangerous than ever: a car running downhill, without combustion or brakes.

He slept in his penthouse. He had not seen Dominique. Scarret had told him that she had gone back to the country. Once Wynand ordered his secretary to telephone Connecticut. He stood by her desk while she asked the butler whether Mrs. Wynand was there. The butler answered that she was. The secretary hung up and Wynand went back to his office.

He thought he would give himself a few days. Then he’d return to Dominique. Their marriage would be what she had wanted it to be at first—“Mrs. Wynand-Papers.” He would accept it.

Wait, he thought in an agony of impatience, wait. You must learn to face her as you are now. Train yourself to be a beggar. There must be no pretense at things to which you have no right. No equality, no resistance, no pride in holding your strength against hers. Only acceptance now. Stand before her as a man who can give her nothing, who will live on what she chooses to grant him. It will be contempt, but it will come from her and it will be a bond. Show her that you recognize this. There is a kind of dignity in a renunciation of dignity openly admitted. Learn it. Wait.... He sat in the study of his penthouse, his head on the arm of his chair. There were no witnesses in the empty rooms around him.... Dominique, he thought, I will have no claim to make except that I need you so much. And that I love you. I told you once not to consider it. Now I’ll use it as a tin cup. But I’ll use it. I love you....

Dominique lay stretched out on the shore of the lake. She looked at the house on the hill, at the tree branches above her. Flat on her back, hands crossed under her head, she studied the motion of leaves against the sky. It was an earnest occupation, giving her full contentment. She thought, it’s a lovely kind of green, there’s a difference between the color of plants and the color of objects, this has light in it, this is not just green, but also the living force of the tree made visible, I don’t have to look down, I can see the branches, the trunk, the roots just by looking at that color. That fire around the edges is the sun, I don’t have to see it, I can tell what the whole countryside looks like today. The spots of light weaving in circles—that’s the lake, the special kind of light that comes refracted from water, the lake is beautiful today, and it’s better not to see it, just to guess by these spots. I have never been able to enjoy it before, the sight of the earth, it’s such a great background, but it has no meaning except as a background, and I thought of those who owned it and then it hurt me too much. I can love it now. They don’t own it. They own nothing. They’ve never won. I have seen the life of Gail Wynand, and now I know. One cannot hate the earth in their name. The earth is beautiful. And it is a background, but not theirs.

She knew what she had to do. But she would give herself a few days. She thought, I’ve learned to bear anything except happiness. I must learn how to carry it. How not to break under it. It’s the only discipline I’ll need from now on.

Roark stood at the window of his house in Monadnock Valley. He had rented the house for the summer; he went there when he wanted loneliness and rest. It was a quiet evening. The window opened on a small ledge in a frame of trees, hanging against the sky. A strip of sunset light stretched above the dark treetops. He knew that there were houses below, but they could not be seen. He was as grateful as any other tenant for the way in which he had built this place. He heard the sound of a car approaching up the road at the other side. He listened, astonished. He expected no guests. The car stopped. He walked to open the door. He felt no astonishment when he saw Dominique.

She came in as if she had left this house half an hour ago. She wore no hat, no stockings, just sandals and a dress intended for back country roads, a narrow sheath of dark blue linen with short sleeves, like a smock for gardening. She did not look as if she had driven across three states, but as if she were returning from a walk down the hill. He knew that this was to be the solemnity of the moment—that it needed no solemnity; it was not to be stressed and set apart, it was not this particular evening, but the completed meaning of seven years behind them.

“Howard.”

He stood as if he were looking at the sound of his name in the room. He had all he had wanted.

But there was one thought that remained as pain, even now. He said:

“Dominique, wait till he recovers.”

“You know he won’t recover.”

“Have a little pity on him.”

“Don’t speak their language.”

“He had no choice.”

“He could have closed the paper.”

“It was his life.”

“This is mine.”

He did not know that Wynand had once said all love is exception-making; and Wynand would not know that Roark had loved him enough to make his greatest exception, one moment when he had tried to compromise. Then he knew it was useless, like all sacrifices. What he said was his signature under her decision:

“I love you.”

She looked about the room, to let the ordinary reality of walls and chairs help her keep the discipline she had been learning for this moment. The walls he had designed, the chairs he used, a package of his cigarettes on a table, the routine necessities of life that could acquire splendor when life became what it was now.

“Howard, I know what you intend to do at the trial. So it won’t make any difference if they learn the truth about us.”

“It won’t make any difference.”

“When you came that night and told me about Cortlandt, I didn’t try to stop you. I knew you had to do it, it was your time to set the terms on which you could go on. This is my time. My Cortlandt explosion. You must let me do it my way. Don’t question me. Don’t protect me. No matter what I do.”

“I know what you’ll do.”

“You know that I have to?”

“Yes.”

She bent one arm from the elbow, fingers lifted, in a short, backward jolt, as if tossing the subject over her shoulder. It was settled and not to be discussed.

She turned away from him, she walked across the room, to let the casual ease of her steps make this her home, to state that his presence was to be the rule for all her coming days and she had no need to do what she wanted most at this moment: stand and look at him. She knew also what she was delaying, because she was not ready and would never be ready. She stretched her hand out for his package of cigarettes on the table.

His fingers closed over her wrist and he pulled her hand back. He pulled her around to face him, and then he held her and his mouth was on hers. She knew that every moment of seven years when she had wanted this and stopped the pain and thought she had won, was not past, had never been stopped, had lived on, stored, adding hunger to hunger, and now she had to feel it all, the touch of his body, the answer and the waiting together.

She didn’t know whether her discipline had helped; not too well, she thought, because she saw that he had lifted her in his arms, carried her to a chair and sat down, holding her on his knees; he laughed without sound, as he would have laughed at a child, but the firmness of his hands holding her showed concern and a kind of steadying caution. Then it seemed simple, she had nothing to hide from him, she whispered: “Yes, Howard ... that much ...” and he said: “It was very hard for me—all these years.” And the years were ended.

She slipped down, to sit on the floor, her elbows propped on his knees, she looked up at him and smiled, she knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known. “Howard ... willingly, completely, and always ... without reservations, without fear of anything they can do to you or me ... in any way you wish ... as your wife or your mistress, secretly or openly ... here, or in a furnished room I’ll take in some town near a jail where I’ll see you through a wire net ... it won’t matter. ... Howard, if you win the trial—even that won’t matter too much. You’ve won long ago.... I’ll remain what I am, and I’ll remain with you—now and ever—in any way you want....”

He held her hands in his, she saw his shoulders sagging down to her, she saw him helpless, surrendered to this moment, as she was—and she knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness, yet they could let each other see it without need of protection. It was growing dark, the room was indistinguishable, only the window remained and his shoulders against the sky in the window.

She awakened with the sun in her eyes. She lay on her back, looking at the ceiling as she had looked at the leaves. Not to move, to guess by hints, to see everything through the greater intensity of implication. The broken triangles of light on the angular modeling of the ceiling’s plastic tiles meant that it was morning and that this was a bedroom at Monadnock, the geometry of fire and structure above her designed by him. The fire was white—that meant it was very early and the rays came through clean country air, with nothing anywhere in space between this bedroom and the sun. The weight of the blanket, heavy and intimate on her naked body, was everything that had been last night. And the skin she felt against her arm was Roark asleep beside her.

She slipped out of bed. She stood at the window, her arms raised, holding on to the frame at each side. She thought if she looked back she would see no shadow of her body on the floor, she felt as if the sunlight went straight through her, because her body had no weight.

But she had to hurry before he awakened. She found his pyjamas in a dresser drawer and put them on. She went to the living room, closing the door carefully behind her. She picked up the telephone and asked for the nearest sheriff’s office.

“This is Mrs. Gail Wynand,” she said. “I am speaking from the house of Mr. Howard Roark at Monadnock Valley. I wish to report that my star-sapphire ring was stolen here last night.... About five thousand dollars.... It was a present from Mr. Roark.... Can you get here within an hour? ... Thank you.”

She went to the kitchen, made coffee and stood watching the glow of the electric coil under the coffee pot, thinking that it was the most beautiful light on earth.

She set the table by the large window in the living room. He came out, wearing nothing but a dressing gown, and laughed at the sight of her in his pyjamas. She said: “Don’t dress. Sit down. Let’s have breakfast.”

They were finishing when they heard the sound of the car stopping outside. She smiled and walked to open the door.

There were a sheriff, a deputy and two reporters from local papers.

“Good morning,” said Dominique. “Come in.”

“Mrs.... Wynand?” said the sheriff.

“That’s right. Mrs. Gail Wynand. Come in. Sit down.”

In the ludicrous folds of the pyjamas, with dark cloth bulging over a belt wound tightly, with sleeves hanging over her finger tips, she had all the poised elegance she displayed in her best hostess gown. She was the only one who seemed to find nothing unusual in the situation.

The sheriff held a notebook as if he did not know what to do with it. She helped him to find the right questions and answered them precisely, like a good newspaper woman.

“It was a star-sapphire ring set in platinum. I took it off and left it here, on this table, next to my purse, before going to bed.... It was about ten o’clock last night.... When I got up this morning, it was gone.... Yes, this window was open.... No, we didn’t hear anything. ... No, it was not insured, I have not had the time, Mr. Roark gave it to me recently.... No, there are no servants here and no other guests.... Yes, please look through the house.... Living room, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen.... Yes, of course, you may look too, gentlemen. The press, I believe? Do you wish to ask me any questions?”

There were no questions to ask. The story was complete. The reporters had never seen a story of this nature offered in this manner.

She tried not to look at Roark after her first glance at his face. But he kept his promise. He did not try to stop her or protect her. When questioned, he answered, enough to support her statements.

Then the men departed. They seemed glad to leave. Even the sheriff knew that he would not have to conduct a search for that ring.

Dominique said:

“I’m sorry. I know it was terrible for you. But it was the only way to get it into the papers.”

“You should have told me which one of your star sapphires I gave you.”

“I’ve never had any. I don’t like star sapphires.”

“That was a more thorough job of dynamiting than Cortlandt.”

“Yes. Now Gail is blasted over to the side where he belongs. So he thinks you’re an ‘unprincipled, antisocial type of man’? Now let him see the Banner smearing me also. Why should he be spared that? Sorry, Howard, I don’t have your sense of mercy. I’ve read that editorial. Don’t comment on this. Don’t say anything about self-sacrifice or I’ll break and ... and I’m not quite as strong as that sheriff is probably thinking. I didn’t do it for you. I’ve made it worse for you—I’ve added scandal to everything else they’ll throw at you. But, Howard, now we stand together—against all of them. You’ll be a convict and I’ll be an adulteress. Howard, do you remember that I was afraid to share you with lunch wagons and strangers’ windows? Now I’m not afraid to have this past night smeared all over their newspapers. My darling, do you see why I’m happy and why I’m free?”

He said:

“I’ll never remind you afterward that you’re crying, Dominique.”

The story, including the pyjamas, the dressing gown, the breakfast table and the single bed, was in all the afternoon papers of New York that day.

Alvah Scarret walked into Wynand’s office and threw a newspaper down on his desk. Scarret had never discovered how much he loved Wynand, until now, and he was so hurt that he could express it only in furious abuse. He gulped:

“God damn you, you blasted fool! It serves you right! It serves you right and I’m glad, damn your witless soul! Now what are we going to do?”

Wynand read the story and sat looking at the paper. Scarret stood before the desk. Nothing happened. It was just an office, a man sat at a desk holding a newspaper. He saw Wynand’s hands, one at each side of the sheet, and the hands were still. No, he thought, normally a man would not be able to hold his hands like that, lifted and unsupported, without a tremor.

Wynand raised his head. Scarret could discover nothing in his eyes, except a kind of mild astonishment, as if Wynand were wondering what Scarret was doing here. Then, in terror, Scarret whispered:

“Gail, what are we going to do?”

“We’ll run it,” said Wynand. “It’s news.”

“But ... how?”

“In any way you wish.”

Scarret’s voice leaped ahead, because he knew it was now or never, he would not have the courage to attempt this again; and because he was caught here, he was afraid to back toward the door.

“Gail, you must divorce her.” He found himself still standing there, and he went on, not looking at Wynand, screaming in order to get it said: “Gail, you’ve got no choice now! You’ve got to keep what’s left of your reputation! You’ve got to divorce her and it’s you who must file the suit!”

“All right.”

“Will you? At once? Will you let Paul file the papers at once?”

“All right.”

Scarret hurried out of the room. He rushed to his own office, slammed the door, seized the telephone and called Wynand’s lawyer. He explained and went on repeating: “Drop everything and file it now, Paul, now, today, hurry, Paul, before he changes his mind!”

Wynand drove to his country house. Dominique was there, waiting for him.

She stood up when he entered her room. She stepped forward, so that there would be no furniture between them; she wished him to see her whole body. He stood across the empty space and looked at her as if he were observing them both at once, an impartial spectator who saw Dominique and a man facing her, but no Gail Wynand.

She waited, but he said nothing.

“Well, I’ve given you a story that will build circulation, Gail.”

He had heard, but he looked as if nothing of the present were relevant. He looked like a bank teller balancing a stranger’s account that had been overdrawn and had to be closed. He said:

“I would like only to know this, if you’ll tell me: that was the first time since our marriage?”

“Yes.”

“But it was not the first time?”

“No. He was the first man who had me.”

“I think I should have understood. You married Peter Keating. Right after the Stoddard trial.”

“Do you wish to know everything? I want to tell you. I met him when he was working in a granite quarry. Why not? You’ll put him in a chain gang now or a jute mill. He was working in a quarry. He didn’t ask my consent. He raped me. That’s how it began. Want to use it? Want to run it in the Banner?”

“He loved you.”

“Yes.”

“Yet he built this house for us.”

“Yes.”

“I only wanted to know.”

He turned to leave.

“God damn you!” she cried. “If you can take it like this, you had no right to become what you became!”

“That’s why I’m taking it.”

He walked out of the room. He closed the door softly.

Guy Francon telephoned Dominique that evening. Since his retirement he had lived alone on his country estate near the quarry town. She had refused to answer calls today, but she took the receiver when the maid told her that it was Mr. Francon. Instead of the fury she expected, she heard a gentle voice saying:

“Hello, Dominique.”

“Hello, Father.”

“You’re going to leave Wynand now?”

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t move to the city. It’s not necessary. Don’t overdo it. Come and stay here with me. Until ... the Cortlandt trial.”

The things he had not said and the quality of his voice, firm, simple and with a note that sounded close to happiness, made her answer, after a moment:

“All right, Father.” It was a girl’s voice, a daughter’s voice, with a tired, trusting, wistful gaiety. “I’ll get there about midnight. Have a glass of milk for me and some sandwiches.”

“Try not to speed as you always do. The roads aren’t too good.”

When she arrived, Guy Francon met her at the door. They both smiled, and she knew that there would be no questions, no reproaches. He led her to the small morning room where he had set the food on a table by a window open to a dark lawn. There was a smell of grass, candles on the table and a bunch of jasmine in a silver bowl.

She sat, her fingers closed about a cold glass, and he sat across the table, munching a sandwich peacefully.

“Want to talk, Father?”

“No. I want you to drink your milk and go to bed.”

“All right.”

He picked up an olive and sat studying it thoughtfully, twisting it on a colored toothpick. Then he glanced up at her.

“Look, Dominique. I can’t attempt to understand it all. But I know this much—that it’s the right thing for you. This time, it’s the right man.”

“Yes, Father.”

“That’s why I’m glad.”

She nodded.

“Tell Mr. Roark that he can come here any time he wants.”

She smiled. “Tell whom, Father?”

“Tell ... Howard.”

Her arm lay on the table; her head dropped down on her arm. He looked at the gold hair in the candlelight. She said, because it was easier to control a voice: “Don’t let me fall asleep here. I’m tired.”

But he answered:

“He’ll be acquitted, Dominique.”

All the newspapers of New York were brought to Wynand’s office each day, as he had ordered. He read every word of what was written and whispered in town. Everybody knew that the story had been a self-frame-up; the wife of a multi-millionaire would not report the loss of a five-thousand-dollar ring in the circumstances; but this did not prevent anyone from accepting the story as given and commenting accordingly. The most offensive comments were spread on the pages of the Banner.

Alvah Scarret had found a crusade to which he devoted himself with the truest fervor he had ever experienced. He felt that it was his atonement for any disloyalty he might have committed toward Wynand in the past. He saw a way to redeem Wynand’s name. He set out to sell Wynand to the public as the victim of a great passion for a depraved woman; it was Dominique who had forced her husband to champion an immoral cause, against his better judgment; she had almost wrecked her husband’s paper, his standing, his reputation, the achievement of his whole life—for the sake of her lover. Scarret begged readers to forgive Wynand—a tragic, self-sacrificing love was his justification. It was an inverse ratio in Scarret’s calculations: every filthy adjective thrown at Dominique created sympathy for Wynand in the reader’s mind; this fed Scarret’s smear talent. It worked. The public responded, the Banner’s old feminine readers in particular. It helped in the slow, painful work of the paper’s reconstruction.

Letters began to arrive, generous in their condolences, unrestrained in the indecency of their comment on Dominique Francon. “Like the old days, Gail,” said Scarret happily, “just like the old days!” He piled all the letters on Wynand’s desk.

Wynand sat alone in his office with the letters. Scarret could not suspect that this was the worst of the suffering Gail Wynand was to know. He made himself read every letter. Dominique, whom he had tried to save from the Banner ...

When they met in the building, Scarret looked at him expectantly, with an entreating, tentative half-smile, an eager pupil waiting for the teacher’s recognition of a lesson well learned and well done. Wynand said nothing. Scarret ventured once:

“It was clever, wasn’t it, Gail?”

“Yes.”

“Have any idea on where we can milk it some more?”

“It’s your job, Alvah.”

“She’s really the cause of everything, Gail. Long before all this. When you married her. I was afraid then. That’s what started it. Remember when you didn’t allow us to cover your wedding? That was a sign. She’s ruined the Banner. But I’ll be damned if I don’t rebuild it now right on her own body. Just as it was. Our old Banner.”

“Yes.”

“Got any suggestions, Gail? What else would you like me to do?”

“Anything you wish, Alvah.”

XVIII

A TREE BRANCH HUNG IN THE OPEN WINDOW. THE LEAVES MOVED against the sky, implying sun and summer and an inexhaustible earth to be used. Dominique thought of the world as background. Wynand thought of two hands bending a tree branch to explain the meaning of life. The leaves drooped, touching the spires of New York’s skyline far across the river. The skyscrapers stood like shafts of sunlight, washed white by distance and summer. A crowd filled the county courtroom, witnessing the trial of Howard Roark.

Roark sat at the defense table. He listened calmly.

Dominique sat in the third row of spectators. Looking at her, people felt as if they had seen a smile. She did not smile. She looked at the leaves in the window.

Gail Wynand sat at the back of the courtroom. He had come in, alone, when the room was full. He had not noticed the stares and the flashbulbs exploding around him. He had stood in the aisle for a moment, surveying the place as if there were no reason why he should not survey it. He wore a gray summer suit and a panama hat with a drooping brim turned up at one side. His glance went over Dominique as over the rest of the courtroom. When he sat down, he looked at Roark. From the moment of Wynand’s entrance Roark’s eyes kept returning to him. Whenever Roark looked at him, Wynand turned away.

“The motive which the State proposes to prove,” the prosecutor was making his opening address to the jury, “is beyond the realm of normal human emotions. To the majority of us it will appear monstrous and inconceivable.”

Dominique sat with Mallory, Heller, Lansing, Enright, Mike—and Guy Francon, to the shocked disapproval of his friends. Across the aisle, celebrities formed a comet: from the small point of Ellsworth Toohey, well in front, a tail of popular names stretched through the crowd: Lois Cook, Gordon L. Prescott, Gus Webb, Lancelot Clokey, Ike, Jules Fougler, Sally Brent, Homer Slottern, Mitchell Layton.

“Even as the dynamite which swept a building away, his motive blasted all sense of humanity out of this man’s soul. We are dealing, gentlemen of the jury, with the most vicious explosive on earth—the egotist!”

On the chairs, on the window sills, in the aisles, pressed against the walls, the human mass was blended like a monolith, except for the pale ovals of faces. The faces stood out, separate, lonely, no two alike. Behind each, there were the years of a life lived or half over, effort, hope and an attempt, honest or dishonest, but an attempt. It had left on all a single mark in common: on lips smiling with malice, on lips loose with renunciation, on lips tight with uncertain dignity—on all—the mark of suffering.

“... In this day and age, when the world is torn by gigantic problems, seeking an answer to questions that hold the survival of man in the balance—this man attached to such a vague intangible, such an inessential as his artistic opinions sufficient importance to let it become his sole passion and the motivation of a crime against society.”

The people had come to witness a sensational case, to see celebrities, to get material for conversation, to be seen, to kill time. They would return to unwanted jobs, unloved families, unchosen friends, to drawing rooms, evening clothes, cocktail glasses and movies, to unadmitted pain, murdered hope, desire left unreached, left hanging silently over a path on which no step was taken, to days of effort not to think, not to say, to forget and give in and give up. But each of them had known some unforgotten moment—a morning when nothing had happened, a piece of music heard suddenly and never heard in the same way again, a stranger’s face seen in a bus—a moment when each had known a different sense of living. And each remembered other moments, on a sleepless night, on an afternoon of steady rain, in a church, in an empty street at sunset, when each had wondered why there was so much suffering and ugliness in the world. They had not tried to find the answer and they had gone on living as if no answer were necessary. But each had known a moment when, in lonely, naked honesty, he had felt the need of an answer.

“... a ruthless, arrogant egotist who wished to have his own way at any price ...”

Twelve men sat in the jury box. They listened, their faces attentive and emotionless. People had whispered that it was a tough-looking jury. There were two executives of industrial concerns, two engineers, a mathematician, a truck driver, a bricklayer, an electrician, a gardener and three factory workers. The impaneling of the jury had taken some time. Roark had challenged many talesmen. He had picked these twelve. The prosecutor had agreed, telling himself that this was what happened when an amateur undertook to handle his own defense; a lawyer would have chosen the gentlest types, those most likely to respond to an appeal for mercy; Roark had chosen the hardest faces.

“... Had it been some plutocrat’s mansion, but a housing project, gentlemen of the jury, a housing project!”

The judge sat erect on the tall bench. He had gray hair and the stern face of an army officer.

“... a man trained to serve society, a builder who became a destroyer ...”

The voice went on, practiced and confident. The faces filling the room listened with the response they granted to a good weekday dinner: satisfying and to be forgotten within an hour. They agreed with every sentence; they had heard it before, they had always heard it, this was what the world lived by; it was self-evident—like a puddle before one’s feet.

The prosecutor introduced his witnesses. The policeman who had arrested Roark took the stand to tell how he had found the defendant standing by the electric plunger. The night watchman related how he had been sent away from the scene; his testimony was brief; the prosecutor preferred not to stress the subject of Dominique. The contractor’s superintendent testified about the dynamite missing from the stores on the site. Officials of Cortlandt, building inspectors, estimators took the stand to describe the building and the extent of the damage. This concluded the first day of the trial.

Peter Keating was the first witness called on the following day.

He sat on the stand, slumped forward. He looked at the prosecutor obediently. His eyes moved, once in a while. He looked at the crowd, at the jury, at Roark. It made no difference.

“Mr. Keating, will you state under oath whether you designed the project ascribed to you, known as Cortlandt Homes?”

“No. I didn’t.”

“Who designed it?”

“Howard Roark.”

“At whose request?”

“At my request.”

“Why did you call on him?”

“Because I was not capable of doing it myself.”

There was no sound of honesty in the voice, because there was no sound of effort to pronounce a truth of such nature; no tone of truth or falsehood; only indifference.

The prosecutor handed him a sheet of paper. “Is this the agreement you signed?”

Keating held the paper in his hand. “Yes.”

“Is that Howard Roark’s signature?”

“Yes.”

“Will you please read the terms of this agreement to the jury?”

Keating read it aloud. His voice came evenly, well drilled. Nobody in the courtroom realized that this testimony had been intended as a sensation. It was not a famous architect publicly confessing incompetence; it was a man reciting a memorized lesson. People felt that were he interrupted, he would not be able to pick up the next sentence, but would have to start all over again from the beginning.

He answered a great many questions. The prosecutor introduced in evidence Roark’s original drawings of Cortlandt, which Keating had kept; the copies which Keating had made of them; and photographs of Cortlandt as it had been built.

“Why did you object so strenuously to the excellent structural changes suggested by Mr. Prescott and Mr. Webb?”

“I was afraid of Howard Roark.”

“What did your knowledge of his character lead you to expect?”

“Anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I was afraid. I used to be afraid.”

The questions went on. The story was unusual, but the audience felt bored. It did not sound like the recital of a participant. The other witnesses had seemed to have a more personal connection with the case.

When Keating left the stand, the audience had the odd impression that no change had occurred in the act of a man’s exit; as if no person had walked out.

“The prosecution rests,” said the District Attorney.

The judge looked at Roark.

“Proceed,” he said. His voice was gentle.

Roark got up. “Your Honor, I shall call no witnesses. This will be my testimony and my summation.”

“Take the oath.”

Roark took the oath. He stood by the steps of the witness stand. The audience looked at him. They felt he had no chance. They could drop the nameless resentment, the sense of insecurity which he aroused in most people. And so, for the first time, they could see him as he was: a man totally innocent of fear.

The fear of which they thought was not the normal kind, not a response to a tangible danger, but the chronic, unconfessed fear in which they all lived. They remembered the misery of the moments when, in loneliness, a man thinks of the bright words he could have said, but had not found, and hates those who robbed him of his courage. The misery of knowing how strong and able one is in one’s own mind, the radiant picture never to be made real. Dreams? Self-delusion? Or a murdered reality, unborn, killed by that corroding emotion without name—fear—need—dependence—hatred?

Roark stood before them as each man stands in the innocence of his own mind. But Roark stood like that before a hostile crowd—and they knew suddenly that no hatred was possible to him. For the flash of an instant, they grasped the manner of his consciousness. Each asked himself: do I need anyone’s approval?—does it matter?—am I tied? And for that instant, each man was free—free enough to feel benevolence for every other man in the room.

It was only a moment; the moment of silence when Roark was about to speak.

“Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. He was considered an evildoer who had dealt with a demon mankind dreaded. But thereafter men had fire to keep them warm, to cook their food, to light their caves. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had lifted darkness off the earth. Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he had taught his brothers to build. He was considered a transgressor who ventured into forbidden territory. But thereafter, men could travel past any horizon. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had opened the roads of the world.

“That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning. Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures—because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer—because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that that one paid for his courage.

“Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received—hatred. The great creators—the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors—stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.

“No creator was prompted by a desire to serve his brothers, for his brothers rejected the gift he offered and that gift destroyed the slothful routine of their lives. His truth was his only motive. His own truth, and his own work to achieve it in his own way. A symphony, a book, an engine, a philosophy, an airplane or a building—that was his goal and his life. Not those who heard, read, operated, believed, flew or inhabited the thing he had created. The creation, not its users. The creation, not the benefits others derived from it. The creation which gave form to his truth. He held his truth above all things and against all men.

“His vision, his strength, his courage came from his own spirit. A man’s spirit, however, is his self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego.

“The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power—that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover. The creator served nothing and no one. He lived for himself.

“And only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement.

“Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons—a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.

“But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred.

“We inherit the products of the thought of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make a cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane. But all through the process what we receive from others is only the end product of their thinking. The moving force is the creative faculty which takes this product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator. Men learn from one another. But all learning is only the exchange of material. No man can give another the capacity to think. Yet that capacity is our only means of survival.

“Nothing is given to man on earth. Everything he needs has to be produced. And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways—by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows. The creator faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary.

“The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.

“The creator lives for his work. He needs no other men. His primary goal is within himself. The parasite lives second-hand. He needs others. Others become his prime motive.

“The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary.

“The basic need of the second-hander is to secure his ties with men in order to be fed. He places relations first. He declares that man exists in order to serve others. He preaches altruism.

“Altruism is the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self.

“No man can live for another. He cannot share his spirit just as he cannot share his body. But the second-hander has used altruism as a weapon of exploitation and reversed the base of mankind’s moral principles. Men have been taught every precept that destroys the creator. Men have been taught dependence as a virtue.

“The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption. It is impossible in concept. The nearest approach to it in reality—the man who lives to serve others—is the slave. If physical slavery is repulsive, how much more repulsive is the concept of servility of the spirit? The conquered slave has a vestige of honor. He has the merit of having resisted and of considering his condition evil. But the man who enslaves himself voluntarily in the name of love is the basest of creatures. He degrades the dignity of man and he degrades the conception of love. But this is the essence of altruism.

“Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. Creation comes before distribution—or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement.

“Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the suffering of others. But suffering is a disease. Should one come upon it, one tries to give relief and assistance. To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then man must wish to see others suffer—in order that he may be virtuous. Such is the nature of altruism. The creator is not concerned with disease, but with life. Yet the work of the creators has eliminated one form of disease after another, in man’s body and spirit, and brought more relief from suffering than any altruist could ever conceive.

“Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.

“Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egotist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self.

“Here the basic reversal is most deadly. The issue has been perverted and man has been left no alternative—and no freedom. As poles of good and evil, he was offered two conceptions: egotism and altruism. Egotism was held to mean the sacrifice of others to self. Altruism—the sacrifice of self to others. This tied man irrevocably to other men and left him nothing but a choice of pain: his own pain borne for the sake of others or pain inflicted upon others for the sake of self. When it was added that man must find joy in self-immolation, the trap was closed. Man was forced to accept masochism as his ideal—under the threat that sadism was his only alternative. This was the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on mankind.

“This was the device by which dependence and suffering were perpetuated as fundamentals of life.

“The choice is not self-sacrifice or domination. The choice is independence or dependence. The code of the creator or the code of the second-hander. This is the basic issue. It rests upon the alternative of life or death. The code of the creator is built on the needs of the reasoning mind which allows man to survive. The code of the second-hander is built on the needs of a mind incapable of survival. All that which proceeds from man’s independent ego is good. All that which proceeds from man’s dependence upon men is evil.

“The egotist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He does not exist for any other man—and he asks no other man to exist for him. This is the only form of brotherhood and mutual respect possible between men.

“Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man’s independence, initiative and personal love for his work determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn’t done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.

“In all proper relationships there is no sacrifice of anyone to anyone. An architect needs clients, but he does not subordinate his work to their wishes. They need him, but they do not order a house just to give him a commission. Men exchange their work by free, mutual consent to mutual advantage when their personal interests agree and they both desire the exchange. If they do not desire it, they are not forced to deal with each other. They seek further. This is the only possible form of relationship between equals. Anything else is a relation of slave to master, or victim to executioner.

“No work is ever done collectively, by a majority decision. Every creative job is achieved under the guidance of a single individual thought. An architect requires a great many men to erect his building. But he does not ask them to vote on his design. They work together by free agreement and each is free in his proper function. An architect uses steel, glass, concrete, produced by others. But the materials remain just so much steel, glass and concrete until he touches them. What he does with them is his individual product and his individual property. This is the only pattern for proper co-operation among men.

“The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man’s first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men. This includes the whole sphere of his creative faculty, his thinking, his work. But it does not include the sphere of the gangster, the altruist and the dictator.

“A man thinks and works alone. A man cannot rob, exploit or rule—alone. Robbery, exploitation and ruling presuppose victims. They imply dependence. They are the province of the second-hander.

“Rulers of men are not egotists. They create nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of others. Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving. They are as dependent as the beggar, the social worker and the bandit. The form of dependence does not matter.

“But men were taught to regard second-handers—tyrants, emperors, dictators—as exponents of egotism. By this fraud they were made to destroy the ego, themselves and others. The purpose of the fraud was to destroy the creators. Or to harness them. Which is a synonym.

“From the beginning of history, the two antagonists have stood face to face: the creator and the second-hander. When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander responded. He invented altruism.

“The creator—denied, opposed, persecuted, exploited—went on, moved forward and carried all humanity along on his energy. The second-hander contributed nothing to the process except the impediments. The contest has another name: the individual against the collective.

“The ‘common good’ of a collective—a race, a class, a state—was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism? Does the fault lie in men’s hypocrisy or in the nature of the principle? The most dreadful butchers were the most sincere. They believed in the perfect society reached through the guillotine and the firing squad. Nobody questioned their right to murder since they were murdering for an altruistic purpose. It was accepted that man must be sacrificed for other men. Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with declarations of love for mankind and ends with a sea of blood. It goes on and will go on so long as men believe that an action is good if it is unselfish. That permits the altruist to act and forces his victims to bear it. The leaders of collectivist movements ask nothing for themselves. But observe the results.

“The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is—Hands off!

“Now observe the results of a society built on the principle of individualism. This, our country. The noblest country in the history of men. The country of greatest achievement, greatest prosperity, greatest freedom. This country was not based on selfless service, sacrifice, renunciation or any precept of altruism. It was based on a man’s right to the pursuit of happiness. His own happiness. Not anyone else’s. A private, personal, selfish motive. Look at the results. Look into your own conscience.

“It is an ancient conflict. Men have come close to the truth, but it was destroyed each time and one civilization fell after another. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

“Now, in our age, collectivism, the rule of the second-hander and second-rater, the ancient monster, has broken loose and is running amuck. It has brought men to a level of intellectual indecency never equaled on earth. It has reached a scale of horror without precedent. It has poisoned every mind. It has swallowed most of Europe. It is engulfing our country.

“I am an architect. I know what is to come by the principle on which it is built. We are approaching a world in which I cannot permit myself to live.

“Now you know why I dynamited Cortlandt.

“I designed Cortlandt. I gave it to you. I destroyed it.

“I destroyed it because I did not choose to let it exist. It was a double monster. In form and in implication. I had to blast both. The form was mutilated by two second-handers who assumed the right to improve upon that which they had not made and could not equal. They were permitted to do it by the general implication that the altruistic purpose of the building superseded all rights and that I had no claim to stand against it.

“I agreed to design Cortlandt for the purpose of seeing it erected as I designed it and for no other reason. That was the price I set for my work. I was not paid.

“I do not blame Peter Keating. He was helpless. He had a contract with his employers. It was ignored. He had a promise that the structure he offered would be built as designed. The promise was broken. The love of a man for the integrity of his work and his right to preserve it are now considered a vague intangible and an inessential. You have heard the prosecutor say that. Why was the building disfigured? For no reason. Such acts never have any reason, unless it’s the vanity of some second-handers who feel they have a right to anyone’s property, spiritual or material. Who permitted them to do it? No particular man among the dozens in authority. No one cared to permit it or to stop it. No one was responsible. No one can be held to account. Such is the nature of all collective action.

“I did not receive the payment I asked. But the owners of Cortlandt got what they needed from me. They wanted a scheme devised to build a structure as cheaply as possible. They found no one else who could do it to their satisfaction. I could and did. They took the benefit of my work and made me contribute it as a gift. But I am not an altruist. I do not contribute gifts of this nature.

“It is said that I have destroyed the home of the destitute. It is forgotten that but for me the destitute could not have had this particular home. Those who were concerned with the poor had to come to me, who have never been concerned, in order to help the poor. It is believed that the poverty of the future tenants gave them a right to my work. That their need constituted a claim on my life. That it was my duty to contribute anything demanded of me. This is the second-hander’s credo now swallowing the world.

“I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.

“I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.

“It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.

“I wished to come here and say that the integrity of a man’s creative work is of greater importance than any charitable endeavor. Those of you who do not understand this are the men who’re destroying the world.

“I wished to come here and state my terms. I do not care to exist on any others.

“I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society. To my country, I wish to give the ten years which I will spend in jail if my country exists no longer. I will spend them in memory and in gratitude for what my country has been. It will be my act of loyalty, my refusal to live or work in what has taken its place.

“My act of loyalty to every creator who ever lived and was made to suffer by the force responsible for the Cortlandt I dynamited. To every tortured hour of loneliness, denial, frustration, abuse he was made to spend—and to the battles he won. To every creator whose name is known—and to every creator who lived, struggled and perished unrecognized before he could achieve. To every creator who was destroyed in body or in spirit. To Henry Cameron. To Steven Mallory. To a man who doesn’t want to be named, but who is sitting in this courtroom and knows that I am speaking of him.”

Roark stood, his legs apart, his arms straight at his sides, his head lifted—as he stood in an unfinished building. Later, when he was seated again at the defense table, many men in the room felt as if they still saw him standing; one moment’s picture that would not be replaced.

The picture remained in their minds through the long legal discussions that followed. They heard the judge state to the prosecutor that the defendant had, in effect, changed his plea: he had admitted his act, but had not pleaded guilty of the crime; an issue of temporary legal insanity was raised; it was up to the jury to decide whether the defendant knew the nature and quality of his act, or, if he did, whether he knew that the act was wrong. The prosecutor raised no objection; there was an odd silence in the room; he felt certain that he had won his case already. He made his closing address. No one remembered what he said. The judge gave his instructions to the jury. The jury rose and left the courtroom.

People moved, preparing to depart, without haste, in expectation of many hours of waiting. Wynand, at the back of the room, and Dominique, in the front, sat without moving.

A bailiff stepped to Roark’s side to escort him out. Roark stood by the defense table. His eyes went to Dominique, then to Wynand. He turned and followed the bailiff.

He had reached the door when there was a sharp crack of sound, and a space of blank silence before people realized that it was a knock at the closed door of the jury room. The jury had reached a verdict.

Those who had been on their feet remained standing, frozen, until the judge returned to the bench. The jury filed into the courtroom.

“The prisoner will rise and face the jury,” said the clerk of the court.

Howard Roark stepped forward and stood facing the jury. At the back of the room, Gail Wynand got up and stood also.

“Mr. Foreman, have you reached a verdict?”

“We have.”

“What is your verdict?”

“Not guilty.”

The first movement of Roark’s head was not to look at the city in the window, at the judge or at Dominique. He looked at Wynand.

Wynand turned sharply and walked out. He was the first man to leave the courtroom.

XIX

ROGER ENRIGHT BOUGHT THE SITE, THE PLANS AND THE RUINS OF Cortlandt from the government. He ordered every twisted remnant of foundations dug out to leave a clean hole in the earth. He hired Howard Roark to rebuild the project. Placing a single contractor in charge, observing the strict economy of the plans, Enright budgeted the undertaking to set low rentals with a comfortable margin of profit for himself. No questions were to be asked about the income, occupation, children or diet of the future tenants; the project was open to anyone who wished to move in and pay the rent, whether he could afford a more expensive apartment elsewhere or not.

Late in August Gail Wynand was granted his divorce. The suit was not contested and Dominique was not present at the brief hearing. Wynand stood like a man facing a court-martial and heard the cold obscenity of legal language describing the breakfast in a house of Monadnock Valley—Mrs. Gail Wynand—Howard Roark; branding his wife as officially dishonored, granting him lawful sympathy, the status of injured innocence, and a paper that was his passport to freedom for all the years before him, and for all the silent evenings of those years.

Ellsworth Toohey won his case before the labor board. Wynand was ordered to reinstate him in his job.

That afternoon Wynand’s secretary telephoned Toohey and told him that Mr. Wynand expected him back at work tonight, before nine o’clock. Toohey smiled, dropping the receiver.

Toohey smiled, entering the Banner Building that evening. He stopped in the city room. He waved to people, shook hands, made witty remarks about some current movies, and bore an air of guileless astonishment, as if he had been absent just since yesterday and could not understand why people greeted him in the manner of a triumphal homecoming.

Then he ambled on to his office. He stopped short. He knew, while stopping, that he must enter, must not show the jolt, and that he had shown it: Wynand stood in the open door of his office.

“Good evening, Mr. Toohey,” said Wynand softly. “Come in.”

“Hello, Mr. Wynand,” said Toohey, his voice pleasant, reassured by feeling his face muscles manage a smile and his legs walking on.

He entered and stopped uncertainly. It was his own office, unchanged, with his typewriter and a stack of fresh paper on the desk. But the door remained open and Wynand stood there silently, leaning against the jamb.

“Sit down at your desk, Mr. Toohey. Go to work. We must comply with the law.”

Toohey gave a gay little shrug of acquiescence, crossed the room and sat down. He put his hands on the desk surface, palms spread solidly, then dropped them to his lap. He reached for a pencil, examined its point and dropped it.

Wynand lifted one wrist slowly to the level of his chest and held it still, the apex of a triangle made by his forearm and the long, drooping fingers of his hand; he was looking down at his wrist watch. He said:

“It is ten minutes to nine. You are back on your job, Mr. Toohey.”

“And I’m happy as a kid to be back. Honestly, Mr. Wynand, I suppose I shouldn’t confess it, but I missed this place like all hell.”

Wynand made no movement to go. He stood, slouched as usual, his shoulder blades propped against the doorjamb, arms crossed on his chest, hands holding his elbows. A lamp with a square shade of green glass burned on the desk, but there was still daylight outside, streaks of tired brown on a lemon sky; the room held a dismal sense of evening in the illumination that seemed both premature and too feeble. The light made a puddle on the desk, but it could not shut out the brown, half-dissolved shapes of the street, and it could not reach the door to disarm Wynand’s presence.

The lamp shade rattled faintly and Toohey felt the rumble under his shoe soles: the presses were rolling. He realized that he had heard them for some time. It was a comforting sound, dependable and alive. The pulse beat of a newspaper—the newspaper that transmits to men the pulse beat of the world. A long, even flow of separate drops, like marbles rolling away in a straight line, like the sound of a man’s heart.

Toohey moved a pencil over a sheet of paper, until he realized that the sheet lay in the lamplight and Wynand could see the pencil making a water lily, a teapot and a bearded profile. He dropped the pencil and made a self-mocking sound with his lips. He opened a drawer and looked attentively at a pile of carbons and paper clips. He did not know what he could possibly be expected to do: one did not start writing a column just like that. He had wondered why he should be asked to resume his duties at nine o’clock in the evening, but he had supposed that it was Wynand’s manner of softening surrender by overdoing it, and he had felt he could afford not to argue the point.

The presses were rolling; a man’s heartbeats gathered and re-broadcast. He heard no other sound and he thought it was absurd to keep this up if Wynand had gone, but most inadvisable to look in his direction if he hadn’t.

After a while he looked up. Wynand was still there. The light picked out two white spots of his figure: the long fingers of one hand closed over an elbow, and the high forehead. It was the forehead that Toohey wanted to see; no, there were no slanting ridges over the eyebrows. The eyes made two solid white ovals, faintly discernible in the angular shadows of the face. The ovals were directed at Toohey. But there was nothing in the face; no indication of purpose.

After a while, Toohey said:

“Really, Mr. Wynand, there’s no reason why you and I can’t get together.”

Wynand did not answer.

Toohey picked up a sheet of paper and inserted it in the typewriter. He sat looking at the keys, holding his chin between two fingers, in the pose he knew he assumed when preparing to attack a paragraph. The rims of the keys glittered under the lamps, rings of bright nickel suspended in the dim room.

The presses stopped.

Toohey jerked back, automatically, before he knew why he had jerked: he was a newspaperman and it was a sound that did not stop like that.

Wynand looked at his wrist watch. He said:

“It’s nine o’clock. You’re out of a job, Mr. Toohey. The Banner has ceased to exist.”

The next incident of reality Toohey apprehended was his own hand dropping down on the typewriter keys: he heard the metal cough of the levers tangling and striking together, and the small jump of the carriage.

He did not speak, but he thought his face was naked because he heard Wynand answering him:

“Yes, you had worked here for thirteen years.... Yes, I bought them all out, Mitchell Layton included, two weeks ago....” The voice was indifferent. “No, the boys in the city room didn’t know it. Only the boys in the pressroom....”

Toohey turned away. He picked up a paper clip, held it on his palm, then turned his hand over and let the clip fall, observing with mild astonishment the finality of the law that had not permitted it to remain on his downturned palm.

He got up. He stood looking at Wynand, a stretch of gray carpet between them.

Wynand’s head moved, leaned slightly to one shoulder. Wynand’s face looked as if no barrier were necessary now, it looked simple, it held no anger, the closed lips were drawn in the hint of a smile of pain that was almost humble.

Wynand said:

“This was the end of the Banner.... I think it’s proper that I should meet it with you.”

Many newspapers bid for the services of Ellsworth Monkton Toohey. He selected the Courier, a paper of well-bred prestige and gently uncertain policy.

In the evening of his first day on the new job Ellsworth Toohey sat on the edge of an associate editor’s desk and they talked about Mr. Talbot, the owner of the Courier, whom Toohey had met but a few times.

“But Mr. Talbot as a man?” asked Ellsworth Toohey. “What’s his particular god? What would he go to pieces without?”

In the radio room across the hall somebody was twisting a dial. “Time,” blared a solemn voice, “marches on!”

Roark sat at the drafting table in his office, working. The city beyond the glass walls seemed lustrous, the air washed by the first cold of October.

The telephone rang. He held his pencil suspended in a jerk of impatience; the telephone was never to ring when he was drawing. He walked to his desk and picked up the receiver.

“Mr. Roark,” said his secretary, the tense little note in her voice serving as apology for a broken order, “Mr. Gail Wynand wishes to know whether it would be convenient for you to come to his office at four o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”

She heard the faint buzz of silence in the receiver at her ear and counted many seconds.

“Is he on the wire?” asked Roark. She knew it was not the phone connection that made his voice sound like that.

“No, Mr. Roark. It’s Mr. Wynand’s secretary.”

“Yes. Yes. Tell her yes.”

He walked to the drafting table and looked down at the sketches; it was the first desertion he had ever been forced to commit: he knew he would not be able to work today. The weight of hope and relief together was too great.

When Roark approached the door of what had been the Banner Building, he saw that the sign, the Banner’s masthead, was gone. Nothing replaced it. A discolored rectangle was left over the door. He knew the building now contained the offices of the Clarion and floors of empty rooms. The Clarion, a third-rate afternoon tabloid, was the only representative of the Wynand chain in New York.

He walked to an elevator. He was glad to be the only passenger: he felt a sudden, violent possessiveness for the small cage of steel; it was his, found again, given back to him. The intensity of the relief told him the intensity of the pain it had ended; the special pain, like no other in his life.

When he entered Wynand’s office, he knew that he had to accept that pain and carry it forever, that there was to be no cure and no hope. Wynand sat behind his desk and rose when he entered, looking straight at him. Wynand’s face was more than the face of a stranger: a stranger’s face is an unapproached potentiality, to be opened if one makes the choice and effort; this was a face known, closed and never to be reached again. A face that held no pain of renunciation, but the stamp of the next step, when even pain is renounced. A face remote and quiet, with a dignity of its own, not a living attribute, but the dignity of a figure on a medieval tomb that speaks of past greatness and forbids a hand to reach out for the remains.

“Mr. Roark, this interview is necessary, but very difficult for me. Please act accordingly.”

Roark knew that the last act of kindness he could offer was to claim no bond. He knew he would break what was left of the man before him if he pronounced one word: Gail.

Roark answered:

“Yes, Mr. Wynand.”

Wynand picked up four typewritten sheets of paper and handed them across the desk:

“Please read this and sign it if it meets with your approval.”

“What is it?”

“Your contract to design the Wynand Building.”

Roark put the sheets down. He could not hold them. He could not look at them.

“Please listen carefully, Mr. Roark. This must be explained and understood. I wish to undertake the construction of the Wynand Building at once. I wish it to be the tallest structure of the city. Do not discuss with me the question of whether this is timely or economically advisable. I wish it built. It will be used—which is all that concerns you. It will house the Clarion and all the offices of the Wynand Enterprises now located in various parts of the city. The rest of the space will be rented. I have sufficient standing left to guarantee that. You need have no fear of erecting a useless structure. I shall send you a written statement on all details and requirements. The rest will be up to you. You will design the building as you wish. Your decisions will be final. They will not require my approval. You will have full charge and complete authority. This is stated in the contract. But I wish it understood that I shall not have to see you. There will be an agent to represent me in all technical and financial matters. You will deal with him. You will hold all further conferences with him. Let him know what contractors you prefer chosen for the job. If you find it necessary to communicate with me, you will do it through my agent. You are not to expect or attempt to see me. Should you do so, you will be refused admittance. I do not wish to speak to you. I do not wish ever to see you again. If you are prepared to comply with these conditions, please read the contract and sign it.”

Roark reached for a pen and signed without looking at the paper.

“You have not read it,” said Wynand.

Roark threw the paper across the desk.

“Please sign both copies.”

Roark obeyed.

“Thank you,” said Wynand, signed the sheets and handed one to Roark. “This is your copy.”

Roark slipped the paper into his pocket.

“I have not mentioned the financial part of the undertaking. It is an open secret that the so-called Wynand empire is dead. It is sound and doing as well as ever throughout the country, with the exception of New York City. It will last my lifetime. But it will end with me. I intend to liquidate a great part of it. You will, therefore, have no reason to limit yourself by any consideration of costs in your design of the building. You are free to make it cost whatever you find necessary. The building will remain long after the newsreels and tabloids are gone.”

“Yes, Mr. Wynand.”

“I presume you will want to make the structure efficiently economical in maintenance costs. But you do not have to consider the return of the original investment. There’s no one to whom it must return.”

“Yes, Mr. Wynand.”

“If you consider the behavior of the world at present and the disaster toward which it is moving you might find the undertaking preposterous. The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave. But you are not afraid of a gesture against the whole world. This will be the last skyscraper ever built in New York. It is proper that it should be so. The last achievement of man on earth before mankind destroys itself.”

“Mankind will never destroy itself, Mr. Wynand. Nor should it think of itself as destroyed. Not so long as it does things such as this.”

“As what?”

“As the Wynand Building.”

“That is up to you. Dead things—such as the Banner—are only the financial fertilizer that will make it possible. It is their proper function.”

He picked up his copy of the contract, folded it and put it, with a precise gesture, into his inside coat pocket. He said, with no change in the tone of his voice:

“I told you once that this building was to be a monument to my life. There is nothing to commemorate now. The Wynand Building will have nothing—except what you give it.”

He rose to his feet, indicating that the interview was ended. Roark got up and inclined his head in parting. He held his head down a moment longer than a formal bow required.

At the door he stopped and turned. Wynand stood behind his desk without moving. They looked at each other.

Wynand said:

“Build it as a monument to that spirit which is yours ... and could have been mine.”

XX

ON A SPRING DAY, EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER, DOMINIQUE WALKED to the construction site of the Wynand Building.

She looked at the skyscrapers of the city. They rose from unexpected spots, out of the low roof lines. They had a kind of startling suddenness, as if they had sprung up the second before she saw them and she had caught the last thrust of the motion; as if, were she to turn away and look again fast enough, she would catch them in the act of springing.

She turned a corner of Hell’s Kitchen and came to the vast cleared tract.

Machines were crawling over the torn earth, grading the future park. From its center, the skeleton of the Wynand Building rose, completed, to the sky. The top part of the frame still hung naked, an intercrossed cage of steel. Glass and masonry had followed its rise, covering the rest of the long streak slashed through space.

She thought: They say the heart of the earth is made of fire. It is held imprisoned and silent. But at times it breaks through the clay, the iron, the granite, and shoots out to freedom. Then it becomes a thing like this.

She walked to the building. A wooden fence surrounded its lower stories. The fence was bright with large signs advertising the names of the firms who had supplied materials for the tallest structure in the world. “Steel by National Steel, Inc.” “Glass by Ludlow.” “Electrical Equipment by Wells-Clairmont.” “Elevators by Kessler, Inc.” “Nash & Dunning, Contractors.”

She stopped. She saw an object she had never noticed before. The sight was like the touch of a hand on her forehead, the hand of those figures in legend who had the power to heal. She had not known Henry Cameron and she had not heard him say it, but what she felt now was as if she were hearing it: “And I know that if you carry these words through to the end, it will be a victory, Howard, not just for you, but for something that should win, that moves the world—and never wins acknowledgment. It will vindicate so many who have fallen before you, who have suffered as you will suffer.”

She saw, on the fence surrounding New York’s greatest building, a small tin plate bearing the words:

“Howard Roark, Architect”

She walked to the superintendent’s shed. She had come here often to call for Roark, to watch the progress of construction. But there was a new man in the shed who did not know her. She asked for Roark.

“Mr. Roark is way up on top by the water tank. Who’s calling, ma’am?”

“Mrs. Roark,” she answered.

The man found the superintendent who let her ride the outside hoist, as she always did—a few planks with a rope for a railing, that rose up the side of the building.

She stood, her hand lifted and closed about a cable, her high heels posed firmly on the planks. The planks shuddered, a current of air pressed her skirt to her body, and she saw the ground dropping softly away from her.

She rose above the broad panes of shop windows. The channels of streets grew deeper, sinking. She rose above the marquees of movie theaters, black mats held by spirals of color. Office windows streamed past her, long belts of glass running down. The squat hulks of warehouses vanished, sinking with the treasures they guarded. Hotel towers slanted, like the spokes of an opening fan, and folded over. The fuming matchsticks were factory stacks and the moving gray squares were cars. The sun made lighthouses of peaked summits, they reeled, flashing long white rays over the city. The city spread out, marching in angular rows to the rivers. It stood held between two thin black arms of water. It leaped across and rolled away to a haze of plains and sky.

Flat roofs descended like pedals pressing the buildings down, out of the way of her flight. She went past the cubes of glass that held dining rooms, bedrooms and nurseries. She saw roof gardens float down like handkerchiefs spread on the wind. Skyscrapers raced her and were left behind. The planks under her feet shot past the antennae of radio stations.

The hoist swung like a pendulum above the city. It sped against the side of the building. It had passed the line where the masonry ended behind her. There was nothing behind her now but steel ligaments and space. She felt the height pressing against her eardrums. The sun filled her eyes. The air beat against her raised chin.

She saw him standing above her, on the top platform of the Wynand Building. He waved to her.

The line of the ocean cut the sky. The ocean mounted as the city descended. She passed the pinnacles of bank buildings. She passed the crowns of courthouses. She rose above the spires of churches.

Then there was only the ocean and the sky and the figure of Howard Roark.

The End

AFTERWORD

by Leonard Peikoff

Before starting a novel, Ayn Rand wrote voluminously in her journals about its theme, characters, and plot. She wrote not for any outside reader, but for herself—for the clarity of her own understanding. For her admirers, however, the Fountainhead journals are a cornucopia of treasures, all of which will be published in due course. Among other things, they include her first sketches of the characters, notes indicating the evolution of the plot, her own editorial analysis of the first draft of Part One, and extensive architectural research, with passages from the books of various authorities copied by hand and followed by her own comments. Throughout the journals, of course, in one form or another, there is also philosophy—that is, the ideas which were eventually to culminate in Objectivism.

From these journals, with the kind help of an associate, Gary Hull, I have selected for this Afterword entries of several kinds. They are being offered here as an advance bonus for Miss Rand’s readers, to mark the occasion of The Fountainhead’s 50th anniversary. This material will give the reader at least a glimpse of the novel being born—and of the author at work creating it by solving problems to which, thanks to her, he already knows the full, perfect answers.

Ayn Rand’s working title for the novel was Second-Hand Lives. The final title, chosen after the manuscript was completed, changes the emphasis: like the book, it gives primacy not to the villains, but to the creative hero, the man who uses his mind first-handed and becomes thereby the fountainhead of all achievement.

The first page of the handwritten manuscripts of The Fountainhead is dated June 26, 1938. But years earlier Miss Rand was hard at work thinking about the book. On December 26, 1935, for example, she outlined the following preliminary cast of characters (three of these were later cut and others were added):

Howard Roark—The noble soul par excellence. The man as man should be. The self-sufficient, self-confident, the end of ends, the reason unto himself, the joy of living personified. Above all—the man who lives for himself, as living for oneself should be understood. And who triumphs completely. A man who is what he should be.

Peter Keating—The exact opposite of Howard Roark, and everything a man should not be. A perfect example of a selfless man who is a ruthless, unprincipled egotist—in the accepted meaning of the word. A tremendous vanity and greed, which lead him to sacrifice all for the sake of a “brilliant career” A mob man at heart, of the mob and for the mob. His triumph is his disaster. Left as an empty, bitter wreck, his “second-hand life” takes the form of sacrificing all for the sake of a victory which has no meaning and gives him no satisfaction. Because his means become his end. He shows that a selfless man cannot be ethical. He has no self and, therefore, cannot have any ethics. A man who never could be [man as he should be]. And doesn’t know it.

A great publisher (Gail Wynand)—A man who rules the mob only as long as he says what the mob wants him to say. What happens when he tries to say what he wants. A man who could have been.

A Preacher?—A man who tries to save the world with an outworn ideology. Show that his ideals are actually in working existence and that they precisely are what the world has to be saved from.

An art producer—(Screen) A man who has no opinions and no values, save those of others.

The actress (Vesta Dunning)—A woman who accepts greatness in other people’s eyes, rather than in her own. A woman who could have been.

Dominique Wynand—The woman for a man like Howard Roark. The perfect priestess.

John Eric Snyte—The real ghost-writer-liver. A man who glories in appropriating the achievements of others.

Ellsworth Monkton Toohey—Noted economist, critic and liberal. “Noted” anything and everything. Great “humanitarian” and “man of integrity.” Glorifies all forms of collectivism because he knows that only under such forms will he, as the best representative of the mass, attain prominence and distinction, impossible to him on his own merits which do not exist. The idol-crusher par excellence. Born, organic enemy of all things heroic. Has a positive genius for the commonplace. Worst of all possible rats. A man who never could be—and knows it.

The two moral extremes in this cast are obviously Roark and Toohey. Here is Miss Rand creating the character of Roark, on February 9, 1936. Observe her concern both for the physical detail which will make him real, and for the spirit which will make him Roark.

Howard Roark

Tall, slender. Somewhat angular—straight lines, straight angles, hard muscles. Walks swiftly, easily, too easily, slouching a little, a loose kind of ease in motion, as if movement requires no effort whatever, a body to which movement is as natural as immobility, without a definite line to divide them, a light, flowing, lazy ease of motion, an energy so complete that it assumes the ease of laziness. Large, long hands—prominent joints and knuckles and wrist-bones, with hard, prominent veins on the backs of the hands; hands that look neither young nor old, but exceedingly strong. His clothes always dishevelled, disarranged, loose and suggesting ... a certain savage unfitness for clothes. Definitely red, loose, straight hair, always dishevelled.

A hard, forbidding face, not in the least attractive according to conventional standards. More liable to be considered homely than handsome. Very prominent cheek-bones. A sharp, straight nose. A large mouth—long and narrow, with a thin upper lip and a rather prominent lower one, which gives him the appearance of an eternal, frozen half-smile, an ironic, hard, uncomfortable smile, mocking and contemptuous. Wrinkles or dimples or slightly prominent muscles, all of that and none definitely, around the corners of his mouth. A rather pale face, without color on the cheeks and with freckles over the bridge of the nose and the cheekbones. Dark red eyebrows, straight and thin. Dark gray, steady, expressionless eyes—eyes that refuse to show expression, to be exact. Very long, straight, dark red eyelashes—the only soft, gentle touch of the whole face—a surprising touch in his grim expression. And when he laughs—which happens seldom—his mouth opens wide, with a complete, loose kind of abandon. A low, hard, throaty voice—not rasping, but rather blurred in its tone, though distinct in its sound, with the same soft, lazy fluency as his movements, neither one being soft or lazy....

He is not even militant or defiant about his utter selfishness. No more than he could be defiant about the right to breathe and eat. He has the quiet, complete, irrevocable calm of an iron conviction. No dramatics, no hysteria, no sensitiveness about it—because there are no doubts. A quiet, almost indifferent acceptance of an irrevocable fact.

A quick, sharp mind, courageous and not afraid to be hurt, has long since grasped and understood completely that the world is not what he is and just exactly what that world is. Consequently, he can no longer be hurt. The world has no painful surprise for him, since he has accepted long ago just what he is to expect from the world....

He does not suffer, because he does not believe in suffering. Defeat or disappointment are merely a part of the battle. Nothing can really touch him. He is concerned only with what he does. Not how he feels. How he feels is entirely a matter of his own, which cannot be influenced by anything and anyone on the outside. His feeling is a steady, unruffled flame, deep and hidden, a profound joy of living and of knowing his power, a joy that is not even conscious of being joy, because it is so steady, natural and unchangeable....

He will be himself at any cost—the only thing he really wants of life. And, deep inside of him, he knows that he has the ability to win the right to be himself. Consequently, his life is clear, simple, satisfying and joyous—even if very hard outwardly.

He is in conflict with the world in every possible way-and at complete peace with himself. And his chief difference from the rest of the world is that he was born without the ability to consider others. As a matter of form and necessity on the way, as one meets fellow travellers—yes. As a matter of basic, primary consideration—no....

Religion—None. Not a speck of it. Born without any “religious brain center.” Does not understand or even conceive of the instinct for bowing and submission. His whole capacity for reverence is centered on himself. Needs no mystical “consolation,” no other life. Thinks too much of this world to expect or desire any other....

The story is the story of Howard Roark’s triumph. It has to show what the man is, what he wants and how he gets it. It has to be a triumphant epic of man’s spirit, a hymn glorifying a man’s “I.” It has to show every conceivable hardship and obstacle on his way—and how he triumphs over them, why he has to triumph.

A year later, on February 22, 1937, Miss Rand is working on an early sketch of Toohey. Here are some excerpts:

Ellsworth Monkton Toohey

the non-creative “second-hand” man par excettence—the critic, expressing and molding the voice of public opinion, the average man at large—condensed, representing the average man’s qualities plus the peculiar qualities of his kind which make him the natural leader of average men. Theme song—a vicious, ingrown vanity coupled with an inane will to power, a lust for superiority that can be expressed only through others, whom, therefore, he has to dominate, a natural inferiority complex subconsciously leading to the bringing down of everything into inferiority...

Went into “Intellectualism” in a big way. Two reasons: first, a subconscious revenge for his obvious physical inferiority, a means to a power his body could never give him; second, and main—a cunning perception that only mental control over others is true control, that if he can rule them mentaly he is indeed their total ruler. His vanity is not the passive one of Peter, who is really not concerned with other people as such, only as mirrors for his vanity; Toohey is very much concerned with other people in the sense of an overwhelming desire to dominate them....

[Toohey] has realized ahead of many others the tremendous power of numbers, the power of the masses which, for the first time, in the XX century, are acquiring real significance in all, even in the intellectual, departments of life. In that sense, he is the man of the century, the genius of modern democracy in its worst meaning. The first cornerstone of his convictions is equality—his greatest passion. This includes the idea that, as two-legged human creatures, all possess certain intrinsic value by the mere fact of having been born in the shape of men, not apes. Any concrete, mental content inside the human shape does not matter. A great brain or a great talent or a magnificent character are of no importance as compared to that intrinsic value all possess as men—whatever that may be. He is never clear on what that may be and rather annoyed when the question is raised....

Inasmuch as beliefs are important to him only as a means to an end, and that is the extent of his belief in beliefs, he is not bothered by his inconsistencies, by the vagueness and logical fallacy of his convictions. They are efficient and effective to secure the ends he is seeking. They work—and that is all they’re for....

Communism, the Soviet variety particularly, is not merely an economic theory. It does not demand economic equality and security in order to set each individual free to rise as he chooses. Communism is, above all, a spiritual theory which denies the individual, not merely as an economic power, but in all and every respect. It demands spiritual subordination to the mass in every way conceivable, economic, intellectual, artistic; it allows individuals to rise on as servants of the masses, only as mouthpieces for the great average. It places, among single individuals, Ellsworth Monkton Toohey at the top of the human pyramid....

In opposing the existing order of society, it is not the big capitalists and their money that Toohey opposes; he opposes the fading conceptions of individualism still existing in that society, and the privileged few as its material symbols. He says that he is fighting Rockefeller and Morgan; he is fighting Beethoven and Shakespeare....

Toohey studies voraciously. He has a magnificent memory for facts and statistics, he is known as a “walking encyclopedia.” This is natural—since he has no creative mind, only a repeating, aping, absorbing “second-hand” one. By the same token—his absorption in studies: he has nothing new to create, but can acquire importance by absorbing the works and achievements of others. He is a sponge, not a fresh spring....

He is a man so completely poisoned spiritually, that his puny physical appearance seems to be a walking testimonial to the spiritual pus filling his blood vessels.

If her journals exhibit Ayn Rand in the passionate act of creative work, they also reveal her dispassionately analyzing and criticizing some of the work’s early stages. Here, for example, are her comments on the first draft of Chapter One (February 18, 1940):

Chapter I Roark planted too soon—(too much of him given)—too obviously heroic—the author’s sympathy too clear. (?) Don’t like Roark’s outbreak with Dean—can be treated differently. Don’t dialogue thoughts—narrate them (such as Dean’s and Mrs. Keating’s) Roark changing his drawing—too much detail (?) In this first chapter—plant Roark: ornament—that his buildings are not modernistic boxes?

After a chapter-by-chapter analysis in this way of the whole of Part One, Miss Rand sums up for herself certain key points:

About first part in general:

Do not dialogue thoughts. Control adjectives—cut the weakening ones. Do not use adjectives unless they are different and illuminating. Don’t go into over-detailed analyses of psychotogy—unless it’s something new and illuminating to say. Don’t give any details whatever—in sentences or thoughts—unless you have something new to say.

Stress the second-handedness whenever possible, particularly in Keating, but a different facet of it each time. Cut out episodes that do not bear on that theme. The book is not about architecture, it’s about Roark against the world and about the workings of that thing in the world which opposes him. Give only enough pure architecture to make the background real. But only as a background. Eliminate bromides or convenient colloquial expressions ready-made, even in places that are mere transitions, such as “and it made film history,” “round of nightclubs,” etc.

One of the most interesting and philosophical parts of these journals is the pages devoted to research. Miss Rand learned about architecture both from books and from life (including a year spent working in an architect’s office). Here are some research notes of hers from 1937, dealing with architecture and other subjects. I have picked these excerpts at random, but offer them in chronological order.

Feb. 27, 1937

Incidental question: a librarian writing about library building, insists that libraries must be made to look as accessible to the public as possibte—to “bring the library nearer to the people.” “Spacious and inviting entrances are places at grade level, close to the public thoroughfare, with as few steps as possible between the pedestrian and the building.” This may be quite sound in relation to library architecture, but the question it raises, in a more general sense, is this: is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?

March 27, 1937

A typical instance of the rising power of the masses—The open arrogance of the inferior who no longer try to imitate their superiors, but boldly flaunt their inferiority, their averageness, their “popular appeal.” A state of affairs where quality is no longer of any importance, and where it is coming to be shunned, avoided, even despised. The paradox of the dregs of humanity actually feeling contempt for their betters, because they are better. Quantity alone considered important—quality no longer even considered. The masses triumphant. [Real-life] example of this: the head of a “charm school,” a contemptible racket, having been attacked by a “high brow” magazine, states haughtily: “Why should I worry? Who are they? In all the years they’ve been in existence, they have only a hundred thousand circulation. I have a million customers in one year!”

June 4, 1937

Typical and valuable instance of mob-spirit:

Raymond Hook, architect of the “Daily News Building” in New York (ugliest building in the city! AR) is “an architect of the modern type who preaches and practices cooperation. He has no use for the architect who ‘shuts himself up in his office to make a design and then sends it out to a contractor to build or to an engineer to fit up the plumbing, heating and steel as best as he can.’ Nor has he any use for the architect who ‘goes up to a Communion on Mount Sinai and hands the results to the owner, the engineers and the public: In his view, as in my own, the best designs, at any rate for the building of skyscrapers, come from ‘a group of minds in which the architect is one link in the chain.’ ”

So speaks the mob. And the results—the “Daily News Building” and the author’s buildings—speak for themselves. Being the ugliest, flattest, most conventional, meaningless, unimaginative and uninspiring buildings in the book.

This type of architect works “by conference” in which all parties concerned take part, discuss his drawings, make suggestions, etc. (A Hollywood story conference) The result is what the result of collective creation always is—“an average on an average.”

June 10, 1937

Note: The peculiar preoccupation of architects such as the author and the previous one with “proportions,” “mouldings,” “scholarly faithfulness to Classic examples,” etc. Worrying about every little thing, except the main one—the composition and its meaning as a whole. Isn’t it like the people who worry greatly about fine points of “style” and grammar in literature, without caring what the writing is about? Again, the “how” against the “what.” (Yet, the “what” determines everything else, just as the end determines the means, not vice versa. I do not intend that the “end” should justify lousy “means,” either. The “how” should always be worthy of the “what,” but determined by it.)

Dec. 5, 1937

Let us decide once and for all what is a unit and what is to be only a part of the unit, subordinated to it. A building is a unit—all else in it, such as sculpture, murals, ornaments, are parts of the unit and to be subordinated to the will of the architect, as creator of the unit. No talk of “the freedom of craftsmen” for sculptors and the like here.

Also—man is a unit, not Society. So that man cannot be considered as only a subordinate part to be ruled by and to fit into the ensemble of society.

(I really believe that a building is a unit, not a city, so that city planning should not control all buildings. Because a house can be the product of one man, but a city cannot. And nothing collective can have the unity and integrity of a “unit.”)

Much of the confusion in “collectivism” and “individualism” could be cleared up if men were clear on what constitutes a unit, what is to be regarded as such.

As to the rules about this—my job of the future.

Those who know Ayn Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, know how startlingly she completed this highly technical “job of the future.”

In the thirties, however, Ayn Rand was concerned primarily with ethics; she wanted to define and present a proper view of man’s life. Here, in a note dated January 15, 1936, is her reason for writing The Fountainhead:

This may sound naive. But—is our life ever to have any reality? Are we ever going to live on the level or is life always to be something else, something different from what it should be? A real life, simple and sincere, and even naive, is the only life where all the potential grandeur and beauty of human existence can really be found. Are there real reasons for accepting the alternative, that which we have today? No one has really shown [today’s] life, as it really is, with its real meaning and its reasons. I’m going to show it. If it’s not a pretty picture—what is the substitute:

I have read The Fountainhead many times since 1949, when I first found it. I read it mostly for the sheer pleasure of living in the “substitute” world Ayn Rand creates. I hope the story has given you the same pleasure.

-Leonard Peikoff, Irvine, California, March 1992

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

Part 1

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

Part 2

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

Part 3

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

Part 4

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

AFTERWORD

Annotation

Rand's most notable novel asks the question: What happens to the world when the prime movers [inventors and scientists] go on strike? Narrator Scott Brick takes listeners on a journey so extraordinary they'll hardly notice the book's length. While his performance offers little in the way of theatrics, Brick is capable of garnering sympathy and, perhaps most importantly, devout attention for Rand's plot and characters. On the surface, Brick's voice is a cool, unrelenting force determined to capture every facet of Rand's complex story. But amid his calm and collected delivery, he taps into a more colorful emotional palette that will keep listeners involved. Brick's subtle delivery holds far more than meets the ear. L.B. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Atlas Shrugged

PART I

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

PART II

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

PART III

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand

PART I
NON-CONTRADICTION

CHAPTER I
THE THEME

"Who is John Galt?"

The light was ebbing, and Eddie Willers could not distinguish the bum's face. The bum had said it simply, without expression. But from the sunset far at the end of the street, yellow glints caught his eyes, and the eyes looked straight at Eddie Willers, mocking and still—as if the question had been addressed to the causeless uneasiness within him.

"Why did you say that?" asked Eddie Willers, his voice tense.

The bum leaned against the side of the doorway; a wedge of broken glass behind him reflected the metal yellow of the sky.

"Why does it bother you?" he asked.

"It doesn't," snapped Eddie Willers.

He reached hastily into his pocket. The bum had stopped him and asked for a dime, then had gone on talking, as if to kill that moment and postpone the problem of the next. Pleas for dimes were so frequent in the streets these days that it was not necessary to listen to explanations, and he had no desire to hear the details of this bum's particular despair.

"Go get your cup of coffee," he said, handing the dime to the shadow that had no face.

"Thank you, sir," said the voice, without interest, and the face leaned forward for a moment. The face was wind-browned, cut by lines of weariness and cynical resignation; the eyes were intelligent. Eddie Willers walked on, wondering why he always felt it at this time of day, this sense of dread without reason. No, he thought, not dread, there's nothing to fear: just an immense, diffused apprehension, with no source or object. He had become accustomed to the feeling, but he could find no explanation for it; yet the bum had spoken as if he knew that Eddie felt it, as if he thought that one should feel it, and more: as if he knew the reason.

Eddie Willers pulled his shoulders straight, in conscientious self-discipline. He had to stop this, he thought; he was beginning to imagine things. Had he always felt it? He was thirty-two years old. He tried to think back. No, he hadn't; but he could not remember when it had started. The feeling came to him Suddenly, at random intervals, and now it was coming more often than ever. It's the twilight, he thought; I hate the twilight.

The clouds and the shafts of skyscrapers against them were turning brown, like an old painting in oil, the color of a fading masterpiece. Long streaks of grime ran from under the pinnacles down the slender, soot-eaten walls. High on the side of a tower there was a crack in the shape of a motionless lightning, the length of ten stories. A jagged object cut the sky above the roofs; it was half a spire, still holding the glow of the sunset; the gold leaf had long since peeled off the other half. The glow was red and still, like the reflection of a fire: not an active fire, but a dying one which it is too late to stop.

No, thought Eddie Willers, there was nothing disturbing in the sight of the city. It looked as it had always looked.

He walked on, reminding himself that he was late in returning to the office. He did not like the task which he had to perform on his return, but it had to be done. So he did not attempt to delay it, but made himself walk faster.

He turned a corner. In the narrow space between the dark silhouettes of two buildings, as in the crack of a door, he saw the page of a gigantic calendar suspended in the sky.

It was the calendar that the mayor of New York had erected last year on the top of a building, so that citizens might tell the day of the month as they told the hours of the day, by glancing up at a public tower. A white rectangle hung over the city, imparting the date to the men in the streets below. In the rusty light of this evening's sunset, the rectangle said: September 2.

Eddie Willers looked away. He had never liked the sight of that calendar. It disturbed him, in a manner he could not explain or define. The feeling seemed to blend with his sense of uneasiness; it had the same quality.

He thought suddenly that there was some phrase, a kind of quotation, that expressed what the calendar seemed to suggest. But he could not recall it. He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it nor dismiss it. He glanced back. The white rectangle stood above the roofs, saying in immovable finality: September 2.

Eddie Willers shifted his glance down to the street, to a vegetable pushcart at the stoop of a brownstone house. He saw a pile of bright gold carrots and the fresh green of onions. He saw a clean white curtain blowing at an open window. He saw a bus turning a corner, expertly steered. He wondered why he felt reassured—and then, why he felt the sudden, inexplicable wish that these things were not left in the open, unprotected against the empty space above.

When he came to Fifth Avenue, he kept his eyes on the windows of the stores he passed. There was nothing he needed or wished to buy; but he liked to see the display of good?, any goods, objects made by men, to be used by men. He enjoyed the sight of a prosperous street; not more than every fourth one of the stores was out of business, its windows dark and empty.

He did not know why he suddenly thought of the oak tree. Nothing had recalled it. But he thought of it and of his childhood summers on the Taggart estate. He had spent most of his childhood with the Taggart children, and now he worked for them, as his father and grandfather had worked for their father and grandfather.

The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson, in a lonely spot of the Taggart estate. Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that tree. It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers sunk into the soil, and he thought that if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak tree's presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength.

One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside—just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it.

Years later, he heard it said that children should be protected from shock, from their first knowledge of death, pain or fear. But these had never scarred him; his shock came when he stood very quietly, looking into the black hole of the trunk. It was an immense betrayal—the more terrible because he could not grasp what it was that had been betrayed. It was not himself, he knew, nor his trust; it was something else. He stood there for a while, making no sound, then he walked back to the house. He never spoke about it to anyone, then or since.

Eddie Willers shook his head, as the screech of a -rusty mechanism changing a traffic light stopped him on the edge of a curb. He felt anger at himself. There was no reason that he had to remember the oak tree tonight. It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness—and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark.

He wanted no sadness attached to his childhood; he loved its memories: any day of it he remembered now seemed flooded by a still, brilliant sunlight. It seemed to him as if a few rays from it reached into his present: not rays, more like pinpoint spotlights that gave an occasional moment's glitter to his job, to his lonely apartment, to the quiet, scrupulous progression of his existence.

He thought of a summer day when he was ten years old. That day, in a clearing of the woods, the one precious companion of his childhood told him what they would do when they grew up. The words were harsh and glowing, like the sunlight. He listened in admiration and in wonder. When he was asked what he would want to do, he answered at once, "Whatever is right," and added, "You ought to do something great . . . I mean, the two of us together." "What?" she asked. He said, "I don't know. That's what we ought to find out. Not just what you said. Not just business and earning a living. Things like winning battles, or saving people out of fires, or climbing mountains." "What for?" she asked. He said, "The minister said last Sunday that we must always reach for the best within us. What do you suppose is the best within us?" "I don't know." "We'll have to find out." She did not answer; she was looking away, up the railroad track.

Eddie Willers smiled. He had said, "Whatever is right," twenty-two years ago. He had kept that statement unchallenged ever since; the other questions had faded in his mind; he had been too busy to ask them. But he still thought it self-evident that one had to do what was right; he had never learned how people could want to do otherwise; he had learned only that they did. It still seemed simple and incomprehensible to him: simple that things should be right, and incomprehensible that they weren't. He knew that they weren't. He thought of that, as he turned a corner and came to the great building of Taggart Transcontinental.

The building stood over the street as its tallest and proudest structure. Eddie Willers always smiled at his first sight of it. Its long bands of windows were unbroken, in contrast to those of its neighbors. Its rising lines cut the sky, with no crumbling corners or worn edges. It seemed to stand above the years, untouched. It would always stand there, thought Eddie Willers.

Whenever he entered the Taggart Building, he felt relief and a sense of security. This was a place of competence and power. The floors of its hallways were mirrors made of marble. The frosted rectangles of its electric fixtures were chips of solid light. Behind sheets of glass, rows of girls sat at typewriters, the clicking of their keys like the sound of speeding train wheels. And like an answering echo, a faint shudder went through the walls at times, rising from under the building, from the tunnels of the great terminal where trains started out to cross a continent and stopped after crossing it again, as they had started and stopped for generation after generation. Taggart Transcontinental, thought Eddie Willers, From Ocean to Ocean—the proud slogan of his childhood, so much more shining and holy than any commandment of the Bible. From Ocean to Ocean, forever—thought Eddie Willers, in the manner of a rededication, as he walked through the spotless halls into the heart of the building, into the office of James Taggart, President of Taggart Transcontinental.

James Taggart sat at his desk. He looked like a man approaching fifty, who had crossed into age from adolescence, without the intermediate stage of youth. He had a small, petulant mouth, and thin hair clinging to a bald forehead. His posture had a limp, decentralized sloppiness, as if in defiance of his tall, slender body, a body with an elegance of line intended for the confident poise of an aristocrat, but transformed into the gawkiness of a lout. The flesh of his face was pale and soft. His eyes were pale and veiled, with a glance that moved slowly, never quite stopping, gliding off and past things in eternal resentment of their existence. He looked obstinate and drained. He was thirty-nine years old.

He lifted his head with irritation, at the sound of the opening door.

"Don't bother me, don't bother me, don't bother me," said James Taggart.

Eddie Willers walked toward the-desk.

"It's important, Jim," he said, not raising his voice.

"All right, all right, what is it?"

Eddie Willers looked at a map on the wall of the office. The map's colors had faded under the glass—he wondered dimly how many Taggart presidents had sat before it and for how many years. The Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, the network of red lines slashing the faded body of the country from New York to San Francisco, looked like a system of blood vessels. It looked as if once, long ago, the blood had shot down the main artery and, under the pressure of its own overabundance, had branched out at random points, running all over the country. One red streak twisted its way from Cheyenne, Wyoming, down to El Paso, Texas—the Rio Norte Line of Taggart Transcontinental. New tracing had been added recently and the red streak had been extended south beyond El Paso—but Eddie Willers turned away hastily when his eyes reached that point.

He looked at James Taggart and said, "It's the Rio Norte Line." He noticed Taggart's glance moving down to a corner of the desk. "We've had another wreck."

"Railroad accidents happen every day. Did you have to bother me about that?"

"You know what I'm saying, Jim. The Rio Norte is done for. That track is shot. Down the whole line."

"We are getting a new track."

Eddie Willers continued as if there had been no answer: "That track is shot. It's no use trying to run trains down there. People are giving up trying to use them."

"There is not a railroad in the country, it seems to me, that doesn't have a few branches running at a deficit. We're not the only ones. It's a national condition—a temporary national condition."

Eddie stood looking at him silently. What Taggart disliked about Eddie Willers was this habit of looking straight into people's eyes. Eddie's eyes were blue, wide and questioning; he had blond hair and a square face, unremarkable except for that look of scrupulous attentiveness and open, puzzled wonder.

"What do you want?" snapped Taggart.

"I just came to tell you something you had to know, because somebody had to tell you."

"That we've had another accident?"

"That we can't give up the Rio Norte Line."

James Taggart seldom raised his head; when he looked at people, he did so by lifting his heavy eyelids and staring upward from under the expanse of his bald forehead.

"Who's thinking of giving up the Rio Norte Line?" he asked.

"There's never been any question of giving it up. I resent your saying it. I resent it very much."

"But we haven't met a schedule for the last six months. We haven't completed a run without some sort of breakdown, major or minor. We're losing all our shippers, one after another. How long can we last?"

"You're a pessimist, Eddie. You lack faith. That's what undermines the morale of an organization."

"You mean that nothing's going to be done about the Rio Norte Line?"

"I haven't said that at all. Just as soon as we get the new track-"

"Jim, there isn't going to be any new track." He watched Taggart's eyelids move up slowly. "I've just come back from the office of Associated Steel. I've spoken to Orren Boyle."

"What did he say?"

"He spoke for an hour and a half and did not give me a single straight answer."

"What did you bother him for? I believe the first order of rail wasn't due for delivery until next month."

"And before that, it was due for delivery three months ago."

"Unforeseen circumstances. Absolutely beyond Orren's control."

"And before that, it was due six months earlier. Jim, we have waited for Associated Steel to deliver that rail for thirteen months."

"What do you want me to do? I can't run Orren Boyle's business."

"I want you to understand that we can't wait."

Taggart asked slowly, his voice half-mocking, half-cautious, "What did my sister say?"

"She won't be back until tomorrow."

"Well, what do you want me to do?"

"That's for you to decide."

"Well, whatever else you say, there's one thing you're not going to mention next—and that's Rearden Steel."

Eddie did not answer at once, then said quietly, "All right, Jim. I won't mention it."

"Orren is my friend." He heard no answer. "I resent your attitude. Orren Boyle will deliver that rail just as soon as it's humanly possible. So long as he can't deliver it, nobody can blame us."

"Jim! What are you talking about? Don't you understand that the Rio Norte Line is breaking up—whether anybody blames us or not?"

"People would put up with it—they'd have to—if it weren't for the Phoenix-Durango." He saw Eddie's face tighten. "Nobody ever complained about the Rio Norte Line, until the Phoenix-Durango came on the scene."

"The Phoenix-Durango is doing a brilliant job."

"Imagine a thing called the Phoenix-Durango competing with Taggart Transcontinental! It was nothing but a local milk line ten years ago."

"It's got most of the freight traffic of Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado now." Taggart did not answer. "Jim, we can't lose Colorado. It's our last hope. It's everybody's last hope. If we don't pull ourselves together, we'll lose every big shipper in the state to the Phoenix-Durango. We've lost the Wyatt oil fields."

"I don't see why everybody keeps talking about the Wyatt oil fields."

"Because Ellis Wyatt is a prodigy who—"

"Damn Ellis Wyatt!"

Those oil wells, Eddie thought suddenly, didn't they have something in common with the blood vessels on the map? Wasn't that the way the red stream of Taggart Transcontinental had shot across the country, years ago, a feat that seemed incredible now? He thought of the oil wells spouting a black stream that ran over a continent almost faster than the trains of the Phoenix-Durango could carry it. That oil field had been only a rocky patch in the mountains of Colorado, given up as exhausted long ago. Ellis Wyatt's father had managed to squeeze an obscure living to the end of his days, out of the dying oil wells. Now it was as if somebody had given a shot of adrenalin to the heart of the mountain, the heart had started pumping, the black blood had burst through the rocks—of course it's blood, thought Eddie Willers, because blood is supposed to feed, to give life, and that is what Wyatt Oil had done. It had shocked empty slopes of ground into sudden existence, it had brought new towns, new power plants, new factories to a region nobody had ever noticed on any map. New factories, thought Eddie Willers, at a time when the freight revenues from all the great old industries were dropping slowly year by year; a rich new oil field, at a time when the pumps were stopping in one famous field after another; a new industrial state where nobody had expected anything but cattle and beets. One man had done it, and he had done it in eight years; this, thought Eddie Willers, was like the stories he had read in school books and never quite believed, the stories of men who had lived in the days of the country's youth. He wished he could meet Ellis Wyatt. There was a great deal of talk about him, but few had ever met him; he seldom came to New York. They said he was thirty-three years old and had a violent temper. He had discovered some way to revive exhausted oil wells and he had proceeded to revive them.

"Ellis Wyatt is a greedy bastard who's after nothing but money," said James Taggart. "It seems to me that there are more important things in life than making money."

"What are you talking about, Jim? What has that got to do with—"

"Besides, he's double-crossed us. We served the Wyatt oil fields for years, most adequately. In the days of old man Wyatt, we ran a tank train a week."

"These are not the days of old man Wyatt, Jim. The Phoenix-Durango runs two tank trains a day down there—and it runs them on schedule."

"If he had given us time to grow along with him—"

"He has no time to waste."

"What does he expect? That we drop all our other shippers, sacrifice the interests of the whole country and give him all our trains?"

"Why, no. He doesn't expect anything. He just deals with the Phoenix-Durango."

"I think he's a destructive, unscrupulous ruffian. I think he's an irresponsible upstart who's been grossly overrated." It was astonishing to hear a sudden emotion in James Taggart's lifeless voice. "I'm not so sure that his oil fields are such a beneficial achievement. It seems to me that he's dislocated the economy of the whole country. Nobody expected Colorado to become an industrial state. How can we have any security or plan anything if everything changes all the time?"

"Good God, Jim! He's—"

"Yes, I know, I know, he's making money. But that is not the standard, it seems to me, by which one gauges a man's value to society. And as for his oil, he'd come crawling to us. and he'd wait his turn along with all the other shippers, and he wouldn't demand more than his fair share of transportation—if it weren't for the Phoenix-Durango. We can't help it if we're up against destructive competition of that kind. Nobody can blame us."

The pressure in his chest and temples, thought Eddie Willers, was the strain of the effort he was making; he had decided to make the issue clear for once, and the issue was so clear, he thought, that nothing could bar it from Taggart's understanding, unless it was the failure of his own presentation. So he had tried hard, but he was failing, just as he had always failed in all of their discussions; no matter what he said, they never seemed to be talking about the same subject.

"Jim, what are you saying? Does it matter that nobody blames us—when the road is falling apart?"

James Taggart smiled; it was a thin smile, amused and cold. "It's touching, Eddie," he said. "It's touching—your devotion to Taggart Transcontinental. If you don’t look out, you’ll turn into one of those real feudal serfs."

"That’s what I am, Jim."

"But may I ask whether it is your job to discuss these matters with me?"

"No, it isn't."

"Then why don't you learn that we have departments to take care of things? Why don't you report all this to whoever's concerned? Why don't you cry on my dear sister's shoulder?"

"Look. Jim, I know it's not my place to talk to you. But I can't understand what's going on. I don't know what it is that your proper advisers tell you, or why they can't make you understand. So I thought I'd try to tell you myself."

"I appreciate our childhood friendship, Eddie, but do you think that that should entitle you to walk in here unannounced whenever you wish? Considering your own rank, shouldn't you remember that I am president of Taggart Transcontinental?"

This was wasted. Eddie Willers looked at him as usual, not hurt, merely puzzled, and asked, "Then you don't intend to do anything about the Rio Norte Line?"

"I haven't said that. I haven't said that at all." Taggart was looking at the map, at the red streak south of El Paso. "Just as soon as the San Sebastian Mines get going and our Mexican branch begins to pay off—"

"Don't let's talk about that, Jim." Taggart turned, startled by the unprecedented phenomenon of an implacable anger in Eddie's voice. "What's the matter?"

"You know what's the matter. Your sister said—"

"Damn my sister!" said James Taggart.

Eddie Willers did not move. He did not answer. He stood looking straight ahead. But he did not see James Taggart or anything in the office.

After a moment, he bowed and walked out.

In the anteroom, the clerks of James Taggart's personal staff were switching off the lights, getting ready to leave for the day. But Pop Harper, chief clerk, still sat at his desk, twisting the levers of a half-dismembered typewriter. Everybody in the company had the impression that Pop Harper was born in that particular corner at that particular desk and never intended to leave it. He had been chief clerk for James Taggart's father.

Pop Harper glanced up at Eddie Willers as he came out of the president's office. It was a wise, slow glance; it seemed to say that he knew that Eddie's visit to their part of the building meant trouble on the line, knew that nothing had come of the visit, and was completely indifferent to the knowledge. It was the cynical indifference which Eddie Willers had seen in the eyes of the bum on the street corner.

"Say, Eddie, know where I could get some woolen undershirts?" he asked, "Tried all over town, but nobody's got 'em."

"I don't know," said Eddie, stopping. "Why do you ask me?"

"I just ask everybody. Maybe somebody'!! tell me."

Eddie looked uneasily at the blank, emaciated face and white hair.

"It's cold in this joint," said Pop Harper. "It's going to be colder this winter."

"What are you doing?" Eddie asked, pointing at the pieces of typewriter.

"The damn thing's busted again. No use sending it out, took them three months to fix it the last time. Thought I'd patch it up myself. Not for long, I guess." He let his fist drop down on the keys. "You're ready for the junk pile, old pal. Your days are numbered."

Eddie started. That was the sentence he had tried to remember: Your days are numbered. But he had forgotten in what connection he had tried to remember it.

"It's no use, Eddie," said Pop Harper.

"What's no use?"

"Nothing. Anything."

"What's the matter, Pop?"

"I'm not going to requisition a new typewriter. The new ones are made of tin. When the old ones go, that will be the end of typewriting. There was an accident in the subway this morning, their brakes wouldn't work. You ought to go home, Eddie, turn on the radio and listen to a good dance band. Forget it, boy. Trouble with you is you never had a hobby. Somebody stole the electric light bulbs again, from off the staircase, down where I live. I've got a pain in my chest. Couldn't get any cough drops this morning, the drugstore on our corner went bankrupt last week. The Texas-Western Railroad went bankrupt last month. They closed the Queensborough Bridge yesterday for temporary repairs. Oh well, what's the use? Who is John Galt?"

She sat at the window of the train, her head thrown back, one leg stretched across to the empty seat before her. The window frame trembled with the speed of the motion, the pane hung over empty darkness, and dots of light slashed across the glass as luminous streaks, once in a while.

Her leg, sculptured by the tight sheen of the stocking, its long line running straight, over an arched instep, to the tip of a foot in a high-heeled pump, had a feminine elegance that seemed out of place in the dusty train car and oddly incongruous with the rest of her. She wore a battered camel's hair coat that had been expensive, wrapped shapelessly about her slender, nervous body. The coat collar was raised to the slanting brim of her hat. A sweep of brown hair fell back, almost touching the line of her shoulders. Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut, as if she resented immobility, and unfeminine, as if she were unconscious of her own body and that it was a woman's body. She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.

She thought: For just a few moments—while this lasts—it is all right to surrender completely—to forget everything and just permit yourself to feel. She thought: Let go—drop the controls—this is it.

Somewhere on the edge of her mind, under the music, she heard the sound of train wheels. They knocked in an even rhythm, every fourth knock accented, as if stressing a conscious purpose. She could relax, because she heard the wheels. She listened to the symphony, thinking: This is why the wheels have to be kept going, and this is where they're going.

She had never heard that symphony before, but she knew that it was written by Richard Halley. She recognized the violence and the magnificent intensity. She recognized the style of the theme; it was a clear, complex melody—at a time when no one wrote melody any longer. . . . She sat looking up at the ceiling of the car, but she did not see it and she had forgotten where she was. She did not know whether she was hearing a full symphony orchestra or only the theme; perhaps she was hearing the orchestration in her own mind.

She thought dimly that there had been premonitory echoes of this theme in all of Richard Halley's work, through all the years of his long struggle, to the day, in his middle-age, when fame struck him suddenly and knocked him out. This—she thought, listening to the symphony— had been the goal of his struggle. She remembered half-hinted attempts in his music, phrases that promised it, broken bits of melody that started but never quite reached it; when Richard Halley wrote this, he . . . She sat up straight. When did Richard Halley write this?

In the same instant, she realized where she was and wondered for the first time where that music came from.

A few steps away, at the end of the car, a brakeman was adjusting the controls of the air-conditioner. He was blond and young. He was whistling the theme of the symphony. She realized that he had been whistling it for some time and that this was all she had heard.

She watched him incredulously for a while, before she raised her voice to ask, "Tell me please, what are you whistling?"

The boy turned to her. She met a direct glance and saw an open, eager smile, as if he were sharing a confidence with a friend. She liked his face—its lines were tight and firm, it did not have that look of loose muscles evading the responsibility of a shape, which she had learned to expect in people's faces.

"It's the Halley Concerto," he answered, smiling.

"Which one?"

"The Fifth."

She let a moment pass, before she said slowly and very carefully, "Richard Halley wrote only four concertos."

The boy's smile vanished. It was as if he were jolted back to reality, just as she had been a few moments ago. It was as if a shutter were slammed down, and what remained was a face without expression, impersonal, indifferent and empty.

"Yes, of course," he said. "I'm wrong. I made a mistake."

"Then what was it?"

"Something I heard somewhere."

"What?"

"I don't know."

"Where did you hear it?"

"I don't remember."

She paused helplessly; he was turning away from her without further interest.

"It sounded like a Halley theme," she said. "But I know every note he's ever written and he never wrote that."

There was still no expression, only a faint look of attentiveness on the boy's face, as he turned back to her and asked, "You like the music of Richard Halley?"

"Yes," she said, "I like it very much."

He considered her for a moment, as if hesitating, then he turned away. She watched the expert efficiency of his movements as he went on working. He worked in silence.

She had not slept for two nights, but she could not permit herself to sleep; she had too many problems to consider and not much time: the train was due in New York early in the morning. She needed the time, yet she wished the train would go faster; but it was the Taggart Comet, the fastest train in the country.

She tried to think; but the music remained on the edge of her mind and she kept hearing it, in full chords, like the implacable steps of something that could not be stopped. . . . She shook her head angrily, jerked her hat off and lighted a cigarette.

She would not sleep, she thought; she could last until tomorrow night. . . . The train wheels clicked in accented rhythm. She was so used to them that she did not hear them consciously, but the sound became a sense of peace within her. . . . When she extinguished her cigarette, she knew that she needed another one, but thought that she would give herself a minute, just a few minutes, before she would light it. . . .

She had fallen asleep and she awakened with a jolt, knowing that something was wrong, before she knew what it was: the wheels had stopped. The car stood soundless and dim in the blue glow of the night lamps. She glanced at her watch: there was no reason for stopping. She looked out the window: the train stood still in the middle of empty fields.

She heard someone moving in a seat across the aisle, and asked, "How long have we been standing?"

A man's voice answered indifferently, "About an hour." The man looked after her, sleepily astonished, because she leaped to her feet and rushed to the door. There was a cold wind outside, and an empty stretch of land under an empty sky. She heard weeds rustling in the darkness. Far ahead, she saw the figures of men standing by the engine—and above them, hanging detached in the sky, the red light of a signal.

She walked rapidly toward them, past the motionless line of wheels. No one paid attention to her when she approached. The train crew and a few passengers stood clustered under the red light. They had stopped talking, they seemed to be waiting in placid indifference.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

The engineer turned, astonished. Her question had sounded like an order, not like the amateur curiosity of a passenger. She stood, hands in pockets, coat collar raised, the wind beating her hair in strands across her face.

"Red light, lady," he said, pointing up with his thumb.

"How long has it been on?"

"An hour."

"We're off the main track, aren't we?"

"That's right."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

The conductor spoke up. "I don't think we had any business being sent off on a siding, that switch wasn't working right, and this thing's not working at all." He jerked his head up at the red light. "I don't think the signal's going to change. I think it's busted."

"Then what are you doing?"

"Waiting for it to change."

In her pause of startled anger, the fireman chuckled. "Last week, the crack special of the Atlantic Southern got left on a siding for two hours—just somebody's mistake."

"This is the Taggart Comet," she said. "The Comet has never been late."

"She's the only one in the country that hasn't," said the engineer.

"There's always a first time," said the fireman.

"You don't know about railroads, lady," said a passenger.

"There's not a signal system or a dispatcher in the country that's worth a damn."

She did not turn or notice him, but spoke to the engineer.

"If you know that the signal is broken, what do you intend to do?"

He did not like her tone of authority, and he could not understand why she assumed it so naturally. She looked like a young girl; only her mouth and eyes showed that she was a woman in her thirties. The dark gray eyes were direct and disturbing, as if they cut through things, throwing the inconsequential out of the way. The face seemed faintly familiar to him, but he could not recall where he had seen it.

"Lady, I don't intend to stick my neck out," he said.

"He means," said the fireman, "that our job's to wait for orders."

"Your job is to run this train."

"Not against a red light. If the light says stop, we stop."

"A red light means danger, lady," said the passenger.

"We're not taking any chances," said the engineer. "Whoever's responsible for it, he'll switch the blame to us if we move. So we're not moving till somebody tells us to."

"And if nobody does?"

"Somebody will turn up sooner or later."

"How long do you propose to wait?"

The engineer shrugged. "Who is John Galt?"

"He means," said the fireman, "don't ask questions nobody can answer."

She looked at the red light and at the rail that went off into the black, untouched distance.

She said, "Proceed with caution to the next signal. If it's in order, proceed to the main track. Then stop at the first open office."

"Yeah? Who says so?"

"I do."

"Who are you?"

It was only the briefest pause, a moment of astonishment at a question she had not expected, but the engineer looked more closely at her face, and in time with her answer he gasped, "Good God!"

She answered, not offensively, merely like a person who does not hear the question often: "Dagny Taggart."

"Well, I'll be—" said the fireman, and then they all remained silent. She went on, in the same tone of unstressed authority. "Proceed to the main track and hold the train for me at the first open office."

"Yes, Miss Taggart."

"You'll have to make up time. You've got the rest of the night to do it. Get the Comet in on schedule."

"Yes, Miss Taggart."

She was turning to go, when the engineer asked, "If there's any trouble, are you taking the responsibility for it, Miss Taggart?"

"I am."

The conductor followed her as she walked back to her car. He was saying, bewildered, "But . . . just a seat in a day coach, Miss Taggart? But how come? But why didn't you let us know?"

She smiled easily. "Had no time to be formal. Had my own car attached to Number 22 out of Chicago, but got off at Cleveland—and Number 22 was running late, so I let the car go. The Comet came next and I took it. There was no sleeping-car space left."

The conductor shook his head. "Your brother—he wouldn't have taken a coach."

She laughed. "No, he wouldn't have."

The men by the engine watched her walking away. The young brakeman was among them. He asked, pointing after her, "Who is that?"

"That'swho runs Taggart Transcontinental," said the engineer; the respect in his voice was genuine. "That's the Vice-president in Charge of Operation."

When the train jolted forward, the blast of its whistle dying over the fields, she sat by the window, lighting another cigarette. She thought: It's cracking to pieces, like this, all over the country, you can expect it anywhere, at any moment. But she felt no anger or anxiety; she had no time to feel.

This would be just one more issue, to be settled along with the others. She knew that the superintendent of the Ohio Division was no good and that he was a friend of James Taggart. She had not insisted on throwing him out long ago only because she had no better man to put in his place. Good men were so strangely hard to find. But she would have to get rid of him, she thought, and she would give his post to Owen Kellogg, the young engineer who was doing a brilliant job as one of the assistants to the manager of the Taggart Terminal in New York; it was Owen Kellogg who ran the Terminal. She had watched his work for some time; she had always looked for sparks of competence, like a diamond prospector in an unpromising wasteland. Kellogg was still too young to be made superintendent of a division; she had wanted to give him another year, but there was no time to wait. She would have to speak to him as soon as she returned.

The strip of earth, faintly visible outside the window, was running faster now, blending into a gray stream. Through the dry phrases of calculations in her mind, she noticed that she did have time to feel something: it was the hard, exhilarating pleasure of action.

With the first whistling rush of air, as the Comet plunged into the tunnels of the Taggart Terminal under the city of New York, Dagny Taggart sat up straight. She always felt it when the train went underground—this sense of eagerness, of hope and of secret excitement. It was as if normal existence were a photograph of shapeless things in badly printed colors, but this was a sketch done in a few sharp strokes that made things seem clean, important—and worth doing.

She watched the tunnels as they flowed past: bare walls of concrete, a net of pipes and wires, a web of rails that went off into black holes where green and red lights hung as distant drops of color. There was nothing else, nothing to dilute it, so that one could admire naked purpose and the ingenuity that had achieved it. She thought of the Taggart Building standing above her head at this moment, growing straight to the sky, and she thought: These are the roots of the building, hollow roots twisting under the ground, feeding the city.

When the train stopped, when she got off and heard the concrete of the platform under her heels, she felt light, lifted, impelled to action.

She started off, walking fast, as if the speed of her steps could give form to the things she felt. It was a few moments before she realized that she was whistling a piece of music—and that it was the theme of Halley's Fifth Concerto. She felt someone looking at her and turned. The young brakeman stood watching her tensely.

She sat on the arm of the big chair facing James Taggart's desk, her coat thrown open over a wrinkled traveling suit. Eddie Willers sat across the room, making notes once in a while. His title was that of Special Assistant to the Vice-President in Charge of Operation, and his main duty was to be her bodyguard against any waste of time. She asked him to be present at interviews of this nature, because then she never had to explain anything to him afterwards. James Taggart sat at his desk, his head drawn into his shoulders.

"The Rio Norte Line is a pile of junk from one end to the other," she said. "It's much worse than I thought. But we're going to save it."

"Of course," said James Taggart.

"Some of the rail can be salvaged. Not much and not for long. We'll start laying new rail in the mountain sections, Colorado first. We'll get the new rail in two months."

"Oh, did Orren Boyle say he'll—"

"I've ordered the rail from Rearden Steel."

The slight, choked sound from Eddie Willers was his suppressed desire to cheer.

James Taggart did not answer at once. "Dagny, why don't you sit in the chair as one is supposed to?" he said at last; his voice was petulant.

"Nobody holds business conferences this way."

"I do."

She waited. He asked, his eyes avoiding hers, "Did you say that you have ordered the rail from Rearden?"

"Yesterday evening. I phoned him from Cleveland."

"But the Board hasn't authorized it. I haven't authorized it. You haven't consulted me."

She reached over, picked up the receiver of a telephone on his desk and handed it to him.

"Call Rearden and cancel it," she said.

James Taggart moved back in his chair. "I haven't said that," he answered angrily. "I haven't said that at all."

"Then it stands?"

"I haven't said that, either."

She turned. "Eddie, have them draw up the contract with Rearden Steel. Jim will sign it." She took a crumpled piece of notepaper from her pocket and tossed it to Eddie. "There's the figures and terms."

Taggart said, "But the Board hasn't—"

"The Board hasn't anything to do with it. They authorized you to buy the rail thirteen months ago. Where you buy it is up to you."

"I don't think it's proper to make such a decision without giving the Board a chance to express an opinion. And I don't see why I should be made to take the responsibility."

"I am taking it.”

"What about the expenditure which—"

"Rearden is charging less than Orren Boyle's Associated Steel."

"Yes, and what about Orren Boyle?"

"I've cancelled the contract. We had the right to cancel it six months ago."

"When did you do that?"

"Yesterday."

"But he hasn't called to have me confirm it."

"He won't."

Taggart sat looking down at his desk. She wondered why he resented the necessity of dealing with Rearden, and why his resentment had such an odd, evasive quality. Rearden Steel had been the chief supplier of Taggart Transcontinental for ten years, ever since the first Rearden furnace was fired, in the days when their father was president of the railroad. For ten years, most of their rail had come from Rearden Steel. There were not many firms in the country who delivered what was ordered, when and as ordered. Rearden Steel was one of them.

If she were insane, thought Dagny, she would conclude that her brother hated to deal with Rearden because Rearden did his job with superlative efficiency; but she would not conclude it, because she thought that such a feeling was not within the humanly possible.

"It isn't fair," said James Taggart.

"What isn't?"

"That we always give all our business to Rearden. It seems to me we should give somebody else a chance, too. Rearden doesn't need us; he's plenty big enough. We ought to help the smaller fellows to develop. Otherwise, we're just encouraging a monopoly."

"Don't talk tripe, Jim,"

"Why do we always have to get things from Rearden?"

"Because we always get them."

"I don't like Henry Rearden."

"I do. But what does that matter, one way or the other? We need rails and he's the only one who can give them to us."

"The human element is very important. You have no sense of the human element at all."

"We're talking about saving a railroad, Jim."

"Yes, of course, of course, but still, you haven't any sense of the human element."

"No. I haven't."

"If we give Rearden such a large order for steel rails—"

"They're not going to be steel. They're Rearden Metal."

She had always avoided personal reactions, but she was forced to break her rule when she saw the expression on Taggart's face. She burst out laughing.

Rearden Metal was a new alloy, produced by Rearden after ten years of experiments. He had placed it on the market recently. He had received no orders and had found no customers.

Taggart could not understand the transition from the laughter to the sudden tone of Dagny's voice; the voice was cold and harsh: "Drop it, Jim. I know everything you're going to say. Nobody's ever used it before. Nobody approves of Rearden Metal. Nobody's interested in it. Nobody wants it. Still, our rails are going to be made of Rearden Metal."

"But . . ." said Taggart, "but . . . but nobody's ever used it before!"

He observed, with satisfaction, that she was silenced by anger. He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points. But how one could feel a personal emotion about a metal alloy, and what such an emotion indicated, was incomprehensible to him; so he could make no use of his discovery.

"The consensus of the best metallurgical authorities," he said, "seems to be highly skeptical about Rearden Metal, contending—"

"Drop it, Jim."

"Well, whose opinion did you take?"

"I don't ask for opinions."

"What do you go by?"

"Judgment."

"Well, whose judgment did you take?"

"Mine."

"But whom did you consult about it?"

"Nobody."

"Then what on earth do you know about Rearden Metal?"

"That it's the greatest thing ever put on the market."

"Why?"

"Because it's tougher than steel, cheaper than steel and will outlast any hunk of metal in existence."

"But who says so?"

"Jim, I studied engineering in college. When I see things, I see them."

"What did you see?"

"Rearden's formula and the tests he showed me."

"Well, if it were any good, somebody would have used it, and nobody has." He saw the flash of anger, and went on nervously: "How can you know it's good? How can you be sure? How can you decide?"

"Somebody decides such things, Jim. Who?"

"Well, I don't see why we have to be the first ones. I don't see it at all."

"Do you want to save the Rio Norte Line or not?" He did not answer, "If the road could afford it, I would scrap every piece of rail over the whole system and replace it with Rearden Metal. All of it needs replacing. None of it will last much longer. But we can't afford it. We have to get out of a bad hole, first. Do you want us to pull through or not?"

"We're still the best railroad in the country. The others are doing much worse."

"Then do you want us to remain in the hole?"

"I haven't said that! Why do you always oversimplify things that way? And if you're worried about money, I don't see why you want to waste it on the Rio Norte Line, when the Phoenix-Durango has robbed us of all our business down there. Why spend money when we have no protection against a competitor who'll destroy our investment?"

"Because the Phoenix-Durango is an excellent railroad, but I intend to make the Rio Norte Line better than that. Because I'm going to beat the Phoenix-Durango, if necessary—only it won't be necessary, because there will be room for two or three railroads to make fortunes in Colorado. Because I'd mortgage the system to build a branch to any district around Ellis Wyatt."

"I'm sick of hearing about Ellis Wyatt."

He did not like the way her eyes moved to look at him and remained still, looking, for a moment.

"I don't see any need for immediate action," he said; he sounded offended. "Just what do you consider so alarming in the present situation of Taggart Transcontinental?"

"The consequences of your policies, Jim."

"Which policies?"

"That thirteen months' experiment with Associated Steel, for one. Your Mexican catastrophe, for another."

"The Board approved the Associated Steel contract," he said hastily.

"The Board voted to build the San Sebastian Line. Besides, I don't see why you call it a catastrophe."

"Because the Mexican government is going to nationalize your line any day now."

"That's a lie!" His voice was almost a scream. "That's nothing but vicious rumors! I have it on very good inside authority that—"

"Don't show that you're scared, Jim," she said contemptuously. He did not answer. "It's no use getting panicky about it now," she said. "All we can do is try to cushion the blow. It's going to be a bad blow. Forty million dollars is a loss from which we won't recover easily. But Taggart transcontinental has withstood many bad shocks in the past. I'll see to it that it withstands this one."

"I refuse to consider, I absolutely refuse to consider the possibility of the San Sebastian Line being nationalized!"

"All right. Don't consider it."

She remained silent. He said defensively, "I don't see why you're so eager to give a chance to Ellis Wyatt, yet you think it's wrong to take part in developing an underprivileged country that never had a chance."

"Ellis Wyatt is not asking anybody to give him a chance. And I'm not in business to give chances. I'm running a railroad."

"That's an extremely narrow view, it seems to me. I don't see why we should want to help one man instead of a whole nation."

"I'm not interested in. helping anybody. I want to make money."

"That's an impractical attitude. Selfish greed for profit is a thing of the past. It has been generally conceded that the interests of society as a whole must always be placed first in any business undertaking which—"

"How long do you intend to talk in order to evade the issue, Jim?"

"What issue?"

"The order for Rearden Metal."

He did not answer. He sat studying her silently. Her slender body, about to slump from exhaustion, was held erect by the straight line of the shoulders, and the shoulders were held by a conscious effort of will. Few people liked her face: the face was too cold, the eyes too intense; nothing could ever lend her the charm of a soft focus. The beautiful legs, slanting down from the chair's arm in the center of his vision, annoyed him; they spoiled the rest of his estimate.

She remained silent; he was forced to ask, "Did you decide to order it just like that, on the spur of the moment, over a telephone?"

"I decided it six months ago. I was waiting for Hank Rearden to get ready to go into production."

"Don't call him Hank Rearden. It's vulgar."

"That's what everybody calls him. Don't change the subject."

"Why did you have to telephone him last night?"

"Couldn't reach him sooner."

"Why didn't you wait until you got back to New York and—"

"Because I had seen the Rio Norte Line."

"Well, I need time to consider it, to place the matter before the Board, to consult the best—"

"There is no time."

"You haven't given me a chance to form an opinion."

"I don't give a damn about your opinion. I am not going to argue with you, with your Board or with your professors. You have a choice to make and you're going to make it now. Just say yes or no."

"That's a preposterous, high-handed, arbitrary way of-—"

"Yes or no?"

"That's the trouble with you. You always make it 'Yes' or 'No.' Things are never absolute like that. Nothing is absolute."

"Metal rails are. Whether we get them or not, is."

She waited. He did not answer. "Well?" she asked.

"Are you taking the responsibility for it?"

"I am."

"Go ahead," he said, and added, "but at your own risk. I won't cancel it, but I won't commit myself as to what I'll say to the Board."

"Say anything you wish."

She rose to go. He leaned forward across the desk, reluctant to end the interview and to end it so decisively.

"You realize, of course, that a lengthy procedure will be necessary to put this through," he said; the words sounded almost hopeful. "It isn't as simple as that."

"Oh sure," she said. "I'll send you a detailed report, which Eddie will prepare and which you won't read. Eddie will help you put it through the works. I'm going to Philadelphia tonight to see Rearden. He and I have a lot of work to do." She added, "It's as simple as that, Jim."

She had turned to go, when he spoke again—and what he said seemed bewilderingly irrelevant. "That's all right for you, because you're lucky. Others can't do it."

"Do what?"

"Other people are human. They're sensitive. They can't devote their whole life to metals and engines. You're lucky—you've never had any feelings. You've never felt anything at all."

As she looked at him, her dark gray eyes went slowly from astonishment to stillness, then to a strange expression that resembled a look of weariness, except that it seemed to reflect much more than the endurance of this one moment.

"No, Jim," she said quietly, "I guess I've never felt anything at all." Eddie Willers followed her to her office. Whenever she returned, he felt as if the world became clear, simple, easy to face—and he forgot his moments of shapeless apprehension. He was the only person who found it completely natural that she should be the Operating Vice-President of a great railroad, even though she was a woman. She had told him, when he was ten years old, that she would run the railroad some day. It did not astonish him now, just as it had not astonished him that day in a clearing of the woods.

When they entered her office, when he saw her sit down at the desk and glance at the memos he had left for her—he felt as he did in his car when the motor caught on and the wheels could move forward.

He was about to leave her office, when he remembered a matter he had not reported. "Owen Kellogg of the Terminal Division has asked me for an appointment to see you," he said.

She looked up, astonished. "That's funny. I was going to send for him. Have him come up. I want to see him. . . . Eddie," she added suddenly, "before I start, tell them to get me Ayers of the Ayers Music Publishing Company on the phone."

"The Music Publishing Company?" he repeated incredulously.

"Yes. There's something I want to ask him."

When the voice of Mr. Ayers, courteously eager, inquired of what service he could be to her, she asked, "Can you tell me whether Richard Halley has written a new piano concerto, the Fifth?"

"A fifth concerto, Miss Taggart? Why, no, of course he hasn't."

"Are you sure?"

"Quite sure, Miss Taggart. He has not written anything for eight years."

"Is he still alive?"

"Why, yes—that is, I can't say for certain, he has dropped out of public life entirely—but I'm sure we would have heard of it if he had died."

"If he wrote anything, would you know about it?"

"Of course. We would be the first to know. We publish all of his work. But he has stopped writing."

"I see. Thank you."

When Owen Kellogg entered her office, she looked at him with satisfaction. She was glad to see that she had been right in her vague recollection of his appearance—his face had the same quality as that of the young brakeman on the train, the face of the kind of man with whom she could deal.

"Sit down, Mr. Kellogg," she said, but he remained standing in front of her desk.

"You had asked me once to let you know if I ever decided to change my employment, Miss Taggart," he said. "So I came to tell you that I am quitting."

She had expected anything but that; it took her a moment before she asked quietly, "Why?"

"For a personal reason."

"Were you dissatisfied here?"

"No."

"Have you received a better offer?"

"No."

"What railroad are you going to?"

"I'm not going to any railroad, Miss Taggart."

"Then what job are you taking?"

"I have not decided that yet."

She studied him, feeling slightly uneasy. There was no hostility in his face; he looked straight at her, he answered simply, directly; he spoke like one who has nothing to hide, or to show; the face was polite and empty.

"Then why should you wish to quit?"

"It's a personal matter."

"Are you ill? Is it a question of your health?"

"No."

"Are you leaving the city?"

"No."

"Have you inherited money that permits you to retire?"

"No."

"Do you intend to continue working for a living?"

"Yes."

"But you do not wish to work for Taggart Transcontinental?"

"No."

"In that case, something must have happened here to cause your decision. What?"

"Nothing, Miss Taggart."

"I wish you'd tell me. I have a reason for wanting to know."

"Would you take my word for it, Miss Taggart?"

"Yes."

"No person, matter or event connected with my job here had any bearing upon my decision."

"You have no specific complaint against Taggart Transcontinental?"

"None."

"Then I think you might reconsider when you hear what I have to offer you."

"I'm sorry, Miss Taggart. I can't."

"May I tell you what I have in mind?"

"Yes, if you wish."

"Would you take my word for it that I decided to offer you the post I'm going to offer, before you asked to see me? I want you to know that."

"I will always take your word, Miss Taggart."

"It's the post of Superintendent of the Ohio Division. It's yours, if you want it."

His face showed no reaction, as if the words had no more significance for him than for a savage who had never heard of railroads.

"I don't want it, Miss Taggart," he answered.

After a moment, she said, her voice tight, "Write your own ticket, Kellogg. Name your price, I want you to stay. I can match anything any other railroad offers you."

"I am not going to work for any other railroad."

"I thought you loved your work."

This was the first sign of emotion in him, just a slight widening of his eyes and an oddly quiet emphasis in his voice when he answered, "I do."

"Then tell me what it is that I should say in order to hold you!" It had been involuntary and so obviously frank that he looked at her as if it had reached him.

"Perhaps I am being unfair by coming here to tell you that I'm quitting, Miss Taggart. I know that you asked me to tell you because you wanted to have a chance to make me a counter-offer. So if I came, it looks as if I'm open to a deal. But I'm not. I came only because I . . . I wanted to keep my word to you."

That one break in his voice was like a sudden flash that told her how much her interest and her request had meant to him; and that his decision had not been an easy one to make.

"Kellogg, is there nothing I can offer you?" she asked.

"Nothing, Miss Taggart. Nothing on earth."

He turned to go. For the first time in her life, she felt helpless and beaten.

"Why?" she asked, not addressing him.

He stopped. He shrugged and smiled—he was alive for a moment and it was the strangest smile she had ever seen: it held secret amusement, and heartbreak, and an infinite bitterness. He answered: "Who is John Galt?"

CHAPTER II
THE CHAIN

It began with a few lights. As a train of the Taggart line rolled toward Philadelphia, a few brilliant, scattered lights appeared in the darkness; they seemed purposeless in the empty plain, yet too powerful to have no purpose. The passengers watched them idly, without interest.

The black shape of a structure came next, barely visible against the sky, then a big building, close to the tracks; the building was dark, and the reflections of the train lights streaked across the solid glass of its walls.

An oncoming freight train hid the view, filling the windows with a rushing smear of noise. In a sudden break above the fiat cars, the passengers saw distant structures under a faint, reddish glow in the sky; the glow moved in irregular spasms, as if the structures were breathing.

When the freight train vanished, they saw angular buildings wrapped in coils of steam. The rays of a few strong lights cut straight sheafs through the coils. The steam was red as the sky.

The thing that came next did not look like a building, but like a shell of checkered glass enclosing girders, cranes and trusses in a solid, blinding, orange spread of flame.

The passengers could not grasp the complexity of what seemed to be a city stretched for miles, active without sign of human presence. They saw towers that looked like contorted skyscrapers, bridges hanging in mid-air, and sudden wounds spurting fire from out of solid walls. They saw a line of glowing cylinders moving through the night; the cylinders were red-hot metal.

An office building appeared, close to the tracks. The big neon sign on its roof lighted the interiors of the coaches as they went by. It said: REARDEN STEEL.

A passenger, who was a professor of economics, remarked to his companion: "Of what importance is an individual in the titanic collective achievements of our industrial age?" Another, who was a journalist, made a note for future use in his column: "Hank Rearden is the kind of man who sticks his name on everything he touches. You may, from this, form your own opinion about the character of Hank Rearden."

The train was speeding on into the darkness when a red gasp shot to the sky from behind a long structure. The passengers paid no attention; one more heat of steel being poured was not an event they had been taught to notice.

It was the first heat for the first order of Rearden Metal.

To the men at the tap-hole of the furnace inside the mills, the first break of the liquid metal into the open came as a shocking sensation of morning. The narrow streak pouring through space had the pure white color of sunlight. Black coils of steam were boiling upward, streaked with violent red. Fountains of sparks shot in beating spasms, as from broken arteries. The air seemed torn to rags, reflecting a raging flame that was not there, red blotches whirling and running through space, as if not to be contained within a man-made structure, as if about to consume the columns, the girders, the bridges of cranes overhead. But the liquid metal had no aspect of violence. It was a long white curve with the texture of satin and the friendly radiance of a smile. It flowed obediently through a spout of clay, with two brittle borders to restrain it. It fell through twenty feet of space, down into a ladle that held two hundred tons. A flow of stars hung above the stream, leaping out of its placid smoothness, looking delicate as lace and innocent as children's sparklers.

Only at a closer glance could one notice that the white satin was boiling. Splashes flew out at times and fell to the ground below: they were metal and, cooling while hitting the soil, they burst into flame.

Two hundred tons of a metal which was to be harder than steel, running liquid at a temperature of four thousand degrees, had the power to annihilate every wall of the structure and every one of the men who worked by the stream. But every inch of its course, every pound of its pressure and the content of every molecule within it, were controlled and made by a conscious intention that had worked upon it for ten years.

Swinging through the darkness of the shed, the red glare kept stashing the face of a man who stood in a distant corner; he stood leaning against a column, watching. The glare cut a moment's wedge across his eyes, which had the color and quality of pale blue ice—then across the black web of the metal column and the ash-blond strands of his hair— then across the belt of his trenchcoat and the pockets where he held his hands. His body was tall and gaunt; he had always been too tall for those around him. His face was cut by prominent cheekbones and by a few sharp lines; they were not the lines of age, he had always had them: this had made him look old at twenty, and young now, at forty-five.

Ever since he could remember, he had been told that his face was ugly, because it was unyielding, and cruel, because it was expressionless. It remained expressionless now, as he looked at the metal. He was Hank Rearden.

The metal came rising to the top of the ladle and went running over with arrogant prodigality. Then the blinding white trickles turned to glowing brown, and in one more instant they were black icicles of metal, starting to crumble off. The slag was crusting in thick, brown ridges that looked like the crust of the earth. As the crust grew thicker, a few craters broke open, with the white liquid still boiling within.

A man came riding through the air, in the cab of a crane overhead. He pulled a lever by the casual movement of one hand: steel hooks came down on a chain, seized the handles of the ladle, lifted it smoothly like a bucket of milk—and two hundred tons of metal went sailing through space toward a row of molds waiting to be filled.

Hank Rearden leaned back, closing his eyes. He felt the column trembling with the rumble of the crane. The job was done, he thought.

A worker saw him and grinned in understanding, like a fellow accomplice in a great celebration, who knew why that tall, blond figure had to be present here tonight. Rearden smiled in answer: it was the only salute he had received. Then he started back for his office, once again a figure with an expressionless face.

It was late when Hank Rearden left his office that night to walk from his mills to his house. It was a walk of some miles through empty country, but he had felt like doing it, without conscious reason.

He walked, keeping one hand in his pocket, his fingers closed about a bracelet. It was made of Rearden Metal, in the shape of a chain. His fingers moved, feeling its texture once in a while. It had taken ten years to make that bracelet. Ten years, he thought, is a long time. The road was dark, edged with trees. Looking up, he could see a few leaves against the stars; the leaves were twisted and dry, ready to fall.

There were distant lights in the windows of houses scattered through the countryside; but the lights made the road seem lonelier.

He never felt loneliness except when he was happy. He turned, once in a while, to look back at the red glow of the sky over the mills. He did not think of the ten years. What remained of them tonight was only a feeling which he could not name, except that it was quiet and solemn. The feeling was a sum, and he did not have to count again the parts that had gone to make it. But the parts, unrecalled, were there, within the feeling. They were the nights spent at scorching ovens in the research laboratory of the mills—-the nights spent in the workshop of his home, over sheets of paper which he filled with formulas, then tore up in angry failure—-the days when the young scientists of the small staff he had chosen to assist him waited for instructions like soldiers ready for a hopeless battle, having exhausted their ingenuity, still willing, but silent, with the unspoken sentence hanging in the air: "Mr. Rearden, it can't be done—"—the meals, interrupted and abandoned at the sudden flash of a new thought, a thought to be pursued at once, to be tried, to be tested, to be worked on for months, and to be discarded as another failure——the moments snatched from conferences, from contracts, from theduties of running the best steel mills in the country, snatched almostguiltily, as for a secret love——the one thought held immovably across a span of ten years, undereverything he did and everything he saw, the thought held in his mindwhen he looked at the buildings of a city, at the track of a railroad, atthe light in the windows of a distant farmhouse, at the knife in the handsof a beautiful woman cutting a piece of fruit at a banquet, the thought ofa metal alloy that would do more than steel had ever done, a metal thatwould be to steel what steel had been to iron——the acts of self-racking when he discarded a hope or a sample,not permitting himself to know that he was tired, not giving himself timeto feel, driving himself through the wringing torture of: "not good enough . . . still not good enough . . ." and going on with no motor save the conviction that it could be done— —then the day when it was done and its result was called Rearden Metal— —these were the things that had come to white heat, had melted and fused within him, and their alloy was a strange, quiet feeling that made him smile at the countryside in the darkness and wonder why happiness could hurt.

After a while, he realized that he was thinking of his past, as if certain days of it were spread before him, demanding to be seen again. He did not want to look at them; he despised memories as a pointless indulgence. But then he understood that he thought of them tonight in honor of that piece of metal in his pocket. Then he permitted himself to look.

He saw the day when he stood on a rocky ledge and felt a thread of sweat running from his temple down his neck. He was fourteen years old and it was his first day of work in the iron mines of Minnesota. He was trying to learn to breathe against the scalding pain in his chest. He stood, cursing himself, because he had made up his mind that he would not be tired. After a while, he went back to his task; he decided that pain was not a valid reason for stopping, He saw the day when he stood at the window of his office and looked at the mines; he owned them as of that morning. He was thirty years old. What had gone on in the years between did not matter, just as pain had not mattered. He had worked in mines, in foundries, in the steel mills of the north, moving toward the purpose he had chosen. All he remembered of those jobs was that the men around him had never seemed to know what to do, while he had always known. He remembered wondering why so many iron mines were closing, just as these had been about to close until he took them over. He looked at the shelves of rock in the distance. Workers were putting up a new sign above a gate at the end of a road: Rearden Ore.

He saw an evening when he sat slumped across his desk in that office.

It was late and his staff had left; so he could lie there alone, unwitnessed. He was tired. It was as if he had run a race against his own body, and all the exhaustion of years, which he had refused to acknowledge, had caught him at once and flattened him against the desk top. He felt nothing, except the desire not to move. He did not have the strength to feel—not even to suffer. He had burned everything there was to burn within him; he had scattered so many sparks to start so many things— and he wondered whether someone could give him now the spark he needed, now when he felt unable ever to rise again. He asked himself who had started him and kept him going. Then he raised his head.

Slowly, with the greatest effort of his life, he made his body rise until he was able to sit upright with only one hand pressed to the desk and a trembling arm to support him.

He never asked that question again. He saw the day when he stood on a hill and looked at a grimy wasteland of structures that had been a steel plant. It was closed and given up. He had bought it the night before. There was a strong wind and a gray light squeezed from among the clouds. In that light, he saw the brown-red of rust, like dead blood, on the steel of the giant cranes—and bright, green, living weeds, like gorged cannibals, growing over piles of broken glass at the foot of walls made of empty frames. At a gate in the distance, he saw the black silhouettes of men. They were the unemployed from the rotting hovels of what had once been a prosperous town.

They stood silently, looking at the glittering car he had left at the gate of the mills; they wondered whether the man on the hill was the Hank Rearden that people were talking about, and whether it was true that the mills were to be reopened. "The historical cycle of steel-making in Pennsylvania is obviously running down," a newspaper had said, "and experts agree that Henry Rearden's venture into steel is hopeless. You may soon witness the sensational end of the sensational Henry Rearden." That was ten years ago. Tonight, the cold wind on his face felt like the wind of that day. He turned to look back. The red glow of the mills breathed in the sky, a sight as life-giving as a sunrise. These had been his stops, the stations which an express had reached and passed. He remembered nothing distinct of the years between them; the years were blurred, like a streak of speed.

Whatever it was, he thought, whatever the strain and the agony, they were worth it, because they had made him reach this day—this day when the first heat of the first order of Rearden Metal had been poured, to become rails for Taggart Transcontinental.

He touched the bracelet in his pocket. He had had it made from that first poured metal. It was for his wife. As he touched it, he realized suddenly that he had thought of an abstraction called "his wife"—not of the woman to whom he was married.

He felt a stab of regret, wishing he had not made the bracelet, then a wave of self-reproach for the regret. He shook his head. This was not the time for his old doubts. He felt that he could forgive anything to anyone, because happiness was the greatest agent of purification. He felt certain that every living being wished him well tonight. He wanted to meet someone, to face the first stranger, to stand disarmed and open, and to say, "Look at me." People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been—for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy.

The dark road had risen imperceptibly to the top of a hill. He stopped and turned. The red glow was a narrow strip, far to the west. Above it, small at a distance of miles, the words of a neon sign stood written on the blackness of the sky: REARDEN STEEL. He stood straight, as if before a bench of judgment. He thought that in the darkness of this night other signs were lighted over the country: Rearden Ore—Rearden Coal—Rearden Limestone. He thought of the days behind him. He wished it were possible to light a neon sign above them, saying: Rearden Life.

He turned sharply and walked on. As the road came closer to his house, he noticed that his steps were slowing down and that something was ebbing away from his mood. He felt a dim reluctance to enter his home, which he did not want to feel. No, he thought, not tonight; they'll understand it, tonight. But he did not know, he had never defined, what it was that he wanted them to understand.

He saw lights in the windows of the living room, when he approached his house. The house stood on a hill, rising before him like a big white bulk; it looked naked, with a few semi-colonial pillars for reluctant ornament; it had the cheerless look of a nudity not worth revealing.

He was not certain whether his wife noticed him when he entered the living room. She sat by the fireplace, talking, the curve of her arm floating in graceful emphasis of her words. He heard a small break in her voice, and thought that she had seen him, but she did not look up and her sentence went on smoothly; he could not be certain. "—but it's just that a man of culture is bored with the alleged wonders of purely material ingenuity," she was saying. "He simply refuses to get excited about plumbing."

Then she turned her head, looked at Rearden in the shadows across the long room, and her arms spread gracefully, like two swan necks by her sides.

"Why, darling," she said in a bright tone of amusement, "isn't it too early to come home? Wasn't there some slag to sweep or tuyeres to polish?"

They all turned to him—his mother, his brother Philip and Paul Larkin, their old friend.

"I'm sorry," he answered. "I know I'm late."

"Don't say you're sorry," said his mother. "You could have telephoned." He looked at her, trying vaguely to remember something.

"You promised to be here for dinner tonight."

"Oh, that's right, I did. I'm sorry. But today at the mills, we poured—" He stopped; he did not know what made him unable to utter the one thing he had come home to say; he added only, "It's just that I . . . forgot."

"That's what Mother means," said Philip.

"Oh, let him get his bearings, he's not quite here yet, he's still at the mills," his wife said gaily. "Do take your coat off, Henry."

Paul Larkin was looking at him with the devoted eyes of an inhibited dog. "Hello, Paul," said Rearden. "When did you get in?"

"Oh, I just hopped down on the five thirty-five from New York." Larkin was smiling in gratitude for the attention.

"Trouble?"

"Who hasn't got trouble these days?" Larkin's smile became resigned, to indicate that the remark was merely philosophical. "But no, no special trouble this time. I just thought I'd drop in to see you."

His wife laughed. "You've disappointed him, Paul." She turned to Rearden. "Is it an inferiority complex or a superiority one, Henry? Do you believe that nobody can want to see you just for your own sake, or do you believe that nobody can get along without your help?”

He wanted to utter an angry denial, but she was smiling at him as if this were merely a conversational joke, and he had no capacity for the sort of conversations which were not supposed to be meant, so he did not answer. He stood looking at her, wondering about the things he had never been able to understand.

Lillian Rearden was generally regarded as a beautiful woman. She had a tall, graceful body, the kind that looked well in high-waisted gowns of the Empire style, which she made it a practice to wear. Her exquisite profile belonged to a cameo of the same period: its pure, proud lines and the lustrous, light brown waves of her hair, worn with classical simplicity, suggested an austere, imperial beauty. But when she turned full-face, people experienced a small shock of disappointment.

Her face was not beautiful. The eyes were the flaw: they were vaguely pale, neither quite gray nor brown, lifelessly empty of expression. Rearden had always wondered, since she seemed amused so often, why there was no gaiety in her face.

"We have met before, dear," she said, in answer to his silent scrutiny, "though you don't seem to be sure of it."

"Have you had any dinner, Henry?" his mother asked; there was a reproachful impatience in her voice, as if his hunger were a personal insult to her.

"Yes . . . No . . . I wasn't hungry."

"I'd better ring to have them—"

"No, Mother, not now, it doesn't matter."

"That's the trouble I've always had with you." She was not looking at him, but reciting words into space. "It's no use trying to do things for you, you don't appreciate it. I could never make you eat properly."

"Henry, you work too hard," said Philip. "It's not good for you."

Rearden laughed. "I like it."

"That's what you tell yourself. It's a form of neurosis, you know. When a man drowns himself in work, it's because he's trying to escape from something. You ought to have a hobby."

"Oh, Phil, for Christ's sake!" he said, and regretted the irritation in his voice.

Philip had always been in precarious health, though doctors had found no specific defect in his loose, gangling body. He was thirty-eight, but his chronic weariness made people think at times that he was older than his brother.

"You ought to learn to have some fun," said Philip. "Otherwise, you'll become dull and narrow. Single-tracked, you know. You ought to get out of your little private shell and take a look at the world. You don't want to miss life, the way you're doing."

Fighting anger, Rearden told himself that this was Philip's form of solicitude. He told himself that it would be unjust to feel resentment: they were all trying to show their concern for him—and he wished these were not the things they had chosen for concern.

"I had a pretty good time today, Phil," he answered, smiling—and wondered why Philip did not ask him what it was.

He wished one of them would ask him. He was finding it hard to concentrate. The sight of the running metal was still burned into his mind, filling his consciousness, leaving no room for anything else.

"You might have apologized, only I ought to know better than to expect it." It was his mother's voice; he turned: she was looking at him with that injured look which proclaims the long-bearing patience of the defenseless.

"Mrs. Beecham was here for dinner," she said reproachfully.

"What?"

"Mrs. Beecham. My friend Mrs. Beecham."

"Yes?"

"I told you about her, I told you many times, but you never remember anything I say. Mrs. Beecham was so anxious to meet you, but she had to leave after dinner, she couldn't wait, Mrs. Beecham is a very busy person. She wanted so much to tell you about the wonderful work we're doing in our parish school, and about the classes in metal craftsmanship, and about the beautiful wrought-iron doorknobs that the little slum children are making all by themselves."

It took the whole of his sense of consideration to force himself to answer evenly, "I'm sorry if I disappointed you, Mother."

"You're not sorry. You could've been here if you'd made the effort. But when did you ever make an effort for anybody but yourself? You're not interested in any of us or in anything we do. You think that if you pay the bills, that's enough, don't you? Money! That's all you know. And all you give us is money. Have you ever given us any time?"

If this meant that she missed him, he thought, then it meant affection, and if it meant affection, then he was unjust to experience a heavy, murky feeling which kept him silent lest his voice betray that the feeling was disgust.

"You don't care," her voice went half-spitting, half-begging on. "Lillian needed you today for a very important problem, but I told her it was no use waiting to discuss it with you."

"Oh, Mother, it's not important!" said Lillian. "Not to Henry."

He turned to her. He stood in the middle of the room, with his trenchcoat still on, as if he were trapped in an unreality that would not become real to him.

"It's not important at all," said Lillian gaily; he could not tell whether her voice was apologetic or boastful. "It's not business. It's purely non-commercial."

"What is it?"

"Just a party I'm planning to give."

"A party?"

"Oh, don't look frightened, it's not for tomorrow night. I know that you're so very busy, but it's for three months from now and I want it to be a very big, very special affair, so would you promise me to be here that night and not in Minnesota or Colorado or California?"

She was looking at him in an odd manner, speaking too lightly and too purposefully at once, her smile overstressing an air of innocence and suggesting something like a hidden trump card.

"Three months from now?" he said. "But you know that I can't tell what urgent business might come up to call me out of town."

"Oh, I know! But couldn't I make a formal appointment with you, way in advance, just like any railroad executive, automobile manufacturer or junk—I mean, scrap—dealer? They say you never miss an appointment. Of course, I'd let you pick the date to suit your convenience." She was looking up at him, her glance acquiring some special quality of feminine appeal by being sent from under her lowered forehead up toward his full height; she asked, a little too casually and too cautiously, "The date I had in mind was December tenth, but would you prefer the ninth or the eleventh?"

"It makes no difference to me."

She said gently, "December tenth is our wedding anniversary, Henry."

They were all watching his face; if they expected a look of guilt, what they saw, instead, was a faint smile of amusement. She could not have intended this as a trap, he thought, because he could escape it so easily, by refusing to accept any blame for his forgetfulness and by leaving her spurned; she knew that his feeling for her was her only weapon. Her motive, he thought, was a proudly indirect attempt to test his feeling and to confess her own. A party was not his form of celebration, but it was hers. It meant nothing in his terms; in hers, it meant the best tribute she could offer to him and to their marriage. He had to respect her intention, he thought, even if he did not share her standards, even if he did not know whether he still cared for any tribute from her. He had to let her win, he thought, because she had thrown herself upon his mercy. He smiled, an open, unresentful smile in acknowledgment of her victory. "All right, Lillian," he said quietly, "I promise to be here on the night of December tenth."

"Thank you, dear." Her smile had a closed, mysterious quality; he wondered why he had a moment's impression that his attitude had disappointed them all.

If she trusted him, he thought, if her feeling for him was still alive, then he would match her trust. He had to say it; words were a lens to focus one's mind, and he could not use words for anything else tonight. "I'm sorry I'm late, Lillian, but today at the mills we poured the first heat of Rearden Metal."

There was a moment of silence. Then Philip said, "Well, that's nice."

The others said nothing.

He put his hand in his pocket. When he touched it, the reality of the bracelet swept out everything else; he felt as he had felt when the liquid metal had poured through space before him.

"I brought you a present, Lillian."

He did not know that he stood straight and that the gesture of his arm was that of a returning crusader offering his trophy to his love, when he dropped a small chain of metal into her lap.

Lillian Rearden picked it up, hooked on the tips of two straight fingers, and raised it to the light. The links were heavy, crudely made, the shining metal had an odd tinge, it was greenish-blue.

"What's that?" she asked.

"The first thing made from the first heat of the first order of Rearden Metal."

"You mean," she said, "it's fully as valuable as a piece of railroad rails?"

He looked at her blankly.

She jingled the bracelet, making it sparkle under the light. "Henry, it's perfectly wonderful! What originality! I shall be the sensation of New York, wearing jewelry made of the same stuff as bridge girders, truck motors, kitchen stoves, typewriters, and—what was it you were saying about it the other day, darling?—soup kettles?"

"God, Henry, but you're conceited!" said Philip.

Lillian laughed. "He's a sentimentalist. All men are. But, darling, I do appreciate it. It isn't the gift, it's the intention, I know."

"The intention's plain selfishness, if you ask me," said Rearden's mother. "Another man would bring a diamond bracelet, if he wanted to give his wife a present, because it's' her pleasure he'd think of, not his own. But Henry thinks that just because he's made a new kind of tin, why, it's got to be more precious than diamonds to everybody, just because it's he that's made it. That's the way he's been since he was five years old—the most conceited brat you ever saw—and I knew he'd grow up to be the most selfish creature on God's earth."

"No, it's sweet," said Lillian. "It's charming." She dropped the bracelet down on the table. She got up, put her hands on Rearden's shoulders, and raising herself on tiptoe, kissed him on the cheek, saying, "Thank you, dear."

He did not move, did not bend his head down to her. After a while, he turned, took off his coat and sat down by the fire, apart from the others. He felt nothing but an immense exhaustion.

He did not listen to their talk. He heard dimly that Lillian was arguing, defending him against his mother.

"I know him better than you do," his mother was saying. "Hank Rearden's not interested in man, beast or weed unless it's tied in some way to himself and his work. That's all he cares about. I've tried my best to teach him some humility, I've tried all my life, but I've failed."

He had offered his mother unlimited means to live as and where she pleased; he wondered why she had insisted that she wanted to live with him. His success, he had thought, meant something to her, and if it did, then it was a bond between them, the only kind of bond he recognized; if she wanted a place in the home of her successful son, he would not deny it to her.

"It's no use hoping to make a saint out of Henry, Mother," said Philip. "He wasn't meant to be one."

"Oh but, Philip, you're wrong!" said Lillian. "You're so wrong! Henry has all the makings of a saint. That's the trouble." What did they seek from him?—thought Rearden—what were they after? He had never asked anything of them; it was they who wished to hold him, they who pressed a claim on him—and the claim seemed to have the form of affection, but it was a form which he found harder to endure than any sort of hatred. He despised causeless affection, just as he despised unearned wealth. They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved. He wondered what response they could hope to obtain from him in such manner—if his response was what they wanted.

And it was, he thought; else why those constant complaints, those unceasing accusations about his indifference? Why that chronic air of suspicion, as if they were waiting to be hurt? He had never had a desire to hurt them, but he had always felt their defensive, reproachful expectation; they seemed wounded by anything he said, it was not a matter of his words or actions, it was almost . . . almost as if they were Wounded by the mere fact of his being. Don't start imagining the insane —he told himself severely, struggling to face the riddle with the strictest of his ruthless sense of justice. He could not condemn them without understanding; and he could not understand.

Did he like them? No, he thought; he had wanted to like them, which was not the same. He had wanted it in the name of some unstated potentiality which he had once expected to see in any human being. He felt nothing for them now, nothing but the merciless zero of indifference, not even the regret of a loss. Did he need any person as part of his life? Did he miss the feeling he had wanted to feel? No, he thought. Had he ever missed it? Yes, he thought, in his youth; not any longer.

His sense of exhaustion was growing; he realized that it was boredom.

He owed them the courtesy of hiding it, he thought—and sat motionless, fighting a desire for sleep that was turning into physical pain.

His eyes were closing, when he felt two soft, moist fingers touching his hand: Paul Larkin had pulled a chair to his side and was leaning over for a private conversation.

"I don't care what the industry says about it, Hank, you've got a great product in Rearden Metal, a great product, it will make a fortune, like everything you touch."

"Yes," said Rearden, "it will."

"I just . . . I just hope you don't run into trouble."

"What trouble?"

"Oh, I don't know . . . the way things are nowadays . . . there's people, who . . . but how can we tell? . . . anything can happen. . . ."

"What trouble?"

Larkin sat hunched, looking up with his gentle, pleading eyes. His short, plumpish figure always seemed unprotected and incomplete, as if he needed a shell to shrink into at the slightest touch. His wistful eyes, his lost, helpless, appealing smile served as substitute for the shell. The smile was disarming, like that of a boy who throws himself at the mercy of an incomprehensible universe. He was fifty-three years old.

"Your public relations aren't any too good, Hank," he said. "You've always had a bad press."

"So what?"

"You're not popular, Hank."

"I haven't heard any complaints from my customers."

"That's not what I mean. You ought to hire yourself a good press agent to sell you to the public,"

"What for? It's steel that I'm selling."

"But you don't want to have the public against you. Public opinion, you know—it can mean a lot."

"I don't think the public's against me. And I don't think that it means a damn, one way or another,"

"The newspapers are against you."

"They have time to waste. I haven't."

"I don't like it, Hank. It's not good."

"What?"

"What they write about you."

"What do they write about me?"

"Well, you know the stuff. That you're intractable. That you're ruthless. That you won't allow anyone any voice in the running of your mills.

That your only goal is to make steel and to make money."

"But that is my only goal."

"But you shouldn't say it."

"Why not? What is it I'm supposed to say?"

"Oh, I don't know . . . But your mills—"

"They're my mills, aren't they?"

"Yes, but—but you shouldn't remind people of that too loudly. . . .

You know how it is nowadays. . . . They think that your attitude is anti-social."

"I don't give a damn what they think,"

Paul Larkin sighed.

"What's the matter, Paul? What are you driving at?"

"Nothing . . . nothing in particular. Only one never knows what can happen in times like these. . . . One has to be so careful . . ."

Rearden chuckled. "You're not trying to worry about me, are you?"

"It's just that I'm your friend, Hank. I'm your friend. You know how much I admire you."

Paul Larkin had always been unlucky. Nothing he touched ever came off quite well, nothing ever quite failed or succeeded. He was a businessman, but he could not manage to remain for long in any one line of business. At the moment, he was struggling with a modest plant that manufactured mining equipment.

He had clung to Rearden for years, in awed admiration. He came for advice, he asked for loans at times, but not often; the loans were modest and were always repaid, though not always on time. His motive in the relationship seemed to resemble the need of an anemic person who receives a kind of living transfusion from the mere sight of a savagely overabundant vitality.

Watching Larkin's efforts, Rearden felt what he did when he watched an ant struggling under the load of a matchstick. It's so hard for him, thought Rearden, and so easy for me. So he gave advice, attention and a tactful, patient interest, whenever he could.

"I'm your friend, Hank."

Rearden looked at him inquiringly.

Larkin glanced away, as if debating something in his mind. After a while, he asked cautiously, "How is your man in Washington?"

"Okay, I guess."

"You ought to be sure of it. It's important." He looked up at Rearden, and repeated with a kind of stressed insistence, as if discharging a painful moral duty, "Hank, it's very important."

"I suppose so."

"In fact, that's what I came here to tell you."

"For any special reason?"

Larkin considered it and decided that the duty was discharged. "No," he said.

Rearden disliked the subject. He knew that it was necessary to have a man to protect him from the legislature; all industrialists had to employ such men. But he had never given much attention to this aspect of his business; he could not quite convince himself that it was necessary.

An inexplicable kind of distaste, part fastidiousness, part boredom, stopped him whenever he tried to consider it.

"Trouble is, Paul," he said, thinking aloud, "that the men one has to pick for that job are such a crummy lot,"

Larkin looked away. "That's life," he said.

"Damned if I see why. Can you tell me that? What's wrong with the world?"

Larkin shrugged sadly. "Why ask useless questions? How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky? Who is John Galt?"

Rearden sat up straight. "No," he said sharply. "No. There's no reason to feel that way."

He got up. His exhaustion had gone while he talked about his business. He felt a sudden spurt of rebellion, a need to recapture and defiantly to reassert his own view of existence, that sense of it which he had held while walking home tonight and which now seemed threatened in some nameless manner.

He paced the room, his energy returning. He looked at his family.

They were bewildered, unhappy children—he thought—all of them, even his mother, and he was foolish to resent their ineptitude; it came from their helplessness, not from malice. It was he who had to make himself learn to understand them, since he had so much to give, since they could never share his sense of joyous, boundless power.

He glanced at them from across the room. His mother and Philip were engaged in some eager discussion; but he noted that they were not really eager, they were nervous. Philip sat in a low chair, his stomach forward, his weight on his shoulder blades, as if the miserable discomfort of his position were intended to punish the onlookers.

"What's the matter, Phil?" Rearden asked, approaching him. "You look done in."

"I've had a hard day," said Philip sullenly.

"You're not the only one who works hard," said his mother. "Others have problems, too—even if they're not billion-dollar, trans-super-continental problems like yours."

"Why, that's good. I always thought that Phil should find some interest of his own."

"Good? You mean you like to see your brother sweating his health away? It amuses you, doesn't it? I always thought it did."

"Why, no, Mother. I'd like to help."

"You don't have to help. You don't have to feel anything for any of us."

Rearden had never known what his brother was doing or wished to do. He had sent Philip through college, but Philip had not been able to decide on any specific ambition. There was something wrong, by Rearden's standards, with a man who did not seek any gainful employment, but he would not impose his standards on Philip; he could afford to support his brother and never notice the expense. Let him take it easy, Rearden had thought for years, let him have a chance to choose his career without the strain of struggling for a livelihood.

"What were you doing today, Phil?" he asked patiently.

"It wouldn't interest you."

"It does interest me. That's why I'm asking."

"I had to see twenty different people all over the place, from here to Redding to Wilmington."

"What did you have to see them about?"

"I am trying to raise money for Friends of Global Progress."

Rearden had never been able to keep track of the many organizations to which Philip belonged, nor to get a clear idea of their activities. He had heard Philip talking vaguely about this one for the last six months.

It seemed to be devoted to some sort of free lectures on psychology, folk music and co-operative farming. Rearden felt contempt for groups of that kind and saw no reason for a closer inquiry into their nature.

He remained silent. Philip added without being prompted, "We need ten thousand dollars for a vital program, but it's a martyr's task, trying to raise money. There's not a speck of social conscience left in people.

When I think of the kind of bloated money-bags I saw today—why, they spend more than that on any whim, but I couldn't squeeze just a hundred bucks a piece out of them, which was all I asked. They have no sense of moral duty, no . . . What are you laughing at?" he asked sharply. Rearden stood before him, grinning.

It was so childishly blatant, thought Rearden, so helplessly crude: the hint and the insult, offered together. It would be so easy to squash Philip by returning the insult, he thought—by returning an insult which would be deadly because it would be true—that he could not bring himself to utter it. Surely, he thought, the poor fool knows he's at my mercy, knows he's opened himself to be hurt, so I don't have to do it, and my not doing it is my best answer, which he won't be able to miss.

What sort of misery does he really live in, to get himself twisted quite so badly?

And then Rearden thought suddenly that he could break through Philip's chronic wretchedness for once, give him a shock of pleasure, the unexpected gratification of a hopeless desire. He thought: What do I care about the nature of his desire?—it's his, just as Rearden Metal was mine—it must mean to him what that meant to me—let's see him happy just once, it might teach him something—didn't I say that happiness is the agent of purification?—I'm celebrating tonight, so let him share in it—it will be so much for him, and so little for me.

"Philip," he said, smiling, "call Miss Ives at my office tomorrow.

She'll have a check for you for ten thousand dollars."

Philip stared at him blankly; it was neither shock nor pleasure; it was just the empty stare of eyes that looked glassy.

"Oh," said Philip, then added, "We'll appreciate it very much."

There was no emotion in his voice, not even the simple one of greed.

Rearden could not understand his own feeling: it was as if something leaden and empty were collapsing within him, he felt both the weight and the emptiness, together. He knew it was disappointment, but he wondered why it was so gray and ugly.

"It's very nice of you, Henry," Philip said dryly. "I'm surprised. I didn't expect it of you."

"Don't you understand it, Phil?" said Lillian, her voice peculiarly clear and lilting. "Henry's poured his metal today." She turned to Rearden. "Shall we declare it a national holiday, darling?"

"You're a good man, Henry," said his mother, and added, "but not often enough."

Rearden stood looking at Philip, as if waiting.

Philip looked away, then raised his eyes and held Rearden's glance, as if engaged in a scrutiny of his own.

"You don't really care about helping the underprivileged, do you?"

Philip asked—and Rearden heard, unable to believe it, that the tone of his voice was reproachful.

"No, Phil, I don't care about it at all. I only wanted you to be happy."

"But that money is not for me. I am not collecting it for any personal motive. I have no selfish interest in the matter whatever." His voice was cold, with a note of self-conscious virtue.

Rearden turned away. He felt a sudden loathing: not because the words were hypocrisy, but because they were true; Philip meant them.

"By the way, Henry," Philip added, "do you mind if I ask you to have Miss Ives give me the money in cash?" Rearden turned back to him, puzzled. "You see, Friends of Global Progress are a very progressive group and they have always maintained that you represent the blackest element of social retrogression ha the country, so it would embarrass us, you know, to have your name on our list of contributors, because somebody might accuse us of being in the pay of Hank Rearden."

He wanted to slap Philip's face. But an almost unendurable contempt made him close his eyes, instead.

"All right," he said quietly, "you can have it in cash."

He walked away, to the farthest window of the room, and stood looking at the glow of the mills in the distance.

He heard Larkin's voice crying after him, "Damn it, Hank, you shouldn't have given it to him!"

Then Lillian's voice came, cold and gay: "But you're wrong, Paul, you're so wrong! What would happen to Henry's vanity if he didn't have us to throw alms to? What would become of his strength if he didn't have weaker people to dominate? What would he do with himself if he didn't keep us around as dependents? It's quite all right, really, I'm not criticizing him, it's just a law of human nature."

She took the metal bracelet and held it up, letting it glitter in the lamplight.

"A chain," she said. "Appropriate, isn't it? It's the chain by which he holds us all in bondage."

CHAPTER III
THE TOP AND THE BOTTOM

The ceiling was that of a cellar, so heavy and low that people stooped when crossing the room, as if the weight of the vaulting rested on their shoulders. The circular booths of dark red leather were built into walls of stone that looked eaten by age and dampness. There were no windows, only patches of blue light shooting from dents in the masonry, the dead blue light proper for use in blackouts. The place was entered by way of narrow steps that led down, as if descending deep under the ground. This was the most expensive barroom in New York and it was built on the roof of a skyscraper.

Four men sat at a table. Raised sixty floors above the city, they did not speak loudly as one speaks from a height in the freedom of air and space; they kept their voices low, as befitted a cellar.

"Conditions and circumstances, Jim," said Orren Boyle. "Conditions and circumstances absolutely beyond human control. We had everything mapped to roll those rails, but unforeseen developments set in which nobody could have prevented. If you'd only given us a chance, Jim."

"Disunity," drawled James Taggart, "seems to be the basic cause of all social problems. My sister has a certain influence with a certain element among our stockholders. Their disruptive tactics cannot always be defeated."

"You said it, Jim. Disunity, that's the trouble. It's my absolute opinion that in our complex industrial society, no business enterprise can succeed without sharing the burden of the problems of other enterprises."

Taggart took a sip of his drink and put it down again. "I wish they'd fire that bartender," he said.

"For instance, consider Associated Steel. We've got the most modern plant in the country and the best organization. That seems to me to be an indisputable fact, because we got the Industrial Efficiency Award of Globe Magazine last year. So we can maintain that we've done our best and nobody can blame us. But we cannot help it if the iron ore situation is a national problem. We could not get the ore, Jim."

Taggart said nothing. He sat with his elbows spread wide on the table top. The table was uncomfortably small, and this made it more uncomfortable for his three companions, but they did not seem to question his privilege.

"Nobody can get ore any longer," said Boyle. "Natural exhaustion of the mines, you know, and the wearing out of equipment, and shortages of materials, and difficulties of transportation, and other unavoidable conditions."

"The ore industry is crumbling. That's what's killing the mining equipment business," said Paul Larkin.

"It's been proved that every business depends upon every other business," said Orren Boyle. "So everybody ought to share the burdens of everybody else."

"That is, I think, true,” said Wesley Mouch. But nobody ever paid any attention to Wesley Mouch.

"My purpose," said Orren Boyle, "is the preservation of a free economy. It's generally conceded that free economy is now on trial. Unless it proves its social value and assumes its social responsibilities, the people won't stand for it. If it doesn't develop a public spirit, it's done for, make no mistake about that."

Orren Boyle had appeared from nowhere, five years ago, and had since made the cover of every national news magazine. He had started out with a hundred thousand dollars of his own and a two-hundred million-dollar loan from the government. Now he headed an enormous concern which had swallowed many smaller companies. This proved, he liked to say, that individual ability still had a chance to succeed in the world.

"The only justification of private property," said Orren Boyle, "is public service."

"That is, I think, indubitable," said Wesley Mouch.

Orren Boyle made a noise, swallowing his liquor. He was a large man with big, virile gestures; everything about his person was loudly full of life, except the small black slits of his eyes.

"Jim," he said, "Rearden Metal seems to be a colossal kind of swindle."

"Uh-huh," said Taggart.

"I hear there's not a single expert who's given a favorable report on it."

"No, not one."

"We've been improving steel rails for generations, and increasing their weight. Now, is it true that these Rearden Metal rails are to be lighter than the cheapest grade of steel?"

"That's right," said Taggart. "Lighter."

"But it's ridiculous, Jim. It's physically impossible. For your heavy-duty, high-speed, main-line track?"

"That's right."

"But you're just inviting disaster."

"My sister is."

Taggart made the stem of his glass whirl slowly between two fingers.

There was a moment of silence.

"The National Council of Metal Industries," said Orren Boyle, "passed a resolution to appoint a committee to study the question of Rearden Metal, inasmuch as its use may be an actual public hazard."

"That is, in my opinion, wise," said Wesley Mouch.

"When everybody agrees," Taggart's voice suddenly went shrill, "when people are unanimous, how does one man dare to dissent? By what right? That's what I want to know—by what right?"

Boyle's eyes darted to Taggart's face, but the dim light of the room made it impossible to see faces clearly: he saw only a pale, bluish smear.

"When we think of the natural resources, at a time of critical shortage," Boyle said softly, "when we think of the crucial raw materials that are being wasted on an irresponsible private experiment, when we think of the ore . . ."

He did not finish. He glanced at Taggart again. But Taggart seemed to know that Boyle was waiting and to find the silence enjoyable.

"The public has a vital stake in natural resources, Jim, such as iron ore. The public can't remain indifferent to reckless, selfish waste by an anti-social individual. After all, private property is a trusteeship held for the benefit of society as a whole."

Taggart glanced at Boyle and smiled; the smile was pointed, it seemed to say that something in his words was an answer to something in the words of Boyle. "The liquor they serve here is swill. I suppose that's the price we have to pay for not being crowded by all kinds of rabble. But I do wish they'd recognize that they're dealing with experts.

Since I hold the purse strings, I expect to get my money's worth and at my pleasure."

Boyle did not answer; his face had become sullen. "Listen, Jim . . ." he began heavily.

Taggart smiled. "What? I'm listening."

"Jim, you will agree, I'm sure, that there's nothing more destructive than a monopoly."

"Yes," said Taggart, "on the one hand. On the other, there's the blight of unbridled competition."

"That's true. That's very true. The proper course is always, in my opinion, in the middle. So it is, I think, the duty of society to snip the extremes, now isn't it?"

"Yes," said Taggart, "it is."

"Consider the picture in the iron-ore business. The national output seems to be falling at an ungodly rate. It threatens the existence of the whole steel industry. Steel mills are shutting down all over the country.

There's only one mining company that's lucky enough not to be affected by the general conditions. Its output seems to be plentiful and always available on schedule. But who gets the benefit of it? Nobody except its owner. Would you say that that's fair?"

"No," said Taggart, "it isn't fair."

"Most of us don't own iron mines. How can we compete with a man who's got a corner on God's natural resources? Is it any wonder that he can always deliver steel, while we have to struggle and wait and lose our customers and go out of business? Is it in the public interest to let one man destroy an entire industry?"

"No," said Taggart, "it isn't."

"It seems to me that the national policy ought to be aimed at the objective of giving everybody a chance at his fair share of iron ore, with a view toward the preservation of the industry as a whole. Don't you think so?"

"I think so."

Boyle sighed. Then he said cautiously, "But I guess there aren't many people in Washington capable of understanding a progressive social policy."

Taggart said slowly, "There are. No, not many and not easy to approach, but there are. I might speak to them."

Boyle picked up his drink and swallowed it in one gulp, as if he had heard all he had wanted to hear.

"Speaking of progressive policies, Orren," said Taggart, "you might ask yourself whether at a time of transportation shortages, when so many railroads are going bankrupt and large areas are left without rail service, whether it is in the public interest to tolerate wasteful duplication of services and the destructive, dog-eat-dog competition of newcomers in territories where established companies have historical priority."

"Well, now," said Boyle pleasantly, "that seems to be an interesting question to consider. I might discuss it with a few friends in the National Alliance of Railroads."

"Friendships," said Taggart in the tone of an idle abstraction, "are more valuable than gold." Unexpectedly, he turned to Larkin. "Don't you think so, Paul?"

"Why . . . yes," said Larkin, astonished. "Yes, of course."

"I am counting on yours."

"Huh?"

"I am counting on your many friendships."

They all seemed to know why Larkin did not answer at once; his shoulders seemed to shrink down, closer to the table. "If everybody could pull for a common purpose, then nobody would have to be hurt!" he cried suddenly, in a tone of incongruous despair; he saw Taggart watching him and added, pleading, "I wish we didn't have to hurt anybody."

"That is an anti-social attitude," drawled Taggart. "People who are afraid, to sacrifice somebody have no business talking about a common purpose."

"But I'm a student of history," said Larkin hastily. "I recognize historical necessity."

"Good," said Taggart.

"I can't be expected to buck the trend of the whole world, can I?"

Larkin seemed to plead, but the plea was not addressed to anyone.

"Can I?"

"You can't, Mr. Larkin," said Wesley Mouch. "You and I are not to be blamed, if we—"

Larkin jerked his head away; it was almost a shudder; he could not bear to look at Mouch.

"Did you have a good time in Mexico, Orren?" asked Taggart, his voice suddenly loud and casual. All of them seemed to know that the purpose of their meeting was accomplished and whatever they had come here to understand was understood.

"Wonderful place, Mexico," Boyle answered cheerfully. "Very stimulating and thought-provoking. Their food rations are something awful, though. I got sick. But they're working mighty hard to put their country on its feet."

"How are things going down there?"

"Pretty splendid, it seems to me, pretty splendid. Right at the moment, however, they're . . . But then, what they're aiming at is the future. The People's State of Mexico has a great future. They'll beat us all in a few years."

"Did you go down to the San Sebastian Mines?"

The four figures at the table sat up straighter and tighter; all of them had invested heavily in the stock of the San Sebastian Mines.

Boyle did not answer at once, so that his voice seemed unexpected and unnaturally loud when it burst forth: "Oh, sure, certainly, that's what I wanted to see most."

"And?"

"And what?"

"How are things going?"

"Great. Great. They must certainly have the biggest deposits of copper on earth, down inside that mountain!"

"Did they seem to be busy?"

"Never saw such a busy place in my life."

"What were they busy doing?"

"Well, you know, with the kind of Spic superintendent they have down there, I couldn't understand half of what he was talking about, but they're certainly busy."

"Any . . . trouble of any kind?"

"Trouble? Not at San Sebastian. It's private property, the last piece of it left in Mexico, and that does seem to make a difference."

"Orren," Taggart asked cautiously, "what about those rumors that they're planning to nationalize the San Sebastian Mines?"

"Slander," said Boyle angrily, "plain, vicious slander. I know it for certain. I had dinner with the Minister of Culture and lunches with all the rest of the boys."

"There ought to be a law against irresponsible gossip," said Taggart sullenly. "Let's have another drink."

He waved irritably at a waiter. There was a small bar in a dark corner of the room, where an old, wizened bartender stood for long stretches of time without moving. When called upon, he moved with contemptuous slowness. His job was that of servant to men's relaxation and pleasure, but his manner was that of an embittered quack ministering to some guilty disease.

The four men sat in silence until the waiter returned with their drinks. The glasses he placed on the table were four spots of faint blue glitter in the semi-darkness, like four feeble jets of gas flame. Taggart reached for his glass and smiled suddenly.

"Let's drink to the sacrifices to historical necessity," he said, looking at Larkin.

There was a moment's pause; in a lighted room, it would have been the contest of two men holding each other's eyes; here, they were merely looking at each other's eye sockets. Then Larkin picked up his glass, "It's my party, boys," said Taggart, as they drank.

Nobody found anything else to say. until Boyle spoke up with indifferent curiosity. "Say, Jim, I meant to ask you, what in hell's the matter with your train service down on the San Sebastian Line?"

"Why, what do you mean? What is the matter with it?"

"Well, I don't know, but running just one passenger train a day is—"

"One train?"

"—is pretty measly service, it seems to me, and what a train! You must have inherited those coaches from your great-grandfather, and he must have used them pretty hard. And where on earth did you get that wood-burning locomotive?"

"Wood-burning?"

"That's what I said, wood-burning. I never saw one before, except in photographs. What museum did you drag it out of? Now don't act as if you didn't know it, just tell me what's the gag?"

"Yes, of course I knew it," said Taggart hastily. "It was just . . .

You just happened to choose the one week when we had a little trouble with our motive power—our new engines are on order, but there's been a slight delay—you know what a problem we're having with the manufacturers of locomotives—but it's only temporary."

"Of course," said Boyle. "Delays can't be helped. It's the strangest train I ever rode on, though. Nearly shook my guts out."

Within a few minutes, they noticed that Taggart had become silent.

He seemed preoccupied with a problem of his own. When he rose abruptly, without apology, they rose, too, accepting it as a command.

Larkin muttered, smiling too strenuously, "It was a pleasure, Jim.

A pleasure. That's how great projects are born—over a drink with friends."

"Social reforms are slow," said Taggart coldly. "It is advisable to be patient and cautious." For the first time, he turned to Wesley Mouch.

"What I like about you, Mouch, is that you don't talk too much."

Wesley Mouch was Rearden's Washington man.

There was still a remnant of sunset light in the sky, when Taggart and Boyle emerged together into the street below. The transition was faintly shocking to them—the enclosed barroom led one to expect midnight darkness. A tall building stood outlined against the sky, sharp and straight like a raised sword. In the distance beyond it, there hung the calendar.

Taggart fumbled irritably with his coat collar, buttoning it against the chill of the streets. He had not intended to go back to the office tonight, but he had to go back. He had to see his sister.

". . . a difficult undertaking ahead of us, Jim," Boyle was saying, "a difficult undertaking, with so many dangers and complications and so much at stake . . ."

"It all depends," James Taggart answered slowly, "on knowing the people who make it possible. . . . That's what has to be known—who makes it possible."

Dagny Taggart was nine years old when she decided that she would run the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad some day. She stated it to herself when she stood alone between the rails, looking at the two straight lines of steel that went off into the distance and met in a single point. What she felt was an arrogant pleasure at the way the track cut through the woods: it did not belong in the midst of ancient trees, among green branches that hung down to meet green brush and the lonely spears of wild flowers—but there it was. The two steel lines were brilliant in the sun, and the black ties were like the rungs of a ladder which she had to climb.

It was not a sudden decision, but only the final seal of words upon something she had known long ago. In unspoken understanding, as if bound by a vow it had never been necessary to take, she and Eddie Willers had given themselves to the railroad from the first conscious days of their childhood.

She felt a bored indifference toward the immediate world around her, toward other children and adults alike. She took it as a regrettable accident, to be borne patiently for a while, that she happened to be imprisoned among people who were dull. She had caught a glimpse of another world and she knew that it existed somewhere, the world that had created trains, bridges, telegraph wires and signal lights winking in the night. She had to wait, she thought, and grow up to that world.

She never tried to explain why she liked the railroad. Whatever it was that others felt, she knew that this was one emotion for which they had no equivalent and no response. She felt the same emotion in school, in classes of mathematics, the only lessons she liked. She felt the excitement of solving problems, the insolent delight of taking up a challenge and disposing of it without effort, the eagerness to meet another, harder test. She felt, at the same time, a growing respect for the adversary, for a science that was so clean, so strict, so luminously rational. Studying mathematics, she felt, quite simply and at once: "How great that men have done this" and "How wonderful that I'm so good at it." It was the joy of admiration and of one's own ability, growing together. Her feeling for the railroad was the same: worship of the skill that had gone to make it, of the ingenuity of someone's clean, reasoning mind, worship with a secret smile that said she would know how to make it better some day. She hung around the tracks and the roundhouses like a humble student, but the humility had a touch of future pride, a pride to be earned.

"You're unbearably conceited," was one of the two sentences she heard throughout her childhood, even though she never spoke of her own ability. The other sentence was: "You're selfish." She asked what was meant, but never received an answer. She looked at the adults, wondering how they could imagine that she would feel guilt from an undefined accusation.

She was twelve years old when she told Eddie Willers that she would run the railroad when they grew up. She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. To hell with that, she thought—and never worried about it again.

She went to work for Taggart Transcontinental at the age of sixteen.

Her father permitted it: he was amused and a little curious. She started as night operator at a small country station. She had to work nights for the first few years, while attending a college of engineering.

James Taggart began his career on the railroad at the same time; he was twenty-one. He started in the Department of Public Relations.

Dagny's rise among the men who operated Taggart Transcontinental was swift and uncontested. She took positions of responsibility because there was no one else to take them. There were a few rare men of talent around her, but they were becoming rarer every year. Her superiors, who held the authority, seemed afraid to exercise it, they spent their time avoiding decisions, so she told people what to do and they did it.

At every step of her rise, she did the work long before she was granted the title. It was like advancing through empty rooms. Nobody opposed her, yet nobody approved of her progress.

Her father seemed astonished and proud of her, but he said nothing and there was sadness in his eyes when he looked at her in the office She was twenty-nine years old when he died. "There has always been a Taggart to run the railroad," was the last thing he said to her. He looked at her with an odd glance: it had the quality of a salute and of compassion, together.

The controlling stock of Taggart Transcontinental was left to James Taggart. He was thirty-four when he became President of the railroad Dagny had expected the Board of Directors to elect him, but she had never been able to understand why they did it so eagerly. They talked about tradition, the president had always been the eldest son of the Taggart family; they elected James Taggart in the same manner as they refused to walk under a ladder, to propitiate the same kind of fear. They talked about his gift of "making railroads popular," his "good press," his "Washington ability." He seemed unusually skillful at obtaining favors from the Legislature.

Dagny knew nothing about the field of "Washington ability" or what such an ability implied. But it seemed to be necessary, so she dismissed it with the thought that there were many kinds of work which were offensive, yet necessary, such as cleaning sewers; somebody had to do it, and Jim seemed to like it.

She had never aspired to the presidency; the Operating Department was her only concern. When she went out on the line, old railroad men, who hated Jim, said, "There will always be a Taggart to run the railroad," looking at her as her father had looked. She was armed against Jim by the conviction that he was not smart enough to harm the railroad too much and that she would always be able to correct whatever damage he caused.

At sixteen, sitting at her operator's desk, watching the lighted windows of Taggart trains roll past, she had thought that she had entered her kind of world. In the years since, she learned that she hadn't. The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she would have found honor in challenging; it was ineptitude—a gray spread of cotton that deemed soft and shapeless, that could offer no resistance to anything or anybody, yet managed to be a barrier in her way. She stood, disarmed, before the riddle of what made this possible. She could find no answer.

It was only in the first few years that she felt herself screaming silently, at times, for a glimpse of human ability, a single glimpse of clean, hard, radiant competence. She had fits of tortured longing for a friend or an enemy with a mind better than her own. But the longing passed. She had a job to do. She did not have time to feel pain; not often.

The first step of the policy that James Taggart brought to the railroad was the construction of the San Sebastian Line. Many men were responsible for it; but to Dagny, one name stood written across that venture, a name that wiped out all others wherever she saw it. It stood across five years of struggle, across miles of wasted track, across sheets of figures that recorded the losses of Taggart Transcontinental like a red trickle from a wound which would not heal—as it stood on the ticker tape of every stock exchange left in the world—as it stood on smokestacks in the red glare of furnaces melting copper—as it stood in scandalous headlines—as it stood on parchment pages recording the nobility of the centuries—as it stood on cards attached to flowers in the boudoirs of women scattered through three continents.

The name was Francisco d'Anconia.

At the age of twenty-three, when he inherited his fortune, Francisco d'Anconia had been famous as the copper king of the world. Now, at thirty-six, he was famous as the richest man and the most spectacularly worthless playboy on earth. He was the last descendant of one of the noblest families of Argentina. He owned cattle ranches, coffee plantations and most of the copper mines of Chile. He owned half of South America and sundry mines scattered through the United States as small change.

When Francisco d'Anconia suddenly bought miles of bare mountains in Mexico, news leaked out that he had discovered vast deposits of copper. He made no effort to sell stock in his venture; the stock was begged out of his hands, and he merely chose those whom he wished to favor from among the applicants. His financial talent was called phenomenal; no one had ever beaten him in any transaction—he added to his incredible fortune with every deal he touched and every step he made, when he took the trouble to make it. Those who censured him most were first to seize the chance of riding on his talent, toward a share of his new wealth. James Taggart, Orren Boyle and their friends were among the heaviest stockholders of the project which Francisco d'Anconia had named the San Sebastian Mines.

Dagny was never able to discover what influences prompted James Taggart to build a railroad branch from Texas into the wilderness of San Sebastian. It seemed likely that he did not know it himself: like a field without a windbreak, he seemed open to any current, and the final sum was made by chance, A few among the Directors of Taggart Transcontinental objected to the project. The company needed all its resources to rebuild the Rio Norte Line; it could not do both. But James Taggart was the road's new president. It was the first year of his administration. He won.

The People's State of Mexico was eager to co-operate, and signed a contract guaranteeing for two hundred years the property right of Taggart Transcontinental to its railroad line in a country where no property rights existed. Francisco d'Anconia had obtained the same guaranty for his mines.

Dagny fought against the building of the San Sebastian Line. She fought by means of whoever would listen to her; but she was only an assistant in the Operating Department, too young, without authority, and nobody listened.

She was unable, then or since, to understand the motives of those who decided to build the line. Sitting as a helpless spectator, a minority member, at one of the Board meetings, she felt a strange evasiveness in the air of the room, in every speech, in every argument, as if the real reason of their decision were never stated, but clear to everyone except herself.

They spoke about the future importance of the trade with Mexico, about a rich stream of freight, about the large revenues assured to the exclusive carrier of an inexhaustible supply of copper. They proved it by citing Francisco d'Anconia's past achievements. They did not mention any mineralogical facts about the San Sebastian Mines. Few facts were available; the information which d'Anconia had released was not very specific; but they did not seem to need facts.

They spoke at great length about the poverty of the Mexicans and their desperate need of railroads, "They've never had a chance." "It is our duty to help an underprivileged nation to develop. A country, it seems to me, is its neighbors' keeper."

She sat, listening, and she thought of the many branch lines which Taggart Transcontinental had had to abandon; the revenues of the great railroad had been falling slowly for many years. She thought of the ominous need of repairs, ominously neglected over the entire system.

Their policy on the problem of maintenance was not a policy but a game they seemed to be playing with a piece of rubber that could be stretched a little, then a little more.

"The Mexicans, it seems to me, are a very diligent people, crushed by their primitive economy. How can they become industrialized if nobody lends them a hand?" "When considering an investment, we should, in my opinion, take a chance on human beings, rather than on purely material factors."

She thought of an engine that lay in a ditch beside the Rio Norte Line, because a splice bar had cracked. She thought of the five days when all traffic was stopped on the Rio Norte Line, because a retaining wall had collapsed, pouring tons of rock across the track.

"Since a man must think of the good of his brothers before he thinks of his own, it seems to me that a nation must think of its neighbors before it thinks of itself."

She thought of a newcomer called Ellis Wyatt whom people were beginning to watch, because his activity was the first trickle of a torrent of goods about to burst from the dying stretches of Colorado. The Rio Norte Line was being allowed to run its way to a final collapse, just when its fullest efficiency was about to be needed and used.

"Material greed isn't everything. There are non-material ideals to consider." "I confess to a feeling of shame when I think that we own a huge network of railways, while the Mexican people have nothing but one or two inadequate lines." "The old theory of economic self-sufficiency has been exploded long ago. It is impossible for one country to prosper in the midst of a starving world."

She thought that to make Taggart Transcontinental what it had been once, long before her time, every available rail, spike and dollar was needed—and how desperately little of it was available.

They spoke also, at the same session, in the same speeches, about the efficiency of the Mexican government that held complete control of everything. Mexico had a great future, they said, and would become a dangerous competitor in a few years. "Mexico's got discipline," the men of the Board kept saying, with a note of envy in their voices.

James Taggart let it be understood—in unfinished sentences and undefined hints—that his friends in Washington, whom he never named, wished to see a railroad line built in Mexico, that such a line would be of great help in matters of international diplomacy, that the good will of the public opinion of the world would more than repay Taggart Transcontinental for its investment.

They voted to build the San Sebastian Line at a cost of thirty million dollars.

When Dagny left the Board room and walked through the clean, cold air of the streets, she heard two words repeated clearly, insistently in the numbed emptiness of her mind: Get out . . . Get out . . .

Get out.

She listened, aghast. The thought of leaving Taggart Transcontinental did not belong among the things she could hold as conceivable. She felt terror, not at the thought, but at the question of what had made her think it. She shook her head angrily; she told herself that Taggart Transcontinental would now need her more than ever.

Two of the Directors resigned; so did the Vice-President in Charge of Operation. He was replaced by a friend of James Taggart, Steel rail was laid across the Mexican desert—while orders were issued to reduce the speed of trains on the Rio Norte Line, because the track was shot. A depot of reinforced concrete, with marble columns and mirrors, was built amidst the dust of an unpaved square in a Mexican village—while a train of tank cars carrying oil went hurtling down an embankment and into a blazing junk pile, because a rail had split on the Rio Norte Line. Ellis Wyatt did not wait for the court to decide whether the accident was an act of God, as James Taggart claimed, He transferred the shipping of his oil to the Phoenix-Durango, an obscure railroad which was small and struggling, but struggling well.

This was the rocket that sent the Phoenix-Durango on its way. From then on, it grew, as Wyatt Oil grew, as factories grew in nearby valleys —as a band of rails and ties grew, at the rate of two miles a month, across the scraggly fields of Mexican corn.

Dagny was thirty-two years old, when she told James Taggart that she would resign. She had run the Operating Department for the past three years, without title, credit or authority. She was defeated by loathing for the hours, the days, the nights she had to waste circumventing the interference of Jim's friend who bore the title of Vice-President in Charge of Operation. The man had no policy, and any decision he made was always hers, but he made it only after he had made every effort to make it impossible. What she delivered to her brother was an ultimatum. He gasped, "But, Dagny, you're a woman! A woman as Operating Vice-President? It's unheard of! The Board won't consider it!" "Then I'm through," she answered.

She did not think of what she would do with the rest of her life. To face leaving Taggart Transcontinental was like waiting to have her legs amputated; she thought she would let it happen, then take up the load of whatever was left.

She never understood why the Board of Directors voted unanimously to make her Vice-President in Charge of Operation.

It was she who finally gave them their San Sebastian Line. When she took over, the construction had been under way for three years; one third of its track was laid; the cost to date was beyond the authorized total. She fired Jim's friends and found a contractor who completed the job in one year.

The San Sebastian Line was now in operation. No surge of trade had come across the border, nor any trains loaded with copper. A few carloads came clattering down the mountains from San Sebastian, at long intervals. The mines, said Francisco d'Anconia, were still in the process of development. The drain on Taggart Transcontinental had not stopped.

Now she sat at the desk in her office, as she had sat for many evenings, trying to work out the problem of what branches could save the system and in how many years.

The Rio Norte Line, when rebuilt, would redeem the rest. As she looked at the sheets of figures announcing losses and more losses, she did not think of the long, senseless agony of the Mexican venture. She thought of a telephone call. "Hank, can you save us? Can you give us rail on the shortest notice and the longest credit possible?" A quiet, steady voice had answered, "Sure."

The thought was a point of support. She leaned over the sheets of paper on her desk, finding it suddenly easier to concentrate. There was one thing, at least, that could be counted upon not to crumble when needed.

James Taggart crossed the anteroom of Dagny's office, still holding the kind of confidence he had felt among his companions at the barroom half an hour ago. When he opened her door, the confidence vanished. He crossed the room to her desk like a child being dragged to punishment, storing the resentment for all his future years.

He saw a head bent over sheets of paper, the light of the desk lamp glistening on strands of disheveled hair, a white shirt clinging to her shoulders, its loose folds suggesting the thinness of her body.

"What is it, Jim?"

"What are you trying to pull on the San Sebastian Line?"

She raised her head. "Pull? Why?"

"What sort of schedule are we running down there and what kind of trains?"

She laughed; the sound was gay and a little weary. "You really ought to read the reports sent to the president's office, Jim, once in a while."

"What do you mean?"

"We've been running that schedule and those trains on the San Sebastian for the last three months."

"One passenger train a day?"

"—in the morning. And one freight train every other night."

"Good God! On an important branch like that?"

"The important branch can't pay even for those two trams."

"But the Mexican people expect real service from us!"

"I'm sure they do."

"They need trains!"

"For what?"

"For . . . To help them develop local industries. How do you expect them to develop if we don't give them transportation?"

"I don't expect them to develop,"

"That's just your personal opinion. I don't see what right you had to take it upon yourself to cut our schedules. Why, the copper traffic alone will pay for everything."

"When?"

He looked at her; his face assumed the satisfaction of a person about to utter something that has the power to hurt. "You don't doubt the success of those copper mines, do you?—when it's Francisco d'Anconia who's running them?" He stressed the name, watching her.

She said, "He may be your friend, but—"

"My friend? I thought he was yours."

She said steadily, "Not for the last ten years."

"That's too bad, isn't it? Still, he's one of the smartest operators on earth. He's never failed in a venture—I mean, a business venture—and he's sunk millions of his own money into those mines, so we can rely on his judgment."

"When will you realize that Francisco d'Anconia has turned into a worthless bum?"

He chuckled. "I always thought that that's what he was—as far as his personal character is concerned. But you didn't share my opinion. Yours was opposite. Oh my, how opposite! Surely you remember our quarrels on the subject? Shall I quote some of the things you said about him? I can only surmise as to some of the things you did."

"Do you wish to discuss Francisco d'Anconia? Is that what you came here for?"

His face showed the anger of failure—because hers showed nothing.

"You know damn well what I came here for!" he snapped. "I've heard some incredible things about our trains in Mexico."

"What things?"

"What sort of rolling stock are you using down there?"

"The worst I could find."

"You admit that?"

"I've stated it on paper in the reports I sent you."

"Is it true that you're using wood-burning locomotives?"

"Eddie found them for me in somebody's abandoned roundhouse down in Louisiana. He couldn't even learn the name of the railroad."

"And that's what you're running as Taggart trains?"

"Yes."

"What in hell's the big idea? What's going on? I want to know what's going on!"

She spoke evenly, looking straight at him. "If you want to know, I have left nothing but junk on the San Sebastian Line, and as little of that as possible. I have moved everything that could be moved—switch engines, shop tools, even typewriters and mirrors—out of Mexico."

"Why in blazes?"

"So that the looters won't have too much to loot when they nationalize the line."

He leaped to his feet. "You won't get away with that! This is one time you won't get away with it! To have the nerve to pull such a low, unspeakable . . . just because of some vicious rumors, when we have a contract for two hundred years and . . ."

"Jim," she said slowly, "there's not a car, engine or ton of coal that we can spare anywhere on the system."

"I won't permit it, I absolutely won't permit such an outrageous policy toward a friendly people who need our help. Material greed isn't everything. After all, there are non-material considerations, even though you wouldn't understand them!"

She pulled a pad forward and picked up a pencil. "All right, Jim.

How many trains do you wish me to run on the San Sebastian Line?"

"Huh?"

"Which runs do you wish me to cut and on which of our lines—in order to get the Diesels and the steel coaches?"

"I don't want you to cut any runs!"

"Then where do I get the equipment for Mexico?"

"That's for you to figure out. It's your job."

"I am not able to do it. You will have to decide."

"That's your usual rotten trick—switching the responsibility to me!"

"I'm waiting for orders, Jim."

"I'm not going to let you trap me like that!"

She dropped the pencil. "Then the San Sebastian schedule will remain as it is."

"Just wait till the Board meeting next month. I'll demand a decision, Once and for all, on how far the Operating Department is to be permitted to exceed its authority. You're going to have to answer for this."

"Ill answer for it."

She was back at her work before the door had closed on James Taggart.

When she finished, pushed the papers aside and glanced up, the sky was black beyond the window, and the city had become a glowing spread of lighted glass without masonry. She rose reluctantly. She resented the small defeat of being tired, but she knew that she was, tonight.

The outer office was dark and empty; her staff had gone. Only Eddie Willers was still there, at his desk in his glass-partitioned enclosure that looked like a cube of light in a comer of the large room. She waved to him on her way out.

She did not take the elevator to the lobby of the building, but to the concourse of the Taggart Terminal. She liked to walk through it on her way home.

She had always felt that the concourse looked like a temple. Glancing up at the distant ceiling, she saw dim vaults supported by giant granite columns, and the tops of vast windows glazed by darkness. The vaulting held the solemn peace of a cathedral, spread in protection high above the rushing activity of men.

Dominating the concourse, but ignored by the travelers as a habitual sight, stood a statue of Nathaniel Taggart, the founder of the railroad.

Dagny was the only one who remained aware of it and had never been able to take it for granted. To look at that statue whenever she crossed the concourse, was the only form of prayer she knew.

Nathaniel Taggart had been a penniless adventurer who had come from somewhere in New England and built a railroad across a continent, in the days of the first steel rails. His railroad still stood; his battle to build it had dissolved into a legend, because people preferred not to Understand it or to believe it possible.

He was a man who had never accepted the creed that others had the right to stop him. He set his goal and moved toward it, his way as straight as one of his rails. He never sought any loans, bonds, subsidies, land grants or legislative favors from the government. He obtained money from the men who owned it, going from door to door—from the mahogany doors of bankers to the clapboard doors of lonely farmhouses. He never talked about the public good. He merely told people that they would make big profits on his railroad, he told them why he expected the profits and he gave his reasons. He had good reasons.

Through all the generations that followed, Taggart Transcontinental was one of the few railroads that never went bankrupt and the only one whose controlling stock remained in the hands of the founder's descendants.

In his lifetime, the name "Nat Taggart" was not famous, but notorious; it was repeated, not in homage, but in resentful curiosity; and if anyone admired him, it was as one admires a successful bandit. Yet no penny of his wealth had been obtained by force or fraud; he was guilty of nothing, except that he earned his own fortune and never forgot that it was his.

Many stories were whispered about him. It was said that in the wilderness of the Middle West, he murdered a state legislator who attempted to revoke a charter granted to him, to revoke it when his rail was laid halfway across the state; some legislators had planned to make a fortune on Taggart stock—by selling it short. Nat Taggart was indicted for the murder, but the charge could never be proved. He had no trouble with legislators from then on.

It was said that Nat Taggart had staked his life on his railroad many times; but once, he staked more than his life. Desperate for funds, with the construction of his line suspended, he threw down three flights of stairs a distinguished gentleman who offered him a loan from the government. Then he pledged his wife as security for a loan from a millionaire who hated him and admired her beauty. He repaid the loan on time and did not have to surrender his pledge. The deal had been made with his wife's consent. She was a great beauty from the noblest family of a southern state, and she had been disinherited by her family because she eloped with Nat Taggart when he was only a ragged young adventurer.

Dagny regretted at times that Nat Taggart was her ancestor. What she felt for him did not belong in the category of unchosen family affections. She did not want her feeling to be the thing one was supposed to owe an uncle or a grandfather. She was incapable of love for any object not of her own choice and she resented anyone's demand for it. But had it been possible to choose an ancestor, she would have chosen Nat Taggart, in voluntary homage and with all of her gratitude.

Nat Taggart's statue was copied from an artist's sketch of him, the only record ever made of his appearance. He had lived far into old age, but one could never think of him except as he was on that sketch —as a young man. In her childhood, his statue had been Dagny's first concept of the exalted. When she was sent to church or to school, and heard people using that word, she thought that she knew what they meant: she thought of the statue.

The statue was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it. All that Dagny wanted of life was contained in the desire to hold her head as he did.

Tonight, she looked at the statue when she walked across the concourse. It was a moment's rest; it was as if a burden she could not name were lightened and as if a faint current of air were touching her forehead.

In a corner of the concourse, by the main entrance, there was a small newsstand. The owner, a quiet, courteous old man with an air of breeding, had stood behind his counter for twenty years. He had owned a cigarette factory once, but it had gone bankrupt, and he had resigned himself to the lonely obscurity of his little stand in the midst of an eternal whirlpool of strangers. He had no family or friends left alive.

He had a hobby which was his only pleasure: he gathered cigarettes from all over the world for his private collection; he knew every brand made or that had ever been made.

Dagny liked to stop at his newsstand on her way out. He seemed to be part of the Taggart Terminal, like an old watchdog too feeble to protect it, but reassuring by the loyalty of his presence. He liked to see her coming, because it amused him to think that he alone knew the importance of the young woman in a sports coat and a slanting hat, who came hurrying anonymously through the crowd.

She stopped tonight, as usual, to buy a package of cigarettes. "How is the collection?" she asked him. "Any new specimens?"

He smiled sadly, shaking his head. "No, Miss Taggart. There aren't any new brands made anywhere in the world. Even the old ones are going, one after another. There's only five or six kinds left selling now.

There used to be dozens. People aren't making anything new any more."

"They will. That's only temporary."

He glanced at her and did not answer. Then he said, "I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind—and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."

"Do they ever think?" she asked involuntarily, and stopped; the question was her one personal torture and she did not want to discuss it.

The old man looked as if he had noticed the sudden stop and understood it; but he did not start discussing it; he said, instead, "I don't like the thing that's happening to people, Miss Taggart."

"What?"

"I don't know. But I've watched them here for twenty years and I've seen the change. They used to rush through here, and it was wonderful to watch, it was the hurry of men who knew where they were going and were eager to get there. Now they're hurrying because they are afraid.

It's not a purpose that drives them, it's fear. They're not going anywhere, they're escaping. And I don't think they know what it is that they want to escape. They don't look at one another. They jerk when brushed against. They smile too much, but it's an ugly kind of smiling: it's not joy, it's pleading. I don't know what it is that's happening to the world." He shrugged. "Oh well, who is John Galt?"

"He's just a meaningless phrase!"

She was startled by the sharpness of her own voice, and she added in apology, "I don't like that empty piece of slang. What does it mean?

Where did it come from?"

"Nobody knows," he answered slowly.

"Why do people keep saying it? Nobody seems able to explain just what it stands for, yet they all use it as if they knew the meaning."

"Why does it disturb you?" he asked.

"I don't like what they seem to mean when they say it."

"I don't, either, Miss Taggart."

Eddie Willers ate his dinners in the employees' cafeteria of the Taggart Terminal. There was a restaurant in the building, patronized by Taggart executives, but he did not like it. The cafeteria seemed part of the railroad, and he felt more at home.

The cafeteria lay underground. It was a large room with walls of white tile that glittered in the reflections of electric lights and looked like silver brocade. It had a high ceiling, sparkling counters of glass and chromium, a sense of space and light.

There was a railroad worker whom Eddie Willers met at times in the cafeteria. Eddie liked his face. They had been drawn into a chance conversation once, and then it became their habit to dine together whenever they happened to meet.

Eddie had forgotten whether he had ever asked the worker's name or the nature of his job; he supposed that the job wasn't much, because the man's clothes were rough and grease-stained. The man was not a person to him, but only a silent presence with an enormous intensity of interest in the one thing which was the meaning of his own life: in Taggart Transcontinental.

Tonight, coming down late, Eddie saw the worker at a table in a corner of the half-deserted room. Eddie smiled happily, waving to him, and carried his tray of food to the worker's table.

In the privacy of their corner, Eddie felt at ease, relaxing after the long strain of the day. He could talk as he did not talk anywhere else, admitting things he would not confess to anyone, thinking aloud, looking into the attentive eyes of the worker across the table.

"The Rio Norte Line is our last hope," said Eddie Willers. "But it will save us. We'll have at least one branch in good condition, where it's needed most, and that will help to save the rest. . . . It's funny—isn't it?—to speak about a last hope for Taggart Transcontinental. Do you take it seriously if somebody tells you that a meteor is going to destroy the earth? . . . I don't, either. . . . 'From Ocean to Ocean, forever'—that's what we heard all through our childhood, she and I.

No, they didn't say 'forever,' but that's what it meant. . . . You know, I'm not any kind of a great man. I couldn't have built that railroad. If it goes, I won't be able to bring it back. I'll have to go with it. . . .

Don't pay any attention to me. I don't know why I should want to say things like that. Guess I'm just a little tired tonight. . . . Yes, I worked late. She didn't ask me to stay, but there was a light under her door, long after all the others had gone . . . Yes, she's gone home now. . . .

Trouble? Oh, there's always trouble in the office. But she's not worried.

She knows she can pull us through. . . . Of course, it's bad. We're having many more accidents than you hear about. We lost two Diesels again, last week. One—just from old age, the other—in a head-on collision. . . . Yes, we have Diesels on order, at the United Locomotive Works, but we've waited for them for two years. I don't know whether we'll ever get them or not. . . . God, do we need them! Motive power —you can't imagine how important that is. That's the heart of everything. . . . What are you smiling at? . . . Well, as I was saying, it's bad. But at least the Rio Norte Line is set. The first shipment of rail will get to the site in a few weeks. In a year, we'll run the first train on the new track. Nothing's going to stop us, this time. . . . Sure, I know who's going to lay the rail. McNamara, of Cleveland. He's the contractor who finished the San Sebastian Line for us. There, at least, is one man who knows his job. So we're safe. We can count on him. There aren't many good contractors left. . . . We're rushed as hell, but I like it. I've been coming to the office an hour earlier than usual, but she beats me to it. She's always there first. . . . What? . . . I don't know what she does at night. Nothing much, I guess. . . . No, she never goes out with anyone. She sits at home, mostly, and listens to music. She plays records. . . . What do you care, which records? Richard Halley.

She loves the music of Richard Halley. Outside the railroad, that's the only thing she loves."

CHAPTER IV
THE IMMOVABLE MOVERS

Motive power—thought Dagny, looking up at the Taggart Building in the twilight—was its first need; motive power, to keep that building standing; movement, to keep it immovable. It did not rest on piles driven into granite; it rested on the engines that rolled across a continent.

She felt a dim touch of anxiety. She was back from a trip to the plant of the United Locomotive Works in New Jersey, where she had gone to see the president of the company in person. She had learned nothing: neither the reason for the delays nor any indication of the date when the Diesel engines would be produced. The president of the company had talked to her for two hours. But none of his answers had connected to any of her questions. His manner had conveyed a peculiar note of condescending reproach whenever she attempted to make the conversation specific, as if she were giving proof of ill-breeding by breaking some unwritten code known to everyone else.

On her way through the plant, she had seen an enormous piece of machinery left abandoned in a corner of the yard. It had been a precision machine tool once, long ago, of a kind that could not be bought anywhere now. It had not been worn out; it had been rotted by neglect, eaten by rust and the black drippings of a dirty oil. She had turned her face away from it. A sight of that nature always blinded her for an instant by the burst of too violent an anger. She did not know why; she could not define her own feeling; she knew only that there was, in her feeling, a scream of protest against injustice, and that it was a response to something much beyond an old piece of machinery.

The rest of her staff had gone, when she entered the anteroom of her office, but Eddie Willers was still there, waiting for her. She knew at once that something had happened, by the way he looked and the way he followed her silently into her office.

"What's the matter, Eddie?"

"McNamara quit."

She looked at him blankly. "What do you mean, quit?"

"Left. Retired. Went out of business."

"McNamara, our contractor?"

"Yes"

"But that's impossible!"

"I know it."

"What happened? Why?"

"Nobody knows."

Taking her time deliberately, she unbuttoned her coat, sat down at her desk, started to pull off her gloves. Then she said, "Begin at the beginning, Eddie. Sit down."

He spoke quietly, but he remained standing. "I talked to his chief engineer, long distance. The chief engineer called from Cleveland, to tell us. That's all he said. He knew nothing else."

"What did he say?"

"That McNamara has closed his business and gone."

"Where?"

"He doesn't know. Nobody knows."

She noticed that she was holding with one hand two empty fingers of the glove of the other, the glove half-removed and forgotten. She pulled it off and dropped it on the desk.

Eddie said, "He's walked out on a pile of contracts that are worth a fortune. He had a waiting list of clients for the next three years. . . ."

She said nothing. He added, his voice low, "I wouldn't be frightened if I could understand it. . . . But a thing that can't have any possible reason . . ." She remained silent. "He was the best contractor in the country."

They looked at each other. What she wanted to say was, "Oh God, Eddie!" Instead, her voice even, she said, "Don't worry. We'll find another contractor for the Rio Norte Line,"

It was late when she left her office. Outside, on the sidewalk at the door of the building, she paused, looking at the streets. She felt suddenly empty of energy, of purpose, of desire, as if a motor had crackled and stopped.

A faint glow streamed from behind the buildings into the sky, the reflection of thousands of unknown lights, the electric breath of the city.

She wanted to rest. To rest, she thought, and to find enjoyment somewhere.

Her work was all she had or wanted. But there were times, like tonight, when she felt that sudden, peculiar emptiness, which was not emptiness, but silence, not despair, but immobility, as if nothing within her were destroyed, but everything stood still. Then she felt the wish to find a moment's joy outside, the wish to be held as a passive spectator by some work or sight of greatness. Not to make it, she thought, but to accept; not to begin, but to respond; not to create, but to admire. I need it to let me go on, she thought, because joy is one's fuel.

She had always been—she closed her eyes with a faint smile of amusement and pain—the motive power of her own happiness. For once, she wanted to feel herself carried by the power of someone else's achievement. As men on a dark prairie liked to see the lighted windows of a train going past, her achievement, the sight of power and purpose that gave them reassurance in the midst of empty miles and night —so she wanted to feel it for a moment, a brief greeting, a single glimpse, just to wave her arm and say: Someone is going somewhere. . . .

She started walking slowly, her hands in the pockets of her coat, the shadow of her slanting hat brim across her face. The buildings around her rose to such heights that her glance could not find the sky. She thought: It has taken so much to build this city, it should have so much to offer.

Above the door of a shop, the black hole of a radio loudspeaker was hurling sounds at the streets. They were the sounds of a symphony concert being given somewhere in the city. They were a long screech without shape, as of cloth and flesh being torn at random. They scattered with no melody, no harmony, no rhythm to hold them. If music was emotion and emotion came from thought, then this was the scream of chaos, of the irrational, of the helpless, of man's self-abdication.

She walked on. She stopped at the window of a bookstore. The window displayed a pyramid of slabs in brownish-purple jackets, inscribed: The Vulture Is Molting. "The novel of our century," said a placard.

"The penetrating study of a businessman's greed. A fearless revelation of man's depravity."

She walked past a movie theater. Its lights wiped out half a block, leaving only a huge photograph and some letters suspended in blazing mid-air. The photograph was of a smiling young woman; looking at her face, one felt the weariness of having seen it for years, even while seeing it for the first time. The letters said: ". . . in a momentous drama giving the answer to the great problem: Should a woman tell?"

She walked past the door of a night club. A couple came staggering out to a taxicab. The girl had blurred eyes, a perspiring face, an ermine cape and a beautiful evening gown that had slipped off one shoulder like a slovenly housewife's bathrobe, revealing too much of her breast, not in a manner of daring, but in the manner of a drudge's indifference. Her escort steered her, gripping her naked arm; his face did not have the expression of a man anticipating a romantic adventure, but the sly look of a boy out to write obscenities on fences.

What had she hoped to find?—she thought, walking on. These were the things men lived by, the forms of their spirit, of their culture, of their enjoyment. She had seen nothing else anywhere, not for many years.

At the corner of the street where she lived, she bought a newspaper and went home.

Her apartment was two rooms on the top floor of a skyscraper. The sheets of glass in the corner window of her living room made it look like the prow of a ship in motion, and the lights of the city were like phosphorescent sparks on the black waves of steel and stone. When she turned on a lamp, long triangles of shadow cut the bare walls, in a geometrical pattern of light rays broken by a few angular pieces of furniture.

She stood in the middle of the room, alone between sky and city.

There was only one thing that could give her the feeling she wanted to experience tonight; it was the only form of enjoyment she had found.

She turned to a phonograph and put on a record of the music of Richard Halley.

It was his Fourth Concerto, the last work he had written. The crash of its opening chords swept the sights of the streets away from her mind.

The Concerto was a great cry of rebellion. It was a "No" flung at some vast process of torture, a denial of suffering, a denial that held the agony of the struggle to break free. The sounds were like a voice saying: There is no necessity for pain—why, then, is the worst pain reserved for those who will not accept its necessity?—we who hold the love and the secret of joy, to what punishment have we been sentenced for it, and by whom? . . . The sounds of torture became defiance, the statement of agony became a hymn to a distant vision for whose sake anything was worth enduring, even this. It was the song of rebellion—and of a desperate quest.

She sat still, her eyes closed, listening.

No one knew what had happened to Richard Halley, or why. The story of his life had been like a summary written to damn greatness by showing the price one pays for it. It had been a procession of years spent in garrets and basements, years that had taken the gray tinge of the walls imprisoning a man whose music overflowed with violent color.

It had been the gray of a struggle against long flights of unlighted tenement stairs, against frozen plumbing, against the price of a sandwich in an ill-smelling delicatessen store, against the faces of men who listened to music, their eyes empty. It had been a struggle without the relief of violence, without the recognition of finding a conscious enemy, with only a deaf wall to batter, a wall of the most effective soundproofing: indifference, that swallowed blows, chords and screams—a battle of silence, for a man who could give to sounds a greater eloquence than they had ever carried—the silence of obscurity, of loneliness, of the nights when some rare orchestra played one of his works and he looked at the darkness, knowing that his soul went in trembling, widening circles from a radio tower through the air of the city, but there were no receivers tuned to hear it.

"The music of Richard Halley has a quality of the heroic. Our age has outgrown that stuff," said one critic. "The music of Richard Halley is out of key with our times. It has a tone of ecstasy. Who cares for ecstasy nowadays?" said another.

His life had been a summary of the lives of all the men whose reward is a monument in a public park a hundred years after the time when a reward can matter—except that Richard Halley did not die soon enough. He lived to see the night which, by the accepted laws of history, he was not supposed to see. He was forty-three years old and it was the opening night of Phaethon, an opera he had written at the age of twenty-four. He had changed the ancient Greek myth to his own purpose and meaning: Phaethon, the young son of Helios, who stole his father's chariot and, in ambitious audacity, attempted to drive the sun across the sky, did not perish, as he perished in the myth; in Halley's opera, Phaethon succeeded. The opera had been performed then, nineteen years ago, and had closed after one performance, to the sound of booing and catcalls. That night, Richard Halley had walked the streets of the city till dawn, trying to find an answer to a question, which he did not find.

On the night when the opera was presented again, nineteen years later, the last sounds of the music crashed into the sounds of the greatest ovation the opera house had ever heard. The ancient walls could not contain it, the sounds of cheering burst through to the lobbies, to the stairs, to the streets, to the boy who had walked those streets nineteen years ago.

Dagny was in the audience on the night of the ovation. She was one of the few who had known the music of Richard Halley much earlier; but she had never seen him. She saw him being pushed out on the stage, saw him facing the enormous spread of waving arms and cheering heads. He stood without moving, a tall, emaciated man with graying hair. He did not bow, did not smile; he just stood there, looking at the crowd. His face had the quiet, earnest look of a man staring at a question.

"The music of Richard Halley," wrote a critic next morning, "belongs to mankind. It is the product and the expression of the greatness of the people." "There is an inspiring lesson," said a minister, "in the life of Richard Halley. He has had a terrible struggle, but what does that matter? It is proper, it is noble that he should have endured suffering, injustice, abuse at the hands of his brothers—in order to enrich their lives and teach them to appreciate the beauty of great music."

On the day after the opening, Richard Halley retired.

He gave no explanation. He merely told his publishers that his career was over. He sold them the rights to his works for a modest sum, even though he knew that his royalties would now bring him a fortune. He went away, leaving no address. It was eight years ago; no one had seen him since.

Dagny listened to the Fourth Concerto, her head thrown back, her eyes closed. She lay half-stretched across the corner of a couch, her body relaxed and still; but tension stressed the shape of her mouth on her motionless face, a sensual shape drawn in lines of longing.

After a while, she opened her eyes. She noticed the newspaper she had thrown down on the couch. She reached for it absently, to turn the vapid headlines out of sight. The paper fell open. She saw the photograph of a face she knew, and the heading of a story. She slammed the pages shut and flung them aside.

It was the face of Francisco d'Anconia. The heading said that he had arrived in New York. What of it?—she thought. She would not have to see him. She had not seen him for years.

She sat looking down at the newspaper on the floor. Don't read it, she thought; don't look at it. But the face, she thought, had not changed.

How could a face remain the same when everything else was gone? She wished they had not caught a picture of him when he smiled. That kind of smile did not belong in the pages of a newspaper. It was the smile of a man who is able to see, to know and to create the glory of existence. It was the mocking, challenging smile of a brilliant intelligence.

Don't read it, she thought; not now—not to that music—oh, not to that music!

She reached for the paper and opened it.

The story said that Senor Francisco d'Anconia had granted an interview to the press in his suite at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel. He said that he had come to New York for two important reasons: a hat-check girl at the Cub Club, and the liverwurst at Moe's Delicatessen on Third Avenue. He had nothing to say about the coming divorce trial of Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Vail. Mrs. Vail, a lady of noble breeding and unusual loveliness, had taken a shot at her distinguished young husband, some months ago, publicly declaring that she wished to get rid of him for the sake of her lover, Francisco d'Anconia. She had given to the press a detailed account of her secret romance, including a description of the night of last New Year's Eve which she had spent at d'Anconia's villa in the Andes. Her husband had survived the shot and had sued for divorce.

She had countered with a suit for half of her husband's millions, and with a recital of his private life which, she said, made hers look innocent.

All of that had been splashed over the newspapers for weeks. But Senor d'Anconia had nothing to say about it, when the reporters questioned him. Would he deny Mrs. Vail's story, they asked. "I never deny anything," he answered. The reporters had been astonished by his sudden arrival in town; they had thought that he would not wish to be there just when the worst of the scandal was about to explode on the front pages. But they had been wrong. Francisco d'Anconia added one more comment to the reasons for his arrival. "I wanted to witness the farce," he said.

Dagny let the paper slip to the floor. She sat, bent over, her head on her arms. She did not move, but the strands of hair, hanging down to her knees, trembled in sudden jolts once in a while.

The great chords of Halley's music went on, filling the room, piercing the glass of the windows, streaming out over the city. She was hearing the music. It was her quest, her cry.

James Taggart glanced about the living room of his apartment, wondering what time it was; he did not feel like moving to find his watch.

He sat in an armchair, dressed in wrinkled pajamas, barefooted; it was too much trouble to look for his slippers. The light of the gray sky in the windows hurt his eyes, still sticky with sleep. He felt, inside his skull, the nasty heaviness which is about to become a headache. He wondered angrily why he had stumbled out into the living room. Oh yes, he remembered, to look for the time.

He slumped sidewise over the arm of the chair and caught sight of a clock on a distant building: it was twenty minutes past noon.

Through the open door of the bedroom, he heard Betty Pope washing her teeth in the bathroom beyond. Her girdle lay on the floor, by the side of a chair with the rest of her clothes; the girdle was a faded pink, with broken strands of rubber.

"Hurry up, will you?" he called irritably. "I've got to dress,"

She did not answer. She had left the door of the bathroom open; he could hear the sound of gargling.

Why do I do those things?—he thought, remembering last night. But it was too much trouble to look for an answer.

Betty Pope came into the living room, dragging the folds of a satin negligee harlequin-checkered in orange and purple. She looked awful in a negligee, thought Taggart; she was ever so much better in a riding habit, in the photographs on the society pages of the newspapers. She was a lanky girl, all bones and loose joints that did not move smoothly.

She had a homely face, a bad complexion and a look of impertinent condescension derived from the fact that she belonged to one of the very best families.

"Aw, hell!" she said at nothing in particular, stretching herself to limber up. "Jim, where are your nail clippers? I've got to trim my toenails."

"I don't know. I have a headache. Do it at home."

"You look unappetizing in the morning." she said indifferently. "You look like a snail."

"Why don't you shut up?"

She wandered aimlessly about the room. "I don't want to go home," she said with no particular feeling. "I hate morning. Here's another day and nothing to do. I've got a tea session on for this afternoon, at Liz Blane's. Oh well, it might be fun, because Liz is a bitch." She picked up a glass and swallowed the stale remnant of a drink. "Why don't you have them repair your air-conditioner? This place smells."

"Are you through in the bathroom?" he asked. "I have to dress. I have an important engagement today."

"Go right in. I don't mind. I'll share the bathroom with you. I hate to be rushed."

While he shaved, he saw her dressing in front of the open bathroom door. She took a long time twisting herself into her girdle, hooking garters to her stockings, pulling on an ungainly, expensive tweed suit.

The harlequin negligee, picked from an advertisement in the smartest fashion magazine, was like a uniform which she knew to be expected on certain occasions, which she had worn dutifully for a specified purpose and then discarded.

The nature of their relationship had the same quality. There was no passion in it, no desire, no actual pleasure, not even a sense of shame.

To them, the act of sex was neither joy nor sin. It meant nothing. They had heard that men and women were supposed to sleep together, so they did.

"Jim, why don't you take me to the Armenian restaurant tonight?" she asked. "I love shish-kebab."

"I can't," he answered angrily through the soap lather on his face.

"I've got a busy day ahead."

"Why don't you cancel it?"

"What?"

"Whatever it is."

"It is very important, my dear. It is a meeting of our Board of Directors."

"Oh, don't be stuffy about your damn railroad. It's boring. I hate businessmen. They're dull."

He did not answer.

She glanced at him slyly, and her voice acquired a livelier note when she drawled, "Jock Benson said that you have a soft snap on that railroad anyway, because it's your sister who runs the whole works."

"Oh, he did, did he?"

"I think that your sister is awful. I think it's disgusting—a woman acting like a grease-monkey and posing around like a big executive. It's so unfeminine. Who does she think she is, anyway?"

Taggart stepped out to the threshold. He leaned against the doorjamb, studying Betty Pope. There was a faint smile on his face, sarcastic and confident. They had, he thought, a bond in common.

"It might interest you to know, my dear," he said, "that I'm putting the skids under my sister this afternoon."

"No?" she said, interested. "Really?"

"And that is why this Board meeting is so important."

"Are you really going to kick her out?"

"No. That's not necessary or advisable. I shall merely put her in her place. It's the chance I've been waiting for."

"You got something on her? Some scandal?"

"No, no. You wouldn't understand. It's merely that she's gone too far, for once, and she's going to get slapped down. She's pulled an inexcusable sort of stunt, without consulting anybody. It's a serious offense against our Mexican neighbors. When the Board hears about it, they'll pass a couple of new rulings on the Operating Department, which will make my sister a little easier to manage."

"You're smart, Jim," she said.

"I'd better get dressed." He sounded pleased. He turned back to the washbowl, adding cheerfully, "Maybe I will take you out tonight and buy you some shish-kebab."

The telephone rang.

He lifted the receiver. The operator announced a long-distance call from Mexico City.

The hysterical voice that came on the wire was that of his political man in Mexico.

"I couldn't help it, Jim!" it gulped. "I couldn't help it! . . . We had no warning, I swear to God, nobody suspected, nobody saw it coming, I've done my best, you can't blame me, Jim, it was a bolt out of the blue! The decree came out this morning, just five minutes ago, they sprang it on us like that, without any notice! The government of the People's State of Mexico has nationalized the San Sebastian Mines and the San Sebastian Railroad."

". . . and, therefore, I can assure the gentlemen of the Board that there is no occasion for panic. The event of this morning is a regrettable development, but I have full confidence—based on my knowledge of the inner processes shaping our foreign policy in Washington—that our government will negotiate an equitable settlement with the government of the People's State of Mexico, and that we will receive full and just compensation for our property."

James Taggart stood at the long table, addressing the Board of Directors. His voice was precise and monotonous; it connoted safety.

"I am glad to report, however, that I foresaw the possibility of such a turn of events and took every precaution to protect the interests of Taggart Transcontinental. Some months ago, I instructed our Operating Department to cut the schedule on the San Sebastian Line down to a single train a day, and to remove from it our best motive power and rolling stock, as well as every piece of equipment that could be moved.

The Mexican government was able to seize nothing but a few wooden cars and one superannuated locomotive. My decision has saved the company many millions of dollars—I shall have the exact figures computed and submit them to you. I do feel, however, that our stockholders will be justified in expecting that those who bore the major responsibility for this venture should now bear the consequences of their negligence. I would suggest, therefore, that we request the resignation of Mr. Clarence Eddington, our economic consultant, who recommended the construction of the San Sebastian Line, and of Mr. Jules Mott, our representative in Mexico City."

The men sat around the long table, listening. They did not think of what they would have to do, but of what they would have to say to the men they represented. Taggart's speech gave them what they needed.

Orren Boyle was waiting for him, when Taggart returned to his office. Once they were alone, Taggart's manner changed. He leaned against the desk, sagging, his face loose and white.

"Well?" he asked.

Boyle spread his hands out helplessly. "I've checked, Jim," he said.

"It's straight all right; d'Anconia's lost fifteen million dollars of his own money in those mines. No, there wasn't anything phony about that, he didn't pull any sort of trick, he put up his own cash and now he's lost it."

"Well, what's he going to do about it?"

"That—I don't know. Nobody does."

"He's not going to let himself be robbed, is he? He's too smart for that. He must have something up his sleeve."

"I sure hope so."

"He's outwitted some of the slickest combinations of money-grubbers on earth. Is he going to be taken by a bunch of Greaser politicians with a decree? He must have something on them, and he'll get the last word, and we must be sure to be in on it, too!"

"That's up to you, Jim. You're his friend."

"Friend be damned! I hate his guts."

He pressed a button for his secretary. The secretary entered uncertainly, looking unhappy; he was a young man, no longer too young, with a bloodless face and the well-bred manner of genteel poverty.

"Did you get me an appointment with Francisco d'Anconia?" snapped Taggart.

"No, sir."

"But, God damn it, I told you to call the—"

"I wasn't able to, sir. I have tried."

"Well, try again."

"I mean I wasn't able to obtain the appointment, Mr. Taggart."

"Why not?"

"He declined it."

"You mean he refused to see me?"

"Yes, sir, that is what I mean."

"He wouldn't see me?"

"No, sir, he wouldn't."

"Did you speak to him in person?"

"No, sir, I spoke to his secretary."

"What did he tell you? Just what did he say?" The young man hesitated and looked more unhappy. "What did he say?"

"He said that Senior d'Anconia said that you bore him, Mr. Taggart."

The proposal which they passed was known as the "Anti-dog-eat-dog Rule." When they voted for it, the members of the National Alliance of Railroads sat in a large hall in the deepening twilight of a late autumn evening and did not look at one another.

The National Alliance of Railroads was an organization formed, it was claimed, to protect the welfare of the railroad industry. This was to be achieved by developing methods of co-operation for a common purpose; this was to be achieved by the pledge of every member to subordinate his own interests to those of the industry as a whole; the interests of the industry as a whole were to be determined by a majority vote, and every member was committed to abide by any decision the majority chose to make.

"Members of the same profession or of the same industry should stick together," the organizers of the Alliance had said. "We all have the same problems, the same interests, the same enemies. We waste our energy fighting one another, instead of presenting a common front to the world.

We can all grow and prosper together, if we pool our efforts." "Against whom is this Alliance being organized?" a skeptic had asked. The answer had been: "Why, it's not 'against' anybody. But if you want to put it that way, why, it's against shippers or supply manufacturers or anyone who might try to take advantage of us. Against whom is any union organized?" "That's what I wonder about," the skeptic had said.

When the Anti-dog-eat-dog Rule was offered to the vote of the full membership of the National Alliance of Railroads at its annual meeting, it was the first mention of this Rule in public. But all the members had heard of it; it had been discussed privately for a long tune, and more insistently in the last few months. The men who sat in the large hall of the meeting were the presidents of the railroads. They did not like the Anti-dog-eat-dog Rule; they had hoped it would never be brought up.

But when it was brought up, they voted for it.

No railroad was mentioned by name in the speeches that preceded the voting. The speeches dealt only with the public welfare. It was said that while the public welfare was threatened by shortages of transportation, railroads were destroying one another through vicious competition, on "the brutal policy of dog-eat-dog." While there existed blighted areas where rail service had been discontinued, there existed at the same time large regions where two or more railroads were competing for a traffic barely sufficient for one. It was said that there were great opportunities for younger railroads in the blighted areas. While it was true that such areas offered little economic incentive at present, a public-spirited railroad, it was said, would undertake to provide transportation for the struggling inhabitants, since the prime purpose of a railroad was public service, not profit.

Then it was said that large, established railroad systems were essential to the public welfare; and that the collapse of one of them would be a national catastrophe; and that if one such system had happened to sustain a crushing loss in a public-spirited attempt to contribute to international good will, it was entitled to public support to help it survive the blow.

No railroad was mentioned by name. But when the chairman of the meeting raised his hand, as a solemn signal that they were about to vote, everybody looked at Dan Conway, president of the Phoenix-Durango.

There were only five dissenters who voted against it. Yet when the chairman announced that the measure had passed, there was no cheering, no sounds of approval, no movement, nothing but a heavy silence.

To the last minute, every one of them had hoped that someone would save them from it.

The Anti-dog-eat-dog Rule was described as a measure of "voluntary self-regulation" intended "the better to enforce" the laws long since passed by the country's Legislature. The Rule provided that the members of the National Alliance of Railroads were forbidden to engage in practices defined as "destructive competition"; that in regions declared to be restricted, no more than one railroad would be permitted to operate; that in such regions, seniority belonged to the oldest railroad now operating there, and that the newcomers, who had encroached unfairly upon its territory, would suspend operations within nine months after being so ordered; that the Executive Board of the National Alliance of Railroads was empowered to decide, at its sole discretion, which regions were to be restricted.

When the meeting adjourned, the men hastened to leave. There were no private discussions, no friendly loitering. The great hall became deserted in an unusually short time. Nobody spoke to or looked at Dan Conway.

In the lobby of the building, James Taggart met Orren Boyle. They had made no appointment to meet, but Taggart saw a bulky figure outlined against a marble wall and knew who it was before he saw the face. They approached each other, and Boyle said, his smile less soothing than usual, "I've delivered. Your turn now, Jimmie." "You didn't have to come here. Why did you?" said Taggart sullenly. "Oh, just for the fun of it," said Boyle.

Dan Conway sat alone among rows of empty seats. He was still there when the charwoman came to clean the hall. When she hailed him, he rose obediently and shuffled to the door. Passing her in the aisle, he fumbled in his pocket and handed her a five dollar bill, silently, meekly, not looking at her face. He did not seem to know what he was doing; he acted as if he thought that he was in some place where generosity demanded that he give a tip before leaving.

Dagny was still at her desk when the door of her office flew open and James Taggart rushed in. It was the first time he had ever entered in such manner. His face looked feverish.

She had not seen him since the nationalization of the San Sebastian Line. He had not sought to discuss it with her, and she had said nothing about it. She had been proved right so eloquently, she had thought, that comments were unnecessary. A feeling which was part courtesy, part mercy had stopped her from stating to him the conclusion to be drawn from the events. In all reason and justice, there was but one conclusion he could draw. She had heard about his speech to the Board of Directors. She had shrugged, contemptuously amused; if it served his purpose, whatever that was, to appropriate her achievements, then, for his own advantage, if for no other reason, he would leave her free to achieve, from now on.

"So you think you're the only one who's doing anything for this railroad?"

She looked at Mm, bewildered. His voice was shrill; he stood in front of her desk, tense with excitement.

"So you think that I've ruined the company, don't you?" he yelled.

"And now you're the only one who can save us? Think I have no way to make up for the Mexican loss?"

She asked slowly, "What do you want?"

"I want to tell you some news. Do you remember the Anti-dog-eat dog proposal of the Railroad Alliance that I told you about months ago?

You didn't like the idea. You didn't like it at all."

"I remember. What about it?"

"It has been passed."

"What has been passed?"

"The Anti-dog-eat-dog Rule. Just a few minutes ago. At the meeting.

Nine months from now, there's not going to be any Phoenix-Durango Railroad in Colorado!"

A glass ashtray crashed to the floor off the desk, as she leaped to her feet.

"You rotten bastards!"

He stood motionless. He was smiling.

She knew that she was shaking, open to him, without defense, and that this was the sight he enjoyed, but it did not matter to her. Then she saw his smile—and suddenly the blinding anger vanished. She felt nothing. She studied that smile with a cold, impersonal curiosity.

They stood facing each other. He looked as if, for the first time, he was not afraid of her. He was gloating. The event meant something to him much beyond the destruction of a competitor. It was not a victory over Dan Conway, but over her. She did not know why or in what manner, but she felt certain that he knew.

For the flash of one instant, she thought that here, before her, in James Taggart and in that which made him smile, was a secret she had never suspected, and it was crucially important that she learn to understand it. But the thought flashed and vanished.

She whirled to the door of a closet and seized her coat.

"Where are you going?" Taggart's voice had dropped; it sounded disappointed and faintly worried.

She did not answer. She rushed out of the office.

"Dan, you have to fight them. I'll help you. I'll fight for you with everything I've got."

Dan Conway shook his head.

He sat at his desk, the empty expanse of a faded blotter before him, one feeble lamp lighted in a corner of the room. Dagny had rushed straight to the city office of the Phoenix-Durango. Conway was there, and he still sat as she had found him. He had smiled at her entrance and said, "Funny, I thought you would come," his voice gentle, lifeless.

They did not know each other well, but they had met a few times in Colorado.

"No," he said, "it's no use."

"Do you mean because of that Alliance agreement that you signed?

It won't hold. This is plain expropriation. No court will uphold it. And if Jim tries to hide behind the usual looters' slogan of 'public welfare,' I’ll go on the stand and swear that Taggart Transcontinental can't handle the whole traffic of Colorado, And if any court rules against you, you can appeal and keep on appealing for the next ten years."

"Yes," he said, "I could . . . I'm not sure I'd win, but I could try and I could hang onto the railroad for a few years longer, but . . . No, it's not the legal points that I'm thinking about, one way or the other. It's not that."

"What, then?"

"I don't want to fight it, Dagny."

She looked at him incredulously. It was the one sentence which, she felt sure, he had never uttered before; a man could not reverse himself so late in life.

Dan Conway was approaching fifty. He had the square, stolid, stubborn face of a tough freight engineer, rather than a company president; the face of a fighter, with a young, tanned skin and graying hair. He had taken over a shaky little railroad in Arizona, a road whose net revenue was "less than that of a successful grocery store, and he had built it into the best railroad of the Southwest. He spoke little, seldom read books, had never gone to college. The whole sphere of human endeavors, with one exception, left him blankly indifferent; he had no touch of that which people called culture. But he knew railroads.

"Why don't you want to fight?"

"Because they had the right to do it."

"Dan," she asked, "have you lost your mind?"

"I've never gone back on my word in my life," he said tonelessly. "I don't care what the courts decide. I promised to obey the majority. I have to obey."

"Did you expect the majority to do this to you?"

"No." There was a kind of faint convulsion in the stolid face. He spoke softly, not looking at her, the helpless astonishment still raw within him. "No, I didn't expect it. I heard them talking about it for over a year, but I didn't believe it. Even when they were voting, I didn't believe it."

"What did you expect?"

"I thought . . . They said all of us were to stand for the common good. I thought what I had done down there in Colorado was good.

Good for everybody."

"Oh, you damn fool! Don't you see that that's what you're being punished for—because it was good?"

He shook his head. "I don't understand it," he said. "But I see no way out."

"Did you promise them to agree to destroy yourself?"

"There doesn't seem to be any choice for any of us."

"What do you mean?"

"Dagny, the whole world's in a terrible state right now. I don't know what's wrong with it, but something's very wrong. Men have to get together and find a way out. But who's to decide which way to take, unless it's the majority? I guess that's the only fair method of deciding, I don't see any other. I suppose somebody's got to be sacrificed. If it turned out to be me, I have no right to complain. The right's on their side. Men have to get together."

She made an effort to speak calmly; she was trembling with anger.

"If that's the price of getting together, then I'll be damned if I want to live on the same earth with any human beings! If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive?

Nothing can make self-immolation proper. Nothing can give them the right to turn men into sacrificial animals. Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability. If that is right, then we'd better start slaughtering one another, because there isn't any right at all in the world!"

He did not answer. He looked at her helplessly.

"If it's that kind of world, how can we live in it?" she asked.

"I don't know . . ." he whispered.

"Dan, do you really think it's right? In all truth, deep down, do you think it's right?"

He closed his eyes. "No," he said. Then he looked at her and she saw a look of torture for the first time. "That's what I've been sitting here trying to understand. I know that I ought to think it's right—but I can't. It's as if my tongue wouldn't turn to say it. I keep seeing every tie of the track down there, every signal light, every bridge, every night that I spent when . . ." His head dropped down on his arms. "Oh God, it's so damn unjust!"

"Dan," she said through her teeth, "fight it."

He raised his head. His eyes were empty. "No," he said. "It would be wrong- I'm just selfish."

"Oh, damn that rotten tripe! You know better than that!"

"I don't know . . ." His voice was very tired. "I've been sitting here, trying to think about it . . . I don't know what is right any more. . . ."

He added, "I don't think I care."

She knew suddenly that all further words were useless and that Dan Conway would never be a man of action again. She did not know what made her certain of it. She said, wondering, "You've never given up in the face of a battle before."

"No, I guess I haven't. . . ." He spoke with a quiet, indifferent astonishment. "I've fought storms and floods and rock slides and rail fissure. . . . I knew how to do it, and I liked doing it. . . . But this kind of battle—it's one I can't fight."

"Why?"

"I don't know. Who knows why the world is what it if-? Oh, who is John Galt?"

She winced. "Then what are you going to do?"

"I don't know . . .'“

"I mean—" She stopped.

He knew what she meant. "Oh, there's always something to do. . . ."

He spoke without conviction. "I guess it's only Colorado and New Mexico that they're going to declare restricted. I'll still have the line in Arizona to run." He added, "As it was twenty years ago . . .

Well, it will keep me busy. I'm getting tired, Dagny. I didn't take time to notice it, but I guess I am."

She could say nothing.

"I'm not going to build a line through one of their blighted areas," he said in the same indifferent voice. "That's what they tried to hand me for a consolation prize, but I think it's just talk. You can't build a railroad where there's nothing for hundreds of miles but a couple of farmers who're not growing enough to feed themselves. You can't build a road and make it pay. If you don't make it pay, who's going to? It doesn't make sense to me. They just didn't know what they were saying."

"Oh, to hell with their blighted areas! It's you I'm thinking about."

She had to name it. "What will you do with yourself?"

"I don't know . . . Well, there's a lot of things I haven't had time to do. Fishing, for instance. I've always liked fishing. Maybe I'll start reading books, always meant to. Guess I'll take it easy now. Guess I'll go fishing. There's some nice places down in Arizona, where it's peaceful and quiet and you don't have to see a human being for miles. . . ."

He glanced up at her and added, "Forget it. Why should you worry about me?"

"It's not about you, it's . . . Dan," she said suddenly, "I hope you know it's not for your sake that I wanted to help you fight."

He smiled; it was a faint, friendly smile. "I know," he said.

"It's not out of pity or charity or any ugly reason like that. Look, I intended to give you the battle of your life, down there in Colorado.

I intended to cut into your business and squeeze you to the wall and drive you out, if necessary,"

He chuckled faintly; it was appreciation. "You would have made a pretty good try at it, too," he said.

"Only I didn't think it would be necessary. I thought there was enough room there for both of us."

"Yes," he said. "There was."

"Still, if I found that there wasn't, I would have fought you, and if I could make my road better than yours, I'd have broken you and not given a damn about what happened to you. But this . . . Dan, I don't think I want to look at our Rio Norte Line now. I . . . Oh God, Dan, I don't want to be a looter!"

He looked at her silently for a moment. It was an odd look, as if from a great distance. He said softly, "You should have been born about a hundred years earlier, kid. Then you would have had a chance."

"To hell with that. I intend to make my own chance."

"That's what I intended at your age."

"You succeeded."

"Have I?"

She sat still, suddenly unable to move.

He sat up straight and said sharply, almost as if he were issuing orders, "You'd better look at that Rio Norte Line of yours, and you'd better do it fast. Get it ready before I move out, because if you don't, that will be the end of Ellis Wyatt and all the rest of them down there, and they're the best people left in the country. You can't let that happen. It's all on your shoulders now. It would be no use trying to explain to your brother that it's going to be much tougher for you down there without me to compete with. But you and I know it. So go to it. Whatever you do, you won't be a looter. No looter could run a railroad in that part of the country and last at it. Whatever you make down there, you will have earned it. Lice like your brother don't count, anyway. It's up to you now."

She sat looking at him, wondering what it was that had defeated a man of this kind; she knew that it was not James Taggart.

She saw him looking at her, as if he were struggling with a question mark of his own. Then he smiled, and she saw, incredulously, that the smile held sadness and pity.

"You'd better not feel sorry for me," he said. "I think, of the two of us, it's you who have the harder time ahead. And I think you're going to get it worse than I did."

She had telephoned the mills and made an appointment to see Hank Rearden that afternoon. She had just hung up the receiver and was bending over the maps of the Rio Norte Line spread on her desk, when the door opened. Dagny looked up, startled; she did not expect the door of her office to open without announcement.

The man who entered was a stranger. He was young, tall, and something about him suggested violence, though she could not say what it was, because the first trait one grasped about him was a quality of self-control that seemed almost arrogant. He had dark eyes, disheveled hair, and his clothes were expensive, but worn as if he did not care or notice what he wore.

"Ellis Wyatt," he said in self-introduction.

She leaped to her feet, involuntarily. She understood why nobody had or could have stopped him in the outer office.

"Sit down, Mr. Wyatt," she said, smiling.

"It won't be necessary." He did not smile. "I don't hold long conferences."

Slowly, taking her time by conscious intention, she sat down and leaned back, looking at him.

"Well?" she asked.

"I came to see you because I understand you're the only one who's got any brains in this rotten outfit."

"What can I do for you?"

"You can listen to an ultimatum." He spoke distinctly, giving an unusual clarity to every syllable. "I expect Taggart Transcontinental, nine months from now, to run trains in Colorado as my business requires them to be run. If the snide stunt you people perpetrated on the Phoenix-Durango was done for the purpose of saving yourself from the necessity of effort, this is to give you notice that you will not get away with it. I made no demands on you when you could not give me the kind of service I needed. I found someone who could. Now you wish to force me to deal with you. You expect to dictate terms by leaving me no choice. You expect me to hold my business down to the level of your incompetence. This is to tell you that you have miscalculated."

She said slowly, with effort, "Shall I tell you what I intend to do about our service in Colorado?"

"No. I have no interest in discussions and intentions. I expect transportation. What you do to furnish it and how you do it, is your problem, not mine. I am merely giving you a warning. Those who wish to deal with me, must do so on my terms or not at all. I do not make terms with incompetence. If you expect to earn money by carrying the oil I produce, you must be as good at your business as I am at mine. I wish this to be understood."

She said quietly, "I understand."

"I shan't waste time proving to you why you'd better take my ultimatum seriously. If you have the intelligence to keep this corrupt organization functioning at all, you have the intelligence to judge this for yourself. We both know that if Taggart Transcontinental runs trains in Colorado the way it did five years ago, it will ruin me. I know that that is what you people intend to do. You expect to feed off me while you can and to find another carcass to pick dry after you have finished mine. That is the policy of most of mankind today. So here is my ultimatum: it is now in your power to destroy me; I may have to go; but if I go, I'll make sure that I take all the rest of you along with me."

Somewhere within her, under the numbness that held her still to receive the lashing, she felt a small point of pain, hot like the pain of scalding. She wanted to tell him of the years she had spent looking for men such as he to work with; she wanted to tell him that his enemies were hers, that she was fighting the same battle; she wanted to cry to him: I'm not one of them! But she knew that she could not do it. She bore the responsibility for Taggart Transcontinental and for everything done in its name; she had no right to justify herself now.

Sitting straight, her glance as steady and open as his, she answered evenly, "You will get the transportation you need, Mr. Wyatt."

She saw a faint hint of astonishment in his face; this was not the manner or the answer he had expected; perhaps it was what she had not said that astonished him most: that she offered no defense, no excuses. He took a moment to study her silently. Then he said, his voice less sharp: "All right. Thank you. Good day."

She inclined her head. He bowed and left the office.

"That's the story, Hank. I had worked out an almost impossible schedule to complete the Rio Norte Line in twelve months. Now I'll have to do it in nine. You were to give us the rail over a period of one year. Can you give it to us within nine months? If there's any human way to do it, do it. If not, I'll have to find some other means to finish it."

Rearden sat behind his desk. His cold, blue eyes made two horizontal cuts across the gaunt planes of his face; they remained horizontal, impassively half-closed; he said evenly, without emphasis: 'I'll do it."

Dagny leaned back in her chair. The short sentence was a shock. It was not merely relief: it was the sudden realization that nothing else was necessary to guarantee that it would be done; she needed no proofs, no questions, no explanations; a complex problem could rest safely on three syllables pronounced by a man who knew what he was saying.

"Don't show that you're relieved." His voice was mocking. "Not too obviously." His narrowed eyes were watching her with an unrevealing smile. "I might think that I hold Taggart Transcontinental in my power,"

"You know that, anyway."

"I do. And I intend to make you pay for it."

"I expect to. How much?"

"Twenty dollars extra per ton on the balance of the order delivered after today."

"Pretty steep, Hank. Is that the best price you can give me?"

"No. But that's the one I'm going to get. I could ask twice that and you'd pay it."

"Yes., I would. And you could. But you won't."

"Why won't I?"

"Because you need to have the Rio Norte Line built. It's your first showcase for Rearden Metal."

He chuckled. "That's right. I like to deal with somebody who has no illusions about getting favors."

"Do you know what made me feel relieved, when you decided to take advantage of it?"

"What?"

"That I was dealing, for once, with somebody who doesn't pretend to give favors."

His smile had a discernible quality now: it was enjoyment. "You always play it open, don't you?" he asked.

"I've never noticed you doing otherwise."

"I thought I was the only one who could afford to."

"I'm not broke, in that sense, Hank."

"I think I'm going to break you some day—in that sense."

"Why?"

"I've always wanted to."

"Don't you have enough cowards around you?"

"That's why I'd enjoy trying it—because you're the only exception.

So you think it's right that I should squeeze every penny of profit I can, out of your emergency?"

"Certainly. I'm not a fool. I don't think you're in business for my convenience."

"Don't you wish I were?"

"I'm not a moocher, Hank."

"Aren't you going to find it hard to pay?"

"That's my problem, not yours. I want that rail."

"At twenty dollars extra per ton?"

"Okay, Hank."

"Fine. You'll get the rail. I may get my exorbitant profit—or Taggart Transcontinental may crash before I collect it."

She said, without smiling, "If I don't get that line built in nine months, Taggart Transcontinental will crash."

"It won't, so long as you run it,"

When he did not smile, his face looked inanimate, only his eyes remained alive, active with a cold, brilliant clarity of perception. But what he was made to feel by the things he perceived, no one would be permitted to know, she thought, perhaps not even himself.

"They've done their best to make it harder for you, haven't they?" he said.

"Yes. I was counting on Colorado to save the Taggart system. Now it's up to me to save Colorado. Nine months from now, Dan Conway will close his road. If mine isn't ready, it won't be any use finishing it.

You can't leave those men without transportation for a single day, let alone a week or a month. At the rate they've been growing, you can't stop them dead and then expect them to continue. It's like slamming brakes on an engine going two hundred miles an hour."

"I know."

"I can run a good railroad. I can't run it across a continent of sharecroppers who're not good enough to grow turnips successfully. I've got to have men like Ellis Wyatt to produce something to fill the trains I run. So I've got to give him a train and a track nine months from now, if I have to blast all the rest of us into hell to do it!"

He smiled, amused. "You feel very strongly about it, don't you?"

"Don't you?"

He would not answer, but merely held the smile.

"Aren't you concerned about it?" she asked, almost angrily.

"No."

"Then you don't realize what it means?"

"I realize that I'm going to get the rail rolled and you're going to get the track laid in nine months."

She smiled, relaxing, wearily and a little guiltily. "Yes. I know we will. I know it's useless—getting angry at people like Jim and his friends. We haven't any time for it. First, I have to undo what they've done. Then afterwards"—she stopped, wondering, shook her head and shrugged—"afterwards, they won't matter."

"That's right. They won't. When I heard about that Anti-dog-eat-dog business, it made me sick. But don't worry about the goddamn bastards."

The two words sounded shockingly violent, because his face and voice remained calm. "You and I will always be there to save the country from the consequences of their actions." He got up; he said, pacing the office, "Colorado isn't going to be stopped. You'll pull it through. Then Dan Conway will be back, and others. All that lunacy is temporary. ]t can't last. It's demented, so it has to defeat itself. You and I will just have to work a little harder for a while, that's all."

She watched his tall figure moving across the office. The office suited him; it contained nothing but the few pieces of furniture he needed, all of them harshly simplified down to their essential purpose, all of them exorbitantly expensive in the quality of materials and the skill of design.

The room looked like a motor—a motor held within the glass case of broad windows. But she noticed one astonishing detail: a vase of jade that stood on top of a filing cabinet. The vase was a solid, dark green stone carved into plain surfaces; the texture of its smooth curves provoked an irresistible desire to touch it. It seemed startling in that office, incongruous with the sternness of the rest: it was a touch of sensuality.

"Colorado is a great place," he said. "It's going to be the greatest in the country. You're not sure that I'm concerned about it? That state's becoming one of my best customers, as you ought to know if you take time to read the reports on your freight traffic."

"I know. I read them."

"I've been thinking of building a plant there in a few years. To save them your transportation charges." He glanced at her. "You'll lose an awful lot of steel freight, if I do."

"Go ahead. I'll be satisfied with carrying your supplies, and the groceries for your workers, and the freight of the factories that will follow you there—and perhaps I won't have time to notice that I've lost your steel. . . . What are you laughing at?"

"It's wonderful."

"What?"

"The way you don't react as everybody else does nowadays.”

"Still, I must admit that for the time being you're the most important single shipper of Taggart Transcontinental."

"Don't you suppose I know it?"

"So I can't understand why Jim—" She stopped.

"—tries his best to harm my business? Because your brother Jim is a fool."

"He is. But it's more than that. There's something worse than stupidity about it."

"Don't waste time trying to figure him out. Let him spit. He's no danger to anyone. People like Jim Taggart just clutter up the world."

"I suppose so."

"Incidentally, what would you have done if I'd said I couldn't deliver your rails sooner?"

"I would have torn up sidings or closed some branch line, any branch line, and I would have used the rail to finish the Rio Norte track on time."

He chuckled. "That's why I'm not worried about Taggart Transcontinental. But you won't have to start getting rail out of old sidings. Not so long as I'm in business."

She thought suddenly that she was wrong about his lack of emotion: the hidden undertone of his manner was enjoyment. She realized that she had always felt a sense of light-hearted relaxation in his presence and known that he shared it. He was the only man she knew to whom she could speak without strain or effort. This, she thought, was a mind she respected, an adversary worth matching. Yet there had always been an odd sense of distance between them, the sense of a closed door; there was an impersonal quality in his manner, something within him that could not be reached.

He had stopped at the window. He stood for a moment, looking out. "Do you know that the first load of rail is being delivered to you today?" he asked, "Of course I know it."

"Come here."

She approached him. He pointed silently. Far in the distance, beyond the mill structures, she saw a string of gondolas waiting on a siding.

The bridge of an overhead crane cut the sky above them. The crane was moving. Its huge magnet held a load of rails glued to a disk by the sole power of contact. There was no trace of sun in the gray spread of clouds, yet the rails glistened, as if the metal caught light out of space. The metal was a greenish-blue. The great chain stopped over a car, descended, jerked in a brief spasm and left the rails in the car. The crane moved back in majestic indifference; it looked like the giant drawing of a geometrical theorem moving above the men and the earth.

They stood at the window, watching silently, intently. She did not speak, until another load of green-blue metal came moving across the sky. Then the first words she said were not about rail, track or an order completed on time. She said, as if greeting a new phenomenon of nature: "Rearden Metal . . ."

He noticed that, but said nothing. He glanced at her, then turned back to the window.

"Hank, this is great."

"Yes."

He said it simply, openly. There was no flattered pleasure in his voice, and no modesty. This, she knew, was a tribute to her, the rarest one person could pay another: the tribute of feeling free to acknowledge one's own greatness, knowing that it is understood.

She said, "When I think of what that metal can do, what it will make possible . . . Hank, this is the most important thing happening in the world today, and none of them know it."

"We know it."

They did not look at each other. They stood watching the crane. On the front of the locomotive in the distance, she could distinguish the letters TT. She could distinguish the rails of the busiest industrial siding of the Taggart system.

"As soon as I can find a plant able to do it," she said, "I'm going to order Diesels made of Rearden Metal."

"You'll need them. How fast do you run your trains on the Rio Norte track?"

"Now? We're lucky if we manage to make twenty miles an hour."

He pointed at the cars. "When that rail is laid, you'll be able to run trains at two hundred and fifty, if you wish."

"I will, in a few years, when we'll have cars of Rearden Metal, which will be half the weight of steel and twice as safe."

"You'll have to look out for the air lines. We're working on a plane of Rearden Metal. It will weigh practically nothing and lift anything.

You'll see the day of long-haul, heavy-freight air traffic."

"I've been thinking of what that metal will do for motors, any motors, and what sort of thing one can design now."

"Have you thought of what it will do for chicken wire? Just plain chicken-wire fences, made of Rearden Metal, that will cost a few pennies a mile and last two hundred years. And kitchenware that will be bought at the dime store and passed on from generation to generation. And ocean liners that one won't be able to dent with a torpedo."

"Did I tell you that I'm having tests made of communications wire of Rearden Metal?"

"I'm making so many tests that I'll never get through showing people what can be done with it and how to do it.”

They spoke of the metal and of the possibilities which they could not exhaust. It was as if they were standing on a mountain top, seeing a limitless plain below and roads open in all directions. But they merely spoke of mathematical figures, of weights, pressures, resistances, costs.

She had forgotten her brother and his National Alliance. She had forgotten every problem, person and event behind her; they had always been clouded in her sight, to be hurried past, to be brushed aside, never final, never quite real. This was reality, she thought, this sense of clear outlines, of purpose, of lightness, of hope. This was the way she had expected to live—she had wanted to spend no hour and take no action that would mean less than this.

She looked at him in the exact moment when he turned to look at her. They stood very close to each other. She saw, in his eyes, that he felt as she did. If joy is the aim and the core of existence, she thought, and if that which has the power to give one joy is always guarded as one's deepest secret, then they had seen each other naked in that moment.

He made a step back and said in a strange tone of dispassionate wonder, "We're a couple of blackguards, aren't we?"

"Why?"

"We haven't any spiritual goals or qualities. All we're after is material things. That's all we care for,"

She looked at him, unable to understand. But he was looking past her, straight ahead, at the crane in the distance. She wished he had not said it. The accusation did not trouble her, she never thought of herself in such terms and she was completely incapable of experiencing a feeling of fundamental guilt. But she felt a vague apprehension which she could not define, the suggestion that there was something of grave consequence in whatever had made him say it, something dangerous to him. He had not said it casually. But there had been no feeling in his voice, neither plea nor shame. He had said it indifferently, as a statement of fact.

Then, as she watched him, the apprehension vanished. He was looking at his mills beyond the window; there was no guilt in his face, no doubt, nothing but the calm of an inviolate self-confidence.

"Dagny" he said, "whatever we are, it's we who move the world and it's we who'll pull it through."

CHAPTER V
THE CLIMAX OF THE D'ANCONIAS

The newspaper was the first thing she noticed. It was clutched tightly in Eddie's hand, as he entered her office. She glanced up at his face: it was tense and bewildered.

"Dagny, are you very busy?"

"Why?"

"I know that you don't like to talk about him. But there's something here I think you ought to see."

She extended her hand silently for the newspaper.

The story on the front page announced that upon taking over the San Sebastian Mines, the government of the People's State of Mexico had discovered that they were worthless—blatantly, totally, hopelessly worthless. There was nothing to justify the five years of work and the millions spent; nothing but empty excavations, laboriously cut. The few traces of copper were not worth the effort of extracting them. No great deposits of metal existed or could be expected to exist there, and there were no indications that could have permitted anyone to be deluded. The government of the People's State of Mexico was holding emergency sessions about their discovery, in an uproar of indignation; they felt that they had been cheated.

Watching her, Eddie knew that Dagny sat looking at the newspaper long after she had finished reading. He knew that he had been right to feel a hint of fear, even though he could not tell what frightened him about that story.

He waited. She raised her head. She did not look at him. Her eyes were fixed, intent in concentration, as if trying to discern something at a great distance.

He said, his voice low, "Francisco is not a fool. Whatever else he may be, no matter what depravity he's sunk to—and I've given up trying to figure out why—he is not a fool. He couldn't have made a mistake of this kind. It is not possible. I don't understand it."

"I'm beginning to."

She sat up, jolted upright by a sudden movement that ran through her body like a shudder. She said: "Phone him at the Wayne-Falkland and tell the bastard that I want to see him."

"Dagny," he said sadly, reproachfully, "it's Frisco d'Anconia."

"It was."

She walked through the early twilight of the city streets to the Wayne-Falkland Hotel. "He says, any time you wish," Eddie had told her. The first lights appeared in a few windows high under the clouds.

The skyscrapers looked like abandoned lighthouses sending feeble, dying signals out into an empty sea where no ships moved any longer.

A few snowflakes came down, past the dark windows of empty stores, to melt in the mud of the sidewalks. A string of red lanterns cut the street, going off into the murky distance.

She wondered why she felt that she wanted to run, that she should be running; no, not down this street; down a green hillside in the blazing sun to the road on the edge of the Hudson, at the foot of the Taggart estate. That was the way she always ran when Eddie yelled, "It's Frisco d'Anconia!" and they both flew down the hill to the car approaching on the road below.

He was the only guest whose arrival was an event in their childhood, their biggest event. The running to meet him had become part of a contest among the three of them. There was a birch tree on the hillside, halfway between the road and the house; Dagny and Eddie tried to get past the tree, before Francisco could race up the hill to meet them. On all the many days of his arrivals, in all the many summers, they never reached the birch tree; Francisco reached it first and stopped them when he was way past it. Francisco always won, as he always won everything.

His parents were old friends of the Taggart family. He was an only son and he was being brought up all over the world; his father, it was said, wanted' him to consider the world as his future domain.

Dagny and Eddie could never be certain of where he would spend his winter; but once a year, every summer, a stern South American tutor brought him for a month to the Taggart estate.

Francisco found it natural that the Taggart children should be chosen as his companions: they were the crown heirs of Taggart Transcontinental, as he was of d'Anconia Copper. "We are the only aristocracy left in the world—the aristocracy of money," he said to Dagny once, when he was fourteen. "It's the only real aristocracy, if people understood what it means, which they don't."

He had a caste system of his own: to him, the Taggart children were not Jim and Dagny, but Dagny and Eddie. He seldom volunteered to notice Jim's existence. Eddie asked him once, "Francisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you?" He answered, "Not yet.

The reason my family has lasted for such a long lime is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one." He pronounced his name as if he wished his listeners to be struck in the face and knighted by the sound of it.

Sebastian d'Anconia, his ancestor, had left Spain many centuries ago, at a time when Spain was the most powerful country on earth and his was one of Spain's proudest figures. He left, because the lord of the Inquisition did not approve of his manner of thinking and suggested, at a court banquet, that he change it. Sebastian d'Anconia threw the contents of his wine glass at the face of the lord of the Inquisition, and escaped before he could be seized. He left behind him his fortune, his estate, his marble palace and the girl he loved—and he sailed to a new world.

His first estate in Argentina was a wooden shack in the foothills of the Andes. The sun blazed like a beacon on the silver coat-of-arms of the d'Anconias, nailed over the door of the shack, while Sebastian d'Anconia dug for the copper of his first mine. He spent years, pickax in hand, breaking rock from sunrise till darkness, with the help of a few stray derelicts: deserters from the armies of his countrymen, escaped convicts, starving Indians.

Fifteen years after he left Spain, Sebastian d'Anconia sent for the girl he loved; she had waited for him. When she arrived, she found the silver coat-of-arms above the entrance of a marble palace, the gardens of a great estate, and mountains slashed by pits of red ore in the distance. He carried her in his arms across the threshold of his home. He looked younger than when she had seen him last.

"My ancestor and yours," Francisco told Dagny, "would have liked each other."

Through the years of her childhood, Dagny lived in the future—in the world she expected to find, where she would not have to feel contempt or boredom. But for one month each year, she was free. For one month, she could live in the present. When she raced down the hill to meet Francisco d'Anconia, it was a release from prison.

"Hi, Slug!"

"Hi, Frisco!"

They had both resented the nicknames, at first. She had asked him angrily, "What do you think you mean?" He had answered, "In case you don't know it, 'Slug' means a great fire in a locomotive firebox."

"Where did you pick that up?" "From the gentlemen along the Taggart iron." He spoke five languages, and he spoke English without a trace of accent, a precise, cultured English deliberately mixed with slang. She had retaliated by calling him Frisco. He had laughed, amused and annoyed. "If you barbarians had to degrade the name of a great city of yours, you could at least refrain from doing it to me." But they had grown to like the nicknames.

It had started in the days of their second summer together, when he was twelve years old and she was ten. That summer, Francisco began vanishing every morning for some purpose nobody could discover. He went off on his bicycle before dawn, and returned in time to appear at the white and crystal table set for lunch on the terrace, his manner courteously punctual and a little too innocent. He laughed, refusing to answer, when Dagny and Eddie questioned him. They tried to follow him once, through the cold, pre-morning darkness, but they gave it up; no one could track him when he did not want to be tracked.

After a while, Mrs. Taggart began, to worry and decided to investigate. She never learned how he had managed to by-pass all the child-labor laws, but she found Francisco working—by an unofficial deal with the dispatcher—as a call boy for Taggart Transcontinental, at a division point ten miles away. The dispatcher was stupefied by her personal visit; he had no idea that his call boy was a house guest of the Taggarts. The boy was known to the local railroad crews as Frankie, and Mrs. Taggart preferred not to enlighten them about his full name.

She merely explained that he was working without his parents' permission and had to quit at once. The dispatcher was sorry to lose him; Frankie, he said, was the best call boy they had ever had. "I'd sure like to keep him on. Maybe we could make a deal with his parents?” he suggested. "I'm afraid not.” said Mrs. Taggart faintly.

"Francisco," she asked, when she brought him home, "what would your father say about this, if he knew?"

"My father would ask whether I was good at the job or not.

That's all he'd want to know."

"Come now, I'm serious."

Francisco was looking at her politely, his courteous manner suggesting centuries of breeding and drawing rooms; but something in his eyes made her feel uncertain about the politeness. "Last winter," he answered, "I shipped out as cabin boy on a cargo steamer that carried d'Anconia copper. My father looked for me for three months, but that's all he asked me when I came back."

"So that's how you spend your winters?" said Jim Taggart. Jim's smile had a touch of triumph, the triumph of finding cause to feel contempt.

"That was last winter," Francisco answered pleasantly, with no change in the innocent, casual tone of his voice. "The winter before last I spent in Madrid, at the home of the Duke of Alba."

"Why did you want to work on a railroad?" asked Dagny.

They stood looking at each other: hers was a glance of admiration, his of mockery; but it was not the mockery of malice—it was the laughter of a salute.

"To learn what it's like, Slug," he answered, "and to tell you that I've had a job with Taggart Transcontinental before you did."

Dagny and Eddie spent their winters trying to master some new skill, in order to astonish Francisco and beat him, for once. They never succeeded. When they showed him how to hit a ball with a bat, a game he had never played before, he watched them for a few minutes, then said, "I think I get the idea. Let me try." He took the bat and sent the ball flying over a line of oak trees far at the end of the field.

When Jim was given a motorboat for his birthday, they all stood on the river landing, watching the lesson, while an instructor showed Jim how to run it. None of them had ever driven a motorboat before. The sparkling white craft, shaped like a bullet, kept staggering clumsily across the water, its wake a long record of shivering, its motor choking with hiccoughs, while the instructor, seated beside him, kept seizing the wheel out of Jim's hands. For no apparent reason, Jim raised his head suddenly and yelled at Francisco, "Do you think you can do it any better?" "I can do it." "Try it!"

When the boat came back and its two occupants stepped out, Francisco slipped behind the wheel. "Wait a moment," he said to the instructor, who remained on the landing. "Let me take a look at this."

Then, before the instructor had time to move, the boat shot out to the middle of the river, as if fired from a gun. It was streaking away before they grasped what they were seeing. As it went shrinking into the distance and sunlight, Dagny's picture of it was three straight lines: its wake, the long shriek of its motor, and the aim of the driver at its wheel.

She noticed the strange expression of her father's face as he looked at the vanishing speedboat. He said nothing; he just stood looking. She remembered that she had seen him look that way once before. It was when he inspected a complex system of pulleys which Francisco, aged twelve, had erected to make an elevator to the top of a rock; he was teaching Dagny and Eddie to dive from the rock into the Hudson. Francisco's notes of calculation were still scattered about on the ground; her father picked them up, looked at them, then asked, "Francisco, how many years of algebra have you had?" "Two years." "Who taught you to do this?" "Oh, that's just something I figured out." She did not know that what her father held on the crumpled sheets of paper was the crude version of a differential equation.

The heirs of Sebastian d'Anconia had been an unbroken line of first sons, who knew how to bear his name. It was a tradition of the family that the man to disgrace them would be the heir who died, leaving the d'Anconia fortune no greater than he had received it. Throughout the generations, that disgrace had not come. An Argentinian legend said that the hand of a d'Anconia had the miraculous power of the saints—only it was not the power to heal, but the power to produce.

The d'Anconia heirs had been men of unusual ability, but none of them could match what Francisco d'Anconia promised to become. It was as if the centuries had sifted the family's qualities through a fine mesh, had discarded the irrelevant, the inconsequential, the weak, and had let nothing through except pure talent; as if chance, for once, had achieved an entity devoid of the accidental.

Francisco could do anything he undertook, he could do it better than anyone else, and he did it without effort. There was no boasting in his manner and consciousness, no thought of comparison. His attitude was not: "I can do it better than you," but simply: "I can do it." What he meant by doing was doing superlatively.

No matter what discipline was required of him by his father's exacting plan for his education, no matter what subject he was ordered to study, Francisco mastered it with effortless amusement. His father adored him, but concealed it carefully, as he concealed the pride of knowing that he was bringing up the most brilliant phenomenon of a brilliant family line.

Francisco, it was said, was to be the climax of the d'Anconias.

"I don't know what sort of motto the d'Anconias have on their family crest," Mrs. Taggart said once, "but I'm sure that Francisco will change it to 'What for?' " It was the first question he asked about any activity proposed to him—and nothing would make him act, if he found no valid answer. He flew through the days of his summer month like a rocket, but if one stopped him in mid-flight, he could always name the purpose of his every random moment. Two things were impossible to him: to stand still or to move aimlessly.

"Let's find out" was the motive he gave to Dagny and Eddie for anything he undertook, or "Let's make it." These were his only forms of enjoyment.

"I can do it," he said, when he was building his elevator, clinging to the side of a cliff, driving metal wedges into rock, his arms moving with an expert's rhythm, drops of blood slipping, unnoticed, from under a bandage on his wrist. "No, we can't take turns, Eddie, you're not big enough yet to handle a hammer. Just cart the weeds off and keep the way clear for me, I'll do the rest. . . . What blood? Oh, that's nothing, just a cut I got yesterday. Dagny, run to the house and bring me a clean bandage."

Jim watched them. They left him alone, but they often saw him standing in the distance, watching Francisco with a peculiar kind of intensity.

He seldom spoke in Francisco's presence. But he would corner Dagny and he would smile derisively, saying, "AH those airs you put on, pretending that you're an iron woman with a mind of her own! You're a spineless dishrag, that's all you are. It's disgusting, the way you let that conceited punk order you about. He can twist you around his little finger. You haven't any pride at all. The way you run when he whistles and wait on him! Why don't you shine his shoes?" "Because he hasn't told me to," she answered.

Francisco could win any game in any local contest. He never entered contests. He could have ruled the junior country club. He never came within sight of their clubhouse, ignoring their eager attempts to enroll the most famous heir in the world. Dagny and Eddie were his only friends. They could not tell whether they owned him or were owned by him completely; it made no difference: either concept made them happy.

The three of them set out every morning on adventures of their own kind. Once, an elderly professor of literature, Mrs. Taggart's friend, saw them on top of a pile in a junk yard, dismantling the carcass of an automobile. He stopped, shook his head and said to Francisco, "A young man of your position ought to spend his time in libraries, absorbing the culture of the world." "What do you think I'm doing?" asked Francisco.

There were no factories in the neighborhood, but Francisco taught Dagny and Eddie to steal rides on Taggart trains to distant towns, where they climbed fences into mill yards or hung on window sills, watching machinery as other children watched movies. "When I run Taggart Transcontinental . . ." Dagny would say at times. "When I run d'Anconia Copper . . ." said Francisco. They never had to explain the rest to each other; they knew each other's goal and motive.

Railroad conductors caught them, once in a while. Then a stationmaster a hundred miles away would telephone Mrs. Taggart: "We've got three young tramps here who say that they are—" "Yes," Mrs. Taggart would sigh, "they are. Please send them back."

"Francisco," Eddie asked him once, as they stood by the tracks of the Taggart station, "you've been just about everywhere in the world.

What's the most important thing on earth?" "This," answered Francisco, pointing to the emblem TT on the front of an engine. He added, "I wish I could have met Nat Taggart."

He noticed Dagny's glance at him. He said nothing else. But minutes later, when they went on through the woods, down a narrow path of damp earth, ferns and sunlight, he said, "Dagny, I'll always bow to a coat-of-arms. I'll always worship the symbols of nobility. Am I not supposed to be an aristocrat? Only I don't give a damn for moth-eaten turrets and tenth-hand unicorns. The coats-of-arms of our day are to be found on billboards and in the ads of popular magazines." "What do you mean?" asked Eddie. "Industrial trademarks, Eddie," he answered.

Francisco was fifteen years old, that summer.

"When I run d'Anconia Copper . . ." "I'm studying mining and mineralogy, because I must be ready for the time when I run d'Anconia Copper. . . ." "I'm studying electrical engineering, because power companies are the best customers of d'Anconia Copper. . . ." "I'm going to study philosophy, because I'll need it to protect d'Anconia Copper. . . ."

"Don't you ever think of anything but d'Anconia Copper?" Jim asked him once.

"No."

"It seems to me that there are other things in the world."

"Let others think about them."

"Isn't that a very selfish attitude?"

"It is."

"What are you after?"

"Money."

"Don't you have enough?"

"In his lifetime, every one of my ancestors raised the production of d'Anconia Copper by about ten per cent. I intend to raise it by one hundred."

"What for?" Jim asked, in sarcastic imitation of Francisco's voice.

"When I die, I hope to go to heaven—whatever the hell that is—and I want to be able to afford the price of admission.”

"Virtue is the price of admission," Jim said haughtily.

"That's what I mean, James. So I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all—that I was a man who made money."

"Any grafter can make money."

"James, you ought to discover some day that words have an exact meaning."

Francisco smiled; it was a smile of radiant mockery. Watching them, Dagny thought suddenly of the difference between Francisco and her brother Jim. Both of them smiled derisively. But Francisco seemed to laugh at things because he saw something much greater. Jim laughed as if he wanted to let nothing remain great.

She noticed the particular quality of Francisco's smile again, one night, when she sat with him and Eddie at a bonfire they had built in the woods. The glow of the fire enclosed them within a fence of broken, moving strips that held pieces of tree trunks, branches and distant stars.

She felt as if there were nothing beyond that fence, nothing but black emptiness, with the hint of some breath-stopping, frightening promise . . . like the future. But the future, she thought, would be like Francisco's smile, there was the key to it, the advance warning of its nature —in his face in the firelight under the pine branches—and suddenly she felt an unbearable happiness, unbearable because it was too full and she had no way to express it. She glanced at Eddie. He was looking at Francisco. In some quiet way of his own, Eddie felt as she did.

"Why do you like Francisco?" she asked him weeks later, when Francisco was gone.

Eddie looked astonished; it had never occurred to him that the feeling could be questioned. He said, "He makes me feel safe."

She said, "He makes me expect excitement and danger."

Francisco was sixteen, next summer, the day when she stood alone with him on the summit of a cliff by the river, their shorts and shirts torn in their climb to the top. They stood looking down the Hudson; they had heard that on clear days one could see New York in the distance. But they saw only a haze made of three different kinds of light merging together: the river, the sky and the sun.

She knelt on a rock, leaning forward, trying to catch some hint of the city, the wind blowing her hair across her eyes. She glanced back over her shoulder—and saw that Francisco was not looking at the distance: he stood looking at her. It was an odd glance, intent and unsmiling. She remained still for a moment, her hands spread flat on the rock, her arms tensed to support the weight of her body; inexplicably, his glance made her aware of her pose, of her shoulder showing through the torn shirt, of her long, scratched, sunburned legs slanting from the rock to the ground. She stood up angrily and backed away from him. And while throwing her head up, resentment in her eyes to meet the sternness in his, while feeling certain that his was a glance of condemnation and hostility, she heard herself asking him, a tone of smiling defiance in her voice: "What do you like about me?"

He laughed; she wondered, aghast, what had made her say it. He answered, "There's what I like about you," pointing to the glittering rails of the Taggart station in the distance.

"It's not mine," she said, disappointed.

"What I like is that it's going to be."

She smiled, conceding his victory by being openly delighted. She did not know why he had looked at her so strangely; but she felt that he had seen some connection, which she could not grasp, between her body and something within her that would give her the strength to rule those rails some day.

He said brusquely, "Let's see if we can see New York," and jerked her by the arm to the edge of the cliff. She thought that he did not notice that he twisted her arm in a peculiar way, holding it down along the length of his side; it made her stand pressed against him, and she felt the warmth of the sun in the skin of his legs against hers. They looked far out into the distance, but they saw nothing ahead except a haze of light.

When Francisco left, that summer, she thought that his departure was; like the crossing of a frontier which ended his childhood: he was to start college, that fall. Her turn would come next. She felt an eager impatience touched by the excitement of fear, as if he had leaped into an unknown danger. It was like the moment, years ago, when she had seen him dive first from a rock into the Hudson, had seen him vanish under the black water and had stood, knowing that he would reappear in an instant and that it would then be her turn to follow.

She dismissed the fear; dangers, to Francisco, were merely opportunities for another brilliant performance; there were no battles he could lose, no enemies to beat him. And then she thought of a remark she had heard a few years earlier. It was a strange remark—and it was strange that the words had remained in her mind, even though she had thought them senseless at the time. The man who said it was an old professor of mathematics, a friend of her father, who came to their country house for just that one visit. She liked his face, and she could still see the peculiar sadness in his eyes when he said to her father one evening, sitting on the terrace in the fading light, pointing to Francisco's figure in the garden, "That boy is vulnerable. He has too great a capacity for joy.

What will he do with it in a world where there's so little occasion for it?"

Francisco went to a great American school, which his father had chosen for him long ago. It was the most distinguished institution of learning left in the world, the Patrick Henry University of Cleveland.

He did not come to visit her in New York, that winter, even though he was only a night's journey away. They did not write to each other, they had never done it. But she knew that he would come back to the country for one summer month.

There were a few times, that winter, when she felt an undefined apprehension: the professor's words kept returning to her mind, as a warning which she could not explain. She dismissed them. When she thought of Francisco, she felt the steadying assurance that she would have another month as an advance against the future, as a proof that the world she saw ahead was real, even though it was not the world of those around her.

"Hi, Slug!"

"Hi, Frisco!"

Standing on the hillside, in the first moment of seeing him again, she grasped suddenly the nature of that world which they, together, held against all others. It was only an instant's pause, she felt her cotton skirt beating in the wind against her knees, felt the sun on her eyelids, and the upward thrust of such an immense relief that she ground her feet into the grass under her sandals, because she thought she would rise, weightless, through the wind.

It was a sudden sense of freedom and safety—because she realized that she knew nothing about the events of his life, had never known and would never need to know. The world of chance—of families, meals, schools, people, of aimless people dragging the load of some unknown guilt—was not theirs, could not change him, could not matter. He and she had never spoken of the things that happened to them, but only of what they thought and of what they would do. . . . She looked at him silently, as if a voice within her were saying: Not the things that are, but the things we'll make . . . We are not to be stopped, you and I . . .

Forgive me the fear, if I thought I could lose you to them—forgive me the doubt, they'll never reach you—I’ll never be afraid for you again. . . .

He, too, stood looking at her for a moment—and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning to point at the birch tree behind him and saying in the tone of their childhood game: "I wish you'd learn to run faster. I'll always have to wait for you."

"Will you wait for me?" she asked gaily.

He answered, without smiling, "Always."

As they went up the hill to the house, he spoke to Eddie, while she walked silently by his side. She felt that there was a new reticence between them which, strangely, was a new kind of intimacy.

She did not question him about the university. Days later, she asked him only whether he liked it.

"They're teaching a lot of drivel nowadays," he answered, "but there are a few courses I like."

"Have you made any friends there?"

"Two."

He told her nothing else.

Jim was approaching his senior year in a college in New York. His studies had given him a manner of odd, quavering belligerence, as if he had found a new weapon. He addressed Francisco once, without provocation, stopping him in the middle of the lawn to say in a tone of aggressive self-righteousness: "I think that now that you've reached college age, you ought to learn something about ideals. It's time to forget your selfish greed and give some thought to your social responsibilities, because I think that all those millions you're going to inherit are not for your personal pleasure, they are a trust for the benefit of the underprivileged and the poor, because I think that the person who doesn't realize this is the most depraved type of human being."

Francisco answered courteously, "It is not advisable, lames, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener."

Dagny asked him, as they walked away, "Are there many men like Jim in the world?"

Francisco laughed. "A great many."

"Don't you mind it?"

"No. I don't have to deal with them. Why do you ask that?"

"Because I think they're dangerous in some way . . . I don't know how . . ."

"Good God, Dagny! Do you expect me to be afraid of an object like James?"

It was days later, when they were alone, walking through the woods on the shore of the river, that she asked: "Francisco, what's the most depraved type of human being?"

"The man without a purpose."

She was looking at the straight shafts of the trees that stood against the great, sudden, shining spread of space beyond. The forest was dim and cool, but the outer branches caught the hot, silver sunrays from the water. She wondered why she enjoyed the sight, when she had never taken any notice of the country around her, why she was so aware of her enjoyment, of her movements, of her body in the process of walking.

She did not want to look at Francisco. She felt that his presence seemed more intensely real when she kept her eyes away from him, almost as if the stressed awareness of herself came from him, like the sunlight from the water.

"You think you're good, don't you?" he asked.

"I always did," she answered defiantly, without turning.

"Well, let me sec you prove it. Let me see how far you'll rise with Taggart Transcontinental. No matter how good you are, I'll expect you to wring everything you've got, trying to be still better. And when you've worn yourself out to reach a goal, I'll expect you to start for another."

"Why do you think that I care to prove anything to you?" she asked.

"Want me to answer?"

"No," she whispered, her eyes fixed upon the other shore of the river in the distance.

She heard him chuckling, and after a while he said, "Dagny, there's nothing of any importance in life—except how well you do your work.

Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard. When you grow up, you'll know what I mean."

"I know it now. But . . . Francisco, why are you and I the only ones who seem to know it?"

"Why should you care about the others?"

"Because I like to understand things, and there's something about people that I can't understand."

"What?"

"Well, I've always been unpopular in school and it didn't bother me, but now I've discovered the reason. It's an impossible kind of reason.

They dislike me, not because I do things badly, but because I do them well. They dislike me because I've always had the best grades in the class. I don't even have to study. I always get A's. Do you suppose I should try to get D's for a change and become the most popular girl in school?"

Francisco stopped, looked at her and slapped her face.

What she felt was contained in a single instant, while the ground rocked under her feet, in a single blast of emotion within her. She knew that she would have killed any other person who struck her; she felt the violent fury which would have given her the strength for it—and as violent a pleasure that Francisco had done it. She felt pleasure from the dull, hot pain in her cheek and from the taste of blood in the corner of her mouth. She felt pleasure in what she suddenly grasped about him, about herself and about his motive.

She braced her feet to stop the dizziness, she held her head straight and stood facing him in the consciousness of a new power, feeling herself his equal for the first time, looking at him with a mocking smile of triumph.

"Did I hurt you as much as that?" she asked.

He looked astonished; the question and the smile were not those of a child. He answered, "Yes—if it pleases you."

"It does."

"Don't ever do that again. Don't crack jokes of that kind."

"Don't be a fool. Whatever made you think that I cared about being popular?"

"When you grow up, you'll understand what sort of unspeakable thing you said."

"I understand it now."

He turned abruptly, took out his handkerchief and dipped it in the water of the river. "Come here," he ordered.

She laughed, stepping back, "Oh no. I want to keep it as it is. I hope it swells terribly. I like it."

He looked at her for a long moment. He said slowly, very earnestly, "Dagny, you're wonderful."

"I thought that you always thought so," she answered, her voice insolently casual.

When she came home, she told her mother that she had cut her lip by falling against a rock. It was the only lie she ever told. She did not do it to protect Francisco; she did it because she felt, for some reason which she could not define, that the incident was a secret too precious to share, Next summer, when Francisco came, she was sixteen. She started running down the hill to meet him, but stopped abruptly. He saw it, stopped, and they stood for a moment, looking at each other across the distance of a long, green slope. It was he who walked up toward her, walked very slowly, while she stood waiting.

When he approached, she smiled innocently, as if unconscious of any contest intended or won.

"You might like to know," she said, "that I have a job on the railroad.

Night operator at Rockdale."

He laughed. "All right, Taggart Transcontinental, now it's a race.

Let's see who'll do greater honor, you—to Nat Taggart, or I—to Sebastian d'Anconia."

That winter, she stripped her life down to the bright simplicity of a geometrical drawing: a few straight lines—to and from the engineering college in the city each day, to and from her job at Rockdale Station each night—and the closed circle of her room, a room littered with diagrams of motors, blueprints of steel structures, and railroad timetables.

Mrs. Taggart watched her daughter in unhappy bewilderment. She could have forgiven all the omissions, but one: Dagny showed no sign of interest in men, no romantic inclination whatever. Mrs. Taggart did not approve of extremes; she had been prepared to contend with an extreme of the opposite kind, if necessary; she found herself thinking that this was worse. She felt embarrassed when she had to admit that her daughter, at seventeen, did not have a single admirer.

"Dagny and Francisco d'Anconia?" she said, smiting ruefully, in answer to the curiosity of her friends. "Oh no, it's not a romance. It's an international industrial cartel of some kind. That's all they seem to care about."

Mrs. Taggart heard James say one evening, in the presence of guests, a peculiar tone of satisfaction in his voice, "Dagny, even though you were named after her, you really look more like Nat Taggart than like that first Dagny Taggart, the famous beauty who was his wife." Mrs. Taggart did not know which offended her most: that James said it or that Dagny accepted it happily as a compliment.

She would never have a chance, thought Mrs. Taggart, to form some conception of her own daughter. Dagny was only a figure hurrying in and out of the apartment, a slim figure in a leather jacket, with a raised collar, a short skirt and long show-girl legs. She walked, cutting across a room, with a masculine, straight-line abruptness, but she had a peculiar grace of motion that was swift, tense and oddly, challengingly feminine.

At times, catching a glimpse of Dagny's face, Mrs. Taggart caught an expression which she could not quite define: it was much more than gaiety, it was the look of such an untouched purity of enjoyment that she found it abnormal, too: no young girl could be so insensitive as to have discovered no sadness in life. Her daughter, she concluded, was incapable of emotion.

"Dagny.," she asked once, "don't you ever want to have a good time?" Dagny looked at her incredulously and answered, "What do you think I'm having?"

The decision to give her daughter a formal debut cost Mrs. Taggart a great deal of anxious thought. She did not know whether she was introducing to New York society Miss Dagny Taggart of the Social Register or the night operator of Rockdale Station; she was inclined to believe it was more truly this last; and she felt certain that Dagny would reject the idea of such an occasion. She was astonished when Dagny accepted it with inexplicable eagerness, for once like a child.

She was astonished again, when she saw Dagny dressed for the party, It was the first feminine dress she had ever worn—a gown of white chiffon with a huge skirt that floated like a cloud. Mrs. Taggart had expected her to look like a preposterous contrast. Dagny looked like a beauty. She seemed both older and more radiantly innocent than usual; standing in front of a mirror, she held her head as Nat Taggart's wife would have held it.

"Dagny," Mrs. Taggart said gently, reproachfully, "do you see how beautiful you can be when you want to?"

"Yes," said Dagny, without any astonishment.

The ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel had been decorated under Mrs. Taggart's direction; she had an artist's taste, and the setting of that evening was her masterpiece. "Dagny, there are things I would like you to learn to notice," she said, "lights, colors, flowers, music.

They are not as negligible as you might think." "I've never thought they're negligible," Dagny answered happily. For once, Mrs. Taggart felt a bond between them; Dagny was looking at her with a child's grateful trust. "They're the things that make life beautiful," said Mrs.

Taggart. "I want this evening to be very beautiful for you, Dagny. The first ball is the most romantic event of one's life."

To Mrs. Taggart, the greatest surprise was the moment when she saw Dagny standing under the lights, looking at the ballroom. This was not a child, not a girl, but a woman of such confident, dangerous power that Mrs. Taggart stared at her with shocked admiration. In an age of casual, cynical, indifferent routine, among people who held themselves as if they were not flesh, but meat—Dagny's bearing seemed almost indecent, because this was the way a woman would have faced a ballroom centuries ago, when the act of displaying one's half-naked body for the admiration of men was an act of daring, when it had meaning, and but one meaning, acknowledged by all as a high adventure. And this—thought Mrs. Taggart, smiling—was the girl she had believed to be devoid of sexual capacity. She felt an immense relief, and a touch of amusement at the thought that a discovery of this kind should make her feel relieved.

The relief lasted only for a few hours. At the end of the evening, she saw Dagny in a corner of the ballroom, sitting on a balustrade as if it were a fence rail, her legs dangling under the chiffon skirt as if she were dressed in slacks. She was talking to a couple of helpless young men, her face contemptuously empty.

Neither Dagny nor Mrs. Taggart said a word when they rode home together. But hours later, on a sudden impulse, Mrs. Taggart went to her daughter's room. Dagny stood by the window, still wearing the white evening gown; it looked like a cloud supporting a body that now seemed too thin for it, a small body with sagging shoulders. Beyond the window, the clouds were gray in the first light of morning.

When Dagny turned, Mrs. Taggart saw only puzzled helplessness in her face; the face was calm, but something about it made Mrs. Taggart wish she had not wished that her daughter should discover sadness.

"Mother, do they think it's exactly in reverse?" she asked.

"What?" asked Mrs. Taggart, bewildered.

"The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around?"

"Darling, what do you mean?"

"There wasn't a person there who enjoyed it," she said, her voice lifeless, "or who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant."

"Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay."

"How? By being stupid?"

"I mean, for instance, didn't you enjoy meeting the young men?"

"What men? There wasn't a man there I couldn't squash ten of."

Days later, sitting at her desk at Rockdale Station, feeling lightheartedly at home, Dagny thought of the party and shrugged in contemptuous reproach at her own disappointment. She looked up: it was spring and there were leaves on the tree branches in the darkness outside; the air was still and warm. She asked herself what she had expected from that party. She did not know. But she felt it again, here, now, as she sat slouched over a battered desk, looking out into the darkness: a sense of expectation without object, rising through her body, slowly, like a warm liquid. She slumped forward across the desk, lazily, feeling neither exhaustion nor desire to work.

When Francisco came, that summer, she told him about the party and about her disappointment. He listened silently, looking at her for the first time with that glance of unmoving mockery which he reserved for others, a glance that seemed to see too much. She felt as if he heard, in her words, more than she knew she told him.

She saw the same glance in his eyes on the evening when she left him too early. They were alone, sitting on the shore of the river.

She had another hour before she was due at Rockdale. There were long, thin strips of fire in the sky, and red sparks floating lazily on the water. He had been silent for a long time, when she rose abruptly and told him that she had to go. He did not try to stop her; he leaned back, his elbows in the grass, and looked at her without moving; his glance seemed to say that he knew her motive. Hurrying angrily up the slope to the house, she wondered what had made her leave; she did not know; it had been a sudden restlessness that came from a feeling she did not identify till now: a feeling of expectation.

Each night, she drove the five miles from the country house to Rockdale. She came back at dawn, slept a few hours and got up with the rest of the household. She felt no desire to sleep. Undressing for bed in the first rays of the sun, she felt a tense, joyous, causeless impatience to face the day that was starting.

She saw Francisco's mocking glance again, across the net of a tennis court. She did not remember the beginning of that game; they had often played tennis together and he had always won. She did not know at what moment she decided that she would win, this time.

When she became aware of it, it was no longer a decision or a wish, but a quiet fury rising within her. She did not know why she had to win; she did not know why it seemed so crucially, urgently necessary; she knew only that she had to and that she would.

It seemed easy to play; it was as if her will had vanished and someone's power were playing for her. She watched Francisco's figure ——a tall, swift figure, the suntan of his arms stressed by his short white shirt sleeves. She felt an arrogant pleasure in seeing the skill of his movements, because this was the thing which she would beat, so that his every expert gesture became her victory, and the brilliant competence of his body became the triumph of hers.

She felt the rising pain of exhaustion—not knowing that it was pain, feeling it only in sudden stabs that made her aware of some part of her body for an instant, to be forgotten in the next: her arm socket—her shoulder blades—her hips, with the white shorts sticking to her skin —the muscles of her legs, when she leaped to meet the ball, but did not remember whether she came down to touch the ground again—her eyelids, when the sky went dark red and the ball came at her through the darkness like a whirling white flame—the thin, hot wire that shot from her ankle, up her back, and went on shooting straight across the air, driving the ball at Francisco's figure. . . . She felt an exultant pleasure—because every stab of pain begun in her body had to end in his, because he was being exhausted as she was—what she did to herself, she was doing it also to him—this was what he felt—this was what she drove him to—it was not her pain that she felt or her body, but his.

In the moments when she saw his face, she saw that he was laughing.

He was looking at her as if he understood. He was playing, not to win, but to make it harder for her—sending his shots wild to make her run —losing points to see her twist her body in an agonizing backhand—standing still, letting her think he would miss, only to let his arm shoot out casually at the last moment and send the ball back with such force that she knew she would miss it. She felt as if she could not move again, not ever—and it was strange to find herself landing suddenly at the other side of the court, smashing the ball in time, smashing it as if she wished it to burst to pieces, as if she wished it were Francisco's face.

Just once more, she thought, even if the next one would crack the bones of her arm . . . Just once more, even if the air which she forced down in gasps past her tight, swollen throat, would be stopped altogether . . . Then she felt nothing, no pain, no muscles, only the thought that she had to beat him, to see him exhausted, to see him collapse, and then she would be free to die in the next moment.

She won. Perhaps it was his laughing that made him lose, for once.

He walked to the net, while she stood still, and threw his racket across, at her feet, as if knowing that this was what she wanted. He walked out of the court and fell down on the grass of the lawn, collapsing, his head on his arm.

She approached him slowly. She stood over him, looking down at his body stretched at her feet, looking at his sweat-drenched shirt and the strands of his hair spilled across his arm. He raised his head. His glance moved slowly up the line of her legs, to her shorts, to her blouse, to her eyes. It was a mocking glance that seemed to see straight through her clothes and through her mind. And it seemed to say that he had won.

She sat at her desk at Rockdale, that night, alone in the old station building, looking at the sky in the window. It was the hour she liked best, when the top panes of the window grew lighter, and the rails of the track outside became threads of blurred silver across the lower panes. She turned off her lamp and watched the vast, soundless motion of light over a motionless earth. Things stood still, not a leaf trembled on the branches, while the sky slowly lost its color and became an expanse that looked like a spread of glowing water.

Her telephone was silent at this hour, almost as if movement had stopped everywhere along the system. She heard steps approaching outside, suddenly, close to the door. Francisco came in. He had never come here before, but she was not astonished to see him.

"What are you doing up at this hour?" she asked.

"I didn't feel like sleeping."

"How did you get here? I didn't hear your car."

"I walked."

Moments passed before she realized that she had not asked him why he came and that she did not want to ask it.

He wandered through the room, looking at the clusters of waybills that hung on the walls, at the calendar with a picture of the Taggart Comet caught in a proud surge of motion toward the onlooker. He seemed casually at home, as if he felt that the place belonged to them, as they always felt wherever they went together. But he did not seem to want to talk. He asked a few questions about her job, then kept silent.

As the light grew outside, movement grew down on the line and the telephone started ringing in the silence. She turned to her work. He sat in a corner, one leg thrown over the arm of his chair, waiting.

She worked swiftly, feeling inordinately clear-headed. She found pleasure in the rapid precision of her hands. She concentrated on the sharp, bright sound of the phone, on the figures of train numbers, car numbers, order numbers. She was conscious of nothing else.

But when a thin sheet of paper fluttered down to the floor and she bent to pick it up, she was suddenly as intently conscious of that particular moment, of herself and her own movement. She noticed her gray linen skirt, the rolled sleeve of her gray blouse and her naked arm reaching down for the paper. She felt her heart stop causelessly in the kind of gasp one feels in moments of anticipation. She picked up the paper and turned back to her desk.

It was almost full daylight. A train went past the station, without stopping. In the purity of the morning light, the long line of car roofs melted into a silver string, and the train seemed suspended above the ground, not quite touching it, going past through the air. The floor of the station trembled., and glass rattled in the windows. She watched the train's flight with a smile of excitement. She glanced at Francisco: he was looking at her, with the same smile.

When the day operator arrived, she turned the station over to him, and they walked out into the morning air. The sun had not yet risen and the air seemed radiant in its stead. She felt no exhaustion. She felt as if she were just getting up.

She started toward her car, but Francisco said, "Let's walk home.

We'll come for the car later."

"All right."

She was not astonished and she did not mind the prospect of walking five miles. It seemed natural; natural to the moment's peculiar reality that was sharply clear, but cut off from everything, immediate, but disconnected, like a bright island in a wall of fog, the heightened, unquestioning reality one feels when one is drunk.

The road led through the woods. They left the highway for an old trail that went twisting among the trees across miles of untouched country. There were no traces of human existence around them. Old ruts, overgrown with grass, made human presence seem more distant, adding the distance of years to the distance of miles. A haze of twilight remained over the ground, but in the breaks between the tree trunks there were leaves that hung in patches of shining green and seemed to light the forest. The leaves hung still. They walked, alone to move through a motionless world. She noticed suddenly that they had not said a word for a long time.

They came to a clearing. It was a small hollow at the bottom of a shaft made of straight rock hillsides. A stream cut across the grass, and tree branches flowed low to the ground, like a curtain of green fluid.

The sound of the water stressed the silence. The distant cut of open sky made the place seem more hidden. Far above, on the crest of a hill, one tree caught the first rays of sunlight.

They stopped and looked at each other. She knew, only when he did it, that she had known he would. He seized her, she felt her lips in his mouth, felt her arms grasping him in violent answer, and knew for the first time how much she had wanted him to do it.

She felt a moment's rebellion and a hint of fear. He held her, pressing the length of his body against hers with a tense, purposeful insistence, his hand moving over her breasts as if he were learning a proprietor's intimacy with her body, a shocking intimacy that needed no consent from her, no permission. She tried to pull herself away, but she only leaned back against his arms long enough to see his face and his smile, the smile that told her she had given him permission long ago. She thought that she must escape; instead, it was she who pulled his head down to find his mouth again.

She knew that fear was useless, that he would do what he wished, that the decision was his, that he left nothing possible to her except the thing she wanted most—to submit. She had no conscious realization of his purpose, her vague knowledge of it was wiped out, she had no power to believe it clearly, in this moment, to believe it about herself, she knew only that she was afraid—yet what she felt was as if she were crying to him: Don't ask me for it—oh, don't ask me—do it!

She braced her feet for an instant, to resist, but his mouth was pressed to hers and they went down to the ground together, never breaking their lips apart. She lay still—as the motionless, then the quivering object of an act which he did simply, unhesitatingly, as of right, the right of the unendurable pleasure it gave them.

He named what it meant to both of them in the first words he spoke afterwards. He said, "We had to learn it from each other." She looked at his long figure stretched on the grass beside her, he wore black slacks and a black shirt, her eyes stopped on the belt pulled tight across his slender waistline, and she felt the stab of an emotion that was like a gasp of pride, pride in her ownership of his body. She lay on her back, looking up at the sky, feeling no desire to move or think or know that there was any time beyond this moment.

When she came home, when she lay in bed, naked because her body had become an unfamiliar possession, too precious for the touch of a nightgown, because it gave her pleasure to feel naked and to feel as if the white sheets of her bed were touched by Francisco's body—when she thought that she would not sleep, because she did not want to rest and lose the most wonderful exhaustion she had ever known—her last thought was of the times when she had wanted to express, but found no way to do it, an instant's knowledge of a feeling greater than happiness, the feeling of one's blessing upon the whole of the earth, the feeling of being in love with the fact that one exists and in this kind of world; she thought that the act she had learned was the way one expressed it. If this was a thought of the gravest importance, she did not know it; nothing could be grave in a universe from which the concept of pain had been wiped out; she was not there to weigh her conclusion; she was asleep, a faint smile on her face, in a silent, luminous room filled with the light of morning.

That summer, she met him in the woods, in hidden corners by the river, on the floor of an abandoned shack, in the cellar of the house.

These were the only times when she learned to feel a sense of beauty—by looking up at old wooden rafters or at the steel plate of an air conditioning machine that whirred tensely, rhythmically above their heads. She wore slacks or cotton summer dresses, yet she was never so feminine as when she stood beside him, sagging in his arms, abandoning herself to anything he wished, in open acknowledgment of his power to reduce her to helplessness by the pleasure he had the power to give her. He taught her every manner of sensuality he could invent. "Isn't it wonderful that our bodies can give us so much pleasure?" he said to her once, quite simply. They were happy and radiantly innocent. They were both incapable of the conception that joy is sin.

They kept their secret from the knowledge of others, not as a shameful guilt, but as a thing that was immaculately theirs, beyond anyone's right of debate or appraisal. She knew the general doctrine on sex, held by people in one form or another, the doctrine that sex was an ugly weakness of man's lower nature, to be condoned regretfully. She experienced an emotion of chastity that made her shrink, not from the desires of her body, but from any contact with the minds who held this doctrine.

That winter, Francisco came to see her in New York, at unpredictable intervals. He would fly down from Cleveland, without warning, twice a week, or he would vanish for months. She would sit on the floor of her room, surrounded by charts and blueprints, she would hear a knock at her door and snap, "I'm busy!" then hear a mocking voice ask, "Are you?" and leap to her feet to throw the door open, to find him standing there. They would go to an apartment he had rented in the city, a small apartment in a quiet neighborhood. "Francisco," she asked him once, in sudden astonishment, "I'm your mistress, am I not?" He laughed. "That's what you are." She felt the pride a woman is supposed to experience at being granted the title of wife.

In the many months of his absence, she never wondered whether he was true to her or not; she knew he was. She knew, even though she was too young to know the reason, that indiscriminate desire and unselective indulgence were possible only to those who regarded sex and themselves as evil.

She knew little about Francisco's life. It was his last year in college; he seldom spoke of it, and she never questioned him. She suspected that he was working too hard, because she saw, at times, the unnaturally bright look of his face, the look of exhilaration that comes from driving one's energy beyond its limit. She laughed at him once, boasting that she was an old employee of Taggart Transcontinental, while he had not started to work for a living. He said, "My father refuses to let me work for d'Anconia Copper until I graduate." "When did you learn to be obedient?" "I must respect his wishes. He is the owner of d'Anconia Copper. . . . He is not, however, the owner of all the copper companies in the world." There was a hint of secret amusement in his smile.

She did not learn the story until the next fall, when he had graduated and returned to New York after a visit to his father in Buenos Aires.

Then he told her that he had taken two courses of education during the last four years: one at the Patrick Henry University, the other in a copper foundry on the outskirts of Cleveland. "I like to learn things for myself," he said. He had started working at the foundry as furnace boy, when he was sixteen—and now, at twenty, he owned it. He acquired his first title of property, with the aid of some inaccuracy about his age, on the day when he received his university diploma, and he sent them both to his father.

He showed her a photograph of the foundry. It was a small, grimy place, disreputable with age, battered by years of a losing struggle; above its entrance gate, like a new flag on the mast of a derelict, hung the sign: d'Anconia Copper.

The public relations man of his father's office in New York had moaned, outraged, "But, Don Francisco, you can't do that! What will the public think? That name on a dump of this kind?" "It's my name,"

Francisco had answered.

When he entered his father's office in Buenos Aires, a large room, severe and modern as a laboratory, with photographs of the properties of d'Anconia Copper as sole ornament on its walls—photographs of the greatest mines, ore docks and foundries in the world—he saw, in the place of honor, facing his father's desk, a photograph of the Cleveland foundry with the new sign above its gate.

His father's eyes moved from the photograph to Francisco's face as he stood in front of the desk.

"Isn't it a little too soon?" his father asked.

"I couldn't have stood four years of nothing but lectures."

"Where did you get the money for your first payment on that property?"

"By playing the New York stock market,"

"What? Who taught you to do that?"

"It is not difficult to judge which industrial ventures will succeed and which won't."

"Where did you get the money to play with?"

"From the allowance you sent me, sir, and from my wages."

"When did you have time to watch the stock market?"

"While I was writing a thesis on the influence—upon subsequent metaphysical systems—of Aristotle's theory of the Immovable Mover."

Francisco's stay in New York was brief, that fall. His father was sending him to Montana as assistant superintendent of a d'Anconia mine. "Oh well," he said to Dagny, smiling, "my father does not think it advisable to let me rise too fast. I would not ask him to take me on faith. If he wants a factual demonstration, I shall comply." In the spring, Francisco came back—as head of the New York office of d'Anconia Copper.

She did not see him often in the next two years. She never knew where he was, in what city or on what continent, the day after she had seen him. He always came to her unexpectedly—and she liked it, because it made him a continuous presence in her life, like the ray of a hidden light that could hit her at any moment.

Whenever she saw him in his office, she thought of his hands as she had seen them on the wheel of a motorboat: he drove his business HI with the same smooth, dangerous, confidently mastered speed. But one small incident remained in her mind as a shock: it did not fit him.

She saw him standing at the window of his office, one evening, looking at the brown winter twilight of the city. He did not move for a long time. His face was hard and tight; it had the look of an emotion she had never believed possible to him: of bitter, helpless anger. He said, "There's something wrong in the world. There's always been. Something no one has ever named or explained." He would not tell her what it was.

When she saw him again, no trace of that incident remained in his manner. It was spring and they stood together on the roof terrace of a restaurant, the light silk of her evening gown blowing in the wind against his tall figure in formal black clothes. They looked at the city.

In the dining room behind them, the sounds of the music were a concert etude by Richard Halley; Halley's name was not known to many, but they had discovered it and they loved his music. Francisco said, "We don't have to look for skyscrapers in the distance, do we?

We've reached them." She smiled and said, "I think we're going past them. . . . I'm almost afraid . . . we're on a speeding elevator of some kind." "Sure. Afraid of what? Let it speed. Why should there be a limit?"

He was twenty-three when his father died and he went to Buenos Aires to take over the d'Anconia estate, now his. She did not see him for three years.

He wrote to her, at first, at random intervals. He wrote about d'Anconia Copper, about the world market, about issues affecting the interests of Taggart Transcontinental. His letters were brief, written by hand, usually at night.

She was not unhappy in his absence. She, too, was making her first steps toward the control of a future kingdom. Among the leaders of industry, her father's friends, she heard it said that one had better watch the young d'Anconia heir; if that copper company had been great before, it would sweep the world now, under what his management promised to become. She smiled, without astonishment. There were moments when she felt a sudden, violent longing for him, but it was only impatience, not pain. She dismissed it, in the confident knowledge that they were both working toward a future that would bring them everything they wanted, including each other. Then his letters stopped.

She was twenty-four on that day of spring when the telephone rang on her desk, in an office of the Taggart Building. "Dagny," said a voice she recognized at once, "I'm at the Wayne-Falkland. Come to have dinner with me tonight. At seven." He said it without greeting, as if they had parted the day before. Because it took her a moment to regain the art of breathing, she realized for the first time how much that voice meant to her. "All right . . . Francisco," she answered. They needed to say nothing else. She thought, replacing the receiver, that his return was natural and as she had always expected it to happen, except that she had not expected her sudden need to pronounce his name or the stab of happiness she felt while pronouncing it.

When she entered his hotel room, that evening, she stopped short.

He stood in the middle of the room, looking at her—and she saw a smile that came slowly, involuntarily, as if he had lost the ability to smile and were astonished that he should regain it. He looked at her incredulously, not quite believing what she was or what he felt. His glance was like a plea, like the cry for help of a man who could never cry. At her entrance, he had started their old salute, he had started to say, "Hi—" but he did not finish it. Instead, after a moment, he said, "You're beautiful, Dagny." He said it as if it hurt him.

"Francisco, I—"

He shook his head, not to let her pronounce the words they had never said to each other—even though they knew that both had said and heard them in that moment.

He approached, he took her in his arms, he kissed her mouth and held her for a long time. When she looked up at his face, he was smiling down at her confidently, derisively. It was a smile that told her he was in control of himself, of her, of everything, and ordered her to forget what she had seen in that first moment. "Hi, Slug," he said.

Feeling certain of nothing except that she must not ask questions, she smiled and said, "Hi, Frisco."

She could have understood any change, but not the things she saw.

There was no sparkle of life in his face, no hint of amusement; the face had become implacable. The plea of his first smile had not been a plea of weakness; he had acquired an air of determination that seemed merciless. He acted like a man who stood straight, under the weight of an unendurable burden. She saw what she could not have believed possible: that there were lines of bitterness in his face and that he looked tortured.

"Dagny, don't be astonished by anything I do," he said, "or by anything I may ever do in the future."

That was the only explanation he granted her, then proceeded to act as if there were nothing to explain.

She could feel no more than a faint anxiety; it was impossible to feel fear for his fate or in his presence. When he laughed, she thought they were back in the woods by the Hudson: he had not changed and never would.

The dinner was served in his room. She found it amusing to face him across a table laid out with the icy formality pertaining to excessive cost, in a hotel room designed as a European palace.

The Wayne-Falkland was the most distinguished hotel left on any continent. Its style of indolent luxury, of velvet drapes, sculptured panels and candlelight, seemed a deliberate contrast to its function: no one could afford its hospitality except men who came to New York on business, to settle transactions involving the world. She noticed that the manner of the waiters who served their dinner suggested a special deference to this particular guest of the hotel, and that Francisco did not notice it. He was indifferently at home. He had long since become accustomed to the fact that he was Senor d'Anconia of d'Anconia Copper.

But she thought it strange that he did not speak about his work. She had expected it to be his only interest, the first thing he would share with her. He did not mention it. He led her to talk, instead, about her job, her progress, and what she felt for Taggart Transcontinental. She spoke of it as she had always spoken to him, in the knowledge that he was the only one who could understand her passionate devotion. He made no comment, but he listened intently.

A waiter had turned on the radio for dinner music; they had paid no attention to it. But suddenly, a crash of sound jarred the room, almost as if a subterranean blast had struck the walls and made them tremble. The shock came, not from the loudness, but from the quality of the sounds. It was Halley's new Concerto, recently written, the Fourth.

They sat in silence, listening to the statement of rebellion—the anthem of the triumph of the great victims who would refuse to accept pain. Francisco listened, looking out at the city.

Without transition or warning, he asked, his voice oddly unstressed, "Dagny, what would you say if I asked you to leave Taggart Transcontinental and let it go to hell, as it will when your brother takes over?"

"What would I say if you asked me to consider the idea of committing suicide?" she answered angrily.

He remained silent.

"Why did you say that?" she snapped. "I didn't think you'd joke about it. It's not like you."

There was no touch of humor in his face. He answered quietly, gravely, "No. Of course. I shouldn't."

She brought herself to question him about his work. He answered the questions; he volunteered nothing. She repeated to him the comments of the industrialists about the brilliant prospects of d'Anconia Copper under his management. "That's true," he said, his voice lifeless.

In sudden anxiety, not knowing what prompted her, she asked, "Francisco, why did you come to New York?"

He answered slowly, "To see a friend who called for me,"

"Business?"

Looking past her, as if answering a thought of his own, a faint smile of bitter amusement on his face, but his voice strangely soft and sad, he answered: "Yes."

It was long past midnight when she awakened in bed by his side.

No sounds came from the city below. The stillness of the room made life seem suspended for a while. Relaxed in happiness and in complete exhaustion, she turned lazily to glance at him. He lay on his back, half propped by a pillow. She saw his profile against the foggy glow of the night sky in the window. He was awake, his eyes were open. He held his mouth closed like a man lying in resignation in unbearable pain, bearing it, making no attempt to hide it.

She was too frightened to move. He felt her glance and turned to her.

He shuddered suddenly, he threw off the blanket, he looked at her naked body, then he fell forward and buried his face between her breasts. He held her shoulders, hanging onto her convulsively. She heard the words, muffled, his mouth pressed to her skin: "I can't give it up! I can't!"

"What?" she whispered.

"You."

"Why should—"

"And everything."

"Why should you give it up?"

"Dagny! Help me to remain. To refuse. Even though he's right!"

She asked evenly, 'To refuse what, Francisco?"

He did not answer, only pressed his face harder against her.

She lay very still, conscious of nothing but a supreme need of caution.

His head on her breast, her hand caressing his hair gently, steadily, she lay looking up at the ceiling of the room, at the sculptured garlands faintly visible in the darkness, and she waited, numb with terror.

He moaned, "It's right, but it's so hard to do! Oh God, it's so hard!"

After a while, he raised his head. He sat up. He had stopped trembling.

"What is it, Francisco?"

"I can't tell you." His voice was simple, open, without attempt to disguise suffering, but it was a voice that obeyed him now. "You're not ready to hear it."

"I want to help you."

"You can't."

"You said, to help you refuse."

"I can't refuse."

"Then let me share it with you."

He shook his head.

He sat looking down at her, as if weighing a question. Then he shook his head again, in answer to himself.

"If I'm not sure I can stand it," he said, and the strange new note in his voice was tenderness, "how could you?"

She said slowly, with effort, trying to keep herself from screaming, "Francisco, I have to know."

"Will you forgive me? I know you're frightened, and it's cruel. But will you do this for me—will you let it go, just let it go, and don't ask me anything?"

«I_"

"That's all you can do for me. Will you?"

"Yes, Francisco."

"Don't be afraid for me. It was just this once. It won't happen to me again. It will become much easier . . . later."

"If I could—"

"No. Go to sleep, dearest,"

It was the first time he had ever used that word.

In the morning, he faced her openly, not avoiding her anxious glance, but saying nothing about it. She saw both serenity and suffering in the calm of his face, an expression like a smile of pain, though he was not smiling. Strangely, it made him look younger. He did not look like a man bearing torture now, but like a man who sees that which makes the torture worth bearing.

She did not question him. Before leaving, she asked only, "When will I see you again?"

He answered, "I don't know. Don't wait for me, Dagny. Next time we meet, you will not want to see me. I will have a reason for the things I'll do. But I can't tell you the reason and you will be right to damn me. I am not committing the contemptible act of asking you to take me on faith. You have to live by your own knowledge and judgment. You will damn me. You will be hurt. Try not to let it hurt you too much. Remember that I told you this and that it was all I could tell you."

She heard nothing from him or about him for a year. When she began to hear gossip and to read newspaper stories, she did not believe, at first, that they referred to Francisco d'Anconia. After a while, she had to believe it.

She read the story of the party he gave on his yacht, in the harbor of Valparaiso; the guests wore bathing suits, and an artificial rain of champagne and flower petals kept falling upon the decks throughout the night.

She read the story of the party he gave at an Algerian desert resort; he built a pavilion of thin sheets of ice and presented every woman guest with an ermine wrap, as a gift to be worn for the occasion, on condition that they remove their wraps, then their evening gowns, then all the rest, in tempo with the melting of the walls.

She read the accounts of the business ventures he undertook at lengthy intervals; the ventures were spectacularly successful and ruined his competitors, but he indulged in them as in an occasional sport, staging a sudden raid, then vanishing from the industrial scene for a year or two, leaving d'Anconia Copper to the management of his employees.

She read the interview where he said, "Why should I wish to make money? I have enough to permit three generations of descendants to have as good a time as I'm having."

She saw him once, at a reception given by an ambassador in New York. He bowed to her courteously, he smiled, and he looked at her with a glance in which no past existed. She drew him aside. She said only, "Francisco, why?" "Why—what?" he asked. She turned away. "I warned you," he said. She did not try to see him again.

She survived it. She was able to survive it, because she did not believe in suffering. She faced with astonished indignation the ugly fact of feeling pain, and refused to let it matter. Suffering was a senseless accident, it was not part of life as she saw it. She would not allow pain to become important. She had no name for the kind of resistance she offered, for the emotion from which the resistance came; but the words that stood as its equivalent in her mind were: It does not count —it is not to be taken seriously. She knew these were the words, even in the moments when there was nothing left within her but screaming and she wished she could lose the faculty of consciousness so that it would not tell her that what could not be true was true. Not to be taken seriously—an immovable certainty within her kept repeating—pain and ugliness are never to be taken seriously.

She fought it. She recovered. Years helped her to reach the day when she could face her memories indifferently, then the day when she felt no necessity to face them. It was finished and of no concern to her any longer.

There had been no other men in her life. She did not know whether this had made her unhappy. She had had no time to know. She found the clean, brilliant sense of life as she wanted it—in her work. Once, Francisco had given her the same sense, a feeling that belonged with her work and in her world. The men she had met since were like the men she met at her first ball.

She had won the battle against her memories. But one form of torture remained, untouched by the years, the torture of the word "why?"

Whatever the tragedy he met, why had Francisco taken the ugliest way of escape, as ignoble as the way of some cheap alcoholic? The boy she had known could not have become a useless coward. An incomparable mind could not turn its ingenuity to the invention of melting ballrooms. Yet he had and did, and there was no explanation to make it conceivable and to let her forget him in peace. She could not doubt the fact of what he had been; she could not doubt the fact of what he had become; yet one made the other impossible. At times, she almost doubted her own rationality or the existence of any rationality anywhere; but this was a doubt which she did not permit to anyone. Yet there was no explanation, no reason, no clue to any conceivable reason —and in all the days of ten years she had found no hint of an answer.

No, she thought—as she walked through the gray twilight, past the windows of abandoned shops, to the Wayne-Falkland Hotel—no, there could be no answer. She would not seek it. It did not matter now.

The remnant of violence, the emotion rising as a thin trembling within her, was not for the man she was going to see; it was a cry of protest against a sacrilege—against the destruction of what had been greatness.

In a break between buildings, she saw the towers of the Wayne Falkland. She felt a slight jolt, in her lungs and legs, that stopped her for an instant. Then she walked on evenly.

By the time she walked through the marble lobby, to the elevator, then down the wide, velvet-carpeted, soundless corridors of the Wayne Falkland, she felt nothing but a cold anger that grew colder with every step.

She was certain of the anger when she knocked at his door. She heard his voice, answering, "Come in." She jerked the door open and entered.

Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Anconia sat on the floor, playing marbles.

Nobody ever wondered whether Francisco d'Anconia was good-looking or not; it seemed irrelevant; when he entered a room, it was impossible to look at anyone else. His tall, slender figure had an air of distinction, too authentic to be modern, and he moved as if he had a cape floating behind him in the wind. People explained him by saying that he had the vitality of a healthy animal, but they knew dimly that that was not correct. He had the vitality of a healthy human being, a thing so rare that no one could identify it. He had the power of certainty.

Nobody described his appearance as Latin, yet the word applied to him, not in its present, but in its original sense, not pertaining to Spain, but to ancient Rome. His body seemed designed as an exercise in consistency of style, a style made of gauntness, of tight flesh, long legs and swift movements. His features had the fine precision of sculpture. His hair was black and straight, swept back. The suntan of his skin intensified the startling color of his eyes: they were a pure, clear blue. His face was open, its rapid changes of expression reflecting whatever he felt, as if he had nothing to hide. The blue eyes were still and changeless, never giving a hint of what he thought.

He sat on the floor of his drawing room, dressed in sleeping pajamas of thin black silk. The marbles spread on the carpet around him were made of the semi-precious stones of his native country: carnelian and rock crystal. He did not rise when Dagny entered. He sat looking up at her, and a crystal marble fell like a teardrop out of his hand. He smiled, the unchanged, insolent, brilliant smile of his childhood.

"Hi, Slug!"

She heard herself answering, irresistibly, helplessly, happily: "Hi, Frisco!"

She was looking at his face; it was the face she had known. It bore no mark of the kind of life he had led, nor of what she had seen on their last night together. There was no sign of tragedy, no bitterness, no tension—only the radiant mockery, matured and stressed, the look of dangerously unpredictable amusement, and the great, guiltless serenity of spirit. But this, she thought, was impossible; this was more shocking than all the rest.

His eyes were studying her: the battered coat thrown open, half slipping off her shoulders, and the slender body in a gray suit that looked like an office uniform.

"If you came here dressed like this in order not to let me notice how lovely you are," he said, "you miscalculated. You're lovely. I wish I could tell you what a relief it is to see a face that's intelligent though a woman's. But you don't want to hear it. That's not what you came here for."

The words were improper in so many ways, yet were said so lightly that they brought her back to reality, to anger and to the purpose of her visit. She remained standing, looking down at him, her face blank, refusing him any recognition of the personal, even of its power to offend her. She said, "I came here to ask you a question."

"Go ahead."

"When you told those reporters that you came to New York to witness the farce, which farce did you mean?"

He laughed aloud, like a man who seldom finds a chance to enjoy the unexpected.

"That's what I like about you, Dagny. There are seven million people in the city of New York, at present. Out of seven million people, you are the only one to whom it could have occurred that I wasn't talking about the Vail divorce scandal."

"What were you talking about?"

"What alternative occurred to you?"

"The San Sebastian disaster."

"That's much more amusing than the Vail divorce scandal, isn't it?"

She said in the solemn, merciless tone of a prosecutor, "You did it consciously, cold-bloodedly and with full intention."

"Don't you think it would be better if you took your coat off and sat down?"

She knew she had made a mistake by betraying too much intensity.

She turned coldly, removed her coat and threw it aside. He did not rise to help her. She sat down in an armchair. He remained on the floor, at some distance, but it seemed as if he were sitting at her feet.

"What was it I did with full intention?" he asked.

"The entire San Sebastian swindle."

"What was my full intention?"

"That is what I want to know."

He chuckled, as if she had asked him to explain in conversation a complex science requiring a lifetime of study.

"You knew that the San Sebastian mines were worthless," she said.

"You knew it before you began the whole wretched business."

"Then why did I begin it?"

"Don't start telling me that you gained nothing. I know it. I know you lost fifteen million dollars of your own money. Yet it was done on purpose."

"Can you think of a motive that would prompt me to do it?"

"No. It's inconceivable."

"Is it? You assume that I have a great mind, a great knowledge and a great productive ability, so that anything I undertake must necessarily be successful. And then you claim that I had no desire to put out my best effort for the People's State of Mexico. Inconceivable, isn't it?"

"You knew, before you bought that property, that Mexico was in the hands of a looters' government. You didn't have to start a mining project for them."

"No, I didn't have to."

"You didn't give a damn about that Mexican government, one way or another, because—"

"You're wrong about that."

"—because you knew they'd seize those mines sooner or later. What you were after is your American stockholders."

"That's true." He was looking straight at her, he was not smiling, his face was earnest. He added, "That's part of the truth."

"What's the rest?"

"It was not all I was after."

"What else?"

"That's for you to figure out."

"I came here because I wanted you to know that I am beginning to understand your purpose."

He smiled. "If you did, you wouldn't have come here."

"That's true. I don't understand and probably never shall. I am merely beginning to see part of it."

"Which part?"

"You had exhausted every other form of depravity and sought a new thrill by swindling people like Jim and his friends, in order to watch them squirm. I don't know what sort of corruption could make anyone enjoy that, but that's what you came to New York to see, at the right time."

"They certainly provided a spectacle of squirming on the grand scale. Your brother James in particular."

"They're rotten fools, but in this case their only crime was that they trusted you. They trusted your name and your honor."

Again, she saw the look of earnestness and again knew with certainty that it was genuine, when he said, "Yes. They did. I know it."

"And do you find it amusing?"

"No. I don't find it amusing at all."

He had continued playing with his marbles, absently, indifferently, taking a shot once in a while. She noticed suddenly the faultless accuracy of his aim, the skill of his hands. He merely flicked his wrist and sent a drop of stone shooting across the carpet to click sharply against another drop. She thought of his childhood and of the predictions that anything he did would be done superlatively.

"No," he said, "I don't find it amusing. Your brother James and his friends knew nothing about the copper-mining industry. They knew nothing about making money. They did not think it necessary to learn. They considered knowledge superfluous and judgment inessential. They observed that there I was in the world and that I made it my honor to know. They thought they could trust my honor. One does not betray a trust of this kind, does one?”

"Then you did betray it intentionally?"

"That's for you to decide. It was you who spoke about their trust and my honor. I don't think in such terms any longer. . . ." He shrugged, adding, "I don't give a damn about your brother James and his friends. Their theory was not new, it has worked for centuries. But it wasn't foolproof. There is just one point that they overlooked. They thought it was safe to ride on my brain, because they assumed that the goal of my journey was wealth. All their calculations rested on the premise that I wanted to make money. What if I didn't?"

"If you didn't, what did you want?"

"They never asked me that. Not to inquire about my aims, motives or desires is an essential part of their theory."

"If you didn't want to make money, what possible motive could you have had?"

"Any number of them. For instance, to spend it."

"To spend money on a certain, total failure?"

"How was I to know that those mines were a certain, total failure?"

"How could you help knowing it?"

"Quite simply. By giving it no thought."

"You started that project without giving it any thought?"

"No, not exactly. But suppose I slipped up? I'm only human. I made a mistake. I failed. I made a bad job of it." He flicked his wrist; a crystal marble shot, sparkling, across the floor and cracked violently against a brown one at the other end of the room.

"I don't believe it," she said.

"No? But haven't I the right to be what is now accepted as human?

Should I pay for everybody's mistakes and never be permitted one of my own?"

"That's not like you."

"No?" He stretched himself full-length on the carpet, lazily, relaxing.

"Did you intend me to notice that if you think I did it on purpose, then you still give me credit for having a purpose? You're still unable to accept me as a bum?"

She closed her eyes. She heard him laughing; it was the gayest sound hi the world. She opened her eyes hastily; but there was no hint of cruelty in his face, only pure laughter.

"My motive, Dagny? You don't think that it's the simplest one of all—the spur of the moment?"

No, she thought, no, that's not true; not if he laughed like that, not if he looked as he did. The capacity for unclouded enjoyment, she thought, does not belong to irresponsible fools; an inviolate peace of spirit is not the achievement of a drifter; to be able to laugh like that is the end result of the most profound, most solemn thinking.

Almost dispassionately, looking at his figure stretched on the carpet at her feet, she observed what memory it brought back to her: the black pajamas stressed the long lines of his body, the open collar showed a smooth, young, sunburned skin—and she thought of the figure in black slacks and shirt stretched beside her on the grass at sunrise. She had felt pride then, the pride of knowing that she owned his body; she still felt it. She remembered suddenly, specifically, the excessive acts of their intimacy; the memory should have been offensive to her now, but wasn't. It was still pride, without regret or hope, an emotion that had no power to reach her and that she had no power to destroy.

Unaccountably, by an association of feeling that astonished her, she remembered what had conveyed to her recently the same sense of consummate joy as his.

"Francisco," she heard herself saying softly, "we both loved the music of Richard Halley. . . ."

"I still love it."

"Have you ever met him?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Do you happen to know whether he has written a Fifth Concerto?"

He remained perfectly still. She had thought him impervious to shock; he wasn't. But she could not attempt to guess why of all the things she had said, this should be the first to reach him. It was only an instant; then he asked evenly, "What makes you think he has?"

"Well, has he?"

"You know that there are only four Halley Concertos."

"Yes. But I wondered whether he had written another one."

"He has stopped writing."

"I know."

"Then what made you ask that?"

"Just an idle thought. What is he doing now? Where is he?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen him for a long time. What made you think that there was a Fifth Concerto?"

"I didn't say there was. I merely wondered about it."

"Why did you think of Richard Halley just now?"

"Because"—she felt her control cracking a little—"because my mind can't make the leap from Richard Halley's music to . . . to Mrs.

Gilbert Vail."

He laughed, relieved. "Oh, that? . . . Incidentally, if you've been following my publicity, have you noticed a funny little discrepancy in the story of Mrs. Gilbert Vail?"

"I don't read the stuff."

"You should. She gave such a beautiful description of last New Year's Eve, which we spent together in my villa in the Andes. The moonlight on the mountain peaks, and the blood-red flowers hanging on vines in the open windows. See anything wrong in the picture?"

She said quietly, "It's I who should ask you that, and I'm not going to."

"Oh, I see nothing wrong—except that last New Year's Eve I was in El Paso, Texas, presiding at the opening of the San Sebastian Line of Taggart Transcontinental, as you should remember, even if you didn't choose to be present on the occasion. I had my picture taken with my arms around your brother James and the Senor Orren Boyle."

She gasped, remembering that this was true, remembering also that she had seen Mrs. Vail's story in the newspapers.

"Francisco, what . . . what does that mean?"

He chuckled. "Draw your own conclusions. . . . Dagny"—his face was serious—"why did you think of Halley writing a Fifth Concerto?

Why not a new symphony or opera? Why specifically a concerto?"

"Why does that disturb you?"

"It doesn't." He added softly, "I still love his music, Dagny." Then he spoke lightly again. "But it belonged to another age. Our age provides a different kind of entertainment."

He rolled over on his back and lay with his hands crossed under his head, looking up as if he were watching the scenes of a movie farce unrolling on the ceiling.

"Dagny, didn't you enjoy the spectacle of the behavior of the People's State of Mexico in regard to the San Sebastian Mines? Did you read their government's speeches and the editorials in their newspapers?

They're saying that I am an unscrupulous cheat who has defrauded them. They expected to have a successful mining concern to seize. I had no right to disappoint them like that. Did you read about the scabby little bureaucrat who wanted them to sue me?"

He laughed, lying flat on his back; his arms were thrown wide on the carpet, forming a cross with his body; he seemed disarmed, relaxed and young.

"It was worth whatever it's cost me. I could afford the price of that show. If I had staged it intentionally, I would have beaten the record of the Emperor Nero. What's burning a city—compared to tearing the lid off hell and letting men see it?"

He raised himself, picked up a few marbles and sat shaking them absently in his hand; they clicked with the soft, clear sound of good stone. She realized suddenly that playing with those marbles was not a deliberate affectation on his part; it was restlessness; he could not remain inactive for long.

"The government of the People's State of Mexico has issued a proclamation," he said, "asking the people to be patient and put up with hardships just a little longer. It seems that the copper fortune of the San Sebastian Mines was part of the plans of the central planning council.

It was to raise everybody's standard of living and provide a roast of pork every Sunday for every man, woman, child and abortion in the People's State of Mexico. Now the planners are asking their people not to blame the government, but to blame the depravity of the rich, because I turned out to be an irresponsible playboy, instead of the greedy capitalist I was expected to be. How were they to know, they're asking, that I would let them down? Well, true enough. How were they to know it?"

She noticed the way he fingered the marbles in his hand. He was not conscious of it, he was looking off into some grim distance, but she felt certain that the action was a relief to him, perhaps as a contrast. His fingers were moving slowly, feeling the texture of the stones with sensual enjoyment. Instead of finding it crude, she found it strangely attractive—as if, she thought suddenly, as if sensuality were not physical at all, but came from a fine discrimination of the spirit.

"And that's not all they didn't know," he said. "They're in for some more knowledge. There's that housing settlement for the workers of San Sebastian. It cost eight million dollars. Steel-frame houses, with plumbing, electricity and refrigeration. Also a school, a church, a hospital and a movie theater. A settlement built for people who had lived in hovels made of driftwood and stray tin cans. My reward for building it was to be the privilege of escaping with my skin, a special concession due to the accident of my not being a native of the People's State of Mexico. That workers' settlement was also part of their plans.

A model example of progressive State housing. Well, those steel-frame houses arc mainly cardboard, with a coating of good imitation shellac, They won't stand another year. The plumbing pipes—as well as most of our mining equipment—were purchased from the dealers whose main source of supply are the city dumps of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. I'd give those pipes another five months, and the electric system about six. The wonderful roads we graded up four thousand feet of rock for the People's State of Mexico, will not last beyond a couple of winters: they're cheap cement without foundation, and the bracing at the bad turns is just painted clapboard. Wait for one good mountain slide. The church, I think, will stand. They'll need it."

"Francisco," she whispered, "did you do it on purpose?"

He raised his head; she was startled to see that his face had a look of infinite weariness. "Whether I did it on purpose," he said, "or through neglect, or through stupidity, don't you understand that that doesn't make any difference? The same element was missing."

She was trembling. Against all her decisions and control, she cried, "Francisco! If you see what's happening in the world, if you understand all the things you said, you can't laugh about it! You, of all men, you should fight them!"

"Whom?"

"The looters, and those who make world-looting possible. The Mexican planners and their kind."

His smile had a dangerous edge. "No, my dear. It's you that I have to fight."

She looked at him blankly. "What are you trying to say?"

"I am saying that the workers' settlement of San Sebastian cost eight million dollars," he answered with slow emphasis, his voice hard. "The price paid for those cardboard houses was the price that could have bought steel structures. So was the price paid for every other item. That money went to men who grow rich by such methods. Such men do not remain rich for long. The money will go into channels which will carry it, not to the most productive, but to the most corrupt. By the standards of our time, the man who has the least to offer is the man who wins. That money will vanish in projects such as the San Sebastian Mines,"

She asked with effort, "Is that what you're after?"

"Yes."

"Is that what you find amusing?"

"Yes."

"I am thinking of your name," she said, while another part of her mind was crying to her that reproaches were useless. "It was a tradition of your family that a d'Anconia always left a fortune greater than the one he received."

"Oh yes, my ancestors had a remarkable ability for doing the right thing at the right time—and for making the right investments. Of course, 'investment' is a relative term. It depends on what you wish to accomplish. For instance, look at San Sebastian. It cost me fifteen million dollars, but these fifteen million wiped out forty million belonging to Taggart Transcontinental, thirty-five million belonging to stockholders such as James Taggart and Orren Boyle, and hundreds of millions which will be lost in secondary consequences. That's not a bad return on an investment, is it, Dagny?"

She was sitting straight. "Do you realize what you're saying?"

"Oh, fully! Shall I beat you to it and name the consequences you were going to reproach me for? First, I don't think that Taggart Transcontinental will recover from its loss on that preposterous San Sebastian Line. You think it will, but it won't. Second, the San Sebastian helped your brother James to destroy the Phoenix-Durango, which was about the only good railroad left anywhere."

"You realize all that?"

"And a great deal more."

"Do you"—she did not know why she had to say it, except that the memory of the face with the dark, violent eyes seemed to stare at her—

"do you know Ellis Wyatt?"

"Sure."

"Do you know what this might do to him?"

"Yes. He's the one who's going to be wiped out next."

"Do you . . . find that . . . amusing?"

"Much more amusing than the ruin of the Mexican planners."

She stood up. She had called him corrupt for years; she had feared it, she had thought about it, she had tried to forget it and never think of it again; but she had never suspected how far the corruption had gone.

She was not looking at him; she did not know that she was saying it aloud, quoting his words of the past: ". . . who'll do greater honor, you—to Nat Taggart, or I—to Sebastian d'Anconia . . ."

"But didn't you realize that I named those mines in honor of my great ancestor? I think it was a tribute which he would have liked."

It took her a moment to recover her eyesight; she had never known what was meant by blasphemy or what one felt on encountering it; she knew it now.

He had risen and stood courteously, smiling down at her; it was a cold smile, impersonal and unrevealing.

She was trembling, but it did not matter. She did not care what he saw or guessed or laughed at.

"I came here because I wanted to know the reason for what you've done with your life," she said tonelessly, without anger.

"I have told you the reason," he answered gravely, "but you don't want to believe it."

"I kept seeing you as you were. I couldn't forget it. And that you should have become what you are—that does not belong in a rational universe."

"No? And the world as you see it around you, does?"

"You were not the kind of man who gets broken by any kind of world"

"True."

"Then—why?"

He shrugged. "Who is John Galt?"

"Oh, don't use gutter language!"

He glanced at her. His lips held the hint of a smile, but his eyes were still, earnest and, for an instant, disturbingly perceptive.

"Why?" she repeated.

He answered, as he had answered in the night, in this hotel, ten years ago, "You're not ready to hear it."

He did not follow her to the door. She had put her hand on the doorknob when she turned—and stopped. He stood across the room, looking at her; it was a glance directed at her whole person; she knew its meaning and it held her motionless, "I still want to sleep with you," he said. "But I am not a man who is happy enough to do it."

"Not happy enough?" she repeated in complete bewilderment.

He laughed. "Is it proper that that should be the first thing you'd answer?" He waited, but she remained silent. "You want it, too, don't you?"

She was about to answer "No," but realized that the truth was worse than that. "Yes," she answered coldly, "but it doesn't matter to me that I want it."

He smiled, in open appreciation, acknowledging the strength she had needed to say it.

But he was not smiling when he said, as she opened the door to leave, "You have a great deal of courage, Dagny. Some day, you'll have enough of it."

"Of what? Courage?"

But he did not answer.

CHAPTER VI
THE NON-COMMERCIAL

Rearden pressed his forehead to the mirror and tried not to think. That was the only way he could go through with it, he told himself.

He concentrated on the relief of the mirror's cooling touch, wondering how one went about forcing one's mind into blankness, particularly after a lifetime lived on the axiom that the constant, clearest, most ruthless function of his rational faculty was his foremost duty. He wondered why no effort had ever seemed beyond his capacity, yet now he could not scrape up the strength to stick a few black pearl studs into his starched white shirt front.

This was his wedding anniversary and he had known for three months that the party would take place tonight, as Lillian wished.

He had promised it to her, safe in the knowledge that the party was a long way off and that he would attend to it, when the time came, as he attended to every duty on his overloaded schedule. Then, during three months of eighteen-hour workdays, he had forgotten it happily—until half an hour ago, when, long past dinner time, his secretary had entered his office and said firmly, "Your party, Mr. Rearden." He had cried, "Good God!" leaping to his feet; he had hurried home, rushed up the stairs, started tearing his clothes off and gone through the routine of dressing, conscious only of the need to hurry, not of the purpose.

When the full realization of the purpose struck him like a sudden blow, he stopped.

"You don't care for anything but business." He had heard it all his life, pronounced as a verdict of damnation. He had always known that business was regarded as some sort of secret, shameful cult, which one did not impose on innocent laymen, that people thought of it as of an ugly necessity, to be performed but never mentioned, that to talk shop was an offense against higher sensibilities, that just as one washed machine grease off one's hands before coming home, so one was supposed to wash the stain of business off one's mind before entering a drawing room. He had never held that creed, but he had accepted it as natural that his family should hold it. He took it for granted—wordlessly, in the manner of a feeling absorbed in childhood, left unquestioned and unnamed—that he had dedicated himself, like the martyr of some dark religion, to the service of a faith which was his passionate love, but which made him an outcast among men, whose sympathy he was not to expect.

He had accepted the tenet that it was his duty to give his wife some form of existence unrelated to business. But he had never found the capacity to do it or even to experience a sense of guilt. He could neither force himself to change nor blame her if she chose to condemn him.

He had given Lillian none of his time for months—:no, he thought, for years; for the eight years of their marriage. He had no interest to spare for her interests, not even enough to learn just what they were.

She had a large circle of friends, and he had heard it said that their names represented the heart of the country's culture, but he had never had time to meet them or even to acknowledge their fame by knowing what achievements had earned it. He knew only that he often saw their names on the magazine covers on newsstands. If Lillian resented his attitude, he thought, she was right. If her manner toward him was objectionable, he deserved it. If his family called him heartless, it was true.

He had never spared himself in any issue. When a problem came up at the mills, his first concern was to discover what error he had made; he did not search for anyone's fault but his own; it was of himself that he demanded perfection. He would grant himself no mercy now; he took the blame. But at the mills, it prompted him to action in an immediate impulse to correct the error; now, it had no effect. . . . Just a few more minutes, he thought, standing against the mirror, his eyes closed.

He could not stop the thing in his mind that went on throwing words at him; it was like trying to plug a broken hydrant with his bare hands.

Stinging jets, part words, part pictures, kept shooting at his brain. . . .

Hours of it, he thought, hours to spend watching the eyes of the guests getting heavy with boredom if they were sober or glazing into an imbecile stare if they weren't, and pretend that he noticed neither, and strain to think of something to say to them, when he had nothing to say —while he needed hours of inquiry to find a successor for the superintendent of his rolling mills who had resigned suddenly, without explanation—he had to do it at once—men of that sort were so hard to find—and if anything happened to break the flow of the rolling mills—it was the Taggart rail that was being rolled. . . . He remembered the silent reproach, the look of accusation, long-bearing patience and scorn, which he always saw in the eyes of his family when they caught some evidence of his passion for his business—and the futility of his silence, of his hope that they would not think Rearden Steel meant as much to him as it did—like a drunkard pretending indifference to liquor, among people who watch him with the scornful amusement of their full knowledge of his shameful weakness. . . . "I heard you last night coming home at two in the morning, where were you?" his mother saying to him at the dinner table, and Lillian answering, "Why, at the mills, of course," as another wife would say, "At the corner saloon." . . . Or Lillian asking him, the hint of a wise half-smile on her face, "What were you doing in New York yesterday?" "It was a banquet with the boys." "Business?" "Yes." "Of course"—and Lillian turning away, nothing more, except the shameful realization that he had almost hoped she would think he had attended some sort of obscene stag party. . . .

An ore carrier had gone down in a storm on Lake Michigan, with thousands of tons of Rearden ore—those boats were falling apart—if he didn't take it upon himself to help them obtain the replacements they needed, the owners of the line would go bankrupt, and there was no other line left in operation on Lake Michigan. . . . "That nook?" said Lillian, pointing to an arrangement of settees and coffee tables in their drawing room. "Why, no, Henry, it's not new, but I suppose I should feel flattered that three weeks is all it took you to notice it. It's my own adaptation of the morning room of a famous French palace —but things like that can't possibly interest you, darling, there's no stock market quotation on them, none whatever." . . . The order for copper, which he had placed six months ago, had not been delivered, the promised date had been postponed three tunes—"We can't help it, Mr. Rearden"—he had to find another company to deal with, the supply of copper was becoming increasingly uncertain. . . . Philip did not smile, when he looked up in the midst of a speech he was making to some friend of their mother's, about some organization he had joined, but there was something that suggested a smile of superiority in the loose muscles of his face when he said, "No, you wouldn't care for this, it's not business, Henry, not business at all, it's a strictly non-commercial endeavor." . . . That contractor in Detroit, with the job of rebuilding a large factory, was considering structural shapes of Rearden Metal —he should fly to Detroit and speak to him in person—he should have done it a week ago—he could have done it tonight. . . . "You're not listening," said his mother at the breakfast table, when his mind wandered to the current coal price index, while she was telling him about the dream she'd had last night. "You've never listened to a living soul.

You're not interested in anything but yourself. You don't give a damn about people, not about a single human creature on God's earth."

. . . The typed pages lying on the desk in his office were a report on the tests of an airplane motor made of Rearden Metal—perhaps of all things on earth, the one he wanted most at this moment was to read it—it had lain on his desk, untouched, for three days, he had had no time for it—why didn't he do it now and—

He shook his head violently, opening his eyes, stepping back from the mirror.

He tried to reach for the shirt studs. He saw his hand reaching, instead, for the pile of mail on his dresser. It was mail picked as urgent, it had to be read tonight, but he had had no time to read it in the office.

His secretary had stuffed it into his pocket on his way out. He had thrown it there while undressing.

A newspaper clipping fluttered down to the floor. It was an editorial which his secretary had marked with an angry stash in red pencil. It was entitled "Equalization of Opportunity." He had to read it: there had been too much talk about this issue in the last three months, ominously too much, He read it, with the sound of voices and forced laughter coming from downstairs, reminding him that the guests were arriving, that the party had started and that he would face the bitter, reproachful glances of his family when he came down.

The editorial said that at a time of dwindling production, shrinking markets and vanishing opportunities to make a living, it was unfair to let one man hoard several business enterprises, while others had none; it was destructive to let a few corner all the resources, leaving others no chance; competition was essential to society, and it was society's duty to see that no competitor ever rose beyond the range of anybody who wanted to compete with him. The editorial predicted the passage of a bill which had been proposed, a bill forbidding any person or corporation to own more than one business concern.

Wesley Mouch, his Washington man, had told Rearden not to worry; the fight would be stiff, he had said, but the bill would be defeated.

Rearden understood nothing about that kind of fight. He left it to Mouch and his staff. He could barely find time to skim through the reports from Washington and to sign the checks which Mouch requested for the battle.

Rearden did not believe that the bill would pass. He was incapable of believing it. Having dealt with the clean reality of metals, technology, production all his life, he had acquired the conviction that one had to concern oneself with the rational, not the insane—that one had to seek that which was right, because the right answer always won—that the senseless, the wrong, the monstrously unjust could not work, could not succeed, could do nothing but defeat itself. A battle against a thing such as that bill seemed preposterous and faintly embarrassing to him, as if he were suddenly asked to compete with a man who calculated steel mixtures by the formulas of numerology.

He had told himself that the issue was dangerous. But the loudest screaming of the most hysterical editorial roused no emotion in him—while a variation of a decimal point in a laboratory report on a test of Rearden Metal made him leap to his feet in eagerness or apprehension.

He had no energy to spare for anything else.

He crumpled the editorial and threw it into the wastebasket. He felt the leaden approach of that exhaustion which he never felt at his job, the exhaustion that seemed to wait for him and catch him the moment he turned to other concerns. He felt as if he were incapable of any desire except a desperate longing for sleep, He told himself that he had to attend the party—that his family had the right to demand it of him—that he had to learn to like their kind of pleasure, for their sake, not his own.

He wondered why this was a motive that had no power to impel him. Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically. What was happening to him?—he wondered. The impossible conflict of feeling reluctance to do that which was right—wasn't it the basic formula of moral corruption? To recognize one's guilt, yet feel nothing but the coldest, most profound indifference—wasn't it a betrayal of that which had been the motor of his life-course and of his pride?

He gave himself no time to seek an answer. He finished dressing, quickly, pitilessly.

Holding himself erect, his tall figure moving with the unstressed, unhurried confidence of habitual authority, the white of a fine handkerchief in the breast pocket of his black dinner jacket, he walked slowly down the stairs to the drawing room, looking—to the satisfaction of the dowagers who watched him—like the perfect figure of a great industrialist.

He saw Lillian at the foot of the stairs. The patrician lines of a lemon-yellow Empire evening gown stressed her graceful body, and she stood like a person proudly in control of her proper background.

He smiled; he liked to see her happy; it gave some reasonable justification to the party.

He approached her—and stopped. She had always shown good taste in her use of jewelry, never wearing too much of it. But tonight she wore an ostentatious display: a diamond necklace, earrings, rings and brooches. Her arms looked conspicuously bare by contrast. On her right wrist, as sole ornament, she wore the bracelet of Rearden Metal. The glittering gems made it look like an ugly piece of dime-store jewelry.

When he moved his glance from her wrist to her face, he found her looking at him. Her eyes were narrowed and he could not define their expression; it was a look that seemed both veiled and purposeful, the look of something hidden that flaunted its security from detection.

He wanted to tear the bracelet off her wrist. Instead, in obedience to her voice gaily pronouncing an introduction, he bowed to the dowager who stood beside her, his face expressionless.

"Man? What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur," said Dr. Pritchett to a group of guests across the room.

Dr. Pritchett picked a canape off a crystal dish, held it speared between two straight fingers and deposited it whole into his mouth.

"Man's metaphysical pretensions," he said, "are preposterous. A miserable bit of protoplasm, full of ugly little concepts and mean little emotions—and it imagines itself important! Really, you know, that is the root of all the troubles in the world."

"But which concepts are not ugly or mean, Professor?" asked an earnest matron whose husband owned an automobile factory.

"None," said Dr. Pritchett, "None within the range of man's capacity."

A young man asked hesitantly, "But if we haven't any good concepts, how do we know that the ones we've got are ugly? I mean, by what standard?"

"There aren't any standards."

This silenced his audience.

"The philosophers of the past were superficial," Dr. Pritchett went on. "It remained for our century to redefine the purpose of philosophy.

The purpose of philosophy is not to help men find the meaning of life, but to prove to them that there isn't any."

An attractive young woman, whose father owned a coal mine, asked indignantly, "Who can tell us that?"

"I am trying to," said Dr. Pritchett. For the last three years, he had been head of the Department of Philosophy at the Patrick Henry University.

Lillian Rearden approached, her jewels glittering under the lights.

The expression on her face was held to the soft hint of a smile, set and faintly suggested, like the waves of her hair.

"It is this insistence of man upon meaning that makes him so difficult," said Dr. Pritchett. "Once he realizes that he is of no importance whatever in the vast scheme of the universe, that no possible significance can be attached to his activities, that it does not matter whether he lives or dies, he will become much more . . . tractable."

He shrugged and reached for another canape", A businessman said uneasily, "What I asked you about, Professor, was what you thought about the Equalization of Opportunity Bill."

"Oh, that?" said Dr. Pritchett. "But I believe I made it clear that I am in favor of it, because I am in favor of a free economy. A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be forced to compete. Therefore, we must control men in order to force them to be free."

"But, look . . . isn't that sort of a contradiction?"

"Not in the higher philosophical sense. You must learn to see beyond the static definitions of old-fashioned thinking. Nothing is static in the universe. Everything is fluid."

"But it stands to reason that if—"

"Reason, my dear fellow, is the most naive of all superstitions. That, at least, has been generally conceded in our age,"

"But I don't quite understand how we can—"

"You suffer from the popular delusion of believing that things can be understood. You do not grasp the fact that the universe is a solid contradiction."

"A contradiction of what?" asked the matron.

"Of itself."

"How . . . how's that?"

"My dear madam, the duty of thinkers is not to explain, but to demonstrate that nothing can be explained."

"Yes, of course . . . only . , ,"

"The purpose of philosophy is not to seek knowledge, but to prove that knowledge is impossible to man."

"But when we prove it," asked the young woman, "what's going to be left?"

"Instinct," said Dr. Pritchett reverently.

At the other end of the room, a group was listening to Balph Eubank. He sat upright on the edge of an armchair, in order to counteract the appearance of his face and figure, which had a tendency to spread if relaxed.

"The literature of the past," said Balph Eubank, "was a shallow fraud. It whitewashed life in order to please the money tycoons whom it served. Morality, free will, achievement, happy endings, and man as some sort of heroic being—all that stuff is laughable to us. Our age has given depth to literature for the first time, by exposing the real essence of life,"

A very young girl in a white evening gown asked timidly, "What is the real essence of life, Mr. Eubank?"

"Suffering," said Balph Eubank. "Defeat and suffering."

"But . . . but why? People are happy . . . sometimes . . . aren't they?"

"That is a delusion of those whose emotions are superficial."

The girl blushed. A wealthy woman who had inherited an oil refinery, asked guiltily, "What should we do to raise the people's literary taste, Mr. Eubank?"

"That is a great social problem," said Balph Eubank. He was described as the literary leader of the age, but had never written a book that sold more than three thousand copies. "Personally, I believe that an Equalization of Opportunity Bill applying to literature would be the solution."

"Oh, do you approve of that Bill for industry? I'm not sure I know what to think of it."

"Certainly, I approve of it. Our culture has sunk into a bog of materialism. Men have lost all spiritual values in their pursuit of material production and technological trickery. They're too comfortable. They will return to a nobler life if we teach them to bear privations. So we ought to place a limit upon their material greed."

"I hadn't thought of it that way," said the woman apologetically.

"But how are you going to work an Equalization of Opportunity Bill for literature, Ralph?" asked Mort Liddy. "That's a new one on me."

"My name is Balph," said Eubank angrily. "And it's a new one on you because it's my own idea."

"Okay, okay, I'm not quarreling, am I? I'm just asking." Mort Liddy smiled. He spent most of his time smiling nervously. He was a composer who wrote old-fashioned scores for motion pictures, and modern symphonies for sparse audiences.

"It would work very simply," said Balph Eubank. "There should be a law limiting the sale of any book to ten thousand copies. This would throw the literary market open to new talent, fresh ideas and non-commercial writing. If people were forbidden to buy a million copies of the same piece of trash, they would be forced to buy better books."

"You've got something there," said Mort Liddy. "But wouldn't it be kinda tough on the writers' bank accounts?"

"So much the better. Only those whose motive is not money-making should be allowed to write."

"But, Mr. Eubank," asked the young girl in the white dress, "what if more than ten thousand people want to buy a certain book?"

"Ten thousand readers is enough for any book."

"That's not what I mean. I mean, what if they want it?"

"That is irrelevant."

"But if a book has a good story which—"

"Plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature," said Balph Eubank contemptuously.

Dr. Pritchett, on his way across the room to the bar, stopped to say, "Quite so. Just as logic is a primitive vulgarity in philosophy."

"Just as melody is a primitive vulgarity in music," said Mort Liddy.

"What's all this noise?” asked Lillian Rearden, glittering to a stop beside them.

"Lillian, my angel," Balph Eubank drawled, "did I tell you that I'm dedicating my new novel to you?"

"Why. thank you, darling."

"What is the name of your new novel?" asked the wealthy woman.

"The Heart Is a Milkman."

"What is it about?"

"Frustration."

"But, Mr. Eubank," asked the young girl in the white dress, blushing desperately, "if everything is frustration, what is there to live for?"

"Brother-love," said Balph Eubank grimly.

Bertram Scudder stood slouched against the bar. His long, thin face looked as if it had shrunk inward, with the exception of his mouth and eyeballs, which were left to protrude as three soft globes. He was the editor of a magazine called The Future and he had written an article on Hank Rearden, entitled "The Octopus."

Bertram Scudder picked up his empty glass and shoved it silently toward the bartender, to be refilled. He took a gulp from his fresh drink, noticed the empty glass in front of Philip Rearden, who stood beside him, and jerked his thumb in a silent command to the bartender. He ignored the empty glass in front of Betty Pope, who stood at Philip's other side.

"Look, bud," said Bertram Scudder, his eyeballs focused approximately in the direction of Philip, "whether you like it or not, the Equalization of Opportunity Bill represents a great step forward."

"What made you think that I did not like it, Mr. Scudder?" Philip asked humbly.

"Well, it's going to pinch, isn't it? The long arm of society is going to trim a little off the hors d'oeuvres bill around here." He waved his hand at the bar.

"Why do you assume that I object to that?"

"You don't?" Bertram Scudder asked without curiosity.

"I don't!" said Philip hotly. "I have always placed the public good above any personal consideration. I have contributed my time and money to Friends of Global Progress in their crusade for the Equalization of Opportunity Bill. I think it is perfectly unfair that one man should get all the breaks and leave none to others."

Bertram Scudder considered him speculatively, but without particular interest. "Well, that's quite unusually nice of you," he said.

"Some people do take moral issues seriously, Mr. Scudder," said Philip, with a gentle stress of pride in his voice.

"What's he talking about, Philip?" asked Betty Pope. "We don't know anybody who owns more than one business, do we?"

"Oh, pipe down!" said Bertram Scudder, his voice bored.

"I don't see why there's so much fuss about that Equalization of Opportunity Bill," said Betty Pope aggressively, in the tone of an expert on economics. "I don't see why businessmen object to it. It's to their own advantage. If everybody else is poor, they won't have any market for their goods. But if they stop being selfish and share the goods they've hoarded—they'll have a chance to work hard and produce some more."

"I do not see why industrialists should be considered at all," said Scudder. "When the masses are destitute and yet there are goods available, it's idiotic to expect people to be stopped by some scrap of paper called a property deed. Property rights are a superstition. One holds property only by the courtesy of those who do not seize it. The people can seize it at any moment. If they can, why shouldn't they?"

"They should," said Claude Slagenhop. "They need it. Need is the only consideration. If people are in need, we've got to seize things first and talk about it afterwards."

Claude Slagenhop had approached and managed to squeeze himself between Philip and Scudder, shoving Scudder aside imperceptibly.

Slagenhop was not tall or heavy, but he had a square, compact bulk, and a broken nose. He was the president of Friends of Global Progress.

"Hunger won't wait," said Claude Slagenhop. "Ideas are just hot air.

An empty belly is a solid fact. I've said in all my speeches that it's not necessary to talk too much. Society is suffering for lack of business opportunities at the moment, so we've got the right to seize such opportunities as exist. Right is whatever's good for society."

"He didn't dig that ore single-handed, did he?" cried Philip suddenly, his voice shrill. "He had to employ hundreds of workers. They did it.

Why does he think he's so good?"

The two men looked at him, Scudder lifting an eyebrow, Slagenhop without expression.

"Oh, dear me!" said Betty Pope, remembering.

Hank Rearden stood at a window in a dim recess at the end of the drawing room. He hoped no one would notice him for a few minutes.

He had just escaped from a middle-aged woman who had been telling him about her psychic experiences. He stood, looking out. Far in the distance, the red glow of Rearden Steel moved in the sky. He watched it for a moment's relief.

He turned to look at the drawing room. He had never liked his house; it had been Lillian's choice. But tonight, the shifting colors of the evening dresses drowned out the appearance of the room and gave it an air of brilliant gaiety. He liked to see people being gay, even though he did not understand this particular manner of enjoyment.

He looked at the flowers, at the sparks of light on the crystal glasses, at the naked arms and shoulders of women. There was a cold wind outside, sweeping empty stretches of land. He saw the thin branches of a tree being twisted, like arms waving in an appeal for help.

The tree stood against the glow of the mills.

He could not name his sudden emotion. He had no words to state its cause, its quality, its meaning. Some part of it was joy, but it was solemn like the act of baring one's head—he did not know to whom.

When he stepped back into the crowd, he was smiling. But the smile vanished abruptly; he saw the entrance of a new guest: it was Dagny Taggart.

Lillian moved forward to meet her, studying her with curiosity. They had met before, on infrequent occasions, and she found it strange to see Dagny Taggart wearing an evening gown. It was a black dress with a bodice that fell as a cape over one arm and shoulder, leaving the other bare; the naked shoulder was the gown's only ornament. Seeing her in the suits she wore, one never thought of Dagny Taggart's body. The black dress seemed excessively revealing—because it was astonishing to discover that the lines of her shoulder were fragile and beautiful, and that the diamond band on the wrist of her naked arm gave her the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained.

"Miss Taggart, it is such a wonderful surprise to see you here," said Lillian Rearden, the muscles of her face performing the motions of a smile. "I had not really dared to hope that an invitation' from me would take you away from your ever so much weightier concerns. Do permit me to feel flattered."

James Taggart had entered with his sister. Lillian smiled at him, in the manner of a hasty postscript, as if noticing him for the first time.

"Hello, James. That's your penalty for being popular—one tends to lose sight of you in the surprise of seeing your sister."

"No one can match you in popularity, Lillian," he answered, smiling thinly, "nor ever lose sight of you."

"Me? Oh, but I am quite resigned to taking second place in the shadow of my husband. I am humbly aware that the wife of a great man has to be contented with reflected glory—don't you think so, Miss Taggart?"

"No," said Dagny, "I don't."

"Is this a compliment or a reproach, Miss Taggart? But do forgive me if I confess I'm helpless. Whom may I present to you? I'm afraid I have nothing but writers and artists to offer, and they wouldn't interest you, I'm sure."

"I'd like to find Hank and say hello to him."

"But of course. James, do you remember you said you wanted to meet Balph Eubank?—oh yes, he's here—I’ll tell him that I heard you rave about his last novel at Mrs. Whitcomb's dinner!"

Walking across the room, Dagny wondered why she had said that she wanted to find Hank Rearden, what had prevented her from admitting that she had seen him the moment she entered.

Rearden stood at the other end of the long room, looking at her.

He watched her as she approached, but he did not step forward to meet her.

"Hello, Hank."

"Good evening."

He bowed, courteously, impersonally, the movement of his body matching the distinguished formality of his clothes. He did not smile.

"Thank you for inviting me tonight," she said gaily.

"I cannot claim that I knew you were coming."

"Oh? Then I'm glad that Mrs. Rearden thought of me. I wanted to make an exception."

"An exception?"

"I don't go to parties very often."

"I am pleased that you chose this occasion as the exception." He did not add "Miss Taggart," but it sounded as if he had.

The formality of his manner was so unexpected that she was unable to adjust to it. "I wanted to celebrate," she said.

"To celebrate my wedding anniversary?"

"Oh, is it your wedding anniversary? I didn't know. My congratulations, Hank."

"What did you wish to celebrate?"

"I thought I'd permit myself a rest. A celebration of my own—in your honor and mine."

"For what reason?"

She was thinking of the new track on the rocky grades of the Colorado mountains, growing slowly toward the distant goal of the Wyatt oil fields. She was seeing the greenish-blue glow of the rails on the frozen ground, among the dried weeds, the naked boulders, the rotting shanties of half-starved settlements.

"In honor of the first sixty miles of Rearden Metal track," she answered.

"I appreciate it." The tone of his voice was the one that would have been proper if he had said, "I've never heard of it."

She found nothing else to say. She felt as if she were speaking to a stranger.

"Why, Miss Taggart!" a cheerful voice broke their silence. "Now this is what I mean when I say that Hank Rearden can achieve any miracle!"

A businessman whom they knew had approached, smiling at her in delighted astonishment. The three of them had often held emergency conferences about freight rates and steel deliveries. Now he looked at her, his face an open comment on the change in her appearance, the change, she thought, which Rearden had not noticed.

She laughed, answering the man's greeting, giving herself no time to recognize the unexpected stab of disappointment, the unadmitted thought that she wished she had seen this look on Rearden's face, instead. She exchanged a few sentences with the man. When she glanced around, Rearden was gone.

"So that is your famous sister?" said Balph Eubank to James Taggart, looking at Dagny across the room.

"I was not aware that my sister was famous," said Taggart, a faint bite in his voice.

"But, my good man, she's an unusual phenomenon in the field of economics, so you must expect people to talk about her. Your sister is a symptom of the illness of our century. A decadent product of the machine age. Machines have destroyed man's humanity, taken him away from the soil, robbed him of his natural arts, killed his soul and turned him into an insensitive robot. There's an example of it—a woman who runs a railroad, instead of practicing the beautiful craft of the handloom and bearing children."

Rearden moved among the guests, trying not to be trapped into conversation. He looked at the room; he saw no one he wished to approach.

"Say, Hank Rearden, you're not such a bad fellow at all when seen close up in the lion's own den. You ought to give us a press conference once in a while, you'd win us over."

Rearden turned and looked at the speaker incredulously. It was a young newspaperman of the seedier sort, who worked on a radical tabloid. The offensive familiarity of his manner seemed to imply that he chose to be rude to Rearden because he knew that Rearden should never have permitted himself to associate with a man of his kind.

Rearden would not have allowed him inside the mills; but the man was Lillian's guest; he controlled himself; he asked dryly, "What do you want?"

"You're not so bad. You've got talent. Technological talent. But, of course, I don't agree with you about Rearden Metal."

"I haven't asked you to agree."

"Well, Bertram Scudder said that your policy—" the man started belligerently, pointing toward the bar, but stopped, as if he had slid farther than he intended.

Rearden looked at the untidy figure slouched against the bar. Lillian had introduced them, but he had paid no attention to the name. He turned sharply and walked off, in a manner that forbade the young bum to tag him.

Lillian glanced up at his face, when Rearden approached her in the midst of a group, and, without a word, stepped aside where they could not be heard.

"Is that Scudder of The Future?" he asked, pointing.

"Why, yes."

He looked at her silently, unable to begin to believe it, unable to find the lead of a thought with which to begin to understand. Her eyes were watching him.

"How could you invite him here?" he asked.

"Now, Henry, don't let's be ridiculous. You don't want to be narrow minded, do you? You must learn to tolerate the opinions of others and respect their right of free speech."

"In my house?"

"Oh, don't be stuffy!"

He did not speak, because his consciousness was held, not by coherent statements, but by two pictures that seemed to glare at him insistently.

He saw the article, "The Octopus," by Bertram Scudder, which was not an expression of ideas, but a bucket of slime emptied in public—an article that did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one, but poured a stream of sneers and adjectives in which nothing was clear except the filthy malice of denouncing without considering proof necessary. And he saw the lines of Lillian's profile, the proud purity which he had sought in marrying her.

When he noticed her again, he realized that the vision of her profile was in his own mind, because she was turned to him full-face, watching him. In the sudden instant of returning to reality, he thought that what he saw in her eyes was enjoyment. But in the next instant he reminded himself that he was sane and that this was not possible.

"It's the first time you've invited that . . ." he used an obscene word with unemotional precision, "to my house. It's the last."

"How dare you use such—"

"Don't argue, Lillian. If you do, I'll throw him out right now."

He gave her a moment to answer, to object, to scream at him if she wished. She remained silent, not looking at him, only her smooth cheeks seemed faintly drawn inward, as if deflated.

Moving blindly away through the coils of lights, voices and perfume, he felt a cold touch of dread. He knew that he should think of Lillian and find the answer to the riddle of her character, because this was a revelation which he could not ignore; but he did not think of her—and he felt the dread because he knew that the answer had ceased to matter to him long ago.

The flood of weariness was starting to rise again. He felt as if he could almost see it in thickening waves; it was not within him, but outside, spreading through the room. For an instant, he felt as if he were alone, lost in a gray desert, needing help and knowing that no help would come, He stopped short. In the lighted doorway, the length of the room between them, he saw the tall, arrogant figure of a man who had paused for a moment before entering. He had never met the man, but of all the notorious faces that cluttered the pages of newspapers, this was the one he despised. It was Francisco d'Anconia.

Rearden had never given much thought to men like Bertram Scudder.

But with every hour of his life, with the strain and the pride of every moment when his muscles or his mind had ached from effort, with every step he had taken to rise out of the mines of Minnesota and to turn his effort into gold, with all of his profound respect for money and for its meaning, he despised the squanderer who did not know how to deserve the great gift of inherited wealth. There, he thought, was the most contemptible representative of the species.

He saw Francisco d'Anconia enter, bow to Lillian, then walk into the crowd as if he owned the room which he had never entered before.

Heads turned to watch him, as if he pulled them on strings in his wake.

Approaching Lillian once more, Rearden said without anger, the contempt becoming amusement in his voice, "I didn't know you knew that one."

"I've met him at a few parties."

"Is he one of your friends, too?"

"Certainly not!" The sharp resentment was genuine.

"Then why did you invite him?"

"Well, you can't give a party—not a party that counts—while he's in this country, without inviting him. It's a nuisance if he comes, and a social black mark if he doesn't."

Rearden laughed. She was off guard; she did not usually admit things of this kind. "Look," he said wearily, "I don't want to spoil your party. But keep that man away from me. Don't come around with introductions. I don't want to meet him. I don't know how you'll work that, but you're an expert hostess, so work it."

Dagny stood still when she saw Francisco approaching. He bowed to her as he passed by. He did not stop, but she knew that he had stopped the moment in his mind. She saw him smile faintly in deliberate emphasis of what he understood and did not choose to acknowledge. She turned away. She hoped to avoid him for the rest of the evening.

Balph Eubank had joined the group around Dr. Pritchett, and was saying sullenly, ". . . no, you cannot expect people to understand the higher reaches of philosophy. Culture should be taken out of the hands of the dollar-chasers. We need a national subsidy for literature. It is disgraceful that artists are treated like peddlers and that art works have to be sold like soap."

"You mean, your complaint is that they don't sell like soap?" asked Francisco d'Anconia.

They had not noticed him approach; the conversation stopped, as if slashed off; most of them had never met him, but they all recognized him at once.

"I meant—" Balph Eubank started angrily and closed his mouth; he saw the eager interest on the faces of his audience, but it was not interest in philosophy any longer.

"Why, hello, Professor!" said Francisco, bowing to Dr. Pritchett.

There was no pleasure in Dr. Pritchett's face when he answered the greeting and performed a few introductions.

"We were just discussing a most interesting subject," said the earnest matron. "Dr. Pritchett was telling us that nothing is anything."

"He should, undoubtedly, know more than anyone else about that,"

Francisco answered gravely.

"I wouldn't have supposed that you knew Dr. Pritchett so well, Senor d'Anconia," she said, and wondered why the professor looked displeased by her remark.

"I am an alumnus of the great school that employs Dr. Pritchett at present, the Patrick Henry University. But I studied under one of his predecessors—Hugh Akston."

"Hugh Akston!" the attractive young woman gasped. "But you couldn't have, Senor d'Anconia! You're not old enough. I thought he was one of those great names of . . . of the last century."

"Perhaps in spirit, madame. Not in fact."

"But I thought he died years ago."

"Why, no. He is still alive."

"Then why don't we ever hear about him any more?"

"He retired, nine years ago."

"Isn't it odd? When a politician or a movie star retires, we read front page stories about it. But when a philosopher retires, people do not even notice it."

"They do, eventually."

A young man said, astonished, "I thought Hugh Akston was one of those classics that nobody studied any more, except in histories of philosophy. I read an article recently which referred to him as the last of the great advocates of reason."

"Just what did Hugh Akston teach?" asked the earnest matron.

Francisco answered, "He taught that everything is something."

"Your loyalty to your teacher is laudable, Senior d'Anconia," said Dr.

Pritchett dryly. "May we take it that you are an example of the practical results of his teaching?"

"I am."

James Taggart had approached the group and was waiting to be noticed.

"Hello, Francisco."

"Good evening, James."

"What a wonderful coincidence, seeing you here! I've been very anxious to speak to you."

"That's new. You haven't always been."

"Now you're joking, just like in the old days." Taggart was moving slowly, as if casually, away from the group, hoping to draw Francisco after him. "You know that there's not a person in this room who wouldn't love to talk to you."

"Really? I'd be inclined to suspect the opposite." Francisco had followed obediently, but stopped within hearing distance of the others.

"I have tried in every possible way to get in touch with you," said Taggart, "but . . . but circumstances didn't permit me to succeed."

"Are you trying to hide from me the fact that I refused to see you?"

"Well . . . that is . , . I mean, why did you refuse?"

"I couldn't imagine what you wanted to speak to me about."

"The San Sebastian Mines, of course!" Taggart's voice rose a little.

"Why, what about them?"

"But . . . Now, look, Francisco, this is serious. It's a disaster, an unprecedented disaster—and nobody can make any sense out of it. I don't know what to think. I don't understand it at all. I have a right to know."

"A right? Aren't you being old-fashioned, James? But what is it you want to know?"

"Well, first of all, that nationalization—what are you going to do about it?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?!"

"But surely you don't want me to do anything about it. My mines and your railroad were seized by the will of the people. You wouldn't want me to oppose the will of the people, would you?"

"Francisco, this is not a laughing matter!"

"I never thought it was."

"I'm entitled to an explanation! You owe your stockholders an account of the whole disgraceful affair! Why did you pick a worthless mine? Why did you waste all those millions? What sort of rotten swindle was It?"

Francisco stood looking at him in polite astonishment. "Why, James," he said, "I thought you would approve of it."

"Approve?!"

"I thought you would consider the San Sebastian Mines as the practical realization of an ideal of the highest moral order. Remembering that you and I have disagreed so often in the past, I thought you would be gratified to see me acting in accordance with your principles."

"What are you talking about?"

Francisco shook his head regretfully. "I don't know why you should call my behavior rotten. I thought you would recognize it as an honest effort to practice what the whole world is preaching. Doesn't everyone believe that it is evil to be selfish? I was totally selfless in regard to the San Sebastian project. Isn't it evil to pursue a personal interest? I had no personal interest in it whatever. Isn't it evil to work for profit? I did not work for profit—I took a loss. Doesn't everyone agree that the purpose and justification of an industrial enterprise are not production, but the livelihood of its employees? The San Sebastian Mines were the most eminently successful venture in industrial history: they produced no copper, but they provided a livelihood for thousands of men who could not have achieved, in a lifetime, the equivalent of what they got for one day's work, which they could not do. Isn't it generally agreed that an owner is a parasite and an exploiter, that it is the employees who do all the work and make the product possible? I did not exploit anyone. I did not burden the San Sebastian Mines with my useless presence; I left them in the hands of the men who count. I did not pass judgment on the value of that property. I turned it over to a mining specialist. He was not a very good specialist, but he needed the job very badly. Isn't it generally conceded that when you hire a man for a job, it is his need that counts, not his ability? Doesn't everyone believe that in order to get the goods, all you have to do is need them? I have carried out every moral precept of our age. I expected gratitude and a citation of honor. I do not understand why I am being damned."

In the silence of those who had listened, the sole comment was the shrill, sudden giggle of Betty Pope: she had understood nothing, but she saw the look of helpless fury on James Taggart's face.

People were looking at Taggart, expecting an answer. They were indifferent to the issue, they were merely amused by the spectacle of someone's embarrassment. Taggart achieved a patronizing smile.

"You don't expect me to take this seriously?" he asked.

"There was a time," Francisco answered, "when I did not believe that anyone could take it seriously. I was wrong."

"This is outrageous!" Taggart's voice started to rise. "It's perfectly outrageous to treat your public responsibilities with such thoughtless levity!" He turned to hurry away.

Francisco shrugged, spreading his hands. "You see? I didn't think you wanted to speak to me."

Rearden stood alone, far at the other end of the room. Philip noticed him, approached and waved to Lillian, calling her over.

"Lillian, I don't think that Henry is having a good time," he said, smiling; one could not tell whether the mockery of his smile was directed at Lillian or at Rearden. "Can't we do something about it?"

"Oh, nonsense!" said Rearden.

"I wish I knew what to do about it, Philip," said Lillian. "I've always wished Henry would learn to relax. He's so grimly serious about everything. He's such a rigid Puritan. I've always wanted to see him drunk, just once. But I've given up. What would you suggest?"

"Oh, I don't know! But he shouldn't be standing around all by himself."

"Drop it," said Rearden. While thinking dimly that he did not want to hurt their feelings, he could not prevent himself from adding, "You don't know how hard I've tried to be left standing all by myself."

"There—you see?" Lillian smiled at Philip. "To enjoy life and people is not so simple as pouring a ton of steel. Intellectual pursuits are not learned in the market place."

Philip chuckled. "It's not intellectual pursuits I'm worried about.

How sure are you about that Puritan stuff, Lillian? If I were you, I wouldn't leave him free to look around. There are too many beautiful women here tonight."

"Henry entertaining thoughts of infidelity? You flatter him, Philip.

You overestimate his courage." She smiled at Rearden, coldly, for a brief, stressed moment, then moved away.

Rearden looked at his brother. "What in hell do you think you're doing?"

"Oh, stop playing the Puritan! Can't you take a joke?"

Moving aimlessly through the crowd, Dagny wondered why she had accepted the invitation to this party. The answer astonished her: it was because she had wanted to see Hank Rearden. Watching him in the crowd, she realized the contrast for the first time. The faces of the others looked like aggregates of interchangeable features, every face oozing to blend into the anonymity of resembling all, and all looking as if they were melting. Rearden's face, with the sharp planes, the pale blue eyes, the ash-blond hair, had the firmness of ice; the uncompromising clarity of its lines made it look, among the others, as if he were moving through a fog, hit by a ray of light.

Her eyes kept returning to him involuntarily. She never caught him glancing in her direction. She could not believe that he was avoiding her intentionally; there could be no possible reason for it- yet she felt certain that he was. She wanted to approach him and convince herself that she was mistaken. Something stopped her; she could not understand her own reluctance.

Rearden bore patiently a conversation with his mother and two ladies whom she wished him to entertain with stories of his youth and his struggle. He complied, telling himself that she was proud of him in her own way. But he felt as if something in her manner kept suggesting that she had nursed him through his struggle and that she was the source of his success. He was glad when she let him go. Then he escaped once more to the recess of the window.

He stood there for a while, leaning on a sense of privacy as if it were a physical support.

"Mr. Rearden," said a strangely quiet voice beside him, "permit me to introduce myself. My name is d'Anconia."

Rearden turned, startled; d'Anconia's manner and voice had a quality he had seldom encountered before: a tone of authentic respect.

"How do you do," he answered. His voice was brusque and dry; but he had answered.

"I have observed that Mrs. Rearden has been trying to avoid the necessity of presenting me to you, and I can guess the reason. Would you prefer that I leave your house?"

The action of naming an issue instead of evading it, was so unlike the usual behavior of all the men he knew, it was such a sudden, startling relief, that Rearden remained silent for a moment, studying d'Anconia's face. Francisco had said it very simply, neither as a reproach nor a plea, but in a manner which, strangely, acknowledged Rearden's dignity and his own.

"No," said Rearden, "whatever else you guessed, I did not say that."

"Thank you. In that case, you will allow me to speak to you."

"Why should you wish to speak to me?"

"My motives cannot interest you at present."

"Mine is not the sort of conversation that could interest you at all."

"You are mistaken about one of us, Mr. Rearden, or both. I came to this party solely in order to meet you."

There had been a faint tone of amusement in Rearden's voice; now it hardened into a hint of contempt. "You started by playing it straight.

Stick to it."

"I am."

"What did you want to meet me for? In order to make me lose money?"

Francisco looked straight at him. "Yes—eventually."

"What is it, this time? A gold mine?"

Francisco shook his head slowly; the conscious deliberation of the movement gave it an air that was almost sadness. "No," he said, "I don't want to sell you anything. As a matter of fact, I did not attempt to sell the copper mine to James Taggart, either. He came to me for it. You won't."

Rearden chuckled. "If you understand that much, we have at least a sensible basis for conversation. Proceed on that. If you don't have some fancy investment in mind, what did you want to meet me for?"

"In order to become acquainted with you,"

"That's not an answer. It's just another way of saying the same thing."

"Not quite, Mr. Rearden."

"Unless you mean—in order to gain my confidence?"

"No. I don't like people who speak or think in terms of gaining anybody's confidence. If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others, only their rational perception. The person who craves a moral blank check of that kind, has dishonest intentions, whether he admits it to himself or not."

Rearden's startled glance at him was like the involuntary thrust of a hand grasping for support in a desperate need. The glance betrayed how much he wanted to find the sort of man he thought he was seeing. Then Rearden lowered his eyes, almost closing them, slowly, shutting out the vision and the need. His face was hard; it had an expression of severity, an inner severity directed at himself; it looked austere and lonely.

"All right," he said tonelessly. "What do you want, if it's not my confidence?"

"I want to learn to understand you."

"What for?"

"For a reason of my own which need not concern you at present."

"What do you want to understand about me?"

Francisco looked silently out at the darkness. The fire of the mills was dying down. There was only a faint tinge of red left on the edge of the earth, just enough to outline the scraps of clouds ripped by the tortured battle of the storm in the sky. Dim shapes kept sweeping through space and vanishing, shapes which were branches, but looked as if they were the fury of the wind made visible.

"It's a terrible night for any animal caught unprotected on that plain," said Francisco d'Anconia. "This is when one should appreciate the meaning of being a man."

Rearden did not answer for a moment; then he said, as if in answer to himself, a tone of wonder in his voice, "Funny . . ."

"What?"

"You told me what I was thinking just a while ago . . .”

"You were?"

". . . only I didn't have the words for it,"

"Shall I tell you the rest of the words?"

"Go ahead."

"You stood here and watched the storm _with the greatest pride one can ever feel—because you are able to have summer flowers and half naked women in your house on a night like this, in demonstration of your victory over that storm. And if it weren't for you, most of those who are here would be left helpless at the mercy of that wind in the middle of some such plain."

"How did you know that?"

In tune with his question., Rearden realized that it was not his thoughts this man had named, but his most hidden, most persona] emotion; and that he, who would never confess his emotions to anyone, had confessed it in his question. He saw the faintest flicker in Francisco's eyes, as of a smile or a check mark.

"What would you know about a pride of that kind?" Rearden asked sharply, as if the contempt of the second question could erase the confidence of the first.

"That is what I felt once, when I was young."

Rearden looked at him. There was neither mockery nor self-pity in Francisco's face; the fine, sculptured planes and the clear, blue eyes held a quiet composure, the face was open, offered to any blow, unflinching.

"Why do you want to talk about it?" Rearden asked, prompted by a moment's reluctant compassion.

"Let us say—by way of gratitude, Mr. Rearden."

"Gratitude to me?"

"If you will accept it."

Rearden's voice hardened. "I haven't asked for gratitude. I don't need it."

"I have not said you needed it. But of all those whom you are saving from the storm tonight, I am the only one who will offer it."

After a moment's silence, Rearden asked, his voice low with a sound which was almost a threat, "What are you trying to do?"

"I am calling your attention to the nature of those for whom you are working."

"It would take a man who's never done an honest day's work in his life, to think or say that." The contempt in Rearden's voice had a note of relief; he had been disarmed by a doubt of his judgment on the character of his adversary; now he felt certain once more. "You wouldn't understand it if I told you that the man who works, works for himself, even if he does carry the whole wretched bunch of you along. Now I'll guess what you're thinking: go ahead, say that it's evil, that I'm selfish, conceited, heartless, cruel. I am. I don't want any part of that tripe about working for others. I'm not."

For the first time, he saw the look of a personal reaction in Francisco's eyes, the look of something eager and young. "The only thing that's wrong in what you said," Francisco answered, "is that you permit anyone to call it evil." In Rearden's pause of incredulous silence, he pointed at the crowd in the drawing room. "Why are you willing to carry them?"

"Because they're a bunch of miserable children who struggle to remain alive, desperately and very badly, while I—I don't even notice the burden,"

"Why don't you tell them that?”

"What?"

"That you're working for your own sake, not theirs."

"They know it."

"Oh yes, they know it. Every single one of them here knows it. But they don't think you do. And the aim of all their efforts is to keep you from knowing it."

"Why should I care what they think?"

"Because it's a battle in which one must make one's stand clear."

"A battle? What battle? I hold the whip hand. I don't fight the disarmed."

"Are they? They have a weapon against you. It's their only weapon, but it's a terrible one. Ask yourself what it is, some time."

"Where do you see any evidence of it?"

"In the unforgivable fact that you're as unhappy as you are."

Rearden could accept any form of reproach, abuse, damnation anyone chose to throw at him; the only human reaction which he would not accept was pity. The stab of a coldly rebellious anger brought him back to the full context of the moment. He spoke, fighting not to acknowledge the nature of the emotion rising within him, "What sort of effrontery are you indulging in? What's your motive?"

"Let us say—to give you the words you need, for the time when you'll need them."

"Why should you want to speak to me on such a subject?"

"In the hope that you will remember it."

What he felt, thought Rearden, was anger at the incomprehensible fact that he had allowed himself to enjoy this conversation. He felt a dim sense of betrayal, the hint of an unknown danger. "Do you expect me to forget what you are?" he asked, knowing that this was what he had forgotten.

"I do not expect you to think of me at all."

Under his anger, the emotion which Rearden would not acknowledge remained unstated and unthought; he knew it only as a hint of pain.

Had he faced it, he would have known that he still heard Francisco's voice saying, "I am the only one who will offer it . . . if you will accept it. . . ." He heard the words and the strangely solemn inflection of the quiet voice and an inexplicable answer of his own, something within him that wanted to cry yes, to accept, to tell this man that he accepted, that he needed it—though there was no name for what he needed, it was not gratitude, and he knew that it was not gratitude this man had meant.

Aloud, he said, "I didn't seek to talk to you. But you've asked for it and you're going to hear it. To me, there's only one form of human depravity—the man without a purpose."

"That is true."

"I can forgive all those others, they're not vicious, they're merely helpless. But you—you're the kind who can't be forgiven."

"It is against the sin of forgiveness that I wanted to warn you."

"You had the greatest chance in life. What have you done with it?

If you have the mind to understand all the things you said, how can you speak to me at all? How can you face anyone after the sort of irresponsible destruction you've perpetrated in that Mexican business?"

"It is your right to condemn me for it, if you wish."

Dagny stood by the corner of the window recess, listening. They did not notice her. She had seen them together and she had approached, drawn by an impulse she could not explain or resist; it seemed crucially important that she know what these two men said to each other.

She had heard their last few sentences. She had never thought it possible that she would see Francisco taking a beating. He could smash any adversary in any form of encounter. Yet he stood, offering no defense.

She knew that it was not indifference; she knew his face well enough to see the effort his calm cost him—she saw the faint line of a muscle pulled tight across his cheek.

"Of all those who live by the ability of others," said Rearden, "you're the one real parasite."

"I have given you grounds to think so."

"Then what right have you to talk about the meaning of being a man? You're the one who has betrayed it."

"I am sorry if I have offended you by what you may rightly consider as a presumption."

Francisco bowed and turned to go. Rearden said involuntarily, not knowing that the question negated his anger, that it was a plea to stop this man and hold him, "What did you want to learn to understand about me?"

Francisco turned. The expression of his face had not changed; it was still a look of gravely courteous respect. "I have learned it," he answered.

Rearden stood watching him as he walked off into the crowd. The figures of a butler, with a crystal dish, and of Dr. Pritchett, stooping to choose another canape, hid Francisco from sight. Rearden glanced out at the darkness; nothing could be seen there but the wind.

Dagny stepped forward, when he came out of the recess; she smiled, openly inviting conversation. He stopped. It seemed to her that he had stopped reluctantly. She spoke hastily, to break the silence.

"Hank, why do you have so many intellectuals of the looter persuasion here? I wouldn't have them in my house."

This was not what she had wanted to say to him. But she did not know what she wanted to say; never before had she felt herself left wordless in his presence.

She saw his eyes narrowing, like a door being closed. "I see no reason why one should not invite them to a party," he answered coldly.

"Oh, I didn't mean to criticize your choice of guests. But . . . Well, I've been trying not to learn which one of them is Bertram Scudder. If I do, I'll slap his face." She tried to sound casual, "I don't want to create a scene, but I'm not sure I'll be able to control myself. I couldn't believe it when somebody told me that Mrs. Rearden had invited him."

"I invited him."

"But . . ." Then her voice dropped. "Why?"

"I don't attach any importance to occasions of this kind."

"I'm sorry, Hank. I didn't know you were so tolerant. I'm not."

He said nothing.

"I know you don't like parties. Neither do I. But sometimes I wonder . . . perhaps we're the only ones who were meant to be able to enjoy them."

"I am afraid I have no talent for it."

"Not for this. But do you think any of these people are enjoying it? They're just straining to be more senseless and aimless than usual. To be light and unimportant . . . You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light."

"I wouldn't know."

"It's just a thought that disturbs me once in a while. . . . I thought it about my first ball. . . . I keep thinking that parties are intended to be celebrations, and celebrations should be only for those who have something to celebrate."

"I have never thought of it."

She could not adapt her words to the rigid formality of his manner; she could not quite believe it. They had always been at ease together, in his office. Now he was like a man in a strait jacket.

"Hank, look at it. If you didn't know any of these people, wouldn't it seem beautiful? The lights and the clothes and all the imagination that went to make it possible . . ." She was looking at the room. She did not notice that he had not followed her glance. He was looking down at the shadows on her naked shoulder, the soft, blue shadows made by the light that fell through the strands of her hair. "Why have we left it all to fools? It should have been ours."

"In what manner?"

"I don't know . . . I've always expected parties to be exciting and brilliant, like some rare drink." She laughed; there was a note of sadness in it. "But I don't drink, either. That's just another symbol that doesn't mean what it was intended to mean," He was silent. She added, "Perhaps there's something that we have missed."

"I am not aware of it."

In a flash of sudden, desolate emptiness, she was glad that he had not understood or responded, feeling dimly that she had revealed too much, yet not knowing what she had revealed. She shrugged, the movement running through the curve of her shoulder like a faint convulsion.

"It's just an old illusion of mine," she said indifferently. "Just a mood that comes once every year or two. Let me see the latest steel price index and I'll forget all about it."

She did not know that his eyes were following her, as she walked away from him.

She moved slowly through the room, looking at no one. She noticed a small group huddled by the unlighted fireplace. The room was not cold, but they sat as if they drew comfort from the thought of a non-existent fire.

"I do not know why, but I am growing to be afraid of the dark. No, not now, only when I am alone. What frightens me is night. Night as such."

The speaker was an elderly spinster with an air of breeding and hopelessness. The three women and two men of the group were well dressed, the skin of their faces was smoothly well tended, but they had a manner of anxious caution that kept their voices one tone lower than normal and blurred the differences of their ages, giving them all the same gray look of being spent. It was the look one saw in groups of respectable people everywhere. Dagny stopped and listened.

"But, my dear," one of them asked, "why should it frighten you?"

"I don't know," said the spinster, "I am not afraid of prowlers or robberies or anything of the sort. But I stay awake all night. I fall asleep only when I see the sky turning pale. It is very odd. Every evening, when it grows dark, I get the feeling that this tune it is final, that daylight will not return."

"My cousin who lives on the coast of Maine wrote me the same thing," said one of the women.

"Last night," said the spinster, "I stayed awake because of the shooting. There were guns going off all night, way out at sea. There were no flashes. There was nothing. Just those detonations, at long intervals, somewhere in the fog over the Atlantic."

"I read something about it in the paper this morning. Coast Guard target practice."

"Why, no," the spinster said indifferently. "Everybody down on the shore knows what it was. It was Ragnar Danneskjold. It was the Coast Guard trying to catch him."

"Ragnar Danneskjold in Delaware Bay?" a woman gasped.

"Oh, yes. They say it is not the first time."

"Did they catch him?"

"No."

"Nobody can catch him," said one of the men.

"The People's State of Norway has offered a million-dollar reward for his head."

"That's an awful lot of money to pay for a pirate's head."

"But how are we going to have any order or security or planning in the world, with a pirate running loose all over the seven seas?"

"Do you know what it was that he seized last night?" said the spinster.

"The big ship with the relief supplies we were sending to the People's State of France."

"How does he dispose of the goods he seizes?"

"Ah, that—nobody knows."

"I met a sailor once, from a ship he'd attacked, who'd seen him in person. He said that Ragnar Danneskjold has the purest gold hair and the most frightening face on earth, a face with no sign of any feeling. If there ever was a man born without a heart, he's it—the sailor said."

"A nephew of mine saw Ragnar Danneskjold's ship one night, off the coast of Scotland. He wrote me that he couldn't believe his eyes. It was a better ship than any in the navy of the People's State of England."

"They say he hides in one of those Norwegian fjords where neither God nor man will ever find him. That's where the Vikings used to hide in the Middle Ages."

"There's a reward on his head offered by the People's State of Portugal, too. And by the People's State of Turkey."

"They say it's a national scandal in Norway. He comes from one of their best families. The family lost its money generations ago, but the name is of the noblest. The ruins of their castle are still in existence.

His father is a bishop. His father has disowned him and excommunicated him. But it had no effect."

"Did you know that Ragnar Danneskjold went to school in this country? Sure. The Patrick Henry University."

"Not really?"

"Oh yes. You can look it up."

"What bothers me is . . . You know, I don't like it. I don't like it that he's now appearing right here, in our own waters. I thought things like that could happen only in the wastelands. Only in Europe. But a big-scale outlaw of that kind operating in Delaware in our day and age!"

"He's been seen off Nantucket, too. And at Bar Harbor. The newspapers have been asked not to write about it."

"Why?"

"They don't want people to know that the navy can't cope with him."

"I don't like it. It feels funny. It's like something out of the Dark Ages."

Dagny glanced up. She saw Francisco d'Anconia standing a few steps away. He was looking at her with a kind of stressed curiosity; his eyes were mocking.

"It's a strange world we're living in," said the spinster, her voice low.

"I read an article," said one of the women tonelessly. "It said that times of trouble are good for us. It is good that people are growing poorer. To accept privations is a moral virtue."

"I suppose so," said another, without conviction.

"We must not worry. I heard a speech that said it is useless to worry or to blame anyone. Nobody can help what he does, that is the way things made him. There is nothing we can do about anything. We must learn to bear it."

"What's the use anyway? What is man's fate? Hasn't it always been to hope, but never to achieve? The wise man is the one- who does not attempt to hope."

"That is the right attitude to take."

"I don't know . . . I don't know what is right any more . . . How can we ever know?"

"Oh well, who is John Galt?"

Dagny turned brusquely and started away from them. One of the women followed her.

"But I do know it," said the woman, in the soft, mysterious tone of sharing a secret.

"You know what?"

"I know who is John Galt."

"Who?" Dagny asked tensely, stopping.

"I know a man who knew John Galt in person. This man is an old friend of a great-aunt of mine. He was there and he saw it happen. Do you know the legend of Atlantis, Miss Taggart?"

"What?"

"Atlantis."

"Why . . . vaguely."

"The Isles of the Blessed. That is what the Greeks called it, thousands of years ago. They said Atlantis was a place where hero-spirits lived in a happiness unknown to the rest of the earth. A place which only the spirits of heroes could enter, and they reached it without dying, because they carried the secret of life within them. Atlantis was lost to mankind, even then. But the Greeks knew that it had existed. They tried to find it. Some of them said it was underground, hidden in the heart of the earth. But most of them said it was an island. A radiant island in the Western Ocean. Perhaps what they were thinking of was America. They never found it. For centuries afterward, men said it was only a legend.

They did not believe it, but they never stopped looking for it, because they knew that that was what they had to find."

"Well, what about John Galt?"

"He found it."

Dagny's interest was gone. "Who was he?"

"John Galt was a millionaire, a man of inestimable wealth. He was sailing his yacht one night, in mid-Atlantic, fighting the worst storm ever wreaked upon the world, when he found it. He saw it in the depth, where it had sunk to escape the reach of men. He saw the towers of Atlantis shining on the bottom of the ocean. It was a sight of such kind that when one had seen it, one could no longer wish to look at the rest of the earth. John Galt sank his ship and went down with his entire crew. They all chose to do it. My friend was the only one who survived."

"How interesting."

"My friend saw it with his own eyes," said the woman, offended. "It happened many years ago. But John Galt's family hushed up the story."

"And what happened to his fortune? [ don't recall ever hearing of a Galt fortune."

"It went down with him." She added belligerently, "You don't have to believe it."

"Miss Taggart doesn't," said Francisco d'Anconia. "I do."

They turned. He had followed them and he stood looking at them with the insolence of exaggerated earnestness.

"Have you ever had faith in anything, Senor d'Anconia?" the woman asked angrily.

"No, madame."

He chuckled at her brusque departure. Dagny asked coldly, "What's the joke?"

"The joke's on that fool woman. She doesn't know that she was telling you the truth."

"Do you expect me to believe that?"

"No."

"Then what do you find so amusing?"

"Oh, a great many things here. Don't you?"

"No."

"Well, that's one of the things I find amusing."

"Francisco, will you leave me alone?"

"But I have. Didn't you notice that you were first to speak to me tonight?"

"Why do you keep watching me?"

"Curiosity."

"About what?"

"Your reaction to the things which you don't find amusing."

"Why should you care about my reaction to anything?"

"That is my own way of having a good time, which, incidentally, you are not having, are you, Dagny? Besides, you're the only woman worth watching here."

She stood defiantly still, because the way he looked at her demanded an angry escape. She stood as she always did, straight and taut, her head lifted impatiently. It was the unfeminine pose of an executive. But her naked shoulder betrayed the fragility of the body under the black dress, and the pose made her most truly a woman. The proud strength became a challenge to someone's superior strength, and the fragility a reminder that the challenge could be broken. She was not conscious of it. She had met no one able to see it.

He said, looking down at her body, "Dagny, what a magnificent waste!"

She had to turn and escape. She felt herself blushing, for the first time in years: blushing because she knew suddenly that the sentence named what she had felt all evening.

She ran, trying not to think. The music stopped her. It was a sudden blast from the radio. She noticed Mort Liddy, who had turned it on, waving his arms to a group of friends, yelling, "That's it! That's it! I want you to hear it!"

The great burst of sound was the opening chords of Halley's Fourth Concerto. It rose in tortured triumph, speaking its denial of pain, its hymn to a distant vision. Then the notes broke. It was as if a handful of mud and pebbles had been flung at the music, and what followed was the sound of the rolling and the dripping. It was Halley's Concerto swung into a popular tune. It was Halley's melody torn apart, its holes stuffed with hiccoughs. The great statement of joy had become the giggling of a barroom. Yet it was still the remnant of Halley’s melody that gave it form; it was the melody that supported it like a spinal cord.

"Pretty good?" Mort Liddy was smiling at his friends, boastfully and nervously. "Pretty good, eh? Best movie score of the year. Got me a prize. Got me a long-term contract. Yeah, this was my score for Heaven's in Your Backyard."

Dagny stood, staring at the room, as if one sense could replace another, as if sight could wipe out sound. She moved her head in a slow circle, trying to find an anchor somewhere. She saw Francisco leaning against a column, his arms crossed; he was looking straight at her; he was laughing.

Don't shake like this, she thought. Get out of here. This was the approach of an anger she could not control. She thought: Say nothing.

Walk steadily. Get out.

She had started walking, cautiously, very slowly. She heard Lillian's words and stopped. Lillian had said it many times this evening, in answer to the same question, but it was the first time that Dagny heard it.

"This?" Lillian was saying, extending her arm with the metal bracelet for the inspection of two smartly groomed women. "Why, no, it's not from a hardware store, it's a very special gift from my husband.

Oh, yes, of course it's hideous. But don't you sec? It's supposed to be priceless. Of course, I'd exchange it for a common diamond bracelet any time, but somehow nobody will offer me one for it, even though it is so very, very valuable. Why? My dear, it's the first thing ever made of Rearden Metal."

Dagny did not see the room. She did not hear the music. She felt the pressure of dead stillness against her eardrums. She did not know the moment that preceded, or the moments that were to follow. She did not know those involved, neither herself, nor Lillian, nor Rearden, nor the meaning of her own action. It was a single instant, blasted out of context. She had heard. She was looking at the bracelet of green-blue metal.

She felt the movement of something being torn off her wrist, and she heard her own voice saying in the great stillness, very calmly, a voice cold as a skeleton, naked of emotion, "If you are not the coward that I think you are, you will exchange it."

On the palm of her hand, she was extending her diamond bracelet to Lillian.

"You're not serious, Miss Taggart?" said a woman's voice.

It was not Lillian's voice. Lillian's eyes were looking straight at her.

She saw them. Lillian knew that she was serious.

"Give me that bracelet," said Dagny, lifting her palm higher, the diamond band glittering across it.

"This is horrible!" cried some woman. It was strange that the cry stood out so sharply. Then Dagny realized that there were people standing around them and that they all stood in silence. She was hearing sounds now, even the music; it was Halley's mangled Concerto, somewhere far away.

She saw Rearden's face. It looked as if something within him were mangled, like the music; she did not know by what. He was watching them.

Lillian's mouth moved into an upturned crescent. It resembled a smile. She snapped the metal bracelet open, dropped it on Dagny's palm and took the diamond band.

"Thank you, Miss Taggart," she said.

Dagny's fingers closed about the metal. She felt that; she felt nothing else.

Lillian turned, because Rearden had approached her. He took the diamond bracelet from her hand. He clasped it on her wrist, raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.

He did not look at Dagny.

Lillian laughed, gaily, easily, attractively, bringing the room back to its normal mood.

"You may have it back, Miss Taggart, when you change your mind," she said.

Dagny had turned away. She felt calm and free. The pressure was gone. The need to get out had vanished.

She clasped the metal bracelet on her wrist. She liked the feel of its weight against her skin. Inexplicably, she felt a touch of feminine vanity, the kind she had never experienced before: the desire to be seen wearing this particular ornament.

From a distance, she heard snatches of indignant voices: "The most offensive gesture I've ever seen. . . . It was vicious. . . . I'm glad Lillian took her up on it. . . . Serves her right, if she feels like throwing a few thousand dollars away. . . . "

For the rest of the evening, Rearden remained by the side of his wife.

He shared her conversations, he laughed with her friends, he was suddenly the devoted, attentive, admiring husband.

He was crossing the room, carrying a tray with drinks requested by someone in Lillian's group—an unbecoming act of informality which nobody had ever seen him perform—when Dagny approached him.

She stopped and looked up at him, as if they were alone in his office.

She stood like an executive, her head lifted. He looked down at her. In the line of his glance, from the fingertips of her one hand to her face, her body was naked but for his metal bracelet.

"I'm sorry, Hank," she said, "but I had to do it."

His eyes remained expressionless. Yet she was suddenly certain that she knew what he felt: he wanted to slap her face.

"It was not necessary," he answered coldly, and walked on.

It was very late when Rearden entered his wife's bedroom. She was still awake. A lamp burned on her bedside table.

She lay in bed, propped up on pillows of pale green linen. Her bed jacket was pale green satin, worn with the untouched perfection of a window model; its lustrous folds looked as if the crinkle of tissue paper still lingered among them. The light, shaded to a tone of apple blossoms, fell on a table that held a book, a glass of fruit juice, and toilet accessories of silver glittering like instruments in a surgeon's case. Her arms had a tinge of porcelain. There was a touch of pale pink lipstick on her mouth. She showed no sign of exhaustion after the party—no sign of life to be exhausted. The place was a decorator's display of a lady groomed for sleep, not to be disturbed.

He still wore his dress clothes; his tie was loose, and a strand of hair hung over his face. She glanced at him without astonishment, as if she knew what the last hour in his room had done to him.

He looked at her silently. He had not entered her room for a long time. He stood, wishing he had not entered it now.

"Isn't it customary to talk, Henry?"

"If you wish."

"I wish you'd send one of your brilliant experts from the mills to take a look at our furnace. Do you know that it went out during the party and Simons had a terrible time getting it started again? . . . Mrs.

Weston says that our best achievement is our cook—she loved the hors d'oeuvres. . . . Balph Eubank said a very funny thing about you, he said you're a crusader with a factory's chimney smoke for a plume. . . .

I'm glad you don't like Francisco d'Anconia. I can't stand him."

He did not care to explain his presence, or to disguise defeat, or to admit it by leaving. Suddenly, it did not matter to him what she guessed or felt. He walked to the window and stood, looking out.

Why had she married him?—he thought. It was a question he had not asked himself on their wedding day, eight years ago. Since then, in tortured loneliness, he had asked it many times. He had found no answer.

It was not for position, he thought, or for money. She came from an old family that had both. Her family's name was not among the most distinguished and their fortune was modest, but both were sufficient to let her be included in the top circles of New York's society, where he had met her. Nine years ago, he had appeared in New York like an explosion, in the glare of the success of Rearden Steel, a success that had been thought impossible by the city's experts. It was his indifference that made him spectacular. He did not know that he was expected to attempt to buy his way into society and that they anticipated the pleasure of rejecting him. He had no time to notice their disappointment.

He attended, reluctantly, a few social occasions to which he was invited by men who sought his favor. He did not know, but they knew, that his courteous politeness was condescension toward the people who had expected to snub him, the people who had said that the age of achievement was past.

It was Lillian's austerity that attracted him—the conflict between her austerity and her behavior. He had never liked anyone or expected to be liked. He found himself held by the spectacle of a woman who was obviously pursuing him but with obvious reluctance, as if against her own will, as if fighting a desire she resented. It was she who planned that they should meet, then faced him coldly, as if not caring that he knew it. She spoke little; she had an air of mystery that seemed to tell him he would never break through her proud detachment, and an air of amusement, mocking her own desire and his.

He had not known many women. He had moved toward his goal, sweeping aside everything that did not pertain to it in the world and in himself. His dedication to his work was like one of the fires he dealt with, a fire that burned every lesser element, every impurity out of the white stream of a single metal. He was incapable of halfway concerns.

But there were times when he felt a sudden access of desire, so violent that it could not be given to a casual encounter. He had surrendered to it, on a few rare occasions through the years, with women he had thought he liked. He had been left feeling an angry emptiness—because he had sought an act of triumph, though he had not known of what nature, but the response he received was only a woman's acceptance of a casual pleasure, and he knew too clearly that what he had won had no meaning. He was left, not with a sense of attainment, but with a sense of his own degradation. He grew to hate his desire. He fought it. He came to believe the doctrine that this desire was wholly physical, a desire, not of consciousness, but of matter, and he rebelled against the thought that his flesh could be free to choose and that its choice was impervious to the will of his mind. He had spent his life in mines and mills, shaping matter to his wishes by the power of his brain—and he found it intolerable that he should be unable to control the matter of his own body. He fought it. He had won his every battle against inanimate nature; but this was a battle he lost.

It was the difficulty of the conquest that made him want Lillian.

She seemed to be a woman who expected and deserved a pedestal; this made him want to drag her down to his bed. To drag her down, were the words in his mind; they gave him a dark pleasure, the sense of a victory worth winning.

He could not understand why—he thought it was an obscene conflict, the sign of some secret depravity within him—why he felt, at the same time, a profound pride at the thought of granting to a woman the title of his wife. The feeling was solemn and shining; it was almost as if he felt that he wished to honor a woman by the act of possessing her.

Lillian seemed to fit the image he had not known he held, had not known he wished to find; he saw the grace, the pride, the purity; the rest was in himself; he did not know that he was looking at a reflection.

He remembered the day when Lillian came from New York to his office, of her own sudden choice, and asked him to take her through his mills. He heard a soft, low, breathless tone—the tone of admiration—growing in her voice, as she questioned him about his work and looked at the place around her. He looked at her graceful figure moving against the bursts of furnace flame, and at the light, swift steps of her high heels stumbling through drifts of slag, as she walked resolutely by his side.

The look in her eyes, when she watched a heat of steel being poured, was like his own feeling for it made visible to him. When her eyes moved up to his face, he saw the same look, but intensified to a degree that seemed to make her helpless and silent. It was at dinner, that evening, that he asked her to marry him.

It took him some time after his marriage before he admitted to himself that this was torture. He still remembered the night when he admitted it, when he told himself—the veins of his wrists pulled tight as he stood by the bed, looking down at Lillian—that he deserved the torture and that he would endure it. Lillian was not looking at him; she was adjusting her hair. "May I go to sleep now?" she asked.

She had never objected; she had never refused him anything; she submitted whenever he wished. She submitted in the manner of complying with the rule that it was, at times, her duty to become an inanimate object turned over to her husband's use.

She did not censure him. She made it clear that she took it for granted that men had degrading instincts which constituted the secret, ugly part of marriage. She was condescendingly tolerant. She smiled, in amused distaste, at the intensity of what he experienced. "It's the most undignified pastime I know of," she said to him once, "but I have never entertained the illusion that men are superior to animals."

His desire for her had died in the first week of their marriage. What remained was only a need which he was unable to destroy. He had never entered a whorehouse; he thought, at times, that the self-loathing he would experience there could be no worse than what he felt when he was driven to enter his wife's bedroom.

He would often find her reading a book. She would put it aside, with a white ribbon to mark the pages. When lie lay exhausted, his eyes closed, still breathing in gasps, she would turn on the light, pick up the book and continue her reading.

He told himself that he deserved the torture, because he had wished never to touch her again and was unable to maintain his decision. He despised himself for that. He despised a need which now held no shred of joy or meaning, which had become the mere need of a woman's body, an anonymous body that belonged to a woman whom he had to forget while he held it. He became convinced that the need was depravity.

He did not condemn Lillian. He felt a dreary, indifferent respect for her. His hatred of his own desire had made him accept the doctrine that women were pure and that a pure woman was one incapable of physical pleasure.

Through the quiet agony of the years of his marriage, there had been one thought which he would not permit himself to consider; the thought of infidelity. He had given his word. He intended to keep it. It was not loyalty to Lillian; it was not the person of Lillian that he wished to protect from dishonor—but the person of his wife.

He thought of that now, standing at the window. He had not wanted to enter her room. He had fought against it. He had fought, more fiercely, against knowing the particular reason why he would not be able to withstand it tonight. Then, seeing her, he had known suddenly that he would not touch her. The reason which had driven him here tonight was the reason which made it impossible for him.

He stood still, feeling free of desire, feeling the bleak relief of indifference to his body, to this room, even to his presence here. He had turned away from her, not to see her lacquered chastity. What he thought he should feel was respect; what he felt was revulsion.

". . . but Dr. Pritchett said that our culture is dying because our universities have to depend on the alms of the meat packers, the steel puddlers and the purveyors of breakfast cereals."

Why had she married him?—he thought. That bright, crisp voice was not talking at random. She knew why he had come here. She knew what it would do to him to see her pick up a silver buffer and go on talking gaily, polishing her fingernails. She was talking about the party.

But she did not mention Bertram Scudder—or Dagny Taggart.

What had she sought in marrying him? He felt the presence of some cold, driving purpose within her—but found nothing to condemn. She had never tried to use him. She made no demands on him. She found no satisfaction in the prestige of industrial power—she spurned it—she preferred her own circle of friends. She was not after money—she spent little—she was indifferent to the kind of extravagance he could have afforded. He had no right to accuse her, he thought, or ever to break the bond. She was a woman of honor in their marriage. She wanted nothing material from him.

He turned and looked at her wearily.

"Next time you give a party," he said, "stick to your own crowd.

Don't invite what you think are my friends. I don't care to meet them socially."

She laughed, startled and pleased. "I don't blame you, darling," she said.

He walked out, adding nothing else.

What did she want from him?—he thought. What was she after? In the universe as he knew it. There was no answer.

CHAPTER VII
THE EXPLOITERS AND THE EXPLOITED

The rails rose through the rocks to the oil derricks and the oil derricks rose to the sky. Dagny stood on the bridge, looking up at the crest of the hill where the sun hit a spot of metal on the top of the highest rigging.

It looked like a white torch lighted over the snow on the ridges of Wyatt OIL By spring, she thought, the track would meet the line growing toward it from Cheyenne. She let her eyes follow the green-blue rails that started from the derricks, came down, went across the bridge and past her. She turned her head to follow them through the miles of clear air, as they went on in great curves hung on the sides of the mountains, far to the end of the new track, where a locomotive crane, like an arm of naked bones and nerves, moved tensely against the sky.

A tractor went past her, loaded with green-blue bolts. The sound of drills came as a steady shudder from far below, where men swung on metal cables, cutting the straight stone drop of the canyon wall to reinforce the abutments of the bridge. Down the track, she could see men working, their arms stiff with the tension of their muscles as they gripped the handles of electric tie tampers.

"Muscles, Miss Taggart," Ben Nealy, the contractor, had said to her, "muscles—that's all it takes to build anything in the world."

No contractor equal to McNamara seemed to exist anywhere. She had taken the best she could find. No engineer on the Taggart staff could be trusted to supervise the job; all of them were skeptical about the new metal. "Frankly, Miss Taggart," her chief engineer had said, "since it is an experiment that nobody has ever attempted before, I do not think it's fair that it should be my responsibility." 'It's mine," she had answered. He was a man in his forties, who still preserved the breezy manner of the college from which he had graduated. Once, Taggart Transcontinental had had a chief engineer, a silent, gray-haired, self educated man, who could not be matched on any railroad. He had resigned, five years ago.

She glanced down over the bridge. She was standing on a slender beam of steel above a gorge that had cracked the mountains to a depth of fifteen hundred feet. Far at the bottom, she could distinguish the dim outlines of a dry river bed, of piled boulders, of trees contorted by centuries. She wondered whether boulders, tree trunks and muscles could ever bridge that canyon. She wondered why she found herself thinking suddenly that cave-dwellers had lived naked on the bottom of that canyon for ages.

She looked up at the Wyatt oil fields. The track broke into sidings among the wells. She saw the small disks of switches dotted against the snow. They were metal switches, of the kind that were scattered in thousands, unnoticed, throughout the country—but these were sparkling in the sun and the sparks were greenish-blue. What they meant to her was hour upon hour of speaking quietly, evenly, patiently, trying to hit the center less target that was the person of Mr. Mowen, president of the Amalgamated Switch and Signal Company, Inc., of Connecticut. "But, Miss Taggart, my dear Miss Taggart! My company has served your company for generations, why, your grandfather was the first customer of my grandfather, so you cannot doubt our eagerness to do anything you ask, but—did you say switches made of Rearden Metal?"

"Yes."

"But, Miss Taggart! Consider what it would mean, having to work with that metal. Do you know that the stuff won't melt under less than four thousand degrees? . . . Great? Well, maybe that's great for motor manufacturers, but what I'm thinking of is that it means a new type of furnace, a new process entirely, men to be trained, schedules upset, work rules shot, everything balled up and then God only knows whether it will come out right or not! . . . How do you know, Miss Taggart? How can you know, when it's never been done before? . . .

Well, I can't say that that metal is good and I can't say that it isn't.

. . . Well, no, I can't tell whether it's a product of genius, as you say, or just another fraud as a great many people are saying, Miss Taggart, a great many. . . . Well, no, I can't say that it does matter one way or the other, because who am I to take a chance on a job of this kind?"

She had doubled the price of her order. Rearden had sent two metallurgists to train Mowen's men, to teach, to show, to explain every step of the process, and had paid the salaries of Mowen's men while they were being trained.

She looked at the spikes in the rail at her feet. They meant the night when she had heard that Summit Casting of Illinois, the only company willing to make spikes of Rearden Metal, had gone bankrupt, with half of her order undelivered. She had flown to Chicago, that night, she had got three lawyers, a judge and a state legislator out of bed, she had bribed two of them and threatened the others, she had obtained a paper that was an emergency permit of a legality no one would ever be able to untangle, she had had the padlocked doors of the Summit Casting plant unlocked and a random, half-dressed crew working at the smelters before the windows had turned gray with daylight. The crews had remained at work, under a Taggart engineer and a Rearden metallurgist. The rebuilding of the Rio Norte Line was not held up.

She listened to the sound of the drills. The work had been held up once, when the drilling for the bridge abutments was stepped. "I couldn't help it, Miss Taggart," Ben Nealy had said, offended. "You know how fast drill heads wear out. I had them on order, but Incorporated Tool ran into a little trouble, they couldn't help it either, Associated Steel was delayed in delivering the steel to them, so there's nothing we can do but wait. It's no use getting upset, Miss Taggart, I'm doing my best."

"I've hired you to do a job, not to do your best—whatever that is."

"That's a funny thing to say. That's an unpopular attitude, Miss Taggart, mighty unpopular."

"Forget Incorporated Tool. Forget the steel. Order the doll heads made of Rearden Metal."

"Not me. I've had enough trouble with the damn stuff in that rail of yours. I'm not going to mess up my own equipment."

"A drill head of Rearden Metal will outlast three of steel."

"Maybe."

"I said order them made."

"Who's going to pay for it?"

"I am."

"Who's going to find somebody to make them?"

She had telephoned Rearden. He had found an abandoned tool plant, long since out of business. Within an hour, he had purchased it from the relatives of its last owner. Within a day, the plant had been reopened. Within a week, drill heads of Rearden Metal lad been delivered to the bridge in Colorado.

She looked at the bridge. It represented a problem badly solved, but she had had to accept it. The bridge, twelve hundred feet of steel across the black gap, was built in the days of Nat Taggart's son. It was long past the stage of safety; it had been patched with stringers of steel, then of iron, then of wood; it was barely worth the patching.

She had thought of a new bridge of Rearden Metal. She had asked her chief engineer to submit a design and an estimate of the cost.

The design he had submitted was the scheme of a steel bridge badly scaled down to the greater strength of the new metal; the cost made the project impossible to consider.

"I beg your pardon, Miss Taggart," he had said, offended. "I don't know what you mean when you say that I haven't made use of the metal. This design is an adaptation of the best bridges on record.

What else did you expect?”

"A new method of construction."

"What do you mean, a new method?"

"I mean that when men got structural steel, they did not use it to build steel copies of wooden bridges." She had added wearily, "Get me an estimate on what we'll need to make our old bridge last for another five years."

"Yes, Miss Taggart," he had said cheerfully. "If we reinforce it with steel—"

"We'll reinforce it with Rearden Metal."

"Yes, Miss Taggart," he had said coldly.

She looked at the snow-covered mountains. Her job had seemed hard at times, in New York. She had stopped for blank moments in the middle of her office, paralyzed by despair at the rigidity of time which she could not stretch any further—on a day when urgent appointments had succeeded one another, when she had discussed worn Diesels, rotting freight cars, failing signal systems, falling revenues, while thinking of the latest emergency on the Rio Norte construction; when she had talked, with the vision of two streaks of green-blue metal cutting across her mind; when she had interrupted the discussions, realizing suddenly why a certain news item had disturbed her, and seized the telephone receiver to call long-distance, to call her contractor, to say, "Where do you get the food from, for your men?

. . . I thought so. Well, Barton and Jones of Denver went bankrupt yesterday. Better find another supplier at once, if you don't want to have a famine on your hands." She had been building the line from her desk in New York. It had seemed hard. But now she was looking at the track. It was growing. It would be done on time.

She heard sharp, hurried footsteps, and turned. A man was coming up the track. He was tall and young, his head of black hair was hatless in the cold wind, he wore a workman's leather jacket, but he did not look like a workman, there was too imperious an assurance in the way he walked. She could not recognize the face until he came closer. It was Ellis Wyatt. She had not seen him since that one interview in her office.

He approached, stopped, looked at her and smiled.

"Hello, Dagny," he said.

In a single shock of emotion, she knew everything the two words were intended to tell her. It was forgiveness, understanding, acknowledgment. It was a salute.

She laughed, like a child, in happiness that things should be as right as that.

"Hello," she said, extending her hand.

His hand held hers an instant longer than a greeting required. It was their signature under a score settled and understood.

"Tell Nealy to put up new snow fences for a mile and a half on Granada Pass," he said. "The old ones are rotted. They won't stand through another storm. Send him a rotary plow. What he's got is a piece of junk that wouldn't sweep a back yard. The big snows are coming any day now."

She considered him for a moment. "How often have you been doing this?" she asked, "What?"

"Coming to watch the work."

"Every now and then. When I have the time. Why?"

"Were you here the night when they had the rock slide?"

"Yes."

"I was surprised how quickly and well they cleared the track, when I got the reports about it. It made me think that Nealy was a better man than I had thought"

"He isn't."

"Was it you who organized the system of moving his day's supplies down to the line?"

"Sure. His men used to spend half their time hunting for things.

Tell him to watch his water tanks. They'll freeze on him one of these nights. See if you can get him a new ditcher. I don't like the looks of the one he's got. Check on his wiring system."

She looked at him for a moment. "Thanks, Ellis," she said.

He smiled and walked on. She watched him as he walked across the bridge, as he started up the long rise toward his derricks.

"He thinks he owns the place, doesn't he?"

She turned, startled. Ben Nealy had approached her; his thumb was pointing at Ellis Wyatt.

"What place?"

"The railroad, Miss Taggart. Your railroad. Or the whole world maybe. That's what he thinks."

Ben Nealy was a bulky man with a soft, sullen face. His eyes were stubborn and blank. In die bluish light of the snow, his skin had the tinge of butter.

"What does he keep hanging around here for?" he said. "As if nobody knew their business but him. The snooty show-off. Who does he think he is?"

"God damn you," said Dagny evenly, not raising her voice.

Nealy could never know what had made her say it. But some part of him, in some way of his own, knew it: the shocking thing to her was that he was not shocked. He said nothing.

"Let's go to your quarters," she said wearily, pointing to an old railway coach on a spur in the distance. "Have somebody there to take notes."

"Now about those crossties, Miss Taggart," he said hastily as they started. "Mr. Coleman of your office okayed them. He didn't say anything about too much bark. I don't see why you think they're—"

"I said you're going to replace them."

When she came out of the coach, exhausted by two hours of effort to be patient, to instruct, to explain—she saw an automobile parked on the torn dirt road below, a black two-seater, sparkling and new. A new car was an astonishing sight anywhere; one did not see them often.

She glanced around and gasped at the sight of the tall figure standing at the foot of the bridge. It was Hank Rearden; she had not expected to find him in Colorado. He seemed absorbed in calculations, pencil and notebook in hand. His clothes attracted attention, like his car and for the same reason; he wore a simple trenchcoat and a hat with a slanting brim, but they were of such good quality, so flagrantly expensive that they appeared ostentatious among the seedy garments of the crowds everywhere, the more ostentatious because worn so naturally.

She noticed suddenly that she was running toward him; she had lost all trace of exhaustion. Then she remembered that she had not seen him since the party. She stopped.

He saw her, he waved to her in a gesture of pleased, astonished greeting, and he walked forward to meet her. He was smiling.

"Hello," he said. "Your first trip to the job?"

"My fifth, in three months."

"I didn't know you were here. Nobody told me."

"I thought you'd break down some day."

"Break down?"

"Enough to come and see this. There's your Metal. How do you like it?"

He glanced around. "If you ever decide to quit the railroad business, let me know."

"You'd give me a job?"

"Any time."

She looked at him for a moment. "You're only half-kidding, Hank.

I think you'd like it—having me ask you for a job. Having me for an employee instead of a customer. Giving me orders to obey."

"Yes. I would."

She said, her face hard, "Don't quit the steel business, I won't promise you a job on the railroad."

He laughed. "Don't try it."

"What?"

"To win any battle when I set the terms."

She did not answer. She was struck by what the words made her feel; it was not an emotion, but a physical sensation of pleasure, which she could not name or understand.

"incidentally," he said, "this is not my first trip. I was here yesterday."

"You were? Why?"

"Oh, I came to Colorado on some business of my own, so I thought I'd take a look at this."

"What are you after?"

"Why do you assume that I'm after anything?"

"You wouldn't waste time coming here just to look. Not twice."

He laughed. "True." He pointed at the bridge. "I'm after that."

"What about it?"

"It's ready for the scrap heap."

"Do you suppose that I don't know it?"

"I saw the specifications of your order for Rearden Metal members for that bridge. You're wasting your money. The difference between what you're planning to spend on a makeshift that will last a couple of years, and the cost of a new Rearden Metal bridge, is comparatively so little that I don't see why you want to bother preserving this museum piece."

"I've thought of a new Rearden Metal bridge, I've had my engineers give me an estimate."

"What did they tell you?"

"Two million dollars."

"Good God!"

"What would you say?"

"Eight hundred thousand."

She looked at him. She knew that he never spoke idly. She asked, trying to sound calm, "How?"

"Like this."

He showed her his notebook. She saw the disjoined notations he had made, a great many figures, a few rough sketches. She understood his scheme before he had finished explaining it. She did not notice that they had sat down, that they were sitting on a pile of frozen lumber, that her legs were pressed to the rough planks and she could feel the cold through her thin stockings. They were bent together over a few scraps of paper which could make it possible for thousands of tons of freight to cross a cut of empty space. His voice sounded sharp and clear, while he explained thrusts, pulls, loads, wind pressures. The bridge was to be a single twelve-hundred-foot truss span. He had devised a new type of truss. It had never been made before end could not be made except with members that had the strength and the lightness of Rearden Metal.

"Hank," she asked, "did you invent this in two days?"

"Hell, no. I 'invented' it long before I had Rearden Metal. I figured it out while making steel for bridges. I wanted a metal with which one would be able to do this, among other things. I came here just to see your particular problem for myself."

He chuckled, when he saw the slow movement of her hand across her eyes and the line of bitterness in the set of her mouth, as if she were trying to wipe out the things against which she had fought such an exhausting, cheerless battle.

"This is only a rough scheme," he said, "but I believe you see what can be done?"

"I can't tell you all that I see, Hank."

"Don't bother. I know it."

"You're saving Taggart Transcontinental for the second time."

"You used to be a better psychologist than that."

"What do you mean?"

"Why should I give a damn about saving Taggart Transcontinental?

Don't you know that I want to have a bridge of Rearden Metal to show the country?"

"Yes, Hank. I know it"

"There are too many people yelping that rails of Rearden Metal are unsafe. So I thought I'd give them something real to yelp about. Let them see a bridge of Rearden Metal."

She looked at him and laughed aloud in simple delight.

"Now what's that?" he asked.

"Hank, I don't know anyone, not anyone in the world, who'd think of such an answer to people, in such circumstances—except you."

"What about you? Would you want to make the answer with me and face the same screaming?"

"You knew I would."

"Yes. I knew it."

He glanced at her, his eyes narrowed; he did not laugh as she had, but the glance was an equivalent.

She remembered suddenly their last meeting, at the party. The memory seemed incredible. Their ease with each other—the strange, light-headed feeling, which included the knowledge that it was the only sense of ease either of them found anywhere—made the thought of hostility impossible. Yet she knew that the party had taken place; he acted as if it had not.

They walked to the edge of the canyon. Together, they looked at the dark drop, at the rise of rock beyond it, at the sun high on the derricks of Wyatt Oil. She stood, her feet apart on the frozen stones, braced firmly against the wind. She could feel, without touching it, the line of his chest behind her shoulder. The wind beat her coat against his legs.

"Hank, do you think we can build it in time? There are only six months left."

"Sure. It will take less time and labor than any other type of bridge.

Let me have my engineers work out the basic scheme and submit it to you. No obligation on your part. Just take a look at it and see for yourself whether you'll be able to afford it. You will. Then you can let your college boys work out the details."

"What about the Metal?"

"I'll get the Metal rolled if I have to throw every other order out of the mills."

"You'll get it rolled on so short a notice?"

"Have I ever held you up on an order?"

"No. But the way things are going nowadays, you might not be able to help it."

"Who do you think you're talking to—Orren Boyle?"

She laughed. "All right. Let me have the drawings as soon as possible. I'll take a look and let you know within forty-eight hours. As to my college boys, they—" She stopped, frowning. "Hank, why is it so hard to find good men for any job nowadays?"

"I don't know . . ."

He looked at the lines of the mountains cut across the sky. A thin jet of smoke was rising from a distant valley.

"Have you seen the new towns of Colorado and the factories?" he asked.

"Yes."

"It's great, isn't it?—to see the kind of men they've gathered here from every corner of the country. All of them young, all of them starting on a shoestring and moving mountains."

"What mountain have you decided to move?"

"Why?"

"What are you doing in Colorado?"

He smiled. "Looking at a mining property."

"What sort?"

"Copper."

"Good God, don't you have enough to do?"

"I know it's a complicated job. But the supply of copper is becoming completely unreliable. There doesn't seem to be a single first-rate company left in the business in this country—and I don't want to deal with d'Anconia Copper. I don't trust that playboy."

"I don't blame you," she said, looking away.

"So if there's no competent person left to do it, I'll have to mine my own copper, as I mine my own iron ore. I can't take any chances on being held up by all those failures and shortages. I need a great deal of copper for Rearden Metal."

"Have you bought the mine?"

"Not yet. There are a few problems to solve. Getting the men, the equipment, the transportation."

"Oh . . . !" She chuckled. "Going to speak to me about building a branch line?"

"Might. There's no limit to what's possible in this state. Do you know that they have every kind of natural resource here, waiting, untouched? And the way their factories are growing! I feel ten years younger when I come here."

"I don't." She was looking east, past the mountains. "I think of the contrast, all over the rest of the Taggart system. There's less to carry, less tonnage produced each year. It's as if . . . Hank, what's wrong with the country?"

"I don't know."

"I keep thinking of what they told us in school about the sun losing energy, growing colder each year. I remember wondering, then, what it would be like in the last days of the world. I think it would be . . . like this. Growing colder and things stopping."

"I never believed that story. I thought by the time the sun was exhausted, men would find a substitute."

"You did? Funny. I thought that, too."

He pointed at the column of smoke. "There's your new sunrise. It's going to feed the rest."

"If it's not stopped."

"Do you think it can be stopped?"

She looked at the rail under her feet. "No," she said.

He smiled. He looked down at the rail, then let his eyes move along the track, up the sides of the mountains, to the distant crane. She saw two things, as if, for a moment, the two stood alone in her field of vision: the lines of his profile and the green-blue cord coiling through space.

"We've done it, haven't we?" he said.

In payment for every effort, for every sleepless night, for every silent thrust against despair, this moment was all she wanted. "Yes. We have."

She looked away, noticed an old crane on a siding, and thought that its cables were worn and would need replacing: This was the great clarity of being beyond emotion, after the reward of having felt everything one could feel. Their achievement, she thought, and one moment of acknowledging it, of possessing it together—what greater intimacy could one share? Now she was free for the simplest, most commonplace concerns of the moment, because nothing could be meaningless within her sight.

She wondered what made her certain that he felt as she did. He turned abruptly and started toward his car. She followed. They did not look at each other.

"I'm due to leave for the East in an hour," he said.

She pointed at the car. "Where did you get that?"

"Here. It's a Hammond. Hammond of Colorado—they're the only people who're still making a good car. I just bought it, on this trip."

"Wonderful job."

"Yes, isn't it?"

"Going to drive it back to New York?"

"No. I'm having it shipped. I flew my plane down here."

"Oh, you did? I drove down from Cheyenne—I had to see the line —but I'm anxious to get home as fast as possible. Would you take me along? Can I fly back with you?"

He did not answer at once. She noticed the empty moment of a pause. "I'm sorry," he said; she wondered whether she imagined the note of abruptness in his voice. "I'm not flying back to New York. I'm going to Minnesota."

"Oh well, then I'll try to get on an air liner, if I can find one today,"

She watched his car vanish down the winding road. She drove to the airport an hour later. The place was a small field at the bottom of a break in the desolate chain of mountains. There were patches of snow on the hard, pitted earth. The pole of a beacon stood at one side, trailing wires to the ground; the other poles had been knocked down by a storm.

A lonely attendant came to meet her. "No, Miss Taggart," he said regretfully, "no planes till day after tomorrow. There's only one transcontinental liner every two days, you know, and the one that was due today has been grounded, down in Arizona. Engine trouble, as usual." He added, "It's a pity you didn't get here a bit sooner. Mr.

Rearden took off for New York, in his private plane, just a little while ago."

"He wasn't flying to New York, was be?"

"Why, yes. He said so."

"Are you sure?"

"He said he had an appointment there tonight."

She looked at the sky to the east, blankly, without moving. She had no clue to any reason, nothing to give her a foothold, nothing with which to weigh this or fight it or understand.

"Damn these streets!" said James Taggart. "We're going to be late."

Dagny glanced ahead, past the back of the chauffeur. Through the circle made by a windshield wiper on the sleet-streaked glass, she saw black, worn, glistening car tops strung in a motionless line. Far ahead, the smear of a red lantern, low over the ground, marked a street excavation.

"There's something wrong on every other street," said Taggart irritably. "Why doesn't somebody fix them?"

She leaned back against the seat, tightening the collar of her wrap.

She felt exhausted at the end of a day she had started at her desk, in her office, at seven A.M.; a day she had broken off, uncompleted, to rush home and dress, because she had promised Jim to speak at the dinner of the New York Business Council "They want us to give them a talk about Rearden Metal," he had said. "You can do it so much better than I. It's very important that we present a good case. There's such a controversy about Rearden Metal."

Sitting beside him in his car, she regretted that she had agreed. She looked at the streets of New York and thought of the race between metal and time, between the rails of the Rio Norte Line and the passing days. She felt as if her nerves were being pulled tight by the stillness of the car, by the guilt of wasting an evening when she could not afford to waste an hour.

"With all those attacks on Rearden that one hears everywhere," said Taggart, "he might need a few friends."

She glanced at him incredulously. "You mean you want to stand by him?"

He did not answer at once; he asked, his voice bleak, "That report of the special committee of the National Council of Metal Industries—what do you think of it?"

"You know what I think of it."

"They said Rearden Metal is a threat to public safety. They said its chemical composition is unsound, it's brittle, it's decomposing molecularly, and it will crack suddenly, without warning . . ." He stopped, as if begging for an answer. She did not answer. He asked anxiously, "You haven't changed your mind about it, have you?"

"About what?"

"About that metal."

"No, Jim, I have not changed my mind."

"They're experts, though . . . the men on that committee. . . .

Top experts . . . Chief metallurgists for the biggest corporations, with a string of degrees from universities all over the country . . ." He said it unhappily, as if he were begging her to make him doubt these men and their verdict.

She watched him, puzzled; this was not like him.

The car jerked forward. It moved slowly through a gap in a plank barrier, past the hole of a broken water main. She saw the new pipe stacked by the excavation; the pipe bore a trademark: Stockton Foundry, Colorado. She looked away; she wished she were not reminded of Colorado.

"I can't understand it . . ." said Taggart miserably. "The top experts of the National Council of Metal Industries . . ."

"Who's the president of the National Council of Metal Industries, Jim? Orren Boyle, isn't it?"

Taggart did not turn to her, but his jaw snapped open. "If that fat slob thinks he can—" he started, but stopped and did not finish.

She looked up at a street lamp on the corner. It was a globe of glass filled with light. It hung, secure from storm, lighting boarded windows and cracked sidewalks, as their only guardian. At the end of the street, across the river, against the glow of a factory, she saw the thin tracing of a power station. A truck went by, hiding her view. It was the kind of truck that fed the power station—a tank truck, its bright new paint impervious to sleet, green with white letters: Wyatt Oil, Colorado.

"Dagny, have you heard about that discussion at the structural steel workers' union meeting in Detroit?"

"No. What discussion?"

"It was in all the newspapers. They debated whether their members should or should not be permitted to work with Rearden Metal.

They didn't reach a decision, but that was enough for the contractor who was going to take a chance on Rearden Metal. He cancelled his order, but fast! . . . What if . . . what if everybody decides against it?"

"Let them."

A dot of light was rising in a straight line to the top of an invisible tower. It was the elevator of a great hotel. The car went past the building's alley. Men were moving a heavy, crated piece of equipment from a truck into the basement. She saw the name on the crate: Nielsen Motors, Colorado.

"I don't like that resolution passed by the convention of the grade school teachers of New Mexico," said Taggart.

"What resolution?"

"They resolved that it was their opinion that children should not be permitted to ride on the new Rio Norte Line of Taggart Transcontinental when it's completed, because it is unsafe. . . . They said it specifically, the new line of Taggart Transcontinental. It was in all the newspapers. It's terrible publicity for us. . . . Dagny, what do you think we should do to answer them?"

"Run the first train on the new Rio Norte Line."

He remained silent for a long time. He looked strangely dejected.

She could not understand it: he did not gloat, he did not use the opinions of his favorite authorities against her, he seemed to be pleading for reassurance.

A car flashed past them; she had a moment's glimpse of power—a smooth, confident motion and a shining body. She knew the make of the car: Hammond, Colorado.

"Dagny, are we . . . are we going to have that line built . . . on time?"

It was strange to hear a note of plain emotion in his voice, the uncomplicated sound of animal fear.

"God help this city, if we don't!" she answered.

The car turned a corner. Above the black roofs of the city, she saw the page of the calendar, hit by the white glare of a spotlight. It said: January 29.

"Dan Conway is a bastard!"

The words broke out suddenly, as if he could not hold them any longer.

She looked at him, bewildered. "Why?"

"He refused to sell us the Colorado track of the Phoenix-Durango."

"You didn't—" She had to stop. She started again, keeping her voice flat in order not to scream. "You haven't approached him about it?"

"Of course I have!"

"You didn't expect him . . . to sell it . . . to you?"

"Why not?" His hysterically belligerent manner was back, "I offered him more than anybody else did. We wouldn't have had the expense of tearing it up and carting it off, we could have used it as is. And it would have been wonderful publicity for us—that we're giving up the Rearden Metal track in deference to public opinion. It would have been worth every penny of it in good will! But the son of a bitch refused. He's actually declared that not a foot of rail would be sold to Taggart Transcontinental. He's selling it piecemeal to any stray comer, to one-horse railroads in Arkansas or North Dakota, selling it at a loss, way under what I offered him, the bastard! Doesn't even want to take a profit! And you should see those vultures flocking to him! They know they'd never have a chance to get rail anywhere else!”

She sat, her head bowed. She could not bear to look at him.

"I think it's contrary to the intent of the Anti-dog-cat-dog Rule," he said angrily. "I think it was the intent and purpose of the National Alliance of Railroads to protect the essential systems, not the jerkwaters of North Dakota. But I can't get the Alliance to vote on it now, because they're all down there, outbidding one another for that rail!"

She said slowly, as if she wished it were possible to wear gloves to handle the words, "I see why you want me to defend Rearden Metal."

"I don't know what you're—"

"Shut up, Jim," she said quietly.

He remained silent for a moment. Then he drew his head back and drawled defiantly, "You'd better do a good job of defending Rearden Metal, because Bertram Scudder can get pretty sarcastic."

"Bertram Scudder?"

"He's going to be one of the speakers tonight."

"One of the . . . You didn't tell me there were to be other speakers."

"Well . . . I . . . What difference does that make? You're not afraid of him, are you?"

"The New York Business Council . . . and you invite Bertram Scudder?"

"Why not? Don't you think it's smart? He doesn't have any hard feelings toward businessmen, not really. He's accepted the invitation.

We want to be broad-minded and hear all sides and maybe win him over. . . . Well, what are you staring at? You'll be able to beat him, won't you?"

". . . to beat him?"

"On the air. It's going to be a radio broadcast. You're going to debate with him the question: 'Is Rearden Metal a lethal product of greed?' "

She leaned forward. She pulled open the glass partition of the front seat, ordering, "Stop the car!"

She did not hear what Taggart was saying. She noticed dimly that his voice rose to screams: "They're waiting! . . . Five hundred people at the dinner, and a national hook-up! . . . You can't do this to me!"

He seized her arm, screaming, "But why?"

"You goddamn fool, do you think I consider their question debatable?"

The car stopped, she leaped out and ran.

The first tiling she noticed after a while, was her slippers. She was walking slowly, normally, and it was strange to feel iced stone under the thin soles of black satin sandals. She pushed her hair back, off her forehead, and felt drops of sleet melting on her palm.

She was quiet now; the blinding anger was gone; she felt nothing but a gray weariness. Her head ached a little, she realized that she was hungry and remembered that she was to have had dinner at the Business Council. She walked on. She did not want to eat. She thought she would get a cup of coffee somewhere, then take a cab home.

She glanced around her. There were no cabs in sight. She did not know the neighborhood. It did not seem to be a good one. She saw an empty stretch of space across the street, an abandoned park encircled by a jagged line that began as distant skyscrapers and came down to factory chimneys; she saw a few lights in the windows of dilapidated houses, a few small, grimy shops closed for the night, and the fog of the East River two blocks away.

She started back toward the center of the city. The black shape of a ruin rose before her. It had been an office building, long ago; she saw the sky through the naked steel skeleton and the angular remnants of the bricks that had crumbled. In the shadow of the ruin, like a blade of grass fighting to live at the roots of a dead giant, there stood a small diner. Its windows were a bright band of glass and light. She went in.

There was a clean counter inside, with a shining strip of chromium at the edges. There was a bright metal boiler and the odor of coffee. A few derelicts sat at the counter, a husky, elderly man stood behind it, the sleeves of his clean white shirt rolled at the elbows. The warm air made her realize, in simple gratitude, that she had been cold. She pulled her black velvet cape tight about her and sat down at the counter.

"A cup of coffee, please," she said.

The men looked at her without curiosity. They did not seem astonished to see a woman in evening clothes enter a slum diner; nothing astonished anyone, these days. The owner turned impassively to fill her order; there was, in his stolid indifference, the kind of mercifulness that asks no questions.

She could not tell whether the four at the counter were beggars or Working men; neither clothes nor manner showed the difference, these days. The owner placed a mug of coffee before her. She closed both hands about it, finding enjoyment in its warmth.

She glanced around her and thought, in habitual professional calculation, how wonderful it was that one could buy so much for a dime.

Her eyes moved from the stainless steel cylinder of the coffee boiler to the cast-iron griddle, to the glass shelves, to the enameled sink, to the chromium blades of a mixer. The owner was making toast. She found pleasure in watching the ingenuity of an open belt that moved slowly, carrying slices of bread past glowing electric coils. Then she saw the name stamped on the toaster: Marsh, Colorado.

Her head fell down on her arm on the counter.

"It's no use, lady," said the old bum beside her.

She had to raise her head. She had to smile in amusement, at him and at herself.

"It isn't?" she asked.

"No. Forget it. You're only fooling yourself."

"About what?"

"About anything being worth a damn. It's dust, lady, all of it, dust and blood. Don't believe the dreams they pump you full of, and you won't get hurt."

"What dreams?"

"The stories they tell you when you're young—about the human spirit. There isn't any human spirit. Man is just a low-grade animal, without intellect, without soul, without virtues or moral values. An animal with only two capacities: to eat and to reproduce."

His gaunt face, with staring eyes and shrunken features that had been delicate, still retained a trace of distinction. He looked like the hulk of an evangelist or a professor of esthetics who had spent years in contemplation in obscure museums. She wondered what had destroyed him, what error on the way could bring a man to this.

"You go through life looking for beauty, for greatness, for some sublime achievement," he said. "And what do you find? A lot of trick machinery for making upholstered cars or inner-spring mattresses."

"What's wrong with inner-spring mattresses?" said a man who looked like a truck driver. "Don't mind him, lady. He likes to hear himself talk. He don't mean no harm."

"Man's only talent is an ignoble cunning for satisfying the needs of his body," said the old bum. "No intelligence is required for that.

Don't believe the stories about man's mind, his spirit, his ideals, his sense of unlimited ambition."

"I don't," said a young boy who sat at the end of the counter. He wore a coat ripped across one shoulder; his square-shaped mouth seemed formed by the bitterness of a lifetime.

"Spirit?" said the old bum. "There's no spirit involved in manufacturing or in sex. Yet these are man's only concerns. Matter—that's all men know or care about. As witness our great industries—the only accomplishment of our alleged civilization—built by vulgar materialists with the aims, the interests and the moral sense of hogs. It doesn't take any morality to turn out a ten-ton truck on an assembly line."

"What is morality?" she asked.

"Judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price. But where does one find it?"

The young boy made a sound that was half-chuckle, half-sneer: "Who is John Galt?"

She drank the coffee, concerned with nothing but the pleasure of feeling as if the hot liquid were reviving the arteries of her body.

"I can tell you," said a small, shriveled tramp who wore a cap pulled low over his eyes. "I know."

Nobody heard him or paid any attention. The young boy was watching Dagny with a kind of fierce, purposeless intensity.

"You're not afraid," he said to her suddenly, without explanation, a fiat statement in a brusque, lifeless voice that had a note of wonder.

She looked at him. "No," she said, "I'm not."

"I know who is John Galt," said the tramp. "It's a secret, but I know it."

"Who?" she asked without interest.

"An explorer," said the tramp. "The greatest explorer that ever lived. The man who found the fountain of youth."

"Give me another cup. Black," said the old bum, pushing his cup across the counter.

"John Galt spent years looking for it. He crossed oceans, and he crossed deserts, and he went down into forgotten mines, miles under the earth. But he found it on the top of a mountain. It took him ten years to climb that mountain. It broke every bone in his body, it tore the skin off his hands, it made him lose his home, his name, his love.

But he climbed it. He found the fountain of youth, which he wanted to bring down to men. Only he never came back."

"Why didn't he?" she asked.

"Because he found that it couldn't be brought down."

The man who sat in front of Rearden's desk had vague features and a manner devoid of all emphasis, so that one could form no specific image of his face nor detect the driving motive of his person. His only mark of distinction seemed to be a bulbous nose, a bit too large for the rest of him; his manner was meek, but it conveyed a preposterous hint, the hint of a threat deliberately kept furtive, yet intended to be recognized. Rearden could not understand the purpose of his visit. He was Dr. Potter, who held some undefined position with the State Science Institute.

"What do you want?" Rearden asked for the third time.

"It is the social aspect that I am asking you to consider, Mr.

Rearden," the man said softly, "I urge you to take note of the age we're living in. Our economy is not ready for it."

"For what?"

"Our economy is in a state of extremely precarious equilibrium. We all have to pool our efforts to save it from collapse."

"Well, what is it you want me to do?"

"These are the considerations which I was asked to call to your attention. I am from the State Science Institute, Mr. Rearden."

"You've said so before. But what did you wish to see me about?"

"The State Science Institute does not hold a favorable opinion of Rearden Metal."

"You've said that, too."

"Isn't that a factor which you must take into consideration?"

"No."

The light was growing dim in the broad windows of the office. The days were short. Rearden saw the irregular shadow of the nose on the man's cheek, and the pale eyes watching him; the glance was vague, but its direction purposeful.

"The State Science Institute represents the best brains of the country, Mr. Rearden."

"So I'm told."

"Surely you do not want to pit your own judgment against theirs?"

"I do."

The man looked at Rearden as if pleading for help, as if Rearden had broken an unwritten code which demanded that he should have understood long ago. Rearden offered no help.

"Is this all you wanted to know?" he asked.

"It's only a question of time, Mr. Rearden," the man said placatingly. "Just a temporary delay. Just to give our economy a chance to get stabilized. If you'd only wait for a couple of years—"

Rearden chuckled, gaily, contemptuously. "So that's what you're after? Want me to take Rearden Metal off the market? Why?"

"Only for a few years, Mr. Rearden. Only until—"

"Look," said Rearden. "Now I'll ask you a question: did your scientists decide that Rearden Metal is not what I claim it is?"

"We have not committed ourselves as to that."

"Did they decide it's no good?"

"It is the social impact of a product that must be considered. We are thinking in terms of the country as a whole, we are concerned with the public welfare and the terrible crisis of the present moment, which—"

"Is Rearden Metal good or not?"

"If we view the picture from the angle of the alarming growth of unemployment, which at present—"

"Is Rearden Metal good?"

"At a time of desperate steel shortage, we cannot afford to permit the expansion of a steel company which produces too much, because it might throw out of business the companies which produce too little, thus creating an unbalanced economy which—"

"Are you going to answer my question?"

The man shrugged. "Questions of value are relative. If Rearden Metal is not good, it's a physical danger to the public. If it is good—it's a social danger."

"If you have anything to say to me about the physical danger of Rearden Metal, say it. Drop the rest of it. Fast. I don't speak that language."

"But surely questions of social welfare—"

"Drop it."

The man looked bewildered and lost, as if the ground had been cut from under his feet. In a moment, he asked helplessly, "But what, then, is your chief concern?"

"The market."

"How do you mean?"

"There's a market for Rearden Metal and I intend to take full advantage of it."

"Isn't the market somewhat hypothetical? The public response to your metal has not been encouraging. Except for the order from Taggart Transcontinental, you haven't obtained any major—"

"Well, then, if you think the public won't go for it, what are you worrying about?"

"If the public doesn't go for it, you will take a heavy loss, Mr.

Rearden."

"That's my worry, not yours."

"Whereas, if you adopt a more co-operative attitude and agree to wait for a few years—"

"Why should I wait?"

"But I believe I have made it clear that the State Science Institute does not approve of the appearance of Rearden Metal on the metallurgical scene at the present time."

"Why should I give a damn about that?"

The man sighed. "You are a very difficult man, Mr. Rearden."

The sky of the late afternoon was growing heavy, as if thickening against the glass of the windowpanes. The outlines of the man's figure seemed to dissolve into a blob among the sharp, straight planes of the furniture.

"I gave you this appointment," said Rearden, "because you told me that you wished to discuss something of extreme importance. If this is all you had to say, you will please excuse me now. I am very busy."

The man settled back in his chair. "I believe you have spent ten years of research on Rearden Metal," he said. "How much has it cost you?"

Rearden glanced up: he could not understand the drift of the question, yet there was an undisguised purposefulness in the man's voice; the voice had hardened.

"One and a half million dollars," said Rearden.

"How much will you take for it?"

Rearden had to let a moment pass. He could not believe it. "For what?" he asked, his voice low.

"For all rights to Rearden Metal."

"I think you had better get out of here,"' said Rearden.

"There is no call for such an attitude. You are a businessman. I am offering you a business proposition. You may name your own price."

"The rights to Rearden Metal are not for sale."

"I am in a position to speak of large sums of money. Government money."

Rearden sat without moving, the muscles of his cheeks pulled tight; but his glance was indifferent, focused only by the faint pull of morbid curiosity.

"You are a businessman, Mr. Rearden. This is a proposition which you cannot afford to ignore. On the one hand, you are gambling against great odds, you are bucking an unfavorable public opinion, you run a good chance of losing every penny you put into Rearden Metal. On the other hand, we can relieve you of the risk and the responsibility, at an impressive profit, an immediate profit, much larger than you could hope to realize from the sale of the metal for the next twenty years."

"The State Science Institute is a scientific establishment, not a commercial one," said Rearden. "What is it that they're so afraid of?"

"You are using ugly, unnecessary words, Mr. Rearden. I am endeavoring to suggest that we keep the discussion on a friendly plane. The matter is serious."

"I am beginning to see that."

"We are offering you a blank check on what is, as you realize, an unlimited account. What else can you want? Name your price."

"The sale of the rights to Rearden Metal is not open to discussion.

If you have anything else to say, please say it and leave."

The man leaned back, looked at Rearden incredulously and asked, "What are you after?"

"I? What do you mean?"

"You're in business to make money, aren't you?"

"I am."

"You want to make as big a profit as possible, don't you?"

"I do."

"Then why do you want to struggle for years, squeezing out your gains in the form of pennies per ton—rather than accept a fortune for Rearden Metal? Why?"

"Because it's mine. Do you understand the word?"

The man sighed and rose to his feet. "I hope you will not have cause to regret your decision, Mr. Rearden," he said; the tone of his voice was suggesting the opposite.

"Good day," said Rearden.

"I think I must tell you that the State Science Institute may issue an official statement condemning Rearden Metal."

"That is their privilege."

"Such a statement would make things more difficult for you."

"Undoubtedly."

"As to further consequences . . ." The man shrugged. "This is not the day for people who refuse to co-operate. In this age, one needs friends. You are not a popular man, Mr. Rearden."

"What are you trying to say?"

"Surely, you understand."

"I don't."

"Society is a complex structure. There are so many different issues awaiting decision, hanging by a thin thread. We can never tell when one such issue may he decided and what may be the decisive factor in a delicate balance. Do I make myself clear?"

"No."

The red flame of poured steel shot through the twilight. An orange glow, the color of deep gold, hit the wall behind Rearden's desk.

The glow moved gently across his forehead. His face had an unmoving serenity.

"The State Science Institute is a government organization, Mr.

Rearden. There are certain bills pending in the Legislature, which may be passed at any moment. Businessmen are peculiarly vulnerable these days. I am sure you understand me."

Rearden rose to his feet. He was smiling. He looked as if all tension had left him.

"No, Dr. Potter," he said, "I don't understand. If I did, I'd have to kill you."

The man walked to the door, then stopped and looked at Rearden in a way which, for once, was simple human curiosity. Rearden stood motionless against the moving glow on the wall; he stood casually, his hands in his pockets.

"Would you tell me," the man asked, "just between us, it's only my personal curiosity—why are you doing this?"

Rearden answered quietly, "I'll tell you. You won't understand. You see, it's because Rearden Metal is good."

Dagny could not understand Mr. Mowen's motive. The Amalgamated Switch and Signal Company had suddenly given notice that they would not complete her order. Nothing had happened, she could find no cause for it and they would give no explanation.

She had hurried to Connecticut, to see Mr. Mowen in person, but the sole result of the interview was a heavier, grayer weight of bewilderment in her mind. Mr. Mowen stated that he would not continue to make switches of Rearden Metal. For sole explanation, he said, avoiding her eyes, "Too many people don't like it."

"What? Rearden Metal or your making the switches?"

"Both, I guess . . . People don't like it . . . I don't want any trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

"Any kind."

"Have you heard a single thing against Rearden Metal that's true?"

"Aw, who knows what's true? . . . That resolution of the National Council of Metal Industries said—"

"Look, you've worked with metals all your life. For the last four months, you've worked with Rearden Metal. Don't you know that it's the greatest thing you've ever handled?" He did not answer. "Don't you know it?" He looked away. "Don't you know what's true?"

"Hell, Miss Taggart, I'm in business, I'm only a little guy. I just want to make money."

"How do you think one makes it?"

But she knew that it was useless. Looking at Mr. Mowen's face, at the eyes which she could not catch, she felt as she had felt once on a lonely section of track, when a storm blew down the telephone wires: that communications were cut and that words had become sounds which transmitted nothing.

It was useless to argue, she thought, and to wonder about people who would neither refute an argument nor accept it. Sitting restlessly in the train, on her way back to New York, she told herself that Mr.

Mowen did not matter, that nothing mattered now, except finding somebody else to manufacture the switches. She was wrestling with a list of names in her mind, wondering who would be easiest to convince, to beg or to bribe.

She knew, the moment she entered the anteroom of her office, that something had happened. She saw the unnatural stillness, with the faces of her staff turned to her as if her entrance were the moment they had all waited for, hoped for and dreaded.

Eddie Willers rose to his feet and started toward the door of her office, as if knowing that she would understand and follow. She had seen his face. No matter what it was, she thought, she wished it had not hurt him quite so badly.

"The State Science Institute," he said quietly, when they were alone in her office, "has issued a statement warning people against the use of Rearden Metal." He added, "It was on the radio. It's in the afternoon papers."

"What did they say?"

"Dagny, they didn't say it! . . . They haven't really said it, yet it's there—and it isn't. That's what's monstrous about it."

His effort was focused on keeping his voice quiet; he could not control his words. The words were forced out of him by the unbelieving. bewildered indignation of a child screaming in denial at his first encounter with evil.

"What did they say, Eddie?"

"They . . . You'd have to read it." He pointed to the newspaper he had left on her desk. "They haven't said that Rearden Metal is bad.

They haven't said that it's unsafe. What they've done is . . ." His hands spread and dropped in a gesture of futility.

She saw at a glance what they had done. She saw the sentences: "It may be possible that after a period of heavy usage, a sudden fissure may appear, though the length of this period cannot be predicted. . . . The possibility of a molecular reaction, at present unknown, cannot be entirely discounted. . . . Although the tensile strength of the metal is obviously demonstrable, certain questions in regard to its behavior under unusual stress are not to be ruled out.

. . . Although there is no evidence to support the contention that the use of the metal should be prohibited, a further study of its properties would be of value."

"We can't fight it. It can't be answered," Eddie was saying slowly.

"We can't demand a retraction. We can't show them our tests or prove anything. They've said nothing. They haven't said a thing that could be refuted and embarrass them professionally. It's the job of a coward.

You'd expect it from some con-man or blackmailer. But, Dagny! It's the State Science Institute!"

She nodded silently. She stood, her eyes fixed on some point beyond the window. At the end of a dark street, the bulbs of an electric sign kept going on and off, as if winking at her maliciously.

Eddie gathered his strength and said in the tone of a military report, "Taggart stock has crashed. Ben Nealy quit. The National Brotherhood of Road and Track Workers has forbidden its members to work on the Rio Norte Line. Jim has left town."

She took her hat and coat off, walked across the room and slowly, very deliberately sat down at her desk.

She noticed a large brown envelope lying before her; it bore the letterhead of Rearden Steel.

"That came by special messenger, right after you left," said Eddie.

She put her hand on the envelope, but did not open it. She knew what it was: the drawings of the bridge.

After a while, she asked, "Who issued that statement?"

Eddie glanced at her and smiled briefly, bitterly, shaking his head.

"No," he said. "I thought of that, too. I called the Institute long distance and asked them. No, it was issued by the office of Dr. Floyd Ferris, their co-ordinator."

She said nothing.

"But still! Dr. Stadler is the head of that Institute. He is the Institute. He must have known about it. He permitted it. If it's done, it's done in his name . . . Dr. Robert Stadler . . . Do you remember . . . when we were in college . . . how we used to talk about the great names in the world . . . the men of pure intellect . . . and we always chose his name as one of them, and—" He stopped. "I'm sorry, Dagny. I know it's no use saying anything. Only—"

She sat, her hand pressed to the brown envelope.

"Dagny," he asked, his voice low, "what is happening to people?

Why did that statement succeed? It's such an obvious smear-job, so obvious and so rotten. You'd think a decent person would throw it in the gutter. How could"—his voice was breaking in gentle, desperate, rebellious anger—"how could they accept it? Didn't they read it?

Didn't they see? Don't they think? Dagny! What is it in people that lets them do this—and how can we live with it?"

"Quiet, Eddie," she said, "quiet. Don't be afraid."

The building of the State Science Institute stood over a river of New Hampshire, on a lonely hillside, halfway between the river and the sky. From a distance, it looked like a solitary monument in a virgin forest. The trees were carefully planted, the roads were laid out as a park, the roof tops of a small town could be seen in a valley some miles away. But nothing had been allowed to come too close and detract from the building's austerity.

The white marble of the walls gave it a classical grandeur; the composition of its rectangular masses gave it the cleanliness and beauty of a modern plant. It was an inspired structure. From across the river, people looked at it with reverence and thought of it as a monument to a living man whose character had the nobility of the building's lines.

Over the entrance, a dedication was cut into the marble: "To the fearless mind. To the inviolate truth." In a quiet aisle, in a bare corridor, a small brass plate, such as dozens of other name plates on other doors, said: Dr. Robert Stadler.

At the age of twenty-seven, Dr. Robert Stadler had written a treatise on cosmic rays, which demolished most of the theories held by the scientists who preceded him. Those who followed, found his achievement somewhere at the base of any line of inquiry they undertook.

At the age of thirty, he was recognized as the greatest physicist of his time. At thirty-two, he became head of the Department of Physics of the Patrick Henry University, in the days when the great University still deserved its glory. It was of Dr. Robert Stadler that a writer had said: "Perhaps, among the phenomena of the universe which he is studying, none is so miraculous as the brain of Dr. Robert Stadler himself." It was Dr. Robert Stadler who had once corrected a student: "Free scientific inquiry? The first adjective is redundant."

At the age of forty, Dr. Robert Stadler addressed the nation, endorsing the establishment of a State Science Institute. "Set science free of the rule of the dollar," he pleaded. The issue had hung in the balance; an obscure group of scientists had quietly forced a bill through its long way to the floor of the Legislature; there had been some public hesitation about the bill, some doubt, an uneasiness no one could define. The name of Dr. Robert Stadler acted upon the country like the cosmic rays he studied: it pierced any barrier. The nation built the white marble edifice as a personal present to one of its greatest men.

Dr. Stadler's office at the Institute was a small room that looked like the office of the bookkeeper of an unsuccessful firm. There was n cheap desk of ugly yellow oak, a filing cabinet, two chairs, and a blackboard chalked with mathematical formulas. Sitting on one of the chairs against a blank wall, Dagny thought that the office had an air of ostentation and elegance, together: ostentation, because it seemed intended to suggest that the owner was great enough to permit himself such a setting; elegance, because he truly needed nothing else.

She had met Dr. Stadler on a few occasions, at banquets given by leading businessmen or great engineering societies, in honor of some solemn cause or another. She had attended the occasions as reluctantly as he did, and had found that he liked to talk to her. "Miss Taggart," he had said to her once, "I never expect to encounter intelligence.

That I should find it here is such an astonishing relief!" She had come to his office, remembering that sentence. She sat, watching him in the manner of a scientist: assuming nothing, discarding emotion, seeking only to observe and to understand.

"Miss Taggart," he said gaily, "I'm curious about you, I'm curious whenever anything upsets a precedent. As a rule, visitors are a painful duty to me. I'm frankly astonished that I should feel such a simple pleasure in seeing you here. Do you know what it's like to feel suddenly that one can talk without the strain of trying to force some sort of understanding out of a vacuum?"

He sat on the edge of his desk, his manner gaily informal. He was not tall, and his slenderness gave him an air of youthful energy, almost of boyish zest. His thin face was ageless; it was a homely face, but the great forehead and the large gray eyes held such an arresting intelligence that one could notice nothing else. There were wrinkles of humor in the corners of the eyes, and faint lines of bitterness in the corners of the mouth. He did not look like a man in his early fifties; the slightly graying hair was his only sign of age.

"Tell me more about yourself," he said. "I always meant to ask you what you're doing in such an unlikely career as heavy industry and how you can stand those people."

"I cannot take too much of your time, Dr. Stadler." She spoke with polite, impersonal precision. "And the matter I came to discuss is extremely important."

He laughed. "There's a sign of the businessman—wanting to come to the point at once. Well, by all means. But don't worry about my time—it's yours. Now, what was it you said you wanted to discuss?

Oh yes. Rearden Metal. Not exactly one of the subjects on which I'm best informed, but if there's anything I can do for you—" His hand moved in a gesture of invitation.

"Do you know the statement issued by this Institute in regard to Rearden Metal?"

He frowned slightly. "Yes, I've heard about it."

"Have you read it?"

"No."

"It was intended to prevent the use of Rearden Metal."

"Yes, yes, I gathered that much.”

"Could you tell me why?"

He spread his hands; they were attractive hands—long and bony, beautiful in their suggestion of nervous energy and strength. "I really wouldn't know. That is the province of Dr. Ferris. I'm sure he had his reasons. Would you like to speak to Dr. Ferris?"

"No. Are you familiar with the metallurgical nature of Rearden Metal, Dr. Stadler?"

"Why, yes, a little. But tell me, why are you concerned about it?"

A flicker of astonishment rose and died in her eyes; she answered without change in the impersonal tone of her voice, "I am building a branch line with rails of Rearden Metal, which—"

"Oh, but of course! I did hear something about it. You must forgive me, I don't read the newspapers as regularly as I should. It's your railroad that's building that new branch, isn't it?"

"The existence of my railroad depends upon the completion of that branch—and, I think," eventually, the existence of this country will depend on it as well."

The wrinkles of amusement deepened about his eyes. "Can you make such a statement with positive assurance, Miss Taggart? I couldn't."

"In this case?"

"In any case. Nobody can tell what the course of a country's future may be. It is not a matter of calculable trends, but a chaos subject to the rule of the moment, in which anything is possible."

"Do you think that production is necessary to the existence of a country, Dr. Stadler?"

"Why, yes, yes, of course."

"The building of our branch line has been stopped by the statement of this Institute."

He did not smile and he did not answer.

"Does that statement represent your conclusion about the nature of Rearden Metal?" she asked.

"I have said that I have not read it." There was an edge of sharpness in his voice.

She opened her bag, took out a newspaper clipping and extended it to him. "Would you read it and tell me whether this is a language which science may properly speak?"

He glanced through the clipping, smiled contemptuously and tossed it aside with a gesture of distaste. "Disgusting, isn't it?" he said. "But what can you do when you deal with people?"

She looked at him, not understanding. "You do not approve of that statement?"

He shrugged. "My approval or disapproval would be irrelevant."

"Have you formed a conclusion of your own about Rearden Metal?"

"Well, metallurgy is not exactly—what shall we say?—my specialty."

"Have you examined any data on Rearden Metal?"

"Miss Taggart, I don't see the point of your questions." His voice sounded faintly impatient.

"I would like to know your personal verdict on Rearden Metal,"

"For what purpose?"

"So that I may give it to the press."

He got up. "That is quite impossible."

She said, her voice strained with the effort of trying to force understanding, "I will submit to you all the information necessary to form a conclusive judgment."

"I cannot issue any public statements about it."

"Why not?"

"The situation is much too complex to explain in a casual discussion."

"But if you should find that Rearden Metal is, in fact, an extremely valuable product which—"

"That is beside the point."

"The value of Rearden Metal is beside the point?"

"There are other issues involved, besides questions of fact."

She asked, not quite believing that she had heard him right, "What other issues is science concerned with, besides questions of fact?"

The bitter lines of his mouth sharpened into the suggestion of a smile. "Miss Taggart, you do not understand the problems of scientists."

She said slowly, as if she were seeing it suddenly in time with her words, "I believe that you do know what Rearden Metal really is."

He shrugged. "Yes. I know. From such information as I've seen, it appears to be a remarkable thing. Quite a brilliant achievement—as far as technology is concerned." He was pacing impatiently across the office. "In fact, I should like, some day, to order a special laboratory motor that would stand just such high temperatures as Rearden Metal can take. It would be very valuable in connection with certain phenomena I should like to observe. I have found that when particles are accelerated to a speed approaching the speed of light, they—"

"Dr. Stadler," she asked slowly, "you know the truth, yet you will not state it publicly?"

"Miss Taggart, you are using an abstract term, when we are dealing with a matter of practical reality."

"We are dealing with a matter of science."

"Science? Aren't you confusing the standards involved? It is only in the realm of pure science that truth is an absolute criterion. When we deal with applied science, with technology—we deal with people.

And when we deal with people, considerations other than truth enter the question."

"What considerations?"

"I am not a technologist, Miss Taggart. I have no talent or taste for dealing with people. I cannot become involved in so-called practical matters."

"That statement was issued in your name."

"I had nothing to do with it!"

"The name of this Institute is your responsibility."

"That's a perfectly unwarranted assumption."

"People think that the honor of your name is the guarantee behind any action of this Institute."

"I can't help what people think—if they think at all!"

"They accepted your statement. It was a lie."

"How can one deal in truth when one deals with the public?"

"I don't understand you," she said very quietly.

"Questions of truth do not enter into social issues. No principles have ever had any effect on society."

"What, then, directs men's actions?"

He shrugged. "The expediency of the moment,"

"Dr. Stadler," she said, "I think I must tell you the meaning and the consequences of the fact that the construction of my branch line is being stopped. I am stopped, in the name of public safety, because I am using the best rail ever produced. In six months, if I do not complete that line, the best industrial section of the country will be left without transportation. It will be destroyed, because it was the best and there were men who thought it expedient to seize a share of its wealth."

"Well, that may be vicious, unjust, calamitous—but such is life in society. Somebody is always sacrificed, as a rule unjustly; there is no other way to live among men. What can any one person do?"

"You can state the truth about Rearden Metal."

He did not answer.

"I could beg you to do it in order to save me. I could beg you to do it in order to avert a national disaster. But I won't. These may not be valid reasons. There is only one reason; you must say it, because it is true."

"I was not consulted about that statement!" The cry broke out involuntarily. "I wouldn't have allowed it! I don't like it any better than you do! But I can't issue a public denial!"

"You were not consulted? Then shouldn't you want to find out the reasons behind that statement?"

"I can't destroy the Institute now!"

"Shouldn't you want to find out the reasons?"

"I know the reasons! They won't tell me, but I know. And I can't say that I blame them, either."

"Would you tell me?"

"I'll tell you, if you wish. It's the truth that you want, isn't it?

Dr. Ferris cannot help it, if the morons who vote the funds for this Institute insist on what they call results. They are incapable of conceiving of such a thing as abstract science. They can judge it only in terms of the latest gadget it has produced for them. I do not know how Dr. Ferris has managed to keep this Institute in existence, I can only marvel at his practical ability. I don't believe he ever was a first-rate scientist—but what a priceless valet of science! I know that he has been facing a grave problem lately. He's kept me out of it, he spares me all that, but I do hear rumors. People have been criticizing the Institute, because, they say, we have not produced enough. The public has been demanding economy. In times like these, when their fat little comforts are threatened, you may be sure that science is the first thing men will sacrifice. This is the only establishment left. There are practically no private research foundations any longer. Look at the greedy ruffians who run our industries. You cannot expect them to support science."

"Who is supporting you now?" she asked, her voice low.

He shrugged. "Society."

She said, with effort, "You were going to tell me the reasons behind that statement."

"I wouldn't think you'd find them hard to deduce. If you consider that for thirteen years this Institute has had a department of metallurgical research, which has cost over twenty million dollars and has produced nothing but a new silver polish and a new anti-corrosive preparation, which, I believe, is not so good as the old ones—you can imagine what the public reaction will be if some private individual comes out with a product that revolutionizes the entire science of metallurgy and proves to be sensationally successful!"

Her head dropped. She said nothing.

"I don't blame our metallurgical department!" he said angrily. "I know that results of this kind are not a matter of any predictable time.

But the public won't understand it. What, then, should we sacrifice? An excellent piece of smelting—or the last center of science left on earth, and the whole future of human knowledge? That is the alternative."

She sat, her head down. After a while, she said, "AH right, Dr. Stadler. I won't argue."

He saw her groping for her bag, as if she were trying to remember the automatic motions necessary to get up.

"Miss Taggart," he said quietly. It was almost a plea. She looked up.

Her face was composed and empty.

He came closer; he leaned with one hand against the wall above her head, almost as if he wished to hold her in the circle of his arm.

"Miss Taggart," he said, a tone of gentle, bitter persuasiveness in his voice, "I am older than you. Believe me, there is no other way to live on earth, Men are not open to truth or reason. They cannot be reached by a rational argument. The mind is powerless against them. Yet we have to deal with them. If we want to accomplish anything, we have to deceive them into letting us accomplish it. Or force them. They understand nothing else. We cannot expect their support for any endeavor of the intellect, for any goal of the spirit. They are nothing but vicious animals. They are greedy, self-indulgent, predatory dollar-chasers who—"

"I am one of the dollar-chasers, Dr. Stadler," she said, her voice low.

"You are an unusual, brilliant child who has not seen enough of life to grasp the full measure of human stupidity. I've fought it all my life.

I'm very tired. . . ." The sincerity of his voice was genuine. He walked slowly away from her. "There was a time when I looked at the tragic mess they've made of this earth, and I wanted to cry out, to beg them to listen—I could teach them to live so much better than they did—but there was nobody to hear me, they had nothing to hear me with. . . .

Intelligence? It is such a rare, precarious spark that flashes for a moment somewhere among men, and vanishes. One cannot tell its nature, or its future . . . or its death. . . ."

She made a movement to rise.

"Don't go, Miss Taggart. I'd like you to understand."

She raised her face to him, in obedient indifference. Her face was not pale, but its planes stood out with strangely naked precision, as if its skin had lost the shadings of color.

"You're young," he said. "At your age, I had the same faith in the unlimited power of reason. The same brilliant vision of man as a rational being. I have seen so much, since. I have been disillusioned so often. . . . I'd like to tell you just one story."

He stood at the window of his office. It had grown dark outside. The darkness seemed to rise from the black cut of the river, far below. A few lights trembled in the water, from among the hills of the other shore. The sky was still the intense blue of evening. A lonely star, low over the earth, seemed unnaturally large and made the sky look darker.

"When I was at the Patrick Henry University," he said, "I had three pupils. I have had many bright students in the past, but these three were- the kind of reward a teacher prays for. If ever you could wish to receive the gift of the human mind at its best, young and delivered into your hands for guidance, they were this gift. Theirs was the kind of intelligence one expects to see, in the future, changing the course of the world. They came from very different backgrounds, but they were inseparable friends. They made a strange choice of studies. They majored in two subjects—mine and Hugh Akston's. Physics and philosophy. It is not a combination of interests one encounters nowadays. Hugh Akston was a distinguished man, a great mind . . . unlike the incredible creature whom that University has now put in his place. . . . Akston and I were a little jealous of each other over these three students. It was a kind of contest between us, a friendly contest, because we understood each other, I heard Akston saying one day that he regarded them as his sons. I resented it a little . . . because I thought of them as mine. . . ."

He turned and looked at her. The bitter lines of age were visible now, cutting across his cheeks. He said, "When I endorsed the establishment of this Institute, one of these three damned me. I have not seen him since. It used to disturb me, in the first few years. I wondered, once in a while, whether he had been right. . . . It has ceased to disturb me, long ago."

He smiled. There was nothing but bitterness now, in his smile and his face.

"These three men, these three who held all the hope which the gift of intelligence ever proffered, these three from whom we expected such a magnificent future—one of them was Francisco d'Anconia, who became a depraved playboy. Another was Ragnar Danneskjold, who became a plain bandit. So much for the promise of the human mind."

"Who was the third one?" she asked, He shrugged. "The third one did not achieve even that sort of notorious distinction. He vanished without a trace—into the great unknown of mediocrity. He is probably a second assistant bookkeeper somewhere."

"It's a lie! I didn't run away!" cried James Taggart. "I came here because I happened to be sick. Ask Dr. Wilson. It's a form of flu.

He'll prove it. And how did you know that I was here?"

Dagny stood in the middle of the room; there were melting snowflakes on her coat collar, on the brim of her hat. She glanced around, feeling an emotion that would have been sadness, had she had time to acknowledge it.

It was a room in the house of the old Taggart estate on the Hudson.

Jim had inherited the place, but he seldom came here. In their childhood, this had been their father's study. Now it had the desolate air of a room which is used, yet uninhabited. There were slipcovers on all but two chairs, a cold fireplace and the dismal warmth of an electric heater with a cord twisting across the floor, a desk, its glass surface empty.

Jim lay on the couch, with a towel wrapped for a scarf around his neck. She saw a stale, filled ashtray on a chair beside him, a bottle of whisky, a wilted paper cup, and two-day-old newspapers scattered about the floor. A portrait of their grandfather hung over the fireplace, full figure, with a railroad bridge in the fading background.

"I have no time for arguments, Jim."

"It was your idea! I hope you'll admit to the Board that it was your idea. That's what your goddamn Rearden Metal has done to us! If we had waited for Orren Boyle . . ." His unshaved face was pulled by a twisted scramble of emotions: panic, hatred, a touch of triumph, the relief of screaming at a victim—and the faint, cautious, begging look that sees a hope of help.

He had stopped tentatively, but she did not answer. She stood watching him, her hands in the pockets of her coat.

"There's nothing we can do now!" he moaned. "I tried to call Washington, to get them to seize the Phoenix-Durango and turn it over to us, on the ground of emergency, but they won't even discuss it! Too many people objecting, they say, afraid of some fool precedent or another! . . . I got the National Alliance of Railroads to suspend the deadline and permit Dan Conway to operate his road for another year —that would have given us time—but he's refused to do it! I tried to get Ellis Wyatt and his bunch of friends in Colorado to demand that Washington order Conway to continue operations—but all of them, Wyatt and all the rest of those bastards, refused! It's their skin, worse than ours, they're sure to go down the drain—but they've refused!"

She smiled briefly, but made no comment.

"Now there's nothing left for us to do! We're caught. We can't give up that branch and we can't complete it. We can't stop or go on. We have no money. Nobody will touch us with a ten-foot pole! What have we got left without the Rio Norte Line? But we can't finish it. We'd be boycotted. We'd be blacklisted. That union of track workers would sue us. They would, there's a law about it. We can't complete that Line! Christ! What are we going to do?"

She waited. "Through, Jim?" she asked coldly. "If you are, I’ll tell you what we're going to do."

He kept silent, looking up at her from under his heavy eyelids.

"This is not a proposal, Jim. It's an ultimatum. Just listen and accept. I am going to complete the construction of the Rio Norte Line.

I personally, not Taggart Transcontinental. I will take a leave of absence from the job of Vice-President. I will form a company in my own name. Your Board will turn the Rio None Line over to me. I will act as my own contractor. I will get my own financing. I will take full charge and sole responsibility. I will complete the Line on time. After you have seen how the Rearden Metal rails can take it, I will transfer the Line back to Taggart Transcontinental and I'll return to my job. That is all,"

He was looking at her silently, dangling a bedroom slipper on the tip of his foot. She had never supposed that hope could look ugly in a man's face, but it did: it was mixed with cunning. She turned her eyes away from him, wondering how it was possible that a man's first thought in such a moment could be a search for something to put over on her.

Then, preposterously, the first thing he said, his voice anxious, was, "But who will run Taggart Transcontinental in the meantime?"

She chuckled; the sound astonished her, it seemed old in its bitterness.

She said, "Eddie Willers."

"Oh no! He couldn't!"

She laughed, in the same brusque, mirthless way. "I thought you were smarter than I about things of this kind. Eddie will assume the title of Acting Vice-President. He will occupy my office and sit at my desk.

But who do you suppose will run Taggart Transcontinental?"

"But I don't see how—"

"I will commute by plane between Eddie's office and Colorado. Also, there are long-distance phones available. I will do just what I have been doing. Nothing will change, except the kind of show you will put on for your friends . . . and the fact that it will be a little harder for me."

"What show?"

"You understand me, Jim. I have no idea what sort of games you're tangled in, you and your Board of Directors. I don't know how many ends you're all playing against the middle and against one another, or how many pretenses you have to keep up in how many opposite directions. I don't know or care. You can all hide behind me.

If you're all afraid, because you've made deals with friends who're threatened by Rearden Metal—well, here's your chance to go through the motions of assuring them that you're not involved, that you're not doing this—I am. You can help them to curse me and denounce me.

You can all stay home, take no risks and make no enemies. Just keep out of my way."

"Well . . ." he said slowly, "of course, the problems involved in the policy of a great railroad system are complex . . . while a small, independent company, in the name of one person, could afford to—"

"Yes, Jim, yes, I know all that. The moment you announce that you're turning the Rio Norte Line over to me, the Taggart stock will rise. The bedbugs will stop crawling from out of unlikely corners, since they won't have the incentive of a big company to bite. Before they decide what to do about me, I will have the Line finished. And as for me, I don't want to have you and your Board to account to, to argue with, to beg permissions from. There isn't any time for that, if I am to do the kind of job that has to be done. So I'm going to do it alone."

"And . . . if you fail?"

"If I fail, I'll go down alone."

"You understand that in such case Taggart Transcontinental wilt not be able to help you in any way?"

“I understand.”

"You will not count on us?"

"No."

"You will cut all official connection with us, so that your activities will not reflect upon our reputation?"

"Yes."

"I think we should agree that in case of failure or public scandal . . . your leave of absence will become permanent . . . that is, you will not expect to return to the post of Vice-President."

She closed her eyes for a moment. "All right, Jim. In such case, I will not return."

"Before we transfer the Rio Norte Line to you, we must have a written agreement that you will transfer it back to us, along with your controlling interest at cost, in case the Line becomes successful. Otherwise you might try to squeeze us for a windfall profit, since we need that Line."

There was only a brief stab of shock in her eyes, then she said indifferently, the words sounding as if she were tossing alms, "By all means, Jim. Have that stated in writing."

"Now as to your temporary successor . . ."

"Yes?"

"You don't really want it to be Eddie Willers, do you?"

"Yes. I do."

"But he couldn't even act like a vice-president! He doesn't have the presence, the manner, the—"

"He knows his work and mine. He knows what I want. I trust him.

I'll be able to work with him."

"Don't you think it would be better to pick one of our more distinguished young men, somebody from a good family, with more social poise and—"

"It's going to be Eddie Willers, Jim."

He sighed. "All right. Only . . . only we must be careful about it.

. . . We don't want people to suspect that it's you who're still running Taggart Transcontinental. Nobody must know it."

"Everybody will know it, Jim. But since nobody will admit it openly, everybody will be satisfied."

"But we must preserve appearances."

"Oh, certainly! You don't have to recognize me on the street, if you don't want to. You can say you've never seen me before and I'll say I've never heard of Taggart Transcontinental."

He remained silent, trying to think, staring down at the floor.

She turned to look at the grounds beyond the window. The sky had the even, gray-white pallor of winter. Far below, on the shore of the Hudson, she saw the road she used to watch for Francisco's car—she saw the cliff over the river, where they climbed to look for the towers of New York—and somewhere beyond the woods were the trails that led to Rockdale Station. The earth was snow-covered now, and what remained was like the skeleton of the countryside she remembered—a thin design of bare branches rising from the snow to the sky.

It was gray and white, like a photograph, a dead photograph which one keeps hopefully for remembrance, but which has no power to bring back anything.

"What are you going to call it?"

She turned, startled. "What?"

"What are you going to call your company?"

"Oh . . . Why, the Dagny Taggart Line, I guess."

"But . . . Do you think that's wise? It might be misunderstood.

The Taggart might be taken as—"

"Well, what do you want me to call it?" she snapped, worn down to anger. "The Miss Nobody? The Madam X? The John Galt?" She stopped. She smiled suddenly, a cold, bright, dangerous smile. 'That's what I'm going to call it: the John Galt Line."

"Good God, no!"

"Yes."

"But it's . . . if s just a cheap piece of slang!"

"You can't make a joke out of such a serious project! . . . You can't be so vulgar and . . . and undignified!"

"Can't I?"

"But for God's sake, why?”

"Because it's going to shock all the rest of them just as it shocked you."

"I've never seen you playing for effects."

"I am, this time."

"But . . ." His voice dropped to an almost superstitious sound: "Look, Dagny, you know, it's . . . it's bad luck. . . . What it stands for is . . ." He stopped.

"What does it stand for?"

"I don't know . . . But the way people use it, they always seem to say it out of—"

"Fear? Despair? Futility?"

"Yes . . . yes, that's what it is."

"That's what I want to throw in their faces!"

The bright, sparkling anger in her eyes, her first look of enjoyment, made him understand that he had to keep still.

"Draw up all the papers and all the red tape in the name of the John Galt Line," she said.

He sighed. "Well, it's your Line."

"You bet it is!"

He glanced at her, astonished. She had dropped the manners and style of a vice-president; she seemed to be relaxing happily to the level of yard crews and construction gangs.

"As to the papers and the legal side of it," he said, "there might be some difficulties. We would have to apply for the permission of—"

She whirled to face him. Something of the bright, violent look still remained in her face. But it was not gay and she was not smiling. The look now had an odd, primitive quality. When he saw it, he hoped he would never have to see it again.

"Listen, Jim," she said; he had never heard that tone in any human voice. "There is one thing you can do as your part of the deal and you'd better do it: keep your Washington boys off. See to it that they give me all the permissions, authorizations, charters and other waste paper that their laws require. Don't let them try to stop me. If they try . . . Jim, people say that our ancestor, Nat Taggart, killed a politician who tried to refuse him a permission he should never have had to ask. I don't know whether Nat Taggart did it or not. But I'll tell you this: I know how he felt, if he did. If he didn't—I might do the job for him, to complete the family legend. I mean it, Jim."

Francisco d'Anconia sat in front of her desk. His face was blank. It had remained blank while Dagny explained to him, in the clear, impersonal tone of a business interview, the formation and purpose of her own railroad company. He had listened. He had not pronounced a word.

She had never seen his face wear that look of drained passivity.

There was no mockery, no amusement, no antagonism; it was as if he did not belong in these particular moments of existence and could not be reached. Yet his eyes looked at her attentively; they seemed to see more than she could suspect; they made her think of one-way glass: they let all light rays in, but none out.

"Francisco, I asked you to come here, because I wanted you to see me in my office. You've never seen it. It would have meant something to you, once."

His eyes moved slowly to look at the office. Its walls were bare, except for three things: a map of Taggart Transcontinental—the original drawing of Nat Taggart, that had served as model for his statue —and a large railroad calendar, in cheerfully crude colors, the kind that was distributed each year, with a change of its picture, to every station along the Taggart track, the kind that had hung once in her first work place at Rockdale.

He got up. He said quietly, "Dagny, for your own sake, and"—it was a barely perceptible hesitation—"and in the name of any pity you might feel for me, don't request what you're going to request.

Don't. Let me go now."

This was not like him and like nothing she could ever have expected to hear from him. After a moment, she asked, "Why?"

"I can't answer you. I can't answer any questions. That is one of the reasons why it's best not to discuss it."

"You know what I am going to request?"

"Yes." The way she looked at him was such an eloquent, desperate question, that he had to add, "I know that I am going to refuse."

"Why?"

He smiled mirthlessly, spreading his hands out, as if to show her that this was what he had predicted and had wanted to avoid.

She said quietly, "I have to try, Francisco. I have to make the request. That's my part. What you'll do about it is yours. But I'll know that I've tried everything."

He remained standing, but he inclined his head a little, in assent, and said, "I will listen, if that will help you."

"I need fifteen million dollars to complete the Rio Norte Line, I have obtained seven million against the Taggart stock I own free and clear. I can raise nothing else. I will issue bonds in the name of my new company, in the amount of eight million dollars. I called you here to ask you to buy these bonds."

He did not answer.

"I am simply a beggar, Francisco, and I am begging you for money.

I had always thought that one did not beg in business. I thought that one stood on the merit of what one had to offer, and gave value for value. This is not so any more, though I don't understand how we can act on any other rule and continue to exist. Judging by every objective fact, the Rio Norte Line is to be the best railroad in the country. Judging by every known standard, it is the best investment possible. And that is what damns me. I cannot raise money by offering people a good business venture: the fact that it's good, makes people reject it. There is no bank that would buy the bonds of my company.

So I can't plead merit. I can only plead."

Her voice was pronouncing the words with impersonal precision. She stopped, waiting for his answer. He remained silent.

"I know that I have nothing to offer you," she said. "I can't speak to you in terms of investment. You don't care to make money. Industrial projects have ceased to concern you long ago. So I won't pretend that it's a fair exchange. It's just begging." She drew her breath and said, "Give me that money as alms, because it means nothing to you."

"Don't," he said, his voice low. She could not tell whether the strange sound of it was pain or anger; his eyes were lowered.

"Will you do it, Francisco?"

"No."

After a moment, she said, "I called you, not because I thought you would agree, but because you were the only one who could understand what I am saying. So I had to try it." Her voice was dropping lower, as if she hoped it would make emotion harder to detect. "You see, I can't believe that you're really gone . . . because I know that you're still able to hear me. The way you live is depraved. But the way you act is not. Even the way you speak of it, is not. . . . I had to try . . .

But I can't struggle to understand you any longer."

"I'll give you a hint. Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."

"Francisco," she whispered, "why don't you tell me what it was that happened to you?"

"Because, at this moment, the answer would hurt you more than the doubt."

"Is it as terrible as that?"

"It is an answer which you must reach by yourself."

She shook her head. "I don't know what to offer you. I don't know what is of value to you any longer. Don't you see that even a beggar has to give value in return, has to offer some reason why you might want to help him? . . . Well, I thought . . . at one time, it meant a great deal to you—success. Industrial success. Remember how we used to talk about it? You were very severe. You expected a lot from me.

You told me I'd better live up to it. I have. You wondered how far I'd rise with Taggart Transcontinental." She moved her hand, pointing at the office. "This is how far I've risen. . . . So I thought . . . if the memory of what had been your values still has some meaning for you, if only as amusement, or a moment's sadness, or just like . . . like putting flowers on a grave . . . you might want to give me the money . . . in the name of that."

"No."

She said, with effort, "That money would mean nothing to you—you've wasted that much on senseless parties—you've wasted much more on the San Sebastian Mines—"

He glanced up. He looked straight at her and she saw the first spark of a living response in his eyes, a look that was bright, pitiless and, incredibly, proud: as if this were an accusation that gave him strength.

"Oh, yes," she said slowly, as if answering his thought, "I realize that. I've damned you for those mines, I've denounced you, I've thrown my contempt at you in every way possible, and now I come back to you—for money. Like Jim, like any moocher you've ever met. I know it's a triumph for you, I know that you can laugh at me and despise me with full justice. Well—perhaps I can offer you that. If it's amusement that you want, if you enjoyed seeing Jim and the Mexican planners crawl—wouldn't it amuse you to break me? Wouldn't it give you pleasure? Don't you want to hear me acknowledge that I'm beaten by you? Don't you want to see me crawling before you? Tell me what form of it you'd like and I'll submit."

He moved so swiftly that she could not notice how he started; it only seemed to her that his first movement was a shudder. He came around the desk, he took her hand and raised it to his lips. It began as a gesture of the gravest respect, as if its purpose were to give her strength; but as he held his lips, then his face, pressed to her hand, she knew that he was seeking strength from it himself.

He dropped her hand, he looked down at her face, at the frightened stillness of her eyes, he smiled, not trying to hide that his smile held suffering, anger and tenderness.

"Dagny, you want to crawl? You don't know what the word means and never will. One doesn't crawl by acknowledging it as honestly as that. Don't you suppose I know that your begging me was the bravest thing you could do? But . . . Don't ask me, Dagny."

"In the name of anything I ever meant to you . . ." she whispered, "anything left within you . . ."

In the moment when she thought that she had seen this look before, that this was the way he had looked against the night glow of the city, when he lay in bed by her side for the last time—she heard his cry, the kind of cry she had never torn from him before: "My love, I can't!"

Then, as they looked at each other, both shocked into silence by astonishment, she saw the change in his face. It was as crudely abrupt as if he had thrown a switch. He laughed, he moved away from her and said, his voice jarringly offensive by being completely casual: "Please excuse the mixture in styles of expression. I've been supposed to say that to so many women, but on somewhat different occasions."

Her head dropped, she sat huddled tight together, not caring that he saw it.

When she raised her head, she looked at him indifferently. "All right, Francisco. It was a good act. I did believe it. If that was your own way of having the kind of fun I was offering you, you succeeded.

I won't ask you for anything."

"I warned you."

"I didn't know which side you belonged on. It didn't seem possible —but it's the side of Orren Boyle and Bertram Scudder and your old teacher."

"My old teacher?" he asked sharply.

"Dr. Robert Stadler."

He chuckled, relieved. "Oh, that one? He's the looter who thinks that his end justifies his seizure of my means." He added, "You know, Dagny, I'd like you to remember which side you said I'm on. Some day, I'll remind you of it and ask you whether you'll want to repeat it."

"You won't have to remind me."

He turned to go. He tossed his hand in a casual salute and said, "If it could be built, I'd wish good luck to the Rio Norte Line."

"It's going to be built. And it's going to be called the John Galt Line."

"What?!"

It was an actual scream; she chuckled derisively. "The John Galt Line."

"Dagny, in heaven's name, why?"

"Don't you like it?"

"How did you happen to choose that?"

"It sounds better than Mr. Nemo or Mr. Zero, doesn't it?"

"Dagny, why that?"

"Because it frightens you."

"What do you think it stands for?"

"The impossible. The unattainable. And you're all afraid of my Line just as you're afraid of that name."

He started laughing. He laughed, not looking at her, and she felt strangely certain that he had forgotten her, that he was far away, that he was laughing—in furious gaiety and bitterness—at something in which she had no part.

When he turned to her, he said earnestly, "Dagny, I wouldn't, if I were you."

She shrugged. "Jim didn't like it, either."

"What do you like about it?"

"I hate it! I hate the doom you're all waiting for, the giving up, and that senseless question that always sounds like a cry for help. I'm sick of hearing pleas for John Galt. I'm going to fight him."

He said quietly, "You are."

"I'm going to build a railroad line for him. Let him come and claim it!"

He smiled sadly and nodded: "He will."

The glow of poured steel streamed across the ceiling and broke against one wall. Rearden sat at his desk, in the light of a single lamp. Beyond its circle, the darkness of the office blended with the darkness outside. He felt as if it were empty space where the rays of the furnaces moved at will; as if the desk were a raft hanging in mid-air, holding two persons imprisoned in privacy. Dagny sat in front of his desk.

She had thrown her coat off, and she sat outlined against it, a slim, tense body in a gray suit, leaning diagonally across the wide armchair.

Only her hand lay in the light, on the edge of the desk; beyond it, he saw the pale suggestion of her face, the white of a blouse, the triangle of an open collar.

"All right, Hank," she said, "we're going ahead with a new Rearden Metal bridge. This is the official order of the official owner of the John Galt Line."

He smiled, looking down at the drawings of the bridge spread in the light on his desk. "Have you had a chance to examine the scheme we submitted?"

"Yes. You don't need my comments or compliments. The order says it."

"Very well. Thank you. I'll start rolling the Metal"

"Don't you want to ask whether the John Galt Line is in a position to place orders or to function?"

"I don't need to. Your coming here says it,"

She smiled. "True. It's all set, Hank. I came to tell you that and to discuss the details of the bridge in person."

"All right, I am curious: who are the bondholders of the John Galt Line?"

"I don't think any of them could afford it. All of them have growing enterprises. All of them needed their money for their own concerns.

But they needed the Line and they did not ask anyone for help." She took a paper out of her bag. "Here's John Galt, Inc.," she said, handing it across the desk.

He knew most of the names on the list: "Ellis.. Wyatt, Wyatt Oil, Colorado. Ted Nielsen, Nielsen Motors, Colorado. Lawrence Hammond, Hammond Cars, Colorado. Andrew Stockton, Stockton Foundry, Colorado." There were a few from other states; he noticed the name: "Kenneth Danagger, Danagger Coal, Pennsylvania." The amounts of their subscriptions varied, from sums in five figures to six.

He reached for his fountain pen, wrote at the bottom of the list "Henry Rearden, Rearden Steel, Pennsylvania—$1,000,000" and tossed the list back to her.

"Hank," she said quietly, "I didn't want you- in on this. You've invested so much in Rearden Metal that it's worse for you than for any of us. You can't afford another risk."

"I never accept favors," he answered coldly.

"What do you mean?"

"I don't ask people to take greater chances on my ventures than I take myself. If it's a gamble, I'll match anybody's gambling. Didn't you say that that track was my first showcase?"

She inclined her head and said gravely, "All right. Thank you."

"Incidentally, I don't expect to lose this money. I am aware of the conditions under which these bonds can be converted into stock at my option. I therefore expect to make an inordinate profit—and you're going to earn it for me."

She laughed. "God, Hank, I've spoken to so many yellow fools that they've almost infected me into thinking of the Line as of a hopeless loss! Thanks for reminding me. Yes, I think I'll earn your inordinate profit for you."

"If it weren't for the yellow fools, there wouldn't be any risk in it at all. But we have to beat them. We will.” He reached for two telegrams from among the papers on his desk. "There are still a few men in existence." He extended the telegrams. "I think you'd like to see these.”

One of them read: "I had intended to undertake it in two years, but the statement of the State Science Institute compels me to proceed at once. Consider this a commitment for the construction of a 12inch pipe line of Rearden Metal, 600 miles, Colorado to Kansas City.

Details follow. Ellis Wyatt."

The other read: "Re our discussion of my order. Go ahead. Ken Danagger."

He added, in explanation, "He wasn't prepared to proceed at once, either. It's eight thousand tons of Rearden Metal. Structural metal.

For coal mines."

They glanced at each other and smiled. They needed no further comment.

He glanced down, as she handed the telegrams back to him. The skin of her hand looked transparent in the light, on the edge of his desk, a young girl's hand with long, thin fingers, relaxed for a moment, defenseless.

"The Stockton Foundry in Colorado," she said, "is going to finish that order for me—the one that the Amalgamated Switch and Signal Company ran out on. They're going to get in touch with you about the Metal."

"They have already. What have you done about the construction crews?"

"Nealy's engineers are staying on, the best ones, those I need. And most of the foremen, too. It won't be too hard to keep them going.

Nealy wasn't of much use, anyway."

"What about labor?"

"More applicants than I can hire. I don't think the union is going to interfere. Most of the applicants are giving phony names. They're union members. They need the work desperately. I'll have a few guards on the Line, but I don't expect any trouble."

"What about your brother Jim's Board of Directors?"

"They're all scrambling to get statements into the newspapers to the effect that they have no connection whatever with the John Galt Line and how reprehensible an undertaking they think it is. They agreed to everything I asked."

The line of her shoulders looked taut, yet thrown back easily, as if poised for flight. Tension seemed natural to her, not a sign of anxiety, but a sign of enjoyment; the tension of her whole body, under the gray suit, half-visible in the darkness, "Eddie Willers has taken over the office of Operating Vice-President," she said. "If you need anything, get in touch with him. I'm leaving for Colorado tonight."

"Tonight?"

"Yes. We have to make up time. We've lost a week."

"Flying your own plane?"

"Yes. I’ll be back in about ten days, I intend to be in New York once or twice a month."

"Where will you live out there?"

"On the site. In my own railway car—that is, Eddie's car, which I'm borrowing."

"Will you be safe?"

"Safe from what?" Then she laughed, startled. "Why, Hank, it's the first time you've ever thought that I wasn't a man. Of coarse I'll be safe."

He was not looking at her; he was looking at a sheet of figures on his desk. "I've had my engineers prepare a breakdown of the cost of the bridge," he said, "and an approximate schedule of the construction time required. That is what I wanted to discuss with you." He extended the papers. She settled back to read them.

A wedge of light fell across her face. He saw the firm, sensual mouth in sharp outline. Then she leaned back a little, and he saw only a suggestion of its shape and the dark lines of her lowered lashes.

Haven't I?—he thought. Haven't I thought of it since the first time I saw you? Haven't I thought of nothing else for two years? . . . He sat motionless, looking at her. He heard the words he had never allowed himself to form, the words he had felt, known, yet had not faced, had hoped to destroy by never letting them be said within his own mind. Now it was as sudden and shocking as if he were saying it to her. . . . Since the first time I saw you . . . Nothing but your body, that mouth of yours, and the way your eyes would look at me, if . . . Through every sentence I ever said to you, through every conference you thought so safe, through the importance of all the issues we discussed . . . You trusted me, didn't you? To recognize your greatness? To think of you as you deserved—as if you were a man?

. . . Don't you suppose I know how much I've betrayed? The only bright encounter of my life—the only person I respected—the best businessman I know—my ally—my partner in a desperate battle . . .

The lowest of all desires—as my answer to the highest I've met . . .

Do you know what I am? I thought of it, because it should have been unthinkable. For that degrading need, which should never touch you, I have never wanted anyone but you . . . I hadn't known what it was like, to want it, until I saw you for the first time. I had thought: Not I, I couldn't be broken by it . . . Since then . . . for two years . . . with not a moment's respite . . . Do you know what it's like, to want it? Would you wish to hear what I thought when I looked at you . . . when I lay awake at night . . . when I heard your voice over a telephone wire . . . when I worked, but could not drive it away?

. . . To bring you down to things you can't conceive—and to know that it's I who have done it. To reduce you to a body, to teach you an animal's pleasure, to see you need it, to see you asking me for it, to see your wonderful spirit dependent upon the obscenity of your need. To watch you as you are, as you face the world with your clean, proud strength—then to see you, in my bed, submitting to any infamous whim I may devise, to any act which I'll perform for the sole purpose of watching your dishonor and to which you'll submit for the sake of an unspeakable sensation . . . I want you—and may I be damned for it! . . .

She was reading the papers, leaning back in the darkness—he saw the reflection of the fire touching her hair, moving to her shoulder, down her arm, to the naked skin of her wrist.

. . . Do you know what I'm thinking now, in this moment? . . .

Your gray suit and your open collar . . . you look so young, so austere, so sure of yourself . . . What would you be like if I knocked your head back, if I threw you down in that formal suit of yours, if I raised your skirt—

She glanced up at him. He looked down at the papers on his desk.

In a moment, he said, "The actual cost of the bridge is less than our original estimate. You will note that the strength of the bridge allows for the eventual addition of a second track, which, I think, that section of the country will justify in a very few years. If you spread the cost over a period of—"

He spoke, and she looked at his face in the lamplight, against the black emptiness of the office. The lamp was outside her field of vision, and she felt as if it were his face that illuminated the papers on the desk. His face, she thought, and the cold, radiant clarity of his voice, of his mind, of Ms drive to a single purpose. The face was like his words—as if the line of a single theme ran from the steady glance of the eyes, through the gaunt muscles of the cheeks, to the faintly scornful, downward curve of the mouth—the line of a ruthless asceticism.

The day began with the news of a disaster: a freight train of the Atlantic Southern had crashed head-on into a passenger train, in New Mexico, on a sharp curve in the mountains, scattering freight cars all over the slopes. The cars carried five thousand tons of copper, bound from a mine in Arizona to the Rearden mills, Rearden telephoned the general manager of the Atlantic Southern, but the answer he received was: "Oh God, Mr. Rearden, how can we tell? How can anybody tell how long it will take to clear that wreck?

One of the worst we've ever had . . . I don't know, Mr. Rearden.

There are no other lines anywhere in that section. The track is torn for twelve hundred feet. There's been a rockslide. Our wrecking train can't get through. I don't know how we'll ever get those freight cars back on rails, or when. Can't expect it sooner than two weeks . . .

Three days? Impossible, Mr. Rearden! . . . But we can't help it!

. . . But surely you can tell your customers that it's an act of God!

What if you do hold them up? Nobody can blame you in a case of this kind!"

In the next two hours, with the assistance of his secretary, two young engineers from his shipping department, a road map, and the long-distance telephone, Rearden arranged for a fleet of trucks to proceed to the scene of the wreck, and for a chain of hopper cars to meet them at the nearest station of the Atlantic Southern. The hopper cars had been borrowed from Taggart Transcontinental. The trucks had been recruited from all over New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado. Rearden's engineers had hunted by telephone for private truck owners and had offered payments that cut all arguments short.

It was the third of three shipments of copper that Rearden. had expected; two orders had not been delivered: one company had gone out of business, the other was still pleading delays that it could not help.

He had attended to the matter without breaking his chain of appointments, without raising his voice, without sign of strain, uncertainty or apprehension; he had acted with the swift precision of a military commander under sudden fire—and Gwen Ives, his secretary, had acted as his calmest lieutenant. She was a girl in her late twenties, whose quietly harmonious, impenetrable face had a quality matching the best designed office equipment; she was one of his most ruthlessly competent employees; her manner of performing her duties suggested the kind of rational cleanliness that would consider any element of emotion, while at work, as an unpardonable immorality.

When the emergency was over, her sole comment was, "Mr. Rearden, I think we should ask all our suppliers to ship via Taggart Transcontinental." "I'm thinking that, too," he answered; then added, "Wire Fleming in Colorado. Tell him I'm taking an option on that copper mine property."

He was back at his desk, speaking to his superintendent on one phone and to his purchasing manager on another, checking every date and ton of ore on hand—he could not leave to chance or to another person the possibility of a single hour's delay in the flow of a furnace: it was the last of the rail for the John Galt Line that was being poured—when the buzzer rang and Miss Ives' voice announced that his mother was outside, demanding to see him.

He had asked his family never to come to the mills without appointment. He had been glad that they hated the place and seldom appeared in his office. What he now felt was a violent impulse to order his mother off the premises. Instead, with a greater effort than the problem of the train wreck had required of him, he said quietly, "All right. Ask her to come in."

His mother came in with an air of belligerent defensiveness. She looked at his office as if she knew what it meant to him and as if she were declaring her resentment against anything being of greater importance to him than her own person. She took a long time settling down in an armchair, arranging and rearranging her bag, her gloves, the folds of her dress, while droning, "It's a fine thing when a mother has to wait in an anteroom and ask permission of a stenographer before she's allowed to see her own son who—"

"Mother, is it anything important? I am very rushed today."

"You're not the only one who's got problems. Of course, it's important. Do you think I'd go to the trouble of driving way out here, if it wasn't important?"

"What is it?"

"It's about Philip."

"Yes?"

"Philip is unhappy."

"Well?"

"He feels it's not right that he should have to depend on your charity and live on handouts and never be able to count on a single dollar of his own."

"Well!" he said with a startled smile. "I've been waiting for him to realize that."

"It isn't right for a sensitive man to be in such a position."

"It certainly isn't."

"I'm glad you agree with me. So what you have to do is give him a job."

"A . . . what?"

"You must give him a job, here, at the mills—but a nice, clean job, of course, with a desk and an office and a decent salary, where he wouldn't have to be among your day laborers and your smelly furnaces."

He knew that he was hearing it; he could not make himself believe it. "Mother, you're not serious."

"I certainly am. I happen to know that that's what he wants, only 's too proud to ask you for it But if you offer it to him and make it look like it's you who're asking him a favor—why, I know he'd be happy to take it. That's why I had to come here to talk to you—so he wouldn't guess that I put you up to it."

It was not in the nature of his consciousness to understand the nature of the things he was hearing. A single thought cut through his mind like a spotlight, making him unable to conceive how any eyes could miss it. The thought broke out of him as a cry of bewilderment: "But he knows nothing about the steel business!"

"What has that got to do with it? He needs a job."

"But he couldn't do the work."

"He needs to gain self-confidence and to feel important."

"But he wouldn't be any good whatever."

"He needs to feel that he's wanted."

"Here? What could I want him for?"

"You hire plenty of strangers.”

"I hire men who produce. What has he got to offer?"

"He's your brother, isn't he?"

"What has that got to do with it?"

She stared incredulously, in turn, silenced by shock. For a moment, they sat looking at each other, as if across an interplanetary distance.

"He's your brother," she said, her voice like a phonograph record repeating a magic formula she could not permit herself to doubt. "He needs a position in the world. He needs a salary, so that he'd feel that he's got money coming to him as his due, not as alms."

"As his due? But he wouldn't be worth a nickel to me."

"Is that what you think of first? Your profit? I'm asking you to help your brother, and you're figuring how to make a nickel on him, and you won't help him unless there's money in it for you—is that it?"

She saw the expression of his eyes, and she looked away, but spoke hastily, her voice rising. "Yes, sure, you're helping him—like you'd help any stray beggar. Material help—that's all you know or understand. Have you thought about his spiritual needs and what his position is doing to his self-respect? He doesn't want to live like a beggar. He wants to be independent of you."

"By means of getting from me a salary he can't earn for work he can't do?"

"You'd never miss it. You've got enough people here who're making money for you."

"Are you asking me to help him stage a fraud of that kind?"

"You don't have to put it that way."

"Is it a fraud—or isn't it?"

"That's why I can't talk to you—because you're not human. You have no pity, no feeling for your brother, no compassion for his feelings."

"Is it a fraud or not?"

"You have no mercy for anybody."

"Do you think that a fraud of this kind would be just?"

"You're the most immoral man living—you think of nothing but justice! You don't feel any love at all!"

He got up, his movement abrupt and stressed, the movement of ending an interview and ordering a visitor out of his office. "Mother, I'm running a steel plant—not a whorehouse."

"Henry!" The gasp of indignation was at his choice of language, nothing more.

"Don't ever speak to me again about a job for Philip. I would not give him the job of a cinder sweeper. I would not allow him inside my mills. I want you to understand that, once and for all. You may try to help him in any way you wish, but don't ever let me see you thinking of my mills as a means to that end."

The wrinkles of her soft chin trickled into a shape resembling a sneer. "What are they, your mills—a holy temple of some kind?"

"Why . . . yes," he said softly, astonished at the thought.

"Don't you ever think of people and of your moral duties?"

"I don't know what it is that you choose to call morality. No, I don't think of people—except that if I gave a job to Philip, I wouldn't be able to face any competent man who needed work and deserved it."

She got up. Her head was drawn into her shoulders, and the righteous bitterness of her voice seemed to push the words upward at his tall, straight figure: "That's your cruelty, that's what's mean and selfish about you. If you loved your brother, you'd give him a job he didn't deserve, precisely because he didn't deserve it—that would be true love and kindness and brotherhood. Else what's love for? If a man deserves a job, there's no virtue in giving it to him. Virtue is the giving of the undeserved."

He was looking at her like a child at an unfamiliar nightmare, incredulity preventing it from becoming horror. "Mother," he said slowly, "you don't know what you're saying. I'm not able ever to despise you enough to believe that you mean it"

The look on her face astonished him more than all the rest: it was a look of defeat and yet of an odd, sly, cynical cunning, as if, for a moment, she held some worldly wisdom that mocked his innocence.

The memory of that look remained in his mind, like a warning signal telling him that he had glimpsed an issue which he had to understand.

But he could not grapple with it, he could not force his mind to accept it as worthy of thought, he could find no clue except his dim uneasiness and his revulsion—and he had no time to give it, he could not think of it now, he was facing his next caller seated in front of his desk—he was listening to a man who pleaded for his life.

The man did not state it in such terms, but Rearden knew that that was the essence of the case. What the man put into words was only a a for five hundred tons of steel.

He was Mr. Ward, of the Ward Harvester Company of Minnesota.

It was an unpretentious company with an unblemished reputation, the kind of business concern that seldom grows large, but never fails. Mr.

Ward represented the fourth generation of a family that had owned the plant and had given it the conscientious best of such ability as they possessed.

He was a man in his fifties, with a square, stolid face. Looking at him, one knew that he would consider it as indecent to let his face show suffering as to remove his clothes in public. He spoke in a dry, businesslike manner. He explained that he had always dealt, as his father had, with one of the small steel companies now taken over by Orren Boyle's Associated Steel. He had waited for his last order of steel for a year. He had spent the last month struggling to obtain a personal interview with Rearden.

"I know that your mills are running at capacity, Mr. Rearden," he said, "and I know that you are not in a position to take care of new orders, what with your biggest, oldest customers having to wait their turn, you being the only decent—I mean, reliable—steel manufacturer left in the country. I don't know what reason to offer you as to why you should want to make an exception in my case. But there was nothing else for me to do, except close the doors of my plant for good, and I"—there was a slight break in his voice—"I can't quite see my way to closing the doors . . . as yet . . . so I thought I'd speak to you, even if I didn't have much chance . . . still, I had to try everything possible."

This was language that Rearden could understand, "I wish I could help you out," he said, "but this is the worst possible time for me, because of a very large, very special order that has to take precedence over everything."

"I know. But would you just give me a hearing, Mr. Rearden?"

"Sure."

"If it's a question of money, I'll pay anything you ask. If I could make it worth your while that way, why, charge me any extra you please, charge me double the regular price, only let me have the steel.

I wouldn't care if I had to sell the harvester at a loss this year, just so I could keep the doors open. I've got enough, personally, to run at a loss for a couple of years, if necessary, just to hold out—because, I figure, things can't go on this way much longer, conditions are bound to improve, they've got to or else we'll—" He did not finish. He said firmly, "They've got to."

"They will," said Rearden.

The thought of the John Galt Line ran through his mind like a harmony under the confident sound of his words. The John Galt Line was moving forward. The attacks on his Metal had ceased. He felt as if, miles apart across the country, he and Dagny Taggart now stood in empty space, their way cleared, free to finish the job. They'll leave us alone to do it, he thought. The words were like a battle hymn in his mind: They'll leave us alone.

"Our plant capacity is one thousand harvesters per year," said Mr.

Ward. "Last year, we put out three hundred. I scraped the steel together from bankruptcy sales, and begging a few tons here and there from big companies, and just going around like a scavenger to all sorts of unlikely places—well, I won't bore you with that, only I never thought I'd live to see the time when I'd have to do business that way.

And all the while Mr. Orren Boyle was swearing to me that he was going to deliver the steel next week. But whatever he managed to pour, it went to new customers of his, for some reason nobody would mention, only I heard it whispered that they were men with some sort of political pull. And now I can't even get to Mr. Boyle at all.

He's in Washington, been there for over a month. And all his office tells me is just that they can't help it, because they can't get the ore."

"Don't waste your time on them," said Rearden. "You'll never get anything from that outfit."

"You know, Mr. Rearden," he said in the tone of a discovery which he could not quite bring himself to believe, "I think there's something phony about the way Mr. Boyle runs his business. I can't understand what he's after. They've got half their furnaces idle, but last month there were all those big stories about Associated Steel in all the newspapers. About their output? Why, no—about the wonderful housing project that Mr. Boyle's just built for his workers. Last week, it was colored movies that Mr. Boyle sent to all the high schools, showing how steel is made and what great service it performs for everybody.

Now Mr. Boyle's got a radio program, they give talks about the importance of the steel industry to the country and they keep saying that we must preserve the steel industry as a whole. I don't understand what he means by it as a whole."

"I do. Forget it. He won't get away with it."

"You know, Mr. Rearden, I don't like people who talk too much about how everything they do is just for the sake of others. It's not true, and I don't think it would be right if it ever were true. So I'll say that what I need the steel for is to save my own business. Because it's mine. Because if I had to close it . . . oh well, nobody understands that nowadays."

"I do."

"Yes . . . Yes, I think you would. . . . So, you see, that's my first concern. But still, there are my customers, too. They've dealt with me for years. They're counting on me. It's just about impossible to get any sort of machinery anywhere. Do you know what it's getting to be like, out in Minnesota, when the farmers can't get tools, when machine break down in the middle of the harvest season and there are no parts, no replacements . . . nothing but Mr. Orren Boyle's colored movies about . . . Oh well . . . And then there are my workers, too. Some of them have been with us since my father's time. They've got no other place to go. Not now."

It was impossible, thought Rearden, to squeeze more steel out of mills where every furnace, every hour and every ton were scheduled in advance for urgent orders, for the next six months. But . . . The John Galt Line, he thought. If he could do that, he could do anything.

- . . He felt as if he wished to undertake ten new problems at once.

He felt as if this were a world where nothing was impossible to him.

"Look," he said, reaching for the telephone, "let me check with my superintendent and see just what we're pouring in the next few weeks.

Maybe I'll find a way to borrow a few tons from some of the orders and—"

Mr. Ward looked quickly away from him, but Rearden had caught a glimpse of his face. It's so much for him, thought Rearden, and so little for me!

He lifted the telephone receiver, but he had to drop it, because the door of his office flew open and Gwen Ives rushed in.

It seemed impossible that Miss Ives should permit herself a breach of that kind, or that the calm of her face should look like an unnatural distortion, or that her eyes should seem blinded, or that her steps should sound a shred of discipline away from staggering. She said, "Excuse me for interrupting, Mr. Rearden," but he knew that she did not see the office, did not see Mr. Ward, saw nothing but him. "I thought I must tell you that the Legislature has just passed the Equalization of Opportunity Bill."

It was the stolid Mr. Ward who screamed, "Oh God, no! Oh, no!"—staring at Rearden.

Rearden had leaped to his feet. He stood unnaturally bent, one shoulder drooping forward. It was only an instant. Then he looked around him, as if regaining eyesight, said, "Excuse me," his glance including both Miss Ives and Mr. Ward, and sat down again.

"We were not informed that the Bill had been brought to the floor, were we?" he asked, his voice controlled and dry.

"No, Mr. Rearden. Apparently, it was a surprise move and it took them just forty-five minutes."

"Have you heard from Mouch?"

"No, Mr. Rearden." She stressed the no. "It was the office boy from the fifth floor who came running in to tell me that he'd just heard it on the radio. I called the newspapers to verify it. I tried to reach Mr.

Mouch in Washington. His office does not answer."

"When did we hear from him last?"

"Ten days ago, Mr. Rearden."

"All right. Thank you, Gwen. Keep trying to get his office."

"Yes, Mr. Rearden."

She walked out. Mr. Ward was on his feet, hat in hand. He muttered, "I guess I'd better—"

"Sit down!" Rearden snapped fiercely.

Mr. Ward obeyed, staring at him.

"We had business to transact, didn't we?" said Rearden. Mr. Ward could not define the emotion that contorted Rearden's mouth as he spoke. "Mr. Ward, what is it that the foulest bastards on earth denounce us for, among other things? Oh yes, for our motto of 'Business as usual.' Well—business as usual, Mr. Ward!"

He picked up the telephone receiver and asked for his superintendent. "Say, Pete . . . What? . . . Yes, I've heard. Can it. We'll talk about that later. What I want to know is, could you let me have five hundred tons of steel, extra, above schedule, in the next few weeks?

. . . Yes, I know . . . I know it's tough. . . . Give me the dates and the figures." He listened, rapidly jotting notes down on a sheet of paper. Then he said, "Right. Thank you," and hung up.

He studied the figures for a few moments, marking some brief calculations on the margin of the sheet. Then he raised his head.

"All right, Mr. Ward," he said. "You will have your steel in ten days."

When Mr. Ward had gone, Rearden came out into the anteroom.

He said to Miss Ives, his voice normal, "Wire Fleming in Colorado.

He'll know why I have to cancel that option." She inclined her head, in the manner of a nod signifying obedience. She did not look at him.

He turned to his next caller and said, with a gesture of invitation toward his office, "How do you do. Come in."

He would think of it later, he thought; one moves step by step and one must keep moving. For the moment, with an unnatural clarity, with a brutal simplification that made it almost easy, his consciousness contained nothing but one thought: It must not stop me. The sentence hung alone, with no past and no future. He did not think of what it was that must not stop him, or why this sentence was such a crucial absolute. It held him and he obeyed. He went step by step. He completed his schedule of appointments, as scheduled.

It was late when his last caller departed and he came out of his office. The rest of his staff had gone home. Miss Ives sat alone at her desk in an empty room. She sat straight and stiff, her hands clasped tightly together in her lap. Her head was not lowered, but held rigidly level, and her face seemed frozen. Tears were running down her cheeks, with no sound, with no facial movement, against her resistance, beyond control.

She saw him and said dryly, guiltily, in apology, "I'm sorry, Mr.

Rearden," not attempting the futile pretense of hiding her face.

He approached her. "Thank you," he said gently.

She looked up at him, astonished.

He smiled. "But don't you think you're underestimating me, Gwen?

Isn't it too soon to cry over me?"

"I could have taken the rest of it," she whispered, "but they"—she pointed at the newspapers on her desk—"they're calling it a victory for anti-greed."

He laughed aloud. "I can see where such a distortion of the English language would make you furious," he said. "But what else?"

As she looked at him, her mouth relaxed a little. The victim whom she could not protect was her only point of reassurance in a world dissolving around her.

He moved his hand gently across her forehead; it was an unusual break of formality for him, and a silent acknowledgment of the things at which he had not laughed. "Go home, Gwen. I won't need you tonight. I'm going home myself in just a little while. No, I don't want you to wait."

It was past midnight, when, still sitting at his desk, bent over blueprints of the bridge for the John Galt Line, he stopped his work abruptly, because emotion reached him in a sudden stab, not to be escaped any longer, as if a curtain of anesthesia had broken, He slumped down, halfway, still holding onto some shred of resistance, and sat, his chest pressed to the edge of the desk to stop him, his head hanging down, as if the only achievement still possible to him was not to let his head drop down on the desk. He sat that way for a few moments, conscious of nothing but pain, a screaming pain without content or limit—he sat, not knowing whether it was in his mind or his body, reduced to the terrible ugliness of pain that stopped thought.

In a few moments, it was over. He raised his head and sat up straight, quietly, leaning back against his chair. Now he saw that in postponing this moment for hours, he had not been guilty of evasion: he had not thought of it, because there was nothing to think.

Thought—he told himself quietly—is a weapon one uses in order to act. No action was possible. Thought is the tool by which one makes a choice. No choice was left to him. Thought sets one's purpose and the way to reach it. In the matter of his life being torn piece by piece out of him, he was to have no voice, no purpose, no way, no defense.

He thought of this in astonishment. He saw for the first time that he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act. No, he thought, not an assurance of victory—who can ever have that?—only the chance to act, which is all one needs. Now he was contemplating, impersonally and for the first time, the real heart of terror: being delivered to destruction with one's hands tied behind one's back.

Well, then, go on with your hands tied, he thought. Go on in chains.

Go on. It must not stop you. . . . But another voice was telling him things he did not want to hear, while he fought back, crying through and against it: There's no point in thinking of that . . . there's no use . . . what for? . . . leave it alone!

He could not choke it off. He sat still, over the drawings of the bridge for the John Galt Line, and heard the things released by a voice that was part-sound, part-sight: They decided it without him.

. . . They did not call for him, they did not ask, they did not let him speak. . . . They were not bound even by the duty to let him know—to let him know that they had slashed part of his life away and that he had to be ready to walk on as a cripple. . . . Of ah" those concerned, whoever they were, for whichever reason, for whatever need, he was the one they had not had to consider.

The sign at the end of a long road said: Rearden Ore. It hung over black tiers of metal . . . and over years and nights . . . over a clock ticking drops of his blood away . . . the blood he had given gladly, exultantly in payment for a distant day and a sign over a road . . paid for with his effort, his strength, his mind, his hope.

Destroyed at the whim of some men who sat and voted . . . Who knows by what minds? . . . Who knows whose will had placed them in power?—what motive moved them?—what was their knowledge?—which one of them, unaided, could bring a chunk of ore out of the earth? . . . Destroyed at the whim of men whom he had never seen and who had never seen those tiers of metal . . . Destroyed, because they so decided. By what right?

He shook his head. There are things one must not contemplate, he thought. There is an obscenity of evil which contaminates the observer.

There is a limit to what it is proper for a man to see. He must not think of this, or look within it, or try to learn the nature of its roots.

Feeling quiet and empty, he told himself that he would be all right tomorrow. He would forgive himself the weakness of this night, it was like the tears one is permitted at a funeral, and then one learns how to live with an open wound or with a crippled factory.

He got up and walked to the window. The mills seemed deserted and still; he saw feeble snatches of red above black funnels, long coils of steam, the webbed diagonals of cranes and bridges.

He felt a desolate loneliness, of a kind he had never known before.

He thought that Gwen Ives and Mr. Ward could look to him for hope, for relief, for renewal of courage. To whom could he look for it? He, too, needed it, for once. He wished he had a friend who could be permitted to see him suffer, without pretense or protection, on whom he could lean for a moment, just to say, "I'm very tired," and find a moment's rest. Of all the men he knew, was there one he wished he had beside him now? He heard the answer in his mind, immediate and shocking: Francisco d'Anconia.

His chuckle of anger brought him back. The absurdity of the longing jolted him into calm. That's what you get, he thought, when you indulge yourself in weakness.

He stood at the window, trying not to think. But he kept hearing words in his mind: Rearden Ore . . . Rearden Coal . . . Rearden Steel . . . Rearden Metal . . . What was the use? Why had he done it? Why should he ever want to do anything again? . . .

His first day on the ledges of the ore mines . . . The day when he stood in the wind, looking down at the ruins of a steel plant . . . The day when he stood here, in this office, at this window, and thought that a bridge could be made to carry incredible loads on just a few bars of metal, if one combined a truss with an arch, if one built diagonal bracing with the top members curved to—

He stopped and stood still. He had not thought of combining a truss with an arch, that day.

In the next moment, he was at his desk, bending over it, with one knee on the seat of the chair, with no time to think of sitting down, he was drawing lines, curves, triangles, columns of calculations, indiscriminately on the blueprints, on the desk blotter, on somebody's letters.

And an hour later, he was calling for a long-distance line, he was waiting for a phone to ring by a bed in a railway car on a siding, he was saying, "Dagny! That bridge of ours—throw in the ash can all the drawings I sent you, because . . . What? . . . Oh, that? To hell with that! Never mind the looters and their laws! Forget it! Dagny, what do we care! Listen, you know the contraption you called the Rearden Truss, that you admired so much? It's not worth a damn. I've figured out a truss that will beat anything ever built! Your bridge will carry four trains at once, stand three hundred years and cost you less than your cheapest culvert. I'll send you the drawings in two days, but I wanted to tell you about it right now. You see, it's a matter of combining a truss with an arch. If we take diagonal bracing and . . .

What? . . . I can't hear you. Have you caught a cold? . . . What are you thanking me for, as yet? Wait till I explain it to you."

CHAPTER VIII
THE JOHN GALT LINE

The worker smiled, looking at Eddie Willers across the table.

"I feel like a fugitive," said Eddie Willers. 'I guess you know why I haven't been here for months?" He pointed at the underground cafeteria.

"I'm supposed to be a vice-president now. The Vice-President in Charge of Operation. For God's sake, don't take it seriously. I stood it as long as I could, and then I had to escape, if only for one evening. . . . The first time I came down here for dinner, after my alleged promotion, they all stared at me so much, I didn't dare come back. Well, let them stare.

You don't. I'm glad that it doesn't make any difference to you. . . .

No, I haven't seen her for two weeks. But I speak to her on the phone every day, sometimes twice a day. . . . Yes, I know how she feels: she loves it. What is it we hear over the telephone—sound vibrations, isn't it? Well, her voice sounds as if it were turning into light vibrations—if you know what I mean. She enjoys running that horrible battle single handed and winning. . . . Oh yes, she's winning! Do you know why you haven't read anything about the John Galt Line in the newspapers for some time? Because it's going so well . . . Only . . . that Rearden Metal rail will be the greatest track ever built, but what will be the use, if we don't have any engines powerful enough to take advantage of it?

Look at the kind of patched coal-burners we've got left—they can barely manage to drag themselves fast enough for old trolley-car rails. . . .

Still, there's hope. The United Locomotive Works went bankrupt. That's the best break we've had in the last few weeks, because their plant has been bought by Dwight Sanders. He's a brilliant young engineer who's got the only good aircraft plant in the country. He had to sell the aircraft plant to his brother, in order to take over United Locomotive.

That's on account of the Equalization of Opportunity Bill. Sure, it's just a setup between them, but can you blame him? Anyway, we'll see Diesels coming out of the United Locomotive Works now. Dwight Sanders will start things going. . . . Yes, she's counting on him. Why do you ask that? . . . Yes, he's crucially important to us right now. We've just signed a contract with him, for the first ten Diesel engines he'll build. When I phoned her that the contract was signed, she laughed and said, "You see? Is there ever any reason to be afraid?' . . . She said that, because she knows—I've never told her, but she knows—that I'm afraid. . . . Yes, I am. . . . I don't know . . . I wouldn't be afraid if I knew of what, I could do something about it. But this . . . Tell me, don't you really despise me for being Operating Vice-President? . . .

But don't you see that it's vicious? . . . What honor? I don't know what it is that I really am: a clown, a ghost, an understudy or just a rotten stooge. When I sit in her office, in her chair, at her desk, I feel worse than that: I feel like a murderer. . . . Sure, I know that I'm supposed to be a stooge for her—and that would be an honor—but . . . but I feel as if in some horrible way which I can't quite grasp, I'm a stooge for Jim Taggart. Why should it be necessary for her to have a stooge? Why does she have to hide? Why did they throw her out of the building? Do you know that she had to move out into a dinky hole in the back alley, across from our Express and Baggage Entrance? You ought to take a look at it some time, that's the office of John Galt, Inc.

Yet everybody knows that it's she who's still running Taggart Transcontinental. Why does she have to hide the magnificent job she's doing?

Why are they giving her no credit? Why are they robbing her of her achievement—with me as the receiver of stolen goods? Why are they doing everything in their power to make it impossible for her to succeed, when she's all they've got standing between them and destruction? Why are they torturing her in return for saving their lives? . . . What's the matter with you? Why do you look at me like that? . . . Yes, I guess you understand. . . . There's something about it all that I can't define, and it's something evil. That's why I'm afraid. . . . I don't think one can get away with it. . . . You know, it's strange, but I think they know it, too, Jim and his crowd and all of them in the building. There's something guilty and sneaky about the whole place. Guilty and sneaky and dead. Taggart Transcontinental is now like a man who's lost his soul . . . who's betrayed his soul. . . . No, she doesn't care. Last time she was in New York, she came in unexpectedly—I was in my office, in her office—and suddenly the door opened and there she was. She came in, saying, 'Mr. Willers, I'm looking for a job as a station operator, would you give me a chance?' I wanted to damn them all, but I had to laugh, I was so glad to see her and she was laughing so happily. She had come straight from the airport—she wore slacks and a flying jacket—she looked wonderful—she'd got windburned, it looked like a suntan, just as if she'd returned from a vacation. She made me remain where I was, in her chair, and she sat on the desk and talked about the new bridge of the John Galt Line. . . . No. No, I never asked her why she chose that name. . . . I don't know what it means to her. A sort of challenge, I guess . . . I don't know to whom . . . Oh, it doesn't matter, it doesn't mean a thing, there isn't any John Galt, but I wish she hadn't used it. I don't like it, do you? . . . You do? You don't sound very happy saying it."

The windows of the offices of the John Galt Line faced a dark alley.

Looking up from her desk, Dagny could not see the sky, only the wall of a building rising past her range of vision. It was the side wall of the great skyscraper of Taggart Transcontinental.

Her new headquarters were two rooms on the ground floor of a half collapsed structure. The structure still stood, but its upper stories were boarded off as unsafe for occupancy. Such tenants as it sheltered were half-bankrupt, existing, as it did, on the inertia of the momentum of the past.

She liked her new place: it saved money. The rooms contained no superfluous furniture or people. The furniture had come from junk shops. The people were the choice best she could find. On her rare visits to New York, she had no time to notice the room where she worked; she noticed only that it served its purpose.

She did not know what made her stop tonight and look at the thin streaks of rain on the glass of the window, at the wall of the building across the alley.

It was past midnight. Her small staff had gone. She was due at the airport at three A.M., to fly her plane back to Colorado. She had little left to do, only a few of Eddie's reports to read. With the sudden break of the tension of hurrying, she stopped, unable to go on. The reports seemed to require an effort beyond her power. It was too late to go home and sleep, too early to go to the airport. She thought: You're tired—and watched her own mood with severe, contemptuous detachment, knowing that it would pass.

She had flown to New York unexpectedly, at a moment's notice, leaping to the controls of her plane within twenty minutes after hearing a brief item in a news broadcast. The radio voice had said that Dwight Sanders had retired from business, suddenly, without reason or explanation. She had hurried to New York, hoping to find him and stop him.

But she had felt, while flying across the continent, that there would be no trace of him to find.

The spring rain hung motionless in the air beyond the window, like a thin mist. She sat, looking across at the open cavern of the Express and Baggage Entrance of the Taggart Terminal. There were naked lights inside, among the steel girders of the ceiling, and a few piles of luggage on the worn concrete of the floor. The place looked abandoned and dead.

She glanced at a jagged crack on the wall of her office. She heard no sound. She knew she was alone in the ruins of a building. It seemed as if she were alone in the city. She felt an emotion held back for years: a loneliness much beyond this moment, beyond the silence of the room and the wet, glistening emptiness of the street; the loneliness of a gray wasteland where nothing was worth reaching; the loneliness of her childhood.

She rose and walked to the window. By pressing her face to the pane, she could see the whole of the Taggart Building, its lines converging abruptly to its distant pinnacle in the sky. She looked up at the dark window of the room that had been her office. She felt as if she were in exile, never to return, as if she were separated from the building by much more than a sheet of glass, a curtain of rain and the span of a few months.

She stood, in a room of crumbling plaster, pressed to the windowpane, looking up at the unattainable form of everything she loved. She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.

Once, when she was sixteen, looking at a long stretch of Taggart track, at the rails that converged—like the lines of a skyscraper—to a single point in the distance, she had told Eddie Willers that she had always felt as if the rails were held in the hand of a man beyond the horizon—no, not her father or any of the men in the office—and some day she would meet him.

She shook her head and turned away from the window.

She went back to her desk. She tried to reach for the reports. But suddenly she was slumped across the desk, her head on her arm. Don't, she thought; but she did not move to rise, it made no difference, there was no one to see her.

This was a longing she had never permitted herself to acknowledge.

She faced it now. She thought: If emotion is one's response to the things the world has to offer, if she loved the rails, the building, and more: if she loved her love for them—there was still one response, the greatest, that she had missed. She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth . . . To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his . . . No, not Francisco d'Anconia, not Hank Rearden, not any man she had ever met or admired . . . A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience . . . She twisted herself in a slow, faint movement, her breasts pressed to the desk; she felt the longing in her muscles, in the nerves of her body.

Is that what you want? Is it as simple as that?—she thought, but knew that it was not simple. There was some unbreakable link between her love for her work and the desire of her body; as if one gave her the right to the other, the right and the meaning; as if one were the completion of the other—and the desire would never be satisfied, except by a being of equal greatness.

Her face pressed to her arm, she moved her head, shaking it slowly hi negation. She would never find it. Her own thought of what life could be like, was all she would ever have of the world she had wanted. Only the thought of it—and a few rare moments, like a few lights reflected from it on her way—to know, to hold, to follow to the end . . .

She raised her head.

On the pavement of the alley, outside her window, she saw the shadow of a man who stood at the door of her office.

The door was some steps away; she could not see him, or the street light beyond, only his shadow on the stones of the pavement. He stood perfectly still.

He was so close to the door, like a man about to enter, that she waited to hear him knock. Instead, she saw the shadow jerk abruptly, as if he were jolted backward, then he turned and walked away. There was only the outline of his hat brim and shoulders left on the ground, when he stopped. The shadow lay still for a moment, wavered, and grew longer again as he came back.

She felt no fear. She sat at her desk, motionless, watching in blank wonder. He stopped at the door, then backed away from it; he stood somewhere in the middle of the alley, then paced restlessly and stopped again. His shadow swung like an irregular pendulum across the pavement, describing the course of a soundless battle: it was a man fighting himself to enter that door or to escape.

She looked on, with peculiar detachment. She had no power to react, only to observe. She wondered numbly, distantly: Who was he? Had he been watching her from somewhere in the darkness? Had he seen her slumped across her desk, in the lighted, naked window? Had he watched her desolate loneliness as she was now watching his? She felt nothing.

They were alone in the silence of a dead city—it seemed to her that he was miles away, a reflection of suffering without identity, a fellow survivor whose problem was as distant to her as hers would be to him.

He paced, moving out of her sight, coming back again. She sat, watching—on the glistening pavement of a dark alley—the shadow of an unknown torment.

The shadow moved away once more. She waited. It did not return.

Then she leaped to her feet. She had wanted to see the outcome of the battle; now that he had won it—or lost—she was struck by the sudden, urgent need to know his identity and motive. She ran through the dark anteroom, she threw the door open and looked out.

The alley was empty. The pavement went tapering off into the distance, like a band of wet mirror under a few spaced lights. There was no one in sight. She saw the dark hole of a broken window in an abandoned shop. Beyond it, there were the doors of a few rooming houses. Across the alley, streaks of rain glittered under a light that hung over the black gap of an open door leading down to the underground tunnels of Taggart Transcontinental.

Rearden signed the papers, pushed them across the desk and looked away, thinking that he would never have to think of them again, wishing he were carried to the time when this moment would be far behind him.

Paul Larkin reached for the papers hesitantly; he looked ingratiatingly helpless, "It's only a legal technicality, Hank," he said. "You know that I'll always consider these ore mines as yours."

Rearden shook his head slowly; it was just a movement of his neck muscles; his face looked immovable, as if he were speaking to a stranger.

"No!" he said. "Either I own a property or I don't."

"But . . . but you know that you can trust me. You don't have to worry about your supply of ore. We've made an agreement. You know that you can count on me."

"I don't know it. I hope I can."

"But I've given you my word."

"I have never been at the mercy of anyone's word before."

"Why . . . why do you say that? We're friends. I'll do anything you wish. You'll get my entire output. The mines are still yours—just as good as yours. You have nothing to fear. I'll . . . Hank, what's the matter?"

"Don't talk."

"But . . . but what's the matter?"

"I don't like assurances. I don't want any pretense about how safe I am. I'm not. We have made an agreement which I can't enforce. I want you to know that I understand my position fully. If you intend to keep your word, don't talk about it, just do it."

"Why do you look at me as if it were my fault? You know how badly I feel about it. I bought the mines only because I thought it would help you out—I mean, I thought you'd rather sell them to a friend than to some total stranger. It's not my fault. I don't like that miserable Equalization Bill, I don't know who's behind it, I never dreamed they'd pass it, it was such a shock to me when they—"

"Never mind."

"But I only—"

"Why do you insist on talking about it?"

"I . . ." Larkin's voice was pleading. "I gave you the best price, Hank. The law said 'reasonable compensation.' My bid was higher than anyone else's."

Rearden looked at the papers still lying across the desk. He thought of the payment these papers gave him for his ore mines. Two-thirds of the sum was money which Larkin had obtained as a loan from the government; the new law made provisions for such loans "in order to give a fair opportunity to the new owners who have never had a chance."

Two-thirds of the rest was a loan he himself had granted to Larkin, a mortgage he had accepted on his own mines. . . . And the government money, he thought suddenly, the money now given to him as payment for his property, where had that come from? Whose work had provided it?

"'You don't have to worry, Hank," said Larkin, with that incomprehensible, insistent note of pleading in his voice. "It's just a paper formality."

Rearden wondered dimly what it was that Larkin wanted from him.

He felt that the man was waiting for something beyond the physical fact of the sale, some words which he, Rearden, was supposed to pronounce, some action pertaining to mercy which he was expected to grant. Larkin's eyes, in this moment of his best fortune, had the sickening look of a beggar.

"Why should you be angry, Hank? It's only a new form of legal red tape. Just a new historical condition. Nobody can help it, if it's, a historical condition. Nobody can be blamed for it. But there's always a way to get along. Look at all the others. They don't mind. They're—"

"They're setting up stooges whom they control, to run the properties extorted from them. I—"

"Now why do you want to use such words?"

"I might as well tell you—and I think you know it—that I am not good at games of that kind. I have neither the time nor the stomach to devise some form of blackmail in order to tie you up and own my mines through you. Ownership is a thing I don't share. And I don't wish to hold it by the grace of your cowardice—by means of a constant struggle to outwit you and keep some threat over your head. I don't do business that way and I don't deal with cowards. The mines are yours. If you wish to give me first call on all the ore produced, you will do so.

If you wish to double-cross me, it's in your power."

Larkin looked hurt. "That's very unfair of you," he said; there was a dry little note of righteous reproach in his voice. "I have never given you cause to distrust me." He picked up the papers with a hasty movement.

Rearden saw the papers disappear into Larkin's inside coat pocket.

He saw the flare of the open coat, the wrinkles of a vest pulled tight over flabby bulges, and a stain of perspiration in the armpit of the shirt.

Unsummoned, the picture of a face seen twenty-seven years ago rose suddenly in his mind. It was the face of a preacher on a street corner he had passed, in a town he could not remember any longer. Only the dark walls of the slums remained in his memory, the rain of an autumn evening, and the righteous malice of the man's mouth, a small mouth stretched to yell into the darkness: ". . . the noblest ideal—that man live for the sake of his brothers, that the strong work for the weak, that he who has ability serve him who hasn't . . ."

Then he saw the boy who had been Hank Rearden at eighteen. He saw the tension of the face, the speed of the walk, the drunken exhilaration of the body, drunk on the energy of sleepless nights, the proud lift of the head, the clear, steady, ruthless eyes, the eyes of a man who drove himself without pity toward that which he wanted. And he saw what Paul Larkin must have been at that time—a youth with an aged baby's face, smiling ingratiatingly, joylessly, begging to be spared, pleading with the universe to give him a chance. If someone had shown that youth to the Hank Rearden of that time and told him that this was to be the goal of his steps, the collector of the energy of his aching tendons, what would he have—

It was not a thought, it was like the punch of a fist inside his skull.

Then, when he could think again, Rearden knew what the boy he had been would have felt: a desire to step on the obscene thing which was Larkin and grind every wet bit of it out of existence.

He had never experienced an emotion o[ this kind. It took him a few moments to realize that this was what men called hatred.

He noticed that rising to leave and muttering some sort of good-byes, Larkin had a wounded, reproachful, mouth-pinched look, as if he, Larkin, were the injured party.

When he sold his coal mines to Ken Danagger, who owned the largest coal company in Pennsylvania, Rearden wondered why he felt as if it were almost painless. He felt no hatred. Ken Danagger was a man in his fifties, with a hard, closed face; he had started in life as a miner.

When Rearden handed to him the deed to his new property, Danagger said impassively, "I don't believe I've mentioned that any coal you buy from me, you'll get it at cost."

Rearden glanced at him, astonished. "It's against the law," he said.

"Who's going to find out what sort of cash I band to you in your own living room?"

"You're talking about a rebate."

"I am."

"That's against two dozen laws. They'll sock you worse than me, if they catch you at it."

"Sure. That's your protection—so you won't be left at the mercy of my good will."

Rearden smiled; it was a happy smile, but he closed his eyes as under a blow. Then he shook his head. "Thanks," he said. "But I'm not one of them. I don't expect anybody to work for me at cost."

"I'm not one of them, either," said Danagger angrily. "Look here, Rearden, don't you suppose I know what I'm getting, unearned? The money doesn't pay you for it. Not nowadays."

"You didn't volunteer to bid to buy my property. I asked you to buy it. I wish there had been somebody like you in the ore business, to take over my mines. There wasn't. If you want to do me a favor, don't offer me rebates. Give me a chance to pay you higher prices, higher than anyone else will offer, sock me anything you wish, just so I'll be first to get the coal. I'll manage my end of it. Only let me have the coal."

"You'll have it."

Rearden wondered, for a while, why he heard no word from Wesley Mouch. His calls to Washington remained unanswered. Then he received a letter consisting of a single sentence which informed him that Mr. Mouch was resigning from his employ. Two weeks later, he read in the newspapers that Wesley Mouch had been appointed Assistant Coordinator of the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources.

Don't dwell on any of it—thought Rearden, through the silence of many evenings, fighting the sudden access of that new emotion which he did not want to feel—there is an unspeakable evil in the world, you know it, and it's no use dwelling on the details of it. You must work a little harder. Just a little harder. Don't let it win.

The beams and girders of the Rearden Metal bridge were coming daily out of the rolling mills, and were being shipped to the site of the John Galt Line, where the first shapes of green-blue metal, swung into space to span the canyon, glittered in the first rays of the spring sun.

He had no time for pain, no energy for anger. Within a few weeks, it was over; the blinding stabs of hatred ceased and did not return.

He was back in confident self-control on the evening when he telephoned Eddie Willers, "Eddie, I'm in New York, at the Wayne-Falkland. Come to have breakfast with me tomorrow morning. There's something I'd like to discuss with you."

Eddie Willers went to the appointment with a heavy feeling of guilt.

He had not recovered from the shock of the Equalization of Opportunity Bill; it had left a dull ache within him, like the black-and-blue mark of a blow. He disliked the sight of the city: it now looked as if it hid the threat of some malicious unknown. He dreaded facing one of the Bill's victims: he felt almost as if he, Eddie Willers, shared the responsibility for it in some terrible way which he could not define.

When he saw Rearden, the feeling vanished. There was no hint suggesting a victim, in Rearden's bearing. Beyond the windows of the hotel room, the spring sunlight of early morning sparkled on the windows of the city, the sky was a very pale blue that seemed young, the offices were still closed, and the city did not look as if it held malice, but as if it were joyously, hopefully ready to swing into action—in the same manner as Rearden. He looked refreshed by an untroubled sleep, he wore a dressing gown, he seemed impatient of the necessity to dress, unwilling to delay the exciting game of his business duties.

"Good morning, Eddie. Sorry if I got you out so early. It's the only time I had. Have to go back to Philadelphia right after breakfast. We can talk while we're eating."

The dressing gown he wore was of dark blue flannel, with the white initials "H R" on the breast pocket. He looked young, relaxed, at home in this room and in the world.

Eddie watched a waiter wheel the breakfast table into the room with a swift efficiency that made him feel braced. He found himself enjoying the stiff freshness of the white tablecloth and the sunlight sparkling on the silver, on the two bowls of crushed ice holding glasses of orange juice; he had not known that such things could give him an invigorating pleasure.

"I didn't want to phone Dagny long distance about this particular matter," said Rearden. "She has enough to do. We can settle it in a few minutes, you and I."

"If I have the authority to do it,"

Rearden smiled. "You have." He leaned forward across the table.

"Eddie, what's the financial state of Taggart Transcontinental at the moment? Desperate?"

"Worse than that, Mr. Rearden."

"Are you able to meet pay rolls?"

"Not quite. We've kept it out of the newspapers, but I think everybody knows it. We're in arrears all over the system and Jim is running out of excuses."

"Do you know that your first payment for the Rearden Metal rail is due next week?"

"Yes, I know it."

"Well, let's agree on a moratorium. I'm going to give you an extension—you won't have to pay me anything until six months after the opening of the John Galt Line."

Eddie Willers put down his cup of coffee with a sharp thud. He could not say a word.

Rearden chuckled. "What's the matter? You do have the authority to accept, don't you?"

"Mr. Rearden . . . I don't know . . . what to say to you."

"Why, just 'okay' is all that's necessary,"

"Okay, Mr. Rearden." Eddie's voice was barely audible.

"I'll draw up the papers and send them to you. You can tell Jim about it and have him sign them."

"Yes, Mr. Rearden."

"I don't like to deal with Jim. He'd waste two hours trying to make himself believe that he's made me believe that he's doing me a favor by accepting."

Eddie sat without moving, looking down at his plate.

"What's the matter?"

"Mr. Rearden, I'd like . . . to say thank you . . . but there isn't any form of it big enough to—"

"Look, Eddie. You've got the makings of a good businessman, so you'd better get a few things straight. There aren't any thank-you's in situations of this kind. I'm not doing it for Taggart Transcontinental.

It's a simple, practical, selfish matter on my part. Why should I collect my money from you now, when it might prove to be the death blow to your company? If your company were no good, I'd collect, and fast. I don't engage in charity and I don't gamble on incompetents. But you're still the best railroad in the country. When the John Galt Line is completed, you'll be the soundest one financially. So I have good reason to wait. Besides, you're in trouble on account of my rail. I intend to see you win,"

"I still owe you thanks, Mr. Rearden . . . for something much greater than charity."

"No. Don't you see? I have just received a great deal of money . . . which I didn't want. I can't invest it. It's of no use to me whatever. . . .

So, in a way, it pleases me that I can turn that money against the same people in the same battle. They made it possible for me to give you an extension to help you fight them."

He saw Eddie wincing, as if he had hit a wound. "That's what's horrible about it!"

"What?"

"What they've done to you—and what you're doing in return. I mean—" He stopped. "Forgive me, Mr. Rearden. I know this is no way to talk business."

Rearden smiled. "Thanks, Eddie. I know what you mean. But forget it. To hell with them."

"Yes. Only . . . Mr. Rearden, may I say something to you? I know it's completely improper and I'm not speaking as a vice-president."

"Go ahead."

"I don't have to tell you what your offer means to Dagny, to me, to every decent person on Taggart Transcontinental. You know it. And you know you can count on us. But . . . but I think it's horrible that Jim Taggart should benefit, too—that you should be the one to save him and people like him, after they—"

Rearden laughed. "Eddie, what do we care about people like him?

We're driving an express, and they're riding on the roof, making a lot of noise about being leaders. Why should we care? We have enough power to carry them along—haven't we?"

"It won't stand."

The summer sun made blotches of fire on the windows of the city, and glittering sparks in the dust of the streets. Columns of heat shimmered through the air, rising from the roofs to the white page of the calendar. The calendar's motor ran on, marking off the last days of June.

"It won't stand," people said. "When they run the first train on the John Galt Line, the rail will split. They'll never get to the bridge. If they do, the bridge will collapse under the engine."

From the slopes of Colorado, freight trains rolled down the track of the Phoenix-Durango, north to Wyoming and the main line of Taggart Transcontinental, south to New Mexico and the main line of the Atlantic Southern. Strings of tank cars went radiating in all directions from the Wyatt oil fields to industries in distant states. No one spoke about them. To the knowledge of the public, the tank trains moved as silently as rays and, as rays, they were noticed only when they became the light of electric lamps, the heat of furnaces, the movement of motors; but as such, they were not noticed, they were taken for granted.

The Phoenix-Durango Railroad was to end operations on July 25.

"Hank Rearden is a greedy monster," people said. "Look at the fortune he's made. Has he ever given anything in return? Has he ever shown any sign of social conscience? Money, that's all he's after. He'll do anything for money. What does he care if people lose their lives when his bridge collapses?"

"The Taggarts have been a band of vultures for generations," people said. "It's in their blood. Just remember that the founder of that family was Nat Taggart, the most notoriously anti-social scoundrel that ever lived, who bled the country white to squeeze a fortune for himself. You can be sure that a Taggart won't hesitate to risk people's lives in order to make a profit. They bought inferior rail, because it's cheaper than steel—what do they care about catastrophes and mangled human bodies, after they've collected the fares?"

People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. They did not give or ask for reasons. "Reason," Dr. Pritchett had told them, "is the most naive of all superstitions."

"The source of public opinion?" said Claude Slagenhop in a radio speech. 'There is no source of public opinion. It is spontaneously general. It is a reflex of the collective instinct of the collective mind."

Orren Boyle gave an interview to Globe, the news magazine with the largest circulation. The interview was devoted to the subject of the grave social responsibility of metallurgists, stressing the fact that metal performed so many crucial tasks where human lives depended on its quality. "One should not, it seems to me, use human beings as guinea pigs in the launching of a new product," he said. He mentioned no names.

"Why, no, I don't say that that bridge will collapse," said the chief metallurgist of Associated Steel, on a television program. "I don't say it at all. I just say that if I had any children, I wouldn't let them ride on the first train that's going to cross that bridge. But it's only a personal preference, nothing more, just because I'm overly fond of children."

"I don't claim that the Rearden-Taggart contraption will collapse," wrote Bertram Scudder in The Future. "Maybe it will and maybe it won't. That's not the important issue. The important issue is: what protection does society have against the arrogance, selfishness and greed of two unbridled individualists, whose records are conspicuously devoid of any public-spirited actions? These two, apparently, are willing to stake the lives of their fellow men on their own conceited notions about their powers of judgment, against the overwhelming majority opinion of recognized experts. Should society permit it? If that thing does collapse, won't it be too late to take precautionary measures? Won't it be like locking the barn after the horse has escaped? It has always been the belief of this column that certain kinds of horses should be kept bridled and locked, on general social principles."

A group that called itself "Committee of Disinterested Citizens" collected signatures on a petition demanding a year's study of the John Galt Line by government experts before the first train were allowed to run. The petition stated that its signers had no motive other than "a sense of civic duty." The first signatures were those of Balph Eubank and Mort Liddy. The petition was given a great deal of space and comment in all the newspapers. The consideration it received was respectful, because it came from people who were disinterested.

No space was given by the newspapers to the progress of the construction of the John Galt Line. No reporter was sent to look at the scene. The general policy of the press had been stated by a famous editor five years ago. "There are no objective facts," he had said. "Every report on facts is only somebody's opinion. It is, therefore, useless to write about facts."

A few businessmen thought that one should think about the possibility that there might be commercial value in Rearden Metal. They undertook a survey of the question. They did not hire metallurgists to examine samples, nor engineers to visit the site of construction. They took a public poll. Ten thousand people, guaranteed to represent every existing kin ! of brain, were asked the question: "Would you ride on the John Galt Line?" The answer, overwhelmingly., was: "No, sir-reel"

No voices were heard in public in defense of Rearden Metal. And nobody attached significance to the fact that the stock of Taggart Transcontinental was rising on the market, very slowly, almost furtively.

There were men who watched and played safe. Mr. Mowen bought Taggart stock in the name of his sister. Ben Nealy bought it in the name of a cousin. Paul Larkin bought it under an alias. "I don't believe in raising controversial issues," said one of these men.

"Oh yes, of course, the construction is moving on schedule," said James Taggart, shrugging, to his Board of Directors. "Oh yes, you may feel full confidence. My dear sister does not happen to be a human being, but just an internal combustion engine, so one must not wonder at her success."

When James Taggart heard a rumor that some bridge girders had split and crashed, killing three workmen, he leaped to his feet and ran to his secretary's office, ordering him to call Colorado. He waited, pressed against the secretary's desk, as if seeking protection; his eyes had the unfocused look of panic. Yet his mouth moved suddenly into almost a smile and he said, "I'd give anything to see Henry Rearden’s face right now." When he heard that the rumor was false, he said, "Thank God!"

But his voice had a note of disappointment.

"Oh well!" said Philip Rearden to his friends, hearing the same rumor. "Maybe he can fail, too, once in a while. Maybe my great brother isn't as great as he thinks."

"Darling," said Lillian Rearden to her husband, "I fought for you yesterday, at a tea where the women were saying that Dagny Taggart is your mistress. . . . Oh, for heaven's sake, don't look at me like that!

I know it's preposterous and I gave them hell for it. It's just that those silly bitches can't imagine any other reason why a woman would take such a stand against everybody for the sake of your Metal. Of course, I know better than that. I know that the Taggart woman is perfectly sexless and doesn't give a damn about you—and, darling, I know that if you ever had the courage for anything of the sort, which you haven't, you wouldn't go for an adding machine in tailored suits, you'd go for some blond, feminine chorus girl who—oh, but Henry, I'm only joking!

—don't look at me like that!"

"Dagny," James Taggart said miserably, "what's going to happen to us? Taggart Transcontinental has become so unpopular!"

Dagny laughed, in enjoyment of the moment, any moment, as if the undercurrent of enjoyment was constant within her and little was needed to tap it. She laughed easily, her mouth relaxed and open. Her teeth were very white against her sun-scorched face. Her eyes had the look, acquired in open country, of being set for great distances. On her last few visits to New York, he had noticed that she looked at him as if she did not see him.

"What are we going to do? The public is so overwhelmingly against us!"

"Jim, do you remember the story they tell about Nat Taggart? He said that he envied only one of his competitors, the one who said The public be damned!' He wished he had said it."

In the summer days and in the heavy stillness of the evenings of the city, there were moments when a lonely man or woman—on a park bench, on a street corner, at an open window—would see in a newspaper a brief mention of the progress of the John Galt Line, and would look at the city with a sudden stab of hope. They were the very young, who felt that it was the kind of event they longed to see happening in the world—or the very old, who had seen a world in which such events did happen. They did not care about railroads, they knew nothing about business, they knew only that someone was fighting against great odds and winning. They did not admire the fighters' purpose, they believed the voices of public opinion—and yet, when they read that the Line was growing, they felt a moment's sparkle and wondered why it made their own problems seem easier.

Silently, unknown to everyone except to the freight yard of Taggart Transcontinental in Cheyenne and the office of the John Galt Line in the dark alley, freight was rolling in and orders for cars were piling up—for the first train to run on the John Galt Line. Dagny Taggart had announced that the first train would be, not a passenger express loaded with celebrities and politicians, as was the custom, but a freight special.

The freight came from farms, from lumber yards, from mines all over the country, from distant places whose last means of survival were the new factories of Colorado. No one wrote about these shippers, because they were men who were not disinterested.

The Phoenix-Durango Railroad was to close on July 25. The first train of the John Galt Line was to run on July 22.

"Well, it's like this, Miss Taggart," said the delegate of the Union of Locomotive Engineers. "I don't think we're going to allow you to run that train."

Dagny sat at her battered desk, against the blotched wall of her office.

She said, without moving, "Get out of here."

It was a sentence the man had never heard in the polished offices of railroad executives. He looked bewildered. "I came to tell you—"

"If you have anything to say to me, start over again."

"What?"

"Don't tell me what you're going to allow me to do."

"Well, I meant we're not going to allow our men to run your train."

"That's different."

"Well, that's what we've decided."

"Who's decided it?"

"The committee. What you're doing is a violation of human rights.

You can't force men to go out to get killed—when that bridge collapses —just to make money for you."

She reached for a sheet of blank paper and handed it to him. "Put it down in writing," she said, "and we'll sign a contract to that effect."

"What contract?"

"That no member of your union will ever be employed to run an engine on the John Galt Line."

"Why . . . wait a minute . . . I haven't said—"

"You don't want to sign such a contract?"

-No, I—"

"Why not, since you know that the bridge is going to collapse?"

"I only want—"

"I know what you want. You want a stranglehold on your men by means of the jobs which I give them—and on me, by means of your men. You want me to provide the jobs, and you want to make it impossible for me to have any jobs to provide. Now I'll give you a choice.

That train is going to be run. You have no choice about that. But you can choose whether it's going to be run by one of your men or not. If you choose not to let them, the train will still run, if I have to drive the engine myself. Then, if the bridge collapses, there won't be any railroad left in existence, anyway. But if it doesn't collapse, no member of your union will ever get a job on the John Galt Line. If you think that I need your men more than they need me, choose accordingly. If you know that I can run an engine, but they can't build a railroad, choose according to that. Now are you going to forbid your men to run that train?"

"I didn't say we'd forbid it. I haven't said anything about forbidding.

But . . . but you can't force men to risk their lives on something nobody's ever tried before."

"I'm not going to force anyone to take that run."

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to ask for a volunteer."

"And if none of them volunteers?"

"Then it will be my problem, not yours."

"Well, let me tell you that I'm going to advise them to refuse."

"Go ahead. Advise them anything you wish. Tell them whatever, you like. But leave the choice to them. Don't try to forbid it."

The notice that appeared in every roundhouse of the Taggart system was signed "Edwin Willers, Vice-President in Charge of Operation." It asked engineers, who were willing to drive the first train on the John Galt Line, so to inform the office of Mr. Willers., not later than eleven A.M. of July 15.

It was a quarter of eleven, on the morning of the fifteenth, when the telephone rang in her office. It was Eddie, calling from high up in the Taggart Building outside her window. "Dagny, I think you'd better come over." His voice sounded queer.

She hurried across the street, then down the marble-floored halls, to the door that still carried the name "Dagny Taggart" on its glass panel.

She pulled the door open.

The anteroom of the office was full. Men stood jammed among the desks, against the walls. As she entered, they took their hats off in sudden silence. She saw the graying heads, the muscular shoulders, she saw the smiling faces of her staff at their desks and the face of Eddie Willers at the end of the room. Everybody knew that nothing had to be said.

Eddie stood by the open door of her office. The crowd parted to let her approach him. He moved his hand, pointing at the room, then at a pile of letters and telegrams.

"Dagny, every one of them," he said. "Every engineer on Taggart Transcontinental. Those who could, came here, some from as far as the Chicago Division." He pointed at the mail. "There's the rest of them.

To be exact, there's only three I haven't heard from: one's on a vacation in the north woods, one's in a hospital, and one's in jail for reckless driving—of his automobile."

She looked at the men. She saw the suppressed grins on the solemn faces. She inclined her head, in acknowledgment. She stood for a moment, head bowed, as if she were accepting a verdict, knowing that the verdict applied to her, to every man in the room and to the world beyond the walls of the building.

"Thank you," she said.

Most of the men had seen her many times. Looking at her, as she raised her head, many of them thought—in astonishment and for the first time—that the face of their Operating Vice-President was the face of a woman and that it was beautiful.

Someone in the back of the crowd cried suddenly, cheerfully, 'To hell with Jim Taggart!"

An explosion answered him. The men laughed, they cheered, they broke into applause. The response was out of all proportion to the sentence. But the sentence had given them the excuse they needed. They seemed to be applauding the speaker, in insolent defiance of authority.

But everyone in the room knew who it was that they were cheering.

She raised her hand. "We're too early," she said, laughing. "Wait till a week from today. That's when we ought to celebrate. And believe me, we will!"

They drew lots for the run. She picked a folded slip of paper from among a pile containing all their names. The winner was not in the room, but he was one of the best men on the system, Pat Logan, engineer of the Taggart Comet on the Nebraska Division.

"Wire Pat and tell him he's been demoted to a freight," she said to Eddie. She added casually, as if it were a last-moment decision, but it fooled no one, "Oh yes, tell him that I'm going to ride with him in the cab of the engine on that run."

An old engineer beside her grinned and said, "I thought you would, Miss Taggart."

Rearden was in New York on the day when Dagny telephoned him from her office. "Hank, I'm going to have a press conference tomorrow."

He laughed aloud. "No!"

"Yes." Her voice sounded earnest, but, dangerously, a bit too earnest.

"The newspapers have suddenly discovered me and are asking questions.

I'm going to answer them."

"Have a good time."

"I will. Are you going to be in town tomorrow? I'd like to have you in on it."

"Okay. I wouldn't want to miss it."

The reporters who came to the press conference in the office of the John Galt Line were young men who had been trained to think that their job consisted of concealing from the world the nature of its events. It was their daily duty to serve as audience for some public- figure who made utterances about the public good, in phrases carefully chosen to convey no meaning. It was their daily job to sling words together in any combination they pleased, so long as the words did not fall into a sequence saying something specific. They could not understand the interview now being given to them.

Dagny Taggart sat behind her desk in an office that looked like a slum basement. She wore a dark blue suit with a white blouse, beautifully tailored, suggesting an air of formal, almost military elegance. She sat straight, and her manner was severely dignified, just a shade too dignified.

Rearden sat in a corner of the room, sprawled across a broken armchair, his long legs thrown over one of its arms, his body leaning against the other. His manner was pleasantly informal, just a bit too informal.

In the clear, monotonous voice of a military report, consulting no papers, looking straight at the men, Dagny recited the technological facts about the John Galt Line, giving exact figures on the nature of the rail, the capacity of the bridge, the method of construction, the costs. Then, in the dry tone of a banker, she explained the financial prospects of the Line and named the large profits she expected to make. 'That is all," she said.

"All?" said one of the reporters. "Aren't you going to give us a message for the public?"

"That was my message."

"But hell—I mean, aren't you going to defend yourself?"

"Against what?"

"Don't you want to tell us something to justify your Line?"

"I have."

A man with a mouth shaped as a permanent sneer asked, "Well, what I want to know, as Bertram Scudder stated, is what protection do we have against your Line being no good?"

"Don't ride on it."

Another asked, "Aren't you going to tell us your motive for building that Line?"

"I have told you: the profit which I expect to make."

"Oh, Miss Taggart, don't say that!" cried a young boy. He was new, he was still honest about his job, and he felt that he liked Dagny Taggart, without knowing why. "That's the wrong thing to say. That's what they're all saying about you."

"Are they?"

"I'm sure you didn't mean it the way it sounds and . . . and I'm sure you'll want to clarify it."

"Why, yes, if you wish me to. The average profit of railroads has been two per cent of the capital invested. An industry that does so much and keeps so little, should consider itself immoral. As I have explained, the cost of the John Galt Line in relation to the traffic which it will carry makes me expect a profit of not less than fifteen per cent on our investment. Of course, any industrial profit above four per cent is considered usury nowadays. I shall, nevertheless, do my best to make the John Galt Line earn a profit of twenty per cent for me, if possible. That was my motive for building the Line. Have I made myself clear now?”

The boy was looking at her helplessly. "You don't mean, to earn a profit for you, Miss Taggart? You mean, for the small stockholders, of course?" he prompted hopefully.

"Why, no. I happen to be one of the largest stockholders of Taggart Transcontinental, so my share of the profits will be one of the largest, Now, Mr. Rearden is in a much more fortunate position, because he has no stockholders to share with—or would you rather make your own statement, Mr. Rearden?"

"Yes, gladly," said Rearden. "Inasmuch as the formula of Rearden Metal is my own personal secret, and in view of the fact that the Metal costs much less to produce than you boys can imagine, I expect to skin the public to the tune of a profit of twenty-five per cent in the next few years."

"What do you mean, skin the public, Mr. Rearden?" asked the boy.

"If it's true, as I've read in your ads, that your Metal will last three times longer than any other and at half the price, wouldn't the public be getting a bargain?"

"Oh, have you noticed that?" said Rearden.

"Do the two of you realize you're talking for publication?" asked the man with the sneer.

"But, Mr. Hopkins," said Dagny, in polite astonishment, "is there any reason why we would talk to you, if it weren't for publication?"

"Do you want us to quote all the things you said?"

"I hope I may trust you to be sure and quote them. Would you oblige me by taking this down verbatim?" She paused to see their pencils ready, then dictated: "Miss Taggart says—quote—I expect to make a pile of money on the John Galt Line. I will have earned it. Close quote. Thank you so much."

"Any questions, gentlemen?" asked Rearden.

There were no questions.

"Now I must tell you about the opening of the John Galt Line," said Dagny. "The first train will depart from the station of Taggart Transcontinental in Cheyenne, Wyoming, at four P.M. on July twenty-second.

It will be a freight special, consisting of eighty cars. It will be driven by an eight-thousand-horsepower, four-unit Diesel locomotive—which I'm leasing from Taggart Transcontinental for the occasion. It will run non-stop to Wyatt Junction, Colorado, traveling at an average speed of one hundred miles per hour. I beg your pardon?" she asked, hearing the long, low sound of a whistle.

"What did you say, Miss Taggart?"

"I said, one hundred miles per hour—grades, curves and all."

"But shouldn't you cut the speed below normal rather than . . . Miss Taggart, don't you have any consideration whatever for public opinion?"

"But I do. If it weren't for public opinion, an average speed of sixty-five miles per hour would have been quite sufficient."

"Who's going to run that train?"

"I had quite a bit of trouble about that. All the Taggart engineers volunteered to do it. So did the firemen, the brakemen and the conductors. We had to draw lots for every job on the train's crew. The engineer will be Pat Logan, of the Taggart Comet, the fireman—Ray McKim.

I shall ride in the cab of the engine with them."

"Not really!"

"Please do attend the opening. It's on July twenty-second. The press is most eagerly invited. Contrary to my usual policy, I have become a publicity hound. Really. I should like to have spotlights, radio microphones and television cameras. I suggest that you plant a few cameras around the bridge. The collapse of the bridge would give you some interesting shots."

"Miss Taggart," asked Rearden, "why didn't you mention that I'm going to ride in that engine, too?"

She looked at him across the room, and for a moment they were alone, holding each other's glance.

"Yes, of course, Mr. Rearden," she answered.

She did not see him again until they looked at each other across the platform of the Taggart station in Cheyenne, on July 22.

She did not look for anyone when she stepped out on the platform: she felt as if her senses had merged, so that she could not distinguish the sky, the sun or the sounds of an enormous crowd, but perceived only a sensation of shock and light.

Yet he was the first person she saw, and she could not tell for how long a time he was also the only one. He stood by the engine of the John Galt train, talking to somebody outside the field of her consciousness.

He was dressed in gray slacks and shirt, he looked like an expert mechanic, but he was stared at by the faces around him, because he was Hank Rearden of Rearden Steel. High above him, she saw the letters TT on the silver front of the engine. The lines of the engine slanted back, aimed at space.

There was distance and a crowd between them, but his eyes moved to her the moment she came out. They looked at each other and she knew that he felt as she did. This was not to be a solemn venture upon which their future depended, but simply their day of enjoyment. Their work was done. For the moment, there was no future. They had earned the present.

Only if one feels immensely important, she had told him, can one feel truly light. Whatever the train's run would mean to others, for the two of them their own persons were this day's sole meaning. Whatever it was that others sought in life, their right to what they now felt was all the two of them wished to find. It was as if, across the platform, they said it to each other.

Then she turned away from him.

She noticed that she, too, was being stared at, that there were people around her, that she was laughing and answering questions.

She had not expected such a large crowd. They filled the platform, the tracks, the square beyond the station; they were on the roofs of the boxcars on the sidings, at the windows of every house in sight. Something had drawn them here, something in the air which, at the last moment, had made James Taggart want to attend the opening of the John Galt Line. She had forbidden it. "If you come, Jim," she had said, "I'll have you thrown out of your own Taggart station. This is one event you're not going to see." Then she had chosen Eddie Willers to represent Taggart Transcontinental at the opening.

She looked at the crowd and she felt, simultaneously, astonishment that they should stare at her, when this event was so personally her own that no communication about it was possible, and a sense of fitness that they should be here, that they should want to see it, because the sight of an achievement was the greatest gift a human being could offer to others.

She felt no anger toward anyone on earth. The things she had endured had now receded into some outer fog, like pain that still exists, but has no power to hurt. Those things could not stand in the face of this moment's reality, the meaning of this day was as brilliantly, violently clear as the splashes of sun on the silver of the engine, all men had to perceive it now, no one could doubt it and she had no one to hate.

Eddie Willers was watching her. He stood on the platform, surrounded by Taggart executives, division heads, civic leaders, and the various local officials who had been out argued, bribed or threatened, to obtain permits to run a train through town zones at a hundred miles an hour. For once, for this day and event, his title of Vice-president was real to him and he carried it well. But while he spoke to those around him, his eyes kept following Dagny through the crowd. She was dressed in blue slacks and shirt, she was unconscious of official duties, she had left them to him, the train was now her sole concern, as if she were only a member of its crew.

She saw him, she approached, and she shook his hand; her smile was like a summation of all the things they did not have to say. "Well, Eddie, you're Taggart Transcontinental now."

"Yes," he said solemnly, his voice low.

There were reporters asking questions, and they dragged her away from him. They were asking him questions, too. "Mr. Willers, what is the policy of Taggart Transcontinental in regard to this line?" "So Taggart Transcontinental is just a disinterested observer, is it, Mr. Willers?"

He answered as best he could. He was looking at the sun on a Diesel engine. But what he was seeing was the sun in a clearing of the woods and a twelve-year-old girl telling him that he would help her run the railroad some day.

He watched from a distance while the train's crew was lined up in front of the engine, to face a firing squad of cameras. Dagny and Rearden were smiling, as if posing for snapshots of a summer vacation. Pat Logan, the engineer, a short, sinewy man with graying hair and a contemptuously inscrutable face, posed in a manner of amused indifference.

Ray McKim, the fireman, a husky young giant, grinned with an air of embarrassment and superiority together. The rest of the crew looked as if they were about to wink at the cameras. A photographer said, laughing, "Can't you people look doomed, please? I know that's what the editor wants."

Dagny and Rearden were answering questions for the press. There was no mockery in their answers now, no bitterness. They were enjoying it. They spoke as if the questions were asked in good faith. Irresistibly, at some point which no one noticed, this became true, "What do you expect to happen on this run?" a reporter asked one of the brakemen. "Do you think you'll get there?"

"I think we'll get there," said the brakeman, "and so do you, brother."

"Mr. Logan, do you have any children? Did you take out any extra insurance? I'm just thinking of the bridge, you know."

"Don't cross that bridge till I come to it," Pat Logan answered contemptuously.

"Mr. Rearden, how do you know that your rail will hold?"

"The man who taught people to make a printing press," said Rearden, "how did he know it?"

"Tell me, Miss Taggart, what's going to support a seven-thousand-ton train on a three-thousand-ton bridge?"

"My judgment," she answered.

The men of the press, who despised their own profession, did not know why they were enjoying it today. One of them, a young man with years of notorious success behind him and a cynical look of twice his age, said suddenly, "I know what I'd like to be: I wish I could be a man who covers news!"

The hands of the clock on the station building stood at 3:45. The crew started off toward the caboose at the distant end of the train. The movement and noise of the crowd were subsiding. Without conscious intention, people were beginning to stand still.

The dispatcher had received word from every local operator along the line of rail that wound through the mountains to the Wyatt oil fields three hundred miles away. He came out of the station building and, looking at Dagny, gave the signal for clear track ahead. Standing by the engine, Dagny raised her hand, repeating his gesture in sign of an order received and understood.

The long line of boxcars stretched off into the distance, in spaced, rectangular links, like a spinal cord. When the conductor's arm swept through the air, far at the end, she moved her arm in answering signal.

Rearden, Logan and McKim stood silently, as if at attention, letting her be first to get aboard. As she started up the rungs on the side of the engine, a reporter thought of a question he had not asked.

"Miss Taggart," he called after her, "who is John Galt?"

She turned, hanging onto a metal bar with one hand, suspended for an instant above the heads of the crowd.

"We are!" she answered.

Logan followed her into the cab, then McKim; Rearden went last, then the door of the engine was shut, with the tight finality of sealed metal.

The lights, hanging on a signal bridge against the sky, were green.

There were green lights between the tracks, low over the ground, dropping off into the distance where the rails turned and a green light stood at the curve, against leaves of a summer green that looked as if they, too, were lights.

Two men held a white silk ribbon stretched across the track in front of the engine. They were the superintendent of the Colorado Division and Nealy's chief engineer, who had remained on the job. Eddie Willers was to cut the ribbon they held and thus to open the new line.

The photographers posed him carefully, scissors in hand, his back to the engine. He would repeat the ceremony two or three times, they explained, to give them a choice of shots; they had a fresh bolt of ribbon ready. He was about to comply, then stopped. "No," he said suddenly.

"It's not going to be a phony."

In a voice of quiet authority, the voice of a vice-president, he ordered, pointing at the cameras, "Stand back—way back. Take one shot when I cut it, then get out of the way, fast."

They obeyed, moving hastily farther down the track. There was only one minute left. Eddie turned his back to the cameras and stood between the rails, facing the engine. He held the scissors ready over the white ribbon. He took his hat off and tossed it aside. He was looking up at the engine. A faint wind stirred his blond hair. The engine was a great silver shield bearing the emblem of Nat Taggart.

Eddie Willers raised his hand as the hand of the station clock reached the instant of four.

"Open her up, Pat!" he called.

In the moment when the engine started forward, he cut the white ribbon and leaped out of the way.

From the side track, he saw the window of the cab go by and Dagny waving to him in an answering salute. Then the engine was gone, and he stood looking across at the crowded platform that kept appearing and vanishing as the freight cars clicked past him.

The green-blue rails ran to meet them, like two jets shot out of a single point beyond the curve of the earth. The crossties melted, as they approached, into a smooth stream rolling down under the wheels. A blurred streak clung to the side of the engine, low over the ground. Trees and telegraph poles sprang into sight abruptly and went by as if jerked back. The green plains stretched past, in a leisurely flow. At the edge of the sky, a long wave of mountains reversed the movement and seemed to follow the train.

She felt no wheels under the floor. The motion was a smooth flight on a sustained impulse, as if the engine hung above the rails, riding a current. She felt no speed. It seemed strange that the green lights of the signals kept coming at them and past, every few seconds. She knew that the signal lights were spaced two miles apart.

The needle on the speedometer in front of Pat Logan stood at one hundred.

She sat in the fireman's chair and glanced across at Logan once in a while. He sat slumped forward a little, relaxed, one hand resting lightly on the throttle as if by chance; but his eyes were fixed on the track ahead. He had the ease of an expert, so confident that it seemed casual, but it was the ease of a tremendous concentration, the concentration on one's task that has the ruthlessness of an absolute. Ray McKim sat on a bench behind them. Rearden stood in the middle of the cab.

He stood, hands in pockets, feet apart, braced against the motion, looking ahead. There was nothing he could now care to see by the side of the track: he was looking at the rail.

Ownership—she thought, glancing back at him—weren't there those who knew nothing of its nature and doubted its reality? No, it was not made of papers, seals, grants and permissions. There it was—in his eyes.

The sound filling the cab seemed part of the space they were crossing. It held the low drone of the motors—the sharper clicking of the many parts that rang in varied cries of metal—and the high, thin chimes of trembling glass panes.

Things streaked past—a water tank, a tree, a shanty, a grain silo.

They had a windshield-wiper motion: they were rising, describing a curve and dropping back. The telegraph wires ran a race with the train, rising and falling from pole to pole, in an even rhythm, like the cardiograph record of a steady heartbeat written across the sky.

She looked ahead, at the haze that melted rail and distance, a haze that could rip apart at any moment to some shape of disaster. She wondered why she felt safer than she had ever felt in a car behind the engine, safer here, where it seemed as if, should an obstacle rise, her breast and the glass shield would be first to smash against it. She smiled, grasping the answer: it was the security of being first, with full sight and full knowledge of one's course—not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead. It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust, but to know.

The glass sheets of the cab's windows made the spread of the fields seem vaster: the earth looked as open to movement as it was to sight.

Yet nothing was distant and nothing was out of reach. She had barely grasped the sparkle of a lake ahead—and in the next instant she was beside it, then past.

It was a strange foreshortening between sight and touch, she thought, between wish and fulfillment, between—the words clicked sharply in her mind after a startled stop—between spirit and body. First, the vision—then the physical shape to express it. First, the thought—then the purposeful motion down the straight line of a single track to a chosen goal. Could one have any meaning without the other? Wasn't it evil to wish without moving—or to move without aim? Whose malevolence was it that crept through the world, struggling to break the two apart and set them against each other?

She shook her head. She did not want to think or to wonder why the world behind her was as it was. She did not care. She was flying away from it, at the rate of a hundred miles an hour. She leaned to the open window by her side, and felt the wind of the speed blowing her hair off her forehead. She lay back, conscious of nothing but the pleasure it gave her.

Yet her mind kept racing. Broken bits of thought flew past her attention, like the telegraph poles by the track. Physical pleasure?—she thought. This is a train made of steel . . . running on rails of Rearden Metal . . . moved by the energy of burning oil and electric generators . . . it's a physical sensation of physical movement through space . . . but is that the cause and the meaning of what I now feel?

. . . Do they call it a low, animal joy—this feeling that I would not care if the rail did break to bits under us now—it won't—but I wouldn't care, because I have experienced this? A low, physical, material, degrading pleasure of the body?

She smiled, her eyes closed, the wind streaming through her hair.

She opened her eyes and saw that Rearden stood looking down at her. It was the same glance with which he had looked at the rail. She felt her power of volition knocked out by some single, dull blow that made her unable to move. She held his eyes, lying back in her chair, the wind pressing the thin cloth of her shirt to her body.

He looked away, and she turned again to the sight of the earth tearing open before them.

She did not want to think, but the sound of thought went on, like the drone of the motors under the sounds of the engine. She looked at the cab around her. The fine steel mesh of the ceiling, she thought, and the row of rivets in the corner, holding sheets of steel sealed together—who made them? The brute force of men's muscles? Who made it possible for four dials and three levers in front of Pat Logan to hold the incredible power of the sixteen motors behind them and deliver it to the effortless control of one man's hand?

These things and the capacity from which they came—was this the pursuit men regarded as evil? Was this what they called an ignoble concern with the physical world? Was this the state of being enslaved by matter? Was this the surrender of man's spirit to his body?

She shook her head, as if she wished she could toss the subject out of the window and let it get shattered somewhere along the track. She looked at the sun on the summer fields. She did not have to think, because these questions were only details of a truth she knew and had always known. Let them go past like the telegraph poles. The thing she knew was like the wires flying above in an unbroken line. The words for it, and for this journey, and for her feeling, and for the whole of man's earth, were: It's so simple and so right!

She looked out at the country. She had been aware for some time of the human figures that flashed with an odd regularity at the side of the track. But they went by so fast that she could not grasp their meaning until, like the squares of a movie film, brief flashes blended into a whole and she understood it. She had had the track guarded since its completion, but she had not hired the human chain she saw strung out along the right-of-way. A solitary figure stood at every mile post. Some were young schoolboys, others were so old that the silhouettes of their bodies looked bent against the sky. All of them were armed, with anything they had found, from costly rifles to ancient muskets. All of them wore railroad caps. They were the sons of Taggart employees, and old railroad men who had retired after a full lifetime of Taggart service. They had come, unsummoned, to guard this train. As the engine went past him, every man in his turn stood erect, at attention, and raised his gun in a military salute.

When she grasped it, she burst out laughing, suddenly, with the abruptness of a cry. She laughed, shaking, like a child; it sounded like sobs of deliverance. Pat Logan nodded to her with a faint smile; he had noted the guard of honor long ago. She leaned to the open window, and her arm swept in wide curves of triumph, waving to the men by the track.

On the crest of a distant hill, she saw a crowd of people, their arms swinging against the sky. The gray houses of a village were scattered through a valley below, as if dropped there once and forgotten; the roof lines slanted, sagging, and the years had washed away the color of the walls. Perhaps generations had lived there, with nothing to mark the passage of their days but the movement of the sun from east to west.

Now, these men had climbed the hill to see a silver-headed comet cut through their plains like the sound of a bugle through a long weight of silence.

As houses began to come more frequently, closer to the track, she saw people at the windows, on the porches, on distant roofs. She saw crowds blocking the roads at grade crossings. The roads went sweeping past like the spokes of a fan, and she could not distinguish human figures, only their arms greeting the train like branches waving in the wind of its speed. They stood under the swinging red lights of warning signals, under the signs saying; "Stop. Look. Listen."

The station past which they flew, as they went through a town at a hundred miles an hour, was a swaying sculpture of people from platform to roof. She caught the flicker of waving arms, of hats tossed in the air, of something flung against the side of the engine, which was a bunch of flowers.

As the miles clicked past them, the towns went by, with the stations at which they did not stop, with the crowds of people who had come only to see, to cheer and to hope. She saw garlands of flowers under the sooted eaves of old station buildings, and bunting of red-white-and-blue on the time-eaten walls. It was like the pictures she had seen—and envied—in schoolbook histories of railroads, from the era when people gathered to greet the first run of a train. It was like the age when Nat Taggart moved across the country, and the stops along his way were marked by men eager for the sight of achievement. That age, she had thought, was gone; generations had passed, with no event to greet anywhere, with nothing to see but the cracks lengthening year by year on the walls built by Nat Taggart. Yet men came again, as they had come in his time, drawn by the same response.

She glanced at Rearden. He stood against the wall, unaware of the crowds, indifferent to admiration. He was watching the performance of track and train with an expert's intensity of professional interest; his bearing suggested that he would kick aside, as irrelevant, any thought such as 'They like it," when the thought ringing in his mind was "It works!"

His tall figure in the single gray of slacks and shirt looked as if his body were stripped for action. The slacks stressed the long lines of his legs, the light, firm posture of standing without effort or being ready to swing forward at an instant's notice; the short sleeves stressed the gaunt strength of his arms; the open shirt bared the tight skin of his chest.

She turned away, realizing suddenly that she had been glancing back at him too often. But this day had no ties to past or future—her thoughts were cut off from implications—she saw no further meaning, only the immediate intensity of the feeling that she was imprisoned with him, sealed together in the same cube of air, the closeness of his presence underscoring her awareness of this day, as his rails underscored the flight of the train.

She turned deliberately and glanced back. He was looking at her.

He did not turn away, but held her glance, coldly and with full intention.

She smiled defiantly, not letting herself know the full meaning of her smile, knowing only that it was the sharpest blow she could strike at his inflexible face. She felt a sudden desire to see him trembling, to tear a cry out of him. She turned her head away, slowly, feeling a reckless amusement, wondering why she found it difficult to breathe.

She sat leaning back in her chair, looking ahead, knowing that he was as aware of her as she was of him. She found pleasure in the special self-consciousness it gave her. When she crossed her legs, when she leaned on her arm against the window sill, when she brushed her hair off her forehead—every movement of her body was underscored by a feeling the unadmitted words for which were: Is he seeing it?

The towns had been left behind. The track was rising through a country growing more grimly reluctant to permit approach. The rails kept vanishing behind curves, and the ridges of hills kept moving closer, as if the plains were being folded into pleats. The flat stone shelves of Colorado were advancing to the edge of the track—and the distant reaches of the sky were shrinking into waves of bluish mountains.

Far ahead, they saw a mist of smoke over factory chimneys—then the web of a power station and the lone needle of a steel structure. They were approaching Denver.

She glanced at Pat Logan. He was leaning forward a little farther; she saw a slight tightening in the fingers of his hand and in his eyes. He knew, as she did, the danger of crossing a city at the speed they were traveling.

It was a succession of minutes, but it hit them as a single whole. First, they saw the lone shapes, which were factories, rolling across their windowpanes—then the shapes fused into the blur of streets—then a delta of rails spread out before them, like the mouth of a funnel sucking them into the Taggart station, with nothing to protect them but the small green beads of lights scattered over the ground—from the height of the cab, they saw boxcars on sidings streak past as flat ribbons of roof tops —the black hole of the train-shed flew at their faces—they hurtled through an explosion of sound, the beating of wheels against the glass panes of a vault, and the screams of cheering from a mass that swayed like a liquid in the darkness among steel columns—they flew toward a glowing arch and the green lights hanging in the open sky beyond, the green lights that were like the doorknobs of space, throwing door after door open before them. Then, vanishing behind them, went the streets clotted with traffic, the open windows bulging with human figures, the screaming sirens, and—from the top of a distant skyscraper—a cloud of paper snowflakes shimmering on the air, flung by someone who saw the passage of a silver bullet across a city stopped still to watch it.

Then they were out again, on a rocky grade—and with shocking suddenness, the mountains were before them, as if the city had flung them straight at a granite wall, and a thin ledge had caught them in time. They were clinging to the side of a vertical cliff, with the earth rolling down, dropping away, and giant tiers of twisted boulders streaming up and shutting out the sun, leaving them to speed through a bluish twilight, with no sight of soil or sky.

The curves of rail became coiling circles among walls that advanced to grind them off their sides. But the track cut through at times and the mountains parted, flaring open like two wings at the tip of the rail—one wing green, made of vertical needles, with whole pines serving as the pile of a solid carpet—the other reddish-brown, made of naked rock.

She looked down through the open window and saw the silver side of the engine hanging over empty space. Far below, the thin thread of a stream went falling from ledge to ledge, and the ferns that drooped to the water were the shimmering tops of birch trees. She saw the engine's tail of boxcars winding along the face of a granite drop—and miles of contorted stone below, she saw the coils of green-blue rail unwinding behind the train.

A wall of rock shot upward in their path, filling the windshield, darkening the cab, so close that it seemed as if the remnant of time could not let them escape it. But she heard the screech of wheels on curve, the light came bursting back—and she saw an open stretch of rail on a narrow shelf. The shelf ended in space. The nose of the engine was aimed straight at the sky. There was nothing to stop them but two strips of green-blue metal strung in a curve along the shelf.

To take the pounding violence of sixteen motors, she thought, the thrust of seven thousand tons of steel and freight, to withstand it, grip it and swing it around a curve, was the impossible feat performed by two strips of metal no wider than her arm. What made it possible? What power had given to an unseen arrangement of molecules the power on which their lives depended and the lives of all the men who waited for the eighty boxcars? She saw a man's face and hands in the glow of a laboratory oven, over the white liquid of a sample of metal.

She felt the sweep of an emotion which she could not contain, as of something bursting upward. She turned to the door of the motor units, she threw it open to a screaming jet of sound and escaped into the pounding of the engine's heart.

For a moment, it was as if she were reduced to a single sense, the sense of hearing, and what remained of her hearing was only a long, rising, falling, rising scream. She stood in a swaying, sealed chamber of metal, looking at the giant generators. She had wanted to see them, because the sense of triumph within her was bound to them, to her love for them, to the reason of the life-work she had chosen. In the abnormal clarity of a violent emotion, she felt as if she were about to grasp something she had never known and had to know. She laughed aloud, but heard no sound of it; nothing could be heard through the continuous explosion. "The John Galt Line!" she shouted, for the amusement of feeling her voice swept away from her lips.

She moved slowly along the length of the motor units, down a narrow passage between the engines and the wall. She felt the immodesty of an intruder, as if she had slipped inside a living creature, under its silver skin, and were watching its life beating in gray metal cylinders, in twisted coils, in sealed tubes, in the convulsive whirl of blades in wire cages. The enormous complexity of the shape above her was drained by invisible channels, and the violence raging within it was led to fragile needles on glass dials, to green and red beads winking on panels, to tall, thin cabinets stenciled "High Voltage."

Why had she always felt that joyous sense of confidence when looking at machines?—she thought. In these giant shapes, two aspects pertaining to the inhuman were radiantly absent: the causeless and the purposeless. Every part of the motors was an embodied answer to "Why?" and "What for?"—like the steps of a life-course chosen by the sort of mind she worshipped. The motors were a moral code cast in steel.

They are alive, she thought, because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power—of the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its purpose, to give it form. For an instant, it seemed to her that the motors were transparent and she was seeing the net of their nervous system. It was a net of connections, more intricate, more crucial than all of their wires and circuits: the rational connections made by that human mind which had fashioned any one part of them for the first time.

They are alive, she thought, but their soul operates them by remote control. Their soul is in every man who has the capacity to equal this achievement. Should the soul vanish from the earth, the motors would stop, because that is the power which keeps them going—not the oil under the floor under her feet, the oil that would then become primeval ooze again—not the steel cylinders that would become stains of rust on the walls of the caves of shivering savages—the power of a living mind —the power of thought and choice and purpose.

She was making her way back toward the cab, feeling that she wanted to laugh, to kneel or to lift her arms, wishing she were able to release the thing she felt, knowing that it had no form of expression.

She stopped She saw Rearden standing by the steps of the door to the cab. He was looking at her as if he knew why she had escaped and what she felt. They stood still, their bodies becoming a glance that met across a narrow passage. The beating within her was one with the beating of the motors—and she felt as if both came from him; the pounding rhythm wiped out her will. They went back to the cab, silently, knowing that there had been a moment which was not to be mentioned between them.

The cliffs ahead were a bright, liquid gold. Strips of shadow were lengthening in the valleys below. The sun was descending to the peaks in the west. They were going west and up, toward the sun.

The sky had deepened to the greenish-blue of the rails, when they saw smokestacks in a distant valley. It was one of Colorado's new towns, the towns that had grown like a radiation from the Wyatt oil fields. She saw the angular lines of modern houses, flat roofs, great sheets of windows. It was too far to distinguish people. In the moment when she thought that they would not be watching the train at that distance, a rocket shot out from among the buildings, rose high above the town and broke as a fountain of gold stars against the darkening sky. Men whom she could not see, were seeing the streak of the train on the side of the mountain, and were sending a salute, a lonely plume of fire in the dusk, the symbol of celebration or of a call for help.

Beyond the next turn, in a sudden view of distance, she saw two dots of electric light, white and red, low in the sky. They were not airplanes '—she saw the cones of metal girders supporting them—and in the moment when she knew that they were the derricks of Wyatt Oil, she saw that the track was sweeping downward, that the earth flared open, as if the mountains were flung apart—and at the bottom, at the foot of the Wyatt hill, across the dark crack of a canyon, she saw the bridge of Rearden Metal.

They were flying down, she forgot the careful grading, the great curves of the gradual descent, she felt as if the train were plunging downward, head first, she watched the bridge growing to meet them—a small, square tunnel of metal lace work, a few beams criss-crossed through the air, green-blue and glowing, struck by a long ray of sunset light from some crack in the barrier of mountains. There were people by the bridge, the dark splash of a crowd, but they rolled off the edge of her consciousness. She heard the rising, accelerating sound of the wheels—and some theme of music, heard to the rhythm of wheels, kept tugging at her mind, growing louder—it burst suddenly within the cab, but she knew that it was only in her mind; the Fifth Concerto by Richard Halley—she thought: did he write it for this? had he known a feeling such as this?—they were going faster, they had left the ground, she thought, flung off by the mountains as by a springboard, they were now sailing through space—it's not a fair test, she thought, we're not going to touch that bridge—she saw Rearden's face above her, she held his eyes and her head leaned back, so that her face lay still on the air under his face—they heard a ringing blast of metal, they heard a drum roll under their feet, the diagonals of the bridge went smearing across the windows with the sound of a metal rod being run along the pickets of a fence—then the windows were too suddenly clear, the sweep of their downward plunge was carrying them up a hill, the derricks of Wyatt Oil were reeling before them—Pat Logan turned, glancing up at Rearden with the hint of a smile—and Rearden said, "That's that."

The sign on the edge of a roof read: Wyatt Junction. She stared, feeling that there was something odd about it, until she grasped what it was: the sign did not move. The sharpest jolt of the journey was the realization that the engine stood still.

She heard voices somewhere, she looked down and saw that there were people on the platform. Then the door of the cab was flung open, she knew that she had to be first to descend, and she stepped to the edge.

For the flash of an instant, she felt the slenderness of her own body, the lightness of standing full-figure in a current of open air. She gripped the metal bars and started down the ladder. She was halfway down when she felt the palms of a man's hands slam tight against her ribs and waistline, she was torn off the steps, swung through the air and deposited on the ground. She could not believe that the young boy laughing in her face was Ellis Wyatt. The tense, scornful face she remembered, now had the purity, the eagerness, the joyous benevolence of a child in the kind of world for which he had been intended.

She was leaning against his shoulder, feeling unsteady on the motionless ground, with his arm about her, she was laughing, she was listening to the things he said, she was answering, "But didn't you know we would?"

In a moment, she saw the faces around them. They were the bondholders of the John Galt Line, the men who were Nielsen Motors, Hammond Cars, Stockton Foundry and all the others. She shook their hands, and there were no speeches; she stood against Ellis Wyatt, sagging a little, brushing her hair away from her eyes, leaving smudges of soot on her forehead. She shook the hands of the men of the train's crew, without words, with the seal of the grins on their faces. There were flash bulbs exploding around them, and men waving to them from the riggings of the oil wells on the slopes of the mountains. Above her head, above the heads of the crowd, the letters TT on a silver shield were hit by the last ray of a sinking sun.

Ellis Wyatt had taken charge. He was leading her somewhere, the sweep of his arm cutting a path for them through the crowd, when one of the men with the cameras broke through to her side. "Miss Taggart," he called, "will you give us a message for the public?" Ellis Wyatt pointed at the long string of freight cars. "She has."

Then she was sitting in the back seat of an open car, driving up the curves of a mountain road. The man beside her was Rearden, the driver was Ellis Wyatt.

They stopped at a house that stood on the edge of a cliff, with no other habitation anywhere in sight, with the whole of the oil fields spread on the slopes below.

"Why, of course you're staying at my house overnight, both of you," said Ellis Wyatt, as they went in. "Where did you expect to stay?"

She laughed. "I don't know, I hadn't thought of it at all."

"The nearest town is an hour's drive away. That's where your crew has gone: your boys at the division point are giving a party in their honor. So is the whole town. But I told Ted Nielsen and the others that we'd have no banquets for you and no oratory. Unless you'd like it?"

"God, no!" she said. "Thanks, Ellis."

It was dark when they sat at the dinner table in a room that had large windows and a few pieces of costly furniture. The dinner was served by a silent figure in a white jacket, the only other inhabitant of the house, an elderly Indian with a stony face and a courteous manner. A few points of fire were scattered through the room, running over and out beyond the windows: the candles on the table, the lights on the derricks, and the stars.

"Do you think that you have your hands full now?" Ellis Wyatt was saying. "Just give me a year and I'll give you something to keep you busy. Two tank trains a day, Dagny? It's going to be four or six or as many as you wish me to fill." His hand swept over the lights on the mountains. "This? It's nothing, compared to what I've got coming." He pointed west. "The Buena Esperanza Pass. Five miles from here. Everybody's wondering what I'm doing with it. Oil shale. How many years ago was it that they gave up trying to get oil from shale, because it was too expensive? Well, wait till you see the process I've developed. It will be the cheapest oil ever to splash in their faces, and an unlimited supply of it, an untapped supply that will make the biggest oil pool look like a mud puddle. Did I order a pipe line? Hank, you and I will have to build pipe lines in all directions to . . . Oh, I beg your pardon. I don't believe I introduced myself when I spoke to you at the station. I haven't even told you my name."

Rearden grinned. "I've guessed it by now."

"I'm sorry, I don't like to be careless, but I was too excited."

"What were you excited about?" asked Dagny, her eyes narrowed in mockery.

Wyatt held her glance for a moment; his answer had a tone of solemn intensity strangely conveyed by a smiling voice. "About the most beautiful slap in the face I ever got and deserved."

"Do you mean, for our first meeting?"

"I mean, for our first meeting."

"Don't. You were right."

"I was. About everything but you. Dagny, to find an exception after years of . . . Oh, to hell with them! Do you want me to turn on the radio and hear what they're saying about the two of you tonight?"

"No."

"Good. I don't want to hear them. Let them swallow their own speeches. They're all climbing on the band wagon now. We're the band."

He glanced at Rearden. "What are you smiling at?"

"I've always been curious to see what you're like."

"I've never had a chance to be what I'm like—except tonight."

"Do you live here alone, like this, miles away from everything?"

Wyatt pointed at the window. "I'm a couple of steps away from—everything."

"What about people?"

"I have guest rooms for the kind of people who come to see me on business. I want as many miles as possible between myself and all the other kinds." He leaned forward to refill their wine glasses. "Hank, why don't you move to Colorado? To hell with New York and the Eastern Seaboard! This is the capital of the Renaissance. The Second Renaissance—not of oil paintings and cathedrals—but of oil derricks, power plants, and motors made of Rearden Metal. They had the Stone Age and the Iron Age and now they're going to call it the Rearden Metal Age—because there's no limit to what your Metal has made possible."

"I'm going to buy a few square miles of Pennsylvania," said Rearden.

"The ones around my mills. It would have been cheaper to build a branch here, as I wanted, but you know why I can't, and to hell with them! Ill beat them anyway. I'm going to expand the mills—and if she can give me three-day freight service to Colorado, I'll give you a race for who's going to be the capital of the Renaissance!"

"Give me a year," said Dagny, "of running trains on the John Galt Line, give me time to pull the Taggart system together—and I'll give you three-day freight service across the continent, on a Rearden Metal track from ocean to ocean!"

"Who was it that said he needed a fulcrum?" said Ellis Wyatt. "Give me an unobstructed right-of-way and I'll show them how to move the earth!"

She wondered what it was that she liked about the sound of Wyatt's laughter. Their voices, even her own, had a tone she had never heard before. When they rose from the table, she was astonished to notice that the candles were the only illumination of the room: she had felt as if she were sitting in a violent light.

Ellis Wyatt picked up his glass, looked at their faces and said, "To the world as it seems to be right now!"

He emptied the glass with a single movement.

She heard the crash of the glass against the wall in the same instant that she saw a circling current—from the curve of his body to the sweep of his arm to the terrible violence of his hand that flung the glass across the room. It was not the conventional gesture meant as celebration, it was the gesture of a rebellious anger, the vicious gesture which is movement substituted for a scream of pain.

"Ellis," she whispered, "what's the matter?"

He turned to look at her. With the same violent suddenness, his eyes were clear, his face was calm; what frightened her was seeing him smile gently. "I'm sorry," he said. "Never mind. We'll try to think that it will last."

The earth below was streaked with moonlight, when Wyatt led them up an outside stairway to the second floor of the house, to the open gallery at the doors of the guest rooms. He wished them good night and they heard his steps descending the stairs. The moonlight seemed to drain sound as it drained color. The steps rolled into a distant past, and when they died, the silence had the quality of a solitude that had lasted for a long time, as if no person were left anywhere in reach.

She did not turn to the door of her room. He did not move. At the level of their feet, there was nothing but a thin railing and a spread of space. Angular tiers descended below, with shadows repeating the steel tracery of derricks, criss-crossing sharp, black lines on patches of glowing rock. A few lights, white and red, trembled in the clear air, like drops of rain caught on the edges of steel girders. Far in the distance, three small drops were green, strung in a line along the Taggart track.

Beyond them, at the end of space, at the foot of a white curve, hung a webbed rectangle which was the bridge.

She felt a rhythm without sound or movement, a sense of beating tension, as if the wheels of the John Galt Line were still speeding on.

Slowly, in answer and in resistance to an unspoken summons, she turned and looked at him.

The look she saw on his face made her know for the first time that she had known this would be the end of the journey. That look was not as men are taught to represent it, it was not a matter of loose muscles, hanging lips and mindless hunger. The lines of his face were pulled tight, giving it a peculiar purity, a sharp precision of form, making it clean and young. His mouth was taut, the lips faintly drawn inward, stressing the outline of its shape. Only his eyes were blurred, their lower lids swollen and raised, their glance intent with that which resembled hatred and pain.

The shock became numbness spreading through her body—she felt a tight pressure in her throat and her stomach—she was conscious of nothing but a silent convulsion that made her unable to breathe. But what she felt, without words for it, was: Yes, Hank, yes—now—because it is part of the same battle, in some way that I can't name . . . because it is our being, against theirs . . . our great capacity, for which they torture us, the capacity of happiness . . . Now, like this, without words or questions . . . because we want it. . . .

It was like an act of hatred, like the cutting blow of a lash encircling her body: she felt his arms around her, she felt her legs pulled forward against him and her chest bent back under the pressure of his, his mouth on hers.

Her hand moved from his shoulders to his waist to his legs, releasing the unconfessed desire of her every meeting with him. When she tore her mouth away from him, she was laughing soundlessly, in triumph, as if saying: Hank Rearden—the austere, unapproachable Hank Rearden of the monk like office, the business conferences, the harsh bargains—do you remember them now?—I'm thinking of it, for the pleasure of knowing that I've brought you to this. He was not smiling, his face was tight, it was the face of an enemy, he jerked her head and caught her mouth again, as if he were inflicting a wound.

She felt him trembling and she thought that this was the kind of cry she had wanted to tear from him—this surrender through the shreds of his tortured resistance. Yet she knew, at the same time, that the triumph was his, that her laughter was her tribute to him, that her defiance was submission, that the purpose of all of her violent strength was only to make his victory the greater—he was holding her body against his, as if stressing his wish to let her know that she was now only a tool for the satisfaction of his desire—and his victory, she knew, was her wish to let him reduce her to that. Whatever I am, she thought, whatever pride of person I may hold, the pride of my courage, of my work, of my mind and my freedom—that is what I offer you for the pleasure of your body, that is what I want you to use in your service—and that you want it to serve you is the greatest reward I can have.

There were lights burning in the two rooms behind them. He took her wrist and threw her inside his room, making the gesture tell her that he needed no sign of consent or resistance. He locked the door, watching her face. Standing straight, holding his glance, she extended her arm to the lamp on the table and turned out the light. He approached. He turned the light on again, with a single, contemptuous jerk of his wrist.

She saw him smile for the first time, a slow, mocking, sensual smile that stressed the purpose of his action.

He was holding her half-stretched across the bed, he was tearing her clothes off. while her face was pressed against him, her mouth, moving down the line of his neck, down his shoulder. She knew that every gesture of her desire for him struck him like a blow, that there was some shudder of incredulous anger within him—yet that no gesture would satisfy his greed for every evidence of her desire.

He stood looking down at her naked body, he leaned over, she heard his voice—it was more a statement of contemptuous triumph than a question: "You want it?" Her answer was more a gasp than a word, her eyes closed, her mouth open: "Yes."

She knew that what she felt with the skin of her arms was the cloth of his shirt, she knew that the lips she felt on her mouth were his, but in the rest of her there was no distinction between his being and her own, as there was no division between body and spirit. Through all the steps of the years behind them, the steps down a course chosen in the courage of a single loyalty: their love of existence—chosen in the knowledge that nothing will be given, that one must make one's own desire and every shape of its fulfillment—through the steps of shaping metal, rails and motors—they had moved by the power of the thought that one remakes the earth for one's enjoyment, that man's spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one's chosen goal. The course led them to the moment when, in answer to the highest of one's values, in an admiration not to be expressed by any other form of tribute, one's spirit makes one's body become the tribute, recasting it—as proof, as sanction, as reward—into a single sensation of such intensity of joy that no other sanction of one's existence is necessary. He heard the moan of her breath, she felt the shudder of his body, in the same instant.

CHAPTER IX
THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE

She looked at the glowing bands on the skin of her arm, spaced like bracelets from her wrist to her shoulder. They were strips of sunlight from the Venetian blinds on the window of an unfamiliar room. She saw a bruise above her elbow, with dark beads that had been blood. Her arm lay on the blanket that covered her body. She was aware of her legs and hips, but the rest of her body was only a sense of lightness, as if it were stretched restfully across the air in a place that looked like a cage made of sunrays.

Turning to look at him, she thought: From his aloofness, from his manner of glass-enclosed formality, from his pride in never being made to feel anything—to this, to Hank Rearden in bed beside her, after hours of a violence which they could not name now, not in words or in daylight—but which was in their eyes, as they looked at each other, which they wanted to name, to stress, to throw at each other's face.

He saw the face of a young girl, her lips suggesting a smile, as if her natural state of relaxation were a state of radiance, a lock of hair falling across her cheek to the curve of a naked shoulder, her eyes looking at him as if she were ready to accept anything he might wish to say, as she had been ready to accept anything he had wished to do.

He reached over and moved the lock of hair from her cheek, cautiously, as if it were fragile. He held it back with his fingertips and looked at her face. Then his fingers closed suddenly in her hair and he raised the lock to his lips. The way he pressed his mouth to it was tenderness, but the way his fingers held it was despair.

He dropped back on the pillow and lay still, his eyes closed. His face seemed young, at peace. Seeing it for a moment without the reins of tension, she realized suddenly the extent of the unhappiness he had borne; but it's past now, she thought, it's over.

He got up, not looking at her. His face was blank and closed again.

He picked up his clothes from the floor and proceeded to dress, standing in the middle of the room, half-turned away from her. He acted, not as if she wasn't present, but as if it did not matter that she was. His movements, as he buttoned his shirt, as he buckled the belt of his slacks, had the rapid precision of performing a duty.

She lay back on the pillow, watching him, enjoying the sight of his figure in motion. She liked the gray slacks and shirt—the expert mechanic of the John Galt Line, she thought, in the stripes of sunlight and shadow, like a convict behind bars. But they were not bars any longer, they were the cracks of a wall which the John Galt Line had broken, the advance notice of what awaited them outside, beyond the Venetian blinds—she thought of the trip back, on the new rail, with the first train from Wyatt Junction—the trip back to her office in the Taggart Building and to all the things now open for her to win—but she was free to let it wait, she did not want to think of it, she was thinking of the first touch of his mouth on hers—she was free to feel it, to hold a moment when nothing else was of any concern—she smiled defiantly at the strips of sky beyond the blinds.

"I want you to know this."

He stood by the bed, dressed, looking down at her. His voice had pronounced it evenly, with great clarity and no inflection. She looked up at him obediently. He said: "What I feel for you is contempt. But it's nothing, compared to the contempt I feel for myself. I don't love you. I've never loved anyone.

I wanted you from the first moment I saw you. I wanted you as one wants a whore—for the same reason and purpose. I spent two years damning myself, because I thought you were above a desire of this kind.

You're not. You're as vile an animal as I am. I should loathe my discovering it. I don't. Yesterday, I would have killed anyone who'd tell me that you were capable of doing what I've had you do. Today, I would give my life not to let it be otherwise, not to have you be anything but the bitch you are. All the greatness that I saw in you—I would not take it in exchange for the obscenity of your talent at an animal's sensation of pleasure. We were two great beings, you and I, proud of our strength, weren't we? Well, this is all that's left of us—and I want no self-deception about it."

He spoke slowly, as if lashing himself with his words. There was no sound of emotion in his voice, only the lifeless pull of effort; it was not the tone of a man's willingness to speak, but the ugly, tortured sound of duty.

"I held it as my honor that I would never need anyone. I need you.

It had been my pride that I had always acted on my convictions. I've given in to a desire which I despise. It is a desire that has reduced my mind, my will, my being, my power to exist into an abject dependence upon you—not even upon the Dagny Taggart whom I admired—but upon your body, your hands, your mouth and the few seconds of a convulsion of your muscles. I had never broken my word. Now I've broken an oath I gave for life. I had never committed an act that had to be hidden. Now I am to lie, to sneak, to hide. Whatever I wanted, I was free to proclaim it aloud and achieve it in the sight of the whole world.

Now my only desire is one I loathe to name even to myself. But it is my only desire. I'm going to have you—I'd give up everything I own for it, the mills, the Metal, the achievement of my whole life. I'm going to have you at the price of more than myself: at the price of my self esteem—and I want you to know it. I want no pretense, no evasion, no silent indulgence, with the nature of our actions left unnamed. I want no pretense about love, value, loyalty or respect. I want no shred of honor left to us, to hide behind. I've never begged for mercy. I've chosen to do this—and I'll take all the consequences, including the full recognition of my choice. It's depravity—and I accept it as such—and there is no height of virtue that I wouldn't give up for it. Now if you wish to slap my face, go ahead. I wish you would."

She had listened, sitting up straight, holding the blanket clutched at her throat to cover her body. At first, he had seen her eyes growing dark with incredulous shock. Then it seemed to him that she was listening with greater attentiveness, but seeing more than his face, even though her eyes were fixed on his. She looked as if she were studying intently some revelation that had never confronted her before. He felt as if some ray of light were growing stronger on his face, because he saw its reflection on hers, as she watched him—he saw the shock vanishing, then the wonder—he saw her face being smoothed into a strange serenity that seemed quiet and glittering at once.

When he stopped, she burst out laughing.

The shock to him was that he heard no anger in her laughter. She laughed simply, easily, in joyous amusement, in release, not as one laughs at the solution of a problem, but at the discovery that no problem had ever existed.

She threw the blanket off with a stressed, deliberate sweep of her arm.

She stood up. She saw her clothes on the floor and kicked them aside.

She stood facing him, naked. She said: "I want you, Hank. I'm much more of an animal than you think. I wanted you from the first moment I saw you—and the only thing I'm ashamed of is that I did not know it. I did not know why, for two years, the brightest moments I found were the ones in your office, where I could lift my head to look up at you. I did not know the nature of what I felt in your presence, nor the reason. I know it now. That is all I want, Hank. I want you in my bed—and you are free of me for all the rest of your time. There's nothing you'll have to pretend—don't think of me, don't feel, don't care—I do not want your mind, your will, your being or your soul, so long as it's to me that you will come for that lowest one of your desires. I am an animal who wants nothing but that sensation of pleasure which you despise--but I want it from you. You'd give up any height of virtue for it, while I—I haven't any to give up. There's none I seek or wish to reach. I am so low that I would exchange the greatest sight of beauty in the world for the sight of your figure in the cab of a railroad engine. And seeing it, I would not be able to see it indifferently. You don't have to fear that you're now dependent upon me. It's I who will depend on any whim of yours. You’ll have me any time you wish, anywhere, on any. terms. Did you call it the obscenity of my talent? It's such that it gives you a safer hold on me than on any other property you own. You may dispose of me as you please—I'm not afraid to admit it—L have nothing to protect from you and nothing to reserve. You think that this is a threat to your achievement, but it is not to mine. I will sit at my desk, and work, and when the things around me get hard to bear, I will think that for my reward I will be in your bed that night. Did you call it depravity? I am much more depraved than you are: you hold it as your guilt, and I—as my pride. I'm more proud of it than of anything I've done, more proud than of building the Line.

If I'm asked to name my proudest attainment, I will say: I have slept with Hank Rearden. I had earned it.'1

When he threw her down on the bed, their bodies met like the two sounds that broke against each other in the air of the room: the sound of his tortured moan and of her laughter.

The rain was invisible in the darkness of the streets, but it hung like the sparkling fringe of a lampshade under the corner light. Fumbling in his pockets, James Taggart discovered that he had lost his handkerchief.

He swore half-aloud, with resentful malice, as if the loss, the rain and his head cold were someone's personal conspiracy against him.

There was a thin gruel of mud on the pavements; he felt a gluey suction under his shoe soles and a chill slipping down past his collar. He did not want to walk or to stop. He had no place to go.

Leaving his office, after the meeting of the Board of Directors, he had realized suddenly that there were no other appointments, that he had a long evening ahead and no one to help him kill it. The front pages of the newspapers were screaming of the triumph of the John Galt Line, as the radios had screamed it yesterday and all through the night. The name of Taggart Transcontinental was stretched in headlines across the continent, like its track, and he had smiled in answer to the congratulations. He had smiled, seated at the bead of the long table, at the Board meeting, while the Directors spoke about the soaring rise of the Taggart stock on the Exchange, while they cautiously asked to see his written agreement with his sister—just in case, they said—and commented that it was fine, it was hole proof, there was no doubt but that she would have to turn the Line over to Taggart Transcontinental at once, they spoke about their brilliant future and the debt of gratitude which the company owed to James Taggart.

He had sat through the meeting, wishing it were over with, so that he could go home. Then he had stepped out into the street and realized that home was the one place where he dared not go tonight. He could not be alone, not in the next few hours, yet there was nobody to call.

He did not want to see people. He kept seeing the eyes of the men of the Board when they spoke about his greatness: a sly, filmy look that held contempt for him and, more terrifyingly, for themselves.

He walked, head down, a needle of rain pricking the skin of his neck once in a while. He looked away whenever he passed a newsstand. The papers seemed to shriek at him the name of the John Galt Line, and another name which he did not want to hear: Ragnar Danneskjold. A ship bound for the People's State of Norway with an Emergency Gift cargo of machine tools had been seized by Ragnar Danneskjold last night. That story disturbed him in some personal manner which he could not explain. The feeling seemed to have some quality in common with the things he felt about the John Galt Line.

It's because he had a cold, he thought; he wouldn't feel this way if he didn't have a cold; a man couldn't be expected to be in top form when he had a cold—he couldn't help it—what did they expect him to do tonight, sing and dance?—he snapped the question angrily at the unknown judges of his unwitnessed mood. He fumbled for his handkerchief again, cursed and decided that he'd better stop somewhere to buy some paper tissues.

Across the square of what had once been a busy neighborhood, he saw the lighted windows of a dime store, still open hopefully at this late hour. There's another one that will go out of business pretty soon, he thought as he crossed the square; the thought gave him pleasure.

There were glaring lights inside, a few tired salesgirls among a spread of deserted counters, and the screaming of a phonograph record being played for a lone, listless customer in a corner. The music swallowed the sharp edges of Taggart's voice: he asked for paper tissues in a tone which implied that the salesgirl was responsible for his cold. The girl turned to the counter behind her, but turned back once to glance swiftly at his face. She took a packet, but stopped, hesitating, studying him with peculiar curiosity.

"Are you James Taggart?" she asked.

"Yes!" he snapped. "Why?"

"Oh!"

She gasped like a child at a burst of firecrackers; she was looking at him with a glance which he had thought to be reserved only for movie stars.

"I saw your picture in the paper this morning, Mr. Taggart," she said very rapidly, a faint flush appearing on her face and vanishing. "It said what a great achievement it was and how it was really you who had done it all, only you didn't want it to be known."

"Oh," said Taggart. He was smiling.

"You look just like your picture," she said in immense astonishment, and added, "Imagine you walking in here like this, in person!"

"Shouldn't I?" His tone was amused.

"I mean, everybody's talking about it, the whole country, and you're the man who did it—and here you are! I've never seen an important person before. I've never been so close to anything important, I mean to any newspaper news."

He had never had the experience of seeing his presence give color to a place he entered: the girl looked as if she was not tired any longer, as if the dime store had become a scene of drama and wonder.

"Mr. Taggart, is it true, what they said about you in the paper?"

"What did they say?"

"About your secret."

"What secret?"

"Well, they said that when everybody was fighting about your bridge, whether it would stand or not, you didn't argue with them, you just went ahead, because you knew it would stand, when nobody else was sure of it—so the Line was a Taggart project and you were the guiding spirit behind the scenes, but you kept it secret, because you didn't care whether you got credit for it or not."

He had seen the mimeographed release of his Public Relations Department. "Yes," he said, "it's true." The way she looked at him made him feel as if it were.

"It was wonderful of you, Mr. Taggart."

"Do you always remember what you read in the newspapers, so well, in such detail?"

"Why, yes, I guess so—all the interesting things. The big things. I like to read about them. Nothing big ever happens to me."

She said it gaily, without self-pity. There was a young, determined brusqueness in her voice and movements. She had a head of reddish brown curls, wide-set eyes, a few freckles on the bridge of an upturned nose. He thought that one would call her face attractive if one ever noticed it, but there was no particular reason to notice it. It was a common little face, except for a look of alertness, of eager interest, a look that expected the world to contain an exciting secret behind every corner.

"Mr. Taggart, how does it feel to be a great man?"

"How does it feel to be a little girl?"

She laughed. "Why, wonderful."

"Then you're better off than I am."

"Oh, how can you say such a—"

"Maybe you're lucky if you don't have anything to do with the big events in the newspapers. Big. What do you call big, anyway?"

"Why . . . important."

"What's important?"

"You're the one who ought to tell me that, Mr. Taggart."

"Nothing's important."

She looked at him incredulously. "You, of all people, saying that tonight of all nights!"

"1 don't feel wonderful at all, if that's what you want to know. I've never felt less wonderful in my life."

He was astonished to see her studying his face with a look of concern such as no one had ever granted him. "You're worn out, Mr. Taggart," she said earnestly. "Tell them to go to hell."

"Whom?"

"Whoever's getting you down. It isn't right,"

"What isn't?"

"That you should feel this way. You've had a tough time, but you've licked them all, so you ought to enjoy yourself now. You've earned it."

"And how do you propose that I enjoy myself?"

"Oh, I don't know. But I thought you'd be having a celebration tonight, a party with all the big shots, and champagne, and things given to you, like keys to cities, a real swank party like that—instead of walking around all by yourself, shopping for paper handkerchiefs, of all fool things!"

"You give me those handkerchiefs, before you forget them altogether," he said, handing her a dime. "And as to the swank party, did it occur to you that I might not want to see anybody tonight?"

She considered it earnestly. "No," she said, "I hadn't thought of it.

But I can see why you wouldn't."

"Why?" It was a question to which he bad no answer.

"Nobody's really good enough for you, Mr. Taggart," she answered very simply, not as flattery, but as a matter of fact.

"Is that what you think?"

"I don't think I like people very much, Mr. Taggart. Not most of them."

"I don't either. Not any of them."

"I thought a man like you—you wouldn't know how mean they can be and how they try to step on you and ride on your back, if you let them. I thought the big men in the world could get away from them and not have to be flea-bait all of the time, but maybe I was wrong."

"What do you mean, flea-bait?"

"Oh, it's just something I tell myself when things get tough—that I've got to beat my way out to where I won't feel like I'm flea-bitten all the time by all kinds of lousiness—but maybe it's the same anywhere, only the fleas get bigger."

"Much bigger."

She remained silent, as if considering something. "It's funny," she said sadly to some thought of her own.

"What's funny?"

"I read a book once where it said that great men are always unhappy, and the greater—the unhappier. It didn't make sense to me. But maybe it's true."

"It's much truer than you think."

She looked away, her face disturbed.

"Why do you worry so much about the great men?" he asked. "What are you, a hero worshipper of some kind?"

She turned to look at him and he saw the light of an inner smile, while her face remained solemnly grave; it was the most eloquently personal glance he had ever seen directed at himself, while she answered in a quiet, impersonal voice, "Mr. Taggart, what else is there to look up to?"

A screeching sound, neither quite bell nor buzzer, rang out suddenly and went on ringing with nerve-grating insistence.

She jerked her head, as if awakening at the scream of an alarm clock, then sighed. "That's closing time, Mr. Taggart," she said regretfully.

"Go get your hat—I'll wait for you outside," he said.

She stared at him, as if among all of life's possibilities this was one she had never held as conceivable.

"No kidding?" she whispered.

"No kidding."

She whirled around and ran like a streak to the door of the employees1 quarters, forgetting her counter, her duties and all feminine concern about never showing eagerness in accepting a man's invitation.

He stood looking after her for a moment, his eyes narrowed. He did not name to himself the nature of his own feeling—never to identify his emotions was the only steadfast rule of his life; he merely felt it—and this particular feeling was pleasurable, which was the only identification he cared to know. But the feeling was the product of a thought he would not utter. He had often met girls of the lower classes, who had put on a brash little act, pretending to look up to him, spilling crude flattery for an obvious purpose; he had neither liked nor resented them; he had found a bored amusement in their company and he had granted them the status of his equals in a game he considered natural to both players involved. This girl was different. The unuttered words in his mind were: The damn little fool means it.

That he waited for her impatiently, when he stood in the rain on the sidewalk, that she was the one person he needed tonight, did not disturb him or strike him as a contradiction. He did not name the nature of his need. The unnamed and the unuttered could not clash into a contradiction.

When she came out, he noted the peculiar combination of her shyness and of her head held high. She wore an ugly raincoat, made worse by a gob of cheap jewelry on the lapel, and a small hat of plush flowers planted defiantly among her curls. Strangely, the lift of her head made the apparel seem attractive; it stressed how well she wore even the things she wore.

"Want to come to my place and have a drink with me?" he asked.

She nodded silently, solemnly, as if not trusting herself to find the right words of acceptance. Then she said, not looking at him, as if stating it to herself, "You didn't want to see anybody tonight, but you want o see me. . . " He had never heard so solemn a tone of pride in anyone's voice.

She was silent, when she sat beside him in the taxicab. She looked up at the skyscrapers they passed. After a while, she said, "I heard that things like this happened in New York, but I never thought they'd happen to me."

"Where do you come from?"

"Buffalo."

"Got any family?"

She hesitated. "I guess so. In Buffalo."

"What do you mean, you guess so?"

"I walked out on them."

"Why?"

"I thought that if I ever was to amount to anything, I had to get away from them, clean away."

"Why? What happened?"

"Nothing happened. And nothing was ever going to happen. That's what I couldn't stand."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, they . . . well, I guess I ought to tell you the truth, Mr. Taggart. My old man's never been any good, and Ma didn't care whether he was or not, and I got sick of it always turning out that I was the only one of the seven of us that kept a job, and the rest of them always being out of luck, one way or another. I thought if I didn't get out, it would get me—I'd rot all the way through, like the rest of them. So I bought a railroad ticket one day and left. Didn't say good-bye. They didn't even know I was going." She gave a soft, startled little laugh at a sudden thought. "Mr. Taggart," she said, "it was a Taggart train."

"When did you come here?"

"Six months ago."

"And you're all alone?"

"Yes," she said happily.

"What was it you wanted to do?"

"Well, you know—make something of myself, get somewhere."

"Where?"

"Oh, I don't know, but . . . but people do things in the world. 1 saw pictures of New York and I thought"—she pointed at the giant buildings beyond the streaks of rain on the cab window—"I thought, somebody built those buildings—he didn't just sit and whine that the kitchen was filthy and the roof leaking and the plumbing clogged and it's a goddamn world and . . . Mr. Taggart"—she jerked her head in a shudder and looked straight at him—"we were stinking poor and not giving a damn about it. That's what I couldn't take—that they didn't really give a damn. Not enough to lift a finger. Not enough to empty the garbage pail. And the woman next door saying it was my duty to help them, saying it made no difference what became of me or of her or of any of us, because what could anybody do anyway!" Beyond the bright look of her eyes, he saw something within her that was hurt and hard.

"I don't want to talk about them," she said. "Not with you. This—my meeting you, I mean—that's what they couldn't have. That's what I'm not going to share with them. It's mine, not theirs."

"How old are you?" he asked.

"Nineteen."

When he looked at her in the lights of his living room, he thought that she'd have a good figure if she'd eat a few meals; she seemed too thin for the height and structure of her bones. She wore a tight, shabby little black dress, which she had tried to camouflage by the gaudy plastic bracelets tinkling on her wrist. She stood looking at his room as if it were a museum where she must touch nothing and reverently memorize everything.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Cherryl Brooks."

"Well, sit down."

He mixed the drinks in silence, while she waited obediently, sitting on the edge of an armchair. When he handed her a glass, she swallowed dutifully a few times, then held the glass clutched in her hand. He knew that she did not taste what she was drinking, did not notice it, had no time to care.

He took a gulp of his drink and put the glass down with irritation: he did not feel like drinking, either. He paced the room sullenly, knowing that her eyes followed him, enjoying the knowledge, enjoying the sense of tremendous significance which his movements, his cuff links, his shoelaces, his lampshades and ashtrays acquired in that gentle, unquestioning glance.

"Mr. Taggart, what is it that makes you so unhappy?"

"Why should you care whether I am or not?"

"Because . . . well, if you haven't the right to be happy and proud, who has?"

"That's what I want to know—who has?" He turned to her abruptly, the words exploding as if a safety fuse had blown. "He didn't invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?"

"Who?"

"Rearden. He didn't invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn't have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it's his? Why does he think it's his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else.

Nobody ever invents anything."

She said, puzzled, "But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn't anybody else make that Metal, but Mr.

Rearden did?"

"He didn't do it for any noble purpose, he did it just for his own profit, he's never done anything for any other reason."

"What's wrong with that, Mr. Taggart?" Then she laughed softly, as if at the sudden solution of a riddle. "That's nonsense, Mr. Taggart. You don't mean it. You know that Mr. Rearden has earned all his profits, and so have you. You're saying those things just to be modest, when everybody knows what a great job you people have done—you and Mr. Rearden and your sister, who must be such a wonderful person!"

"Yeah? That's what you think. She's a hard, insensitive woman who spends her life building tracks and bridges, not for any great ideal, but only because that's what she enjoys doing. If she enjoys it, what is there to admire about her doing it? I'm not so sure it was great—building that Line for all those prosperous industrialists in Colorado, when there are so many poor people in blighted areas who need transportation."

"But, Mr. Taggart, it was you who fought to build that Line."

"Yes, because it was my duty—to the company and the stockholders and our employees. But don't expect me to enjoy it. I'm not so sure it was great—inventing this complex new Metal, when so many nations are in need of plain iron—why, do you know that the People's State of China hasn't even got enough nails to put wooden roofs over people's heads?"

"But . . . but I don't see that that's your fault."

"Somebody should attend to it. Somebody with the vision to see beyond his own pocketbook. No sensitive person these days—when there's so much suffering around us—would devote ten years of his life to splashing about with a lot of trick metals. You think it's great? Well, it's not any kind of superior ability, but just a hide that you couldn't pierce if you poured a ton of his own steel over his head! There are many people of much greater ability in the world, but you don't read about them in the headlines and you don't run to gape at them at grade crossings—because they can't invent non-collapsible bridges at a time when the suffering of mankind weighs on their spirit!"

She was looking at him silently, respectfully, her joyous eagerness toned down, her eyes subdued. He felt better.

He picked up his drink, took a gulp, and chuckled abruptly at a sudden recollection.

"It was funny, though," he said, his tone easier, livelier, the tone of a confidence to a pal. "You should have seen Orren Boyle yesterday, when the first flash came through on the radio from Wyatt Junction! He turned green—but I mean, green, the color of a fish that's been lying around too long! Do you know what he did last night, by way of taking the bad news? Hired himself a suite at the Valhalla Hotel—and you know what that is—and the last I heard, he was still there today, drinking himself under the table and the beds, with a few choice friends of his and half the female population of upper Amsterdam Avenue!"

"Who is Mr. Boyle?" she asked, stupefied.

"Oh, a fat slob that's inclined to overreach himself. A smart guy who gets too smart at times. You should have seen his face yesterday! I got a kick out of that. That—and Dr. Floyd Ferris. That smoothy didn't like it a bit, oh not a bit!—the elegant Dr. Ferris of the State Science Institute, the servant of the people, with the patent-leather vocabulary—but he carried it off pretty well, I must say, only you could see him squirming in every paragraph—I mean, that interview he gave out this morning, where he said, 'The country gave Rearden that Metal, now we expect him to give the country something in return.' That was pretty nifty, considering who's been riding on the gravy train and . . . well, considering. That was better than Bertram Scudder—Mr. Scudder couldn't think of anything but 'No comment,' when his fellow gentlemen of the press asked him to voice his sentiments. 'No comment'—from Bertram Scudder who's never been known to shut his trap from the day he was born, about anything you ask him or don't ask, Abyssinian poetry or the state of the ladies' rest rooms in the textile industry! And Dr. Pritchett, the old fool, is going around saying that he knows for certain that Rearden didn't invent that Metal—because he was told, by an unnamed reliable source, that Rearden stole the formula from a penniless inventor whom he murdered!"

He was chuckling happily. She was listening as to a lecture on higher mathematics, grasping nothing, not even the style of the language, a style which made the mystery greater, because she was certain that it did not mean—coming from him—what it would have meant anywhere else.

He refilled his glass and drained it, but his gaiety vanished abruptly.

He slumped into an armchair, facing her, looking up at her from under his bald forehead, his eyes blurred.

"She's coming back tomorrow," he said, with a sound like a chuckle devoid of amusement.

"Who?"

"My sister. My dear sister. Oh, she'll think she's great, won't she?"

"You dislike your sister, Mr. Taggart?" He made the same sound; its meaning was so eloquent that she needed no other answer. "Why?" she asked.

"Because she thinks she's so good. What right has she to think it?

What right has anybody to think he's good? Nobody's any good."

"You don't mean it, Mr. Taggart."

"I mean, we're only human beings—and what's a human being? A weak, ugly, sinful creature, born that way, rotten in his bones—so humility is the one virtue he ought to practice. He ought to spend his life on his knees, begging to be forgiven for his dirty existence. When a man thinks he's good—that's when he's rotten. Pride is the worst of all sins, no matter what he's done."

"But if a man knows that what he's done is good?"

"Then he ought to apologize for it."

"To whom?"

"To those who haven't done it."

"I . . . I don't understand."

"Of course you don't. It takes years and years of study in the higher reaches of the intellect. Have you ever heard of The Metaphysical Contradictions of the Universe, by Dr. Simon Pritchett?" She shook her head, frightened. "How do you know what's good, anyway? Who knows what's good? Who can ever know? There are no absolutes—as Dr.

Pritchett has proved irrefutably. Nothing is absolute. Everything is a matter of opinion. How do you know that that bridge hasn't collapsed?

You only think it hasn't. How do you know that there's any bridge at all?

You think that a system of philosophy—such as Dr. Pritchett's—is just something academic, remote, impractical? But it isn't. Oh, boy, how it isn't!"

"But, Mr. Taggart, the Line you built—"

"Oh, what's that Line, anyway? It's only a material achievement, is that of any importance? Is there any greatness in anything material?

Only a low animal can gape at that bridge—when there are so many higher things in life. But do the higher things ever get recognition? Oh no! Look at people. All that hue and cry and front pages about some trick arrangement of some scraps of matter. Do they care about any nobler issue? Do they ever give front pages to a phenomenon of the spirit? Do they notice or appreciate a person of finer sensibility? And you wonder whether it's true that a great man is doomed to unhappiness in this depraved world!" He leaned forward, staring at her intently. "I'll tell you . . . I'll tell you something . . . unhappiness is the hallmark of virtue. If a man is unhappy, really, truly unhappy, it means that he is a superior sort of person."

He saw the puzzled, anxious look of her face. "But, Mr. Taggart, you got everything you wanted. Now you have the best railroad in the country, the newspapers call you the greatest business executive of the age, they say the stock of your company made a fortune for you overnight, you got everything you could ask for—aren't you glad of it?"

In the brief space of his answer, she felt frightened, sensing a sudden fear within him. He answered, "No."

She didn't know why her voice dropped to a whisper. "You'd rather the bridge had collapsed?"

"I haven't said that!" he snapped sharply. Then he shrugged and waved his hand in a gesture of contempt. "You don't understand."

"I'm sorry . . . Oh, I know that I have such an awful lot to learn!"

"I am talking about a hunger for something much beyond that bridge.

A hunger that nothing material will ever satisfy."

"What, Mr. Taggart? What is it you want?"

"Oh, there you go! The moment you ask, 'What is it?' you're back in the crude, material world where everything's got to be tagged and measured. I'm speaking of things that can't be named in materialistic words . . . the higher realms of the spirit, which man can never reach. . . .

What's any human achievement, anyway? The earth is only an atom whirling in the universe—of what importance is that bridge to the solar system?"

A sudden, happy look of understanding cleared her eyes. "It's great of you, Mr. Taggart, to think that your own achievement isn't good enough for you. I guess no matter how far you've gone, you want to go still farther. You're ambitious. That's what I admire most: ambition. I mean, doing things, not stopping and giving up, but doing. I understand, Mr. Taggart . . . even if I don't understand all the big thoughts."

"You'll learn."

"Oh, I'll work very hard to learn!"

Her glance of admiration had not changed. He walked across the room, moving in that glance as in a gentle spotlight. He went to refill his glass. A mirror hung in the niche behind the portable bar. He caught a glimpse of his own figure: the tall body distorted by a sloppy, sagging posture, as if in deliberate negation of human grace, the thinning hair, the soft, sullen mouth. It struck him suddenly that she did not see him at all: what she saw was the heroic figure of a builder, with proudly straight shoulders and wind-blown hair. He chuckled aloud, feeling that this was a good joke on her, feeling dimly a satisfaction that resembled a sense of victory: the superiority of having put something over on her.

Sipping his drink, he glanced at the door of his bedroom and thought of the usual ending for an adventure of this kind. He thought that it would be easy: the girl was too awed to resist. He saw the reddish-bronze sparkle of her hair—as she sat, head bent, under a light—and a wedge of smooth, glowing skin on her shoulder. He looked away. Why bother?

—he thought.

The hint of desire that he felt, was no more than a sense of physical discomfort. The sharpest impulse in his mind, nagging him to action, was not the thought of the girl, but of all the men who would not pass up an opportunity of this kind. He admitted to himself that she was a much better person than Betty Pope, perhaps the best person ever offered to him. The admission left him indifferent. He felt no more than he had felt for Betty Pope. He felt nothing. The prospect of experiencing pleasure was not worth the effort; he had no desire to experience pleasure.

"It's getting late," he said. "Where do you live? Let me give you another drink and then I'll take you home."

When he said good-bye to her at the door of a miserable rooming house in a slum neighborhood, she hesitated, fighting not to ask a question which she desperately wished to ask him, "Will I . . . " she began, and stopped.

"What?"

"No, nothing, nothing!"

He knew that the question was: "Will I see you again?" It gave him pleasure not to answer, even though he knew that she would.

She glanced up at him once more, as if it were perhaps for the last time, then said earnestly, her voice low, "Mr. Taggart, I'm very grateful to you, because you . . . I mean, any other man would have tried to . . . I mean, that's all he'd want, but you're so much better than that, oh, so much better!"

He leaned closer to her with a faint, interested smile. "Would you have?" he asked.

She drew back from him, in sudden terror at her own words. "Oh, I didn't mean it that way!" she gasped. "Oh God, I wasn't hinting or . . . or . . ." She blushed furiously, whirled around and ran, vanishing up the long, steep stairs of the rooming house.

He stood on the sidewalk, feeling an odd, heavy, foggy sense of satisfaction: feeling as if he had committed an act of virtue—and as if he had taken his revenge upon every person who had stood cheering along the three-hundred-mile track of the John Galt Line.

When their train reached Philadelphia, Rearden left her without a word, as if the nights of their return journey deserved no acknowledgment in the daylight reality of crowded station platforms and moving engines, the reality he respected. She went on to New York, alone. But late that evening, the doorbell of her apartment rang and Dagny knew that she had expected it.

He said nothing when he entered, he looked at her, making his silent presence more intimate a greeting than words. There was the faint suggestion of a contemptuous smile in his face, at once admitting and mocking his knowledge of her hours of impatience and his own. He stood in the middle of her living room, looking slowly around him; this was her apartment, the one place in the city that had been the focus of two years of his torment, as the place he could not think about and did, the place he could not enter—and was now entering with the casual, unannounced right of an owner. He sat down in an armchair, stretching his legs forward—and she stood before him, almost as if she needed his permission to sit down and it gave her pleasure to wait.

"Shall I tell you that you did a magnificent job, building that Line?" he asked. She glanced at him in astonishment; he had never paid her open compliments of that kind; the admiration in his voice was genuine, but the hint of mockery remained in his face, and she felt as if he were speaking to some purpose which she could not guess. "I've spent all day answering questions about you-—and about the Line, the Metal and the future. That, and counting the orders for the Metal.

They're coming in at the rate of thousands of tons an hour. When was it, nine months ago?—I couldn't get a single answer anywhere. Today, I had to cut off my phone, not to listen to all the people who wanted to speak to me personally about their urgent need of Rearden Metal.

What did you do today?"

"I don't know. Tried to listen to Eddie's reports—tried to get away from people—tried to find the rolling stock to put more trains on the John Galt Line, because the schedule I'd planned won't be enough for the business that's piled up in just three days."

"A great many people wanted to see you today, didn't they?"

"Why. yes."

"They'd have given anything just for a word with you, wouldn't they?"

"I . . . I suppose so."

"The reporters kept asking me what you were like. A young boy from a local sheet kept saying that you were a great woman. He said he'd be afraid to speak to you, if he ever had the chance. He's right. That future that they're all talking and trembling about—it will be as you made it, because you had the courage none of them could conceive of.

All the roads to wealth that they're scrambling for now, it's your strength that broke them open. The strength to stand against everyone.

The strength to recognize no will but your own."

She caught the sinking gasp of her breath: she knew his purpose. She stood straight, her arms at her sides, her face austere, as if in unflinching endurance; she stood under the praise as under a lashing of insults.

"They kept asking you questions, too, didn't they?" He spoke intently, leaning forward. "And they looked at you with admiration.

They looked, as if you stood on a mountain peak and they could only take their hats off to you across the great distance. Didn't they?"

"Yes," she whispered.

"They looked as if they knew that one may not approach you or speak in your presence or touch a fold of your dress. They knew it and it's true. They looked at you with respect, didn't they? They looked up to you?"

He seized her arm, threw her down on her knees, twisting her body against his legs, and bent down to kiss her mouth. She laughed soundlessly, her laughter mocking, but her eyes half-closed, veiled with pleasure.

Hours later, when they lay in bed together, his hand moving over her body, he asked suddenly, throwing her back against the curve of his arm, bending over her—and she knew, by the intensity of his face, by the sound of a gasp somewhere in the quality of his voice, even though his voice was low and steady, that the question broke out of him as if it were worn by the hours of torture he had spent with it: "Who were the other men that had you?"

He looked at her as if the question were a sight visualized in every detail, a sight he loathed, but would not abandon; she heard the contempt in his voice, the hatred, the suffering—and an odd eagerness that did not pertain to torture; he had asked the question, holding her body tight against him.

She answered evenly, but he saw a dangerous flicker in her eyes, as of a warning that she understood him too well. "There was only one other, Hank."

"When?"

"When I was seventeen.'1

"Did it last?"

"For some years."

"Who was he?"

She drew back, lying against his arm; he leaned closer, his face taut; she held his eyes. "I won't answer you.”

"Did you love him?"

"I won't answer."

"Did you like sleeping with him?"

"Yes!"

The laughter in her eyes made it sound like a slap across his face, the laughter of her knowledge that this was the answer he dreaded and wanted.

He twisted her arms behind her, holding her helpless, her breasts pressed against him; she felt the pain ripping through her shoulders, she heard the anger in his words and the huskiness of pleasure in his voice: "Who was he?"

She did not answer, she looked at him, her eyes dark and oddly brilliant, and he saw that the shape of her mouth, distorted by pain, was the shape of a mocking smile.

He felt it change to a shape of surrender, under the touch of his lips.

He held her body as if the violence and the despair of the way he took her could wipe his unknown rival out of existence, out of her past, and more: as if it could transform any part of her, even the rival, into an instrument of his pleasure. He knew, by the eagerness of her movement as her arms seized him, that this was the way she wanted to be taken.

The silhouette of a conveyor belt moved against the strips of fire in the sky, raising coal to the top of a distant tower, as if an inexhaustible number of small black buckets rode out of the earth in a diagonal line across the sunset. The harsh, distant clatter kept going through the rattle of the chains which a young man in blue overalls was fastening over the machinery, securing it to the flatcars lined on the siding of the Quinn Ball Bearing Company of Connecticut.

Mr. Mowen, of the Amalgamated Switch and Signal Company across the street, stood by, watching. He had stopped to watch, on his way home from his own plant. He wore a light overcoat stretched over his short, paunchy figure, and a derby hat over his graying, blondish head.

There was a first touch of September chill in the air. All the gates of the Quinn plant buildings stood wide open, while men and cranes moved the machinery out; like taking the vital organs and leaving a carcass, thought Mr. Mowen.

"Another one?" asked Mr. Mowen, jerking his thumb at the plant, even though he knew the answer.

"Huh?" asked the young man, who had not noticed him standing there.

"Another company moving to Colorado?"

"Uh-huh."

"It's the third one from Connecticut in the last two weeks," said Mr.

Mowen. "And when you look at what's happening in New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and all along the Atlantic coast . . ."

The young man was not looking and did not seem to listen. "It's like a leaking faucet," said Mr. Mowen, "and all the water's running out to Colorado. All the money." The young man flung the chain across and followed it deftly, climbing over the big shape covered with canvas.

"You'd think people would have some feeling for their native state, some loyalty . . . But they're running away. I don't know what's happening to people."

"It's the Bill," said the young man.

"What Bill?"

"The Equalization of Opportunity Bill."

"How do you mean?"

"I hear Mr. Quinn was making plans a year ago to open a branch in Colorado. The Bill knocked that out cold. So now he's made up his mind to move there, lock, stock and barrel."

"I don't see where that makes it right. The Bill was necessary. It's a rotten shame—old firms that have been here for generations . . .

There ought to be a law . . ."

The young man worked swiftly, competently, as if he enjoyed it. Behind him. the conveyor belt kept rising and clattering against the sky.

Four distant smokestacks stood like flagpoles, with coils of smoke weaving slowly about them, like long banners at half-mast in the reddish glow of the evening.

Mr. Mowen had lived with every smokestack of that skyline since the days of his father and grandfather. He had seen the conveyor belt from his office window for thirty years. That the Quinn Ball Bearing Company should vanish from across the street had seemed inconceivable; he had known about Quinn's decision and had not believed it; or rather, he had believed it as he believed any words he heard or spoke: as sounds that bore no fixed relation to physical reality. Now he knew that it was real. He stood by the flatcars on the siding as if he still had a chance to stop them.

"It isn't right," he said; he was speaking to the skyline at large, but the young man above was the only part of it that could hear him.

"That's not the way it was in my father's time. I'm not a big shot. I don't want to fight anybody. What's the matter with the world?" There was no answer, "Now you, for instance—are they taking you along to Colorado?"

"Me? No. I don't work here. I'm just transient labor. Just picked up this job helping to lug the stuff out."

"Well, where are you going to go when they move away?"

"Haven't any idea."

"What are you going to do, if more of them move out?"

"Wait and see."

Mr. Mowen glanced up dubiously: he could not tell whether the answer was intended to apply to him or to the young man. But the young man's attention was fixed on his task; he was not looking down.

He moved on, to the shrouded shapes on the next flatcar, and Mr.

Mowen followed, looking up at him, pleading with something up in space: "I've got rights, haven't I? I was born here. I expected the old companies to be here when I grew up. I expected to run the plant like my father did. A man is part of his community, he's got a right to count on it, hasn't he? . . . Something ought to be done about it."

"About what?"

"Oh, I know, you think it's great, don't you?—that Taggart boom and Rearden Metal and the gold rush to Colorado and the drunken spree out there, with Wyatt and his bunch expanding their production like kettles boiling over! Everybody thinks it's great—that's all you hear anywhere you go—people are slap-happy, making plans like six-year olds on a vacation—you'd think it was a national honeymoon of some kind or a permanent Fourth of July!"

The young man said nothing.

"Well, I don't think so," said Mr. Mowen. He lowered his voice. 'The newspapers don't say so, either—mind you that—the newspapers aren't saying anything."

Mr. Mowen heard no answer, only the clanking of the chains.

"Why are they all running to Colorado?” he asked. "What have they got down there that we haven't got?"

The young man grinned. "Maybe it's something you've got that they haven't got."

"What?" The young man did not answer. "I don't see it. It's a backward, primitive, unenlightened place. They don't even have a modern government. It's the worst government in any state. The laziest. It does nothing—outside of keeping law courts and a police department.

It doesn't do anything for the people. It doesn't help anybody. I don't see why all our best companies want to run there."

The young man glanced down at him, but did not answer.

Mr. Mowen sighed. "Things aren't right," he said. "The Equalization of Opportunity Bill was a sound idea. There's got to be a chance for everybody. It's a rotten shame if people like Quinn take unfair advantage of it. Why didn't he let somebody else start manufacturing ball bearings in Colorado? . . . I wish the Colorado people would leave us alone. That Stockton Foundry out there had no right going into the switch and signal business. That's been my business for years, I have the right of seniority, it isn't fair, it's dog-eat-dog competition, newcomers shouldn't be allowed to muscle in. Where am I going to sell switches and signals? There were two big railroads out in Colorado.

Now the Phoenix-Durango's gone, so there's just Taggart Transcontinental left. It isn't fair—their forcing Dan Conway out. There's got to be room for competition. . . . And I've been waiting six months for an order of steel from Orren Boyle—and now he says he can't promise me anything, because Rearden Metal has shot his market to hell, there's a run on that Metal, Boyle has to retrench. It isn't fair—Rearden being allowed to ruin other people's markets that way. . . . And I want to get some Rearden Metal, too, I need it—but try and get it! He has a waiting line that would stretch across three states—nobody can get a scrap of it, except his old friends, people like Wyatt and Danagger and such. It isn't fair. It's discrimination. I'm just as good as the next fellow. I'm entitled to my share of that Metal."

The young man looked up. "I was in Pennsylvania last week," he said. "I saw the Rearden mills. There's a place that's busy! They're building four new open-hearth furnaces, and they've got six more coming. . . . New furnaces," he said, looking off to the south. "Nobody's built a new furnace on the Atlantic coast for the last five years. . . ." He stood against the sky, on the top of a shrouded motor, looking off at the dusk with a faint smile of eagerness and longing, as one looks at the distant vision of one's love. "They're busy. . . ." he said.

Then his smile vanished abruptly; the way he jerked the cru-fin was the first break in the smooth competence of his movements: it looked like a jolt of anger.

Mr. Mowen looked at the skyline, at the belts, the wheels, the smoke—the smoke that settled heavily, peacefully across the evening air, stretching in a long haze all the way to the city of New York somewhere beyond the sunset—and he felt reassured by the thought of New York in its ring of sacred fires, the ring of smokestacks, gas tanks, cranes and high tension lines. He felt a current of power flowing through every grimy structure of his familiar street; he liked the figure of the young man above him, there was something reassuring in the way he worked, something that blended with the skyline. . . . Yet Mr. Mowen wondered why he felt that a crack was growing somewhere, eating through the solid, the eternal walls.

"Something ought to be done," said Mr. Mowen. "A friend of mine went out of business last week—the oil business—had a couple of wells down in Oklahoma—couldn't compete with Ellis Wyatt. It isn't fair. They ought to leave the little people a chance. They ought to place a limit on Wyatt's output. He shouldn't be allowed to produce so much that he'll swamp everybody else off the market. . . . I got stuck in New York yesterday, had to leave my car there and come home on a damn commuters'1 local, couldn't get any gas for the car, they said there's a shortage of oil in the city. . . . Things aren't right. Something ought to be done about it. . . ."

Looking at the skyline, Mr. Mowen wondered what was the nameless threat to it and who was its destroyer.

“What do you want to do about it?" asked the young man.

"Who, me?" said Mr. Mowen. "I wouldn't know. I'm not a big shot.

I can't solve national problems. I just want to make a living. All I know is, somebody ought to do something about it. . . . Things aren't right. . . . Listen—what's your name?"

"Owen Kellogg."

"Listen, Kellogg, what do you think is going to happen to the world?"

"You wouldn't care to know."

A whistle blew on a distant tower, the night-shift whistle, and Mr.

Mowen realized that it was getting late. He sighed, buttoning his coat, turning to go.

"Well, things are being done," he said. "Steps are being taken. Constructive steps. The Legislature has passed a Bill giving wider powers to the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources. They've appointed a very able man as Top Co-ordinator. Can't say I've heard of him before, but the newspapers said he's a man to be watched. His name is Wesley Mouch."

Dagny stood at the window of her living room, looking at the city.

It was late and the lights were like the last sparks left glittering on the black remnants of a bonfire.

She felt at peace, and she wished she could hold her mind still to let her own emotions catch up with her, to look at every moment of the month that had rushed past her. She had had no time to feel that she was back in her own office at Taggart Transcontinental; there had been so much to do that she forgot it was a return from exile. She had not noticed what Jim had said on her return or whether he had said anything. There had been only one person whose reaction she had wanted to know; she had telephoned the Wayne-Falkland Hotel; but Senor Francisco d'Anconia, she was told, had gone back to Buenos Aires.

She remembered the moment when she signed her name at the bottom of a long legal page; it was the moment that ended the John Galt Line. Now it was the Rio Norte Line of Taggart Transcontinental again—except that the men of the train crews refused to give up its name. She, too, found it hard to give up; she forced herself not to call it "the John Galt," and wondered why that required an effort, and why she felt a faint wrench of sadness.

One evening, on a sudden impulse, she had turned the corner of the Taggart Building, for a last look at the office of John Galt, Inc., in the alley; she did not know what she wanted—just to see it, she thought.

A plank barrier had been raised along the sidewalk: the old building was being demolished; it had given up, at last. She had climbed over the planks and, by the light of the street lamp that had once thrown a stranger's shadow across the pavement, she had looked in through the window of her former office. Nothing was left of the ground floor; the partitions had been torn down, there were broken pipes hanging from the ceiling and a pile of rubble on the floor. There was nothing to see.

She had asked Rearden whether he had come there one night last spring and stood outside her window, fighting his desire to enter. But she had known, even before he answered, that he had not. She did not tell him why she asked it. She did not know why that memory still disturbed her at times.

Beyond the window of her living room, the lighted rectangle of the calendar hung like a small shipping tag in the black sky. It read: September 2. She smiled defiantly, remembering the race she had run against its changing pages; there were no deadlines now, she thought, no barriers, no threats, no limits.

She heard a key turning in the door of her apartment; this was the sound she had waited for, had wanted to hear tonight.

Rearden came in, as he had come many times, using the key she had given him, as sole announcement. He threw his hat and coat down on a chair with a gesture that had become familiar; he wore the formal black of dinner clothes.

"Hello," she said.

"I'm still waiting for the evening when I won't find you in," he answered, "Then you'll have to phone the offices of Taggart Transcontinental."

"Any evening? Nowhere else?"

"Jealous, Hank?"

"No. Curious what it would feel like, to be."

He stood looking at her across the room, refusing to let himself approach her, deliberately prolonging the pleasure of knowing that he could do it whenever he wished. She wore the tight gray skirt of an office suit and a blouse of transparent white cloth tailored like a man's shirt; the blouse flared out above her waistline, stressing the trim flatness of her hips; against the glow of a lamp behind her, he could see the slender silhouette of her body within the flaring circle of the blouse.

"How was the banquet?" she asked.

"Fine. I escaped as soon as I could. Why didn't you come? You were invited."

"I didn't want to see you in public."

He glanced at her, as if stressing that he noted the full meaning of her answer; then the lines of his face moved to the hint of an amused smile. "You missed a lot. The National Council of Metal Industries won't put itself again through the ordeal of having me for guest of honor.

Not if they can help it."

"What happened?"

"Nothing. Just a lot of speeches."

"Was it an ordeal for you?"

"No . . . Yes, in a way . . . I had really wanted to enjoy it."

"Shall I get you a drink?"

"Yes, will you?"

She turned to go. He stopped her, grasping her shoulders from behind; he bent her head back and kissed her mouth. When he raised his head, she pulled it down again with a demanding gesture of ownership, as if stressing her right to do it. Then she stepped away from him.

"Never mind the drink," he said, "I didn't really want it—except for seeing you wait on me."

"Well, then, let me wait on you."

"No."

He smiled, stretching himself out on the couch, his hands crossed under his head. He felt at home; it was the first home he had ever found.

"You know, the worst part of the banquet was that the only wish of every person present was to get it over with," he said. "What I can't understand is why they wanted to do it at all. They didn't have to. Certainly not for my sake."

She picked up a cigarette box, extended it to him, then held the flame of a lighter to the tip of his cigarette, in the deliberate manner of waiting on him. She smiled in answer to his chuckle, then sat down on the arm of a chair across the room.

"Why did you accept their invitation, Hank?" she asked. "You've always refused to join them."

"I didn't want to refuse a peace offer—when I've beaten them and they know it. I'll never join them, but an invitation to appear as a guest of honor—well, I thought they were good losers. I thought it was generous of them."

"Of them?"

"Are you going to say: of me?"

"Hank! After all the things they've done to stop you—"

"I won, didn't I? So I thought . . . You know, I didn't hold it against them that they couldn't see the value of the Metal sooner—so long as they saw it at last. Every man learns in his own way and time.

Sure, I knew there was a lot of cowardice there, and envy and hypocrisy, but I thought that that was only the surface—now, when I've proved my case, when I've proved it so loudly!—I thought their real motive for inviting me was their appreciation of the Metal, and—"

She smiled in the brief space of his pause; she knew the sentence he had stopped himself from uttering: " and for that, I would forgive anyone anything."

"But it wasn't," he said. "And I couldn't figure out what their motive was. Dagny, I don't think they had any motive at all. They didn't give that banquet to please me, or to gain something from me, or to save face with the public. There was no purpose of any kind about it, no meaning. They didn't really care when they denounced the Metal—and they don't care now. They're not really afraid that I'll drive them all off the market—they don't care enough even about that. Do you know what that banquet was like? It's as if they'd heard that there are values one is supposed to honor and this is what one does to honor them—so they went through the motions, like ghosts pulled by some sort of distant echoes from a better age. I . . . I couldn't stand it."

She said, her face tight, "And you don't think you're generous!"

He glanced up at her; his eyes brightened to a look of amusement.

"Why do they make you so angry?"

She said, her voice low to hide the sound of tenderness, "You wanted to enjoy it . . ."

"It probably serves me right. I shouldn't have expected anything. 1 don't know what it was that I wanted."

"I do."

"I've never liked occasions of that sort. I don't see why I expected it to be different, this time. . . . You know, I went there feeling almost as if the Metal had changed everything, even people."

"Oh yes, Hank, I know!"

"Well, it was the wrong place to seek anything. . . . Do you remember? You said once that celebrations should be only for those who have something to celebrate."

The dot of her lighted cigarette stopped in mid-air; she sat still. She had never spoken to him of that party or of anything related to his home. In a moment., she answered quietly, "I remember."

"1 know what you meant . . . I knew it then, too."

He was looking straight at her. She lowered her eyes.

He remained silent; when he spoke again, his voice was gay. "The worst thing about people is not the insults they hand out, but the compliments. I couldn't bear the kind they spouted tonight, particularly when they kept saying how much everybody needs me—they, the city, the country and the whole world, I guess. Apparently, their idea of the height of glory is to deal with people who need them. I can't stand people who need me." He glanced at her. "Do you need me?"

She answered, her voice earnest, "Desperately."

He laughed. "No. Not the way I meant. You didn't say it the way they do."

"How did I say it?"

"Like a trader—who pays for what he wants. They say it like beggars who use a tin cup as a claim check."

"I . . . pay for it, Hank?"

"Don't look innocent. You know exactly what I mean."

"Yes," she whispered; she was smiling.

"Oh, to hell with them!" he said happily, stretching his legs, shifting the position of his body on the couch, stressing the luxury of relaxation. "I'm no good as a public figure. Anyway, it doesn't matter now.

We don't have to care what they see or don't see. They'll leave us alone. It's clear track ahead. What's the next undertaking, Mr. Vice-President?"

"A transcontinental track of Rearden Metal."

"How soon do you want it?"

"Tomorrow morning. Three years from now is when I'll get it."

"Think you can do it in three years?"

"If the John Galt . . . if the Rio Norte Line does as well as it's doing now."

"It's going to do better. That's only the beginning."

"I have an installment plan made out. As the money comes in, I'm going to start tearing up the main track, one division at a time, and replacing it with Rearden Metal rail."

"Okay. Any time you wish to start."

"I'll keep moving the old rail to the branch lines—they won't last much longer, if I don't. In three years, you'll ride on your own Metal into San Francisco, if somebody wants to give you a banquet there."

"In three years, I'll have mills pouring Rearden Metal in Colorado, in Michigan and in Idaho. That's my installment plan."

"Your own mills? Branches?"

"Uh-huh."

"What about the Equalization of Opportunity Bill?"

"You don't think it's going to exist three years from now, do you?

We've given them such a demonstration that all that rot is going to be swept away. The whole country is with us. Who'll want to stop things now? Who'll listen to the bilge? There's a lobby of the better kind of men working In Washington right this moment. They're going to get the Equalization Bill scrapped at the next session."

"I . . . I hope so."

"I've had a terrible time, these last few weeks, getting the new furnaces started, but it's all set now, they're being built, I can sit back and take it easy. I can sit at my desk, rake in the money, loaf like a bum, watch the orders for the Metal pouring in and play favorites ail over the place. . . . Say, what's the first train you've got for Philadelphia tomorrow morning?"

"Oh, I don't know."

"You don't? What's the use of an Operating Vice-president? I have to be at the mills by seven tomorrow. Got anything running around six?"

"Five-thirty A.M. is the first one, I think."

"Will you wake me up in time to make it or would you rather order the train held for me?"

"I'll wake you up."

“Ok".

She sat, watching him as he remained silent. He had looked tired when he came in; the lines of exhaustion were gone from his face now.

"Dagny," he asked suddenly; his tone had changed, there was some hidden, earnest note in his voice, "why didn't you want to see me in public?"

"I don't want to be part of your . . . official life."

He did not answer; in a moment, he asked casually, "When did you take a vacation last?"

"I think it was two . . . no, three years ago."

"What did you do?"

"Went to the Adirondacks for a month. Came back in a week."

"I did that five years ago. Only it was Oregon." He lay flat on his back, looking at the ceiling. "Dagny, let's take a vacation together. Let's take my car and drive away for a few weeks, anywhere, just drive, down the back roads, where no one knows us. We'll leave no address, we won't look at a newspaper, we won't touch a phone—we won't have any official life at all."

She got up. She approached him, she stood by the side of the couch, looking down at him, the light of the lamp behind her; she did not want him to see her face and the effort she was making not to smile.

"You can take a few weeks off. can't you?" he said. "Things are set and going now. It's safe. We won't have another chance in the next three years."

"All right, Hank," she said, forcing her voice to sound calmly toneless.

"Will you?"

"When do you want to start?"

"Monday morning."

"All right."

She turned to step away. He seized her wrist, pulled her down, swung her body to lie stretched full-length on top of him, he held her still, uncomfortably, as she had fallen, his one hand in her hair, pressing her mouth to his, his other hand moving from the shoulder blades under her thin blouse to her waist, to her legs. She whispered, "And you say I don't need you . . . !"

She pulled herself away from him, and stood up, brushing her hair off her face. He lay still, looking up at her, his eyes narrowed, the bright flicker of some particular interest in his eyes, intent and faintly mocking. She glanced down: a strap of her slip had broken, the slip hung diagonally from her one shoulder to her side, and he was looking at her breast under the transparent film of the blouse. She raised her hand to adjust the strap. He slapped her hand down. She smiled, in understanding, in answering mockery. She walked slowly, deliberately across the room and leaned against a table, facing him, her hands holding the table's edge, her shoulders thrown back. It was the contrast he liked—the severity of her clothes and the half-naked body, the railroad executive who was a woman he owned.

He sat up; he sat leaning comfortably across the couch, his legs crossed and stretched forward, his hands in his pockets, looking at her with the glance of a property appraisal.

"Did you say you wanted a transcontinental track of Rearden Metal, Mr. Vice-President?" he asked. "What if I don't give it to you? I can choose my customers now and demand any price I please. If this were a year ago, I would have demanded that you sleep with me in exchange."

"I wish you had."

"Would you have done it?"

"Of course."

"As a matter of business? As a sale?"

"If you were the buyer. You would have liked that, wouldn't you?"

"Would you?"

"Yes . . ." she whispered.

He approached her, he grasped her shoulders and pressed his mouth to her breast through the thin cloth.

Then, holding her, he looked at her silently for a long moment.

"What did you do with that bracelet?" he asked.

They had never referred to it; she had to let a moment pass to regain the steadiness of her voice. "I have it," she answered.

"I want you to wear it."

"If anyone guesses, it will be worse for you than for me."

"Wear it."

She brought out the bracelet of Rearden Metal. She extended it to him without a word, looking straight at him, the green-blue chain glittering across her palm. Holding her glance, he clasped the bracelet on her wrist. In the moment when the clasp clicked shut under his fingers, she bent her head down to them and kissed his hand.

The earth went flowing under the hood of the car. Uncoiling from among the curves of Wisconsin's hills, the highway was the only evidence of human labor, a precarious bridge stretched across a sea of brush, weeds and trees. The sea rolled softly, in sprays of yellow and orange, with a few red jets shooting up on the hillsides, with pools of remnant green in the hollows, under a pure blue sky. Among the colors of a picture post card, the car's hood looked like the work of a jeweler, with the sun sparkling on its chromium steel, and its black enamel reflecting the sky.

Dagny leaned against the corner of the side window, her legs stretched forward; she liked the wide, comfortable space of the car's seat and the warmth of the sun on her shoulders; she thought that the countryside was beautiful.

"What I'd like to see," said Rearden, "is a billboard,”

She laughed: he had answered her silent thought. "Selling what and to whom? We haven't seen a car or a house for an hour."

"That's what I don't like about it." He bent forward a little, his hands on the wheel; he was frowning. "Look at that road."

The long strip of concrete was bleached to the powdery gray of bones left on a desert, as if sun and snows had eaten away the traces of tires, oil and carbon, the lustrous polish of motion. Green weeds rose from the angular cracks of the concrete. No one had used the road or repaired it for many years; but the cracks were few.

"It's a good road," said Rearden. "It was built to last. The man who built it must have had a good reason for expecting it to carry a heavy traffic in the years ahead."

"Yes . . . "

"I don't like the looks of this."

"I don't either." Then she smiled. "But think how often we've heard people complain that billboards ruin the appearance of the countryside.

Well, there's the unruined countryside for them to admire." She added, "They're the people I hate."

She did not want to feel the uneasiness which she felt like a thin crack under her enjoyment of this day. She had felt that uneasiness at times, in the last three weeks, at the sight of the country streaming past the wedge of the car's hood. She smiled: it was the hood that had been the immovable point in her field of vision, while the earth had gone by, it was the hood that had been the center, the focus, the security in a blurred, dissolving world . . . the hood before her and Rearden's hands on the wheel by her side . . . she smiled, thinking that she was satisfied to let this be the shape of her world.

After the first week of their wandering, when they had driven at random, at the mercy of unknown crossroads, he had said to her one morning as they started out, "Dagny, does resting have to be purposeless?" She had laughed, answering, "No. What factory do you want to see?" He had smiled—at the guilt he did not have to assume, at the explanations he did not have to give—and he had answered, "It's an abandoned ore mine around Saginaw Bay, that I've heard about. They say it's exhausted."

They had driven across Michigan to the ore mine. They had walked through the ledges of an empty pit, with the remnants of a crane like a skeleton bending above them against the sky, and someone's rusted lunchbox clattering away from under their feet. She had felt a stab of uneasiness, sharper than sadness—but Rearden had said cheerfully, "Exhausted, hell! I'll show them how many tons and dollars I can draw out of this place!" On their way back to the car, he had said, "If I could find the right man, I'd buy that mine for him tomorrow morning and set him up to work it."

The next day, when they were driving west and south, toward the plains of Illinois, he had said suddenly, after a long silence, "No, I'll have to wait till they junk the Bill. The man who could work that mine, wouldn't need me to teach him. The man who'd need me, wouldn't be worth a damn."

They could speak of their work, as they always had, with full confidence in being understood. But they never spoke of each other. He acted as if their passionate intimacy were a nameless physical fact, not to be identified in the communication between two minds. Each night, it was as if she lay in the arms of a stranger who let her see every shudder of sensation that ran through his body, but would never permit her to know whether the shocks reached any answering tremor within him. She lay naked at his side, but on her wrist there was the bracelet of Rearden Metal.

She knew that he hated the ordeal of signing the "Mr. and Mrs.

Smith" on the registers of squalid roadside hotels. There were evenings when she noticed the faint contraction of anger in the tightness of his mouth, as he signed the expected names of the expected fraud, anger at those who made fraud necessary. She noticed, indifferently, the air of knowing slyness in the manner of the hotel clerks, which seemed to suggest that guests and clerks alike were accomplices in a shameful guilt: the guilt of seeking pleasure. But she knew that it did not matter to him when they were alone, when he held her against him for a moment and she saw his eyes look alive and guiltless.

They drove through small towns, through obscure side roads, through the kind of places they had not seen for years. She felt uneasiness at the sight of the towns. Days passed before she realized what it was that she missed most: a glimpse of fresh paint. The houses stood like men in unpressed suits, who had lost the desire to stand straight: the cornices were like sagging shoulders, the crooked porch steps like torn hem lines, the broken windows like patches, mended with clapboard. The people in the streets stared at the new car, not as one stares at a rare sight, but as if the glittering black shape were an impossible vision from another world. There were few vehicles in the streets and too many of them were horse-drawn. She had forgotten the literal shape and usage of horsepower; she did not like to see its return.

She did not laugh, that day at the grade crossing, when Rearden chuckled, pointing, and she saw the train of a small local railroad come tottering from behind a hill, drawn by an ancient locomotive that coughed black smoke through a tall stack.

"Oh God, Hank, it's not funny!"

"I know," he said.

They were seventy miles and an hour away from it, when she said, "Hank, do you see the Taggart Comet being pulled across the continent by a coal-burner of that kind?"

"What's the matter with you? Pull yourself together."

"I'm sorry . . . It's just that I keep thinking it won't be any use, all my new track and all your new furnaces, if we don't find someone able to produce Diesel engines. If we don't find him fast,"

"Ted Nielsen of Colorado is your man."

"Yes, if he finds a way to open his new plant. He's sunk more money than he should into the bonds of the John Galt Line."

"That's turned out to be a pretty profitable investment, hasn't it?"

"Yes, but it's held him up. Now he's ready to go ahead, but he can't find the tools. There are no machine tools to buy, not anywhere, not at any price. He's getting nothing but promises and delays. He's combing the country, looking for old junk to reclaim, from closed factories. If he doesn't start soon—"

"He will. Who's going to stop him now?"

"Hank," she said suddenly, "could we go to a place I'd like to see?"

"Sure, Anywhere. Which place?"

"It's in Wisconsin. There used to be a great motor company there, in my father's time. We had a branch line serving it, but we closed the line—about seven years ago—when they closed the factory. I think it's one of those blighted areas now. Maybe there's still some machinery left there that Ted Nielsen could use. It might have been overlooked—the place is forgotten and there's no transportation to it at all."

"I'll find it. What was the name of the factory?"

"The Twentieth Century Motor Company."

"Oh, of course! That was one of the best motor firms in my youth, perhaps the best. I seem to remember that there was something odd about the way it went out of business . . . can't recall what it was.'1

It took them three days of inquiries, but they found the bleached, abandoned road—and now they were driving through the yellow leaves that glittered like a sea of gold coins, to the Twentieth Century Motor Company.

"Hank, what if anything happens to Ted Nielsen?" she asked suddenly, as they drove in silence.

"Why should anything happen to him?"

"I don't know, but . . . well, there was Dwight Sanders. He vanished. United Locomotives is done for now. And the other plants are in no condition to produce Diesels. I've stopped listening to promises. And . . . and of what use is a railroad without motive power?"

"Of what use is anything, for that matter, without it?"

The leaves sparkled, swaying in the wind. They spread for miles, from grass to brush to trees, with the motion and all the colors of fire; they seemed to celebrate an accomplished purpose, burning in unchecked, untouched abundance.

Rearden smiled. "There's something to be said for the wilderness.

I'm beginning to like it. New country that nobody's discovered." She nodded gaily. "It's good soil—look at the way things grow. I'd clear that brush and I'd build a—"

And then they stopped smiling. The corpse they saw in the weeds by the roadside was a rusty cylinder with bits of glass—the remnant of a gas-station pump.

It was the only thing left visible. The few charred posts, the slab of concrete and the sparkle of glass dust—which had been a gas station—were swallowed in the brush, not to be noticed except by a careful glance, not to be seen at all in another year.

They looked away. They drove on, not wanting to know what else lay hidden under the miles of weeds. They felt the same wonder like a weight in the silence between them: wonder as to how much the weeds had swallowed and how fast.

The road ended abruptly behind the turn of a hill. What remained was a few chunks of concrete sticking out of a long, pitted stretch of tar and mud. The concrete had been smashed by someone and carted away; even weeds could not grow in the strip of earth left behind. On the crest of a distant hill, a single telegraph pole stood slanted against the sky, like a cross over a vast grave.

It took them three hours and a punctured tire to crawl in low gear through trackless soft, through gullies, then down ruts left by cart wheels—to reach the settlement that lay in the valley beyond the hill with the telegraph pole.

A few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had once been an industrial town. Everything that could move, had moved away; but some human beings had remained. The empty structures were vertical rubble; they had been eaten, not by time, but by men: boards torn out at random, missing patches of roofs, holes left in gutted cellars. It looked as if blind hands had seized whatever fitted the need of the moment, with no concept of remaining in existence the next morning.

The inhabited houses were scattered at random among the ruins; the smoke of their chimneys was the only movement visible in town. A shell of concrete, which had been a schoolhouse, stood on the outskirts; it looked like a skull, with the empty sockets of glassless windows, with a few strands of hair still clinging to it, in the shape of broken wires.

Beyond the town, on a distant hill, stood the factory of the Twentieth Century Motor Company. Its walls, roof lines and smokestacks looked trim, impregnable like a fortress. It would have seemed intact but for a silver water tank: the water tank was tipped sidewise.

They saw no trace of a road to the factory in the tangled miles of trees and hillsides. They drove to the door of the first house in sight that showed a feeble signal of rising smoke. The door was open. An old woman came shuffling out at the sound of the motor. She was bent and swollen, barefooted, dressed in a garment of flour sacking. She looked at the car without astonishment, without curiosity; it was the blank stare of a being who had lost the capacity to feel anything but exhaustion.

"Can you tell me the way to the factory?" asked Rearden.

The woman did not answer at once; she looked as if she would be unable to speak English. "What factory?" she asked.

Rearden pointed. "That one."

"It's closed."

"I know it's closed. But is there any way to get there?"

"I don't know."

"Is there any sort of road?"

"There's roads in the woods."

"Any for a car to drive through?"

"Maybe."

"Well, which would be the best road to take?"

"I don't know."

Through the open door, they could see the interior of her house.

There was a useless gas stove, its oven stuffed with rags, serving as a chest of drawers. There was a stove built of stones in a corner, with a few logs burning under an old kettle, and long streaks of soot rising up the wall. A white object lay propped against the legs of a table: it was a porcelain washbowl, torn from the wall of some bathroom, filled with wilted cabbages. A tallow candle stood in a bottle on the table. There was no paint left on the floor; its boards were scrubbed to a soggy gray that looked like the visual expression of the pain in the bones of the person who had bent and scrubbed and lost the battle against the grime now soaked into the grain of the boards.

A brood of ragged children had gathered at the door behind the woman, silently, one by one. They stared at the car, not with the bright curiosity of children, but with the tension of savages ready to vanish at the first sign of danger.

"How many miles is it to the factory?" asked Rearden.

"Ten miles," said the woman, and added, "Maybe five."

"How far is the next town?"

"There ain't any next town."

"There are other towns somewhere. I mean, how far?"

"Yeah. Somewhere."

In the vacant space by the side of the house, they saw faded rags hanging on a clothesline, which was a piece of telegraph wire. Three chickens pecked among the beds of a scraggly vegetable garden; a fourth sat roosting on a bar which was a length of plumber's pipe. Two pigs waddled in a stretch of mud and refuse; the stepping stones laid across the muck were pieces of the highway's concrete.

They heard a screeching sound in the distance and saw a man drawing water from a public well by means of a rope pulley. They watched him as he came slowly down the street. He carried two buckets that seemed too heavy for his thin arms. One could not tell his age.

He approached and stopped, looking at the car. His eyes darted at the strangers, then away, suspicious and furtive.

Rearden took out a ten-dollar bill and extended it to him, asking, "Would you please tell us the way to the factory?"

The man stared at the money with sullen indifference, not moving, not lifting a hand for it, still clutching the two buckets. If one were ever to see a man devoid of greed, thought Dagny, there he was.

"We don't need no money around here," he said.

"Don't you work for a living?"

"Yeah."

"Well, what do you use for money?"

The man put the buckets down, as if it had just occurred to him that he did not have to stand straining under their weight. "We don't use no money," he said. "We just trade things amongst us."

"How do you trade with people from other towns?"

"We don't go to no other towns."

"You don't seem to have it easy here."

"What's that to you?"

"Nothing. Just curiosity. Why do you people stay here?"

"My old man used to have a grocery store here. Only the factory closed."

"Why didn't you move?"

"Where to?"

"Anywhere."

"What for?"

Dagny was staring at the two buckets: they were square tins with rope handles; they had been oil cans.

"Listen," said Rearden, "can you tell us whether there's a road to the factory?"

"There's plenty of roads."

"Is there one that a car can take?"

"I guess so."

"Which one?"

The man weighed the problem earnestly for some moments. "Well, now, if you turn to the left by the schoolhouse," he said, "and go on til you come to the crooked oak, there's a road up there that's fine when it don't rain for a couple of weeks."

"When did it rain last?"

"Yesterday."

"Is there another road?"

"Well, you could go through Hanson's pasture and across the woods and then there's a good, solid road there, all the way down to the creek."

"Is there a bridge across the creek?"

"No."

"What are the other roads?"

"Well, if it's a car road that you want, there's one the other side of Miller's patch, it's paved, it's the best road for a car, you just turn to the right by the schoolhouse and—"

"But that road doesn't go to the factory, does it?"

"No, not to the factory."

"All right," said Rearden. "Guess we'll find our own way."

He had pressed the starter, when a rock came smashing into the windshield. The glass was shatterproof, but a sunburst of cracks spread across it. They saw a ragged little hoodlum vanishing behind a corner with a scream of laughter, and they heard the shrill laughter of children answering him from behind some windows or crevices.

Rearden suppressed a swear word. The man looked vapidly across the street, frowning a little. The old woman looked on, without reaction. She had stood there silently, watching, without interest or purpose, like a chemical compound on a photographic plate, absorbing visual shapes because they were there to be absorbed, but unable ever to form any estimate of the objects of her vision.

Dagny had been studying her for some minutes. The swollen shapelessness of the woman's body did not look like the product of age and neglect: it looked as if she was pregnant. This seemed impossible, but glancing closer Dagny saw that her dust-colored hair was not gray and that there were few wrinkles on her face; it was only the vacant eyes, the stooped shoulders, the shuffling movements that gave her the stamp of senility.

Dagny leaned out and asked, "How old are you?"

The woman looked at her, not in resentment, but merely as one looks at a pointless question. "Thirty-seven," she answered.

They had driven five former blocks away, when Dagny spoke.

"Hank," she said in terror, "that woman is only two years older than I!"

"Yes."

"God, how did they ever come to such a state?"

He shrugged. "Who is John Galt?"

The last thing they saw, as they left the town, was a billboard. A design was still visible on its peeling strips, imprinted in the dead gray that had once been color. It advertised a washing machine.

In a distant field, beyond the town, they saw the figure of a man moving slowly, contorted by the ugliness of a physical effort beyond the proper use of a human body: he was pushing a plow by hand.

They reached the factory of the Twentieth Century Motor Company two miles and two hours later. They knew, as they climbed the hill, that their quest was useless. A rusted padlock hung on the door of the main entrance, but the huge windows were shattered and the place was open to anyone, to the woodchucks, the rabbits and the dried leaves that lay in drifts inside.

The factory had been gutted long ago. The great pieces of machinery had been moved out by some civilized means—the neat holes of their bases still remained in the concrete of the floor. The rest had gone to random looters. There was nothing left, except refuse which the neediest tramp had found worthless, piles of twisted, rusted scraps, of boards, plaster and glass splinters—and the steel stairways, built to last and lasting, rising in trim spirals to the roof.

They stopped in the great hall where a ray of light fell diagonally from a gap in the ceiling, and the echoes of their steps rang around them, dying far away in rows of empty rooms. A bird darted from among the steel rafters and went in a hissing streak of wings out into the sky, "We'd better look through it, just in case," said Dagny. "You take the shops and I'll take the annexes. Let's do it as fast as possible."

"I don't like to let you wander around alone. I don't know how safe they are, any of those floors or stairways."

"Oh, nonsense! I can find my way around a factory—or in a wrecking crew. Let's get it over with. I want to get out of here."

When she walked through the silent yards—where steel bridges still hung overhead, tracing lines of geometrical perfection across the sky —her only wish was not to see any of it, but she forced herself to look.

It was like having to perform an autopsy on the body of one's love. She moved her glance as an automatic searchlight, her teeth clamped tight together. She walked rapidly—there was no necessity to pause anywhere.

It was in a room of what had been the laboratory that she stopped. It was a coil of wire that made her stop. The coil protruded from a pile of junk. She had never seen that particular arrangement of wires, yet it seemed familiar, as if it touched the hint of some memory, faint and very distant. She reached for the coil, but could not move it: it seemed to be part of some object buried in the pile.

The room looked as if it had been an experimental laboratory—if she was right in judging the purpose of the torn remnants she saw on the walls: a great many electrical outlets, bits of heavy cable, lead conduits, glass tubing, built-in cabinets without shelves or doors. There was a great deal of glass, rubber, plastic and metal in the junk pile, and dark gray splinters of slate that had been a blackboard. Scraps of paper rustled dryly all over the floor. There were also remnants of things which had not been brought here by the owner of that room: popcorn wrappers, a whiskey bottle, a confession magazine.

She attempted to extricate the coil from the scrap pile. It would not move; it was part of some large object. She knelt and began to dig through the junk.

She had cut her hands, she was covered with dust by the time she stood up to look at the object she had cleared. It was the broken remnant of the model of a motor. Most of its parts were missing, but enough was left to convey some idea of its former shape and purpose.

She had never seen a motor of this kind or anything resembling it.

She could not understand the peculiar design of its parts or the functions they were intended to perform.

She examined the tarnished tubes and odd-shaped connections. She tried to guess their purpose, her mind going over every type of motor she knew and every possible kind of work its parts could perform.

None fitted the model. It looked like an electric motor, but she could not tell what fuel it was intended to burn. It was not designed for steam, or oil, or anything she could name.

Her sudden gasp was not a sound, but a jolt that threw her at the junk pile. She was on her hands and knees, crawling over the wreckage, seizing every piece of paper in sight, flinging it away, searching further. Her hands were shaking.

She found part of what she hoped had remained in existence. It was a thin sheaf of typewritten pages clamped together—the remnant of a manuscript. Its beginning and end were gone; the bits of paper left under the clamp showed the thick number of pages it had once contained. The paper was yellowed and dry. The manuscript had been a description of the motor.

From the empty enclosure of the plant's powerhouse, Rearden heard her voice screaming, "Hank!" It sounded like a scream of terror.

He ran in the direction of the voice. He found her standing in the middle of a room, her hands bleeding, her stockings torn, her suit smeared with dust, a bunch of papers clutched in her hand.

"Hank, what does this look like?" she asked, pointing at an odd piece of wreckage at her feet; her voice had the intense, obsessed tone of a person stunned by a shock, cut off from reality. "What does it look like?"

"Are you hurt? What happened?”

"No! . . . Oh, never mind, don't look at me! I'm all right. Look at this. Do you know what that is?"

"What did you do to yourself?"

"I had to dig it out of there. I'm all right."

"You're shaking."

"You will, too, in a moment. Hank! Look at it. Just look and tell me what you think it is."

He glanced down, then looked attentively—then he was sitting on the floor, studying the object intently. "It's a queer way to put a motor together," he said, frowning.

"Read this," she said, extending the pages.

He read, looked up and said, "Good God!"

She was sitting on the floor beside him, and for a moment they could say nothing else.

"It was the coil," she said. She felt as if her mind were racing, she could not keep up with all the things which a sudden blast had opened to her vision, and her words came hurtling against one another. "It was the coil that I noticed first—because I had seen drawings like it, not quite, but something like it, years ago, when I was in school—it was in an old book, it was given up as impossible long, long ago—but I liked to read everything I could find about railroad motors. That book said that there was a time when men were thinking of it—they worked on it, they spent years on experiments, but they couldn't solve it and they gave it up. It was forgotten for generations. I didn't think that any living scientist ever thought of it now. But someone did.

Someone has solved it, now, today! . . . Hank, do you understand?

Those men, long ago, tried to invent a motor that would draw static electricity from the atmosphere, convert it and create its own power as it went along. They couldn't do it. They gave it up." She pointed at the broken shape. "But there it is."

He nodded. He was not smiling. He sat looking at the remnant, intent on some thought of his own; it did not seem to be a happy thought.

"Hank! Don't you understand what this means? It's the greatest revolution in power motors since the internal-combustion engine—greater than that! It wipes everything out—and makes everything possible. To hell with Dwight Sanders and all of them! Who'll want to look at a Diesel? Who'll want to worry about oil, coal or refueling stations? Do you see what I see? A brand-new locomotive half the size of a single Diesel unit, and with ten times the power. A self-generator, working on a few drops of fuel, with no limits to its energy. The cleanest, swiftest, cheapest means of motion ever devised. Do you see what this will do to our transportation systems and to the country—in about one year?"

There was no spark of excitement in his face. He said slowly, "Who designed it? Why was it left here?"

"We'll find out."

He weighed the pages in his hand reflectively. "Dagny," he asked, "if you don't find the man who made it, will you be able to reconstruct that motor from what is left?"

She took a long moment, then the word fell with a sinking sound: "No."

"Nobody will. He had it all right. It worked—judging by what he writes here. It is the greatest thing I've ever laid eyes on. It was. We can't make it work again. To supply what's missing would take a mind as great as his."

"I'll find him—if I have to drop every other thing I'm doing."

"—and if he's still alive."

She heard the unstated guess in the tone of his voice. "Why do you say it like that?"

"I don't think he is. If he were, would he leave an invention of this kind to rot on a junk pile? Would he abandon an achievement of this size? If he were still alive, you would have had the locomotives with the self-generators years ago. And you wouldn't have had to look for him, because the whole world would know his name by now."

"I don't think this model was made so very long ago."

He looked at the paper of the manuscript and at the rusty tarnish of the motor. "About ten years ago, I'd guess. Maybe a little longer."

"We've got to find him or somebody who knew him. This is more important—"

«—than anything owned or manufactured by anyone today. I don't think we'll find him. And if we don't, nobody will be able to repeat his performance. Nobody will rebuild his motor. There's not enough of it left. It's only a lead, an invaluable lead, but it would take the sort of mind that's born once in a century, to complete it. Do you see our present-day motor designers attempting it?"

"No."

"There's not a first-rate designer left. There hasn't been a new idea in motors for years. That's one profession that seems to be dying—or dead."

"Hank, do you know what that motor would have meant, if built?"

He chuckled briefly. "I'd say: about ten years added to the life of every person in this country—if you consider how many things it would have made easier and cheaper to produce, how many hours of human labor it would have released for other work, and how much more anyone's work would have brought him. Locomotives? What about automobiles and ships and airplanes with a motor of this kind? And tractors.

And power plants. All hooked to an unlimited supply of energy, with no fuel to pay for, except a few pennies' worth to keep the converter going. That motor could have set the whole country in motion and on fire. It would have brought an electric light bulb into every hole, even into the homes of those people we saw down in the valley."

"It would have? It will. I'm going to find the man who made it."

"We'll try."

He rose abruptly, but stopped to glance down at the broken remnant and said, with a chuckle that was not gay, “There was the motor for the John Galt Line."

Then he spoke in the brusque manner of an executive. "First, we'll try to see if we can find their personnel office here. We'll look for their records, if there's any left. We want the names of their research staff and their engineers. I don't know who owns this place now, and I suspect that the owners will be hard to find, or they wouldn't have let it come to this. Then we'll go over every room in the laboratory.

Later, we'll get a few engineers to fly here and comb the rest of the place."

They started out, but she stopped for a moment on the threshold.

"Hank, that motor was the most valuable thing inside this factory," she said, her voice low. "It was more valuable than the whole factory and everything it ever contained. Yet it was passed up and left in the refuse. It was the one thing nobody found worth the trouble of taking."

"That's what frightens me about this," he answered.

The personnel office did not take them long. They found it by the sign which was left on the door, but it was the only thing left. There was no furniture inside, no papers, nothing but the splinters of smashed windows.

They went back to the room of the motor. Crawling on hands and knees, they examined every scrap of the junk that littered the floor.

There was little to find. They put aside the papers that seemed to contain laboratory notes, but none referred to the motor, and there were no pages of the manuscript among them. The popcorn wrappers and the whiskey bottle testified to the kind of invading hordes that had rolled through the room, like waves washing the remnants of destruction away to unknown bottoms.

They put aside a few bits of metal that could have belonged to the motor, but these were too small to be of value. The motor looked as if parts of it had been ripped off, perhaps by someone who thought he could put them to some customary use. What had remained was too unfamiliar to interest anybody.

On aching knees, her palms spread flat upon the gritty floor, she felt the anger trembling within her, the hurting, helpless anger that answers the sight of desecration. She wondered whether someone's diapers hung on a clothesline made of the motor's missing wires—whether its wheels had become a rope pulley over a communal well—whether its cylinder was now a pot containing geraniums on the window sill of the sweetheart of the man with the whiskey bottle.

There was a remnant of light on the hill, but a blue haze was moving in upon the valleys, and the red and gold of the leaves was spreading to the sky in strips of sunset.

It was dark when they finished. She rose and leaned against the empty frame of the window for a touch of cool air on her forehead. The sky was dark blue. "It could have set the whole country in motion and on fire." She looked down at the motor. She looked out at the country. She moaned suddenly, hit by a single long shudder, and dropped her head on her arm, standing pressed to the frame of the window.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

She did not answer.

He looked out. Far below, in the valley, in the gathering night, there trembled a few pale smears which were the lights of tallow candles.

CHAPTER X
WYATT'S TORCH

"God have mercy on us, ma'am!" said the clerk of the Hall of Records. "Nobody knows who owns that factory now. I guess nobody will ever know it,"

The clerk sat at a desk in a ground-floor office, where dust lay undisturbed on the files and few visitors ever called. He looked at the shining automobile parked outside his window, in the muddy square that had once been the center of a prosperous county seat; he looked with a faint, wistful wonder at his two unknown visitors.

"Why?" asked Dagny.

He pointed helplessly at the mass of papers he had taken out of the files. "The court will have to decide who owns it, which I don't think any court can do. If a court ever gets to it. I don't think it will."

"Why? What happened?"

"Well, it was sold out—the Twentieth Century, I mean. The Twentieth Century Motor Company. It was sold twice, at the same time and to two different sets of owners. That was sort of a big scandal at the time, two years ago, and now it's just"—he pointed—"just a bunch of paper lying around, waiting for a court hearing. I don't see how any judge will be able to untangle any property rights out of it—or any right at all."

"Would you tell me please just what happened?"

"Well, the last legal owner of the factory was The People's Mortgage Company, of Rome, Wisconsin. That's the town the other side of the factory, thirty miles north. That Mortgage Company was a sort of noisy outfit that did a lot of advertising about easy credit. Mark Yonts was the head of it. Nobody knew where he came from and nobody knows where he's gone to now, but what they discovered, the morning after The People's Mortgage Company collapsed, was that Mark Yonts had sold the Twentieth Century Motor factory to a bunch of suckers from South Dakota, and that he'd also given it as collateral for a loan from a bank in Illinois. And when they took a look at the factory, they discovered that he'd moved all the machinery out and sold it piecemeal, God only knows where and to whom. So it seems like everybody owns the place—and nobody. That's how it stands now—the South Dakotans and the bank and the attorney for the creditors of The People's Mortgage Company all suing one another, all claiming this factory, and nobody having the right to move a wheel in it, except that there's no wheels left to move."

"Did Mark Yonts operate the factory before he sold it?"

"Lord, no, ma'am! He wasn't the kind that ever operates anything.

He didn't want to make money, only to get it. Guess he got it, too—more than anyone could have made out of that factory."

He wondered why the blond, hard-faced man, who sat with the woman in front of his desk, looked grimly out the window at their car, at a large object wrapped in canvas, roped tightly under the raised cover of the car's luggage compartment.

"What happened to the factory records?"

"Which do you mean, ma'am?"

"Their production records. Their work records. Their . . . personnel files."

"Oh, there's nothing left of that now. There's been a lot of looting going on. All the mixed owners grabbed what furniture or things they could haul out of there, even if the sheriff did put a padlock on the door. The papers and stuff like that—I guess it was all taken by the scavengers from Starnesville, that's the place down in the valley, where they're having it pretty tough these days. They burned the stuff for kindling, most likely."

"Is there anyone left here who used to work in the factory?" asked Rearden.

"No, sir. Not around here. They all lived down in Starnesville."

"All of them?" whispered Dagny; she was thinking of the ruins. "The . . . engineers, too?"

"Yes, ma'am. That was the factory town. They've all gone, long ago."

"Do you happen to remember the names of any men who worked there?"

"No, ma'am."

"What owner was the last to operate the factory?" asked Rearden.

"I couldn't say, sir. There's been so much trouble up there and the place has changed hands so many times, since old Jed Starnes died.

He's the man who built the factory. He made this whole part of the country, I guess. He died twelve years ago."

"Can you give us the names of all the owners since?"

"No, sir. We had a fire in the old courthouse, about three years ago, and all the old records are gone. I don't know where you could trace them now."

"You don't know how this Mark Yonts happened to acquire the factory?"

"Yes, I know that. He bought it from Mayor Bascom of Rome. How Mayor Bascom happened to own it, I don't know."

"Where is Mayor Bascom now?”

"Still there, in Rome."

"Thank you very much," said Rearden, rising. "We'll call on him."

They were at the door when the clerk asked, "What is it you're looking for, sir?"

"We're looking for a friend of ours," said Rearden. "A friend we've lost, who used to work in that factory."

Mayor Bascom of Rome, Wisconsin, leaned back in his chair; his chest and stomach formed a pear-shaped outline under his soiled shirt.

The air was a mixture of sun and dust, pressing heavily upon the porch of his house. He waved his arm, the ring on his finger flashing a large topaz of poor quality.

"No use, no use, lady, absolutely no use," he said. "Would be just a waste of your time, trying to question the folks around here. There's no factory people left, and nobody that would remember much about them. So many families have moved away that what's left here is plain no good, if I do say so myself, plain no good, just being Mayor of a bunch of trash."

He had offered chairs to his two visitors, but he did not mind it if the lady preferred to stand at the porch railing. He leaned back, studying her long-lined figure; high-class merchandise, he thought; but then, the man with her was obviously rich.

Dagny stood looking at the streets of Rome. There were houses, sidewalks, lampposts, even a sign advertising soft drinks; but they looked as if it were now only a matter of inches and hours before the town would reach the stage of Starnesville.

"Naw, there's no factory records left," said Mayor Bascom. "If that's what you want to find, lady, give it up. It's like chasing leaves in a storm now. Just like leaves in a storm. Who cares about papers? At a time like this, what people save is good, solid, material objects. One's got to be practical."

Through the dusty windowpanes, they could see the living room of his house: there were Persian rugs on a buckled wooden floor, a portable bar with chromium strips against a wall stained by the seepage of last year's rains, an expensive radio with an old kerosene lamp placed on top of it.

"Sure, it's me that sold the factory to Mark Yonts. Mark was a nice fellow, a nice, lively, energetic fellow. Sure, he did trim a few corners, but who doesn't? Of course, he went a bit too far. That, I didn't expect.

I thought he was smart enough to stay within the law—whatever's left of it nowadays."

Mayor Bascom smiled, looking at them in a manner of placid frankness. His eyes were shrewd without intelligence, his smile good-natured without kindness.

"I don't think you folks are detectives," he said, "but even if you were, it wouldn't matter to me. I didn't get any rake-off from Mark, he didn't let me in on any of his deals, I haven't any idea where he's gone to now." He sighed. "I liked that fellow. Wish he'd stayed around. Never mind the Sunday sermons. He had to live, didn't he? He was no worse than anybody, only smarter. Some get caught at it and some don't—that's the only difference. . . . Nope, I didn't know what he was going to do with it, when he bought that factory. Sure, he paid me quite a bit more than the old booby trap was worth. Sure, he was doing me a favor when he bought it. Nope, I didn't put any pressure on him to make him buy it. Wasn't necessary. I'd done him a few favors before. There's plenty of laws that's sort of made of rubber, and a mayor's in a position to stretch them a bit for a friend. Well, what the hell? That's the only way anybody ever gets rich in this world"—he glanced at the luxurious black car—"as you ought to know."

"You were telling us about the factory," said Rearden, trying to control himself.

"What I can't stand," said Mayor Bascom, "is people who talk about principles. No principle ever filled anybody's milk bottle. The only thing that counts in life is solid, material assets. It's no time for theories, when everything is falling to pieces around us. Well, me—I don't aim to go under. Let them keep their ideas and I'll take the factory. I don't want ideas, I just want my three square meals a day."

"Why did you buy that factory?"

"Why does anybody buy any business? To squeeze whatever can be squeezed out of it. I know a good chance when I see it. It was a bankruptcy sale and nobody much who'd want to bid on the old mess. So I got the place for peanuts. Didn't have to hold it long, either—Mark took it off my hands in two-three months. Sure, it was a smart deal, if I say so myself. No big business tycoon could have done any better with it."

"Was the factory operating when you took it over?"

"Naw. It was shut down."

"Did you attempt to reopen it?"

"Not me. I'm a practical person."

"Can you recall the names of any men who worked there?"

"No. Never met 'em."

"Did you move anything out of the factory?"

"Well, I'll tell you. I took a look around—and what I liked was old Jed's desk. Old led Starnes. He was a real big shot in his time. Wonderful desk, solid mahogany. So I carted it home. And some executive, don't know who he was, had a stall shower in his bathroom, the like of which I never saw. A glass door with a mermaid cut in the glass, real art work, and hot stuff, too, hotter than any oil painting. So I had that shower lifted and moved here. What the hell, I owned it, didn't I? I was entitled to get something valuable out of that factory."

"Whose bankruptcy sale was it, when you bought the factory?"

"Oh, that was the big crash of the Community National Bank in Madison. Boy, was that a crash! It just about finished the whole state of Wisconsin—sure finished this part of it. Some say it was this motor factory that broke the bank, but others say it was only the last drop in a leaking bucket, because the Community National had bum investments all over three or four states. Eugene Lawson was the head of it. The banker with a heart, they called him. He was quite famous in these parts two-three years ago."

"Did Lawson operate the factory?"

"No. He merely lent an awful lot of money on it, more than he could ever hope to get back out of the old dump. When the factory busted, that was the last straw for Gene Lawson. The bank busted three months later." He sighed. "It hit the folks pretty hard around here. They all had their life savings in the Community National."

Mayor Bascom looked regretfully past his porch railing at his town.

He jerked his thumb at a figure across the street: it was a white-haired charwoman, moving painfully on her knees, scrubbing the steps of a house.

"See that woman, for instance? They used to be solid, respectable folks. Her husband owned the dry-goods store. He worked all his life to provide for her in her old age, and he did, too, by the time he died—only the money was in the Community National Bank."

"Who operated the factory when it failed?"

"Oh, that was some quicky corporation called Amalgamated Service, Inc. Just a puff-ball. Came up out of nothing and went back to it."

"Where are its members?"

"Where are the pieces of a puff-ball when it bursts? Try and trace them all over the United States. Try it."

"Where is Eugene Lawson?"

"Oh, him? He's done all right. He's got a job in Washington—in the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources."

Rearden rose too fast, thrown to his feet by a jolt of anger, then said, controlling himself, "Thank you for the information."

"You're welcome, friend, you're welcome," said Mayor Bascom placidly. "I don't know what it is you're after, but take my word for it, give it up. There's nothing more to be had out of that factory."

"I told you that we are looking for a friend of ours."

"Well, have it your way. Must be a pretty good friend, if you'll go to so much trouble to find him, you and the charming lady who is not your Wife."

Dagny saw Rearden's face go white, so that even his lips became a sculptured feature, indistinguishable against his skin. "Keep your dirty —" he began, but she stepped between them.

"Why do you think that I am not his wife?" she asked calmly.

Mayor Bascom looked astonished by Rearden's reaction; he had made the remark without malice, merely like a fellow cheat displaying his shrewdness to his partners in guilt.

"Lady, I've seen a lot in my lifetime," he said good-naturedly. "Married people don't look as if they have a bedroom on their minds when they look at each other. In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both."

"I've asked him a question," she said to Rearden in time to silence him. "He's given me an instructive explanation."

"If you want a tip, lady," said Mayor Bascom, "get yourself a wedding ring from the dime store and wear it. It's not sure fire, but it helps."

"Thank you," she said, "Good-bye."

The stern, stressed calm of her manner was a command that made Rearden follow her back to their car in silence.

They were miles beyond the town when he said, not looking at her, his voice desperate and low, "Dagny, Dagny, Dagny . . . I'm sorry!"

"I'm not."

Moments later, when she saw the look of control returning to his face, she said, "Don't ever get angry at a man for stating the truth."

"That particular truth was none of his business."

"His particular estimate of it was none of your concern or mine."

He said through his teeth, not as an answer, but as if the single thought battering his brain turned into sounds against his will, 'T couldn't protect you from that unspeakable little—"

"I didn't need protection."

He remained silent, not looking at her.

"Hank, when you're able to keep down the anger, tomorrow or next week, give some thought to that man's explanation and see if you recognize any part of it."

He jerked his head to glance at her, but said nothing.

When he spoke, a long time later, it was only to say in a tired, even voice, "We can't call New York and have our engineers come here to search the factory. We can't meet them here. We can't let it be known that we found the motor together. . . . I had forgotten all that . . . up there . . . in the laboratory."

"Let me call Eddie, when we find a telephone. I'll have him send two engineers from the Taggart staff. I'm here alone, on my vacation, for all they'll know or have to know."

They drove two hundred miles before they found a long-distance telephone line. When she called Eddie Willers, he gasped, hearing her voice.

"Dagny! For God's sake, where are you?"

"In Wisconsin. Why?"

"1 didn't know where to reach you. You'd better come back at once.

As fast as you can."

"What happened?"

"Nothing—yet. But there are things going on, which . . . You'd better stop them now, if you can. If anybody can."

"What things?"

"Haven't you been reading the newspapers?"

"No."

"I can't tell you over the phone. I can't give you all the details.

Dagny, you'll think I'm insane, but I think they're planning to kill Colorado."

"I'll come back at once," she said.

Cut into the granite of Manhattan, under the Taggart Terminal, there were tunnels which had once been used as sidings, at a time when traffic ran in clicking currents through every artery of the Terminal every hour of the day. The need for space had shrunk through the years, with the shrinking of the traffic, and the side tunnels had been abandoned, like dry river beds; a few lights remained as blue patches on the granite over rails left to rust on the ground.

Dagny placed the remnant of the motor into a vault in one of the tunnels; the vault had once contained an emergency electric generator, which had been removed long ago. She did not trust the useless young men of the Taggart research staff; there were only two engineers of talent among them, who could appreciate her discovery. She had shared her secret with the two and sent them to search the factory in Wisconsin. Then she had hidden the motor where no one else would know of its existence.

When her workers carried the motor down to the vault and departed, she was about to follow them and lock the steel door, but she stopped, key in hand, as if the silence and solitude had suddenly thrown her at the problem she had been facing for days, as if this were the moment to make her decision.

Her office car was waiting for her at one of the Terminal platforms, attached to the end of a train due to leave for Washington in a few minutes. She had made an appointment to see Eugene Lawson, but she had told herself that she would cancel it and postpone her quest—if she could think of some action to take against the things she had found on her return to New York, the things Eddie begged her to fight.

She had tried to think, but she could see no way of fighting, no rules of battle, no weapons. Helplessness was a strange experience, new to her; she had never found it hard to face things and make decisions; but she was not dealing with things—this was a fog without shapes or definitions, in which something kept forming and shifting before it could be seen, like semi-clots in a not-quite-liquid—it was as if her eyes were reduced to side-vision and she were sensing blurs of disaster coiling toward her, but she could not move her glance, she had no glance to move and focus.

The Union of Locomotive Engineers was demanding that the maximum speed of all trains on the John Galt Line be reduced to sixty miles an hour. The Union of Railway Conductors and Brakemen was demanding that the length of all freight trains on the John Galt Line be reduced to sixty cars.

The states of Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona were demanding that the number of trains run in Colorado not exceed the number of trains run in each of these neighboring states.

A group headed by Orren Boyle was demanding the passage of a Preservation of Livelihood Law, which would limit the production of Rearden Metal to an amount equal to the output of any other steel mill of equal plant capacity, A group headed by Mr. Mowen was demanding the passage of a Fair Share Law to give every customer who wanted it an equal supply of Rearden Metal.

A group headed by Bertram Scudder was demanding the passage of a Public Stability Law, forbidding Eastern business firms to move out of their states.

Wesley Mouch, Top Co-ordinator of the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources, was issuing a great many statements, the content and purpose of which could not be denned, except that the words "emergency powers" and "unbalanced economy" kept appearing in the text every few lines.

"Dagny, by what right?” Eddie Willers had asked her, his voice quiet, but the words sounding like a cry. "By what right are they all doing it?

By what right?"

She had confronted James Taggart in his office and said, "Jim, this is your battle. I've fought mine. You're supposed to be an expert at dealing with the looters. Stop them."

Taggart had said, not looking at her, "You can't expect to run the national economy to suit your own convenience."

"I don't want to run the national economy! I want your national economy runners to leave me alone! I have a railroad to run—and I know what's going to happen to your national economy if my railroad collapses!"

"I see no necessity for panic."

"Jim, do I have to explain to you that the income from our Rio Norte Line is all we've got, to save us from collapsing? That we need every penny of it, every fare, every carload of freight—as fast as we can get it?" He had not answered. "When we have to use every bit of power in every one of our broken-down Diesels, when we don't have enough of them to give Colorado the service it needs—what's going to happen if we reduce the speed and the length of trains?"

"Well, there's something to be said for the unions' viewpoint, too.

With so many railroads closing and so many railroad men out of work, they feel that those extra speeds you've established on the Rio Norte Line are unfair—they feel that there should be more trains, instead, so that the work would be divided around—they feel that it's not fair for us to get all the benefit of that new rail, they want a share of it, too."

"Who wants a share of it? In payment for what?" He had not answered. "Who'll bear the cost of two trains doing the work of one?" He had not answered. "Where are you going to get the cars and the engines?" He had not answered. "What are those men going to do after they've put Taggart Transcontinental out of existence?"

"I fully intend to protect the interests of Taggart Transcontinental."

"How?" He had not answered. "How—if you kill Colorado?"

"It seems to me that before we worry about giving some people a chance to expand, we ought to give some consideration to the people who need a chance of bare survival."

"If you kill Colorado, what is there going to be left for your damn looters to survive on?"

"You have always been opposed to every progressive social measure. I seem to remember that you predicted disaster when we passed the Anti-dog-eat-dog Rule—but the disaster has not come."

"Because I saved you, you rotten fools! I won't be able to save you this time!" He had shrugged, not looking at her. "And if I don't, who will?" He had not answered.

It did not seem real to her, here, under the ground. Thinking of it here, she knew she could have no part in Jim's battle. There was no action she could take against the men of undefined thought, of unnamed motives, of unstated purposes, of unspecified morality. There was nothing she could say to them—nothing would be heard or answered. What were the weapons, she thought, in a realm where reason was not a weapon any longer? It was a realm she could not enter. She had to leave it to Jim and count on his self-interest. Dimly, she felt the chill of a thought telling her that self-interest was not Jim's motive.

She looked at the object before her, a glass case containing the remnant of the motor. The man who made the motor—she thought suddenly, the thought coming like a cry of despair. She felt a moment's helpless longing to find him, to lean against him and let him tell her what to do. A mind like his would know the way to win this battle.

She looked around her. In the clean, rational world of the underground tunnels, nothing was of so urgent an importance as the task of finding the man who made the motor. She thought: Could she delay it in order to argue with Orren Boyle?—to reason with Mr. Mowen?—to plead with Bertram Scudder? She saw the motor, completed, built into an engine that pulled a train of two hundred cars down a track of Rearden Metal at two hundred miles an hour. When the vision was within her reach, within the possible, was she to give it up and spend her time bargaining about sixty miles and sixty cars? She could not descend to an existence where her brain would explode under the pressure of forcing itself not to outdistance incompetence. She could not function to the rule of: Pipe down—keep down—slow down—don't do your best, it is not wanted!

She turned resolutely and left the vault, to take the train for Washington.

It seemed to her, as she locked the steel door, that she heard a faint echo of steps. She glanced up and down the dark curve of the tunnel.

There was no one in sight; there was nothing but a string of blue lights glistening on walls of damp granite.

Rearden could not fight the gangs who demanded the laws. The choice was to fight them or to keep his mills open. He had lost his supply of iron ore. He had to fight one battle or the other. There was no time for both.

He had found, on his return, that a scheduled shipment of ore had not been delivered. No word or explanation had been heard from Larkin. When summoned to Rearden's office, Larkin appeared three days later than the appointment made, offering no apology. He said, not looking at Rearden, his mouth drawn tightly into an expression of rancorous dignity: "After all, you can't order people to come running to your office any time you please."

Rearden spoke slowly and carefully. "Why wasn't the ore delivered?"

"I won't take abuse, I simply won't take any abuse for something I couldn't help. I can run a mine just as well as you ran it, every bit as well, I did everything you did—I don't know why something keeps going wrong unexpectedly all the time. I can't be blamed for the unexpected."

"To whom did you ship your ore last month?"

"I intended to ship you your share of it, I fully intended it, but I couldn't help it if we lost ten days of production last month on account of the rainstorm in the whole of north Minnesota—I intended to ship you the ore, so you can't blame me, because my intention was completely honest."

"If one of my blast furnaces goes down, will I be able to keep it going by feeding your intention into it?"

"That's why nobody can deal with you or talk to you—because you're inhuman,"

"I have just learned that for the last three months, you have not been shipping your ore by the lake boats, you have been shipping it by rail.

Why?"

"Well, after all, I have a right to run my business as I see fit."

"Why are you willing to pay the extra cost?"

"What do you care? I'm not charging it to you."

"What will you do when you find that you can't afford the rail rates and that you have destroyed the lake shipping?"

"I am sure you wouldn't understand any consideration other than dollars and cents, but some people do consider their social and patriotic responsibilities."

"What responsibilities?"

"Well, I think that a railroad like Taggart Transcontinental is essential to the national welfare and it is one's public duty to support Jim's Minnesota branch line, which is running at a deficit."

Rearden leaned forward across the desk; he was beginning to see the links of a sequence he had never understood. "To whom did you ship your ore last month?" he asked evenly.

"Well, after all, that is my private business which—"

"To Orren Boyle, wasn't it?"

"You can't expect people to sacrifice the entire steel industry of the nation to your selfish interests and—"

"Get out of here," said Rearden. He said it calmly. The sequence was clear to him now.

"Don't misunderstand me, I didn't mean—"

"Get out."

Larkin got out.

Then there followed the days and nights of searching a continent by phone, by wire, by plane—of looking at abandoned mines and at mines ready to be abandoned—of tense, rushed conferences held at tables hi the unlighted corners of disreputable restaurants. Looking across the table, Rearden had to decide how much he could risk to invest upon the sole evidence of a man's face, manner and tone of voice, hating the state of having to hope for honesty as for a favor, but risking it, pouring money into unknown hands in exchange for unsupported promises, into unsigned, unrecorded loans to dummy owners of failing mines—money handed and taken furtively, as an exchange between criminals, in anonymous cash; money poured into unenforceable contracts—both parties knowing that in case of fraud, the defrauded was to be punished, not the defrauder—but poured that a stream of ore might continue flowing into furnaces, that the furnaces might continue to pour a stream of white metal.

"Mr. Rearden," asked the purchasing manager of his mills, "if you keep that up, where will be your profit?"

"We'll make it up on tonnage," said Rearden wearily. "We have an unlimited market for Rearden Metal."

The purchasing manager was an elderly man with graying hair, a lean, dry face, and a heart which, people said, was given exclusively to the task of squeezing every last ounce of value out of a penny. He stood in front of Rearden's desk, saying nothing else, merely looking straight at Rearden, his cold eyes narrowed and grim. It was a look of the most profound sympathy that Rearden had ever seen.

There's no other course open, thought Rearden, as he had thought through days and nights. He knew no weapons but to pay for what he wanted, to give value for value, to ask nothing of nature without trading his effort in return, to ask nothing of men without trading the product of his effort. What were the weapons, he thought, if values were not a weapon any longer?

"An unlimited market, Mr. Rearden?" the purchasing manager asked dryly.

Rearden glanced up at him. "I guess I'm not smart enough to make the sort of deals needed nowadays," he said, in answer to the unspoken thoughts that hung across his desk.

The purchasing manager shook his head. "No, Mr. Rearden, it's one or the other. The same kind of brain can't do both. Either you're good at running the mills or you're good at running to Washington."

"Maybe I ought to learn their method."

"You couldn't learn it and it wouldn't do you any good. You wouldn't win in any of those deals. Don't you understand? You're the one who's got something to be looted."

When he was left alone, Rearden felt a jolt of blinding anger, as it had come to him before, painful, single and sudden like an electric shock—the anger bursting out of the knowledge that one cannot deal with pure evil, with the naked, full-conscious evil that neither has nor seeks justification. But when he felt the wish to fight and kill in the rightful cause of self-defense—he saw the fat, grinning face of Mayor Bascom and heard the drawling voice saying, ". . . you and the charming lady who is not your wife."

Then no rightful cause was left, and the pain of anger was turning into the shameful pain of submission. He had no right to condemn anyone—he thought—to denounce anything, to fight and die joyously, claiming the sanction of virtue. The broken promises, the unconfessed desires, the betrayal, the deceit, the lies, the fraud—he was guilty of them all. What form of corruption could he scorn? Degrees do not matter, he thought; one does not bargain about inches of evil.

He did not know—as he sat slumped at his desk, thinking of the honesty he could claim no longer, of the sense of justice he had lost—that it was his rigid honesty and ruthless sense of justice that were now knocking his only weapon out of his hands. He would fight the looters, but the wrath and fire were gone. He would fight, but only as one guilty wretch against the others. He did not pronounce the words, but the pain was their equivalent, the ugly pain saying: Who am I to cast the first stone?

He let his body fall across the desk. . . . Dagny, he thought, Dagny, if this is the price I have to pay, I'll pay it. . . . He was still the trader who knew no code except that of full payment for his desires.

It was late when he came home and hurried soundlessly up the stairs to his bedroom. He hated himself for being reduced to sneaking, but he had done it on most of his evenings for months. The sight of his family had become unbearable to him; he could not tell why. Don't hate them for your own guilt, he had told himself, but knew dimly that this was not the root of his hatred.

He closed the door of his bedroom like a fugitive winning a moment's reprieve. He moved cautiously, undressing for bed: he wanted no sound to betray his presence to his family, he wanted no contact with them, not even in their own minds.

He had put on his pajamas and stopped to light a cigarette, when the door of his bedroom opened. The only person who could properly enter his room without knocking had never volunteered to enter it, so he stared blankly for a moment before he was able to believe that it was Lillian who came in.

She wore an Empire garment of pale chartreuse, its pleated skirt streaming gracefully from its high waistline; one could not tell at first glance whether it was an evening gown or a negligee; it was a negligee.

She paused in the doorway, the lines of her body flowing into an attractive silhouette against the light.

"I know I shouldn't introduce myself to a stranger," she said softly, "but I'll have to: my name is Mrs. Rearden." He could not tell whether it was sarcasm or a plea.

She entered and threw the door closed with a casual, imperious gesture, the gesture of an owner.

"What is it, Lillian?" he asked quietly.

"My dear, you mustn't confess so much so bluntly"—she moved in a leisurely manner across the room, past his bed, and sat down in an armchair—"and so unflatteringly. It's an admission that I need to show special cause for taking your time. Should I make an appointment through your secretary?"

He stood in the middle of the room, holding the cigarette at his lips, looking at her. volunteering no answer.

She laughed. "My reason is so unusual that I know it will never occur to you: loneliness, darling. Do you mind throwing a few crumbs of your expensive attention to a beggar? Do you mind if I stay here without any formal reason at all?"

"No," he said quietly, "not if you wish to."

"I have nothing weighty to discuss—no million-dollar orders, no transcontinental deals, no rails, no bridges. Not even the political situation. I just want to chatter like a woman about perfectly unimportant things."

"Go ahead."

"Henry, there's no better way to stop me, is there?" She had an air of helpless, appealing sincerity. "What can I say after that? Suppose I wanted to tell you about the new novel which Balph Eubank is writing—he is dedicating it to me—would that interest you?"

"If it's the truth that you want—not in the least."

She laughed. "And if it's not the truth that I want?"

"Then I wouldn't know what to say," he answered—and felt a rush of blood to his brain, tight as a slap, realizing suddenly the double infamy of a lie uttered in protestation of honesty; he had said it sincerely, but it implied a boast to which he had no right any longer. "Why would you want it, if it's not the truth?" he asked. "What for?"

"Now you see, that's the cruelty of conscientious people. You wouldn't understand it—would you?—if I answered that real devotion consists of being willing to lie, cheat and fake in order to make another person happy—to create for him the reality he wants, if he doesn't like the one that exists."

"No," he said slowly, "I wouldn't understand it."

"It's really very simple. If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It's no more than a fact and it has cost you nothing. But if you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She's earned it, it's a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake—and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem.”

He looked at her blankly. It sounded like some sort of monstrous corruption that precluded the possibility of wondering whether anyone could mean it; he wondered only what was the point of uttering it.

"What's love, darling, if it's not self-sacrifice?" she went on lightly, in the tone of a drawing-room discussion. "What's self-sacrifice, unless one sacrifices that which is one's most precious and most important? But I don't expect you to understand it. Not a stainless-steel Puritan like you.

That's the immense selfishness of the Puritan. You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed."

He said slowly, his voice oddly strained and solemn, "I have never claimed to be immaculate."

She laughed. "And what is it you're being right now? You're giving me an honest answer, aren't you?" She shrugged her naked shoulders.

"Oh, darling, don't take me seriously! I'm just talking."

He ground his cigarette into an ashtray; he did not answer.

"Darling," she said, "I actually came here only because I kept thinking that I had a husband and I wanted to find out what he looked like."

She studied him as he stood across the room, the tall, straight, taut lines of his body emphasized by the single color of the dark blue pajamas.

"You're very attractive," she said. "You look so much better—these last few months. Younger. Should I say happier? You look less tense.

Oh, I know you're rushed more than ever and you act like a commander in an air raid, but that's only the surface. You're less tense—inside."

He looked at her, astonished. It was true; he had not known it, had not admitted it to himself. He wondered at her power of observation.

She had seen little of him in these last few months. He had not entered her bedroom since his return from Colorado. He had thought that she would welcome their isolation from each other. Now he wondered what motive could have made her so sensitive to a change in him—unless it was a feeling much greater than he had ever suspected her of experiencing.

"I was not aware of it,” he said.

"It's quite becoming, dear—and astonishing, since you've been having such a terribly difficult time."

He wondered whether this was intended as a question. She paused, as if waiting for an answer, but she did not press it and went on gaily: "I know you're having all sorts of trouble at the mills—and then the political situation is getting to be ominous, isn't it? If they pass those laws they're talking about, it will hit you pretty hard, won't it?"

"Yes. It will. But that is a subject which is of no interest to you, Lillian, is it?"

"Oh, but it is!" She raised her head and looked straight at him; her eyes had the blank, veiled look he had seen before, a look of deliberate mystery and of confidence in his inability to solve it. "It is of great interest to me . . . though not because of any possible financial losses,” she added softly.

He wondered, for the first time, whether her spite, her sarcasm, the cowardly manner of delivering insults under the protection of a smile, were not the opposite of what he had always taken them to be—not a method of torture, but a twisted form of despair, not a desire to make him suffer, but a confession of her own pain, a defense for the pride of an unloved wife, a secret plea—so that the subtle, the hinted, the evasive in her manner, the thing begging to be understood, was not the open malice, but the hidden love. He thought of it, aghast. It made his guilt greater than he had ever contemplated.

"If we're talking politics, Henry, I had an amusing thought. The side you represent—what is that slogan you all use so much, the motto you're supposed to stand for? 'The sanctity of contract'—is that it?"

She saw his swift glance, the intentness of his eyes, the first response of something she had struck, and she laughed aloud.

"Go on," he said; his voice was low; it had the sound of a threat.

"Darling, what for?—since you understood me quite well."

"What was it you intended to say?" His voice was harshly precise and without any color of feeling.

"Do you really wish to bring me to the humiliation of complaining?

It's so trite and such a common complaint—although I did think I had a husband who prides himself on being different from lesser men. Do you want me to remind you that you once swore to make my happiness the aim of your life? And that you can't really say in all honesty whether I'm happy or unhappy, because you haven't even inquired whether I exist?"

He felt them as a physical pain—all the things that came tearing at him impossibly together. Her words were a plea, he thought—and he felt the dark, hot flow of guilt. He felt pity—the cold ugliness of pity without affection. He felt a dim anger, like a voice he tried to choke, a voice crying in revulsion: Why should I deal with her rotten, twisted lying?—why should I accept torture for the sake of pity?—why is it I who should have to take the hopeless burden of trying to spare a feeling she won't admit, a feeling I can't know or understand or try to guess?

—if she loves me, why doesn't the damn coward say so and let us both face it in the open? He heard another, louder voice, saying evenly: Don't switch the blame to her, that's the oldest trick of all cowards—you're guilty—no matter what she does, it's nothing compared to your guilt—she's right—it makes you sick, doesn't it, to know it's she who's right?—let it make you sick, you damn adulterer—it's she who's right!

"What would make you happy, Lillian?" he asked. His voice was toneless.

She smiled, leaning back in her chair, relaxing; she had been watching his face intently.

"Oh, dear!" she said, as in bored amusement. "That's the shyster question. The loophole. The escape clause."

She got up, letting her arms fall with a shrug, stretching her body in a limp, graceful gesture of helplessness.

"What would make me happy, Henry? That is what you ought to tell me. That is what you should have discovered for me. I don't know. You were to create it and offer it to me. That was your trust, your obligation, your responsibility. But you won't be the first man to default on that promise. It's the easiest of all debts to repudiate. Oh, you'd never welsh on a payment for a load of iron ore delivered to you. Only on a life."

She was moving casually across the room, the green-yellow folds of her skirt coiling in long waves about her, "I know that claims of this kind are impractical," she said. "I have no mortgage on you, no collateral, no guns, no chains. I have no hold on you at all, Henry—nothing but your honor."

He stood looking at her as if it took all of his effort to keep his eyes directed at her face, to keep seeing her, to endure the sight. "What do you want?" he asked.

"Darling, there are so many things you could guess by yourself, if you really wished to know what I want. For instance, if you have been avoiding me so blatantly for months, wouldn't I want to know the reason?"

"I have been very busy."

She shrugged. "A wife expects to be the first concern of her husband's existence. I didn't know that when you swore to forsake all others, it didn't include blast furnaces."

She came closer and, with an amused smile that seemed to mock them both, she slipped her arms around him.

It was the swift, instinctive, ferocious gesture of a young bridegroom at the unrequested contact of a whore—the gesture with which he tore her arms off his body and threw her aside.

He stood, paralyzed, shocked by the brutality of his own reaction.

She was staring at him, her face naked in bewilderment, with no mystery, no pretense or protection; whatever calculations she had made, this was a thing she had not expected.

"I'm sorry, Lillian . . ." he said, his voice low, a voice of sincerity and of suffering.

She did not answer.

"I'm sorry . . . It's just that I'm very tired," he added, his voice lifeless; he was broken by the triple lie, one part of which was a disloyalty he could not bear to face; it was not the disloyalty to Lillian.

She gave a brief chuckle. "Well, if that's the effect your work has on you, I may come to approve of it. Do forgive me, I was merely trying to do my duty. I thought that you were a sensualist who'd never rise above the instincts of an animal in the gutter. I'm not one of those bitches who belong in it." She was snapping the words dryly, absently, without thinking. Her mind was on a question mark, racing over every possible answer.

It was her last sentence that made him face her suddenly, face her simply, directly, not as one on the defensive any longer. "Lillian, what purpose do you live for?" he asked.

"What a crude question! No enlightened person would ever ask it."

"Well, what is it that enlightened people do with their lives?"

"Perhaps they do not attempt to do anything. That is their enlightenment."

"What do they do with their time?"

"They certainly don't spend it on manufacturing plumbing pipes."

"Tell me, why do you keep making those cracks? I know that you feel contempt for the plumbing pipes. You've made that clear long ago.

Your contempt means nothing to me. Why keep repeating it?"

He wondered why this hit her; he did not know in what manner, but he knew that it did. He wondered why he felt with absolute certainty that that had been the right thing to say.

She asked, her voice dry, "What's the purpose of the sudden questionnaire?"

He answered simply, "I'd like to know whether there's anything that you really want. If there is, I'd like to give it to you, if I can."

"You'd like to buy it? That's all you know—paying for things. You get off easily, don't you? No, it's not as simple as that. What I want is non-material."

"What is it?"

"You."

"How do you mean that, Lillian? You don't mean it in the gutter sense."

"No, not in the gutter sense."

"How, then?"

She was at the door, she turned, she raised her head to look at him and smiled coldly.

"You wouldn't understand it," she said and walked out.

The torture remaining to him was the knowledge that she would never want to leave him and he would never have the right to leave—the thought that he owed her at least the feeble recognition of sympathy, of respect for a feeling he could neither understand nor return—the knowledge that he could summon nothing for her, except contempt, a strange, total, unreasoning contempt, impervious to pity, to reproach, to his own pleas for justice—and, hardest to bear, the proud revulsion against his own verdict, against his demand that he consider himself lower than this woman he despised.

Then it did not matter to him any longer, it all receded into some outer distance, leaving only the thought that he was willing to bear anything—leaving him in a state which was both tension and peace—because he lay in bed, his face pressed to the pillow, thinking of Dagny, of her slender, sensitive body stretched beside him, trembling under the touch of his fingers. He wished she were back in New York. If she were, he would have gone there, now, at once, in the middle of the night.

Eugene Lawson sat at his desk as if it were the control panel of a bomber plane commanding a continent below. But he forgot it, at times, and slouched down, his muscles going slack inside his suit, as if he were pouting at the world. His mouth was the one part of him which he could not pull tight at any time; it was uncomfortably prominent in his lean face, attracting the eyes of any listener: when he spoke, the movement ran through his lower lip, twisting its moist flesh into extraneous contortions of its own.

"I am not ashamed of it," said Eugene Lawson. "Miss Taggart, I want you to know that I am not ashamed of my past career as president of the Community National Bank of Madison."

"I haven't made any reference to shame," said Dagny coldly.

"No moral guilt can be attached to me, inasmuch as I lost everything I possessed in the crash of that bank. It seems to me that I would have the right to feel proud of such a sacrifice."

"I merely wanted to ask you some questions about the Twentieth Century Motor Company which—"

"I shall be glad to answer any questions. I have nothing to hide. My conscience is clear. If you thought that the subject was embarrassing to me, you were mistaken.'1

"I wanted to inquire about the men who owned the factory at the time when you made a loan to—"

"They were perfectly good men. They were a perfectly sound risk—though, of course, I am speaking in human terms, not in the terms of cold cash, which you are accustomed to expect from bankers. I granted them the loan for the purchase of that factory, because they needed the money. If people needed money, that was enough for me. Need was my standard, Miss Taggart. Need, not greed. My father and grandfather built up the Community National Bank just to amass a fortune for themselves. I placed their fortune in the service of a higher ideal. I did not sit on piles of money and demand collateral from poor people who needed loans. The heart was my collateral. Of course, I do not expect anyone in this materialistic country to understand me. The rewards I got were not of a kind that people of your class, Miss Taggart, would appreciate. The people who used to sit in front of my desk at the bank, did not sit as you do, Miss Taggart. They were humble, uncertain, worn with care, afraid to speak. My rewards were the tears of gratitude in their eyes, the trembling voices, the blessings, the woman who kissed my hand when I granted her a loan she had begged for in vain everywhere else."

"Will you please tell me the names of the men who owned the motor factory?"

"That factory was essential to the region, absolutely essential. I was perfectly justified in granting that loan. It provided employment for thousands of workers who had no other means of livelihood."

"Did you know any of the people who worked in the factory?"

"Certainly. I knew them all. It was men that interested me, not machines. I was concerned with the human side of industry, not the cash register side."

She leaned eagerly across the desk. "Did you know any of the engineers who worked there?"

"The engineers? No, no. I was much more democratic than that. It's the real workers that interested me. The common men. They all knew me by sight. I used to come into the shops and they would wave and shout, 'Hello, Gene.' That's what they called me—Gene. But I'm sure this is of no interest to you. It's past history. Now if you really came to Washington in order to talk to me about your railroad"—he straightened up briskly, the bomber-plane pose returning—"I don't know whether I can promise you any special consideration, inasmuch as I must hold the national welfare above any private privileges or interests which—"

"1 didn't come to talk to you about my railroad," she said, looking at him in bewilderment. "I have no desire to talk to you about my railroad."

"No?" He sounded disappointed.

"No. I came for information about the motor factory. Could you possibly recall the names of any of the engineers who worked there?"

"I don't believe I ever inquired about their names. I wasn't concerned with the parasites of office and laboratory. I was concerned with the real workers—the men of calloused hands who keep a factory going. They were my friends."

"Can you give me a few of their names? Any names, of anyone who worked there?"

"My dear Miss Taggart, it was so long ago, there were thousands of them, how can I remember?"

"Can't you recall one, any one?”

"I certainly cannot. So many people have always filled my life that I can't be expected to recall individual drops in the ocean."

"Were you familiar with the production of that factory? With the kind of work they were doing—or planning?"

"Certainly. I took a personal interest in all my investments. I went to inspect that factory very often. They were doing exceedingly well.

They were accomplishing wonders. The workers' housing conditions were the best in the country. I saw lace curtains at every window and flowers on the window sills. Every home had a plot of ground for a garden. They had built a new schoolhouse for the children."

"Did you know anything about the work of the factory's research laboratory?"

"Yes, yes, they had a wonderful research laboratory, very advanced, very dynamic, with forward vision and great plans."

"Do you . . . remember hearing anything about . . . any plans to produce a new type of motor?"

"Motor? What motor, Miss Taggart? I had no time for details. My objective was social progress, universal prosperity, human brotherhood and love. Love, Miss Taggart. That is the key to everything. If men learned to love one another, it would solve all their problems."

She turned away, not to see the damp movements of his mouth.

A chunk of stone with Egyptian hieroglyphs lay on a pedestal in a corner of the office—the statue of a Hindu goddess with six spider arms stood in a niche—and a huge graph of bewildering mathematical detail, like the sales chart of a mail-order house, hung on the wall.

"Therefore, if you're thinking of your railroad, Miss Taggart—as, of course, you are, in view of certain possible developments—I must point out to you that although the welfare of the country is my first consideration, to which I would not hesitate to sacrifice anyone's profits, still, I have never closed my ears to a plea for mercy and—"

She looked at him and understood what it was that he wanted from her, what sort of motive kept him going.

"I don't wish to discuss my railroad," she said, fighting to keep her voice monotonously flat, while she wanted to scream in revulsion. "Anything you have to say on the subject, you will please say it to my brother, Mr. James Taggart."

"I'd think that at a time like this you wouldn't want to pass up a rare opportunity to plead your case before—"

"Have you preserved any records pertaining to the motor factory?"

She sat straight, her hands clasped tight together.

"What records? I believe I told you that I lost everything I owned when the bank collapsed." His body had gone slack once more, his interest had vanished. "But I do not mind it. What I lost was mere material wealth. I am not the first man in history to suffer for an ideal. I was defeated by the selfish greed of those around me. I couldn't establish a system of brotherhood and love in just one small state, amidst a nation of profit-seekers and dollar-grubbers. It was not my fault. But I won't let them beat me. I am not to be stopped. I am fighting—on a wider scale—for the privilege of serving my fellow men. Records, Miss Taggart? The record I left, when I departed from Madison, is inscribed in the hearts of the poor, who had never had a chance before."

She did not want to utter a single unnecessary word; but she could not stop herself: she kept seeing the figure of the old charwoman scrubbing the steps. "Have you seen that section of the country since?" she asked.

"It's not my fault!" he yelled. "It's the fault of the rich who still had money, but wouldn't sacrifice it to save my bank and the people of Wisconsin! You can't blame me! I lost everything!"

"Mr. Lawson," she said with effort, "do you perhaps recall the name of the man who headed the corporation that owned the factory? The corporation to which you lent the money. It was called Amalgamated Service, wasn't it? Who was its president?"

"Oh, him? Yes, I remember him. His name was Lee Hunsacker. A very worthwhile young man, who's taken a terrible beating."

"Where is he now? Do you know his address?"

"Why—I believe he's somewhere in Oregon. Grangeville, Oregon.

My secretary can give you his address. But I don't see of what interest . . . Miss Taggart, if what you have in mind is to try to see Mr.

Wesley Mouch, let me tell you that Mr. Mouch attaches a great deal of weight to my opinion in matters affecting such issues as railroads and other—"

"I have no desire to see Mr. Mouch," she said, rising.

"But then, I can't understand . . . What, really, was your purpose in coming here?"

"I am trying to find a certain man who used to work for the Twentieth Century Motor Company."

"Why do you wish to find him?"

"I want him to work for my railroad."

He spread his arms wide, looking incredulous and slightly indignant.

"At such a moment, when crucial issues hang in the balance, you choose to waste your time on looking for some one employee? Believe me, the fate of your railroad depends on Mr. Mouch much more than on any employee you ever find."

"Good day," she said.

She had turned to go, when he said, his voice jerky and high, "You haven't any right to despise me."

She stopped to look at him. "I have expressed no opinion."

"I am perfectly innocent, since I lost my money, since I lost all of my own money for a good cause. My motives were pure. I wanted nothing for myself. I've never sought anything for myself. Miss Taggart, I can proudly say that in all of my life I have never made a profit!"

Her voice was quiet, steady and solemn: "Mr. Lawson, I think I should let you know that of all the statements a man can make, that is the one I consider most despicable."

"I never had a chance!" said Lee Hunsacker.

He sat in the middle of the kitchen, at a table cluttered with papers.

He needed a shave; his shirt needed laundering. It was hard to judge his age: the swollen flesh of his face looked smooth and blank, untouched by experience; the graying hair and filmy eyes looked worn by exhaustion; he was forty-two.

"Nobody ever gave me a chance. I hope they're satisfied with what they've made of me. But don't think that I don't know it. I know I was cheated out of my birthright. Don't let them put on any airs about how kind they are. They're a stinking bunch of hypocrites."

"Who?" asked Dagny.

"Everybody," said Lee Hunsacker. "People are bastards at heart and it's no use pretending otherwise. Justice? Huh! Look at it!" His arm swept around him. "A man like me reduced to this!"

Beyond the window, the light of noon looked like grayish dusk among the bleak roofs and naked trees of a place that was not country and could never quite become a town. Dusk and dampness seemed soaked into the walls of the kitchen. A pile of breakfast dishes lay in the sink; a pot of stew simmered on the stove, emitting steam with the greasy odor of cheap meat; a dusty typewriter stood among the papers on the table.

"The Twentieth Century Motor Company," said Lee Hunsacker, "was one of the most illustrious names in the history of American industry. I was the president of that company. I owned that factory.

But they wouldn't give me a chance."

"You were not the president of the Twentieth Century Motor Company, were you? I believe you headed a corporation called Amalgamated Service?"

"Yes, yes, but it's the same thing. We took over their factory. We were going to do just as well as they did. Better. We were just as important. Who the hell was Jed Starnes anyway? Nothing but a backwoods garage mechanic—did you know that that's how he started?—without any background at all. My family once belonged to the New York Four Hundred. My grandfather was a member of the national legislature. It's not my fault that my father couldn't afford to give me a car of my own, when he sent me to school. All the other boys had cars. My family name was just as good as any of theirs. When I went to college—" He broke off abruptly. "What newspaper did you say you're from?"

She had given him her name; she did not know why she now felt glad that he had not recognized it and why she preferred not to enlighten him. "I did not say I was from a newspaper," she answered, "j need some information on that motor factory for a private purpose of my own, not for publication."

"Oh." He looked disappointed. He went on sullenly, as if she were guilty of a deliberate offense against him. "I thought maybe you came for an advance interview because I'm writing my autobiography." He pointed to the papers on the table. "And what I intend to tell is plenty.

I intend—Oh, hell!" he said suddenly, remembering something.

He rushed to the stove, lifted the lid off the pot and went through the motions of stirring the stew, hatefully, paying no attention to his performance. He flung the wet spoon down on the stove, letting the grease drip into the gas burners, and came back to the table.

"Yeah, I'll write my autobiography if anybody ever gives me a chance," he said. "How can I concentrate on serious work when this is the sort of thing I have to do?" He jerked his head at the stove.

"Friends, huh! Those people think that just because they took me in, they can exploit me like a Chinese coolie! Just because I had no other place to go. They have it easy, those good old friends of mine. He never lifts a finger around the house, just sits in his store all day; a lousy little two-bit stationery store—can it compare in importance with the book I'm writing? And she goes out shopping and asks me to watch her damn stew for her. She knows that a writer needs peace and concentration, but does she care about that? Do you know what she did today?" He leaned confidentially across the table, pointing at the dishes in the sink. "She went to the market and left all the breakfast dishes there and said she'd do them later. I know what she wanted. She expected me to do them. Well, I'll fool her. I'll leave them just where they are."

"Would you allow me to ask you a few questions about the motor factory?"

"Don't imagine that that motor factory was the only thing in my life.

I'd held many important positions before. I was prominently connected, at various times, with enterprises manufacturing surgical appliances, paper containers, men's hats and vacuum cleaners. Of course, that sort of stuff didn't give me much scope. But the motor factory—that was my big chance. That was what I'd been waiting for."

"How did you happen to acquire it?"

"It was meant for me. It was my dream come true. The factory was 'shut down—bankrupt. The heirs of Jed Starnes had run it into the ground pretty fast. I don't know exactly what it was, but there had been something goofy going on up there, so the company went broke. The railroad people closed their branch line. Nobody wanted the place, nobody would bid on it. But there it was, this great factory, with all the equipment, all the machinery, all the things that had made millions for Jed Starnes. That was the kind of setup I wanted, the kind of opportunity I was entitled to. So I got a few friends together and we formed the Amalgamated Service Corporation and we scraped up a little money. But we didn't have enough, we needed a loan to help us out and give us a start. It was a perfectly safe bet, we were young men embarking on great careers, full of eagerness and hope for the future.

But do you think anybody gave us any encouragement? They did not.

Not those greedy, entrenched vultures of privilege! How were we to succeed in life if nobody would give us a factory? We couldn't compete against the little snots who inherit whole chains of factories, could we?

Weren't we entitled to the same break? Aw, don't let me hear anything about justice! I worked like a dog, trying to get somebody to lend us the money. But that bastard Midas Mulligan put me through the wringer."

She sat up straight. "Midas Mulligan?"

"Yeah—the banker who looked like a truck driver and acted it, too!"

"Did you know Midas Mulligan?"

"Did I know him? I'm the only man who ever beat him—not that it did me any good!"

At odd moments, with a sudden sense of uneasiness, she had wondered—as she wondered about the stories of deserted ships found floating at sea or of sourceless lights flashing in the sky—about the disappearance of Midas Mulligan. There was no reason why she felt that she had to solve these riddles, except that they were mysteries which had no business being mysteries: they could not be causeless, yet no known cause could explain them.

Midas Mulligan had once been the richest and, consequently, the most denounced man in the country. He had never taken a loss on any investment he made; everything he touched turned into gold. "It's because I know what to touch," he said. Nobody could grasp the pattern of his investments: he rejected deals that were considered flawlessly safe, and he put enormous amounts into ventures that no other banker would handle. Through the years, he had been the trigger that had sent unexpected, spectacular bullets of industrial success shooting over the country. It was he who had invested in Rearden Steel at its start, thus helping Rearden to complete the purchase of the abandoned steel mills in Pennsylvania. When an economist referred to him once as an audacious gambler, Mulligan said, "The reason why you'll never get rich is because you think that what I do is gambling."

It was rumored that one had to observe a certain unwritten rule when dealing with Midas Mulligan: if an applicant for a loan ever mentioned his personal need or any personal feeling whatever, the interview ended and he was never given another chance to speak to Mr. Mulligan.

"Why yes, I can," said Midas Mulligan, when he was asked whether he could name a person more evil than the man with a heart closed to pity. "The man who uses another's pity for him as a weapon."

In his long career, he had ignored all the public attacks on him, except one. His first name had been Michael; when a newspaper columnist of the humanitarian clique nicknamed him Midas Mulligan and the tag stuck to him as an insult, Mulligan appeared in court and petitioned for a legal change of his first name to "Midas." The petition was granted.

In the eyes of his contemporaries, he was a man who had committed the one unforgivable sin: he was proud of his wealth.

These were the things Dagny had heard about Midas Mulligan; she had never met him. Seven years ago, Midas Mulligan had vanished.

He left his home one morning and was never heard from again. On the next day, the depositors of the Mulligan Bank in Chicago received notices requesting that they withdraw their funds, because the bank was closing. In the investigations that followed, it was learned that Mulligan had planned the closing in advance and in minute detail; his employees were merely carrying out his instructions. It was the most orderly run on a bank that the country ever witnessed. Every depositor received his money down to the last fraction of interest due. All of the bank's assets had been sold piecemeal to various financial institutions. When the books were balanced, it was found that they balanced perfectly, to the penny; nothing was left over; the Mulligan Bank had been wiped out.

No clue was ever found to Mulligan's motive, to his personal fate or to the many millions of his personal fortune. The man and the fortune vanished as if they had never existed. No one had had any warning about his decision, and no events could be traced to explain it. If he had wished to retire—people wondered—why hadn't he sold his establishment at a huge profit, as he could have done, instead of destroying it? There was nobody to give an answer. He had no family, no friends.

His servants knew nothing: he had left his home that morning as usual and did not come back; that was all.

There was—Dagny had thought uneasily for years—a quality of the impossible about Mulligan's disappearance; it was as if a New York skyscraper had vanished one night, leaving nothing behind but a vacant lot on a street corner. A man like Mulligan, and a fortune such as he had taken along with him, could not stay hidden anywhere; a skyscraper could not get lost, it would be seen rising above any plain or forest chosen for its hiding place; were it destroyed, even its pile of rubble could not remain unnoticed. But Mulligan had gone—and in the seven years since, in the mass of rumors, guesses, theories, Sunday supplement stories, and eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen him in every part of the world, no clue to a plausible explanation had ever been discovered.

Among the stories, there was one so preposterously out of character that Dagny believed it to be true: nothing in Mulligan's nature could have given anyone ground to invent it. It was said that the last person to see him, on the spring morning of his disappearance, was an old woman who sold flowers on a Chicago street corner by the Mulligan Bank. She related that he stopped and bought a bunch of the year's first bluebells. His face was the happiest face she had ever seen; he had the look of a youth starting out into a great, unobstructed vision of life lying open before him; the marks of pain and tension, the sediment of years upon a human face, had been wiped off, and what remained was only joyous eagerness and peace. He picked up the flowers as if on a sudden impulse, and he winked at the old woman, as if he had some shining joke to share with her. He said, "Do you know how much I've always loved it—being alive?" She stared at him, bewildered, and he walked away, tossing the flowers like a ball in his hand—a broad, straight figure in a sedate, expensive, businessman's overcoat, going off into the distance against the straight cliffs of office buildings with the spring sun sparkling on their windows.

"Midas Mulligan was a vicious bastard with a dollar sign stamped on his heart," said Lee Hunsacker, in the fumes of the acrid stew. "My whole future depended upon a miserable half-million dollars, which was just small change to him, bat when I applied for a loan, he turned me down flat—for no better reason than that I had no collateral to offer.

How could I have accumulated any collateral, when nobody had ever given me a chance at anything big? Why did he lend money to others, but not to me? It was plain discrimination. He didn't even care about my feelings—he said that my past record of failures disqualified me for ownership of a vegetable pushcart, let alone a motor factory. What failures? I couldn't help it if a lot of ignorant grocers refused to co-operate with me about the paper containers. By what right did he pass judgment on my ability? Why did my plans for my own future have to depend upon the arbitrary opinion of a selfish monopolist? I wasn't going to stand for that. I wasn't going to take it lying down. I brought suit against him."

"You did what?"

"Oh yes," he said proudly, "I brought suit. I'm sure it would seem strange in some of your hidebound Eastern states, but the state of Illinois had a very humane, very progressive law under which I could sue him. I must say it was the first case of its kind, but I had a very smart, liberal lawyer who saw a way for us to do it. It was an economic emergency law which said that people were forbidden to discriminate for any reason whatever against any person in any matter involving his livelihood. It was used to protect day laborers and such, but it applied to me and my partners as well, didn't it? So we went to court, and we testified about the bad breaks we'd all had in the past, and I quoted Mulligan saying that I couldn't even own a vegetable pushcart, and we proved that all the members of the Amalgamated Service corporation had no prestige, no credit, no way to make a living —and, therefore, the purchase of the motor factory was our only chance of livelihood—and, therefore, Midas Mulligan had no right to discriminate against us—and, therefore, we were entitled to demand a loan from him under the law. Oh, we had a perfect case all right, but the man who presided at the trial was Judge Narragansett, one of those old-fashioned monks of the bench who thinks like a mathematician and never feels the human side of anything. He just sat there all through the trial like a marble statue—like one of those blindfolded marble statues, At the end, he instructed the jury to bring in a verdict in favor of Midas Mulligan—and he said some very harsh things about me and my partners. But we appealed to a higher court—and the higher court reversed the verdict and ordered Mulligan to give us the loan on our terms. He had three months in which to comply, but before the three months were up, something happened that nobody can figure out and he vanished into thin air, he and his bank. There wasn't an extra penny left of that bank, to collect our lawful claim. We wasted a lot of money on detectives, trying to find him—as who didn't?—but we gave it up."

No—thought Dagny—no, apart from the sickening feeling it gave her, this case was not much worse than any of the other things that Midas Mulligan had borne for years. He had taken many losses under laws of a similar justice, under rules and edicts that had cost him much larger sums of money; he had borne them and fought and worked the harder; it was not likely that this case had broken him.

"What happened to Judge Narragansett?" she asked involuntarily, and wondered what subconscious connection had made her ask it. She knew little about Judge Narragansett, but she had heard and remembered his name, because it was a name that belonged so exclusively to the North American continent. Now she realized suddenly that she had heard nothing about him for years.

"Oh, he retired," said Lee Hunsacker.

"He did?" The question was almost a gasp.

"Yeah."

"When?"

"Oh, about six months later."

"What did he do after he retired?"

"I don't know. I don't think anybody's heard from him since."

He wondered why she looked frightened. Part of the fear she felt, was that she could not name its reason, either. "Please tell me about the motor factory," she said with effort.

"Well, Eugene Lawson of the Community National Bank in Madison finally gave us a loan to buy the factory—but he was just a messy cheapskate, he didn't have enough money to see us through, he couldn't help us when we went bankrupt. It was not our fault. We had everything against us from the start. How could we run a factory when we had no railroad? Weren't we entitled to a railroad? I tried to get them to reopen their branch line, but those damn people at Taggart Trans—"

He stopped. "Say, are you by any chance one of those Taggarts?"

"I am the Operating Vice-President of Taggart Transcontinental."

For a moment, he stared at her in blank stupor; she saw the struggle of fear, obsequiousness and hatred in his filmy eyes. The result was a sudden snarl: "I don't need any of you big shots! Don't think I'm going to be afraid of you. Don't expect me to beg for a job. I'm not asking favors of anybody. I bet you're not used to hear people talk to you this way, are you?"

"Mr. Hunsacker, I will appreciate it very much if you will give me the information I need about the factory."

"You're a little late getting interested. What's the matter? Your conscience bothering you? You people let Jed Starnes grow filthy rich on that factory, but you wouldn't give us a break. It was the same factory.

We did everything he did. We started right in manufacturing the particular type of motor that had been his biggest money-maker for years. And then some newcomer nobody ever heard of opened a two bit factory down in Colorado, by the name of Nielsen Motors, and put out a new motor of the same class as the Starnes model, at half the price! We couldn't help that, could we? It was all right for Jed Starnes, no destructive competitor happened to come up in his time, but what were we to do? How could we fight this Nielsen, when nobody had given us a motor to compete with his?"

"Did you take over the Starnes research laboratory?"

"Yes, yes, it was there. Everything was there."

"His staff, too?"

"Oh, some of them. A lot of them had gone while the factory was closed."

"His research staff?"

"They were gone."

"Did you hire any research men of your own?"

"Yes, yes, some—but let me tell you, I didn't have much money to spend on such things as laboratories, when I never had enough funds to give me a breathing spell. I couldn't even pay the bills I owed for the absolutely essential modernizing and redecorating which I'd had to do —that factory was disgracefully old-fashioned from the standpoint of human efficiency. The executive offices had bare plaster walls and a dinky little washroom. Any modern psychologist will tell you that nobody could do his best in such depressing surroundings. I had to have a brighter color scheme in my office, and a decent modern bathroom with a stall shower. Furthermore, I spent a lot of money on a new cafeteria and a playroom and rest room for the workers. We had to have morale, didn't we? Any enlightened person knows that man is made by the material factors of his background, and that a man's mind is shaped by his tools of production. But people wouldn't wait for the laws of economic determinism to operate upon us. We never had a motor factory before. We had to let the tools condition our minds, didn't we? But nobody gave us time."

"Can you tell me about the work of your research staff?"

"Oh, I had a group of very promising young men, all of them guaranteed by diplomas from the best universities. But it didn't do me any good. I don't know what they were doing. I think they were just sitting around, eating up their salaries."

"Who was in charge of your laboratory?"

"Hell, how can I remember that now?"

"Do you remember any of the names of your research staff?"

"Do you think I had time to meet every hireling in person?"

"Did any of them ever mention to you any experiments with a . . . with an entirely new kind of motor?"

"What motor? Let me tell you that an executive of my position does not hang around laboratories. I spent most of my time in New York and Chicago, trying to raise money to keep us going."

"Who was the general manager of tie factory?"

"A very able fellow by the name of Roy Cunningham. He died last year in an auto accident. Drunk driving, they said."

"Can you give me the names and addresses of any of your associates? Anyone you remember?"

"I don't know what's become of them. I wasn't in a mood to keep track of that."

"Have you preserved any of the factory records?"

"I certainly have."

She sat up eagerly. "Would you let me see them?"

"You bet!"

He seemed eager to comply; he rose at once and hurried out of the room. What he put down before her, when he returned, was a thick album of clippings: it contained his newspaper interviews and his press agent's releases.

"I was one of the big industrialists, too," he said proudly. "I was a national figure, as you can see. My life will make a book of deep, human significance. I'd have written it long ago, if I had the proper tools of production." He banged angrily upon his typewriter. "I can't work on this damn thing. It skips spaces. How can I get any inspiration and write a best seller with a typewriter that skips spaces?"

"Thank you, Mr. Hunsacker," she said. "I believe this is all you can tell me." She rose. "You don't happen to know what became of the Starnes heirs?"

"Oh, they ran for cover after they'd wrecked the factory. There were three of them, two sons and a daughter. Last I heard, they were hiding their faces out in Durance, Louisiana."

The last sight she caught of Lee Hunsacker, as she turned to go, was his sudden leap to the stove; he seized the lid off the pot and dropped it to the floor, scorching his fingers and cursing: the stew was burned.

Little was left of the Starnes fortune and less of the Starnes heirs.

"You won't like having to see them, Miss Taggart," said the chief of police of Durance, Louisiana; he was an elderly man with a slow, firm manner and a look of bitterness acquired not in blind resentment., but in fidelity to clear-cut standards. "There's all sorts of human beings to see in the world, there's murderers and criminal maniacs—but, somehow, I think these Starnes persons are what decent people shouldn't have to see. They're a bad sort, Miss Taggart. Clammy and bad . . .

Yes, they're still here in town—two of them, that is. The third one is: dead. Suicide. That was four years ago. It's an ugly story. He was the youngest of the three, Eric Starnes. He was one of those chronic young men who go around whining about their sensitive feelings, when they're well past forty. He needed love, was his line. He was being kept by older women, when he could find them. Then he started running after a girl of sixteen, a nice girl who wouldn't have anything to do with him.

She married a boy she was engaged to. Eric Starnes got into their house on the wedding day, and when they came back from church after the ceremony, they found him in their bedroom, dead, messy dead, his wrists slashed. . . . Now I say there might be forgiveness for a man who kills himself quietly. Who can pass judgment on another man's suffering and on the limit of what he can bear? But the man who kills himself, making a show of his death in order to hurt somebody, the man who gives his life for malice—there's no forgiveness for him, no excuse, he's rotten clear through, and what he deserves is that people spit at his memory, instead of feeling sorry for him and hurt, as he wanted them to be. . . . Well, that was Eric Starnes. I can tell you where to find the other two, if you wish."

She found Gerald Starnes in the ward of a flophouse. He lay half twisted on a cot. His hair was still black, but the white stubble of his chin was like a mist of dead weeds over a vacant face. He was soggy drunk. A pointless chuckle kept breaking his voice when he spoke, the sound of a static, unfocused malevolence, "It went bust, the great factory. That's what happened to it. Just went up and bust. Does that bother you, madam? The factory was rotten. Everybody is rotten. I'm supposed to beg somebody's pardon, but I won't. I don't give a damn. People get fits trying to keep up the show, when it's all rot, black rot, the automobiles, the buildings and the souls, and it doesn't make any difference, one way or another. You should've seen the kind of literati who turned flip-flops when I whistled, when I had the dough. The professors, the poets, the intellectuals, the world-savers and the brother-lovers. Any way I whistled. I had lots of fun. I wanted to do good, but now I don't. There isn't any good. Not any goddamn good in the whole goddamn universe. I don't propose to take a bath if I don't feel like it, and that's that. If you want to know anything about the factory, ask my sister. My sweet sister who had a trust fund they couldn't touch, so she got out of it safe, even if she's in the hamburger class now, not the filet mignon a la Sauce Bearnaise, but would she give a penny of it to her brother? The noble plan that busted was her idea as much as mine, but will she give me a penny?

Hah! Go take a look at the duchess, take a look. What do I care about the factory? It was just a pile of greasy machinery. I'll sell you all my rights, claims and title to it—for a drink. I'm the last of the Starnes name. It used to be a great name—Starnes. I'll sell it to you. You think I'm a stinking bum, but that goes for all the rest of them and for rich ladies like you, too. I wanted to do good for humanity. Hah! I wish they'd all boil in oil. Be lots of fun. I wish they'd choke. What does it matter? What does anything matter?"

On the next cot, a white-haired, shriveled little tramp turned in his sleep, moaning; a nickel clattered to the floor out of his rags. Gerald Starnes picked it up and slipped it into his own pocket. He glanced at Dagny. The creases of his face were a malignant smile.

"Want to wake him up and start trouble?" he asked. "If you do, I'll say that you're lying."

The ill-smelling bungalow, where she found Ivy Starnes, stood on the edge of town, by the shore of the Mississippi. Hanging strands of moss and clots of waxy foliage made the thick vegetation look as if it were drooling; the too many draperies, hanging in the stagnant air of a small room, had the same look. The smell came from undusted corners and from incense burning in silver jars at the feet of contorted Oriental deities. Ivy Starnes sat on a pillow like a baggy Buddha. Her mouth was a tight little crescent, the petulant mouth of a child demanding adulation—on the spreading, pallid face of a woman past fifty. Her eyes were two lifeless puddles of water. Her voice had the even, dripping monotone of rain: "I can't answer the kind of questions you're asking, my girl. The research laboratory? The engineers? Why should I remember anything about them? It was my father who was concerned with such matters, not I, My father was an evil man who cared for nothing but business.

He had no time for love, only for money. My brothers and I lived on a different plane. Our aim was not to produce gadgets, but to do good.

We brought a great, new plan into the factory. It was eleven years ago.

We were defeated by the greed, the selfishness and the base, animal nature of men. It was the eternal conflict between spirit and matter, between soul and body. They would not renounce their bodies, which was all we asked of them. I do not remember any of those men. I do not care to remember. . . . The engineers? I believe it was they who started the hemophilia. . . . Yes, that is what I said: the hemophilia—the slow leak—the loss of blood that cannot be stopped. They ran first.

They deserted us, one after another . . . Our plan? We put into practice that noble historical precept: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Everybody in the factory, from charwomen to president, received the same salary—the barest minimum necessary.

Twice a year, we all gathered in a mass meeting, where every person presented his claim for what he believed to be his needs. We voted on every claim, and the will of the majority established every person's need and every person's ability. The income of the factory was distributed accordingly. Rewards were based on need, and penalties on ability. Those whose needs were voted to be the greatest, received the most. Those who had not produced as much as the vote said they could, were fined and had to pay the fines by working overtime without pay.

That was our plan. It was based on the principle of selflessness. It required men to be motivated, not by personal gain, but by love for their brothers."

Dagny heard a cold, implacable voice saying somewhere within her: Remember it—remember it well—it is not often that one can see pure evil—look at it—remember—and some day you'll find the words to name its essence. . . . She heard it through the screaming of other voices that cried in helpless violence: It's nothing—I've heard it before —I'm hearing it everywhere—it's nothing but the same old tripe—why can't I stand it?—I can't stand it—I can't stand it!

"What's the matter with you, my girl? Why did you jump up like that? Why are you shaking? . . . What? Do speak louder, I can't hear you. . . . How did the plan work out? I do not care to discuss it.

Things became very ugly indeed and went fouler every year. It has cost me my faith in human nature. In four years, a plan conceived, not by the cold calculations of the mind, but by the pure love of the heart, was brought to an end in the sordid mess of policemen, lawyers and bankruptcy proceedings. But I have seen my error and I am free of it, I am through with the world of machines, manufacturers and money, the world enslaved by matter. I am learning the emancipation of the spirit, as revealed in the great secrets of India, the release from bondage to flesh, the victory over physical nature, the triumph of the spirit over matter."

Through the blinding white glare of anger, Dagny was seeing a long strip of concrete that had been a road, with weeds rising from its cracks, and the figure of a man contorted by a hand plow.

"But, my girl, I said that I do not remember. . . . But I do not know their names, I do not know any names, I do not know what sort of adventurers my father may have had in that laboratory! . . .

Don't you hear me? . . . I am not accustomed to being questioned in such manner and . . . Don't keep repeating it. Don't you know any words but 'engineer'? . . . Don't you hear me at all? . . . What's the matter with you? I—I don't like your face, you're . . . Leave me alone. I don't know who you are, I've never hurt you, I'm an old woman, don't look at me like that, I . . . Stand back! Don't come near me or I'll call for help! I'll . . . Oh, yes, yes, I know that one!

The chief engineer. Yes. He was the head of the laboratory. Yes.

William Hastings. That was his name—William Hastings. I remember.

He went off to Brandon, Wyoming. He quit the day after we introduced the plan. He was the second man to quit us. . . . No. No, I don't remember who was the first. He wasn't anybody important."

The woman who opened the door had graying hair and a poised, distinguished look of grooming; it took Dagny a few seconds to realize that her garment was only a simple cotton housedress, "May I see Mr. William Hastings?" asked Dagny.

The woman looked at her for the briefest instant of a pause; it was an odd glance, inquiring and grave. "May I ask your name?"

"I am Dagny Taggart, of Taggart Transcontinental."

"Oh. Please come in, Miss Taggart. I am Mrs. William Hastings."

The measured tone of gravity went through every syllable of her voice, like a warning. Her manner was courteous, but she did not smile.

It was a modest home in the suburbs of an industrial town. Bare tree branches cut across the bright, cold blue of the sky, on the top of the rise that led to the house. The walls of the living room were silver-gray; sunlight hit the crystal stand of a lamp with a white shade; beyond an open door, a breakfast nook was papered in red-dotted white.

"Were you acquainted with my husband in business, Miss Taggart?"

"No. I have never met Mr. Hastings. But I should like to speak to him on a matter of business of crucial importance."

"My husband died five years ago, Miss Taggart."

Dagny closed her eyes; the dull, sinking shock contained the conclusions she did not have to make in words: This, then, had been the man she was seeking, and Rearden had been right; this was why the motor had been left unclaimed on a junk pile.

"I'm sorry," she said, both to Mrs. Hastings and to herself.

The suggestion of a smile on Mrs. Hastings' face held sadness, but the face had no imprint of tragedy, only a grave look of firmness, acceptance and quiet serenity.

"Mrs. Hastings, would you permit me to ask you a few questions?"

"Certainly. Please sit down."

"Did you have some knowledge of your husband's scientific work?"

"Very little. None, really. He never discussed it at home."

"He was, at one time, chief engineer of the Twentieth Century Motor Company?"

"Yes. He had been employed by them for eighteen years."

"I wanted to ask Mr. Hastings about his work there and the reason why he gave it up. If you can tell me, I would like to know what happened in that factory."

The smile of sadness and humor appeared fully on Mrs. Hastings' face. "That is what I would like to know myself," she said. "But I'm afraid I shall never learn it now. I know why he left the factory. It was because of an outrageous scheme which the heirs of led Starnes established there. He would not work on such terms or for such people.

But there was something else. I've always felt that something happened at Twentieth Century Motors, which he would not tell me."

"I'm extremely anxious to know any clue you may care to give me."

"I have no clue to it. I've tried to guess and given up. I cannot understand or explain it. But I know that something happened.

When my husband left Twentieth Century, we came here and he took a job as head of the engineering department of Acme Motors. It was a growing, successful concern at the time. It gave my husband the kind of work he liked. He was not a person prone to inner conflicts, he had always been sure of his actions and at peace with himself. But for a whole year after we left Wisconsin, he acted as if he were tortured by something, as if he were struggling with a personal problem he could not solve. At the end of that year, he came to me one morning and told me that he had resigned from Acme Motors, that he was retiring and would not work anywhere else. He loved his work; it was his whole life. Yet he looked calm, self-confident and happy, for the first time since we'd come here. He asked me not to question him about the reason of his decision. I didn't question him and I didn't object. We had this house, we had our savings, we had enough to live on modestly for the rest of our days. I never learned his reason. We went on living here, quietly and very happily. He seemed to feel a profound contentment. He had an odd serenity of spirit that I had never seen in him before. There was nothing strange in his behavior or activity—except that at times, Very rarely, he went out without telling me where he went or whom he saw. In the last two years of his life, he went away for one month, each summer; he did not tell me where. Otherwise, he lived as he always had. He studied a great deal and he spent his time on engineering research of his own, working in the basement of our house. I don't know what he did with his notes and experimental models. I found no trace of them in the basement, after his death.

He died five years ago, of a heart ailment from which he had suffered for some time."

Dagny asked hopelessly, "Did you know the nature of his experiments?"

"No. I know very little about engineering."

"Did you know any of his professional friends or co-workers, who might have been acquainted with his research?"

"No. When he was at Twentieth Century Motors, he worked such long hours that we had very little time for ourselves and we spent it together. We had no social life at all. He never brought his associates to the house."

"When he was at Twentieth Century, did he ever mention to you a motor he had designed, an entirely new type of motor that could have changed the course of all industry?"

"A motor? Yes. Yes, he spoke of it several times. He said it was an invention of incalculable importance. But it was not he who had designed it. It was the invention of a young assistant of his."

She saw the expression on Dagny's face, and added slowly, quizzically, without reproach, merely in sad amusement, "I see."

"Oh, I'm sorry!" said Dagny, realizing that her emotion had shot to her face and become a smile as obvious as a cry of relief.

"It's quite all right. I understand. It's the inventor of that motor that you're interested in. I don't know whether he is still alive, but at least I have no reason to think that he isn't."

"I'd give half my life to know that he is—and to find him. It's as important as that, Mrs. Hastings. Who is he?"

"I don't know. I don't know his name or anything about him. I never knew any of the men on my husband's staff. He told me only that he had a young engineer who, some day, would up-turn the world.

My husband did not care for anything in people except ability. I think this was the only man he ever loved. He didn't say so, but I could tell it, just by the way he spoke of this young assistant. I remember—the day he told me that the motor was completed—how his voice sounded when he said, 'And he's only twenty-six!' This was about a month before the death of Jed Starnes. He never mentioned the motor or the young engineer, after that."

"You don't know what became of the young engineer?"

"No."

"You can't suggest any way to find him?"

"No."

"You have no clue, no lead to help me learn his name?"

"None. Tell me, was that motor extremely valuable?"

"More valuable than any estimate I could give you."

"It's strange, because, you see, I thought of it once, some years after we'd left Wisconsin, and I asked my husband what had become of that invention he'd said was so great, what would be done with it.

He looked at me very oddly and answered, 'Nothing.' "

"Why?"

"He wouldn't tell me."

"Can you remember anyone at all who worked at Twentieth Century? Anyone who knew that young engineer? Any friend of his?"

"No, I . . . Wait! Wait, I think I can give you a lead. I can tell you where to find one friend of his. I don't even know that friend's name, either, but I know his address. It's an odd story. I'd better explain how it happened. One evening—about two years after we'd come here—my husband was going out and I needed our car that night, so he asked me to pick him up after dinner at the restaurant of the railroad station. He did not tell me with whom he was having dinner. When I drove up to the station, I saw him standing outside the restaurant with two men. One of them was young and tall. The other was elderly; he looked very distinguished. I would still recognize those men anywhere; they had the kind of faces one doesn't forget. My husband saw me and left them. They walked away toward the station platform; there was a train coming. My husband pointed after the young man and said, 'Did you see him? That's the boy I told you about.1 'The one who's the great maker of motors?' The one who was.' "

"And he told you nothing else?"

"Nothing else. This was nine years ago. Last spring, I went to visit my brother who lives in Cheyenne. One afternoon, he took the family out for a long drive. We went up into pretty wild country, high in the Rockies, and we stopped at a roadside diner. There was a distinguished, gray-haired man behind the counter. I kept staring at him while he fixed our sandwiches and coffee, because I knew that I had seen his face before, but could not remember where. We drove on, we were miles away from the diner, when I remembered. You'd better go there.

It's on Route 86, in the mountains, west of Cheyenne, near a small industrial settlement by the Lennox Copper Foundry. It seems strange, but I'm certain of it: the cook in that diner is the man I saw at the railroad station with my husband's young idol."

The diner stood on the summit of a long, hard climb. Its glass walls spread a coat of polish over the view of rocks and pines descending in broken ledges to the sunset. It was dark below, but an even, glowing light still remained in the diner, as in a small pool left behind by a receding tide.

Dagny sat at the end of the counter, eating a hamburger sandwich.

It was the best-cooked food she had ever tasted, the product of simple ingredients and of an unusual skill. Two workers were finishing their dinner; she was waiting for them to depart.

She studied the man behind the counter. He was slender and tall; he had an air of distinction that belonged in an ancient castle or in the inner office of a bank; but his peculiar quality came from the fact that he made the distinction seem appropriate here, behind the counter of a diner. He wore a cook's white jacket as if it were a full-dress suit. There was an expert competence in his manner of working; his movements were easy, intelligently economical. He had a lean face and gray hair that blended in tone with the cold blue of his eyes; somewhere beyond his look of courteous sternness, there was a note of humor, so faint that it vanished if one tried to discern it.

The two workers finished, paid and departed, each leaving a dime for a tip. She watched the man as he removed their dishes, put the dimes into the pocket of his white jacket, wiped the counter, working with swift precision. Then he turned and looked at her. It was an impersonal glance, not intended to invite conversation; but she felt certain that he had long since noted her New York suit, her high-heeled pumps, her air of being a woman who did not waste her time; his cold, observant eyes seemed to tell her that he knew she did not belong here and that he was waiting to discover her purpose.

"How is business?" she asked.

"Pretty bad. They're going to close the Lennox Foundry next week, so I'll have to close soon, too, and move on." His voice was clear, impersonally cordial.

"Where to?"

"1 haven't decided."

"What sort of thing do you have in mind?"

"I don't know. I'm thinking of opening a garage, if I can find the right spot in some town."

"Oh no! You're too good at your job to change it. You shouldn't want to be anything but a cook."

A strange, fine smile moved the curve of his mouth. "No?" he asked courteously.

"No! How would you like a job in New York?" He looked at her, astonished. "I'm serious. I can give you a job on a big railroad, in charge of the dining-car department."

"May I ask why you should want to?"

She raised the hamburger sandwich in its white paper napkin.

"There's one of the reasons."

"Thank you. What are the others?"

"T don't suppose you've lived in a big city, or you'd know how miserably difficult it is to find any competent men for any job whatever."

"I know a little about that."

"Well? How about it, then? Would you like a job in New York at ten thousand dollars a year?"

"No."

She had been carried away by the joy of discovering and rewarding ability. She looked at him silently, shocked. "I don't think you understood me," she said.

"I did."

"You're refusing an opportunity of this kind?"

"Yes."

"But why?"

"That is a personal matter."

"Why should you work like this, when you can have a better job?"

"I am not looking for a better job."

"You don't want a chance to rise and make money?"

"No. Why do you insist?"

"Because I hate to see ability being wasted!"

He said slowly, intently, "So do I."

Something in the way he said it made her feel the bond of some profound emotion which they held in common; it broke the discipline that forbade her ever to call for help. "I'm so sick of them!" Her voice startled hen it was an involuntary cry. "I'm so hungry for any sight of anyone who's able to do whatever it is he's doing!"

She pressed the back of her hand to her eyes, trying to dam the outbreak of a despair she had not permitted herself to acknowledge; she had not known the extent of it, nor how little of her endurance the quest had left her.

"I'm sorry," he said, his voice low. It sounded, not as an apology, but as a statement of compassion.

She glanced up at him. He smiled, and she knew that the smile was intended to break the bond which he, too, had felt: the smile had a trace of courteous mockery. He said, "But I don't believe that you came all the way from New York just to hunt for railroad cooks in the Rockies."

"No. I came for something else." She leaned forward, both forearms braced firmly against the counter, feeling calm and in tight control again, sensing a dangerous adversary. "Did you know, about ten years ago, a young engineer who worked for the Twentieth Century Motor Company?"

She counted the seconds of a pause; she could not define the nature of the way he looked at her, except that it was the look of some special attentiveness.

"Yes, I did," he answered.

"Could you give me his name and address?"

"What for?"

"It's crucially important that I find him."

"That man? Of what importance is he?"

"He is the most important man in the world."

"Really? Why?"

"Did you know anything about his work?"

"Yes."

"Did you know that he hit upon an idea of the most tremendous consequence?"

He let a moment pass. "May I ask who you are?”

"Dagny Taggart. I'm the Vice-Pres—"

"Yes, Miss Taggart. I know who you are."

He said it with impersonal deference. But he looked as if he had found the answer to some special question in his mind and was not astonished any longer.

"Then you know that my interest is not idle," she said. "I'm in a position to give him the chance he needs and I'm prepared to pay anything he asks."

"May I ask what has aroused your interest in him?"

"His motor."

"How did you happen to know about his motor?"

"I found a broken remnant of it in the ruins of the Twentieth Century factory. Not enough to reconstruct it or to learn how it worked, But enough to know that it did work and that it's an invention which can save my railroad, the country and the economy of the whole world.

Don't ask me to tell you now what trail I've followed, trying to trace that motor and to find its inventor. That's not of any importance, even my life and work are not of any importance to me right now, nothing is of any importance, except that I must find him. Don't ask me how I happened to come to you. You're the end of the trail. Tell me his name."

He had listened without moving, looking straight at her; the attentiveness of his eyes seemed to take hold of every word and store it carefully away, giving her no clue to his purpose. He did not move for a long time. Then he said, "Give it up, Miss Taggart. You won't find him."

"What is his name?"

"I can tell you nothing about him."

"Is he still alive?"

"I can tell you nothing."

"What is your name?"

"Hugh Akston."

Through the blank seconds of recapturing her mind, she kept telling herself: You're hysterical . . . don't be preposterous . . . it's just a coincidence of names—while she knew, in certainty and numb, inexplicable terror, that this was the Hugh Akston.

"Hugh Akston?" she stammered. "The philosopher? . . . The last of the advocates of reason?"

"Why, yes," he answered pleasantly. "Or the first of their return."

He did not seem startled by her shock, but he seemed to find it unnecessary. His manner was simple, almost friendly, as if he felt no need to hide his identity and no resentment at its being discovered.

"I didn't think that any young person would recognize my name or attach any significance to it, nowadays," he said.

"But . . . but what are you doing here?" Her arm swept at the room. "This doesn't make sense!"

"Are you sure?"

"What is it? A stunt? An experiment? A secret mission? Are you studying something for some special purpose?"

"No, Miss Taggart. I'm earning my living." The words and the voice had the genuine simplicity of truth, "Dr. Akston, I . . . it's inconceivable, it's . . . You're . . . you're a philosopher . . . the greatest philosopher living . . . an immortal name . . . why would you do this?"

"Because I am a philosopher, Miss Taggart."

She knew with certainty—even though she felt as if her capacity for certainty and for understanding were gone—that she would obtain no help from him, that questions were useless, that he would give her no explanation, neither of the inventor's fate nor of his own.

"Give it up, Miss Taggart," he said quietly, as if giving proof that he could guess her thoughts, as she had known he would. "It is a hopeless quest, the more hopeless because you have no inkling of what an impossible task you have chosen to undertake. I would like to spare you the strain of trying to devise some argument, trick or plea that would make me give you the information you are seeking. Take my word for it: it can't be done. You said I'm the end of your trail. It's a blind alley, Miss Taggart, Do not attempt to waste your money and effort on other, more conventional methods of inquiry: do not hire detectives. They will learn nothing. You may choose to ignore my warning, but I think that you are a person of high intelligence, able to know that I know what I am saying. Give it up. The secret you are trying to solve involves something greater—much greater—than the invention of a motor run by atmospheric electricity. There is only one helpful suggestion that I can give you: By the essence and nature of existence, contradictions cannot exist. If you find it inconceivable that an invention of genius should be abandoned among ruins, and that a philosopher should wish to work as a cook in a diner—check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."

She started: she remembered that she had heard this before and that it was Francisco who had said it. And then she remembered that this man had been one of Francisco's teachers.

"As you wish, Dr. Akston," she said. "I won't attempt to question you about it. But would you permit me to ask you a question on an entirely different subject?"

"Certainly."

"Dr. Robert Stadler once told me that when you were at the Patrick Henry University, you had three students who were your favorites and his, three brilliant minds from whom you expected a great future. One of them was Francisco d'Anconia."

"Yes. Another was Ragnar Danneskjold."

"Incidentally—this is not my question—who was the third?"

"His name would mean nothing to you. He is not famous."

"Dr. Stadler said that you and he were rivals over these three students, because you both regarded them as your sons."

"Rivals? He lost them."

"Tell me, are you proud of the way these three have turned out?"

He looked off, into the distance, at the dying fire of the sunset on the farthest rocks; his face had the look of a father who watches his sons bleeding on a battlefield. He answered: "More proud than I had ever hoped to be,"

It was almost dark. He turned sharply, took a package of cigarettes from his pocket, pulled out one cigarette, but stopped, remembering her presence, as if he had forgotten it for a moment, and extended the package to her. She took a cigarette and he struck the brief flare of a match, then shook it out, leaving only two small points of fire in the darkness of a glass room and of miles of mountains beyond it.

She rose, paid her bill, and said, "Thank you, Dr. Akston. I will not molest you with tricks or pleas. I will not hire detectives. But I think I should tell you that I will not give up, I must find the inventor of that motor. I will find him."

"Not until the day when he chooses to find you—as he will."

When she walked to her car, he switched on the lights in the diner, she saw the mailbox by the side of the road and noted the incredible fact that the name "Hugh Akston" stood written openly across it.

She had driven far down the winding road, and the lights of the diner were long since out of sight, when she noticed that she was enjoying the taste of the cigarette he had given her: it was different from any she had ever smoked before. She held the small remnant to the light of the dashboard, looking for the name of the brand. There was no name, only a trademark. Stamped in gold on the thin, white paper there stood the sign of the dollar.

She examined it curiously: she had never heard of that brand before.

Then she remembered the old man at the cigar stand of the Taggart Terminal, and smiled, thinking that this was a specimen for his collection. She stamped out the fire and dropped the butt into her handbag.

Train Number 57 was lined along the track, ready to leave for Wyatt Junction, when she reached Cheyenne, left her car at the garage where she had rented it, and walked out on the platform of the Taggart station. She had half an hour to wait for the eastbound main liner to New York. She walked to the end of the platform and leaned wearily against a lamppost; she did not want to be seen and recognized by the station employees, she did not want to talk to anyone, she needed rest. A few people stood in clusters on the half-deserted platform; animated conversations seemed to be going on, and newspapers were more prominently in evidence than usual.

She looked at the lighted windows of Train Number 57—for a moment's relief in the sight of a victorious achievement. Train Number 57 was about to start down the track of the John Galt Line, through the towns, through the curves of the mountains, past the green signals where people had stood cheering and the valleys where rockets had risen to the summer sky. Twisted remnants of leaves now hung on the branches beyond the train's roof line, and the passengers wore furs and mufflers, as they climbed aboard. They moved with the casual manner of a daily event, with the security of expecting a performance long since taken for granted. . . . We've done it—she thought—this much, at least, is done.

It was the chance conversation of two men somewhere behind her that came beating suddenly against her closed attention.

"But laws shouldn't be passed that way, so quickly."

"They're not laws, they're directives."

"Then it's illegal."

"It's not illegal, because the Legislature passed a law last month giving him the power to issue directives."

"I don't think directives should be sprung on people that way, out of the blue, like a punch in the nose."

"Well, there's no time to palaver when it's a national emergency."

"But I don't think it's right and it doesn't jibe. How is Rearden going to do it, when it says here—"

"Why should you worry about Rearden? He's rich enough. He can find a way to do anything."

Then she leaped to the first newsstand in sight and seized a copy of the evening paper.

It was on the front page. Wesley Mouch, Top Co-ordinator of the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources, "in a surprise move," said the paper, "and in the name of the national emergency," had issued a set of directives, which were strung in a column down the page: The railroads of the country were ordered to reduce the maximum speed of all trains to sixty miles per hour—to reduce the maximum length of all trains to sixty cars—and to run the same number of trains in every state of a zone composed of five neighboring states, the country being divided into such zones for the purpose.

The steel mills of the country were ordered to limit the maximum production of any metal alloy to an amount equal to the production of other metal alloys by other mills placed in the same classification of plant capacity—and to supply a fair share of any metal alloy to all consumers who might desire to obtain it.

All the manufacturing establishments of the country, of any size and nature, were forbidden to move from their present locations, except when granted a special permission to do so by the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources.

To compensate the railroads of the country for the extra costs involved and "to cushion the process of readjustment," a moratorium on payments of interest and principal on all railroad bonds—secured and unsecured, convertible and non-convertible—was declared for a period of five years.

To provide the funds for the personnel to enforce these directives, a special tax was imposed on the state of Colorado, "as the state best able to assist the needier states to bear the brunt of the national emergency," such tax to consist of five per cent of the gross sales of Colorado's industrial concerns.

The cry she uttered was one she had never permitted herself before, because she made it her pride always to answer it herself—but she saw a man standing a few steps away, she did not see that he was a ragged bum, and she uttered the cry because it was the plea of reason and he was a human figure: "What are we going to do?"

The bum grinned mirthlessly and shrugged: "Who is John Galt?"

It was not Taggart Transcontinental that stood as the focus of terror in her mind, it was not the thought of Hank Rearden tied to a rack pulled in opposite directions—it was Ellis Wyatt. Wiping out the rest, filling her consciousness, leaving no room for words, no time for wonder, as a glaring answer to the questions she had not begun to ask, stood two pictures: Ellis Wyatt's implacable figure in front of her desk, saying, "It is now in your power to destroy me; I may have to go; but if I go, I'll make sure that I take all the rest of you along with me"—and the circling violence of Ellis Wyatt's body when he flung a glass to shatter against the wall.

The only consciousness the pictures left her was the feeling of the approach of some unthinkable disaster, and the feeling that she had to outrun it. She had to reach Ellis Wyatt and stop him. She did not know what it was that she had to prevent. She knew only that she had to stop him.

And because, were she lying crushed under the ruins of a building, were she torn by the bomb of an air raid, so long as she was still in existence she would know that action is man's foremost obligation, regardless of anything he feels—she was able to run down the platform and to see the face of the stationmaster when she found him—she was able to order: "Hold Number 57 for me!"—then to run to the privacy of a telephone booth in the darkness beyond the end of the platform, and to give the long-distance operator the number of Ellis Wyatt's house.

She stood, propped up by the walls of the booth, her eyes closed, and listened to the dead whirl of metal which was the sound of a bell ringing somewhere. It brought no answer. The bell kept coming in sudden spasms, like a drill going through her ear, through her body.

She clutched the receiver as if, unheeded, it were still a form of contact.

She wished the bell were louder. She forgot that the sound she heard was not the one ringing in his house. She did not know that she was screaming, "Ellis, don't! Don't! Don't I"—until she heard the cold, reproving voice of the operator say, "Your party does not answer."

She sat at the window of a coach of Train Number 57, and listened to the clicking of the wheels on the rails of Rearden Metal, She sat, unresisting, swaying with the motion of the train. The black luster of the window hid the countryside she did not want to see. It was her second run on the John Galt Line, and she tried not to think of the first.

The bondholders, she thought, the bondholders of the John Galt Line—it was to her honor that they had entrusted their money, the saving and achievement of years, it was on her ability that they had staked it, it was on her work that they had relied and on their own—and she had been made to betray them into a looters' trap: there would be no trains and no life-blood of freight, the John Galt Line had been only a drainpipe that had permitted Jim Taggart to make a deal and to drain their wealth, unearned, into his pocket, in exchange for letting others drain his railroad—the bonds of the John Galt Line, which, this morning, had been the proud guardians of their owners' security and future, had become in the space of an hour, scraps of paper that no one would buy, with no value, no future, no power, save the power to close the doors and stop the wheels of the last hope of the country—and Taggart Transcontinental was not a living plant, fed by blood it had worked to produce, but a cannibal of the moment, devouring the unborn children of greatness.

The tax on Colorado, she thought, the tax collected from Ellis Wyatt to pay for the livelihood of those whose job was to tie him and make him unable to live, those who would stand on guard to see that he got no trains, no tank cars, no pipeline of Rearden Metal—Ellis Wyatt, stripped of the right of serf-defense, left without voice, without weapons, and worse: made to be the tool of his own destruction, the supporter of his own destroyers, the provider of their food and of their weapons—Ellis Wyatt being choked, with his own bright energy turned against him as the noose—Ellis Wyatt, who had wanted to tap an unlimited source of shale oil and who spoke of a Second Renaissance. . . .

She sat bent over, her head on her arms, slumped at the, ledge of the window—while the great curves of the green-blue rail, the mountains, the valleys, the new towns of Colorado went by in the darkness, unseen.

The sudden jolt of brakes on wheels threw her upright. It was an unscheduled stop, and the platform of the small station was crowded with people, all looking off in the same direction. The passengers around her were pressing to the windows, staring. She leaped to her feet, she ran down the aisle, down the steps, into the cold wind sweeping the platform.

In the instant before she saw it and her scream cut the voices of the crowd, she knew that she had known that which she was to see. In a break between mountains, lighting the sky, throwing a glow that swayed on the roofs and walls of the station, the hill of Wyatt Oil was a solid sheet of flame.

Later, when they told her that Ellis Wyatt had vanished, leaving nothing behind but a board he had nailed to a post at the foot of the hill, when she looked at his handwriting on the board, she felt as if she had almost known that these would be the words: "I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. It's yours."

PART II
EITHER-OR

CHAPTER I
THE MAN WHO BELONGED ON EARTH

Dr. Robert Stadler paced his office, wishing he would not feel the cold. Spring had been late in coming. Beyond the window, the dead gray of the hills looked like the smeared transition from the soiled white of the sky to the leaden black of the river. Once in a while, a distant patch of hillside flared into a silver-yellow that was almost green, then vanished. The clouds kept cracking for the width of a single sunray, then oozing closed again. It was not cold in the office, thought Dr. Stadler, it was that view that froze the place.

It was not cold today, the chill was in his bones—he thought—the stored accumulation of the winter months, when he had had to be distracted from his work by an awareness of such a matter as inadequate heating and people had talked about conserving fuel. It was preposterous, he thought, this growing intrusion of the accidents of nature into the affairs of men: it had never mattered before, if a winter happened to be unusually severe; if a flood washed out a section of railroad track, one did not spend two weeks eating canned vegetables; if an electric storm struck some power station, an establishment such as the State Science Institute was not left without electricity for five days. Five days of stillness this winter, he thought, with the great laboratory motors stopped and irretrievable hours wiped out, when his staff had been working on problems that involved the heart of the universe. He turned angrily away from the window—but stopped and turned back to it again. He did not want to see the book that lay on his desk.

He wished Dr. Ferris would come. He glanced at his watch: Dr.

Ferris was late—an astonishing matter—late for an appointment with him—Dr. Floyd Ferris, the valet of science, who had always faced him in a manner that suggested an apology for having but one hat to take off.

This was outrageous weather for the month of May, he thought, looking down at the river; it was certainly the weather that made him feel as he did, not the book. He had placed the book in plain view on his desk, when he had noted that his reluctance to see it was more than mere revulsion, that it contained the element of an emotion never to be admitted. He told himself that he had risen from his desk, not because the book lay there, but merely because he had wanted to move, feeling cold. He paced the room, trapped between the desk and the window. He would throw that book in the ash can where it belonged, he thought, just as soon as he had spoken to Dr. Ferris.

He watched the patch of green and sunlight on the distant hill, the promise of spring in a world that looked as if no grass or bud would ever function again. He smiled eagerly—and when the patch vanished, he felt a stab of humiliation, at his own eagerness, at the desperate way he had wanted to hold it. It reminded him of that interview with the eminent novelist, last winter. The novelist had come from Europe to write an article about him—and he, who had once despised interviews, had talked eagerly, lengthily, too lengthily, seeing a promise of intelligence in the novelist's face, feeling a causeless, desperate need to be understood. The article had come out as a collection of sentences that gave him exorbitant praise and garbled every thought he had expressed. Closing the magazine, he had felt what he was feeling now at the desertion of a sunray.

All right—he thought, turning away from the window—he would concede that attacks of loneliness had begun to strike him at times; but it was a loneliness to which he was entitled, it was hunger for the response of some living, thinking mind. He was so tired of all those people, he thought in contemptuous bitterness; he dealt with cosmic rays, while they were unable to deal with an electric storm.

He felt the sudden contraction of his mouth, like a slap denying him the right to pursue this course of thought. He was looking at the book on his desk. Its glossy jacket was glaring and new; it had been published two weeks ago. But I had nothing to do with it!—he screamed to himself; the scream seemed wasted on a merciless silence; nothing answered it, no echo of forgiveness. The title on the book's jacket was Why Do You Think You Think?

There was no sound in that courtroom silence within him, no pity, no voice of defense—nothing but the paragraphs which his great memory had reprinted on his brain: "Thought is a primitive superstition. Reason is an irrational idea.

The childish notion that we are able to think has been mankind's costliest error."

"What you think you think is an illusion created by your glands, your emotions and, in the last analysis, by the content of your stomach."

"That gray matter you're so proud of is like a mirror in an amusement park which transmits to you nothing but distorted signals from a reality forever beyond your grasp."

"The more certain you feel of your rational conclusions, the more certain you are to be wrong. Your brain being an instrument of distortion, the more active the brain the greater the distortion."

"The giants of the intellect, whom you admire so much, once taught you that the earth was flat and that the atom was the smallest particle of matter. The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies, not of achievements."

"The more we know, the more we learn that we know nothing."

"Only the crassest ignoramus can still hold to the old-fashioned notion that seeing is believing. That which you see is the first thing to disbelieve."

"A scientist knows that a stone is not a stone at all. It is, in fact, identical with a feather pillow. Both are only a cloud formation of the same invisible, whirling particles. But, you say, you can't use a stone for a pillow? Well, that merely proves your helplessness in the face of actual reality."

"The latest scientific discoveries—such as the tremendous achievements of Dr. Robert Stadler—have demonstrated conclusively that our reason is incapable of dealing with the nature of the universe. These discoveries have led scientists to contradictions which are impossible, according to the human mind, but which exist in reality nonetheless.

If you have not yet heard it, my dear old-fashioned friends, it has now been proved that the rational is the insane."

"Do not expect consistency. Everything is a contradiction of everything else. Nothing exists but contradictions."

"Do not look for 'common sense.' To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense. The only crusaders for 'sense' are the studious type of adolescent old maid who can't find a boy friend, and the old-fashioned shopkeeper who thinks that the universe is as simple as his neat little inventory and beloved cash register."

"Let us break the chains of the prejudice called Logic. Are we going to be stopped by a syllogism?"

"So you think you're sure of your opinions? You cannot be sure of anything. Are you going to endanger the harmony of your community, your fellowship with your neighbors, your standing, reputation, good name and financial security—for the sake of an illusion? For the sake of the mirage of thinking that you think? Are you going to run risks and court disasters—at a precarious time like ours—by opposing the existing social order in the name of those imaginary notions of yours which you call your convictions? You say that you're sure you're right? Nobody is right, or ever can be. You feel that the world around you is wrong? You have no means to know it. Everything is wrong in human eyes—so why fight it? Don't argue. Accept. Adjust yourself. Obey."

The book was written by Dr. Floyd Ferris and published by the State Science Institute.

"I had nothing to do with it!" said Dr. Robert Stadler. He stood still by the side of his desk, with the uncomfortable feeling of having missed some beat of time, of not knowing how long the preceding moment had lasted. He had pronounced the words aloud, in a tone of rancorous sarcasm directed at whoever had made him say it.

He shrugged. Resting on the belief that self-mockery is an act of virtue, the shrug was the emotional equivalent of the sentence: You're Robert Stadler, don't act like a high-school neurotic. He sat down at his desk and pushed the book aside with the back of his hand.

Dr. Floyd Ferris arrived half an hour late. "Sorry," he said, "but my car broke down again on the way from Washington and I had a hell of a time trying to find somebody to fix it—there's getting to be so damn few cars out on the road that half the service stations are closed."

There was more annoyance than apology in his voice. He sat down without waiting for an invitation to do so.

- Dr. Floyd Ferris would not have been noticed as particularly handsome in any other profession, but in the one he had chosen he was always described as "that good-looking scientist." He was six feet tall and forty-five years old, but he managed to look taller and younger.

He had an air of immaculate grooming and a ballroom grace of motion, but his clothes were severe, his suits being usually black or midnight blue. He had a finely traced mustache, and his smooth black hair made the Institute office boys say that he used the same shoe polish on both ends of him. He did not mind repeating, in the tone of a joke on himself, that a movie producer once said he would cast him for the part of a titled European gigolo. He had begun his career as a biologist, but that was forgotten long ago; he was famous as the Top Co-ordinator of the State Science Institute.

Dr. Stadler glanced at him with astonishment—the lack of apology was unprecedented—and said dryly, "It seems to me that you are spending a great deal of your time in Washington."

"But, Dr. Stadler, wasn't it you who once paid me the compliment of calling me the watchdog of this Institute?" said Dr. Ferris pleasantly.

"Isn't that my most essential duty?"

"A few of your duties seem to be accumulating right around this place. Before I forget it, would you mind telling me what's going on here about that oil shortage mess?"

He could not understand why Dr. Ferris' face tightened into an injured look, "You will permit me to say that this is unexpected and unwarranted," said Dr. Ferris in that tone of formality which conceals pain and reveals martyrdom. "None of the authorities involved have found cause for criticism. We have just submitted a detailed report on the progress of the work to date to the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources, and Mr. Wesley Mouch has expressed himself as satisfied. We have done our best on that project. We have heard no one else describe it as a mess. Considering the difficulties of the terrain, the hazards of the fire and the fact that it has been only six months since we—"

"What are you talking about?" asked Dr. Stadler.

"The Wyatt Reclamation Project. Isn't that what you asked me?"

"No," said Dr. Stadler, "no, I . . . Wait a moment. Let me get this straight. I seem to recall something about this Institute taking charge of a reclamation project. What is it that you're reclaiming?"

"Oil," said Dr. Ferris. "The Wyatt oil fields."

"That was a fire, wasn't it? In Colorado? That was . . . wait a moment . . . that was the man who set fire to his own oil wells."

"I'm inclined to believe that that's a rumor created by public hysteria," said Dr. Ferris dryly. '"A rumor with some undesirable, unpatriotic implications. I wouldn't put too much faith in those newspaper stories. Personally, I believe that it was an accident and that Ellis Wyatt perished in the fire."

"Well, who owns those fields now?"

"Nobody—at the moment. There being no will or heirs, the government has taken charge of operating the fields—as a measure of public necessity—for seven years. If Ellis Wyatt does not return within that time, he will be considered officially dead."

"Well, why did they come to you—to us, for such an unlikely assignment as oil pumping?"

"Because it is a problem of great technological difficulty, requiring the services of the best scientific talent available. You see, it is a matter of reconstructing the special method of oil extraction that Wyatt had employed. His equipment is still there, though in a dreadful condition; some of his processes are known, but somehow there is no full record of the complete operation or the basic principle involved. That is what we have to rediscover."

"And how is it going?"

"The progress is most gratifying. We have just been granted a new and larger appropriation. Mr. Wesley Mouch is pleased with our work.

So are Mr. Balch of the Emergency Commission, Mr. Anderson of Crucial Supplies and Mr. Pettibone of Consumers' Protection. I do not see what more could be expected of us. The project is fully successful."

"Have you produced any oil?"

"No, but we have succeeded in forcing a flow from one of the wells, to the extent of six and a half gallons. This, of course, is merely of experimental significance, but you must take into consideration the fact that we had to spend three full months just to put out the fire, which has now been totally—almost totally—extinguished. We have a much tougher problem than Wyatt ever had, because he started from scratch while we have to deal with the disfigured wreckage of an act of vicious, anti-social sabotage which . . . I mean to say, it is a difficult problem, but there is no doubt that we will be able to solve it."

"Well, what I really asked you about was the oil shortage here, in the Institute. The level of temperature maintained in this building all winter was outrageous. They told me that they had to conserve oil.

Surely you could have seen to it that the matter of keeping this place adequately supplied with such things as oil was handled more efficiently."

"Oh, is that what you had in mind, Dr. Stadler? Oh, but I am so sorry!" The words came with a bright smile of relief on Dr. Ferris' face; his solicitous manner returned. "Do you mean that the temperature was low enough to cause you discomfort?"

"I mean that I nearly froze to death."

"But that is unforgivable! Why didn't they tell me? Please accept my personal apology, Dr. Stadler, and rest assured that you will never be inconvenienced again. The only excuse I can offer for our maintenance department is that the shortage of fuel was not due to their negligence, it was—oh, I realize that you would not know about it and such matters should not take up your invaluable attention—but, you see, the oil shortage last winter was a nation-wide crisis."

"Why? For heaven's sake, don't tell me that those Wyatt fields were the only source of oil in the country!"

"No, no, but the sudden disappearance of a major supply wrought havoc in the entire oil market. So the government had to assume control and impose oil rationing on the country, in order to protect the essential enterprises. I did obtain an unusually large quota for the Institute—and only by the special favor of some very special connections—but I feel abjectly guilty if this proved insufficient. Rest assured that it will not happen again. It is only a temporary emergency. By next winter, we shall have the Wyatt fields back in production, and conditions will return to normal. Besides, as far as this Institute is concerned, I made all the arrangements to convert our furnaces to coal, and it was to be done next month, only the Stockton Foundry in Colorado closed down suddenly, without notice—they were casting parts for our furnaces, but Andrew Stockton retired, quite unexpectedly, and now we have to wait till his nephew reopens the plant."

"I see. Well, I trust that you will take care of it among all your other activities." Dr. Stadler shrugged with annoyance. "It is becoming a little ridiculous—the number of technological ventures that an institution of science has to handle for the government."

"But, Dr. Stadler—"

“I know, I know, it can't be avoided. By the way, what is Project X?"

Dr. Ferris' eyes shot to him swiftly—an odd, bright glance of alertness, that seemed startled, but not frightened. "Where did you hear about Project X, Dr. Stadler?"

"Oh, I heard a couple of your younger boys saying something about it with an air of mystery you'd expect from amateur detectives. They told me it was something very secret."

"That's right, Dr. Stadler. It is an extremely secret research project which the government has entrusted to us. And it is of utmost importance that the newspapers get no word about it."

"What's the X?"

"Xylophone. Project Xylophone. That is a code name, of course.

The work has to do with sound. But I am sure that it would not interest you. It is a purely technological undertaking."

"Yes, do spare me the story. I have no time for your technological undertakings."

"May I suggest that it would be advisable to refrain from mentioning the words 'Project X' to anyone, Dr. Stadler?"

"Oh, all right, all right. I must say I do not enjoy discussions of that kind."

"But of course! And I wouldn't forgive myself if I allowed your time to be taken up by such concerns. Please feel certain that you may safely leave it to me." He made a movement to rise. "Now if this was the reason you wanted to see me, please believe that I—"

"No,” said Dr. Stadler slowly. "This was not the reason I wanted to see you."

Dr. Ferris volunteered no questions, no eager offers of service; he remained seated, merely waiting.

Dr. Stadler reached over and made the book slide from the corner to the center of his desk, with a contemptuous flick of one hand. "Will you tell me, please," he asked, "what is this piece of indecency?"

Dr. Ferris did not glance at the book, but kept his eyes fixed on Stadler's for an inexplicable moment; then he leaned back and said with an odd smile, "I feel honored that you chose to make such an exception for my sake as reading a popular book. This little piece has sold twenty thousand copies in two weeks."

"I have read it."

"And?"

"I expect an explanation."

"Did you find the text confusing?"

Dr. Stadler looked at him in bewilderment. "Do you realize what theme you chose to treat and in what manner? The style alone, the style, the gutter kind of attitude—for a subject of this nature!"

"Do you think, then, that the content deserved a more dignified form of presentation?" The voice was so innocently smooth that Dr.

Stadler could not decide whether this was mockery.

"Do you realize what you're preaching in this book?"

"Since you do not seem to approve of it, Dr. Stadler, I'd rather have you think that I wrote it innocently."

This was it, thought Dr. Stadler, this was the incomprehensible element in Ferris' manner: he had supposed that an indication of his disapproval would be sufficient, but Ferris seemed to remain untouched by it "If a drunken lout could find the power to express himself on paper," said Dr. Stadler, "if he could give voice to his essence—the eternal savage, leering his hatred of the mind—this is the sort of book I would expect him to write. But to see it come from a scientist, under the imprint of this Institute!"

"But, Dr. Stadler, this book was not intended to be read by scientists. It was written for that drunken lout."

"What do you mean?"

"For the general public."

"But, good God! The feeblest imbecile should be able to see the glaring contradictions in every one of your statements."

"Let us put it this way, Dr. Stadler: the man who doesn't see that, deserves to believe all my statements."

"But you've given the prestige of science to that unspeakable stuff!

It was all right for a disreputable mediocrity like Simon Pritchett to drool it as some sort of woozy mysticism—nobody listened to him. But you've made them think it's science. Science! You've taken the achievements of the mind to destroy the mind. By what right did you use my work to make an unwarranted, preposterous switch into another field, pull an inapplicable metaphor and draw a monstrous generalization out of what is merely a mathematical problem? By what right did you make it sound as if I—I!-—gave my sanction to that book?"

Dr. Ferris did nothing, he merely looked at Dr. Stadler calmly; but the calm gave him an air that was almost patronizing. "Now, you see, Dr. Stadler, you're speaking as if this book were addressed to a thinking audience. If it were, one would have to be concerned with such matters as accuracy, validity, logic and the prestige of science. But it isn't. It's addressed to the public. And you have always been first to believe that the public does not think." He paused, but Dr, Stadler said nothing.

"This book may have no philosophical value whatever, but it has a great psychological value."

"Just what is that?"

"You see, Dr. Stadler, people don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue—a highly intellectual virtue—out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt."

"And you propose to pander to that?"

"That is the road to popularity."

"Why should you seek popularity?"

Dr. Ferris' eyes moved casually to Dr. Stadler's face, as if by pure accident. "We are a public institution," he answered evenly, "supported by public funds."

"So you tell people that science is a futile fraud which ought to be abolished!"

"That is a conclusion which could be drawn, in logic, from my book.

But that is not the conclusion they will draw."

"And what about the disgrace to the Institute in the eyes of the men of intelligence, wherever such may be left?”

"Why should we worry about them?"

Dr. Stadler could have regarded the sentence as conceivable, had it been uttered with hatred, envy or malice; but the absence of any such emotion, the casual ease of the voice, an ease suggesting a chuckle, hit him like a moment's glimpse of a realm that could not be taken as part of reality; the thing spreading down to his stomach was cold terror.

"Did you observe the reactions to my book, Dr. Stadler? It was received with considerable favor."

"Yes—and that is what I find impossible to believe." He had to speak, he had to speak as if this were a civilized discussion, he could not allow himself time to know what it was he had felt for a moment.

"I am unable to understand the attention you received in all the reputable academic magazines and how they could permit themselves to discuss your book seriously. If Hugh Akston were around, no academic publication would have dared to treat this as a work admissible into the realm of philosophy."

"He is not around."

Dr. Stadler felt that there were words which he was now called upon to pronounce—and he wished he could end this conversation before he discovered what they were.

"On the other hand," said Dr, Ferris, "the ads for my book—oh, I'm sure you wouldn't notice such things as ads—quote a letter of high praise which I received from Mr. Wesley Mouch."

"Who the hell is Mr. Wesley Mouch?"

Dr. Ferris smiled. "In another year, even you won't ask that question, Dr. Stadler. Let us put it this way: Mr. Mouch is the man who is rationing oil—for the time being."

"Then I suggest that you stick to your job. Deal with Mr. Mouch and leave him the realm of oil furnaces, but leave the realm of ideas to me."

"It would be curious to try to formulate the line of demarcation,” said Dr. Ferris, in the tone of an idle academic remark. "But if we're talking about my book, why, then we're talking about the realm of public relations." He turned to point solicitously at the mathematical formulas chalked on the blackboard. "Dr. Stadler, it would be disastrous if you allowed the realm of public relations to distract you from the work which you alone on earth are capable of doing."

It was said with obsequious deference, and Dr. Stadler could not tell what made him hear in it the sentence: "Stick to your blackboard!"

He felt a biting irritation and he switched it against himself, thinking angrily that he had to get rid of these suspicions.

"Public relations?" he said contemptuously. "I don't see any practical purpose in your book. I don't see what it's intended to accomplish."

"Don't you?" Dr. Ferris1 eyes flickered briefly to his face; the sparkle of insolence was too swift to be identified with certainty.

"I cannot permit myself to consider certain things as possible in a civilized society," Dr. Stadler said sternly.

"That is admirably exact," said Dr. Ferris cheerfully. "You cannot permit yourself."

Dr. Ferris rose, being first to indicate that the interview was ended.

"Please call for me whenever anything occurs in this Institute to cause you discomfort, Dr. Stadler," he said. "It is my privilege always to be at your service."

Knowing that he had to assert his authority, smothering the shameful realization of the sort of substitute he was choosing, Dr. Stadler said imperiously, in a tone of sarcastic rudeness, "The next time I call for you, you'd better do something about that car of yours."

"Yes, Dr. Stadler. I shall make certain never to be late again, and I beg you to forgive me." Dr. Ferris responded as if playing a part on cue; as if he were pleased that Dr. Stadler had learned, at last, the modern method of communication. "My car has been causing me a great deal of trouble, it's falling to pieces, and I had ordered a new one sometime ago, the best one on the market, a Hammond convertible—but Lawrence Hammond went out of business last week, without reason or warning, so now I'm stuck. Those bastards seem to be vanishing somewhere. Something will have to be done about it."

When Ferris had gone, Dr. Stadler sat at his desk, his shoulders shrinking together, conscious only of a desperate wish not to be seen by anyone. In the fog of the pain which he would not define, there was also the desperate feeling that no one—no one of those he valued—would ever wish to see him again.

He knew the words which he had not uttered. He had not said that he would denounce the book in public and repudiate it in the name of the Institute. He had not said it, because he had been afraid to discover that the threat would leave Ferris unmoved, that Ferris was safe, that the word of Dr. Robert Stadler had no power any longer. And while he told himself that he would consider later the question of making a public protest, he knew that he would not make it.

He picked up the book and let it drop into the wastebasket.

A face came to his mind, suddenly and clearly, as if he were seeing the purity of its every line, a young face he had not permitted himself to recall for years. He thought: No, he has not read this book, he won't see it, he's dead, he must have died long ago. . . . The sharp pain was the shock of discovering simultaneously that this was the man he longed to see more than any other being in the world—and that he had to hope that this man was dead.

He did not know why—when the telephone rang and his secretary told him that Miss Dagny Taggart was on the line—why he seized the receiver with eagerness and noticed that his hand was trembling. She would never want to see him again, he had thought for over a year. He heard her clear, impersonal voice asking for an appointment to see him.

"Yes, Miss Taggart, certainly, yes, indeed. . . . Monday morning?

Yes—look, Miss Taggart, I have an engagement in New York today, I could drop in at your office this afternoon, if you wish. . . . No, no —no trouble at all, I'll be delighted. . . . This afternoon, Miss Taggart, about two—I mean, about four o'clock."

He had no engagement in New York. He did not give himself time to know what had prompted him to do it. He was smiling eagerly, looking at a patch of sunlight on a distant hill.

Dagny drew a black line across Train Number 93 on the schedule, and felt a moment's desolate satisfaction in noting that she did it calmly. It was an action which she had had to perform many times in the last six months. It had been hard, at first; it was becoming easier.

The day would come, she thought, when she would be able to deliver that death stroke even without the small salute of an effort. Train Number 93 was a freight that had earned its living by carrying supplies to Hammondsville, Colorado.

She knew what steps would come next: first, the death of the special freights—then the shrinking in the number of boxcars for Hammondsville, attached, like poor relatives, to the rear end of freights bound for other towns—then the gradual cutting of the stops at Hammondsville Station from the schedules of the passenger trains—then the day when she would strike Hammondsville, Colorado, off the map. That had been the progression of Wyatt Junction and of the town called Stockton.

She knew—once word was received that Lawrence Hammond had retired—that it was useless to wait, to hope and to wonder whether his cousin, his lawyer or a committee of local citizens would reopen the plant. She knew it was time to start cutting the schedules.

It had lasted less than six months after Ellis Wyatt had gone—that period which a columnist had gleefully called "the field day of the little fellow." Every oil operator in the country, who owned three wells and whined that Ellis Wyatt left him no chance of livelihood, had rushed to fill the hole which Wyatt had left wide open. They formed leagues, cooperatives, associations; they pooled their resources and their letter heads, "The little fellow's day in the sun," the columnist had said. Their sun had been the flames that twisted through the derricks of Wyatt Oil. In its glare, they made the kind of fortunes they had dreamed about, fortunes requiring no competence or effort. Then their biggest customers, such as power companies, who drank oil by the trainful and would make no allowances for human frailty, began to convert to coal —and the smaller customers, who were more tolerant, began to go out of business—the boys in Washington imposed rationing on oil and an emergency tax on employers to support the unemployed oil field workers—then a few of the big oil companies closed down—then the little fellows in the sun discovered that a drilling bit which had cost a hundred dollars, now cost them five hundred, there being no market for oil field equipment, and the suppliers having to earn on one drill what they had earned on five, or perish—then the pipe lines began to close, there being no one able to pay for their upkeep—then the railroads were granted permission to raise their freight rates, there being little oil to carry and the cost of running tank trains having crushed two small lines out of existence—and when the sun went down, they saw that the operating costs, which had once permitted them to exist on their sixty-acre fields, had been made possible by the miles of Wyatt's hillside and had gone in the same coils of smoke. Not until their fortunes had vanished and their pumps had stopped, did the little fellows realize that no business in the country could afford to buy oil at the price it would now take them to produce it. Then the boys in Washington granted subsidies to the oil operators, but not all of the oil operators had friends in Washington, and there followed a situation which no one cared to examine too closely or to discuss.

Andrew Stockton had been in the sort of position which most of the businessmen envied. The rush to convert to coal had descended upon his shoulders like a weight of gold: he had kept his plant working around the clock, running a race with next winter's blizzards, casting parts for coal-burning stoves and furnaces. There were not many dependable foundries left; he had become one of the main pillars supporting the cellars and kitchens of the country. The pillar collapsed without warning. Andrew Stockton announced that lie was retiring, closed his plant and vanished. He left no word on what he wished to be done with the plant or whether his relatives had the right to reopen it.

There still were cars on the roads of the country, but they moved like travelers in the desert, who ride past the warning skeletons of horses bleached by the sun: they moved past the skeletons of cars that had collapsed on duty and had been left in the ditches by the side of the road. People were not buying cars any longer, and the automobile factories were closing. But there were men still able to get oil, by means of friendships that nobody cared to question. These men bought cars at any price demanded. Lights flooded the mountains of Colorado from the great windows of the plant, where the assembly belts of Lawrence Hammond poured trucks and cars to the sidings of Taggart Transcontinental. The word that Lawrence Hammond had retired came when least expected, brief and sudden like the single stroke of a bell in a heavy stillness. A committee of local citizens was now broadcasting appeals on the radio, begging Lawrence Hammond, wherever he was, to give them permission to reopen his plant. There was no answer.

She had screamed when Ellis Wyatt went; she had gasped when Andrew Stockton retired; when she heard that Lawrence Hammond had quit, she asked impassively, "Who's next?"

"No, Miss Taggart, I can't explain it," the sister of Andrew Stockton had told her on her last trip to Colorado, two months ago. "He never said a word to me and I don't even know whether he's dead or living, same as Ellis Wyatt. No, nothing special had happened the day before he quit. I remember only that some man came to see him on that last evening. A stranger I'd never seen before. They talked late into the night—when I went to sleep, the light was still burning in Andrew's study."

People were silent in the towns of Colorado. Dagny had seen the way they walked in the streets, past their small drugstores, hardware stores and grocery markets: as if they hoped that the motions of their jobs would save them from looking ahead at the future. She, too, had walked through those streets, trying not to lift her head, not to see the ledges of sooted rock and twisted steel, which had been the Wyatt oil fields. They could be seen from many of the towns; when she had looked ahead, she had seen them in the distance.

One well, on the crest of the hill, was still burning. Nobody had been able to extinguish it. She had seen it from the streets: a spurt of fire twisting convulsively against the sky, as if trying to tear loose. She had seen it at night, across the distance of a hundred clear, black miles, from the window of a train: a small, violent flame, waving in the wind.

People called it Wyatt's Torch.

The longest train on the John Galt Line had forty cars; the fastest ran at fifty miles an hour. The engines had to be spared: they were coal burning engines, long past their age of retirement. Jim obtained the oil for the Diesels that pulled the Comet and a few of their transcontinental freights. The only source of fuel she could count on and deal with was Ken Danagger of Danagger Coal in Pennsylvania.

Empty trains clattered through the four states that were tied, as neighbors, to the throat of Colorado. They carried a few carloads of sheep, some corn, some melons and an occasional farmer with an overdressed family, who had friends in Washington. Jim had obtained a subsidy from Washington for every train that was run, not as a profit making carrier, but as a service of "public equality."

It took every scrap of her energy to keep trains running through the sections where they were still needed, in the areas that were still producing. But on the balance sheets of Taggart Transcontinental, the checks of Jim's subsidies for empty trains bore larger figures than the profit brought by the best freight train of the busiest industrial division.

Jim boasted that this had been the most prosperous six months in Taggart history. Listed as profit, on the glossy pages of his report to the stockholders, was the money he had not earned—the subsidies for empty trains; and the money he did not own—the sums that should have gone to pay the interest and the retirement of Taggart bonds, the debt which, by the will of Wesley Mouch, he had been permitted not to pay. He boasted about the greater volume of freight carried by Taggart trains in Arizona—where Dan Conway had closed the last of the Phoenix-Durango and retired; and in Minnesota—where Paul Larkin was shipping iron ore by rail, and the last of the ore boats on the Great Lakes had gone out of existence.

"You have always considered money-making as such an important virtue," Jim had said to her with an odd half-smile. "Well, it seems to me that I'm better at it than you are."

Nobody professed to understand the question of the frozen railroad bonds; perhaps, because everybody understood it too well. At first, there had been signs of a panic among the bondholders and of a dangerous indignation among the public. Then, Wesley Mouch had issued another directive, which ruled that people could get their bonds "defrozen" upon a plea of "essential need": the government would purchase the bonds, if it found the proof of the need satisfactory. There were three questions that no one answered or asked: "What constituted proof?" "What constituted need?" "Essential—to whom?"

Then it became bad manners to discuss why one man received the grant defreezing his money, while another had been refused. People turned away in mouth-pinched silence, if anybody asked a "why?" One was supposed to describe, not to explain, to catalogue facts, not to evaluate them: Mr. Smith had been defrozen, Mr. Jones had not; that was all. And when Mr. Jones committed suicide, people said, "Well, I don't know, if he'd really needed his money, the government would have given it to him, but some men arc just greedy."

One was not supposed to speak about the men who, having been refused, sold their bonds for one-third of the value to other men who possessed needs which, miraculously, made thirty-three frozen cents melt into a whole dollar; or about a new profession practiced by bright young boys just out of college, who called themselves "defreezers" and offered their services "to help you draft your application in the proper modern terms." The boys had friends in Washington, Looking at the Taggart rail from the platform of some country station, she had found herself feeling, not the brilliant pride she had once felt, but a foggy, guilty shame, as if some foul kind of rust had grown on the metal, and worse: as if the rust had a tinge of blood. But then, in the concourse of the Terminal, she looked at the statue of Nat Taggart and thought: It was your rail, you made it, you fought for it, you were not stopped by fear or by loathing—I won't surrender it to the men of blood and rust—and I'm the only one left to guard it.

She had not given up her quest for the man who invented the motor.

It was the only part of her work that made her able to bear the rest.

It was the only goal in sight that gave meaning to her struggle. There were times when she wondered why she wanted to rebuild that motor.

What for?—some voice seemed to ask her. Because I'm still alive, she answered. But her quest had remained futile. Her two engineers had found nothing in Wisconsin. She had sent them to search through the country for men who had worked for Twentieth Century, to learn the name of the inventor. They had learned nothing. She had sent them to search through the files of the Patent Office; no patent for the motor had ever been registered.

The only remnant of her personal quest was the stub of the cigarette with the dollar sign. She had forgotten it, until a recent evening, when she had found it in a drawer of her desk and given it to her friend at the cigar counter of the concourse. The old man had been very astonished, as he examined the stub, holding it cautiously between two fingers; he had never heard of such a brand and wondered how he could have missed it. "Was it of good quality, Miss Taggart?" "The best I've ever smoked." He had shaken his head, puzzled. He had promised to discover where those cigarettes were made and to get her a carton.

She had tried to find a scientist able to attempt the reconstruction of the motor. She had interviewed the men recommended to her as the best in their field. The first one, after studying the remnants of the motor and of the manuscript, had declared, in the tone of a drill sergeant, that the thing could not work, had never worked and he would prove that no. such motor could ever be made to work. The second one had drawled,, in the tone of an answer to a boring imposition, that he did not know whether it could be done or not and did not care to find out. The third had said, his voice belligerently insolent, that he would attempt the task on a ten-year contract at twenty-five thousand dollars a year—"After all, Miss Taggart, if you expect to make huge profits on that motor, it's you who should pay for the gamble of my time." The fourth, who was the youngest, had looked at her silently for a moment and the lines of his face had slithered from blankness into a suggestion of contempt.

"You know, Miss Taggart, I don't think that such a motor should ever be made, even if somebody did learn how to make it. It would be so superior to anything we've got that it would be unfair to lesser scientists, because it would leave no field for their achievements and abilities. I don't think that the strong should have the right to wound the self esteem of the weak." She had ordered him out of her office, and had sat in incredulous horror before the fact that the most vicious statement she had ever heard had been uttered in a tone of moral righteousness.

The decision to speak to Dr. Robert Stadler had been her last recourse.

She had forced herself to call him, against the resistance of some immovable point within her that felt like brakes slammed tight. She had argued against herself. She had thought: I deal with men like Jim and Orren Boyle—his guilt is less than theirs—why can't I speak to him?

She had found no answer, only a stubborn sense of reluctance, only the feeling that of all the men on earth, Dr. Robert Stadler was the one she must not call.

As she sat at her desk, over the schedules of the John Galt Line, waiting for Dr. Stadler to come, she wondered why no first-rate talent had risen in the field of science for years. She was unable to look for an answer. She was looking at the black line which was the corpse of Train Number 93 on the schedule before her.

A train has the two great attributes of life, she thought, motion and purpose; this had been like a living entity, but now it was only a number of dead freight cars and engines. Don't give yourself time to fee], she thought, dismember the carcass as fast as possible, the engines are needed all over the system, Ken Danagger in Pennsylvania needs trains, more trains, if only—

"Dr. Robert Stadler," said the voice of the interoffice communicator on her desk.

He came in, smiling; the smile seemed to underscore his words: "Miss Taggart, would you care to believe how helplessly glad I am to see you again?"

She did not smile, she looked gravely courteous as she answered, "It was very kind of you to come here." She bowed, her slender figure standing tautly straight but for the slow, formal movement of her head.

"What if I confessed that all I needed was some plausible excuse in order to come? Would it astonish you?"

"I would try not to overtax your courtesy." She did not smile. "Please sit down, Dr. Stadler,"

He looked brightly around him. "I've never seen the office of a railroad executive. I didn't know it would be so . . . so solemn a place. Is that in the nature of the job?"

"The matter on which I'd like to ask your advice is far removed from the field of your interests, Dr. Stadler. You may think it odd that I should call on you. Please allow me to explain my reason."

"The fact that you wished to call on me is a fully sufficient reason. If I can be of any service to you, any service whatever, I don't know what would please me more at this moment." His smile had an attractive quality, the smile of a man of the world who used it, not to cover his words, but to stress the audacity of expressing a sincere emotion.

"My problem is a matter of technology," she said, in the clear, expressionless tone of a young mechanic discussing a difficult assignment.

"I fully realize your contempt for that branch of science. I do not expect you to solve my problem—it is not the kind of work which you do or care about. I should like only to submit the problem to you, and then I'll have just two questions to ask you. I had to call on you, because it is a matter that involves someone's mind, a very great mind, and"—she spoke impersonally, in the manner of rendering exact justice—"and you are the only great mind left in this field."

She could not tell why her words bit him as they did. She saw the stillness of his face, the sudden earnestness of the eyes, a strange earnestness that seemed eager and almost pleading, then she heard his voice come gravely, as if from under the pressure of some emotion that made it sound simple and humble: "What is your problem, Miss Taggart?"

She told him about the motor and the place where she had found it; she told him that it had proved impossible to learn the name of the inventor; she did not mention the details of her quest. She handed him photographs of the motor and the remnant of the manuscript.

She watched him as he read. She saw the professional assurance in the swift, scanning motion of his eyes, at first, then the pause, then the growing intentness, then a movement of his lips which, from another man, would have been a whistle or a gasp. She saw him stop for long minutes and look off, as if his mind were racing over countless sudden trails, trying to follow them all—she saw him leaf back through the pages, then stop, then force himself to read on, as if he were torn between his eagerness to continue and his eagerness to seize all the possibilities breaking open before his vision. She saw his silent excitement, she knew that he had forgotten her office, her existence, everything but the sight of an achievement—and in tribute to his being capable of such reaction, she wished it were possible for her to like Dr. Robert Stadler.

They had been silent for over an hour, when he finished and looked up at her. "But this is extraordinary!" he said in the joyous, astonished tone of announcing some news she had not expected.

She wished she could smile in answer and grant him the comradeship of a joy celebrated together, but she merely nodded and said coldly, "Yes."

"But, Miss Taggart, this is tremendous!"

"Yes."

"Did you say it's a matter of technology? It's more, much, much more than that. The pages where he writes about his converter—you can see what premise he's speaking from. He arrived at some new concept of energy. He discarded all our standard assumptions, according to which his motor would have been impossible. He formulated a new premise of his own and he solved the secret of converting static energy into kinetic power. Do you know what that means? Do you realize what a feat of pure, abstract science he had to perform before he could make his motor?"

"Who?" she asked quietly.

"I beg your pardon?"

"That was the first of the two questions I wanted to ask you, Dr.

Stadler: can you think of any young scientist you might have known ten years ago, who would have been able to do this?"

He paused, astonished; he had not had time to wonder about that question. "No," he said slowly, frowning, "no, I can't think of anyone.

. . . And that's odd . . . because an ability of this kind couldn't have passed unnoticed anywhere . . . somebody would have called him to my attention . . . they always sent promising young physicists to me.

. . . Did you say you found this in the research laboratory of a plain, commercial motor factory?"

"Yes."

"That's odd. What was he doing in such a place?"

"Designing a motor."

"That's what I mean. A man with the genius of a great scientist, who chose to be a commercial inventor? I find it outrageous. He wanted a motor, and he quietly performed a major revolution in the science of energy, just as a means to an end, and he didn't bother to publish his findings, but went right on making his motor. Why did he want to waste his mind on practical appliances?"

"Perhaps because he liked living on this earth," she said involuntarily.

"I beg your pardon?"

"No, I . . . I'm sorry, Dr. Stadler. I did not intend to discuss any . . . irrelevant subject."

He was looking off, pursuing his own course of thought, "Why didn't he come to me? Why wasn't he in some great scientific establishment where he belonged? If he had the brains to achieve this, surely he had the brains to know the importance of what he had done. Why didn't he publish a paper on his definition of energy? I can see the general direction he'd taken, but God damn him!—the most important pages are missing, the statement isn't here! Surely somebody around him should have known enough to announce his work to the whole world of science. Why didn't they? How could they abandon, just abandon, a thing of this kind?"

"These are the questions to which I found no answers."

"And besides, from the purely practical aspect, why was that motor left in a junk pile? You'd think any greedy fool of an industrialist would have grabbed it in order to make a fortune. No intelligence was needed to see its commercial value."

She smiled for the first time—a smile ugly with bitterness; she said nothing.

"You found it impossible to trace the inventor?" he asked.

"Completely impossible—so far."

"Do you think that he is still alive?"

"I have reason to think that he is. But I can't be sure."

"Suppose I tried to advertise for him?"

"No. Don't."

"But if I were to place ads in scientific publications and have Dr.

Ferris"—he stopped; he saw her glance at him as swiftly as he glanced at her; she said nothing, but she held his glance; he looked away and finished the sentence coldly and firmly—"and have Dr. Ferris broadcast on the radio that I wish to see him, would he refuse to come?"

"Yes, Dr. Stadler, I think he would refuse."

He was not looking at her. She saw the faint tightening of his facial muscles and, simultaneously, the look of something going slack in the lines of his face; she could not tell what sort of light was dying within him nor what made her think of the death of a light.

He tossed the manuscript down on the desk with a casual, contemptuous movement of his wrist. 'Those men who do not mind being practical enough to sell their brains for money, ought to acquire a little knowledge of the conditions of practical reality."

He looked at her with a touch of defiance, as if waiting for an angry answer. But her answer was worse than anger: her face remained expressionless, as if the truth or falsehood of his convictions were of no concern to her any longer. She said politely, "The second question I wanted to ask you was whether you would be kind enough to tell me the name of any physicist you know who, in your judgment, would possess the ability to attempt the reconstruction of this motor."

He looked at her and chuckled; it was a sound of pain. "Have you been tortured by it, too, Miss Taggart? By the impossibility of finding any sort of intelligence anywhere?"

"I have interviewed some physicists who were highly recommended to me and I have found them to be hopeless."

He leaned forward eagerly. "Miss Taggart," he asked, "did you call on me because you trusted the integrity of my scientific judgment?"

The question was a naked plea.

"Yes," she answered evenly, "I trusted the integrity of your scientific judgment."

He leaned back; he looked as if some hidden smile were smoothing the tension away from his face. "I wish I could help you," he said, as to a comrade. "I most selfishly wish I could help you, because, you see, this has been my hardest problem—trying to find men of talent for my own staff. Talent, hell! I'd be satisfied with just a semblance of promise —but the men they send me couldn't be honestly said to possess the potentiality of developing into decent garage mechanics. I don't know whether I am getting older and more demanding, or whether the human race is degenerating, but the world didn't seem to be so barren of intelligence in my youth. Today, if you saw the kind of men I've had to interview, you'd—"

He stopped abruptly, as if at a sudden recollection. He remained silent; he seemed to be considering something he knew, but did not wish to tell her; she became certain of it, when he concluded brusquely, in that tone of resentment which conceals an evasion, "No, I don't know anyone I'd care to recommend to you."

"This was all I wanted to ask you, Dr. Stadler," she said. "Thank you for giving me your time."

He sat silently still for a moment, as if he could not bring himself to leave.

"Miss Taggart," he asked, "could you show me the actual motor itself?"

She looked at him, astonished. "Why, yes . . . if you wish. But it's in an underground vault, down in our Terminal tunnels."

"I don't mind, if you wouldn't mind taking me down there. I have no special motive. It's only my personal curiosity. I would like to see it—that's all."

When they stood in the granite vault, over a glass case containing a shape of broken metal, he took off his hat with a slow, absent movement—and she could not tell whether it was the routine gesture of remembering that he was in a room with a lady, or the gesture of baring one's head over a coffin.

They stood in silence, in the glare of a single light refracted from the glass surface to their faces. Train wheels were clicking in the distance, and it seemed at times as if a sudden, sharper jolt of vibration were about to awaken an answer from the corpse in the glass case.

"It's so wonderful," said Dr. Stadler, his voice low. "It's so wonderful to see a great, new, crucial idea which is not mine!"

She looked at him, wishing she could believe that she understood him correctly. He spoke, in passionate sincerity, discarding convention, discarding concern for whether it was proper to let her hear the confession of his pain, seeing nothing but the face of a woman who was able to understand: “Miss Taggart, do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own—they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal— for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them—while you'd give a year of your life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity., because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors—hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?"

"I've felt it all my life," she said. It was an answer she could not refuse him.

"I know," he said—and there was beauty in the impersonal gentleness of his voice. "I knew it the first time I spoke to you. That was why I came today—" He stopped for the briefest instant, but she did not answer the appeal and he finished with the same quiet gentleness, "Well, that was why I wanted to see the motor."

"I understand," she said softly; the tone of her voice was the only form of acknowledgment she could grant him.

"Miss Taggart," he said, his eyes lowered, looking at the glass case, "I know a man who might be able to undertake the reconstruction of that motor. He would not work for me—so he is probably the kind of man you want."

But by the time he raised his head—and before he saw the look of admiration in her eyes, the open look he had begged for, the look of forgiveness—he destroyed his single moment's atonement by adding in a voice of drawing-room sarcasm, "Apparently, the young man had no desire to work for the good of society or the welfare of science. He told me that he would not take a government job. I presume he wanted the bigger salary he could hope to obtain from a private employer."

He turned away, not to see the look that was fading from her face, not to let himself know its meaning. "Yes," she said, her voice hard, "he is probably the kind of man I want."

"He's a young physicist from the Utah Institute of Technology," he said dryly. "His name is Quentin Daniels. A friend of mine sent him to me a few months ago. He came to see me, but he would not take the job I offered. I wanted him on my staff. He had the mind of a scientist. I don't know whether he can succeed with your motor, but at least he has the ability to attempt it. I believe you can still reach him at the Utah Institute of Technology. I don't know what he's doing there now—they closed the Institute a year ago."

"Thank you, Dr. Stadler. I shall get in touch with him."

"If . . . if you want me to, I'll be glad to help him with the theoretical part of it. I'm going to do some work myself, starting from the leads of that manuscript. I'd like to find the cardinal secret of energy that its author had found. It's his basic principle that we must discover. If we succeed, Mr. Daniels may finish the job, as far as your motor is concerned."

"I will appreciate any help you may care to give me, Dr. Stadler."

They walked silently -through the dead tunnels of the Terminal, down the ties of a rusted track under a string of blue lights, to the distant glow of the platforms.

At the mouth of the tunnel, they saw a man kneeling on the track, hammering at a switch with the unrhythmical exasperation of uncertainty. Another man stood watching him impatiently.

"Well, what's the matter with the damn thing?" asked the watcher.

"Don't know."

"You've been at it for an hour."

"Yeah."

"How long is it going to take?"

"Who is John Galt?"

Dr. Stadler winced. They had gone past the men, when he said, "I don't like that expression."

"I don't, either," she answered.

"Where did it come from?"

"Nobody knows."

They were silent, then he said, "I knew a John Galt once. Only he died long ago."

"Who was he?"

"I used to think that he was still alive. But now I'm certain that he must have died. He had such a mind that, had he lived, the whole world would have been talking of him by now."

"But the whole world is talking of him."

He stopped still. "Yes . . ." he said slowly, staring at a thought that had never struck him before, "yes . . . Why?" The word was heavy with the sound of terror.

"Who was he, Dr. Stadler?"

"Why are they talking of him?"

"Who was he?"

He shook his head with a shudder and said sharply, "It's just a coincidence. The name is not uncommon at all. It's a meaningless coincidence. It has no connection with the man I knew. That man is dead."

He did not permit himself to know the full meaning of the words he added: "He has to be dead."

The order that lay on his desk was marked "Confidential . . .

Emergency . . . Priority . . . Essential need certified by office of Top Co-ordinator . . . for the account of Project X"—and demanded that he sell ten thousand tons of Rearden Metal to the State Science Institute.

Rearden read it and glanced up at the superintendent of his mills who stood before him without moving. The superintendent had come in and put the order down on his desk without a word.

"I thought you'd want to see it," he said, in answer to Rearden's glance.

Rearden pressed a button, summoning Miss Ives. He handed the order to her and said, "Send this back to wherever it came from. Tell them that I will not sell any Rearden Metal to the State Science Institute."

Gwen Ives and the superintendent looked at him, at each other and back at him again; what he saw in their eyes was congratulation.

"Yes, Mr. Rearden," Gwen Ives said formally, taking the slip as if it were any other kind of business paper. She bowed and left the room. The superintendent followed.

Rearden smiled faintly, in greeting to what they felt. He felt nothing about that paper or its possible consequences.

By a sort of inner convulsion—which had been like tearing a plug out to cut off the current of his emotions—he had told himself six months ago: Act first, keep the mills going, feel later. It had made him able to watch dispassionately the working of the Fair Share Law.

Nobody had known how that law was to be observed. First, he had been told that he could not produce Rearden Metal in an amount greater than the tonnage of the best special alloy, other than steel, produced by Orren Boyle. But Orren Boyle's best special alloy was some cracking mixture that no one cared to buy. Then he had been told that he could produce Rearden Metal in the amount that Orren Boyle could have produced, if he could have produced it. Nobody had known how this was to be determined. Somebody in Washington had announced a figure, naming a number of tons per year, giving no reasons. Everybody had let it go at that.

He had not known how to give every consumer who demanded it an equal share of Rearden Metal. The waiting list of orders could not be filled in three years, even had he been permitted to work at full capacity. New orders were coming in daily. They were not orders any longer, in the old, honorable sense of trade; they were demands. The law provided that he could be sued by any consumer who failed to receive his fair share of Rearden Metal.

Nobody had known how to determine what constituted a fair share of what amount. Then a bright young boy just out of college had been sent to him from Washington, as Deputy Director of Distribution. After many telephone conferences with the capital, the boy announced that customers would get five hundred tons of the Metal each, in the order of the dates of their applications. Nobody had argued against his figure.

There was no way to form an argument; the figure could have been one pound or one million tons, with the same validity. The boy had established an office at the Rearden mills, where four girls took applications for shares of Rearden Metal. At the present rate of the mills' production, the applications extended well into the next century.

Five hundred tons of Rearden Metal could not provide three miles of rail for Taggart Transcontinental; it could not provide the bracing for one of Ken Danagger's coal mines. The largest industries, Rearden's best customers, were denied the use of his Metal. But golf clubs made of Rearden Metal were suddenly appearing on the market, as well as coffee pots, garden tools and bathroom faucets. Ken Danagger, who had seen the value of the Metal and had dared to order it against a fury of public opinion, was not permitted to obtain it; his order had been left unfilled, cut off without warning by the new laws. Mr. Mowen, who had betrayed Taggart Transcontinental in its most dangerous hour, was now making switches of Rearden Metal and selling them to the Atlantic Southern. Rearden looked on, his emotions plugged out.

He turned away, without a word, when anybody mentioned to him what everybody knew: the quick fortunes that were being made on Rearden Metal. "Well, no," people said in drawing rooms, "you mustn’t call it a black market, because it isn't, really. Nobody is selling the Metal illegally. They're just selling their right to it. Not selling really, just pooling their shares." He did not want to know the insect intricacy of the deals through which the "shares" were sold and pooled—nor how a manufacturer in Virginia had produced, in two months, five thousand tons of castings made of Rearden Metal—nor what man in Washington was that manufacturer's unlisted partner.

He knew that their profit on a ton of Rearden Metal was five times larger than his own. He said nothing. Everybody had a right to the Metal, except himself.

The young boy from Washington—whom the steel workers had nicknamed the Wet Nurse—hung around Rearden with a primitive, astonished curiosity which, incredibly, was a form of admiration. Rearden watched him with disgusted amusement. The boy had no inkling of any concept of morality; it had been bred out of him by his college; this had left him an odd frankness, naive and cynical at once, like the innocence of a savage.

"You despise me, Mr. Rearden," he had declared once, suddenly and without any resentment. "That's impractical."

"Why is it impractical?" Rearden had asked.

The boy had looked puzzled and had found no answer. He never had an answer to any "why?" He spoke in flat assertions. He would say about people, "He's old-fashioned," "He's unreconstructed," "He's unadjusted," without hesitation or explanation; he would also say, while being a graduate in metallurgy, "Iron smelting, I think, seems to require a high temperature." He uttered nothing but uncertain opinions about physical nature—and nothing but categorical imperatives about men.

"Mr. Rearden," he had said once, "if you feel you'd like to hand out more of the Metal to friends of yours—I mean, in bigger hauls—it could be arranged, you know. Why don't we apply for a special permission on the ground of essential need? I've got a few friends in Washington. Your friends are pretty important people, big businessmen, so it wouldn't be difficult to get away with the essential need dodge. Of course, there would be a few expenses. For things in Washington, You know how it is, things always occasion expenses."

"What things?"

"You understand what I mean."

"No," Rearden had said, "I don't. Why don't you explain it to me?"

The boy had looked at him uncertainly, weighed it in his mind, then come out with: "It's bad psychology."

"What is?"

"You know, Mr. Rearden, it's not necessary to use such words as that."

"As what?"

"Words are relative. They're only symbols. If we don't use ugly symbols, we won't have any ugliness. Why do you want me to say things one way, when I've already said them another?"

"Which way do I want you to say them?"

"Why do you want me to?"

"For the same reason that you don't."

The boy had remained silent for a moment, then had said, "You know, Mr. Rearden, there are no absolute standards. We can't go by rigid principles, we've got to be flexible, we've got to adjust to the reality of the day and act on the expediency of the moment."

"Run along, punk. Go and try to pour a ton of steel without rigid principles, on the expediency of the moment."

A strange sense, which was almost a sense of style, made Rearden feel contempt for the boy, but no resentment. The boy seemed to fit the spirit of the events around them. It was as if they were being carried back across a long span of centuries to the age where the boy had belonged, but he, Rearden, had not. Instead of building new furnaces, thought Rearden, he was now running a losing race to keep the old ones going; instead of starting new ventures, new research, new experiments in the use of Rearden Metal, he was spending the whole of his energy on a quest for sources of iron ore: like the men at the dawn of the Iron Age—he thought—but with less hope.

He tried to avoid these thoughts. He had to stand on guard against his own feeling—as if some part of him had become a stranger that had to be kept numb, and his will had to be its constant, watchful anesthetic. That part was an unknown of which he knew only that he must never see its root and never give it voice. He had lived through one dangerous moment which he could not allow to return.

It was the moment when—alone in his office, on a winter evening, held paralyzed by a newspaper spread on his desk with a long column of directives on the front page—he had heard on the radio the news of Ellis Wyatt's flaming oil fields. Then, his first reaction—before any thought of the future, any sense of disaster, any shock, terror or protest —had been to burst out laughing. He had laughed in triumph, in deliverance, in a spurting, living exultation—and the words which he had not pronounced, but felt, were: God bless you, Ellis, whatever you're doing!

When he had grasped the implications of his laughter, he had known that he was now condemned to constant vigilance against himself. Like the survivor of a heart attack, he knew that he had had a warning and that he carried within him a danger that could strike him at any moment.

He had held it off, since then. He had kept an even, cautious, severely controlled pace in his inner steps. But it had come close to him for a moment, once again. When he had looked at the order of the State Science Institute on his desk, it had seemed to him that the glow moving over the paper did not come from the furnaces outside, but from the flames of a burning oil field.

"Mr. Rearden," said the Wet Nurse, when he heard about the rejected order, "you shouldn't have done that."

"Why not?"

"There's going to be trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

"It's a government order. You can't reject a government order."

"Why can't I?"

"It's an Essential Need project, and secret, too. It's very important."

"What kind of a project is it?"

"I don't know. It's secret."

"Then how do you know it's important?"

"It said so."

"Who said so?"

"You can't doubt such a thing as that, Mr. Rearden!"

"Why can't 1?"

"But you can't."

"If I can't, then that would make it an absolute and you said there aren't any absolutes."

"That's different."

"How is it different?"

"It's the government."

"You mean, there aren't any absolutes except the government?"

"I mean, if they say it's important, then it is."

"Why?"

"I don't want you to get in trouble, Mr. Rearden, and you're going to, sure as hell. You ask too many why's. Now why do you do that?"

Rearden glanced at him and chuckled. The boy noticed his own words and grinned sheepishly, but he looked unhappy.

The man who came to see Rearden a week later was youngish and slenderish, but neither as young nor as slender as he tried to make himself appear. He wore civilian clothes and the leather leggings of a traffic cop. Rearden could not quite get it clear whether he came from the State Science Institute or from Washington.

"I understand that you refused to sell metal to the State Science Institute, Mr. Rearden," he said in a soft, confidential tone of voice.

"That's right," said Rearden.

"But wouldn't that constitute a willful disobedience of the law?"

"It's for you to interpret."

"May I ask your reason?"

"My reason is of no interest to you."

"Oh, but of course it is! We are not your enemies, Mr. Rearden. We want to be fair to you. You mustn't be afraid of the fact that you are a big industrialist. We won't hold it against you. We actually want to be as fair to you as to the lowest day laborer. We would like to know your reason."

"Print my refusal in the newspapers, and any reader will tell you my reason. It appeared in all the newspapers a little over a year ago."

"Oh, no, no, no! Why talk of newspapers? Can't we settle this as a friendly, private matter?"

"That's up to you."

"We don't want this in the newspapers."

"No?"

"No. We wouldn't want to hurt you."

Rearden glanced at him and asked, "Why does the State Science Institute need ten thousand tons of metal? What is Project X?"

"Oh, that? It's a very important project of scientific research, an undertaking of great social value that may prove of inestimable public benefit, but, unfortunately, the regulations of top policy do not permit me to tell you its nature in fuller detail."

"You know," said Rearden, "I could tell you—as my reason—that I do not wish to sell my Metal to those whose purpose is kept secret from me. I created that Metal. It is my moral responsibility to know for what purpose I permit it to be used."

"Oh, but you don't have to worry about that, Mr. Rearden! We relieve you of the responsibility."

"Suppose I don't wish to be relieved of it?"

"But . . . but that is an old-fashioned and . . . and purely theoretical attitude."

"I said I could name it as my reason. But I won't—because, in this case, I have another, inclusive reason. I would not sell any Rearden Metal to the State Science Institute for any purpose whatever, good or bad, secret or open."

"But why?"

"Listen," said Rearden slowly, "there might be some sort of justification for the savage societies in which a man had to expect that enemies could murder him at any moment and had to defend himself as best he could. But there can be no justification for a society in which a man is expected to manufacture the weapons for his own murderers."

"I don't think it's advisable to use such words, Mr. Rearden. I don't think it's practical to think in such terms. After all, the government cannot—in the pursuit of wide, national policies—take cognizance of your personal grudge against some one particular institution."

"Then don't take cognizance of it."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't come asking my reason."

"But, Mr. Rearden, we cannot let a refusal to obey the law pass unnoticed. What do you expect us to do?"

"Whatever you wish."

"But this is totally unprecedented. Nobody has ever refused to sell an essential commodity to the government. As a matter of fact, the law does not permit you to refuse to sell your Metal to any consumer, let alone the government."

"Well, why don't you arrest me, then?"

"Mr. Rearden, this is an amicable discussion. Why speak of such things as arrests?"

"Isn't that your ultimate argument against me?"

"Why bring it up?"

"Isn't it implied in every sentence of this discussion?"

"Why name it?"

"Why not?" There was no answer. "Arc you trying to hide from me the fact that if it weren't for that trump card of yours, I wouldn't have allowed you to enter this office?"

"But I'm not speaking of arrests."

"I am.11

"I don't understand you, Mr. Rearden."

"I am not helping you to pretend that this is any sort of amicable discussion. It isn't. Now do what you please about it."

There was a strange look on the man's face: bewilderment, as if he had no conception of the issue confronting him, and fear, as if he had always had full knowledge of it and had lived in dread of exposure.

Rearden felt a strange excitement; he felt as if he were about to grasp something he had never understood, as if he were on the trail of some discovery still too distant to know, except that it had the most immense importance he had ever glimpsed.

"Mr. Rearden" said the man, "the government needs your Metal.

You have to sell it to us, because surely you realize that the government's plans cannot be held up by the matter of your consent."

"A sale," said Rearden slowly, "requires the seller's consent." He got up and walked to the window. "I'll tell you what you can do.”

He pointed to the siding where ingots of Rearden Metal were being loaded onto freight cars. "There's Rearden Metal. Drive down there with your trucks—like any other looter, but without his risk, because I won't shoot you, as you know I can't—take as much of the Metal as you wish and go. Don't try to send me payment. I won't accept it.

Don't print out a check to me. It won't be cashed. If you want that Metal, you have the guns to seize it. Go ahead."

"Good God, Mr. Rearden, what would the public think!"

It was an instinctive, involuntary cry. The muscles of Rearden's face moved briefly in a soundless laughter. Both of them had understood the implications of that cry. Rearden said evenly, in the grave, unstrained tone of finality, "You need my help to make it look like a sale—like a safe, just, moral transaction. I will not help you."

The man did not argue. He rose to leave. He said only, "You will regret the stand you've taken, Mr. Rearden."

"I don't think so," said Rearden.

He knew that the incident was not ended. He knew also that the secrecy of Project X was not the main reason why these people feared to make the issue public. He knew that he felt an odd, joyous, lighthearted self-confidence. He knew that these were the right steps down the trail he had glimpsed.

Dagny lay stretched in an armchair of her living room, her eyes closed. This day had been hard, but she knew that she would see Hank Rearden tonight. The thought of it was like a lever lifting the weight of hours of senseless ugliness away from her.

She lay still, content to rest with the single purpose of waiting quietly for the sound of the key in the lock. He had not telephoned her, but she had heard that he was in New York today for a conference with producers of copper, and he never left the city till next morning, nor spent a night in New York that was not hers. She liked to wait for him. She needed a span of time as a bridge between her days and his nights.

The hours ahead, like all her nights with him, would be added, she thought, to that savings account of one's life where moments of time are stored in the pride of having been lived. The only pride of her workday was not that it had been lived, but that it had been survived.

It was wrong, she thought, it was viciously wrong that one should ever be forced to say that about any hour of one's life. But she could not think of it now. She was thinking of him, of the struggle she had watched through the months behind them, his struggle for deliverance; she had known that she could help him win, but must help him in every way except in words.

She thought of the evening last winter when he came in, took a small package from his pocket and held it out to her, saying, "I want you to have it." She opened it and stared in incredulous bewilderment at a pendant made of a single pear-shaped ruby that spurted a violent fire on the white satin of the jeweler's box. It was a famous stone, which only a dozen men in the world could properly afford to purchase; he was not one of them.

"Hank . . . why?"

"No special reason. I just wanted to see you wear it."

"Oh, no, not a thing of this kind! Why waste it? I go so rarely to occasions where one has to dress. When would I ever wear it?"

He looked at her, his glance moving slowly from her legs to her face. "I'll show you," he said.

He led her to the bedroom, he took off her clothes, without a word, in the manner of an owner undressing a person whose consent is not required. He clasped the pendant on her shoulders. She stood naked, the stone between her breasts, like a sparkling drop of blood.

"Do you think a man should give jewelry to his mistress for any purpose but his own pleasure?" he asked. "This is the way I want you to wear it. Only for me. I like to look at it. It's beautiful,"

She laughed; it was a soft, low, breathless sound. She could not speak or move, only nod silently in acceptance and obedience; she nodded several times, her hair swaying with the wide, circular movement of her head, then hanging still as she kept her head bowed to him.

She dropped down on the bed. She lay stretched lazily, her head thrown back, her arms at her sides, palms pressed to the rough texture of the bedspread, one leg bent, the long line of the other extended across the dark blue linen of the spread, the stone glowing like a wound in the semi-darkness, throwing a star of rays against her skin.

Her eyes were half-closed in the mocking, conscious triumph of being admired, but her mouth was half-open in helpless, begging expectation. He stood across the room, looking at her, at her flat stomach drawn in, as her breath was drawn, at the sensitive body of a sensitive consciousness. He said, his voice low, intent and oddly quiet: "Dagny, if some artist painted you as you are now, men would come to look at the painting to experience a moment that nothing could give them in their own lives. They would call it great art. They would not know the nature of what they felt, but the painting would show them everything—even that you're not some classical Venus, but the Vice-President of a railroad, because that's part of it—even what I am, because that's part of it, too. Dagny, they'd feel it and go away and sleep with the first barmaid in sight—and they'd never try to reach what they had felt. I wouldn't want to seek it from a painting.

I'd want it real. I'd take no pride in any hopeless longing. I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it.

Do you understand?"

"Oh yes, Hank, 7 understand!" she said. Do you, my darling?—do you understand it fully?—she thought, but did not say it aloud.

On the evening of a blizzard, she came home to find an enormous spread of tropical flowers standing in her living room against the dark glass of windows battered by snowflakes. They were stems of Hawaiian Torch Ginger, three feet tall; their large heads were cones of petals that had the sensual texture of soft leather and the color of blood. "I saw them in a florist's window," he told her when he came, that night.

"I liked seeing them through a blizzard. But there's nothing as wasted as an object in a public window."

She began to find flowers in her apartment at unpredictable times, flowers sent without a card, but with the signature of the sender in their fantastic shapes, in the violent colors, in the extravagant cost. He brought her a gold necklace made of small hinged squares that formed a spread of solid gold to cover her neck and shoulders, like the collar of a knight's armor—"Wear it with a black dress," he ordered. He brought her a set of glasses that were tall, slender blocks of square-cut crystal, made by a famous jeweler. She watched the way he held one of the glasses when she served him a drink—as if the touch of the texture under his fingers, the taste of the drink and the sight of her face were the single form of an indivisible moment of enjoyment. "I used to see things I liked," he said, "but I never bought them. There didn't seem to be much meaning in it. There is, now."

He telephoned her at the office, one winter morning, and said, not in the tone of an invitation, but in the tone of an executive's order, "We're going to have dinner together tonight, T want you to dress. Do you have any sort of blue evening gown? Wear it."

The dress she wore was a slender tunic of dusty blue that gave her a look of unprotected simplicity, the look of a statue in the blue shadows of a garden under the summer sun. What he brought and put over her shoulders was a cape of blue fox that swallowed her from the curve of her chin to the tips of her sandals. "Hank, that's preposterous"—she laughed—"it's not my kind of thing!" "No?" he asked, drawing her to a mirror.

The huge blanket of fur made her look like a child bundled for a snowstorm; the luxurious texture transformed the innocence of the awkward bundle into the elegance of a perversely intentional contrast: into a look of stressed sensuality. The fur was a soft brown, dimmed by an aura of blue that could not be seen, only felt like an enveloping mist, like a suggestion of color grasped not by one's eyes but by one's hands, as if one felt, without contact, the sensation of sinking one's palms into the fur's softness. The cape left nothing to be seen of her, except the brown of her hair, the blue-gray of her eyes, the shape of her mouth.

She turned to him, her smile startled and helpless. "I . . . I didn't know it would look like that."

"I did."

She sat beside him in his car as he drove through the dark streets of the city. A sparkling net of snow flashed into sight once in a while, when they went past the lights on the corners. She did not ask where they were going. She sat low in the scat, leaning back, looking up at the snowflakes. The fur cape was wrapped tightly about her; within it, her dress felt as light as a nightgown and the feel of the cape was like an embrace.

She looked at the angular tiers of lights rising through the snowy curtain, and—glancing at him, at the grip of his gloved hands on the wheel, at the austere, fastidious elegance of the figure in black overcoat and white muffler—she thought that he belonged in a great city, among polished sidewalks and sculptured stone.

The car went down into a tunnel, streaked through an echoing tube of tile under the river and rose to the coils of an elevated highway under an open black sky. The lights were below them now, spread in flat miles of bluish windows, of smokestacks, slanting cranes, red gusts of fire, and long, dim rays silhouetting the contorted shapes of an industrial district. She thought that she had seen him once, at his mills, with smudges of soot on his forehead, dressed in acid-eaten overalls; he had worn them as naturally well as he wore his formal clothes. He belonged here, too—she thought, looking down at the flats of New Jersey—among the cranes, the fires and the grinding clatter of gears.

When they sped down a dark road through an empty countryside, with the strands of snow glittering across their headlights—she remembered how he had looked in the summer of their vacation, dressed in slacks, stretched on the ground of a lonely ravine, with the grass under his body and the sun on his bare arms. He belonged in the countryside, she thought—he belonged everywhere—he was a man who belonged on earth—and then she thought of the words which were more exact: he was a man to whom the earth belonged, the man at home on earth and in control. Why, then—she wondered—should he have had to carry a burden of tragedy which, in silent endurance, he had accepted so completely that he had barely known he carried it? She knew part of the answer; she felt as if the whole answer were close and she would grasp it on some approaching day. But she did not want to think of it now, because they were moving away from the burdens, because within the space of a speeding car they held the stillness of full happiness. She moved her head imperceptibly to let it touch his shoulder for a moment.

The car left the highway and turned toward the lighted squares of distant windows, that hung above the snow beyond a grillwork of bare branches. Then, in a soft, dim light, they sat at a table by a window facing darkness and trees. The inn stood on a knoll in the woods; it had the luxury of high cost and privacy, and an air of beautiful taste suggesting that it had not been discovered by those who sought high cost and notice. She was barely aware of the dining room; it blended away into a sense of superlative comfort, and the only ornament that caught her attention was the glitter of iced branches beyond the glass of the window.

She sat, looking out, the blue fur half-slipping off her naked arms and shoulders. He watched her through narrowed eyes, with the satisfaction of a man studying his own workmanship.

"I like giving things to you," he said, "because you don't need them."

"No?"

"And it's not that I want you to have them. I want you to have them from me."

"That is the way I do need them, Hank. From you."

"Do you understand that it's nothing but vicious self-indulgence on my part? I'm not doing it for your pleasure, but for mine."

"Hank!" The cry was involuntary; it held amusement, despair, indignation and pity. "If you'd given me those things just for my pleasure, not yours, I would have thrown them in your face."

"Yes . . . Yes, then you would—and should."

"Did you call it your vicious self-indulgence?"

"That's what they call it."

"Oh, yes! That's what they call it. What do you call it, Hank?"

"I don't know," he said indifferently, and went on intently. "I know only that if it's vicious, then let me be damned for it but that's what I want to do more than anything else on earth."

She did not answer; she sat looking straight at him with a faint smile, as if asking him to listen to the meaning of his own words.

"I've always wanted to enjoy my wealth," he said. "I didn't know how to do it. I didn't even have time to know how much T wanted to.

But I knew that all the steel I poured came back to me as liquid gold, and the gold was meant to harden into any shape I wished, and it was I who had to enjoy it. Only I couldn't. I couldn't find any purpose for it. I've found it, now. It's I who've produced that wealth and it's I who am going to let it buy for me every kind of pleasure I want—including the pleasure of seeing Row much I'm able to pay for—including the preposterous feat of turning you into a luxury object."

"But I'm a luxury object that you've paid for long ago," she said; she was not smiling.

"How?"

"By means of the same values with which you paid for your mills."

She did not know whether he understood it with that full, luminous finality which is a thought named in words; but she knew that what he felt in that moment was understanding. She saw the relaxation of an invisible smile in his eyes.

"I've never despised luxury," he said, "yet I've always despised those who enjoyed it. I looked at what they called their pleasures and it seemed so miserably senseless to me—after what I felt at the mills. I used to watch steel being poured, tons of liquid steel running as I wanted it to, where I wanted it. And then I'd go to a banquet and I'd see people who sat trembling in awe before their own gold dishes and lace tablecloths, as if their dining room were the master and they were just objects serving it, objects created by their diamond shirt studs and necklaces, not the other way around. Then I'd run to the sight of the first slag heap I could find—and they'd say that I didn't know how to enjoy life, because I cared for nothing but business."

He looked at the dim, sculptured beauty of the room and at the people who sat at the tables. They sat in a manner of self-conscious display, as if the enormous cost of their clothes and the enormous care of their grooming should have fused into splendor, but didn't. Their faces had a look of rancorous anxiety.

"Dagny, look at those people. They're supposed to be the playboys of life, the amusement-seekers and luxury-lovers. They sit there, waiting for this place to give them meaning, not the other way around.

But they're always shown to us as the enjoyers of material pleasures —and then we're taught that enjoyment of material pleasures is evil.

Enjoyment? Are they enjoying it? Isn't there some sort of perversion in what we're taught, some error that's vicious and very important?"

"Yes, Hank—very vicious and very, very important."

"They are the playboys, while we're just tradesmen, you and I. Do you realize that we're much more capable of enjoying this place than they can ever hope to be?"

"Yes."

He said slowly, in the tone of a quotation, "Why have we left it all to fools? It should have been ours." She looked at him, startled. He smiled. "I remember every word you said to me at that party. I didn't answer you then, because the only answer I had, the only thing your words meant to me, was an answer that you would hate me for, I thought; it was that I wanted you." He looked at her. "Dagny, you didn't intend it then, but what you were saying was that you wanted to sleep with me, wasn't it?"

"Yes, Hank. Of course."

He held her eyes, then looked away. They were silent for a long time. He glanced at the soft twilight around them, then at the sparkle of two wine glasses on their table. "Dagny, in my youth, when I was working in the ore mines in Minnesota, I thought that I wanted to reach an evening like this. No, that was not what I was working for, and I didn't think of it often. But once in a while, on a winter night, when the stars were out and it was very cold, when I was tired, because I had worked two shifts, and wanted nothing on earth except to lie down and fall asleep right there, on the mine ledge—I thought that some day I would sit in a place like this, where one drink of wine would cost more than my day's wages, and I would have earned the price of every minute of it and of every drop and of every flower on the table, and I would sit there for no purpose but my own amusement."

She asked, smiling, "With your mistress?"

She saw the shot of pain in his eyes and wished desperately that she had not said it.

"With . . . a woman," he answered. She knew the word he had not pronounced. He went on, his voice soft and steady: "When I became rich and saw what the rich did for their amusement, I thought that the place I had imagined, did not exist. I had not even imagined it too clearly. I did not know what it would be like, only what I would feel. I gave up expecting it years ago. But I feel it tonight."

He raised his glass, looking at her.

"Hank, I . . . I'd give up anything I've ever had in my life, except my being a . . . a luxury object of your amusement."

He saw her hand trembling as she held her glass. He said evenly, "I know it, dearest."

She sat shocked and still: he had never used that word before. He threw his head back and smiled the most brilliantly gay smile she had ever seen on his face.

"Your first moment of weakness, Dagny," he said.

She laughed and shook her head. He stretched his arm across the table and closed his hand over her naked shoulder, as if giving her an instant's support. Laughing softly, and as if by accident, she let her mouth brush against his fingers; it kept her face down for the one moment when he could have seen that the brilliance of her eyes was tears.

When she looked up at him, her smile matched his—and the rest of the evening was their celebration—for all his years since the nights on the mine ledges—for all her years since the night of her first ball when, in desolate longing for an uncaptured vision of gaiety, she had wondered about the people who expected the lights and the flowers to make them brilliant.

"Isn't there . . . in what we're taught . . . some error that's vicious and very important?"—she thought of his words, as she lay in an armchair of her living room, on a dismal evening of spring, waiting for him to come. . . . Just a little farther, my darling—she thought—look a little farther and you'll be free of that error and of all the wasted pain you never should have had to carry. . . . But she felt that she, too, had not seen the whole of the distance, and she wondered what were the steps left for her to discover. . . .

Walking through the darkness of the streets, on his way to her apartment, Rearden kept his hands in his coat pockets and his arms pressed to his sides, because he felt that he did not want to touch anything or brush against anyone. He had never experienced it before —this sense of revulsion that was not aroused by any particular object, but seemed to flood everything around him, making the city seem sodden. He could understand disgust for any one thing, and he could fight that thing with the healthy indignation of knowing that it did not belong in the world; but this was new to him—this feeling that the world was a loathsome place where he did not want to belong.

He had held a conference with the producers of copper, who had just been garroted by a set of directives that would put them out of existence in another year. He had had no advice to give them, no solution to offer; his ingenuity, which had made him famous as the man who would always find a way to keep production going, had not been able to discover a way to save them. But they had all known that there was no way; ingenuity was a virtue of the mind—and in the issue confronting them, the mind had been discarded as irrelevant long ago. "It's a deal between the boys in Washington and the importers of copper," one of the men had said, "mainly d'Anconia Copper."

This was only a small, extraneous stab of pain, he thought, a feeling of disappointment in an expectation he had never had the right to expect; he should have known that this was just what a man like Francisco d'Anconia would do—and he wondered angrily why he felt as if a bright, brief flame had died somewhere in a lightless world.

He did not know whether the impossibility of acting had given him this sense of loathing, or whether the loathing had made him lose the desire to act. It's both, he thought; a desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving. If the only goal possible was to wheedle a precarious moment's favor from men who held guns, then neither action nor desire could exist any longer.

Then could life?—he asked himself indifferently. Life, he thought, had been defined as motion; man's life was purposeful motion; what was the state of a being to whom purpose and motion were denied, a being held in chains but left to breathe and to see all the magnificence of the possibilities he could have reached, left to scream "Why?" and to be shown the muzzle of a gun as sole explanation? He shrugged, walking on; he did not care even to find an answer.

He observed, indifferently, the devastation wrought by his own indifference. No matter how hard a struggle he had lived through in the past, he had never reached the ultimate ugliness of abandoning the will to act. In moments of suffering, he had never let pain win its one permanent victory: he had never allowed it to make him lose the desire for joy. He had never doubted the nature of the world or man's greatness as its motive power and its core. Years ago, he had wondered with contemptuous incredulity about the fanatical sects that appeared among men in the dark corners of history, the sects who believed that man was trapped in a malevolent universe ruled by evil for the sole purpose of his torture. Tonight, he knew what their vision of the world and their feel of it had been. If what he now saw around him was the world in which he lived, then he did not want to touch any part of it, he did not want to fight it, he was an outsider with nothing at stake and no concern for remaining alive much longer.

Dagny and his wish to see her were the only exception left to him.

The wish remained. But in a sudden shock, he realized that he felt no desire to sleep with her tonight. That desire—which had never given him a moment's rest, which had been growing, feeding on its own satisfaction—was wiped out. It was an odd impotence, neither of his mind nor of his body. He felt, as passionately as he had ever felt it, that she was the most desirable woman on earth; but what came from it was only a desire to desire her, a wish to feel, not a feeling. The sense of numbness seemed impersonal, as if its root were neither in him nor in her; as if it were the act of sex that now belonged to a realm which he had left.

"Don't get up—stay there—it's so obvious that you've been waiting for me that I want to look at it longer."

He said it, from the doorway of her apartment, seeing her stretched in an armchair, seeing the eager little jolt that threw her shoulders forward as she was about to rise; he was smiling.

He noted—as if some part of him were watching his reactions with detached curiosity—that his smile and his sudden sense of gaiety were real. He grasped a feeling that he had always experienced, but never identified because it had always been absolute and immediate: a feeling that forbade him ever to face her in pain. It was much more than the pride of wishing to conceal his suffering: it was the feeling that suffering must not be granted recognition in her presence, that no form of claim between them should ever be motivated by pain and aimed at pity. It was not pity that he brought here or came here to find.

"Do you still need proof that I'm always waiting for you?" she asked, leaning obediently back in her chair; her voice was neither tender nor pleading, but bright and mocking.

"Dagny, why is it that most women would never admit that, but you do?"

"Because they're never sure that they ought to be wanted. I am."

"I do admire self-confidence."

"Self-confidence was only one part of what I said, Hank."

"What's the whole?"

"Confidence of my value—and yours." He glanced at her as if catching the spark of a sudden thought, and she laughed, adding, "I wouldn't be sure of holding a man like Orren Boyle, for instance. He wouldn't want me at all. You would."

"Are you saying," he asked slowly, "that I rose in your estimation when you found that I wanted you?"

"Of course."

"That's not the reaction of most people to being wanted."

"It isn't."

"Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.".

"I feel that others live up to me, if they want me. And that is the way you feel, too, Hank, about yourself—whether you admit it or not,"

That's not what I said to you then, on that first morning—he thought, looking down at her. She lay stretched out lazily, her face blank, but her eyes bright with amusement. He knew that she was thinking of it and that she knew he was. He smiled, but said nothing else.

As he sat half-stretched on the couch, watching her across the room, he felt at peace—as if some temporary wall had risen between him and the things he had felt on his way here. He told her about his encounter with the man from the State Science Institute, because, even though he knew that the event held danger, an odd, glowing sense of satisfaction still remained from it in his mind.

He chuckled at her look of indignation. "Don't bother being angry at them," he said. "It's no worse than all the rest of what they're doing every day."

"Hank, do you want me to speak to Dr. Stadler about it?"

"Certainly not!"

"He ought to stop it. He could at least do that much."

"I'd rather go to jail. Dr. Stadler? You're not having anything to do with him, are you?"

"1 saw him a few days ago."

"Why?"

"In regard to the motor."

"The motor . . . ?" He said it slowly, in a strange way, as if the thought of the motor had suddenly brought back to him a realm he had forgotten. "Dagny . . . the man who invented that motor . . . he did exist, didn't he?"

"Why . . . of course. What do you mean?"

"I mean only that . . . that it's a pleasant thought, isn't it? Even if he's dead now, he was alive once . . . so alive that he designed that motor. . . ."

"What's the matter, Hank?"

"Nothing. Tell me about the motor."

She told him about her meeting with Dr. Stadler. She got up and paced the room, while speaking; she could not lie still, she always felt a surge of hope and of eagerness for action when she dealt with the subject of the motor.

The first thing he noticed were the lights of the city beyond the window: he felt as if they were being turned on, one by one, forming the great skyline he loved; he felt it, even though he knew that the lights had been there all the time. Then he understood that the thing which was returning was within him: the shape coming back drop by drop was his love for the city. Then he knew that it had come back because he was looking at the city past the taut, slender figure of a woman whose head was lifted eagerly as at a sight of distance, whose steps were a restless substitute for flight. He was looking at her as at a stranger, he was barely aware that she was a woman, but the sight was flowing into a feeling the words for which were: This is the world and the core of it, this is what made the city—they go together, the angular shapes of the buildings and the angular lines of a face stripped of everything but purpose—the rising steps of steel and the steps of a being intent upon his goal—this is what they had been, all the men who had lived to invent the lights, the steel, the furnaces, the motors—they were the world, they, not the men who crouched in dark corners, half-begging, half-threatening, boastfully displaying their open sores as their only claim on life and virtue—so long as he knew that there existed one man with the bright courage of a new thought, could he give up the world to those others?—so long as he could find a single sight to give him a life-restoring shot of admiration, could he believe that the world belonged to the sores, the moans and the guns?—the men who invented motors did exist, he would never doubt their reality, it was his vision of them that had made the contrast-unbearable, so that even the loathing was the tribute of his loyalty to them and to that world which was theirs and his.

"Darling . . ." he said, "darling . . ." like a man awakening suddenly, when he noticed that she had stopped speaking.

"What's the matter, Hank?" she asked softly.

"Nothing . . . Except that you shouldn't have called Stadler." His face was bright with confidence, his voice sounded amused, protective and gentle; she could discover nothing else, he looked as he had always looked, it was only the note of gentleness that seemed strange and new.

"I kept feeling that I shouldn't have," she said, "but I didn't know why."

"I'll tell you why." He leaned forward. "What he wanted from you was a recognition that he was still the Dr, Robert Stadler he should have been, but wasn't and knew he wasn't. He wanted you to grant him your respect, in spite of and in contradiction to his actions. He wanted you to juggle reality for him, so that his greatness would remain, but the State Science Institute would be wiped out, as if it had never existed—and you're the only one who could do it for him."

"Why I?"

"Because you're the victim."

She looked at him, startled. He spoke intently; he felt a sudden, violent clarity of perception, as if a surge of energy were rushing into the activity of sight, fusing the half-seen and haft-grasped into a single shape and direction.

"Dagny, they're doing something that we've never understood. They know something which we don't, but should discover. I can't see it fully yet, but I'm beginning to see parts of it. That looter from the State Science Institute was scared when I refused to help him pretend that he was just an honest buyer of my Metal. He was scared way deep. Of what? I don't know—public opinion was just his name for it, but it's not the full name. Why should he have been scared? He has the guns, the jails, the laws—he could have seized the whole of my mills, if he wished, and nobody would have risen to defend me, and he knew it—so why should he have cared what I thought? But he did.

It was I who had to tell him that he wasn't a looter, but my customer and friend. That's what he needed from me. And that's what Dr. Stadler needed from you—it was you who had to act as if he were a great man who had never tried to destroy your rail and my Metal. I don't know what it is that they think they accomplish—but they want us to pretend that we sec the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us. I don't know the nature of that sanction—but. Dagny, I know that if we value our lives, we must not give it to them. If they put you on a torture rack, don't give it to them. Let them destroy your railroad and my mills, but don't give it to them. Because I know this much: I know that that's our only chance."

She had remained standing still before him, looking attentively at the faint outline of some shape she, too, had tried to grasp.

"Yes . . ." she said, "yes, I know what you've seen in them. . . .

I've felt it, too—but it's only like something brushing past that's gone before I know I've seen it, like a touch of cold air, and what's left is always the feeling that I should have stopped it. . . . I know that you're right. I can't understand their game, but this much is right: We must not see the world as they want us to see it. It's some sort of fraud, very ancient and very vast—and the key to break it is: to check every premise they teach us, to question every precept, to—"

She whirled to him at a sudden thought, but she cut the motion and the words in the same instant: the next words- would have been the ones she did not want to say to him. She stood looking at him with a slow, bright smile of curiosity.

Somewhere within him, he knew the thought she would not name, but he knew it only in that prenatal shape which has to find its words in the future. He did not pause to grasp it now—because in the flooding brightness of what he felt, another thought, which was its predecessor, had become clear to him and had been holding him for many minutes past. He rose, approached her and took her in his arms.

He held the length of her body pressed to his, as if their bodies were two currents rising upward together, each to a single point, each carrying the whole of their consciousness to the meeting of their lips.

What she felt in that moment contained, as one nameless part of it, the knowledge of the beauty in the posture of his body as he held her, as they stood in the middle of a room high above the lights of the city.

What he knew, what he had discovered tonight, was that his recaptured love of existence had not been given back to him by the return of his desire for her—but that the desire had returned after he had regained his world, the love, the value and the sense of his world—and that the desire was not an answer to her body, but a celebration of himself and of his will to live.

He did not know it, he did not think of it, he was past the need of words, but in the moment when he felt the response of her body to his, he felt also the unadmitted knowledge that that which he had called her depravity was her highest virtue—this capacity of hers to feel the joy of being, as he felt it.

CHAPTER II
THE ARISTOCRACY OF PULL

The calendar in the sky beyond the window of her office said: September 2. Dagny leaned wearily across her desk. The first light to snap on at the approach of dusk was always the ray that hit the calendar; when the white-glowing page appeared above the roofs, it blurred the city, hastening the darkness.

She had looked at that distant page every evening of the months behind her. Your days are numbered, it had seemed to say—as if it were marking a progression toward something it knew, but she didn't. Once, it had clocked her race to build the John Galt Line; now it was clocking her race against an unknown destroyer.

One by one, the men who had built new towns in Colorado, had departed into some silent unknown, from which no voice or person had yet returned. The towns they had left were dying. Some of the factories they built had remained ownerless and locked; others had been seized by the local authorities; the machines in both stood still.

She had felt as if a dark map of Colorado were spread before her like a traffic control panel, with a few lights scattered through its mountains. One after another, the lights had gone out. One after another, the men had vanished. There had been a pattern about it, which she felt, but could not define; she had become able to predict, almost with certainty, who would go next and when; she was unable to grasp the "why?"

Of the men who had once greeted her descent from the cab of an engine on the platform of Wyatt Junction, only Ted Nielsen was left, still running the plant of Nielsen Motors. "Ted, you won't be the next one to go?" she had asked him, on his recent visit to New York; she had asked it, trying to smile. He had answered grimly, "I hope not."

"What do you mean, you hope?—aren't you sure?" He had said slowly, heavily, "Dagny, I've always thought that I'd rather die than stop working. But so did the men who're gone. It seems impossible to me that I could ever want to quit. But a year ago, it seemed impossible that they ever could. Those men were my friends. They knew what their going would do to us, the survivors. They would not have gone like that, without a word, leaving to us the added terror of the inexplicable—unless they had some reason of supreme importance. A month ago, Roger Marsh, of Marsh Electric, told me that he'd have himself chained to his desk, so that he wouldn't be able to leave it, no matter what ghastly temptation struck him. He was furious with anger at the men who'd left. He swore to me that he'd never do it.

"And if it's something that I can't resist,' he said, 'I swear that I'll keep enough of my mind to leave you a letter and give you some hint of what it is, so that you won't have to rack your brain in the kind of dread we're both feeling now.' That's what he swore. Two weeks ago, he went. He left me no letter. . . . Dagny, I can't tell what I'll do when I see it—whatever it was that they saw when they went."

It seemed to her that some destroyer was moving soundlessly through the country and the lights were dying at his touch—someone, she thought bitterly, who had reversed the principle of the Twentieth Century motor and was now turning kinetic energy into static.

That was the enemy—she thought, as she sat at her desk in the gathering twilight—with whom she was running a race. The monthly report from Quentin Daniels lay on her desk. She could not be certain, as yet, that Daniels would solve the secret of the motor; but the destroyer, she thought, was moving swiftly, surely, at an ever accelerating tempo; she wondered whether, by the time she rebuilt the motor, there would be any world left to use it.

She had liked Quentin Daniels from the moment he entered her office on their first interview. He was a lanky man in his early thirties, with a homely, angular face and an attractive smile. A hint of the smile remained in his features at all times, particularly when he listened; it was a look of good-natured amusement, as if he were swiftly and patiently discarding the irrelevant in the words he heard and going straight to the point a moment ahead of the speaker.

"Why did you refuse to work for Dr. Stadler?" she asked.

The hint of his smile grew harder and more stressed; this was as near as he came to showing an emotion; the emotion was anger. But he answered in his even, unhurried drawl, "You know, Dr. Stadler once said that the first word of 'Free, scientific inquiry' was redundant.

He seems to have forgotten it. Well, I'll just say that 'Governmental scientific inquiry' is a contradiction in terms."

She asked him what position he held at the Utah Institute of Technology. "Night watchman," he answered. "What?" she gasped. "Night watchman," he repeated politely, as if she had not caught the words, as if there were no cause for astonishment.

Under her questioning, he explained that he did not like any of the scientific foundations left in existence, that he would have liked a job in the research laboratory of some big industrial concern—"But which one of them can afford to undertake any long-range work nowadays, and why should they?"—so when the Utah Institute of Technology was closed for lack of funds, he had remained there as night watchman and sole inhabitant of the place; the salary was sufficient to pay for his needs—and the Institute's laboratory was there, intact, for his own private, undisturbed use.

"So you're doing research work of your own?"

"That's right."

"For what purpose?"

"For my own pleasure."

"What do you intend to do, if you discover something of scientific importance or commercial value? Do you intend to put it to some public use?"

"I don't know. I don't think so."

"Haven't you any desire to be of service to humanity?"

"I don't talk that kind of language, Miss Taggart. I don't think you do, either."

She laughed. "I think we'll get along together, you and I."

"We will."

When she had told him the story of the motor, when he had studied the manuscript, he made no comment, but merely said that he would take the job on any terms she named.

She asked him to choose his own terms. She protested, in astonishment, against the low monthly salary he quoted. "Miss Taggart," he said, "if there's something that I won't take, it's something for nothing.

I don't know how long you might have to pay me, or whether you'll get anything at all in return. I'll gamble on my own mind. I won't let anybody else do it. I don't collect for an intention. But I sure do intend to collect for goods delivered. If I succeed, that's when I'll skin you alive, because what I want then is a percentage, and it's going to be high, but it's going to be worth your while."

When he named the percentage he wanted, she laughed. "That is skinning me alive and it will be worth my while. Okay."

They agreed that it was to be her private project and that he was to be her private employee; neither of them wanted to have to deal with the interference of the Taggart Research Department. He asked to remain in Utah, in his post of watchman, where he had all the laboratory equipment and all the privacy he needed. The project was to remain confidential between them, until and unless he succeeded.

"Miss Taggart," he said in conclusion, "I don't know how many years it will take me to solve this, if ever. But I know that if I spend the rest of my life on it and succeed, I will die satisfied." He added, "There's only one thing that I want more than to solve it: it's to meet the man who has."

Once a month, since his return to Utah, she had sent him a check and he had sent her a report on his work. It was too early to hope, but his reports were the only bright points in the stagnant fog of her days in the office.

She raised her head, as she finished reading his pages. The calendar in the distance said: September 2. The lights of the city had grown beneath it, spreading and glittering. She thought of Rearden. She wished he were in the city; she wished she would sec him tonight.

Then, noticing the date, she remembered suddenly that she had to rush home to dress, because she had to attend Jim's wedding tonight.

She had not seen Jim, outside the office, for over a year. She had not met his fiancee, but she had read enough about the engagement in the newspapers. She rose from her desk in wearily distasteful resignation: it seemed easier to attend the wedding than to bother explaining her absence afterwards.

She was hurrying across the concourse of the Terminal when she heard a voice calling, "Miss Taggart!" with a strange note of urgency and reluctance, together. It stopped her abruptly; she took a few seconds to realize that it was the old man at the cigar stand who had called.

"I've been waiting to catch sight of you for days. Miss Taggart. I've been extremely anxious to speak to you." There was an odd expression on his face, the look of an effort not to look frightened.

"I'm sorry," she said, smiling, "I've been rushing in and out of the building all week and didn't have time to stop."

He did not smile. "Miss Taggart, that cigarette with the dollar sign that you gave me some months ago—where did you get it?"

She stood still for a moment. "I'm afraid that's a long, complicated story," she answered.

"Have you any way of getting in touch with the person who gave it to you?"

"I suppose so—though I'm not too sure. Why?"

"Would he tell you where he got it?"

"I don't know. What makes you suspect that he wouldn't?"

He hesitated, then asked, "Miss Taggart, what do you do when you have to tell someone something which you know to be impossible?"

She chuckled. 'The man who gave me the cigarette said that in such a case one must check one's premises."

"He did? About the cigarette?"

"Well, no, not exactly. But why? What is it you have to tell me?"

"Miss Taggart, I have inquired all over the world. I have checked every source of information in and about the tobacco industry. I have had that cigarette stub put through a chemical analysis. There is no plant that manufactures that kind of paper. The flavoring elements in that tobacco have never been used in any smoking mixture I could find. That cigarette was machine-made, but it was not made in any factory I know—and I know them all. Miss Taggart, to the best of my knowledge, that cigarette was not made anywhere on earth."

Rearden stood by, watching absently, while the waiter wheeled the dinner table out of his hotel room. Ken Danagger had left. The room was half-dark; by an unspoken agreement, they had kept the lights low during their dinner, so that Danagger's face would not be noticed and, perhaps, recognized by the waiters.

They had had to meet furtively, like criminals who could not be seen together. They could not meet in their offices or in their homes, only in the crowded anonymity of a city, in his suite at the Wayne Falkland Hotel. There could be a fine of $10,000 and ten years of imprisonment for each of them, if it became known that he had agreed to deliver to Danagger four thousand tons of structural shapes of Rearden Metal.

They had not discussed that law, at their dinner together, or their motives or the risk they were taking. They had merely talked business.

Speaking clearly and dryly, as he always spoke at any conference, Danagger had explained that half of his original order would be sufficient to brace such tunnels as would cave in, if he delayed the bracing much longer, and to recondition the mines of the Confederated Coal Company, gone bankrupt, which he had purchased three weeks ago—

"It's an excellent property, bat in rotten condition; they had a nasty accident there last month, cave-in and gas explosion, forty men killed."

He had added, in the monotone of reciting some impersonal, statistical report, "The newspapers are yelling that coal is now the most crucial commodity in the country. They are also yelling that the coal operators are profiteering on the oil shortage. One gang in Washington is yelling that I am expanding too much and something should be done to stop me, because I am becoming a monopoly. Another gang in Washington is yelling that I am not expanding enough and something should be done to let the government seize my mines, because I am greedy for profits and unwilling to satisfy the public's need of fuel. At my present rate of profit, this Confederated Coal property will bring back the money I spent on it—in forty-seven years. I have no children. I bought it, because there's one customer I don't dare leave without coal —and that's Taggart Transcontinental. I keep thinking of what would happen if the railroads collapsed." He had stopped, then added, "T don't know why I still care about that, but I do. Those people in Washington don't seem to have a clear picture of what that would be like. I have." Rearden had said, "I'll deliver the Metal. When you need the other half of your order, let me know. I'll deliver that, too."

At the end of the dinner, Danagger had said in the same precise, impassive tone, the tone of a man who knows the exact meaning of his words, "If any employee of yours or mine discovers this and attempts private blackmail, I will pay it, within reason. But I will not pay, if he has friends in Washington. If any of those come around, then I go to jail." "Then we go together," Rearden had said.

Standing alone in his half-darkened room, Rearden noted that the prospect of going to jail left him blankly indifferent. He remembered the time when, aged fourteen, faint with hunger, he would not steal fruit from a sidewalk stand. Now, the possibility of being sent to jail—H this dinner was a felony—meant no more to him than the possibility of being run over by a truck: an ugly physical accident without any moral significance.

He thought that he had been made to hide, as a guilty secret, the only business transaction he had enjoyed in a year's work—and that he was hiding, as a guilty secret, his nights with Dagny, the only hours that kept him alive. He felt that there was some connection between the two secrets, some essential connection which he had to discover. He could not grasp it, he could not find the words to name it, but he felt that the day when he would find them, he would answer every question of his life.

He stood against the wall, his head thrown back, his eyes closed, and thought of Dagny, and then he felt that no questions could matter to him any longer. He thought that he would see her tonight, almost hating it, because tomorrow morning seemed so close and then he would have to leave her—he wondered whether he could remain in town tomorrow, or whether he should leave now, without seeing her, so that he could wait, so that he could always have it ahead of him: the moment of closing his hands over her shoulders and looking down at her face. You're going insane, he thought—but he knew that if she were beside him through every hour of his days, it would still be the same, he would never have enough of it, he would have to invent some senseless form of torture for himself in order to bear it—he knew he would see her tonight, and the thought of leaving without it made the pleasure greater, a moment's torture to underscore his certainty of the hours ahead. He would leave the light on in her living room, he thought, and hold her across the bed, and see nothing but the curve of the strip of light running from her waist to her ankle, a single line drawing the whole shape of her long, slim body in the darkness, then he would pull her head into the light, to see her face, to see it falling back, unresisting, her hair over his arm. her eyes closed, the face drawn as in a look of pain, her mouth open to him.

He stood at the wall, waiting, to let all the events of the day drop away from him, to feel free, to know that the next span of time was his.

When the door of his room flew open without warning, he did not quite hear or believe it, at first. He saw the silhouette of a woman, then of a bellboy who put down a suitcase and vanished. The voice he heard was Lillian's: "Why, Henry! All alone and in the dark?"

She pressed a light switch by the door. She stood there, fastidiously groomed, wearing a pale beige traveling suit that looked as if she had traveled under glass; she was smiling and pulling her gloves off with the air of having reached home.

"Are you in for the evening, dear?" she asked. "Or were you going out?"

He did not know how long a time passed before he answered, "What are you doing here?"

"Why, don't you remember that Jim Taggart invited us to his wedding? It's tonight."

"I didn't intend to go to his wedding."

"Oh, but I did!"

"Why didn't you tell me this morning, before I left?"

"To surprise you, darling." She laughed gaily. "It's practically impossible to drag you to any social function, but I thought you might do it like this, on the spur of the moment, just to go out and have a good time, as married couples are supposed to. I thought you wouldn't mind it—you've been staying overnight in New York so often!"

He saw the casual glance thrown at him from under the brim of her fashionably tilted hat. He said nothing.

"Of course, I was running a risk," she said. "You might have been taking somebody out to dinner." He said nothing. "Or were you, perhaps, intending to return home tonight?"

"No."

"Did you have an engagement for this evening?"

"No."

"Fine." She pointed at her suitcase. "I brought my evening clothes.

Will you bet me a corsage of orchids that I can get dressed faster than you can?"

He thought that Dagny would be at her brother's wedding tonight; the evening did not matter to him any longer. "I'll take you out, if you wish," he said, "but not to that wedding."

"Oh, but that's where I want to go! It's the most preposterous event of the season, and everybody's been looking forward to it for weeks, all my friends. I wouldn't miss it for the world. There isn't any better show in town—nor better publicized. It's a perfectly ridiculous marriage, but just about what you'd expect from Jim Taggart."

She was moving casually through the room, glancing around, as if getting acquainted with an unfamiliar place. "I haven't been in New York for years," she said. "Not with you, that is. Not on any formal occasion."

He noticed the pause in the aimless wandering of her eyes, a glance that stopped briefly on a filled ashtray and moved on. He felt a stab of revulsion.

She saw it in his face and laughed gaily. "Oh but, darling, I'm not relieved! I'm disappointed. I did hope I'd find a few cigarette butts smeared with lipstick."

He gave her credit for the admission of the spying, even if under cover of a joke. But something in the stressed frankness of her manner made him wonder whether she was joking; for the flash of an instant, he felt that she had told him the truth. He dismissed the impression, because he could not conceive of it as possible.

"I'm afraid that you'll never be human," she said. "So I'm sure that I have no rival. And if I have—which I doubt, darling—I don't think I'll worry about it, because if it's a person who's always available on call, without appointment—well, everybody knows what sort of a person that is."

He thought that he would have to be careful; he had been about to slap her face. "Lillian, I think you know," he said, "that humor of this kind is more than I can stand."

"Oh, you're so serious!" she laughed. "I keep forgetting it. You're so serious about everything—particularly yourself."

Then she whirled to him suddenly, her smile gone. She had the strange, pleading look which he had seen in her face at times, a look that seemed made of sincerity and courage: "You prefer to be serious, Henry? All right. How long do you wish me to exist somewhere in the basement of your life? How lonely do you want me to become? I've asked nothing of you. I've let you live your life as you pleased. Can't you give me one evening? Oh, I know you hate parties and you'll be bored. But it means a great deal to me. Call it empty, social vanity—I want to appear, for once, with my husband. I suppose you never think of it in such terms, but you're an important man, you're envied, hated, respected and feared, you're a man whom any woman would be proud to show off as her husband.

You may say it's a low form of feminine ostentation, but that's the form of any woman's happiness. You don't live by such standards, but I do. Can't you give me this much, at the price of a few hours of boredom? Can't you be strong enough to fulfill your obligation and to perform a husband's duty? Can't you go there, not for your own sake, but mine, not because you want to go, but only because I want it?"

Dagny—he thought desperately—Dagny, who had never said a word about his life at home, who had never made a claim, uttered a reproach or asked a question—he could not appear before her with his wife, he could not let her see him as the husband being proudly shown off—he wished he could die now, in this moment, before he committed this action—because he knew that he would commit it.

Because he had accepted his secret as guilt and promised himself to take its consequences—because he had granted that the right was with Lillian, and he was able to bear any form of damnation, but not able to deny the right when it was claimed of him—because he knew that the reason for his refusal to go, was the reason that gave him no right to refuse—because he heard the pleading cry in his mind: "Oh God, Lillian, anything but that party!" and he did not allow himself to beg for mercy—he said evenly, his voice lifeless and firm: "All right, Lillian. I’ll go."

The wedding veil of rose-point lace caught on the splintered floor of her tenement bedroom. Cherryl Brooks lifted it cautiously, stepping to look at herself in a crooked mirror that hung on the wall. She had been photographed here all day, as she had been many times in the past two months. She still smiled with incredulous gratitude when newspaper people wanted to take her picture, but she wished they would not do it so often.

An aging sob sister, who had a drippy love column in print and the bitter wisdom of a policewoman in person, had taken Cherryl under her protection weeks ago, when the girl had first been thrown into press interviews as into a meat grinder. Today, the sob sister had chased the reporters out, had snapped, "All right, all right, beat it!" at the neighbors, had slammed Cherryl's door in their faces and had helped her to dress. She was to drive Cherryl to the wedding; she had discovered that there was no one else to do it.

The wedding veil, the white satin gown, the delicate slippers and the strand of pearls at her throat, had cost five hundred times the price of the entire contents of Cherryl's room. A bed took most of the room's space, and the rest was taken by a chest of drawers, one chair, and her few dresses hanging behind a faded curtain. The huge hoop skirt of the wedding gown brushed against the walls when she moved, her slender figure swaying above the skirt in the dramatic contrast of a tight, severe, long-sleeved bodice; the gown had been made by the best designer in the city.

"You see, when I got the job in the dime store, I could have moved to a better room," she said to the sob sister, in apology, "but I don't think it matters much where you sleep at night, so I saved my money, because I’ll need it for something important in the future—"

She stopped and smiled, shaking her head dazedly. "I thought I'd need it," she said.

"You look fine," said the sob sister. "You can't see much in that alleged mirror, but you're okay."

"The way all this happened, I . . . I haven't had time to catch up with myself. But you see, Jim is wonderful. He doesn't mind it, that I'm only a salesgirl from a dime store, living in a place like this. He doesn't hold it against me."

"Uh-huh," said the sob sister; her face looked grim.

Cherryl remembered the wonder of the first time Jim Taggart had come here. He had come one evening, without warning, a month after their first meeting, when she had given up hope of ever seeing him again. She had been miserably embarrassed, she had felt as if she were trying to hold a sunrise within the space of a mud puddle—but Jim had smiled, sitting on her only chair, looking at her flushed face and at her room. Then he had told her to put on her coat, and he had taken her to dinner at the most expensive restaurant in the city.

He had smiled at her uncertainty, at her awkwardness, at her terror of picking the wrong fork, and at the look of enchantment in her eyes.

She had not known what he thought. But he had known that she was stunned, not by the place, but by his bringing her there, that she barely touched the costly food, that she took the dinner, not as booty from a rich sucker—as all the girls he knew would have taken it—but as some shining award she had never expected to deserve.

He had come back to her two weeks later, and then their dates had grown progressively more frequent. He would drive up to the dime store at the closing hour, and she would see her fellow salesgirls gaping at her, at his limousine, at the uniformed chauffeur who opened the door for her. He would take her to the best night clubs, and when he introduced her to his friends, he would say, "Miss Brooks works in the dime store in Madison Square." She would see the strange expressions on their faces and Jim watching them with a hint of mockery in his eyes. He wanted to spare her the need of pretense or embarrassment, she thought with gratitude. He had the strength to be honest and not to care whether others approved of him or not, she thought with admiration. But she felt an odd, burning pain, new to her, the night she heard some woman, who worked for a highbrow political magazine, say to her companion at the next table, "How generous of Jim!"

Had he wished, she would have given him the only kind of payment she could offer in return. She was grateful that he did not seek it. But she felt as if their relationship was an immense debt and she had nothing to pay it with, except her silent worship. He did not need her worship, she thought.

There were evenings when he came to take her out, but remained in her room, instead, and talked to her, while she listened in silence. It always happened unexpectedly, with a kind of peculiar abruptness, as if he had not intended doing it, but something burst within him and he had to speak. Then he sat slumped on her bed, unaware of his surroundings and of her presence, yet his eyes jerked to her face once in a while, as if he had to be certain that a living being heard him.

". . . it wasn't for myself, it wasn't for myself at all—why won't they believe me, those people? I had to grant the unions' demands to cut down the trains—and the moratorium on bonds was the only way I could do it, so that's why Wesley gave it to me, for the workers, not for myself. AH the newspapers said that I was a great example for all businessmen to follow—a businessman with a sense of social responsibility. That's what they said. It's true, isn't it? . . . Isn't it? . . .

What was wrong about that moratorium? What if we did skip a few technicalities? It was for a good purpose. Everyone agrees that anything you do is good, so long as it's not for yourself. . . . But she won't give me credit for a good purpose. She doesn't think anybody's any good except herself. My sister is a ruthless, conceited bitch, who won't take anyone's ideas but her own. . . . Why do they keep looking at me that way—she and Rearden and all those people? Why are they so sure they're right? . . . If I acknowledge their superiority in the material realm, why don't they acknowledge mine in the spiritual?

They have the brain, but I have the heart. They have the capacity to produce wealth, but I have the capacity to love. Isn't mine the greater capacity? Hasn't it been recognized as the greatest through all the centuries of human history? Why won't they recognize it? . . . Why are they so sure they're great? . . . And if they're great and I'm not —isn't that exactly why they should bow to me, because I'm not?

Wouldn't that be an act of true humanity? It takes no kindness to respect a man who deserves respect—it's only a payment which he's earned. To give an unearned respect is the supreme gesture of charity.

. . . But they're incapable of charity. They're not human. They feel no concern for anyone's need . . . or weakness. No concern . . . and no pity . . . "

She could understand little of it, but she understood that he was unhappy and that somebody had hurt him. He saw the pain of tenderness in her face, the pain of indignation against his enemies, and he saw the glance intended for heroes—given to him by a person able to experience the emotion behind that glance.

She did not know why she felt certain that she was the only one to whom he could confess his torture. She took it as a special honor, as one more gift.

The only way to be worthy of him, she thought, was never to ask him for anything. He offered her money once, and she refused it, with such a bright, painful flare of anger in her eyes that he did not attempt it again. The anger was at herself: she wondered whether she had done something to make him think she was that kind of person.

But she did not want to be ungrateful for his concern, or to embarrass him by her ugly poverty; she wanted to show him her eagerness to rise and justify his favor; so she told him that he could help her, if he wished, by helping her to find a better job. He did not answer. In the weeks that followed, she waited, but he never mentioned the subject.

She blamed herself: she thought that she had offended him, that he had taken it as an attempt to use him.

When he gave her an emerald bracelet, she was too shocked to understand. Trying desperately not to hurt him, she pleaded that she could not accept it. "Why not?" he asked. "It isn't as if you were a bad woman paying the usual price for it. Are you afraid that I'll start making demands? Don't you trust me?" He laughed aloud at her stammering embarrassment. He smiled, with an odd kind of enjoyment, all through the evening when they went to a night club and she wore the bracelet with her shabby black dress.

He made her wear that bracelet again, on the night when he took her to a party, a great reception given by Mrs. Cornelias Pope. If he considered her good enough to bring into the home of his friends, she thought—the illustrious friends whose names she had seen on the inaccessible mountain peaks that were the society columns of the newspapers—she could not embarrass him by wearing her old dress. She spent her year's savings on an evening gown of bright green chiffon with a low neckline, a belt of yellow roses and a rhinestone buckle. When she entered the stern residence, with the cold, brilliant lights and a terrace suspended over the roofs of skyscrapers, she knew that her dress was wrong for the occasion, though she could not tell why. But she kept her posture proudly straight and she smiled with the courageous trust of a kitten when it sees a hand extended to play: people gathered to have a good time would not hurt anyone, she thought.

At the end of an hour, her attempt to smile had become a helpless, bewildered plea. Then the smile went, as she watched the people around her. She saw that the trim, confident girls had a nasty insolence of manner when they spoke to Jim, as if they did not respect him and never had. One of them in particular, a Betty Pope, the daughter of the hostess, kept making remarks to him which Cherryl could not understand, because she could not believe that she understood them correctly.

No one had paid any attention to her, at first, except for a few astonished glances at her gown. After a while, she saw them looking at her. She heard an elderly woman ask Jim, in the anxious tone of referring to some distinguished family she had missed knowing, "Did you say Miss Brooks of Madison Square?" She saw an odd smile on Jim's face, when he answered, making his voice sound peculiarly clear, "Yes —the cosmetics counter of Raleigh's Five and Ten." Then she saw some people becoming too polite to her, and others moving away in a pointed manner, and most of them being senselessly awkward in simple bewilderment, and Jim watching silently with that odd smile.

She tried to get out of the way, out of their notice. As she slipped by, along the edge of the room, she heard some man say, with a shrug, "Well, Jim Taggart is one of the most powerful men in Washington at the moment." He did not say it respectfully.

Out on the terrace, where it was darker, she heard two men talking and wondered why she felt certain that they were talking about her.

One of them said, "Taggart can afford to do it, if he pleases" and the other said something about the horse of some Roman emperor named Caligula.

She looked at the lone straight shaft of the Taggart Building rising in the distance—and then she thought that she understood: these people hated Jim because they envied him. Whatever they were, she thought, whatever their names and their money, none of them had an achievement comparable to his, none of them had defied the whole country to build a railroad everybody thought impossible. For the first time, she saw that she did have something to offer Jim: these people were as mean and small as the people from whom she had escaped in Buffalo; he was as lonely as she had always been, and the sincerity of her feeling was the only recognition he had found.

Then she walked back into the ballroom, cutting straight through the crowd, and the only thing left of the tears she had tried to hold back in the darkness of the terrace, was the fiercely luminous sparkle of her eyes. If he wished to stand by her openly, even though she was only a shop girl, if he wished to flaunt it, if he had brought her here to face the indignation of his friends—then it was the gesture of a courageous man defying their opinion, and she was willing to match his courage by serving as the scarecrow of the occasion.

But she was glad when it was over, when she sat beside him in his car, driving home through the darkness. She felt a bleak kind of relief, Her battling defiance ebbed into a strange, desolate feeling; she tried not to give way to it. Jim said little; he sat looking sullenly out the car window; she wondered whether she had disappointed him in some manner.

On the stoop of her rooming house, she said to him forlornly, "I'm sorry if I let you down . . ."

He did not answer for a moment, and then he asked, "What would you say if I asked you to marry me?"

She looked at him, she looked around them—there was a filthy mattress hanging on somebody's window sill, a pawnshop across the street, a garbage pail at the stoop beside them—one did not ask such a question in such a place, she did not know what it meant, and she answered, "I guess I . . . I haven't any sense of humor."

"This is a proposal, my dear."

Then this was the way they reached their first kiss—with tears running down her face, tears unshed at the party, tears of shock, of happiness, of thinking that this should be happiness, and of a low, desolate voice telling her that this was not the way she would have wanted it to happen.

She had not thought about the newspapers, until the day when Jim told her to come to his apartment and she found it crowded with people who had notebooks, cameras and flash bulbs. When she saw her picture in the papers for the first time—a picture of them together, Jim's arm around her—she giggled with delight and wondered proudly whether every person in the city had seen it. After a while, the delight vanished.

They kept photographing her at the dime-store counter, in the subway, on the stoop of the tenement house, in her miserable room. She would have taken money from Jim now and run to hide in some obscure hotel for the weeks of their engagement—but he did not offer it.

He seemed to want her to remain where she was. They printed pictures of Jim at his desk, in the concourse of the Taggart Terminal, by the steps of his private railway car, at a formal banquet in Washington.

The huge spreads of full newspaper pages, the articles in magazines, the radio voices, the newsreels, all were a single, long, sustained scream—about the "Cinderella Girl" and the "Democratic Businessman."

She told herself not to be suspicious, when she felt uneasy; she told herself not to be ungrateful, when she felt hurt. She felt it only in a few rare moments, when she awakened in the middle of the night and lay in the silence of her room, unable to sleep. She knew that it would take her years to recover, to believe, to understand. She was reeling through her days like a person with a sunstroke, seeing nothing but the figure of Jim Taggart as she had seen him first on the night of his great triumph.

"Listen, kid," the sob sister said to her, when she stood in her room for the last time, the lace of the wedding veil streaming like crystal foam from her hair to the blotched planks of the floor. "You think that if one gets hurt in life, it's through one's own sins—and that's true, in the long run. But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you—knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that."

"I don't think I'm afraid," she said, looking intently straight before her, the radiance of her smile melting the earnestness of her glance. "I have no right to be afraid of anything. I'm too happy. You sec, I always thought that there wasn't any sense in people saying that all you can do in life is suffer. I wasn't going to knuckle down to that and give up.

I thought that things could happen which were beautiful and very great.

I didn't expect it to happen to me—not so much and so soon. But I'll try to live up to it."

"Money is the root of all evil," said James Taggart. "Money can't buy happiness. Love will conquer any barrier and any social distance. That may be a bromide, boys, but that's how I feel."

He stood under the lights of the ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, in a circle of reporters who had closed about him the moment the wedding ceremony ended. He heard the crowd of guests beating like a tide beyond the circle. Cherryl stood beside him, her white gloved hand on the black of his sleeve. She was still trying to hear the words of the ceremony, not quite believing that she had heard them.

"How do you feel, Mrs. Taggart?"

She heard the question from somewhere in the circle of reporters. It was like the jolt of returning to consciousness: two words suddenly made everything real to her. She smiled and whispered, choking, "I . . .

I'm very happy . . ."

At opposite ends of the ballroom, Orren Boyle, who seemed too stout for his full-dress clothes, and Bertram Scudder, who seemed too meager for his, surveyed the crowd of guests with the same thought, though neither of them admitted that he was thinking it. Orren Boyle half-told himself that he was looking for the faces of friends, and Bertram Scudder suggested to himself that he was gathering material for an article. But both, unknown to each other, were drawing a mental chart of the faces they saw, classifying them under two headings which, if named, would have read: "Favor" and "Fear." There were men whose presence signified a special protection extended to James Taggart, and men whose presence confessed a desire to avoid his hostility—those who represented a hand lowered to pull him up, and those who represented a back bent to let him climb. By the unwritten code of the day, nobody received or accepted an invitation from a man of public prominence except in token of one or the other of these motives.

Those in the first group were, for the most part, youthful; they had come from Washington. Those in the second group were older; they were businessmen.

Orren Boyle and Bertram Scudder were men who used words as a public instrument, to be avoided in the privacy of one's own mind.

Words were a commitment, carrying implications which they did not wish to face. They needed no words for their chart; the classification was done by physical means: a respectful movement of their eyebrows, equivalent to the emotion of the word "So!" for the first group—and a sarcastic movement of their lips, equivalent to the emotion of "Well, well!" for the second. One face blew up the smooth working of their calculating mechanisms for a moment: when they saw the cold blue eyes and blond hair of Hank Rearden, their muscles tore at the register of the second group in the equivalent of "Oh, boy!" The sum of the chart was an estimate of James Taggart's power. It added up to an impressive total.

They knew that James Taggart was fully aware of it, when they saw him moving among his guests. He walked briskly, in a Morse code pattern of short dashes and brief stops, with a manner of faint irritation, as if conscious of the number of people whom his displeasure might worry. The hint of a smile on his face had a flavor of gloating—as if he knew that the act of coming to honor him was an act that disgraced the men who had come; as if he knew and enjoyed it.

A tail of figures kept trailing and shifting behind him, as if their function were to give him the pleasure of ignoring them. Mr. Mowen flickered briefly among the tail, and Dr. Pritchett, and Balph Eubank.

The most persistent one was Paul Larkin. He kept describing circles around Taggart, as if trying to acquire a suntan by means of an occasional ray, his wistful smile pleading to be noticed.

Taggart's eyes swept over the crowd once in a while, swiftly and furtively, in the manner of a prowler's flashlight; this, in the muscular shorthand legible to Orren Boyle, meant that Taggart was looking for someone and did not want anyone to know it. The search ended when Eugene Lawson came to shake Taggart's hand and to say, his wet lower lip twisting like a cushion to soften the blow, "Mr. Mouch couldn't come, Jim, Mr. Mouch is so sorry, he had a special plane chartered, but at the last minute things came up, crucial national problems, you know." Taggart stood still, did not answer and frowned.

Orren Boyle burst out laughing. Taggart turned to him so sharply that the others melted away without waiting for a command to vanish.

"What do you think you're doing?" snapped Taggart.

"Having a good time, Jimmy, just having a good time," said Boyle. "Wesley is your boy, wasn't he?"

"I know somebody who's my boy and he'd better not forget it."

"Who? Larkin? Well, no, I don't think you're talking about Larkin.

And if it's not Larkin that you're talking about, why then I think you ought to be careful in your use of the possessive pronouns. I don't mind the age classification, I know I look young for my years, but I'm just allergic to pronouns."

"That's very smart, but you're going to get too smart one of these days."

"If I do, you just go ahead and make the most of it, Jimmy.If ."

"The trouble with people who overreach themselves is that they have short memories. You'd better remember who got Rearden Metal choked off the market for you."

"Why, I remember who promised to. That was the party who then pulled every string he could lay his hands on to try to prevent that particular directive from being issued, because he figured he might need rail of Rearden Metal in the future."

"Because you spent ten thousand dollars pouring liquor into people you hoped would prevent the directive about the bond moratorium!"

"That's right. So I did. I had friends who had railroad bonds. And besides, I have friends in Washington, too, Jimmy. Well, your friends beat mine on that moratorium business, but mine beat yours on Rearden Metal—and I'm not forgetting it. But what the hell!—it's all right with me, that's the way to share things around, only don't you try to fool me, Jimmy. Save the act for the suckers."

"If you don't believe that I've always tried to do my best for you—"

"Sure, you have. The best that could be expected, all things considered. And you'll continue to do it, too, so long as I've got somebody you need—and not a minute longer. So I just wanted to remind you that I've got my own friends in Washington. Friends that money can't buy—just like yours, Jimmy."

"What do you think you mean?"

"Just what you're thinking. The ones you buy aren't really worth a damn, because somebody can always offer them more, so the field's wide open to anybody and it's just like old-fashioned competition again.

But if you get the goods on a man, then you've got him, then there's no higher bidder and you can count on his friendship. Well, you have friends, and so have I. You have friends I can use, and vice versa.

That's all right with me—what the hell!—one's got to trade something.

If we don't trade money—and the age of money is past—then we trade men."

"What is it you're driving at?"

"Why, I'm just telling you a few things that you ought to remember.

Now take Wesley, for instance. You promised him the assistant's job in the Bureau of National Planning—for double-crossing Rearden, at the time of the Equalization of Opportunity Bill. You had the connections to do it, and that's what I asked you to do—in exchange for the Anti-dog-eat-dog Rule, where I had the connections. So Wesley did his part, and you saw to it that you got it all on paper—oh sure, I know that you've got written proof of the kind of deals he pulled to help pass that bill, while he was taking Rearden's money to defeat it and keeping Rearden off guard. They were pretty ugly deals. It would be pretty messy for Mr. Mouch, if it all came out in public. So you kept your promise and you got the job for him, because you thought you had him. And so you did. And he paid off pretty handsomely, didn't he? But it works only just so long. After a while, Mr. Wesley Mouch might get to be so powerful and the scandal so old, that nobody will care how he got his start or whom he double-crossed. Nothing lasts forever. Wesley was Rearden's man, and then he was your man, and he might be somebody else's man tomorrow "

"Are you giving me a hint?"

"Why no, I'm giving you a friendly warning. We're old friends.

Jimmy, and I think that that's what we ought to remain. I think we can be very useful to each other, you and I, if you don't start getting the wrong ideas about friendship. Me—I believe in a balance of power."

"Did you prevent Mouch from coming here tonight?"

"Well, maybe I did and maybe I didn't. I'll let you worry about it.

That's good for me, if I did—and still better, if I didn't."

Cherryl's eyes followed James Taggart through the crowd. The faces that kept shifting and gathering around her seemed so friendly and their voices were so eagerly warm that she felt certain there was no malice anywhere in the room. She wondered why some of them talked to her about Washington, in a hopeful, confidential manner of half sentences, half-hints, as if they were seeking her help for something secret she was supposed to understand. She did not know what to say, but she smiled and answered whatever she pleased. She could not disgrace the person of "Mrs. Taggart" by any touch of fear.

Then she saw the enemy. It was a tall, slender figure in a gray evening gown, who was now her sister-in-law.

The pressure of anger in Cherryl's mind was the stored accumulation of the sounds of Jim's tortured voice. She felt the nagging pull of a duty left undone. Her eyes kept returning to the enemy and studying her intently. The pictures of Dagny Taggart in the newspapers had shown a figure dressed in slacks, or a face with a slanting hat brim and a raised coat collar. Now she wore a gray evening gown that seemed indecent, because it looked austerely modest, so modest that it vanished from one's awareness and left one too aware of the slender body it pretended to cover. There was a tone of blue in the gray cloth that went with the gun-metal gray of her eyes. She wore no jewelry, only a bracelet on her wrist, a chain of heavy metal links with a green blue cast.

Cherryl waited, until she saw Dagny standing alone, then tore forward, cutting resolutely across the room. She looked at close range into the gun-metal eyes that seemed cold and intense at once, the eyes that looked at her directly with a polite, impersonal curiosity.

"There's something I want you to know," said Cherryl, her voice taut and harsh, "so that there won't be any pretending about it. I'm not going to put on the sweet relative act. I know what you've done to Jim and how you've made him miserable all his life. I'm going to protect him against you. I'll put you in your place. I'm Mrs. Taggart. I'm the woman in this family now."

"That's quite all right," said Dagny. "I'm the man.”

Cherryl watched her walk away, and ihoug'rit1 that Jim had been right: this sister of his was a creature of cold evil who had given her no response, no acknowledgment, no emotion of any kind except a touch of something that looked like an astonished, indifferent amusement.

Rearden stood by Lillian's side and followed her when she moved.

She wished to be seen with her husband; he was complying. He did not know whether anyone looked at him or not; he was aware of no one around them, except the person whom he could not permit himself to see.

The image still holding his consciousness was the moment when he had entered this room with Lillian and had seen Dagny looking at them. He had looked straight at her, prepared to accept any blow her eyes would choose to give him. Whatever the consequences to Lillian, he would have confessed his adultery publicly, there and in that moment, rather than commit the unspeakable act of evading Dagny's eyes, of closing his face into a coward's blankness, of pretending to her that he did not know the nature of his action.

But there had been no blow. He knew every shade of sensation ever reflected in Dagny's face; he had known that she had felt no shock; he had seen nothing but an untouched serenity. Her eyes had moved to his, as if acknowledging the full meaning of this encounter, but looking at him as she would have looked anywhere, as she looked at him in his office or in her bedroom. It had seemed to him that she had stood before them both, at the distance of a few steps, revealed to them as simply and openly as the gray dress revealed her body.

She had bowed to them, the courteous movement of her head including them both. He had answered, he had seen Lillian's brief nod, and then he had seen Lillian moving away and realized that he had stood with his head bowed for a long moment.

He did not know what Lillian's friends were saying to him or what he was answering. As a man goes step by step, trying not to think of the length of a hopeless road, so he went moment by moment, keeping no imprint of anything in his mind. He heard snatches of Lillian's pleased laughter and a tone of satisfaction in her voice.

After a while, he noticed the women around him; they all seemed to resemble Lillian, with the same look of static grooming, with thin eyebrows plucked to a static lift and eyes frozen in static amusement. He noticed that they were trying to flirt with him, and that Lillian watched it as if she were enjoying the hopelessness of their attempts. This, then —he thought—was the happiness of feminine vanity which she had begged him to give her, these were the standards which he did not live by, but had to consider. He turned for escape to a group of men.

He could not find a single straight statement in the conversation of the men; whatever subject they seemed to be talking about never seemed to be the subject they were actually discussing. He listened like a foreigner who recognized some of the words, but could not connect them into sentences. A young man, with a look of alcoholic insolence, staggered past the group and snapped, chuckling, "Learned your lesson, Rearden?" He did not know what the young rat had meant; everybody else seemed to know it; they looked shocked and secretly pleased.

Lillian drifted away from him, as if letting him understand that she did not insist upon his literal attendance. He retreated to a corner of the room where no one would see him or notice the direction of his eyes. Then he permitted himself to look at Dagny.

He watched the gray dress, the shifting movement of the soft cloth when she walked, the momentary pauses sculptured by the cloth, the shadows and the light. He saw it as a bluish-gray smoke held shaped for an instant into a long curve that slanted forward to her knee and back to the tip of her sandal. He knew every facet the light would shape if the smoke were ripped away.

He felt a murky, twisting pain: it was jealousy of every man who spoke to her. He had never felt it before; but he felt it here, where everyone had the right to approach her, except himself.

Then, as if a single, sudden blow to his brain blasted a moment's shift of perspective, he felt an immense astonishment at what he was doing here and why. He lost, for that moment, all the days and dogmas of his past; his concepts, his problems, his pain were wiped out; he knew only—as from a great, clear distance—that man exists for the achievement of his desires, and he wondered why he stood here, he wondered who had the right to demand that he waste a single irreplaceable hour of his life, when his only desire was to seize the slender figure in gray and hold her through the length of whatever time there was left for him to exist.

In the next moment, he felt the shudder of recapturing his mind. He felt the tight, contemptuous movement of his lips pressed together in token of the words he cried to himself: You made a contract once, now stick to it. And then he thought suddenly that in business transactions the courts of law did not recognize a contract wherein no valuable consideration had been given by one party to the other. He wondered what made him think of it. The thought seemed irrelevant. He did not pursue it.

James Taggart saw Lillian Rearden drift casually toward him at the one moment when he chanced to be alone in the dim corner between a potted palm and a window. He stopped and waited to let her approach.

He could not guess her purpose, but this was the manner which, in the code he understood, meant that he had better hear her.

"How do you like my wedding gift, Jim?" she asked, and laughed at his look of embarrassment. "No, no, don't try to go over the list of things in your apartment, wondering which one the hell it was. It's not in your apartment, it's right here, and it's a non-material gift, darling."

He saw the half-hint of a smile on her face, the look understood among his friends as an invitation to share a secret victory; it was the look, not of having outthought, but of having outsmarted somebody.

He answered cautiously, with a safely pleasant smile, "Your presence is the best gift you could give me."

"My presence, Jim?"

The lines of his face were shock-bound for a moment. He knew what she meant, but he had not expected her to mean it.

She smiled openly. "We both know whose presence is the most valuable one for you tonight—and the unexpected one. Didn't you really think of giving me credit for it? I'm surprised at you. I thought you had a genius for recognizing potential friends."

He would not commit himself; he kept his voice carefully neutral.

"Have I failed to appreciate your friendship, Lillian?"

"Now, now, darling, you know what I'm talking about. You didn't expect him to come here, you didn't really think that he is afraid of you, did you? But to have the others think he is—that's quite an inestimable advantage, isn't it?"

"I'm . . . surprised, Lillian."

"Shouldn't you say 'impressed'? Your guests are quite impressed. I can practically hear them thinking all over the room. Most of them are thinking: 'If he has to seek terms with Jim Taggart, we'd better toe the line.' And a few are thinking: 'If he's afraid, we'll get away with much more.' This is as you want it, of course—and I wouldn't think of spoiling your triumph—but you and I are the only ones who know that you didn't achieve it single-handed."

He did not smile; he asked, his face blank, his voice smooth, but with a carefully measured hint of harshness, "What's your angle?"

She laughed. "Essentially—the same as yours, Jim. But speaking practically—none at all. It's just a favor I've done you, and I need no favor in return. Don't worry, I'm not lobbying for any special interests, I'm not after squeezing some particular directive out of Mr. Mouch, I'm not even after a diamond tiara from you. Unless, of course, it's a tiara of a non-material order, such as your appreciation."

He looked straight at her for the first time, his eyes narrowed, his face relaxed to the same half-smile as hers, suggesting the expression which, for both of them, meant that they felt at home with each other: an expression of contempt. "You know that I have always admired you, Lillian, as one of the truly superior women."

"I'm aware of it." There was the faintest coating of mockery spread, like shellac, over the smooth notes of her voice.

He was studying her insolently. "You must forgive me if I think that some curiosity is permissible between friends," he said, with no tone of apology. "I'm wondering from what angle you contemplate the possibility of certain financial burdens—or losses—which affect your own personal interests."

She shrugged. "From the angle of a horsewoman, darling. If you had the most powerful horse in the world, you would keep it bridled down to the Galt required to carry you in comfort, even though this meant the sacrifice of its full capacity, even though its top speed would never be seen and its great power would be wasted. You would do it—because if you let the horse go full blast, it would throw you off in no time. . . . However, financial aspects are not my chief concern —nor yours, Jim."

"t did underestimate you," he said slowly.

"Oh, well, that's an error I'm willing to help you correct. I know the sort of problem he presents to you. I know why you're afraid of him, as you have good reason to be. But . . . well, you're in business and in politics, so I'll try to say it in your language. A businessman says that he can deliver the goods, and a ward heeler says that he can deliver the vote, is that right? Well, what I wanted you to know is that I can deliver him, any time I choose. You may act accordingly."

In the code of his friends, to reveal any part of one's self was to give a weapon to an enemy—but he signed her confession and matched it, when he said, "I wish I were as smart about my sister."

She looked at him without astonishment; she did not find the words irrelevant. "Yes, there's a tough one," she said. "No vulnerable point?

No weaknesses?"

"None."

"No love affairs?"

"God, no!"

She shrugged, in sign of changing the subject; Dagny Taggart was a person on whom she did not care to dwell. "I think I'll let you run along, so that you can chat a little with Balph Eubank," she said. "He looks worried, because you haven't looked at him all evening and he's wondering whether literature will be left without a friend at court."

"Lillian, you're wonderful!" he said quite spontaneously.

She laughed. "That, my dear, is the non-material tiara I wanted!"

The remnant of a smile stayed on her face as she moved through the crowd, a fluid smile that ran softly into the look of tension and boredom worn by all the faces around her. She moved at random, enjoying the sense of being seen, her eggshell satin gown shimmering like heavy cream with the motion of her tall figure.

It was the green-blue spark that caught her attention: it flashed for an instant under the lights, on the wrist of a thin, naked arm. Then she saw the slender body, the gray dress, the fragile, naked shoulders. She stopped. She looked at the bracelet, frowning.

Dagny turned at her approach. Among the many things that Lillian resented, the impersonal politeness of Dagny's face was the one she resented most.

"What do you think of your brother's marriage, Miss Taggart?" she asked casually, smiling.

"I have no opinion about it."

"Do you mean to say that you don't find it worthy of any thought?"

"If you wish to be exact—yes, that's what I mean."

"Oh, but don't you see any human significance in it?"

"No."

"Don't you think that a person such as your brother's bride does deserve some interest?"

"Why, no."

"I envy you, Miss Taggart. I envy your Olympian detachment. It is, I think, the secret of why lesser mortals can never hope to equal your success in the field of business. They allow their attention to be divided—at least to the extent of acknowledging achievements in other fields."

"What achievements are we talking about?"

"Don't you grant any recognition at all to the women who attain unusual heights of conquest, not in the industrial, but in the human realm?"

"I don't think that there is such a word as 'conquest'—in the human realm."

"Oh, but consider, for instance, how hard other women would have had to work—if work were the only means available to them—to achieve what this girl has achieved through the person of your brother."

"1 don't think she knows the exact nature of what she has achieved."

Rearden saw them together. He approached. He felt that he had to hear it, no matter what the consequences. He stopped silently beside them. He did not know whether Lillian was aware of his presence; he knew that Dagny was.

"Do show a little generosity toward her, Miss Taggart," said Lillian.

"At least, the generosity of attention. You must not despise the women who do not possess your brilliant talent, but who exercise their own particular endowments. Nature always balances her gifts and offers compensations—don't you think so?"

"I'm not sure I understand you."

"Oh, I'm sure you don't want to hear me become more explicit!"

"Why, yes, I do."

Lillian shrugged angrily; among the women who were her friends, she would have been understood and stopped long ago; but this was an adversary new to her—a woman who refused to be hurt. She did not care to speak more clearly, but she saw Rearden looking at her.

She smiled and said, "Well, consider your sister-in-law, Miss Taggart.

What chance did she have to rise in the world? None—by your exacting standards. She could not have made a successful career in business.

She does not possess your unusual mind. Besides, men would have made it impossible for her. They would have found her too attractive.

So she took advantage of the fact that men have standards which, unfortunately, are not as high as yours. She resorted to talents which, I'm sure, you despise. You have never cared to compete with us lesser women in the sole field of our ambition—in the achievement of power over men."

"If you call it power, Mrs. Rearden—then, no, I haven't."

She turned to go, but Lillian's voice stopped her: "I would like to believe that you're fully consistent, Miss Taggart, and fully devoid of human frailties. I would like to believe that you've never felt the desire to flatter—or to offend—anyone. But I see that you expected both Henry and me to be here tonight."

"Why, no, I can't say that I did, I had not seen my brother's guest list."

"Then why are you wearing that bracelet?"

Dagny's eyes moved deliberately straight to hers. "I always wear it."

"Don't you think that that's carrying a joke too far?"

"It was never a joke, Mrs. Rearden."

"Then you'll understand me if I say that I'd like you to give that bracelet back to me."

"I understand you. But (will not give it back."

Lillian let a moment pass, as if to let them both acknowledge the meaning of their silence. For once, she held Dagny's glance without smiling. "What do you expect me to think, Miss Taggart?"

"Anything you wish."

"What is your motive?"

"You knew my motive when you gave me the bracelet."

Lillian glanced at Rearden. His face was expressionless; she saw no reaction, no hint of intention to help her or stop her, nothing but an attentiveness that made her feel as if she were standing in a spotlight.

Her smile came back, as a protective shield, an amused, patronizing smile, intended to convert the subject into a drawing-room issue again. "I'm sure, Miss Taggart, that you realize how enormously improper this is."

"No."

"But surely you know that you are taking a dangerous and ugly risk."

"No."

"You do not take into consideration the possibility of being . . . misunderstood?"

"No."

Lillian shook her head in smiling reproach. "Miss Taggart, don't you think that this is a case where one cannot afford to indulge in abstract theory, but must consider practical reality?"

Dagny would not smile. "I have never understood what is meant by a statement of that kind."

"I mean that your attitude may be highly idealistic—as I am sure it is—but, unfortunately, most people do not share your lofty frame of mind and will misinterpret your action in the one manner which would be most abhorrent to you."

"Then the responsibility and the risk will be theirs, not mine."

"I admire your . . . no, I must not say 'innocence,' but shall I say 'purity?' You have never thought of it, I'm sure, but life is not as straight and logical as . . . as a railroad track. It is regrettable, but possible, that your high intentions may lead people to suspect things which . . . well, which I'm sure you know to be of a sordid and scandalous nature."

Dagny was looking straight at her. "I don't."

"But you cannot ignore that possibility."

"I do." Dagny turned to go.

"Oh, but should you wish to evade a discussion if you have nothing to hide?" Dagny stopped. "And if your brilliant—and reckless courage permits you to gamble with your reputation, should you ignore the danger to Mr. Rearden?"

Dagny asked slowly, "What is the danger to Mr. Rearden?"

"I'm sure you understand me."

"I don't."

"Oh, but surely it isn't necessary to be more explicit."

"It is—if you wish to continue this discussion."

Lillian's eyes went to Rearden's face, searching for some sign to help her decide whether to continue or to stop. He would not help her.

"Miss Taggart” she said, "I am not your equal in philosophical altitude. I am only an average wife. Please give me that bracelet—if you do not wish me to think what I might think and what you wouldn't want me to name."

"Mrs. Rearden, is this the manner and place in which you choose to suggest that I am sleeping with your husband?"

"Certainly not!" The cry was immediate; it had a sound of panic and the quality of an automatic reflex, like the jerk of withdrawal of a pickpocket's hand caught in action. She added, with an angry, nervous chuckle, in a tone of sarcasm and sincerity that confessed a reluctant admission of her actual opinion, "That would be the possibility farthest from my mind."

"Then you will please apologize to Miss Taggart," said Rearden.

Dagny caught her breath, cutting off all but the faint echo of a gasp.

They both whirled to him. Lillian saw nothing in "his face; Dagny saw torture.

"It isn't necessary, Hank," she said.

"It is—for me," he answered coldly, not looking at her; he was looking at Lillian in the manner of a command that could not be disobeyed.

Lillian studied his face with mild astonishment, but without anxiety or anger, like a person confronted by a puzzle of no significance.

"But of course,” she said complaisantly, her voice smooth and confident again. "Please accept my apology, Miss Taggart, if I gave you the impression that I suspected the existence of a relationship which I would consider improbable for you and—from my knowledge of his inclinations—impossible for my husband."

She turned and walked away indifferently, leaving them together, as if in deliberate proof of her words.

Dagny stood still, her eyes closed; she was thinking of the night when Lillian had given her the bracelet. He had taken his wife's side, then; he had taken hers, now. Of the three of them, she was the only one who understood fully what this meant.

"Whatever is the worst you may wish to say to me, you will be right."

She heard him and opened her eyes. He was looking at her coldly, his face harsh, allowing no sign of pain or apology to suggest a hope of forgiveness.

"Dearest, don't torture yourself like that," she said. "I knew that you're married. I've never tried to evade that knowledge. I'm not hurt by it tonight,"

Her first word was the most violent of the several blows he felt: she had never used that word before. She had never let him hear that particular tone of tenderness. She had never spoken of his marriage in the privacy of their meetings—yet she spoke of it here with effortless simplicity.

She saw the anger in his face—the rebellion against pity—the look of saying to her contemptuously that he had betrayed no torture and needed no help—then the look of the realization that she knew his face as thoroughly as he knew hers—he closed his eyes, he inclined his head a little, and he said very quietly, "Thank you."

She smiled and turned away from him.

James Taggart held an empty champagne glass in his hand and noticed the haste with which Balph Eubank waved at a passing waiter, as if the waiter were guilty of an unpardonable lapse. Then Eubank completed his sentence: "—but you, Mr. Taggart, would know that a man who lives on a higher plane cannot be understood or appreciated. It's a hopeless struggle—trying to obtain support for literature from a world ruled by businessmen. They are nothing but stuffy, middle-class vulgarians or else predatory savages like Rearden."

"Jim," said Bertram Scudder, slapping his shoulder, "the best compliment I can pay you is that you're not a real businessman!"

"You're a man of culture, Jim," said Dr. Pritchett, "you're not an ex-ore-digger like Rearden. I don't have to explain to you the crucial need of Washington assistance to higher education."

"You really liked my last novel, Mr. Taggart?" Balph Eubank kept asking. "You really liked it?"

Orren Boyle glanced at the group, on his way across the room, but did not stop. The glance was sufficient to give him an estimate of the nature of the group's concerns. Fair enough, he thought, one's got to trade something. He knew, but did not care to name just what was being traded.

"We arc at the dawn of a new age," said James Taggart, from above the rim of his champagne glass. "We are breaking up the vicious tyranny of economic power. We will set men free of the rule of the dollar. We will release our spiritual aims from dependence on the owners of material means. We will liberate our culture from the stranglehold of the profit-chasers. We will build a society dedicated to higher ideals, and we will replace the aristocracy of money by—"

"—the aristocracy of pull," said a voice beyond the group.

They whirled around. The man who stood facing them was Francisco d'Anconia.

His face looked tanned by a summer sun, and his eyes were the exact color of the sky on the kind of day when he had acquired his tan.

His smile suggested a summer morning. The way he wore his formal clothes made the rest of the crowd look as if they were masquerading in borrowed costumes.

"What's the matter?" he asked in the midst of their silence. "Did I say something that somebody here didn't know?"

"How did you get here?" was the first thing James Taggart found himself able to utter.

"By plane to Newark, by taxi from there, then by elevator from my suite fifty-three floors above you."

"I didn't mean . . . that is, what I meant was—"

"Don't look so startled, James. If I land in New York and hear that there's a party going on, I wouldn't miss it, would I? You've always said that I'm just a party hound."

The group was watching them.

"I'm delighted to see you, of course," Taggart said cautiously, then added belligerently, to balance it, "But if you think you're going to—"

Francisco would not pick up the threat; he let Taggart's sentence slide into mid-air and stop, then asked politely, "If I think what?"

"You understand me very well."

"Yes. I do. Shall I tell you what I think?"

"This is hardly the moment for any—"

"I think you should present me to your bride, James. Your manners have never been glued to you too solidly—you always lose them in an emergency, and that's the time when one needs them most."

Turning to escort him toward Cherryl, Taggart caught the faint sound that came from Bertram Scudder; it was an unborn chuckle. Taggart knew that the men who had crawled at his feet a moment ago, whose hatred for Francisco d'Anconia was, perhaps, greater than his own, were enjoying the spectacle none the less. The implications of this knowledge were among the things he did not care to name.

Francisco bowed to Cherryl and offered his best wishes, as if she were the bride of a royal heir. Watching nervously, Taggart felt relief—and a touch of nameless resentment, which, if named, would have told him he wished the occasion deserved the grandeur that Francisco's manner gave it for a moment.

He was afraid to remain by Francisco's side and afraid to let him loose among the guests, He backed a few tentative steps away, but Francisco followed him, smiling.

"You didn't think I'd want to miss your wedding, James—when you're my childhood friend and best stockholder?"

"What?" gasped Taggart, and regretted it: the sound was a confession of panic.

Francisco did not seem to take note of it; he said, his voice gaily innocent, "Oh, but of course I know it. I know the stooge behind the stooge behind every name on the list of the stockholders of d'Anconia Copper. It's surprising how many men by the name of Smith and Gomez are rich enough to own big chunks of the richest corporation in the world—so you can't blame me if I was curious to learn what distinguished persons I actually have among my minority stockholders. I seem to be popular with an astonishing collection of public figures from all over the world—from People's States where you wouldn't think there's any money left at all."

Taggart said dryly, frowning, "There are many reasons—business reasons—why it is sometimes advisable not to make one's investments directly."

"One reason is that a man doesn't want people to know he's rich.

Another is that he doesn't want them to learn how he got that way."

"I don't know what you mean or why you should object."

"Oh, I don't object at all. I appreciate it. A great many investors —the old-fashioned sort—dropped me after the San Sebastian Mines.

It scared them away. But the modern ones had more faith in me and acted as they always do—on faith. I can't tell you how thoroughly I appreciate it."

Taggart wished Francisco would not talk so loudly; he wished people would not gather around them. "You have been doing extremely well," he said, in the safe tone of a business compliment.

"Yes, haven't I? It's wonderful how the stock of d'Anconia Copper has risen within the last year. But I don't think I should be too conceited about it—there's not much competition left in the world, there's no place to invest one's money, if one happens to get rich quickly, and here's d'Anconia Copper, the oldest company on earth, the one that's been the safest bet for centuries. Just think of what it managed to survive through the ages. So if you people have decided that it's the best place for your hidden money, that it can't be beaten, that it would take a most unusual kind of man to destroy d'Anconia Copper—you were right."

"Well, I hear it said that you've begun to take your responsibilities seriously and that you've settled down to business at last. They say you've been working very hard,"

"Oh, has anybody noticed that? It was the old-fashioned investors who made it a point to watch what the president of a company was doing. The modern investors don't find knowledge necessary. I don't think they ever look into my activities."

Taggart smiled. "They look at the ticker tape of the stock exchange.

That tells the whole story, doesn't it?"

"Yes. Yes, it does—in the long run."

"I must say I'm glad that you haven't been much of a party hound this past year. The results show in your work."

"Do they? Well, no, not quite yet."

"I suppose," said Taggart, in the cautious tone of an indirect question, "that I should feel flattered you chose to come to this party."

"Oh, but I had to come. I thought you were expecting me."

"Why, no, I wasn't . . . that is, I mean—"

"You should have expected me, James. This is the great, formal, nose-counting event, where the victims come in order to show how safe it is to destroy them, and the destroyers form pacts of eternal friendship, which lasts for three months. I don't know exactly which group I belong to, but I had to come and be counted, didn't I?"

"What in hell do you think you're saying?" Taggart cried furiously, seeing the tension on the faces around them.

"Be careful, James. If you try to pretend that you don't understand me, I'm going to make it much clearer."

"If you think it's proper to utter such—"

"I think it's funny. There was a time when men were afraid that somebody would reveal some secret of theirs that was unknown to their fellows. Nowadays, they're afraid that somebody will name what everybody knows. Have you practical people ever thought that that's all it would take to blast your whole, big, complex structure, with all your laws and guns—just somebody naming the exact nature of what you're doing?"

"If you think it's proper to come to a celebration such as a wedding, in order to insult the host—"

"Why, James, I came here to thank you."

"To thank me?"

"Of course. You've done me a great favor—you and your boys in Washington and the boys in Santiago. Only I wonder why none of you took the trouble to inform me about it. Those directives that somebody issued here a few months ago are choking off the entire copper industry of this country. And the result is that this country suddenly has to import much larger amounts of copper. And where in the world is there any copper left—unless it's d'Anconia copper? So you see that I have good reason to be grateful."

"1 assure you I had nothing to do with it," Taggart said hastily, "and besides, the vital economic policies of this country are not determined by any considerations such as you're intimating or—-"

"I know how they're determined, James. I know that the deal started with the boys in Santiago, because they've been on the d'Anconia pay roll for centuries—well, no, 'pay roll' is an honorable word, it would be more exact to say that d'Anconia Copper has been paying them protection money for centuries—isn't that what your gangsters call it?

Our boys in Santiago call it taxes. They've been getting their cut on every ton of d'Anconia copper sold. So they have a vested interest to see me sell as many tons as possible. But with the world turning into People's States, this is the only country left where men are not yet reduced to digging for roots in forests for their sustenance—so this is the only market left on earth. The boys in Santiago wanted to corner this market. I don't know what they offered to the boys in Washington, or who traded what and to whom—but I know that you came in on it somewhere, because you do hold a sizable chunk of d'Anconia Copper stock. And it surely didn't displease you—that morning, four months L ago, the day after the directives were issued—to see the kind of soaring leap that d'Anconia Copper performed on the Stock Exchange. Why, it practically leaped off the ticker tape and into your face."

"Who gave you any grounds to invent an outrageous story of this kind?"

"Nobody. I knew nothing about it. I just saw the leap on the ticker tape that morning. That told the whole story, didn't it? Besides, the boys in Santiago slapped a new tax on copper the following week—and they told me that I shouldn't mind it, not with that sudden rise of my stock. They were working for my best interests, they said. They said, why should I care—taking the two events together, I was richer than I had been before. True enough. I was."

"Why do you wish to tell me this?"

"Why don't you wish to take any credit for it, James? That's out of character and out of the policy at which you're such an expert. In an age when men exist, not by right, but by favor, one does not reject a grateful person, one tries to trap into gratitude as many people as possible. Don't you want to have me as one of your men under obligation?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Think what a favor I received without any effort on my part. I wasn't consulted, I wasn't informed, I wasn't thought about, everything was arranged without me—and all I have to do now is produce the copper. That was a great favor, James—and you may be sure that I will repay it."

Francisco turned abruptly, not waiting for an answer, and started away. Taggart did not follow; he stood, feeling that anything was preferable to one more minute of their conversation.

Francisco stopped when he came to Dagny. He looked at her for a silent instant, without greeting, his smile acknowledging that she had been the first person he saw and the first one to see him at his entrance into the ballroom.

Against every doubt and warning in her mind, she felt nothing but a joyous confidence; inexplicably, she felt as if his figure in that crowd was a point of indestructible security. But in the moment when the beginning of a smile told him how glad she was to see him, he asked, "Don't you want to tell me what a brilliant achievement the John Galt Line turned out to be?"

She felt her lips trembling and tightening at once, as she answered, 'I'm sorry if I show that I'm still open to be hurt. It shouldn't shock me that you've come to the stage where you despise achievement."

"Yes; don't T? I despised that Line so much that I didn't want to see it reach the kind of end it has reached."

He saw her look of sudden attentiveness, the look of thought rushing into a breach torn open upon a new direction. He watched her for a moment, as if he knew every step she would find along that road, then chuckled and said, "Don't you want to ask me now: Who is John Galt?"

"Why should I want to, and why now?"

"Don't you remember that you dared him to come and claim your Line? Well, he has."

He walked on, not waiting to sec the look in her eyes—a look that held anger, bewilderment and the first faint gleam of a question mark.

It was the muscles of his own face that made Rearden realize the nature of his reaction to Francisco's arrival: he noticed suddenly that he was smiling and that his face had been relaxed into the dim well being of a smile for some minutes past, as he watched Francisco d'Anconia in the crowd.

He acknowledged to himself, for the first time, all the half-grasped, half-rejected moments when he had thought of Francisco d'Anconia and thrust the thought aside before it became the knowledge of how much he wanted to see him again. In moments of sudden exhaustion—at his desk, with the fires of the furnaces going down in the twilight—in the darkness of the lonely walk through the empty countryside to his house—in the silence of sleepless nights—he had found himself thinking of the only man who had once seemed to be his spokesman.

He had pushed the memory aside, telling himself: But that one is worse than all the others!—while feeling certain that this was not true, yet being unable to name the reason of his certainty. He had caught himself glancing through the newspapers to see whether Francisco d'Anconia had returned to New York—and he had thrown the newspapers aside, asking himself angrily: What if he did return?—would you go chasing him through night clubs and cocktail parties?—what is it that you want from him?

This was what he had wanted—he thought, when he caught himself smiling at the sight of Francisco in the crowd—this strange feeling of expectation that held curiosity, amusement and hope.

Francisco did not seem to have noticed him. Rearden waited, fighting a desire to approach; not after the kind of conversation we had, he thought—what for?—what would I say to him? And then, with the same smiling, light-hearted feeling, the feeling of being certain that it was right, he found himself walking across the ballroom, toward the group that surrounded Francisco d'Anconia.

He wondered, looking at them, why these people were drawn to Francisco, why they chose to hold him imprisoned in a clinging circle. when their resentment of him was obvious under their smiles. Their faces had the hint of a look peculiar, not to fear, but to cowardice: a look of guilty anger. Francisco stood cornered against the side edge of a marble stairway, half-leaning, half-sitting on the steps; the informality of his posture, combined with the strict formality of his clothes, gave him an air of superlative elegance. His was the only face that had the carefree look and the brilliant smile proper to the enjoyment of a party; but his eyes seemed intentionally expressionless, holding no trace of gaiety, showing—like a warning signal—nothing but the activity of a heightened perceptiveness.

Standing unnoticed on the edge of the group, Rearden heard a woman, who had large diamond earrings and a flabby, nervous face, ask tensely, "Senior d'Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?"

"Just exactly what it deserves,"

"Oh, how cruel!"

"Don't you believe in the operation of the moral law, madame?"

Francisco asked gravely. "I do."

Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, "Don't let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil—and he's the typical product of money."

Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile.

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce.

Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor—your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made—before it can be looted or mooched—made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will.

Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss—the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery—that you must offer them values, not wounds—that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods.

Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade—with reason, not force, as their final arbiter—it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability—and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires.

Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality—the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choke of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth—the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him.

But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil?

To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money—and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it.

They know they are able to deserve it.

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil.

That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another—their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich—will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt—and of his life, as he deserves.

"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard—the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money—the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law—men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims—then money becomes its creators' avenger.

Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money.

Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality.

It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to "produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are.

"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood—-money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves—slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers—as industrialists.

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money—and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being—the self-made man—the American industrialist.

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose—because it contains all the others—the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity—to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide—as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other—and your time is running out."

Francisco had not glanced at Rearden once while speaking; but the moment he finished, his eyes went straight to Rearden's face. Rearden stood motionless, seeing nothing but Francisco d'Anconia across the moving figures and angry voices between them.

There were people who had listened, but now hurried away, and people who said, "It's horrible!"—"It's not true!"—"How vicious and selfish!"—saying it loudly and guardedly at once, as if wishing that their neighbors would hear them, but hoping that Francisco would not.

"Senor d'Anconia," declared the woman with the earrings, "I don't agree with you!"

"If you can refute a single sentence I uttered, madame, I shall hear it gratefully."

"Oh, I can't answer you. I don't have any answers, my mind doesn't work that way, but I don't feel that you're right, so I know that you're wrong."

"How do you know it?"

"I feel it. I don't go by my head, but by my heart. You might be good at logic, but you're heartless."

"Madame, when we'll see men dying of starvation around us, your heart won't be of any earthly use to save them. And I'm heartless enough to say that when you'll scream, 'But I didn't know it!'—you will not be forgiven."

The woman turned away, a shudder running through the flesh of her cheeks and through the angry tremor of her voice: "Well, it's certainly a funny way to talk at a party!"

A portly man with evasive eyes said loudly, his tone of forced cheerfulness suggesting that his sole concern in any issue was not to let it become unpleasant, "If this is the way you feel about money, senor, I think I'm darn glad that I've got a goodly piece of d'Anconia Copper stock."

Francisco said gravely, "I suggest that you think twice, sir."

Rearden started toward him—and Francisco, who had not seemed to look in his direction, moved to meet him at once, as if the others had never existed.

"Hello," said Rearden simply, easily, as to a childhood friend; he was smiling.

He saw his own smile reflected in Francisco's face. "Hello."

"I want to speak to you."

"To whom do you think I've been speaking for the last quarter of an hour?"

Rearden chuckled, in the manner of acknowledging an opponent's round. "I didn't think you had noticed me."

"I noticed, when I came in, that you were one of the only two persons in this room who were glad to see me."

"Aren't you being presumptuous?"

"No—grateful."

"Who was the other person glad to see you?"

Francisco shrugged and said lightly, "A woman."

Rearden noticed that Francisco had led him aside, away from the group, in so skillfully natural a manner that neither he nor the others had known it was being done intentionally.

"I didn't expect to find you here," said Francisco. "You shouldn't have come to this party."

"Why not?"

"May I ask what made you come?"

"My wife was anxious to accept the invitation."

"Forgive me if I put it in such form, but it would have been more proper and less dangerous if she had asked you to take her on a tour of whorehouses."

"What danger are you talking about?"

"Mr. Rearden, you do not know these people's way of doing business or how they interpret your presence here. In your code, but not in theirs, accepting a man's hospitality is a token of good will, a declaration that you and your host stand on terms of a civilized relationship.

Don't give them that kind of sanction."

"Then why did you come here?"

Francisco shrugged gaily. "Oh, I—it doesn't matter what I do. I'm only a party hound."

"What are you doing at this party?"

"Just looking for conquests."

"Found any?"

His face suddenly earnest, Francisco answered gravely, almost solemnly, "Yes—what I think is going to be my best and greatest."

Rearden's anger was involuntary, the cry, not of reproach, but of despair: "How can you waste yourself that way?"

The faint suggestion of a smile, like the rise of a distant light, came into Francisco's eyes as he asked, "Do you care to admit that you care about it?"

"You're going to hear a few more admissions, if that's what you're after. Before I met you, I used to wonder how you could waste a fortune such as yours. Now it's worse, because I can't despise you as I did, as I'd like to, yet the question is much more terrible: How can you waste a mind such as yours?"

"I don't think I'm wasting it right now."

"I don't know whether there's ever been anything that meant a damn to you—but I'm going to tell you what I've never said to anyone before. When I met you, do you remember that you said you wanted to offer me your gratitude?"

There was no trace of amusement left in Francisco's eyes; Rearden had never faced so solemn a look of respect, "Yes, Mr. Rearden," he answered quietly.

"I told you that I didn't need it and I insulted you for it. All right, you've won. That speech you made tonight—that was what you were offering me, wasn't it?"

"Yes, Mr. Rearden.”

"It was more than gratitude, and I needed the gratitude; it was more than admiration, and I needed that, too; it was much more than any word I can find, it will take me days to think of all that it's given me—but one thing I do know: I needed it. I've never made an admission of this kind, because I've never cried for anyone's help. If it amused you to guess that I was glad to see you, you have something real to laugh about now, if you wish."

"It might take me a few years, but I will prove to you that these are the things I do not laugh about."

"Prove it now—by answering one question: Why don't you practice what you preach?"

"Are you sure that I don't?"

"If the things you said are true, if you have the greatness to know it, you should have been the leading industrialist of the world by now."

Francisco said gravely, as he had said to the portly man, but with an odd note of gentleness in his voice, "I suggest that you think twice, Mr. Rearden."

"I've thought about you more than I care to admit. I have found no answer."

"Let me give you a hint: If the things I said are true, who is the guiltiest man in this room tonight?"

"I suppose—James Taggart?"

"No, Mr. Rearden, it is not James Taggart. But you must define the guilt and choose the man yourself."

"A few years ago, I would have said that it's you. I still think that that's what I ought to say. But I'm almost in the position of that fool woman who spoke to you: every reason I know tells me that you're guilty—and yet I can't feel it."

"You are making the same mistake as that woman, Mr. Rearden, though in a nobler form."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean much more than just your judgment of me. That woman and all those like her keep evading the thoughts which they know to be good. You keep pushing out of your mind the thoughts which you believe to be evil. They do it, because they want to avoid effort. You do it, because you won't permit yourself to consider anything that would spare y6u. They indulge their emotions at any cost. You sacrifice your emotions as the first cost of any problem. They are willing to bear nothing. You are willing to bear anything. They keep evading responsibility. You keep assuming it. But don't you see that the essential error is the same? Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think. Don't ignore your own desires, Mr.

Rearden. Don't sacrifice them. Examine their cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to bear."

"How did you know this about me?"

"I made the same mistake, once. But not for long."

"I wish—" Rearden began and stopped abruptly.

Francisco smiled. "Afraid to wish, Mr. Rearden?"

"I wish I could permit myself to like you as much as I do."

"I'd give—" Francisco stopped; inexplicably, Rearden saw the look of an emotion which he could not define, yet felt certain to be pain; he saw Francisco's first moment of hesitation. "Mr. Rearden, do you own any d'Anconia Copper stock?"

Rearden looked at him, bewildered. "No."

"Some day, you'll know what treason I'm committing right now, but . . . Don't ever buy any d'Anconia Copper stock. Don't ever deal with d'Anconia Copper in any way."

"Why?"

"When you'll learn the full reason, you'll know whether there's ever been anything—or anyone—that meant a damn to me, and . . . and how much he did mean."

Rearden frowned: he had remembered something. "I wouldn't deal with your company. Didn't you call them the men of the double standard? Aren't you one of the looters who is growing rich right now by means of directives?"

Inexplicably, the words did not hit Francisco as an insult, but cleared his face back into his look of assurance. "Did you think that it was I who wheedled those directives out of the robber-planners?"

"If not, then who did it?"

"My hitchhikers."

"Without your consent?"

"Without my knowledge."

"I'd hate to admit how much I want to believe you—but there's no way for you to prove it now."

"No? I'll prove it to you within the next fifteen minutes."

"How? The fact remains that you've profited the most from those directives."

"That's true. I've profited more than Mr. Mouch and his gang could ever imagine. After my years of work, they gave me just the chance I needed."

"Are you boasting?"

"You bet I am!” Rearden saw incredulously that Francisco's eyes had a hard, bright look, the look, not of a party hound, but of a man of action. "Mr. Rearden, do you know where most of those new aristocrats keep their hidden money? Do you know where most of the fair share vultures have invested their profits from Rearden Metal?"

"No, but—"

"In d'Anconia Copper stock. Safely out of the way and out of the country. D'Anconia Copper—an old, invulnerable company, so rich that it would last for three more generations of looting. A company managed by a decadent playboy who doesn't give a damn, who'll let them use his property in any way they please and just continue to make money for them—automatically, as did his ancestors. Wasn't that a perfect setup for the looters, Mr. Rearden? Only—what one single point did they miss?"

Rearden was staring at him. "What are you driving at?"

Francisco laughed suddenly. "It's too bad about those profiteers on Rearden Metal. You wouldn't want them to lose the money you made for them, would you, Mr. Rearden? But accidents do happen in the world—you know what they say, man is only a helpless plaything at the mercy of nature's disasters. For instance, there was a fire at the d'Anconia ore docks in Valparaiso tomorrow morning, a fire that razed them to the ground along with half of the port structures. What time is it, Mr. Rearden? Oh, did I mix my tenses? Tomorrow afternoon, there will be a rock slide in the d'Anconia mines at Orano—no lives lost, no casualties, except the mines themselves. It will be found that the mines are done for, because they had been worked in the wrong places for months—what can you expect from a playboy's management? The great deposits of copper will be buried under tons of mountain where a Sebastian d'Anconia would not be able to reclaim them in less than three years, and a People's State will never reclaim them at all. When the stockholders begin to look into things, they will find that the mines at Campos, at San Felix, at Las Heras have been worked in exactly the same manner and have been running at a loss for over a year, only the playboy juggled the books and kept it out of the newspapers.

Shall I tell you what they will discover about the management of the d'Anconia foundries? Or of the d'Anconia ore fleet? But all these discoveries won't do the stockholders any good anyway, because the stock of d'Anconia Copper will have crashed tomorrow morning, crashed like an electric bulb against concrete, crashed like an express elevator, spattering pieces of hitchhikers all over the gutters!"

The triumphant rise of Francisco's voice merged with a matching sound: Rearden burst out laughing.

Rearden did not know how long that moment lasted or what he had felt, it had been like a blow hurling him into another kind of consciousness, then a second blow returning him to his own—all that was left, as at the awakening from a narcotic, was the feeling that he had known some immense kind of freedom, never to be matched in reality. This was like the Wyatt fire again, he thought, this was his secret danger.

He found himself backing away from Francisco d'Anconia, Francisco stood watching him intently, and looked as if he had been watching him all through that unknown length of time.

"There are no evil thoughts, Mr. Rearden," Francisco said softly, "except one: the refusal to think."

"No," said Rearden; it was almost a whisper, he had to keep his voice down, he was afraid that he would hear himself scream it, "no . . . if this is the key to you, no, don't expect me to cheer you . . . you didn't have the strength to fight them . . . you chose the easiest, most vicious way . . . deliberate destruction . . . the destruction of an achievement you hadn't produced and couldn't match. . . ."

"That's not what you'll read in the newspapers tomorrow. There won't be any evidence of deliberate destruction. Everything happened in the normal, explicable, justifiable course of plain incompetence. Incompetence isn't supposed to be punished nowadays, is it? The boys in Buenos Aires and the boys in Santiago will probably want to hand me a subsidy, by way of consolation and reward. There's still a great part of the d'Anconia Copper Company left, though a great part of it is gone for good. Nobody will say that I've done it intentionally. You may think what you wish."

"I think you're the guiltiest man in this room," said Rearden quietly, wearily; even the fire of his anger was gone; he felt nothing but the emptiness left by the death of a great hope. "I think you're worse than anything I had supposed. . . ."

Francisco looked at him with a strange half-smile of serenity, the serenity of a victory over pain, and did not answer.

It was their silence that let them hear the voices of the two men who stood a few steps away, and they turned to look at the speakers.

The stocky, elderly man was obviously a businessman of the conscientious, unspectacular kind. His formal dress suit was of good quality, but of a cut fashionable twenty years before, with the faintest tinge of green at the seams; he had had few occasions to wear it. His shirt studs were ostentatiously too large, but it was the pathetic ostentation of an heirloom, intricate pieces of old-fashioned workmanship, that had probably come to him through four generations, like his business.

His face had the expression which, these days, was the mark of an honest man: an expression of bewilderment. He was looking at his companion, trying hard—conscientiously, helplessly, hopelessly—to understand.

His companion was younger and shorter, a small man with lumpy flesh, with a chest thrust forward and the thin points of a mustache thrust up. He was saying, in a tone of patronizing boredom, "Well, I don't know. All of you are crying about rising costs, it seems to be the stock complaint nowadays, it's the usual whine of people whose profits are squeezed a little. I don't know, we'll have to see, we'll have to decide whether we'll permit you to make any profits or not."

Rearden glanced at Francisco—and saw a face that went beyond his conception of what the purity of a single purpose could do to a human countenance: it was the most merciless face one could ever be permitted to see. He had thought of himself as ruthless, but he knew that he could not match this level, naked, implacable look, dead to all feeling but justice. Whatever the rest of him—thought Rearden—the man who could experience this was a giant.

It was only a moment. Francisco turned to him, his face normal, and said very quietly, "I've changed my mind, Mr. Rearden. I'm glad that you came to this party. I want you to see this."

Then, raising his voice, Francisco said suddenly, in the gay, loose, piercing tone of a man of complete irresponsibility, "You won't grant me that loan, Mr. Rearden? It puts me on a terrible spot. I must get the money—I must raise it tonight—I must raise it before the Stock Exchange opens in the morning, because otherwise—"

He did not have to continue, because the little man with the mustache was clutching at his arm.

Rearden had never believed that a human body could change dimensions within one's sight, but he saw the man shrinking in weight, in posture, in form, as if the air were let out of his lumps, and what had been an arrogant ruler was suddenly a piece of scrap that could not be a threat to anyone.

"Is . . . is there something wrong, Senor d'Anconia? I mean, on . . . on the Stock Exchange?"

Francisco jerked his finger to his lips, with a frightened glance.

"Keep quiet," he whispered. "For God's sake, keep quiet!"

The man was shaking. "Something's . . . wrong?"

"You don't happen to own any d'Anconia Copper stock, do you?"

The man nodded, unable to speak. "Oh my, that's too bad! Well, listen, I'll tell you, if you give me your word of honor that you won't repeat it to anyone, You don't want to start a panic."

"Word of honor . . ." gasped the man.

"What you'd better do is run to your stockbroker and sell as fast as you can—because things haven't been going too well for d'Anconia Copper, I'm trying to raise some money, but if I don't succeed, you'll be lucky if you'll have ten cents on your dollar tomorrow morning—oh my! I forgot that you can't reach your stockbroker before tomorrow morning—well, it's too bad, but—"

The man was running across the room, pushing people out of his way, like a torpedo shot into the crowd.

"Watch," said Francisco austerely, turning to Rearden.

The man was lost in the crowd, they could not see him, they could not tell to whom he was selling his secret or whether he had enough of his cunning left to make it a trade with those who held favors—but they saw the wake of his passage spreading through the room, the sudden cuts splitting the crowd, like the first few cracks, then like the accelerating branching that runs through a wall about to crumble, the streaks of emptiness slashed, not by a human touch, but by the impersonal breath of terror.

There were the voices abruptly choked off, the pools of silence, then sounds of a different nature; the rising, hysterical inflections of uselessly repeated questions, the unnatural whispers, a woman's scream, the few spaced, forced giggles of those still trying to pretend that nothing was happening.

There were spots of immobility in the motion of the crowd, like spreading blotches of paralysis; there was a sudden stillness, as if a motor had been cut off; then came the frantic, jerking, purposeless, rudderless movement of objects bumping down a hill by the blind mercy of gravitation and of every rock they hit on the way. People were running out, running to telephones, running to one another, clutching or pushing the bodies around them at random. These men, the most powerful men in the country, those who held, unanswerable to any power, the power over every man's food and every man's enjoyment of his span of years on earth—these men had become a pile of rubble, clattering in the wind of panic, the rubble left of a structure when its key pillar has been cut.

James Taggart, his face indecent in its exposure of emotions which centuries had taught men to keep hidden, rushed up to Francisco and screamed, "Is it true?"

"Why, James," said Francisco, smiling, "what's the matter? Why do you seem to be upset? Money is the root of all evil—so I just got tired of being evil."

Taggart ran toward the main exit, yelling something to Orren Boyle on the way. Boyle nodded and kept on nodding, with the eagerness and humility of an inefficient servant, then darted of in another direction. Cherryl, her wedding veil coiling like a crystal cloud upon the air, as she ran after him, caught Taggart at the door. "Jim, what's the matter?" He pushed her aside and she fell against the stomach of Paul Larkin, as Taggart rushed out.

Three persons stood immovably still, like three pillars spaced through the room, the lines of their sight cutting across the spread of the wreckage: Dagny, looking at Francisco—Francisco and Rearden, looking at each other.

CHAPTER III
WHITE BLACKMAIL

"What time is it?"

It's running out, thought Rearden—but he answered, "I don't know, Not yet midnight," and remembering his wrist watch, added, "Twenty of."

"I'm going to take a train home," said Lillian.

He heard the sentence, but it had to wait its turn to enter the crowded passages to his consciousness. He stood looking absently at the living room of his suite, a few minutes' elevator ride away from the party. In a moment, he answered automatically, "At this hour?"

"It's still early. There are plenty of trains running."

"You're welcome to stay here, of course."

"No, I think I prefer to go home." He did not argue. "What about you, Henry? Do you intend going home tonight?"

"No." He added, "I have business appointments here tomorrow."

"As you wish."

She shrugged her evening wrap off her shoulders, caught it on her arm and started toward the door of his bedroom, but stopped.

"I hate Francisco d'Anconia," she said tensely. "Why did he have to come to that party? And didn't he know enough to keep his mouth shut, at least till tomorrow morning?" He did not answer. "It's monstrous—what he's allowed to happen to his company. Of course, he's nothing but a rotten playboy—still, a fortune of that size is a responsibility, there's a limit to the negligence a man can permit himself!" He glanced at her face: it was oddly tense, the features sharpened, making her look older. "He owed a certain duty to his stockholders, didn't he?

. . . Didn't he, Henry?"

"Do you mind if we don't discuss it?"

She made a tightening, sidewise movement with her lips, the equivalent of a shrug, and walked into the bedroom.

He stood at the window, looking down at the streaming roofs of automobiles, letting his eyes rest on something while his faculty of sight was disconnected. His mind was still focused on the crowd in the ballroom downstairs and on two figures in that crowd. But as his living room remained on the edge of his vision, so the sense of some action he had to perform remained on the edge of his consciousness. He grasped it for a moment—it was the fact that he had to remove his evening clothes—but farther beyond the edge there was the feeling of reluctance to undress in the presence of a strange woman in his bedroom, and he forgot it again in the next moment.

Lillian came out, as trimly groomed as she had arrived, the beige traveling suit outlining her figure with efficient tightness, the hat tilted over half a head of hair set in waves. She carried her suitcase, swinging it a little, as if in demonstration of her ability to carry it.

He reached over mechanically and took the suitcase out of her hand.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"I'm going to take you to the station."

"Like this? You haven't changed your clothes."

"It doesn't matter."

"You don't have to escort me. I'm quite able to find my own way. If you have business appointments tomorrow, you'd better go to bed."

He did not answer, but walked to the door, held it open for her and followed her to the elevator.

They remained silent when they rode in a taxicab to the station. At such moments as he remembered her presence, he noticed that she sat efficiently straight, almost flaunting the perfection of her poise; she seemed alertly awake and contented, as if she were starting out on a purposeful journey of early morning.

The cab stopped at the entrance to the Taggart Terminal. The bright lights flooding the great glass doorway transformed the lateness of the hour into a sense of active, timeless security. Lillian jumped lightly out of the cab, saying, "No, no, you don't have to get out, drive on back.

Will you be home for dinner tomorrow—or next month?"

"I'll telephone you," he said.

She waved her gloved hand at him and disappeared into the lights of the entrance. As the cab started forward, he gave the driver the address of Dagny's apartment.

The apartment was dark when he entered, but the door to her bedroom was half-open and he heard her voice saying, "Hello, Hank."

He walked in, asking, "Were you asleep?"

"No."

He switched on the light. She lay in bed, her head propped by the pillow, her hair falling smoothly to her shoulders, as if she had not moved for a long time; but her face was untroubled. She looked like a schoolgirl, with the tailored collar of a pale blue nightgown lying severely high at the base of her throat; the nightgown's front was a deliberate contrast to the severity, a spread of pale blue embroidery that looked luxuriously adult and feminine.

He sat down on the edge of the bed—and she smiled, noticing that the stern formality of his full dress clothes made his action so simply, naturally intimate. He smiled in answer. He had come, prepared to reject the forgiveness she had granted him at the party, as one rejects a favor from too generous an adversary. Instead, he reached out suddenly and moved his hand over her forehead, down the line of her hair, in a gesture of protective tenderness, in the sudden feeling of how delicately childlike she was, this adversary who had borne the constant challenge of his strength, but who should have had his protection.

"You're carrying BO much," he said, "and it's I who make it harder for you . . ."

"No, Hank, you don't and you know it."

"I know that you have the strength not to let it hurt you, but it's a strength I have no right to call upon. Yet I do, and I have no solution, no atonement to offer. I can only admit that I know it and that there's no way I can ask you to forgive me."

"There's nothing to forgive."

"I had no right to bring her into your presence."

"It did not hurt me. Only . . ."

"Yes?"

". . . only seeing the way you suffered . . . was hard to see."

"I don't think that suffering makes up for anything, but whatever I felt, I didn't suffer enough, if there's one thing I loathe, it's to speak of my own suffering—that should be no one's concern but mine. But if you want to know, since you know it already—yes, it was hell for me. And I wish it were worse. At least, I'm not letting myself get away with it."

He said it sternly, without emotion, as an impersonal verdict upon himself. She smiled, in amused sadness, she took his hand and pressed it to her lips, and shook her head in rejection of the verdict, holding her face hidden against his hand.

"What do you mean?" he asked softly.

"Nothing . . ." Then she raised her head and said firmly, "Hank, I knew you were married. I knew what I was doing. I chose to do it.

There's nothing that you owe me, no duty that you have to consider."

He shook his head slowly, in protest.

"Hank, I want nothing from you except what you wish to give me.

Do you remember that you called me a trader once? I want you to come to me seeking nothing but your own enjoyment. So long as you wish to remain married, whatever your reason, I have no right to resent it. My way of trading is to know that the joy you give me is paid for by the joy you get from me—not by your suffering or mine. I don't accept sacrifices and I don't make them. If you asked me for more than you meant to me, I would refuse. If you asked me to give up the railroad, I'd leave you. If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud. You don't do it in business, Hank.

Don't do it in your own life."

Like a dim sound track under her words, he was hearing the words said to him by Lillian; he was seeing the distance between the two, the difference in what they sought from him and from life.

"Dagny, what do you think of my marriage?"

"I have no right to think of it."

"You must have wondered about it."

"I did . . . before I came to Ellis Wyatt's house. Not since."

"You've never asked me a question about it."

"And won't."

He was silent for a moment, then said, looking straight at her, underscoring his first rejection of the privacy she had always granted him, "There's one thing I want you to know: I have not touched her since . . . Ellis Wyatt's house."

"I'm glad."

"Did you think I could?"

"I've never permitted myself to wonder about that."

"Dagny, do you mean that if I had, you . . . you'd accept that, too?"

"Yes."

"You wouldn't hate it?"

"I'd hate it more than I can tell you. But if that were your choice, I would accept it. I want you, Hank."

He took her hand and raised it to his lips, she felt the moment's struggle in his body, in the sudden movement with which he came down, half-collapsing, and let his mouth cling to her shoulder. Then he pulled her forward, he pulled the length of her body in the pale blue nightgown to lie stretched across his knees, he held it with an unsmiling violence, as if in hatred for her words and as if they were the words he had most wanted to hear.

He bent his face down to hers and she heard the question that had come again and again in the nights of the year behind them, always torn out of him involuntarily, always as a sudden break that betrayed his constant, secret torture: "Who was your first man?"

She strained back, trying to draw away from him, but he held her.

"No, Hank," she said, her face hard.

The brief, taut movement of his lips was a smile. "I know that you won't answer it, but I won't stop asking—because that is what I'll never accept."

"Ask yourself why you won't accept it."

He answered, his hand moving slowly from her breasts to her knees, as if stressing his ownership and hating it, "Because . . . the things you've permitted me to do . . . I didn't think you could, not ever, not even for me . . . but to find that you did, and more: that you had permitted another man, had wanted him to, had—"

"Do you understand what you're saying? That you've never accepted my wanting you, either—you've never accepted that I should want you, just as I should have wanted him, once."

He said, his voice low, "That's true."

She tore herself away from him with a brusque, twisting movement, she stood up, but she stood looking down at him with a faint smile, and she said softly, "Do you know your only real guilt? With the greatest capacity for it, you've never learned to enjoy yourself. You've always rejected your own pleasure too easily. You've been willing to bear too much."

"He said that, too."

"Who?"

"Francisco d'Anconia."

He wondered why he had the impression that the name shocked her and that she answered an instant too late, "He said that to you?"

"We were talking about quite a different subject."

In a moment, she said calmly, "I saw you talking to him. Which one of you was insulting the other, this time?"

"We weren't. Dagny, what do you think of him?"

"I think that he's done it intentionally—that smash-up we're in for, tomorrow."

"I know he has. Still, what do you think of him as a person?"

"I don't know. I ought to think that he's the most depraved person I've ever met."

"You ought to? But you don't?"

"No. I can't quite make myself feel certain of it."

He smiled. "That's what's strange about him. I know that he's a liar, a loafer, a cheap playboy, the most viciously irresponsible waste of a human being I ever imagined possible. Yet, when I look at him, I feel that if ever there was a man to whom I would entrust my life, he's the one."

She gasped. "Hank, are you saying that you like him?"

"I'm saying that I didn't know what it meant, to like a man, I didn't know how much I missed it—until I met him,"

"Good God, Hank, you've fallen for him!"

"Yes—I think I have." He smiled. "Why does it frighten you?"

"Because . . . because I think he's going to hurt you in some terrible way . . . and the more you see in him, the harder it will be to bear . . . and it will take you a long time to get over it, if ever. . . .

I feel that I ought to warn you against him, but I can't—because I'm certain of nothing about him, not even whether he's the greatest or the lowest man on earth."

"I'm certain of nothing about him—except that I like him."

"But think of what' he's done. It's not Jim and Boyle that he's hurt, it's you and me and Ken Danagger and the rest of us, because Jim's gang will merely take it out on us—and it's going to be another disaster, like the Wyatt fire."

"Yes . . . yes, like the Wyatt fire. But, you know, I don't think I care too much about that. What's one more disaster? Everything's going anyway, it's only a question of a little faster or a little slower, all that's left for us ahead is to keep the ship afloat as long as we can and then go down with it."

"Is that his excuse for himself? Is that what he's made you feel?"

"No. Oh no! That's the feeling I lose when I speak to him. The strange thing is what he does make me feel."

"What?"

"Hope."

She nodded, in helpless wonder, knowing that she had felt it, too.

"I don't know why," he said. "But I look at people and they seem to be made of nothing but pain. He's not. You're not. That terrible hopelessness that's all around us, I lose it only in his presence. And here.

Nowhere else."

She came back to him and slipped down to sit at his feet, pressing her face to his knees. "Hank, we still have so much ahead of us . . . and so much right now. . . . "

He looked at the shape of pale blue silk huddled against the black of his clothes—he bent down to her—he said, his voice low, "Dagny . . . the things I said to you that morning in Ellis Wyatt's house . . . I think I was lying to myself."

"I know it."

Through a gray drizzle of rain, the calendar above the roofs said: September 3, and a clock on another tower said: 10:40, as Rearden rode back to the Wayne-Falkland Hotel. The cab's radio was spitting out shrilly the sounds of a panic-tinged voice announcing the crash of d'Anconia Copper.

Rearden leaned wearily against the seat: the disaster seemed to be no more than a stale news story read long ago. He felt nothing, except an uncomfortable sense of impropriety at finding himself out in the morning streets, dressed in evening clothes. He felt no desire to return from the world he had left to the world he saw drizzling past the windows of the taxi.

He turned the key in the door of his hotel suite, hoping to get back to a desk as fast as possible and have to see nothing around him.

They hit his consciousness together: the breakfast table—the door to his bedroom., open upon the sight of a bed that had been slept in—and Lillian's voice saying, "Good morning, Henry."

She sat in an armchair, wearing the suit she had worn yesterday, without the jacket or hat; her white blouse looked smugly crisp. There were remnants of a breakfast on the table. She was smoking a cigarette, with the air and pose of a long, patient vigil.

As he stood still, she took the time to cross her legs and settle down more comfortably, then asked, "Aren't you going to say anything, Henry?"

He stood like a man in military uniform at some official proceedings where emotions could not be permitted to exist. "It is for you to speak."

"Aren't you going to try to justify yourself?"

"No."

"Aren't you going to start begging my forgiveness?"

"There is no reason why you should forgive me. There is nothing for me to add. You know the truth. Now it is up to you."

She chuckled, stretching, rubbing her shoulder blades against the chair's back. "Didn't you expect to be caught, sooner or later?" she asked. "If a man like you stays pure as a monk for over a year, didn't you think that I might begin to suspect the reason? It's funny, though, that that famous brain of yours didn't prevent you from getting caught as simply as this." She waved at the room, at the breakfast table. "I felt certain that you weren't going to return here, last night. And it wasn't difficult or expensive at all to find out from a hotel employee, this morning, that you haven't spent a night in these rooms in the past year."

He said nothing.

"The man of stainless steel!" She laughed. "The man of achievement and honor who's so much better than the rest of us! Does she dance in the chorus or is she a manicurist in an exclusive barber shop patronized by millionaires?"

He remained silent.

"Who is she, Henry?"

"I won't answer that."

"I want to know."

"You're not going to."

"Don't you think it's ridiculous, your playing the part of a gentleman who's protecting the lady's name—or of any sort of gentleman, from now on? Who is she?"

"I said I won't answer."

She shrugged. "I suppose it makes no difference. There's only one standard type for the one standard purpose. I've always known that under that ascetic look of yours you were a plain, crude sensualist who sought nothing from a woman except an animal satisfaction which I pride myself on not having given you. I knew that your vaunted sense of honor would collapse some day and you would be drawn to the lowest, cheapest type of female, just like any other cheating husband."

She chuckled. "That great admirer of yours, Miss Dagny Taggart, was furious at me for the mere hint of a suggestion that her hero wasn't as pure as his stainless, non-corrosive rail. And she was naive enough to imagine that I could suspect her of being the type men find attractive for a relationship in which what they seek is most notoriously not brains. I knew your real nature and inclinations. Didn't I?" He said nothing. "Do you know what [ think of you now?"

"You have the right to condemn me in any way you wish."

She laughed. "The great man who was so contemptuous—in business—of weaklings who trimmed corners or fell by the wayside, because they couldn't match his strength of character and steadfastness of purpose! How do you feel about it now?"

"My feelings need not concern you. You have the right to decide what you wish me to do. I will agree to any demand you make, except one: don't ask me to give it up."

"Oh, I wouldn't ask you to give it up! I wouldn't expect you to change your nature. This is your true level—under all that self-made grandeur of a knight of industry who rose by sheer genius from the ore mine gutters to finger bowls and white tie! It fits you welt, that white tie, to come home in at eleven o'clock in the morning! You never rose out of the ore mines, that's where you belong—all of you self-made princes of the cash register—in the corner saloon on Saturday night, with the traveling salesmen and the dance-hall girls!"

"Do you wish to divorce me?"

"Oh, wouldn't you like that! Wouldn't that be a smart trade to pull!

Don't you suppose I know that you've wanted to divorce me since the first month of our marriage?"

"If that is what you thought, why did you stay with me?"

She answered severely, "It's a question you have lost the right to ask."

"That's true," he said, thinking that only one conceivable reason, her love for him, could justify her answer.

"No, I'm not going to divorce you. Do you suppose that I will allow your romance with a floozie to deprive me of my home, my name, my social position? I shall preserve such pieces of my life as I can, whatever does not rest on so shoddy a foundation as your fidelity. Make no mistake about it: I shall never give you a divorce. Whether you like it or not, you're married and you'll stay married."

"I will, if that is what you wish."

"And furthermore, I will not consider—incidentally, why don't you sit down?"

He remained standing. "Please say what you have to say."

"I will not consider any unofficial divorce, such as a separation. You may continue your love idyll in the subways and basements where it belongs, but in the eyes of the world I will expect you to remember that I am Mrs. Henry Rearden. You have always proclaimed such an exaggerated devotion to honesty—now let me see you be condemned to the life of the hypocrite that you really are. I will expect you to maintain your residence at the home which is officially yours, but will now be mine."

"If you wish."

She leaned back loosely, in a manner of untidy relaxation, her legs spread apart, her arms resting in two strict parallels on the arms of the chair—like a judge who could permit himself to be sloppy.

"Divorce?" she said, chuckling coldly. "Did you think you'd get off as easily as that? Did you think you'd get by at the price of a few of your millions tossed off as alimony? You're so used to purchasing whatever you wish by the simple means of your dollars, that you cannot conceive of things that are non-commercial, non-negotiable, non-subject to any kind of trade. You're unable to believe that there may exist a person who feels no concern for money. You cannot imagine what that means.

Well, I think you're going to learn. Oh yes, of course you'll agree to any demand I make, from now on. I want you to sit in that office of which you're so proud, in those precious mills of yours, and play the hero who works eighteen hours a day, the giant of industry who keeps the whole country going, the genius who is above the common herd of whining, lying, chiseling humanity. Then I want you to come home and face the only person who knows you for what you really are, who knows the actual value of your word, of your honor, of your integrity, of your vaunted self-esteem. I want you to face, in your own home, the one person who despises you and has the right to do so. I want you to look at me whenever you build another furnace, or pour another record breaking load of steel, or hear applause and admiration, whenever you feel proud of yourself, whenever you feel clean, whenever you feel drunk on the sense of your own greatness. I want you to look at me whenever you hear of some act of depravity, or feel anger at human corruption, or feel contempt for someone's knavery, or are the victim of a new governmental extortion—to look and to know that you're no better, that you're superior to no one, that there's nothing you have the right to condemn. I want you to look at me and to learn the fate of the man who tried to build a tower to the sky, or the man who wanted to reach the sun on wings made of wax—or you, the man who wanted to hold himself as perfect!"

Somewhere outside of him and apart, as if he were reading it in a brain not his own, he observed the thought that there was some flaw in the scheme of the punishment she wanted him to bear, something wrong by its own terms, aside from its propriety or justice, some practical miscalculation that would demolish it all if discovered. He did not attempt to discover it. The thought went by as a moment's notation, made in cold curiosity, to be brought back in some distant future. There was nothing within him now with which to feel interest or to respond.

His own brain was numb with the effort to hold the last of his sense of justice against so overwhelming a tide of revulsion that it swamped Lillian out of human form, past all his pleas to himself that he had no right to feel it. If she was loathsome, he thought, it was he who had brought her to it; this was her way of taking pain—no one could prescribe the form of a human being's attempt to bear suffering—no one could blame—above all, not he, who had caused it. But he saw no evidence of pain in her manner. Then perhaps the ugliness was the only means she could summon to hide it, he thought. Then he thought of nothing except of withstanding the revulsion, for the length of the next moment and of the next.

When she stopped speaking, he asked, "Have you finished?"

"Yes, I believe so."

"Then you had better take the train home now."

When he undertook the motions necessary to remove his evening clothes, he discovered that his muscles felt as if he were at the end of a long day of physical labor. His starched shirt was limp with sweat.

There was neither thought nor feeling left in him, nothing but a sense that merged the remnants of both, the sense of congratulation upon the greatest victory he had ever demanded of himself: that Lillian had walked out of the hotel suite alive.

Entering Rearden's office, Dr. Floyd Ferris wore the expression of a man so certain of the success of his quest that he could afford a benevolent smile. He spoke with a smooth, cheerful assurance; Rearden had the impression that it was the assurance of a cardsharp who has spent a prodigious effort in memorizing every possible variation of the pattern, and is now safe in the knowledge that every card in the deck is marked.

"Well, Mr. Rearden," he said, by way of greeting, "I didn't know that even a hardened hound of public functions and shaker of famous hands, like myself, could still get a thrill out of meeting an eminent man, but that's what I feel right now, believe it or not."

"How do you do," said Rearden.

Dr. Ferris sat down and made a few remarks about the colors of the leaves in the month of October, as he had observed them by the roadside on his long drive from Washington, undertaken specifically for the purpose of meeting Mr. Rearden in person. Rearden said nothing. Dr.

Ferris looked out the window and commented on the inspiring sight of the Rearden mills which, he said, were one of the most valuable productive enterprises in the country.

"That is not what you thought of my product a year and a half ago," said Rearden.

Dr. Ferris gave a brief frown, as if a dot of the pattern had slipped and almost cost him the game, then chuckled, as if he had recaptured it. "That was a year and a half ago, Mr. Rearden," he said easily.

"Times change, and people change with the times—the wise ones do.

Wisdom lies in knowing when to remember and when to forget. Consistency is not a habit of mind which it is wise to practice or to expect of the human race."

He then proceeded to discourse upon the foolishness of consistency in a world where nothing was absolute except the principle of compromise. He talked earnestly, but in a casual manner, as if they both understood that this was not the main subject of their interview; yet, oddly, he spoke not in the tone of a foreword, but in the tone of a postscript, as if the main subject had been settled long ago.

Rearden waited for the first "Don't you think so?” and answered, "Please state the urgent matter for which you requested this appointment."

Dr. Ferris looked astonished and blank for a moment, then said brightly, as if remembering an unimportant subject which could be disposed of without effort, "Oh, that? That was in regard to the dates of delivery of Rearden Metal to the State Science Institute. We should like to have five thousand tons by the first of December, and then we'll be quite agreeable to waiting for the balance of the order until after the first of the year."

Rearden sat looking at him silently for a long time; each passing moment had the effect of making the gay intonations of Dr. Ferris' voice, still hanging in the air of the room, seem more foolish. When Dr. Ferris had begun to dread that he would not answer at all, Rearden answered, "Hasn't the traffic cop with the leather leggings, whom you sent here, given you a report on his conversation with me?"

"Why, yes, Mr. Rearden, but—"

"What else do you want to hear?"

"But that was five months ago, Mr. Rearden. A certain event has taken place since, which makes me quite sure that you have changed your mind and that you will make no trouble for us at all, just as we will make no trouble for you."

"What event?"

"An event of which you have far greater knowledge than I—but, you see, I do have knowledge of it, even though you would much prefer me to have none."

"What event?"

"Since it is your secret, Mr. Rearden, why not let it remain a secret?

Who doesn't have secrets nowadays? For instance, Project X is a secret.

You realize, of course, that we could obtain your Metal simply by having it purchased in smaller quantities by various government offices who would then transfer it to us—and you would not be able to prevent it.

But this would necessitate our letting a lot of lousy bureaucrats"—Dr.

Ferris smiled with disarming frankness—"oh yes, we are as unpopular with one another as we are with you private citizens—it would necessitate our letting a lot of other bureaucrats in on the secret of Project X, which would be highly undesirable at this time. And so would any newspaper publicity about the Project—if we put you on trial for refusal to comply with a government order. But if you had to stand trial on another, much more serious charge, where Project X and the State Science Institute were not involved, and where you could not raise any issue of principle or arouse any public sympathy—why, that would not inconvenience us at all, but it would cost you more than you would care to contemplate. Therefore, the only practical thing for you to do is to help us keep our secret and get us to help you keep yours—and, as I'm sure you realize, we are fully able to keep any of the bureaucrats safely off your trail for as long as we wish,"

"What event, what secret and what trail?"

"Oh, come, Mr. Rearden, don't be childish! The four thousand tons of Rearden Metal which you delivered to Ken Danagger, of course," said Dr. Ferris lightly.

Rearden did not answer.

"Issues of. principle are such a nuisance," said Dr. Ferris, smiling, "and such a waste of time for all concerned. Now would you care to be a martyr for an issue of principle, only in circumstances where nobody will know that that's what you are—nobody but you and me—where you won't get a chance to breathe a word about the issue or the principle—where you won't be a hero, the creator of a spectacular new metal, making a stand against enemies whose actions might appear somewhat shabby in the eyes of the public—where you won't be a hero, but a common criminal, a greedy industrialist who's cheated the law for a plain motive of profit, a racketeer of the black market who's broken the national regulations designed to protect the public welfare—a hero without glory and without public, who'll accomplish no more than about half a column of newsprint somewhere on page five—now would you still care to be that kind of martyr? Because that's just what the issue amounts to now: either you let us have the Metal or you go to jail for ten years and take your friend Danagger along, too."

As a biologist, Dr. Ferris had always been fascinated by the theory that animals had the capacity to smell fear; he had tried to develop a similar capacity in himself. Watching Rearden, he concluded that the man had long since decided to give in—because he caught no trace of any fear.

"Who was your informer?" asked Rearden.

"One of your friends, Mr. Rearden. The owner of a copper mine in Arizona, who reported to us that you had purchased an extra amount of copper last month, above the regular tonnage required for the monthly quota of Rearden Metal which the law permits you to produce. Copper is one of the ingredients of Rearden Metal, isn't it? That was all the information we needed. The rest was easy to trace. You mustn't blame that mine owner too much. The copper producers, as you know, are being squeezed so badly right now that the man had to offer something of value in order to obtain a favor, an 'emergency need' ruling which suspended a few of the directives in his case and gave him a little breathing spell. The person to whom he traded his information knew where it would have the highest value, so he traded it to me, in return for certain favors he needed. So all the necessary evidence, as well as the next ten years of your life, are now in my possession—and I am offering you a trade. I'm sure you won't object, since trade is your specialty. The form may be a little different from what it was in your youth—but you're a smart trader, you've always known how to take advantage of changing conditions, and these are the conditions of our day, so it should not be difficult for you to see where your interests lie and to act accordingly."

Rearden said calmly, "In my youth, this was called blackmail."

Dr. Ferris grinned. "That's what it is, Mr. Rearden. We've entered a much more realistic age."

But there was a peculiar difference, thought Rearden, between the manner of a plain blackmailer and that of Dr. Ferris. A blackmailer would show signs of gloating over his victim's sin and of acknowledging its evil, he would suggest a threat to the victim and a sense of danger to them both. Dr. Ferris conveyed none of it. His manner was that of dealing with the normal and the natural, it suggested a sense of safety, it held no tone of condemnation, but a hint of comradeship, a comradeship based—for both of them—on self-contempt. The sudden feeling that made Rearden lean forward in a posture of eager attentiveness, was the feeling that he was about to discover another step along his half glimpsed trail.

Seeing Rearden's look of interest, Dr. Ferris smiled and congratulated himself on having caught the right key. The game was clear to him now, the markings of the pattern were falling in the right order; some men, thought Dr. Ferris, would do anything so long as it was left unnamed, but this man wanted frankness, this was the tough realist he had expected to find.

"You're a practical man, Mr. Rearden," said Dr. Ferris amiably. "I can't understand why you should want to stay behind the times. Why don't you adjust yourself and play it right? You're smarter than most of them. You're a valuable person, we've wanted you for a long time, and when I heard that you were trying to string along with Jim Taggart, I knew you could be had. Don't bother with Jim Taggart, he's nothing, he's just flea-bait. Get into the big game. We can use you and you can use us. Want us to step on Orren Boyle for you? He's given you an awful beating, want us to trim him down a little? It can be done. Or want us to keep Ken Danagger in line? Look how impractical you've been about that. I know why you sold him the Metal—it's because you need him to get coal from. So you take a chance on going to jail and paying huge fines, just to keep on the good side of Ken Danagger. Do you call that good business? Now, make a deal with us and just let Mr. Danagger understand that if he doesn't toe the line, he'll go to jail, but you won't, because you've got friends he hasn't got—and you'll never have to worry about your coal supply from then on. Now that's the modern way of doing business. Ask yourself which way is more practical. And whatever anyone's said about you, nobody's ever denied that you're a great businessman and a hard-headed realist."

"That's what I am," said Rearden.

"That's what I thought," said Dr. Ferris. "You rose to riches in an age when most men were going bankrupt, you've always managed to blast obstacles, to keep your mills going and to make money—that's your reputation—so you wouldn't want to be impractical now, would you? What for? What do you care, so long as you make money? Leave the theories to people like Bertram Scudder and the ideals to people like Balph Eubank—and be yourself. Come down to earth. You're not the man who'd let sentiment interfere with business."

"No," said Rearden slowly, "I wouldn't. Not any kind of sentiment."

Dr. Ferris smiled. "Don't you suppose we knew it?" he said, his tone suggesting that he was letting his patent-leather hair down to impress a fellow criminal by a display of superior cunning. "We've waited a long time to get something on you. You honest men are such a problem and such a headache. But we knew you'd slip sooner or later—and this is just what we wanted."

"You seem to be pleased about it."

"Don't I have good reason to be?"

"But, after all, I did break one of your laws."

"Well, what do you think they're for?"

Dr. Ferris did not notice the sudden look on Rearden's face, the look of a man hit by the first vision of that which he had sought to see.

Dr. Ferris was past the stage of seeing; he was intent upon delivering the last blows to an animal caught in a trap.

"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against—then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it.

You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of law-breakers—and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."

Watching Dr. Ferris watch him, Rearden saw the sudden twitch of anxiety, the look that precedes panic, as if a clean card had fallen on the table from a deck Dr. Ferris had never seen before.

What Dr. Ferris was seeing in Rearden's face was the look of luminous serenity that comes from the sudden answer to an old, dark problem, a look of relaxation and eagerness together; there was a youthful clarity in Rearden's eyes and the faintest touch of contempt in the line of his mouth. Whatever this meant—and Dr. Ferris could not decipher it —he was certain of one thing: the face held no sign of guilt.

"There's a flaw in your system, Dr. Ferris,” Rearden said quietly, almost lightly, "a practical flaw which you will discover when you put me on trial for selling four thousand tons of Rearden Metal to Ken Danagger."

It took twenty seconds—Rearden could feel them moving past slowly—at the end of which Dr. Ferris became convinced that he had heard Rearden's final decision.

"Do you think we're bluffing?" snapped Dr. Ferris; his voice suddenly had the quality of the animals he had spent so much time studying: it sounded as if he were baring his teeth.

"I don't know," said Rearden. "I don't care, one way or the other."

"Are you going to be as impractical as that?"

"The evaluation of an action as 'practical,' Dr. Ferris, depends on what it is that one wishes to practice."

"Haven't you always placed your self-interest above all else?"

"That is what I am doing right now."

"If you think we'll let you get away with a—"

"You will now please get out of here."

"Whom do you think you're fooling?" Dr. Ferris' voice had risen close to the edge of a scream. "The day of the barons of industry is done! You've got the goods, but we've got the goods on you, and you're going to play it our way or you'll—"

Rearden had pressed a button; Miss Ives entered the office.

"Dr. Ferris has become confused and has lost his way, Miss Ives," said Rearden. "Will you escort him out please?" He turned to Ferris.

"Miss Ives is a woman, she weighs about a hundred pounds, and she has no practical qualifications at all, only a superlative intellectual efficiency. She would never do for a bouncer in a saloon, only in an impractical place, such as a factory."

Miss Ives looked as if she was performing a duty of no greater emotional significance than taking dictation about a list of shipping invoices. Standing straight in a disciplined manner of icy formality, she held the door open, let Dr. Ferris cross the room, then walked out first; Dr. Ferris followed.

She came back a few minutes later, laughing in uncontrollable exultation.

"Mr. Rearden," she asked, laughing at her fear for him, at their danger, at everything but the triumph of the moment, "what is it you're doing?"

He sat in a pose he had never permitted himself before, a pose he had resented as the most vulgar symbol of the businessman—he sat leaning back in his chair, with his feet on his desk—and it seemed to her that the posture had an air of peculiar nobility, that it was not the pose of a stuffy executive, but of a young crusader.

"I think I'm discovering a new continent, Owen," he answered cheerfully. "A continent that should have been discovered along with America, but wasn't."

"I have to speak of it to you" said Eddie Willers, looking at the worker across the table. "I don't know why it helps me, but it does—just to know that you're hearing me."

It was late and the lights of the underground cafeteria were low, but Eddie Willers could see the worker's eyes looking at him intently.

"I feel as if . . . as if there's no people and no human language left," said Eddie Willers. "I feel that if I were to scream in the middle of the streets, there would be no one to hear it. . . . No, that's not quite what I feel, it's this: I feel that someone is screaming in the middle of the streets, but people are passing by and no sound can reach them —and it's not Hank Rearden or Ken Danagger or I who's screaming, and yet it seems as if it's all three of us. . . . Don't you see that somebody should have risen to defend them, but nobody has or will?

Rearden and Danagger were indicted this morning—for an illegal sale of Rearden Metal. They'll go on trial next month. I was there, in the courtroom in Philadelphia, when they read the indictment. Rearden was very calm—I kept feeling that he was smiling, but he wasn't.

Danagger was worse than calm. He didn't say a word, he just stood there, as if the room were empty. . . . The newspapers are saying that both of them should be thrown in jail. . . . No . . . no, I'm not shaking, I'm all right, I'll be all right in a moment. . . . That's why I haven't said a word to her, I was afraid I'd explode and I didn't want to make it harder for her, I know how she feels. . . . Oh yes, she spoke to me about it, and she didn't shake, but it was worse—you know, the kind of rigidity when a person acts as if she didn't feel anything at all, and . . . Listen, did I ever tell you that I like you?

I like you very much—for the way you look right now. You hear us.

You understand . . . What did she say? It was strange: it's not Hank Rearden that she's afraid for, it's Ken Danagger. She said that Rearden will have the strength to take it, but Danagger won't. Not that he'll lack the strength, but he'll refuse to take it. She . . . she feels certain that Ken Danagger will be the next one to go. To go like Ellis Wyatt and all those others. To give up and vanish . . . Why?

Well, she thinks that there's something like a shift of stress involved—economic and personal stress. As soon as all the weight of the moment shifts to the shoulders of some one man—he's the one who vanishes, like a pillar slashed off. A year ago, nothing worse could have happened to 'the country than to lose Ellis Wyatt. He's the one we lost.

Since then, she says, it's been as if the center of gravity were swinging wildly—like in a sinking cargo ship out of control—shifting from industry to industry, from man to man. When we lose one, another becomes that much more desperately needed—and he's the one we lose next. Well, what could be a greater disaster now than to have the country's coal supply left in the hands of men like Boyle or Larkin?

And there's no one left in the coal industry who amounts to much, except Ken Danagger. So she says that she feels almost as if he's a marked man, as if he's hit by a spotlight right now, waiting to be cut down. . . . What are you laughing at? It might sound preposterous, but I think it's true. . . . What? . . . Oh yes, you bet she's a smart woman! . . . And then there's another thing involved, she says. A man has to come to a certain mental stage—not anger or despair, but something much, much more than both—before he can be cut down.

She can't tell what it is, but she knew, long before the fire, that Ellis Wyatt had reached that stage and something would happen to him.

When she saw Ken Danagger in the courtroom today, she said that he was ready for the destroyer. . . . Yes, that's the words she used: he was ready for the destroyer. You see, she doesn't think it's happening by chance or accident. She thinks there's a system behind it, an intention, a man. There's a destroyer loose in the country, who's cutting down the buttresses one after another to let the structure collapse upon our heads. Some ruthless creature moved by some inconceivable purpose . . . She says that she won't let him get Ken Danagger. She keeps repeating that she must stop Danagger—she wants to speak to him, to beg, to plead, to revive whatever it is that he's losing, to arm him against the destroyer, before the destroyer comes. She's desperately anxious to reach Danagger first. He has refused to see anyone. He's gone back to Pittsburgh, to his mines. But she got him on the phone, late today, and she's made an appointment to see him tomorrow afternoon. . . . Yes, she'll go to Pittsburgh tomorrow. . . . Yes, she's afraid for Danagger, terribly afraid. . . . No. She knows nothing about the destroyer. She has no clue to his identity, no evidence of his existence—except the trail of destruction. But she feels certain that he exists. . . . No, she cannot guess his purpose. She says that nothing on earth could justify him. There are times when she feels that she'd like to find him more than any other man in the world, more than the inventor of the motor. She says that if she found the destroyer, she'd shoot him on sight—she'd be willing to give her life if she could take his first and by her own hand . . . because he's the most evil creature that's ever existed, the man who's draining the brains of the world.

. . . I guess it's getting to be too much for her, at times—even for her. I don't think she allows herself to know how tired she is. The other morning, I came to work very early and I found her asleep on the couch in her office, with the light still burning on her desk. She'd been there all night. I just stood and looked at her. I wouldn't have awakened her if the whole goddamn railroad collapsed. . . . When she was asleep? Why, she looked like a young girl. She looked as if she felt certain that she would awaken in a world where no one would harm her, as if she had nothing to hide or to fear. That's what was terrible—that guiltless purity of her face, with her body twisted by exhaustion, still lying there as she had collapsed. She looked—say, why should you ask me what she looks like when she's asleep? . . .

Yes, you're right, why do I talk about it? I shouldn't. I don't know what made me think of it. . . . Don't pay any attention to me. I'll be all right tomorrow. I guess it's just that I'm sort of shell-shocked by that courtroom. I keep thinking: if men like Rearden and Danagger are to be sent to jail, then what kind of world are we working in and what for? Isn't there any justice left on earth? I was foolish enough to say that to a reporter when we were leaving the courtroom—and he just laughed and said, 'Who is John Galt?' . . . Tell me, what's happening to us? Isn't there a single man of justice left? Isn't there anyone to defend them? Oh, do you hear me? Isn't there anyone to defend them?"

"Mr. Danagger will be free in a moment, Miss Taggart. He has a visitor in his office. Will you excuse it, please?" said the secretary.

Through the two hours of her flight to Pittsburgh, Dagny had been tensely unable to justify her anxiety or to dismiss it; there was no reason to count minutes, yet she had felt a blind desire to hurry. The anxiety vanished when she entered the anteroom of Ken Danagger's office: she had reached him, nothing had happened to prevent it, she felt safety, confidence and an enormous sense of relief.

The words of the secretary demolished it. You're becoming a coward—thought Dagny., feeling a causeless jolt of dread at the words, out of all proportion to their meaning.

"I am so sorry, Miss Taggart." She heard the secretary's respectful, solicitous voice and realized that she had stood there without answering. "Mr. Danagger will be with you in just a moment. Won't you sit down?" The voice conveyed an anxious concern over the impropriety of keeping her waiting.

Dagny smiled. "Oh, that's quite all right."

She sat down in a wooden armchair, facing the secretary's railing.

She reached for a cigarette and stopped, wondering whether she would have time to finish it, hoping that she would not, then lighted it brusquely.

It was an old-fashioned frame building, this headquarters of the great Danagger Coal Company. Somewhere in the hills beyond the window were the pits where Ken Danagger had once worked as a miner. He had never moved his office away from the coal fields.

She could see the mine entrances cut into the hillsides, small frames of metal girders, that led to an immense underground kingdom. They seemed precariously modest, lost in the violent orange and red of the hills. . . . Under a harsh blue sky, in the sunlight of late October, the sea of leaves looked like a sea of fire . . . like waves rolling to swallow the fragile posts of the mine doorways. She shuddered and looked away: she thought of the flaming leaves spread over the hills of Wisconsin, on the road to Starnesville.

She noticed that there was only a stub left of the cigarette between her fingers. She lighted another.

When she glanced at the clock on the wall of the anteroom, she caught the secretary glancing at it at the same time. Her appointment was for three o'clock; the white dial said: 3:12.

"Please forgive it, Miss Taggart," said the secretary, "Mr. Danagger will be through, any moment now, Mr. Danagger is extremely punctual about Ms appointments. Please believe me that this is unprecedented."

"I know it." She knew that Ken Danagger was as rigidly exact about his schedule as a railroad timetable and that he had been known to cancel an interview if a caller permitted himself to arrive five minutes late.

The secretary was an elderly spinster with a forbidding manner: a manner of even-toned courtesy impervious to any shock, just as her spotless white blouse was impervious to an atmosphere filled with coal dust. Dagny thought it strange that a hardened, well-trained woman of this type should appear to be nervous: she volunteered no conversation, she sat still, bent over some pages of paper on her desk. Half of Dagny's cigarette had gone in smoke, while the woman still sat looking at the same page.

When she raised her head to glance at the clock, the 4ial said: 3:30.

"I know that this is inexcusable, Miss Taggart." The note of apprehension was obvious in her voice now. "I am unable to understand it."

"Would you mind telling Mr. Danagger that I'm here?"

"I can't!" It was almost a cry; she saw Dagny's astonished glance and felt obliged to explain: "Mr. Danagger called me, on the interoffice communicator, and told me that he was not to be interrupted under any circumstances or for any reason whatever."

"When did he do that?"

The moment's pause was like a small air cushion for the answer: "Two hours ago."

Dagny looked at the closed door of Danagger's office. She could hear the sound of a voice beyond the door, but so faintly that she could not tell whether it was the voice of one man or the conversation of two; she could not distinguish the words or the emotional quality of the tone: it was only a low, even progression of sounds that seemed normal and did not convey the pitch of raised voices.

"How long has Mr. Danagger been in conference?" she asked.

"Since one o'clock," said the secretary grimly, then added in apology, "It was an unscheduled caller, or Mr. Danagger would never have permitted this to happen."

The door was not locked, thought Dagny; she felt an unreasoning desire to tear it open and walk in—it was only a few wooden boards with a brass knob, it would require only a small muscular contraction of her arm—but she looked away, knowing that the power of a civilized order and of Ken Danagger's right was more impregnable a barrier than any lock.

She found herself staring at the stubs of her cigarettes in the ashtray stand beside her, and wondered why it gave her a sharper feeling of apprehension. Then she realized that she was thinking of Hugh Akston: she had written to him, at his diner in Wyoming, asking him to tell her where he had obtained the cigarette with the dollar sign; her letter had come back, with a postal inscription to inform her that he had moved away, leaving no forwarding address.

She told herself angrily that this had no connection with the present moment and that she had to control her nerves. But her hand jerked to press the button of the ashtray and make the cigarette stubs vanish inside the stand.

As she looked up, her eyes met the glance of the secretary watching her. "I am sorry, Miss Taggart. I don't know what to do about it."

It was an openly desperate plea. "I don't dare interrupt."

Dagny asked slowly, as a demand, in defiance of office etiquette, "Who is with Mr. Danagger?"

"I don't know, Miss Taggart. I have never seen the gentleman before." She noticed the sudden, fixed stillness of Dagny's eyes and added, "I think it's a childhood friend of Mr. Danagger."

"Oh!" said Dagny, relieved.

"He came in unannounced and asked to see Mr. Danagger and said that this was an appointment which Mr. Danagger had made with him forty years ago,"

"How old is Mr. Danagger?"

"Fifty-two," said the secretary. She added reflectively, in the tone of a casual remark, "Mr. Danagger started working at the age of twelve."

After another silence, she added, "The strange thing is that the visitor does not look as if he's even forty years old. He seems to be a man in his thirties."

"Did he give his name?"

"No."

"What does he look like?"

The secretary smiled with sudden animation, as if she were about to utter an enthusiastic compliment, but the smile vanished abruptly.

"I don't know," she answered uneasily. "He's hard to describe. He has a strange face."

They had been silent for a long time, and the hands of the dial were approaching 3:50 when the buzzer rang on the secretary's desk—the bell from Danagger's office, the signal of permission to enter.

They both leaped to their feet, and the secretary rushed forward, smiling with relief, hastening to open the door.

As she entered Danagger's office, Dagny saw the private exit door closing after the caller who had preceded her. She heard the knock of the door against the jamb and the faint tinkle of the glass panel.

She saw the man who had left, by his reflection on Ken Danagger's face. It was not the face she had seen in the courtroom, it was not the face she had known for years as a countenance of unchanging, unfeeling rigidity—it was a face which a young man of twenty should hope for, but could not achieve, a face from which every sign of strain had been wiped out, so that the lined cheeks, the creased forehead, the graying hair—like elements rearranged by a new theme—were made to form a composition of hope, eagerness and guiltless serenity: the theme was deliverance.

He did not rise when she entered—he looked as if he had not quite returned to the reality of the moment and had forgotten the proper routine—but he smiled at her with such simple benevolence that she found herself smiling in answer. She caught herself thinking that this was the way every human being should greet another—and she lost her anxiety, feeling suddenly certain that all was well and that nothing to be feared could exist.

"How do you do, Miss Taggart," he said. "Forgive me, I think that I have kept you waiting. Please sit down." He pointed to the chair in front of his desk.

"I didn't mind waiting," she said. "I'm grateful that you gave me this appointment. I was extremely anxious to speak to you on a matter of urgent importance."

He leaned forward across the desk, with a look of attentive concentration, as he always did at the mention of an important business matter, but she was not speaking to the man she knew, this was a stranger, and she stopped, uncertain about the arguments she had been prepared to use.

He looked at her in silence, and then he said, "Miss Taggart, this is such a beautiful day—probably the last, this year. There's a thing I've always wanted to do, but never had time for it. Let's go back to New York together and take one of those excursion boat trips around the island of Manhattan. Let's take a last look at the greatest city in the world."

She sat still, trying to hold her eyes fixed in order to stop the office from swaying. This was the Ken Danagger who had never had a personal friend, had never married, had never attended a play or a movie, had never permitted anyone the impertinence of taking his time for any concern but business.

"Mr. Danagger, I came here to speak to you about a matter of crucial importance to the future of your business and mine. I came to speak to you about your indictment."

"Oh, that? Don't worry about that. It doesn't matter. I'm going to retire."

She sat still, feeling nothing, wondering numbly whether this was how it felt to hear a death sentence one had dreaded, but had never quite believed possible.

Her first movement was a sudden jerk of her head toward the exit door; she asked, her voice low, her mouth distorted by hatred, "Who was he?"

Danagger laughed. "If you've guessed that much, you should have guessed that it's a question I won't answer."

"Oh God, Ken Danagger!" she moaned; his words made her realize that the barrier of hopelessness, of silence, of unanswered questions was already erected between them; the hatred had been only a thin wire that had held her for a moment and she broke with its breaking.

"Oh God!"

"You're wrong, kid," he said gently. "I know how you feel, but you're wrong," then added more formally, as if remembering the proper manner, as if still trying to balance himself between two kinds of reality, "I'm sorry, Miss Taggart, that you had to come here so soon after."

"I came too late," she said. "That's what I came here to prevent. I knew it would happen."

"Why?"

"I felt certain that he'd get you next, whoever he is."

"You did? That's funny. I didn't."

"I wanted to warn you, to . . . to arm you against him."

He smiled. "Take my word for it, Miss Taggart, so that you won't torture yourself with regrets about the timing; that could not have been done."

She felt that with every passing minute he was moving away into some great distance where she would not be able to reach him, but there was still some thin bridge left between them and she had to hurry.

She leaned forward, she said very quietly, the intensity of emotion taking form in the exaggerated steadiness of her voice, "Do you remember what you thought and felt, what you were, three hours ago? Do you remember what your mines meant to you? Do you remember Taggart Transcontinental or Rearden Steel? In the name of that, will you answer me? Will you help me to understand?"

"I will answer whatever I may."

"You have decided to retire? To give up your business?"

"Yes."

"Does it mean nothing to you now?"

"It means more to me now than it ever did before."

"But you're going to abandon it?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"That, I won't answer,”

"You, who loved your work, who respected nothing but work, who despised every kind of aimlessness, passivity and renunciation—have you renounced the kind of life you loved?"

"No. I have just discovered how much I do love it."

"But you intend to exist without work or purpose?"

"What makes you think that?"

"Are you going into the coal-mining business somewhere else?"

"No, not into the coal-mining business."

"Then what are you going to do?"

"I haven't decided that yet."

"Where are you going?"

"I won't answer."

She gave herself a moment's pause, to gather her strength, to tell herself; Don't feel, don't show him that you feel anything, don't let it cloud and break the bridge—then she said, in the same quiet, even voice, "Do you realize what your retirement will do to Hank Rearden, to me, to all the rest of us, whoever is left?"

"Yes. I realize it more fully than you do at present."

"And it means nothing to you?"

"It means more than you will care to believe."

"Then why are you deserting us?"

"You will not believe it and I will not explain, but I am not deserting you."

"We're being left to carry a greater burden, and you're indifferent to the knowledge that you'll see us destroyed by the looters."

"Don't be too sure of that."

"Of which? Your indifference or our destruction?"

"Of either."

"But you know, you knew it this morning, that it's a battle to the death, and it's we—you were one of us—against the looters."

"If I answer that 7 know it, but you don't—you'll think that I attach no meaning to my words. So take it as you wish, but that is my answer."

"Will you tell me the meaning?"

"No. It's for you to discover."

"You're willing to give up the world to the looters. We aren't."

"Don't be too sure of either."

She remained helplessly silent. The strangeness of his manner was its simplicity; he spoke as if he were being completely natural and—in the midst of unanswered questions and of a tragic mystery—he conveyed the impression that there were no secrets any longer, and no mystery need ever have existed.

But as she watched him, she saw the first break in his joyous calm: she saw him struggling against some thought; he hesitated, then said, with effort, "About Hank Rearden . . . Will you do me a favor?"

"Of course."

"Will you tell him that I . . . You see, I've never cared for people, yet he was always the man I respected, but I didn't know until today that what I felt was,. . . that he was the only man I ever loved. . . .

Just tell him this and that I wish I could—no, I guess that's all I can tell him. . . . He'll probably damn me for leaving . . . still, maybe he won't."

"I'll tell him."

Hearing the dulled, hidden sound of pain in his voice, she felt so close to him that it seemed impossible he would deliver the blow he was delivering—and she made one last effort.

"Mr. Danagger, if I were to plead on my knees, if I were to find some sort of words that I haven't found—would there be . . . is there a chance to stop you?"

"There isn't."

After a moment, she asked tonelessly, "When are you quitting?"

"Tonight."

"What will you do with"—she pointed at the hills beyond the window—"the Danagger Coal Company? To whom are you leaving it?"

"I don't know—or care. To nobody or everybody. To whoever wants to take it."

"You're not going to dispose of it or appoint a successor?"

"No. What for?"

"To leave it in good hands. Couldn't you at least name an heir of your own choice?"

"I haven't any choice. It doesn't make any difference to me. Want me to leave it all to you?" He reached for a sheet of paper. "I'll write a letter naming you sole heiress right now, if you want me to."

She shook her head in an involuntary recoil of horror. "I'm not a looter!"

He chuckled, pushing the paper aside. "You see? You gave the right answer, whether you knew it or not. Don't worry about Danagger Coal. It won't make any difference, whether I appoint the best successor in the world, or the worst, or none. No matter who takes it over now, whether men or weeds, it won't make any difference."

"But to walk off and abandon . . . just abandon . . . an industrial enterprise, as if we were in the age of landless nomads or of savages wandering in the jungle!"

"Aren't we?" He was smiling at her, half in mockery, half in compassion. "Why should I leave a deed or a will? I don't want to help the looters to pretend that private property still exists. I am complying with the system which they have established. They do not need me, they say, they only need my coal. Let them take it."

"Then you're accepting their system?"

"Am I?"

She moaned, looking at the exit door, "What has he done to you?"

"He told me that I had the right to exist."

"I didn't believe it possible that in three hours one could make a man turn against fifty-two years of his life!"

"If that's what you trunk he's done, or if you think that he's told me some inconceivable revelation, then I can see how bewildering it would appear to you. But that's not what he's done. He merely named what I had lived by, what every man lives by—at and to the extent of such time as he doesn't spend destroying himself."

She knew that questions were futile and that there was nothing she could say to him.

He looked at her bowed head and said gently, "You're a brave person, Miss Taggart. I know what you're doing right now and what it's costing you. Don't torture yourself. Let me go."

She rose to her feet. She was about to speak—but suddenly he saw her stare down, leap forward and seize the ashtray that stood on the edge of the desk.

The ashtray contained a cigarette butt stamped with the sign of the dollar.

"What's the matter, Miss Taggart?"

"Did he . . . did he smoke this?"

"Who?"

"Your caller—did he smoke this cigarette?"

"Why, I don't know . . . I guess so . . . yes, I think I did see him smoking a cigarette once . . . let me see . . . no, that's not my brand, so it must be his."

"Were there any other visitors in this office today?"

"No. But why, Miss Taggart? What's the matter?"

"May I take this?"

"What? The cigarette butt?" He stared at her in bewilderment.

"Yes."

"Why, sure—but what for?"

She was looking down at the butt in the palm of her hand as if it were a jewel. "I don't know . . . I don't know what good it will do me, except that it's a clue to"—she smiled bitterly—"to a secret of my own."

She stood, reluctant to leave, looking at Ken Danagger in the manner of a last look at one departing for the realm of no return.

He guessed it, smiled and extended his hand. "I won't say goodbye," he said, "because I'll see you again in the not too distant future."

"Oh," she said eagerly, holding his hand clasped across the desk, "are you going to return?"

"No. You're going to join me."

There was only a faint red breath above the structures in the darkness, as if the mills were asleep but alive, with the even breathing of the furnaces and the distant heartbeats of the conveyor belts to show it.

Rearden stood at the window of his office, his hand pressed to the pane; in the perspective of distance, his hand covered half a mile of structures, as if he were trying to hold them.

He was looking at a long wall of vertical strips, which was the battery of coke ovens. A narrow door slid open with a brief gasp of flame, and a sheet of red-glowing coke came sliding out smoothly, like a slice of bread from the side of a giant toaster. It held still for an instant, then an angular crack shot through the slice and it crumbled into a gondola waiting on the rails below.

Danagger coal, he thought. These were the only words in his mind.

The rest was a feeling of loneliness, so vast that even its own pain seemed swallowed in an enormous void.

Yesterday, Dagny had told him the story of her futile attempt and given him Danagger's message. This morning, he had heard the news that Danagger had disappeared. Through his sleepless night, then through the taut concentration on the duties of the day, his answer to the message had kept beating in his mind, the answer he would never have a chance to utter.

"The only man I ever loved." It came from Ken Danagger, who had never expressed anything more personal than "Look here, Rearden."

He thought: Why had we let it go? Why had we both been condemned —in the hours away from our desks—to an exile among dreary strangers who had made us give up all desire for rest, for friendship, for the sound of human voices? Could I now reclaim a single hour spent listening to my brother Philip and give it to Ken Danagger? Who made it our duty to accept, as the only reward for our work, the gray torture of pretending love for those who roused us to nothing but contempt?

We who were able to melt rock and metal for our purpose, why had we never sought that which we wanted from men?

He tried to choke the words in his mind, knowing that it was useless to think of them now. But the words were there and they were like words addressed to the dead: No, I don't damn you for leaving—if that is the question and the pain which you took away with you. Why didn't you give me a chance to tell you . . . what? that I approve?

. . . no, but that I can neither blame you nor follow you.

Closing his eyes, he permitted himself to experience for a moment the immense relief he would feel if he, too, were to walk off, abandoning everything. Under the shock of his loss, he felt a thin thread of envy. Why didn't they come for me, too, whoever they are, and give me that irresistible reason which would make me go? But in the next moment, his shudder of anger told him that he would murder the man who'd attempt to approach him, he would murder before he could hear the words of the secret that would take him away from his mills.

It was late, his staff had gone, but he dreaded the road to his house and the emptiness of the evening ahead. He felt as if the enemy who had wiped out Ken Danagger, were waiting for him in the darkness beyond the glow of the mills. He was not invulnerable any longer, but whatever it was, he thought, wherever it came from, he was safe from it here, as in a circle of fires drawn about him to ward off evil.

He looked at the glittering white splashes on the dark windows of a structure in the distance; they were like motionless ripples of sunlight on water. It was the reflection of the neon sign that burned on the roof of the building above his head, saying: Rearden Steel. He thought of the night when he had wished to light a sign above his past, saying: Rearden Life. Why had he wished it? For whose eyes to see?

He thought—in bitter astonishment and for the first time—that the joyous pride he had once felt, had come from his respect for men, for the value of their admiration and their judgment. He did not feel it any longer. There were no men, he thought, to whose sight he could wish to offer that sign.

He turned brusquely away from the window. He seized his overcoat with the harsh sweep of a gesture intended to jolt him back into the discipline of action. He slammed the two folds of the overcoat about his body, he jerked the belt tight, then hastened to turn off the lights with rapid snaps of his hand on his way out of the office.

He threw the door open—and stopped. A single lamp was burning in a corner of the dimmed anteroom. The man who sat on the edge of a desk, in a pose of casual, patient waiting, was Francisco d'Anconia.

Rearden stood still and caught a brief instant when Francisco, not moving, looked at him with the hint of an amused smile that was like a wink between conspirators at a secret they both understood, but would not acknowledge. It was only an instant, almost too brief to grasp, because it seemed to him that Francisco rose at once at his entrance, with a movement of courteous deference. The movement suggested a strict formality, the denial of any attempt at presumption—but it stressed the intimacy of the fact that he uttered no word of greeting or explanation.

Rearden asked, his voice hard, "What are you doing here?"

"I thought that you would want to see me tonight, Mr. Rearden."

"Why?"

"For the same reason that has kept you so late in your office. You were not working."

"How long have you been sitting here?"

"An hour or two."

"Why didn't you knock at my door?"

"Would you have allowed me to come in?"

"You're late in asking that question,"

"Shall I leave, Mr. Rearden?"

Rearden pointed to the door of his office. "Come in."

Turning the lights on in the office, moving with unhurried control, Rearden thought that he must not allow himself to feel anything, but felt the color of life returning to him in the tensely quiet eagerness of an emotion which he would not identify. What he told himself consciously was: Be careful.

He sat down on the edge of his desk, crossed his arms, looked at Francisco, who remained standing respectfully before him, and asked with the cold hint of a smile, "Why did you come here?"

"You don't want me to answer, Mr. Rearden. You wouldn't admit to me or to yourself how desperately lonely you are tonight. If you don't question me, you won't feel obliged to deny it. Just accept what you do know, anyway: that I know it."

Taut like a string pulled by anger against the impertinence at one end and by admiration for the frankness at the other, Rearden answered, "I'll admit it, if you wish. What should it matter to me, that you know it?"

"That I know and care, Mr. Rearden. I'm the only man around you who does."

"Why should you care? And why should I need your help tonight?"

"Because it's not easy to have to damn the man who meant most to you."

"I wouldn't damn you if you'd only stay away from me."

Francisco's eyes widened a little, then he grinned and said, "I was speaking of Mr. Danagger."

For an instant, Rearden looked as if he wanted to slap his own face, then he laughed softly and said, "All right. Sit down."

He waited to see what advantage Francisco would take of it now, but Francisco obeyed him in silence, with a smile that had an oddly boyish quality: a look of triumph and gratitude, together.

"I don't damn Ken Danagger," said Rearden.

"You don't?" The two words seemed to fall with a singular emphasis; they were pronounced very quietly, almost cautiously, with no remnant of a smile on Francisco's face.

"No. I don't try to prescribe how much a man should have to bear.

If he broke, it's not for me to judge him."

"If he broke . . . ?"

"Well, didn't he?"

Francisco leaned back; his smile returned, but it was not a happy smile. "What will his disappearance do to you?"

"I will just have to work a little harder."

Francisco looked at a steel bridge traced in black strokes against red steam beyond the window, and said, pointing, "Every one of those girders has a limit to the load it can carry. What's yours?"

Rearden laughed. "Is that what you're afraid of? Is that why you came here? Were you afraid I'd break? Did you want to save me, as Dagny Taggart wanted to save Ken Danagger? She tried to reach him in time, but couldn't."

"She did? I didn't know it. Miss Taggart and I disagree about many things."

"Don't worry. I'm not going to vanish. Let them all give up and stop working. I won't. I don't know my limit and don't care. All I have to know is that I can't be stopped."

"Any man can be stopped, Mr. Rearden."

"How?"

"It's only a matter of knowing man's motive power."

"What is it?"

"You ought to know, Mr. Rearden. You're one of the last moral men left to the world."

Rearden chuckled in bitter amusement. "I've been called just about everything but that. And you're wrong. You have no idea how wrong."

"Are you sure?"

"I ought to know. Moral? What on earth made you say it?"

Francisco pointed to the mills beyond the window. "This."

For a long moment, Rearden looked at him without moving, then asked only, "What do you mean?"

"If you want to see an abstract principle, such as moral action, in material form—there it is. Look at it, Mr. Rearden. Every girder of it, every pipe, wire and valve was put there by a choice in answer to the question: right or wrong? You had to choose right and you had to choose the best within your knowledge—the best for your purpose, which was to make steel—and then move on and extend the knowledge, and do better, and still better, with your purpose as your standard of value. You had to act on your own judgment, you had to have the capacity to judge, the courage to stand on the verdict of your mind, and the purest, the most ruthless consecration to the rule of doing right, of doing the best, the utmost best possible to you. Nothing could have made you act against your judgment, and you would have rejected as wrong—as evil—any man who attempted to tell you that the best way to heat a furnace was to fill it with ice. Millions of men, an entire nation, were not able to deter you from producing Rearden Metal—because you had the knowledge of its superlative value and the power which such knowledge gives. But what I wonder about, Mr. Rearden, is why you live by one code of principles when you deal with nature and by another when you deal with men?"

Rearden's eyes were fixed on him so intently that the question came slowly, as if the effort to pronounce it were a distraction: "What do you mean?"

"Why don't you hold to the purpose of your life as clearly and rigidly as you hold to the purpose of your mills?"

"What do you mean?"

"You have judged every brick within this place by its value to the goal of making steel. Have you been as strict about the goal which your work and your steel are serving? What do you wish to achieve by giving your life to the making of steel? By what standard of value do you judge your days? For instance, why did you spend ten years of exacting effort to produce Rearden Metal?"

Rearden looked away, the slight, slumping movement of his shoulders like a sigh of release and disappointment. "If you have to ask that, then you wouldn't understand."

"If I told you that I understand it, but you don't—would you throw me out of here?"

"T should have thrown you out of here anyway—so go ahead, tell me what you mean."

"Are you proud of the rail of the John Galt Line?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because it's the best rail ever made."

"Why did you make it?"

"In order to make money."

"There were many easier ways to make money. Why did you choose the hardest?"

"You said it in your speech at Taggart's wedding: in order to exchange my best effort for the best effort of others."

"If that was your purpose, have you achieved it?"

A beat of time vanished in a heavy drop of silence. "No," said Rearden.

"Have you made any money?"

"No."

"When you strain your energy to its utmost in order to produce the best, do you expect to be rewarded for it or punished?" Rearden did not answer. "By every standard of decency, of honor, of justice known to you—are you convinced that you should have been rewarded for it?"

"Yes," said Rearden, his voice low.

"Then if you were punished, instead—what sort of code have you accepted?"

Rearden did not answer.

"It is generally assumed," said Francisco, "that living in a human society makes one's life much easier and safer than if one were left alone to struggle against nature on a desert island. Now wherever there is a man who needs or uses metal in any way-—Rearden Metal has made his life easier for him. Has it made yours easier for you?"

"No," said Rearden, his voice low.

"Has it left your life as it was before you produced the Metal?"

"No—" said Rearden, the word breaking off as if he had cut short the thought that followed.

Francisco's voice lashed at him suddenly, as a command: "Say it!"

"It has made it harder," said Rearden tonelessly.

"When you felt proud of the rail of the John Galt Line," said Francisco, the measured rhythm of his voice giving a ruthless clarity to his words, "what sort of men did you think of? Did you want to see that Line used by your equals—by giants of productive energy, such as Ellis Wyatt, whom it would help to reach higher and still higher achievements of their own?"

"Yes," said Rearden eagerly.

"Did you want to see it used by men who could not equal the power of your mind, but who would equal your moral integrity—men such as Eddie Willers—who could never invent your Metal, but who would do their best, work as hard as you did, live by their own effort, and—riding on your rail—give a moment's silent thanks to the man who gave them more than they could give him?"

"Yes," said Rearden gently.

"Did you want to see it used by whining rotters who never rouse themselves to any effort, who do not possess the ability of a filing clerk, but demand the income of a company president, who drift from failure to failure and expect you to pay their bills, who hold their wishing as an equivalent of your work and their need as a higher claim to reward than your effort, who demand that you serve them, who demand that it be the aim of your life to serve them, who demand that your strength be the voiceless, rightless, unpaid, unrewarded slave of their impotence, who proclaim that you are born to serfdom by reason of your genius, while they are born to rule by the grace of incompetence, that yours is only to give, but theirs only to take, that yours is to produce, but theirs to consume, that you are not to be paid, neither in matter nor in spirit, neither by wealth nor by recognition nor by respect nor by gratitude—so that they would ride on your rail and sneer at you and curse you, since they owe you nothing, not even the effort of taking off their hats which you paid for? Would this be what you wanted? Would you feel proud of it?"

"I'd blast that rail first," said Rearden, his lips white.

"Then why don't you do it, Mr. Rearden? Of the three kinds of men I described—which men are being destroyed and which are using your Line today?"

They heard the distant metal heartbeats of the mills through the long thread of silence.

"What I described last," said Francisco, "is any man who proclaims his right to a single penny of another man's effort."

Rearden did not answer; he was looking at the reflection of a neon sign on dark windows in the distance.

"You take pride in setting no limit to your endurance, Mr. Rearden, because you think that you are doing right. What if you aren't? What if you're placing your virtue in the service of evil and letting it become a tool for the destruction of everything you love, respect and admire?

Why don't you uphold your own code of values among men as you do among iron smelters? You who won't allow one per cent of impurity into an alloy of metal—what have you allowed into your moral code?"

Rearden sat very still; the words in his mind were like the beat of steps down the trail he had been seeking; the words were: the sanction of the victim.

"You, who would not submit to the hardships of nature, but set out to conquer it and placed it in the service of your joy and your comfort—to what have you submitted at the hands of men? You, who know from your work that one bears punishment only for being wrong —what have you been willing to bear and for what reason? All your life, you have heard yourself denounced, not for your faults, but for your greatest virtues. You have been hated, not for your mistakes, but for your achievements. You have been scorned for all those qualities of character which are your highest pride. You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgment and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been called anti-social for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads. You have been called ruthless for the strength and self-discipline of your drive to your purpose. You have been called greedy for the magnificence of your power to create wealth. You, who've expended an inconceivable flow of energy, have been called a parasite. You, who've created abundance where there had been nothing but wastelands and helpless, starving men before you, have been called a robber. You, who've kept them all alive, have been called an exploiter. You, the purest and most moral man among them, have been sneered at as a 'vulgar materialist.' Have you stopped to ask them: by what right?—by what code?—by what standard? No, you have borne it all and kept silent. You bowed to their code and you never upheld your own. You knew what exacting morality was needed to produce a single metal nail, but you let them brand you as immoral.

You knew that man needs the strictest code of values to deal with nature, but you thought that you needed no such code to deal with men. You left the deadliest weapon in the hands of your enemies, a weapon you never suspected or understood. Their moral code is their weapon. Ask yourself how deeply and in how many terrible ways you have accepted it. Ask yourself what it is that a code of moral values does to a man's life, and why he can't exist without it, and what happens to him if he accepts the wrong standard, by which the evil is the good. Shall I tell you why you're drawn to me, even though you think you ought to damn me? It's because I'm the first man who has given you what the whole world owes you and what you should have demanded of all men before you dealt with them: a moral sanction."

Rearden whirled to him, then remained still, with a stillness like a gasp. Francisco leaned forward, as if he were reaching the landing of a dangerous flight, and his eyes were steady, but their glance seemed to tremble with intensity.

"You're guilty of a great sin, Mr. Rearden, much guiltier than they tell you, but not in the way they preach. The worst guilt is to accept an undeserved guilt—and that is what you have been doing all your life.

You have been paying blackmail, not for your vices, but for your virtues. You have been willing to carry the load of an unearned punishment—and toilet it grow the heavier the greater the virtues you practiced. But your virtues were those which keep men alive. Your own moral code—the one you lived by, but never stated, acknowledged or defended—was the code that preserves man's existence. If you were punished for it, what was the nature of those who punished you?

Yours was the code of life. What, then, is theirs? What standard of value lies at its root? What is its ultimate purpose? Do you think that what you're facing is merely a conspiracy to seize your wealth? You, who know the source of wealth, should know it's much more and much worse than that. Did you ask me to name man's motive power?

Man's motive power is his moral code. Ask yourself where their code is leading you and what it offers you as your final goal. A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. A viler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to demand that he leap in, of his own will, and that he build the furnace, besides. By their own statement, it is they who need you and have nothing to offer you in return. By their own statement, you must support them because they cannot survive without you. Consider the obscenity of offering their impotence and their need—their need of you—as a justification for your torture. Are you willing to accept it? Do you care to purchase—at the price of your great endurance, at the price of your agony—the satisfaction of the needs of your own destroyers?"

"No!"

"Mr. Rearden," said Francisco, his voice solemnly calm, "if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders—what would you tell him to do?"

"I . . . don't know. What . . . could he do? What would you tell him?"

"To shrug."

The clatter of the metal came in a flow of irregular sounds without discernible rhythm, not like the action of a mechanism, but as if some conscious impulse were behind every sudden, tearing rise that went up and crashed, scattering into the faint moan of gears. The glass of the windows tinkled once in a while.

Francisco's eyes were watching Rearden as if he were examining the course of bullets on a battered target. The course was hard to trace: the gaunt figure on the edge of the desk was erect, the cold blue eyes showed nothing but the intensity of a glance fixed upon a great distance, only the inflexible mouth betrayed a line drawn by pain.

"Go on," said Rearden with effort, "continue. You haven't finished, have you?"

"I have barely begun." Francisco's voice was hard.

"What . . . are you driving at?"

"You'll know it before I'm through. But first, I want you to answer a question: if you understand the nature of your burden, how can you . . ."

The scream of an alarm siren shattered the space beyond the window and shot like a rocket in a long, thin line to the sky. It held for an instant, then fell, then went on in rising, falling spirals of sound, as if fighting for breath against terror to scream louder. It was the shriek of agony, the call for help, the voice of the mills as of a wounded body crying to hold its soul.

Rearden thought that he leaped for the door the instant the scream hit his consciousness, but he saw that he was an instant late, because Francisco had preceded him. Flung by the blast of the same response as his own, Francisco was flying down the hall, pressing the button of the elevator and, not waiting, racing on down the stairs. Rearden followed him and, watching the dial of the elevator on the stair landings, they met it halfway down the height of the building. Before the steel cage had ceased trembling at the sill of the ground floor, Francisco was out, racing to meet the sound of the call for help. Rearden had thought himself a good runner, but he could not keep up with the swift figure streaking off through stretches of red glare and darkness, the figure of a useless playboy he had hated himself for admiring.

The stream, gushing from a hole low on the side of a blast furnace, did not have the red glow of fire, but the white radiance of sunlight.

It poured along the ground, branching off at random in sudden streaks; it cut through a dank fog of steam with a bright suggestion of morning.

It was liquid iron, and what the scream of the alarm proclaimed was a break-out.

The charge of the furnace had been hung up and, breaking, had blown the tap-hole open. The furnace foreman lay knocked unconscious, the white flow spurted, slowly tearing the hole wider, and men were struggling with sand, hose and fire clay to stop the glowing streaks that spread in a heavy, gliding motion, eating everything on their way into jets of acrid smoke.

In the few moments which Rearden needed to grasp the sight and nature of the disaster, he saw a man's figure rising suddenly at the foot of the furnace, a figure outlined by the red glare almost as if it stood in the path of the torrent, he saw the swing of a white shirt sleeved arm that rose and flung a black object into the source of the spurting metal. It was Francisco d'Anconia, and his action belonged to an art which Rearden had not believed any man to be trained to perform any longer.

Years before, Rearden had worked in an obscure steel plant in Minnesota, where it had been his job, after a blast furnace was tapped, to close the hole by hand—by throwing bullets of fire clay to dam the flow of the metal. It was a dangerous job that had taken many lives; it had been abolished years earlier by the invention of the hydraulic gun; but there had been struggling, failing mills which, on their way down, had attempted to use the outworn equipment and methods of a distant past. Rearden had done the job; but in the years since, he had met no other man able to do it. In the midst of shooting jets of live steam, in the face of a crumbling blast furnace, he was now seeing the tall, slim figure of the playboy performing the task with the skill of an expert.

It took an instant for Rearden to tear off his coat, seize a pair of goggles from the first man in sight and join Francisco at the mouth of the furnace. There was no time to speak, to feel or to wonder. Francisco glanced at him once—and what Rearden saw was a smudged face, black goggles and a wide grin.

They stood on a slippery bank of baked mud, at the edge of the white stream, with the raging hole under their feet, flinging clay into the glare where the twisting tongues that looked like gas were boiling metal. Rearden's consciousness became a progression of bending, raising the weight, aiming and sending it down and, before it had reached its unseen destination, bending for the next one again, a consciousness drawn tight upon watching the aim of his arm, to save the furnace, and the precarious posture of his feet, to save himself. He was aware of nothing else—except that the sum of it was the exultant feeling of action, of his own capacity, of his body's precision, of its response to his will. And with no time to know it, but knowing it, seizing it with his senses past the censorship of his mind, he was seeing a black silhouette with red rays shooting from behind its shoulders, its elbows, its angular curves, the red rays circling through steam like the long needles of spotlights, following the movements of a swift, expert, confident being whom he had never seen before except in evening clothes under the lights of ballrooms.

There was no time to form words, to think, to explain, but he knew that this was the real Francisco d'Anconia, this was what he had seen from the first and loved—the word did not shock him, because there was no word in his mind, there was only a joyous feeling that seemed like a flow of energy added to his own.

To the rhythm of his body, with the scorching heat on his face and the winter night on his shoulder blades, he was seeing suddenly that this was the simple essence of his universe: the instantaneous refusal to submit to disaster, the irresistible drive to fight it, the triumphant feeling of his own ability to win. He was certain that Francisco felt it, too, that he had been moved by the same impulse, that it was right to feel it, right for both of them to be what they were—he caught glimpses of a sweat-streaked face intent upon action, and it was the most joyous face he had ever seen.

The furnace stood above them, a black bulk wrapped in coils of tubes and steam; she seemed to pant, shooting red gasps that hung on the air above the mills—and they fought not to let her bleed to death.

Sparks hung about their feet and burst in sudden sheafs out of the metal, dying unnoticed against their clothes, against the skin of their hands. The stream was coming slower, in broken spurts through the dam rising beyond their sight.

It happened so fast that Rearden knew it fully only after it was over.

He knew that there were two moments: the first was when he saw the violent swing of Francisco's body in a forward thrust that sent the bullet to continue the line in space, then he saw the sudden, unrhythmic jerk backward that did not succeed, the convulsive beating against a forward pull, the extended arms of the silhouette losing its balance, he thought that a leap across the distance between them on the slippery, crumbling ridge would mean the death of both of them—and the second moment was when he landed at Francisco's side, held him in his arms, hung swaying together between space and ridge, over the white pit, then gained his footing and pulled him back, and, for an instant, still held the length of Francisco's body against the length of his own, as he would have held the body of an only son. His love, his terror, his relief were in a single sentence: "Be careful, you goddamn fool!"

Francisco reached for a chunk of clay and went on.

When the job was done and the gap was closed, Rearden noticed that there was a twisting pain in the muscles of his arms and legs, that his body had no strength left to move—yet that he felt as if he were entering his office in the morning, eager for ten new problems to solve.

He looked at Francisco and noticed for the first time that their clothes had blade-ringed holes, that their hands were bleeding, that there was a patch of skin torn on Francisco's temple and a red thread winding down his cheekbone. Francisco pushed the goggles back off his eyes and grinned at him: it was a smile of morning.

A young man with a look of chronic hurt and impertinence together, rushed up to him, crying, "I couldn't help it, Mr. Rearden!" and launched into a speech of explanation. Rearden turned his back on him without a word. It was the assistant in charge of the pressure gauge of the furnace, a young man out of college.

Somewhere on the outer edge of Rearden's consciousness, there was the thought that accidents of this nature were happening more frequently now, caused by the kind of ore he was using, but he had to use whatever ore he could find. There was the thought that his old workers had always been able to avert disaster; any of them would have seen e indications of a hang-up and known how to prevent it; but there were not many of them left, and he had to employ whatever men he could find. Through the swirling coils of steam around him, he observed that it was the older men who had rushed from all over the mills to fight the break-out and now stood in line, being given first aid by the medical staff. He wondered what was happening to the young men of the country. But the wonder was swallowed by the sight of the college boy's face, which he could not bear to see, by a wave of contempt, by the wordless thought that if this was the enemy, there was nothing to fear. All these things came to him and vanished in the outer darkness; the sight blotting them out was Francisco d'Anconia, He saw Francisco giving orders to the men around him. They did not know who he was or where he came from, but they listened: they knew he was a man who knew his job. Francisco broke off in the middle of a sentence, seeing Rearden approach and listen, and said, laughing, "Oh, I beg your pardon!" Rearden said, "Go right ahead. It's all correct, so far."

They said nothing to each other when they walked together through the darkness, on their way back to the office. Rearden felt an exultant laughter swelling within him, he felt that he wanted, in his turn, to wink at Francisco like a fellow conspirator who had learned a secret Francisco would not acknowledge. He glanced at his face once in a while, but Francisco would not look at him.

After a while, Francisco said, "You saved my Me." The "thank you" was in the way he said it.

Rearden chuckled. "You saved my furnace."

They went on in silence. Rearden felt himself growing lighter with every step. Raising his face to the cold air, he saw the peaceful darkness bf the sky and a single star above a smokestack with the vertical lettering: Rearden Steel. He felt how glad he was to be alive.

He did not expect the change he saw in Francisco's face when he looked at it in the light of his office. The things he had seen by the glare of the furnace were gone. He had expected a look of triumph, of mockery at all the insults Francisco had heard from him, a look demanding the apology he was joyously eager to offer. Instead, he saw a face made lifeless by an odd dejection.

"Are you hurt?"

"No . . . no, not at all."

"Come here," ordered Rearden, opening the door of his bathroom.

. "Look at yourself."

"Never mind. You come here."

For the first time, Rearden felt that he was the older man; he felt the pleasure of taking Francisco in charge; he felt a confident, amused, paternal protectiveness. He washed the grime off Francisco's face, he put disinfectants and adhesive bandages on his temple, his hands, his scorched elbows. Francisco obeyed him in silence.

Rearden asked, in the tone of the most eloquent salute he could offer, "Where did you learn to work like that?"

Francisco shrugged. "I was brought up around smelters of every kind," he answered indifferently.

Rearden could not decipher the expression of his face: it was only a look of peculiar stillness, as if his eyes were fixed on some secret vision of his own that drew his mouth into a line of desolate, bitter, hurting self-mockery.

They did not speak until they were back in the office.

"You know," said Rearden, "everything you said here was true. But that was only part of the story. The other part is what we've done tonight. Don't you see? We're able to act. They're not. So it's we who'll win in the long run, no matter what they do to us."

Francisco did not answer, "Listen," said Rearden, "I know what's been the trouble with you.

You've never cared to do a real day's work in your life. I thought you were conceited enough, but I see that you have no idea of what you've got in you. Forget that fortune of yours for a while and come to work for me. I'll start you as furnace foreman any time. You don't know what it will do for you. In a few years, you'll be ready to appreciate and to run d'Anconia Copper."

He expected a burst of laughter and he was prepared to argue; instead, he saw Francisco shaking his head slowly, as if he could not trust his voice, as if he feared that were he to speak, he would accept.

In a moment, he said, "Mr. Rearden . . . I think I would give the rest of my life for one year as your furnace foreman. But I can't."

"Why not?"

"Don't ask me. It's . . . a personal matter."

The vision of Francisco in Rearden's mind, which he had resented and found irresistibly attractive, had been the figure of a man radiantly incapable of suffering. What he saw now in Francisco's eyes was the look of a quiet, tightly controlled, patiently borne torture.

Francisco reached silently for his overcoat.

"You're not leaving, are you?" asked Rearden, "Yes."

"Aren't you going to finish what you had to tell me?"

"Not tonight."

"You wanted me to answer a question. What was it?"

Francisco shook his head.

"You started asking me how can I . . . How can I—what?"

Francisco's smile was like a moan of pain, the only moan he would permit himself. "I won't ask it, Mr. Rearden. I know it."

CHAPTER IV
THE SANCTION OF THE VICTIM

The roast turkey had cost $30. The champagne had cost $25. The lace tablecloth, a cobweb of grapes and vine leaves iridescent in the candlelight, had cost $2,000. The dinner service, with an artist's design burned in blue and gold into a translucent white china, had cost $2,500.

The silverware, which bore the initials LR in Empire wreaths of laurels, had cost $3,000. But it was held to be unspiritual to think of money and of what that money represented.

A peasant's wooden shoe, gilded, stood in the center of the table, filled with marigolds, grapes and carrots. The candles were stuck into pumpkins that were cut as open-mouthed faces drooling raisins, nuts and candy upon the tablecloth.

It was Thanksgiving dinner, and the three who faced Rearden about the table were his wife, his mother and his brother.

"This is the night to thank the Lord for our blessings," said Rearden's mother. "God has been kind to us. There are people all over the country who haven't got any food in the house tonight, and some that haven't even got a house, and more of them going jobless every day.

Gives me the creeps to look around in the city. Why, only last week, who do you suppose I ran into but Lucie Judson—Henry, do you remember Lucie Judson? Used to live next door to us. up in Minnesota, when you were ten-twelve years old. Had a boy about your age. I lost track of Lucie when they moved to New York, must have been all of twenty years ago. Well, it gave me the creeps to see what she's come to—just a toothless old hag, wrapped in a man's overcoat, panhandling on a street corner. And I thought: That could've been me, but for the grace of God."

"Well, if thanks are in order," said Lillian gaily, "I think that we shouldn't forget Gertrude, the new cook. She's an artist."

"Me, I'm just going to be old-fashioned," said Philip. "I'm just going to thank the sweetest mother in the world."

"Well, for the matter of that," said Rearden's mother, "we ought to . thank Lillian for this dinner and for all the trouble she took to make it so pretty. She spent hours fixing the table. It's real quaint and different."

"It's the wooden shoe that does it," said Philip, bending his head sidewise to study it in a manner of critical appreciation. "That's the real touch. Anybody can have candles, silverware and junk, that doesn't take anything but money—but this shoe, that took thought."

Rearden said nothing. The candlelight moved over his motionless face as over a portrait; the portrait bore an expression of impersonal courtesy.

"You haven't touched your wine," said his mother, looking at him.

"What I think is you ought to drink a toast in gratitude to the people of this country who have given you so much."

"Henry is not in the mood for it, Mother," said Lillian. "I'm afraid Thanksgiving is a holiday only for those who have a clear conscience."

She raised her wine glass, but stopped it halfway to her lips and asked, "You're not going to make some sort of stand at your trial tomorrow, are you, Henry?"

"I am."

She put the glass down. "What are you going to do?"

"You'll see it tomorrow."

"You don't really imagine that you can get away with it!"

"I don't know what you have in mind as the object I'm to get away with."

"Do you realize that the charge against you is extremely serious?"

"I do."

"You've admitted that you sold the Metal to Ken Danagger."

"I have."

"They might send you to jail for ten years,"

"I don't think they will, but it's possible."

"Have you been reading the newspapers, Henry?" asked Philip, with an odd kind of smile.

"No."

"Oh, you should!"

"Should I? Why?"

"You ought to see the names they call you!"

"That's interesting," said Rearden; he said it about the fact that Philip's smile was one of pleasure.

"I don't understand it," said his mother. "Jail? Did you say jail, Lillian? Henry, are you going to be sent to jail?"

"I might be."

"But that's ridiculous' Do something about it."

"What?"

"I don't know. I don't understand any of it. Respectable people don't go to jail. Do something. You've always known what to do about business."

"Not this kind of business."

"I don't believe it." Her voice had the tone of a frightened, spoiled child. "You're saying it just to be mean."

"He's playing the hero, Mother," said Lillian. She smiled coldly, turning to Rearden. "Don't you think that your attitude is perfectly futile?"

"No."

"You know that cases of this kind are not . . . intended ever to come to trial. There are ways to avoid it, to get things settled amicably —if one knows the right people."

"I don't know the right people."

"Look at Orren Boyle. He's done much more and much worse than your little fling at the black market, but he's smart enough to keep himself out of courtrooms."

"Then I'm not smart enough."

"Don't you think it's time you made an effort to adjust yourself to the conditions of our age?"

"No."

"Well, then I don't see how you can pretend that you're some sort of victim. If you go to jail, it will be your own fault."

"What pretense are you talking about, Lillian?"

"Oh, I know that you think you're fighting for some sort of principle —but actually it's only a matter of your incredible conceit. You're doing it for no better reason than because you think you're right."

"Do you think they're right?"

She shrugged, "That's the conceit I'm talking about—the idea that it matters who's right or wrong. It's the most insufferable form of vanity, this insistence on always doing right. How do you know what's right?

How can anyone ever know it? It's nothing but a delusion to flatter your own ego and to hurt other people by flaunting your superiority over them."

He was looking at her with attentive interest. "Why should it hurt other people, if it's nothing but a delusion?"

"Is it necessary for me to point out that in your case it's nothing but hypocrisy? That is why I find your attitude preposterous. Questions of right have no bearing on human existence. And you're certainly nothing but human—aren't you, Henry? You're no better than any of the men you're going to face tomorrow. I think you should remember that it's not for you to make a stand on any sort of principle. Maybe you're a victim in this particular mess, maybe they're pulling a rotten trick on you, but what of it? They're doing it because they're weak; they couldn't resist the temptation to grab your Metal and to muscle in on your profits, because they had no other way of ever getting rich. Why should you blame them? It's only a question of different strains, but it s the same shoddy human fabric that gives way just as quickly. You wouldn't be tempted by money, because it's so easy for you to make it.

But you wouldn't withstand other pressures and you'd fall just as ignominiously. Wouldn't you? So you have no right to any righteous indignation against them. You have no moral superiority to assert or to defend. And if you haven't, then what is the point of fighting a battle that you can't win? I suppose that one might find some satisfaction in being a martyr, if one is above reproach. But you—who are you to cast the first stone?"

She paused to observe the effect. There was none, except that his look of attentive interest seemed intensified; he listened as if he were held by some impersonal, scientific curiosity. It was not the response she had expected.

"1 believe you understand me," she said.

"No," he answered quietly, "I don't."

"I think you should abandon the illusion of your own perfection, which you know full well to be an illusion. I think you should learn to get along with other people. The day of the hero is past. This is the day of humanity, in a much deeper sense than you imagine. Human beings are no longer expected to be saints nor to be punished for their sins. Nobody is right or wrong, we're all in it together, we're all human—and the human is the imperfect. You'll gain nothing tomorrow by proving that they're wrong. You ought to give in with good grace, simply because it's the practical thing to do. You ought to keep silent, precisely because they're wrong. They'll appreciate it. Make concessions for others and they'll make concessions for you. Live and let live. Give and take. Give in and take in. That's the policy of our age—and it's time you accepted it. Don't tell me you're too good for it. You know that you're not. You know that I know it."

The look of his eyes, held raptly still upon some point in space, was not in answer to her words; it was in answer to a man's voice saying to him, "Do you think that what you're facing is merely a conspiracy to seize your wealth? You, who know the source of wealth, should know it's much more and much worse than that."

He turned to look at Lillian. He was seeing the full extent of her failure—in the immensity of his own indifference. The droning stream of her insults was like the sound of a distant riveting machine, a long, impotent pressure that reached nothing within him. He had heard her studied reminders of his guilt on every evening he had spent at home in the past three months. But guilt had been the one emotion he had found himself unable to feel. The punishment she had wanted to inflict on him was the torture of shame; what she had inflicted was the torture of boredom.

He remembered his brief glimpse—on that morning in the Wayne Falkland Hotel—of a flaw in her scheme of punishment, which he had not examined. Now he stated it to himself for the first time. She wanted to force upon him the suffering of dishonor—but his own sense of honor was her only weapon of enforcement. She wanted to wrest from him an acknowledgment of his moral depravity—but only his own moral rectitude could attach significance to such a verdict. She wanted to injure him by her contempt—but he could not be injured, unless he respected her judgment. She wanted to punish him for the pain he had caused her and she held her pain as a gun aimed at him, as if she wished to extort his agony at the point of his pity. But her only tool was his own benevolence, his concern for her, his compassion. Her only power was the power of his own virtues. What if he chose to withdraw it?

An issue of guilt, he thought, had to rest on his own acceptance of the code of justice that pronounced him guilty. He did not accept it; he never had. His virtues, all the virtues she needed to achieve his punishment, came from another code and lived by another standard.

He felt no guilt, no shame, no regret, no dishonor. He felt no concern for any verdict she chose to pass upon him: he had lost respect for her judgment long ago. And the sole chain still holding him was only a last remnant of pity.

But what was the code on which she acted? What sort of code permitted the concept of a punishment that required the victim's own virtue as the fuel to make it work? A code—he thought—which would destroy only those who tried to observe it; a punishment, from which only the honest would suffer, while the dishonest would escape unhurt. Could one conceive of an infamy lower than to equate virtue with pain, to make virtue, not vice, the source and motive power of suffering? If he were the kind of rotter she was struggling to make him believe he was, then no issue of his honor and his moral worth would matter to him. If he wasn't, then what was the nature of her attempt?

To count upon his virtue and use it as an instrument of torture, to practice blackmail with the victim's generosity as sole means of extortion, to accept the gift of a man's good will and turn it into a tool for the giver's destruction . . . he sat very still, contemplating the formula of so monstrous an evil that he was able to name it, but not to believe it possible.

He sat very still, held by the hammering of a single question: Did Lillian know the exact nature of her scheme?—was it a conscious policy, devised with full awareness of its meaning? He shuddered; he did not hate her enough to believe it.

He looked at her. She was absorbed, at the moment, in the task of cutting a plum pudding that stood as a mount of blue flame on a silver platter before her, its glow dancing over her face and her laughing mouth—she was plunging a silver knife into the flame, with a practiced, graceful curve of her arm. She had metallic leaves in the red, gold and brown colors of autumn scattered over one shoulder of her black velvet gown; they glittered in the candlelight.

He could not get rid of the impression, which he had kept receiving and rejecting for three months, that her vengeance was not a form of despair, as he had supposed—the impression, which he regarded as inconceivable, that she was enjoying it. He could find no trace of pain in her manner. She had an air of confidence new to her. She seemed to be at home in her house for the first time. Even though everything within the house was of her own choice and taste, she had always seemed to act as the bright, efficient, resentful manager of a high-class hotel, who keeps smiling in bitter amusement at her position of inferiority to the owners. The amusement remained, but the bitterness was gone. She had not gained weight, but her features had lost their delicate sharpness in a blurring, softening look of satisfaction; even her voice sounded as if it had grown plump.

He did not hear what she was saying; she was laughing in the last flicker of the blue flames, while he sat weighing the question: Did she know? He felt certain that he had discovered a secret much greater than the problem of his marriage, that he had grasped the formula of a policy practiced more widely throughout the world than he dared to contemplate at the moment. But to convict a human being of that practice was a verdict of irrevocable damnation, and he knew that he would not believe it of anyone, so long as the possibility of a doubt remained.

No—he thought, looking at Lillian, with the last effort of his generosity—he would not believe it of her. In the name of whatever grace and pride she possessed—in the name of such moments when he had seen a smile of joy on her face, the smile of a living being—in the name of the brief shadow of love he had once felt for her—he would not pronounce upon her a verdict of total evil.

The butter slipped a plate of plum pudding in front of him, and he heard Lillian's voice: "Where have you been for the last five minutes, Henry—or is it for the last century? You haven't answered me. You haven't heard a word I said."

"I heard it," he answered quietly. "I don't know what you're trying to accomplish."

"What a question!" said his mother. "Isn't that just like a man?

She's trying to save you from going to jail—that's what she's trying to accomplish."

That could be true, he thought; perhaps, by the reasoning of some crude, childish cowardice, the motive of their malice was a desire to protect him, to break him down into the safety of a compromise. It's possible, he thought—but knew that he did not believe it.

"You've always been unpopular," said Lillian, "and it's more than a matter of any one particular issue. It's that unyielding, intractable attitude of yours. The men who're going to try you, know what you're thinking. That's why they'll crack down on you, while they'd let another man off."

"Why, no. I don't think they know what I'm thinking. That's what I have to let them know tomorrow."

"Unless you show them that you're willing to give in and co-operate, you won't have a chance. You've been too hard to deal with."

"No. I've been too easy."

"But if they put you in jail," said his mother, "what's going to happen to your family? Have you thought of that?"

"No. I haven't."

"Have you thought of the disgrace you'll bring upon us?"

"Mother, do you understand the issue in this case?"

"No, I don't and I-don't want to understand. It's all dirty business and dirty politics. All business is just dirty politics and all politics is just dirty business. I never did want to understand any of it. I don't care who's right or wrong, but what I think a man ought to think of first is his family. Don't you know what this will do to us?"

"No, Mother, I don't know or care."

His mother looked at him, aghast.

"Well, I think you have a very provincial attitude, all of you," said Philip suddenly. "Nobody here seems to be concerned with the wider, social aspects of the case. I don't agree with you, Lillian. I don't see why you say that they're pulling some sort of rotten trick on Henry and that he's in the right. I think he's guilty as hell. Mother, I can explain the issue to you very simply. There's nothing unusual about it, the courts are full of cases of this kind. Businessmen are taking advantage of the national emergency in order to make money. They break the regulations which protect the common welfare of all—for the sake of their own personal gain. They're profiteers of the black market who grow rich by defrauding the poor of their rightful share, at a time of desperate shortage. They pursue a ruthless, grasping, grabbing, antisocial policy, based on nothing but plain, selfish greed. It's no use pretending about it, we all know it—and I think it's contemptible."

He spoke in a careless, offhand manner, as if explaining the obvious to a group of adolescents; his tone conveyed the assurance of a man who knows that the moral ground of his stand is not open to question.

Rearden sat looking at him, as if studying an object seen for the first time. Somewhere deep in Rearden's mind, as a steady, gentle, inexorable beat, was a man's voice, saying: By what right?—by what code?—by what standard?

"Philip," he said, not raising his voice, "say any of that again and you will find yourself out in the street, right now, with the suit you've got on your back, with whatever change you've got in your pocket and with nothing else."

. He heard no answer, no sound, no movement. He noted that the stillness of the three before him had no element of astonishment. The look of shock on their faces was not the shock of people at the sudden explosion of a bomb, but the shock of people who had known that they Were playing with a lighted fuse. There were no outcries, no protests, no questions; they knew that he meant it and they knew everything it meant. A dim, sickening feeling told him that they had known it long before he did.

"You . . . you wouldn't throw your own brother out on the street, would you?" his mother said at last; it was not a demand, but a plea.

"I would."

"But he's your brother . . . Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"No."

"Maybe he goes a bit too far at times, but it's just loose talk, it's just that modern jabber, he doesn't know what he's saying."

"Then let him learn."

"Don't be hard on him . . . he's younger than you and . . . and weaker. He . . . Henry, don't look at me that way! I've never seen you look like that. . . . You shouldn't frighten him. You know that he needs you."

"Does he know it?"

"You can't be hard on a man who needs you, it will prey on your conscience for the rest of your life."

"It won't."

"You've got to be kind, Henry."

"I'm not."

"You've got to have some pity."

"I haven't."

"A good man knows how to forgive."

"I don't."

"You wouldn't want me to think that you're selfish,"

"I am."

Philip's eyes were darting from one to the other. He looked like a man who had felt certain that he stood on solid granite and had suddenly discovered that it was thin ice, now cracking open all around him.

"But I . . . " he tried, and stopped; his voice sounded like steps testing the ice. "But don't I have any freedom of speech?"

"In your own house. Not in mine."

"Don't I have a right to my own ideas?"

"At your own expense. Not at mine."

"Don't you tolerate any differences of opinion?"

"Not when I'm paying the bills."

"Isn't there anything involved but money?"

"Yes. The fact that it's my money."

"Don't you want to consider any hi . . ."—he was going to say "higher," but changed his mind—"any other aspects?"

"No."

"But I'm not your slave."

"Am I yours?"

"I don't know what you—" He stopped; he knew what was meant.

"No," said Rearden, "you're not my slave. You're free to walk out of here any time you choose."

"I . . . I'm not speaking of that."

"I am."

"I don't understand it . . ." my political views. You've never "Don't you?"

"You've always known my . objected before."

"That's true," said Rearden gravely. "Perhaps I owe you an explanation, if I have misled you. I've tried never to remind you that you're riving on my charity. I thought that it was your place to remember it.

I thought that any human being who accepts the help of another, knows that good will is the giver's only motive and that good will is the payment he owes in return. But I see that I was wrong. You were getting your food unearned and you concluded that affection did not have to be earned, either. You concluded that I was the safest person in the world for you to spit on, precisely because I held you by the throat. You concluded that I wouldn't want to remind you of it and that I would be tied by the fear of hurting your feelings. All right, let's get it straight: you're an object of charity who's exhausted his credit long ago.

Whatever affection I might have felt for you once, is gone. I haven't the slightest interest in you, your fate or your future. I haven't any reason whatever for wishing to feed you. If you leave my house, it won't make any difference to me whether you starve or not. Now that is your position here and I will expect you to remember it, if you wish to stay. If not, then get out."

But for the movement of drawing his head a little into his shoulders, Philip showed no reaction. "Don't imagine that I enjoy living here," he said; his voice was lifeless and shrill. "If you think I'm happy, you're mistaken. I'd give anything to get away." The words pertained to defiance, but the voice had a curiously cautious quality. "If that is how you feel about it, it would be best for me to leave." The words were a statement, but the voice put a question mark at the end of it and waited; there was no answer. "You needn't worry about my future. I don't have to ask: favors of anybody. I can take care of myself all right." The words were addressed to Rearden, but the eyes were looking at his mother; she did not speak; she was afraid to move. "I've always wanted to be on my own. I've always wanted to live in New York, near all my friends." The voice slowed down and added in an impersonal, reflective manner, as if the words were not addressed to anyone, "Of course, I'd have the problem of maintaining a certain social position . . . it's not my fault if I'll be embarrassed by a family name associated with a millionaire. . . . I would need enough money for a year or two . . . to establish myself in a manner suitable to my—"

"You won't get it from me."

"I wasn't asking you for it, was 1? Don't imagine that I couldn't get it somewhere else, if I wanted to! Don't imagine that I couldn't leave!

I'd go in a minute, if I had only myself to think about. But Mother needs me, and if I deserted her—"

"Don't explain."

"And besides, you misunderstood me, Henry. I haven't said anything to insult you. I wasn't speaking in any personal way. I was only discussing the general political picture from an abstract sociological viewpoint which—"

"Don't explain," said Rearden. He was looking at Philip's face. It was half-lowered, its eyes looking up at him. The eyes were lifeless, as if they had witnessed nothing; they held no spark of excitement, no personal sensation, neither of defiance nor of regret, neither of shame nor of suffering; they were filmy ovals that held no response to reality, no attempt to understand it, to weigh it, to reach some verdict of justice —ovals that held nothing but a dull, still, mindless hatred. "Don't explain. Just keep your mouth shut."

The revulsion that made Rearden turn his face away contained a spasm of pity. There was an instant when he wanted to seize his brother's shoulders, to shake him, to cry: How could you do this to yourself? How did you come to a stage where this is all that's left of you? Why did you let the wonderful fact of your own existence go by?

. . . He looked away. He knew it was useless.

He noted, in weary contempt, that the three at the table remained silent. Through all the years past, his consideration for them had brought him nothing but their maliciously righteous reproaches. Where was their righteousness now? Now was the time to stand on their code of justice—if justice had been any part of their code. Why didn't they throw at him all those accusations of cruelty and selfishness, which he had come to accept as the eternal chorus to his life? What had permitted them to do it for years? He knew that the words he heard in his mind were the key to the answer: The sanction of the victim.

"Don't let's quarrel," said his mother, her voice cheerless and vague.

"It's Thanksgiving Day."

When he looked at Lillian, he caught a glance that made him certain she had watched him for a long time: its quality was panic.

He got up. "You will please excuse me now," he said to the table at large.

"Where are you going?" asked Lillian sharply.

He stood looking at her for a deliberate moment, as if to confirm the meaning she would read in his answer: "To New York."

She jumped to her feet. "Tonight?"

"Now,"

"You can't go to New York tonight!" Her voice was not loud, but it had the imperious helplessness of a shriek. "This is not the time when you can afford it. When you can afford to desert your family, I mean.

You ought to think about the matter of clean hands. You're not in a position to permit yourself anything which you know to be depravity."

By what code?—thought Rearden—by what standard?

"Why do you wish to go to New York tonight?"

"I think, Lillian, for the same reason that makes you wish to stop me."

"Tomorrow is your trial."

"That is what I mean."

He made a movement to turn, and she raised her voice: "I don't want you to go!" He smiled. It was the first time he had smiled at her in the past three months; it was not the kind of smile she could care to see. "I forbid you to leave us tonight!"

He turned and left the room.

Sitting at the wheel of his car, with the glassy, frozen road flying at his face and down under the wheels at sixty miles an hour, he let the thought of his family drop away from him—and the vision of their faces went rolling back into the abyss of speed that swallowed the bare Trees and lonely structures of the roadside. There was little traffic, and few lights in the distant clusters of the towns he passed; the emptiness of inactivity was the only sign of a holiday. A hazy glow, rusted by frost, flashed above the roof of a factory once in a rare while, and a cold wind shrieked through the joints of his car, beating the canvas top against the metal frame.

By some dim sense of contrast, which he did not define, the thought of his family was replaced by the thought of his encounter with the Wet Nurse, the Washington boy of his mills.

At the time of his indictment, he had discovered that the boy had known about his deal with Danagger, yet had not reported it to anyone.

"Why didn't you inform your friends about me?" he had asked.

The boy had answered brusquely, not looking at him, "Didn't want to."

"It was part of your job to watch precisely for things of that kind, wasn't it?"

"Yeah."

"Besides, your friends would have been delighted to hear it."

"I knew."

"Didn't you know what a valuable piece of information it was and what a stupendous trade you could have pulled with those friends of yours in Washington whom you offered to me once—remember?—the friends who always 'occasion expenses'?" The boy had not answered.

"It could have made your career at the very top level. Don't tell me that you didn't know it."

"I knew it."

"Then why didn't you make use of it?"

"I didn't want to."

"Why not?"

"Don't know."

The boy had stood, glumly avoiding Rearden's eyes, as if trying to avoid something incomprehensible within himself. Rearden had laughed.

"Listen, Non-Absolute, you're playing with fire. Better go and murder somebody fast, before you let it get you—that reason that stopped you from turning informer—or else it will blast your career to hell."

The boy had not answered.

This morning, Rearden had gone to his office as usual, even though the rest of the office building was closed. At lunch time, he had stopped at the rolling mills and had been astonished to find the Wet Nurse standing there, alone in a corner, ignored by everybody, watching the work with an air of childish enjoyment.

"What are you doing here today?" Rearden had asked. "Don't you know it's a holiday?"

"Oh, I let the girls off, but I just came in to finish some business."

"What business?"

"Oh, letters and . . . Oh, hell, I signed three letters and sharpened my pencils, I know I didn't have to do it today, but I had nothing to do at home and . . . I get lonesome away from this place."

"Don't you have any family?"

"No . . . not to speak of. What about you, Mr. Rearden? Don't you have any?"

"I guess—not to speak of."

"I like this place. I like to hang around. . . . You know, Mr. Rearden, what I studied to be was a metallurgist."

Walking away, Rearden had turned to glance back and had caught the Wet Nurse looking after him as a boy would look at the hero of his childhood's favorite adventure story. God help the poor little bastard!—he had thought.

God help them all—he thought, driving through the dark streets of a small town, borrowing, in contemptuous pity, the words of their belief which he had never shared. He saw newspapers displayed on metal stands, with the black letters of headlines screaming to empty corners: "Railroad Disaster." He had heard the news on the radio, that afternoon: there had been a wreck on the main line of Taggart Transcontinental, near Rockland, Wyoming; a split rail had sent a freight train crashing over the edge of a canyon. Wrecks on the Taggart main line were becoming more frequent—the track was wearing out—the track which, less than eighteen months ago, Dagny was planning to rebuild, promising him a journey from coast to coast on his own Metal.

She had spent a year, picking worn rail from abandoned branches to patch the rail of the main line. She had spent months fighting the men of Jim's Board of Directors, who said that the national emergency was only temporary and a track that had lasted for ten years could well last for another winter, until spring, when conditions would improve, as Mr. Wesley Mouch had promised. Three weeks ago, she had made them authorize the purchase of sixty thousand tons of new rail; it could do no more than make a few patches across the continent in the worst divisions, but it was all she had been able to obtain from them.

She had had to wrench the money out of men deaf with panic: the freight revenues were falling at such a rate that the men of the Board had begun to tremble, staring at Jim's idea of the most prosperous year in Taggart history. She had had to order steel rail, there was no hope of obtaining an "emergency need" permission to buy Rearden Metal and no time to beg for it.

Rearden looked away from the headlines to the glow at the edge of the sky, which was the city of New York far ahead; his hands tightened on the wheel a little.

It was half past nine when he reached the city. Dagny's apartment was dark, when he let himself in with his key. He picked up the telephone and called her office. Her own voice answered: "Taggart Transcontinental."

"Don't you know it's a holiday?" he asked.

"Hello, Hank. Railroads have no holidays. Where are you calling from?"

"Your place."

"I'll be through in another half-hour."

"It's all right. Stay there. I'll come for you."

The anteroom of her office was dark, when he entered, except for the lighted glass cubbyhole of Eddie Willers. Eddie was closing his desk, getting ready to leave. He looked at Rearden, in puzzled astonishment.

"Good evening, Eddie. What is it that keeps you people so busy—the Rockland wreck?"

Eddie sighed. "Yes, Mr. Rearden."

"That's what I want to see Dagny about—about your rail."

"She's still here."

He started toward her door, when Eddie called after him hesitantly, "Mr. Rearden . . ."

He stopped. "Yes?"

"I wanted to say . . . because tomorrow is your trial . . . and whatever they do to you is supposed to be in the name of all the people . . . I just wanted to say that I . . . that it won't be in my name . . . even if there's nothing I can do about it, except to tell you . . . even if I know that that doesn't mean anything."

"It means much more than you suspect. Perhaps more than any of us suspect. Thanks, Eddie."

Dagny glanced up from her desk, when Rearden entered her office; he saw her watching him as he approached and he saw the look of weariness disappearing from her eyes. He sat down on the edge of the desk. She leaned back, brushing a strand of hair off her face, her shoulders relaxing under her thin white blouse.

"Dagny, there's something I want to tell you about the rail that you ordered. I want you to know this tonight."

She was watching him attentively; the expression of his face pulled hers into the same look of quietly solemn tension.

"I am supposed to deliver to Taggart Transcontinental, on February 'fifteenth, sixty thousand tons of rail, which is to give you three hundred miles of track. You will receive—for the same sum of money—eighty thousand tons of rail, which will give you five hundred miles of track.

You know what material is cheaper and lighter than steel. Your rail will not be steel, it will be Rearden Metal. Don't argue, object or agree.

I am not asking for your consent. You are not supposed to consent or to know anything about it. I am doing this and I alone will be responsible.

We will work it so that those on your staff who'll know that you've ordered steel, won't know that you've received Rearden Metal, and those who'll know that you've received Rearden Metal, won't know that you had no permit to buy it. We will tangle the bookkeeping in such a way that if the thing should ever blow up, nobody will be able to pin anything on anybody, except on me. They might suspect that I bribed someone on your staff, or they might suspect that you were hi on it, but they won't be able to prove it. I want you to give me your word that you will never admit it, no matter what happens. It's my Metal, and if there are any chances to take, it's I who'll take them. I have been planning this from the day I received your order. I have ordered the copper for it, from a source which will not betray me. I did not intend to tell you about it till later, but I changed my mind. I want you to know it tonight—because I am going on trial tomorrow for the same kind of crime."

She had listened without moving. At his last sentence, he saw a faint contraction of her cheeks and lips; it was not quite a smile, but it gave him her whole answer: pain, admiration, understanding.

Then he saw her eyes becoming softer, more painfully, dangerously alive—he took her wrist, as if the tight grasp of his fingers and the severity of his glance were to give her the support she needed—and he said sternly, "Don't thank me—this is not a favor—I am doing it in order to be able to bear my work, or else I'll break like Ken Danagger."

She whispered, "AH right, Hank, I won't thank you," the tone of her voice and the look of her eyes making it a lie by the time it was uttered.

He smiled. "Give me the word I asked."

She inclined her head. "I give you my word." He released her wrist.

She added, not raising her head, "The only thing I'll say is that if they sentence you to jail tomorrow, I'll quit—without waiting for any destroyer to prompt me."

"You won't. And I don't think they'll sentence me to jail. I think they'll let me off very lightly. I have a hypothesis about it—I'll explain it to you afterwards, when I've put it to the test."

"What hypothesis?"

"Who is John Galt?" He smiled, and stood up. "That's all. We won't talk any further about my trial, tonight. You don't happen to have anything to drink in your office, have you?"

"No. But I think my traffic manager has some sort of a bar on one shelf of his filing closet."

"Do you think you could steal a drink for me, if he doesn't have it locked?"

"I'll try."

He stood looking at the portrait of Nat Taggart on the wall of her office—the portrait of a young man with a lifted head—until she returned, bringing a bottle of brandy and two glasses. He filled the glasses in silence.

"You know, Dagny, Thanksgiving was a holiday established by productive people to celebrate the success of their work."

The movement of his arm, as he raised his glass, went from the portrait—to her—to himself— to the buildings of the city beyond the window.

For a month in advance, the people who filled the courtroom had been told by the press that they would see the man who was a greedy enemy of society; but they had come to see the man who had invented Rearden Metal.

He stood up, when the judges called upon him to do so. He wore a gray suit, he had pale blue eyes and blond hair; it was not the colors that made his figure seem icily implacable, it was the fact that the suit had an expensive simplicity seldom flaunted these days, that it belonged in the sternly luxurious office of a rich corporation, that his bearing came from a civilized era and clashed with the place around him.

The crowd knew from the newspapers that he represented the evil of ruthless wealth; and—as they praised the virtue of chastity, then ran to see any movie that displayed a half-naked female on its posters—so they came to see him; evil, at least, did not have the stale hopelessness of a bromide which none believed and none dared to challenge. They looked at him without admiration—admiration was a feeling they had lost the capacity to experience, long ago; they looked with curiosity and with a dim sense of defiance against those who had told them that it was their duty to hate him.

A few years ago, they would have jeered at his air of self-confident wealth. But today, there was a slate-gray sky in the windows of the courtroom, which promised the first snowstorm of a long, hard winter; the last of the country's oil was vanishing, and the coal mines were not able to keep up with the hysterical scramble for winter supplies. The crowd in the courtroom remembered that this was the case which had cost them the services of Ken Danagger. There were rumors that the output of the Danagger Coal Company had fallen perceptibly within one month; the newspapers said that it was merely a matter of readjustment while Danagger's cousin was reorganizing the company he had taken over. Last week, the front pages had carried the story of a catastrophe on the site of a housing project under construction: defective steel girders had collapsed, killing four workmen; the newspapers had not mentioned, but the crowd knew, that the girders had come from Orren Boyle's Associated Steel.

They sat in the courtroom in heavy silence and they looked at the tall, gray figure, not with hope—they were losing the capacity to hope —but with an impassive neutrality spiked by a faint question mark; the question mark was placed over all the pious slogans they had heard for years.

The newspapers had snarled that the cause of the country's troubles, as this case demonstrated, was the selfish greed of rich industrialists; that it was men like Hank Rearden who were to blame for the shrinking diet, the falling temperature and the cracking roofs in the homes of the nation; that if it had not been for men who broke regulations and hampered the government's plans, prosperity would have been achieved long ago; and that a man like Hank Rearden was prompted by nothing but the profit motive. This last was stated without explanation or elaboration, as if the words "profit motive" were the self-evident brand of ultimate evil.

The crowd remembered that these same newspapers, less than two years ago, had screamed that the production of Rearden Metal should be forbidden, because its producer was endangering people's lives for the sake of his greed; they remembered that the man in gray had ridden in the cab of the first engine to run over a track of his own Metal; and that he was now on trial for the greedy crime of withholding from the public a load of the Metal which it had been his greedy crime to offer in the public market.

According to the procedure established by directives, cases of this kind were not tried by a jury, but by a panel of three judges appointed by the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources; the procedure, the directives had stated, was to be informal and democratic.

The judge's bench had been removed from the old Philadelphia courtroom for this occasion, and replaced by a table on a wooden platform; it gave the room an atmosphere suggesting the kind of meeting where a presiding body puts something over on a mentally retarded membership.

One of the judges, acting as prosecutor, had read the charges. "You may now offer whatever plea you wish to make in your own defense," he announced.

Facing the platform, his voice inflectionless and peculiarly clear, Hank Rearden answered: "I have no defense."

"Do you—" The judge stumbled; he had not expected it to be that easy. "Do you throw yourself upon the mercy of this court?"

"I do not recognize this court's right to try me."

"What?"

"I do not recognize this court's right to try me."

"But, Mr. Rearden, this is the legally appointed court to try this particular category of crime."

"I do not recognize my action as a crime,"

"But you have admitted that you have broken our regulations controlling the sale of your Metal."

"I do not recognize your right to control the sale of my Metal."

"Is it necessary for me to point out that your recognition was not required?"

"No. I am fully aware of it and I am acting accordingly."

He noted the stillness of the room. By the rules of the complicated pretense which all those people played for one another's benefit, they should have considered his stand as incomprehensible folly; there should have been rustles of astonishment and derision; there were none; they sat still; they understood.

"Do you mean that you are refusing to obey the law?" asked the judge.

"No. I am complying with the law—to the letter. Your law holds that my life, my work and my property may be disposed of without my consent. Very well, you may now dispose of me without my participation in the matter. I will not play the part of defending myself, where no defense is possible, and I will not simulate the illusion of dealing with a tribunal of justice."

"But, Mr. Rearden, the law provides specifically that you are to be given an opportunity to present your side of the case and to defend yourself."

"A prisoner brought to trial can defend himself only if there is an objective principle of justice recognized by his judges, a principle upholding his rights, which they may not violate and which he can invoke.

The law, by which you are trying me, holds that there are no principles, that I have no rights and that you may do with me whatever you please. Very well. Do it."

"Mr. Rearden, the law which you are denouncing is based on the highest principle—the principle of the public good."

"Who is the public? What does it hold as its good? There was a time when men believed that the good' was a concept to be defined by a code of moral values and that no man had the right to seek his good through the violation of the rights of another. If it is now believed that my fellow men may sacrifice me in any manner they please for the sake of whatever they deem to be their own good, if they believe that they may seize my property simply because they need it—well, so does any burglar. There is only this difference: the burglar does not ask me to sanction his act."

A group of seats at the side of the courtroom was reserved for the prominent visitors who had come from New York to witness the trial. Dagny sat motionless and her face showed nothing but a solemn attention, the attention of listening with the knowledge that the flow of his words would determine the course of her life. Eddie Willers sat beside her. James Taggart had not come. Paul Larkin sat hunched forward, his face thrust out, pointed like an animal's muzzle, sharpened by a look of fear now turning into malicious hatred. Mr. Mowen, who sat beside him, was a man of greater innocence and smaller understanding; his fear was of a simpler nature; he listened in bewildered indignation and he whispered to Larkin, "Good God, now he's done it! Now he'll convince the whole country that all businessmen are enemies of the public good!"

"Are we to understand," asked the judge, "that you hold your own interests above the interests of the public?"

"I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.”

"What . . . what do you mean?"

"I hold that there is no clash of interests among men who do not demand the unearned and do not practice human sacrifices."

"Are we to understand that if the public deems it necessary to curtail your profits, you do not recognize its right to do so?"

"Why, yes, I do. The public may curtail my profits any time it wishes—by refusing to buy my product."

"We are speaking of . . . other methods."

"Any other method of curtailing profits is the method of looters —and I recognize it as such."

"Mr. Rearden, this is hardly the way to defend yourself."

"I said that I would not defend myself."

"But this is unheard of! Do you realize the gravity of the charge against you?"

"I do not care to consider it."

"Do you realize the possible consequences of your stand?"

"Fully."

"It is the opinion of this court that the facts presented by the prosecution seem to warrant no leniency. The penalty which this court has the power to impose on you is extremely severe."

"Go ahead."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Impose it."

The three judges looked at one another. Then their spokesman turned back to Rearden. "This is unprecedented," he said.

"It is completely irregular," said the second judge. "The law requires you to submit a plea in your own defense. Your only alternative is to state for the record that you throw yourself upon the mercy of the court."

"I do not."

"But you have to."

"Do you mean that what you expect from me is some sort of voluntary action?"

"Yes."

"I volunteer nothing."

"But the law demands that the defendant's side be represented on the record."

"Do you mean that you need my help to make this procedure legal?"

"Well, no . . . yes . . . that is, to complete the form."

"I will not help you."

The third and youngest judge, who had acted as prosecutor, snapped impatiently, "This is ridiculous and unfair! Do you want to let it look as if a man of your prominence had been railroaded without a—" He cut himself off short. Somebody at the back of the courtroom emitted a long whistle.

"I want," said Rearden gravely, "to let the nature of this procedure appear exactly for what it is. If you need my help to disguise it—I will not help you."

"But we are giving you a chance to defend yourself—and it is you who are rejecting it."

"I will not help you to pretend that I have a chance. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of righteousness where rights are not recognized. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of rationality by entering a debate in which a gun is the final argument. I will not help you to pretend that you are administering justice."

"But the law compels you to volunteer a defense!"

There was laughter at the back of the courtroom.

"That is the flaw in your theory, gentlemen," said Rearden gravely, "and I will not help you out of it. If you choose to deal with men by means of compulsion, do so. But you will discover that you need the voluntary co-operation of your victims, in many more ways than you can see at present. And your victims should discover that it is their own volition—which you cannot force—that makes you possible. I choose to be consistent and I will obey you in the manner you demand. Whatever you wish me to do, I will do it at the point of a gun. If you sentence me to jail, you will have to send armed men to carry me there—I will not volunteer to move. If you fine me, you will have to seize my property to collect the fine—I will not volunteer to pay it. If you believe that you have the right to force me—use your guns openly. I will not help you to disguise the nature of your action."

The eldest judge leaned forward across the table and his voice became suavely derisive: "You speak as if you were fighting for some sort of principle, Mr. Rearden, but what you're actually fighting for is only your property, isn't it?"

"Yes, of course. I am fighting for my property. Do you know the kind of principle that represents?"

"You pose as a champion of freedom, but it's only the freedom to make money that you're after."

"Yes, of course. AH I want is the freedom to make money. Do you know what that freedom implies?"

"Surely, Mr. Rearden, you wouldn't want your attitude to be misunderstood. You wouldn't want to give support to the widespread impression that you are a man devoid of social conscience, who feels no concern for the welfare of his fellows and works for nothing but his own profit."

"I work for nothing but my own profit. I earn it."

There was a gasp, not of indignation, but of astonishment, in the crowd behind him and silence from the judges he faced. He went on calmly: "No, I do not want my attitude to be misunderstood. I shall be glad to state it for the record. I am in full agreement with the facts of everything said about me in the newspapers—with the facts, but not with the evaluation. I work for nothing but my own profit—which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it. I do not produce it for their benefit at the expense of mine, and they do not buy it for my benefit at the expense of theirs; I do not sacrifice my interests to them nor do they sacrifice theirs to me; we deal as equals by mutual consent to mutual advantage—and I am proud of every penny that I have earned in this manner. I am rich and I am proud of every penny I own. I have made my money by my own effort, in free exchange and through the voluntary consent of every man I dealt with—the voluntary consent of those who employed me when I started, the voluntary consent of those who work for me now, the voluntary consent of those who buy my product. I shall answer all the questions you are afraid to ask me openly. Do I wish to pay my workers more than their services are worth to me? I do not. Do I wish to sell my product for less than my customers are willing to pay me? I do not. Do I wish to sell it at a loss or give it away? I do not. If this is evil, do whatever you please about me, according to whatever standards you hold. These are mine. I am earning my own living, as every honest man must. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence and the fact that I must work in order to support it. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am able to do it and to do it well. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am able to do it better than most people—the fact that my work is of greater value than the work of my neighbors and that more men are willing to pay I refuse to apologize for my ability—I refuse to apologize for my me. success—I refuse to apologize for my money. If this is evil, make the most of it. If this is what the public finds harmful to its interests, let the public destroy me. This is my code—and I will accept no other.

I could say to you that I have done more good for my fellow men than you can ever hope to accomplish—but I will not say it, because I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life. I will not say that the good of others was the purpose of my work—my own good was my purpose, and I despise the man who surrenders his. I could say to you that you do not serve the public good—that nobody's good can be achieved at the price of human sacrifices—that when you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction. I could say to you that you will and can achieve nothing but universal devastation—as any looter must, when he runs out of victims. I could say it, but I won't.

It is not your particular policy that I challenge, but your moral premise.

If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and I were asked to immolate myself for the sake of creatures who wanted to survive at the price of my blood, if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own—I would refuse, I would reject it as the most contemptible evil, I would fight it with every, power I possess, I would fight the whole of mankind, if one minute were all I could last before I were murdered, I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being's right to exist. Let there be no misunderstanding about me. If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!"

The crowd burst into applause.

Rearden whirled around, more startled than his judges. He saw faces that laughed in violent excitement, and faces that pleaded for help; he saw their silent despair breaking out into the open; he saw the same anger and indignation as his own, finding release in the wild defiance of their cheering; he saw the looks of admiration and the looks of hope. There were also the faces of loose-mouthed young men and maliciously unkempt females, the kind who led the booing in newsreel theaters at any appearance of a businessman on the screen; they did not attempt a counter-demonstration; they were silent.

As he looked at the crowd, people saw in his face what the threats of the judges had not been able to evoke: the first sign of emotion.

It was a few moments before they heard the furious beating of a gavel upon the table and one of the judges yelling: "—or I shall have the courtroom cleared!"

_ As he turned back to the table, Rearden's eyes moved over the visitors' section. His glance paused on Dagny, a pause perceptible only to her, as if he were saying: It works. She would have appeared calm except that her eyes seemed to have become too large for her face.

Eddie Willers was smiling the kind of smile that is a man's substitute for breaking into tears. Mr. Mowen looked stupefied. Paul Larkin was staring at the floor. There was no expression on Bertram Scudder's face on Lillian's. She sat at the end of a row, her legs crossed, a mink stole slanting from her right shoulder to her left hip; she looked at Rearden, not moving.

In the complex violence of all the things he felt, he had time to recognize a touch of regret and of longing: there was a face he had hoped to see, had looked for from the start of the session, had wanted to be present more than any other face around him. But Francisco d'Anconia had not come.

4LMr. Rearden," said the eldest judge, smiling affably, reproachfully and spreading his arms, "it is regrettable that you should have misunderstood us so completely. That's the trouble—that businessmen refuse to approach us in a spirit of trust and friendship. They seem to imagine that we are their enemies. Why do you speak of human sacrifices? What made you go to such an extreme? We have no intention of seizing your property or destroying your life. We do not seek to harm your interests. We are fully aware of your distinguished achievements. Our purpose is only to balance social pressures and do justice to all. This hearing is really intended, not as a trial, but as a friendly discussion aimed at mutual understanding and co-operation."

"I do not co-operate at the point of a gun."

"Why speak of guns? This matter is not serious enough to warrant such references. We are fully aware that the guilt in this case lies chiefly with Mr. Kenneth Danagger, who instigated this infringement of the law, who exerted pressure upon you and who confessed his guilt by disappearing in order to escape trial"

"No. We did it by equal, mutual, voluntary agreement."

"Mr. Rearden," said the second judge, "you may not share some of our ideas, but when all is said and done, we're all working for the same cause. For the good of the people. We realize that you were prompted to disregard legal technicalities by the critical situation of the coal mines and the crucial importance of fuel to the public welfare."

"No. I was prompted by my own profit and my own interests.

What effect it had on the coal mines and the public welfare is for you to estimate. That was not my motive."

Mr. Mowen stared dazedly about him and whispered to Paul Larkin, "Something's gone screwy here."

"Oh, shut up!" snapped Larkin.

"I am sure, Mr. Rearden," said the eldest judge, "that you do not really believe—nor docs the public—that we wish to treat you as a sacrificial victim. If anyone has been laboring under such a misapprehension, we are anxious to prove that it is not true."

The judges retired to consider their verdict. They did not stay out long. They returned to an ominously silent courtroom—and announced that a fine of $5,000 was imposed on Henry Rearden, but that the sentence was suspended.

Streaks of jeering laughter ran through the applause that swept the courtroom. The applause was aimed at Rearden, the laughter—at the judges.

Rearden stood motionless, not turning to the crowd, barely hearing the applause. He stood looking at the judges. There was no triumph in his face, no elation, only the still intensity of contemplating a vision with a bitter wonder that was almost fear. He was seeing the enormity of the smallness of the enemy who was destroying the world. He felt as if, after a journey of years through a landscape of devastation, past the ruins of great factories, the wrecks of powerful engines, the bodies of invincible men, he had come upon the despoiler, expecting to find a giant—and had found a rat eager to scurry for cover at the first sound of a human step. If this is what has beaten us, he thought, the guilt is ours.

He was jolted back into the courtroom by the people pressing to surround him. He smiled in answer to their smiles, to the frantic, tragic eagerness of their faces; there was a touch of sadness in his smile.

"God bless you, Mr. Rearden!" said an old woman with a ragged shawl over her head. "Can't you save us, Mr. Rearden? They're eating us alive, and it's no use fooling anybody about how it's the rich that they're after—do you know what's happening to us?"

"Listen, Mr. Rearden," said a man who looked like a factory worker, "it's the rich who're selling us down the river. Tell those wealthy bastards, who're so anxious to give everything away, that when they give away their palaces, they're giving away the skin off our backs."

"I know it," said Rearden.

The guilt is ours, he thought. If we who were the movers, the providers, the benefactors of mankind, were willing to let the brand of evil be stamped upon us and silently to bear punishment for our virtues—what sort of "good" did we expect to triumph in the world?

He looked at the people around him. They had cheered him today; they had cheered him by the side of the track of the John Galt Line.

But tomorrow they would clamor for a new directive from Wesley Mouch and a free housing project from Orren Boyle, while Boyle's girders collapsed upon their heads. They would do it, because they would be told to forget, as a sin, that which had made them cheer Hank Rearden.

Why were they ready to renounce their highest moments as a sin?

Why were they willing to betray the best within them? What made them believe that this earth was a realm of evil where despair was their natural fate? He could not name the reason, but he knew that it had to be named. He felt it as a huge question mark within the courtroom, which it was now his duty to answer.

This was the real sentence imposed upon him, he thought—to discover what idea, what simple idea available to the simplest man, had made mankind accept the doctrines that led it to self-destruction.

"Hank, I'll never think that it's hopeless, not ever again," said Dagny that evening, after the trial. "I'll never be tempted to quit. You've proved that the right always works and always wins—" She stopped, then added, "—provided one knows what is the right."

Lillian said to him at dinner next day, "So you've won, have you?"

Her voice was noncommittal; she said nothing else; she was watching him, as If studying a riddle.

The Wet Nurse asked him at the mills, "Mr. Rearden, what's a moral premise?" "What you're going to have a lot of trouble with."

The boy frowned, then shrugged and said, laughing, "God, that was a wonderful show! What a beating you gave them, Mr. Rearden! I sat by the radio and howled." "How do you know it was a beating?" "Well, it was, wasn't it?" "Are you sure of it?" "Sure I'm sure." "The thing that makes you sure is a moral premise."

The newspapers were silent. After the exaggerated attention they had given to the case, they acted as if the trial were not worthy of notice. They printed brief accounts on unlikely pages, worded in such generalities that no reader could discover any hint of a controversial issue.

The businessmen he met seemed to wish to evade the subject of his trial. Some made no comment at all, but turned away, their faces showing a peculiar resentment under the effort to appear noncommittal, as if they feared that the mere act of looking at him would be interpreted as taking a stand. Others ventured to comment: "In my opinion, Rearden, it was extremely unwise of you. . . . It seems to me that this is hardly the time to make enemies. . . . We can't afford to arouse resentment."

"Whose resentment?" he asked.

"I don't think the government will like it."

"You saw the consequences of that"

"Well, I don't know . . . The public won't take it, there's bound to be a lot of indignation."

"You saw how the public took it."

"Well, I don't know . . . We've been trying hard not to give any grounds for all those accusations about selfish greed—and you've given ammunition to the enemy."

"Would you rather agree with the enemy that you have no right to your profits and your property?"

"Oh, no, no, certainly not—but why go to extremes? There's always a middle ground."

"A middle ground between you and your murderers?"

"Now why use such words?”

"What I said at the trial, was it true or not?"

"It's going to be misquoted and misunderstood."

"Was it true or not?"

"The public is too dumb to grapple with such issues."

"Was it true or not?"

"It's no time to boast about being rich—when the populace is starving. It's just goading them on to seize everything."

"But telling them that you have no right to your wealth, while they have—is what's going to restrain them?"

"Well, I don't know . . ."

"I don't like the things you said at your trial," said another man.

"In my opinion, I don't agree with you at all. Personally, I'm proud to believe that I am working for the public good, not just for my own profit. I like to think that I have some goal higher than just earning my three meals a day and my Hammond limousine."

"And I don't like that idea about no directives and no controls," said another. "I grant you they're running hog-wild and overdoing it.

But—no controls at all? I don't go along with that. I think some controls are necessary. The ones which are for the public good."

"I am sorry, gentlemen," said Rearden, "that I will be obliged to save your goddamn necks along with mine."

A group of businessmen headed by Mr. Mowen did not issue any statements about the trial. But a week later they announced, with an inordinate amount of publicity, that they were endowing the construction of a playground for the children of the unemployed.

Bertram Scudder did not mention the trial in his column. But ten days later, he wrote, among items of miscellaneous gossip: "Some idea of the public value of Mr. Hank Rearden may be gathered from the fact that of all social groups, he seems to be most unpopular with his own fellow businessmen. His old-fashioned brand of ruthlessness seems to be too much even for those predatory barons of profit."

On an evening in December—when the street beyond his window was like a congested throat coughing with the horns of pre-Christmas traffic—Rearden sat in his room at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, fighting an enemy more dangerous than weariness or fear: revulsion against the thought of having to deal with human beings.

He sat, unwilling to venture into the streets of the city, unwilling to move, as if he were chained to his chair and to this room. He had tried for hours to ignore an emotion that felt like the pull of homesickness: his awareness that the only man whom he longed to see, was here, in this hotel, just a few floors above him.

He had caught himself, in the past few weeks, wasting time in the lobby whenever he entered the hotel or left it, loitering unnecessarily at the mail counter or the newsstand, watching the hurried currents of people, hoping to see Francisco d'Anconia among them. He had caught himself eating solitary dinners in the restaurant of the Wayne-Falkland, with his eyes on the curtains of the entrance doorway, Now he caught himself sitting in his room, thinking that the distance was only a few floors.

He rose to his feet, with a chuckle of amused indignation; he was acting, he thought, like a woman who waits for a telephone call and fights against the temptation to end the torture by making the first move. There was no reason, he thought, why he could not go to Francisco d'Anconia, if that was what he wanted. Yet when he told himself that he would, he felt some dangerous element of surrender in the intensity of his own relief.

He made a step toward the phone, to call Francisco's suite, but stopped. It was not what he wanted; what he wanted was simply to walk in, unannounced, as Francisco had walked into his office; it was this that seemed to state some unstated right between them.

On his way to the elevator, he thought: He won't be in or, if he is, you'll probably find him entertaining some floozie, which will serve you right. But the thought seemed unreal, he could not make it apply to the man he had seen at the mouth of the furnace—he stood confidently in the elevator, looking up—he walked confidently down the hall, feeling his bitterness relax into gaiety—he knocked at the door.

Francisco's voice snapped, "Come in!" It had a brusque, absentminded sound.

Rearden opened the door and stopped on the threshold. One of the hotel's costliest satin-shaded lamps stood in the middle of the floor, throwing a circle of light on wide sheets of drafting paper. Francisco d'Anconia, in shirt sleeves, a strand of hair hanging down over his face, lay stretched on the floor, on his stomach, propped up by his elbows, biting the end of a pencil in concentration upon some point of the intricate tracing before him. He did not look up, he seemed to have forgotten the knock. Rearden tried to distinguish the drawing: it looked like the section of a smelter. He stood watching in startled wonder; had he had the power to bring into reality his own image of Francisco d'Anconia, this was the picture he would have seen: the figure of a purposeful young worker intent upon a difficult task, In a moment, Francisco raised his head. In the next instant, he flung his body upward to a kneeling posture, looking at Rearden with a smile of incredulous pleasure. In the next, he seized the drawings and threw them aside too hastily, face down.

"What did I interrupt?" asked Rearden.

"Nothing much. Come in." He was grinning happily. Rearden felt suddenly certain that Francisco had waited, too, had waited for this as for a victory which he had not quite hoped to achieve.

"What were you doing?" asked Rearden.

"Just amusing myself."

"Let me see it."

"No." He rose and kicked the drawings aside.

Rearden noted that if he had resented as impertinence Francisco's manner of proprietorship in his office, he himself was now guilty of the same attitude—because he offered no explanation for his visit, but crossed the room and sat down in an armchair, casually, as if he were at home.

"Why didn't you come to continue what you had started?" he asked.

"You have been continuing it brilliantly without my help."

"Do you mean, my trial?"

"I mean, your trial."

"How do you know? You weren't there."

Francisco smiled, because the tone of the voice confessed an added sentence: I was looking for you. "Don't you suppose I heard every word of it on the radio?"

"You did? Well, how did you like hearing your own lines come over the air, with me as your stooge?"

"You weren't, Mr. Rearden. They weren't my lines. Weren't they the things you had always lived by?"

"Yes."

"I only helped you to see that you should have been proud to live by them."

"I am glad you heard it"

"It was great, Mr. Rearden—and about three generations too late."

"What do you mean?"

"If one single businessman had had the courage, then, to say that he worked for nothing but his own profit—and to say it proudly—he would have saved the world."

"I haven't given up the world as lost."

"It isn't. It never can be. But oh God!—what he would have spared us!"

"Well, I guess we have to fight, no matter what era we're caught in."

"Yes . . . You know, Mr. Rearden, I would suggest that you get a transcript of your trial and read what you said. Then see whether you are practicing it fully and consistently—or not."

"You mean that I'm not?"

"See for yourself."

"I know that you had a great deal to tell me, when we were interrupted, that night at the mills. Why don't you finish what you had to say?"

"No. It's too soon."

Francisco acted as if there were nothing unusual about this visit, as if he took it as a matter of natural course—as he had always acted in Rearden's presence. But Rearden noted that he was not so calm as he wished to appear; he was pacing the room, in a manner that seemed a release for an emotion he did not want to confess; he had forgotten the lamp and it still stood on the floor as the room's sole illumination.

"You've been taking an awful beating in the way of discoveries, haven't you?" said Francisco, "How did you like the behavior of your fellow businessmen?"

"I suppose it was to be expected."

His voice tense with the anger of compassion, Francisco said, "It's been twelve years and yet I'm still unable to see it indifferently!" The sentence sounded involuntary, as if, trying to suppress the sound of emotion, he had uttered suppressed words.

"Twelve years—since what?" asked Rearden.

There was an instant's pause, but Francisco answered calmly, "Since I understood what those men were doing," He added, "I know what you're going through right now . . . and what's still ahead."

"Thanks," said Rearden.

"For what?"

"For what you're trying so hard not to show. But don't worry about me. I'm still able to stand it. . . . You know, I didn't come here because I wanted to talk about myself or even about the trial."

"I'll agree to any subject you choose—in order to have you here."

He said it in the tone of a courteous joke; but the tone could not disguise it; he meant it. "What did you want to talk about?"

"You."

Francisco stopped. He looked at Rearden for a moment, then answered quietly, "All right.”

If that which Rearden felt could have gone directly into words, past the barrier of his will, he would have cried: Don't let me down—I need you—I am fighting all of them, I have fought to my limit and am condemned to fight beyond it—and, as sole ammunition possible to me, I need the knowledge of one single man whom I can trust, respect and admire.

Instead, he said calmly, very simply—and the only note of a personal bond between them was that tone of sincerity which comes with a direct, unqualifiedly rational statement and implies the same honesty of mind in the listener—"You know, I think that the only real moral crime that one man can commit against another is the attempt to create, by his words or actions, an impression of the contradictory, the impossible, the irrational, and thus shake the concept of rationality in his victim."

"That's true."

"If I say that that is the dilemma you've put me in, would you help me by answering a personal question?"

"I will try.”

"I don't have to tell you—I think you know it—that you are the man of the highest mind I have ever met. I am coming to accept, not as right, but at least as possible, the fact that you refuse to exercise your great ability in the world of today. But what a man does out of despair, is not necessarily a key to his character. I have always thought that the real key is in that which he seeks for his enjoyment.

And this is what I find inconceivable: no matter what you've given up, so long as you chose to remain alive, how can you find any pleasure in spending a life as valuable as yours on running after cheap women and on an imbecile's idea of diversions?"

Francisco looked at him with a fine smile of amusement, as if saying: No? You didn't want to talk about yourself? And what is it that you're confessing but the desperate loneliness which makes the question of my character more important to you than any other question right now?

The smile merged into a soft, good-natured chuckle, as if the question involved no problem for him, no painful secret to reveal. "There's a way to solve every dilemma of that kind, Mr. Rearden. Check your premises." He sat down on the floor, settling himself gaily, informally, for a conversation he would enjoy. "Is it your own first-hand conclusion that I am a man of high mind?"

"Yes."

"Do you know of your own first-hand knowledge that I spend my life running after women?"

"You've never denied it."

"Denied it? I've gone to a lot of trouble to create that impression."

"Do you mean to say that it isn't true?"

"Do I strike you as a man with a miserable inferiority complex?"

"Good God, no!"

"Only that kind of man spends his life running after women."

"What do you mean?"

"Do you remember what I said about money and about the men who seek to reverse the law of cause and effect? The men who try to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind? Well, the mail who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures —which can't be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man's sense of his own value."

"You'd better explain that."

"Did it ever occur to you that it's the same issue? The men who think that wealth comes from material resources and has no intellectual root or meaning, are the men who think—for the same reason—that sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of one's mind, choice or code of values. They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you—just about in some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails of its own volition. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man's sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.

Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he's taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment—just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity!—an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as., his standard of value. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience—or to fake—a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer—because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut. He does not seek to . . . What's the matter?" he asked, seeing the look on Rearden's face, a look of intensity much beyond mere interest in an abstract discussion.

"Go on," said Rearden tensely.

"He does not seek to gain his value, he seeks to express it. There is no conflict between the standards of his mind and the desires of his body. But the man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises—because she will reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective reality in which he is a fraud, she will give him a momentary illusion of his own value and a momentary escape from the moral code that damns him. Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives—and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy. One proceeds from the other. Love is our response to our highest values—and can be nothing else. Let a man corrupt his values and his view of existence, let him profess that love is not self-enjoyment but self-denial, that virtue consists, not of pride, but of pity or pain or weakness or sacrifice, that the noblest love is born, not of admiration, but of charity, not in response to values, but in response to flaws—and he will have cut himself in two. His body will not obey him, it will not respond, it will make him impotent toward the woman he professes to love and draw him to the lowest type of whore he can find. His body will always follow the ultimate logic of his deepest convictions; if he believes that flaws are values, he has damned existence as evil and only the evil will attract him. He has damned himself and he will feel that depravity is all he is worthy of enjoying. He has equated virtue with pain and he will feel that vice is the only realm of pleasure. Then he will scream that his body has vicious desires of its own which his mind cannot conquer, that sex is sin, that true love is a pure emotion of the spirit. And then he will wonder why love brings him nothing but boredom, and sex—nothing but shame."

Rearden said slowly, looking off, not realizing that he was thinking aloud, "At least . . . I've never accepted that other tenet . . . I've never felt guilty about making money."

Francisco missed the significance of the first two words; he smiled and said eagerly, "You do see that it's the same issue? No, you'd never accept any part of their vicious creed. You wouldn't be able to force it upon yourself. If you tried to damn sex as evil, you'd still find yourself, against your will, acting on the proper moral premise. You'd be attracted to the highest woman you met. You'd always want a heroine. You'd be incapable of self-contempt. You'd be unable to believe that existence is evil and that you're a helpless creature caught in an impossible universe. You're the man who's spent his life shaping matter to the purpose of his mind. You're the man who would know that just as an idea unexpressed in physical action is contemptible hypocrisy, so is platonic love—and just as physical action unguided by an idea is a fool's self-fraud, so is sex when cut off from one's code of values. It's the same issue, and you would know it. Your inviolate sense of self-esteem would know it. You would be incapable of desire for a woman you despised. Only the man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love. But observe that most people are creatures cut in half who keep swinging desperately to one side or to the other. One kind of half is the man who despises money, factories, skyscrapers and his own body.

He holds undefined emotions about non-conceivable subjects as the meaning of life and as his claim to virtue. And he cries with despair, because he can feel nothing for the women he respects, but finds himself in bondage to an irresistible passion for a slut from the gutter.

He is the man whom people call an idealist. The other kind of half is the man whom people call practical, the man who despises principles, abstractions, art, philosophy and his own mind. He regards the acquisition of material objects as the only goal of existence—and he laughs at the need to consider their purpose or their source. He expects them to give him pleasure—and he wonders why the more he gets, the less he feels. He is the man who spends his time chasing women. Observe the triple fraud which he perpetrates upon himself. He will not acknowledge his need of self-esteem, since he scoffs at such a concept as moral values; yet he feels the profound self-contempt which comes from believing that he is a piece of meat. He will not acknowledge, but he knows that sex is the physical expression of a tribute to personal values. So he tries, by going through the motions of the effect, to acquire that which should have been the cause. He tries to gain a sense of his own value from the women who surrender to him—and he forgets that the women he picks have neither character nor judgment nor standard of value. He tells himself that all he's after is physical pleasure—but observe that he tires of his women in a week or a night, that he despises professional whores and that he loves to imagine he is seducing virtuous girls who make a great exception for his sake. It is the feeling, of achievement that he seeks and never finds. What glory can there be in the conquest of a mindless body? Now that is your woman-chaser. Does the description fit me?"

"God, no!"

"Then you can judge, without asking my word for it, how much chasing of women I've done in my life."

"But what on earth have you been doing on the front pages of newspapers for the last—isn't it twelve—years?"

"I've spent a lot of money on the most ostentatiously vulgar parties I could think of, and a miserable amount of time on being seen with the appropriate sort of women. As for the rest—" He stopped, then said, "I have some friends who know this, but you are the first person to whom I am confiding it against my own rules: I have never slept with any of those women. I have never touched one of them."

"What is more incredible than that, is that I believe you."

The lamp on the floor beside him threw broken bits of light across Francisco's face, as he leaned forward; the face had a look of guiltless amusement. "If you care to glance over those front pages, you'll see that I've never said anything. It was the women who were eager to rush into print with stories insinuating that being seen with me at a restaurant was the sign of a great romance. What do you suppose those women are after but the same thing as the chaser—the desire to gain their own value from the number and fame of the men they conquer? Only it's one step phonier, because the value they seek is not even in the actual fact, but in the impression on and the envy of other women. Well, I gave those bitches what they wanted—but what they literally wanted, without the pretense that they expected, the pretense that hides from Them the nature of their wish. Do you think they wanted to sleep with me or with any man? They wouldn't be capable of so real and honest a desire. They wanted food for their vanity—and I gave it to them. I gave them the chance to boast to their friends and to see themselves in the scandal sheets in the roles of great seductresses. But do you know that it works in exactly the same way as what you did at your trial? If you want to defeat any kind of vicious fraud—comply with it literally, adding nothing of your own to disguise its nature. Those women understood. They saw whether there's any satisfaction in being envied by others for a feat one has not achieved. Instead of self-esteem, their publicized romances with me have given them a deeper sense of inferiority: each one of them knows that she's tried and failed. If dragging me into bed is supposed to be her public standard of value, she knows that she couldn't live up to it. I think those women hate me more than any other man on. earth. But my secret is safe—because each one of them thinks that she was the only one who failed, while all the others succeeded, so she'll be the more vehement in swearing to our romance and will never admit the truth to anybody."

"But what have you done to your own reputation?"

Francisco shrugged. "Those whom I respect, will know the truth about me, sooner or later. The others"—his face hardened—"the others consider that which I really am as evil. Let them have what they prefer—what I appear to be on the front pages."

"But what for? Why did you do it? Just to teach them a lesson?"

"Hell, no! I wanted to be known as a playboy."

"Why?"

"A playboy is a man who just can't help letting money run through his fingers.”

"Why did you want to assume such an ugly sort of role?"

"Camouflage."

"For what?"

"For a purpose of my own."

"What purpose?"

Francisco shook his head. "Don't ask me to tell you that. I've told you more than I should. You'll come to know the rest of it soon, anyway."

"If it's more than you should, why did you tell me?"

"Because . . . you've made me become impatient for the first time in years." The note of a suppressed emotion came back into his voice.

"Because I've never wanted anyone to know the truth about me as I wanted you to know it. Because I knew that you'd despise a playboy more than any other sort of man—as I would, too. Playboy? I've never loved but one woman in my life and still do and always will!" It was an involuntary break, and he added, his voice low, "I've never confessed that to anyone . . . not even to her."

"Have you lost her?"

Francisco sat looking off into space; in a moment, he answered tonelessly, "I hope not."

The light of the lamp hit his face from below, and Rearden could not see his eyes, only his mouth drawn in lines of endurance and oddly solemn resignation. Rearden knew that this was a wound not to be probed any further.

With one of his swift changes of mood, Francisco said, "Oh well, it's just a little longer!" and rose to his feet, smiling.

"Since you trust me," said Rearden, "I want to tell you a secret of mine in exchange. I want you to, know how much I trusted you before I came here. And I might need your help later."

"You're the only man left whom I'd like to help."

"There's a great deal that I don't understand about you, but I'm certain of one thing: that you're not a friend of the looters."

"I'm not." There was a hint of amusement in Francisco's face, as at an understatement.

"So I know that you won't betray me if I tell you that I'm going to continue selling Rearden Metal to customers of my own choice in any amount I wish, whenever I see a chance to do it. Right now, I'm getting ready to pour an order twenty times the size of the one they tried me for."

Sitting on the arm of a chair, a few feet away, Francisco leaned forward to look at him silently, frowning, for a long moment, "Do you think that you're fighting them by doing it?" he asked.

"Well, what would you call it? Co-operating?"

"You were willing to work and produce Rearden Metal for them at the price of losing your profits, losing your friends, enriching stray bastards who had the pull to rob you, and taking their abuse for the privilege of keeping them alive. Now you're willing to do it at the price of accepting the position of a criminal and the risk of being thrown in jail at any moment—for the sake of keeping in existence a system which can be kept going only by its victims, only by the breaking of its own laws."

"It's not for their system, but for customers whom I can't abandon to the mercy of their system—I intend to outlast that system of theirs —I don't intend to let them stop me, no matter how hard they make it for me—and I don't intend to give up the world to them, even if I am the last man left. Right now, that illegal order is more important to me than the whole of my mills."

Francisco shook his head slowly and did not answer; then he asked, "To which one of your friends in the copper industry are you going to give the valuable privilege of informing on you this time?"

Rearden smiled. "Not this time. This time, I'm dealing with a man I can trust."

"Really? Who is it?"

"You."

Francisco sat up straight. "What?" he asked, his voice so low that he almost succeeded in hiding the sound of a gasp.

Rearden was smiling. "You didn't know that I'm one of your customers now? It was done through a couple of stooges and under a phony name—but I'll need your help to prevent anyone on your staff from becoming inquisitive about it. I need that copper, I need it on time—and I don't care if they arrest me later, so long as I get this through. I know that you've lost all concern for your company, your wealth, your work, because you don't care to deal with looters like Taggart and Boyle. But if you meant all the things you taught me, if I am the last man left whom you respect, you'll help me to survive and to beat them. I've never asked for anyone's help. I'm asking for yours.

I need you. I trust you. You've always professed your admiration for me. Well, there's my life in your hands—if you want it. An order of d'Anconia copper is being shipped to me right now. It left San Juan on December fifth."

"What?!"

It was a scream of plain shock. Francisco had shot to his feet, past any attempt to hide anything. "On December fifth?"

"Yes," said Rearden, stupefied.

Francisco leaped to the telephone. "I told you not to deal with d'Anconia Copper!" It was the half-moaning, half-furious cry of despair.

His hand was reaching for the telephone, but jerked back. He grasped the edge of the table, as if to stop himself from lifting the receiver, and he stood, head down, for how long a time neither he nor Rearden could tell. Rearden was held numb by the fact of watching an agonized struggle with the motionless figure of a man as its only evidence. He could not guess the nature of the struggle, he knew only that there was something which Francisco had the power to prevent in that moment and that it was a power which he would not use.

When Francisco raised his head, Rearden saw a face drawn by so great a suffering that its lines were almost an audible cry of pain, the more terrible because the face had a look of firmness, as if the decision had been made and this was the price of it.

"Francisco . . . what's the matter?"

"Hank, I . . . " He shook his head, stopped, then stood up straight.

"Mr. Rearden," he said, in a voice that had the strength, the despair and the peculiar dignity of a plea he knew to be hopeless, "for the time when you're going to damn me, when you're going to doubt every word I said . . . I swear to you—by the woman I love—that I am your friend."

The memory of Francisco's face as it looked in that moment, came back to Rearden three days later, through a blinding shock of loss and hatred—it came back, even though, standing by the radio in his office, he thought that he must now keep away from the Wayne-Falkland or he would kill Francisco d'Anconia on sight—it kept coming back to him, through the words he was hearing—he was hearing that three ships of d'Anconia copper, bound from San Juan to New York, had been attacked by Ragnar Danneskjold and sent to the bottom of the ocean—it kept coming back, even though he knew that much more than the copper had gone down for him with those ships.

CHAPTER V
ACCOUNT OVERDRAWN

It was the first failure in the history of Rearden Steel. For the first time, an order was not delivered as promised. But by February 15, when the Taggart rail was due, it made no difference to anyone any longer.

Winter had come early, in the last days of November. People said that it was the hardest winter on record and that no one could be blamed for the unusual severity of the snowstorms. They did not care to remember that there had been a time when snowstorms did not sweep, unresisted, down unlighted roads and upon the roofs of unheated houses, did not stop the movement of trains, did not leave a wake of corpses counted by the hundreds.

The first time that Danagger Coal was late in delivering fuel to Taggart Transcontinental, in the last week of December, Danagger's cousin explained that he could not help it; he had had to cut the workday down to six hours, he said, in order to raise the morale of the men who did not seem to function as they had in the days of his cousin Kenneth; the men had become listless and sloppy, he said, because they were exhausted by the harsh discipline of the former management; he could not help it if some of the superintendents and foremen had quit him without reason, men who had been with the company for ten to twenty years; he could not help it if there seemed to be some friction between his workers and his new supervisory staff, even though the new men were much more liberal than the old slave drivers; it was only a matter of readjustment, he said. He could not help it, he said, if the tonnage intended for Taggart Transcontinental had been turned over, on the eve of its scheduled delivery, to the Bureau of Global Relief for shipment to the People's State of England; it was an emergency, the people of England were starving, with all of their State factories closing down—and Miss Taggart was being unreasonable, since it was only a matter of one day's delay.

It was only one day's delay. It caused a three days' delay in the run of Freight Train Number 386, bound from California to New York with fifty-nine carloads of lettuce and oranges. Freight Train Number 386 waited on sidings, at coaling stations, for the fuel that had not arrived. When the train reached New York, the lettuce and oranges had to be dumped into the East River: they had waited their turn too long in the freight houses of California, with the train schedules cut and the engines forbidden, by directive, to pull a train of more than sixty cars.

Nobody but their friends and trade associates noticed that three orange growers in California went out of business, as well as two lettuce farmers in Imperial Valley; nobody noticed the closing of a commission house in New York, of a plumbing company to which the commission house owed money, of a lead-pipe wholesaler who had supplied the plumbing company. When people were starving, said the newspapers, one did not have to feel concern over the failures of business enterprises which were only private ventures for private profit.

The coal shipped across the Atlantic by the Bureau of Global Relief did not reach the People's State of England: it was seized by Ragnar Danneskjold.

The second time that Danagger Coal was late in delivering fuel to Taggart Transcontinental, in mid-January, Danagger's cousin snarled over the telephone that he could not help it: his mines had been shut down for three days, due to a shortage of lubricating oil for the machinery. The supply of coal to Taggart Transcontinental was four days late.

Mr. Quinn, of the Quinn Ball Bearing Company which had once moved from Connecticut to Colorado, waited a week for the freight train that carried his order of Rearden steel. When the train arrived, the doors of the Quinn Ball Bearing Company's plant were closed.

Nobody traced the closing of a motor company in Michigan, that had waited for a shipment of ball bearings, its machinery idle, its workers on full pay; or the closing of a sawmill in Oregon, that had waited for a new motor; or the closing of a lumber yard in Iowa, left without supply; or the bankruptcy of a building contractor in Illinois who, failing to get his lumber on time, found his contracts cancelled and the purchasers of his homes sent wandering off down snowswept roads in search of that which did not exist anywhere any longer.

The snowstorm that came at the end of January blocked the passes through the Rocky Mountains, raising white walls thirty feet high across the main-line track of Taggart Transcontinental. The men who attempted to clear the track, gave up within the first few hours: the rotary plows broke down, one after another. The plows had been kept in precarious repair for two years past the span of their usefulness. The new plows had not been delivered; the manufacturer had quit, unable to obtain the steel he needed from Orren Boyle.

Three westbound trains were trapped on the sidings of Winston Station, high in the Rockies, where the main line of Taggart Transcontinental cut across the northwest corner of Colorado. For five days, they remained beyond the reach of help. Trains could not approach them through the storm. The last of the trucks made by Lawrence Hammond broke down on the frozen grades of the mountain highways.

The best of the airplanes once made by Dwight Sanders were sent out, but never reached Winston Station; they were worn past the stage of fighting a storm.

Through the driving mesh of snow, the passengers trapped aboard the trains looked out at the lights of Winston's shanties. The lights died in the night of the second day. By the evening of the third, the lights, the heat and the food had given out aboard the trains. In the brief lulls of the storm, when the white mesh vanished and left behind it the stillness of a black void merging a lightless earth with a starless sky—the passengers could see, many miles away to the south, a small tongue of flame twisting in the wind. It was Wyatt's Torch.

By the morning of the sixth day, when the trains were able to move and proceeded down the slopes of Utah, of Nevada, of California, the trainmen observed the smokeless stacks and the closed doors of small trackside factories, which had not been closed on their last run.

"Storms are an act of God," wrote Bertram Scudder, "and nobody can be held socially responsible for the weather."

The rations of coal, established by Wesley Mouch, permitted the heating of homes for three hours a day. There was no wood to burn, no metal to make new stoves, no tools to pierce the walls of the houses for new installations. In makeshift contraptions of bricks and oil cans, professors were burning the books of their libraries, and fruit growers were burning the trees of their orchards. "Privations strengthen a people's spirit," wrote Bertram Scudder, "and forge the fine steel of social discipline. Sacrifice is the cement which unites human bricks into the great edifice of society."

"The nation which had once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor," said Francisco d'Anconia in a press interview. But this was not printed.

The only business boom, that winter, came to the amusement industry. People wrenched their pennies out of the quicksands of their food and heat budgets, and went without meals in order to crowd into movie theaters, in order to escape for a few hours the state of animals reduced to the single concern of terror over their crudest needs. In January, all movie theaters, night clubs and bowling alleys were closed by order of Wesley Mouch, for the purpose of conserving fuel. "Pleasure is not an essential of existence," wrote Bertram Scudder.

"You must learn to take a philosophical attitude," said Dr. Simon Pritchett to a young girl student who broke down into sudden, hysterical sobs in the middle of a lecture. She had just returned from a volunteer relief expedition to a settlement on Lake Superior; she had seen a mother holding the body of a grown son who had died of hunger.

"There are no absolutes," said Dr. Pritchett. "Reality is only an illusion.

How does that woman know that her son is dead? How does she know that he ever existed?"

People with pleading eyes and desperate faces crowded into tents where evangelists cried in triumphant gloating that man was unable to cope with nature, that his science was a fraud, that his mind was a failure, that he was reaping punishment for the sin of pride, for his confidence in his own intellect—and that only faith in the power of mystic secrets could protect him from the fissure of a rail or from the blowout of the last tire on his last truck. Love was the key to the mystic secrets, they cried, love and selfless sacrifice to the needs of others.

Orren Boyle made a selfless sacrifice to the needs of others. He sold to the Bureau of Global Relief, for shipment to the People's State of Germany, ten thousand tons of structural steel shapes that had been intended for the Atlantic Southern Railroad. "It was a difficult decision to make," he said, with a moist, unfocused look of righteousness, to the panic-stricken president of the Atlantic Southern, "but I weighed the fact that you're a rich corporation, while the people of Germany are in a state of unspeakable misery. So I acted on the principle that need comes first. When in doubt, it's the weak that must be considered, not the strong." The president of the Atlantic Southern had heard that Orren Boyle's most valuable friend in Washington had a friend in the Ministry of Supply of the People's State of Germany. But whether this had been Boyle's motive or whether it had been the principle of sacrifice, no one could tell and it made no difference: if Boyle had been a saint of the creed of selflessness, he would have had to do precisely what he had done. This silenced the president of the Atlantic Southern; he dared not admit that he cared for his railroad more than for the people of Germany; he dared not argue against the principle of sacrifice.

The waters of the Mississippi had been rising all through the month of January, swollen by the storms, driven by the wind into a restless grinding of current against current and against every obstruction in their way. On a night of lashing sleet, in the first week of February, the Mississippi bridge of the Atlantic Southern collapsed under a passenger train. The engine and the first five sleepers went down with the cracking girders into the twisting black spirals of water eighty feet below. The rest of the train remained on the first three spans of the bridge, which held.

"You can't have your cake and let your neighbor eat it, too," said Francisco d'Anconia. The fury of denunciations which the holders of public voices unleashed against him was greater than their concern over the horror at the river.

It was whispered that the chief engineer of the Atlantic Southern, in despair over the company's failure to obtain the steel he needed to reinforce the bridge, had resigned six months ago, telling the company that the bridge was unsafe. He had written a letter to the largest newspaper in New York, warning the public about it; the letter had not been printed. It was whispered that the first three spans of the bridge had held because they had been reinforced with structural shapes of Rearden Metal; but five hundred tons of the Metal was all that the railroad had been able to obtain under the Fair Share Law.

As the sole result of official investigations, two bridges across the Mississippi, belonging to smaller railroads, were condemned. One of the railroads went out of business; the other closed a branch line, tore up its rail and laid a track to the Mississippi bridge of Taggart Transcontinental; so did the Atlantic Southern.

The great Taggart Bridge at Bedford, Illinois, had been built by Nathaniel Taggart. He had fought the government for years, because the courts had ruled, on the complaint of river shippers, that railroads were a destructive competition to shipping and thus a threat to the public welfare, and that railroad bridges across the Mississippi were to be forbidden as a material obstruction; the courts had ordered Nathaniel Taggart to tear down his bridge and to carry his passengers across the river by means of barges. He had won that battle by a majority of one voice on the Supreme Court. His bridge was now the only major link left to hold the continent together. His last descendant had made it her strictest rule that whatever else was neglected, the Taggart Bridge would always be maintained in flawless shape.

The steel shipped across the Atlantic by the Bureau of Global Relief had not reached the People's State of Germany. It had been seized by Ragnar Danneskjold—but nobody heard of it outside the Bureau, because the newspapers had long since stopped mentioning the activities of Ragnar Danneskjold.

It was not until the public began to notice the growing shortage, then the disappearance from the market of electric irons, toasters, washing machines and all electrical appliances, that people began to ask questions and to hear whispers. They heard that no ship loaded with d'Anconia copper was able to reach a port of the United States; it could not get past Ragnar Danneskjold.

In the foggy winter nights, on the waterfront, sailors whispered the story that Ragnar Danneskjold always seized the cargoes of relief vessels, but never touched the copper: he sank the d'Anconia ships with their loads; he let the crews escape in lifeboats, but the copper went to the bottom of the ocean. They whispered it as a dark legend beyond men's power to explain; nobody could find a reason why Danneskjold did not choose to take the copper.

In the second week of February, for the purpose of conserving copper wire and electric power, a directive forbade the running of elevators above the twenty-fifth floor. The upper floors of the buildings had to be vacated, and partitions of unpainted boards went up to cut off the stairways. By special permit, exceptions were granted—on the grounds of "essential need"—to a few of the larger business enterprises and the more fashionable hotels. The tops of the cities were cut down.

The inhabitants of New York had never had to be aware of the weather. Storms had been only a nuisance that slowed the traffic and made puddles in the doorways of brightly lighted shops. Stepping against the wind, dressed in raincoats, furs and evening slippers, people had felt that a storm was an intruder within the city. Now, facing the gusts of snow that came sweeping down the narrow streets, people felt in dim terror that they were the temporary intruders and that the wind had the right-of-way.

"It won't make any difference to us now, forget it, Hank, it doesn't matter," said Dagny when Rearden told her that he would not be able to deliver the rail; he had not been able to find a supplier of copper.

"Forget it, Hank." He did not answer her. He could not forget the first failure of Rearden Steel.

On the evening of February 15, a plate cracked on a rail joint and sent an engine off the track, half a mile from Winston, Colorado, on a division which was to have been relaid with the new rail. The station agent of Winston sighed and sent for a crew with a crane; it was only one of the minor accidents that were happening in his section every other day or so, he was getting used to it.

Rearden, that evening, his coat collar raised, his hat slanted low over his eyes, the snow drifts rising to his knees, was tramping through an abandoned open-pit coal mine, in a forsaken corner of Pennsylvania, supervising the loading of pirated coal upon the trucks which he had provided. Nobody owned the mine, nobody could afford the cost of working it. But a young man with a brusque voice and dark, angry eyes, who came from a starving settlement, had organized a gang of the unemployed and made a deal with Rearden to deliver the coal.

They mined it at night, they stored it in hidden culverts, they were paid in cash, with no questions asked or answered. Guilty of a fierce desire to remain alive, they and Rearden traded like savages, without rights, titles, contracts or protection, with nothing but mutual understanding and a ruthlessly absolute observance of one's given word. Rearden did not even know the name of the young leader. Watching him at the job of loading the trucks, Rearden thought that this boy, if born a generation earlier, would have become a great industrialist; now, he would probably end his brief life as a plain criminal in a few more years.

Dagny, that evening, was facing a meeting of the Taggart Board of Directors.

They sat about a polished table in a stately Board room which was inadequately heated. The men who, through the decades of their careers, had relied for their security upon keeping their faces blank, their words inconclusive and their clothes impeccable, were thrown off-key by the sweaters stretched over their stomachs, by the mufflers wound about their necks, by the sound of coughing that cut through the discussion too frequently, like the rattle of a machine gun.

She noted that Jim had lost the smoothness of his usual performance.

He sat with his head drawn into his shoulders, and his eyes kept darting too rapidly from face to face.

A man from Washington sat at the table among them. Nobody knew his exact job or title, but it was not necessary: they knew that he was the man from Washington. His name was Mr. Weatherby, he had graying temples, a long, narrow face and a mouth that looked as if he had to stretch his facial muscles in order to keep it closed; this gave a suggestion of primness to a face that displayed nothing else. The Directors did not know whether he was present as the guest, the adviser or the ruler of the Board; they preferred not to find out.

"It seems to me," said the chairman, "that the top problem for us to consider is the fact that the track of our main line appears to be in a deplorable, not to say critical, condition—" He paused, then added cautiously, "—while the only good rail we own is that of the John Galt—I mean, the Rio Norte—Line."

In the same cautious tone of waiting for someone else to pick up the intended purpose of his words, another man said, "If we consider our critical shortage of equipment, and if we consider that we are letting it wear out in the service of a branch line running at a loss—" He stopped and did not state what would occur if they considered it.

"In my opinion," said a thin, pallid man with a neat mustache, "the Rio Norte Line seems to have become a financial burden which the company might not be able to carry—that is, not unless certain readjustments are made, which—" He did not finish, but glanced at Mr.

Weatherby. Mr. Weatherby looked as if he had not noticed it.

"Jim," said the chairman, "I think you might explain the picture to Mr. Weatherby."

Taggart's voice still retained a practiced smoothness, but it was the smoothness of a piece of cloth stretched tight over a broken glass object, and the sharp edges showed through once in a while: "I think it is generally conceded that the main factor affecting every railroad in the country is the unusual rate of business failures. While we all realize, of course, that this is only temporary, still, for the moment, it has made the railroad situation approach a stage that may well be described as desperate. Specifically, the number of factories which have closed throughout the territory of the Taggart Transcontinental system is so large that it has wrecked our entire financial structure. Districts and divisions which had always brought us our steadiest revenues, are now showing an actual operating loss. A train schedule geared to a heavy volume of freight cannot be maintained for three shippers where there had once been seven. We cannot give them the same service—at least, not at . . . our present rates." He glanced at Mr. Weatherby, but Mr.

Weatherby did not seem to notice. "It seems to me," said Taggart, the sharp edges becoming sharper in his voice, "that the stand taken by our shippers is unfair. Most of them have been complaining about their competitors and have passed various local measures to eliminate competition in their particular fields. Now most of them are practically in sole possession of their markets, yet they refuse to realize that a railroad cannot give to one lone factory the freight rates which had been made possible by the production of a whole region. We are running our trains for them at a loss, yet they have taken a stand against any . . . raise in rates."

"Against any raise?" said Mr. Weatherby mildly, with a good imitation of astonishment. "That is not the stand they have taken."

"If certain rumors, which I refuse to credit, are true—" said the chairman, and stopped one syllable after the tone of panic had become obvious in his voice.

"Jim," said Mr. Weatherby pleasantly, "I think it would be best if we just didn't mention the subject of raising the rates."

"I wasn't suggesting an actual raise at this time," said Taggart hastily. "I merely referred to it to round out the picture."

"But, Jim," said an old man with a quavering voice, "I thought that your influence—I mean, your friendship—with Mr. Mouch would insure . . . "

He stopped, because the others were looking at him severely, in reproof for the breach of an unwritten law: one did not mention a failure of this kind, one did not discuss the mysterious ways of Jim's powerful friendships or why they had failed him.

"Fact is," said Mr. Weatherby easily, "that Mr. Mouch sent me here to discuss the demand of the railway unions for a raise in wages and the demand of the shippers for a cut in rates."

He said it in a tone of casual firmness; he knew that all these men had known it, that the demands had been discussed in the newspapers for months; he knew that the dread in these men's minds was not of the fact, but of his naming it-—as if the fact had not existed, but his words held the power to make it exist; he knew that they had waited to see whether he would exercise that power; he was letting them know that he would.

Their situation warranted an outcry of protest; there was none; nobody answered him. Then James Taggart said in that biting, nervous tone which is intended to convey anger, but merely confesses uncertainty, "I wouldn't exaggerate the importance of Buzzy Watts of the National Shippers Council. He's been making a lot of noise and giving a lot of expensive dinners in Washington, but I wouldn't advise taking it too seriously."

"Oh, I don't know," said Mr. Weatherby.

"Listen, Clem, I do know that Wesley refused to see him last week."

"That's true. Wesley is a pretty busy man."

"And I know that when Gene Lawson gave that big party ten days ago, practically everybody was there, but Buzzy Watts was not invited."

"That's so," said Mr. Weatherby peaceably.

"So I wouldn't bet on Mr. Buzzy Watts, Clem. And I wouldn't let it worry me."

"Wesley's an impartial man," said Mr. Weatherby. "A man devoted to public duty. It's the interests of the country as a whole that he's got to consider above everything else." Taggart sat up; of all the danger signs he knew, this line of talk was the worst. "Nobody can deny it, Jim, that Wesley feels a high regard for you as an enlightened businessman, a valuable adviser and one of his closest personal friends."

Taggart's eyes shot to him swiftly: this was still worse. "But nobody can say that Wesley would hesitate to sacrifice his personal feelings and friendships—where the welfare of the public is concerned."

Taggart's face remained blank; his terror came from things never allowed to reach expression in words or in facial muscles. The terror was his struggle against an unadmitted thought: he himself had been "the public" for so long and in so many different issues, that he knew what it would mean if that magic title, that sacred title no one dared to oppose, were transferred, along with its "welfare," to the person of Buzzy Watts.

But what he asked, and he asked it hastily, was, "You're not implying that I would place my personal interests above the public welfare, are you?"

"No, of course not," said Mr. Weatherby, with a look that was almost a smile. "Certainly not. Not you, Jim. Your public-spirited attitude—and understanding-—are too well known. That's why Wesley expects you to see every side of the picture."

"Yes, of course," said Taggart, trapped.

"Well, consider the unions' side of it. Maybe you can't afford to give them a raise, but how can they afford to exist when the cost of living has shot sky-high? They've got to eat, don't they? That comes first, railroad or no railroad." Mr. Weatherby's tone had a kind of placid righteousness, as if he were reciting a formula required to convey another meaning, clear to all of them; he was looking straight at Taggart, in special emphasis of the unstated. "There are almost a million members in the railway unions. With families, dependents and poor relatives—and who hasn't got poor relatives these days?—it amounts to about five million votes. Persons, I mean. Wesley has to bear that in mind. He has to think of their psychology. And then, consider the public. The rates you're charging were established at a time when everybody was making money. But the way things are now, the cost of transportation has become a burden nobody can afford. People arc screaming about it all over the country." He looked straight at Taggart; he merely looked, but his glance had the quality of a wink.

"There's an awful lot of them, Jim. They're not very happy at the moment about an awful lot of things. A government that would bring the railroad rates down would make a lot of folks grateful."

The silence that answered him was like a hole so deep that no sound could be heard of the things crashing down to its bottom. Taggart knew, as they all knew, to what disinterested motive Mr. Mouch would always be ready to sacrifice his personal friendships.

It was the silence and the fact that she did not want to say it, had come here resolved not to speak, but could not resist it, that made Dagny's voice sound so vibrantly harsh: "Got what you've been asking for, all these years, gentlemen?"

The swiftness with which their eyes moved to her was an involuntary answer to an unexpected sound, but the swiftness with which they moved away—to look down at the table, at the walls, anywhere but at her—was the conscious answer to the meaning of the sounds.

In the silence of the next moment, she felt their resentment like a starch thickening the air of the room, and she knew that it was not resentment against Mr. Weatherby, but against her. She could have borne it, if they had merely let her question go unanswered; but what made her feel a sickening tightness in her stomach, was their double fraud of pretending to ignore her and then answering in their own kind of manner.

The chairman said, not looking at her, his voice pointedly noncommittal, yet vaguely purposeful at the same time, "It would have been all right, everything would have worked out fine, if it weren't for the wrong people in positions of power, such as Buzzy Watts and Chick Morrison."

"Oh, I wouldn't worry about Chick Morrison," said the pallid man with the mustache. "He hasn't any top-level connections. Not really.

It's Tinky Holloway that's poison."

"I don't see the picture as hopeless," said a portly man who wore a green muffler. "Joe Dunphy and Bud Hazleton are very close to Wesley. If their influence prevails, we'll be all right. However, Kip Chalmers and Tinky Holloway are dangerous."

"I can take care of Kip Chalmers," said Taggart.

Mr. Weatherby was the only person in the room who did not mind looking at Dagny; but whenever his glance rested upon her, it registered nothing; she was the only person in the room whom he did not see.

"I am thinking," said Mr. Weatherby casually, looking at Taggart, "that you might do Wesley a favor."

"Wesley knows that he can always count on me."

"Well, my thought is that if you granted the unions' wage raises—we might drop the question of cutting the rates, for the time being."

"I can't do that!" It was almost a cry. "The National Alliance of Railroads has taken a unanimous stand against the raises and has committed every member to refuse."

"That's just what I mean," said Mr. Weatherby softly. "Wesley needs to drive a wedge into that Alliance stand. If a railroad like Taggart Transcontinental were to give in, the rest would be easy. You would help Wesley a great deal. He would appreciate it."

"But, good God, Clem!—I'd be open to court action for it, by the Alliance rules!"

Mr. Weatherby smiled. "What court? Let Wesley take care of that."

"But listen, Clem, you know—you know just as well as I do—that we can't afford it!"

Mr. Weatherby shrugged. "That's a problem for you to work out."

"How, for Christ's sake?"

"I don't know. That's your job, not ours. You wouldn't want the government to start telling you how to run your railroad, would you?"

"No, of course not! But—"

"Our job is only to see that the people get fair wages and decent transportation. It's up to you to deliver. But, of course, if you say that you can't do the job, why then—"

"I haven't said it!" Taggart cried hastily, "I haven't said it at all!"

"Good," said Mr. Weatherby pleasantly. "We know that you have the ability to find some way to do it."

He was looking at Taggart; Taggart was looking at Dagny.

"Well, it was just a thought," said Mr. Weatherby, leaning back in his chair in a manner of modest withdrawal. "Just a thought for you to mull over. I'm only a guest here. I don't want to interfere. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the situation of the . . . branch lines, I believe?"

"Yes," said the chairman and sighed. "Yes. Now if anyone has a constructive suggestion to offer—" He waited; no one answered. "I believe the picture is clear to all of us." He waited. "It seems to be established that we cannot continue to afford the operation of some of our branch lines . . . the Rio Norte Line in particular . . . and, therefore, some form of action seems to be indicated. . . ."

"I think," said the pallid man with the mustache, his voice unexpectedly confident, "that we should now hear from Miss Taggart." He leaned forward with a look of hopeful craftiness. As Dagny did not answer, but merely turned to him, he asked, "What do you have to say, Miss Taggart?"

"Nothing."

"I beg your pardon?"

"All I had to say was contained in the report which Jim has read to you." She spoke quietly, her voice clear and flat.

"But you did not make any recommendations."

"I have none to make."

"But, after all, as our Operating Vice-President, you have a vital interest in the policies of this railroad."

"I have no authority over the policies of this railroad."

"Oh, but we are anxious to consider your opinion."

"I have no opinions."

"Miss Taggart," he said, in the smoothly formal tone of an order, "you cannot fail to realize that our branch lines are running at a disastrous deficit—and that we expect you to make them pay."

"How?"

"I don't know. That is your job, not ours."

"I have stated in my report the reasons why that is now impossible.

If there are facts which I have overlooked, please name them."

"Oh, I wouldn't know. We expect you to find some way to make it possible. Our job is only to see that the stockholders get a fair profit.

It's up to you to deliver. You wouldn't want us to think that you're unable to do the job and—"

"I am unable to do it."

The man opened his mouth, but found nothing else to say; he looked at her in bewilderment, wondering why the formula had failed.

"Miss Taggart," asked the man with the green muffler, "did you imply in your report that the situation of the Rio Norte Line was critical?"

"I stated that it was hopeless."

"Then what action do you propose?"

"I propose- nothing."

"Aren't you evading a responsibility?"

"What is it that you think you're doing?" She spoke evenly, addressing them all. "Are you counting on my not saying that the responsibility-is yours, that it was your goddamn policies that brought us where we are? Well, I'm saying it."

"Miss Taggart, Miss Taggart," said the chairman in a tone of pleading reproach, "there shouldn't be any hard feelings among us. Does it matter now who was to blame? We don't want to quarrel over past mistakes. We must all pull together as a team to carry our railroad through this desperate emergency,"

A gray-haired man of patrician bearing, who had remained silent throughout the session, with a look of the quietly bitter knowledge that the entire performance was futile, glanced at Dagny in a way which would have been sympathy had he still felt a remnant of hope. He said, raising his voice just enough to betray a note of controlled indignation, "Mr. Chairman, if it is practical solutions that we are considering, I should like to suggest that we discuss the limitation placed upon the length and speed of our trains. Of any single practice, that is the most disastrous one. Its repeal would not solve all of our problems, but it would be an enormous relief. With the desperate shortage of motive power and the appalling shortage of fuel, it is criminal insanity to send an engine out on the road with sixty cars when it could pull a hundred and to take four days on a run which could be made in three. I suggest that we compute the number of shippers we have ruined and the districts we have destroyed through the failures, shortages and delays of transportation, and then we—"

"Don't think of it," Mr. Weatherby cut in snappily. "Don't try dreaming about any repeals. We wouldn't consider it. We wouldn't even consider listening to any talk on the subject."

"Mr. Chairman," the gray-haired man asked quietly, "shall I continue?"

The chairman spread out his hands, with a smooth smile, indicating helplessness. "It would be impractical," he answered.

"I think we'd better confine the discussion to the status of the Rio Norte Line," snapped James Taggart.

There was a long silence.

The man with the green muffler turned to Dagny. "Miss Taggart," he asked sadly and cautiously, "would you say that if—this is just a hypothetical question—if the equipment now in use on the Rio Norte Line were made available, it would fill the needs of our transcontinental main-line traffic?"

"It would help."

"The rail of the Rio Norte Line," said the pallid man with the mustache, "is unmatched anywhere in the country and could not now be purchased at any price. We have three hundred miles of track, which means well over four hundred miles of rail of pure Rearden Metal in that Line. Would you say, Miss Taggart, that we cannot afford to waste that superlative rail on a branch that carries no major traffic any longer?"

"That is for you to judge."

"Let me put it this way: would it be of value if that rail were made available for our main-line track, which is in such urgent need of repair?"

"It would help."

"Miss Taggart," asked the man with the quavering voice, "would you say that there are any shippers of consequence left on the Rio Norte Line?"

"There's Ted Nielsen of Nielsen Motors. No one else."

"Would you say that the operating costs of the Rio Norte Line could be used to relieve the financial strain on the rest of the system?"

"It would help."

"Then, as our Operating Vice-President . . ." He stopped; she waited, looking at him; he said, "Well?"

"What was your question?"

"I meant to say . . . that is, well, as our Operating Vice-President, don't you have certain conclusions to draw?"

She stood up. She looked at the faces around the table. "Gentlemen," she said, "I do not know by what sort of self-fraud you expect to feel that if it's I who name the decision you intend to make, it will be I who'll bear the responsibility for it. Perhaps you believe that if my voice delivers the final blow, it will make me the murderer involved—since you know that this is the last act of a long-drawn-out murder. I cannot conceive what it is you think you can accomplish by a pretense of this kind, and I will not help you to stage it. The final blow will be delivered by you, as were all the others."

She turned to go. The chairman half-rose, asking helplessly, "But, Miss Taggart—"

"Please remain seated. Please continue the discussion—and take the vote in which I shall have no voice. I shall abstain from voting. Ill stand by, if you wish me to, but only as an employee. I will not pretend to be anything else."

She turned away once more, but it was the voice of the gray-haired man that stopped her. "Miss Taggart, this is not an official question, it is only my personal curiosity, but would you tell me your view of the future of the Taggart Transcontinental system?"

She answered, looking at him in understanding, her voice gentler, "I have stopped thinking of a future or of a railroad system. I intend to continue running trains so long as it is still possible to run them. I don't think that it will be much longer."

She walked away from the table, to the window, to stand aside and let them continue without her.

She looked at the city. Jim had obtained the permit which allowed them the use of electric power to the top of the Taggart Building.

From the height of the room, the city looked like a flattened remnant, with but a few rare, lonely streaks of lighted glass still rising through the darkness to the sky.

She did not listen to the voices of the men behind her. She did not know for how long the broken snatches of their struggle kept rolling past her—the sounds that nudged and prodded one another, trying to edge back and leave someone pushed forward—a struggle, not to assert one's own will, but to squeeze an assertion from some unwilling victim —a battle in which the decision was to be pronounced, not by the winner, but by the loser: "It seems to me . . . It is, I think . . . It must, in my opinion . . .

If we were to suppose . . . I am merely suggesting . . . I am not implying, but . . . If we consider both sides . . . It is, in my opinion, indubitable . . . It seems to me to be an unmistakable fact . . ."

She did not know whose voice it was, but she heard it when the voice pronounced: ". . . and, therefore, I move that the John Galt Line be closed."

Something, she thought, had made him call the Line by its right name.

You had to bear it, too, generations ago—it was just as hard for you, just as bad, but you did not let it stop you—was it really as bad as this? as ugly?—never mind, it's different forms, but it's only pain, and you were not stopped by pain, not by whatever kind it was that you had to bear—you were not stopped—you did not give in to it—you faced it and this is the kind I have to face—you fought and I will have to —you did it—I will try . . . She heard, in her own mind, the quiet intensity of the words of dedication—and it was some time before she realized that she was speaking to Nat Taggart.

The next voice she heard was Mr. Weatherby's: "Wait a minute, boys.

Do you happen to remember that you need to obtain permission before you can close a branch line?"

"Good God, Clem!" Taggart's cry was open panic. "Surely there's not going to be any trouble about—"

"I wouldn't be too sure of it. Don't forget that you're a public service and you're expected to provide transportation, whether you make money or not."

"But you know that it's impossible!"

"Well, that's fine for you, that solves your problem, if you close that Line—but what will it do to us? Leaving a whole state like Colorado practically without transportation—what sort of public sentiment will it arouse? Now, of course, if you gave Wesley something in return, to balance it, if you granted the unions' wage raises—"

"I can't! I gave my word to the National Alliance!"

"Your word? Well, suit yourself; We wouldn't want to force the Alliance. We much prefer to have things happen voluntarily. But these are difficult times and it's hard telling what's liable to happen. With everybody going broke and the tax receipts falling, we might—fact being that we hold well over fifty per cent of the Taggart bonds—we might be compelled to call for the payment of railroad bonds within six months."

"What?!" screamed Taggart.

"—or sooner."

"But you can't! Oh God, you can't! It was understood that the moratorium was for five years! It was a contract, an obligation! We were counting on it!"

"An obligation? Aren't you old-fashioned, Jim? There aren't any obligations, except the necessity of the moment. The original owners of those bonds were counting on their payments, too."

Dagny burst out laughing.

She could not stop herself, she could not resist it, she could not reject a moment's chance to avenge Ellis Wyatt, Andrew Stockton, Lawrence Hammond, all the others. She said, torn by laughter: "Thanks, Mr. Weatherby!"

Mr. Weatherby looked at her in astonishment. "Yes?" he asked coldly.

"I knew that we would have to pay for those bonds one way or another. We're paying."

"Miss Taggart," said the chairman severely, "don't you think that I told-you-so's are futile? To talk of what would have happened if we had acted differently is nothing but purely theoretical speculation. We cannot indulge in theory, we have to deal with the practical reality of the moment."

"Right," said Mr. Weatherby. "That's what you ought to be—practical. Now we offer you a trade. You do something for us and we'll do something for you. You give the unions their wage raises and we'll give you permission to close the Rio Norte Line."

"All right," said James Taggart, his voice choked.

Standing at the window, she heard them vote on their decision. She heard them declare that the John Galt Line would end in six weeks, on March 31.

It's only a matter of getting through the next few moments, she thought; take care of the next few moments, and then the next, a few at a time, and after a while it will be easier; you'll get over it, after a while.

The assignment she gave herself for the next few moments was to put on her coat and be first to leave the room.

Then there was the assignment of riding in an elevator down the great, silent length of the Taggart Building. Then there was the assignment of crossing the dark lobby.

Halfway through the lobby, she stopped. A man stood leaning against the wall, in a manner of purposeful waiting—and it was she who was his purpose, because he was looking straight at her. She did not recognize him at once, because she felt certain that the face she saw could not possibly be there in that lobby at this hour.

"Hi, Slug," he said softly.

She answered, groping for some great distance that had once been hers, "Hi, Frisco."

"Have they finally murdered John Galt?"

She struggled to place the moment into some orderly sequence of time. The question belonged to the present, but the solemn face came from those days on the hill by the Hudson when he would have understood all that the question meant to her.

"How did you know that they'd do it tonight?" she asked.

"It's been obvious for months that that would be the next step at their next meeting."

"Why did you come here?"

"To see how you'd take it."

"Want to laugh about it?"

"No, Dagny, I don't want to laugh about it."

She saw no hint of amusement in his face; she answered trustingly, "I don't know how I'm taking it."

"I do."

"I was expecting it, I knew they'd have to do it, so now it's only a matter of getting through"—tonight, she wanted to say, but said—"all the work and details."

He took her arm. "Let's go some place where we can have a drink together."

"Francisco, why don't you laugh at me? You've always laughed about that Line."

"I will—tomorrow, when I see you going on with all the work and details. Not tonight."

"Why not?"

"Come on. You're in no condition to talk about it."

"I—" She wanted to protest, but said, "No, I guess I'm not."

He led her out to the street, and she found herself walking silently in time with the steady rhythm of his steps, the grasp of his fingers on her arm unstressed and firm. He signaled a passing taxicab and held the door open for her. She obeyed him without questions; she felt relief, like a swimmer who stops struggling. The spectacle of a man acting with assurance, was a life belt thrown to her at a moment when she had forgotten the hope of its existence. The relief was not in the surrender of responsibility, but in the sight of a man able to assume it.

"Dagny," he said, looking at the city as it moved past their taxi window, "think of the first man who thought of making a steel girder. He knew what he saw, what he thought and what he wanted. He did not say, 'It seems to me,' and he did not take orders from those who say, 'In my opinion.'"

She chuckled, wondering at his accuracy: he had guessed the nature of the sickening sense that held her, the sense of a swamp which she had to escape.

"Look around you," he said. "A city is the frozen shape of human courage—the courage of those men who thought for the first time of every bolt, rivet and power generator that went to make it. The courage to say, not 'It seems to me,' but 'It is'—and to stake one's life on one's judgment. You're not alone. Those men exist. They have always existed. There was a time when human beings crouched in caves, at the mercy of any pestilence and any storm. Could men such as those on your Board of Directors have brought them out of the cave and up to this?" He pointed at the city.

"God, no!"

"Then there's your proof that another kind of men do exist."

"Yes," she said avidly. "Yes."

"Think of them and forget your Board of Directors."

"Francisco, where are they now—the other kind of men?"

"Now they're not wanted."

"I want them. Oh God, how I want them!"

"When you do, you'll find them."

He did not question her about the John Galt Line and she did not speak of it, until they sat at a table in a dimly lighted booth and she saw the stem of a glass between her fingers. She had barely noticed how they had come here. It was a quiet, costly place that looked like a secret retreat; she saw a small, lustrous table under her hand, the leather of a circular seat behind her shoulders, and a niche of dark blue mirror that cut them off from the sight of whatever enjoyment or pain others had come here to hide. Francisco was leaning against the table, watching her, and she felt as if she were leaning against the steady attentiveness of his eyes.

They did not speak of the Line, but she said suddenly, looking down at the liquid in her glass: "I'm thinking of the night when Nat Taggart was told that he had to abandon the bridge he was building. The bridge across the Mississippi. He had been desperately short of money—because people were afraid of the bridge, they called it an impractical venture. That morning, he was told that the river steamboat concerns had filed suit against him, demanding that his bridge be destroyed as a threat to the public welfare. There were three spans of the bridge built, advancing across the river. That same day, a local mob attacked the structure and set fire to the wooden scaffolding. His workers deserted him, some because they were scared, some because they were bribed by the steamboat people, and most of them because he had had no money to pay them for weeks. Throughout that day, he kept receiving word that men who had subscribed to buy the stock of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad were cancelling their subscriptions, one after another. Toward evening, a committee, representing two banks that were his last hope of support, came to see him. It was right there, on the construction site by the river, in the old railway coach where he lived, with the door open to the view of the blackened ruin, with the wooden remnants still smoking over the twisted steel. He had negotiated a loan from those banks, but the contract had not been signed. The committee told him that he would have to give up his bridge, because he was certain to lose the suit, and the bridge would be ordered torn down by the time he completed it. If he was willing to give it up, they said, and to ferry his passengers across the river on barges, as other railroads were doing, the contract would stand and he would get the money to continue his line west on the other shore; if not, then the loan was off. What was his answer?—they asked. He did not say a word, he picked up the contract, tore it across, handed it to them and walked out. He walked to the bridge, along the spans, down to the last girder. He knelt, he picked up the tools his men had left and he started to clear the charred wreckage away from the steel structure. His chief engineer saw him there, axe in hand, alone over the wide river, with the sun setting behind him in that west where his line was to go. He worked there all night. By morning, he had thought out a plan of what he would do to find the right men, the men of independent judgment—to find them, to convince them, to raise the money, to continue the bridge."

She spoke in a low, flat voice, looking down at the spot of light that shimmered in the liquid as her fingers turned the stem of her glass once in a while. She showed no emotion, but her voice had the intense monotone of a prayer: "Francisco . . . if he could live through that night, what right have I to complain? What does it matter, how I feel just now? He built that bridge, I have to hold it for him. I can't let it go the way of the bridge of the Atlantic Southern. I feel almost as if he'd know it, if I let that happen, he'd know it that night when he was alone over the river . . . no, that's nonsense, but here's what I feel: any man who knows what Nat Taggart felt that night, any man living now and capable of knowing it—it's him that I would betray if I let it happen . . . and I can't."

"Dagny, if Nat Taggart were living now, what would he do?"

She answered involuntarily, with a swift, bitter chuckle, "He wouldn't last a minute!"—then corrected herself: "No, he would. He would find a way to fight them."

"How?"

"I don't know."

She noticed some tense, cautious quality in the attentive way he watched her as he leaned forward and asked, "Dagny, the men of your Board of Directors are no match for Nat Taggart, are they? There's no form of contest in which they could beat him, there's nothing he'd have to fear from them, there's no mind, no will, no power in the bunch of them to equal one-thousandth of his."

"No, of course not."

"Then why is it that throughout men's history the Nat Taggarts, who make the world, have always won—and always lost it to the men of the Board?"

"I . . . don't know."

"How could men who're afraid to hold an unqualified opinion about the weather, fight Nat Taggart? How could they seize his achievement, if he chose to defend it? Dagny, he fought with every weapon he possessed, except the most important one. They could not have won, if we —he and the rest of us—had not given the world away to them."

"Yes, You gave it away to them. Ellis Wyatt did. Ken Danagger did, I won't."

He smiled. "Who built the John Galt Line for them?"

He saw only the faintest contraction of her mouth, but he knew that the question was like a blow across an open wound. Yet she answered quietly, "I did."

"For this kind of end?"

"For the men who did not hold out, would not fight and gave up."

"Don't you see that no other end was possible?"

"No."

"How much injustice are you willing to take?"

"As much as I'm able to fight."

"What will you do now? Tomorrow?"

She said calmly, looking straight at him with the faintly proud look of stressing her calm, "Start to tear it up."

"What?"

"The John Galt Line. Start to tear it up as good as with my own hands—with my own mind, by my own instructions. Get it ready to be closed, then tear it up and use its pieces to reinforce the transcontinental track. There's a lot of work to do. It will keep me busy." The calm cracked a little, in the faintest change of her voice: "You know, I'm looking forward to it. I'm glad that I'll have to do it myself.

That's why Nat Taggart worked all that night—just to keep going. It's not so bad as long as there's something one can do. And I'll know, at least, that I'm saving the main line."

"Dagny," he asked very quietly—and she wondered what made her feel that he looked as if his personal fate hung on her answer, "what if it were the main line that you had to dismember?"

She answered irresistibly, "Then I'd let the last engine run over me!"—but added, "No. That's just self-pity. I wouldn't."

He said gently, "I know you wouldn't. But you'd wish you could."

"Yes."

He smiled, not looking at her; it was a mocking smile, but it was a smile of pain and the mockery was directed at himself. She wondered what made her certain of it; but she knew his face so well that she would always know what he felt, even though she could not guess his reasons any longer. She knew his face as well, she thought, as she knew every line of his body, as she could still see it, as she was suddenly aware of it under his clothes, a few feet away, in the crowding intimacy of the booth. He turned to look at her and some sudden change in his eyes made her certain that he knew what she was thinking. He looked away and picked up his glass.

"Well—" he said, "to Nat Taggart."

"And to Sebastian d'Anconia?" she asked—then regretted it, because it had sounded like mockery, which she had not intended.

But she saw a look of odd, bright clarity in his eyes and he answered firmly, with the faintly proud smile of stressing his firmness, "Yes—and to Sebastian d'Anconia,"

Her hand trembled a little and she spilled a few drops on the square of paper lace that lay on the dark, shining plastic of the table. She watched him empty his glass in a single gesture; the brusque, brief movement of his hand made it look like the gesture of some solemn pledge.

She thought suddenly that this was the first time in twelve years that he had come to her of his own choice.

He had acted as if he were confidently in control, as if his confidence were a transfusion to let her recapture hers, he had given her no time to wonder that they should be here together. Now she felt, unaccountably, that the reins he had held were gone. It was only the silence of a few blank moments and the motionless outline of his forehead, cheekbone and mouth, as he sat with his face turned away from her—but she felt as if it were he who was now struggling for something he had to recapture.

She wondered what had been his purpose tonight—and noticed that he had, perhaps, accomplished it: he had carried her over the worst moment, he had given her an invaluable defense against despair—the knowledge that a living intelligence had heard her and understood. But why had he wanted to do it? Why had he cared about her hour of despair—after the years of agony he had given her? Why had it mattered to him how she would take the death of the John Galt Line? She noticed that this was the question she had not asked him in the lobby of the Taggart Building.

This was the bond between them, she thought: that she would never be astonished if he came when she needed him most, and that he would always know when to come. This was the danger: that she would trust him even while knowing that it could be nothing but some new kind of trap, even while remembering that he would always betray those who trusted him.

He sat, leaning forward with his arms crossed on the table, looking straight ahead. He said suddenly, not turning to her: "1 am thinking of the fifteen years that Sebastian d'Anconia had to wait for the woman he loved. He did not know whether he would ever find her again, whether she would survive . . . whether she would wait for him. But he knew that she could not live through his battle and that he could not call her to him until it was won. So he waited, holding his love in the place of the hope which he had no right to hold.

But when he carried her across the threshold of his house, as the first Senora d'Anconia of a new world, he knew that the battle was won, that they were free, that nothing threatened her and nothing would ever hurt her again."

In the days of their passionate happiness, he had never given her a hint that he would come to think of her as Senora d'Anconia. For one moment, she wondered whether she had known what she had meant to him. But the moment ended in an invisible shudder: she would not believe that the past twelve years could allow the things she was hearing to be possible. This was the new trap, she thought.

"Francisco," she asked, her voice hard, "what have you done to Hank Rearden?"

He looked startled that she should think of that name at that moment "Why?" he asked.

"He told me once that you were the only man he'd ever liked. But last time I saw him, he said that he would kill you on sight."

"He did not tell you why?"

"No."

“He told you nothing about it?"

"No." She saw him smiling strangely, a smile of sadness, gratitude and longing. "I warned him that you would hurt him—when he told me that you were the only man he liked."

His words came like a sudden explosion: "He was the only man—with one exception—to whom I could have given my life!"

"Who is the exception?"

"The man to whom I have."

"What do you mean?"

He shook his head, as if he had said more than he intended, and did not answer.

"What did you do to Rearden?"

"I'll tell you some time. Not now."

"Is that what you always do to those who . . . mean a great deal to you?"

He looked at her with a smile that had the luminous sincerity of innocence and pain. "You know," he said gently, "I could say that that is what they always do to me." He added, "But I won't. The actions—and the knowledge—were mine."

He stood up. "Shall we go? I'll take you home."

She rose and he held her coat for her; it was a wide, loose garment, and his hands guided it to enfold her body. She felt his arm remain about her shoulders a moment longer than he intended her to notice.

She glanced back at him. But he was standing oddly still, staring intently down at the table. In rising, they had brushed aside the mats of paper lace and she saw an inscription cut into the plastic of the table top. Attempts had been made to erase it, but the inscription remained, as the graven voice of some unknown drunk's despair: "Who is John Galt?"

With a brusque movement of anger, she flicked the mat back to cover the words. He chuckled.

"I can answer it," he said. "I can tell you who is John Galt."

"Really? Everybody seems to know him, but they never tell the same story twice."

"They're all true, though—all the stories you've heard about him."

"Well, what's yours? Who is he?"

"John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his fire—until the day when men withdraw their vultures."

The band of crossties swept in wide curves around granite corners, clinging to the mountainsides of Colorado. Dagny walked down the ties, keeping her hands in her coat pockets, and her eyes on the meaningless distance ahead; only the familiar movement of straining her steps to the spacing of the ties gave her the physical sense of an action pertaining to a railroad.

A gray cotton, which was neither quite fog nor clouds, hung in sloppy wads between sky and mountains, making the sky look like an old mattress spilling its stuffing down the sides of the peaks. A crusted snow covered the ground, belonging neither to winter nor to spring. A net of moisture hung in the air, and she felt an icy pin-prick on her face once in a while, which was neither a raindrop nor a snowflake.

The weather seemed afraid to take a stand and clung noncommittally to some sort of road's middle; Board of Directors' weather, she thought.

The light seemed drained and she could not tell whether this was the afternoon or the evening of March 31. But she was very certain that it was March 31; that was a certainty not to be escaped.

She had come to Colorado with Hank Rearden, to buy whatever machinery could still be found in the closed factories. It had been like a hurried search through the sinking hulk of a great ship before it was to vanish out of reach. They could have given the task to employees, but they had come, both prompted by the same unconfessed motive: they could not resist the desire to attend the run of the last train, as one cannot resist the desire to give a last salute by attending a funeral, even while knowing that it is only an act of self-torture.

They had been buying machinery from doubtful owners in sales of dubious legality, since nobody could tell who had the right to dispose of the great, dead properties, and nobody would come to challenge the transactions. They had bought everything that could be moved from the gutted plant of Nielsen Motors. Ted Nielsen had quit and vanished, a week after the announcement that the Line was to be closed.

She had felt like a scavenger, but the activity of the hunt had made her able to bear these past few days. When she had found that three empty hours remained before the departure of the last train, she had gone to walk through the countryside, to escape the stillness of the town. She had walked at random through twisting mountain trails, alone among rocks and snow, trying to substitute motion for thought, knowing that she had to get through this day without thinking of the summer when she had ridden the engine of the first train.

But she found herself walking back along the roadbed of the John Galt Line—and she knew that she had intended it, that she had gone out for that purpose.

It was a spur track which had already been dismembered. There were no signal lights, no switches, no telephone wires, nothing but a long band of wooden strips left on the ground—a chain of ties without rail, like the remnant of a spine—and, as its lonely guardian, at an abandoned grade crossing, a pole with slanted arms saying: "Stop.

Look. Listen."

An early darkness mixed with fog was slipping down to fill the valleys, when she came upon the factory. There was an inscription high on the lustrous tile of its front wall: "Roger Marsh. Electrical Appliances." The man who had wanted to chain himself to his desk in order not to leave this, she thought. The building stood intact, like a corpse in that instant when its eyes have just closed and one still waits to see them open again. She felt that the lights would flare up at any moment behind the great sheets of windows, under the long, flat roofs. Then she saw one broken pane, pierced by a stone for some young moron's enjoyment—and she saw the tall, dry stem of a single weed rising from the steps of the main entrance. Hit by a sudden, blinding hatred, in rebellion against the weed's impertinence, knowing of what enemy this was the scout, she ran forward, she fell on her knees and jerked the weed up by its roots. Then, kneeling on the steps of a closed factory, looking at the vast silence of mountains, brush and dusk, she thought: What do you think you're doing?

It was almost dark when she reached the end of the ties that led her back to the town of Marshville. Marshville had been the end of the Line for months past; service to Wyatt Junction had been discontinued long ago; Dr. Ferris' Reclamation Project had been abandoned this winter.

The street lights were on, and they hung in mid-air at the intersections, in a long, diminishing line of yellow globes over the empty streets of Marshville. All the better homes were closed—the neat, sturdy houses of modest cost, well built and well kept; there were faded "For Sale" signs on their lawns. But she saw lights in the windows of the cheap, garish structures that had acquired, within a few years, the slovenly dilapidation of slum hovels; the homes of people who had not moved, the people who never looked beyond the span of one week. She saw a large new television set in the lighted room of a house with a sagging roof and cracking walls. She wondered how long they expected the electric power companies of Colorado to remain in existence. Then she shook her head: those people had never known that power companies existed.

The main street of Marshville was lined by the black windows of shops out of business. All the luxury stores are gone—she thought, looking at their signs; and then she shuddered, realizing what things she now called luxury, realizing to what extent and in what manner those things, once available to the poorest, had been luxuries: Dry Cleaning—Electrical Appliances—Gas Station—Drug Store—Five and Ten. The only ones left open were grocery stores and saloons.

The platform of the railroad station was crowded. The glaring arc lights seemed to pick it out of the mountains, to isolate and focus it, like a small stage on which every movement was naked to the sight of the unseen tiers rising in the vast, encircling night. People were carting luggage, bundling their children, haggling at ticket windows, the stifled panic of their manner suggesting that what they really wanted to do was to fall down on the ground and scream with terror. Their terror had the evasive quality of guilt: it was not the fear that comes from understanding, but from the refusal to understand.

The last train stood at the platform, its windows a long, lone streak of light. The steam of the locomotive, gasping tensely through the wheels, did not have its usual joyous sound of energy released for a sprint; it had the sound of a panting breath that one dreads to hear and dreads more to stop hearing. Far at the end of the lighted windows, she saw the small red dot of a lantern attached to her private car. Beyond the lantern, there was nothing but a black void.

The train was loaded to capacity, and the shrill notes of hysteria in the confusion of voices were the pleas for space in vestibules and aisles. Some people were not leaving, but stood in vapid curiosity, watching the show; they had come, as if knowing that this was the last event they would ever witness in their community and, perhaps, in their lives.

She walked hastily through the crowd, trying not to look at anyone.

Some knew who she was, most of them did not. She saw an old woman with a ragged shawl on her shoulders and the graph of a lifetime's struggle on the cracked skin of her face; the woman's glance was a hopeless appeal for help. An unshaved young man with gold-rimmed glasses stood on a crate under an arc light, yelling to the faces shifting past him, "What do they mean, no business! Look at that train! It's full of passengers! There's plenty of business! It's just that there's no profits for them—that's why they're letting you perish, those greedy parasites!" A disheveled woman rushed up to Dagny, waving two tickets and screaming something about the wrong date. Dagny found herself pushing people out of the way, fighting to reach the end of the train—but an emaciated man, with the staring eyes of years of malicious futility, rushed at her, shouting, "It's all right for you, you've got a good overcoat and a private car, but you won't give us any trains, you and all the selfish—"

He stopped abruptly, looking at someone behind her. She felt a hand grasping her elbow: it was Hank Rearden. He held her arm and led her toward her car; seeing the look on his face, she understood why people got out of their way. At the end of the platform, a pallid, plumpish man stood saying to a crying woman, "That's how it's always been in this world. There will be no chance for the poor, until the rich are destroyed." High above the town, hanging in black space like an uncooled planet, the flame of Wyatt's Torch was twisting in the wind.

Rearden went inside her car, but she remained on the steps of the vestibule, delaying the finality of turning away. She heard the "All aboard!" She looked at the people who remained on the platform as one looks at those who watch the departure of the last lifeboat.

The conductor stood below, at the foot of the steps, with his lantern in one hand and his watch in the other. He glanced at the watch, then glanced up at her face. She answered by the silent affirmation of closing her eyes and inclining her head. She saw his lantern circling through the air, as she turned away—and the first jolt of the wheels, on the rails of Rearden Metal, was made easier for her by the sight of Rearden, as she pulled the door open and went into her car.

When James Taggart telephoned Lillian Rearden from New York and said, "Why, no—no special reason, just wondered how you were and whether you ever came to the city—haven't seen you for ages and just thought we might have lunch together next time you're in New York"—she knew that he had some very special reason in mind.

When she answered lazily, "Oh, let me see—what day is this? April second?—let me look at my calendar—why, it just so happens that I have some shopping to do in New York tomorrow, so I'll be delighted to let you save me my lunch money"—he knew that she had no shopping to do and that the luncheon would be the only purpose of her trip to the city.

They met in a distinguished, high-priced restaurant, much too distinguished and high-priced ever to be mentioned in the gossip columns; not the kind of place which James Taggart, always eager for personal publicity, was in the habit of patronizing; he did not want them to be seen together, she concluded.

The half-hint of half-secret amusement remained on her face while she listened to him talking about their friends, the theater and the weather, carefully building for himself the protection of the unimportant. She sat gracefully not quite straight, as if she were leaning back, enjoying the futility of his performance and the fact that he had to stage it for her benefit. She waited with patient curiosity to discover his purpose.

"I do think that you deserve a pat on the back or a medal or something, Jim," she said, "for being remarkably cheerful in spite of all the messy trouble you're having. Didn't you just close the best branch of your railroad?"

"Oh, it's only a slight financial setback, nothing more. One has to expect retrenchments at a time like this. Considering the general state of the country, we're doing quite well. Better than the rest of them." He added, shrugging, "Besides, it's a matter of opinion whether the Rio Norte Line was our best branch. It is only my sister who thought so.

It was her pet project."

She caught the tone of pleasure blurring the drawl of his syllables.

She smiled and said, "I see."

Looking up at her from under his lowered forehead, as if stressing that he expected her to understand, Taggart asked, "How is he taking it?"

"Who?" She understood quite well.

"Your husband.”

"Taking what?"

"The closing of that Line."

She smiled gaily. "Your guess is as good as mine, Jim—and mine is very good indeed,"

"What do you mean?"

"You know how he would take it—just as you know how your sister is taking it. So your cloud has a double silver lining, hasn't it?"

"What has he been saying in the last few days?"

"He's been away in Colorado for over a week, so I—" She stopped; she had started answering lightly, but she noticed that Taggart's question had been too specific while his tone had been too casual, and she realized that he had struck the first note leading toward the purpose of the luncheon; she paused for the briefest instant, then finished, still more lightly, "so I wouldn't know. But he's coming back any day now."

"Would you say that his attitude is still what one might call recalcitrant?"

"Why, Jim, that would be an understatement!"

"It was to be hoped that events had, perhaps, taught him the wisdom of a mellower approach."

It amused her to keep him in doubt about her understanding. "Oh yes," she said innocently, "it would be wonderful if anything could ever make him change."

"He is making things exceedingly hard for himself."

"He always has."

"But events have a way of beating us all into a more . . . pliable frame of mind, sooner or later."

"I've heard many characteristics ascribed to him, but 'pliable' has never been one of them."

"Well, things change and people change with them. After all, it is a law of nature that animals must adapt themselves to their background.

And I might add that adaptability is the one characteristic most stringently required at present by laws other than those of nature. We're in for a very difficult time, and I would hate to see you suffer the consequences of his intransigent attitude. I would hate—as your friend—to see you in the kind of danger he's headed for, unless he learns to cooperate."

"How sweet of you, Jim," she said sweetly.

He was doling his sentences out with cautious slowness, balancing himself between word and intonation to hit the right degree of semi clarity. He wanted her to understand, but he did not want her to understand fully, explicitly, down to the root—since the essence of that modern language, which he had learned to speak expertly, was never to let oneself or others understand anything down to the root.

He had not needed many words to understand Mr. Weatherby. On his last trip to Washington, he had pleaded with Mr. Weatherby that a cut in the rates of the railroads would be a deathblow; the wage raises had been granted, but the demands for the cut in rates were still heard in the press—and Taggart had known what it meant, if Mr. Mouch still permitted them to be heard; he had known that the knife was still poised at his throat. Mr. Weatherby had not answered his pleas, but had said, in a tone of idly irrelevant speculation, "Wesley has so many tough problems. If he is to give everybody a breathing spell, financially speaking, he's got to put into operation a certain emergency program of which you have some inkling. But you know what hell the unprogressive elements of the country would raise about it. A man like Rearden, for instance. We don't want any more stunts of the sort he's liable to pull. Wesley would give a lot for somebody who could keep Rearden in line. But I guess that's something nobody can deliver.

Though I may be wrong. You may know better, Jim, since Rearden is a sort of friend of yours, who comes to your parties and all that."

Looking at Lillian across the table, Taggart said, "Friendship, I find, is the most valuable thing in life—and I would be amiss if I didn't give you proof of mine."

"But I've never doubted it."

He lowered his voice to the tone of an ominous warning: "I think I should tell you, as a favor to a friend, although it's confidential, that your husband's attitude is being discussed in high places—very high places. I'm sure you know what I mean."

This was why he hated Lillian Rearden, thought Taggart: she knew the game, but she played it with unexpected variations of her own. It was against all rules to look at him suddenly, to laugh in his face, and —after all those remarks showing that she understood too little—to say bluntly, showing that she understood too much, "Why, darling, of course I know what you mean. You mean that the purpose of this very excellent luncheon was not a favor you wanted to do me, but a favor you wanted to get from me. You mean that it's you who are in danger and could use that favor to great advantage for a trade in high places.

And you mean that you are reminding me of my promise to deliver the goods."

"The sort of performance he put on at his trial was hardly what I'd call delivering the goods," he said angrily. "It wasn't what you had led me to expect."

"Oh my, no, it wasn't," she said placidly. "It certainly wasn't. But, darling, did you expect me not to know that after that performance of his he wouldn't be very popular in high places? Did you really think you had to tell me that as a confidential favor?"

"But it's true. I heard him discussed, so I thought I'd tell you."

"I'm sure it's true. I know that they would be discussing him. I know also that if there were anything they could do to him, they would have done it right after his trial. My, would they have been glad to do it! So I know that he's the only one among you who is in no danger whatever, at the moment. I know that it's they who are afraid of him. Do you see how well I understand what you mean, darling?"

"Well, if you think you do, I must say that for my part I don't understand you at all. I don't know what it is you're doing."

"Why, I'm just setting things straight—so that you'll know that I know how much you need me. And now that it's straight, I'll tell you the truth in my turn: I didn't double-cross you, I merely failed. His performance at the trial—I didn't expect it any more than you did.

Less. I had good reason not to expect it. But something went wrong.

I don't know what it was. I am trying to find out. When I do, I will keep my promise. Then you'll be free to take full credit for it and to tell your friends in high places that it's you who've disarmed him."

"Lillian," he said nervously, "I meant it when I said that I was anxious to give you proof of my friendship—so if there's anything-1 can do for—"

She laughed. "There isn't. I know you meant it. But there's nothing you can do for me. No favor of any kind. No trade. I'm a truly noncommercial person, I want nothing in return. Tough luck, Jim. You'll just have to remain at my mercy."

"But then why should you want to do it at all? What are you getting out of it?"

She leaned back, smiling. "This lunch. Just seeing you here. Just knowing that you had to come to me."

An angry spark flashed in Taggart's veiled eyes, then his eyelids narrowed slowly and he, too, leaned back in his chair, his face relaxing to a faint look of mockery and satisfaction. Even from within that unstated, unnamed, undefined muck which represented his code of values, he was able to realize which one of them was the more dependent on the other and the more contemptible.

When they parted at the door of the restaurant, she went to Rearden's suite at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, where she stayed occasionally in his absence. She paced the room for about half an hour, in a leisurely manner of reflection. Then she picked up the telephone, with a smoothly casual gesture, but with the purposeful air of a decision reached. She called Rearden's office at the mills and asked Miss Ives when she expected him to return.

"Mr. Rearden will be in New York tomorrow, arriving on the Comet, Mrs. Rearden," said Miss Ives' clear, courteous voice.

"Tomorrow? That's wonderful. Miss Ives, would you do me a favor?

Would you call Gertrude at the house and tell her not to expect me for dinner? I'm staying in New York overnight."

She hung up, glanced at her watch and called the florist of the Wayne-Falkland. "This is Mrs. Henry Rearden," she said. "I should like to have two dozen roses delivered to Mr. Rearden's drawing room aboard the Comet. . . . Yes, today, this afternoon, when the Comet reaches Chicago. . . . No, without any card—just the flowers. . . .

Thank you ever so much."

She telephoned James Taggart. "Jim, will you send me a pass to your passenger platforms? I want to meet my husband at the station tomorrow."

She hesitated between Balph Eubank and Bertram Scudder, chose Balph Eubank, telephoned him and made a date for this evening's dinner and a musical show. Then she went to take a bath1, and lay relaxing in a tub of warm water, reading a magazine devoted to problems of political economy.

It was late afternoon when the florist telephoned her. "Our Chicago office sent word that they were unable to deliver the flowers, Mrs.

Rearden," he said, "because Mr. Rearden is not aboard the Comet."

"Are you sure?" she asked.

"Quite sure, Mrs. Rearden. Our man found at the station in Chicago that there was no compartment on the train reserved in Mr. Rearden's name. We checked with the New York office of Taggart Transcontinental, just to make certain, and were told that Mr. Rearden's name is not on the passenger list of the Comet."

"I see. . . . Then cancel the order, please. . . . Thank you."

She sat by the telephone for a moment, frowning, then called Miss Ives. "Please forgive me for being slightly scatterbrained, Miss Ives, but I was rushed and did not write it down, and now I'm not quite certain of what you said. Did you say that Mr. Rearden was coming back tomorrow? On the Comet?"

"Yes, Mrs. Rearden."

"You have not heard of any delay or change in his plans?"

"Why, no. In fact, I spoke to Mr. Rearden about an hour ago. He telephoned from the station in Chicago, and he mentioned that he had to hurry back aboard, as the Comet was about to leave."

"I see. Thank you."

She leaped to her feet as soon as the click of the instrument restored her to privacy. She started pacing the room, her steps now unrhythmically tense. Then she stopped, struck by a sudden thought.

There was only one reason why a man would make a train reservation under an assumed name: if he was not traveling alone.

Her facial muscles went flowing slowly into a smile of satisfaction: this was an opportunity she had not expected.

Standing on the Terminal platform, at a point halfway down the length of the train, Lillian Rearden watched the passengers descending from the Comet. Her mouth held the hint of a smile; there was a spark of animation in her lifeless eyes; she glanced from one face to another, jerking her head with the awkward eagerness of a schoolgirl.

She was anticipating the look on Rearden's face when, with his mistress beside him, he would see her standing there.

Her glance darted hopefully to every flashy young female stepping off the train. It was hard to watch: within an instant after the first few figures, the train had seemed to burst at the seams, flooding the platform with a solid current that swept in one direction, as if pulled by a vacuum; she could barely distinguish separate persons. The lights were more glare than illumination, picking this one strip out of a dusty, oily darkness. She needed an effort to stand still against the invisible pressure of motion.

Her first sight of Rearden in the crowd came as a shock: she had not seen him step out of a car, but there he was, walking in her direction from somewhere far down the length of the train. He was alone. He was walking with his usual purposeful speed, his hands in the pockets of his trenchcoat. There was no woman beside him, no companion of any kind, except a porter hurrying along with a bag she recognized as his.

In a fury of incredulous disappointment, she looked frantically for any single feminine figure he could, have left behind. She felt certain that she would recognize his choice. She saw none that could be possible. And then she saw that the last car of the train was a private car, and that the figure standing at its door, talking to some station official—a figure wearing, not minks and veils, but a rough sports coat that stressed the incomparable grace of a slender body in the confident posture of this station's owner and center—was Dagny Taggart. Then Lillian Rearden understood.

"Lillian! What's the matter?"

She heard Rearden's voice, she felt his hand grasping her arm, she saw him looking at her as one looks at the object of a sudden emergency. He was looking at a blank face and an unfocused glance of terror.

"What happened? What are you doing here?"

"I . . . Hello, Henry . . . I just came to meet you . . . No special reason . . . I just wanted to meet you." The terror was gone from her face, but she spoke in a strange, flat voice. "I wanted to see you, it was an impulse, a sudden impulse and I couldn't resist it, because—"

"But you look . . . looked ill."

"No . . . No, maybe I felt faint, it's stuffy here. . . . I couldn't resist coming, because it made me think of the days when you would have been glad to see me . . . it was a moment's illusion to recreate for myself. . . ." The words sounded like a memorized lesson.

She knew that she had to speak, while her mind was fighting to grasp the full meaning of her discovery. The words were part of the plan she had intended to use, if she had met him after he had found the roses in his compartment.

He did not answer, he stood watching her, frowning.

"I missed you, Henry, I know what I am confessing. But I don't expect it to mean anything to you any longer." The words did not fit the tight face, the lips that moved with effort, the eyes that kept glancing away from him down the length of the platform. "I wanted . . . I merely wanted to surprise you." A look of shrewdness and purpose was returning to her face.

He took her arm, but she drew back, a little too sharply.

"Aren't you going to say a word to me, Henry?"

"What do you wish me to say?”

"Do you hate it as much as that—having your wife come to meet you at the station?" She glanced down the platform: Dagny Taggart was walking toward them; he did not see her.

"Let's go," he said.

She would not move. "Do you?" she asked.

"What?"

"Do you hate it?"

"No, I don't hate it. I merely don't understand it."

"Tell me about your trip. I'm sure you've had a very enjoyable trip."

"Come on. We can talk at home."

"When do I ever have a chance to talk to you at home?" She was drawling her words impassively, as if she were stretching them to fill time, for some reason which he could not imagine. "I had hoped to catch a few moments of your attention—like this—between trains and business appointments and all those important matters that hold you day and night, all those great achievements of yours, such as . . .

Hello, Miss Taggart!" she said sharply, her voice loud and bright.

Rearden whirled around. Dagny was walking past them, but she stopped.

"How do you do," she said to Lillian, bowing, her face expressionless.

"I am so sorry, Miss Taggart," said Lillian, smiling, "you must forgive me if I don't know the appropriate formula of condolences for the occasion." She noted that Dagny and Rearden had not greeted each other. "You're returning from what was, in effect, the funeral of your child by my husband, aren't you?"

Dagny's mouth showed a faint line of astonishment and of contempt.

She inclined her head, by way of leave-taking, and walked on.

Lillian glanced sharply at Rearden's face, as if in deliberate emphasis. He looked at her indifferently, puzzled.

She said nothing. She followed him without a word when he turned to go. She remained silent in the taxicab, her face half-turned away from him, while they rode to the Wayne-Falkland Hotel. He felt certain, as he looked at the tautly twisted set of her mouth, that some uncustomary violence was raging within her. He had never known her to experience a strong emotion of any kind.

She whirled to face him, the moment they were alone in his room.

"So that's who it is?" she asked.

He had not expected it. He looked at her, not quite believing that he had understood it correctly.

"It's Dagny Taggart who's your mistress, isn't she?"

He did not answer.

"I happen to know that you had no compartment on that train. So I know where you've slept for the last four nights. Do you want to admit it or do you want me to send detectives to question her train crews and her house servants? Is it Dagny Taggart?"

"Yes," he answered calmly.

Her mouth twisted into an ugly chuckle; she was staring past him.

"I should have known it. I should have guessed. That's why it didn't work!"

He asked, in blank bewilderment, "What didn't work?"

She stepped back, as if to remind herself of his presence. "Had you—when she was in our house, at the party—had you, then . . . ?"

"No. Since."

"The great businesswoman," she said, "above reproach and feminine weaknesses. The great mind detached from any concern with the body . . ." She chuckled, "The bracelet . . ." she said, with the still look that made it sound as if the words were dropped accidentally out of the torrent in her mind. "That's what she meant to you. That's the weapon she gave you."

"If you really understand what you're saying—yes."

"Do you think I'll let you get away with it?"

"Get away . . . ?" He was looking at her incredulously, in cold, astonished curiosity.

"That's why, at your trial—" She stopped.

"What about my trial?"

She was trembling. "You know, of course, that I won't allow this to continue."

"What does it have to do with my trial?"

"I won't permit you to have her. Not her. Anyone but her."

He let a moment pass, then asked evenly, "Why?"

"I won't permit it! You'll give it up!" He was looking at her without expression, but the steadiness of his eyes hit her as his most dangerous answer. "You'll give it up, you'll leave her, you'll never see her again!"

"Lillian, if you wish to discuss it, there's one thing you'd better understand; nothing on earth will make me give it up."

"But I demand it!"

"I told you that you could demand anything but that."

He saw the look of a peculiar panic growing in her eyes: it was not the look of understanding, but of a ferocious refusal to understand—as if she wanted to turn the violence of her emotion into a fog screen, as if she hoped, not that it would blind her to reality, but that her blindness would make reality cease to exist.

"But I have the right to demand it! I own your life! It's my property.

My property—by your own oath. You swore to serve my happiness, Not yours—mine! What have you done for me? You've given me nothing, you've sacrificed nothing, you've never been concerned with anything but yourself—your work, your mills, your talent, your mistress!

What about me? I hold first claim! I'm presenting it for collection!

You're the account I own!"

It was the look on his face that drove her up the rising steps of her voice, scream by scream, into terror. She was seeing, not anger or pain or guilt, but the one inviolate enemy: indifference.

"Have you thought of me?" she screamed, her voice breaking against his face. "Have you thought of what you're doing to me? You have no right to go on, if you know that you're putting me through hell every time you sleep with that woman! I can't stand it, I can't stand one moment of knowing it! Will you sacrifice me to your animal desire? Are you as vicious and selfish as that? Can you buy your pleasure at the price of my suffering? Can you have it, if this is what it does to me?"

Feeling nothing but the emptiness of wonder, he observed the thing which he had glimpsed briefly in the past and was now seeing in the full ugliness of its futility: the spectacle of pleas for pity delivered, in snarling hatred, as threats and as demands.

"Lillian," he said very quietly, "I would have it, even if it took your life."

She heard it. She heard more than he was ready to know and to hear in his own words. The shock, to him, was that she did not scream in answer, but that he saw her, instead, shrinking down into calm. "You have no right . . ." she said dully. It had the embarrassing helplessness of the words of a person who knows her own words to be meaningless.

"Whatever claim you may have on me," he said, "no human being can hold on another a claim demanding that he wipe himself out of existence."

"Does she mean as much as that to you?"

"Much more than that."

The look of thought was returning to her face, but in her face it had the quality of a look of cunning. She remained silent.

"Lillian, I'm glad that you know the truth. Now you can make a choice with full understanding. You may divorce me—or you may ask that we continue as we are. That is the only choice you have. It is all I can offer you. I think you know that I want you to divorce me. But I don't ask for sacrifices. I don't know what sort of comfort you can find in our marriage, but if you do, I won't ask you to give it up. I don't know why you should want to hold me now, I don't know what it is that I mean to you, I don't know what you're seeking, what form of happiness is yours or what you will obtain from a situation which I see as intolerable for both of us. By every standard of mine, you should have divorced me long ago. By every standard of mine, to maintain our marriage will be a vicious fraud. But my standards are not yours. I do not understand yours, I never have, but I will accept them. If this is the manner of your love for me, if bearing the name of my wife will give you some form of contentment, I won't take it away from you. It's I who've broken my word, so I will atone for it to the extent I can. You know, of course, that I could buy one of those modern judges and obtain a divorce any time I wished. I won't do it. I will keep my word, if you so desire, but this is the only form in which I can keep it. Now make your choice—but if you choose to hold me, you must never speak to me about her, you must never show her that you know, if you meet her in the future, you must never touch that part of my life."

She stood still, looking up at him, the posture of her body slouched and loose, as if its sloppiness were a form of defiance, as if she did not care to resume for his sake the discipline of a graceful bearing.

"Miss Dagny Taggart . . ." she said, and chuckled. "The superwoman whom common, average wives were not supposed to suspect.

The woman who cared for nothing but business and dealt with men as a man. The woman of great spirit who admired you platonically, just for your genius, your mills and your Metal!" She chuckled. "I should have known that she was just a bitch who wanted you in the same way as any bitch would want you—because you are fully as expert in bed as you are at a desk, if I am a judge of such matters. But she would appreciate that better than I, since she worships expertness of any kind and since she has probably been laid by every section hand on her railroad!"

She stopped, because she saw, for the first time in her life, by what sort of look one learns that a man is capable of killing. But he was not looking at her. She was not sure whether he was seeing her at all or hearing her voice.

He was hearing his own voice saying her words—saying them to Dagny in the sun-striped bedroom of Ellis Wyatt's house. He was seeing, in the nights behind him, Dagny's face in those moments when, his body leaving hers, she lay still with a look of radiance that was more than a smile, a look of youth, of early morning, of gratitude to the fact of one's own existence. And he was seeing Lillian's face, as he had seen it in bed beside him, a lifeless face with evasive eyes, with some feeble sneer on its lips and the look of sharing some smutty guilt. He saw who was the accuser and who the accused—he saw the obscenity of letting impotence hold itself as virtue and damn the power of living as a sin—he saw, with the clarity of direct perception, in the shock of a single instant, the terrible ugliness of that which had once been his own belief.

It was only an instant, a conviction without words, a knowledge grasped as a feeling, left unsealed by his mind. The shock brought him back to the sight of Lillian and to the sound of her words. She appeared to him suddenly as some inconsequential presence that had to be dealt with at the moment.

"Lillian," he said, in an unstressed voice that did not grant her even the honor of anger, "you are not to speak of her to me. If you ever do it again, I will answer you as I would answer a hoodlum: I will beat you up. Neither you nor anyone else is to discuss her."

She glanced at him. "Really?" she said. It had an odd, casual sound —as if the word were tossed away, leaving some hook implanted in her mind. She seemed to be considering some sudden vision of her own.

He said quietly, in weary astonishment, "I thought you would be glad to discover the truth. I thought you would prefer to know—for the sake of whatever love or respect you felt for me—that if I betrayed you, it was not cheaply and casually, it was not for a chorus girl, but for the cleanest and most serious feeling of my life."

The ferocious spring with which she whirled to him was involuntary, as was the naked twist of hatred in her face. "Oh, you goddamn fool!"

He remained silent.

Her composure returned, with the faint suggestion of a smile of secret mockery. "I believe you're waiting for my answer?" she said. "No, I won't divorce you. Don't ever hope for that. We shall continue as we are—if that is what you offered and if you think it can continue. See whether you can flout all moral principles and get away with it!"

He did not listen to her while she reached for her coat, telling him that she was going back to their home. He barely noticed it when the door closed after her. He stood motionless, held by a feeling he had never experienced before. He knew that he would have to think later, to think and understand, but for the moment he wanted nothing but to observe the wonder of what he felt.

It was a sense of freedom, as if he stood alone in the midst of an endless sweep of clean air, with only the memory of some weight that had been torn off his shoulders. It was the feeling of an immense deliverance. It was the knowledge that it did not matter to him what Lillian felt, what she suffered or what became of her, and more: not only that it did not matter, but the shining, guiltless knowledge that it did not have to matter.

CHAPTER VI
MIRACLE METAL

"But can we get away with it?" asked Wesley Mouch. His voice was high with anger and thin with fear.

Nobody answered him. James Taggart sat on the edge of an armchair, not moving, looking up at him from under his forehead, Orren Boyle gave a vicious tap against an ashtray, shaking the ash off his cigar. Dr.

Floyd Ferris smiled. Mr. Weatherby folded his lips and hands. Fred Kinnan, head of the Amalgamated Labor of America, stopped pacing the office, sat down on the window sill and crossed his arms. Eugene Lawson, who had sat hunched downward, absent-mindedly rearranging a display of flowers on a low glass table, raised his torso resentfully and glanced up. Mouch sat at his desk, with his fist on a sheet of paper.

It was Eugene Lawson who answered. "That's not, it seems to me, the way to put it. We must not let vulgar difficulties obstruct our feeling that it's a noble plan motivated solely by the public welfare. It's for the good of the people. The people need it. Need comes first, so we don't have to consider anything else."

Nobody objected or picked it up; they looked as if Lawson had merely made it harder to continue the discussion. But a small man who sat unobtrusively in the best armchair of the room, apart from the others, content to be ignored and fully aware that none of them could be unconscious of his presence, glanced at Lawson, then at Mouch, and said with brisk cheerfulness, "That's the line, Wesley. Tone it down and dress it up and get your press boys to chant it—and you won't have to worry."

"Yes, Mr. Thompson," said Mouch glumly.

Mr. Thompson, the Head of the State, was a man who possessed the quality of never being noticed. In any group of three, his person became indistinguishable, and when seen alone it seemed to evoke a group of its own, composed of the countless persons he resembled.

The country had no clear image of what he looked like: his photographs had appeared on the covers of magazines as frequently as those of his predecessors in office, but people could never be quite certain which photographs were his and which were pictures of "a mail clerk" or "a white-collar worker," accompanying articles about the daily life of the undifferentiated—except that Mr. Thompson's collars were usually wilted. He had broad shoulders and a slight body. He had stringy hair, a wide mouth and an elastic age range that made him look like a harassed forty or an unusually vigorous sixty. Holding enormous official powers, he schemed ceaselessly to expand them, because it was expected of him by those who had pushed him into office. He had the cunning of the unintelligent and the frantic energy of the lazy. The sole secret of his rise in life was the fact that he was a product of chance and knew it and aspired to nothing else.

"It's obvious that measures have to be taken. Drastic measures," said James Taggart, speaking, not to Mr. Thompson, but to Wesley Mouch. "We can't let things go the way they're going much longer."

His voice was belligerent and shaky.

"Take it easy, Jim," said Orren Boyle.

"Something's got to be done and done fast!"

"Don't look at me," snapped Wesley Mouch. "I can't help it. I can't help it if people refuse to co-operate. I'm tied. I need wider powers."

Mouch had summoned them all to Washington, as his friends and personal advisers, for a private, unofficial conference on the national crisis. But, watching him, they were unable to decide whether his manner was overbearing or whining, whether he was threatening them or pleading for their help.

"Fact is," said Mr. Weatherby primly, in a statistical tone of voice, "that in the twelve-month period ending on the first of this year, the rate of business failures has doubled, as compared with the preceding twelve-month period. Since the first of this year, it has trebled."

"Be sure they think it's their own fault," said Dr. Ferris casually.

"Huh?" said Wesley Mouch, his eyes darting to Ferris.

"Whatever you do, don't apologize," said Dr, Ferris. "Make them feel guilty."

"I'm not apologizing!" snapped Mouch. "I'm not to blame. I need wider powers."

"But it is their own fault," said Eugene Lawson, turning aggressively to Dr. Ferris. "It's their lack of social spirit. They refuse to recognize that production is not a private choice, but a public duty. They have no right to fail, no matter what conditions happen to come up. They've got to go on producing. It's a social imperative. A man's work is not a personal matter, it's a social matter. There's no such thing as a personal matter—or a personal life. That's what we've got to force them to learn."

"Gene Lawson knows what I'm talking about," said Dr. Ferris, with a slight smile, "even though he hasn't the faintest idea that he does."

"What do you think you mean?" asked Lawson, his voice rising.

"Skip it," ordered Wesley Mouch.

"I don't care what you decide to do, Wesley," said Mr. Thompson, "and I don't care if the businessmen squawk about it. Just be sure you've got the press with you. Be damn sure about that."

"I've got 'em," said Mouch.

"One editor who'd open his trap at the wrong time could do us more harm than ten disgruntled millionaires."

"That's true, Mr. Thompson," said Dr. Ferris. "But can you name one editor who knows it?"

"Guess not," said Mr. Thompson; he sounded pleased.

"Whatever type of men we're counting on and planning for," said Dr. Ferris, "there's a certain old-fashioned quotation which we may safely forget: the one about counting on the wise and the honest. We don't have to consider them. They're out of date."

James Taggart glanced at the window. There were patches of blue in the sky above the spacious streets of Washington, the faint blue of mid-April, and a few beams breaking through the clouds, A monument stood shining in the distance, hit by a ray of sun: it was a tall, white obelisk, erected to the memory of the man Dr. Ferris was quoting, the man in whose honor this city had been named. James Taggart looked away.

"I don't like the professor's remarks," said Lawson loudly and sullenly.

"Keep still," said Wesley Mouch. "Dr. Ferris is not talking theory, but practice."

"Well, if you want to talk practice," said Fred Kinnan, "then let me tell you that we can't worry about businessmen at a time like this.

What we've got to think about is jobs. More jobs for the people. In my unions, every man who's working is feeding five who aren't, not counting his own pack of starving relatives. If you want my advice—oh, I know you won't go for it, but it's just a thought—issue a directive making it compulsory to add, say, one-third more men to every payroll in the country."

"Good God!" yelled Taggart. "Are you crazy? We can barely meet our payrolls as it is! There's not enough work for the men we've got now! One-third more? We wouldn't have any use for them whatever!"

"Who cares whether you'd have any use for them?" said Fred Kinnan. "They need jobs. That's what comes first—need—doesn't it?—not your profits."

"It's not a question of profits!" yelled Taggart hastily. "I haven't said anything about profits. I haven't given you any grounds to insult me.

It's just a question of where in hell we'd get the money to pay your men—when half our trains are running empty and there's not enough freight to fill a trolley car." His voice slowed down suddenly to a tone of cautious thoughtfulness: "However, we do understand the plight of the working men, and—it's just a thought —we could, perhaps, take on a certain extra number, if we were permitted to double our freight rates, which—"

"Have you lost your mind?" yelled Orren Boyle. "I'm going broke on the rates you're charging now, I shudder every time a damn boxcar pulls in or out of the mills, they're bleeding me to death, I can't afford it—and you want to double it?"

"It is not essential whether you can afford it or not," said Taggart coldly, "You have to be prepared to make some sacrifices. The public needs railroads. Need conies first—above your profits."

"What profits?" yelled Orren Boyle. "When did I ever make any profits? Nobody can accuse me of running a profit-making business!

Just look at my balance sheet—and then look at the books of a certain competitor of mine, who's got all the customers, all the raw materials, all the technical advantages and a monopoly on secret formulas—then tell me who's the profiteer! . . . But, of course, the public does need railroads, and perhaps I could manage to absorb a certain raise in rates, if I were to get—it's just a thought—if I were to get a subsidy to carry me over the next year or two, until I catch my stride and—"

"What? Again?" yelled Mr. Weatherby, losing his primness. "How many loans have you got from us and how many extensions, suspensions and moratoriums? You haven't repaid a penny—and with all of you boys going broke and the tax receipts crashing, where do you expect us to get the money to hand you a subsidy?"

"There are people who aren't broke," said Boyle slowly. "You boys have no excuse for permitting all that need and misery to spread through the country—so long as there are people who aren't broke."

"I can't help it!" yelled Wesley Mouch. "I can't do anything about it!

I need wider powers!"

They could not tell what had prompted Mr. Thompson to attend this particular conference. He had said little, but had listened with interest. It seemed as if there were something which he had wanted to learn, and now he looked as if he had learned it. He stood up and smiled cheerfully.

"Go ahead, Wesley," he said. "Go ahead with Number 10-289. You won't have any trouble at all,"

They had all risen to their feet, in gloomily reluctant deference. Wesley Mouch glanced down at his sheet of paper, then said in a petulant tone of voice, "If you want me to go ahead, you'll have to declare a state of total emergency."

"I'll declare it any time you're ready."

"There are certain difficulties, which—"

"I'll leave it up to you. Work it out any way you wish. It's your job.

Let me see the rough draft, tomorrow or next day, but don't bother me about the details. I've got a speech to make on the radio in half an hour."

"The chief difficulty is that I'm not sure whether the law actually grants us the power to put into effect certain provisions of Directive Number 10-289.1 fear they might be open to challenge."

“Oh hell, we've passed so many emergency laws that if you hunt through them, you're sure to dig up something that will cover it."

Mr. Thompson turned to the others with a smile of good fellowship.

"I'll leave you boys to iron out the wrinkles," he said. "I appreciate your coming to Washington to help us out. Glad to have seen you."

They waited until the door closed after him, then resumed their seats; they did not look at one another.

They had not heard the text of Directive No. 10-289, but they knew what it would contain. They had known it for a long time, in that special manner which consisted of keeping secrets from oneself and leaving knowledge untranslated into words. And, by the same method, they now wished it were possible for them not to hear the words of the directive. It was to avoid moments such as this that all the complex twistings of their minds had been devised, They wished the directive to go into effect. They wished it could be put into effect without words, so that they would not have to know that what they were doing was what it was. Nobody had ever announced that Directive No. 10-289 was the final goal of his efforts.

Yet, for generations past, men had worked to make it possible, and for months past, every provision of it had been prepared for by countless speeches, articles, sermons, editorials—by purposeful voices that screamed with anger if anyone named their purpose.

"The picture now is this," said Wesley Mouch. "The economic condition of the country was better the year before last than it was last year, and last year it was better than it is at present. It's obvious that we would not be able to survive another year of the same progression.

Therefore, our sole objective must now be to hold the line. To stand still in order to catch our stride. To achieve total stability. Freedom has been given a chance and has failed. Therefore, more stringent controls are necessary. Since men are unable and unwilling to solve their problems voluntarily, they must be forced to do it." He paused, picked up the sheet of paper, then added in a less formal tone of voice, "Hell, what it comes down to is that we can manage to exist as and where we are, but we can't afford to move! So we've got to stand still. We've got to stand still. We've got to make those bastards stand still!"

His head drawn into his shoulders, he was looking at them with the anger of a man declaring that the country's troubles were a personal affront to him. So many men seeking favors had been afraid of him that he now acted as if his anger were a solution to everything, as if his anger were omnipotent, as if all he had to do was to get angry.

Yet, facing him, the men who sat in a silent semicircle before his desk were uncertain whether the presence of fear in the room was their own emotion or whether the hunched figure behind the desk generated the panic of a cornered rat.

Wesley Mouch had a long, square face and a flat-topped skull, made more so by a brush haircut. His lower lip was a petulant bulb and the pale, brownish pupils of his eyes looked like the yolks of eggs smeared under the not fully translucent whites. His facial muscles moved abruptly, and the movement vanished, having conveyed no expression.

No one had ever seen him smile.

Wesley Mouch came from a family that had known neither poverty nor wealth nor distinction for many generations; it had clung, however, to a tradition of its own: that of being college-bred and, therefore, of despising men who were in business. The family's diplomas had always hung on the wall in the manner of a reproach to the world, because the diplomas had not automatically produced the material equivalents of their attested spiritual value. Among the family's numerous relatives, there was one rich uncle. He had married his money and, in his widowed old age, he had picked Wesley as his favorite from among his many nephews and nieces, because Wesley was the least distinguished of the lot and therefore, thought Uncle Julius, the safest. Uncle Julius did not care for people who were brilliant. He did not care for the trouble of managing his money, either; so he turned the job over to Wesley. By the time Wesley graduated from college, there was no money left to manage. Uncle Julius blamed it on Wesley's cunning and cried that Wesley was an unscrupulous schemer.

But there had been no scheme about it; Wesley could not have said just where the money had gone. In high school, Wesley Mouch had been one of the worst students and had passionately envied those who were the best. College taught him that he did not have to envy them at all. After graduation, he took a job in the advertising department of a company that manufactured a bogus corn-cure. The cure sold well and he rose to be the head of his department. He left it to take charge of the advertising of a hair-restorer, then of a patented brassiere, then of a new soap, then of a soft drink—and then he became advertising vice-president of an automobile concern. He tried to sell automobiles as if they were a bogus corn-cure. They did not sell.

He blamed it on the insufficiency of his advertising budget. It was the president of the automobile concern who recommended him to Rearden. It was Rearden who introduced him to Washington—Rearden, who knew no standard by which to judge the activities of his Washington man. It was James Taggart who gave him a start in the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources—in exchange for double crossing Rearden in order to help Orren Boyle in exchange for destroying Dan Conway. From then on, people helped Wesley Mouch to advance, for the same reason as that which had prompted Uncle Julius: they were people who believed that mediocrity was safe. The men who now sat in front of his desk had been taught that the law of causality was a superstition and that one had to deal with the situation of the moment without considering its cause. By the situation of the moment, they had concluded that Wesley Mouch was a man of superlative skill and cunning, since millions aspired to power, but he was the one who had achieved it. It was not within their method of thinking to know that Wesley Mouch was the zero at the meeting point of forces unleashed in destruction against one another.

"This is just a rough draft of Directive Number 10-289," said Wesley Mouch, "which Gene, Clem and I have dashed off just to give you the general idea. We want to hear your opinions, suggestions and so forth—you being the representatives of labor, industry, transportation and the professions."

Fred Kinnan got off the window sill and sat down on the arm of a chair. Orren Boyle spit out the butt of his cigar. James Taggart looked down at his own hands. Dr. Ferris was the only one who seemed to be at ease.

"In the name of the general welfare," read Wesley Mouch, "to protect the people's security, to achieve full equality and total stability, it is decreed for the duration of the national emergency that—

"Point One. All workers, wage earners and employees of any kind whatsoever shall henceforth be attached to their jobs and shall not leave nor be dismissed nor change employment, under penalty of a term in jail. The penalty shall be determined by the Unification Board, such Board to be appointed by the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources. All persons reaching the age of twenty-one shall report to the Unification Board, which shall assign them to where, in its opinion, their services will best serve the interests of the nation.

"Point Two. All industrial, commercial, manufacturing and business establishments of any nature whatsoever shall henceforth remain in operation, and the owners of such establishments shall not quit nor leave nor retire, nor close, sell or transfer their business, under penalty of the nationalization of their establishment and of any and all of their property.

"Point Three. All patents and copyrights, pertaining to any devices, inventions, formulas, processes and works of any nature whatsoever, shall be turned over to the nation as a patriotic emergency gift by means of Gift Certificates to be signed voluntarily by the owners of all such patents and copyrights. The Unification Board shall then license the use of such patents and copyrights to all applicants, equally and without discrimination, for the purpose of eliminating monopolistic practices, discarding obsolete products and making the best available to the whole nation. No trademarks, brand names or copyrighted titles shall be used. Every formerly patented product shall be known by a new name and sold by all manufacturers under the same name, such name to be selected by the Unification Board. All private trademarks and brand names are hereby abolished.

"Point Four. No new devices, inventions, products, or goods of any nature whatsoever, not now on the market, shall be produced, invented, manufactured or sold after the date of this directive. The Office of Patents and Copyrights is hereby suspended.

"Point Five. Every establishment, concern, corporation or person engaged in production of any nature whatsoever shall henceforth produce the same amount of goods per year as it, they or he produced during the Basic Year, no more and no less. The year to be known as the Basic or Yardstick Year is to be the year ending on the date of this directive. Over or under production shall be fined, such fines to be determined by the Unification Board.

"Point Six. Every person of any age, sex, class or income, shall henceforth spend the same amount of money on the purchase of goods per year as he or she spent during the Basic Year, no more and no less.

Over or under purchasing shall be fined, such fines to be determined by the Unification Board.

"Point Seven. All wages, prices, salaries, dividends, profits, interest rates and forms of income of any nature whatsoever, shall be frozen at their present figures, as of the date of this directive.

"Point Eight. All cases arising from and rules not specifically provided for in this directive, shall be settled and determined by the Unification Board, whose decisions will be final."

There was, even within the four men who had listened, a remnant of human dignity, which made them sit still and feel sick for the length of one minute.

James Taggart spoke first. His voice was low, but it had the trembling intensity of an involuntary scream: "Well, why not? Why should they have it, if we don't? Why should they stand above us? If we are to perish, let's make sure that we all perish together. Let's make sure that we leave them no chance to survive!"

"That's a damn funny thing to say about a very practical plan that will benefit everybody," said Orren Boyle shrilly, looking at Taggart in frightened astonishment.

Dr. Ferris chuckled.

Taggart's eyes seemed to focus, and he said, his voice louder, "Yes, of course. It's a very practical plan. It's necessary, practical and just.

It will solve everybody's problems. It will give everybody a chance to feel safe. A chance to rest."

"It will give security to the people," said Eugene Lawson, his mouth slithering into a smile. "Security—that's what the people want. If they want it, why shouldn't they have it? Just because a handful of rich will object?"

"It's not the rich who'll object," said Dr. Ferris lazily. "The rich drool for security more than any other sort of animal—haven't you discovered that yet?"

"Well, who'll object?" snapped Lawson.

Dr. Ferris smiled pointedly, and did not answer.

Lawson looked away. "To hell with them! Why should we worry about them? We've got to run the world for the sake of the little people. It's intelligence that's caused all the troubles of humanity. Man's mind is the root of all evil. This is the day of the heart. It's the weak, the meek, the sick and the humble that must be the only objects of our concern," His lower Up was twisting in soft, lecherous motions.

"Those who're big are here to serve those who aren't. If they refuse to do their moral duty, we've got to force them. There once was an Age of Reason, but we've progressed beyond it. This is the Age of Love."

"Shut up!" screamed James Taggart.

They all stared at him. "For Christ's sake, Jim, what's the matter?" said Orren Boyle, shaking.

"Nothing," said Taggart, "nothing . . . Wesley, keep him still, will you?"

Mouch said uncomfortably, "But I fail to see—"

"Just keep him still. We don't have to listen to him, do we?"

"Why, no, but—"

"Then let's go on."

"What is this?" demanded Lawson, "I resent it. I most emphatically—" But he saw no support in the faces around him and stopped, his mouth sagging into an expression of pouting hatred.

"Let's go on," said Taggart feverishly.

"What's the matter with you?" asked Orren Boyle, trying not to know what was the matter with himself and why he felt frightened.

"Genius is a superstition, Jim," said Dr. Ferris slowly, with an odd kind of emphasis, as if knowing that he was naming the unnamed in all their minds. "There's no such thing as the intellect. A man's brain is a social product. A sum of influences that he's picked up from those around him. Nobody invents anything, he merely reflects what's floating in the social atmosphere. A genius is an intellectual scavenger and a greedy hoarder of the ideas which rightfully belong to society, from which he stole them. All thought is theft. If we do away with private fortunes, we'll have a fairer distribution of wealth. If we do away with the genius, we'll have a faker distribution of ideas."

"Are we here to talk business or are we here to kid one another?" asked Fred Kinnan.

They turned to him. He was a muscular man with large features, but his face had the astonishing property of finely drawn lines that raised the corners of his mouth into the permanent hint of a wise, sardonic grin. He sat on the arm of the chair, hands in pockets, looking at Mouch with the smiling glance of a hardened policeman at a shoplifter.

"All I've got to say is that you'd better staff that Unification Board with my men," he said. "Better make sure of it, brother—or I'll blast your Point One to hell."

"I intend, of course, to have a representative of labor on that Board," said Mouch dryly, "as well as a representative of industry, of the professions and of every cross-section of—"

"No cross-sections," said Fred Kinnan evenly. "Just representatives of labor. Period."

"What the hell!" yelled Orren Boyle. "That's stacking the cards, isn't it?"

"Sure," said Fred Kinnan.

"But that will give you a stranglehold on every business in the country!"

"What do you think I'm after?"

"That's unfair!" yelled Boyle. "I won't stand for it! You have no right! You—"

"Right?" said Kinnan innocently. "Are we talking about rights?"

"But, I mean, after all, there are certain fundamental property rights which—"

"Listen, pal, you want Point Three, don't you?"

"Well, I—"

"Then you'd better keep your trap shut about property rights from now on. Keep it shut tight."

"Mr. Kinnan," said Dr. Ferris, "you must not make the old fashioned mistake of drawing wide generalizations. Our policy has to be flexible. There are no absolute principles which—"

"Save it for Jim Taggart, Doc," said Fred Kinnan. "I know what I'm talking about. That's because I never went to college."

"I object," said Boyle, "to your dictatorial method of—"

Kinnan turned his back on him and said, "Listen, Wesley, my boys won't like Point One. If I get to run things, I'll make them swallow it. If not, not. Just make up your mind,"

"Well—" said Mouch, and stopped.

"For Christ's sake, Wesley, what about us?" yelled Taggart.

"You'll come to me," said Kinnan, "when you'll need a deal to fix the Board. But I'll run that Board. Me and Wesley."

"Do you think the country will stand for it?" yelled Taggart.

"Stop kidding yourself," said Kinnan. "The country? If there aren't any principles any more—and I guess the doc is right, because there sure aren't—if there aren't any rules to this game and it's only a question of who robs whom—then I've got more votes than the bunch of you, there are more workers than employers, and don't you forget it, boys!"

"That's a funny attitude to take," said Taggart haughtily, "about a measure which, after all, is not designed for the selfish benefit of workers or employers, but for the general welfare of the public."

"Okay," said Kinnan amiably, "let's talk your lingo. Who is the public? If you go by quality—then it ain't you, Jim, and it ain't Orrie Boyle. If you go by quantity—then it sure is me, because quantity is what I've got behind me." His smile disappeared, and with a sudden, bitter look of weariness he added, "Only I'm not going to say that I'm working for the welfare of my public, because I know I'm not. I know that I'm delivering the poor bastards into slavery, and that's all there is to it. And they know it, too. But they know that I'll have to throw them a crumb once in a while, if I want to keep my racket, while with the rest of you they wouldn't have a chance in hell. So that's why, if they've got to be under a whip, they'd rather I held it, not you—you drooling, tear-jerking, mealy-mouthed bastards of the public welfare!

Do you think that outside of your college-bred pansies there's one village idiot whom you're fooling? I'm a racketeer—but I know it and my boys know it, and they know that I'll pay off. Not out of the kindness of my heart, either, and not a cent more than I can get away with, but at least they can count on that much. Sure, it makes me sick sometimes, it makes me sick right now, but it's not me who's built this kind of world—you did—so I'm playing the game as you've set it up and I'm going to play it for as long as it lasts—which isn't going to be long for any of us!"

He stood up. No one answered him. He let his eyes move slowly from face to face and stop on Wesley Mouch.

"Do I get the Board, Wesley?" he asked casually.

"The selection of the specific personnel is only a technical detail," said Mouch pleasantly. "Suppose we discuss it later, you and I?"

Everybody in the room knew that this meant the answer Yes.

"Okay, pal," said Kinnan. He went back to the window, sat down on the sill and lighted a cigarette.

For some unadmitted reason, the others were looking at Dr. Ferris, as if seeking guidance.

"Don't be disturbed by oratory," said Dr. Ferris smoothly. "Mr.

Kinnan is a fine speaker, but he has no sense of practical reality. He is unable to think dialectically."

There was another silence, then James Taggart spoke up suddenly.

"I don't care. It doesn't matter. He'll have to hold things still. Everything will have to remain as it is. Just as it is. Nobody will be permitted to change anything. Except—" He turned sharply to Wesley Mouch.

"Wesley, under Point Four, we'll have to close all research departments, experimental laboratories, scientific foundations and all the rest of the institutions of that kind. They'll have to be forbidden."

"Yes, that's right," said Mouch. "I hadn't thought of that. We'll have to stick in a couple of lines about that." He hunted around for a pencil and made a few scrawls on the margin of his paper.

"It will end wasteful competition," said James Taggart. "We'll stop scrambling to beat one another to the untried and the unknown. We won't have to worry about new inventions upsetting the market. We won't have to pour money down the drain in useless experiments just to keep up with over ambitious competitors."

"Yes," said Orren Boyle. "Nobody should be allowed to waste money on the new until everybody has plenty of the old. Close all those damn research laboratories—and the sooner, the better."

"Yes," said Wesley Mouch. "We'll close them. All of them."

"The State Science Institute, too?" asked Fred Kinnan.

"Oh, no!" said Mouch. "That's different. That's government. Besides, it's a non-profit institution. And it will be sufficient to take care of all scientific progress."

"Quite sufficient," said Dr. Ferris.

"And what will become of all the engineers, professors and such, when you close all those laboratories?" asked Fred Kinnan. "What are they going to do for a living, with all the other jobs and businesses frozen?"

"Oh," said Wesley Mouch. He scratched his head. He turned to Mr.

Weatherby. "Do we put them on relief, Clem?"

"No," said Mr. Weatherby. "What for? There's not enough of them to raise a squawk. Not enough to matter."

"I suppose," said Mouch, turning to Dr. Ferris, "that you'll be able to absorb some of them, Floyd?"

"Some," said Dr. Ferris slowly, as if relishing every syllable of his answer. "Those who prove co-operative."

"What about the rest?" asked Fred Kinnan.

"They'll have to wait till the Unification Board finds some use for them," said Wesley Mouch.

"What will they eat while they're waiting?"

Mouch shrugged. "There's got to be some victims in times of national emergency. It can't be helped."

"We have the right to do it!" cried Taggart suddenly, in defiance to the stillness of the room. "We need it. We need it, don't we?" There was no answer. "We have the right to protect our livelihood!" Nobody opposed him, but he went on with a shrill, pleading insistence. "We'll be safe for the first time in centuries. Everybody will know his place and job, and everybody else's place and job—and we won't be at the mercy of every stray crank with a new idea. Nobody will push us out of business or steal our markets or undersell us or make us obsolete.

Nobody will come to us offering some damn new gadget and putting us on the spot to decide whether we'll lose our shirt if we buy it, or whether we'll lose our shirt if we don't but somebody else does! We won't have to decide. Nobody will be permitted to decide anything.

It will be decided once and for all." His glance moved pleadingly from face to face. "There's been enough invented already—enough for everybody's comfort—why should they be allowed to go on inventing?

Why should we permit them to blast the ground from under our feet every few steps? Why should we be kept on the go in eternal uncertainty? Just because of a few restless, ambitious adventurers? Should we sacrifice the contentment of the whole of mankind to the greed of a few non-conformists? We don't need them. We don't need them at all.

I wish we'd get rid of that hero worship! Heroes? They've done nothing but harm, all through history. They've kept mankind running a wild race, with no breathing spell, no rest, no ease, no security. Running to catch up with them . . . always, without end . . . Just as -we catch up, they're years ahead. . . . They leave us no chance . . . They've never left us a chance. . . ." His eyes were moving restlessly; he glanced at the window, but looked hastily away: he did not want to see the white obelisk in the distance. "We're through with them. We've won. This is our age. Our world. We're going to have security—for the first time in centuries—for the first time since the beginning of the industrial revolution!"

"Well, this, I guess," said Fred Kinnan, "is the anti-industrial revolution."

"That's a damn funny thing for you to say!" snapped Wesley Mouch. "We can't be permitted to say that to the public."

"Don't worry, brother. I won't say it to the public."

"It's a total fallacy," said Dr. Ferris. "It's a statement prompted by ignorance. Every expert has conceded long ago that a planned economy achieves the maximum of productive efficiency and that centralization leads to super-industrialization.”

"Centralization destroys the blight of monopoly," said Boyle.

"How's that again?" drawled Kinnan.

Boyle did not catch the tone of mockery, and answered earnestly, "It destroys the blight of monopoly. It leads to the democratization of industry. It makes everything available to everybody. Now, for instance, at a time like this, when there's such a desperate shortage of iron ore, is there any sense in my wasting money, labor and national resources on making old-fashioned steel, when there exists a much better metal that I could be making? A metal that everybody wants, but nobody can get. Now is that good economics or sound social efficiency or democratic justice? Why shouldn't I be allowed to manufacture that metal and why shouldn't the people get it when they need it?

Just because of the private monopoly of one selfish individual? Should we sacrifice our rights to his personal interests?"

"Skip it, brother," said Fred Kinnan. "I've read it all in the same newspapers you did."

"I don't like your attitude," said Boyle, in a sudden tone of righteousness, with a look which, in a barroom, would have signified a prelude to a fist fight. He sat up straight, buttressed by the columns of paragraphs on yellow-tinged paper, which he was seeing in his mind: "At a time of crucial public need, are we to waste social effort on the manufacture of obsolete products? Are we to let the many remain in want while the few withhold from us the better products and methods available? Are we to be stopped by the superstition of patent rights?"

"Is it not obvious that private industry is unable to cope with the present economic crisis? How long, for instance, are we going to put up with the disgraceful shortage of Rearden Metal? There is a crying public demand for it, which Rearden has failed to supply."

"When are we going to put an end to economic injustice and special privileges? Why should Rearden be the only one permitted to manufacture Rearden Metal?"

"I don't like your attitude," said Orren Boyle. "So long as we respect the rights of the workers, we'll want you to respect the rights of the industrialists."

"Which rights of which industrialists?" drawled Kinnan.

"I'm inclined to think," said Dr. Ferris hastily, "that Point Two, perhaps, is the most essential one of all at present. We must put an end to that peculiar business of industrialists retiring and vanishing. We must stop them. It's playing havoc with our entire economy."

"Why are they doing it?" asked Taggart nervously. "Where are they all going?"

"Nobody knows," said Dr. Ferris. "We've been unable to find any information or explanation. But it must be stopped. In times of crisis, economic service to the nation is just as much of a duty as military service. Anyone who abandons it should be regarded as a deserter. I have recommended that we introduce the death penalty for those men, but Wesley wouldn't agree to it."

"Take it easy, boy," said Fred Kinnan in an odd, slow voice. He sat suddenly and perfectly still, his arms crossed, looking at Ferris in a manner that made it suddenly real to the room that Ferris had proposed murder. "Don't let me hear you talk about any death penalties in industry."

Dr. Ferris shrugged.

"We don't have to go to extremes," said Mouch hastily. "We don't want to frighten people. We want to have them on our side. Our top problem is, will they . . . will they accept it at all?"

"They will," said Dr. Ferris.

"I'm a little worried," said Eugene Lawson, "about Points Three and Four. Taking over the patents is fine. Nobody's going to defend industrialists. But I'm worried about taking over the copyrights. That's going to antagonize the intellectuals. It's dangerous. It's a spiritual issue. Doesn't Point Four mean that no new books are to be written or published from now on?"

"Yes," said Mouch, "it does. But we can't make an exception for the book-publishing business. It's an industry like any other. When we say 'no new products,' it's got to mean 'no new products.' "

"But this is a matter of the spirit," said Lawson; his voice had a tone, not of rational respect, but of superstitious awe.

"We're not interfering with anybody's spirit. But when you print a book on paper, it becomes a material commodity—and if we grant an exception to one commodity, we won't be able to hold the others in line and we won't be able to make anything stick."

"Yes, that's true. But—"

"Don't be a chump, Gene," said Dr. Ferris. "You don't want some recalcitrant hacks to come out with treatises that will wreck our entire program, do you? If you breathe the word 'censorship' now, they'll all scream bloody murder. They're not ready for it—as yet. But if you leave the spirit alone and make it a simple material issue—not a matter of ideas, but just a matter of paper, ink and printing presses—you accomplish your purpose much more smoothly. You'll make sure that nothing dangerous gets printed or heard—and nobody is going to fight over a material issue."

"Yes, but . . . but I don't think the writers will like it."

"Are you sure?" asked Wesley Mouch, with a glance that was almost a smile, "Don't forget that under Point Five, the publishers will have to publish as many books as they did in the Basic Year. Since there will be no new ones, they will have to reprint—and the public will have to buy—some of the old ones. There are many very worthy books that have never had a fair chance."

"Oh," said Lawson; he remembered that he had seen Mouch lunching with Balph Eubank two weeks ago. Then he shook his head and frowned. "Still, I'm worried. The intellectuals are our friends. We don't want to lose them. They can make an awful lot of trouble."

"They won't," said Fred Kinnan. "Your kind of intellectuals are the first to scream when it's safe—and the first to shut their traps at the first sign of danger. They spend years spitting at the man who feeds them—and they lick the hand of the man who slaps their drooling faces. Didn't they deliver every country of Europe, one after another, to committees of goons, just like this one here? Didn't they scream their heads off to shut out every burglar alarm and to break every padlock open for the goons? Have you heard a peep out of them since? Didn't they scream that they were the friends of labor? Do you hear them raising their voices about the chain gangs, the slave camps, the fourteen-hour workday and the mortality from scurvy in the People's States of Europe? No, but you do hear them telling the whip-beaten wretches that starvation is prosperity, that slavery is freedom, that torture chambers arc brother-love and that if the wretches don't understand it, then it's their own fault that they suffer, and it's the mangled corpses in the jail cellars who're to blame for all their troubles, not the benevolent leaders! Intellectuals? You might have to worry about any other breed of men, but not about the modern intellectuals: they'll swallow anything. I don't feel so safe about the lousiest wharf rat in the longshoremen's union: he's liable to remember suddenly that he is a man—and then I won't be able to keep him in line. But the intellectuals? That's the one thing they've forgotten long ago. I guess it's the one thing that all their education was aimed to make them forget. Do anything you please to the intellectuals. They'll take it."

"For once," said Dr. Ferns, "I agree with Mr. Kinnan. I agree with his facts, if not with his feelings. You don't have to worry about the intellectuals, Wesley. Just put a-few of them on the government payroll and send them out to preach precisely the sort of thing Mr.

Kinnan mentioned: that the blame rests on the victims. Give them moderately comfortable salaries and extremely loud titles—and they'll forget their copyrights and do a better job for you than whole squads of enforcement officers."

"Yes," said Mouch. "I know."

"The danger that I'm worried about will come from a different quarter," said Dr. Ferris thoughtfully. "You might run into quite a bit of trouble on that 'voluntary Gift Certificate1 business, Wesley."

"I know," said Mouch glumly. "That's the point I wanted Thompson to help us out on. But I guess he can't. We don't actually have the legal power to seize the patents. Oh, there's plenty of clauses in dozens of laws that can be stretched to cover it—almost, but not quite. Any tycoon who'd want to make a test case would have a very good chance to beat us. And we have to preserve a semblance of legality—or the populace won't take it."

"Precisely," said Dr. Ferris. "It's extremely important to get those patents turned over to us voluntarily. Even if we had a law permitting outright nationalization, it would be much better to get them as a gift, We want to leave to people the illusion that they're still preserving their private property rights. And most of them will play along. They'll sign the Gift Certificates. Just raise a lot of noise about its being a patriotic duty and that anyone who refuses is a prince of greed, and they'll sign. But—" He stopped.

"I know," said Mouch; he was growing visibly more nervous. "There will be, I think, a few old-fashioned bastards here and there who'll refuse to sign—but they won't be prominent enough to make a noise, nobody will hear about it, their own communities and friends will turn against them for their being selfish, so it won't give us any trouble.

We'll just take the patents over, anyway—and those guys won't have the nerve or the money to start a test case. But—" He stopped.

James Taggart leaned back in his chair, watching them; he was beginning to enjoy the conversation.

"Yes," said Dr. Ferris, "I'm thinking of it, too. I'm thinking of a certain' tycoon who is in a position to blast us to pieces. Whether we'll recover the pieces or not, is hard to tell. God knows what is liable to happen at a hysterical time like the present and in a situation as delicate as this. Anything can throw everything off balance. Blow up the whole works. And if there's anyone who wants to do it, he does. He does and can. He knows the real issue, he knows the things which must not be said—and he is not afraid to say them. He knows the one dangerous, fatally dangerous weapon. He is our deadliest adversary."

"Who?" asked Lawson.

Dr. Ferris hesitated, shrugged and answered, "The guiltless man."

Lawson stared blankly. "What do you mean and whom are you talking about?"

James Taggart smiled.

"I mean that there is no way to disarm any man," said Dr. Ferris, "except through guilt. Through that which he himself has accepted as guilt. If a man has ever stolen a dime, you can impose on him the punishment intended for a bank robber and he will take it. He'll bear any form of misery, he'll feel that he deserves no better. If there's not enough guilt in the world, we must create it. If we teach a man that it's evil to look at spring flowers and he believes us and then does it —we'll be able to do whatever we please with him. He won't defend himself. He won't feel he's worth it. He won't fight. But save us from the man who lives up to his own- standards. Save us from the man of clean conscience. He's the man who'll beat us."

"Are you talking about Henry Rearden?" asked Taggart, his voice peculiarly clear.

The one name they had not wanted to pronounce struck them into an instant's silence.

"What if I were?" asked Dr. Ferris cautiously.

"Oh, nothing," said Taggart. "Only, if you were, I would tell you that I can deliver Henry Rearden. He'll sign."

By the rules of their unspoken language, they all knew—from the tone of his voice—that he was not bluffing.

"God, Jim! No!" gasped Wesley Mouch.

"Yes," said Taggart. "I was stunned, too, when I learned—what I learned. I didn't expect that. Anything but that."

"I am glad to hear it," said Mouch cautiously. "It's a constructive piece of information. It might be very valuable indeed."

"Valuable—yes," said Taggart pleasantly. "When do you plan to put the directive into effect?"

"Oh, we have to move fast. We don't want any news of it to leak out. I expect you all to keep this most strictly confidential. I'd say that we'll be ready to spring it on them in a couple of weeks."

"Don't you think that it would be advisable—before all prices are frozen—to adjust the matter of the railroad rates? I was thinking of a raise. A small but most essentially needed raise."

"We'll discuss it, you and I," said Mouch amiably. "It might be arranged." He turned to the others; Boyle's face was sagging. "There are many details still to be worked out, but I'm sure that our program won't encounter any major difficulties." He was assuming the tone and manner of a public address; he sounded brisk and almost cheerful. "Rough spots are to be expected. If one thing doesn't work, we'll try another.

Trial-and-error is the only pragmatic rule of action. We'll just keep on trying. If any hardships come up, remember that it's only temporary.

Only for the duration of the national emergency."

"Say," asked Kinnan, "how is the emergency to end if everything is to stand still?"

"Don't be theoretical," said Mouch impatiently. "We've got to deal with the situation of the moment. Don't bother about minor details, so long as the broad outlines of our policy are clear. We'll have the power. We'll be able to solve any problem and answer any question."

Fred Kinnan chuckled. "Who is John Galt?"

"Don't say that!" cried Taggart.

"I have a question to ask about Point Seven," said Kinnan. "It says that al! wages, prices, salaries, dividends, profits and so forth will be frozen on the date of the directive. Taxes, too?"

"Oh no!" cried Mouch. "How can we tell what funds we'll need in the future?" Kinnan seemed to be smiling. "Well?" snapped Mouch.

"What about it?"

"Nothing," said Kinnan. "I just asked."

Mouch leaned back in his chair. "I must say to all of you that I appreciate your coming here and giving us the benefit of your opinions. It has been very helpful." He leaned forward to look at his desk calendar and sat over it for a moment, toying with his pencil, Then the pencil came down, struck a date and drew a circle around it. "Directive 10-289 will go into effect on the morning of May first."

All nodded approval. None looked at his neighbor.

James Taggart rose, walked to the window and pulled the blind down over the white obelisk.

In the first moment of awakening, Dagny was astonished to find herself looking at the spires of unfamiliar buildings against a glowing, pale blue sky. Then she saw the twisted seam of the thin stocking on her own leg, she felt a wrench of discomfort in the muscles of her waistline, and she realized that she was lying on the couch in her office, with the clock on her desk saying 6:15 and the first rays of the sun giving silver edges to the silhouettes of the skyscrapers beyond the window. The last thing she remembered was that she had dropped down on the couch, intending to rest for ten minutes, when the window was black and the clock stood at 3:30.

She twisted herself to her feet, feeling an enormous exhaustion. The lighted lamp on the desk looked futile in the glow of the morning, over the piles of paper which were her cheerless, unfinished task. She tried not to think of the work for a few minutes longer, while she dragged herself past the desk to her washroom and let handfuls of cold water run over her face.

The exhaustion was gone by the time she stepped back into the office. No matter what night preceded it, she had never known a morning when she did not feel the rise of a quiet excitement that became a tightening energy in her body and a hunger for action in her mind—because this was the beginning of day and it was a day of her life.

She looked down at the city. The streets were still empty, it made them look wider, and in the luminous cleanliness of the spring air they seemed to be waiting for the promise of all the greatness that would take form in the activity about to pour through them. The calendar in the distance said: May 1.

She sat down at her desk, smiling in defiance at the distastefulness of her job. She hated the reports that she had to finish reading, but it was her job, it was her railroad, it was morning. She lighted a cigarette, thinking that she would finish this task before breakfast; she turned off the lamp and pulled the papers forward.

There were reports from the general managers of the four Regions of the Taggart system, their pages a typewritten cry of despair over the breakdowns of equipment. There was a report about a wreck on the main line near Winston, Colorado. There was the new budget of the Operating Department, the revised budget based on the raise in rates which Jim had obtained last week. She tried to choke the exasperation of hopelessness as she went slowly over the budget's figures: all those calculations had been made on the assumption that the volume of freight would remain unchanged and that the raise would bring them added revenue by the end of the year; she knew that the freight tonnage would go on shrinking, that the raise would make little difference, that by the end of this year their losses would be greater than ever.

When she looked up from the pages, she saw with a small jolt of astonishment that the clock said 9:25. She had been dimly aware of the usual sound of movement and voices in the anteroom of her office, as her staff had arrived to begin their day; she wondered why nobody had entered her office and why her telephone had remained silent; as a daily rule, there should have been a rush of business by this hour. She glanced at her calendar; there was a note that the McNeil Car Foundry of Chicago was to phone her at nine A.M. in regard to the new freight cars which Taggart Transcontinental had been expecting for six months.

She flicked the switch of the interoffice communicator to call her secretary. The girl's voice answered with a startled little gasp: "Miss Taggart! Are you here, in your office?"

"I slept here last night, again. Didn't intend to, but did. Was there a call for me from the McNeil Car Foundry?"

"No, Miss Taggart."

"Put them through to me immediately, when they call,"

"Yes, Miss Taggart."

Switching the communicator off, she wondered whether she imagined it or whether there had been something strange in the girl's voice: it had sounded unnaturally tense.

She felt the faint light-headedness of hunger and thought that she should go down to get a cup of coffee, but there was still the report of the chief engineer to finish, so she lighted one more cigarette.

The chief engineer was out on the road, supervising the reconstruction of the main track with the Rearden Metal rail taken from the corpse of the John Galt Line; she had chosen the sections most urgently in need of repair. Opening his report, she read—with a shock of incredulous anger—that he had stopped work in the mountain section of Winston, Colorado. He recommended a change of plans: he suggested that the rail intended for Winston be used, instead, to repair the track of their Washington-to-Miami branch. He gave his reasons: a derailment had occurred on that branch last week, and Mr. Tinky Holloway of Washington, traveling with a party of friends, had been delayed for three hours; it had been reported to the chief engineer that Mr. Holloway had expressed extreme displeasure. Although, from a purely technological viewpoint—said the chief engineer's report—the rail of the Miami branch was in better condition than that of the Winston section, one had to remember, from a sociological viewpoint, that the Miami branch carried a much more important class of passenger traffic; therefore, the chief engineer suggested that Winston could be kept waiting a little longer, and recommended the sacrifice of an obscure section of mountain trackage for the sake of a branch where "Taggart Transcontinental could not afford to create an unfavorable impression."

She read, slashing furious pencil marks on the margins of the pages, thinking that her first duty of the day, ahead of any other, was to stop this particular piece of insanity.

The telephone rang.

"Yes?" she asked, snatching the receiver. "McNeil Car Foundry?"

"No," said the voice of her secretary. "Senor Francisco d'Anconia."

She looked at the phone's mouthpiece for the instant of a brief shock. "All right. Put him on."

The next voice she heard was Francisco's. "I see that you're in your office just the same," he said; his voice was mocking, harsh and tense.

"Where did you expect me to be?"

"How do you like the new suspension?"

"What suspension?"

"The moratorium on brains."

"What are you talking about?"

"Haven't you seen today's newspapers?"

"No."

There was a pause; then his voice came slowly, changed and grave: "Better take a look at them, Dagny."

"All right."

"I'll call you later."

She hung up and pressed the switch of the communicator on her desk. "Get me a newspaper," she said to her secretary.

"Yes, Miss Taggart," the secretary's voice answered grimly.

It was Eddie Willers who came in and put the newspaper down on her desk. The meaning of the look on his face' was the same as the tone she had caught in Francisco's voice: the advance notice of some inconceivable disaster.

"None of us wanted to be first to tell you," he said very quietly and walked out.

When she rose from her desk, a few moments later, she felt that she had full control of her body and that she was not aware of her body's existence. She felt lifted to her feet and it seemed to her that she stood straight, not touching the ground. There was an abnormal clarity about every object in the room, yet she was seeing nothing around her, but she knew that she would be able to see the thread of a cobweb if her purpose required it, just as she would be able to walk with a somnambulist's assurance along the edge of a roof. She could not know that she was looking at the room with the eyes of a person who had lost the capacity and the concept of doubt, and what remained to her was the simplicity of a single perception and of a single goal. She did not know that the thing which seemed so violent, yet felt like such a still, unfamiliar calm within her, was the power of full certainty—and that the anger shaking her body, the anger which made her ready, with the same passionate indifference, either to kill or to die, was her love of rectitude, the only love to which all the years of her life had been given.

Holding the newspaper in her hand, she walked out of her office and on toward the hall. She knew, crossing the anteroom, that the faces of her staff were turned to her, but they seemed to be many years away.

She walked down the hall, moving swiftly but without effort, with the same sensation of knowing that her feet were probably touching the ground but that she did not feel it. She did not know how many rooms she crossed to reach Jim's office, or whether there had been any people in her way, she knew the direction to take and the door to pull open to enter unannounced and walk toward his desk.

The newspaper was twisted into a roll by the time she stood before him. She threw it at his face, it struck his cheek and fell down to the carpet.

"There's my resignation, Jim," she said. "I won't work as a slave or as a slave-driver."

She did not hear the sound of his gasp; it came with the sound of the door closing after her.

She went back to her office and, crossing the anteroom, signaled Eddie to follow her inside.

She said, her voice calm and clear, "I have resigned."

He nodded silently.

"I don't know as yet what I’ll do in the future. I'm going away, to think it over and to decide. If you want to follow me, I'll be at the lodge in Woodstock." It was an old hunting cabin in a forest of the Berkshire Mountains, which she had inherited from her father and had not visited for years.

"I want to follow," he whispered, "I want to quit, and . . . and I can't. I can't make myself do it."

"Then will you do me a favor?"

"Of course."

"Don't communicate with me about the railroad. I don't want to hear it. Don't tell anyone where I am, except Hank Rearden. If he asks, tell him about the cabin and how to get there. But no one else. I don't want to see anybody."

"AU right."

"Promise?"

"Of course."

"When I decide what's to become of me, I'll let you know."

"Ill wait."

"That's all, Eddie."

He knew that every word was measured and that nothing else could be said between them at this moment. He inclined his head, letting it say the rest, then walked out of the office.

She saw the chief engineer's report still lying open on her desk, and thought that she had to order him at once to resume the work on the Winston section, then remembered that it was not her problem any longer. She felt no pain. She knew that the pain would come later and that it would be a tearing agony of pain, and that the numbness of this moment was a rest granted to her, not after, but before, to make her ready to bear it. But it did not matter. If that is required of me, then I'll bear it—she thought.

She sat down at her desk and telephoned Rearden at his mills in Pennsylvania.

"Hello, dearest," he said. He said it simply and clearly, as if he wanted to say it because it was real and right, and he needed to hold on to the concepts of reality and Tightness.

"Hank, I've quit."

"I see." He sounded as if he had expected it.

"Nobody came to get me, no destroyer, perhaps there never was any destroyer, after all. I don't know what I'll do next, but I have to get away, so that I won't have to see any of them for a while. Then I'll decide. I know that you can't go with me right now."

"No. I have two weeks in which they expect me to sign their Gift Certificate. I want to be right here when the two weeks expire."

"Do you need me—for the two weeks?"

"No. It's worse for you than for me. You have no way to fight them. I have. I think I'm glad they did it. It's clear and final. Don't worry about me. Rest. Rest from all of it, first."

"Yes."

"Where are you going?"

"To the country. To a cabin I own in the Berkshires. If you want to see me, Eddie Willers will tell you the way to get there. I'll be back in two weeks."

"Will you do me a favor?"

"Yes."

"Don't come back until I come for you."

"But I want to be here, when it happens."

"Leave that up to me."

"Whatever they do to you, I want it done to me also."

"Leave it up to me. Dearest, don't you understand? I think that what I want most right now is what you want: not to see any of them. But I have to stay here for a while. So it will help me if I know that you, at least, are out of their reach. I want to keep one clean point in my mind, to lean against. It will be only a short while—and then I'll come for you. Do you understand?"

"Yes, my darling. So long."

It was weightlessly easy to walk out of her office and down the stretching halls of Taggart Transcontinental. She walked, looking ahead, her steps advancing with the unbroken, unhurried rhythm of finality.

Her face was held level and it had a look of astonishment, of acceptance, of repose.

She walked across the concourse of the Terminal. She saw the statue of Nathaniel Taggart. But she felt no pain from it and no reproach, only the rising fullness of her love, only the feeling that she was going to join him, not in death, but in that which had been his life.

The first man to quit at Rearden Steel was Tom Colby, rolling mill foreman, head of the Rearden Steel Workers Union. For ten years, he had heard himself denounced throughout the country, because his was a "company union" and because he had never engaged in a violent conflict with the management. This was true: no conflict had ever been necessary; Rearden paid a higher wage scale than any union scale in the country, for which he demanded—and got—the best labor force to be found anywhere.

When Tom Colby told him that he was quitting, Rearden nodded, without comment or questions.

"I won't work under these conditions, myself," Colby added quietly, "and I won't help, to keep the men working. They trust me. I won't be the Judas goat leading them to the stockyards."

"What are you going to do for a living?" asked Rearden.

"I've saved enough to last me for about a year."

"And after that?"

Colby shrugged.

Rearden thought of the boy with the angry eyes, who mined coal at night as a criminal. He thought of all the dark roads, the alleys, the back yards of the country, where the best of the country's men would now exchange their services in jungle barter, in chance jobs, in unrecorded transactions. He thought of the end of that road.

Tom Colby seemed to know what he was thinking. "You're on your way to end up right alongside of me, Mr. Rearden," he said. "Are you going to sign your brains over to them?"

"No."

"And after that?"

Rearden shrugged.

Colby's eyes watched him for a moment, pale, shrewd eyes in a furnace-tanned face with soot-engraved wrinkles. "They've been telling us for years that it's you against me, Mr. Rearden. But it isn't. It's Orren Boyle and Fred Kinnan against you and me."

"I know it."

The Wet Nurse had never entered Rearden's office, as if sensing that that was a place he had no right to enter. He always waited to catch a glimpse of Rearden outside. The directive had attached him to his job, as the mills' official watchdog of over-or-under-production. He stopped Rearden, a few days later, in an alley between the rows of open-hearth furnaces. There was an odd look of fierceness on the boy's face.

"Mr. Rearden," he said, "I wanted to tell you that if you want to pour ten times the quota of Rearden Metal or steel or pig iron or anything, and bootleg it all over the place to anybody at any price—I wanted to tell you to go ahead. Ill fix it up. I'll juggle the books, I'll fake the reports, I'll get phony witnesses, I'll forge affidavits, I'll commit perjury—so you don't have to worry, there won't be any trouble!"

"Now why do you want to do that?" asked Rearden, smiling, but his smile vanished when he heard the boy answer earnestly: "Because I want, for once, to do something moral."

"That's not the way to be moral—" Rearden started, and stopped abruptly, realizing that- it was the way, the only way left, realizing through how many twists of intellectual corruption upon corruption this boy had to struggle toward his momentous discovery.

"I guess that's not the word," the boy said sheepishly. "I know it's a stuffy, old-fashioned word. That's not what I meant. I meant—" It was a sudden, desperate cry of incredulous anger: "Mr. Rearden, they have no right to do it!"

"What?"

"Take Rearden Metal away from you."

Rearden smiled and, prompted by a desperate pity, said, "Forget it, Non-Absolute. There are no rights."

"I know there aren't. But I mean . . . what I mean is that they can't do it."

"Why not?" He could not help smiling.

"Mr. Rearden, don't sign the Gift Certificate! Don't sign it, on principle."

"I won't sign it. But there aren't any principles."

"I know there aren't." He was reciting it in full earnestness, with the honesty of a conscientious student: "I know that everything is relative and that nobody can know anything and that reason is an illusion and that there isn't any reality. But I'm just talking about Rearden Metal.

Don't sign, Mr. Rearden. Morals or no morals, principles or no principles, just don't sign it—because it isn't right!"

No one else mentioned the directive in Rearden's presence. Silence was the new aspect about the mills. The men did not speak to him when he appeared in the workshops, and he noticed that they did not speak to one another. The personnel office received no formal resignations. But every other morning, one or two men failed to appear and never appeared again. Inquiries at their homes found the homes abandoned and the men gone. The personnel office did not report these desertions, as the directive required; instead, Rearden began to see unfamiliar faces among the workers, the drawn, beaten faces of the long unemployed, and heard them addressed by the names of the men who had quit. He asked no questions.

There was silence throughout the country. He did not know how many industrialists had retired and vanished on May I and 2, leaving their plants to be seized. He counted ten among his own customers, including McNeil of the McNeil Car Foundry in Chicago. He had no way of learning about the others; no reports appeared in the newspapers.

The front pages of the newspapers were suddenly full of stories about spring floods, traffic accidents, school picnics and golden-wedding anniversaries.

There was silence in his own home. Lillian had departed on a vacation trip to Florida, in mid-April; it had astonished him, as an inexplicable whim; it was the first trip she had taken alone since their marriage. Philip avoided him, with a look of panic. His mother stared at Rearden in reproachful bewilderment; she said nothing, but she kept bursting into tears in his presence, her manner suggesting that her tears were the most important aspect to consider in whatever disaster it was that she sensed approaching.

On the morning of May 15, he sat at the desk in his office, above the spread of the mills, and watched the colors of the smoke rising to the clear, blue sky. There were spurts of transparent smoke, like waves of heat, invisible but for the structures that shivered behind them; there were streaks of red smoke, and sluggish columns of yellow, and light, floating spirals of blue—and the thick, tight, swiftly pouring coils that looked like twisted bolts of satin tinged a mother-of-pearl pink by the summer sun.

The buzzer rang on his desk, and Miss Ives voice said, "Dr. Floyd Ferris to see you, without appointment, Mr. Rearden." In spite of its rigid formality, her tone conveyed the question: Shall I throw him out?

There was a faint movement of astonishment in Rearden's face, barely above the line of indifference: he had not expected that particular emissary. He answered evenly, "Ask him to come in."

Dr. Ferris did not smile as he walked toward Rearden's desk; he merely wore a look suggesting that Rearden knew full well that he had good reason to smile and so he would abstain from the obvious.

He sat down in front of the desk, not waiting for an invitation; he carried a briefcase, which he placed across his knees; he acted as if words were superfluous, since his reappearance in this office had made everything clear.

Rearden sat watching him in patient silence.

"Since the deadline for the signing of the national Gift Certificates expires tonight at midnight," said Dr. Ferris, in the tone of a salesman extending a special courtesy to a customer, "I have come to obtain your signature, Mr. Rearden."

He paused, with an air of suggesting that the formula now called for an answer.

"Go on," said Rearden. "I am listening."

"Yes, I suppose I should explain," said Dr. Ferris, "that we wish to get your signature early in the day in order to announce the fact on a national news broadcast. Although the gift program has gone through quite smoothly, there are still a few stubborn individualists left, who have failed to sign—small fry, really, whose patents are of no crucial value, but we cannot let them remain unbound, as a matter of principle, you understand. They are, we believe, waiting to follow your lead. You have a great popular following, Mr. Rearden, much greater than you suspected or knew how to use. Therefore, the announcement that you have signed will remove the last hopes of resistance and, by midnight, will bring in the last signatures, thus completing the program on schedule."

Rearden knew that of all possible speeches, this was the last Dr.

Ferris would make if any doubt of his surrender remained in the man's mind.

"Go on," said Rearden evenly. "You haven't finished."

"You know—as you have demonstrated at your trial—how important it is, and why, that we obtain all that property with the voluntary consent of the victims." Dr. Ferris opened his briefcase. "Here is the Gift Certificate, Mr. Rearden. We have filled it out and all you have to do is to sign your name at the bottom."

The piece of paper, which he placed in front of Rearden, looked like a small college diploma, with the text printed in old-fashioned script and the particulars inserted by typewriter. The thing stated that he, Henry Rearden, hereby transferred to the nation all rights to the metal alloy now known as "Rearden Metal," which would henceforth be manufactured by all who so desired, and which would bear the name of "Miracle Metal," chosen by the representatives of the people.

Glancing at the paper, Rearden wondered whether it was a deliberate mockery of decency, or so low an estimate of their victims' intelligence, that had made the designers of this paper print the text across a faint drawing of the Statue of Liberty.

His eyes moved slowly to Dr. Ferris' face. "You would not have come here," he said, "unless you had some extraordinary kind of blackjack to use on me. What is it?"

"Of course," said Dr. Ferris. "I would expect you to understand that. That is why no lengthy explanations are necessary." He opened his briefcase. "Do you wish to see my blackjack? I have brought a few samples."

In the manner of a cardsharp whisking out a long fan of cards with one snap of the hand, he spread before Rearden a line of glossy photographic prints. They were photostats of hotel and auto court registers, bearing in Rearden's handwriting the names of Mr. and Mrs. J.

Smith.

"You know, of course," said Dr. Ferris softly, "but you might wish to see whether we know it, that Mrs. J. Smith is Miss Dagny Taggart."

He found nothing to observe in Rearden's face. Rearden had not moved to bend over the prints, but sat looking down at them with grave attentiveness, as if, from the perspective of distance, he were discovering something about them which he had not known.

"We have a great deal of additional evidence," said Dr. Ferris, and tossed down on the desk a photostat of the jeweler's bill for the ruby pendant. "You wouldn't care to see the sworn statements of apartment house doormen and night clerks—they contain nothing that would be new to you, except the number of witnesses who know where you spent your nights in New York, for about the last two years. You mustn't blame those people too much. It's an interesting characteristic of epochs such as ours that people begin to be afraid of saying the things they want to say—and afraid, when questioned, to remain silent about things they'd prefer never to utter. That is to be expected. But you would be astonished if you knew who gave us the original tip."

"I know it," said Rearden; his voice conveyed no reaction. The trip to Florida was not inexplicable to him any longer.

"There is nothing in this blackjack of mine that can harm you personally," said Dr. Ferris, "We knew that no form of personal injury would ever make you give in. Therefore, I am telling you frankly that this will not hurt you at all. It will only hurt Miss Taggart"

Rearden was looking straight at him now, but Dr. Ferris wondered why it seemed to him that the calm, closed face was moving away into a greater and greater distance.

"If this affair of yours is spread from one end of the country to the other," said Dr, Ferris, "by such experts in the art of smearing as Bertram Scudder, it will do no actual damage to your reputation.

Beyond a few glances of curiosity and a few raised eyebrows in a few of the stuffier drawing rooms, you will get off quite easily. Affairs of this sort are expected of a man. In fact, it will enhance your reputation.

It will give you an aura of romantic glamour among the women and, among the men, it will give you a certain kind of prestige, in the nature of envy for an unusual conquest. But what it will do to Miss Taggart—with her spotless name, her reputation for being above scandal, her peculiar position of a woman in a strictly masculine business—what it will do to her, what she will see in the eyes of everyone she meets, what she will hear from every man she deals with—I will leave that up to your own mind to imagine. And to consider."

Rearden felt nothing but a great stillness and a great clarity. It was as if some voice were telling him sternly: This is the time—the scene is lighted—now look. And standing naked in the great light, he was looking quietly, solemnly, stripped of fear, of pain, of hope, with nothing left to him but the desire to know.

Dr. Ferris was astonished to hear him say slowly, in the dispassionate tone of an abstract statement that did not seem to be addressed to his listener, "But all your calculations rest on the fact that Miss Taggart is a virtuous woman, not the slut you're going to call her."

"Yes, of course," said Dr. Ferris.

"And that this means much more to me than a casual affair."

"Of course."

"If she and I were the kind of scum you're going to make us appear, your blackjack wouldn't work."

"No, it wouldn't.”

"If our relationship were the depravity you're going to proclaim it to be, you'd have no way to harm us."

"No."

"We'd be outside your power."

"Actually—yes."

It was not to Dr. Ferris that Rearden was speaking. He was seeing a long line of men stretched through the centuries from Plato onward, whose heir and final product was an incompetent little professor with the appearance of a gigolo and the soul of a thug.

"I offered you, once, a chance to join us," said Dr. Ferris. "You refused. Now you can see the consequences. How a man of your intelligence thought that he could win by playing it straight, I can't imagine."

"But if I had joined you," said Rearden with the same detachment, as if he were not speaking about himself, "what would I have found worth looting from Orren Boyle?"

"Oh hell, there's always enough suckers to expropriate in the world!"

"Such as Miss Taggart? As Ken Danagger? As Ellis Wyatt? As I?"

"Such as any man who wants to be impractical."

"You mean that it is not practical to live on earth, is it?"

He did not know whether Dr. Ferris answered him. He was not listening any longer. He was seeing the pendulous face of Orren Boyle with the small slits of pig's eyes, the doughy face of Mr. Mowen with the eyes that scurried away from any speaker and any fact—he was seeing them go through the jerky motions of an ape performing a routine it had learned to copy by muscular habit, performing it in order to manufacture Rearden Metal, with no knowledge and no capacity to know what had taken place in the experimental laboratory of Rearden Steel through ten years of passionate devotion to an excruciating effort. It was proper that they should now call it "Miracle Metal".—a miracle was the only name they could give to those ten years and to that faculty from which Rearden Metal was born—a miracle was all that the Metal could be in their eyes, the product of an unknown, unknowable cause, an object in nature, not to be explained, but to be seized, like a stone or a weed, theirs for the seizing—"are we to let the many remain in want while the few withhold from us the better products and methods available?"

If I had not known that my life depends on my mind and my effort—he was saying soundlessly to the line of men stretched through the centuries—if I had not made it my highest moral purpose to exercise the best of my effort and the fullest capacity of my mind in order to support and expand my life, you would have found nothing to loot from me, nothing to support your own existence. It is not my sins that you're using to injure me, but my virtues—my virtues by your own acknowledgment, since your own life depends on them, since you need them, since you do not seek to destroy my achievement but to seize it.

He remembered the voice of the gigolo of science saying to him: "We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick." We were not after power—he said to the gigolo's ancestors-in-spirit—and we did not live by means of that which we condemned. We regarded productive ability as virtue—and we let the degree of his virtue be the measure of a man's reward. We drew no advantage from the things we regarded as evil—we did not require the existence of bank robbers in order to operate our banks, or of burglars in order to provide for our homes, or of murderers in order to protect our lives. But you need the products of a man's ability—yet you proclaim that productive ability is a selfish evil and you turn the degree of a man's productiveness into the measure of his loss. We lived by that which we held to be good and punished that which we held to be evil. You live by that which you denounce as evil and punish that which you know to be good.

He remembered the formula of the punishment that Lillian had sought to impose on him, the formula he had considered too monstrous to believe—and he saw it now in its full application, as a system of thought, as a way of life and on a world scale. There it was: the punishment that required the victim's own virtue as the fuel to make it work—his invention of Rearden Metal being used as the cause of his expropriation—Dagny's honor and the depth of their feeling for each other being used as a tool of blackmail, a blackmail from which the depraved would be immune—and, in the People's States of Europe, millions of men being held in bondage by means of their desire to live, by means of their energy drained in forced labor, by means of their ability to feed their masters, by means of the hostage system, of their love for their children or wives or friends—by means of love, ability and pleasure as the fodder for threats and the bait for extortion, with love tied to fear, ability to punishment, ambition to confiscation, with blackmail as law, with escape from pain, not quest for pleasure, as the only incentive to effort and the only reward of achievement—men held enslaved by means of whatever living power they possessed and of whatever joy they found in life. Such was the code that the world had accepted and such was the key to the code: that it hooked man's love of existence to a circuit of torture, so that only the man who had nothing to offer would have nothing to fear, so that the virtues which made life possible and the values which gave it meaning became the agents of its destruction, so that one's best became the tool of one's agony, and man's life on earth became impractical.

“Yours was the code of life," said the voice of a man whom he could not forget. "What, then, is theirs?"

Why had the world accepted it?—he thought. How had the victims come to sanction a code that pronounced them guilty of the fact of existing? . . . And then the violence of an inner blow became the total stillness of his body as he sat looking at a sudden vision: Hadn't he done it also? Hadn't he given his sanction to the code of self damnation? Dagny—he thought—and the depth of their feeling for each other . . . the blackmail from which the depraved would be immune . . . hadn't he, too, once called it depravity? Hadn't he been first to throw at her all the insults which the human scum was now threatening to throw at her in public? Hadn't he accepted as guilt the highest happiness he had ever found?

"You who won't allow one per cent of impurity into an alloy of metal," the unforgotten voice was saying to him, "what have you allowed into your moral code?"

"Well, Mr. Rearden?" said the voice of Dr, Ferris. "Do you understand me now? Do we get the Metal or do we make a public showplace out of Miss Taggart's bedroom?"

He was not seeing Dr. Ferris. He was seeing—in the violent clarity that was like a spotlight tearing every riddle open to him—the day he met Dagny for the first time.

It was a few months after she had become Vice-President of Taggart Transcontinental. He had been hearing skeptically, for some time, the rumors that the railroad was run by Jim Taggart's sister. That summer, when he grew exasperated at Taggart's delays and contradictions over an order of rail for a new cutoff, an order which Taggart kept placing, altering and withdrawing, somebody told him that if he wished to get any sense or action out of Taggart Transcontinental, he'd better speak to Jim's sister. He telephoned her office to make an appointment and insisted on having it that same afternoon. Her secretary told him that Miss Taggart would be at the construction site of the new cutoff, that afternoon, at Milford Station between New York and Philadelphia, but would be glad to see him there if he wished. He went to the appointment resentfully; he did not like such businesswomen as he had met, and he felt that railroads were no business for a woman to play with; he expected a spoiled heiress who used her name and sex as substitute for ability, some eyebrow-plucked, over groomed female, like the lady executives of department stores.

He got off the last car of a long train, far beyond the platform of Milford Station. There was a clutter of sidings, freight cars, cranes and steam shovels around him, descending from the main track down the slope of a ravine where men were grading the roadbed of the new cutoff. He started walking between the sidings toward the station building. Then he stopped.

He saw a girl standing on top of a pile of machinery on a flatcar.

She was looking off at the ravine, her head lifted, strands of disordered hair stirring in the wind. Her plain gray suit was like a thin coating of metal over a slender body against the spread of sun-flooded space and sky. Her posture had the lightness and unself-conscious precision of an arrogantly pure self-confidence. She was watching the work, her glance intent and purposeful, the glance of competence enjoying its own function. She looked as if this were her place, her moment and her world, she looked as if enjoyment were her natural state, her face was the living form of an active, living intelligence., a young girl's face with a woman's mouth, she seemed unaware of her body except as of a taut instrument ready to serve her purpose in any manner she wished.

Had he asked himself a moment earlier whether he carried in his mind an image of what he wanted a woman to look like, he would have answered that he did not; yet, seeing her, he knew that this was the image and that it had been for years. But he was not looking at her as at a woman. He had forgotten where he was and on what errand, he was held by a child's sensation of joy in the immediate moment, by the delight of the unexpected and undiscovered, he was held by the astonishment of realizing how seldom he came upon a sight he truly liked, liked in complete acceptance and for its own sake, he was looking up at her with a faint smile, as he would have looked at a statue or a landscape, and what he felt was the sheer pleasure of the sight, the purest esthetic pleasure he had ever experienced.

He saw a switchman going by and he asked, pointing, "Who is that?"

"Dagny Taggart," said the man, walking on.

Rearden felt as if the words struck him inside his throat. He felt the start of a current that cut his breath for a moment, then went slowly down his body, carrying in its wake a sense of weight, a drained heaviness that left him no capacity but one. He was aware—with an abnormal clarity—of the place, the woman's name, and everything it implied, but all of it had receded into some outer ring and had become a pressure that left him alone in the center, as the ring's meaning and essence—and his only reality was the desire to have this woman, now, here, on top of the flatcar in the open sun—to have her before a word was spoken between them, as the first act of their meeting, because it would say everything and because they had earned it long ago.

She turned her head. In the slow curve of the movement, her eyes came to his and stopped. He felt certain that she saw the nature of his glance, that she was held by it, yet did not name it to herself.

Her eyes moved on and he saw her speak to some man who stood beside the flatcar, taking notes.

Two things struck him together: his return to his normal reality, and the shattering impact of guilt. He felt a moment's approach to that which no man may feel fully and survive: a sense of self-hatred—the more terrible because some part of him refused to accept it and made him feel guiltier. It was not a progression of words, but the instantaneous verdict of an emotion, a verdict that told him: This, then, was his nature, this was his depravity—that the shameful desire he had never been able to conquer, came to him in response to the only sight of beauty he had found, that it came with a violence he had not known to be possible, and that the only freedom now left to him was to hide it and to despise himself, but never to be rid of it so long as he and this woman were alive.

He did not know how long he stood there or what devastation that span of time left within him. All that he could preserve was the will to decide that she must never know it.

He waited until she had descended to the ground and the man with the notes had departed; then he approached her and said coldly: "Miss Taggart? I am Henry Rearden."

"Oh!" It was just a small break, then he heard the quietly natural "How do you do, Mr. Rearden."

He knew, not admitting it to himself, that the break came from some faint equivalent of his own feeling: she was glad that a face she had liked belonged to a man she could admire. When he proceeded to speak to her about business, his manner was more harshly abrupt than it had ever been with any of his masculine customers.

Now, looking from the memory of the girl on the flatcar to the Gift Certificate lying on his desk, he felt as if the two met in a single shock, fusing all the days and doubts he had lived between them, and, by the glare of the explosion, in a moment's vision of a final sum, he saw the answer to all his questions.

He thought: Guilty?—guiltier than I had known, far guiltier than I had thought, that day—guilty of the evil of damning as guilt that which was my best. I damned the fact that my mind and body were a unit, and that my body responded to the values of my mind. I damned the fact that joy is the core of existence, the motive power of every living being, that it is the need of one's body as it is the goal of one's spirit, that my body was not a weight of inanimate muscles, but an instrument able to give me an experience of superlative joy to unite my flesh and my spirit. That capacity, which I damned as shameful, had left me indifferent to sluts, but gave me my one desire in answer to a woman's greatness. That desire, which I damned as obscene, did not come from the sight of her body, but from the knowledge that the lovely form I saw, did express the spirit I was seeing—it was not her body that I wanted, but her person—it was not the girl in gray that I had to possess, but the woman who ran a railroad.

But I damned my body's capacity to express what I felt, I damned, as an affront to her, the highest tribute I could give her—just as they damn my ability to translate the work of my mind into Rearden Metal, just as they damn me for the power to transform matter to serve my needs. I accepted their code and believed, as they taught me, that the values of one's spirit must remain as an impotent longing, unexpressed in action, untranslated into reality, while the life of one's body must be lived in misery, as a senseless, degrading performance, and those who attempt to enjoy it must be branded as inferior animals.

I broke their code, but I fell into the trap they intended, the trap of a code devised to be broken. I took no pride in my rebellion, I took it as guilt, I did not damn them, I damned myself, I did not damn their code, I damned existence—and I hid my happiness as a shameful secret. I should have lived it openly, as of our right—or made her my wife, as in truth she was. But I branded my happiness as evil and made her bear it as a disgrace. What they want to do to her now, I did it first. I made it possible.

I did it—in the name of pity for the most contemptible woman I know. That, too, was their code, and I accepted it. I believed that one person owes a duty to another with no payment for it in return. I believed that it was my duty to love a woman who gave me nothing, who betrayed everything I lived for, who demanded her happiness at the price of mine. I believed that love is some static gift which, once granted, need no longer be deserved—just as they believe that wealth is a static possession which can be seized and held without further effort. I believed that love is a gratuity, not a reward to be earned—just as they believe it is their right to demand an unearned wealth.

And just as they believe that their need is a claim on my energy, so I believed that her unhappiness was a claim on my life. For the sake of pity, not justice, T endured ten years of self-torture. I placed pity above my own conscience, and this is the core of my guilt. My crime was committed when I said to her, "By every standard of mine, to maintain our marriage will be a vicious fraud. But my standards are not yours.

I do not understand yours, I never have, but I will accept them."

Here they are, lying on my desk, those standards I accepted without understanding, here is the manner of her love for me, that love which I never believed, but tried to spare. Here is the final product of the unearned. I thought that it was proper to commit injustice, so long as I would be the only one to suffer. But nothing can justify injustice.

And this is the punishment for accepting as proper that hideous evil which is self-immolation. I thought that I would be the only victim.

Instead, I've sacrificed the noblest woman to the vilest. When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.

It was not the cheap little looters of wealth who have beaten me—it was I. They did not disarm me—I threw away my weapon. This is a battle that cannot be fought except with clean hands—because the enemy's sole power is in the sores of one's conscience—and I accepted a code that made me regard the strength of my hands as a sin and a stain.

"Do we get the Metal, Mr. Rearden?"

He looked from the Gift Certificate on his desk to the memory of the girl on the flatcar. He asked himself whether he could deliver the radiant being he had seen in that moment, to the looters of the mind and the thugs of the press. Could he continue to let the innocent bear punishment? Could he let her take the stand he should have taken?

Could he now defy the enemy's code, when the disgrace would be hers, not his—when the muck would be thrown at her, not at him—when she would have to fight, while he'd be spared? Could he let her existence be turned into a hell he would have no way of sharing?

He sat still, looking up at her, I love you, he said to the girl on the flatcar, silently pronouncing the words that had been the meaning of that moment four years ago, feeling the solemn happiness that belonged with the words, even though this was how he had to say it to her for the first time.

He looked down at the. Gift Certificate. Dagny, he thought, you would not let me do it if you knew, you will hate me for it if you learn—but I cannot let you pay my debts. The fault was mine and I will not shift to you the punishment which is mine to take. Even if I have nothing else now left to me, I have this much: that I see the truth, that I am free of their guilt, that I can now stand guiltless in my own eyes, that I know I am right, right fully and for the first time—and that I will remain faithful to the one commandment of my code which I have never broken: to be a man who pays his own way.

I love you, he said to the girl on the flatcar, feeling as if the light of that summer's sun were touching his forehead, as if he, too, were standing under an open sky over an unobstructed earth, with nothing left to him except himself.

"Well, Mr. Rearden? Are you going to sign?'1 asked Dr. Ferris.

Rearden's eyes moved to him. He had forgotten that Ferris was there, he did not know whether Ferris had been speaking, arguing or waiting in silence.

"Oh, that?" said Rearden.

He picked up a pen and with no second glance, with the easy gesture of a millionaire signing a check, he signed his name at the foot of the Statue of Liberty and pushed the Gift Certificate across the desk.

CHAPTER VII
THE MORATORIUM ON BRAINS

"Where have you been all this time?" Eddie Willers asked the worker in the underground cafeteria, and added, with a smile that was an appeal, an apology and a confession of despair, "Oh, I know it's I who've stayed away from here for weeks." The smile looked like the effort of a crippled child groping for a gesture that he could not perform any longer. "I did come here once, about two weeks ago, but you weren't here that night. I was afraid you'd gone . . . so many people are vanishing without notice. I hear there's hundreds of them roving around the country. The police have been arresting them for leaving their jobs—they're called deserters—but there's too many of them and no food to feed them in jail, so nobody gives a damn any more, one way or another. I hear the deserters are just wandering about, doing odd jobs or worse—who's got any odd jobs to offer these days? . . . It's our best men that we're losing, the kind who've been with the company for twenty years or more. Why did they have to chain them to their jobs? Those men never intended to quit—but now they're quitting at the slightest disagreement, just dropping their tools and walking off, any hour of the day or night, leaving us in all sorts of jams—the men who used to leap out of bed and come running if the railroad needed them. . . . You should see the kind of human driftwood we're getting to fill the vacancies. Some of them mean well, but they're scared of their own shadows. Others are the kind of scum I didn't think existed—they get the jobs and they know that we can't throw them out once they're in, so they make it clear that they don't intend to work for their pay and never did intend. They're the kind of men who like it—who like the way things are now. Can you imagine that there are human beings who like it? Well, there are. . . . You know, I don't think that I really believe it—all that's happening to us these days. It's happening all right, but I don't believe it. I keep thinking that insanity is a state where a person can't tell what's real.

Well, what's real now is insane—and if I accepted it as real, I'd have to lose my mind, wouldn't I? . . . I go on working and I keep telling myself that this is Taggart Transcontinental. I keep waiting for her to come back—for die door to open at any moment and—oh God, I'm not supposed to say that! . . . What? You knew it? You knew that she's gone? . . . They're keeping it secret. But I guess everybody knows it, only nobody is supposed to say it. They're telling people that she's away on a leave of absence. She's still listed as our Vice-President in Charge of Operation. I think Jim and I are the only ones who know that she has resigned for good. Jim is scared to death that his friends in Washington will take it out on him, if it becomes known that she's quit. It's supposed to be disastrous for public morale, if any prominent person quits, and Jim doesn't want them to know that he's got a deserter right in his own family. . . . But that's not all. Jim is scared that the stockholders, the employees and whoever we do business with, will lose the last of their confidence in Taggart Transcontinental if they learn that she's gone. Confidence! You'd think that it wouldn't matter now, since there's nothing any of them can do about it. And yet, Jim knows that we have to preserve some semblance of the greatness that Taggart Transcontinental once stood for. And he knows that the last of it went with her. . . . No, they don't know where she is. . . . Yes, I do, but I won't tell them. I'm the only one who knows. . . . Oh yes, they've been trying to find out. They've tried to pump me in every way they could think of, but it's no use.

I won't tell anyone. . . . You should see the trained seal that we now have in her place—our new Operating Vice-President. Oh sure, we have one—that is, we have and we haven't. It's like everything they do today—it is and it ain't, at the same tune. His name is Clifton Locey—he's from Jim's personal staff—a bright, progressive young man of fortyseven and a friend of Jim's. He's only supposed to be pinch-hitting for her, but he sits in her office and we all know that that's the new Operating Vice-President. He gives the orders—that is, he sees to it that he's never caught actually giving an order. He works very hard at making sure that no decision can ever be pinned down on him, so that he won't be blamed for anything. You see, his purpose is not to operate a railroad, but to hold a job. He doesn't want to run trains—he wants to please Jim. He doesn't give a damn whether there's a single train moving or not, so long as he can make a good impression on Jim and on the boys in Washington. So far, Mr. Clifton Locey has managed to frame up two men: a young third assistant, for not relaying an order which Mr. Locey had never given—and the freight manager, for issuing an order which Mr. Locey did give, only the freight manager couldn't prove it. Both men were fired, officially, by ruling of the Unification Board. . . . When things go well—which is never longer than half an hour—Mr. Locey makes it a point to remind us that 'these are not the days of Miss Taggart.' At the first sign of trouble, he calls me into his office and asks me—casually, in the midst of the most irrelevant drivel—what Miss Taggart used to do in such an emergency. I tell him, whenever I can. I tell myself that it's Taggart Transcontinental, and . . . and there's thousands of lives on dozens of trains that hang on our decisions. Between emergencies, Mr. Locey goes out of his way to be rude to me—that's so I wouldn't think that he needs me. He's made it a point to change everything she used to do, in every respect that doesn't matter, but he's damn cautious not to change anything that matters. The only trouble is that he can't always tell which is which. . . . On his first day in her office, he told me that it wasn't a good idea to have a picture of Nat Taggart on the wall—'Nat Taggart,' he said, 'belongs to a dark past, to the age of selfish greed, he is not exactly a symbol of our modern, progressive policies, so it could make a bad impression, people could identify me with him.' 'No, they couldn't,' I said—but I took the picture off his wall. . . . What?

. . . No, she doesn't know any of it. I haven't communicated with her.

Not once. She told me not to. . . . Last week, I almost quit. It was over Chick's Special. Mr. Chick Morrison of Washington, whoever the hell he is, has gone on a speaking tour of the whole country—to speak about the directive and build up the people's morale, as things are getting to be pretty wild everywhere. He demanded a special train, for himself and party—a sleeper, a parlor car and a diner with barroom and lounge. The Unification Board gave him permission to travel at a hundred miles an hour—by reason, the ruling said, of this being a non-profit journey. Well, so it is. It's just a journey to talk people into continuing to break their backs at making profits in order to support men who are superior by reason of not making any. Well, our trouble came when Mr. Chick Morrison demanded a Diesel engine for his train. We had none to give him. Every Diesel we own is out on the road, pulling the Comet and the transcontinental freights, and there wasn't a spare one anywhere on the system, except—well, that was an exception I wasn't going to mention to Mr. Clifton Locey.

Mr. Locey raised the roof, screaming that come hell or high water we couldn't refuse a demand of Mr. Chick Morrison. I don't know what damn fool finally told him about the extra Diesel that was kept at Winston, Colorado, at the mouth of the tunnel. You know the way our Diesels break down nowadays, they're all breathing their last—so you can understand why that extra Diesel had to be kept at the tunnel. I explained it to Mr. Locey, I threatened him, I pleaded, I told him that she had made it our strictest rule that Winston Station was never to be left without an extra Diesel. He told me to remember that he was not Miss Taggart—as if I could ever forget it!—and that the rule was nonsense, because nothing had happened all these years, so Winston could do without a Diesel for a couple of months, and he wasn't going to worry about some theoretical disaster in the future when we were up against the very real, practical, immediate disaster of getting Mr.

Chick Morrison angry at us. Well, Chick's Special got the Diesel. The superintendent of the Colorado Division quit. Mr. Locey gave that job to a friend of his own. I wanted to quit. I had never wanted to so badly. But I didn't. . . . No, I haven't heard from her. I haven't heard a word since she left. Why do you keep questioning me about her? Forget it. She won't be back, . . . I don't know what it is that I'm hoping for. Nothing, I guess. I just go day by day, and I try not to look ahead. At first, I hoped that somebody would save us. I thought maybe it would be Hank Rearden. But he gave in. I don't know what they did to him to make him sign, but I know that it must have been something terrible. Everybody thinks so. Everybody's whispering about it, wondering what sort of pressure was used on him. . . . No, nobody knows. He's made no public statements and he's refused to see anyone, . . . But, listen, I'll tell you something else that everybody's whispering about. Lean closer, will you?—I don't want to speak too loudly. They say that Orren Boyle seems to have known about that directive long ago, weeks or months in advance, because he had started, quietly and secretly, to reconstruct his furnaces for the production of Rearden Metal, in one of his lesser steel plants, an obscure little place way out on the coast of Maine, He was ready to start pouring the Metal the moment Rearden's extortion paper—I mean, Gift Certificate—was signed. But—listen—the night before they were to start, Boyle's men were heating the furnaces in that place on the coast, when they heard a voice, they didn't know whether it came from a plane or a radio or some sort of loud-speaker, but it was a man's voice and it said that he would give them ten minutes to get out of the place.

They got out. They started going and they kept on going—because the man's voice had said that he was Ragnar Danneskjold. In the next half-hour, Boyle's mills were razed to the ground. Razed, wiped out, not a brick of them left standing. They say it was done by long-range naval guns, from somewhere way out on the Atlantic. Nobody saw Danneskjold's ship. . . . That's what people are whispering. The newspapers haven't printed a word about it. The boys in Washington say that it's only a rumor spread by panic-mongers. . . . I don't know whether the story is true. I think it is. I hope it is. . . . You know, when I was fifteen years old, I used to wonder how any man could become a criminal, I couldn't understand what would make it possible.

Now—now I'm glad that Ragnar Danneskjold has blown up those mills. May God bless him and never let them find him, whatever and wherever he is! . . . Yes, that's what I've come to feel. Well, how much do they think people can take? . . . It's not so bad for me in the daytime, because I can keep busy and not think, but it gets me at night. I can't sleep any more, I lie awake for hours. . . . Yes!—if you want to know it—yes, it's because I'm worried about her! I'm scared to death for her. Woodstock is just a miserable little hole of a place, miles away from everything, and the Taggart lodge is twenty miles farther, twenty miles of a twisting trail in a godforsaken forest. How do I know what might happen to her there, alone, and with the kind of gangs that are roving all through the country these nights—just through such desolate parts of the country as the Berkshires? . . . I know I shouldn't think about it. I know that she can take care of herself. Only I wish she'd drop me a line. I wish I could go there. But she told me not to.

I told her I'd wait. . . . You know, I'm glad you're here tonight. It helps me—talking to you and . . . just seeing you here. You won't vanish, like all the others, will you? . . . What? Next week? . . . Oh, on your vacation. For how long? . . . How do you rate a whole month's vacation? . . . I wish I could do that, too—take a month off at my own expense. But they wouldn't let me. . . . Really? I envy you. . . . I wouldn't have envied you a few years ago. But now—now I'd like to get away. Now I envy you—if you've been able to take a month off every summer for twelve years."

It was a dark road, but it led in a new direction. Rearden walked from his mills, not toward his house, but toward the city of Philadelphia.

It was a great distance to walk, but he had wanted to do it tonight, as he had done it every evening of the past week. He felt at peace in the empty darkness of the countryside, with nothing but the black shapes of trees around him, with no motion but that of his own body and of branches stirring in the wind, with no lights but the slow sparks of the fireflies flickering through the hedges. The two hours between mills and city were his span of rest.

He had moved out of his home to an apartment in Philadelphia. He had given no explanation to his mother and Philip, he had said nothing except that they could remain in the house if they wished and that Miss Ives would take care of their bills. He had asked them to tell Lillian, when she returned, that she was not to attempt to see him.

They had stared at him in terrified silence.

He had handed to his attorney a signed blank check and said, "Get me a divorce. On any grounds and at any cost. I don't care what means you use, how many of their judges you purchase or whether you find it necessary to stage a frame-up of my wife. Do whatever you wish.

But there is to be no alimony and no property settlement." The attorney had looked at him with the hint of a wise, sad smile, as if this were an event he had expected to happen long ago. He had answered, "Okay, Hank. It can be done. But it will take some time." "Make it as fast as you can."

No one had questioned him about his signature on the Gift Certificate. But he had noticed that the men at the mills looked at him with a kind of searching curiosity, almost as if they expected to find the scars of some physical torture on his body.

He felt nothing—nothing but the sense of an even, restful twilight, like a spread of slag over a molten metal, when it crusts and swallows the last brilliant spurt of the white glow within. He felt nothing at the thought of the looters who were now going to manufacture Rearden Metal. His desire to hold his right to it and proudly to be the only one to sell it, had been his form of respect for his fellow men, his belief that to trade with them was an act of honor. The belief, the respect and the desire were gone. He did not care what men made, what they sold, where they bought his Metal or whether any of them would know that it had been his. The human shapes moving past him in the streets of the city were physical objects without any meaning. The countryside —with the darkness washing away all traces of human activity, leaving only an untouched earth which he had once been able to handle—was real.

He carried a gun in his pocket, as advised by the policemen of the radio car that patrolled the roads; they had warned him that no road was safe after dark, these days. He felt, with a touch of mirthless amusement, that the gun had been needed at the mills, not in the peaceful safety of loneliness and night; what could some starving vagrant take from him, compared to what had been taken by men who claimed to be his protectors?

He walked with an effortless speed, feeling relaxed by a form of activity that was natural to him. This was his period of training for solitude, he thought; he had to learn to live without any awareness of people, the awareness that now paralyzed him with revulsion. He had once built his fortune, starting out with empty hands; now he had to rebuild his life, starting out with an empty spirit.

He would give himself a short span of time for the training, he thought, and then he would claim the one incomparable value still left to him, the one desire that had remained pure and whole: he would go to Dagny. Two commandments had grown in his mind; one was a duty, the other a passionate wish. The first was never to let her learn the reason of his surrender to the looters; the second was to say to her the words which he should have known at their first meeting and should have said on the gallery of Ellis Wyatt's house.

There was nothing but the strong summer starlight to guide him, as he walked, but he could distinguish the highway and the remnant of a stone fence ahead, at the corner of a country crossroad. The fence had nothing to protect any longer, only a spread of weeds, a willow tree bending over the road and, farther in the distance, the ruin of a farmhouse with the starlight showing through its roof.

He walked, thinking that even this sight still retained the power to be of value: it gave him the promise of a long stretch of space undisturbed by human intrusion.

The man who stepped suddenly out into the road must have come from behind the willow tree, but so swiftly that it seemed as if he had sprung up from the middle of the highway. Rearden's hand went to the gun in his pocket, but stopped: he knew—by the proud posture of the body standing in the open, by the straight line of the shoulders against the starlit sky—that the man was not a bandit. When he heard the voice, he knew that the man was not a beggar.

"I should like to speak to you, Mr. Rearden."

The voice had the firmness, the clarity and the special courtesy peculiar to men who are accustomed to giving orders.

"Go ahead," said Rearden, "provided you don't intend to ask me for help or money."

The man's garments were rough, but efficiently trim. He wore dark trousers and a dark blue windbreaker closed tight at his throat, prolonging the lines of his long, slender figure. He wore a dark blue cap, and all that could be seen of him in the night were his hands, his face and a patch of gold-blond hair on his temple. The hands held no weapon, only a package wrapped in burlap, the size of a carton of cigarettes.

"No, Mr. Rearden," he said, "I don't intend to ask you for money, but to return it to you."

"To return money?"

"Yes."

"What money?"

"A small refund on a very large debt."

"Owed by you?"

"No, not by me. It is only a token payment, but I want you to accept it as proof that if we live long enough, you and I, every dollar of that debt will be returned to you."

"What debt?"

"The money that was taken from you by force."

He extended the package to Rearden, flipping the burlap open.

Rearden saw the starlight run like fire along a mirror-smooth surface.

He knew, by its weight and texture, that what he held was a bar of solid gold.

He looked from the bar to the man's face, but the face seemed harder and less revealing than the surface of the metal.

"Who are you?" asked Rearden.

"The friend of the friendless."

"Did you come here to give this to me?"

"Yes."

"Do you mean that you had to stalk me at night, on a lonely road, in order, not to rob me, but to hand me a bar of gold?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"When robbery is done in open daylight by sanction of the law, as it is done today, then any act of honor or restitution has to be hidden underground."

"What made you think that I'd accept a gift of this kind?"

"It is not a gift, Mr. Rearden. It is your own money. But I have one favor to ask of you. It is a request, not a condition, because there can be no such thing as conditional property. The gold is yours, so you are free to use it as you please. But I risked my life to bring it to you tonight, so I am asking, as a favor, that you save it for the future or spend it on yourself. On nothing but your own comfort and pleasure. Do not give it away and, above all, do not put it into your business."

"Why?"

"Because I don't want it to be of any benefit to anybody but you.

Otherwise, I will have broken an oath taken long ago—as I am breaking every rule I had set for myself by speaking to you tonight."

"What do you mean?"

"I have been collecting this money for you for a long time. But I did not intend to see you or tell you about it or give it to you until much later."

"Then why did you?"

"Because I couldn't stand it any longer."

"Stand what?"

"I thought that I had seen everything one could see and that there was nothing I could not stand seeing. But when they took Rearden Metal away from you, it was too much, even for me. I know that you don't need this gold at present. What you need is the justice which it represents, and the knowledge that there are men who care for justice."

Struggling not to give in to an emotion which he felt rising through his bewilderment, past all his doubts, Rearden tried to study the man's face, searching for some clue to help him understand. But the face had no expression; it had not changed once while speaking; it looked as if the man had lost the capacity to feel long ago, and what remained of him were only features that seemed implacable and dead. With a shudder of astonishment, Rearden found himself thinking that it was not the face of a man, but of an avenging angel.

"Why did you care?" asked Rearden. "What do I mean to you?"

"Much more than you have reason to suspect. And I have a friend to whom you mean much more than you will ever learn. He would have given anything to stand by you today. But he can't come to you. So I came in his place."

"What friend?"

"I prefer not to name him."

"Did you say that you've spent a long time collecting this money for me?"

"I have collected much more than this." He pointed at the gold. "I am holding it in your name and I will turn it over to you when the time comes. This is only a sample, as proof that it does exist. And if you reach the day when you find yourself robbed of the last of your fortune, I want you to remember that you have a large bank account waiting for you."

"What account?"

"If you try to think of all the money that has been taken from you by force, you will know that your account represents a considerable sum."

"How did you collect it? Where did this gold come from?"

"It was taken from those who robbed you."

"Taken by whom?"

"By me."

"Who are you?"

"Ragnar Danneskjold."

Rearden looked at him for a long, still moment, then let the gold fall out of his hands.

Danneskjold's eyes did not follow it to the ground, but remained fixed on Rearden with no change of expression. "Would you rather I were a law-abiding citizen, Mr. Rearden? If so, which law should I abide by? Directive 10-289?"

"Ragnar Danneskjold . . ." said Rearden, as if he were seeing the whole of the past decade, as if he were looking at the enormity of a crime spread through ten years and held within two words.

"Look more carefully, Mr. Rearden. There are only two modes of living left to us today: to be a looter who robs disarmed victims or to be a victim who works for the benefit of his own despoilers. I did not choose to be either."

"You chose to live by means of force, like the rest of them,"

"Yes—openly. Honestly, if you will. I do not rob men who are tied and gagged, I do not demand that my victims help me, I do not tell them that I am acting for their own good. I stake my life in every encounter with men, and they have a chance to match their guns and their brains against mine in fair battle. Fair? It's I against the organized strength, the guns, the planes, the battleships of five continents. If it's a moral judgment that you wish to pronounce, Mr. Rearden, then who is the man of higher morality: I or Wesley Mouch?"

"I have no answer to give you," said Rearden, his voice low.

"Why should you be shocked, Mr. Rearden? I am merely complying with the system which my fellow men have established. If they believe that force is the proper means to deal with one another, I am giving them what they ask for. If they believe that the purpose of my life is to serve them, let them try to enforce their creed. If they believe that my mind is their property—let them come and get it."

"But what sort of life have you chosen? To what purpose are you giving your mind?"

"To the cause of my love."

"Which is what?"

"Justice."

"Served by being a pirate?"

"By working for the day when I won't have to be a pirate any longer."

"Which day is that?"

"The day when you'll be free to make a profit on Rearden Metal."

"Oh God!" said Rearden, laughing, his voice desperate. "Is that your ambition?"

Danneskjold's face did not change. "It is."

"Do you expect to live to see that day?"

"Yes. Don't you?"

"No."

"Then what are you looking forward to, Mr. Rearden?"

"Nothing."

"What are you working for?"

Rearden glanced at him. "Why do you ask that?"

"To make you understand why I'm not."

"Don't expect me ever to approve of a criminal."

"I don't expect it. But there are a few things I want to help you to see."

"Even if they're true, the things you said, why did you choose to be a bandit? Why didn't you simply step out, like—" He stopped.

"Like Ellis Wyatt, Mr. Rearden? Like Andrew Stockton? Like your friend Ken Danagger?"

"Yes!"

"Would you approve of that?"

"I—" He stopped, shocked by his own words.

The shock that came next was to see Danneskjold smile: it was like seeing the first green of spring on the sculptured planes of an iceberg. Rearden realized suddenly, for the first time, that Danneskjold's face was more than handsome, that it had the startling beauty of physical perfection—the hard, proud features, the scornful mouth of a Viking's statue—yet he had not been aware of it, almost as if the dead sternness of the face had forbidden the impertinence of an appraisal.

But the smile was brilliantly alive.

"I do approve of it, Mr. Rearden. But I've chosen a special mission of my own. I'm after a man whom I want to destroy. He died many centuries ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of men's minds, we will not have a decent world to live in."

"What man?"

"Robin Hood."

Rearden looked at him blankly, not understanding.

"He was the man who robbed the rich and gave to the poor. Well, I'm the man who robs the poor and gives to the rich—or, to be exact, the man who robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich."

"What in blazes do you mean?"

"If you remember the stories you've read about me in the newspapers, before they stopped printing them, you know that I have never robbed a private ship and never taken any private property. Nor have I ever robbed a military vessel—because the purpose of a military fleet is to protect from violence the citizens who paid for it, which is the proper function of a government. But I have seized every loot carrier that came within range of my guns, every government relief ship, subsidy ship, loan ship, gift ship, every vessel with a cargo of goods taken by force from some men for the unpaid, unearned benefit of others. I seized the boats that sailed under the flag of the idea which I am fighting: the idea that need is a sacred idol requiring human sacrifices—that the need of some men is the knife of a guillotine hanging over others—that all of us must live with our work, our hopes, our plans, our efforts at the mercy of the moment when that knife will descend upon us—and that the extent of our ability is the extent of our danger, so that success will bring our heads down on the block, while failure will give us the right to pull the cord. This is the horror which Robin Hood immortalized as an ideal of righteousness. It is said that he fought against the looting rulers and returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is not the meaning of the legend which has survived. He is remembered, not as a champion of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don't have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, has demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors. It is this foulest of creatures—the double-parasite who lives on the sores, of the poor and the blood of the rich—whom men have come to regard as a moral ideal. And this has brought us to a world where the more a man produces, the closer he comes to the loss of all his rights, until, if his ability is great enough, he becomes a rightless creature delivered as prey to any claimant—while in order to be placed above rights, above principles, above morality, placed where anything is permitted to him, even plunder and murder, all a man has to do is to be in need. Do you wonder why the world is collapsing around us? That is what I am fighting, Mr.

Rearden. Until men learn that of all human symbols, Robin Hood is the most immoral and the most contemptible, there will be no justice on earth and no way for mankind to survive."

Rearden listened, feeling numb. But under the numbness, like the first thrust of a seed breaking through, he felt an emotion he could not identify except that it seemed familiar and very distant, like something experienced and renounced long ago.

"What I actually am, Mr. Rearden, is a policeman. It is a policeman's duty to protect men from criminals—criminals being those who seize wealth by force. It is a policeman's duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman's duty becomes, not the protection, but the plunder of property—then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman. I have been selling the cargoes I retrieved to some special customers of mine in this country, who pay me in gold. Also, I have been selling my cargoes to the smugglers and the black-market traders of the People's States of Europe. Do you know the conditions of existence in those People's States? Since production and trade—not violence—were decreed to be crimes, the best men of Europe had no choice but to become criminals. The slave-drivers of those States are kept in power by the handouts from their fellow looters in countries not yet fully drained, such as this country. I do not let the handouts reach them. I sell the goods to Europe's law-breakers, at the highest prices I can get, and I make them pay me in gold. Gold is the objective value, the means of preserving one's wealth and one's future. Nobody is permitted to have gold in Europe, except the whip-wielding friends of humanity, who claim that they spend it for the welfare of their victims. That is the gold which my smuggler-customers obtain to pay me.

How? By the same method I use to obtain the goods. And then I return the gold to those from whom the goods were stolen—to you, Mr.

Rearden, and to other men like you."

Rearden grasped the nature of the emotion he had forgotten. It was the emotion he had felt when, at the age of fourteen, he had looked at his first pay check—when, at the age of twenty-four, he had been made superintendent of the ore mines—when, as the owner of the mines, he had placed, in his own name, his first order for new equipment from the best concern of the time, Twentieth Century Motors—an emotion of solemn, joyous excitement, the sense of winning his place in a world he respected and earning the recognition of men he admired. For almost two decades, that emotion had been buried under a mount of wreckage, as the years had added layer upon gray layer of contempt, of indignation, of his struggle not to look around him, not to see those he dealt with, not to expect anything from men and to keep, as a private vision within the four walls of his office, the sense of that world into which he had hoped to rise. Yet there it was again, breaking through from under the wreckage, that feeling of quickened interest, of listening to the luminous voice of reason, with which one could communicate and deal and live. But it was the voice of a pirate speaking about acts of violence, offering him this substitute for his world of reason and justice. He could not accept it; he could not lose whatever remnant of his vision he still retained. He listened, wishing he could escape, yet knowing that he would not miss a word of it.

"I deposit the gold in a bank—in a gold-standard bank, Mr. Rearden —to the account of men who are its rightful owners. They are the men of superlative ability who made their fortunes by personal effort, in free trade, using no compulsion, no help from the government. They are the great victims who have contributed the most and suffered the worst injustice in return. Their names are written in my book of restitution. Every load of gold which I bring back is divided among them and deposited to their accounts."

"Who are they?"

"You're one of them, Mr. Rearden. I cannot compute all the money that has been extorted from you—in hidden taxes, in regulations, in wasted time, in lost effort, in energy spent to overcome artificial obstacles. I cannot compute the sum, but if you wish to see its magnitude —look around you. The extent of the misery now spreading through this once prosperous country is the extent of the injustice which you have suffered. If men refuse to pay the debt they owe you, this is the manner in which they will pay for it. But there is one part of the debt which is computed and on record. That is the part which I have made it my purpose to collect and return to you."

"What is that?"

"Your income tax, Mr. Rearden."

"What?"

"Your income tax for the last twelve years."

"You intend to refund that?"

"In full and in gold, Mr. Rearden."

Rearden burst out laughing; he laughed like a young boy, in simple amusement, in enjoyment of the incredible. "Good God! You're a policeman and a collector of Internal Revenue, too?"

"Yes," said Danneskjold gravely.

"You're not serious about this, are you?"

"Do I look as if I'm joking?"

"But this is preposterous!"

"Any more preposterous than Directive 10-289?"

"It's not real or possible!"

"Is only evil real and possible?"

"But—"

"Are you thinking that death and taxes are our only certainty, Mr.

Rearden? Well, there's nothing I can do about the first, but if I lift the burden of the second, men might learn to see the connection between the two and what a longer, happier life they have the power to achieve. They might learn to hold, not death and taxes, but life and production as their two absolutes and as the base of their moral code."

Rearden looked at him, not smiling. The tall, slim figure, with the windbreaker stressing its trained muscular agility, was that of a highwayman; the stern marble face was that of a judge; the dry, clear voice was that of an efficient bookkeeper.

"The looters are not the only ones who have kept records on you, Mr. Rearden. So have I. I have, in my files, copies of all your income tax returns for the last twelve years, as well as the returns of all my other clients. I have friends in some astonishing places, who obtain the copies I need. I divide the money among my clients in proportion to the sums extorted from them. Most of my accounts have now been paid to their owners. Yours is the largest one left to settle. On the day when you will be ready to claim it—the day when I'll know that no penny of it will go back to support the looters—I will turn your account over to you. Until then—" He glanced down at the gold on the ground. "Pick it up, Mr. Rearden. It's not stolen. It's yours."

Rearden would not move or answer or look down.

"Much more than that lies in the bank, in your name."

"What bank?"

"Do you remember Midas Mulligan of Chicago?"

"Yes, of course."

"All my accounts are deposited at the Mulligan Bank."

"There is no Mulligan Bank in Chicago."

"It is not in Chicago."

Rearden let a moment pass. "Where is it?"

"I think that you will know it before long, Mr. Rearden. But I cannot tell you now." He added, "I must tell you, however, that I am the only one responsible for this undertaking. It is my own personal mission. No one is involved in it but me and the men of my ship's crew.

Even my banker has no part in it, except for keeping the money I deposit. Many of my friends do not approve of the course I've chosen.

But we all choose different ways to fight the same battle—and this is mine."

Rearden smiled contemptuously, "Aren't you one of those damn altruists who spends his time on a non-profit venture and risks his life merely to serve others?"

"No, Mr. Rearden. I am investing my time in my own future.

When we are free and have to start rebuilding from out of the ruins, I want to see the world reborn as fast as possible. If there is, then, some working capital in the right hands—in the hands of our best, our most productive men—it will save years for the rest of us and, incidentally, centuries for the history of the country. Did you ask what you meant to me? Everything I admire, everything I want to be on the day when the earth will have a place for such state of being, everything I want to deal with—even if this is the only way I can deal with you and be of use to you at present."

"Why?" whispered Rearden.

"Because my only love, the only value I care to live for, is that which has never been loved by the world, has never won recognition or friends or defenders: human ability. That is the love I am serving—and if I should lose my life, to what better purpose could I give it?"

The man who had lost the capacity to feel?—thought Rearden, and knew that the austerity of the marble face was the form of a disciplined capacity to feel too deeply. The even voice was continuing dispassionately: "I wanted you to know this. I wanted you to know it now, when it most seem to you that you're abandoned at the bottom of a pit among subhuman creatures who are all that's left of mankind. I wanted you to know, in your most hopeless hour, that the day of deliverance is much closer than you think. And there was one special reason why I had to speak to you and tell you my secret ahead of the proper time.

Have you heard of what happened to Orren Boyle's steel mills on the coast of Maine?"

"Yes," said Rearden—and was shocked to hear that the word came as a gasp out of the sudden jolt of eagerness within him. "I didn't know whether it was true."

"It's true. I did it. Mr. Boyle is not going to manufacture Rearden Metal on the coast of Maine. He is not going to manufacture it anywhere. Neither is any other looting louse who thinks that a directive can give him a right to your brain. Whoever attempts to produce that Metal, will find his furnaces blown up, his machinery blasted, his shipments wrecked, his plant set on fire—so many things will happen to any man who tries it, that people will say there's a curse on it, and there will soon be no worker in the country willing to enter the plant of any new producer of Rearden Metal. If men like Boyle think that force is all they need to rob their betters—let them see what happens when one of their betters chooses to resort to force. I wanted you to know, Mr. Rearden, that none of them will produce your Metal nor make a penny on it."

Because he felt an exultant desire to laugh—as he had laughed at the news of Wyatt's fire, as he had laughed at the crash of d'Anconia Copper—and knew that if he did, the thing he feared would hold him, would not release him this time, and he would never see his mills again—Rearden drew back and, for a moment, kept his lips closed tight to utter no sound. When the moment was over, he said quietly, his voice firm and dead, "Take that gold of yours and get away from here. I won't accept the help of a criminal."

Danneskjold's face showed no reaction. "I cannot force you to accept the gold, Mr. Rearden. But I will not take it back. You may leave it lying where it is, if you wish."

"I don't want your help and I don't intend to protect you. If I were within reach of a phone, I would call the police. I would and I will, if you ever attempt to approach me again. I'll do it—in self-protection."

"I understand exactly what you mean."

"You know—because I've listened to you, because you've seen me eager to hear it—that I haven't damned you as I should. I can't damn you or anyone else. There are no standards left for men to live by, so I don't care to judge anything they do today or in what manner they attempt to endure the unendurable. If this is your manner, I will let you go to hell in your own way, but I want no part of it. Neither as your inspiration nor as your accomplice. Don't expect me ever to accept your bank account, if it does exist. Spend it on some extra armor plate for yourself—because I'm going to report this to the police and give them every clue I can to set them on your trail."

Danneskjold did not move or answer. A freight train was rolling by, somewhere in the distance and darkness; they could not see it, but they heard the pounding beat of wheels filling the silence, and it seemed close, as if a disembodied train, reduced to a long string of sound, were going past them in the night.

"You wanted to help me in my most hopeless hour?" said Rearden.

"If I am brought to where my only defender is a pirate, then I don't care to be defended any longer. You speak some remnant of a human language, so in the name of that, I'll tell you that I have no hope left, but I have the knowledge that when the end comes, I will have lived by my own standards, even while I was the only one to whom they remained valid. I will have lived in the world in which I started and J will go down with the last of it. I don't think you'll want to understand me, but—"

A beam of light hit them with the violence of a physical blow. The clangor of the train had swallowed the noise of the motor and they had not heard the approach of the car that swept out of the side road, from behind the farmhouse. They were not in the car's path, yet they heard the screech of brakes behind the two headlights, pulling an invisible shape to a stop. It was Rearden who jumped back involuntarily and had time to marvel at his companion: the swiftness of Danneskjold's self-control was that he did not move.

It was a police car and it stopped beside them.

The driver leaned out. "Oh, it's you, Mr. Rearden!" he said, touching his fingers to his cap. "Good evening, sir."

"Hello," said Rearden, fighting to control the unnatural abruptness of his voice.

There were two patrolmen in the front seat of the car and their faces had a tight look of purpose, not the look of their usual friendly intention to stop for a chat.

"Mr. Rearden, did you walk from the mills by way of Edgewood Road, past Blacksmith Cove?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Did you happen to see a man anywhere around these parts, a stranger moving along in a hurry?"

"Where?"

"He'd be either on foot or in a battered wreck of a car that's got a million-dollar motor."

"What man?"

"A tall man with blond hair."

"Who is he?"

"You wouldn't believe it if I told you, Mr. Rearden. Did you see him?"

Rearden was not aware of his own questions, only of the astonishing fact that he was able to force sounds past some beating barrier inside his throat. He was looking straight at the policeman, but he felt as if the focus of his eyes had switched to his side vision, and what he saw most clearly was Danneskjold's face watching him with no expression, with no line's, no muscle's worth of feeling. He saw Danneskjold's arms hanging idly by his sides, the hands relaxed, with no sign of intention to reach for a weapon, leaving the tall, straight body defenseless and open—open as to a firing squad. He saw, in the light, that the face looked younger than he had thought and that the eyes were sky-blue.

He felt that his one danger would be to glance directly at Danneskjold—and he kept his eyes on the policeman, on the brass buttons of a blue uniform, but the object filling his consciousness, more forcefully than a visual perception, was Danneskjold's body, the naked body under the clothes, the body that would be wiped out of existence. He did not hear his own words, because he kept hearing a single sentence in his mind, without context except the feeling that it was the only thing that mattered to him in the world: "If I should lose my life, to what better purpose could I give it?"

"Did you see him, Mr. Rearden?"

"No," said Rearden. "I didn't."

The policeman shrugged regretfully and closed his hands about the steering wheel. "You didn't see any man that looked suspicious?"

"No."

"Nor any strange car passing you on the road?"

"No."

The policeman reached for the starter. "They got word that he was seen ashore in these parts tonight, and they've thrown a dragnet over five counties. We're not supposed to mention his name, not to scare the folks, but he's a man whose head is worth three million dollars in rewards from all over the world.”

He had pressed the starter and the motor was churning the air with bright cracks of sound, when the second policeman leaned forward.

He had been looking at the blond hair under Danneskjold's cap.

"Who is that, Mr. Rearden?" he asked.

"My new bodyguard,” said Rearden.

"Oh . . . ! A sensible precaution, Mr. Rearden, in times like these.

Good night, sir."

The motor jerked forward. The red taillights of the car went shrinking down the road. Danneskjold watched it go, then glanced pointedly at Rearden's right hand. Rearden realized that he had stood facing the policemen with his hand clutching the gun in his pocket and that he had been prepared to use it.

He opened his fingers and drew his hand out hastily. Danneskjold smiled. It was a smile of radiant amusement, the silent laughter of a clear, young spirit greeting a moment it was glad to have lived.

And although the two did not resemble each other, the smile made Rearden think of Francisco d'Anconia.

"You haven't told a lie," said Ragnar Danneskjold. "Your bodyguard—that's what I am and what I'll deserve to be, in many more ways than you can know at present. Thanks, Mr. Rearden, and so long—we'll meet again much sooner than I had hoped."

He was gone before Rearden could answer. He vanished beyond the stone fence, as abruptly and soundlessly as he had come. When Rearden turned to look through the farm field, there was no trace of him and no sign of movement anywhere in the darkness.

Rearden stood on the edge of an empty road in a spread of loneliness vaster than it had seemed before. Then he saw, lying at his feet, an object wrapped in burlap, with one corner exposed and glistening in the moonlight, the color of the pirate's hair. He bent, picked it up and walked on.

Kip Chalmers swore as the train lurched and spilled his cocktail over the table top. He slumped forward, his elbow in the puddle, and said: "God damn these railroads! What's the matter with their track?

You'd think with all the money they've got they'd disgorge a little, so we wouldn't have to bump like farmers on a hay cart!"

His three companions did not take the trouble to answer. It was late, and they remained in the lounge merely because an effort was needed to retire to their compartments. The lights of the lounge looked like feeble portholes in a fog of cigarette smoke dank with the odor of alcohol. It was a private car, which Chalmers had demanded and obtained for his journey; it was attached to the end of the Comet and it swung like the tail of a nervous animal as the Comet coiled through the curves of the mountains.

"I'm going to campaign for the nationalization of the railroads," said Kip Chalmers, glaring defiantly at a small, gray man who looked at him without interest. 'That's going to be my platform plank. I've got to have a platform plank. I don't like Jim Taggart. He looks like a soft-boiled clam. To hell with the railroads! It's time we took them over."

"Go to bed," said the man, "if you expect to look like anything human at the big rally tomorrow."

"Do you think we'll make it?"

"You've got to make it."

"I know I've got to. But I don't think we'll get there on time. This goddamn snail of a super-special is hours late."

"You’ve got to get there, Kip," said the man ominously, in that stubborn monotone of the unthinking which asserts an end without concern for the means.

"God damn you, don't you suppose I know it?"

Kip Chalmers had curly blond hair and a shapeless mouth. He came from a semi-wealthy, semi-distinguished family, but he sneered at wealth and distinction in a manner which implied that only a top rank aristocrat could permit himself such a degree of cynical indifference. He had graduated from a college which specialized in breeding that kind of aristocracy. The college had taught him that the purpose of ideas is to fool those who are stupid enough to think. He had made his way in Washington with the grace of a cat-burglar, climbing from bureau to bureau as from ledge to ledge of a crumbling structure. He was ranked as semi-powerful, but his manner made laymen mistake him for nothing less than Wesley Mouch.

For reasons of his own particular strategy, Kip Chalmers had decided to enter popular politics and to run for election as Legislator from California, though he knew nothing about that state except the movie industry and the beach clubs. His campaign manager had done the preliminary work, and Chalmers was now on his way to face his future constituents for the first time at an over publicized rally in San Francisco tomorrow night. The manager had wanted him to start a day earlier, but Charmers had stayed in Washington to attend a cocktail party and had taken the last train possible. He had shown no concern about the rally until this evening, when he noticed that the Comet was running six hours late.

His three companions did not mind his mood: they liked his liquor, tester Tuck, his campaign manager, was a small, aging man with a face that looked as if it had once been punched in and had never rebounded. He was an attorney who, some generations earlier, would have represented shoplifters and people who stage accidents on the premises of rich corporations; now he found that he could do better by representing men like Kip Chalmers.

Laura Bradford was Chalmers' current mistress; he liked her because his predecessor had been Wesley Mouch. She was a movie actress who had forced her way from competent featured player to incompetent star, not by means of sleeping with studio executives, but by taking the long-distance short cut of sleeping with bureaucrats. She talked economics, instead of glamor, for press interviews, in the belligerently righteous style of a third-rate tabloid; her economics consisted of the assertion that "we've got to help the poor."

Gilbert Keith-Worthing was Chalmers' guest, for no reason that either of them could discover. He was a British novelist of world fame, who had been popular thirty years ago; since then, nobody bothered to read what he wrote, but everybody accepted him as a walking classic.

He had been considered profound for uttering such things as: "Freedom? Do let's stop talking about freedom. Freedom is impossible. Man can never be free of hunger, of cold, of disease, of physical accidents.

He can never be free of the tyranny of nature. So why should he object to the tyranny of a political dictatorship?" When all of Europe put into practice the ideas which he bad preached, he came to live in America. Through the years, his style of writing and his body had grown flabby. At seventy, he was an obese old man with retouched hair and a manner of scornful cynicism retouched by quotations from the yogis about the futility of all human endeavor. Kip Chalmers had invited him, because it seemed to look distinguished. Gilbert Keith Worthing had come along, because he had no particular place to go.

"God damn these railroad people!" said Kip Chalmers. "They're doing it on purpose. They want to ruin my campaign. I can't miss that rally! For Christ's sake, Lester, do something!"

"I've tried," said Lester Tuck. At the train's last stop, he had tried, by long-distance telephone, to find air transportation to complete their journey; but there were no commercial flights scheduled for the next two days.

"If they don't get me there on time, I'll have their scalps and their railroad! Can't we tell that damn conductor to hurry?"

"You've told him three times,"

"I'll get him fired. He's given me nothing but a lot of alibis about all their messy technical troubles. I expect transportation, not alibis. They can't treat me like one of their day-coach passengers. I expect them to get me where I want to go when I want it. Don't they know that I'm on this train?"

"They know it by now," said Laura Bradford. "Shut up, Kip. You bore me."

Chalmers refilled his glass. The car was rocking and the glassware tinkled faintly on the shelves of the bar. The patches of starlit sky in the windows kept swaying jerkily, and it seemed as if the stars were tinkling against one another. They could see nothing beyond the glass bay of the observation window at the end of the car, except the small halos of red and green lanterns marking the rear of the train, and a brief stretch of rail running away from them into the darkness. A wall of rock was racing the train, and the stars dipped occasionally into a sudden break that outlined, high above them, the peaks of the mountains of Colorado.

"Mountains . . ." said Gilbert Keith-Worthing, with satisfaction.

"It is a spectacle of this kind that makes one feel the insignificance of man.' What is this presumptuous little bit of rail, which crude materialists are so proud of building—compared to that eternal grandeur? No more than the basting thread of a seamstress on the hem of the garment of nature. If a single one of those granite giants chose to crumble, it would annihilate this train."

"Why should it choose to crumble?" asked Laura Bradford, without any particular interest.

"I think this damn train is going slower," said Kip Chalmers. "Those bastards are slowing down,, in spite of what I told them!"

"Well . . . it's the mountains, you know . . ." said Lester Tuck.

"Mountains be damned! Lester, what day is this? With all those damn changes of time, I can't tell which—"

"It's May twenty-seventh," sighed Lester Tuck.

"It's May twenty-eighth," said Gilbert Keith-Worthing, glancing at his watch. "It is now twelve minutes past midnight.”

"Jesus!" cried Chalmers. "Then the rally is today?"

"Yep," said Lester Tuck.

"We won't make it! We—"

The train gave a sharper lurch, knocking the glass out of his hand.

The thin sound of its crash against the floor mixed with the screech of the wheel-flanges tearing against the rail of a sharp curve.

"I say," asked Gilbert Keith-Worthing nervously, "are your railroads safe?"

"Hell, yes!" said Kip Chalmers. "We've got so many rules, regulations and controls that those bastards wouldn't dare not to be safe!

. . . Lester, how far are we now? What's the next stop?'1

"There won't be any stop till Salt Lake City."

"I mean, what's the next station?"

Lester Tuck produced a soiled map, which he had been consulting every few minutes since nightfall. "Winston," he said. "Winston, Colorado."

Kip Chalmers reached for another glass.

"Tinky Holloway said that Wesley said that if you don't win this election, you're through," said Laura Bradford. She sat sprawled in her chair, looking past Chalmers, studying her own face in a mirror on the wall of the lounge; she was bored and it amused her to needle his impotent anger.

"Oh, he did, did he?"

"Uh-huh. Wesley doesn't want what's-his-name—whoever's running against you—to get into the Legislature. If you don't win, Wesley will be sore as hell. Tinky said—"

"Damn that bastard! He'd better watch his own neck!"

"Oh, I don't know. Wesley likes him very much." She added, "Tinky Holloway wouldn't allow some miserable train to make him miss an important meeting. They wouldn't dare to hold him up."

Kip Chalmers sat staring at his glass. "I'm going to have the government seize all the railroads," he said, his voice low.

"Really," said Gilbert Keith-Worthing, "I don't see why you haven't done it long ago. This is the only country on earth backward enough to permit private ownership of railroads."

"Well, we're catching up with you," said Kip Chalmers.

"Your country is so incredibly naive. It's such an anachronism. All that talk about liberty and human rights—I haven't heard it since the days of my great-grandfather. It's nothing but a verbal luxury of the rich. After all, it doesn't make any difference to the poor whether their livelihood is at the mercy of an industrialist or of a bureaucrat."

5S8

"The day of the industrialists is over. This is the day of—"

The jolt felt as if the air within the car smashed them forward while the floor stopped under their feet. Kip Chalmers was flung down to the carpet, Gilbert Keith-Worthing was thrown across the table top, the lights were blasted out. Glasses crashed off the shelves, the steel of the walls screamed as if about to rip open, while a long, distant thud went like a convulsion through the wheels of the train.

When he raised his head, Chalmers saw that the car stood intact and still; he heard the moans of his companions and the first shriek of Laura Bradford's hysterics. He crawled along the floor to the doorway, wrenched it open, and tumbled down the steps. Far ahead, on the side of a curve, he saw moving flashlights and a red glow at a spot where the engine had no place to be. He stumbled through the darkness, bumping into half-clothed figures that waved the futile little flares of matches.

Somewhere along the line, he saw a man with a flashlight and seized his arm. It was the conductor.

"What happened?" gasped Chalmers.

"Split rail,” the conductor answered impassively. "The engine went off the track."

"Off . . . ?M

"On its side."

"Anybody . . . killed?"

"No. The engineer's all right. The fireman is hurt."

"Split rail? What do you mean, split rail?"

The conductor's face had an odd look: it was grim, accusing and closed. "Rail wears out, Mr. Chalmers," he answered with a strange kind of emphasis. "Particularly on curves."

"Didn't you know that it was worn out?"

"We knew."

"Well, why didn't you have it replaced?"

"It was going to be replaced. But Mr. Locey cancelled that."

"Who is Mr. Locey?"

"The man who is not our Operating Vice-President."

Chalmers wondered why the conductor seemed to look at him as if something about the catastrophe were his fault. "Well . . . well, aren't you going to put the engine back on the track?"

"That engine's never going to be put back on any track, from the looks of it."

"But . . . but it's got to move us!"

"It can't."

Beyond the few moving flares and the dulled sounds of screams, Chalmers sensed suddenly, not wanting to look at it, the black immensity of the mountains, the silence of hundreds of uninhabited miles, and the precarious strip of a ledge hanging between a wall of rock and an abyss. He gripped the conductor's arm tighter.

"But . . . but what are we going to do?"

"The engineer's gone to call Winston."

"Call? How?"

"There's a phone couple of miles down the track."

"Will they get us out of here?"

"They will."

"But . . ." Then his mind made a connection with the past and the future, and his voice rose to a scream for the first time: "How long will we have to wait?"

"I don't know," said the conductor. He threw Chalmers' hand off his arm, and walked away.

The night operator of Winston Station listened to the phone message, dropped the receiver and raced up the stairs to shake the station agent out of bed. The station agent was a husky, surly drifter who had been assigned to the job ten days ago, by order of the new division superintendent. He stumbled dazedly to his feet, but he was knocked awake when the operator's words reached his brain.

"What?" he gasped. "Jesus! The Comet? . . . Well, don't stand there shaking! Call Silver Springs!"

The night dispatcher of the Division Headquarters at Silver Springs listened to the message, then telephoned Dave Mitchum, the new superintendent of the Colorado Division.

"The Comet?" gasped Mitchum, his hand pressing the telephone receiver to his ear, his feet hitting the floor and throwing him upright, out of bed. "The engine done for? The Diesel?"

"Yes, sir."

"Oh God! Oh, God Almighty! What are we going to do?" Then, remembering his position, he added, "Well, send out the wrecking train."

"I have."

"Call the operator at Sherwood to hold all traffic."

"I have."

"What have you got on the sheet?"

"The Army Freight Special, westbound. But it's not due for about four hours. It's running late."

"I'll be right down. . . . Wait, listen, get Bill, Sandy and Clarence down by the time I get there. There's going to be hell to pay!"

Dave Mitchum had always complained about injustice, because, he said, he had always had bad luck. He explained it by speaking darkly about the conspiracy of the big fellows, who would never give him a chance, though he did not explain just whom he meant by "the big fellows." Seniority of service was his favorite topic of complaint and sole standard of value; he had been in the railroad business longer than many men who had advanced beyond him; this, he said, was proof of the social system's injustice—though he never explained just what he meant by "the social system." He had worked for many railroads, but had not stayed long with any one of them. His employers had had no specific misdeeds to charge against him, but had simply eased him out, because he said, "Nobody told me to!” too often. He did not know that he owed his present job to a deal between James Taggart and Wesley Mouch: when Taggart traded to Mouch the secret of his sister's private life, in exchange for a raise in rates, Mouch made him throw in an extra favor, by their customary rules of bargaining, which consisted of squeezing all one could out of any given trade. The extra was a job for Dave Mitchum, who was the brother-in-law of Claude Slagenhop, who was the president of the Friends of Global Progress, who were regarded by Mouch as a valuable influence on public opinion. James Taggart pushed the responsibility of finding a job for Mitchum onto Clifton Locey. Locey pushed Mitchum into the first job that came up—superintendent of the Colorado Division—when the man holding it quit without notice. The man quit when the extra Diesel engine of Winston Station was given to Chick Morrison's Special.

"What are we going to do?" cried Dave Mitchum, rushing, half-dressed and groggy with sleep, into his office, where the chief dispatcher, the trainmaster and the road foreman of engines were waiting for him.

The three men did not answer. They were middle-aged men with years of railroad service behind them. A month ago, they would have volunteered their advice in any emergency; but they were beginning to learn that things had changed and that it was dangerous to speak.

"What in hell are we going to do?"

"One thing is certain," said Bill Brent, the chief dispatcher. "We can't send a train into the tunnel with a coal-burning engine."

Dave Mitchum's eyes grew sullen: he knew that this was the one thought on all their minds; he wished Brent had not named it.

"Well, where do we get a Diesel?" he asked angrily.

"We don't," said the road foreman.

"But we can't keep the Comet waiting on a siding all night!"

"Looks like we'll have to," said the trainmaster. "What's the use of talking about it, Dave? You know that there is no Diesel anywhere on the division."

"But Christ Almighty, how do they expect us to move trains without engines?"

"Miss Taggart didn't," said the road foreman. "Mr. Locey does."

"Bill," asked Mitchum, in the tone of pleading for a favor, "isn't there anything transcontinental that's due tonight, with any sort of a Diesel?"

"The first one to come," said Bill Brent implacably, "will be Number 236, the fast freight from San Francisco, which is due at Winston at seven-eighteen A.M." He added, "That's the Diesel closest to us at this moment. I've checked,"

"What about the Army Special?"

"Better not think about it, Dave. That one has superiority over everything on the line, including the Comet, by order of the Army.

They're running late as it is—journal boxes caught fire twice. They're carrying munitions for the West Coast arsenals. Better pray that nothing stops them on your division. If you think we'll catch hell for holding the Comet, it's nothing to what we'll catch if we try to stop that Special."

They remained silent. The windows were open to the summer night and they could hear the ringing of the telephone in the dispatcher's office downstairs. The signal lights winked over the deserted yards that had once been a busy division point.

Mitchum looked toward the roundhouse, where the black silhouettes of a few steam engines stood outlined in a dim light.

"The tunnel—" he said and stopped.

"—is eight miles long," said the trainmaster, with a harsh emphasis.

"I was only thinking," snapped Mitchum.

"Better not think of it," said Brent softly.

"I haven't said anything!"

"What was that talk you had with Dick Horton before he quit?" the road foreman asked too innocently, as if the subject were irrelevant.

"Wasn't it something about the ventilation system of the tunnel being on the bum? Didn't he say that that tunnel was hardly safe nowadays even for Diesel engines?"

"Why do you bring that up?" snapped Mitchum. "I haven't said anything!" Dick Horton, the division chief engineer, had quit three days after Mitchum's arrival.

"I thought I'd just mention it," the road foreman answered innocently.

"Look, Dave," said Bill Brent, knowing that Mitchum would stall for another hour rather than formulate a decision, "you know that there's only one thing to do: hold the Comet at Winston till morning, wait for Number 236, have her Diesel take the Comet through the tunnel, then let the Comet finish her run with the best coal-burner we can give her on the other side,"

"But how late will that make her?"

Brent shrugged. "Twelve hours—eighteen hours—who knows?"

"Eighteen hours—for the Comet? Christ, that's never happened before!"

"None of what's been happening to us has ever happened before," said Brent, with an astonishing sound of weariness in his brisk, competent voice.

"But they'll blame us for it in New York! They'll put all the blame on us!"

Brent shrugged. A month ago, he would have considered such an injustice inconceivable; today, he knew better.

"I guess . . ." said Mitchum miserably, "I guess there's nothing else that we can do."

"There isn't, Dave,"

"Oh God! Why did this have to happen to us?"

"Who is John Galt?"

It was half-past two when the Comet, pulled by an old switch engine, jerked to a stop on a siding of Winston Station. Kip Chalmers glanced out with incredulous anger at the few shanties on a desolate mountainside and at the ancient hovel of a station.

"Now what? What in hell are they stopping here for?" he cried, and rang for the conductor.

With the return of motion and safety, his terror had turned into rage. He felt almost as if he had been cheated by having been made to experience an unnecessary fear. His companions were still clinging to the tables of the lounge; they felt too shaken to sleep.

"How long?" the conductor said impassively, in answer to his question. "Till morning, Mr. Chalmers."

Chalmers stared at him, stupefied. "We're going to stand here till morning?"

"Yes, Mr. Chalmers."

"Here?"

"Yes."

"But I have a rally in San Francisco in the evening!"

The conductor did not answer.

"Why? Why do we have to stand? Why in hell? What happened?"

Slowly, patiently, with contemptuous politeness, the conductor gave him an exact account of the situation. But years ago, in grammar school, in high school, in college, Kip Chalmers had been taught that man does not and need not live by reason.

"Damn your tunnel!" he screamed. "Do you think I'm going to let you hold me up because of some miserable tunnel? Do you want to wreck vital national plans on account of a tunnel? Tell your engineer that I must be in San Francisco by evening and that he's got to get me there!"

"How?"

"That's your job, not mine!"

"There is no way to do it."

"Then find a way, God damn you!"

The conductor did not answer.

"Do you think I'll let your miserable technological problems interfere with crucial social issues? Do you know who I am? Tell that engineer to start moving, if he values his job!"

"The engineer has his orders."

"Orders be damned! I give the orders these days! Tell him to start at once!"

"Perhaps you'd better speak to the station agent, Mr. Chalmers. I have no authority to answer you as I'd like to," said the conductor, and walked out.

Chalmers leaped to his feet. "Say, Kip . . ." said Lester Tuck uneasily, "maybe it's true . . . maybe they can't do it."

"They can if they have to!" snapped Chalmers, marching resolutely to the door.

Years ago, in college, he had been taught that the only effective means to impel men to action was fear.

In the dilapidated office of Winston Station, he confronted a sleepy man with slack, worn features, and a frightened young boy who sat at the operator's desk. They listened, in silent stupor, to a stream of profanity such as they had never heard from any section gang.

"—and it's not my problem how you get the train through the tunnel, that's for you to figure out!" Chalmers concluded. "But if you don't get me an engine and don't start that train, you can kiss good-bye to your jobs, your work permits and this whole goddamn railroad!"

The station agent had never heard of Kip Chalmers and did not know the nature of his position. But he knew that this was the day when unknown men in undefined positions held unlimited power—the power of life or death.

"It's not up to us, Mr. Chalmers," he said pleadingly. "We don't issue the orders out here. The order came from Silver Springs. Suppose you telephone Mr. Mitchum and—"

"Who's Mr. Mitchum?"

"He's the division superintendent at Silver Springs. Suppose you send him a message to—"

"I should bother with a division superintendent! I'll send a message to Jim Taggart—that's what I'm going to do!"

Before the station agent had time to recover, Chalmers whirled to the boy, ordering, "You—take this down and send it at once!"

It was a message which, a month ago, the station agent would not have accepted from any passenger; the rules forbade it; but he was not certain about any rules any longer: Mr. James Taggart, New York City. Am held up on the Comet at Winston, Colorado, by the incompetence of your men, who refuse to give me an engine. Have meeting in San Francisco in the evening of top-level national importance. If you don't move my train at once, I'll let you guess the consequences. Kip Chalmers.

After the boy had transmitted the words onto the wires that stretched from pole to pole across a continent as guardians of the Taggart track—after Kip Chalmers had returned to Ms car to wait for an answer—the station agent telephoned Dave Mitchum, who was his friend, and read to him the text of the message. He heard Mitchum groan in answer.

"I thought I'd tell you, Dave. I never heard of the guy before, but maybe he's somebody important."

"I don't know!" moaned Mitchum. "Kip Chalmers? You see his name in the newspapers all the time, right in with all the top-level boys, I don't know what he is, but if he's from Washington, we can't take any chances. Oh Christ, what are we going to do?"

We can't take any chances—thought the Taggart operator in New York, and transmitted the message by telephone to James Taggart's home. It was close to six A.M. in New York, and James Taggart was awakened out of the fitful sleep of a restless night. He listened to the telephone, his face sagging. He felt the same fear as the station agent of Winston, and for the same reason.

He called the home of Clifton Locey. All the rage which he could not pour upon Kip Chalmers, was poured over the telephone wire upon Clifton Locey. "Do something!" screamed Taggart. "I don't care what you do, it's your job, not mine, but see to it that that train gets through! What in hell is going on? I never heard of the Comet being held up! Is that how you run your department? It's a fine thing when important passengers have to start sending messages to me! At least, when my sister ran the place, I wasn't awakened in the middle of the night over every spike that broke in Iowa—Colorado, I mean!"

"I'm so sorry, Jim," said Clifton Locey smoothly, in a tone that balanced apology, reassurance and the right degree of patronizing confidence. "It's just a misunderstanding. It's somebody's stupid mistake.

Don't worry, 111 take care of it. I was, as a matter of fact, in bed, but I'll attend to it at once."

Clifton Locey was not in bed; he had just returned from a round of night clubs, in the company of a young lady. He asked her to wait and hurried to the offices of Taggart Transcontinental. None of the night staff who saw him there could say why he chose to appear in person, but neither could they say that it had been unnecessary. He rushed in and out of several offices, was seen by many people and gave an impression of great activity. The only physical result of it was an order that went over the wires to Dave Mitchum, superintendent of the Colorado Division: "Give an engine to Mr. Chalmers at once. Send the Comet through safely and without unnecessary delay. If you are unable to perform your duties, I shall hold you responsible before the Unification Board, Clifton Locey,"

Then, calling his girl friend to join him, Clifton Locey drove to a country roadhouse—to make certain that no one would be able to find him in the next few hours.

The dispatcher at Silver Springs was baffled by the order that he handed to Dave Mitchum, but Dave Mitchum understood. He knew that no railroad order would ever speak in such terms as giving an engine to a passenger; he knew that the thing was a show piece, he guessed what sort of show was being staged, and he felt a cold sweat at the realization of who was being framed as the goat of the show.

"What's the matter, Dave?" asked the trainmaster.

Mitchum did not answer. He seized the telephone, his hands shaking as he begged for a connection to the Taggart operator in New York, He looked like an animal in a trap.

He begged the New York operator to get him Mr. Clifton Locey's home. The operator tried. There was no answer. He begged the operator to keep on trying and to try every number he could think of, where Mr. Locey might be found. The operator promised and Mitchum hung up, but knew that it was useless to wait or to speak to anyone in Mr. Locey's department.

"What's the matter, Dave?"

Mitchum handed him the order—and saw by the look on the trainmaster's face that the trap was as bad as he had suspected.

He called the Region Headquarters of Taggart Transcontinental at Omaha, Nebraska, and begged to speak to the general manager of the region. There was a brief silence on the wire, then the voice of the Omaha operator told him that the general manager had resigned and vanished three days ago—"over a little trouble with Mr. Locey," the voice added.

He asked to speak to the assistant general manager in charge of his particular district; but the assistant was out of town for the week end and could not be reached.

"Get me somebody else!" Mitchum screamed. "Anybody, of any district! For Christ's sake, get me somebody who'll tell me what to do!"

The man who came on the wire was the assistant general manager of the Iowa-Minnesota District.

"What?" he interrupted at Mitchum's first words. "At Winston, Colorado? Why in hell are you calling me? . . . No, don't tell me what happened, I don't want to know it! . . . No, I said! No! You're not going to frame me into having to explain afterwards why I did or didn't do anything about whatever it is. It's not my problem! . . . Speak to some region executive, don't pick on me, what do I have to do with Colorado? . . . Oh hell, I don't know, get the chief engineer, speak to him!"

The chief engineer of the Central Region answered impatiently, "Yes? What? What is it?"—and Mitchum rushed desperately to explain. When the chief engineer heard that there was no Diesel, he snapped, "Then hold the train, of course!" When he heard about Mr.

Chalmers, he said, his voice suddenly subdued, "Hm . . . Kip Chalmers? Of Washington? . . . Well, I don't know. That would be a matter for Mr. Locey to decide." When Mitchum said, "Mr. Locey ordered me to arrange it, but—" the chief engineer snapped in great relief, "Then do exactly as Mr. Locey says!" and hung up.

Dave Mitchum replaced the telephone receiver cautiously. He did not scream any longer. Instead, he-tiptoed to a chair, almost as if he were sneaking. He sat looking at Mr. Locey's order for a long time.

Then he snatched a glance about the room. The dispatcher was busy at his telephone. The trainmaster and the road foreman were there, but they pretended that they were not waiting. He wished Bill Brent, the chief dispatcher, would go home; Bill Brent stood in a corner, watching him.

Brent was a short, thin man with broad shoulders; he was forty, but looked younger; he had the pale face of an office worker and the hard, lean features of a cowboy. He was the best dispatcher on the system.

Mitchum rose abruptly and walked upstairs to his office, clutching Locey's order in his hand.

Dave Mitchum was not good at understanding problems of engineering and transportation, but he understood men like Clifton Locey. He understood the kind of game the New York executives were playing and what they were now doing to him. The order did not tell him to give Mr. Chalmers a coal-burning engine—just "an engine." If the time came to answer questions, wouldn't Mr. Locey gasp in shocked indignation that he had expected a division superintendent to know that only a Diesel engine could be meant in that order? The order stated that he was to send the Comet through "safely"—wasn't a division superintendent expected to know what was safe?—"and without unnecessary delay." What was an unnecessary delay? If the possibility of a major disaster was involved, wouldn't a delay of a week or a month be considered necessary?

The New York executives did not care, thought Mitchum; they did not care whether Mr. Chalmers reached his meeting on time, or whether an unprecedented catastrophe struck their rails; they cared only about making sure that they would not be blamed for either. If he held the train, they would make him the scapegoat to appease the anger of Mr. Chalmers; if he sent the train through and it did not reach the western portal of the tunnel, they would put the blame on his incompetence; they would claim that he had acted against their orders, in either case. What would he be able to prove? To whom? One could prove nothing to a tribunal that had no stated policy, no defined procedure, no rules of evidence, no binding principles—a tribunal, such as the Unification Board, that pronounced men guilty or innocent as it saw fit, with no standard of guilt or innocence.

Dave Mitchum knew nothing about the philosophy of law; but he knew that when a court is not bound by any rules, it is not bound by any facts, and then a hearing is not an issue of justice, but an issue of men, and your fate depends not on what you have or have not done, but on whom you do or do not know. He asked himself what chance he would have at such a hearing against Mr. James Taggart, Mr. Clifton Locey, Mr. Kip Chalmers and their powerful friends.

Dave Mitchum had spent his life slipping around the necessity of ever making a decision; he had done it by waiting to be told and never being certain of anything. All that he now allowed into his brain was a long, indignant whine against injustice. Fate, he thought, had singled him out for an unfair amount of bad luck: he was being framed by his superiors on the only good job he had ever held. He had never been taught to understand that the manner in which he obtained this job, and the frame-up, were inextricable parts of a single whole.

As he looked at Locey's order, he thought that he could hold the Comet, attach Mr. Chalmers1 car to an engine and send it into the tunnel, alone. But he shook his head before the thought was fully formed: he knew that this would force Mr. Chalmers to recognize the nature of the risk; Mr. Chalmers would refuse; he would continue to demand a safe and non-existent engine. And more: this would mean that he, Mitchum, would have to assume responsibility, admit full knowledge of the danger, stand in the open and identify the exact nature of the situation—the one act which the policy of his superiors was based on evading, the one key to their game.

Dave Mitchum was not the man to rebel against his background or to question the moral code of those in charge. The choice he made was not to challenge, but to follow the policy of his superiors. Bill Brent could have- beaten him in any contest of technology, but here was an endeavor at which he could beat Bill Brent without effort. There had once been a society where men needed the particular talents of Bill Brent, if they wished to survive; what they needed now was the talent of Dave Mitchum.

Dave Mitchum sat down at his secretary's typewriter and, by means of two fingers, carefully typed out an order to the trainmaster and another to the road foreman. The first instructed the trainmaster to summon a locomotive crew at once, for a purpose described only as "an emergency"; the second instructed the road foreman to "send the best engine available to Winston, to stand by for emergency assistance."

He put carbon copies of the orders into his own pocket, then opened the door, yelled for the night dispatcher to come up and handed him the two orders for the two men downstairs. The night dispatcher was a conscientious young boy who trusted his superiors and knew that discipline was the first rule of the railroad business. He was astonished that Mitchum should wish to send written orders down one flight of stairs, but he asked no questions, Mitchum waited nervously. After a while, he saw the figure of the road foreman walking across the yards toward the roundhouse. He felt relieved: the two men had not come up to confront him in person; they had understood and they would play the game as he was playing it.

The road foreman walked across the yards, looking down at the ground. He was thinking of his wife, his two children and the house which he had spent a lifetime to own. He knew what his superiors were doing and he wondered whether he should refuse to obey them. He had never been afraid of losing his job; with the confidence of a competent man, he had known that if he quarreled with one employer, he would always be able to find another. Now, he was afraid; he had no right to quit or to seek a job; if he defied an employer, he would be delivered into the unanswerable power of a single Board, and if the Board ruled against him, it would mean being sentenced to the slow death of starvation: it would mean being barred from any employment. He knew that the Board would rule against him; he knew that the key to the dark, capricious mystery of the Board's contradictory decisions was the secret power of pull. What chance would he have against Mr. Chalmers? There had been a time when the self-interest of his employers had demanded that he exercise his utmost ability.

Now, ability was not wanted any longer. There had been a time when he had been required to do his best and rewarded accordingly. Now, he could expect nothing but punishment, if he tried to follow his conscience. There had been a time when he had been expected to think.

Now, they did not want him to think, only to obey. They did not want him to have a conscience any longer. Then why should he raise his voice? For whose sake? He thought of the passengers—the three hundred passengers aboard the Comet. He thought of his children. He had a son in high school and a daughter, nineteen, of whom he was fiercely, painfully proud, because she was recognized as the most beautiful girl in town. He asked himself whether he could deliver his children to the fate of the children of the unemployed, as he had seen them in the blighted areas, in the settlements around closed factories and along the tracks of discontinued railroads. He saw, in astonished horror, that the choice which he now had to make was between the lives of his children and the lives of the passengers on the Comet. A conflict of this kind had never been possible before. It was by protecting the safety of the passengers that he had earned the security of his children; he had served one by serving the other; there had been no clash of interests, no call for victims. Now, if he wanted to save the passengers, he had to do it at the price of his children.

He remembered dimly the sermons he had heard about the beauty of self-immolation, about the virtue of sacrificing to others that which was one's dearest. He knew nothing about the philosophy of ethics; but he knew suddenly—not in words, but in the form of a dark, angry, savage pain—that if this was virtue, then he wanted no part of it.

He walked into the roundhouse and ordered a large, ancient coal burning locomotive to be made ready for the run to Winston.

The trainmaster reached for the telephone in the dispatcher's office, to summon an engine crew, as ordered. But his hand stopped, holding the receiver. It struck him suddenly that he was summoning men to their death, and that of the twenty lives listed on the sheet before him, two would be ended by his choice. He felt a physical sensation of cold, nothing more; he felt no concern, only a puzzled, indifferent astonishment. It had never been his job to call men out to die; his job had been to call them out to earn their living. It was strange, he thought; and it was strange that his hand had stopped; what made it stop was like something he would have felt twenty years ago—no, he thought, strange, only one month ago, not longer.

He was forty-eight years old. He had no family, no friends, no ties to any living being in the world. Whatever capacity for devotion he had possessed, the capacity which others scatter among many random concerns, he had given it whole to the person of his young brother —the brother, his junior by twenty-five years, whom he had brought up. He had sent him through a technological college, and he had known, as had all the teachers, that the boy had the mark of genius on the forehead of his grim, young face. With the same single-tracked devotion as his brother's, the boy had cared for nothing but his studies, not for sports or parties or girls, only for the vision of the things he was going to create as an inventor. He had graduated from college and had gone, on a salary unusual for his age, into the research laboratory of a great electrical concern in Massachusetts.

This was now May 28, thought the trainmaster. It was on May 1 that Directive 10-289 had been issued. It was on the evening of May I that he had been informed that his brother had committed suicide.

The trainmaster had heard it said that the directive was necessary to save the country. He could not know whether this was true or not; he had no way of knowing what was necessary to save a country. But driven by some feeling which he could not express, he had walked into the office of the editor of the local newspaper and demanded that they publish the story of his brother's death. "People have to know it," had been all he could give as his reason. He had been unable to explain that the bruised connections of his mind had formed the wordless conclusion that if this was done by the will of the people, then the people had to know it; he could not believe that they would do it, if they knew. The editor had refused; he had stated that it would be bad for the country's morale.

The trainmaster knew nothing about political philosophy; but he knew that that had been the moment when he lost all concern for the life or death of any human being or of the country.

He thought, holding the telephone receiver, that maybe he should warn the men whom he was about to call. They trusted him; it would never occur to them that he could knowingly send them to their death.

But he shook his head: this was only an old thought, last year's thought, a remnant of the time when he had trusted them, too. It did not matter now. His brain worked slowly, as if he were dragging his thoughts through a vacuum where no emotion responded to spur them on; he thought that there would be trouble if he warned anyone, there would be some sort of fight and it was he who had to make some great effort to start it. He had forgotten what it was that one started this sort of fight for. Truth? Justice? Brother-love? He did not want to make an effort. He was very tired. If he warned all the men on his list, he thought, there would be no one to run that engine, so he would save two lives and also three hundred lives aboard the Comet.

But nothing responded to the figures in his mind; "lives" was just a word, it had no meaning.

He raised the telephone receiver to his ear, he called two numbers, he summoned an engineer and a fireman to report for duty at once.

Engine Number 306 had left for Winston, when Dave Mitchum came downstairs. "Get a track motor car ready for me," he ordered, "I'm going to run up to Fairmount." Fairmount was a small station, twenty miles east on the line. The men nodded, asking no questions. Bill Brent was not among them. Mitchum walked into Brent's office. Brent was there, sitting silently at his desk; he seemed to be waiting.

"I'm going to Fairmount," said Mitchum; his voice was aggressively too casual, as if implying that no answer was necessary. "They had a Diesel there couple of weeks ago . . . you know, emergency repairs or something. . . . I'm going down to see if we could use it."

He paused, but Brent said nothing.

"The way things stack up," said Mitchum, not looking at him, "we can't hold that train till morning. We've got to take a chance, one way or another. Now I think maybe this Diesel will do it, but that's the last one we can try for. So if you don't hear from me in half an hour, sign the order and send the Comet through with Number 306 to pull her."

Whatever Brent had thought, he could not believe it when he heard it. He did not answer at once; then he said, very quietly, "No."

"What do you mean, no?"

"I won't do it."

"What do you mean, you won't? It's an order!”

"I won't do it." Brent's voice had the firmness of certainty unclouded by any emotion.

"Are you refusing to obey an order?"

"I am."

"But you have no right to refuse! And I'm not going to argue about it, either. It's what I've decided, it's my responsibility and I'm not asking for your opinion. Your job is to take my orders."

"Will you give me that order in writing?"

"Why, God damn you, are you hinting that you don't trust me? Are you . . . ?"

"Why do you have to go to Fairmount, Dave? Why can't you telephone them about that Diesel, if you think that they have one?"

"You're not going to tell me how to do my job! You're not going to sit there and question me! You're going to keep your trap shut and do as you're told or I'll give you a chance to talk—to the Unification Board!"

It was hard to decipher emotions on Brent's cowboy face, but Mitchum saw something that resembled a look of incredulous horror; only it was horror at some sight of his own, not at the words, and it had no quality of fear, not the kind of fear Mitchum had hoped for.

Brent knew that tomorrow morning the issue would be his word against Mitchum's; Mitchum would deny having given the order; Mitchum would show written proof that Engine Number 306 had been sent to Winston only "to stand by," and would produce witnesses that he had gone to Fairmount in search of a Diesel; Mitchum would claim that the fatal order had been issued by and on the sole responsibility of Bill Brent, the chief dispatcher, it would not be much of a case, not a case that could bear close study, but it would be enough for the Unification Board, whose policy was consistent only in not permitting anything to be studied closely. Brent knew that he could play the same game and pass the frame-up on to another victim, he knew that he had the brains to work it out—except that he would rather be dead than do it.

It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror.

It was the realization that there was no one whom he could call to expose this thing and stop it—no superior anywhere on the line, from Colorado to Omaha to New York. They were in on it, all of them, they were doing the same, they had given Mitchum the lead and the method. It was Dave Mitchum who now belonged on this railroad and he, Bill Brent, who did not.

As Bill Brent had learned to see, by a single glance at a few numbers on a sheet of paper, the entire trackage of a division—so he was now able to see the whole of his own life and the full price of the decision he was making. He had not fallen in love until he was past his youth; he had been thirty-six when he had found the woman he wanted. He had been engaged to her for the last four years; he had had to wait, because he had a mother to support and a widowed sister with three children. He had never been afraid of burdens, because he had known his ability to carry them, and he had never assumed an obligation unless he was certain that he could fulfill it. He had waited, he had saved his money, and now he had reached the time when he felt himself free to be happy. He was to be married in a few weeks, this coming June. He thought of it, as he sat at his desk, looking at Dave Mitchum, but the thought aroused no hesitation, only regret and a distant sadness—distant, because he knew that he could not let it be part of this moment.

Bill Brent knew nothing about epistemology; but he knew that man must live by his own rational perception of reality, that he cannot act against it or escape it or find a substitute for it—and that there is no other way for him to live.

He rose to his feet. "It's true that so long as I hold this job, I cannot refuse to obey you," he said. "But I can, if I quit. So I'm quitting."

"You're what?"

"I'm quitting, as of this moment."

"But you have no right to quit, you goddamn bastard! Don't you know that? Don't you know that I'll have you thrown in jail for it?"

"If you want to send the sheriff for me in the morning, I'll be at home. I won't try to escape. There's no place to go."

Dave Mitchum was six-foot-two and had the build of a bruiser, but he stood shaking with fury and terror over the delicate figure of Bill Brent. "You can't quit! There's a law against it! I've got a law! You can't walk out on me! I won't let you out! I won't let you leave this building tonight!"

Brent walked to the door. "Will you repeat that order you gave me, in front of the others? No? Then I will!"

As he pulled the door open, Mitchum's fist shot out, smashed into his face and knocked him down.

The trainmaster and the road foreman stood in the open doorway.

"He quit!" screamed Mitchum. "The yellow bastard quit at a time like this! He's a law-breaker and a coward!"

In the slow effort of rising from the floor, through the haze of blood running into his eyes, Bill Brent looked up at the two men. He saw that they understood, but he saw the closed faces of men who did not want to understand, did not want to interfere and hated him for putting them on the spot in the name of justice. He said nothing, rose to his feet and walked out of the building.

Mitchum avoided looking at the others. "Hey, you," he called, jerking his head at the night dispatcher across the room. "Come here.

You've got to take over at once."

With the door closed, he repeated to the boy the story of the Diesel at Fairmount, as he had given it to Brent, and the order to send the Comet through with Engine Number 306, if the boy did not hear from him in half an hour. The boy was in no condition to think, to speak or to understand anything: he kept seeing the blood on the face of Bill Brent, who had been his idol. "Yes, sir," he answered numbly Dave Mitchum departed for Fairmount, announcing to every yardman, switchman and wiper in sight, as he boarded the track motor car that he was going in search of a Diesel for the Comet.

The night dispatcher sat at his desk, watching the clock and the telephone, praying that the telephone would ring and let him hear from Mr. Mitchum. But the half-hour went by in silence, and whet there were only three minutes left, the boy felt a terror he could not explain, except that he did not want to send that order, He turned to the trainmaster and the road foreman, asking hesitantly, "Mr. Mitchum gave me an order before he left, but I wonder whether I ought to send it, because I . . . I don't think it's right. He said—"

The trainmaster turned away; he felt no pity: the boy was about the same age as his brother had been.

The road foreman snapped, "Do just as Mr. Mitchum told you.

You're not supposed to think," and walked out of the room.

The responsibility that James Taggart and Clifton Locey had evaded now rested on the shoulders of a trembling, bewildered boy. He hesitated, then he buttressed his courage with the thought that one did not doubt the good faith and the competence of railroad executives. He did not know that his vision of a railroad and its executives was that of a century ago.

With the conscientious precision of a railroad man, in the moment when the hand of the clock ended the half-hour, he signed his name to the order instructing the Comet to proceed with Engine Number 306, and transmitted the order to Winston Station.

The station agent at Winston shuddered when he looked at the order, but he was not the man to defy authority. He told himself that the tunnel was not, perhaps, as dangerous as he thought. He told himself that the best policy, these days, was not to think.

When he handed their copies of the order to the conductor and the engineer of the Comet, the conductor glanced slowly about the room, from face to face, folded the slip of paper, put it into his pocket and walked out without a word.

The engineer stood looking at the paper for a moment, then threw it down and said, "I'm not going to do it. And if it's come to where this railroad hands out orders like this one, I'm not going to work for it, either. Just list me as having quit."

"But you can't quit!" cried the station agent, "They'll arrest you for it!"

"If they find me," said the engineer, and walked out of the station into the vast darkness of the mountain night.

The engineer from Silver Springs, who had brought in Number 306, was sitting in a corner of the room. He chuckled and said, "He's yellow."

The station agent turned to him. "Will you do it, Joe? Will you take the Comet?"

Joe Scott was drunk. There had been a time when a railroad man, reporting for duty with any sign of intoxication, would have been regarded as a doctor arriving for work with sores of smallpox on his face.

But Joe Scott was a privileged person. Three months ago, he had been fired for an infraction of safety rules, which had caused a major wreck; two weeks ago, he had been reinstated in his job by order of the Unification Board. He was a friend of Fred Kinnan; he protected Kinnan's interests in his union, not against the employers, but against the membership.

"Sure," said Joe Scott. "I'll take the Comet. I'll get her through, if I go fast enough."

The fireman of Number 306 had remained in the cab of his engine.

He looked up uneasily, when they came to switch his engine to the head end of the Comet; he looked up at the red and green lights of the tunnel, hanging in the distance above twenty miles of curves. But he was a placid, amicable fellow, who made a good fireman with no hope of ever rising to engineer; his husky muscles were his only asset.

He felt certain that his superiors knew what they were doing, so he did not venture any questions.

The conductor stood by the rear end of the Comet. He looked at the lights of the tunnel, then at the long chain of the Comet's windows. A few windows were lighted, but most of them showed only the feeble blue glow of night lamps edging the lowered blinds. He thought that he should rouse the passengers and warn them. There had been a time when he had placed the safety of the passengers above his own, not by reason of love for his fellow men, but because that responsibility was part of his job, which he accepted and felt pride in fulfilling. Now, he felt a contemptuous indifference and no desire to save them. They had asked for and accepted Directive 10-289, he thought, they went on living and daily turning away in evasion from the kind of verdicts that the Unification Board was passing on defenseless victims—why shouldn't he now turn away from them? If he saved their lives, not one of them would come forward to defend him when the Unification Board would convict him for disobeying orders, for creating a panic, for delaying Mr. Chalmers. He had no desire to be a martyr for the sake of allowing people safely to indulge in their own irresponsible evil.

When the moment came, he raised his lantern and signaled the engineer to start.

"See?" said Kip Chalmers triumphantly to Lester Tuck, as the wheels under their feet shuddered forward. "Fear is the only practical means to deal with people."

The conductor stepped onto the vestibule of the last car. No one saw him as he went down the steps of the other side, slipped off the train and vanished into the darkness of the mountains.

A switchman stood ready to throw the switch that would send the Comet from the siding onto the main track. He looked at the Comet as it came slowly toward him. It was only a blazing white globe with a beam stretching high above his head, and a jerky thunder trembling through the rail under his feet. He knew that the switch should not be thrown. He thought of the night, ten years ago, when he had risked his life in a flood to save a train from a washout. But he knew that times had changed. In the moment when he threw the switch and saw the headlight jerk sidewise, he knew that he would now hate his job for the rest of his life.

The Comet uncoiled from the siding into a thin, straight line, and went on into the mountains, with the beam of the headlight like an extended arm pointing the way, and the lighted glass curve of the observation lounge ending it off.

Some of the passengers aboard the Comet were awake. As the train started its coiling ascent, they saw the small cluster of Winston's lights at the bottom of the darkness beyond their windows, then the same darkness, but with red and green lights by the hole of a tunnel on the upper edge of the windowpanes. The lights of Winston kept growing smaller, each time they appeared; the black hole of the tunnel kept growing larger. A black veil went streaking past the windows at times, dimming the lights: it was the heavy smoke from the coal-burning engine.

As the tunnel came closer, they saw, on the edge of the sky far to the south, in a void of space and rock, a spot of living fire twisting in the wind. They did not know what it was and did not care to learn.

It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.

The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that individual effort is futile, that an individual conscience is a useless luxury, that there is no individual mind or character or achievement, that everything is achieved collectively, and that it's masses that count, not men.

The man in Roomette 7, Car No. 2, was a journalist who wrote that it is proper and moral to use compulsion "for a good cause," who believed that he had the right to unleash physical force upon others—to wreck lives, throttle ambitions, strangle desires, violate convictions, to imprison, to despoil, to murder—for the sake of whatever he chose to consider as his own idea of "a good cause," which did not even have to be an idea, since he had never defined what he regarded as the good, but had merely stated that he went by "a feeling"—a feeling unrestrained by any knowledge, since he considered emotion superior to knowledge and relied solely on his own "good intentions" and on the power of a gun.

The woman in Roomette 10, Car No. 3, was an elderly schoolteacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards, by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil, that a majority may do anything it pleases, that they must not assert their own personalities, but must do as others were doing.

The man in Drawing Room B, Car No, 4, was a newspaper publisher who believed that men are evil by nature and unfit for freedom, that their basic instincts, if left unchecked, are to lie, to rob and to murder one another—and, therefore, men must be ruled by means of lies, robbery and murder, which must be made the exclusive privilege of the rulers, for the purpose of forcing men to work, teaching them to be moral and keeping them within the bounds of order and justice.

The man in Bedroom H, Car No. 5, was a businessman who had acquired his business, an ore mine, with the help of a government loan, under the Equalization of Opportunity Bill.

The man in Drawing Room A, Car No. 6, was a financier who had made a fortune by buying "frozen" railroad bonds and getting his friends in Washington to "defreeze" them.

The man in Seat 5, Car No, 7, was a worker who believed that he had "a right" to a job, whether his employer wanted him or not.

The woman in Roomette 6, Car No. 8, was a lecturer who believed that, as a consumer, she had "a right" to transportation, whether the railroad people wished to provide it or not.

The man in Roomette 2, Car No. 9, was a professor of economics who advocated the abolition of private property, explaining that intelligence plays no part in industrial production, that man's mind is conditioned by material tools, that anybody can run a factory or a railroad and it's only a matter of seizing the machinery.

The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, "I don't care, it's only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children."

The man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels.

The woman in Roomette 9, Car No. 12, was a housewife who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing, to control giant industries, of which she had no knowledge.

The man in Bedroom F, Car No. 13, was a lawyer who had said, "Me? I'll find a way to get along under any political system."

The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 14, was a professor of philosophy who taught that there is no mind—how do you know that the tunnel is dangerous?—-no reality—how can you prove that the tunnel exists?—no logic—why do you claim that trains cannot move without motive power?—no principles—why should you be bound by the law of cause and-effect?—no rights—why shouldn't you attach men to their jobs by force?—no morality—what's moral about running a railroad?—no absolutes—what difference does it make to you whether you live or die, anyway? He taught that we know nothing—why oppose the orders of your superiors?—that we can never be certain of anything—how do you know you're right?—that we must act on the expediency of the moment—you don't want to risk your job, do you?

The man in Drawing Room B, Car No. 15, was an heir who had inherited his fortune, and who had kept repeating, "Why should Rearden be the only one permitted to manufacture Rearden Metal?"

The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 16, was a humanitarian who had said, "The men of ability? I do not care what or if they are made to suffer. They must be penalized in order to support the incompetent.

Frankly, I do not care whether this is just or not. I take pride in not caring to grant any justice to the able, where mercy to the needy is concerned."

These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas. As the train went into the tunnel, the flame of Wyatt's Torch was the last thing they saw on earth.

CHAPTER VIII
BY OUR LOVE

The sun touched the tree tops on the slope of the hill, and they looked a bluish-silver, catching the color of the sky. Dagny stood at the door of the cabin, with the first sunrays on her forehead and miles of forest spread under her feet. The leaves went down from silver to green to the smoky blue of the shadows on the road below. The light trickled down through the branches and shot upward in sudden spurts when it hit a clump of ferns that became a fountain of green rays. It gave her pleasure to watch the motion of the light over a stillness where nothing else could move.

She had marked the date, as she did each morning, on the sheet of paper she had tacked to the wall of her room. The progression of the dates on that paper was the only movement in the stillness of her days, like the record kept by a prisoner on a desert island. This morning's date was May 28.

She had intended the dates to lead to a purpose, but she could not say whether she had reached it or not. She had come here with three assignments given, as orders, to herself: rest—learn to live without the railroad—get the pain out of the way. Get it out of the way, were the words she used. She felt as if she were tied to some wounded stranger who could be stricken at any moment by an attack that would drown her in his screams. She felt no pity for the stranger, only a contemptuous impatience; she had to fight him and destroy him, then her way would be clear to decide what she wished to do; but the stranger was not easy to fight.

The assignment to rest had been easier. She found that she liked the solitude; she awakened in the morning with a feeling of confident benevolence, the sense that she could venture forth and be willing to deal with whatever she found. In the city, she had lived in chronic tension to withstand the shock of anger, indignation, disgust, contempt.

The only danger to threaten her here was the simple pain of some physical accident; it seemed innocent and easy by comparison, The cabin was far from any traveled road; it had remained as her father had left it. She cooked her meals on a wood-burning stove and gathered the wood on the hillsides. She cleared the brush from under her walls, she reshingled the roof, she repainted the door and the frames of the windows. Rains, weeds and brush had swallowed the steps of what had once been a terraced path rising up the hill from the road to the cabin. She rebuilt it, clearing the terraces, re-laying the stones, bracing the banks of soft earth with walls of boulders. It gave her pleasure to devise complex systems of levers and pulleys out of old scraps of iron and rope, then to move weights of rock that were much beyond her physical power. She planted a few seeds of nasturtiums and morning glories, to see one spreading slowly over the ground and the other climbing up the tree trunks, to see them grow, to see progression and movement.

The work gave her the calm she needed; she had not noticed how she began it or why; she had started without conscious intention, but she saw it growing under her hands, pulling her forward, giving her a healing sense of peace. Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no matter how small or in what form, the sense of an activity going step by step to some chosen end across a span of time. The work of cooking a meal was like a closed circle, completed and gone, leading nowhere. But the work of building a path was a living sum, so that no day was left to die behind her, but each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow. A circle, she thought, is the movement proper to physical nature, they say that there's nothing but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end.

The cooking of meals, she thought, is like the feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make? It is not proper for man's life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him—man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station to—oh, stop it!

Stop it—she told herself in quiet severity, when the scream of the wounded stranger was choked off—don't think of that, don't look too far, you like building this path, build it, don't look beyond the foot of the hill.

She had driven a few times to the store in Woodstock, twenty miles away, to buy supplies and food. Woodstock was a small huddle of dying structures, built generations ago for some reason and hope long since forgotten. There was no railroad to feed it, no electric power, nothing but a county highway growing emptier year by year.

The only store was a wooden hovel, with spider-eaten corners and a rotted patch in the middle of the floor, eaten by the rains that came through the leaking roof. The storekeeper was a fat, pallid woman who moved with effort, but seemed indifferent to her own discomfort. The stock of food consisted of dusty cans with faded labels, some grain, and a few vegetables rotting in ancient bins outside the door. "Why don't you move those vegetables out of the sun?" Dagny asked once. The woman looked at her blankly, as if unable to understand the possibility of such a question. "They've always been there," she answered indifferently.

Driving back to the cabin, Dagny looked up at a mountain stream that fell with ferocious force down a sheer granite wall, its spray hanging like a mist of rainbows in the sun. She thought that one could build a hydroelectric plant, just large enough to supply the power for her cabin and for the town of Woodstock—Woodstock could be made to be productive—those wild apple trees she saw in such unusual numbers among the dense growth on the hillsides, were the remnants of orchards—suppose one were to reclaim them, then build a small spur to the nearest railroad—oh, stop it!

"No kerosene today," the storekeeper told her on her next trip to Woodstock. "It rained Thursday night, and when it rains, the trucks can't get through Fairfield gorge, the road's flooded, and the kerosene truck won't be back this way till next month." "If you know that the road gets flooded every time it rains, why don't you people repair it?"

The woman answered, "The road's always been that way."

Driving back, Dagny stopped on the crest of a hill and looked down at the miles of countryside below. She looked at Fairfield gorge where the county road, twisting through marshy soil below the level of a river, got trapped in a crack between two hills. It would be simple to bypass those hills, she thought, to build a road on the other side of the river—the people of Woodstock had nothing to do, she could teach them—cut a road straight to the southwest, save miles, connect with the state highway at the freight depot of—oh, stop it!

She put her kerosene lamp aside and sat in her cabin after dark by the light of a candle, listening to the music of a small portable radio.

She hunted for symphony concerts and twisted the dial rapidly past whenever she caught the raucous syllables of a news broadcast; she did not want any news from the city.

Don't think of Taggart Transcontinental—she had told herself on her first night in the cabin—don't think of it until you're able to hear the words as if they were "Atlantic Southern" or "Associated Steel," But the weeks passed and no scar would grow over the wound.

It seemed to her as if she were fighting the unpredictable cruelty of her own mind. She would lie in bed, drifting off to sleep—then find herself suddenly thinking that the conveyor belt was worn at the coaling station at Willow Bend, Indiana, she had seen it from the window of her car on her last trip, she must tell them to replace it or they—and then she would be sitting up in bed, crying, Stop it!—and stopping it, but remaining awake for the rest of that night.

She would sit at the door of the cabin at sunset and watch the motion of the leaves growing still in the twilight—then she would see the sparks of the fireflies rising from the grass, flashing on and off in every darkening corner, flashing slowly, as if holding one moment's warning—they were like the lights of signals winking at night over the track of a—Stop it!

It was the times when she could not stop it that she dreaded, the times when, unable to stand up—as in physical pain, with no limit to divide it from the pain of her mind—she would fall down on the floor of the cabin or on the earth of the woods and sit still, with her face pressed to a chair or a rock, and fight not to let herself scream aloud, while they were suddenly as close to her and as real as the body of a lover: the two lines of rail going off to a single point in the distance—the front of an engine cutting space apart by means of the letters TT—the sound of the wheels clicking in accented rhythm under the floor of her car—the statue of Nat Taggart in the concourse of the Terminal. Fighting not to know them, not to feel them, her body rigid but for the grinding motion of her face against her arm, she would draw whatever power over her consciousness still remained to her into the soundless, toneless repetition of the words: Get it over with, There were long stretches of calm, when she was able to face her problem with the dispassionate clarity of weighing a problem in engineering. But she could find no answer. She knew that her desperate longing for the railroad would vanish, were she to convince herself that it was impossible or improper. But the longing came from the certainty that the truth and the right were hers—that the enemy was the irrational and the unreal—that she could not set herself another goal or summon the love to achieve it, while her rightful achievement had been lost, not to some superior power, but to a loathsome evil that conquered by means of impotence.

She could renounce the railroad, she thought; she could find contentment here, in this forest; but she would build the path, then reach the road below, then rebuild the road—and then she would reach the storekeeper of Woodstock and that would be the end, and the empty white face staring at the universe in stagnant apathy would be the limit placed on her effort. Why?—she heard herself screaming aloud, There was no answer.

Then stay here until you answer it, she thought. You have no place to go, you can't move, you can't start grading a right-of-way until . . . until you know enough to choose a terminal.

There were long, silent evenings when the emotion that made her sit still and look at the unattainable distance beyond the fading light to the south, was loneliness for Hank Rearden. She wanted the sight of his unyielding face, the confident face looking at her with the hint of a smile. But she knew that she could not see him until her battle was won. His smile had to be deserved, it was intended for an adversary who traded her strength against his, not for a pain-beaten wretch who would seek relief in that smile and thus destroy its meaning. He could help her to live; he could not help her to decide for what purpose she wished to go on living.

She had felt a faint touch of anxiety since the morning when she marked "May 15" on her calendar. She had forced herself to listen to news broadcasts, once in a while; she had heard no mention of his name. Her fear for him was her last link to the city; it kept drawing her eyes to the horizon at the south and down to the road at the foot of the hill. She found herself waiting for him to come. She found herself listening for the sound of a motor. But the only sound to give her a futile start of hope at times, was the sudden crackle of some large bird's wings hurtling through the branches into the sky.

There was another link to the past, that still remained as an unsolved question: Quentin Daniels and the motor that he was trying to rebuild.

By June 1, she would owe him his monthly check. Should she tell him that she had quit, that she would never need that motor and neither would the world? Should she tell him to stop and to let the remnant of the motor vanish in rust on some such junk pile as the one where she had found it? She could not force herself to do it. It seemed harder than leaving the railroad. That motor, she thought, was not a link to the past: it was her last link to the future. To kill it seemed like an act, not of murder, but of suicide: her order to stop it would be her signature under the certainty that there was no terminal for her to seek ahead.

But it is not true—she thought, as she stood at the door of her cabin, on this morning of May 28—it is not true that there is no place in the future for a superlative achievement of man's mind; it can never be true. No matter what her problem, this would always remain to her—this immovable conviction that evil was unnatural and temporary. She felt it more clearly than ever this morning: the certainty that the ugliness of the men in the city and the ugliness of her suffering were transient accidents—while the smiling sense of hope within her at the sight of a sun-flooded forest, the sense of an unlimited promise, was the permanent and the real.

She stood at the door, smoking a cigarette. In the room behind her, the sounds of a symphony of her grandfather's time were coming from the radio. She barely listened, she was conscious only of the flow of chords that seemed to play an underscoring harmony for the flow of the smoke curving slowly from her cigarette, for the curving motion of her arm moving the cigarette to her lips once in a while. She closed her eyes and stood still, feeling the rays of the sun on her body. This was the achievement, she thought—to enjoy this moment, to let no memory of pain blunt her capacity to feel as she felt right now; so long as she could preserve this feeling, she would have the fuel to go on.

She was barely aware of a faint noise that came through the music, like the scratching of an old record. The first thing to reach her consciousness was the sudden jerk of her own hand flinging the cigarette aside. It came in the same instant as the realization that the noise was growing loader and that it was the sound of a motor. Then she knew that she had not admitted to herself how much she had wanted to hear that sound, how desperately she had waited for Hank Rearden.

She heard her own chuckle—it was humbly, cautiously low, as if not to disturb the drone of revolving metal which was now the unmistakable sound of a car rising up the mountain road.

She could not see the road—the small stretch under the arch of branches at the foot of the hill was her only view of it—but she watched the car's ascent by the growing, imperious strain of the motor against the grades and the screech of the tires on curves.

The car stopped under the arch of branches. She did not recognize it —it was not the black Hammond, but a long, gray convertible. She saw the driver step out: it was a man whose presence here could not be possible. It was Francisco d'Anconia.

The shock she felt was not disappointment, it was more like the sensation that disappointment would now be irrelevant. It was eagerness and an odd, solemn stillness, the sudden certainty that she was facing the approach of something unknown and of the gravest importance.

The swiftness of Francisco's movements was carrying him toward the hill while he was raising his head to glance up. He saw her above, at the door of the cabin, and stopped. She could not distinguish the expression on his face. He stood still for a long moment, his face raised to her. Then he started up the hill.

She felt—almost as if she had expected it—that this was a scene from their childhood. He was coming toward her, not running, but moving upward with a kind of triumphant, confident eagerness. No, she thought, this was not their childhood—it was the future as she would have seen it then, in the days when she waited for him as for her release from prison. It was a moment's view of a morning they would have reached, if her vision of life had been fulfilled, if they had both gone the way she had then been so certain of going. Held motionless by wonder, she stood looking at him, taking this moment, not in the name of the present, but as a salute to their past.

When he was close enough and she could distinguish his face, she saw the look of that luminous gaiety which transcends the solemn by proclaiming the great innocence of a man who has earned the right to be light-hearted. He was smiling and whistling some piece of music that seemed to flow like the long, smooth, rising flight of his steps.

The melody seemed distantly familiar to her, she felt that it belonged with this moment, yet she felt also that there was something odd about it, something important to grasp, only she could not think of it now.

"Hi, Slug!"

"Hi, Frisco!"

She knew—by the way he looked at her, by an instant's drop of his eyelids closing his eyes, by the brief pull of his head striving to lean back and resist, by the faint, half-smiling, half-helpless relaxation of his lips, then by the sudden harshness of his arms as he seized her—that it was involuntary, that he had not intended it, and that it was irresistibly right for both of them.

The desperate violence of the way he held her, the hurting pressure of his mouth on hers, the exultant surrender of his body to the touch of hers, were not the form of a moment's pleasure— she knew that no physical hunger could bring a man to this—she knew that it was the statement she had never heard from him, the greatest confession of love a man could make. No matter what he had done to wreck his life, this was still the Francisco d'Anconia in whose bed she had been so proud of belonging—no matter what betrayals she had met from the world, her vision of life had been true and some indestructible part of it had remained within him—and in answer to it, her body responded to his, her arms and mouth held him, confessing her desire, confessing an acknowledgment she had always given him and always would.

Then the rest of his years came back to her, with a stab of the pain of knowing that the greater his person, the more terrible his guilt hi destroying it. She pulled herself away from him, she shook her head, she said, in answer to both of them, "No."

He stood looking at her, disarmed and smiling. "Not yet. You have a great deal to forgive me, first. But I can tell you everything now."

She had never heard that low, breathless quality of helplessness in his voice. He was fighting to regain control, there was almost a touch of apology in his smile, the apology of a child pleading for indulgence, but there was also an adult's amusement, the laughing declaration that he did not have to hide his struggle, since it was happiness that he was wrestling with, not pain.

She backed away from him; she felt as if emotion had flung her ahead of her own consciousness, and questions were now catching up with her, groping toward the form of words.

"Dagny, that torture you've been going through, here, for the last month . . . answer me as honestly as you can . . . do you think you could have borne it twelve years ago?"

"No," she answered; he smiled. "Why do you ask that?"

"To redeem twelve years of my life, which I won't have to regret."

"What do you mean? And"—her questions had caught up with her—"and what do you know about my torture here?"

"Dagny, aren't you beginning to see that I would know everything about it?"

"How did you . . . Francisco! What were you whistling when you were coming up the hill?"

"Why, was I? I don't know."

"It was the Fifth Concerto by Richard Halley, wasn't it?"

"Oh . . . ]” He looked startled, then smiled in amusement at himself, then answered gravely, "I'll tell you that later."

"How did you find out where I was?"

"I'll tell you that, too."

"You forced it out of Eddie."

"I haven't seen Eddie for over a year."

"He was the only one who knew it."

"It wasn't Eddie who told me."

"I didn't want anybody to find me."

He glanced slowly about him, she saw his eyes stop on the path she had built, on the planted flowers, on the fresh-shingled roof. He chuckled, as if he understood and as if it hurt him. "You shouldn't have been left here for a month," he said. "God, you shouldn't have! It's my first failure, at the one time when I didn't want to fail. But I didn't think you were ready to quit. Had I known it, I would have watched you day and night."

"Really? What for?"

"To spare you"—he pointed at her work—"all this."

"Francisco," she said, her voice low, "if you're concerned about my torture, don't you know that I don't want to hear you speak of it, because—" She stopped; she had never complained to him, not in all those years; her voice flat, she 'said only, "—that I don't want to hear it?"

"Because I'm the one man who has no right to speak of it? Dagny, if you think that I don't know how much I've hurt you, I'll tell you about the years when I . . . But it's over. Oh, darling, it's over!"

"Is it?"

"Forgive me, I mustn't say that. Not until you say it," He was trying to control his voice, but the look of happiness was beyond his power of control.

"Are you happy because I've lost everything I lived for? All right, I'll say it, if this is what you've come to hear: you were the first thing I lost—does it amuse you now to see that I've lost the rest?"

He glanced straight at her, his eyes drawn narrow by such an intensity of earnestness that the glance was almost a threat, and she knew that whatever the years had meant to him, "amusement" was the one word she had no right to utter.

"Do you really think that?" he asked.

She whispered, "No . . ."

"Dagny, we can never lose the things we live for. We may have to change their form at times, if we've made an error, but the purpose remains the same and the forms are ours to make."

"'That is what I've been telling myself for a month. But there's no way left open toward any purpose whatever."

He did not answer. He sat down on a boulder by the door of the cabin, watching her as if he did not want to miss a single shadow of reaction on her face. "What do you think now of the men who quit and vanished?" he asked.

She shrugged, with a faint smile of helpless sadness, and sat down on the ground beside him. "You know," she said, "I used to think that there was some destroyer who came after them and made them quit.

But I guess there wasn't. There have been times, this past month, when I've almost wished he would come for me, too. But nobody came."

"No?"

"No. I used to think that he gave them some inconceivable reason to make them betray everything they loved. But that wasn't necessary.

I know how they felt. I can't blame them any longer. What I don't know is how they learned to exist afterward—if any of them still exist."

"Do you feel that you've betrayed Taggart Transcontinental?"

"No. I . . . I feel that I would have betrayed it by remaining at work."

"You would have."

"If I had agreed to serve the looters, it's . . . it's Nat Taggart that I would have delivered to them. I couldn't. I couldn't let his achievement, and mine, end up with the looters as our final goal."

"No, you couldn't. Do you call this indifference? Do you think that you love the railroad less than you did a month ago?"

"I think that I would give my life for just one more year on the railroad . . . But I can't go back to it."

"Then you know what they felt, all the men who quit, and what it was that they loved when they gave up."

"Francisco," she asked, not looking at him, her head bent, "why did you ask me whether I could have given it up twelve years ago?"

"Don't you know what night I am thinking of, just as you are?"

"Yes . . ." she whispered.

"That was the night I gave up d'Anconia Copper."

Slowly, with a long effort, she moved her head to glance up at him.

His face had the expression she had seen then, on that next morning, twelve years ago: the look of a smile, though he was not smiling, the quiet look of victory over pain, the look of a man's pride in the price he paid and in that which made it worth paying.

"But you didn't give it up," she said. "You didn't quit. You're still the President of d'Anconia Copper, only it means nothing to you now."

"It means as much to me now as it did that night."

"Then how can you let it go to pieces?"

"Dagny, you're more fortunate than I. Taggart Transcontinental is a delicate piece of precision machinery. It will not last long without you. It cannot be run by slave labor. They will mercifully destroy it for you and you won't have to see it serving the looters. But copper mining is a simpler job. D'Anconia Copper could have lasted for generations of looters and slaves. Crudely, miserably, ineptly—but it could have lasted and helped them to last. I had to destroy it myself."

-You—what?"

"I am destroying d'Anconia Copper, consciously, deliberately, by plan and by my own hand. I have to plan it as carefully and work as hard as if I were producing a fortune—in order not to let them notice it and stop me, in order not to let them seize the mines until it is too late. AH the effort and energy I had hoped to spend on d'Anconia Copper, I'm spending them, only . . . only it's not to make it grow. I shall destroy every last bit of it and every last penny of my fortune and every ounce of copper that could feed the looters. I shall not leave it as I found it—I shall leave it as Sebastian d'Anconia found it—then let them try to exist without him or me!"

"Francisco!" she screamed. "How could you make yourself do it?"

"By the grace of the same love as yours," he answered quietly, "my love for d'Anconia Copper, for the spirit of which it was the shape.

Was—and, some day, will be again."

She sat still, trying to grasp all the implications of what she now grasped only as the numbness of shock. In the silence, the music of the radio symphony went on, and the rhythm of the chords reached her like the slow, solemn pounding of steps, while she struggled to see at once the whole progression of twelve years: the tortured boy who called for help on her breasts—the man who sat on the floor of a drawing room, playing marbles and laughing at the destruction of great industries—the man who cried, "My love, I can't!" while refusing to help her—the man who drank a toast, in the dim booth of a barroom, to the years which Sebastian d'Anconia had had to wait. . . .

"Francisco . . . of all the guesses I tried to make about you . . . I never thought of it . . . I never thought that you were one of those men who had quit . . ."

"I was one of the first of them."

"I thought that they always vanished . . ."

"Well, hadn't I? Wasn't it the worst of what I did to you—that I left you looking at a cheap playboy who was not the Francisco d'Anconia you had known?"

"Yes . . ." she whispered, "only the worst was that I couldn't believe it . . . I never did . . . It was Francisco d'Anconia that I kept seeing every time I saw you. . . ."

"I know. And I know what it did to you. I tried to help you understand, but it was too soon to tell you. Dagny, if I had told you—that night or the day when you came to damn me for the San Sebastian Mines—that I was not an aimless loafer, that I was out to speed up the destruction of everything we had held sacred together, the destruction of d'Anconia Copper, of Taggart Transcontinental, of Wyatt Oil, of Rearden Steel—would you have found it easier to take?"

"Harder," she whispered. "I'm not sure T can take it, even now.

Neither your kind of renunciation nor my own . . . But, Francisco"—she threw her head back suddenly to look up at him—"if this was your secret, then of all the hell you had to take, I was—"

"Oh yes, my darling, yes, you were the worst of it!" It was a desperate cry, its sound of laughter and of release confessing all the agony he wanted to sweep away. He seized her hand, he pressed his mouth to it, then his face, not to let her see the reflection of what his years had been like. "If it's any kind of atonement, which it isn't . . . whatever I made you suffer, that's how I paid for it . . . by knowing what I was doing to you and having to do it . . . and waiting, waiting to . . . But it's over."

He raised his head, smiling, he looked down at her and she saw a look of protective tenderness come into his face, which told her of the despair he saw in hers.

"Dagny, don't think of that. I won't claim any suffering of mine as my excuse. Whatever my reason, I knew what I was doing and I've hurt you terribly. I'll need years to make up for it. Forget what"—she knew that he meant: what his embrace had confessed—"what I haven't said. Of all the things I have to tell you, that is the one I'll say last." But his eyes, his smile, the grasp of his fingers on her wrist were saying it against his will. "You've borne too much, and there's a great deal that you have to learn to understand in order to lose every scar of the torture you never should have had to bear. All that matters now is that you're free to recover. We're free, both of us, we're free of the looters, we're out of their reach."

She said, her voice quietly desolate, "That's what I came here for—to try to understand. But I can't. It seems monstrously wrong to surrender the world to the looters, and monstrously wrong to live under their rule. I can neither give up nor go back. I can neither exist without work nor work as a serf. I had always thought that any sort of battle was proper, anything, except renunciation. I'm not sure we're right to quit, you and f, when we should have fought them. But there is no way to fight. It's surrender, if we leave—and surrender, if we remain. I don't know what is right any longer."

"Check your premises, Dagny. Contradictions don't exist."

"But I can't find any answer. I can't condemn you for what you're doing, yet it's horror that I feel—admiration and horror, at the same time. You, the heir of the d'Anconias, who could have surpassed all his ancestors of the miraculous hand that produced, you're turning your matchless ability to the job of destruction. And I—I'm playing with cobblestones and shingling a roof, while a transcontinental railroad system is collapsing in the hands of congenital ward heelers. Yet you and I were the kind who determine the fate of the world. If this is what we let it come to, then it must have been our own guilt. But I can't see the nature of our error."

"Yes, Dagny, it was our own guilt."

"Because we didn't work hard enough?"

"Because we worked too hard—and charged too little."

"What do you mean?"

"We never demanded the one payment that the world owed us—and we let our best reward go to the worst of men. The error was made centuries ago, it was made by Sebastian d'Anconia, by Nat Taggart, by every man who fed the world and received no thanks in return.

You don't know what is right any longer? Dagny, this is not a battle over material goods. It's a moral crisis, the greatest the world has ever faced and the last. Our age is the climax of centuries of evil. We must put an end to it, once and for all, or perish—we, the men of the mind. It was our own guilt. We produced the wealth of the world—but we let our enemies write its moral code."

"But we never accepted their code. We lived by our own standards."

"Yes—and paid ransoms for it! Ransoms in matter and in spirit—in money, which our enemies received, but did not deserve, and in honor, which we deserved, but did not receive. That was our guilt—that we were willing to pay. We kept mankind alive, yet we allowed men to despise us and to worship our destroyers. We allowed them to worship incompetence and brutality, the recipients and the dispensers of the unearned. By accepting punishment, not for any sins, but for our virtues, we betrayed our code and made theirs possible. Dagny, theirs is the morality of kidnappers. They use your love of virtue as a hostage. They know that you'll bear anything in order to work and produce, because you know that achievement is man's highest moral purpose, that he can't exist without it, and your love of virtue is your love of life. They count on you to assume any burden. They count on you to feel that no effort is too great in the service of your love.

Dagny, your enemies are destroying you by means of your own power. Your generosity and your endurance are their only tools. Your unrequited rectitude is the only hold they have upon you. They know it.

You don't. The day when you'll discover it is the only thing they dread.

You must learn to understand them. You won't be free of them, until you do. But when you do, you'll reach such a stage of rightful anger that you'll blast every rail of Taggart Transcontinental, rather than let it serve them!"

"But to leave it to them!" she moaned. "To abandon it . . . To abandon Taggart Transcontinental . . . when it's . . . it's almost like a living person . . ."

"It was. It isn't any longer. Leave it to them. It won't do them any good. Let it go. We don't need it. We can rebuild it. They can't. We'll survive without it. They won't."

"But we, brought down to renouncing and giving up!"

"Dagny, we who've been called 'materialists' by the killers of the human spirit, we're the only ones who know how little value or meaning there is in material objects as such, because we're the ones who create their value and meaning. We can afford to give them up, for a short while, in order to redeem something much more precious. We are the soul, of which railroads, copper mines, steel mills and oil wells are the body—and they are living entities that beat day and night, like our hearts, in the sacred function of supporting human life, but only so long as they remain our body, only so long as they remain the expression, the reward and the property of achievement. Without us, they are corpses and their sole product is poison, not wealth or food, the poison of disintegration that turns men into hordes of scavengers.

Dagny, learn to understand the nature of your own power and you'll understand the paradox you now see around you. You do not have to depend on any material possessions, they depend on you, you create them, you own the one and only tool of production. Wherever you are, you will always be able to produce. But the looters—by their own stated theory—are in desperate, permanent, congenital need and at the blind mercy of matter. Why don't you take them at their word? They need railroads, factories, mines, motors, which they cannot make or run. Of what use will your railroad be to them without you? Who held it together? Who kept it alive? Who saved it, time and time again?

Was it your brother James? Who fed him? Who fed the looters? Who produced their weapons? Who gave them the means to enslave you?

The impossible spectacle of shabby little incompetents holding control over the products of genius—who made it possible? Who supported your enemies, who forged your chains, who destroyed your achievement?"

The motion that threw her upright was like a silent cry. He shot to his feet with the stored abruptness of a spring uncoiling, his voice driving on in merciless triumph: "You're beginning to see, aren't you? Dagny! Leave them the carcass of that railroad, leave them all the rusted rails and rotted ties and gutted engines—but don't leave them your mind! Don't leave them your mind! The fate of the world rests on that decision!"

"Ladies and gentlemen," said the panic-pregnant voice of a radio announcer, breaking off the chords of the symphony, "we interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special news bulletin. The greatest disaster in railroad history occurred in the early hours of the morning on the main line of Taggart Transcontinental, at Winston, Colorado, demolishing the famous Taggart Tunnel!"

Her scream sounded like the screams that had rung out in the one last moment in the darkness of the tunnel. Its sound remained with him through the rest of the broadcast—as they both ran to the radio in the cabin and stood, in equal terror, her eyes staring at the radio, his eyes watching her face.

"The details of the story were obtained from Luke Beal, fireman of the Taggart luxury main liner, the Comet, who was found unconscious at the western portal of the tunnel this morning, and who appears to be the sole survivor of the catastrophe. Through some astounding infraction of safety rules—in circumstances not yet fully established—the Comet, westbound for San Francisco, was sent into the tunnel with a coal-burning steam locomotive. The Taggart Tunnel, an eight-mile bore, cut through the summit of the Rocky Mountains and regarded as an engineering achievement not to be equaled in our time, was built by the grandson of Nathaniel Taggart, in the great age of the clean, smokeless Diesel-electric engine. The tunnel's ventilation system was not designed to provide for the heavy smoke and fumes of coal-burning locomotives—and it was known to every railroad employee in the district that to send a train into the tunnel with such a locomotive would mean death by suffocation for everyone aboard. The Comet, none the less, was so ordered to proceed. According to Fireman Beal, the effects of the fumes began to be felt when the train was about three miles inside the tunnel. Engineer Joseph Scott threw the throttle wide open, in a desperate attempt to gain speed, but the old, worn engine was inadequate for the weight of the long train and the rising grade of the track. Struggling through the thickening fumes, engineer and fireman had barely managed to force the leaking steam boilers up to a speed of forty miles per hour—when some passenger, prompted undoubtedly by the panic of choking, pulled the emergency brake cord. The sudden jolt of the stop apparently broke the engine's airhose, for the train could not be started again. There were screams coming from the cars. Passengers were breaking windows. Engineer Scott struggled frantically to make the engine start, but collapsed at the throttle, overcome by the fumes.

Fireman Beal leaped from the engine and ran. He was within sight of the western portal, when he heard the blast of the explosion, which is the last thing he remembers. The rest of the story was gathered from railroad employees at Winston Station. It appears that an Army Freight Special, westbound, carrying a heavy load of explosives, had been given no warning about the presence of the Comet on the track just ahead. Both trains had encountered delays and were running off their schedules. It appears that the Freight Special had been ordered to proceed regardless of signals, because the tunnel's signal system was out of order. It is said that in spite of speed regulations and in view of the frequent breakdowns of the ventilating system, it was the tacit custom of all engineers to go full speed while in the tunnel. It appears, as far as can be established at present, that the Comet was stalled just beyond the point where the tunnel makes a sharp curve. It is believed that everyone aboard was dead by that time. It is doubted that the engineer of the Freight Special, turning a curve at eighty miles an hour, would have been able to see, in time, the observation window of the Comet's last car, which was brightly lighted when it left Winston Station. What is known is that the Freight Special crashed into the rear of the Comet. The explosion of the Special's cargo broke windows in a farmhouse five miles away and brought down such a weight of rock upon the tunnel that rescue parties have not yet been able to come within three miles of where either train had been. It is not expected that any survivors will be found—and it is not believed that the Taggart Tunnel can ever be rebuilt."

She stood still. She looked as if she were seeing, not the room around her, but the scene in Colorado. Her sudden movement had the abruptness of a convulsion. With the single-tracked rationality of a somnambulist,, she whirled to find her handbag, as if it were the only object in existence, she seized it, she whirled to the door and ran.

"Dagny!" he screamed. "Don't go back!"

The scream had no more power to reach her than if he were calling to her across the miles between him and the mountains of Colorado.

He ran after her, he caught her, seizing her by both elbows, and he cried, "Don't go back! Dagny! In the name of anything sacred to you, don't go back!"

She looked as if she did not know who he was. In a contest of physical strength, he could have broken the bones of her arms without effort.

But with the force of a living creature fighting for life, she tore herself loose so violently that she threw him off balance for a moment. When he regained his footing, she was running down the hill—running as he had run at the sound of the alarm siren in Rearden's mills—running to her car on the road below.

His letter of resignation lay on the desk before him—and James Taggart sat staring at it, hunched by hatred. He felt as if his enemy were this piece of paper, not the words on it, but the sheet and the ink that had given the words a material finality. He had always regarded thoughts and words as inconclusive, but a material shape was that which he had spent his life escaping: a commitment.

He had not decided to resign—not really, he thought; he had dictated the letter for a motive which he identified to himself only as "just in case." The letter, he felt, was a form of protection; but he had not signed it yet, and that was his protection against the protection. The hatred was directed at whatever had brought him to feel that he would not be able to continue extending this process much longer.

He had received word of the catastrophe at eight o'clock this morning; by noon, he had arrived at his office. An instinct that came from reasons which he knew, but spent his whole effort on not knowing, had told him that he had to be there, this time.

The men who had been his marked cards—in a game he knew how to play—were gone. Clifton Locey was barricaded behind the statement of a doctor who had announced that Mr. Locey was suffering from a heart condition which made it impossible to disturb him at present. One of Taggart's executive assistants was said to have left for Boston last night, and the other was said to have been called unexpectedly to an unnamed hospital, to the bedside of a father nobody had ever suspected him of having. There was no answer at the home of the chief engineer. The vice-president in charge of public relations could not be found.

Driving through the streets to his office, Taggart had seen the black letters of the headlines. Walking down the corridors of Taggart Transcontinental, he had heard the voice of a speaker pouring from a radio in someone's office, the kind of voice one expects to hear on unlighted street corners: it was screaming demands for the nationalization of the railroads.

He had walked through the corridors, his steps noisy, in order to be seen, and hasty, in order not to be stopped for questions. He had locked the door of his office, ordering his secretary not to admit any person or phone call and to tell all comers that Mr. Taggart was busy.

Then he sat at his desk, alone with blank terror. He felt as if he were trapped in a subterranean vault and the lock could never be broken again—and as if he were held on display in the sight of the whole city below, hoping that the lock would hold out for eternity. He had to be here, in this office, it was required of him, he had to sit idly and wait—wait for the unknown to descend upon him and to determine his actions—and the terror was both of who would come for him and of the fact that nobody came, nobody to tell him what to do.

The ringing of the telephones in the outer office sounded like screams for help. He looked at the door with a sensation of malevolent triumph at the thought of all those voices being defeated by the innocuous figure of his secretary, a young man expert at nothing but the art of evasion, which he practiced with the gray, rubber limpness of the amoral. The voices, thought Taggart, were coming from Colorado, from every center of the Taggart system, from every office of the building around him. He was safe so long as he did not have to hear them.

His emotions had clogged into a still, solid, opaque ball within him, which the thought of the men who operated the Taggart system could not pierce; those men were merely enemies to be outwitted. The sharper bites of fear came from the thought of the men on the Board of Directors; but his letter of resignation was his fire escape, which would leave them stuck with the fire. The sharpest fear came from the thought of the men in Washington. If they called, he would have to answer; his rubber secretary would know whose voices superseded his orders. But Washington did not call.

The fear went through him in spasms, once in a while, leaving his mouth dry. He did not know what he dreaded. He knew that it was not the threat of the radio speaker. What he had experienced at the sound of the snarling voice had been more like a terror which he felt because he was expected to feel it, a duty-terror, something that went with his position, like well-tailored suits and luncheon speeches. But under it, he had felt a sneaking little hope, swift and furtive like the course of a cockroach: if that threat took form, it would solve everything, save him from decision, save him from signing the letter . . . he would not be President of Taggart Transcontinental any longer, but neither would anyone else . . . neither would anyone else. . . .

He sat, looking down at his desk, keeping his eyes and his mind out of focus. It was as if he were immersed in a pool of fog, struggling not to let it reach the finality of any form. That which exists possesses identity; he could keep it out of existence by refusing to identify it.

He did not examine the events in Colorado, he did not attempt to grasp their cause, he did not consider their consequences. He did not think. The clogged ball of emotion was like a physical weight in his chest, filling his consciousness, releasing him from the responsibility of thought. The bah1 was hatred—hatred as his only answer, hatred as the sole reality, hatred without object, cause, beginning or end, hatred as his claim against the universe, as a justification, as a right, as an absolute.

The screaming of the telephones went on through the silence. He knew that those pleas for help were not addressed to him, but to an entity whose shape he had stolen. It was this shape that the screams were now tearing away from him; he felt as if the ringing ceased to be sounds and became a succession of slashes hitting his skull. The object of the hatred began to take form, as if summoned by the bells. The solid ball exploded within him and flung him blindly into action.

Rushing out of the room, in defiance of all the faces around him, he went running down the halls to the Operating Department and into the anteroom of the Operating Vice-President's office.

The door to the office was open: he saw the sky in the great windows beyond an empty desk. Then he saw the staff in the anteroom around him, and the blond head of Eddie Willers in the glass cubbyhole. He walked purposefully straight toward Eddie Willers, he flung the glass door open and, from the threshold, in the sight and hearing of the room, he screamed: "Where is she?"

Eddie Willers rose slowly to his feet and stood looking at Taggart with an odd kind of dutiful curiosity, as if this were one more phenomenon to observe among all the unprecedented things he had observed. He did not answer.

"Where is she?"

"I cannot tell you."

"Listen, you stubborn little punk, this is no time for ceremony! If you're trying to make me believe that you don't know where she is, I don't believe you! You know it and you're going to tell me, or I'll report you to the Unification Board! I'll swear to them that you know it—then try and prove that you don't!"

There was a faint tone of astonishment in Eddie's voice as he answered, "I've never attempted to imply that I don't know where she is, Jim, I know it. But I won't tell you."

Taggart's scream rose to the shrill, impotent sound that confesses a miscalculation: "Do you realize what you're saying?"

"Why, yes, of course."

"Will you repeat it"—he waved at the room—"for these witnesses?"

Eddie raised his voice a little, more in precision and clarity than in volume: "I know where she is. But I will not tell you."

"You're confessing that you're an accomplice who's aiding and abetting a deserter?"

"If that's what you wish to call it."

"But it's a crime! It's a crime against the nation. Don't you know that?"

"No."

"It's against the law!"

"Yes."

"This is a national emergency! You have no right to any private secrets! You're withholding vital information! I'm the President of this railroad! I'm ordering you to tell me! You can't refuse to obey an order!

It's a penitentiary offense! Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Do you refuse?"

"I do."

Years of training had made Taggart able to watch any audience around him, without appearing to do so. He saw the tight, closed faces of the staff, faces that were not his allies. All had a look of despair, except the face of Eddie Willers. The "feudal serf" of Taggart Transcontinental was the only one who seemed untouched by the disaster. He looked at Taggart with the lifelessly conscientious glance of a scholar confronted by a field of knowledge he had never wanted to study.

"Do you realize that you're a traitor?" yelled Taggart.

Eddie asked quietly, 'To whom?"

"To the people! It's treason to shield a deserter! It's economic treason! Your duty to feed the people comes first, above anything else whatever! Every public authority has said so! Don't you know it?

Don't you know what they'll do to you?"

"Don't you see that I don't give a damn about that?"

"Oh, you don't? I'll quote that to the Unification Board! I have all these witnesses to prove that you said—"

"Don't bother about witnesses, Jim. Don't put them on the spot. I'll write down everything I said, I'll sign it, and you can take it to the Board."

The sudden explosion of Taggart's voice sounded as if he had been slapped: "Who are you to stand against the government? Who are you, you miserable little office rat, to judge national policies and hold opinions of your own? Do you think the country has time to bother about your opinions, your wishes or your precious little conscience?

You're going to learn a lesson—all of you!—all of you spoiled, self-indulgent, undisciplined little two-bit clerks, who strut as if that crap about your rights was serious! You're going to learn that these are not the days of Nat Taggart!"

Eddie said nothing. For an instant, they stood looking at each other across the desk. Taggart's face was distorted by terror, Eddie's remained sternly serene. James Taggart believed the existence of an Eddie Willers too well; Eddie Willers could not believe the existence of a James Taggart.

"Do you think the nation will bother about your wishes or hers?" screamed Taggart. "It's her duty to come back! It's her duty to work!

What do we care whether she wants to work or not? We need her!"

"Do you, Jim?"

An impulse pertaining to self-preservation made Taggart back a step away from the sound of that particular tone, a very quiet tone, in the voice of Eddie Willers. But Eddie made no move to follow. He remained standing behind his desk, in a manner suggesting the civilized tradition of a business office.

"You won't find her," he said, "She won't be back. I'm glad she won't. You can starve, you can close the railroad, you can throw me in jail, you can have me shot—what does it matter? I won't tell you where she is. If I see the whole country crashing, I won't tell you. You won't find her. You—"

They whirled at the sound of the entrance door flung open. They saw Dagny standing on the threshold.

She wore a wrinkled cotton dress, and her hair was disheveled by hours of driving. She stopped for the duration of a glance around her, as if to recapture the place, but there was no recognition of persons in her eyes, the glance merely swept through the room, as if making a swift inventory of physical objects. Her face was not the face they remembered; it had aged, not by means of lines, but by means of a still, naked look stripped of any quality save ruthlessness.

Yet their first response, ahead of shock or wonder, was a single emotion that went through the room like a gasp of relief. It was in all their faces but one: Eddie Willers, who alone had been calm a moment ago, collapsed with his face down on his desk; he made no sound, but the movements of his shoulders were sobs.

Her face gave no sign of acknowledgment to anyone, no greeting, as if her presence here were inevitable and no words were necessary. She went straight to the door of her office; passing the desk of her secretary, she said, her voice like the sound of a business machine, neither rude nor gentle, "Ask Eddie to come in."

James Taggart was the first one to move, as if dreading to let her out of his sight. He rushed in after her, he cried, "I couldn't help it!" and then, life returning to him, his own, his normal kind of life, he screamed, "It was your fault! You did it! You're to blame for it! Because you left!"

He wondered whether his scream had been an illusion inside his own ears. Her face remained blank; yet she had turned to him; she looked as if sounds had reached her, but not words, not the communication of a mind. What he felt for a moment was his closest approach to a sense of his own non-existence.

Then he saw the faintest change in her face, merely the indication of perceiving a human presence, but she was looking past him and he turned and saw that Eddie Willers had entered the office.

There were traces of tears in Eddie's eyes, but he made no attempt to hide them, he stood straight, as if the tears or any embarrassment or any apology for them were as irrelevant to him as to her.

She said, "Get Ryan on the telephone, tell him I'm here, then let me speak to him." Ryan had been the general manager of the railroad's Central Region.

Eddie gave her a warning by not answering at once, then said, his voice as even as hers, "Ryan's gone, Dagny. He quit last week."

They did not notice Taggart, as they did not notice the furniture around them. She had not granted him even the recognition of ordering him out of her office. Like a paralytic, uncertain of his muscles' obedience, he gathered his strength and slipped out. But he was certain of the first thing he had to do: he hurried to his office to destroy his letter of resignation.

She did not notice his exit; she was looking at Eddie. "Is Knowland here?" she asked.

"No. He's gone."

"Andrews?"

"Gone."

"McGuire?"

"Gone."

He went on quietly to recite the list of those he knew she would ask for, those most needed in this hour, who had resigned and vanished within the past month. She listened without astonishment or emotion, as one listens to the casualty list of a battle where all are doomed and it makes no difference whose names fall first.

When he finished, she made no comment, but asked, "What has been done since this morning?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Dagny, any office boy could have issued orders here since this morning and everybody would have obeyed him, But even the office boys know that whoever makes the first move today will be held responsible for the future, the present and the past—when the buck passing begins. He would not save the system, he would merely lose his job by the time he saved one division. Nothing has been done. It's stopped still. Whatever is moving, is moving on anyone's blind guess—out on the line where they don't know whether they're to move or to stop. Some trains are held at stations, others are going on, waiting to be stopped before they reach Colorado. It's whatever the local dispatchers decide. The Terminal manager downstairs has cancelled all transcontinental traffic for today, including tonight's Comet. I don't know what the manager in San Francisco is doing. Only the wrecking crews are working. At the tunnel. They haven't come anywhere near the wreck as yet. I don't think they will."

"Phone the Terminal manager downstairs and tell him to put all transcontinental trains back on the schedule at once, including tonight's Comet. Then come back here."

When he came back, she was bending over the maps she had spread on a table, and she spoke while he made rapid notes: "Route all westbound trains south from Kirby, Nebraska, down the spur track to Hastings, down the track of the Kansas Western to Laurel, Kansas, then to the track of the Atlantic Southern at Jasper, Oklahoma.

West on the Atlantic Southern to Flagstaff, Arizona, north on the track of the Flagstaff-Homedale to Elgin, Utah, north to Midland, northwest on the track of the Wasatch Railway to Salt Lake City. The Wasatch Railway is an abandoned narrow-gauge. Buy it. Have the gauge spread to standard. If the owners are afraid, since sales are illegal, pay them twice the money and proceed with the work. There is no rail between Laurel, Kansas, and Jasper, Oklahoma—three miles, no rail between Elgin and Midland, Utah—five and a half miles. Have the rail laid.

Have construction crews start at once—recruit every local man available, pay twice the legal wages, three times, anything they ask—put three shifts on—and have the job done overnight. For rail, tear up the sidings at Winston, Colorado, at Silver Springs, Colorado, at Leeds, Utah, at Benson, Nevada. If any local stooges of the Unification Board come to stop the work—give authority to our local men, the ones you trust, to bribe them. Don't put that through the Accounting Department, charge it to me, I'll pay it. If they find some case where it doesn't work, have them tell the stooge that Directive 10-289 does not provide for local injunctions, that an injunction has to be brought against our headquarters and that they have to sue me, if they wish to stop us."

"Is that true?"

"How do I know? How can anybody know? But by the time they untangle it and decide whatever it is they please to decide—our track will be built."

"I see."

"I'll go over the lists and give you the names of our local men to put in charge—if they're still there. By the time tonight's Comet Teaches Kirby, Nebraska, the track will be ready. It will add about thirty-six hours to the transcontinental schedule—but there will be a transcontinental schedule. Then have them get for me out of the files the old maps of our road as it was before Nat Taggart's grandson built the tunnel."

"The . . . what?" He did not raise his voice, but the catch of his breath was the break of emotion he had wanted to avoid.

Her face did not change, but a fault note in her voice acknowledged him, a note of gentleness, not reproof: "The old maps of the days before the tunnel. We're going back, Eddie. Let's hope we can. No, we won't rebuild the tunnel. There's no way to do it now. But the old grade that crossed the Rockies is still there. It can be reclaimed. Only it will be hard to get the rail for it and the men to do it. Particularly the men."

He knew, as he had known from the first, that she had seen his tears and that she had not walked past in indifference, even though her clear, toneless voice and unmoving face gave him no sign of feeling.

There was some quality in her manner, which he sensed but could not translate. Yet the feeling it gave him, translated, was as if she were saying to him: I know, I understand, I would feel compassion and gratitude, if we were alive and free to feel, but we're not, are we, Eddie?—we're on a dead planet, like the moon, where we must move, but dare not stop for a breath of feeling or we'll discover that there is no air to breathe.

"We have today and tomorrow to get things started," she said. "I'll leave for Colorado tomorrow night."

"If you want to fly, I'll have to rent a plane for you somewhere.

Yours is still in the shops, they can't get the parts for it."

"No, I'll go by rail. I have to see the line. I'll take tomorrow's Comet."

It was two hours later, in a brief pause between long-distance phone calls, that she asked him suddenly the first question which did not pertain to the railroad: "What have they done to Hank Rearden?"

Eddie caught himself in the small evasion of looking away, forced his glance back to meet hers, and answered, "He gave in. He signed their Gift Certificate, at the last moment."

"Oh." The sound conveyed no shock or censure, it was merely a vocal punctuation mark, denoting the acceptance of a fact. "Have you heard from Quentin Daniels?"

"No."

"He sent no letter or message for me?"

"No."

He guessed the thing she feared and it reminded him of a matter he had not reported. "Dagny, there's another problem that's been growing all over the system since you left. Since May first. It's the frozen trains,"

"The what?"

"We've had trains abandoned on the line, on some passing track, in the middle of nowhere, usually at night—with the entire crew gone.

They just leave the train and vanish. There's never any warning given or any special reason, it's more like an epidemic, it hits the men suddenly and they go. It's been happening on other railroads, too. Nobody can explain it. But I think that everybody understands. It's the directive that's doing it. It's our men's form of protest. They try to go on and then they suddenly reach a moment when they can't take it any longer.

What can we do about it?" He shrugged. "Oh well, who is John Galt?"

She nodded thoughtfully; she did not look astonished.

The telephone rang and the voice of her secretary said, "Mr. Wesley Mouch calling from Washington, Miss Taggart."

Her lips stiffened a little, as at the unexpected touch of an insect. "It must be for my brother," she said.

"No, Miss Taggart. For you."

"All right. Put him on."

"Miss Taggart," said the voice of Wesley Mouch in the tone of a cocktail-party host, "I was so glad to hear you've regained your health that I wanted to welcome you back in person. I know that your health required a long rest and I appreciate the patriotism that made you cut your leave of absence short in this terrible emergency. I wanted to assure you that you can count on our co-operation in any step you now find it necessary to take. Our fullest co-operation, assistance and support. If there are any . . . special exceptions you might require, please feel certain that they can be granted."

She let him speak, even though he had made several small pauses inviting an answer. When his pause became long enough, she said, "I would be much obliged if you would let me speak to Mr. Weatherby."

"Why, of course, Miss Taggart, any time you wish . . . why . . . that is . . . do you mean, now?"

"Yes. Right now."

He understood. But he said, "Yes, Miss Taggart."

When Mr. Weatherby's voice came on the wire, it sounded cautious: "Yes, Miss Taggart? Of what service can I be to you?"

"You can tell your boss that if he doesn't want me to quit again, as he knows I did, he is never to call me or speak to me. Anything your gang has to tell me, let them send you to tell it. I'll speak to you, but not to him. You may tell him that my reason is what he did to Hank Rearden when he was on Rearden's payroll. If everybody else has forgotten it, I haven't."

"It is my duty to assist the nation's railroads at any time, Miss Taggart." Mr. Weatherby sounded as if he were trying to avoid the commitment of having heard what he had heard; but a sudden note of interest crept into his voice as he asked slowly, thoughtfully, with guarded shrewdness, "Am I to understand, Miss Taggart, that it is your wish to deal exclusively with me in all official matters? May I take this as your policy?"

She gave a brief, harsh chuckle. "Go ahead," she said. "You may list me as your exclusive property, use me as a special item of pull, and trade me all over Washington. But I don't know what good that will do you, because I'm not going to play the game, I'm not going to trade favors, I'm simply going to start breaking your laws right now—and you can arrest me when you feel that you can afford to."

"I believe that you have an old-fashioned idea about law, Miss Taggart. Why speak of rigid, unbreakable laws? Our modern laws are elastic and open to interpretation according to . . . circumstances."

"Then start being elastic right now, because I'm not and neither are railroad catastrophes."

She hung up, and said to Eddie, in the tone of an estimate passed on physical objects, "They'll leave us alone for a while."

She did not seem to notice the changes in her office: the absence of Nat Taggart's portrait, the new glass coffee table where Mr. Locey had spread, for the benefit of visitors, a display of the loudest humanitarian magazines with titles of articles headlined on their covers.

She heard—with the attentive look of a machine equipped to record, not to react—Eddie's account of what one month had done to the railroad. She heard his report on what he guessed about the causes of the catastrophe. She faced, with the same look of detachment, a succession of men who went in and out of her office with over hurried steps and hands fumbling in superfluous gestures. He thought that she had become impervious to anything. But suddenly—while pacing the office, dictating to him a list of track-laying materials and where to obtain them illegally—she stopped and looked down at the magazines on the coffee table. Their headlines said: "The New Social Conscience," "Our Duty to the Underprivileged," "Need versus Greed." With a single movement of her arm, the abrupt, explosive movement of sheer physical brutality, such as he had never seen from her before, she swept the magazines off the table and went on, her voice reciting a list of figures without a break, as if there were no connection between her mind and the violence of her body.

Late in the afternoon, finding a moment alone in her office, she telephoned Hank Rearden.

She gave her name to his secretary—and she heard, in the way he said it, the haste with which he had seized the receiver: "Dagny?"

"Hello, Hank. I'm back."

"Where?"

"In my office."

She heard the things he did not say, in the moment's silence on the wire, then he said, "1 suppose I'd better start bribing people at once to get the ore to start pouring rail for you."

"Yes. As much of it as you can. It doesn't have to be Rearden Metal. It can be—" The break in her voice was almost too brief to notice, but what it held was the thought: Rearden Metal rail for going back to the time before heavy steel?—perhaps back to the time of wooden rails with strips of iron? "It can be steel, any weight, anything you can give me."

"All right. Dagny, do you know that I've surrendered Rearden Metal to them? I've signed the Gift Certificate."

"Yes, I know."

"I've given in."

"Who am I to blame you? Haven't I?" He did not answer, and she said, "Hank, I don't think they care whether there's a train or a blast furnace left on earth. We do. They're holding us by our love of it, and we'll go on paying so long as there's still one chance left to keep one single wheel alive and moving in token of human intelligence. We'll go on holding it afloat, like our drowning child, and when the flood swallows it, we'll go down with the last wheel and the last syllogism. I know what we're paying, but—price is no object any longer."

"I know."

"Don't be afraid for me, Hank, I'll be all right by tomorrow morning."

"I'll never be afraid for you, darling. I'll see you tonight."

CHAPTER IX
THE FACE WITHOUT PAIN OR FEAR OR GUILT

The silence of her apartment and the motionless perfection of objects that had remained just as she had left them a month before, struck her with a sense of relief and desolation together, when she entered her living room. The silence gave her an illusion of privacy and ownership; the sight of the objects reminded her that they were preserving a moment she could not recapture, as she could not undo the events that had happened since.

There was still a remnant of daylight beyond the windows. She had left the office earlier than, she intended, unable to summon the effort for any task that could be postponed till morning. This was new to her —and it was new that she should now feel more at home in her apartment than in her office.

She took a shower, and stood for long, blank minutes, letting the water run over her body, but stepped out hastily when she realized that what she wanted to wash off was not the dust of the drive from the country, but the feel of the office.

She dressed, lighted a cigarette and walked into the living room, to stand at the window, looking at the city, as she had stood looking at the countryside at the start of this day.

She had said she would give her life for one more year on the railroad. She was back; but this was not the joy of working; it was only the clear, cold peace of a decision reached—and the stillness of unadmitted pain.

Clouds had wrapped the sky and had descended as fog to wrap the streets below, as if the sky were engulfing the city. She could see the whole of Manhattan Island, a long, triangular shape cutting into an invisible ocean. It looked like the prow of a sinking ship; a few tall buildings still rose above it, like funnels, but the rest was disappearing under gray-blue coils, going down slowly into vapor and space.

This was how they had gone—she thought—Atlantis, the city that sank into the ocean, and all the other kingdoms that vanished, leaving the same legend in all the languages of men, and the same longing.

She felt—-as she had felt it one spring night, slumped across her desk in the crumbling office of the John Galt Line, by a window facing a dark alley—the sense and vision of her own world, which she would never reach. , , . You—she thought—whoever you are, whom ,1 have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon, you whose presence I had always felt in the streets of the city and whose world I had wanted to build, it is my love for you that had kept me moving, my love and my hope to reach you and my wish to be worthy of you on the day when I would stand before you face to face. Now I know that I shall never find you—that it is not to be reached or lived—but what is left of my life is still yours, and I will go on in your name, even though it is a name I'll never learn, I will go on serving you, even though I'm never to win, I will go on, to be worthy of you on the day when I would have met you, even though I won't. . . . She had never accepted hopelessness, but she stood at the window and, addressed to the shape of a fogbound city, it was her self-dedication to unrequited love.

The doorbell rang.

She turned with indifferent astonishment to open, the door—but she knew that she should have expected him, when she saw that it was Francisco d'Anconia. She felt no shock and no rebellion, only the cheerless serenity of her assurance—and she raised her head to face him, with a slow, deliberate movement, as if telling him that she had chosen her stand and that she stood in the open.

His face was grave and calm; the look of happiness was gone, but the amusement of the playboy had not returned. He looked as if all masks were down, he looked direct, tightly disciplined, intent upon a purpose, he looked like a man able to know the earnestness of action, as she had once expected him to look—he had never seemed so attractive as he did in this moment—and she noted, in astonishment, her sudden feeling that he was not a man who had deserted her, but a man whom she had deserted.

"Dagny, are you able to talk about it now?"

"Yes—if you wish. Come in."

He glanced briefly at her living room, her home which he had never entered, then his eyes came back to her. He was watching her attentively. He seemed to know that the quiet simplicity of her manner was the worst of all signs for his purpose, that it was like a spread of ashes where no flicker of pain could be revived, that even pain would have been a form of fire.

"Sit down, Francisco."

She remained standing before him, as if consciously letting him see that she had nothing to hide, not even the weariness of her posture, the price she had paid for this day and her carelessness of price.

"I don't think I can stop you now," he said, "if you've made your choice. But if there's one chance left to stop you, it's a chance I have to take."

She shook her head slowly. "There isn't. And—what for, Francisco?

You've given up. What difference does it make to you whether I perish with the railroad or away from it?"

"I haven't given up the future,"

"What future?"

"The day when the looters will perish, but we won't."

"If Taggart Transcontinental is to perish with the looters, then so am I."

He did not take his eyes off her face and he did not answer.

She added dispassionately, "I thought I could live without it. I can't.

I'll never try it again. Francisco, do you remember?—we both believed, when we started, that the only sin on earth was to do things badly, I still believe it." The first note of life shuddered in her voice. "I can't stand by and watch what they did at that tunnel. I can't accept what they're all accepting—Francisco, it's the thing we thought so monstrous, you and I!—the belief that disasters are one's natural fate, to be borne, not fought. I can't accept submission. I can't accept helplessness. I can't accept renunciation. So long as there's a railroad left to run, I'll run it."

"In order to maintain the looters' world?"

"In order to maintain the last strip of mine."

"Dagny," he said slowly, "I know why one loves one's work. I know what it means to you, the job of running trains. But you would not run them if they were empty. Dagny, what is it you see when you think of a moving train?"

She glanced at the city. "The life of a man of ability who might have perished in that catastrophe, but will escape the next one, which I'll prevent—a man who has an intransigent mind and an unlimited ambition, and is in love with his own life . . . the kind of man who is what we were when we started, you and I. You gave him up. I can't."

He closed his eyes for an instant, and the tightening movement of his mouth was a smile, a smile substituting for a moan of understanding, amusement and pain. He asked, his voice gravely gentle, "Do you think that you can still serve him—that kind of man—by running the railroad?"

"Yes."

"All right, Dagny. I won't try to stop you. So long as you still think that, nothing can stop you, or should. You will stop on the day when you'll discover that your work has been placed in the service, not of that man's life, but of his destruction."

"Francisco!" It was a cry of astonishment and despair. "You do understand it, you know what I mean by that kind of man, you see him, too!"

"Oh yes," he said simply, casually, looking at some point in space within the room, almost as if he were seeing a real person. He added, "Why should you be astonished? You said that we were of his kind once, you and I. We still are. But one of us has betrayed him."

"Yes," she said sternly, "one of us has. We cannot serve him by renunciation."

"We cannot serve him by making terms with his destroyers."

"I'm not making terms with them. They need me. They know it.

It's my terms that I'll make them accept."

"By playing a game in which they gain benefits in exchange for harming you?"

"If I can keep Taggart Transcontinental in existence, it's the only benefit I want. What do I care if they make me pay ransoms? Let them have what they want. I'll have the railroad."

He smiled. "Do you think so? Do you think that their need of you is your protection? Do you think that you can give them what they want? No, you won't quit until you see, of your own sight and judgment, what it is that they really want. You know, Dagny, we were taught that some things belong to God and others to Caesar. Perhaps their God would permit it. But the man you say we're serving—he docs not permit it. He permits no divided allegiance, no war between your mind and your body, no gulf between your values and your actions, no tributes to Caesar. He permits no Caesars."

"For twelve years," she said softly, "I would have thought it inconceivable that there might come a day when I would have to beg your forgiveness on my knees. Now I think it's possible. If I come to see that you're right, I will. But not until then."

"You will. But not on your knees."

He was looking at her, as if he were seeing her body as she stood before him, even though his eyes were directed at her face, and his glance told her what form of atonement and surrender he was seeing in the future. She saw the effort he made to look away, his hope that she had not seen his glance or understood it, his silent struggle, betrayed by the tension of a few muscles under the skin of his face—the face she knew so well, "Until then, Dagny, remember that we're enemies. I didn't want to tell you this, but you're the first person who almost stepped into heaven and came back to earth. You've glimpsed too much, so you have to know this clearly. It's you that I'm fighting, not your brother James or Wesley Mouch. It's you that I have to defeat. I am out to end all the things that are most precious to you right now. While you'll struggle to save Taggart Transcontinental, I will be working to destroy it. Don't ever ask me for help or money. You know my reasons. Now you may hate me—as, from your stand, you should."

She raised her head a little, there was no perceptible change in her posture, it was no more than her awareness of her own body and of its meaning to him, but for the length of one sentence she stood as a woman, the suggestion of defiance coming only from the faintly stressed spacing of her words: "And what will it do to you?"

He looked at her, in full understanding, but neither admitting nor denying the confession she wanted to tear from him. "That is no one's concern but mine," he answered.

It was she who weakened, but realized, while saying it, that this was still more cruel: "I don't hate you. I've tried to, for years, but I never will, no matter what we do, either one of us."

"I know it," he said, his voice low, so that she did not hear the pain, but felt it within herself as if by direct reflection from him.

"Francisco!" she cried, in desperate defense of him against herself.

"How can you do what you're doing?"

"By the grace of my love"—for you, said his eyes—"for the man," said his voice, "who did not perish in your catastrophe and who will never perish,"

She stood silently still for a moment, as if in respectful acknowledgment.

"I wish I could spare you what you're going to go through," he said, the gentleness of his voice saying: It's not me that you should pity.

"But I can't. Every one of us has to travel that road by his own steps.

But it's the same road."

"Where does it lead?"

He smiled, as if softly closing a door on the questions that he would not answer. "To Atlantis," he said.

"What?" she asked, startled.

"Don't you remember?—the lost city that only the spirits of heroes can enter."

The connection that struck her suddenly had been struggling in her mind since morning, like a dim anxiety she had had no time to identify.

She had known it, but she had thought only of his own fate and his personal decision, she had thought of him as acting alone. Now she remembered a wider danger and sensed the vast, undefined shape of the enemy she was facing.

"You're one of them," she said slowly, "aren't you?"

"Of whom?"

"Was it you in Ken Danagger's office?"

He smiled. "No." But she noted that he did not ask what she meant.

"Is there—you would know it—is there actually a destroyer loose in the world?"

"Of course."

"Who is it?"

"You."

She shrugged; her face was growing hard. "The men who've quit, are they still alive or dead?"

"They're dead—as far as you're concerned. But there's to be a Second Renaissance in the world. I'll wait for it."

"No!" The sudden violence of her voice was in personal answer to him, to one of the two things he had wanted her to hear in his words.

"No, don't wait for me!"

"I'll always wait for you, no matter what we do, either one of us."

The sound they heard was the turning of a key in the lock of the entrance door. The door opened and Hank Rearden came in.

He stopped briefly on the threshold, then walked slowly into the living room, his hand slipping the key into his pocket.

She knew that he had seen Francisco's face before he had seen hers.

He glanced at her, but his eyes came back to Francisco, as if this were the only face he was now able to see.

It was at Francisco's face that she was afraid to look. The effort she made to pull her glance along the curve of a few steps felt as if she were pulling a weight beyond her power. Francisco had risen to his feet, as if in the unhurried, automatic manner of a d'Anconia trained to the code of courtesy. There was nothing that Rearden could see in his face. But what she saw in it was worse than she had feared.

"What are you doing here?" asked Rearden, in the tone one would use to address a menial caught in a drawing room.

"I see that I have no right to ask you the same question," said Francisco. She knew what effort was required to achieve the clear, toneless quality of his voice. His eyes kept returning to Rearden's right hand, as if he were still seeing the key between, his fingers.

"Then answer it," said Rearden.

"Hank, any questions you wish to ask should be asked of me," she said.

Rearden did not seem to see or hear her. "Answer it," he repeated.

"There is only one answer which you would have the right to demand," said Francisco, "so I will answer you that that is not the reason of my presence here."

"There is only one reason for your presence in the house of any woman," said Rearden. "And I mean, any woman—as far as you're concerned. Do you think that I believe it now, that confession of yours or anything you ever said to me?"

"I have given you grounds not to trust me, but none to include Miss Taggart."

"Don't tell me that you have no chance here, never had and never will. I know it. But that I should find you here on the first—"

"Hank, if you wish to accuse me—" she began, but Rearden whirled to her.

"God, no, Dagny, I don't! But you shouldn't be seen speaking to him. You shouldn't deal with him in any way. You don't know him. I do." He turned to Francisco. "What are you after? Are you hoping to include her among your kind of conquests or—"

"No!" It was an involuntary cry and it sounded futile, with its passionate sincerity offered—to be rejected—as its only proof.

"No? Then are you here on a matter of business? Are you setting a trap, as you -did for me? What sort of double-cross are you preparing for her?"

"My purpose . . . was not . . . a matter of business."

"Then what was it?"

"If you still care to believe me, I can tell you only that it involved no . . . betrayal of any kind."

"Do you think that you may still discuss betrayal, in my presence?”

"I will answer you some day. I cannot answer you now."

"You don't like to be reminded of it, do you? You've stayed away from me since, haven't you? You didn't expect to see me here? You didn't want to face me?" But he knew that Francisco was facing him as no one else did these days—he saw the eyes held straight to meet his, the features composed, without emotion, without defense or appeal, set to endure whatever was coming—he saw the open, unprotected look of courage—this was the face of the man he had loved, the man who had set him free of guilt—and he found himself fighting against the knowledge that this face still held him, above all else, above his month of impatience for the sight of Dagny. "Why don't you defend yourself, if you have nothing to hide? Why are you here? Why were you stunned to see me enter?"

"Hank, stop it!" Dagny's voice was a cry, and she drew back, knowing that violence was the most dangerous element to introduce into this moment.

Both men turned to her. "Please let me be the one to answer," Francisco said quietly.

"I told you that I hoped I'd never see him again," said Rearden.

"I'm sorry if it has to be here. It doesn't concern you, but there's something he must be paid for."

"If that is . . . your purpose," Francisco said with effort, "haven't you . . . achieved it already?"

"What's the matter?" Rearden's face was frozen, his lips barely moving, but his voice had the sound of a chuckle. "Is this your way of asking for mercy?"

The instant of silence was Francisco's strain to a greater effort.

"Yes . . . if you wish," he answered.

"Did you grant it when you held my future in your hands?"

"You are justified in anything you wish to think of me. But since it doesn't concern Miss Taggart . . . would you now permit me to leave?"

"No! Do you want to evade it, like all those other cowards? Do you want to escape?"

"I will come anywhere you require any time you wish. But I would rather it were not in Miss Taggart's presence."

"Why not? I want it to be in her presence, since this is the one place you had no right to come. I have nothing left to protect from you, you've taken more than the looters can ever take, you've destroyed everything you've touched, but here is one thing you're not -going to touch." He knew that the rigid absence of emotion in Francisco's face was the strongest evidence of emotion, the evidence of some abnormal effort at control—he knew that this was torture and that he, Rearden, was driven blindly by a feeling which resembled a torturer's enjoyment, except that he was now unable to tell whether he was torturing Francisco or himself. "You're worse than the looters, because you betray with full understanding of that which you're betraying. I don't know what form of corruption is your motive—but I want you to learn that there are things beyond your reach, beyond your aspiration or your malice."

"You have nothing . . . to fear from me . . . now."

"I want you to learn that you are not to think of her, not to look at her, not to approach her. Of all men, it's you who're not to appear in her presence." He knew that he was driven by a desperate anger at his own feeling for this man, that the feeling still lived, that it was this feeling which he had to outrage and destroy. "Whatever your motive, it's from any contact with you that she has to be protected."

"IE I gave you my word—" He stopped.

Rearden chuckled. "I know what they mean, your words, your convictions, your friendship and your oath by the only woman you ever—"

He stopped. They all knew what this meant, in the same instant that Rearden knew it.

He made a step toward Francisco; he asked, pointing at Dagny, his voice low and strangely unlike his own voice, as if it neither came from nor were addressed to a living person, "Is this the woman you love?"

Francisco closed his eyes.

"Don't ask him that!" The cry was Dagny's.

"Is this the woman you love?"

Francisco answered, looking at her, "Yes."

Rearden's hand rose, swept down and slapped Francisco's face.

The scream came from Dagny. When she could see again—after an instant that felt as if the blow had struck her own cheek—Francisco's hands were the first thing she saw. The heir of the d'Anconias stood thrown back against a table, clasping the edge behind him, not to support himself, but to stop his own hands. She saw the rigid stillness of his body,, a body that was pulled too straight but seemed broken, with the slight, unnatural angles of his waistline and shoulders, with his arms held stiff but slanted back—he stood as if the effort not to move were turning the force of his violence against himself, as if the motion he resisted were running through his muscles as a tearing pain. She saw his convulsed fingers struggling to grow fast to the table's edge, she wondered which would break first, the wood of the table or the bones of the man, and she knew that Rearden's life hung in the balance.

When her eyes moved up to Francisco's face, she saw no sign of struggle, only the skin of his temples pulled tight and the planes of his cheeks drawn inward, seeming faintly more hollow than usual. It made his face look naked, pure and young. She felt terror because she was seeing in his eyes the tears which were not there. His eyes were brilliant and dry. He was looking at Rearden, but it was not Rearden that he was seeing. He looked as if he were facing another presence in the room and as if his glance were saying: If this is what you demand of me, then even this is yours, yours to accept and mine to endure, there is no more than this in me to offer you, but let me be proud to know that I can offer so much. She saw—with a single artery beating under the skin of his throat, with a froth of pink in the corner of his mouth—the look of an enraptured dedication which was almost a smile, and she knew that she was witnessing Francisco d'Anconia's greatest achievement.

When she felt herself shaking and heard her own voice, it seemed to meet the last echo of her scream in the air of the room—and she realized how brief a moment had passed between. Her voice had the savage sound of rising to deliver a blow and it was crying to Rearden: "—to protect me from him? Long before you ever—"

"Don't!" Francisco's head jerked to her, the brief snap of his voice held all of his unreleased violence, and she knew it was an order that had to be obeyed.

Motionless but for the slow curve of his head, Francisco turned to Rearden. She saw his hands leave the edge of the table and hang relaxed by his sides. It was Rearden that he was now seeing, and there was nothing in Francisco's face except the exhaustion of effort, but Rearden knew suddenly how much this man had loved him.

"Within the extent of your knowledge," Francisco said quietly, "you are right."

Neither expecting nor permitting an answer, he turned to leave. He bowed to Dagny, inclining his head in a manner that appeared as a simple gesture of leave-taking to Rearden, as a gesture of acceptance to her. Then he left.

Rearden stood looking after him, knowing—without context and with absolute certainty—that he would give his life for the power not to have committed the action he had committed.

When he turned to Dagny, his face looked drained, open and faintly attentive, as if he were not questioning her about the words she had cut off, but were waiting for them to come.

A shudder of pity ran through her body and ended in the movement of shaking her head: she did not know for which of the two men the pity was intended, but it made her unable to speak and she shook her head over and over again, as if trying desperately to negate some vast, impersonal suffering that had made them all its victims.

"If there's something that must be said, say it." His voice was toneless.

The sound she made was half-chuckle, half-moan—it was not a desire for vengeance, but a desperate sense of justice that drove the cutting bitterness of her voice, as she cried, consciously throwing the words at his face, "You wanted to know the name of that other man?

The man. I slept with? The man who had me first? It was Francisco d'Anconia!"

She saw the force of the blow by seeing his face swept blank. She knew that if justice was her purpose, she had achieved it—because this slap was worse than the one he had dealt.

She felt suddenly calm, knowing that her words had had to be said for the sake of all three of them. The despair of a helpless victim left her, she was not a victim any longer, she was one of the contestants, willing to bear the responsibility of action. She stood facing him, waiting for any answer he would choose to give her, feeling almost as if it were her turn to be subjected to violence.

She did not know what form of torture he was enduring, or what he saw being wrecked within him and kept himself the only one to see.

There was no sign of pain to give her any warning; he looked as if he were just a man who stood still in the middle of a room, making his consciousness absorb a fact that it refused to absorb. Then she noticed that he did not change his posture, that even his hands hung by his sides with the fingers half-bent as they had been for a long time, it seemed to her that she could feel the heavy numbness of the blood stopping in his fingers—and this was the only clue to his suffering she was able to find, but it told her that that which he felt left him no power to feel anything else, not even the existence of his own body.

She waited, her pity vanishing and becoming respect.

Then she saw his eyes move slowly from her face down the length of her body, and she knew the sort of torture he was now choosing to experience, because it was a glance of a nature he could not hide from her. She knew that he was seeing her as she had been at seventeen, he was seeing her with the rival he hated, he was seeing them together as they would be now, a sight he could neither endure nor resist. She saw the protection of control dropping from his face, but he did not care whether he let her see his face alive and naked, because there now was nothing to read in it except an unrevealing violence, some part of which resembled hatred.

He seized her shoulders, and she felt prepared to accept that he would now kill her or beat her into unconsciousness, and in the moment when she felt certain that he had thought of it, she felt her body thrown against him and his mouth falling on hers, more brutally than the act of a beating would have permitted.

She found herself, in terror, twisting her body to resist, and, in exultation, twisting her arms around him, holding him, letting her lips bring blood to his, knowing that she had never wanted him as she did in this moment.

When he threw her down on the couch, she knew, to the rhythm of the beat of his body, that it was the act of his victory over his rival and of his surrender to him, the act of ownership brought to unendurable violence by the thought of the man whom it was defying, the act of transforming his hatred for the pleasure that man had known into the intensity of his own pleasure, his conquest of that man by means of her body—she felt Francisco's presence through Rearden's mind, she felt as if she were surrendering to both men, to that which she had worshipped in both of them, that which they held in common, that essence of character which had made of her love for each an act of loyalty to both. She knew also that this was his rebellion against the world around them, against its worship of degradation, against the long torment of his wasted days and lightless struggle—this was what he wished to assert and, alone with her in the half-darkness high in space above a city of ruins, to hold as the last of his property.

Afterwards, they lay still, his face on her shoulder. The reflection of a distant electric sign kept beating in faint flashes on the ceiling above her head.

He reached for her hand and slipped her fingers under his face to let his mouth rest against her palm for a moment, so gently that she felt his motive more than his touch.

After a while, she got up, she reached for a cigarette, lighted it, then held it out to him with a slight, questioning lift of her hand; he nodded, still sitting half-stretched on the couch; she placed the cigarette between his lips and lighted another for herself. She felt a great sense of peace between them, and the intimacy of the unimportant gestures underscored the importance of the things they were not saying to each other. Everything was said, she thought—but knew that it waited to be acknowledged.

She saw his eyes move to the entrance door once in a while and remain on it for long moments, as if he were still seeing the man who had left.

He said quietly, "He could have beaten me by letting me have the truth, any time he wished. Why didn't he?"

She shrugged, spreading her hands in a gesture of helpless sadness, because they both knew the answer. She asked, "He did mean a great deal to you, didn't he?"

"He does."

The two dots of fire at the tips of their cigarettes had moved slowly to the tips of their fingers, with the small glow of an occasional flare and the soft crumbling of ashes as sole movement in the silence, when the doorbell rang. They knew that it was not the man they wished but could not hope to see return, and she frowned with sudden anger as she went to open the door. It took her a moment to remember that the innocuously courteous figure she saw bowing to her with a standard smile of welcome was the assistant manager of the apartment house.

"Good evening, Miss Taggart. We're so glad to see you back. I just came on duty and heard that you had returned and wanted to greet you in person."

"Thank you." She stood at the door, not moving to admit him.

"I have a letter that came for you about a week ago, Miss Taggart," he said, reaching into his pocket. "It looked as if it might be important, but being marked 'personal,' it was obviously not intended to be sent to your office and, besides, they did not know your address, either—so not knowing where to forward it, I kept it in our safe and I thought I'd deliver it to you in person."

The envelope he handed to her was marked: Registered—Air Mail —Special Delivery—Personal. The return address said: Quentin Daniels, Utah Institute of Technology;. Afton, Utah.

"Oh . . . Thank you."

The assistant manager noted that her voice went dropping toward a whisper, the polite disguise for a gasp, he noted that she stood looking down at the sender's name much longer than was necessary, so he repeated his good wishes and departed.

She was tearing the envelope open as she walked toward Rearden, and she stopped in the middle of the room to read the letter. It was typewritten on thin paper—he could see the black rectangles of the paragraphs through the transparent sheets—and he could see her face as she read them.

He expected it, by the time he saw her come to the end: she leaped to the telephone, he heard the violent whirl of the dial and her voice saying with trembling urgency, "Long-distance, please . . . Operator, get me the Utah Institute of Technology at Afton, Utah!"

He asked, approaching, "What is it?"

She extended the letter, not looking at him, her eyes fixed on the telephone, as if she could force it to answer.

The letter said: Dear Miss Taggart: I have fought it out for three weeks, I did not want to do it, I know how this will hit you and I know every argument you could offer me, because I have used them all against myself—but this is to tell you that I am quitting.

I cannot work under the terms of Directive 10-289—though not for the reason its perpetrators intended. I know that their abolition of all scientific research does not mean a damn to you or me, and that you would want me to continue. But I have to quit, because I do not wish to succeed any longer.

I do not wish to work in a world that regards me as a slave. I do not wish to be of any value to people. If I succeeded in rebuilding the motor, I would not let you place it in their service. I would not take it upon my conscience that anything produced by my mind should be used to bring them comfort.

I know that if we succeed, they will be only too eager to expropriate the motor. And for the sake of that prospect, we have to accept the position of criminals, you and I, and live under the threat of being arrested at any moment at their whim. And this is the thing that I cannot take, even were I able to take all the rest: that in order to give them an inestimable benefit, we should be made martyrs to the men who, but for us, could not have conceived of it. I might have forgiven the rest, but when I think of this, I say: May they be damned, I will see them all die of starvation, myself included, rather than forgive them for this or permit it!

To tell you the full truth, I want to succeed, to solve the secret of the motor, as much as ever. So I shall continue to work on it for my own sole pleasure and for as long as I last. But if I solve it, it will remain my private secret. I will not release it for any commercial use. Therefore, I cannot take your money any longer.

Commercialism is supposed to be despicable, so all those people should truly approve of my decision, and I—I'm tired of helping those who despise me.

I don't know how long I will last or what I will do in the future.

For the moment, I intend to remain in my job at this Institute.

But if any of its trustees or receivers should remind me that I am now legally forbidden to cease being a janitor, I will 'quit.

You had given me my greatest chance and if I am now giving you a painful blow, perhaps T should ask you to forgive me, I think that you love your work as much as I loved mine, so you will know that my decision was not easy to make, but that I had to make it.

It is a strange feeling—writing this letter. I do not intend to die, but I am giving up the world and this feels like the letter of a suicide. So I want to say that of all the people I have known, you are the only person I regret leaving behind.

Sincerely yours, Quentin Daniels When he looked up from the letter, he heard her saying, as he had heard her through the words of the typewritten lines, her voice rising closer to despair each time: "Keep ringing, Operator! . . . Please keep ringing!"

"What can you tell him?" he asked. "There are no arguments to offer."

"I won't have a chance to tell him! He's gone by now. It was a week ago. I'm sure he's gone. They've got him."

"Who got him?"

"Yes, Operator, I'll hold the line, keep trying!"

"What would you tell him if he answered?"

"I'd beg him to go on taking my money, with no strings attached, no conditions, just so he'll have the means to continue! I'll promise him that if we're still in a looters' world when and if he succeeds, I won't ask him to give me the motor or even to tell me its secret. But if, by that time, we're free—" She stopped.

"If we're free . . ."

"All I want from him now is that he doesn't give up and vanish, like . . . like all those others. I don't want to let them get him. If it's not too late—oh God, I don't want them to get him! . . . Yes, Operator, keep ringing!"

"What good will it do us, even if he continues to work?"

"That's all I'll beg him to do—just to continue. Maybe we'll never get a chance to use the motor in the future. But I want to know that somewhere in the world there's still a great brain at work on a great attempt—and that we still have a chance at a future. , , . If that motor is abandoned again, then there's nothing but Starnesville ahead of us."

"Yes. I know."

She held the receiver pressed to her ear, her arm stiff with the effort not to tremble. She waited, and he heard, in the silence, the futile clicking of the unanswered call.

"He's gone," she said. 'They got him. A week is much longer than they need. I don't know how they learn when the time is right, but this"

—she pointed at the letter—"this was their time and they wouldn't have missed it."

"Who?"

"The destroyer's agents,"

"Are you beginning to think that they really exist?"

"Yes."

"Are you serious?"

"I am. I've met one of them."

"Who?"

"I'll tell you later. I don't know who their leader is, but I'm going to find out, one of these days. I'm going to find out. I'll be damned if I let them—"

She broke off on a gasp; he saw the change in her face the moment before he heard the click of a distant receiver being lifted and the sound of a man's voice saying, across the wire, "Hello?"

"Daniels! Is that you? You're alive? You're still there?"

"Why, yes. Is this you, Miss Taggart? What's the matter?"

"I . . . I thought you were gone."

"Oh, I'm sorry, I just heard the phone ringing, I was out in the back lot, gathering carrots."

""Carrots?" She was laughing with hysterical relief.

"I have my own vegetable patch out there. Used to be the Institute's parking lot. Are you calling from New York, Miss Taggart?"

"Yes. I just received your letter. Just now. I . . . I had been away."

"Oh." There was a pause, then he said quietly, "There's really nothing more to be said about it, Miss Taggart."

"Tell me, are you going away?"

"No."

"You're not planning to go?"

"No. Where?"

"Do you intend to remain at the Institute?"

"Yes."

"For how long? Indefinitely?"

"Yes—as far as I know."

"Has anyone approached you?"

"About what?"

"About leaving."

"No. Who?"

"Listen, Daniels, I won't try to discuss your letter over the phone.

But I must speak to you. I'm coming to see you. I'll get there as fast as I can."

"I don't want you to do that, Miss Taggart. I don't want you to go to such an effort, when it's useless."

"Give me a chance, won't you? You don't have to promise to change your mind, you don't have to commit yourself to anything—only to give me a hearing. If I want to come, it's my risk, I'm taking it. There are things I want to say to you, I'm asking you only-for the chance to say them."

"You know that I will always give you that chance, Miss Taggart."

"I'm leaving for Utah at once. Tonight. But there's one thing I want you to promise me. Will you promise to wait for me? Will you promise to be there when I arrive?"

"Why . . . of course, Miss Taggart. Unless I die or something happens outside my power—but I don't expect it to happen."

"Unless you die, will you wait for me no matter what happens?"

"Of course."

"Do you give me your word that you'll wait?"

"Yes, Miss Taggart."

"Thank you. Good night."

"Good night, Miss Taggart."

She pressed the receiver down and picked it up again in the same sweep of her hand and rapidly dialed a number.

"Eddie? . . . Have them hold the Comet for me. . . . Yes, tonight's Comet. Give orders to have my car attached, then come here, to my place, at once," She glanced at her watch. "It's eight-twelve. I have an hour to make it. I don't think I'll hold them up too long. I'll talk to you while I pack."

She hung up and turned to Rearden.

"Tonight?" he said.

"I have to."

"I guess so. Don't you have to go to Colorado, anyway?"

"Yes. I intended to leave tomorrow night. But I think Eddie can manage to take care of my office, and I'd better start now. It takes three days"—she remembered—"it will now take five days to reach Utah.

I have to go by train, there are people I have to see on the line—this can't be delayed, either."

"How long will you stay in Colorado?"

"Hard to tell."

"Wire me when you get there, will you? If it looks as if it's going to be long, I'll join you there."

This was the only expression he could give to the words he had desperately wished to say to her, had waited for, had come here to say, and now wished to pronounce more than ever, but knew that it must not be said tonight.

She knew, by a faint, solemn stress in the tone of his voice, that this was his acceptance of her confession, his surrender, his forgiveness. She asked, "Can you leave the mills?"

"It will take me a few days to arrange, but I can."

He knew what her words were admitting, acknowledging and forgiving him, when she said, "Hank, why don't you meet me in Colorado in a week? If you fly your plane, we'll both get there at the same time. And then we'll come back together."

"All right . . . dearest."

She dictated a list of instructions, while pacing her bedroom, gathering her clothes, hastily packing a suitcase. Rearden had left; Eddie Willers sat at her dressing table, making notes. He seemed to work in his usual manner of unquestioning efficiency, as if he were not aware of the perfume bottles and powder boxes, as if the dressing table were a desk and the room were only an office.

"I'll phone you from Chicago, Omaha, Flagstaff and Afton," she said, tossing underwear into the suitcase. "If you need me in between, call any operator along the line, with orders to flag the train."

"The Comet?" he asked mildly.

"Hell, yes!—the Comet.”

"Okay."

"Don't hesitate to call, if you have to."

"Okay. But I don't think I'll have to."

"We'll manage. We'll work by long-distance phone, just as we did when we—" She stopped.

"—when we were building the John Galt Line?" he asked quietly.

They glanced at each other, but said nothing else.

"What's the latest report on the construction crews?" she asked.

"Everything's under way. I got word, just after you left the office, that the grading gangs have started—out of Laurel, Kansas, and out of Jasper, Oklahoma. The rail is on its way to them from Silver Springs.

It will be all right. The hardest thing to find was—M

"The men?"

"Yes. The men to put in charge. We had trouble out West, over the Elgin to Midland stretch. All the men we were counting on are gone. I couldn't find anyone able to assume responsibility, neither on our line nor elsewhere. I even tried to get Dan Conway, but—"

"Dan Conway?" she asked, stopping.

"Yes. I did. I tried. Do you remember how he used to have rail laid at the rate of five miles a day, right in that part of the country? Oh, I know he'd have reason to hate our guts, but what does it matter now?

I found him—he's living on a ranch out in Arizona. I phoned him myself and I begged him to save us. Just to take charge, for one night, of building five and a half miles of track. Five and a half miles, Dagny, that we're stuck with—and he's the greatest railroad builder living! I told him that I was asking him to do it as a gesture of charity to us, if he would. You know, I think he understood me. He wasn't angry. He sounded sad. But he wouldn't do it. He said one must not try to bring people back out of the grave. . . . He wished me luck. I think he meant it. . . . You know, I don't think he's one of those that the destroyer knocked out. I think he just broke by himself."

"Yes. I know he did."

Eddie saw the expression on her face and pulled himself up hastily.

"Oh, we finally found a man to put in charge at Elgin," he said, forcing his voice to sound confident. "Don't worry, the track will be built long before you get there."

She glanced at him with the faint suggestion of a smile, thinking of how often she had said these words to him and of the desperate bravery with which he was now trying to tell her: Don't worry. He caught her glance, he understood, and the answering hint of his smile had a touch of embarrassed apology.

He turned back to his note pad, feeling anger at himself, sensing that he had broken his own unstated commandment: Don't make it harder for her. He should not have told her about Dan Conway, he thought; he should not have said anything to remind them both of the despair they would feel, if they felt. He wondered what was the matter with him: he thought it inexcusable that he should find his discipline slipping just because this was a room, not an office.

She went on speaking—and he listened, looking down at his pad, making a brief notation once in a while. He did not permit himself to look at her again.

She threw the door of her closet open, jerked a suit off a hanger and folded it rapidly, while her voice went on with unhurried precision.

He did not look up, he was aware of her only by means of sound: the sound of the swift movements and of the measured voice. He knew what was wrong with him, he thought; he did not want her to leave, he did not want to lose her again, after so brief a moment of reunion. But to indulge any personal loneliness, at a time when he knew how desperately the railroad needed her in Colorado, was an act of disloyalty he had never committed before—and he felt a vague, desolate sense of guilt.

('Send out orders that the Comet is to stop at every division point," she said, "and that all division superintendents are to prepare for me a report on—"

He glanced up—then his glance stopped and he did not hear the rest of the words. He saw a man's dressing gown hanging on the back of the open closet door, a dark blue gown with the white initials HR on its breast pocket.

He remembered where he had seen that gown before, he remembered the man facing him across a breakfast table in the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, he remembered that man coming, unannounced, to her office late on a Thanksgiving night—and the realization that he should have known it, came to him as two subterranean jolts of a single earthquake: it came with a feeling that screamed "No!" so savagely that the scream, not the sight, brought down every girder within him. It was not the shock of the discovery, but the more terrible shock of what it made him discover about himself.

He hung on to a single thought; that he must not let her see what he had noticed or what it had done to him. He felt a sensation of embarrassment magnified to the point of physical torture; it was the dread of violating her privacy twice: by learning her secret and by revealing his own. He bent lower over the note pad and concentrated on an immediate purpose: to stop his pencil from shaking.

". . . fifty miles of mountain trackage to build, and we can count on nothing but whatever material we own."

"I beg your pardon," he said, his voice barely audible, "I didn't hear what you said.”

"I said I want a report from all superintendents on every foot of rail and every piece of equipment available on their divisions."

"Okay."

"I will confer with each one of them in turn. Have them meet me in my car aboard the Comet."

"Okay."

"Send word out—unofficially—that the engineers are to make up time for the stops by going seventy, eighty, a hundred miles an hour, anything they wish as and when they need to, and that I will . . .

Eddie?"

"Yes. Okay."

"Eddie, what's the matter?"

He had to look up, to face her and, desperately, to lie for the first time in his life. "I'm . . . I'm afraid of the trouble we'll get into with the law," he said.

"Forget it. Don't you see that there isn't any law left? Anything goes now, for whoever can get away with it—and, for the moment, it's we who're setting the terms."

When she was ready, he carried her suitcase to a taxicab, then down the platform of the Taggart Terminal to her office car, the last at the end of the Comet. He stood on the platform, saw the train jerk forward and watched the red markers on the back of her car slipping slowly away from him into the long darkness of the exit tunnel. When they were gone, he felt what one feels at the loss of a dream one had not known till after it was lost.

There were few people on the platform around him and they seemed to move with self-conscious strain, as if a sense of disaster clung to the rails and to the girders above their heads. He thought indifferently that after a century of safety, men were once more regarding the departure of a train as an event involving a gamble with death.

He remembered that he had had no dinner, and he felt no desire to eat, but the underground cafeteria of the Taggart Terminal was more truly his home than the empty cube of space he now thought of as his apartment—so he walked to the cafeteria, because he had no other place to go.

The cafeteria was almost deserted—but the first thing he saw, as he entered, was a thin column of smoke rising from the cigarette of the worker, who sat alone at a table in a dark corner.

Not noticing what he put on his tray, Eddie carried it to the worker's table, said, "Hello," sat down and said nothing else. He looked at the silverware spread before him, wondered about its purpose, remembered the use of a fork and attempted to perform the motions of eating, but found that it was beyond his power. After a while, he looked up and saw that the worker's eyes were studying him attentively.

"No," said Eddie, "no, there's nothing the matter with me. . . .

Oh yes, a lot has happened, but what difference does it make now?

. . . Yes, she's back. . . . What else do you want me to say about it? . . . How did you know she's back? Oh well, I suppose the whole company knew it within the first ten minutes. . . . No, I don't know whether I'm glad that she's back. . . . Sure, she'll save the railroad—for another year or month. . . . What do you want me to say? . . .

No, she didn't. She didn't tell me what she's counting on. She didn't tell me what she thought or felt. . . . Well, how do you suppose she'd feel? It's hell for her—all right, for me, too! Only my kind of hell is my own fault. . . . No. Nothing. I can't talk about it—talk?—I mustn't even think about it, I've got to stop it, stop thinking of her and—of her, I mean."

He remained silent and he wondered why the worker's eyes—the eyes that always seemed to see everything within him—made him feel uneasy tonight. He glanced down at the table, and he noticed the butts of many cigarettes among the remnants of food on the worker's plate.

"Are you in trouble, too?" asked Eddie. "Oh, just that you've sat here for a long time tonight, haven't you? . . . For me? Why should you have wanted to wait for me? . . . You know, I never thought you cared whether you saw me or not, me or anybody, you seemed so complete in yourself, and that's why I liked to talk to you, because I felt that you always understood, but nothing could hurt you—you looked as if nothing had ever hurt you—and it made me feel free, as if . . . as if there were no pain in the world. . . . Do you know what's strange about your face? You look as if you've never known pain or fear or guilt. . . . I'm sorry I'm so late tonight. I had to see her off—she has just left, on the Comet. . . . Yes, tonight, just now.

. . . Yes, she's gone. . . . Yes, it was a sudden decision—within the past hour. She intended to leave tomorrow night, but something unexpected happened and she had to go at once. . . . Yes, she's going to Colorado—afterwards. . . . To Utah—first. . . . Because she got a letter from Quentin Daniels that he's quitting—and the one thing she won't give up, couldn't stand to give up, is the motor. You remember, the motor I told you about, the remnant that she found. . . . Daniels?

He's a physicist who's been working for the past year, at the Utah Institute of Technology, trying to solve the secret of the motor and to rebuild it. . . . Why do you look at me like that? . . . No, I haven't told you about him before, because it was a secret. It was a private, secret project of her own—and of what interest would it have been to you, anyway? . . . I guess I can talk about it now, because he's quit. . . . Yes, he told her his reasons. He said that he won't give anything produced by his mind to a world that regards him as a slave.

He said that he won't be made a martyr to people in exchange for giving them an inestimable benefit. . . . What—what are you laughing at? . . . Stop it, will you? Why do you laugh like that? . . . The whole secret? What do you mean, the whole secret? He hasn't found the whole secret of the motor, if that's what you meant, but he seemed to be doing well, he had a good chance. Now it's lost. She's rushing to him, she wants to plead, to hold him, to make him go on—but I think it's useless. Once they stop, they don't come back again. Not one of them has. . . . No, I don't care, not any more, we've taken so many losses that I'm getting used to it. . . . Oh no! It's not Daniels that I can't take, it's—no, drop it. Don't question me about it. The whole world is going to pieces, she's still fighting to save it, and I—I sit here damning her for something I had no right to know. . . . No! She's done nothing to be damned, nothing—and, besides, it doesn't concern the railroad. . . . Don't pay any attention to me, it's not true, it's not her that I'm damning, it's myself. . . . Listen, I've always known that you loved Taggart Transcontinental as I loved it, that it meant something special to you, something personal, and that was why you liked to hear me talk about it. But this—the thing I learned today—this has nothing to do with the railroad. It would be of no importance to you.

Forget it. . . . It's something that I didn't know about her, that's all.

. . . I grew up with her. I thought I knew her. I didn't. . . . I don't know what it was that I expected. I suppose I just thought that she had no private life of any kind. To me, she was not a person and not . . . not a woman. She was the railroad. And I didn't think that anyone would ever have the audacity to look at her in any other way.

. . . Well, it serves me right. Forget it. . . . Forget it, I said! Why do you question me like this? It's only her private life. What can it matter to you? . . . Drop it, for God's sake! Don't you see that I can't talk about it? . . . Nothing happened, nothing's wrong with me, I just —oh, why am I lying? I can't lie to you, you always seem to see everything, it's worse than trying to lie to myself! . . . I have lied to myself. I didn't know what I felt for her. The railroad? I'm a rotten hypocrite. If the railroad was all she meant to me, it wouldn't have hit me like this. I wouldn't have felt that I wanted to kill him! . . .

What's the matter with you tonight? Why do you look at me like that?

. . . Oh, what's the matter with all of us? Why is there nothing but misery left for anyone? Why do we suffer so much? We weren't meant to. I always thought that we were to be happy, all of us, as our natural fate. What are we doing? What have we lost? A year ago, I wouldn't have damned her for finding something she wanted. But I know that they're doomed, both of them, and so am I, and so is everybody, and she was all I had left. . . . It was so great, to be alive, it was such a wonderful chance, I didn't know that I loved it and that that was our love, hers and mine and yours—but the world is perishing and we cannot stop it. Why are we destroying ourselves? Who will tell us the truth? Who will save us? Oh, who is John Galt?! . . . No, it's no use.

It doesn't matter now. Why should I feel anything? We won't last much longer. Why should I care what she does? Why should I care that she's sleeping with Hank Rearden? . . . Oh God!—what's the matter with you? Don't go! Where are you going?"

CHAPTER X
THE SIGN OF THE DOLLAR

She sat at the window of the train, her head thrown back, not moving, wishing she would never have to move again.

The telegraph poles went racing past the window, but the train seemed lost in a void, between a brown stretch of prairie and a solid spread of rusty, graying clouds. The twilight was draining the sky without the wound of a sunset; it looked more like the fading of an anemic body in the process of exhausting its last drops of blood and light. The train was going west, as if it, too, were pulled to follow the sinking rays and quietly to vanish from the earth. She sat still, feeling no desire to resist it.

She wished she would not hear the sound of the wheels. They knocked in an even rhythm, every fourth knock accented—and it seemed to her that through the rapid, running clatter of some futile stampede to escape, the beat of the accented knocks was like the steps of an enemy moving toward some inexorable purpose.

She had never experienced it before, this sense of apprehension at the sight of a prairie, this feeling that the rail was only a fragile thread stretched across an enormous emptiness, like a worn nerve ready to break. She had never expected that she, who had felt as if she were the motive power aboard a train, would now sit wishing, like a child or a savage, that this train would move, that it would not stop, that it would get her there on time—wishing it, not like an act of will, but like a plea to a dark unknown.

She thought of what a difference one month had made. She had seen it in the faces of the men at the stations. The track workers, the switchmen, the yardmen, who had always greeted her, anywhere along the line, their cheerful grins boasting that they knew who she was—had now looked at her stonily, turning away, their faces wary and closed.

She had wanted to cry to them in apology, "It's not I who've done it to you!"—then had remembered that she had accepted it and that they now had the right to hate her, that she was both a slave and a driver of slaves, and so was every human being in the country, and hatred was the only thing that men could now feel for one another.

She had found reassurance, for two days, in the sight of the cities moving past her window—the factories, the bridges, the electric signs, the billboards pressing down upon the roofs of homes—the crowded, grimy, active, living conflux of the industrial East.

But the cities had been left behind. The train was now diving into the prairies of Nebraska, the rattle of its couplers sounding as if it were shivering with cold. She saw lonely shapes that had been farmhouses in the vacant stretches that had been fields. But the great burst of energy, in the East, generations ago, had splattered bright trickles to run through the emptiness; some were gone, but some still lived.

She was startled when the lights of a small town swept across her car and, vanishing, left it darker than it had been before. She would not move to turn on the light. She sat still, watching the rare towns. Whenever an electric beam went flashing briefly at her face, it was like a moment's greeting.

She saw them as they went by, written on the walls of modest structures, over sooted roofs, down slender smokestacks, on the curves of tanks: Reynolds Harvesters—Macey Cement—Quinlan & Jones Pressed Alfalfa—Home of the Crawford Mattress—Benjamin Wylie Grain and Feed—words raised like flags to the empty darkness of the sky, the motionless forms of movement, of effort, of courage, of hope, the monuments to how much had been achieved on the edge of nature's void by men who had once been free to achieve—she saw the homes built in scattered privacy, the small shops, the wide streets with electric lighting, like a few luminous strokes criss-crossed on the black sheet of the wastelands—she saw the ghosts between, the remnants of towns, the skeletons of factories with crumbling smokestacks, the corpses of shops with broken panes, the slanting poles with shreds of wire—she saw a sudden blaze, the rare sight of a gas station, a glittering white island of glass and metal under the huge black weight of space and sky —she saw an ice-cream cone made of radiant tubing, hanging above the corner of a street, and a battered car being parked below, with a young boy at the wheel and a girl stepping out, her white dress blowing in the summer wind—she shuddered for the two of them, thinking: I can't look at you, I who know what it has taken to give you your youth, to give you this evening, this car and the ice-cream cone you're going to buy for a quarter—she saw, on the edge beyond a town, a building glowing with tiers of pale blue light, the industrial light she loved, with the silhouettes of machines in its windows and a billboard in the darkness above its roof—and suddenly her head fell on her arm, and she sat shaking, crying soundlessly to the night, to herself, to whatever was human in any living being: Don't let it go! . . . Don't let it go! . . .

She jumped to her feet and snapped on the light. She stood still, fighting to regain control, knowing that such moments were her greatest danger. The lights of the town were past, her window was now an empty rectangle, and she heard, in the silence, the progression of the fourth knocks, the steps of the enemy moving on, not to be hastened or stopped.

In desperate need of the sight of some living activity, she decided she would not order dinner in her car, but would go to the diner. As if stressing and mocking her loneliness, a voice came back to her mind: "But you would not run trains if they were empty." Forget it!—she told herself angrily, walking hastily to the door of her car.

She was astonished, approaching her vestibule, to hear the sound of voices close by. As she pulled the door open, she heard a shout: "Get off, God damn you!"

An aging tramp had taken refuge in the corner of her vestibule.

He sat on the floor, his posture suggesting that he had no strength left to stand up or to care about being caught. He was looking at the conductor, his eyes observant, fully conscious, but devoid of any reaction. The train was slowing down for a bad stretch of track, the conductor had opened the door to a cold gust of wind, and was waving at the speeding black void, ordering, "Get going! Get off as you got on or I'll kick you off head first!"

There was no astonishment in the tramp's face, no protest, no anger, no hope; he looked as if he had long since abandoned any judgment of any human action. He moved obediently to rise, his hand groping upward along the rivets of the car's wall. She saw him glance at her and glance away, as if she were merely another inanimate fixture of the train. He did not seem to be aware of her person, any more than of his own, he was indifferently ready to comply with an order which, in his condition, meant certain death.

She glanced at the conductor. She saw nothing in his face except the blind malevolence of pain, of some long-repressed anger that broke out upon the first object available, almost without consciousness of the object's identity. The two men were not human beings to each other any longer.

The tramp's suit was a mass of careful patches on a cloth so stiff and shiny with wear that one expected it to crack like glass if bent; but she noticed the collar of his shirt: it was bone-white from repeated laundering and it still preserved a semblance of shape. He had pulled himself up to his feet, he was looking indifferently at the black hole open upon miles of uninhabited wilderness where no one would see the body or hear the voice of a mangled man, but the only gesture of concern he made was to tighten his grip on a small, dirty bundle, as if to make sure he would not lose it in leaping off the train.

It was the laundered collar and this gesture for the last of his possessions—the gesture of a sense of property—that made her feel an emotion like a sudden, burning twist within her. "Wait," she said.

The two men turned to her.

"Let him be my guest," she said to the conductor, and held her door open for the tramp, ordering, "Come in."

The tramp followed her, obeying as blankly as he had been about to obey the conductor.

He stood in the middle of her car, holding his bundle, looking around him with the same observant, unreacting glance.

"Sit down," she said.

He obeyed—and looked at her, as if waiting for further orders.

There was a kind of dignity in his manner, the honesty of the open admission that he had no claim to make, no plea to offer, no questions to ask, that he now had to accept whatever was done to him and was ready to accept it.

He seemed to be in his early fifties; the structure of his bones and the looseness of his suit suggested that he had once been muscular.

The lifeless indifference of his eyes did not fully hide that they had been intelligent; the wrinkles cutting his face with the record of some incredible bitterness, had not fully erased the fact that the face had once possessed the kindliness peculiar to honesty.

"When did you eat last?" she asked.

"Yesterday," he said, and added, "I think."

She rang for the porter and ordered dinner for two, to be brought to her car from the diner.

The tramp had watched her silently, but when the porter departed, he offered the only payment it was in his power to offer: "I don't want to get you in trouble, ma'am," he said.

She smiled. "What trouble?"

"You're traveling with one of those railroad tycoons, aren't you?"

"No, alone."

"Then you're the wife of one of them?"

"No."

"Oh." She saw his effort at a look of something like respect, as if to make up for having forced an improper confession, and she laughed.

"No, not that, either. I guess I'm one of the tycoons myself. My name is Dagny Taggart and I work for this railroad."

"Oh . . . I think I've heard of you, ma'am—in the old days." It was hard to tell what "the old days" meant to him, whether it was a month or a year or whatever period of time had passed since he had given up. He was looking at her with a sort of interest in the past tense, as if he were thinking that there had been a time when he would have considered her a personage worth seeing. "You were the lady who ran a railroad," he said.

"Yes," she said. "I was."

He showed no sign of astonishment at the fact that she had chosen to help him. He looked as if so much brutality had confronted him that he had given up the attempt to understand, to trust or to expect anything.

"When did you get aboard the train?" she asked.

"Back at the division point, ma'am. Your door wasn't locked." He added, "I figured maybe nobody would notice me till morning on account of it being a private car."

"Where are you going?"

"I don't know." Then, almost as if he sensed that this could sound too much like an appeal for pity, he added, "I guess I just wanted to keep moving till I saw some place that looked like there might be a chance to find work there." This was his attempt to assume the responsibility of a purpose, rather than to throw the burden of his aimlessness upon her mercy—an attempt of the same order as his shirt collar.

"What kind of work are you looking for?"

"People don't look for kinds of work any more, ma'am," he answered impassively. "They just look for work."

"What sort of place did you hope to find?"

"Oh . . . well . . . where there's factories, I guess.”

"Aren't you going in the wrong direction for that? The factories are in the East."

"No." He said it with the firmness of knowledge. "There are too many people in the East. The factories are too well watched. I figured there might be a better chance some place where there's fewer people and less law."

"Oh, running away? A fugitive from the law, are you?"

"Not as you'd mean it in the old days, ma'am. But as things are now, I guess I am. I want to work."

"What do you mean?"

"There aren't any jobs back East. And a man couldn't give you a job, if he had one to give—he'd go to jail for it. He's watched. You can't get work except through the Unification Board. The Unification Board has a gang of its own friends waiting in line for the jobs, more friends than a millionaire's got relatives. Well, me—I haven't got either."

"Where did you work last?"

"I've been bumming around the country for six months—no, longer, I guess—I guess it's closer to about a year—I can't tell any more—mostly day work it was. Mostly on farms. But it's getting to be no use now. I know how the farmers look at you—they don't like to see a man starving, but they're only one jump ahead of starvation themselves, they haven't any work to give you, they haven't any food, and whatever they save, if the tax collectors don't get it, then the raiders do—you know, the gangs that rove all through the country—deserters, they call them."

"Do you think that it's any better in the West?"

"No. I don't."

"Then why are you going there?"

"Because I haven't tried it before. That's all there is left to try. It's somewhere to go. Just to keep moving . . . You know," he added suddenly, "I don't think it will be any use. But there's nothing to do in the East except sit under some hedge and wait to die. I don't think I'd mind it much now, the dying. I know it would be a lot easier. Only I think that it's a sin to sit down and let your life go, without making a try for it."

She thought suddenly of those modern college-infected parasites who assumed a sickening air of moral self-righteousness whenever they uttered the standard bromides about their concern for the welfare of others. The tramp's last sentence was one of the most profoundly moral statements she had ever heard; but the man did not know it; he had said it in his impassive, extinguished voice, simply, dryly, as a matter of fact.

"What part of the country do you come from?" she asked.

"Wisconsin," he answered.

The waiter came in, bringing their dinner. He set a table and courteously moved two chairs, showing no astonishment at the nature of the occasion.

She looked at the table; she thought that the magnificence of a world where men could afford the time and the effortless concern for such things as starched napkins and tinkling ice cubes, offered to travelers along with their meals for the price of a few dollars, was a remnant of the age when the sustenance of one's life had not been made a crime and a meal had not been a matter of running a race with death—a remnant which was soon to vanish, like the white filling station on the edge of the weeds of the jungle.

She noticed that the tramp, who had lost the strength to stand up, had not lost the respect for the meaning of the things spread before him. He did not pounce upon the food; he fought to keep his movements slow, to unfold his napkin, to pick up his fork in tempo with hers, his hand shaking—as if he still knew that this, no matter what indignity was ever forced upon them, was the manner proper to men.

"What was your line of work—in the old days?" she asked, when the waiter left. "Factories, wasn't it?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"What trade?"

"Skilled lathe-operator."

"Where did you work at it last?"

"In Colorado, ma'am. For the Hammond Car Company."

"Oh . . . !"

"Ma'am?"

"No, nothing. Worked there long?"

"No, ma'am. Just two weeks."

"How come?"

"Well, I'd waited a year for it, hanging around Colorado just to get that job. They had a waiting list too, the Hammond Car Company, only they didn't go by friendships and they didn't go by seniority, they went by a man's record. I had a good record. But it was just two weeks after I got the job that Lawrence Hammond quit. He quit and disappeared. They closed the plant. Afterwards, there was a citizens' committee that reopened it. I got called back. But five days was all it lasted. They started layoffs just about at once. By seniority. So I had to go. I heard they lasted for about three months, the citizens' committee. Then they had to close the plant for good."

"Where did you work before that?"

"Just about in every Eastern state, ma'am. But it was never more than a month or two. The plants kept closing."

"Did that happen on every job you've held?"

He glanced at her, as if he understood her question. "No, ma'am," he answered and, for the first time, she caught a faint echo of pride in his voice. "The first job I had, I held it for twenty years. Not the same job, but the same place, I mean—I got to be shop foreman. That was twelve years ago. Then the owner of the plant died, and the heirs who took it over, ran it into the ground. Times were bad then, but it was since then that things started going to pieces everywhere faster and faster. Since then, it seems like anywhere I turned—the place cracked and went. At first, we thought it was only one state or another. A lot of us thought that Colorado would last. But it went, too.

Anything you tried, anything you touched—it fell. Anywhere you looked, work was stopping—the factories were stopping—the machines were stopping—" he added slowly, in a whisper, as if seeing some secret terror of his own, "the motors . . . were . . . stopping." His voice rose: "Oh God, who is—" and broke off.

"—John Galt?" she asked.

"Yes," he said, and shook his head as if to dispel some vision, "only I don't like to say that."

"I don't, either. I wish I knew why people are saying it and who started it."

"That's it, ma'am. That's what I'm afraid of. It might have been me who started it."

"What?"

"Me or about six thousand others. We might have. I think we did.

I hope we're wrong."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, there was something that happened at that plant where I worked for twenty years. It was when the old man died and his heirs took over. There were three of them, two sons and a daughter, and they brought a new plan to run the factory. They let us vote on it, too, and everybody—almost everybody—voted for it. We didn't know. We thought it was good. No, that's not true, either. We thought that we were supposed to think it was good. The plan was that everybody in the factory would work according to his ability, but would be paid according to his need. We—what's the matter, ma'am? Why do you look like that?"

"What was the name of the factory?" she asked, her voice barely audible.

"The Twentieth Century Motor Company, ma'am, of Starnesville, Wisconsin."

"Go on."

"We voted for that plan at a big meeting, with all of us present, six thousand of us, everybody that worked in the factory. The Starnes heirs made long speeches about it, and it wasn't too clear, but nobody asked any questions. None of us knew just how the plan would work, but every one of us thought that the next fellow knew it. And if anybody had doubts, he felt guilty and kept his mouth shut—because they made it sound like anyone who'd oppose the plan was a child killer at heart and less than a human being. They told us that this plan would achieve a noble ideal. Well, how were we to know otherwise? Hadn't we heard it all our lives—from our parents and our schoolteachers and our ministers, and in every newspaper we ever read and every movie and every public speech? Hadn't we always been told that this was righteous and just? Well, maybe there's some excuse for what we did at that meeting. Still, we voted for the plan—and what we got, we had it coming to us. You know, ma'am, we are marked men, in a way, those of us who lived through the four years of that plan in the Twentieth Century factory. What is it that hell is supposed to be?

Evil—plain, naked, smirking evil, isn't it? Well, that's what we saw and helped to make—and I think we're damned, every one of us, and maybe we'll never be forgiven. . . .

"Do you know how it worked, that plan, and what it did to people?

Try pouring water into a tank where there's a pipe at the bottom draining it out faster than you pour it, and each bucket you bring breaks that pipe an inch wider, and the harder you work the more is demanded of you, and you stand slinging buckets forty hours a week, then forty-eight, then fifty-six—for your neighbor's supper—for his wife's operation—for his child's measles—for his mother's wheel chair —for his uncle's shirt—for his nephew's schooling—for the baby next door—for the baby to be born—for anyone anywhere around you—it's theirs to receive, from diapers to dentures—and yours to work, from sunup to sundown, month after month, year after year, with nothing to show for it but your sweat, with nothing in sight for you but their pleasure, for the whole of your life, without rest, without hope, without end. . . . From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. . . .

"We're all one big family, they told us, we're all in this together.

But you don't all stand working an acetylene torch ten hours a day—together, and you don't all get a bellyache—together. What's whose ability and which of whose needs comes first? When it's all one pot, you can't let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim that he needs a yacht—and if his feelings is all you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not? If it's not right for me to own a car until I've worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on earth—why can't he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability not to have collapsed? No? He can't? Then why can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee until he's replastered his living room? . . . Oh well . . . Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We voted on it. Yes, ma'am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars—rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn't belong to him, it belonged to 'the family,' and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his 'need'—so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife's head colds, hoping that 'the family' would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because it's miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm—so it turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that his need was worse than his brother's. How else could it be done? Do you care to guess what happened, what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got away with the jackpot?

"But that wasn't all. There was something else that we discovered at the same meeting. The factory's production had fallen by forty per cent, in that first half-year, so it was decided that somebody hadn't delivered 'according to his ability’ Who? How would you tell it? 'The family' voted on that, too. They voted which men were the best, and these men were sentenced to work overtime each night for the next six months. Overtime without pay—because you weren't paid by tune and you weren't paid by work, only by need.

"Do I have to tell you what happened after that—and into what sort of creatures we all started turning, we who had once been human?

We began to hide whatever ability we had, to slow down and watch like hawks that we never worked any faster or better than the next fellow. What else could we do, when we knew that if we did our best for 'the family,' it's not thanks or rewards that we'd get, but punishment? We knew that for every stinker who'd ruin a batch of motors and cost the company money—either through his sloppiness, because he didn't have to care, or through plain incompetence—it's we who'd have to pay with our nights and our Sundays. So we did our best to be no good.

"There was one young boy who started out, full of fire for the noble ideal, a bright kid without any schooling, but with a wonderful head on his shoulders. The first year, he figured out a work process that saved us thousands of man-hours. He gave it to 'the family,' didn't ask anything for it, either, couldn't ask, but that was all right with him. It was for the ideal, he said. But when he found himself voted as one of our ablest and sentenced to night work, because we hadn't gotten enough from him, he shut his mouth and his brain. You can bet he didn't come up with any ideas, the second year.

"What was it they'd always told us about the vicious competition of the profit system, where men had to compete for who'd do a better job than his fellows? Vicious, wasn't it? Well, they should have seen what it was like when we all had to compete with one another for who'd do the worst job possible. There's no surer way to destroy a man than to force him into a spot where he has to aim at not doing his best, where he has to struggle to do a bad job, day after day. That will finish him quicker than drink or idleness or pulling stick-ups for a living. But there was nothing else for us to do except to fake unfitness.

The one accusation we feared was to be suspected of ability. Ability was like a mortgage on you that you could never pay off. And what was there to work for? You knew that your basic pittance would be given to you anyway, whether you worked or not—your 'housing and feeding allowance,' it was called—and above that pittance, you had no chance to get anything, no matter how hard you tried. You couldn't count on buying a new suit of clothes next year—they might give you a 'clothing allowance' or they might not, according to whether nobody broke a leg, needed an operation or gave birth to more babies. And if there wasn't enough money for new suits for everybody, then you couldn't get yours, either.

"There was one man who'd worked hard all his life, because he'd always wanted to send his son through college. Well, the boy graduated from high school in the second year of the plan—but 'the family' wouldn't give the father any 'allowance’ for the college. They said his son couldn't go to college, until we had enough to send everybody's sons to college—and that we first had to send everybody's children through high school, and we didn't even have enough for that. The father died the following year, in a knife fight with somebody in a saloon, a fight over nothing in particular—such fights were beginning to happen among us all the time.

"Then there was an old guy, a widower with no family, who had one hobby: phonograph records. I guess that was all he ever got out of life. In the old days, he used to skip meals just to buy himself some new recording of classical music. Well, they didn't give him any 'allowance' for records—'personal luxury,' they called it. But at that same meeting, Millie Bush, somebody's daughter, a mean, ugly little eight-year-old, was voted a pair of gold braces for her buck teeth—this was 'medical need,' because the staff psychologist had said that the poor girl would get an inferiority complex if her teeth weren't straightened out. The old guy' who loved music, turned to drink, instead. He got so you never saw him fully conscious any more. But it seems like there was one tiling he couldn't forget. One night, he came staggering down the street, saw Millie Bush, swung his fist and knocked all her teeth out. Every one of them.

"Drink, of course, was what we all turned to, some more, some less.

Don't ask how we got the money for it. When all the decent pleasures are forbidden, there's always ways to get the rotten ones. You don't break into grocery stores after dark and you don't pick your fellow's pockets to buy classical symphonies or fishing tackle, but if it's to get stinking drunk and forget—you do. Fishing tackle? Hunting guns?

Snapshot cameras? Hobbies? There wasn't any 'amusement allowance' for anybody. 'Amusement' was the first thing they dropped. Aren't you always supposed to be ashamed to object when anybody asks you to give up anything, if it's something that gave you pleasure? Even our 'tobacco allowance' was cut to where we got two packs of cigarettes a month—and this, they told us, was because the money had to go into the babies' milk fund. Babies was the only item of production that didn't fall, but rose and kept on rising—because people had nothing else to do, I guess, and because they didn't have to care, the baby wasn't their burden, it was 'the family's.' In fact, the best chance you had of getting a raise and breathing easier for a while was a 'baby allowance.' Either that, or a major disease.

"It didn't take us long to see how it all worked out. Any man who tried to play straight, had to refuse himself everything. He lost his taste for any pleasure, he hated to smoke a nickel's worth of tobacco or chew a stick of gum, worrying whether somebody had more need for that nickel. He felt ashamed of every mouthful of food he swallowed, wondering whose weary nights of overtime had paid for it, knowing that his food was not his by right, miserably wishing to be cheated rather than to cheat, to be a sucker, but not a blood-sucker.

He wouldn't marry, he wouldn't help his folks back home, he wouldn't put an extra burden on 'the family.' Besides, if he still had some sort of sense of responsibility, he couldn't marry or bring children into the world, when he could plan nothing, promise nothing, count on nothing.

But the shiftless and the irresponsible had a field day of it. They bred babies, they got girls into trouble, they dragged in every worthless relative they had from all over the country, every unmarried pregnant sister, for an extra 'disability allowance,' they got more sicknesses than any doctor could disprove, they ruined their clothing, their furniture, their homes—what the hell, 'the family' was paying for it! They found more ways of getting in 'need' than the rest of us could ever imagine —they developed a special skill for it, which was the only ability they showed.

"God help us, ma'am! Do you see what we saw? We saw that we'd been given a law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which punished those who observed it—for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got. Your honesty was like a tool left at the mercy of the next man's dishonesty. The honest ones paid, the dishonest collected.

The honest lost, the dishonest won. How long could men stay good under this sort of a law of goodness? We were a pretty decent bunch of fellows when we started. There weren't many chiselers among us.

We knew our jobs and we were proud of it and we worked for the best factory in the country, where old man Starnes hired nothing but the pick of the country's labor. Within one year under the new plan, there wasn't an honest man left among us. That was the evil, the sort of hell-horror evil that preachers used to scare you with, but you never thought to see alive. Not that the plan encouraged a few bastards, but that it turned decent people into bastards, and there was nothing else that it could do—and it was called a moral ideal!

"What was it we were supposed to want to work for? For the love of our brothers? What brothers? For the bums, the loafers, the moochers we saw all around us? And whether they were cheating or plain incompetent, whether they were unwilling or unable—what difference did that make to us? If we were tied for life to the level of their unfitness, faked or real, how long could we care to go on? We had no way of knowing their ability, we had no way of controlling their needs—all we knew was that we were beasts of burden struggling blindly in some sort of place that was half-hospital, half-stockyards—a place geared to nothing but disability, disaster, disease—beasts put there for the relief of whatever whoever chose to say was whichever's need.

"Love of our brothers? That's when we learned to hate our brothers for the first time in our lives. We began to hate them for every meal they swallowed, for every small pleasure they enjoyed, for one man's new shirt, for another's wife's hat, for an outing with their family, for a paint job on their house—it was taken from us, it was paid for by our privations, our denials, our hunger. We began to spy on one another, each hoping to catch the others lying about their needs, so as to cut their 'allowance' at the next meeting. We began to have stool pigeons who informed on people, who reported that somebody had bootlegged a turkey to his family on some Sunday—which he'd paid for by gambling, most likely. We began to meddle into one another's lives. We provoked family quarrels, to get somebody's relatives thrown out. Any time we saw a man starting to go steady with a girl, we made life miserable for him. We broke up many engagements.

We didn't want anyone to marry, we didn't want any more dependents to feed.

"In the old days, we used to celebrate if somebody had a baby, we used to chip in and help him out with the hospital bills, if he happened to be hard-pressed for the moment. Now, if a baby was born, we didn't speak to the parents for weeks. Babies, to us, had become what locusts were to farmers. In the old days, we used to help a man if he had a bad illness in the family. Now—well, I’ll tell you about just one case. It was the mother of a man who had been with us for fifteen years. She was a kindly old lady, cheerful and wise, she knew us all by our first names and we all liked her—we used to like her. One day, she slipped on the cellar stairs and fell and broke her hip. We knew what that meant at her age. The staff doctor said that she'd have to be sent to a hospital in town, for expensive treatments that would take a long time. The old lady died the night before she was to leave for town. They never established the cause of death. No, I don't know whether she was murdered. Nobody said that. Nobody would talk about it at all. All I know is that I—and that's what I can't forget!—I, too, had caught myself wishing that she would die. This—may God forgive us!—was the brotherhood, the security, the abundance that the plan was supposed to achieve for us!

"Was there any reason why this sort of horror would ever be preached by anybody? Was there anybody who got any profit from it? There was. The Starnes heirs. I hope you're not going to remind me that they'd sacrificed a fortune and turned the factory over to us as a gift. We were fooled by that one, too. Yes, they gave up the factory. But profit, ma'am, depends on what it is you're after. And what the Starnes heirs were after, no money on earth could buy.

Money is too clean and innocent for that.

"Eric Starnes, the youngest—he was a jellyfish that didn't have the guts to be after anything in particular. He got himself voted as Director of our Public Relations Department, which didn't do anything, except that he had a staff for the not doing of anything, so he didn't have to bother sticking around the office. The pay he got—well, I shouldn't call it 'pay,' none of us was 'paid'—the alms voted to him was fairly modest, about ten times what I got, but that wasn't riches.

Eric didn't care for money—he wouldn't have known what to do with it. He spent his time hanging around among us, showing how chummy he was and democratic. He wanted to be loved, it seems. The way he went about it was to keep reminding us that he had given us the factory. We couldn't stand him.

"Gerald Starnes was our Director of Production. We never learned just what the size of his rake-off—his alms—had been. It would have taken a staff of accountants to figure that out, and a staff of engineers to trace the way it was piped, directly or indirectly, into his office.

None of it was supposed to be for him—it was all for company expenses. Gerald had three cars, four secretaries, five telephones, and he used to throw champagne and caviar parties that no tax-paying tycoon in the country could have afforded. He spent more money in one year than his father had earned in profits in the last two years of his life. We saw a hundred-pound stack—a hundred pounds, we weighed them—of magazines in Gerald's office, full of stories about our factory and our noble plan, with big pictures of Gerald Starnes, calling him a great social crusader. Gerald liked to come into the shops at night, dressed in his formal clothes, flashing diamond cuff links the size of a nickel and shaking cigar ashes all over. Any cheap show-off who's got nothing to parade but his cash, is bad enough—except that he makes no bones about the cash being his, and you're free to gape at him or not, as you wish, and mostly you don't. But when a bastard like Gerald Starnes puts on an act and keeps spouting that he doesn't care for material wealth, that he's only serving 'the family,' that all the lushness is not for himself, but for our sake and for the common good, because it's necessary to keep up the prestige of the company and of the noble plan in the eyes of the public—then that's when you learn to hate the creature as you've never hated anything human.

"But his sister Ivy was worse. She really did not care for material wealth. The alms she got was no bigger than ours, and she went about in scuffed, flat-heeled shoes and shirtwaists—just to show how selfless she was. She was our Director of Distribution. She was the lady in charge of our needs. She was the one who held us by the throat. Of course, distribution was supposed to be decided by voting—by the voice of the people. But when the people are six thousand howling voices, trying to decide without yardstick, rhyme or reason, when there are no rules to the game and each can demand anything, but has a right to nothing, when everybody holds power over everybody's life except his own—then it turns out, as it did, that the voice of the people is Ivy Starnes. By the end of the second year, we dropped the pretense of the 'family meetings'—in the name of 'production efficiency and time economy,' one meeting used to take ten days—and all the petitions of need were simply sent to Miss Starnes' office. No, not sent. They had to be recited to her in person by every petitioner.

Then she made up a distribution list, which she read to us for our vote of approval at a meeting that lasted three-quarters of an hour.

We voted approval. There was a ten-minute period on the agenda for discussion and objections. We made no objections. We knew better by that time. Nobody can divide a factory's income among thousands of people, without some sort of a gauge to measure people's value. Her gauge was bootlicking. Selfless? In her father's time, all of his money wouldn't have given him a chance to speak to his lousiest wiper and get away with it, as she spoke to our best skilled workers and their wives. She had pale eyes that looked fishy, cold and dead. And if you ever want to see pure evil, you should have seen the way her eyes glinted when she watched some man who'd talked back to her once and who'd just heard his name on the list of those getting nothing above basic pittance. And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who's ever preached the slogan: 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,' "This was the whole secret of it. At first, I kept wondering how it could be possible that the educated, the cultured, the famous men of the world could make a mistake of this size and preach, as righteousness, this sort of abomination—when five minutes of thought should have told them what would happen if somebody tried to practice what they preached. Now I know that they didn't do it by any kind of mistake. Mistakes of this size are never made innocently.

If men fall for some vicious piece of insanity, when they have no way to make it work and no possible reason to explain their choice—it's because they have a reason that they do not wish to tell. And we weren't so innocent either, when we voted for that plan at the first meeting. We didn't do it just because we believed that the drippy old guff they spewed was good. We had another reason, but the guff helped us to hide it from our neighbors and from ourselves. The guff gave us a chance to pass off as virtue something that we'd be ashamed to admit otherwise. There wasn't a man voting for it who didn't think that under a setup of this kind he'd muscle in on the profits of the men abler than himself. There wasn't a man rich and smart enough but that he didn't think that somebody was richer and smarter, and this plan would give him a share of his better's wealth and brain. But while he was thinking that he'd get unearned benefits from the men above, he forgot about the men below who'd get unearned benefits, too. He forgot about all his inferiors who'd rush to drain him just as he hoped to drain his superiors. The worker who liked the idea that his need entitled him to a limousine like his boss's, forgot that every bum and beggar on earth would come howling that their need entitled them to an icebox like his own. That was our real motive when we voted—that was the truth of it—but we didn't like to think it, so the less we liked it, the louder we yelled about our love for the common good.

"Well, we got what we asked for. By the time we saw what it was that we'd asked for, it was too late. We were trapped, with no place to go. The best men among us left the factory in the first week of the plan. We lost our best engineers, superintendents, foremen and highest skilled workers. A man of self-respect doesn't turn into a milch cow for anybody. Some able fellows tried to stick it out, but they couldn't take it for long. We kept losing our men, they kept escaping from the factory like from a pesthole—till we had nothing left except the men of need, but none of the men of ability.

"And the few of us who were still any good, but stayed on, were only those who had been there too long. In the old days, nobody ever quit the Twentieth Century—and, somehow, we couldn't make ourselves believe that it was gone. After a while, we couldn't quit, because no other employer would have us—for which I can't blame him.

Nobody would deal with us in any way, no respectable person or firm.

All the small shops, where we traded, started moving out of Starnesville fast—till we had nothing left but saloons, gambling joints and crooks who sold us trash at gouging prices. The alms we got kept falling, but the cost of our living went up. The list of the factory's needy kept stretching, but the list of its customers shrank. There was less and less income to divide among more and more people. In the old days, it used to be said that the Twentieth Century Motor trademark was as good as the karat mark on gold. I don't know what it was that the Starnes heirs thought, if they thought at all, but I suppose that like all social planners and like savages, they thought that this trademark was a magic stamp which did the trick by some sort of voodoo power and that it would keep them rich, as it had kept their father. Well, when our customers began to see that we never delivered an order on time and never put out a motor that didn't have something wrong with it—the magic stamp began to work the other way around: people wouldn't take a motor as a gift, if it was marked Twentieth Century, And it came to where our only customers were men who never paid and never meant to pay their bills. But Gerald Starnes, doped by his own publicity, got huffy and went around, with an air of moral superiority, demanding that businessmen place orders with us, not because our motors were good, but because we needed the orders so badly.

"By that time, a village half-wit could see what generations of professors had pretended not to notice. What good would our need do to a power plant when its generators stopped because of our defective engines? What good would it do to a man caught on an operating table when the electric light went out? What good would it do to the passengers of a plane when its motor failed in mid-air?

And if they bought our product, not because of its merit, but because of our need, would that be the good, the right, the moral thing to do for the owner of that power plant, the surgeon in that hospital, the maker of that plane?

"Yet this was the moral law that the professors and leaders and thinkers had wanted to establish all over the earth. If this is what it did in a single small town where we all knew one another, do you care to think what it would do on a world scale? Do you care to imagine what it would be like, if you had to live and to work, when you're tied to all the disasters and all the malingering of the globe? To work —and whenever any men failed anywhere, it's you who would have to make up for it. To work—with no chance to rise, with your meals and your clothes and your home and your pleasure depending on any swindle, any famine, any pestilence anywhere on earth. To work—with no chance for an extra ration, till the Cambodians have been fed and the Patagonians have been sent through college. To work—on a blank check held by every creature born, by men whom you'll never see, whose needs you'll never know, whose ability or laziness or sloppiness or fraud you have no way to learn and no right to question —just to work and work and work—and leave it up to the Ivys and the Geralds of the world to decide whose stomach will consume the effort, the dreams and the days of your life. And this is the moral law to accept? This—a moral ideal?

"Well, we tried it—and we learned. Our agony took four years, from our first meeting to our last, and it ended the only way it could end: in bankruptcy. At our last meeting, Ivy Starnes was the one who tried to brazen it out. She made a short, nasty, snippy little speech in which she said that the plan had failed because the rest of the country had not accepted it, that a single community could not succeed in the midst of a selfish, greedy world—and that the plan was a noble ideal, but human nature was not good enough for it. A young boy—the one who had been punished for giving us a useful idea in our first year—got up, as we all sat silent, and walked straight to Ivy Starnes on the platform. He said nothing. He spat in her face. That was the end of the noble plan and of the Twentieth Century."

The man had spoken as if the burden of his years of silence had slipped suddenly out of his grasp. She knew that this was his tribute to her: he had shown no reaction to her kindness, he had seemed numbed to human value or human hope, but something within him had been reached and his response was this confession, this long, desperate cry of rebellion against injustice, held back for years, but breaking out in recognition of the first person he had met in whose hearing an appeal for justice would not be hopeless. It was as if the life he had been about to renounce were given back to him by the two essentials he needed: by his food and by the presence of a rational being.

"But what about John Galt?" she asked.

"Oh . . ." he said, remembering. "Oh, yes . . ."

"You were going to tell me why people started asking that question."

"Yes . . ." He was looking off, as if at some sight which he had studied for years, but which remained unchanged and unsolved; his face had an odd, questioning look of terror.

"You were going to tell me who was the John Galt they mean—if there ever was such a person."

"I hope there wasn't, ma'am. I mean, I hope that it's just a coincidence, just a sentence that hasn't any meaning."

"You had something in mind. What?"

"It was . . . it was something that happened at that first meeting at the Twentieth Century factory. Maybe that was the start of it, maybe not. I don't know . . . The meeting was held on a spring night, twelve years ago. The six thousand of us were crowded on bleachers built way up to the rafters of the plant's largest hangar. We had just voted for the new plan and we were in an edgy sort of mood, making too much noise, cheering the people's victory, threatening some kind of unknown enemies and spoiling for a fight, like bullies with an uneasy conscience. There were white arclights beating down on us and we felt kind of touchy and raw, and we were an ugly, dangerous mob in that moment. Gerald Starnes, who was chairman, kept hammering his gavel for order, and we quieted down some, but not much, and you could see the whole place moving restlessly from side to side, like water in a pan that's being rocked. 'This is a crucial moment in the history of mankind!' Gerald Starnes yelled through the noise. 'Remember that none of us may now leave this place, for each of us belongs to all the others by the moral law which we all accept!' 'I don't," said one man and stood up. He was one of the young engineers. Nobody knew much about him. He'd always kept mostly by himself. When he stood up, we suddenly turned dead-still. It was the way he held his head. He was tall and slim—and I remember thinking that any two of us could have broken his neck without trouble—but what we all felt was fear. He stood like a man who knew that he was right. 'I will put an end to this, once and for all,' he said. His voice was clear and without any feeling. That was all he said and started to walk out. He walked down the length of the place, in the white light, not hurrying and not noticing any of us. Nobody moved to stop him. Gerald Starnes cried suddenly after him, 'How?' He turned and answered, 'I will stop the motor of the world. Then he walked out. We never saw him again.

We never heard what became of him. But years later, when we saw the lights going out, one after another, in the great factories that had stood solid like mountains for generations, when we saw the gates closing and the conveyor belts turning still, when we saw the roads growing empty and the stream of cars draining off, when it began to look as if some silent power were stopping the generators of the world and the world was crumbling quietly, like a body when its spirit is gone—then we began to wonder and to ask questions about him. We began to ask it of one another, those of us who had heard him say it.

We began to think that he had kept his word, that he, who had seen and known the truth we refused to know, was the retribution we had called upon our heads, the avenger, the man of that justice which we had defied. We began to think that he had damned us and there was no escape from his verdict and we would never be able to get away from him—and this was the more terrible because he was not pursuing us, it was we who were suddenly looking for him and he had merely gone without a trace. We found no answer about him anywhere. We wondered by what sort of impossible power he could have done what he had promised to do. There was no answer to that. We began to think of him whenever we saw another collapse in the world, which nobody could explain, whenever we took another blow, whenever we lost another hope, whenever we felt caught in this dead, gray fog that's descending all over the earth. Perhaps people heard us crying that question and they did not know what we meant, but they knew too well the feeling that made us cry it. They, too, felt that something had gone from the world. Perhaps this was why they began to say it, whenever they felt that there was no hope. I'd like to think that I am wrong, that those words mean nothing, that there's no conscious intention and no avenger behind the ending of the human race. But when I hear them repeating that question, I feel afraid. I think of the man who said that he would stop the motor of the world. You see, his name was John Galt."

She awakened, because the sound of the wheels had changed. It was an irregular beat, with sudden screeches and short, sharp cracks, a sound like the broken laughter of hysteria, with the fitful jerking of the car to match it. She knew, before she glanced at her watch, that this was the track of the Kansas Western and that the train had started on its long detour south from Kirby, Nebraska.

The train was half-empty; few people had ventured across the continent on the first Comet since the tunnel disaster. She had given a bedroom to the tramp, and then had remained alone with his story.

She had wanted to think of it, of all the questions she intended to ask him tomorrow—but she had found her mind frozen and still, like a spectator staring at the story, unable to function, only to stare. She had felt as if she knew the meaning of that spectacle, knew it with no further questions and had to escape it. To move—had been the words beating in her mind with peculiar urgency—to move—as if movement had become an end in itself, crucial, absolute and doomed.

Through a thin layer of sleep, the sound of the wheels had kept running a race with the growth of her tension. She had kept awakening, as in a causeless start of panic, finding herself upright in the darkness, thinking blankly: What was it?—then telling herself in reassurance: We're moving . . . we're still moving. . . .

The track of the Kansas Western was worse than she had expected—she thought, listening to the wheels. The train was now carrying her hundreds of miles away from Utah. She had felt a desperate desire to get off the train on the main line, abandon all the problems of Taggart Transcontinental, find an airplane and fly straight to Quentin Daniels.

It had taken a cheerless effort of will to remain in her car.

She lay in the darkness, listening to the wheels, thinking that only Daniels and his motor still remained like a point of fire ahead, pulling her forward. Of what use would the motor now be to her? She had no answer. Why did she feel so certain of the desperate need to hurry?

She had no answer. To reach him in time, was the only ultimatum left in her mind. She held onto it, asking no questions. Wordlessly, she knew the real answer: the motor was needed, not to move trains, but to keep her moving.

She could not hear the beat of the fourth knocks any longer in the jumbled screeching of metal, she could not hear the steps of the enemy she was racing, only the hopeless stampede of panic. . . .

I'll get there in time, she thought, I'll get there first, I'll save the motor.

There's one motor he's not going to stop, she thought . . . he's not going to stop . . . he's not going to stop . . . He's not going to stop, she thought—awakening with a jolt, jerking her head off the pillow. The wheels had stopped.

For a moment, she remained still, trying to grasp the peculiar stillness around her. It felt like the impossible attempt to create a sensory image of non-existence. There were no attributes of reality to perceive, nothing but their absence: no sound, as if she were alone on the train—no motion, as if this were not a train, but a room in a building—no light, as if this were neither train nor room, but space without objects—no sign of violence or physical disaster, as if this were the state where disaster is no longer possible.

In the moment when she grasped the nature of the stillness, her body sprang upright with a single curve of motion, immediate and violent like a cry of rebellion. The loud screech of the window shade went like a knife-cut through the silence, as she threw the shade upward. There was nothing outside but anonymous stretches of prairie; a strong wind was breaking the clouds, and a shaft of moonlight fell through, but it fell upon plains that seemed as dead as those from which it came.

The sweep of her hand pressed the light switch and the bell to summon the porter. The electric light came on and brought her back to a rational world. She glanced at her watch: it was a few minutes past midnight. She looked out of the rear window: the track went off in a straight line and, at the prescribed distance, she saw the red lanterns left on the ground, placed conscientiously to protect the rear of the train. The sight seemed reassuring.

She pressed the porter's bell once more. She waited. She went to the vestibule, unlocked the door and leaned out to look down the line of the train. A few windows were lighted in the long, tapering band of steel, but she saw no figures, no sign of human activity. She slammed the door, came back and started to dress, her movements suddenly calm and swift.

No one came to answer her bell. When she hastened across to the next car, she felt no fear, no uncertainty, no despair, nothing but the urgency of action.

There was no porter in the cubbyhole of the next car, no porter in the car beyond. She hurried down the narrow passageways, meeting no one. But a few compartment doors were open. The passengers sat inside, dressed or half-dressed, silently, as if waiting. They watched her rush by with oddly furtive glances, as if they knew what she was after, as if they had expected someone to come and to face what they had not faced. She went on, running down the spinal cord of a dead train, noting the peculiar combination of lighted compartments, open doors and empty passages: no one had ventured to step out. No one had wanted to ask the first question.

She ran through the train's only coach, where some passengers slept in contorted poses of exhaustion, while others, awake and still, sat hunched, like animals waiting for a blow, making no move to avert it In the vestibule of the coach, she stopped. She saw a man, who had unlocked the door and was leaning out, looking inquiringly ahead through the darkness, ready to step off. He turned at the sound of her approach. She recognized his face: it was Owen Kellogg, the man who had rejected the future she had once offered him.

"Kellogg!" she gasped, the sound of laughter in her voice like a cry of relief at the sudden sight of a man in a desert.

"Hello, Miss Taggart," he answered, with an astonished smile that held a touch of incredulous pleasure—and of wistfulness. "I didn't know you were aboard."

"Come on," she ordered, as if he were still an employee of the railroad. "I think we're on a frozen train."

"We are," he said, and followed her with prompt, disciplined obedience.

No explanations were necessary. It was as if, in unspoken understanding, they were answering a call to duty—and it seemed natural that of the hundreds aboard, it was the two of them who should be partners-in-danger.

"Any idea how long we've been standing?" she asked, as they hurried on through the next car.

"No," he said. "We were standing when I woke up."

They went the length of the train, finding no porters, no waiters in the diner, no brakemen, no conductor. They glanced at each other once in a while, but kept silent. They knew the stories of abandoned trains, of the crews that vanished in sudden bursts of rebellion against serfdom.

They got off at the head end of the train, with no motion around them save the wind on their faces, and they climbed swiftly aboard the engine. The engine's headlight was on, stretching like an accusing arm into the void of the night. The engine's cab was empty.

Her cry of desperate triumph broke out in answer to the shock of the sight: "Good for them! They're human beings!"

She stopped, aghast, as at the cry of a stranger. She noticed that Kellogg stood watching her curiously, with the faint hint of a smile.

It was an old steam engine, the best that the railroad had been able to provide for the Comet. The fire was banked in the grates, the steam gauge was low, and in the great windshield before them the headlight fell upon a band of ties that should have been running to meet them, but lay still instead, like a ladder's steps, counted, numbered and ended.

She reached for the logbook and looked at the names of the train's last crew. The engineer had been Pat Logan.

Her head dropped slowly, and she closed her eyes. She thought of the first run on a green-blue track, that must have been in Pat Logan's mind—as it was now in hers—through the silent hours of his last run on any rail.

"Miss Taggart?" said Owen Kellogg softly.

She jerked her head up. "Yes," she said, "yes . . . Well"—her voice had no color except the metallic tinge of decision—"we'll have to get to a phone and call for another crew." She glanced at her watch. "At the rate we were running, I think we must be about eighty miles from the Oklahoma state line. I believe Bradshaw is this road's nearest division point to call. We're somewhere within thirty miles of it."

"Are there any Taggart trains following us?"

"The next one is Number 253, the transcontinental freight, but it won't get here till about seven A.M., if it's running on time, which 1 doubt."

"Only one freight in seven hours?" He said it involuntarily, with a note of outraged loyalty to the great railroad he had once been proud to serve.

Her mouth moved in the brief snap of a smile. "Our transcontinental traffic is not what it was in your day."

He nodded slowly. "I don't suppose there are any Kansas Western trains coming tonight, either?"

"I can't remember offhand, but I think not."

He glanced at the poles by the side of the track. "I hope that the Kansas Western people have kept their phones in order."

"You mean that the chances are they haven't, if we judge by the state of their track. But we'll have to try it,"

"Yes."

She turned to go, but stopped. She knew it was useless to comment, but the words came involuntarily. "You know," she said, "it's those lanterns our men put behind the train to protect us that's the hardest thing to take. They . . . they felt more concern for human lives than their country had shown for theirs."

His swift glance at her was like a shot of deliberate emphasis, then he answered gravely, "Yes, Miss Taggart."

Climbing down the ladder on the side of the engine, they saw a cluster of passengers gathered by the track and more figures emerging from the train to join them. By some special instinct of their own, the men who had sat waiting knew that someone had taken charge, someone had assumed the responsibility and it was now safe to show signs of life.

They all looked at her with an air of inquiring expectation, as she approached. The unnatural pallor of the moonlight seemed to dissolve the differences of their faces and to stress the quality they all had in common: a look of cautious appraisal, part fear, part plea, part impertinence held in abeyance.

"Is there anyone here who wishes to be spokesman for the passengers?" she asked.

They looked at one another. There was no answer.

"Very well," she said. "You don't have to speak. I'm Dagny Taggart, the Operating Vice-President of this railroad, and"—there was a rustle of response from the group, half-movement, half-whisper, resembling relief—"and I'll do the speaking. We are on a train that has been abandoned by its crew. There was no physical accident. The engine is intact. But there is no one to run it. This is what the newspapers call a frozen train. You all know what it means—and you know the reasons. Perhaps you knew the reasons long before they were discovered by the men who deserted you tonight. The law forbade them to desert. But this will not help you now."

A woman shrieked suddenly, with the demanding petulance of hysteria, "What are we going to do?"

Dagny paused to look at her. The woman was pushing forward, to squeeze herself into the group, to place some human bodies between herself and the sight of the great vacuum—the plain stretching off and dissolving into moonlight, the dead phosphorescence of impotent, borrowed energy. The woman had a coat thrown over a nightgown; the coat was slipping open and her stomach protruded under the gown's thin cloth, with that loose obscenity of manner which assumes all human self-revelation to be ugliness and makes no effort to conceal it. For a moment, Dagny regretted the necessity to continue.

"I shall go down the track to a telephone," she continued, her voice clear and as cold as the moonlight. "There are emergency telephones at intervals of five miles along the right-of-way. I shall call for another crew to be sent here. This will take some time. You will please stay aboard and maintain such order as you are capable of maintaining."

"What about the gangs of raiders?" asked another woman's nervous voice.

"That's true," said Dagny. "I'd better have someone to accompany me. Who wishes to go?"

She had misunderstood the woman's motive. There was no answer.

There were no glances directed at her or at one another. There were no eyes—only moist ovals glistening in the moonlight. There they were, she thought, the men of the new age, the demanders and recipients of self-sacrifice. She was struck by a quality of anger in their silence—an anger saying that she was supposed to spare them moments such as this—and, with a feeling of cruelty new to her, she remained silent by conscious intention.

She noticed that Owen Kellogg, too, was waiting; but he was not watching the passengers, he was watching her face. When he became certain that there would be no answer from the crowd, he said quietly, "I'll go with you, of course, Miss Taggart."

"Thank you."

"What about us?" snapped the nervous woman.

Dagny turned to her, answering in the formal, inflectionless monotone of a business executive, "There have been no cases of raider gang attacks upon frozen trains—unfortunately."

"Just where are we?" asked a bulky man with too expensive an overcoat and too flabby a face; his voice had a tone intended for servants by a man unfit to employ them. "In what part of what state?"

"I don't know," she answered.

"How long will we be kept here?" asked another, in the tone of a creditor who is imposed upon by a debtor.

"1 don't know."

"When will we get to San Francisco?" asked a third, in the manner of a sheriff addressing a suspect.

"I don't know."

The demanding resentment was breaking loose, in small, crackling puffs, like chestnuts popping open in the dark oven of the minds who now felt certain that they were taken care of and safe.

"This is perfectly outrageous!" yelled a woman, springing forward, throwing her words at Dagny's face. "You have no right to let this happen! I don't intend to be kept waiting in the middle of nowhere!

I expect transportation!"

"Keep your mouth shut," said Dagny, "or I'll lock the train doors and leave you where you are."

"You can't do that! You're a common carrier! You have no right to discriminate against me! I'll report it to the Unification Board!"

"—if I give you a train to get you within sight or hearing of your Board," said Dagny, turning away.

She saw Kellogg looking at her, his glance like a line drawn under her words, underscoring them for her own attention.

"Get a flashlight somewhere," she said, "while I go to get my handbag, then we'll start."

When they started out on their way to the track phone, walking past the silent line of cars, they saw another figure descending from the train and hurrying to meet them. She recognized the tramp.

"Trouble, ma'am?" he asked, stopping.

"The crew has deserted."

"Oh. What's to be done?"

"I'm going to a phone to call the division point."

"You can't go alone, ma'am. Not these days. I'd better go with you."

She smiled. "Thanks. But I'll be all right. Mr. Kellogg here is going with me. Say—what's your name?"

"Jeff Alien, ma'am."

"Listen, Alien, have you ever worked for a railroad?"

"No, ma'am."

"Well, you're working for one now. You're deputy-conductor and proxy-vice-president-in-charge-of-operation. Your job is to take charge of this train in my absence, to preserve order and to keep the cattle from stampeding. Tell them that I appointed you. You don't need any proof. They'll obey anybody who expects obedience."

"Yes, ma'am," he answered firmly, with a look of understanding.

She remembered that money inside a man's pocket had the power to turn into confidence inside his mind; she took a hundred-dollar bill from her bag and slipped it into his hand. "As advance on wages," she said.

"Yes, ma'am."

She had started off, when he called after her, "Miss Taggart!"

She turned. "Yes?"

"Thank you," he said.

She smiled, half-raising her hand in a parting salute, and walked on.

"Who is that?" asked Kellogg.

"A tramp who was caught stealing a ride."

"He'll do the job, I think."

"He will."

They walked silently past the engine and on in the direction of its headlight. At first, stepping from tie to tie, with the violent light beating against them from behind, they still felt as if they were at home in the normal realm of a railroad. Then she found herself watching the light on the ties under her feet, watching it ebb slowly, trying to hold it, to keep seeing its fading glow, until she knew that the hint of a glow on the wood was no longer anything but moonlight. She could not prevent the shudder that made her turn to look back. The headlight still hung behind them, like the liquid silver globe of a planet, deceptively close, but belonging to another orbit and another system.

Owen Kellogg walked silently beside her, and she felt certain that they knew each other's thoughts.

"He couldn't have. Oh God, he couldn't!" she said suddenly, not realizing that she had switched to words.

"Who?"

"Nathaniel Taggart. He couldn't have worked with people like those passengers. He couldn't have run trains for them. He couldn't have employed them. He couldn't have used them at all, neither as customers nor as workers."

Kellogg smiled. "You mean that he couldn't have grown rich by exploiting them, Miss Taggart?"

She nodded. "They . . ." she said, and he heard the faint trembling of her voice, which was love and pain and indignation, "they've said for years that he rose by thwarting the ability of others, by leaving them no chance, and that . . . that human incompetence was to his selfish interest. . . . But he . . . it wasn't obedience that he required of people."

"Miss Taggart," he said, with an odd note of sternness in his voice, "just remember that he represented a code of existence which—for a brief span in all human history—drove slavery out of the civilized world. Remember it, when you feel baffled by the nature of his enemies,"

"Have you ever heard of a woman named Ivy Starnes?"

"Oh yes."

"I keep thinking that this was what she would have enjoyed—the spectacle of those passengers tonight. This was what she's after. But we—we can't live with it, you and I, can we? No one can live with it.

It's not possible to live with it."

"What makes you think that Ivy Starnes's purpose is life?"

Somewhere on the edge of her mind—like the wisps she saw floating on the edges of the prairie, neither quite rays nor fog nor cloud—she felt some shape which she could not grasp, half-suggested and demanding to be grasped.

She did not speak, and—like the links of a chain unrolling through their silence—the rhythm of their steps went on, spaced to the ties, scored by the dry, swift beat of heels on wood.

She had not had time to be aware of him, except as of a providential comrade-in-competence; now she glanced at him with conscious attention. His face had the clear, hard look she remembered having liked in the past. But the face had grown calmer, as if more serenely at peace. His clothes were threadbare. He wore an old leather jacket, and even in the darkness she could distinguish the scuffed blotches streaking across the leather.

"What have you been doing since you left Taggart Transcontinental?" she asked.

"Oh, many things."

"Where are you working now?"

"On special assignments, more or less."

"Of what kind?"

"Of every kind."

"You're not working for a railroad?"

"No."

The sharp brevity of the sound seemed to expand it into an eloquent statement. She knew that he knew her motive. "Kellogg, if I told you that I don't have a single first-rate man left on the Taggart system, if I offered you any job, any terms, any money you cared to name—would you come back to us?"

"No."

"You were shocked by our loss of traffic. I don't think you have any idea of what our loss of men has done to us. I can't tell you the sort of agony I went through three days ago, trying to find somebody able to build five miles of temporary track. I have fifty miles to build through the Rockies. I see no way to do it. But it has to be done. I've combed the country for men. There aren't any. And then to run into you suddenly, to find you here, in a day coach, when I'd give half the system for one employee like you—do you understand why I can't let you go? Choose anything you wish. Want to be general manager of a region? Or assistant operating vice-president?"

"No."

"You're still working for a living, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"You don't seem to be making very much."

"I'm making enough for my needs—and for nobody else's."

"Why are you willing to work for anyone but Taggart Transcontinental?"

"Because you wouldn't give me the kind of job I'd want."

"I?" She stopped still. "Good God, Kellogg!—haven't you understood? I'd give you any job you name!"

"All right. Track walker."

"What?"

"Section hand. Engine wiper." He smiled at the look on her face.

"No? You see, I said you wouldn't."

"Do you mean that you'd take a day laborer's job?"

"Any time you offered it."

"But nothing better?"

"That's right, nothing better."

"Don't you understand that I have too many men who're able to do those jobs, but nothing better?"

"I understand it, Miss Taggart. Do you?"

"What I need is your—"

"—mind, Miss Taggart? My mind is not on the market any longer."

She stood looking at him, her face growing harder. "You're one of them, aren't you?" she said at last.

"Of whom?"

She did not answer, shrugged and went on, "Miss Taggart," he asked, "how long will you remain willing to be a common carrier?"

"I won't surrender the world to the creature you're quoting."

"The answer you gave her was much more realistic."

The chain of their steps had stretched through many silent minutes before she asked, "Why did you stand by me tonight? Why were you willing to help me?"

He answered easily, almost gaily, "Because there isn't a passenger on that train who needs to get where he's going more urgently than I do. If the train can be started, none will profit more than I. But when I need something, I don't sit and expect transportation, like that creature of yours."

"You don't? And what if all trains stopped running?"

"Then I wouldn't count on making a crucial journey by train."

"Where are you going?"

"West."

"On a 'special assignment'?"

"No. For a month's vacation with some friends."

"A vacation? And it's that important to you?"

"More important than anything on earth."

They had walked two miles when they came to the small gray box on a post by the trackside, which was the emergency telephone.

The box hung sidewise, beaten by storms. She jerked it open. The telephone was there, a familiar, reassuring object, glinting in the beam of Kellogg's flashlight. But she knew, the moment she pressed the receiver to her ear, and he knew, when he saw her finger tapping sharply against the hook, that the telephone was dead.

She handed the receiver to him without a word. She held the flashlight, while he went swiftly over the instrument, then tore it off the wall and studied the wires.

"The wire's okay," he said. "The current's on. It's this particular instrument that's out of order. There's a chance that the next one might be working." He added, "The next one is five miles away."

"Let's go," she said.

Far behind them, the engine's headlight was still visible, not a planet any longer, but a small star winking, through mists of distance.

Ahead of them, the rail went off into bluish space, with nothing to mark its end.

She realized how often she had glanced back at that headlight; so long as it remained in sight, she had felt as if a life-line were holding them anchored safely; now they had to break it and dive into . . . and dive off this planet, she thought. She noticed that Kellogg, too, stood looking back at the headlight.

They glanced at each other, but said nothing. The crunch of a pebble under her shoe sole burst like a firecracker in the silence.

With a coldly intentional movement, he kicked the telephone instrument and sent it rolling into a ditch: the violence of the noise shattered the vacuum.

"God damn him," he said evenly, not raising his voice, with a loathing past any display of emotion. "He probably didn't feel like attending to his job, and since he needed his pay check, nobody had the right to ask that he keep the phones in order."

"Come on," she said.

"We can rest, if you feel tired, Miss Taggart."

"I'm all right. We have no time to feel tired."

"That's our great error, Miss Taggart. We ought to take the time, some day."

She gave a brief chuckle, she stepped onto a tie of the track, stressing the step as her answer, and they went on.

It was hard, walking on ties, but when they tried to walk along the trackside, they found that it was harder. The soil, half-sand, half-dust, sank under their heels, like the soft, unresisting spread of some substance that was neither liquid nor solid. They went back to walking from tie to tie; it was almost like stepping from log to log in the midst of a river.

She thought of what an enormous distance five miles had suddenly become, and that a division point thirty miles away was now unattainable—after an era of railroads built by men who thought in thousands of transcontinental miles. That net of rails and lights, spreading from ocean to ocean, hung on the snap of a wire, on a broken connection inside a rusty phone—no, she thought, on something much more powerful and much more delicate. It hung on the connections in the minds of the men who knew that the existence of a wire, of a train, of a job, of themselves and their actions was an absolute not to be escaped. When such minds were gone, a two thousand-ton train was left at the mercy of the muscles of her legs.

Tired?—she thought; even the strain of walking was a value, a small piece of reality in the stillness around them. The sensation of effort was a specific experience, it was pain and could be nothing else—in the midst of a space which was neither light nor dark, a soil which neither gave nor resisted, a fog which neither moved nor hung still. Their strain was the only evidence of their motion: nothing changed in the emptiness around them, nothing took form to mark their progress. She had always wondered, in incredulous contempt, about the sects that preached the annihilation of the universe as the ideal to be attained. There, she thought, was their world and the content of their minds made real.

When the green light of a signal appeared by the track, it gave them a point to reach and pass, but—incongruous in the midst of the floating dissolution—it brought them no sense of relief. It seemed to come from a long since extinguished world, like those stars whose light remains after they are gone. The green circle glowed in space, announcing a clear track, inviting motion where there was nothing to move. Who was that philosopher, she thought, who preached that motion exists without any moving entities? This was his world, too.

T!

She found herself pushing forward with increasing effort, as if against some resistance that was, not pressure, but suction. Glancing at Kellogg, she saw that he, too, was walking like a man braced against a storm. She felt as if the two of them were the sole survivors of . . . of reality, she thought—two lonely figures fighting, not through a storm, but worse: through non-existence.

It was Kellogg who glanced back, after a while, and she followed his glance: there was no headlight behind them.

They did not stop. Looking straight ahead, he reached absently into his pocket; she felt certain that the movement was involuntary; he produced a package of cigarettes and extended it to her.

She was about to take a cigarette—then, suddenly, she seized his wrist and tore the package out of his hand. It was a plain white package that bore, as single imprint, the sign of the dollar.

"Give me the flashlight!" she ordered, stopping.

He stopped obediently and sent the beam of the flashlight at the package in her hands. She caught a glimpse of his face: he looked a little astonished and very amused.

There was no printing on the package, no trade name, no address, only the dollar sign stamped in gold. The cigarettes bore the same sign.

"Where did you get this?" she asked.

He was smiling. "If you know enough to ask that, Miss Taggart, you should know that I won't answer."

"I know that this stands for something."

"The dollar sign? For a great deal. It stands on the vest of every fat, pig like figure in every cartoon, for the purpose of denoting a crook, a grafter, a scoundrel—as the one sure-fire brand of evil. It stands—as the money of a free country—for achievement, for success, for ability, for man's creative power—and, precisely for these reasons, it is used as a brand of infamy. It stands stamped on the forehead of a man like Hank Rearden, as a mark of damnation. Incidentally, do you know where that sign comes from? It stands for the initials of the United States."

He snapped the flashlight off, but he did not move to go; she could distinguish the hint of his bitter smile.

"Do you know that the United States is the only country in history that has ever used its own monogram as a symbol of depravity? Ask yourself why. Ask yourself how long a country that did that could hope to exist, and whose moral standards have destroyed it. It was the only country in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only country whose money was the symbol of man's right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself. If this is evil, by the present standards of the world, if this is the reason for damning us, then we —we, the dollar chasers and makers—accept it and choose to be damned by that world. We choose to wear the sign of the dollar on our foreheads, proudly, as our badge of nobility—the badge we are willing to live for and, if need be, to die."

He extended his hand for the package. She held it as if her fingers would not let it go, but gave up and placed it on his palm. With deliberate slowness, as if to underscore the meaning of his gesture, he offered her a cigarette. She took it and placed it between her lips.

He took one for himself, struck a match, lighted both, and they walked on.

They walked, over rotting logs that sank without resistance into the shifting ground, through a vast, uncongealed globe of moonlight and coiling mist—with two spots of living fire in their hands and the glow of two small circles to light their faces.

"Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips . . ." she remembered the old man saying to her, the old man who had said that these cigarettes were not made anywhere on earth. "When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind—and it's proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."

"I wish you'd tell me who makes them," she said, in the tone of a hopeless plea.

He chuckled good-naturedly. "I can tell you this much: they're made by a friend of mine, for sale, but—not being a common carrier —he sells them only to his friends."

"Sell me that package, will you?"

"I don't think you'll be able to afford it, Miss Taggart, but—all right, if you wish."

"How much is it?"

"Five cents."

"Five cents?" she repeated, bewildered.

"Five cents—" he said, and added, "in gold."

She stopped, staring at him. "In gold?"

"Yes, Miss Taggart."

"Well, what's your rate of exchange? How much is it in our normal money?"

"There is no rate of exchange, Miss Taggart. No amount of physical—or spiritual—currency, whose sole standard of value is the decree of Mr. Wesley Mouch, will buy these cigarettes."

"I see."

He reached into his pocket, took out the package and handed it to her. "I'll give them to you, Miss Taggart," he said, "because you've earned them many times over—and because you need them for the same purpose we do."

"What purpose?"

"To remind us—in moments of discouragement, in the loneliness of exile—of our true homeland, which has always been yours, too, Miss Taggart."

"Thank you," she said. She put the cigarettes in her pocket; he saw that her hand was trembling.

When they reached the fourth of the five mileposts, they had been silent for a long time, with no strength left for anything but the effort of moving their feet. Far ahead, they saw a dot of light, too low on the horizon and too harshly clear to be a star. They kept watching it, as they walked, and said nothing until they became certain that it was a powerful electric beacon blazing in the midst of the empty prairie.

"What is that?" she asked.

"I don't know," he said. "It looks like—"

"No," she broke in hastily, "it couldn't be. Not around here."

She did not want to hear him name the hope which she had felt for many minutes past. She could not permit herself to think of it or to know that the thought was hope.

They found the telephone box at the fifth milepost. The beacon hung like a violent spot of cold fire, less than half a mile farther south.

The telephone was working. She heard the buzz of the wire, like the breath of a living creature, when she lifted the receiver. Then a drawling voice answered, "Jessup, at Bradshaw." The voice sounded sleepy.

"This is Dagny Taggart, speaking from—"

"Who?"

"Dagny Taggart, of Taggart Transcontinental, speaking—"

"Oh . . . Oh yes . . . I see . . . Yes?"

"—speaking from your track phone Number 83. The Comet is stalled seven miles north of here. It's been abandoned. The crew has deserted."

There was a pause. "Well, what do you want me to do about it?"

She had to pause in turn, in order to believe it. "Are you the night dispatcher?”

"Yeah."

"Then send another crew out to us at once."

"A full passenger train crew?"

"Of course."

"Now?"

"Yes."

There was a pause. "The rules don't say anything about that."

"Get me the chief dispatcher," she said, choking.

"He's away on his vacation."

"Get the division superintendent."

"He's gone down to Laurel for a couple of days."

"Get me somebody who's in charge."

"I'm in charge."

"Listen," she said slowly, fighting for patience, "do you understand that there's a train, a passenger limited, abandoned in the middle of the prairie?"

"Yeah, but how am I to know what I'm supposed to do about it?

The rules don't provide for it. Now if you had an accident, we'd send out the wrecker, but if there was no accident . . . you don't need the wrecker, do you?"

"No. We don't need the wrecker. We need men. Do you understand? Living men to run an engine."

"The rules don't say anything about a train without men. Or about men without a train. There's no rule for calling out a full crew in the middle of the night and sending them to hunt for a train somewhere.

I've never heard of it before,"

"You're hearing it now. Don't you know what you have to do?"

"Who am I to know?"

"Do you know that your job is to keep trains moving?"

"My job is to obey the rules. If I send out a crew when I'm not supposed to, God only knows what's going to happen! What with the Unification Board and all the regulations they've got nowadays, who am I to take it upon myself?"

"And what's going to happen if you leave a train stalled on the line?"

"That's not my fault. I had nothing to do with it. They can't blame me. I couldn't help it."

"You're to help it now."

"Nobody told me to."

"I'm telling you to!"

"How do I know whether you're supposed to tell me or not? We're not supposed to furnish any Taggart crews. You people were to run with your own crews. That's what we were told."

"But this is an emergency!"

"Nobody told me anything about an emergency."

She had to take a few seconds to control herself. She saw Kellogg watching her with a bitter smile of amusement.

"Listen," she said into the phone, "do you know that the Comet was due at Bradshaw over three hours ago?"

"Oh, sure. But nobody's going to make any trouble about that. No train's ever on schedule these days,"

"Then do you intend to leave us blocking your track forever?"

"We've got nothing due till Number 4, the northbound passenger out of Laurel, at eight thirty-seven A.M. You can wait till then. The day-trick dispatcher will be on then. You can speak to him,"

"You blasted idiot! This is the Comet!"

"What's that to me? This isn't Taggart Transcontinental. You people expect a lot for your money. You've been nothing but a headache to us7 with all the extra work at no extra pay for the little fellows."

His voice was slipping into whining insolence. "You can't talk to me that way. The time's past when you could talk to people that way."

She had never believed that there were men with whom a certain method, which she had never used, would work; such men were not hired by Taggart Transcontinental and she had never been forced to deal with them before.

"Do you know who I am?" she asked, in the cold, overbearing tone of a personal threat.

It worked. "I . . . I guess so," he answered.

"Then let me tell you that if you don't send a crew to me at once, you'll be out of a job within one hour after I reach Bradshaw, which I'll reach sooner or later. You'd better make it sooner."

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

"Call out a full passenger train crew and give them orders to run us to Laurel, where we have our own men."

"Yes, ma'am.” He added, "Will you tell headquarters that it was you who told me to do it?"

"I will."

"And that it's you who're responsible for it?"

"I am."

There was a pause, then he asked helplessly, "Now how am I going to call the men? Most of them haven't got any phones."

"Do you have a call boy?"

"Yes, but he won't get here till morning."

"Is there anybody in the yards right now?"

"There's the wiper in the roundhouse."

"Send him out to call the men."

"Yes, ma'am. Hold the line."

She leaned against the side of the phone box, to wait. Kellogg was smiling.

"And you propose to run a railroad—a transcontinental railroad—with that?" he asked.

She shrugged.

She could not keep her eyes off the beacon. It seemed so close, so easily within her reach. She felt as if the unconfessed thought were struggling furiously against her, splattering bits of the struggle all over her mind: A man able to harness an untapped source of energy, a man working on a motor to make all other motors useless . . . she could be talking to him, to his kind of brain, in a few hours . . . in just a few hours. . . . What if there was no need to hurry to him? It was what she wanted to do. It was all she wanted. . . . Her work?

What was her work: to move on to the fullest, most exacting use of her mind—or to spend the rest of her life doing his thinking for a man unfit to be a night dispatcher? Why had she chosen to work?

Was it in order to remain where she had started—night operator of Rockdale Station—no, lower than that—she had been better than that dispatcher, even at Rockdale—was this to be the final sum: an end lower than her beginning? . . . There was no reason to hurry? She was the reason. . . . They needed the trains, but they did not need the motor? She needed the motor. . . . Her duty? To whom?

The dispatcher was gone for a long time; when he came back, his voice sounded sulky: "Well, the wiper says he can get the men all right, but it's no use, because how am I going to send them out to you? We have no engine."

"No engine?"

"No. The superintendent took one to run down to Laurel, and the other's in the shops, been there for weeks, and the switch engine jumped a rail this morning, they'll be working on her till tomorrow afternoon."

"What about the wrecker's engine that you were offering to send us?"

"Oh, she's up north. They had a wreck there yesterday. She hasn't come back yet."

"Have you a Diesel car?"

"Never had any such thing. Not around here."

"Have you a track motor car?"

"Yes. We have that."

"Send them out on the track motor car."

"Oh . . . Yes, ma'am."

"Tell your men to stop here, at track phone Number 83, to pick up Mr. Kellogg and myself." She was looking at the beacon, "Yes, ma'am."

"Call the Taggart trainmaster at Laurel, report the Comet's delay and explain to him what happened." She put her hand into her pocket and suddenly clutched her fingers: she felt the package of cigarettes. "Say—" she asked, "what's that beacon, about half a mile from here?"

"From where you are? Oh, that must be the emergency landing field of the Flagship Airlines."

"I see . . . Well, that's all. Get your men started at once. Tell them to pick up Mr. Kellogg by track phone Number 83."

"Yes, ma'am."

She hung up. Kellogg was grinning.

"An airfield, isn't it?" he asked.

"Yes." She stood looking at the beacon, her hand still clutching the cigarettes in her pocket.

"So they're going to pick up Mr. Kellogg, are they?"

She whirled to him, realizing what decision her mind had been reaching without her conscious knowledge. "No," she said, "no, I didn't mean to abandon you here. It's only that I, too, have a crucial purpose out West, where I ought to hurry, so I was thinking of trying to catch a plane, but I can't do it and it's not necessary."

"Come on," he said, starting in the direction of the airfield.

"But I—"

"If there's anything you want to do more urgently than to nurse those morons—go right ahead."

"More urgently than anything in the world," she whispered.

"I'll undertake to remain in charge for you and to deliver the Comet to your man at Laurel."

"Thank you . . . But if you're hoping . . . I'm not deserting, you know."

"I know."

"Then why are you so eager to help me?"

"I just want you to see what it's like to do something you want, for once."

"There's not much chance that they'll have a plane at that field."

"There's a good chance that they will."

There were two planes on the edge of the airfield: one, the half charred remnant of a wreck, not worth salvaging for scrap—the other, a Dwight Sanders monoplane, brand-new, the kind of ship that men were pleading for, in vain, all over the country.

There was one sleepy attendant at the airfield, young, pudgy and, but for a faint smell of college about his vocabulary, a brain brother of the night dispatcher of Bradshaw. He knew nothing about the two planes: they had been there when he first took this job a year ago. He had never inquired about them and neither had anybody else. In whatever silent crumbling had gone on at the distant headquarters, in the slow dissolution of a great airline company, the Sanders monoplane had been forgotten—as assets of this nature were being forgotten everywhere . . . as the model of the motor had been forgotten on a junk pile and, left in plain sight, had conveyed nothing to the inheritors and the takers-over. . . .

There were no rules to tell the young attendant whether he was expected to keep the Sanders plane or not. The decision was made for him by the brusque, confident manner of the two strangers—by the credentials of Miss Dagny Taggart, Vice-President of a railroad—by brief hints about a secret, emergency mission, which sounded like Washington to him—by the mention of an agreement with the airline's top officials in New York, whose names he had never heard before—by a check for fifteen thousand dollars, written by Miss Taggart, as deposit against the return of the Sanders plane—and by another check, for two hundred bucks, for his own, personal courtesy.

He fueled the plane, he checked it as best he could, he found a map of the country's airports—and she saw that a landing field on the outskirts of Afton, Utah, was marked as still in existence. She had been too tensely, swiftly active to feel anything, but at the last moment, when the attendant switched on the floodlights, when she was about to climb aboard, she paused to glance at the emptiness of the sky, then at Owen Kellogg. He stood, alone in the white glare, his feet planted firmly apart, on an island of cement in a ring of blinding lights, with nothing beyond the ring but an irredeemable night—and she wondered which one of them was taking the greater chance and facing the more desolate emptiness, "In case anything happens to me," she said, "will you tell Eddie Willers in my office to give Jeff Alien a job, as I promised?"

"I will. . . . Is this all you wish to be done . . . in case anything happens?"

She considered it and smiled sadly, in astonishment at the realization. "Yes, I guess that's all . . . Except, tell Hank Rearden what happened and that I asked you to tell him."

"I will."

She lifted her head and said firmly, "I don't expect it to happen, however. When you reach Laurel, call Winston, Colorado, and tell them that I will be there tomorrow by noon."

"Yes, Miss Taggart."

She wanted to extend her hand in parting, but it seemed inadequate, and then she remembered what he had said about times of loneliness. She took out the package and silently offered him one of his own cigarettes. His smile was a full statement of understanding, and the small flame of his match lighting their two cigarettes was their most enduring handshake.

Then she climbed aboard—and the next span of her consciousness was not separate moments and movements, but the sweep of a single motion and a single unit of time, a progression forming one entity, like the notes of a piece of music: from the touch of her hand on the starter—to the blast of the motor's sound that broke off, like a mountain rockslide, all contact with the time behind her—to the circling fall of a blade that vanished in a fragile sparkle of whirling air that cut the space ahead—to the start for the runway—to the brief pause—then to the forward thrust—to the long, perilous run, the run not to be obstructed, the straight line ran that gathers power by spending it on a harder and harder and ever-accelerating effort, the straight line to a purpose—to the moment, unnoticed., when the earth drops off and the line, unbroken, goes on into space in the simple, natural act of rising.

She saw the telegraph wires of the trackside slipping past at the tip of her toes. The earth was falling downward, and she felt as if its weight were dropping off her ankles, as if the globe would go shrinking to the size of a ball, a convict's ball she had dragged and lost.

Her body swayed, drunk with the shock of a discovery, and her craft rocked with her body, and it was the earth below that reeled with the rocking of her craft—the discovery that her life was now in her own hands, that there was no necessity to argue, to explain, to teach, to plead, to fight—nothing but to see and think and act. Then the earth steadied into a wide black sheet that grew wider and wider as she circled, rising. When she glanced down for the last time, the lights of the field were extinguished, there was only the single beacon left and it looked like the tip of Kellogg's cigarette, glowing as a last salute in the darkness.

Then she was left with the lights on her instrument panel and the spread of stars beyond her film of glass. There was nothing to support her but the beat of the engine and the minds of the men who had made the plane. But what else supports one anywhere?—she thought.

The line of her course went northwest, to cut a diagonal across the state of Colorado. She knew she had chosen the most dangerous route, over too long a stretch of the worst mountain barrier—but it was the shortest line, and safety lay in altitude, and no mountains seemed dangerous compared to the dispatcher of Bradshaw.

The stars were like foam and the sky seemed full of flowing motion, the motion of bubbles settling and forming, the floating of circular waves without progression. A spark of light flared up on earth once in a while, and it seemed brighter than all the static blue above. But it hung alone, between the black of ashes and the blue of a crypt, it seemed to fight for its fragile foothold, it greeted her and went.

The pale streak of a river came rising slowly from the void, and for a long stretch of time it remained in sight, gliding imperceptibly to meet her. It looked like a phosphorescent vein showing through the skin of the earth, a delicate vein without blood.

When she saw the lights of a town, like a handful of gold coins flung upon the prairie, the brightly violent lights fed by an electric current, they seemed as distant as the stars and now as unattainable. The energy that had lighted them was gone, the power that created power stations in empty prairies had vanished, and she knew of no journey to recapture it. Yet these had been her stars—she thought, looking down—these had been her goal, her beacon, the aspiration drawing her upon her upward course. That which others claimed to feel at the sight of the stars—stars safely distant by millions of years and thus imposing no obligation to act, but serving as the tinsel of futility—she had felt at the sight of electric bulbs lighting the streets of a town. It was this earth below that had been the height she had wanted to reach, and she wondered how she had come to lose it, who had made of it a convict's ball to drag through muck, who had turned its promise of greatness into a vision never to be reached. But the town was past, and she had to look ahead, to the mountains of Colorado rising in her way.

The small glass dial on her panel showed that she was now climbing.

The sound of the engine, beating through the metal shell around her, trembling in the wheel against her palms, like the pounding of a heart strained to a solemn effort, told her of the power carrying her above the peaks. The earth was now a crumpled sculpture that swayed from side to side, the shape of an explosion still shooting sudden spurts to reach the plane. She saw them as dented black cuts ripping through the milky spread of stars, straight in her path and tearing wider. Her mind one with her body and her body one with the plane, she fought the invisible suction drawing her downward, she fought the sudden gusts that tipped the earth as if she were about to roll off into the sky, with half of the mountains rolling after. It was like fighting a frozen ocean where the touch of a single spray would be fatal.

There were stretches of rest when the mountains shrank down, over valleys filled with fog. Then the fog rose higher to swallow the earth and she was left suspended in space, left motionless but for the sound of the engine.

But she did not need to see the earth. The instrument panel was now her power of sight'—it was the condensed sight of the best minds able to guide her on her way. Their condensed sight, she thought, offered to hers and requiring only that she be able to read it. How had they been paid for it, they, the sight-givers? From condensed milk to condensed music to the condensed sight of precision instruments—what wealth had they not given to the world and what had they received in return?

Where were they now? Where was Dwight Sanders? Where was the inventor of her motor?

The fog was lifting—and in a sudden clearing, she saw a drop of fire on a spread of rock. It was not an electric light, it was a lonely flame in the darkness of the earth. She knew where she was and she knew that flame: it was Wyatt's Torch.

She was coming close to her goal. Somewhere behind her, in the northeast, stood the summits pierced by the Taggart Tunnel. The mountains were sliding in a long descent into the steadier soil of Utah. She let her plane slip closer to the earth.

The stars were vanishing, the sky was growing darker, but in the bank of clouds to the east thin cracks were beginning to appear—first as threads, then faint spots of reflection, then straight bands that were not yet pink, but no longer blue, the color of a future light, the first hints of the coming sunrise. They kept appearing and vanishing, slowly growing clearer, leaving the sky darker, then breaking it wider apart, like a promise struggling to be fulfilled. She heard a piece of music beating in her mind, one she seldom liked to recall: not Halley's Fifth Concerto, but his Fourth, the cry of a tortured struggle, with the chords of its theme breaking through, like a distant vision to be reached.

She saw the Afton airport from across a span of miles, first as a square of sparks, then as a sunburst of white rays. It was lighted for a plane about to take off, and she had to wait for her landing. Circling in the outer darkness above the field, she saw the silver body of a plane rising like a phoenix out of the white fire and—in a straight line, almost leaving an instant's trail of light to hang in space behind it—going off toward the east.

Then she swept down in its stead, to dive into the luminous funnel of beams—she saw a strip of cement flying at her face, she felt the jolt of the wheels stopping it in time, then the streak of her motion ebbing out and the plane being tamed to the safety of a car, as it taxied smoothly off the runway.

It was a small private airfield, serving the meager traffic of a few industrial concerns still remaining in Afton, She saw a lone attendant hurrying to meet her. She leaped down to the ground the moment the plane stood still, the hours of the flight swept from her mind by the impatience over the stretch of a few more minutes.

"Can I get a car somewhere to drive me to the Institute of Technology at once?" she asked.

The attendant looked at her, puzzled. "Why, yes, I guess so, ma'am.

But . . . but what for? There's nobody there."

"Mr. Quentin Daniels is there."

The attendant shook his head slowly—then jerked his thumb, pointing east to the shrinking taillights of the plane. "There's Mr. Daniels going now."

"What?"

"He just left."

"Left? Why?"

"He went with the man who flew in for him two-three hours ago."

"What man?"

"Don't know, never saw him before, but, boy!—he's got a beauty of a ship!"

She was back at the wheel, she was speeding down the runway, she was rising into the air, her plane like a bullet aimed at two sparks of red and green light that were twinkling away into the eastern sky—while she was still repeating, "Oh no, they don't! They don't! They don't!

They don't!"

Once and for all—she thought, clutching the wheel as if it were the enemy not to be relinquished, her words like separate explosions with a trail of fire in her mind to link them—once and for all . . . to meet the destroyer face to face . . . to learn who he is and where he goes to vanish . . . not the motor . . . he is not to carry the motor away into the darkness of his monstrously closed unknown . . . he is not to escape, this time. . . .

A band of light was rising in the east and it seemed to come from the earth, as a breath long-held and released. In the deep blue above it, the stranger's plane was a single spark changing color and flashing from side to side, like the tip of a pendulum swinging in the darkness, beating time.

The curve of distance made the spark drop closer to the earth, and she pushed her throttle wide open, not to let the spark out of her sight, not to let it touch the horizon and vanish. The light was flowing into the sky, as if drawn from the earth by the stranger's plane. The plane was headed southeast, and she was following it into the coming sunrise.

From the transparent green of ice, the sky melted into pale gold, and the gold spread into a lake under a fragile film of pink glass, the color of that forgotten morning which was the first she had seen on earth. The clouds were dropping away in long shreds of smoky blue. She kept her eyes on the stranger's plane, as if her glance were a towline pulling her ship. The stranger's plane was now a small black cross, like a shrinking check mark on the glowing sky.

Then she noticed that the clouds were not dropping, that they stood congealed on the edge of the earth—and she realized that the plane was headed toward the mountains of Colorado, that the struggle against the invisible storm lay ahead for her once more. She noted it without emotion; she did not wonder whether her ship or her body had the power to attempt it again. So long as she was able to move, she would move to follow the speck that was fleeing away with the last of her world. She felt nothing but the emptiness left by a fire that had been hatred and anger and the desperate impulse of a fight to the kill; these had fused into a single icy streak, the single resolve to follow the stranger, whoever he was, wherever he took her, to follow and . . . she added nothing in her mind, but, unstated, what lay at the bottom of the emptiness was: and give her life, if she could take his first.

Like an instrument set to automatic control, her body was performing the motions of driving the plane—with the mountains reeling in a bluish fog below and the dented peaks rising in her path as smoky formations of a deadlier blue. She noticed that the distance to the stranger's plane had shrunk: he had checked his speed for the dangerous crossing, while she had gone on, unconscious of the danger, with only the muscles of her arms and legs fighting to keep her plane aloft. A brief, tight movement of her lips was as close as she could come to a smile: it was he who was flying her plane for her, she thought; he had given her the power to follow him with a somnambulist's unerring skill.

As if responding of itself to his control, the needle of her altimeter was slowly moving upward. She was rising and she went on rising and she wondered when her breath and her propeller would fail.

He was going southeast, toward the highest mountains that obstructed the path of the sun.

It was his plane that was struck by the first sunray. It flashed for an instant, like a burst of white fire, sending rays to shoot from its wings.

The peaks of the mountains came next: she saw the sunlight reaching the snow in the crevices, then trickling down the granite sides; it cut violent shadows on the ledges and brought the mountains into the Jiving finality of a form.

They were flying over the wildest stretch of Colorado, uninhabited, uninhabitable, inaccessible to men on foot or plane. No landing was possible within a radius of a hundred miles; she glanced at her fuel gauge: she had one half-hour left. The stranger was heading straight toward another, higher range. She wondered why he chose a course no air route did or ever would travel. She wished this range were behind her; it was the last effort she could hope to make.

The stranger's plane was suddenly slacking its speed. He was losing altitude just when she had expected him to climb. The granite barrier was rising In his path, moving to meet him, reaching for his wings—but the long, smooth line of his motion was sliding down. She could detect no break, no jolt, no sign of mechanical failure; it looked like the even movement of a controlled intention. With a sudden flash of sunlight on its wings, the plane banked into a long curve, rays dripping like water from its body—then went into the broad, smooth circles of a spiral, as if circling for a landing where no landing was conceivable.

She watched, not trying to explain it, not believing what she saw, waiting for the upward thrust that would throw him back on his course. But the easy, gliding circles went on dropping, toward a ground she could not see and dared not think of. . . Like remnants of broken jaws, strings of granite dentures stood between her ship and his; she could not tell what lay at the bottom of his spiral motion.

She knew only that it did not look like, but was certain to be, the motion of a suicide.

She saw the sunlight glitter on his wings for an instant. Then, like the body of a man diving chest-first and arms outstretched, serenely abandoned to the sweep of the fall, the plane went down and vanished behind the ridges of rock.

She flew on, almost waiting for it to reappear, unable to believe that she had witnessed a horrible catastrophe taking place so simply and quietly. She flew on to where the plane had dropped. It seemed to be a valley in a ring of granite walls.

She reached the valley and looked down. There was no possible place for a landing. There was no sign of a plane.

The bottom of the valley looked like a stretch of the earth's crust mangled in the days when the earth was cooling, left irretrievable ever since. It was a stretch of rocks ground against one another, with boulders hanging in precarious formations, with long, dark crevices and a few contorted pine trees growing half-horizontally into the air.

There was no level piece of soil the size of a handkerchief. There was no place for a plane to hide. There was no remnant of a plane's wreck.

She banked sharply, circling above the valley, dropping down a little. By some trick of light, which she could not explain, the floor of the valley seemed more clearly visible than the rest of the earth.

She could distinguish it well enough to, know that the plane was not there; yet this was not possible.

She circled, dropping down farther. She glanced around her—and for one frightening moment, she thought that it was a quiet summer morning, that she was alone, lost in a region of the Rocky Mountains which no plane should ever venture to approach, and, with the last of her fuel burning away, she was looking for a plane that had never existed, in quest of a destroyer who had vanished as he always vanished; perhaps it was only his vision that had led her here to be destroyed. In the next moment, she shook her head, pressed her mouth tighter and dropped farther.

She thought that she could not abandon an incalculable wealth such as the brain of Quentin Daniels on one of those rocks below, if he was still alive and within her reach to help. She had dropped inside the circle of the valley's walls. It was a dangerous job of flying, the space was much too tight, but she went on circling and dropping lower, her life hanging on her eyesight, and her eyesight flashing between two tasks: searching the floor of the valley and watching the granite walls that seemed about to rip her wings.

She knew the danger only as part of the job. It had no personal meaning any longer. The savage thing she felt was almost enjoyment. It was the last rage of a lost battle. No!—she was crying in her mind, crying it to the destroyer, to the world she had left, to the years behind her, to the long progression of defeat—No! . . .No!

. . . No! . . .

Her eyes swept past the instrument panel—and then she sat still but for the sound of a gasp. Her altimeter had stood at 11,000 feet the last time she remembered seeing it. Now it stood at 10,000. But the floor of the valley had not changed. It had come no closer. It remained as distant as at her first glance down.

She knew that the figure 8,000 meant the level of the ground in this part of Colorado. She had not noticed the length of her descent.

She had not noticed that the ground, which had seemed too clear and too close from the height, was now too dim and too far. She was looking at the same rocks from the same perspective, they had grown no larger, their shadows had not moved, and the oddly unnatural light still hung over the bottom of the valley.

She thought that her altimeter was off, and she went on circling downward. She saw the needle of her dial moving down;, she saw the walls of granite moving up, she saw the ring of mountains growing higher, its peaks coming closer together in the sky—but the floor of the valley remained unchanged, as if she were dropping down a well with a bottom never to be reached. The needle moved to 9,500—to 9,300—to 9,000—to 8,700.

The flash of light that hit her had no source. It was as if the air within and beyond the plane became an explosion of blinding cold fire, sudden and soundless. The shock threw her back, her hands off the wheel and over her eyes. In the break of an instant, when she seized the wheel again, the light was gone, but her ship was spinning. her ears were bursting with silence and her propeller stood stiffly straight before her: her motor was dead.

She tried to pull for a rise, but the ship was going down—and what she saw flying at her face was not the spread of mangled boulders, but the green grass of a field where no field had been before.

There was no time to see the rest. There was no time to think of explanations. There was no time to come out of the spin. The earth was a green ceiling coming down upon her, a few hundred swiftly shrinking feet away.

Flung from side to side, like a battered pendulum, clinging to the wheel, half in her seat, half on her knees, she fought to pull the ship into a glide, for an attempt to make a belly-landing, while the green ground was whirling about her, sweeping above her, then below, its spiral coils coming closer. Her arms pulling at the wheel, with no chance to know whether she could succeed, with her space and time running out—she felt, in a flash of its full, violent purity, that special sense of existence which had always been hers. In a moment's consecration to her love—to her rebellious denial of disaster, to her love of life and of the matchless value that was herself—she felt the fiercely proud certainty that she would survive.

And in answer to the earth that flew to meet her, she heard in her mind, as her mockery at fate, as her cry of defiance, the words of the sentence she hated—the words of defeat, of despair and of a plea for help: "Oh hell! Who is John Galt?"

PART III
A is A

CHAPTER I
ATLANTIS

When she opened her eyes, she saw sunlight, green leaves and a man's face. She thought: I know what this is. This was the world as she had expected to see it at sixteen—and now she had reached it—and it seemed so simple, so unastonishing, that the thing she felt was like a blessing pronounced upon the universe by means of three words: But of course.

She was looking up at the face of a man who knelt by her side, and she knew that in all the years behind her, this was what she would have given her life to see: a face that bore no mark of pain or fear or guilt. The shape of his mouth was pride, and more: it was as if he took pride in being proud. The angular planes of his cheeks made her think of arrogance, of tension, of scorn—yet the face had none of these qualities, it had their final sum: a look of serene determination and of certainty, and the look of a ruthless innocence which would not seek forgiveness or grant it. It was a face that had nothing to hide or to escape, a face with no fear of being seen, or of seeing, so that the first thing she grasped about him was the intense perceptiveness of his eyes—he looked as if his faculty of sight were his best-loved tool and its exercise were a limitless, joyous adventure, as if his eyes imparted a superlative value to himself and to the world—to himself for his ability to see, to the world for being a place so eagerly worth seeing. It seemed to her for a moment that she was in the presence of a being who was pure consciousness—yet she had never been so aware of a man's body. The light cloth of his shirt seemed to stress, rather than hide, the structure of his figure, his skin was suntanned, his body had the hardness, the gaunt, tensile strength, the clean precision of a foundry casting, he looked as if he were poured out of metal, but some dimmed, soft-lustered metal, like an aluminum-copper alloy, the color of his skin blending with the chestnut-brown of his hair, the loose strands of the hair shading from brown to gold in the sun, and his eyes completing the colors, as the one part of the casting left undimmed and harshly lustrous: his eyes were the deep, dark green of light glinting on metal.

He was looking down at her with the faint trace of a smile, it was not a look of discovery, but of familiar contemplation—as if he, too, were seeing the long-expected and the never-doubted.

This was her world, she thought, this was the way men were meant to be and to face their existence—and all the rest of it, all the years of ugliness and struggle were only someone's senseless joke. She smiled at him, as at a fellow conspirator, in relief, in deliverance, in radiant mockery of all the things she would never have to consider important again. He smiled in answer, it was the same smile as her own, as if he felt what she felt and knew what she meant.

"We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?" she whispered.

"No, we never had to."

And then, her consciousness returning fully, she realized that this man was a total stranger.

She tried to draw away from him, but it was only a faint movement of her head on the grass she felt under her hair. She tried to rise.

A shot of pain across her back threw her down again.

"Don't move, Miss Taggart. You're hurt."

"You know me?" Her voice was impersonal and hard.

"I've known you for many years."

"Have I known you?"

"Yes, I think so."

"What is your name?"

"John Galt."

She looked at him, not moving.

"Why are you frightened?" he asked.

"Because I believe it."

He smiled, as if grasping a full confession of the meaning she attached to his name; the smile held an adversary's acceptance of a challenge—and an adult's amusement at the self-deception of a child.

She felt as if she were returning to consciousness after a crash that had shattered more than an airplane. She could not reassemble the pieces now, she could not recall the things she had known about his name, she knew only that it stood for a dark vacuum which she would slowly have to fill. She could not do it now, this man was too blinding a presence, like a spotlight that would not let her see the shapes strewn hi the outer darkness.

"Was it you that I was following?" she asked.

"Yes."

She glanced slowly around her. She was lying in the grass of a field at the foot of a granite drop that came down from thousands of feet away in the blue sky. On the other edge of the field, some crags and pines and the glittering leaves of birch trees hid the space that stretched to a distant wall of encircling mountains. Her plane was not shattered—it was there, a few feet away, flat on its belly in the grass. There was no other plane in sight, no structures, no sign of human habitation.

"What is this valley?" she asked.

He smiled, "The Taggart Terminal."

"What do you mean?"

"You'll find out."

A dim impulse, like the recoil of an antagonist, made her want to check on what strength was left to her. She could move her arms and legs; she could lift her head; she felt a stabbing pain when she breathed deeply; she saw a thin thread of blood running down her stocking.

"Can one get out of this place?" she asked.

His voice seemed earnest, but the glint of the metal-green eyes was a smile: "Actually—no. Temporarily—yes."

She made a movement to rise. He bent to lift her, but she gathered her strength in a swift, sudden jolt and slipped out of his grasp, struggling to stand up. "I think I can—" she started saying, and collapsed against him the instant her feet rested on the ground, a stab of pain shooting up from an ankle that would not hold her.

He lifted her in his arms and smiled. "No, you can't, Miss Taggart," he said, and started off across the field.

She lay still, her arms about him, her head on his shoulder, and she thought: For just a few moments—while this lasts—it is all right to surrender completely—to forget everything and just permit yourself to feel. . . . When had she experienced it before?—she wondered; there had been a moment when these had been the words in her mind, but she could not remember it now. She had known it, once—this feeling of certainty, of the final, the reached, the not-to-be-questioned. But it was new to feel protected, and to feel that it was right to accept the protection, to surrender—right, because this peculiar sense of safety was not protection against the future, but against the past, not the protection of being spared from battle, but of having won it, not a protection granted to her weakness, but to her strength. . . . Aware with abnormal intensity of the pressure of his hands against her body, of the gold and copper threads of his hair, the shadows of his lashes on the skin of his face a few inches away from hers, she wondered dimly: Protected, from what? . . . it's he who was the enemy . . . was he?

. . . why? . . . She did not know, she could not think of it now. It took an effort to remember that she had had a goal and a motive a few hours ago. She forced herself to recapture it.

"Did you know that I was following you?" she asked.

"No."

"Where is your plane?"

"At the landing field."

"Where is the landing field?"

"On the other side of the valley."

"There was no landing field in this valley, when I looked down, There was no meadow, either. How did it get here?"

He glanced at the sky. "Look carefully. Do you see anything up there?"

She dropped her head back, looking straight into the sky, seeing nothing but the peaceful blue of morning. After a while she distinguished a few faint strips of shimmering air.

"Heat waves," she said.

"Refractor rays," he answered. "The valley bottom that you saw is a mountain top eight thousand feet high, five miles away from here."

"A . . . what?"

"A mountain top that no flyer would ever choose for a landing.

What you saw was its reflection projected over this valley."

"How?"

"By the same method as a mirage on a desert: an image refracted from a layer of heated air."

"How?"

"By a screen of rays calculated against everything—except a courage such as yours."

"What do you mean?"

"I never thought that any plane would attempt to drop within seven hundred feet of the ground. You hit the ray screen. Some of the rays are the kind that kill magnetic motors. Well, that's the second time you beat me: I've never been followed, either,"

"Why do you keep that screen?"

"Because this place is private property intended to remain as such."

"What is this place?"

"I'll show it to you, now that you're here, Miss Taggart. I'll answer questions after you've seen it."

She remained silent. She noticed that she had asked questions about every subject, but not about him. It was as if he were a single whole, grasped by her first glance at him, like some irreducible absolute, like an axiom not to be explained any further, as if she knew everything about him by direct perception, and what awaited her now was only the process of identifying her knowledge.

He was carrying her down a narrow trail that went winding to the bottom of the valley. On the slopes around them, the tall, dark pyramids of firs stood immovably straight, in masculine simplicity, like sculpture reduced to an essential form, and they clashed with the complex, feminine, over detailed lace-work of the birch leaves trembling in the sun.

The leaves let the sunrays fall through to sweep across his hair, across both their faces. She could not see what lay below, beyond the turns of the trail.

Her eyes kept coming back to his face. He glanced down at her once in a while. At first, she looked away, as if she had been caught.

Then, as if learning it from him, she held his glance whenever he chose to look down—knowing that he knew what she felt and that he did not hide from her the meaning of his glance.

She knew that his silence was the same confession as her own. He did not hold her in the impersonal manner of a man carrying a wounded woman. It was an embrace, even though she felt no suggestion of it in his bearing; she felt it only by means of her certainty that his whole body was aware of holding hers.

She heard the sound of the waterfall before she saw the fragile thread that fell in broken strips of glitter down the ledges. The sound came through some dim beat in her mind, some faint rhythm that seemed no louder than a struggling memory—but they went past and the beat remained; she listened to the sound of the water, but another sound seemed to grow clearer, rising, not in her mind, but from somewhere among the leaves. The trail turned, and in a sudden clearing she saw a small house on a ledge below, with a flash of sun on the pane of an open window. In the moment when she knew what experience had once made her want to surrender to the immediate present—it had been the night in a dusty coach of the Comet, when she had heard the. theme of Halley's Fifth Concerto for the first time—she knew that she was hearing it now, hearing it rise from the keyboard of a piano, in the clear, sharp chords of someone's powerful, confident touch.

She snapped the question at his face, as if hoping to catch him unprepared: "That's the Fifth Concerto by Richard Halley, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"When did he write it?"

"Why don't you ask him that in person?"

"Is he here?"

"It's he who's playing it. That's his house."

"Oh . . . !"

"You'll meet him, later. He'll be glad to speak to you. He knows that his works are the only records you like to play, in the evening, when you are alone."

"How does he know that?"

"I told him."

The look on her face was like a question that would have begun with "How in hell . . . ?"—but she saw the look of his eyes, and she laughed, her laughter giving sound to the meaning of his glance.

She could not question anything, she thought, she could not doubt, not now—not with the sound of that music rising triumphantly through the sun-drenched leaves, the music of release, of deliverance, played as it was intended to be played, as her mind had struggled to hear it in a rocking coach through the beat of wounded wheels—it was this that her mind had seen in the sounds, that night—this valley and the morning sun and—And then she gasped, because the trail had turned and from the height of an open ledge she saw the town on the floor of the valley.

It was not a town, only a cluster of houses scattered at random from the bottom to the rising steps of the mountains that went on rising above their roofs, enclosing them within an abrupt, impassable circle.

They were homes, small and new, with naked, angular shapes and the glitter of broad windows. Far in the distance, some structures seemed taller, and the faint coils of smoke above them suggested an industrial district. But close before her, rising on a slender granite column from a ledge below to the level of her eyes, blinding her by its glare, dimming the rest, stood a dollar sign three feet tall, made of solid gold. It hung in space above the town, as its coat-of-arms, its trademark, its beacon—and it caught the sunrays, like some transmitter of energy that sent them in shining blessing to stretch horizontally through the air above the roofs, "What's that?" she gasped, pointing at the sign.

"Oh, that's Francisco's private joke."

"Francisco—who?" she whispered, knowing the answer.

"Francisco d'Anconia."

"Is he here, too?"

"He will be, any day now."

"What do you mean, his joke?"

"He gave that sign as an anniversary present to the owner of this place. And then we all adopted it as our particular emblem. We liked the idea."

"Aren't you the owner of this place?"

"I? No." He glanced down at the foot of the ledge and added, pointing, "There's the owner of this place, coming now."

A car had stopped at the end of a dirt road below, and two men were hurrying up the trail. She could not distinguish their faces; one of them was slender and tall, the other shorter, more muscular. She lost sight of them behind the twists of the trail, as he went on carrying her down to meet them.

She met them when they emerged suddenly from behind a rocky corner a few feet away. The sight of their faces hit her with the abruptness of a collision.

"Well, I'll be goddamned!" said the muscular man, whom she did not know, staring at her.

She was staring at the tall, distinguished figure of his companion: it was Hugh Akston.

It was Hugh Akston who spoke first, bowing to her with a courteous smile of welcome. "Miss Taggart, this is the first time anyone has ever proved me wrong, I didn't know—when I told you you'd never find him —that the next time I saw you, you would be in his arms."

"In whose arms?"

"Why, the inventor of the motor."

She gasped, closing her eyes; this was one connection she knew she should have made. When she opened her eyes, she was looking at Galt, He was smiling, family, derisively, as if he knew fully what this meant to her.

"It would have served you right if you'd broken your neck!" the muscular man snapped at her, with the anger of concern, almost of affection. "What a stunt to pull—for a person who'd have been admitted here so eagerly, if she'd chosen to come through the front door!"

"Miss Taggart, may I present Midas Mulligan?" said Galt.

"Oh," she said weakly, and laughed; she had no capacity for astonishment any longer. "Do you suppose I was killed in that crash—and this is some other kind of existence?"

"It is another kind of existence," said Galt. "But as for being killed, doesn't it seem more like the other way around?"

"Oh yes," she whispered, "yes . . ." She smiled at Mulligan. "Where is the front door?"

"Here," he said, pointing to his forehead.

"I've lost the key," she said simply, without resentment. "I've lost all keys, right now."

"You'll find them. But what in blazes were you doing in that plane?"

"Following."

"Him?" He pointed at Galt.

"Yes."

"You're lucky to be alive! Are you badly hurt?"

"I don't think so."

"You'll have a few questions to answer, after they patch you up." He turned brusquely, leading the way down to the car, then glanced at Galt. "Well, what do we do now? There's something we hadn't provided for: the first scab."

"The first . . . what?" she asked.

"Skip it," said Mulligan, and looked at Galt. "What do we do?"

"It will be my charge," said Galt. "I will be responsible. You take Quentin Daniels."

"Oh, he's no problem at all. He needs nothing but to get acquainted with the place. He seems to know all the rest,"

"Yes. He had practically gone the whole way by himself." He saw her watching him in bewilderment, and said, "There's one thing I must thank you for, Miss Taggart: you did pay me a compliment when you chose Quentin Daniels as my understudy. He was a plausible one."

"Where is he?" she asked. "Will you tell me what happened?"

"Why, Midas met us at the landing field, drove me to my house and took Daniels with him. I was going to join them for breakfast, but I saw your plane spinning and plunging for that pasture. I was the closest one to the scene."

"We got here as fast as we could," said Mulligan. "I thought he deserved to get himself killed—whoever was in that plane. I never dreamed that it was one of the only two persons in the whole world whom I'd exempt."

"Who is the other one?" she asked.

"Hank Rearden."

She winced; it was like a sudden blow from another great distance.

She wondered why it seemed to her that Galt was watching her face intently and that she saw an instant's change in his, too brief to define.

They had come to the car. It was a Hammond convertible, its top down, one of the costliest models, some years old, but kept in the shining trim of efficient handling. Galt placed her cautiously in the back seat and held her in the circle of his arm. She felt a stabbing pain once in a while, but she had no attention to spare for it. She watched the distant houses of the town, as Mulligan pressed the starter and the car moved forward, as they went past the sign of the dollar and a golden ray hit her eyes, sweeping over her forehead.

"Who is the owner of this place?" she asked.

"I am," said Mulligan.

"What is he?" She pointed to Galt.

Mulligan chuckled. "He just works here."

"And you, Dr. Akston?" she asked.

He glanced at Galt, "I'm one of his two fathers, Miss Taggart. The one who didn't betray him."

"Oh!" she said, as another connection fell into place. "Your third pupil?"

"That's right."

"The second assistant bookkeeper!" she moaned suddenly, at one more memory.

"What's that?"

"That's what Dr. Stadler called him. That's what Dr. Stadler told me he thought his third pupil had become."

"He overestimated," said Galt. "I'm much lower than that by the scale of his standards and of his world."

The car had swerved into a lane rising toward a lonely house that stood on a ridge above the valley. She saw a man walking down a path, ahead of them, hastening in the direction of the town. He wore blue denim overalls and carried a lunchbox. There was something faintly familiar in the swift abruptness of his Galt. As the car went past him, she caught a glimpse of his face—and she jerked backward, her voice rising to a scream from the pain of the movement and from the shock of the sight: "Oh, stop! Stop! Don't let him go!" It was Ellis Wyatt.

The three men laughed, but Mulligan stopped the car. "Oh . . . " she said weakly, in apology, realizing she had forgotten that this was the place from which Wyatt would not vanish.

Wyatt was running toward them: he had recognized her, too. When he seized the edge of the car, to brake his speed, she saw the face and the young, triumphant smile that she had seen but once before: on the platform of Wyatt Junction.

"Dagny! You, too, at last? One of us?"

"No," said Galt. "Miss Taggart is a castaway."

"What?"

"Miss Taggart's plane crashed. Didn't you see it?"

"Crashed—here?"

"Yes."

"I heard a plane, but I . . ." His look of bewilderment changed to a smile, regretful, amused and friendly. "I see. Oh, hell, Dagny, it's preposterous!"

She was staring at him helplessly, unable to reconnect the past to the present. And helplessly—as one would say to a dead friend, in a dream, the words one regrets having missed the chance to say in life—she said, with the memory of a telephone ringing, unanswered, almost two years ago, the words she had hoped to say if she ever caught sight of him again, "I . . . I tried to reach you."

He smiled gently. "We've been trying to reach you ever since, Dagny.

. . . I'll see you tonight. Don't worry, I won't vanish—and I don't think you will, either."

He waved to the others and went off, swinging his lunchbox. She glanced up, as Mulligan started the car, and saw Galt's eyes watching her attentively. Her face hardened, as if in open admission of pain and in defiance of the satisfaction it might give him. "All right," she said. "I see what sort of show you want to put me through the shock of witnessing."

But there was neither cruelty nor pity in his face, only the level look of justice. "Our first rule here, Miss Taggart," he answered, "is that one must always see for oneself."

The car stopped in front of the lonely house. It was built of rough granite blocks, with a sheet of glass for most of its front wall. "I'll send the doctor over," said Mulligan, driving off, while Galt carried her up the path.

"Your house?" she asked.

"Mine," he answered, kicking the door open.

He carried her across the threshold into the glistening space of his living room, where shafts of sunlight hit walls of polished pine. She saw a few pieces of furniture made by hand, a ceiling of bare rafters, an archway open upon a small kitchen with rough shelves, a bare wooden table and the astonishing sight of chromium glittering on an electric stove; the place had the primitive simplicity of a frontiersman's cabin, reduced to essential necessities, but reduced with a super-modern skill.

He carried her across the sunrays into a small guest room and placed her down on a bed. She noticed a window open upon a long slant of rocky steps and pines going off into the sky. She noticed small streaks that looked like inscriptions cut into the wood of the walls, a few scattered lines that seemed made by different handwritings; she could not distinguish the words. She noticed another door, left half-open; it led to his bedroom.

"Am I a guest here or a prisoner?" she asked.

"The choice will be yours, Miss Taggart."

"I can make no choice when I'm dealing with a stranger."

"But you're not Didn't you name a railroad line after me?"

"Oh! . . . Yes . . ." It was the small jolt of another connection falling into place. "Yes, I—" She was looking at the tall figure with the sun-streaked hair, with the suppressed smile in the mercilessly perceptive eyes—she was seeing the struggle to build her Line and the summer day of the first train's run—she was thinking that if a human figure could be fashioned as an emblem of that Line, this was the figure.

"Yes . . . I did . . . " Then, remembering the rest, she added, "But I named it after an enemy."

He smiled. "That's the contradiction you had to resolve sooner or later, Miss Taggart."

"It was you . . . wasn't it? . . . who destroyed my Line. . . ."

"Why, no. It was the contradiction."

She closed her eyes; in a moment, she asked, "All those stories I heard about you—which of them were true?"

"All of them."

"Was it you who spread them?"

"No. What for? I never had any wish to be talked about."

"But you do know that you've become a legend?"

"Yes."

"The young inventor of the Twentieth Century Motor Company is the one real version of the legend, isn't it?"

"The one that's concretely real—yes."

She could not say it indifferently; there was still a breathless tone and the drop of her voice toward a whisper, when she asked, "The motor . . . the motor I found . . . it was you who made it?"

"Yes."

She could not prevent the jolt of eagerness that threw her head up.

"The secret of transforming energy—" she began, and stopped, "I could tell it to you in fifteen minutes," he said, in answer to the desperate plea she had not uttered, "but there's no power on earth that can force me to tell it. If you understand this, you'll understand everything that's baffling you."

"That night . . . twelve years ago . . . a spring night when you walked out of a meeting of six thousand murderers—that story is true, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"You told them that you would stop the motor of the world."

"I have."

"What have you done?"

"I've done nothing, Miss Taggart. And that's the whole of my secret."

She looked at him silently for a long moment. He stood waiting, as if he could read her thoughts. "The destroyer—" she said in a tone of wonder and helplessness.

"—the most evil creature that's ever existed," he said in the tone of a quotation, and she recognized her own words, "the man who's draining the brains of the world."

"How thoroughly have you been watching me," she asked, "and for how long?"

It was only an instant's pause, his eyes did not move, but it seemed to her that his glance was stressed, as if in special awareness of seeing her, and she caught the sound of some particular intensity in his voice as he answered quietly, "For years."

She closed her eyes, relaxing and giving up. She felt an odd, lighthearted indifference, as if she suddenly wanted nothing but the comfort of surrendering to helplessness.

The doctor who arrived was a gray-haired man with a mild, thoughtful face and a firmly, unobtrusively confident manner.

"Miss Taggart, may I present Dr. Hendricks?" said Galt.

"Not Dr, Thomas Hendricks?" she gasped, with the involuntary rudeness of a child; the name belonged to a great surgeon, who had retired and vanished six years ago.

"Yes, of course," said Galt.

Dr. Hendricks smiled at her, in answer. "Midas told me that Miss Taggart has to be treated for shock," he said, "not for the one sustained, but for the ones to come."

"I'll leave you to do it," said Galt, "while I go to the market to get supplies for breakfast."

She watched the rapid efficiency of Dr. Hendricks' work, as he examined her injuries. He had brought an object she had never seen before: a portable X-ray machine. She learned that she had torn the cartilage of two ribs, that she had sprained an ankle, ripped patches of skin off one knee and one elbow, and acquired a few bruises spread in purple blotches over her body. By the time Dr. Hendricks' swift, competent hands had wound the bandages and the tight lacings of tape, she felt as if her body were an engine checked by an expert mechanic, and no further care was necessary, "I would advise you to remain in bed, Miss Taggart."

"Oh no! If I'm careful and move slowly, I'll be all right."

"You ought to rest."

"Do you think I can?"

He smiled. "I guess not."

She was dressed by the time Galt came back. Dr. Hendricks gave him an account of her condition, adding, "I'll be back to check up, tomorrow."

"Thanks," said Galt. "Send the bill to me."

"Certainly not!" she said indignantly. "I will pay it myself."

The two men glanced at each other, in amusement, as at the boast of a beggar.

"We'll discuss that later," said Galt.

Dr. Hendricks left, and she tried to stand up, limping, catching at the furniture for support. Galt lifted her in his arms, carried her to the kitchen alcove and placed her on a chair by the table set for two.

She noticed that she was hungry, at the sight of the coffee pot boiling on the stove, the two glasses of orange juice, the heavy white pottery dishes sparkling in the sun on the polished table top.

"When did you sleep or eat last?" he asked.

"I don't know . . . I had dinner on the train, with—" She shook her head in helplessly bitter amusement: with the tramp, she thought, with a desperate voice pleading for escape from an avenger who would not pursue or be found—the avenger who sat facing her across the table, drinking a glass of orange juice. "I don't know . . . it seems centuries and continents away."

"How did you happen to be following me?"

"I landed at the Alton airport just as you were taking off. The man there told me that Quentin Daniels had gone with you."

"I remember your plane circling to land. But that was the one and only time when I didn't think of you. I thought you were coming by train."

She asked, looking straight at him, "How do you want me to understand that?"

"What?"

"The one and only time when you didn't think of me."

He held her glance; she saw the faint movement she had noted as typical of him: the movement of his proudly intractable mouth curving into the hint of a smile. "In any way you wish," he answered.

She let a moment pass to underscore her choice by the severity of her face, then asked coldly, in the tone of an enemy's accusation, "You knew that I was coming for Quentin Daniels?"

"Yes."

"You got him first and fast, in order not to let me reach him? In order to beat me—knowing fully what sort of beating that would mean for me?"

"Sure."

It was she who looked away and remained silent. He rose to cook the rest of their breakfast. She watched him as he stood at the stove, toasting bread, frying eggs and bacon. There was an easy, relaxed skill about the way he worked, but it was a skill that belonged to another profession; his hands moved with the rapid precision of an engineer pulling the levers of a control board. She remembered suddenly where she had seen as expert and preposterous a performance.

"Is that what you learned from Dr. Akston?" she asked, pointing at the stove.

"That, among other things."

"Did he teach you to spend your time—your time!—" she could not keep the shudder of indignation out of her voice—"on this sort of work?"

"I've spent time on work of much lesser importance."

When he put her plate before her, she asked, "Where did you get that food? Do they have a grocery store here?"

"The best one in the world. It's run by Lawrence Hammond."

"What?"

"Lawrence Hammond, of Hammond Cars. The bacon is from the farm of Dwight Sanders—of Sanders Aircraft. The eggs and the butter from Judge Narragansett—of the Superior Court of the State of Illinois."

She looked at her plate, bitterly, almost as if she were afraid to touch it. "It's the most expensive breakfast I'll ever eat, considering the value of the cook's time and of all those others."

"Yes—from one aspect. But from another, it's the cheapest breakfast you'll ever eat—because no part of it has gone to feed the looters who'll make you pay for it through year after year and leave you to starve in the end."

After a long silence, she asked simply, almost wistfully, "What is it that you're all doing here?"

"Living."

She had never heard that word sound so real, "What is your job?" she asked. "Midas Mulligan said that you work here."

"I'm the handy man, I guess."

"The what?"

"I'm on call whenever anything goes wrong with any of the installations—with the power system, for instance."

She looked at him—and suddenly she tore forward, staring at the electric stove, but fell back on her chair, stopped by pain.

He chuckled. "Yes, that's true—but take it easy or Dr. Hendricks will order you back to bed."

"The power system . . ." she said, choking, "the power system here . . . it's run by means of your motor?"

"Yes."

"It's built? It's working? It's functioning?"

"It has cooked your breakfast."

"I want to see it!"

"Don't bother crippling yourself to look at that stove. It's just a plain electric stove like any other, only about a hundred times cheaper to run.

And that's all you'll have a chance to see, Miss Taggart."

"You promised to show me this valley."

"I'll show it to you. But not the power generator."

"Will you take me to see the place now, as soon as we finish?"

"If you wish—and if you're able to move."

"I am."

He got up, went to the telephone and dialed a number. "Hello, Midas? . . . Yes. . . . He did? Yes, she's all right. . . . Will you rent me your car for the day? . . . Thanks. At the usual rate—twenty-five cents, . . . . Can you send it over? . . . Do you happen to have some sort of cane? She'll need it. . . . Tonight? Yes, I think so.

We will. Thanks."

He hung up. She was staring at him incredulously.

"Did I understand you to say that Mr. Mulligan—who's worth about two hundred million dollars, I believe—is going to charge you twenty-five cents for the use of his car?"

"That's right."

"Good heavens, couldn't he give it to you as a courtesy?"

He sat looking at her for a moment, studying her face, as if deliberately letting her see the amusement in his. "Miss Taggart," he said, "we have no laws in this valley, no rules, no formal organization of any kind. We come here because we want to rest. But we have certain customs, which we all observe, because they pertain to the things we need to rest from. So I'll warn you now that there is one word which is forbidden in this valley: the word 'give,' "

"I'm sorry," she said. "You're right."

He refilled her cup of coffee and extended a package of cigarettes.

She smiled, as she took a cigarette: it bore the sign of the dollar.

"If you're not too tired by evening," he said, "Mulligan has invited us for dinner. He'll have some guests there whom, I think, you'll want to meet."

"Oh, of course! I won't be too tired. I don't think I’ll ever feel tired again."

They were finishing breakfast when she saw Mulligan's car stopping in front of the house. The driver leaped out, raced up the path and rushed into the room, not pausing to ring or knock. It took her a moment to realize that the eager, breathless, disheveled young man was Quentin Daniels.

"Miss Taggart," he gasped, "I'm sorry!" The desperate guilt in his voice clashed with the joyous excitement in his face, "I've never broken my word before! There's no excuse for it, I can't ask you to forgive me, and I know that you won't believe it, but the truth is that I—I forgot!"

She glanced at Galt, "I believe you."

"I forgot that I promised to wait, I forgot everything—until a few minutes ago, when Mr. Mulligan told me that you'd crashed here in a plane, and then I knew it was my fault, and if anything had happened to you—oh God, are you all right?"

"Yes. Don't worry. Sit down."

"I don't know how one can forget one's word of honor. I don't know what happened to me."

"I do."

"Miss Taggart, I had been working on it for months, on that one particular hypothesis, and the more I worked, the more hopeless it seemed to become. I'd been in my laboratory for the last two days, trying to solve a mathematical equation that looked impossible. I felt I'd die at that blackboard, but wouldn't give up. It was late at night when he came in. I don't think I even noticed him, not really. He said he wanted to speak to me and I asked him to wait and went right on.

I think I forgot his presence. I don't know how long he stood there, watching me, but what I remember is that suddenly his hand reached over, swept all my figures off the blackboard and wrote one brief equation. And then I noticed him! Then I screamed—because it wasn't the full answer to the motor, but it was the way to it, a way I hadn't seen, hadn't suspected, but I knew where it led! I remember I cried, 'How could you know it?'—and he answered, pointing at a photograph of your motor, 'I'm the man who made it in the first place.' And that's the last I remember, Miss Taggart—I mean, the last I remember of my own existence, because after that we talked about static electricity and the conversion of energy and the motor."

"We talked physics all the way down here," said Galt.

"Oh, I remember when you asked me whether I'd go with you," said Daniels, "whether I'd be willing to go and never come back and give up everything . . . Everything? Give up a dead Institute that's crumbling back into the jungle, give up my future as a janitor-slave-by-law, give up Wesley Mouch and Directive 10-289 and sub-animal creatures who crawl on their bellies, grunting that there is no mind! . . . Miss Taggart"—he laughed exultantly—"he was asking me whether I'd give that up to go with him! He had to ask it twice, I couldn't believe it at first, I couldn't believe that any human being would need to be asked or would think of it as a choice. To go? I would have leaped off a skyscraper just to follow him—and to hear his formula before we hit the pavement!"

"I don't blame you," she said; she looked at him with a tinge of wistfulness that was almost envy. "Besides, you've fulfilled your contract. You've led me to the secret of the motor."

"I'm going to be a janitor here, too," said Daniels, grinning happily.

"Mr. Mulligan said he'd give me the job of janitor—at the power plant.

And when I learn, I'll rise to electrician. Isn't he great—Midas Mulligan? That's what I want to be when I reach his age. I want to make money. I want to make millions. I want to make as much as he did!"

"Daniels!" She laughed, remembering the quiet self-control, the strict precision, the stern logic of the young scientist she had known. "What's the matter with you? Where are you? Do you know what you're saying?"

"I'm here, Miss Taggart—and there's no limit to what's possible here!

I'm going to be the greatest electrician in the world and the richest! I'm going to—"

"You're going to go back to Mulligan's house," said Galt, "and sleep for twenty-four hours—or I won't let you near the power plant."

"Yes, sir," said Daniels meekly.

The sun had trickled down the peaks and drawn a circle of shining granite and glittering snow to enclose the valley—when they stepped out of the house. She felt suddenly as if nothing existed beyond that circle, and she wondered at the joyous, proud comfort to be found in a sense of the finite, in the knowledge that the field of one's concern lay within the realm of one's sight. She wanted to stretch out her arms over the roofs of the town below, feeling that her fingertips would touch the peaks across. But she could not raise her arms; leaning on a cane with one hand and on Galt's arm with the other, moving her feet by a slow, conscientious effort, she walked down to the car like a child learning to walk for the first time.

She sat by Galt's side as he drove, skirting the town, to Midas Mulligan's house. It stood on a ridge, the largest house of the valley, the only one built two stories high, an odd combination of fortress and pleasure resort, with stout granite walls and broad, open terraces. He stopped to let Daniels off, then drove on up a winding road rising slowly into the mountains.

It was the thought of Mulligan's wealth, the luxurious car and the sight of Galt's hands on the wheel that made her wonder for the first time whether Galt, too, was wealthy. She glanced at his clothes: the gray slacks and white shirt seemed of a quality intended for long wear; the leather of the narrow belt about his waistline was cracked; the watch on his wrist was a precision instrument, but made of plain stainless steel. The sole suggestion of luxury was the color of his hair—the strands stirring in the wind like liquid gold and copper.

Abruptly, behind a turn of the road, she saw the green acres of pastures stretching to a distant farmhouse. There were herds of sheep, some horses, the fenced squares of pigpens under the sprawling shapes of wooden barns and, farther away, a metal hangar of a type that did not belong on a farm, A man in a bright cowboy shirt was hurrying toward them. Galt stopped the car and waved to him, but said nothing in answer to her questioning glance. He let her discover for herself, when the man came closer, that it was Dwight Sanders, "Hello, Miss Taggart," he said, smiling.

She looked silently at his rolled shirt sleeves, at his heavy boots, at the herds of cattle. "So that's all that's left of Sanders Aircraft," she said.

"Why, no. There's that excellent monoplane, my best model, which you flattened up in the foothills."

"Oh, you know about that? Yes, it was one of yours. It was a wonderful ship. But I'm afraid I've damaged it pretty badly."

"You ought to have it fixed."

"I think I've ripped the bottom. Nobody can fix it."

"I can."

These were the words and the tone of confidence that she had not heard for years, this was the manner she had given up expecting—but the start of her smile ended in a bitter chuckle. "How?" she asked. "On a hog farm?"

"Why, no. At Sanders Aircraft."

"Where is it?"

"Where did you think it was? In that building in New Jersey, which Tinky Holloway's cousin bought from my bankrupt successors by means of a government loan and a tax suspension? In that building where he produced six planes that never left the ground and eight that did, but crashed with forty passengers each?"

"Where is it, then?"

"Wherever I am."

He pointed across the road. Glancing down through the tops of the pine trees, she saw the concrete rectangle of an airfield on the bottom of the valley.

"We have a few planes here and it's my job to take care of them," he said. "I'm the hog farmer and the airfield attendant. I'm doing quite well at producing ham and bacon, without the men from whom I used to buy it. But those men cannot produce airplanes without me—and, without me, they cannot even produce their ham and bacon,"

"But you—you have not been designing airplanes, either."

"No, I haven't. And I haven't been manufacturing the Diesel engines I once promised you. Since the time I saw you last, I have designed and manufactured just one new tractor. I mean, one—I tooled it by hand—no mass production was necessary. But that tractor has cut an eight-hour workday down to four hours on"—the straight line of his arm, extended to point across the valley, moved like a royal scepter; her eyes followed it and she saw the terraced green of hanging gardens on a distant mountainside—"the chicken and dairy farm of Judge Narragansett"—his arm moved slowly to a long, flat stretch of greenish gold at the foot of a canyon, then to a band of violent green—"in the wheat fields and tobacco patch of Midas Mulligan"—his arm rose to a granite flank striped by glistening tiers of leaves—"in the orchards of Richard Halley."

Her eyes went slowly over the curve his arm had traveled, over and over again, long after the arm had dropped; but she said only, "I see."

"Now do you believe that I can fix your plane?" he asked.

"Yes. But have you seen it?"

"Sure. Midas called two doctors immediately—Hendricks for you, and me for your plane. It can be fixed. But it will be an expensive job."

"How much?"

"Two hundred dollars."

"Two hundred dollars?" she repeated incredulously; the price seemed much too low.

"In gold, Miss Taggart."

"Oh . . . ! Well, where can I buy the gold?"

"You can't," said Galt.

She jerked her head to face him defiantly. "No?"

"No. Not where you come from. Your laws forbid it."

"Yours don't?"

"No."

"Then sell it to me. Choose your own rate of exchange. Name any sum you want—in my money."

"What money? You're penniless, Miss Taggart."

"What?" It was a word that a Taggart heiress could not ever expect to hear.

"You're penniless in this valley. You own millions of dollars in Taggart Transcontinental stock—but it will not buy one pound of bacon from the Sanders hog farm."

"1 see."

Galt smiled and turned to Sanders. "Go ahead and fix that plane.

Miss Taggart will pay for it eventually."

He pressed the starter and drove on, while she sat stiffly straight, asking no questions.

A stretch of violent turquoise blue split the cliffs ahead, ending the road; it took her a second to realize that it was a lake. The motionless water seemed to condense the blue of the sky and the green of the pine-covered mountains into so brilliantly pure a color that it made the sky look a dimmed pale gray. A streak of boiling foam came from among the pines and went crashing down the rocky steps to vanish in the placid water. A small granite structure stood by the stream.

Galt stopped the car just as a husky man in overalls stepped out to the threshold of the open doorway. It was Dick McNamara, who had once been her best contractor.

"Good day, Miss Taggart!" he said happily. "I'm glad to see that you weren't hurt badly.”

She inclined her head in silent greeting—it was like a greeting to the loss and the pain of the past, to a desolate evening and the desperate face of Eddie Willers telling her the news of this man's disappearance—hurt badly? she thought—I was, but not in the plane crash—on that evening, in an empty office. . . . Aloud, she asked, "What are you doing here? What was it that you betrayed me for, at the worst time possible?"

He smiled, pointing at the stone structure and down at the rocky drop where the tube of a water main went vanishing into the underbrush. "I'm the utilities man," he said. "I take care of the water lines, the power lines and the telephone service."

"Alone?"

"Used to. But we've grown so much in the past year that I've had to hire three men to help me."

"What men? From where?"

"Well, one of them is a professor of economics who couldn't get a job outside, because he taught that you can't consume more than you have produced—one is a professor of history who couldn't get a job because he taught that the inhabitants of slums were not the men who made this country—and one is a professor of psychology who couldn't get a job because he taught that men are capable of thinking."

"They work for you as plumbers and linesmen?"

"You'd be surprised how good they are at it."

"And to whom have they abandoned our colleges?"

"To those who're wanted there." He chuckled, "How long ago was it that I betrayed you, Miss Taggart? Not quite three years ago, wasn't it? it's the John Galt Line that I refused to build for you. Where is your Line now? But my lines have grown, in that time, from the couple of miles that Mulligan had built when I took over, to hundreds of miles of pipe and wire, all within the space of this valley."

He saw the swift, involuntary look of eagerness on her face, the look of a competent person's appreciation; he smiled, glanced at her companion and said softly, "You know, Miss Taggart, when it comes to the John Galt Line—maybe it's I who've followed it and you who're betraying it."

She glanced at Galt. He was watching her face, but she could read nothing in his.

As they drove on along the edge of the lake, she asked, "You've mapped this route deliberately, haven't you? You're showing me all the men whom"—she stopped, feeling inexplicably reluctant to say it, and said, instead—"whom I have lost?"

"I'm showing you all the men whom I have taken away from you," he answered firmly.

This was the root, she thought, of the guiltlessness of his face: he had guessed and named the words she had wanted to spare him, he had rejected a good will that was not based on his values—and in proud certainty of being right, he had made a boast of that which she had intended as an accusation.

Ahead of them, she saw a wooden pier projecting into the water of the lake. A young woman lay stretched on the sun-flooded planks, watching a battery of fishing rods. She glanced up at the sound of the car, then leaped to her feet in a single swift movement, a shade too swift, and ran to the road. She wore slacks, rolled above the knees of her bare legs, she had dark, disheveled hair and large eyes. Galt waved to her.

"Hello, John! When did you get in?" she called.

"This morning," he answered, smiling and driving on.

Dagny jerked her head to look back and saw the glance with which the young woman stood looking after Galt. And even though hopelessness, serenely accepted, was part of the worship in that glance, she experienced a feeling she had never known before: a stab of jealousy.

"Who is that?" she asked.

"Our best fishwife. She provides the fish for Hammond's grocery market."

"What else is she?"

"You've noticed that there's a 'what else' for every one of us here?

She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside.

She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind."

The car turned into a narrow path, climbing steeply into a wilderness of brush and pine trees. She knew what to expect when she saw a handmade sign nailed to a tree, with an arrow pointing the way: The Buena Esperanza Pass.

It was not a pass, it was a wall of laminated rock with a complex chain of pipes, pumps and valves climbing like a vine up its narrow ledges, but it bore, on its crest, a huge wooden sign—and the proud violence of the letters announcing their message to an impassable tangle of ferns and pine branches, was more characteristic, more familiar than the words: Wyatt Oil.

It was oil that ran in a glittering curve from the mouth of a pipe into a tank at the foot of the wall, as the only confession of the tremendous secret struggle inside the stone, as the unobtrusive purpose of all the intricate machinery—but the machinery did not resemble the installations of an oil derrick, and she knew that she was looking at the unborn secret of the Buena Esperanza Pass, she knew that this was oil drawn out of shale by some method men had considered impossible.

Ellis Wyatt stood on a ridge, watching the glass dial of a gauge imbedded in the rock. He saw the car stopping below, and called, "Hi, Dagny! Be with you in a minute!"

There were two other men working with him: a big, muscular roughneck, at a pump halfway up the wall, and a young boy, by the tank on the ground. The young boy had blond hair and a face with an unusual purity of form. She felt certain that she knew this face, but she could not recall where she had seen it. The boy caught her puzzled glance, grinned and, as if to help her, whistled softly, almost inaudibly the first notes of Halley's Fifth Concerto. It was the young brakeman of the Comet.

She laughed. "It was the Fifth Concerto by Richard Halley, wasn't it?"

"Sure," he answered. "But do you think I'd tell that to a scab?"

"A what?"

"What am I paying you for?" asked Ellis Wyatt, approaching; the boy chuckled, darting back to seize the lever he had abandoned for a moment. "It's Miss Taggart who couldn't fire you, if you loafed on the job. lean."

"That's one of the reasons why I quit the railroad, Miss Taggart," said the boy.

"Did you know that I stole him from you?" said Wyatt. "He used to be your best brakeman and now he's my best grease-monkey, but neither one of us is going to hold him permanently."

"Who is?"

"Richard Halley. Music. He's Halley's best pupil."

She smiled, "I know, this is a place where one employs nothing but aristocrats for the lousiest kinds of jobs."

"They're all aristocrats, that's true," said Wyatt, "because they know that there's no such thing as a lousy job—only lousy men who don't care to do it."

The roughneck was watching them from above, listening with curiosity. She glanced up at him, he looked like a truck driver, so she asked, "What were you outside? A professor of comparative philology, I suppose?"

"No, ma'am," he answered. "I was a truck driver." He added, "But that's not what I wanted to remain."

Ellis Wyatt was looking at the place around them with a kind of youthful pride eager for acknowledgment: it was the pride of a host at a formal reception in a drawing room, and the eagerness of an artist at the opening of his show in a gallery. She smiled and asked, pointing at the machinery, "Shale oil?"

"Uh-huh."

"That's the process which you were working to develop while you were on earth?" She said it involuntarily and she gasped a little at her own words.

He laughed. "While I was in hell—yes. I'm on earth now."

"How much do you produce?"

"Two hundred barrels a day."

A note of sadness came back into her voice: "It's the process by which you once intended to fill five tank-trains a day."

"Dagny," he said earnestly, pointing at his tank, "one gallon of it is worth more than a trainful back there in hell—because this is mine, all of it, every single drop of it, to be spent on nothing but myself." He raised his smudged hand, displaying the greasy stains as a treasure, and a black drop on the tip of his finger flashed like a gem in the sun.

"Mine," he said. "Have you let them beat you into forgetting what that word means, what it feels like? You should give yourself a chance to relearn it."

"You're hidden in a hole in the wilderness," she said bleakly, "and you're producing two hundred barrels of oil, when you could have flooded the world with it."

"What for? To feed the looters?"

"No! To earn the fortune you deserve."

"But I'm richer now than I was in the world. What's wealth but the means of expanding one's life? There's two ways one can do it: either by producing more or by producing it faster. And that's what I'm doing: I'm manufacturing time."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm producing everything I need, I'm working to improve my methods, and every hour I save is an hour added to my life. It used to take me five hours to fill that tank. It now takes three. The two I saved are mine—as pricelessly mine as if I moved my grave two further hours away for every five I've got. It's two hours released from one task, to be invested in another—two more hours in which to work, to grow, to move forward. That's the savings account I'm -hoarding. Is there any sort of safety vault that could protect this account in the outside world?"

"But what space do you have for moving forward? Where's your market?"

He chuckled. "Market? I now work for use, not for profit—my use, not the looters' profit. Only those who add to my life, not those who devour it, are my market. Only those who produce, not those who consume, can ever be anybody's market. I deal with the life-givers, not with the cannibals. If my oil takes less effort to produce, I ask less of the men to whom I trade it for the things I need. I add an extra span of time to their lives with every gallon of my oil that they burn. And since they're men like me, they keep inventing faster ways to make the things they make—so every one of them grants me an added minute, hour or day with the bread I buy from them, with the clothes, the lumber, the metal"—he glanced at Galt—"an added year with every month of electricity I purchase. That's our market and that's how it works for us—but that was not the way it worked in the outer world. Down what drain were they poured out there, our days, our lives and our energy?

Into what bottomless, futureless sewer of the unpaid-for? Here, we trade achievements, not failures—values, not needs. We're free of one another, yet we all grow together. Wealth, Dagny? What greater wealth is there than to own your Me and to spend it on growing?

Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish.

Look—" He pointed at a plant fighting upward from under the weight of a rock—a long, gnarled stem, contorted by an unnatural struggle, with drooping, yellow remnants of unformed leaves and a single green shoot thrust upward to the sun with the desperation of a last, spent, inadequate effort. "That's what they're doing to us back there in hell.

Do you see me submitting to it?"

"No," she whispered.

"Do you see him submitting?" He pointed at Galt.

"God, no!"

"Then don't be astonished by anything you see in this valley."

She remained silent when they drove on. Galt said nothing.

On a distant mountainside, in the dense green of a forest, she saw a. pine tree slanting down suddenly, tracing a curve, like the hand of a clock, then crashing abruptly out of sight. She knew that it was a manmade motion.

"Who's the lumberjack around here?" she asked.

"Ted Nielsen."

The road was relaxing into wider curves and gentler grades, among the softer shapes of hillsides. She saw a rust-brown slope patched by two squares of unmatching green: the dark, dusty green of potato plants, and the pale, greenish-silver of cabbages, A man in a red shirt was riding a small tractor, cutting weeds, "Who's the cabbage tycoon?" she asked.

"Roger Marsh."

She closed her eyes. She thought of the weeds that were climbing up the steps of a closed factory, over its lustrous tile front, a few hundred miles away, beyond the mountains.

The road was descending to the bottom of the valley. She saw the roofs of the town straight below, and the small, shining spot of the dollar sign in the distance at the other end. Galt stopped the car in front of the first structure on a ledge above the roofs, a brick building with a faint tinge of red trembling over its smokestack. It almost shocked her to see so logical a sign as "Stockton Foundry" above its door.

When she walked, leaning on her cane, out of the sunlight into the dank gloom of the building, the shock she felt was part sense of anachronism, part homesickness. This was the industrial East which, in the last few hours, had seemed to be centuries behind her. This was the old, the familiar, the loved sight of reddish billows rising to steel rafters, of sparks shooting in sunbursts from invisible sources, of sudden flames streaking through a black fog, of sand molds glowing with white metal. The fog hid the walls of the structure, dissolving its size—and for a moment, this was the great, dead foundry at Stockton, Colorado, it was Nielsen Motors . . . it was Rearden Steel.

"Hi, Dagny!"

The smiling face that approached her out of the fog was Andrew Stockton's, and she saw a grimy hand extended to her with a gesture of confident pride, as if it held all of her moment's vision on its palm.

She clasped the hand. "Hello," she said softly, not knowing whether she was greeting the past or the future. Then she shook her head and added, "How come you're not planting potatoes or making shoes around here? You've actually remained in your own profession."

"Oh, Calvin Atwood of the Atwood Light and Power Company of New York City is making the shoes. Besides, my profession is one of the oldest and most immediately needed anywhere. Still, I had to fight for it. I had to ruin a competitor, first."

"What?"

He grinned and pointed to the glass door of a sun-flooded room.

"There's my ruined competitor," he said.

She saw a young man bent over a long table, working on a complex model for the mold of a drill head. He had the slender, powerful hands of a concert pianist and the grim face of a surgeon concentrating on his task.

"He's a sculptor," said Stockton. "When I came here, he and his partner had a sort of combination hand-forge and repair shop. I opened a real foundry, and took all their customers away from them. The boy couldn't do the kind of job I did, it was only a part-time business for him, anyway—sculpture is his real business—so he came to work for me. He's making more money now, in shorter hours, than he used to make in his own foundry. His partner was a chemist, so he went into agriculture and he's produced a chemical fertilizer that's doubled some of the crops around here—did you mention potatoes?—potatoes, in particular."

"Then somebody could put you out of business, too?"

"Sure. Any time. I know one man who could and probably will, when he gets here. But, boy!—I'd work for him as a cinder sweeper. He'd blast through this valley like a rocket. He'd triple everybody's production."

"Who's that?"

"Hank Rearden."

"Yes . . ." she whispered, "Oh yes!"

She wondered what had made her say it with such immediate certainty. She felt, simultaneously, that Hank Rearden's presence in this valley was impossible—and that this was his place, peculiarly his, this was the place of his youth, of his start, and, together, the place he had been seeking all his life, the land he had struggled to reach, the goal of his tortured battle. . . . It seemed to her that the spirals of flame tinged fog were drawing time into an odd circle—and while a dim thought went floating through her mind like the streamer of an unfollowed sentence: To hold an unchanging youth is to reach, at the end, the vision with which one started—she heard the voice of a tramp in a diner, saying, "John Galt found the fountain of youth which he wanted to bring down to men. Only he never came back . . . because he found that it couldn't be brought down."

A sheaf of sparks went up in the depth of the fog—and she saw the broad back of a foreman whose arm made the sweeping gesture of a signal, directing some invisible task. He jerked his head to snap an order—she caught a glimpse of his profile—and she caught her breath.

Stockton saw it, chuckled and called into the fog: "Hey, Ken! Come here! Here's an old friend of yours!"

She looked at Ken Danagger as he approached them. The great industrialist, whom she had tried so desperately to hold to his desk, was now dressed in smudged overalls.

"Hello, Miss Taggart. I told you we'd soon meet again."

Her head dropped, as if in assent and in greeting, but her hand bore down heavily upon her cane, for a moment, while she stood reliving their last encounter: the tortured hour of waiting, then the gently distant face at the desk and the tinkling of a glass-paneled door closing upon a stranger.

It was so brief a moment that two of the men before her could take it only as a greeting—but it was at Galt that she looked when she raised her head, and she saw him looking at her as if he knew what she felt—she saw him seeing in her face the realization that it was he who had walked out of Danagger's office, that day. His face gave her nothing in answer: it had that look of respectful severity with which a man stands before the fact that the truth is the truth.

"I didn't expect it," she said softly, to Danagger. "I never expected to see you again."

Danagger was watching her as if she were a promising child he had once discovered and was now affectionately amused to watch. "I know," he said. "But why are you so shocked?"

"I . . . oh, it's just that it's preposterous!" She pointed at his clothes.

"What's wrong with it?"

"Is this, then, the end of your road?"

"Hell, no! The beginning."

"What are you aiming at?"

"Mining. Not coal, though. Iron."

"Where?"

He pointed toward the mountains. "Right here. Did you ever know Midas Mulligan to make a bad investment? You'd be surprised what one can find in that stretch of rock, if one knows how to look. That's what I've been doing—looking."

"And if you don't find any iron ore?"

He shrugged. "There's other things to do. I've always been short on time in my life, never on what to use it for."

She glanced at Stockton with curiosity. "Aren't you training a man who could become your most dangerous competitor?"

"That's the only sort of men I like to hire. Dagny, have you lived too long among the looters? Have you come to think that one man's ability is a threat to another?"

"Oh no! But I thought I was almost the only one left who didn't think that."

"Any man who's afraid of hiring the best ability he can find, is a cheat who's in a business where he doesn't belong. To me—the foulest man on earth, more contemptible than a criminal, is the employer who rejects men for being too good. That's what I've always thought and—say, what are you laughing at?"

She was listening to him with an eager, incredulous smile. "It's so startling to hear," she said, "because it's so right!"

"What else can one think?"

She chuckled softly. "You know, when I was a child, I expected every businessman to think it."

"And since then?"

"Since then, I've learned not to expect it."

"But it's right, isn't it?"

"I've learned not to expect the right."

"But it stands to reason, doesn't it?"

"I've given up expecting reason."

"That's what one must never give up," said Ken Danagger.

They had returned to the car and had started down the last, descending curves of the road, when she glanced at Galt and he turned to her at once, as if he had expected it.

"It was you in Danagger's office that day, wasn't it?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Did you know, then, that I was waiting outside?"

"Yes."

"Did you know what it was like, to wait behind that closed door?"

She could not name the nature of the glance with which he looked at her. It was not pity, because she did not seem to be its object; it was the kind of glance with which one looks at suffering, but it was not her suffering that he seemed to be seeing.

"Oh yes," he answered quietly, almost lightly.

The first shop to rise by the side of the valley's single street was like the sudden sight of an open theater: a frame box without front wall, its stage set in the bright colors of a musical comedy—with red cubes, green circles, gold triangles, which were bins of tomatoes, barrels of lettuce, pyramids of oranges, and a spangled backdrop where the sun hit shelves of metal containers. The name on the marquee said; Hammond Grocery Market. A distinguished man in shirt sleeves, with a stern profile and gray temples, was weighing a chunk of butter for an attractive young woman who stood at the counter, her posture light as a show girl's, the skirt of her cotton dress swelling faintly in the wind, like a dance costume. Dagny smiled involuntarily, even though the man was Lawrence Hammond.

The shops were small one-story structures, and as they moved past her, she caught familiar names on their signs, like headings on the pages of a book riffled by the car's motion: Mulligan General Store—Atwood Leather Goods—Nielsen Lumber—then the sign of the dollar above the door of a small brick factory with the inscription: Mulligan Tobacco Company. "Who's the Company, besides Midas Mulligan?" she asked. "Dr. Akston," he answered.

There were few passers-by, some men, fewer women, and they walked with purposeful swiftness, as if bound on specific errands. One after another, they stopped at the sight of the car, they waved to Galt and they looked at her with the unastonished curiosity of recognition.

"Have I been expected here for a long time?" she asked, "You still are," he answered.

On the edge of the road, she saw a structure made of glass sheets held together by a wooden framework, but for one instant it seemed to her that it was only a frame for the painting of a woman—a tall, fragile woman with pale blond hair and a face of such beauty that it seemed veiled by distance, as if the artist had been merely able to suggest it, not to make it quite real. In the next instant the woman moved her head—and Dagny realized that there were people at the tables inside the structure, that it was a cafeteria, that the woman stood behind the counter, and that she was Kay Ludlow, the movie star who, once seen, could never be forgotten; the star who had retired and vanished five years ago, to be replaced by girls of indistinguishable names and interchangeable faces. But at the shock of the realization, Dagny thought of the sort of movies that were now being made—and then she felt that the glass cafeteria was a cleaner use for Kay Ludlow's beauty than a role in a picture glorifying the commonplace for possessing no glory.

The building that came next was a small, squat block of rough granite, sturdy, solid, neatly built, the lines of its rectangular bulk as severely precise as the creases of a formal garment—but she saw, like an instant's ghost, the long streak of a skyscraper rising into the coils of Chicago's fog, the skyscraper that had once borne the sign she now saw written in gold letters above a modest pine-wood door: Mulligan Bank.

Galt slowed the car while moving past the bank, as if placing the motion in some special italics.

A small brick structure came next, bearing the sign: Mulligan Mint.

"A mint?" she asked. "What's Mulligan doing with a mint?" Galt reached into his pocket and dropped two small coins into the palm of her hand. They were miniature disks of shining gold, smaller than pennies, the kind that had not been in circulation since the days of Nat Taggart; they bore the head of the Statue of Liberty on one side, the words "United States of America—One Dollar" on the other, but the dates stamped upon them were of the past two years.

"That's the money we use here," he said. "It's minted by Midas Mulligan."

"But . . . on whose authority?"

"That's stated on the coin—on both sides of it."

"What do you use for small change?"

"Mulligan mints that, too, in silver. We don't accept any other currency in this valley. We accept nothing but objective values."

She was studying the coins. "This looks like . . . like something from the first morning in the age of my ancestors."

He pointed at the valley, "Yes, doesn't it?"

She sat looking at the two thin, delicate, almost weightless drops of gold in the palm of her hand, knowing that the whole of the Taggart Transcontinental system had rested upon them, that this had been the keystone supporting all the keystones, all the arches, all the girders of the Taggart track, the Taggart Bridge, the Taggart Building. . . . She shook her head and slipped the coins back into his hand.

"You're not making it easier for me," she said, her voice low.

"I'm making it as hard as possible."

"Why don't you say it? Why don't you tell me all the things you want me to learn?"

The gesture of his arm pointed at the town, at the road behind them.

"What have I been doing?" he asked.

They drove on in silence. After a while, she asked, in the tone of a dryly statistical inquiry, "How much of a fortune has Midas Mulligan amassed in this valley?"

He pointed ahead. "Judge for yourself."

The road was winding through stretches of unleveled soil toward the homes of the valley. The homes were not lined along a street, they were spread at irregular intervals over the rises and hollows of the ground, they were small and simple, built of local materials, mostly of granite and pine, with a prodigal ingenuity of thought and a tight economy of physical effort. Every house looked as if it had been put up by the labor of one man, no two houses were alike, and the only quality they had in common was the stamp of a mind grasping a problem and solving it. Galt pointed out a house, once in a while, choosing the names she knew—and it sounded to her like a list of quotations from the richest stock exchange in the world, or like a roll call of honor: "Ken Danagger . . . Ted Nielsen . . . Lawrence Hammond . . . Roger Marsh . . . Ellis Wyatt . . . Owen Kellogg . . . Dr. Akston."

The home of Dr. Akston was the last, a small cottage with a large terrace, lifted on the crest of a wave against the rising walls of the mountains. The road went past it and climbed on into the coils of an ascending grade. The pavement shrank to a narrow path between two walls of ancient pines, their tall, straight trunks pressing against it like a grim colonnade, their branches meeting above, swallowing the path into sudden silence and twilight. There were no marks of wheels on the thin strip of earth, it looked unused and forgotten, a few minutes and a few turns seemed to take the car miles away from human habitation—and then there was nothing to break the pressure of the stillness but a rare wedge of sunlight cutting across the trunks in the depth of the forest once in a while.

The sudden sight of a house on the edge of the path struck her like the shock of an unexpected sound: built in loneliness, cut off from all ties to human existence, it looked like the secret retreat of some great defiance or sorrow. It was the humblest home of the valley, a log cabin beaten in dark streaks by the tears of many rains, only its great windows withstanding the storms with the smooth, shining, untouched serenity of glass.

"Whose house is . . . Oh!"—she caught her breath and jerked her head away. Above the door, hit by a ray of sun, its design blurred and worn, battered smooth by the winds of centuries, hung the silver coat of-arms of Sebastian d'Anconia.

As if in deliberate answer to her involuntary movement of escape, Galt stopped the car in front of the house. For a moment, they held each other's eyes: her glance was a question, his a command, her face had a defiant frankness, his an unrevealing severity; she understood his purpose, but not his motive. She obeyed. Leaning on her cane, she stepped out of the car, then stood erect, facing the house.

She looked at the silver crest that had come from a marble palace in Spain to a shack in the Andes to a log cabin in Colorado—the crest of the men who would not submit. The door of the cabin was locked, the sun did not reach into the glazed darkness beyond the windows, and pine branches hung outstretched above the roof like arms spread in protection, in compassion, in solemn blessing. With no sound but the snap of a twig or the ring of a drop falling somewhere in the forest through long stretches of moments, the silence seemed to hold all the pain that had been hidden here, but never given voice. She stood, listening with a gentle, resigned, unlamenting respect: Let's see who'll do greater honor, you—to Nat Taggart, or I—to Sebastian d'Anconia. . . .

Dagny! Help me to remain. To refuse. Even though he's right! . . .

She turned to look at Galt, knowing that he was the man against whom she had had no help to offer. He sat at the wheel of the car, he had not followed her or moved to assist her, as if he had wanted her to acknowledge the past and had respected the privacy of her lonely salute. She noticed that he still sat as she had left him, his forearm leaning against the wheel at the same angle, the fingers of his hand hanging down in the same sculptured position. His eyes were watching her, but that was all she could read in his face: that he had watched her intently, without moving.

When she was seated beside him once more, he said, "That was the first man I took away from you."

She asked, her face stern, open and quietly defiant, "How much do you know about that?"

"Nothing that he told me in words. Everything that the tone of his voice told me whenever he spoke of you."

She inclined her head. She had caught the sound of suffering in the faintest exaggeration of evenness in his voice.

He pressed the starter, the motor's explosion blasted the story contained in the silence, and they drove on., The path widened a little, streaming toward a pool of sunlight ahead.

She saw a brief glitter of wires among the branches, as they drove out into a clearing. An unobtrusive little structure stood against a hillside, on a rising slant of rocky ground. It was a simple cube of granite, the size of a toolshed, it had no windows, no apertures of any kind, only a door of polished steel and a complex set of wire antennae branching out from the roof. Galt was driving past, leaving it unnoticed, when she asked with a sudden start, "What's that?"

She saw the faint break of his smile. "The powerhouse."

"Oh, stop, please!"

He obeyed, backing the car to the foot of the hillside. It was her first few steps up the rocky incline that stopped her, as if there were no need to move forward, no further place to rise—and she stood as in the moment when she had opened her eyes on the earth of the valley, a moment uniting her beginning to her goal.

She stood looking up at the structure, her consciousness surrendered to a single sight and a single, wordless emotion—but she had always known that an emotion was a sum totaled by an adding machine of the mind, and what she now felt was the instantaneous total of the thoughts she did not have to name, the final sum of a long progression, like a voice telling her by means of a feeling: If she had held onto Ouentin Daniels, with no hope of a chance to use the motor, for the sole sake of knowing that achievement had not died on earth—if, like a weighted diver sinking in an ocean of mediocrity, under the pressure of men with gelatin eyes, rubber voices, spiral-shaped convictions, noncommittal souls and non-committing hands, she had held, as her life line and oxygen tube, the thought of a superlative achievement of the human mind—if, at the sight of the motor's remnant, in a sudden gasp of suffocation, as a last protest from his corruption-eaten lungs, Dr.

Stadler had cried for something, not to look down at, but up to, and this had been the cry, the longing and the fuel of her life—if she had moved, drawn by the hunger of her youth for a sight of clean, hard, radiant competence—then here it was before her, reached and done, the power of an incomparable mind given shape in a net of wires sparkling peacefully under a summer sky, drawing an incalculable power out of space into the secret interior of a small stone hovel.

She thought of this structure, half the size of a boxcar, replacing the power plants of the country, the enormous conglomerations of steel, fuel and effort—she thought of the current flowing from this structure, lifting ounces, pounds, tons of strain from the shoulders of those who would make it or use it, adding hours, days and years of liberated time to their lives, be it an extra moment to lift one's head from one's task and glance at the sunlight, or an extra pack of cigarettes bought with the money saved from one's electric bill, or an hour cut from the workday of every factory using power, or a month's journey through the whole, open width of the world, on a ticket paid for by one day of one's labor, on a train pulled by the power of this motor—with all the energy of that weight, that strain, that time replaced and paid for by the energy of a single mind who had known how to make connections of wire follow the connections of his thought. But she knew that there was no meaning in motors or factories or trains, that their only meaning was in man's enjoyment of his life, which they served—and that her swelling admiration at the sight of an achievement was for the man from whom it came, for the power and the radiant vision within him which had seen the earth as a place of enjoyment and had known that the work of achieving one's happiness was the purpose, the sanction and the meaning of life.

The door of the structure was a straight, smooth sheet of stainless steel, softly lustrous and bluish in the sun. Above it, cut in the granite, as the only feature of the building's rectangular austerity, there stood an inscription: I SWEAR BY MY LIFE AND MY LOVE OF IT THAT I WILL NEVER LIVE FOR THE SAKE OF ANOTHER

MAN, NOR ASK ANOTHER MAN TO LIVE FOR MINE.

She turned to Galt. He stood beside her; he had followed her, he had known that this salute was his. She was looking at the inventor of the motor, but what she saw was the easy, casual figure of a workman in his natural setting and function—she noted the uncommon lightness of his posture, a weightless way of standing that showed an expert control of the use of his body—a tall body in simple garments: a thin shirt, light slacks, a belt about a slender waistline—and loose hair made to glitter like metal by the current of a sluggish wind. She looked at him as she had looked at his structure.

Then she knew that the first two sentences they had said to each other still hung between them, filling the silence—that everything said since, had been said over the sound of those words, that he had known it, had held it, had not let her forget it. She was suddenly aware that they were alone; it was an awareness that stressed the fact, permitting no further implication, yet holding the full meaning of the unnamed in that special stress. They were alone in a silent forest, at the foot of a structure that looked like an ancient temple—and she knew what rite was the proper form of worship to be offered on an altar of that kind.

She felt a sudden pressure at the base of her throat, her head leaned back a little, no more than to feel the faint shift of a current against her hair, but it was as if she were lying back in space, against the wind, conscious of nothing but his legs and the shape of his mouth. He stood watching her, his face still but for the faint movement of his eyelids drawing narrow as if against too strong a light. It was like the beat of three instants—this was the first—and in the next, she felt a stab of ferocious triumph at the knowledge that his effort and his struggle were harder to endure than hers—and, then he moved his eyes and raised his head to look at the inscription on the temple.

She let him look at it for a moment, almost as an act of condescending mercy to an adversary struggling to refuel his strength, then she asked, with a note of imperious pride in her voice, pointing at the inscription, "What's that?"

"It's the oath that was taken by every person in this valley, but you."

She said, looking at the words, "This has always been my own rule of living."

"I know it."

"But I don't think that yours is the way to practice it."

"Then you'll have to learn which one of us is wrong."

She walked up to the steel door of the structure, with a sudden confidence faintly stressed in the movements of her body, a mere hint of stress, no more than her awareness of the power she held by means of his pain—and she tried, asking no permission, to turn the knob of the door. But the door was locked, and she felt no tremor under the pressure of her hand, as if the lock were poured and sealed to the stone with the solid steel of the sheet.

"Don't try to open that door, Miss Taggart"

He approached her, his steps a shade too slow, as if stressing his knowledge of her awareness of every step. "No amount of physical force will do it," he said. "Only a thought can open that door. If you tried to break it down by means of the best explosives in the world, the machinery inside would collapse into rubble long before the door would give way. But reach the thought which it requires—and the secret of the motor will be yours, as well as"—it was the first break she had heard in his voice—"as well as any other secret you might wish to know."

He faced her for a moment, as if leaving himself open to her full understanding, then smiled oddly, quietly at some thought of his own, and added, "I'll show you how it's done."

He stepped back. Then, standing still, his face raised to the words carved in the stone, he repeated them slowly, evenly, as if taking that oath once more. There was no emotion in his voice, nothing but the spaced clarity of the sounds he pronounced with full knowledge of their meaning—but she knew that she was witnessing the most solemn moment it would ever be given her to witness, she was seeing a man's naked soul and the cost it had paid to utter these words, she was hearing an echo of the day when he had pronounced that oath for the first time and with full knowledge of the years ahead—she knew what manner of man had stood up to face six thousand others on a dark spring night and why they had been afraid of him, she knew that this was the birth and the core of all the things that had happened to the world in the twelve years since, she knew that this was of far greater import than the motor hidden inside the structure—she knew it, to the sound of a man's voice pronouncing in self-reminder and rededication: "I swear by my life . . . and my love of it . . . that I will never live for the sake of another man . . . nor ask another man . . . to live . . . for mine."

It did not startle her, it seemed unastonishing and almost unimportant, that at the end of the last sound, she saw the door opening slowly, without human touch, moving inward upon a growing strip of darkness.

In the moment when an electric light went on inside the structure, he seized the knob and pulled the door shut, its lock clicking sealed once more.

"It's a sound lock," he said; his face was serene. "That sentence is the combination of sounds needed to open it. I don't mind telling you this secret—because I know that you won't pronounce those words until you mean them the way I intended them to be meant."

She inclined her head. "I won't."

She followed him down to the car, slowly, feeling suddenly too exhausted to move. She fell back against the seat, closing her eyes, barely hearing the sound of the starter. The accumulated strain and shock of her sleepless hours hit her at once, breaking through the barrier of the tension her nerves had held to delay it. She lay still, unable to think, to react or to struggle, drained of all emotions but one.

She did not speak. She did not open her eyes until the car stopped in front of his house.

"You'd better rest," he said, "and go to sleep right now, if you want to attend Mulligan's dinner tonight."

She nodded obediently. She staggered to the house, avoiding his help. She made an effort to tell him, "I'll be all right," then to escape to the safety of her room and last long enough to close the door.

She collapsed, face down, on the bed. It was not the mere fact of physical exhaustion. It was the sudden monomania of a sensation too complete to endure. While the strength of her body was gone, while her mind had lost the faculty of consciousness, a single emotion drew on her remnants of energy, of understanding, of judgment, of control, leaving her nothing to resist it with or to direct it, making her unable to desire, only to feel, reducing her to a mere sensation—a static sensation without start or goal. She kept seeing his figure in her mind—his figure as he had stood at the door of the structure—she felt nothing else, no wish, no hope, no estimate of her feeling, no name for it, no relation to herself—there was no entity such as herself, she was not a person, only a function, the function of seeing him, and the sight was its own meaning and purpose, with no further end to reach.

Her face buried in the pillow, she recalled dimly, as a faint sensation, the moment of her take-off from the floodlighted strip of the Kansas airfield. She felt the beat of the engine, the streak of accelerating motion gathering power in a straight-line run to a single goal—and in the moment when the wheels left the ground, she was asleep.

The floor of the valley was like a pool still reflecting the glow of the sky, but the light was thickening from gold to copper, the shores were fading and the peaks were smoke-blue—when they drove to Mulligan's house.

There was no trace of exhaustion left in her bearing and no remnant of violence. She had awakened at sundown; stepping out of her room, she had found Galt waiting, sitting idly motionless in the light of a lamp. He had glanced up at her; she had stood in the doorway, her face composed, her hair smooth, her posture relaxed and confident —she had looked as she would have looked on the threshold of her office in the Taggart Building, but for the slight angle of her body leaning on a cane. He had sat looking at her for a moment, and she had wondered why she had felt certain that this was the image he was seeing—he was seeing the doorway of her office, as if it were a sight long-imagined and long-forbidden.

She sat beside him in the car, feeling no desire to speak, knowing that neither of them could conceal the meaning of their silence. She watched a few lights come up in the distant homes of the valley, then the lighted windows of Mulligan's house on the ledge ahead. She asked, "Who will be there?"

"Some of your last friends," he answered, "and some of my first."

Midas Mulligan met them at the door. She noticed that his grim, square face was not as harshly expressionless as she had thought: he had a look of satisfaction, but satisfaction could not soften his features, it merely struck them like flint and sent sparks of humor to glitter faintly in the corners of his eyes, a humor that was shrewder, more demanding, yet warmer than a smile.

He opened the door of his house, moving his arm a shade more slowly than normal, giving an imperceptibly solemn emphasis to his gesture.

Walking into the living room, she faced seven men who rose to their feet at her entrance.

"Gentlemen—Taggart Transcontinental," said Midas Mulligan.

He said it smiling, but only half-jesting; some quality in his voice made the name of the railroad sound as it would have sounded in the days of Nat Taggart, as a sonorous title of honor.

She inclined her head, slowly, in acknowledgment to the men before her, knowing that these were the men whose standards of value and honor were the same as her own, the men who recognized the glory of that title as she recognized it, knowing with a sudden stab of wistfulness how much she had longed for that recognition through all her years.

Her eyes moved slowly, in greeting, from face to face: Ellis Wyatt—Ken Danagger—Hugh Akston—Dr. Hendricks—Quentin Daniels—Mulligan's voice pronounced the names of the two others: "Richard Halley—Judge Narragansett."

The faint smile on Richard Halley's face seemed to tell her that they had known each other for years—as, in her lonely evenings by the side of her phonograph, they had. The austerity of Judge Narragansett's white-haired figure reminded her that she had once heard him described as a marble statue—a blindfolded marble statue; it was the kind of figure that had vanished from the courtrooms of the country when the gold coins had vanished from the country's hands.

"You have belonged here for a long time, Miss Taggart," said Midas Mulligan. "This was not the way we expected you to come, but—welcome home."

No!—she wanted to answer, but heard herself answering softly, "Thank you."

"Dagny, how many years is it going to take you to learn to be yourself?” It was Ellis Wyatt, grasping her elbow, leading her to a chair, grinning at her look of helplessness, at the struggle between a smile and a tightening resistance in her face. "Don't pretend that you don't understand us. You do."

"We never make assertions, Miss Taggart," said Hugh Akston. "That is the moral crime peculiar to our enemies. We do not tell—we show.

We do not claim—we prove. It is not your obedience that we seek to win, but your rational conviction. You have seen all the elements of our secret. The conclusion is now yours to draw—we can help you to name it, but not to accept it—the sight, the knowledge and the acceptance must be yours."

"I feel as if I know it," she answered simply, "and more: I feel as if I've always known it, but never found it, and now I'm afraid, not afraid to hear it, just afraid that it's coming so close."

Akston smiled. "What does this look like to you, Miss Taggart?" He pointed around the room.

"This?" She laughed suddenly, looking at the faces of the men against the golden sunburst of rays filling the great windows. "This looks like . . . You know, I never hoped to see any of you again, I wondered at times how much I'd give for just one more glimpse or one more word—and now—now this is like that dream you imagine in childhood, when you think that some day, in heaven, you will see those great departed whom you had not seen on earth, and you choose, from all the past centuries, the great men you would like to meet."

"Well, that's one clue to the nature of our secret," said Akston.

"Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves—or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth."

"I know," she whispered.

"And if you met those great men in heaven," asked Ken Danagger, "what would you want to say to them?"

"Just . . . just 'hello,' I guess."

"That's not all," said Danagger. "There's something you'd want to hear from them. I didn't know it, either, until I saw him for the first time"—he pointed to Galt—"and he said it to me, and then I knew what it was that I had missed all my life. Miss Taggart, you'd want them to look at you and to say, 'Well done’ " She dropped her head and nodded silently, head down, not to let him see the sudden spurt of tears to her eyes. "All right, then: Well done, Dagny!—well done—too well—and now it's time for you to rest from that burden which none of us should ever have had to carry."

"Shut up," said Midas Mulligan, looking at her bowed head with anxious concern.

But she raised her head, smiling. "Thank you," she said to Danagger.

"If you talk about resting, then let her rest,” said Mulligan. "She's had too much for one day."

"No." She smiled. "Go ahead, say it—whatever it is."

"Later," said Mulligan.

It was Mulligan and Akston who served dinner, with Quentin Daniels to help them. They served it on small silver trays, to be placed on the arms of the chairs—and they all sat about the room, with the fire of the sky fading in the windows and sparks of electric light glittering in the wine glasses. There was an air of luxury about the room, but it was the luxury of expert simplicity; she noted the costly furniture, carefully chosen for comfort, bought somewhere at a time when luxury had still been an art. There were no superfluous objects, but she noticed a small canvas by a great master of the Renaissance, worth a fortune, she noticed an Oriental rug of a texture and color that belonged under glass in a museum. This was Mulligan's concept of wealth, she thought—the wealth of selection, not of accumulation.

Quentin Daniels sat on the floor, with his tray on his lap; he seemed completely at home, and he glanced up at her once in a while, grinning like an impudent kid brother who had beaten her to a secret she had not discovered. He had preceded her into the valley by some ten minutes, she thought, but he was one of them, while she was still a stranger.

Galt sat aside, beyond the circle of lamplight, on the arm of Dr.

Akston's chair. He had not said a word, he had stepped back and turned her over to the others, and he sat watching it as a spectacle in which he had no further part to play. But her eyes kept coming back to him, drawn by the certainty that the spectacle was of his choice and staging, that he had set it in motion long ago, and that all the others knew it as she knew it.

She noticed another person who was intensely aware of Galt's presence: Hugh Akston glanced up at him once in a while, involuntarily, almost surreptitiously, as if struggling not to confess the loneliness of a long separation. Akston did not speak to him, as if taking his presence for granted. But once, when Galt bent forward and a strand of hair fell down across his face, Akston reached over and brushed it back, his hand lingering for an imperceptible instant on his pupil's forehead: it was the only break of emotion he permitted himself, the only greeting; it was the gesture of a father.

She found herself talking to the men around her, relaxing in lighthearted comfort. No, she thought, what she felt was not strain, it was a dim astonishment at the strain which she should, but did not, feel; the abnormality of it was that it seemed so normal and simple.

She was barely aware of her questions, as she spoke to one man after another, but their answers were printing a record in her mind, moving sentence by sentence to a goal.

"The Fifth Concerto?" said Richard Halley, in answer to her question. "I wrote it ten years ago. We call it the Concerto of Deliverance.

Thank you for recognizing it from a few notes whistled in the night.

. . . Yes, I know about that. . . . Yes, since you knew my work, you would know, when you heard it, that this Concerto said everything I had been struggling to say and reach. It's dedicated to him." He pointed to Galt. "Why, no, Miss Taggart, I haven't given up music, What makes you think so? I've written more in the last ten years than in any other period of my life. I will play it for you, any of it, when you come to my house. . . . No, Miss Taggart, it will not be published outside. Not a note of it will be heard beyond these mountains."

"No, Miss Taggart, I have not given up medicine," said Dr. Hendricks, in answer to her question. "I have spent the last six years on research. I have discovered a method to protect the blood vessels of the brain from that fatal rupture which is known as a brain stroke. It will remove from human existence the terrible threat of sudden paralysis.

. . . No, not a word of my method will be heard outside.”

"The law, Miss Taggart?" said Judge Narragansett. "What law? I did not give it up—it has ceased to exist. But I am still working in the profession I had chosen, which was that of serving the cause of justice.

. . . No, justice has not ceased to exist. How could it? It is possible for men to abandon their sight of it, and then it is justice that destroys them. But it is not possible for justice to go out of existence, because one is an attribute of the other, because justice is the act of acknowledging that which exists. . . . Yes, I am continuing in my profession. I am writing a treatise on the philosophy of law, I shall demonstrate that humanity's darkest evil, the most destructive horror machine among all the devices of men, is non-objective law. . . . No, Miss Taggart, my treatise will not be published outside."

"My business, Miss Taggart?" said Midas Mulligan. "My business is blood transfusion—and I'm still doing it. My job is to feed a life-fuel into the plants that are capable of growing. But ask Dr. Hendricks whether any amount of blood will save a body that refuses to function, a rotten hulk that expects to exist without effort. My blood bank is gold. Gold is a fuel that will perform wonders, but no fuel can work where there is no motor. . . . No, I haven't given up. I merely got fed up with the job of running a slaughter house, where one drains blood out of healthy living beings and pumps it into gutless half-corpses."

"Given up?" said Hugh Akston. "Check your premises, Miss Taggart.

None of us has given up. It is the world that has. . . . What is wrong with a philosopher running a roadside diner? Or a cigarette factory, as I am doing now? All work is an act of philosophy. And when men will learn to consider productive work—and that which is its source—as the standard of their moral values, they will reach that state of perfection which is the birthright they lost. . . . The source of work? Man's mind, Miss Taggart, man's reasoning mind. I am writing a book on this subject, defining a moral philosophy that I learned from my own pupil. . . . Yes, it could save the world. . . . No, it will not be published outside."

"Why?" she cried. "Why? What are you doing, all of you?"

"We are on strike," said John Galt.

They all turned to him, as if they had been waiting for his voice and for that word. She heard the empty beat of time within her, which was the sudden silence of the room, as she looked at him across a span of lamplight. He sat slouched casually on the arm of a chair, leaning forward, his forearm across his knees, his hand hanging down idly—and it was the faint smile on his face that gave to his words the deadly sound of the irrevocable: "Why should this seem so startling? There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in human history. Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable—except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race.

Well, their turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what happens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of the men of the mind, Miss Taggart. This is the mind on strike."

She did not move, except for the fingers of one hand that moved slowly up her cheek to her temple.

"Through all the ages," he said, "the mind has been regarded as evil, and every form of insult: from heretic to materialist to exploiter—every form of iniquity: from exile to disfranchisement to expropriation—every form of torture: from sneers to rack to firing squad—have been brought down upon those who assumed the responsibility of looking at the world through the eyes of a living consciousness and performing the crucial act of a rational connection. Yet only to the extent to which—in chains, in dungeons, in hidden corners, in the cells of philosophers, in the shops of traders—some men continued to think, only to that extent was humanity able to survive. Through all the centuries of the worship of the mindless, whatever stagnation humanity chose to endure, whatever brutality to practice—it was only by the grace of the men who perceived that wheat must have water in order to grow, that stones laid in a curve will form an arch, that two and two make four, that love is not served by torture and life is not fed by destruction—only by the grace of those men did the rest of them learn to experience moments when they caught the spark of being human, and only the sum of such moments permitted them to continue to exist. It was the man of the mind who taught them to bake their bread, to heal their wounds, to forge their weapons and to build the jails into which they threw him. He was the man of extravagant energy—and reckless generosity—who knew that stagnation is not man's fate, that impotence is not his nature, that the ingenuity of his mind is his noblest and most joyous power—and in service to that love of existence he was alone to feel, he went on working, working at any price, working for his despoilers, for his jailers, for his torturers, paying with his life for the privilege of saving theirs. This was his glory and his guilt—that he let them teach him to feel guilty of his glory, to accept the part of a sacrificial animal and, in punishment for the sin of intelligence, to perish on the altars of the brutes. The tragic joke of human history is that on any of the altars men erected, it was always man whom they immolated and the animal whom they enshrined. It was always the animal's attributes, not man's, that humanity worshipped: the idol of instinct and the idol of force—the mystics and the kings—the mystics, who longed for an irresponsible consciousness and ruled by means of the claim that their dark emotions were superior to reason, that knowledge came in blind, causeless fits, blindly to be followed, not doubted—and the kings, who ruled by means of claws and muscles, with conquest as their method and looting as their aim, with a club or a gun as sole sanction of their power. The defenders of man's soul were concerned with his feelings, and the defenders of man's body were concerned with his stomach—but both were united against his mind. Yet no one, not the lowest of humans, is ever able fully to renounce his brain. No one has ever believed in the irrational; what they do believe in is the unjust.

Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess. When he preaches contradictions, he does so in the knowledge that someone will accept the burden of the impossible, someone will make it work for him at the price of his own suffering or life; destruction is the price of any contradiction. It is the victims who made injustice possible. It is the men of reason who made it possible for the rule of the brute to work. The despoiling of reason has been the motive of every anti-reason creed on earth. The despoiling of ability has been the purpose of every creed that preached self-sacrifice. The despoilers have always known it. We haven't. The time has come for us to see. What we are now asked to worship, what had once been dressed as God or king, is the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent. This is the new ideal, the goal to aim at, the purpose to live for, and all men are to be rewarded according to how close they approach it. This is the age of the common man, they tell us—a title which any man may claim to the extent of such distinction as he has managed not to achieve. He will rise to a rank of nobility by means of the effort he has failed to make, he will be honored for such virtue as he has not displayed, and he will be paid for the goods which he did not produce. But we—we, who must atone for the guilt of ability—we will work to support him as he orders, with his pleasure as our only reward. Since we have the most to contribute, we will have the least to say. Since we have the better capacity to think, we will not be permitted a thought of our own. Since we have the judgment to act, we will not be permitted an action of our choice. We will work under directives and controls, issued by those who are incapable of working. They will dispose of our energy, because they have none to offer, and of our product, because they can't produce. Do you say that this is impossible, that it cannot be made to work? They know it, but it is you who don't—and they are counting on you not to know it. They are counting on you to go on, to work to the limit of the inhuman and to feed them while you last—and when you collapse, there will be another victim starting out and feeding them, while struggling to survive—and the span of each succeeding victim will be shorter, and while you'll die to leave them a railroad, your last descendant-in-spirit will die to leave them a loaf of bread.

This does not worry the looters of the moment. Their plan—like all the plans of all the royal looters of the past—is only that the loot shall last their lifetime. It has always lasted before, because in one generation they could not run out of victims. But this time—it will not last. The victims are on strike. We are on strike against martyrdom—and against the moral code that demands it. We are on strike against those who believe that one man must exist for the sake of another. We are on strike against the morality of cannibals, be it practiced in body or in spirit. We will not deal with men on any terms but ours—and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others. We do not seek to force our code upon them. They are free to believe what they please. But, for once, they will have to believe it and to exist—without our help. And, once and for all, they will learn the meaning of their creed. That creed has lasted for centuries solely by the sanction of the victims—by means of the victims' acceptance of punishment for breaking a code impossible to practice. But that code was intended to be broken. It is a code that thrives not on those who observe it, but on those who don't, a morality kept in existence not by virtue of its saints, but by the grace of its shiners. We have decided not to be sinners any longer. We have ceased breaking that moral code. We shall blast it out of existence forever by the one method that it can't withstand: by obeying it. We are obeying it. We are complying. In dealing with our fellow men, we are observing their code of values to the letter and sparing them all the evils they denounce. The mind is evil? We have withdrawn the works of our minds from society, and not a single idea of ours is to be known or used by men. Ability is a selfish evil that leaves no chance to those who are less able? We have withdrawn from the competition and left all chances open to incompetents. The pursuit of wealth is greed, the root of all evil? We do not seek to make fortunes any longer. It is evil to earn more than one's bare sustenance? We take nothing but the lowliest jobs and we produce, by the effort of our muscles, no more than we consume for our immediate needs—with not a penny nor an inventive thought left over to harm the world. It is evil to succeed, since success is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? We have ceased burdening the weak with our ambition and have left them free to prosper without us. It is evil to be an employer? We have no employment to offer. It is evil to own property? We own nothing. It is evil to enjoy one's existence in this world? There is no form of enjoyment that we seek from their world, and—this was hardest for us to attain—what we now feel for their world is that emotion which they preach as an ideal: indifference—the blank—the zero—the mark of death. . . .

We are giving men everything they've professed to want and to seek as virtue for centuries. Now let them see whether they want it."

"It was you who started this strike?" she asked.

"I did."

He got up, he stood, hands in pockets, his face in the light—and she saw him smile with the easy, effortless, implacable amusement of certainty.

"We've heard so much about strikes," he said, "and about the dependence of the uncommon man upon the common. We've heard it shouted that the industrialist is a parasite, that his workers support him, create his wealth, make his luxury possible—and what would happen to him if they walked out? Very well. I propose to show to the world who depends on whom, who supports whom, who is the source of wealth, who makes whose livelihood possible and what happens to whom when who walks out."

The windows were now sheets of darkness, reflecting the dots of lighted cigarettes. He picked a cigarette from a table beside him, and in the flare of a match she saw the brief sparkle of gold, the dollar sign, between his fingers.

"I quit and joined him and went on strike," said Hugh Akston, "because I could not share my profession with men who claim that the qualification of an intellectual consists of denying the existence of the intellect. People would not employ a plumber who'd attempt to prove his professional excellence by asserting that there's no such thing as plumbing—but, apparently, the same standards of caution are not considered necessary in regard to philosophers. I learned from my own pupil, however, that it was I who made this possible. When thinkers accept those who deny the existence of thinking, as fellow thinkers of a different school of thought—it is they who achieve the destruction of the mind. They grant the enemy's basic premise, thus granting the sanction of reason to formal dementia, A basic premise is an absolute that permits no co-operation with its antithesis and tolerates no tolerance. In the same manner and for the same reason as a banker may not accept and pass counterfeit money, granting it the sanction, honor and prestige of his bank, just as he may not grant the counterfeiter's demand for tolerance of a mere difference of opinion—so I may not grant the title of philosopher to Dr. Simon Pritchett or compete with him for the minds of men. Dr. Pritchett has nothing to deposit to the account of philosophy, except his declared intention to destroy it. He seeks to cash in—by means of denying it—on the power of reason among men. He seeks to stamp the mint-mark of reason upon the plans of his looting masters. He seeks to use the prestige of philosophy to purchase the enslavement of thought. But that prestige is an account which can exist only so long as I am there to sign the checks.

Let him do it without me. Let him—and those who entrust to him their children's minds—have exactly that which they demand: a world of intellectuals without intellect and of thinkers who proclaim that they cannot think. I am conceding it. I am complying. And when they see the absolute reality of their non-absolute world, I will not be there and it will not be I who will pay the price of their contradictions."

"Dr. Akston quit on the principle of sound banking," said Midas Mulligan. "I quit on the principle of love. Love is the ultimate form of recognition one grants to superlative values. It was the Hunsacker case that made me quit—that case when a court of law ordered that I honor, as first right to my depositors' funds, the demand of those who would offer proof that they had no right to demand it. I was ordered to hand out money earned by men, to a worthless rotter whose only claim consisted of his inability to earn it. I was born on a farm. I knew the meaning of money. I had dealt with many men in my life. I had watched them grow. I had made my fortune by being able to spot a certain kind of man. The kind who never asked you for faith, hope and charity, but offered you facts, proof and profit. Did you know that I invested in Hank Rearden's business at the time when he was rising, when he had just beaten his way out of Minnesota to buy the steel mills in Pennsylvania? Well, when I looked at that court order on my desk, I had a vision. I saw a picture, and I saw it so clearly that it changed the looks of everything for me. I saw the bright face and the eyes of young Rearden, as he'd been when I'd met him first. I saw him lying at the foot of an altar, with his blood running down into the earth—and what stood on that altar was Lee Hunsacker, with the mucus-filled eyes, whining that he'd never had a chance. . . . It's strange how simple things become, once you see them clearly. It wasn't hard for me to close the bank and go: I kept seeing, for the first time in my life, what it was that I had lived for and loved."

She looked at Judge Narragansett. "You quit over the same case, didn't you?"

"Yes," said Judge Narragansett. "I quit when the court of appeals reversed my ruling. The purpose for which I had chosen my work, was my resolve to be a guardian of justice. But the laws they asked me to enforce made me the executor of the vilest injustice conceivable. I was asked to use force to violate the rights of disarmed men, who came before me to seek my protection for their rights. Litigants obey the verdict of a tribunal solely on the premise that there is an objective rule of conduct, which they both accept. Now I saw that one man was to be bound by it, but the other was not, one was to obey a rule, the other was to assert an arbitrary wish—his need—and the law was to stand on the side of the wish. Justice was to consist of upholding the unjustifiable. I quit—because I could not have borne to hear the words 'Your Honor' addressed to me by an honest man."

Her eyes moved slowly to Richard Halley, as if she were both pleading and afraid to hear his story. He smiled.

"I would have forgiven men for my struggle," said Richard Halley.

"It was their view of my success that I could not forgive. I had felt no hatred in all the years when they rejected me. If my work was new, I had to give them time to learn, if I took pride in being first to break a trail to a height of my own, I had no right to complain if others were slow to follow. That was what I had told myself through all those years —except on some nights, when I could neither wait nor believe any longer, when I cried 'why?' but found no answer. Then, on the night when they chose to cheer me, I stood before them on the stage of a theater, thinking that this was the moment I had struggled to reach, wishing to feel it, but feeling nothing. I was seeing all the other nights behind me, hearing the 'why?' which still had no answer—and their cheers seemed as empty as their snubs. If they had said, 'Sorry to be so late, thank you for waiting—I would have asked for nothing else and they could have had anything I had to give them. But what I saw in their faces, and in the way they spoke when they crowded to praise me, was the thing I had heard being preached to artists—only I had never believed that anyone human could mean it. They seemed to say that they owed me nothing, that their deafness had provided me with a moral goal, that it had been my duty to struggle, to suffer, to bear—for their sake—whatever sneers, contempt, injustice, torture they chose to inflict upon me, to bear it in order to teach them to enjoy my work, that this was their rightful due and my proper purpose. And then I understood the nature of the looter-in-spirit, a thing I had never been able to conceive. I saw them reaching into my soul, just as they reach into Mulligan's pocket, reaching to expropriate the value of my person, just as they reach to expropriate his wealth—I saw the impertinent malice of mediocrity boastfully holding up its own emptiness as an abyss to be filled by the bodies of its betters—I saw them seeking, just as they seek to feed on Mulligan's money, to feed on those hours when I wrote my music and on that which made me write it, seeking to gnaw their way to self-esteem by extorting from me the admission that they were the goal of my music, so that precisely by reason of my achievement, it would not be they who'd acknowledge my value, but I who would bow to theirs. . . . It was that night that I took the oath never to let them hear another note of mine. The streets were empty when I left that theater, I was the last one to leave—and I saw a man whom I had never seen before, waiting for me in the light of a lamppost. He did not have to tell me much. But the concerto I dedicated to him is called the Concerto of Deliverance."

She looked at the others. "Please tell me your reasons," she said, with a faint stress of firmness in her voice, as if she were taking a beating, but wished to take it to the end.

"I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago," said Dr. Hendricks. "Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the 'welfare' of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only 'to serve.' That a man who's willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards—never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind—yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn't."

"I quit," said Ellis Wyatt, "because I didn't wish to serve as the cannibals' meal and to do the cooking, besides,"

"I discovered," said Ken Danagger, "that the men I was fighting were impotent. The shiftless, the purposeless, the irresponsible, the irrational—it was not I who needed them, it was not theirs to dictate terms to me, it was not mine to obey demands. I quit, to let them discover it, too."

"I quit," said Quentin Daniels, "because, if there are degrees of damnation, the scientist who places his mind in the service of brute force is the longest-range murderer on earth."

They were silent. She turned to Galt. "And you?" she asked. "You were first. What made you come to it?"

He chuckled, "My refusal to be born with any original sin."

"What do you mean?"

"I have never felt guilty of my ability. I have never felt guilty of my mind. I have never felt guilty of being a man. I accepted no unearned guilt, and thus was free to earn and to know my own value. Ever since I can remember, I had felt that I would kill the man who'd claim that I exist for the sake of his need—and I had known that this was the highest moral feeling. That night, at the Twentieth Century meeting, when I heard an unspeakable evil being spoken in a tone of moral righteousness, I saw the root of the world's tragedy, the key to it and the solution. I saw what had to be done. I went out to do it."

"And the motor?" she asked. "Why did you abandon it? Why did you leave it to the Starnes heirs?"

"It was then- father's property. He paid me for it. It was made on his time. But I knew that it would be of no benefit to them and that no one would ever hear of it again. It was my first experimental model.

Nobody but me or my equivalent could have been able to complete it or even to grasp what it was. And I knew that no equivalent of mine would come near that factory from then on."

"You knew the kind of achievement your motor represented?"

"Yes."

"And you knew you were leaving it to perish?"

"Yes." He looked off into the darkness beyond the windows and chuckled softly, but it was not a sound of amusement. "I looked at my motor for the last tune, before I left. I thought of the men who claim that wealth is a matter of natural resources—and of the men who claim that wealth is a matter of seizing the factories—and of the men who claim that machines condition their brains. Well, there was the motor to condition them, and there it remained as just exactly what it is without man's mind—as a pile of metal scraps and wires, going to rust. You have been thinking of the great service which that motor could have rendered to mankind, if it had been put into production. I think that on the day when men understand the meaning of its fate in that factory's junk heap—it will have rendered a greater one."

"Did you expect to see that day, when you left it?"

"No."

"Did you expect a chance to rebuild it elsewhere?”

"No."

"And you were willing to let it remain in a junk heap?"

"For the sake of what that motor meant to me," he said slowly, "I had to be willing to let it crumble and vanish forever"—he looked straight at her and she heard the steady, unhesitant, uninflected ruthlessness of his voice—"just as you will have to be willing to let the rail of Taggart Transcontinental crumble and vanish."

She held his eyes, her head was lifted, and she said softly, in the tone of a proudly open plea, "Don't make me answer you now."

"I won't. We'll tell you whatever you wish to know. We won't urge you to make a decision." He added, and she was shocked by the sudden gentleness of his voice, "I said that that kind of indifference toward a world which should have been ours was the hardest thing to attain. I know. We've all gone through it."

She looked at the quiet, impregnable room, and at the light—the light that came from his motor—on the faces of men who were the most serene and confident gathering she had ever attended.

"What did you do, when you walked out of the Twentieth Century?" she asked.

"I went out to become a flame-spotter. I made it my job to watch for those bright flares in the growing night of savagery, which were the men of ability, the men of the mind—to watch their course, their struggle and their agony—and to pull them out, when I knew that they had seen enough."

"What did you tell them to make them abandon everything?"

"I told them that they were right."

In answer to the silent question of her glance, he added, "I gave them the pride they did not know they had. I gave them the words to identify it. I gave them that priceless possession which they had missed, had longed for, yet had not known they needed: a moral sanction. Did you call me the destroyer and the hunter of men? I was the walking delegate of this strike, the leader of the victims' rebellion, the defender of the oppressed, the disinherited, the exploited—and when I use these words, they have, for once, a literal meaning."

"Who were the first to follow you?"

He let a moment pass, in deliberate emphasis, then answered, "My two best friends. You know one of them. You know, perhaps better than anyone else, what price he paid for it. Our own teacher, Dr.

Akston, was next. He joined us within one evening's conversation. William Hastings, who had been my boss in the research laboratory of Twentieth Century Motors, had a hard time, fighting it out with himself. It took him a year. But he joined. Then Richard Halley. Then Midas Mulligan."

"—who took fifteen minutes," said Mulligan.

She turned to him. "It was you who established this valley?"

"Yes," said Mulligan. "It was just my own private retreat, at first. I bought it years ago, I bought miles of these mountains, section by section, from ranchers and cattlemen who didn't know what they owned. The valley is not listed on any map. I built this house, when I decided to quit. I cut off all possible avenues of approach, except one road—and it's camouflaged beyond anyone's power to discover—and I stocked this place to be self-supporting, so that I could live here for the rest of my life and never have to see the face of a looter. When I heard that John had got Judge Narragansett, too, I invited the Judge to come here. Then we asked Richard Halley to join us. The others remained outside, at first."

"We had no rules of any kind,” said Galt, "except one. When a man took our oath, it meant a single commitment: not to work in his own profession, not to give to the world the benefit of his mind. Each of us carried it out in any manner he chose. Those who had money, retired to live on their savings. Those who had to work, took the lowest jobs they could find. Some of us had been famous; others—like that young brakeman of yours, whom Halley discovered—were stopped by us before they had set out to get tortured. But we did not give up our minds or the work we loved. Each of us continued in his real profession, in whatever manner and spare time he could manage—but he did it secretly, for his own sole benefit, giving nothing to men, sharing nothing. We were scattered all over the country, as the outcasts we had always been, only now we accepted our parts with conscious intention.

Our sole relief were the rare occasions when we could see one another.

We found that we liked to meet—in order to be reminded that human beings still existed. So we came to set aside one month a year to spend in this valley—to rest, to live in a rational world, to bring our real work out of hiding, to trade our achievements—here, where achievements meant payment, not expropriation. Each of us built his own house here, at his own expense—for one month of life out of twelve.

It made the eleven easier to bear."

"You see, Miss Taggart," said Hugh Akston, "man is a social being, but not in the way the looters preach."

"It's the destruction of Colorado that started the growth of this valley," said Midas Mulligan. "Ellis Wyatt and the others came to live here permanently, because they had to hide. Whatever part of their wealth they could salvage, they converted into gold or machines, as I had, and they brought it here. There were enough of us to develop the place and to create jobs for those who had had to earn their living outside. We have now reached the stage where most of us can live here full time. The valley is almost self-supporting—and as to the goods that we can't yet produce, I purchase them from the outside through a pipe line of my own. It's a special agent, a man who does not let my money reach the looters. We are not a state here, not a society of any kind—we're just a voluntary association of men held together by nothing but every man's self-interest. I own the valley and I sell the land to the others, when they want it. Judge Narragansett is to act as our arbiter, hi case of disagreements. He hasn't had to be called upon, as yet. They say that it's hard for men to agree. You'd be surprised how easy it is—when both parties hold as their moral absolute that neither exists for the sake of the other and that reason is their only means of trade. The time is approaching when all of us will have to be called to live here—because the world is falling apart so fast that it will soon be starving.

But we will be able to support ourselves in this valley."

"The world is crashing faster than we expected," said Hugh Akston.

"Men are stopping and giving up. Your frozen trains, the gangs of raiders, the deserters, they're men who've never heard of us, and they're not part of our strike, they are acting on their own—it's the natural response of whatever rationality is still left in them—it's the same kind of protest as ours."

"We started with no time limit in view," said Galt. "We did not know whether we'd live to see the liberation of the world or whether we'd have to leave our battle and our secret to the next generations.

We knew only that this was the only way we cared to live. But now we think that we will see, and soon, the day of our victory and of our return."

"When?" she whispered.

"When the code of the looters has collapsed."

He saw her looking at him, her glance half-question, half-hope, and he added, "When the creed of self-immolation has run, for once, its undisguised course—when men find no victims ready to obstruct the path of justice and to deflect the fall of retribution on themselves—when the preachers of self-sacrifice discover that those who are willing to practice it, have nothing to sacrifice, and those who have, are not willing any longer—when men see that neither their hearts nor their muscles can save them, but the mind they damned is not there to answer then: screams for help—when they collapse as they must, as men without mind—when they have no pretense of authority left, no remnant of law, no trace of morality, no hope, no food and no way to obtain it—when they collapse and the road is clear—then we'll come back to rebuild the world."

The Taggart Terminal, she thought; she heard the words beating through the numbness of her mind, as the sum of a burden she had not had time to weigh. This was the Taggart Terminal, she thought, this room, not the giant concourse in New York—this was her goal, the end of track, the point beyond the curve of the earth where the two straight lines of rail met and vanished, drawing her forward—as they had drawn Nathaniel Taggart—this was the goal Nathaniel Taggart had seen in the distance and this was the point still holding the straight-line glance of his lifted head above the spiral motion of men in the granite concourse. It was for the sake of this that she had dedicated herself to the rail of Taggart Transcontinental, as to the body of a spirit yet to be found. She had found it, everything she had ever wanted, it was here in this room, reached and hers—but the price was that net of rail behind her, the rail that would vanish, the bridges that would crumble, the signal lights that would go out. . . . And yet . . . Everything I had ever wanted, she thought—looking away from the figure of a man with sun-colored hair and implacable eyes.

"You don't have to answer us now."

She raised her head; he was watching her as if he had followed the steps in her mind.

"We never demand agreement," he said. "We never tell anyone more than he is ready to hear You are the first person who has learned our secret ahead of time. But you're here and you had to know. Now you know the exact nature of the choice you'll have to make. If it seems hard, it's because you still think that it does not have to be one or the other. You will learn that it does."

"Will you give me time?"

"Your time is not ours to give. Take your time. You alone can decide what you'll choose to do, and when. We know the cost of that decision. We've paid it. That you've come here might now make it easier for you—or harder."

"Harder," she whispered.

"I know."

He said it, his voice as low as hers, with the same sound of being forced past one's breath, and she missed an instant of time, as in the stillness after a blow, because she felt that this—not the moments when he had carried her in his arms down the mountainside, but this meeting of their voices—had been the closest physical contact between them.

A full moon stood in the sky above the valley, when they drove back to his house; it stood like a flat, round lantern without rays, with a haze of light hanging in space, not reaching the ground, and the illumination seemed to come from the abnormal white brightness of the soil. In the unnatural stillness of sight without color, the earth seemed veiled by a film of distance, its shapes did not merge into a landscape, but went slowly flowing past, like the print of a photograph on a cloud.

She noticed suddenly that she was smiling. She was looking down at the houses of the valley. Their lighted windows were dimmed by a bluish cast, the outlines of their walls were dissolving, long bands of mist were coiling among them in torpid, unhurried waves. It looked like a city sinking under water.

"What do they call this place?" she asked.

"I call it Mulligan's Valley," he said. "The others call it Galt's Gulch."

"I'd call it—" but she did not finish.

He glanced at her. She knew what he saw in her face. He turned away.

She saw a faint movement of his lips, like the release of a breath that he was forcing to function. She dropped her glance, her arm falling against the side of the car, as if her hand were suddenly too heavy for the weakness in the crook of her elbow.

The road grew darker, as it went higher, and pine branches met over their heads. Above a slant of rock moving to meet them, she saw the moonlight on the windows of his house. Her head fell back against the seat and she lay still, losing awareness of the car, feeling only the motion that carried her forward, watching the glittering drops of water in the pine branches, which were the stars.

When the car stopped, she did not permit herself to know why she did not look at him as she stepped, out. She did not know that she stood still for an instant, looking up at the dark windows. She did not hear him approach; but she felt the impact of his hands with shocking intensity, as if it were the only awareness she could now experience.

He lifted her in his arms and started slowly up the path to the house.

He walked, not looking at her, holding her tight, as if trying to hold a progression of time, as if his arms were still locked over the moment when he had lifted her against his chest. She felt his steps as if they were a single span of motion to a goal and as if each step were a separate moment in which she dared not think of the next.

Her head was close to his, his hair brushing her cheek, and she knew that neither of them would move his face that one breath closer. It was a sudden, stunned state of quiet drunkenness, complete in itself, their hair mingled like the rays of two bodies in space that had achieved their meeting, she saw that he walked with his eyes closed, as if even sight would now be an intrusion.

He entered the house, and as he moved across the living room, he did not look to his left and neither did she, but she knew that both of them were seeing the door on his left that led to his bedroom. He walked the length of the darkness to the wedge of moonlight that fell across the guest-room bed, he placed her down upon it, she felt an instant's pause of his hands still holding her shoulder and waistline, and when his hands left her body, she knew that the moment was over.

He stepped back and pressed a switch, surrendering the room to the harshly public glare of light. He stood still, as if demanding that she look at him, his face expectant and stern.

"Have you forgotten that you wanted to shoot me on sight?" he asked.

It was the unprotected stillness of his figure that made it real. The shudder that threw her upright was like a cry of terror and denial; but she held his glance and answered evenly, "That's true. I did."

"Then stand by it."

Her voice was low, its intensity was both a surrender and a scornful reproach: "You know better than that, don't you?"

He shook his head. "No. I want you to remember that that had been your wish. You were right, in the past. So long as you were part of the outer world, you had to seek to destroy me. And of the two courses now open to you, one will lead you to the day when you will find yourself forced to do it." She did not answer, she sat looking down, he saw the strands of her hair swing jerkily as she shook her head in desperate protest. "You are my only danger. You are the only person who could deliver me to my enemies. If you remain with them, you will. Choose that, if you wish, but choose it with full knowledge.

Don't answer me now. But until you do"—the stress of severity in his voice was the sound of effort directed against himself—"remember that I know the meaning of either answer."

"As fully as I do?" she whispered.

"As fully."

He turned to go, when her eyes fell suddenly upon the inscriptions she had noticed, and forgotten, on the walls of the room.

They were cut into the polish of the wood, still showing the force of the pencil's pressure in the hands that had made them, each in his own violent writing: "You'll get over it—Ellis Wyatt" "It will be all right by morning—Ken Danagger" "It's worth it—Roger Marsh."

There were others, "What is that?" she asked.

He smiled. "This is the room where they spent their first night in the valley. The first night is the hardest. It's the last pull of the break with one's memories, and the worst. I let them stay here, so they can call for me, if they want me. I speak to them, if they can't sleep.

Most of them can't. But they're free of it by morning. . . . They've all gone through this room. Now they call it the torture chamber or the anteroom—because everyone has to enter the valley through my house.”

He turned to go, he stopped on the threshold and added: "This is the room I never intended you to occupy. Good night, Miss Taggart."

CHAPTER II
THE UTOPIA OF GREED

"Good morning."

She looked at him across the living room from the threshold of her door. In the windows behind him, the mountains had that tinge of silver-pink which seems brighter than daylight, with the promise of a light to come. The sun. had risen somewhere over the earth, but it had not reached the top of the barrier, and the sky was glowing in its stead, announcing its motion. She had heard the joyous greeting to the sunrise, which was not the song of birds, but the ringing of the telephone a moment ago; she saw the start of day, not in the shining green of the branches outside, but in the glitter of chromium on the stove, the sparkle of a glass ashtray on a table, and the crisp whiteness of his shirt sleeves. Irresistibly, she heard the sound of a smile in her own voice, matching his, as she answered: "Good morning."

He was gathering notes of penciled calculations from his desk and stuffing them into his pocket. "I have to go down to the powerhouse," he said. "They've just phoned me that they're having trouble with the ray screen. Your plane seems to have knocked it off key. I'll be back in half an hour and then I'll cook our breakfast"

It was the casual simplicity of his voice, the manner of taking her presence and their domestic routine for granted, as if it were of no significance to them, that gave her the sense of an underscored significance and the feeling that he knew it.

She answered as casually, "If you'll bring me the cane I left in the car, I'll have breakfast ready for you by the time you come back."

He glanced at her with a slight astonishment; his eyes moved from her bandaged ankle to the short sleeves of the blouse that left her arms bare to display the heavy bandage on her elbow. But the transparent blouse, the open collar, the hair falling down to the shoulders that seemed innocently naked under a thin film of cloth, made her look like a schoolgirl, not an invalid, and her posture made the bandages look irrelevant.

He smiled, not quite at her, but as if in amusement at some sudden memory of his own. "If you wish," he said.

It was strange to be left alone in his house. Part of it was an emotion she had never experienced before: an awed respect that made her hesitantly conscious of her hands, as if to touch any object around her would be too great an intimacy. The other part was a reckless sense of ease, a sense of being at home in this place, as if she owned its owner.

It was strange to feel so pure a joy in the simple task of preparing a breakfast. The work seemed an end in itself, as if the motions of filling a coffee pot, squeezing oranges, slicing bread were performed for their own sake, for the sort of pleasure one expects, but seldom finds, in the motions of dancing. It startled her to realize that she had not experienced this kind of pleasure in her work since her days at the operator's desk in Rockdale Station.

She was setting the table, when she saw the figure of a man hurrying up the path to the house, a swift, agile figure that leaped over boulders with the casual ease of a flight. He threw the door open, calling, "Hey, John!"—and stopped short as he saw her. He wore a dark blue sweater and slacks, he had gold hair and a face of such shocking perfection of beauty that she stood still, staring at him, not in admiration, at first, but in simple disbelief.

He looked at her as if he had not expected to find a woman in this house. Then she saw a look of recognition melting into a different kind of astonishment, part amusement, part triumph melting into a chuckle.

"Oh, have you joined us?" he asked.

"No," she answered dryly, "I haven't. I'm a scab."

He laughed, like an adult at a child who uses technological words beyond its understanding. "If you know what you're saying, you know that it's not possible," he said. "Not here."

"I crashed the gate. Literally."

He looked at her bandages, weighing the question, his glance almost insolent in its open curiosity. "When?"

"Yesterday."

"How?"

"In a plane."

"What were you doing in a plane in this part of the country?"

He had the direct, imperious manner of an aristocrat or a roughneck; he looked like one and was dressed like the other. She considered him for a moment, deliberately letting him wait. "I was trying to land on a prehistorical mirage," she answered. "And I have."

"You are a scab," he said, and chuckled, as if grasping all the implications of the problem. "Where's John?"

"Mr. Galt is at the powerhouse. He should be back any moment."

He sat down in an armchair, asking no permission, as if he were at home. She turned silently to her work. He sat watching her movements with an open grin, as if the sight of her laying out cutlery on a kitchen table were the spectacle of some special paradox.

"What did Francisco say when he saw you here?" he asked.

She turned to him with a slight jolt, but answered evenly, "He is not here yet."

"Not yet?" He seemed startled. "Are you sure?"

"So I was told."

He lighted a cigarette. She wondered, watching him, what profession he had chosen, loved and abandoned in order to join this valley. She could make no guess; none seemed to fit; she caught herself in the preposterous feeling of wishing that he had no profession at all, because any work seemed too dangerous for his incredible kind of beauty. It was an impersonal feeling, she did not look at him as at a man, but as at an animated work of art—and it seemed to be a stressed indignity of the outer world that a perfection such as his should be subjected to the shocks, the strains, the scars reserved for any man who loved his work.

But the feeling seemed the more preposterous, because the lines of his face had the sort of hardness for which no danger on earth was a match, "No, Miss Taggart," he said suddenly, catching her glance, "you've never seen me before."

She was shocked to realize that she had been studying him openly.

"How do you happen to know who I am?" she asked.

"First, I've seen your pictures in the papers many times. Second, you're the only woman left in the outer world, to the best of our knowledge, who'd be allowed to enter Galt's Gulch, Third, you're the only woman who'd have the courage—and prodigality—still to remain a scab."

"What made you certain that I was a scab?"

"If you weren't, you'd know that it's not this valley, but the view of life held by men in the outer world that is a prehistorical mirage."

They heard the sound of the motor and saw the car stopping below, in front of the house. She noticed the swiftness with which he rose to his feet at the sight of Galt in the car; if it were not for the obvious personal eagerness, it would have looked like an instinctive gesture of military respect.

She noticed the way Galt stopped, when he entered and saw his visitor. She noticed that Galt smiled, but that his voice was oddly low, almost solemn, as if weighted with unconfessed relief,, when he said very quietly, "Hello."

"Hi, John," said the visitor gaily.

She noticed that their handshake came an instant too late and lasted an instant too long, like the handshake of men who had not been certain that their previous meeting would not be their last.

Galt turned to her. "Have you met?" he asked, addressing them both.

"Not exactly," said the visitor.

"Miss Taggart, may I present Ragnar Danneskjold?"

She knew what her face had looked like, when she heard Danneskjold's voice as from a great distance: "You don't have to be frightened, Miss Taggart I'm not dangerous to anyone in Galt's Gulch."

She could only shake her head, before she recaptured her voice to say, "It's not what you're doing to anyone . . . it's what they're doing to you. . . . "

His laughter swept her out of her moment's stupor, "Be careful, Miss Taggart. If that's how you're beginning to feel, you won't remain a scab for long." He added, "But you ought to start by adopting the right things from the people in Galt's Gulch, not their mistakes: they've spent twelve years worrying about me—needlessly." He glanced at Galt.

"When did you get in?" asked Galt.

"Late last night."

"Sit down. You're going to have breakfast with us."

"But where's Francisco? Why isn't he here yet?"

"I don't know," said Galt, frowning slightly. "I asked at the airport, just now. Nobody's heard from him."

As she turned to the kitchen, Galt moved to follow. "No," she said, "it's my job today."

"Let me help you."

"This is the place where one doesn't ask for help, isn't it?"

He smiled. "That's right."

She had never experienced the pleasure of motion, of walking as if her feet had no weight to carry, as if the support of the cane in her hand were merely a superfluous touch of elegance, the pleasure of feeling her steps trace swift, straight lines, of sensing the faultless, spontaneous precision of her gestures—as she experienced it while placing their food on the table in front of the two men. Her bearing told them that she knew they were watching her—she held her head like an actress on a stage, like a woman in a ballroom, like the winner of a silent contest.

"Francisco will be glad to know that it's you who were his stand-in today," said Danneskjold, when she joined them at the table.

"His what?"

"You see, today is June first, and the three of us—John, Francisco and I—have had breakfast together on every June first for twelve years."

"Here?"

"Not when we started. But here, ever since this house was built eight years ago." He shrugged, smiling. "For a man who has more centuries of tradition behind him than I have, it's odd that Francisco should be the first to break our own tradition."

"And Mr. Galt?" she asked. "How many centuries does he have behind him?"

"John? None at all. None behind him—but all of those ahead."

"Never mind the centuries," said Galt. "Tell me what sort of year you've had behind you. Lost any men?"

"No."

"Lost any of your time?"

"You mean, was I wounded? No. I haven't had a scratch since that one time, ten years ago, when I was still an amateur, which you ought to forget by now. I wasn't in any danger whatever, this year—in fact, I was much more safe than if I were running a small-town drugstore under Directive 10-289."

"Lost any battles?"

"No. The losses were all on the other side, this year. The looters lost most of their ships to me—and most of their men to you. You've had a good year, too, haven't you? I know, I've kept track of it. Since our last breakfast together, you got everyone you wanted from the state of Colorado, and a few others besides, such as Ken Danagger, who was a great prize to get. But let me tell you about a still greater one, who is almost yours. You're going to get him soon, because he's hanging by a thin thread and is just about ready to fall at your feet. He's a man who saved my life—so you can see how far he's gone."

Galt leaned back, his eyes narrowing. "So you weren't in any danger whatever, were you?"

Danneskjold laughed. "Oh, I took a slight risk. It was worth it. It was the most enjoyable encounter I've ever had. I've been waiting to tell you about it in person. It's a story you'll want to hear. Do you know who the man was? Hank Rearden. I—"

"No!"

It was Galt's voice; it was a command; the brief snap of sound had a tinge of violence neither of them had ever heard from him before.

"What?" asked Danneskjold softly, incredulously.

"Don't tell me about it now."

"But you've always said that Hank Rearden was the one man you wanted to see here most."

"I still do. But you'll tell me later."

She studied Galt's face intently, but she could find no clue, only a closed, impersonal look, either of determination or of control, that tightened the skin of his cheekbones and the line of his mouth. No matter what he knew about her, she thought, the only knowledge that could explain this, was a knowledge he had had no way of acquiring.

"You've met Hank Rearden?" she asked, turning to Danneskjold.

"And he saved your life?"

"Yes."

"I want to hear about it."

"I don't," said Galt.

"Why not?"

"You're not one of us, Miss Taggart."

"I see." She smiled, with a faint touch of defiance. "Were you thinking that I might prevent you from getting Hank Rearden?"

"No, that was not what I was thinking,"

She noticed that Danneskjold was studying Galt's face, as if he, too, found the incident inexplicable. Galt held his glance, deliberately and openly, as if challenging him to find the explanation and promising that he would fail. She knew that Danneskjold had failed, when she saw a faint crease of humor softening Galt's eyelids.

"What else," asked Galt, "have you accomplished this year?"

"I've defied the law of gravitation."

"You've always done that. In what particular form now?"

"In the form of a flight from mid-Atlantic to Colorado in a plane loaded with gold beyond the safety point of its capacity. Wait till Midas sees the amount I have to deposit. My customers, this year, will become richer by— Say, have you told Miss Taggart that she's one of my customers?"

"No, not yet You may tell her, if you wish."

"I'm—What did you say I am?" she asked.

"Don't be shocked, Miss Taggart," said Danneskjold. "And don't object. I'm used to objections. I'm a sort of freak here, anyway. None of them approve of my particular method of fighting our battle. John doesn't, Dr. Akston doesn't. They think that my life is too valuable for it. But, you see, my father was a bishop—and of all his teachings there was only one sentence that I accepted: 'All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.' "

"What do you mean?"

"That violence is not practical. If my fellow men believe that the force of the combined tonnage of their muscles is a practical means to rule me—let them learn the outcome of a contest in which there's nothing but brute force on one side, and force ruled by a mind, on the other. Even John grants me that in our age I had the moral right to choose the course I've chosen. I am doing just what he is doing—only in my own way. He is withdrawing man's spirit from the looters, I'm withdrawing the products of man's spirit. He is depriving them of reason, I'm depriving them of wealth. He is draining the soul of the world, I'm draining its body. His is the lesson they have to learn, only I'm impatient and I'm hastening their scholastic progress. But, like John, I'm simply complying with their moral code and refusing to grant them a double standard at my expense. Or at Rearden's expense. Or at yours."

"What are you talking about?"

"About a method of taxing the income taxers. All methods of taxation are complex, but this one is very simple, because it's the naked essence of all the others. Let me explain it to you."

She listened. She heard a sparkling voice reciting, in the tone of a dryly meticulous bookkeeper, a report about financial transfers, bank accounts, income-tax returns, as if he were reading the dusty pages of a ledger—a ledger where every entry was made by means of offering his own blood as the collateral to be drained at any moment, at any slip of his bookkeeping pen. As she listened, she kept seeing the perfection of his face—and she kept thinking that this was the head on which the world had placed a price of millions for the purpose of delivering it to the rot of death. . . . The face she had thought too beautiful for the scars of a productive career—she kept thinking numbly, missing half his words—the face too beautiful to risk. . . . Then it struck her that his physical perfection was only a simple illustration, a childish lesson given to her in crudely obvious terms on the nature of the outer world and on the fate of any human value in a subhuman age. Whatever the justice or the evil of his course, she thought, how could they . . . no! she thought, his course was just, and this was the horror of it, that there was no other course for justice to select, that she could not condemn him, that she could neither approve nor utter a word of reproach.

". . . and the names of my customers, Miss Taggart, were chosen slowly, one by one. I had to be certain of the nature of their character and career. On my list of restitution, your name was one of the first."

She forced herself to keep her face expressionlessly tight, and she answered only, "I see."

"Your account is one of the last left unpaid. It is here, at the Mulligan Bank, to be claimed by you on the day when you join us."

"I see."

"Your account, however, is not as large as some of the others, even though huge sums were extorted from you by force in the past twelve years. You will find—as it is marked on the copies oЈ your income-tax returns which Mulligan will hand over to you—that I have refunded only those taxes which you paid on the salary you earned as Operating Vice-President, but not the taxes you paid on your income from your Taggart Transcontinental stock. You deserved every penny of that stock, and in the days of your father I would have refunded every penny of your profit—but under your brother's management, Taggart Transcontinental has taken its share of the looting, it has made profits by force, by means of government favors, subsidies, moratoriums, directives. You were not responsible for it, you were, in fact, the greatest victim of that policy—but I refund only the money which was made by pure productive ability, not the money any part of which was loot taken by force."

"I see."

They had finished their breakfast. Danneskjold lighted a cigarette and watched her for an instant through the first jet of smoke, as if he knew the violence of the conflict in her mind—then he grinned at Galt and rose to his feet.

"I'll run along," he said. "My wife is waiting for me."

"What?" she gasped.

"My wife," he repeated gaily, as if he had not understood the reason of her shock.

"Who is your wife?"

"Kay Ludlow."

The implications that struck her were more than she could bear to consider. "When . . . when were you married?"

"Four years ago."

"How could you show yourself anywhere long enough to go through a wedding ceremony?"

"We were married here, by Judge Narragansett."

"How can"—she tried to stop, but the words burst involuntarily, in helplessly indignant protest, whether against him, fate or the outer world, she could not tell—"how can she live through eleven months of thinking that you, at any moment, might be . . . ?" She did not finish.

He was smiling, but she saw the enormous solemnity of that which he and his wife had needed to earn their right to this kind of smile. "She can live through it, Miss Taggart, because we do not hold the belief that this earth is a realm of misery where man is doomed to destruction.

We do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and we do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it—and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life."

Galt accompanied him to the door, then came back, sat down at the table and in a leisurely manner reached for another cup of coffee.

She shot to her feet, as if flung by a jet of pressure breaking a safety valve. "Do you think that I'll ever accept his money?"

He waited until the curving streak of coffee had filled his cup, then glanced up at her and answered, "Yes, I think so."

"Well, I won't! I won't let him risk his life for it!"

"You have no choice about that."

"I have the choice never to claim it!"

"Yes, you have."

"Then it will lie in that bank till doomsday!"

"No, it won't. If you don't claim it, some part of it—a very small part—will be turned over to me in your name."

"In my name? Why?"

"To pay for your room and board."

She stared at him, her look of anger switching to bewilderment, then dropped slowly back on her chair.

He smiled. "How long did you think you were going to stay here, Miss Taggart?" He saw her startled look of helplessness. "You haven't thought of it? I have. You're going to stay here for a month. For the one month of our vacation, like the rest of us. I am not asking for your consent—you did not ask for ours when you came here. You broke our rules, so you'll have to take the consequences. Nobody leaves the valley during this month. I could let you go, of course, but I won't.

There's no rule demanding that I hold you, but by forcing your way here, you've given me the right to any choice I make—and I'm going to hold you simply because I want you here. If, at the end of a month, you decide that you wish to go back, you will be free to do so. Not until then."

She sat straight, the planes of her face relaxed, the shape of her mouth softened by the faint, purposeful suggestion of a smile; it was the dangerous smile of an adversary, but her eyes were coldly brilliant and veiled at once, like the eyes of an adversary who fully intends to fight, but hopes to lose.

"Very well," she said, "I shall charge you for your room and board—it is against our rules to provide the unearned sustenance of another human being.

Some of us have wives and children, but there is a mutual trade involved in that, and a mutual payment"—he glanced at her—"of a kind I am not entitled to collect. So I shall charge you fifty cents a day and you will pay me when you accept the account that lies in your name at the Mulligan Bank. If you don't accept the account, Mulligan will charge your debt against it and he will give me the money when I ask for it."

"I shall comply with your terms," she answered; her voice had the shrewd, confident, deliberating slowness of a trader. "But I shall not permit the use of that money for my debts."

"How else do you propose to comply?"

"I propose to earn my room and board."

"By what means?"

"By working."

"In what capacity?"

"In the capacity of your cook and housemaid."

For the first time, she saw him take the shock of the unexpected, in a manner and with a violence she had not foreseen. It was only an explosion of laughter on his part—but he laughed as if he were hit beyond his defenses, much beyond the immediate meaning of her words; she felt that she had struck his past, tearing loose some memory and meaning of his own which she could not know. He laughed as if he were seeing some distant image, as if he were laughing in its face, as if this were his victory—and hers.

"If you will hire me," she said, her face severely polite, her tone harshly clear, impersonal and businesslike, "I shall cook your meals, clean your house, do your laundry and perform such other duties as are required of a servant—in exchange for my room, board and such money as I will need for some items of clothing. I may be slightly handicapped by my injuries for the next few days, but that will not last and I will be able to do the job fully."

"Is that what you want to do?" he asked.

"That is what I want to do—" she answered, and stopped before she uttered the rest of the answer in her mind: more than anything else in the world.

He was still smiling, it was a smile of amusement, but it was as if amusement could be transmuted into some shining glory. "All right, Miss Taggart," he said, "I'll hire you."

She inclined her head in a dryly formal acknowledgment. "Thank you,"

"I will pay you ten dollars a month, in addition to your room and board."

"Very well,"

"I shall be the first man in this valley to hire a servant." He got up, reached into his pocket and threw a five-dollar gold piece down on the table. "As advance on your wages," he said.

She was startled to discover, as her hand reached for the gold piece, that she felt the eager, desperate, tremulous hope of a young girl on her first job: the hope that she would be able to deserve it.

"Yes, sir," she said, her eyes lowered.

Owen Kellogg arrived on the afternoon of her third day in the valley.

She did not know which shocked him most: the sight of her standing on the edge of the airfield as he descended from the plane—the sight of her clothes: her delicate, transparent blouse, tailored by the most expensive shop in New York, and the wide, cotton-print skirt she had bought in the valley for sixty cents—her cane, her bandages or the basket of groceries on her arm.

He descended among a group of men, he saw her, he stopped, then ran to her as if flung forward by some emotion so strong that, whatever its nature, it looked like terror.

"Miss Taggart . . ." he whispered—and said nothing else, while she laughed, trying to explain how she had come to beat him to his destination.

He listened, as if it were irrelevant, and then he uttered the thing from which he had to recover, "But we thought you were dead."

"Who thought it?"

"All of us . . . I mean, everybody in the outside world."

Then she suddenly stopped smiling, while his voice began to recapture his story and his first sound of joy.

"Miss Taggart, don't you remember? You told me to phone Winston, Colorado, and to tell them that you'd be there by noon of the next day. That was to be the day before yesterday, May thirty-first. But you did not reach Winston—and by late afternoon, the news was on all the radios that you were lost in a plane crash somewhere in the Rocky Mountains."

She nodded slowly, grasping the events she had not thought of considering.

"I heard it aboard the Comet," he said. "At a small station in the middle of New Mexico, The conductor held us there for an hour, while I helped him to check the story on long-distance phones. He was hit by the news just as I was. They all were—the train crew, the station agent, the switchmen. They huddled around me while I called the city rooms of newspapers in Denver and New York. We didn't learn much.

Only that you had left the Afton airfield just before dawn on May thirty-first, that you seemed to be following some stranger's plane, that the attendant had seen you go off southeast—and that nobody had seen you since . . . And that searching parties were combing the Rockies for the wreckage of your plane."

She asked involuntarily, "Did the Comet reach San Francisco?"

"I don't know. She was crawling north through Arizona, when I gave up. There were too many delays, too many things going wrong, and a total confusion of orders. I got off and spent the night hitchhiking my way to Colorado, bumming rides on trucks, on buggies, on horse carts, to get there on time—to get to our meeting place, I mean, where we gather for Midas' ferry plane to pick us up and bring us here."

She started walking slowly up the path toward the car she had left in front of Hammond's Grocery Market. Kellogg followed, and when he spoke again, his voice dropped a little, slowing down with their steps, as if there were something they both wished to delay.

"I got a job for Jeff Alien," he said; his voice had the peculiarly solemn tone proper for saying: I have carried out your last will. "Your agent at Laurel grabbed him and put him to work the moment we got there. The agent needed every able-bodied—no, able-minded—man he could find."

They had reached the car, but she did not get in.

"Miss Taggart, you weren't hurt badly, were you? Did you say you crashed, but it wasn't serious?"

"No, not serious at all. I'll be able to get along without Mr. Mulligan's car by tomorrow—and in a day or two I won't need this thing, either." She swung her cane and tossed it contemptuously into the car.

They stood in silence; she was waiting.

"The last long-distance call I made from that station in New Mexico," he said slowly, "was to Pennsylvania. I spoke to Hank Rearden.

I told him everything I knew. He listened, and then there was a pause, and then he said, 'Thank you for calling me.' " Kellogg's eyes were lowered; he added, “I never want to hear that kind of pause again as long as I live."

He raised his eyes to hers; there was no reproach in his glance, only the knowledge of that which he had not suspected when he heard her request, but had guessed since.

"Thank you," she said, and threw the door of the car open. "Can I give you a lift? I have to get back and get dinner ready before my employer comes home."

It was in the first moment of returning to Galt's house, of standing alone in the silent, sun-filled room, that she faced the full meaning of what she felt. She looked at the window, at the mountains barring the sky in the east. She thought of Hank Rearden as he sat at his desk, now, two thousand miles away, his face tightened into a retaining wall against agony, as it had been tightened under all the blows of all his years—and she felt a desperate wish to fight his battle, to fight for him, for his past, for that tension of his face and the courage that fed it—as she wanted to fight for the Comet that crawled by a last effort across a desert on a crumbling track. She shuddered, closing her eyes, feeling as if she were guilty of double treason, feeling as if she were suspended in space between this valley and the rest of the earth, with no right to either.

The feeling vanished when she sat facing Galt across the dinner table. He was watching her, openly and with an untroubled look, as if her presence were normal—and as if the sight of her were all he wished to allow into his consciousness.

She leaned back a little, as if complying with the meaning of his glance, and said dryly, efficiently, in deliberate denial, "I have checked your shirts and found one with two buttons missing, and another with the left elbow worn through. Do you wish me to mend them?"

"Why, yes—if you can do it.”

"I can do it."

It did not seem to alter the nature of his glance; it merely seemed to stress its satisfaction, as if this were what he had wished her to say —except that she was not certain whether satisfaction was the name for the thing she saw in his eyes and fully certain that he had not wished her to say anything.

Beyond the window, at the edge of the table, storm clouds had wiped out the last remnants of light in the eastern sky. She wondered why she felt a sudden reluctance to look out, why she felt as if she wanted to cling to the golden patches of light on the wood of the table, on the buttered crust of the rolls, on the copper coffee pot, on Galt's hair —to cling as to a small island on the edge of a void.

Then she heard her own voice asking suddenly, involuntarily, and she knew that this was the treason she had wanted to escape, "Do you permit any communication with the outside world?"

"No."

"Not any? Not even a note without return address?"

"No."

"Not even a message, if no secret of yours were given away?"

"Not from here. Not during this month. Not to outsiders at any time,"

She noticed that she was avoiding his eyes, and she forced herself to lift her head and face him. His glance had changed; it was watchful, unmoving, implacably perceptive. He asked, looking at her as if he knew the reason of her query, "Do you wish to ask for a special exception?"

"No," she answered, holding his glance.

Next morning, after breakfast, when she sat in her room, carefully placing a patch on the sleeve of Galt's shirt, with her door closed, not to let him see her fumbling effort at an unfamiliar task, she heard the sound of a car stopping in front of the house.

She heard Galt's steps hurrying across the living room, she heard him jerk the entrance door open and call out with the joyous anger of relief: "It's about time!"

She rose to her feet, but stopped: she heard his voice, its tone abruptly changed and grave, as if in answer to the shock of some sight confronting him: "What's the matter?"

"Hello, John," said a clear, quiet voice that sounded steady, but weighted with exhaustion.

She sat down on her bed, feeling suddenly drained of strength: the voice was Francisco's.

She heard Galt asking, his tone severe with concern, "What is it?"

"I'll tell you afterwards."

"Why are you so late?"

"I have to leave again in an hour."

"To leave?"

"John, I just came to tell you that I won't be able to stay here this year."

There was a pause, then Galt asked gravely, his voice low, "Is it as bad as that—whatever it is?"

"Yes. I . . . I might be back before the month is over. I don't know." He added, with the sound of a desperate effort, "I don't know whether to hope to be done with it quickly or . . . or not,"

"Francisco, could you stand a shock right now?"

"I? Nothing could shock me now."

"There's a person, here, in my guest room, whom you have to see.

It will be a shock to you, so I think I'd better warn you in advance that this person is still a scab."

"What? A scab? In your house?"

"Let me tell you how—"

"That's something I want to see for myself!"

She heard Francisco's contemptuous chuckle and the rush of his steps, she saw her door flung open, and she noticed dimly that it was Galt who closed it, leaving them alone.

She did not know how long Francisco stood looking at her, because the first moment that she grasped fully was when she saw him on his knees, holding onto her, his face pressed to her legs, the moment when she felt as if the shudder that ran through his body and left him still, had run into hers and made her able to move.

She saw, in astonishment, that her hand was moving gently over his hair, while she was thinking that she had no right to do it and feeling as if a current of serenity were flowing from her hand, enveloping them both, smoothing the past. He did not move, he made no sound, as if the act of holding her said everything he had to say.

When he raised his head, he looked as she had felt when she had opened her eyes in the valley: he looked as if no pain had ever existed in the world. He was laughing.

"Dagny, Dagny, Dagny"—his voice sounded, not as if a confession resisted for years were breaking out, but as if he were repeating the long since known, laughing at the pretense that it had ever been unsaid —"of course I love you. Were you afraid when he made me say it?

I'll say it as often as you wish—I love you, darling, I love you, I always will—don't be afraid for me, I don't care if I'll never have you again, what does that matter?—you're alive and you're here and you know everything now. And it's so simple, isn't it? Do you see what it was and why I had to desert you?" His arm swept out to point at the valley. "There it is—it's your earth, your kingdom, your kind of world—Dagny, I've always loved you and that I deserted you, that was my love."

He took her hands and pressed them to his lips and held them, not moving, not as a kiss, but as a long moment of rest—as if the effort of speech were a distraction from the fact of her presence, and as if he were torn by too many things to say, by the pressure of all the words stored in the silence of years.

"The women I chased—you didn't believe that, did you? I've never touched one of them—but I think you knew it, I think you've known it all along. The playboy—it was a part that I had to play in order not to let the looters suspect me while I was destroying d'Anconia Copper in plain sight of the whole world. That's the joker in their system, they're out to fight any man of honor and ambition, but let them see a worthless rotter and they think he's a friend, they think he's safe—safe!—that's their view of life, but are they learning!—are they learning whether evil is safe and incompetence practical! . . .

Dagny, it was the night when I knew, for the first time, that I loved you—it was then that I knew I had to go. It was when you entered my hotel room, that night, when I saw what you looked like, what you were, what you meant to me—and what awaited you in the future. Had you been less, you might have stopped me for a while. But it was you, you who were the final argument that made me leave you. I asked for your help, that night—against John Galt. But I knew that you were his best weapon against me, though neither you nor he could know it.

You were everything that he was seeking, everything he told us to live for or die, if necessary. . . . I was ready for him, when he called me suddenly to come to New York, that spring. I had not heard from him for some time. He was fighting the same problem I was. He solved it.

. . . Do you remember? It was the time when you did not hear from me for three years. Dagny, when I took over my father's business, when I began to deal with the whole industrial system of the world, it was then that I began to see the nature of the evil I had suspected, but thought too monstrous to believe. I saw the tax-collecting vermin that had grown for centuries like mildew on d'Anconia Copper, draining us by no right that anyone could name—I saw the government regulations passed to cripple me, because I was successful, and to help my competitors, because they were loafing failures—I saw the labor unions who won every claim against me, by reason of my ability to make their livelihood possible—I saw that any man's desire for money he could not earn was regarded as a righteous wish, but if he earned it, it was damned as greed—I saw the politicians who winked at me, telling me not to worry, because I could just work a little harder and outsmart them all. I looked past the profits of the moment, and I saw that the harder I worked, the more I tightened the noose around my throat, I saw that my energy was being poured down a sewer, that the parasites who fed on me were being fed upon in their turn, that they were caught in their own trap—and that there was no reason for it, no answer known to anyone, that the sewer pipes of the world, draining its productive blood, led into some dank fog nobody had dared to pierce, while people merely shrugged and said that life on earth could be nothing but evil. And then I saw that the whole industrial establishment of the world, with all of its magnificent machinery, its thousand-ton furnaces, its transatlantic cables, its mahogany offices, its stock exchanges, its blazing electric signs, its power, its wealth—all of it was run, not by bankers and boards of directors, but by any unshaved humanitarian in any basement beer joint, by any face pudgy with malice, who preached that virtue must be penalized for being virtue, that the purpose of ability is to serve incompetence, that man has no right to exist except for the sake of others. . . . I knew it. I saw no way to fight it. John found the way. There were just the two of us with him, the night when we came to New York in answer to his call, Ragnar and I. He told us what we had to do and what sort of men we had to reach. He had quit the Twentieth Century. He was living in a garret in a slum neighborhood. He stepped to the window and pointed at the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done. He did not ask us to join him at once. He told us to think it over and to weigh everything it would do to our lives. I gave him my answer on the morning of the second day, and Ragnar a few hours later, in the afternoon. . . . Dagny, that was the morning after our last night together. I had seen, in a manner of vision that I couldn't escape, what it was that I had to fight for.

It was for the way you looked that night, for the way you talked about your railroad—for the way you had looked when we tried to see the skyline of New York from the top of a rock over the Hudson—I had to save you, to clear the way for you, to let you find your city—not to let you stumble the years of your life away, struggling on through a poisoned fog, with your eyes still held straight ahead, still looking as they had looked in the sunlight, struggling on to find, at the end of your road, not the towers of a city, but a fat, soggy, mindless cripple performing his enjoyment of life by means of swallowing the gin your life had gone to pay for! You,—to know no joy in order that he may know it? You—to serve as fodder for the pleasure of others? You—as the means for the subhuman as the end? Dagny, that was what I saw and that was what I couldn't let them do to you! Not to you, not to any child who had your kind of look when-he faced the future, not to any man who had your spirit and was able to experience a moment of being proudly, guiltlessly, confidently, joyously alive. That was my love, that state of the human spirit, and I left you to fight for it, and I knew that if I were to lose you, it was still you that I would be winning with every year of the battle. But you see it now, don't you? You've seen this valley. It's the place we set out to reach when we were children, you and I. We've reached it. What else can I ask for now? Just to see you here—did John say you're still a scab?—oh well, it's only a matter of tune, but you'll be one of us, because you've always been, if you don't see it fully, we'll wait, I don't care—so long as you're alive, so long as I don't have to go on flying over the Rockies, looking for the wreckage of your plane!"

She gasped a little, realizing why he had not come to the valley on time.

He laughed. "Don't look like that. Don't look at me as if I were a wound that you're afraid to touch."

"Francisco, I've hurt you in so many different ways—"

"No! No, you haven't hurt me—and he hasn't either, don't say anything about it, it's he who's hurt, but we'll save him and he'll come here, too, where he belongs, and he'll know, and then he, too, will be able to laugh about it. Dagny, I didn't expect you to wait, I didn't hope, I knew the chance I'd taken, and if it had to be anyone, I'm glad it's he."

She closed her eyes, pressing her lips together not to moan.

"Darling, don't! Don't you see that I've accepted it?"

But it isn't—she thought—it isn't he, and I can't tell you the truth, because it's a man who might never hear it from me and whom I might never have.

"Francisco, I did love you—" she said, and caught her breath, shocked, realizing that she had not intended to say it and, simultaneously, that this was not the tense she had wanted to use.

"But you do," he said calmly, smiling. "You still love me—even if there's one expression of it that you'll always feel and want, but will not give me any longer. I'm still what I was, and you'll always see it, and you'll always grant me the same response, even if there's a greater one that you grant to another man. No matter what you feel for him, it will not change what you feel for me, and it won't be treason to either, because it comes from the same root, it's the same payment in answer to the same values. No matter what happens in the future, we'll always be what we were to each other, you and I, because you'll always love me."

"Francisco," she whispered, "do you know that?"

"Of course. Don't you understand it now? Dagny, every form of happiness is one, every desire is driven by the same motor—by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence—and every achievement is an expression of it. Look around you. Do you see how much is open to us here, on an unobstructed earth? Do you see how much I am free to do, to experience, to achieve? Do you see that all of it is part of what you are to me—as I am part of it for you? And if I'll see you smile with admiration at a new copper smelter that I built, it will be another form of what I felt when I lay in bed beside you. Will I want to sleep with you? Desperately. Will I envy the man who does? Sure. But what does that matter? It's so much—just to have you here, to love you and to be alive."

Her eyes lowered, her face stern, holding her head bowed as in an act of reverence, she said slowly, as if fulfilling a solemn promise, "Will you forgive me?"

He looked astonished, then chuckled gaily, remembering, and answered, "Not yet. There's nothing to forgive, but I'll forgive it when you join us."

He rose, he drew her to her feet—and when his arms closed about her, their kiss was the summation of their past, its end and their seal of acceptance.

Galt turned to them from across the living room, when they came out. He had been standing at a window, looking at the valley—and she felt certain that he had stood there all that time. She saw his eyes studying their faces, his glance moving slowly from one to the other.

His face relaxed a little at the sight of the change in Francisco's.

Francisco smiled, asking him, "Why do you stare at me?"

"Do you know what you looked like when you came in?"

"Oh, did I? That's because I hadn't slept for three nights. John, will you invite me to dinner? I want to know how this scab of yours got here, but I think that I might collapse sound asleep in the middle of a sentence—even though right now I feel as if I'll never need any sleep at all—so I think I'd better go home and stay there till evening."

Galt was watching him with a faint smile. "But aren't you going to leave the valley in an hour?"

"What? No . . ." he said mildly, in momentary astonishment. "No!" he laughed exultantly. "I don't have to! That's right, I haven't told you what it was, have I? I was searching for Dagny. For . . . for the wreck of her plane. She'd been reported lost in a crash in the Rockies."

"I see," said Galt quietly.

"I could have thought of anything, except that she would choose to crash in Galt's Gulch," Francisco said happily; he had the tone of that joyous relief which almost relishes the horror of the past, defying it by means of the present. "I kept flying over the district between Afton, Utah, and Winston, Colorado, over every peak and crevice of it, over every remnant of a car in any gully below, and whenever I saw one, I—" He stopped; it looked like a shudder. "Then at night, we went out on foot—the searching parties of railroad men from Winston—we went climbing at random, with no clues, no plan, on and on, until it was daylight again, and—" He shrugged, trying to dismiss it and to smile. "I wouldn't wish it on my worst—"

He stopped short; his smile vanished and a dim reflection of the look he had worn for three days came back to his face, as if at the sudden presence of an image he had forgotten.

After a long moment, he turned to Galt. "John," his voice sounded peculiarly solemn, "could we notify those outside that Dagny is alive . . . in case there's somebody who . . . who'd feel as I did?"

Galt was looking straight at him. "Do you wish to give any outsider any relief from the consequences of remaining outside?"

Francisco dropped his eyes, but answered firmly, "No."

"Pity, Francisco?"

"Yes. Forget it. You're right."

Galt turned away with a movement that seemed oddly out of character: it had the unrhythmical abruptness of the involuntary.

He did not turn back; Francisco watched him in astonishment, then asked softly, "What's the matter?"

Galt turned and looked at him for a moment, not answering. She could not identify the emotion that softened the lines of Galt's face: it had the quality of a smile, of gentleness, of pain, and of something greater that seemed to make these concepts superfluous.

"Whatever any of us has paid for this battle," said Galt, "you're the one who's taken the hardest beating, aren't you?"

"Who? I?" Francisco grinned with shocked, incredulous amusement.

"Certainly not! What's the matter with you?" He chuckled and added, "Pity, John?"

"No," said Galt firmly.

She saw Francisco watching him with a faint, puzzled frown—because Galt had said it, looking, not at him, but at her.

The emotional sum that struck her as an immediate impression of Francisco's house, when she entered it for the first time, was not the sum she had once drawn from the sight of its silent, locked exterior. She felt, not a sense of tragic loneliness, but of invigorating brightness. The rooms were bare and crudely simple, the house seemed built with the skill, the decisiveness and the impatience typical of Francisco; it looked like a frontiersman's shanty thrown together to serve as a mere springboard for a long flight into the future—a future where so great a field of activity lay waiting that no time could be wasted on the comfort of its start. The place had the brightness, not of a home, but of a fresh wooden scaffolding erected to shelter the birth of a skyscraper.

Francisco, in shirt sleeves, stood in the middle of his twelve-foot square living room, with the look of a host in a palace. Of all the places where she had ever seen him, this was the background that seemed most properly his. Just as the simplicity of his clothes, added to his bearing, gave him the air of a superlative aristocrat, so the crudeness of the room gave it the appearance of the most patrician retreat; a single royal touch was added to the crudeness: two ancient silver goblets stood in a small niche cut in a wall of bare logs; their ornate design had required the luxury of some craftsman's long and costly labor, more labor than had gone to build the shanty, a design dimmed by the polish of more centuries than had gone to grow the log wall's pines. In the midst of that room, Francisco's easy, natural manner had a touch of quiet pride, as if his smile were silently saying to her: This is what I am and what I have been all these years.

She looked up at the silver goblets.

"Yes," he said, in answer to her silent guess, "they belonged to Sebastian d'Anconia and his wife. That's the only thing I brought here from my palace in Buenos Aires. That, and the crest over the door.

It's all I wanted to save. Everything else will go, in a very few months now." He chuckled. "They'll seize it, all of it, the last dregs of d'Anconia Copper, but they'll be surprised. They won't find much for their trouble. And as to that palace, they won't be able to afford even its heating bill."

"And then?" she asked. "Where will you go from there?"

"I? I will go to work for d'Anconia Copper."

"What do you mean?"

"Do you remember that old slogan: "The king is dead, long live the king'? When the carcass of my ancestors' property is out of the way, then my mine will become the young new body of d'Anconia Copper, the kind of property my ancestors had wanted, had worked for, had deserved, but had never owned."

"Your mine? What mine? Where?"

"Here," he said, pointing toward the mountain peaks. "Didn't you know it?"

"No."

"I own a copper mine that the looters won't reach. It's here, in these mountains. I did the prospecting, I discovered it, I broke the first excavation. It was over eight years ago. I was the first man to whom Midas sold land in this valley. I bought that mine. I started it with my own hands, as Sebastian d'Anconia had started. I have a superintendent 77! in charge of it now, who used to be my best metallurgist in Chile.

The mine produces all the copper we require. My profits are deposited at the Mulligan Bank. That will be all I'll have, a few months from now. That will be all I'll need."

—to conquer the world, was the way his voice sounded on his last sentence—and she marveled at the difference between that sound and the shameful, mawkish tone, half-whine, half-threat, the tone of beggar and thug combined, which the men of their century had given to the word "need."

"Dagny," he was saying, standing at the window, as if looking out at the peaks, not of mountains, but of time, "the rebirth of d'Anconia Copper—and of the world—has to start here, in the United States. This country was the only country in history born, not of chance and blind tribal warfare, but as a rational product of man's mind. This country was built on the supremacy of reason—and, for one magnificent century, it redeemed the world. It will have to do so again. The first step of d'Anconia Copper, as of any other human value, has to come from here—because the rest of the earth has reached the consummation of the beliefs it has held through the ages: mystic faith, the supremacy of the irrational, which has but two monuments at the end of its course: the lunatic asylum and the graveyard. . . . Sebastian d'Anconia committed one error: he accepted a system which declared that the property he had earned by right, was to be his, not by right, but by permission. His descendants paid for that error. I have made the last payment. . . . I think that I will see the day when, growing out from their root in this soil, the mines, the smelters, the ore docks of d'Anconia Copper will spread again through the world and down to my native country, and I will be the first to start my country's rebuilding.

I may see it, but I cannot be certain. No man can predict the time when others will choose to return to reason. It may be that at the end of my life, I shall have established nothing but this single mine—d'Anconia Copper No. 1, Galt's Gulch, Colorado, U.S.A. But, Dagny, do you remember that my ambition was to double my father's production of copper? Dagny, if at the end of my life, I produce but one pound of copper a year, I will be richer than my father, richer than all my ancestors with all their thousands of tons—because that one pound will be mine by right and will be used to maintain a world that knows it!"

This was the Francisco of their childhood, in bearing, in manner, in the unclouded brilliance of his eyes—and she found herself questioning him about his copper mine, as she had questioned him about his industrial projects on their walks on the shore of the Hudson, recapturing the sense of an unobstructed future.

"I'll take you to see the mine," he said, "as soon as your ankle recovers completely. We have to climb a steep trail to get there, just a mule trail, there's no truck road as yet. Let me show you the new smelter I'm designing. I've been working on it for some time, it's too complex for our present volume of production, but when the mine's output grows to justify it—just take a look at the time, labor and money that it will save!"

They were sitting together on the floor, bending over the sheets of paper he spread before her, studying the intricate sections of the smelter—with the same joyous earnestness they had once brought to the study of scraps in a junk yard.

She leaned forward just as he moved to reach for another sheet, and she found herself leaning against his shoulder.-Involuntarily, she held still for one instant, no longer than for a small break in the flow of a single motion, while her eyes rose to his. He was looking down at her, neither hiding what he felt nor implying any further demand. She drew back, knowing that she had felt the same desire as his.

Then, still holding the recaptured sensation of what she had felt for him in the past, she grasped a quality that had always been part of it, now suddenly clear to her for the first time: if that desire was a celebration of one's life, then what she had felt for Francisco had always been a celebration of her future, like a moment of splendor gained in part payment of an unknown, total, affirming some promise to come. In the instant when she grasped it, she knew also the only desire she had ever experienced not in token of the future but of the full and final present She knew it by means of an image—the image of a man's figure standing at the door of a small granite structure. The final form of the promise that had kept her moving, she thought, was the man who would, perhaps, remain a promise never to be reached.

But this—she thought in consternation—was that view of human destiny which she had most passionately hated and rejected: the view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve. Her life and her values could not bring her to that, she thought; she had never found beauty in longing for the impossible and had never found the possible to be beyond her reach. But she had come to it and she could find no answer.

She could not give him up or give up the world—she thought, looking at Galt, that evening. The answer seemed harder to find in his presence. She felt that no problem existed, that nothing could stand beside the fact of seeing him and nothing would ever have the power to make her leave—and, simultaneously, that she would have no right to look at him if she were to renounce her railroad. She felt that she owned him, that the unnamed had been understood between them from the start—and, simultaneously, that he was able to vanish from her Me and, on some future street of the outside world, to pass her by in unweighted indifference.

She noted that he did not question her about Francisco. When she spoke of her visit, she could find no reaction in his face, neither of approval nor of resentment. It seemed to her that she caught an imperceptible shading in his gravely attentive expression: he looked as if this were a matter about which he did not choose to feel.

Her faint apprehension grew into a question mark, and the question mark turned into a drill, cutting deeper and deeper into her mind through the evenings that followed—when Galt left the house and she remained alone. He went out every other night, after dinner, not telling her where he went, returning at midnight or later. She tried not to allow herself fully to discover with what tension and. restlessness she waited for his return. She did not ask him where he spent his evenings. The reluctance that stopped her was her too urgent desire to know; she kept silent in some dimly intentional form of defiance, half in defiance of him, half of her own anxiety.

She would not acknowledge the things she feared or give them the solid shape of words, she knew them only by the ugly, nagging pull of an unadmitted emotion. Part of it was a savage resentment, of a kind she had never experienced before, which was her answer to the dread that there might be a woman in his life; yet the resentment was softened by some quality of health in the thing she feared, as if the threat could be fought and even, if need be, accepted. But there was another, uglier dread: the sordid shape of self-sacrifice, the suspicion, not to be uttered about him, that he wished to remove himself from her path and let its emptiness force her back to the man who was his best-loved friend.

Days passed before she spoke of it. Then, at dinner, on an evening when he was to leave, she became suddenly aware of the peculiar pleasure she experienced while watching him eat the food she had prepared—and suddenly, involuntarily, as if that pleasure gave her a right she dared not identify, as if enjoyment, not pain, broke her resistance, she heard herself asking him, "What is it you're doing every other evening?"

He answered simply, as if he had taken for granted that she knew it, "Lecturing."

"What?"

"Giving a course of lectures on physics, as I do every year during this month. It's my . . . What are you laughing at?" he asked, seeing the look of relief, of silent laughter that did not seem to be directed at his words—and then, before she answered, he smiled suddenly, as if he had guessed the answer, she saw some particular, intensely personal quality in his smile, which was almost a quality of insolent intimacy—in contrast to the calmly impersonal, casual manner with which he went on. "You know that this is the month when we all trade the achievements of our real professions. Richard Halley is to give concerts, Kay Ludlow is to appear in two plays written by authors who do not write for the outside world—and I give lectures, reporting on the work I've done during the year."

"Free lectures?"

"Certainly not. It's ten dollars per person for the course."

"I want to hear you."

He shook his head. "No. You'll be allowed to attend the concerts, the plays or any form of presentation for your own enjoyment, but not my lectures or any other sale of ideas which you might carry out of this valley. Besides, my customers, or students, are only those who have a practical purpose in taking my course: Dwight Sanders, Lawrence Hammond, Dick McNamara, Owen Kellogg, a few others. I've added one beginner this year: Quentin Daniels."

"Really?" she said, almost with a touch of jealousy. "How can he afford anything that expensive?"

"On credit. I've given him a time-payment plan. He's worth it."

"Where do you lecture?"

"In the hangar, on Dwight Sanders' farm."

"And where do you work during the year?"

"In my laboratory."

She asked cautiously, "Where is your laboratory? Here, in the valley?"

He held her eyes for a moment, letting her see that his glance was amused and that he knew her purpose, then answered, "No."

"You've lived in the outside world for all of these twelve years?"

"Yes."

"Do you"—the thought seemed unbearable—"do you hold some such job as the others?"

"Oh yes." The amusement in his eyes seemed stressed by some special meaning.

"Don't tell me that you're a second assistant bookkeeper!"

"No, I'm not."

"Then what do you do?"

"I hold the kind of job that the world wishes me to hold."

"Where?"

He shook his head. "No, Miss Taggart. If you decide to leave the valley, this is one of the things that you are not to know."

He smiled again with that insolently personal quality which now seemed to say that he knew the threat contained in his answer and what it meant to her, then he rose from the table.

When he had gone, she felt as if the motion of time were an oppressive weight in the stillness of the house, like a stationary, half-solid mass slithering slowly into some faint elongation by a tempo that left her no measure to know whether minutes had passed or hours. She lay half-stretched in an armchair of the living room, crumpled by that heavy, indifferent lassitude which is not the will to laziness, but the frustration of the will to a secret violence that no lesser action can satisfy.

That special pleasure she had felt in watching him eat the food she had prepared—she thought, lying still, her eyes closed, her mind moving, like time, through some realm of veiled slowness—it had been the pleasure of knowing that she had provided him with a sensual enjoyment, that one form of his body's satisfaction had come from her.

. . . There is reason, she thought, why a woman would wish to cook for a man . . . oh, not as a duty, not as a chronic career, only as a rare and special rite in symbol of . . . but what have they made of it, the preachers of woman's duty? . . . The castrated performance of a sickening drudgery was held to be a woman's proper virtue—while that which gave it meaning and sanction was held as a shameful sin . . . the work of dealing with grease, steam and slimy peelings in a reeking kitchen was held to be a spiritual matter, an act of compliance with her moral duty—while the meeting of two bodies in a bedroom was held to be a physical indulgence, an act of surrender to an animal instinct, with no glory, meaning or pride of spirit to be claimed by the animals involved.

She leaped abruptly to her feet. She did not want to think of the outer world or of its moral code. But she knew that that was not the subject of her thoughts. And she did not want to think of the subject her mind was intent on pursuing, the subject to which it kept returning against her will, by some will of its own. . . .

She paced the room, hating the ugly, jerky, uncontrolled looseness of her movements—torn between the need to let her motion break the stillness, and the knowledge that this was not the form of break she wanted. She lighted cigarettes, for an instant's illusion of purposeful action—and discarded them within another instant, feeling the weary distaste of a substitute purpose. She looked at the room like a restless beggar, pleading with physical objects to give her a motive, wishing she could find something to clean, to mend, to polish—while knowing that no task was worth the effort. When nothing seems worth the effort—said some stern voice in her mind—it's a screen to hide a wish that's worth too much; what do you want? . . . She snapped a match, viciously jerking the flame to the tip of a cigarette she noticed hanging, unlighted, in the corner of her mouth. . . . What do you want?—repeated the voice that sounded severe as a judge. I want him to come back!—she answered, throwing the words, as a soundless cry, at some accuser within her, almost as one would throw a bone to a pursuing beast, in the hope of distracting it from pouncing upon the rest.

I want him back—she said softly, in answer to the accusation that there was no reason for so great an impatience. . . . I want him back —she said pleadingly, in answer to the cold reminder that her answer did not balance the judge's scale. . . . I want him back!—she cried defiantly, fighting not to drop' the one superfluous, protective word in that sentence.

She felt her head drooping with exhaustion, as after a prolonged beating. The cigarette she saw between her fingers had burned the mere length of half an inch. She ground it out and fell into the armchair again.

I'm not evading it—she thought—I'm not evading it, it's just that I can see no way to any answer. . . . That which you want—said the voice, while she stumbled through a thickening fog—is yours for the taking, but anything less than your full acceptance, anything less than your full conviction, is a betrayal of everything he is. . . . Then let him damn me—she thought, as if the voice were now lost in the fog and would not hear her—let him damn me tomorrow. . . . I want him . . . back. . . . She heard no answer, because her head had fallen softly against the chair; she was asleep.

When she opened her eyes, she saw him standing three feet away, looking down at her, as if he had been watching her for some time.

She saw his face and, with the clarity of undivided perception, she saw the meaning of the expression on his face: it was the meaning she had fought for hours. She saw it without astonishment, because she had not yet regained her awareness of any reason why it should astonish her.

"This is the way you look," he said softly, "when you fall asleep in your office," and she knew that he, too, was not fully aware of letting her hear it: the way he said it told her how often he had thought of it and for what reason. "You look as if you would awaken in a world where you had nothing to hide or to fear," and she knew that the first movement of her face had been a smile, she knew it in the moment when it vanished, when she grasped that they were both awake. He added quietly, with full awareness, "But here, it's true."

Her first emotion of the realm of reality was a sense of power. She sat up with a flowing, leisurely movement of confidence, feeling the flow of the motion from muscle to muscle through her body. She asked, and it was the slowness, the sound of casual curiosity, the tone of taking the implications for granted, that gave to her voice the faintest sound of disdain, "How did you know what I look like in . . . my office?"

"I told you that I've watched you for years."

"How were you able to watch me that thoroughly? From where?"

"I will not answer you now," he said, simply, without defiance.

The slight movement of her shoulder leaning back, the pause, then the lower, huskier tone of her voice, left a hint of smiling triumph to trail behind her words: "When did you see me for the first time?"

"Ten years ago," he answered, looking straight at her, letting her see that he was answering the full, unnamed meaning of her question.

"Where?" The word was almost a command.

He hesitated, then she saw a faint smile that touched only his lips, not his eyes, the kind of smile with which one contemplates—with longing, bitterness and pride—a possession purchased at an excruciating cost; his eyes seemed directed, not at her, but at the girl of that time.

"Underground, in the Taggart Terminal," he answered.

She became suddenly conscious of her posture: she had let her shoulder blades slide down against the chair, carelessly, half-lying, one leg stretched forward—and with her sternly tailored, transparent blouse, her wide peasant skirt hand-printed in violent colors, her thin stocking and high-heeled pump, she did not look like a railroad executive—the consciousness of it struck her in answer to his eyes that seemed to be seeing the unattainable—she looked like that which she was: his servant girl. She knew the moment when some faintest stress of the brilliance in his dark green eyes removed the veil of distance, replacing the vision of the past by the act of seeing her immediate person.

She met his eyes with that insolent glance which is a smile without movement of facial muscles.

He turned away, but as he moved across the room his steps were as eloquent as the sound of a voice. She knew that he wanted to leave the room, as he always left it, he had never stayed for longer than a brief good night when he came home. She watched the course of his struggle, whether by means of his steps, begun in one direction and swerving in another, or by means of her certainty that her body had become an instrument for the direct perception of his, like a screen reflecting both movements and motives—she could not tell. She knew only that he who had never started or lost a battle against himself, now had no power to leave this room.

His manner seemed to show no sign of strain. He took off his coat, throwing it aside, remaining in shirt sleeves, and sat down, facing her, at the window across the room. But he sat down on the arm of a chair, as if he were neither leaving nor staying.

She felt the light-headed, the easy, the almost frivolous sensation of triumph in the knowledge that she was holding him as surely as by a physical touch; for the length of a moment, brief and dangerous to endure, it was a more satisfying form of contact.

Then she felt a sudden, blinding shock, which was half-blow, half scream within her, and she groped, stunned, for its cause—only to realize that he had leaned a little to one side and it had been no more than the sight of an accidental posture, of the long line running from his shoulder to the angle of his waist, to his hips, down his legs. She looked away, not to let him see that she was trembling—and she dropped all thoughts of triumph and of whose was the power.

"I've seen you many times since," he said, quietly, steadily, but a little more slowly than usual, as if he could control everything except his need to speak.

"Where have you seen me?"

"Many places."

"But you made certain to remain unseen?" She knew that his was a face she could not have failed to notice.

"Yes."

"Why? Were you afraid?"

"Yes."

He said it simply, and it took her a moment to realize that he was admitting he knew what the sight of his person would have meant to her. "Did you know who I was, when you saw me for the first time?"

"Oh yes. My worst enemy but one."

"What?" She had not expected it; she added, more quietly, "Who's the worst one?"

"Dr. Robert Stadler."

"Did you have me classified with him?"

"No. He's my conscious enemy. He's the man who sold his soul. We don't intend to reclaim him. You—you were one of us. I knew it, long before I saw you. I knew also that you would be the last to join us and the hardest one to defeat."

"Who told you that?"

"Francisco."

She let a moment pass, then asked, "What did he say?"

"He said that of all the names on our list, you'd be the one most difficult to win. That was when I heard of you for the first time. It was Francisco who put your name on our list. He told me that you were the sole hope and future of Taggart Transcontinental, that you'd stand against us for a long time, that you'd fight a desperate battle for your railroad—because you had too much endurance, courage and consecration to your work." He glanced at her. "He told me nothing else.

He spoke of you as if he were merely discussing one of our future strikers. I knew that you and he had been childhood friends, that was all."

"When did you see me?"

"Two years later."

"How?"

"By chance. It was late at night . . . on a passenger platform of the Taggart Terminal." She knew that this was a form of surrender, he did not want to say it, yet he had to speak, she heard both the muted intensity and the pull of resistance in his voice—he had to speak, because he had to give himself and her this one form of contact. "You wore an evening gown. You had a cape half-slipping off your body—I saw, at first, only your bare shoulders, your back and your profile—it looked for a moment as if the cape would slip further and you would stand there naked. Then I saw that you wore a long gown, the color of ice, like the tunic of a Grecian goddess, but had the short hair and the imperious profile of an American woman. You looked preposterously out of place on a railroad platform—and it was not on a railroad platform that I was seeing you, I was seeing a setting that had never haunted me before—but then, suddenly, I knew that you did belong among the rails, the soot and the girders, that that was the proper setting for a flowing gown and naked shoulders and a face as alive as yours—a railroad platform, not a curtained apartment—you looked like a symbol of luxury and you belonged in the place that was its source—you seemed to bring wealth, grace, extravagance and the enjoyment of life back to their rightful owners, to the men who created railroads and factories—you had a look of energy and of its reward, together, a look of competence and luxury combined—and I was the first man who had ever stated in what manner these two were inseparable—and I thought that if our age gave form to its proper gods and erected a statue to the meaning of an American railroad, yours would be that statue. . . . Then I saw what you were doing—and I knew who you were. You were giving orders to three Terminal officials, I could not hear your words, but your voice sounded swift, clear-cut and confident. I knew that you were Dagny Taggart. I came closer, close enough to hear two sentences. 'Who said so?' asked one of the men. 'I did,' you answered. That was all I heard. That was enough."

"And then?"

He raised his eyes slowly to hold hers across the room, and the submerged intensity that pulled his voice down, blurring its tone to softness, gave it a sound of self-mockery that was desperate and almost gentle: "Then I knew that abandoning my motor was not the hardest price I would have to pay for this strike."

She wondered which anonymous shadow—among the passengers who had hurried past her, as insubstantial as the steam of the engines and as ignored—which shadow and face had been his; she wondered how close she had come to him for the length of that unknown moment. "Oh, why didn't you speak to me, then or later?"

"Do you happen to remember what you were doing in the Terminal that night?"

"I remember vaguely a night when they called me from some party I was attending. My father was out of town and the new Terminal manager had made some sort of error that tied up all traffic in the tunnels. The old manager had quit unexpectedly the week before,"

"It was I who made him quit."

"I see . . ."

Her voice trailed off, as if abandoning sound, as her eyelids dropped, abandoning sight. If he had not withstood it then—she thought—if he had come to claim her, then or later, what( sort of tragedy would they have had to reach? . . . She remembered what she had felt when she had cried that she would shoot the destroyer on sight. . . .

I would have—the thought was not in words, she knew it only as a trembling pressure in her stomach—I would have shot him, afterward, if I discovered his role . . . and I would have had to discover it . . . and yet—she shuddered, because she knew she still wished he had come to her, because the thought not to be admitted into her mind. but flowing as a dark warmth through her body, was: I would have shot him, but not before—She raised her eyelids—and she knew that that thought was as naked to him in her eyes, as it was to her in his. She saw his veiled glance and the tautness of his mouth, she saw him reduced to agony, she felt herself drowned by the exultant wish to cause him pain, to see it, to watch it, to watch it beyond her own endurance and his, then to reduce him to the helplessness of pleasure.

He got up, he looked away, and she could not tell whether it was the slight lift of his head or the tension of his features that made his face look oddly calm and clear, as if it were stripped of emotion down to the naked purity of its structure.

"Every man that your railroad needed and lost in the past ten years," he said, "it was I who made you lose him." His voice had the single toned flatness and the luminous simplicity of an accountant who reminds a reckless purchaser that cost is an absolute which cannot be escaped, "I have pulled every girder from under Taggart Transcontinental and, if you choose to go back, I will see it collapse upon your head."

He turned to leave the room. She stopped him. It was her voice, more than her words, that made him stop: her voice was low, it had no quality of emotion, only of a sinking weight, and its sole color was some dragging undertone, like an inner echo, resembling a threat; it was the voice of the plea of a person who still retains a concept of honor, but is long past caring for it: "You want to hold me here, don't you?"

"More than anything else in the world."

"You could hold me."

"I know it"

His voice had said it with the same sound as hers. He waited, to regain his breath. When he spoke, his voice was low and clear, with some stressed quality of awareness, which was almost the quality of a smile of understanding: "It's your acceptance of this place that I want. What good would it do me, to have your physical presence without any meaning? That's the kind of faked reality by which most people cheat themselves of their lives. I'm not capable of it." He turned to go. "And neither are you. Good night, Miss Taggart."

He walked out, into his bedroom, closing the door.

She was past the realm of thought—as she lay in bed in the darkness of her room, unable to think or to sleep—and the moaning violence that filled her mind seemed only a sensation of her muscles, but its tone and its twisting shades were like a pleading cry, which she knew, not as words, but as pain: Let him come here, let him break —let it be damned, all of it, my railroad and his strike and everything we've lived by!—let it be damned, everything we've been and are!—he would, if tomorrow I were to die—then let me die, but tomorrow —let him come here, be it any price he names, I have nothing left that's not for sale to him any longer—is this what it means to be an animal?—it does and I am. . . . She lay on her back, her palms pressed to the sheet at her sides, to stop herself from rising and walking into his room, knowing that she was capable even of that. . . .

It's not I, it's a body I can neither endure nor control. . . . But somewhere within her, not as words, but as a radiant point of stillness, there was the presence of the judge who seemed to observe her, not in stern condemnation any longer, but in approval and amusement, as if saying: Your body?—if he were not what you know him to be, would your body bring you to this?—why is it his body that you want, and no other?—do you think that you are damning them, the things you both have lived by?—are you damning that which you are honoring in this very moment, by your very desire? . . . She did not have to hear the words, she knew them, she had always known them.

. . . After a while, she lost the glow of that knowledge, and there was nothing left but pain and the palms that were pressed to the sheet—and the almost indifferent wonder whether he, too, was awake and fighting the same torture.

She heard no sound in the house and saw no light from his window on the tree trunks outside. After a long while she heard, from the darkness of his room, two sounds that gave her a full answer; she knew that he was awake and that he would not come; it was the sound of a step and the click of a cigarette lighter.

Richard Halley stopped playing, turned away from the piano and glanced at Dagny, He saw her drop her face with the involuntary movement of hiding too strong an emotion, he rose, smiled and said softly, "Thank you."

"Oh no . . ." she whispered, knowing that the gratitude was hers and that it was futile to express it. She was thinking of the years when the works he had just played for her were being written, here, in his small cottage on a ledge of the valley, when all this prodigal magnificence of sound was being shaped by him as a flowing monument to a concept which equates the sense of life with the sense of beauty—while she had walked through the streets of New York in a hopeless quest for some form of enjoyment, with the screeches of a modern symphony running after her, as if spit by the infected throat of a loud-speaker coughing its malicious hatred of existence.

"But I mean it," said Richard Halley, smiling. "I'm a businessman and I never do anything without payment. You've paid me. Do you see why I wanted to play for you tonight?"

She raised her head. He stood in the middle of his living room, they were alone, with the window open to the summer night, to the dark trees on a long sweep of ledges descending toward the glitter of the valley's distant lights.

"Miss Taggart, how many people are there to whom my work means as much as it does to you?"

"Not many," she answered simply, neither as boast nor flattery, but as an impersonal tribute to the exacting values involved.

"That is the payment I demand. Not many can afford it. I don't mean your enjoyment, I don't mean your emotion—emotions be damned!—I mean your understanding and the fact that your enjoyment was of the same nature as mine, that it came from the same source: from your intelligence, from the conscious judgment of a mind able to judge my work by the standard of the same values that went to write it—I mean, not the fact that you felt, but that you felt what I wished you to feel, not the fact that you admire my work, but that you admire it for the things I wished to be admired." He chuckled.

"There's only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive. But it's a fear I've never shared. I do not fool myself about my work or the response I seek—I value both too highly.

I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively—or blindly, I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show—or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone's heart—only by someone's head. And when I find a customer with that invaluable capacity, then my performance is a mutual trade to mutual profit. An artist is a trader, Miss Taggart, the hardest and most exacting of all traders. Now do you understand me?"

"Yes," she said incredulously, "I do," incredulously because she was hearing her own symbol of moral pride, chosen by a man she had least expected to choose it.

"If you do, why did you look quite so tragic just a moment ago?

What is it that you regret?"

"The years when your work has remained unheard."

"But it hasn't. I've given two or three concerts every year. Here, in Galt's Gulch. I am giving one next week. I hope you'll come. The price of admission is twenty-five cents."

She could not help laughing. He smiled, then his face slipped slowly into earnestness, as under the tide of some unspoken contemplation of his own. He looked at the darkness beyond the window, at a spot where, in a clearing of the branches, with the moonlight draining its color, leaving only its metallic luster, the sign of the dollar hung like a curve of shining steel engraved on the sky.

"Miss Taggart, do you see why I'd give three dozen modern artists for one real businessman? Why I have much more in common with Ellis Wyatt or Ken Danagger—who happens to be tone deaf—than with men like Mort Liddy and Balph Eubank? Whether it's a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one's own eyes—which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification -—which means: the capacity to sew, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before. That shining vision which they talk about as belonging to the authors of symphonies and novels—what do they think is the driving faculty of men who discover how to use oil, how to run a mine, how to build an electric motor? That sacred fire which is said to burn within musicians and poets—what do they suppose moves an industrialist to defy the whole world for the sake of his new metal, as the inventors of the airplane, the builders of the railroads, the discoverers of new germs or new continents have done through all the ages? . . . An intransigent devotion to the pursuit of truth, Miss Taggart? Have you heard the moralists and the art lovers of the centuries talk about the artist's intransigent devotion to the pursuit of truth? Name me a greater example of such devotion than the act of a man who says that the earth does turn, or the act of a man who says that an alloy of steel and copper has certain properties which enable it to do certain things, that it is and does—and let the world rack him or ruin him, he will not bear false witness to the evidence of his mind! This, Miss Taggart, this sort of spirit, courage and love for truth—as against a sloppy bum who goes around proudly assuring you that he has almost reached the perfection of a lunatic, because he's an artist who hasn't the faintest idea what his art work is or means, he's not restrained by such crude concepts as 'being' or 'meaning’ he's the vehicle of higher mysteries, he doesn't know how he created his work or why, it just came out of him spontaneously, like vomit out of a drunkard, he did not think, he wouldn't stoop to thinking, he just felt it, all he has to do is feel—he feels, the flabby, loose-mouthed, shifty-eyed, drooling, shivering, uncongealed bastard! I, who know what discipline, what effort, what tension of mind, what unrelenting strain upon one's power of clarity are needed to produce a work of art—I, who know that it requires a labor which makes a chain gang look like rest and a severity no army drilling sadist could impose—I'll take the operator of a coal mine over any walking vehicle of higher mysteries. The operator knows that it's not his feelings that keep the coal carts moving under the earth—and he knows what does keep them moving. Feelings? Oh yes, we do feel, he, you and I—we are, in fact, the only people capable of feeling—and we know where our feelings come from. But what we did not know and have delayed learning for too long is the nature of those who claim that they cannot account for their feelings. We did not know what it is that they feel. We are learning it now. It was a costly error. And those most guilty of it, will pay the hardest price—as, in justice, they must. Those most guilty of it were the real artists, who will now see that they are first to be exterminated and that they had prepared the triumph of their own exterminators by helping to destroy their only protectors. For if there is more tragic a fool than the businessman who doesn't know that he's an exponent of man's highest creative spirit—it's the artist who thinks that the businessman is his enemy."

It was true—she thought, when she walked through the streets of the valley, looking with a child's excitement at the shop windows sparkling in the sun—that the businesses here had the purposeful selectiveness of art—and that the art—she thought, when she sat in the darkness of a clapboard concert hall, listening to the controlled violence and the mathematical precision of Halley's music—had the stern discipline of business.

Both had the radiance of engineering—she thought, when she sat among rows of benches under the open sky, watching Kay Ludlow on the stage. It was an experience she had not known since childhood —the experience of being held for three hours by a play that told a story she had not seen before, in lines she had not heard, uttering a theme that had not been picked from the hand-me-downs of the centuries. It was the forgotten delight of being held in rapt attention by the reins of the ingenious, the unexpected, the logical, the purposeful, the new—and of seeing it embodied in a performance of superlative artistry by a woman playing a character whose beauty of spirit matched her own physical perfection.

"That's why I'm here, Miss Taggart," said Kay Ludlow, smiling in answer to her comment, after the performance. "Whatever quality of human greatness I have the talent to portray—that was the quality the outer world sought to degrade. They let me play nothing but symbols of depravity, nothing but harlots, dissipation-chasers and home-wreckers, always to be beaten at the end by the little girl next door, personifying the virtue of mediocrity. They used my talent—for the defamation of itself. That was why I quit."

Not since childhood, thought Dagny, had she felt that sense of exhilaration after witnessing the performance of a play—the sense that life held things worth reaching, not the sense of having studied some aspect of a sewer there had been no reason to see. As the audience filed away into the darkness from the lighted rows of benches, she noticed Ellis Wyatt, Judge Narragansett, Ken Danagger, men who had once been said to despise all forms of art.

The last image she caught, that evening, was the sight of two tall, straight, slender figures walking away together down a trail among the rocks, with the beam of a spotlight flashing once on the gold of their hair. They were Kay Ludlow and Ragnar Danneskjold—and she wondered whether she could bear to return to a world where these were the two doomed to destruction.

The recaptured sense of her own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley—two fearless beings, aged seven and four. They seemed to face life as she had faced it. They did not have the look she had seen in the children of the outer world—a look of fear, half-secretive, half sneering, the look of a child's defense against an adult, the look of a being in the process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred. The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value and as innocent a trust in any stranger's ability to recognize it, they had the eager curiosity that would venture anywhere with the certainty that life held nothing unworthy of or closed to discovery, and they looked as if, should they encounter malevolence, they would reject it contemptuously, not as dangerous, but as stupid, they would not accept it in bruised resignation as the law of existence, "They represent my particular career, Miss Taggart," said the young mother in answer to her comment, wrapping a loaf of fresh bread and smiling at her across the counter. "They're the profession I've chosen to practice, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can't practice successfully in the outer world. I believe you've met my husband, he's the teacher of economics who works as linesman for Dick McNamara. You know, of course, that there can be no collective commitments in this valley and that families or relatives are not allowed to come here, unless each person takes the striker's oath by his own independent conviction. I came here, not merely for the sake of my husband's profession, but for the sake of my own. I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings. I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child's brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he's unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror. You marvel at the difference between my children and those outside, Miss Taggart? Yet the cause is so simple. The cause is that here, in Galt's Gulch, there's no person who would not consider it monstrous ever to confront a child with the slightest suggestion of the irrational."

She thought of the teachers whom the schools of the world had lost —when she looked at the three pupils of Dr. Akston, on the evening of their yearly reunion.

The only other guest he had invited was Kay Ludlow. The six of them sat in the back yard of his house, with the light of the sunset on their faces, and the floor of the valley condensing into a soft blue vapor far below.

She looked at his pupils, at the three pliant, agile figures half stretched on canvas chairs in poses of relaxed contentment, dressed in slacks, windbreakers and open-collared shirts: John Galt, Francisco d'Anconia, Ragnar Danneskjold.

"Don't be astonished, Miss Taggart," said Dr. Akston, smiling, "and don't make the mistake of thinking that these three pupils of mine are some sort of superhuman creatures. They're something much greater and more astounding than that: they're normal men—a thing the world has never seen—and their feat is that they managed to survive as such. It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world's doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries—to remain human, since the human is the rational."

She felt some new quality in Dr. Akston's attitude, some change in the sternness of his usual reserve; he seemed to include her in their circle, as if she were more than a guest. Francisco acted as if her presence at their reunion were natural and to be taken gaily for granted. Galt's face gave no hint of any reaction; his manner was that of a courteous escort who had brought her here at Dr. Akston's request.

She noticed that Dr. Akston's eyes kept coming back to her, as if with the quiet pride of displaying his students to an appreciative observer. His conversation kept returning to a single theme, in the manner of a father who has found a listener interested in his most cherished subject: "You should have seen them, when they were in college, Miss Taggart. You couldn't have found three boys 'conditioned' to such different backgrounds, but—conditioners be damned!—they must have picked one another at first sight, among the thousands on that campus.

Francisco, the richest hen- in the world—Ragnar, the European aristocrat—and John, the self-made man, self-made in every sense, out of nowhere, penniless, parentless, tie-less. Actually, he was the son of a gas-station mechanic at some forsaken crossroads in Ohio, and he had left home at the age of twelve to make his own way—but I've always thought of him as if he had come into the world like Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, who sprang forth from Jupiter's head, fully grown and fully armed. . . . I remember the day when I saw the three of them for the first time. They were sitting at the back of the classroom—I was giving a special course for postgraduate students, so difficult a course that few outsiders ever ventured to attend these particular lectures. Those three looked too young even for freshmen—they were sixteen at the time, as I learned later. At the end of that lecture, John got up to ask me a question. It was a question which, as a teacher, I would have been proud to hear from a student who'd taken six years of philosophy. It was a question pertaining to Plato's metaphysics, which Plato hadn't had the sense to ask of himself. I answered—and I asked John to come to my office after the lecture.

He came—all three of them came—I saw the two others in my anteroom and let them in. I talked to them for an hour—then I cancelled all my appointments and talked to them for the rest of the day. After which, I arranged to let them take that course and receive their credits for it. They took the course. They got the highest grades in the class.

. . . They were majoring in two subjects: physics and philosophy.

Their choice amazed everybody but me: modern thinkers considered it unnecessary to perceive reality, and modern physicists considered it unnecessary to think. I knew better; what amazed me was that these children knew it, too. . . . Robert Stadler was head of the Department of Physics, as I was head of the Department of Philosophy. He and I suspended all rules and restrictions for these three students, we spared them all the routine, unessential courses, we loaded them with nothing but the hardest tasks, and we cleared their way to major in our two subjects within their four years. They worked for it. And, during those four years, they worked for their living, besides. Francisco and Ragnar were receiving allowances from their parents, John had nothing, but all three of them held part-time jobs to earn their own experience and money. Francisco worked in a copper foundry, John worked in a railroad roundhouse, and Ragnar—no, Miss Taggart, Ragnar was not the least, but the most studiously sedate of the three—he worked as clerk in the university library. They had time for everything they wanted, but no time for people or for any communal campus activities. They . . . Ragnar!" he interrupted himself suddenly, sharply. "Don't sit on the ground!"

Danneskjold had slipped down and was now sitting on the grass, with his head leaning against Kay Ludlow's knees. He rose obediently, chuckling. Dr. Akston smiled with a touch of apology.

"It's an old habit of mine," he explained to Dagny. "A 'conditioned' reflex, I guess. I used to tell him that in those college years, when I'd catch him sitting on the ground in my back yard, on cold, foggy evenings—he was reckless that way, he made me worry, he should have known it was dangerous and—"

He stopped abruptly; he read in Dagny's startled eyes the same thought as his own: the thought of the kind of dangers the adult Ragnar had chosen to face. Dr. Akston shrugged, spreading his hands in a gesture of helpless self-mockery. Kay Ludlow smiled at him in understanding.

"My house stood just outside the campus," he continued, sighing, "on a tall bluff over Lake Erie. We spent many evenings together, the four of us. We would sit just like this, in my back yard, on the nights of early fall or in the spring, only instead of this granite mountainside, we had the spread of the lake before us, stretching off into a peacefully unlimited distance. I had to work harder on those nights than in any classroom, answering all the questions they'd ask me, discussing the kind of issues they'd raise. About midnight, I would fix some hot chocolate and force them to drink it—the one thing I suspected was that they never took time to eat properly—and then we'd go on talking, while the lake vanished into solid darkness and the sky seemed lighter than the earth. There were a few tunes when we stayed there till I noticed suddenly that the sky was turning darker and the lake was growing pale and we were within a few sentences of daylight. I should have known better, I knew that they weren't getting enough sleep as it was, but I forgot it occasionally, I lost my sense of time—you see, when they were there, I always felt as ft it were early morning and a long, inexhaustible day were stretching ahead before us. They never spoke of what they wished they might do in the future, they never wondered whether some mysterious omnipotence had favored them with some unknowable talent to achieve the things they wanted—they spoke of what they would do. Does affection tend to make one a coward? I know that the only times I felt fear were occasional moments when I listened to them and thought of what the world was becoming and what they would have to encounter in the future. Fear?

Yes—but it was more than fear. It was the kind of emotion that makes men capable of killing—when I thought that the purpose of the world's trend was to destroy these children, that these three sons of mine were marked for immolation. Oh yes, I would have killed—but whom was there to kill? It was everyone and no one, there was no single enemy, no center and no villain, it was not the simpering social worker incapable of earning a penny or the thieving bureaucrat scared of his own shadow, it was the whole of the earth rolling into an obscenity of horror, pushed by the hand of every would-be decent man who believed that need is holier than ability, and pity is holier than justice. But these were only occasional moments. It was not my constant feeling. I listened to my children and I knew that nothing would defeat them. I looked at them, as they sat in my back yard, and beyond my house there were the tall, dark buildings of what was still a monument to unenslaved thought—the Patrick Henry University—and farther in the distance there were the lights of Cleveland, the orange glow of steel mills behind batteries of smokestacks, the twinkling red dots of radio towers, the long white rays of airports on the black edge of the sky—and I thought that in the name of any greatness that had ever existed and moved this world, the greatness of which they were the last descendants, they would win, . . . I remember one night when I noticed that John had been silent for a long time —and I saw that he had fallen asleep, stretched there on the ground.

The two others confessed that he had not slept for three days. I sent the two of them home at once, but I didn't have the heart to disturb him. It was a warm spring night, I brought a blanket to cover him, and I let him sleep where he was. I sat there beside him till morning—and as I watched his face in the starlight, then the first ray of the sun on his untroubled forehead and closed eyelids, what I experienced was not a prayer, I do not pray, but that state of spirit at which a prayer is a misguided attempt: a full, confident, affirming self-dedication to my love of the right, to the certainty that the right would win and that this boy would have the kind of future he deserved." He moved his arm, pointing to the valley. "I did not expect it to be as great as this—or as hard."

It had grown dark and the mountains had blended with the sky.

Hanging detached in space, there were the lights of the valley below them, the red breath of Stockton's foundry above, and the lighted string of windows of Mulligan's house, like a railroad car imbedded in the sky.

"I did have a rival," said Dr. Akston slowly. "It was Robert Stadler.

. . . Don't frown, John—it's past. . . . John- did love him, once.

Well, so did I—no, not quite, but what one felt for a mind like Stadler's was painfully close to love, it was that rarest of pleasures: admiration. No, I did not love him, but he and I had always felt as if we were fellow survivors from some vanishing age or land, in the gibbering swamp of mediocrity around us. The mortal sin of Robert Stadler was that he never identified his proper homeland. . . . He hated stupidity. It was the only emotion I had ever seen him display toward people—a biting, bitter, weary hatred for any ineptitude that dared to oppose him. He wanted his own way, he wanted to be left alone to pursue it, he wanted to brush people out of his path—and he never identified the means to it or the nature of his path and of his enemies. He took a short cut. Are you smiling, Miss Taggart?

You hate him, don't you? Yes, you know the kind of short cut he took. . . . He told you that we were rivals for these three students.

That was true—or rather, that was not the way I thought of it, but I knew that he did. Well, if we were rivals, I had one advantage: I knew why they needed both our professions; he never understood their interest in mine. He never understood its importance to himself—which, incidentally, is what destroyed him. But in those years he was still alive enough to grasp at these three students. 'Grasp' was the word for it. Intelligence being the only value he worshipped, he clutched them as if they were a private treasure of his own. He had always been a very lonely man. I think that in the whole of his life, Francisco and Ragnar were his only love, and John was his only passion. It was John whom he regarded as his particular heir, as his future, as his own immortality. John intended to be an inventor, which meant that he was to be a physicist; he was to take his postgraduate course under Robert Stadler. Francisco intended to leave after graduation and go to work; he was to be the perfect blend of both of us, his two intellectual fathers: an industrialist. And Ragnar—you didn't know what profession Ragnar had chosen, Miss Taggart? No, it wasn't stunt pilot, or jungle explorer, or deep-sea diver. It was something much more courageous than these. Ragnar intended to be a philosopher. An abstract, theoretical, academic, cloistered, ivory-tower philosopher. . . .

Yes, Robert Stadler loved them. And yet—I have said that I would have killed to protect them, only there was no one to kill. If that were the solution—which, of course, it isn't—the man to kill was Robert Stadler. Of any one person, of any single guilt for the evil which is now destroying the world—his was the heaviest guilt. He had the mind to know better. His was the only name of honor and achievement, used to sanction the rule of the looters. He was the man who delivered science into the power of the looters' guns. John did not expect it. Neither did I. . . . John came back for his postgraduate course in physics. But he did not finish it. He left, on the day when Robert Stadler endorsed the establishment of a State Science Institute.

I met Stadler by chance in a corridor of the university, as he came out of his office after his last conversation with John. He looked changed.

I hope that I shall never have to see again a change of that kind in a man's face. He saw me approaching—and he did not know, but I knew, what made him whirl upon me and cry, Tin so sick of all of you Impractical idealists!1 I turned away. I knew that I had heard a man pronounce a death sentence upon himself. . . . Miss Taggart, do you remember the question you asked me about my three pupils?"

"Yes," she whispered.

"I could gather, from your question, the nature of what Robert Stadler had said to you about them. Tell me, why did he speak of them at all?"

He saw the faint movement of her bitter smile. "He told me their story as a justification for his belief in the futility of human intelligence. He told it to me as an example of his disillusioned hope.

Theirs was the kind of ability,' he said, 'one expects to see, in the future, changing the course of the world'."

"Well, haven't they done so?"

She nodded, slowly, holding her head inclined for a long moment hi acquiescence and in homage.

"What I want you to understand, Miss Taggart, is the full evil of those who claim to have become convinced that this earth, by its nature, is a realm of malevolence where the good has no chance to win. Let them check their premises. Let them check their standards of value. Let them check—before they grant themselves the unspeakable license of evil-as-necessity—whether they know what is the good and what are the conditions it requires. Robert Stadler now believes that intelligence is futile and that human life can be nothing but irrational. Did he expect John Galt to become a great scientist, willing to work under the orders of Dr. Floyd Ferris? Did he expect Francisco d'Anconia to become a great industrialist, willing to produce under the orders and for the benefit of Wesley Mouch? Did he expect Ragnar Danneskjold to become a great philosopher, willing to preach, under the orders of Dr. Simon Pritchett, that there is no mind and that might is right? Would that have been a future which Robert Stadler would have considered rational? I want you to observe, Miss Taggart, that those who cry the loudest about their disillusionment, about the failure of virtue, the futility of reason, the impotence of logic—are those who have achieved the full, exact, logical result of the ideas they preached, so mercilessly logical that they dare not identify it. In a world that proclaims the non-existence of the mind, the moral righteousness of rule by brute force, the penalizing of the competent in favor of the incompetent, the sacrifice of the best to the worst —in such a world, the best have to turn against society and have to become its deadliest enemies. In such a world John Galt, the man of incalculable intellectual power, will remain an unskilled laborer—Francisco d'Anconia, the miraculous producer of wealth, will become a wastrel—and Ragnar Danneskjold, the man of enlightenment, will become the man of violence. Society—and Dr. Robert Stadler—have achieved everything they advocated. What complaint do they now have to make? That the universe is irrational? Is it?"

He smiled; his smile had the pitiless gentleness of certainty.

"Every man builds his world in his own image," he said. "He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.

If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence—by his own choice. Whoever preserves a single thought uncorrupted by any concession to the will of others, whoever brings into reality a matchstick or a patch of garden made in the image of his thought—he, and to that extent, is a man, and that extent is the sole measure of his virtue. They"—he pointed at his pupils—"made no concessions. This"—he pointed at the valley—"is the measure of what they preserved and of what they are. . . . Now I can repeat my answer to the question you asked me, knowing that you will understand it fully. You asked me whether I was proud of the way my three sons had turned out. I am more proud than I had ever hoped to be. I am proud of their every action, of their every goal—and of every value they've chosen. And this, Dagny, is my full answer."

The sudden sound of her first name was pronounced in the tone of a father; he spoke his last two sentences, looking, not at her, but at Galt.

She saw Galt answering him by an open glance held steady for an instant, like a signal of affirmation. Then Galt's eyes moved to hers.

She saw him looking at her as if she bore the unspoken title that hung in the silence between them, the title Dr. Akston had granted her, but had not pronounced and none of the others had caught—she saw, in Galt's eyes, a glance of amusement at her shock, of support and, incredibly, of tenderness.

D'Anconia Copper No. I was a small cut on the face of the mountain, that looked as if a knife had made a few angular slashes, leaving shelves of rock, red as a wound, on the reddish-brown flank.

The sun beat down upon it. Dagny stood at the edge of a path, holding on to Galt's arm on one side and to Francisco's on the other, the wind blowing against their faces and out over the valley, two thousand feet below.

This—she thought, looking at the mine—was the story of human wealth written across the mountains: a few pine trees hung over the cut, contorted by the storms that had raged through the wilderness for centuries, six men worked on the shelves, and an inordinate amount of complex machinery traced delicate lines against the sky; the machinery did most of the work.

She noticed that Francisco was displaying his domain to Galt as much as to her, as much or more. "You haven't seen it since last year, John. . . . John, wait till you see it a year from now. I'll be through, outside, in just a few months—and then this will be my full-time job."

"Hell, no, John!" he said, laughing, in answer to a question—but she caught suddenly the particular quality of his glance whenever it rested on Galt: it was the quality she had seen in his eyes when he had stood in her room, clutching the edge of a table to outlive an unlivable moment; he had looked as if he were seeing someone before him; it was Galt, she thought; it was Galt's image that had carried him through.

Some part of her felt a dim dread: the effort which Francisco had made in that moment to accept her loss and his rival, as the payment demanded of him for his battle, had cost him so much that he was now unable to suspect the truth Dr. Akston had guessed. What will it do to him when he learns?—she wondered, and felt a bitter voice reminding her that there would, perhaps, never be any truth of this kind to learn.

Some part of her felt a dim tension as she watched the way Galt looked at Francisco: it was an open, simple, unreserved glance of surrender to an unreserved feeling. She felt the anxious wonder she had never fully named or dismissed: wonder whether this feeling would bring him down to the ugliness of renunciation.

But most of her mind seemed swept by some enormous sense of release, as if she were laughing at all doubts. Her glance kept going back over the path they had traveled to get here, over the two exhausting miles of a twisted trail that ran, like a precarious corkscrew, from the tip of her feet down to the floor of the valley. Her eyes kept studying it, her mind racing with some purpose of its own.

Brush, pines and a clinging carpet of moss went climbing from the green slopes far below, up the granite ledges. The moss and the brush vanished gradually, but the pines went on, struggling upward in thinning strands, till only a few dots of single trees were left, rising up the naked rock toward the white sunbursts of snow in the crevices at the peaks. She looked at the spectacle of the most ingenious mining machinery she had ever seen, then at the trail where the plodding hoofs and swaying shapes of mules provided the most ancient form of transportation.

"Francisco," she asked, pointing, "who designed the machines?"

"They're just adaptations of standard equipment."

"Who designed them?"

"I did. We don't have many men to spare. We had to make up for it."

"You're wasting an unconscionable amount of manpower and time, carting your ore on muleback. You ought to build a railroad down to the valley."

She was looking down and did not notice the sudden, eager shot of his glance to her face or the sound of caution in his voice: "I know it, but it's such a difficult job that the mine's output won't justify it at present."

"Nonsense! It's much simpler than it looks. There's a pass to the east where there's an easier grade and softer stone, I watched it on the way up, it wouldn't take so many curves, three miles of rail or less would do it."

She was pointing east, she did not notice the intensity with which the two men were watching her face.

"Just a narrow-gauge track is all you’ll need . . . like the first railroads . . . that's where the first railroads started—at mines, only they were coal mines. . . . Look, do you see that ridge? There's plenty of clearance for a three-foot gauge, you wouldn't need to do any blasting or widening. Do you see where there's a slow rise for a stretch of almost half a mile? That would be no worse than a four per cent grade, any engine could manage it." She was speaking with a swift, bright certainty, conscious of nothing but the joy of performing her natural function in her natural world where nothing could take precedence over the act of offering a solution to a problem. "The road will pay for itself within three years. I think, at a rough glance, that the costliest part of the job will be a couple of steel trestles—and there's one spot where I might have to blast a tunnel, but it's only for a hundred feet or less. I'll need a steel trestle to throw the track across that gorge and bring it here, but it's not as hard as it looks—let me show you, have you got a piece of paper?"

She did not notice with what speed Galt produced a notebook and a pencil and thrust them into her hands—she seized them, as if she expected them to be there, as if she were giving orders on a construction site where details of this kind were not to delay her.

"Let me give you a rough idea of what I mean. If we drive diagonal piles into the rock"—she was sketching rapidly—"the actual steel span would be only six hundred feet long—it would cut off this last half mile of your corkscrew turns—I could have the rail laid in three months and—"

She stopped. When she looked up at their faces, the fire had gone out of hers. She crumpled her sketch and flung it aside into the red dust of the gravel. "Oh, what for?" she cried, the despair breaking out for the first time. "To build three miles of railroad and abandon a transcontinental system!"

The two men were looking at her, she saw no reproach in their faces, only a look of understanding which was almost compassion.

"I'm sorry," she said quietly, dropping her eyes.

"If you change your mind," said Francisco, "I'll hire you on the spot-—or Midas will give you a loan in five minutes to finance that railroad, if you want to own it yourself."

She shook her head. "I can't . . ." she whispered, "not yet . . ."

She raised her eyes, knowing that they knew the nature of her despair and that it was useless to hide her struggle. "I've tried it once," she said. "I've tried to give it up . . . I know what it will mean . . .

I'll think of it with every crosstie I'll see laid here, with every spike driven . . . I'll think of that other tunnel and . . . and of Nat Taggart's bridge. . . . Oh, if only I didn't have to hear about it! If only I could stay here and never know what they're doing to the railroad, and never learn when it goes!"

"You'll have to hear about it," said Galt; it was that ruthless tone, peculiarly his, which sounded implacable by being simple, devoid of any emotional value, save the quality of respect for facts. "You'll hear the whole course of the last agony of Taggart Transcontinental.

You'll hear about every wreck. You'll hear about every discontinued train. You'll hear about every abandoned line. You'll hear about the collapse of the Taggart Bridge. Nobody stays in this valley except by a full, conscious choice based on a full, conscious knowledge of every fact involved in his decision. Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever."

She looked at him, her head lifted, knowing what chance he was rejecting. She thought that no man of the outer world would have said this to her at this moment—she thought of the world's code that worshipped white lies as an act of mercy—she felt a stab of revulsion against that code, suddenly seeing its full ugliness for the first time—she felt an enormous pride for the tight, clean face of the man before her—he saw the shape of her mouth drawn firm in self-control, yet softened by some tremulous emotion, while she answered quietly, "Thank you. You're right."

"You don't have to answer me now," he said. "You'll tell me when you've decided. There's still a week left."

"Yes," she said calmly, "just one more week."

He turned, picked up her crumpled sketch, folded it neatly and slipped it into his pocket.

"Dagny," said Francisco, "when you weigh your decision, consider the first time you quit, if you wish, but consider everything about it.

In this valley, you won't have to torture yourself by shingling roofs and building paths that lead nowhere."

"Tell me," she asked suddenly, "how did you find out where I was, that time?'1

He smiled. "It was John who told me. The destroyer, remember?

You wondered why the destroyer had not sent anyone after you. But he had. It was he who sent me there."

"He sent you?"

"Yes."

"What did he say to you?"

"Nothing much. Why?"

"What did he say? Do you remember the exact words?"

"Yes, I do remember. He said, 'If you want your chance, take it.

You’ve earned it.' I remember, because—" He turned to Galt with the untroubled frown of a slight, casual puzzle. "John, I never quite understood why you said it. Why that? Why—my chance?"

"Do you mind if I don't answer you now?"

"No, but—"

Someone hailed him from the ledges of the mine, and he went off swiftly, as if the subject required no further attention.

She was conscious of the long span of moments she took while turning her head to Galt. She knew that she would find him looking at her. She could read nothing in his eyes, except a hint of derision, as if he knew what answer she was seeking and that she would not find it in his face.

"You gave him a chance that you wanted?"

"I could have no chance till he'd had every chance possible to him."

"How did you know what he had earned?"

"I had been questioning him about you for ten years, every time I could, in every way, from every angle. No, he did not tell me—it was the way he spoke of you that did. He didn't want to speak, but he spoke too eagerly, eagerly and reluctantly together—and then I knew that it had not been just a childhood friendship. I knew how much he had given up for the strike and how desperately he hadn't given it up forever. I? I was merely questioning him about one of our most important future strikers—as I questioned him about many others,"

The hint of derision remained in his eyes; he knew that she had wanted to hear this, but that this was not the answer to the one question she feared.

She looked from his face to Francisco's approaching figure, not hiding from herself any longer that her sudden, heavy, desolate anxiety was the fear that Galt might throw the three of them into the hopeless waste of self-sacrifice.

Francisco approached, looking at her thoughtfully, as if weighing some question of his own, but some question that gave a sparkle of reckless gaiety to his eyes.

"Dagny, there's only one week left," he said. "If you decide to go back, it will be the last, for a long time," There was no reproach and no sadness in his voice, only some softened quality as sole evidence of emotion. "If you leave now—oh yes, you'll still come back —but it won't be soon. And I—in a few months, I'll come to live here permanently, so if you go, I won't see you again, perhaps for years.

I'd like you to spend this last week with me. I'd like you to move to my house. As my guest, nothing else, for no reason, except that I'd like you to."

He said it simply, as if nothing were or could be hidden among the three of them. She saw no sign of astonishment in Galt's face. She felt some swift tightening in her chest, something hard, reckless and almost vicious that had the quality of a dark excitement driving her blindly into action.

"But I'm an employee," she said, with an odd smile, looking at Galt, "I have a job to finish."

"I won't hold you to it," said Galt, and she felt anger at the tone of his voice, a tone that granted her no hidden significance and answered nothing but the literal meaning of her words. "You can quit the job any time you wish. It's up to you."

"No, it isn't. I'm a prisoner here. Don't you remember? I'm to take orders. I have no preferences to follow, no wishes to express, no decisions to make. I want the decision to be yours."

"You want it to be mine?"

"Yes!"

"You've expressed a wish."

The mockery of his voice was in its seriousness—and she threw at him defiantly, not smiling, as if daring him to continue pretending that he did not understand: "All right. That's what I wish!"

He smiled, as at a child's complex scheming which he had long since seen through. "Very well." But he did not smile, as he said, turning to Francisco, "Then—no."

The defiance toward an adversary who was the sternest of teachers, was all that Francisco had read in her face. He shrugged, regretfully, but gaily. "You're probably right. If you can't prevent her from going back—nobody can."

She was not hearing Francisco's words. She was stunned by the magnitude of the relief that hit her at the sound of Galt's answer, a relief that told her the magnitude of the fear it swept away. She knew, only after it was over, what had hung for her on his decision; she knew that had his answer been different, it would have destroyed the valley in her eyes.

She wanted to laugh, she wanted to embrace them both and laugh with them in celebration., it did not seem to matter whether she would stay here or return to the world, a week was like an endless span of time, either course seemed flooded by an unchanging sunlight—and no struggle was hard, she thought, if this was the nature of existence. The relief did not come from the knowledge that he would not renounce her, nor from arty assurance that she would win—the relief came from the certainty that he would always remain what he was.

"I don't know whether I'll go back to the world or not," she said soberly, but her voice was trembling with a subdued violence, which was pure gaiety. "I'm sorry that I'm still unable to make a decision.

I'm certain of only one thing: that I won't be afraid to decide."

Francisco took the sudden brightness of her face as proof that the incident had been of no significance. But Galt understood; he glanced at her and the glance was part amusement, part contemptuous reproach.

He said nothing, until they were alone, walking down the trail to the valley. Then he glanced at her again, the amusement sharper in his eyes, and said, "You had to put me to a test in order to learn whether I'd fall to the lowest possible stage of altruism?"

She did not answer, but looked at him in open, undefensive admission.

He chuckled and looked away, and a few steps later said slowly, in the tone of a quotation, "Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever."

Part of the intensity of her relief—she thought, as she walked silently by his side—was the shock of a contrast: she had seen, with the sudden, immediate vividness of sensory perception, an exact picture of what the code of self-sacrifice would have meant, if enacted by the three of them. Galt, giving up the woman he wanted, for the sake of his friend, faking his greatest feeling out of existence and himself out of her life, no matter what the cost to him and to her, then dragging the rest of his years through the waste of the unreached and unfulfilled —she, turning for consolation to a second choice, faking a love she did not feel, being willing to fake, since her will to self-deceit was the essential required for Galt's self-sacrifice, then living out her years in hopeless longing, accepting, as relief for an unhealing wound, some moments of weary affection, plus the tenet that love is futile and happiness is not to be found on earth—Francisco, struggling in the elusive fog of a counterfeit reality, his life a fraud staged by the two who were dearest to him and most trusted, struggling to grasp what was missing from his happiness, struggling down the brittle scaffold of a lie over the abyss of the discovery that he was not the man she loved, but only a resented substitute, half-charity-patient, half-crutch, his perceptiveness becoming his danger and only his surrender to lethargic stupidity protecting the shoddy structure of his joy, struggling and giving up and settling into the dreary routine of the conviction that fulfillment is impossible to man—the three of them, who had had all the gifts of existence spread out before them, ending up as embittered hulks, who cry in despair that life is frustration—the frustration of not being able to make unreality real.

But this—she thought—was men's moral code in the outer world, a code that told them to act on the premise of one another's weakness, deceit and stupidity, and this was the pattern of their lives, this struggle through a fog of the pretended and unacknowledged, this belief that facts are not solid or final, this state where, denying any form to reality, men stumble through life, unreal and unformed, and die having never been born. Here—she thought, looking down through green branches at the glittering roofs of the valley—one dealt with men as clear and firm as sun and rocks, and the immense light-heartedness of her relief came from the knowledge that no battle was hard, no decision was dangerous where there was no soggy uncertainty, no shapeless evasion to encounter.

"Did it ever occur to you, Miss Taggart," said Galt, in the casual tone of an abstract discussion, but as if he had known her thoughts, "that there is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires—if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical? There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another—if men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the unearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that the destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't. The businessman who wishes to gain a market by throttling a superior competitor, the worker who wants a share of his employer's wealth, the artist who envies a rival's higher talent—they're all wishing facts out of existence, and destruction is the only means of their wish. If they pursue it, they will not achieve a market, a fortune or an immortal fame—they will merely destroy production, employment and art. A wish for the irrational is not to be achieved, whether the sacrificial victims are willing or not. But men will not cease to desire the impossible and will not lose their longing to destroy—so long as self-destruction and self-sacrifice are preached to them as the practical means of achieving the happiness of the recipients."

He glanced at her and added slowly, a slight emphasis as sole change in the impersonal tone of his voice, "No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy. You should have had more respect for him and for me than to fear what you had feared."

She did not answer, she felt as if a word would overfill the fullness of this moment, she merely turned to him with a look of acquiescence that was disarmed, childishly humble and would have been an apology but for its shining joy, He smiled—in amusement, in understanding, almost in comradeship of the things they shared and in sanction of the things she felt.

They went on in silence, and it seemed to her that this was a summer day out of a carefree youth she had never lived, it was just a walk through the country by two people who were free for the pleasure of motion and sunlight, with no unsolved burdens left to carry. Her sense of lightness blended with the weightless sense of walking downhill, as if she needed no effort to walk, only to restrain herself from flying, and she walked, fighting the speed of the downward pull, her body leaning back, the wind blowing her skirt like a sail to brake her motion.

They parted at the bottom of the trail; he went to keep an appointment with Midas Mulligan, while she went to Hammond's Market with a list of items for the evening's dinner as the sole concern of her world.

His wife—she thought, letting herself hear consciously the word Dr. Akston had not pronounced, the word she had long since felt, but never named—for three weeks she had been his wife in every sense but one, and that final one was still to be earned, but this much was real and today she could permit herself to know it, to feel it, to live with that one thought for this one day.

The groceries, which Lawrence Hammond was lining up at her order on the polished counter of his store, had never appeared to her as such shining objects—and, intent upon them, she was only half-conscious of some disturbing element, of something that was wrong but that her mind was too full to notice. She noticed it only when she saw Hammond pause, frown and stare upward, at the sky beyond his open store front.

In time with his words: "I think somebody's trying to repeat your stunt, Miss Taggart," she realized that it was the sound of an airplane overhead and that it had been there for some time, a sound which was not to be heard in the valley after the first of this month.

They rushed out to the street. The small silver cross of a plane was circling above the ring of mountains, like a sparkling dragonfly about to brush the peaks with its wings.

"What does he think he's doing?" said Lawrence Hammond.

There were people at the doors of the shops and standing still all down the street, looking up.

"Is . . . is anyone expected?" she asked and was astonished by the anxiety of her own voice.

"No," said Hammond. "Everyone who's got any business here is here." He did not sound disturbed, but grimly curious.

The plane was now a small dash, like a silver cigarette, streaking against the flanks of the mountains: it had dropped lower.

"Looks like a private monoplane," said Hammond, squinting against the sun. "Not an army model."

"Will the ray screen hold out?" she asked tensely, in a tone of defensive resentment against the approach of an enemy.

He chuckled. "Hold out?"

"Will he see us?"

"That screen is safer than an underground vault, Miss Taggart. As you ought to know."

The plane rose, and for a moment it was only a bright speck, like a bit of paper blown by the wind—it hovered uncertainly., then dropped down again into another circling spiral.

"What in hell is he after?" said Hammond.

Her eyes shot suddenly to his face.

"He's looking for something," said Hammond. "What?"

"Is there a telescope somewhere?"

"Why—yes, at the airfield, but—" He was about to ask what was the matter with her voice—but she was running across the road, down the path to the airfield, not knowing that she was running, driven by a reason she had no time and no courage to name.

She found Dwight Sanders at the small telescope of the control tower; he was watching the plane attentively, with a puzzled frown.

"Let me see it!" she snapped.

She clutched the metal tube, she pressed her eye to the lens, her hand guiding the tube slowly to follow the plane—then he saw that her hand had stopped, but her fingers did not open and her face remained bent over the telescope, pressed to the lens, until he looked closer and saw that the lens was pressed to her forehead.

"What's the matter, Miss Taggart?"

She raised her head slowly.

"Is it anyone you know, Miss Taggart?"

She did not answer. She hurried away, her steps rushing with the zigzagging aimlessness of uncertainty—she dared not run, but she had to escape, she had to hide, she did not know whether she was afraid to be seen by the men around her or by the plane above—the plane whose silver wings bore the number that belonged to Hank Rearden.

She stopped when she stumbled over a rock and fell and noticed that she had been running. She was on a small ledge in the cliffs above the airfield, hidden from the sight of the town, open to the view of the sky. She rose, her hands groping for support along a granite wall, feeling the warmth of the sun on the rock under her palms—she stood, her back pressed to the wall, unable to move or to take her eyes off the plane.

The plane was circling slowly, dipping down, then rising again, struggling—she thought—as she had struggled, to distinguish the sight of a wreck in a hopeless spread of crevices and boulders, an elusive spread neither clear enough to abandon nor to survey. He was searching for the wreck of her plane, he had not given up, and whatever the three weeks of it had cost him, whatever he felt, the only evidence he would give to the world and his only answer was this steady, insistent, monotonous drone of a motor carrying a fragile craft over every deadly foot of an inaccessible chain of mountains.

Through the brilliant purity of the summer air, the plane seemed intimately close, she could see it rock on precarious currents and bank under the thrusts of wind. She could see, and it seemed impossible that so clear a sight was closed to his eyes. The whole of the valley lay below him, flooded by sunlight, flaming with glass panes and green lawns, screaming to be seen—the end of his tortured quest, the fulfillment of more than his wishes, not the wreck of her plane and her body, but her living presence and his freedom—all that he was seeking or had ever sought was now spread open before him, open and waiting, his to be reached by a straight-line dive through the pure, clear air—his and asking nothing of him but the capacity to see. "Hank!" she screamed, waving her arms in desperate signal. "Hank!"

She fell back against the rock, knowing that she had no way to reach him, that she had no power to give him sight, that no power on earth could pierce that screen except his own mind and vision.

Suddenly and for the first time, she felt the screen, not as the most intangible, but as the most grimly absolute barrier in the world.

Slumped against the rock, she watched, in silent resignation, the hopeless circles of the plane's struggle and its motor's uncomplaining cry for help, a cry she had no way to answer. The plane swooped down abruptly, but it was only the start of its final rise, it cut a swift diagonal across the mountains and shot into the open sky. Then, as if caught in the spread of a lake with no shores and no exit, it went sinking slowly and drowning out of sight.

She thought, in bitter compassion, of how much he had failed to see.

And I?—she thought. If she left the valley, the screen would close for her as tightly, Atlantis would descend under a vault of rays more impregnable than the bottom of the ocean, and she, too, would be left to struggle for the things she had not known how to see, she, too, would be left to fight a mirage of primordial savagery, while the reality of all that she desired would never come again within her reach, But the pull of the outer world, the pull that drew her to follow the plane, was not the image of Hank Rearden—she knew that she could not return to him, even if she returned to the world—the pull was the vision of Hank Rearden's courage and the courage of all those still fighting to stay alive. He would not give up the search for her plane, when all others had long since despaired, as he would not give up his mills, as he would not give up any goal he had chosen if a single chance was left. Was she certain that no chance remained for the world of Taggart Transcontinental? Was she certain that the terms of the battle were such that she could not care to win? They were right, the men of Atlantis, they were right to vanish if they knew that they left no value behind them—but until and unless she saw that no chance was untaken and no battle unfought, she had no right to remain among them. This was the question that had lashed her for weeks, but had not driven her to a glimpse of the answer.

She lay awake, through the hours of that night, quietly motionless, following—like an engineer and like Hank Rearden—a process of dispassionate, precise, almost mathematical consideration, with no regard for cost or feeling. The agony which he lived in his plane, she lived it in a soundless cube of darkness, searching, but finding no answer. She looked at the inscriptions on the walls of her room, faintly visible in patches of starlight, but the help those men had called in their darkest hour was not hers to call.

"Yes or no, Miss Taggart?"

She looked at the faces of the four men in the soft twilight of Mulligan's living room: Galt, whose face had the serene, impersonal attentiveness of a scientist—Francisco, whose face was made expressionless by the hint of a smile, the kind of smile that would fit either answer—Hugh Akston who looked compassionately gentle—Midas Mulligan, who had asked the question with no touch of rancor in his voice. Somewhere two thousand miles away, at this sunset hour, the page of a calendar was springing into light over the roofs of New York, saying: June 28—and it seemed to her suddenly that she was seeing it, as if it were hanging over the heads of these men.

"I have one more day," she said steadily. "Will you let me have it? I think I've reached my decision, but I am not fully certain of it and I'll need all the certainty possible to me."

"Of course," said Mulligan. "You have, in fact, until morning of the day after tomorrow. We'll wait."

"We'll wait after that as well," said Hugh Akston, "though in your absence, if that be necessary."

She stood by the window, facing them, and she felt a moment's satisfaction in the knowledge that she stood straight, that her hands did not tremble, that her voice sounded as controlled, uncomplaining and unpitying as theirs; it gave her a moment's feeling of a bond to them.

"If any part of your uncertainty,” said Galt, "is a conflict between your heart and your mind—follow your mind."

"Consider the reasons which make us certain that we are right," said Hugh Akston, "but not the fact that we are certain. If you are not convinced, ignore our certainty. Don't be tempted to substitute our judgment for your own,"

"Don't rely on our knowledge of what's best for your future," said Mulligan. "We do know, but it can't be best until you know it."

"Don't consider our interests or desires," said Francisco. "You have no duty to anyone but yourself."

She smiled, neither sadly nor gaily, thinking that none of it was the sort of advice she would have been given in the outer world. And knowing how desperately they wished to help her where no help was possible, she felt it was her part to give them reassurance.

"I forced my way here," she said quietly, "and I was to bear responsibility for the consequences. I'm bearing it."

Her reward was to see Galt smile; the smile was like a military decoration bestowed upon her.

Looking away, she remembered suddenly Jeff Alien, the tramp aboard the Comet, in the moment when she had admired him for attempting to tell her that he knew where he was going, to spare her the burden of his aimlessness. She smiled faintly, thinking that she had now experienced it in both roles and knew that no action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice. She felt an odd calm, almost a confident repose; she knew that it was tension, but the tension of a great clarity. She caught herself thinking: She's functioning well in an emergency, I'll be all right with her—and realized that she was thinking of herself.

"Let it go till day after tomorrow, Miss Taggart," said Midas Mulligan. "Tonight you're still here."

"Thank you," she said.

She remained by the window, while they went on discussing the valley's business; it was their closing conference of the month. They had just finished dinner—and she thought of her first dinner in this house a month ago; she was wearing, as she had then worn, the gray suit that belonged in her office, not the peasant skirt that had been so easy to wear hi the sun. I'm still here tonight, she thought, her hand pressed possessively to the window sill.

The sun had not yet vanished beyond the mountains, but the sky was an even, deep, deceptively clear blue that blended with the blue of invisible clouds into a single spread, hiding the sun; only the edges of the clouds were outlined by a thin thread of flame, and it looked like a glowing, twisted net of neon tubing, she thought . . . like a chart of winding rivers . . . like . . . like the map of a railroad traced in white fire on the sky.

She heard Mulligan giving Galt the names of those who were not returning to the outer world. "We have jobs for all of them," said Mulligan. "In fact, there's only ten or twelve men who're going back this year—mostly to finish off, convert whatever they own and come here permanently. I think this was our last vacation month, because before another year is over we'll all be living in this valley."

"Good," said Galt.

"We'll have to, from the way things are going outside."

"Yes."

"Francisco," said Mulligan, "you'll come back in a few months?"

"In November at the latest," said Francisco. "I'll send you word by short wave, when I'm ready to come back—will you turn the furnace on in my house?"

"I will," said Hugh Akston. "And I'll have your supper ready for you when you arrive."

"John, I take it for granted," said Mulligan, "that you're not returning to New York this time."

Galt took a moment to glance at him, then answered evenly, "I have not decided it yet."

She noticed the shocked swiftness with which Francisco and Mulligan bent forward to stare at him—and the slowness with which Hugh Akston's glance moved to his face; Akston did not seem to be astonished.

"You're not thinking of going back to that hell for another year, are you?" said Mulligan.

"I am."

"But—good God, John!—what for?"

"I'll tell you, when I've decided."

"But there's nothing left there for you to do. We got everybody we knew of or can hope to know of. Our list is completed, except for Hank Rearden—and we'll get him before the year is over—and Miss Taggart, if she so chooses. That's all. Your job is done. There's nothing to look for, out there—except the final crash, when the roof comes down on their heads."

"I know it."

"John, yours is the one head I don't want to be there when it happens."

"You've never had to worry about me."

"But don't you realize what stage they're coming to? They're only one step away from open violence—hell, they've taken the step and sealed and declared it long ago!—but in one more moment they'll see the full reality of what they've taken, exploding in their damned faces—plain, open, blind, arbitrary, blood shedding violence, running amuck, hitting anything and anyone at random. That's what I don't want to see you in the midst of."

"I can take care of myself."

"John, there's no reason for you to take the risk," said Francisco.

"What risk?"

"The looters are. worried about the men who've disappeared. They're suspecting something. You, of all people, shouldn't stay there any longer. There's always a chance that they might discover just who and what you are."

"There's some chance. Not much."

"But there's no reason whatever to take it. There's nothing left that Ragnar and I can't finish."

Hugh Akston was watching them silently, leaning back in his chair; his face had that look of intensity, neither quite bitterness nor quite a SOS smile, with which a man watches a progression that interests him, but that lags a few steps behind his vision.

"If I go back," said Galt, "it won't be for our work. It will be to win the only thing I want from the world for myself, now that the work is done. I've taken nothing from the world and I've wanted nothing. But there's one thing which it's still holding and which is mine and which I won't let it have. No, I don't intend to break my oath, I won't deal with the looters, I won't be of any value or help to anyone out there, neither to looters nor neutrals—nor scabs. If I go, it won't be for anyone's sake but mine—and I don't think I'm risking my life, but if I am—well, I'm now free to risk it."

He was not looking at her, but she had to turn away and stand pressed against the window frame, because her hands were trembling.

"But, John!" cried Mulligan, waving his arm at the valley, "if anything happens to you, what would we—" He stopped abruptly and guiltily.

Galt chuckled. "What were you about to say?" Mulligan waved his hand sheepishly, in a gesture of dismissal. "Were you about to say that if anything happens to me, I'll die as the worst failure in the world?"

"All right," said Mulligan guiltily, "I won't say it. I won't say that we couldn't get along without you—we can, I won't beg you to stay here for our sake—I didn't think I'd ever revert to that rotten old plea, but, boy!

—what a temptation it was, I can almost see why people do it. I know that whatever it is you want, if you wish to risk your life, that's all there is to it—but I'm thinking only that it's . . . oh God, John, it's such a valuable life!"

Galt smiled. "I know it. That's why I don't think I'm risking it—I think I'll win."

Francisco was now silent, he was watching Galt intently, with a frown of wonder, not as if he had found an answer, but as if he had suddenly glimpsed a question.

"Look, John," said Mulligan, "since you haven't decided whether you'll go—you haven't decided it yet, have you?"

"No, not yet."

"Since you haven't, would you let me remind you of a few things, just for you to consider?"

"Go ahead."

"It's the chance dangers that I'm afraid of—the senseless, unpredictable dangers of a world falling apart. Consider the physical risks of complex machinery in the hands of blind fools and fear-crazed cowards.

Just think of their railroads—you'd be taking a chance on some such horror as that Winston tunnel incident every time you stepped aboard a train—and there will be more incidents of that kind, coming faster and faster. They'll reach the stage where no day will pass without a major wreck."

"I know it."

"And the same will be happening in every other industry, wherever machines are used—the machines which they thought could replace our minds. Plane crashes, oil tank explosions, blast-furnace break-outs, high-tension wire electrocutions, subway cave-ins and trestle collapses —they'll see them all. The very machines that had made their life so safe, will now make it a continuous peril."

"I know it."

"I know that you know it, but have you considered it in every specific detail? Have you allowed yourself to visualize it? I want you to see the exact picture of what it is that you propose to enter—before you decide whether anything can justify your entering it. You know that the cities will be hit worst of all. The cities were made by the railroads and will go with them."

"That's right."

"When the rails are cut, the city of New York will starve in two days.

That's all the supply of food it's got. It's fed by a continent three thousand miles long. How will they carry food to New York? By directive and oxcart? But first, before it happens, they'll go through the whole of the agony—through the shrinking, the shortages, the hunger riots, the stampeding violence in the midst of the growing stillness."

"They will."

"They'll lose their airplanes first, then their automobiles, then their trucks, then their horse carts."

"They will."

"Their factories will stop, then their furnaces and their radios. Then their electric light system will go."

"It will."

"There's only a worn thread holding that continent together. There will be one train a day, then one train a week—then the Taggart Bridge will collapse and—"

"No, it won't!"

It was her voice and they whirled to her. Her face was white, but calmer than it had been when she had answered them last.

Slowly, Galt rose to his feet and inclined his head, as in acceptance of a verdict. "You've made your decision," he said.

"I have."

"Dagny," said Hugh Akston, "I'm sorry." He spoke softly, with effort, as if his words were struggling and failing to fill the silence of the room. "I wish it were possible not to see this happen, I would have preferred anything—except to see you stay here by default of the courage of your convictions."

She spread her hands, palms out, her arms at her sides, in a gesture of simple frankness, and said, addressing them all, her manner so calm that she could afford to show emotion, "I want you to know this: I have wished it were possible for me to die in one more month, so that I could spend it in this valley. This is how much I've wanted to remain. But so long as I choose to go on living, I can't desert a battle which I think is mine to fight"

"Of course," said Mulligan respectfully, "if you still think it."

"If you want to know the one reason that's taking me back, 111 tell you; I cannot bring myself to abandon to destruction all the greatness of the world, all that which was mine and yours, which was made by us and is still ours by right—because I cannot believe that men can refuse to see, that they can remain blind and deaf to us forever, when the truth is ours and their lives depend on accepting it. They still love their lives—and that is the uncorrupted remnant of their minds. So long as men desire to live, I cannot lose my battle."

"Do they?" said Hugh Akston softly. "Do they desire it? No, don't answer me now. I know that the answer was the hardest thing for any of us to grasp and to accept. Just take that question back with you, as the last premise left for you to check."

"You're leaving as our friend," said Midas Mulligan, "and we'll be fighting everything you'll do, because we know you're wrong, but it's not you that we'll be damning."

"You'll come back," said Hugh Akston, "because yours is an error of knowledge, not a moral failure, not an act of surrender to evil, but only the last act of being victim to your own virtue. We'll wait for you—and, Dagny, when you come back, you will have discovered that there need never be any conflict among your desires, nor so tragic a clash of values as the one you've borne so well."

"Thank you," she said, closing her eyes.

"We must discuss the conditions of your departure," said Galt; he spoke in the dispassionate manner of an executive. "First, you must give us your word that you will not disclose our secret or any part of it—neither our cause nor our existence nor this valley nor your whereabouts for the past month—to anyone in the outer world, not at any time or for any purpose whatsoever."

"I give you my word."

"Second, you must never attempt to find this valley again. You are not to come here uninvited. Should you break the first condition, it will not place us in serious danger. Should you break the second—it will. It is not our policy ever to be at the arbitrary mercy of the good faith of another person, or at the mercy of a promise that cannot be enforced. Nor can we expect you to place our interests above your own. Since you believe that your course is right, the day may come when you may find it necessary to lead our enemies to this valley. We shall, therefore, leave you no means to do it. You will be taken out of the valley by plane, blindfolded, and you will be flown a distance sufficient to make it impossible for you ever to retrace the course."

She inclined her head. "You are right."

"Your plane has been repaired. Do you wish to reclaim it by signing a draft on your account at the Mulligan Bank?"

"No."

"Then we shall hold it, until such time as you choose to pay for it.

Day after tomorrow, I will take you in my plane to a point outside the valley and leave you within reach of further transportation."

She inclined her head. "Very well."

It had grown dark, when they left Midas Mulligan's. The trail back to Galt's house led across the valley, past Francisco's cabin, and the three of them walked home together. A few squares of lighted windows hung scattered through the darkness, and the first streams of mist were weaving slowly across the panes, like shadows cast by a distant sea.

They walked in silence, but the sound of their steps, blending into a single, steady beat, was like a speech to be grasped and not to be uttered in any other form.

After a while, Francisco said, "It changes nothing, it only makes the span a little longer, and the last stretch is always the hardest—but it's the last."

"I will hope so," she said. In a moment, she repeated quietly, "The last is the hardest." She turned to Galt. "May I make one request?"

"Yes."

"Will you let me go tomorrow?"

"If you wish."

When Francisco spoke again, moments later, it was as if he were addressing the unnamed wonder in her mind; his voice had the tone of answering, a question: "Dagny, all three of us are in love"—she jerked her head to him—"with the same thing, no matter what its forms. Don't wonder why you feel no breach among us. You'll be one of us, so long as you'll remain in love with your rails and your engines—and they'll lead you back to us, no matter how many times you lose your way. The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion."

"Thank you," she said softly.

"For what?"

"For . . . for the way you sound."

"How do I sound? Name it, Dagny."

"You sound . . . as if you're happy."

"I am—in exactly the same way you are. Don't tell me what you feel. I know it. But, you see, the measure of the hell you're able to endure is the measure of your love. The hell I couldn't bear to witness would be to see you being indifferent."

She nodded silently, unable to name as joy any part of the things she felt, yet feeling that he was right.

Clots of mist were drifting, like smoke, across the moon, and in the diffused glow she could not distinguish the expressions of their faces, as she walked between them: the only expressions to perceive were the straight silhouettes of their bodies, the unbroken sound of then- steps and her own feeling that she wished to walk on and on, a feeling she could not define, except that it was neither doubt nor pain, When they approached his cabin, Francisco stopped, the gesture of his hand embracing them both as he pointed to his door. "Will you come in —since it's to be our last night together for some time? Let's have a drink to that future of which all three of us are certain."

"Are we?" she asked.

"Yes," said Galt, "we are."

She looked at their faces when Francisco switched on the light in his house. She could not define their expressions, it was not happiness or any emotion pertaining to joy, their faces were taut and solemn, but it was a glowing solemnity—she thought—if this were possible, and the odd glow she felt within her, told her that her own face had the same look.

Francisco reached for three glasses from a cupboard, but stopped, as at a sudden thought. He placed one glass on the table, then reached for the two silver goblets of Sebastian d'Anconia and placed them beside it.

"Are you going straight to New York, Dagny?" he asked, in the calm, unstrained tone of a host, bringing out a bottle of old wine, "Yes," she answered as calmly.

"I'm flying to Buenos Aires day after tomorrow," he said, uncorking the bottle. "I'm not sure whether I'll be back in New York later, but if I am, it will be dangerous for you to see me."

"I won't care about that," she said, "unless you feel that I'm not entitled to see you any longer."

"True, Dagny. You're not. Not in New York."

He was pouring the wine and he glanced up at Galt. "John, when will you decide whether you're going back or staying here?"

Galt looked straight at him, then said slowly, in the tone of a man who knows all the consequences of his words, "I have decided, Francisco. I'm going back."

Francisco's hand stopped. For a long moment, he was seeing nothing but Galt's face. Then his eyes moved to hers. He put the bottle down and he did not step back, but it was as if his glance drew back to a wide range, to include them both, "But of course," he said.

He looked as if he had moved still farther and were now seeing the whole spread of their years; his voice had an even, uninflected sound, quality that matched the size of the vision.

"I knew it twelve years ago," he said. "I knew it before you could have known, and it's I who should have seen that you would see. That night, when you called us to New York, I thought of it then as"—he was speaking to Galt, but his eyes moved to Dagny—"as everything that you were seeking . . . everything you told us to live for or die, if necessary. I should have seen that you would think it, too. It could not have been otherwise. It is as it had—and ought—to be. It was set then, twelve years ago." He looked at Galt and chuckled softly. "And you say that it's I who've taken the hardest beating?"

He turned with too swift a movement—then, too slowly, as if in deliberate emphasis, he completed the task of pouring the wine, filling the three vessels on the table. He picked up the two silver goblets, looked down at them for the pause of an instant, then extended one to Dagny, the other to Galt.

"Take it," he said. "You've earned it—and it wasn't chance."

Galt took the goblet from his hand, but it was as if the acceptance was done by their eyes as they looked at each other.

"I would have given anything to let it be otherwise," said Galt, "except that which is beyond giving."

She held her goblet, she looked at Francisco and she let him see her eyes glance at Galt. "Yes,” she said in the tone of an answer, "But I have not earned it—and what you've paid, I'm paying it now, and I don't know whether I'll ever earn enough to hold clear title, but if hell is the price—and the measure—then let me be the greediest of the three of us."

As they drank, as she stood, her eyes closed, feeling the liquid motion of the wine inside her throat, she knew that for all three of them this was the most tortured—and the most exultant—moment they had ever reached.

She did not speak to Galt, as they walked down the last stretch of the trail to his house. She did not turn her head to him, feeling that even a glance would be too dangerous. She felt, in their silence, both the calm of a total understanding and the tension of the knowledge that they were not to name the things they understood.

But she faced him, when they were in his living room, with full confidence and as if in sudden certainty of a right—the certainty that she would not break and that it was now safe to speak. She said evenly, neither as plea nor as triumph, merely as the statement of a fact, "You are going back to the outer world because I will be there."

"Yes."

"I do not want you to go."

"You have no choice about it."

"You are going for my sake."

"No, for mine."

"Will you allow me to see you there?"

"No."

"I am not to see you?"

"No."

"I am not to know where you are or what you do?"

"You're not."

"Will you be watching me, as you did before?"

"More so."

"Is your purpose to protect me?"

"No."

"What is it, then?"

"To be there on the day when you decide to join us."

She looked at him attentively, permitting herself no other reaction, but as if groping for an answer to the first point she had not fully understood.

"All the rest of us will be gone," he explained. "It will become too dangerous to remain. I will remain as your last key, before the door of this valley closes altogether."

"Oh!" She choked it off before it became a moan. Then, regaining the manner of impersonal detachment, she asked, "Suppose I were to tell you that my decision is final and that I am never to join you?"

"It would be a lie."

"Suppose I were now to decide that I wish to make it final and to stand by it, no matter what the future?"

"No matter what future evidence you observe and what convictions you form?"

"Yes."

"That would be worse than a lie.”

"You are certain that I have made the wrong decision?”

"I am."

"Do you believe that one must be responsible for one's own errors?"

"I do."

"Then why aren't you letting me bear the consequences of mine?"

"I am and you will."

"If I find, when it is too late, that I want to return to this valley —why should you have to bear the risk of keeping that door open to me?"

"I don't have to. I wouldn't do it if I had no selfish end to gain."

"What selfish end?"

"I want you here."

She closed her eyes and inclined her head in open admission of defeat—defeat in the argument and in her attempt to face calmly the full meaning of that which she was leaving.

Then she raised her head and, as if she had absorbed his kind of frankness, she looked at him, hiding neither her suffering nor her longing nor her calm, knowing that all three were in her glance.

His face was as it had been in the sunlight of the moment when she had seen it for the first time: a face of merciless serenity and unflinching perceptiveness, without pain or fear or guilt. She thought that were it possible for her to stand looking at him, at the straight lines of his eyebrows over the dark green eyes, at the curve of the shadow underscoring the shape of his mouth, at the poured-metal planes of his skin in the open collar of his shirt and the casually immovable posture of his legs—she would wish to spend the rest of her life on this spot and in this manner. And in the next instant she knew that if her wish were granted, the contemplation would lose all meaning, because she would have betrayed all the things that gave it value.

Then, not as memory, but as an experience of the present, she felt herself reliving the moment when she had stood at the window of her room in New York, looking at a fogbound city, at the unattainable shape of Atlantis sinking out of reach—and she knew that she was now seeing the answer to that moment. She felt, not the words she had then addressed to the city, but that untranslated sensation from which the words had come: You, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon—

Aloud, she said, "I want you to know this. I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle"—you whose presence I had always felt in the streets of the city, the wordless voice within her was saying, and whose world I had wanted to build—"Now I know that I was fighting for this valley"—it is my love for you that had kept me moving—"It was this valley that I saw as possible and would exchange for nothing less and would not give up to a mindless evil"—my love and my hope to reach you and my wish to be worthy of you on the day when I would stand before you face to face—"I am going back to fight for this valley—to release it from its underground, to regain for it its full and rightful realm, to let the earth belong to you in fact, as it does in spirit—and to meet you again on the day when I'm able to deliver to you the whole of the world—or, if I fail, to remain in exile from this valley to the end of my life"—but what is left of my life will still be yours, and I will go on in your name, even though it is a name I'm never to pronounce, I will go on serving you, even though I'm never to win, I will go on, to be worthy of you on the day when I would have met you, even though I won't—"I will fight for it, even if I have to fight against you, even if you damn me as a traitor . . . even if I am never to see you again."

He had stood without moving, he had listened with no change in his face, only his eyes had looked at her as if he were hearing every word, even the words she had not pronounced. He answered, with the same look, as if the look were holding some circuit not yet to be broken, his voice catching some tone of hers, as if in signal of the same code, a voice with no sign of emotion except in the spacing of the words: "If you fail, as men have failed in their quest for a vision that should have been possible, yet has remained forever beyond their reach—if, like them, you come to think that one's highest values are not to be attained and one's greatest vision is not to be made real—don't damn this earth, as they did. don't damn existence. You have seen the Atlantis they were seeking, it is here, it exists—but one must enter it naked and alone, with no rags from the falsehoods of centuries, with the purest clarity of mind—not an innocent heart, but that which is much rarer: an intransigent mind—as one's only possession and key. You will not enter it until you learn that you do not need to convince or to conquer the world. When you learn it, you will see that through all the years of your struggle, nothing had barred you from Atlantis and there were no chains to hold you, except the chains you were willing to wear. Through all those years, that which you most wished to win was waiting for you"—he looked at her as if he were speaking to the unspoken words in her mind—"waiting as unremittingly as you were fighting, as passionately, as desperately—but with a greater certainty than yours. Go out to continue your struggle. Go on carrying unchosen burdens, taking undeserved punishment and believing that justice can be served by the offer of your own spirit to the most unjust of tortures. But in your worst and darkest moments, remember that you have seen another kind of world. Remember that you can reach it whenever you choose to see. Remember that it will be waiting and that it's real, it's possible—it's yours."

Then, turning his head a little, his voice as clear, but his eyes breaking the circuit, he asked, "What time do you wish to leave tomorrow?"

"Oh . . . ! As early as it will be convenient for you."

"Then have breakfast ready at seven and we'll take off at eight."

"I will."

He reached into his pocket and extended to her a small, shining disk which she could not distinguish at first. He dropped it on the palm of her hand: it was a five-dollar gold piece.

"The last of your wages for the month," he said.

Her fingers snapped closed over the coin too tightly, but she answered calmly and tonelessly, "Thank you."

"Good night, Miss Taggart."

"Good night."

She did not sleep in the hours that were still left to her. She sat on the floor of her room, her face pressed to the bed, feeling nothing but the sense of his presence beyond the wall. At times, she felt as if he were before her, as if she were sitting at his feet. She spent her last night with him in this manner.

She left the valley as she had come, carrying away nothing that belonged to it. She left the few possessions she had acquired—her peasant skirt, a blouse, an apron, a few pieces of underwear—folded neatly in a drawer of the chest in her room. She looked at them for a moment, before she closed the drawer, thinking that if she came back, she would, perhaps, still find them there. She took nothing with her but the five-dollar gold piece and the band of tape still wound about her ribs.

The sun touched the peaks of the mountains, drawing a shining circle as a frontier of the valley—when she climbed aboard the plane.

She leaned back in the seat beside him and looked at Galt's face bent over her, as it had been bent when she had opened her eyes on the first morning. Then she closed her eyes and felt his hands tying the blindfold across her face.

She heard the blast of the motor, not as sound, but as the shudder of an explosion inside her body; only it felt like a distant shudder, as if the person feeling it would have been hurt if she were not so far away.

She did not know when the wheels left the ground or when the plane crossed the circle of the peaks. She lay still, with the pounding beat of the motor as her only perception of space, as if she were carried inside a current of sound that rocked once in a while. The sound came from his engine, from the control of his hands on the wheel; she held onto that; the rest was to be endured, not resisted.

She lay still, her legs stretched forward, her hands on the arms of the seat, with no sense of motion, not even her own, to give her a sense of time, with no space, no sight, no future, with the night of closed eyelids under the pressure of the cloth—and with the knowledge of his presence beside her as her single, unchanging reality, They did not speak. Once, she said suddenly, "Mr. Galt."

"Yes?"

"No. Nothing. I just wanted to know whether you were still there."

"I will always be there."

She did not know for how many miles the memory of the sound of words seemed like a small landmark rolling away into the distance, then vanishing. Then there was nothing but the stillness of an indivisible present.

She did not know whether a day had passed or an hour, when she felt the downward, plunging motion which meant that they were about to land or to crash; the two possibilities seemed equal to her mind.

She felt the jolt of the wheels against the ground as an oddly delayed sensation: as if some fraction of time had gone to make her believe it.

She felt the running streak of jerky motion, then the jar of the stop and of silence, then the touch of his hands on her hair, removing the blindfold.

She saw a glaring sunlight, a stretch of scorched weeds going off into the sky, with no mountains to stop it, a deserted highway and the hazy outline of a town about a mile away. She glanced at her watch: forty seven minutes ago, she had still been in the valley.

"You'll find a Taggart station there," he said, pointing at the town, "and you'll be able to take a train."

She nodded, as if she understood.

He did not follow her as she descended to the ground. He leaned across the wheel toward the open door of the plane, and they looked at each other. She stood, her face raised to him, a faint wind stirring her hair, the straight line of her shoulders sculptured by the trim suit of a business executive amidst the flat immensity of an empty prairie.

The movement of his hand pointed east, toward some invisible cities.

"Don't look for me out there," he said. "You will not find me—until you want me for what I am. And when you'll want me, I'll be the easiest man to find."

She heard the sound of the door falling closed upon him; it seemed louder than the blast of the propeller that followed. She watched the run of the plane's wheels and the trail of weeds left flattened behind them.

Then she saw a strip of sky between wheels and weeds.

She looked around her. A reddish haze of heat hung over the shapes of the town in the distance, and the shapes seemed to sag under a rusty tinge; above their roofs, she saw the remnant of a crumbled smokestack. She saw a dry, yellow scrap rustling faintly in the weeds beside her: it was a piece of newspaper. She looked at these objects blankly, unable to make them real.

She raised her eyes to the plane. She watched the spread of its wings grow smaller in the sky, draining away in its wake the sound of its motor. It kept rising, wings first, like a long silver cross; then the curve of its motion went following the sky, dropping slowly closer to the earth; then it seemed not to move any longer, but only to shrink. She watched it like a star in the process of extinction, while it shrank from cross to dot to a burning spark which she was no longer certain of seeing. When she saw that the spread of the sky was strewn with such sparks all over, she knew that the plane was gone.

CHAPTER III
ANTI-GREED

"What am I doing here?" asked Dr. Robert Stadler. "Why was I asked to come here? I demand an explanation. I'm not accustomed to being dragged halfway across a continent without rhyme, reason or notice."

Dr, Floyd Ferris smiled. "Which makes me appreciate it all the more that you did come, Dr. Stadler." It was impossible to tell whether his voice had a tone of gratitude—or of gloating.

The sun was beating down upon them and Dr. Stadler felt a streak of perspiration oozing along his temple. He could not hold an angrily, embarrassingly private discussion in the middle of a crowd streaming to fill the benches of the grandstand around them—the discussion which he had tried and failed to obtain for the last three days. It occurred to him that that was precisely the reason why his meeting with Dr. Ferris had been delayed to this moment; but he brushed the thought aside, just as he brushed some insect buzzing to reach his wet temple.

"Why was I unable to get in touch with you?" he asked. The fraudulent weapon of sarcasm now seemed to sound less effective than ever, but it was Dr. Stadler's only weapon: "Why did you find it necessary to send me messages on official stationery worded in a style proper, I'm sure, for Army"—orders, he was about to say, but didn't—"communications, but certainly not for scientific correspondence?"

"It is a government matter," said Dr. Ferris gently.

"Do you realize that I was much too busy and that this meant an interruption of my work?"

"Oh yes," said Dr. Ferris noncommittally.

"Do you realize that I could have refused to come?"

"But you didn't," said Dr. Ferris softly.

"Why was I given no explanation? Why didn't you come for me in person, instead of sending those incredible young hooligans with their mysterious gibberish that sounded half-science, half-pulp-magazine?"

"I was too busy," said Dr. Ferris blandly.

"Then would you mind telling me what you're doing in the middle of a plain in Iowa—and what I'm doing here, for that matter?" He waved contemptuously at the dusty horizon of an empty prairie and at the three wooden grandstands. The stands were newly erected, and the wood, too, seemed to perspire; he could see drops of resin sparkling in the sun.

"We are about to witness an historical event, Dr. Stadler. An occasion which will become a milestone on the road of science, civilization, social welfare and political adaptability." Dr. Ferris' voice had the tone of a public relations man's memorized handout. "The turning point of a new era."

"What event? What new era?"

"As you will observe, only the most distinguished citizens, the cream of our intellectual elite, have been chosen for the special privilege of witnessing this occasion. We could not omit your name, could we?—and we feel certain, of course, that we can count on your loyalty and cooperation."

He could not catch Dr. Ferris' eyes. The grandstands were rapidly filling with people, and Dr. Ferris kept interrupting himself constantly to wave to nondescript newcomers, whom Dr. Stadler had never seen before, but who were personages, as he could tell by the particular shade of gaily informal deference in Ferns' waving. They all seemed to know Dr. Ferris and to seek him out, as if he were the master of ceremonies —or the star—of the occasion.

"If you would kindly be specific for a moment," said Dr. Stadler, "and tell me what—"

"Hi, Spud!" called Dr. Ferris, waving to a portly, white-haired man who filled the full-dress uniform of a general.

Dr. Stadler raised his voice: "I said, if you would kindly concentrate long enough to explain to me what in hell is going on—"

"But it's very simple. It's the final triumph of . . . You'll have to excuse me a minute, Dr. Stadler," said Dr. Ferris hastily, tearing forward, like an over trained lackey at the sound of a bell, in the direction of what looked like a group of aging rowdies; he turned back long enough to add two words which he seemed reverently to consider as a full explanation: "The press!"

Dr. Stadler sat down on the wooden bench, feeling unaccountably reluctant to brush against anything around him. The three grandstands were spaced at intervals in a semi-curve, like the tiers of a small, private circus, with room for some three hundred people; they seemed built for the viewing of some spectacle—but they faced the emptiness of a flat prairie stretching off to the horizon, with nothing in sight but the dark blotch of a farmhouse miles away.

There were radio microphones in front of one stand, which seemed reserved for the press. There was a contraption resembling a portable switchboard in front of the stand reserved for officials; a few levers of polished metal sparkled in the sun on the face of the switchboard. In an improvised parking lot behind the stands, the glitter of luxurious new cars seemed a brightly reassuring sight. But it was the building that stood on a knoll some thousand feet away that gave Dr. Stadler a vague sense of uneasiness. It was a small, squat structure of unknown purpose, with massive stone walls, no windows except a few slits protected by stout iron bars, and a large dome, grotesquely too heavy for the rest, that seemed to press the structure down into the soil. A few outlets protruded from the base of the dome, in loose, irregular shapes, resembling badly poured clay funnels; they did not seem to belong to an industrial age or to any known usage. The building had an air of silent malevolence, like a puffed, venomous mushroom; it was obviously modern, but its sloppy, rounded, ineptly unspecific lines made it look like a primitive structure unearthed in the heart of the jungle, devoted to some secret rites of savagery.

Dr. Stadler sighed with irritation; he was tired of secrets. "Confidential" and "Top Confidential" had been the words stamped on the invitation which had demanded that he travel to Iowa on a two-day notice and for an unspecified purpose. Two young men, who called themselves physicists, had appeared at the Institute to escort him; his calls to Ferris' office in Washington had remained unanswered. The young men had talked—through an exhausting trip by government plane, then a clammy ride in a government car—about science, emergencies, social equilibriums and the need of secrecy, till he knew less than he had known at the start; he noticed only that two words kept recurring in their jabber, which had also appeared in the text of the invitation, two words that had an ominous sound when involving an unknown issue: the demands for his "loyalty" and "co-operation."

The young men had deposited him on a bench in the front row of the grandstand and had vanished, like the folding gear of a mechanism, leaving him to the sudden presence of Dr. Ferris in person. Now, watching the scene around him, watching Dr. Ferris' vague, excited, loosely casual gestures in the midst of a group of newsmen, he had an impression of bewildering confusion, of senseless, chaotic inefficiency—and of a smooth machine working to produce the exact degree of that impression needed at the exact moment.

He felt a single, sudden flash of panic, in which, as in a flash of lightning, he permitted himself to know that he felt a desperate desire to escape. But he slammed his mind shut against it. He knew that the darkest secret of the occasion—more crucial, more untouchable, more deadly than whatever was hidden in the mushroom building—was that which had made him agree to come.

He would never have to learn his own motive, he thought; he thought it, not by means of words, but by means of the brief, vicious spasm of an emotion that resembled irritation and felt like acid. The words that stood in his mind, as they had stood when he had agreed to come, were like a voodoo formula which one recites when it is needed and beyond which one must not look: What can you do when you have to deal with people?

He noticed that the stand reserved for those whom Ferris had called the intellectual elite was larger than the stand prepared for government officials. He caught himself feeling a swift little sneak of pleasure at the thought that he had been placed in the front row. He turned to glance at the tiers behind him. The sensation he experienced was like a small, gray shock: that random, faded, shopworn assembly was not his conception of an intellectual elite. He saw defensively belligerent men and tastelessly dressed women—he saw mean, rancorous, suspicious faces that bore the one mark incompatible with a standard bearer of the intellect: the mark of uncertainty. He could find no face he knew, no face to recognize as famous and none likely ever to achieve such recognition.

He wondered by what standard these people had been selected.

Then he noticed a gangling figure in the second row, the figure of an elderly man with a long, slack face that seemed faintly familiar to him, though he could recall nothing about it, except a vague' memory, as of a photograph seen in some unsavory publication. He leaned toward a woman and asked, pointing, "Could you tell me. the name of that gentleman?" The woman answered in a whisper of awed respect, "That is Dr. Simon Pritchett!" Dr. Stadler turned away, wishing no one would see him, wishing no one would ever learn that he had been a member of that group.

He raised his eyes and saw that Ferris was leading the whole press gang toward him. He saw Ferris sweeping his arm at him, in the manner of a tourist guide, and declaring, when they were close enough to be heard, "But why should you waste your time on me, when there is the source of today's achievement, the man who made it all possible—Dr. Robert Stadler!"

It seemed to him for an instant that he saw an incongruous look on the worn, cynical faces of the newsmen, a look that was not quite respect, expectation or hope, but more like an echo of these, like a faint reflection of the look they might have worn in their youth on hearing the name of Robert Stadler. In that instant, he felt an impulse which he would not acknowledge: the impulse to tell them that he knew nothing about today's event, that his power counted for less than theirs, that he had been brought here as a pawn in some confidence game, almost as . . . as a prisoner.

Instead, he heard himself answering their questions in the smug, condescending tone of a man who shares all the secrets of the highest authorities: "Yes, the State Science Institute is proud of its record of public service. . . . The State Science Institute is not the tool of any private interests or personal greed, it is devoted to the welfare of mankind, to the good of humanity as a whole—" spouting, like a dictaphone, the sickening generalities he had heard from Dr. Ferns.

He would not permit himself to know that what he felt was self loathing; he identified the emotion, but not its object; it was loathing for the men around him, he thought; it was they who were forcing him to go through this shameful performance. What can you do—he thought—when you have to deal with people?

The newsmen were making brief notes of his answers. Their faces now had the look of automatons acting out the routine of pretending that they were hearing news in the empty utterances of another automaton.

"Dr. Stadler," asked one of them, pointing at the building on the knoll, "is it true that you consider Project X the greatest achievement of the State Science Institute?"

There was a dead drop of silence.

"Project . . . X . . . ?" said Dr. Stadler.

He knew that something was ominously wrong in the tone of his voice, because he saw the heads of the newsmen go up, as at the sound of an alarm; he saw them waiting, their pencils poised.

For one instant, while he felt the muscles of his face cracking into the fraud of a smile, he felt a formless, an almost supernatural terror, as if he sensed again the silent working of some smooth machine, as if he were caught in it, part of it and doing its irrevocable will. "Project X?" he said softly, in the mysterious tone of a conspirator. "Well, gentlemen, the value—and the motive—of any achievement of the State Science Institute are not to be doubted, since it is a non-profit venture—need I say more?"

He raised his head and noticed that Dr. Ferris had stood on the edge of the group through the whole of the interview. He wondered whether he imagined that the look on Dr. Ferris' face now seemed less tense—and more impertinent.

Two resplendent cars came shooting at full speed into the parking lot and stopped with a flourish of screeching brakes. The newsmen deserted him in the middle of a sentence and went running to meet the group alighting from the cars.

Dr. Stadler turned to Ferris. "What is Project X?" he asked sternly.

Dr. Ferris smiled in a manner of innocence and insolence together.

"A non-profit venture," he answered—and went running off to meet the newcomers.

From the respectful whispers of the crowd, Dr. Stadler learned that the little man in a wilted linen suit, who looked like a shyster, striding briskly in the center of the new group, was Mr. Thompson, the Head of the State. Mr. Thompson was smiling, frowning and barking answers to the newsmen. Dr. Ferris was weaving through the group, with the grace of a cat rubbing against sundry legs.

The group came closer and he saw Ferris steering them in his direction. "Mr. Thompson," said Dr. Ferris sonorously, as they approached, "may I present Dr. Robert Stadler?"

Dr. Stadler saw the little shyster's eyes studying him for the fraction of a second: the eyes had a touch of superstitious awe, as at the sight of a phenomenon from a mystical realm forever incomprehensible to Mr. Thompson—and they had the piercing, calculating shrewdness of a ward heeler who feels certain that nothing is immune from his standards, a glance like the visual equivalent of the words: What's your angle?

"It's an honor, Doctor, an honor, I'm sure," said Mr. Thompson briskly, shaking his hand.

He learned that the tall, stoop-shouldered man with a crew haircut was Mr. Wesley Mouch. He did not catch the names of the others, whose hands he shook. As the group proceeded toward the officials' grandstand, he was left with the burning sensation of a discovery he dared not face: the discovery that he had felt anxiously pleased by the little shyster's nod of approval.

A party of young attendants, who looked like movie theater ushers, appeared- from, somewhere with handcarts of glittering objects, which they proceeded to distribute to the assembly. The objects were field glasses. Dr. Ferns took his place at the microphone of a public-address system by the officials' stand. At a signal from Wesley Mouch, his voice boomed suddenly over the prairie, an unctuous, fraudulently solemn voice magnified by the microphone inventor's ingenuity into the sound and power of a giant: "Ladies and gentlemen . . . !"

The crowd was struck into silence, all heads jerking unanimously toward the graceful figure of Dr. Floyd Ferris.

"Ladies and gentlemen, you have been chosen—in recognition of your distinguished public service and social loyalty—to witness the unveiling of a scientific achievement of such tremendous importance, such staggering scope, such epoch-making possibilities that up to this moment it has been known only to a very few and only as Project X."

Dr. Stadler focused his field glasses on the only thing in sight—on the blotch of the distant farm.

He saw that it was the deserted ruin of a farmhouse, which had obviously been abandoned years ago. The light of the sky showed through the naked ribs of the roof, and jagged bits of glass framed the darkness of empty windows. He saw a sagging barn, the rusted tower of a water wheel, and the remnant of a tractor lying upturned with its treads in the air.

Dr. Ferris was talking about the crusaders of science and about the years of selfless devotion, unremitting toil and persevering research that had gone into Project X.

It was odd—thought Dr. Stadler, studying the ruins of the farm—that there should be a herd of goats in the midst of such desolation.

There were six or seven of them, some drowsing, some munching lethargically at whatever grass they could find among the sun-scorched weeds.

"Project X," Dr. Ferris was saying, "was devoted to some special research in the field of sound. The science of sound has astonishing aspects, which laymen would scarcely suspect. . . ."

Some fifty feet away from the farmhouse, Dr. Stadler saw a structure, obviously new and of no possible purpose whatever: it looked like a few spans of a steel trestle, rising into empty space, supporting nothing, leading nowhere.

Dr. Ferris was now talking about the nature of sound vibrations.

Dr. Stadler aimed his field glasses at the horizon beyond the farm, but there was nothing else to be seen for dozens of miles. The sudden, straining motion of one of the goats brought his eyes back to the herd.

He noticed that the goats were chained to stakes driven at intervals into the ground.

". . . And it was discovered," said Dr. Ferris, "that there are certain frequencies of sound vibration which no structure, organic or inorganic, can withstand. . . ."

Dr. Stadler noticed a silvery spot bouncing over the weeds among the herd. It was a kid that had not been chained; it kept leaping and weaving about its mother.

". . . The sound ray is controlled by a panel inside the giant underground laboratory," said Dr. Ferris, pointing at the building on the knoll. "That panel is known to us affectionately as the 'Xylophone'—because one must be darn careful to strike the right keys, or, rather, to pull the right levers. For this special occasion, an extension Xylophone, connected to the one inside, has been erected here"—he pointed to the switchboard in front of the officials1 stand—"so that you may witness the entire operation and see the simplicity of the whole procedure. . . ."

Dr. Stadler found pleasure in watching the kid, a soothing, reassuring kind of pleasure. The little creature seemed barely a week old, it looked like a ball of white fur with graceful long legs, it kept bounding in a manner of deliberate, gaily ferocious awkwardness, all four of its legs held stiff and straight. It seemed to be leaping at the sunrays, at the summer air, at the joy of discovering its own existence.

". . . The sound ray is invisible, inaudible and fully controllable in respect to target, direction and range. Its first public test, which you are about to witness, has been set to cover a small sector, a mere two miles, in perfect safety, with all space cleared for twenty miles beyond. The present generating equipment in our laboratory is capable of producing rays to cover—through the outlets which you may observe under the dome—the entire countryside within a radius of a hundred miles, a circle with a periphery extending from the shore of the Mississippi, roughly from the bridge of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, to Des Moines and Fort Dodge, Iowa, to Austin, Minnesota, to Woodman, Wisconsin, to Rock Island, Illinois. This is only a modest beginning. We possess the technical knowledge to build generators with a range of two and three hundred miles—but due to the fact that we were unable to obtain in time a sufficient quantity of a highly heat resistant metal, such as Rearden Metal, we had to be satisfied with our present equipment and radius of control. In honor of our great executive, Mr. Thompson, under whose far-sighted administration the State Science Institute was granted the funds without which Project X would not have been possible, this great invention will henceforth be known as the Thompson Harmonizer!"

The crowd applauded. Mr. Thompson sat motionless, with his face held self-consciously stiff. Dr. Stadler felt certain that this small-time shyster had had as little to do with the Project as any of the movie usher attendants, that he possessed neither the mind nor the initiative nor even the sufficient degree of malice to cause a new gopher trap to be brought into the world, that he, too, was only the pawn of a silent machine—a machine that had no center, no leader, no direction, a machine that had not been set in motion by Dr. Ferris or Wesley Mouch, or any of the cowed creatures in the grandstands, or any of the creatures behind the scenes—an impersonal, unthinking, unembodied machine, of which none was the driver and all were the pawns, each to the degree of his evil. Dr. Stadler gripped the edge of the bench: he felt a desire to leap to his feet and run.

". . . As to the function and the purpose of the sound ray, I shall say nothing. I shall let it speak for itself. You will now see it work.

When Dr. Blodgett pulls the levers of the Xylophone, I suggest that you keep your eyes on the target—which is that farmhouse two miles away. There will be nothing else to see. The ray itself is invisible. It has long been conceded by all progressive thinkers that there are no entities, only actions—and no values, only consequences. Now, ladies and gentlemen, you will see the action and the consequences of the Thompson Harmonizer."

Dr. Ferris bowed, walked slowly away from the microphone and came to take his seat on the bench beside Dr. Stadler.

A youngish, fattish kind of man took his stand by the switchboard—and raised his eyes expectantly toward Mr. Thompson. Mr. Thompson looked blankly bewildered for an instant, as if something had slipped his mind, until Wesley Mouch leaned over and whispered some word into his ear. "Contact!" said Mr. Thompson loudly.

Dr. Stadler could not bear to watch the graceful, undulating, effeminate motion of Dr. Blodgett's hand as it pulled the first lever of the switchboard, then the next. He raised his field glasses and looked at the farmhouse.

In the instant when he focused his lens, a goat was pulling at its chain, reaching placidly for a tall, dry thistle. In the next instant, the goat rose into the air, upturned, its legs stretched upward and jerking, then fell into a gray pile made of seven goats in convulsions. By the time Dr. Stadler believed it, the pile was motionless, except for one beast's leg sticking out of the mass, stiff as a rod and shaking as in a strong wind. The farmhouse tore into strips of clapboard and went down, followed by a geyser of the bricks of its chimney. The tractor vanished into a pancake. The water tower cracked and its shreds hit the ground white its wheel was still describing a long curve through the air, as if of its own leisurely volition. The steel beams and girders of the solid new trestle collapsed like a structure of matchsticks under the breath of a sigh. It was so swift, so uncontested, so simple, that Dr.

Stadler felt no horror, he felt nothing, it was not the reality he had known, it was the realm of a child's nightmare where material objects could be dissolved by means of a single malevolent wish.

He moved the field glasses from his eyes. He was looking at an empty prairie. There was no farm, there was nothing in the distance except a darkish strip that looked like the shadow of a cloud.

A single, high, thin scream rose from the tiers behind him, as some woman fainted. He wondered why she should scream so long after the fact-and then he realized that the time elapsed since the touch of the first lever was not a full minute.

He raised his field glasses again, almost as if he were suddenly hoping that the cloud shadow would be all he would see. But the material objects were still there; they were a mount of refuse. He moved his glasses over the wreckage; in a moment, he realized that he was looking for the kid. He could not find it; there was nothing but a pile of gray fur.

When he lowered the glasses and turned, he found Dr. Ferns looking at him. He felt certain that through the whole of the test, it was not the target, it was his face that Ferris had watched, as if to see whether he, Robert Stadler, could withstand the ray.

"That's all there is to it," the fattish Dr. Blodgett announced through the microphone, in the ingratiating sales tone of a department-store floorwalker. "There is no nail or rivet remaining in the frame of the structures and there is no blood vessel left unbroken in the bodies of the animals."

The crowd was rustling with jerky movements and high-pitched whispers. People were looking at one another, rising uncertainly and dropping down again, restlessly demanding anything but this pause. There was a sound of submerged hysteria in the whispers. They seemed to be waiting to be told what to think.

Dr. Stadler saw a woman being escorted down the steps from the back row, her head bent, a handkerchief pressed to her mouth: she was sick at her stomach.

He turned away and saw that Dr. Ferris was still watching him. Dr.

Stadler leaned back a little, his face austere and scornful, the face of the nation's greatest scientist, and asked, "Who invented that ghastly thing?"

"You did."

Dr. Stadler looked at him, not moving.

"It is merely a practical appliance," said Dr. Ferris pleasantly, "based upon your theoretical discoveries. It was derived from your invaluable research into the nature of cosmic rays and of the spatial transmission of energy."

"Who worked on the Project?"

"A few third-raters, as you would call them. Really, there was very little difficulty. None of them could have begun to conceive of the first step toward the concept of your energy-transmission formula, but given that—the rest was easy."

"What is the practical purpose of this invention? What are the 'epoch-making possibilities'?"

"Oh, but don't you see? It is an invaluable instrument of public security. No enemy would attack the possessor of such a weapon. It will set the country free from the fear of aggression and permit it to plan its future in undisturbed safety." His voice had an odd carelessness, a tone of offhand improvisation, as if he were neither expecting nor attempting to be believed. "It will relieve social frictions. It will promote peace, stability and—as we have indicated—harmony. It will eliminate all danger of war."

"What war? What aggression? With the whole world starving and all those People's States barely subsisting on handouts from this country—where do you see any danger of war? Do you expect those ragged savages to attack you?"

Dr. Ferris looked straight into his eyes. "Internal enemies can be as great a danger to the people as external ones," he answered. "Perhaps greater." This time his voice sounded as if he expected and was certain to be understood. "Social systems are so precarious. But think of what stability could be achieved by a few scientific installations at strategic key points. It would guarantee a state of permanent peace—don't you think so?"

Dr. Stadler did not move or answer; as the seconds clicked past and his face still held an unchanged expression, it began to look paralyzed.

His eyes had the stare of a man who suddenly sees that which he had known, had known from the first, had spent years trying not to see, and who is now engaged in a contest between the sight and his power to deny its existence. "I don't know what you're talking about!" he snapped at last.

Dr. Ferris smiled. "No private businessman or greedy industrialist would have financed Project X," he said softly, in the tone of an idle, informal discussion. "He couldn't have afforded it. It's an enormous investment, with no prospect of material gain. What profit could he expect from it? There are no profits henceforth to be derived from that farm." He pointed at the dark strip in the distance. "But, as you have so well observed, Project X had to be a non-profit venture. Contrary to a business firm, the State Science Institute had no trouble in obtaining funds for the Project. You have not heard of the Institute having any financial difficulties in the past two years, have you? And it used to be such a problem—getting them to vote the funds necessary for the advancement of science. They always demanded gadgets for their cash, as you used to say. Well, here was a gadget which some people in power could fully appreciate. They got the others to vote for it. It wasn't difficult. In fact, a great many of those others felt safe in voting money for a project that was secret—they felt certain it was important, since they were not considered important enough to be let in on it.

There were, of course, a few skeptics and doubters. But they gave in when they were reminded that the head of the State Science Institute was Dr. Robert Stadler—whose judgment and integrity they could not doubt."

Dr. Stadler was looking down at his fingernails.

The sudden screech of the microphone jerked the crowd into an instantaneous attentiveness; people seemed to be a second's worth of self-control away from panic. An announcer, with a voice like a machine gun spitting smiles, barked cheerily that they were now to witness the radio broadcast that would break the news of the great discovery to the whole nation. Then, with a glance at his watch, his script and the signaling arm of Wesley Mouch, he yelled into the sparkling snake-head of the microphone—into the living rooms, the offices, the studies, the nurseries of the country: "Ladies and gentlemen! Project X!"

Dr. Ferris leaned toward Dr. Stadler—through the staccato hoof beats of the announcer's voice galloping across the continent with a description of the new invention—and said in the tone of a casual remark, "It is vitally important that there be no criticism of the Project in the country at this precarious time," then added semi-accidentally, as a semi-joke, "that there be no criticism of anything at any time."

"—and the nation's political, cultural, intellectual and moral leaders," the announcer was yelling into the microphone, "who have witnessed this great event, as your representatives and in your name, will now tell you their views of it in person!"

Mr. Thompson was the first to mount the wooden steps to the platform of the microphone. He snapped his way through a brief speech, hailing a new era and declaring—in the belligerent tone of a challenge to unidentified enemies—that science belonged to the people and that every man on the face of the globe had a right to a share of the advantages created by technological progress.

Wesley Mouch came next. He spoke about social planning and the necessity of unanimous rallying in support of the planners. He spoke about discipline, unity, austerity and the patriotic duty of bearing temporary hardships. "We have mobilized the best brains of the country to work for your welfare. This great invention was the product of the genius of a man whose devotion to the cause of humanity is not to be questioned, a man acknowledged by all as the greatest mind of the century—Dr. Robert Stadler!"

"What?" gasped Dr. Stadler, whirling toward Ferris.

Dr. Ferris looked at him with a glance of patient mildness.

"He didn't ask my permission to say that!" Dr. Stadler half-snapped, half-whispered.

Dr. Ferris spread out his hands in a gesture of reproachful helplessness. "Now you see, Dr. Stadler, how unfortunate it is if you allow yourself to be disturbed by political matters, which you have always considered unworthy of your attention and knowledge. You see, it is not Mr. Mouch's function to ask permissions."

The figure now slouching against the sky on the speakers platform, coiling itself about the microphone, talking in the bored, contemptuous tone of an off-color story, was Dr. Simon Pritchett. He was declaring that the new invention was an instrument of social welfare, which guaranteed general prosperity, and that anyone who doubted this self evident fact was an enemy of society, to be treated accordingly.

"This invention, the product of Dr. Robert Stadler, the pre-eminent lover of freedom—"

Dr. Ferris opened a briefcase, produced some pages of neatly typed copy and turned to Dr. Stadler. "You are to be the climax of the broadcast," he said. "You will speak last, at the end of the hour." He extended the pages. "Here's the speech you'll make," His eyes said the rest: they said that his choice of words had not been accidental.

Dr. Stadler took the pages, but held them between the tips of two straight fingers, as one might hold a scrap of waste paper about to be tossed aside. "I haven't asked you to appoint yourself as my ghost writer," he said. The sarcasm of the voice gave Ferris his clue: this was not a moment for sarcasm.

"I couldn't have allowed your invaluable time to be taken up by the writing of radio speeches," said Dr. Ferris. "I felt certain that you would appreciate it." He said it in a tone of spurious politeness intended to be recognized as spurious, the tone of tossing to a beggar the alms of face-saving.

Dr. Stadler's answer disturbed him: Dr. Stadler did not choose to answer or to glance down at the manuscript.

"Lack of faith," a beefy speaker was snarling on the platform, in the tone of a street brawl, "lack of faith is the only thing we got to fear! If we 4iave faith in the plans of our leaders, why, the plans will work and we'll all have prosperity and ease and plenty. It's the fellows who go around doubting and destroying our morale, it's they who're keeping us in shortages and misery. But we're not going to let them do it much longer, we're here to protect the people—and if any of those doubting smarties come around, believe you me, we'll take care of them!"

"It would be unfortunate," said Dr. Ferris in a soft voice, "to arouse popular resentment against the State Science Institute at an explosive time like the present. There's a great deal of dissatisfaction and unrest in the country—and if people should misunderstand the nature of the new invention, they're liable to vent their rage on all scientists. Scientists have never been popular with the masses."

"Peace," a tall, willowy woman was signing into the microphone, "this invention is a great, new instrument of peace. It will protect us from the aggressive designs of selfish enemies, it will allow us to breathe freely and to learn to love our fellow men." She had a bony face with a mouth embittered at cocktail parties, and wore a flowing pale blue gown, suggesting the concert garment of a harpist. "It may well be considered as that miracle which was thought impossible in history—the dream of the ages—the final synthesis of science and love!"

Dr. Stadler looked at the faces in the grandstands. They were sitting quietly now, they were listening, but their eyes had an ebbing look of twilight, a look of fear in the process of being accepted as permanent, the look of raw wounds being dimmed by the veil of infection. They knew, as he knew it, that they were the targets of the shapeless funnels protruding from the mushroom building's dome—and he wondered in what manner they were now extinguishing their minds and escaping that knowledge; he knew that the words they were eager to absorb and believe were the chains slipping in to hold them, like the goats, securely within the range of those funnels. They were eager to believe; he saw the tightening lines of their lips, he saw the occasional glances of suspicion they threw at their neighbors—as if the horror that threatened them was not the sound ray, but the men who would make them acknowledge it as horror. Their eyes were veiling over, but the remnant look of a wound was a cry for help.

"Why do you think they think?" said Dr. Ferris softly. "Reason is the scientist's only weapon—and reason has no power over men, has it? At a time like ours, with the country falling apart, with the mob driven by blind desperation to the edge of open riots and violence—order must be maintained by any means available. What can we do when we have to deal with people?"

Dr. Stadler did not answer.

A fat, jellied woman, with an inadequate brassiere under a dark, perspiration-stained dress, was saying into the microphone—Dr. Stadler could not believe it at first—that the new invention was to be greeted with particular gratitude by the mothers of the country.

Dr. Stadler turned away; watching him, Ferris could see nothing but the noble line of the high forehead and the deep cut of bitterness at the corner of the mouth.

Suddenly, without context or warning, Robert Stadler whirled to face him. It was like a spurt of blood from a sudden crack in a wound that had almost closed: Stadler's face was open, open in pain, in horror, in sincerity, as if, for that moment, both he and Ferris were human beings, while he moaned with incredulous despair: "In a civilized century, Ferris, in a civilized century!"

Dr. Ferris took his time to produce and prolong a soft chuckle. "I don't know what you're talking about," he answered in the tone of a quotation.

Dr. Stadler lowered his eyes.

When Ferris spoke again, his voice had the faintest edge of a tone which Stadler could not define, except that it did not belong in any civilized discussion: "It would be unfortunate if anything were to happen to jeopardize the State Science Institute. It would be most unfortunate if the Institute were to be closed—or if any one of us were to be forced to leave it. Where would we go? Scientists are an inordinate luxury these days—and there aren't many people or establishments left who're able to afford necessities, let alone luxuries. There are no doors left open to us. We wouldn't be welcome in the research department of an industrial concern, such as—let us say—Rearden Steel. Besides, if we should happen to make enemies, the same enemies would be feared by any person tempted to employ our talents. A man like Rearden would have fought for us. Would a man like Orren Boyle? But this is purely theoretical speculation, because, as a matter of practical fact, all private establishments of scientific research have been closed by law—by Directive 10-289, issued, as you might not realize, by Mr. Wesley Mouch. Are you thinking, perhaps, of universities? They are in the same position. They can't afford to make enemies. Who would speak up for us? I believe that some such man as Hugh Akston would have come to our defense—but to think of that is to be guilty of an anachronism. He belonged to a different age. The conditions set up in our social and economic reality have long since made his continued existence impossible. And I don't think that Dr. Simon Pritchett, or the generation reared under his guidance, would be able or willing to defend us. I have never believed in the efficacy of idealists—have you?—and this is no age for impractical idealism. If anyone wished to oppose a government policy, how would he make himself heard? Through these gentlemen of the press, Dr. Stadler? Through this microphone? Is there an independent newspaper left in the country? An uncontrolled radio station? A private piece of property, for that matter—or a personal opinion?" The tone of the voice was obvious now: it was the tone of a thug. "A personal opinion is the one luxury that nobody can afford today."

Dr. Stadler's lips moved stiffly, as stiffly as the muscles of the goats, "You are speaking to Robert Stadler."

"I have not forgotten that. It is precisely because I have not forgotten it that I am speaking, 'Robert Stadler' is an illustrious name, which I would hate to see destroyed. But what is an illustrious name nowadays? In whose eyes?" His arm swept over the grandstands. "In the eyes of people such as you see around you? If they will believe, when so told, that an instrument of death is a tool of prosperity—would they not believe it if they were told that Robert Stadler is a traitor and an enemy of the State? Would you then rely on the fact that this is not true? Are you thinking of truth, Dr. Stadler? Questions of truth do not enter into social issues. Principles have no influence on public affairs.

Reason has no power over human beings. Logic is impotent. Morality is superfluous. Do not answer me now, Dr. Stadler. You will answer me over the microphone. You're the next speaker."

Looking off at the dark strip of the farm in the distance, Dr. Stadler knew that what he felt was terror, but he would not permit himself to know its nature. He, who had been able to study the particles and sub particles of cosmic space, would not permit himself to examine his feeling and to know that it was made of three parts: one part was terror of a vision that seemed to stand before his eyes, the vision of the inscription cut, in his honor, over the door of the Institute: "To the fearless mind, to the inviolate truth"—another part was a plain, brute, animal fear of physical destruction, a humiliating fear which, in the civilized world of his youth, he had not expected ever to experience—and the third was the terror of the knowledge that by betraying the first, one delivers oneself into the realm of the second.

He walked toward the speaker's scaffold, his steps firm and slow, his head lifted, the manuscript of the speech held crumpled in his fingers.

It looked like a walk to mount either a pedestal or a guillotine. As the whole of a man's life flashes before him in his dying moment, so he walked to the sound of the announcer's voice reading to the country the list of Robert Stadler's achievements and career. A faint convulsion ran over Robert Stadler's face at the words: "—former head of the Department of Physics of the Patrick Henry University." He knew, distantly, not as if the knowledge were within him, but as if it were within some person he was leaving behind, that the crowd was about to witness an act of destruction more terrible than the destruction of. the farm.

He had mounted the first three steps of the scaffold, when a young newsman tore forward, ran to him and, from below, seized the railing to stop him. "Dr. Stadler!" he cried in a desperate whisper. "Tell them the truth! Tell them that you had nothing to do with it! Tell them what sort of infernal machine it is and for what purpose it's intended to be used! Tell the country what sort of people are trying to rule it! Nobody can doubt your word! Tell them the truth! Save us! You're the only one who can!"

Dr. Stadler looked down at him. He was young; his movements and voice had that swift, sharp clarity which belongs to competence; among his aged, corrupt, favor-ridden and pull-created colleagues, he had managed to achieve the rank of elite of the political press, by means and in the role of a last, irresistible spark of ability. His eyes had the look of an eager, unfrightened intelligence; they were the kind of eyes Dr.

Stadler had seen looking up at him from the benches of classrooms.

He noticed that this boy's eyes were hazel; they had a tinge of green.

Dr. Stadler turned his head and saw that Ferris had come rushing to his side, like a servant or a jailer. "I do not expect to be insulted by disloyal young punks with treasonable motives," said Dr. Stadler loudly.

Dr. Ferris whirled upon the young man and snapped, his face out of control, distorted by rage at the unexpected and unplanned, "Give me your press card and your work permit!"

"I am proud," Dr. Robert Stadler read-into the microphone and into the attentive silence of a nation, "that my years of work in the service of science have brought me the honor of placing into the hands of our great leader, Mr. Thompson, a new instrument with an incalculable potential for a civilizing and liberating influence upon the mind of man. . . . "

The sky had the stagnant breath of a furnace and the streets of New York were like pipes running, not with air and light, but with melted dust. Dagny stood on a street corner, where the airport bus had left her, looking at the city in passive astonishment. The buildings seemed worn by weeks of summer heat, but the people seemed worn by centuries of anguish. She stood watching them, disarmed by an enormous sense of unreality.

That sense of unreality had been her only feeling since the early hours of the morning—since the moment when, at the end of an empty highway, she had walked into an unknown town and stopped the first passer-by to ask where she was.

"Watsonville," he answered. "What state, please?" she asked. The man glanced at her, said, "Nebraska," and walked hastily away. She smiled mirthlessly, knowing that he wondered where she had come from and that no explanation he could imagine would be as fantastic as the truth. Yet it was Watsonville that seemed fantastic to her, as she walked through its streets to the railroad station. She had lost the habit of observing despair as the normal and dominant aspect of human existence, so normal as to become unnoticed—and the sight of it struck her in all of its senseless futility. She was seeing the brand of pain and fear on the faces of people, and the look of evasion that refuses to know it—they seemed to be going through the motions of some enormous pretense, acting out a ritual to ward off reality, letting the earth remain unseen and their lives unlived, in dread of something namelessly forbidden—yet the forbidden was the simple act of looking at the nature of their pain and questioning their duty to bear it. She was seeing it so clearly that she kept wanting to approach strangers, to shake them, to laugh in their faces and to cry, "Snap out of it!"

There was no reason for people to be as unhappy as that, she thought, no reason whatever . . . and then she remembered that reason was the one power they had banished from their existence.

She boarded a Taggart train for the nearest airfield; she did not identify herself to anyone: it seemed irrelevant. She sat at the window of a coach, like a stranger who has to learn the incomprehensible language of those around her. She picked up a discarded newspaper; she managed, with effort, to understand what was written, but not why it should ever have been written: it all seemed so childishly senseless.

She stared in astonishment at a paragraph in a syndicated column from New York, which stated over emphatically that Mr. James Taggart wished it to be known that his sister had died in an airplane crash, any unpatriotic rumors to the contrary notwithstanding. Slowly, she remembered Directive 10-289 and realized that Jim was embarrassed by the public suspicion that she had vanished as a deserter.

The wording of the paragraph suggested that her disappearance had been a prominent public issue, not yet dropped. There were other suggestions of it: a mention of Miss Taggart's tragic death, in a story about the growing number of plane crashes—and, on the back page, an ad, offering a $100,000 reward to the person who would find the wreckage of her plane, signed by Henry Rearden.

The last gave her a stab of urgency; the rest seemed meaningless.

Then, slowly, she realized that her return was a public event which would be taken as big news. She felt a lethargic weariness at the prospect of a dramatic homecoming, of facing Jim and the press, of witnessing the excitement. She wished they would get it over with in her absence.

At the airfield, she saw a small-town reporter interviewing some departing officials. She waited till he had finished, then she approached him, extended her credentials and said quietly, to the gaping stare of his eyes, "I'm Dagny Taggart. Would you make it known, please, that I'm alive and that I'll be in New York this afternoon?" The plane was about to take off and she escaped the necessity of answering questions.

She watched the prairies, the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below—and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer, The passengers were listening to some radio broadcast, which appeared to be important, judging by their earnest attentiveness. She caught brief snatches of fraudulent voices talking about some sort of new invention that was to bring some undefined benefits to some undefined public's welfare. The words were obviously chosen to convey no specific meaning whatever; she wondered how one could pretend that one was hearing a speech; yet that was what the passengers were doing.

They were going through the performance of a child who, not yet able to read, holds a book open and spells out anything he wishes to spell, pretending that it is contained in the incomprehensible black lines. But the child, she thought, knows that he is playing a game; these people pretend to themselves that they are not pretending; they know no other state of existence.

The sense of unreality remained as her only feeling, when she landed, when she escaped a crowd of reporters without being seen—by avoiding the taxi stands and leaping into the airport bus—when she rode on the bus, then stood on a street corner, looking et New York, She felt as if she were seeing an abandoned city.

She felt no sense of homecoming, when she entered her apartment; the place seemed to be a convenient machine that she could use for some purpose of no significance whatever.

But she felt a quickened touch of energy, like the first break in a fog —a touch of meaning—when she picked up the telephone receiver and called Rearden's office in Pennsylvania. "Oh, Miss Taggart . . . Miss Taggart!" said, in a joyous moan, the voice of the severe, unemotional Miss Ives.

"Hello, Miss Ives. I haven't startled you, have I? You knew that I was alive?"

"Oh yes! I heard it on the radio this morning."

"Is Mr. Rearden in his office?"

"No, Miss Taggart. He . . . he's in the Rocky Mountains, searching for . . . that is . . ."

"Yes, I know. Do you know where we can reach him?"

"I expect to hear from him at any moment. He's stopping in Los Gatos, Colorado, right now. I phoned him, the moment I heard the news, but he was out and I left a message for him to call me. You see, he's out flying, most of the day . . . but he'll call me when he comes back to the hotel."

"What hotel is it?"

"The Eldorado Hotel, in Los Gatos."

"Thank you, Miss Ives." She was about to hang up.

"Oh, Miss Taggart!"

"Yes?"

"What was it that happened to you? Where were you?"

"I . . . I'll tell you when I see you. I'm in New York now. When Mr. Rearden calls, tell him please that I'll be in my office."

"Yes, Miss Taggart."

She hung up, but her hand remained on the receiver, clinging to her first contact with a matter that had importance. She looked at her apartment and at the city in the window, feeling reluctant to sink again into the dead fog of the meaningless.

She raised the receiver and called Los Gatos.

"Eldorado Hotel," said a woman's drowsily resentful voice.

"Would you take a message for Mr. Henry Rearden? Ash him, when he comes in, to—"

"Just a minute, please," drawled the voice, in the impatient tone that resents any effort as an imposition.

She heard the clicking of switches, some buzzing, some breaks of silence and then a man's clear, firm voice answering: "Hello?" It was Hank Rearden.

She stared at the receiver as at the muzzle of a gun, feeling trapped, unable to breathe.

"Hello?" he repeated.

"Hank, is that you?"

She heard a low sound, more a sigh than a gasp, and then the long, empty crackling of the wire.

"Hank'" There was no answer. "Hank!" she screamed in terror.

She thought she heard the effort of a breath—then she heard a whisper, which was not a question, but a statement saying everything: "Dagny."

"Hank, I'm sorry—oh, darling, I'm sorry!—didn't you know?"

"Where are you, Dagny?"

"Are you all right?"

"Of course."

"Didn't you know that I was back and . . . and alive?"

"No . . . I didn't know it."

"Oh God, I'm sorry I called, I—"

"What are you talking about? Dagny, where are you?"

"In New York. Didn't you hear about it on the radio?"

"No. I've just come in."

"Didn't they give you a message to call Miss Ives?"

"No."

"Are you all right?"

"Now?" She heard his soft, low chuckle. She was hearing the sound of unreleased laughter, the sound of youth, growing in his voice with every word. "When did you come back?"

"This morning."

"Dagny, where were you?"

She did not answer at once. "My plane crashed," she said. "In the Rockies. I was picked up by some people who helped me, but I could not send word to anyone."

The laughter went out of his voice. "As bad as that?"

"Oh . . . oh, the crash? No, it wasn't bad. I wasn't hurt. Not seriously."

"Then why couldn't you send word?"

"There were no . . . no means of communication."

"Why did it take you so long to get back?"

“I . . . can't answer that now,"

"Dagny, were you in danger?"

The half-smiling, half-bitter tone of her voice was almost regret, as she answered, "No."

"Were you held prisoner?"

"No—not really."

"Then you could have returned sooner, but didn't?"

"That's true—but that's all I can tell you,"

"Where were you, Dagny?"

"Do you mind if we don't talk about it now? Let's wait until I see you."

"Of course. I won't ask any questions. Just tell me: are you safe now?"

"Safe? Yes."

"I mean, have you suffered any permanent injuries or consequences?"

She answered, with the same sound of a cheerless smile, "Injuries—no, Hank. I don't know, as to the permanent consequences."

"Will you still be in New York tonight?"

"Why, yes. I'm . . . I'm back for good."

"Are you?"

"Why do you ask that?"

"I don't know. I guess I'm too used to what it's like when . . . when I can't find you."

"I'm back."

"Yes. I'll see you in a few hours." His voice broke off, as if the sentence were too enormous to believe. "In a few hours," he repeated firmly.

"I'll be here."

"Dagny—"

"Yes?"

He chuckled softly. "No, nothing. Just wanted to hear your voice awhile longer. Forgive me. I mean, not now. I mean, I don't want to say anything now."

"Hank, I—"

"When I see you, my darling. So long."

She stood looking at the silent receiver. For the first time since her return, she felt pain, a violent pain, but it made her alive, because it was worth feeling.

She telephoned her secretary at Taggart Transcontinental, to say briefly that she would be in the office in half an hour.

The statue of Nathaniel Taggart was real—when she stood facing it in the concourse of the Terminal. It seemed to her that they were alone in a vast, echoing temple, with fog coils of formless ghosts weaving and vanishing around them. She stood still, looking up at the statue, as for a brief moment of dedication. I'm back—were the only words she had to offer.

"Dagny Taggart" was still the inscription on the frosted glass panel of the door to her office. The look on the faces of her staff, as she entered the anteroom, was the look of drowning persons at the sight of a lifeline. She saw Eddie Willers standing at his desk in his glass enclosure, with some man before him. Eddie made a move in her direction, but stopped; he looked imprisoned. She let her glance greet every face in turn, smiling at them gently as at doomed children, then walked toward Eddie's desk.

Eddie was watching her approach as if he were seeing nothing else in the world, but his rigid posture seemed designed to pretend that he was listening to the man before him.

"Motive power?" the man was saying in a voice that had a brusque, staccato snap and a slurred, nasal drawl, together. "There's no problem about motive power. You just take—"

"Hello," said Eddie softly, with a muted smile, as to a distant vision.

The man turned to glance at her. He had a yellow complexion, curly hair, a hard face made of soft muscles, and the revolting handsomeness belonging to the esthetic standards of barroom corners; his blurred brown eyes had the empty flatness of glass.

"Miss Taggart," said Eddie, in a resonant tone of severity, the tone of slapping the man into the manners of a drawing room he had never entered, "may I present Mr. Meigs?"

"How d' do," said the man without interest, then turned to Eddie and proceeded, as if she were not present: "You just take the Comet off the schedule for tomorrow and Tuesday, and shoot the engines to Arizona for the grapefruit special, with the rolling stock from the Scranton coal run I mentioned. Send the orders out at once."

"You'll do nothing of the kind!" she gasped, too incredulous to be angry.

Eddie did not answer.

Meigs glanced at her with what would have been astonishment if his eyes were capable of registering a reaction. "Send the orders," he said to Eddie, with no emphasis, and walked out.

Eddie was jotting notations on a piece of paper.

"Are you crazy?" she asked.

He raised his eyes to her, as though exhausted by hours of beating.

"We'll have to, Dagny” he said, his voice dead.

"What is that?" she asked, pointing at the outer door that had closed on Mr. Meigs.

"The Director of Unification."

"What?"

"The Washington representative, in charge of the Railroad Unification Plan."

"What's that?"

"It's . . . Oh, wait, Dagny, are you all right? Were you hurt? Was it a plane crash?"

She had never imagined what the face of Eddie Willers would look like in the process of aging, but she was seeing it now—aging at thirty-five and within the span of one month. It was not a matter of texture or wrinkles, it was the same face with the same muscles, but saturated by the withering look of resignation to a pain accepted as hopeless.

She smiled, gently and confidently, in understanding, in dismissal of all problems, and said, extending her hand, "All right, Eddie. Hello."

He took her hand and pressed it to his lips, a thing he had never done before, his manner neither daring nor apologetic, but simply and openly personal.

"It was a plane crash," she said, "and, Eddie, so that you won't worry, 111 tell you the truth: I wasn't hurt, not seriously. But that's not the story I'm going to give to the press and to all the others. So you're never to mention it."

"Of course."

"I had no way to communicate with anyone, but not because I was hurt. It's all I can tell you, Eddie. Don't ask me where I was or why it took me so long to return."

"I won't."

"Now tell me, what is the Railroad Unification Plan?"

"It's . . . Oh, do you mind?—let Jim tell you. He will, soon enough. I just don't have the stomach—unless you want me to," he added, with a conscientious effort at discipline, "No, you don't have to. Just tell me whether I understood that Unificator correctly: he wants you to cancel the Comet for two days in order to give her engines to a grapefruit special in Arizona?"

"That's right."

"And he's cancelled a coal train in order to get cars to lug grapefruit?"

"Yes."

"Grapefruit?"

"That's right."

"Why?"

"Dagny, 'why' is a word nobody uses any longer."

After a moment, she asked, "Have you any guess about the reason?"

"Guess? I don't have to guess. I know."

"All right, what is it?"

"The grapefruit special is for the Smather brothers. The Smather brothers bought a fruit ranch in Arizona a year ago, from a man who went bankrupt under the Equalization of Opportunity Bill. He had owned the ranch for thirty years. The Smather brothers were in the punchboard business the year before. They bought the ranch by means of a loan from Washington under a project for the reclamation of distressed areas, such as Arizona. The Smather brothers have friends in.

Washington."

"Well?"

"Dagny, everybody knows it. Everybody knows how train schedules have been run in the past three weeks, and why some districts and some shippers get transportation, while others don't. What we're not supposed to do is say that we know it. We're supposed to pretend to believe that 'public welfare is the only reason for any decision—and that the public welfare of the city of New York requires the immediate delivery of a large quantity of grapefruit." He paused, then added, "The Director of Unification is sole judge of the public welfare and has sole authority over the allocation of any motive power and rolling stock on any railroad anywhere in the United States."

There was a moment of silence. "I see," she said. In another moment, she asked, "What has been done about the Winston tunnel?"

"Oh, that was abandoned three weeks ago. They never unearthed the trains. The equipment gave out."

"What has been done about rebuilding the old line around the tunnel?"

"That was shelved."

"Then are we running any transcontinental traffic?"

He gave her an odd glance. "Oh yes," he said bitterly.

"Through the detour of the Kansas Western?"

"No."

"Eddie, what has been happening here in the past month?"

He smiled as if his words were an ugly confession. "We've been making money in the past month," he answered.

She saw the outer door open and James Taggart come in, accompanied by Mr. Meigs. "Eddie, do you want to be present at the conference?" she asked. "Or would you rather miss this one?"

"No. I want to be present."

Jim's face looked like a crumpled piece of paper, though its soft, puffed flesh had acquired no additional lines.

"Dagny, there's a lot of things to discuss, a lot of important changes which—" he said shrilly, his voice rushing in ahead of his person. "Oh, I'm glad to see you back, I'm happy that you're alive," he added impatiently, remembering. "Now there are some urgent—"

"Let's go to my office," she said.

Her office was like a historical reconstruction, restored and maintained by Eddie Willers. Her map, her calendar, the picture of Nat Taggart were on the walls, and no trace was left of the Clifton Locey era, "I understand that I am still the Operating Vice-President of this railroad?" she asked, sitting down at her desk.

"You are," said Taggart hastily, accusingly, almost defiantly. "You certainly are—and don't you forget it—you haven't quit, you're still —have you?"

"No, I haven't quit."

"Now the most urgent thing to do is to tell that to the press, tell them that you're back on the job and where you were and—and, by the way, where were you?"

"Eddie," she said, "will you make a note on this and send it to the press? My plane developed engine trouble while I was flying over the Rocky Mountains to the Taggart Tunnel. I lost my way, looking for an emergency landing, and crashed in an uninhabited mountain section—of Wyoming. I was found by an old sheepherder and his wife, who took me to their cabin, deep in the wilderness, fifty miles away from the nearest settlement. I was badly injured and remained unconscious for most of two weeks. The old couple had no telephone, no radio, no means of communication or transportation, except an old truck that broke down when they attempted to use it. I had to remain with them until I recovered sufficient strength to walk. I walked the fifty miles to the foothills, then hitchhiked my way to a Taggart station in Nebraska."

"I see," said Taggart. "Well, that's fine. Now when you give the press interview—"

"I'm not going to give any press interviews."

"What? But they've been calling me all day! They're waiting! It's essential!" He had an air of panic. "It's most crucially essential!"

"Who's been calling you all day?"

"People in Washington and . . . and others . . . They're waiting for your statement."

She pointed at Eddie's notes. "There's my statement."

"But that's not enough! You must say that you haven't quit."

"That's obvious, isn't it? I'm back."

"You must say something about it."

"Such as what?"

"Something personal."

"To whom?"

"To the country. People were worried about you. You must reassure them."

"The story will reassure them, if anyone was worried about me."

"That's not what I mean!"

"Well, what do you mean?"

"I mean—" He stopped, his eyes avoiding hers. "I mean—" He sat, searching for words, cracking his knuckles.

Jim was going to pieces, she thought; the jerky impatience, the shrillness, the aura of panic were new; crude outbreaks of a tone of ineffectual menace had replaced his pose of cautious smoothness.

"I mean—" He was searching for words to name his meaning without naming it, she thought, to make her understand that which he did not want to be understood, "I mean, the public—"

"I know what you mean," she said. "No, Jim, I'm not going to reassure the public about the state of our industry."

"Now you're—"

"The public had better be as unreassured as it has the wits to be.

Now proceed to business."

"I-"

"Proceed to business, Jim."

He glanced at Mr. Meigs. Mr. Meigs sat silently, his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. He wore a jacket which was not, but looked like, a military uniform. The flesh of his neck bulged over the collar, and the flesh of his body strained against the narrow waistline intended to disguise it. He wore a ring with a large yellow diamond that flashed when he moved his stubby fingers.

"You've met Mr. Meigs," said Taggart. "I'm. so glad that the two of you will get along well together." He made an expectant half-pause, but received no answer from either. "Mr. Meigs is the representative of the Railroad Unification Plan. You'll have many opportunities to cooperate with him."

"What is the Railroad Unification Plan?"

"It is a . . . a new national setup that went into effect three weeks ago, which you will appreciate and approve of and find extremely practical." She marveled at the futility of his method: he was acting as if, by naming her opinion in advance, he would make her unable to alter it. "It is an emergency setup which has saved the country's transportation system."

"What is the plan?"

"You realize, of course, the insurmountable difficulties of any sort of construction job during this period of emergency. It is—temporarily—impossible to lay new track. Therefore, the country's top problem is to preserve the transportation industry as a whole, to preserve its existing plant and all of its existing facilities. The national survival requires—"

"What is the plan?"

"As a policy of national survival, the railroads of the country have been unified into a single team, pooling their resources. All of their gross revenue is turned over to the Railroad Pool Board in Washington, which acts as trustee for the industry as a whole, and divides the total income among the various railroads, according to a . . . a more modern principle of distribution."

"What principle?"

"Now don't worry, property rights have been fully preserved and protected, they've merely been given a new form. Every railroad retains independent responsibility for its own operations, its train schedules and the maintenance of its track and equipment. As its contribution to the national pool, every railroad permits any other, when conditions so require, to use its track and facilities without charge. At the end of the year, the Pool Board distributes the total gross income, and every individual railroad is paid, not on the haphazard, old-fashioned basis of the number of trains run or the tonnage of freight carried, but on the basis of its need—that is, the preservation of its track being its main need, every individual railroad is paid according to the mileage of the track which it owns and maintains."

She heard the words; she understood the meaning; she was unable to make it real—to grant the respect of anger, concern, opposition to a nightmare piece of insanity that rested on nothing but people's willingness to pretend to believe that it was sane. She felt a numbed emptiness —and the sense of being thrown far below the realm where moral indignation is pertinent.

"Whose track are we using for our transcontinental traffic?" she asked, her voice flat and dry.

"Why, our own, of course," said Taggart hastily, "that is, from New York to Bedford, Illinois. We run our trains out of Bedford on the track of the Atlantic Southern."

"To San Francisco?"

"Well, it's much faster than that long detour you tried to establish."

"We run our trains without charge for the use of the track?"

"Besides, your detour couldn't have lasted, the Kansas Western rail was shot, and besides—"

"Without charge for the use of the Atlantic Southern track?"

"Well, we're not charging them for the use of our Mississippi bridge, either."

After a moment, she asked, "Have you looked at a map?"

"Sure," said Meigs unexpectedly. "You own the largest track mileage of any railroad in the country. So you've got nothing to worry about."

Eddie Willers burst out laughing.

Meigs glanced at him blankly, "What's the matter with you?" he asked.

"Nothing," said Eddie wearily, "nothing."

"Mr. Meigs," she said, "if you look at a map, you will see that two thirds of the cost of maintaining a track for our transcontinental traffic is given to us free and is paid by our competitor."

"Why, sure," he said, but his eyes narrowed, watching her suspiciously, as if he were wondering what motive prompted her to so explicit a statement.

"While we're paid for owning miles of useless track which carries no traffic," she said.

Meigs understood—and leaned back as if he had lost all further interest in the discussion.

"That's not true!" snapped Taggart. "We're running a great number of local trains to serve the region of our former transcontinental line—through Iowa, Nebraska and Colorado—and, on the other side of the tunnel, through California, Nevada and Utah."

"We're running two locals a day," said Eddie Willers, in the dry, blankly innocent tone of a business report. "Fewer, some places."

"What determines the number of trains which any given railroad is obligated to run?" she asked.

"The public welfare," said Taggart "The Pool Board," said Eddie.

"How many trains have been discontinued in the country in the past three weeks?"

"As a matter of fact," said Taggart eagerly, "the plan has helped to harmonize the industry and to eliminate cutthroat competition."

"It has eliminated thirty per cent of the trains run in-the country," said Eddie. "The only competition left is in the applications to the Board for permission to cancel trains. The railroad to survive will be the one that manages to run no trains at all."

"Has anybody calculated how long the Atlantic Southern is expected to be able to remain in business?"

"That's no skin off your—" started Meigs.

"Please, Cuffy!" cried Taggart.

"The president of the Atlantic Southern," said Eddie impassively, "has committed suicide."

"That had nothing to do with this!" yelled Taggart. "It was over a personal matter!"

She remained silent. She sat, looking at their faces. There was still an element of wonder in the numbed indifference of her mind: Jim had always managed to switch the weight of his failures upon the strongest plants around him and to survive by destroying them to pay for his errors, as he had done with Dan Conway, as he had done with the industries of Colorado; but this did not have even the rationality of a looter—this pouncing upon the drained carcass of a weaker, a half bankrupt competitor for a moment's delay, with nothing but a cracking bone between the pouncer and the abyss.

The impulse of the habit of reason almost pushed her to speak, to argue, to demonstrate the self-evident—but she looked at their faces and she saw that they knew it. In some terms different from hers, in some inconceivable manner of consciousness, they knew all that she could tell them, it was useless to prove to them the irrational horror of their course and of its consequences, both Meigs and Taggart knew it—and the secret of their consciousness was the means by which they escaped the finality of their knowledge, "I see," she said quietly.

"Well, what would you rather have had me do?" screamed Taggart.

"Give up our transcontinental traffic? Go bankrupt? Turn the railroad into a miserable East Coast local?" Her two words seemed to have hit him worse than any indignant objection; he seemed to be shaking with terror at that which the quiet "I see” had acknowledged seeing. "I couldn't help it! We had to have a transcontinental track! There was no way to get around the tunnel! We had no money to pay for any extra costs! Something had to be done! We had to have a track!"

Meigs was looking at him with a glance of part-astonishment, part disgust, "I am not arguing, Jim," she said dryly.

"We couldn't permit a railroad like Taggart Transcontinental to crash! It would have been a national catastrophe! We had to think of all the cities and industries and shippers and passengers and employees and stockholders whose lives depend on us! It wasn't just for ourselves, it was for the public welfare! Everybody agrees that the Railroad Unification Plan is practical! The best-informed—"

"Jim," she said, "if you have any further business to discuss with me —discuss it."

"You've never considered the social angle of anything," he said, in a sullen, retreating voice.

She noticed that this form of pretense was as unreal to Mr. Meigs as it was to her, though for an antipodal reason. He was looking at Jim with bored contempt. Jim appeared to her suddenly as a man who had tried to find a middle course between two poles—Meigs and herself —and who was now seeing that his course was narrowing and that he was to be ground between two straight walls.

"Mr. Meigs," she asked, prompted by a touch of bitterly amused curiosity, "what is your economic plan for day after tomorrow?"

She saw his bleary brown eyes focus upon her without expression.

"You're impractical," he said.

"It's perfectly useless to theorize about the future," snapped Taggart, "when we have to take care of the emergency of the moment. In the long run—"

"In the long run, we'll all be dead," said Meigs.

Then, abruptly, he shot to his feet. "I'll run along, Jim," he said. "I've got no time to waste on conversations." He added, "You talk to her about that matter of doing something to stop all those train wrecks—if she's the little girl who's such a wizard at railroading." It was said inoffensively; he was a man who would not know when he was giving offense or taking it.

"I'll see you later, Cuffy," said Taggart, as Meigs walked out with no parting glance at any of them.

Taggart looked at her, expectantly and fearfully, as if dreading her comment, yet desperately hoping to hear some word, any word.

"Well?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Have you anything else to discuss?"

"Well, I . . . " He sounded disappointed. "Yes!" he cried, in the tone of a desperate plunge. "I have another matter to discuss, the most important one of all, the—"

"Your growing number of train wrecks?"

"No! Not that."

"What, then?"

"It's . . . that you're going to appear on Bertram Scudder's radio program tonight."

She leaned back. "Am I?"

"Dagny, it's imperative, it's crucial, there's nothing to be done about it, to refuse is out of the question, in times like these one has no choice, and—"

She glanced at her watch. "I'll give you three minutes to explain—if you want to be heard at all. And you'd better speak straight."

"All right!" he said desperately. "It's considered most important—on the highest levels, I mean Chick Morrison and Wesley Mouch and Mr. Thompson, as high as that—that you should make a speech to the nation, a morale-building speech, you know, saying that you haven't quit."

"Why?"

"Because everybody thought you had! . . . You don't know what's been going on lately, but . . . but it's sort of uncanny. The country is full of rumors, all sorts of rumors, about everything, all of them dangerous. Disruptive, I mean. People seem to do nothing but whisper. They don't believe the newspapers, they don't believe the best speakers, they believe every vicious, scare-mongering piece of gossip that comes floating around. There's no confidence left, no faith, no order, no . . . no respect for authority. People . . . people seem to be on the verge of panic."

"Well?"

"Well, for one thing, it's that damnable business of all those big industrialists who've vanished into thin air! Nobody's been able to explain it and it's giving them the jitters. There's all sorts of hysterical stuff being whispered about it, but what they whisper mostly is that 'no decent man will work for those people.' They mean the people in Washington. Now do you see? You wouldn't suspect that you were so famous, but you are, or you've become, ever since your plane crash. Nobody believed the plane crash. They all thought you had broken the law, that is, Directive 10-289, and deserted. There's a lot of popular . . . misunderstanding of Directive 10-289, a lot of . . . well, unrest.

Now you see how important it is that you go on the air and tell people that it isn't true that Directive 10-289 is destroying industry, that it's a sound piece of legislation devised for everybody's good, and that if they'll just be patient a little longer, things will improve and prosperity will return. They don't believe any public official any more. You . . . you're an industrialist, one of the few left of the old school, and the only one who's ever come back after they thought you'd gone. You're known as . . . as a reactionary who's opposed to Washington policies. So the people will believe you. It would have a great influence on them, it would buttress their confidence, it would help their morale. Now do you see?"

He had rushed on, encouraged by the odd look of her face, a look of contemplation that was almost a faint half-smile.

She had listened, hearing, through his words, the sound of Rearden's voice saying to her on a spring evening over a year ago: "They need some sort of sanction from us. I don't know the nature of that sanction -—but, Dagny, I know that if we value our lives, we must not give it to them. If they put you on a torture rack, don't give it to them. Let them destroy your railroad and my mills, but don't give it to them."

"Now do you see?"

"Oh yes, Jim, I see!"

He could not interpret the sound of her voice, it was low, it was part-moan, part-chuckle, part-triumph—but it was the first sound of emotion to come from her, and he plunged on, with no choice but to hope. "I promised them in Washington that you'd speak! We can't fail them—not in an issue of this kind! We can't afford to be suspected of disloyalty. It's alt arranged. You'll be the guest speaker on Bertram Scudder's program, tonight, at ten-thirty. He's got a radio program where he interviews prominent public figures, it's a national hookup, he has a large following, he reaches over twenty million people. The office of the Morale Conditioner has—"

"The what?"

"The Morale Conditioner—that's Chick Morrison—has called me three times, to make sure that nothing would go wrong. They've issued orders to all the news broadcasters, who've been announcing it all day, all over the country, telling people to listen to you tonight on Bertram Scudder's hour."

He looked at her as if he were demanding both an answer and the recognition that her answer was the element of least importance in these circumstances. She said, "You know what I think of the Washington policies and of Directive 10-289."

"At a time like this, we can't afford the luxury of thinking!"

She laughed aloud.

"But don't you see that you can't refuse them now?" he yelled. "If you don't appear after all those announcements, it will support the rumors, it will amount to an open declaration of disloyalty!"

"The trap won't work, Jim."

"What trap?"

"The one you're always setting up."

"I don't know what you mean!"

"Yes, you do. You knew—all of you knew it—that I would refuse.

So you pushed me into a public trap, where my refusal would become an embarrassing scandal for you, more embarrassing than you thought I'd dare to cause. You were counting on me to save your faces and the necks you stuck out. I won't save them."

"But I promised it!"

"I didn't."

"But we can't refuse them! Don't you see that they've got us hogtied?

That they're holding us by the throat? Don't you know what they can do to us through this Railroad Pool, or through the Unification Board, or through the moratorium on our bonds?"

"I knew that two years ago."

He was shaking; there was some formless, desperate, almost superstitious quality in his terror, out of proportion to the dangers he named.

She felt suddenly certain that it came from something deeper than his fear of bureaucratic reprisal, that the reprisal was the only identification of it which he would permit himself to know, a reassuring identification which had a semblance of rationality and hid his true motive. She felt certain that it was not the country's panic he wanted to stave off, but his own—that he, and Chick Morrison and Wesley Mouch and all the rest of the looting crew needed her sanction, not to reassure their victims, but to reassure themselves, though the allegedly crafty, the allegedly practical idea of deluding their victims was the only identification they gave to their own motive and their hysterical insistence. With an awed contempt—awed by the enormity of the sight—she wondered what inner degradation those men had to reach in order to arrive at a level of self-deception where they would seek the extorted approval of an unwilling victim as the moral sanction they needed, they who thought that they were merely deceiving the world.

"We have no choice!" he cried. "Nobody has any choice!"

"Get out of here," she said, her voice very quiet and low.

Some tonal quality in the sound of her voice struck the note of the unconfessed within him, as ft, never allowing it into words, he knew from what knowledge that sound had come. He got out.

She glanced at Eddie; he looked like a man worn by fighting one more of the attacks of disgust which he was learning to endure as a chronic condition.

After a moment, he asked, "Dagny, what became of Quentin Daniels?

You were flying after him, weren't you?"

"Yes," she said. "He's gone."

"To the destroyer?"

The word hit her like a physical blow. It was the first touch of the outer world upon that radiant presence which she had kept within her all day, as a silent, changeless vision, a private vision, not to be affected by any of the things around her, not to be thought about, only to be felt as the source of her strength. The destroyer, she realized, was the name of that vision, here, in their world.

"Yes," she said dully, with effort, "to the destroyer."

Then she closed her hands over the edge of the desk, to steady her purpose and her posture, and said, with the bitter hint of a smile, "Well, Eddie, let's see what two impractical persons, like you and me, can do about preventing the tram wrecks."

It was two hours later—when she was alone at her desk, bent over sheets of paper that bore nothing but figures, yet were like a motion picture film unrolling to tell her the whole story of the railroad in the past four weeks—that the buzzer rang and her secretary's voice said, "Mrs. Rearden to see you, Miss Taggart."

"Mr. Rearden?" she asked incredulously, unable to believe either.

"No. Mrs. Rearden."

She let a moment pass, then said, "Please ask her to come in."

There was some peculiar touch of emphasis in Lillian Rearden's bearing when she entered and walked toward the desk. She wore a tailored suit, with a loose, bright bow hanging casually sidewise for a note of elegant incongruity, and a small hat tilted at an angle considered smart by virtue of being considered amusing; her face was a shade too smooth, her steps a shade too slow, and she walked almost as if she were swinging her hips.

"How do you do, Miss Taggart," she said in a lazily gracious voice, a drawing-room voice which seemed to strike, in that office, the same style of incongruity as her suit and her bow.

Dagny inclined her head gravely.

Lillian glanced about the office; her glance had the same style of amusement as her hat: an amusement purporting to express maturity by the conviction that life could be nothing but ridiculous.

"Please sit down," said Dagny.

Lillian sat down, relaxing Into a confident, gracefully casual posture.

When she turned her face to Dagny, the amusement was still there, but its shading was now different: it seemed to suggest that they shared a secret, which would make her presence here seem preposterous to the world, but self-evidently logical to the two of them. She stressed it by remaining silent.

"What can I do for you?"

"I came to tell you," said Lillian pleasantly, "that you will appear on Bertram Scudder's broadcast tonight."

She detected no astonishment in Dagny's face, no shock, only the glance of an engineer studying a motor that makes an irregular sound.

"I assume," said Dagny, "that you are fully aware of the form of your sentence."

"Oh yes!" said Lillian.

"Then proceed to support it."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Proceed to tell me."

Lillian gave a brief little laugh, its forced brevity betraying that this was not quite the attitude she had expected. "I am sure that no lengthy explanations will be necessary," she said. "You know why your appearance on that broadcast is important to those in power. I know why you have refused to appear. I know your convictions on the subject.

You may have attached no importance to it, but you do know that my sympathy has always been on the side of the system now in power.

Therefore, you will understand my interest in the issue and my place in it. When your brother told me that you had refused, I decided to take a hand in the matter—because, you see, I am one of the very few who know that you are not in a position to refuse."

"I am not one of those few, as yet," said Dagny.

Lillian smiled. "Well, yes, I must explain a little further. You realize that your radio appearance will have the same value for those in power as—as the action of my husband when he signed the Gift Certificate that turned Rearden Metal over to them. You know how frequently and how usefully they have been mentioning it in all of their propaganda."

"I didn't know that," said Dagny sharply.

"Oh, of course, you have been away for most of the last two months, so you might have missed the constant reminders—in the press, on the radio, in public speeches—that even Hank Rearden approves of and supports Directive 10-289, since he has voluntarily signed his Metal over to the nation. Even Hank Rearden. That discourages a great many recalcitrants and helps to keep them in line." She leaned back and asked in the tone of a casual aside, "Have you ever asked him why he signed?"

Dagny did not answer; she did not seem to hear that it was a question; she sat still and her face was expressionless, but her eyes seemed too large and they were fixed on Lillian's, as if she were now intent upon nothing but hearing Lillian to the end.

"No, I didn't think you knew it. I didn't think that he would ever tell you," said Lillian, her voice smoother, as if recognizing the signposts and sliding comfortably down the anticipated course. "Yet you must learn the reason that made him sign—because it is the same reason that will make you appear on Bertram Scudder's broadcast tonight."

She paused, wishing to be urged; Dagny waited.

"It is a reason," said Lillian, "which should please you—as far as my husband's action is concerned. Consider what that signature meant to him. Rearden Metal was his greatest achievement, the summation of the best in his life, the final symbol of his pride—and my husband, as you have reason to know, is an extremely passionate man, his pride in himself being, perhaps, his greatest passion. Rearden Metal was more than an achievement to him, it was the symbol of his ability to achieve, of his independence, of his struggle, of his rise. It was his property, his by right—and you know what rights mean to a man as strict as he, and what property means to a man as possessive. He would have gladly died to defend it, rather than surrender it to the men he despised. This is what it meant to him—and this is what he gave up. You will be glad to know that he gave it up for your sake, Miss Taggart. For the sake of your reputation and your honor. He signed the Gift Certificate surrendering Rearden Metal—under the threat that the adultery he was carrying on with you would be exposed to the eyes of the world. Oh yes, we had full proof of it, in every intimate detail. I believe that you hold a philosophy which disapproves of sacrifice—but in this case, you are most certainly a woman, so I'm sure that you will feel gratification at the magnitude of the sacrifice a man has made for the privilege of using your body. You have undoubtedly taken great pleasure in the nights which he spent in your bed. You may now take pleasure in the knowledge of what those nights have cost him. And since—you like bluntness, don't you, Miss Taggart?—since your chosen status is that of a whore, I take my hat off to you in regard to the price you exacted, which none of your sisters could ever have hoped to match."

Lillian's voice had kept growing reluctantly sharper, like a drill head that kept breaking by being unable to find the line of the fault in the stone. Dagny was still looking at her, but the intensity had vanished from Dagny's eyes and posture. Lillian wondered why she felt as if Dagny's face were hit by a spotlight. She could detect no particular expression, it was simply a face in natural repose—and the clarity seemed to come from its structure, from the precision of its sharp planes, the firmness of the mouth, the steadiness of the eyes. She could not decipher the expression of the eyes, it seemed incongruous, it resembled the calm, not of a woman, but of a scholar, it had that peculiar, luminous quality which is the fearlessness of satisfied knowledge.

"It was I," said Lillian softly, "who informed the bureaucrats about my husband's adultery."

Dagny noticed the first flicker of feeling in Lillian's lifeless eyes: it resembled pleasure, but so distantly that it looked like sunlight reflected from the dead surface of the moon to the stagnant water of a swamp; it flickered for an instant and went.

"It was I," said Lillian, "who took Rearden Metal away from him."

It sounded almost like a plea.

It was not within the power of Dagny's consciousness ever to understand that plea or to know what response Lillian had hoped to find; she knew only that she had not found it, when she heard the sudden shrillness of Lillian's voice: "Have you understood me?"

"Yes."

"Then you know what I demand and why you'll obey me. You thought you were invincible, you and he, didn't you?" The voice was attempting smoothness, but it was jerking unevenly. "You have always acted on no will but your own—a luxury I have not been able to afford. For once and in compensation, I will see you acting on mine.

You can't fight me. You can't buy your way out of it, with those dollars which you're able to make and I'm not. There's no profit you can offer me—I'm devoid of greed. I'm not paid by the bureaucrats for doing this—I am doing it without gain. Without gain. Do you understand me?"

"Yes."

"Then no further explanations are necessary, only the reminder that all the factual evidence—hotel registers, jewelry bills and stuff like that—is still in the possession of the right persons and will be broadcast on every radio program tomorrow, unless you appear on one radio program tonight. Is this clear?"

"Yes."

"Now what is your answer?" She saw the luminous scholar-eyes looking at her, and suddenly she felt as if too much of her were seen and as if she were not seen at all.

"I am glad that you have told me," said Dagny. "I will appear on Bertram Scudder's broadcast tonight."

There was a beam of white light beating down upon the glittering metal of a microphone—in the center of a glass cage imprisoning her with Bertram Scudder. The spark of glitter were greenish-blue; the microphone was made of Rearden Metal.

Above them, beyond a sheet of glass, she could distinguish a booth with two rows of faces looking down at her: the lax, anxious face of James Taggart, with Lillian Rearden beside him, her hand resting reassuringly on his arm—a man who had arrived by plane from Washington and had been introduced to her as Chick Morrison—and a group of young men from his staff, who talked about percentage curves of intellectual influence and acted like motorcycle cops.

Bertram Scudder seemed to be afraid of her. He clung to the microphone, spitting words into its delicate mesh, into the ears of the country, introducing the subject of his program. He was laboring to sound cynical, skeptical, superior and hysterical together, to sound like a man who sneers at the vanity of all human beliefs and thereby demands an instantaneous belief from his listeners. A small patch of moisture glistened on the back of his neck. He was describing in over colored detail her month of convalescence in the lonely cabin of a sheepherder, then her heroic trudging down fifty miles of mountain trails for the sake of resuming her duties to the people in this grave hour of national emergency.

". . . And if any of you have been deceived by vicious rumors aimed to undermine your faith in the great social program of our leaders—you may trust the word of Miss Taggart, who—"

She stood, looking up at the white beam. Specks of dust were whirling in the beam and she noticed that one of them was alive: it was a gnat with a tiny sparkle in place of its beating wings, it was struggling for some frantic purpose of its own, and she watched it, feeling as distant from its purpose as from that of the world.

". . . Miss Taggart is an impartial observer, a brilliant businesswoman who has often been critical of the government in the past and who may be said to represent the extreme, conservative viewpoint held by such giants of industry as Hank Rearden. Yet even she—"

She wondered at how easy it felt, when one did not have to feel; she seemed to be standing naked on public display, and a beam of light was enough to support her, because there was no weight of pain in her, no hope, no regret, no concern, no future.

". . . And now, ladies and gentlemen, I will present to you the heroine of this night, our most uncommon guest, the—"

Pain came back to her in a sudden, piercing stab, like a long splinter from the glass of a protective wall shattered by the knowledge that the next words would be hers; it came back for the brief length of a name in her mind, the name of the man she had called the destroyer: she did not want him to hear what she would now have to say. If you hear it—the pain was like a voice crying it to him—you won't believe the things I have said to you—no, worse, the things which I have not said, but which you knew and believed and accepted —you will think that I was not free to offer them and that my days with you were a lie—this will destroy my one month and ten of your years—this was not the way I wanted you to learn it, not like this, not tonight —but you will, you who've watched and known my every movement, you who're watching me now, wherever you are—you will hear it—but it has to be said.

"—the last descendant of an illustrious name in our industrial history, the woman executive possible only in America, the Operating Vice-President of a great railroad—Miss Dagny Taggart!"

Then she felt the touch of Rearden Metal, as her hand closed over the stem of the microphone, and it was suddenly easy, not with the drugged ease of indifference, but with the bright, clear, living ease of action.

"I came here to tell you about the social program, the political system and the moral philosophy under which you are now living."

There was so calm, so natural, so total a certainty in the sound of her voice that the mere sound seemed to carry an immense persuasiveness.

"You have heard it said that I believe that this system has depravity as its motive, plunder as its goal, lies, fraud and force as its method, and destruction as its only result. You have also heard it said that, like Hank Rearden, I am a loyal supporter of this system and that I give my voluntary co-operation to present policies, such as Directive 10-289.1 have come here to tell you the truth about it.

"It is true that I share the stand of Hank Rearden. His political convictions are mine. You have heard him denounced in the past as a reactionary who opposed every step, measure, slogan and premise of the present system. Now you hear him praised as our greatest industrialist, whose judgment on the value of economic policies may safely be trusted. It is true. You may trust his judgment. If you are now beginning to fear that you are in the power of an irresponsible evil, that the country is collapsing and that you will soon be left to starve—consider the views of our ablest industrialist, who knows what conditions are necessary to make production possible and to permit a country to survive.

Consider all that you know about his views. At such times as he was able to speak, you have heard him tell you that this government's policies were leading you to enslavement and destruction. Yet he did not denounce the final climax of these policies—Directive 10-289. You have heard him fighting for his rights—his and yours—for his independence, for his property. Yet he did not fight Directive 10-289. He signed voluntarily, so you have been told, the Gift Certificate that surrendered Rearden Metal to his enemies. He signed the one paper which, by all of his previous record, you had expected him to fight to the death. What could this mean—you have constantly been told—unless it meant that even he recognized the necessity of Directive 10289 and sacrificed his personal interests for the sake of the country?

Judge his views by the motive of that action, you have constantly been told. And with this I agree unreservedly: judge his views by the motive of that action. And—for whatever value you attach to my opinion and to any warning I may give you—judge my views also by the motive of that action, because his convictions are mine.

"For two years, I had been Hank Rearden's mistress. Let there be no misunderstanding about it: I am saying this, not as a shameful confession, but with the highest sense of pride. I had been his mistress. I had slept with him, in his bed, in his arms. There is nothing anyone might now say to you about me, which I will not tell you first. It will be useless to defame me—I know the nature of the accusations and I will state them to you myself. Did I feel a physical desire for him? I did. Was I moved by a passion of my body? I was. Have I experienced the most violent form of sensual pleasure? I have. If this now makes me a disgraced woman in your eyes—let your estimate be your own concern. I will stand on mine."

Bertram Scudder was staring at her; this was not the speech he had expected and he felt, in dim panic, that it was not proper to let it continue, but she was the special guest whom the Washington rulers had ordered him to treat cautiously; he could not be certain whether he was now supposed to interrupt her or not; besides, he enjoyed hearing this sort of story. In the audience booth, James Taggart and Lillian Rearden sat frozen, like animals paralyzed by the headlight of a train rushing down upon them; they were the only ones present who knew the connection between the words they were hearing and the theme of the broadcast; it was too late for them to move; they dared not assume the responsibility of a movement or of whatever was to follow.

In the control room, a young intellectual of Chick Morrison's staff stood ready to cut the broadcast off the air in case of trouble, but he saw no political significance in the speech he was hearing, no element he could construe as dangerous to his masters. He was accustomed to hearing speeches extorted by unknown pressure from unwilling victims, and he concluded that this was the case of a reactionary forced to confess a scandal and that, therefore, the speech had, perhaps, some political value; besides, he was curious to hear it "I am proud that he had chosen me to give him pleasure and that it was he who had been my choice. It was not—as it is for most of you—an act of casual indulgence and mutual contempt. It was the ultimate form of our admiration for each other, with full knowledge of the values by which we made our choice. We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies, those who do not leave their values to empty dreams, but bring them into existence, those who give material form to thoughts, and reality to values—those who make steel, railroads and happiness. And to such among you who hate the thought of human joy, who wish to see men's life as chronic suffering and failure, who wish men to apologize for happiness—or for success, or ability, or achievement, or wealth—to such among you, I am now saying: I wanted him, I had him, I was happy, I had known joy, a pure, full, guiltless joy, the joy you dread to hear confessed by any human being, the joy of which your only knowledge is in your hatred for those who are worthy of reaching it. Well, hate me, then—because I reached it!"

"Miss Taggart," said Bertram Scudder nervously, "aren't we departing from the subject of . . . After all, your personal relationship with Mr.

Rearden has no political significance which—"

"[ didn't think it had, either. And, of course, I came here to tell you about the political and moral system under which you are now living. Well, I thought that I knew everything about Hank Rearden, but there was one thing which I did not learn until today. It was the blackmail threat that our relationship would be made public that forced Hank Rearden to sign the Gift Certificate surrendering Rearden Metal. It was blackmail—blackmail by your government officials, by your rulers, by your—"

In the instant when Scudder's hand swept out to knock the microphone over, a faint click came from its throat as it crashed to the floor, signifying that the intellectual cop had cut the broadcast off the air.

She laughed—but there was no one to see her and to hear the nature of her laughter. The figures rushing into the glass enclosure were screaming at one another. Chick Morrison was yelling unprintable curses at Bertram Scudder—Bertram Scudder was shouting that he had been opposed to the whole idea, but had been ordered to do it—James Taggart looked like an animal baring its teeth, while he snarled at two of Morrison's youngest assistants and avoided the snarls of an older third. The muscles of Lillian Rearden's face had an odd slackness, like the limbs of an animal lying in the road, intact but dead. The morale conditioners were shrieking what they guessed they thought Mr.

Mouch would think. "What am I to say to them?" the program announcer was crying, pointing at the microphone. "Mr. Morrison, there's an audience waiting, what am I to say?" Nobody answered him. They were not fighting over what to do, but over whom to blame.

Nobody said a word to Dagny or glanced in her direction. Nobody stopped her, when she walked out.

She stepped into the first taxicab in sight, giving the address of her apartment. As the cab started, she noticed that the dial of the radio on the driver's panel was lighted and silent, crackling with the brief, tense coughs of static: it was tuned to Bertram Scudder's program.

She lay back against the seat, feeling nothing but the desolation of the knowledge that the sweep of her action had, perhaps, swept away the man who might never wish to see her again. She felt, for the first time, the immensity of the hopelessness of finding him—if he did not choose to be found—in the streets of the city, in the towns of a continent, in the canyons of the Rocky Mountains where the goal was closed by a screen of rays. But one thing remained to her, like a log floating on a void, the log to which she had clung through the broadcast—and she knew that this was the thing she could not abandon, even were she to lose all the rest; it was the sound of his voice saying to her: "Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever."

"Ladies and gentlemen,'1 the voice of Bertram Scudder's announcer crackled suddenly out of the static, "due to technical difficulties over which we have no control, this station will remain off the air, pending the necessary readjustments." The taxi driver gave a brief, contemptuous chuckle—and snapped the radio off.

When she stepped out and handed him a bill, he extended the change to her and, suddenly, leaned forward for a closer look at her face.

She felt certain that he recognized her and she held his glance austerely for an instant. His bitter face and his over patched shirt were worn out by a hopeless, losing struggle. As she handed him. a tip, he said quietly, with too earnest, too solemn an emphasis for a mere acknowledgment of the corns, "Thank you, ma'am,"

She turned swiftly and hurried into the building, not to let him see the emotion which was suddenly more than she could bear.

Her head was drooping, as she unlocked the door of her apartment, and the light struck her from below, from the carpet, before she jerked her head up in astonishment at finding the apartment lighted. She took a step forward—and saw Hank Rearden standing across the room.

She was held still by two shocks: one was the sight of his presence, she had not expected him to be back so soon; the other was the sight of his face. His face had so firm, so confident, so mature a look of calm, in the faint half-smile, in the clarity of the eyes, that she felt as if he had aged decades within one month, but aged in the proper sense of human growth, aged in vision, in stature, in power. She felt that he who had lived through a month of agony, he whom she had hurt so deeply and was about to hurt more deeply still, he would now be the one to give her support and consolation, his would be the strength to protect them both. She stood motionless for only an instant, but she saw his smile deepening as if he were reading her thoughts and telling her that she had nothing to fear. She heard a slight, crackling sound and saw, on a table beside him, the lighted dial of a silent radio. Her eyes moved to his as a question and he answered by the faintest nod, barely more than a lowering of his eyelids; he had heard her broadcast.

They moved toward each other in the same moment. He seized her shoulders to support her, her face was raised to his, but he did not touch her lips, he took her hand and kissed her wrist, her fingers, her palm, as the sole form of the greeting which so much of his suffering had gone to await. And suddenly, broken by the whole of this day and of that month, she was sobbing in his arms, slumped against him, sobbing as she had never done in her life, as a woman, in surrender to pain and in a last, futile protest against it.

Holding her so that she stood and moved only by means of his body, not hers, he led her to the couch and tried to make her sit down beside him, but she slipped to the floor, to sit at his feet and bury her face in his knees and sob without defense or disguise.

He did not lift her, he let her cry, with his arm tight about her. She felt his hand on her head, on. her shoulder, she felt the protection of his firmness, a firmness which seemed to tell her that as her tears were for both of them, so was his knowledge, that he knew her pain and felt it and understood, yet was able to witness it calmly—and his calm seemed to lift her burden, by granting her the right to break, here, at his feet, by telling her that he was able to carry what she could not carry any longer. She knew dimly that this was the real Hank Rearden, and no matter what form of insulting cruelty he had once given to their first nights together, no matter how often she had seemed as the stronger of the two, this had always been within him and at the root of their bond—this strength of his which would protect her if ever hers were gone.

When she raised her head, he was smiling down at her.

"Hank . . ." she whispered guiltily, in desperate astonishment at her own break.

"Quiet, darling."

She let her face drop back on his knees; she lay still, fighting for rest, fighting against the pressure of a wordless thought: he had been able to bear and to accept her broadcast only as a confession of her love; it made the truth she now had to tell him more inhuman a blow than anyone had the right to deliver. She felt terror at the thought that she would not have the strength to do it, and terror at the thought that she would.

When she looked up at him again, he ran his hand over her forehead, brushing the hair o2 her face.

"It's over, darling," he said. "The worst of it is over, for both of us."

"No, Hank, it isn't."

He smiled.

He drew her to sit beside him, with her head on his shoulder. "Don't say anything now,” he said. "You know that we both understand all that has to be said, and we'll speak of it, but not until it has ceased to hurt you quite so much."

His hand moved down the line of her sleeve, down a fold of her skirt, with so light a pressure that it seemed as if the hand did not feel the body inside the clothes, as if he were regaining possession, not of her body, but only of its vision.

"You've taken too much," he said. "So have I. Let them batter us.

There's no reason why we should add to it. No matter what we have to face, there can be no suffering between the two of us. No added pain.

Let that come from their world. It won't come from us. Don't be afraid.

We won't hurt each other. Not now."

She raised her head, shaking it with a bitter smile—there was a desperate violence in her movement, but the smile was a sign of recovery: of the determination to face the despair.

"Hank, the kind of hell I let you go through in the last month—"

Her voice was trembling.

"It's nothing, compared to the kind of hell I let you go through in the last hour." His voice was steady.

She got up, to pace the room, to prove her strength—her steps like words telling him that she was not to be spared any longer. When she stopped and turned to face him, he rose, as if he understood her motive.

"I know that I've made it worse for you," she said, pointing at the radio.

He shook his head. "No."

"Hank, there's something I have to tell you."

"So have I. Will you let me speak first? You see, it's something I should have said to you long ago. Will you let me speak and not answer me until I finish?"

She nodded.

He took a moment to look at her as she stood before him, as if to hold the full sight of her figure, of this moment and of everything that had led them to it.

"I love you, Dagny," he said quietly, with the simplicity of an unclouded, yet unsmiling happiness.

She was about to speak, but knew that she couldn't, even if he had permitted it, she caught her unuttered words, the movement of her lips was her only answer, then she inclined her head in acceptance.

"I love you. As the same value, as the same expression, with the same pride and the same meaning as I love my work, my mills, my Metal, my hours at a desk, at a furnace, in a laboratory, in an ore mine, as I love my ability to work, as I love the act of sight and knowledge, as I love the action of my mind when it solves a chemical equation or grasps a sunrise, as I love the things I've made and the things I've felt, as my product, as my choice, as a shape of my world, as my best mirror, as the wife I've never had, as that which makes all the rest of it possible: as my power to live."

She did not drop her face, but kept it level and open, to hear and accept, as he wanted her to and as he deserved.

"I loved you from the first day I saw you, on a flatcar on a siding of Milford Station. I loved you when we rode in the cab of the first engine on the John Galt Line. I loved you on the gallery of Ellis Wyatt's house. I loved you on that next morning. You knew it. But it's I who must say it to you, as I'm saying it now—if I am to redeem all those days and to let them be fully what they were for both of us, I loved you. You knew it. I didn't. And because I didn't, I had to learn it when I sat at my desk and looked at the Gift Certificate for Rearden Metal."

She closed her eyes. But there was no suffering in his face, nothing but the immense and quiet happiness of clarity.

" 'We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies.' You said it in your broadcast tonight.

But you knew it, then, on that morning in Ellis Wyatt's house. You knew that all those insults I was throwing at you were the fullest confession of love a man could make. You knew that the physical desire I was damning as our mutual shame, is neither physical nor an expression of one's body, but the expression of one's mind's deepest values, whether one has the courage to know it or not. That was why you laughed at me as you did, wasn't it?"

"Yes," she whispered.

"You said, 'I do not want your mind, your will, your being or your soul—so long as it's to me that you will come for that lowest one of your desires.' You knew, when you said it, that it was my mind, my will, my being and my soul that I was giving you by means of that desire. And I want to say it now, to let that morning mean what it meant: my mind, my will, my being and my soul, Dagny—yours, for as long as I shall live."

He was looking straight at her and she saw a brief sparkle in his eyes, which was not a smile, but almost as if he had heard the cry she had not uttered.

"Let me finish, dearest. I want you to know how fully I know what I am saying. I, who thought that I was fighting them, I had accepted the worst of our enemies' creed—and that is what I've paid for ever since, as I am paying now and as I must. I had accepted the one tenet by which they destroy a man before he's started, the killer-tenet: the breach between his mind and body. I had accepted it, like most of their victims, not knowing it, not knowing even that the issue existed. I rebelled against their creed of human impotence and I took pride in my ability to think, to act, to work for the satisfaction of my desires.

But I did not know that this was virtue, I never identified it as a moral value, as the highest of moral values, to be defended above one's life, because it's that which makes life possible. And I accepted punishment for it, punishment for virtue at the hands of an arrogant evil, made arrogant solely by my ignorance and my submission.

"1 accepted their insults, their frauds, their extortions. I thought I could afford to ignore them—all those impotent mystics who prattle about their souls and are unable to build a roof over their heads. I thought that the world was mine, and that those jabbering incompetents were no threat to my strength. I could not understand why I kept losing every battle. I did not know that the force unleashed against me was my own. While I was busy conquering matter, I had surrendered to them the realm of the mind, of thought, of principle, of law, of values, of morality. I had accepted, unwittingly and by default, the tenet that ideas were of no consequence to one's existence, to one's work, to reality, to this earth—as if ideas were not the province of reason, but of that mystic faith which I despised. This was all they wanted me to concede. It was enough. I had surrendered that which all of their claptrap is designed to subvert and to destroy: man's reason.

No, they were not able to deal with matter, to produce abundance, to control this earth. They did not have to. They controlled me.

"I, who knew that wealth is only a means to an end, created the means and let them prescribe my ends. I, who took pride in my ability to achieve the satisfaction of my desires, let them prescribe the code of values by which I judged my desires. I, who shaped matter to serve my purpose, was left with a pile of steel and gold, but with my every purpose defeated, my every desire betrayed, my every attempt at happiness frustrated.

"1 had cut myself in two, as the mystics preached, and I ran my business by one code of rules, but my own life by another. I rebelled against the looters' attempt to set the price and value of my steel—but I let them set the moral values of my life. I rebelled against demands for an unearned wealth—but I thought it was my duty to grant an unearned love to a wife I despised, an unearned respect to a mother who hated me, an unearned support to a brother who plotted for my destruction. I rebelled against undeserved financial injury—but I accepted a life of undeserved pain. I rebelled against the doctrine that my productive ability was guilt—but I accepted, as guilt, my capacity for happiness. I rebelled against the creed that virtue is some disembodied unknowable of the spirit—but I damned you, you, my dearest one, for the desire of your body and mine. But if the body is evil; then so are those who provide the means of its survival, so is material wealth and those who produce it—and if moral values are set in contradiction to our physical existence, then it's right that rewards should be unearned, that virtue should consist of the undone, that there should be no tie between achievement and profit, that the inferior animals who're able to produce should serve those superior beings whose superiority in spirit consists of incompetence in the flesh.

"If some man like Hugh Akston had told me, when I started, that by accepting the mystics' theory of sex I was accepting the looters' theory of economics, I would have laughed in his face. I would not laugh at him now. Now I see Rearden Steel being ruled by human scum—I see the achievement of my life serving to enrich the worst of my enemies—and as to the only two persons I ever loved, I've brought a deadly insult to one and public disgrace to the other. I slapped the face of the man who was my friend, my defender, my teacher, the man who set me free by helping me to learn what I've learned, I loved him, Dagny, he was the brother, the son, the comrade I never had—but I knocked him out of my life, because he would not help me to produce for the looters. I'd give anything now to have him back, but I own nothing to offer in such repayment, and I'll never see him again, because it's I who'll know that there is no way to deserve even the right to ask forgiveness.

"But what I've done to you, my dearest, is still worse. Your speech and that you had to make it—that's what I've brought upon the only woman I loved, in payment for the only happiness I've known. Don't tell me that it was your choice from the first and that you accepted all consequences, including tonight—it does not redeem the fact that it was I who had no better choice to offer you. And that the looters forced you to speak, that you spoke to avenge me and set me free—does not redeem the fact that it was I who made their tactics possible.

It was not then own convictions of sin and dishonor that they could use to disgrace you—it was mine. They merely carried out the things I believed and said in Ellis Wyatt's house. It was I who kept our love bidden as a guilty secret—they merely treated it for what it was by my own appraisal. It was I who was willing to counterfeit reality for the sake of appearance in their eyes—they merely cashed in on the right I had given them.

"People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked. And if one gains the immediate purpose of the lie—the price one pays is the destruction of that which the gain was intended to serve. The man who lies to the world, is the world's slave from then on- When I chose to hide my love for you, to disavow it in public and live it as a lie, I made it public property—and the public has claimed it in a fitting sort of manner. I had no way to avert it and no power to save you. When I gave in to the looters, when I signed their Gift Certificate, to protect you—I was still faking reality, there was nothing else left open to me—and, Dagny, I'd rather have seen us both dead than permit them to do what they threatened. But there are no white lies, there is only the blackness of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all. I was still faking reality, and it had the inexorable result: instead of protection, it brought you a more terrible kind of ordeal, instead of saving your name, it forced you to offer yourself for a public stoning and to throw the stones by your own hand. I know that you were proud of the things you said, and I was proud to hear you—but that was the pride we should have claimed two years ago.

"No, you did not make it worse for me, you set me free, you saved us both, you redeemed our past. I can't ask you to forgive me, we're far beyond such terms—and the only atonement I can offer you is the fact that I am happy. That I am happy, my darling, not that I suffer. I am happy that I have seen the truth—even if my power of sight is all that's left to me now. Were I to surrender to pain and give up in futile regret that my own error has wrecked my past—that would be the act of final treason, the ultimate failure toward that truth I regret having failed. But if my love of truth is left as my only possession, then the greater the loss behind me, the greater the pride I may take in the price I have paid for that love. Then the wreckage will not become a funereal mount above me, but will serve as a height I have climbed to attain a wider field of vision. My pride and my power of vision were all that I owned when I started—and whatever I achieved, was achieved by means of them. Both are greater now, Now I have the knowledge of the superlative value I had missed: of my right to be proud of my vision. The rest is mine to reach.

"And, Dagny, the one thing I wanted, as the first step of my future, was to say that I love you—as I'm saying it now. I love you, my dearest, with that blindest passion of my body which comes from the clearest perception of my mind—and my love for you is the only attainment of my past that will be left to me, unchanged, through all the years ahead. I wanted to say it to you while I still had the right to say it. And because I had not said it at our beginning, this is the way I have to say it—at the end. Now I'll tell you what it was that you wanted to tell me—because, you see, I know it and I accept: somewhere within the past month, you have met the man you love, and if love means one's final, irreplaceable choice, then he is the only man you've ever loved."

"Yes!" Her voice was half-gasp, half-scream, as under a physical blow, with shock as her only awareness. "Hank!—how did you know it?"

He smiled and pointed at the radio. "My darling, you used nothing but the past tense."

"Oh . . . !” Her voice was now half-gasp, half-moan, and she closed her eyes.

"You never pronounced the one word you would have rightfully thrown at them, were it otherwise. You said, 'I wanted him,' not, 'I love him.' You told me on the phone today that you could have returned sooner. No other reason would have made you leave me as you did. Only that one reason was valid and right."

She was leaning back a little, as if fighting for balance to stand, yet she was looking straight at him, with a smile that did not part her lips, but softened her eyes to a glance of admiration and her mouth to a shape of pain.

"It's true. I've met the man I love and will always love, I've seen him, I've spoken to him—but he's a man whom I can't have, whom I may never have and, perhaps, may never see again."

"I think I've always known that you would find him. I knew what you felt for me, I knew how much it was, but I knew that I was not your final choice. What you'll give him is not taken away from me, it's what I've never had. I can't rebel against it. What I've had means too much to me—and that I've had it, can never be changed."

"Do you want me to say it, Hank? Will you understand it, if I say that I'll always love you?"

"I think I've understood it before you did."

"I've always seen you as you are now. That greatness of yours which you are just beginning to allow yourself to know—I've always known it and I've watched your struggle to discover it. Don't speak of atonement, you have not hurt me, your mistakes came from your magnificent integrity under the torture of an impossible code—and your fight against it did not bring me suffering, it brought me the feeling I've found too seldom: admiration. If you will accept it, it will always be yours. What you meant to me can never be changed. But the man I met—he is the love I had wanted to reach long before I knew that he existed, and I think he will remain beyond my reach, but that I love him will be enough to keep me living."

He took her hand and pressed it to his lips. "Then you know what I feel," he said, "and why I am still happy."

Looking up at his face, she realized that for the first time he was what she had always thought him intended to be: a man with an immense capacity for the enjoyment of existence. The taut look of endurance, of fiercely unadmitted pain, was gone; now, in the midst of the wreckage and of his hardest hour, his face had the serenity of pure strength; it had the look she had seen in the faces of the men in the valley.

"Hank," she whispered, "I don't think I can explain it, but I feel that I have committed no treason, either to you or to him."

"You haven't."

Her eyes seemed abnormally alive in a face drained of color, as if her consciousness remained untouched in a body broken by exhaustion. He made her sit down and slipped his arm along the back of the couch, not touching her, yet holding her in a protective embrace.

"Now tell me," he asked, "where were you?"

"I can't tell you that. I've given my word never to reveal anything about it. I can say only that it's a place I found by accident, when I crashed, and I left it blindfolded—and I wouldn't be able to find it again."

"Couldn't you trace your way back to it?"

"I won't try."

"And the man?"

"I won't look for him."

"He remained there?"

"I don't know."

"Why did you leave him?"

"I can't tell you."

"Who is he?"

Her chuckle of desperate amusement was involuntary. "Who is John Galt?"

He glanced at her, astonished—but realized that she was not joking.

"So there is a John Galt?" he asked slowly, "Yes."

"That slang phrase refers to him?"

"Yes."

"And it has some special meaning?"

"Oh yes! . . . There's one thing I can tell you about him, because I discovered it earlier, without promise of secrecy: he is the man who invented the motor we found."

"Oh!" He smiled, as if he should have known it. Then he said softly, with a glance that was almost compassion, "He's the destroyer, isn't he?" He saw her look of shock, and added, "No, don't answer me, if you can't. I think I know where you were. It was Quentin Daniels that you wanted to save from the destroyer, and you were following Daniels when you crashed, weren't you?"

"Yes."

"Good God, Dagny!—does such a place really exist? Are they all alive? Is there . . . ? I'm sorry. Don't answer."

She smiled. "It does exist."

He remained silent for a long time.

"Hank, could you give up Rearden Steel?"

"No!" The answer was fiercely immediate, but he added, with the first sound of hopelessness in his voice, "Not yet."

Then he looked at her, as if, in the transition of his three words, he had lived the course of her agony of the past month. "I see," he said. He ran his hand over her forehead, with a gesture of understanding, of compassion, of an almost incredulous wonder. "What hell you've now undertaken to endure!" he said, his voice low.

She nodded.

She slipped down, to lie stretched, her face on his knees. He stroked her hair; he said, "We'll fight the looters as long as we can. I don't know what future is possible to us, but we'll win or we'll learn that it's hopeless. Until we do, we'll fight for our world. We're all that's left of it."

She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek.

CHAPTER IV
ANTI-LIFE

James Taggart reached into the pocket of his dinner jacket, pulled out the first wad of paper he found, which was a hundred-dollar bill, and dropped it into the beggar's hand.

He noticed that the beggar pocketed the money in a manner as indifferent as his own. "Thanks, bud." said the beggar contemptuously, and walked away.

James Taggart remained still in the middle of the sidewalk, wondering what gave him a sense of shock and dread. It was not the man's insolence—he had not sought any gratitude, he had not been moved by pity, his gesture had been automatic and meaningless. It was that the beggar acted as if he would have been indifferent had he received a hundred dollars or a dime or, failing to find any help whatever, had seen himself dying of starvation within this night. Taggart shuddered and walked brusquely on, the shudder serving to cut off the realization that the beggar's mood matched his own.

The walls of the street around him had the stressed, unnatural clarity of a summer twilight, while an orange haze filled the channels of intersections and veiled the tiers of roofs, leaving him on a shrinking remnant of ground. The calendar in the sky seemed to stand insistently out of the haze, yellow like a page of old parchment, saying: August 5, No—he thought, in answer to things he had not named—it was not true, he felt fine, that's why he wanted to do something tonight. He could not admit to himself that his peculiar restlessness came from a desire to experience pleasure; he could not admit that the particular pleasure he wanted was that of celebration, because he could not admit what it was that he wanted to celebrate.

This had been a day of intense activity, spent on words floating as vaguely as cotton, yet achieving a purpose as precisely as an adding machine, summing up to his full satisfaction. But his purpose and the nature of his satisfaction had to be kept as carefully hidden from himself as they had been from others; and his sudden craving for pleasure was a dangerous breach.

The day had started with a small luncheon in the hotel suite of a visiting Argentinian legislator, where a few people of various nationalities had talked at leisurely length about the climate of Argentina, its soil, its resources, the needs of its people, the value of a dynamic, progressive attitude toward the future—and had mentioned, as the briefest topic of conversation, that Argentina would be declared a People's State within two weeks.

It had been followed by a few cocktails at the home of Orren Boyle, with only one unobtrusive gentleman from Argentina sitting silently in a corner, while two executives from Washington and a few friends of unspecified positions had talked about national resources, metallurgy, mineralogy, neighborly duties and the welfare of the globe—and had mentioned that a loan of four billion dollars would be granted within three weeks to the People's State of Argentina and the People's State of Chile.

It had been followed by a small cocktail party in a private room of the bar built like a cellar on the roof of a skyscraper, an informal party given by him, James Taggart, for the directors of a recently formed company, The Interneighborly Amity and Development Corporation, of which Orren Boyle was president and a slender, graceful, overactive man from Chile was treasurer, a man whose name was Senor Mario Martinez, but whom Taggart was tempted, by some resemblance of spirit, to call Senor Cuffy Meigs. Here they had talked about golf, horse races, boat races, automobiles and women. It had not been necessary to mention, since they all knew it, that the Interneighborly Amity and Development Corporation had an exclusive contract to operate, on a twenty-year "managerial lease," all the industrial properties of the People's States of the Southern Hemisphere.

The last event of the day had been a large dinner reception at the home of Senor Rodrigo Gonzales, a diplomatic representative of Chile.

No one had heard of Senor Gonzales a year ago, but he had become famous for the parties he had given in the past six months, ever since his arrival in New York. His guests described him as a progressive businessman. He had lost his property—it was said—when Chile, becoming a People's State, had nationalized all properties, except those belonging to citizens of backward, non-People's countries, such as Argentina; but he had adopted an enlightened attitude and had joined the new regime, placing himself in the service of his country. His home in New York occupied an entire floor of an exclusive residential hotel.

He had a fat, blank face and the eyes of a killer. Watching him at tonight's reception, Taggart had concluded that the man was impervious to any sort of feeling, he looked as if a knife could slash, unnoticed, through his pendulous layers of flesh—except that there was a lewd, almost sexual relish in the way he rubbed his feet against the rich pile of his Persian rugs, or patted the polished arm of his chair, or folded his lips about a cigar. His wife, the Senora Gonzales, was a small, attractive woman, not as beautiful as she assumed, but enjoying the reputation of a beauty by means of a violent nervous energy and an odd manner of loose, warm, cynical self-assertiveness that seemed to promise anything and to absolve anyone. It was known that her particular brand of trading was her husband's chief asset, in an age when one traded, not goods, but favors—and, watching her among the guests, Taggart had found amusement in wondering what deals had been made, what directives issued, what industries destroyed in exchange for a few chance nights, which most of those men had had no reason to seek and, perhaps, could no longer remember. The party had bored him, there had been only half a dozen persons for whose sake he had put in an appearance, and it had not been necessary to speak to that half-dozen, merely to be seen and to exchange a few glances. Dinner had been about to be served, when he had heard what he had come to hear: Senor Gonzales had mentioned—the smoke of his cigar weaving over the half-dozen men who had drifted toward his armchair—that by agreement with the future People's State of Argentina, the properties of d'Anconia Copper would be nationalized by the People's State of Chile, in less than a month, on September 2.

It had all gone as Taggart had expected; the unexpected had come when, on hearing those words, he had felt an irresistible urge to escape.

He had felt incapable of enduring the boredom of the dinner, as if some other form of activity were needed to greet the achievement of this night. He had walked out into the summer twilight of the streets, feeling as if he were both pursuing and pursued: pursuing a pleasure which nothing could give him, in celebration of a feeling which he dared not name—pursued by the dread of discovering what motive had moved him through the planning of tonight's achievement and what aspect of it now gave him this feverish sense of gratification.

He reminded himself that he would sell his d'Anconia Copper stock, which had never rallied fully after its crash of last year, and he would purchase shares of the Inter-neighborly Amity and Development Corporation, as agreed with his friends, which would bring him a fortune. But the thought brought him nothing but boredom; this was not the thing he wanted to celebrate.

He tried to force himself to enjoy it: money, he thought, had been his motive, money, nothing worse. Wasn't that a normal motive? A valid one? Wasn't that what they all were after, the Wyatts, the Reardens, the d'Anconias? . . . He jerked his head to stop it: he felt as if his thoughts were slipping down a dangerous blind alley, the end of which he must never permit himself to see.

No—he thought bleakly, in reluctant admission—money meant nothing to him any longer. He had thrown dollars about by the hundreds—at that party he had given today—for unfinished drinks, for uneaten delicacies, for unprovoked tips and unexpected whims, for a long distance phone call to Argentina because one of the guests had wanted to check the exact version of a smutty story he had started telling, for the spur of any moment, for the clammy stupor of knowing that it was easier to pay than to think.

"You've got nothing to worry about, under that Railroad Unification Plan," Orren Boyle had giggled to him drunkenly. Under the Railroad Unification Plan, a local railroad had gone bankrupt in North Dakota, abandoning the region to the fate of a blighted area, the local banker had committed suicide, first killing his wife and children—a freight train had been taken oil the schedule in Tennessee, leaving a local factory without transportation at a day's notice, the factory owner's son had quit college and was now in jail, awaiting execution for a murder committed with a gang of raiders—a way station had been closed in Kansas, and the station agent, who had wanted to be a scientist, had given up his studies and become a dishwasher—that he, James Taggart, might sit in a private barroom and pay for the alcohol pouring down Orren Boyle's throat, for the waiter who sponged Boyle's garments when he spilled his drink over his chest, for the carpet burned by the cigarettes of an ex-pimp from Chile who did not want to take the trouble of reaching for an ashtray across a distance of three feet.

It was not the knowledge of his indifference to money that now gave him a shudder of dread. It was the knowledge that he would be equally indifferent, were he reduced to the state of the beggar. There had been a time when he had felt some measure of guilt—in no clearer a form than a touch of irritation—at the thought that he shared the sin of greed, which he spent his time denouncing. Now he was hit by the chill realization that, in fact, he had never been a hypocrite: in full truth, he had never cared for money. This left another hole gaping open before him, leading into another blind alley which he could not risk seeing.

I just want to do something tonight!—he cried soundlessly to someone at large, in protest and in demanding anger—in protest against whatever it was that kept forcing these thoughts into his mind—in anger at a universe where some malevolent power would not permit him to find enjoyment without the need to know what he wanted or why.

What do you want?—some enemy voice kept asking, and he walked faster, trying to escape it. It seemed to him that his brain was a maze where a blind alley opened at every turn, leading into a fog that hid an abyss. It seemed to him that he was running, while the small island of safety was shrinking and nothing but those alleys would soon be left. It was like the remnant of clarity in the street around him, with the haze rolling in to fill all exits. Why did it have to shrink?—he thought in panic. This was the way he had lived all his life—keeping his eyes stubbornly, safely on the immediate pavement before him, craftily avoiding the sight of his road, of corners, of distances, of pinnacles. He had never intended going anywhere, he had wanted to be free of progression, free of the yoke of a straight line, he had never wanted his years to add up to any sum—what had summed them up?—why had he reached some unchosen destination where one could no longer stand still or retreat? "Look where you're going, brother!" snarled some voice, while an elbow pushed him back—and he realized that he had collided with some large, ill-smelling figure and that he had been running.

He slowed his steps and admitted into his mind a recognition of the streets he had chosen in his random escape. He had not wanted to know that he was going home to his wife. That, too, was a fogbound alley, but there was no other left to him.

He knew—the moment he saw Cherryl's silent, poised figure as she rose at his entrance into her room—that this was more dangerous than he had allowed himself to know and that he would not find what he wanted. But danger, to him, was a signal to shut off his sight, suspend his judgment and pursue an unaltered course, on the unstated premise that the danger would remain unreal by the sovereign power of his wish not to see it—like a foghorn within him, blowing, not to sound a warning, but to summon the fog.

"Why, yes, I did have an important business banquet to attend, but I changed my mind, I felt like having dinner with you tonight," he said in the tone of a compliment—but a quiet "I see" was the only answer he obtained.

He felt irritation at her unastonished manner and her pale, unrevealing face. He felt irritation at the smooth efficiency with which she gave instructions to the servants, then at finding himself in the candlelight of the dining room, facing her across a perfectly appointed table, with two crystal cups of fruit in silver bowls of ice between them.

It was her poise that irritated him most; she was no longer an incongruous little freak, dwarfed by the luxury of the residence which a famous artist had designed; she matched it. She sat at the table as if she were the kind of hostess that room had the right to demand. She wore a tailored housecoat of russet-colored brocade that blended with the bronze of her hair, the severe simplicity of its lines serving as her only ornament. He would have preferred the jingling bracelets and rhinestone buckles of her past. Her eyes disturbed him, as they had for months: they were neither friendly nor hostile, but watchful and questioning.

"I closed a big deal today," he said, his tone part boastful, part pleading. "A deal involving this whole continent and half a dozen governments."

He realized that the awe, the admiration, the eager curiosity he had expected, belonged to the face of the little shop girl who had ceased to exist. He saw none of it in the face of his wife; even anger or hatred would have been preferable to her level, attentive glance; the glance was worse than accusing, it was inquiring.

"What deal, Jim?"

"What do you mean, what deal? Why are you suspicious? Why do you have to start prying at once?"

"I'm sorry. I didn't know it was confidential. You don't have to answer me."

"It's not confidential." He waited, but she remained silent. "Well?

Aren't you going to say anything?"

"Why, no." She said it simply, as if to please him.

"So you're not interested at all?"

"But I thought you didn't want to discuss it."

"Oh, don't be so tricky!" he snapped. "It's a big business deal. That's what you admire, isn't it, big business? Well, it's bigger than anything those boys ever dreamed of. They spend their lives grubbing for their fortunes penny by penny, while I can do it like that"—he snapped his fingers—"just like that. It's the biggest single stunt ever pulled."

"Stunt, Jim?"

"Deal!"

"And you did it? Yourself?"

"You bet I did it! That fat fool, Orren Boyle, couldn't have swung it in a million years. This took knowledge and skill and timing"—he saw a spark of interest in her eyes—"and psychology." The spark vanished, but he went rushing heedlessly on. "One had to know how to approach Wesley, and how to keep the wrong influences away from him, and how to get Mr. Thompson interested without letting him know too much, and how to cut Chick Morrison in on it, but keep Tinky Holloway out, and how to get the right people to give a few parties for Wesley at the right time, and . . . Say, Cherryl, is there any champagne in this house?"

"Champagne?"

"Can't we do something special tonight? Can't we have a sort of celebration together?"

"We can have champagne, yes, Jim, of course."

She rang the bell and gave the orders, in her odd, lifeless, uncritical manner, a manner of meticulous compliance with his wishes while volunteering none of her own.

"You don't seem to be very impressed," he said. "But what would you know about business, anyway? You wouldn't be able to understand anything on so large a scale. Wait till September second. Wait till they hear about it."

"They? Who?"

He glanced at her, as if he had let a dangerous word slip out involuntarily, "We've organized a setup where we—me, Orren and a few friends—are going to control every industrial property south of the border."

"Whose property?"

"Why . . . the people's. This is not an old-fashioned grab for private profit. It's a deal with a mission—a worthy, public-spirited mission—to manage the nationalized properties of the various People's States of South America, to teach their workers our modern techniques of production, to help the underprivileged who've never had a chance, to—" He broke off abruptly, though she had merely sat looking at him without shifting her glance. "You know," he said suddenly, with a cold little chuckle, "if you're so damn anxious to hide that you came from the slums, you ought to be less indifferent to the philosophy of social welfare. It's always the poor who lack humanitarian instincts. One has to be born to wealth in order to know the finer feelings of altruism."

"I've never tried to hide that I came from the slums," she said in the simple, impersonal tone of a factual correction. "And I haven't any sympathy for that welfare philosophy. I've seen enough of them to know what makes the kind of poor who want something for nothing."

He did not answer, and she added suddenly, her voice astonished, but firm, as if in final confirmation of a long-standing doubt, "Jim, you don't care about it, either. You don't care about any of that welfare hogwash."

"Well, if money is all that you're interested in," he snapped, "let me tell you that that deal will bring me a fortune. That's what you've always admired, isn't it, wealth?"

"It depends."

"I think I'll end up as one of the richest men in the world," he said; he did not ask what her admiration depended upon. "There's nothing I won't be able to afford. Nothing. Just name it. I can give you anything you want. Go on, name it."

"I don't want anything, Jim."

"But I'd like to give you a present! To celebrate the occasion, see?

Anything you take it into your head to ask. Anything. I can do it. I want to show you that I can do it. Any fancy you care to name."

"I haven't any fancies."

"Oh, come on! Want a yacht?"

"No."

"Want me to buy you the whole neighborhood where you lived in Buffalo?"

"No."

"Want the crown jewels of the People's State of England? They can be had, you know. That People's State has been hinting about it on the black market for a long time. But there aren't any old-fashioned tycoons left who're able to afford it. I'm able to afford it—or will be, after September second. Want it?"

"No."

"Then what do you want?"

"I don't want anything, Jim."

"But you've got to! You've got to want something, damn you!"

She looked at him, faintly startled, but otherwise indifferent.

"Oh, all right, I'm sorry," he said; he seemed astonished by his own 87! outbreak. "I just wanted to please you," he added sullenly, "but I guess you can't understand it at all. You don't know how important it is.

You don't know how big a man you're married to."

"I'm trying to find out," she said slowly, "Do you still think, as you used to, that Hank Rearden is a great man?"

"Yes, Jim, I do."

"Well, I've got him beaten. I'm greater than any of them, greater than Rearden and greater than that other lover of my sister's, who—"

He stopped, as if he had slid too far.

"Jim," she asked evenly, "what is going to happen on September second?"

He glanced up at her, from under his forehead—a cold glance, while his muscles creased into a semi-smile, as if in cynical breach of some hallowed restraint. "They're going to nationalize d'Anconia Copper," he said.

He heard the long, harsh roll of a motor, as a plane went by somewhere in the darkness above the roof, then a thin tinkle, as a piece of ice settled, melting, in the silver bowl of his fruit cup—before she answered. She said, "He was your friend, wasn't he?"

"Oh, shut up!"

He remained silent, not looking at her. When his eyes came back to her face, she was still watching him and she spoke first, her voice oddly stern: "What your sister did in her radio broadcast was great."

"Yes, I know, I know, you've been saying that for a month."

"You've never answered me."

"What is there to ans . . . ?"

"Just as your friends in Washington have never answered her." He remained silent. "Jim, I'm not dropping the subject." He did not answer.

"Your friends in Washington never uttered a word about it. They did not deny the things she said, they did not explain, they did not try to justify themselves. They acted as if she had never spoken. I think they're hoping that people will forget it. Some people will. But the rest of us know what she said and that your friends were afraid to fight her."

"That's not true! The proper action was taken and the incident is closed and I don't see why you keep bringing it up."

"What action?"

"Bertram Scudder was taken off the air, as a program not in the public interest at the present time."

"Does that answer her?"

"It closes the issue and there's nothing more to be said about it."

"About a government that works by blackmail and extortion?"

"You can't say that nothing was done. It's been publicly announced that Scudder's programs were disruptive, destructive and untrustworthy."

"Jim, I want to understand this. Scudder wasn't on her side—he was on yours. He didn't even arrange that broadcast. He was acting on orders from Washington, wasn't he?"

"I thought you didn't like Bertram Scudder."

"I didn't and I don't, but—"

"Then what do you care?"

"But he was innocent, as far as your friends were concerned, wasn't he?"

"I wish you wouldn't bother with politics. You talk like a fool."

"He was innocent, wasn't he?"

"So what?"

She looked at him, her eyes incredulously wide. "Then they just made him the scapegoat, didn't they?"

"Oh, don't sit there looking like Eddie Willers!"

"Do I? I like Eddie Willers. He's honest."

"He's a damn half-wit who doesn't have the faintest idea of how to deal with practical reality!"

"But you do, don't you, Jim?"

"You bet I do!"

"Then couldn't you have helped Scudder?"

"I?" He burst into helpless, angry laughter. "Oh, why don't you grow up? I did my best to get Scudder thrown to the lions! Somebody had to be. Don't you know that it was my neck, if some other hadn't been found?"

"Your neck? Why not Dagny's, if she was wrong? Because she wasn't?"

"Dagny is in an entirely different category! It had to be Scudder or me."

"Why?"

"And it's much better for national policy to let it be Scudder. This way, it's not necessary to argue about what she said—and if anybody brings it up, we start howling that it was said on Scudder's program and that Scudder's programs have been discredited and that Scudder is a proven fraud and liar, etc., etc.—and do you think the public will be able to unscramble it? Nobody's ever trusted Bertram Scudder, anyway.

Oh, don't stare at me like that! Would you rather they'd picked me to discredit?"

"Why not Dagny? Because her speech could not be discredited?"

"If you're so damn sorry for Bertram Scudder, you should have seen him try his damndest to make them break my neck! He's been doing that for years—how do you think he got to where he was, except by climbing on carcasses? He thought he was pretty powerful, too—you should have seen how the big business tycoons used to be afraid of him! But he got himself outmaneuvered, this time. This time, he belonged to the wrong faction."

Dimly, through the pleasant stupor of relaxing, of sprawling back in his chair and smiling, he knew that this was the enjoyment he wanted: to be himself. To be himself—he thought, in the drugged, precarious state of floating past the deadliest of his blind alleys, the one that led to the question of what was himself.

"You see, he belonged to the Tinky Holloway faction. It was pretty much of a seesaw for a while, between the Tinky Holloway faction and the Chick Morrison faction. But we won. Tinky made a deal and agreed to scuttle his pal Bertram in exchange for a few things he needed from us. You should have heard Bertram howl! But he was a dead duck and he knew it."

He started on a rolling chuckle, but choked it off, as the haze cleared and he saw his wife's face. "Jim," she whispered, "is that the sort of . . . victories you're winning?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake!" he screamed, smashing his fist down on the table. "Where have you been all these years? What sort of world do you think you're living in?" His blow had upset his water glass and the water went spreading in dark stains over the lace of the tablecloth.

"I'm trying to find out," she whispered. Her shoulders were sagging and her face looked suddenly worn, an odd, aged look that seemed haggard and lost.

"I couldn't help it!" he burst out in the silence. "I'm not to blame! I have to take things as I find them! It's not I who've made this world!"

He was shocked to see that she smiled—a smile of so fiercely bitter a contempt that it seemed incredible on her gently patient face; she was not looking at him, but at some image of her own. "That's what my father used to say when he got drunk at the corner saloon instead of looking for work."

"How dare you try comparing me to—" he started, but did not finish, because she was not listening.

Her words, when she looked at him again, astonished him as completely irrelevant. "The date of that nationalization, September second," she asked, her voice wistful, "was it you who picked it?"

"No. I had nothing to do with it. It's the date of some special session of their legislature. Why?"

"It's the date of our first wedding anniversary."

"Oh? Oh, that's right!" He smiled, relieved at the change to a safe subject. "We'll have been married a year. My, it doesn't seem that long!"

"It seems much longer," she said tonelessly.

She was looking off again, and he felt in sudden uneasiness that the subject was not safe at all; he wished she would not look as if she were seeing the whole course of that year and of their marriage.

. . . not to get scared, but to learn—she thought—the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn . . . The words came from a sentence she had repeated to herself so often that it felt like a pillar polished smooth by the helpless weight of her body, the pillar that had supported her through the past year. She tried to repeat it, but she felt as if her hands were slipping on the polish, as if the sentence would not stave off terror any longer—because she was beginning to understand.

If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.

. . . It was in the bewildered loneliness of the first weeks of her marriage that she said it to herself for the first time. She could not understand Jim's behavior, or his sullen anger, which looked like weakness, or his evasive, incomprehensible answers to her questions, which sounded like cowardice; such traits were not possible in the James Taggart whom she had married. She told herself that she could not condemn without understanding, that she knew nothing about his world, that the extent of her ignorance was the extent to which she misinterpreted his actions. She took the blame, she took the beating of self reproach—against some bleakly stubborn certainty which told her that something was wrong and that the thing she felt was fear.

"I must learn everything that Mrs. James Taggart is expected to know and to be." was the way she explained her purpose to a teacher of etiquette. She set out to learn with the devotion, the discipline, the drive of a military cadet or a religious novice. It was the only way, she thought, of earning the height which her husband had granted her on trust, of living up to his vision of her, which it was now her duty to achieve. And, not wishing to confess it to herself, she felt also that at the end of the long task she would recapture her vision of him, that knowledge would bring back to her the man she had seen on the night of his railroad's triumph.

She could not understand Jim's attitude when she told him about her lessons. He burst out laughing; she was unable to believe that the laughter had a sound of malicious contempt. "Why, Jim? Why? What are you laughing at?" He would not explain—almost as if the fact of his contempt were sufficient and required no reasons.

She could not suspect him of malice: he was too patiently generous about her mistakes. He seemed eager to display her in the best drawing rooms of the city, and he never uttered a word of reproach for her ignorance, for her awkwardness, for those terrible moments when a silent exchange of glances among the guests and a burst of blood to her cheekbones told her that she had said the wrong thing again. He showed no embarrassment, he merely watched her with a faint smile.

When they came home after one of those evenings, his mood seemed affectionately cheerful. He was trying to make it easier for her, she thought—and gratitude drove her to study the harder.

She expected her reward on the evening when, by some imperceptible transition, she found herself enjoying a party for the first time. She felt free to act, not by rules, but at her own pleasure, with sudden confidence that the rules had fused into a natural habit—she knew that she was attracting attention, but now, for the first time, it was not the attention of ridicule, but of admiration—she was sought after, on her own merit, she was Mrs. Taggart, she had ceased being an object of charity weighing Jim down, painfully tolerated for his sake—she was laughing gaily and seeing the smiles of response, of appreciation on the faces around her—and she kept glancing at him across the room, radiantly, like a child handing him a report card with a perfect score, begging him to be proud of her. Jim sat alone in a corner, watching her with an undecipherable glance.

He would not speak to her on their way home. "I don't know why I keep dragging myself to those parties," he snapped suddenly, tearing off his dress tie in the middle of their living room, "I've never sat through such a vulgar, boring waste of time!" "Why, Jim," she said, stunned, "I thought it was wonderful." "You would! You seemed to be quite at home—quite as if it were Coney Island. I wish you'd learn to keep your place and not to embarrass me in public." "[ embarrassed you? Tonight?" "You did!" "How?" "If you don't understand it, I can't explain," he said in the tone of a mystic who implies that a lack of understanding is the confession of a shameful inferiority. "I don't understand it," she said firmly. He walked out of the room, slamming the door.

She felt that the inexplicable was not a mere blank, this time: it had a tinge of evil. From that night on, a small, hard point of fear remained within her, like the spot of a distant headlight advancing upon her down an invisible track.

Knowledge did not seem to bring her a clearer vision of Jim's world, but to make the mystery greater. She could not believe that she was supposed to feel respect for the dreary senselessness of the art shows which his friends attended, of the novels they read, of the political magazines they discussed—the art shows, where she saw the kind of drawings she had seen chalked on any pavement of her childhood's slums—the novels, that purported to prove the futility of science, industry, civilization and love, using language that her father would not have used in his drunkenest moments—the magazines, that propounded cowardly generalities, less clear and more stale than the sermons for which she had condemned the preacher of the slum mission as a mealy-mouthed old fraud.

She could not believe that these things were the culture she had so reverently looked up to and so eagerly waited to discover. She felt as if she had climbed a mountain toward a jagged shape that had looked like a castle and had found it to be the crumbling ruin of a gutted warehouse.

"Jim," she said once, after an evening spent among the men who were called the intellectual leaders of the country, "Dr. Simon Pritchett is a phony—a mean, scared old phony." "Now, really," he answered, "do you think you're qualified to pass judgment on philosophers?"

"I'm qualified to pass judgment on con men. I've seen enough of them to know one when I see him." "Now this is why I say that you'll never outgrow your background. If you had, you would have learned to appreciate Dr. Pritchett's philosophy." "What philosophy?" "If you don't understand it, I can't explain." She would not let him end the conversation on that favorite formula of his. "Jim," she said, "he's a phony, he and Balph Eubank and that whole gang of theirs—and I think you've been taken in by them." Instead of the anger she expected, she saw a brief flash of amusement in the lift of his eyelids. "That's what you think," he answered.

She felt an instant of terror at the first touch of a concept she had not known to be possible: What if Jim was not taken in by them? She could understand the phoniness of Dr. Pritchett, she thought—it was a racket that gave him an undeserved income; she could even admit the possibility, by now, that Jim might be a phony in his own business; what she could not hold inside her mind was the concept of Jim as a phony in a racket from which he gained nothing, an unpaid phony, an unvenal phony; the phoniness of a cardsharp or a con man seemed innocently wholesome by comparison. She could not conceive of his motive; she felt only that the headlight moving upon her had grown larger.

She could not remember by what steps, what accumulation of pain, first as small scratches of uneasiness, then as stabs of bewilderment, then as the chronic, nagging pull of fear, she had begun to doubt Jim's position on the railroad. It was his sudden, angry "so you don't trust me?" snapped in answer to her first, innocent questions that made her realize that she did not—when the doubt had not yet formed in her mind and she had fully expected that his answers would reassure her. She had learned, in the slums of her childhood, that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted, "I don't care to talk shop," was his answer whenever she mentioned the railroad. She tried to plead with him once. "Jim, you know what I think of your work and how much I admire you for it." "Oh, really?

What is it you married, a man or a railroad president?" "I . . . I never thought of separating the two." "Well, it is not very flattering to me." She looked at him, baffled: she had thought it was. "I'd like to believe," he said, "that you love me for myself, and not for my railroad." "Oh God, Jim," she gasped, "you didn't think that I—!" "No," he said, with a sadly generous smile, "I didn't think that you married me for my money or my position. I have never doubted you." Realizing, in stunned confusion and in tortured fairness, that she might have given him ground to misinterpret her feeling, that she had forgotten how many bitter disappointments he must have suffered at the hands of fortune-hunting women, she could do nothing but shake her head and moan, "Oh, Jim, that's not what I meant!" He chuckled softly, as at a child, and slipped his arm around her. "Do you love me?" he asked. "Yes," she whispered. "Then you must have faith in me. Love is faith, you know. Don't you see that I need it? I don't trust anyone around me, I have nothing but enemies, I am very lonely. Don't you know that I need you?"

The thing that made her pace her room—hours later, in tortured restlessness—was that she wished desperately to believe him and did not believe a word of it, yet knew that it was true.

It was true, but not in the manner he implied, not in any manner or meaning she could ever hope to grasp. It was true that he needed her, but the nature of his need kept slipping past her every effort to define it. She did not know what he wanted of her. It was not flattery that he wanted, she had seen him listening to the obsequious compliments of liars, listening with a look of resentful inertness—almost the look of a drug addict at a dose inadequate to rouse him. But she had seen him look at her as if he were waiting for some reviving shot and, at times, as if he were begging. She had seen a flicker of life in his eyes whenever she granted him some sign of admiration—yet a burst of anger was his answer, whenever she named a reason for admiring him.

He seemed to want her to consider him great, but never dare ascribe any specific content to his greatness.

She did not understand the night, in mid-April, when he returned from a trip to Washington. "Hi, kid!" he said loudly, dropping a sheaf of lilac into her arms. "Happy days are here again! Just saw those flowers and thought of you. Spring is coming, baby!"

He poured himself a drink and paced the room, talking with too light, too brash a manner of gaiety. There was a feverish sparkle in his eyes, and his voice seemed shredded by some unnatural excitement. She began to wonder whether he was elated or crushed.

"I know what it is that they're planning!" he said suddenly, without transition, and she glanced up at him swiftly: she knew the sound of one of his inner explosions. "There's not a dozen people in the whole country who know it, but I do! The top boys are keeping it secret till they're ready to spring it on the nation. Will it surprise a lot of people!

Will it knock them flat! A lot of people? Hell, every single person in this country! It will affect every single person. That's how important it is."

"Affect—how, Jim?"

"It will affect them! And they don't know what's coming, but I do.

There they sit tonight"—he waved at the lighted windows of the city—"making plans, counting their money, hugging their children or their dreams, and they don't know, but I do, that all of it will be struck, stopped, changed!"

"Changed—for the worse or the better?"

"For the better, of course," he answered impatiently, as if it were irrelevant; his voice seemed to lose its fire and to slip into the fraudulent sound of duty. "It's a plan to save the country, to stop our economic decline, to hold things still, to achieve stability and security."

"What plan?"

"I can't tell you. It's secret. Top secret. You have no idea how many people would like to know it. There's no industrialist who wouldn't give a dozen of his best furnaces for just one hint of warning, which he's not going to get! Like Hank Rearden, for instance, whom you admire so much." He chuckled, looking off into the future.

"Jim," she asked, the sound of fear in her voice telling him what the sound of his chuckle had been like, "why do you hate Hank Rearden?"

"I don't hate him!" He whirled to her, and his face, incredibly, looked anxious, almost frightened. "I never said I hated him. Don't worry, he'll approve of the plan. Everybody will. It's for everybody's good." He sounded as if he were pleading. She felt the dizzying certainty that he was lying, yet that the plea was sincere—as if he had a desperate need to reassure her, but not about the things he said.

She forced herself to smile. "Yes, Jim, of course," she answered, wondering what instinct in what impossible kind of chaos had made her say it as if it were her part to reassure him.

The look she saw on his face was almost a smile and almost of gratitude. "1 had to tell you about it tonight. I had to tell you. I wanted you to know what tremendous issues I deal with. You always talk about my work, but you don't understand it at all, it's so much wider than you imagine. You think that running a railroad is a matter of track laying and fancy metals and getting trains there on time. But it's not.

Any underling can do that. The real heart of a railroad is in Washington. My job is politics. Politics. Decisions made on a national scale, affecting everything, controlling everybody. A few words on paper, a directive—changing the life of every person in every nook, cranny and penthouse of this country!"

"Yes, Jim," she said, wishing to believe that he was, perhaps, a man of stature in the mysterious realm of Washington.

"You'll see," he said, pacing the room. "You think they're powerful —those giants of industry who're so clever with motors and furnaces?

They'll be stopped! They'll be stripped! They'll be brought down! They'll be—" He noticed the way she was staring at him. "It's not for ourselves," he snapped hastily, "it's for the people. That's the difference between business and politics—we have no selfish ends in view, no private motives, we're not after profit, we don't spend our lives scrambling for money, we don't have to! That's why we're slandered and misunderstood by all the greedy profit-chasers who can't conceive of a spiritual motive or a moral ideal or . . . We couldn't help it!" he cried suddenly, whirling to her. "We had to have that plan! With everything falling to pieces and stopping, something had to be done! We had to stop them from stopping! We couldn't help it!"

His eyes were desperate; she did not know whether he was boasting or begging for forgiveness; she did not know whether this was triumph or terror. "Jim, don't you feel well? Maybe you've worked too hard and you're worn out and—"

"I've never felt better in my life!" he snapped, resuming his pacing.

"You bet I've worked hard. My work is bigger than any job you can hope to imagine. It's above anything that grubbing mechanics like Rearden and my sister, are doing. Whatever they do, I can undo it. Let them build a track—I can come and break it, just like that!"

He snapped his fingers. "Just like breaking a spine'"

"You want to break spines?" she whispered, trembling.

"I haven't said that!" he screamed. "What's the matter with you? I haven't said it!"

"I'm sorry, Jim!" she gasped, shocked by her own words and by the terror in his eyes. "It's just that I don't understand, but . . . but I know I shouldn't bother you with questions when you're so tired"—she was struggling desperately to convince herself—"when you have so many things on your mind . . . such . . . such great things . . . things I can't even begin to think of . . ."

His shoulders sagged, relaxing. He approached her and dropped wearily down on his knees, slipping his arms around her. "You poor little fool," he said affectionately.

She held onto him, moved by something that felt like tenderness and almost like pity. But he raised his head to glance up at her face, and it seemed to her that the look she saw in his eyes was part-gratification, part-contempt—almost as if, by some unknown kind of sanction, she had absolved him and damned herself.

It was useless—she found in the days that followed—to tell herself that these things were beyond her understanding, that it was her duty to believe in him, that love was faith. Her doubt kept growing—doubt of his incomprehensible work and of his relation to the railroad. She wondered why it kept growing in direct proportion to her self-admonitions that faith was the duty she owed him. Then, one sleepless night, she realized that her effort to fulfill that duty consisted of turning away whenever people discussed his job, of refusing to look at newspaper mentions of Taggart Transcontinental, of slamming her mind shut against any evidence and every contradiction. She stopped, aghast, struck by the question: What is it, then—faith versus truth? And realizing that part of her zeal to believe was her fear to know, she set out to learn the truth, with a cleaner, calmer sense of Tightness than the effort at dutiful self-fraud had ever given her.

It did not take her long to learn. The evasiveness of the Taggart executives, when she asked a few casual questions, the stale generalities of their answers, the strain of their manner at the mention of their boss, and their obvious reluctance to discuss him—told her nothing concrete, but gave her a feeling equivalent to knowing the worst. The railroad workers were more specific—the switchmen, the gatemen, the ticket sellers whom she drew into chance conversations in the Taggart Terminal and who did not know her. "Jim Taggart? That whining, sniveling, speech-making deadhead!" "Jimmy the President? Well, I'll tell you: he's the hobo on the gravy train." "The boss? Mr. Taggart? You mean Miss Taggart, don't you?"

It was Eddie Willers who told her the whole truth. She heard that he had known Jim since childhood, and she asked him to lunch with her.

When she faced him at the table, when she saw the earnest, questioning directness of his eyes and the severely literal simplicity of his words, she dropped all attempts at casual prodding, she told him what she wanted to know and why, briefly, impersonally, not appealing for help or for pity, only for truth. He answered her in the same manner. He told her the whole story, quietly, impersonally, pronouncing no verdict, expressing no opinion, never encroaching on her emotions by any sign of concern for them, speaking with the shining austerity and the awesome power of facts. He told her who ran Taggart Transcontinental.

He told her the story of the John Galt Line. She listened, and what she felt was not shock, but worse: the lack of shock, as if she had always known it. "Thank you, Mr. Willers," was all that she said when he finished.

She waited for Jim to come home, that evening, and the thing that eroded any pain or indignation, was a feeling of her own detachment, as if it did not matter to her any longer, as if some action were required of her, but it made no difference what the action would be or the consequences.

It was not anger that she felt when she saw Jim enter the room, but a murky astonishment, almost as if she wondered who he was and why it should now be necessary to speak to him. She told him what she knew, briefly, in a tired, extinguished voice. It seemed to her that he understood it from her first few sentences, as if he had expected this to come sooner or later.

"Why didn't you tell me the truth?" she asked.

"So that's your idea of gratitude?" he screamed. "So that's how you feel after everything I've done for you? Everybody told me that crudeness and selfishness was all I could expect for lifting a cheap little alley cat by the scruff of her neck!"

She looked at him as if he were making inarticulate sounds that connected to nothing inside her mind. "Why didn't you tell me the truth?"

"Is that all the love you felt for me, you sneaky little hypocrite? Is. that all I get in return for my faith in you?"

"Why did you lie? Why did you let me think what I thought?"

"You should be ashamed of yourself, you should be ashamed to face me or speak to me!"

"1?" The inarticulate sounds had connected, but she could not believe the sum they made. "What are you trying to do, Jim?" she asked, her voice incredulous and distant.

"Have you thought of my feelings? Have you thought of what this. would do to my feelings? You should have considered my feelings first!

That's the first obligation of any wife—and of a woman in your position in particular! There's nothing lower and uglier than ingratitude!"

For the flash of one instant, she grasped the unthinkable fact of a man who was guilty and knew it and was trying to escape by inducing an emotion of guilt in his victim. But she could not hold the fact inside her brain. She felt a stab of horror, the convulsion of a mind rejecting a sight that would destroy it—a stab like a swift recoil from the edge of insanity. By the time she dropped her head, closing her eyes, she knew only that she felt disgust, a sickening disgust for a nameless reason.

When she raised her head, it seemed to her-that she caught a glimpse of him watching her with the uncertain, retreating, calculating look of a man whose trick has not worked. But before she had time to believe it, his face was hidden again under an expression of injury and anger.

She said, as if she were naming her thoughts for the benefit of the rational being who was not present, but whose presence she had to assume, since no other could be addressed, "That night . . . those headlines . . . that glory . . . it was not you at all . . . it was Dagny."

"Shut up, you rotten little bitch!"

She looked at him blankly, without reaction. She looked as if nothing could reach her, because her dying words had been uttered.

He made the sound of a sob. "Cherryl, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it, I take it back, I didn't mean it . . ."

She remained standing, leaning against the wall, as she had stood from the first.

He dropped down on the edge of a couch, in a posture of helpless dejection. "How could I have explained it to you?" he said in the tone of abandoning hope. "It's all so big and so complex. How could I have told you anything about a transcontinental railroad, unless you knew all the details and ramifications? How could I have explained to you my years of work, my . . . Oh, what's the use? I've always been misunderstood and I should have been accustomed to it by now, only I thought that you were different and that I had a chance."

"Jim, why did you marry me?"

He chuckled sadly. "That's what everybody kept asking me. I didn't think you'd ever ask it. Why? Because I love you."

She wondered at how strange it was that this word—which was supposed to be the simplest in the human language, the word understood by all, the universal bond among men—conveyed to her no meaning whatever. She did not know what it was that it named in his mind.

"Nobody's ever loved me," he said. "There isn't any love in the world. People don't feel. I feel things. Who cares about that? All they care for is time schedules and freight loads and money. I can't live among those people. I'm very lonely. I've always longed to find understanding. Maybe I'm just a hopeless idealist, looking for the impossible.

Nobody will ever understand me."

"Jim," she said, with an odd little note of severity in her voice, "what I've struggled for all this time is to understand you."

He dropped his hand in a motion of brushing her words aside, not offensively, but sadly. "I thought you could. You're all I have. But maybe understanding is just not possible between human beings."

"Why should it be impossible? Why don't you tell me what it is that you want? Why don't you help me to understand you?"

He sighed. "That's it. That's the trouble—your asking all those why's. Your constant asking of a why for everything. What I'm talking about can't be put into words. It can't be named. It has to be felt.

Either you feel it or you don't. It's not a thing of the mind, but of the heart. Don't you ever feel? Just feel, without asking all those questions? Can't you understand me as a human being, not as if I were a scientific object in a laboratory? The great understanding that transcends our shabby words and helpless minds . . . No, I guess I shouldn't look for it. But I'll always seek and hope. You're my last hope. You're all I have."

She stood at the wall, without moving.

"I need you," he wailed softly. "Fm all alone. You're not like the others. I believe in you. I trust you. What has all that money and fame and business and struggle given me? You're all I have . . . "

She stood without moving and the direction of her glance, lowered to look down at him, was the only form of recognition she gave him.

The things he said about his suffering were lies, she thought; but the suffering was real; he was a man torn by some continual anguish, which he seemed unable to tell her, but which, perhaps, she could learn to understand. She still owed him this much—she thought, with the grayness of a sense of duty—in payment for the position he had given her, which, perhaps, was all he had to give, she owed him an effort to understand him.

It was strange to feel, in the days that followed, that she had become a stranger to herself, a stranger who had nothing to want or to seek. In place of a love made by the brilliant fire of hero worship, she was left with the gnawing drabness of pity. In place of the men she had struggled to find, men who fought for their goals and refused to suffer—she was left with a man whose suffering was his only claim to value and his only offer in exchange for her life. But it made no difference to her any longer. The one who was she, had looked with eagerness at the turn of every corner ahead; the passive stranger who had taken her place, was like all the over groomed people around her, the people who said that they were adult because they did not try to think or to desire.

But the stranger was still haunted by a ghost who was herself, and the ghost had a mission to accomplish. She had to learn to understand the things that had destroyed her. She had to know, and she lived with a sense of ceaseless waiting. She had to know, even though she felt that the headlight was closer and in the moment of knowledge she would be struck by the wheels.

What do you want of me?—was the question that kept beating in her mind as a clue. What do you want of me?—she kept crying soundlessly, at dinner tables, in drawing rooms, on sleepless nights— crying it to Jim and those who seemed to share his secret, to Balph Eubank, to Dr. Simon Pritchett—what do you want of me? She did not ask it aloud; she knew that they would not answer. What do you want of me?—she asked, feeling as if she were running, but no way were open to escape. What do you want of me?—she asked, looking at the whole long torture of her marriage that had not lasted the full span of one year.

"What do you want of me?" she asked aloud—and saw that she was sitting at the table in her dining room, looking at Jim, at his feverish face, and at a drying stain of water on the table.

She did not know how long a span of silence had stretched between them, she was startled by her own voice and by the--question she had not intended to utter. She did not expect him to understand it, he had never seemed to understand much simpler queries—and she shook her head, struggling to recapture the reality of the present.

She was startled to see him looking at her with a touch of derision, as if he were mocking her estimate of his understanding.

"Love," he answered.

She felt herself sagging with hopelessness, in the face of that answer which was at once so simple and so meaningless.

"You don't love me," he said accusingly. She did not answer. "You don't love me or you wouldn't ask such a question."

"I did love you once," she said dully, "but it wasn't what you wanted. I loved you for your courage, your ambition, your ability. But it wasn't real, any of it."

His lower lip swelled a little in a faint, contemptuous thrust. "What a shabby idea of love!" he said.

"Jim, what is it that you want to be loved for?"

"What a cheap shopkeeper's attitude!"

She did not speak; she looked at him, her eyes stretched by a silent question.

"To be lovedfor! " he said, his voice grating with mockery and righteousness. "So you think that love is a matter of mathematics, of exchange, of weighing and measuring, like a pound of butter on a grocery counter? I don't want to be loved for anything. I want to be loved for myself—not for anything I do or have or say or think. For myself—not for my body or mind or words or works or actions."

"But then . . . what is yourself?"

"If you loved me, you wouldn't ask it." His voice had a shrill note of nervousness, as if he were swaying dangerously between caution and some blindly heedless impulse. "You wouldn't ask. You'd know. You'd feel it. Why do you always try to tag and label everything? Can't you rise above those petty materialistic definitions? Don't you ever feel—just feel?"

"Yes. Jim, I do," she said, her voice low. "But I am trying not to, because . . . because what T feel is fear."

"Of me?" he asked hopefully.

"No, not exactly. Not fear of what you can do to me, but of what you are."

He dropped his eyelids with the swiftness of slamming a door—but she caught a flash of his eyes and the flash, incredibly, was terror.

"You're not capable of love, you cheap little gold-digger!" he cried suddenly, in a tone stripped of all color but the desire "to hurt. "Yes, I said gold-digger. There are many forms of it, other than greed for money, other and worse. You're a gold-digger of the spirit. You didn't marry me for my cash—but you married me for my ability or courage or whatever value it was that you set as the price of your love!"

"Do you want . . . love . . . to be . . . causeless?"

"Love is its own cause! Love is above causes and reasons. Love is blind. But you wouldn't be capable of it. You have the mean, scheming, calculating little soul of a shopkeeper who trades', but never gives!

Love is a gift—a great, free, unconditional gift that transcends and forgives everything. What's the generosity of loving a man for his virtues?

What do you give him? Nothing. It's no more than cold justice. No more than he's earned."

Her eyes were dark with the dangerous intensity of glimpsing her goal. "You want it to be unearned," she said, not in the tone of a question, but of a verdict.

"Oh, you don't understand!"

"Yes, Jim, I do. That's what you want—that's what all of you really want—not money, not material benefits, not economic security, not any of the handouts you keep demanding." She spoke in a flat monotone, as if reciting her thoughts to herself, intent upon giving the solid identity of words to the torturous shreds of chaos twisting in her mind.

"All of you welfare preachers—it's not unearned money that you're after. You want handouts, but of a different kind. I'm a gold-digger of the spirit, you said, because I look for value. Then you, the welfare preachers . . . it's the spirit that you want to loot. I never thought and nobody ever told us how it could be thought of and what it would mean—the unearned in spirit. But that is what you want. You want unearned love. You want unearned admiration. You want unearned greatness. You want to be a man like Hank Rearden without the necessity of being what he is. Without the necessity of being anything.

Without . . . the necessity . . . of being."

"Shut up!" he screamed.

They looked at each other, both in terror, both feeling as if they were swaying on an edge which she could not and he would not name, both knowing that one more step would be fatal.

"What do you think you're saying?" he asked in a tone of petty anger, which sounded almost benevolent by bringing them back into the realm of the normal, into the near-wholesomeness of nothing worse than a family quarrel. "What sort of metaphysical subject are you trying to deal with?"

"I don't know . . ." she said wearily, dropping her head, as if some shape she had tried to capture had slipped once more out of her grasp. "I don't know . . . It doesn't seem possible . . ."

"You'd better not try to wade in way over your head or—" But he had to stop, because the butler entered, bringing the glittering ice bucket with the champagne ordered for celebration.

They remained silent, letting the room be filled by the sounds which centuries of men and of struggle had established as the symbol of joyous attainment: the blast of the cork, the laughing tinkle of a pale gold liquid running into two broad cups filled with the weaving reflections of candles, the whisper of bubbles rising through two crystal stems, almost demanding that everything in sight rise, too, in the same aspiration.

They remained silent, till the butler had gone. Taggart sat looking down at the bubbles, holding the stem of his glass between two limply casual fingers. Then his hand closed suddenly about the stem into an awkwardly convulsed fist and he raised it, not as one lifts a glass of champagne, but as one would lift a butcher knife.

"To Francisco d'Anconia!" he said.

She put her glass down. "No," she answered.

"Drink it!" he screamed.

"No," she answered, her voice like a drop of lead.

They held each other's glances for a moment, the light playing on the golden liquid, not reaching their faces or eyes.

"Oh, go to hell!" he cried, leaping to his feet, flinging his glass to smash on the floor and rushing out of the room.

She sat at the table, not moving, for a long time, then rose slowly and pressed the bell.

She walked to her room, her steps unnaturally even, she opened the door of a closet, she reached for a suit and a pair of shoes, she took off the housecoat, moving with cautious precision, as if her life depended on not jarring anything about or within her. She held onto a single thought: that she had to get out of this house—just get out of it for a while, if only for the next hour—and then, later, she would be able to face all that had to be faced.

The lines were blurring on the paper before her and, raising her head, Dagny realized that it had long since grown dark.

She pushed the papers aside, unwilling to turn on the lamp, permitting herself the luxury of idleness and darkness. It cut her off from the city beyond the windows of her living room. The calendar in the distance said: August 5.

The month behind her had gone, leaving nothing but the blank of dead time. It had gone into the planless, thankless work of racing from emergency to emergency, of delaying the collapse of a railroad—a month like a waste pile of disconnected days, each given to averting the disaster of the moment. It had not been a sum of achievements brought into existence, but only a sum of zeros, of that which had not happened, a sum of prevented catastrophes—not a task in the service of life, but only a race against death.

There had been times when an unsummoned vision—a sight of the valley—had seemed to rise before her, not as a sudden appearance, but as a constant, hidden presence that suddenly chose to assume an insistent reality. She had faced it, through moments of blinded stillness, in a contest between an unmoving decision and an unyielding pain, a pain to be fought by acknowledgment, by saying: All right, even this.

There had been mornings when, awakening with rays of sunlight on her face, she had thought that she must hurry to Hammond's Market to get fresh eggs for breakfast; then, recapturing full consciousness, seeing the haze of New York beyond the window of her bedroom, she had felt a tearing stab, like a touch of death, the touch of rejecting reality. You knew it—she had told herself severely—you knew what it would be like when you made your choice. And dragging her body, like an unwilling weight, out of bed to face an unwelcome day, she would whisper: All right, even this.

The worst of the torture had been the moments when, walking down the street, she had caught a sudden glimpse of chestnut-gold, a glowing streak of hair among the heads of strangers, and had felt as if the city had vanished, as if nothing but the violent stillness within her were delaying the moment when she would rush to him and seize him; but that next moment had come as the sight of some meaningless face—and she had stood, not wishing to live through the following step, not wishing to generate the energy of living. She had tried to avoid such moments; she had tried to forbid herself to look; she had walked, keeping her eyes on the pavements. She had failed: by some will of their own, her eyes had kept leaping to every streak of gold.

She had kept the blinds raised on the windows of her office, remembering his promise, thinking only: If you are watching me, wherever you are . . . There were no buildings close to the height of her office, but she had looked at the distant towers, wondering which window was his observation post, wondering whether some invention of his own, some device of rays and lenses, permitted him to observe her every movement from some skyscraper a block or a mile away. She had sat at her desk, at her uncurtained windows, thinking: Just to know that you're seeing me, even if I'm never to see you again.

And remembering it, now, in the darkness of her room, she leaped to her feet and snapped on the light.

Then she dropped her head for an instant, smiling in mirthless amusement at herself. She wondered whether her lighted windows, in the black immensity of the city, were a flare of distress, calling for his help—or a lighthouse still protecting the rest of the world.

The doorbell rang.

When she opened the door, she saw the silhouette of a girl with a faintly familiar face—and it took her a moment of startled astonishment to realize that it was Cherryl Taggart. Except for a formal exchange of greetings on a few chance encounters in the halls of the Taggart Building, they had not seen each other since the wedding.

Cherryl's face was composed and unsmiling. "Would you permit me to speak to you"—she hesitated and ended on—"Miss Taggart?"

"Of course," said Dagny gravely. "Come in."

She sensed some desperate emergency in the unnatural calm of Cherryl's manner; she became certain of it when she looked at the girl's face in the light of the living room. "Sit down," she said, but Cherryl remained standing.

"I came to pay a debt," said Cherryl, her voice solemn with the effort to permit herself no sound of emotion. "I want to apologize for the things I said to you at my wedding. There's no reason why you should forgive me, but it's my place to tell you that I know I was insulting everything I admire and defending everything I despise. I know that admitting it now, doesn't make up for it, and even coming here is only another presumption, there's no reason why you should want to hear it, so I can't even cancel the debt, I can only ask for a favor—that you let me say the things I want to say to you."

Dagny's shock of emotion, incredulous, warm and painful, was the wordless equivalent of the sentence: What a distance to travel in less than a year . . . ! She answered, the unsmiling earnestness of her voice like a hand extended in support, knowing that a smile would upset some precarious balance, "But it does make up for it, and I do want to hear it."

"I know that it was you who ran Taggart Transcontinental. It was you who built the John Galt Line. It was you who had the mind and the courage that kept all of it alive. I suppose you thought that I married Jim for his money—as what shop girl wouldn't have? But, you see, I married Jim because I . . . I thought that he was you. I thought that he was Taggart Transcontinental. Now I know that he's"—she hesitated, then went on firmly, as if not to spare herself anything—"he's some sort of vicious moocher, though I can't understand of what kind or why. When I spoke to you at my wedding, I thought that I was defending greatness and attacking its enemy . . . but it was in reverse . . . it was in such horrible, unbelievable reverse! . . . So I wanted to tell you that I know the truth . . . not so much for your sake, I have no right to presume that you'd care, but . . . but for the sake of the things I loved."

Dagny said slowly, "Of course I forgive it."

"Thank you," she whispered, and turned to go.

"Sit down."

She shook her head. "That . . . that was all, Miss Taggart."

Dagny allowed herself the first touch of a smile, no more than in the look of her eyes, as she said, "Cherryl, my name is Dagny."

Cherryl's answer was no more than a faint, tremulous crease of her mouth, as if, together, they had completed a single smile. "I . . .

I didn't know whether I should—"

"We're sisters, aren't we?"

"No! Not through Jim!" It was an involuntary cry.

"No, through our own choice. Sit down, Cherryl." The girl obeyed, struggling not to show the eagerness of her acceptance, not to grasp for support, not to break. "You've had a terrible time, haven't you?"

"Yes . . . but that doesn't matter . . . that's my own problem . . . and my own fault."

"I don't think it was your own fault."

Cherryl did not answer, then said suddenly, desperately, "Look . . . what I don't want is charity."

"Jim must have told you—and it's true—that I never engage in charity."

"Yes, he did . . . But what I mean is—"

"I know what you mean."

"But there's no reason why you should have to feel concern for me . . . I didn't come here to complain and . . . and load another burden on your shoulders . . . That I happen to suffer, doesn't give me a claim on you."

"No, it doesn't. But that you value all the things I value, does."

"You mean . . . if you want to talk to me, it's not alms? Not just because you feel sorry for me?"

"I feel terribly sorry for you, Cherryl, and I'd like to help you—not because you suffer, but because you haven't deserved to suffer."

"You mean, you wouldn't be kind to anything weak or whining or rotten about me? Only to whatever you see in me that's good?"

"Of course."

Cherryl did not move her head, but she looked as if it were lifted—as if some bracing current were relaxing her features into that rare look which combines pain and dignity.

"It's not alms, Cherryl. Don't be afraid to speak to me."

"It's strange . . . You're the first person I can talk to . . . and it feels so easy . . . yet I . . . I was afraid to speak to you. I wanted to ask your forgiveness long ago . . . ever since I learned the truth, I went as far as the door of your office, but I stopped and stood there in the hall and didn't have the courage to go in. . . . I didn't intend to come here tonight. I went out only to . . . to think something over, and then, suddenly, I knew that I wanted to see you, that in the whole of the city this was the only place for me to go and the only thing still left for me to do."

"I'm glad you did."

"You know, Miss Tag—Dagny," she said softly, in wonder, "you're not as I expected you to be at all. . . . They, Jim and his friends, they said you were hard and cold and unfeeling."

"But it's true, Cherryl. I am, in the sense they mean—only have they ever told you in just what sense they mean it?"

"No. They never do. They only sneer at me when I ask them what they mean by anything . . . about anything. What did they mean about you?"

"Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that 'to feel' is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality. He means . . . What's the matter?" she asked, seeing the abnormal intensity of the girl's face.

"It's . . . it's something I've tried so hard to understand . . . for such a long time. . . ."

"Well, observe that you never hear that accusation in defense of innocence, but always in defense of guilt. You never hear it said by a good person about those who fail to do him justice. But you always hear it said by a rotter about those who treat him as a rotter, those who don't feel any sympathy for the evil he's committed or for the pain he suffers as a consequence. Well, it's true—that is what I do not feel. But those who feel it, feel nothing for any quality of human greatness, for any person or action that deserves admiration, approval, esteem. These are the things 7 feel. You'll find that it's one or the other. Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.

Ask yourself which, of the two, are the unfeeling persons. And then you'll see what motive is the opposite of charity."

"What?" she whispered.

"Justice, Cherryl."

Cherryl shuddered suddenly and dropped her head. "Oh God!" she moaned. "If you knew what hell Jim has been giving me because I believed just what you said!" She raised her face in the sweep of another shudder, as if the things she had tried to control had broken through; the look in her eyes was terror. "Dagny," she whispered, "Dagny, I'm afraid of them . . . of Jim and all the others . . . not afraid of something they'll do . . . if it were that, I could escape . . . but afraid, as if there's no way out . . . afraid of what they are and . . . and that they exist."

Dagny came forward swiftly to sit on the arm of her chair and seize her shoulder in a steadying grasp. "Quiet, kid," she said. "You're wrong. You must never feel afraid of people in that way. You must never think that their existence is a reflection on yours—yet that's what you're thinking."

"Yes . . . Yes, I feel that there's no chance for me to exist, if they do . . . no chance, no room, no world I can cope with. . . . I don't want to feel it, I keep pushing it back, but it's coming closer and 1 know I have no place to run. . . . I can't explain what it feels like, I can't catch hold of it—and that's part of the terror, that you can't catch hold of anything—it's as if the whole world were suddenly destroyed, but not by an explosion—an explosion is something hard and solid—but destroyed by . . . by some horrible kind of softening . . . as if nothing were solid, nothing held any shape at all, and you could poke your finger through stone walls and the stone would give, like jelly, and mountains would slither, and buildings would switch their shapes like clouds—and that would be the end of the world, not fire and brimstone, but goo."

"Cherryl . . . Cherryl, you poor kid, there have been centuries of philosophers plotting to turn the world into just that—to destroy people's minds by making them believe that that's what they're seeing.

But you don't have to accept it. You don't have to see through the eyes of others, hold onto yours, stand on your own judgment, you know that what is, is—say it aloud, like the holiest of prayers, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise."

"But . . . but nothing is, any more. Jim and his friends—they're not. I don't know what I'm looking at, when I'm among them, I don't know what I'm hearing when they speak . . . it's not real, any of it, it's some ghastly sort of act that they're all going through . . . and I don't know what they're after. . . . Dagny! We've always been told that human beings have such a great power of knowledge, so much greater than animals, but I—I feel blinder than any animal right now, blinder and more helpless. An animal knows who are its friends and who are its enemies, and when to defend itself. It doesn't expect a friend to step on it or to cut its throat. It doesn't expect to be told that love is blind, that plunder is achievement, that gangsters are statesmen and that it's great to break the spine of Hank Rearden!—oh God, what am I saying?"

"I know what you're saying."

"I mean, how am I to deal with people? I mean, if nothing held firm for the length of one hour—we couldn't go on, could we? Well, I know that things are solid—but people? Dagny! They're nothing and anything, they're not beings, they're only switches, just constant switches without any shape. But I have to live among them. How am I to do it?"

"Cherryl, what you've been struggling with is the greatest problem in history, the one that has caused ail of human suffering. You've understood much more than most people, who suffer and die, never knowing what killed them. I'll help you to understand. It's a big subject and a hard battle—but first, above all, don't be afraid."

The look on Cherryl's face was an odd, wistful longing, as if, seeing Dagny from a great distance, she were straining and failing to come closer, "I wish I could wish to fight," she said softly, "but I don't. I don't even want to win any longer. There's one change that I don't seem to have the strength to make. You see, I had never expected anything like my marriage to Jim, Then when it happened, I thought that life was much more wonderful than I had expected. And now to get used to the idea that life and people are much more horrible than anything I had imagined and that my marriage was not a glorious miracle, but some unspeakable kind of evil which I'm still afraid to learn fully—that is what I can't force myself to take. I can't get past it." She glanced up suddenly. "Dagny, how did you do it? How did you manage to remain unmangled?"

"By holding to just one rule."

"Which?"

"To place nothing—nothing—above the verdict of my own mind."

"You've taken some terrible beatings . . . maybe worse than I did . . . worse than any of us. . . . What held you through it?"

"The knowledge that my life is the highest of values, too high to give up without a fight."

She saw a look of astonishment, of incredulous recognition on Cherryl's face, as if the girl were struggling to recapture some sensation across a span of years. "Dagny"—her voice was a whisper—"that's . . . that's what I felt when I was a child . . . that's what I seem to remember most about myself . . . that kind of feeling . . . and I never lost it, it's there, it's always been there, but as I grew up, I thought it was something that I must hide. . . . I never had any name for it, but just now, when you said it, it struck me that that's what it was. . . . Dagny, to feel that way about your own life—is that good?"

"Cherryl, listen to me carefully: that feeling—with everything which it requires and implies—is the highest, noblest and only good on earth."

"The reason I ask is because I . . . I wouldn't have dared to think that. Somehow, people always made me feel as if they thought it was a sin . . . as if that were the thing in me which they resented and . . . and wanted to destroy."

"It's true. Some people do want to destroy it. And when you learn to understand their motive, you'll know the darkest, ugliest and only evil in the world, but you'll be safely out of its reach."

Cherryl's smile was like a feeble flicker struggling to retain its hold upon a few drops of fuel, to catch them, to flare up. "It's the first time in months," she whispered, "that I've felt as if . . . as if there's still a chance." She saw Dagny's eyes watching her with attentive concern, and she added, "I'll be all right . . . Let me get used to it—to you, to all the things you said. I think I'll come to believe it . . . to believe that it's real . . . and that Jim doesn't matter." She rose to her feet, as if trying to retain the moment of assurance.

Prompted by a sudden, causeless certainty, Dagny said sharply, "Cherryl, I don't want you to go home tonight."

"Oh no! I'm all right. I'm not afraid, that way. Not of going home."

"Didn't something happen there tonight?"

"No . . . not really . . . nothing worse than usual. It was just that I began to see things a little more clearly, that was all . . . I'm all right. I have to think, think harder than I ever did before . . . and then I'll decide what I must do. May I—" She hesitated.

"Yes?'1

"May I come back to talk to you again?"

"Of course."

"Thank you, I . . . I'm very grateful to you."

"Will you promise me that you'll come back?"

"I promise."

Dagny saw her walking off down the hall toward the elevator, saw the slump of her shoulders, then the effort that lifted them, saw the slender figure that seemed to sway then marshal all of its strength to remain erect. She looked like a plant with a broken stem, still held together by a single fiber, struggling to heal the breach, which one more gust of wind would finish.

Through the open door of his study, James Taggart had seen Cherryl cross the anteroom and walk out of the apartment. He had slammed his door and slumped down on the davenport, with patches of spilled champagne still soaking the cloth of his trousers, as if his own discomfort were a revenge upon his wife and upon a universe that would not provide him with the celebration he had wanted.

After a while, he leaped to his feet, tore off his coat and threw it across the room. He reached for a cigarette, but snapped it in half and flung it at a painting over the fireplace.

He noticed a vase of Venetian glass—a museum piece, centuries old, with an intricate system of blue and gold arteries twisting through its transparent body. He seized it and flung it at the wall; it burst into a rain of glass as thin as a shattered light bulb.

He had bought that vase for the satisfaction of thinking of all the connoisseurs who could not afford it. Now he experienced the satisfaction of a revenge upon the centuries which had prized it—and the satisfaction of thinking that there were millions of desperate families, any one of whom could have lived for a year on the price of that vase.

He kicked off his shoes, and fell back on the davenport, letting his stocking feet dangle in mid-air.

The sound of the doorbell startled him: it seemed to match his mood.

It was the kind of brusque, demanding, impatient snap of sound he would have produced if he were now jabbing his finger at someone's doorbell.

He listened to the butler's steps, promising himself the pleasure of refusing admittance to whoever was seeking it. In a moment, he heard the knock at his door and the butler entered to announce, "Mrs.

Rearden to see you, sir."

"What? . . . Oh . . . Well! Have her come in!"

He swung his feet down to the floor, but made no other concession, and waited with half a smile of alerted curiosity, choosing not to rise until a moment after Lillian had entered the room.

She wore a wine-colored dinner gown, an imitation of an Empire traveling suit, with a miniature double-breasted jacket gripping her high waistline over the long sweep of the skirt, and a small hat clinging to one ear, with a feather sweeping down to curl under her chin. She entered with a brusque, unrhythmical motion, the train of her dress and the feather of her hat swirling, then flapping against her legs and throat, like pennants signaling nervousness.

"Lillian, my dear, am I to be flattered, delighted or just plain flabbergasted?"

"Oh, don't make a fuss about it! I had to see you, and it had to be immediately, that's all."

The impatient tone, the peremptory movement with which she sat down were a confession of weakness: by the rules of their unwritten language, one did not assume a demanding manner unless one were seeking a favor and had no value—no threat—to barter.

"Why didn't you stay at the Gonzales reception?" she asked, her casual smile failing to hide the tone of irritation. "I dropped in on them after dinner, just to catch hold of you—but they said you hadn't been feeling well and had gone home."

He crossed the room and picked up a cigarette, for the pleasure of padding in his stocking feet past the formal elegance of her costume.

"I was bored," he answered.

"I can't stand them," she said, with a little shudder; he glanced at her in astonishment: the words sounded involuntary and sincere. "I can't stand Senor Gonzales and that whore he's got himself for a wife.

It's disgusting that they've become so fashionable, they and their parties. I don't feel like going anywhere any longer. It's not the same style any more, not the same spirit. I haven't run into Balph Eubank for months, or Dr. Pritchett, or any of the boys. And all those new faces that look like butcher's assistants! After all, our crowd were gentlemen."

"Yeah," he said reflectively. "Yeah, there's some funny kind of difference. It's like on the railroad, too: I could get along with Gem Weatherby, he was civilized, but Cuffy Meigs—that's something else again, that's . . ."He stopped abruptly.

"It's perfectly preposterous," she said, in the tone of a challenge to the space at large. "They can't get away with it."

She did not explain "who" or "with what." He knew what she meant. Through a moment of silence, they looked as if they were clinging to each other for reassurance.

In the next moment, he was thinking with pleasurable amusement that Lillian was beginning to show her age. The deep burgundy color of her gown was unbecoming, it seemed to draw a purplish tinge out of her skin, a tinge that gathered, like twilight, in the small gullies of her face, softening her flesh to a texture of tired slackness, changing her look of bright mockery into a look of stale malice.

He saw her studying him, smiling and saying crisply, with the smile as license for insult, "You are unwell, aren't you, Jim? You look like a disorganized stable boy."

He chuckled. "I can afford it."

"I know it, darling. You're one of the most powerful men in New York City." She added, "It's a good joke on New York City."

"It is."

"I concede that you're in a position to do anything. That's why I had to see you." She added a small, grunt like sound of amusement, to dilute her statement's frankness.

"Good," he said, his voice comfortable and noncommittal.

"I had to come here, because I thought it best, in this particular matter, not to be seen together in public."

"That is always wise."

"I seem to remember having been useful to you in the past."

"In the past—yes."

"I am sure that I can count on you."

"Of course—only isn't that an old-fashioned, unphilosophical remark? How can we ever be sure of anything?"

"Jim," she snapped suddenly, "you've got to help me!"

"My dear, I'm at your disposal, I'd do anything to help you," he answered, the rules of their language requiring that any open statement be answered by a blatant lie. Lillian was slipping, he thought—and he experienced the pleasure of dealing with an inadequate adversary.

She was neglecting, he noted, even the perfection of her particular trademark: her grooming. A few strands were escaping from the drilled waves of her hair—her nails, matching her gown, were the deep shade of coagulated blood, which made it easy to notice the chipped polish at their tips—and against the broad, smooth, creamy expanse of her skin in the low, square cut of her gown, he observed the tiny glitter of a safety pin holding the strap of her slip.

"You've got to prevent it!" she said, in the belligerent tone of a plea disguised as a command. "You've got to stop it!"

"Really? What?"

"My divorce."

"Oh . . . !" His features dropped into sudden earnestness.

"You know that he's going to divorce me, don't you?"

"I've heard some rumors about it."

"It's set for next month. And when I say set, that's just what I mean.

Oh, it's cost him plenty—but he's bought the judge, the clerks, the bailiffs, their backers, their backers1 backers, a few legislators, half a dozen administrators—he's bought the whole legal process, like a private thoroughfare, and there's no single crossroad left for me to squeeze through to stop it!"

"I see."

"You know, of course, what made him start divorce proceedings?"

"I can guess."

"And I did it as a favor to you!" Her voice was growing anxiously shrill. "I told you about your sister in order to let you get that Gift Certificate for your friends, which—"

"I swear I don't know who let it out!" he cried hastily. "Only a very few at the top knew that you'd been our informer, and I'm sure nobody would dare mention—"

"Oh, I'm sure nobody did. He'd have the brains to guess it, wouldn't he?"

"Yes, I suppose so. Well, then you knew that you were taking a chance."

"I didn't think he'd go that far. I didn't think he'd ever divorce me.

I didn't—"

He chuckled suddenly, with a glance of astonishing perceptiveness.

"You didn't think that guilt is a rope that wears thin, did you, Lillian?"

She looked at him, startled, then answered stonily, "I don't think it does."

"It does, my dear—for men such as your husband."

"I don't want him to divorce me!" It was a sudden scream. "I don't want to let him go free! I won't permit it! I won't let the whole of my life be a total failure!" She stopped abruptly, as if she had admitted too much.

He was chuckling softly, nodding his head with a slow movement that had an air of intelligence, almost of dignity, by signifying a complete understanding.

"I mean . . . after all, he's my husband," she said defensively.

"Yes, Lillian, yes, I know."

"Do you know what he's planning? He's going to get the decree and he's going to cut me off without a penny—no settlement, no alimony, nothing! He's going to have the last word. Don't you see? If he gets away with it, then . . . then the Gift Certificate was no victory for me at all!"

"Yes, my dear, I see."

"And besides . . . It's preposterous that I should have to think of it, but what am I going to live on? The little money I had of my own is worth nothing nowadays. It's mainly stock in factories of my father's time, that have closed long ago. What am I going to do?"

"But, Lillian," he said softly, "I thought you had no concern for money or for any material rewards."

"You don't understand! I'm not talking about money—I'm talking about poverty! Real, stinking, hall-bedroom poverty! That's out of bounds for any civilized person! I—I to have to worry about food and rent?"

He was watching her with a faint smile; for once, his soft, aging face seemed tightened into a look of wisdom; he was discovering the pleasure of full perception—in a reality which he could permit himself to perceive.

"Jim, you've got to help me! My lawyer is powerless. I've spent the little I had, on him and on his investigators, friends and fixers—but all they could do for me was find out that they can do nothing. My lawyer gave me his final report this afternoon. He told me bluntly that I haven't a chance. I don't seem to know anyone who can help against a setup of this kind. I had counted on Bertram Scudder, but . . . well, you know what happened to Bertram. And that, too, was because I had tried to help you. You pulled yourself out of that one. Jim, you're the only person who can pull me out now. You've got your gopher-hole pipe line straight up to the top. You can reach the big boys. Slip a word to your friends to slip a word to their friends. One word from Wesley would do it. Have them order that divorce decree to be refused. Just have it be refused."

He shook his head slowly, almost compassionately, like a tired professional at an overzealous amateur. "It can't be done, Lillian," he said firmly. "I'd like to do it—for the same reasons as yours—and I think you know it. But whatever power I have is not enough in this case."

She was looking at him, her eyes dark with an odd, lifeless stillness; when she spoke, the motion of her lips was twisted by so evil a contempt that he did not dare identify it beyond knowing that it embraced them both; she said, "I know that you'd like to do it."

He felt no desire to pretend; oddly, for the first time, for this one chance, truth seemed much more pleasurable—truth, for once, serving his particular kind of enjoyment. "I think you know that it can't be done," he said. "Nobody does favors nowadays, if there's nothing to gain in return. And the stakes are getting higher and higher. The gopher holes, as you called them, are so complex, so twisted and intertwisted that everybody has something on everybody else, and nobody dares move because he can't tell who'll crack which way or when. So he'll move only when he has to, when the stakes are life or death—and that's practically the only kind of stakes we're playing for now. Well, what's your private life to any of those boys? That you'd like to hold your husband—what's in it for them, one way or another? And my personal stock-in-trade—well, there's nothing I could offer them at the moment in exchange for trying to blast a whole court clique out of a highly profitable deal. Besides, right now, the top boys wouldn't do it at any price. They have to be mighty careful of your husband—he's the man who's safe from them right now—ever since that radio broadcast of my sister's."

"You asked me to force her to speak on that broadcast!"

"I know, Lillian. We lost, both of us, that time. And we lose, both of us, now."

"Yes," she said, with the same darkness of contempt in her eyes, "both of us."

It was the contempt that pleased him; it was the strange, heedless, unfamiliar pleasure of knowing that this woman saw him as he was, yet remained held by his presence, remained and leaned back in her chair, as if declaring her bondage.

"You're a wonderful person, Jim," she said. It had the sound of damnation. Yet it was a tribute, and she meant it as such, and his pleasure came from the knowledge that they were in a realm where damnation was value.

"You know," he said suddenly, "you're wrong about those butcher's assistants, like Gonzales. They have their uses. Have you ever liked Francisco d'Anconia?"

"I can't stand him."

"Well, do you know the real purpose of that cocktail-swilling occasion staged by Senor Gonzales tonight? It was to celebrate the agreement to nationalize d'Anconia Copper in about a month."

She looked at him for a moment, the corners of her lips lifting slowly into a smile. "He was your friend, wasn't he?"

Her voice had a tone he had never earned before, the tone of an emotion which he had drawn from people only by fraud, but which now, for the first time, was granted with full awareness to the real, the actual nature of his deed: a tone of admiration.

Suddenly, he knew that this was the goal of his restless hours, this was the pleasure he had despaired of finding, this was the celebration he had wanted.

"Let's have a drink, Lil." he said.

Pouring the liquor, he glanced at her across the room, as she lay stretched limply in her chair. "Let him get his divorce," he said, "He won't have the last word. They will. The butcher's assistants. Senor Gonzales and Cuffy Meigs."

She did not answer. When he approached, she took the glass from him with a sloppily indifferent sweep of her hand. She drank, not in the manner of a social gesture, but like a lonely drinker in a saloon—for the physical sake of the liquor.

He sat down on the arm of the davenport, improperly close to her, and sipped his drink, watching her face. After a while, he asked, "What does he think of me?"

The question did not seem to astonish her. "He thinks you're a fool," she answered. "He thinks life's too short to have to notice your existence."

"He'd notice it, if—" He stopped.

"—if you bashed him over the head with a club? I'm not too sure.

He'd merely blame himself for not having moved out of the club's reach. Still, that would be your only chance."

She shifted her body, sliding lower in the armchair, stomach forward, as if relaxation were ugliness, as if she were granting him the kind of intimacy that required no poise and no respect.

"That was the first thing I noticed about him," she said, "when I met him for the first time: that he was not afraid. He looked as if he felt certain that there was nothing any of us could do to him—so certain that he didn't even know the issue or the nature of what he felt."

"How long since you saw him last?"

"Three months. I haven't seen him since . . . since the Gift Certificate . . ."

"I saw him at an industrial meeting two weeks ago. He still looks that way—only more so. Now, he looks as if he knows it." He added, "You have failed, Lillian."

She did not answer. She pushed her hat off with the back of her hand; it rolled down to the carpet, its feather curling like a question mark. "I remember the first time I saw his mills," she said. "His mills!

You can't imagine what he felt about them. You wouldn't know the kind of intellectual arrogance it takes to feel as if anything pertaining to him, anything he touched, were made sacred by the touch. His mills, his Metal, his money, his bed, his wife!" She glanced up at him, a small flicker piercing the lethargic emptiness of her eyes. "He never noticed your existence. He did notice mine. I'm still Mrs. Rearden—at least for another month."

"Yes . . ." he said, looking down at her with a sudden, new interest.

"Mrs. Rearden!" she chuckled. "You wouldn't know what that meant to him. No feudal lord ever felt or demanded such reverence for the title of his wife—or held it as such a symbol of honor. Of his unbending, untouchable, inviolate, stainless honor!" She waved her hand in a vague motion, indicating the length of her sprawled body. "Caesar's wife!" she chuckled. "Do you remember what she was supposed to be?

No, you wouldn't. She was supposed to be above reproach,"

He was staring down at her with the heavy, blind stare of impotent hatred—a hatred of which she was the sudden symbol, not the object.

"He didn't like it when his Metal was thrown into common, public use, for any chance passer-by to make . . . did he?"

"No, he didn't."

His words were blurring a little, as if weighted with drops of the liquor he had swallowed: "Don't tell me that you helped us to get that Gift Certificate as a favor to me and that you gained nothing. . . . I know why you did it."

"You knew it at the time."

"Sure. That's why I like you, Lillian."

His eyes kept coming back to the low cut of her gown. It was not the smooth skin that attracted his glance, not the exposed rise of her breasts, but the fraud of the safety pin beyond the edge.

"I'd like to see him beaten," he said. "I'd like to hear him scream with pain, just once."

"You won't, Jimmy."

"Why does he think he's better than the rest of us—he and that sister of mine?"

She chuckled, He rose as if she had slapped him. He went to the bar and poured himself another drink, not offering to refill her glass.

She was speaking into space, staring past him. "He did notice my existence—even though I can't lay railroad tracks for him and erect bridges to the glory of his Metal. I can't build his mills—but I can destroy them. I can't produce his Metal—but I can take it away from him. I can't bring men down to their knees in admiration—but I can bring them down to their knees."

"Shut up!" he screamed in terror, as if she were coming too close to that fogbound alley which had to remain unseen.

She glanced up at his face. "You're such a coward, Jim."

"Why don't you get drunk?" he snapped, sticking his unfinished drink at her mouth, as if he wanted to strike her.

Her fingers half-closed limply about the glass, and she drank, spilling the liquor down her chin, her breast and her gown.

"Oh hell, Lillian, you're a mess!" he said and, not troubling to reach for his handkerchief, he stretched out his hand to wipe the liquor with the flat of his palm. His fingers slipped under the gown's neckline, closing over her breast, his breath catching in a sudden gulp, like a hiccough. His eyelids were drawing closed, but he caught a glimpse of her face leaning back unresistingly, her mouth swollen with revulsion.

When he reached for her mouth, her arms embraced him obediently and her mouth responded, but the response was just a pressure, not a kiss.

He raised his head to glance at her face. Her teeth were bared in a smile, but she was staring past him, as if mocking some invisible presence, her smile lifeless, yet loud with malice, like the grin of a fleshless skull.

He jerked her closer, to stifle the sight and his own shudder. His hands were going through the automatic motions of intimacy—and she complied, but in a manner that made him feel as if the beats of her arteries under his touch were snickering giggles. They were both performing an expected routine, a routine invented by someone and imposed upon them, performing it in mockery, in hatred, in defiling parody on its inventors.

He felt a sightless, heedless fury, part-horror, part-pleasure—the horror of committing an act he would never dare confess to anyone—the pleasure of committing it in blasphemous defiance of those to whom he would not dare confess it. He was himself!—the only conscious part of his rage seemed to be screaming to him—he was, at last, himself!

They did not speak. They knew each other's motive. Only two words were pronounced between them. "Mrs. Rearden," he said.

They did not look at each other when he pushed her into his bedroom and onto his bed, falling against her body, as against a soft. stuffed object. Their faces had a look of secrecy, the look of partners in guilt, the furtive, smutty look of children defiling someone's clean fence by chalking sneaky scratches intended as symbols of obscenity.

Afterward, it did not disappoint him that what he had possessed was an inanimate body without resistance or response. It was not a woman that he had wanted to possess. It was not an act in celebration of life that he had wanted to perform—but an act in celebration of the triumph of impotence.

Cherryl unlocked the door and slipped in quietly, almost surreptitiously, as if hoping not to be seen or to see the place which was her home. The sense of Dagny's presence—of Dagny's world—had supported her on her way back, but when she entered her own apartment the walls seemed to swallow her again into the suffocation of a trap.

The apartment was silent; a wedge of light cut across the anteroom from a door left half-open. She dragged herself mechanically in the direction of her room. Then she stopped.

The open band of light was the door of Jim's study, and on the illuminated strip of its carpet she saw a woman's hat with a feather stirring faintly in a draft.

She took a step forward. The room was empty, she saw two glasses, one on a table, the other on the floor, and a woman's purse lying on the seat of an armchair. She stood, in unexacting stupor, until she heard the muffled drawl of two voices behind the door of Jim's bedroom; she could not distinguish the words, only the quality of the sounds: Jim's voice had a tone of irritation, the woman's—of contempt.

Then she found herself in her own room, fumbling frantically to lock her door. She had been flung here by the blind panic of escape, as if it were she who had to hide, she who had to run from the ugliness of being seen in the act of seeing them—a panic made of revulsion, of pity, of embarrassment, of that mental chastity which recoils from confronting a man with the unanswerable proof of his evil.

She stood in the middle of her room, unable to grasp what action was now possible to her. Then her knees gave way, folding gently, she found herself sitting on the floor and she stayed there, staring at the carpet, shaking.

It was neither anger nor jealousy nor indignation, but the blank horror of dealing with the grotesquely senseless. It was the knowledge that neither their marriage nor his love for her nor his insistence on holding her nor his love for that other woman nor this gratuitous adultery had any meaning whatever, that there was no shred of sense in any of it and no use to grope for explanations. She had always thought of evil as purposeful, as a means to some end; what she was seeing now was evil for evil's sake.

She did not know how long she had sat there, when she heard their steps and voices, then the sound of the front door closing. She got up, with no purpose in mind, but impelled by some instinct from the past, as if acting in a vacuum where honesty was not relevant any longer, but knowing no other way to act.

She met Jim in the anteroom. For a moment, they looked at each other as if neither could believe the other's reality.

"When did you come back?" he snapped. "How long have you been home?"

"I don't know . . ."

He was looking at her face. "What's the matter with you?"

"Jim, I—" She struggled, gave up and waved her hand toward his bedroom. "Jim, I know."

"What do you know?"

"You were there . . . with a woman."

His first action was to push her into his study and slam the door, as if to hide them both, he could no longer say from whom. An unadmitted rage was boiling in his mind, struggling between escape and explosion, and it blew up into the sensation that this negligible little wife of his was depriving him of his triumph, that he would not surrender to her his new enjoyment.

"Sure!" he screamed. "So what? What are you going to do about it?"

She stared at him blankly.

"Sure! I was there with a woman! That's what I did, because that's what I felt like doing! Do you think you're going to scare me with your gasps, your stares, your whimpering virtue?" He snapped his fingers.

"That for your opinion! I don't give a hoot in hell about your opinion!

Take it and like it!" It was her white, defenseless face that drove him on, lashing him into a state of pleasure, the pleasure of feeling as if his words were blows disfiguring a human face. "Do you think you're going to make me hide? I'm sick of having to put on an act for your righteous satisfaction! Who the hell are you, you cheap little nobody?

I'll do as I please, and you'll keep your mouth shut and go through the right tricks in public, like everybody else, and stop demanding that I act in my own home!—nobody is virtuous in his own home, the show is only for company!—but if you expect me to mean it—to mean it, you damn little fool!—you'd better grow up in a hurry!"

It was not her face that he was seeing, it was the face of the man at whom he wanted and would never be able to throw his deed of this night—but she had always stood as the worshipper, the defender, the agent of that man in his eyes, he had married her for it, so she could serve his purpose now, and he screamed, "Do you know who she was, the woman I laid? It was—"

"No!" she cried. "Jim! I don't have to know it!"

"It was Mrs. Rearden! Mrs. Hank Rearden!"

She stepped back. He felt a brief flash of terror—because she was looking at him as if she were seeing that which had to remain unadmitted to himself. She asked, in a dead voice that had the incongruous sound of common sense, "I suppose you will now want us to get divorced?"

He burst out laughing. "You goddamn fool! You still mean it! You still want it big and pure' I wouldn't think of divorcing you—and don't go imagining that I'll let you divorce me! You think it's as important as that? Listen, you fool, there isn't a husband who doesn't sleep with other women and there isn't a wife who doesn't know it, but they don't talk about it! I'll lay anybody I please, and you go and do the same, like all those bitches, and keep your mouth shut!"

He saw the sudden, startling sight of a look of hard, unclouded, unfeeling, almost inhuman intelligence in her eyes. "Jim, if I were the kind who did or would, you wouldn't have married me."

"No. I wouldn't have."

"Why did you marry me?"

He felt himself drawn as by a whirlpool, part in relief that the moment of danger was past, part in irresistible defiance of the same danger. "Because you were a cheap, helpless, preposterous little guttersnipe, who'd never have a chance at anything to equal me! Because I thought you'd love me! I thought you'd know that you had to love me!"

"As you are?"

"Without daring to ask what I am! Without reasons! Without putting me on the spot always to live up to reason after reason after reason, like being on some goddamn dress parade to the end of my days!"

"You loved me . . . because I was worthless?"

"Well, what did you think you were?"

"You loved me for being rotten?"

"What else did you have to offer? But you didn't have the humility to appreciate it. I wanted to be generous, I wanted to give you security—what security is there in being loved for one's virtues? The competition's wide open, like a jungle market place, a better person will always come along to beat you! But I—I was willing to love you for your flaws, for your faults and weaknesses, for your ignorance, your crudeness, your vulgarity—and that's safe, you'd have nothing to fear, nothing to hide, you could be yourself, your real, stinking, sinful, ugly self—everybody's self is a gutter—but you could hold my love, with nothing demanded of you!"

"You wanted me to . . . accept your love . . . as alms'"

"Did you imagine that you could earn it? Did you imagine that you could deserve to marry me, you poor little tramp? I used to buy the likes of you for the price of a meal! I wanted you to know, with every step you took, with every mouthful of caviar you swallowed, that you owed it all to me, that you had nothing and were nothing and could never hope to equal, deserve or repay!"

"I . . . tried . . . to deserve it."

"Of what use would you be to me, if you had?"

"You didn't want me to?"

"Oh, you goddamn fool!"

"You didn't want me to improve? You didn't want me to rise? You thought me rotten and you wanted me to stay rotten?"

"Of what use would you be to me, if you earned it all, and I had to work to hold you, and you could trade elsewhere if you chose?"

"You wanted it to be alms . . . for both of us and from both?

You wanted us to be two beggars chained to each other?"

"Yes, you goddamn evangelist! Yes, you goddamn hero worshipper!

Yes!"

"You chose me because I was worthless?"

"Yes!"

"You're lying, Jim."

His answer was only a startled glance of astonishment.

"Those girls that you used to buy for the price of a meal, they would have been glad to let their real selves become a gutter, they would have taken your alms and never tried to rise, but you would not marry one of them. You married me, because you knew that I did not accept the gutter, inside or out, that I was struggling to rise and would go on struggling—didn't you?"

"Yes!" he cried.

Then the headlight she had felt rushing upon her, hit its goal—and she screamed in the bright explosion of the impact—she screamed in physical terror, backing away from him.

"What's the matter with you?" he cried, shaking, not daring to see in her eyes the thing she had seen.

She moved her hands in groping gestures, half-waving it away, half trying to grasp it; when she answered, her words did not quite name it, but they were the only words she could find: "You . . . you're a killer . . . for the sake of killing . . ."

It was too close to the unnamed; shaking with terror, he swung out blindly and struck her in the face.

She fell against the side of an armchair, her head striking the floor, but she raised her head in a moment and looked up at him blankly, without astonishment, as if physical reality were merely taking the form she had expected. A single pear-shaped drop of blood went slithering slowly from the corner of her mouth.

He stood motionless—and for a moment they looked at each other, as if neither dared to move.

She moved first. She sprang to her feet—and ran. She ran out of the room, out of the apartment—he heard her running down the hall, tearing open the iron door of the emergency stairway, not waiting to ring for the elevator.

She ran down the stairs, opening doors on random landings, running through the twisting hallways of the building, then down the stairs again, until she found herself in the lobby and ran to the street.

After a while, she saw that she was walking down a littered sidewalk in a dark neighborhood, with an electric bulb glaring in the cave of a subway entrance and a lighted billboard advertising soda crackers on the black roof of a laundry. She did not remember how she had come here. Her mind seemed to work in broken spurts, without connections.

She knew only that she had to escape and that escape was impossible.

She had to escape from Jim, she thought. Where?—she asked, looking around her with a glance like a cry of prayer. She would have seized upon a job in a five-and-ten, or in that laundry, or in any of the dismal shops she passed. But she would work, she thought, and the harder she worked, the more malevolence she would draw from the people around her, and she would not know when truth would be expected of her and when a lie, but the stricter her honesty, the greater the fraud she would be asked to suffer at their hands. She had seen it before and had borne it, in the home of her family, in the shops of the slums, but she had thought that these were vicious exceptions, chance evils, to escape and forget. Now she knew that they were not exceptions, that theirs was the code accepted by the world, that it was a creed of living, known by all, but kept unnamed, leering at her from people's eyes in that sly, guilty look she had never been able to understand—and at the root of the creed, hidden by silence, lying in wait for her in the cellars of the city and in the cellars of their souls, there was a thing with which one could not live.

Why are you doing it to me?—she cried soundlessly to the darkness around her. Because you're good—some enormous laughter seemed to be answering from the roof tops and from the sewers. Then I won't want to be good any longer—But you will—I don't have to—You will—I can't bear it—You will.

She shuddered and walked faster—but ahead of her, in the foggy distance, she saw the calendar above the roofs of the city—it was long past midnight and the calendar said: August 6, but it seemed to her suddenly that she saw September 2 written above the city in letters of blood—and she thought: If she worked, if she struggled, if she rose., she would take a harder beating with each step of her climb, until, at the end, whatever she reached, be it a copper company or an unmortgaged cottage, she would see it seized by Jim on some September 2 and she would see it vanish to pay for the parties where Jim made his deals with his friends.

Then I won't!—she screamed and whirled around and went running back along the street—but it seemed to her that in the black sky. grinning at her from the steam of the laundry, there weaved an enormous figure that would hold no shape, but its grin remained the same on its changing faces, and its face was Jim's and her childhood preacher's and the woman social worker's from the personnel department of the five-and-ten—and the grin seemed to say to her: People like you will always stay honest, people like you will always struggle to rise, people like you will always work, so we're safe and you have no choice.

She ran. When she looked around her once more, she was walking down a quiet street, past the glass doorways where lights were burning in the carpeted lobbies of luxurious buildings. She noticed that she was limping, and saw that the heel of her pump was loose; she had broken it somewhere in her blank span of running.

From the sudden space of a broad intersection, she looked at the great skyscrapers in the distance. They were vanishing quietly into a veil of fog, with the faint breath of a glow behind them, with a few lights like a smile of farewell. Once, they had been a promise, and from the midst of the stagnant sloth around her she had looked to them for proof that another kind of men existed. Now she knew that they were tombstones, slender obelisks soaring in memory of the men who had been destroyed for having created them, they were the frozen shape of the silent cry that the reward of achievement was martyrdom.

Somewhere in one of those vanishing towers, she thought, there was Dagny—but Dagny was a lonely victim, fighting a losing battle, to be destroyed and to sink into fog like the others.

There is no place to go, she thought and stumbled on—T can't stand still, nor move much longer—I can neither work nor rest—I can neither surrender nor fight—but this . . . this is what they want of me, this is where they want me—neither living nor dead, neither thinking nor insane, but just a chunk of pulp that screams with fear, to be shaped by them as they please, they who have no shape of their own.

She plunged into the darkness behind a corner, shrinking in dread from any human figure. No, she thought, they're not evil, not all people . . . they're only their own first victims, but they all believe in Jim's creed, and I can't deal with them, once I know it . . . and if I spoke to them, they would try to grant me their good will, but I'd know what it is that they hold as the good and I would see death staring out of their eyes.

The sidewalk had shrunk to a broken strip, and splashes of garbage ran over from the cans at the stoops of crumbling houses. Beyond the dusty glow of a saloon, she saw a lighted sign "Young Women's Rest Club" above a locked door.

She knew the institutions of that kind and the women who ran them, the women who said that theirs was the job of helping sufferers.

If she went in—she thought, stumbling past—if she faced them and begged them for help, "What is your guilt?" they would ask her.

"Drink? Dope? Pregnancy? Shoplifting?" She would answer, "I have no guilt, I am innocent, but I'm—" "Sorry. We have no concern for the pain of the innocent."

She ran. She stopped, regaining her eyesight, on the corner of a long, wide street. The buildings and pavements merged with the sky—and two lines of green lights hung in open space, going off into an endless distance, as if stretching into other towns and oceans and foreign lands, to encircle the earth. The green glow had a look of serenity, like an inviting, unlimited path open to confident travel. Then the lights switched to red, dropping heavily lower, turning from sharp circles into foggy smears, into a warning of unlimited danger. She stood and watched a giant truck-go by, its enormous wheels crushing one more layer of shiny polish into the flattened cobbles of the street.

The lights went back to the green of safety—but she stood trembling, unable to move. That's how it works for the travel of one's body, she thought, but what have they done to the traffic of the soul? They have set the signals in reverse—and the road is safe when the lights are the red of evil—but when the lights are the green of virtue, promising that yours is the right-of-way, you venture forth and are ground by the wheels. All over the world, she thought—those inverted lights go reaching into every land, they go on, encircling the earth. And the earth is littered with mangled cripples, who don't know what has hit them or why, who crawl as best they can on their crushed limbs through their lightless days, with no answer save that pain is the core of existence—and the traffic cops of morality chortle and tell them that man, by his nature, is unable to walk.

These were not words in her mind, these were the words which would have named, had she had the power to find them, what she knew only as a sudden fury that made her beat her fists in futile horror against the iron post of the traffic light beside her, against the hollow tube where the hoarse, rusty chuckle of a relentless mechanism went grating on and on.

She could not smash it with her fists, she could not batter one by one all the posts of the street stretching off beyond eyesight—as she could not smash that creed from the souls of the men she would encounter, one by one. She could not deal with people any longer, she could not take the paths they took—but what could she say to them, she who had no words to name the thing she knew and no voice that people would hear? What could she tell them? How could she reach them all?

Where were the men who could have spoken?

These were not words in her mind, these were only the blows of: her fists against metal—then she saw herself suddenly, battering her knuckles to blood against an immovable post, and the sight made her shudder—and she stumbled away. She went on, seeing nothing around her, feeling trapped in a maze with no exit.

No exit—her shreds of awareness were saying, beating it into the pavements in the sound of her steps—no exit . . . no refuge . . . no signals . . . no way to tell destruction from safety, or enemy from friend. . . . Like that dog she had heard about, she thought . . . somebody's dog in somebody's laboratory . . . the dog who got his signals switched on him, and saw no way to tell satisfaction from torture, saw food changed to beatings and beatings to food, saw his eyes and ears deceiving him and his judgment futile and his consciousness impotent in a shifting, swimming, shapeless world—and gave up, refusing to eat at that price or to live in a world of that kind. . . . No!—was the only conscious word in her brain—no!—no!—no!—not your way, not your world—even if this "no" is all that's to be left of mine!

It was in the darkest hour of the night, in an alley among wharfs and warehouses that the social worker saw her. The social worker was a woman whose gray face and gray coat blended with the walls of the district. She saw a young girl wearing a suit too smart and expensive for the neighborhood, with no hat, no purse, with a broken heel, disheveled hair and a bruise at the corner of her mouth, a girl staggering blindly, not knowing sidewalks from pavements. The street was only a narrow crack between the sheer, blank walls of storage structures, but a ray of light fell through a fog dank with the odor of rotting water; a stone parapet ended the street on the edge of a vast black hole merging river and sky.

The social worker approached her and asked severely, "Are you in trouble?"—and saw one wary eye, the other hidden by a lock of hair, and the face of a wild creature who has forgotten the sound of human voices, but listens as to a distant echo, with suspicion, yet almost with hope.

The social worker seized her arm. "It's a disgrace to come to such a state . . . if you society girls had something to do besides indulging your desires and chasing pleasures, you wouldn't be wandering, drunk as a tramp, at this hour of the night . . . if you stopped living for your own enjoyment, stopped thinking of yourself and found some higher—"

Then the girl screamed—and the scream went beating against the blank walls of the street as in a chamber of torture, an animal scream of terror. She tore her arm loose and sprang back, then screamed in articulate sounds: "No! No! Not your kind of world!"

Then she ran, ran by the sudden propulsion of a burst of power, the power of a creature running for its life, she ran straight down the street that ended at the river—and in a single streak of speed, with no break, no moment of doubt, with full consciousness of acting in self-preservation, she kept running till the parapet barred her way and, not stopping, went over into space.

CHAPTER V
THEIR BROTHERS' KEEPERS

On the morning of September 2, a copper wire broke in California, between two telephone poles by the track of the Pacific branch line of Taggart Transcontinental.

A slow, thin rain had been falling since midnight, and there had been no sunrise, only a gray light seeping through a soggy sky—and the brilliant raindrops hanging on the telephone wires had been the only sparks glittering against the chalk of the clouds, the lead of the ocean and the steel of the oil derricks descending as lone bristles down a desolate hillside. The wires had been worn by more rains and years than they had been intended to carry; one of them had kept sagging, through the hours of that morning, under the fragile load of raindrops; then its one last drop had grown on the wire's curve and had hung like a crystal bead, gathering the weight of many seconds; the bead and the wire had given up together and, as soundless as the fall of tears, the wire had broken and fallen with the fall of the bead.

The men at the Division Headquarters of Taggart Transcontinental avoided looking at one another, when the break of the telephone line was discovered and reported. They made statements painfully miscalculated to seem to refer to the problem, yet to state nothing, none fooling the others. They knew that copper wire was a vanishing commodity, more precious than gold or honor; they knew that the division storekeeper had sold their stock of wire weeks ago, to unknown dealers who came by night and were not businessmen in the daytime, but only men who had friends in Sacramento and in Washington—just as the storekeeper, recently appointed to the division, had a friend in New York, named Cuffy Meigs, about whom one asked no questions. They knew that the man who would now assume the responsibility of ordering repairs and initiating the action which would lead to the discovery that the repairs could not be made, would incur retaliation from unknown enemies, that his fellow workers would become mysteriously silent and would not testify to help him, that he would prove nothing, and if he attempted to do his job, it would not be his any longer. They did not know what was safe or dangerous these days, when the guilty were not punished, but the accusers were; and, like animals, they knew that immobility was the only protection when in doubt and in danger. They remained immobile; they spoke about the appropriate procedure of sending reports to the appropriate authorities on the appropriate dates.

A young roadmaster walked out of the room and out of the headquarters building to the safety of a telephone booth in a drugstore and, at his own expense, ignoring the continent and the tiers of appropriate executives between, he telephoned Dagny Taggart in New York.

She received the call in her brother's office, interrupting an emergency conference. The young roadmaster told her only that the telephone line was broken and that there was no wire to repair it; he said nothing else and he did not explain why he had found it necessary to call her in person. She did not question him; she understood. "Thank you," was all that she answered.

An emergency file in her office kept a record of all the crucial materials still on hand, on every division of Taggart Transcontinental.

Like the file of a bankrupt, it kept registering losses, while the rare additions of new supplies seemed like the malicious chuckles of some tormentor throwing crumbs at a starving continent. She looked through the file, closed it, sighed and said, "Montana, Eddie. Phone the Montana Line to ship half their stock of wire to California. Montana might be able to last without it—for another week." And as Eddie Willers was about to protest, she added, "Oil, Eddie. California is one of the last producers of oil left in the country. We don't dare lose the Pacific Line." Then she went back to the conference in her brother's office.

"Copper wire?" said James Taggart, with an odd glance that went from her face to the city beyond the window. "In a very short while, we won't have any trouble about copper."

"Why?" she asked, but he did not answer. There was nothing special to see beyond the window, only the clear sky of a sunny day, the quiet light of early afternoon on the roofs of the city and, above them, the page of the calendar, saying: September 2.

She did not know why he had insisted on holding this conference in his own office, why he had insisted on speaking to her alone, which he had always tried to avoid, or why he kept glancing at his wrist watch.

"Things are, it seems to me, going wrong," he said. "Something has to be done. There appears to exist a state of dislocation and confusion tending toward an uncoordinated, unbalanced policy. What I mean is, there's a tremendous national demand for transportation, yet we're losing money. It seems to me—"

She sat looking at the ancestral map of Taggart Transcontinental on the wall of his office, at the red arteries winding across a yellowed continent. There had been a time when the railroad was called the blood system of the nation, and the stream of trains had been like a living circuit of blood, bringing growth and wealth to every patch of wilderness it touched. Now. it was still like a stream of blood, but like the one-way stream that runs from a wound, draining the last of a body's sustenance and life. One-way traffic—she thought indifferently—consumers' traffic.

There was Train Number 193, she thought. Six weeks ago, Train Number 193 had been sent with a load of steel, not to Faulkton, Nebraska, where the Spencer Machine Tool Company, the best machine tool concern still in existence, had been idle for two weeks, waiting for the shipment—but to Sand Creek, Illinois, where Confederated Machines had been wallowing in debt for over a year, producing unreliable goods at unpredictable times. The steel had been allocated by a directive which explained that the Spencer Machine Tool Company was a rich concern, able to wait, while Confederated Machines was bankrupt and could not be allowed to collapse, being the sole source of livelihood of the community of Sand Creek, Illinois. The Spencer Machine Tool Company had closed a month ago. Confederated Machines had closed two weeks later.

The people of Sand Creek, Illinois, had been placed on national relief, but no food could be found for them in the empty granaries of the nation at the frantic call of the moment—so the seed grain of the farmers of Nebraska had been seized by order of the Unification Board—and Train Number 194 had carried the unplanted harvest and the future of the people of Nebraska to be consumed by the people of Illinois. "In this enlightened age," Eugene Lawson had said in a radio broadcast, "we have come, at last, to realize that each one of us is his brother's keeper."

"In a precarious period of emergency, like the present," James Taggart was saying, while she looked at the map, "it is dangerous to find ourselves forced to miss pay days and accumulate wage arrears on some of our divisions, a temporary condition, of course, but—"

She chuckled. "The Railroad Unification Plan isn't working, is it, Jim?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"You're to receive a big cut of the Atlantic Southern's gross income, out of the common pool at the end of the year—only there won't be any gross income left for the pool to seize, will there?"

"That's not true! It's just that the bankers are sabotaging the Plan.

Those bastards—who used to give us loans in the old days, with no security at all except our own railroad—now refuse to let me have a few measly hundred-thousands, on short term, just to take care of a few payrolls, when I have the entire plant of all the railroads of the country to offer them as security for my loan!"

She chuckled.

"We couldn't help it!" he cried. "It's not the fault of the Plan that some people refuse to carry their fair share of our burdens!"

"Jim, was this all you wanted to tell me? If it is, I'll go. I have work to do."

His eyes shot to his wrist watch. "No, no, that's not all! It's most urgent that we discuss the situation and arrive at some decision, which—"

She listened blankly to the next stream of generalities, wondering about his motive. He was marking time, yet he wasn't, not fully; she felt certain that he was holding her here for some specific purpose and, simultaneously, that he was holding her for the mere sake of her presence.

It was some new trait in him, which she had begun to notice ever since Cherryl's death. He had come running to her, rushing, unannounced, into her apartment on the evening of the day when Cherryl's body had been found and the story of her suicide had filled the newspapers, given by some social worker who had witnessed it; "an. inexplicable suicide," the newspapers had called it, unable to discover any motive. "It wasn't my fault!" he had screamed to her, as if she were the only judge whom he had to placate. "I'm not to blame for it! I'm not to blame!" He had been shaking with terror—yet she had caught a few glances thrown shrewdly at her face, which had seemed, inconceivably, to convey a touch of triumph. "Get out of here, Jim," was all she had said to him.

He had never spoken to her again about Cherry], but he had started coming to her office more often than usual, he had stopped her in the halls for snatches of pointless discussions—and such moments had grown into a sum that gave her an incomprehensible sensation: as if, while clinging to her for support and protection against some nameless terror, his arms were sliding to embrace her and to plunge a knife into her back.

"I am eager to know your views," he was saying insistently, as she looked away. "It is most urgent that we discuss the situation and . . . and you haven't said anything." She did not turn. "It's not as if there were no money to be had out of the railroad business, but—"

She glanced at him sharply; his eyes scurried away.

"What I mean is, some constructive policy has to be devised," he droned on hastily. "Something has to be done . . . by somebody. In times of emergency—"

She knew what thought he had scurried to avoid, what hint he had given her, yet did not want her to acknowledge or discuss. She knew that no train schedules could be maintained any longer, no promises kept, no contracts observed, that regular trains were cancelled at a moment's notice and transformed into emergency specials sent by unexplained orders to unexpected destinations—and that the orders came from Cuffy Meigs, sole judge of emergencies and of the public welfare.

She knew that factories were closing, some with their machinery stilled for lack of supplies that had not been received, others with their warehouses full of goods that could not be delivered. She knew that the old industries—the giants who had built their power by a purposeful course projected over a span of time—were left to exist at the whim of the moment, a moment they could not foresee or control. She knew that the best among them, those of the longest range and most complex function, had long since gone—and those still struggling to produce, struggling savagely to preserve the code of an age when production had been possible, were now inserting into their contracts a line shameful to a descendant of Nat Taggart: "Transportation permitting."

And yet there were men—and she knew it—who were able to obtain transportation whenever they wished, as by a mystic secret, as by the grace of some power which one was not to question or explain.

They were the men whose dealings with Cuffy Meigs were regarded by people as that unknowable of mystic creeds which smites the observer for the sin of looking, so people kept their eyes closed, dreading, not ignorance, but knowledge. She knew that deals were made whereby those men sold a commodity known as "transportation pull"—a term which all understood, but none would dare define. She knew that these were the men of the emergency specials, the men who could cancel her scheduled trains and send them to any random spot of the continent which they chose to strike with their voodoo stamp, the stamp superseding contract, property, justice, reason and lives, the stamp stating that "the public welfare" required the immediate salvation of that spot. These were the men who sent trains to the relief of the Smather Brothers and their grapefruit in Arizona—to the relief of a factory in Florida engaged in the production of pin-ball machines—to the relief of a horse farm in Kentucky—to the relief of Orren Boyle's Associated Steel.

These were the men who made deals with desperate industrialists to provide transportation for the goods stalled in their warehouses—or, failing to obtain the percentage demanded, made deals to purchase the goods, when the factory closed, at the bankruptcy sale, at ten cents on the dollar, and to speed the goods away in freight cars suddenly available, away to markets where dealers of the same kind were ready for the kill. These were the men who hovered over factories, waiting for the last breath of a furnace, to pounce upon the equipment—and over desolate sidings, to pounce upon the freight cars of undelivered goods—these were a new biological species, the hit-and-run businessmen, who did not stay in any line of business longer than the span of one deal, who had no payrolls to meet, no overhead to carry, no real estate to own, no equipment to build, whose only asset and sole investment consisted of an item known as "friendship." These were the men whom official speeches described as "the progressive businessmen of our dynamic age," but whom people called "the pull peddlers"—the species included many breeds, those of "transportation pull," and of "steel pull" and "oil pull'1 and "wage-raise pull" and "suspended sentence pull"—men who were dynamic, who kept darting all over the country while no one else could move, men who were active and mindless, active, not like animals, but like that which breeds, feeds and moves upon the stillness of a corpse.

She knew that there was money to be had out of the railroad business and she knew who was now obtaining it Cuffy Meigs was selling trains as he was selling the last of the railroad's supplies, whenever he could rig a setup which would not let it be discovered or proved—selling rail to roads in Guatemala or to trolley companies in Canada, selling wire to manufacturers of juke boxes, selling crossties for fuel in resort hotels.

Did it matter—she thought, looking at the map—which part of the corpse had been consumed by which type of maggot, by those who gorged themselves or by those who gave the food to other maggots? So long as living flesh was prey to be devoured, did it matter whose stomachs it had gone to fill? There was no way to tell which devastation had been accomplished by the humanitarians and which by undisguised gangsters. There was no way to tell which acts of plunder had been prompted by the charity-lust of the Lawsons and which by the gluttony of Cuffy Meigs—no way to tell which communities had been immolated to feed another community one week closer to starvation and which to provide yachts for the pull-peddlers. Did it matter? Both were alike in fact as they were alike in spirit, both were in need and need was regarded as sole title to property, both were acting in strictest accordance with the same code of morality. Both held the immolation of men as proper and both were achieving it. There wasn't even any way to tell who were the cannibals and who the victims—the communities that accepted as their rightful due the confiscated clothing or fuel of a town to the east of them, found, next week, their granaries confiscated to feed a town to the west—men had achieved the ideal of the centuries, they were practicing it in unobstructed perfection, they were serving need as their highest ruler, need as first claim upon them, need as their standard of value, as the coin of their realm, as more sacred than right and life. Men had been pushed into a pit where, shouting that man is his brother's keeper, each was devouring his neighbor and was being devoured by his neighbor's brother, each was proclaiming the righteousness of the unearned and wondering who was stripping the skin off his back, each was devouring himself, while screaming in terror that some unknowable evil was destroying the earth.

"What complaint do they now have to make?" she heard Hugh Akston's voice in her mind. "That the universe is irrational? Is it?"

She sat looking at the map, her glance dispassionately solemn, as if no emotion save respect were permissible when observing the awesome power of logic. She was seeing—in the chaos of a perishing continent —the precise, mathematical execution of all the ideas men had held.

They had not wanted to know that this was what they wanted, they had not wanted to see that they had the power to wish, but not the power to fake—and they had achieved their wish to the letter, to the last bloodstained comma of it.

What were they thinking now, the champions of need and the lechers of pity?—she wondered. What were they counting on? Those who had once simpered: "I don't want to destroy the rich, I only want to seize a little of their surplus to help the poor, just a little, they'll never miss it!"—then, later, had snapped: "The tycoons can stand being squeezed, they've amassed enough to last them for three generations"—then, later, had yelled: "Why should the people suffer while businessmen have reserves to last a year?"—now were screaming: "Why should we starve while some people have reserves to last a week?" What were they counting on?—she wondered.

"You must do something!" cried James Taggart.

She whirled to face him. "I?"

"It's your job, it's your province, it's your duty!"

"What is?"

"To act. To do."

"To do—what?"

"How should I know? It's your special talent. You're the doer."

She glanced at him: the statement was so oddly perceptive and so incongruously irrelevant. She rose to her feet.

"Is this all, Jim?"

"No! No! I want a discussion!"

"Go ahead."

"But you haven't said anything!"

"You haven't, either."

"But . . . What I mean is, there are practical problems to solve, which . . . For instance, what was that matter of our last allocation of new rail vanishing from the storehouse in Pittsburgh?"

"Cuffy Meigs stole it and sold it."

"Can you prove it?" he snapped defensively.

"Have your friends left any means, methods, rules or agencies of proof?"

"Then don't talk about it, don't be theoretical, we've got to deal with facts! We've got to deal with facts as they are today . . . I mean, we've got to be realistic and devise some practical means to protect our supplies under existing conditions, not under unprovable assumptions, which—"

She chuckled. There was the form of the formless, she thought, there was the method of his consciousness: he wanted her to protect him from Cuffy Meigs without acknowledging Meigs' existence, to fight it without admitting its reality, to defeat it without disturbing its game.

"What do you find so damn funny?" he snapped angrily.

"You know it"

"I don't know what's the matter with you! I don't know what's happened to you . . . in the last two months . . . ever since you came back. . . . You've never been so uncooperative!"

"Why, Jim, I haven't argued with you in the last two months."

"That's what I mean!" He caught himself hastily, but not fast enough to miss her smile. "I mean, I wanted to have a conference, I wanted to know your view of the situation—"

"You know it."

"But you haven't said a word!"

"I said everything I had to say, three years ago. I told you where your course would take you. It has."

"Now there you go again! What's the use of theorizing? We're here, we're not back three years ago. We've got to deal with the present, not the past. Maybe things would have been different, if we had followed your opinion, maybe, but the fact is that we didn't—and we've got to deal with facts. We've got to take reality as it is now, today!"

"Well, take it."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Take your reality. I'll merely take your orders."

"That's unfair! I'm asking for your opinion—"

"You're asking for reassurance, Jim. You're not going to get it."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I'm not going to help you pretend—by arguing with you—that the reality you're talking about is not what it is, that there's still a way to make it work and to save your neck. There isn't."

"Well . . ." There was no explosion, no anger—only the feebly uncertain voice of a man on the verge of abdication. "Well . . . what would you want me to do?"

"Give up." He looked at her blankly. "Give up—all of you, you and your Washington friends and your looting planners and the whole of your cannibal philosophy. Give up and get out of the way and let those of us who can, start from scratch out of the ruins."

"No!" The explosion came, oddly, now; it was the scream of a man who would die rather than betray his idea, and it came from a man who had spent his life evading the existence of ideas, acting with the expediency of a criminal. She wondered whether she had ever understood the essence of criminals. She wondered about the nature of the loyalty to the idea of denying ideas.

"No!" he cried, his voice lower, hoarser and more normal, sinking from the tone of a zealot to the tone of an overbearing executive.

"That's impossible! That's out of the question!"

"Who said so?"

"Never mind! It's so! Why do you always think of the impractical?

Why don't you accept reality as it is and do something about it?

You're the realist, you're the doer, the mover, the producer, the Nat Taggart, you're the person who's able to achieve any goal she chooses!

You could save us now, you could find a way to make things work—if you wanted to!"

She burst out laughing.

There, she thought, was the ultimate goal of all that loose academic prattle which businessmen had ignored for years, the goal of all the slipshod definitions, the sloppy generalities, the soupy abstractions, all claiming that obedience to objective reality is the same as obedience to the State, that there is no difference between a law of nature and a bureaucrat's directive, that a hungry man is not free, that man must be released from the tyranny of food, shelter and clothing—all of it, for years, that the day might come when Nat Taggart, the realist, would be asked to consider the will of Cuffy Meigs as a fact of nature, irrevocable and absolute like steel, rails and gravitation, to accept the Meigs made world as an objective, unchangeable reality—then to continue producing abundance in that world. There was the goal of all those con men of library and classroom, who sold their revelations as reason, their "instincts" as science, their cravings as knowledge, the goal of all the savages of the non-objective, the non-absolute, the relative, the tentative, the probable—the savages who, seeing a farmer gather a harvest, can consider it only as a mystic phenomenon unbound by the law of causality and created by the farmer's omnipotent whim, who then proceed to seize the farmer, to chain him, to deprive him of tools, of seeds, of water, of soil, to push him out on a barren rock and to command: "Now grow a harvest and feed us!"

No—she thought, expecting Jim to ask it—it would be useless to try to explain what she was laughing at, he would not be able to understand it.

But he did not ask it. Instead, she saw him slumping and heard him say—terrifyingly, because his words were so irrelevant, if he did not understand, and so monstrous, if he did, "Dagny, I'm your brother . . ."

She drew herself up, her muscles growing rigid, as if she were about to face a killer's gun.

"Dagny"—his voice was the soft, nasal, monotonous whine of a beggar—"I want to be president of a railroad. I want it. Why can't I have my wish as you always have yours? Why shouldn't I be given the fulfillment of my desires as you always fulfill any desire of your own? Why should you be happy while I suffer? Oh yes, the world is yours, you're the one who has the brains to run it. Then why do you permit suffering in your world? You proclaim the pursuit of happiness, but you doom me to frustration. Don't I have the right to demand any form of happiness I choose? Isn't that a debt which you owe me? Am I not your brother?"

His glance was like a prowler's flashlight searching her face for a shred of pity. It found nothing but a look of revulsion.

"It's your sin if I suffer! It's your moral failure! I'm your brother, therefore I'm your responsibility, but you've failed to supply my wants, therefore you're guilty! All of mankind's moral leaders have said so for centuries—who are you to say otherwise? You're so proud of yourself, you think that you're pure and good—but you can't be good, so long as I'm wretched. My misery is the measure of your sin. My contentment is the measure of your virtue. I want this kind of world, today's world, it gives me my share of authority, it allows me to feel important-make it work for me!—do something!—how do I know what?—it's your problem and your duty! You have the privilege of strength, but I—I have the right of weakness! That's a moral absolute!

Don't you know it? Don't you? Don't you?"

His glance was now like the hands of a man hanging over an abyss, groping frantically for the slightest fissure of doubt, but slipping on the clean, polished rock of her face.

"You bastard," she said evenly, without emotion, since the words were not addressed to anything human.

It seemed to her that she saw him fall into the abyss—even though there was nothing to see in his face except the look of a con man whose trick has not worked.

There was no reason to feel more revulsion than usual, she thought; he had merely uttered the things which were preached, heard and accepted everywhere; but this creed was usually expounded in the third person, and Jim had had the open effrontery to expound it in the first.

She wondered whether people accepted the doctrine of sacrifice provided its recipients did not identify the nature of their own claims and actions.

She turned to leave.

"No! No! Wait!" he cried, leaping to his feet, with a glance at his wrist watch. "It's time now! There's a particular news broadcast that I want you to hear!"

She stopped, held by curiosity.

He pressed the switch of the radio, watching her face openly, intently, almost insolently. His eyes had a look of fear and of oddly lecherous anticipation.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" the voice of the radio speaker leaped forth abruptly; it had a tone of panic. "News of a shocking development has just reached us from Santiago, Chile!"

She saw the jerk of Taggart's head and a sudden anxiety in his bewildered frown, as if something about the words and voice were not what he had expected.

"A special session of the legislature of the People's State of Chile had been called for ten o'clock this morning, to pass an act of utmost importance to the people of Chile, Argentina and other South American People's States. In line with the enlightened policy of Senior Ramirez, the new Head of the Chilean State—who came to power on the moral slogan that man is his brother's keeper—the legislature was to nationalize the Chilean properties of d'Anconia Copper, thus opening the way for the People's State of Argentina to nationalize the rest of the d'Anconia properties the world over. This, however, was known only to a very few of the top-level leaders of both nations. The measure had been kept secret in order to avoid debate and reactionary opposition.

The seizure of the multi-billion dollar d'Anconia Copper was to come as a munificent surprise to the country.

"On the stroke of ten, in the exact moment when the chairman's gavel struck the rostrum, opening the session—almost as if the gavel's blow had set it off—the sound of a tremendous explosion rocked the hall, shattering the glass of its windows. It came from the harbor, a few streets away—and when the legislators rushed to the windows, they saw a long column of flame where once there had risen the familiar silhouettes of the ore docks of d'Anconia Copper. The ore docks had been blown to bits.

"The chairman averted panic and called the session to order. The act of nationalization was read to the assembly, to the sound of fire alarm sirens and distant cries. It was a gray morning, dark with rain clouds, the explosion had broken an electric transmitter—so that the assembly voted on the measure by the light of candles, while the red glow of the fire kept sweeping over the great vaulted ceiling above their heads.

"But more terrible a shock came later, when the legislators called a hasty recess to announce to the nation the good news that the people now owned d'Anconia Copper. While they were voting, word had come from the closest and farthest points of the globe that there was no d'Anconia Copper left on earth. Ladies and gentlemen, not anywhere.

In that same instant, on the stroke of ten, by an infernal marvel of synchronization, every property of d'Anconia Copper on the face of the globe, from Chile to Siam to Spain to Pottsville, Montana, had been blown up and swept away.

"The d'Anconia workers everywhere had been handed their last pay checks, in cash, at nine A.M., and by nine-thirty had been moved off the premises. The ore docks, the smelters, the laboratories, the office buildings were demolished. Nothing was left of the d'Anconia ore ships which had been in port—and only lifeboats carrying the crews were left of those ships which had been at sea. As to the d'Anconia mines, some were buried under tons of blasted rock, while others were found not to be worth the price of blasting. An astounding number of these mines, as reports pouring in seem to indicate, had continued to be run, even though exhausted years ago.

"Among the thousands of d'Anconia employees, the police have found no one with any knowledge of how this monstrous plot had been conceived, organized and carried out. But the cream of the d'Anconia staff are not here any longer. The most efficient of the executives, mineralogists, engineers, superintendents have vanished—all the men upon whom the People's State had been counting to carry on the work and cushion the process of readjustment. The most able—correction: the most selfish—of the men are gone. Reports from the various banks indicate that there are no d'Anconia accounts left anywhere; the money has been spent down to the last penny, "Ladies and gentlemen, the d'Anconia fortune—the greatest fortune on earth, the legendary fortune of the centuries—has ceased to exist.

In place of the golden dawn of a new age, the People's States of Chile and Argentina are left with a pile of rubble and hordes of unemployed on their hands.

"No clue has been found to the fate or the whereabouts of Senor Francisco d'Anconia. He has vanished, leaving nothing behind him, not even a message of farewell."

Thank you, my darling—thank you in the name of the last of us, even if you will not hear it and will not care to hear. . . . It was not a sentence, but the silent emotion of a prayer in her mind, addressed to the laughing face of a boy she had known at sixteen.

Then she noticed that she was clinging to the radio, as if the faint electric beat within it still held a tie to the only living force on earth, which it had transmitted for a few brief moments and which now filled the room where all else was dead.

As distant remnants of the explosion's wreckage, she noticed a sound that came from Jim, part-moan, part-scream, part-growl—then the sight of Jim's shoulders shaking over a telephone and his distorted voice screaming, "But, Rodrigo, you said it was safe! Rodrigo—oh God!—do you know how much I'd sunk into it?"—then the shriek of another phone on his desk, and his voice snarling into another receiver, his hand still clutching the first, "Shut your trap, Orren! What are you to do? What do I care, God damn you!"

There were people rushing into the office, the telephones were screaming and, alternating between pleas and curses, Jim kept yelling into one receiver, "Get me Santiago! . . . Get Washington to get me Santiago!"

Distantly, as on the margin of her mind, she could see what sort of game the men behind the shrieking phones had played and lost. They seemed far away, like tiny commas squirming on the white field under the lens of a microscope. She wondered how they could ever expect to be taken seriously when a Francisco d'Anconia was possible on earth.

She saw the glare of the explosion in every face she met through the rest of the day—and in every face she passed in the darkness of the streets, that evening. If Francisco had wanted a worthy funeral pyre for d'Anconia Copper, she thought, he -had succeeded. There it was, in the streets of New York City, the only city on earth still able to understand it—in the faces of people, in their whispers, the whispers crackling tensely like small tongues of fire, the faces lighted by a look that was both solemn and frantic, the shadings of expressions appearing to sway and weave, as if cast by a distant flame, some frightened, some angry, most of them uneasy, uncertain, expectant, but all of them acknowledging a fact much beyond an industrial catastrophe, all of them knowing what it meant, though none would name Us meaning, all of them carrying a touch of laughter, a laughter of amusement and defiance, the bitter laughter of perishing victims who feel that they are avenged.

She saw it in the face of Hank Rearden, when she met him for dinner that evening. As his tall, confident figure walked toward her—the only figure that seemed at home in the costly setting of a distinguished restaurant—she saw the look of eagerness fighting the sternness of his features, the look of a young boy still open to the enchantment of the unexpected. He did not speak of this day's event, but she knew that it was the only image in his mind.

They had been meeting whenever he came to the city, spending a brief, rare evening together—with their past still alive in their silent acknowledgment—with no future in their work and in their common struggle, but with the knowledge that they were allies gaining support from the fact of each other's existence.

He did not want to mention today's event, he did not want to speak of Francisco, but she noticed, as they sat at the table, that the strain of a resisted smile kept pulling at the hollows of his cheeks. She knew whom he meant, when he said suddenly, his voice soft and low with the weight of admiration, "He did keep his oath, didn't he?"

"His oath?" she asked, startled, thinking of the inscription on the temple of Atlantis.

"He said to me, 'I swear—by the woman I love—that I am your friend,' He was."

"He is."

He shook his head. "I have no right to think of him. I have no right to accept what he's done as an act in my defense. And yet . . ."

He stopped.

"But it was, Hank. In defense of all of us—and of you, most of all."

He looked away, out at the city. They sat at the side of the room, with a sheet of glass as an invisible protection against the sweep of space and streets sixty floors below. The city seemed abnormally distant: it lay flattened down to the pool of its lowest stories. A few blocks away, its tower merging into darkness, the calendar hung at the level of their faces, not as a small, disturbing rectangle, but as an enormous screen, eerily close and large, flooded by the dead, white glow of light projected through an empty film, empty but for the letters: September 2.

"Rearden Steel is now working at capacity," he was saying indifferently. "They've lifted the production quotas off my mills—for the next five minutes, I guess. I don't know how many of their own regulations they've suspended, I don't think they know it, either, they don't bother keeping track of legality any longer, I'm sure I'm a law-breaker on five or six counts, which nobody could prove or disprove—all I know is that the gangster of the moment told me to go full steam ahead." He shrugged. "When another gangster kicks him out tomorrow, I'll probably be shut down, as penalty for illegal operation. But according to the plan of the present split-second, they've begged me to keep pouring my Metal, in any amount and by any means I choose."

She noticed the occasional, surreptitious glances that people were throwing in their direction. She had noticed it before, ever since her broadcast, ever since the two of them had begun to appear in public together. Instead of the disgrace he had dreaded, there was an air of awed uncertainty in people's manner—uncertainty of their own moral precepts, awe in the presence of two persons who dared to be certain of being right. People were looking at them with anxious curiosity, with envy, with respect, with the fear of offending an unknown, proudly rigorous standard, some almost with an air of apology that seemed to say: "Please forgive us for being married." There were some who had a look of angry malice, and a few who had a look of admiration.

"Dagny," he asked suddenly, "do you suppose he's in New York?"

"No. I've called the Wayne-Falkland. They told me that the lease on his suite had expired a month ago and he did not renew it."

"They're looking for him all over the world," he said, smiling.

"They'll never find him." The smile vanished. "Neither will I." His voice slipped back to the flat, gray tone of duty: "Well, the mills are working, but I'm not. I'm doing nothing but running around the country like a scavenger, searching for illegal ways to purchase raw materials.

Hiding, sneaking, lying—just to get a few tons of ore or coal or copper.

They haven't lifted their regulations off my raw materials. They know that I'm pouring more Metal than the quotas they give me could produce. They don't care." He added, "They think I do."

"Tired, Hank?"

"Bored to death."

There was a time, she thought, when his mind, his energy, his inexhaustible resourcefulness had been given to the task of a producer devising better ways to deal with nature; now, they were switched to the task of a criminal outwitting men. She wondered how long a man could endure a change of that kind.

"It's becoming almost impossible to get iron ore," he said indifferently, then added, his voice suddenly alive, "Now it's going to be completely impossible to get copper." He was grinning.

She wondered how long a man could continue to work against himself, to work when his deepest desire was not to succeed, but to fail.

She understood the connection of his thoughts when he said, "I've never told you, but I've met Ragnar Danneskjold."

"He told me."

"What? Where did you ever—" He stopped. "Of course," he said, his voice tense and low. "He would be one of them. You would have met him. Dagny, what are they like, those men who . . . No. Don't answer me." In a moment he added, "So I've met one of their agents."

"You've met two of them."

His response was a span of total stillness. "Of course," he said dully.

"I knew it . . . I just wouldn't admit to myself that I knew . . . He was their recruiting agent, wasn't he?"

"One of their earliest and best."

He chuckled; it was a sound of bitterness and longing. 'That night . . . when they got Ken Danagger . . . I thought that they had not sent anyone after me. . . ."

The effort by which he made his face grow rigid, was almost like the slow, resisted turn of a key locking a sunlit room he could not permit himself to examine. After a while, he said impassively, "Dagny, that new rail we discussed last month—I don't think I'll be able to deliver it. They haven't lifted their regulations off my output, they're still controlling my sales and disposing of my Metal as they please. But the bookkeeping is in such a snarl that I'm smuggling a few thousand tons into the black market every week. I think they know it. They're pretending not to. They don't want to antagonize me, right now. But, you see, I've been shipping every ton I could snatch, to some emergency customers of mine. Dagny, I was in Minnesota last month. I've seen what's going on there. The country will starve, not next year, but this winter, unless a few of us act and act fast. There are no grain reserves left anywhere. With Nebraska gone, Oklahoma wrecked, North Dakota abandoned, Kansas barely subsisting—there isn't going to be any wheat this winter, not for the city of New York nor for any Eastern city.

Minnesota is our last granary. They've had two bad years in succession, but they have a bumper crop this fall—and they have to be able to harvest it. Have you had a chance to take a look at the condition of the farm-equipment industry? They're not big enough, any of them, to keep a staff of efficient gangsters in Washington or to pay percentages to pull-peddlers. So they haven't been getting many allocations of materials. Two-thirds of them have shut down and the rest are about to.

And farms are perishing all over the country—for lack of tools. You should have seen those farmers in Minnesota. They've been spending more time fixing old tractors that can't be fixed than plowing their fields.

I don't know how they managed to survive till last spring. I don't know how they managed to plant their wheat. But they did. They did." There was a look of intensity on his face, as if he were contemplating a rare, forgotten sight: a vision of men—and she knew what motive was still holding him to his job. "Dagny, they had to have tools for their harvest. I've been selling all the Metal I could steal out of my own mills to the manufacturers of farm equipment. On credit. They've been sending the equipment to Minnesota as fast as they could put it out.

Selling it in the same way—illegally and on credit. But they will be paid, this fall, and so will I. Charity, hell! We're helping producers—and what tenacious producers!—not lousy, mooching 'consumers.1

We're giving loans, not alms. We're supporting ability, not need. I'll be damned if I'll stand by and let those men be destroyed while the pull peddlers grow rich!"

He was looking at the image of a sight he had seen in Minnesota: the silhouette of an abandoned factory, with the light of the sunset streaming, unopposed, through the holes of its windows and the cracks of its roof, with the remnant of a sign: Ward Harvester Company.

"Oh, I know," he said. "We'll save them this winter, but the looters will devour them next year. Still, we'll save them this winter. . . .

Well, that's why I won't be able to smuggle any rail for you. Not in the immediate future—and there's nothing left to us but the immediate future. I don't know what is the use of feeding a country, if it loses its railroads—but what is the use of railroads where there is no food?

What is the use, anyway?"

"It's all right, Hank, We'll last with such rail as we have, for—"

She stopped.

"For a month?"

"For the winter—I hope."

Cutting across their silence, a shrill voice reached them from another table, and they turned to look at a man who had the jittery manner of a cornered gangster about to reach for his gun. "An act of anti-social destruction," he was snarling to a sullen companion, "at a time when there's such a desperate shortage of copper! . . . We can't permit it!

We can't permit it to be true!"

Rearden turned abruptly to look off, at the city. "I'd give anything to know where he is," he said, his voice low. "Just to know where he is, right now, at this moment."

"What would you do, if you knew it?"

He dropped his hand in a gesture of futility. "[ wouldn't approach him. The only homage I can still pay him is not to cry for forgiveness where no forgiveness is possible."

They remained silent. They listened to the voices around them, to the splinters of panic trickling through the luxurious room.

She had not been aware that the same presence seemed to be an invisible guest at every table, that the same subject kept breaking through the attempts at any other conversation. People sat in a manner, not quite of cringing, but as if they found the room too large and too exposed—a room of glass, blue velvet, aluminum and gentle lighting. They looked as if they had come to this room at the price of countless evasions, to let it help them pretend that theirs was still a civilized existence—but an act oЈ primeval violence had blasted the nature of their world into the open and they were no longer able not to see.

"How could he? How could he?" a woman was demanding with petulant terror. "He had no right to do it!"

"It was an accident," said a young man with a staccato voice and an odor of public payroll. "It was a chain of coincidences, as any statistical curve of probabilities can easily prove. It is unpatriotic to spread rumors exaggerating the power of the people's enemies."

"Right and wrong is all very well for academic conversations," said a woman with a schoolroom voice and a barroom mouth, "but how can anybody take his own ideas seriously enough to destroy a fortune when people need it?"

"f don't understand it," an old man was saying with quavering bitterness. "After centuries of efforts to curb man's innate brutality, after centuries of teaching, training and indoctrination with the gentle and the humane!"

A woman's bewildered voice rose uncertainly and trailed off: "I thought we were living in an age of brotherhood . . ."

"I'm scared," a young girl was repeating, "I'm scared . . . oh, I don't know! . . . I'm just scared . . ."

"He couldn't have done it!" . . . "He did!" . . . "But why?" . . .

"I refuse to believe it!" . . . "It's not human!" . . . "But why?" . . .

"Just a worthless playboy!" . . . "But why?"

The muffled scream of a woman across the room and some half grasped signal on the edge of Dagny's vision, came simultaneously and made her whirl to look at the city.

The calendar was run by a mechanism locked in a room behind the screen, unrolling the same film year after year, projecting the dates in steady rotation, in changeless rhythm, never moving but on the stroke of midnight. The speed of Dagny's turn gave her time to see a phenomenon as unexpected as if a planet had reversed its orbit in the sky: she saw the words "September 2" moving upward and vanishing past the edge of the screen.

Then, written across the enormous page, stopping time, as a last message to the world and to the world's motor which was New York, she saw the lines of a sharp, intransigent handwriting: Brother, you asked for it!

Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Anconia She did not know which shock was greater: the sight of the message or the sound of Rearden's laughter—Rearden, standing on his feet, in full sight and hearing of the room behind him, laughing above their moans of panic, laughing in greeting, in salute, in acceptance of the gift he had tried to reject, in release, in triumph, in surrender.

On the evening of September 7, a copper wire broke in Montana, stopping the motor of a loading crane on a spur track of Taggart Transcontinental, at the rim of the Stanford Copper Mine.

The mine had been working on three shifts, its days and nights blending into a single stretch of struggle to lose no minute, no drop of copper it could squeeze from the shelves of a mountain into the nation's industrial desert. The crane broke down at the task of loading a train; it stopped abruptly and hung still against the evening sky, between a string of empty cars and piles of suddenly immovable ore.

The men of the railroad and of the mine stopped in dazed bewilderment: they found that in all the complexity of their equipment, among the drills, the motors, the derricks, the delicate gauges, the ponderous floodlights beating down into the pits and ridges of a mountain—there was no wire to mend the crane. They stopped, like men on an ocean liner propelled by ten-thousand-horsepower generators, but perishing for lack of a safety pin.

The station agent, a young man with a swift body and a brusque voice, stripped the wiring from the station building and set the crane in motion again—and while the ore went clattering to fill the cars, the light of candles came trembling through the dusk from the windows of the station.

"Minnesota, Eddie," said Dagny grimly, closing the drawer of her special file. "Tell the Minnesota Division to ship half their stock of wire to Montana." "But good God, Dagny!—with the peak of the harvest rush approaching—" "They'll hold through it—I think. We don't dare lose a single supplier of copper."

"But I have!" screamed James Taggart, when she reminded him once more. "I have obtained for you the top priority on copper wire, the first claim, the uppermost ration level, I've given you all the cards, certificates, documents and requisitions—what else do you want?" "The copper wire." "I've done all I could! Nobody can blame me!"

She did not argue. The afternoon newspaper was lying on his desk—and she was staring at an item on the back page: An Emergency State Tax had been passed in California for the relief of the state's unemployed, in the amount of fifty per cent of any local corporation's gross income ahead of other taxes; the California oil companies had gone out of business.

"Don't worry, Mr. Rearden," said an unctuous voice over a long distance telephone line from Washington, "I just wanted to assure you that you will not have to worry." "About what?" asked Rearden, baffled. "About that temporary bit of confusion in California. We'll straighten it out in no time, it was an act of illegal insurrection, their state government had no right to impose local taxes detrimental to national taxes, we'll negotiate an equitable arrangement immediately—but in the meantime, if you have been disturbed by any unpatriotic rumors about the California oil companies, I just wanted to tell you that Rearden Steel has been placed in the top category of essential need, with first claim upon any oil available anywhere in the nation, very top category, Mr. Rearden—so I just wanted you to know that you won't have to worry about the problem of fuel this winter!"

Rearden hung up the telephone receiver, with a frown of worry, not about the problem of fuel and the end of the California oil fields—disasters of this kind had become habitual—but about the fact that the Washington planners found it necessary to placate him. This was new; he wondered what it meant. Through the years of his struggle, he had learned that an apparently causeless antagonism was not hard to deal with, but an apparently causeless solicitude was an ugly danger. The same wonder struck him again, when, walking down an alley between the mill structures, he caught sight of a slouching figure whose posture combined an air of insolence with an air of expecting to be swatted: it was his brother Philip.

Ever since he had moved to Philadelphia, Rearden had not visited his former home and had not heard a word from his family, whose bills he went on paying. Then, inexplicably, twice in the last few weeks, he had caught Philip wandering through the mills for no apparent reason.

He had been unable to tell whether Philip was sneaking to avoid him or waiting to catch his attention; it had looked like both. He had been unable to discover any clue to Philip's purpose, only some incomprehensible solicitude, of a kind Philip had never displayed before.

The first time, in answer to his startled "What are you doing here?"

—Philip had said vaguely, “Well, I know that you don't like me to come to your office." "What do you want?" "Oh, nothing . . . but . . . well, Mother is worried about you." "Mother can call me any time she wishes." Philip had not answered, but had proceeded to question him, in an unconvincingly casual manner, about his work, his health, his business; the questions had kept hitting oddly beside the point, not questions about business, but more about his, Rearden's, feelings toward business. Rearden had cut him short and waved him away, but had been left with the small, nagging sense of an incident that remained inexplicable.

The second time, Philip had said, as sole explanation, "We just want to know how you feel." "Who's we?" "Why . . . Mother and I. These are difficult times and . . . well, Mother wants to know how you feel about it all." "Tell her that I don't." The words had seemed to hit Philip in some peculiar manner, almost as if this were the one answer he dreaded. "Get out of here," Rearden had ordered wearily, "and the next time you want to see me, make an appointment and come to my office. But don't come unless you have something to say. This is not a place where one discusses feelings, mine or anybody else's."

Philip had not called for an appointment—but now there he was again, slouching among the giant shapes of the furnaces, with an air of guilt and snobbishness together, as if he were both snooping and slumming.

"But I do have something to say! I do!" he cried hastily, in answer to the angry frown on Rearden's face.

"Why didn't you come to my office?"

"You don't want me in your office."

"I don't want you here, either."

"But I'm only . . . I'm only trying to be considerate and not to take your time when you're so busy and . . . you are very busy, aren't you?"

"And?"

"And . . . well, I just wanted to catch you in a spare moment . . . to talk to you."

"About what?"

"I . . . Well, I need a job."

He said it belligerently and drew back a little. Rearden stood looking at him blankly.

"Henry, I want a job. I mean, here, at the mills. I want you to give me something to do. I need a job, I need to earn my living.

I'm tired of alms." He was groping for something to say, his voice both offended and pleading, as if the necessity to justify the plea were an unfair imposition upon him. "I want a livelihood of my own, I'm not asking you for charity, I'm asking you to give me a chance!"

"This is a factory, Philip, not a gambling joint,"

"Uh?"

"We don't take chances or give them."

"I’m asking you to give me a job!"

"Why should I?"

"Because I need it!"

Rearden pointed to the red spurts of flame shooting from the black shape of a furnace, shooting safely into space four hundred feet of steel-clay-and-steam-embodied thought above them. "I needed that furnace, Philip. "It wasn't my need that gave it to me."

Philip's face assumed a look of not having heard. "You're not officially supposed to hire anybody, bat that's just a technicality, if you'll put me on, my friends will okay it without any trouble and—" Something about Rearden's eyes made him stop abruptly, then ask in an angrily impatient voice, "Well, what's the matter? What have I said that's wrong?"

"What you haven't said."

"I beg your pardon?"

"What you're squirming to leave unmentioned."

"What?"

"That you'd be of no use to me whatever."

"Is that what you—" Philip started with automatic righteousness, but stopped and did not finish.

"Yes," said Rearden, smiling, "that's what I think of first."

Philip's eyes oozed away; when he spoke, his voice sounded as if it were darting about at random, picking stray sentences: "Everybody is entitled to a livelihood . . . How am I going to get it, if nobody gives me my chance?"

"How did I get mine?"

"I wasn't born owning a steel plant."

"Was I?"

"I can do anything you can—if you'll teach me."

"Who taught me?"

"Why do you keep saying that? I'm not talking about you!"

"I am."

In a moment, Philip muttered, "What do you have to worry about?

It's not your livelihood that's in question!"

Rearden pointed to the figures of men in the steaming rays of the furnace. "Can you do what they're doing?"

"I don't see what you're—"

"What will happen if I put you there and you ruin a heat of steel for me?"

"What's more important, that your damn steel gets poured or that I eat?"

"How do you propose to eat if the steel doesn't get poured?"

Philip's face assumed a look of reproach. "I'm not in a position to argue with you right now, since you hold the upper hand."

"Then don't argue."

"Uh?"

"Keep your mouth shut and get out of here."

"But I meant—" He stopped.

Rearden chuckled. "You meant that it's I who should keep my mouth shut, because I hold the upper hand, and should give in to you, because you hold no hand at all?"

"That's a peculiarly crude way of stating a moral principle."

"But that's what your moral principle amounts to, doesn't it?"

"You can't discuss morality in materialistic terms."

"We're discussing a job in a steel plant—and, boy! is that a materialistic place!"

Philip's 'body drew a shade tighter together and his eyes became a shade more glazed, as if in fear of the place around him, in resentment of its sight, in an effort not to concede its reality. He said, in the soft, stubborn whine of a voodoo incantation, "It's a moral imperative, universally conceded in our day and age, that every man is entitled to a job." His voice rose: "I'm entitled to it!"

"You are? Go on, then, collect your claim."

"Uh?"

"Collect your job. Pick it off the bush where you think it grows."

"I mean—"

"You mean that it doesn't? You mean that you need it, but can't create it? You mean that you're entitled to a job which I must create for you?"

"Yes!"

"And if I don't?"

The silence went stretching through second after second. "I don't understand you," said Philip; his voice had the angry bewilderment of a man who recites the formulas of a well-tested role, but keeps getting the wrong cues in answer. "I don't understand why one can't talk to you any more. I don't understand what sort of theory you're propounding and—"

"Oh yes, you do."

As if refusing to believe that the formulas could fail, Philip burst out with: "Since when did you take to abstract philosophy? You're only a businessman, you're not qualified to deal with questions of principle, you ought to leave it to the experts who have conceded for centuries—"

"Cut it, Philip. What's the gimmick?"

“Gimmick?"

"Why the sudden ambition?"

"Well, at a time like this . . ."

"Like what?"

"Well, every man has the right to have some means of support and . . . and not be left to be tossed aside . . . When things are so uncertain, a man's got to have some security . . . some foothold . . . I mean, at a time like this, if anything happened to you, I'd have no—"

"What do you expect to happen to me?"

"Oh, I don't! I don't!" The cry was oddly, incomprehensibly genuine.

"I don't expect anything to happen] . . . Do you?"

"Such as what?"

"How do I know? . . . But I've got nothing except the pittance you give me and . . . and you might change your mind any time."

"I might."

"And I haven't any hold on you at all."

"Why did it take you that many years to realize it and start worrying?

Why now?"

"Because . . . because you've changed. You . . . you used to have a sense of duty and moral responsibility, but . . . you're losing it.

You're losing it, aren't you?"

Rearden stood studying him silently; there was something peculiar in Philip's manner of sliding toward questions, as if his words were accidental, but the too casual, the faintly Insistent questions were the key to his purpose.

"Well, I'll be glad to take the burden off your shoulders, if I'm a burden to you!" Philip snapped suddenly. "Just give me a job, and your conscience won't have to bother you about me any longer!"

"It doesn't."

"That's what I mean! You don't care. You don't care what becomes of any of us, do you?"

"Of whom?"

"Why . . . Mother and me and . . . and mankind in general. But I'm not going to appeal to your better self. I know that you're ready to ditch me at a moment's notice, so—"

"You're lying, Philip. That's not what you're worried about. If it were, you'd be angling for a chunk of cash, not for a job, not—"

"No! I want a job!" The cry was immediate and almost frantic. "Don't try to buy me off with cash! I want a job!"

"Pull yourself together, you poor louse. Do you hear what you're saying?"

Philip spit out his answer with impotent hatred: "You can't talk to me that way!"

"Can you?"

"I only—"

"To buy you off? Why should I try to buy you off—instead of kicking you out, as I should have, years ago?"

"Well, after all, I'm your brother!”

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"One's supposed to have some sort of feeling for one's brother."

"Do you?"

Philip's mouth swelled petulantly; he did not answer; he waited; Rearden let him wait. Philip muttered, "You're supposed . . . at least . . . to have some consideration for my feelings . . . but you haven't."

"Have you for mine?"

"Yours? Your feelings?" It was not malice in Philip's voice, but worse: it was a genuine, indignant astonishment. "You haven't any feelings. You've never felt anything at all. You've never suffered!"

It was as if a sum of years hit Rearden in the face, by means of a sensation and a sight: the exact sensation of what he had felt in the cab of the first train's engine on the John Galt Line—and the sight of Philip's eyes, the pale, half-liquid eyes presenting the uttermost of human degradation: an uncontested pain, and, with the obscene insolence of a skeleton toward a living being, demanding that this pain be held as the highest of values. You've never suffered, the eyes were saying to him accusingly—while he was seeing the night in his office when his ore mines were taken away from him—the moment when he had signed the Gift Certificate surrendering Rearden Metal—the month of days inside a plane that searched for the remains of Dagny's body. You've never suffered, the eyes were saying with self-righteous scorn—while he remembered the sensation of proud chastity with which he had fought through those moments, refusing to surrender to pain, a sensation made of his love, of his loyalty, of his knowledge that joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture. You've never suffered, the dead stare of the eyes was saying, you've never felt anything, because only to suffer is to feel—there's no such thing as joy, there's only pain and the absence of pain, only pain and the zero, when one feels nothing—I suffer, I'm twisted by suffering, I'm made of undiluted suffering, that's my purity, that's my virtue—and yours, you the untwisted one, you the uncomplaining, yours is to relieve me of my pain—cut your unsuffering body to patch up mine, cut your unfeeling soul to stop mine from feeling—and we'll achieve the ultimate ideal, the triumph over life, the zero! He was seeing the nature of those who, for centuries, had not recoiled from the preachers of annihilation—he was seeing the nature of the enemies he had been fighting all his life.

"Philip," he said, "get out of here." His voice was like a ray of sunlight in a morgue, it was the plain, dry, daily voice of a businessman, the sound of health, addressed to an enemy one could not honor by anger, nor even by horror. "And don't ever try to enter these mills again, because there will be orders at every gate to throw you out, if you try it.'1

"Well, after all," said Philip, in the angry and cautious tone of a tentative threat, "I could have my friends assign me to a job here and compel you to accept it!"

Rearden had started to go, but he stopped and turned to look at his brother.

Philip's moment of grasping a sudden revelation was not accomplished by means of thought, but by means of that dark sensation which was his only mode of consciousness: he felt a sensation of terror, squeezing his throat, shivering down into his stomach—he was seeing the spread of the mills, with the roving streamers of flame, with the ladles of molten metal sailing through space on delicate cables, with open pits the color of glowing coal, with cranes coming at his head, pounding past, holding tons of steel by the invisible power of magnets—and he knew that he was afraid of this place, afraid to the death, that he dared not move without the protection and guidance of the man before him—then he looked at the tall, straight figure standing casually still, the figure with the unflinching eyes whose sight had cut through rock and flame to build this place—and then he knew how easily the man he was proposing to compel could let a single bucket of metal tilt over a second ahead of its time or let a single crane drop its load a foot short of its goal, and there would be nothing left of him, of Philip the claimant—and his only protection lay in the fact that his mind would think of such actions, but the mind of Hank Rearden would not.

"But we'd better keep it on a friendly basis," said Philip.

"You'd better," said Rearden and walked away.

Men who worship pain—thought Rearden, staring at the image of the enemies he had never been able to understand—they're men who worship pain. It seemed monstrous, yet peculiarly devoid of importance.

He felt nothing. It was like trying to summon emotion toward inanimate objects, toward refuse sliding down a mountainside to crush him. One could flee from the slide or build retaining walls against it or be crushed —but one could not grant any anger, indignation or moral concern to the senseless motions of the un-living; no, worse, he thought—the antiliving.

The same sense of detached unconcern remained with him while he sat in a Philadelphia courtroom and watched men perform the motions which were to grant him his divorce. He watched them utter mechanical generalities, recite vague phrases of fraudulent evidence, play an intricate game of stretching words to convey no facts and no meaning. He had paid them to do it—he whom the law permitted no other way to gain his freedom, no right to state the facts and plead the truth—the law which delivered his fate, not to objective rules objectively defined, but to the arbitrary mercy of a judge with a wizened face and a look of empty cunning.

Lillian was not present in the courtroom; her attorney made gestures once in a while, with the energy of letting water run through his fingers. They all knew the verdict in advance and they knew its reason; no other reason had existed for years, where no standards, save whim, had existed. They seemed to regard it as their rightful prerogative; they acted as if the purpose of the procedure were not to try a case, but to give them jobs, as if their jobs were to recite the appropriate formulas with no responsibility to know what the formulas accomplished, as if a courtroom were the one place where questions of right and wrong were irrelevant and they, the men in charge of dispensing justice, were safely wise enough to know that no justice existed. They acted like savages performing a ritual devised to set them free of objective reality.

But the ten years of his marriage had been real, he thought—and these were the men who assumed the power to dispose of it, to decide whether he would have a chance of contentment on earth or be condemned to torture for the rest of his lifetime. He remembered the austerely pitiless respect he had felt for his contract of marriage, for all his contracts and all his legal obligations—and he saw what sort of legality his scrupulous observance was expected to serve.

He noticed that the puppets of the courtroom had started by glancing at him in the sly, wise manner of fellow conspirators sharing a common guilt, mutually safe from moral condemnation. Then, when they observed that he was the only man in the room who looked steadily straight at anyone's face, he saw resentment growing in their eyes. Incredulously, he realized what it was that had been expected of him: he, the victim, chained, bound, gagged and left with no recourse save to bribery, had been expected to believe that the farce he had purchased was a process of law, that the edicts enslaving him had moral validity, that he was guilty of corrupting the integrity of the guardians of justice, and that the blame was his, not theirs. It was like blaming the victim of a holdup for corrupting the integrity of the thug. And yet—he thought —through all the generations of political extortion, it was not the looting bureaucrats who had taken the blame, but the chained industrialists, not the men who peddled legal favors, but the men who were forced to buy them; and through all those generations of crusades against corruption, the remedy had always been, not the liberating of the victims, but the granting of wider powers for extortion to the extortionists. The only guilt of the victims, he thought, had been that they accepted it as guilt.

When he walked out of the courtroom into the chilly drizzle of a gray afternoon, he felt as if he had been divorced, not only from Lillian, but from the whole of the human society that supported the procedure he had witnessed.

The face of his attorney, an elderly man of the old-fashioned school, wore an expression that made it look as if he longed to take a bath.

"Say, Hank,” he asked as sole comment, "is there something the looters are anxious to get from you right now?" "Not that I know of. Why?"

"The thing went too smoothly. There were a few points at which I expected pressure and hints for some extras, but the boys sailed past and took no advantage of it. Looks to me as if orders had come from on high to treat you gently and let you have your way. Are they planning something new against your mills?" "Not that I know of," said Rearden —and was astonished to hear in his mind: Not that I care.

It was on the same afternoon, at the mills, that he saw the Wet Nurse hurrying toward him—a gangling, coltish figure with a peculiar mixture of brusqueness, awkwardness and decisiveness.

"Mr. Rearden, I would like to speak to you." His voice was diffident, yet oddly firm.

"Go ahead."

"There's something I want to ask you." The boy's face was solemn and taut. "I want you to know that I know you should refuse me, but I want to ask it just the same . . . and . . . and if it's presumptuous, then just tell me to go to hell."

"Okay. Try it."

"Mr. Rearden, would you give me a job?" It was the effort to sound normal that betrayed the days of struggle behind the question. "I want to quit what I'm doing and go to work. I mean, real work—in steel making, like I thought I'd started to, once. I want to earn my keep. I'm tired of being a bedbug."

Rearden could not resist smiling and reminding him, in the tone of a quotation, "Now why use such words, Non-Absolute? If we don't use ugly words, we won't have any ugliness and—" But he saw the desperate earnestness of the boy's face and stopped, his smile vanishing.

"I mean it, Mr. Rearden. And I know what the word means and it's the right word. I'm tired of being paid, with your money, to do nothing except make it impossible for you to make any money at all. I know that anyone who works today is only a sucker for bastards like me, but . . . well, God damn it, I'd rather be a sucker, if that's all there's left to be!"

His voice had risen to a cry. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Rearden," he said stiffly, looking away. In a moment, he went on in his woodenly unemotional tone. "I want to get out of the Deputy-Director-of-Distribution racket. I don't know that I'd be of much use to you, I've got a college diploma in metallurgy, but that's not worth the paper it's printed on. But I think I've learned a little about the work in the two years I've been here—and if you could use me at all, as sweeper or scrap man or whatever you'd trust me with, I'd tell them where to put the deputy directorship and I'd go to work for you tomorrow, next week, this minute or whenever you say." He avoided looking at Rearden, not in a manner of evasion, but as if he had no right to do it.

"Why were you afraid to ask me?" said Rearden gently.

The boy glanced at him with indignant astonishment, as if the answer were self-evident. "Because after the way I started here and the way I acted and what I'm deputy of, if I come asking you for favors, you ought to kick me in the teeth!"

"You have learned a great deal in the two years you've been here."

"No, I—" He glanced at Rearden, understood, looked away and said woodenly, "Yeah . . . if that's what you mean."

"Listen, kid, I'd give you a job this minute and I'd trust you with more than a sweeper's job, if it were up to me. But have you forgotten the Unification Board? I'm not allowed to hire you and you're not allowed to quit. Sure, men are quitting all the time, and we're hiring others under phony names and fancy papers proving that they've worked here for years. You know it, and thanks for keeping your mouth shut. But do you think that if I hired you that way, your friends in Washington would miss it?"

The boy shook his head slowly.

"Do you think that if you quit their service to become a sweeper, they wouldn't understand your reason?"

The boy nodded.

"Would they let you go?"

The boy shook his head. After a moment, he said in a tone of forlorn astonishment, "I hadn't thought of that at all, Mr. Rearden. I forgot them. I kept thinking of whether you'd want me or not and that the only thing that counted was your decision.”

"I know."

"And . . . it is the only thing that counts, in fact."

"Yes, Non-Absolute, in fact."

The boy's mouth jerked suddenly into the brief, mirthless twist of a smile. "I guess I'm tied worse than any sucker . . ."

"Yes. There's nothing you can do now, except apply to the Unification Board for permission to change your job. I'll support your application, if you want to try—only I don't think they'll grant it. I don't think they'll let you work for me."

"No. They won't."

"If you maneuver enough and lie enough, they might permit you to transfer to a private job—with some other steel company."

"No! I don't want to go anywhere else! I don't want to leave this place!” He stood looking off at the invisible vapor of rain over the flame of the furnaces. After a while, he said quietly, "I'd better stay put, I guess. I'd better go on being a deputy looter. Besides, if I left, God only knows what sort of bastard they'd saddle you with in my place!"

He turned. "They're up to something, Mr. Rearden. I don't know what it is, but they're getting ready to spring something on you."

"What?"

"I don't know. But they've been watching every opening here, in the last few weeks, every desertion, and slipping their own gang in. A queer sort of gang, too—real goons, some of them, that I'd swear never stepped inside a steel plant before. I've had orders to get as many of 'our boys' in as possible. They wouldn't tell me why. I don't know what it is they're planning. I've tried to pump them, but they're acting pretty cagey about it. I don't think they trust me any more. I'm losing the right touch, I guess. All I know is they're getting set to pull something here."

"Thanks for warning me."

"I'll try to get the dope on it. I'll try my damndest to get it in time." He turned brusquely and started off, but stopped. "Mr. Rearden, if it were up to you, you would have hired me?"

"I would have, gladly and at once."

"Thank you, Mr. Rearden," he said, his voice solemn and low, then walked away.

Rearden stood looking after him, seeing, with a tearing smile of pity, what it was that the ex-relativist, the ex-pragmatist, the ex-amoralist was carrying away with him for consolation.

On the afternoon of September 11, a copper wire broke in Minnesota, stopping the belts of a grain elevator at a small country station of Taggart Transcontinental.

A flood of wheat was moving down the highways, the roads, the abandoned trails of the countryside, emptying thousands of acres of farmland upon the fragile dams of the railroad's stations. It was moving day and night, the first trickles growing into streams, then rivers, then torrents—moving on palsied trucks with coughing, tubercular motors—on wagons pulled by the rusty skeletons of starving horses—on carts pulled by oxen—on the nerves and last energy of men who had lived through two years of disaster for the triumphant reward of this autumn's giant harvest, men who had patched their trucks and carts with wire, blankets, ropes and sleepless nights, to make them hold together for this one more journey, to carry the grain and collapse at destination, but to give their owners a chance at survival.

Every year, at this season, another movement had gone clicking across the country, drawing freight cars from all corners of the continent to the Minnesota Division of Taggart Transcontinental, the beat of train wheels preceding the creak of the wagons, like an advance echo rigorously planned, ordered and timed to meet the flood. The Minnesota Division drowsed through the year, to come to violent life for the weeks of the harvest; fourteen thousand freight cars had jammed its yards each year; fifteen thousand were expected this time. The first of the wheat trains had started to channel the flood into the hungry flour mills, then bakeries, then stomachs of the nation—but every train, car and storage elevator counted, and there was no minute or inch of space to spare.

Eddie Willers watched Dagny's face as she went through the cards of her emergency file; he could tell the content of the cards by her expression. "The Terminal," she said quietly, closing the file. "Phone the Terminal downstairs and have them ship half their stock of wire to Minnesota." Eddie said nothing and obeyed.

He said nothing, the morning when he put on her desk a telegram from the Taggart office in Washington, informing them of the directive which, due to the critical shortage of copper, ordered government agents to seize all copper mines and operate them as a public utility.

"Well," she said, dropping the telegram into the wastebasket, "that's the end of Montana."

She said nothing when James Taggart announced to her that he was issuing an order to discontinue all dining cars on Taggart trains. "We can't afford it any longer," he explained, "we've always lost money on those goddamn diners, and when there's no food to get, when restaurants are closing because they can't grab hold of a pound of horse meat anywhere, how can railroads be expected to do it? Why in hell should we have to feed the passengers, anyway? They're lucky if we give them transportation, they'd travel in cattle cars if necessary, let 'em pack their own box lunches, what do we care?—they've got no other trains to take!"

The telephone on her desk had become, not a voice of business, but an alarm siren for the desperate appeals of disaster. "Miss Taggart. we have no copper wire!" "Nails, Miss Taggart, plain nails, could you tell somebody to send us a keg of nails?" "Can you find any paint.

Miss Taggart, any sort of waterproof paint anywhere?"

But thirty million dollars of subsidy money from Washington had been plowed into Project Soybean—an enormous acreage in Louisiana, where a harvest of soybeans was ripening, as advocated and organized by Emma Chalmers, for the purpose of reconditioning the dietary habits of the nation. Emma Chalmers, better known as Kip's Ma, was an old sociologist who had hung about Washington for years, as other women of her age and type hang about barrooms. For some reason which nobody could define, the death of her son in the tunnel catastrophe had given her in Washington an aura of martyrdom, heightened by her recent conversion to Buddhism. "The soybean is a much more sturdy, nutritious and economical plant than all the extravagant foods which our wasteful, self-indulgent diet has conditioned us to expect," Kip's Ma had said over the radio; her voice always sounded as if it were falling in drops, not of water, but of mayonnaise.

"Soybeans make an excellent substitute for bread, meat, cereals and coffee—and if all of us were compelled to adopt soybeans as our staple diet, it would solve the national food crisis and make it possible to feed more people. The greatest food for the greatest number—that's my slogan. At a time of desperate public need, it's our duty to sacrifice our luxurious tastes and eat our way back to prosperity by adapting ourselves to the simple, wholesome foodstuff on which the peoples of the Orient have so nobly subsisted for centuries. There's a great deal that we could learn from the peoples of the Orient."

"Copper tubing, Miss Taggart, could you get some copper tubing for us somewhere?" the voices were pleading over her telephone. "Rail spikes, Miss Taggart!" "Screwdrivers, Miss Taggart!" "Light bulbs, Miss Taggart, there's no electric light bulbs to be had anywhere within two hundred miles of us!"

But five million dollars was being spent by the office of Morale Conditioning on the People's Opera Company, which traveled through the country, giving free performances to people who, on one meal a day, could not afford the energy to walk to the opera house. Seven million dollars had been granted to a psychologist in charge of a project to solve the world crisis by research into the nature of brother-love. Ten million dollars had been granted to the manufacturer of a new electronic cigarette lighter—but there were no cigarettes in the shops of the country. There were flashlights on the market, but no batteries; there were radios, but no tubes; there were cameras, but no film. The production of airplanes had been declared "temporarily suspended." Air travel for private purposes had been forbidden, and reserved exclusively for missions of "public need." An industrialist traveling to save his factory was not considered as publicly needed and could not get aboard a plane; an official traveling to collect taxes was and could.

"People are stealing nuts and bolts out of rail plates, Miss Taggart, stealing them at night, and our stock is running out, the division storehouse is bare, what are we to do, Miss Taggart?"

But a super-color-four-foot-screen television set was being erected for tourists in a People's Park in Washington—and a super-cyclotron for the study of cosmic rays was being erected at the State Science Institute, to be completed in ten years.

"The trouble with our modern world," Dr. Robert Stadler said over the radio, at the ceremonies launching the construction of the cyclotron, "is that too many people think too much. It is the cause of all our current fears and doubts. An enlightened citizenry should abandon the superstitious worship of logic and the outmoded reliance on reason.

Just as laymen leave medicine to doctors and electronics to engineers, so people who are not qualified to think should leave all thinking to the experts and have faith in the experts' higher authority. Only experts are able to understand the discoveries of modern science, which have proved that thought is an illusion and that the mind is a myth."

"This age of misery is God's punishment to man for the sin of relying on his mind!" snarled the triumphant voices of mystics of every sect and sort, on street corners, in rain-soaked tents, in crumbling temples. "This world ordeal is the result of man's attempt to live by reason! This is where thinking, logic and science have brought you! And there's to be no salvation until men realize that their mortal mind is impotent to solve their problems and go back to faith, faith in God, faith in a higher authority!"

And confronting her daily there was the final product of it all, the heir and collector—Cuffy Meigs, the man impervious to thought.

Cuffy Meigs strode through the offices of Taggart Transcontinental, wearing a semi-military tunic and slapping a shiny leather briefcase against his shiny leather leggings. He carried an automatic pistol in one pocket and a rabbit's foot in the other.

Cuffy Meigs tried to avoid her; his manner was part scorn, as if he considered her an impractical idealist, part superstitious awe, as if she possessed some incomprehensible power with which he preferred not to tangle. He acted as if her presence did not belong to his view of a railroad, yet as if hers were the one presence he dared not challenge.

There was a touch of impatient resentment in his manner toward Jim, as if it were Jim's duty to deal with her and to protect him; just as he expected Jim to keep the railroad in running order and leave him free for activities of more practical a nature, so he expected Jim to keep her in line, as part of the equipment.

Beyond the window of her office, like a patch of adhesive plaster stuck over a wound on the sky, the page of the calendar hung blank in the distance. The calendar had never been repaired since the night of Francisco's farewell. The officials who had rushed to the tower, that night, had knocked the calendar's motor to a stop, while tearing the film out of the projector. They had found the small square of Francisco's message, pasted into the strip of numbered days, but who had pasted it there, who had entered the locked room and when and how, was never discovered by the three commissions still investigating the case. Pending the outcome of their efforts, the page hung blank and still above the city.

It was blank on the afternoon of September 14, when the telephone rang in her office. "A man from Minnesota," said the voice of her secretary.

She had told her secretary that she would accept all calls of this kind. They were the appeals for help and her only source of information. At a time when the voices of railroad officials uttered nothing but sounds designed to avoid communication, the voices of nameless men were her last link to the system, the last sparks of reason and tortured honesty flashing briefly through the miles of Taggart track.

"Miss Taggart, it is not my place to call you, but nobody else will," said the voice that came on the wire, this time; the voice sounded young and too calm. "In another day or two, a disaster's going to happen here the like of which they've never seen, and they won't be able to hide it any longer, only it will be too late by then, and maybe it's too late already."

"What is it? Who are you?"

"One of your employees of the Minnesota Division, Miss Taggart.

In another day or two, the trains will stop running out of here—and you know what that means, at the height of the harvest. At the height of the biggest harvest we've ever had. They'll stop, because we have no cars. The harvest freight cars have not been sent to us this year."

"What did you say?" She felt as if minutes went by between the words of the unnatural voice that did not sound like her own.

"The cars have not been sent. Fifteen thousand should have been here by now. As far as I could learn, about eight thousand cars is all we got. I've been calling Division Headquarters for a week. They've been telling me not to worry. Last time, they told me to mind my own damn business. Every shed, silo, elevator, warehouse, garage and dance hall along the track is filled with wheat. At the Sherman elevators, there's a line of farmers' trucks and wagons two miles long, waiting on the road. At Lakewood Station, the square is packed solid and has been for three nights. They keep telling us it's only temporary, the cars are coming and we'll catch up. We won't. There aren't any cars coming.

I've called everyone I could. I know, by the way they answer. They know, and not one of them wants to admit it. They're scared, scared to move or speak or ask or answer. All they're thinking of is who will be blamed when that harvest rots here around the stations—and not of who's going to move it. Maybe nobody can, now. Maybe there's nothing you can do about it, either. But I thought you're the only person left who'd want to know and that somebody had to tell you."

"I . . ." She made an effort to breathe. "I see . . . Who are you?"

"The name wouldn't matter. When I hang up, I will have become a deserter. I don't want to stay here to see it when it happens. I don't want any part of it any more. Good luck to you, Miss Taggart."

She heard the click. "Thank you," she said over a dead wire.

The next time she noticed the office around her and permitted herself to feel, it was noon of the following day. She stood in the middle of the office, running stiff, spread fingers through a strand of hair, brushing it back off her face—and for an instant, she wondered where she was and what was the unbelievable thing that had happened in the last twenty hours. What she felt was horror, and she knew that she had felt it from the first words of the man on the wire, only there had been no time to know it.

There was not much that remained in her mind of the last twenty hours, only disconnected bits, held together by the single constant that had made them possible—by the soft, loose faces of men who fought to hide from themselves that they knew the answers to the questions she asked.

From the moment when she was told that the manager of the Car Service Department had been out of town for a week and had left no address where one could reach him—she knew that the report of the man from Minnesota was true. Then came the faces of the assistants in the Car Service Department, who would neither confirm the report nor deny it, but kept showing her papers, orders, forms, file cards that bore words in the English language, but no connection to intelligible facts. "Were the freight cars sent to Minnesota?" "Form 357W is filled out in every particular, as required by the office of the Co-ordinator in conformance with the instructions of the comptroller and by Directive 11-493."

"Were the freight cars sent to Minnesota?" "The entries for the months of August and September have been processed by—" "Were the freight cars sent to Minnesota?" "My files indicate the locations of freight cars by state, date, classification and—" "Do you know whether the cars were sent to Minnesota?" "As to the interstate motion of freight cars, I would have to refer you to the files of Mr. Benson and of—"

There was nothing to learn from the files. There were careful entries, each conveying four possible meanings, with references which led to references which led to a final reference which was missing from the files. It did not take her long to discover that the cars had not been sent to Minnesota and that the order had come from Cuffy Meigs—but who had carried it out, who had tangled the trail, what steps had been taken by what compliant men to preserve the appearance of a safely normal operation, without a single cry of protest to arouse some braver man's attention, who had falsified the reports, and where the cars had gone—seemed, at first, impossible to learn.

Through the hours of that night—while a small, desperate crew under the command of Eddie Willers kept calling every division point, every yard, depot, station, spur and siding of Taggart Transcontinental for every freight car in sight or reach, ordering them to unload, drop, dump, scuttle anything and proceed to Minnesota at once, while they kept calling the yards, stations and presidents of every railroad still half in existence anywhere across the map, begging for cars for Minnesota—she went through the task of tracing from face to coward's face the destination of the freight cars that had vanished.

She went from railroad executives to wealthy shippers to Washington officials and back to the railroad—by cab, by phone, by wire—pursuing a trail of half-uttered hints. The trail approached its end when she heard the pinch-lipped voice of a public relations, woman in a Washington office, saying resentfully over the telephone wire, "Well, after all, it is a matter of opinion whether wheat is essential to a nation's welfare—there are those of more progressive views who feel that the soybean is, perhaps, of far greater value"—and then, by noon, she stood in the middle of her office, knowing that the freight cars intended for the wheat of Minnesota had been sent, instead, to carry the soybeans from the Louisiana swamps of Kip's Ma's project.

The first story of the Minnesota disaster appeared in the newspapers three days later. It reported that the farmers who had waited in. the streets of Lakewood for six days, with no place to store their wheat and no trains to carry it, had demolished the local courthouse, the mayor's home and the railroad station. Then the stories vanished abruptly and the newspapers kept silent, then began to print admonitions urging people not to believe unpatriotic rumors.

While the flour mills and grain markets of the country were screaming over the phones and the telegraph wires, sending pleas to New York and delegations to Washington, while strings of freight cars from random corners of the continent were crawling like rusty caterpillars across the map in the direction of Minnesota—the wheat and hope of the country were waiting to perish along an empty track, under the unchanging green lights of signals that called for motion to trains that were not there.

At the communication desks of Taggart Transcontinental, a small crew kept calling for freight cars, repeating, like the crew of a sinking ship, an S.O.S, that remained unheard. There were freight cars held loaded for months in the yards of the companies owned by the friends of pull-peddlers, who ignored the frantic demands to unload the cars and release them. "You can tell that railroad to—" followed by untransmissible words, was the message of the Smather Brothers of Arizona in answer to the S.O.S. of New York.

In Minnesota, they were seizing cars from every siding, from the Mesabi Range, from the ore mines of Paul Larkin where the cars had stood waiting for a dribble of iron. They were pouring wheat into ore cars, into coal cars, into boarded stock cars that went spilling thin gold trickles along the track as they clattered off. They were pouring wheat into passenger coaches, over seats, racks and fixtures, to send it off, to get it moving, even if it went moving into track-side ditches in the sudden crash of breaking springs, in the explosions set off by burning journal boxes.

They fought for movement, for movement with no thought of destination, for movement as such, like a paralytic under a stroke, struggling in wild, stiff, incredulous jerks against the realization that movement was suddenly impossible. There were no other railroads: James Taggart had killed them; there were no boats on the Lakes: Paul Larkin had destroyed them. There was only the single line of rail and a net of neglected highways.

The trucks and wagons of waiting farmers started trickling blindly down the roads, with no maps, no gas, no feed for horses—moving south, south toward the vision of flour mills awaiting them somewhere, with no knowledge of the distances ahead, but with the knowledge of death behind them—moving, to collapse on the roads, in the gullies, in the breaks of rotted bridges. One farmer was found, half a mile south of the wreck of his truck, lying dead in a ditch, face down, still clutching a sack of wheat on his shoulders. Then rain clouds burst over the prairies of Minnesota; the rain went eating the wheat into rot at the waiting railroad stations; it went hammering the piles spilled along the roads, washing gold kernels into the soil.

The men in Washington were last to be reached by the panic. They watched, not the news from Minnesota, but the precarious balance of their friendships and commitments; they weighed, not the fate of the harvest, but the unknowable result of unpredictable emotions in unthinking men of unlimited power. They waited, they evaded all pleas, they declared, "Oh, ridiculous, there's nothing to worry about! Those Taggart people have always moved that wheat on schedule, they'll find some way to move it!"

Then, when the State Chief Executive of Minnesota sent a request to Washington for the assistance of the Army against the riots he was unable to control—three directives burst forth within two hours, stopping all trains in the country, commandeering all cars to speed to Minnesota.

An order signed by Wesley Mouch demanded the immediate release of the freight cars held in the service of Kip's Ma. But by that time, it was too late. Ma's freight cars were in California, where the soybeans had been sent to a progressive concern made up of sociologists preaching the cult of Oriental austerity, and of businessmen formerly in the numbers racket.

In Minnesota, farmers were setting fire to their own farms, they were demolishing grain elevators and the homes of county officials, they were fighting along the track of the railroad, some to tear it up, some to defend it with their lives—and, with no goal to reach save violence, they were dying in the streets of gutted towns and in the silent gullies of a roadless night.

Then there was only the acrid stench of grain rotting in half-smouldering piles—a few columns of smoke rising from the plains, standing still in the air over blackened ruins—and, in an office in Pennsylvania, Hank Rearden sitting at his desk, looking at a list of men who had gone bankrupt: they were the manufacturers of farm equipment, who could not be paid and would not be able to pay him.

The harvest of soybeans did not reach the markets of the country: it had been reaped prematurely, it was moldy and unfit for consumption.

On the night of October 15, a copper wire broke in New York City, in an underground control tower of the Taggart Terminal, extinguishing the lights of the signals.

It was only the breach of one wire, but it produced a short circuit in the interlocking traffic system, and the signals of motion or danger disappeared from the panels of the control towers and from among the strands of rail. The red and green lenses remained red and green, not with the living radiance of sight, but with the dead stare of glass eyes. On the edge of the city, a cluster of trains gathered at the entrance to the Terminal tunnels and grew through the minutes of stillness, like blood dammed by a clot inside a vein, unable to rush into the chambers of the heart.

Dagny, that night, was sitting at a table in a private dining room of the Wayne-Falkland. The wax of candles was dripping down on the white camellias and laurel leaves at the base of the silver candlesticks, arithmetical calculations were penciled on the damask linen tablecloth, and a cigar butt was swimming in a finger bowl. The six men in formal dinner jackets, facing her about the table, were Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, Dr. Floyd Ferris, Clem Weatherby, James Taggart and Cuffy Meigs.

"Why?" she had asked, when Jim had told her that she had to attend that dinner. "Well . . . because our Board of Directors is to meet next week." "And?" "You're interested in what's going to be decided about our Minnesota Line, aren't you?" "Is that going to be decided at the Board meeting?'1 "Well, not exactly." "Is it going to be decided at this dinner?" "Not exactly, but . . . oh, why do you always have to be so definite? Nothing's ever definite. Besides, they insisted that they wanted you to come." "Why?" "Isn't that sufficient?"

She did not ask why those men chose to make all their crucial decisions at parties of this kind; she knew that they did. She knew that behind the clattering, lumbering pretense of their council sessions, committee meetings and mass debates, the decisions were made in advance, in furtive informality, at luncheons, dinners and bars, the graver the issue, the more casual the method of settling it. It was the first time that they had asked her, the outsider, the enemy, to one of those secret sessions; it was, she thought, an acknowledgment of the fact that they needed her and, perhaps, the first step of their surrender; it was a chance she could not leave untaken.

But as she sat in the candlelight of the dining room, she felt certain that she had no chance; she felt restlessly unable to accept that certainty, since she could not grasp its reason, yet lethargically reluctant to pursue any inquiry.

"As, I think, you will concede, Miss Taggart, there now seems to be no economic justification for the continued existence of a railroad line in Minnesota, which . . ." "And even Miss Taggart will, I'm sure, agree that certain temporary retrenchments seem to be indicated, until . . ." "Nobody, not even Miss Taggart, will deny that there are times when it is necessary to sacrifice the parts for the sake of the whole . . ." As she listened to the mentions of her name tossed into the conversation at half-hour intervals, tossed perfunctorily, with the speaker's eyes never glancing in her direction, she wondered what motive had made them want her to be present. It was not an attempt to delude her into believing that they were consulting her, but worse: an attempt to delude themselves into believing that she had agreed. They asked her questions at times and interrupted her before she had completed the first sentence of the answer. They seemed to want her approval, without having to know whether she approved or not.

Some crudely childish form of self-deception had made them choose to give to this occasion the decorous setting of a formal dinner. They acted as if they hoped to gain, from the objects of gracious luxury, the power and the honor of which those objects had once been the product and symbol—they acted, she thought, like those savages who devour the corpse of an adversary in the hope of acquiring his strength and his virtue.

She regretted that she was dressed as she was. "It's formal," Jim had told her, "but don't overdo it . . . what I mean is, don't look too rich . . . business people should avoid any appearance of arrogance these days . . . not that you should look shabby, but if you could just seem to suggest . . . well, humility . . . it would please them, you know, it would make them feel big." "Really?" she had said, turning away.

She wore a black dress that looked as if it were no more than a piece of cloth crossed over her breasts and falling to her feet in the soft folds of a Grecian tunic; it was made of satin, a satin so light and thin that it could have served as the stuff of a nightgown. The luster of the cloth, streaming and shifting with her movements, made it look as if the light of the room she entered were her personal property, sensitively obedient to-the motions of her body, wrapping her in a sheet of radiance more luxurious than the texture of brocade, underscoring the pliant fragility of her figure, giving her an air of so natural an elegance that it could afford to be scornfully casual. She wore a single piece of jewelry, a diamond clip at the edge of the black neckline, that kept flashing with the imperceptible motion of her breath, like a transformer converting a flicker into fire, making one conscious, not of the gems, but of the living beat behind them; it flashed like a military decoration, like wealth worn as a badge of honor. She wore no other ornament, only the sweep of a black velvet cape, more arrogantly, ostentatiously patrician than any spread of sables.

She regretted it now, as she looked at the men before her; she felt the embarrassing guilt of pointlessness, as if she had tried to defy the figures in a waxworks. She saw a mindless resentment in their eyes and a sneaking trace of the lifeless, sexless, smutty leer with which men look at a poster advertising burlesque.

"It's a great responsibility," said Eugene Lawson, "to hold the decision of life or death over thousands of people and to sacrifice them when necessary, but we mast have the courage to do it." His soft lips seemed to twist into a smile.

"The only factors to consider are land acreage and population figures," said Dr. Ferris in a statistical voice, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. "Since it is no longer possible to maintain both the Minnesota Line and the transcontinental traffic of this railroad, the choice is between Minnesota and those states west of the Rockies which were cut off by the failure of the Taggart Tunnel, as well as the neighboring states of Montana, Idaho, Oregon, which means, practically speaking, the whole of the Northwest. When you compute the acreage and the number of heads in both areas, it's obvious that we should scuttle Minnesota rather than give up our lines of communication over a third of a continent."

"1 won't give up the continent," said Wesley Mouch, staring down at his dish of ice cream, his voice hurt and stubborn.

She was thinking of the Mesabi Range, the last of the major sources of iron ore, she was thinking of the Minnesota farmers, such as were left of them, the best producers of wheat in the country—she was thinking that the end of Minnesota would end Wisconsin, then Michigan, then Illinois—she was seeing the red breath of the factories dying out over the industrial East—as against the empty miles of western sands, of scraggly pastures and abandoned ranches.

"The figures indicate," said Mr. Weatherby primly, "that the continued maintenance of both areas seems to be impossible. The railway track and equipment of one has to be dismantled to provide the material for the maintenance of the other."

She noticed that Clem Weatherby, their technical expert on railroads, was the man of least influence among them, and Cuffy Meigs—of most.

Cuffy Meigs sat sprawled in his chair, with a look of patronizing tolerance for their game of wasting time on discussions. He spoke little, but when he did, it was to snap decisively, with a contemptuous grin, "Pipe down, Jimmy!" or, "Nuts, Wes, you're talking through your hat!" She noticed that neither Jim nor Mouch resented it. They seemed to welcome the authority of his assurance; they were accepting him as their master.

"We have to be practical," Dr. Ferris kept saying. "We have to. be scientific."

"I need the economy of the country as a whole," Wesley Mouch kept repeating. "I need the production of a nation."

"Is it economics that you're talking about? Is it production?" she said, whenever her cold, measured voice was able to seize a brief stretch of their tune. "If it is, then give us leeway to save the Eastern states. That's all that's left of the country—and of the world. If you let us save that, we'll have a chance to rebuild the rest. If not, it's the end.

Let the Atlantic Southern take care of such transcontinental traffic as still exists. Let the local railroads take care of the Northwest. But let Taggart Transcontinental drop everything else—yes, everything—and devote all our resources, equipment and rail to the traffic of the Eastern states. Let us shrink back to the start of this country, but let us hold that start. We'll run no trains west of the Missouri. We'll become a local railroad—the local of the industrial East. Let us save our industries.

There's nothing left to save in the West. You can run agriculture for centuries by manual labor and oxcarts. But destroy the last of this country's industrial plant—and centuries of effort won't be able to rebuild it or to gather the economic strength to make a start. How do you expect our industries—or railroads—to survive without steel? How do you expect any steel to be produced if you cut off the supply of iron ore? Save Minnesota, whatever's left of it. The country? You have no country to save, if its industries perish. You can sacrifice a leg or an arm. You can't save a body by sacrificing its heart and brain. Save our industries. Save Minnesota. Save the Eastern Seaboard."

It was no use. She said it as many times, with as many details, statistics, figures, proofs, as she could force out of her weary mind into their evasive hearing. It was no use. They neither refuted nor agreed; they merely looked as if her arguments were beside the point. There was a sound of hidden emphasis in their answers, as if they were giving her an explanation, but in a code to which she had no key.

"There's trouble in California," said Wesley Mouch sullenly. "Their state legislature's been acting pretty huffy. There's talk of seceding from the Union."

"Oregon is overrun by gangs of deserters," said Clem Weatherby cautiously. "They murdered two tax collectors within the last three months."

"The importance of industry to a civilization has been grossly overemphasized," said Dr. Ferris dreamily. "What is now known as the People's State of India has existed for centuries without any industrial development whatever."

"People could do with fewer material gadgets and a sterner discipline of privations," said Eugene Lawson eagerly. "It would be good for them."

"Oh hell, are you going to let that dame talk you into letting the richest country on earth slip through your fingers?" said Cuffy Meigs, leaping to his feet. "It's a fine time to give up a whole continent—and in exchange for what? For a dinky little state that's milked dry, anyway!

I say ditch Minnesota, but hold onto your transcontinental dragnet.

With trouble and riots everywhere, you won't be able to keep people in line unless you have transportation—troop transportation—unless you hold your soldiers within a few days' journey of any point on the continent. This is no time to retrench. Don't get yellow, listening to all that talk. You've got the country in your pocket. Just keep it there."

"In the long run—" Mouch started uncertainly.

"In the long run, we'll all be dead," snapped Cuffy Meigs. He was pacing restlessly. "Retrenching, hell! There's plenty of pickings left in California and Oregon and all those places. What I've been thinking is, we ought to think of expanding—the way things are, there's nobody to stop us, it's there for the taking—Mexico, and Canada maybe—it ought to be a cinch."

Then she saw the answer; she saw the secret premise behind their words. With all of their noisy devotion to the age of science, their hysterically technological jargon, their cyclotrons, their sound rays, these men were moved forward, not by the image of an industrial skyline, but by the vision of that form of existence which the industrialists had swept away—the vision of a fat, unhygienic rajah of India, with vacant eyes staring in indolent stupor out of stagnant layers of flesh, with nothing to do but run precious gems through his fingers and, once in a while, stick a knife into the body of a starved, toil-dazed, germeaten creature, as a claim to a few grains of the creature's rice, then claim it from hundreds of millions of such creatures and thus let the rice grains gather into gems.

She had thought that industrial production was a value not to be questioned by anyone; she had thought that these men's urge to expropriate the factories of others was their acknowledgment of the factories value. She, born of the industrial revolution, had not held as conceivable, had forgotten along with the tales of astrology and alchemy, what these men knew in their secret, furtive souls, knew not by means of thought, but by means of that nameless muck which they called their instincts and emotions: that so long as men struggle to stay alive, they'll never produce so little but that the man with the club won't be able to seize it and leave them still less, provided millions of them are willing to submit—that the harder their work and the less their gain, the more submissive the fiber of their spirit—that men who live by pulling levers at an electric switchboard, are not easily ruled, but men who live by digging the soil with their naked fingers, are—that the feudal baron did not need electronic factories in order to drink his brains away out of jeweled goblets, and neither did the rajahs of the People's State of India.

She saw what they wanted and to what goal their "instincts," which they called unaccountable, were leading them. She saw that Eugene Lawson, the humanitarian, took pleasure at the prospect of human starvation—and Dr. Ferris, the scientist, was dreaming of the day when men would return to the hand-plow.

Incredulity and indifference were her only reaction: incredulity, because she could not conceive of what would bring human beings to such a state—indifference, because she could not regard those who reached it, as human any longer. They went on talking, but she was unable to speak or to listen. She caught herself feeling that her only desire was now to get home and fall asleep.

"Miss Taggart," said a politely rational, faintly anxious voice—and jerking her head up, she saw the courteous figure of a waiter, "the assistant manager of the Taggart Terminal is on the telephone, requesting permission to speak to you at once. He says it's an emergency.”

It was a relief to leap to her feet and get out of that room, even if in answer to the call of some new disaster. It was a relief to hear the assistant manager's voice, even though it was saying, "The interlocker system is out, Miss Taggart. The signals are dead. There are eight incoming trains held up and six outgoing. We can't move them in or out of the tunnels, we can't find the chief engineer, we can't locate the breach of the circuit, we have no copper wire for repairs, we don't know what to do, we—" "111 be right down," she said, dropping the receiver.

Hurrying to the elevator, then half-running through the stately lobby of the Wayne-Falkland, she felt herself returning to life at the summons of the possibility of action.

Taxicabs were rare, these days, and none came in answer to the doorman's whistle. She started rapidly down the street, forgetting what she wore, wondering why the touch of the wind seemed too cold and too ultimately close.

Her mind on the Terminal ahead, she was startled by the loveliness of a sudden sight: she saw the slender figure of a woman hurrying toward her, the ray of a lamppost sweeping over lustrous hair, naked arms, the swirl of a black cape and the flame of a diamond on her breast, with the long, empty corridor of a city street behind her and skyscrapers drawn by lonely dots of light. The knowledge that she was seeing her own reflection in the side mirror of a florist's window, came an instant too late: she had felt the enchantment of the full context to which that image and city belonged. Then she felt a stab of desolate loneliness, much wider a loneliness than the span of an empty street—and a stab of anger at herself, at the preposterous contrast between her appearance and the context of this night and age.

She saw a taxi turn a corner, she waved to it and leaped in, slamming the door against a feeling which she hoped to leave behind her, on the empty pavement by a florist's window. But she knew—in self mockery, in bitterness, in longing—that this feeling was the sense of expectation she had felt at her first ball and at those rare times when she had wanted the outward beauty of existence to match its inner splendor. What a time to think of it! she told herself in mockery—not now! she cried to herself in anger—but a desolate voice kept asking her quietly to the rattle of the taxi's wheels: You who believed you must live for your happiness, what do you now have left of it?—what are you gaining from your struggle?—yes! say it honestly: what's in it for you?—or are you becoming one of those abject altruists who has no answer to that question any longer? . . . Not now!—she ordered, as the glowing entrance to the Taggart Terminal flared up in the rectangle of the taxi's windshield.

The men in the Terminal manager's office were like extinguished signals, as if here, too, a circuit were broken and there were no living current to make them move. They looked at her with a kind of inanimate passivity, as if it made no difference whether she let them stay still or threw a switch to set them in motion.

The Terminal manager was absent. The chief engineer could not be found; he had been seen at the Terminal two hours ago, not since. The assistant manager had exhausted his power of initiative by volunteering to call her. The others volunteered nothing. The signal engineer was a college-boyish man in his thirties, who kept saying aggressively, "But this has never happened before, Miss Taggart! The interlocker has never failed. It's not supposed to fail. We know our jobs, we can take care of it as well as anybody can—but not if it breaks down when it's not supposed to!" She could not tell whether the dispatcher, an elderly man with years of railroad work behind him, still retained his intelligence but chose to hide it, or whether months of suppressing it had choked it for good, granting him the safety of stagnation, "We don't know what to do, Miss Taggart." "We don't know whom to call for what sort of permission." "There are no rules to cover an emergency of this kind." "There aren't even any rules about who's to lay down the rules for it!"

She listened, she reached for the telephone without a word of explanation, she ordered the operator to get her the operating vice-president of the Atlantic Southern in Chicago, to get him at his home and out of bed, if necessary.

"George? Dagny Taggart," she said, when the voice of her competitor came on the wire. "Will you lend me the signal engineer of your Chicago terminal, Charles Murray, for twenty-four hours? . . .

Yes. . . . Right. . . . Put him aboard a plane and get him here as fast as you can. Tell him we'll pay three thousand dollars. . . . Yes, for the one day. . . . Yes, as bad as that. . . . Yes, I'll pay him in cash, out of my own pocket, if necessary. I'll pay whatever it takes to bribe his way aboard a plane, but get him on the first plane out of Chicago. . . . No, George, not one—not a single mind left on Taggart Transcontinental. . . . Yes, I'll get all the papers, exemptions, exceptions and emergency permissions. . . . Thanks, George. So long."

She hung up and spoke rapidly to the men before her, not to hear the stillness of the room and of the Terminal, where no sound of wheels was beating any longer, not to hear the bitter words which the stillness seemed to repeat: Not a single mind left on Taggart Transcontinental. . . .

"Get a wrecking train and crew ready at once,'1 she said. "Send them out on the Hudson Line, with orders to tear down every foot of copper wire, any copper wire, lights, signals, telephone, everything that's company property. Have it here by morning." "But, Miss Taggart! Our service on the Hudson Line is only temporarily suspended and the Unification Board has refused us permission to dismantle the line!" "I'll be responsible." "But how are we going to get the wrecking train out of here, when there aren't any signals?" "There will be signals in half an hour." "How?" "Come on," she said, rising to her feet.

They followed her as she hurried down the passenger platforms, past the huddling, shifting groups of travelers by the motionless trains. She hurried down a narrow catwalk, through a maze of rail, past blinded signals and frozen switches, with nothing but the beat of her satin sandals to fill the great vaults of the underground tunnels of Taggart Transcontinental, with the hollow creaking of planks under the slower steps of men trailing her like a reluctant echo—she hurried to the lighted glass cube of Tower A, that hung in the darkness like a crown without a body, the crown of a deposed ruler above a realm of empty tracks.

The tower director was too expert a man at too exacting a job to be able wholly to conceal the dangerous burden of intelligence. He understood what she wanted him to do from her first few words and answered only with an abrupt "Yes, ma'am," but he was bent over his charts by the time the others came following her up the iron stairway, he was grimly at work on the most humiliating job of calculation he had ever had to perform in his long career. She knew how fully he understood it, from a single glance he threw at her, a glance of indignation and endurance that matched some emotion he had caught in her face, "We'll do it first and feel about it afterwards," she said, even though he had made no comment. "Yes, ma'am," he answered woodenly.

His room, on the top of an underground tower, was like a glass verandah overlooking what had once been the swiftest, richest and most orderly stream in the world. He had been trained to chart the course of over ninety trains an hour and to watch them roll safely through a maze of tracks and switches in and out of the Terminal, under his glass walls and his fingertips. Now, for the first time, he was looking out at the empty darkness of a dried channel.

Through the open door of the relay room, she saw the tower men standing grimly idle—the men whose jobs had never permitted a moment's relaxation—standing by the long rows that looked like vertical copper pleats, like shelves of books and as much of a monument to human intelligence. The pull of one of the small levers, which protruded like bookmarks from the shelves, threw thousands of electric circuits into motion, made thousands of contacts and broke as many others, set dozens of switches to clear a chosen course and dozens of signals to light it, with no error left possible, no chance, no contradiction —an enormous complexity of thought condensed into one movement of a human hand to set and insure the course of a train, that hundreds of trains might safely rush by, that thousands of tons of metal and lives might pass in speeding streaks a breath away from one another, protected by nothing but a thought, the thought of the man who devised the levers. But they—she looked at the face of her signal engineer —they believed that that muscular contraction of a hand was the only thing required to move the traffic—and now the tower men stood idle—and on the great panels in front of the tower director, the red and green lights, which had flashed announcing the progress of trains at a distance of miles, were now so many glass beads—like the glass beads for which another breed of savages had once sold the Island of Manhattan.

"Calf all of your unskilled laborers," she said to the assistant manager, "the section hands, trackwalkers, engine wipers, whoever's in the Terminal right now, and have them come here at once."

"Here?"

"Here," she said, pointing at the tracks outside the tower. "Call all your switchmen, too. Phone your storehouse and have them bring here every lantern they can lay their hands on, any sort of lantern, conductors' lanterns, storm lanterns, anything."

"Lanterns, Miss Taggart?"

"Get going."

"Yes, ma'am."

"What is it we're doing, Miss Taggart?" asked the dispatcher.

"We're going to move trains and we're going "to move them manually."

"Manually?" said the signal engineer.

"Yes, brother! Now why should you be shocked?" She could not resist it. "Man is only muscles, isn't he? We're going back—back to where there were no interlocking systems, no semaphores, no electricity —back to the time when train signals were not steel and wire, but men holding lanterns. Physical men, serving as lampposts. You've advocated it long enough—you got what you wanted. Oh, you thought that your tools would determine your ideas? But it happens to be the other way around—and now you're going to see the kind of tools your ideas have determined!"

But even to go back took an act of intelligence—she thought, feeling the paradox of her own position, as she looked at the lethargy of the faces around her.

"How will we work the switches, Miss Taggart?"

"By hand."

"And the signals?"

"By hand."

"How?"

"By placing a man with a lantern at every signal post."

"How? There's not enough clearance."

"We'll use alternate tracks."

"How will the men know which way to throw the switches?"

"By written orders."

"Uh?"

"By written orders—just as in the old days." She pointed to the tower director. "He's working out a schedule of how to move the trains and which tracks to use. He'll write out an. order for every signal and switch, he'll pick some men as runners and they'll keep delivering the orders to every post—and it will take hours to do what used to take minutes, but we'll get those waiting trains into the Terminal and out on the road-"

"We're to work it that way all night?"

"And all day tomorrow—until the engineer who's got the brains for it, shows you how to repair the interlocker."

"There's nothing in the union contracts about men standing with lanterns. There's going to be trouble. The union will object."

"Let them come to me."

"The Unification Board will object."

"I'll be responsible."

"Well, I wouldn't want to be held for giving the orders—"

"I'll give the orders."

She stepped out on the landing of the iron stairway that hung on the side of the tower; she was fighting for self-control. It seemed to her for a moment as if she, too, were a precision instrument of high technology, left without electric current, trying to run a transcontinental railroad by means of her two hands. She looked out at the great, silent darkness of the Taggart underground—and she felt a stab of burning humiliation that she should now see it brought down to the level where human lampposts would stand in its tunnels as its last memorial statues.

She could barely distinguish the faces of the men when they gathered at the foot of the tower. They came streaming silently through the darkness and stood without moving in the bluish murk, with blue bulbs on the walls behind them and patches of light falling on their shoulders from the tower's windows. She could see the greasy garments, the slack, muscular bodies, the limply hanging arms of men drained by the unrewarding exhaustion of a labor that required no thought. These were the dregs of the railroad, the younger men who could now seek no chance to rise and the older men who had never wanted to seek it.

They stood in silence, not with the apprehensive curiosity of workmen, but with the heavy indifference of convicts.

"The orders which you are about to receive have come from me," she said, standing above them on the iron stairs, speaking with resonant clarity. "The men who'll issue them are acting under my instructions.

The interlocking control system has broken down. It will now be replaced by human labor. Train service will be resumed at once."

She noticed some faces in the crowd staring at her with a peculiar look: with a veiled resentment and the kind of insolent curiosity that made her suddenly conscious of being a woman. Then she remembered what she wore, and thought that it did look preposterous—and then, at the sudden stab of some violent impulse that felt like defiance and like loyalty to the full, real meaning of the moment, she threw her cape back and stood in the raw glare of light, under the sooted columns, like a figure at a formal reception, sternly erect, flaunting the luxury of naked arms, of glowing black satin, of a diamond flashing like a military cross.

"The tower director will assign switchmen to their posts. He will select men for the job of signaling trains by means of lanterns and for the task of transmitting his orders. Trains will—"

She was fighting to drown a bitter voice that seemed to be saying: That's all they're fit for, these men, if even that . . . there's not a single mind left anywhere on Taggart Transcontinental. . . .

"Trains will continue to be moved in and out of the Terminal. You will remain at your posts until—"

Then she stopped. It was his eyes and hair that she saw first—the ruthlessly perceptive eyes, the streaks of hair shaded from gold to copper that seemed to reflect the glow of sunlight in the murk of the underground—she saw John Galt among the chain gang of the mindless, John Galt in greasy overalls and rolled shirt sleeves, she saw his weightless way of standing, his face held lifted, his eyes looking at her as if he had seen this moment many moments ago.

"What's the matter, Miss Taggart?"

It was the soft voice of the tower director, who stood by her side, with some sort of paper in his hand—and she thought it was strange to emerge from a span of unconsciousness which had been the span of the sharpest awareness she had ever experienced, only she did not know how long it had lasted or where she was or why. She had been aware of Galt's face, she had been seeing, in the shape of his mouth, in the planes of his cheeks, the crackup of that implacable serenity which had always been his, but he still retained it in his look of acknowledging the breach, of admitting that this moment was too much even for him.

She knew that she went on speaking, because those around her looked as if they were listening, though she could not hear a sound, she went on speaking as if carrying out a hypnotic order given to herself some endless time ago, knowing only that the completion of that order was a form of defiance against him, neither knowing nor hearing her own words.

She felt as if she were standing in a radiant silence where sight was her only capacity and his face was its only object, and the sight of his face was like a speech in the form of a pressure at the base of her throat. It seemed so natural that he should be here, it seemed so unendurably simple—she felt as if the shock were not his presence, but the presence of others on the tracks of her railroad, where he belonged and they did not. She was seeing those moments aboard a train when, at its plunge into the tunnels, she had felt a sudden, solemn tension, as if this place were showing her in naked simplicity the essence of her railroad and of her life, the union of consciousness and matter, the frozen form of a mind's ingenuity giving physical existence to its purpose; she had felt a sense of sudden hope, as if this place held the meaning of all of her values, and a sense of secret excitement, as if a nameless promise were awaiting her under the ground—it was right that she should now meet him here, he had been the meaning and the promise—she was not seeing his clothing any longer, nor to what level her railroad had reduced him—she was seeing only the vanishing torture of the months when he had been outside her reach—she was seeing in his face the confession of what those months had cost him —the only speech she heard was as if she were saying to him: This is the reward for all my days—and as if he were answering: For all of mine.

She knew that she had finished speaking to the strangers when she saw that the tower director had stepped forward and was saying something to them, glancing at a list in his hand. Then, drawn by a sense of irresistible certainty, she found herself descending the stairs, slipping away from the crowd, not toward the platforms and the exit, but into the darkness of the abandoned tunnels. You will follow me, she thought —and felt as if the thought were not in words, but in the tension of her muscles, the tension of her will to accomplish a thing she knew to be outside her power, yet she knew with certainty that it would be accomplished and by her wish . . . no, she thought, not by her wish, but by its total Tightness. You will follow me—it was neither plea nor prayer nor demand., but the quiet statement of a fact, it contained the whole of her power of knowledge and the whole of the knowledge she had earned through the years. You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached. You will follow me—she felt an exultant assurance, which was neither hope nor faith, but an act of worship for the logic of existence.

She was hurrying down the remnants of abandoned rails, down the long, dark corridors twisting through granite. She lost the sound of the director's voice behind her. Then she felt the beat of her arteries and heard, in answering rhythm, the beat of the city above her head, but she felt as if she heard the motion of her blood as a sound filling the silence, and the motion of the city as the beat inside her body—and, far behind her, she heard the sound of steps. She did not glance back.

She went faster.

She went past the locked iron door where the remnant of his motor was still hidden, she did not stop, but a faint shudder was her answer to the sudden glimpse of the unity and logic in the events of the last two years. A string of blue lights went on into the darkness, over patches of glistening granite, over broken sandbags spilling drifts on the rails, over rusty piles of scrap metal. When she heard the steps coming closer, she stopped and turned to look back.

She saw a sweep of blue light flash briefly on the shining strands of Galt's hair, she caught the pale outline of his face and the dark hollows of his eyes. The face disappeared, but the sound of his steps served as the link to the next blue light that swept across the line of his eyes, the eyes that remained held level, directed ahead—and she felt certain that she had stayed in his sight from the moment he had seen her at the tower.

She heard the beat of the city above them—these tunnels, she had once thought, were the roots of the city and of all the motion reaching to the sky—but they, she thought, John Galt and she, were the living power within these roots, they were the start and aim and meaning—he, too, she thought, heard the beat of the city as the beat of his body.

She threw her cape back, she stood defiantly straight, as he had seen her stand on the steps of the tower—as he had seen her for the first time, ten years ago, here, under the ground—she was hearing the words of his confession, not as words, but by means of that beating which made it so difficult to breathe: You looked like a symbol of luxury and you belonged in the place that was its source . . . you seemed to bring the enjoyment of life back to its rightful owners . . . you had a look of energy and of its reward, together . . . and I was the first man who had ever stated in what manner these two were inseparable. . . .

The next span of moments was like flashes of light in stretches of blinded unconsciousness—the moment when she saw his face, as he stopped beside her, when she saw the unastonished calm, the leashed intensity, the laughter of understanding in the dark green eyes—the moment when she knew what he saw in her face, by the tight, drawn harshness of his lips—the moment when she felt his mouth on hers, when she felt the shape of his mouth both as an absolute shape and as a liquid filling her body—then the motion of his lips down the line of her throat, a drinking motion that left a trail of bruises—then the sparkle of her diamond clip against the trembling copper of his hair.

Then she was conscious of nothing but the sensations of her body, because her body acquired the sudden power to let her know her most complex values by direct perception. Just as her eyes had the power to translate wave lengths of energy into sight, just as her ears had the power to translate vibrations into sound, so her body now had the power to translate the energy that had moved all the choices of her life, into immediate sensory perception. It was not the pressure of a hand that made her tremble, but the instantaneous sum of its meaning, the knowledge that it was his hand, that it moved as if her flesh were his possession, that its movement was his signature of acceptance under the whole of that achievement which was herself—it was only a sensation of physical pleasure, but it contained her worship of him, of everything that was his person and his life—from the night of the mass meeting in a factory in Wisconsin, to the Atlantis of a valley hidden in the Rocky Mountains, to the triumphant mockery of the green eyes of the superlative intelligence above a worker's figure at the foot of the tower—it contained her pride in herself and that it should be she whom he had chosen as his mirror, that it should be her body which was now giving him the sum of his existence, as his body was giving her the sum of hers. These were the things it contained—but what she knew was only the sensation of the movement of his hand on her breasts.

He tore off her cape and she felt the slenderness of her own body by means of the circle of his arms, as if his person were only a tool for her triumphant awareness of herself, but that self were only a tool for her awareness of him. It was as if she were reaching the limit of her capacity to feel, yet what she felt was like a cry of impatient demand, which she was now incapable of naming, except that it had the same quality of ambition as the course of her life, the same inexhaustible quality of radiant greed.

He pulled her head back for a moment, to look straight into her eyes, to let her see his, to let her know the full meaning of their actions, as if throwing the spotlight of consciousness upon them for the meeting of their eyes in a moment of intimacy greater than the one to come.

Then she felt the mesh of burlap striking the skin of her shoulders, she found herself lying on the broken sandbags, she saw the long, tight gleam of her stockings, she felt his mouth pressed to her ankle, then rising in a tortured motion up the line of her leg, as if he wished to own its shape by means of his lips, then she felt her teeth sinking into the flesh of his arm, she felt the sweep of his elbow knocking her head aside and his mouth seizing her lips with a pressure more viciously painful than hers—then she felt, when it hit her throat, that which she knew only as an upward streak of motion that released and united her body into a single shock of pleasure—then she knew nothing but the motion of his body and the driving greed that went reaching on and on, as if she were not a person any longer, only a sensation of endless reaching for the impossible—then she knew that it was possible, and she gasped and lay still, knowing that nothing more could be desired, ever.

He lay beside her, on his back, looking up at the darkness of the granite vault above them, she saw him stretched on the jagged slant of sandbags as if his body were fluid in relaxation, she saw the black wedge of her cape flung across the rails at their feet, there were beads of moisture twinkling on the vault, shifting slowly, running into invisible cracks, like the lights of a distant traffic. When he spoke, his voice sounded as if he were quietly continuing a sentence in answer to the questions in her mind, as if he had nothing to hide from her any longer and what he owed her now was only the act of undressing his soul, as simply as he would have undressed his body: ". . . this is how I've watched you for ten years . . . from here, from under the ground under your feet . . . knowing every move you made in your office at the top of the building, but never seeing you, never enough . . . ten years of nights, spent waiting to catch a glimpse of you, here, on the platforms, when you boarded a train. . . .

Whenever the order came down to couple your car, I'd know of it and wait and see you come down the ramp, and wish you didn't walk so fast . . . it was so much like you, that walk, I'd know it anywhere . . . your walk and those legs of yours . . . it was always your legs that I'd see first, hurrying down the ramp, going past me as I looked up at you from a dark side track below. . . . I think I could have molded a sculpture of your legs, I knew them, not with my eyes, but with the palms of my hands when I watched you go by . . . when I turned back to my work . . . when I went home just before sunrise for the three hours of sleep which I didn't get . . ."

"I love you," she said, her voice quiet and almost toneless except for a fragile sound of youth.

He closed his eyes, as if letting the sound travel through the years behind them. "Ten years, Dagny . . ., except that once there were a few weeks when I had you before me, in plain sight, within reach, not hurrying away, but held still, as on a lighted stage, a private stage for me to watch . . . and I watched you for hours through many evenings . . . in the lighted window of an office that was called the John Galt Line. . . . And one night—"

Her breath was a faint gasp. "Was it you, that night?"

"Did you see me?"

"I saw your shadow . . . on the pavement . . . pacing back and forth . . . it looked like a struggle . . . it looked like—" She stopped; she did not want to say "torture."

"It was," he said quietly. "That night, I wanted to walk in, to face you, to speak, to . . . That was the night I came closest to breaking my oath, when I saw you slumped across your desk, when I saw you broken by the burden you were carrying—"

"John, that night, it was you that I was thinking of . . . only I didn't know it . . ."

"But, you see, 7 knew it,"

". . . it was you, all my life, through everything I did and everything I wanted . . . "

"I know it."

"John, the hardest was not when I left you in the valley . . . it was—"

"Your radio speech, the day you returned?"

"Yes! Were you listening?"

"Of course. I'm glad you did it. It was a magnificent thing to do. And I—I knew it, anyway."

"You knew . . . about Hank Rearden?"

"Before I saw you in the valley."

"Was it . . . when you learned about him, had you expected it?"

"No."

"Was it . . . ?" she stopped.

"Hard? Yes. But only for the first few days. That next night . . . Do you want me to tell you what I did the night after I learned it?"

"Yes."

"I had never seen Hank Rearden, only pictures of him in the newspapers.

I knew that he was in New York, that night, at some conference of big industrialists. I wanted to have just one look at him. I went to wait at the entrance of the hotel where that conference was held. There were bright lights under the marquee of the entrance, but it was dark beyond, on the pavement, so I could see without being seen, there were a few loafers and vagrants hanging around, there was a drizzle of rain and we clung to the walls of the building. One could tell the members of the conference when they began filing out, by their clothes and their manner—ostentatiously prosperous clothes and a manner of overbearing timidity, as if they were guiltily trying to pretend that they were what they appeared to be for that moment. There were chauffeurs driving up their cars, there were a few reporters delaying them for questions and hangers-on trying to catch a word from them. They were worn men, those industrialists, aging, flabby, frantic with the effort to disguise uncertainty. And then I saw him. He wore an expensive trenchcoat and a hat slanting across his eyes. He walked swiftly, with the kind of assurance that has to be earned, as he'd earned it. Some of his fellow industrialists pounced on him with questions, and those tycoons were acting like hangers-on around him. I caught a glimpse of him as he stood with his hand on the door of his car, his head lifted, I saw the brief flare of a smile under the slanting brim, a confident smile, impatient and a little amused. And then, for one instant, I did what I had never done before, what most men wreck their lives on doing—I saw that moment out of context, I saw the world as he made it look, as if it matched him, as if he were its symbol—I saw a world of achievement, of unenslaved energy, of unobstructed drive through purposeful years to the enjoyment of one's reward—I saw, as I stood in the rain in a crowd of vagrants, what my years would have brought me, if that world had existed, and I felt a desperate longing—he was the image of everything I should have been . . . and he had everything that should have been mine. . . . But it was only a moment. Then I saw the scene in full context again and in all of its actual meaning—I saw what price he was paying for his brilliant ability, what torture he was enduring in silent bewilderment, struggling to understand what I had understood—I saw that the world he suggested, did not exist and was yet to be made, I saw him again for what he was, the symbol of my battle, the unrewarded hero whom I was to avenge and to release—and then . . . then I accepted what I had learned about you and him. I saw that it changed nothing, that I should have expected it—that it was right."

He heard the faint sound of her moan and he chuckled softly.

"Dagny, it's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence. Don't feel sorry for me. It was gone right then."

She turned her head to look at him in silence, and he smiled, lifting himself on an elbow to look down at her face as she lay helplessly still.

She whispered, "You've been a track laborer, here—here!—for twelve years . . .”

"Yes."

"Ever since—"

"Ever since I quit the Twentieth Century."

"The night when you saw me for the first time . . . you were working here, then?"

"Yes. And the morning when you offered to work for me as my cook, I was only your track laborer on leave of absence. Do you see why I laughed as I did?"

She was looking up at his face; hers was a smile of pain, his—of pure gaiety, "John . . ."

"Say it. But say it all."

"You were here . . . all those years . . ."

"Yes."

". . . all those years . . . while the railroad was perishing . . . while I was searching for men of intelligence . . . while I was struggling to hold onto any scrap of it I could find . . ."

". . . while you were combing the country for the inventor of my motor, while you were feeding James Taggart and Wesley Mouch, while you were naming your best achievement after the enemy whom you wanted to destroy.”

She closed her eyes.

"I was here all those years," he said, "within your reach, inside your own realm, watching your struggle, your loneliness, your longing, watching you in a battle you thought you were fighting for me, a battle in which you were supporting my enemies and taking an endless defeat —I was here, hidden by nothing but an error of your sight, as Atlantis is hidden from men by nothing but an optical illusion—I was here, waiting for the day when you would see, when you would know that by the code of the world you were supporting, it's to the darkest bottom of the underground that all the things you valued would have to be consigned and that it's there that you would have to look. I was here. I was waiting for you. I love you, Dagny. I love you more than my life, I who have taught men how life is to be loved. I've taught them also never to expect the unpaid for—and what I did tonight, I did it with full knowledge that I would pay for it and that my life might have to be the price,"

"No!"

He smiled, nodding. "Oh yes. You know that you've broken me for once, that I broke the decision I had set for myself—but I did it consciously, knowing what it meant, I did it, not in blind surrender to the moment, but with full sight of the consequences and full willingness to bear them. I could not let this kind of moment pass us by, it was ours, my love, we had earned it. But you're not ready to quit and join me—you don't have to tell me, I know—and since I chose to take what I wanted before it was fully mine, I'll have to pay for it, I have no way of knowing how or when, I know only that if I give in to an enemy, I'll take the consequences." He smiled in answer to the look on her face.

"No, Dagny, you're not my enemy in mind—and that is what brought me to this—but you are in fact, in the course you're pursuing, though you don't see it yet, but I do. My actual enemies are of no danger to me.

You are. You're the only one who can lead them to find me. They would never have the capacity to know what I am, but with your help —they will."

"No!"

"No, not by your intention. And you're free to change your course, but so long as you follow it, you're not free to escape its logic. Don't frown, the choice was mine and it's a danger I chose to accept. I am a trader, Dagny, in all things. I wanted you, I had no power to change your decision, I had only the power to consider the price and decide whether I could afford it. I could. My life is mine to spend or to invest —and you, you're"—as if his gesture were continuing his sentence, he raised her across his arm and kissed her mouth, while her body hung limply in surrender, her hair streaming down, her head falling back, held only by the pressure of his lips—"you're the one reward I had to have and chose to buy. I wanted you, and if my life is the price, I'll give it. My life—but not my mind."

There was a sudden glint of hardness in his eyes, as he sat up and smiled and asked, "Would you want me to join you and go to work?

Would you like me to repair that interlocking signal system of yours within an hour?"

"No!" The cry was immediate—in answer to the flash of a sudden image, the image of the men in the private dining room of the Wayne Falkland.

He laughed. "Why not?"

"I don't want to see you working as their serf!"

"And yourself?"

"I think that they're crumbling and that I'll win. I can stand it just a little longer."

"True, it's just a little longer—not till you win, but till you learn."

"I can't let it go!" It was a cry of despair.

"Not yet," he said quietly.

He got up, and she rose obediently, unable to speak.

"I will remain here, on my job," he said. "But don't try to see me.

You'll have to endure what I've endured and wanted to spare you—you'll have to go on, knowing where I am, wanting me as I'll want you, but never permitting yourself to approach me. Don't seek me here.

Don't come to my home. Don't ever let them see us together. And when you reach the end, when you're ready to quit, don't tell them, just chalk a dollar sign on the pedestal of Nat Taggart's statue—where it belongs —then go home and wait. I'll come for you in twenty-four hours."

She inclined her head in silent promise.

But when he turned to go, a sudden shudder ran through her body, like a first jolt of awakening or a last convulsion of life, and it ended in an involuntary cry: "Where are you going?"

"To be a lamppost and stand holding a lantern till dawn—which is the only work your world relegates me to and the only work it's going to get."

She seized his arm, to hold him, to follow, to follow him blindly, abandoning everything but the sight of his face. "John!"

He gripped her wrist, twisted her hand and threw it off. "No," he said.

Then he took her hand and raised it to his lips and the pressure of his mouth was more passionate a statement than any he had chosen to confess. Then he walked away, down the vanishing line of rail, and it seemed to her that both the rail and the figure were abandoning her at the same time.

When she staggered out into the concourse of the Terminal, the first blast of rolling wheels went shuddering through the walls of the building, like the sudden beat of a heart that had stopped. The temple of Nathaniel Taggart was silent and empty, its changeless light beating down on a deserted stretch of marble. Some shabby figures shuffled across it, as if lost in its shining expanse. On the steps of the pedestal, under the statue of the austere, exultant figure, a ragged bum sat slumped in passive resignation, like a wing-plucked bird with no place to go, resting on any chance cornice.

She fell down on the steps of the pedestal, like another derelict, her dust-smeared cape wrapped tightly about her, she sat still, her head on her arm, past crying or reeling or moving.

It seemed to her only that she kept seeing a figure with a raised arm holding a light, and it looked at times like the Statue of Liberty and then it looked like a man with sun-streaked hair, holding a lantern against a midnight sky, a red lantern that stopped the movement of the world.

"Don't take it to heart, lady, whatever it is," said the bum, in a tone of exhausted compassion. "Nothing's to be done about it, anyway. . . .

What's the use, lady? Who is John Galt?"

CHAPTER VI
THE CONCERTO OF DELIVERANCE

On October 20, the steel workers' union of Rearden Steel demanded a raise in wages.

Hank Rearden learned it from the newspaper; no demand had been presented to him and it had not been considered necessary to inform him. The demand was made to the Unification Board; it was not explained why no other steel company was presented with a similar claim.

He was unable to tell whether the demanders did or did not represent his workers, the Board's rules on union elections having made it a matter impossible to define. He learned only that the group consisted of those newcomers whom the Board had slipped into his mills in the past few months.

On October 23, the Unification Board rejected the union's petition, refusing to grant the raise. If any hearings had been held on the matter, Rearden had not known about it. He had not been consulted, informed or notified. He had waited, volunteering no questions.

On October 25, the newspapers of the country, controlled by the same men who controlled the Board, began a campaign of commiseration with the workers of Rearden Steel. They printed stories about the refusal of the wage raise, omitting any mention of who had refused it or who held the exclusive legal power to refuse, as if counting on the public to forget legal technicalities under a barrage of stories implying that an employer was the natural cause of all miseries suffered by employees. They printed a story describing the hardships of the workers of Rearden Steel under the present rise in the cost of their living—next to a story describing Hank Rearden's profits, of five years ago. They printed a story on the plight of a Rearden worker's wife trudging from store to store in a hopeless quest for food—next to a story about a champagne bottle broken over somebody's head at a drunken party given by an unnamed steel tycoon at a fashionable hotel; the steel tycoon had been Orren Boyle, but the story mentioned no names. "Inequalities still exist among us," the newspapers were saying, "and cheat us of the benefits of our enlightened age." "Privations have worn the nerves and temper of the people. The situation is reaching the danger point. We fear an outbreak of violence." "We fear an outbreak of violence," the newspapers kept repeating, On October 28, a group of the new workers at Rearden Steel attacked a foreman and knocked the tuyeres off a blast furnace. Two days later, a similar group broke the ground-floor windows of the administration building. A new worker smashed the gears of a crane, upsetting a ladle of molten metal within a yard of five bystanders. "Guess I went nuts, worrying about my hungry kids," he said, when arrested. "This is no time to theorize about who's right or wrong," the newspapers commented. "Our sole concern is the fact that an inflammatory situation is endangering the steel output of the country."

Rearden watched, asking no questions. He waited, as if some final knowledge were in the process of unraveling before him, a process not to be hastened or stopped. No—he thought through the early dusk of autumn evenings, looking out the window of his office—no, he was not indifferent to his mills;4but the feeling which had once been passion for a living entity was now like the wistful tenderness one feels for the memory of the loved and dead. The special quality of what one feels for the dead, he thought, is that no action is possible any longer.

On the morning of October 31, he received a notice informing him that all of his property, including his bank accounts and safety deposit boxes, had been attached to satisfy a delinquent judgment obtained against him in a trial involving a deficiency in his personal income tax of three years ago. It was a formal notice, complying with every requirement of the law—except that no such deficiency had ever existed and no such trial had ever taken place.

"No," he said to his indignation-choked attorney, "don't question them, don't answer, don't object." "But this is fantastic!" "Any more fantastic than the rest?" "Hank, do you want me to do nothing? To take it lying down?" "No, standing up. And I mean, standing. Don't move. Don't act." "But they've left you helpless." "Have they?" he asked softly, smiling.

He had a few hundred dollars in cash, left in his wallet, nothing else.

But the odd, glowing warmth in his mind, like the feel of a distant handshake, was the thought that in a secret safe of his bedroom there lay a bar of solid gold, given to him by a gold-haired pirate.

Next day, on November 1, he received a telephone call from Washington, from a bureaucrat whose voice seemed to come sliding down the wire on its knees in protestations of apology. "A mistake, Mr. Rearden! It was nothing but an unfortunate mistake! That attachment was not intended for you. You know how it is nowadays, with the inefficiency of all office help and with the amount of red tape we're tangled in, some bungling fool mixed the records and processed the attachment order against you—when it wasn't your case at all, it was, in fact, the case of a soap manufacturer! Please accept our apologies, Mr. Rearden, our deepest personal apologies at the top level." The voice slid to a slight, expectant pause. "Mr. Rearden . . . ?" "I'm listening." "I can't tell you how sorry we are to have caused you any embarrassment or inconvenience. And with all those damn formalities that we have to go through—you know how it is, red tape!—it will take a few days, perhaps a week, to de-process that order and to lift the attachment.

. . . Mr. Rearden?" "I heard you." "We're desperately sorry and ready to make any amends within our power. You will, of course, be entitled to claim damages for any inconvenience this might cause you, and we are prepared to pay. We won't contest it. You will, of course, file such a claim and—" "I have not said that." "Uh? No, you haven't . . . that is . . . well, what have you said, Mr. Rearden?" "I have said nothing."

Late on the next afternoon, another voice came pleading from Washington. This one did not seem to slide, but to bounce on the telephone wire with the gay virtuosity of a tight-rope walker. It introduced itself as Tinky Holloway and pleaded that Rearden attend a conference, "an informal little conference, just a few of us, the top-level few," to be held in New York, at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, day after next.

"There have been so many misunderstandings in the past few weeks!" said Tinky Holloway. "Such unfortunate misunderstandings—and so unnecessary! We could straighten everything out in a jiffy, Mr.

Rearden, if we had a chance to have a little talk with you. We're extremely anxious to see you."

"You can issue a subpoena for me any time you wish."

"Oh, no! no! no!" The voice sounded frightened. "No, Mr. Rearden —why think of such things? You don't understand us, we're anxious to meet you on a friendly basis, we're seeking nothing but your voluntary co-operation." Holloway paused tensely, wondering whether he had heard the faint sound of a distant chuckle; he waited, but heard nothing else.

"Mr. Rearden?"

"Yes?"

"Surely, Mr. Rearden, at a time like this, a conference with us could be to your great advantage."

"A conference—about what?"

"You've encountered so many difficulties—and we're anxious to help you in any way we can."

"I have not asked for help."

"These are precarious times, Mr. Rearden, the public mood is so uncertain and inflammatory, so . . . so dangerous . . . and we want to be able to protect you."

"I have not asked for protection."

"But surely you realize that we're in a position to be of value to you. and if there's anything you want from us, any . . ."

"There isn't."

"But you must have problems you'd like to discuss with us."

"I haven't."

"Then . . . well, then" —giving up the attempt at the play of granting a favor, Holloway switched to an open plea—"then won't you just give us a hearing?"

"If you have anything to say to me,"

"We have, Mr. Rearden, we certainly have! That's all we're asking for—a hearing. Just give us a chance. Just come to this conference.

You wouldn't be committing yourself to anything—" He said it involuntarily, and stopped, hearing a bright, mocking stab of life in Rearden's voice, an unpromising-sound, as Rearden answered: "I know it."

"Well, I mean . . . that is . . . well, then, will you come?"

"All Tight," said Rearden. "I'll come."

He did not listen to Holloway's assurances of gratitude, he noted only that Holloway kept repeating, "At seven P.M., November fourth, Mr. Rearden . . . November fourth . . ." as if the date had some special significance.

Rearden dropped the receiver and lay back in his chair, looking at the glow of furnace flames on the ceiling of his office. He knew that the conference was a trap; he knew also that he was walking into it with nothing for any trappers to gain.

Tinky Holloway dropped the receiver, in his Washington office, and sat up tensely, frowning. Claude Slagenhop, president of Friends of Global Progress, who had sat in an armchair, nervously chewing a matchstick, glanced up at him and asked, "Not so good?"

Holloway shook his head. "He'll come, but . . . no, not so good."

He added, "I don't think he'll take it."

"That's what my punk told me."

"I know."

"The punk said we'd better not try it."

"God damn your punk! We've got to! We'll have to risk it!"

The punk was Philip Rearden who, weeks ago, had reported to Claude Slagenhop: "No, he won't let me in, he won't give me a job, I've tried, as you wanted me to, I've tried my best, but it's no use, he won't let me set foot inside his mills. And as to his frame of mind—listen, it's bad. It's worse than anything I expected. I know him and I can tell you that you won't have a chance. He's pretty much at the end of his rope. One more squeeze will snap it. You said the big boys wanted to know. Tell them not to do it. Tell them he . . . Claude, God help us, if they do it, they'll lose him!" "Well, you're not of much help,"

Slagenhop had said dryly, turning away. Philip had seized his sleeve and asked, his voice shrinking suddenly into open anxiety, "Say, Claude - . . according to . . . to Directive 10-289 . . . if he goes, there's . . . there's to be no heirs?" "That's right." "They'd seize the mills and . . . and everything?" 'That's the law." "But . . . Claude, they wouldn't do that to me, would they?" "They don't want him to go. You know that. Hold him, if you can." "But I can't! You know I can't! Because of my political ideas and . . . and everything I've done for you, you know what he thinks of me! I have no hold on him at all!" "Well, that's your tough luck." "Claude!" Philip had cried in panic. "Claude, they won't leave me out in the cold, will they? I belong, don't I?

They've always said I belonged, they've always said they needed me . . . they said they needed men like me, not like him, men with my . . . my sort of spirit, remember? And after all I've done for them, after all my faith and service and loyalty to the cause—" "You damn fool," Slagenhop had snapped, "of what use are you to us without him?"

On the morning of November 4, Hank Rearden was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. He opened his eyes to the sight of a clear, pale sky, the sky of early dawn, in the window of his bedroom, a sky the delicate color of aquamarine, with the first rays of an invisible sun giving a shade of porcelain pink to Philadelphia's ancient roof tops.

For a moment, while his consciousness had a purity to equal the sky's, while he was aware of nothing but himself and had not yet reharnessed his soul to the burden of alien memories, he lay still, held by the sight and by the enchantment of a world to match it, a world where the style of existence would be a continuous morning.

The telephone threw him back into exile: it was screaming at spaced intervals, like a nagging, chronic cry for help, the kind of cry that did not belong in his world. He lifted the receiver, frowning. "Hello?"

"Good morning, Henry," said a quavering voice; it was his mother.

"Mother—at this hour?" he asked dryly.

"Oh, you're always up at dawn, and I wanted to catch you before you went to the office."

"Yes? What is it?"

"I've got to see you, Henry. I've got to speak to you. Today. Sometime today. It's important."

"Has anything happened?"

"No . . . yes . . . that is . . . I've got to have a talk with you in person. Will you come?"

"I'm sorry, I can't. I have an appointment in New York tonight. If you want me to come tomorrow—"

"No! No, not tomorrow. It's got to be today. It's got to." There was a dim tone of panic in her voice, but it was the stale panic of chronic helplessness, not the sound of an emergency—except for an odd echo of fear in her mechanical insistence.

"What is it, Mother?"

"I can't talk about it over the telephone, I've got to see you."

"Then if you wish to come to the office—"

"No! Not at the office! I've got to sec you alone, where we can talk.

Can't you come here today, as a favor? It's your mother who's asking you a favor. You've never come to see us at all. And maybe you're not the one to blame for it, either. But can't you do it for me this once, if I beg you to?"

"All right, Mother. I'll be there at four o'clock this afternoon."

"That will be fine, Henry. Thank you, Henry. That will be fine.”

It seemed to him that there was a touch of tension in the air of the mills, that day. It was a touch too slight to define—but the mills, to him, were like the face of a loved wife where he could catch shades of feeling almost ahead of expression. He noticed small clusters of the new workers, just three or four of them huddling together in conversation —once or twice too often. He noticed their manner, a manner suggesting a poolroom corner, not a factory. He noticed a few glances thrown at him as he went by, glances a shade too pointed and lingering. He dismissed it; it was not quite enough to wonder about—and he had no time to wonder.

When he drove up to his former home, that afternoon, he stopped his car abruptly at the foot of the hill. He had not seen the house since that May 15, six months ago, when he had walked out of it—and the sight brought back to him the sum of all he had felt in ten years of daily home-coming: the strain, the bewilderment, the gray weight of unconfessed unhappiness, the stern endurance that forbade him to confess it, the desperate innocence of the effort to understand his family . . . the effort to be just.

He walked slowly up the path toward the door. He felt no emotion, only the sense of a great, solemn clarity. He knew that this house was a monument of guilt—of his guilt toward himself.

He had expected to see his mother and Philip; he had not expected the third person who rose, as they did, at his entrance into the living room: it was Lillian.

He stopped on the threshold. They stood looking at his face and at the open door behind him. Their faces had a look of fear and cunning, the look of that blackmail-through-virtue which he had learned to understand, as if they hoped to get away with it by means of nothing but his pity, to hold him trapped, when a single step back could take him out of their reach.

They had counted on his pity and dreaded his anger; they had not dared consider the third alternative; his indifference.

"What is she doing here?" he asked, turning to his mother, his voice dispassionately flat.

"Lillian's been living here ever since your divorce," she answered defensively. "I couldn't let her starve on the city pavements, could I?"

The look in his mother's eyes was half-plea, as if she were begging him not to slap her face, half-triumph, as if she had slapped his. He knew her motive: it was not compassion, there had never been much love between Lillian and her, it was their common revenge against him, it was the secret satisfaction of spending his money on the ex-wife he had refused to support.

Lillian's head was poised to bow in greeting, with the tentative hint of a smile on her lips, half-timid, half-brash. He did not pretend to ignore her; he looked at her, as if he were seeing her fully, yet as if no presence were being registered in his mind. He said nothing, closed the door and stepped into the room.

His mother gave a small sigh of uneasy relief and dropped hastily into the nearest chair, watching him, nervously uncertain of whether he would follow her example.

"What was it you wanted?" he asked, sitting down.

His mother sat erect and oddly hunched, her shoulders raised, her head half-lowered. "Mercy, Henry," she whispered.

"What do you mean?"

"Don't you understand me?"

"No."

"Well"—she spread her hands in an untidily fluttering gesture of helplessness—"well . . . " Her eyes darted about, struggling to escape his attentive glance. "Well, there are so many things to say and . . . and I don't know how to say them, but . . . well, there's one practical matter, but it's not important by itself . . . it's not why I called you here . . . "

"What is it?"

"The practical matter? Our allowance checks—Philip's and mine. It's the first of the month, but on account of that attachment order, the checks couldn't come through. You know that, don't you?"

"I know it."

"Well, what are we going to do?"

"I don't know."

"I mean, what are you going to do about it?"

"Nothing,"

His mother sat staring at him, as if counting the seconds of silence.

"Nothing, Henry?"

"I have no power to do anything."

They were watching his face with a kind of searching intensity; he felt certain that his mother had told him the truth, that immediate financial worry was not their purpose, that it was only the symbol of a much wider issue.

"But, Henry, we're caught short."

"So was I."

"But can't you send us some cash or something?"

"They gave me no warning, no time to get any cash."

"Then . . . Look, Henry, the thing was so unexpected, it scared people, I guess—the grocery store refuses to give us credit, unless you ask for it. I think they want you to sign a credit card or something. So will you speak to them and arrange it?"

"I will not."

"You won't?" She choked on a small gasp. "Why?"

"I will not assume obligations that I can't fulfill."

"What do you mean?"

"I will not assume debts I have no way of repaying."

"What do you mean, no way? That attachment is only some sort of technicality, it's only temporary, everybody knows that!"

"Do they? I don't."

"But, Henry—a grocery bill! You're not sure you'll be able to pay a grocery bill, you, with all the millions you own?"

"I'm not going to defraud the grocer by pretending that I own those millions."

"What are you talking about? Who owns them?"

"Nobody."

"What do you mean?"

"Mother, I think you understand me fully. I think you understood it before I did. There isn't any ownership left in existence or any property. It's what you've approved of and believed in for years. You wanted me tied. I'm tied. Now it's too late to play any games about it."

"Are you going to let some political ideas of yours—" She saw the look on his face and stopped abruptly.

Lillian sat looking down at the floor, as if afraid to glance up at this moment. Philip sat cracking his knuckles.

His mother dragged her eyes into focus again and whispered, "Don't abandon us, Henry." Some faint stab of life in her voice told him that the lid of her real purpose was cracking open. "These are terrible times, and we're scared. That's the truth of it, Henry, we're scared, because you're turning away from us. Oh, I don't mean just that grocery bill, but that's a sign—a year ago you wouldn't have let that happen to us. Now . . . now you don't care." She made an expectant pause.

"Do you?"

"No."

"Well . . . well, I guess the blame is ours. That's what I wanted to tell you—that we know we're to blame. We haven't treated you right, all these years. We've been unfair to you, we've made you suffer, we've used you and given you no thanks in return. We're guilty, Henry, we've sinned against you, and we confess it. What more can we say to you now? Will you find it in your heart to forgive us?"

"What is it you want me to do?" he asked, in the clear, flat tone of a business conference.

"I don't know! Who am I to know? But that's not what I'm talking of right now. Not of doing, only of feeling. It's your feeling that I'm begging you for, Henry—just your feeling—even if we don't deserve it. You're generous and strong. Will you cancel the past, Henry? Will you forgive us?"

The look of terror in her eyes was real. A year ago, he would have told himself that this was her way of making amends; he would have choked his revulsion against her words, words which conveyed nothing to him but the fog of the meaningless; he would have violated his mind to give them meaning, even if he did not understand; he would have ascribed to her the virtue of sincerity in her own terms, even if they were not his. But he was through with granting respect to any terms other than his own.

"Will you forgive us?"

"Mother, it would be best not to speak of that. Don't press me to tell you why. I think you know it as well as I do. If there's anything you want done, tell me what it is. There's nothing else to discuss.

"But I don't understand you! I don't! That's what I called you here for—to ask your forgiveness! Are you going to refuse to answer me?"

"Very well. What would it mean, my forgiveness?"

"Uh?"

"I said, what would it mean?"

. She spread her hands out in an astonished gesture to indicate the self-evident. "Why, it . . . it would make us feel better."

"Will it change the past?"

"It would make us feel better to know that you've forgiven it."

"Do you wish me to pretend that the past has not existed?"

"Oh God, Henry, can't you see? All we want is only to know that you . . . that you feel some concern for us."

"I don't feel it. Do you wish me to fake it?"

"But that's what I'm begging you for—to feel it!"

"On what ground?"

"Ground?"

"In exchange for what?"

"Henry, Henry, it's not business we're talking about, not steel tonnages and bank balances, it's feelings—and you talk like a trader!"

"I am one."

What he saw in her eyes was terror—not the helpless terror of struggling and failing to understand, but the terror of being pushed toward the edge where to avoid understanding would no longer be possible.

"Look, Henry," said Philip hastily, "Mother can't understand those things. We don't know how to approach you. We can't speak your language."

"I don't speak yours."

"What she's trying to say is that we're sorry. We're terribly sorry that we've hurt you. You think we're not paying for it, but we are.

We're suffering remorse."

The pain in Philip's face was real. A year ago, Rearden would have felt pity. Now, he knew that they had held him through nothing but his reluctance to hurt them, his fear of their pain. He was not afraid of it any longer, "We're sorry, Henry. We know we've harmed you. We wish we could atone for it. But what can we do? The past is past. We can't undo it."

"Neither can I."

"You can accept our repentance," said Lillian, in a voice glassy with caution. "I have nothing to gain from you now. I only want you to know that whatever I've done, I've done it because I loved you."

He turned away, without answering.

"Henry!" cried his mother. "What's happened to you? What's changed you like that? You don't seem to be human any more! You keep pressing us for answers, when we haven't any answers to give. You keep beating us with logic—what's logic at a time like this?—what's logic when people are suffering?"

"We can't help it!" cried Philip.

"We're at your mercy," said Lillian.

They were throwing their pleas at a face that could not be reached.

They did not know—and their panic was the last of their struggle to escape the knowledge—that his merciless sense of justice, which had been their only hold on him, which had made him take any punishment and give them the benefit of every doubt, was now turned against them—that the same force that had made him tolerant, was now the force that made him ruthless—that the justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil.

"Henry, don't you understand us?" his mother was pleading.

"I do," he said quietly.

She looked away, avoiding the clarity of his eyes. "Don't you care what becomes of us?"

"I don't."

"Aren't you human?" Her voice grew shrill with anger. "Aren't you capable of any love at all? It's your heart I'm trying to reach, not your mind! Love is not something to argue and reason and bargain about!

It's something to give! To feel! Oh God, Henry, can't you feel without thinking?"

"I never have."

In a moment, her voice came back, low and droning: "We're not as smart as you are, not as strong. If we've sinned and blundered, it's because we're helpless. We need you, you're all we've got—and we're losing you—and we're afraid. These are terrible times, and getting worse, people are scared to death, scared and blind and not knowing what to do. How are we to cope with it, if you leave us? We're small and weak and we'll be swept like driftwood in that terror that's running loose in the world. Maybe we had our share of guilt for it, maybe we helped to bring it about, not knowing any better, but what's done is done—and we can't stop it now. If you abandon us, we're lost. If you give up and vanish, like all those men who—"

It was not a sound that stopped her, it was only a movement of his eyebrows, the brief, swift movement of a check mark. Then they saw him smile; the nature of the smile was the most terrifying of answers.

"So that's what you're afraid of," he said slowly.

"You can't quit!" his mother screamed in blind panic. "You can't quit now! You could have, last year, but not now! Not today! You can't turn deserter, because now they take it out on your family! They'll leave us penniless, they'll seize everything, they'll leave us to starve, they'll—"

"Keep still!" cried Lillian, more adept than the others at reading danger signs in Rearden's face.

His face held the remnant of a smile, and they knew that he was not seeing them any longer, but it was not in their power to know why his smile now seemed to hold pain and an almost wistful longing, or why he was looking across the room, at the niche of the farthest window.

He was seeing a finely sculptured face held composed under the lashing of his insults, he was hearing a voice that had said to him quietly, here, in this room: "It is against the sin of forgiveness that I wanted to warn you." You who had known it then, he thought . . . but he did not finish the sentence in his mind, he let it end in the bitter twist of his smile, because he knew what he had been about to think: You who had known it then—forgive me.

There it was—he thought, looking at his family—the nature of their pleas for mercy, the logic of those feelings they so righteously proclaimed as non-logical—there was the simple, brutal essence of all men who speak of being able to feel without thought and of placing mercy over justice.

They had known what to fear; they had grasped and named, before he had, the only way of deliverance left open to him; they had understood the hopelessness of his industrial position, the futility of his struggle, the impossible burdens descending to crush him; they had known that in reason, in justice, in self-preservation, his only course was to drop it all and run—yet they wanted to hold him, to keep him in the sacrificial furnace, to make him let them devour the last of him in the name of mercy, forgiveness and brother-cannibal love.

"If you still want me to explain it, Mother," he said very quietly, "if you're still hoping that I won't be cruel enough to name what you're pretending not to know, then here's what's wrong with your idea of forgiveness: You regret that you've hurt me and, as your atonement for it, you ask that I offer myself to total immolation."

"Logic!" she screamed. "There you go again with your damn logic!

It's pity that we need, pity, not logic!"

He rose to his feet.

"Wait! Don't go! Henry, don't abandon us! Don't sentence us to perish! Whatever we are, we're human! We want to live!"

"Why, no—" he started in quiet astonishment and ended in quiet horror, as the thought struck him fully, "I don't think you do. If you did, you would have known how to value me."

As if in silent proof and answer, Philip's face went slowly into an expression intended as a smile of amusement, yet holding nothing but fear and malice. "You won't be able to quit and run away," said Philip. "You can't run away without money."

It seemed to strike its goal; Rearden stopped short, then chuckled, "Thanks, Philip," he said.

"Uh?" Philip gave a nervous jerk of bewilderment.

"So that's the purpose of the attachment order. That's what your friends are afraid of. I knew they were getting set to spring something on me today. I didn't know that the attachment was their idea of cutting off escape." He turned incredulously to look at his mother. "And that's why you had to see me today, before the conference in New York."

"Mother didn't know it!" cried Philip, then caught himself and cried louder, "I don't know what you're talking about! I haven't said anything! I haven't said it!" His fear now seemed to have some much less mystic and much more practical quality.

"Don't worry, you poor little louse, I won't tell them that you've told me anything. And if you were trying—"

He did not finish; he looked at the three faces before him, and a sudden smile ended his sentence, a smile of weariness, of pity, of incredulous revulsion. He was seeing the final contradiction, the grotesque absurdity at the end of the irrationalists' game: the men in Washington had hoped to hold him by prompting these three to try for the role of hostages.

"You think you're so good, don't you?" It was a sudden cry and it came from Lillian; she had leaped to her feet to bar his exit; her face was distorted, as he had seen it once before, on that morning when she had learned the name of his mistress. "You're so good! You're so proud of yourself! Well, I have something to tell you!"

She looked as if she had not believed until this moment that her game was lost. The sight of her face struck him like a last shred completing a circuit, and in sudden clarity he knew what her game had been and why she had married him.

If to choose a person as the constant center of one's concern, as the focus of one's view of life, was to love—he thought—then it was true that she loved him; but if, to him, love was a celebration of one's self and of existence—then, to the self-haters and life-haters, the pursuit of destruction was the only form and equivalent of love. It was for the best of his virtues that Lillian had chosen him, for his strength, his confidence, his pride—she had chosen him as one chooses an object of love, as the symbol of man's living power, but the destruction of that power had been her goal.

He saw them as they had been at their first meeting: he, the man of violent energy and passionate ambition, the man of achievement, lighted by the flame of his success and flung into the midst of those pretentious ashes who called themselves an intellectual elite, the burned out remnants of undigested culture, feeding on the afterglow of the minds of others, offering their denial of the mind as their only claim to distinction, and a craving to control the world as their only lust—she, the woman hanger-on of that elite, wearing their shopworn sneer as her answer to the universe, holding impotence as superiority and emptiness as virtue—he, unaware of their hatred, innocently scornful of their posturing fraud—she, seeing him as the danger to their world, as a threat, as a challenge, as a reproach.

The lust that drives others to enslave an empire, had become, in her limits, a passion for power over him. She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if—he thought with a shudder—as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth.

He remembered her hammering derision of his work, his mills, his Metal, his success, he remembered her desire to see him drunk, just once, her attempts to push him into infidelity, her pleasure at the thought that he had fallen to the level of some sordid romance, her terror on discovering that that romance had been an attainment, not a degradation. Her line of attack, which he had found so baffling, had been constant and clear—it was his self-esteem she had sought to destroy, knowing that a man who surrenders his value is at the mercy of anyone's will; it was his moral purity she had struggled to breach, it was his confident rectitude she had wanted to shatter by means of the poison of guilt—as if, were he to collapse, his depravity would give her a right to hers.

For the same purpose and motive, for the same satisfaction, as others weave complex systems of philosophy to destroy generations, of establish dictatorships to destroy a country, so she, possessing no weapons except femininity, had made it her goal to destroy one man.

Yours was the code of life—he remembered the voice of his lost young teacher—what, then, is theirs?

"I have something to tell you!" cried Lillian, with the sound of that impotent rage which wishes that words were brass knuckles. "You're so proud of yourself, aren't you? You're so proud of your name!

Rearden Steel, Rearden Metal, Rearden Wife! That's what I was, wasn't I? Mrs. Rearden! Mrs. Henry Rearden!" The sounds she was making were now a string of cackling gasps, an unrecognizable corruption of laughter. "Well, I think you'd like to know that your wife's been laid by another man! I've been unfaithful to you, do you hear me? I've been unfaithful, not with some great, noble lover, but with the scummiest louse, with Jim Taggart! Three months ago! Before your divorce!

While I was your wife! While I was still your wife!"

He stood listening like a scientist studying a subject of no personal relevance whatever. There, he thought, was the final abortion of the creed of collective interdependence, the creed of non-identity, nonproperty, non-fact: the belief that the moral stature of one is at the mercy of the action of another.

"I've been unfaithful to you! Don't you hear me, you stainless Puritan? I've slept with Jim Taggart, you incorruptible hero! Don't you hear me? . . . Don't you hear me? . . . Don't you . . . ?"

He was looking at her as he would have looked if a strange woman had approached him on the street with a personal confession—a look like the equivalent of the words: Why tell it to me?

Her voice trailed off. He had not known what the destruction of a person would be like; but he knew that he was seeing the destruction of Lillian. He saw it in the collapse of her face, in the sudden slackening of features, as if there were nothing to hold them together, in the eyes, blind, yet staring, staring inward, filled with that terror which no outer threat can equal. It was not the look of a person losing her mind, but the look of a mind seeing total defeat and, in the same instant, seeing, her own nature for the first time—the look of a person seeing that after years of preaching non-existence, she had achieved it.

He turned to go. His mother stopped him at the door, seizing his arm. With a look of stubborn bewilderment, with the last of her effort at self-deceit, she moaned in a voice of tearfully petulant reproach, "Are you really incapable of forgiveness?"

"No, Mother," he answered, "I'm not. I would have forgiven the past—if, today, you had urged me to quit and disappear."

There was a cold wind outside, tightening his overcoat about him like an embrace, there was the great, fresh sweep of country stretching at the foot of the hill, and the clear, receding sky of twilight. Like two sunsets ending the day, the red glow of the sun was a straight, still band in the west, and the breathing red band in the east was the glow of his mills.

The feel of the steering wheel under his hands and of the smooth highway streaming past, as he sped to New York, had an oddly bracing quality. It was a sense of extreme precision and of relaxation, together, a sense of action without strain, which seemed inexplicably youthful—until he realized that this was the way he had acted and had expected always to act, in his youth—and what he now felt was like the simple, astonished question: Why should one ever have to act in any other manner?

It seemed to him that the skyline of New York, when it rose before him, had a strangely luminous clarity, though its shapes were veiled by distance, a clarity that did not seem to rest in the object, but felt as if the illumination came from him. He looked at the great city, with no tie to any view or usage others had made of it, it was not a city of gangsters or panhandlers or derelicts or whores, it was the greatest industrial achievement in the history of man, its only meaning was that which it meant to him, there was a personal quality in his sight of it, a quality of possessiveness and of unhesitant perception, as if he were seeing it for the first time—or the last.

He paused in the silent corridor of the Wayne-Falkland, at the door of the suite he was to enter; it took him a long moment's effort to lift his hand and knock; it was the suite that had belonged to Francisco d'Anconia.

There were coils of cigarette smoke weaving through the air of the drawing room, among the velvet drapes and bare, polished tables.

With its costly furniture and the absence of all personal belongings, the room had that air of dreary luxury which pertains to transient occupancy, as dismal as the air of a flophouse. Five figures rose in. the fog at his entrance: Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, James Taggart, Dr. Floyd Ferris and a slim, slouching man who looked like a rat-faced tennis player and was introduced to him as Tinky Holloway.

"All right," said Rearden, cutting off the greetings, the smiles, the offers of drinks and the comments on the national emergency, "what did you want?"

"We're here as your friends, Mr. Rearden," said Tinky Holloway, "purely as your friends, for an informal conversation with a view to closer mutual teamwork."

"We're anxious to avail ourselves of your outstanding ability," said Lawson, "and your expert advice on the country's industrial problems."

"It's men like you that we need in Washington," said Dr. Ferris.

"There's no reason why you should have remained an outsider for so long, when your voice is needed at the top level of national leadership.”

The sickening thing about it, thought Rearden, was that the speeches were only half-lies; the other half, in their tone of hysterical urgency, was the unstated wish to have it somehow be true. "What did you want?" he asked.

"Why . . . to listen to you, Mr. Rearden," said Wesley Mouch, the jerk of his features imitating a frightened smile; the smile was faked, the fear was real. "We . . . we want the benefit of your opinion on the nation's industrial crisis."

"I have nothing to say."

"But, Mr. Rearden," said Dr. Ferris, "all we want is a chance to co-operate with you."

"I've told you once, publicly, that I don't co-operate at the point of a gun."

"Can't we bury the hatchet at a time like this?" said Lawson beseechingly.

"The gun? Go ahead."

"Uh?"

"It's you who're holding it. Bury it, if you think you can."

"That . . . that was just a figure of speech," Lawson explained, blinking, "I was speaking metaphorically."

>78

"I wasn't."

"Can't we all stand together for the sake of the country in this hour of emergency?" said Dr. Ferris. "Can't we disregard our differences of opinion? We're willing to meet you halfway. If there's any aspect of our policy which you oppose, just tell us and we'll issue a directive to—"

"Cut it, boys. I didn't come here to help you pretend that I'm not in the position I'm in and that any halfway is possible between us.

Now come to the point. You've prepared some new gimmick to spring on the steel industry. What is it?"

"As a matter of fact," said Mouch, "we do have a vital question to discuss in regard to the steel industry, but . . . but your language, Mr. Rearden!"

"We don't want to spring anything on you," said Holloway. "We asked you here to discuss it with you."

"I came here to take orders. Give them."

"But, Mr. Rearden, we don't want to look at it that way. We don't want to give you orders. We want your voluntary consent."

Rearden smiled. "I know it."

"You do?" Holloway started eagerly, but something about Rearden's smile made him slide into uncertainty. "Well, then—"

"And you, brother," said Rearden, "know that that is the flaw in your game, the fatal flaw that will blast it sky-high. Now do you tell me what clout on my head you're working so hard not to let me notice—or do I go home?"

"Oh no, Mr. Rearden!" cried Lawson, with a sudden dart of his eyes to his wrist watch. "You can't go now!—That is, I mean, you wouldn't want to go without hearing what we have to say."

"Then let me hear it."

He saw them glancing at one another. Wesley Mouch seemed afraid to address him; Mouch's face assumed an expression of petulant stubbornness, like a signal of command pushing the others forward; whatever their qualifications to dispose of the fate of the steel industry, they had been brought here to act as Mouch's conversational bodyguards.

Rearden wondered about the reason for the presence of James Taggart; Taggart sat in gloomy silence, sullenly sipping a drink, never glancing in his direction.

"We have worked out a plan," said Dr. Ferris too cheerfully, "which will solve the problems of the steel industry and which will meet with your full approval, as a measure providing for the general welfare, while protecting your interests and insuring your safety in a—"

"Don't try to tell me what I'm going to think. Give me the facts."

"It is a plan which is fair, sound, equitable and—"

"Don't tell me your evaluation. Give me the facts."

"It is a plan which—" Dr. Ferris stopped; he had lost the habit of naming facts.

"Under this plan," said Wesley Mouch, "we will grant the industry a five per cent increase in the price of steel." He paused triumphantly.

Rearden said nothing.

"Of course, some minor adjustments will be necessary," said Holloway airily, leaping into the silence as onto a vacant tennis court. "A certain increase in prices will have to be granted to the producers of iron ore—oh, three per cent at most—in view of the added hardships which some of them, Mr. Larkin of Minnesota, for instance, will now encounter, inasmuch as they'll have to ship their ore by the costly means of trucks, since Mr. James Taggart has had to sacrifice his Minnesota branch line to the public welfare. And, of course, an increase in freight rates will have to be granted to the country's railroads—let's say, seven per cent, roughly speaking—in view of the absolutely essential need for—"

Holloway stopped, like a player emerging from a whirlwind activity to notice suddenly that no opponent was answering his shots.

"But there will be no increase in wages," said Dr. Ferris hastily. "An essential point of the plan is that we will grant no increase in wages to the steel workers, in spite of their insistent demands. We do wish to be fair to you, Mr. Rearden, and to protect your interests—even at the risk of popular resentment and indignation."

"Of course, if we expect labor to make a sacrifice," said Lawson, "we must show them that management, too, is making certain sacrifices for the sake of the country. The mood of labor in the steel industry is extremely tense at present, Mr. Rearden, it is dangerously explosive and . . . and in order to protect you from . . . from . . . " He stopped.

"Yes?" said Rearden. "From?"

"From possible . . . violence, certain measures are necessary, which . . . Look, Jim"—he turned suddenly to James Taggart—"why don't you explain it to Mr. Rearden, as a fellow industrialist?"

"Well, somebody's got to support the railroads," said Taggart sullenly, not looking at him. "The country needs railroads and somebody's got to help us carry the load, and if we don't get an increase in freight rates—"

"No, no, no!" snapped Wesley Mouch. "Tell Mr. Rearden about the working of the Railroad Unification Plan."

"Well, the Plan is a full success," said Taggart lethargically, "except for the not fully controllable element of time. It is only a question of time before our unified teamwork puts every railroad in the country back on its feet. The Plan, I'm in a position to assure you, would work as successfully for any other industry."

"No doubt about that," said Rearden, and turned to Mouch. "Why do you ask the stooge to waste my time? What has the Railroad Unification Plan to do with me?"

"But, Mr. Rearden," cried Mouch with desperate cheerfulness, "that's the pattern we're to follow! That's what we called you here to discuss!"

"What?"

"The Steel Unification Plan!"

There was an instant of silence, as of breaths drawn after a plunge.

Rearden sat looking at them with a glance that seemed to be a glance of interest.

"In view of the critical plight of the steel industry," said Mouch with a sudden rush, as if not to give himself time to know what made him uneasy about the nature of Rearden's glance, "and since steel is the most vitally, crucially basic commodity, the foundation of our entire industrial structure, drastic measures must be taken to preserve the country's steel-making facilities, equipment and plant." The tone and impetus of public speaking carried him that far and no farther. "With this objective in view, our Plan is . . . our Plan is . . ."

"Our Plan Is really very simple," said Tinky Holloway, striving to prove it by the gaily bouncing simplicity of his voice. "We'll lift all restrictions from the production of steel and every company will produce all it can, according to its ability. But to avoid the waste and danger of dog-eat-dog competition, all the companies will deposit their gross earnings into a common pool, to be known as the Steel Unification Pool, in charge of a special Board. At the end of the year, the Board will distribute these earnings by totaling the nation's steel output and dividing it by the number of open-hearth furnaces in existence, thus arriving at an average which will be fair to all—and every company will be paid according to its need. The preservation of its furnaces being its basic need, every company will be paid according to the number of furnaces it owns."

He stopped, waited, then added, "That's it, Mr. Rearden," and getting no answer, said, "Oh, there's a lot of wrinkles to be ironed out, but . . . but that's it."

Whatever reaction they had expected, it was not the one they saw.

Rearden leaned back in his chair, his eyes attentive, but fixed on space, as if looking at a not too distant distance, then he asked, with an odd note of quietly impersonal amusement, "Will you tell me just one thing, boys: what is it you're counting on?"

He knew that they understood. He saw, on their faces, that stubbornly evasive look which he had once thought to be the look of a liar cheating a victim, but which he now knew to be worse: the look of a man cheating himself of his own consciousness. They did not answer. They remained silent, as if struggling, not to make him forget his question, but to make themselves forget that they had heard it.

"It's a sound, practical Plan!" snapped James Taggart unexpectedly, with an angry edge of sudden animation in his voice. "It will work!

It has to work! We want it to work!"

No one answered him.

"Mr. Rearden . . . ?" said Holloway timidly.

"Well, let me see," said Rearden. "Orren Boyle's Associated Steel owns 60 open-hearth furnaces, one-third of them standing idle and the rest producing an average of 300 tons of steel per furnace per day.

I own 20 open-hearth furnaces, working at capacity, producing tons of Rearden Metal per furnace per day. So we own SO 'pooled' furnaces with a 'pooled' output of 27,000 tons, which makes an average of 337.5 tons per furnace. Each day of the year, I, producing 15,000 tons, will be paid for 6,750 tons. Boyle, producing 12,000 tons, will be paid for 20,250 tons. Never mind the other members of the pool, they won't change the scale, except to bring the average still lower, most of them doing worse than Boyle, none of them producing as much as I. Now how long do you expect me to last under your Plan?"

There was no answer, then Lawson cried suddenly, blindly, righteously, "In time of national peril, it is your duty to serve, suffer and work for the salvation of the country!"

"I don't see why pumping my earnings into Orren Boyle's pocket is going to save the country."

"You have to make certain sacrifices to the public welfare!"

"I don't see why Orren Boyle is more 'the public' than I am."

"Oh, it's not a question of Mr. Boyle at all! It's much wider than any one person. It's a matter of preserving the country's natural resources—such as factories—and saving the whole of the nation's industrial plant. We cannot permit the ruin of an establishment as vast as Mr. Boyle's. The country needs it."

"I think," said Rearden slowly, "that the country needs me much more than it needs Orren Boyle."

"But of course!" cried Lawson with startled enthusiasm. "The country needs you, Mr. Rearden! You do realize that, don't you?"

But Lawson's avid pleasure at the familiar formula of self-immolation, vanished abruptly at the sound of Rearden's voice, a cold, trader's voice answering: "I do."

"It's not Boyle alone who's involved," said Holloway pleadingly.

"The country's economy would not be able to stand a major dislocation at the present moment. There are thousands of Boyle's workers, suppliers and customers. What would happen to them if Associated Steel went bankrupt?"

"What will happen to the thousands of my workers, suppliers and customers when I go bankrupt?"

"You, Mr. Rearden?" said Holloway incredulously. "But you're the richest, safest and strongest industrialist in the country at this moment!"

"What about the moment after next?"

"Uh?"

"How long do you expect me to be able to produce at a loss?"

"Oh, Mr. Rearden, I have complete faith in you!"

"To hell with your faith! How do you expect me to do it?"

"You'll manage!"

"How?"

There was no answer.

"We can't theorize about the future," cried Wesley Mouch, "when here's an immediate national collapse to avoid! We've got to save the country's economy! We've got to do something!" Rearden's imperturbible glance of curiosity drove him to heedlessness. "If you don't like it, do you have a better solution to offer?"

"Sure," said Rearden easily. "If it's production that you want, then get out of the way, junk all of your damn regulations, let Orren Boyle go broke, let me buy the plant of Associated Steel—and it will be pouring a thousand tons a day from every one of its sixty furnaces."

"Oh, but . . . but we couldn't!" gasped Mouch. "That would be monopoly!"

Rearden chuckled. "Okay," he said indifferently, "then let my mills superintendent buy it. Hell do a better job than Boyle."

"Oh, but that would be letting the strong have an advantage over the weak! We couldn't do that!"

"Then don't talk about saving the country's economy."

"All we want is—" He stopped.

"All you want is production without men who're able to produce, isn't it?"

"That . . . that's theory. That's just a theoretical extreme. All we want is a temporary adjustment."

"You've been making those temporary adjustments for years. Don't you see that you've run out of time?"

"That's just theo . . ." His voice trailed off and stopped.

"Well, now, look here," said Holloway cautiously, "it's not as if Mr.

Boyle were actually . . . weak. Mr. Boyle is an extremely able man.

It's just that he's suffered some unfortunate reverses, quite beyond his control. He had invested large sums in a public-spirited project to assist the undeveloped peoples of South America, and that copper crash of theirs has dealt him a severe financial blow. So it's only a matter of giving him a chance to recover, a helping hand to bridge the gap, a bit of temporary assistance, nothing more. All we have to do is just equalize the sacrifice—then everybody will recover and prosper."

"You've been equalizing sacrifice for over a hundred"—he stopped —"for thousands of years," said Rearden slowly. "Don't you see that you're at the end of the road?"

"That's just theory!" snapped Wesley Mouch.

Rearden smiled. "I know your practice," he said softly. "It's your theory that I'm trying to understand."

He knew that the specific reason behind the Plan was Orren Boyle; he knew that the working of an intricate mechanism, operated by pull, threat, pressure, blackmail—a mechanism like an irrational adding machine run amuck and throwing up any chance sum at the whim of any moment—had happened to add up to Boyle's pressure upon these men to extort for him this last piece of plunder. He knew also that Boyle was not the cause of it or the essential to consider, that Boyle was only a chance rider, not the builder, of the infernal machine that had destroyed the world, that it was not Boyle who had made it possible, nor any of the men in this room. They, too, were only riders on a machine without a driver, they were trembling hitchhikers who knew that their vehicle was about to crash into its final abyss—and it was not love or fear of Boyle that made them cling to their course and press on toward their end, it was something else, it was some one nameless element which they knew and evaded knowing, something which was neither thought nor hope, something he identified only as a certain look in their faces, a furtive look saying: I can get away with it. Why?—he thought. Why do they think they can?

"We can't afford any theories!" cried Wesley Mouch. "We've got to act!"

"Well, then, I'll offer you another solution. Why don't you take over my mills and be done with it?"

The jolt that shook them was genuine terror.

"Oh no!" gasped Mouch.

"We wouldn't think of it!" cried Holloway.

"We stand for free enterprise!" cried Dr. Ferris.

"We don't want to harm you!" cried Lawson. "We're your friends, Mr.

Rearden. Can't we all work together? We're your friends."

There, across the room, stood a table with a telephone, the same table, most likely, and the same instrument—and suddenly Rearden felt as if he were seeing the convulsed figure of a man bent over that telephone, a man who had then known what he, Rearden, was now beginning to learn, a man fighting to refuse him the same request which he was now refusing to the present tenants of this room—he saw the finish of that fight, a man's tortured face lifted to confront him and a desperate voice saying steadily: "Mr. Rearden, I swear to you . . . by the woman I love . . . that I am your friend."

This was the act he had then called treason, and this was the man he had rejected in order to go on serving the men confronting him now.

Who, then, had been the traitor?—he thought; he thought it almost without feeling, without right to feel, conscious of nothing but a solemnly reverent clarity. Who had chosen to give its present tenants the means to acquire this room? Whom had he sacrificed and to whose profit?

"Mr. Rearden!" moaned Lawson. "What's the matter?"

He turned his head, saw Lawson's eyes watching him fearfully and guessed what look Lawson had caught in his face.

"We don't want to seize your mills!" cried Mouch.

"We don't want to deprive you of your property!" cried Dr. Ferris.

"You don't understand us!"

"I'm beginning to."

A year ago, he thought, they would have shot him; two years ago, they would have confiscated his property; generations ago, men of their kind had been able to afford the luxury of murder and expropriation, the safety of pretending to themselves and their victims that material loot was their only objective. But their time was running out and his fellow victims had gone, gone sooner than any historical schedule had promised, and they, the looters, were now left to face the undisguised reality of their own goal.

"Look, boys," he said wearily. "I know what you want. You want to eat my mills and have them, too. And all I want to know is this: what makes you think it's possible?"

"I don't know what you mean," said Mouch in an injured tone of voice. "We said we didn't want your mills."

"All right, I'll say it more precisely: You want to eat me and have me, too. How do you propose to do it?"

"I don't know how you can say that, after we've given you every assurance that we consider you of invaluable importance to the country, to the steel industry, to—"

"I believe you. That's what makes the riddle Harder. You consider me of invaluable importance to the country? Hell, you consider me of invaluable importance even to your own necks. You sit there trembling, because you know that I'm the last one left to save your lives—and you know that time is as short as that. Yet you propose a plan to destroy me, a plan which demands, with an idiot's crudeness, without loopholes, detours or escape, that I work at a loss—that I work, with every ton I pour costing me more than I'll get for it—that I feed the last of my wealth away until we all starve together. That much irrationality is not possible to any man or any looter. For your own sake—never mind the country's or mine—you must be counting on something. What?"

He saw the getting-away-with-it look on their faces, a peculiar look that seemed secretive, yet resentful, as if, incredibly, it were he who was hiding some secret from them.

"I don't see why you should choose to take such a defeatist view of the situation," said Mouch sullenly.

"Defeatist? Do you really expect me to be able to remain in business under your Plan?"

"But it's only temporary!"

"There's no such thing as a temporary suicide."

"But it's only for the duration of the emergency! Only until the country recovers!"

"How do you expect it to recover?"

There was no answer.

"How do you expect me to produce after I go bankrupt?"

"You won't go bankrupt. You'll always produce," said Dr. Ferris indifferently, neither in praise nor in blame, merely in the tone of stating a fact of nature, as he would have said to another man: You'll always be a bum, "You can't help it. It's in your blood. Or, to be more scientific: you're conditioned that way."

Rearden sat up: it was as if he had been struggling to find the secret combination of a lock and felt, at those words, a faint click within, as of the first tumbrel falling into place.

"It's only a matter of weathering this crisis," said Mouch, "of giving people a reprieve, a chance to catch up."

"And then?"

"Then things will improve."

"How?"

There was no answer.

"What will improve them?"

There was no answer.

"Who will improve them?"

"Christ, Mr. Rearden, people don't just stand still!" cried Holloway, "They do things, they grow, they move forward!"

"What people?"

Holloway waved his hand vaguely. "People," he said.

"What people? The people to whom you're going to feed the last of Rearden Steel, without getting anything in return? The people who'll go on consuming more than they produce?"

"Conditions will change."

"Who'll change them?"

There was no answer.

"Have you anything left to loot? If you didn't see the nature of your policy before—it's not possible that you don't see it now. Look around you. All those damned People's States all over the earth have been existing only on the handouts which you squeezed for them out of this country. But you—you have no place left to sponge on or mooch from. No country on the face of the globe. This was the greatest and last. You've drained it. You've milked it dry. Of all that irretrievable splendor, I'm only one remnant, the last, What will you do, you and your People's Globe, after you've finished me? What are you hoping for? What do you see ahead—except plain, stark, animal starvation?"

They did not answer. They did not look at him. Their faces wore expressions of stubborn resentment, as if his were the plea of a liar.

Then Lawson said softly, half in reproach, half in scorn, "Well, after all, you businessmen have kept predicting disasters for years, you've cried catastrophe at every progressive measure and told us that we'll perish—but we haven't." He started a smile, but drew back from the sudden intensity of Rearden’s eyes.

Rearden had felt another click in his mind, the sharper click of the second tumbrel connecting the circuits of the lock. He leaned forward.

"What are you counting on?" he asked; his tone had changed, it was low, it had the steady, pressing, droning sound of a drill.

"It's only a matter of gaining time!" cried Mouch.

"There isn't any time left to gain."

"All we need is a chance!" cried Lawson.

"There are no chances left."

"It's only until we recover!" cried Holloway.

"There is no way to recover."

"Only until our policies begin to work!" cried Dr. Ferris.

"There's no way to make the irrational work.'1 There was no answer.

"What can save you now?"

"Oh, you'll do something!" cried James Taggart.

Then—even though it was only a sentence he had heard all his life—he felt a deafening crash within him, as of a steel door dropping open at the touch of the final tumbrel, the one small number completing the sum and releasing the intricate lock, the answer uniting all the pieces, the questions and the unsolved wounds of his life.

In the moment of silence after the crash, it seemed to him that he heard Francisco's voice, asking him quietly in the ballroom of this building, yet asking it also here and now: "Who is the guiltiest man in this room?" He heard his own answer of the past: "I suppose—James Taggart?" and Francisco's voice saying without reproach: "No, Mr. Rearden, it's not James Taggart,"—but here, in this room and this moment, his mind answered: "I am."

He had cursed these looters for their stubborn blindness? It was he who had made it possible. From the first extortion he had accepted, from the first directive he had obeyed, he had given them cause to believe that reality was a thing to be cheated, that one could demand the irrational and someone somehow would provide it. If he had accepted the Equalization of Opportunity Bill, if he had accepted Directive 10-289, if he had accepted the law that those who could not equal his ability had the right to dispose of it, that those who had not earned were to profit, but he who had was to lose, that those who could not think were to command, but he who could was to obey them—then were they illogical in believing that they existed in an irrational universe? He had made it for them, he had provided it.

Were they illogical in believing that theirs was only to wish, to wish with no concern for the possible—and that his was to fulfill their wishes, by means they did not have to know or name? They, the impotent mystics, struggling to escape the responsibility of reason, had known that he, the rationalist, had undertaken to serve their whims.

They had known that he had given them a blank check on reality—his was not to ask why?—theirs was not to ask how?—let them demand that he give them a share of his wealth, then all that he owns, then more than he owns—impossible?—no, he'll do something!

He did not know that he had leaped to his feet, that he stood staring down at James Taggart, seeing in the unbridled shapelessness of Taggart's features the answer to all the devastation he had witnessed through the years of his life.

"What's the matter, Mr. Rearden? What have I said?" Taggart was asking with rising anxiety—but he was out of the reach of Taggart's voice.

He was seeing the progression of the years, the monstrous extortions, the impossible demands, the inexplicable victories of evil, the preposterous plans and unintelligible goals proclaimed in volumes of muddy philosophy, the desperate wonder of the victims who thought that some complex, malevolent wisdom was moving the powers destroying the world—and all of it had rested on one tenet behind the shifty eyes of the victors: he'll do something! . . . We'll get away with it—he'll let us—he'll do something! . . .

You businessmen kept predicting that we'd perish, but we haven't.

. . . It was true, he thought. They had not been blind to reality, he had—blind to the reality he himself had created. No, they had not perished, but who had? Who had perished to pay for their manner of survival? Ellis Wyatt . . . Ken Danagger . . . Francisco d'Anconia.

He was reaching for his hat and coat, when he noticed that the men in the room were trying to stop him, that their faces had a look of panic and their voices were crying in bewilderment: "What's the matter, Mr.

Rearden? . . . Why? . . . But why? . . . What have we said? . . .

You're not going! . . . You can't go! . . . It's too early! . . . Not yet! Oh, not yet!"

He felt as if he were seeing them from the rear window of a speeding express, as if they stood on the track behind him, waving their arms in futile gestures and screaming indistinguishable sounds, their figures growing smaller in the distance, their voices fading.

One of them tried to stop him as he turned to the door. He pushed him out of his way, not roughly, but with a simple, smooth sweep of his arm, as one brushes aside an obstructing curtain, then walked out.

Silence was his only sensation, as he sat at the wheel of his car, speeding back down the road to Philadelphia. It was the silence of immobility within him, as if, possessing knowledge, he could now afford to rest, with no further activity of soul. He felt nothing, neither anguish nor elation. It was as if, by an effort of years, he had climbed a mountain to gain a distant view and, having reached the top, had fallen to lie still, to rest before he looked, free to spare himself for the first time.

He was aware of the long, empty road streaming, then curving, then streaming straight before him, of the effortless pressure of his hands on the wheel and the screech of the tires on the curves. But he felt as if he were speeding down a skyway suspended and coiling in empty space.

The passers-by at the factories, the bridges, the power plants along his road saw a sight that had once been natural among them: a trim, expensively powerful car driven by a confident man, with the concept of success proclaimed more loudly than by any electric sign, proclaimed by the driver's garments, by his expert steering, by his purposeful speed.

They watched him go past and vanish into the haze equating earth with night.

He saw his mills rising in the darkness, as a black silhouette against a breathing glow. The glow was the color of burning gold, and "Rearden Steel" stood written across the sky in the cool, white fire of crystal.

He looked at the long silhouette, the curves of blast furnaces standing like triumphal arches, the smokestacks rising like a solemn colonnade along an avenue of honor in an imperial city, the bridges hanging like garlands, the cranes saluting like lances, the smoke waving slowly like flags. The sight broke the stillness within him and he smiled in greeting. It was a smile of happiness, of love, of dedication. He had never loved his mills as he did in that moment, for—seeing them by an act of his own vision, cleared of all but his own code of values, in a luminous reality that held no contradictions—he was seeing the reason of his love: the mills were an achievement of his mind, devoted to his enjoyment of existence, erected in a rational world to deal with rational men. If those men had vanished, if that world was gone, if his mills had ceased to serve his values—then the mills were only a pile of dead scrap, to be left to crumble, the sooner the better—to be left, not as an act of treason, but as an act of loyalty to their actual meaning.

The mills were still a mile ahead when a small spurt of flame caught his sudden attention. Among all the shades of fire in the vast spread of structures, he could tell the abnormal and the out-of-place: this one was too raw a shade of yellow and it was darting from a spot where no fire had reason to be, from a structure by the gate of the main entrance.

In the next instant, he heard the dry crack of a gunshot, then three answering cracks in swift succession, like an angry hand slapping a sudden assailant.

Then the black mass barring the road in the distance took shape, it was not mere darkness and it did not recede as he came closer—it was a mob squirming at the main gate, trying to storm the mills.

He had time to distinguish waving arms, some with clubs, some with crowbars, some with rifles—the yellow flames of burning wood gushing from the window of the gatekeeper's office—the blue cracks of gunfire darting out of the mob and the answers spitting from the roofs of the structures—he had time to see a human figure twisting backward and falling from the top of a car—then he sent his wheels into a shrieking curve, turning into the darkness of a side road.

He was going at the rate of sixty miles an hour down the ruts of an unpaved soil, toward the eastern gate of the mills—and the gate was in sight when the impact of tires on a gully threw the car off the road, to the edge of a ravine where an ancient slag heap lay at the bottom. With the weight of his chest and elbow on the wheel, pitted against two tons of speeding metal, the curve of his body forced the curve of the car to complete its screaming half-circle, sweeping it back onto the road and into the control of his hands. It had taken one instant, but in the next his foot went down on the brake, tearing the engine to a stop: for in the moment when his headlights had swept the ravine, he had glimpsed an oblong shape, darker than the gray of the weeds on the slope, and it had seemed to him that a brief white blur had been a human hand waving for help.

Throwing off his overcoat, he went hurrying down the side of the ravine, lumps of earth giving way under his feet, he went catching at the dried coils of brush, half-running, half-sliding toward the long black form which he could now distinguish to be a human body. A scum of cotton was swimming against the moon, he could see the white of a hand and the shape of an arm lying stretched in the weeds, but the body lay still, with no sign of motion.

"Mr. Rearden . . ."

It was a whisper struggling to be a cry, it was the terrible sound of eagerness fighting against a voice that could be nothing but a moan of pain.

He did not know which came first, it felt like a single shock: his thought that the voice was familiar, a ray of moonlight breaking through the cotton, the movement of falling down on his knees by the white oval of a face, and the recognition. It was the Wet Nurse.

He felt the boy's hand clutching his with the abnormal strength of agony, while he was noticing the tortured lines of the face, the drained lips, the glazing eyes and the thin, dark trickle from a small, black hole in too wrong, too close a spot on the left side of the boy's chest.

"Mr. Rearden . . . I wanted to stop them . . . I wanted to save you . . ."

"What happened to you, kid?"

"They shot me, so I wouldn't talk . . . I wanted to prevent"—his hand fumbled toward the red glare in the sky—"what they're doing . . .

I was too late, but I've tried to . . . I've tried . . . And . . . and I'm still able . . . to talk . . . Listen, they—"

"You need help. Let's get you to a hospital and—"

"No! Wait! I . . . I don't think I have much time left to me and . . . and I've got to tell you . . . Listen, that riot . . . it's staged . . . on orders from Washington . . . It's not workers . . . not your workers . . . it's those new boys of theirs and . . . and a lot of goons hired on the outside . . . Don't believe a word they'll tell you about it . . . It's a frame-up . . . it's their rotten kind of frame-up . . ."

There was a desperate intensity in the boy's face, the intensity of a crusader's battle, his voice seemed to gain a sound of life from some fuel burning in broken spurts within him—-and Rearden knew that the greatest assistance he could now render was to listen.

"They . . . they've got a Steel Unification Plan ready . . . and they need an excuse for it . . . because they know that the country won't take it . . . and you won't stand for it . . . They're afraid this one's going to be too much for everybody . . . it's just a plan to skin you alive, that's all . . . So they want to make it look like you're starving your workers . . . and the workers are running amuck and you're unable to control them . . . and the government's got to step in for your own protection and for public safety . . . That's going to be their pitch, Mr. Rearden . . ."

Rearden was noticing the torn flesh of the boy's hands, the drying mud of blood and dust on his palms and his clothing, gray patches of dust on knees and stomach, scrambled with the needles of burs. In the intermittent fits of moonlight, he could see the trail of flattened weeds and glistening smears going off into the darkness below. He dreaded to think how far the boy had crawled and for how long.

"They didn't want you to be here tonight, Mr. Rearden . . . They didn't want you to see their 'People's rebellion' . . . Afterwards . . . you know how they screw up the evidence . . . there won't be a straight story to get anywhere . . . and they hope to fool the country . . . and you . . . that they're acting to protect you from violence . . .

Don't let them get away with it, Mr. Rearden! . . . Tell the country . . . tell the people . . . tell the newspapers . . . Tell them that I told you . . . it's under oath . . . I swear it . . . that makes it legal, doesn't it? . . . doesn't it? . . . that gives you a chance?"

Rearden pressed the boy's hand in his. "Thank you, kid."

"I . . . I'm sorry I'm late, Mr. Rearden, but . . . but they didn't let me in on it till the last minute . . . till just before it started . . .

They called me in on a . . . a strategy conference . . . there was a man there by the name of Peters . . . from the Unification Board . . . he's a stooge of Tinky Holloway . . . who's a stooge of Orren Boyle . . . What they wanted from me was . . . they wanted me to sign a lot of passes . . . to let some of the goons in . . . so they'd start trouble from the inside and the outside together . . . to make it look like they really were your workers . . . I refused to sign the passes."

"You did? After they'd let you in on their game?"

"But . . . but, of course, Mr. Rearden . . . Did you think I'd play that kind of game?"

"No, kid, no, I guess not. Only—"

"What?"

"Only that's when you stuck your neck out."

"But I had to! . . . I couldn't help them wreck the mills, could I?

. . . How long was I to keep from sticking my neck out? Till they broke yours? . . . And what would I do with my neck, if that's how I had to keep it? . . . You . . . you understand it, don't you, Mr.

Rearden?"

"Yes. I do."

"I refused them . . . I ran out of the office . . . I ran to look for the superintendent . . . to tell him everything . . . but I couldn't find him . . . and then I heard shots at the main gate and I knew it had started . . . I tried to phone your home . . . the phone wires were cut . . . I ran to get my car, I wanted to reach you or a policeman or a newspaper or somebody . . . but they must have been following me . . . that's when they shot me . . . in the parking lot . . . from behind . . . all I remember is falling and . . . and then, when I opened my eyes, they had dumped me here . . . on the slag heap . . . "

"On the slag heap?" said Rearden slowly, knowing that the heap was a hundred feet below.

The boy nodded, pointing vaguely down into the darkness. "Yeah . . . down there . . . And then I . . . I started crawling . . . crawling up . . . I wanted . . . I wanted to last till I told somebody who'd tell you." The pain-twisted lines of his face smoothed suddenly into a smile; his voice had the sound of a lifetime's triumph as he added, "I have." Then he jerked his head up and asked, in the tone of a child's astonishment at a sudden discovery, "Mr. Rearden, is this how it feels to . . . to want something very much . . . very desperately much . . . and to make it?"

"Yes, kid, that's how it feels." The boy's head dropped back against Rearden's arm, the eyes closing, the mouth relaxing, as if to hold a moment's profound contentment. "But you can't stop there. You're not through. You've got to hang on till I get you to a doctor and—" He was lifting the boy cautiously, but a convulsion of pain ran through the boy's face, his mouth twisting to stop a cry—and Rearden had to lower him gently back to the ground.

The boy shook his head with a glance that was almost apology. "I won't make it, Mr. Rearden . . . No use fooling myself . . . I know I'm through."

Then, as if by some dim recoil against self-pity, he added, reciting a memorized lesson, his voice a desperate attempt at his old, cynical, intellectual tone, "What does it matter, Mr. Rearden? . . . Man is only a collection of . . . conditioned chemicals . . . and a man's dying doesn't make . . . any more difference than an animal's."

"You know better than that."

"Yes," he whispered. "Yes, I guess I do."

His eyes wandered over the vast darkness, then rose to Rearden's face; the eyes were helpless, longing, childishly bewildered. "I know . . . it's crap, all those things they taught us . . . all of it, everything they said . . . about living or . . . or dying . . . Dying . . . it wouldn't make any difference to chemicals, but—" he stopped, and all of his desperate protest was only in the intensity of his voice dropping lower to say, "—but it does, to me . . . And . . . and, I guess, it makes a difference to an animal, too . . . But they said there are no values . . . only social customs . . . No values!" His hand clutched blindly at the hole in his chest, as if trying to hold that which he was losing. "No . . . values . . .”

Then his eyes opened wider, with the sudden calm of full frankness.

"I'd like to live, Mr. Rearden. God, how I'd like to!" His voice was passionately quiet. "Not because I'm dying . . . but because I've just discovered it tonight, what it means, really to be alive . . . And . . . it's funny . . . do you know when [ discovered it? . . . In the office . . . when I stuck my neck out . . . when I told the bastards to go to hell . . . There's . . . there's so many things I wish I'd known sooner . . . But . . . well, it's no use crying over spilled milk." He saw Rearden's involuntary glance at the flattened trail below and added, "Over spilled anything, Mr. Rearden."

"Listen, kid," said Rearden sternly, "I want you to do me a favor."

"Now, Mr. Rearden?"

"Yes. Now."

"Why, of course, Mr. Rearden . . . if I can."

"You've done me a big favor tonight, but I want you to do a still bigger one. You've done a great job, climbing out of that slag heap.

Now will you try for something still harder? You were willing to die to save my mills. Will you try to live for me?"

"For you, Mr. Rearden?"

"For me. Because I'm asking you to. Because I want you to. Because we still have a great distance to climb together, you and I."

"Does it . . . does it make a difference to you, Mr. Rearden?"

"It does. Will you make up your mind that you want to live—just as you did down there on the slag heap? That you want to last and live? Will you fight for it? You wanted to fight my battle. Will you fight this one with me, as our first?"

He felt the clutching of the boy's hand; it conveyed the violent eagerness of the answer; the voice was only a whisper: "I'll try, Mr.

Rearden."

"Now help me to get you to a doctor. Just relax, take it easy and let me lift you."

"Yes, Mr. Rearden." With the jerk of a sudden effort, the boy pulled himself up to lean on an elbow.

"Take it easy, Tony."

He saw a sudden flicker in the boy's face, an attempt at his old, bright, impudent grin. "Not 'Non-Absolute' any more?"

"No, not any more. You're a full absolute now, and you know it."

"Yes. I know several of them, now. There's one"—he pointed at the wound in his chest—"that's an absolute, isn't it? And"—he went on speaking while Rearden was lifting him from the ground by imperceptible seconds and inches, speaking as if the trembling intensity of his words were serving as an anesthetic against the pain—"and men can't live . . . if rotten bastards . . . like the ones in Washington . . . get away with things like . . . like the one they're doing tonight . . . if everything becomes a stinking fake . . . and nothing is real . . . and nobody is anybody . . . men can't live that way . . . that's an absolute, isn't it?"

"Yes, Tony, that's an absolute."

Rearden rose to his feet by a long, cautious effort; he saw the tortured spasm of the boy's features, as he settled him slowly against his chest, like a baby held tight in his arms—but the spasm twisted into another echo of the impudent grin, and the boy asked, "Who's the Wet Nurse now?"

"I guess I am."

He took the first steps up the slant of crumbling soil, his body tensed to the task of shock absorber for his fragile burden, to the task of maintaining a steady progression where there was no foothold to find.

The boy's head dropped on Rearden's shoulder, hesitantly, almost as if this were a presumption. Rearden bent down and pressed his lips to the dust-streaked forehead.

The boy jerked back, raising his head with a shock of incredulous, indignant astonishment. "Do you know what you did?" he whispered, as if unable to believe that it was meant for him.

"Put your head down," said Rearden, "and I'll do it again."

The boy's head dropped and Rearden kissed his forehead; it was like a father's recognition granted to a son's battle.

The boy lay still, his face hidden, his hands clutching Rearden's shoulders. Then, with no hint of sound, with only the sudden beat of faint, spaced, rhythmic shudders to show it, Rearden knew that the boy was crying—crying in surrender, in admission of all the things which he could not put into the words he had never found.

Rearden went on moving slowly upward, step by groping step, fighting for firmness of motion against the weeds, the drifts of dust, the chunks of scrap metal, the refuse of a distant age. He went on, toward the line where the red glow of his mills marked the edge of the pit above him, his movement a fierce struggle that had to take the form of a gentle, unhurried flow.

He heard no sobs, but he felt the rhythmic shudders, and, through the cloth of his shirt, in place of tears, he felt the small, warm, liquid spurts flung from the wound by the shudders. He knew that the tight pressure of his arms was the only answer which the boy was now able to hear and understand—and he held the trembling body as if the strength of his arms could transfuse some part of his living power into the arteries beating ever fainter against him.

Then the sobbing stopped and the boy raised his head. His face seemed thinner and paler, but the eyes were lustrous, and he looked up at Rearden, straining for the strength to speak.

"Mr. Rearden . . . I . . . I liked you very much."

"I know it."

The boy's features had no power to form a smile, but it was a smile that spoke in his glance, as he looked at Rearden's face—as he looked at that which he had not known he had been seeking through the brief span of his life, seeking as the image of that which he had not known to be his values.

Then his head fell back, and there was no convulsion in his face, only his mouth relaxing to a shape of serenity—but there was a brief stab of convulsion in his body, like a last cry of protest—and Rearden went on slowly, not altering his pace, even though he knew that no caution was necessary any longer because what he was carrying in his arms was now that which had been the boy's teachers' idea of man—a collection of chemicals.

He walked, as if this were his form of last tribute and funeral procession for the young life that had ended in his arms. He felt an anger too intense to identify except as a pressure within him: it was a desire to kill.

The desire was not directed at the unknown thug who had sent a bullet through the boy's body, or at the looting bureaucrats who had hired the thug to do it, but at the boy's teachers who had delivered him, disarmed, to the thug's gun—at the soft, safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent to answer the queries of a quest for reason, took pleasure in crippling the young minds entrusted to their care.

Somewhere, he thought, there was this boy's mother, who had trembled with protective concern over his groping steps, while teaching him to walk, who had measured his baby formulas with a jeweler's caution, who had obeyed with a zealot's fervor the latest words of science on his diet and hygiene, protecting his unhardened body from germs—then had sent him to be turned into a tortured neurotic by the men who taught him that he had no mind and must never attempt to think. Had she fed him tainted refuse, he thought, had she mixed poison into his food, it would have been more kind and less fatal.

He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly—yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach <a child to think, but devotes the child's education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.

From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, it is like a series of shocks to freeze his motor, to undercut the power of his consciousness. "Don't ask so many questions, children should be seen and not heard!"—"Who are you to think? It's so, because I say so!"—"Don't argue, obey!"—"Don't try to understand, believe!"-—"Don't rebel, adjust!"—"Don't stand out, belong!"—"Don't struggle, compromise!"—"Your heart is more important than your mind!"—"Who are you to know? Your parents know best!"—"Who are you to know? Society knows best!"—"Who are you to know? The bureaucrats know best!"—"Who are you to object? All values are relative!"—"Who are you to want to escape a thug's bullet? That's only a personal prejudice!"

Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival—yet that was what they did to their children.

Armed with nothing but meaningless phrases, this boy had been thrown to fight for existence, he had hobbled and groped through a brief, doomed effort, he had screamed his indignant, bewildered protest —and had perished in his first attempt to soar on his mangled wings.

But a different breed of teachers had once existed, he thought, and had reared the men who created this country; he thought that mothers should set out on their knees to look for men like Hugh Akston, to find them and beg them to return.

He went through the gate of the mills, barely noticing the guards who let him enter, who stared at his face and his burden; he did not pause to listen to their words, as they pointed to the fighting in the distance; he went on walking slowly toward the wedge of light which was the open door of the hospital building.

He stepped into a lighted room full of men, bloody bandages and the odor of antiseptics; he deposited his burden on a bench, with no word of explanation to anyone, and walked out, not glancing behind him.

He walked in the direction of the front gate, toward the glare of fire and the bursts of guns. He saw, once in a while, a few figures running through the cracks between structures or darting behind black corners, pursued by groups of guards and workers; he was astonished to notice that his workers were well armed. They seemed to have subdued the hoodlums inside the mills, and only the siege at the front gate remained to be beaten. He saw a lout scurrying across a patch of lamplight, swinging a length of pipe at a wall of glass panes, battering them down with an animal relish, dancing like a gorilla to the sound of crashing glass, until three husky human figures descended upon him, carrying him writhing to the ground.

The siege of the gate appeared to be ebbing, as if the spine of the mob had been broken. He heard the distant screeches of their cries—but the shots from the road were growing rarer, the fire set to the gatekeeper's office was put out, there were armed men on the ledges and at windows, posted in well-planned defense.

On the roof of a structure above the gate, he saw, as he came closer, the slim silhouette of a man who held a gun in each hand and, from behind the protection of a chimney, kept firing at intervals down into the mob, firing swiftly and, it seemed, in two directions at once, like a sentinel protecting the approaches to the gate. The confident skill of his movements, his manner of firing, with no time wasted to take aim, but with the kind of casual abruptness that never misses a target, made him look like a hero of Western legend—and Rearden watched him with detached, impersonal pleasure, as if the battle of the mills were not his any longer, but he could still enjoy the sight of the competence and certainty with which men of that distant age had once combatted evil.

The beam of a roving searchlight struck Rearden's face, and when the light swept past he saw the man on the roof leaning down, as if peering in his direction. The man waved to someone to replace him, then vanished abruptly from his post.

Rearden hurried on through the short stretch of darkness ahead —but then, from the side, from the crack of an alley, he heard a drunken voice yell, "There he is!" and whirled to see two beefy figures advancing upon him. He saw a leering, mindless face with a mouth hung loose in a joyless chuckle, and a club in a rising fist—he heard the sound of running steps approaching from another direction, he attempted to turn his head, then the club crashed down on his skull from behind—and in the moment of splitting darkness, when he wavered, refusing to believe it, then felt himself going down, he felt a strong, protective arm seizing him and breaking his fall, he heard a gun exploding an inch above his ear, then another explosion from the same gun in the same second, but it seemed faint and distant, as if he had fallen down a shaft.

His first awareness, when he opened his eyes, was a sense of profound serenity. Then he saw that he was lying on a couch in a modern, sternly gracious room—then, he realized that it was his office and that the two men standing beside him were the mills' doctor and the superintendent. He felt a distant pain in his head, which would have been violent had he cared to notice it, and he felt a strip of tape across his hair, on the side of his head. The sense of serenity was the knowledge that he was free.

The meaning of his bandage and the meaning of his office were not to be accepted or to exist, together—it was not a combination for men to live with—this was not his battle any longer, nor his job, nor his business.

"I think I'll be all right, Doctor," he said, raising his head.

"Yes, Mr. Rearden, fortunately." The doctor was looking at him as if still unable to believe that this had happened to Hank Rearden inside his own mills; the doctor's voice was tense with angry loyalty and indignation. "Nothing serious, just a scalp wound and a slight concussion.

But you must take it easy and allow yourself to rest."

"I will," said Rearden firmly.

"It's all over," said the superintendent, waving at the mills beyond the window. "We've got the bastards beaten and on the run. You don't have to worry, Mr. Rearden. It's all over."

"It is," said Rearden. "There must be a lot of work left for you to do, Doctor."

"Oh yes! I never thought I’d live to see the day when—"

"I know. Go ahead, take care of it. I'll be all right."

"Yes, Mr. Rearden."

"I'll take care of the place," said the superintendent, as the doctor hurried out. "Everything's under control, Mr. Rearden. But it was the dirtiest—"

"I know," said Rearden. "Who was it that saved my life? Somebody grabbed me as I fell, and fired at the thugs."

"Did he! Straight at their faces. Blew their heads off. That was that new furnace foreman of ours. Been here two months. Best man I've ever had. He's the one who got wise to what the gravy boys were planning and warned me, this afternoon. Told me to arm our men, as many as we could. We got no help from the police or the state troopers, they dodged all over the place with the fanciest delays and excuses I ever heard of, it was all fixed in advance, the goons weren't expecting any armed resistance. It was that furnace foreman—Frank Adams is his name—who organized our defense, ran the whole battle, and stood on a roof, picking off the scum that came too close to the gate. Boy, what a marksman! I shudder to think how many of our lives he saved tonight.

Those bastards were out for blood, Mr. Rearden."

"I'd like to see him."

"He's waiting somewhere outside. It's he who brought you here, and he asked permission to speak to you, when possible."

"Send him in. Then go back out there, take charge, finish the job."

"Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Rearden?"

"No, nothing else."

He lay still, alone in the silence of his office. He knew that the meaning of his mills had ceased to exist, and the fullness of the knowledge left no room for the pain of regretting an illusion. He had seen, in a final image, the soul and essence of his enemies: the mindless face of the thug with the club. It was not the face itself that made him draw back in horror, but the professors, the philosophers, the moralists, the mystics who had released that face upon the world.

He felt a peculiar cleanliness. It was made of pride and of love for this earth, this earth which was his, not theirs. It was the feeling which had moved him through his life, the feeling which some among men know in their youth, then betray, but which he had never betrayed and had carried within him as a battered, attacked, unidentified, but living motor—the feeling which he could now experience in its full, uncontested purity: the sense of his own superlative value and the superlative value of his life. It was the final certainty that his life was his, to be lived with no bondage to evil, and that that bondage had never been necessary. It was the radiant serenity of knowing that he was free of fear, of pain, of guilt.

If it's true, he thought, that there are avengers who are working for the deliverance of men like me, let them see me now, let them tell me their secret, let them claim me, let them—"Come in!" he said aloud, in answer to the knock on his door.

The door opened and he lay still. The man standing on the threshold, with disheveled hair, a soot-streaked face and furnace-smudged arms, dressed in scorched overalls and bloodstained shirt, standing as if he wore a cape waving behind him in the wind, was Francisco d'Anconia.

It seemed to Rearden that his consciousness shot forward ahead of his body, it was his body that refused to move, stunned by shock, while his mind was laughing, telling him that this was the most natural, the most-to-have-been-expected event in the world.

Francisco smiled, a smile of greeting to a childhood friend on a summer morning, as if nothing else had ever been possible between them—and Rearden found himself smiling in answer, some part of him feeling an incredulous wonder, yet knowing that it was irresistibly right.

"You've been torturing yourself for months," said Francisco, approaching him, "wondering what words you'd use to ask my forgiveness and whether you had the right to ask it, if you ever saw me again —but now you see that it isn't necessary, that there's nothing to ask or to forgive."

"Yes," said Rearden, the word coming as an astonished whisper, but by the time he finished his sentence he knew that this was the greatest tribute he could offer, "yes, I know it."

Francisco sat down on the couch beside him, and slowly moved his hand over Rearden's forehead. It was like a healing touch that closed the past.

"There's only one thing I want to tell you," said Rearden. "I want you to hear it from me: you kept your oath, you were my friend."

"I knew that you knew it. You knew it from the first. You knew it, no matter what you thought of my actions. You slapped me because you could not force yourself to doubt it."

"That . . ." whispered Rearden, staring at him, "that was the thing I had no right to tell you . . . no right to claim as my excuse . . ."

"Didn't you suppose I'd understand it?"

"I wanted to find you . . . I had no right to look for you . . . And all that time, you were—" He pointed at Francisco's clothes, then his hand dropped helplessly and he closed his eyes.

"I was your furnace foreman," said Francisco, grinning. "I didn't think you'd mind that. You offered me the job yourself."

"You've been here, as my bodyguard, for two months?"

"Yes."

"You've been here, ever since—" He stopped.

"That's right. On the morning of the day when you were reading my farewell message over the roofs of New York, I was reporting here for my first shift as your furnace foreman."

"Tell me," said Rearden slowly, "that night, at James Taggart's wedding, when you said that you were after your greatest conquest . . . you meant me, didn't you?"

"Of course."

Francisco drew himself up a little, as if for a solemn task, his face earnest, the smile remaining only in his eyes. "I have a great deal to tell you," he said, "But first, will you repeat a word you once offered me and I . . . I had to reject, because I knew that I was not free to accept it?"

Rearden smiled. "What word, Francisco?"

Francisco inclined his head in acceptance, and answered, "Thank you, Hank." Then he raised his head. "Now I'll tell you the things I had come to say, but did not finish, that night when I came here for the first time. I think you're ready to hear it,"

"I am."

The glare of steel being poured from a furnace shot to the sky beyond the window. A red glow went sweeping slowly over the walls of the office, over the empty desk, over Rearden's face, as if in salute and farewell.

CHAPTER VII
"THIS IS JOHN GALT SPEAKING"

The doorbell was ringing like an alarm, In a long, demanding scream, broken by the impatient stabs of someone's frantic finger.

Leaping out of bed, Dagny noticed the cold, pale sunlight of late morning and a clock on a distant spire marking the hour of ten. She had worked at the office till four A.M. and had left word not to expect her till noon.

The white face ungroomed by panic, that confronted her when she threw the door open, was James Taggart.

“He's gone!" he cried.

"Who?"

"Hank Rearden! He's gone, quit, vanished, disappeared!"

She stood still for a moment, holding the belt of the dressing gown she had been tying; then, as the full knowledge reached her, her hands jerked the belt tight—as if snapping her body in two at the waistline—while she burst out laughing. It was a sound of triumph.

He stared at her in bewilderment. "What's the matter with you?" he gasped. "Haven't you understood?"

"Come in, Jim," she said, turning contemptuously, walking into the living room. "Oh yes, I've understood."

"He's quit! Gone! Gone like all the others! Left his mills, his bank accounts, his property, everything! Just vanished! Took some clothing and whatever he had in the safe in his apartment—they found a safe left open in his bedroom, open and empty—that's all! No word, no note, no explanation! They called me from Washington, but it's all over town! The news, I mean, the story! They can't keep it quiet!

They've tried to, but . . . Nobody knows how it got out, but it went through the mills like one of those furnace break-outs, the word that he'd gone, and then . . . before anyone could stop it, a whole bunch of them vanished! The superintendent, the chief metallurgist, the chief engineer, Rearden's secretary, even the hospital doctor! And God knows how many others! Deserting, the bastards! Deserting us, in spite of all the penalties we've set up! He's quit and the rest are quitting and those mills are just left there, standing still! Do you understand what that means?"

"Do you?" she asked.

He had thrown his story at her, sentence by sentence, as if trying to knock the smile off her face, an odd, unmoving smile of bitterness and triumph; he had failed. "It's a national catastrophe! What's the matter with you? Don't you see that it's a fatal blow? It will break the last of the country's morale and economy! We can't let him vanish! You've got to bring him back!"

Her smile disappeared.

"You can!" he cried. "You're the only one who can! He's your lover, isn't he? . . . Oh, don't look like that! It's no time for squeamishness!

It's no time for anything except that we've got to have him! You must know where he is! You can find him! You must reach him and bring him back!"

The way she now looked at him was worse than her smile—she looked as if she were seeing him naked and would not endure the sight much longer. "I can't bring him back," she said, not raising her voice.

"And I wouldn't, if I could. Now get out of here."

"But the national catastrophe—"

"Get out."

She did not notice his exit. She stood alone in the middle of her living room, her head dropping, her shoulders sagging, while she was smiling, a smile of pain, of tenderness, of greeting to Hank Rearden. She wondered dimly why she should feel so glad that he had found liberation, so certain that he was right, and yet refuse herself the same deliverance. Two sentences were beating in her mind; one was the triumphant sweep of: He's free, he's out of their reach!—the other was like a prayer of dedication: There's still a chance to win, but let me be the only victim. . . .

It was strange—she thought, in the days that followed, looking at the men around her—that catastrophe had made them aware of Hank Rearden with an intensity that his achievements had not aroused, as if the paths of their consciousness were open to disaster, but not to value.

Some spoke of him in shrill curses—others whispered, with a look of guilt and terror, as if a nameless retribution were now to descend upon them—some tried, with hysterical evasiveness, to act as if nothing had happened.

The newspapers, like puppets on tangled strings, were shouting with the same belligerence and on the same dates: "It is social treason to ascribe too much importance to Hank Rearden's desertion and to undermine public morale by the old-fashioned belief that an individual can be of any significance to society." "It is social treason to spread rumors about the disappearance of Hank Rearden. Mr. Rearden has not disappeared, he is in his office, running his mills, as usual, and there has been no trouble at Rearden Steel, except a minor disturbance, a private scuffle among some workers." "It is social treason to cast an unpatriotic light upon the tragic loss of Hank Rearden. Mr. Rearden has not deserted, he was killed in an automobile accident on his way to work, and his grief-stricken family has insisted on a private funeral."

It was strange, she thought, to obtain news by means of nothing but denials, as if existence had ceased, facts had vanished and only the frantic negatives uttered by officials and columnists gave any clue to the reality they were denying. "It is not true that the Miller Steel Foundry of New Jersey has gone out of business." "It is not true that the Jansen Motor Company of Michigan has closed its doors." "It is a vicious, anti-social lie that manufacturers of steel products are collapsing under the threat of a steel shortage. There is no reason to expect a steel shortage." "It is a slanderous, unfounded rumor that a Steel Unification Plan had been in the making and that it had been favored by Mr.

Orren Boyle. Mr. Boyle's attorney has issued an emphatic denial and has assured the press that Mr. Boyle is now vehemently opposed to any such plan. Mr. Boyle, at the moment, is suffering from a nervous breakdown."

But some news could be witnessed in the streets of New York, in the cold, dank twilight of autumn evenings: a crowd gathered in front of a hardware store, where the owner had thrown the doors open, inviting people to help themselves to the last of his meager stock, while he laughed in shrieking sobs and went smashing his plate-glass windows—a crowd gathered at the door of a run-down apartment house, where a police ambulance stood waiting, while the bodies of a man, his wife and their three children were being removed from a gas-filled room; the man had been a small manufacturer of steel castings.

If they see Hank Rearden's value now—she thought—why didn't they see it sooner? Why hadn't they averted their own doom and spared him his years of thankless torture? She found no answer.

In the silence of sleepless nights, she thought that Hank Rearden and she had now changed places: he was in Atlantis and she was locked out by a screen of light—he was, perhaps, calling to her as she had called to his struggling airplane, but no signal could reach her through that screen.

Yet the screen split open for one brief break—for the length of a letter she received a week after he vanished. The envelope bore no return address, only the postmark of some hamlet in Colorado. The letter contained two sentences: I have met him. I don't blame you.

H.R.

She sat still for a long time, looking at the letter, as if unable to move or to feel. She felt nothing, she thought, then noticed that her shoulders were trembling in a faint, continuous shudder, then grasped that the tearing violence within her was made of an exultant tribute, of gratitude and of despair—her tribute to the victory that the meeting of these two men implied, the final victory of both—her gratitude that those in Atlantis still regarded her as one of them and had granted her the exception of receiving a message—the despair of the knowledge that her blankness was a struggle not to hear the questions she was now hearing. Had Galt abandoned her? Had he gone to the valley to meet his greatest conquest? Would he come back? Had he given her up? The unendurable was not that these questions had no answer, but that the answer was so simply, so easily within her reach and that she had no right to take a step to reach it.

She had made no attempt to see him. Every morning, for a month, on entering her office, she had been conscious, not of the room around her, but of the tunnels below, under the floors of the building—and she had worked, feeling as if some marginal part of her brain was computing figures, reading reports, making decisions in a rush of lifeless activity, while her living mind was inactive and still, frozen in contemplation, forbidden to move beyond the sentence: He's down there. The only inquiry she had permitted herself had been a glance at the payroll list of the Terminal workers. She had seen the name: Galt, John. The list had carried it, openly, for over twelve years. She had seen an address next to the name—and, for a month, had struggled to forget it.

It had seemed hard to live through that month—yet now, as she looked at the letter, the thought that Galt had gone was still harder to bear. Even the struggle of resisting his proximity had been a link to him, a price to pay, a victory achieved in his name. Now there was nothing, except a question that was not to be asked. His presence in the tunnels had been her motor through those days—just as his presence in the city had been her motor through the months of that summer—just as his presence somewhere in the world had been her motor through the years before she ever heard his name. Now she felt as if her motor, too, had stopped.

She went on, with the bright, pure glitter of a five-dollar gold piece, which she kept in her pocket, as her last drop of fuel. She went on, protected from the world around her by a last armor: indifference.

The newspapers did not mention the outbreaks of violence that had begun to burst across the country—but she watched them through the reports of train conductors about bullet-riddled cars, dismantled tracks, attacked trains, besieged stations, in. Nebraska, in Oregon, in Texas, in Montana—the futile, doomed outbreaks, prompted by nothing but despair, ending in nothing but destruction. Some were the explosions of local gangs; some spread wider. There were districts that rose in blind rebellion, arrested the local officials, expelled the agents of Washington, killed the tax collectors—then, announcing their secession from the country, went on to the final extreme of the very evil that had destroyed them, as if fighting murder with suicide: went on to seize all property within their reach, to declare community bondage of all to all, and to perish within a week, their meager loot consumed, in the bloody hatred of all for all, in the chaos of no rule save that of the gun, to perish under the lethargic thrust of a few worn soldiers sent out from Washington to bring order to the ruins.

The newspapers did not mention it. The editorials went on speaking of self-denial as the road to future progress, of self-sacrifice as the moral imperative, of greed as the enemy, of love as the solution—their threadbare phrases as sickeningly sweet as the odor of ether in a hospital.

Rumors went spreading through the country in whispers of cynical terror—yet people read the newspapers and acted as if they believed what they read, each competing with the others on who would keep most blindly silent, each pretending that he did not know what he knew, each striving to believe that the unnamed was the unreal. It was as if a volcano were cracking open, yet the people at the foot of the mountain ignored the sudden fissures, the black fumes, the boiling trickles, and went on believing that their only danger was to acknowledge the reality of these signs.

"Listen to Mr. Thompson's report on the world crisis, November 22!"

It was the first acknowledgment of the unacknowledged. The announcements began to appear a week in advance and went ringing across the country. "Mr. Thompson will give the people a report on the world crisis! Listen to Mr. Thompson on every radio station and television channel at 8 P.M., on November 22!"

First, the front pages of the newspapers and the shouts of the radio voices had explained it: "To counteract the fears and rumors spread by the enemies of the people, Mr. Thompson will address the country on November 22 and will give us a full report on the state of the world in this solemn moment of global crisis. Mr. Thompson will put an end to those sinister forces whose purpose is to keep us in terror and despair. He will bring light into the darkness of the world and will show us the way out of our tragic problems—a stern way, as befits the gravity of this hour, but a way of glory, as granted by the rebirth of light.

Mr. Thompson's address will be carried by every radio station in this country and in all countries throughout the world, wherever radio waves may still be heard."

Then the chorus broke loose and went growing day by day. "Listen to Mr. Thompson on November 22!" said daily headlines. "Don't forget Mr. Thompson on November 22!" cried radio stations at the end of every program. "Mr. Thompson will tell you the truth!" said placards in subways and buses—then posters on the walls of buildings —then billboards on deserted highways.

"Don't despair! Listen to Mr. Thompson!" said pennants on government cars, "Don't give up! Listen to Mr. Thompson!" said banners in offices and shops. "Have faith! Listen to Mr. Thompson!" said voices in churches. "Mr. Thompson will give you the answer!" wrote army airplanes across the sky, the letters dissolving in space, and only the last two words remaining by the time the sentence was completed.

Public loud-speakers were built in the squares of New York for the day of the speech, and came to rasping life once an hour, in time with the ringing of distant clocks, to send over the worn rattle of the traffic, over the heads of the shabby crowds, the sonorous, mechanical cry of an alarm-toned voice: "Listen to Mr. Thompson's report on the world crisis, November 22!"—a cry rolling through the frosted air and vanishing among the foggy roof tops, under the blank page of a calendar that bore no date.

On the afternoon of November 22, James Taggart told Dagny that Mr. Thompson wished to meet her for a conference before the broadcast.

"In Washington?" she asked incredulously, glancing at her watch.

"Well, I must say that you haven't been reading the newspapers or keeping track of important events. Don't you know that Mr. Thompson is to broadcast from New York? He has come here to confer with the leaders of industry, as well as of labor, science, the professions, and the best of the country's leadership in general. He has requested that I bring you to the conference."

"Where is it to be held?"

"At the broadcasting studio."

"They don't expect me to speak on the air in support of their policies, do they?"

"Don't worry, they wouldn't let you near a microphone! They just want to hear your opinion, and you can't refuse, not in a national emergency, not when it's an invitation from Mr. Thompson in person!" He spoke impatiently, avoiding her eyes.

"When is that conference to be held?"

"At seven-thirty."

"Not much time to give to a conference about a national emergency, is it?"

"Mr. Thompson is a very busy man. Now please don't argue, don't start being difficult, I don't see what you're—"

"All right," she said indifferently, "I'll come," and added, prompted by the kind of feeling that would have made her reluctant to venture without a witness into a conference of gangsters, "but I'll bring Eddie Willers along with me,"

He frowned, considering it for a moment, with a look of annoyance more than anxiety. "Oh, all right, if you wish," he snapped, shrugging.

She came to the broadcasting studio with James Taggart as a policeman at one side of her and Eddie Willers as a bodyguard at the other.

Taggart's face was resentful and tense, Eddie's—resigned, yet wondering and curious. A stage set of pasteboard walls had been erected in a corner of the vast, dim space, representing a stiffly traditional suggestion of a cross between a stately drawing room and a modest study. A semicircle of empty armchairs filled the set, suggesting a grouping from a family album, with microphones dangling like bait at the end of long poles extended for fishing among the chairs.

The best leadership of the country, that stood about in nervous clusters, had the look of a remnant sale in a bankrupt store: she saw Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, Chick Morrison, Tinky Holloway, Dr.

Floyd Ferris, Dr. Simon Pritchett, Ma Chalmers, Fred Kinnan, and a seedy handful of businessmen among whom the half-scared, half-flattered figure of Mr. Mowen of the Amalgamated Switch and Signal Company was, incredibly, intended to represent an industrial tycoon.

But the figure that gave her an instant's shock was Dr. Robert Stadler. She had not known that a face could age so greatly within the brief space of one year: the look of timeless energy, of boyish eagerness, was gone, and nothing remained of the face except the lines of contemptuous bitterness. He stood alone, apart from the others, and she saw the moment when his eyes saw her enter; he looked like a man in a whorehouse who had accepted the nature of his surroundings until suddenly caught there by his wife: it was a look of guilt in the process of becoming hatred. Then she saw Robert Stadler, the scientist, turn away as if he had not seen her—as if his refusal to see could wipe a fact out of existence.

Mr. Thompson was pacing among the groups, snapping at random bystanders, in the restless manner of a man of action who feels contempt for the duty of making speeches. He was clutching a sheaf of typewritten pages, as if it were a bundle of old clothing about to be discarded.

James Taggart caught him in mid-step, to say uncertainly and loudly, "Mr. Thompson, may I present my sister, Miss Dagny Taggart?"

"So nice of you to come, Miss Taggart," said Mr. Thompson, shaking her hand as if she were another voter from back home whose name he had never heard before; then he marched briskly off.

"Where's the conference, Jim?" she asked, and glanced at the clock: it was a huge white dial with a black hand slicing the minutes, like a knife moving toward the hour of eight.

"I can't help it! I don't run this show!" he snapped.

Eddie Willers glanced at her with a look of bitterly patient astonishment, and stepped closer to her side.

A radio receiver was playing a program of military marches broadcast from another studio, half-drowning the fragments of nervous voices, of hastily aimless steps, of screeching machinery being pulled to focus upon the drawing-room set.

"Stay tuned to hear Mr. Thompson's report on the world crisis at eight P.M.!" cried the martial voice of an announcer, from the radio receiver—when the hand on the dial reached the hour of 7:45, "Step on it, boys, step on it!" snapped Mr. Thompson, while the radio burst into another march.

It was 7:50 when Chick Morrison, the Morale Conditioner, who seemed to be in charge, cried, "AH right, boys and girls, all right, let's take our places!" waving a bunch of notepaper, like a baton, toward the light-flooded circle of armchairs.

Mr. Thompson thudded down upon the central chair, in the manner of grabbing a vacant seat in a subway.

Chick Morrison's assistants were herding the crowd toward the circle of light.

"A happy family," Chick Morrison explained, "the country must see us as a big, united, happy—What's the matter with that thing?"

The radio music had gone off abruptly, choking on an odd little gasp of static, cut in the middle of a ringing phrase. It was 7:51. He shrugged and went on: "—happy family. Hurry up, boys. Take close-ups of Mr. Thompson, first."

The hand of the clock went slicing off the minutes, while press photographers clicked their cameras at Mr. Thompson's" sourly impatient face.

"Mr. Thompson will sit between science and industry!" Chick Morrison announced. "Dr. Stadler, please—the chair on Mr. Thompson's left. Miss Taggart—this way, please—on Mr. Thompson's right."

Dr. Stadler obeyed. She did not move.

"It's not just for the press, it's for the television audiences," Chick Morrison explained to her, in the tone of an inducement.

She made a step forward. "I will not take part in this program," she said evenly, addressing Mr. Thompson.

"You won't?" he asked blankly, with the kind of look he would have worn if one of the flower vases had suddenly refused to perform its part.

"Dagny, for Christ's sake!" cried James Taggart in panic.

"What's the matter with her?" asked Mr. Thompson.

"But, Miss Taggart! Why?" cried Chick Morrison.

"You all know why," she said to the faces around her. "You should have known better than to try that again,"

"Miss Taggart!" yelled Chick Morrison, as she turned to go. "It's a national emer—"

Then a man came rushing toward Mr. Thompson, and she stopped, as did everyone else—and the look on the man's face swept the crowd into an abruptly total silence. He was the station's chief engineer, and it was odd to see a look of primitive terror struggling against his remnant of civilized control.

"Mr. Thompson," he said, "we . . . we might have to delay the broadcast."

"What?" cried Mr. Thompson.

The hand of the dial stood at 7:58.

"We're trying to fix it, Mr. Thompson, we're trying to find out what it is . . . but we might not be on time and—"

"What are you talking about? What happened?"

"We're trying to locate the—"

"What happened?"

"I don't know! But . . . We . . we can't get on the air, Mr. Thompson."

There was a moment of silence, then Mr. Thompson asked, his voice unnaturally low, "Are you crazy?"

"I must be. I wish I were. I can't make it out. The station is dead."

"Mechanical trouble?" yelled Mr. Thompson, leaping to his feet.

"Mechanical trouble, God damn you, at a time like this? If that's how you run this station—"

The chief engineer shook his head slowly, in the manner of an adult who is reluctant to frighten a child. "It's not this station, Mr. Thompson," he said softly. "It's every station in the country, as far as we've been able to check. And there is no mechanical trouble. Neither here nor elsewhere. The equipment is in order, in perfect order, and they all report the same, but . . . but all radio stations went off the air at seven-fifty-one, and . . . and nobody can discover why."

"But—" cried Mr. Thompson, stopped, glanced about him and screamed, "Not tonight! You can't let it happen tonight! You've got to get me on the air!"

"Mr. Thompson," the man said slowly, "we've called the electronic laboratory of the State Science Institute. They . . . they've never seen anything like it. They said it might be a natural phenomenon, some sort of cosmic disturbance of an unprecedented kind, only—"

"Well?"

"Only they don't think it is. We don't, either. They said it looks like radio waves, but of a frequency never produced before, never observed anywhere, never discovered by anybody."

No one answered him. In a moment, he went on, his voice oddly solemn: "It looks like a wall of radio waves jamming the air, and we can't get through it, we can't touch it, we can't break it. . . . What's more, we can't locate its source, not by any of our usual methods. . . .

Those waves seem to come from a transmitter that . . . that makes any known to us look like a child's toy!"

"But that's not possible!" The cry came from behind Mr. Thompson and they all whirled in its direction, startled by its note of peculiar terror; it came from Dr. Stadler. "There's no such thing! There's nobody on earth to make it!"

The chief engineer spread his hands out. "That's it, Dr. Stadler," he said wearily. "It can't be possible. It shouldn't be possible. But there it is."

"Well, do something about it!" cried Mr. Thompson to the crowd at large.

No one answered or moved.

"I won't permit this!" cried Mr. Thompson. "I won't permit it! Tonight of all nights! I've got to make that speech! Do something! Solve it, whatever it is! I order you to solve it!"

The chief engineer was looking at him blankly.

"I'll fire the lot of you for this! I'll fire every electronic engineer in the country! I’ll put the whole profession on trial for sabotage, desertion and treason! Do you hear me? Now do something, God damn you!

Do something!"

The chief engineer was looking at him impassively, as if words were not conveying anything any longer.

"Isn't there anybody around to obey an order?" cried Mr. Thompson. "Isn't there a brain left in this country?"

The hand of the clock reached the dot of 8:00.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said a voice that came from the radio receiver—a man's clear, calm, implacable voice, the kind of voice that had not been heard on the airwaves for years—"Mr. Thompson will not speak to you tonight. His time is up. I have taken it over. You were to hear a report on the world crisis. That is what you are going to hear."

Three gasps of recognition greeted the voice, but nobody had the power to notice them among the sounds of the crowd, which were beyond the stage of cries. One was a gasp of triumph, another—of terror, the third—of bewilderment. Three persons had recognized the speaker: Dagny, Dr. Stadler, Eddie Willers. Nobody glanced at Eddie Willers; but Dagny and Dr. Stadler glanced at each other. She saw that his face was distorted by as evil a terror as one could ever bear to see; he saw that she knew and that the way she looked at him was as if the speaker had slapped his face.

"For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing—you who dread knowledge—I am the man who will now tell you."

The chief engineer was the only one able to move; he ran to a television set and struggled frantically with its dials. But the screen remained empty; the speaker had not chosen to be seen. Only his voice filled the airways of the country—of the world, thought the chief engineer—sounding as if he were speaking here, in this room, not to a group, but to one man; it was not the tone of addressing a meeting, but the tone of addressing a mind.

"You have heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis. You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the words had no meaning.

You have cried that man's sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster. In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith.

You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.

"You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, you have wished it, and I —I am the man who has granted you your wish.

"Your ideal had an implacable enemy, which your code of morality was designed to destroy. I have withdrawn that enemy. I have taken it out of your way and out of your reach. I have removed the source of all those evils you were sacrificing one by one. I have ended your battle. I have stopped your motor. I have deprived your world of man's mind.

"Men do not live by the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those who do. The mind is impotent, you say? I have withdrawn those whose mind isn't. There are values higher than the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those for whom there aren't.

"While you were dragging to your sacrificial altars the men of justice, of independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem—I beat you to it, I reached them first. I told them the nature of the game you were playing and the nature of that moral code of yours, which they had been too innocently generous to grasp. I showed them the way to live by another morality—mine. It is mine that they chose to follow.

“All the men who have vanished, the men you hated, yet dreaded to lose, it is I who have taken them away from you. Do not attempt to find us. We do not choose to be found. Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty- Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don't, Do not beg us to return. We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.

"We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.

"There is a difference between our strike and all those you've practiced for centuries: our strike consists, not of making demands, but of granting them. We are evil, according to your morality. We have chosen not to harm you any longer. We are useless, according to your economics. We have chosen not to exploit you any longer. We are dangerous and to be shackled, according to your politics. We have chosen not to endanger you, nor to wear the shackles any longer. We are only an illusion, according to your philosophy. We have chosen not to blind you any longer and have left you free to face reality—the reality you wanted, the world as you see it now, a world without mind.

"We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it. We have no demands to present to you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.

"Are you now crying: No, this was not what you wanted? A mindless world of ruins was not your goal? You did not want us to leave you? You moral cannibals, I know that you've always known what it was that you wanted. But your game is up, because now we know it, too.

"Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill al! the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. Your victims took the blame and struggled on, with your curses as reward for their martyrdom—while you went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good?—by what standard?

"You wanted to know John Galt's identity. I am the man who has asked that question.

"Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that's through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality—you who have never known any—but to discover it.

"You have heard no concepts of morality but the mystical or the social. You have been taught that morality is a code of behavior imposed on you by whim, the whim of a supernatural power or the whim of society, to serve God's purpose or your neighbor's welfare, to please an authority beyond the grave or else next door—but not to serve your life or pleasure. Your pleasure, you have been taught, is to be found in immorality, your interests would best be served by evil, and any moral code must be designed not for you, but against you, not to further your life, but to drain it.

"For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors—between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.

"Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your self interest and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are opposites, that morality is not the province of reason, but the province of faith and force. Both sides agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is no right or wrong in reason—that in reason there's no reason to be moral.

"Whatever else they fought about, it was against man's mind that all your moralists have stood united. It was man's mind that all their schemes and systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life.

"Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch—or build a cyclotron—without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.

"But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call 'human nature,' the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival—so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think.'

"A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. 'Value' is that which one acts to gain and keep, 'virtue' is the action by which one gains and keeps it. 'Value' presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? 'Value' presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.

"There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.

"A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue; its life is the standard of value directing its actions. But a plant has no choice of action; there are alternatives in the conditions it encounters, but there is no alternative in its function: it acts automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction.

"An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its senses provide it with an automatic code of action, an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or evil. It has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In conditions where its knowledge proves inadequate, it dies. But so long as it lives, it acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable to ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.

"Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An 'instinct' is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man's desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that (hat is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love for life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

"A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind.

"Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice—and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal, Man has to be man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a value—by choice; he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues—by choice.

"A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

"Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to whatever living remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human, to your mind, and I say: There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man's Life is its standard of value.

"AH that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.

"Man's life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being—not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement—not survival at any price, since there's only one price that pays for man's survival: reason.

"Man's life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose. If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man—for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.

"Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it- A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, capable of nothing but pain.

"Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death.

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness—to value the failure of your values—is an insolent negation of morality. A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

"But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

"Sweep aside those parasites of subsidized classrooms, who live on the profits of the mind of others and proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code of behavior. They, who pose as scientists and claim that man is only an animal, do not grant him inclusion in the law of existence they have granted to the lowest of insects. They recognize that every living species has a way of survival demanded by its nature, they do not claim that a fish can live out of water or that a dog can live without its sense of smell—but man, they claim, the most complex of beings, man can survive in any way whatever, man has no identity, no nature, and there's no practical reason why he cannot live with his means of survival destroyed, with his mind throttled and placed at the disposal of any orders they might care to issue.

"Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man's instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live.

"No, you do not have to live; it is your basic act of choice; but if you choose to live, you must live as a man—by the work and the judgment of your mind.

"No, you do not have to live as a man; it is an act of moral choice. But you cannot live as anything else—and the alternative is that state of living death which you now see within you and around you, the state of a thing unfit for existence, no longer human and less than animal, a thing that knows nothing but pain and drags itself through its span of years in the agony of unthinking self-destruction.

"No, you do not have to think; it is an act of moral choice. But someone had to think to keep you alive; if you choose to default, you default on existence and you pass the deficit to some moral man, expecting him to sacrifice his good for the sake of letting you survive by your evil.

"No, you do not have to be a man; but today those who are, are not there any longer. I have removed your means of survival—your victims.

"If you wish to know how I have done it and what I told them to make them quit, you are hearing it now. I told them, in essence, the statement I am making tonight. They were men who had lived by my code, but had not known how great a virtue it represented. I made them see it. I brought them, not a re-evaluation, but only an identification of their values.

"We, the men of the mind, are now on strike against you in the name of a single axiom, which is the root of our moral code, just as the root of yours is the wish to escape it: the axiom that existence exists.

"Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.

"If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.

"Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.

"To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors —the greatest of. your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A. thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

"Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.

"Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? AH the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders1 attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.

"Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.

"All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identity it as a solid object: he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.

A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

"Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

"The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answer is: Yours. No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth—and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man's mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.

"You who speak of a 'moral instinct' as if it were some separate endowment opposed to reason—man's reason is his moral faculty. A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False?—Right or Wrong? Is a seed to be planted in soil in order to grow—right or wrong? Is a man's wound to be disinfected in order to save his life—right or wrong? Does the nature of atmospheric electricity permit it to be converted into kinetic power—right or wrong? It is the answers to such questions that gave you everything you have—and the answers came from a man's mind, a mind of intransigent devotion to that which is right.

"A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest—but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

"That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

"Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think—not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment—on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict 'It is.'

Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say 'It is,’ you are refusing to say 'I am.' By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: 'Who am I to know?'—he is declaring: 'Who am I to live?'

"This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.

"To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.

"You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island—it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today—and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

"If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shall think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

"My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man's virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.

"Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking—that the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action—that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise—that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality—that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind—that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's consciousness.

"Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it—that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life—that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.

"Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence—that man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and that he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions—that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may not sacrifice his convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole of mankind shouting pleas or threats against him—that courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one's own consciousness.

"Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud—that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee—that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling—that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.

"Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men's vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

"Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live—that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values—that all work is creative work ft done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others—that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human—that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay—that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live—that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road—that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up—that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.

"Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned—that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character—that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind—that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining—that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul—that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice—that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself—and that the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul's shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others.

"Are you beginning to see who is John Galt? I am the man who has earned the thing you did not fight for, the thing you have renounced, betrayed, corrupted, yet were unable fully to destroy and are now hiding as your guilty secret, spending your Me in apologies to every professional cannibal, lest it be discovered that somewhere within you, you still long to say what I am now saying to the hearing of the whole of mankind: I am proud of my own value and of the fact that I wish to live.

"This wish—which you share, yet submerge as an evil—is the only remnant of the good within you, but it is a wish one must learn to deserve. His own happiness is man's only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it. Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue—and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.

"Just as your body has two fundamental sensations, pleasure and pain, as signs of its welfare or injury, as a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death, so your consciousness has two fundamental emotions, joy and suffering, in answer to the same alternative. Your emotions are estimates of that which furthers your life or threatens it, lightning calculators giving you a sum of your profit or loss. You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value. Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.

"If you hold the irrational as your standard of value and the impossible as your concept of the good, if you long for rewards you have not earned, for a fortune or a love you don't deserve, for a loophole in the law of causality, for an A that becomes non-A at your whim, if you desire the opposite of existence—you will reach it. Do not cry, when you reach it, that life is frustration and that happiness is impossible to man; check your fuel: it brought you where you wanted to go.

"Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind's fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.

"Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but earn it by my own achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of the lives of others. Just as there are no contradictions in my values and no conflicts among my desires—so there are no victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned and do not view one another with a cannibal's lust, men who neither make sacrifices nor accept them.

"The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does not ask to be paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for his flaws, A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his soul as alms. Just as he does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit—his love, his friendship, his esteem—except in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure, which he receives from men he can respect. The mystic parasites who have, throughout the ages, reviled the traders and held them in contempt, while honoring the beggars and the looters, have known the secret motive of their sneers: a trader is the entity they dread—a man of justice.

"Do you ask what moral obligation I owe to my fellow men?

None—except the obligation I owe to myself, to material objects and to all of existence: rationality. I deal with men as my nature and theirs demands: by means of reason. I seek or desire nothing from them except such relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice.

It is only with their mind that I can deal and only for my own self interest, when they see that my interest coincides with theirs. When they don't, I enter no relationship; I let dissenters go their way and I do not swerve from mine. I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs. I have nothing to gain from fools or cowards; I have no benefits to seek from human vices: from stupidity, dishonesty or fear. The only value men can offer me is the work of their mind. When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.

"Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate—do you hear me? no man may start—the use of physical force against others.

"To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man's capacity to live.

"Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. When you declare that men are irrational animals and propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own character and can no longer claim the sanction of reason—as no advocate of contradictions can claim it. There can be no 'right' to destroy the source of rights, the only means of judging right and wrong: the mind.

"To force a man to drop his own mind and to accept your will as a substitute, with a gun in. place of a syllogism, with terror in place of proof, and death as the final argument—is to attempt to exist in defiance of reality. Reality demands of man that he act for his own rational interest; your gun demands of him that he act against it. Reality threatens man with death if he does not act on his rational judgment; you threaten him with death if he does. You place him into a world where the price of his life is the surrender of all the virtues required by life—and death by a process of gradual destruction is all that you and your system will achieve, when death is made to be the ruling power, the winning argument in a society of men.

"Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum: 'Your money or your life,' or a politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: 'Your children's education or your life,' the meaning of that ultimatum is: 'Your mind or your life'—and neither is possible to man without the other.

"If there are degrees of evil, it is hard to say who is the more contemptible: the brute who assumes the right to force the mind of others or the moral degenerate who grants to others the right to force his mind.

That is the moral absolute one does not leave open to debate. I do not grant the terms of reason to men who propose to deprive me of reason. I do not enter discussions with neighbors who think they can forbid me to think. I do not place my moral sanction upon a murderer's wish to kill me. When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him—by force.

"It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own. He uses force to seize a value; I use it only to destroy destruction. A holdup man seeks to gain wealth by killing me; I do not grow richer by killing a holdup man. I seek no values by means of evil, nor do I surrender my values to evil.

"In the name of all the producers who had kept you alive and received your death ultimatums in payment, I now answer you with a single ultimatum of our own: Our work or your guns. You can choose either; you can't have both. We do not initiate the use of force against others or submit to force at their hands. If you desire ever again to live in an industrial society, it will be on our moral terms. Our terms and our motive power are the antithesis of yours. You have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours.

"You who are worshippers of the zero—you have never discovered that achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not 'the absence of pain,' intelligence is not 'the absence of stupidity,' light is not 'the absence of darkness,' an entity is not 'the absence of a nonentity.' Building is not done by abstaining from demolition; centuries of sitting and waiting in such abstinence will not raise one single girder for you to abstain from demolishing—and now you can no longer say to me, the builder: 'Produce, and feed us in exchange for our not destroying your production.' I am answering in the name of all your victims: Perish with and in your own void. Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from. us. Perish, because we have learned that a zero cannot hold a mortgage over life.

"You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness.

You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.

"You, who have lost the concept of the difference, you who claim that fear and joy are incentives of equal power—and secretly add that fear is the more 'practical’—you do not wish to live, and only fear of death still holds you to the existence you have damned. You dart in panic through the trap of your days, looking for the exit you have closed, running from a pursuer you dare not name to a terror you dare not acknowledge, and the greater your terror the greater your dread of the only act that could save you: thinking. The purpose of your struggle is not to know, not to grasp or name or hear the thing I shall now state to your hearing: that yours is the Morality of Death.

"Death is the standard of your values, death is your chosen goal, and you have to keep running, since there is no escape from the pursuer who is out to destroy you or from the knowledge that that pursuer is yourself. Stop running, for once—there is no place to run—stand naked, as you dread to stand, but as I see you, and take a look at what you dared to call a moral code.

"Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means and end. Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.

"It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him—it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.

"The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin, "A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man's nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.

"Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a 'tendency’ to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is. like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.

"What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge—he acquired a mind and became a rational being.

It was the knowledge of good and evil—he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor—he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire—he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy—all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was—that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love—he was not man.

"Man's fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin.

His evil, they charge, is that he's man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

"They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man.

"No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say, against his pain—and they point at the torture rack to which they've tied him, the rack with two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body.

"They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth—and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.

"They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost—yet such is their image of man's nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists.

"Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore? It was man's mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and of a soul moved by mystic revelations—he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone.

"And as he now crawls through the wreckage, groping blindly for a way to live, your teachers offer him the help of a morality that proclaims that he'll find no solution, and must seek no fulfillment on earth. Real existence, they tell him, is that which he cannot perceive, true consciousness is the faculty of perceiving the non-existent—and if he is unable to understand it, that is the proof that his existence is evil and his. consciousness impotent.

"As products of the split between man's soul and body, there are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelations, the other to their reflexes. No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter—the enslavement of man's body, in spirit—the destruction of his mind.

"The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive—a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society—a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself. Man's mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God, Man's mind, say the mystics of muscle, must be subordinated to the will of Society. Man's standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man's power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. Man's standard of value, say the mystics of muscle, is the pleasure of Society, whose standards are beyond man's right of judgment and must be obeyed as a primary absolute. The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. His reward, say the mystics of spirit, will be given to him beyond the grave. His reward, say the mystics of muscle, will be given on earth—to his great-grandchildren.

"Selfishness—say both—is man's evil. Man's good—say both—is to give up his personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man's good is to negate the life he lives. Sacrifice—cry both—is the essence of morality, the highest virtue within man's reach.

"Whoever is now within reach of my voice, whoever is man the victim, not man the killer, I am speaking at the deathbed of your mind, at the brink of that darkness in which you're drowning, and if there still remains within you the power to struggle to hold on to those fading sparks which had been yourself—use it now. The word that has destroyed you is 'sacrifice.' Use the last of your strength to understand its meaning. You're still alive. You have a chance.

" 'Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. 'Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. 'Sacrifice' is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don't.

"If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor's child and let your own die, it is.

"If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself—that is the virtue of sacrifice in full.

"If you renounce all personal desires and dedicate your life to those you love, you do not achieve full virtue: you still retain a value of your own, which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers, it is an act of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men you hate—that is the greatest of the virtues you can practice, "A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values. If you wish to achieve full virtue, you must seek no gratitude in return for your sacrifice, no praise, no love, no admiration, no self-esteem, not even the pride of being virtuous; the faintest trace of any gain dilutes your virtue. If you pursue a course of action that does not taint your life by any joy, that brings you no value in matter, no value in spirit, no gain, no profit, no reward—if you achieve this state of total zero, you have achieved the ideal of moral perfection.

"You are told that moral perfection is impossible to man—and, by this standard, it is. You cannot achieve it so long as you live, but the value of your life and of your person is gauged by how closely you succeed in approaching that ideal zero which is death.

"If you start, however, as a passionless blank, as a vegetable seeking to be eaten, with no values to reject and no wishes to renounce, you will not win the crown of sacrifice. It is not a sacrifice to renounce the unwanted. It is not a sacrifice to give your life for others, if death is your personal desire. To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you—you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body. It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture.

"Do not remind me that it pertains only to this life on earth. I am concerned with no other. Neither are you.

"If you wish to save the last of your dignity, do not call your best actions a 'sacrifice': that term brands you as immoral. If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty. If a man dies fighting for his own freedom, it is not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a slave; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of man who's willing.

If a man refuses to sell his convictions, it is not a sacrifice, unless he is the sort of man who has no convictions.

"Sacrifice could be proper only for those who have nothing to sacrifice—no values, no standards, no judgment—those whose desires are irrational whims, blindly conceived and lightly surrendered. For a man of moral stature, whose desires are born of rational values, sacrifice is the surrender of the right to the wrong, of the good to the evil.

"The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral—a morality that declares its own bankruptcy by confessing that it can't impart to men any personal stake in virtues or values, and that their souls are sewers of depravity, which they must be taught to sacrifice. By its own confession, it is impotent to teach men to be good and can only subject them to constant punishment.

"Are you thinking, in some foggy stupor, that it's only material values that your morality requires you to sacrifice? And what do you think are material values? Matter has no value except as a means for the satisfaction of human desires. Matter is only a tool of human values.

To what service are you asked to give the material tools your virtue has produced? To the service of that which you regard as evil: to a principle you do not share, to a person you do not respect, to the achievement of a purpose opposed to your own—else your gift is not a sacrifice.

"Your morality tells you to renounce the material world and to divorce your values from matter. A man whose values are given no expression in material form, whose existence is unrelated to his ideals, whose actions contradict his convictions, is a cheap little hypocrite—yet that is the man who obeys your morality and divorces his values from matter. The man who loves one woman, but sleeps with another—the man who admires the talent of a worker, but hires another—the man who considers one cause to be just, but donates his money to the support of another—the man who holds high standards of craftsmanship, but devotes his effort to the production of trash—these are the men who have renounced matter, the men who believe that the values of their spirit cannot be brought into material reality.

"Do you say it is the spirit that such men have renounced? Yes, of course. You cannot have one without the other. You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness. Renounce your consciousness and you become a brute. Renounce your body and you become a fake.

Renounce the material world and you surrender it to evil.

"And that is precisely the goal of your morality, the duty that your code demands of you. Give to that which you do not enjoy, serve that which you do not admire, submit to that which you consider evil—surrender the world to the values of others, deny, reject, renounce your self. Your self is your mind; renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow.

"It is your mind that they want you to surrender—all those who preach the creed of sacrifice, whatever their tags or their motives, whether they demand it for the sake of your soul or of your body, whether they promise you another life in heaven or a full stomach on this earth. Those who start by saying: 'It is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of others'—end up by saying: 'It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must sacrifice them to the convictions of others.'

"This much is true: the most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth. You are asked to sacrifice your intellectual integrity, your logic, your reason, your standard of truth—in favor of becoming a prostitute whose standard is the greatest good for the greatest number.

"If you search your code for guidance, for an answer to the question: 'What is the good?'—the only answer you will find is 'The good of others.' The good is whatever others wish, whatever you feel they feel they wish, or whatever you feel they ought to feel. 'The good of others' is a magic formula that transforms anything into gold, a formula to be recited as a guarantee of moral glory and as a fumigator for any action, even the slaughter of a continent. Your standard of virtue is not an object, not an act, not a principle, but an intention. You need no proof, no reasons, no success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others —all you need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the 'non-good for me.'

"Your code—which boasts that it upholds eternal, absolute, objective moral values and scorns the conditional, the relative and the subjective —your code hands out, as its version of the absolute, the following rule of moral conduct: If you wish it, it's evil; if others wish it, it's good; if the motive of your action is your welfare, don't do it; if the motive is the welfare of others, then anything goes.

"As this double-jointed, double-standard morality splits you in half, so it splits mankind into two enemy camps: one is you, the other is all the rest of humanity. You are the only outcast who has no right to wish or live. You are the only servant, the rest are the masters, you are the only giver, the rest are the takers, you are the eternal debtor, the rest are the creditors never to be paid off. You must not question their right to your sacrifice, or the nature of their wishes and their needs: their right is conferred upon them by a negative, by the fact that they are 'non-you.'

"For those of you who might ask questions, your code provides a consolation prize and booby-trap: it is for your own happiness, it says, that you must serve the happiness of others, the only way to achieve your joy is to give it up to others, the only way to achieve your prosperity is to surrender your wealth to others, the only way to protect your life is to protect all men except yourself—and if you find no joy in this procedure, it is your own fault and the proof of your evil; if you were good, you would find your happiness in providing a banquet for others, and your dignity in existing on such crumbs as they might care to toss you.

"You who have no standard of self-esteem, accept the guilt and dare not ask the questions. But you know the unadmitted answer, refusing to acknowledge what you see, what hidden premise moves your world.

You know it, not in honest statement, but as a dark uneasiness within you, while you flounder between guiltily cheating and grudgingly practicing a principle too vicious to name.

"I, who do not accept the unearned, neither in values nor in guilt, am here to ask the questions you evaded. Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your own? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? If the sensation of eating a cake is a value, why is it an immoral indulgence in your stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the stomach of others? Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it?

Does virtue consist of serving vice? Is the moral purpose of those who are good, self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil?

"The answer you evade, the monstrous answer is: No, the takers are not evil, provided they did not earn the value you gave them. It is not immoral for them to accept it, provided they are unable to produce it, unable to deserve it, unable to give you any value in return. It is not immoral for them to enjoy it, provided they do not obtain it by right.

"Such is the secret core of your creed, the other half of your double standard: it is immoral to live by your own effort, but moral to live by the effort of others—it is immoral to consume your own product, but moral to consume the products of others—it is immoral to earn, but moral to mooch—it is the parasites who are the moral justification for the existence of the producers, but the existence of the parasites is an end in itself—it is evil to profit by achievement, but good to profit by sacrifice—it is evil to create your own happiness, but good to enjoy it at the price of the blood of others.

"Your code divides mankind into two castes and commands them to live by opposite rules: those who may desire anything and those who may desire nothing, the chosen and the damned, the riders and the carriers, the eaters and the eaten. What standard determines your caste? What passkey admits you to the moral elite? The passkey is lack of value.

"Whatever the value involved, it is your lack of it that gives you a claim upon those who don't lack it. It is your need that gives you a claim to rewards. If you are able to satisfy your need, your ability annuls your right to satisfy it. But a need you are unable to satisfy gives you first right to the lives of mankind.

"If you succeed, any man who fails is your master; if you fail, any man who succeeds is your serf. Whether your failure is just or not, whether your wishes are rational or not, whether your misfortune is undeserved or the result of your vices, it is misfortune that gives you a right to rewards. It is pain, regardless of its nature or cause, pain as a primary absolute, that gives you a mortgage on all of existence.

"If you heal your pain by your own effort, you receive no moral credit: your code regards it scornfully as an act of self-interest. Whatever value you seek to acquire, be it wealth or food or love or rights, if you acquire it by means of your virtue, your code does not regard it as a moral acquisition: you occasion no loss to anyone, it is a trade, not alms; a payment, not a sacrifice. The deserved belongs in the selfish, commercial realm of mutual profit; it is only the undeserved that calls for that moral transaction which consists of profit to one at the price of disaster to the other. To demand rewards for your virtue is selfish and immoral; it is your lack of virtue that transforms your demand into a moral right.

"A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness—nonexistence—as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw—the zero.

"Who provides the account to pay these claims? Those who are cursed for being non-zeros, each to the extent of his distance from that ideal. Since all values are the product of virtues, the degree of your virtue is used as the measure of your penalty; the degree of your faults is used as the measure of your gain. Your code declares that the rational man must sacrifice himself to the irrational, the independent man to parasites, the honest man to the dishonest, the man of justice to the unjust, the productive man to thieving loafers, the man of integrity to compromising knaves, the man of self-esteem to sniveling neurotics. Do you wonder at the meanness of soul in those you see around you? The man who achieves these virtues will not accept your moral code; the man who accepts your moral code will not achieve these virtues.

"Under a morality of sacrifice, the first value you sacrifice is morality; the next is self-esteem. When need is the standard, every man is both victim and parasite. As a victim, he must labor to fill the needs of others, leaving himself in the position of a parasite whose needs must be filled by others. He cannot approach his fellow men except in one of two disgraceful roles: he is both a beggar and a sucker.

"You fear the man who has a dollar less than you, that dollar is rightfully his, he makes you feel like a moral defrauder. You hate the man who has a dollar more than you, that dollar is rightfully yours, he makes you feel that you are morally defrauded. The man below is a source of your guilt, the man above is a source of your frustration. You do not know what to surrender or demand, when to give and when to grab, what pleasure in life is rightfully yours and what debt is still unpaid to others—you struggle to evade, as 'theory,' the knowledge that by the moral standard you've accepted you are guilty every moment of your life, there is no mouthful of food you swallow that is not needed by someone somewhere on earth—and you give up the problem in blind resentment, you conclude that moral perfection is not to be achieved or desired, that you will muddle through by snatching as snatch can and by avoiding the eyes of the young, of those who look at you as if self-esteem were possible and they expected you to have it Guilt is all that you retain within your soul—and so does every other man, as he goes past, avoiding your eyes. Do you wonder why your morality has not achieved brotherhood on earth or the good will of man to man?

"The justification of sacrifice, that your morality propounds, is more corrupt than the corruption it purports to justify. The motive of your sacrifice, it tells you, should be love—the love you ought to feel for every man. A morality that professes the belief that the values of the spirit are more precious than matter, a morality that teaches you to scorn a whore who gives her body indiscriminately to all men—this same morality demands that you surrender your soul to promiscuous love for all comers.

"As there can be no causeless wealth, so there can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards. To love is to value.

The man who tells you that it is possible to value without values, to love those whom you appraise as worthless, is the man who tells you that it is possible to grow rich by consuming without producing and that paper money is as valuable as gold.

"Observe that he does not expect you to feel a causeless fear. When his kind get into power, they are expert at contriving means of terror, at giving you ample cause to feel the fear by which they desire to rule you. But when it comes to love, the highest of emotions, you permit them to shriek at you accusingly that you are a moral delinquent if you're incapable of feeling causeless love. When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not 1034 so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.

"Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. Your morality demands that you divorce your love from values and hand it down to any vagrant, not as response to his worth, but as response to his need, not as reward, but as alms, not as a payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices. Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral judgment, that true love transcends, forgives and survives every manner of evil in Its object, and the greater the love the greater the depravity it permits to the loved. To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, it tells you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love to 'those who don't deserve it, and the less they deserve it, the more love you owe them—the more loathsome the object, the nobler your love—the more unfastidious your love, the greater your virtue—and if you can bring your soul to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection.

"Such is your morality of sacrifice and such are the twin ideals it offers: to refashion the life of your body in the image of a human stockyards, and the life of your spirit in the image of a dump.

"Such was your goal—and you've reached it. Why do you now moan complaints about man's impotence and the futility of human aspirations? Because you were unable to prosper by seeking destruction? Because you were unable to find joy by worshipping pain? Because you were unable to live by holding death as your standard of value?

"The degree of your ability to live was the degree to which you broke your moral code, yet you believe that those who preach it are friends of humanity, you damn yourself and dare not question their motives or their goals. Take a look at them now, when you face your last choice—and if you choose to perish, do so with full knowledge of how cheaply how small an enemy has claimed your life.

"The mystics of both schools, who preach the creed of sacrifice, are germs that attack you through a single sore: your fear of relying on your mind. They tell you that they possess a means of knowledge higher than the mind, a mode of consciousness superior to reason—like a special pull with some bureaucrat of the universe who gives them secret tips withheld from others. The mystics of spirit declare that they possess an extra sense you lack: this special sixth sense consists of contradicting the whole of the knowledge of your five. The mystics of muscle do not bother to assert any claim to extrasensory perception: they merely declare that your senses are not valid, and that their wisdom consists of perceiving your blindness by some manner of unspecified means. Both kinds demand that you invalidate your own consciousness and surrender yourself into their power. They offer you, as proof of their superior knowledge, the fact that they assert the opposite of everything you know, and as proof of their superior ability to deal with existence, the fact that they lead you to misery, self-sacrifice, starvation, destruction.

"They claim that they perceive a mode of being superior to your existence on this earth. The mystics of spirit call it 'another dimension,' which consists of denying dimensions. The mystics of muscle call it 'the future,' which consists of denying the present. To exist is to possess identity. What identity are they able to give to their superior realm?

They keep telling you what it is not, but never tell you what it is. All their identifications consist of negating: God is that which no human mind can know, they say—and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge—God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.

"It is only the metaphysics of a leech that would cling to the idea of a universe where a zero is a standard of identification. A leech would want to seek escape from the necessity to name its own nature—escape from the necessity to know that the substance on which it builds its private universe is blood.

"What is the nature of that superior world to which they sacrifice the world that exists? The mystics of spirit curse matter, the mystics of muscle curse profit. The first wish men to profit by renouncing the earth, the second wish men to inherit the earth by renouncing all profit. Their non-material, non-profit worlds are realms where rivers run with milk and coffee, where wine spurts from rocks at their command, where pastry drops on them from clouds at the price of opening their mouth. On this material, profit-chasing earth, an enormous investment of virtue—of intelligence, integrity, energy, skill—is required to construct a railroad to carry them the distance of one mile; in their nonmaterial, non-profit world, they travel from planet to planet at the cost of a wish. If an honest person asks them: 'How?'—they answer with righteous scorn that a 'how' is the concept of vulgar realists; the concept of superior spirits is 'Somehow.' On this earth restricted by matter and profit, rewards are achieved by thought; in a world set free of such restrictions, rewards are achieved by wishing.

"And that is the whole of their shabby secret. The secret of all their esoteric philosophies, of all their dialectics and super-senses, of their evasive eyes and snarling words, the secret for which they destroy civilization, language, industries and lives, the secret for which they pierce "their own eyes and eardrums, grind out their senses, blank out their minds, the purpose for which they dissolve the absolutes of reason, logic, matter, existence, reality—is to erect upon that plastic fog a single holy absolute: their Wish.

"The restriction they seek to escape is the law of identity. The freedom they seek is freedom from the fact that an A will remain an A, no matter what their tears or tantrums—that a river will not bring them milk, no matter what their hunger—that water will not run uphill, no matter what comforts they could gain if it did, and if they want to lift it to the roof of a skyscraper, they must do it by a process of thought and labor, in which the nature of an inch of pipe line counts, but their feelings do not—that their feelings are impotent to alter the course of a single speck of dust in space or the nature of any action they have committed.

"Those who tell you that man is unable to perceive a reality undistorted by his senses, mean that they are unwilling to perceive a reality undistorted by their feelings. 'Things as they are' are things as perceived by your mind; divorce them from reason and they become 'things as perceived by your wishes.'

"There is no honest revolt against reason—and when you accept any part of their creed, your motive is to get away with something your reason would not permit you to attempt. The freedom you seek is freedom from the fact that if you stole your wealth, you are a scoundrel, no matter how much you give to charity or how many prayers you recite—that if you sleep with sluts, you're not a worthy husband, no matter how anxiously you feel that you love your wife next morning—that you are an entity, not a series of random pieces scattered through a universe where nothing sticks and nothing commits you to anything., the universe of a child's nightmare where identities switch and swim, where the rotter and the hero are interchangeable parts arbitrarily assumed at will—that you are a man—that you are an entity—that you are.

"No matter how eagerly you claim that the goal of your mystic wishing is a higher mode of life, the rebellion against identity is the wish for non-existence. The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.

"Your teachers, the mystics of both schools, have reversed causality in their consciousness, then strive to reverse it in existence. They take their emotions as a cause, and their mind as a passive effect. They make their emotions their tool for perceiving reality. They hold their desires as an irreducible primary, as a fact superseding all facts. An honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of his desire. He says: 'It is, therefore I want it.' They say: 'I want it, therefore it is.’

"They want to cheat the axiom of existence and consciousness, they want their consciousness to be an instrument not of perceiving but of creating existence, and existence to be not the object but the subject of their consciousness—they want to be that God they created in their image and likeness, who creates a universe out of a void by means of an arbitrary whim. But reality is not to be cheated. What they achieve is the opposite of their desire. They want an omnipotent power over existence; instead, they lose the power of their consciousness. By refusing to know, they condemn themselves to the horror of a perpetual unknown.

"Those irrational wishes that draw you to their creed, those emotions you worship as an idol, on whose altar you sacrifice the earth, that dark, incoherent passion within you, which you take as the voice of God or of your glands, is nothing more than the corpse of your mind.

An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.

"Whenever you committed the evil of refusing to think and to see, of exempting from the absolute of reality some one small wish of yours, whenever you chose to say: Let me withdraw from the judgment of reason the cookies I stole, or the existence of God, let me have my one irrational whim and I will be a man of reason about all else—that was the act of subverting your consciousness, the act of corrupting your mind. Your mind then became a fixed jury who takes orders from a secret underworld, whose verdict distorts the evidence to fit an absolute it dares not touch—and a censored reality is the result, a splintered reality where the bits you chose to see are floating among the chasms of those you didn't, held together by that embalming fluid of the mind which is an emotion exempted from thought.

"The links you strive to drown are causal connections. The enemy you seek to defeat is the law of causality: it permits you no miracles.

The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. Al! actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature. An action not caused by an entity would be caused by a zero, which would mean a zero controlling a thing, a nonentity controlling an entity, the non-existent ruling the existent—which is the universe of your teachers' desire, the cause of their doctrines of causeless action, the reason of their revolt against reason, the goal of their morality, their politics, their economics, the ideal they strive for: the reign of the zero.

"The law of identity does not permit you to have your cake and eat it, too. The law of causality does not permit you to eat your cake before you have it. But if you drown both laws in the blanks of your mind, if you pretend to yourself and to others that you don't see—then you can try to proclaim your right to eat your cake today and mine tomorrow, you can preach that the way to have a cake is to eat it first, before you bake it, that the way to produce is to start by consuming, that "all wishers have an equal claim to all things, since nothing is caused by anything. The corollary of the causeless in matter is the unearned in spirit.

"Whenever you rebel against causality, your motive is the fraudulent desire, not to escape it, but worse: to reverse it. You want unearned love, as if love, the effect, could give you personal value, the cause—you want unearned admiration, as if admiration, the effect, could give you virtue, the cause—you want unearned wealth, as if wealth, the effect, could give you ability, the cause—you plead for mercy, mercy, not justice, as if an unearned forgiveness could wipe out the cause of your plea. And to indulge your ugly little shams, you support the doctrines of your teachers, while they run hog-wild proclaiming that spending, the effect, creates riches, the cause, that machinery, the effect, creates intelligence, the cause, that your sexual desires, the effect, create your philosophical values, the cause.

"Who pays for the orgy? Who causes the causeless? Who are the victims, condemned to remain unacknowledged and to perish in silence, lest their agony disturb your pretense that they do not exist? We are, we, the men of the mind.

"We are the cause of all the values that you covet, we who perform the process of thinking, which is the process of defining identity and discovering causal connections. We taught you to know, to speak, to produce, to desire, to love. You who abandon reason—were it not for us who preserve it, you would not be able to fulfill or even to conceive your wishes. You would not be able to desire the clothes that had not been made, the automobile that had not been invented, the money that had not been devised, as exchange for goods that did not exist, the admiration that had not been experienced for men who had achieved nothing, the love that belongs and pertains only to those who preserve their capacity to think, to choose, to value.

"You—who leap like a savage out of the jungle of your feelings into the Fifth Avenue of our New York and proclaim that you want to keep the electric lights, but to destroy the generators—it is our wealth that you use while destroying us, it is our values that you use while damning us, it is our language that you use while denying the mind.

"Just as your mystics of spirit invented their heaven in the image of our earth, omitting our existence, and promised you rewards created by miracle out of non-matter—so your modern mystics of muscle omit our existence and promise you a heaven where matter shapes itself of its own causeless will into all the rewards desired by your non-mind.

"For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket—by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners. We, the men of the mind, were the unnamed victims of their creed, we who were willing to break their moral code and to bear damnation for the sin of reason—we who thought and acted, while they wished and prayed—we who were moral outcasts, we who were bootleggers of life when life was held to be a crime—while they basked in moral glory for the virtue of surpassing material greed and of distributing in selfless charity the material goods produced by—blank-out.

"Now we are chained and commanded to produce by savages who do not grant us even the identification of sinners—by savages who proclaim that we do not exist, then threaten to deprive us of the life we don't possess, if we fail to provide them with the goods we don't produce. Now we are expected to continue running railroads and to know the minute when a train will arrive after crossing the span of a continent, we are expected to continue running steel mills and to know the molecular structure of every drop of metal in the cables of your bridges and in the body of the airplanes that support you in mid-air—while the tribes of your grotesque little mystics of muscle fight over the carcass of our world, gibbering in sounds of non-language that there are no principles, no absolutes, no knowledge, no mind.

"Dropping below the level of a savage, who believes that the magic words he utters have the power to alter reality, they believe that reality can be altered by the power of the words they do not utter—and their magic tool is the blank-out, the pretense that nothing can come into existence past the voodoo of their refusal to identify it.

"As they feed on stolen wealth in body, so they feed on stolen concepts in mind, and proclaim that honesty consists of refusing to know that one is stealing. As they use effects while denying causes, so they use our concepts while denying the roots and the existence of the concepts they are using. As they seek, not to build, but to take over industrial plants, so they seek, not to think, but to take over human thinking.

"As they proclaim that the only requirement for running a factory is the ability to turn the cranks of the machines, and blank out the question of who created the factory—so they proclaim that there are no entities, that nothing exists but motion, and blank out the fact that motion presupposes the thing which moves, that without the concept of entity, there can be no such concept as 'motion.' As they proclaim their right to consume the unearned, and blank out the question of who's to produce it—so they proclaim that there is no law of identity, that nothing exists but change, and blank out the fact that change presupposes the concepts of what changes, from what and to what, that without the law of identity no such concept as 'change' is possible. As they rob an industrialist while denying his value, so they seek to seize power over all of existence while denying that existence exists.

" 'We know that we know nothing,' they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are claiming knowledge—'There are no absolutes,' they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute—'You cannot prove that you exist or that you're conscious,' they chatter, blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge: the existence of something to know, of a consciousness able to know it, and of a knowledge that has learned to distinguish between such concepts as the proved and the unproved.

"When a savage who has not learned to speak declares that existence must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of nonexistence—when he declares that your consciousness must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of unconsciousness—he is asking you to step into a void outside of existence and consciousness to give him proof of both—he is asking you to become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero, "When he declares that an axiom is a matter of arbitrary choice and he doesn't choose to accept the axiom that he exists, he blanks out the fact that he has accepted it by uttering that sentence, that the only way to reject it is to shut one's mouth, expound no theories and die.

"An axiom is a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others, whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it. Let the caveman who does not choose to accept the axiom of identity, try to present his theory without using the concept of identity or any concept derived from it—let the anthropoid who does not choose to accept the existence of nouns, try to devise a language without nouns, adjectives or verbs—let the witchdoctor who does not choose to accept the validity of sensory perception, try to prove it without using the data he obtained by sensory perception —let the head-hunter who does not choose to accept the validity of logic, try to prove it without using logic—let the pigmy who proclaims that a skyscraper needs no foundation after it reaches its fiftieth story, yank the base from under his building, not yours—let the cannibal who snarls that the freedom of man's mind was needed to create an industrial civilization, but is not needed to maintain it, be given an arrowhead and bearskin, not a university chair of economics.

"Do you think they are taking you back to dark ages? They are taking you back to darker ages than any your history has known. Their goal is not the era of pre-science, but the era of pre-language. Their purpose is to deprive you of the concept on which man's mind, his life and his culture depend: the concept of an objective reality. Identify the development of a human consciousness—and you will know the purpose of their creed.

"A savage is a being who has not grasped that A is A and that reality is real. He has arrested his mind at the level of a baby's, at the stage when a consciousness acquires its initial sensory perceptions and has not learned to distinguish solid objects. It is to a baby that the world appears as a blur of motion, without things that move—and the birth of his mind is the day when he grasps that the streak that keeps flickering past him is his mother and the whirl beyond her is a curtain, that the two are solid entities and neither can turn into the other, that they are what they are, that they exist. The day when he grasps that matter has no volition is the day when he grasps that he has—and this is his birth as a human being. The day when he grasps that the reflection he sees in a mirror is not a delusion, that it is real, but it is not himself, that the mirage he sees in a desert is not a delusion, that the air and the light rays that cause it are real, but it is not a city, it is a city's reflection—the day when he grasps that he is not a passive recipient of the sensations of any given moment, that his senses do not provide him with automatic knowledge in separate snatches independent of context, but only with the material of knowledge, which his mind must learn to integrate—the day when he grasps that his senses cannot deceive him, that physical objects cannot act without causes, that his organs of perception are physical and have no volition, no power to invent or to distort, that the evidence they give him is an absolute, but his mind must learn to understand it, his mind must discover the nature, the causes, the full context of his sensory material, his mind must identify the things that he perceives—that is the day of his birth as a thinker and scientist.

"We are the men who reach that day; you are the men who choose to reach it partly; a savage is a man who never does.

"To a savage, the world is a place of unintelligible miracles where anything is possible to inanimate matter and nothing is possible to him.

His world is not the unknown, but that irrational horror: the unknowable. He believes that physical objects are endowed with a mysterious volition, moved by causeless, unpredictable whims, while he is a helpless pawn at the mercy of forces beyond his control. He believes that nature is ruled by demons who possess an omnipotent power and that reality is their fluid plaything, where they can turn his bowl of meal into a snake and his wife into a beetle at any moment, where the A he has never discovered can be any non-A they choose, where the only knowledge he possesses is that he must not attempt to know. He can count on nothing, he can only wish, and he spends his life on wishing, on begging his demons to grant him his wishes by the arbitrary power of their will, giving them credit when they do, taking the blame when they don't, offering them sacrifices in token of his gratitude and sacrifices in token of his guilt, crawling on his belly in fear and worship of sun and moon and wind and rain and of any thug who announces himself as their spokesman, provided his words are unintelligible and his mask sufficiently frightening—he wishes, begs and crawls, and dies, leaving you, as a record of his view of existence, the distorted monstrosities of his idols, part-man, part-animal, part-spider, the embodiments of the world of non-A.

"His is the intellectual state of your modern teachers and his is the world to which they want to bring you.

"If you wonder by what means they propose to do it, walk into any college classroom and you will hear your professors teaching your children that man can be certain of nothing, that his consciousness has no validity whatever, that he can learn no facts and no laws of existence, that he's incapable of knowing an objective reality. What, then, is his standard of knowledge and truth? Whatever others believe, is their answer. There is no knowledge, they teach, there's only faith: your belief that you exist is an act of faith, no more valid than another's faith in his right to kill you; the axioms of science are an act of faith, no more valid than a mystic's faith in revelations; the belief that electric light can be produced by a generator is an act of faith, no more valid than the belief that it can be produced by a rabbit's foot kissed under a stepladder on the first of the moon—truth is whatever people want it to be, and people are everyone except yourself; reality is whatever people choose to say it is, there are no objective facts, there are only people's arbitrary wishes—a man who seeks knowledge in a laboratory by means of test tubes and logic is an old-fashioned, superstitious fool; a true scientist is a man who goes around taking public polls—and if it weren't for the selfish greed of the manufacturers of steel girders, who have a vested interest in obstructing the progress of science, you would learn that New York City does not exist, because a poll of the entire population of the world would tell you by a landslide majority that their beliefs forbid its existence.

"For centuries, the mystics of spirit have proclaimed that faith is superior to reason, but have not dared deny the existence of reason.

Their heirs and product, the mystics of muscle, have completed their job and achieved their dream: they proclaim that everything is faith, and call it a revolt against believing. As revolt against unproved assertions, they proclaim that nothing can be proved; as revolt against supernatural knowledge, they proclaim that no knowledge is possible; as revolt against the enemies of science, they proclaim that science is superstition; as revolt against the enslavement of the mind, they proclaim that there is no mind.

"If you surrender your power to perceive, if you accept the switch of your standard from the objective to the collective and wait for mankind to tell you what to think, you will find another switch taking place before the eyes you have renounced: you will find that your teachers become the rulers of the collective, and if you then refuse to obey them, protesting that they are not the whole of mankind, they will answer: 'By what means do you know that we are not? Are, brother?

Where did you get that old-fashioned term?'

"If you doubt that such is their purpose, observe with what passionate consistency the mystics of muscle are striving to make you forget that a concept such as 'mind' has ever existed. Observe the twists of undefined verbiage, the words with rubber meanings, the terms left floating in midstream, by means of which they try to get around the recognition of the concept of 'thinking.' Your consciousness, they tell you, consists of 'reflexes,' 'reactions,' 'experiences,' 'urges,’ and 'drives'—and refuse to identify the means by which they acquired that knowledge, to identify the act they are performing when they tell it or the act you are performing when you listen. Words have the power to 'condition' you, they say and refuse to identify the reason why words have the power to change your—blank-out. A student reading a book understands it through a process of—blank-out. A scientist working on an invention is engaged in the activity of—blank-out. A psychologist helping a neurotic to solve a problem and untangle a conflict, does it by means of—blank-out. An industrialist—blank-out—there is no such person. A factory is a 'natural resource,' like a tree, a rock or a mud puddle.

"The problem of production, they tell you, has been solved and deserves no study or concern; the only problem left for your 'reflexes' to solve is now the problem of distribution. Who solved the problem of production? Humanity, they answer. What was the solution? The goods are here. How did they get here? Somehow. What caused it? Nothing has causes.

"They proclaim that every man born is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his 'minimum sustenance'—his food, his clothes, his shelter—with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it—from whom? Blank-out. Every man, they announce, owns an equal share of the technological benefits created in the world.

Created—by whom? Blank-out. Frantic cowards who posture as defenders of industrialists now define the purpose of economics as 'an adjustment between the unlimited desires of men and the goods supplied in limited quantity.' Supplied—by whom? Blank-out. Intellectual hoodlums who pose as professors, shrug away the thinkers of the past by declaring that their social theories were based on the impractical assumption that man was a rational being—but since men are not rational, they declare, there ought to be established a system that will make it possible for them to exist while being irrational, which means: while defying reality. Who will make it possible? Blank-out. Any stray mediocrity rushes into print with plans to control the production of mankind—and whoever agrees or disagrees with his statistics, no one questions his right to enforce his plans by means of a gun. Enforce—on whom? Blank-out. Random females with causeless incomes flitter on trips around the globe and return to deliver the message that the backward peoples of the world demand a higher standard of living. Demand—of whom? Blank-out.

"And to forestall any inquiry into the cause of the difference between a jungle village and New York City, they resort to the ultimate obscenity of explaining man's industrial progress—skyscrapers, cable bridges, power motors, railroad trains—by declaring that man is an animal who possesses an 'instinct of tool-making.'

"Did you wonder what is wrong with the world? You are now seeing the climax of the creed of the uncaused and unearned. All your gangs of mystics, of spirit or muscle, are fighting one another for power to rule you, snarling that love is the solution for all the problems of your spirit and that a whip is the solution for all the problems of your body—you who have agreed to have no mind. Granting man less dignity than they grant to cattle, ignoring what an animal trainer could tell them—that no animal can be trained by fear, that a tortured elephant will trample its torturer, but will not work for him or carry his burdens —they expect man to continue to produce electronic tubes, supersonic airplanes, atom-smashing engines and interstellar telescopes, with his ration of meat for reward and a lash on his back for incentive.

"Make no mistake about the character of mystics. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages —and power, the power to rule you by force, has always been their only lust.

"From the rites of the jungle witch-doctors, which distorted reality into grotesque absurdities, stunted the minds of their victims and kept them in terror of the supernatural for stagnant stretches of centuries—to the supernatural doctrines of the Middle Ages, which kept men huddling on the mud floors of their hovels, in terror that the devil might steal the soup they had worked eighteen hours to earn—to the seedy little smiling professor who assures you that your brain has no capacity to think, that you have no means of perception and must blindly obey the omnipotent will of that supernatural force: Society—all of it is the same performance for the same and only purpose: to reduce you to the kind of pulp that has surrendered the validity of its consciousness.

"But it cannot be done to you without your consent. If you permit it to be done, you deserve it.

"When you listen to a mystic's harangue on the impotence of the human mind and begin to doubt your consciousness, not his, when you permit your precariously semi-rational state to be shaken by any assertion and decide it is safer to trust his superior certainty and knowledge, the joke is on both of you: your sanction is the only source of certainty he has. The supernatural power that a mystic dreads, the unknowable spirit he worships, the consciousness he considers omnipotent is—yours.

A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others. Somewhere in. the distant reaches of his childhood, when his own understanding of reality clashed with the assertions of others, with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to so craven a fear of dependence that he renounced his rational faculty. At the crossroads of the choice between 'I know' and 'They say,' he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think. Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others. His surrender took the form of the feeling that he must hide his lack of understanding, that others possess some mysterious knowledge of which he alone is deprived, that reality is whatever they want it to be, through some means forever denied to him.

"From then on, afraid to think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings. His feelings become his only guide, his only remnant of personal identity, he clings to them with ferocious possessiveness—and whatever thinking he does is devoted to the struggle of hiding from himself that the nature of his feelings is terror.

"When a mystic declares that he feels the existence of a power superior to reason, he feels it all right, but that power is not an omniscient super-spirit of the universe, it is the consciousness of any passer-by to whom he has surrendered his own. A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness of others. 'They' are his only key to reality, he feels that he cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting their unaccountable consent, 'They' are his only means of perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live. To control the consciousness of others becomes his only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

"Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator.

A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims—as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force—he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious; reason, to him, is a means of deception; he feels that men possess some power more potent than reason—and only their causeless belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he lacked.

His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and rests on the absolute of an objective reality. What he seeks is power over reality and over men's means of perceiving it, their mind, the power to interpose his will between existence and consciousness, as if, by agreeing to fake the reality he orders them to fake, men would, in fact, create it.

"Just as the mystic is a parasite in matter, who expropriates the wealth created by others—just as he is a parasite in spirit, who plunders the ideas created by others—so he falls below the level of a lunatic who creates his own distortion of reality, to the level of a parasite of lunacy who seeks a distortion created by others.

"There is only one state that fulfills the mystic's longing for infinity, non-causality, non-identity: death. No matter what unintelligible causes he ascribes to his incommunicable feelings, whoever rejects reality rejects existence—and the feelings that move him from then on are hatred for all the values of man's life, and lust for all the evils that destroy it, A mystic relishes the spectacle of suffering, of poverty, subservience and terror; these give him a feeling of triumph, a proof of the defeat of rational reality. But no other reality exists.

"No matter whose welfare he professes to serve, be it the welfare of God or of that disembodied gargoyle he describes as 'The People,' no matter what ideal he proclaims in terms of some supernatural dimension—in fact, in reality, on earth, his ideal is death, his craving is to kill, his only satisfaction is to torture.

"Destruction is the only end that the mystics' creed has ever achieved, as it is the only end that you see them achieving today, and if the ravages wrought by their acts have not made them question their doctrines, if they profess to be moved by love, yet are not deterred by piles of human corpses, it is because the truth about their souls is worse than the obscene excuse you have allowed them, the excuse that the end justifies the means and that the horrors they practice are means to nobler ends. The truth is that those horrors are their ends.

"You who're depraved enough to believe that you could adjust yourself to a mystic's dictatorship and could please him by obeying his orders—there is no way to please him; when you obey, he will reverse his orders; he seeks obedience for the sake of obedience and destruction for the sake of destruction. You who are craven enough to believe that you can make terms with a mystic by giving in to his extortions—there is no way to buy him off, the bribe he wants is your life, as slowly or as fast as you are willing to give it in—and the monster he seeks to bribe is the hidden blank-out in his mind, which drives him to kill in order not to learn that the death he desires is his own.

"You who are innocent enough to believe that the forces let loose in your world today are moved by greed for material plunder—the mystics' scramble for spoils is only a screen to conceal from their mind the nature of their motive. Wealth is a means of human life, and they clamor for wealth in imitation of living beings, to pretend to themselves that they desire to live. But their swinish indulgence in plundered luxury is not enjoyment, it is escape. They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself.

"You who've never grasped the nature of evil, you who describe them as 'misguided idealists'—may the God you invented forgive you!—they are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they're after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.

"It is a conspiracy without leader or direction, and the random little thugs of the moment who cash in on the agony of one land or another are chance scum riding the torrent from the broken dam of the sewer of centuries, from the reservoir of hatred for reason, for logic, for ability, for achievement, for joy, stored by every whining anti-human who ever preached the superiority of the 'heart' over the mind.

"It is a conspiracy of all those who seek, not to live, but to get away with living, those who seek to cut just one small corner of reality and are drawn, by feeling, to all the others who are busy cutting other corners—a conspiracy that unites by links of evasion all those who pursue a zero as a value: the professor who, unable to think, takes pleasure in crippling the mind of his students, the businessman who, to protect his stagnation, takes pleasure in chaining the ability of competitors, the neurotic who, to defend his self-loathing, takes pleasure in breaking men of self-esteem, the incompetent who takes pleasure in defeating achievement, the mediocrity who takes pleasure in demolishing greatness, the eunuch who takes pleasure in the castration of all pleasure—and all their intellectual munition-makers, all those who preach that the immolation of virtue will transform vices into virtue.

Death is the premise at the root of their theories, death is the goal of their actions in practice—and you are the last of their victims.

"We, who were the living buffers between you and the nature of your creed, are no longer there to save you from the effects of your chosen beliefs. We are no longer willing to pay with our lives the debts you incurred in yours or the moral deficit piled up by all the generations behind you. You had been living on borrowed time—and I am the man who has called in the loan.

"I am the man whose existence your blank-outs were intended to permit you to ignore. I am the man whom you did not want either to live or to die. You did not want me to live, because you were afraid of knowing that I carried the responsibility you dropped and that your lives depended upon me; you did not want me to die, because you knew it.

"Twelve years ago, when I worked in your world, I was an inventor.

I was one of a profession that came last in human history and will be first to vanish on the way back to the sub-human. An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.

"Like the man who discovered the use of steam or the man who discovered the use of oil, I discovered a source of energy which was available since the birth of the globe, but which men had not known how to use except as an object of worship, of terror and of legends about a thundering god. I completed the experimental model of a motor that would have made a fortune for me and for those who had hired me, a motor that would have raised the efficiency of every human installation using power and would have added the gift of higher productivity to every hour you spend at earning your living.

"Then, one night at a factory meeting, I heard myself sentenced to death by reason of my achievement. I heard three parasites assert that my brain and my life were their property, that my right to exist was conditional and depended on the satisfaction of their desires. The purpose of my ability, they said, was to serve the needs of those who were less able. I had no right to live, they said, by reason of my competence for living; their right to live was unconditional, by reason of their incompetence.

"Then I saw what was wrong with the world, I saw what destroyed men and nations, and where the battle for life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality—and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it. Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a slavery they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my self-immolation to provide them with the means of their plan—so throughout the world and throughout men's history, in every version and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collectivized countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for their own values—the impotence of death.

I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win—and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was 'No.'

"I quit that factory. I quit your world. I made it my job to warn your victims and to give them the method and the weapon to fight you. The method was to refuse to deflect retribution. The weapon was justice.

"If you want to know what you lost when I quit and when my strikers deserted your world—stand on an empty stretch of soil in a wilderness unexplored by men and ask yourself what manner of survival you would achieve and how long you would last if you refused to think, with no one around to teach you the motions, or, if you chose to think, how much your mind would be able to discover—ask yourself how many independent conclusions you have reached in the course of your life and how much of your time was spent on performing the actions you learned from others—ask yourself whether you would be able to discover how to till the soil and grow your food, whether you would be able to invent a wheel, a lever, an induction coil, a generator, an electronic tube—then decide whether men of ability are exploiters who live by the fruit of your labor and rob you of the wealth that you produce, and whether you dare to believe that you possess the power to enslave them. Let your women take a look at a jungle female with her shriveled face and pendulous breasts, as she sits grinding meal in a bowl, hour after hour, century by century—then let them ask themselves whether their 'instinct of tool-making' will provide them with their electric refrigerators, their washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and, if not, whether they care to destroy those who provided it all, but not 'by instinct.'

"Take a look around you, you savages who stutter that ideas are created by men's means of production, that a machine is not the product of human thought, but a mystical power that produces human thinking. You have never discovered the industrial age—and you cling to the morality of the barbarian eras when a miserable form of human subsistence was produced by the muscular labor of slaves. Every mystic had always longed for slaves, to protect him from the material reality he dreaded. But you, you grotesque little atavists, stare blindly at the skyscrapers and smokestacks around you and dream of enslaving the material providers who are scientists, inventors, industrialists.

When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind. I have taught my strikers that the answer you deserve is only: 'Try and get it.'

"You proclaim yourself unable to harness the forces of inanimate matter, yet propose to harness the minds of men who are able to achieve the feats you cannot equal. You proclaim that you cannot survive without us, yet propose to dictate the terms of our survival. You proclaim that you need us, yet indulge the impertinence of asserting your right to rule us by force—and expect that we, who are not afraid of that physical nature which fills you with terror, will cower at the sight of any lout who has talked you into voting him a chance to command us.

"You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you're incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others—that you're unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler—that you're unable to earn your living by the use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and to vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic industries where you, by your own definition of your capacity, would be unable successfully to fill the job of assistant greaser.

"This idol of your cult of zero-worship, this symbol of impotence—the congenital dependent—is your image of man and your standard of value, in whose likeness you strive to refashion your soul. 'It's only human,' you cry in defense of any depravity, reaching the stage of self-abasement where you seek to make the concept 'human' mean the weakling, the fool, the rotter, the liar, the failure, the coward, the fraud, and to exile from the human race the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventor, the strong, the purposeful, the pure—as if 'to feel' were human, but to think were not, as if to fail were human, but to succeed were not, as if corruption were human, but virtue were not —as if the premise of death were proper to man, but the premise of life were not.

"In order to deprive us of honor, that you may then deprive us of our wealth, you have always regarded us as slaves who deserve no moral recognition. You praise any venture that claims to be nonprofit, and damn the men who made the profits that make the venture possible. You regard as 'in the public interest' any project serving those who do not pay; it is not in the public interest to provide any services for those who do the paying. 'Public benefit' is anything given as alms; to engage in trade is to injure the public. 'Public welfare' is the welfare of those who do not earn it; those who do, are entitled to no welfare. 'The public,' to you, is whoever has failed to achieve any virtue or value; whoever achieves it, whoever provides the goods you require for survival, ceases to be regarded as part of the public or as part of the human race.

"What blank-out permitted you to hope that you could get away with this muck of contradictions and to plan it as an ideal society, when the 'No' of your victims was sufficient to demolish the whole of your structure? What permits any insolent beggar to wave his sores in the face of his betters and to plead for help in the tone of a threat? You cry, as he does, that you are counting on our pity, but your secret hope is the moral code that has taught you to count on our guilt. You expect us to feel guilty of our virtues in the presence of your vices, wounds and failures—guilty of succeeding at existence, guilty of enjoying the life that you damn, yet beg us to help you to live, "Did you want to know who is John Galt? I am the first man of ability who refused to regard it as guilt. I am the first man who would not do penance for my virtues or let them be used as the tools of my destruction. I am the first man who would not suffer martyrdom at the hands of those who wished me to perish for the privilege of keeping them, alive. I am the first man who told them that I did not need them, and until they learned to deal with me as traders, giving value for value, they would have to exist without me, as I would exist without them; then I would let them learn whose is the need and whose the ability—and if human survival is the standard, whose terms would set the way to survive.

"I have done by plan and intention what had been done throughout history by silent default. There have always been men of intelligence who went on strike, in protest and despair, but they did not know the meaning of their action. The man who retires from public life, to think, but not to share his thoughts—the man who chooses to spend his years in the obscurity of menial employment, keeping to himself the fire of his mind, never giving it form, expression or reality, refusing to bring it into a world he despises—the man who is defeated by revulsion, the man who renounces before he has started, the man who gives up rather than give in, the man who functions at a fraction of his capacity, disarmed by his longing for an ideal he has not found—they are on strike, on strike against unreason, on strike against your world and your values. But not knowing any values of their own, they abandon the quest to know—in the darkness of their hopeless indignation, which is righteous without knowledge of the right, and passionate without knowledge of desire, they concede to you the power of reality and surrender the incentives of their mind—and they perish in bitter futility, as rebels who never learned the object of their rebellion, as lovers who never discovered their love.

"The infamous times you call the Dark Ages were an era of intelligence on strike, when men of ability went underground and lived undiscovered, studying in secret, and died, destroying the works of their mind, when only a few of the bravest of martyrs remained to keep the human race alive. Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence, working for less than their barest survival, leaving nothing but scraps for their rulers to loot, refusing to think, to venture, to produce, when the ultimate collector of their profits and the final authority on truth or error was the whim of some gilded degenerate sanctioned as superior to reason by divine right and by grace of a club.

The road of human history was a string of blank-outs over sterile stretches eroded by faith and force, with only a few brief bursts of sunlight, when the released energy of the men of the mind performed the wonders you gaped at, admired and promptly extinguished again.

"But there will be no extinction, this time. The game of the mystics is up. You will perish in and by your own unreality. We, the men of reason, will survive.

"I have called out on strike the kind of martyrs who had never deserted you before. I have given them the weapon they had lacked: the knowledge of their own moral value. I have taught them that the world is ours, whenever we choose to claim it, by virtue and grace of the fact that ours is the Morality of Life. They, the great victims who had produced all the wonders of humanity's brief summer, they, the industrialists, the conquerors of matter, had not discovered the nature of their right. They had known that theirs was the power. I taught them that theirs was the glory.

"You, who dare to regard us as the moral inferiors of any mystic who claims supernatural visions—you, who scramble like vultures for plundered pennies, yet honor a fortune-teller above a fortune maker—you, who scorn a businessman as ignoble, but esteem any posturing artist as exalted—the root of your standards is that mystic miasma which comes from primordial swamps, that cult of death, which pronounces a businessman immoral by reason of the fact that he keeps you alive. You, who claim that you long to rise above the crude concerns of the body, above the drudgery of serving mere physical needs—who is enslaved by physical needs: the Hindu who labors from sunrise to sunset at the shafts of a hand-plow for a bowl of rice, or the American who is driving a tractor? Who is the conqueror of physical reality: the man who sleeps on a bed of nails or the man who sleeps on an inner-spring mattress? Which is the monument to the triumph of the human spirit over matter: the germ-eaten hovels on the shorelines of the Ganges or the Atlantic skyline of New York?

"Unless you learn the answers to these questions—and learn to stand at reverent attention when you face the achievements of man's mind—you will not stay much longer on this earth, which we love and will not permit you to damn. You will not sneak by with the rest of your lifespan. I have foreshortened the usual course of history and have let you discover the nature of the payment you had hoped to switch to the shoulders of others. It is the last of your own living power that will now be drained to provide the unearned for the worshippers and carriers of Death. Do not pretend that a malevolent reality defeated you—you were defeated by your own evasions. Do not pretend that you will perish for a noble ideal—you will perish as fodder for the haters of man.

"But to those of you who still retain a remnant of the dignity and will to love one's life, I am offering the chance to make a choice.

Choose whether you wish to perish for a morality you have never believed or practiced. Pause on the brink of self-destruction and examine your values and your life. You had known how to take an inventory of your wealth. Now take an inventory of your mind.

"Since childhood, you have been hiding the guilty secret that you feel no desire to be moral, no desire to seek self-immolation, that you dread and hate your code, but dare not say it even to yourself, that you're devoid of those moral 'instincts' which others profess to feel.

The less you felt, the louder you proclaimed your selfless love and servitude to others, in dread of ever letting them discover your own self, the self that you betrayed, the self that you kept in concealment, like a skeleton in the closet of your body. And they, who were at once your dupes and your deceivers, they listened and voiced their loud approval, in dread of ever letting you discover that they were harboring the same unspoken secret. Existence among you is a giant pretense, an act you all perform for one another, each feeling that he is the only guilty freak, each placing his moral authority in the unknowable known only to others, each faking the reality he feels they expect him to fake, none having the courage to break the vicious circle.

"No matter what dishonorable compromise you've made with your impracticable creed, no matter what miserable balance, half-cynicism, half-superstition, you now manage to maintain, you still preserve the root, the lethal tenet: the belief that the moral and the practical are opposites. Since childhood, you have been running from the terror of a choice you have never dared fully to identify: If the practical, whatever you must practice to exist, whatever works, succeeds, achieves your purpose, whatever brings you food and joy, whatever profits you, is evil—and if the good, the moral, is the impractical, whatever fails, destroys, frustrates, whatever injures you and brings you loss or pain—then your choice is to be moral or to live.

"The sole result of that murderous doctrine was to remove morality from life. You grew up to believe that moral laws bear no relation to the job of living, except as an impediment and threat, that man's existence is an amoral jungle where anything goes and anything works.

And in that fog of switching definitions which descends upon a frozen mind, you have forgotten that the evils damned by your creed were the virtues required for living, and you have come to believe that actual evils are the practical means of existence. Forgetting that the impractical 'good' was self-sacrifice, you believe that self-esteem is impractical; forgetting that the practical 'evil' was production, you believe that robbery is practical.

"Swinging like a helpless branch in the wind of an uncharted moral wilderness; you dare not fully to be evil or fully to live. When you are honest, you feel the resentment of a sucker; when you cheat, you feel terror and shame. When you are happy, your joy is diluted by guilt; when you suffer, your pain is augmented by the feeling that pain is your natural state. You pity the men you admire, you believe they are doomed to fail; you envy the men you hate, you believe they are the masters of existence. You feel disarmed when you come up against a scoundrel: you believe that evil is bound to win, since the moral is the impotent, the impractical.

"Morality, to you, is a phantom scarecrow made of duty, of boredom, of punishment, of pain, a cross-breed between the first schoolteacher of your past and the tax collector of your present, a scarecrow standing in a barren field, waving a stick to chase away your pleasures —and pleasure, to you, is a liquor-soggy brain, a mindless slut, the stupor of a moron who stakes his cash on some animal's race, since pleasure cannot be moral.

"If you identify your actual belief, you will find a triple damnation —of yourself, of life, of virtue—in the grotesque conclusion you have reached: you believe that morality is a necessary evil.

"Do you wonder why you live without dignity, love without fire and die without resistance? Do you wonder why, wherever you look, you see nothing but unanswerable questions, why your life is torn by impossible conflicts, why you spend it straddling irrational fences to evade artificial choices, such as soul or body, mind or heart, security or freedom, private profit or public good?

"Do you cry that you find no answers? By what means did you hope to find them? You reject your tool of perception—your mind—then complain that the universe is a mystery. You discard your key, then wail that all doors are locked against you. You start out in pursuit of the irrational, then damn existence for making no sense.

"The fence you have been straddling for two hours—while hearing my words and seeking to escape them—is the coward's formula contained in the sentence: 'But we don't have to go to extremes!' The extreme you have always struggled to avoid is the recognition that reality is final, that A is A and that the truth is true. A moral code impossible to practice, a code that demands imperfection or death, has taught you to dissolve all ideas in fog, to permit no firm definitions, to regard any concept as approximate and any rule of conduct as elastic, to hedge on any principle, to compromise on any value, to take the middle of any road.

By extorting your acceptance of supernatural absolutes, it has forced you to reject the absolute of nature. By making moral judgments impossible, it has made you incapable of rational judgment. A code that forbids you to cast the first stone, has forbidden you to admit the identity of stones and to know when or if you're being stoned.

"The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute.

Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.

"There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice.

But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.

"You, who are half-rational, half-coward, have been playing a con game with reality, but the victim you have conned is yourself. When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it's picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil. As you surrendered to the mystics of muscle when they told you that ignorance consists of claiming knowledge, so now you surrender to them when they shriek that immorality consists of pronouncing moral judgment. When they yell that it is selfish to be certain that you are right, you hasten to assure them that you're certain of nothing.

When they shout that it's immoral to stand on your convictions, you assure them that you have no convictions whatever. When the thugs of Europe's People's States snarl that you are guilty of intolerance, because you don't treat your desire to live and their desire to kill you as a difference of opinion—you cringe and hasten to assure them that you are not intolerant of any horror. When some barefoot bum in some pesthole of Asia yells at you: How dare you be rich—you apologize and beg him to be patient and promise him you'll give it all away.

"You have reached the blind alley of the treason you committed when you agreed that you had no right to exist. Once, you believed it was 'only a compromise': you conceded it was evil to live for yourself, but moral to live for the sake of your children. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your children, but moral to live for your community. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your community, but moral to live for your country. Now, you are letting this greatest of countries be devoured by any scum from any corner of the earth, while you concede that it is selfish to live for your country and that your moral duty is to live for the globe. A man who has no right to life, has no right to values and will not keep them.

"At the end of your road of successive betrayals, stripped of weapons, of certainty, of honor, you commit your final act of treason and sign your petition of intellectual bankruptcy: while the muscle-mystics of the People's States proclaim that they're the champions of reason and science, you agree and hasten to proclaim that faith is your cardinal principle, that reason is on the side of your destroyers, but yours is the side of faith. To the struggling remnants of rational honesty in the twisted, bewildered minds of your children, you declare that you can offer no rational argument to support the ideas that created this country, that there is no rational justification for freedom, for property, for justice, for rights, that they rest on a mystical insight and can be accepted only on faith, that in reason and logic the enemy is right, but faith is superior to reason. You declare to your children that it is rational to loot, to torture, to enslave, to expropriate, to murder, but that they must resist the temptations of logic and stick to the discipline of remaining irrational—that skyscrapers, factories, radios, airplanes were the products of faith and mystic intuition, while famines, concentration camps and firing squads are the products of a reasonable manner of existence—that the industrial revolution was the revolt of the men of faith against that era of reason and logic which is known as the Middle Ages. Simultaneously, in the same breath, to the same child, you declare that the looters who rule the People's States will surpass this country in material production, since they are the representatives of science, but that it's evil to be concerned with physical wealth and that one must renounce material prosperity—you declare that the looters' ideals are noble, but they do not mean them, while you do; that your purpose in fighting the looters is only to accomplish their aims, which they cannot accomplish, but you can; and that the way to fight them is to beat them to it and give one's wealth away.

Then you wonder why your children join the People's thugs or become half-crazed delinquents, you wonder why the looters' conquests keep creeping closer to your doors—and you blame it on human stupidity, declaring that the masses are impervious to reason.

"You blank out the open, public spectacle of the looters' fight against the mind, and the fact that their bloodiest horrors are unleashed to punish the crime of thinking. You blank out the fact that most mystics of muscle started out as mystics of spirit, that they keep switching from one to the other, that the men you call materialists and spiritualists are only two halves of the same dissected human, forever seeking completion, but seeking it by swinging from the destruction of the flesh to the destruction of the soul and vice versa—that they keep running from your colleges to the slave pens of Europe to an open collapse into the mystic muck of India, seeking any refuge against reality, any form of escape from the mind.

"You blank it out and cling to your hypocrisy of 'faith' in order to blank out the knowledge that the looters have a stranglehold upon you, which consists of your moral code—that the looters are the final and consistent practitioners of the morality you're half-obeying, half-evading—that they practice it the only way it can be practiced: by turning the earth into a sacrificial furnace—that your morality forbids you to oppose them in the only way they can be opposed: by refusing to become a sacrificial animal and proudly asserting your right to exist—that in order to fight them to the finish and with full rectitude, it is your morality that you have to reject, "You blank it out, because your self-esteem is tied to that mystic 'unselfishness' which you've never possessed or practiced, but spent so many years pretending to possess that the thought of denouncing it fills you with terror. No value is higher than self-esteem, but you've invested it in counterfeit securities—and now your morality has caught you in a trap where you are forced to protect your self-esteem by fighting for the creed of self-destruction. The grim joke is on you: that need of self-esteem, which you're unable to explain or to define, belongs to my morality, not yours; it's the objective token of my code, it is my proof within your own soul.

"By a feeling he has not learned to identify, but has derived from his first awareness of existence, from his discovery that he has to make choices, man knows that his desperate need of self-esteem is a matter of life or death. As a being of volitional consciousness, he knows that he must know his own value in order to maintain his own life. He knows that he has to be right; to be wrong in action means danger to his life; to be wrong in person, to be evil, means to be unfit for existence.

"Every act of man's life has to be willed; the mere act of obtaining or eating his food implies that the person he preserves is worthy of being preserved; every pleasure he seeks to enjoy implies that the person who seeks it is worthy of finding enjoyment. He has no choice about his need of self-esteem, his only choice is the standard by which to gauge it. And he makes his fatal error when he switches this gauge protecting his life into the service of his own destruction, when he chooses a standard contradicting existence and sets his self-esteem against reality.

"Every form of causeless self-doubt, every feeling of inferiority and secret unworthiness is, in fact, man's hidden dread of his inability to deal with existence. But the greater his terror, the more fiercely he clings to the murderous doctrines that choke him. No man can survive the moment of pronouncing himself irredeemably evil; should he do it, his next moment is insanity or suicide. To escape it—if he's chosen an irrational standard—he will fake, evade, blank out; he will cheat himself of reality, of existence, of happiness, of mind; and he will ultimately cheat himself of self-esteem by struggling to preserve its illusion rather than to risk discovering its lack. To fear to face an issue is to believe that the worst is true.

"It is not any crime you have ever committed that infects your soul with permanent guilt, it is none of your failures, errors or flaws, but the blank-out by which you attempt to evade them—it is not any sort of Original Sin or unknown prenatal deficiency, but the knowledge and fact of your basic default, of suspending your mind, of refusing to think.

Fear and guilt are your chronic emotions, they are real and you do deserve them, but they don't come from the superficial reasons you invent to disguise their cause, not from your 'selfishness,' weakness or ignorance, but from a real and basic threat to your existence: fear, because you have abandoned your weapon of survival, guilt, because you know you have done it volitionally.

"The self you have betrayed is your mind; self-esteem is reliance on one's power to think. The ego you seek, that essential 'you' which you cannot express or define, is not your emotions or inarticulate dreams, but your intellect, that judge of your supreme tribunal whom you've impeached in order to drift at the mercy of any stray shyster you describe as your 'feeling.' Then you drag yourself through a self-made night, in a desperate quest for a nameless fire, moved by some fading vision of a dawn you had seen and lost.

"Observe the persistence, in mankind's mythologies, of the legend about a paradise that men had once possessed, the city of Atlantis or the Garden of Eden or some kingdom of perfection, always behind us.

The root of that legend exists, not in the past of the race, but in the past of every man. You still retain a sense—not as firm as a memory, but diffused like the pain of hopeless longing—that somewhere in the starting years of your childhood, before you had learned to submit, to absorb the terror of unreason and to doubt the value of your mind, you had known a radiant state of existence, you had known the independence of a rational consciousness facing an open universe. That is the paradise which you have lost, which you seek—which is yours for the taking.

"Some of you will never know who is John Galt. But those of you who have known a single moment of love for existence and of pride in being its worthy lover, a moment of looking at this earth and letting your glance be its sanction, have known the state of being a man, and I —I am only the man who knew that that state is not to be betrayed. I am the man who knew what made it possible and who chose consistently to practice and to be what you had practiced and been in that one moment.

"That choice is yours to make. That choice—the dedication to one's highest potential—is made by accepting the fact that the noblest act you have ever performed is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four.

"Whoever you are—you who are alone with my words in this moment, with nothing but your honesty to help you understand—the choice is still open to be a human being, but the price is to start from scratch, to stand naked in the face of reality and, reversing a costly historical error, to declare: I am, therefore I'll think.1

"Accept the irrevocable fact that your life depends upon your mind.

Admit that the whole of your struggle, your doubts, your fakes, your evasions, was a desperate quest for escape from the responsibility of a volitional consciousness—a quest for automatic knowledge, for instinctive action, for intuitive certainty—and while you called it a longing for the state of an angel, what you were seeking was the state of an animal.

Accept, as your moral ideal, the task of becoming a man.

"Do not say that you're afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little that you know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience—that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible—that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error. In place of your dream of an omniscient automaton, accept the fact that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and that that is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his morality, his glory.

"Discard that unlimited license to evil which consists of claiming that man is imperfect. By what standard do you damn him when you claim it? Accept the fact that in the realm of morality nothing less than perfection will do. But perfection is not to be gauged by mystic commandments to practice the impossible, and your moral stature is not to be gauged by matters not open to your choice. Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality—not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.

"Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of "knowledge; do not forgive or accept any breach of morality. Give the benefit of the doubt to those who seek to know; but treat as potential killers those specimens of insolent depravity who make demands upon you, announcing that they have and seek no reasons, proclaiming, as a license, that they 'just feel if —or those who reject an irrefutable argument by saying: 'It's only logic’ which means: 'It's only reality.' The only realm opposed to reality is the realm and premise of death.

"Accept the fact that the achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness—not pain or mindless self-indulgence—is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.

Happiness was the responsibility you dreaded, it required the kind of rational discipline you did not value yourself enough to assume—and the anxious staleness of your days is the monument to your evasion of the knowledge that there is no moral substitute for happiness, that there is no more despicable coward than, the man who deserted the battle for his joy, fearing to assert his right to existence, lacking the courage and the loyalty to life of a bird or a flower reaching for the sun. Discard the protective rags of that vice which you called a virtue: humility—learn to value yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness—and when you learn that pride is the sum of all virtues, you will learn to live like a man.

"As a basic step of self-esteem, learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man's demand for your help. To demand it is to claim that your life is his property—and loathsome as such claim might be, there's something still more loathsome: your agreement. Do you ask if it's ever proper to help another man? No—if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes—if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle. Suffering as such is not a value; only man's fight against suffering, is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his fight to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. But to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim —is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values. A man who has no virtues is a hater of existence who acts on the premise of death; to help him is to sanction his evil and to support his career of destruction. Be it only a penny you will not miss or a kindly smile he has not earned, a tribute to a zero is treason to life and to all those who struggle to maintain it. It is of such pennies and smiles that the desolation of your world was made.

"Do not say that my morality is too hard for you to practice and that you fear it as you fear the unknown. Whatever living moments you have known, were lived by the values of my code. But you stifled, negated, betrayed it. You kept sacrificing your virtues to your vices, and the best among men to the worst. Look around you-: what you have done to society, you had done it first within your soul; one is the image of the other. This dismal wreckage, which is now your world, is the physical form of the treason you committed to your values, to your friends, to your defenders, to your future, to your country, to yourself.

"We—whom you are now calling, but who will not answer any longer—we had lived among you, but you failed to know us, you refused to think and to see what we were. You failed to recognize the motor I invented—and it became, in your world, a pile of dead scrap. You failed to recognize the hero in your soul—and you failed to know me when I passed you in the street. When you cried in despair for the unattainable spirit which you felt had deserted your world, you gave it my name, but what you were calling was your own betrayed self-esteem. You will not recover one without the other.

"When you failed to give recognition to man's mind and attempted to rule human beings by force—those who submitted had no mind to surrender; those who had, were men who don't submit. Thus the man of productive genius assumed in your world the disguise of a playboy and became a destroyer of wealth, choosing to annihilate his fortune rather than surrender it to guns. Thus the thinker, the man of reason, assumed in your world the role of a pirate, to defend his values by force against your force, rather than submit to the rule of brutality. Do you hear me, Francisco d'Anconia and Ragnar Danneskjold, my first friends, my fellow fighters, my fellow outcasts, in whose name and honor I speak?

"It was the three of us who started what I am now completing. It was the three of us who resolved to avenge this country and to release its imprisoned soul. This greatest of countries was built on my morality—on the inviolate supremacy of man's right to exist—but you dreaded to admit it and live up to it. You stared at an achievement unequaled in history, you looted its effects and blanked out its cause. In the presence of that monument to human morality, which is a factory, a highway or a bridge—you kept damning this country as immoral and its progress as 'material greed,' you kept offering apologies for this country's greatness to the idol of primordial starvation, to decaying Europe's idol of a leprous, mystic bum.

"This country—the product of reason—could not survive on the morality of sacrifice. It was not built by men who sought self-immolation or by men who sought handouts. It could not stand on the mystic split that divorced man's soul from his body. It could not live by the mystic doctrine that damned this earth as evil and those who succeeded on earth as depraved. From its start, this country was a threat to the ancient rule of mystics. In the brilliant rocket-explosion of its youth, this country displayed to an incredulous world what greatness was possible to man, what happiness was possible on earth. It was one or the other: America or mystics. The mystics knew it; you didn't. You let them infect you with the worship of need—and this country became a giant in body with a mooching midget in place of its soul, while its living soul was driven underground to labor and feed you in silence, unnamed, unhonored, negated, its soul and hero: the industrialist. Do you hear me now, Hank Rearden, the greatest of the victims I have avenged?

"Neither he nor the rest of us will return until the road is clear to rebuild this country—until the wreckage of the morality of sacrifice has been wiped out of our way. A country's political system is based on its code of morality. We will rebuild America's system on the moral premise which had been its foundation, but which you treated as a guilty underground, in your frantic evasion of the conflict between that premise and your mystic morality: the premise that man is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others, that man's life, his freedom, his happiness are his by inalienable right.

"You who've lost the concept of a right, you who swing in impotent evasiveness between the claim that rights are a gift of God, a supernatural gift to be taken on faith, or the claim that rights are a gift of society, to be broken at its arbitrary whim—the source of man's rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man's rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.

"Rights are a moral concept—and morality is a matter of choice.

Men are free not to choose man's survival as the standard of their morals and their laws, but not free to escape from the fact that the alternative is a cannibal society, which exists for a while by devouring its best and collapses like a cancerous body, when the healthy have been eaten by the diseased, when the rational have been consumed by the irrational. Such has been the fate of your societies in history, but you've evaded the knowledge of the cause. I am here to state it: the agent of retribution was the law of identity, which you cannot escape. Just as man cannot live by means of the irrational, so two men cannot, or two thousand, or two billion. Just as man can't succeed by defying reality, so a nation can't, or a country, or a globe. A is A. The rest is a matter of time, provided by the generosity of victims.

"Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality—to think, to work and to keep the results—which means: the right of property. The modern mystics of muscle who offer you the fraudulent alternative of 'human rights' versus 'property rights,' as if one could exist without the other, are making a last, grotesque attempt to revive the doctrine of soul versus body. Only a ghost can exist without material property; only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort. The doctrine that 'human rights' are superior to 'property rights' simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others; since the competent have nothing to gain from the incompetent, it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle. Whoever regards this as human and right, has no right to the title of 'human.'

"The source of property rights is the law of causality. All property and all forms of wealth are produced by man's mind and labor. As you cannot have effects without causes, so you cannot have wealth without its source: without intelligence. You cannot force intelligence to work: those who're able to think, will not work under compulsion; those who will, won't produce much more than the price of the whip needed to keep them enslaved. You cannot obtain the products of a mind except on the owner's terms, by trade and by volitional consent. Any other policy of men toward man's property is the policy of criminals, no matter what their numbers. Criminals are savages who play it short range and starve when their prey runs out—just as you're starving today, you who believed that crime could be 'practical' if your government decreed that robbery was legal and resistance to robbery illegal.

"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality: such a government reverses its only moral purpose and switches from the role of protector to the role of man's deadliest enemy, from the role of policeman to the role of a criminal vested with the right to the wielding of violence against victims deprived of the right of self-defense. Such a government substitutes for morality the following rule of social conduct: you may do whatever you please to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his.

"Only a brute, a fool or an evader can agree to exist on such terms or agree to give his fellow men a blank check on his life and his mind, to accept the belief that others have the right to dispose of his person at their whim, that the will of the majority is omnipotent, that the physical force of muscles and numbers is a substitute for justice, reality and truth. We, the men of the mind, we who are traders not masters or slaves, do not deal in blank checks or grant them. We do not live or work with any form of the non-objective.

"So long as men, in the era of savagery, had no concept of objective reality and believed that physical nature was ruled by the whim of unknowable demons—no thought, no science, no production were possible. Only when men discovered that nature was a firm, predictable absolute were they able to rely on their knowledge, to choose their course, to plan their future and, slowly, to rise from the cave. Now you have placed modern industry, with its immense complexity of scientific precision, back into the power of unknowable demons—the unpredictable power of the arbitrary whims of hidden, ugly little bureaucrats. A farmer will not invest the effort of one summer if he's unable to calculate his chances of a harvest. But you expect industrial giants—who plan in terms of decades, invest in terms of generations and undertake ninety-nine-year contracts—to continue to function and produce, not knowing what random caprice in the skull of what random official will descend upon them at what moment to demolish the whole of their effort. Drifters and physical laborers live and plan by the range of a day. The better the mind, the longer the range. A man whose vision extends to a shanty, might continue to build on your quicksands, to grab a fast profit and run. A man who envisions skyscrapers, will not. Nor will he give ten years of unswerving devotion to the task of inventing a new product, when he knows that gangs of entrenched mediocrity are juggling the laws against him, to tie him,, restrict him and force him to fail, but should he fight them and struggle and succeed, they will seize his rewards and his invention.

"Look past the range of the moment, you who cry that you fear to compete with men of superior intelligence, that their mind is a threat to your livelihood, that the strong leave no chance to the weak in a market of voluntary trade. What determines the material value of your work? Nothing but the productive effort of your mind—if you lived on a desert island. The less efficient the thinking of your brain, the less your physical labor would bring you—and you could spend your life on a single routine, collecting a precarious harvest or hunting with bow and arrows, unable to think any further. But when you live in a rational society, where men are free to trade, you receive an incalculable bonus: the material value of your work is determined not only by your effort, but by the effort of the best productive minds who exist in the world around you.

"When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing.

"The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics' Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.

"Every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but it's only the degree to which he thinks that determines the degree to which he'll rise. Physical labor as such can extend no further than the range of the moment. The man who does no more than physical labor, consumes the material value-equivalent of his own contribution to the process of production, and leaves no further value, neither for himself nor others. But the man who produces an idea in any field of rational endeavor—the man who discovers new knowledge—is the permanent benefactor of humanity. Material products can't be shared, they belong to some ultimate consumer; it is only the value of an idea that can be shared with unlimited numbers of men, making all sharers richer at no one's sacrifice or loss, raising the productive capacity of whatever labor they perform. It is the value of his own time that the strong of the intellect transfers to the weak, letting them work on the jobs he discovered, while devoting his time to further discoveries. This is mutual trade to mutual advantage; the interests of the mind are one, no matter what the degree of intelligence, among men who desire to work and don't seek or expect the unearned.

"In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability.

The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the 'competition' between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of 'exploitation' for which you have damned the strong.

"Such was the service we had given you and were glad and willing to give. What did we ask in return? Nothing but freedom. We required that you leave us free to function—free to think and to work as we choose—free to take our own risks and to bear our own losses—free to earn our own profits and to make our own fortunes—free to gamble on your rationality, to submit our products to your judgment for the purpose of a voluntary trade, to rely on the objective value of our work and on your mind's ability to see it—free to count on your intelligence and honesty, and to deal with nothing but your mind.

Such was the price we asked, which you chose to reject as too high.

You decided to call it unfair that we, who had dragged you out of your hovels and provided you with modern apartments, with radios, movies and cars, should own our palaces and yachts—you decided that you had a right to your wages, but we had no right to our profits, that you did not want us to deal with your mind, but to deal, instead, with your gun. Our answer to that, was: 'May you be damned!1 Our answer came true. You are.

"You did not care to compete in terms of intelligence—you are now competing in terms of brutality. You did not care to allow rewards to be won by successful production—you are now running a race in which rewards are won by successful plunder. You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade value for value—you have now established an unselfish society where they trade extortion for extortion. Your system is a legal civil war, where men gang up on one another and struggle for possession of the law, which they use as a club over rivals, till another gang wrests it from their clutch and clubs them with it in their turn, all of them clamoring protestations of service to an unnamed public's unspecified good. You had said that you saw no difference between economic and political power, between the power of money and the power of guns—no difference between reward and punishment, no difference between purchase and plunder, no difference between pleasure and fear, no difference between life and death. You are learning the difference now, "Some of you might plead the excuse of your ignorance, of a limited mind and a limited range. But the damned and the guiltiest among you are the men who had the capacity to know, yet chose to blank out reality, the men who were willing to sell their intelligence into cynical servitude to force: the contemptible breed of those mystics of science who profess a devotion to some sort of 'pure knowledge’—the purity consisting of their claim that such knowledge has no practical purpose on this earth—who reserve their logic for inanimate matter, but believe that the subject of dealing with men requires and deserves no rationality, who scorn money and sell their souls in exchange for a laboratory supplied by loot. And since there is no such thing as 'non-practical knowledge' or any sort of 'disinterested' action, since they scorn the use of their science for the purpose and profit of life, they deliver their science to the service of death, to the only practical purpose it can ever have for looters: to inventing weapons of coercion and destruction. They, the intellects who seek escape from moral values, they are the damned on this earth, theirs is the guilt beyond forgiveness. Do you hear me, Dr. Robert Stadler?

"But it is not to him that I wish to speak. I am speaking to those among you who have retained some sovereign shred of their soul, unsold and unstamped: '—to the order of others.' If, in the chaos of the motives that have made you listen to the radio tonight, there was an honest, rational desire to learn what is wrong with the world, you are the man whom I wished to address. By the rules and terms of my code, one owes a rational statement to those whom it does concern and who're making an effort to know. Those who're making an effort to fail to understand me, are not a concern of mine.

"I am speaking to those who desire to live and to recapture the honor of their soul. Now that you know the truth about your world, stop supporting your own destroyers. The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it. Withdraw your sanction. Withdraw your support. Do not try to live on your enemies' terms or to win at a game where they're setting the rules. Do not seek the favor of those who enslaved you, do not beg for alms from those who have robbed you, be it subsidies, loans or jobs, do not join their team to recoup what they've taken by helping them rob your neighbors.

One cannot hope to maintain one's life by accepting bribes to condone one's destruction. Do not struggle for profit, success or security at the price of a lien on your right to exist. Such a lien is not to be paid off; the more you pay them, the more they will demand; the greater the values you seek or achieve, the more vulnerably helpless you become. Theirs is a system of white blackmail devised to bleed you, not by means of your sins, but by means of your love for existence.

"Do not attempt to rise on the looters' terms or to climb a ladder while they're holding the ropes. Do not allow their hands to touch the only power that keeps them in power: your living ambition. Go on strike—in the manner I did. Use your mind and skill in private, extend your knowledge, develop your ability, but do not share your achievements with others. Do not try to produce a fortune, with a looter riding on your back. Stay on the lowest rung of their ladder, earn no more than your barest survival, do not make an extra penny to support the looters' state. Since you're captive, act as a captive, do not help them pretend that you're free. Be the silent, incorruptible enemy they dread. When they force you, obey—but do not volunteer. Never volunteer a step in their direction, or a wish, or a plea, or a purpose.

Do not help a holdup man to claim that he acts as your friend and benefactor. Do not help your jailers to pretend that their jail is your natural state of existence. Do not help them to fake reality. That fake is the only dam holding off their secret terror, the terror of knowing they're unfit to exist; remove it and let them drown; your sanction is their only life belt.

"If you find a chance to vanish into some wilderness out of their reach, do so, but not to exist as a bandit or to create a gang competing with their racket; build a productive life of your own with those who accept your moral code and are willing to struggle for a human existence. You have no chance to win on the Morality of Death or by the code of faith and force; raise a standard to which the honest will repair: the standard of Life and Reason.

"Act as a rational being and aim at becoming a rallying point for all those who are starved for a voice of integrity—act on your rational values, whether alone in the midst of your enemies, or with a few of your chosen friends, or as the founder of a modest community on the frontier of mankind's rebirth.

"When the looters' state collapses, deprived of the best of its slaves, when it falls to a level of impotent chaos, like the mystic-ridden nations of the Orient, and dissolves into starving robber gangs fighting to rob one another—when the advocates of the morality of sacrifice perish with their final ideal—then and on that day we will return.

"We will open the gates of our city to those who deserve to enter, a city of smokestacks, pipe lines, orchards, markets and inviolate homes.

We will act as the rallying center for such hidden outposts as you'll build. With the sign of the dollar as our symbol—the sign of free trade and free minds—we will move to reclaim this country once more from the impotent savages who never discovered its nature, its meaning, its splendor. Those who choose to join us, will join us; those who don't, will not have the power to stop us; hordes of savages have never been an obstacle to men who carried the banner of the mind.

"Then this country will once more become a sanctuary for a vanishing species: the rational being. The political system we will build is contained in a single moral premise: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force. Every man will stand or fall, live or die by his rational judgment. If he fails to use it and falls, he will be his only victim. If he fears that his judgment is inadequate, he will not be given a gun to improve it, If he chooses to correct his errors in time, he will have the unobstructed example of his betters, for guidance in learning to think; but an end will be put to the infamy of paying with one life for the errors of another.

"In that world, you'll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you had known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe. No child is afraid of nature; it is your fear of men that will vanish, the fear that has stunted your soul, the fear you acquired in your early encounters with the incomprehensible, the unpredictable, the contradictory, the arbitrary, the hidden, the faked, the irrational in men. You will live in a world of responsible beings, who will be as consistent and reliable as facts; the guarantee of their character will be a system of existence where objective reality is the standard and the judge. Your virtues will be given protection, your vices and weaknesses will not. Every chance will be open to your good, none will be provided for your evil. What you'll receive from men will not be alms, or pity, or mercy, or forgiveness of sins, but a single value: justice. And when you'll look at men or at yourself, you will feel, not disgust, suspicion and guilt, but a single constant: respect.

"Such is the future you are capable of winning. It requires a struggle; so does any human value. All life is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice is the choice of a goal. Do you wish to continue the battle of your present or do you wish to fight for my world? Do you wish to continue a struggle that consists of clinging to precarious ledges in a sliding descent to the abyss, a struggle where the hardships you endure are irreversible and the victories you win bring you closer to destruction? Or do you wish to undertake a struggle that consists of rising from ledge to ledge in a steady ascent to the top, a struggle where the hardships are investments in your future, and the victories bring you irreversibly closer to the world of your moral ideal, and should you die without reaching full sunlight, you will die on a level touched by its rays? Such is the choice before you. Let your mind and your love of existence decide.

"The last of my words will be addressed to those heroes who might still be hidden in the world, those who are held prisoner, not by their evasions, but by their virtues and their desperate courage. My brothers in spirit, check on your virtues and on the nature of the enemies you're serving. Your destroyers hold you by means of your endurance, your generosity, your innocence, your love—the endurance that carries their burdens—the generosity that responds to their cries of despair—the innocence that is unable to conceive of their evil and gives them the benefit of every doubt, refusing to condemn them without understanding and incapable of understanding such motives as theirs—the love, your love of life, which makes you believe that they are men and that they love it, too. But the world of today is the world they wanted; life is the object of their hatred. Leave them to the death they worship. In the name of your magnificent devotion to this earth, leave them, don't exhaust the greatness of your soul on achieving the triumph of the evil of theirs. Do you hear me . . . my love?

"In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all.

Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours.

"But to win it requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.

"You will win when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my battle—and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I shall now repeat it to the hearing of the world: "I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

CHAPTER VIII
THE EGOIST

"It wasn't real, was it?" said Mr. Thompson.

They stood in front of the radio, as the last sound of Galt's voice had left them. No one had moved through the span of silence; they had stood, looking at the radio, as if waiting. But the radio was now only a wooden box with some knobs and a circle of cloth stretched over an empty loud-speaker.

"We seem to have heard it," said Tinky Holloway.

"We couldn't help it," said Chick Morrison.

Mr. Thompson was sitting on a crate. The pale, oblong smear at the level of his elbow was the face of Wesley Mouch, who was seated on the floor. Far behind them, like an island in the vast semi-darkness of the studio space, the drawing room prepared for their broadcast stood deserted and fully lighted, a semicircle of empty armchairs under a cobweb of dead microphones in the glare of the floodlights which no one had taken the initiative to turn off.

Mr. Thompson's eyes were darting over the faces around him, as if in search of some special vibrations known only to him. The rest of them were trying to do it surreptitiously, each attempting to catch a glimpse of the others without letting them catch his own glance.

"Let me out of here!" screamed a young third-rate assistant, suddenly and to no one in particular.

"Stay put!" snapped Mr. Thompson.

The sound of his own order and the hiccough-moan of the figure immobilized somewhere in the darkness, seemed to help him recapture a familiar version of reality. His head emerged an inch higher from his shoulders.

"Who permitted it to hap—" he began in a rising voice, but stopped; the vibrations he caught were the dangerous panic of the cornered.

"What do you make of it?" he asked, instead. There was no answer.

"Well?" He waited. "Well, say something, somebody!"

"We don't have to believe it, do we?" cried James Taggart, thrusting his face toward Mr. Thompson, in a manner that was almost a threat.

"Do we?" Taggart's face was distorted; his features seemed shapeless; a mustache of small beads sparkled between his nose and mouth.

"Pipe down," said Mr. Thompson uncertainly, drawing a little away from him.

"We don't have to believe it!" Taggart's voice had the flat, insistent sound of an effort to maintain a trance. "Nobody's ever said it before!

It's just one man! We don't have to believe it!"

"Take it easy," said Mr. Thompson.

"Why is he so sure he's right? Who is he to go against the whole world, against everything ever said for centuries and centuries? Who is he to know? Nobody can be sure! Nobody can know what's right!

There isn't any right!"

"Shut up!" yelled Mr. Thompson. "What are you trying to—"

The blast that stopped him was a military march leaping suddenly forth from the radio receiver—the military march interrupted three hours ago, played by the familiar screeches of a studio record. It took them a few stunned seconds to grasp it, while the cheerful, thumping chords went goose-stepping through the silence, sounding grotesquely irrelevant, like the mirth of a half-wit. The station's program director was blindly obeying the absolute that no radio time was ever to be left blank.

"Tell them to cut it off!" screamed Wesley Mouch, leaping to his feet. "It will make the public think that we authorized that speech!"

"You damn fool!" cried Mr. Thompson. "Would you rather have the public think that we didn't?"

Mouch stopped short and his eyes shot to Mr. Thompson with the appreciative glance of an amateur at a master.

"Broadcasts as usual!" ordered Mr. Thompson. "Tell them to go on with whatever programs they'd scheduled for this hour! No special announcements, no explanations! Tell them to go on as if nothing had happened!"

Half a dozen of Chick Morrison's morale conditioners went scurrying off toward telephones.

"Muzzle the commentators! Don't allow them to comment! Send word to every station in the country! Let the public wonder! Don't let them think that we're worried! Don't let them think that it's important!"

"No!" screamed Eugene Lawson. "No, no, no! We can't give people the impression that we're endorsing that speech! It's horrible, horrible, horrible!" Lawson was not in tears, but his voice had the undignified sound of an adult sobbing with helpless rage.

"Who's said anything about endorsing it?" snapped Mr. Thompson.

"It's horrible! It's immoral! It's selfish, heartless, ruthless! It's the most vicious speech ever made! It . . . it will make people demand to be happy!"

"It's only a speech," said Mr. Thompson, not too firmly.

"It seems to me," said Chick Morrison, his voice tentatively helpful, '"that people of nobler spiritual nature, you know what I mean, people of . . . of . . . well, of mystical insight"—he paused, as if waiting to be slapped, but no one moved, so he repeated firmly—"yes, of mystical insight, won't go for that speech. Logic isn't everything, after all."

"The workingmen won't go for it," said Tinky Holloway, a bit more helpfully. "He didn't sound like a friend of labor."

"The women of the country won't go for it," declared Ma Chalmers.

"It is, I believe, an established fact that women don't go for that stuff about the mind. Women have finer feelings. You can count on the women."

"You can count on the scientists," said Dr. Simon Pritchett. They were all pressing forward, suddenly eager to speak, as if they had found a subject they could handle with assurance. "Scientists know better than to believe in reason. He's no friend of the scientists."

"He's no friend of anybody," said Wesley Mouch, recapturing a shade of confidence at the sudden realization, "except maybe of big business."

"No!" cried Mr. Mowen in terror. "No! Don't accuse us! Don't say it! I won't have you say it!"

"What?"

"That . . . that . . . that anybody is a friend of business!"

"Don't let's make a fuss about that speech," said Dr. Floyd Ferris.

"It was too intellectual. Much too intellectual for the common man. It will have no effect. People are too dumb to understand it."

"Yeah," said Mouch hopefully, "that's so."

"In the first place," said Dr. Ferris, encouraged, "people can't think. In the second place, they don't want to."

"In the third place," said Fred Kinnan, "they don't want to starve.

And what do you propose to do about that?"

It was as if he had pronounced the question which all of the preceding utterances had been intended to stave off. No one answered him, but heads drew faintly deeper into shoulders, and figures drew faintly closer to one another, like a small cluster under the weight of the studio's empty space. The military march boomed through the silence with the inflexible gaiety of a grinning skull.

"Turn it off!" yelled Mr. Thompson, waving at the radio. "Turn that damn thing off!"

Someone obeyed him. But the sudden silence was worse.

"Well?" said Mr. Thompson at last, raising his eyes reluctantly to Fred Kinnan. "What do you think we ought to do?"

"Who, me?" chuckled Kinnan. "I don't run this show."

Mr. Thompson slammed his fist down on his knee. "Say something —" he ordered, but seeing Kinnan turn away, added, "somebody!"

There were no volunteers. "What are we to do?" he yelled, knowing that the man who answered would, thereafter, be the man in power.

"What are we to do? Can't somebody tell us what to do?"

"I can!" t It was a woman's voice, but it had the quality of the voice they had heard on the radio. They whirled to Dagny before she had time to step forward from the darkness beyond the group. As she stepped forward, her face frightened them—because it was devoid of fear.

"I can," she said, addressing Mr. Thompson. "You're to give up."

"Give up?" he repeated blankly.

"You're through. Don't you see that you're through? What else do you need, after what you've heard? Give up and get out of the way.

Leave men free to exist." He was looking at her, neither objecting nor moving. "You're still alive, you're using a human language, you're asking for answers, you're counting on reason—you're still counting on reason, God damn you! You're able to understand. It isn't possible that you haven't understood. There's nothing you can now pretend to hope, to want or gain or grab or reach. There's nothing but destruction ahead, the world's and your own. Give up and get out."

They were listening intently, but as if they did not hear her words, as if they were clinging blindly to a quality she was alone among them to possess: the quality of being alive. There was a sound of exultant laughter under the angry violence of her voice, her face was lifted, her eyes seemed to be greeting some spectacle at an incalculable distance, so that the glowing patch on her forehead did not look like the reflection of a studio spotlight, but of a sunrise.

"You wish to live, don't you? Get out of the way, if you want a chance. Let those who can, take over. He knows what to do. You don't. He is able to create the means of human survival. You aren't."

"Don't listen to her!"

It was so savage a cry of hatred that they drew away from Dr.

Robert Stadler, as if he had given voice to the unconfessed within them. His face looked as they feared theirs would look in the privacy of darkness.

"Don't listen to her!" he cried, his eyes avoiding hers, while hers paused on him for a brief, level glance that began as a shock of astonishment and ended as an obituary. "It's your life or his!"

"Keep quiet, Professor," said Mr. Thompson, brushing him off with the jerk of one hand. Mr. Thompson's eyes were watching Dagny, as if some thought were struggling to take shape inside his skull.

"You know the truth, all of you," she said, "and so do I, and so does every man who's heard John Galt! What else are you waiting for?

For proof? He's given it to you. For facts? They're all around you. How many corpses do you intend to pile up before you renounce it—your guns, your power, your controls and the whole of your miserable altruistic creed? Give it up, if you want to live. Give it up, if there's anything left in your mind that's still able to want human beings to remain alive on this earth!"

"But it's treason!" cried Eugene Lawson. "She's talking pure treason!"

"Now, now," said Mr. Thompson. "You don't have to go to extremes."

"Huh?" asked Tinky Holloway.

"But . . . but surely it's outrageous?" asked Chick Morrison.

"You're not agreeing with her, are you?" asked Wesley Mouch.

"Who's said anything about agreeing?" said Mr. Thompson, his tone surprisingly placid. "Don't be premature. Just don't you be premature, any of you. There's no harm in listening to any argument, is there?"

"That kind of argument?" asked Wesley Mouch, his finger stabbing again and again in Dagny's direction.

"Any kind," said Mr. Thompson placidly. "We mustn’t be intolerant,"

"But it's treason, ruin, disloyalty, selfishness and big-business propaganda!"

"Oh, I don't know," said Mr. Thompson. "We've got to keep an open mind. We've got to give consideration to every one's viewpoint.

She might have something there. He knows what to do. We've got to be flexible."

"Do you mean that you're willing to quit?" gasped Mouch.

"Now don't jump to conclusions," snapped Mr. Thompson angrily.

"If there's one thing I can't stand, it's people who jump to conclusions. And another thing is ivory-tower intellectuals who stick to some pet theory and haven't any sense of practical reality. At a time like this, we've got to be flexible above all."

He saw a look of bewilderment on all the faces around him, on Dagny's and on the others, though not for the same reasons. He smiled, rose to his feet and turned to Dagny.

"Thank you, Miss Taggart," he said. "Thank you for speaking your mind. That's what I want you to know—that you can trust me and speak to me with full frankness. We're not your enemies, Miss Taggart.

Don't pay any attention to the boys—they're upset, but they'll come down to earth. We're not your enemies, nor the country's. Sure, we've made mistakes, we're only human, but we're trying to do our best for the people—that is, I mean, for everybody—in these difficult times.

We can't make snap judgments and reach momentous decisions on the spur of the moment, can we? We've got to consider it, and mull it over, and weigh it carefully. I just want you to remember that we're not anybody's enemies—you realize that, don't you?"

"I've said everything I had to say," she answered, turning away from him, with no clue to the meaning of his words and no strength to attempt to find it.

She turned to Eddie Willers, who had watched the men around them with a look of so great an indignation that he seemed paralyzed —as if his brain were crying, "It's evil!" and could not move to any further thought. She jerked her head, indicating the door; he followed her obediently.

Dr. Robert Stadler waited until the door had closed after them, then whirled on Mr. Thompson. "You bloody fool! Do you know what you're playing with? Don't you understand that it's life or death? That it's you or him?"

The thin tremor that ran along Mr. Thompson's lips was a smile of contempt. "It's a funny way for a professor to behave. I didn't think professors ever went to pieces."

"Don't you understand? Don't you see that it's one or the other?"

"And what is it that you want me to do?"

"You must kill him."

It was the fact that Dr. Stadler had not cried it, but had said it in a flat, cold, suddenly and fully conscious voice, that brought a chill moment of silence as the whole room's answer.

"You must find him," said Dr. Stadler, his voice cracking and rising once more. "You must leave no stone unturned till you find him and destroy him! If he lives, he'll destroy all of us! If he lives, we can't!"

"How am I to find him?" asked Mr. Thompson, speaking slowly and carefully.

"I . . . I can tell you. I can give you a lead. Watch that Taggart woman. Set your men to watch every move she makes. She'll lead you to him, sooner or later."

"How do you know that?"

"Isn't it obvious? Isn't it sheer chance that she hasn't deserted you long ago? Don't you have the wits to see that she's one of his kind?"

He did not state what kind.

"Yeah," said Mr. Thompson thoughtfully, "yeah, that's true." He jerked his head up with a smile of satisfaction. "The professor's got something there. Put a tail on Miss Taggart," he ordered, snapping his fingers at Mouch. "Have her tailed day and night. We've got to find him."

"Yes, sir," said Mouch blankly.

"And when you find him," Dr. Stadler asked tensely, "you'll kill him?"

"Kill him, you damn fool? We need him!" cried Mr. Thompson.

Mouch waited, but no one ventured the question that was on everyone's mind, so he made the effort to utter stiffly, "I don't understand you, Mr. Thompson."

"Oh, you theoretical intellectuals!" said Mr. Thompson with exasperation. "What are you all gaping at? It's simple. Whoever he is, he's a man of action. Besides, he's got a pressure group: he's cornered all the men of brains. He knows what to do. We'll find him and he'll tell us. He'll tell us what to do. He'll make things work. He'll pull us out of the hole."

"Us, Mr. Thompson?"

"Sure. Never mind your theories. We'll make a deal with him."

"With him?"

"Sure. Oh, we'll have to compromise, we'll have to make a few concessions to big business, and the welfare boys won't like it, but what the hell!—do you know any other way out?"

"But his ideas—"

"Who cares about ideas?"

"Mr. Thompson," said Mouch, choking, "I . . . I'm afraid he's a man who's not open to a deal."

"There's no such thing," said Mr. Thompson.

A cold wind rattled the broken signs over the windows of abandoned shops, in the street outside the radio station. The city seemed abnormally quiet. The distant rumble of the traffic sounded lower than usual and made the wind sound louder. Empty sidewalks stretched off into the darkness; a few lone figures stood in whispering clusters under the rare lights.

Eddie Willers did not speak until they were many blocks away from the station. He stopped abruptly, when they reached a deserted square where the public loud-speakers, which no one had thought of turning off, were now broadcasting a domestic comedy—the shrill voices of a husband and wife quarreling over Junior's dates—to an empty stretch of pavement enclosed by unlighted house fronts. Beyond the square, a few dots of light, scattered Vertically above the twenty fifth-floor limit of the city, suggested a distant, rising form, which was the Taggart Building.

Eddie' stopped and pointed at the building, his finger shaking.

"Dagny!" he cried, then lowered his voice involuntarily. "Dagny," he whispered, "I know him. He . . . he works there . . . there . . ."

He kept pointing at the building with incredulous helplessness. "He works for Taggart Transcontinental . . ."

"I know," she answered; her voice was a lifeless monotone.

"As a track laborer . . . as the lowest of track laborers . . ."

"I know."

"I've talked to him . . . I've been talking to him for years . . . in the Terminal cafeteria. . . . He used to ask questions . . . all sorts of questions about the railroad, and I—God, Dagny! was I protecting the railroad or was I helping to destroy it?"

"Both. Neither. It doesn't matter now."

"I could have staked my life that he loved the railroad!"

"He does."

"But he's destroyed it."

"Yes."

She tightened the collar of her coat and walked on, against a gust of wind.

"I used to talk to him," he said, after a while. "His face . . . Dagny, it didn't look like any of the others, it . . . it showed that he understood so much. . . . I was glad, whenever I saw him there, in the cafeteria . . . I just talked . . . I don't think I knew that he was asking questions . . . but he was . . . so many questions about the railroad and . . . and about you."

"Did he ever ask you what I look like, when I'm asleep?"

"Yes . . . Yes, he did . . . I'd found you once, asleep in the office, and when I mentioned it, he—" He stopped, as a sudden connection crashed into place in his mind.

She turned to him, in the ray of a street lamp, raising and holding her face in full light for a silent, deliberate moment, as if in answer and confirmation of his thought.

He closed his eyes. "Oh God, Dagny!" he whispered.

They walked on in silence.

"He's gone by now, isn't he?" he asked. "From the Taggart Terminal, I mean."

"Eddie," she said, her voice suddenly grim, "if you value his life, don't ever ask that question. You don't want them to find him, do you?

Don't give them any leads. Don't ever breathe a word to anyone about having known him. Don't try to find out whether he's still working in the Terminal."

"You don't mean that he's still there?"

"I don't know. I know only that he might be."

"Now?"

"Yes."

"Still?"

"Yes. Keep quiet about it, if you don't want to destroy him."

"I think he's gone. He won't be back. I haven't seen him since . . . since . . ."

"Since when?" she asked sharply.

"The end of May. The night when you left for Utah, remember?" He paused, as the memory of that night's encounter and the full understanding of its meaning struck him together. He said with effort, "1 saw him that night. Not since . . . I've waited for him, in the cafeteria . . . He never came back."

"I don't think he'll let you see him now, he'll keep out of your way.

Bat don't look for him. Don't inquire."

"It's funny. I don't even know what name he used. It was Johnny something or—"

"It was John Galt," she said, with a faint, mirthless chuckle. "Don't look at the Terminal payroll. The name is still there."

"Just like that? All these years?"

"For twelve years. Just like that."

"And it's still there now?"

"Yes."

After a moment, he said, "It proves nothing, I know. The personnel office hasn't taken a single name off the payroll list since Directive 10-289. If a man quits, they give his name and job to a starving friend of their own, rather than report it to the Unification Board."

"Don't question the personnel office or anyone. Don't call attention to his name. If you or I make any inquiries about him, somebody might begin to wonder. Don't look for him. Don't make any move in his direction. And if you ever catch sight of him by chance, act as if you didn't know him."

He nodded. After a while, he said, his voice tense and low, "I wouldn't turn him over to them, not even to save the railroad."

"Eddie—"

"Yes?"

"If you ever catch sight of him, tell me."

He nodded.

Two blocks later, he asked quietly, "You're going to quit, one of these days, and vanish, aren't you?"

"Why do you say that?" It was almost a cry.

"Aren't you?"

She did not answer at once; when she did, the sound of despair was present in her voice only in the form of too tight a monotone: "Eddie, if I quit, what would happen to the Taggart trains?"

"There would be no Taggart trains within a week. Maybe less."

"There will be no looters' government within ten days. Then men like Cuffy Meigs will devour the last of our rails and engines. Should I lose the battle by failing to wait one more moment? How can I let it go—Taggart Transcontinental, Eddie—go forever, when one last effort can still keep it in existence? If I've stood things this long, I can stand them a little longer. Just a little longer. I'm not helping the looters.

Nothing can help them now."

"What are they going to do?"

"I don't know. What can they do? They're finished."

"I suppose so."

"Didn't you see them? They're miserable, panic-stricken rats, running for their lives."

"Does it mean anything to them?"

"What?"

"Their lives."

"They're still struggling, aren't they? But they're through and they know it."

"Have they ever acted on what they know?"

"They'll have to. They'll give up. It won't be long. And we'll be here to save whatever's left."

"Mr. Thompson wishes it to be known," said official broadcasts on the morning of November 23, "that there is no cause for alarm. He urges the public not to draw any hasty conclusions. We must preserve our discipline, our morale, our unity and our sense of broad-minded tolerance. The unconventional speech, which some of you might have heard on the radio last night, was a thought-provoking contribution to our pool of ideas on world problems. We must consider it soberly, avoiding the extremes of total condemnation or of reckless agreement.

We must regard it as one viewpoint out of many in our democratic forum of public opinion, which, as last night has proved, is open to all. The truth, says Mr. Thompson, has many facets. We must remain impartial."

"They're silent," wrote Chick Morrison, as a summary of its content, across the report from one of the field agents he had sent out on a mission entitled Public Pulse Taking. "They're silent," he wrote across the next report, then across another and another. "Silence," he wrote, with a frown of uneasiness, summing up his report to Mr. Thompson.

"People seem to be silent."

The flames that went up to the sky of a winter night and devoured a home in Wyoming were not seen by the people of Kansas, who watched a trembling red glow on the prairie horizon, made by the flames that went up to devour a farm, and the glow was not reflected by the windows of a street in Pennsylvania, where the twisting red tongues were reflections of the flames that went up to devour a factory. Nobody mentioned, next morning, that those flames had not been set off. by chance and that the owners of the three places had vanished. Neighbors observed it without comment—and without astonishment. A few homes were found abandoned in random corners across the nation, some left locked, shuttered and empty, others open and gutted of all movable goods—but people watched it in silence and, through the snowdrifts of untended streets in the haze of pre-morning darkness, went on trudging to their jobs, a little slower than usual.

Then, on November 27, a speaker at a political meeting in Cleveland was beaten up and had to escape by scurrying down dark alleys.

His silent audience had come to sudden life when he had shouted that the cause of all their troubles was their selfish concern with their own troubles.

On the morning of November 29, the workers of a shoe factory in Massachusetts were astonished, on entering their workshop, to find that the foreman was late. But they went to their usual posts and went on with their habitual routine, pulling levers, pressing buttons, feeding leather into automatic cutters, piling boxes on a moving belt, wondering, as the hours went by, why they did not catch sight of the foreman, or the superintendent, or the general manager, or the company president.

It was noon before they discovered that the front offices of the plant were empty.

"You goddamn cannibals!" screamed a woman in the midst of a crowded movie theater, breaking into sudden, hysterical sobs—and the audience showed no sign of astonishment, as if she were screaming for them all, "There is no cause for alarm," said official broadcasts on December 5. "Mr. Thompson wishes it to be known that he is willing to negotiate with John Galt for the purpose of devising ways and means to achieve a speedy solution of our problems. Mr. Thompson urges the people to be patient. We must not worry, we must not doubt, we must not lose heart,"

The attendants of a hospital in Illinois showed no astonishment when a man was brought in, beaten up by his elder brother, who had supported him all his life: the younger man had screamed at the elder, accusing him of selfishness and greed—just as the attendants of a hospital in New York City showed no astonishment at the case of a woman who came in with a fractured jaw: she had been slapped in the face by a total stranger, who had heard her ordering her five-year old son to give his best toy to the children of neighbors.

Chick Morrison attempted a whistle-stop tour to buttress the country's morale by speeches on self-sacrifice for the general welfare. He was stoned at the first of his stops and had to return to Washington.

Nobody had ever granted them the title of "the better men" or, granting it, had paused to grasp that title's meaning, but everybody knew, each in his own community, neighborhood, office or shop and hi his own unidentified terms, who would be the men that would now fail to appear at their posts on some coming morning and would silently vanish in search of unknown frontiers—the men whose faces were tighter than the faces around them, whose eyes were more direct, whose energy was more conscientiously enduring—the men who were now slipping away, one by one, from every corner of the country—of the country which was now like the descendant of what had once been regal glory, prostrated by the scourge of hemophilia, losing the best of its blood from a wound not to be healed.

"But we're willing to negotiate!" yelled Mr. Thompson to his assistants, ordering the special announcement to be repeated by all radio stations three times a day. "We're willing to negotiate! He'll hear it! He'll answer!"

Special listeners were ordered to keep watch, day and night, at radio receivers tuned to every known frequency of sound, waiting for an answer from an unknown transmitter. There was no answer.

Empty, hopeless, unfocused faces were becoming more apparent in the streets of the cities, but no one could read their meaning. As some men were escaping with their bodies into the underground of uninhabited regions, so others could only save their souls and were escaping into the underground of their minds—and no power on earth could tell whether their blankly indifferent eyes were shutters protecting hidden treasures at the bottom of shafts no longer to be mined, or were merely gaping holes of the parasite's emptiness never to be filled.

"I don't know what to do," said the assistant superintendent of an oil refinery, refusing to accept the job of the superintendent who had vanished—and the agents of the Unification Board were unable to tell whether he lied or not. It was only an edge of precision in the tone of his voice, an absence of apology or shame, that made them wonder whether he was a rebel or a fool. It was dangerous to force the job on either.

"Give us men!" The plea began to hammer progressively louder upon the desk of the Unification Board, from all parts of a country ravaged by unemployment, and neither the pleaders nor the Board dared to add the dangerous words which the cry was implying: "Give us men of ability!" There were waiting lines years' long for the jobs of janitors, greasers, porters and bus boys; there was no one to apply for the jobs of executives, managers, superintendents, engineers.

The explosions of oil refineries, the crashes of defective airplanes, the break-outs of blast furnaces, the wrecks of colliding trains, and the rumors of drunken orgies in the offices of newly created executives, made the members of the Board fear the kind of men who did apply for the positions of responsibility.

"Don't despair! Don't give up!" said official broadcasts on December 15, and on every day thereafter, "We will reach an agreement with John Galt. We will get him to lead us. He will solve all our problems.

He will make things work. Don't give up! We will get John Galt!"

Rewards and honors were offered to applicants for managerial jobs —then to foremen—then to skilled mechanics—then to any man who would make an effort to deserve a promotion in rank: wage raises, bonuses, tax exemptions and a medal devised by Wesley Mouch, to be known as "The Order of Public Benefactors." It brought no results. Ragged people listened to the offers of material comforts and turned away with lethargic indifference, as if they had lost the concept of "Value." These, thought the public-pulse-takers with terror, were men who did not care to live—or men who did not care to live on present terms.

"Don't despair! Don't give up! John Galt will solve our problems!" said the radio voices of official broadcasts, traveling through the silence of falling snow into the silence of unheated homes.

"Don't tell them that we haven't got him!" cried Mr. Thompson to his assistants, "But for God's sake tell them to find him!" Squads of Chick Morrison's boys were assigned to the task of manufacturing rumors: half of them went spreading the story that John Galt was in Washington and in conference with government officials—while the other half went spreading the story that the government would give five hundred thousand dollars as reward for information that would help to find John Galt.

"No, not a clue," said Wesley Mouch to Mr. Thompson, summing up the reports of the special agents who had been sent to check on every man by the name of John Galt throughout the country. "They're a shabby lot. There's a John Galt who's a professor of ornithology, eighty years old —there's a retired greengrocer with a wife and nine children—there's an unskilled railroad laborer who's held the same job for twelve years—and other such trash."

"Don't despair! We will get John Galt!" said official broadcasts in the daytime—but at night, every hour on the hour, by a secret, official order, an appeal was sent from short-wave transmitters into the empty reaches of space: "Calling John Galt! . . . Calling John Galt! . . .

Are you listening, John Galt? . . . We wish to negotiate. We wish to confer with you. Give us word on where you can be reached. . . .

Do you hear us, John Galt?" There was no answer.

The wads of worthless paper money were growing heavier in the pockets of the nation, but there was less and less for that money to buy. In September, a bushel of wheat had cost eleven dollars; it had cost thirty dollars in November; it had cost one hundred in December; it was now approaching the price of two hundred—while the printing presses of the government treasury were running a race with starvation, and losing.

When the workers of a factory beat up their foreman and wrecked the machinery in a fit of despair— no action could be taken against them. Arrests were futile, the jails were full, the arresting officers winked at their prisoners and let them escape on then- way to prison—men were going through the motions prescribed for the moment, with no thought of the moment to follow. No action could be taken when mobs of starving people attacked warehouses on the outskirts of cities.

No action could be taken when punitive squadrons joined the people they had been sent to punish.

"Are you listening, John Galt? . . . We wish to negotiate. We might meet your terms. . . . Are you listening?"

There were whispered rumors of covered wagons traveling by night through abandoned trails, and of secret settlements armed to resist the attacks of those whom they called the "Indians"—the attacks of any looting savages, be they homeless mobs or government agents. Lights were seen, once in a while, on the distant horizon of a prairie, in the hills, on the ledges of mountains, where no buildings had been known to exist. But no soldiers could be persuaded to investigate the sources of those lights.

On the doors of abandoned houses, on the gates of crumbling factories, on the walls of government buildings, there appeared, once in a while, traced in chalk, in paint, in blood, the curving mark which was the sign of the dollar.

"Can you hear us, John Galt? . . . Send us word. Name your terms.

We will meet any terms you set. Can you hear us?"

There was no answer.

The shaft of red smoke that shot to the sky on the night of January 22 and stood abnormally still for a while, like a solemn memorial obelisk, then wavered and swept back and forth across the sky, like a searchlight sending some undecipherable message, then went out as abruptly as it had come, marked the end of Rearden Steel—but the inhabitants of the area did not know it. They learned it only on subsequent nights, when they—who had cursed the mills for the smoke, the fumes, the soot and the noise—looked out and, instead of the glow pulsating with life on their familiar horizon, they saw a black void.

The mills had been nationalized, as the property of a deserter.

The first bearer of the title of "People's Manager," appointed to run the mills, had been a man of the Orren Boyle faction, a pudgy hanger-on of the metallurgical industry, who had wanted nothing but to follow his employees while going through the motions of leading. But at the end of a month, after too many clashes with the workers, too many occasions when his only answer had been that he couldn't help it, too many undelivered orders, too many telephonic pressures from his buddies, he had begged to be transferred to some other position. The Orren Boyle faction had been falling apart, since Mr. Boyle had been confined to a rest home, where his doctor had forbidden him any contact with business and had put him to the job of weaving baskets, as a means of occupational therapy. The second "People's Manager" sent to Rearden Steel had belonged to the faction of Cuffy Meigs. He had worn leather leggings and perfumed hair lotions, he had come to work with a gun on his hip, he had kept snapping that discipline was his primary goal and that by God he'd get it or else. The only discernible rule of the discipline had been his order forbidding all questions.

After weeks of frantic activity on the part of insurance companies, of firemen, of ambulances and of first-aid units, attending to a series of inexplicable accidents—the "People's Manager" had vanished one morning, having sold and shipped to sundry racketeers of Europe and Latin America most of the cranes, the automatic conveyors, the supplies of refractory brick, the emergency power generator, and the carpet from what had once been Rearden's office.

No one had been able to untangle the issues in the violent chaos of the next few days—the issues had never been named, the sides had remained unacknowledged, but everyone had known that the bloody encounters between the older workers and the newer had not been driven to such ferocious intensity by the trivial causes that kept setting them off—neither guards nor policemen nor state troopers had been able to keep order for the length of a day—nor could any faction muster a candidate willing to accept the post of "People's Manager."

On January 22, the operations of Rearden Steel had been ordered temporarily suspended.

The shaft of red smoke, that night, had been caused by a sixty-year old worker, who had set fire to one of the structures and had been caught in the act, laughing dazedly and staring at the flames. "To avenge Hank Rearden!" he had cried defiantly, tears running down his furnace-tanned face.

Don't let it hurt you like this—thought Dagny, slumped across her desk, over the page of the newspaper where a single brief paragraph announced the "temporary" end of Rearden Steel—don't let it hurt you so much. . . . She kept seeing the face of Hank Rearden, as he had stood at the window of his office, watching a crane move against the sky with a load of green-blue rail. . . . Don't let it hurt him like this —was the plea in her mind, addressed to no one—don't let him hear of it, don't let him know. . . . Then she saw another face, a face with unflinching green eyes, saying to her, in a voice made implacable by the quality of respect for facts: "You'll have to hear about it.

. . . You'll hear about every wreck. You'll hear about every discontinued train. . . . Nobody stays in this valley by faking reality in any manner whatever. . . ." Then she sat still, with no sight and no sound in her mind, with nothing but that enormous presence which was pain —until she heard the familiar cry that had become a drug killing all sensations except the capacity to act: "Miss Taggart, we don't know what to do!"—and she shot to her feet to answer.

"The People's State of Guatemala," said the newspapers on January 26, "declines the request of the United States for the loan of a thousand tons of steel."

On the night of February 3, a young pilot was flying his usual route, a weekly-flight from Dallas to New York City. When he reached the empty darkness beyond Philadelphia—in the place where the flames of Rearden Steel had for years been his favorite landmark, his greeting in the loneliness of night, the beacon of a living earth—he saw a snow-covered spread, dead-white and phosphorescent in the starlight, a spread of peaks and craters that looked like the surface of the moon.

He quit his job, next morning.

Through the frozen nights, over dying cities, knocking in vain at unanswering windows, beating on unechoing walls, rising above the roofs of lightless buildings and the skeletal girders of ruins, the plea went on crying through space, crying to the stationary motion of the stars, to the heatless fire of their twinkling: "Can you hear us, John Galt? Can you hear us?"

"Miss Taggart, we don't know what to do," said Mr. Thompson; he had summoned her to a personal conference on one of his scurrying trips to New York. "We're ready to give in, to meet his terms, to let him take over—but where is he?"

"For the third time," she said, her face and voice shut tight against any fissure of emotion, "I do not know where he is. What made you think I did?"

"Well, I didn't know, I had to try . . . I thought, just in case . . .

I thought, maybe if you had a way to reach him—"

"I haven't."

"You see, we can't announce, not even by short-wave radio, that we're willing to surrender altogether. People might hear it. But if you had some way to reach him, to let him know that we're ready to give in, to scrap our policies, to do anything he tells us to—"

"I said I haven't."

"If he'd only agree to a conference, just a conference, it wouldn't commit him to anything, would it? We're willing to turn the whole economy over to him—if he'd only tell us when, where, how. If he'd give us some word or sign . . . if he'd answer us . . . Why doesn't he answer?"

"You've heard his speech."

"But what are we to do? We can't just quit and leave the country without any government at all. I shudder to think what would happen.

With the kind of social elements now on the loose—why, Miss Taggart, it's all I can do to keep them in line or we'd have plunder and bloody murder in broad daylight. I don't know what's got into people, but they just don't seem to be civilized any more. We can't quit at a time like this. We can neither quit nor run things any longer. What are we to do, Miss Taggart?"

"Start decontrolling."

"Huh?"

"Start lifting taxes and removing controls."

"Oh, no, no, no! That's out of the question!"

"Out of whose question?"

"I mean, not at this time, Miss Taggart, not at this time. The country isn't ready for it. Personally, I'd agree with you, I'm a freedom loving man, Miss Taggart, I'm not after power—but this is an emergency.

People aren't ready for freedom. We've got to keep a strong hand. We can't adopt an idealistic theory, which—"

"Then don't ask me what to do," she said, and rose to her feet.

"But, Miss Taggart—"

"I didn't come here to argue."

She was at the door when he sighed and said, "I hope he's still alive." She stopped. "I hope they haven't done anything rash."

A moment passed before she was able to ask, "Who?" and to make it a word, not a scream.

He shrugged, spreading his arms and letting them drop helplessly.

"I can't hold my own boys in line any longer. I can't tell what they might attempt to do. There's one clique—the Ferris-Lawson-Meigs faction—that's been after me for over a year to adopt stronger measures. A tougher policy, they mean. Frankly, what they mean is: to resort to terror. Introduce the death penalty for civilian crimes, for critics, dissenters and the like. Their argument is that since people won't co-operate, won't act for the public interest voluntarily, we've got to force them to. Nothing will make our system work, they say, but terror.

And they may be right, from the look of things nowadays. But Wesley won't go for strong-arm methods; Wesley is a peaceful man, a liberal, and so am T. We're trying to keep the Ferris boys in check, but . . .

You see, they're set against any surrender to John Galt. They don't want us to deal with him. They don't want us to find him. I wouldn't put anything past them. If they found him first, they'd—there's no telling what they might do. . . . That's what worries me. Why doesn't he answer? Why hasn't he answered us at all? What if they've found him and killed him? I wouldn't know. . . . So I hoped that perhaps you had some way . . . some means of knowing that he's still alive . . ." His voice trailed off Into a question mark.

The whole of her resistance against a rush of liquefying terror went into the effort to keep her voice as stiff as her knees, long enough to say, "I do not know," and her knees stiff enough to carry her out of the room.

From behind the rotted posts of what had once been a corner vegetable stand, Dagny glanced furtively back at the street: the rare lamp posts broke the street into separate islands, she could see a pawnshop in the first patch of light, a saloon in the next, a church in the farthest, and black gaps between them; the sidewalks were deserted; it was hard to tell, but the street seemed empty.

She turned the corner, with deliberately resonant steps, then stopped abruptly to listen: it was hard to tell whether the abnormal tightness inside her chest was the sound of her own heartbeats, and hard to distinguish it from the sound of distant wheels and from the glassy rustle which was the East River somewhere close by; but she heard no sound of human steps behind her. She jerked her shoulders, it was part-shrug, part-shudder, and she walked faster. A rusty clock in some unlighted cavern coughed out the hour of four A.M.

The fear of being followed did not seem fully real, as no fear could be real to her now. She wondered whether the unnatural lightness of her body was a state of tension or relaxation; her body seemed drawn so tightly that she felt as if it were reduced to a single attribute: to the power of motion; her mind seemed inaccessibly relaxed, like a motor set to the automatic control of an absolute no longer to be questioned.

If a naked bullet could feel in mid-flight, this is what it would feel, she thought; just the motion and the goal, nothing else. She thought it vaguely, distantly, as if her own person were unreal; only the word "naked" seemed to reach her: naked . . . stripped of all concern but for the target . . . for the number "367," the number of a house on the East River, which her mind kept repeating, the number it had so long been forbidden to consider.

Three-sixty-seven—she thought, looking for an invisible shape ahead, among the angular forms of tenements—three-sixty-seven . . . that is where he lives . . . if he lives at all. . . . Her calm, her detachment and the confidence of her steps came from the certainty that this was an "if with which she could not exist any longer.

She had existed with it for ten days—and the nights behind her were a single progression that had brought her to this night, as if the momentum now driving her steps were the sound of her own steps still ringing, unanswered, in the tunnels of the Terminal. She had searched for him through the tunnels, she had walked for hours, night after night—the hours of the shift he had once worked—through the underground passages and platforms and shops and every twist of abandoned tracks, asking no questions of anyone, offering no explanations of her presence. She had walked, with no sense of fear or hope, moved by a feeling of desperate loyalty that was almost a feeling of pride.

The root of that feeling was the moments when she had stopped in sudden astonishment in some dark subterranean corner and had heard the words half-stated in her mind: This is my railroad—as she looked at a vault vibrating to the sound of distant wheels; this is my life—as she felt the clot of tension, which was the stopped and the suspended within herself; this is my love—as she thought of the man who, perhaps, was somewhere in those tunnels. There can be no conflict among these three . . . what am I doubting? . . . what can keep us apart, here, where only he and I belong? . . . Then, recapturing the context of the present, she had walked steadily on, with the sense of the same unbroken loyalty, but the sound of different words: You have forbidden me to look for you, you may damn me, you may choose to discard me . . . but by the right of the fact that I am alive, I must know that you are . . . I must see you this once . . . not to stop, not to speak, not to touch you, only to see. . . . She had not seen him. She had abandoned her search, when she had noticed the curious, wondering glances of the underground workers, following her steps.

She had called a meeting of the Terminal track laborers for the alleged purpose of boosting their morale, she had held the meeting twice, to face all the men in turn—she had repeated the same unintelligible speech, feeling a stab of shame at the empty generalities she uttered and, together, a stab of pride that it did not matter to her any longer—she had looked at the exhausted, brutalized faces of men who did not care whether they were ordered to work or to listen to meaningless sounds. She had not seen his face among them. "Was everyone present?" she had asked the foreman. "Yeah, I guess so," he had answered indifferently.

She had loitered at the Terminal entrances, watching the men as they came to work. But there were too many entrances to cover and no place where she could watch while remaining unseen—she had stood in the soggy twilight on a sidewalk glittering with rain, pressed to the wall of a warehouse, her coat collar raised to her cheekbones, raindrops falling off the brim of her hat—she had stood exposed to the sight of the street, knowing that the glances of the men who passed her were glances of recognition and astonishment, knowing that her vigil was too dangerously obvious. If there was a John Galt among them, someone could guess the nature of her quest . . . if there was no John Galt among them . . . if there was no John Galt in the world, she thought, then no danger existed—and no world.

No danger and no world, she thought—as she walked through the streets of the slums toward a house with the number "367," which was or was not his home. She wondered whether this was what one felt while awaiting a verdict of death: no fear, no anger, no concern, nothing but the icy detachment of light without heat or of cognition without values.

A tin can clattered from under her toes, and the sound went beating too loudly and too long, as if against the walls of an abandoned city.

The streets seemed razed by exhaustion, not by rest, as if the men inside the walls were not asleep, but had collapsed. He would be home from work at this hour, she thought . . . if he worked . . . if he still had a home. . . . She looked at the shapes of the slums, at the crumbling plaster, the peeling paint, the fading signboards of failing shops with unwanted goods in unwashed windows, the sagging steps unsafe to climb, the clotheslines of garments unfit to wear, the undone, the unattended, the given up, the incomplete, all the twisted monuments of a losing race against two enemies: "no time" and "no strength"—and she thought that this was the place where he had lived for twelve years, he who possessed such extravagant power to lighten the job of human existence.

Some memory kept struggling to reach her, then came back: its name was Starnesville. She felt the sensation of a shudder. But this is New York City!—she cried to herself in defense of the greatness she had loved; then she faced with unmoving austerity the verdict pronounced by her mind: a city that had left him in these slums for twelve years was damned and doomed to the future of Starnesville.

Then, abruptly, it ceased to matter; she felt a peculiar shock, like the shock of sudden silence, a sense of stillness within her, which she took for a sense of calm: she saw the number "367" above the door of an ancient tenement.

She was calm, she thought, it was only time that had suddenly lost its continuity and had broken her perception into separate snatches: she knew the moment when she saw the number—then the moment when she looked at a list on a board in the moldy half-light of a doorway and saw the words "John Galt, 5th, rear" scrawled in pencil by some illiterate hand—then the moment when she stopped at the foot of a stairway, glanced up at the vanishing angles of the railing and suddenly leaned against the wall, trembling with terror, preferring not to know—then the moment when she felt the movement of her foot coming to rest on the first of the steps—then a single, unbroken progression of lightness, of rising without effort or doubt or fear, of feeling the twisting installments of stairway dropping down beneath her unhesitant feet, as if the momentum of her irresistible rise were coming from the straightness of her body, the poise of her shoulders, the lift of her head and the solemnly exultant certainty that in the moment of ultimate decision, it was not disaster she expected of her life, at the end of a rising stairway she had needed thirty-seven years to climb.

At the top, she saw a narrow hallway, its walls converging to an unlighted door. She heard the floorboards creaking in the silence, under her steps. She felt the pressure of her finger on a doorbell and heard the sound of ringing in the unknown space beyond. She waited. She heard the brief crack of a board, but it came from the floor below. She heard the sliding wail of a tugboat somewhere on the river. Then she knew that she had missed some span of time, because her next awareness was not like a moment of awakening, but like a moment of birth: as if two sounds were pulling her out of a void, the sound of a step behind the door and the sound of a lock being turned—but she was not present until the moment when suddenly there was no door before her and the figure standing on the threshold was John Galt, standing casually in his own doorway, dressed in slacks and shirt, the angle of his waistline slanting faintly against the light behind him.

She knew that his eyes were grasping this moment, then sweeping over its past and its future, that a lightning process of calculation was bringing it into his conscious control—and by the time a fold of his shirt moved with the motion of his breath, he knew the sum—and the sum was a smile of radiant greeting.

She was now unable to move. He seized her arm, he jerked her inside the room, she felt the clinging pressure of his mouth, she felt the slenderness of his body through the suddenly alien stiffness of her coat.

She saw the laughter in his eyes, she felt the touch of his mouth again and again, she was sagging in his arms, she was breathing in gasps, as if she had not breathed for five flights of stairs, her face was pressed to the angle between his neck and shoulder, to hold him, to hold him with her arms, her hands and the skin of her cheek.

"John . . . you're alive . . ." was all she could say.

He nodded, as if he knew what the words were intended to explain.

Then he picked up her hat that had fallen to the floor, he took off her coat and put it aside, he looked at her slender, trembling figure, a sparkle of approval in his eyes, his hand moving over the tight, high collared, dark blue sweater that gave to her body the fragility of a schoolgirl and the tension of a fighter.

"The next time I see you," he said, "wear a white one. It will look wonderful, too,"

She realized that she was dressed as she never appeared in public. as she had been dressed at home through the sleepless hours of that night. She laughed, rediscovering the ability to laugh: she had expected his first words to be anything but that.

"If there is a next time," he added calmly.

"What . . . do you mean?"

He went to the door and locked it. "Sit down," he said.

She remained standing, but she took the time to glance at the room she had not noticed: a long, bare garret with a bed in one corner and a gas stove in another, a few pieces of wooden furniture, naked boards stressing the length of the floor, a single lamp burning on a desk, a closed door in the shadows beyond the lamp's circle—and New York City beyond an enormous window, the spread of angular structures and scattered lights, and the shaft of the Taggart Building far in the distance.

"Now listen carefully," he said. "We have about half an hour, I think. I know why you came here. I told you that it would be hard to stand and that you would be likely to break. Don't regret it. You see?—I can't regret it, either. But now, we have to know how to act, from here on. In about half an hour, the looters' agents, who followed you, will be here to arrest me."

"Oh no!" she gasped.

"Dagny, whoever among them had any remnant of human perceptiveness would know that you're not one of them, that you're their last link to me, and would not let you out of his sight—or the sight of his spies."

"I wasn't followed! I watched, I—"

"You wouldn't know how to notice it. Sneaking is one art they're expert at. Whoever followed you is reporting to his bosses right now.

Your presence in this district, at this hour, my name on the board downstairs, the fact that I work for your railroad—it's enough even for them to connect,"

"Then let's get out of here!"

He shook his head. "They've surrounded the block by now. Your follower would have every policeman in the district at his immediate call. Now I want you to know what you'll have to do when they come here. Dagny, you have only one chance to save me. If you did not quite understand what I said on the radio about the man in the middle, you'll understand it now. There is no middle for you to take. And you cannot take my side, not so long as we're in their hands. Now you must take their side."

"What?"

"You must take their side, as fully, consistently and loudly as your capacity for deception will permit. You must act as one of them. You must act as my worst enemy. If you do, I'll have a chance to come out of it alive. They need me too much, they'll go to any extreme before they bring themselves to kill me. Whatever they extort from people, they can extort it only through their victims' values — and they have no value of mine to hold over my head, nothing to threaten me with. But if they get the slightest suspicion of what we are to each other, they will have you on a torture rack — I mean, physical torture — before my eyes, in less than a week. I am not going to wait for that. At the first mention of a threat to you, I will kill myself and stop them right there."

He said it without emphasis, in the same impersonal tone of practical calculation as the rest. She knew that he meant it and that he was right to mean it: she saw in what manner she alone had the power to succeed at destroying him, where all the power of his enemies would fail. He saw the look of stillness in her eyes, a look of understanding and of horror. He nodded, with a faint smile.

"I don't have to tell you," he said, "that if I do it, it won't be an act of self-sacrifice. I do not care to live on their terms, I do not care to obey them and I do not care to see you enduring a drawn-out murder.

There will be no values for me to seek after that — and I do not care to exist without values. I don't have to tell you that we owe no morality to those who hold us under a gun. So use every power of deceit you can command, but convince them that you hate me. Then we'll have a chance to remain alive and to escape — I don't know when or how, but I'll know that I'm free to act. Is this understood?"

She forced herself to lift her head, to look straight at him and to nod.

"When they come," he said, "tell them that you had been trying to find me for them, that you became suspicious when you saw my name on your payroll list and that you came here to investigate."

She nodded.

"I will stall about admitting my identity — they might recognize my voice, but I'll attempt to deny it — so that it will be you who'll tell them that I am the John Galt they're seeking."

It took her a few seconds longer, but she nodded, "Afterwards, you'll claim — and accept — that five-hundred-thousand dollar reward they've offered for my capture."

She closed her eyes, then nodded.

"Dagny," he said slowly, "there is no way to serve your own values under their system. Sooner or later, whether you intended it or not, they had to bring you to the point where the only thing you can do for me is to turn against me. Gather your strength and do it — then we'll earn this one half-hour and, perhaps, the future."

I'll do it," she said firmly, and added, "if that is what happens, if "It will happen. Don't regret it. I won't. You haven't seen the nature of our enemies. You'll see it now. If I have to be the pawn in the demonstration that will convince you, I'm willing to be—and to win you from them, once and for all. You didn't want to wait any longer?

Oh, Dagny, Dagny, neither did I!"

It was the way he held her, the way he kissed her mouth that made her feel as if every step she had taken, every danger, every doubt, even her treason against him, if it was treason, all of it were giving her an exultant right to this moment. He saw the struggle in her face, the tension of an incredulous protest against herself—and she heard the sound of his voice through the strands of her hair pressed to his lips: "Don't think of them now. Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them. You're here.

It's our time and our life, not theirs. Don't struggle not to be happy.

You are."

"At the risk of destroying you?" she whispered.

"You won't. But—yes, even that. You don't think it's indifference, do you? Was it indifference that broke you and brought you here?"

"I—" And then the violence of the truth made her pull his mouth down to hers, then throw the words at his face: "I didn't care whether either one of us lived afterwards, just to see you this once!"

"I would have been disappointed if you hadn't come."

"Do you know what it was like, waiting, fighting it, delaying it one more day, then one more, then—"

He chuckled. "Do I?" he said softly.

Her hand dropped in a helpless gesture: she thought of his ten years. "When I heard your voice on the radio," she said, "when I heard the greatest statement I ever . . . No, I have no right to tell you what I thought of it,"

"Why not?"

"You think that I haven't accepted it."

"You will."

"Were you speaking from here?"

"No, from the valley."

"And then you returned to New York?"

"The next morning."

"And you've been here ever since?"

"Yes."

"Have you heard the kind of appeals they're sending out to you every night?"

"Sure."

She glanced slowly about the room, her eyes moving from the towers of the city in the window to the wooden rafters of his ceiling, to the cracked plaster of his walls, to the iron posts of his bed. "You've been here all that time," she said. "You've lived here for twelve years . . . here . . . like this . . ."

"Like this," he said, throwing open the door at the end of the room.

She gasped: the long, light-flooded, windowless space beyond the threshold, enclosed in a shell of softly lustrous metal, like a small ballroom aboard a submarine, was the most efficiently modern laboratory she had ever seen.

"Come in," he said, grinning. "I don't have to keep secrets from you any longer."

It was like crossing the border into a different universe. She looked at the complex equipment sparkling in a bright, diffused glow, at the mesh of glittering wires, at the blackboard chalked with mathematical formulas, at the long counters of objects shaped by the ruthless discipline of a purpose—then at the sagging boards and crumbling plaster of the garret. Either-or, she thought; this was the choice confronting the world: a human soul in the image of one or of the other.

"You wanted to know where I worked for eleven months out of the year," he said, "All this," she asked, pointing at the laboratory, "on the salary of—she pointed at the garret—"of an unskilled laborer?"

"Oh, no! On the royalties Midas Mulligan pays me for his powerhouse, for the ray screen, for the radio transmitter and a few other jobs of that kind."

"Then . . . then why did you have to work as a track laborer?"

"Because no money earned in the valley is ever to be spent outside."

"Where did you get this equipment?"

"I designed it. Andrew Stockton's foundry made it." He pointed to an unobtrusive object the size of a radio cabinet in a corner of the room: "There's the motor you wanted," and chuckled at her gasp, at the involuntary jolt that threw her forward, "Don't bother studying it, you won't give it away to them now."

She was staring at the shining metal cylinders and the glistening coils of wire that suggested the rusted shape resting, like a sacred relic, in a glass coffin in a vault of the Taggart Terminal.

"It supplies my own electric power for the laboratory," he said. "No one has had to wonder why a track laborer is using such exorbitant amounts of electricity."

"But if they ever found this place—"

He gave an odd, brief chuckle. "They won't."

"How long have you been—?"

She stopped; this time, she did not gasp; the sight confronting her could not be greeted by anything except a moment of total inner stillness: on the wall, behind a row of machinery, she saw a' picture cut out of a newspaper—a picture of her, in slacks and shirt, standing by the side of the engine at the opening of the John Galt Line, her head lifted, her smile holding the context, the meaning and the sunlight of that day.

A moan was her only answer, as she turned to him, but the look on his face matched hers in the picture.

"I was the symbol of what you wanted to destroy in the world," he said, "But you were my symbol of what I wanted to achieve." He pointed at the picture. "This is how men expect to feel about their life once or twice, as an exception, in the course of their lifetime. But I—this is what I chose as the constant and normal."

The look on his face, the serene intensity of his eyes and of his mind made it real to her, now, in this moment, in this moment's full context, in this city.

When he kissed her, she knew that their arms, holding each other, were holding their greatest triumph, that this was the reality untouched by pain or fear, the reality of Halley's Fifth Concerto, this was the reward they had wanted, fought for and won.

The doorbell rang.

Her first reaction was to draw back, his—to hold her closer and longer.

When he raised his head, he was smiling. He said only, "Now is the time not to be afraid."

She followed him back to the garret. She heard the door of the laboratory clicking locked behind them.

He held her coat for her silently, he waited until she had tied its belt and had put on her hat—then he walked to the entrance door and opened it.

Three of the four men who entered were muscular figures in military uniforms, each with two guns on his hips, with broad faces devoid of shape and eyes untouched by perception. The fourth, their leader, was a frail civilian with an expensive overcoat, a neat mustache, pale blue eyes and the manner of an intellectual of the public-relations species.

He blinked at Galt, at the room, made a step forward, stopped, made another step and stopped.

"Yes?" said Galt.

"Are . . . are you John Galt?" he asked too loudly.

"That's my name."

"Are you the John Galt?"

"Which one?"

"Did you speak on the radio?"

"When?"

"Don't let him fool you." The metallic voice was Dagny's and it was addressed to the leader. "He—is—John—Galt. I shall report the proof to headquarters. You may proceed."

Galt turned to her as to a stranger. "Will you tell me now just who you are and what it was that you wanted here?"

Her face was as blank as the faces of the soldiers. "My name is Dagny Taggart. I wanted to convince myself that you are the man whom the country is seeking,"

He turned to the leader. "All right," he said. "I am John Galt—but if you want me to answer you at all, keep your stool pigeon"—he pointed at Dagny—"away from me."

"Mr. Galt!" cried the leader with the sound of an enormous joviality.

"It is an honor to meet you, an honor and a privilege! Please, Mr. Galt, don't misunderstand us—we're ready to grant you your wishes—no, of course, you don't have to deal with Miss Taggart, if you prefer not to —Miss Taggart was only trying to do her patriotic duty, but—"

"I said keep her away from me."

"We're not your enemies, Mr. Galt, I assure you we're not your enemies." He turned to Dagny. "Miss Taggart, you have performed an invaluable service to the people. You have earned the highest form of public gratitude. Permit us to take over from here on." The soothing motions of his hands were urging her to stand back, to keep out of Galt's sight.

"Now what do you want?" asked Galt.

"The nation is waiting for you, Mr. Galt. All we want is a chance to dispel misapprehensions. Just a chance to co-operate with you." His gloved hand was waving a signal to his three men; the floorboards creaked, as the men proceeded silently to the task of opening drawers and closets; they were searching the room. "The spirit of the nation will revive tomorrow morning, Mr. Galt, when they hear that you have been found."

"What do you want?"

"Just to greet you in the name of the people."

"Am I under arrest?"

"Why think in such old-fashioned terms? Our job is only to escort you safely to the top councils of the national leadership, where your presence is urgently needed." He paused, but got no answer. "The country's top leaders desire to confer with you—just to confer and to reach a friendly understanding."

The soldiers were finding nothing but garments and kitchen utensils; there were no letters, no books, not even a newspaper, as if the room were the habitation of an illiterate.

"Our objective is only to assist you to assume your rightful place in society, Mr. Galt. You do not seem to realize your own public value."

"I do."

"We are here only to protect you."

"Locked!" declared a soldier, banging his fist against the laboratory door.

The leader assumed an ingratiating smile. "What is behind that door, Mr. Galt?"

"Private property."

"Would you open it, please?"

"No."

The leader spread his hands out in a gesture of pained helplessness.

"Unfortunately, my hands are tied. Orders, you know. We have to enter that room."

"Enter it."

"It's only a formality, a mere formality. There's no reason why things should not be handled amicably. Won't you please co-operate?"

"I said, no."

"I'm sure you wouldn't want us to resort to any . . . unnecessary means." He got no answer. "We have the authority to break that door down, you know—but, of course, we wouldn't want to do it." He waited, but got no answer. "Force that lock!" he snapped to the soldier.

Dagny glanced at Galt's face. He stood impassively, his head held level, she saw the undisturbed lines of his profile, his eyes directed at the door. The lock was a small, square plate of polished copper, without keyhole or fixtures.

The silence and the sudden immobility of the three brutes were involuntary, while the burglar's tools in the hands of the fourth went grating cautiously against the wood of the door.

The wood gave way easily, and small chips fell down, their thuds magnified by the silence into the rattle of a distant gun. When the burglar's jimmy attacked the copper plate, they heard a faint rustle behind the door, no louder than the sigh of a weary mind. In another minute, the lock fell out and the door shuddered forward the width of an inch.

The soldier jumped back. The leader approached, his steps irregular like hiccoughs, and threw the door open. They faced a black hole of unknown content and unrelieved darkness.

They glanced at one another and at Galt; he did not move; he stood looking at the darkness.

Dagny followed them, when they stepped over the threshold, preceded by the beams of their flashlights. The space beyond was a long shell of metal, empty but for heavy drifts of dust on the floor, an odd, grayish-white dust that seemed to belong among ruins undisturbed for centuries. The room looked dead like an empty skull.

She turned away, not to let them see in her face the scream of the knowledge of what that dust had been a few minutes ago. Don't try to open that door, he had said to her at the entrance to the powerhouse of Atlantis . . . if you tried to break it down, the machinery inside would collapse into rubble long before the door would give way. . . . Don't try to open that door—she was thinking, but knew that what she was now seeing was the visual form of the statement: Don't try to force a mind.

The men backed out in silence and went on backing toward the exit door, then stopped uncertainly, one after another, at random points of the garret, as if abandoned by a receding tide.

"Well," said Galt, reaching for his overcoat and turning to the leader, "let's go."

Three floors of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel had been evacuated and transformed into an armed camp. Guards with machine guns stood at every turn of the long, velvet-carpeted corridors. Sentinels with bayonets stood on the landings of the fire-stairways. The elevator doors of the fifty-ninth, sixtieth and sixty-first floors were padlocked; a single door and one elevator were left as sole means of access, guarded by soldiers in full battle regalia. Peculiar-looking men loitered in the lobbies, restaurants and shops of the ground floor: their clothes were too new and too expensive, in unsuccessful imitation of the hotel's usual patrons, a camouflage impaired by the fact that the clothes were badly fitted to their wearers' husky figures and were further distorted by bulges in places where the garments of businessmen have no cause to bulge, but the garments of gunmen have. Groups of guards with Tommy guns were posted at every entrance and exit of the hotel, as well as at strategic windows of the adjoining streets.

In the center of this camp, on the sixtieth floor, in what was known as the royal suite of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, amidst satin drapes, crystal candelabra and sculptured garlands of Sowers, John Galt, dressed in slacks and shirt, sat in a brocaded armchair, one leg stretched out on a velvet hassock, his hands crossed behind his head, looking at the ceiling.

This was the posture in which Mr. Thompson found him, when the four guards, who had stood outside the door of the royal suite since five A.M., opened it at eleven A.M. to admit Mr. Thompson, and locked it again.

Mr. Thompson experienced a brief flash of uneasiness when the click of the lock cut off his escape and left him alone with the prisoner. But he remembered the newspaper headlines and the radio voices, which had been announcing to the country since dawn: "John Galt is found!—John Galt is in New York!—John Galt has joined the people's cause!—John Galt is in conference with the country's leaders, working for a speedy solution of all our problems!"—and he made himself feel that he believed it.

"Well, well, well!" he said brightly, marching up to the armchair.

"So you're the young fellow who's started all the trouble—Oh," he said suddenly, as he got a closer look at the dark green eyes watching him. "Well, I . . . I'm tickled pink to meet you, Mr. Galt, just tickled pink." He added, "I'm Mr. Thompson, you know."

"How do you do," said Galt.

Mr. Thompson thudded down on a chair, the brusqueness of the movement suggesting a cheerily businesslike attitude. "Now don't go imagining that you're under arrest or some such nonsense." He pointed at the room. "This is no jail, as you can see. You can see that we'll treat you right. You're a big person, a very big person—and we know it.

Just make yourself at home. Ask for anything you please. Fire any flunky that doesn't obey you. And if you take a dislike to any of the army boys outside, just breathe the word—and we'll send another one to replace him."

He paused expectantly. He received no answer.

"The only reason we brought you here is just that we wanted to talk to you. We wouldn't have done it this way, but you left us no choice. You kept hiding. And all we wanted was a chance to tell you that you got us all wrong."

He spread his hands out, palms up, with a disarming smile. Galt's eyes were watching him, without answer.

"That was some speech you made. Boy, are you an orator! You've done something to the country—I don't know what or why, but you have. People seem to want something you've got. But you thought we'd be dead set against it? That's where you're wrong. We're not. Personally, I think there was plenty in that speech that made sense. Yes, sir, I do. Of course, I don't agree with every word you said—but what the hell, you don't expect us to agree with everything, do you? Differences of opinion—that's what makes horse racing. Me, I'm always willing to change my mind. I'm open to any argument."

He leaned forward invitingly. He obtained no answer.

"The world is in a hell of a mess. Just as you said. There, I agree with you. We have a point in common. We can start from that. Something's got to be done about it. All I wanted was—Look," he cried suddenly, "why don't you let me talk to you?"

"You are talking to me."

"I . . . well, that is . . . well, you know what I mean."

"Fully."

"Well? . . . Well, what have you got to say?"

"Nothing."

"Huh?!"

"Nothing."

"Oh, come now!"

"I didn't seek to talk to you."

"But . . . but look! . . . we have things to discuss!"

"I haven't."

"Look," said Mr. Thompson, after a pause, "you're a man of action.

A practical man. Boy, are you a practical man! Whatever else I don't quite get about you, I'm sure of that. Now aren't you?"

"Practical? Yes."

"Well, so am I. We can talk straight We can put our cards on the table. Whatever it is you're after, I'm offering you a deal."

"I'm always open to a deal."

"I knew it!" cried Mr. Thompson triumphantly, slamming his fist down on his own knee. "I told them so—all those fool intellectual theorizers, like Wesley!"

"I'm always open to a deal—with anyone who has a value to offer me."

Mr. Thompson could not tell what made him miss a beat before he answered, "Well, write your own ticket, brother! Write your own ticket!"

"What have you got to offer me?"

"Why—anything."

"Such as?"

"Anything you name. Have you heard our short-wave broadcasts to you?"

"Yes."

"We said we'll meet your terms, any terms. We meant it."

"Have you heard me say on the radio that I have no terms to bargain about? I meant it."

"Oh, but look, you misunderstood us! You thought we'd fight you.

But we won't. We're not that rigid. We're willing to consider any idea.

Why didn't you answer our calls and come to a conference?"

"Why should I?"

"Because . . . because we wanted to speak to you in the name of the country."

"I don't recognize your right to speak in the name of the country."

"Now look here, I'm not used to . . . Well, okay, won't you just give me a hearing? Won't you listen?"

"I'm listening."

"The country is in a terrible state. People are starving and giving up, the economy is falling to pieces, nobody is producing any longer.

We don't know what to do about it. You do. You know how to make things work. Okay, we're ready to give in. We want you to tell us what to do."

"I told you what to do."

"What?"

"Get out of the way."

"That's impossible! That's fantastic! That's out of the question!"

"You see? I told you we had nothing to discuss."

"Now, wait! Wait! Don't go to extremes! There's always a middle ground. You can't have everything. We aren't . . . people aren't ready for it. You can't expect us to ditch the machinery of State.

We've got to preserve the system. But we're willing to amend it. We'll modify it any way you wish. We're not stubborn, theoretical dogmatists—we're flexible. We'll do anything you say. We'll give you a free hand. We'll co-operate. We'll compromise. We'll split fifty-fifty. We'll keep the sphere of politics and give you total power over the sphere of economics. We'll turn the production, of the country over to you, we'll make you a present of the entire economy. You'll run it any way you wish, you'll give the orders, you'll issue the directives—and you'll have the organized power of the State at your command to enforce your decisions. We'll stand ready to obey you, all of us, from me on down. In the field of production, we'll do whatever you say. You'll be—you'll be the Economic Dictator of the nation!"

Galt burst out laughing.

It was the simple amusement of the laughter that shocked Mr.

Thompson. "What's the matter with you?"

"So that's your idea of a compromise, is it?"

"What's the . . . ? Don't sit there grinning like that! . . . I don't think you understood me. I'm offering you Wesley Mouch's job—and there's nothing bigger that anyone could offer you! . . . You'll be free to do anything you wish. If you don't like controls—repeal them. If you want higher profits and lower wages—decree them. If you want special privileges for the big tycoons—grant them. If you don't like labor unions—dissolve them. If you want a free economy—order people to be free! Play it any way you please. But get things going. Get the country organized. Make people work again. Make them produce.

Bring back your own men—the men of brains. Lead us to a peaceful, scientific, industrial age and to prosperity."

"At the point of a gun?"

"Now look, I . . . Now what's so damn funny about it?"

"Will you tell me just one thing: if you're able to pretend that you haven't heard a word I said on the radio, what makes you think I'd be willing to pretend that I haven't said it?"

"I don't know what you mean! I—"

"Skip it. It was just a rhetorical question. The first part of it answers the second."

"Huh?"

"I don't play your kind of games, brother—if you want a translation."

"Do you mean that you're refusing my offer?"

"I am."

"But why?"

"It took me three hours on the radio to tell you why."

"Oh, that's just theory! I'm talking business. I'm offering you the greatest job in the world. Will you tell me what's wrong with it?"

"What I told you, in three hours, was that it won't work."

"You can make it work."

"How?"

Mr. Thompson spread his hands out. "I don't know. If I did, I wouldn't come to you. It's for you to figure out. You're the industrial genius. You can solve anything."

"I said it can't be done."

"You could do it"

"How?"

"Somehow." He heard Galt's chuckle, and added, "Why not? Just tell me why not?"

"Okay, I'll tell you. You want me to be the Economic Dictator?"

"Yes!"

"And you’d obey any order I give?"

"Implicitly!"

"Then start by abolishing all income taxes."

"Oh, no!" screamed Mr. Thompson, leaping to his feet. "We couldn't do that! That's . . . that's not the field of production. That's the field of distribution. How would we pay government employees?"

"Fire your government employees."

"Oh, no! That's politics! That's not economics! You can't interfere with politics! You can't have everything!"

Galt crossed his legs on the hassock, stretching himself more comfortably in the brocaded armchair. "Want to continue the discussion?

Or do you get the point?"

"I only—" He stopped.

"Are you satisfied that I got the point?"

"Look," said Mr. Thompson placatingly, resuming the edge of his seat. "I don't want to argue. I'm no good at debates. I'm a man of action. Time is short. All I know is that you've got a mind. Just the sort of mind we need. You can do anything. You could make things work if you wanted to."

"All right, put it your own way: I don't want to. I don't want to be an Economic Dictator, not even long enough to issue that order for people to be free—which any rational human being would throw back in my face, because he'd know that his rights are not to be held, given or received by your permission or mine."

"Tell me," said Mr. Thompson, looking at him reflectively, "what is it you're after?"

"I told you on the radio."

"I don't get it. You said that you're out for your own selfish interest —and that, I can understand. But what can you possibly want in the future that you couldn't get right now, from us, handed down to you on a platter? I thought you were an egoist—and a practical man. I offer you a blank check on anything you wish—and you tell me that you don't want it, Why?"

"Because there are no funds behind your blank check."

"What?"

"Because you have no value to offer me."

"I can offer you anything you can ask. Just name it."

"You name it."

"Well, you talked a lot about wealth. If it's money that you want—you couldn't make in three lifetimes what I can hand over to you in a minute, this minute, cash on the barrel. Want a billion dollars—a cool, neat billion dollars?"

"Which I’ll have to produce, for you to give me?"

"No, I mean straight out of the public treasury, in fresh, new bills . . . or . . . or even in gold, if you prefer."

"What will it buy me?"

"Oh, look, when the country gets back on its feet—"

"When I put it back on its feet?"

"Well, if what you want is to run things your own way, if it's power that you're after, I'll guarantee you that every man, woman and child in this country will obey your orders and do whatever you wish."

"After I teach them to do it?"

"If you want anything for your own gang—for all those men who’ve disappeared—jobs, positions, authority, tax exemptions, any special favor at all—just name it and they'll get it."

"After I bring them back?"

"Well, what on earth do you want?"

"What on earth do I need you for?"

"Huh?"

"What have you got to offer me that I couldn't get without you?"

There was a different look in Mr. Thompson's eyes when he drew back, as if cornered, yet looked straight at Galt for the first time and said slowly, "Without me, you couldn't get out of this room, right now."

Galt smiled. "True."

"You wouldn't be able to produce anything. You could be left here to starve."

"True."

"Well, don't you see?" The loudness of homey joviality came back into Mr. Thompson's voice, as if the hint given and received were now to be safely evaded by means of humor. "What I've got to offer you is your life.”

"It's not yours to offer, Mr. Thompson," said Galt softly.

Something about his voice made Mr. Thompson jerk to glance at him, then jerk faster to look away: Galt's smile seemed almost gentle.

"Now," said Galt, "do you see what I meant when I said that a zero can't hold a mortgage over life? It's I who'd have to grant you that kind of mortgage—and I don't. The removal of a threat is not a payment, the negation of a negative is not a reward, the withdrawal of your armed hoodlums is not an incentive, the offer not to murder me is not a value."

"Who . . . who's said anything about murdering you?"

"Who's said anything about anything else? If you weren't holding me here at the point of a gun, under threat of death, you wouldn't have a chance to speak to me at all. And that is as much as your guns can accomplish. I don't pay for the removal of threats. I don't buy my life from anyone."

“That's not true," said Mr. Thompson brightly. "If you had a broken leg, you'd pay a doctor to set it.”

"Not if he was the one who broke it." He smiled at Mr. Thompson's silence. "I'm a practical man, Mr. Thompson. I don't think it's practical to establish a person whose sole means of livelihood is the breaking of my bones. I don't think it's practical to support a protection racket."

Mr. Thompson looked thoughtful, then shook his head. "I don't think you're practical," he said. "A practical man doesn't ignore the facts of reality. He doesn't waste his time wishing things to be different or trying to change them. He takes things as they are. We're holding you. It's a fact. Whether you like it or not, it's a fact. You should act accordingly."

"I am."

"What I mean is, you should co-operate. You should recognize an existing situation, accept it and adjust to it."

"If you had blood poisoning, would you adjust to it or act to change it?"

"Oh, that's different! That's physical!"

"You mean, physical facts are open to correction, but your whims are not?"

"Huh?"

"You mean, physical nature can be adjusted to men, but your whims are above the laws of nature, and men must adjust to you?"

"I mean that I hold the upper hand!"

"With a gun in it?"

"Oh, forget about guns! I—"

"I can't forget a fact of reality, Mr. Thompson. That would be impractical."

"All right, then: I hold a gun. What are you going to do about it?"

"I'll act accordingly. I'll obey you."

"What?"

"I'll do whatever you tell me to."

"Do you mean it?"

"I mean it. Literally." He saw the eagerness of Mr. Thompson's face ebb slowly under a look of bewilderment. "I will perform any motion you order me to perform. If you order me to move into the office of an Economic Dictator, I'll move into it. If you order me to sit at a desk, I will sit at it. If you order me to issue a directive, I will issue the directive you order me to issue."

"Oh, but I don't know what directives to issue!"

"I don't, either."

There was a long pause.

"Well?" said Galt. "What are your orders?"

"I want you to save the economy of the country!"

"I don't know how to save it."

"I want you to find a way!"

"I don't know how to find it."

"I want you to think!"

"How will your gun make me do that, Mr. Thompson?”

Mr. Thompson looked at him silently—and Galt saw, in the tightened lips, in the jutting chin, in the narrowed eyes, the look of an adolescent bully about to utter that philosophical argument which is expressed by the sentence: I'll bash your teeth in. Galt smiled, looking straight at him, as if hearing the unspoken sentence and underscoring it. Mr.

Thompson looked away.

"No," said Galt, "you don't want me to think. When you force a man to act against his own choice and judgment, it's his thinking that you want him to suspend. You want him to become a robot. I shall comply."

Mr. Thompson sighed. "I don't get it," he said in a tone of genuine helplessness. "Something's off and I can't figure it out. Why should you ask for trouble? With a brain like yours—you can beat anybody.

I'm no match for you, and you know it. Why don't you pretend to join us, then gain control and outsmart me?"

"For the same reason that makes you offer it: because you'd win."

"Huh?"

"Because it's the attempt of your betters to beat you on your terms that has allowed your kind to get away with it for centuries.

Which one of us would succeed, if I were to compete with you for control over your musclemen? Sure, I could pretend—and I wouldn't save your economy or your system, nothing will save them now—but I'd perish and what you'd win would be what you've always won in the past: a postponement, one more stay of execution, for another year—or month—bought at the price of whatever hope and effort might still be squeezed out of the best of the human remnants left around you, including me. That's all you're after and that is the length of your range. A month? You'd settle for a week—on the unchallenged absolute that there will always be another victim to find. But you've found your last victim—the one who refuses to play his historical part. The game is up, brother."

"Oh, that's just theory!" snapped Mr. Thompson, a little too sharply; his eyes were roving about the room, in the manner of a substitute for pacing; he glanced at the door, as if longing to escape. "You say that if we don't give up the system, we'll perish?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Then, since we're holding you, you will perish with us?"

"Possibly."

"Don't you want to live?"

"Passionately." He saw the snap of a spark in Mr. Thompson's eyes and smiled. "I'll tell you more: I know that I want to live much more intensely than you do. I know that that's what you're counting on. I know that you, in fact, do not want to live at all. I want it. And because I want it so much, I will accept no substitute."

Mr. Thompson jumped to his feet. "That's not true!" he cried. "My not wanting to live—it's not true! Why do you talk like that?" He stood, his limbs drawn faintly together, as if against a sudden chill.

"Why do you say such things? I don't know what you mean." He backed a few steps away. "And it's not true that I'm a gunman. I'm not. I don't intend to harm you. I never intended to harm anybody. I want people to like me. I want to be your friend . . . I want to be your friend!" he cried to the space at large.

Galt's eyes were watching him, without expression, giving him no clue to what they were seeing, except that they were seeing it.

Mr. Thompson jerked suddenly into bustling, unnecessary motions, as if he were in a hurry, "I've got to run along," he said. "I . . . 1 have so many appointments. We'll talk about it some more. Think it over. Take your time. I'm not trying to high-pressure you. Just relax, take it easy and make yourself at home. Ask for anything you like—food, drinks, cigarettes, the best of anything." He waved his hand at Galt's garments. "I'm going to order the most expensive tailor in the city to make some decent clothes for you. I want you to get used to the best. I want you to be comfortable and . . . Say," he asked, a little too casually, "have you got any family? Any relatives you'd like to see?"

"No."

"Any friends?"

"No."

"Have you got a sweetheart?"

"No."

"It's just that I wouldn't want you to get lonesome. We can let you have visitors, any visitor you name, if there's anyone you care for."

"There isn't"

Mr. Thompson paused at the door, turned to look at Galt for a moment and shook his head. "I can't figure you out," he said. "I just can't figure you out."

Galt smiled, shrugged and answered, "Who is John Galt?"

A whirling mesh of sleet hung over the entrance of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, and the armed guards looked oddly, desolately helpless in the circle of light: they stood hunched, heads down, hugging their guns for warmth—as if, were they to release all the spitting violence of their bullets at the storm, it would not bring comfort to their bodies.

From across the street, Chick Morrison, the Morale Conditioner—on his way to a conference on the fifty-ninth floor—noted that the rare, lethargic passers-by were not taking the trouble to glance at the guards, as they did not take the trouble to glance at the soggy headlines of a pile of unsold newspapers on the stand of a ragged, shivering vendor: "John Galt Promises Prosperity."

Chick Morrison shook his head uneasily: six days of front-page stories—about the united efforts of the country's leaders working with John Galt to shape new policies—had brought no results. People were moving, he observed, as if they did not care to see anything around them. No one took any notice of his existence, except a ragged old woman who stretched out her hand to him silently, as he approached the lights of the entrance; he hurried past, and only drops of sleet fell on the gnarled, naked palm.

It was his memory of the streets that gave a jagged sound to Chick Morrison's voice, when he spoke to a circle of faces in Mr. Thompson's room on the fifty-ninth floor. The look of the faces matched the sound of his voice.

"It doesn't seem to work," he said, pointing to a pile of reports from his public-pulse-takers. "All the press releases about our collaborating with John Galt don't seem to make any difference. People don't care. They don't believe a word of it. Some of them say that he'll never collaborate with us. Most of them don't even believe that we've got him. I don't know what's happened to people. They don't believe anything any more." He sighed. "Three factories went out of business in Cleveland, day before yesterday. Five factories closed in Chicago yesterday. In San Francisco—"

"I know, I know," snapped Mr. Thompson, tightening the muffler around his throat: the building's furnace had gone out of order.

"There's no choice about it: he's got to give in and take over. He's got to!"

Wesley Mouch glanced at the ceiling. "Don't ask me to talk to him again," he said, and shuddered. "I've tried. One can't talk to that man."

"I . . . I can't, Mr. Thompson!" cried Chick Morrison, in answer to the stop of Mr. Thompson's roving glance. "I'll resign, if you want me to! I can't talk to him again! Don't make me!"

"Nobody can talk to him," said Dr. Floyd Ferris. "It's a waste of time. He doesn't hear a word you say."

Fred Kinnan chuckled. "You mean, he hears too much, don't you?

And what's worse, he answers it."

"Well, why don't you try it again?" snapped Mouch. "You seem to have enjoyed it. Why don't you try to persuade him?"

"I know better," said Kinnan. "Don't fool yourself, brother. Nobody's going to persuade him. I won't try it twice. . . . Enjoyed it?" he added, with a look of astonishment. "Yeah . . . yeah, I guess I did."

"What's the matter with you? Are you falling for him? Are you letting him win you over?"

"Me?" Kinnan chuckled mirthlessly. "What use would he have for me? I'll be the first one to go down the drain when he wins. . . . It's only"—he glanced wistfully up at the ceiling—"it's only that he's a man who talks straight."

"He won't win!" snapped Mr. Thompson. "It's out of the question!"

There was a long pause.

"There are hunger riots in West Virginia," said Wesley Mouch. "And the farmers in Texas have—"

"Mr. Thompson!" said Chick Morrison desperately. "Maybe . . . maybe we could let the public see him . . . at a mass rally . . . or maybe on TV . . . just see him, just so they'd believe that we've really got him. . . . It would give people hope, for a while . . . it would give us a little time. . . ."

"Too dangerous," snapped Dr. Ferris. "Don't let him come anywhere near the public. There's no limit to what he'll permit himself to do."

"He's got to give in," said Mr. Thompson stubbornly. "He's got to join us. One of you must—"

"No!" screamed Eugene Lawson. "Not me! I don't want to see him at all! Not once! I don't want to have to believe it!"

"What?" asked James Taggart; his voice had a note of dangerously reckless mockery; Lawson did not answer. "What are you scared of?"

The contempt in Taggart's voice sounded abnormally stressed, as if the sight of someone's greater fear were tempting him to defy his own.

"What is it you're scared to believe, Gene?"

"I won't believe it! I won't!" Lawson's voice was half-snarl, half whimper. "You can't make me lose my faith in humanity! You shouldn't permit such a man to be possible! A ruthless egoist who—"

"You're a fine bunch of intellectuals, you are," said Mr. Thompson scornfully. "I thought you could talk to him in his own lingo—but he's scared the lot of you. Ideas? Where are your ideas now? Do something! Make him join us! Win him over!"

"Trouble is, he doesn't want anything," said Mouch. "What can we offer a man who doesn't want anything?"

"You mean," said Kinnan, "what can we offer a man who wants to live?"

"Shut up!" screamed James Taggart. "Why did you say that? What made you say it?"

"What made you scream?" asked Kinnan.

"Keep quiet, all of you!" ordered Mr. Thompson. "You're fine at fighting one another, but when it comes to fighting a real man—"

"So he's got you, too?" yelled Lawson.

"Aw, pipe down," said Mr. Thompson wearily. "He's the toughest bastard I've ever been up against. You wouldn't understand that. He's as hard as they come . . ." The faintest tinge of admiration crept into his voice. "As hard as they come . . ."

"There are ways to persuade tough bastards," drawled Dr. Ferris casually, "as I've explained to you."

"No!" cried Mr. Thompson. "No! Shut up! I won't listen to you!

I won't hear of it!" His hands moved frantically, as if struggling to dispel something he would not name. "I told him . . . that that's not true . . . that we're not . . . that I'm not a . . . " He shook his head violently, as if his own words were some unprecedented form of danger. "No, look, boys, what I mean is, we've got to be practical . . . and cautious. Damn cautious. We've got to handle it peacefully.

We can't afford to antagonize him or . . . or harm him. We don't dare take any chances on . . . anything happening to him. Because . . . because, if he goes, we go. He's our last hope. Make no mistake about it. If he goes, we perish. You all know it." His eyes swept over the faces around him: they knew it.

The sleet of the following morning fell down on front-page stories announcing that a constructive, harmonious conference between John Galt and the country's leaders, on the previous afternoon, had produced "The John Galt Plan," soon to be announced. The snowflakes of the evening fell down upon the furniture of an apartment house whose front wall had collapsed—and upon a crowd of men waiting silently at the closed cashier's window of a plant whose owner had vanished.

"The farmers of South Dakota," Wesley Mouch reported to Mr.

Thompson, next morning, "are marching on the state capital, burning every government building on their way, and every home worth more than ten thousand dollars."

"California's blown to pieces," he reported in the evening. "There's a civil war going on there—if that's what it is, which nobody seems to be sure of. They've declared that they're seceding from the Union, but nobody knows who's now in power. There's armed fighting all over the state, between a 'People's Party,' led by Ma Chalmers and her soybean cult of Orient-admirers—and something called 'Back to God,' led by some former oil-field owners."

"Miss Taggart!" moaned Mr. Thompson, when she entered his hotel room next morning, in answer to his summons. "What are we going to do?"

He wondered why he had once felt that she possessed some reassuring kind of energy. He was looking at a blank face that seemed composed, but the composure became disquieting when one noticed that it lasted for minute after minute, with no change of expression, no sign of feeling. Her face had the same look as all the others, he thought, except for something in the set of the mouth that suggested endurance.

"I trust you, Miss Taggart. You've got more brains than all my boys," he pleaded. "You've done more for the country than any of them—it's you who found him for us. What are we to do? With everything falling to pieces, he's the only one who can lead us out of this mess—but he won't. He refuses. He simply refuses to lead. I've never seen anything like it: a man who has no desire to command. We beg him to give orders—and he answers that he wants to obey them! It's preposterous!"

"It is."

"What do you make of it? Can you figure him out?”

"He's an arrogant egoist," she said. "He's an ambitious adventurer.

He's a man of unlimited audacity who's playing for the biggest stakes in the world."

It was easy, she thought. It would have been difficult in that distant time when she had regarded language as a tool of honor, always to be used as if one were under oath—an oath of allegiance to reality and to respect for human beings. Now it was only a matter of making sounds, inarticulate sounds addressed to inanimate objects unrelated to such concepts as reality, human or honor.

It had been easy, that first morning, to report to Mr. Thompson how she had traced John Galt to his home. It had been easy to watch Mr.

Thompson's gulping smiles and his repeated cries of "That's my girl!" uttered with glances of triumph at his assistants, the triumph of a man whose judgment in trusting her had been vindicated. It had been easy to express an angry hatred for Galt—"I used to agree with his ideas, but I won't let him destroy my railroad!"—and to hear Mr.

Thompson say, "Don't you worry, Miss Taggart! We'll protect you from him!"

It had been easy to assume a look of cold shrewdness and to remind Mr. Thompson of the five-hundred-thousand-dollar reward, her voice clear and cutting, like the sound of an adding machine punching out the sum of a bill. She had seen an instant's pause in Mr. Thompson's facial muscles, then a brighter, broader smile—like a silent speech declaring that he had not expected it, but was delighted to know what made her tick and that it was the kind of ticking he understood.

"Of course, Miss Taggart! Certainly! That reward is yours—all yours!

The check will be sent to you, in full!"

It had been easy, because she had felt as if she were in some dreary non-world, where her words and actions were not facts any longer—not reflections of reality, but only distorted postures in one of those side-show mirrors that project deformity for the perception of beings whose consciousness is not to be treated as consciousness. Thin, single and hot, like the burning pressure of a wire within her, like a needle selecting her course, was her only concern: the thought of his safety. The rest was a blur of shapeless dissolution, half-acid, half fog.

But this—she thought with a shudder—was the state in which they lived, all those people whom she had never understood, this was the state they desired, this rubber reality, this task of pretending, distorting, deceiving, with the credulous stare of some Mr. Thompson's panic-bleary eyes as one's only purpose and reward. Those who desired this state—she wondered—did they want to live?

"The biggest stakes in the world, Miss Taggart?" Mr. Thompson was asking her anxiously. "What is it? What does he want?"

"Reality. This earth."

"I don't know quite what you mean, but . . . Look, Miss Taggart, if you think you can understand him, would you . . . would you try to speak to him once more?"

She felt as if she heard her own voice, many light-years away, crying that she would give her life to see him—but in this room, she heard the voice of a meaningless stranger saying coldly, "No, Mr.

Thompson, I wouldn't. I hope I'll never have to see him again."

"I know that you can't stand him, and I can't say I blame you, but couldn't you just try to—"

"I tried to reason with him, the night I found him. I heard nothing but insults in return. I think he resents me more than he'd resent anyone else. He won't forgive me the fact that it was I who trapped him.

I'd be the last person to whom he would surrender."

"Yeah . . . yeah, that's true. . . . Do you think he will ever surrender?"

The needle within her wavered for a moment, burning its oscillating way between two courses: should she say that he would not, and see them kill him?—should she say that he would, and see them hold onto their power till they destroyed the world?

"He will," she said firmly. "He'll give in, if you treat him right.

He's too ambitious to refuse power. Don't let him escape, but don't threaten him—or harm him. Fear won't work. He's impervious to fear."

"But what if . . . I mean, with the way things are collapsing . . . what if he holds out too long?"

"He won't. He's too practical for that. By the way, are you letting him hear any news about the state of the country?"

"Why . . . no."

"I would suggest that you let him have copies of your confidential reports. He'll see that it won't be long now."

"That's a good idea! A very good idea! . . . You know, Miss Taggart," he said suddenly, with the sound of some desperate clinging hi his voice, "I feel better whenever I talk to you. It's because I trust you. I don't trust anybody around me. But you—you're different.

You're solid."

She was looking unflinchingly straight at him. "Thank you, Mr.

Thompson," she said.

It had been easy, she thought—until she walked out into the street and noticed that under her coat, her blouse was sticking damply to her shoulder blades.

Were she able to feel—she thought as she walked through the concourse of the Terminal—she would know that the heavy indifference she now felt for her railroad was hatred. She could not get rid of the feeling that she was running nothing but freight trains: the passengers, to her, were not living or human. It seemed senseless to waste such enormous effort on preventing catastrophes, on protecting the mi safety of trains carrying nothing but inanimate objects. She looked at the faces in the Terminal: if he were to die, she thought, to be murdered by the rulers of their system, that these might continue to eat, sleep and travel—would she work to provide them with trains? If she were to scream for their help, would one of them rise to his defense?

Did they want him to live, they who had heard him?

The check for five hundred thousand dollars was delivered to her office, that afternoon; it was delivered with a bouquet of flowers from Mr. Thompson. She looked at the check and let it flutter down to her desk: it meant nothing and made her feel nothing, not even a suggestion of guilt. It was a scrap of paper, of no greater significance than the ones in the office wastebasket. Whether it could buy a diamond necklace or the city dump or the last of her food, made no difference. It would never be spent. It was not a token of value and nothing it purchased could be a value. But this—she thought—this inanimate indifference was the permanent state of the people around her, of men who had no purpose and no passion. This was the state of a non-valuing soul; those who chose it—she wondered—did they want to live?

The lights were out of order in the hall of the apartment house, when she came home that evening, numb with exhaustion—and she did not notice the envelope at her feet until she switched on the light in her foyer. It was a blank, sealed envelope that had been slipped under her door. She picked it up—and then, within a moment, she was laughing soundlessly, half-kneeling, half-sitting on the floor, not to move off that spot, not to do anything but stare at the note written by a hand she knew, the hand that had written its last message on the calendar above the city. The note said: Dagny: Sit tight. Watch them. When he'll need our help, call me at OR 6-5693.

F.

The newspapers of the following morning admonished the public not to believe the rumors that there was any trouble in the Southern states. The confidential reports, sent to Mr. Thompson, stated that armed fighting had broken out between Georgia and Alabama, for the possession of a factory manufacturing electrical equipment—a factory cut off by the fighting and by blasted railroad tracks from any source of raw materials.

"Have you read the confidential reports I sent you?" moaned Mr.

Thompson, that evening, facing Galt once more. He was accompanied by James Taggart, who had volunteered to meet the prisoner for the first time.

Galt sat on a straight-backed chair, his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. He seemed erect and relaxed, together. They could not decipher the expression on his face, except that it showed no sign of apprehension.

"I have," he answered.

"There's not much time left," said Mr. Thompson.

"There isn't."

"Are you going to let such things go on?"

"Are you?"

"How can you be so sure you're right?" cried James Taggart; his voice was not loud, but it had the intensity of a cry. "How can you take it upon yourself, at a terrible time like this, to stick to your own ideas at the risk of destroying the whole world?"

"Whose ideas should I consider safer to follow?"

"How can you be sure you're right? How can you know? Nobody can be sure of his knowledge! Nobody! You're no better than anyone else!"

"Then why do you want me?"

"How can you gamble with other people's lives? How can you permit yourself such a selfish luxury as to hold out, when people need you?"

"You mean: when they need my ideas?"

"Nobody is fully right or wrong! There isn't any black or white!

You don't have a monopoly on truth!"

There was something wrong in Taggart's manner—thought Mr.

Thompson, frowning—some odd, too personal resentment, as if it were not a political issue that he had come here to solve.

"If you had any sense of responsibility," Taggart was saying, "you wouldn't dare take such a chance on nothing but your own judgment!

You would join us and consider some ideas other than your own and admit that we might be right, too! You would help us with our plans!

You would—"

Taggart went on speaking with feverish insistence, but Mr. Thompson could not tell whether Galt was listening: Galt had risen and was pacing the room, not in a manner of restlessness, but in the casual manner of a man enjoying the motion of his own body. Mr. Thompson noted the lightness of the steps, the straight spine, the flat stomach, the relaxed shoulders. Galt walked as if he were both unconscious of his body and tremendously conscious of his pride in it. Mr. Thompson glanced at James Taggart, at the sloppy posture of a tall figure slumped in ungainly self-distortion, and caught him watching Galt's movements with such hatred that Mr. Thompson sat up, fearing it would become audible in the room. But Galt was not looking at Taggart.

". . . your conscience!" Taggart was saying. "I came here to appeal to your conscience! How can you value your mind above thousands of human lives? People are perishing and—Oh, for Christ's sake," he snapped, "stop pacing!"

Galt stopped. "Is this an order?"

"No, no!" said Mr. Thompson hastily. "It's not an order. We don't want to give you orders. . . . Take it easy, Jim."

Galt resumed his pacing. "The world is collapsing," said Taggart, his eyes following Galt irresistibly. "People are perishing—and it's you who could save them! Does it matter who's right or wrong? You should join us, even if you think we're wrong, you should sacrifice your mind to save them!"

"By what means will I then save them?”

"Who do you think you are?" cried Taggart.

Galt stopped. "You know it."

"You're an egoist!"

"I am."

"Do you realize what sort of egoist you are?"

"Do you?" asked Galt, looking straight at him.

It was the slow withdrawal of Taggart's body into the depth of his armchair, while his eyes were holding Galt's, that made Mr. Thompson unaccountably afraid of the next moment.

"Say," Mr. Thompson interrupted in a brightly casual voice, "what sort of cigarette are you smoking?"

Galt turned to him and smiled. "I don't know."

"Where did you get it?"

"One of your guards brought me a package of them. He said some man asked him to give it to me as a present. . . . Don't worry," he added, "your boys have put it through every kind of test. There were no hidden messages. It was just a present from an anonymous admirer."

The cigarette between Galt's fingers bore the sign of the dollar.

James Taggart was no good at the job of persuasion, Mr. Thompson concluded. But Chick Morrison, whom he brought the next day, did no better.

"I . . . I'll just throw myself on your mercy, Mr. Galt," said Chick Morrison with a frantic smile. "You're right. I'll concede that you're right—and all I can appeal to is your pity. Deep down in my heart, I can't believe that you're a total egoist who feels no pity for the people." He pointed to a pile of papers he had spread on a table.

"Here's a plea signed by ten thousand schoolchildren, begging you to join us and save them. Here's a plea from a home for the crippled.

Here's a petition sent by the ministers of two hundred different faiths-Here's an appeal from the mothers of the country. Read them."

"Is this an order?"

"No!" cried Mr. Thompson. "It's not an order!"

Galt remained motionless, not extending his hand for the papers.

"These are just plain, ordinary people, Mr. Galt," said Chick Morrison in a tone intended to project their abject humility. "They can't tell you what to do. They wouldn't know. They're merely begging you. They may be weak, helpless, blind, ignorant. But you, who are so intelligent and strong, can't you take pity on them? Can't you help them?"

"By dropping my intelligence and following their blindness?"

"They may be wrong, but they don't know any better!"

"But I, who do, should obey them?"

"I can't argue, Mr. Galt. I'm just begging for your pity. They're suffering. I'm begging you to pity those who suffer. I'm . . . Mr.

Galt," he asked, noticing that Galt was looking off at the distance beyond the window and that his eyes were suddenly implacable, "what's the matter? What are you thinking of?"

"Hank Rearden."

"Uh . . . why?"

"Did they feel any pity for Hank Rearden?"

"Oh, but that's different! He—"

"Shut up," said Galt evenly.

"I only—"

"Shut up!" snapped Mr. Thompson. "Don't mind him, Mr. Galt.

He hasn't slept for two nights. He's scared out of his wits."

Dr. Floyd Ferris, next day, did not seem to be scared—but it was worse, thought Mr. Thompson. He observed that Galt remained silent and would not answer Ferris at all.

"It's the question of moral responsibility that you might not have studied sufficiently, Mr. Galt," Dr. Ferris was drawling in too airy, too forced a tone of casual informality. "You seem to have talked on the radio about nothing but sins of commission. But there are also the sins of omission to consider. To fail to save a Me is as immoral as to murder. The consequences are the same—and since we must judge actions by their consequences, the moral responsibility is the same.

. . . For instance, in view of the desperate shortage of food, it has been suggested that it might become necessary to issue a directive ordering that every third one of all children under the age of ten and of all adults over the age of sixty be put to death, to secure the survival of the rest. You wouldn't want this to happen, would you?

You can prevent it. One word from you would prevent it. If you refuse and all those people are executed—it will be your fault and your moral responsibility!"

"You're crazy!" screamed Mr. Thompson, recovering from shock and leaping to his feet. "Nobody's ever suggested any such thing! Nobody's ever considered it! Please, Mr. Galt! Don't believe him! He doesn't mean it!"

"Oh yes, he does," said Galt. "Tell the bastard to look at me, then look in the mirror, then ask himself whether I would ever think that my moral stature is at the mercy of his actions."

"Get out of here!" cried Mr. Thompson, yanking Ferris to his feet.

"Get out! Don't let me hear another squeak out of you!" He flung the door open and pushed Ferris at the startled face of a guard outside.

Turning to Galt, he spread his arms and let them drop with a gesture of drained helplessness. Galt's face was expressionless.

"Look," said- Mr. Thompson pleadingly, "isn't there anybody who can talk to you?"

"There's nothing to talk about."

"We've got to. We've got to convince you. Is there anyone you'd want to talk to?"

"No."

"I thought maybe . . . it's because she talks—used to talk—like you, at times . . . maybe if I sent Miss Dagny Taggart to tell you—"

"That one? Sure, she used to talk like me. She's my only failure. I thought she was the kind who belonged on my side. But she double crossed me, to keep her railroad. She'd sell her soul for her railroad.

Send her in, if you want me to slap her face."

"No, no, no! You don't have to see her, if that's how you feel. I don't want to waste more time on people who rub you the wrong way. . . .

Only . . . only if it's not Miss Taggart, I don't know whom to pick.

. . . If . . . if I could find somebody you'd be willing to consider or . . ."

"I've changed my mind," said Galt. "There is somebody I'd like to speak to."

"Who?" cried Mr. Thompson eagerly.

"Dr. Robert Stadler."

Mr. Thompson emitted a long whistle and shook his head apprehensively. "That one is no friend of yours," he said in a tone of honest warning.

"He's the one I want to see."

"Okay, if you wish. If you say so. Anything you wish. I'll have him here tomorrow morning."

That evening, dining with Wesley Mouch in his own suite, Mr. Thompson glared angrily at a glass of tomato juice placed before him. "What?

No grapefruit juice?" he snapped; his doctor had prescribed grapefruit juice as protection against an epidemic of colds.

"No grapefruit juice," said the waiter, with an odd kind of emphasis.

"Fact is," said Mouch bleakly, "that a gang of raiders attacked a train at the Taggart Bridge on the Mississippi. They blew up the track and damaged the bridge. Nothing serious. It's being repaired—but all traffic is held up and the trains from Arizona can't get through."

"That's ridiculous! Aren't there any other—?" Mr. Thompson stopped; he knew that there were no other railroad bridges across the Mississippi.

After a moment, he spoke up in a staccato voice. "Order army detachments to guard the bridge. Day and night. Tell them to pick their best men for it. If anything happened to that bridge—"

He did not finish; he sat hunched, staring down at the costly china plates and the delicate hors d'oeuvres before him. The absence of so prosaic a commodity as grapefruit juice had suddenly made real to him, for the first time, what it was that would happen to the city of New York if anything happened to the Taggart Bridge.

"Dagny," said Eddie Willers, that evening, "the bridge is not the only problem." He snapped on her desk lamp which, in forced concentration on her work, she had neglected to turn on at the approach of dusk.

"No transcontinental trains can leave San Francisco. One of the fighting factions out there—I don't know which one—has seized our terminal and imposed a 'departure tax' on trains. Meaning that they're holding trains for ransom. Our terminal manager has quit. Nobody knows what to do there now."

"I can't leave New York," she answered stonily.

"I know," he said softly. "That's why it's 7 who'll go there to straighten things out. At least, to find a man to put in charge.”

"No! I don't want you to. It's too dangerous. And what for? It doesn't matter now. There's nothing to save."

"It's still Taggart Transcontinental. I'll stand by it, Dagny, wherever you go, you'll always be able to build a railroad. I couldn't. I don't even want to make a new start. Not any more. Not after what I've seen. You should. I can't. Let me do what I can."

"Eddie! Don't you want—" She stopped, knowing that it was useless.

"All right, Eddie. If you wish."

"I'm flying to California tonight. I've arranged for space on an army plane. . . . I know that you will quit as soon as . . . as soon as you can leave New York. You might be gone by the time I return. When you're ready, just go. Don't worry about me. Don't wait to tell me. Go as fast as you can. I . . . I'll say good-bye to you, now."

She rose to her feet. They stood facing each other; in the dim half light of the office, the picture of Nathaniel Taggart hung on the wall between them. They were both seeing the years since- that distant day when they had first learned to walk down the track of a railroad. He inclined his head and held it lowered for a long moment.

She extended her hand. "Good-bye, Eddie."

He clasped her hand firmly, not looking down at his fingers; he was looking at her face.

He started to go, but stopped, turned to her and asked, his voice low, but steady, neither as plea nor as despair, but as a last gesture of conscientious clarity to close a long ledger, "Dagny . . . did you know . . . how I felt about you?"

"Yes," she said softly, realizing in this moment that she had known it wordlessly for years, "I knew it."

"Good-bye, Dagny."

The faint rumble of an underground train went through the walls of the building and swallowed the sound of the door closing after him.

It was snowing, next morning, and melting drops were like an icy, cutting touch on the temples of Dr. Robert Stadler, as he walked down the long corridor of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, toward the door of the royal suite. Two husky men walked by his sides; they were from the department of Morale Conditioning, but did not trouble to hide what method of conditioning they would welcome a chance to employ, "Just remember Mr. Thompson's orders," one of them told him contemptuously. "One wrong squawk out of you—and you'll regret it, brother."

It was not the snow on his temples—thought Dr. Stadler—it was a burning pressure, it had been there since that scene, last night, when he had screamed to Mr. Thompson that he could not see John Galt. He had screamed in blind terror, begging a circle of impassive faces not to make him do it, sobbing that he would do anything but that. The faces had not condescended to argue or even to threaten him; they had merely given him orders. He had spent a sleepless night, telling himself that he would not obey; but he was walking toward that door. The burning pressure on his temples and the faint, dizzying nausea of unreality came from the fact that he could not recapture the sense of being Dr. Robert Stadler.

He noticed the metallic gleam of the bayonets held by the guards at the door, and the sound of a key being turned in a lock. He found himself walking forward and heard the door being locked behind him.

Across the long room, he saw John Galt sitting on the window sill, a tall, slender figure in slacks and shirt, one leg slanting down to the floor, the other bent, his hands clasping his knee, his head of sun-streaked hair raised against a spread of gray sky—and suddenly Dr. Stadler saw the figure of a young boy sitting on the porch-railing of his home, near the campus of the Patrick Henry University, with the sun on the chestnut hair of a head lifted against a spread of summer blue, and he heard the passionate intensity of his own voice saying twenty-two years ago: "The only sacred value in the world, John, is the human mind, the inviolate human mind . . ." —and he cried to that boy's figure, across the room and across the years: "I couldn't help it, John! I couldn't help it!"

He gripped the edge of a table between them, for support and as a protective barrier, even though the figure on the window sill had not moved.

"I didn't bring you to this!" he cried. "I didn't mean to! I couldn't help it! It's not what I intended! . . . John! I'm not to blame for it!

I'm not! I never had a chance against them! They own the world! They left me no place in it! . . . What's reason to them? What's science?

You don't know how deadly they are! You don't understand them! They don't think! They're mindless animals moved by irrational feelings—by their greedy, grasping, blind, unaccountable feelings! They seize whatever they want, that's all they know: that they want it, regardless of cause, effect or logic—they want it, the bloody, grubbing pigs! . . . The mind? Don't you know how futile it is, the mind, against those mindless hordes? Our weapons are so helplessly, laughably childish: truth, knowledge, reason, values, rights! Force is all they know, force, fraud and plunder! . , , John! Don't look at me like that! What could I do against their fists? I had to live, didn't I? It wasn't for myself—it was for the future of science! I had to be left alone, I had to be protected, I had to make terms with them—there's no way to live except on their terms—there isn't!—do you hear me?—there isn't! . . . What did you want me to do? Spend my life begging for jobs? Begging my inferiors for funds and endowments? Did you want my work to depend on the mercy of the ruffians who have a knack for making money? I had no time to compete with them for money or markets or any of their miserable material pursuit! Was that your idea of justice—that they should spend their money on liquor, yachts and women, while the priceless hours of my life were wasted for lack of scientific equipment? Persuasion? How could I persuade them? What language could I speak to men who don't think? . . . You don't know how lonely I was, how starved for some spark of intelligence! How lonely and tired and helpless! Why should a mind like mine have to bargain with ignorant fools?

They'd never contribute a penny to science! Why shouldn't they be forced? It wasn't you that I wanted to force! That gun was not aimed at the intellect! It wasn't aimed at men like you and me, only at mindless materialists! . . . Why do you look at me that way? I had no choice!

There isn't any choice except to beat them at their own game! Oh yes, it is their game, they set the rules! What do we count, the few who can think? We can only hope to get by, unnoticed—and to trick them into serving our aims! . . . Don't you know how noble a purpose it was—my vision of the future of science? Human knowledge set free of material bonds! An unlimited end unrestricted by means! I am not a traitor, John! I'm not! I was serving the cause of the mind! What I saw ahead, what I wanted, what I felt, was not to be measured in their miserable dollars! I wanted a laboratory! I needed it! What do I care where it came from or how? I could do so much! I could reach such heights!

Don't you have any pity? I wanted it! . . . What if they had to be forced? Who are they to think, anyway? Why did you teach them to rebel? It would have worked, if you hadn't withdrawn them! It would have worked, I tell you! It wouldn't be—like this! . . . Don't accuse me! We can't be guilty . . . all of us . . . for centuries. . . . We can't be so totally wrong! . . . We're not to be damned! We had no choice! There is no other way to live on earth! . . . Why don't you answer me? What are you seeing? Are you thinking of that speech you made? I don't want to think of it! It was only logic! One can't live by logic! Do you hear me? . . . Don't look at me! You're asking the impossible! Men can't exist your way! You permit no moments of weakness, you don't allow for human frailties or human feelings! What do you want of us? Rationality twenty-four hours a day, with no loophole, no rest, no escape? . . . Don't look at me, God damn you! I'm not afraid of you any longer! Do you hear me? I am not afraid! Who are you to blame me, you miserable failure? Here's where your road has brought you! Here you are, caught, helpless, under guard, to be killed by those brutes at any moment—and you dare to accuse me of being impractical! Oh yes, you're going to be killed! You won't win! You can't be allowed to win! You are the man who has to be destroyed!"

Dr, Stadler's gasp was a muffled scream, as if the immobility of the figure on the window sill had served as a silent reflector and had suddenly made him see the full meaning of his own words.

"No!" moaned Dr. Stadler, moving his head from side to side, to escape the unmoving green eyes. "No! . . . No! . . . No!"

Galt's voice had the same unbending austerity as his eyes: "You have said everything I wanted to say to you."

Dr. Stadler banged his fists against the door; when it was opened, he ran out of the room.

For three days, no one entered Galt's suite except the guards who brought his meals. Early on the evening of the fourth day, the door opened to admit Chick Morrison with two companions. Chick Morrison was dressed in dinner clothes, and his smile was nervous, but a shade more confident than usual. One of his companions was a valet. The other was a muscular man whose face seemed to clash with his tuxedo: it was a stony face with sleepy eyelids, pale, darting eyes and a prizefighter's broken nose; his skull was shaved except for a patch of faded blond curls on top; he kept his right hand in the pocket of his trousers.

"You will please dress, Mr. Galt," said Chick Morrison persuasively, pointing to the door of the bedroom, where a closet had been filled with expensive garments which Galt had not chosen to wear. "You will please put on your dinner clothes." He added, "This is an order, Mr.

Galt."

Galt walked silently into the bedroom. The three men followed. Chick Morrison sat on the edge of a chair, starting and discarding one cigarette after another. The valet went through too many too courteous motions, helping Galt to dress, handing him his shirt studs, holding his coat. The muscular man stood in a corner, his hand in his pocket. No one said a word.

"You will please co-operate, Mr. Galt," said Chick Morrison, when Galt was ready, and indicated the door with a courtly gesture of invitation to proceed.

So swiftly that no one could catch the motion of his hand, the muscular man was holding Galt's arm and pressing an invisible gun against his ribs. "Don't make any false moves," he said in an expressionless voice.

"I never do," said Galt.

Chick Morrison opened the door. The valet stayed behind. The three figures in dinner clothes walked silently down the hall to the elevator.

They remained silent in the elevator, the clicks of the flashing numbers above the door marking their downward progress.

The elevator stopped on the mezzanine floor. Two armed soldiers preceded them and two others followed, as they walked through the long, dim corridors. The corridors were deserted except for armed sentinels posted at the turns. The muscular man's right arm was linked to Galt's left; the gun remained invisible to any possible observer. Galt felt the small pressure of the muzzle against his side; the pressure was expertly maintained: not to be felt as an impediment and not to be forgotten for a moment.

The corridor led to a wide, closed doorway. The soldiers seemed to melt away into the shadows, when Chick Morrison's hand touched the doorknob. It was his hand that opened the door, but the sudden contrast of light and sound made it seem as if the door were flung open by an explosion: the light came from three hundred bulbs in the blazing chandeliers of the grand ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel; the sound was the applause of five hundred people.

Chick Morrison led the way to the speakers' table raised on a platform above the tables filling the room. The people seemed to know, without announcement, that of the two figures following him, it was the tall, slender man with the gold-copper hair that they were applauding. His face had the same quality as the voice they had heard on the radio : calm, confident—and out of reach.

The seat reserved for Galt was the place of honor in the center of the long table, with Mr. Thompson waiting for him at his right and the muscular man slipping skillfully into the seat at his left, not relinquishing his arm or the pressure of the muzzle. The jewels on the naked shoulders of women carried the glitter of the chandeliers to the shadows of the tables crowded against the distant walls; the severe black-and white of the men's figures rescued the room's style of solemnly regal luxury from the discordant slashes made by news cameras, microphones and a dormant array of television equipment. The crowd was on its feet, applauding. Mr. Thompson was smiling and watching Galt's face, with the eager, anxious look of an adult waiting for a child's reaction to a spectacularly generous gift. Galt sat facing the ovation, neither ignoring it nor responding.

"The applause you are hearing," a radio announcer was yelling into a microphone in a corner of the room, "is in greeting to John Galt, who has just taken his place at the speakers' table! Yes, my friends, John Galt in person—as those of you who can find a television set will have a chance to see for yourself in a short while!"

I must remember where I am—thought Dagny, clenching her fists under the tablecloth, in the obscurity of a side table. It was hard to maintain a sense of double reality in the presence of Galt, thirty feet away from her. She felt that no danger or pain could exist in the world so long as she could see his face—and, simultaneously, an icy terror, when she looked at those who held him in their power, when she remembered the blind irrationality of the event they were staging. She fought to keep her facial muscles rigid, not to betray herself by a smile of happiness or by a scream of panic.

She wondered how his eyes had been able to find her in that crowd.

She had seen the brief pause of his glance, which no one else could notice; the glance had been more than a kiss, it had been a handshake of approval and support.

He did not glance again in her direction. She could not force herself to look away. It was startling to see him in evening clothes and more startling still that he wore them so naturally; he made them look like a work uniform of honor; his figure suggested the kind of banquet, in the days of a distant past, where he would have been receiving an industrial award. Celebrations—she remembered her own words, with a stab of longing—should be only for those who have something to celebrate.

She turned away. She struggled not to look at him too often, not to attract the attention of her companions. She had been placed at a table prominent enough to display her to the assembly, but obscure enough to keep her out of the line of Galt's sight, along with those who had incurred Galt's disfavor: with Dr. Ferris and Eugene Lawson.

Her brother Jim, she noted, had been placed closer to the platform; she could see his sullen face among the nervous figures of Tinky Holloway, Fred Kinnan, Dr. Simon Pritchett. The tortured faces strung out above the speakers' table were not succeeding in their efforts to hide that they looked like men enduring an ordeal; the calm of Galt's face seemed radiant among them; she wondered who was prisoner here and who was master. Her glance moved slowly down the line-up of his table: Mr. Thompson, Wesley Mouch, Chick Morrison, some generals, some members of the Legislature and, preposterously, Mr. Mowen chosen as a bribe to Galt, as a symbol of big business. She glanced about the room, looking for the face of Dr. Stadler; he was not present.

The voices filling the room were like a fever chart, she thought; they kept darting too high and collapsing into patches of silence; the occasional spurts of someone's laughter broke off, incompleted, and attracted the shuddering turn of the heads at the neighboring tables. The faces were drawn and twisted by the most obvious and least dignified form of tension: by forced smiles. These people—she thought—knew, not by means of their reason, but by means of their panic, that this banquet was the ultimate climax and the naked essence of their world. They knew that neither their God nor their guns could make this celebration mean what they were struggling to pretend it meant.

She could not swallow the food that was placed before her; her throat seemed closed by a rigid convulsion. She noticed that the others at her table were also merely pretending to eat. Dr. Ferris was the only one whose appetite seemed unaffected.

When she saw a slush of ice cream in a crystal bowl before her, she noticed the sudden silence of the room and heard the screeching of the television machinery being dragged forward for action. Now—she thought, with a sinking sense of expectation, and knew that the same question mark was on every mind in the room. They were all staring at Galt. His face did not move or change.

No one had to call for silence, when Mr. Thompson waved to an announcer: the room did not seem to breathe.

"Fellow citizens," the announcer cried into a microphone, "of this country and of any other that's able to listen—from the grand ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel in New York City, we are bringing you the inauguration of the John Galt Plan!"

A rectangle of tensely bluish light appeared on the wall behind the speakers' table—a television screen to project for the guests the images which the country was now to see.

"The John Galt Plan for Peace, Prosperity and Profit!" cried the announcer, while a shivering picture of the ballroom sprang into view on the screen. "The dawn of a new age! The product of a harmonious collaboration between the humanitarian spirit of our leaders and the scientific genius of John Galt! If your faith in the future has been undermined by vicious rumors, you may now see for yourself our happily united family of leadership! . . . Ladies and gentlemen"—as the television camera swooped down to the speakers' table, and the stupefied face of Mr. Mowen filled the screen—"Mr. Horace Bussby Mowen, the American Industrialist!" The camera moved to an aged collection of facial muscles shaped in imitation of a smile. "General of the Array Whittington S. Thorpe!" The camera, like an eye at a police line-up, moved from face to scarred face—scarred by the ravages of fear, of evasion, of despair, of uncertainty, of self-loathing, of guilt. "Majority Leader of the National Legislature, Mr. Lucian Phelps! . . . Mr.

Wesley Mouch! . . . Mr. Thompson!" The camera paused on Mr.

Thompson; he gave a big grin to the nation, then turned and looked off screen, to his left, with an air of triumphant expectancy. "Ladies and gentlemen," the announcer said solemnly, "John Galt!"

Good God!—thought Dagny—what are they doing? From the screen, the face of John Galt was looking at the nation, the face without pain or fear or guilt, implacable by virtue of serenity, invulnerable by virtue of self-esteem. This face—she thought—among those others?

Whatever it is that they're planning, she thought, it's undone—nothing more can or has to be said—there's the product of one code and of the other, there's the choice, and whoever is human will know it.

"Mr. Galt's personal secretary," said the announcer, while the camera blurred hastily past the next face and went on. "Mr. Clarence 'Chick' Morrison . . . Admiral Homer Dawley . . . Mr.—"

She looked at the faces around her, wondering: Did they see the contrast? Did they know it? Did they see him? Did they want him to be real?

"This banquet," said Chick Morrison, who had taken over as master of ceremonies, "is in honor of the greatest figure of our time, the ablest producer, the man of the 'know-how,' the new leader of our economy—John Galt! If you have heard his extraordinary radio speech, you can "have no doubt that he can make things work. Now he is here to tell you that he will make them work for you. If you have been misled by those old-fashioned extremists who claimed that he would never join us, that no merger is possible between his way of life and ours, that it's either one or the other—tonight's event will prove to you that anything can be reconciled and united!"

Once they have seen him—thought Dagny—can they wish to look at anybody else? Once they know that he is possible, that this is what man can be, what else can they want to seek? Can they now feel any desire except to achieve in their souls what he has achieved in his? Or are they going to be stopped by the fact that the Mouches, the Morrisons, the Thompsons of the world had not chosen to achieve it? Are they going to regard the Mouches as the human and him as the impossible?

The camera was roving over the ballroom, flashing to the screen and to the country the faces of the prominent guests, the faces of the tensely watchful leaders and—once in a while—the face of John Galt. He looked as if his perceptive eyes were studying the men outside this room, the men who were seeing him across the country; one could not tell whether he was listening: no reaction altered the composure of his face.

"I am proud to pay tribute tonight," said the leader of the Legislature, the next speaker, "to the greatest economic organizer the world has ever discovered, the most gifted administrator, the most brilliant planner—John Galt, the man who will save us! I am here to thank him in the name of the people!"

This—thought Dagny, with a sickened amusement—was the spectacle of the sincerity of the dishonest. The most fraudulent part of the fraud was that they meant it. They were offering Galt the best that their view of existence could offer, they were trying to tempt him with that which was their dream of life's highest fulfillment: this spread of mindless adulation, the unreality of this enormous pretense—approval without standards, tribute without content, honor without causes, admiration without reasons, love without a code of values.

"We have discarded all our petty differences," Wesley Mouch was now saying into the microphone, "all partisan opinions, all personal interests and selfish views—in order to serve under the selfless leadership of John Galt!"

Why are they listening?—thought Dagny. Don't they see the hallmark of death in those faces, and the hallmark of life in his?

Which state do they wish to choose? Which state do they seek for mankind? . . . She looked at the faces in the ballroom. They were nervously blank; they showed nothing but the sagging weight of lethargy and the staleness of a chronic fear. They were looking at Galt and at Mouch, as if unable to perceive any difference between them or to feel concern if a difference existed, their empty, uncritical, unvaluing stare declaring: "Who am I to know?" She shuddered, remembering his sentence: "The man who declares, (Who am I to know?' is declaring, 'Who am I to live?' " Did they care to live?—she thought. They did not seem to care even for the effort of raising that question. . . . She saw a few faces who seemed to care. They were looking at Galt with a desperate plea, with a wistfully tragic admiration—and with hands lying limply on the tables before them.

These were the men who saw what he was, who lived in frustrated longing for his world—but tomorrow, if they saw him being murdered before them, their hands would hang as limply and their eyes would look away, saying, "Who am I to act?"

"Unity of action and purpose," said Mouch, "will bring us to a happier world. . . ."

Mr. Thompson leaned toward Galt and whispered with an amiable smile, "You'll have to say a few words to the country, later on, after me. No, no, not a long speech, just a sentence or two, no more.

Just 'hello, folks' or something like that, so they'll recognize your voice." The faintly stressed pressure of the "secretary's" muzzle against Galt's side added a silent paragraph. Galt did not answer.

"The John Galt Plan," Wesley Mouch was saying, "will reconcile all conflicts. It will protect the property of the rich and give a greater share to the poor. It will cut down the burden of your taxes and provide you with more government benefits. It will lower prices and raise wages. It will give more freedom to the individual and strengthen the bonds of collective obligations. It will combine the efficiency of free enterprise with the generosity of a planned economy,"

Dagny observed some faces—it took her an effort fully to believe it—who were looking at Galt with hatred. Jim was one of them, she noted. When the image of Mouch held the screen, these faces were relaxed in bored contentment, which was not pleasure, but the comfort of license, of knowing that nothing was demanded of them and nothing was firm or certain. When the camera flashed the image of Galt, their lips grew tight and their features were sharpened by a look of peculiar caution. She felt with sudden certainty that they feared the precision of his face, the unyielding clarity of his features, the look of being an entity, a look of asserting existence. They hate him for being himself—she thought, feeling a touch of cold horror, as the nature of their souls became real to her—they hate him for his capacity to live.

Do they want to live?—she thought in self-mockery. Through the stunned numbness of her mind, she remembered the sound of his sentence: "The desire not to be anything, is the desire not to be."

It was now Mr. Thompson who was yelling into the microphone in his briskest and folksiest manner: "And I say to you: kick them in the teeth, all those doubters who're spreading disunity and fear! They told you that John Galt would never join us, didn't they? Well, here he is, in person, of his own free choice, at this table and at the head of our State! Ready, willing and able to serve the people's cause!

Don't you ever again, any of you, start doubting or running or giving up! Tomorrow is here today—and what a tomorrow! With three meals a day for everyone on earth, with a car in every garage, and with electric power given free, produced by some sort of a motor the like of which we've never seen! And all you have to do is just be patient a little while longer! Patience, faith and unity—that's the recipe, for progress! We must stand united among ourselves and united with the rest of the world, as a great big happy family, all working for the good of all! We have found a leader who will beat the record of our richest and busiest past! It's his love for mankind that has made him come here—to serve you, protect you and take care of you! He has heard your pleas and has answered the call of our common human duty! Every man is his brother's keeper! No man is an island unto himself! And now you will hear his voice—now you will hear his own message! . . . 'Ladies and gentlemen," he said solemnly, "John Galt—to the collective family of mankind!"

The camera moved to Galt. He remained still for a moment. Then, with so swift and expert a movement that his secretary's hand was unable to match it, he rose to his feet, leaning sidewise, leaving the pointed gun momentarily exposed to the sight of the world—then, standing straight, facing the cameras, looking at all his invisible viewers, he said: "Get the hell out of my way!"

CHAPTER IX
THE GENERATOR

"Get the hell out of my way!"

Dr. Robert Stadler heard it on the radio in his car. He did not know whether the next sound, part-gasp, part-scream, part-laughter, started rising from him or from the radio—but he heard the click that cut them both off. The radio went dead. No further sounds came from the Wayne-Falkland Hotel.

He jerked his hand from knob to knob under the lighted dial. Nothing came through, no explanations, no pleas of technical trouble, no silence-hiding music. All stations were off the air.

He shuddered, he gripped the wheel, leaning forward across it, like a jockey at the close of a race, and his foot pressed down on the accelerator. The small stretch of highway before him bounced with the leaping of his headlights. There was nothing beyond the lighted strip but the emptiness of the prairies of Iowa.

He did not know why he had been listening to the broadcast; he did not know what made him tremble now. He chuckled abruptly—it sounded like a malevolent growl—either at the radio, or at those in the city, or at the sky.

He was watching the rare posts of highway numbers. He did not need to consult a map: for four days, that map had been printed on his brain, like a net of lines traced in acid. They could not take it away from him, he thought; they could not stop him. He felt as if he were being pursued; but there was nothing for miles behind him, except the two red lights on the rear of his car—like two small signals of danger, fleeing through the darkness of the Iowa plains.

The motive directing his hands and feet was four days behind him. It was the face of the man on the window sill, and the faces he had confronted when he had escaped from that room. He had cried to them that he could not deal with Galt and neither could they, that Galt would destroy them all, unless they destroyed him first. "Don't get smart, Professor," Mr. Thompson had answered coldly. "You've done an awful lot of yelling about hating his guts, but when it comes to action, you haven't helped us at all. I don't know which side you're on. If he doesn't give in to us peaceably, we might have to resort to pressure—such as hostages whom he wouldn't want to see hurt—and you're first on the list, Professor." "I?" he had screamed, shaking with terror and with bitterly desperate laughter. "I? But he damns me more than anyone on earth!" "How do I know?" Mr. Thompson had answered. "I hear that you used to be his teacher. Arid, don't forget, you're the only one he asked for."

His mind liquid with terror, he had felt as if he were about to be crushed between two walls advancing upon him: he had no chance, if Galt refused to surrender—and less chance, if Galt joined these men.

It was then that a distant shape had come swimming forward in his mind: the image of a mushroom-domed structure in the middle of an Iowa plain.

All images had begun to fuse in his mind thereafter. Project X—he had thought, not knowing whether it was the vision of that structure or of a feudal castle commanding the countryside, that gave him the sense of an age and a world to which he belonged. . . . I'm Robert Stadler —he had thought—it's my property, it came from my discoveries, they said it was I who invented it. . . . I'll show them!—he had thought, not knowing whether he meant the man on the window sill or the others or the whole of mankind. . . . His thoughts had become like chips floating in a liquid, without connections: To seize control . . .

I'll show them! . . . To seize control, to rule . . . There is no other way to live on earth. . . .

These had been the only words that named the plan in his mind. He had felt that the rest was clear to him—clear in the form of a savage emotion crying defiantly that he did not have to make it clear. He would seize control of Project X and he would rule a part of the country as his private feudal domain. The means? His emotion had answered: Somehow. The motive? His mind had repeated insistently that his motive was terror of Mr. Thompson's gang, that he was not safe among them any longer, that his plan was a practical necessity. In the depth of his liquid brain, his emotion had held another kind of terror, drowned along with the connections between his broken chips of words.

These chips had been the only compass directing his course through four days and nights—while he drove down deserted highways, across a country collapsing into chaos, while he developed a monomaniac's cunning for obtaining illegal purchases of gas, while he snatched random hours of restless sleep, in obscure motels, under assumed names. . . .

I'm Robert Stadler—he had thought, his mind repeating it as a formula of omnipotence. . . . To seize control—he had thought, speeding against the futile traffic lights of half-abandoned towns—speeding on the vibrating steel of the Taggart Bridge across the Mississippi—speeding past the occasional ruins of farms in the empty stretches of Iowa. . . . I'll show them—he had thought—let them pursue, they won't stop me this time. . . . He had thought it, even though no one had pursued him—as no one was pursuing him now, but the taillights of his own car and the motive drowned in his mind.

He looked at his silent radio and chuckled; the chuckle had the emotional quality of a fist being shaken at space. It's I who am practical—he thought—I have no choice . . . I have no other way . . . I'll show all those insolent gangsters, who forget that I am Robert Stadler . . . They will all collapse, but I won't! . . . I'll survive! . . . I'll win! . . . I'll show them!

The words were like chunks of solid ground in his mind, in the midst of a fiercely silent swamp; the connections lay submerged at the bottom.

If connected, his words would have formed the sentence: I'll show him that there is no other way to live on earth! . . .

The scattered lights in the distance ahead were the barracks erected on the site of Project X, now known as Harmony City. He observed, as he came closer, that something out of the ordinary was going on at Project X, The barbed-wire fence was broken, and no sentinels met him at the gate. But some sort of abnormal activity was churning in the patches of darkness and in the glare of some wavering spotlights: there were armored trucks and running figures and shouted orders and the gleam of bayonets. No one stopped his car. At the corner of a shanty, he saw the motionless body of a soldier sprawled on the ground.

Drunk—he thought, preferring to think it, wondering why he felt unsure of it.

The mushroom structure crouched on a knoll before him; there were lights in the narrow slits of its windows—and the shapeless funnels protruded from under its dome, aimed at the darkness of the country. A soldier barred his way, when he alighted from his car at the entrance.

The soldier was properly armed, but hatless, and his uniform seemed too sloppy. "Where are you going, bud?" he asked.

"Let me in!" Dr. Stadler ordered contemptuously.

"What's your business here?"

"I'm Dr. Robert Stadler."

"I'm Joe Blow. I said, What's your business? Are you one of the new or one of the old?"

"Let me in, you idiot! I'm Dr. Robert Stadler!"

It was not the name, but the tone of voice and the form of address that seemed to convince the soldier. "One of the new," he said and, opening the door, shouted to somebody inside, "Hey, Mac, take care of Grandpaw here, see what he wants!"

In the bare, dim hall of reinforced concrete, he was met by a man who might have been an officer, except that his tunic was open at the throat and a cigarette hung insolently in the corner of his mouth.

"Who are you?" he snapped, his hand jerking too swiftly to the holster on his hip.

"I'm Dr. Robert Stadler."

The name had no effect. "Who gave you permission to come here?"

"I need no permission."

This seemed to have an effect; the man removed the cigarette from his mouth. "Who sent for you?" he asked, a shade uncertainly.

"Will you please let me speak to the commandant?" Dr. Stadler demanded impatiently.

"The commandant? You're too late, brother."

"The chief engineer, then!"

"The chief-who? Oh, Willie? Willie's okay, he's one of us, but he's out on an errand just now."

There were other figures in the hall, listening with an apprehensive curiosity. The officer's hand summoned one of them to approach—an unshaved civilian with a shabby overcoat thrown over his shoulders.

"What do you want?" he snapped at Stadler, "Would someone please tell me where are the gentlemen of the scientific staff?" Dr. Stadler asked in the courteously peremptory tone of an order.

The two men glanced at each other, as if such a question were irrelevant in this place. "Do you come from Washington?" the civilian asked suspiciously.

"I do not. I will have you understand that I'm through with that Washington gang."

"Oh?" The man seemed pleased. "Are you a Friend of the People, then?"

"I would say that I'm the best friend the people ever had. I'm the man who gave them all this." He pointed around him.

"You did?" said the man, impressed. "Are you one of those who made a deal with the Boss?"

"I'm the boss here, from now on,"

The men looked at each other, retreating a few steps. The officer asked, "Did you say the name was Stadler?"

"Robert Stadler, And if you don't know what that means, you'll find out!"

"Will you please follow me, sir?" said the officer, with shaky politeness.

What happened next was not clear to Dr. Stadler, because his mind refused to admit the reality of the things he was seeing. There were shifting figures in half-lighted, disordered offices, there were too many firearms on everybody's hips, there were senseless questions asked of him by jerky voices that alternated between impertinence and fear.

He did not know whether any of them tried to give him an explanation; he would not listen; he could not permit this to be true. He kept stating in the tone of a feudal sovereign, "I'm the boss here, from now on . . . I give the orders . . . I came to take over . . . I own this place.

. . . I am Dr. Robert Stadler—and if you don't know that name in this place, you have no business being here, you infernal idiots! You'll blow yourselves to pieces, if that's the' state of your knowledge! Have you had a high-school course in physics? You don't look to me as if you've ever been allowed inside a high school, any of you! What are you doing here? Who are you?"

It took him a long time to grasp—when his mind could not block it any longer—that somebody had beaten him to his plan: somebody had held the same view of existence as his own and had set out to achieve the same future. He grasped that these men, who called themselves the Friends of the People, had seized possession of Project X, tonight, a few hours ago, intending to establish a reign of their own. He laughed in their faces, with bitterly incredulous contempt, "You don't know what you're doing, you miserable juvenile delinquents! Do you think that you—you!—can handle a high-precision instrument of science? Who is your leader? I demand to see your leader!"

It was his tone of overbearing authority, his contempt and their own panic—the blind panic of men of unbridled violence, who have no standards of safety or danger—that made them waver and wonder whether he was, perhaps, some secret top-level member of their leadership; they were equally ready to defy or to obey any authority. After being shunted from one jittery commander to another, he found himself at last being led down iron stairways and down long, echoing, underground corridors of reinforced concrete to an audience with "The Boss" in person, The Boss had taken refuge in the underground control room.

Among the complex spirals of the delicate scientific machinery that produced the sound ray, against the wall panel of glittering levers, dials and gauges, known as the Xylophone, Robert Stadler faced the new ruler of Project X. It was Cuffy Meigs.

He wore a tight, semi-military tunic and leather leggings; the flesh of his neck bulged over the edge of his collar; his black curls were matted with sweat. He was pacing restlessly, unsteadily in front of the Xylophone, shouting orders to men who kept rushing in and out of the room: "Send couriers to every county seat within our reach! Tell 'em that the Friends of the People have won! Tell 'em they're not to take orders from Washington any longer! The new capital of the People's Commonwealth is Harmony City, henceforth to be known as Meigsville! Tell 'em that I'll expect five hundred thousand dollars per every five thousand heads of population, by tomorrow morning—or else!"

It took some time before Cuffy Meigs' attention and bleary brown eyes could be drawn to focus on the person of Dr. Stadler. "Well, what is it? What is it?" he snapped.

"I am Dr. Robert Stadler."

"Huh?— Oh, yeah! Yeah! You're the big guy from outer spaces, aren't you? You're the fellow who catches atoms or something. Well, what on earth are you doing here?"

"It is I who should ask you that question."

"Huh? Look, Professor, I'm in no mood for jokes."

"I have come here to take control."

"Control? Of what?"

"Of this equipment. Of this place. Of the countryside within its radius of operation."

Meigs stared at him blankly for a moment, then asked softly, "How did you get here?"

"By car."

"I mean, whom did you bring with you?"

"Nobody."

"What weapons did you bring?"

"None. My name is sufficient."

"You came here alone, with your name and your car?"

"I did."

Cuffy Meigs burst out laughing in his face.

"Do you think," asked Dr. Stadler, "that you can operate an installation of this kind?"

"Run along, Professor, run along! Beat it, before I have you shot!

We've got no use for intellectuals around here!"

"How much do you know about this?" Dr. Stadler pointed at the Xylophone.

"Who cares? Technicians are a dime a dozen these days! Beat it!

This ain't Washington! I'm through with those impractical dreamers in Washington! They won't get anywhere, bargaining with that radio ghost and making speeches! Action—that's what's needed! Direct action!

Beat it, Doc! Your day is over!" He was weaving unsteadily back and forth, catching at a lever of the Xylophone once in a while. Dr. Stadler realized that Meigs was drunk.

"Don't touch those levers, you fool!"

Meigs jerked his hand back involuntarily, then waved it defiantly at the panel. "I'll touch anything I please! Don't you tell-me what to do!"

"Get away from that panel! Get out of here! This is mine! Do you understand? It's my property!"

"Property? Huh!" Meigs gave a brief bark that was a chuckle.

"I invented it! I created it! I made it possible!"

"You did? Well, many thanks, Doc. Many thanks, but we don't need you any longer. We've got our own mechanics."

_ "Have you any idea what I had to know in order to make it possible?

You couldn't think of a single tube of it! Not a single bolt!"

Meigs shrugged. "Maybe not."

"Then how dare you think that you can own it? How dare you come here? What claim do you have to it?"

Meigs patted his holster. "This."

"Listen, you drunken lout!" cried Dr. Stadler. "Do you know what you're playing with?"

"Don't you talk to me like that, you old fool! Who are you to talk to me like that? I can break your neck with my bare hands! Don't you know who I am?"

"You're a scared thug way out of his depth!"

"Oh, I am, am I? I'm the Boss! I'm the Boss and I'm not going to be stopped by an old scarecrow like you! Get out of here!"

They stood staring at each other for a moment, by the panel of the Xylophone, both cornered by terror. The unadmitted root of Dr. Stadler's terror was his frantic struggle not to acknowledge that he was looking at his final product, that this was his spiritual son. Cuffy Meigs' terror had wider roots, it embraced all of existence; he had lived in chronic terror all his life, but now he was struggling not to acknowledge what it was that he had dreaded: in the moment of his triumph, when he expected to be safe, that mysterious, occult breed—the intellectual —was refusing to fear him and defying his power.

"Get out of here!" snarled Cuffy Meigs. "I'll call my men! I'll have you shot!"

"Get out of here, you lousy, brainless, swaggering moron!" snarled Dr. Stadler. "Do you think I'll let you cash in on my life? Do you think it's for you that I . . . that I sold—" He did not finish. "Stop touching those levers, God damn you!"

"Don't you give me orders! I don't need you to tell me what to do!

You're not going to scare me with your classy mumbo-jumbo! I'll do as I please! What did I fight for, if I can't do as I please?" He chuckled and reached for a lever.

"Hey, Cuffy, take it easy!" yelled some figure in the back of the room, darting forward.

"Stand back!" roared Cuffy Meigs. "Stand back, all of you! Scared, am I? I'll show you who's boss!"

Dr. Stadler leaped to stop him—but Meigs shoved him aside with one arm, gave a gulp of laughter at the sight of Stadler falling to the floor, and, with the other arm, yanked a lever of the Xylophone.

The crash of sound—the screeching crash of ripped metal and of pressures colliding on conflicting circuits, the sound of a monster turn' ing upon itself—was heard only inside the structure. No sound was heard outside. Outside, the structure merely rose into the air, suddenly and silently, cracked open into a 'few large pieces, shot some hissing streaks of blue light to the sky and came down as a pile of rubble. Within the circle of a radius of a hundred miles, enclosing parts of four states, telegraph poles fell like matchsticks, farmhouses collapsed into chips, city buildings went down as if slashed and minced by a single second's blow, with no time for a sound to be heard by the twisted bodies of the victims—and, on the circle's periphery, halfway across the Mississippi, the engine and the first six cars of a passenger train flew as a shower of metal into the water of the river, along with the western spans of the Taggart Bridge, cut in half.

On the site of what had once been Project X, nothing remained alive among the ruins—except, for some endless minutes longer, a huddle of torn flesh and screaming pain that had once been a great mind.

There was a sense of weightless freedom—thought Dagny—in the feeling that a telephone booth was her only immediate, absolute goal, with no concern for any of the goals of the passers-by in the streets around her. It did not make her feel estranged from the city: it made her feel, for the first time, that she owned the city and that she loved it, that she had never loved it before as she did in this moment, with so personal, solemn and confident a sense of possession. The night was still and clear; she looked at the sky; as her feeling was more solemn than joyous, but held the sense of a future joy—so the air was more windless than warm, but held the hint of a distant spring.

Get the hell out of my way—she thought, not with resentment, but almost with amusement, with a sense of detachment and deliverance, addressing it to the passers-by, to the traffic when it impeded her hurried progress, and to any fear she had known in the past. It was less than an hour ago that she had heard him utter that sentence, and his voice still seemed to ring in the air of the streets, merging into a distant hint of laughter.

She had laughed exultantly, in the ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland, when she had heard him say it; she had laughed, her hand pressed to her mouth, so that the laughter was only in her eyes—and in his, when he had looked straight at her and she had known that he heard it. They had looked at each other for the span of a second, above the heads of the gasping, screaming crowd—above the crash of the microphones being shattered, though all stations had been instantly cut off—above the bursts of breaking glass on falling tables, as some people went stampeding to the doors.

Then she had heard Mr. Thompson cry, waving his arm at Galt, "Take him back to his room, but guard him with your lives!"—and the crowd had parted as three men led him out. Mr. Thompson seemed to collapse for a moment, dropping his forehead on his arm, but he rallied, jumped to his feet, waved vaguely at his henchmen to follow and rushed out, through a private side exit. No one addressed or instructed the guests: some were running blindly to escape, others sat still, not daring to move. The ballroom was like a ship without captain. She cut through the crowd and followed the clique. No one tried to stop her.

She found them huddled in a small, private study: Mr. Thompson was slumped in an armchair, clutching his head with both hands, Wesley Mouch was moaning, Eugene Lawson was sobbing with the sound of a nasty child's rage, Jim was watching the others with an oddly expectant intensity. "I told you so!" Dr. Ferris was shouting. "I told you so, didn't I? That's where you get with your 'peaceful persuasion'!"

She remained standing by the door. They seemed to notice her presence, but they did not seem to care.

"I resign!" yelled Chick Morrison. "I resign! I'm through! I don't know what to say to the country! I can't think! I won't try! It's no use!

I couldn't help it! You're not going to blame me! I've resigned!" He waved his arms in some shapeless gesture of futility or farewell, and ran out of the room, "He has a hide-out all stocked for himself in Tennessee," said Tinky Holloway reflectively, as if he, too, had taken a similar precaution and were now wondering whether the time had come.

"He won't keep it for long, if he gets there at all," said Mouch. "With the gangs of raiders and the state of transportation—" He spread his hands and did not finish.

She knew what thoughts were filling the pause; she knew that no matter what private escapes these men had once provided for themselves, they were now grasping the fact that all of them were trapped.

She observed that there was no terror in their faces; she saw hints of it, but it looked like a perfunctory terror. Their expressions ranged from blank apathy to the relieved look of cheats who had believed that the game could end no other way and were making no effort to contest it or regret it—to the petulant blindness of Lawson, who refused to be conscious of anything—to the peculiar intensity of Jim, whose face suggested a secret smile.

"Well? Well?" Dr. Ferris was asking impatiently, with the crackling energy of a man who feels at home in a world of hysteria. "What are you now going to do with him? Argue? Debate? Make speeches?"

No one answered.

"He . . . has . . . to . . . save . . . us," said Mouch slowly, as if straining the last of his mind into blankness and delivering an ultimatum to reality. "He has to . . . take over . . . and save the system."

"Why don't you write him a love letter about it?" said Ferris.

"We've got to . . . make him . . . take over . . . We've got to force him to rule," said Mouch in the tone of a sleepwalker.

"Now," said Ferris, suddenly dropping his voice, "do you see what a valuable establishment the State Science Institute really is?"

Mouch did not answer him, but she observed that they all seemed to know what he meant.

"You objected to that private research project of mine as 'impractical,' " said Ferris softly. "But what did I tell you?"

Mouch did not answer; he was cracking his knuckles.

"This is no time for squeamishness," James Taggart spoke up with unexpected vigor, but his voice, too, was oddly low. "We don't have to be sissies about it."

"It seems to me . . ." said Mouch dully, "that . . . that the end justifies the means . . ."

"It's too late for any scruples or any principles," said Ferris. "Only direct action can work now."

No one answered; they were acting as if they wished that their pauses, not their words, would state what they were discussing.

"It won't work," said Tinky Holloway, "He won't give in."

"That's what you think!" said Ferris, and chuckled, "You haven't seen our experimental model in action. Last month, we got three confessions in three unsolved murder cases."

"If . . ." started Mr. Thompson, and his voice cracked suddenly into a moan, "if he dies, we all perish!"

"Don't worry," said Ferris. "He won't. The Ferris Persuader is safely calculated against that possibility."

Mr. Thompson did not answer.

"It seems to me . . . that we have no other choice . . ." said Mouch; it was almost a whisper.

They remained silent; Mr. Thompson was struggling not to see that they were all looking at him. Then he cried suddenly, "Oh, do anything you want! I couldn't help it! Do anything you want!"

Dr. Ferris turned to Lawson. "Gene," he said tensely, still whispering, "run to the radio-control office. Order all stations to stand by. Tell them that I'll have Mr. Galt on the air within three hours."

Lawson leaped to his feet, with a sudden, mirthful grin, and ran out of the room.

She knew. She knew what they intended doing and what it was within them that made it possible. They did not think that this would succeed. They did not think that Galt would give in; they did not want him to give in. They did not think that anything could save them now; they did not want to be saved. Moved by the panic of their nameless emotions, they had fought against reality all their lives—and now they had reached a moment when at last they felt at home. They did not have to know why they felt it, they who had chosen never to know what they felt—they merely experienced a sense of recognition, since this was what they had been seeking, this was die kind of reality that had been implied in all of their feelings, their actions, their d3sires, their choices, their dreams. This was the nature and the method of the rebellion against existence and of the undefined quest for an unnamed Nirvana. They did not want to live; they wanted him to die.

The horror she felt was only a brief stab, like the wrench of a switching perspective: she grasped that the objects she had thought to be human were not. She was left with a sense of clarity, of a final answer and of the need to act. He was in danger; there was no time and no room in her consciousness to waste emotion on the actions of the subhuman.

"We must make sure," Wesley Mouch was whispering, "that nobody -ever learns about it . . ."

"Nobody will," said Ferris; their voices had the cautious drone of conspirators. "It's a secret, separate unit on the Institute grounds . . .

Sound-proofed and safely distant from the rest . . . Only a very few of our staff have ever entered it. . . ."

"If we were to fly—" said Mouch, and stopped abruptly, as if he had caught some warning in Ferris' face.

She saw Ferris' eyes move to her, as if he had suddenly remembered her presence. She held his glance, letting him see the untroubled indifference of hers, as if she had neither cared nor understood. Then, as if merely grasping the signal of a private discussion, she turned slowly, with the suggestion of a shrug, and left the room. She knew that they were now past the stage of worrying about her.

She walked with the same unhurried indifference through the halls and through the exit of the hotel. But a block away, when she had turned a corner, her head flew up and the folds of her evening gown slammed like a sail against her legs with the sudden violence of the speed of her steps.

And now, as she rushed through the darkness, thinking only of finding a telephone booth, she felt a new sensation rising irresistibly within her, past the immediate tension of danger and concern: it was the sense of freedom of a world that had never had to be obstructed.

She saw the wedge of light on the sidewalk, that came from the window of a bar. No one gave her a second glance, as she crossed the half deserted room: the few customers were still waiting and whispering tensely in front of the crackling blue void of an empty television screen.

Standing in the tight space of the telephone booth, as in the cabin of a ship about to take off for a different planet, she dialed the number OR 6-5693.

The voice that answered at once was Francisco's. "Hello?"

"Francisco?"

"Hello, Dagny. I was expecting you to call."

"Did you hear the broadcast?"

"I did."

"They are now planning to force him to give in." She kept her voice to the tone of a factual report. "They intend to torture him. They have some machine called the Ferris Persuader, in an isolated unit on the grounds of the State Science Institute. It's in New Hampshire. They mentioned flying. They mentioned that they would have him on the radio within three hours."

"I see. Are you calling from a public phone booth?"

"Yes."

"You're still in evening clothes, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"Now listen carefully. Go home, change your clothes, pack a few things you'll need, take your jewelry and any valuables that you can carry, take some warm clothing. We won't have time to do it later.

Meet me in forty minutes, on the northwest corner, two blocks east of the main entrance of the Taggart Terminal,"

"Right."

"So long, Slug."

“So long, Frisco."

She was in the bedroom of her apartment, in less than five minutes, tearing off her evening gown. She left it lying in the middle of the floor, like the discarded uniform of an army she was not serving any longer. She put on a dark blue suit and—remembering Galt's words—a white, high-collared sweater. She packed a suitcase and a bag with a strap that she could carry swung over her shoulder. She put her jewelry in a corner of the bag, including the bracelet of Rearden Metal she had earned in the outside world, and the five-dollar gold piece she had earned in the valley.

It was easy to leave the apartment and to lock the door, even though she knew she would probably never open it again. It seemed harder, for a moment, when she came to her office. No one had seen her come in; the anteroom of her office was empty; the great Taggart Building seemed unusually quiet. She stood looking for a moment at this room and at all the years it had contained. Then she smiled—no, it was not too hard, she thought; she opened her safe and took the documents she had come here to get. There was nothing else that she wanted to take from her office—except the picture of Nathaniel Taggart and the map of Taggart Transcontinental. She broke the two frames, folded the picture and the map, and slipped them into her suitcase.

She was locking the suitcase, when she heard the sound of hurrying steps. The door flew open and the chief engineer rushed in; he was shaking; his face was distorted.

"Miss Taggart!" he cried. "Oh, thank God, Miss Taggart, you're here! We've been calling for you all over!"

She did not answer; she looked at him inquiringly.

"Miss Taggart, have you heard?"

"What?"

"Then you haven't! Oh God, Miss Taggart, it's . . . I can't believe it, I still can't believe it, but . . . Oh God, what are we going to do?

The . . . the Taggart Bridge is gone!"

She stared at him, unable to move.

"It's gone! Blown up! Blown up, apparently, in one second! Nobody -knows for certain what happened—but it looks like . . . they think that something went wrong at Project X and . . . it looks like those sound rays, Miss Taggart! We can't get through to any point within a radius of a hundred miles! It's not possible, it can't be possible, but it looks as if everything in that circle has been wiped out! . . . We can't get any answers! Nobody can get an answer—the newspapers, the radio stations, the police! We're still checking, but the stories that are coming from the rim of that circle are—" He shuddered. "Only one thing is certain: the bridge is gone! Miss Taggart! We don't know what to do!"

She leaped to her desk and seized the telephone receiver. Her hand stopped in mid-air. Then, slowly, twistedly, with the greatest effort ever demanded of her, she began to move her arm down to place the receiver back. It seemed to her that it took a long time, as if her arm had to move against some atmospheric pressure that no human body could combat—and in the span of these few brief moments, in the stillness of a blinding pain, she knew what Francisco had felt, that night, twelve years ago—and what a boy of twenty-six had felt when he had looked at his motor for the last time.

"Miss Taggart!" cried the chief engineer. "We don't know what to do!"

The receiver clicked softly back into its cradle. "I don't, either," she answered.

In a moment, she knew it was over. She heard her voice telling the man to check further and report to her later—and she waited for the sound of his steps to vanish in the echoing silence of the hall.

Crossing the concourse of the Terminal for the last time, she glanced at the statue of Nathaniel Taggart—and remembered a promise she had made. It would be only a symbol now, she thought, but it would be the kind of farewell that Nathaniel Taggart deserved. She had no other writing instrument, so she took the lipstick from her bag and, smiling up at the marble face of the man who would have understood, she drew a large sign of the dollar on the pedestal under his feet.

She was first to reach the corner, two blocks east of the Terminal entrance. As she waited, she observed the first trickles of the panic that was soon to engulf the city: there were automobiles driving too fast, some of them loaded with household effects, there were too many police cars speeding by, and too many sirens bursting in the distance.

The news of the destruction of the Bridge was apparently spreading through the city; they would know that the city was doomed and they would start a stampede to escape—but they had no place to go, and it was not her concern any longer.

She saw Francisco's figure approaching from some distance away; she recognized the swiftness of his walk, before she could distinguish the face under the cap pulled low over his eyes. She caught the moment when he saw her, as he came closer. He waved his arm, with a smile of greeting. Some conscious stress in the sweep of his arm made it the gesture of a d'Anconia, welcoming the arrival of a long-awaited traveler at the gates of his own domain.

When he approached, she stood solemnly straight and, looking at his face and at the buildings of the greatest city in the world, as at the kind of witnesses she wanted, she said slowly, her voice confident and steady: "I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

He inclined his head, as if in sign of admittance. His smile was now a salute.

Then he took her suitcase with one hand, her arm with the other, and said, "Come on."

The unit known as "Project F"—in honor of its originator, Dr. Ferns—was a small structure of reinforced concrete, low on the slope of the hill that supported the State Science Institute on a higher, more public level. Only the small gray patch of the unit's roof could be seen from the Institute's windows, hidden in a jungle of ancient trees; it looked no bigger than the cover of a manhole.

The unit consisted of two stories in the shape of a small cube placed asymmetrically on top of a larger one. The first story had no windows, only a door studded with iron spikes; the second story had but one window, as if in reluctant concession to daylight, like a face with a single eye. The men on the staff of the Institute felt no curiosity about that structure and avoided the paths that led down to its door; nobody had ever suggested it, but they had the impression that the structure housed a project devoted to experiments with the germs of deadly diseases.

The two floors were occupied by laboratories that contained a great many cages with guinea pigs, dogs and rats. But the heart and meaning of the structure was a room in its cellar, deep under the ground; the room had been incompetently lined with the porous sheets of soundproofing material; the sheets had begun to crack and the naked rock of a cave showed through.

The unit was always protected by a squad of four special guards.

Tonight, the squad had been augmented to sixteen, summoned for emergency duty by a long-distance telephone call from New York. The guards, as well as all other employees of "Project F," had been carefully chosen on the basis of a single qualification: an unlimited capacity for obedience.

The sixteen were stationed for the night outside the structure and in the deserted laboratories above the ground, where they remained uncritically on duty, with no curiosity about anything that might be taking place below.

In the cellar room, under the ground, Dr. Ferris, Wesley Mouch and James Taggart sat in armchairs lined up against one wall. A machine that looked like a small cabinet of irregular shape stood in a corner across from them. Its face bore rows of glass dials, each dial marked by a segment of red, a square screen that looked like an amplifier, rows of numbers, rows of wooden knobs and plastic buttons, a single lever controlling a switch at one side and a single red glass button at the other. The face of the machine seemed to have more expression than the face of the mechanic in charge of it; he was a husky young man in a sweat-stained shirt with sleeves rolled above the elbows; his pale blue eyes were glazed by an enormously conscientious concentration on his task; he moved his lips once in a while, as if reciting a memorized lesson.

A short wire led from the machine to an electric storage battery behind it. Long coils of wire, like the twisted arms of an octopus, stretched forward across the stone floor, from the machine to a leather mattress spread under a cone of violent light. John Galt lay strapped to the mattress. He was naked; the small metal disks of electrodes at the ends of the wires were attached to his wrists, his shoulders, his hips and his ankles; a device resembling a stethoscope was attached to his chest and connected to the amplifier.

"Get this straight," said Dr. Ferris, addressing him for the first time.

"We want you to take full power over the economy of the country. We want you to become a dictator. We want you to rule. Understand?

We want you to give orders and to figure out the right orders to give.

What we want, we mean to get Speeches, logic, arguments or passive obedience won't save you now. We want ideas—or else. We won't let you out of here until you tell us the exact measures you'll take to save our system. Then we'll have you tell it to the country over the radio."

He raised his wrist, displaying a stop-watch. "I'll give you thirty seconds to decide whether you want to start talking right now. If not, then we'll start. Do you understand?"

Galt was looking straight at them, his face expressionless, as if he understood too much. He did not answer.

They heard the sound of the stop-watch in the silence, counting off the seconds, and the sound of Mouch's choked, irregular breathing as he gripped the arms of his chair.

Ferris waved a signal to the mechanic at the machine. The mechanic threw the switch; it lighted the red glass button and set off two sounds: one was the low, humming drone of an electric generator, the other was a peculiar beat, as regular as the ticking of a clock, but with an oddly muffled resonance. It took them a moment to realize that it came from the amplifier and that they were hearing the beat of Galt's heart.

"Number three," said Ferris, raising a finger in signal.

The mechanic pressed a button under one of the dials. A long shudder ran through Galt's body; his left arm shook in jerking spasms, convulsed by the electric current that circled between his wrist and shoulder. His head fell back, his eyes closed, his lips drawn tight. He made no sound.

When the mechanic lifted his finger off the button, Galt's arm stopped shaking. He did not move.

The three men glanced about them with an instant's look of groping.

Ferris' eyes were blank, Mouch's terrified, Taggart's disappointed. The sound of the thumping beat went on through the silence.

"Number two," said Ferris, It was Galt's right leg that twisted in convulsions, with the current now circling between his hip and ankle. His hands gripped the edges of the mattress. His head jerked once, from side to side, then lay still.

The beating of the heart grew faintly faster.

Mouch was drawing away, pressing against the back of his armchair.

Taggart was sitting on the edge of Ms, leaning forward.

"Number one, gradual," said Ferris.

Galt's torso jerked upward and fell back and twisted in long shudders, straining against his strapped wrists—as the current was now running from his one wrist to the other, across his lungs. The mechanic was slowly turning a knob, increasing the voltage of the current; the needle on the dial was moving toward the red segment that marked danger. Galt's breath was coming in broken, panting sounds out of convulsed lungs.

"Had enough?" snarled Ferris, when the current went off.

Galt did not answer. His lips moved faintly, opening for air. The beat from the stethoscope was racing. But his breath was falling to an even rhythm, by a controlled effort at relaxation.

"You're too easy on him!" yelled Taggart, staring at the naked body on the mattress.

Galt opened his eyes and glanced at them for a moment. They could tell nothing, except that his glance was steady and fully conscious. Then he dropped his head again and lay still, as if he had forgotten them.

His naked body looked strangely out of place in this cellar. They knew it, though none of them would identify that knowledge. The long lines of his body, running from his ankles to the flat hips, to the angle of the waist, to the straight shoulders, looked like a statue of ancient Greece, sharing that statue's meaning, but stylized to a longer, lighter, more active form and a gaunter strength, suggesting more restless an energy—the body, not of a chariot driver, but of a builder of airplanes. And as the meaning of a statue of ancient Greece—the statue of man as a god—clashed with the spirit of this century's halls, so his body clashed with a cellar devoted to prehistorical activities. The clash was the greater, because he seemed to belong with electric wires, with stainless steel, with precision instruments, with the levers of a control board. Perhaps—this was the thought most fiercely resisted and most deeply buried at the bottom of his watchers sensations, the thought they knew only as a diffused hatred and an unfocused terror—perhaps it was the absence of such statues from the modern world that had transformed a generator into an octopus and brought a body such as his into its tentacles.

"I understand you're some sort of electrical expert," said Ferris, and chuckled. "So are we—don't you think so?"

Two sounds answered him in the silence: the drone of the generator and the beating of Galt's heart.

"The mixed series!" ordered Ferris, waving one finger at the mechanic.

The shocks now came at irregular, unpredictable intervals, one after another or minutes apart. Only the shuddering convulsions of Galt's legs, arms, torso or entire body showed whether the current was racing between two particular electrodes or through all of them at once. The needles on the dials kept coming close to the red marks, then receding: the machine was calculated to inflict the maximum intensity of pain without damaging the body of the victim.

It was the watchers who found it unbearable to wait through the minutes of the pauses filled with the sound of the heartbeat: the heart was now racing in an irregular rhythm. The pauses were calculated to let that beat slow down, but allow no relief to the victim, who had to wait for a shock at any moment.

Galt lay relaxed, as if not attempting to fight the pain, but surrendering to it, not attempting to negate it, but to bear it. When his lips parted for breath and a sudden jolt slammed them tight again, he did not resist the shaking rigidity of his body, but he let it vanish the instant the current left him. Only the skin of his face was pulled tight, and the sealed line of his lips twisted sidewise once in a while. When a shock raced through his chest, the gold-copper strands of his hair flew with the jerking of his head, as if waving in a gust of wind, beating against his face, across his eyes. The watchers wondered why his hair seemed to be growing darker, until they realized that it was drenched in sweat.

The terror of hearing one's own heart struggling as if about to burst at any moment, had been intended to be felt by the victim. It was the torturers who were trembling with terror, as they listened to the jagged, broken rhythm and missed a breath with every missing beat. It sounded now as if the heart were leaping, beating frantically against its cage of ribs, in agony and in a desperate anger. The heart was protesting; the man would not. He lay still, his eyes closed, his hands relaxed, hearing his heart as it fought for his life.

Wesley Mouch was first to break. "Oh God, Floyd!" he screamed.

"Don't kill him! Don't dare kill him! If he dies, we die!"

"He won't," snarled Ferris. "He'll wish he did, but he won't! The machine won't let him! It's mathematically computed! It's safe!"

"Oh, isn't it enough? He'll obey us now! I'm sure he'll obey!"

"No! It's not enough! I don't want him to obey! I want him to believe! To accept! To want to accept! We've got to have him work for us voluntarily!"

"Go ahead!" cried Taggart. "What are you waiting for? Can't you make the current stronger? He hasn't even screamed yet!"

"What's the matter with you?" gasped Mouch, catching a glimpse of Taggart's face while a current was twisting Galt's body: Taggart was staring at it intently, yet his eyes seemed glazed and dead, but around that inanimate stare the muscles of his face were pulled into an obscene caricature of enjoyment.

"Had enough?" Ferris kept yelling to Galt. "Are you ready to want what we want?"

They heard no answer. Galt raised his head once in a while and looked at them. There were dark rings under his eyes, but the eyes were clear and conscious.

In mounting panic, the watchers lost their sense of context and language—and their three voices blended into a progression of indiscriminate shrieks: "We want you to take over! . . . We want you to rule!

. . . We order you to give orders! . . . We demand that you dictate!

. . . We order you to save us! . . . We order you to think! . . ."

They heard no answer but the beating of the heart on which their own lives depended.

The current was shooting through Galt's chest and the beating was coming in irregular spurts, as if it were racing and stumbling—when suddenly his body fell still, relaxing: the beating had stopped.

The silence was like a stunning blow, and before they had time to scream, their horror was topped by another: by the fact that Galt opened his eyes and raised his head.

Then they realized that the drone of the motor had ceased, too, and that the red light had gone out on the control panel: the current had stopped; the generator was dead.

The mechanic was jabbing his ringer at the button, to no avail. He yanked the lever of the switch again and again. He kicked the side of the machine. The red light would not go on; the sound did not return.

"Well?" snapped Ferris. "Well? What's the matter?"

"The generator's on the blink," said the mechanic helplessly.

"What's the matter with it?"

"I don't know."

"Well, find out and fix it!"

The man was not a trained electrician; he had been chosen, not for his knowledge, but for his uncritical capacity for pushing any buttons; the effort he needed to learn his task was such that his consciousness could be relied upon to have no room for anything else. He opened the rear panel of the machine and stared in bewilderment at the intricate coils: he could find nothing visibly out of order. He put on his rubber gloves, picked up a pair of pliers, tightened a few bolts at random, and scratched his head.

"I don't know," he said; his voice had a sound of helpless docility.

"Who am I to know?"

The three men were on their feet, crowding behind the machine to stare at its recalcitrant organs. They were acting merely by reflex: they knew that they did not know.

"But you've got to fix it!" yelled Ferris. "It's got to work! We've got to have electricity!"

"We must continue!" cried Taggart; he was shaking, "It's ridiculous!

I won't have it! I won't be interrupted! I won't let him off!" He pointed in the direction of the mattress.

"Do something!" Ferris was crying to the mechanic. "Don't just stand there! Do something! Fix it! I order you to fix it!"

"But I don't know what's wrong with it," said the man, blinking.

"Then find out!"

"How am I to find out?"

"I order you to fix it! Do you hear me? Make it work—or I'll fire you and throw you in jail!"

"But I don't know what's wrong with it." The man sighed, bewildered. "I don't know what to do."

"It's the vibrator that's out of order," said a voice behind them; they whirled around; Galt was struggling for breath, but he was speaking in the brusque, competent tone of an engineer. "Take it out and pry off the aluminum cover. You'll find a pair of contacts fused together. Force them apart, take a small file and clean up the pitted surfaces. Then replace the cover, plug it back into the machine—and your generator will work."

There was a long moment of total silence.

The mechanic was staring at Galt; he was holding Galt's glance—and even he was able to recognize the nature of the sparkle in the dark green eyes; it was a sparkle of contemptuous mockery.

He made a step back. In the incoherent dimness of his consciousness, in some wordless, shapeless, unintelligible manner, even he suddenly grasped the meaning of what was occurring in that cellar.

He looked at Galt—he looked at the three men—he looked at the machine. He shuddered, he dropped his pliers and ran out of the room.

Galt burst out laughing.

The three men were backing slowly away from the machine. They were struggling not to allow themselves to understand what the mechanic had understood.

"No!" cried Taggart suddenly, glancing at Galt and leaping forward, "No! I won't let him get away with it!" He fell down on his knees, groping frantically to find the aluminum cylinder of the vibrator.

"I'll fix it! I'll work it myself! We've got to go on! We've got to break him!"

"Take it easy, Jim," said Ferris uneasily, jerking him up to his feet.

"Hadn't we . . . hadn't we better lay off for the night?" said Mouch pleadingly; he was looking at the door through which the mechanic had escaped, his glance part-envy, part-terror.

"No!" cried Taggart, "Jim, hasn't he had enough? Don't forget, we have to be careful."

"No! He hasn't had enough! He hasn't even screamed yet!"

"Jim!" cried Mouch suddenly, terrified by something in Taggart's face. "We can't afford to kill him! You know it!"

"I don't care! I want to break him! I want to hear Mm scream! I want—"

And then it was Taggart who screamed. It was a long, sudden, piercing scream, as if at some sudden sight, though his eyes were staring at space and seemed blankly sightless. The sight he was confronting was within him. The protective walls of emotion, of evasion, of pretense, of semi-thinking and pseudo-words, built up by him through all of his years, had crashed in the span of one moment—the moment when he knew that he wanted Galt to die, knowing fully that his own death would follow.

He was suddenly seeing the motive that had directed all the actions of his life. It was not his incommunicable soul or his love for others or his social duty or any of the fraudulent sounds by which he had maintained his self-esteem: it was the lust to destroy whatever was living, for the sake of whatever was not. It was the urge to defy reality by the destruction of every living value, for the sake of proving to himself that he could exist in defiance of reality and would never have to be bound by any solid, immutable facts. A moment ago, he had been able to feel that he hated Galt above all men, that the hatred was {woof of Galt's evil, which he need define no further, that he wanted Galt to be destroyed for the sake of his own survival. Now he knew that he had wanted Galt's destruction at the price of his own destruction to follow, he knew that he had never wanted to survive, he knew that it was Galt's greatness he had wanted to torture and destroy—he was seeing, it as greatness by his own admission, greatness by the only standard that existed, whether anyone chose to admit it or not: the greatness of a- man who was master of reality in a manner no other had equaled. In the moment when he, lames Taggart, had found himself facing the ultimatum: to accept reality or die, it was death his emotions had chosen, death, rather than surrender to that realm of which Galt was so radiant a son. In the person of Galt—he knew—he had sought the destruction of all existence.

It was not by means of words that this knowledge confronted his consciousness: as all his knowledge had consisted of emotions, so now he was held by an emotion and a vision that he had no power to dispel. He was no longer able to summon the fog to conceal the sight of all those blind alleys he had struggled never to be forced to see: now, at the end of every alley, he was seeing his hatred of existence—he was seeing the face of Cherryl Taggart with her joyous eagerness to live and that it was this particular eagerness he had always wanted to defeat—he was seeing his face as the face of a killer whom all men should rightfully loathe, who destroyed values for being values, who killed in order not to discover his own irredeemable evil.

"No . . ." he moaned, staring at that vision, shaking his head to escape it. "No . . . No . . . "

"Yes," said Galt.

He saw Galt's eyes looking straight at his, as if Galt were seeing the things he was seeing.

"1 told you that on the radio, didn't I?" said Galt.

This was the stamp James Taggart had dreaded, from which there was no escape: the stamp and proof of objectivity. "No . . ." he said feebly once more, but it was no longer the voice of a living consciousness.

He stood for a moment, staring blindly at space, then his legs gave way, folding limply, and he sat on the floor, still staring, unaware of his action or surroundings.

"Jim . . . !" called Mouch. There was no answer.

Mouch and Ferris did not ask themselves or wonder what it was that had happened to Taggart: they knew that they must never attempt to discover it, under peril of sharing his fate. They knew who it was that had been broken tonight. They knew that this was the end of James Taggart, whether his physical body survived or not.

"Let's . . . let's get Jim out of here," said Ferris shakily. "Let's get him to a doctor . . . or somewhere . . ."

They pulled Taggart to his feet; he did not resist, he obeyed lethargically, and he moved his feet when pushed. It was he who had reached the state to which he had wanted Galt to be reduced. Holding his arms at both sides, his two friends led him out of the room.

He saved them from the necessity of admitting to themselves that they wanted to escape Galt's eyes. Galt was watching them; his glance was too austerely perceptive.

"We'll be back," snapped Ferris to the chief of the guards. "Stay here and don't let anyone in. Understand? No one."

They pushed Taggart into their car, parked by the trees at the entrance. "We'll be back." said Ferris to no one in particular, to the trees and the darkness of the sky.

For the moment, their only certainty was that they had to escape from that cellar—the cellar where the living generator was left tied by the side of the dead one.

CHAPTER X
IN THE NAME OF THE BEST AMONG US

Dagny walked straight toward the guard who stood at the door of "Project F". Her steps sounded pourposeful, even and open, rining in the silence of the path among the trees. She raised her head to a ra of moonlight, to let him recognize her face.

"Let me in," she said.

"No admittance," he answered in the voice of a robot. "By order or Dr. Ferris."

"I am here by order of Mr. Thompson."

"Huh? . . . I . . . I don't know anything about that."

"I do."

"I mean, Dr. Ferris hasn't told me . . . ma'am."

"I am telling you."

"But I'm not supposed to take any orders from anyone excepting Dr. Ferris."

"Do you wish to disobey Mr. Thompson?"

"Oh, no, ma'am! But . . . but if Dr. Ferris said to let nobody in, that means nobody-" He added uncertainly and pleadingly, "-doesn't it?"

"Do you know that my name is Dagny Taggart and that you've seen my pictures in the papers with Mr. Thompson and all the top leaders of the country?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Then decide whether you wish to disobey their orders."

"Oh, no, ma'am! I don't!"

"Then let me in."

"But I can't disobey Dr. Ferris, either!"

"Then choose."

"But I can't choose ma'am! Who am I to choose?"

"You'll have to."

"Look," he said hastily, pulling a key from his pocket and turning to the door, "I'll ask the chief. He-"

"No." she said.

Some quality in the tone of her voice made him whirl back to her: she was holding a gun pointed levelly at his heart.

"Listen carefully," she said. "Either you let me in or I shoot you.

You may try to shoot me first, if you can. You have that choice—and no other. Now decide."

His mouth fell open and the key dropped from his hand.

"Get out of my way," she said.

He shook his head frantically, pressing his back against the door.

"Oh Christ, ma'am!" he gulped in the whine of a desperate plea. "I can't shoot at you, seeing as you come from Mr. Thompson! And I can't let you in against the word of Dr. Ferris! What am I to do? I'm only a little fellow! I'm only obeying orders! It's not up to me!"

"It's your life." she said.

"If you let me ask the chief, he'll tell me, he'll—"

"I won't let you ask anyone."

"But how do I know that you really have an order from Mr. Thompson?"

"You don't. Maybe I haven't. Maybe I'm acting on my own—and you'll be punished for obeying me. Maybe I have—and you'll be thrown in jail for disobeying. Maybe Dr.. Ferris and Mr. Thompson agree about this. Maybe they don't—and you have to defy one or the other. These are the things you have to decide. There is no one to ask, no one to call, no one to tell you. You will have to decide them yourself."

"But I can't decide! Why me?"

"Because it's your body that's barring my way."

"But I can't decide! I'm not supposed to decide!"

"I'll count to three," she said. "Then I’ll shoot."

"Wait! Wait! I haven't said yes or no!" he cried, cringing tighter against the door, as if immobility of mind and body were his best protection, "One—" she counted; she could see his eyes staring at her in terror —"Two—" she could see that the gun held less terror for him than the alternative she offered—"Three."

Calmly and impersonally, she, who would have hesitated to fire at an animal, pulled the trigger and fired straight at the heart of a man who had wanted to exist without the responsibility of consciousness.

Her gun was equipped with a silencer; there was no sound to attract anyone's attention, only the thud of a body falling at her feet.

She picked up the key from the ground—then waited for a few brief moments, as had been agreed upon.

Francisco was first to join her, coming from behind a corner of the building, then Hank Rearden, then Ragnar Danneskjold. There had been four guards posted at intervals among the trees, around the building. They were now disposed of: one was dead, three were left in the brush, bound and gagged.

She handed the key to Francisco without a word. He unlocked the door and went in, alone, leaving the door open to the width of an inch.

The three others waited outside, by that opening.

The hall was lighted by a single naked bulb stuck in the middle of the ceiling. A guard stood at the foot of the stairs leading to the second floor.

"Who are you?" he cried at the sight of Francisco entering as if he owned the place. "Nobody's supposed to come in here tonight!"

"I did," said Francisco.

"Why did Rusty let you in?"

"He must have had his reasons."

“He wasn't supposed to!"

"Somebody has changed your suppositions." Francisco's eyes were taking a lightning inventory of the place. A second guard stood on the landing at the turn of the stairs, looking down at them and listening.

"What's your business?"

"Copper-mining."

"Huh? I mean, who are you?"

"The name's too long to tell you. I'll tell it to your chief. Where is he?"

"I'm asking the questions!" But he backed a step away. "Don't . . . don't you act like a big shot or I'll—"

"Hey, Pete, he is!" cried the second guard, paralyzed by Francisco's manner.

The first one was struggling to ignore it; his voice grew louder with the growth of his fear, as he snapped at Francisco, "What are you after?"

"I said IH tell it to your chief. Where is he?"

"I'm asking the questions!"

"I'm not answering them."

"Oh, you're not, are you?" snarled Pete, who had but one recourse when in doubt: his hand jerked to the gun on his hip.

Francisco's hand was too fast for the two men to see its motion, and his gun was too silent. What they saw and heard next was the gun flying out of Pete's hand, along with a splatter of blood from his shattered fingers, and his muffled howl of pain. He collapsed, groaning.

In the instant when the second guard grasped it, he saw that Francisco's gun was aimed at him.

"Don't shoot, mister!" he cried.

"Come down here with your hands up," ordered Francisco, holding his gun aimed with one hand and waving a signal to the crack of the door with the other.

By the time the guard descended the stairs, Rearden was there to disarm him, and Danneskjold to tie his hands and feet. The sight of Dagny seemed to frighten him more than the rest; he could not understand it: the three men wore caps and windbreakers, and, but for their manner, could be taken for a gang of highwaymen; the presence of a lady was inexplicable.

"Now," said Francisco, "where is your chief?"

The guard jerked his head in the direction of the stairs. "Up there."

"How many guards are there in the building?"

"Nine."

"Where are they?"

"One's on the cellar stairs. The others are all up there."

"Where?"

"In the big laboratory. The one with the window."

"All of them?"

"Yes."

"What are these rooms?" He pointed at the doors leading off the hall.

"They're labs, too. They're locked for the night."

"Who's got the key?"

"Him." He jerked his head at Pete.

Rearden and Danneskjold took the key from Pete's pocket and hurried soundlessly to check the rooms, while Francisco continued, "Are there any other men in the building?"

"No."

"Isn't there a prisoner here?"

"Oh . . . yeah, I guess so. There must be, or they wouldn't've kept us all on duty."

"Is he still here?"

"That, I don't know. They'd never tell us,"

"Is Dr. Ferris here?"

"No. He left ten-fifteen minutes ago."

"Now, that laboratory upstairs—does it open right on the stair landing?"

"Yes."

"How many doors are there?”

"Three. It's the one in the middle."

"What are the other rooms?"

"There's the small laboratory on one side and Dr. Ferris' office on the other."

"Are there connecting doors between them?”

"Yes."

Francisco was turning to his companions, when the guard said pleadingly, "Mister, can I ask you a question?"

"Go ahead."

"Who are you?"

He answered in the solemn tone of a drawing-room introduction, "Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Anconia."

He left the guard gaping at him and turned to a brief, whispered consultation with his companions.

In a moment, it was Rearden who went up the stairs—swiftly, soundlessly and alone.

Cages containing rats and guinea pigs were stacked against the walls of the laboratory; they had been put there by the guards who were playing poker on the long laboratory table in the center. Six of them were playing; two were standing in opposite corners, watching the entrance door, guns in hand. It was Rearden's face that saved him from being shot on sight when he entered: his face was too well known to them and too unexpected. He saw eight heads staring at him with recognition and with inability to believe what they were recognizing.

He stood at the door, his hands in the pockets of his trousers, with the casual, confident manner of a business executive.

"Who is in charge here?" he asked in the politely abrupt voice of a man who does not waste time.

"You . . . you're not . . ." stammered a lanky, surly individual at the card table.

"I'm Hank Rearden. Are you the chief?"

"Yeah! But where in blazes do you come from?"

"From New York."

"What are you doing here?"

"Then, I take it, you have not been notified."

"Should I have . . . I mean, about what?" The swift, touchy, resentful suspicion that his superiors had slighted his authority, was obvious in the chief's voice. He was a tall, emaciated man, with jerky movements, a sallow face and the restless, unfocused eyes of a drug addict.

"About my business here."

"You . . . you can't have any business here," he snapped, torn between the fear of a bluff and the fear of having been left out of some important, top-level decision. "Aren't you a traitor and a deserter and a—"

"I see that you're behind the times, my good man.”

The seven others in the room were staring at Rearden with an awed, superstitious uncertainty. The two who held guns still held them aimed at him in the impassive manner of automatons. He did not seem to take notice of them.

"What is it you say is your business here?" snapped the chief.

. "I am here to take charge of the prisoner whom you are to deliver to me."

"If you came from headquarters, you'd know that I'm not supposed to know anything about any prisoner—and that nobody is to touch him!"

"Except me."

The chief leaped to his feet, darted to a telephone and seized the receiver. He had not raised it halfway to his ear when he dropped it abruptly with a gesture that sent a vibration of panic through the room: he had had time to hear that the telephone was dead and to know that the wires were cut.

His look of accusation, as he whirled to Rearden, broke against the faintly contemptuous reproof of Rearden's voice: "That's no way to guard a building—if this is what you allowed to happen. Better let me have the prisoner, before anything happens to him—if you don't want me to report you for negligence, as well as insubordination."

The chief dropped heavily back on his chair, slumped forward across the table and looked up at Rearden with a glance that made his emaciated face resemble the animals that were beginning to stir in the cages.

"Who is the prisoner?" he asked.

"My good man," said Rearden, "if your immediate superiors did not see fit to tell you, I certainly will not."

"They didn't see fit to tell me about your coming here, either!" yelled the chief, his voice confessing the helplessness of anger and broadcasting the vibrations of impotence to his men. "How do I know you're on the level? With the phone out of order, who's going to tell me? How am I to know what to do?"

"That's your problem, not mine."

"I don't believe you!" His cry was too shrill to project conviction, "I don't believe that the government would send you on a mission, when you're one of those vanishing traitors and friends of John Galt who—"

"But haven't you heard?"

"What?"

"John Galt has made a deal with the government and has brought us all back."

"Oh, thank God!" cried one of the guards, the youngest.

"Shut your mouth! You're not to have any political opinions!" snapped the chief, and jerked back to Rearden. "Why hasn't it been announced on the radio?"

"Do you presume to hold opinions on when and how the government should choose to announce its policies?"

In the long moment of silence, they could hear the rustle of the animals clawing at the bars of their cages.

"I think I should remind you," said Rearden, "that your job is not to question orders, but to obey them, that you are not to know or understand the policies of your superiors, that you are not to judge, to choose or to doubt."

"But I don't know whether I'm supposed to obey you!"

"If you refuse, you'll take the consequences."

Crouching against the table, the chief moved his glance slowly, appraisingly, from Rearden's face to the two gunmen in the corners. The gunmen steadied their aim by an almost imperceptible movement. A nervous rustle went through the room. An animal squeaked shrilly in one of the cages.

"I think I should also tell you," said Rearden, his voice faintly harder, "that I am not alone. My friends are waiting outside."

"Where?"

"All around this room."

"How many?"

"You'll find out—one way or the other."

"Say, Chief," moaned a shaky voice from among the guards, "we don't want to tangle with those people, they're—"

"Shut up!" roared the chief, leaping to his feet and brandishing his gun in the direction of the speaker. "You're not going to turn yellow on me, any of you bastards!" He was screaming to ward off the knowledge that they had. He was swaying on the edge of panic, fighting against the realization that something somehow had disarmed his men. "There's nothing to be scared of!" He was screaming it to himself, struggling to recapture the safety of his only sphere: the sphere of violence. "Nothing and nobody! I'll show you'" He whirled around, his hand shaking at the end of his sweeping arm, and fired at Rearden.

Some of them saw Rearden sway, his right hand gripping his left shoulder. Others, in the same instant, saw the gun drop out of the chief's hand and hit the floor in time with his scream and with the spurt of blood from his wrist. Then all of them saw Francisco d'Anconia standing at the door on the left, his soundless gun still aimed at the chief.

All of them were on their feet and had drawn their guns, but they lost that first moment, not daring to fire.

"I wouldn't, if I were you," said Francisco.

"Jesus!" gasped one of the guards, struggling for the memory of a name he could not recapture. "That's . . . that's the guy who blew up all the copper mines in the world!"

"It is," said Rearden.

They had been backing involuntarily away from Francisco—and turned to see that Rearden still stood at the entrance door, with a pointed gun in his right hand and a dark stain spreading on his left shoulder.

"Shoot, you bastards!" screamed the chief to the wavering men.

"What are you waiting for? Shoot them down!" He was leaning with one arm against the table, blood running out of the other. "I'll report any man who doesn't fight! I'll have him sentenced to death for it!"

"Drop your guns," said Rearden.

The seven guards stood frozen for an instant, obeying neither.

"Let me out of here!" screamed the youngest, dashing for the door on the right.

He threw the door open and sprang back: Dagny Taggart stood on the threshold, gun in hand.

The guards were drawing slowly to the center of the room, righting an invisible battle in the fog of their minds, disarmed by a sense of unreality in the presence of the legendary figures they had never expected to see, feeling almost as if they were ordered to fire at ghosts.

"Drop your guns," said Rearden. "You don't know why you're here.

We do. You don't know who your prisoner is. We do. You don't know why your bosses want you to guard him. We know why we want to get him out. You don't know the purpose of your fight. We know the purpose of ours. If you die, you won't know what you're dying for. If we do, we will."

"Don't . . . don't listen to him!" snarled the chief. "Shoot! I order you to shoot!"

One of the guards looked at the chief, dropped his gun and, raising his arms, backed away from the group toward Rearden.

"God damn you!" yelled the chief, seized a gun with his left hand and fired at the deserter.

In time with the fall of the man's body, the window burst into a shower of glass—and from the limb of a tree, as from a catapult, the tall, slender figure of a man flew into the room, landed on its feet and fired at the first guard in reach.

"Who are you?", screamed some terror-blinded voice.

"Ragnar Danneskjold."

Three sounds answered him: a long, swelling moan of panic—the clatter of four guns dropped to the floor—and the bark of the fifth, fired by a guard at the forehead of the chief.

By the time the four survivors of the garrison began to reassemble the pieces of their consciousness, their figures were stretched on the floor, bound and gagged; the fifth one was left standing, his hands tied behind his back.

"Where is the prisoner?" Francisco asked him.

"In the cellar . . . I guess."

"Who has the key?"

"Dr. Ferris."

"Where are the stairs to the cellar?"

"Behind a door in Dr. Ferris' office."

"Lead the way."

As they started, Francisco turned to Rearden. "Are you all right, Hank?"

"Sure."

"Need to rest?"

"Hell, no!"

From the threshold of a door in Ferris' office, they looked down a steep flight of stone stairs and saw a guard on the landing below.

"Come here with your hands up!" ordered Francisco.

The guard saw the silhouette of a resolute stranger and the glint of a gun: It was enough. He obeyed immediately; he seemed relieved to escape from the damp stone crypt. He was left tied on the floor of the office, along with the guard who had led them.

Then the four rescuers were free to fly down the stairs to the locked steel door at the bottom. They had acted and moved with the precision of a controlled discipline. Now, it was as if their inner reins had broken.

Danneskjold had the tools to smash the lock. Francisco was first to enter the cellar, and his arm barred Dagny's way for the fraction of a second—for the length of a look to make certain that the sight was bearable—then he let her rush past him: beyond the tangle of electric wires, he had seen Galt's lifted head and glance of greeting.

She fell down on her knees by the side of the mattress. Galt looked up at her, as he had looked on their first morning in the valley, his smile was like the sound of a laughter that had never been touched by pain, his voice was soft and low: "We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?"

Tears running down her face, but her smile declaring a full, confident, radiant certainty, she answered, "No, we never had to."

Rearden and Danneskjold were cutting his bonds. Francisco held a flask of brandy to Galt's lips. Galt drank, and raised himself to lean on an elbow when his arms were free. "Give me a cigarette," he said.

Francisco produced a package of dollar-sign cigarettes. Galt's hand shook a little, as he held a cigarette to the flame of a lighter, but Francisco's hand shook much more.

Glancing at his eyes over the flame, Galt smiled and said in the tone of an answer to the questions Francisco was not asking, "Yes, it was pretty bad, but bearable—and the kind of voltage they used leaves no damage,”

"I'll find them some day, whoever they were . . ." said Francisco; the tone of his voice, flat, dead and barely audible, said the rest.

"If you do, you'll find that there's nothing left of them to kill."

Galt glanced at the faces around him; he saw the intensity of the relief in their eyes and the violence of the anger in the grimness of their features; he knew in what manner they were now reliving his torture.

"It's over," he said. "Don't make it worse for yourself than it was for me."

Francisco turned his face away. "It's only that it was you . . ." he whispered, "you . . . if it were anyone but you . . ."

"But it had to be me, if they were to try their last, and they've tried, and"—he moved his hand, sweeping the room—and the meaning of those who had made it—into the wastelands of the past—"and that's that."

Francisco nodded, his face still turned away; the violent grip of his fingers clutching Galt's wrist for a moment was his answer.

Galt lifted himself to a sitting posture, slowly regaining control of his muscles. He glanced up at Dagny's face, as her arm shot forward to help him; he saw the struggle of her smile against the tension of her resisted tears; it was the struggle of her knowledge that nothing could matter beside the sight of his naked body and that this body was living —against her knowledge of what it had endured. Holding her glance, he raised his hand and touched the collar of her white sweater with his fingertips, in acknowledgment and in reminder of the only things that were to matter from now on. The faint tremor of her lips, relaxing into a smile, told him that she understood.

Danneskjold found Galt's shirt, slacks and the rest of his clothing, which had been thrown on the floor in a corner of the room. "Do you think you can walk, John?" he asked.

"Sure."

While Francisco and Rearden were helping Galt to dress, Danneskjold proceeded calmly, systematically, with no visible emotion, to demolish the torture machine into splinters.

Galt was not fully steady on his feet, but he could stand, leaning on Francisco's shoulder. The first few steps were hard, but by the time they reached the door, he was able to resume the motions of walking.

His one arm encircled Francisco's shoulders for support; his other arm held Dagny's shoulders, both to gain support and to give it.

They did not speak as they walked down the hill, with the darkness of the trees closing in about them for protection, cutting off the dead glow of the moon and the deader glow in the distance behind them, in the windows of the State Science Institute.

Francisco's airplane was hidden in the brush, on the edge of a meadow beyond the next hill. There were no human habitations for miles around them. There were no eyes to notice or to question the sudden streaks of the airplane's headlights shooting across the desolation of dead weeds, and the violent burst of the motor brought to life by Danneskjold, who took the wheel.

With the sound of the door slamming shut behind them and the forward thrust of the wheels under their feet, Francisco smiled for the first time.

"This is my one and only chance to give you orders," he said, helping Galt to stretch out in a reclining chair. "Now lie still, relax and take it easy . . . You, too," he added, turning to Dagny and pointing at the seat by Galt's side.

The wheels were running faster, as if gaining speed and purpose and lightness, ignoring the impotent obstacles of small jolts from the ruts of the ground. When the motion turned to a long, smooth streak, when they saw the dark shapes of the trees sweeping down and dropping past their windows, Galt leaned silently over and pressed his lips to Dagny's hand: he was leaving the outer world with the one value he had wanted to win from it.

Francisco had produced a first-aid kit and was removing Rearden's shirt to bandage his wound. Galt saw the thin red trickle running from Rearden's shoulder down his chest.

"Thank you, Hank," he said.

Rearden smiled. "I will repeat what you said when I thanked you, on our first meeting: 'If you understand that I acted for my own sake, you know that no gratitude is required.' "

"I will repeat," said Galt, "the answer you gave me: 'That is why I thank you.'"

Dagny noticed that they looked at each other as if their glance were the handshake of a bond too firm to require any statement. Rearden saw her watching them—and the faintest contraction of his eyes was like a smile of sanction, as if his glance were repeating to her the message he had sent her from the valley.

They heard the sudden sound of Danneskjold's voice raised cheerfully in conversation with empty space, and they realized that he was speaking over the plane's radio: "Yes, safe and sound, all of us. . . .

Yes, he's unhurt, just shaken a little, and resting. . . . No, no permanent injury. . . . Yes, we're all here. Hank Rearden got a flesh wound, but"—he glanced over his shoulder—"but he's grinning at me right now. . . . Losses? I think we lost our temper for a few minutes back there, but we're recovering. . . . Don't try to beat me to Galt's Gulch, I'll land first—and I'll help Kay in the restaurant to fix your breakfast."

"Can any outsiders hear him?" asked Dagny.

"No,” said Francisco. "It's a frequency they're not equipped to get."

"Whom is he talking to?" asked Galt.

"To about half the male population of the valley," said Francisco, "or as many as we had space for on every plane available. They are flying behind us right now. Did you think any of them would stay home and leave you in the hands of the looters? We were prepared to get you by open, armed assault on that Institute or on the Wayne-Falkland, if necessary. But we knew that in such case we would run the risk of their killing you when they saw that they were beaten. That's why we decided that the four of us would first try it alone. Had we failed, the others would have proceeded with an open attack. They were waiting, half a mile away. We had men posted among the trees on the hill, who saw us get out and relayed the word to the others. Ellis Wyatt was in charge. Incidentally, He's flying your plane. The reason we couldn't get to New Hampshire as fast as Dr. Ferris, is that we had to get our planes from distant, hidden landing places, while he had the advantage of open airports. Which, incidentally, he won't have much longer."

"No," said Galt, "not much longer."

"That was our only obstacle. The rest was easy. I'll tell you the whole story later. Anyway, the four of us were all that was necessary to beat their garrison."

"One of these centuries," said Danneskjold, turning to them for a moment, "the brutes, private or public, who believe that they can rule their betters by force, will learn the lesson of what happens when brute force encounters mind and force."

"They've learned it," said Galt. "Isn't that the particular lesson you have been teaching them for twelve years?"

"I? Yes. But the semester is over. Tonight was the last act of violence that I'll ever have to perform. It was my reward for the twelve years.

My men have now started to build their homes in the valley. My ship is hidden where no one will find her, until I'm able to sell her for a much more civilized use. She'll be converted into a transatlantic passenger liner—an excellent one, even if of modest size. As for me, I will start getting ready to give a different course of lessons. I think III have to brush up on the works of our teacher's first teacher."

Rearden chuckled. "I'd like to be present at your first lecture on philosophy in a university classroom," he said. "I'd like to see how your students will be able to keep their mind on the subject and how you'll answer the sort of irrelevant questions I won't blame them for wanting to ask you."

"I will tell them that they'll find the answers in the subject."

There were not many lights on the earth below. The countryside was an empty black sheet, with a few occasional flickers in the windows of some government structures, and the trembling glow of candles in the windows of thriftless homes. Most of the rural population had long since been reduced to the life of those ages when artificial light was an exorbitant luxury, and a sunset put an end to human activity. The towns were like scattered puddles, left behind by a receding tide, still holding some precious drops of electricity, but drying out in a desert of rations, quotas, controls and power-conservation rules.

But when the place that had once been the source of the tide—New York City—rose in the distance before them, it was still extending its lights to the sky, still defying the primordial darkness, almost as if, in an ultimate effort, in a final appeal for help, it were now stretching its arms to the plane that was crossing its sky. Involuntarily, they sat up, as if at respectful attention at the deathbed of what had been greatness.

Looking down, they could see the last convulsions: the lights of the cars were darting through the streets, like animals trapped in a maze, frantically seeking an exit, the bridges were jammed with cars, the approaches to the bridges were veins of massed headlights, glittering bottlenecks stopping all motion, and the desperate screaming of sirens reached faintly to the height of the plane. The news of the continent's severed artery had now engulfed the city, men were deserting their posts, trying, in panic, to abandon New York, seeking escape where all roads were cut off and escape was no longer possible.

The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly, with the abruptness of a shudder, as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city disappeared from the face of the earth. It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations—and that the lights of New York had gone out.

Dagny gasped. "Don't look down!" Galt ordered sharply.

She raised her eyes to his face. His face had that look of austerity with which she had always seen him meet facts.

She remembered the story Francisco had told her: "He had quit the Twentieth Century. He was living in a garret in a slum neighborhood.

He stepped to the window and pointed at the skyscrapers of the city.

He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done."

She thought of it when she saw the three of them—John Galt, Francisco d'Anconia, Ragnar Danneskjold—look silently at one another for a moment.

She glanced at Rearden; he was not looking down, he was looking ahead, as she had seen him look at an untouched countryside: with a glance appraising the possibilities of action.

When she looked at the darkness ahead, another memory rose in her mind—the moment when, circling above the Afton airport, she had seen the silver body of a plane rise like a phoenix from the darkness of the earth. She knew that now, at this hour, their plane was carrying all that was left of New York City.

She looked ahead. The earth would be as empty as the space where th6ir propeller was cutting an unobstructed path—as empty and as free.

She knew what Nat Taggart had felt at his start and why now, for the first time, she was following him in full loyalty: the confident sense of facing a void and of knowing that one has a continent to build.

She felt the whole struggle of her past rising before her and dropping away, leaving her here, on the height of this moment. She smiled—and the words in her mind, appraising and sealing the past, were the words of courage, pride and dedication, which most men had never understood, the words of a businessman's language: "Price no object."

She did not gasp and she felt no tremor when, in the darkness below, she saw a small string of lighted dots struggling slowly westward through the void, with the long, bright dash of a headlight groping to protect the safety of its way; she felt nothing, even though it was a train and she knew that it had no destination but the void.

She turned to Galt. He was watching her face, as if he had been following her thoughts. She saw the reflection of her smile in his. "It's the end," she said. "It's the beginning," he answered.

Then they lay still, leaning back in their chairs, silently looking at each other. Then their persons filled each other's awareness, as the sum and meaning of the future—but the sum included the knowledge of all that had had to be earned, before the person of another being could come to embody the value of one's existence.

New York was far behind them, when they heard Danneskjold answer a call from the radio: "Yes, he's awake. I don't think he'll sleep tonight. . . . Yes, I think he can." He turned to glance over his shoulder. "John, Dr. Akston would like to speak to you."

"What? Is he on one of those planes behind us?"

"Certainly."

Galt leaped forward to seize the microphone. "Hello, Dr. Akston," he said; the quiet, low tone of his voice was the audible image of a smile transmitted through space.

"Hello, John." The too-conscious steadiness of Hugh Akston's voice confessed at what cost <he had waited to learn whether he would ever pronounce these two words again. "I just wanted to hear your voice . . . just to know that you're all right."

Galt chuckled and—in the tone of a student proudly presenting a completed task of homework as proof of a lesson well learned—he answered, "Of course I am all right, Professor. I had to be. A is A."

The locomotive of the eastbound Comet broke down in the middle of a desert in Arizona. It stopped abruptly, for no visible reason, like a man who had not permitted himself to know that he was bearing too much: some overstrained connection snapped for good.

When Eddie Willers called for the conductor, he waited a long time before the man came in, and he sensed the answer to his question by the look of resignation on the man's face.

"The engineer is trying to find out what's wrong, Mr. Willers," he answered softly, in a tone implying that it was his duty to hope, but that he had held no hope for years.

"He doesn't know?"

"He's working on it." The conductor waited for a polite half-minute and turned to go, but stopped to volunteer an explanation, as if some dim, rational habit told him that any attempt to explain made any unadmitted terror easier to bear. "Those Diesels of ours aren't fit to be sent out on the road, Mr. Willers. They weren't worth repairing long ago."

"I know," said Eddie Willers quietly.

The conductor sensed that his explanation was worse than none: it led to questions that men did not ask these days. He shook his head and went out.

Eddie Willers sat looking at the empty darkness beyond the window.

This was the first eastbound Cornet out of San Francisco in many days: she was the child of his tortured effort to re-establish transcontinental service. He could not tell what the past few days had cost him or what he had done to save the San Francisco terminal from the blind chaos of a civil war that men were fighting with no concept of their goals; there was no way to remember the deals he had made on the basis of the range of every shifting moment. He knew only that he had obtained immunity for the terminal from the leaders of three different warring factions; that he had found a man for the post of terminal manager who did not seem to have given up altogether; that he had started one more Taggart Comet on her eastward run, with the best Diesel engine and the best crew available; and that he had boarded her for his return journey to New York, with no knowledge of how long his achievement would last.

He had never had to work so hard; he had done his job as conscientiously well as he had always done any assignment; but it was as if he had worked in a vacuum, as if his energy had found no transmitters and had run into the sands of . . . of some such desert as the one beyond the window of the Comet. He shuddered: he felt a moment's kinship with the stalled engine of the train.

After a while, he summoned the conductor once more. "How is it going?" he asked.

The conductor shrugged and shook his head.

"Send the fireman to a track phone. Have him tell the Division Headquarters to send us the best mechanic available."

"Yes, sir."

There was nothing to see beyond the window; turning off the light, Eddie Willers could distinguish a gray spread dotted by the black spots of cacti, with no start to it and no end. He wondered how men had ever ventured to cross it, and at what price, in the days when there were no trains. He jerked his head away and snapped on the light.

It was only the fact that the Comet was in exile, he thought, mat gave him this sense of pressing anxiety. She was stalled on an alien rail—on the borrowed track of the Atlantic Southern that ran through Arizona, the track they were using without payment. He had to get her out of here, he thought; he would not feel like this once they returned to their own rail. But the junction suddenly seemed an insurmountable distance away: on the shore of the Mississippi, at the Taggart Bridge.

No, he thought, that was not all. He had to admit to himself what images were nagging him with a sense of uneasiness he could neither grasp nor dispel; they were too meaningless to define and too inexplicable to dismiss. One was the image of a way station they had passed without stopping, more than two hours ago: he had noticed the empty platform and the brightly lighted windows of the small station building; the lights came from empty rooms; he had seen no single human figure, neither in the building nor on the tracks outside. The other image was of the next way station they had passed: its platform was jammed with an agitated mob. Now they were far beyond the reach of the light or sound of any station.

He had to get the Comet out of here, he thought. He wondered why he felt it with such urgency and why it had seemed so crucially important to re-establish the Comet's run. A mere handful of passengers was rattling in her empty cars; men had no place to go and no goals to reach. It was not for their sake that he had struggled; he could not say for whose. Two phrases stood as the answer in his mind, driving him with the vagueness of a prayer and the scalding force of an absolute.

One was: From Ocean to Ocean, forever—the other was: Don't let it go! . . .

The conductor returned an hour later, with the fireman, whose face looked oddly grim.

"Mr. Willers," said the fireman slowly, "Division Headquarters does not answer."

Eddie Willers sat up, his mind refusing to believe it, yet knowing suddenly that for some inexplicable reason this was what he had expected. "It's impossible!" he said, his voice low; the fireman was looking at him, not moving. "The track phone must have been out of order."

"No, Mr. Willers. It was not out of order. The line was alive all right.

The Division Headquarters wasn't. I mean, there was no one there to answer, or else no one who cared to."

"But you know that that's impossible!"

The fireman shrugged; men did not consider any disaster impossible these days.

Eddie Willers leaped to his feet. "Go down the length of the train," he ordered the conductor. "Knock on all the doors—the occupied ones, that is—and see whether there's an electrical engineer aboard."

"Yes, sir."

Eddie knew that they felt, as he felt it, that they would find no such man; not among the lethargic, extinguished faces of the passengers they had seen. "Come on," he ordered, turning to the fireman.

They climbed together aboard the locomotive. The gray-haired engineer was sitting in his chair, staring out at the cacti. The engine's headlight had stayed on and it stretched out into the night, motionless and straight, reaching nothing but the dissolving blur of crossties.

"Let's try to find what's wrong," said Eddie, removing his. coat, his voice half-order, half-plea. "Let's try some more."

"Yes, sir," said the engineer, without resentment or hope.

The engineer had exhausted his meager store of knowledge; he had checked every source of trouble he could think of. He went crawling over and under the machinery, unscrewing its parts and screwing them back again, taking out pieces and replacing them, dismembering the motors at random, like a child taking a clock apart, but without the child's conviction that knowledge is possible.

The fireman kept leaning out of the cab's window, glancing at the black stillness and shivering, as if from the night air that was growing colder.

"Don't worry," said Eddie Willers, assuming a tone of confidence.

"We've got to do our best, but if we fail, they'll send us help sooner or later. They don't abandon trains in the middle of nowhere."

"They didn't used to," said the fireman.

Once in a while, the engineer raised his grease-smeared face to look at the grease-smeared face and shirt of Eddie Willers. "What's the use, Mr. Willers?" he asked.

"We can't let it go!" Eddie answered fiercely; he knew dimly that what he meant was more than the Comet . . . and more than the railroad.

Moving from the cab through the three motor units and back to the cab again, his hands bleeding, his shirt sticking to his back, Eddie Willers was struggling to remember everything he had ever known about engines, anything he had learned in college, and earlier: anything he had picked up in those days when the station agents at Rockdale Station used to chase him off the rungs of their lumbering switch engines.

The pieces connected to nothing; his brain seemed jammed and tight; he knew that motors were not his profession, he knew that he did not know and that it was now a matter of life or death for him to discover the knowledge. He was looking at the cylinders, the blades, the wires, the control panels still winking with lights. He was struggling not to allow into his mind the thought that was pressing against its periphery: What were the chances and how long would it take—according to the mathematical theory of probability—for primitive men, working by rule-of-thumb, to hit the right combination of parts and re-create the motor of this engine?

"What's the use, Mr. Willers?" moaned the engineer.

"We can't let it go!" he cried.

He did not know how many hours had passed when he heard the fireman shout suddenly, "Mr. Willers! Look!"

The fireman was leaning out the window, pointing into the darkness behind them.

Eddie Willers looked. An odd little light was swinging jerkily far in the distance; it seemed to be advancing at an imperceptible rate; it did not look like any sort of light he could identify.

After a while, it seemed to him that he distinguished some large black shapes advancing slowly; they were moving in a line parallel with the track; the spot of light hung low over the ground, swinging; he strained his ears, but heard nothing.

Then he caught a feeble, muffled beat that sounded like the hoofs of horses. The two men beside him were watching the black shapes with a look of growing terror, as if some supernatural apparition were advancing upon them out of the desert night. In the moment when they chuckled suddenly, joyously, recognizing the shapes, it was Eddie's face that froze into a look of terror at the sight of a ghost more frightening than any they could have expected: it was a train of covered wagons.

The swinging lantern jerked to a stop by the side of the engine. "Hey, bud, can I give you a lift?" called a man who seemed to be the leader; he was chuckling. "Stuck, aren't you?"

The passengers of the Comet were peering out of the windows; some were descending the steps and approaching. Women's faces peeked from the wagons, from among the piles of household goods; a baby wailed somewhere at the rear of the caravan.

"Are you crazy?" asked Eddie Willers.

"No, I mean it, brother. We got plenty of room. We'll give you folks a lift—for a price—if you want to get out of here." He was a lanky, nervous man, with loose gestures and an insolent voice, who looked like a side-show barker.

"This is the Taggart Comet," said Eddie Willers, choking.

"The Comet, eh? Looks more like a dead caterpillar to me. What's the matter, brother? You're not going anywhere—and you can't get there any more, even if you tried."

"What do you mean?"

"You don't think you're going to New York, do you?"

"We are going to New York."

"Then . . . then you haven't heard?"

"What?"

"Say, when was the last time you spoke to any of your stations?"

"I don't know! . . . Heard what?"

"That your Taggart Bridge is gone. Gone. Blasted to bits. Sound-ray explosion or something. Nobody knows exactly. Only there ain't any bridge any more to cross the Mississippi. There ain't any New York any more—leastways, not for folks like you and me to reach."

Eddie Willers did not know what happened next; he had fallen back against the side of the engineer's chair, staring at the open door of the motor unit; he did not know how long he stayed there, but when, at last, he turned his head, he saw that he was alone. The engineer and the fireman had left the cab. There was a scramble of voices outside, screams, sobs, shouted questions and the sound of the side-show barker's laughter.

Eddie pulled himself to the window of the cab: the Comet's passengers and crew were crowding around the leader of the caravan and his semi-ragged companions; he was waving his loose arms in gestures of command. Some of the better-dressed ladies from the Comet—whose husbands had apparently been first to make a deal—were climbing aboard the covered wagons, sobbing and clutching their delicate makeup cases.

"Step right up, folks, step right up!" the barker was yelling cheerfully.

"We'll make room for everybody! A bit crowded, but moving—better than being left here for coyote fodder! The day of the iron horse is past! All we got is plain, old-fashioned horse! Slow, but sure!"

Eddie Willers climbed halfway down the ladder on the side of the engine, to see the crowd and to be heard. He waved one arm, hanging onto the rungs with the other. "You're not going, are you?" he cried to his passengers. "You're not abandoning the Comet?"

They drew a little away from him, as if they did not want to look at him or answer. They did not want to hear questions their minds were incapable of weighing. He saw the blind faces of panic.

"What's the matter with the grease-monkey?" asked the barker, pointing at Eddie.

"Mr. Willers," said the conductor softly, "it's no use . . ."

"Don't abandon the Comet!" cried Eddie Willers. "Don't let it go! Oh God, don't let it go!"

"Are you crazy?" cried the barker. "You've no idea what's going on at your railroad stations and headquarters! They're running around like a pack of chickens with their heads cut off! I don't think there's going to be a railroad left in business this side of the Mississippi, by tomorrow morning!"

"Better come along, Mr. Willers," said the conductor.

"No!" cried Eddie, clutching the metal rung as if he wanted his hand to grow fast to it.

The barker shrugged. "Well, it's your funeral!"

"Which way are you going?" asked the engineer, not looking at Eddie.

"Just going, brother! Just looking for some place to stop . . . somewhere. We're from Imperial Valley, California. The 'People's Party' crowd grabbed the crops and any food we had in the cellars. Hoarding, they called it. So we just picked up and went. Got to travel by night, on account of the Washington crowd. . . . We're just looking for some place to live. . . . You're welcome to come along, buddy, if you've got no home—or else we can drop you off closer to some town or another."

The men of that caravan—thought Eddie indifferently—looked too mean-minded to become the founders of a secret, free settlement, and not mean-minded enough to become a gang of raiders; they had no more destination to find than the motionless beam of the headlight; and, like that beam, they would dissolve somewhere in the empty stretches of the country.

He stayed on the ladder, looking up at the beam. He did not watch while the last men ever to ride the Taggart Comet were transferred to the covered wagons.

The conductor went last. "Mr. Willers!" he called desperately.

"Come along!"

"No," said Eddie.

The side-show barker waved his arm in an upward sweep at Eddie's figure on the side of the engine above their heads. "I hope you know what you're doing!" he cried, his voice half-threat, half-plea. "Maybe somebody will come this way to pick you up—next week or next month! Maybe! Who's going to, these days?"

"Get away from here," said Eddie Willers.

He climbed back into the cab—when the wagons jerked forward and went swaying and creaking off into the night. He sat in the engineer's chair of a motionless engine, his forehead pressed to the useless throttle.

He felt like the captain of an ocean liner in distress, who preferred to go down with his ship rather than be saved by the canoe of savages taunting him with the superiority of their craft.

Then, suddenly, he felt the blinding surge of a desperate, righteous anger. He leaped to his feet, seizing the throttle. He had to start this train; in the name of some victory that he could not name, he had to start the engine, moving, Past the stage of thinking, calculation or fear, moved by some righteous defiance, he was pulling levers at random, he was jerking the throttle back and forth, he was stepping on the dead man's pedal, which was dead, he was groping to distinguish the form of some vision that seemed both distant and close, knowing only that his desperate battle was fed by that vision and was fought for its sake.

Don't let it go! his mind was crying—while he was seeing the streets of New York—Don't let it go!—while he was seeing the lights of railroad signals—Don't let it go!—while he was seeing the smoke rising proudly from factory chimneys, while he was struggling to cut through the smoke and reach the vision at the root of these visions.

He was pulling at coils of wire, he was linking them and tearing them apart—while the sudden sense of sunrays and pine trees kept pulling at the corners of his mind. Dagny!—he heard himself crying soundlessly—Dagny, in the name of the best within us! . . . He was jerking at futile levers and at a throttle that had nothing to move. . . . Dagny!—he was crying to a twelve-year-old girl in a sunlit clearing of the woods—in the name of the best within us, I must now start this train! . . . Dagny, that is what it was . . . and you knew it, then, but I didn't . . . you knew it when you turned to look at the rails. . . . I said, "not business or earning a living" . . . but, Dagny, business and earning a living and that in man which makes it possible—that is the best within us, that was the thing to defend . . . in the name of saving it, Dagny, I must now start this train. . . .

When he found that he had collapsed on the floor of the cab and knew that there was nothing he could do here any longer, he rose and he climbed down the ladder, thinking dimly of the engine's wheels, even though he knew that the engineer had checked them. He felt the crunch of the desert dust under his feet when he let himself drop to the ground. He stood still and, in the enormous silence, he heard the rustle of tumbleweeds stirring in the darkness, like the chuckle of an invisible army made free to move when the Comet was not. He heard a sharper rustle close by—and he saw the small gray shape of a rabbit rise on its haunches to sniff at the steps of a car of the Taggart Comet. With a jolt of murderous fury, he lunged in the direction of the rabbit, as if he could defeat the advance of the enemy in the person of that tiny gray form. The rabbit darted off into the darkness—but he knew that the advance was not to be defeated.

He stepped to the front of the engine and looked up at the letters TT. Then he collapsed across the rail and lay sobbing at the foot of the engine, with the beam of a motionless headlight above him going off into a limitless night.

The music of Richard Halley's Fifth Concerto streamed from his keyboard, past the glass of the window, and spread through the air, over the lights of the valley. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.

The lights of the valley fell in glowing patches on the snow still covering the ground. There were shelves of snow on the granite ledges and on the heavy limbs of the pines. But the naked branches of the birch trees had a faintly upward thrust, as if in confident promise of the coming leaves of spring.

The rectangle of light on the side of a mountain was the window of Mulligan's study. Midas Mulligan sat at his desk, with a map and a column of figures before him. He was listing the assets of his bank and working on a plan of projected investments. He was noting down the locations he was choosing: "New York—Cleveland—Chicago . . . New York—Philadelphia . . . New York . . . New York . . . New York . . ."

The rectangle of light at the bottom of the valley was the window of Danneskjold's home. Kay Ludlow sat before a mirror, thoughtfully studying the shades of film make-up, spread open in a battered case.

Ragnar Danneskjold lay stretched on a couch, reading a volume of the works of Aristotle: ". . . for these truths hold good for everything that is, and not for some special genus apart from others. And all men use them, because they are true of being qua being. . . . For a principle which every one must have who understands anything that is, is not a hypothesis. . . . Evidently then such a principle is the most certain of all; which principle this is, let us proceed to say. It is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect. . ."

The rectangle of light in the acres of a farm was the window of the library of Judge Narragansett. He sat at a table, and the light of his lamp fell on the copy of an ancient document. He had marked and crossed out the contradictions in its statements that had once been the cause of its destruction. He was now adding a new clause to its pages: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade . . ."

The rectangle of light in the midst of a forest was the window of the cabin of Francisco d'Anconia. Francisco lay stretched on the floor, by the dancing tongues of a fire, bent over sheets of paper, completing the drawing of his smelter. Hank Rearden and Ellis Wyatt sat by the fireplace. "John will design the new locomotives," Rearden was saying, "and Dagny will run the first railroad between New York and Philadelphia. She—" And, suddenly, on hearing the next sentence, Francisco threw his head up and burst out laughing, a laughter of greeting, triumph and release. They could not hear the music of Halley's Fifth Concerto now flowing somewhere high above the roof, but Francisco's laughter matched its sounds. Contained in the sentence he had heard, Francisco was seeing the sunlight of spring on the open lawns of homes across the country, he was seeing the sparkle of motors, he was seeing the glow of the steel in the rising frames of new skyscrapers, he was seeing the eyes of youth looking at the future with no uncertainty or fear.

The sentence Rearden had uttered was: "She will probably try to take the shirt off my back with the freight rates she's going to charge, but— I’ll be able to meet them."

The faint glitter of light weaving slowly through space, on the highest accessible ledge of a mountain, was the starlight on the strands of Galt's hair. He stood looking, not at the valley below, but at the darkness of the world beyond its walls. Dagny's hand rested on his shoulder, and the wind blew her hair to blend with his. She knew why he had wanted to walk through the mountains tonight and what he had stopped to consider. She knew what words were his to speak and that she would be first to hear them.

They could not see the world beyond the mountains, there was only a void of darkness and rock, but the darkness was hiding the ruins of a continent: the roofless homes, the rusting tractors, the lightless streets, the abandoned rail. But far in the distance, on the edge of the earth, a small flame was waving in the wind, the defiantly stubborn flame of Wyatt's Torch, twisting, being torn and regaining its hold, not to be uprooted or extinguished. It seemed to be calling and waiting for the words John Galt was now to pronounce.

"The road is cleared," said Galt. "We are going back to the world."

He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar.

THE END

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

"My personal life," says Ayn Rand, "is a postscript to my novels; it consists of the sentence: 'And I mean it.' I have always lived by the philosophy I present in my books— and it has worked for me, as it works for my characters. The concretes differ, the abstractions are the same.

"I decided to be a writer at the age of nine, and everything I have done was integrated to that purpose. I am an American by choice and conviction. I was born in Europe, but I came to America because this was the country based on my moral premises and the only country where one could be fully free to write. I came here alone, after graduating from a European college. I had a difficult struggle, earning my living at odd jobs, until I could make a financial success of my writing. No one helped me, nor did I think at any time that it was anyone's duty to help me.

"In college, I had taken history as my major subject, and philosophy as my special interest; the first—in order to have a factual knowledge of men's past, for my future writing; the second—in order to achieve an objective definition of my values. I found that the first could be learned, but the second had to be done by me.

"I have held the same philosophy I now hold, for as far back as I can remember. I have learned a great deal through the years and expanded my knowledge of details, of specific issues, of definitions, of applications—and I intend to continue expanding it—but I have never had to change any of my fundamentals. My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

"The only philosophical debt I can acknowledge is to Aristotle. I most emphatically disagree with a great many parts of his philosophy—but his definition of the laws of logic and of the means of human knowledge is so great an achievement that his errors are irrelevant by comparison. You will find my tribute to him in the titles of the three parts of ATLAS SHRUGGED.

"My other acknowledgment is on the dedication page of this novel. I knew what values of character I wanted to find in a man. I met such a man—and we have been married for twenty-eight years. His name is Frank O'Connor.

"To all the readers who discovered The Fountainhead and asked me many questions about the wider application of its ideas, I want to say that I am answering these questions in the present novel and that The Fountainhead was only an overture to ATLAS SHRUGGED.

"I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about don't exist. That this book has been written—and published—is my proof that they do."

Night of January 16th

Copyright 1933 by Ayn Rand

Copyright © 1961, 1968 by Ayn Rand

All rights to Night of January 16th are the property of Ayn

Rand and fully protected by copyright. This play may not be

performed without permission. All requests for permission

should be addressed to author's agent Curtis Brown Ltd.,

60 East 56 Street, New York, New York 10022.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-56144

This is an authorized reprint of a hardcover edition published

by The World Publishing Company. The hardcover edition was

published simultaneously in Canada by Nelson, Foster Scott Ltd.

Third Printing

First Printing, January, 1971

Printed in the United States of America

Introduction

           If I were to classify Night of January 16th in conventional literary terms, I would say that it represents, not Romantic Realism, but Romantic Symbolism. For those acquainted with Objectivist aesthetics, I can name a more precise classification: Night of January 16th is not a philosophical, but a sense-of-life play.

           A sense of life is a preconceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man's relationship to existence. I emphasize this last because it is a man's attitude toward life that constitutes the core and motor of his subconscious philosophy. Every work of fiction (and wider: every work of art) is the product and expression of its author's sense of life. But it may express that sense of life translated into conceptual, i.e., philosophical, terms, or it may express only an abstract emotional sum. Night of January 16th is a pure, untranslated abstraction.

           This means that its events are not to be taken literally ; they dramatize certain fundamental psychological characteristics, deliberately isolated and emphasized in order to convey a single abstraction: the characters' attitude toward life. The events serve to feature the motives of the characters' actions, regardless of the particular forms of action -- i.e., the motives, not their specific concretization. The events feature the confrontation of two extremes, two opposite ways of facing existence: passionate self-assertiveness, self-confidence, ambition, audacity, independence -- versus conventionality, servility, envy, hatred, power-lust. I do not think, nor did I think it when I wrote this play, that a swindler is a heroic character or that a respectable banker is a villain. But for the purpose of dramatizing the conflict of independence versus conformity, a criminal -- a social outcast -- can be an eloquent symbol. This, incidentally, is the reason of the profound appeal of the "noble crook" in fiction. He is the symbol of the rebel as such, regardless of the kind of society he rebels against, the symbol -- for most people -- of their vague, undefined, unrealized groping toward a concept, or a shadowy image, of man's self-esteem.

           That a career of crime is not, in fact, the way to implement one's self-esteem, is irrelevant in sense-of-life terms. A sense of life is concerned primarily with consciousness, not with existence -- or rather: with the way a man's consciousness faces existence. It is concerned with a basic frame of mind, not with rules of conduct.

           If this play's sense of life were to be verbalized, it would say, in effect: "Your life, your achievement, your happiness, your person are of paramount importance. Live up to your highest vision of yourself no matter what the circumstances you might encounter. An exalted view of self-esteem is a man's most admirable quality." How one is to live up to this vision -- how this frame of mind is to be implemented in action and in reality -- is a question that a sense of life cannot answer: that is the task of philosophy.*

* For a fuller discussion of the nature and functions of a sense of life, I refer you to my articles, "Philosophy and Sense of Life" and "Art and Sense of Life," in the February and March 1966 issues of The Objectivist.

           Night of January 16this not a philosophical treatise on morality: that basic frame of mind (and its opposite) is all that I wanted to convey.

           This play was written in 1933. It started in my mind with the idea of writing a courtroom drama, a murder trial, in which the jury would be drawn from the audience and would vote on the verdict. Obviously, the factual evidence of the defendant's guilt or innocence had to be evenly balanced in order to make either verdict possible. But a jury's disagreement about inconclusive facts could not be of any possible interest or significance. The issue at stake, therefore, had to be psychological.

           The springboard for the story was the collapse of Ivar Kreuger -- or, more precisely, the public reaction to that collapse.

           On March 12, 1932, Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish "Match King," committed suicide. His death was followed by the crash of the vast financial empire he had created, and by the revelation that that empire was a gigantic fraud. He had been a mysterious figure, a "lone wolf," celebrated as a man of genius, of unswerving determination and spectacular audacity. His fall was like an explosion that threw up a storm of dust and muck -- a storm of peculiarly virulent denunciations.

           It was not his shady methods, his ruthlessness, his dishonesty that were being denounced, but his ambition. His ability, his self-confidence, the glamorous aura of his life and name were featured, exaggerated, overstressed, to serve as fodder for the hordes of envious mediocrities rejoicing at his downfall. It was a spree of gloating malice. Its leitmotif was not: "How did he fall?" but: "How did he dare to rise?" Had there been a world press at the time of Icarus and Phaethon, this was the kind of obituary they would have received.

           In fact, Ivar Kreuger was a man of unusual ability who had, at first, made a fortune by legitimate means; it was his venture into politics -- mixed-economy politics -- that destroyed him. Seeking a world monopoly for his match industry, he began to give large loans to various European governments in exchange for a monopoly status in their countries -- loans which were not repaid, which he could not collect and which led him to a fantastic juggling of his assets and bookkeeping in order to conceal his losses. In the final analysis, it was not Kreuger who profiteered on the ruin of the investors he had swindled; the profiteers were sundry European governments. (But when governments pursue such policies, it is not called a swindle: it is called "deficit financing.")

           At the time of Kreuger's death, it was not the political aspects of his story that interested me, but the nature of those public denunciations. It was not a crook that they were denouncing, but greatness as such; it was greatness as such that I wanted to defend.

           This, then, was my assignment in Night of January 16th: to dramatize the sense of life that was vaguely symbolized by Ivar Kreuger, and set it against the sense of life blatantly revealed by his attackers.

           Bjorn Faulkner, the hero who never appears in the play, is not Ivar Kreuger; he is what Ivar Kreuger might have been or, perhaps, ought to have been. The two sides in the play are represented, on the one hand, by Bjorn Faulkner and Karen Andre, his secretary-mistress who is on trial for his murder -- and, on the other, by John Graham Whitfield and his daughter. The factual evidence for and against the accused is (approximately) balanced. The issue rests on the credibility of the witnesses. The jury has to choose which side to believe, and this depends on every juror's own sense of life.

           Or, at least, so I hoped. I was aware, even then, that most people would not see the issue in such terms, that most people are not that consistent, neither in their conscious convictions, nor in their choice of values, nor even in their sense of life. I was aware that they would probably miss the basic antithesis and would judge on the spur or color or drama of the moment, attaching no further significance to their verdict.

           I knew also that a sense-of-life issue was not the best way to implement the idea of a trial by an audience-jury, and that some explicit controversial issue would be better, such as birth control or mercy-killing or "trial marriages." But here I truly had no choice. For the life of me, I could not have invented a story dealing with some narrow issue. My own sense of life demanded a theme involving great figures and crucial fundamentals; I could not arouse myself to any interest in anything less -- then or now.

           The motive of my writing has always been the presentation of an ideal man. I did not regard Bjorn Faulkner as an ideal. But I was not ready to attempt the portrait of an ideal man; his first appearance in my writing is Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, followed by the heroes of Atlas Shrugged. What I was ready to write about was a woman's feeling for her ideal man, and this I did in the person of Karen Andre.

           Those interested in tracing my personal development will observe the sense-of-life consistency of this play with my subsequent novels. But my novels deal with more than a sense of life: they involve a conscious philosophy, i.e., a conceptually defined view of man and of existence. And, to illustrate the translation of a sense of life into conceptual terms: if Bjorn Faulkner were to make the same mistakes in terms applicable to actual life, he would become Gail Wynand, the most tragic character in The Fountainhead; or, if Bjorn Faulkner were to be an ideal businessman, he would become Francisco d'Anconia of Atlas Shrugged.

           I am still asked, once in a while -- and it always astonishes me -- whether I intended Karen Andre to be found guilty or not guilty. I did not think that there could be any doubt about my verdict: of course, she is not guilty. (But this need not deter any prospective viewer or reader from pronouncing his own judgment: in this matter, to each his own sense of life.)

           The original title of this play was Penthouse Legend.

           This is still its best title; it gives some indication of the play's nonrealistic, symbolic nature. But it was changed twice, first to Woman on Trial, then to Night of January 16th. In both cases, the producers assured me that my original title would be a serious handicap to the play; one of them claimed that the public was antagonized by the word "Legend" and he cited the failure of some movies which had used that word in their titles. I thought that this was nonsense, but I did not want the producers to work under the pressure of doubt or fear in regard to an issue about which they felt very strongly, but which I considered unimportant.

           Today, I regret it. Night of January 16th is an empty, meaningless title. It was, however, the least offensive one of those suggested to me at the time. I could not change it later: the play had become too famous.

           In a way, that title is appropriate to the practical history of the play: for me, it was empty, meaningless -- and very painful.

           The play's history began with a series of rejections by New York's theatrical producers. I was living in Hollywood at the time, but I had an agent who kept sending the play to one producer after another. What I regarded as the most original feature of the play was the idea of drawing the jury from the audience. It was precisely because of this idea that the producers rejected the play: the jury gimmick would not work, they said, the public would not go for it, it would "destroy the theatrical illusion."

           Then, simultaneously, I received two offers for the play: one from A. H. Woods, a well-known New York producer, the other from E. E. Clive, a British actor who ran a modest stock company at the Hollywood Playhouse. But Woods wanted the right to make changes in my play at his sole discretion. So I rejected his offer and signed a contract with Clive.

           The play was produced at the Hollywood Playhouse in the fall of 1934, under the title Woman on Trial. The role of Karen Andre was played by Barbara Bedford, a star of the silent movies. E. E. Clive directed it and played a small part; he was a brilliant character actor, who loved my play and seemed to understand it, at least to the extent of knowing that there was something unusual about it. To this day, I deeply appreciate his attitude. But, as a producer, he was badly handicapped by lack of funds. The production was competent, but somewhat unexciting: unstylized and too naturalistic. The play received good reviews and had a modestly successful run.

           At its conclusion, A. H. Woods renewed his offer for a Broadway production. The contract clause regarding script changes was reworded, but in a highly ambiguous manner; my agent assured me that the new clause meant that all changes were to be made by mutual consent. I did not think so; I was fairly certain that it still gave Woods the control he wanted, but I decided to take the chance, relying on nothing but my power of persuasion.

           The rest of the play's history was hell.

           The entire period before and after the play's opening was a sickening struggle between Woods and me. I managed to prevent the worst of the changes he wanted to introduce, and I managed to preserve the best of the passages he wanted to eliminate, but that was all I could do. So the play became an incongruous mongrel slapdashed out of contradictory elements.

           Woods was famous as a producer of melodramas, some of which had been good, some dreadful. Melodrama was the only element of my play that he understood, but he thought that there wasn't enough of it. So, "to liven it up," he introduced, in small touches, a junk heap of worn, irrelevant melodramatic devices that clashed with the style, did not advance the action and served only to confuse the audience -- such as a gun, a heat test to determine its erased serial number, a flashy gun moll, etc. (The gun moll was introduced, in the last act, to throw doubt on the testimony of Guts Regan, which, of course, she did not accomplish. I did not write that bit; it was written by the play's director.) Woods actually believed that only guns, fingerprints and police matters could hold an audience's attention, but "speeches" could not. To his credit as a showman, I can say only that he thought the jury gimmick was a great idea, which is what made him buy the play.

           This was my first (but not last) encounter with the literary manifestation of the mind-body dichotomy that dominates today's culture: the split between the "serious" and the "entertaining" -- the belief that if a literary work is "serious," it must bore people to death; and if it is "entertaining," it must not communicate anything of importance. (Which means that "the good" has to be painful, and that pleasure has to be mindlessly low-grade.) A. H. Woods was a faithful adherent of that school of thought, so that it was useless to mention the word "thought" to him, or "idea" or "philosophy" or "sense of life" in connection with any theatrical matter. It would be inexact to say that he was antagonistic to such concepts: he was completely tone-deaf to them. I was naive enough to be shocked by it. Since then, I have observed the same tone-deafness in regard to this dichotomy (though, usually, on its other side) in men who had less excuse for it than A. H. Woods: in college professors. At the time, I fought against that dogma to the limit of my brain and endurance. I am still fighting that battle today, with the same intensity, but without the painful, incredulous astonishment of youth.

           In regard to casting, Woods' judgment was better than his literary views. He gave the part of Karen Andre to a talented unknown, a young actress he had discovered -- Doris Nolan. She was very attractive in the right way, she was an unusually good type for the part and gave an excellent performance. The male lead, the part of Guts Regan, was played by Walter Pidgeon. This was my one contribution to the casting. At that time, which was the period of transition from the silent movies to the talkies, Pidgeon was regarded as through in Hollywood and was playing in a summer stock theater in the East. He had been one of my favorites in the silent movies (where he had played strong, glamorous, aristocratic villains) and I had seen him on the stage in Hollywood, so I suggested that Woods go to see him in summer stock. Woods' first reaction was: "Aw, he's through," but he went. To give him credit, Woods was so impressed with Pidgeon's performance that he signed him for Night of January 16th at once (and told me: "Aw, that guy's great"). Shortly after our opening, Pidgeon signed a long-term movie contract with M-G-M, which was his new start in pictures, the beginning of his rise to stardom. He told me later that he owed that contract to his performance as Guts Regan. (I regret that M-G-M confined him to the homey, "Mister Miniver" type of role; he deserved better than that.)

           This was one of the few pleasant incidents connected with Night of January 16th. By the time the play opened on Broadway (in September of 1935), it was dead, as far as I was concerned. I could feel nothing for it or about it except revulsion and indignation. It was not merely a mangled body, but worse: it was a mangled body with some of its torn limbs still showing a former beauty and underscoring the bloody mess. On opening night, I sat in the back row, yawning -- not out of tension, but out of genuine boredom, since it was an event that had no value-meaning for me any longer.

           The play received mixed reviews; it did not become a hit, but what was regarded as a "success." It ran for six months. What made it successful and talked about was, of course, the jury gimmick. On opening night, Woods had arranged in advance for a jury of celebrities (of whom the only one I remember was Jack Dempsey, the former heavyweight champion). For the first couple of weeks thereafter, he kept a jury of stooges on hand backstage, just in case the members of the audience did not volunteer. But he soon found the precaution unnecessary: his office was besieged by requests from celebrities and others who wanted to sit on that jury; there were more volunteers than he could accommodate.

           One interesting incident of the play's run was a benefit performance given for the blind. (I did not attend it: I could not bear to see the play again, but I was told about it.) All the members of the jury and most of the audience were blind; the foreman of the jury was Helen Keller. Graham McNamee, a famous newscaster, acted as a narrator to describe visual information, when needed. The verdict that night was "Guilty."

           As to the general record of verdicts during the play's run in New York, they were 3 to 2 in favor of acquittal -- according to the stage manager, who kept a tally.

           That winter, Woods launched two road companies (starting out of Chicago and Los Angeles) and a third company in London; all of them did very well.

           The Chicago production remains in my mind for the unexpected reason that a drama critic, Ashton Stevens, gave me the only review that pleased me in my entire career. I have received reviews that might be called better and some that I deeply appreciated, but none of them said the things I would have wanted to be said. I learned to expect nothing from reviewers because of the so-called favorable reviews, not because of the illiterate smears. What I liked about Ashton Stevens' piece was that he understood the technique of drama, knew what it takes and praised me for the best aspects of the play's structure; he praised me for an attribute which only a viewer in full focus can appreciate: ingenuity. He treated the play as a melodrama, since that is all it had become; I am inclined to believe that his sense of life was probably the opposite of mine, since he wrote: "It is not as close and upclimbing a piece as [The Trial of] Mary Dugan. Nor as heart-tearing. None of the characters is lovable."

           But here is what I love him for: "But it is the fastest courtroom melo I ever saw. It shoots its stuff from a dozen angles, and every shot is a surprise.

           "The biggest and best surprise is when the prisoner -- the tense, Roman-medal-faced Karen Andre -- crashes and crumbles as Gunman ('Guts') Regan rushes up the aisle and into court and informs her that the man she is accused of murdering IS dead. That, ladies and gentlemen of the audience, is a S E C O N D-A C T C U R T A I N. [Typography his.]. . .

           "You see, the play flattered the cunning of the audience. It permitted us to anticipate with some success. But it never left us right for more than a jiffy. . . There is a kind of genius in the play." (If there was, in the version he saw, I marvel at his ability to see it.)

           The play was unusually successful in summer stock: in its first summer (1936), it was presented by eighteen theaters, and was a leading favorite for many summers thereafter. One bright spot of the summer of 1936 was a week at a theater in Stony Creek, Connecticut, where the part of Guts Regan was played by my husband, Frank O'Connor.

           In subsequent years, the play was presented, in various translations, in most European countries. In World War II, it was presented by the U.S.O. for the American troops occupying Berlin. It is still being given occasionally in various parts of the world, with or without my knowledge; at least, I receive unexpected royalties from it, once in a while. And, once in a while, it is still played here, in summer stock. It has been presented on the radio and twice (by two different companies) on television.

           The amateur market of this play belongs on the horror side of its history. The amateur rights were sold to a publishing house that issued an adapted, "cleaned up" version. The amateur market, they claimed at the time, consisted of church, school and college groups that worked under a strict kind of censorship (I do not know who imposed it): these groups were not allowed to mention a love affair or a mistress, or to smoke onstage, or to swear, etc. For instance, they were not allowed to use the word "Guts," so that my character's name was changed to "Larry" Regan. That version of my play was adapted by the publishing house; it was not to be sold in bookstores or to the public, but was to be sold only to amateur groups for amateur performances. Once in a while, I hear -- with somewhat helpless indignation -- that some fan of mine has somehow obtained a copy of that version. So I want to state formally, for the record and as a public notice, that the amateur version of Night of January 16th is not written by me and is not part of my works.

           The movie version of this play is another horror story. I had nothing to do with its screen adaptation. There is nothing of mine in that movie, except the names of some of the characters and the title (which was not mine). The only line of dialogue from my play which appears in the movie is: "The court will now adjourn till ten o'clock tomorrow morning." The cheap, trashy vulgarity of that movie is such that no lengthier discussion is possible to me.

           Through all those years, while the play was becoming famous, I felt a painfully growing embarrassment: I did not want to be associated with it or to be known as its author. I thought, at the time, that I had merely been unlucky in my producer and in the kind of people I had to deal with. Today, I know better: I know that it could not have been different, granting the nature of my work and of today's cultural trends. But don't let anyone ever approach me about making changes in my work: I learned my lesson the hard way.

           For twenty-five years, I never looked at a script of this play, and winced whenever it was mentioned. Then, in 1960, Nathaniel Branden asked me to let him give a reading of the play at Nathaniel Branden Institute, in response to requests from students. I could not let him read the A. H. Woods version, so I had to prepare a definitive version of the play. I compared the original script of Penthouse Legend, the script of Woman on Trial (which was the same, but with some cuts made by me) and the script of Night of January 16th. I was somewhat astonished by the result: in this final, definitive version, I had to cut out everything that had been contributed by the Woods production (except one line change and the title). I cut out, of course, the gun moll, the gun and all the cruder elements of that sort; but I did not expect to find that even small lines and minor touches were jarringly wrong and had to be discarded.

           I felt an odd kind of sadness: my mind went back to a certain argument I had with Woods during the rehearsals. We were sitting in the front row of an empty theater and he was saying indignantly: "How can you be so stubborn? How can you argue with me? This is your first play and I've been in the theater for forty years!" I explained to him that it was not a matter of personalities, age or experience, not a matter of who said it, but of what was said, and that I would give in to his office boy, if the boy happened to be right. Woods did not answer; I knew even then that he did not hear me.

           The final, definitive version of Night of January 16th is closest, in content, to the script of Woman on Trial. I made no changes in story or substance; the additional changes I made were mainly grammatical. That final version is the one now published here, in this book.

           I am glad to see it published. Up to now, I had felt as if it were an illegitimate child roaming the world. Now, with this publication, it becomes legitimately mine.

           And, although it has played all over the world, I feel as if it were a play that has never been produced.

AYN RAND

New York, June 1968

Note to Producer

           This play is a murder trial without a prearranged verdict. The jurors are to be selected from the audience. They are to witness the play as real jurors and bring in a verdict at the end of the last act. Two short endings are written for the play -- to be used according to the verdict.

           The play is built in such a way that the evidence of the defendant's guilt or innocence is evenly balanced and the decision will have to be based upon the jurors' own values and characters. The two parties opposed in the trial are as radically antagonistic as will be members of any audience, where some will sympathize with the wife, others with the mistress. Either decision will bring the protest of the opposite side; the case is bound to arouse arguments and discussions, for its underlying conflict is the basic conflict of two different types of humanity. It is really the audience who is thus put on trial. In the words of the defense attorney: "Who is on trial in this case? Karen Andre? No! It's you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, who are here on trial. It is your own souls that will be brought to light when your decision is rendered."

           The jurors' seats are to be on the stage, as in a real courtroom. Thus we give the public all the excitement of a murder trial. We heighten the public's interest by leaving the decision in its own hands and add to the suspense by the fact that no audience, at any performance of the play, can be sure of its outcome.

Characters, Time, Place

CHARACTERS:

JUDGE HEATH

DISTRICT ATTORNEY FLINT

DEFENSE ATTORNEY STEVENS

KAREN ANDRE

DR. KIRKLAND

JOHN HUTCHINS

HOMER VAN FLEET

ELMER SWEENEY

MAGDA SVENSON

NANCY LEE FAULKNER

JOHN GRAHAM WHITFIELD

JAMES CHANDLER

SIEGURD JUNGQUIST

"GUTS" REGAN

COURT ATTENDANTS

TIME: Present

PLACE: New York Courtroom

Act One

           Scene: The stage represents a New York courtroom. It faces the audience, so that the public is in the position of spectators in a real courtroom. In the center of the back is the Judge's desk on a high platform; behind it is the door to the Judge's chambers; by the side of the desk, at left, is the witness stand, facing the audience; behind it is the door to the jury room. In front of the Judge's desk is the desk of the Court Reporter; at right the desk of the Court Clerk. Behind it is the door through which witnesses enter the courtroom. Farther downstage, at right, is a table for the defendant and attorneys; at left another table for the prosecution. At the wall, left, are the twelve seats for the jurors. Farther downstage is a door through which spectators enter the courtroom. At the opposite wall, at right, are a few chairs for spectators. Steps lead down from the stage in the right and left aisles. When the curtain rises the court session is ready to open, but the JUDGE has not yet made his appearance. The prosecution and defense are ready at their respective tables.

DISTRICT ATTORNEY FLINT is a heavy, middle-aged man with the kindly appearance of a respectable father of a family and the shrewd, piercing manner of a pawnbroker. DEFENSE ATTORNEY STEVENS is tall, gray-haired, displaying the grooming and sophisticated grace of a man of the world. He is watching his client, who does not pay any attention to him and, sitting at the defense table, calmly, almost insolently studies the audience. The client, the defendant KAREN ANDRE, is twenty-eight. One's first impression of her is that to handle her would require the services of an animal trainer, not an attorney. Yet there is nothing emotional or rebellious in her countenance; it is one of profound, inexorable calm; but one feels the tense vitality, the primitive fire, the untamed strength in the defiant immobility of her slender body, the proud line of her head held high, the sweep of her tousled hair. Her clothes are conspicuous by their severe, tailored simplicity; a very costly simplicity, one can notice, but not the elegance of a woman who gives much thought to her clothes; rather that of one who knows she can make any rag attractive and does it unconsciously.

When the curtain rises the lights in the audience do not go out.

BAILIFF: Court attention!

[EVERYONE rises as JUDGE HEATH enters. BAILIFF raps]

Superior Court Number Eleven of the State of New York. The Honorable Judge William Heath presiding.

[The JUDGE takes his seat. BAILIFF raps and EVERYONE sits down]

JUDGE HEATH: The people of the State of New York versus Karen Andre.

FLINT: Ready, your Honor.

STEVENS: Ready, your Honor.

JUDGE HEATH: Mr. Clerk, draw a jury.

[The CLERK steps to the proscenium with a list in his hand, and addresses the audience]

CLERK: Ladies and gentlemen, you are to be the jurors in this case. Twelve of you will be drawn to perform this duty. You will kindly step up here, take your seats, and receive your instructions from Judge Heath.

[He reads twelve names. The JURORS take their places. If some are unwilling and do not appear, the CLERK calls a few more names. When the jurors are seated, the lights in the audience go out. JUDGE HEATH addresses the jury]

JUDGE HEATH: Ladies and gentlemen, you are the jurors who will try this case. At its close, you will retire to the jury room and vote upon your verdict. I instruct you to listen to the testimony carefully and pronounce your judgment to the best of your ability and integrity. You are to determine whether the defendant is Guilty or Not Guilty and her fate rests in your hands . . . The District Attorney may now proceed.

[DISTRICT ATTORNEY FLINT rises and addresses the jury]

FLINT: Your Honor! Ladies and gentlemen of the jury! On the sixteenth of January, near midnight, when the lights of Broadway blazed an electric dawn over the gay crowd below, the body of a man came hurtling through space and crashed -- a disfigured mess -- at the foot of the Faulkner Building. That body had been Sweden's great financier -- Bjorn Faulkner. He fell fifty stories from his luxurious penthouse. A suicide, we were told. A great man unwilling to bend before his imminent ruin. A man who found a fall from the roof of a skyscraper shorter and easier than a descent from his tottering throne of the world's financial dictator. Only a few months ago, behind every big transaction of gold in the world, stood that well-known figure: young, tall, with an arrogant smile, with kingdoms and nations in the palm of one hand -- and a whip in the other. If gold is the world's life blood, then Bjorn Faulkner, holding all its dark, hidden arteries, regulating its ebb and flow, its every pulsation, was the heart of the world. Well, ladies and gentlemen, the world has just had a heart attack. And like all heart attacks, it was rather sudden. No one suspected the gigantic swindle that lay at the foundation of the Faulkner enterprises. A few days after his death, the earth shook from the crash of his business; thousands of investors were stricken with the paralysis which follows an attack, when that monstrous heart stopped beating. Bjorn Faulkner had had a hard struggle facing the world. But he had a much harder struggle to face in his heart, a struggle which this trial will have to uncover. Two women ruled his life -- and death. Here is one of them, ladies and gentlemen.

[Points at KAREN]

Karen Andre, Faulkner's efficient secretary and notorious mistress. But six months ago Faulkner came to America to get a loan and save his fortune. Fate sent him a means to save his own heart -- in the person of the lovely girl who is now his widow, Nancy Lee Faulkner, only daughter of John Graham Whitfield, our great philanthropist. Faulkner thought he had found salvation and a new life in the virtuous innocence of his young bride. And the best proof of it is that two weeks after his wedding he dismissed his secretary -- Karen Andre. He was through with her. But, ladies and gentlemen, one is not easily through with a woman like Karen Andre. We can only guess at what hatred and revenge smouldered in her heart; but they leaped into flame on the night of January sixteenth. Bjorn Faulkner did not kill himself. He was murdered. Murdered by the very delicate and capable hands which you see here before you.

[He points at KAREN]

The hands that helped to raise Bjorn Faulkner high over the world; the hands that threw him down, from as great a height, to crash into a pavement cold as this woman's heart. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we are going to prove.

[FLINT pauses; then calls]

Our first witness will be Doctor Kirkland.

[DR. KIRKLAND, elderly, kindly, and indifferent, makes his way toward the witness stand ]

CLERK: You solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God?

KIRKLAND: I do.

FLINT: Kindly state your name.

KIRKLAND: Thomas Kirkland.

FLINT: What is your occupation?

KIRKLAND: Medical examiner of this county.

FLINT: In the course of your duty, what were you called upon to do on the night of January sixteenth?

KIRKLAND: I was called to examine the body of Bjorn Faulkner.

FLINT: What did you find?

KIRKLAND: A body mangled to an extreme degree.

FLINT: What did you establish as the cause of death?

KIRKLAND: A fall from a great height.

FLINT: How long had Faulkner been dead when you examined his body?

KIRKLAND: I reached it about half an hour after the fall.

FLINT: Judging by the condition of the body, could you say exactly how long it had been dead?

KIRKLAND: No, I could not. Owing to the cold weather, the blood had coagulated immediately, which makes a difference of several hours impossible to detect.

FLINT: Therefore, it is possible that Faulkner had been dead longer than half an hour?

KIRKLAND: It is possible.

FLINT: Could his death have been caused by anything other than this fall?

KIRKLAND: I found no evidence of it.

FLINT: For instance, had his skull been broken before the fall, would you be able to tell it by examining the body?

KIRKLAND: No. Owing to the condition of the body, it would be impossible to determine.

FLINT: That's all, Doctor.

STEVENS: Did you find any trace of any such earlier wound in your examination of the body, Doctor Kirkland?

KIRKLAND: No, I did not.

STEVENS: Did you find any indication that death might have been caused by anything other than the fall?

KIRKLAND: No, I did not.

STEVENS: That's all.

[DR. KIRKLAND leaves the stand and exits]

FLINT: John Hutchins!

CLERK: John Hutchins!

HUTCHINS:[Entering]Yes, sir.

[HUTCHINS is a timid, elderly man, neat, but almost shabby; he walks to the stand shyly, cringing, nervously fingering his hat in both hands]

CLERK: You solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God?

HUTCHINS: Yes, sir, I do.

FLINT: What is your name?

HUTCHINS: [Timidly]John Joseph Hutchins.

FLINT: And your occupation?

HUTCHINS: I'm the night watchman in the Faulkner Building, sir.

FLINT: Did Mr. Faulkner have business offices in that building?

HUTCHINS: Yes, sir.

FLINT: Do you know who owned the penthouse on the roof of the building?

HUTCHINS: Certainly, sir. Mr. Faulkner did.

FLINT: And who lived there?

HUTCHINS: Mr. Faulkner and Miss Andre, sir. That is, before Mr. Faulkner's marriage.

FLINT: And after the marriage?

HUTCHINS: After the marriage, Miss Andre lived there -- alone.

FLINT: Have you ever seen Mr. Faulkner calling on Miss Andre after his marriage?

HUTCHINS: Only once, sir.

FLINT: And that was?

HUTCHINS: On the night of January sixteenth.

FLINT: Tell us about it, Mr. Hutchins.

HUTCHINS: Well, sir, it was about ten thirty and --

FLINT: How did you know the time?

HUTCHINS: I come on duty at ten, sir, and it was no more than a half hour after. The entrance door bell rang. I went down to the lobby and opened the door. It was Miss Andre, and Mr. Faulkner was with her. I was surprised, because Miss Andre has her own key and, usually, she opens the door herself.

FLINT: Was she alone with Mr. Faulkner?

HUTCHINS: No, sir. There were two other gentlemen with them.

FLINT: Who were they?

HUTCHINS: I don't know, sir.

FLINT: Had you ever seen them before?

HUTCHINS: No, sir, never.

FLINT: What did they look like?

HUTCHINS: They were tall and sort of slender, both of them. One had light eyes, as I remember. The other one -- I couldn't see his face at all, sir, on account of his hat being all crooked over his eyes. He must have had a bit too much, sir, meaning no disrespect.

FLINT: Just what do you mean?

HUTCHINS: Well, he was a bit tight, sir, if I'm permitted to say so. He wasn't very steady on his feet, so that Mr. Faulkner and the other gentleman had to help him. They almost dragged him into the elevator.

FLINT: Did Mr. Faulkner look worried?

HUTCHINS: No, sir. On the contrary, he seemed very happy.

FLINT: Did he look like a man contemplating suicide?

STEVENS: We object, your Honor!

JUDGE HEATH: Objection sustained.

FLINT: Did the others in the party seem happy, too?

HUTCHINS: Yes, sir. Miss Andre was smiling. And Mr. Faulkner laughed when they went up in the elevator.

FLINT: Did you see any of them leave, that night?

HUTCHINS: Yes, sir. The first one left about fifteen minutes later.

FLINT: Who was that?

HUTCHINS: The drunken one, sir. He came down in the elevator, all by himself. He didn't seem quite so drunk no more. He could walk, but he staggered a little.

FLINT: Did you see where he went?

HUTCHINS: Well, I wanted to help him to the door, seeing the condition he was in, but he noticed me coming and he hurried out. He got into a car parked right at the entrance and did he step on it! But I'm sure he didn't go far. The cops must've got him.

FLINT: What makes you think that?

HUTCHINS: Well, I noticed a car that started right after him.

[KAREN comes to life, suddenly, out of her frozen calm. She jumps up and throws her question at Hutchins]

KAREN: What car?

JUDGE HEATH: The defendant will please keep quiet.

[STEVENS whispers to KAREN, making her sit down]

FLINT: If Miss Andre will let me do the questioning, I may satisfy her curiosity. I was just going to ask what car, Mr. Hutchins?

HUTCHINS: It was a big black sedan, sir. It was parked two cars away from him.

FLINT: Who was in it?

HUTCHINS: I saw only one man.

FLINT: What makes you think he was after the first car?

HUTCHINS: Well, I couldn't be sure he was, sir. It just looked funny they started together like that.

FLINT: Did you see that other guest of Miss Andre's leaving, too?

HUTCHINS: Yes, sir. It wasn't more than ten minutes later when he came out of the elevator.

FLINT: What did he do?

HUTCHINS: Nothing unusual, sir. He seemed to be in a hurry. He went right out.

FLINT: And then what happened?

HUTCHINS: I started on my round of the building; and then, it must have been an hour later, I heard screams outside, in the street. I rushed down and as I came into the lobby, I saw Miss Andre running out of the elevator, her gown all torn, sobbing wild-like. I ran after her. We pushed through the crowd outside and there was Mr. Faulkner all over the pavement.

FLINT: What did Miss Andre do?

HUTCHINS: She screamed and fell on her knees. It was horrible, sir. I've never seen a body smashed like that.

FLINT: That is all, Mr. Hutchins.

STEVENS: You said that you had never seen Mr. Faulkner calling on Miss Andre after his marriage, with the exception of that night. Now, tell me, do you always see every visitor who comes into the building at night?

HUTCHINS: No, sir. I'm not in the lobby all of the time, I have my rounds to make. If the guest has a key, he can come in and I wouldn't see him at all.

STEVENS: In other words, Miss Andre might have had any number of visitors, Mr. Faulkner included, whom you never saw come in?

HUTCHINS: Yes, sir, quite right.

STEVENS: That is all.

[HUTCHINS leaves the stand and exits]

FLINT: Homer Van Fleet!

CLERK: Homer Van Fleet!

[HOMER VAN FLEET makes his appearance. He is tall, not very young, and can be best described by the word "correct." His clothes are correct --smart, but not flashy; his manner is correct - -cool, exact, strictly businesslike. He is diffident and dignified at the same time]

CLERK: You solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God?

VAN FLEET: I do.

FLINT: Your name?

VAN FLEET: Homer Herbert Van Fleet.

FLINT: Occupation?

VAN FLEET: Private investigator.

FLINT: What was your last assignment?

VAN FLEET: Shadowing Mr. Bjorn Faulkner.

FLINT: By whom were you hired to do it?

VAN FLEET: By Mrs. Bjorn Faulkner.

[A slight reaction in the courtroom]

FLINT: Were you shadowing Mr. Faulkner on the night of January sixteenth?

VAN FLEET: I was.

FLINT: Kindly tell us about it.

VAN FLEET: I'll start with six thirteen P.M.

FLINT: How do you know the time, Mr. Van Fleet?

VAN FLEET: Part of my duties. Had to record it and report to Mrs. Faulkner.

FLINT: I see.

VAN FLEET: [He speaks briskly, precisely, as if reporting to an employer]Six thirteen P.M. Mr. Faulkner leaves home on Long Island. Wears formal dress suit. Drives car himself, alone. Special notation: Unusual speed all the way to New York.

FLINT: Where does Mr. Faulkner go?

VAN FLEET: He drives up to the Faulkner Building and goes in. It is now seven fifty-seven P.M., all offices closed. I wait outside, in my car. Nine thirty-five P.M. Mr. Faulkner comes out with Miss Andre. Miss Andre is dressed formally. Special notation: Miss Andre is wearing a corsage of orchids of unusual proportions. They drive away.

FLINT: Where do they go?

VAN FLEET: No one is perfect in this world.

FLINT: What do you mean?

VAN FLEET: I mean I lost track of them. Due to Mr. Faulkner's speed and to an accident.

FLINT: What accident?

VAN FLEET: My left fender crashing into a truck; damages for which fender charged to Mrs. Faulkner.

FLINT: What did you do when you lost track of them?

VAN FLEET: Returned to the Faulkner Building and waited.

FLINT: When did they return?

VAN FLEET: Ten thirty P.M. exactly. A gray coupé follows them. Mr. Faulkner gets out and helps Miss Andre. While she rings the bell, he opens the door of the gray coupé; a tall gentleman in formal clothes steps out, and together they help out a third gentleman, the latter wearing a dark gray sport coat. Special notation: The aforementioned gentleman shows signs of inebriation. They all go into the Faulkner Building.

FLINT: Then what did you do?

VAN FLEET: Left my car and went into Gary's Grill, across the street from the Faulkner Building. I must explain that I allow myself time to take nourishment every four hours while on duty and four hours had elapsed since we left Long Island. I sat at a window and watched the Faulkner entrance door.

FLINT: What did you observe?

VAN FLEET: Nothing -- for fifteen minutes. Then the man in the gray coat comes out and starts the car -- the gray coupé. Obviously in a hurry. Drives south.

FLINT: Did you see the other stranger leave?

VAN FLEET: Yes, ten minutes later. He gets into a car which stands at the curb. I don't know how it got there, but there it is and he seems to have the keys, for he gets in and drives away. South.

FLINT: Have you ever seen Mr. Faulkner with these two men before?

VAN FLEET: No. First time I ever saw them.

FLINT: What did you do when they left?

VAN FLEET: I wait. Mr. Faulkner is now alone up in the penthouse with Miss Andre. I'm curious -- professionally. Decide to do some closer investigating. Have a special observation post; had used it before.

FLINT: And where is that?

VAN FLEET: At the Sky Top. Night club, roof of Brooks Building, three doors from Faulkner's. There's an open gallery there, off the dance floor. You go out and you can see the Faulkner penthouse clear as the palm of your hand. I go out, I look and I yell.

FLINT: What do you see?

VAN FLEET: No lights. Karen Andre's white gown shimmering in the moonlight. She is hoisting a man's body up on the parapet. A man in evening clothes. Faulkner. He's unconscious. No resistance. She pushes him with all her strength. He goes over the parapet. Down. Into space.

FLINT: Then what do you do?

VAN FLEET: I rush back into the dining room. Yell about what I'd seen. A crowd follows me down to the Faulkner Building. We find the bloody mess on the pavement and Miss Andre sobbing over it, fit to move a first-night audience.

FLINT: Did you speak to her?

VAN FLEET: No. The police arrive and I report what I'd seen, as I've told you here.

FLINT: Your witness.

[STEVENS gets up and walks slowly toward VAN FLEET, eyeing him steadily]

STEVENS: Can you kindly tell us, Mr. Van Fleet, when did you start in the employ of Mrs. Faulkner?

VAN FLEET: October thirteenth last.

STEVENS: Can you tell us the date of Mr. and Mrs. Faulkner's wedding?

VAN FLEET: October twelfth. The day before.

STEVENS: Exactly. Just the day before. In other words, Mrs. Faulkner hired you to spy on her husband the day after their wedding?

VAN FLEET: So it seems.

STEVENS: What were Mrs. Faulkner's instructions when you were hired?

VAN FLEET: To watch every action of Mr. Faulkner and report in detail.

STEVENS: Any special attention to Miss Andre?

VAN FLEET: Not specified.

STEVENS: Had Mr. Faulkner been calling on Miss Andre after his marriage?

VAN FLEET: Yes. Frequently.

STEVENS: In the daytime?

VAN FLEET: Seldom.

STEVENS: Did you report that to Mrs. Faulkner?

VAN FLEET: I did.

STEVENS: What was Mrs. Faulkner's reaction to these reports?

VAN FLEET: Mrs. Faulkner is a lady and, as such, she has no reactions.

STEVENS: Did she seem worried?

VAN FLEET: I don't believe so.

[He declaims in a slightly unnatural manner]

Mr. Faulkner was the most devoted of husbands and he loved his wife dearly.

STEVENS: Just how do you know that?

VAN FLEET: Those are Mrs. Faulkner's own words.

STEVENS: Now, Mr. Van Fleet, can you tell us exactly what time you started for the Sky Top Night Club on the evening of January sixteenth?

VAN FLEET: At eleven thirty-two exactly.

STEVENS: How long a walk is it from the Faulkner Building to the Sky Top?

VAN FLEET: Three minutes.

STEVENS: What time was it when you came out to the balcony at the Sky Top?

VAN FLEET: Eleven fifty-seven.

STEVENS: So it took you exactly twenty-five minutes to get to the balcony. What were you doing the rest of the time?

VAN FLEET: Of course, they have a dance floor at the Sky Top . . . and other things.

STEVENS: Did you take advantage of the . . . "other things"?

VAN FLEET: Well, I just had a couple of drinks, if I understand the drift of your curiosity. But it doesn't mean that you can say I was intoxicated.

STEVENS: I have said nothing of the kind -- as yet. Now, then, you saw Miss Andre pushing Mr. Faulkner off the roof, and it was a little distance away, in the darkness, and you were . . . well, shall we say you just had a couple of drinks?

VAN FLEET: The drinks had nothing to do with it.

STEVENS: Are you quite certain that she was pushing him? Isn't it possible that she was struggling with him?

VAN FLEET: Well, it's a funny way of struggling. If I were struggling with a man, I wouldn't be hoisting him up by his . . . I wouldn't be hoisting him up, I mean.

STEVENS: Mr. Van Fleet, what were Mrs. Faulkner's instructions to you before you came here to testify?

VAN FLEET: [With indignation]I received no instructions of any kind. I may inform you that Mrs. Faulkner is not here to instruct me, were she inclined to do so. She has been taken to California by her father -- to rest her shattered nerves.

STEVENS: Mr. Van Fleet, do you think that Mr. Faulkner's suicide is very flattering to Mrs. Faulkner?

FLINT: We object!

JUDGE HEATH: Objection sustained.

STEVENS: Mr. Van Fleet, can you tell us how much a witness to Mr. Faulkner's murder would be worth to Mrs. Faulkner?

FLINT: [Jumping up] We object, your Honor!

JUDGE HEATH: Objection sustained.

VAN FLEET: I should like to remind Mr. Stevens that he may be sued for making insinuations such as these.

STEVENS: I made no insinuation, Mr. Van Fleet. I merely asked a question in a general way.

VAN FLEET: Well, I would like to inform you -- in a general way -- that perjury is not part of a private investigator's duties.

STEVENS: No special notations to the rule?

VAN FLEET: None!

STEVENS: That is all, Mr. Van Fleet.

KAREN: Not quite. I want you to ask him two more questions, Stevens.

STEVENS: Certainly, Miss Andre. What are the questions?

[KAREN whispers to STEVENS; he is astonished]

STEVENS: What kind of a car do you drive, Mr. Van Fleet?

VAN FLEET: [Astonished, too]A brown Buick coupé. Last year's model. Old but serviceable.

[KAREN whispers to STEVENS]

STEVENS: Did you see any car following the gentleman in the gray coat when he drove away, Mr. Van Fleet?

VAN FLEET: I cannot recall that I did. The traffic was quite heavy at that time.

STEVENS: That's all, Mr. Van Fleet.

[VAN FLEET exits]

FLINT: Inspector Sweeney!

CLERK: Inspector Sweeney!

[POLICE INSPECTOR SWEENEY, round-faced, somewhat naive, walks to the stand]

CLERK: You solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God?

SWEENEY: I do.

FLINT: Your name?

SWEENEY: Elmer Sweeney.

FLINT: Your occupation?

SWEENEY: Inspector of Police.

FLINT: On the night of January sixteenth were you called upon to investigate Bjorn Faulkner's death?

SWEENEY: Yes, sir. I was one of the first officers to reach the spot.

FLINT: Did you question Miss Andre?

SWEENEY: Not right away. Before I could do anything, that fellow Van Fleet rushed up to me and yelled that he had seen Karen Andre throw Faulkner off the roof.

FLINT: How did Miss Andre react to this?

SWEENEY: She was stunned. She stood there, her eyes wide fit to burst. And then, cross my heart, sir, she started laughing. I thought she'd went crazy.

FLINT: What did you do?

SWEENEY: I ordered her held for questioning and we took her up with us in the elevator -- to examine the penthouse. What a joint!

FLINT: Did you find anything unusual?

SWEENEY: Unusual -- yes, sir. The bedroom.

FLINT: Ah, and what did you find in the bedroom?

SWEENEY: Nightgowns, sir. Lace nightgowns, just about made of thin air. A crystal bathtub in the bathroom. And we turned the shower on -- and the water was perfumed.

FLINT: [Smiling]You misunderstood my question, Inspector. I wasn't referring to the esthetic values of the penthouse. I asked if you found anything unusual that could be connected with Bjorn Faulkner's death?

SWEENEY: Yes, sir. In the living room.

FLINT: And what was that?

SWEENEY: A letter. It was lying in plain sight on a table. It was sealed and the address said: "To whomsoever finds it first."

[FLINT takes a letter from the CLERK and hands it to SWEENEY]

FLINT: Is this the letter?

SWEENEY: Yes, sir.

FLINT: Will you kindly read it to the jury?

SWEENEY: [Reading]"If any future historian wants to record my last advice to humanity, I'll say that I found only two enjoyable things on this earth whose every door was open to me: My whip over the world and Karen Andre. To those who can use it, the advice is worth what it has cost mankind. Bjorn Faulkner."

FLINT:[Handing letter to CLERK] Submitted as evidence.

JUDGE HEATH: Accepted as Exhibit A.

FLINT: Did you question Miss Andre about this letter?

SWEENEY: I did. She said that Faulkner wrote the letter and left it there, on the table, and ordered her not to touch it, then went out to the roof garden. She struggled with him, when she saw what he was going to do, but she couldn't stop him.

FLINT: Did you ask her who had been with them that night?

SWEENEY: I did. She said two gentlemen had: they were friends of Mr. Faulkner and she had never seen them before. He picked them up in a night club, that evening, and brought them along. She said their names were "Jerry White" and "Dick Saunders."

FLINT: Did you try to find any gentlemen by these names among Mr. Faulkner's acquaintances?

SWEENEY: We did. We found that no one had ever heard of them.

FLINT: And Miss Andre told you, as she did at the inquest, that she had never seen these two men before?

SWEENEY: Yes, sir.

FLINT: Was she very emphatic about that?

SWEENEY: Yes, sir.Very.

FLINT: That is all, Inspector.

STEVENS: Miss Andre told you that she had struggled with Faulkner to prevent his suicide. Did you notice any evidence of a struggle in her clothes?

SWEENEY: Yes, sir. Her dress was torn. It had diamond shoulder straps, and one of them was broken, so that she had to hold the dress up with one hand.

STEVENS: What did you think of that?

SWEENEY: [Embarrassed]Do I have to answer?

STEVENS: You certainly do.

SWEENEY: Well . . . I wished he had broken the other strap, too.

STEVENS: I meant, did you think that the dress looked as though it had been torn in a struggle?

SWEENEY: It looked like it, yes, sir.

STEVENS: Now, can you tell us why on earth you turned the shower on in the bathroom?

SWEENEY: [Embarrassed]Well, you see, we heard Faulkner had wine instead of water in it.

STEVENS: [Laughing] You mustn't believe all the legends you hear about Bjorn Faulkner . . . That's all, Inspector.

[SWEENEY leaves the stand and exits]

FLINT: Magda Svenson!

CLERK: Magda Svenson!

[MAGDA SVENSON enters and waddles toward the witness stand. She is fat, middle-aged, with tight, drawn lips, suspicious eyes, an air of offended righteousness. Her clothes are plain, old-fashioned, meticulously neat]

You solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God?

MAGDA: [Speaks with a pronounced Swedish accent]I swear.[She takes the Bible, raises it slowly to her lips, kisses it solemnly, and hands it back, taking the whole ceremony with a profound religious seriousness]

FLINT: What is your name?

MAGDA: You know it. You just call me.

FLINT: Kindly answer my questions without argument. State your name.

MAGDA: Magda Svenson.

FLINT: What is your occupation?

MAGDA: I am housekeeper.

FLINT: By whom were you employed last?

MAGDA: By Herr Bjorn Faulkner and before that his father.

FLINT: How long have you been employed by them?

MAGDA: I been in the family thirty-eight years. I remember Herr Bjorn since he was little child.

FLINT: When did you come to America?

MAGDA: I been here five years.

FLINT: What were the duties Mr. Faulkner assigned to you?

MAGDA: I keep penthouse for him. He visit here every year or so. I stay even after he go, when he get married. But I never employed by this one.

[She points at KAREN with undisguised hatred]

FLINT: Now, Mrs. Svenson, what --

MAGDA: [Offended] Miss Svenson.

FLINT: I beg your pardon, Miss Svenson. What do you know about Miss Andre's relations with Mr. Faulkner?

MAGDA: [With forceful indignation] Decent woman like me shouldn't know about such things. But sin is shameless in this world.

FLINT: Tell us about it, Miss Svenson.

MAGDA: From very first day this woman appeared, she was sleeping with Herr Faulkner. It isn't good thing when a man forgets line between his bed and his desk. And she put her claws tight on both. Sometimes, they talked loans and dividends in bed; other times, the door to his office was locked and, under the window shades that was pulled down, I seen her lace pants on the window sill.

STEVENS: [Jumping up] Your Honor! We object!

FLINT: I think Miss Andre should have objected many years ago!

STEVENS: Such line of testimony is outrageous!

FLINT: These are facts pertaining to the vital question of their relationship and --

JUDGE HEATH: [Rapping his gavel] Silence, gentlemen! I shall ask the witness to word her testimony more carefully.

MAGDA: Sin is sin any name you call it, Judge.

FLINT: Miss Svenson, do you know of any instance when Miss Andre's conduct was detrimental to Mr. Faulkner in other ways than moral?

MAGDA: I do so. You try count up all money he waste on that woman.

FLINT: Can you tell us an instance of Mr. Faulkner's extravagance?

MAGDA: I tell you. He had a platinum gown made for her. Yes, I said platinum. Fine mesh, fine and soft as silk. She wore it on her naked body. He would make a fire in the fireplace and he would heat the dress and then put it on her. It cooled and you could see her body in silver sheen, and it been more decent if she had been naked. And she ask to put it on as hot as she can stand, and if it burned her shameless skin, she laughed like the pagan she is, and he kissed the burn, wild like tiger!

STEVENS: Your Honor! We object! This testimony is irrelevant and only tends to prejudice the jury against Miss Andre!

KAREN: [Very calmly] Let her talk, Stevens.

[She looks at the jury and for a swift moment we see a smile, mischievous, tempting, radiant, a surprise in this cold business woman, revealing an entirely different type of femininity]

Perhaps it may prejudice the jury in my favor.

[Commotion in the courtroom. STEVENS stares at KAREN.JUDGE HEATH strikes his gavel]

FLINT: Mr. Stevens has my sympathy. His client is not an easy one to handle.

JUDGE HEATH: Silence! Objection overruled.

FLINT: Did you observe Mr. Faulkner's attitude toward his marriage?

MAGDA: He was happy for first time in his life. He was happy like decent man what found right road.

FLINT: Did you know of anything that made him worry in those days, that could bring him to suicide eventually?

MAGDA: No. Nothing.

FLINT: Now, tell us, Miss Svenson, did you observe Miss Andre's attitude toward Mr. Faulkner's marriage?

MAGDA: She silent, like stone statue. She --

[There is a commotion in the courtroom. NANCY LEE FAULKNER appears at the spectators' door at left. NANCY LEE FAULKNER is twenty-two, blonde, slender, delicate, perfect as a costly porcelain statuette. Her exquisite white skin is a contrast to the somber, unrelieved black of her clothes; they are clothes of mourning, severe and in perfect taste. EVERYONE in the courtroom stares at her. KAREN turns toward her slowly. But NANCY LEE does not look at KAREN. FLINT cannot restrain an exclamation of astonishment]

FLINT: Mrs. Faulkner!

NANCY LEE: [She speaks in a soft, slow voice] I understand you wanted to call me as a witness, Mr. Flint?

FLINT: I did, Mrs. Faulkner, but I thought you were in California.

NANCY LEE: I was. I escaped.

FLINT: You escaped?

NANCY LEE: Father was concerned over my health. He wouldn't allow me to come back. But I want to do my duty toward the memory of . . . [Her voice trembles a little] my husband. I'm at your disposal, Mr. Flint.

FLINT: I can only express my deepest appreciation, Mrs. Faulkner. If you will kindly take a seat, we will be ready for you in just a little while.

NANCY LEE: Thank you.

[She takes one of the spectators' chairs at the wall, at right]

FLINT: [To MAGDA] You were telling us about Miss Andre's attitude toward Mr. Faulkner's marriage, Miss Svenson.

MAGDA: I said she keep silent. But I hear her crying one night, after marriage. Crying, sobbing -- and that the first and only time in her life.

FLINT: Did she seem to . . . suffer much?

MAGDA: Suffer? No. Not her. One man more or less make no much difference to her. I seen her unfaithful to Herr Faulkner on the night of his wedding.

[Reaction in the courtroom. Even KAREN takes notice, a little startled]

FLINT: Unfaithful? With whom?

MAGDA: I don't know the man. I seen him first time the night of Herr Faulkner's wedding.

FLINT: Tell us about it.

MAGDA: I gone to wedding. Ah, it was beautiful. My poor Herr Bjorn so handsome and the young bride all white and lovely as lily.

[Sniffles audibly]

I cried like looking at my own children.

[Her voice changes; she points at KAREN ferociously]

But she not go to wedding!

FLINT: Did Miss Andre stay at home?

MAGDA: She stay home. I come back early. I come in servants' door. She not hear me come. She was home. But she was not alone.

FLINT: Who was with her?

MAGDA: He was. The man. Out on the roof, in the garden. It was dark, but I could see. He holding her in his arms and I think he want to crush her bones. He bent her back so far I think she fall into her reflection in the pool. And then he kiss her and I think he never get his lips off hers.

FLINT: And then?

MAGDA: She step aside and say something. I cannot hear, she speak very soft. He not say word. He just take her hand and kiss it and hold it on his lips so long I get tired waiting and go back to my room.

FLINT: Did you learn the name of that man?

MAGDA: No.

FLINT: Did you see him again?

MAGDA: Yes. Once.

FLINT: And when was that?

MAGDA: The night of January sixteenth.

[A movement in the courtroom]

FLINT: Tell us about it, Miss Svenson.

MAGDA: Well, she very strange that day. She call me and said I have the rest of day off. And I been suspicious.

FLINT: Why did that make you suspicious?

MAGDA: My day off is Thursday and I not asked for second day. So I said I not need day off, and she said she not need me. So I go.

FLINT: What time did you go?

MAGDA: About four o'clock. But I want to know secret. I come back.

FLINT: When did you come back?

MAGDA: About ten at night. The house dark, she not home. So I wait. Half hour after, I hear them come. I seen Herr Faulkner with her. So I afraid to stay. But before I go I seen two gentlemen with them. One gentleman, he drunk, I not know him.

FLINT: Did you know the other one?

MAGDA: The other one -- he was tall and lanky and had light eyes. He was the man I seen kissing Miss Andre.

FLINT: [Almost triumphant] That's all, Miss Svenson.

[MAGDA is about to leave the stand. STEVENS stops her]

STEVENS: Just a minute, Miss Svenson. You still have to have a little talk with me.

MAGDA: [Resentfully] For what? I say all I know.

STEVENS: You may know the answers to a few more questions. Now, you said that you had seen that stranger kissing Miss Andre?

MAGDA: Yes, I did.

STEVENS: You said it was dark, that night when you saw him for the first time?

MAGDA: Yes, it was dark.

STEVENS: And, on the night of January sixteenth, when you were so ingeniously spying on your mistress, you said that you saw her come in with Mr. Faulkner, and you hurried to depart in order not to be caught. Am I correct?

MAGDA: You have a good memory.

STEVENS: You just had a swift glance at the two gentlemen with them?

MAGDA: Yes.

STEVENS: Can you tell us what the drunken gentleman looked like?

MAGDA: How can I? No time to notice face and too dark at door.

STEVENS: So! It was too dark? And you were in a hurry? And yet you were able to identify a man you had seen but once before?

MAGDA: [With all the strength of her righteous indignation] Let me tell you, mister! I'm under oath as you say, and I'm religious woman and respect oath. But I said it was the same man and I say it again!

STEVENS: That is all. Thank you, Miss Svenson.

[MAGDA leaves the stand, carefully avoiding looking at KAREN. There is a little hush of expectancy as all eyes turn to NANCY LEE FAULKNER. FLINT calls solemnly, distinctly]

FLINT: Mrs. Faulkner!

CLERK: Mrs. Faulkner!

[NANCY LEE rises and walks to the stand slowly, as if each step taxed her strength. She is calm, but gives the impression that the ordeal is painful to her and that she is making a brave effort to do her duty]

CLERK: You solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God?

NANCY LEE: I do.

FLINT: What is your name?

NANCY LEE: Nancy Lee Faulkner.

FLINT: What relation were you to the late Bjorn Faulkner?

NANCY LEE: I was . . . his wife.

FLINT: I realize how painful this is to you, Mrs. Faulkner, and I appreciate your courage, but I will have to ask you many questions that will awaken sad memories.

NANCY LEE: I am ready, Mr. Flint.

FLINT: When did you first meet Bjorn Faulkner?

NANCY LEE: In August of last year.

FLINT: Where did you meet him?

NANCY LEE: At a ball given by my friend Sandra van Renssler, in Newport.

FLINT: Will you kindly tell us about it, Mrs. Faulkner?

NANCY LEE: Sandra introduced us. I remember she said: "Here's a tough one for you, Nancy. I wonder whether you'll add this scalp to the well-known collection." Sandra had always insisted on exaggerating my popularity . . . I danced with him, that night. We danced in the garden, under the trees, and stopped on the edge of a pool. We were alone in the darkness, with the faint sound of the Blue Danube Waltz filling the silence. Mr. Faulkner reached up to pick a rose for me. As he tore it off, his hand brushed my bare shoulder. I don't know why, but I blushed. He noticed it and apologized, graciously, smiling. Then he took me back to the guests . . . I think we both felt a silent understanding, that night, for we did not dance again with each other.

FLINT: When did you see Mr. Faulkner again?

NANCY LEE: Three days later. I invited him to dine at my home on Long Island; just an informal little dinner with Father as my chaperon. It was a real Swedish meal -- and I cooked it myself.

FLINT: Did you see him often after that?

NANCY LEE: Yes, quite often. His visits became more and more frequent until the day . . .

[Her voice breaks]

FLINT: Until the day?

NANCY LEE: [Her voice barely above a whisper]

The day he proposed to me.

FLINT: Please tell us about it, Mrs. Faulkner.

NANCY LEE: We went driving, Mr. Faulkner and I, alone. It was a beautiful day, with a bright, cold sunshine. I was driving my car -- and I felt so young, so happy that I grew reckless. I . . .

[Her voice trembles; she is silent for a few seconds, as if fighting the pain of these memories, then resumes with a faint smile of apology]

I'm sorry. It's a little . . . hard for me to think of . . . those days . . . I was reckless . . . reckless enough to lose my way. We stopped on a strange country road. I laughed and said: "We're lost. I've kidnapped you and I won't release you." He answered: "The ransom you want is not in circulation." Then, suddenly, he seized my hand and looking straight at me, said: "What's the use of pretending? I love you, Nancy . . ."

[Her voice breaks into a sob. She buries her face in a lace handkerchief]

FLINT: I'm so sorry, Mrs. Faulkner. If you wish to be dismissed now and continue tomorrow --

NANCY LEE: [Raising her head] Thank you, I'm all right. I can go on . . . It was then that I first learned about the desperate state of Mr. Faulkner's fortune. He said that he had to tell me the truth, that he could not ask me to marry him when he had nothing to offer me. But I . . . I loved him. So I told him that money had never meant anything to me.

FLINT: Did Mr. Faulkner feel hopeless about the future, when your engagement was announced?

NANCY LEE: No, not at all. He said that my faith in him and my courage helped him so much. I told him that it was our duty to save his enterprises, our duty to the world he had wronged, not to ourselves. I made him realize his past mistakes and he was ready to atone for them. We were entering a new life together, a life of unselfish devotion to the service and welfare of others.

FLINT: Did you remain in New York after your wedding?

NANCY LEE: Yes. We made our home in my Long Island residence. Mr. Faulkner gave up his New York penthouse.

FLINT: Did Mr. Faulkner tell you of his relations with Miss Andre?

NANCY LEE: No, not then. But he did, two weeks after our wedding. He came to me and said: "Dearest, there is a woman – there was a woman -- and I feel I must tell you about her." I said: "I know it. You don't have to say a word if you'd rather not, dear."

FLINT: And what did Mr. Faulkner tell you?

NANCY LEE: He said: "Karen Andre is the cause and the symbol of my darkest years. I am going to dismiss her."

FLINT: What did you answer?

NANCY LEE: I said that I understood him and that he was right. "But," I said, "we must not be cruel. Perhaps you can find another position for Miss Andre." He said that he'd provide for her financially, but that he never wanted to see her again.

FLINT: He, therefore, dismissed Miss Andre voluntarily, of his own choice?

NANCY LEE: [Proudly] Mr. Flint, there are two kinds of women in this world. And my kind is never jealous of . . . the other.

FLINT: What was Mr. Faulkner's business situation after your marriage?

NANCY LEE: I'm afraid I don't understand much about business. But I know that Father made a loan -- a very large loan -- to my husband.

FLINT: Mrs. Faulkner, will you tell us whether you think it possible that your husband had any reason to commit suicide?

NANCY LEE: I think it totally impossible.

FLINT: Did he ever speak of his plans for the future?

NANCY LEE: We used to dream of the future, together. Even . . . even on the evening before his . . . his death. We were sitting by the fire, in his study, talking about the years ahead. We knew that we would not be wealthy for a long time. We were planning to have a modest little home, with a bright kitchen and a little flower garden. We'd be so happy there, just the two of us, until . . . until we had little ones to take care of . . .

FLINT: And this was on the night of January fifteenth, the day before his death?

NANCY LEE: [Feebly] Yes.

FLINT: What did Mr. Faulkner do on the day of January sixteenth?

NANCY LEE: He spent it in town, on business, as usual. He came home late in the afternoon. He said that he had to attend a business banquet in New York that night, so he did not have dinner at home. He left at about six o'clock.

FLINT: What banquet was Mr. Faulkner supposed to attend?

NANCY LEE: He did not tell me and I didn't ask. I made it a point never to interfere with his business.

FLINT: Did you notice anything peculiar when he said goodbye to you, that night?

NANCY LEE: No, not a thing. He kissed me and said that he'd try to come home early. I stood at the door and watched him drive away. He waved to me as his car disappeared in the dusk. I stood there for a few minutes, thinking of how happy we were, of what a perfect dream our love had been, like a delicate idyll, like . . .[Her voice trembles]

I didn't know that our beautiful romance would . . . indirectly . . . through jealousy . . . bring about his . . . his death.

[She drops her head, hiding her face in her hands, sobbing audibly, as STEVENS's voice booms out]

STEVENS: Your Honor! We object! Move that that be stricken out!

JUDGE HEATH: The witness's last sentence may go out.

FLINT: Thank you, Mrs. Faulkner. That is all.

STEVENS: [Coldly] Will you be able to answer a few questions now, Mrs. Faulkner?

NANCY LEE: [Raising her tear-stained face, proudly] As many as you wish, Mr. Stevens.

STEVENS: [Softly] You said that your romance was like a perfect dream, didn't you?

NANCY LEE: Yes.

STEVENS: A sacred troth that regenerated a soul?

NANCY LEE: Yes.

STEVENS: A beautiful, uplifting relationship based on mutual trust?

NANCY LEE: [Becoming a little astonished] Yes.

STEVENS: [Changing his voice, fiercely] Then why did you hire a detective to spy on your husband?

NANCY LEE: [A little flustered] I . . . that is . . . I didn't hire a detective to spy on my husband. I hired him to protect Mr. Faulkner.

STEVENS: Will you kindly explain that?

NANCY LEE: Well . . . you see . . . you see, some time ago, Mr. Faulkner had been threatened by a gangster -- "Guts" Regan. I believe they call him that. Mr. Faulkner did not pay any attention to it -- no one could intimidate him -- and he refused to hire a bodyguard. But I was worried . . . so as soon as we were married, I hired Mr. Van Fleet to watch him. I did it secretly, because I knew that Mr. Faulkner would object.

STEVENS: How could a sleuth following at a distance protect Mr. Faulkner?

NANCY LEE: Well, I heard that the underworld has a way of finding out those things and I thought they would not attack a man who was constantly watched.

STEVENS: So all Mr. Van Fleet had to do was to watch Mr. Faulkner?

NANCY LEE: Yes.

STEVENS: Mr. Faulkner alone?

NANCY LEE: Yes.

STEVENS: Not Mr. Faulkner and Miss Andre?

NANCY LEE: Mr. Stevens, that supposition is insulting to me.

STEVENS: I haven't noticed you sparing insults, Mrs. Faulkner.

NANCY LEE: I'm sorry, Mr. Stevens. I assure you that was not my intention.

STEVENS: You said that Mr. Faulkner told you he never wanted to see Miss Andre again?

NANCY LEE: Yes, he did.

STEVENS: And yet, he called on her after his marriage, he called on her often and at night. Your detective told you that, didn't he?

NANCY LEE: Yes. I knew it.

STEVENS: How do you explain it?

NANCY LEE: I cannot explain it. How can I know what blackmail she was holding over his head?

STEVENS: How do you explain the fact that Mr. Faulkner lied to you about the business banquet on the night of January sixteenth and went directly to Miss Andre's house?

NANCY LEE: If I could explain that, Mr. Stevens, I might be able to save you the bother of this trial. We would have an explanation of my husband's mysterious death. All I know is that she made him come to her house for some reason which he could not tell me -- and that he was found dead, that night.

STEVENS: Mrs. Faulkner, I want you to answer one more question.

NANCY LEE: Yes?

STEVENS: I want you to state here, under oath, that Bjorn Faulkner loved you.

NANCY LEE: Bjorn Faulkner was mine.

STEVENS: That is all, Mrs. Faulkner.

KAREN: [Calmly, distinctly] No. That's not all.

[All eyes turn to her]

Ask her one more question, Stevens.

STEVENS: What is it, Miss Andre?

KAREN: Ask her whether she loved him.

NANCY LEE: [Sitting straight up, with the icy poise of a perfect lady] I did, Miss Andre.

KAREN: [Jumping to her feet] Then how can you speak of him as you did? How can you sit here and lie, lie about him, when he can't come back to defend himself?

[JUDGE HEATH strikes his gavel violently. NANCY LEE gasps and jumps to her feet]

NANCY LEE: I won't stand for it! Why should I be questioned by . . . by the murderess of my husband!

[She falls back on the chair, sobbing. FLINT rushes to her]

KAREN: [Calmly] That's all.

FLINT: I'm so sorry, Mrs. Faulkner!

JUDGE HEATH: The court will now adjourn till ten o'clock tomorrow morning.

[EVERYONE rises. JUDGE HEATH leaves the courtroom, while FLINT helps NANCY LEE down from the witness stand. As she passes by KAREN, NANCY LEE throws a defiant look at her .KAREN stands straight and says aloud, so that all heads turn to her]

KAREN: One of us is lying. And we both know which one!

CURTAIN

Act Two

Scene: Same scene as at the opening of Act I. KAREN sitting at the defense table, as proudly calm as ever. When the curtain rises, the BAILIFF raps.

BAILIFF: Court attention!

[JUDGE HEATH enters. EVERYONE rises]

Superior Court Number Eleven of the State of New York. The Honorable Judge William Heath presiding.

[JUDGE HEATH sits down, BAILIFF raps, and EVERYONE resumes his seat]

JUDGE HEATH: The people of the State of New York versus Karen Andre.

FLINT: Ready, your Honor.

STEVENS: Ready, your Honor.  

JUDGE HEATH: The District Attorney may proceed.

FLINT: If your Honor please, the prosecution has one more witness to introduce. Mr. John Graham Whitfield!

CLERK: John Graham Whitfield!

[MR. WHITFIELD comes in, followed by NANCY LEE.MR. WHITFIELD is tall, gray-haired, perfectly groomed, a thorough gentleman with the imperious manner of a wartime generalissimo. NANCY LEE walks in slowly, head downcast. WHITFIELD pats her hand affectionately as if to encourage her, as they part; he walks to the witness stand, and she takes a chair at right]

CLERK: You solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God?

WHITFIELD: I do.

FLINT: What is your name?

WHITFIELD: John Graham Whitfield.

FLINT: What is your occupation?

WHITFIELD: I am president of the Whitfield National Bank.

FLINT: Were you related to the late Bjorn Faulkner?

WHITFIELD: I was his father-in-law.

FLINT: It is obvious, Mr. Whitfield, that you are well qualified to pass judgment on financial matters. Can you tell us about the state of Mr. Faulkner's business at the time preceding his death?

WHITFIELD: I shall say it was desperate, but not hopeless. My bank made a loan of twenty-five million dollars to Mr. Faulkner in an effort to save his enterprises. Needless to say, that money is lost.

FLINT: What prompted you to make that loan, Mr. Whitfield?

WHITFIELD: He was the husband of my only daughter; her happiness has always been paramount to me. But my motives were not entirely personal: realizing the countless tragedies of small investors that the crash would bring, I considered it my duty to make every possible effort to prevent it.

FLINT: Is it possible that you would have risked such a considerable sum in Mr. Faulkner's enterprises if you believed them hopelessly destined to crash?

WHITFIELD: Certainly not. It was a difficult undertaking, but I had full confidence that my business acumen would have prevented the crash -- had Faulkner lived.

FLINT: He, therefore, had no reason to commit suicide as far as his business affairs were concerned?

WHITFIELD: He had every reason for remaining alive.

FLINT: Now, Mr. Whitfield, can you tell us whether Mr. Faulkner was happy in his family life, in his relations with your daughter?

WHITFIELD: Mr. Flint, I would like to state that I have always regarded the home and the family as the most important institutions in our lives. You, therefore, will believe me when I tell you how important my daughter's family happiness was to me -- and she had found perfect happiness with Mr. Faulkner.

FLINT: Mr. Whitfield, what was your opinion of Mr. Faulkner?

WHITFIELD: It is only fair to admit that he had many qualities of which I did not approve. We were as different as two human beings could be: I believe in one's duty above all; Bjorn Faulkner believed in nothing but his own pleasure.

FLINT: From your knowledge of him, Mr. Whitfield, would you say you consider it possible that Mr. Faulkner committed suicide?

WHITFIELD: I consider it absolutely impossible.

FLINT: Thank you, Mr. Whitfield. That is all.

STEVENS: Mr. Whitfield, were you very fond of your son-in-law?

WHITFIELD: Yes.

STEVENS: And you never disagreed with him, never lost your temper in a quarrel?

WHITFIELD: [With a tolerant, superior smile] Mr. Stevens, I never lose my temper.

STEVENS: If my memory serves me right, there was some kind of trouble at the time you made that stupendous loan to Mr. Faulkner. Wasn't there something said to the effect that you denied making the loan?

WHITFIELD: Purely a misunderstanding, I assure you. I must admit that Mr. Faulkner made a . . . somewhat unethical attempt to hasten that loan, which was quite unnecessary, since I granted it gladly -- for my daughter's sake.

STEVENS: You said that your fortune has been badly damaged by the Faulkner crash?

WHITFIELD: Yes.

STEVENS: And your financial situation is rather strained at present?

WHITFIELD: Yes.

STEVENS: Then how could you afford to offer a fifty thousand dollar reward for the arrest and conviction of "Guts" Regan?

FLINT: Objection! What has that got to do with the case?

WHITFIELD: Your Honor, I would like to have the privilege of explaining this.

JUDGE HEATH: Very well.

WHITFIELD: I did offer such a reward. I was prompted by a feeling of civic duty. The gentleman commonly known as "Guts" Regan is a notorious criminal. I offered that reward for evidence that would make his arrest and conviction possible. However, I agree with Mr. Flint that this has nothing to do with the present case.

STEVENS: Mr. Whitfield, can you tell us why you left for California in such a hurry before the beginning of this trial?

WHITFIELD: I think the answer is obvious. My daughter was crushed by the sudden tragedy. I hastened to take her away, to save her health, perhaps her life.

STEVENS: You love your daughter profoundly?

WHITFIELD: Yes.

STEVENS: You have always made it a point that her every wish should be granted?

WHITFIELD: I can proudly say yes.

STEVENS: When she -- or you -- desire anything, you don't stop at the price, do you?

WHITFIELD: We don't have to.

STEVENS: Then would you refuse to buy her the man she wanted?

FLINT: Your Honor! We --

WHITFIELD: Mr. Stevens!

STEVENS: You wouldn't stop if it took your entire fortune to break the first unbreakable man you'd ever met?

FLINT: Your Honor! We object!

JUDGE HEATH: Sustained.

STEVENS: Now, Mr. Whitfield, are you going to tell us that your money had nothing to do with Mr. Faulkner dismissing Miss Andre? That no ultimatum was delivered to him?

WHITFIELD: [His tone is slightly less kindly and composed than before] You are quite mistaken in your insinuations. My daughter was no more jealous of Miss Andre than she would be of Mr. Faulkner's soiled underwear. All men have some at one time or another!

STEVENS: I'd be careful of statements such as these, Mr. Whitfield. Remember that your daughter paid for what Karen Andre got free!

FLINT: Your Honor! We --

[WHITFIELD jumps to his feet; his face is distorted; he is shaking with fury. JUDGE HEATH raps his gavel, but to no avail. NANCY LEE jumps up, crying hysterically through WHITFIELD's speech]

NANCY LEE: Father! Father!

WHITFIELD: Why you . . . you God-damn, impudent . . . Do you know who I am? Do you know that I can crush you like a cockroach, as I've crushed many a better --

STEVENS: [With insulting calm] That is just what I wanted to prove. That is all. Thank you, Mr. Whitfield.

FLINT: Your Honor! We move that the defense counsel's outrageous remark which led to this incident be stricken out!

JUDGE HEATH: The remark may go out.

[WHITFIELD leaves the stand and sits down next to NANCY LEE; she takes his hand and holds it affectionately, showing great concern]

FLINT: [Loudly, solemnly] The people rest.

STEVENS: Move that the case be dismissed for lack of evidence.

JUDGE HEATH: Denied.

STEVENS: Exception . . . Ladies and gentlemen of the jury! We cannot pass judgment on Karen Andre without passing it on Bjorn Faulkner. He had put himself beyond all present standards; whether it was below or above them, is a question for each of us to decide personally. But I'll ask you to remember that he was the man who said he needed no justifications for his actions: he was the justification; the man who said that laws were made for the fun of breaking them. If you'll remember that, you will understand that the life into which he was thrown in his last few months was as impossible to him as that of a tiger in a vegetarian cafeteria. And to escape it, he would be driven to the most desperate means - - including suicide!

[STEVENS pauses, then calls]

Our first witness will be James Chandler.

CLERK: James Chandler!

[CHANDLER, middle-aged, precise, dignified, enters and takes the stand]

You solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God?

CHANDLER: I do.

STEVENS: Your name?

CHANDLER: James Chandler.

STEVENS: Your occupation?

CHANDLER: Handwriting expert of the New York Police Department.

[STEVENS takes the letter read by INSPECTOR SWEENEY and hands it to CHANDLER]

STEVENS: Do you recognize this letter?

CHANDLER: Yes. It is the letter found in Mr. Faulkner's penthouse on the night of his death. I have been called upon to examine it.

STEVENS: What were you asked to determine?

CHANDLER: I was asked to determine whether it was written by Mr. Faulkner.

STEVENS: What is your verdict?

CHANDLER: This letter was written by Bjorn Faulkner.

STEVENS: Your witness.

FLINT: Mr. Chandler, it has been called to your attention during the inquest that Miss Andre was in the habit of signing Faulkner's name to unimportant documents, at the time she was employed as his secretary. Have you compared those signatures with Faulkner's real ones?

CHANDLER: I have.

FLINT: What is your opinion of them?

CHANDLER: I can compliment Miss Andre on her art. The difference is very slight.

FLINT: With Miss Andre's knowledge of Mr. Faulkner, is it possible that she could have forged this letter so perfectly as to escape detection?

CHANDLER: It is not probable; but it is possible.

FLINT: That is all.

[CHANDLER exits]

STEVENS: Siegurd Jungquist!

CLERK: Siegurd Jungquist!

[JUNGQUIST enters and takes the stand. He is a man in his late thirties, a little timid in a quiet, reserved way, with a naive face and questioning, as if constantly wondering, eyes. He is Swedish and speaks with an accent]

CLERK: Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God?

JUNGQUIST: I do.

STEVENS: What is your name?

JUNGQUIST: Siegurd Jungquist.

STEVENS: What is your occupation?

JUNGQUIST: My last job was secretary to Herr Bjorn Faulkner.

STEVENS: How long have you held that job?

JUNGQUIST: Since beginning of November. Since Miss Andre left.

STEVENS: What was your position before that?

JUNGQUIST: Bookkeeper for Herr Faulkner.

STEVENS: How long did you hold that job?

JUNGQUIST: Eight years.

STEVENS: Did Mr. Faulkner give you Miss Andre's position when she was dismissed?

JUNGQUIST: Yes.

STEVENS: Did Miss Andre instruct you in your new duties?

JUNGQUIST: Yes, she did.

STEVENS: What was her behavior at that time? Did she seem to be angry, sorry or resentful?

JUNGQUIST: No. She was very calm, like always, and explained everything clearly.

STEVENS: Did you notice any trouble between Miss Andre and Mr. Faulkner at that time?

JUNGQUIST: [Amused, with a kindly, but superior tolerance] Herr Lawyer, there can be no more trouble between Herr Faulkner and Miss Andre as between you and your face in the mirror!

STEVENS: Have you ever witnessed any business conferences between Mr. Faulkner and Mr. Whitfield?

JUNGQUIST: I never been present at conferences, but I seen Herr Whitfield come to our office many times. Herr Whitfield he not like Herr Faulkner.

STEVENS: What makes you think that?

JUNGQUIST: I heard what he said one day. Herr Faulkner was desperate for money and Herr Whitfield asked him, sarcastic-like, what he was going to do if his business crash. Herr Faulkner shrugged and said lightly: "Oh, commit suicide." Herr Whitfield looked at him, very strangely and coldly, and said, very slowly: "If you do, be sure you make a good job of it."

[An ATTENDANT enters and hands a note to STEVENS. STEVENS reads it, shrugs, astonished; then turns to JUDGE HEATH]

STEVENS: If your Honor please, I would like to report this incident which I consider as a hoax and whose purpose I would like to determine. A man has just called on the telephone and insisted on talking to me immediately. When informed that it was impossible, he gave the following message just brought to me.

[Reads note]

"Do not put Karen Andre on the stand until I get there." No signature.

[The crash of her chair pushed back so violently that it falls makes all eyes turn to KAREN. She stands straight, eyes blazing, her calm poise shattered]

KAREN: I want to go on the stand right away!

[Reaction in the courtroom]

FLINT: May I ask why, Miss Andre?

KAREN: [Ignoring him] Question me now, Stevens!

STEVENS: [Very astonished] I'm afraid it's impossible, Miss Andre. We have to finish the examination of Mr. Jungquist.

KAREN: Then hurry. Hurry.

[She sits down, showing signs of nervousness for the first time]

JUDGE HEATH: [Rapping his gavel]I shall ask the defendant to refrain from further interruptions.

STEVENS: Now, Mr. Jungquist, where were you on the night of January sixteenth?

JUNGQUIST: I was in our office in the Faulkner Building. I was working. I been working late for many nights.

STEVENS: What did you do when you heard of Mr. Faulkner's death?

JUNGQUIST: I want to call Herr Whitfield. I telephone his home in Long Island, but butler say he not home. I call his office in town, but no answer, no one there. I call many places, but not find Herr Whitfield. Then, I call his home again and I have to tell Mrs. Faulkner that Herr Faulkner committed suicide.

STEVENS: And when you told her that, what were Mrs. Faulkner's first words?

JUNGQUIST: She said: "For God's sake, don't give it to the newspapers!"

STEVENS: That is all.

[KAREN jumps up, ready to go on the stand]

FLINT: Just one moment please, Miss Andre. Why such hurry? Whom are you expecting?

[KAREN sits down reluctantly; without answering]

Mr. Jungquist, you have been employed by Bjorn Faulkner for over eight years, haven't you?

JUNGQUIST: Yes.

FLINT: Did you know all that time how crooked and criminal your boss's operations were?

JUNGQUIST: No, I did not.

FLINT: Do you know now that he was a criminal and a swindler?

JUNGQUIST: [With the quiet dignity of a strong conviction] No, I do not know that.

FLINT: You don't, eh? And you didn't know what all those brilliant financial operations of his were?

JUNGQUIST: I knew that Herr Faulkner did what other people not allowed to do. But I never wonder and I never doubt. I know it was not wrong.

FLINT: How did you know that?

JUNGQUIST: Because he was Herr Bjorn Faulkner.

FLINT: And he could do no wrong?

JUNGQUIST: Herr Lawyer, when little people like you and me meet a man like Bjorn Faulkner, we take our hats off and we bow, and sometimes we take orders; but we don't ask questions.

FLINT: Splendid, my dear Mr. Jungquist. Your devotion to your master is worthy of admiration. You would do anything for him, wouldn't you?

JUNGQUIST: Yes.

FLINT: Are you very devoted to Miss Andre, too?

JUNGQUIST: [Significantly] Miss Andre was dear to Herr Faulkner.

FLINT: Then such a little matter as a few lies for your master's sake would mean nothing to you?

STEVENS: We object, your Honor!

JUDGE HEATH: Objection sustained.

JUNGQUIST: [With quiet indignation] I not lied, Herr Lawyer. Herr Faulkner is dead and cannot tell me to lie. But if I had choice, I lie for Bjorn Faulkner rather than tell truth for you!

FLINT: For which statement I am more grateful than you can guess, Herr Jungquist. That is all.

[JUNGQUIST exits]

STEVENS: [Solemnly] Karen Andre!

[KAREN rises. She is calm. She steps up to the stand with the poise of a queen mounting a scaffold. The CLERK stops her]

CLERK: You solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God?

KAREN: [Calmly] That's useless. I'm an atheist.

JUDGE HEATH: The witness has to affirm regardless.

KAREN: [Indifferently] I affirm.

STEVENS: What is your name?

KAREN: Karen Andre.

STEVENS: What was your last position?

KAREN: Secretary to Bjorn Faulkner.

STEVENS: How long have you held that position?

KAREN: Ten years.

STEVENS: Tell us about your first meeting with Bjorn Faulkner.

KAREN: I answered his advertisement for a stenographer. I saw him for the first time in his office, on an obscure side street of Stockholm. He was alone. It was my first job. It was his first office.

STEVENS: How did Faulkner meet you?

KAREN: He got up and didn't say a word. Just stood and looked at me. His mouth was insulting even when silent; you couldn't stand his gaze very long; I didn't know whether I wanted to kneel or slap his face. I didn't do either. I told him what I had come for.

STEVENS: Did he hire you then?

KAREN: He said I was too young and he didn't like me. But he threw a stenographer's pad at me and told me to get down to work, for he was in a hurry. So I did.

STEVENS: And you worked all day?

KAREN: All day. He dictated as fast -- almost faster than he could talk. He didn't give me time to say a word. He didn't smile once and he never took his eyes off me.

STEVENS: When did he first . . .

[He hesitates]

KAREN: When did he first take me? That first day I met him.

STEVENS: How did that happen?

KAREN: He seemed to take a delight in giving me orders. He acted as if he were cracking a whip over an animal he wanted to break. And I was afraid.

STEVENS: Because you didn't like that?

KAREN: Because I liked it . . . So when I finished my eight hours, I told him I was quitting. He looked at me and didn't answer. Then he asked me suddenly if I had ever belonged to a man. I said, No, I hadn't. He said he'd give me a thousand kroner if I would go into the inner office and take my skirt off. I said I wouldn't. He said if I didn't, he'd take me. I said, try it. He did . . . After a while, I picked up my clothes; but I didn't go. I stayed. I kept the job.

STEVENS: And you worked, and lived, and rose to success together ever since?

KAREN: For ten years. When we made our first million kroner, he took me to Vienna. We sat in a restaurant where the orchestra played "Sing, Gypsy." When we made ten million, he took me to Delhi. We stood on the shore of the Ganges, on the steps of an old temple where human slaves had been sacrificed to gods . . . When we made twenty-five million, he took me to New York. We hired a pilot to fly a plane above the city -- and the wind waved Bjorn's hair as a banner over the world at his feet.

STEVENS: Can you tell us the extent of Mr. Faulkner's personal fortune at the height of his success?

KAREN: No, and he couldn't tell you himself: he had no personal fortune. He took what he wanted. When he owed money to one of his companies -- it was crossed off the books and debited to the accounts of several other concerns. It was very simple. We prepared all the balance sheets ourselves.

STEVENS: Why did a man of Mr. Faulkner's genius resort to such methods?

KAREN: He wanted to build a gigantic net and to build it fast; a net over the world, held in his own hand. He had to draw unlimited sums of money; he had to establish his credit. So he paid dividends out of his capital, dividends much higher than we actually earned.

STEVENS: When did Mr. Faulkner's business difficulties start?

KAREN: Over a year ago.

STEVENS: What brought Mr. Faulkner to America, this time?

KAREN: A short term loan of ten million dollars from the Whitfield National Bank was due and we could not meet it. We had to have an extension. Whitfield refused it. Until his daughter came into the question.

STEVENS: How did that happen?

KAREN: Bjorn met her at a party. She made it obvious that she was greatly interested in him . . . Then, one day, he came to me and said: "Karen, we have only one piece of collateral left and you're holding it. You'll have to let me borrow it for a while." I said: "Certainly. What is it?" He said it was himself. I asked: "Nancy Whitfield?" and he nodded. I didn't answer at once -- it wasn't very easy to say -- then, I said: "All right, Bjorn." He asked: "Will that change things between us?" I said: "No."

STEVENS: Had Mr. Faulkner proposed to Miss Whitfield?

KAREN: No. She had proposed to him.

STEVENS: How did that happen?

KAREN: He told me about it. She took him for a drive and stopped on a lonely road. She said that they were lost, that she had kidnapped him and wouldn't release him. He answered that the ransom she wanted was not in circulation. Then she turned to him pointblank and said: "What's the use of pretending? I want you and you know it. You don't want me and I know that. But I pay for what I want, and I have the price." He asked: "And what is the price?" She said: "The extension of a certain ten million dollar loan which you'll need to save your business. If you stay out of jail as a swindler, it can be only in the custody of Mrs. Bjorn Faulkner!"

[NANCY LEE jumps up, trembling with indignation]

NANCY LEE: It's a lie! It's a shameless lie! How can you --

JUDGE HEATH: [Striking his gavel] Quiet, please! Anyone disturbing the proceedings will be asked to leave the courtroom!

[WHITFIELD whispers to NANCY LEE and forces her to sit down, patting her hand}

STEVENS: What was Mr. Faulkner's answer to that, Miss Andre?

KAREN: He said: "It will cost you an awful lot of money." She answered: "Money has never meant anything to me." Then he said: "Will you always remember that it's a business deal? You're not buying any feeling; you're not to expect any." And she answered: "I don't need any. You'll have your money and I'll have you." Such was the bargain.

STEVENS: Was Mr. Whitfield eager to accept that bargain?

KAREN: Bjorn said he thought Mr. Whitfield would have a stroke when his daughter's decision was announced to him. But Miss Whitfield insisted. She always had her way. It was agreed that the loan would be extended and that Whitfield would give Bjorn unlimited credit.

STEVENS: In other words, Faulkner sold himself as his last security?

KAREN: Yes. And like the others, it meant nothing to him.

STEVENS: Did you resent that marriage?

KAREN: No. I didn't. We had always faced our business as a war. We both looked at this as our hardest campaign.

STEVENS: Why did Mr. Faulkner dismiss you two weeks after his wedding?

KAREN: He was forced to do that. Whitfield refused to advance the money he had promised.

STEVENS: What reason did he offer for that refusal?

KAREN: The reason that Bjorn was keeping a mistress. It was Miss Whitfield's ultimatum: I had to be dismissed.

STEVENS: And did Mr. Whitfield grant the loan after you were dismissed?

KAREN: No. He refused it again. He attached what he called "a slight condition" to it.

STEVENS: What was that condition?

KAREN: He wanted the controlling interest in Bjorn's enterprises.

STEVENS: Did Faulkner agree to that?

KAREN: Bjorn said that he'd rather gather all his stock certificates into one pile -- and strike a match.

STEVENS: And did Mr. Whitfield grant the loan?

KAREN: No, he didn't grant it. Bjorn took it.

STEVENS: How did he do that?

KAREN: By forging Mr. Whitfield's signature on twenty-five million dollars' worth of securities.

STEVENS: How do you know that?

KAREN: [Calmly] I helped him to do it.

[Reaction in the courtroom. STEVENS is taken aback; FLINT chuckles]

STEVENS: Did this help Mr. Faulkner?

KAREN: Only temporarily. Certain dividend payments were coming due. We couldn't meet them. Bjorn had stretched his credit to the utmost -- and there was no more to be had.

STEVENS: How did Mr. Faulkner take this situation?

KAREN: He knew it was the end.

STEVENS: What were his plans?

KAREN: You don't find men like Bjorn Faulkner cringing before a bankruptcy commission. And you don't find them locked in jail.

STEVENS: And the alternative?

KAREN: He was not afraid of the world. He had defied its every law. He was going to leave it when and how he pleased. He was --

[The spectators' door at left flies open. A tall, slender, light-eyed young man in traveling clothes rushes in]

REGAN: I told you to wait for me!

[KAREN leaps to her feet with a startled cry. FLINT, WHITFIELD, and several OTHERS jump up. Startled voices exclaim]

VOICES: Regan! "Guts" Regan!

KAREN: [Desperately] Larry! Keep quiet! Please! Oh, please, keep quiet! You promised to stay away!

[JUDGE HEATH raps his gavel -- to no avail]

REGAN: Karen, you don't understand, you don't --

KAREN: [Whirling toward JUDGE HEATH] Your Honor! I demand that this man not be allowed to testify!

FLINT: Why not, Miss Andre?

STEVENS: [Rushing to KAREN] Wait! Don't say a word!

KAREN: [Ignoring him, shouting desperately over the noise] Your Honor . . . !

REGAN: Karen!

[To STEVENS]

Stop her! For God's sake, stop her!

JUDGE HEATH: Silence!

KAREN: Your Honor! This man loves me! Hell do anything to save me! He'll lie! Don't believe a word he says!

[She breaks off abruptly, looks at REGAN defiantly]

REGAN: [Slowly] Karen, your sacrifice is useless: Bjorn Faulkner is dead.

KAREN: [It is a wild, incredulous cry] He's . . . dead?

REGAN: Yes.

KAREN: Bjorn . . . dead?

FLINT: Didn't you know it, Miss Andre?

[KAREN does not answer. She sways and falls, unconscious, on the steps of the witness stand. Pandemonium in the courtroom]

CURTAIN

Act Three

           Scene: Same scene as at the opening of Acts I and II. Court session ready to open. NANCY LEE, WHITFIELD, and JUNGQUIST occupy the spectators' seats. KAREN sits at the defense table, her head bowed, her arms hanging limply. Her clothes are black. She is calm -- a dead, indifferent calm. When she moves and speaks, her manner is still composed; but it is a broken person that faces us now. The BAILIFF raps.

BAILIFF: Court attention!

[JUDGE HEATH enters. EVERYONE rises]

Superior Court Number Eleven of the State of New York. The Honorable Judge William Heath presiding.

[JUDGE HEATH sits down. BAILIFF raps and EVERYONE resumes his seat]

JUDGE HEATH: The people of the State of New York versus Karen Andre.

STEVENS: Ready, your Honor.

FLINT: If your Honor please, I want to report that I have issued a warrant for Regan's arrest, as he is obviously an accomplice in this murder. But he has disappeared. He was last seen with the defense counsel and I would like to --

REGAN: [Entering] Keep your shirt on!

[He walks toward FLINT calmly]

Who's disappeared? What do you suppose I appeared for, just to give you guys a thrill? You don't have to issue any warrants. I'll stay here. If she's guilty, I'm guilty. [He sits down at the defense table]

JUDGE HEATH: The defense may proceed.

STEVENS: Karen Andre.

[KAREN walks to the witness stand. Her grace and poise are gone; she moves with effort]

Miss Andre, when you took the stand yesterday, did you know the whole truth about this case?

KAREN: [Faintly] No.

STEVENS: Do you wish to retract any of your testimony?

KAREN: No.

STEVENS: When you first took the stand, did you intend to shield anyone?

KAREN: Yes.

STEVENS: Whom?

KAREN: Bjorn Faulkner.

STEVENS: Do you still find it necessary to shield him?

KAREN: [Speaking with great effort] No . . . it's not necessary . . . any more.

STEVENS: Do you still claim that Bjorn Faulkner committed suicide?

KAREN: No.

[Forcefully]

Bjorn Faulkner did not commit suicide. He was murdered. I did not kill him. Please, believe me. Not for my sake -- I don't care what you do to me now -- but because you cannot let his murder remain unpunished! I'll tell you the whole truth. I've lied at the inquest. I've lied to my own attorney. I was going to lie here -- but everything I told you so far has been true. I'll tell you the rest.

STEVENS: You had started telling us about Mr. Faulkner's way out of his difficulties, Miss Andre.

KAREN: I told you that he was going to leave the world. But he was not to kill himself. I did throw a man's body off the penthouse. But that body was dead before I threw it. It was not Bjorn Faulkner.

STEVENS: Please explain this to us, Miss Andre.

KAREN: Bjorn wanted to be officially dead. No searches or investigations were to bother him. He was to disappear. That suicide was staged. He had had the plan in mind for a long time. He had kept ten million dollars of the Whitfield forgery for this. We needed someone to help us. Someone who could not be connected with Bjorn in any way. There was only one such person: Regan.

STEVENS: What made you believe that Mr. Regan would be willing to help in so dangerous an undertaking?

KAREN: He loved me.

STEVENS: And he agreed to help you in spite of that?

KAREN: He agreed because of that.

STEVENS: What was the plan, Miss Andre?

KAREN: Regan was to get a corpse. But he wasn't to kill anyone for the purpose. We waited. On the night of January sixteenth, "Lefty" O'Toole, a gunman, was killed by rival gangsters. His murderers have since been arrested and have confessed, so you can be sure that Regan had nothing to do with the murder. But you may remember reading in the papers that O'Toole's body disappeared mysteriously from his mother's house. That was Regan's work. O'Toole's height, measurements and hair were the same as Bjorn's. He was the man I threw off the penthouse.

STEVENS: Was that the extent of Mr. Regan's help?

KAREN: No. He was to get an airplane and take Bjorn to South America. Bjorn had never learned to operate a plane. Regan used to be a -- transport pilot . . . That day, January sixteenth, Bjorn transferred the ten million dollars to three banks in Buenos Aires, in the name of Ragnar Hedin. A month later, I was to meet him at the Hotel Continental in Buenos Aires. Until then -- the three of us were not to communicate with each other. No matter what happened, we were not to reveal the secret.

STEVENS: Tell us what happened on January sixteenth, Miss Andre.

KAREN: Bjorn came to my house, that night. I'll never forget his smile when he stepped out of the elevator: he loved danger. We had dinner together. At nine thirty we went to Regan's. He had O'Toole's body dressed in traveling clothes. We drove back to my house. Bjorn wanted to be seen entering the building. So I didn't use my key. I rang the door bell. We were dressed formally, to make it look like a gay party. Bjorn and Regan supported the body as if he were a drunken friend. The night watchman opened the door. Then we went up in the elevator.

STEVENS: And then what happened?

KAREN: Bjorn exchanged clothes with the corpse. He wrote the letter. Then they carried the body out and left it leaning against the parapet. Then . . . then, we said goodbye.

[KAREN's voice is not trembling; she is not playing for sympathy; only the slightest effort in her words betrays the pain of these memories]

Bjorn was to go first. He went down in the elevator. I stood and watched the needle of the indicator moving down, fifty floors down. Then it stopped. He was gone.

STEVENS: And then?

KAREN: Regan followed him a few minutes later. They were to meet ten miles out of the city where Regan had left his plane. I stayed alone for an hour. The penthouse was so silent. I didn't want to wait out in the garden -- with the corpse . . . the dead man that was supposed to be Bjorn. I lay on the bed in my bedroom. I took Bjorn's robe and buried my face in it. I could almost feel the warmth of his body. There was a clock by the bed and it ticked in the darkness. I waited. When an hour passed, I knew that the plane had taken off. I got up. I tore my dress -- to make it look like a struggle. Then, I went to the garden -- to the parapet. I looked down; there were so many lights . . . the world seemed so small, so far away . . . Then, I threw the body over. I watched it fall. I thought all of Bjorn's troubles went with it . . . I didn't know that . . . his life went, too.

STEVENS: That is all, Miss Andre.

FLINT: I must confess, Miss Andre, that there is not much left for me to do: you've done all my work yourself . . . Now, tell us, didn't Mr. Faulkner have a clear conception of the difference between right and wrong?

KAREN: Bjorn never thought of things as right or wrong. To him, it was only: you can or you can't. He always could.

FLINT: And yourself? Didn't you object to helping him in all those crimes?

KAREN: To me, it was only: he wants or he doesn't.

FLINT: You said that Bjorn Faulkner loved you?

KAREN: Yes.

FLINT: Did he ever ask you to marry him?

KAREN: No. What for?

FLINT: Don't you know that there are laws made for situations such as these?

KAREN: Laws made by whom, Mr. Flint? And for whom?

FLINT: Miss Andre, did your attorney warn you that anything you say here may be held against you?

KAREN: I am here to tell the truth.

FLINT: You loved Bjorn Faulkner?

KAREN: Yes.

FLINT: Such as he was?

KAREN: Because he was such as he was.

FLINT: Exactly, Miss Andre. Now what would you do if a woman were to take away from you the man you worshipped so insanely? If she appealed to his soul, not to his animal desires as you seem to have done so successfully? If she changed the ruthless scoundrel you loved into her own ideal of an upright man? Would you still love him?

STEVENS: Your Honor! We object!

JUDGE HEATH: Objection sustained.

KAREN: But I want to answer. I want the District Attorney to know that he is insulting Bjorn Faulkner's memory.

FLINT: You do? But you thought nothing of insulting him while he lived, by an affair with a gangster?

REGAN: [Jumping up] You damn --

KAREN: [Calmly] Don't, Larry.

[REGAN sits down reluctantly]

You're mistaken, Mr. Flint. Regan loved me. I didn't love him.

FLINT: And he didn't demand the usual . . . price, for his help?

KAREN: He demanded nothing.

FLINT: You were the only one who knew all the details of Faulkner's criminal activities?

KAREN: Yes.

FLINT: You had enough information to send him to jail at any time?

KAREN: I'd never do that!

FLINT: But you could, if you'd wanted to?

KAREN: I suppose so.

FLINT: Well, Miss Andre, isn't that the explanation of Faulkner's visits to you after his marriage? He had reformed, he wanted to avoid a crash. But you held it over his head. You could ruin his plans and expose him before he had made good for his crimes. Wasn't it fear, not love, that held him in your hands?

KAREN: Bjorn never knew the meaning of the word fear.

FLINT: Miss Andre, who knew about that transfer of ten million dollars to Buenos Aires?

KAREN: Only Bjorn, myself and Regan.

FLINT: Regan! Now, Faulkner could have had perfectly legitimate business reasons for that transfer?

KAREN: I don't know of any.

FLINT: You mean, you won't tell of any. Now, Miss Andre, Bjorn Faulkner kept you in extravagant luxury for ten years. You enjoyed platinum gowns and other little things like that. You hated to change your mode of living. You hated to see him turn his fortune over to his investors -- to see him poor -- didn't you?

KAREN: I was never to see him poor.

FLINT: No! Of course not! Because you and your gangster lover were going to murder him and get the ten million no one knew about!

STEVENS: Your Honor! We object!

JUDGE HEATH: Sustained.

FLINT: You've heard it testified that Faulkner had no reason to commit suicide. He had no more reason to escape from the first happiness he'd ever known. And you hated him for that happiness! Didn't you?

KAREN: You don't understand Bjorn Faulkner.

FLINT: Maybe I don't. But let's see if I understand you correctly. You were raped by a man the first day you saw him. You lived with him for ten years in a brazenly illicit relationship. You defrauded thousands of investors the world over. You cultivated a friendship with a notorious gangster. You helped in a twenty-five million dollar forgery. You told us all this proudly, flaunting your defiance of all decency. And you don't expect us to believe you capable of murder?

KAREN: [Very calmly] You're wrong, Mr. Flint. I am capable of murder --for Bjorn Faulkner's sake.

FLINT: That is all, Miss Andre.

[KAREN back to her seat at the defense table, calmly, indifferently]

STEVENS: Lawrence Regan!

CLERK: Lawrence Regan!

[REGAN takes the stand]

You solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God?

REGAN: I do.

STEVENS: What is your name?

REGAN: Lawrence Regan.

STEVENS: [A little hesitantly] What is your occupation?

REGAN: [Calmly, with a faint trace of irony] Unemployed.

STEVENS: How long have you known Karen Andre?

REGAN: Five months.

STEVENS: Where did you meet her?

REGAN: In Faulkner's office. I went there to . . . to do some business with him. I gave up the business, because I met his secretary.

STEVENS: How did you happen to become friendly with Miss Andre?

REGAN: Well, that first meeting wasn't exactly friendly. She wouldn't let me in to see Faulkner. She said I had enough money to buy orchids by the pound -- and I had no business with her boss. I said I'd think it over -- and went. I thought it over. Only, I didn't think of the business. I thought of her. The next day I sent her a pound of orchids. Ever see how many that makes? That's how it started.

STEVENS: Did you know of Miss Andre's relations with Mr. Faulkner?

REGAN: I knew it before I ever saw her. What of it? I knew it was hopeless. But I couldn't help it.

STEVENS: You never expected Miss Andre to share your feeling?

REGAN: No.

STEVENS: You never made any attempt to force it upon her?

REGAN: Do you have to know all that?

STEVENS: I'm afraid we do.

REGAN: I kissed her -- once. By force. It was the night of Faulkner's wedding. She was alone. She was so unhappy. And I was so crazy about her. She told me it was no use. I never wanted her to know. But she knew. We never mentioned it since.

STEVENS: When did Miss Andre first tell you of Faulkner's planned escape?

REGAN: About two weeks before we pulled it.

STEVENS: Was "Lefty" O'Toole one of your men?

REGAN: No.

STEVENS: Were you connected with his murderers in any way?

REGAN: No.

STEVENS: [With a little hesitation] You actually had no definite knowledge of his planned murder?

REGAN: [With the same joint irony] No. I just had a way of guessing.

STEVENS: What happened on the night of January sixteenth?

REGAN: It all worked as Miss Andre has told you. But she knows only half the story. I know the rest.

STEVENS: Tell us what happened after you left the penthouse.

REGAN: I left ten minutes after Faulkner. He had taken my car. I had one of my men leave another car for me at the door. I stepped on it -- full speed.

STEVENS: Where did you go?

REGAN: To Meadow Lane. Ten miles out, in Kings County. I had left my plane there earlier in the evening. Faulkner was to get there first and wait for me.

STEVENS: What time did you get there?

REGAN: About midnight. There was a bright moon. I turned off the road and I could see tire tracks in the mud -- where Faulkner's car had passed. I drove out into the lane. Then, I thought I'd lost my mind: the plane was gone.

STEVENS: What did you do?

REGAN: I searched around that lane for two hours. Faulkner's car was there -- where we had agreed to hide it. It was empty, lights turned off, the key in the switch. I saw tracks on the ground -- where the plane had taken off. But Faulkner couldn't fly it himself.

STEVENS: Did you search for any clues to this mystery?

REGAN: I searched like a bloodhound.

STEVENS: Did you find anything?

REGAN: I did. One thing. A car.

STEVENS: What kind of a car?

REGAN: It was hidden deep in the bushes on the other side of the lane. It was a big black sedan.

STEVENS: What did you do?

REGAN: I wanted to know whose car it was, so I smashed a window, crawled to the back seat and settled down to wait.

STEVENS: How long did you have to wait?

REGAN: The rest of that night.

STEVENS: And then?

REGAN: Then, the owner came back. I saw him coming. His face looked queer. He had no hat. His clothes were wrinkled and grease-spotted.

STEVENS: What did you do?

REGAN: I pretended to be asleep in the back seat. I watched him. He approached; opened the door. Then, he saw me. He gave a start and a yell as if he'd been struck in the heart. His nerves must have been jittery.

STEVENS: Then, what did you do?

REGAN: I awakened with a start, stretched, rubbed my eyes, and said: "Oh, it's you? Fancy, such a meeting!" I don't think he liked it. He asked: "Who are you? What are you doing here?" I said: "My name's Guts Regan -- you may have heard it. I was in a little trouble and had to hide for a while. And finding this car here was quite a convenience." He said: "That's too bad, but I'll have to ask you to get out. I'm in a hurry."

STEVENS: Did you get out?

REGAN: No. I stretched and asked: "What's the hurry?" He said: "None of your business." I smiled and explained: "It's not for me. You see, it happens that a certain columnist is a friend of mine. He'll appreciate the story about a gentleman of your prominence found wandering in the wilderness at milkman time. But I'm sure he would like to have the whole story."

STEVENS: What did the man say?

REGAN: He said nothing. He took out a check book and looked at me. I shrugged and looked at him. Then, he said: "Would five thousand dollars be a suitable token of appreciation to keep your mouth shut?" I said: "It'll do. Lawrence Regan's the name." He wrote out the check. Here it is.

[REGAN produces a check and hands it to STEVENS. Reaction in the courtroom]

STEVENS: [His voice is tensely ominous] I offer this check in evidence.

[He passes the check to the CLERK. CLERK glances at it and gives a start]

FLINT: [Jumping up] What's all this nonsense? Who was the man?

STEVENS: [Solemnly] Who was the man, Mr. Regan?

REGAN: Let the clerk read that check to you.

STEVENS: [To CLERK] Kindly read the check.

CLERK: [Reading] January seventeenth . . . Pay to the order of Lawrence Regan the sum of five thousand dollars." Signed: "John Graham Whitfield."

[Uproar in the courtroom. WHITFIELD jumps to his feet]

WHITFIELD: It's an outrage!

FLINT: I demand to see that check!

JUDGE HEATH: [Striking his gavel] Silence! If there are any more demonstrations of this kind, I shall order the courtroom cleared!

STEVENS: We offer this check in evidence!

FLINT: Objection!

JUDGE HEATH: Objection overruled. Admitted in evidence.

STEVENS: What did you do after you received this check, Mr. Regan?

REGAN: I put it in my pocket and thanked him. Then -- I drew my gun and stuck it in his ribs, and asked: "Now, you lousy bastard, what did you do with Faulkner?" He opened his mouth like a fish choking and couldn't make a sound.

WHITFIELD: Your Honor! Is this man to be allowed to make such statements in public in my presence?

JUDGE HEATH: The witness is allowed to testify. If it is proved to be perjury, he will suffer the consequences. Proceed, Mr. Stevens.

STEVENS: What did he answer, Mr. Regan?

REGAN: At first, he muttered: "I don't know what you're talking about." But I jammed the gun harder and I said: "Cut it out! I've no time to waste. I'm in on it and so are you. Where did you take him?" He said: "If you kill me, you'll never find out."

STEVENS: Did you get any information out of him?

REGAN: Not a word. I didn't want to kill him -- yet. He said: "If you expose me -- you'll expose the fake suicide and Faulkner will be found." I asked: "Is he alive?" He said: "Go and ask him." I talked and threatened. It was no use. I let him go. I thought I could always get him.

STEVENS: Then, did you try to find Faulkner?

REGAN: I didn't lose a second. I rushed home, changed my clothes, grabbed a sandwich and an airplane -- and flew to Buenos Aires. I searched. I advertised in the papers. I got no answer. No one called at the banks for Ragnar Hedin's millions.

STEVENS: Did you try to communicate about this with Miss Andre?

REGAN: No. We had promised to stay away from each other for a month. And she had been arrested -- for Faulkner's murder. I laughed when I read that. I couldn't say a word -- not to betray him if he were still alive. I waited.

STEVENS: What were you waiting for?

REGAN: February sixteenth -- at the Hotel Continental in Buenos Aires. I set my teeth and waited every minute of every hour of that day. He didn't come.

STEVENS: Then?

REGAN: Then I knew he was dead. I came back to New York. I started a search for my plane. We found it. Yesterday.

STEVENS: Where did you find it?

REGAN: In a deserted valley in New Jersey, a hundred miles from Meadow Lane. I recognized the plane by the engine number. It had been landed and fire set to it.

STEVENS: Was the plane . . . empty?

REGAN: No. I found the body of a man in it.

STEVENS: Could you identify him?

REGAN: No one could. It was nothing but a burned skeleton. But the height was the same. It was Faulkner . . . I examined the body -- or what was left of it. I found two bullet holes. One -- in a rib, over the heart. The other -- straight through the right hand. He didn't die without putting up a fight. He must have been disarmed first, shot through the hand; then, murdered, defenseless, straight through the heart.

STEVENS: [After a pause] That's all, Mr. Regan.

FLINT: Just what is your . . . business, Mr. Regan?

REGAN: You'd like me to answer, wouldn't you?

STEVENS: We object, your Honor. The witness has a right not to answer that question.

JUDGE HEATH: Sustained.

FLINT: Mr. Regan, what do you do when prospective clients refuse to pay you protection?

REGAN: I'm legally allowed not to understand what you're talking about.

FLINT: Very well. You don't have to understand. May I question you as to whether you read the newspapers?

REGAN: You may.

FLINT: Well?

REGAN: Question me.

FLINT: Will you kindly state whether you read newspapers?

REGAN: Occasionally.

FLINT: Then did you happen to read that when Mr. James Sutton Vance, Jr., refused to pay protection to . . . a certain gangster, his magnificent country house in Westchester was destroyed by an explosion, just after the guests left, barely missing a wholesale slaughter? What was that, Mr. Regan, a coincidence?

REGAN: A remarkable coincidence, Mr. Flint: just after the guests left.

FLINT: Did you read that when Mr. Van Dorn refused to --

STEVENS: We object, your Honor! Such questions are irrelevant!

JUDGE HEATH: Sustained.

FLINT: So you had no ill feeling toward Mr. Faulkner for the . . . failure of your business with him?

REGAN: No.

FLINT: Now, Mr. "Guts" -- I beg your pardon -- Mr. Lawrence Regan, what would you do if someone were to take this woman you love so much -- and rape her?

REGAN: I'd cut his throat with a dull saw.

FLINT: You would? And you expect us to believe that you, "Guts" Regan, gangster, outlaw, scum of the underworld, would step aside with a grand gesture and throw the woman you wanted into another man's arms?

STEVENS: Your Honor! We --

[STEVENS is near the witness stand. Calmly and forcefully REGAN pushes him aside. Then, turns to FLINT and says very calmly, very earnestly]

REGAN: I loved her.

FLINT: You did? Why did you allow Faulkner to visit her after his marriage?

REGAN: I had nothing to say about that.

FLINT: No? You two didn't hold a blackmail plot over his head?

REGAN: Got any proof of that?

FLINT: Her association with you is the best proof!

STEVENS: Objection!

JUDGE HEATH: Sustained.

FLINT: How did you kill Faulkner in the penthouse that night?

STEVENS: Objection!

JUDGE HEATH: Sustained.

FLINT: Where is your other accomplice, the man who played the drunk?

REGAN: I can give you his exact address: Evergreen Cemetery, Whitfield Family Memorial; which is the swankiest place poor Lefty's ever been.

FLINT: Now, let me get this clear: you claim that the man buried in Evergreen Cemetery is "Lefty" O'Toole, and the man you found in the burned plane is Bjorn Faulkner?

REGAN: Yes.

FLINT: And what is to prove that it isn't the other way around? Supposing you did steal O'Toole's body? What's to prove that you didn't stage that fantastic thing yourself? That you didn't plant the airplane and the body in New Jersey and then appear with that wild story, in a desperate attempt to save your mistress? You've heard her tell us that you'd do anything for her; that you'd lie for her.

STEVENS: We object, your Honor!

JUDGE HEATH: Objection sustained.

FLINT: Where's your real proof, Mr. Regan?

REGAN:[He looks straight at FLINT for a second. When he speaks, his manner is a startling contrast to his former arrogance and irony; it is simple, sincere; it is almost solemn in its earnestness] Mr. Flint, you're a district attorney and I . . . well, you know what I am. We both have a lot of dirty work to do. Such happens to be life -- or most of it. But do you think we're both so low that if something passes us to which one kneels, we no longer have eyes to see it? I loved her; she loved Faulkner. That's our only proof.

FLINT: That's all, Mr. Regan.

[REGAN returns to the defense table]

STEVENS: John Graham Whitfield!

[WHITFIELD walks to the stand hurriedly, resolutely]

Mr. Whitfield, where were you on the night of January sixteenth?

WHITFIELD: I believe I was in New York, on business, that night.

STEVENS: Do you have any witnesses who can prove it?

WHITFIELD: Mr. Stevens, you must realize that I am not in the habit of providing myself with alibis. I've never had reason to keep track of my activities and to secure any witnesses. I would not be able to find them now.

STEVENS: How many cars do you own, Mr. Whitfield?

WHITFIELD: Four.

STEVENS: What are they?

WHITFIELD: One of them is a black sedan, as you are evidently anxious to learn. I may remind you that it is not the only black sedan in New York City.

STEVENS: [Casually] You have just returned from California by plane?

WHITFIELD: Yes.

STEVENS: You flew it yourself?

WHITFIELD: Yes.

STEVENS: You're a licensed pilot, then?

WHITFIELD: I am.

STEVENS: Now, that story of Mr. Regan's is nothing but a lie in your opinion, isn't it?

WHITFIELD: It is.

STEVENS: [Changing his manner, fiercely] Then, who wrote that five thousand dollar check?

WHITFIELD: [Very calmly] I did.

 STEVENS: Will you kindly explain it?

WHITFIELD: It is very simple. We all know Mr. Regan's profession. He had threatened to kidnap my daughter. I preferred to pay him off, rather than to take any chances on her life.

STEVENS: The check is dated January seventeenth. On that same day, you announced your offer of a reward for Regan's arrest, didn't you?

WHITFIELD: Yes. You realize that besides my civic duty, I also had my daughter's safety in mind and I wanted prompt action.

STEVENS: Mr. Whitfield, your daughter and your fortune are your most cherished possessions, aren't they?

WHITFIELD: They are.

STEVENS: Then what would you do to the man who took your money and deserted your daughter for another woman?

FLINT: We object, your Honor!

JUDGE HEATH: Objection sustained.

STEVENS: You hated Faulkner. You wanted to break him. You suspected his intention of staging suicide. The words Mr. Jungquist heard you say prove it. Didn't you?

WHITFIELD: I suspected nothing of the kind!

STEVENS: And on January sixteenth, didn't you spend the day watching Faulkner?

WHITFIELD: Certainly not!

STEVENS: Weren't you trailing Faulkner in your black sedan? Didn't you follow him as soon as he left his penthouse, that night?

WHITFIELD: Fantastic! How could I have recognized him -- supposing it were Faulkner leaving? Van Fleet, the detective, didn't.

STEVENS: Van Fleet wasn't watching for a trick. He had no suspicion of the plot. You had.

WHITFIELD: [With magnificent calm] My dear Mr. Stevens, how could I have known about the plot for that night?

STEVENS: Didn't you have any particular information about Faulkner's activities at the time?

WHITFIELD: None.

STEVENS: You heard of nothing unusual, that day?

WHITFIELD: Not a thing.

STEVENS: For instance, you did not hear that he transferred ten million dollars to Buenos Aires?

WHITFIELD: I never heard of it.

[There is a scream, a terrifying cry, as of one mortally wounded. JUNGQUIST stands clutching his head, moaning wildly]

JUNGQUIST: I killed him! I killed Bjorn Faulkner, God help me! I helped that man to kill him!

[He points at JUNGQUIST, leaps to the clerk's desk, seizes the Bible and, raising it frantically over his head in a shaking hand, cries as if taking a solemn, hysterical oath]

The whole truth, so help me God! . . . I didn't know! But I see it now!

[He points at WHITFIELD]

He killed Faulkner! Because he lied! He knew about the ten million dollars! I told him!

[STEVENS rushes to him]

FLINT: Now, look here, my man, you can't --

STEVENS:[Hurriedly]That's all, Mr. Whitfield.

FLINT: No questions.

[WHITFIELD leaves the stand]

STEVENS: Kindly take the stand, Mr. Jungquist.

[JUNGQUIST obeys]

You told Mr. Whitfield about that transfer?

JUNGQUIST: [Hysterically] He asked me many times about the ten million -- where it was spent. I did not know it was a secret. That day -- I told him -- about Buenos Aires. That day -- at noon -- January sixteenth!

WHITFIELD: What kind of a frame-up is this?

STEVENS: You told Whitfield? At noon?

JUNGQUIST: I did, God have pity on me! I didn't know! I would give my life for Herr Faulkner! And I helped to kill him!

STEVENS: That's all.

FLINT: Were you alone with Mr. Whitfield when you told him?

JUNGQUIST: [Astonished] Yes.

FLINT: Then it's your word against Mr. Whitfield's?

JUNGQUIST: [Stunned by the sudden thought, feebly] Yes . . .

FLINT: That's all.

[JUNGQUIST leaves the stand]

STEVENS: The defense rests.

JUDGE HEATH: Any other witnesses?

FLINT: No, your Honor.

JUDGE HEATH: The defense may proceed with the closing argument.

STEVENS: Your Honor! Ladies and gentlemen of the jury! You are here to decide the fate of a woman. But much more than one woman is here on trial. Before you pronounce your verdict on Karen Andre, think of your verdict on Bjorn Faulkner. Do you believe that he was the kind of man who would bow, renounce and repent? If you do -- she's guilty. But if you believe that in this sad, halfhearted world of ours a man can still be born with life singing in his veins; a scoundrel, a swindler, a criminal, call him anything, but still a conqueror -- if you value a strength that is its own motor, an audacity that is its own law, a spirit that is its own vindication -- if you are able to admire a man who, no matter what mistakes he may have made in form, had never betrayed his essence: his self-esteem -- if, deep in your hearts, you've felt a longing for greatness and for a sense of life beyond the lives around you, if you have known a hunger which gray timidity can't satisfy -- you'll understand Bjorn Faulkner. If you do -- you'll understand the woman who was his priestess . . . Who is on trial in this case? Karen Andre? No! It's you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, who are here on trial. It is your own souls that will be brought to light when your decision is rendered!

JUDGE HEATH: The District Attorney may now conclude the case.

FLINT: Your Honor! Ladies and gentlemen of the jury! For once, I agree with the defense counsel. Two different types of humanity are opposed in this case -- and your verdict will have to depend on which side you choose to believe. You are asked -- by the defense -- to take the side of a swindler, a harlot and a gangster against a man who is a model of social respectability and a woman who is everything the ideal of pure womanhood has been for centuries. On one side, you see a life of service, duty and unselfishness; on the other -- a steamroller of sensual indulgence and egoistic ambition. I agree with the defense counsel that the judgment on this case will be passed deep within your own souls. If you believe that man is placed on earth for a purpose higher than his own enjoyment -- if you believe that love is not all in the bedroom, but also in your parlor, in your kitchen, in your nursery -- if you believe that the cozy fireside of a home is still the most sacred ideal a man can aspire to -- you will believe that simple virtue is more powerful than arrogance and that a man like Bjorn Faulkner would be brought to bow before it. Let your verdict tell us that none shall raise his head too high in defiance of our common standards!

JUDGE HEATH: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the Bailiff will now escort you to the jury room. I shall ask you to consider your verdict carefully. You are to determine whether Karen Andre is guilty or not guilty of the murder of Bjorn Faulkner.

[The BAILIFF escorts the JURY out of the courtroom. Then the stage is blacked out. Then, one by one, a spotlight picks out of the darkness the different WITNESSES, repeat the most significant lines of their testimony -- a quick succession of contradicting statements, presenting both sides of the case, reviewing the case for the audience, giving it swift flashes of what the jury is considering. The pin spot illuminates only the faces of the witnesses, one after the other, in the following order]

DR. KIRKLAND: I was called to examine the body of Bjorn Faulkner. I found a body mangled to an extreme degree.

HUTCHINS: Well, he was a bit tight. He wasn't very steady on his feet. Mr. Faulkner and the other gentleman had to help him. They almost dragged him into the elevator.

VAN FLEET: She is hoisting a man's body up on the parapet. A man in evening clothes. Faulkner. He's unconscious. No resistance. She pushes him with all her strength. He goes over the parapet. Down. Into space.

SWEENEY: [Reading] "I found only two enjoyable things on this earth whose every door was open to me: my whip over the world and Karen Andre."

MAGDA: He had a platinum gown made for her . . . She wore it on her naked body . . . And if it burned her shameless skin, she laughed like the pagan she is, and he kissed the burn, wild like tiger!

NANCY LEE: We were planning to have a modest little home, with a bright kitchen and a little flower garden. We'd be so happy there, just the two of us, until . . . until we had little ones to take care of . . .

WHITFIELD: I had full confidence that my business acumen would have prevented the crash -- had Faulkner lived.

CHANDLER: It is not probable that the letter was forged; but it is possible.

JUNGQUIST: Herr Faulkner shrugged and said lightly: "Oh, commit suicide." Herr Whitfield looked at him and said, very slowly: "If you do, be sure you make a good job of it!"

KAREN: Bjorn Faulkner never thought of things as right or wrong. To him it was only: you can or you can't. He always could. To me it was only: he wants or he doesn't.

REGAN: But do you think we're both so low that if something passes us to which one kneels, we no longer have eyes to see it? I loved her; she loved Faulkner. That's our only proof.

[After the last flash, the stage remains dark for a few seconds. Then the lights come on and the JURY returns into the courtroom]

BAILIFF: Attention of the Court!

CLERK: The prisoner will rise and face the jury.

[KAREN rises, head high]

The jury will rise and face the prisoner. Mr. Foreman, have you reached a verdict?

FOREMAN: We have.

CLERK: What say you?

Ending Of Play If Verdict Is "NOT GUILTY":

FOREMAN: Not guilty!

[KAREN receives the verdict calmly. She raises her head a little higher and says slowly, solemnly]

KAREN: Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you -- in the name of Bjorn Faulkner.

CURTAIN

Ending Of Play If Verdict Is "GUILTY":

FOREMAN: Guilty!

[KAREN shows no reaction; she stands motionless. STEVENS jumps to his feet]

STEVENS: We shall appeal the case!

KAREN: [Calmly, firmly] There will be no appeal. Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you. You have spared me the trouble of committing suicide.

CURTAIN

Back Cover

WHO WAS BJORN FAULKNER?

To the world, he was a startlingly successful international tycoon, head of a vast financial empire.

To his beautiful secretary-mistress, he was a god-like hero to be served with her mind, soul, and body.

To his aristocratic young wife, he was an elemental force of nature to be tamed.

To his millionaire father-in-law, he was a giant whose single error could be used to destroy him.

What kind of man was Bjorn Faulkner? Only you, the reader, can decide.

           On one level, NIGHT OF JANUARY 16TH is a totally gripping drama about the rise and destruction of a brilliant and ruthless man. On a deeper level, it is a superb dramatic objectification of Ayn Rand's vision of human strength and weakness. Since its original Broadway success, it has achieved vast worldwide popularity and acclaim. Now at last this important work is available for the first time in a paperback edition.

           Ayn Rand is the author of ATLAS SHRUGGED, philosophically the most challenging bestseller of its time. Her first novel, WE THE LIVING, was published in 1936. With the publication of THE FOUNTAINHEAD in 1943, she achieved a spectacular and enduring success. Miss Rand's unique philosophy, Objectivism, gained a worldwide audience. The fundamentals of her philosophy are set forth in three non-fiction books: FOR THE NEW INTELLECTUAL, THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS and CAPITALISM: THE UNKNOWN IDEAL. Her magnificent statement of her artistic credo, THE ROMANTIC MANIFESTO, has been recently made available in a Signet edition. Miss Rand is editor of the monthly magazine THE OBJECTIVIST, which deals with the application of her philosophy to modern problems and cultural trends.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Preface to the Revised Edition

Introduction

Part I - THE TWENTIES

The Husband I Bought

The Night King

Good Copy

Escort

Her Second Career

Part II - THE EARLY THIRTIES

Red Pawn

We the Living (unpublished excerpts)

Ideal

Part III, - THE LATE THIRTIES

Think Twice

The Fountainhead (unpublished excerpts)

The Simplest Thing in the World

“Writers are made, not born,” Ayn Rand wrote in another context. “To be exact, writers are self-made.” In this fascinating collection of Ayn Rand’s earliest work—including a previously unpublished piece, “The Night King”—her own career proves her point. We see here not only the budding of the philosophy that would seal her reputation as a champion of the individual, but also the emergence of a great narrative stylist whose fiction would place her among the most towering figures in the history of American literature.

Dr. Leonard Peikoff worked with Ayn Rand for thirty years; he is her legal heir and the executor of her estate.

SIGNET

Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M4V 3B2, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. This edition of The Early Ayn Rand contains a new preface and two new selections, “The Night King,” which is being published for the first time in this volume, and “The Simplest Thing in the World,” which appeared in Ayn Rand’s The Romantic Manifesto.

First Printing (revised edition), April 2005

Copyright © Leonard Peikoff, Paul Gitlin, Eugene Winick, Executors of the Estate of Ayn Rand, 1983, 1984

Introduction and Editor’s Note copyright © Leonard Peikoff, 1984 Copyright © The Estate of Ayn Rand, 2005

All rights reserved

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

eISBN : 978-1-101-13767-3

http://us.penguingroup.com

Preface to the Revised Edition

This revision adds two short stories to the collection, thereby placing all six short stories by Ayn Rand in one volume. The previously unpublished story, “The Night King,” has been included, as well as the story “The Simplest Thing in the World,” reprinted from The Romantic Manifesto. The first of these, most likely written in 1926, seems to be her first attempt at fiction in English. The second, written in 1940, demonstrates the command of the English language she achieved over this fourteen-year period.

Nearly a decade of organizing and cataloging her papers by the Ayn Rand Archives has allowed some refinement in dating the original manuscripts, which is reflected in this edition. References to the sales figures of her novels have been updated to the present day. Other than that, Leonard Peikoff’s Introduction and prefaces are exactly duplicated from the previous editions of The Early Ayn Rand.

—Richard E. Ralston
Revision Editor
August 2004

Introduction

In 1926, Ayn Rand was a twenty-one-year-old Russian immigrant to America struggling with her first short story in English; she was barely able to speak the language, let alone handle complex ideas or project a convincing hero. In 1938, a mere twelve years later, she was writing The Fountainhead, in full command of her distinctive philosophy, aesthetic approach, and literary style. A progression such as this represents an astonishing intellectual and artistic growth.

The present book is an anthology of Ayn Rand’s fiction from this early period, arranged chronologically. I have decided to publish this material because I believe that admirers of Miss Rand will be interested to learn by what steps she developed her literary abilities. They can now see the steps for themselves.

Only one of the pieces (Think Twice) can be considered finished, mature work. The others are offered not as finished ends-in-themselves, but primarily for the light they shed on Ayn Rand’s development during her most critical formative decade as a writer. None of the pieces has been published before, nor did Miss Rand intend to publish them.

The novels of the mature Ayn Rand contain superlative values that are unique in our age. The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged offer profound and original philosophic themes, expressed in logical, dramatic plot structures. They portray an uplifted vision of man, in the form of protagonists characterized by strength, purposefulness, integrity—heroes who are not only idealists, but happy idealists, self-confident, serene, at home on earth. The books are written in a highly calculated literary style intent on achieving precision and luminous clarity, yet that style is at the same time brilliantly colorful, sensuously evocative, and passionate. Just as Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, rejects the mind-body dichotomy, so her art sweeps aside the false alternatives this dichotomy has spawned: her novels prove that one can unite philosophy and suspense thrillers, art and entertainment, morality and practicality, reason and emotion.

She could not do all of the above, however, at the beginning. She had to create her own abilities gradually, by a prodigious effort.

What kinds of themes concerned her as a young woman, before she could deal with the deeper issues of ethics or epistemology? What kinds of stories did she tell before she could invent complex plots involving an entire society or even the whole world? What kinds of characters did she write about before she was able to project Howard Roark or John Galt? How did she write in these years, when she was first learning the craft?

The eleven selections in this book answer such questions. They exhibit Ayn Rand’s continuous growth in every area: depth of theme, ingenuity of plot structure, stature of hero. Most of all, they exhibit the maturation of her style, from the broken English of “The Husband I Bought” to the power and poetry of The Fountainhead.

Miss Rand’s development seems to fall into three rough stages, reflected in the three parts of this anthology.

Part I covers the 1920s and includes her earliest fiction in English. The short stories from this period are a beginner’s exercises written as literary practice, and never meant for any audience.

Part II covers the early 1930s and represents Miss Rand’s first professional work. It includes a lengthy synopsis of a movie original (Red Pawn); two excerpts from the manuscript of We the Living that were cut before publication; and an early stage play (Ideal) which, though finished work, is not fully consonant with Miss Rand’s later viewpoint.

Part III covers the late 1930s and represents Ayn Rand’s first mature work. It includes an intriguing stage play, the philosophical murder mystery Think Twice; and two sets of excerpts from The Fountainhead manuscript that were cut before publication. One of these tells the story of Roark’s first love affair, before he met Dominique.

An early short story has been omitted from this collection, along with several screenplays (adapting other authors’ stories) from her days in Hollywood, some scenarios for the silent screen, and a version of We the Living written for the stage. Aside from these items, there is no more of Ayn Rand’s fiction that remains unpublished. (There are no excerpts from the Atlas Shrugged manuscript long enough to warrant publication.)

By the nature of this anthology, most of the material is imperfect, unedited and/or undeveloped Ayn Rand. But it is still Ayn Rand—and that is the second reason for publishing it. Despite all the flaws, despite everything she has still to learn, her vision of man and of life, and even some of her power to convey that vision in words, are there at the beginning. They are real, they are able to break through, to be felt, to haunt us. For those who admire her work, as I do, this is reason enough to grasp at these early pieces.

I first met Ayn Rand in 1951 at her home in California. She was writing Atlas Shrugged at the time; I was a pre-medical student who loved The Fountainhead and was brimming over with philosophical questions to ask her about it. That meeting changed my life.

Ayn Rand was unlike anyone I had ever imagined. Her mind was utterly firsthanded. On intellectual issues, she said what no one else said or perhaps had ever even thought, but she said these things so logically—so simply, factually, persuasively—that they seemed to be self-evident. And she was passionate about ideas; she radiated the kind of intensity that one could imagine changing the course of history. Her brilliantly perceptive eyes looked straight at you and missed nothing; neither did her methodical, painstaking, virtually scientific replies to my questions miss anything. She convinced me that night that philosophy is a science, with objective, provable answers to its questions; it is the science that moves the world, she argued, whether men acknowledge the fact or not. It did not take me long to give up medicine and decide on philosophy as a career.

As the years passed, I came to work closely with Miss Rand, first as an informal student of hers, then as a writer and lecturer on her ideas. The two of us regularly talked ideas, not infrequently for twelve hours (or more) at a stretch. I learned more about philosophy listening to her than I did from ten years in graduate school getting a Ph.D. in the subject.

Not long after I met Miss Rand, she let me read the two plays in the present collection, Ideal and Think Twice; she was pleased with both and hoped to see them produced one day. (This, I think, is why she never tried to have them published.) I also came to read the short story “Good Copy” and to hear Miss Rand’s analysis of it; she regarded this piece as a worthy, though flawed, attempt by a beginning writer. Of the rest of this collection, I read nothing at all during Miss Rand’s lifetime (though I heard from her in passing about a few items, which she regarded as ancient history). I was astonished, after her death, to find so much fiction that was new to me in her “trunk.”

Out of this new material, I have three personal favorites: “Vesta Dunning,” for the quality of the writing; “Kira’s Viking,” for its fairy-tale romanticism; and “The Husband I Bought,” because it is a rare window on Ayn Rand’s soul at the beginning, before she knew much about philosophy, art, or English—a window that reveals eloquently her own intense dedication to values. Along with the material I already knew, these pieces are what convinced me, as her literary executor, to publish the total.

To those unfamiliar with Ayn Rand, however, I want to say that this book is not the place to begin. Read her novels first. If their ideas interest you, you might then turn to her nonfiction works, such as The Virtue of Selfishness (on ethics), or Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (politics), or The Romantic Manifesto (aesthetics). Then, if you wish, pick up the present collection.

If any reader wants more information—about Miss Rand’s other published essays; about courses, schools, and publications that carry on her philosophy; or about further material of hers yet to be brought out (journals, letters, lectures)—I suggest that he write to Objectivism EA, P.O. Box 177, Murray Hill Station, New York, NY 10157. I regret that owing to the volume of mail, personal replies to such letters are not possible; but in due course inquirers will receive literature from several sources indicating the direction to pursue if they want to investigate Ayn Rand’s ideas further, or to support them.

Ayn Rand has long been beloved by a broad public. Here then for all to read is her early fiction: the first of her stories, and also the last—the last, that is, for us to discover and to experience. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

—Leonard Peikoff
New York City

Part I

THE TWENTIES

The Husband I Bought

c. 1926

Editor’s Preface

Ayn Rand arrived in the United States from Russia in February 1926, at the age of twenty-one, and spent several months with relatives in Chicago before leaving for Hollywood. Although she had studied some English in Russia, she did not know the language well, and she devoted herself at first to writing scenarios for the silent screen. “The Husband I Bought” seems to be the only writing other than scenarios from these early months. It is the first story she wrote in English.

Miss Rand was aware that this story (like all her work in the 1920s) was a beginner’s exercise, written in effect in a foreign language, and she never dreamed of publishing it. She did not even sign her name to it privately (although she had chosen the name “Ayn Rand” before she left Russia). She signed it with a pseudonym invented for this one case and never used again: Allen Raynor.

Many years later, Ayn Rand was asked to give a lecture defining the goal of her work. “The motive and purpose of my writing,” she said, “is the projection of an ideal man. The portrayal of a moral ideal, as my ultimate literary goal, as an end in itself . . .” (The Romantic Manifesto).

Prior to The Fountainhead, however, she did not consider herself ready for this task; she knew that she had too much still to learn, both as a philosopher and as a writer. What she did regard as possible to her in these early years was the depiction of a woman’s feeling for the ideal man, a feeling which she later called “manworship.” She herself had experienced this feeling as a driving passion since childhood, primarily in response to the projections of heroes she discovered in Romantic literature.

Concepts such as “worship,” “reverence,” “exaltation,” and the like are usually taken as naming emotions oriented to the supernatural, transcending this world. In Ayn Rand’s view, however, this concedes to religion or mysticism what are actually

the highest moral concepts of our language. . . . [S]uch concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions. What, then, is their source or referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man’s dedication to a moral ideal. . . . It is this highest level of man’s emotions that has to be redeemed from the murk of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.¹

“Man-worship” means the enraptured dedication to values—and to man, man the individual, as their only achiever, beneficiary, and ultimate embodiment. This is basically a metaphysical-ethical feeling, open to either sex, a feeling uniting all those “who see man’s highest potential and strive to actualize it”—those “dedicated to the exaltation of man’s self-esteem and the sacredness of his happiness on earth.”²

When a woman with this kind of character sees her deepest values actualized and embodied in a specific man, man-worship becomes (other things being equal) romantic love. Thus the special quality of the Ayn Rand romantic love: it is the union of the abstract and the concrete, of ideal and reality, of mind and body, of uplifted spirituality and violent passion, of reverence and sexuality.

Throughout the early years, female protagonists predominate in Ayn Rand’s fiction; and one of their essential traits is this kind of man-worship. The early heroes are merely suggested; they are not fully realized until Roark. But whatever the language and literary problems still unresolved, the motif of the woman’s feeling for a hero is realized. Even in this first story, Ayn Rand can write eloquent scenes on this theme (especially the moving farewell scene). Even this early, she can make effective use of the dramatic, short-sentence style that became famous with The Fountainhead.

Henry, in the present story, is the earliest ancestor of Leo (in We the Living), of Roark, of Francisco or Rearden (in Atlas Shrugged). Those who know the later heroes can see the first faint glimmer of them here. The focus, however, lies in Irene’s response to him, which may be symbolized by a single line: “When I am tired, I kneel before the table [on which Henry’s picture stands] and I look at him.”

On the surface, this story might appear to be quite conventional. I can imagine someone reading it as the tragic story of an unloved wife “selflessly” removing herself from her husband’s path. But the actual meaning is the opposite. Irene is not a selfless wife, but a passionate valuer; her decision to leave Henry is not self-sacrifice, but self-preservation and the reaffirmation of her values. She cannot accept anyone less than Henry, or any relationship with him less than what she has had.

Nor does Irene draw a tragic conclusion from her suffering. The glory of her life, she feels, is that Henry exists, that she had him once, and that she will love him always. Even in the agony of unrequited love, her implicit focus is on values, not on pain. This is especially clear in her desire to protect her ideal from suffering, to protect him for her own sake, although she is leaving him, to keep her supreme value whole, radiant, godlike, not dimmed or diminished by loss and sorrow. “Henry, you must be happy, and strong, and glorious. Leave suffering to those that cannot help it. You must smile at life. . . . And never think about those that cannot. They are not worthwhile.”

The story’s events are conventional—but their meaning and motivation are vintage Ayn Rand, and utterly unconventional. What makes this possible is the profound seriousness of Irene’s passion. This is what transforms and transfigures an otherwise ordinary tale.

There are, of course, major flaws in the story’s execution. Important events are not dramatized, but merely narrated (and sometimes only sketchily explained). This is a practice opposite to that of the mature Ayn Rand. The moral code of the small town—the narrow respectability of sixty years ago—is thoroughly dated, and, in our age, virtually unbelievable. Above all, there is the problem of the language, which reflects a mind still unfamiliar with many essentials of English grammar, vocabulary, and idiom; as a result, the dialogue in particular is often stilted and unreal. I have edited out the most confusing lapses of English grammar and wording and the most obvious foreignisms, but have allowed the rest of the text to stand as written, so as to leave to posterity a record of where Ayn Rand began. Those who have read her novels can judge for themselves how far she was able to travel.

It may be wondered why Ayn Rand chose to present man-worship first of all in the form of a story of unrequited love. My conjecture—it is only that—is that this aspect of the story was autobiographical. Ayn Rand as a college student was in love with a young man in Russia who was the real-life source of the character of Leo. She remembered this young man, and her feeling for him, all her life. The relationship between them, however, was never fulfilled—whether for personal reasons or political ones (I believe he was exiled to Siberia) I do not know. But, either way, it is easy to imagine that alone in a new country, on the threshold of a new life, she should be drawn to focus as a kind of farewell on the man she loved and had now lost forever—or, more exactly, to focus on her own feeling for that man and loss.

—L. P.

The Husband I Bought

I should not have written this story. If I did it all—I did it only by keeping silent. I went through tortures, such as no other woman on earth, perhaps just to keep silent. And now—I speak. I must not have written my secret. But I have a hope. My one and only, and last hope. And I have no time before me. When life is dead and you have nothing left on your way—who can blame you for taking a last chance, a poor little chance . . . before the end? And so I write my story.

I loved Henry. I love him. It is the only thing I know and I can say about myself. It is the only thing, that was my life. There is no person on earth that has never been in love. But love can go beyond all limits and bounds. Love can go beyond all consciousness, beyond your very soul.

I never think of how I met him. It has no importance for me. I had to meet him and I did. I never think of how and when I began to love him or how I realized that he loved me. The only thing I know is that two words only were written on my life: “Henry Stafford.”

He was tall and slim, and beautiful, too beautiful. He was intensely ambitious and never made a step to realize it. He had an immense, indefinite longing and did not trouble himself to think about it. He was the most perfectly refined and brilliant man, whom society admired and who laughed at society. A little lazy, very skeptical, indifferent to everything. Haughty and self-conceited for himself—gracious and ironical for everybody.

In our little town Henry Stafford was, of course, the aim and target of all the girls and “homemade” vamps. He flirted openly with everyone; that made them all furious.

His father had left him a big business. He managed it just enough to have the necessary money and the least trouble possible. He treated his business with the same smile of perfect politeness and perfect indifference with which he spoke to our society ladies or read a popular best-seller, from the middle.

Mr. Barnes, an old lawyer and a friend of mine, said once, with that thoughtful, indefinite look afar that was so characteristic to him: “That impossible man . . . I could envy the girl he shall love. I would pity the one he will marry.”

For the moment, I could have been envied by Mr. Barnes, and not by Mr. Barnes only: Henry Stafford loved me. I was twenty-one then, just graduated from one of the best colleges. I had come to live in my little native town, in the beautiful estate that belonged to me after my parents’ death. It was a big, luxurious house, with a wonderful old garden, the best in the town. I had a considerable fortune and no near relatives at all. I was accustomed to ruling my existence quietly and firmly myself.

I tell the whole truth here, so I must tell that I was beautiful. And I was clever, I knew it; you always know it when you are. I was considered a “brilliant girl,” “a girl with a great future” by everybody in our society, though they did not like me too much, for I was a little too willful and resolute.

I loved Henry Stafford. It was the only thing I ever understood in my life. It was my life. I knew I would never have another one, never could have. And I never did. Perhaps you should not love a human being like this. I cannot tell and I will not listen, if someone tells me you should not. I cannot listen: it was my whole life.

Henry Stafford loved me. He loved me seriously. It was the first thing he did not smile at in his life.

“I did not know I would be so helpless before love,” he said sometimes. “It was impossible, that you would not be mine, Irene. I must always have the things I wish, and it is the only thing I ever wished!” He kissed my arms, from the fingertips to the shoulder. . . . As for me, I looked at him and felt nothing else. His every movement, his manners, the sound of his voice made me tremble. When a passion like this gets hold of you, it never lets you go, never till your last breath. It burns all in you, and still flames, when there is nothing more to burn. . . . But then, how happy, oh! how happy I was!

I remember one day better than everything. It was summer and there was as much sun on the bushes in my garden as water in a flood. We were flying on a swing, he and I. Both all in white, we stood at each side of the long, narrow plank, holding strongly to the ropes with both hands, and making the swing fly madly from one side to the other. We went so fast that the ropes cracked piteously and I could hardly breathe. . . . Up and down! Up and down! My skirt flew high above my knees, like a light white flag.

“Faster, faster, Irene!” he cried.

“Higher, higher, Henry!” I answered.

With his white shirt open at the chest and the sleeves rolled above the elbows, he held the ropes with his arms, burned by the sun, and pushed the swing by easy, gracious movements of his strong, flexible body. His hair was flying in the wind. . . .

And in the breathtaking speed, in the glowing sun, I saw and felt nothing but the man with the flying hair that was before me.

Then, without saying anything to each other, with one thought, we jumped down from the highest position of our swing, in its fastest moment. We scratched our arms and legs badly in falling; but we did not mind it. I was in his arms. He kissed me with more madness than there had been in our flight. It was not for the first time, but I shall never forget it. To feel his arms around me made me dizzy, almost unconscious. I clutched his shoulders with my hands, so that my nails must have scratched him through his shirt, till blood. I kissed his lips. I kissed his neck, where the shirt was open.

The only words we said then were pronounced by him, or rather whispered, so that he could hardly distinguish them himself: “Forever . . . Irene, Irene, say that it is forever. . . .”

I did not see him the next day. I waited anxiously till the evening. He did not come. Neither did he on the second day. A young fellow, a very self-confident and very clumsy “sheik,” who tried hopelessly to win a little attention from me, called upon me that day and, talking endlessly and quickly about everything imaginable, like a radio, dropped finally: “By the way, Henry Stafford has got into some business trouble . . . serious, they say.”

I learned the whole terrible news in the next days: Henry was ruined. It was a frightful ruin: not only had he lost everything, but he owed a whole fortune to many persons. It was not his fault, even though he had always been so careless with his business. It was circumstance. Everybody knew it; but it looked like his fault. And it was a terrible blow, a mortal blow to his name, his reputation, all his future.

Our little town was greatly excited. There were persons who sympathized with him, but most of them were maliciously, badly glad. They had always resented him, despite the admiration they surrounded him with, or just because of it, perhaps. “I would like to see what kind of face he’ll make now,” said one. “O-oh! That’s great!” “Such a shame!” said others.

Many remarks turned upon me, also. They had always resented me for being Henry’s choice. “Don’t know what he’d find ’bout that Irene Wilmer,” had said once Patsy Tillins, the town’s prize vamp, summing up the general opinion. Now, Mrs. Hughes, one of our social leaders, a respectable lady, but who had three daughters to marry, said to me, with a charming smile: “I am sincerely happy that you escaped it in time, dear child. . . . Always thought that man was good for nothing”; to which Patsy Tillins added, in a white cloud, as she was quickly powdering her nose: “Who’s it you’ll pick up next, dearie?”

I did not pay any attention to it all and I was not hurt. I only tried to understand the position and wondered if it was really so serious for Henry or not. One sentence only, pronounced by a stern, serious businessman whom I always respected, explained all to me and cleared the terrible truth. “He is an honest man,” he said to a friend, not knowing that I heard it, “but the only honorable thing left to him is to shoot himself, and the sooner the better.” Then I understood. I did not think long. I threw a wrap on my shoulders and ran to his house.

I trembled when I saw him. I scarcely even recognized him. He was sitting at his desk, with a stone face and immobile eyes. One of his arms was hanging helplessly by his side and I saw that only his fingers were trembling, so lightly I could scarcely notice it. . . .

He did not hear me enter. I approached him and fell at his feet, burying my head in his knees. He shuddered. Then he took my arms strongly and forced me to rise. “Go home, Irene,” he said with a stern, cold, expressionless voice, “and never come again.”

“You . . . you don’t love me, Henry?” I muttered.

There was suffering now in his voice, but anger also when he answered: “There can be nothing between us, now. . . . Can’t you understand it?”

I understood. But I smiled, I just smiled from fun, because it was too impossible to be true. Money was now between us, money pretended to take him from me. Him! . . . I laughed, a frightful laugh. But would you not laugh if one would try to deprive you of your whole life, your one and only aim, your god . . . because that god has no money? . . .

He did not want to listen to me. But I made him listen . . . I could not tell how many long, horrible hours I spent begging and imploring him. He refused. He was tender at times, asking me to forget him; then he was cold and stern, and turned his back to me, not to hear my words, ordering me to leave him. But I saw the passionate love in his eyes, the despair that he tried in vain to hide. I remained. I fell on my knees; I kissed his hands. “Henry . . . Henry, I cannot live without you! . . . I just cannot!” I cried.

It took a long time to conquer him. But I was desperate and despair always finds a way. He surrendered himself at last and agreed . . . And when he held me in his arms, covering my face with kisses, flooded by tears, when he whispered: “Yes . . . Irene . . . yes,” and his lips trembled, I knew that he loved me, that an immense love made his eyes so dark with emotion. . . .

The town exploded with surprise when they learned the news. No one was able to believe it, at first. When they did—the terror was general. Even Mrs. Hughes rushed to me and cried with a real sincerity and a sincere terror: “But . . . but you will not marry him, Irene! . . . It’s foolish! Why, but it’s . . . it’s foolish!” She was unable to find another word. “The girl is crazy!” said her friend, Mrs. Brogan, who was not so particular about expressions.

Mr. Davis, an old friend of my parents, came to speak to me. He asked me to think it over again. He advised me not to marry Henry, to remember that if I gave my fortune to pay my husband’s debt, it would take all I possess—and could I be sure of the future? All this only made me laugh. I was so happy!

The most farsighted of all was Mr. Barnes. He looked at me with his long, thoughtful glance. He had a sad, kind smile, which his experience with life and men had given him. He said: “I fear you will be very unhappy, Irene. . . . One is never happy with a passion like this.”

Then he said to Henry, in a voice unusually stern for him: “Now, be careful with yourself, Stafford.”

“I think it was superfluous to tell me this,” answered Henry coldly.

We were married. Some persons say there is no perfect happiness on earth. There was. I was. I could not even call it happiness—the word is too small.

I was his wife. I was not Irene Wilmer any longer, I was Irene Stafford. I can hardly describe the first time of my married life. I do not remember anything. If one asks me what was then, I could answer one word only: “Henry!” He was there, and what could I have noticed besides this? We sold all I had, the debt was paid, and he was saved. We could live just for one another, with nothing to disturb us, in the maddest, the wildest of happiness two human beings had ever experienced.

The day came, however, when we were obliged to think of the future. We had paid all the money I possessed, sold my estate and my jewels. So we had to think of some work. Henry had been educated as an engineer. He found employment. It was not a very big position, but it was good enough for the beginning, considering the fact he had never worked in his specialty before.

I rented a little flat. And then we lived, and I took all my strength, all my soul to make his life as it should be. I helped him in his work. He had not enough character to do it always with the necessary energy. He would often, in the middle of an important work, lie down on the sofa, his feet on his desk, with some eccentric new book in hand and a current of smoke from his cigarette. I always found a way to make him work and be more and more successful.

I never allowed myself to become just his “pal,” his good friend and servant-for-all-work. I was his mistress, as well as his wife, and he was my lover. I managed to put a certain indefinite aloofness about me, that made me always seem somewhat inaccessible. He never noticed who was doing all the housework for him. I was a queen in his house, a mysterious being, that he was never sure to possess wholly and unquestionably, that he could never call his property and habitual commodity. I can say, we did not notice our home life; we had no home life. We were lovers, with an immense passion between us. Only.

I made a romance out of his life. I made it seem different, strange, exciting every day, every moment. His house was not a place to rest, eat, and sleep in. It was an unusual, fascinating palace, where he had to fight, win, and conquer, in a silent, thrilling game.

“Who could have thought of creating a woman like you, Irene!” he said sometimes, and his kisses left burning red marks on my neck and shoulders. “If I live it is only because I have you!” I said nothing. I never showed him all my adoration. You must not show a man that he is your whole life. But he knew it; he felt it. . . .

The town’s society, which had met our marriage with such disapproval, began to look more kindly at us, after a while. But through the first hard time of fight, work, and loneliness, I led him, I alone, and I am proud to say that he did not need anyone else, through all those years.

A frequent guest of ours and my best friend was Mr. Barnes. He watched our life attentively. He saw our impossible, unbelievable happiness. It made him glad, but thoughtful. He asked me once: “What would happen if he stopped loving you?”

I had to gather all my strength to make my voice speak: “Don’t ever repeat it. There are things too horrible that one must not think about.”

Time went, and instead of growing cold and tedious, our love became greater and greater. We could understand each other’s every glance, every movement now. We liked to spend long evenings before a burning fireplace in his study. I sat on a pillow and he lay on the carpet, his head on my knees. I bent to press my lips to his, in the dancing red glow of the fire. “I wonder how two persons could have been made so much for one another, Irene,” he said.

We lived like this four years. Four years of perfect, delirious happiness. Who can boast of such a thing in his life? After all, I wonder sometimes whether I have the right to consider myself unhappy now. I paid a terrible price to life, but I had known a terrible happiness. The price was not too high. It was just. For those days had been, they were, and they were mine.

Society had taken us back, even with more appreciation than before, perhaps. Henry became the most popular, the most eagerly expected guest everywhere. He had made a rapid career. He was not very rich yet, but his name began to be mentioned among those of the most brilliant engineers. When a man is so interesting, so fascinating as he was, lack of money will never mean much to society. . . .

Then it happened. . . . I have had the strength to live through it, I shall have the strength to write it down. . . .

A new woman came to our town and appeared in our society. Her name was Claire Van Dahlen. She was divorced and had come from New York after a trip to Europe to rest in our little town, where she had some distant relatives. I saw her on the first evening she appeared in our society, at a dancing party.

She had the body of an antique statuette. She had golden skin and dark-red lips. Her black hair was parted in the middle, combed straight and brilliant, and she wore long, hanging perfume-earrings. She had slow, soft, fluent movements; it seemed that her body had no bones at all. Her arms undulated like velvet ribbons. She was dressed very simply, but it was the simplicity that costs thousands of dollars. . . . She was gorgeously, stunningly beautiful.

Our society was amazed with admiration; they had never seen a woman like this. . . . She was perfectly charming and gracious with everybody, but she had that haughty, disinterested smile of women accustomed to and tired of admiration.

Henry looked at her . . . he looked too long and too fixedly. The glance with which he followed her every movement was full of a strange admiration, too intense for him. He danced with her several times.

At the end of the party, a crowd of young men rushed to ask the favor of bringing Mrs. Van Dahlen home. “I will have to choose,” she said, with a charming, indulgent smile.

“Choose from everyone present!” proposed one of her eager new admirers.

“From everyone?” she repeated, with her smile. She paused, then: “Well, it will be Mr. Stafford.”

Henry had not asked for the favor; he was astonished. But it was impossible to refuse. Mr. Barnes brought me home.

When Henry came back and I asked his opinion of her, he said shortly and indifferently: “Yes, very interesting.” I had seen that he was much more impressed than this, but I did not pay any attention to it.

The next time we had to go to a party, Henry had no desire to go out that evening. He was tired, he had work to do. “Why, Henry, they expect us,” I said. “There will be many persons tonight: Mr. and Mrs. Harwings, Mr. and Mrs. Hughes, Mrs. Brooks, Mrs. Van Dahlen, Mr. Barnes . . .”

“Well, yes, I think we might go,” he said suddenly.

He danced with Claire Van Dahlen that evening more than anyone else. Her dress had a very low neck in back, and I saw his fingers sometimes touch her soft silken skin. The look in her eyes, which were fixed straight into his, between her long, dark lashes, astonished me. . . . At the table, they were placed near one another: the hostess wanted to please Mrs. Van Dahlen.

After this Henry missed no party where she appeared. He took her for rides in his automobile. He called at her relatives’, where she lived. He managed to be in theaters the evenings she was there. He had a strange look, eager and excited. At home, he was always busy, working with an unusual speed, then hurrying somewhere.

I saw it, I was astonished; that was all. I had no suspicion whatever. The thing I could have suspected was so horrible, so unbelievably atrocious, that it simply could not slip into my mind. I could not think of it.

Then, suddenly, he broke off every relation with her. He did not want to go out. He refused sternly every invitation. He was dark, and beneath his darkness I distinguished one thing—fear.

Then I understood. His courtship had meant nothing to me; his break told me everything. Oh, not immediately, of course. These things never happen immediately. First, a vague, uncertain thought, a supposition, that made my blood cold. Then a doubt. A desperate fight against this doubt, which only made it stronger. Then an attentive, frightful study. Then—certainty. Henry loved Claire Van Dahlen. . . . Yes, it is my own hand that writes this sentence.

There are things, there are moments in life, which you must not speak about. That was what I felt when I told this sentence to myself for the first time. I found some gray hair on my head that day.

Then came a madness. I could not believe it. It was there and it could not enter into my brain. Oh, that awful feeling of everything falling, falling down, everything around me and in me! . . . There were days when I was calm, hysterically calm, and I cried it was impossible. There were nights when I bit my hands till blood. . . . And then I resolved to fight.

There was a cold, heavy terror in my head now, and life had changed its whole appearance for me. But I gathered all my strength. I told myself that one must not give up one’s husband so easily. He had been mine—he might be again.

I understood clearly what was going on in his soul. He had flirted with Claire at first, thinking he was just a little interested in her as in a new acquaintance. The supposition of something serious seemed as impossible to him as it seemed to me. He did not think of it. And it came. And when it came—he broke all off, resolved to crush it immediately.

So we both fought. I, for him; he, against himself. Oh, it was long and hard! We fought bravely. We lost—both.

He was never cold, stern, or irritable with me during those days of his struggle. He was tender as ever. I was gay, quiet as always, attractive as never before. But I could not win him back even for a moment: it was done, and finished.

“Henry,” I said once, very calmly and very firmly, “we shall go to this party.” We had been refusing all invitations for a long time. Now we went to the party.

He saw her and I watched him. We both knew what we wanted to know. There was no use fighting any longer.

I did not sleep that night. I made all my efforts to breathe. Something strangled me. “One of us has to go through this torture, for life,” I thought, “he or I. . . . It shall be I. . . .” I breathed with effort. “He will tell me everything at last . . . and I shall give him a divorce. . . . And if he should be too sorry for me . . . I shall tell him that I do not love him as much as before . . . if I have the strength to do it. . . .” One thing only was clear and without doubt—he could never be happy with me again.

“Henry,” I asked one evening, sitting at the fireplace with him and forcing my voice not to tremble, “what will you say . . . if I tell you I do not love you any more?”

He looked into my eyes, kindly and seriously. “I will not believe it,” he answered.

Time passed and he did not say a word to me about the truth. I could not understand him. He pitied me, perhaps; but he must tell it sooner or later. He was calm, quiet, and tender; but I saw his pale face, the drooping corners of his mouth, his dark, desperate eyes. When a passion like this gets him—a man is helpless, and I could not blame him. He must have gone through a terrible torture. But he was silent.

In those heartbreaking days, there was one thing which made me furious, for it looked as though fate was playing a grim joke on me. This thing was Gerald Gray. He was a young English aristocrat who came to our town not long ago for a trip. He was thirty years old, elegant, flawlessly dressed, gracious and polite to the points of his nails, and flirting was his only occupation in life. Many women in our town had fallen in love with him. I do not know what made him become interested, too much interested in me. Gracious, polite, yet firm in his courtship, he called upon me, even after I almost plainly threw him out. And this during the time when I awoke every morning, thinking that it is the last day, that I shall hear the fatal words from Henry, at last!

But I waited and Henry said nothing. He refused any possibility of meeting Claire Van Dahlen. She did all she could to meet him. We were flooded with invitations. She sent an invitation to him herself, at last. He refused.

Then came the day when I understood everything. And that day decided my fate. I went to a party alone that evening. Henry stayed at home, as usual, and besides, he had work to do. I could not refuse this invitation without seriously offending the hostess. So I went, but it was a kind of torture for me. I waited with the greatest impatience for the time when it would be possible for me to leave.

I never regretted afterwards that I went to that party. As I was passing near a curtain, I heard two women speaking on the other side of it. It was Mrs. Hughes and Mrs. Brogan. They were speaking about Henry and Claire; they were speaking about me. “Well, she has given all her fortune,” said Mrs. Hughes, “she paid enough for him. He cannot leave her now.”

“I’ll say so,” said Mrs. Brogan. “She bought her husband. He might be miserable as a starving dog now—he could not show it!”

I stuffed my handkerchief into my mouth. I knew, now. . . .

I went home alone, on foot. . . . I bought my husband . . . I bought my husband! . . . So this was the mystery. He could not leave me. He will never tell me. He will be tortured and keep silent. He cannot be happy with me and his life will be ruined . . . because of my money! . . . Oh! if he will not speak, I must speak!

Perhaps I would not have done what I did, had it not been for that money. I would have fought more, perhaps, and might have gained him back. But now—I could not. I had no right. If he ever came back to me, how would I know whether it was love or thankfulness for my “sacrifice” and the resolution to sacrifice himself in his turn? How would I know that he was not ruining his happiness to recompense me for that money?

I must give him up now—voluntarily and myself. I must give him up—because he owed me too much. I had no right to my husband any more—because I had done too much for him. . . .

I must act now. But what to do? Offer him a divorce? He will not accept it. Tell him I do not love him? He will not believe.

I took off my hat; I could not keep it on. Little drops of rain fell on my forehead and the wind blew my hair—it was such a relief!

I saw a light in the window of Henry’s study as I approached our house. I went in noiselessly, not to disturb him. And when I passed by the door of his study, I heard a sound that made my heart stop. I approached the door and looked through the opening, not believing my ears. Sitting at the desk with his arms on his plans and his head on his arms, Henry was sobbing. I saw his back, which shuddered, racked by deep, desperate sobs.

I made a step from the door. I looked before me with senseless eyes. . . . Henry cried! . . .

“. . . He might be miserable as a starving dog now—he could not show it!”

I knew what I had to do. He will not believe that I do not love him? I must make him believe it! . . .

I went up to my room. I entered it mad, horrified, desperate. I came out in the morning, quiet and calm. What had gone on in me during that night—I will never speak about it with any living creature.

“What is the matter, Irene?” asked Henry, looking into my face, when I came downstairs in the morning.

“Nothing,” I answered. “It was a bad dream; it’s over now.”

I was conscious of one thing only then: I must find a way, an opportunity to prove to Henry my unfaithfulness, so that there should remain no doubt. I found that opportunity. It came the same day.

I returned home after being out, and, entering the hall, I heard a voice in Henry’s study. I knew that voice. It was Claire Van Dahlen. I was not astonished. I approached the study door calmly and listened, looking through the keyhole. She was there. I saw her long, bright-green silk shawl on a tan suit. She was perfectly beautiful.

I heard Henry’s voice: “Once more, I ask you to leave my house, Mrs. Van Dahlen. I do not want to see you. Do you not understand this?”

“No, I don’t, Mr. Stafford,” she answered. She looked at him with half-closed eyes. “You are a coward,” she said slowly.

He made a step towards her and I saw him. His face was white and, even from the distance where I was, I could see his lips tremble.

“Go away,” he said in a strangled voice.

She opened her eyes wholly then. They had a strange look of passion, command, and immense tenderness, that she tried to hide. “Henry . . .” she said slowly, and her voice seemed velvet like her body.

“Mrs. Van Dahlen . . .” he muttered, stepping back.

She approached him more. “You cannot fight . . . I love you, Henry! . . . I want you!”

He was unable to speak. She continued, with a haughty, lightly mocking smile: “You love me and you know it, as well as I. Will you dare to deny it?”

There was torture in his eyes that I could not look upon; and, as though he felt it, he covered them with his hand. “Why did you come here!” he groaned.

She smiled. “Because I want you!” she answered. “Because I love you, Henry, I love you!” She slowly put her hands on his shoulders. “Tell me, Henry, do you love me?” she whispered.

He tore his hand from his eyes. “Yes! . . . Yes! . . . Yes! . . .” he cried. He seized her wildly in his arms and pressed his lips to hers with a desperate greediness.

I was not stricken. There was nothing new for me in all this. But to see him kiss her—it was hard. I closed my eyes. That was all.

“I expected it long ago,” she said at last, with her arms embracing him more passionately than she wanted to show.

But he pushed her aside, suddenly and resolutely. “You will never see me again,” he said sternly.

“I will see you tonight,” she answered. “I will wait for you at nine o’clock at the Excelsior.”

“I shall not come!”

“You shall!”

“Never! . . . Never!”

“I ask you a favor, Henry. . . . Till nine o’clock!” And she walked out of the study. I had just time to throw myself behind a curtain.

When I looked into his room again, Henry had fallen on a chair, his head in his hands. I saw all his despair in the fingers that clutched his hair convulsively.

I had found my opportunity. Now—I had to act.

I went to my room, took off my hat and overcoat. I moved towards the door, to go downstairs, to Henry . . . and begin. Then I stopped. “Do you realize,” I muttered to myself, “do you understand whom and what you are going to lose?” I opened my mouth to take a breath.

There was a photograph of Henry on my table, the best he had ever taken. There was an inscription on it: “To my Irene—Henry—Forever.” I approached it. I fell on my knees. I looked at it with a silent prayer. “Henry . . . Henry . . .” I whispered. I had no voice to say more. I asked him for the strength to do what I had to do.

Then I arose and walked downstairs.

“Henry,” I said, entering his room, “I have received a letter from Mrs. Cowan. She is ill and I am going to visit her.” Mrs. Cowan was an old acquaintance that lived in a little town four hours’ ride from ours. I visited her very rarely.

“I would not like you to go,” answered Henry, tenderly passing his hand on my forehead. “You look pale and tired; you must need a rest.”

“I am perfectly well,” I answered. “I shall be back tomorrow morning.”

I had a telephone in my room, and Henry could not hear me talk. At seven o’clock I called Gerald Gray. “Mr. Gray,” I said, “would you be at half past eight at the Excelsior?”

“W-what? . . . Oh! Mrs. Stafford!” he muttered in the telephone, losing his perfect countenance before this unexpected favor. I hung up the receiver.

My plan was simple. Henry shall come to the Excelsior for Claire Van Dahlen and he shall see me with Mr. Gray. I had told him that I was going away for the whole night. That’s all.

I dressed myself slowly and carefully. I tried to be very attentive, very busy with my toilet, and to drown all thoughts in it. I put on my best gown, a silver gauze dress, all glimmering with rhinestones. I made up my face to look as pretty as possible: I had to use a lot of rouge for it.

Then, suddenly, a thought flashed through my mind, a thought that made me jump from my chair. What if Henry did not come to the Excelsior? He had cried “Never! Never!” so resolutely. . . . What if he had the strength to resist Claire?

The porcelain powder box which I held dropped from my hand and broke to pieces.

Oh, then, if he does not come, it means that he does not love her so much! Then, I will run home and fall at his feet and tell him everything! . . . I had not cried all day; now, tears rolled down my cheeks, so big that I was astonished. Once a person has lost hope, its return is more cruel than the most terrible tortures. I was calm when I began to dress. Now my hands trembled, so that I could hardly touch things.

When I was ready, I put on my traveling overcoat; it hid my evening dress completely. Then I went downstairs.

“Take care of yourself, Irene,” said Henry, fastening tightly and carefully the collar of my overcoat. “Don’t tire yourself. Don’t take too much out of your strength.”

“No, Henry, I won’t. . . . Goodbye, Henry.” I kissed him. For the last time, perhaps. . . .

I walked on foot through the dark streets. It was a cold night and the wind ran under my overcoat, on my naked arms and shoulders. I felt the soft cloud of silver gauze blown close to my legs. I walked firmly and steadily, with a high head.

The Excelsior was a big nightclub in our town. It had not a bad reputation, but somehow women came there with their husbands or did not come at all. I saw the gigantic electric letters “Excelsior,” so white that it hurt the eyes to look upon, above the wide glass entrance. I went upstairs. I did not hear my own footsteps on the deep, soft carpets, and the waiters’ metallic buttons gleamed like diamonds in the strong, unnatural light around me.

The sharp, piercing rumble of a jazz band struck my head like a blow when I entered the great hall. I saw big round white lanterns, white tables, black suits and naked shoulders. I saw glittering glasses, silk stockings, and diamonds.

Mr. Gray was waiting for me. He looked like the best pictures in the most exclusive men’s style magazine. As a perfect gentleman, he did not show the slightest sign of astonishment or surprise at all this. He smiled as courteously and respectfully as it is possible for a man to smile. I chose a table behind a screen, from where I could see the entrance door. Then I sat looking at it, and, strangely, all seemed to be veiled by a cloud. I distinguished the room very vaguely, as in a mist, while I saw the door clearly, precisely, as though through a magnifying glass, with every little detail, to the slightest reflection of the glass, to the smallest curves of the knob.

I remember that Mr. Gray spoke about something and I spoke. He smiled and I smiled, probably, also. . . . There was a clock above the entrance door. It was eight-thirty when I arrived. The hands on the dial moved. I watched them. And if someone could look into my soul then—he would have seen there a round white dial with moving hands. Nothing more.

Just at nine, in the very second when the big hand reached the middle of the 12, the wide glass door opened. I knew it would be opened. . . . However, it was not Henry, no. But it was Claire Van Dahlen.

She was alone. She had a plain black velvet dress, just a piece of soft velvet wrapped around her body; but she had the most gorgeous diamond tiara on her head, with sparkling stones falling to her beautiful golden shoulders.

She stopped at the door and inspected the hall with a quick glance around. She saw at once that he was not there. Her lips had an imperceptible movement of anger and grief. She moved slowly across the hall and sat at a table. I could observe her through a hole in the screen.

Nine-fifteen. . . . The door opened every two minutes. Men in dress coats and women in silk wraps and furs entered and walked noiselessly into the brilliant crowd. I watched the endless torrent of patent-leather shoes and little silver slippers on the soft lavender carpet at the entrance. Oh, why, why were there so many visitors in this restaurant! Every time I heard the door open, with a sinister creaking sound, a cold shudder ran through my back and knees.

My eyes could not leave the door for a second. “Careful, Mrs. Stafford!” I heard Mr. Gray’s voice, as in a dream. I noticed that I had been holding a glass of water and the water was spilling on my dress. I took a little piece of ice from the glass and swallowed it. Mr. Gray looked at me with astonishment.

Nine twenty-five. . . . My knees trembled convulsively. It seemed to me that I would never be able to walk. I looked at Claire through the screen’s hole. She, too, was waiting. Her eyes were also fixed at the door. She was nervously breaking a flower’s stem in her fingers.

Nine-thirty. . . . I could not have told whether the jazz band was rumbling or it was the heavy, striking, knocking noise in my temples. . . . I held my throat with my hand: there was so little air in this hall and a strange leaden humming strangled me.

At nine forty-five he came. The door opened and I saw Henry. For a second it seemed to me that he was standing in the air: there was nothing around. Then I saw the door, but did not see him, though he was standing there: I saw a black hole. Then I saw him again and he moved. And there was a strange dead silence around. No sounds in my ears.

Then I threw back my head and cried: “Let us be merry, Mr. Gray!” I flung my arms around his neck and, burying my face in his shoulder, I bit convulsively his coat: I understood plainly one thing only—I must not shout.

Mr. Gray was amazed; he had been sitting with his back to the door and had not seen Henry. But with his perfect, courteous self-possession, he remained calm and even passed his hand cautiously on my hair.

I raised my head and he could read nothing in my face now. But my eyes must have been horrible, for he looked into them and grew a little uneasy. I seized nervously at all the glasses that were on the table. “Where is the wine, Mr. Gray?” I cried. “Why is there no wine? I want wine!” Afraid to make any opposition, he called a waiter and whispered some words, and the waiter winked.

I looked through the screen’s hole. Henry approached Claire. She had involuntarily jumped from her chair and smiled, with more happiness and passionate tenderness than she wanted to show, perhaps. She must have been very anxious, for she did not even say a word about his delay. He was pale and serious. This delay told me more than anything: he had struggled, oh! horribly struggled, and lost. . . . He sat at her table. I saw his eyes light with an unconquerable joy as he looked at her, and his lips smiled. . . . And he was so beautiful!

The waiter brought the wine, two bottles. Mr. Gray wanted to pour it. I seized the bottle from his hand and filled a glass, so that the wine ran over, on my dress. Then I lifted the glass as high as I could and let it fall to the floor, breaking with a sharp, ringing sound. I burst into a loud, piercing, provocative laugh.

Mr. Gray was amazed. “Laugh!” I whispered threateningly. “I want you to laugh! Laugh loudly!” He laughed. I looked through the hole. Many persons glanced in our direction, wondering who could be making that vulgar noise. That was what I wanted.

I seized my hair and brought it to a wild disorder, so that threads flew in all directions. Then I seized a bottle of wine and flung it to the floor, with a terrible noise. I laughed again and cried: “O-oh! Gerry!” Then I overturned my chair and jumping on Mr. Gray’s knees, embracing him, I pressed my face to his, as though I was kissing him. He could not notice that I pushed the screen with my foot in the same moment. The screen fell and there I was, on “Gerry’s” lap!

Many persons arose from their seats to look, and when I arose, pretending to be very vexed and ashamed—I stood face to face with Henry.

I shall never forget his eyes. . . . We were silent. . . . “Irene . . . Irene,” he muttered.

I pretended to be stricken, afraid, terrified the first minutes. Then I raised my head and looking at him with the greatest insolence: “Well?” I asked.

He stepped back. He shuddered. He passed his hand over his eyes. Then he said slowly: “I will not disturb you.” He turned and walked to Mrs. Van Dahlen. “Let us go to another restaurant . . . Claire,” he said. They walked out. I followed them with my eyes, till they disappeared behind the door. That was all. . . .

I was completely, deeply calm now. I turned to Mr. Gray. He had put the screen around our table again. “Do not grieve yourself, Mrs. Stafford,” he said. “It is for the best, perhaps.”

“Yes, Mr. Gray, it is for the best,” I answered.

We sat down and we finished our dinner, calmly and quietly. I had all my consciousness now. I spoke, and smiled, and flirted with him so gently, so graciously, that he was wholly charmed and forgot the wild scene. At half past ten I asked him to take me home. He was disappointed that our meeting was so short, but said nothing and courteously brought me to my house door, in an automobile. “Shall we meet again soon?” he asked, holding my hand in his.

“Yes, very soon . . . and very often,” I answered. He went away, completely happy.

I entered our apartment. I stood motionless, I could not tell for how long. . . . It was done. . . .

I entered Henry’s study. I saw some papers on the floor and, picking them up, replaced them on the desk. A chair was pushed into the middle of the room—I put it back. I adjusted the pillows on the sofa. I put in order the plans and drawings that covered all the desk. His rulers, compasses, and other objects were thrown all over the room. I put them on the desk. I made a fire in the fireplace. . . . It was for the last time that I could do a wife’s duty for him.

When there was nothing more to arrange, I went to the fireplace and sat on the floor. Henry’s armchair was standing by the fire, and there was a pillow near it, on which he put his feet. I did not dare to sit in the armchair. I lay on the floor and put my head on the pillow. . . . The wood was burning with a soft red glow in the darkness and a little crackling sound in the silence. I lay motionless, pressing the pillow to my lips. . . .

I arose quickly when I heard a key turn in the entrance door’s lock. I went into the hall. Henry was pale, very pale. He did not look at me. He took off his hat and overcoat and hung them on the clothes peg. Then he walked to his study and, passing by me, looked at me with a long glance. He entered first; I followed him.

We were silent for a long time. Then he spoke, sternly and coldly: “Will you explain to me anything?”

“I have nothing to explain, Henry,” I answered. “You have seen.”

“Yes,” he said, “I have seen.”

He walked up and down the room, then stopped again. He smiled, a smile of disgust and hatred. “It was great!” he said. I did not answer. He trembled with fury. “You . . . you . . .” he cried, clasping his fists. “How could you?” I was silent. “And I called my wife during four years a woman like that!” He pressed his head. “You make me crazy! It is impossible! It is not you! You were not like this! You could not be like this!”

I said nothing. He seized me by the arms and flung me to the floor. “Speak, dirt! Answer! Why did you do it?”

I looked at him, I looked straight into his eyes and told a lie. It was the most atrocious lie that could be and the only one he could believe and understand. “I hid it from you because I did not want to make you unhappy. I struggled a long time against this love and could not stand it any longer,” I said.

And he understood this. He left my arms and stepped back. Then laughed. “Well, I can make you happy, then!” he cried. “I don’t love you at all and I am not unhappy at all! I love another woman! I am only happy now!”

“You are happy, Henry?”

“Yes, immensely! I see that you are disappointed!”

“No, Henry, I am not disappointed. It is all right.”

“All right? . . . What are you doing lying on the floor? Get up! . . . All right? You have the insolence to say that?”

He walked up and down the room. “Don’t look at me!” he cried. “You have no right any more even to look at me! I forbid it to you!”

“I will not look, Henry,” I answered, bowing my head.

“No, you will! You will look at yourself!” he cried and, seizing me by the arm, flung me to the looking glass. “Look at your dress!” he cried. Dark wine spots covered the silver gauze of my dress.

“You loved him, you went with him, well. But wine! But kisses! But that conduct in a public place!” he cried. Oh, my plan had worked perfectly! I said nothing.

He was silent for some time, then he said, more calmly and coldly: “You understand that there will be nothing between us, now. I wish I could forget that there ever was. . . . And I want you to forget that I was your husband. I want you to give me back everything you have from me, any kind of remembrance.”

“Well, Henry, I can give them now,” I answered.

I went to my room and brought everything, all his pictures, his presents, some letters, all I had from him. He took them all and threw them into the fireplace. “May I . . . may I keep this one, Henry?” I asked, handing him the best picture, with the inscription. My fingers trembled. He took it, looked, and threw it back to me disdainfully. It fell on the floor. I picked it up.

“I will see to it that we are divorced as soon as possible,” he said. He fell into an armchair. “Let me alone now,” he added.

I walked to the door, then stopped. I looked at him. And I said, with a voice that was very firm and very calm: “Forgive me, Henry . . . if you can . . . and forget me. . . . And don’t grieve with grim thoughts, think about Claire, and be happy . . . and don’t think about me . . . it is not worthwhile.”

He looked at me. “You were like this . . . before,” he said slowly.

“I was . . . I am no longer. . . . Everything changes, Henry . . . everything has an end. But life is beautiful . . . life is great. . . . You must be happy, Henry.”

“Irene,” he said, in a very low voice, “tell me, why have you changed?”

I have gone through it all calmly. This simple sentence, my name, his low voice, made something rise in my throat. But for one second only. “I could not help it, Henry,” I answered.

Then I went upstairs to my room.

I bit my lips, when I entered, so that I felt the heavy taste of blood in my mouth. “That’s nothing,” I muttered. “That’s nothing, Irene. . . . That’s nothing. . . .” I felt a strange necessity to speak; to say something; to drown with words something that has no name and that was there, waiting for me. “That’s nothing . . . nothing. . . . It will be over . . . it will be over . . . just one minute, Irene, it will be over . . . one minute. . . .”

I knew I was not blind, but I did not see anything. I did not hear a sound. . . . When I began to hear again I noticed that I was repeating senselessly, “. . . one minute . . . one minute . . .”

Henry’s picture, which I held, fell to the floor. I looked at it. Then, suddenly, I saw clearly, wholly, and exactly what had happened and what was going to happen. It lasted less than a second, as though in the glow of a sudden lightning, but it seized me at the throat, like pincers of red-hot iron. And I shouted. I uttered a cry. It was not even a cry, it was not a human sound. It was the wild howl of a wounded animal; the primitive, ferocious cry of life for help.

I heard running footsteps on the staircase. “What happened?” cried Henry, knocking at my door.

“Nothing,” I answered. “I saw a mouse.” I heard him go downstairs.

I wanted to move, to take some steps. But the floor was running under my feet, running down, down. And there was a black smoke in my room that turned, turned, turned in columns with a frightful speed. I fell. . . .

When I opened my eyes, I was lying on the floor. It was quite dark in the room, and cold. A window had been left open and the curtains moved slowly, blown by the wind. “I was unconscious,” I said to myself.

I rose to my feet and tried to stand. My knees seemed broken. I let myself slowly down again. Then I saw his picture on the floor. A long shudder ran through all my body.

I took the picture and put it in an armchair. Then I whispered, and my voice was human now, weak and trembling: “Henry . . . Henry . . . my Henry . . . that is nothing. . . . It is not true, is it, Henry? It was a dream, perhaps, and we shall awaken soon. . . . And I will not cry. Don’t look at my eyes, Henry, I am not crying . . . it will be over . . . in a minute. . . . Because, you see, it was hard . . . I think it was even very hard. . . . But that is nothing. You are with me, aren’t you, Henry? . . . And you know everything. . . . You do. . . . I am foolish to grieve like this, am I not, Henry? Say that I am. . . . Smile, Henry, and laugh at me . . . and scold me for torturing myself like this, when there is nothing . . . nothing at all. . . . Nothing happened . . . and you know everything. . . . You see, I am smiling. . . . And you love me. . . . You are my Henry. . . . I am a little tired, you know, but I will take a rest . . . and it will be over. . . . No, I am not crying, Henry . . . I love you . . . Henry. . . .”

Tears ran down my cheeks, big, heavy, silent tears. I did not cry, there were no sobs, no sound. I spoke and I smiled. Only tears rolled down, without interruption, without sound, without end. . . .

I do not remember much about the months that followed. We had applied for a divorce, on the ground of wife’s unfaithfulness. Waiting for it, I lived in Henry’s house. But we did not meet often. When we met, we greeted one another politely.

I managed to live, somehow. I remember that I read books, lots of books. But I cannot remember a word of them now, their titles or how they looked; not one of them. I walked much too, in the little deserted streets of the poorest neighborhoods, where nobody could see me. I think I was calm then. Only I remember that I once heard a boy say, pointing at me: “Here’s one that’s goofy!”

I met Gerald Gray often, as often as I could, and I flirted with him, I had to. I do not remember one of our meetings. But I must have played my part perfectly well, for I remember, as though out of a deep fog, one sentence said by him: “You are the most bewitching, the most exquisite of women, Mrs. Stafford, and your husband is a fool . . . for which I am immensely happy.” I do not know how I could have done it; I must have acted with the precision and unconsciousness of a lunatic.

One thing I remember well: I watched Henry. He spent all his time with Claire. His eyes were brilliant, and sparkling, and smiling, now. I, who knew him so well, who understood every line of his face, I saw that he was happy. He seemed to have come out of a heavy nightmare, which his existence for the last months had been, and to breathe life again, and as before to be young, strong, beautiful, oh! too beautiful!

I watched Claire, also. She loved Henry. It was not a mere flirt for her, or a victory that flattered her pride. It was a deep, great passion, the first in her life, perhaps. She was no “vamp.” She was a clever, noble, refined woman, as clever as she was beautiful. . . . He will be happy.

I saw them together once. They were walking in the street. They were talking and smiling. She wore an elegant white suit. They looked perfectly happy.

The town was indignant at our divorce, indignant with me, of course. I was not admitted in any house any more. Many persons did not greet me in the street. I noticed disdainful, mocking smiles, despising grins on the faces of persons that had been my friends. I met Mrs. Brogan once. She stopped and told me plainly, for she always said what she thought: “You dirty creature! Do you think nobody understands that you sold yourself for Gray’s money?” And Patsy Tillins approached me once in the street and said: “You’ve made a bad bargain, dearie: I wouldn’t have changed Henry Stafford for no one, from heaven to hell!”

The day came when we got the divorce. . . . I was Irene Wilmer again; divorced for unfaithfulness to my husband. That was all.

When Henry spoke to me about money that I might need, I refused to take anything and said cynically: “Mr. Gray has more money than you!”

Gerald Gray was to leave for New York, just on the next day, to take a ship for Europe from there. I was to go with him.

That evening, Mr. Barnes called upon me. He had been out of town for the last months and, returning only today, heard about everything. He came to me immediately. “Now, Irene,” he said very seriously, and his voice trembled in spite of him, “there is some terrible mistake in what I have heard. Would you tell me?”

“Why, Mr. Barnes,” I answered calmly, “I don’t think there could be any mistake: I am divorced, just today.”

“But . . . but . . . but is it really your fault? Are you really guilty?”

“Well, if you call it guilty . . . I love Gerald Gray, that’s all.”

His face grew red, purple, then white. He could not speak for some long minutes. “You . . . you don’t love your husband?” he muttered at last.

“Henry Stafford, you mean? He is not my husband any longer. . . . No, I don’t love him.”

“Irene . . .” He tried to speak calmly and there was a strange solemn strength in his voice. “Irene, it is not true. I will tell everybody that you could not have done it.”

“I’m no saint.”

He stepped back and his grayish old head shook piteously. “Irene,” he said again, and there was almost a plea in his voice, “you could not have traded a man like your husband for that silly snob.”

“I did.”

“You, Irene, you? I cannot believe it!”

“Don’t. Who cares?”

This was too much. He raised his head. “Then,” he said slowly, “I have nothing more to say. . . . Farewell, Irene.”

“Bye-bye!” I answered with an indifferent insolence.

I looked through the window, when he was going away. His poor old figure seemed more bent and heavy than ever. “Farewell, Mr. Barnes,” I whispered. “Farewell . . . and forgive me.”

That night, the last night I spent in my home, I awoke very late. When all was silent in the house, I went noiselessly downstairs. I thought that I could not say farewell to Henry, tomorrow, and I wanted to say it. I cautiously opened the bedroom door: he was sleeping. I entered. I raised slightly the window curtain, to see him. I stood by his bed, that had been mine also. I looked at him. His face was calm and serene. The dark lashes of his closed eyes were immobile on his cheeks. His beautiful lips seemed carved of marble on his face, pale in the darkness. I did not dare to touch him. I put my hand slowly and cautiously on the pillow, near his head.

Then I knelt down, by the bed. I could not kiss his lips; it would have awakened him. I took his hand cautiously and pressed it to my lips. “Henry,” I whispered, “you shall never know. And you must not know. Be happy, very happy. . . . And I shall go through life with one thing, one right only left to me: the right to say that I loved you, Henry . . . and the right to love you . . . till the end.” I kissed his hand with a long, long kiss.

Then I arose, closed the curtain, and went out.

It was a cold, gray day, the next and the last. There was a little chilly rain sometimes, and a wind that carried gray smoky clouds in the sky.

The train was leaving our town at ten-fifteen P.M. Mr. Gray called me in the morning. He was radiant with joy. He wanted to come in the evening to bring me to the station. I refused. “Wait for me there,” I said shortly. “I shall come myself.”

It was already dark and I sat in my room waiting. Waiting with such a despair that it astonished me, for I thought that I was unable to feel anything now. I waited for Henry. He was not at home. He must have gone to Claire, to spend with her the first day of his freedom. I could not say farewell to him, no; but I wanted to take a last look at him, the last one before going forever. And he was not there. . . . I sat by the window. It was cold, but I opened it. I watched the street. The roofs and pavement were wet and glittering. There were few passersby that walked rarely, with a nervous hurry, lonely, hopeless shadows in glittering raincoats. . . .

It was nine-thirty. Henry had not come.

I closed the window and took a little bag. I had not much to pack. I put some linen in it and one dress—my wedding dress, with the veil; I put in Henry’s photograph. It was all I took with me.

When I was closing the bag, I heard a key turn in the entrance door and footsteps, his footsteps. He had come!

I put on my hat and overcoat, took my bag. “I shall pass through the hall and open the door of his study a little. He will not notice and I shall take a look, just one look,” I thought.

I went downstairs. I entered the hall and opened his door: the study was empty; he was not there. I took a deep breath and walked to the entrance door. I put my hand on the knob.

“Irene, are you not going to say farewell to me?” I turned. It was Henry. His voice was calm and sad.

I was so stricken that I almost lost all my self-possession in the first second. “Yes . . . yes . . .” I muttered incoherently.

We entered his study. There was a fire in the fireplace. He looked at me with his dark eyes, and they were very clear and very sad.

“We are parting forever, perhaps, Irene,” he said, “and we had meant much to one another.”

I nodded. My voice would have betrayed me, if I spoke.

“I cannot blame or judge you, Irene. . . . That evening, in the restaurant, it was a sudden madness, perhaps, that you did not realize yourself. . . . I do not think you are really the woman you were then.”

“No, Henry . . . perhaps not.” I could not help whispering.

“You are not. I shall always think of you as the woman I loved.” He paused. I had never seen him so quiet and hopeless.

“Life goes on,” he continued. “I shall marry another woman and you—another man. . . . And everything is over.” He took my hands in his and there was a sudden light in his eyes when he said: “But we were so happy, Irene!”

“Yes, Henry, we were,” I answered firmly and calmly.

“Did you love me then, Irene?”

“I did, Henry.”

“That time has gone. . . . But I could never forget you, Irene. I cannot. I shall think about you.”

“Yes, Henry, think about me . . . sometimes.”

“You will be happy, Irene, won’t you? I want you to be happy.”

“I will be, Henry.”

“I will be also. . . . Maybe even as happy as I was with you. . . . But we cannot look behind now. One has to go on. . . . Will you think about me a little, Irene?”

“I will, Henry.”

His eyes were dark and there was a deep sorrow in them. I raised my head. I put my hand on his shoulder. I spoke with a great calm, with a majesty, perhaps, to which I had the right now.

“Henry, you must be happy, and strong, and glorious. Leave suffering to those that cannot help it. You must smile at life. . . . And never think about those that cannot. They are not worthwhile.”

“Yes . . . you are right. . . . Everything finished well. It could have broken the life of one of us. I am so happy it did not!”

“Yes, Henry, it did not. . . .”

We were silent. Then he said: “Farewell, Irene. . . . We shall never meet on this earth again. . . .”

“Life is not so long, Henry.” I trembled when I said this, but happily he did not understand. “Who knows?” I added quickly. “We shall meet, perhaps . . . when we are sixty.”

He smiled. “Yes, perhaps . . . and then we shall laugh at all this.”

“Yes, Henry, we shall laugh. . . .”

He bent his head and kissed my hand. “Go now,” he whispered, and added, in a very low voice: “You were the greatest thing in my life, Irene.” He raised his head and looking into my eyes: “Will you not say something to me . . . for the last time?” he asked.

I looked straight into his eyes. All my soul was in my answer: “I loved you, Henry.”

He kissed my hand again. His voice was a very faint whisper when he said: “I shall be happy. But there are moments when I wish I would never have met that woman. . . . There is nothing to do. . . . Life is hard, sometimes, Irene.”

“Yes, Henry,” I answered.

He took me in his arms and kissed me. His lips were on mine; my arms—around his neck. It was for the last time, but it was. And no one can deprive me of it now.

He went with me outside. I called a taxi and entered it. I looked through the window: he was standing on the steps. The wind blew his hair and he was immobile like a statue. It was the last time I ever saw him.

I closed my eyes and when I opened them—the taxi was stopped before the station. I paid the driver, took my bag, and went to the train.

Gerald Gray was waiting for me. He had a brilliant traveling costume, a radiant smile, and a gigantic bouquet of flowers, which he presented to me. We entered the car.

At ten-fifteen there was a crackling, metallic sound, the wheels turned, the car shook and moved. The pillars of the station slipped faster and faster beyond us, then some lanterns, on corners of the dark streets, some lights in the windows. And the town remained behind us. . . . The wheels were knocking quickly and regularly.

We were alone in our part of the car. Mr. Gray looked at me and smiled. Then he smiled again, as though to make me smile in answer. I sat motionless. “We are free and alone at last,” he whispered and tried to put his arm around me. I moved from him.

“Wait, Mr. Gray,” I said coldly. “We shall have time enough for that.”

“What is the matter with you, Mrs. Stafford . . . Miss Wilmer, I mean?” he muttered. “You are so pale!”

“Nothing,” I answered. “I am a little tired.”

For two hours we sat, silent and motionless. There was nothing but the noise of the wheels around us.

After two hours’ ride, there was the first station. I took my bag and rose. “Where are you going?” asked Mr. Gray, surprised. Without answer, I left the train. I approached the open window of the car where he sat looking at me anxiously, and I said slowly: “Listen, Mr. Gray: there is a millionaire in San Francisco waiting for me. You were only a means to get rid of my husband. I thank you. And don’t ever say a word about this to anybody—they will laugh at you terribly.”

He was stricken, furious and disappointed, oh, terribly disappointed. But as a perfect gentleman, he did not show it. “I am happy to have rendered you that service,” he said courteously. The train moved at this moment. He took off his hat, with the most gracious politeness.

I remained alone on the little platform. There was an immense black sky around me, with slow, heavy clouds. There was an old fence and a wretched tree, with some last, wet leaves. . . . I saw a dim light in the little window of the ticket office.

I had not much money, only what was left in my pocketbook. I approached the lighted window. “Give me a ticket, please,” I said, handing over all my money, with nickels and pennies, all.

“To which station?” asked the employee shortly.

“To . . . to . . . That is all the same,” I answered.

He looked at me and even moved a little back. “Say . . .” he began.

“Give me to the end of the line,” I said. He handed me a ticket and pushed back some of my money. I moved from the window, and he followed me with a strange look.

“I shall get out at some station or other,” I thought. A train stopped at the platform and I went in. I sat down at a window. Then I moved no more.

I remember it was dark beyond the window, then light, then dark again. I must have traveled more than twenty-four hours. Perhaps. I don’t know.

It was dark when I remembered that I must alight at some station. The train stopped and I got out. On the platform I saw that it was night. I wanted to return to the car. But the train moved and disappeared into the darkness. I remained.

There was nobody on the wet wooden platform. I saw only a sleepy employee, a dim lantern, and a dog rolled under a bench, to protect himself from the rain. I saw some little wooden houses beyond the station, and a narrow street. The rails glittered faintly and there was a poor little red lantern in the distance.

I looked at the clock: it was three A.M. I sat on the bench and waited for the morning.

All was finished. . . . I had done my work. . . . Life was over. . . .

I live in that town now. I am an employee in a department store and I work from nine to seven. I have a little flat—two rooms—in a poor, small house, and a separate staircase—nobody notices me when I go out or return home.

I have no acquaintances whatever. I work exactly and carefully. I never speak. My fellow workers hardly know my name. My landlady sees me once a month, when I pay my rent.

I never think when I work. When I come home—I eat and I sleep. That is all.

I never cry. When I look into a looking glass—I see a pale face, with eyes that are a little too big for it; and with the greatest calm, the greatest quietness, the deepest silence in the world.

I am always alone in my two rooms. Henry’s picture stands on my table. He has a cheerful smile: a little haughty, a little mocking, very gay. There is an inscription: “To my Irene—Henry—Forever.” When I am tired, I kneel before the table and I look at him.

People say that time rubs off everything. This law was not for me. Years have passed. I loved Henry Stafford. I love him. He is happy now—I gave him his happiness. That is all.

They were right, perhaps, those who said that I bought my husband. I bought his life. I bought his happiness. I paid with everything I had. I love him. . . . If I could live life again—I would live it just as I did. . . .

Women, girls, everyone that shall hear me, listen to this: don’t love somebody beyond limits and consciousness. Try to have always some other aim or duty. Don’t love beyond your very soul . . . if you can. I cannot.

One has to live as long as one is not dead. I live on. But I know that it will not be long now. I feel that the end is approaching. I am not ill. But I know that my strength is going and that life simply and softly is dying away in me. It has burned out. It is well.

I am not afraid and I am not sorry. There is only one thing more that I dare to ask from life: I want to see Henry once again. I want to have one look more, before the end, at him that has been my whole life. Just one look only. That is all I ask.

I cannot return to our town, for I will be seen and recognized at once. I wait and I hope. I hope hopelessly. There is not much time left. When I walk in the street—I look at every face around me, searching for him. When I come home—I say to his picture: “It is not today, Henry. . . . But it will be tomorrow, perhaps. . . .”

Shall I see him again? I tell myself that I shall. I know that I shall not. . . .

Now I have written my story. I gathered all my courage and I wrote it. If he reads it—he will not be unhappy. But he will understand all. . . .

And then, perhaps, after reading it, he will . . . oh, no! not come to see me, he will understand that he must not do it . . . he will just pass by me in the street, seeming not to notice me, so that I might see him once again, once more . . . and for the last time.

The Night King

c. 1926

Editor’s Preface

This story represents the writing of the very early Ayn Rand. She wrote the story, probably in 1926, while living at the Hollywood Studio Club. She was still learning English—especially the use of American slang and how to re-create the same on the printed page.

“The Night King” clearly reflects her admiration of O. Henry. (See Leonard Peikoff’s preface to “Escort.”)

This story is being published here with minimal editing in order accurately to convey her literary and linguistic starting point, and thus her development as a writer both of fiction and of English in the ensuing years.

—R.E.R.

The Night King

That one was to be the best crime I ever pulled off, if I say so myself, it was to be a masterpiece. And a masterpiece it was, all right, but every time I think of it my blood boils with fury and I wonder if I’m not going to be a murderer instead of a mild, harmless hold-up man.

Some people may be so heartless as to feel a certain lack of respect for me, when they hear of this memorable affair. But I defy anyone to tell me that he would have acted differently, that he would have been able to act differently in this strange case.

I’m not an average crook and my mind is the best in the business. I sacrificed two years of my valuable life to that one job. Believe it or not, for two whole years I was as straight as a telegraph pole and earned my modest living by holding the honorable, respectable position of a valet. The cops back in Chicago would never believe that of me, Steve Hawkins, the great Steve Hawkins who used to pull stick-up jobs faster than the crime reporters could write down in short-hand. Me—to become a valet! Yet that’s just what I had been doing—for two years. For, you see, I was after the most precious thing and against the most dangerous man in New York.

The thing was the Night King; the man—Winton Stokes.

Winton Stokes had a nasty smile, sixteen million dollars and no fear whatsoever.

He also had the Night King.

He was one of those wealthy loafers that spend their lives looking for danger and never getting enough of it. Big-game hunting, aviation, jungle-exploring, mountain-peak climbing—there wasn’t a thing that man hadn’t had time to do in the thirty-four years of his life. And he always took a particular pleasure in doing the things that would shock people, that nobody could expect or think of. Some brain, too! The keenest, sharpest and, damn it!, queerest brain I ever came across. I often thought it was too bad he was born a millionaire, for he would have made a perfect crook—just the type for it.

His smile? I hated it. I hated almost everything about him: his slow, soft movements that looked as though his bones were of velvet, and with it his tanned skin that looked as though his body were of bronze; and then, his grey eyes, the eyes of a tamed tiger, that you weren’t so sure whether it’s tamed or not. But his smile was the worst of all. He always had it when he looked at people—just two little wrinkles in the corners of his mouth, which seemed to say you were terribly funny, but that he was too polite to laugh.

The Night King was a black diamond; one of those perfect gems that have a world-renown, and their owners—a world-envy. A marvelous stone, famous like a movie star, but different from one in that it never had a double.

Was it valuable? Well, you could buy a small city, inhabitants and all, for the price of that one little splinter of black fire. Winton Stokes was so proud of it that he wouldn’t have traded it for all the rest of his possessions—and that was plenty.

There had been more loss of life from trying to get that stone than there is from traffic accidents in a big city. All of our big guys tried it. Then, it was given up as impossible. No one could get it; not with Winton Stokes as the owner.

But I told them that there was nothing impossible to Steve Hawkins, the master-criminal. I had made up my mind to succeed where all had failed. They laughed at me for giving up my brilliant hold-up career and slaving as Winton Stokes’ valet. During the two years of my working at his New York residence, I never once got even a hint of where the Night King was hidden, no matter how hard I tried. I don’t believe anybody on earth knew that secret, except Winton Stokes. But I waited and played the part of as honest a guy as they make ’em. I was a model valet and just as sweet and white as sugar. Then, finally, my big chance came—and oh! How it did come!

I wanted to show them all an unusual crime to knock them cockeyed with amazement. And they were amazed, though not quite in the way I had expected. But just try to mention the Night King case to the New York cops and see what happens!

It started like this: Winton Stokes was going on a trip to San Francisco. He was engaged to some charming little girl who lived there. I’ve seen her picture on his desk. A blonde little thing, with a smile like a glass of champagne and legs like a hosiery ad. Winton Stokes was to marry her there, in her home town. But I knew something else about this trip of his, something that no one knew, but me, and Stokes, and his girl.

I learned it in a very simple manner, but the news was as unexpected to me as a fresh orchid in a garbage can. You may be sure that for two years I’ve been opening secretly all of Winton Stokes’ letters that I could lay my hands on. So I opened this particular one that he had ordered me to mail. I don’t remember a word of it, except one sentence, and here is the sentence that took hold of my brains, memory and consciousness so as to knock out everything else I had on my mind:

“My dearest one, I’ll bring with me, as my wedding gift, the thing that has been my most precious possession, but isn’t any more—not since I looked into the blue diamonds of your eyes—I’ll bring the Night King, that you asked me about once.”

Oh boy!

The first thing I did when I read this was to take a deep breath. The second—to swear, energetically. The third—to laugh. The big fool! To give that stone away like this to a woman! Just like him, too.

Well, here was my chance.

In the day that followed I turned my brain upside down and back again, trying to figure out a way to accompany him on this trip. But I didn’t have to think much. He saved me the trouble.

I was called into his study on that beautiful spring morning. He was sitting in a deep, Oriental chair, his legs crossed, a long cigarette between his lips, looking at me with half-closed eyes.

“Williams,” he said (this being the name I had adopted), “you might be interested to know that in three days you are leaving with me for San Francisco.”

There must have been something funny in my face, for he added:

“What is it? Are you surprised?”

I muttered something about how grateful I was for the honor. Fact is, I was so grateful that I almost felt like sparing him and not touching his diamond at all!

“Your services have been most satisfactory during the time you have worked for me and I chose you to accompany me on this trip,” he explained, adding, “I trust you more than my other men.”

Now, I had to act and act quick. After some careful deliberation, a plan was ready in my mind, a brilliant plan that only a bright thinker like me could have devised.

That evening, I made my way to a certain part of New York, very far from the residential district and very different from it. I went directly to a certain pool-parlor, unofficially called “The Hanged Cat,” which was a pool-parlor and many other things besides. Since the time I started on my valet job, I didn’t mix with any rough work, as I’ve said before, but I knew where to find the boys if I needed them. “The Hanged Cat” was their favorite social club.

It didn’t take me long to choose my men—three of them—and to get them into a dark corner, around an old, shaking table that had four legs all of different lengths.

“Boys,” I said, “I have a job for us and if we pull it through we can all retire and start putting burglar-proof alarms on our safes!”

I explained the whole thing. I told them just what I wanted them to do and also just how much they’d get from me. Two of them, Pete Crump and “Snout” Timkins, agreed at once, and enthusiastically, too. But the third, and I might have expected it, started trouble. The third was Mickey Finnegan.

I had known Mickey back in my Chicago days and we had always been rivals in business. That sap had the nerve to think he was as good as me, and just as much of a master-crook! Every success of mine always made him green with jealousy and every one of his didn’t make me pink, either.

Mickey was a big, husky fellow, with fists like water-melons, hair like a floor-mop, lips like beef-steaks, eyes like a fish and an atrocious odor of tobacco that he was always chewing, slowly and senselessly, like a cow. I had no respect whatever for that big brute’s mentality, of which he had a nickel’s worth. But I had to admit he was strong, and that’s what I needed now—strength.

I had hesitated before choosing him for my accomplice, but his hairy fists looked so promising and besides, I thought our old misunderstandings were forgotten. I was mistaken.

“It’s all right, Steve,” he said in his slow, dragging voice, “it’s fine—except one thing, which’s this: I’m gonna get half of it, see? Fifty-fifty.”

“What? You don’t mean that . . . !”

“Yeh, I do. I wasn’t never Steve Hawkins’ under-dog yet and I don’t crave to start now, neither. I’m just as good as you, and I’ll get just as much, so I will.”

“Well, for pity sakes, Mickey! Isn’t it my job? Didn’t I prepare it? Didn’t I spend two years on it?”

“That,” said Mickey, “don’t make no difference to me.”

I argued for some time, for a long time. But what was the use? Mickey had always been as stubborn as a bull-dog.

“Shut up,” he said finally, “you’re wastin’ yer breath and my time, and one o’them is valuable. It’s either I gets half of it or I don’t and if I don’t you don’t see none of Mickey Finnegan with your gang, either.”

“Mickey,” I said solemnly, “you’re a skunk.”

“Am I?” roared Mickey, and then followed something which is hard to describe, and which was stopped only by the other boys stepping between Mickey and me and tearing us apart. And the result of it was that I had to spit from my mouth two teeth knocked out by Mickey’s fist.

My two friends assured me that we could manage the job between the three of us and didn’t need Mickey at all. So I told him just what I thought of him and went home.

But when I got there and glanced into a mirror, I was terrified to see what my face looked like. My jaw was swollen and as I open my mouth very wide when I talk, the empty black hole on the side was very much in evidence.

What would Winton Stokes think when he saw his model valet with a mug like that? He might change his mind about taking me along. And he might even suspect something. My brilliant plan might be ruined because of Mickey. I shuddered.

“What happened to your face?” asked Winton Stokes calmly, when he saw me on the next morning.

“I—I had a fall. . . .” I stammered, rather uncertainly. “I fell on the basement steps in the dark, last night.”

He looked at me fixedly for some moments, as though thinking it over. “He suspects!” I trembled. But he said, rather indifferently:

“Well, see to it that you have a more decent appearance by the day of our departure, and have some false teeth put in—it doesn’t look proper.”

He sent me to a dentist, and forgot about this episode, and I felt an immense relief. But I made up my mind that someday I’d make Mickey Finnegan pay dearly for it.

In the days that preceded our departure I watched Winton Stokes like a police-dog that trails a crook. I watched his every movement. There wasn’t a place where I didn’t manage to follow him, and watch. I didn’t sleep nights. I hoped to see him take the Night King out of its mysterious hiding-place and see where he was going to put it for the trip. I didn’t see a thing. I didn’t get the slightest clue. I didn’t see him make one move that could be connected with the diamond, or that even looked suspicious.

And so, the day of our departure came and we started on our trip, just Winton Stokes, me, and a little suitcase of his. He didn’t take any other baggage.

Now, I knew that he had the Night King with him somewhere. He would never disappoint a lady and he would take the stone to her in spite of all danger. Besides, it was just the kind of thing he would enjoy doing.

But what got me mad was his utter, perfect calm. He was just as serene as a summer morning; not the slightest shade of worry or preoccupation. And just as we were leaving the house, I remarked that he had left behind the automatic he always carried.

“I won’t need it,” he said, “not on this trip.”

Not on this trip!

When we found ourselves in the luxurious express flying westward, Winton Stokes sat by a window, calm and indifferent, his head thrown back and his eyes half closed. And I, Steve Hawkins, fidgeted nervously in my corner, biting my dry lips and looking anxiously around.

My big moment was approaching. Two years of my life! I thought of the financial loss I had suffered by being out of business for such a long time. The Night King would make up for it all. I had a customer all ready and it takes my breath away when I think of the sum he had offered me for it.

I looked over the car and watched the passengers. I was afraid there might be some detective around, hired by Stokes for protection. But there didn’t seem to be any. My heart was beating fast and I was as nervous as an author on his play’s first night. Winton Stokes was immobile, like an inscrutable Oriental idol.

All of a sudden I jumped in my seat and stuck both my gloves into my mouth to stifle a cry. In a far corner I noticed a gentleman who seemed to be slumbering in his seat, his head hanging down on his breast and a fly walking across his red, moist forehead. That gentleman had a dirty shirt-collar, a brand new suit that didn’t fit, fat legs squeezing out of patent-leather shoes, and all the appearance of one who isn’t used to decent clothes. His mouth was chewing slowly and heavily. It was Mickey Finnegan.

What was he doing here? What was he going to do? Would he betray me, or try to pull the job for himself? For the first time it occurred to me he knew the secret of the Night King’s trip and might wish to try his own luck at it.

I felt cold in my spine. But there was nothing I could do, except watch Mickey carefully and hope that he wouldn’t have time to act before I did. After a while I was a little reassured: I decided that a master-mind like me didn’t have to fear the rivalry of that brainless boob. Besides, Mickey didn’t seem to have any accomplices around and he looked dead tired and sleepy.

I could hardly wait for night to come. The hours just dragged forever. The speeding strokes of car-wheels on the rails sounded like a slow funeral march to me. But everything comes to him who waits.

It was near midnight. Winton Stokes was still sitting in the day coach. He always went to sleep very late and I had counted on it. The night was black as ink. The train stopped at a miserable little station that had only one dim, dirty light and two sleepy, dirty employees on its deserted platform.

I asked Stokes for permission to go out and buy some cigarettes. I went and, having made sure that everything was as I had prepared, returned into the car.

“I thought you might like to know, sir,” I said, “that Mr. Harvey Clayton is traveling with this train, too, in the next car.”

Harvey Clayton was a good friend of his and was, probably, by this time, sleeping peacefully in his New York apartment.

“Harvey Clayton? On this train?” asked Winton Stokes, surprised.

“Yes, sir. I just saw him in the next car, as I was going out.”

Winton Stokes got up and walked towards the next car. I cast a quick glance at Mickey Finnegan in his corner. I drew a breath of relief. That fat fool was sound asleep.

Unseen behind the door, I watched what happened then on the car’s little platform. As Winton Stokes stepped out he found himself between Pete Crump and “Snout” Timkins and felt two guns pressed against his ribs.

“Now you follow and not a squeal outta you, or we’ll pump you full o’holes like a lace curtain!” whispered Pete Crump.

There was no one around to witness the little scene. Pete and “Snout” put their arms under Stokes’, one on each side, and stepped down from the train. Stokes followed calmly. They walked away across the dark station platform. They looked like three good friends. No one could notice the two guns that were pressed against Stokes’ body, under his arms. The sleepy station employees couldn’t see anything suspicious.

I rushed back to the place where Winton Stokes had been sitting and took his coat, hat and suitcase. Then I followed my boys.

They had taken Stokes to a car parked on a dark street-corner, behind the station. Before joining them I tied a handkerchief around my face and put on a big, long coat they had prepared for me, so that Stokes wouldn’t recognize me by my clothes.

I jumped into the car and we drove away into the darkness.

The whole little town had about two streets, one grocery store and a dozen houses. In a moment we were out in the country, flying along a deserted, muddy road. We saw in the distance the train going away to San Francisco, without its most valuable passenger this time. The long line of lighted car windows rolled faster and faster under a rain of red sparks from the puffing engine. It whistled away into the night and disappeared with a moaning of trembling rails. We were alone in the dark country, going at full speed, with all lights turned off. Nothing but desolated plains, lonely bushes and an immense black sky around us.

We all were tense and silent. But Winton Stokes was perfectly calm and seemed to be curious about it all.

We came to a stop before a shabby little hot-dog stand on the road, a couple of miles from the town. I can’t imagine what kind of a business it was doing in that God-forsaken spot, but it fitted our purpose perfectly. It was locked for the night. We forced the lock easily and took our prisoner in.

The old shack was full of dirty pans, onion-peels, bread crumbs, rusty cans and an odor of cheap grease. We lighted a kerosene lamp and awakened a cloud of flies and night-bugs that came buzzing around and beating against the dusty, smoked lamp-chimney.

“Mr. Stokes,” I said gracefully, “you are a sensible man and so are we. You realize that you are entirely in our power, and you can save yourself a lot of trouble by giving to us peacefully and of a free will the Night King, which is as good as ours already.”

“It never pays,” answered Winton Stokes, “to jump to conclusions.”

“Yeh?” I said, less gracefully. “If you don’t obey, that stone’ll be in my hand here within the next ten minutes!”

“That,” answered Winton Stokes, “remains to be seen.”

“All right!” I sneered. “Look!”

At a sign from me, the boys seized him and started the search, while I busted his suitcase open and looked it over myself. Winton Stokes seemed amused and he had the nasty light smile that I hated playing on his lips.

We searched carefully and thoroughly. During the first five minutes of it I was casting mocking glances at Winton Stokes and whistling a musical comedy tune. At the end of ten minutes I stopped the whistling. At the end of half an hour I began to think that my blood was getting unusually cold.

We looked over every inch of his clothes; we tore off the lining of his coat; we examined every grain of dust in his suitcase—to no avail.

“Hang it!” burst out Pete. “The stone ain’t big, but it couldn’t have gone into thin air, could it?”

“We’ll find it, if we have to spend all night here!” I said.

“Take your time, boys, I’m not in a hurry,” remarked Winton Stokes.

“Listen,” I groaned to him in a hoarse whisper. “Get this into your head: I’ll have that stone!”

“Well, what’s stopping you?” he inquired.

At the end of three hours we sat down on the floor and looked helplessly at each other: we didn’t know what more we could search. We had torn every seam in his clothes; we had broken his suitcase to pieces; we had busted the heels of his shoes; squeezed his hat into a pan-cake; crushed flat all his cigarettes; chopped to pieces his soap and towel; ragged his underwear into a mass of fringe; smashed every object he had in his suitcase. We had a pile of wreckage before us and no sign of anything like a diamond.

Pete was perspiring. “Snout” was shaking. I was breathing heavily. Winton Stokes looked indifferent and slightly bored. Believe it or not, he even yawned once.

“Damn you!” I roared, at last. “You’ll tell me where it is or we’ll make you tell, if we have to tear your whole damn body to bits, too!”

“I’ll tell you.”

“Yeah?!”

“I’ll tell you that you’re a fool: nothing on earth can tear a sound from me when I want to be silent—and you know it!”

I answered by a series of expressions that I can’t write down.

“I have been thinking,” he said suddenly, “that I know your voice.”

And before I had time to jump back, he seized the handkerchief covering my face and pulled it off.

All his self-control was not enough to stop a gasp. He stepped back and looked at my face.

“Surprised, eh?” I sneered. He didn’t answer.

“Listen, you,” I yelled. “I’d give my life, hear me?—my life to get that stone! And I wouldn’t mind taking yours, if it would help me to find it!”

At that—he laughed uproariously, a long, loud, insolent laugh . . .

When morning came and a cold grey light crawled into the shack through the dusty window, we were still there, hopeless, broken, beaten. We didn’t even talk any more. There was nothing to be done. We couldn’t stay here much longer: the owner would come soon to open his stand. And besides, what should we stay for?

Silently, without looking at each other, we went to our car and rode away. Of course, we didn’t take Winton Stokes with us. I remember I turned around and saw him standing at the door of the shack, following us with his eyes, his beautiful brown body trembling slightly in the morning cold under the torn rags of his clothes . . .

I was half insane when I got back to New York. I walked around in a daze. “The Night King!” was the only name on my brain. It haunted me. Everything black and round, even shoe-buttons and raisins in bread-loaves seemed to me black diamonds that were tempting, mocking, torturing me.

For hours I sat in a dark corner, in some joint, racking my brain hopelessly over that unexplainable mystery, gnawing over and over again at the same questions: What had happened? Where had that stone been hidden? Where was it now, while I was eating my soul away for it? I drank like a sponge.

So if you have any imagination, imagine, for I can’t describe it, imagine my feelings when I saw the following headlines on newspaper extras:

THE NIGHT KING STOLEN
Winton Stokes Robbed on Trip West

Was I going goofy? I read the paper, hardly believing my eyes. It didn’t say much. It said only that the well-known young millionaire, Winton Stokes, had been robbed of his famous black diamond, “The Night King,” on his way to San Francisco. And that the police were looking for a certain notorious criminal who committed the robbery and whose name they were keeping a secret.

It was a long time before I gathered my senses and even then I couldn’t understand a thing. It occurred to me that Winton Stokes might have faked that news himself, to protect his diamond from further attempts. But I soon realized that I was mistaken: for Stokes was back in New York and didn’t start on another trip, and was reported seriously perturbed; besides, the police were in a big turmoil and really searching for some one.

And then the thought struck me: Mickey Finnegan! Yes, that must be it. How on earth had that big sap managed to do it when I had failed was more than I could understand. It was unbelievable. Yet, Mickey was the only human being that had been in on the secret.

I turned green with fury. Then, I thought it over. Then I almost felt happy.

The first thing I wanted to do was to learn something of Mickey’s present whereabouts. That evening I went to “The Hanged Cat” to try and get some information.

And whom should I see there, right before my eyes, sitting alone at a table in a dark corner, but Mickey Finnegan himself! Well, he was just enough of a dumbbell to do that. He was sipping slowly some booze and his face had a senseless expression, if any.

I walked to his table and sat down.

“Hello!” I said, amiably.

“Hello,” he answered, dark and surprised.

“Mickey, I have an offer for you: give me half of it.”

“Half o’what?”

“You know very well—half of the Night King’s price.”

He looked at me with open mouth and didn’t answer.

“I know you got it,” I said impatiently, “I know you have it. And it’s healthier for you to be partners with me, Mickey Finnegan, understand?”

“Whatcha talking about?”

“Aw, can that stuff! If you were so lucky as to get it, you owe it to me, for I gave you the tip. It’s only fair that we split now. And if you don’t—I’ll go straight to police headquarters and tell them who’s got the Night King and where to find him!”

“Listen, buddy, you’re cracked. How could I have gotten it when you grabbed it first? Yeh, I was on the train, an’ I figured to try it, but I was too damn tired an’ I fell asleep, an’ when I woke the Stokes guy was gone—so who pulled it?”

“I didn’t know you were such a good actor, Mickey Finnegan! But it’s no use, you can’t fool me. Now, do I get half of it or do I not?”

“I know you’ve got it yerself, an’ you’re lying, but I’ll be damned if I can understand why.”

“Mickey,” I said desperately, “Mickey! We’ve always been good friends. Give me that stone, Mickey! Show it to me! Let me see it!”

“You’ve been drinkin’, buddy.”

“For the last time, Mickey, are we partners?”

“Like fun we are!”

I got up. “All right,” I growled, “all right. So long, Mickey Finnegan. You know where I’m going!”

“Go to hell!” was Mickey’s answer.

There was but one feeling left in me and it was a blind fury against Mickey Finnegan. Forgetting everything else, I had but one thought now—revenge. I decided to go straight to headquarters. I hesitated for a moment, thinking that they were probably looking for me, too, after my attempted robbery. But I reassured myself with the thought that they wouldn’t know me, for Stokes never had a picture of me, and besides, I would be forgiven and maybe even rewarded for helping to catch the real thief.

I remembered the fist fight and all that I had suffered from Mickey Finnegan and my mad fury choked me. I went to headquarters.

I walked right in, head high and with assured steps, like an honest, respectable citizen. I asked proudly and imperatively to see the Chief Inspector.

The cops were looking at me with the queerest looks I ever saw in human eyes. When I asked for the Chief Inspector, two or three of them rushed to his office much too hurriedly.

When I walked into the Chief’s office, he looked at me with bulging eyes.

“Well, for goodness’ sake!” he gasped.

“Inspector,” I said solemnly, “I know who stole the Night King and I know the man you’re looking for: it’s Mickey Finnegan!”

He looked at me silently for a long time, with the funniest expression on his face.

“You’re mistaken, Hawkins,” he said slowly at last, “it isn’t Finnegan we’re looking for—it’s you!”

“Me?! Me? W-why?”

“Because you’ve got the Night King.”

“What?!!”

“You’ve got it and what’s more, you’re going to return it.”

“Who the hell told you that?”

“Mr. Stokes did. And I’m going to get in touch with him at once and tell him that we’ve got you.”

“Mr. Stokes?!” I roared. “Mr. Stokes? Why, the guy’s gone bugs! Call him, call him at once! He knows it’s a lie! He ought to know!”

When I confronted Winton Stokes, he looked at me with that darned mocking smile of his twisting his mouth.

“What the hell does that mean?” I yelled. “You know damn well I didn’t get your sparkler! You know it as well as I do, don’tcha?”

“That’s just it,” he said, so very kindly, “that’s just the trouble: I happen to know a little more than you do.”

The cops around were grinning so that their mouths almost reached their ears.

“What’s the joke?” I asked furiously.

“Oh boy!” roared one of them.

“We owe the gentleman an explanation,” said Winton Stokes. “You fooled me, Hawkins, and it’s a compliment I don’t pay to people often. I believed you to be an honest, trustworthy servant and I chose you for a very important mission. You see, I had to carry the Night King with me and I had to hide it in a place where no one would think of looking for it. I knew it wasn’t safe anywhere on my person. By chance, you yourself gave me the idea for its hiding-place. But even though I trusted you, I didn’t want to take any chances and give you any temptations. So I made you serve my purpose without your knowing it. The only person I had to trust with the secret was a good old friend of mine who happens to be a dentist. Well, the whole thing turned out to be more unusual than I had expected. Open your mouth!”

In the next moment I uttered a yell, the yell of a mad beast, and if the cops hadn’t seized me in time, I would have jumped at Winton Stokes and murdered him on the spot: for I opened my mouth wide, he unscrewed something in it and there, in my teeth, in my own false teeth, was the Night King!

Good Copy

c. 1927

Editor’s Preface

This story was written a year or more after “The Husband I Bought,” probably sometime in 1927, when Ayn Rand was living at the Hollywood Studio Club, had obtained a position as a junior screenwriter for Cecil B. DeMille, and was just beginning to date Frank O’Con-nor, her future husband. The spirit of the story matches these auspicious events.

Miss Rand’s silent-screen synopses from the 1920s—about a dozen remain—are examples of pure, even extravagant Romanticism. Most are imaginative adventure stories, with daring heroes, a strong love interest, non-stop action, and virtually no explicit philosophy. “Good Copy” is one of the few works of this type that are not scenarios. As such, it represents a major change in mood from “The Husband I Bought.”

“The Husband I Bought” portrays the dedication of the passionate valuer, who will bear the greatest suffering, if necessary, rather than settle for something less than the ideal. “Good Copy” reminds us of another crucial aspect of Ayn Rand’s philosophy: her view that suffering is an exception, not the rule of life. The rule, she held, should not be pain or even heroic endurance, but gaiety and lighthearted joy in living. It is on this premise that “Good Copy” was written.

I first heard the story some twenty-five years ago, when it was read aloud in a course on fiction-writing given by Ayn Rand to some young admirers. The class was told merely that this was a story by a beginning writer, and was asked to judge whether the writer had a future. Some students quickly grasped who the author was, but a number did not and were astonished, even indignant, when they found out. Their objection was not to the story’s flaws but to its essential spirit. “It is so unserious,” the criticism went. “It doesn’t deal with big issues like your novels; it has no profound passions, no immortal struggles, no philosophic meaning.”

Miss Rand replied, in effect: “It deals with only one ‘big issue,’ the biggest of all: can man live on earth or not?”

She went on to explain that malevolence—the feeling that man by nature is doomed to suffering and defeat—is all-pervasive in our era; that even those who claim to reject such a viewpoint tend to feel, today, that the pursuit of values must be a painful, teeth-clenched crusade, a holy but grim struggle against evil. This attitude, she said, ascribes far too much power to evil. Evil, she held, is essentially impotent (see Atlas Shrugged); the universe is not set against man, but is “benevolent.” This means that man’s values (if based on reason) are achievable here and in this life; and therefore happiness is not to be regarded as a freak accident, but, metaphysically, as the normal, the natural, the to-be-expected.

Philosophically, in short, the deepest essence of man’s life is not grave, crisis-ridden solemnity, but lighthearted cheerfulness. A story reflecting this approach, she concluded, a story written specifically to project pure “benevolent universe,” should be written as though all problems have already been answered and all big issues solved, and now there is nothing to focus on but man acting in the world and succeeding—nothing but unobstructed excitement, romance, adventure.

In Atlas Shrugged, Dagny hears Francisco laughing: “it was the gayest sound in the world. . . . The capacity for unclouded enjoyment, she thought, does not belong to irresponsible fools . . . to be able to laugh like that is the end result of the most profound, most solemn thinking.” In these terms, we may say that if her more philosophic works represent Ayn Rand’s profound thinking, then “Good Copy” is like the unclouded laugh of Francisco.

The story, of course, is still very early, and must be read in part for its intention, which is not consistently realized.

Laury, the young hero, is but a faint, even humorous suggestion of the heroes still to come. Reflecting the primacy of women in the early works, Jinx, the heroine, is the more mature character, and the one dominant in the action. She is ahead of Laury all the way. Yet, as one would expect from Ayn Rand, Jinx’s feeling for Laury is one of the most convincing elements in the story—and she is the opposite of a feminist. “Women,” she tells Laury warmly at one point, “are the bunk.”

As a piece of writing, “Good Copy” represents a major advance over “The Husband I Bought.” The author’s command of English, though still imperfect, has increased substantially. The originality of certain descriptions and the sudden flashes of wit begin to foreshadow what is to come. The dialogue, especially the use of slang, is still not quite right; and the tone of the piece is unsteady, verging, I think, on being overly broad. But despite these flaws, the story as a whole does manage to convey a real exuberance of spirit.

Decades later, after she had completed Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand occasionally said that she wanted to write a pure adventure story without any deep philosophical theme. (At one point, she had even chosen the hero’s name—Faustin Donnegal—and his description; like Laury McGee, he was to have dimples.) But she never did write it.

“Good Copy,” therefore, though early and imperfect, is all we have from her in this genre. It reflects a side of Ayn Rand that her admirers will not find isolated in this pure form anywhere else.

A note on the text: In the 1950s, for the reading to her class, Miss Rand modernized some of the period expressions in the piece, substituting “sports car” for “roadster,” “panties” for “step-ins,” and the like. I have retained these changes in the following.

—L. P.

Good Copy

——I——

“I wish there was a murder! Somebody chopped to pieces and blood all over the pavements. . . . And I wish there was a fire, an immense fire, so that the gas tank would bust like a peanut and half the town’d be blown up! . . . And I’d like to see somebody stick up the bank and sweep it to the last nickel, clean like a bald head! . . . And I wish there was an earthquake!”

Laury McGee walked fast, fast, so that each step struck the pavement furiously, like a blow to an enemy. His shirt collar thrown open, the veins in his sunburnt neck trembled and tensed as he tried to draw his lips into a grim, straight line. This was very difficult, for Laury McGee’s lips were young, delightfully curved, with tempting, mischievous dimples in the corners that always looked as though he was trying to hold back a sparkling smile. But he was very far from any desire to smile, now.

His steps rang like gunshots in the sweet peace of the summer afternoon—and the summer afternoon on Dicksville’s Main Street was very sweetly peaceful. There were almost no passersby, and those that did pass moved with a speed implying human life to be five hundred years long. The store windows were hot and dusty, and the doors wide open, with no one inside. A few old, overheated tomatoes were transforming themselves into catsup on the sidewalk in front of the Grocery Market. In the middle of Dicksville’s busiest traffic thoroughfare a dog was sleeping in the sun, cuddled in a little depression of the paving. Laury was looking at it all and clenching his fists.

It was Laury McGee’s twenty-third summer on earth and his first on the Dicksville Dawn. He had just had a significant conversation with his City Editor. This conversation was not the first of its kind; but it was to be the last.

“You,” said City Editor Jonathan Scraggs, “are a sap!”

Laury looked at the ceiling and tried to give his face an expression intended to show that his dignity was beyond anything the gentleman at the desk might choose to say.

“One more story like that from you and I’ll send you to wash dishes in a cafeteria—if they’ll take you in!”

Laury could not help following with his eyes the Editor’s powerful five fingers as they closed over his beautiful, neatly typed pages, crunched them with the crisp, crackling sound of a man chewing celery, and flung them furiously into an overflowing wastebasket; the pages that he had hoped would double the Dicksville Dawn’s circulation with his name on the front page.

Laury was very sure of being perfectly self-possessed, but he bit his lips in a way that might have been called self-possession—in a bulldog.

“If you don’t like it,” he threw at the Editor, “it’s your own fault, yours and your town’s. No story is better than its material!”

“You aren’t even a cub!” roared Jonathan Scraggs. “You’re a pup, and a lousy one! Just because you were the star quarterback at college doesn’t mean that you can be a reporter now! I still have to see you use your head for something besides as a show window to parade your good looks on!”

“It’s not my fault!” Laury protested resolutely. “I’ve got nothing to write about! Nothing ever happens in this swamp of a town!”

“You’re at it again, aren’t you?”

“Since I’ve been here you’ve sent me on nothing but funerals, and drunken quarrels, and traffic accidents! I can’t show my talent on such measly news! Get somebody else for your fleas’ bulletins! Let me have something big, big!—and you’ll see what’s in my head besides good looks, which I can’t help, either!”

“How many times have I told you that you’ve got to write about anything that comes along? What do you expect to happen? Dicksville is no Chicago, you know. Still, I don’t think we can complain—things are pretty lively and the Dawn is doing nicely, and I can’t say that much of the Dicksville Globe, for which the Lord be praised! You should be proud, young man, to work for Dicksville’s leading paper.”

“Yeah! Or for Dicksville’s leading paper’s wastebasket! But you’ll learn to appreciate me, Mr. Scraggs, when something happens worthy of my pen!”

“If you can’t write up a funeral, I’d like to see you cover a murder! . . . Now you go home, young man, and try to get some ideas into your head, if it’s possible, which I doubt!”

Somebody had said that Laury’s gray eyes looked like a deep cloudy sky behind which one could feel the sun coming out. But there was no trace of sun in his eyes when they stared straight at City Editor Jonathan Scraggs, and if there was anything coming behind their dark gray it looked more like a thunderstorm, and a serious one.

“Mr. Scraggs,” he said slowly, ominously, “things are going to happen!”

“Amen!” answered Mr. Scraggs, and turning comfortably in his chair lit a cigar, then dropped his head on his breast and closed his eyes to enjoy the peace of the Dicksville afternoon, with the hot summer air breathing in through the open windows that needed a washing.

Laury took his coat from an old rack in a corner and looked fiercely at the room; no one had paid any attention to the conversation. The city room was hot and stuffy, and smelled of print, dust, and chewing gum. One walked as though in a forest on a thick carpet of fallen leaves cracking under the feet—a carpet of old, yellow newspapers, cigarette wrappers, bills, ads, everything that has ever been made out of paper. The walls were an art museum of calendars, drawings, cartoons, comic strips, pasted on the bare bricks and alternated by philosophical inscriptions such as “Easy on the corkscrew!” and “Vic Perkins is a big bum!” The dusty bottle of spring water on a shaking stand was hopelessly and significantly empty; water, after all, was not the only drink that had been used in the room.

The energetic activity of Dicksville’s leading paper made Laury grind his teeth. The chief copy man was very busy making a sailboat out of a paper drinking cup. The sports editor was carefully drawing a pair of French-heeled legs on the dust of a file bureau. Two reporters were playing an exciting game of rummy; and a third was thoroughly cleaning his fingernails with a pen and trying to catch a fly that kept annoying him. The copy boy was sound asleep on a pile of paper, his back turned disdainfully on the room, his face red like his hair and his hair red like a carrot, his decided snores shaking the mountain of future newspapers under him.

However, at one of the central desks, under an imposing sign of: “Don’t park here. Busy” Vic Perkins, the Dawn’s star reporter, was profoundly absorbed in some serious work. Vic Perkins had a long, thin face and a little black mustache under his nose that looked like he needed a handkerchief, more than like anything else. He always wore his hat on the back of his head and never condescended to use a toothbrush. He was chewing zealously the end of a pencil and looking up at a green-shaded lamp, in deep meditation.

“Any news?” asked Laury, approaching him.

“There’s always news for the man who’s smart enough to write ’em!” replied Vic Perkins in a tone of disdainful superiority.

Laury glanced at the story he was writing. It was a gripping account of Dicksville’s latest sensational crime—$550 cash and a silver pepper shaker stolen by Pug-Nose Thomson, the town’s desperate outlaw.

Laury swung on his heels and walked out of the building, slamming the door ferociously, hoping one of the dusty glass panes would bust for a change; but it didn’t.

Laury had graduated from college with a B.A. degree, high honors, and the football championship, this spring. He had accepted the first opportunity to work on a newspaper, to start on the road of his buoyant ambition. He came to the Dicksville Dawn with an overflowing energy, a wild enthusiasm, an irresistible smile, and no experience whatsoever. And he was disappointed.

He had expected a glorious career full of action, danger, and thrills, the career of a glamorous being whose every word on the printed pages sends thousands of hearts beating fast, like a sonorous trumpet that rings through the country thrilling and terrifying men. And now he had found himself hustling after news that wouldn’t disturb a mosquito. . . .

Laury walked fast, his hands in his pockets, a lock of unruly hair falling down to mix with his long, long eyelashes. The sky was blue, blue like a color postcard. An odor of frying grease floated from the open door of Ye Buttercup Tea Room. In a music shop a hoarse radio was singing “My Blue Heaven.” Clampitt’s Grocery Market was having a big event—a canned-goods sale.

Oh, if only something would happen here! Laury’s heart throbbed. But what could happen—here?

A drowsy newsboy was muttering: “Dicksville Dawn poiper,” as though he were selling sleeping tablets. Laury threw a quick glance at the front page, passing by. The headline announced the birth of the town Mayor’s fifth child; there was a prominent news item about the Spinsters’ Club annual convention; and an editorial by Victor Z. Perkins on the importance of animal pets.

Were these, then, the scorching, flamboyant headlines, roaring into people’s eyes, that he had dreamed about? Oh, if only somebody would do something! Somebody, anybody. . . . It seemed hopeless in Dicksville. And yet . . . was it so hopeless? Wasn’t it possible to . . . ?

Laury quickened his steps and clenched his fists in his pockets. His eyes narrowed and glistened. His heart beat faster. For City Editor Jonathan Scraggs’ opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, Laury McGee had an idea.

It would be dangerous, he knew. He had had that idea for a long time. It would be a mad chance to take, a frightful risk. And yet . . . and yet . . .

“Sap!!”

He felt a strong knock across his body and when he turned his head all he could see was a slim, swift, sparkling sports car, like a thrown torpedo, speeding away, and a wild mass of brown hair flying above it like a flag.

He realized that he had been crossing a street, too absorbed in his serious thoughts to notice anything, automobiles included. The result of which was a considerable pain and a greasy line on his tan trousers where the sports car’s fender had struck him.

He looked again at the disappearing car and started as though hit by a sudden inspiration. He had recognized the driver. It was Miss Winford, the “dime-a-hair girl”; called so for being the sole heiress to her father’s fortune, that could number a dime for each hair on her head; which may not seem much, but try to figure it out!

Christopher A. Winford was a big steel magnate from Pittsburgh who had the bad taste to spend his summers in Dicksville. He owned half the town and the white residence on a hill overlooking it, a royal building whose glass-and-marble turrets looked like glistening fountains thrown to the blue sky from a sea of green foliage.

Miss Winford was eighteen and the absolute leader of Dicksville’s younger set, of her parents, and of her sports car. Laury had never met her, but he had seen her often in town. She looked like an antelope and acted like a mustang. She had big, slightly slanting, ominously glistening eyes that made people feel a little nervous wondering just what was going on behind their suspicious calm; she had thin, dancing eyebrows and a determined mouth. Her brown hair was thrown behind her ears in a long, disheveled cut. From the tips of her little feet to that stormy tangle of hair she was slim, straight, strong like a steel spring.

Her ambitious mother had christened her Juliana Xenia. But her friends of the younger set, to the horror of said mother, called her simply Jinx.

Laury stood staring at her car long after it had disappeared. He had a strange, fixed, enraptured expression on his face, the expression of a man who has just been struck by an idea for the invention of an interplanetary communication. That girl . . . was it a coincidence? His idea—this was just what he needed for his idea. He had the aim—here was the means. . . .

He walked home without noticing the streets around him, the sky above or the pavement under his feet. . . .

That night, in his apartment, Laury McGee sat on the desk, his feet on a chair, his elbows on his knees, his chin on his fists, his eyes unblinking—and thought. The result of these thoughts was the lively happenings which occurred in Dicksville in the days that followed.

——II——

Jinx Winford was speeding home at fifty miles an hour, as usual; and at midnight, as usual, too. She had been visiting a girl friend out of town and now was on her way back, not in the slightest measure disturbed by the fact that her little gray sports car was the only sign of life on the dark, deserted road. Under a heavy black sky the endless plain stretched like a frozen sea with immobile waves of hills. Far ahead, a pale glow rose to the sky like a faint luminous fog, and the lights of Dicksville twinkled mysteriously, in straight lines bordering streets and in lonely, disorderly sparks, as though a tangle of golden beads had been thrown into the dark plain and some strings had broken in the fall.

The gray sports car was flying down the road like a swift, humming bug with two long, shuddering feelers of light sweeping the ground and tiny wings beating in the wind—the silk scarf on Jinx’s shoulders. Her two firm hands on the wheel, Jinx was whistling a song. And she remained perfectly calm when, turning a sharp curve, she saw an automobile standing straight across the road, barring the way. It was an old sports car with no one at the wheel. But its lights were turned on, two glaring white spots that made the darkness beyond it seem empty and impenetrable, like a bottomless black hole.

She stepped on the brakes just in time to make her car stop with a jerk and a sharp, alarmed creaking a few inches from the strange sports car.

“Hey, what’s the idea?” she threw into the darkness where it seemed she could distinguish the shadow of a man.

In the darkness, behind the old sports car, Laury McGee was ready. He had been waiting there for two hours. He had a black mask and a revolver. The lips under the mask were grim and determined; the fingers clutching the revolver trembled. Laury McGee was not hunting for news any more—he was making it.

The time had come. He looked, catching his breath, at the girl in the gray sports car, who sat clutching the wheel and peering into the darkness interrogatively, with raised eyebrows.

“How will she take it?” he shuddered. “I hope she doesn’t scream too loud! Oh, I hope she doesn’t faint!”

Then, resolutely, with broad steps, he walked towards her and stopped in full light, his threatening eyes behind the mask and the muzzle of his revolver looking straight at her. He waited silently for the effect that his appearance would produce. But there was no particular effect. Jinx raised one eyebrow higher and looked at him with decided curiosity, waiting.

“Don’t scream for help!” he ordered in his most lugubrious voice. “No man can save you!”

“I haven’t screamed yet,” she observed. “Why suggest it?”

“Not a sound from you nor a movement! And step out of that car!”

“Well, I can’t do that, you know,” she answered sweetly.

Laury bit his lips. “I mean, get out of your car at once! Men like me are used to having their slightest order obeyed immediately!”

“Well, I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting any men like you before, I’m sorry to say. As it happens, I’m not well acquainted with the profession.”

“Then you better remember that my name is whispered with terror from coast to coast!”

“What’s your name? Mine’s Jinx Winford.”

“You’ll be sorry to learn my name! Everybody will tell you that my hand is of steel; that my heart is of granite; that I pass in the night like a death-bearing lightning, leaving terror and desolation behind!”

“Oh, really? I am sorry and you have all my sympathy: it must be awfully hard to live up to such a reputation!”

Laury looked at her strangely. Then he remembered that great bandits are always courteous to women. So he spoke gallantly:

“However, you have nothing to fear: I crush all men, but I spare women!”

“That’s nothing to be proud of: women are the bunk and you ought to know it!”

“I’m profoundly sorry that I have to do this,” he continued, “but you’ll be treated with the greatest respect and courtesy, so you don’t have to be afraid.”

“Afraid? What of?”

“Say, will you please step out of your car and get into mine?”

“Is that absolutely necessary?”

“Yes!”

“Will you please kindly tell me what the hell this is all about?” she asked very suavely.

“You are being kidnapped,” he explained politely.

“Oh!”

He didn’t like that “Oh!”—it was not what he had expected at all. There was no terror or indignation in it; it sounded rather simple, matter-of-fact, as a person would say: “Oh, I see!”

She jumped lightly to the ground, her short skirt whirling high above graceful legs in tight, glistening stockings. The wind blew her clothes tight around her body and for a moment she looked like a slim little dancer in a wet, clinging dress, on an immense black stage, torn out of the darkness by the bright circle of the car’s spotlight. And behind her, as a background—a gray, sandy piece of hill with bushes of dry, thorny weeds sticking out like deer horns.

“Will you please kindly wait while I lock my car?” she asked. “I don’t mind being kidnapped, but I don’t want some other gentleman to get the notion of kidnapping my car.”

Calmly, she turned off the headlights, locked the car, and slipped the key into her pocketbook. She approached his old sports car and looked it over critically.

“Your business doesn’t pay, does it?” she asked. “That buggy of yours doesn’t look as though you get three meals a day.”

“Will you please step in!” he almost shouted, exasperated. “We have no time to waste!”

She stepped in and snuggled comfortably on the seat, stretching her pretty legs far out on the slanting floorboard, her pleated skirt hardly covering the knees. He jumped to the wheel beside her.

“Do you expect a lot of money out of this?” she asked.

He did not answer.

“Are you desperately in love with me, then?”

“I should say not!” he snapped.

With a sharp, hoarse growl and a convulsive jerk from top to tire, the sports car tore forward, snorted, shuddered and rolled, wavering, into the darkness, towards the lights of Dicksville.

The wind and the dark hills rushed to meet them and rolled past. They were both silent. She studied him furtively from the corner of her eye. All she could see was a black mask between a gray cap and gracefully curved lips. He did not look at her once. All he knew of her presence was a faint, expensive perfume and tangled locks of soft hair that the wind blew into his face occasionally.

The first houses of Dicksville rose by the side of the road. Laury drove into town cautiously, choosing the darkest, emptiest streets. There were few streetlamps and no passersby. He stepped on the gas involuntarily, when passing through the white squares of light streaming from lonely corner drugstores.

Laury lived in an old apartment house in a narrow little street winding up a hill, in a new, half-built neighborhood. The house had two floors, big windows, and little balconies with no doors to them. There was an empty, unfinished bungalow next to it and a vacant lot across the street. Only two apartments on the first floor were occupied. Laury was the sole tenant on the second floor.

As the car swung around the corner into his street, Laury turned off the headlights and drove up to the house as noiselessly as he could. He looked carefully around before stopping. There was no one in sight. The little street was as dark and empty as an abandoned stage setting.

“Now, not a sound! Don’t make any noise!” he whispered, clutching the girl’s arm and dashing with her to the front door.

“Sure, I won’t,” she answered. “I know how you feel!”

They tiptoed noiselessly up the carpeted steps to Laury’s door. The first thing that met Jinx’s eyes, as Laury politely let her enter first, was one of his dirty shirts in the middle of the little hall, that had rolled out of an open clothes closet. Laury blushed under his mask and kicked it back into the closet, slamming its door angrily.

The living room had two windows and a soft blue carpet. A desk stood between the windows, a tempestuous ocean of papers with a typewriter as an island in it. The blue davenport had a few cushions on it, also a newspaper, a safety razor, and one shoe. The only big, low armchair was occupied by a pile of victrola records with an alarm clock on top of them; and a portable victrola stood next to it on a soap box covered with an old striped sweater. A big box marked “Puffed Wheat Cereal” served as a bookcase. A graceful glass bowl on a tall stand, intended for goldfish, contained no water, but cigarette ashes and a telephone, instead. The rest of the room was occupied by old newspapers, magazines without covers, covers without magazines, a tennis racket, a bath towel, a bunch of dry, shriveled flowers, a big dictionary, and a ukulele.

Jinx looked the room over slowly, carefully. Laury threw his coat and cap on a chair, took off the mask, wiped his forehead with a sigh of relief, and ran his fingers through his hair. Jinx looked at him, looked again, then took out her compact, powdered her face quickly, and passed the lipstick over her lips with unusual care.

“What’s your name?” she asked in a somewhat changed voice.

“It doesn’t matter, for the present,” he answered.

She settled herself comfortably on the edge of his desk. He looked at her now, in the light. She had a lovely figure, as her tight silk sweater showed in detail, he thought. She had inscrutable eyes, and he could not decide whether their glance, fixed on him, was openly mocking or sweetly innocent.

“Well, you showed good judgment in choosing me for kidnapping,” she said. “I don’t know who else would be as good a bet. If you had less discrimination you might have chosen Louise Chatterton, perhaps, but, you know, her old man is so tight he never gets off a trolley before the end of the line, to get all his money’s worth!”

She glanced over the room.

“You’re a beginner, aren’t you?” she asked. “Your place doesn’t look like the lair of a very sinister criminal.”

He looked at the room and blushed. “I’m sorry the room looks like this,” he muttered. “I’ll straighten it out. I’ll do my best to make you comfortable. I hope your stay here will be as pleasant as possible.”

“There’s no doubt about that, I’m beginning to think. But then, where’s your sweetheart’s picture? Haven’t you got a ‘moll’?”

“Are you hungry?” Laury asked briskly. “If you want something to eat, I can . . .”

“No, I do not. Have you got a gang? Or are you a lonely mastermind?”

“If there’s anything you want . . .”

“No, thanks. Have you ever been in jail yet? And how does it feel?”

“It’s getting late,” Laury said abruptly. “Do you want to sleep?”

“Well, you don’t expect me to stay up all night, do you?”

Laury arranged the davenport for her. For himself he had fixed something like a bed out of a few chairs and an old mattress, in the kitchen.

“Tomorrow,” he said before leaving her, “I’ll have to go out for a while. You’ll find food in the icebox. Don’t make any attempts to run away. Don’t make any noise—no one will hear you. You will save yourself a lot of trouble if you will promise me not to try to escape.”

“I promise,” she said, and added with a strange look straight into his sunny gray eyes: “In fact, I’ll do my best not to escape!” . . .

Laury’s heart was beating louder than the alarm clock at his side when he stretched himself on his uncomfortable couch in the dark kitchen. The couch felt like a mountainous landscape under his body and there was an odor of canned chili floating from the sink above his head. But he felt an ecstasy of triumph beating rapturously, like victorious drums, over all his body, to his very fingertips. He had done it! There had been no one in that dump of a town bright enough to commit a good crime. He had committed it; a crime worthy of his pen; a crime that would make good copy. Tomorrow, when the Dawn’s headlines would thunder like wild beasts . . .

“Mr. Gunman!” a sweet voice called from the living room.

“What’s the matter?” he cried.

“Is it an RCA victrola you have there in the corner?”

“Yes!”

“That’s fine. . . . Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

——III——

The headlines on the Dicksville Dawn were three inches high and blazed on the front pages like huge, black mouths screaming to an astounded world:

SOCIETY GIRL KIDNAPPED

And an army of newsboys rolled over Dicksville like a tidal wave, with swift currents branching into every street and an alarming, tempestuous roar of hoarse voices: “Extray! Extra-a-ay!”

The eager citizens who snatched from each other the crisp, fresh sheets, with the black print still wet and smearing under their fingers, read, shivering, of how the charming young heiress, Miss Juliana X. Winford, had disappeared on her way home from a visit and of how her sports car had been examined by the police on a lonely road two miles out of town. The sports car had two bullet holes in its side and one in a rear tire; the windshield was broken, the upholstery ripped and torn. Everything indicated a grim, desperate struggle. The sports car had been discovered, the Dicksville Dawn proudly announced, by “our own reporter, Mr. L. H. McGee.”

There was a big photograph of Miss Winford, where all one could distinguish were bare legs, a tennis racket, and an intoxicating smile. The thrilling front-page story that related all these events was entitled: “Society Beauty Victim of Unknown Monster”—by Laurence H. McGee. It started with: “A profound sorrow clutched our hearts at the news that our fair city’s peace and respect for law, of which we had always been so proud, was suddenly disturbed by a most atrocious, terrifying, revolting crime. . . .”

The old building of the Dicksville Dawn looked like an anthill that somebody had stepped on. The presses thundered; the typewriters cracked furiously like machine guns; a current of frenzied humanity streamed down the main stairs and another one rolled up. City Editor Jonathan Scraggs dashed around, sweat streaming down his red face, rubbing his hands with a grin of ecstatic satisfaction at the thought that the Dawn had received the great news two hours before its rival, the Dicksville Globe. Laury McGee sat on the Editor’s desk, his legs crossed, calmly smoking a cigarette.

“Great stuff, that story of yours, Laury, my boy!” Mr. Scraggs repeated. “Never thought you had it in you!”

The telephones screamed continuously, calls from all over the town, anxious voices begging news and details.

Chief Police Inspector Rafferty himself dropped in to see the City Editor. He was short, square, and nervous. He had a big black mustache, like a shaving brush, and little restless, suspicious eyes always watching for someone to offend his dignity.

“Cats and rats!” he shouted. “What’s all this? Now, I ask you, what the hell is all this?”

“It’s quite an unexpected occurrence,” agreed Jonathan Scraggs.

“Occurrence be blasted! That any scoundrel should have the nerve to pull that off in my town! Cats and rats! I’ll be hashed into hamburger if I know who the lousy mongrel could be! It isn’t Pug-Nose Thomson, ’cause he was seen stewed like a hog in some joint, last night!”

“The affair does seem rather mysterious and . . .”

“I’ve sent every man on the force to comb the town! I’ll fire them all, each goddamn boob, if they don’t pull the bum out by the gullet!”

That afternoon, Mr. Christopher A. Winford’s gray automobile stopped before the Dawn building and the tall gentleman walked up to the city room, with a step that implied a long acquaintance with respectfully admiring eyes and news cameras. He was cool, poised, distinguished. He had gray eyes, and a mustache that matched his eyes, and a suit that matched his mustache.

“Yes, it’s most annoying,” he said slowly, his eyes half-closed as one used to conceal his superior thoughts. “I wish my daughter back, you understand.”

There was a slight wonder in his voice, as though he was unable to see how his wish could be disobeyed.

“Certainly, certainly, Mr. Winford,” Mr. Scraggs assured him. “You have all our sympathy. A father’s heart in a misfortune like this must . . .”

“I came here personally to arrange for an announcement in your paper,” Mr. Winford went on slowly, “that I will pay a reward to anyone who furnishes information leading to the discovery of my daughter’s whereabouts. Name the sum yourself, whatever you find necessary. I will pay for everything.”

He had the calm tone of a man who knows the surest means of attaining his desires and does not hesitate to use it.

“There’s an extra for us!” Mr. Scraggs cried enthusiastically when Mr. Winford left. “Rush to your mill, Laury, old pal, and fix us a good one! ‘Heartbroken father in Dawn’s office’ . . . and all that, you know!”

“You seem to be in an unusually happy humor, today,” Mr. Scraggs chuckled, watching Laury’s sparkling eyes and swift fingers dancing on the typewriter keys. “So am I, boy, so am I!”

When Laury went home, late that evening, there was under every streetlamp an enthusiastic newsboy yelling himself hoarse with:

“Extree-e! Big ree-word for missin’ goil! Here’s yer cha-ance!”

And the headlines announced:

DESPERATE FATHER OFFERS $5,000 REWARD

That, in Mr. Scraggs’ eyes, had been the most sensational sum he could name. . . .

Laury’s heart missed a few beats when he walked up the steps to his apartment and turned the key in the door lock. Was everything all right?

As he entered, Jinx dashed gaily to meet him. He gasped. She was wearing his best violet silk pajamas! They were too big for her and she draped them gracefully in soft, clinging folds around her little body.

“Hello, darling!” she greeted him. “Why so late? I’ve missed you terribly!”

“Why . . . why did you put these on?”

“These? Pretty, aren’t they? Well, you didn’t leave me anything to change and I was tired of wearing the same dress for two days!”

She led the way into the living room, and he stopped short with another gasp. The living room had been thoroughly cleaned, and not a single object stood in its former place. The whole room had been rearranged to look like a very impressionistic stage setting. The window curtains were hanging over the davenport, forming a cozy, inviting tent. The sofa cushions were capriciously thrown all over the floor. Jinx’s colored silk scarf hung on the wall over his desk, like an artistic banner. The fishbowl stood at the foot of the davenport, and some incense that she had unearthed in one of his desk drawers was burning in it, a long, thin column of blue smoke swaying gracefully like a light, misty scarf.

“What did you do that for?” he muttered, amazed.

“Don’t you like it?” She smiled triumphantly. “Your room looked as though it needed a woman’s influence badly. I thought that you ought to have a little beauty in your hard life, to relax after a day of danger and gun-shooting!”

Laury laughed. She looked at him calmly, with a sweet look that seemed too innocent to be trusted.

“By the way,” she said casually, “you better disconnect that phone. You left it here and I might have called up the police, you know!”

Laury’s face went crimson, then white; with one jump, he snatched the phone and tore the wires furiously out of the wall. Then he turned to her, puzzled.

“Well, why didn’t you?” he asked.

She smiled, a smile that seemed at once indulgent, cunning, and perfectly naive.

“I wanted to,” she answered innocently, “but I had no time, I was too busy.” And she added imperatively: “Take off your coat. Dinner is ready.”

“What?”

“Dinner! And hurry up, ’cause it’s late and I’m darn hungry!”

“But . . . but . . .”

“Come on, now, help me pull that table out!”

In a few seconds he was seated at a neatly arranged table covered with one of his pillowcases, there being no tablecloth in the house. And Jinx was serving a delicious dinner, hot, steaming dishes whose tempting odor made him realize how very tired and hungry he really was after this exciting day.

“Now, don’t look so dumbfounded!” she said, settling down to her plate. “I’m a good cook, I am. I got the first prize in high school. I don’t care much about cooking, but I like first prizes, no matter what for!”

“I must thank you,” Laury muttered, eating hungrily, “although I didn’t expect you to . . .”

“I bet you haven’t had a homemade dinner in ages,” she remarked sympathetically. “I bet you’re used to eating in dingy pool parlors and saloons, where you meet to divide the loot with your gangsters. See, I know all about it. They must have pretty tough food, though, don’t they?”

“Why . . . y-yes . . . yes, they do,” Laury agreed helplessly.

After dinner, she asked for a cigarette, crossed her legs in the violet silk trousers, like a little Oriental princess, and leaned comfortably back in her chair, sending slowly graceful snakes of smoke to float into space.

“Get me a drink!” she ordered.

“Oh, sure!” He jumped up, eager to serve her in turn. “What do you wish? Tea, coffee?”

She smiled and winked at him significantly.

“Well, what do you wish?” he repeated.

“Well, now, as though you didn’t understand!” She frowned impatiently.

“No, I don’t understand. Surely, you don’t mean to say that . . . that you want . . . liquor?”

“Oh, any kind of booze you’ve got will do!”

Laury stared at her with open mouth.

“Well, what’s the matter?” she asked.

“I never thought that you would . . . that you might . . . that you . . .”

“You don’t mean to say that you haven’t got any?”

“No, I haven’t!”

“Well, I’ll be hanged! A crook, a real crook, with nothing to drink in his house! What kind of a gangster are you, anyway?”

“But, Miss Winford, I never thought that you . . .”

“You’ve got a lot to learn, my child, you’ve got a lot to learn!”

Laury blushed; then remembered that he was the kidnapper and had to show some authority.

“Now, don’t disturb me,” he ordered, sitting down at his desk before the typewriter. “I’ve got something very important to write. . . . Here,” he added, “you might be interested in this!” And he threw to her the day’s newspapers.

“O-oh! Sure!” she cried. “The papers!”

She jumped on the sofa, the cushions bouncing under her, folded her legs criss-cross, and bent eagerly over the papers, her tousled hair hanging down over her face, almost touching the wide sheets.

He attacked the typewriter furiously, pounding the keys energetically in an attempt to write the important message he had in mind. But it was not so easy. The words did not seem to him impressive enough. He started one sheet after another, and tore them to pieces, and flung them into the wastebasket.

Jinx interrupted him every few seconds with a gasp of sincere delight: “Oh, look, my picture! . . . Oh, what a fuss for the old town! . . . Aren’t they dumbfounded! . . . Don’t worry, they’ll never find you out, not that bunch of saps! . . . Lizzie Chatterton’s going to chew her nails to the bone from envy—she’s never been kidnapped! . . . Say, what’s this about my car? Who wrecked it and why?”

“Some reporter must have done it,” Laury answered disdainfully. “It makes better copy.”

“Oh, listen to this!” she laughed happily. “ ‘Every heart in our town is convulsed with anxiety at the thought of this helpless young beauty in the cruel claws of some pitiless beast. . . .’ Oh boy! Who wrote that? Gee, what a sap that McGee fellow must be!”

Laury was working hard, very hard—writing the ransom letter. It was not easy, since it had to be good front-page stuff. And a blissful smile of satisfaction spread on his face when he finished it at last and turned to Jinx.

“Here,” he said. “Listen—it concerns you.”

And he read:

Dear Sir,

This is not an offer or a request, this is a command and you will do well to obey it at once or hell itself will seem a sweet baby’s dream compared to the fate I have in store for you. At an hour and place that I will communicate to you later, you will deliver into my hands ten thousand dollars cash, as the price of your daughter’s freedom. Be careful not to oppose me, for you are dealing with the most dangerous enemy that any mortal has ever encountered. You are warned.

Damned Dan

Jinx sprang to her feet, her eyes blazing, her body shaking with indignation.

“How dare you?” she cried. “You cheap scoundrel! How dare you ask my father for ten thousand dollars?”

She snatched the letter from him and tore it to pieces furiously.

“Now sit down!” she commanded, pointing proudly at the typewriter. “Sit down and write another one—and ask for one hundred thousand dollars!”

And as Laury did not move, she added:

“Ten thousand dollars! It’s an insult to be sold for ten thousand! I won’t stand for my price being that low! Why, it’s only the price of a car, and of not such a very good one, at that!”

It was a long time before Laury had recovered enough to sit at the typewriter and obey her order. . . .

“But that is not all, Miss Winford,” he said severely, when he had finished the new ransom message. “You, too, are going to write a letter to your father.”

“Oh, with pleasure!” she answered willingly.

He gave her a pen and a sheet of paper. She wrote quickly: “Dear Pop.”

“What do you mean?” he shouted. “Dear Pop! Do you realize that your letter will be published in all the papers? You write what I dictate!”

“All right,” she agreed sweetly and took another sheet.

“Dear Father,” he dictated solemnly. “If there is in your heart a single drop of pity for your unfortunate daughter, you will . . .”

“I never write like that,” she observed.

“Never mind, write now! ‘. . . you will come to my rescue at once.’ Exclamation point! ‘I can’t tell you all the suffering I am going through.’ Have you got that? ‘Please, oh! please save me.’ Exclamation point! ‘If you could only see what your poor daughter is doing now . . .’ ”

“Say, don’t you think that if he could see that, he’d be rather surprised, and not in the way you want?”

“Go on, write what I say! ‘. . . is doing now, your heart would break!’ ”

“Most probably!”

“Go on! ‘I can’t write very well, because my eyes are dimmed with tears . . .’ ”

“Aren’t you laying it on too thick?”

“ ‘. . . with tears! I implore you to spare no effort to save me!’ Now sign it! ‘Your desperate daughter . . .’ No! Gosh! Not Jinx! ‘Juliana Xenia Winford.’ ”

“Here you are,” she said, handing him the letter.

He read it and frowned slightly.

“Let’s make it a little stronger,” he said. “Write a postscript to it: ‘P.S. I’m miserable, miserable.’ Exclamation point—two of them! Have you finished? Here, fold it and put it into this envelope. Fine! Thank you, Miss Winford!”

He put the envelope with the two letters into his pocket. He smiled triumphantly. It had turned out better than he had expected. Of course, he did not intend to take any ransom money from Mr. Winford; he did not even intend to fix an hour and place for it; and he was certain that, anyway, Mr. Winford would never agree to pay ten thousand dollars, much less a hundred thousand.

He stretched himself with a sigh of relaxation.

“Well, I’m going to bed. I’ve got to get up early tomorrow.”

“Are you going out tomorrow?” Jinx asked.

“Yes. Why?”

“I’ve got a little errand for you. There are a few things that you’ll have to buy for me tomorrow.”

“A few things? What things?”

“Why, if you intend to keep me here for quite a while, you can’t expect me to wear the same clothes all the time, can you? A woman needs a few little things, you know. Here’s the list I’ve written for you.”

He took the list. It occupied four pages. It included everything from dresses and slippers to underwear and nightgowns to nail polish and French perfume at forty dollars an ounce.

He blushed. He thought with a shudder of what would be left of his bank account, if anything. But he was too much of a gentleman to refuse.

“All right,” he said humbly. “You’ll get it tomorrow.”

“Now, don’t forget, I want the chiffon dress flame-red and the silk one electric-blue. And I want the panties real short, see, like the ones I have.”

And she held out the dainty little cloud of lace that she had thrown into one of his desk drawers. She didn’t blush; but he did.

“All right,” he said, “I’ll remember. . . . Goodnight, Miss Winford.”

“Goodnight—Mr. Damned Dan!”

——IV——

“I can’t figure it out!” Vic Perkins was saying acidly, on the next morning. “Spray me with insect powder if I can figure it out! For one thing, I don’t see anything so brilliant in these stories of his. And for two things, all this news he’s getting first, well, it’s just a fool’s luck. And why all this fuss the Editor’s raising over that McGee bum what never got two words in print before is more than my intellect can digest!”

Vic Perkins was not quite satisfied with the turn of events. The Dawn’s morning number had come out with blazing stories, each bearing a line in big black print: “by Laurence H. McGee.” Practically the whole front page was by Laurence H. McGee. There was even a picture of him. And Victor Z. Perkins, the Dawn’s star, had to be satisfied with two measly columns on the third page, where he expressed his opinions on the great crime, and they sounded like a mouse’s squeal, compared to the roar of Laury’s flaming stories.

It had been reported, to City Editor Jonathan Scraggs’ extreme satisfaction, that the Dicksville Globe was seriously perturbed by his brilliant new reporter’s activity. There could be no one to compete with Laurence H. McGee. He was getting all the news hours ahead of everybody else. He seemed to know just where to go to get it. He interviewed Miss Winford’s parents, her servants, her friends. He wrote heartbreaking stories on the vanished girl. He wrote terrifying warnings to parents to watch their children. He seemed to burst with inspiration, and Dicksville’s citizens were beginning to gulp eagerly every issue of the Dawn for its gripping, thrilling articles.

“My congratulations, Mr. McGee,” said the Managing Editor himself, when Mr. Scraggs announced Laury’s raise in salary. “I have a presentiment of a brilliant future for you!”

“Great, Laury, kid, great!” Mr. Scraggs chuckled rapturously. “You have a positive genius for that kind of stuff! Oh boy, ain’t we cleaning up, though! Extras go like pancakes!”

Laury sat in Mr. Scraggs’ comfortable armchair, his feet on the editorial desk, and looked bored. Some of the Dawn staff’s elite had found a few minutes to gather around him and congratulate the new star. Laury was smoking one of Mr. Scraggs’ cigars, and it made him sick, but he looked superior.

“Your stories are . . . are gorgeous! Just simply . . . simply wonderful!” muttered an enthusiastic and anemic little cub.

“How d’you do it?” asked Vic Perkins gruffly.

“It’s all in the day’s work,” answered Laury modestly.

“Oh, Mr. McGee!” cackled Aurelia D. Buttersmith, the flower of the Dawn’s womanhood, who wore glasses and had never been kissed. “I’m doing a story on Miss Winford’s personality. Do you think it will be appropriate to call her ‘a sweet little lily-of-the-valley that the slightest wind could break’? Will it suit her?”

“Perfectly, Miss Buttersmith,” Laury answered. “Oh, perfectly!”

“That whole affair is a godsend!” Mr. Scraggs enthused. “By gum, I almost feel I could thank the guy who pulled it!”

Early that afternoon, Mr. Scraggs had another thrill that sent him jumping in his chair like a rubber ball. Laury rushed into the city room, his shirt collar flung open, his hair like a storm, his eyes like lightning.

“An extra!” he cried. “Quick! I’ve got the letters Winford received from the kidnapper!”

“O-oo-ooh!” was all Mr. Scraggs could answer.

It was lucky for Laury that no one noticed the fact that the Dicksville Dawn received the copy of the two letters half an hour before the postman delivered the originals to Mr. Winford. . . .

While the fresh extras were flowing from the press, Laury went out again, “to look for news,” he said. But this time, he went “to look for news” in Harkdonner’s big department store.

Laury thought that if he deserved a punishment for his crime, he got it, and plenty, in the hours that he spent at Harkdonner’s department store. He went from counter to counter, Jinx’s list in hand, perspiration gluing his shirt to his back and his hair to his forehead, and his face red as a tomato. He thought he had acquired a habit of stuttering for life before he got through with the lingerie counter. He did not dare to look at the courteous saleslady, for fears she would be blushing, too.

“It’s . . . it’s for my wife . . . for my wife,” he repeated helplessly, hoping desperately that no one would see him in the store.

And as it always happens in such cases, two stenographers from the Dawn passed by, saw him at the ladies’ lingerie counter, waved to him, giggled, and winked significantly.

And he almost murdered the salesman who, with an understanding grin, offered him a weekend suitcase.

Finally, with four huge boxes, two in each hand, Laury emerged from the store, put the boxes in his faithful old sports car, and left the car in a garage where no one could see it until evening. Then he walked back to the Dawn building.

His good humor returned to him on the way. Damned Dan’s name was all over Dicksville. It blazed on headlines of extras everywhere. It echoed in the terrified whispers of little groups of people gathered all along Main Street. It ran like the swift fire of a dynamite cord, spreading over the whole town to explode in a frenzy of general panic. Laury felt a personal pride.

Besides, he noticed that many passersby looked at him, pointed him out to each other, whispered, and turned around. “The one that writes those marvelous stories in the Dawn,” he heard.

And two charming young ladies even had the courage to stop him.

“Oh, Mr. McGee!” sang one of them in a lovely voice from lovely lips. “Excuse our boldness, but we recognized you and couldn’t help stopping you to ask about that terrible crime. Do you really think that man is as horrible as he seems?”

“Do you really think all of us girls are in danger?” breathed the other one, very becomingly frightened. “Your stories are so fascinating! I thought, ‘Here’s a man to protect us all!’ ”

And it was hard to decide whether their smiles sparkled with admiration for the stories or for the big gray eyes and tempting lips of the young man before them.

So Laury entered the Dawn offices, head high, whistling nonchalantly, with the proud air of a conqueror tired of victories.

“Hey, where on earth have you been?” shouted the copy boy, meeting him on the stairs. “The Editor’s hollering for you!”

Laury strolled into the city room, a superior smile on his lips.

“You nearsighted, blind boob!” Mr. Scraggs greeted him. “You brainless, straw-stuffed sap!”

“W-why, Mr. Scraggs!” Laury suffocated.

“Why the hell,” Mr. Scraggs roared, “why the hell when you brought us Miss Winford’s letter did you leave out the best part of it?”

“What?”

“Why did you omit the second postscript?”

“The second postscript?!”

“Look here!” And Mr. Scraggs threw to him an extra of the Dicksville Globe that had just come out, an hour after the Dawn, with the two sensational letters that Mr. Winford had received. Laury found Jinx’s letter and read:

Dear Father,

If there is in your heart a single drop of pity for your unfortunate daughter, you will come to my rescue at once! I can’t tell you all the suffering I am going through. Please, oh! please save me! If you could only see what your poor daughter is doing now your heart would break. I can’t write very well because my eyes are dimmed with tears. I implore you to spare no effort to save me.

Your desperate daughter,
Juliana Xenia Winford.

P.S. I’m miserable, miserable!!

P.S.II Like fun I am!

“When interviewed on the subject,” the Globe added, “Mrs. Winford remarked: ‘Unfortunately, only the second postscript sounds like my daughter’s style of self-expression! ’ ”

Laury entered his apartment that evening with a scowl on his face, darker than printing ink. He threw the four boxes in the middle of the room, without answering Jinx’s greeting, and slumped down on the sofa, turning his back to her.

“O-oh! Isn’t that sweet of you!” Jinx cried, throwing herself eagerly on the packages.

In a second the living-room floor looked like a combination salad made out of a woman’s boudoir after an earthquake. And Jinx sat on the carpet in the middle of the waves of lace and silk, enthusiastically examining her new possessions.

“My goodness! What’s this?” she cried suddenly.

And she pulled out the nightgown that Laury had chosen for her. As his excuse it must be said that he had no way of knowing what girls wear at night and so he had chosen the most decent-looking gown in the store, which was an immense thing of heavy flannel with long sleeves, high collar, and little pockets, a dignified garment to which his grandmother could have found no objection.

“What do you think this is, an Eskimo raincoat?” Jinx asked indignantly, waving the gown before Laury’s eyes.

“Well, but . . .” he muttered, embarrassed.

“Have you ever seen a woman in a nightgown like that?” she thundered.

“No, I haven’t!” he answered sharply.

His face was dark and indifferent. And it did not change when, after carrying her new things away, Jinx emerged suddenly from the kitchen, wearing one of her new dresses.

It was the flame-red chiffon. The light red mist clung to her slim waist tightly like a bathing suit and then flowed down to her knees in wide waves that floated around her like trembling tongues of fire. She stood immobile, her head thrown back. Her hair looked tornado-blown. Her lips were parted, glistening like wet petals; and her eyes sparkled strangely with a joyous, intense, and eager glitter.

“Do you like it?” she asked softly.

“Yes!” he threw indifferently, without looking at her.

She laughed. She turned on the victrola, a thundering jazz record.

“Let’s dance!” she invited.

Laury turned to her abruptly.

“What did you write that second postscript for?” he asked.

“Oh! Wasn’t that clever?” she laughed, dancing all over the room, her body shaking with the gracefully convulsive jerks of a fox-trot. “You’re not angry, are you—Danny?”

“Please stop that dancing, Miss Winford! Do you want the neighbors to hear you?”

“Don’t call me Miss Winford!”

“What shall I call you? And leave that ukulele alone! You’ll wake up the whole house, Miss Winford!”

“My name’s Jinx!”

“No wonder!”

She laughed again. With one graceful leap she landed on her knees at his feet and her strong little hands turned his head towards her.

“Now, Danny,” she whispered tenderly, her hair brushing his chin, her laughing eyes fixed straight on his, “can’t you smile, just once?”

He did not want to, but he could not help it and he smiled. When Laury smiled he had little dimples playing on his cheeks, gay like flickers of light, and in his eyes—dancing sparks, mischievous like dimples. And the strange, eager, almost hungry look glittered again in Jinx’s eyes.

She pulled him up to his feet and threw his arms around her and pushed him into the gay rhythm of a fox-trot. He laughed wholeheartedly and obeyed. They glided, swaying, over the room. The victrola screamed joyously and in the buoyant roar of the jazz orchestra some instrument knocked dryly, rhythmically, like a cracking whip spurring the sounds to dance. Laury’s hands clasped her slim little body, the tremulous red cloud with the faint, sweet perfume. And Jinx pressed herself to him, closer, closer.

They danced until their feet could move no longer and then they both fell on the sofa, in the cozy tent of the window curtains that Jinx had arranged. She looked at him with smiling, encouraging, impatient eyes.

“You’re a wonderful dancer, Miss Winford,” he said.

“Thanks! So are you,” she answered indifferently.

“Are you tired?”

“No!” she threw coldly.

They were silent for several minutes.

“Have you ever kidnapped a girl before?” she asked suddenly.

“Now, just why do you want to know that?” he inquired.

“Oh, I just wonder . . . I just wonder if you ever kiss the girls who are your prisoners.”

“You don’t have to be afraid of that!” he answered, with a sincere indignation.

And he could not quite make out what the look that she gave him meant. . . .

They danced again; then, he played the ukulele and sang to her the songs he knew; and she sang the ones he didn’t know; and they sang together; and she taught him a new dance; and she thought that Lizzie Chatterton had certainly missed something having never been kidnapped.

When he finally stretched himself on his mountainous bed in the kitchen and turned off the light, Laury somehow did not feel like sleeping and the sweet perfume lingered with him, as though breathing from the other room, and he looked at the closed door.

“Oh! . . . Danny!!” a frightened voice screamed in the living room.

He jumped up and rushed to her. She threw her arms around him and clung to him, trembling, making him fall on his knees by the side of her bed.

“Oh! . . . I heard a noise . . . as though somebody was moving in the hall!” she whispered with a terror that looked almost perfectly genuine.

Her blanket was half thrown off and she clung to him, trembling, frightened, helpless. His hands clasped her nightgown, and the body under the nightgown, and he felt her heart beating under his fingers.

“There’s no one there. . . . What are you afraid of . . . Jinx?” he whispered.

“Oh!” she breathed. “Oh, I’m afraid the police might come!”

Laury was surprised to see that he was trembling when he returned to his kitchen and that it had cost him a hard effort to return there.

“I wish,” he thought, closing his eyes, “I wish the police would never come here . . . and for more reasons than one!”

——V——

“Extray! . . . Extray-ay!”

The sun was shining so gaily in the sky and in Laury’s eyes, on this following morning, that he did not pay any particular attention to the ominous roar bursting suddenly in the street under the city room windows. The sky was blue and Laury’s desk at the window looked like a square of gold. He had won back Mr. Scraggs’ favor by his brilliant story on the mysterious personality of Damned Dan, in the morning number. He was writing another article now, and the cubs around him looked respectfully at the great journalist at work.

So when the unexpected roar of yelling voices thundered in the street, proclaiming some eventful news, Laury was not disturbed and only wondered dimly what the Globe could have an extra for.

But he did not have much time for meditation. He was summoned hurriedly to Mr. Scraggs’ desk. His heart fell when he saw the Editor’s face. He knew at once that something had happened, something frightful.

“What excuse have you got to offer?” Mr. Scraggs asked with sinister calm.

“Excuse . . . for what?” Laury muttered, steadying his voice.

“I had an impression that you were supposed to cover the Winford case, young man?”

“Well . . .”

“Then how do you account for the fact,” Mr. Scraggs roared, “that a punk, lousy, measly paper like the Globe gets such news ahead of us?” And he waved a Globe extra into Laury’s face.

“News, Mr. Scraggs? News on the Winford case?”

“And how! . . . Or perhaps you wouldn’t call it news that Winford received a second letter from the kidnapper?”

“What?!”

“You heard me! And the letter orders him to deliver the money tonight!”

Laury saw stars swimming between him and Mr. Scraggs. He seized the extra, almost tearing it in half; and he read the great news. Mr. Winford had received this morning a second message from Damned Dan, fixing the time and place for the ransom money to be delivered. Mr. Winford had decided to obey, for, he had declared: “I would rather search for my money than for my daughter.” Therefore, he had refused to make public all of the letter and the place appointed for the meeting. The Globe’s reporter was only able to state that the kidnapper’s letter was written with a pencil on a piece of brown wrapping paper; and that it started with:

Deer Ser enuff monkay biznes. Come across with the dough and make it pretti darn snappi or I’l get sor and wat’l hapen to yur gal then will be plenti. . . .

It was signed:

Veri trooli yur’s
Dammd Dan

Laury swayed on his feet, and Mr. Scraggs wondered at the color of his face.

“It’s . . . it’s impossible!” he muttered hoarsely. “It’s impossible!”

“What’s impossible? The Globe getting it first and you asleep on your job?”

“But . . . but it can’t be, Mr. Scraggs! Oh, God! It can’t be!”

“Just why can’t it be?”

Laury straightened himself slowly, straight and tense like a piano string.

“There’s something happening somewhere, Mr. Scraggs!” he said, white as a sheet. “Something horrible!”

“There sure is,” answered Mr. Scraggs, “and it’s right here, in my city room, from which you’re going to be kicked out, head first, if you ever miss a piece of news like this again!”

Eight hours passed after this conversation; eight desperate hours that Laury spent ransacking the town in search of some clue to that inexplicable development. He was too astounded to be quite conscious of what he was doing. He wondered if he was not going insane—the thing seemed so ridiculously incredible. He was searching frantically for something that would give him the faintest suspicion of an explanation.

He interviewed Mr. Winford and saw the first half of the letter on brown wrapping paper; he interviewed the police; he went around town actually hunting for news on the Winford case, looking for—Damned Dan! The idea made him laugh—with a gnashing of teeth.

And when he dragged himself back towards the Dawn building at six-thirty P.M., he had discovered nothing. The sun was setting far at the end of Main Street and red fires blazed on the windshields of cars rolling west. The peaceful traffic streamed by as usual and the shop awnings were being pulled up over darkened windows, locked for the night, as usual; but it seemed to Laury that somewhere behind these quiet houses, somewhere in this peaceful town, an invisible, frightful doom was silently awaiting him. . . .

“No,” said Mr. Scraggs, when Laury reached the city room, “you can’t go home tonight. You’ll be needed here. Grave developments are coming, I feel. Take an hour off for dinner and then be back on the job. Hang around Winford, be the first to learn the results of the ransom meeting this evening. And be sure to get here before the deadline!”

Laury walked home, his hands deep in his pockets and his thoughts deep in misery. What was he to do now? He could not let Mr. Winford be robbed of that huge sum, robbed and cheated, for he knew that the second “Dammd Dan” could not deliver Jinx to her father. He must warn him. But how? He did not dare to act, now that he felt himself watched and had not the slightest idea of the enemy he was dealing with.

Just the same, he jerked his head up proudly and muttered behind a firmly set mouth:

“But if that lousy bum, whoever he is, thinks he can scare me, he has a surprise coming that he’ll long remember! I’ll learn what his game is and damn soon!”

“Congratulations, buddy!” said a thick voice above his ear.

He stopped short and wheeled around. A tall, huge shadow towered above him in the coming darkness. That shadow had a crumpled little cap, too small for its big head, and greasy clothes that smelled of whiskey. It had a flat face, heavy eyes, and a broken, prizefighter’s nose. Laury recognized it at once: it was Pug-Nose Thomson.

“Sir?” Laury asked indignantly, backing away from the man’s strange, significant grin.

“Yeah, buddy, yeah, I says it was a slick one!” answered the man with a slow chuckle.

“What are you talking about? I don’t know you! Whom do you think you’re talking to?” Laury threw sharply.

“I’m talkin’ to Damned Dan hisself!” the man answered happily.

Laury wanted to make a reply and couldn’t.

“I says, yuh pulled the best job any guy ever tried in this burg,” the man went on. “For an amatcher it was pretty slick, I’ll say!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Laury pronounced with a tremendous effort, wondering himself at the calm of his voice. “Leave me alone! You’ve been drinking!”

“So I have. Which don’t make no difference,” answered Pug-Nose Thomson quietly. “An’ yuh better don’t pull that line on me, kiddo, ’cause I know what I know, an’ yuh know it, too. . . . But I don’t mean no offense to yuh, on the conterry, I mean to pay my compliments. If that’s yer begginin’, yuh’ll go far, young fella, yuh’ll go far!”

“I don’t understand you!” Laury insisted. “You’re taking me for somebody else!”

“No, I ain’t! Now, lissen here, I’ve got a offer fer yuh: Let’s be partners on this job!”

“You crazy fool! If you think . . .”

“Aw, cut that out, I’m talkin’ bizness! I know pretty damn well that yuh’re the guy what writes all them stories in the poipers an’ what’s got the Winford dame locked up in his own joint! Which’s pretty darn smart, I agrees!”

“But . . .”

“An’ if yuh wanna know how I knows it, it’s right simple: I read the poipers an’ I noticed as how yuh was gettin’ all them news on this bizness first. ‘That’s funny,’ I thought to myself, ‘nobody never heard of this guy before.’ An’ then I watched yuh, an’ I saw yuh buy all them Jane’s duds an’ yuh ain’t never got a sweetie, so there! An’ I watched yer joint from acrost the street an’ sure thing, there was the Winford gal at yer winder!

“Now keep yer mouth shut!” he went on, without giving Laury time to reply. “No use tryin’ to fool me! Here’s the main thing: I wrote that second letter to the Winford gent an’ he’s bringin’ the dough over tonight, in an hour. Yuh bring the gal an’ we go fifty-fifty on it!

“That’s still plenty fer yuh,” he added, as Laury remained silent and immobile. “No one ever got fifty grand fer his first job!”

Laury looked calmly, steadily into the man’s eyes.

“All right, then, if you are so well informed,” he said coldly, narrowing his eyes. “Now, suppose I refuse your offer?”

“Yuh won’t,” Pug-Nose declared with conviction, “ ’cause then I go an’ tell the bulls what I know on this case. An’ I get the five grand of reward. So yuh better accept my offer!”

“Well,” said Laury, “I accept it!”

“Great, buddy! Now . . .”

“I accept it on one condition: you give me twenty-four hours. We’ll meet Winford at the same time tomorrow!”

“Why should I?” Pug-Nose protested. “I don’t wanna wait!”

“Then go to the police at once, and denounce me, and get your five thousand, instead of the fifty you’ll get tomorrow! I won’t bring the girl tonight, and that’s final!”

“Well, okay,” said Pug-Nose slowly, after some deliberation. “We’ll make it tomorrow. Yuh meet me here, same time, with the gal.”

“Yes!” said Laury. “Goodnight, partner!”

“Goodnight!”

The darkness was gathering and Pug-Nose Thomson disappeared behind a corner so swiftly that Laury hardly heard his footsteps. There was no one around that could have witnessed their meeting. Lonely streetlamps flared up feebly in the deserted street with two rows of silent, drooping houses, in the brown shadows of a rusty sunset. A woman was gathering the wash from a clothesline in a backyard, and a car rattled through the silence, somewhere in the distance.

Cold sweat was rolling down Laury’s face. He hurried home. But his mind was made up when he entered his apartment.

“Take your things and come on,” he said to Jinx sternly.

“Where?” she asked.

“I’ve decided to take you back to your parents tonight!”

“That’s too bad,” she said sweetly, with a smile of compassion for him. “I won’t go!”

He stepped back and stared at her, wide-eyed.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“Just that I won’t go,” she repeated calmly, “that’s all!”

“How . . . how am I to understand that?”

“Oh, any way you please! Just any way!”

“You mean, you don’t want to be free?”

“No! . . . I enjoy being a prisoner . . . your prisoner!”

There was only one shaded little lamp lighted in the room. She was wearing her electric-blue silk dress, tight, luminous, glittering faintly, and in the half-darkness she looked like a phosphorescent little firefly.

“Danny,” she said softly, “you aren’t going to send me away like that, are you?”

He did not answer. He was surprised to feel his heart beating furiously somewhere in his throat. She smiled scornfully:

“Why, there’s no fun in being kidnapped if that’s all there is to it!”

“But, Miss Winford . . .”

“Do you realize that I’m your prisoner and you can do with me anything you want?”

He was silent.

“Oh, Damned Dan!” she threw at him. “Aren’t you going to take advantage of a girl who is in your power?”

He turned to her sharply and looked at her with half-closed eyes, curious, a little mocking, unexpectedly masterful, a dangerous look. And she felt that look like a hand squeezing her heart with delightful pain.

She stood straight, immobile, from the tips of her feet to her wide, sparkling eyes—waiting. “You have no right! You have no right! What are you thinking about?” he cried soundlessly to himself.

He turned away. “Come on, you’re going home!” he ordered sharply.

“I’m not!” she answered.

“You’re not, eh?” He turned to her fiercely. “You terrible little thing! You’re the worst little creature I ever saw! I’m glad to get rid of you! You’ll go now, do you hear me?”

He seized her wrist with a bruising grip. She whirled around and threw her body close against his.

“Oh, Danny! I don’t want to go away!” She breathed so softly and she was so close that he heard it with his lips rather than his ears.

And then he closed his eyes, and crushed his lips against hers, and thought, when his arms clasped her, that he was going to break her in two. . . .

“Jinx . . . darling . . . darling!”

“Danny, you wonderful thing! You most adorable of all.”

They seemed to be cut away from the whole world by the little tent over the sofa, and not by the little tent only. His arms closed around her, like the gates of a kingdom that no more than two can ever enter. Their eyes were laughing soundlessly at each other. And he was saying to her the most eloquent things which a man’s lips can say and for which no words are needed.

And Laury forgot all about having ever been a reporter. . . .

It was ten minutes to nine when he remembered.

“Oh, my goodness!” he cried, jumping up. “The deadline!”

“The dead who?”

“The deadline! I must run now! Dearest, I’ll be back soon!”

“Oh! Do you have to go? Well, hurry back then—you know how I’ll miss you, darling!”

Laury threw his old sports car as fast as it could go, flying towards the Dawn building. He was too happy to think much about anything else. His soul was dancing, and so was his sports car. The old machine went zigzagging to right and left, jumping buoyantly and senselessly, like a young calf turned loose for the first time in a green, sunny meadow. The drivers around him swore frantically; Laury laughed joyously, his head thrown back.

Then he remembered that he had no story for Mr. Scraggs. He seized his notebook and jotted words down hurriedly. It was a miracle that he reached the Dawn building without an accident, driving as he was with his one hand on the wheel, his other on the notebook, and his mind on a pair of slanting, sparkling eyes and soft, laughing lips, back home.

“Ah, so here you are!” Mr. Scraggs exclaimed ominously, when Laury whirled into the city room.

Laury was too far away in his overflowing happiness to notice the storm on Mr. Scraggs’ face.

“Yes! I’m on time, am I not?” he cried gaily.

“You are? And what about the news?”

“The news? Oh, sure, the news! . . . I got it! Most sensational news, Mr. Scraggs! Winford came to the meeting place and—Damned Dan was not there to meet him!”

Such a dead silence fell over the city room that Laury looked around, surprised.

“I’d like to know,” Mr. Scraggs said slowly with the tense, shivering calm of a fury hard to restrain, “I’d like to know where the hell you are getting your news from!”

“Why . . . why, what’s the matter?”

“What’s the matter? You blockheaded, half-witted, confounded idiot! Nothing’s the matter, except that the Globe came out half an hour ago with the news and . . .”

“Oh, well . . .”

“. . . and Damned Dan did come to the meeting, you skunk of a reporter!”

“He . . . came?”

“Where have you been all that time, you lazy cub? Sure, he came, but he didn’t bring the girl, so he got one grand in advance and promised to bring her later!”

Laury had no strength to make a comment or an answer; he stood, his eyes closed, his arms drooping helplessly.

“In fact,” Mr. Scraggs added, “he promised to bring her in an hour!”

“What?” Laury jumped forward as though he was going to choke Mr. Scraggs.

“I’d like to know,” Mr. Scraggs cried in furious amazement, “what the hell is the meaning of your strange . . . Where are you going?! Hey! Stop! Come here at once! Where are you going?”

But Laury did not hear him. He was flying madly down the stairs, out into the street, into his sports car. . . .

His apartment was empty when he got there. Jinx’s perfume was still lingering in the air. A pair of adorable little slippers was thrown into a chair. The sofa cushions were still crumpled where they had been sitting together. . . .

He found a note on his desk.

Deer partner I changed my mind. Wy shood I wait fer a haff toomoro wenn I can hav oll of it too-nyt? I’l giv yu a litle of it later fer a consolashun. So good lukk and happi dreems. Dont skueel coz then I’l skueel too.

Pug Noz Thomson

——VI——

“You gentlemen of the press,” said Mr. Winford to Laury, “are most decidedly aggravating, I must say. You should realize that I am not exactly in the mood to give you interviews and information on this painful subject. . . . No, I repeat, the individual who calls himself Damned Dan did not come to this second meeting, as he promised, an hour after the first. I waited for him to no avail and I just returned home. That is all I know. . . . But I do wish that you gentlemen would not be so insistent in paying me visits that are becoming rather too frequent.”

Laury stared at him hopelessly.

“And, young man,” Mr. Winford added severely, “I would give a little more consideration to my personal appearance before calling at people’s houses, if I were you.”

Laury glanced indifferently into a big, full-size mirror in the white marble hall of the Winford residence, and the mirror showed to him a haggard, disheveled young man, with his hair hanging down on his wet forehead, his cap backwards on his head, his shirt torn open and his necktie on his shoulder.

The sight did not affect him at all; he had had too many shocks this day to retain any faculty of reaction. The last shock had been the worst of all; from his apartment he had rushed straight to the Winford residence, hoping to find Jinx there; he had found only Mr. Winford just returned from his second appointment with Pug-Nose Thomson and Pug-Nose had not come to this meeting! Why? Jinx was in his power now. What had happened?

Laury bowed to Mr. Winford wearily.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Winford,” he said in a dull voice. “I’m rather upset over a very serious matter. . . . Thank you for the information. . . . Goodnight!”

He turned and left the wide, empty hall dimly lighted by crystal chandeliers reflected in the dark mirrors and polished marble floor, Mr. Winford’s lonely figure motionless among tall, white columns and the faint sound of Mrs. Winford’s sobs, somewhere in a distant room.

He drove his rattling sports car on the graveled road of the Winford gardens, rolling downhill, with a fountain tinkling somewhere in the darkness like breaking glass and the lights of Dicksville glittering far down under his feet between the branches of tall, black cypresses.

With each turn of the wheels his face was becoming grimmer and grimmer. He was calm now, and implacable. There was only one thing to do—and he had decided to do it.

He was going straight to Police Headquarters to throw them on Pug-Nose Thomson’s trail. He knew that once Pug-Nose was caught, it would be the end of him, too, for the bum certainly would not keep silent. For the first time he felt a cold shudder at the thought of jail. So that was the fate awaiting him! Such was to be the end of his glorious journalistic career that had just been starting so brilliantly! A kidnapper, a criminal, a convict. . . . Oh, well, it had to be done!

He did not hesitate for a moment, for there was only one reason, expressed in one word, that pushed him to action: Jinx! His whole being was one immense anxiety for her. Where was she now and what was happening to her? He closed his eyes not to see Pug-Nose Thomson’s picture that rose in his mind. . . .

It was a proud, determined Laury that entered Chief Police Inspector Rafferty’s office; a Laury cold, imperative, and impersonal, like a general ready for a dangerous battle, calm with the calm of a great moment.

“Get your men, Inspector,” he ordered, “to arrest Miss Winford’s kidnapper!”

“Cats and rats!!” cried Chief Police Inspector Rafferty.

Pug-Nose Thomson’s hangouts were pretty well known to the police. It would not take long to make their round, and Inspector Rafferty decided to go himself in his excitement over the biggest case of his whole career. He called two husky policemen to accompany him.

Laury, true to his duty to the last, rushed to a telephone.

“Mr. Scraggs?” he cried, when he got the Dawn’s editorial desk. “It’s McGee speaking! Send your best man over to Police Headquarters right away! There’s going to be a knockout of a story! . . . No, I won’t be able to cover it! . . . You’ll learn why, very soon! . . . Goodbye! Hurry!”

Such was the interest aroused by the Winford case that when Inspector Rafferty, Laury, and the two policemen were leaving Headquarters, Mr. Jonathan Scraggs in person bounced out of a speeding taxi before it had quite stopped, and joined them. He was accompanied by Vic Perkins.

“So Pug-Nose Thomson is Damned Dan?” asked Mr. Scraggs, a note of disappointment in his voice, as the police car dashed into the dark streets, its siren screaming piercingly.

“Well, not quite. But you’re going to find Damned Dan, too,” answered Laury with resignation. . . .

They found Pug-Nose Thomson in the dirty back room of an old, miserable tenement. The room had one tiny window with dusty pieces of broken glass sticking out and a wretched little gas lamp that hardly gave enough light to distinguish Pug-Nose Thomson’s huge bulk huddled over an old, unpainted table, drinking desperately. He was alone.

“Where’s Miss Winford?” cried Laury.

Pug-Nose looked with hazy eyes at the group of men in his doorway, and the gleaming brass buttons were the first thing he understood.

“So yuh squealed, yuh goddamn louse, yuh did?” he yelled, jumping at Laury, but the two policemen seized him, one by each arm, and handcuffed his big, hairy fists.

“Where’s the girl?” asked Inspector Rafferty in a threatening voice.

“The girl? The girl, she’s gone, damn her, she escaped from me!”

“How could she escape?”

“How could she? Oh boy! The only thing I wonder ’bout is how that boob managed to keep her fer three days!” And he shook his fist at Laury.

“What do you mean?” cried Mr. Scraggs.

“Haw-haw! So yuh don’t know, do yuh? Damned Dan—there he is, in his own person! Shake hands an’ make yerself acquainted!” And he bellowed his ferocious laugh into Laury’s face.

“The man’s insane!” Mr. Scraggs exclaimed.

“Who’s insane, yuh old fool? Sure, I stole the girl, but I stole her from him! He’s the one that pulled the whole thing! Yuh thought maybe I wouldn’t squeal on yuh, yuh dirty double-crosser?”

Five pairs of bulging eyes turned to Laury. He looked at them, cold, silent, immobile. He did not want to deny it; he knew that his guilt could be proved too easily.

“Why . . . Laury! . . . Why . . .” choked Mr. Scraggs.

Silently, Laury stretched his hand out to Inspector Rafferty for the handcuffs.

“My stars in heaven!” was all Mr. Scraggs could utter.

“Hot diggity dog!” added Vic Perkins. . . .

Laury was silent in the car all the way down to the jail, and the five men did not dare to look at him. Pug-Nose snored by his side.

The big door of the damp, gray jail building opened like a gaping mouth, eager to swallow Laury, and the heavy iron gratings clicked like hungry teeth. Inspector Rafferty had to kick the jailer on the back to get him out of the trance he had fallen into, on learning who his new prisoner was and why.

When the rusty grate of his cell closed after him, Laury turned suddenly and handed a piece of paper to the jailer with a few words written in the form of a headline. The words were:

RENEGADE IN OUR MIDST:
OUR OWN REPORTER—
ATROCIOUS KIDNAPPER!

“Give that to Mr. Scraggs,” said Laury sadly. “That, too, will make good copy!”

“I suppose,” said Inspector Rafferty, entering his office with Mr. Scraggs, Vic Perkins, and the two policemen, “I suppose Miss Winford is safe at home by this time. I shall inquire.”

He called up the Winford residence and asked if Miss Winford had returned home.

“No! Oh, my God, no!” answered Mrs. Winford’s hysterical voice.

The five men looked at each other, dumbfounded.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” cried Inspector Rafferty, falling into a chair. “What a case! What’s happened now?”

Laury’s apartment being the only place they could think of searching, all five of them rushed back to the car and hurried there at full speed. They were not only anxious by this time, they were panic-stricken.

When they entered Laury’s apartment, Jinx herself met them. She had one of Laury’s shirts draped gracefully instead of an apron, with the two sleeves tied around her waist, and she was in the kitchen, cooking dinner.

“To what do I owe the honor of this visit?” she asked with the charming smile of a gracious hostess.

“Miss . . . Miss Winford!” gulped Inspector Rafferty. He was the only one that had retained the use of his voice.

Jinx stood facing them, perfectly poised, smiling, unperturbed, a slight interrogative frown raising her eyebrows, as though waiting politely for an explanation.

“I . . . I’m glad to see you safe, Miss Winford,” muttered Inspector Rafferty, not at all sure whether he quite understood just what the situation was. “I’m glad we managed to rescue you at last!”

“Oh, you did?”

“Yes, Miss Winford! You have nothing to fear from him any more!”

“Fear from whom?”

“The young man that kidnapped you, Laurence McGee!”

“Laurence McGee?” Jinx shouted. “Laurence McGee?”

And such a thunder of laughter exploded like a bomb with splinters ringing all over the room, that Inspector Rafferty and his companions started, terrified.

“Oh . . . oh, how adorable!” Jinx laughed, understanding the real meaning and reason of the whole case.

“You are glad that we arrested him, is that it?” asked Inspector Rafferty timidly, very much surprised.

“Arrested? Him? Oh, my God! . . . Inspector, you must release him immediately!”

Vic Perkins, who had been taking notes, dropped his pad and pencil.

“It’s all a big misunderstanding, Inspector!” Jinx said quickly, still anxious, but regaining her calm.

“A misunderstanding, Miss Winford?”

“You see, I’ve never been kidnapped,” she explained, so sweetly, so sincerely that it would have been hard to doubt the straight look of her bold, mocking eyes. “I feel that you ought to know the truth, and I must confess everything. Mr. McGee did not kidnap me. We have known each other for a long time, and we were in love, and we eloped to get married; because, you see, my parents would have objected to it. So we made it look like a kidnapping to throw them off the track. It was all my idea!”

The five faces before her were frozen with the queerest expressions she had ever seen.

“Of course, I escaped from that broken-nosed bum, who tried to butt in, and then I came right back here. So there wasn’t any particular need to rescue me.”

“I . . . I don’t . . . I’ve never in my life . . . I . . .” Inspector Rafferty felt that his power of speech had been knocked out together with the rest of his reasoning abilities.

“Oh, dear Inspector!” Jinx gave him her sweetest smile and her most innocent look. “Surely you won’t break my heart and be too severe with my poor fiance?”

“Of . . . of course . . . I see that it . . . it changes the situation,” stuttered Inspector Rafferty.

“Where is he now?”

“In jail, Miss Win—”

“In jail? How dare you! Come, at once, set him free!”

And she rushed out, flying like a bullet down the stairs, the five men hardly able to follow her.

She jumped at the wheel of the police car, pushing the chauffeur aside.

“Never mind, I’m a better driver than any of you!” she cried in reply to Inspector Rafferty’s protest. “Jump in! Hurry!”

And the big car tore forward like a rocket, with a deafening whistle of the siren, in the hands of the little blue driver with wild, flying hair. . . .

“Don’t try to write it, Vic, old boy!” Mr. Scraggs cried, striving to be heard above the roar of the speeding machine. “No words will ever cover that story!”

Jinx had to wait in the jail reception room, while Inspector Rafferty and the jailer went to bring Laury.

They found him lying on his cot, his face in his hands. But he jumped up when they entered the cell and faced them calmly, the brave gray eyes steady and unfaltering.

“I must apologize, Mr. McGee,” said Inspector Rafferty, “though, of course, you shouldn’t have kept silent. But I’m glad to say that you are free to go now.”

“I’m . . . free?”

“Yes, we know the whole truth. Miss Winford confessed everything.”

“She did?”

Laury was stupefied, but he had learned by this time that it was better not to protest against anything Jinx said.

He walked to the reception room. Jinx rushed to him, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him, before the eyes of all the witnesses.

“Oh, Laury darling, I’m so sorry you had to suffer like that for me!” she cried.

“It was very noble of you to keep silent, but, really, you should have told them the truth,” she went on, as though without noticing the amazed look in his eyes. “I told them everything, how we eloped to get married and how I made up the kidnapping story to deceive my parents. You can tell them it’s true now, darling!”

“Oh! Yes! . . . Yes, it’s true!” confirmed Laury enthusiastically, for he would not have denied it, even if he could.

“Oh, Laury!” cried Mr. Scraggs with admiration. “And to think that he works on our paper!”

“The headlines, Mr. Scraggs,” said Jinx to the Editor, “the headlines will be: ‘Society Beauty Elopes with Our Own Reporter!’ ”

“Don’t thank me, you helpless, unimaginative sap of a criminal!” Jinx whispered to Laury, squeezing his hand, as they walked down the steps and his arm encircled her in the darkness of the narrow jail stair way. “So you wanted to give them sensational news, didn’t you? Now think of the sensation my news is going to give them!”

Escort

c. 1929

Editor’s Preface

This brief story seems to have been written in 1929, the year Ayn Rand married Frank O’Connor. One of his earliest gifts to her was a pair of small, stuffed lion cubs, christened Oscar and Oswald, who soon became to the young couple a private symbol of the “benevolent universe.” Every Christmas the cubs were brought out, dressed in colorful hats, to preside over the gaiety of the season.

I mention this because “Escort,” in manuscript, is signed by one “O. O. Lyons.” This means, I take it, that the story is intended as humor, the kind of fine, twinkling humor that Ayn Rand associated with her husband, and with Oscar and Oswald.

Ayn Rand by this time had read a great deal of O. Henry. She admired his cheerful lightheartedness and virtuoso plot ingenuity. “Escort” (and “The Night King”) may be read as her own private salute to O. Henry, her own attempt at his kind of twist ending.

—L. P.

Escort

Before he left the house, Sue asked:

“You won’t be back until morning, dear?”

He nodded dejectedly, for he had heard the question often and he wished his wife would not ask it. She never complained, and her blue eyes looked at him quietly and patiently, but he always felt a sadness in her voice, and a reproach. Yet tonight, the question and the voice seemed different somehow. Sue did not seem to mind. She even repeated:

“You won’t be back until the small hours?”

“God knows, darling,” he protested. “I don’t like it any better than you do. But a job’s a job.”

He had explained it so many times so very carefully: shipping clerks in warehouses could not choose their hours; and since he could not choose jobs, he had to work nights, even though he knew how wistfully she looked at the women whose husbands came home each evening, after the day’s work, to a bright dinner table under a bright lamp. And Sue had done such a grand job of their little house with less than nothing to go on. He had not noticed how the dreary shack they had rented had turned into a bright, warm little miracle, with rows of red-and-white-checkered dishes gleaming in the kitchen, and Sue among them in a wide, starched dress of red and white checks, slim and blond and gay as a child among toys. It was the third year of their marriage, and such a far cry from the first, when he had come, fresh from college, to these same rooms, then full of dust and cracked paint and desolation, when he had brought his young bride here, with nothing to offer her save the menacing monster of rent to be paid, which stared at them each month and which they could not pay. When he thought of those days, his lips tightened grimly and he said:

“I’ve got to hang on to this job, sweetheart, much as you hate it. I hate it too, but I won’t let you go through what we’ve been through ever again.”

“Yes,” said Sue, “of course.” But she seemed to be looking past him, without hearing his voice.

He kissed her and hurried to the door, but Sue stopped him.

“Larry,” she reminded him sweetly, “it’s Saturday.”

So it was. He had forgotten. He groped for his billfold and slipped her weekly allowance into her hand. Her hand seemed much too eager as it closed over the bills.

Then she smiled at him, her gay, impish smile, her eyes sparkling and open and innocent. And he left.

He raised the collar of his neat, modest gray overcoat against the thin drizzle of the street. He looked back once, with regret, at the light over their door, over the number 745, his number, his home, 745 Grant Street. Then he hurried to the subway.

When he alighted upon the milling platforms of Grand Central, Larry Dean did not walk to an exit. He hurried to a locker room instead, opened a locker, took from it a neat suitcase, and then walked to the men’s room. Fifteen minutes later, he emerged from it, and the fat black attendant looked with respectful admiration at his tall, slender figure in full dress clothes, trim and resplendent from the tips of his shining pumps to his shining top hat set at the right careless angle of a dazzling man of the world bent upon a gay evening. He put the suitcase with his modest working clothes back in the locker, snapped his fingers lightly, and walked to an exit, carelessly, without hurry.

The gold-braided doorman at a magnificent entrance on Park Avenue greeted Larry with a respectful bow denoting a long acquaintance. Larry entered the elevator with just the right touch of nonchalant swagger. But he stopped and his gay smile vanished before an imposing door marked: CLAIRE VAN NUYS ESCORT BUREAU.

Larry hated the place and he hated his job. Each evening, night after night, he had to accompany fat dowagers, rich spinsters, and foolish, giggling out-of-town matrons on an endless round of dinners, suppers, dances, nightclubs. He had to bow gracefully, and smile enchantingly, and laugh, and dance, and throw tips to waiters as if he were a millionaire. He had to keep going an endless stream of charming, entertaining drivel, and listen to more drivel in answer, and try to know what he was talking about, while his thoughts ran miserably miles away, to a quiet little room and Sue’s lonely shadow under the lamp.

At least, Sue did not know of this and she would never know. He would rather die than let her guess the kind of job he really had. It was respectable enough, oh yes, most respectable! Miss Van Nuys saw to that. But it was no job for a man, Larry felt. Still, he had to be grateful, for it was a job and it kept the little house at 745 Grant Street going.

Sue must never know of his sacrifice, the shy, quiet Sue who would be horrified at the thought of a nightclub and who had never seen one. At first, she had asked him timidly to take her out some night, but his anger had made her drop the subject, and she never asked it again. He could not let her enter one of those vile, noisy places where he was so well known, and his job as well. Besides, he was sick of the glitter, of the jazz, of the waiters.

He sighed, squared his shoulders for the night’s ordeal, and walked into Miss Van Nuys’ office. . . .

When Larry had left his house, Sue stood for a long time looking at the closed door, the money clutched in her hand. Then she took out the little tin box hidden deep in a kitchen drawer, and added the last dollar to her secret fund. It was a hundred dollars now, an even hundred, and this was the night she had been waiting for.

She had saved the money out of the household allowance, so carefully, with such painstaking little economies, for such a long time. Now she was ready. She went to a closet and took out her evening gown, her lovely blue, shimmering evening gown, which she had had no chance to wear for two years. She laid it out cautiously on the bed, and stood looking at it happily. For one night, for just one night, she would wear it, and dance, and laugh, and see one of those brilliant nightclubs she had heard so much about ever since she came to New York. She was deceiving Larry, she thought, but it was such a harmless deception! Just a few hours of dancing and some innocent fun, which Larry would not understand, the earnest, hardworking Larry who never thought of such things. She loved him so much, she was so happy in their little home, but the lonely evenings were so long, and she was still young, and she looked so pretty in her blue evening gown. Just one night . . . there was no harm in that, and Larry need never know.

It would be different if she allowed some man to take her out. But she wasn’t going to. She was going to pay for it herself, and do it right, one hundred dollars for one grand, reckless smash. She had heard how it could be arranged safely and respectably. Her heart beating, she went to the phone.

In the office on Park Avenue, a trimly permanented, efficient secretary looked up at Larry Dean standing before her desk.

“Your assignment for tonight, Mr. Dean,” she said, “will be dinner, dancing, best place in town, full dress clothes. You are to call in an hour for Mrs. Dean—no relation, I presume?—at 745 Grant Street.”

Her Second Career

c. 1929

Editor’s Preface

“Her Second Career” seems to date from 1929. It was probably written soon after Ayn Rand had begun working in the office of the RKO wardrobe department (a job she hated, but had to hold for three years, until she began to earn money by writing).

The subject matter of “Her Second Career” remains, in a broad sense, that of the early stories: the importance of values in human life. But here the focus is on the negative, on those who do not live life but merely posture at it, those who do something other than pursue values.

By 1929, Ayn Rand had a fund of observations on this subject: she had been working in and around Hollywood for three years. She respected the potential of the film medium, and she loved certain movies (her favorites were the great German Romantic silent films, with stars such as Conrad Veidt and Hans Albers, and directors such as Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang). But she rejected out of hand the syrupy, platitudinous stories enshrining mediocrity, offering odes to “the boy next door” or “the sweet maiden next door.” She despised what she saw as Hollywood’s trite values, its undiscriminating taste, its “incommunicable vulgarity of spirit,” as she put it in The Romantic Manifesto.

Unlike most critics, however, Ayn Rand did not ascribe the movies’ low estate to “commercialism” or “box-office chasing.” She singled out as the basic cause an inner mental practice or default, described by the hero in this story as follows:

There’s no one in this business with an honest idea of what’s good and what’s bad. And there’s no one who’s not scared green of having such an idea for himself. They’re all sitting around waiting for someone to tell them. Begging someone to tell them. Anyone, just so they won’t have to take the awful responsibility of judging and valuing on their own. So merit doesn’t exist here.

The Fountainhead would not appear in print for fourteen years; but here is its author’s first recognition in writing of the psychology of Peter Keating, the secondhander, the man who abdicates his inner sovereignty, then lives without real thought or values, as a parasite on the souls of others. Claire Nash in this story—again, a woman in the central role—is Peter Keating’s earliest ancestor; she is the antonym of Irene in “The Husband I Bought”; she is the woman who does not even know that values exist.

“Her Second Career” is not, however, a psychological study or a serious analysis of secondhandedness. It is a satire and, like “Good Copy,” an essentially jovial, lighthearted piece. (This story, too, is signed by “O. O. Lyons.”) Claire, despite her character, is a mixed case, with enough virtue to be attracted to the hero. Moreover, events reveal that there is, after all, a place for merit, even in Hollywood, and this functions as a redeeming note, making the satire a relatively gentle element in the context of a romantic story, rather than a biting denunciation or a bitter commentary.

This story, I believe, is the last of the preliminary pieces composed by Miss Rand before she turned to her first major literary undertaking, her novel We the Living. Several signs of her increasing maturity are apparent. Winston Ayers and Heddy Leland are more recognizably Ayn Rand types of hero and heroine than any of the figures in earlier stories. Though there is still a certain foreign awkwardness and, as in “Good Copy,” an overly broad tone at times, the writing as a whole is more assured. Parts of the story, especially on the set during the filming, are genuinely funny. Above all, “Her Second Career” presents, for the first time in the early pieces, an element essential to the mature Ayn Rand: an intriguing plot situation, integrated with the broader theme. On the whole, the logic of the events has been carefully worked out (although I have some doubt about Claire’s motivation in accepting Ayers’ wager, and about an element of chance that occurs near the end).

With developments such as these, the period of private writing exercises draws to a close. Ayn Rand is now ready for professional work.

A note on the text: three pages of the original manuscript are missing. To preserve the continuity, I have inserted in their place several paragraphs—about one-third the length of the missing pages—from an earlier version of the story which happens to have been preserved. The inserted material runs from the sentence “She reached the little hotel she was living in” through the sentence “. . . I am sure that I could not have found a better interpreter for my story.”

—L. P.

Her Second Career

“Heart’s Desire narrowly misses being the worst picture of the year. The story is mossgrown and the direction something we had better keep charitably silent about. BUT . . . but Claire Nash is the star. And when this is said, everything has been said. Her exquisite personality illuminates the picture and makes you forget everything but her own matchless magic. Her portrayal of the innocent country maiden will make a lump rise in the most sophisticated throat. Hers is the genius that makes Screen History. . . .”

The newspaper hanging lightly, rustling between two pink-nailed fingertips, Claire Nash handed it to Winston Ayers. Her mouth, bright, pink, and round as a strawberry, smiled lightly her subtlest smile of indulgent pity. But her eyes, soft violets hidden among pine needles of mascara, watched closely the great Winston Ayers reading.

He read and handed the paper back to her without a word.

“Well?” she asked.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have said what I said, Miss Nash,” he answered in his low, clear voice, and she could not tell whether it was perfectly polite or perfectly mocking. “But you asked for my candid opinion, and when I’m asked I usually give it.”

“You still hold to that opinion?”

“Yes. Perhaps I should add I’m sorry.”

She gave a little unnatural laugh which tried to be gay and friendly, but failed. “You realize that it’s a rather . . . well, unusual opinion, Mr. Ayers, to put it gently?”

“Quite,” he answered with a charming smile, “and I’m certain that it means nothing whatever.”

“Quite,” she was tempted to reply, but didn’t. Of course, his opinion should mean nothing to Claire Nash, because she was Claire Nash. She had a palace in Beverly Hills and two Rolls-Royces, and she had immortalized the ideal of sweet maidenhood on the screen. For her, five gentlemen had committed suicide—one of them fatally—and she had had a breakfast cereal named in her honor. She was a goddess, and her shrines were scattered all over the world, little shrines of glass with a tiny window in front, through which an endless stream of coins poured night and day; and the sun never set on that golden stream. Why should she feel such anger at the insult of any single man?

But Winston Ayers had come to Hollywood, and Winston Ayers had been expected and invited and begged to come to Hollywood for more than three years. Winston Ayers was England’s gift to the theaters of the world, or perhaps the theaters of the world had been a gift thrown into Winston Ayers’ nonchalant, expert hands; and these hands had created without effort or notice such miracles of drama and laughter that Ayers’ opening nights became riots, and from the theatrical pages of the world press there looked upon his worshiping public the face of a new playwright, a young playwright who looked bored. Winston Ayers had been offered one hundred thousand dollars for one screen story. And Winston Ayers had refused.

Claire Nash tightened the soft, luminous folds of her sky-blue negligee around her shoulders, pink as clouds of dawn over the satin sky. She bent her head wistfully to one shoulder, her head with the golden tangle of hair as a sun rising from the clouds, and she smiled the sweet smile of a helpless child which had made her famous. It had cost more sleepless nights and diplomacy than she cared to imagine for Mr. Bamburger, president of Wonder-Pictures, to arrange this interview between his great star and the man he wished to become his great scenarist. Mr. Bamburger had hoped that Claire Nash would succeed where all had failed, as she usually did, and induce the Box-Office Name to sign. “Don’t stop at the price,” Mr. Bamburger had instructed her, and she hadn’t known whether he had meant himself or her.

But the interview did not seem to succeed. For the Box-Office Name had said a thing . . . a thing . . . well, she would not care to repeat it to Mr. Bamburger nor to anyone else.

The soft twilight of her dressing room hid the angry little flash of red on Claire’s cheeks. She looked at the man who sat before her. He was tall, young, inexplicable. He had very clear, very cold eyes, and when he spoke, he narrowed his eyelids with a strange, slow movement that seemed to insult whatever he was looking at; she hated the movement, yet found herself watching eagerly to see it. “Much too handsome for a writer,” she decided in her mind.

“So you think,” she began bravely, “that screen actresses . . .” She could not force herself to finish the sentence.

“. . . are not worth writing for,” he finished it for her courteously, just as courteously as he had said it before, in the same even, natural voice that seemed utterly unconscious of the bombshell his words set off in her mind.

“Of course . . .” She fumbled desperately for something brilliant and shattering to say. “Of course, I . . .” She failed and ended up in a furious hurry of stumbling words. “Of course I wouldn’t hold myself as an example of a great screen actress, far from it, but there are others who . . .”

“On the contrary,” he said charmingly, “on the contrary. You are the perfect example of a great screen actress, Miss Nash.” And she didn’t know whether she should smile gratefully or throw him out.

The pink telephone on a crystal stand by her side rang sharply. She took the receiver.

“Hello? . . . Yes. . . .” She listened attentively. She wasn’t yawning, but her voice sounded suddenly as if she were. “My dear, how many times do I have to say it? It was final. . . . No. . . . A definite no! . . . To the Henry Jinx Films as well. . . . I’m sorry.”

She let the receiver drop from her hand and leaned back on the pillows of her chaise longue, little sparks glittering through the mascara needles. “My manager,” she explained lazily. “My contract here expires after this picture, and all the studios are hounding the poor man to death. I wish he wouldn’t bother me about it.”

This was what she said; what she wanted to say was: “You see?”

The telephone rang again before she had a chance to observe the effect.

“Hello? . . . Who? . . . About Heddy Leland?” Claire’s face changed suddenly. Her round cheeks drew up with a jerk and swallowed her eyes, so that there were no violets left, but only two slits of black needles across her face, sticking out like iron lances lowered for battle; and no fan would have recognized the sweet, world-famous voice in the shrill barks showered suddenly upon the pink receiver which seemed to blush under the flow: “You dare ask me again? . . . No! I said, no! . . . I won’t allow it! I never want to see that girl on my set again! . . . I don’t give a damn about her excuses! . . . You heard me? I’m not accustomed to repeating twice! . . . And I hope, my dear Mr. Casting Director, that you won’t bother me again for any five-dollar extra!”

She slammed the receiver down so hard that the crystal stand rang under it with a thin, musical whine. Then she noticed an expression, an actual expression in the eyes of Winston Ayers, the first she had seen in them: it was an expression of mocking astonishment. The look on her face did not quite suit the ideal of sweet maidenhood; she realized that.

She shrugged her beautiful shoulders impatiently. “An insolent extra,” she tried to explain calmly. “Imagine, today, on the set, I was doing my best scene—oh, what a scene! I had had such a hard time getting into the mood of it—and I’m so sensitive to things like that—and just as I got it, right in the midst of it, that creature tumbled from the sidelines straight into me! Almost knocked me down! Of course, the scene was ruined. We had to retake it and I couldn’t do it again! Because of an extra!”

“She did it on purpose, of course?” he asked lightly, and the tone of his voice answered his own question.

“I don’t care! She said someone pushed her. It makes no difference. I told them I won’t have her on my set again!” She took a cigarette, then broke it and flung the pieces away. “Let us return to our interesting subject, Mr. Ayers. You were saying . . .”

“I’ll enter anyway!” a young, ringing voice exploded suddenly behind the door. The door flew open. Something wild, tall, disheveled burst in, slammed the door behind, and stood suddenly still.

The girl wore a tight little suit that ended abruptly above the knees of two strong, thin, exquisite legs. The legs seemed grown fast to the floor, straight and taut; the light from the pink lamp cut a thin, glittering line on each stocking, and they looked like two jets from a fountain, flung up and frozen. She seemed to be standing on tiptoe, but it was only her small, high-heeled pumps that made her seem so, the pumps and the tenseness of her slim body stopped abruptly in flight. Her short hair was thrown back in disorder, as it had been left after she had torn off her screen costume, and a thin line of greasepaint still showed at the edge of her forehead. Her face had odd, irregular lines, impish and solemn and somber all at once. Her eyes, immense, glittering, incredible, were dark and still.

Claire Nash jumped to her feet and stood looking at the intruder, her little mouth hanging open in amazement.

“Excuse me for entering like this, Miss Nash,” said the girl. Her voice was unexpectedly steady, as if she had had time to pull some reins within her and to bring it under control.

“Why . . . Heddy Leland!” Claire stammered, incredulous and suffocated.

“Your secretary wouldn’t let me enter,” the girl said evenly, “but I had to enter. It was my last opportunity to see you. If they send me away tonight, I won’t be able to get on the lot again.”

“Miss Leland, I . . . I really fail to understand how . . .” Claire began grandly, and ended much more naturally, exploding, “Of all the brazen nerve . . . !”

“Please excuse me and listen to me, Miss Nash,” the girl said quietly and firmly. “It was not my fault. I am very sorry. I ask your forgiveness. I promise you that it will never happen again.”

Claire seated herself slowly on the chaise longue and draped the blue folds of the negligee carelessly and majestically about her. She was beginning to enjoy it. She said leisurely:

“No, it will never happen again. Haven’t you understood that I do not want you back on my set?”

“Yes. I have. That’s why I came. I thought that perhaps you hadn’t understood what my work here meant to me. I was promised two weeks. Please, allow me to remain. I . . .” She hesitated for the first time. “I . . . need it very much.”

“Really?” said Claire. “Were you under the impression that a studio is a charitable institution?”

The girl’s lean, tanned cheeks blushed very slightly, so slightly that Winston Ayers was alone to notice it. She made an effort, as if forcing herself on against an overwhelming desire to say something quite different from what she actually said in her level, steady voice:

“Forgive me. You are quite right. It was in very bad taste on my part to mention that. That doesn’t matter. But, you see, I’m just starting in Hollywood. It’s difficult to get an opening, even for extra work, to be seen. My whole career may depend on what I do in this picture.”

“Your whole career?” said Claire sweetly. “But, my dear girl, what makes you think that you have a career before you?”

The girl hadn’t expected it. She looked at Claire closely. Two soft, mocking dimples creased Claire’s cheeks. She continued, shrugging, “There are thousands and thousands of girls like you in Hollywood and every one of them thinks she has a career waiting for her.”

“But . . .”

“Let me give you some advice, Miss Leland. Friendly advice—really, I don’t hold that little incident against you. Think of the thing you can do best—then go and do it. Forget the movies. I am more experienced than you are and I know the business: the screen is not for you.”

“Miss Nash . . .”

“Oh, don’t say it’s heartbreaking and all that! Let me tell you the truth. You are not particularly pretty. Thousands of better-looking girls are starving here. You haven’t a chance. It really doesn’t matter whether you work here or not. You won’t get far anyway. Go back home and try to marry some nice, respectable fellow. That would be the best thing for you.”

Heddy Leland looked at her; looked at the man who sat silently watching them.

“Please excuse my intrusion, Miss Nash,” she said as if she were reciting disjointed words without meaning, for her voice had no expression at all. She turned and walked out and closed the door evenly behind her. The soft curtains of peach velvet rustled and billowed slightly and fell back to immobility.

Claire lit a cigarette with magnificent disdain.

“Why did you give that advice to the girl?” Winston Ayers asked.

“Oh!” Wrinkles gathered on Claire’s pretty little nose. “Oh, it makes me sick! When I see one of those girls who gets five bucks a day and wants to be a star! Everybody wants to be a star. They think that to be a star means nothing at all!”

“Precisely, Miss Nash. It means nothing at all.”

Claire spilled ashes on her blue satin without noticing it. “You’re saying that to me?” she breathed.

“I was under the impression,” he answered, “that I had said it before. You were kind enough to inquire why I refuse to write for Hollywood. Perhaps I can make myself clear now. You see, I believe that screen actresses are not great artists, rare talents, exceptions. They are not one in a thousand, they are just one out of the thousand, chosen by . . .”

“By?”

“. . . chance.”

Claire said nothing. No proper words would come to her.

“Look about you,” he continued. “Thousands and thousands of girls struggle for a place in the movies. Some are as beautiful as you are, and some are more beautiful. All can act as you act. Have they a right to fame and stardom? Just as much or just as little as you have.”

“Do you realize,” said Claire, and her voice made funny little gurgling sounds in her throat, but she was past caring about her voice or what it said, “do you realize, Mr. Ayers, that you are speaking to a woman who is considered one of the world’s geniuses?”

“The world,” said Winston Ayers, “would never have seen that genius, if someone hadn’t told it so—by chance.”

“Really,” Claire stammered, “I don’t mean to be begging for compliments, Mr. Ayers, but . . .”

“Neither do I mean to be insulting, Miss Nash. But look at it objectively. There’s no one in this business with an honest idea of what’s good and what’s bad. And there’s no one who’s not scared green of having such an idea for himself. They’re all sitting around waiting for someone to tell them. Begging someone to tell them. Anyone, just so they won’t have to take the awful responsibility of judging and valuing on their own. So merit doesn’t exist here. What does exist is someone’s ballyhoo which all the others are only too glad to follow. And the ballyhoo starts with less discrimination and from less respectable sources than the betting at a racetrack. Only this is more of a gamble, because at a track all the horses are at least given a chance to run.”

Claire rose. “Most unusual, Mr. Ayers,” she said, smiling icily. “I do wish we could continue this stimulating discussion. But I am so sorry, I do have an early call on the set tomorrow and . . .”

“Keep this, Miss Nash,” he said, rising, “as a little memento of me. You have made your career. I do not ask how you made it. You are famous, great, admired. You are considered one of the world’s geniuses. But you could not make a second career.”

Claire stopped; looked at him; walked back to him.

“A second career? What do you mean?”

“Just that. If you were to start at the beginning now, you would see how easy it is to get your talent recognized. You’d see how many people would notice it. How many people would be eager to notice. How pleasant they would make it for you. How many of them would give a damn!”

“Sit down,” she ordered. He obeyed. “What are you driving at?”

He looked at her, and his eyelids narrowed. And he explained exactly what he was driving at. Claire Nash sat before him, her mouth open, her eyes swimming in fascinated terror.

“Well?” he asked.

She hesitated. But there was one thing to Claire Nash: she believed in her own greatness, deeply, passionately, devotedly. Her belief was the warm glow that greeted her when she awakened each morning; that filled her days with radiance; that rose over the set, brighter than the arc lights, and drove her to her best scenes; that shone, as a halo, over her head when she passed other women in the street, those women who were not like her. It was true that she had married a producer’s nephew many years ago, at the beginning of her career, and divorced him since; but that had been only a shortcut and it proved nothing. Her genius alone could open the gates of Hollywood again and as many times as she wished. Besides, there was the tall man with the narrowed eyelids before her. She liked him—she hated to admit it—yes, she liked him definitely. Most definitely. She knew suddenly that she wanted to see him again. What triumph there would be in making him retract all those words, in seeing him bow, him, like all those countless others!

“Well?” he repeated.

She raised her head and laughed suddenly.

“Of course,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

He looked at her and bowed graciously.

“Miss Nash,” he said, “I admire you—for the first time.”

She was angry at herself for the senseless pleasure these words gave her.

“Well, then, remember,” he continued. “You are starting all over again, at the very beginning. You are taking your real name—Jane Roberts, isn’t it? You allow yourself no more money than an average extra girl can have. You know no one in Hollywood. No one has ever heard of you. I wish you luck.”

“I shan’t need it,” said Claire gaily.

“Then, when you have seen what you shall see, you can return to your stardom and bring Claire Nash back. I hope she will enjoy her fame in a somewhat different manner then.”

“We’ll see.”

“And to prove to you the other side of my theory, Miss Nash,” he said, “while you try to break into the movies, I’ll make a star out of an extra, any extra, the first one we choose—say, out of that little Heddy Leland who was here.”

A burst of ringing laughter was the answer.

Claire Nash was leaving for Europe. She had finished her last picture and was going to take, as the newspapers had explained, a much needed vacation.

When the hour came for her to enter the luxurious car of the Chief, a mob of fans was there to see her departure. She appeared, slow, regal, radiant as a sunrise. She crossed the platform through the waves of flowers and worshipers. Newsmen snapped pictures of her, one thin pump poised gracefully on the car step, a huge bouquet hiding the rest of her, all but the blond head bent wistfully to one shoulder, a trim little French hat pulled low over one eye, the lips smiling sadly and gently. Three reporters asked questions she could not hear through the roar, and wrote down answers they never heard. A sob sister rammed her spectacles into Claire’s ear, and screamed demands to know Claire’s opinion on the European war situation, which Claire gave solemnly and which the woman wrote down in mad haste not to lose a single precious word. The fans fought for a rose that had fallen from Claire’s bouquet. A woman fainted. It rained. Policemen worked hard to maintain order. Six citizens were hurt.

The train moved. Standing on the observation platform, Claire Nash bowed graciously to right and left, smiled sweetly and waved a tiny lace handkerchief. . . .

No passenger paid any attention when, at the first stop, a slender little woman in gray slipped quietly from the train. When the train moved again, no one knew that behind the forbidding locked door of Claire Nash’s compartment, there was no star left, but only a prim, slightly bewildered secretary going on alone for a much needed vacation.

The slender woman in a plain gray coat took the first train back to Los Angeles. Claire Nash was gone, was far away on her journey to Europe. Jane Roberts was coming to Hollywood to break into the movies.

“The story will be ready in two weeks, Mr. Bamburger.”

“Oh, Mr. Ayers!”

“One hundred thousand dollars?”

“Yes, Mr. Ayers.”

“We sign?”

“Yes, indeed, yes, Mr. Ayers.”

Mr. Bamburger pushed the papers forward, thrust a fountain pen toward the hand of the man before him, as if fearing that the hand might change its mind, missed, dropped the pen to the floor, and saw a gurgling spot of blue spread on the rug. Mr. Bamburger plunged down for it, jammed the pen into the man’s hand, and mopped his forehead, adding streaks of blue to the shining glow of perspiration. Mr. Bamburger prided himself on his self-control, but here, in his office, at his desk, sat the great Winston Ayers in person, and the great Winston Ayers had surrendered!

“I supervise the production of the story?”

“Certainly, Mr. Ayers.”

“I choose the director?”

“Yes, Mr. Ayers.”

“And remember, Mr. Bamburger: I choose the cast.”

“Yes, Mr. Ayers.”

“Can’t promise anything. But we might be using crowds later. Drop in next week.”

Heddy Leland repeated to herself the words of the casting director in his short, indifferent voice. “Next week . . . for the sixth time,” she added in her own voice, soft and tired.

She was walking home from the studio, from the seventh studio she had visited that day. The answers in the others had been the same. No, not quite the same. She had waited for two hours in one of them, only to be told that the casting director would see no one else today. In another, an assistant, a skinny boy with a dripping nose, had said: “Nothing today, sister,” and when she had tried to remind him of his boss’ promise, he had snapped: “Who’s running this place? Get going, sister.”

Six weeks without work. Forty-two days of getting up in the morning, dressing herself like a Parisian doll—while being careful that no one should notice the tears in her silk stockings, hidden by her pumps, the tears in her lace blouse, hidden by her trim jacket—walking into a casting office, asking the same question with the same smile and the same sinking of the heart; and hearing the same answer, always, each day, for all eternity.

She reached the little hotel she was living in. “Did the Henry Jinx Films call me, Mrs. Johns?” she asked at the desk, her voice trembling a little.

“Miss Leland? . . . Let’s see . . . the Henry Jinx Films—yes. They called. A message: they are sorry, but they have nothing right now. They hope that next week . . .”

Heddy was sitting on the bed, in her room, her elbows in the pillow and her chin in her hands, in a dark meditation, when the telephone rang, with a dry, sharp noise.

“Hello.”

“Miss Leland?”

“Yes.”

“This is Wonder Pictures. Mr. Bamburger wants to see you at once.”

“Mr. Bamb—”

“Mr. Bamburger, yes. At once.”

“Miss Leland—Mr. Ayers.” Mr. Bamburger introduced them. Winston Ayers looked at her with his slow, cold, curious look. She looked at him with her calm, dark, resolute eyes. He opened his eyelids slightly wider. Hers remained motionless.

“I am very glad to meet you, Miss Leland,” he said in his slow, charming voice, a smiling voice from serious lips, “and I am sure that I could not have found a better interpreter for my story.”

“I am very grateful for your choice, Mr. Ayers,” she answered evenly, “and I shall try to live up to it.”

Winston Ayers looked at her again. He knew that only a few minutes ago, Mr. Bamburger had told this girl that the great author himself had chosen her for the part which Hollywood’s biggest stars dreamed of playing. She seemed too calm, much too calm. He shrugged his shoulders and turned away, his eyes narrowing indifferently, as Mr. Bamburger resumed his nervous, hurried speech; but he found himself looking again at the strange, thin profile, the long lashes, the hard, set mouth. It isn’t indifference in her, he thought, it’s something else. He wished suddenly to know the something else, even if he had to break the arrogant little creature to learn it.

The tips of her fingers pressed to the edge of Mr. Bamburger’s desk, the only thing to keep her from swaying and falling before them, Heddy Leland had the strength to stand still, to listen, to hear Mr. Bamburger saying: “. . . for this one picture only . . . three hundred dollars a week . . . as a beginning . . . the future depends on your work. . . .” Then Winston Ayers’ slow voice: “You’ll have the script at once, Miss Leland, and you can get acquainted with the part of Queen Lani.”

Her round cheeks rouged delicately, her blond curls fluttering in the wind, under the brim of her cheapest little hat (she was being honest about it, for the hat had cost a mere thirty dollars and it was most becoming!), a huge round collar of blinding white lace billowing under her chin, Claire Nash was the very picture of sweet girlhood on its way to see the casting director of the Henry Jinx Film Company.

She had a hard time trying not to smile and she lowered her eyes modestly, to keep from looking at the passersby and from betraying in one laughing glance her whole mad adventure. She had been bored in Hollywood for so many months, and she did not remember such a thrilling morning for a long, long time.

She saw the Henry Jinx Studio rise before her, white, majestic, and royally welcoming, as she turned a corner. With her brisk, assured, graceful little step, she walked up the broad, polished steps to the glittering entrance. A sign stopped her. It was a dirty little cardboard sign with crooked letters drawn by hand: CASTING OFFICE AROUND THE CORNER. It hung there as a silent insult. She made a little grimace, shrugged gaily, and walked obediently around the corner.

The thing whose narrow door carried the faded sign CASTING OFFICE was not a building, was not even a shack. It was a dump heap of old boards, upon which no one had wanted to waste the precaution of beams or the courtesy of paint. It seemed to announce silently for whose entrance it had been designed and what the studio thought of those who entered here. Claire had not turned that corner for many years. She stopped, because she thought unreasonably that someone had just slapped her in the face. Then she shrugged, not quite so gaily, and entered.

The room before her had a floor, a ceiling, four walls, and two wooden benches. All these must have been clean sometime, Claire thought, but she doubted it. Without looking left or right, she walked straight to the little window in the wall across the room.

A blond, round-faced, short-nosed youth looked at her and yawned.

“I want to see the casting director,” said Claire; she had meant to say it; she commanded, instead.

“Gotta wait your turn,” the youth answered indifferently.

She sat down on the corner of a bench. She was not alone. There were others, all waiting for the casting director. A tall, red-haired girl in a tight black dress with flowing sleeves of blue chiffon, tomato-red lips, no stockings, and a slave-bracelet on the left ankle. A tall, athletic young gentleman with dark, languorous eyes, a very neat haircut, and a not so neat shirt collar. A stout woman with a red face, a man’s overcoat, and a drooping ostrich plume on her hat. An assortment of short, plump little things who remained determinedly “flappers,” with fat legs squeezing out of shoes many sizes too small. A sloppy woman with an overdressed child.

Claire pulled her skirt closer to her and tried to look at nothing but the window. She did not know how long she sat there. But she knew that time was passing, for she noticed the flappers producing their compacts and remaking their faces several times. She would permit herself no such vulgarity in public. She sat still. Her right leg went to sleep, from the knee down. She waited.

A door banged against a wall like an explosion. She saw the flash of a man’s heavy stomach and above it the face of an angry bulldog, which, she realized in a few seconds, was the man’s face after all. “Who’s first?” he barked.

Claire rose hastily. Something streaked past her toward the door, hurling her aside roughly in its progress; the door was slammed before she realized that it had been one of the flappers and heard consciously the angry words left in its wake: “Wait your turn, sneak!”

Claire sat down again. She felt damp beads on her upper lip. She took out her compact and remade her face.

Her turn came an hour later. She walked into the next room slowly, conscious of the precise grace of each moving muscle, timing her entrance as carefully as if she were advancing toward a grinding camera.

“Well?” snapped the bulldog behind the desk, without raising his eyes from the papers before him.

Well, thought Claire, what did one say here? She was suddenly, utterly blank. She smiled helplessly, waiting desperately for him to raise his head; no words would be necessary then. He raised his head and looked at her blankly. “Well?” he repeated impatiently.

“I . . . I want to work in pictures,” she stammered foolishly. It was foolish, she thought, and it was not her fault; couldn’t he tell at a glance what he had before him and what he should do about it?

It seemed as if he couldn’t. He wasn’t even looking at her, but was pulling some paper forward.

“Ever done extra work before?”

“Extra work?”

“That’s what I asked.”

“Extra work?”

“Yes, madam!”

She wanted to argue, to explain, but something choked her, and what did come out of her throat was not what she had intended to say at all:

“No, I’m just beginning my career.”

The man pushed the paper aside.

“I see. . . . Well, we don’t use extras who’ve had no previous experience.”

“Extras?”

“Say, what’s the matter with you? Did you mean to ask for a bit straight off the bat?”

“A . . . a bit?”

“Lady, we have no time to waste here.” He pushed the door open with his foot. “Who’s next?”

There was no reason, Claire Nash was telling herself as she walked out into the street, there was no reason to take the whole farce so seriously. No reason at all, she was saying, while she twisted the handle of her bag till she wrenched it off and went on, the bag dangling violently on a broken strap.

But she went on. She went to the Epic Pictures Studio, and three hours later saw its casting director.

“Ever been in pictures before?” the lean, weary, skeptical gentleman asked as if her answer were the last thing in the world he cared to hear.

“No!” she answered flatly, as a challenge.

“No experience?”

“But . . . no. No experience.”

“Whatchur name?”

“Clai—Jane Roberts.”

“Well, Miss Roberts,” he yawned, “we do not make a practice of it, but we could . . .” he yawned, “. . . use you someday, let you try, when . . .” he yawned, “. . . oh, dear me! . . . when we have a very big crowd of extras. Leave your name and phone number with my secretary. Can’t promise anything. Come and remind us—next week. . . .”

When a month had passed, Claire Nash had heard “Next week” four times each from six studios; from three others she heard nothing—their casting directors did not interview beginners; from the last one there was nothing to hear—its casting director was away on a trip to Europe to scout for new screen talent.

His eyes fixed, thoughtful, more troubled than he cared to show, Winston Ayers watched the shooting of the first scenes. Work on Child of Danger, his story, had begun. He was watching—with an emotion which made him angry and which he could not control—the camera and that which stood before the camera. For before the camera stood an old fortress wall, a mighty giant of huge, rough stones; and on the wall was Queen Lani.

Queen Lani was the heroine of his story, a wild, sparkling, fantastic creature, queen of a barbarous people in the age of legends; a cruel, lawless, laughing little tyrant who crushed nations under her bare feet. He had seen her vaguely, uncertainly in his dreams. And now she was here, before him, more alive, more strange, more tempting than he had ever imagined her, more “Queen Lani” than the Queen Lani of his script. He looked at her, stricken, motionless.

Her hair flying in the wind, her slim body wrapped only in a bright, shimmering shawl, her naked legs, arms, and shoulders hard as bronze, her huge eyes glittering with menace and laughter, Heddy Leland sat on the rocks of the wall, under the eyes of the cameras, a reckless, wild, incredible, dazzling queen looking down at her limitless dominions.

There was a dead silence on the set. Werner von Halz, the scornful, aristocratic imported director, bit his megaphone in a frenzy of admiration.

“Dat,” pronounced Mr. von Halz, pointing a fat finger at the girl, “dat iss de virst real actress I efer vork vit!”

Mr. Bamburger nodded, mopped his forehead, dropped his handkerchief, forgot to pick it up, nodded again, and whispered to the silent man beside him:

“Some find, eh, Mr. Ayers?”

“I . . . I didn’t know . . . I didn’t expect . . .” Winston Ayers stammered, without tearing his eyes from the girl.

When the scene was over, he approached her as she stepped off the wall.

“It was splendid,” he said, tensely, harshly, as if grudgingly, his eyes dark between half-closed, insulting eyelids.

“Thank you, Mr. Ayers,” she answered; her voice was polite and meaningless; she turned abruptly and walked away.

“I want,” Mr. Bamburger was shouting, “I want articles in all the fan magazines! I want interviews and I want them syndicated! I want photos—where’s that fool Miller, has he been sleeping?—photos in bathing suits and without bathing suits! Wonder-Pictures’ new discovery! Discovery, hell! Wonder-Pictures’ new gold mine!”

Claire Nash struggled, wept, wrote letters, wasted nickels in phone booths, fought for and obtained an interview at Central Casting.

She sat—trembling and stammering, unable to control her part any longer and the part running away with her—before the desk of a thin, gentle, pitiless woman who looked like a missionary. Central Casting ruled the destinies of thousands of extras; it flung opportunities and ten-dollar-a-day calls by the hundreds each single day. Wasn’t there, Claire begged with an indignation merging into tears, wasn’t there room for one more?

The woman behind the desk shook her head.

“I am sorry, Miss Roberts,” she said precisely and efficiently, “but we do not register beginners. We have thousands of experienced people who have spent years in the business and who are starving. We cannot find enough work for them. We are trying to cut our lists in every way possible, not augment them with novices.”

“But I . . . I . . .” stammered Claire, “I want to be an actress! I may have a great talent . . . I . . . God! I know I have a great talent!”

“Very possible,” said the woman sweetly and shatteringly. “But so say ten thousand others. It is very ill advised, Miss Roberts, for a lovely, inexperienced young girl like you to be thinking of this hard, heartbreaking business. Very ill advised. . . . Of course,” she added, as Claire rose brusquely, “of course, if your situation is . . . well, difficult, we can suggest an organization which undertakes to provide the fare back home for worthy girls who . . .”

Claire forgot her part for the moment; she did a thing which no beginner would have dared to do: she rushed out and slammed the door behind her.

They are fools, Claire thought, sitting in her hotel room, all of them just blind, lazy fools. It was their job to find talent, yet they did not see it, because . . . because it seemed that they didn’t give a damn. Who had said that to her before, so long ago? Then she remembered who had said it, and the cold, mocking eyes of the speaker, and she jumped to her feet with a new determination; a new determination and a brand-new feeling of loneliness.

If they had no eyes to see for themselves, she decided, she would show them. If it’s acting experience they want, she would throw the experience in their faces. She started on a round of the little theaters that flourished like mushrooms on Hollywood’s darkest corners. She learned that one did not get paid for acting in the wretched little barns, because the “chance to be seen” was considered payment enough for the weeks of rehearsals. She was willing to accept this, even though she did wonder dimly how she would have been able to accept it were she a real beginner left alone to struggle on her own earnings. But her willingness brought no results. In four of the theaters, she was told that they employed no one without previous stage experience. In three others, her name and phone number were taken with the promise of a call “if anything came up,” a promise made in such a tone of voice that she knew this would be the end of it, and it was.

But in the eighth theater, the fat, oily manager took one look at the thirty-dollar hat and bowed her eagerly into his office.

“But of course, Miss Roberts,” he gushed enthusiastically, “of course! You are born for the screen. You have the makings of a star, a first-class star! Trust me, I’m an old horse in this business and I know. But talent’s gotta be seen. That’s the secret in Hollywood. You gotta be seen. Now I have just the play for you and a part—boy, what a part! One part like this and you’re made. Only, unfortunately, our production has been delayed because of financial difficulties, most unfortunate. Now, two hundred dollars, for instance, wouldn’t be too much for you to invest in a future that would bring you millio—Well,” said the manager to his secretary, blinking at the slammed door, “what do you suppose is the matter with her?”

The agents, Claire thought, the agents; they made their money on discovering new talent and they would be honest about seeking it. Why hadn’t she thought of them before?

She was careful to call only on those agents who had never met Claire Nash in person. She found that the precaution was unnecessary: she was never admitted any farther than the exquisite, soft-carpeted waiting rooms, modernistic riots of glass, copper, and chromium, where trim secretaries sighed regretfully, apologizing because Mr. Smith or Jones or Brown was so busy in conference; but if Miss Roberts would leave her telephone number, Mr. Smith would be sure and call her. Miss Roberts left the number. The call never came.

The agents who had no waiting rooms and no chromium, but only a hole facing a brick wall, and a mid-Victorian armchair shedding dirty cotton upon a spotted rug, were delighted to meet Miss Roberts and to place her name upon the lists of their distinguished clients; which was as much as they were able to accomplish for Miss Roberts.

One of them, tall and unshaved, seemed more delighted to meet her than all the others. “You have come to the right man, kid,” he assured her, “the right man. You know Joe Billings down at Epic Pictures? The assistant director? Well, Joe’s a partic’lar friend of mine and he’s got a lotta pull at Epic. All I gotta do is slip a coupla words to Joe and bingo! you get a screen test. A real, genuine screen test. How about dinner tonight down at my place, kiddo?” She fled.

Her face . . . her face that had been called “one of the screen’s treasures” so often . . . her face seemed to make no impression on anyone. With a single exception. One of the agents, whom she had never seen before, did look at her closely for a long moment, and then he exclaimed:

“By God but you’re a dead ringer for Claire Nash, sister!”

Then he looked again, shook his head, and changed his mind.

“Nope,” he said, “not exactly. Claire’s eyes are lighter, and her mouth smaller, and she’s got it over you as far as the figure’s concerned. Great friend of mine, Claire. . . . Tell you what we’ll do: you leave your phone number and I’ll get you a swell job as Claire’s stand-in. You look like her—or near enough for that. Only we’ll have to wait—she’s away in Europe right now.”

Jane Roberts’ opportunity came; not exactly in the way she had expected it to come, but it came anyhow.

One evening, as she sat on the bed in her stuffy hotel room, her slippers flung into a corner and her feet aching miserably, a neighbor came in to ask if she hadn’t two nickels for a dime. The neighbor was a tall, cadaverous girl with a long nose and seven years of movie-extra experience.

“No luck around the studios, eh?” she asked sympathetically, seeing Claire’s eyes. “It’s tough, kid, that’s what it is, tough. I know.” Then she brightened suddenly. “Say, want a bit of work for tomorrow?”

Claire jumped to her feet as if her life depended on it.

“You see,” the girl was explaining, “they got a big crowd tomorrow morning and my friend, the propman, got me in and I’m sure he can fix it up for you too.”

“Oh, yes!” Claire gasped. “Oh, yes, please!”

“The call’s for eight in the morning—ready and made-up on the set. We’ll have to be at the studio at six-thirty. I’ll go phone the boy friend, but I’m sure it’ll be okay.”

She was turning to leave the room, when Claire asked:

“What studio is it and what picture?”

“The Wonder-Pictures Studio,” the girl answered. “Child of Danger, you know, their big special with that new star of theirs—Heddy Leland.”

Claire Nash sat, shivering with cold, in the corner of a bus. Snorting and groaning, the bus rambled on its way to the studio through the dark, empty, desolate streets of early morning. The bus shook like a cocktail shaker on wheels, jumbling its passengers against one another, throwing them up at each rut, to fall and bounce upon the sticky leather seats. All the passengers had the same destination—with their tired faces and old, greasy makeup boxes.

Claire felt cold and broken. Her eyelids felt like cotton and closed themselves against her will. She thought dully, dimly, through the crazy unreality around her, that a director, a real director, would know genius when he saw it.

She was still thinking it as she trudged wearily through the gates of the Wonder-Pictures Studio. Claire Nash had worked for seven years on the Wonder-Pictures lot. But it was for the first time in her life that she entered it through the shabby side-gate of the “Extra Talent Entrance.” She kept her head bowed cautiously and her scarf under her nose, not to be recognized. She soon found that she had nothing to fear: no one could pick her out in the dismal stampede of gray shadows streaming past the casting office window; no one could and no one showed any inclination to try. The boy in the window handed her her work ticket without raising his head or looking at her. “Hurry up!” her companion prodded her impatiently, and Claire started running with the others in the mad rush to the wardrobe.

Three stern-faced, gloomy-eyed, frozen individuals in shirtsleeves stood behind a wooden counter, distributing the extras’ costumes. They fished the first rags they could reach out of three hampers filled with filthy junk and pushed them across the counter into uncomplaining hands. When Claire’s turn came, the lordly individual threw at her something heavy, huge, discolored, with dirty pieces of faded gold ribbon, with a smell of stale makeup and perspiration. “Your ticket?” he ordered briefly, extending his hand for it.

“I don’t like this costume,” Claire declared, horrified.

The man looked at her incredulously.

“Well, isn’t that just too bad!” he observed, seized her ticket, punched it, and turned, with an armful of rags, to the next woman in line.

The extras’ dressing room was cold as a cellar, colder than the frozen air outside. With stiff fingers, Claire undressed and struggled into her costume. She looked into a mirror and closed her eyes. Then, with an effort, she looked again: the huge garment could have contained easily three persons of her size; the thick folds gathered clumsily into a lump on her stomach; she tried to adjust them, but they slipped right back to her stomach again; she was awkward, obese, disfigured.

Suffocating, she sat down on a wooden bench before a little crooked mirror on a filthy, unpainted wooden counter—to make up her face. But she knew little about screen makeup and had long since forgotten what she had known. For the last seven years she had had her own expert makeup man who knew how to correct the little defects of her face. Now she realized suddenly that her eyes were a little too narrow; that her cheeks were a little too broad; that she had a slight double chin. She sat twisting the greasy tube helplessly in her fingers, trying to remember and do the best she could.

Around her, the big barrack was full of busy, noisy, hurrying and gossiping females. She saw half-naked, shivering bodies and flabby muscles, vapor fluttering from mouths with every word, barbarian tunics and underwear—not very clean underwear.

She was about to rise when a strong hand pushed her down again.

“What’s the hurry, dearie? Put on yar wig, willya?”

A short, plump girl in a blue smock stood before her, with hairpins in her mouth and in her hand something that looked like the fur of a very unsanitary poodle.

“That . . . for me?” Claire gasped. “But . . . but I’m blond! I . . . I can’t wear a black wig!”

“D’ya suppose we got time to monkey around with every one of ya?” the girl asked, swishing the hairpins in her mouth. “Ya can’t have bobbed hair in this picture. It’s the ancient times, this is. Take what ya get. We ain’t gonna bother about the color of two hundred heads!”

“But it will look awful!”

“Well, who do ya think ya are? It will ruin the picture, I suppose, will it?”

The wig was too small. The hairdresser rammed it down till it squeezed Claire’s temples like a vise. She wound a huge turban over it to keep it in place, and stuck a dozen hairpins inside with such violence that she skinned Claire’s skull.

“Now ya’re okay. Hurry up, ya got five minutes left to get on the set.”

Claire threw a last glance in the mirror. The black poodle fur hung in rags over her face; the huge turban slid down to her eyes; she looked like a mushroom with a lump in the middle. She was safe; no one would recognize her; she couldn’t recognize herself.

“Ef-fry-body on de set!” Werner von Halz roared through his megaphone.

Obedient as a herd, the huge crowd filled the stone-paved yard of Queen Lani’s castle. Four hundred pairs of eyes rose expectantly to the high platform where Mr. von Halz’s majestic figure stood among seven cameras.

In the solemn silence, Mr. von Halz’s voice rang imperiously:

“Vat you haff to do iss diss. Der iss a var going on and your country she hass just von a great fictory. Your queen announces it to you from her castle vall. You greet de news mitt vild joy.”

The mighty castle rose proudly to the clear, blue sky, a giant of impregnable granite and plaster in a forest of wooden scaffoldings and steel wires. An army of overalls moved swiftly through the castle, placing metal sheets and mirrors in, under, above the ramparts. The hot rays of the sun focused on the crowd. Hasty, nervous assistant directors rushed through the mob, placing extras all over the set.

Claire followed every assistant with an eager, hopeful glance. No one noticed her. She was not chosen for the best, prominent spots. And when, once, an assistant pointed her out to another, that other shook his head: “No, not that one!”

The cameramen were bent over their cameras, tense, motionless, studying the scene. Werner von Halz watched critically through a dark lens.

“A shadow in de right corner!” he was ordering. “Kill dat light on your left! . . . I vant sefen more people on dose steps. . . . Break dat line! You’re not soldiers on a parade! . . . Dun’t bunch up like sardines on vun spot! Spread all ofer de yard! . . . All right!” he ordered at last. “Let’s try it!”

Heddy Leland’s slim, quick figure appeared on the castle wall. She spoke. The crowd roared without moving, only hundreds of arms shot vigorously in every direction, as though practicing their daily dozen.

“Stop! Hold it!!” Werner von Halz roared. “Iss dat de vay people iss glad? Iss dat de vay you vould meet your queen speaking of fictory? Now try to tink she iss saying dat you are going to haff lunch at vunce! Let’s see how you vill meet dat!”

Queen Lani spoke again. Her subjects greeted her words enthusiastically. Mr. von Halz nodded.

“Diss vill be picture!” he announced.

Frantic assistants rushed through the crowd, throwing their last orders: “Hey, you there! Take off your spectacles, you fool! . . . Don’t chew gum! . . . Hide that white petticoat, you, over there! . . . No chewing gum! They didn’t chew gum in that century!”

“Ready?” boomed Werner von Halz. The huge set froze in silence, a reverent silence.

“Cam’ra-a-a!!”

Seven hands fell as levers. Seven small, glistening eyes of glass were suddenly alive, ominous, commanding the scene as seven cannons fixed upon it. Four hundred human beings in a panic of enthusiasm stormed like a boiling kettle of rags at the foot of the castle. On the wall, two thin, strong arms rose to the sky and a young voice rang exultantly through the roar of the crowd.

And Claire Nash felt herself torn off her feet, pushed, knocked, tumbled over, thrown to left and right by human bodies gone mad. She tried to act and register joy. Pressed between two huge, enthusiastic fellows, she could not tell on which side stood the cameras and on which the castle; all she could see was a piece of blue sky over red, sweating necks. She tried to fight her way out. She was thrown back by someone’s elbow in her ribs and someone’s knee in her stomach. A woman screaming frantically: “Long live our Queen!” was spitting into her face. A gentleman with the figure of a prizefighter stepped on her bare foot, taking the skin off three toes. She smiled pitifully and muttered: “Long live our Queen,” waving a limp hand over her head. Even the hand could not be seen by the cameras. . . .

When, at last, the piercing siren blew and assistants shouted “Hold it,” when the cameras stopped, when Claire drew a deep breath and pulled the wig’s hair out of her mouth, Mr. von Halz wiped his forehead with satisfaction and said:

“Dat’s good. . . . Vunce more, pleaz!”

Claire had been standing on her feet for three hours when the cameras were moved at last, and she was able to hobble towards a nurse, to get Mercurochrome smeared over the scratches on her arms and legs, to breathe, to powder her face and to look around.

She saw the tall, slender figure of a man in the simplest gray suit, insolently elegant in its simplicity. Her heart did a somersault. She recognized the clear, contemptuous eyes, the scornful, irresistible smile. He was bending over Heddy Leland, talking to her intently, as if they were alone on the set. Heddy Leland was sitting in a low, comfortable canvas chair, a dark silk robe drawn tightly over her costume, her thin, brown hands motionless on the chair’s arms. She was looking up at Winston Ayers, listening quietly, her face inscrutable; but she was looking at him as if he were the only man on the set.

Claire felt suddenly as if something had struck her through the ribs. She did not mind the set, nor the crowd, nor her place in it, nor Heddy Leland’s place. It was the man in gray and the look with which he spoke to the girl in the chair. Claire was surprised to learn how much she minded that. She walked away hastily, with one last, bitter glance at the chair with the black inscription on its canvas back: “Keep off. Miss Heddy Leland.”

She fell down wearily on the first chair she could find. “ ’scuse me, please!” snapped a prop boy and, without waiting for her to rise, snatched the chair from under her and carried it away. She saw that it was marked: “Keep off. Mrs. McWiggins, Wardrobe.” She stumbled away and sat down on the steps of a ladder. “ ’scuse me, please!” snapped an electrician and carried the ladder away. She dragged herself into a shady corner and fell miserably down on an empty box.

“Ef-fry-body on de set!” roared Werner von Halz.

She stumbled heavily back to the set, swaying slightly, the white glare of the sun on the metal reflectors blinding her. A swift shadow fell across her face as someone passed by. She opened her eyes and found herself looking straight upon Winston Ayers. He stopped short and looked at her closely. One of his eyebrows rose slowly; he opened his mouth and quickly closed it again. Then he bowed, calmly, precisely, graciously, without a word, turned and walked on. But Claire had seen that his lips were trembling in a tremendous effort to stop the laughter that choked him. She grew crimson as a beet, even through the thick layers of brown makeup.

When the new scene was being rehearsed, Claire pushed her way, resolute and desperate, to the edge of the crowd, in front of the cameras. “They’ll notice me!” she whispered grimly. They did.

“Who’s dat girl in brown?” asked Werner von Halz after the first rehearsal, pointing his thumb at Claire Nash, who was struggling fiercely with the lump gathering on her stomach and the turban sliding off her head. “Take her out of dere! Put somebody dat can act in front!”

At the end of the day, every bone in her body aching and her feet burning like hot irons, with dust in her eyes and dust creaking on her teeth, Claire Nash stood in line at the cashier’s window, curious and anxious, watching girls walk away with seven-fifty and ten-dollar checks. When she asked for her payment, the little slip of paper she received bore the words: “Pay to the order of Jane Roberts—the sum of five dollars.”

Claire Nash was an indomitable woman. Besides, the thought of Winston Ayers’ trembling lips kept her awake all night. On the following day at the studio, she got a bit.

She remembered the beginning of her first career. She smiled and winked at an assistant director; she spoke to him—not too sternly. And as a result, when Mr. von Halz asked for a girl to do a bit, she was pushed forward.

Mr. von Halz looked her over critically, bending his head to one side. “Vell, try it,” he said at last, indifferently. “Dat man”—he pointed to a tall, lean, pitiful extra—“iss a covard, he iss afraid of var. You”—he pointed to Claire—“are angry und laugh at him. You are . . . vat dey call it? . . . vun rough-und-ready woman.”

“I?” gasped Claire. “I—a rough-and-ready woman? But it’s not my type!”

“Vat?” said Mr. von Halz, astounded. “You dun’t vant to do it maybe?”

“Oh, yes!” said Claire hastily. “Oh, yes, I do!”

The cameras clicked. The coward trembled, covering his face with his hands. Claire laughed demoniacally, her fists on her hips, and slapped him on the back, trying to forget as much of the ideal of sweet maidenhood as she could forget. . . .

On the following evening, Claire saw the rushes of her scene in the projection room. No extra could be admitted lawfully into the sacred mystery of a projection room; but she smiled wistfully upon the susceptible assistant director and he surrendered and smuggled her in through the narrow door, when the lights were off and all the great ones had settled down comfortably in deep leather armchairs: Mr. Bamburger, Mr. von Halz, Mr. Ayers, Miss Leland. Claire stood in a dark corner by the door and looked anxiously at the screen.

She had to confess to herself that she did not photograph as well as she used to; and she remembered that for seven years she had had her own cameraman who knew the secret of the lights which made her face what the fans thought it to be. Besides, rough-and-ready women were definitely not her forte.

Mr. von Halz’s opinion was more detailed. “Hm,” she heard him say, “dat girl hass not got vun nickel’s vorth of personality. And she duss not photograph. And she iss no actress. Cut dat out!”

She did not remember what happened after that. She remembered standing in a dark studio alley, with her head raised to the wind, a cold wind that would not cool her flaming, throbbing forehead; while the assistant director was pleading foolishly, mumbling something about dinner and about something she had promised. She got rid of him at last and fled blindly.

At the studio gate, she saw a long, low roadster sparkling faintly in the moonlight. A slim young girl stood with one foot on the running board, wrapped tightly in a short coat with a huge fur collar; a tall man in gray held the door open for her. They were speaking softly, in low voices Claire could not hear.

Two girls passed by and looked at them. “That’s Winston Ayers and his discovery,” Claire heard the girls whisper. They heard it too. They looked at each other, looked straight into each other’s eyes. They smiled. His smile was warm and soft. Her smile was hard and bitter. She swung behind the wheel, and slammed the door, and was gone. He stood motionless and watched the car disappearing down the long dark road.

“You can think what you wish!” said Claire Nash to Winston Ayers, who had met her in an obscure restaurant at her request. “I’m through with it! I don’t think anything and I’m tired of thinking. It’s all too silly. I’m putting an end to the stupid comedy.”

“Certainly, Miss Nash,” he answered imperturbably. “It can be done easily. I am sorry if this little adventure has given you cause for annoyance.” It was all he said. He asked no questions. He never mentioned the Child of Danger set, as if he had never seen her there.

She tried to forget it all, and she smiled at him warmly, invitingly, hopefully. The cold, hard face before her remained unmoved. She had known on their first meeting that there was little hope for the wish this man awakened in her. She knew now that there was no hope at all. Something had changed him. She thought she could know also what that was, if she but put her certainty into words; but she did not want to know.

She walked alone back to her hotel room, feeling very tired and very empty.

This was on a Monday. On Wednesday, the screen columns of the Hollywood papers announced that Claire Nash had sailed from Europe, outwitting the reporters who had tried to learn the name of the boat she was taking; she was, the papers further stated, to fly back to Hollywood immediately upon landing in New York.

Claire bought all the papers. She sat in her room looking at them. It seemed to her that she was coming out of a nightmare.

Then she sent a long, detailed wire to her secretary in New York. The secretary was to take a Deluxe Transcontinental Flyer for Hollywood in five days; she was to register herself aboard as Claire Nash; she, Claire, would meet the plane at the last stop before Los Angeles and they would exchange places; then a proper welcome would greet her in Hollywood.

She dispatched the wire, entered the first bar she saw, and ordered a drink. She had spent too many nights alone in her room, afraid to venture into the gay night spots where her old friends would see and recognize her. She could stand it no longer. She could not wait another week. She didn’t care. But nothing happened at the bar. No one saw her.

The banquet was coming to an end. The long white table, precise and formal, was like a river frozen under a mantle of snow, dotted with crystal, like chunks of ice, with flashes of silver like sparkling water in the cracks of the snow, with flowers floating like islands in midstream. The cash value of the names borne by those who filled the great hall would have stretched in a line of figures from one end of the table to the other. Hollywood’s great and costly were gathered to celebrate the signing of a five-year starring contract between Miss Heddy Leland and Wonder-Pictures, Inc.

In the place of honor, a thin little figure modeled in white rose from the billowing waves of an immense skirt, a cloud of white chiffon with rhinestones sparkling as lost raindrops in the mist. She sat, straight, poised, calm, as correct as the occasion demanded, all but her hair, brushed back off her forehead, wild, untamed, ready to fly off and to carry the white cloud away with it, away from the frightening place where she had to smile, and bow, and hide her eyes and her wish to scream. On her left sat Mr. Bamburger’s huge, beaming smile and Mr. Bamburger’s huge, beaming diamond shirt studs. On her right sat Winston Ayers.

He sat motionless, silent, grim; he seemed to have lost his impeccable manners and forgotten to compose his face into the proper smile of enthusiasm; he showed no enthusiasm whatever; in fact, he seemed not to know or care where he was. Heddy knew suddenly that this day, this day for which she had waited and struggled through such hell, meant nothing to her compared to the thoughts which she could not guess in the mind of the man beside her. He made no effort to speak to her. So she did not turn to him, but smiled dutifully at Mr. Bamburger, at the flowers, at the endless, ringing sentences of the speakers:

“Miss Leland, whose incomparable talent . . . Miss Leland, whose brilliant youth has achieved . . . Hollywood is proud to welcome . . . Fame never smiled so brightly upon a greater future . . . We, who are ever on the lookout for the great and the gifted . . .”

“Miss Leland . . .” Winston Ayers overtook her in a dark gallery of the building, where she had fled to be alone, to leave the great banquet unnoticed and escape. She stopped short. At least, someone had missed her; he had, he who had not seemed to know that she was there.

She stood still, white as a statue in the darkness. A cold wind blew from the Hollywood hills, flaring her skirt out like a sail. He approached. He stood looking down at her. The look in his eyes did not seem to fit the words she heard in his slow, mocking voice:

“I have neglected my duties on this great day, Miss Leland,” he said. “Consider yourself congratulated.”

She answered without moving:

“Thank you, Mr. Ayers. And thank you—for everything.”

“Unnecessary,” he shrugged. “From now on, you need no further help from me.” She knew he said it as an insult; but it sounded like regret.

“I’m glad of it!” she said suddenly, before she knew she was saying it, her voice alive for the first time, alive and trembling. “I still owe it all to you, but I wish I didn’t. Not to you. To anyone but you. Gratitude is such a hard thing to bear. Because it can . . . it can . . .” She could not say it. “Because it can take the place of everything else, be considered to cover, to explain everything else, to . . . I don’t want to be grateful to you! Not grateful! I wish I could die for you, but not because of gratitude! Because I . . .”

She stopped in time. She didn’t know what she was saying; surely, she thought, he couldn’t know it either. But he stood very close to her now. She looked up at him. She knew what his eyes were saying, she knew it so clearly all of a sudden, that she hardly heard his words and paid no attention to them, his words that were still struggling against that to which his eyes had surrendered.

“You owe nothing to me,” he was saying coldly. “I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time. I knew I’d have to. I didn’t select you because I had faith in you or because I saw anything in you. I’m just as much of a fool as the others. I selected you as a trick, a gag—to prove something unimportant to someone even less important. I’ll tell you the whole story someday. I can’t claim your gratitude. I can claim nothing from you. I didn’t think it would ever make any difference to me, but it does. It does.” He finished in a grim, low voice, still hard, still cold, but something in its coldness had broken: “Because I love you.”

It was not the mocking, skeptical writer who took in his arms the trembling little white figure and whose lips met hers hungrily. . . .

“Oh, my dear, my dear,” said Winston Ayers when he led Heddy Ayers into his apartment, three days later, “more than movie careers depends on chance!”

More than movie careers depends on chance. . . .

“Extry! Extry!” the newsboys were yelling on street corners. “Horrible catastrophe! Airliner crashes with twelve passengers!”

Eager citizens tore the papers out of the boys’ hands, with the hungry joy of a big sensation. And the sensation grew when the next editions appeared with huge black headlines:

CLAIRE NASH DEAD

In smaller type it was explained that the star had been registered among the passengers of the ill-fated liner which crashed on its way to the last stop before Los Angeles; that no one aboard had survived; that the bodies were mangled beyond recognition.

Then the flood broke loose. From coast to coast, tragic articles sobbed over the terrible loss in miles of close-printed black columns. It was said that the screen had been deprived of its brightest luminary; that her name was written in the book of Immortality; that the whole world would feel her absence; that there never would be another Claire Nash; that Wonder-Pictures, Inc., had signed Lula Del Mio, the famous ingenue, for the starring part in Heart and Soul, which the unforgettable Claire Nash was to have made.

In her little hotel room, having come back from the city where her plane never landed, Claire Nash sat among an ocean of newspapers. No obituary notices had ever had such a happy reader. That, thought Claire joyously as she read, was that. This was what she meant to the world. They knew her true value, after all. What publicity and what buildup! What sensation to come, when the world would learn suddenly that its brightest luminary was still shining! She delayed her resurrection for a few days. The bright crop of glowing words that fell into her hands with each new paper was like wine to her battered, thirsty soul.

She frowned for the first time, though, when the producer’s nephew, whom she had thoroughly forgotten, appeared in print with an article about their years-old divorce; a sad, gentle article which, however, brought out some intimate details of the matter that had better been kept hidden. No doubt, he had been well paid for it and a mangled corpse could not bring suit, but still, there were the Women’s Clubs, and that sort of thing did not help a star’s reputation.

She stopped smiling entirely when a featured player of smoldering Latin charm, long since unemployed, whose name she had trouble in recalling, published a lengthy confession of his love life with Miss Nash, the details of which she recalled only too well. And the Sunday supplements carried such stories, with snapshots and facsimiles of letters, that she decided the time had definitely come to stop it. What the country was beginning to whisper about Claire Nash was neither as sad nor as beautiful as the obituary notices.

“I really cannot understand, madam, how you can persist in that queer statement,” said Mr. Bamburger to Claire Nash, a haggard, green-faced, wild-eyed Claire Nash who sat in his office after her long, desperate struggle to gain admittance.

“But, Jake . . .” she stammered. “But you . . . I . . . for God’s sake, Jake, you can’t make me think I’m crazy! You know me. You recognize me!”

“Really, madam, I have never seen you before in my life.”

Mr. Bamburger’s secretary left the room. Mr. Bamburger rose hastily and closed the door.

“Listen, Claire . . .”

She jumped to her feet, a radiant smile drying her gathering tears.

“Jake, you fool! What’s the gag?”

“Listen, Claire. Of course, I recognize you. But I won’t recognize you in public. Now, don’t stare at me like that. I won’t—for your own good.”

She sat down again, for she was going to fall.

“I . . . I don’t understand,” she muttered.

“You understand,” said Mr. Bamburger, “only too damn well. You’ve read those articles, haven’t you? What producer do you think will want to touch you now with a ten-foot pole?”

“But I can . . .”

“No, you can’t. You can’t sue those fellows, because they’ll prove it all. You know it and I know it. And we know also that the Women’s Clubs and all the Moral Uplifters would boycott a studio off the face of the earth, if any of us were fool enough to star you again.”

“But . . .”

“Where were you all this time, you nitwitted idiot? Why did you let all those obituaries go on? If that alone weren’t enough! Do you think the public would love you for that kind of a publicity stunt? Capitalizing on a catastrophe! It would ruin all confidence in the picture business, if they knew! The day is past for cheap, fantastic press-agent tricks like these!”

“But I’ve explained it to you! I did it only because . . .”

“Oh, so you think you’re going to confess the real story? Tell the world that you weren’t on that plane because you were pulling a silly, lousy trick on the studios? And do you expect us producers to back you up in that and make ourselves look like a bunch of jackasses?”

“But . . . but . . . but I’m popular . . . I’m a great star . . . I’m a box-offi—”

“You were. You were also slipping. Oh, definitely slipping, my girl. Take a look at the reports on your last two pictures. The public’s getting sick of ingenues. Besides, we have signed Lula Del Mio to take your place. We don’t need two of a kind. . . .

“Take my advice, Claire,” Mr. Bamburger was saying half an hour later to the white ghost of a woman who was leaving his office. “Stay dead officially, leave Hollywood, and give up the movies. Better for your reputation and your peace of mind. Of course, you can prove your identity easily. But the public won’t take you. You’ll only make yourself ridiculous. And no producer will take you. Ask them. They’ll tell you the same things. You’ve made quite a fortune in pictures. You don’t have to work. Rest and enjoy it. Try to marry some nice, respectable millionaire. Forget the movies. I am more experienced than you are and I know the business: the screen is not for you any more.”

Mr. Bamburger objected violently. Werner von Halz objected with a string of invectives in five European languages. But Winston Ayers and Heddy Leland Ayers, his wife, insisted quietly and irrevocably. So Jane Roberts was signed for the second feminine lead in Child of Danger. The character appeared only in the second half of the picture and the part had not yet been filled.

Mr. Bamburger surrendered on condition that Jane Roberts remain strictly Jane Roberts, change the color of her hair and the shape of her eyebrows, keep to herself socially, and let no breath reach the press about any connection between her and Claire Nash.

“Still,” sighed Mr. Bamburger, “still the public will know.”

“I hope,” said Winston Ayers earnestly, “I hope from the bottom of my heart that they do. But I have my own doubts.”

Jane Roberts’ part was that of a sweet, innocent country maiden in Queen Lani’s kingdom. It was not a big part, but it was worth ten starring roles. It gave her an opportunity for all the dramatic emotions she cared to display. It fitted her to perfection. It was a brilliant condensation of all the great parts she had played.

Claire Nash gathered all her strength. She remembered all her famous roles and took the best from each. She brought to her part the sweet, helpless glances, the tremulous lips, the famous smile of innocence, all the movements, manners, and graces that had been admired so much by fans and critics. She did everything she had ever done and more. Never had she acted so well in her life.

Six months later came the reviews:

“Child of Danger is the picture of the century. Words are inadequate before the magnificence of this miracle of the screen. One must see it in order to comprehend the enchantment of this cinematic triumph. The story is as great as its author—Winston Ayers. And when this is said, everything has been said. Werner von Halz gains his right to immortality by his brilliant direction of this one masterpiece. Heddy Leland, the new star, is a discovery that surpasses anything ever seen on the screen before. Her acting bears the flaming seal of that genius which makes Screen History. . . .

“If we may be permitted to carp on minor flaws in such a stupendous achievement, we would like to remark in passing on a small annoyance in a perfect evening. We are speaking of the second feminine lead. It’s one of those innocent, insipid little things with nothing but a sweet smile and a pretty face. She reminds us of some star or other, but her weak, colorless portrayal of the country maiden shows the disadvantages of a good part in the hands of an inexperienced amateur. The part is played by one Jane Roberts.”

Part II

THE EARLY THIRTIES

Red Pawn

c. 1931-32

Editor’s Preface

In 1930, while still working in the RKO wardrobe department, Ayn Rand began to outline We the Living. But she interrupted the novel late in 1931 to write a movie original, hoping to earn enough money to enable her to write full-time. Ayn Rand regarded Red Pawn as her first professional work. Happily, it was also her first sale: she sold it to Universal Pictures in 1932 for $1,500, and was thus finally able to escape RKO. The payment of $1,500 was for a synopsis of the story as well as the screenplay.

Universal later traded the story to Paramount (for a property that had cost Paramount $20,000). All rights are now owned by Paramount Pictures, which has never produced the story, but which has granted permission to reprint the synopsis here.

Red Pawn presents Ayn Rand’s first serious, philosophical theme: the evil of dictatorship—specifically, of Soviet Russia. Miss Rand’s full objection to dictatorship involves her whole system of philosophy, including her view of the nature of reality and of the requirements of the human mind (see Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal). But in Red Pawn the argument is reduced to its essence. Communism demands that the individual renounce his independence and his happiness, in order to become a cipher selflessly serving the group. Communism, therefore, is the destroyer of the individual and of human joy. Or, as we may put it in terms of the themes of “The Husband I Bought” and “Good Copy,” the philosophic issue is: Communism vs. man-worship and Communism vs. the “benevolent universe,” i.e., Communism vs. values . This is the link between the political theme of the story and Ayn Rand’s lifelong ethical concerns.

The answer to Communism, Ayn Rand held, is the recognition of man’s right to exist—to exist by his own mind and for his own sake, sacrificing neither himself to others nor others to himself. The goal and badge of such a man is the kind of happiness symbolized in this story by the “Song of Dancing Lights.” This song is, in effect, Ayn Rand’s refutation of Communism; the song’s laughing spirit—the fact that such joy is possible to man—is the answer to the apostles of selfless toil. To demand the renunciation of such joy, Ayn Rand held, is evil, no matter what benefit any recipient claims to gain from the sacrifice.

Red Pawn has a subtheme: the philosophic identity of Communism and religion. Both subordinate the individual to something allegedly higher (whether God or the state), and both equate virtue with selfless service. From her early teens, Ayn Rand saw clearly that Communism, contrary to its propaganda, is not the alternative to religion, but only a secularized version of it, with the state assuming the prerogatives once reserved to the supernatural. (The alternative is a philosophy of reason and rational self-interest.)

The plot situation in Red Pawn, like the theme, is very similar to that of We the Living. Both works involve a triangle: a passionate woman (who dominates the action), her anti-Communist lover (or husband), and a dedicated Communist who holds power over him, and whom she must court in order to save the lover’s life. In the conventional triangle of this kind, the heroine despises the second man, and sleeps with him only for practical reasons. In the Ayn Rand version, however, the Communist is not a villain, but a misguided idealist whom the heroine grows to love; this gives the heroine a much more painful situation to resolve, and the story an incomparably greater suspense.

As in most Ayn Rand fiction, the story leaves one with a special, uplifted sense of human stature, and even grandeur, because the essential conflict is not between good and evil, but between good and good (the two men). In accordance with her view that evil is impotent, the villains in Ayn Rand’s fiction rarely rise to the role of dominant, plot-determining figures. For the most part, like Fedossitch in this story, they are peripheral creatures doomed by their own irrationality to failure and defeat. The focus of the story, therefore, is not on man the sordid, but on man the heroic. (In The Fountainhead, the main conflict is not Roark against Toohey or Keating, but Roark against Dominique and Wynand. In Atlas Shrugged, the main conflict is Dagny and Rearden against Galt and the other strikers.)

In Red Pawn, as befits a story for the screen, the central situation is presented in simplified terms. The husband (Michael) is a prisoner on a desolate island, the Communist (Kareyev) is the Commandant, and the goal of the wife (Joan) is to help the husband escape. The details and the pace are thus very different from what they are in We the Living—and so is the ending, which is in itself a brilliant touch; the suspense is resolved by four unexpected but logical, even inevitable, words uttered by Joan to the soldiers. The title seems to be a play on words: Joan is a pawn made available to Kareyev by the red state, but Kareyev is a red who is a pawn of Joan’s own plan.

By its nature, a movie synopsis focuses on dramatic action open to the camera to record. This synopsis offers a Romantic director an abundance of such drama. One can almost see the close-up of Michael’s face as he waits table on his wife and rival, torn by jealousy but unable to speak; or the spotlight stabbing an urgent message into the void, accompanied by the pealing of the bells; or, at the end, the two sleighs moving slowly apart, in opposite directions across the trackless snow, with Joan’s eyes intent on a head that is held proudly high as its owner rides to his death.

The most brilliant visualization of the theme occurs in the prison library. Kareyev is standing between a Communist poster and a painting left on the island by ancient monks. The poster depicts ant-sized men sweating beneath a slogan demanding sacrifice for the collective; the painting depicts a saint ecstatically burning at the stake. And across from both there is Joan with “her head thrown back, her body on the dark altar steps, tense, listening to the song [of Dancing Lights] . . . seem[ing to be] a sacrificial offering to the Deity she was serving.” Here is the reverence of man-worship contrasted with its two destroyers—and all of it captured in one visual scene. That is “writing for the movies.”

It is astonishing how much of purely literary worth this mere synopsis contains. There is Ayn Rand’s eloquent economy of means, enabling one or two words in the right context to speak volumes. (For example, when Kareyev asks Joan why she came to the island, she tells him she heard that he was the loneliest man in the republic. “I see,” he says. “Pity?” “No. Envy.”) There are the dramatic antitheses in the style of Victor Hugo, whose novels Ayn Rand admired above all others. (“The civil war had given him a scar on his shoulder and a contempt of death. Peace gave him Strastnoy Island and a contempt of life.”) There are the sensuous descriptions with their evocative images (for instance, the description of the monastery at twilight, or of the waves at night).

After Red Pawn and We the Living, Ayn Rand rarely wrote again about Soviet Russia. She had had her say about the slave state in which she had grown up. Thereafter, her interest moved from politics to the fundamental branches of philosophy, and from slavery to the achievements (and problems) of life in a human country.

A note on the text: Ayn Rand wrote an original draft of this synopsis, then edited about twenty pages, to the point where Michael first sees Joan on the island. Presumably, these pages were sufficient as a submission to the studios and further editing proved unnecessary. This is why the early pages are somewhat tighter and smoother than the rest.

In her editing, Miss Rand changed the names and backgrounds of some of the characters. Joan was originally Tania, a Russian princess; Michael was Victor, a Russian prince; and the prisoners generally were drawn from the Russian nobility. I have had to make many small changes to render the manuscript consistent with the new opening. I have not, however, written new sentences; I have merely changed the necessary names and deleted references to backgrounds that were altered.

—L. P.

Red Pawn

——I——

“No woman,” said the young convict, “could accept such a thing.”

“As you can observe,” said the old convict, shrugging, “there’s one who has.”

They leaned over the tower parapet to look far out at the sea. From the frost-glazed stone under their elbows, the tower was a straight drop of three hundred feet to the ground below; far out at sea, where the white clouds rolled softly like a first promise of snowdrifts to come, a boat plowed its way toward the island.

Down on the shore guards were ready, waiting under the wall, on a landing of old, rotted boards; on the wall, guards stopped in their rounds; they leaned on their bayonets and looked at the boat. It was a serious breach of discipline.

“I’ve always thought,” said the young convict, “that there was a limit to a woman’s voluntary degradation.”

“That,” said the old convict, pointing at the boat, “proves there isn’t any.”

He shook his hair, for it got tangled in his monocle; there was a strong wind and he needed a haircut.

A faded gilt cupola rose high over them, like the countless peaks that raised gold crosses into the heavy sky over Russia; but its cross had been broken off; a flag floated over it, a bright, twisted, flickering tongue of red, like a streak of flame dancing through the clouds. When the wind unfurled it into a straight, shivering line, a white sickle and hammer flashed for a second on the red cloth—the crossed sickle and hammer of the Soviet Republic.

In the days of the Czar the island had been a monastery. Fanatical monks had chosen this bit of land in the Arctic waters off the Siberian coast; they had welcomed the snow and the winds, and bowed in voluntary sacrifice to a frozen world no man could endure for many years. The revolution had dispersed the monks and brought new men to the island, men who did not come voluntarily. No letter ever left the place; no letter ever reached it. Many prisoners had landed there; none had returned. When a man was sentenced to Strastnoy Island, those he left behind whispered the prayers for the dead.

“I haven’t seen a woman for three years,” said the young convict. There was no regret in his voice; only a wistful, astonished wonder.

“I haven’t seen a woman for ten years,” said the old convict. “But this one won’t be worth looking at.”

“Maybe she’s beautiful.”

“Don’t be a fool. Beautiful women don’t have to do things like this.”

“Maybe she’ll tell us what’s happening . . . outside.”

“I’d advise you not to speak to her.”

“Why?”

“You don’t want to give up the last thing you’ve got.”

“What?”

“Your self-respect.”

“But maybe she . . .”

He stopped. No one had told him to stop and he had heard nothing behind them, no steps or sound. But he knew that a man stood behind them, and he knew who it was, and he turned slowly, without being asked to turn, wishing he could leap off the tower rather than turn to face that man.

Commandant Kareyev stood there, at the head of the stairs. People always knew when Commandant Kareyev entered a room, perhaps because he was never conscious of them, of the room, or of his entering it. He stood without moving, looking at the two convicts. He was tall, straight, thin. He seemed to be made of bones, skin, and anesthetized nerves. His glance held no menace, no anger. It held no meaning at all. His eyes never held any human meaning. The convicts had seen him reward some guard for distinguished service or order a prisoner to be flogged to death—with the same expression. They could not say who feared him more—the guards or the prisoners. His eyes never seemed to see people; they saw, not men, but a thought; a single thought many centuries ahead; and so when people looked at him, they felt cold and lonely, as if they were walking into an endless distance on an open plain at night.

He said nothing. The two convicts moved past him, to the stairs; and went down, hastily, not too steadily; he heard one of them stumbling, if he heard or noticed them at all. He had not ordered them to go.

Commandant Kareyev stood alone on the tower platform, his hair flying in the wind. He leaned over the parapet and looked at the boat. The sky above him was gray as the steel of the gun at his belt.

Commandant Kareyev had worn a gun at his belt for five years. For five years he had been Commandant of Strastnoy Island, the only one of the garrison who had been able to stand it that long. Years before, he had carried a bayonet and fought in the civil war, against some of the men whose prison he was now guarding, and against the parents of others. The civil war had given him a scar on his shoulder and a contempt of death. Peace gave him Strastnoy Island and a contempt of life.

Commandant Kareyev still served the revolution as he had served it in the civil war. He had accepted the island as he had accepted night attacks in the trenches; only this was harder.

He walked sharply, lightly, as if each step were a quick electric shock throwing him forward; a few white streaks shone in his hair, as his first decoration of the North; his lips were motionless when he was pleased, and smiled when he wasn’t; he never repeated an order. At night, he sat at his window and looked somewhere, without movement, without thought. They called him “Comrade Commandant” when they met him; behind his back, they called him “the Beast.”

The boat was approaching. Commandant Kareyev could distinguish figures on deck. He bent over the parapet; there was no eagerness in his glance, and no curiosity. He could not find the figure he expected. He turned and went down the stairs.

The guard on the first landing straightened quickly at his approach; the guard had been looking at the boat.

At the foot of the stairs, two convicts leaned over a windowsill overlooking the sea.

“. . . he told them he was lonely,” he heard one of them say.

“I wouldn’t want what he’s getting,” said the other.

He walked down a deserted corridor. In one of the cells he saw three men standing on a table pushed against a small barred window. They were looking at the sea.

In the hall he was stopped by Comrade Fedossitch, his assistant. Comrade Fedossitch coughed. When he coughed his shoulders shook, drooping forward, and his long neck dipped like the beak of a starving bird. Comrade Fedossitch’s eyes had lost their color; they stared, reflecting, like a frozen mirror, the gray of the monastery walls. They stared timidly and arrogantly at once, as if fearing and inviting an insult. He wore a leather whip at his belt.

Comrade Fedossitch had been told that Strastnoy Island was not good for his cough. But it was the only job he knew where he could wear a whip. Comrade Fedossitch had stayed.

He saluted the Commandant, and bowed, and said with a little grin, a servile grin spread like lacquer over the sharp edges of his words:

“If you please, Comrade Commandant. Of course, the Comrade Commandant knows what’s best, but I was just thinking: a female citizen coming here against all regulations and . . .”

“What do you want?”

“Well, for instance, our rooms are good enough for us, but do you think the comrade woman will like hers? Do you want me to fix it up a little and . . .”

“Never mind. It’s good enough for her.”

In the yard, convicts were busy chopping logs. A wide archway opened upon the sea, and a guard stood in the archway, his back to the convicts, watching the boat that rocked softly, growing, approaching in the pale green fog of waves and sky.

A few axes struck the logs indifferently, once in a while; the convicts, too, were looking at the sea. A stately gentleman, erect in his ragged prison garb, whispered to his companions:

“Really, it’s the best story I’ve ever heard. You see, Commandant Kareyev had sent in his resignation. I presume five years of Strastnoy Island was too much, even for his red nerves. But how would they ever run the place without the Beast? They asked him to stay.”

“Where would they find another fool who’d freeze his blood away for the sake of his duty to the revolution?”

“And this was his condition to the authorities on the mainland: ‘I’ll stay, if you send me a woman; any woman.’ ”

“Just that: any woman.”

“Well, gentlemen, that’s only natural: a good red citizen lets his superiors select his mates. Leaves it to their judgment. All in the line of duty.”

“You can imagine how far a woman must fall to accept such an invitation.”

“And a man to make it.”

Michael Volkontzev stood aside from the others. He did not look at the sea. The ax flashed over his head in a wide silver circle, as he chopped the logs vigorously, rhythmically, without stopping. A lock of black hair rose and fell over his right eye. One of his sleeves was torn, and the muscles of his arm stood out, young and strong. He did not take part in the conversation. But when he was not busy he usually spoke to his fellow convicts, spoke often and long; only the more he spoke, the less they could learn about him. They knew one thing for certain, however: when he spoke, he laughed; he laughed gaily, easily, with an air of mocking, boyish defiance; it was sufficient to know that about him; to know that he was the kind of man who could still laugh like that after two years on Strastnoy Island. He was the only one who could.

The prisoners liked to talk about their past. Their memories were the only future they had. And there were many memories to exchange: memories of the universities where some of them had taught, of the hospitals where others had attended the sick, of the buildings they had designed, of the bridges they had built. There were men of many professions. All of them had been useful and had worked hard in the past. All of them had one thing in common: that the Red State had chosen to discard them and to throw them into jail, for some reason or another, often without reason; perhaps because of some careless word they had uttered somewhere; perhaps simply because they had been too able and had worked too hard.

Michael Volkontzev was the only one among them who would not speak about his past. He would speak about anything under the sun, and often on a subject and at a time when it would have been far safer to remain quiet; he would risk his life drawing caricatures of Commandant Kareyev on the walls of his cell; but he would not speak about his past. No one knew where he had come from or why. They suspected that he had been an engineer at some time in his life, because he was always assigned to any work that required an engineer’s skill, such as repairing the dynamo that operated the wireless high in a room on top of the tower. They could discover nothing else about him.

The boat’s siren roared hoarsely outside. A convict waved his arm in the direction of the sea and announced:

“Gentlemen, salute the first woman on Strastnoy Island!”

Michael raised his head.

“Why all this excitement,” he asked indifferently, “about some cheap tramp?”

Commandant Kareyev had stopped at the entrance to the yard. He walked slowly toward Michael. He stood, watching him silently. Michael did not seem to notice it, but raised his ax and split another log in two. Kareyev said:

“I’m warning you, Volkontzev. I know how little you’re afraid of and how much you like to show it. But you’re not to show it on the subject of that woman. You’re to leave her alone.”

Michael threw his head back and looked at Kareyev innocently.

“Certainly, Commandant,” he said with a charming smile. “She’ll be left alone. Trust my good taste.”

He gathered an armful of logs and walked away, down the steps of the cellar.

The boat’s siren roared again. Commandant Kareyev went to meet it at the landing.

The boat came to the island four times a year. It brought food and new prisoners. There were two convicts aboard, this time. One of them was mumbling prayers and the other one was trying to hold his head high, but it was not convincing, because his lips trembled as he looked at the island.

The woman stood on deck and looked at the island, too. She wore a plain, black coat. It did not look expensive, but it was too plain, and fitted too well, and showed a slim, young body, not the kind that Commandant Kareyev had seen tramping wearily the dark streets of Russian cities. Her hand held her fur collar tightly under her chin. Her hand had long, slender fingers. There was a quiet curiosity in her large, wide eyes, and such an indifferent calm that Commandant Kareyev would not believe she was looking at the island. No one had ever looked at it like that. But she did.

He watched her walking down the gangplank. The fact that her steps were steady, light, assured was astonishing; the fact that she looked like a woman who belonged in exquisite drawing rooms was startling; but the fact that she was beautiful was incredible. There had been some mistake: she was not the woman sent to him.

He bowed curtly. He asked:

“What are you doing here, citizen?”

“Commandant Kareyev?” she inquired. Her voice had a strange, slow, indifferent calm—and a strange foreign accent.

“Yes.”

“I thought you were expecting me.”

“Oh.”

Her cool eyes looked at him as they had looked at his island. She had nothing of the smiling, inviting, professional charm he had expected. She was not smiling. She did not seem to notice his astonishment. She did not seem to find the occasion unusual at all. She said:

“My name is Joan Harding.”

“English?”

“American.”

“What are you doing in Russia?”

She took a letter from her pocket and handed it to him. She said:

“Here is my letter of introduction from the GPU at Nijni Kolimsk.”

He took the letter, but did not open it. He said curtly:

“All right. Come this way, Comrade Harding.”

He walked up the hill, to the monastery, stiff, silent, without offering a hand to help her up the old stone steps, without looking back at her, followed by the eyes of all the men on the landing and by the unusual, long-forgotten sound of French heels.

The room he had prepared for her was a small cube of gray stone. There was a narrow iron cot, a table, a candle on the table, a chair, a small barred window, a stove of red bricks built in the wall. There was nothing to greet her, nothing to show that a human being had been expected to enter that room, only a thin red line of fire trembling in the crack of the stove’s iron door.

“Not very comfortable,” said Commandant Kareyev. “This place wasn’t built for women. It was a monastery—before the revolution. The monks had a law that a woman’s foot could not touch this ground. Woman was sin.”

“You have a better opinion of women, haven’t you, Comrade Kareyev?”

“I’m not afraid of being a sinner.”

She looked at him. She spoke slowly, and he knew she was answering something he had not said:

“The only sin is to miss the things you want most in life. If they’re taken from you, you have to reclaim them—at any price.”

“If this is the price you’re paying for whatever it is you want, it’s pretty high, you know. Sure it’s worth it?”

She shrugged lightly:

“I’ve been accustomed to rather high-priced things.”

“So I notice, Comrade Harding.”

“Call me Joan.”

“It’s a funny name.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“What are you doing in Russia?”

“In the coming months—anything you wish me to do.”

It was not a promise nor an invitation; it was said as an efficient secretary might have said it, and more coldly, more impersonally than that; as one of the guards might have said it, awaiting orders; as if the sound of her voice added that the words meant nothing—to him or to her.

He asked:

“How do you happen to be in Russia at all?”

She shrugged lazily. She said:

“Questions are so boring. I’ve answered so many of them at the GPU before they sent me here. The GPU officials were satisfied. I’m sure you never disagree with them, do you?”

He watched her as she took her hat off, and threw it down on the table, and shook her hair. Her hair was short, blond, and stood like a halo over her face. She walked to the table and touched it with her finger. She took out a small lace handkerchief and wiped the dust off the table. She dropped the handkerchief to the floor. He looked at it. He did not pick it up.

He watched her thoughtfully. He turned to go. At the door he stopped and faced her suddenly.

“Do you,” he asked, “whoever you are, understand what you’re here for?”

She looked straight into his eyes, a long, quiet, disconcerting look, and her eyes were mysterious because they were too calm and too open.

“Yes,” she said slowly, “I understand.”

The letter from the GPU said:

Comrade Kareyev,

As per your request, we are sending to you the bearer of this, Comrade Joan Harding. We vouch for her political trustworthiness. Her past reputation will guarantee that she will satisfy the purpose of your request and lighten the burden of your difficult duty on the far outpost of our great proletarian Republic.

With Communistic greetings, Ivan Veriohoff,

Political Commissar

Commandant Kareyev’s bed had a coarse gray blanket, like those on the prisoners’ cots. His cell of damp gray stone looked emptier than theirs; there was a bed, a table, two chairs. A tall glass door, long and narrow like a cathedral window, led to an open gallery outside. The room looked as if a human being had been flung there in a hurry for a short moment: there were rows of old nails on the bare stone walls bearing clothes and arms, wrinkled shirts hanging by one sleeve, old leather jackets, rifles, trousers turned inside out, cartridge belts; there were cigarette butts and ashes on the bare stone floor. The human being had lived there for five years.

There was not a single picture, not a book, not an ashtray. There was a bed because the human being had to sleep; and clothes, because he had to dress; he needed nothing else.

But there was one single object which he did not need, his single answer to any questions people could ask looking at his room, although no one had ever asked them: in a niche where ikons had been now hung, on a rusty nail, Commandant Kareyev’s old Red Army cap.

The unpainted wooden table had been pulled to the center of the room. On the table stood heavy tin dishes and tin cups without saucers; a candle in an old bottle; and no tablecloth.

Commandant Kareyev and Joan Harding were finishing their first dinner together.

She raised a tin jug of cold tea, with a smile that should have accompanied a glass of champagne, and said:

“Your health, Comrade Kareyev.”

He answered brusquely:

“If it’s a hint—you’re wasting your time. No drinks here. Not allowed. And no exceptions.”

“No exceptions and no hints, Comrade Kareyev. But still—your health.”

“Cut the nonsense. You don’t have to drink my health. You don’t have to smile. And you don’t have to lie. You’ll hate me—and you know it. And I know it. But you may not know that I don’t care—so you’re warned in advance.”

“I didn’t know I’ll hate you.”

“You know it now, don’t you?”

“Less than ever.”

“Listen, forget the pretty speeches. That’s not part of your job. If you expect any compliments—you might as well be disappointed right now.”

“I wasn’t expecting any compliments when I took the boat for Strastnoy Island.”

“And I hope you weren’t expecting any sentiment. This is a business deal. That’s all.”

“That’s all, Comrade Kareyev.”

“Did you expect a companion like me?”

“I’ve heard about you.”

“Have you heard what I’m called?”

“The Beast.”

“You may find I deserve the name.”

“You may find I like it.”

“No use telling me about it—if you do. I don’t care what you think of me.”

“Then why warn me about it?”

“Because the boat’s still here. It goes back at dawn. There’s no other for three months.”

She had lighted a cigarette. She held it in two straight fingers, looking at him.

“Were you in the civil war, Comrade Kareyev?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Did you acquire the habit of retreating?”

“No.”

“Neither have I.”

He leaned toward her, his crossed elbows on the table, watching her in the trembling glow of the candle, his eyes narrow, mocking. He said:

“I’ve seen some soldiers overestimate their strength.” She smiled, and reached over and flicked the ashes off her cigarette into his empty plate.

“Good ones,” she answered, “take chances.”

“Listen,” he said impatiently, “you don’t like questions, so I won’t bother you, because I don’t like to talk either. But there’s just one thing I’m going to ask you. That letter from the GPU said you were all right politically, but you don’t look as . . . as you should look at all.”

She blew at the smoke and did not answer. Then she looked at him and shrugged lightly.

“The letter told you about my present. The past is dead. If I’m not thinking of it, why should you?”

“No reason,” he agreed. “Makes no difference.”

A convict, waiting on the Commandant’s table, had removed the dishes, sliding silently out of the room. Joan rose.

“Show me the island,” she said. “I want to get acquainted. I’m staying here for a long time—I hope.”

“I hope you’ll repeat that,” he answered, rising, “three months from today.”

When they walked out, the sky was red behind the monastery towers, a shivering red, as if the light were dying in gasps. The monastery looked silently upon them, with small barred windows like reluctant eyes opened upon a sinful world, guarded by menacing saints of gray stone; cold evening shadows settled in the wrinkles of the saints’ faces cut by reverent hands, stormy winds, and centuries. A thick stone wall encircled the shore, and sentinels walked slowly on the wall, with measured steps, with bayonets red in the sunset, with heads bowed in resignation, watchful and weary like the saints by the windows.

“The prisoners aren’t locked up in their cells here,” Commandant Kareyev explained to her. “They have the freedom to move around. There’s not much space to move in. It’s safe.”

“They get tired of the island, don’t they?”

“They go mad. Not that it matters. It’s the last place they’ll see on earth.”

“And when they die?”

“Well, no room for a cemetery here. But a strong current.”

“Has anyone ever tried to escape?”

“They forget the word when they land here.”

“And yourself?”

He looked at her, without understanding. “Myself?”

“Have you ever tried to escape?”

“From whom?”

“From Commandant Kareyev.”

“Come on. What are you driving at?”

“Are you happy here?”

“No one’s forcing me to stay.”

“I said: are you happy?”

“Who cares about being happy? There’s so much work to be done in the world.”

“Why should it be done?”

“Because it’s one’s duty.”

“To whom?”

“When it’s duty, you don’t ask why and to whom. You don’t ask any questions. When you come up against a thing about which you can’t ask any questions—then you know you’re facing your duty.”

She pointed far out at the darkening sea and asked:

“Do you ever think of what lies there, beyond the coast? Of the places where I came from?”

He answered, shrugging contemptuously:

“The best of that world beyond the coast is right here.”

“And that is?”

“My work.”

He turned and walked back to the monastery. She followed obediently.

They walked down a long corridor where barred windows threw dark crosses on the floor, over the red squares of dying light, and figures of saints writhed on ancient murals. From behind every door furtive eyes watched the stranger. The eyes were eager and contemptuous at once. Commandant Kareyev did not notice them; Joan was braver—she did, and walked on, not caring.

They had reached the foot of the stairs where, at tall windows, a group of prisoners loitered, as if by chance, aimlessly studying the sunset.

Her foot was on the first step when a cry stopped her, the kind of cry she would have heard if the martyrs of the murals had suddenly found voice.

“Frances!”

Michael Volkontzev stood grasping the banister, barring her way. Many people were looking at his face, but his face looked like a thing that should not be seen.

“Frances! What are you doing here?”

The men around them could not understand the question, because of the way his voice sounded—and because he spoke it in English.

Her face was cool and blank and a little astonished—politely, indifferently astonished. She looked straight at him, her eyes calm and open.

“I beg your pardon,” she said, in Russian. “I don’t believe I know you.”

Kareyev stepped between them and seized Michael’s shoulder, asking:

“Do you know her?”

Michael looked at her, at the stairway, at the men around them.

“No,” he muttered. “I was mistaken.”

“I warned you,” said Kareyev angrily, and threw him out of the way, against the wall. Joan turned and walked up the steps. Kareyev followed.

The prisoners watched Michael pressed to the wall, as he had fallen, not moving, not straightening himself, only his eyes watching her go up and his head nodding slowly as if counting each step.

There was no door to connect Joan’s cell with Commandant Kareyev’s. For five years Commandant Kareyev had not spoken to a woman, but almost forty years had gone before he had ever spoken to a woman like this guest of his. She was his prize, his reward, the pawn from the red republic for the hours and years of his life, for his blood, for his gray hair. She was his as his salary, as the rations of bread citizens got on their provision cards. But she had helpless white fingers and cool eyes that did not invite and did not forbid and looked at him with an open, wondering calm beyond his understanding. He had waited for five years; he could wait one night longer.

He had closed his door and listened. He could hear the moaning of waves outside; and the steps of sentinels on the wall; and the rustle of her long dress against the stone floor, in the next cell.

It was long after midnight, and the monastery towers had dissolved into the black sky, and only the smoking lanterns of the guards floated over the darkness, when a hand knocked on Joan’s door. She had not been sleeping. She was standing at a bare stone wall, under the faint square of a barred window, and the lighted candle tore out of the darkness the white spots of her hands and bowed face. The wax of the candle had frozen in long rivulets across the table. She hesitated for only a second. She tightened the folds of her long, black robe and opened the door.

It was not Commandant Kareyev; it was Michael.

He put his hand on the door so that she could not close it. His lips were determined, but his eyes were desperate, tortured, pleading.

“Keep quiet,” he whispered. “I’ve got to see you alone.”

“Get out of here,” she ordered, in a whisper. “At once.”

“Frances,” he begged, “this . . . all this isn’t possible. I can’t understand . . . I’ve got to hear a word, a . . .”

“I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. Let me close this door.”

“Frances, I have to . . . I can’t . . . I must know the reason you . . .”

“If you don’t go, I’ll call Commandant Kareyev.”

“Oh, you will?” He raised his head defiantly. “Well, let me see you do it.”

She opened her door wider and called:

“Comrade Kareyev!”

She did not have to call twice. He threw his door open and faced them, hand on the gun at his belt.

“I didn’t come here to be annoyed by your prisoners, Comrade Kareyev,” she said evenly.

Commandant Kareyev did not say a word. He blew his whistle. Down the long corridor, the echoes of their heavy boots pounding against the vaults, two guards ran to his summons.

“Into the pit,” he ordered, pointing at Michael.

Michael’s eyes were not desperate any longer. A contemptuous smile pulled down the corners of his mouth. His hand went to his forehead in a military salute to Joan.

She stood, motionless, until the guards’ footsteps died in the darkness beyond the stairs, leading Michael away. Then, Kareyev entered her room and closed the door. He looked at her throat, white against the black robe.

“After all,” said Commandant Kareyev, “he had the right idea.”

He did not know whether the soft warmth under his hands was the velvet or the body under the velvet. For one short second, it seemed to him that her eyes had lost their hard calm, that they were helpless and frightened and childish, like the fluffy blond hair that fell over his arm. But he did not care, for then her lips parted in a smile and his closed them again.

——II——

Joan was unpacking her trunks. She was hanging her clothes on a row of nails. Just enough light crawled in through the barred window to make the satins and laces glimmer, shivering and surprised, in the stone niche built for monks’ robes.

The light seemed to rise out of the sea and the sky hung over it, a dead gray reflecting feebly a borrowed glow. The leaden waves moved restlessly; they did not run towards the shore; they seemed to boil and knock against each other, furious whitecaps flashing up and disappearing instantly, as if the sea, a huge tank, had been shaken and its waters stirred, swaying against unseen walls.

From her window, Joan could watch the statue of St. George on a cornice. His huge, awkward face looked straight at the far horizon, without bending towards the dragon under his horse’s hoofs. The dragon’s head hung over the sea, limp under centuries of threat from a heavy stone spear, as if the last drops of blood had been drained through its gaping mouth into the waves far below.

Joan was hanging a shawl to cover the niche, a square piece of old linen heavy with crosses of embroidery. Commandant Kareyev entered when she struck her finger with the hammer, trying to drive a nail into the hard wooden frame around the niche.

“It’s your fault,” she said, a little smile softening her lips in a wordless greeting. “You promised to help me.”

He took her hand without hesitation, possessively, and looked, worried, at the little red spot.

“I’m sorry. Here, I’ll nail it for you.”

“You’ve left me alone three times this morning,” she complained.

“Sorry. I had to go. A disturbance down there. One of the fools chopped his toe off.”

“Accident?”

“No. Madness. Thought he’d be sent to the mainland to a hospital.”

“Didn’t you send him?”

“No. Had the doctor tend to him. The doctor’s a useful prisoner to have; been a surgeon at the Medical Academy in St. Petersburg. He’s cauterizing the idiot’s foot now—with red iron. . . . What’s all this here?”

“My clothes.”

“Why do you have so many?”

“Why do you carry that gun?”

“That’s my profession.”

“That”—she pointed to the niche—“is mine.”

“Oh.” He looked at the clothes, at her, frowned. “Yes, and a paying one. . . . And if it paid so well, why did you come here?”

“I was tired. I heard about you—and liked it.”

“What did you hear?”

“I heard that you were the loneliest man in this republic.”

“I see. Pity?”

“No. Envy.”

She bent and took out of the trunk a dress of soft, dark satin.

“Hold it,” she ordered, taking out a wrap, shaking its fluffy fur collar, stroking it gently, hanging it carefully in the niche. He held the dress cautiously, his fingers moving slowly in the smooth, lustrous folds, soft and bewildering as some unknown beast’s skin. He said:

“You won’t need such things here.”

“I thought you might like them.”

“I don’t notice rags.”

“Give me that dress. Don’t hold it up by the hem like that.”

“What’s the use of such a thing?”

“It’s beautiful.”

“It’s useless.”

“But it’s beautiful. Isn’t that reason enough to bring it along, Comrade Kareyev?”

“One of us,” said Commandant Kareyev, “has a lot to learn.”

“One of us,” she answered slowly, “has.”

She bent into the trunk and took out a long satin nightgown. She displayed the luxury of her exquisite possessions in a natural, indifferent manner, as if they were to be expected, as if she did not notice Kareyev’s surprised eyes; as if she did not know that this elegance of a fashionable boudoir transplanted into a monk’s cell was a challenge to the frozen walls, to the grim Communist, to the very duty she had accepted. Under the dusty bottle that held a candle on the table, she put down a huge white powder puff.

He asked gruffly:

“Where do you think you are?”

“I think,” she answered with her lightest smile, “that you may wish to think of places where you haven’t been—someday.”

“I don’t have many wishes,” he answered sternly, “except those that come on official blanks with a Party seal. If they tell me to stay here—I’ll stay.”

He looked at the row of dresses in the niche. He kicked an open trunk impatiently.

“Are you through with that?” he asked. “I haven’t much time to waste here helping you.”

“You haven’t given me much time,” she complained. “They have been calling you away all morning.”

“They’ll call me again. I have more important things to do than to hang up that junk of yours.”

She brought out a satin slipper. She studied its buckle thoughtfully, attentively.

“That man who came to my room last night,” she asked, “where did you put him?”

“Into the pit.”

“The pit?”

“Fifty feet under the ground. Could swim down there if all the water on the walls wasn’t frozen. But it’s frozen. And I gave him the limit.”

“The limit of what?”

“Of light. When we give the limit, we close the big shutter over the hole above. Until we open it to throw him food, he might as well be blind for all the good his eyes will do him.”

“How long is his sentence?”

“Ten days.”

She bent for the second slipper. She put them down carefully under the folds of a long robe. She asked with a light smile:

“Do men think that kind of punishment satisfies a woman?”

“What would a woman do?”

“I would make him apologize.”

“You wouldn’t want me to have him shot, would you? For disobedience? He’ll never apologize.”

“Suspend his sentence if he does.”

“He’s a hard one. I’ve broken many a hard one here, but he’s steel—so far. Strastnoy Island hasn’t put its rust on him, yet.”

“Well? Are you only after those you know are easily broken?”

Commandant Kareyev walked to the door, opened it, and blew his whistle.

“Comrade Fedossitch,” he ordered his assistant when shuffling feet stopped at the door, “bring Citizen Volkontzev here.”

Comrade Fedossitch looked, surprised, at Kareyev. He looked into the room at Joan, a veiled glance of resentful hatred. He bowed and shuffled away.

They heard his steps again mingled with the resonant stride of Volkontzev. Comrade Fedossitch pushed the door open with his boot and, stepping aside, drawing his head into his shoulders in the obsequious bow of a headwaiter, his elbows pressed tightly to his body, let Michael enter, approached Kareyev and remarked, smiling softly, his smile timidly apologetic and arrogantly remonstrative at once:

“It’s against the law, Comrade Commandant. The sentence was ten days.”

“Has Comrade Fedossitch forgotten,” Kareyev asked, “that my order brought Citizen Volkontzev here?”

And he slammed the door, leaving his assistant outside.

Commandant Kareyev looked at Michael, pale, erect in his old jacket that fitted so well; then, he looked at Joan, who faced the prisoner, studying with an indifferent curiosity the patches on that jacket and the blue, frozen hands in its sleeves.

“You are here, Volkontzev,” said Commandant Kareyev, “to apologize.”

“To whom?” Michael asked calmly.

“To Comrade Harding.”

Michael made a step toward her and bowed graciously.

“I’m sorry, madam,” he smiled, “that you made the worthy Commandant break a law—for the first time in his life. But I warn you, Comrade Commandant, laws are easily broken by . . . er . . . Comrade Harding.”

“Citizen Volkontzev is not a fair judge of women,” Joan answered, her voice expressionless.

“I should hate to judge all women, Comrade Harding, by some I have known.”

“You’re here to apologize,” reminded Kareyev. “If you do, your sentence will be suspended.”

“And if I don’t?”

“I’ve been here five years and all the prisoners until now have obeyed me. If I stay here longer, all of them will learn to obey me. And I’m not leaving—yet.”

“Well, then, you can feed me to the rats in the pit; or you can have me flogged till I stop bleeding; but you won’t hear me apologize to this woman.”

Commandant Kareyev did not answer, for the door flew open and Comrade Fedossitch saluted, out of breath.

“Comrade Commandant! There’s a disturbance in the kitchen!”

“What’s the matter?”

“The convicts on vegetable duty refuse to peel the potatoes. They say the potatoes are frozen and rotten and not fit to cook.”

“Well, they’ll eat them raw.”

He hurried out, and Comrade Fedossitch followed.

In one swift movement, Joan was at the closed door. She listened, her ear and her hands pressed to the panel. She waited till the last step echoed against the vaults far downstairs.

Then, she turned. She said one word, her voice alive, tremulous, ringing like the first blow to a bursting dam, pleading and triumphant and anguished:

“Michael!”

The word slapped him in the face. He did not move. He did not soften, did not smile. Only his lips quivered when he asked almost without sound:

“Why are you here?”

She smiled softly, her smile pleading, radiant. Her hands rose, hungrily, imperiously, to his shoulders. He seized her wrists; it was an effort that shook every muscle of his body, but he threw her hands aside.

“Why are you here?” he repeated.

She whispered, a faint trace of reproach in her voice:

“I thought you had enough faith in me to understand. I couldn’t recognize you yesterday—I was afraid of being watched. I’m here to save you.”

He asked grimly:

“How did you get here?”

“I have a friend in Nijni Kolimsk,” she whispered hurriedly, breathlessly. “A big English merchant, Ellers. His place is right across the street from the GPU. He knows men there, influential men he can order, you understand? We heard about that . . . that invitation of Kareyev’s. Ellers arranged it—and I was sent here.”

She stopped, looking at his white face. She asked:

“Why so . . . stern, dearest? Won’t you smile to reward me?”

“Smile at what? My wife in the arms of a foul Communist?”

“Michael!”

“Did you really think that you’d find me willing to be saved—at such a price?”

She smiled calmly. “Don’t you know how much a woman can promise—and how little fulfill?”

“My wife can’t pretend to play a part like that.”

“We can’t choose our weapons, Michael.”

“But there is an honor that . . .”

She spoke proudly, solemnly, her head high, her voice tense, ringing, throwing each word straight into his face:

“I have a shield that my honor will carry high through any battle: I love you. . . . Look at these walls. There’s frozen water in the stone. A few more years—your eyes, your skin, your mind will freeze like that, crushed by this stone, by the days and hours that do not move. Do you want me to go away, to wander through the world with but one thought, one desire, and leave you to wither in this frozen hell?”

He looked at her. He took a step toward her. She did not move. She made no sound, but her bones crackled when his arms tore her off the ground, his lips sinking into her body, hungry with the dreams, the despair, the sleepless nights of two long years.

“Frances! . . . Frances . . .”

She was the first one to tear herself away from him. She listened at the door and threw a long gold thread of hair off her temple with the back of her hand, her fingers drooping limply, a quick, sharp movement.

He whispered breathlessly:

“Do it again.”

“What?”

“Your hair . . . the way you threw it back. . . . I’ve been dreaming—for two years—of how you did that . . . and the way you walked, and the way you turned your head with that hair over one eye. . . . I’ve tried to see it—as if you were here—so many times. And now you’re here . . . here . . . Frances . . . but I want you to go back.”

“It’s too late to go back, Michael.”

“Listen.” His face was grim. “You can’t stay here. I thank you. I appreciate what you’ve tried to do. But I can’t let you stay. It’s insane. There’s nothing you can do.”

“I can. I have a plan. I can’t tell you now. And there’s no other way for me to save you. I’ve tried everything. I’ve spent all the money I had. There’s no way out of Strastnoy Island. No way but one. You have to help me.”

“Not while you’re here.”

She walked away from him, turned calmly, stood, her arms crossed, her hands grasping her elbows, the golden thread of hair falling over one eye, looking at him calmly, the faintest wrinkle of a mocking smile in the corners of her long, thin mouth.

“Well?” she asked. “I’m here. What can you do about it?”

“If you don’t go, I can tell one thing to Kareyev. Just one name. Yours.”

“Can you? Think of it, Michael. Don’t you know what he’d do to me if he learned the truth?”

“But . . .”

“It will be worse for me than for you, if you betray me. You could try to kill him. You’d never succeed, but you’d be executed and you’d leave me alone—in his power.”

“But . . .”

“Or you could kill yourself—if you prefer. It would still leave me—alone.”

She knew that she had won. She whirled toward him suddenly, her voice vibrant, passionate, commanding:

“Michael, don’t you understand? I love you. I ask you to believe in me. There has never been a time when you could prove your faith, as you can do now. I’m asking the hardest of sacrifices. Don’t you know that it’s much harder sometimes to stand by and remain silent than to act? I’m doing my part. It’s not easy. But yours is worse. Aren’t you strong enough for it?”

His face set, his eyes on hers, a new fire in his eyes, he answered slowly:

“Yes.”

She whispered, her lips close to his:

“It’s not for your sake only, Michael. It’s our life. It’s the years awaiting us, and all that is still left to us, still possible—if we fight for it. One last struggle and then . . . then . . . Michael, I love you.”

“I’ll do my part, Frances.”

“Keep away from me. Pretend you’ve never seen me before. Remember, your silence is your only way to protect me.”

The vaults downstairs rang faintly as if from quick electric shocks. Kareyev’s steps hurried up the stairs.

“He’s coming, Michael,” she whispered. “Here’s your beginning. Apologize to me. It will be your first step to help me.”

When Commandant Kareyev entered, Joan was standing by the table, examining indifferently a pair of stockings. Michael stood by the door. His head was bowed.

“Well, Volkontzev,” the Commandant inquired, “have you had time to think it over? Have you changed your mind?”

Michael raised his head. Joan looked at him. Not a line moved in her calm face, not even the muscles around her eyes. But her eyes looked into his with a silent, desperate plea he alone could understand.

Michael made a step forward and bowed slightly.

“I have been mistaken about you, Comrade Harding,” he said steadily, distinctly. “I’m sorry.”

Editor’s Note

In one summary of Red Pawn, Ayn Rand wrote the following about the background of Joan and Michael. Presumably, this information would belong somewhere in the preceding sequence.

“Three years ago, as an engineer in charge of a Soviet factory, Michael had been sent on a mission to America. He had met Joan and married her there. But he was forced to return to Russia, because his mother was held as a hostage for his return. Joan had come to Russia with him. Then, during one of the usual political purges, Michael was arrested; the authorities had been suspicious of him for some time, because he showed too much ability, and men of ability are considered dangerous in Russia; besides, he had been abroad and was married to an American who, it was felt, must have taught him many dangerous ideas of freedom. Michael was sent to Strastnoy Island—for life. It had taken Joan two years to find out where he was.”

——III——

The Strastnoy Island library was in the former chapel. Here, prisoners and guards off duty were allowed to spend their long days, to try and forget that their days had twenty-four hours—all of them alike.

The sacred emblems and ikons which could be removed had been taken down. But the old paintings on the walls could not be removed. Many centuries ago, the unknown hand of a great artist had spent a lifetime of dreary days immortalizing his soul on the chapel’s walls. None could tell what dark secret, what sorrow had thrown him out of the world into its last, forgotten outpost. But all the power and passion, all the fire and rebellious agony of his tortured spirit had been poured into the somber colors on the walls, into majestic figures of a magnificent life, the life his eyes had seen and renounced. And the bodies of tortured saints silently cried of his ecstasy, his doubt, his hunger.

Through three narrow slits of windows, a cold haze of light streamed into the library, like a gray fog rolling in from the sea. It left the shadows of centuries to doze in the dark, vaulted corners. It threw white blotches on the rough, unpainted boards of bookshelves that cut into the angels’ snowy wings, into the foreheads of saintly patriarchs; on the procession following the cross-bearing Jesus to the Golgotha; and above it—on the red letters on a strip of white cotton: PROLETARIANS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

Tall candles in silver stands at the altar had to be lighted in the daytime. Their little red flames stood immobile, each candle transformed into a chandelier by the myriads of tiny reflections in the gilded halos of carved saints; they burned without motion, without noise, a silent, resigned service in memory of the past—around a picture of Lenin.

Above, on the vaulted ceiling, the unknown artist had placed his last work. A figure of Jesus floated in the clouds, His robe whiter than snow. He looked down with a sad, wise smile, His arms outstretched in silent invitation and blessing.

The library was the creation of Comrade Fedossitch, who liked to talk of “our duty to the new culture.” The murals did not harmonize with his new culture and Comrade Fedossitch had tried to improve them. He had painted a red flag into the raised hand of Saint Vladimir as that first Christian ruler converted his people to the new faith; he had painted a sickle and hammer on Moses’ tablets. But the ancient glazing that protected the murals, its secret lost with the monks, did not take fresh paint well. The red flag ran down the wall and peeled off in pieces. So Comrade Fedossitch had given up the idea of artistic alterations. He had compromised by tacking over Saint Vladimir’s stomach a bright-red poster bearing a soldier and an airplane, and the inscription: COMRADES! DONATE TO THE RED AIR-FLEET!

On the shelves were The Constitution of the U.S.S.R., The ABC of Communism, the first volume of a novel, a book of verse without a cover, a Ladies’ Guide to Fine Needlework, a manual of arithmetical problems for the first grade, and others.

Joan had brought a radio. She walked into the library carrying it under her arm, a square box with an awkward loudspeaker.

The men in the room rose, bowing to her, smiling a timid welcome. It was different from her first entrance into the library a week ago. Then they had ignored her, as if the door had opened to admit her and no one had entered the room; they had stepped out of her way, cautiously and speedily, as if she were a poisonous plant they did not care to touch. She had won them and none of them could say that she had tried. It was her fluffy, childish hair, and her wise, mysterious smile, and her eyes so defiantly open that they concealed her thoughts by exposing them, and her slow, leisurely steps that carried her down the monastery halls like a vision from these men’s pasts, like the women they had left far behind in the years that had gone, in the halls of mansions that had crumbled.

An old surgeon and a former Senator did not greet her, however. They were playing chess on a corner of the long library table, where a chessboard had been traced on the unpainted wooden boards with cheap purple ink. The chess figures had been modeled out of stale bread. The Senator had a long black beard; he never shaved; he talked little and had trouble in shifting his eyes: they always looked straight into one spot for hours. He did not raise his head when Joan entered; neither did the surgeon.

An old general who wore a patched jacket and St. George’s ribbon did not greet her, either. He was sitting alone, by a window, bending, his eyes squinting painfully in the dim light, busily carving wooden toys.

And still another man did not move when she entered: Michael sat alone under a tall candle reading a book for the third time. He turned a page and bent lower when the door opened to admit her.

“Good morning, Miss Harding,” a prisoner who had been a Count greeted her. “How lovely you are today! May I help you? What is this?”

“Good morning,” said Joan. “It’s a radio.”

“A radio!”

They surrounded her, stunned, eager, curious, looking at that box from somewhere where history, which had stopped for them, was still marching forward.

“A radio!” said the Count, adjusting his monocle. “So I’m not going to die without seeing one, after all.”

“What’s a radio, anyway?” asked an old professor.

Comrade Fedossitch, who had been painting a poster while sitting alone at a table in a corner, put his brush down and looked up, resentfully, frowning.

Joan put the radio down on the altar, under Lenin’s picture. She said:

“This will cheer us all a little.”

“A charming thought.” The Count clicked his heels gallantly. “And what a charming gown! We of the old world said that woman was the flower of creation—and clothes the petals.”

“Nothing can extinguish the torch of human progress,” the gray-haired professor said solemnly. His hair was white as the angels’ wings on the walls, and his eyes sad and innocent as theirs.

A tall young convict, his blond hair disheveled over a face still pale from fifty lashes he had received, said softly, his hesitant fingers touching the radio timidly:

“I haven’t heard any music . . . for three years.”

“The first concert,” Joan announced, “on Strastnoy Island.”

The radio coughed, hissed, as if clearing its throat. Then—the first notes of music dropped into the chapel like pebbles cutting into a deep, stagnant pool, tearing in sweet agony the virginal air that had never been disturbed by the sound of life.

“The hand of fate draws an eternal trace,

I see your face again so close to mine . . .”

It was a woman’s voice singing a song of memories, with a poignant joy as a shadow softening its sorrow, slow and resigned, like an autumn day, still breathing of a past sunshine, but giving it up without thunder, without a storm, with just one teardrop of a first, cold rain.

It rolled into the tortured murals, into the bookshelves and posters and candles from the world outside where life breathed and sent them one faint draught. And they stood, their mouths and their hearts open, gasping for the draught, reverent as at a sacred mass, hearing the music more with a strange, contracted spot in their breasts than with their ears.

They did not speak until the voice of the radio announcer had told them that it was a station in Leningrad. Then, the blond youth broke the silence:

“That was beautiful, Miss Harding. Almost . . .” A violent cough interrupted him, shaking his thin shoulders. “Almost as beautiful as you are. . . . Thank you. . . .”

He grasped her hand and pressed it to his lips, and held it there longer than mere gratitude dictated.

“Leningrad,” the Count remarked, adjusting his monocle, an effort bringing back to his lips his old nonchalant smile. “It was St. Petersburg in my day. Funny how time flies. . . . The quays of the Neva were all white. The snow squealed under the sleighs. We had music, too, at the Aquarium. Champagne that sparkled like music, and girls that sparkled like champagne. . . .”

“I’m from Moscow,” said the professor. “I gave lectures . . . at the University. ‘The History of Aesthetics’—that was my last course. . . .”

“I’m from the Volga,” said the blond youth. “We were building a bridge across the Volga. It gleamed in the sun—like a steel knife that was to slash across the river’s body.”

“When Mademoiselle Collette danced at the Aquarium,” said the Count, “we threw gold coins on the table.”

“Young students listened to me,” the professor whispered. “Rosy cheeks . . . bright eyes. . . . Young Russia. . . .”

“It was to be the longest bridge in the world. . . . Perhaps, someday . . . I might go back and . . .” He did not finish; he coughed.

“I have faith in Russia.” The professor spoke solemnly, like a prophet. “Our Saint Russia has known dark years before and has risen triumphant. What if we have to fall on the way as dry leaves swept by a torrent? Russia will live.”

“It seems to me, citizen”—Comrade Fedossitch rose slowly, frowning, approaching Joan—“that it must be against the law to play this here radio of yours.”

“Is it, Comrade Fedossitch?”

“Well, if you ask me, it is. But then, I don’t have the say. It may be all right for Comrade Kareyev. It was against the law to let a female citizen in here. But then, how could they refuse anything to such a worthy comrade as Commandant Kareyev?”

He walked out, slamming the door. Five years ago, in Nijni Kolimsk, Comrade Fedossitch had been a candidate for the post of Commandant of Strastnoy Island. But the GPU had chosen Comrade Kareyev.

“I gather,” said the Count, following Fedossitch with his eyes, “that the male citizen does not care for the fine art of music. And I observe that he is not alone. How about you, Volkontzev? Not interested?”

“I’ve heard music before,” Michael answered abruptly, turning a page.

“I think that men who let some pet prejudice of theirs stand against the most wonderful woman in the world,” said the young engineer, “ought to be thrown into the pit.”

“Leave him alone,” said the Count. “I’m sure Miss Harding will excuse his unreasonable antipathy.”

“But will she forgive mine?” a hoarse voice asked.

They all turned to the sound.

The old general got up, looking straight at Joan, a timid, awkward apology in his old, stubborn face. He made a step forward, came back, picked up his wooden toy; then walked to her, clutching his precious work in his big, stubby fingers.

“I’m sorry, Miss Harding”—he clicked his heels in bast shoes, as if hoping to hear the old sound of military spurs—“if I’ve been rather . . . Can you forget?”

“Certainly, General.” Joan smiled, her smile warm as a caress, and extended her hand.

The general quickly transferred the toy to his left hand and shook hers in a tight grasp.

“That . . .” He indicated the box from which the soft tune of a folk song floated into the room. “Is that played in St. Petersburg?”

“Yes.”

“I’m from St. Petersburg. Eleven years. I’ve left my wife there. And Iura, my grandson. He’s the grandest little fellow. He was two years old when I left. He had blue eyes, just like . . . like my son.”

He stopped suddenly. Joan noticed the awkward silence that none of the men seemed willing to break.

The Count proved to be the bravest.

“What are you making now, General? A new one?” he asked, pointing at the toy. “You know, Miss Harding, our general is a proud old man. We have a little workshop here where we’re allowed to make things: boots, baskets, and such. When the boat comes, they collect it all and take it away, to the cities. They bring us cigarettes, woolen scarfs, socks—in exchange. The boots are the most profitable to make. But the general won’t make boots.”

“No one shall say,” the general interrupted proudly, “that a general of the Army of his Imperial Majesty stooped to making boots.”

“He makes wooden toys, instead,” the Count explained. “He invents them himself.”

“This is a new one.” The general smiled eagerly. “I’ll show you.”

He raised the toy and pulled a little stick; a wooden peasant and bear armed with hammers struck an anvil in turn, jerking awkwardly. As the tiny hammers knocked rhythmically through the music, the Count whispered into Joan’s ear:

“Don’t ever mention his son. He was a captain in the old army. The reds hanged him—before his father’s eyes.”

“You see,” the general was explaining, “I’m always thinking that my toys go out into the world and children play with them, little chubby, rosy fellows, like Iura. . . . And sometimes, I think, wouldn’t it be funny if one of the toys fell into his hands, and . . . But then, how stupid of me! . . . Eleven years . . . he’s a full-grown young man, by now. . . .”

“Checkmate, Doctor,” the Senator’s raucous voice boomed suddenly. “Were you paying any attention to the game? Or am I going to lose the last man I can speak to?”

He shot a dark, significant glance at the general, and left the room, slamming the door.

“Poor fellow,” sighed the general. “You mustn’t be angry at him, Miss Harding. He won’t speak to anyone that speaks to you. He’s not quite sane.”

“He can’t forgive you,” explained the Count, “for what he presumes to be your . . . shall we say ethical differences? . . . with his code. . . . You see, he shot his own daughter—and also the Bolshevik who had attacked her.”

Comrade Fedossitch found Commandant Kareyev inspecting the guard posts on the wall.

“I’m taking the liberty to report to the Comrade Commandant”—he saluted—“that there are unlawful doings going on in the library.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“It’s the comrade woman. She’s playing music.”

“On what?”

“On a radio.”

“Well, isn’t that great? I haven’t heard one for five years.”

When Commandant Kareyev entered, there was a strange, tense silence in the library. The men were surrounding Joan. She knelt by the radio, turning the dial slowly, listening intently, frowning in concentration. He felt the suspense and stopped at the door.

“I think I have it,” Joan’s triumphant voice greeted a faint rumble from the loudspeaker.

A blast of jazz music exploded into the room, like a skyrocket bursting out of the loudspeaker, rising and breaking into flaming colors under the dark vaults.

“Abroad,” said one of the men, breathlessly, reverently, as if he were saying: “Heaven.”

The music was the end of a dance. It finished abruptly in a burst of applause. It was an unusual sound to enter the library. The men grinned and applauded, too.

A nasal Oriental voice spoke an announcement in French. Joan translated:

“This is the Café Electric, Tokyo, Japan. We are now going to hear the lightest, gayest, maddest tune that ever conquered the capitals of Europe: the ‘Song of Dancing Lights.’ ”

It was a challenge, it was an insulting burst of laughter right into the grim face of Strastnoy Island. It was like a ray of light split by a mirror, its sparkling bits sent flying, dancing over the dark, painted walls. It was the halting, drifting, irregular raving of a music drunk on its own gaiety. It was the voice of streetlights on a blazing boulevard under a dark sky, of electric signs, of automobile headlights, of diamond buckles on dancing feet.

Still kneeling by the radio, like a solemn priestess to that hymn of living, Joan spoke. She spoke to the men, but her eyes were on Commandant Kareyev. He stood at the door. At one side of him was a painting of a saint burning at the stake, his face distorted into a smile of insane ecstasy, renouncing the pleasures and the tortures of the flesh for the glory of his heaven; at the other side—a poster of a huge machine with little ant-sized men, sweating at its gigantic levers, and the inscription: “Our duty is our sacrifice to the red collective of the Communistic State!”

Joan was speaking:

“Somewhere, they are dancing to this music. It’s not very far. It’s on this same earth. Over there, the man is holding the woman in his arms. They, too, have a duty. It’s a duty to look into each other’s eyes and smile at life an answer beyond all doubts, all questions, all sorrows.”

Her head thrown back, her body on the dark altar steps, tense, listening to the song with its every muscle, seemed a sacrificial offering to the Deity she was serving. The candlelight drowned in her hair, golden as the saints’ halos.

She did not feel Michael’s hungry eyes. She was smiling at Commandant Kareyev.

Commandant Kareyev did not say a word. He walked to the altar. He turned the radio dial without looking at it, his eyes on her. He turned until he found a voice speaking in stern, familiar, Party accents:

“. . . and in closing this meeting of the workers of the first Moscow Textile factory, let me remind you, comrades, that but one devotion has a place in our lives: our devotion to the great aim of the world revolution.”

The radio coughed applause. Another voice announced:

“Comrades! We shall close this meeting by singing our great anthem—the ‘Internationale.’ ”

The slow, majestic notes of the red hymn marched solemnly into the air.

“All men—stand up!” ordered Commandant Kareyev.

It seemed that red banners unrolled under the vaults, under Jesus’ white robes. It seemed that drums beat through the singing chorus, drums and footsteps of men marching gladly, steadily into battle, their lives a ready sacrifice to the call of the song.

Commandant Kareyev did not say a word. He looked at Joan, a little wrinkle of a smile in the corners of his mouth, the song giving her his answer.

Joan stood up. She leaned over the radio. She looked at him, calm, undefeated. Her lips parted in a slow, mysterious, indulgent smile.

——IV——

Snow was falling beyond the library windows. It gathered on the sills outside, rising slowly, closing the barred squares one by one. White flakes crashed silently into the glass panes and stayed there like fluffy, broken stars. It made the library darker. New candles burned at the altar.

Commandant Kareyev’s hand had long, sinewy fingers. They grasped things tightly, precisely, as if closing over the trigger of an aimed gun. Commandant Kareyev was turning the radio dial impatiently.

“I can’t get it, dear,” he said. “No one seems to be playing our ‘Song of Dancing Lights’ today.”

Joan’s hand covered his and led it, turning the dial slowly, together. She bent over the radio, her cheek pressed to his forehead, her blond hair brushing his temple, blinding him, getting tangled in his dark eyelashes.

They caught the familiar tune in the middle of a laughing sentence. It came like the unseen hand of the outside world, drawing a curtain of tumbling notes over the snow-laden windows, making Commandant Kareyev’s lips smile gaily, eagerly, a young happiness relaxing his stern wrinkles.

The library was deserted. He sat on the altar steps, drawing Joan close to him.

“Here it is,” he said, “the anthem of our duty.”

Her finger was wandering over his forehead, following the veins on his temple. She said:

“They play it well tonight. It’s night in Japan now.”

“And there are lights . . . dancing lights . . .”

“Not candles, like here.”

“If we were there tonight, I’d take you to this place where they are playing our song. And if there’s snow on the ground, like here, I’d carry you out of the car in my arms so that the snow wouldn’t touch your little slippers.”

“They have no snow there. They have cherry trees in blossom—all white.”

“Like your shoulders under the lights. There are men sitting at tables there, the kind of men who wear black suits and diamond studs. They’ll look at you. I want them to look at you. At your shoulders. I want them to know you’re mine.”

“Cherry blossoms and music . . . no footsteps on the wall outside; no groans from the pit.”

“But you came to all this—and to me. And you’ve stayed with me.”

“I came because I was desperate. I stayed because I found something I didn’t expect.”

Her hand moved slowly from his forehead down to his chin, studying tenderly every line.

“It’s strange, Joan . . . I’ve tracked a cross over Russia, through forests and swamps, with a gun and a red flag. I thought I was marching toward the dawn of the world revolution. It has always been there, ahead of me. And now, when I look ahead, the golden dawn is nothing but,” he finished with a laughing tenderness, drawing her closer, “a lock of your hair loose in the wind because you forgot to comb it.”

He sat on the altar steps. She knelt by his side, erect, her hands on his shoulders. Behind them tall candles burned before golden saints; above them was the picture of Lenin; the radio played the “Song of Dancing Lights.”

Through the windows where the rising snow was growing whiter against a darkening sky came the shrill whistle of a boat. He did not seem to notice it, but Joan started.

“The boat,” she said. “The last boat before the sea freezes.”

He did not turn to look at the window. He smiled slyly, happily.

“I have a little surprise for you, Joan. And will you do something for me? Will you wear tonight, for dinner, the blue dress I like?”

She walked to the window and peered through the frosted pattern. The boat had stopped at the old landing. Most of the prisoners had been ordered to unload the cargo; there was more freight than usual.

The general was the first to appear, bent under a huge crated object. Joan heard his heavy steps in the corridor. She opened the library door and watched him pass on his way upstairs.

“I think it’s an armchair,” the general grinned at her, passing by. “It feels like one. Although I’ve never yet felt an armchair from the underside.”

The next one to come was Comrade Fedossitch. He shuffled to the library door and stopped, saluting, out of breath.

“It’s here, Comrade Commandant. It’s arrived,” he reported, servility fighting indignation in his voice. “The boat’s arrived. Don’t you want to come down and watch the men—under the unusual circumstances?”

Commandant Kareyev waved his hand, annoyed.

“I thought I told you to watch them. You can do it. I’m busy.”

More packages came, carried through the corridor, up the stairs to Kareyev’s room. The prisoners’ boots left tracks of dirty, melting snow as they passed.

The professor and the Senator came with a long, heavy roll of carpet. The professor smiled at Joan. The Senator, his beard longer, his cheeks whiter than before, turned his head away.

The young engineer carried a box in which something rattled with a metallic sound. His cheeks were beginning to acquire an unnatural bright rosiness. His eyes sparkled with a feverish vivacity.

“I think it’s for Miss Harding,” he said aloud as if to himself, passing by the library door, rattling the box, watching Joan from the corner of his eye. “I admire the Commandant—for the first time.”

The Count carried a carefully crated box stuffed with straw. He held it with the reverence due a priceless load. The load made the sound of clinking glass.

“Congratulations, Miss Harding,” he smiled triumphantly, winking at the box. “That is what I call a real victory!”

Commandant Kareyev watched Joan’s wide, questioning eyes as they followed the procession up the stairs. He did not explain.

Michael stopped at the open door. His tall shoulders were beginning to droop; so did the corners of his mouth. His eyes were darker than usual; and that darkness, like a wave of unbearable pain, seemed to have overflown his eyes and frozen in blue puddles of circles under them. The sparkling defiance of Michael Volkontzev was gone; a brooding bitterness had taken its place.

He carried on his shoulders a large bundle sewn in heavy burlap. It seemed soft and light. He looked at Joan and Kareyev in the doorway, her head resting on his shoulder.

“These are pillows, I believe,” said Michael. “Do they go to your room or her room—or does it make any difference?”

Joan did not raise her head.

“To my room,” said Kareyev.

Joan wore her blue dress for dinner. The dark velvet clung to her body tightly, almost too tightly; but a severe military collar clasped her neck high under her chin.

One candle burned on the table in the middle of Commandant Kareyev’s room. It made a little island of light in the darkness, and a bright flame in the black panes of the window. She saw the shadows of long dark drapes; she felt a soft carpet under her feet. Two big armchairs stood at the table. A white stain in the darkness by the wall was a heavy lace spread on the bed with faint glimmers of candlelight in the new satin pillows.

“It’s all for your room,” Kareyev hurried to explain, smiling happily, almost bashfully, before she could say a word. “It’s here . . . just for a surprise.”

Across the swaying candle flame, Joan smiled at him. His eyes did not leave her. He watched for her to notice the snow-white tablecloth, the delicate china dishes, the little red sparks dancing in the silverware and the tall cut-glass goblets.

Joan’s eyes had melted into a soft, dreamy warmth. When she looked at Kareyev they sparkled with more than the candlelight’s reflection. They stopped one second longer than a glance required, lingering in a caress for the two of them alone to understand.

They were not alone. A waiter stood by the wall. It was Michael’s turn to wait on the Commandant’s table.

He stood, hunching his shoulders, thrusting his head forward, watching solicitously Commandant Kareyev’s every movement, stiff and smiling discreetly, an exaggerated picture of a correct waiter. He had thrown a white napkin over his arm—which had never been required. The maître d’hôtel of one of the fashionable restaurants which Michael Volkontzev used to visit would not have approved, however, of the look in that perfect waiter’s eyes.

“This is our anniversary, Joan,” said Kareyev, when they sat down. “Don’t you remember? You came here three months ago.”

She smiled, indicating the table:

“And such is the end of Commandant Kareyev.”

“No. The beginning.”

He leaned closer to her, speaking eagerly.

“I’ll bring everything you want here. I’ll make this island for you—what you make it for me.”

“What I’ve made it—for us.”

She did not notice Michael’s eyes that seemed to gather her every syllable, tearing them, in silent, ferocious agony, off her lips.

Kareyev shook his head slowly. “I don’t like that word. I’ve served it for such a long time. For us. We—the people, the collective, the millions. I’ve fought on barricades—for us. I’ve fought in the trenches. I’ve shot at men and men have shot at me. For us, for them, for those countless others somewhere around me, those for whom I’ve given a lifetime, my every moment, my every thought, my blood. For us. I don’t want to hear the word. Because now—it’s for me. You came here—for me. You’re mine. I won’t share that with anyone on earth. Mine. What a word that is—when you begin to understand it!”

She smiled, mocking, a little reproachful.

“Why, Comrade Kareyev!”

He smiled timidly, apologetically.

“Yes, Comrade Kareyev—tomorrow. And after tomorrow. And for many days to come. But not tonight. I can have one night for my own, can’t I? Look.” He pointed at the table proudly. “I ordered all this for you—by wireless. I have money in the bank at Nijni Kolimsk. My salary. Had nothing to do with it for five years. . . . I guess it wasn’t money alone that I’ve been missing for five years—for more than thirty-five years.”

“It’s never too late while one lives—if one still wants to live.”

“It’s strange, Joan. I’ve never really known what it was to want to live. I’ve never thought of tomorrow. I didn’t care what bullet ended me—or when. But now, for the first time, I want to be spared. Am I a traitor, Joan?”

“One cannot be a traitor to anything,” said Joan, “except to oneself.”

“Loyalty,” said Michael, “is like rubber: one can stretch it so far, and then—it snaps.”

Kareyev looked at him surprised, as if noticing him for the first time.

“Where did you get these perfect waiter’s manners, Volkontzev?” he asked.

“Oh, I’ve had a lot of experience, sir,” Michael answered calmly, “from a slightly different angle, though. We had banquets in my day, too. I remember one. We had many flowers and guests. We had a wedding such as those of the old days. She held a bouquet more gracefully than any woman I’ve ever seen. She wore a long white veil—then.”

Commandant Kareyev looked at him, looked at a convict with a shadow of sympathy—for the first time.

“Do you miss her?” he asked.

“No,” said Michael. “I wish I did.”

“And she?”

“She’s the kind that doesn’t stay lonely for a long time.”

“I wouldn’t say that about a woman I had loved.”

“You and I, Commandant, did not love the same woman.”

“After dinner,” Joan said slowly, looking at Michael, “will you bring some wood to my room? I’ve burned the last logs. It’s very cold at night.”

Michael bowed silently.

Commandant Kareyev pointed to a dark bottle that stood on the table. Michael poured, filling their glasses.

The wine was dark red, and when he poured it, little ruby sparks tumbled into the glasses, as a draft waved the candle flame.

Commandant Kareyev rose holding his glass, looking at Joan. She rose, too.

“To love,” he said calmly, solemnly.

He had pronounced the word for the first time.

Joan held her glass out to his. They met over the candle. It threw a trembling red glow over their faces through the dark liquid, and the shadows swayed over their cheeks, as the flame in the draft.

Her hand jerked suddenly, when she sat down. She spilled a red drop on the white tablecloth. Michael hurried to refill her glass.

“To love, madame,” he said, “that is—and that was.”

She drank.

Joan was alone in her room when Michael entered carrying the wood.

She watched him silently, standing at the window, her arms crossed, without moving. He dropped the logs by the stove. He asked, without looking at her:

“Is that all?”

“Start the fire,” she ordered.

He obeyed, kneeling by the stove. He struck a match and the crisp bark crackled, curling, twisting, bursting into little white flames. She approached him and whispered:

“Michael, please listen. I . . .”

“How many logs, madame?” he asked coldly.

“Michael, what were you trying to do? Do you want to ruin my plan?”

“I didn’t know there was any plan left to ruin.”

“Your faith doesn’t last long, does it?”

“My faith? What about his? I’ve seen what you’ve done to that.”

“Isn’t that what I set out to do?”

“Yes, but I can see the way you look at him. I can see the way you talk to him. What am I to believe?”

“My love.”

“I believe in that. Yes. Your love. But for whom?”

“Don’t you know?”

“He trusts you, too. Which one of us are you deceiving?”

She looked at him, her eyes narrowing with the indifferent, even, enigmatic glance that no one could answer. She said slowly, with the innocence of a perfect calm:

“Maybe both.”

He stepped toward her, his voice tense, his eyes pleading:

“Frances, I trust you. I wouldn’t last here one day if I didn’t trust you. But I can’t stand it. We’ve tried. There’s nothing we can do. You must see that now. It’s hopeless. The boat leaves at dawn. It’s the last one before the sea freezes. You’ll go back. You’ll take that boat tomorrow.”

She spoke slowly, without changing her voice, her words lazy, indifferent:

“I won’t take that boat, Michael. Someone else is taking it.”

“Who’s taking it?”

“You.”

He stared at her, speechless.

“Keep working on that fire,” she ordered.

He obeyed. She bent over him, whispering quickly, eagerly:

“Listen carefully. You’ll get on board. You’ll hide in the hold. The Commandant won’t make his inspection rounds tonight, I’ll see to that.”

“But . . .”

“Here are the keys to the outside door and the gate. There’s only one guard on the wall who can see the landing. Watch him. At midnight he’ll be removed.”

“How?”

“Leave that to me. When you see him go—hurry to the boat.”

“And you?”

“I’m staying here.”

He stared at her. She added:

“I’m staying here just a little longer. To keep him from discovering your escape. Don’t worry. There’s no danger. He’ll never know who helped you.”

He took her hand. “Frances . . .”

“Dearest, not a word. Please! I’ve lived three long months for just this night. We can’t weaken now. We can’t retreat. It’s our last battle. You understand?”

He nodded slowly. She whispered:

“I’ll join you in a free country where we’ll take these last two years of our lives, and seal them, and never open them again.”

“But I’d like to read again about what you’ve done.”

“There’s only one thing I want you to read and remember, only one thing that I’ll write over these years: I love you.”

They heard Kareyev’s steps outside. Michael went out as he entered. Joan stood at the open door of the stove where a bright flame whistled merrily. She said to Michael, aloud:

“Thank you, this will warm the room. I’ll feel much better—tonight.”

——V——

The island was blue under the moon, blue-white, sparkling like hard clean sugar. Dark shadows cut black holes in the snow, with sharp gaping edges. The sky, a black precipice above, twinkled with a white foam of stars floating over its smooth surface, as the foam that crashed furiously against the island, leaping in silver sprays high over the top of the walls. On the black precipice of the sea below floated the white shadows of the first ice.

The lights were out in the monastery. The entrance door had been locked for the night. The gray flag fought the wind on the tower.

Michael sat on his cot in the darkness and watched the wall outside. A guard walked there slowly, back and forth. His lantern seemed a little red eye winking at Michael. His muffler flapped in the wind.

Michael’s roommate, the old professor, had gone to bed. But he could not sleep. He sighed in the darkness, and made the sign of the cross.

“Aren’t you going to bed, Michael?”

“Not yet.”

“Why do you keep your coat on?”

“I’m cold.”

“That’s funny. I feel stuffy in here. . . . Well, goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

The professor turned to the wall. Then he sighed. Then he turned to Michael again.

“Do you hear the sea? It has been beating there for centuries. It’s been moaning before we came here. It will be moaning long after we’re gone.”

He made the sign of the cross. Michael was watching the guard’s lantern.

“We wander in the darkness,” said the professor. “Man has lost sight of beauty. There is a great beauty on this earth of ours. A beauty one’s spirit can approach only bare-headed. But how many of us ever get a glimpse of it?”

Commandant Kareyev’s window was a long, thin, blue cut in the darkness of his room. The moonlight made a long, thin band across the floor, checkered into panes, pointed as the door of an ancient cathedral. In the darkness by the window, Joan’s head was leaning against the back of an armchair, her face a pale white with soft blue shadows under her cheekbones, with a glowing blue patch in the triangle under her chin thrown back, her mouth dark and soft and tender, glistening with a few lost sparks of moonlight. The darkness swallowed her body and only her hands were white on her knees, and in her hands lay the face of Commandant Kareyev at her feet. He did not move. The light of a single candle on the table did not reach them. He whispered, his dark hair brushing her white wrists:

“. . . and then, someday, you may want to leave me. . . .”

She shook her head slowly.

“You may be lonely here in winter. The sea freezes. The nights are so long.”

“Nights like this?”

He looked at the window, smiling.

“Lovely, isn’t it? I’ve never noticed that before. As if . . . as if it were a night for just the two of us.”

Somewhere, far downstairs, an old clock slowly chimed twelve. She repeated softly at the last stroke:

“Yes . . . for just the two . . . of us. Let’s step outside. It’s lovely.”

Commandant Kareyev wrapped her winter cloak around her shoulders. The huge collar of fluffy gray fox swallowed her head, rising over the tips of her blond curls.

On the gallery outside, a soft silver glow streamed from the heavy, sparkling fringe of icicles on the cornices above their heads. A guard with a lantern passed slowly on the wall before them. Beyond the wall rose the black funnel of the boat.

Commandant Kareyev looked at her. It had been his first wine in five years. It had been his first celebration. He drew her closer. His hand slipped under the fluffy fox collar. She jerked herself away.

“What’s the matter?” he whispered.

“Not here.”

“Why?”

Calmly, she pointed to the guard on the wall, a few steps away. Commandant Kareyev smiled. He blew his whistle. The guard turned abruptly, raised his head, saluted.

“Report to post number four at once,” Kareyev shouted over the roar of the waves. “Patrol it until further orders.”

The guard saluted, climbed down, hurried away across the white yard, snow crunching under his boots.

Commandant Kareyev’s lips sank into Joan’s. His arms crushed her body against his.

“Did you ever feel a moment when you knew why you had been living, my dearest . . . dearest . . .” he whispered. “I’m happy . . . Joan.”

Her head was thrown far back, so far that he could see the reflection of the stars in her eyes; so far that she could see the yard below. Her body fell backwards recklessly, limp against his arm. She was smiling triumphantly, deliriously.

“Why do you look so strange, Joan? Why do you smile like that?”

“I’m happy—tonight,” she whispered at the stars.

Michael opened the entrance door noiselessly. He tried with his foot the frozen, slippery steps outside. He felt the gun in his pocket. He stepped out. It took him three minutes to pull the door closed again, slowly, gradually, without a sound. He locked it behind him.

The blue snow glared at him. But there was a narrow line of shadow under the wall of the building. He could follow it to the landing gate. He glided silently into the deep snow, pressing himself against the wall. The snow rose higher than his boots. He could feel it sliding inside. It felt hot as a burn against the holes in his old woolen socks. He moved slowly, his eyes on the empty wall where the guard had been, drawn by it as by a magnet.

He stopped across from the landing gate. He could see the boat’s funnel beyond it. There was no sound on the island but the beating of waves against the wall. He could see two little red dots of lanterns far away. He had to cross to the gate in the open, in the snow. But the guards were too far. The lights were out in the building.

He threw himself down in the snow and crawled as fast as he could toward the gate. He felt the snow biting his wrists between his gloves and sleeves. Halfway across, he raised his head to look back at the building. He stopped.

High on an open gallery, he saw two figures. They were immobile in a passionate embrace. The man’s back was to the yard below.

Michael rose to his feet. He stood in the open, in the glaring snow, and looked at them. One glove slid from his hand, but he didn’t notice it. There was no sound as the glove fell; no sound of his breathing, not even of his heart. Then he ran through the snow, in the moonlight, back to the monastery door.

Commandant Kareyev and Joan turned when the door of his room was flung open. Joan screamed. Michael stood on the threshold, snow dripping from his clothes.

“You might need these,” he said and threw the keys into Kareyev’s face. “I’ve tried to escape. I don’t care what you do to me. And I don’t care what you do to her.”

“Michael!” Joan screamed. “Get out of here! Keep quiet!”

“She’s afraid,” said Michael, “that I’ll tell you that she’s my wife!

“Oh, that’s all right,” he continued, as no answer came. “You can have her, with my compliments and permission. Only I don’t think you needed the permission.”

Commandant Kareyev looked at Joan. She stood straight, looking at him. The cloak with the fluffy collar had fallen to her feet.

Commandant Kareyev bent down and picked up the keys. Then he blew his whistle three times. A little drop of blood rolled from his lips where the keys had struck him.

Comrade Fedossitch and two guards appeared at the door. Comrade Fedossitch was hastily pulling his night-shirt into his trousers.

“Put Citizen Volkontzev in the tower detention cell,” Commandant Kareyev ordered.

“Why don’t you throw me into the pit?” asked Michael. “You’ll be rid of me quicker. Then you can enjoy my wife without any trouble.”

“Did you say—your wife, Citizen Volkontzev?” gasped Comrade Fedossitch.

“Put Citizen Volkontzev in the tower detention cell,” repeated Commandant Kareyev.

The guards grasped Michael’s arms. He walked out, head high, laughing. Comrade Fedossitch followed.

The long flame of a candle on the table hissed in the silence, smoking, reaching the end of the little wax butt. Commandant Kareyev looked at Joan. She stood leaning against the table, her head bent, looking at her toe buried in the fur collar on the floor.

Commandant Kareyev walked to a shelf, took a new candle, lighted it, replaced the old one. He stood waiting. She did not look at him, did not speak. He asked:

“What are you going to say?”

“Nothing.”

“Is it true?”

“My name is Frances Volkontzeva.”

“You love him?”

She looked at him slowly, fixedly, from under her eyelids, without raising her head.

“I didn’t say that,” she answered.

He waited. She was silent.

“Is that all you have to say to me?” he asked.

“No . . . but that’s all I’m going to say.”

“Why?”

“I won’t explain. You won’t believe me.”

“That’s for me to decide.”

His words were an order; but his eyes were a plea.

She studied him again from under her eyelids. Then she raised her head. She looked straight at him. Her eyes were clear and haughty, as they always were when she was proud of the truth in her words or prouder of the lie.

“Well, yes, I’m his wife. Yes, I came here only to save my husband. I came here hating all Communists. But I stayed because I loved one.”

He did not move. But she noticed that he made an effort not to move and she knew that she could go on.

“At first it was just a game, like my name Joan. But, you see, Joan killed Frances, and now it’s Joan who lives . . . and loves.”

“She did not forget Frances’ plans, however.”

“Oh, don’t you understand? I wanted him out of the way. How could I remain here with that threat, that reminder always before me? I wanted his freedom to feel that I had earned mine. But you don’t have to believe me.”

Her eyes were defiant; but her lips trembled, soft and childish, and her body leaned against the table, suddenly frail, helpless, calling for his protection.

“I was young when I married Michael. I thought I loved him. I didn’t learn what love could be until it was too late.”

In his arms was all the strength of his despair, of his faith grateful to be forced to believe again.

“It’s never too late,” he whispered, “while one lives—if one still wants to live.”

She was laughing through his kisses, laughing happily.

“Let him escape,” she whispered. “You can’t leave him here. And you can’t kill him. He’ll always stand between us.”

“Don’t talk about him, now, dear. Let’s just keep silent, and let me hold you like this . . . close.”

“Let him go. I’ll stay here with you . . . forever.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking. If I let him go, there will be an investigation. They’ll learn your real name and arrest you. We’ll be separated. Forever.”

“I can’t stay here if he does.”

“And as long as I’m Commandant here, I can’t betray my Party’s confidence.”

“Well, then, do you have to be Commandant here?”

He let her out of his arms, stepped back, and looked at her. He was not indignant, just surprised.

“Oh, don’t you see?” Her voice fell to a passionate, breathless whisper. “I’ve betrayed my whole past when I said I loved you. Do the same. Let’s kill the years behind us with one blow—and start life again from the same grave.”

“What do you mean, Joan?”

“Let’s escape all together—the three of us. I know that you can’t leave without permission, but we’ll take the emergency motorboat. We’ll go to Nijni Kolimsk. I have a friend there—an English merchant. He has connections in the GPU—it’s right across the street.”

“And . . . then?”

“He’ll arrange our passage on an English ship to foreign lands, far, far away. To America. There Michael will give me my freedom. It’s a fair exchange. And then . . .”

“Joan, I’ve belonged to a Party for twenty-two years. A Party that fought for the revolution.”

“That fought for them? The people, the collective? Look at them, your millions. They sleep, they eat, they marry, they die. Is there one among them who will shed one tear in honor of a man that gave up his desire of desires for their sake?”

“They’re my brothers, Joan. You don’t understand our duty, our great struggle. They’re hungry. They have to be fed.”

“But your own heart will die of starvation.”

“They’ve toiled hopelessly for centuries.”

“But you’ll give up your own last hope.”

“They’ve suffered so much.”

“But you’re going to learn what suffering means.”

“There is a great duty . . .”

“Yes, we all have a great duty. A sacred inviolable duty, and we spend our lives trying to violate it. Our duty to ourselves. We fight it, we stifle it, we compromise. But there comes a day when it gives us an order, its last, highest order—and then we can’t disobey any longer. You want to go. With me. You want it. That’s the highest of all reasons. You can’t question it. When you can’t ask any questions—then you know you’re facing your duty.”

He moaned helplessly:

“Oh, Joan, Joan!”

She stood before him, solemn as a priestess looking into the future, but her words were soft, dreamy, as if her voice were smiling between her stern lips, and it seemed to him that it was not her voice, not her words, but the soft, faint movements of her mouth that drew him, tempting, irresistible, into a future it knew, but he had never known.

“Over there, far away, electric fires will blaze on dark boulevards . . . and they’ll play the ‘Song of Dancing Lights’ . . .”

He whispered obediently:

“. . . and I’ll carry you out of the car . . .”

“. . . and I’ll teach you to dance . . .”

“. . . and I’ll laugh, laugh, and will never feel guilty . . .”

“Are we going?”

He seemed to awaken suddenly. He stepped aside. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again she saw the look she had forgotten on the Beast’s face.

“The boat is to leave at dawn,” he said slowly. “I’ll order it to wait till noon. You can pack your clothes. At noon, you’ll go—alone.”

“Is that your choice?”

“I know what I’m missing. But there are some things I can’t do. I want you to go—before it is too late for me.”

“Repeat it again.” Her voice was calm, like his, and indifferent.

“Tomorrow—at noon—you will go—alone.”

“All right, Commandant. I’ll go to sleep, since I have to travel tomorrow. . . . Goodnight. . . . When you think of me, remember only that I . . . loved you.”

——VI——

The big trunk stood open in the middle of Joan’s room. She folded her dresses slowly and put them in, one by one. She wrapped her slippers in paper. She gathered her stockings, that made a film thin as smoke over her fingers; her white powder puffs, her crystal bottles of perfume. She moved through the room quietly, without hurry. She was as calmly indifferent as on the day when she had unpacked that trunk.

She could hear, above the roar of the sea, the low droning of bells that moaned when the wind was very strong. The sea, a dirty white, turbid like dishwater, swayed furiously, ready to be slung out of the pail. The spurting sprays of foam soiled the sky to a muddy gray.

Twice, Joan had stepped out into the hall and looked at the room next to hers. Its door was open. It was empty. Its new carpet was a deep blue in the daylight. The lace spread and pillows on the bed had not been disturbed. One pillow had been flung against the wall in a far corner.

The monastery was silent. The wind whistled in the old abandoned cells high on top of the towers. Below, in the long, dim halls, whispers crawled eagerly, stealthily, as hushed gusts of wind.

“. . . and all the time she was his wife.”

“I don’t envy him.”

“I do. I wish I had a woman who loved me like that.”

In a huddled group on a stair landing, the old professor whispered, sighing:

“How lonely this place will be without her!”

“I’m glad she’s going,” a weary voice answered, “for her sake.”

At a window, the general leaned on the Count’s shoulder. They were watching the sea.

“Well, the Beast has made people suffer,” the general whispered. “It’s his turn.”

“He’s getting the loan back,” the Count remarked, “with plenty of interest.”

Comrade Fedossitch leaned heavily, crouching, against a windowsill. He was not looking at the sea. He was looking, his shrewd, narrow pupils fixed tensely, up at the tower platform under the bells. The tall figure of a man stood there, at the parapet. Comrade Fedossitch had a good idea of what the Commandant was thinking.

Commandant Kareyev stood on the tower, the wind tearing his hair. He was looking far out to where the clouds, as a heavy gray curtain, had descended over the coast and all that lay beyond the coast. Commandant Kareyev had faced long city streets where barricades rose red with human flags and human blood, where, behind every corner, from every rooftop, machine guns coughed a death rattle deadlier than that of a consumptive. He had faced long trenches where behind rusted barbed wire thin, bluish blades of steel waited, silent, sure, pitiless. But his face had never looked as it did now.

Steps grated on the stairs behind him. He turned. The young engineer was coming up, carrying a stepladder and a new red flag. The old flag was gray, shivering desolately in its last convulsions, high over the cupola white with snow.

The engineer looked at him. In his young, blue eyes was a sorrow he knew they were sharing. He said slowly:

“It’s a bad morning, Commandant. Gray. No sun.”

“There will be no sun for a long time,” said Kareyev.

“I’m cold. I’m so cold. And . . .” He looked straight into Kareyev’s eyes. “I’m not the only one, Commandant.”

“No,” said Commandant Kareyev, “you’re not the only one.”

The engineer put his stepladder against the tower wall. Then he turned again. He said, as if each word were to pierce the grim, fathomless pupils of the man he had hated until that moment:

“If I found that the climate here wasn’t good for my lifeblood, I’d flee to the end of the world—if I were free.”

Kareyev looked at him. Then he looked slowly up, at the old flag fighting the wind between the clouds and the snow. He said thoughtfully, irrelevantly, pointing up:

“Look at that red flag. Red against the white snow. Doesn’t look well together.”

“The flag has faded,” the engineer said slowly. “The snow has taken its color away.”

“It was of cheap material. Good stuff keeps its color—in all weather.”

“It’s due for a change, Commandant. It has served its time.”

He climbed up the ladder. He turned again to look down at the man before him. He spoke suddenly, with an impetuous fire, with the solemn gravity of a prophet, his voice clear, vibrant in the wind:

“A thousand years from now, Commandant, whether the world is red as this flag or white as the snow, who will care that a certain Communist on a speck of an island gave up the very blood of his heart—for the glory of the world revolution?”

Joan’s door was left open. Commandant Kareyev passed by. He hesitated. She saw him and called:

“Good morning.”

“Good morning,” he answered.

“Won’t you come in? We’re not parting like enemies, are we?”

“Of course not.”

“Maybe you’ll help me to pack? Here, can you fold this blue velvet dress for me?”

She handed him the dress she had worn the night before, his favorite one. He folded it; he handed it back to her; he said brusquely:

“I’m sorry. I can’t help you much. I’m busy.”

He walked away. In the corridor, Comrade Fedossitch stopped him. Comrade Fedossitch bowed. Comrade Fedossitch said gently:

“The boat is waiting for Frances Volkontzeva, Comrade Commandant.”

“Well?”

“Do I understand it correctly that she is going away free, that she is not to be arrested for her counterrevolutionary, treacherous plan?”

“She is going away free.”

“I should think our duty is to send her to the GPU in Nijni Kolimsk. I should think hers is a serious offense against the State, punishable by . . .”

“Someday, Comrade Fedossitch, you may be Commandant of this island. Someday. Not yet.”

Commandant Kareyev saw Joan again in the library. She was saying goodbye to the convicts. She was leaving the radio to them to remember her by, she said. She noticed him at the door, but did not turn.

A strange thing happened. The pale, bearded Senator, who had never looked at her, got up. He walked straight to her, took her hand, and raised it to his lips in the most courtly manner.

“I want to tell you, Citizen Volkontzeva,” he said in his hoarse, dead voice, “that you are a great woman.”

“Thank you, Senator,” she answered. “Only, when I go away, I shall not be Citizen Volkontzeva any more. I’m going as Joan Harding.”

Commandant Kareyev hurried away. Outside, on the wharf, the pockmarked, one-eyed captain was leaning on the rail of the boat, smoking his pipe. He looked at the sky and called:

“Almost noon, Comrade Commandant. The woman ready?”

“Not yet,” Kareyev answered.

Soundlessly, as a shadow, Comrade Fedossitch suddenly stood at his elbow. Comrade Fedossitch saluted and said sweetly:

“Of course, Comrade Commandant, there’s no question of our loyalty to you. All this will never be known. But I was just thinking that if one of us Party members here decided to go and tell the GPU about the aristocrat who got away . . .”

“The emergency motorboat is at the service of the first one who wants to go,” said Kareyev. “Ask me for the key when you need it.”

A guard came running down the hill, saluting, reporting breathlessly:

“Citizen Volkontzeva wants to see you, Comrade Commandant!”

Kareyev ran up to the monastery, through the snow, leaping two steps at once. The guard looked after him, surprised. Comrade Fedossitch nodded slowly.

Joan’s trunk was closed.

“I think it’s time,” she said calmly when Kareyev entered. “Will you have the men take my trunk down?”

“You’ll have to wait a little,” he answered desperately. “The boat isn’t ready.”

Then he went to his room and slammed the door. She listened at the wall of her cell, but could not hear a sound.

Then she heard his steps again. She opened her door.

He fell at her feet, as if all strength had gone out of his body and spirit.

“You won’t go alone . . . you won’t go alone . . .” was all he could whisper.

She stroked his head, smiling, kissing his hair. She whispered:

“Dear . . . we’ll be so happy . . . so happy . . .”

He buried his face in the folds of her dress. He did not speak. His hands clasped her legs, holding her, in a desperate panic of fear that she would vanish from his fingers, disappear forever. She whispered:

“It will be easy. . . . Tonight. We’ll take the motorboat. The three of us.”

“You won’t leave me . . . you’ll never leave me.”

“No, dear, never. . . . Tell the captain to go.”

“And they’ll play the ‘Song of Dancing Lights’ . . . just for the two of us. . . .”

“Get the motorboat ready.”

“I’ll buy you little satin slippers. Lined with soft pink feathers. I’ll slip them myself on your bare feet. . . .”

“Destroy the wireless, so they can’t give an alarm.”

The wind had chased the clouds. A red, shivering line panted soundlessly over the sea where the sun had drowned. Red stains died slowly in the snow of the cupolas.

The convicts had finished their supper. Commandant Kareyev could hear the clinking of dishes in the kitchen. But there was no sound of voices. He knew what they were all thinking. When he walked through the corridors, he saw all eyes turn away from him with a forced indifference; and he felt these eyes staring at him behind his back.

Passing by the guard room, he heard Comrade Fedossitch. Comrade Fedossitch was speaking to his friend, the head of the guards. He noticed Kareyev and did not lower his voice.

“. . . silver, carpets, wine . . . that’s what bourgeois luxuries lead to. I never approved of the idea of bringing the bitch here. I knew she was a White.”

Commandant Kareyev passed, without entering.

Comrade Fedossitch followed him.

“The Comrade Commandant inspected the motorboat today,” he remarked. “Anything wrong with it?”

“No. But it’s going to be used.”

“Ah . . . when?”

“Tomorrow. Citizen Volkontzeva is under arrest. She’ll be sent to the GPU in the morning.”

“Alone?”

“No. With a trusted escort. Maybe—you.”

He turned to go.

“If Citizen Volkontzeva is under arrest”—Comrade Fedossitch hunched his shoulders more ingratiatingly than ever—“will you want me to put a guard at her door?”

“If I were you, I’d be careful, Comrade Fedossitch. Someone else here might find himself with a guard at his door.”

When it had grown dark, Commandant Kareyev approached the steps of the tower that guarded the wireless. There were no candles on the stairway. There was no glass in the windows. Snow gathered on the steps, blown in by the wind. He could distinguish the windows by the twinkling stars; the walls of the tower were black as the sky.

He went up slowly, carefully, trying to muffle the sound of snow creaking under his feet.

On the first landing he saw a shadow against the stars. The shadow coughed hoarsely, heaving its shallow chest.

“Good evening, Comrade Fedossitch,” said the Commandant. “What are you doing here?”

“Just taking a stroll, Comrade Commandant. Like yourself.”

“Have a cigarette?”

Kareyev struck a match. Their eyes met for a second over the quivering little flame. The wind blew it out. The two red lighted dots remained in the darkness.

“There’s a strong wind tonight,” said Comrade Fedossitch, “and the sea is rough. Dangerous for sailing.”

“The cold isn’t good for your lungs, Comrade Fedossitch. You should be careful of things that aren’t good for you.”

“I never mind it in the line of my duty. Good Communists don’t let anything stand in the way of their duty. Good Communists like you and me.”

“It’s a pretty late hour for any duty you may have to perform.”

“True, Comrade Commandant. I don’t have as many responsibilities as you have. And, speaking of responsibilities, did it ever occur to you that it’s a bit careless the way we leave our wireless in a lonely tower where anyone can reach it?”

Commandant Kareyev made a step forward and ordered slowly:

“Go back to your room. And stay there.”

Comrade Fedossitch barred the stairs with his body, his outstretched arms touching the walls.

“You won’t go up!” he hissed.

“Get out of my way!” Commandant Kareyev whispered.

“You won’t get that wireless, you traitor!”

Commandant Kareyev’s hand seized the long sinewy throat; his other hand pulled the gun out of Comrade Fedossitch’s belt. He kicked him, and the comrade tumbled down several steps. When he straightened himself he felt Commandant Kareyev’s gun in his back.

“Go down, rat. If you open your mouth—I shoot.”

Comrade Fedossitch did not make a sound. Commandant Kareyev led him down to the yard. He blew his whistle.

“Citizen Fedossitch is under arrest,” he said to the guards calmly, “for insubordination. Take him into the pit.”

Comrade Fedossitch did not say a word. He choked, coughing, his shoulders heaving convulsively. The guards led him away, and Commandant Kareyev followed.

In a dark, clammy, low-vaulted room, the guards opened a heavy stone trapdoor with an old brass ring. They tied a rope around Comrade Fedossitch’s waist. In the light of a smoked lantern, its flame swaying in a draft, his face was the color of a shell with damp, greenish pearls on his forehead. The guards unrolled the rope, lowering him into the pit. They heard his cough growing fainter as he went down. Commandant Kareyev stood watching.

The wireless room was high up in the tower. No one could hear, in the yard below, when the wireless set cracked, breaking in Commandant Kareyev’s strong hands. He made sure the parts were crushed beyond repair. He had to hold them up to the starlight to see. He did not strike a match. The wind blew the hair from his wet forehead.

Commandant Kareyev opened Joan’s door soundlessly, without knocking.

“Come on,” he whispered. “All’s ready.”

She had been waiting, wrapped in a warm coat, a fur collar tight under her chin, a fur cap over her blond curls.

“Don’t make any noise,” he ordered. “We’ll go down and get Volkontzev.”

She raised her smiling lips for a kiss. He kissed them calmly, tenderly. There was no hesitation in his movements, no doubt in his eyes. He was the Communist Kareyev who had fought in the civil war.

Michael was sitting on his cot when the door of his cell was thrown open. He jumped up. Joan entered first. Commandant Kareyev followed. Michael stood, his dark eyes a silent question. Kareyev threw to him a fur-lined leather jacket.

“Put this on,” he ordered. “And don’t make any noise. And follow.”

“Where?” Michael asked.

“You’re escaping. And so am I. The three of us.”

Michael’s wide eyes did not leave Joan.

“I suppose you understand the bargain,” said Commandant Kareyev. “It’s your life in exchange for your woman.”

“Supposing,” Michael asked, “I don’t accept the bargain?”

Joan stood facing him, her back to Kareyev. Her voice was calm, indifferent; but her eyes were trying silently, desperately to make Michael understand.

“There are things you don’t understand, Michael. And some that you forget.”

“The three of us,” said Kareyev, “have an account to settle, Volkontzev. And we can settle it better on free ground. Are you afraid to go?”

Michael shrugged and put on the jacket slowly.

“But aren’t you afraid of the settlement, Commandant?” he asked.

“Come on,” said Joan. “We have no time to talk.”

“You’d better take this,” said Kareyev, slipping a gun into Michael’s hand. “We may need it.”

Michael looked at him for a second, in silent appreciation of his trust; then he took the gun.

The head of the guards was having a night inspection of his staff in the yard back of the monastery, according to Commandant Kareyev’s orders. There were no red lanterns moving on the walls.

Through the thunder of the waves, no one could hear the roar of the motorboat as it shot out into the darkness.

The waves rose high as swelling breasts heaving convulsively. The moon dropped long blotches of a cold, silver fire into the water and the sea tore it into glimmering rags. The stars drowned in the water, and knocking furiously against each other, the waves tried to throw them back in white, gleaming sprays.

The waves rose slowly and hung over the boat, motionless as walls of black, polished glass. Then a white foam burst on their crest, as if a cork had popped, and roared down the black side, throwing the boat up, out of the water, to land on the boiling crest of another mountain.

Commandant Kareyev bent over the wheel. His eyebrows made one straight line across his face and his eyes held one straight line ahead, into the darkness. He could feel every muscle of his body tensed to the will of his fingers that clutched the wheel like claws. The loops of his bent arms worked as the wings, as the nerves of the boat. He had lost his cap. His hair rose straight in the wind like a pennant.

“Volkontzev! Hold Joan!” he yelled once.

Joan looked back at the island. She saw it for the last time as a lonely black shadow, with a faint silver glow in its cupolas, that speeded away, disappearing behind the peaks of the waves.

At midnight, they saw red sparks gleaming faintly ahead. Kareyev swerved to the right, speeding away from the twinkling village. The boat crushed into the soft bottom and stopped. Kareyev carried Joan ashore.

A deserted beach ran into a forest of tall pines, silent, asleep, their branches heavy with snow. A mile to their left was the village; to their right, many miles down the white beach, the searchlight of a coast guard station revolved slowly, groping the sea.

A little lane wound itself on the outskirt of the forest. Snow had covered all tracks. Only two deep ruts left by peasants’ wheels still remained like rails cut into the frozen ground.

Commandant Kareyev walked first; Joan followed. Michael came last, his hand on his gun.

They walked in silence. The wind had died. The moon beyond the forest threw long, black shadows of pine trees over the lane and far out across the beach. Farther, by the water, the snow gleamed, throwing up a hard, blue light.

A low branch bent under its white load, shuddered, powdering them with frozen dust. A white rabbit stuck its long ears from behind a shrub and darted into the forest, a leaping, soundless snowball.

They selected a lonely house on the outskirts of the village. Commandant Kareyev knocked at the door. A dog barked somewhere, choking in a long alarming howl.

A sleepy peasant opened the door fearfully, a sheepskin coat trembling on his shoulders, his eyes blinking over a candle.

“Who goes there?”

“Official business, comrade,” said Kareyev. “We need two good horses and a sleigh.”

“So help me God, Comrade Chief,” the peasant whined, bowing, making the sign of the cross with a freckled hand, “we have no horses, so help me God. We’re poor people, Comrade Chief.”

One of Commandant Kareyev’s hands crumpled significantly a wad of paper money; the other one closed over the butt of his gun.

“I said we needed two good horses and a sleigh,” he repeated slowly. “And we need them quickly.”

“Yes, Comrade Chief, yes, sir, as you wish.”

Bowing, chewing nervously his long, reddish beard, the peasant led them to the stables behind his house, the candle dripping wax on his trembling hand.

Commandant Kareyev selected the horses. Michael gathered straw from the stable floor and filled the bottom of the sleigh around Joan’s feet, wrapping them in an old fur blanket. Commandant Kareyev jumped to the driver’s seat. He threw the wad of bills into the red beard. He warned:

“This is confidential official business, comrade. If you breathe a word about it—it’s the Revolutionary Tribunal for you. Understand?”

“Yes, sir, Comrade Chief, the Lord bless you, yes, sir . . .” the peasant muttered, bowing.

He was still bowing when the sleigh flashed out of his yard in a cloud of snow.

——VII——

At midnight, the head of the guards sneaked noiselessly to the door of the pit. He listened cautiously; he heard no sound in the monastery. He pulled the trapdoor open and called down, raising his lantern over the pit:

“Are you there, Grisha?”

“Is it . . .” came from far below, in a gust of coughing, “. . . you, Makar?”

“It is. Wanted to know how you were getting along, pal.”

At the bottom of a deep well with icicles sparkling in the crevices of its stone walls, Comrade Fedossitch huddled in the straw, his thin fingers at his throat, his eyes like two black puddles in his livid face. He hissed, a growl that ended in a moan:

“It took you long enough to get curious.”

“His orders. Said not to come near you.”

“Seen him around in the last few hours?”

“No.”

“Let me out!”

“Are you in your right mind, Grisha? Against his orders?”

“You blind fool! See if you can find him. Or the woman. Or the motorboat.”

“Lord help us, Grisha! Do you think . . .”

“Hurry! Go and see! Then let me out!”

Comrade Fedossitch laughed when Makar came running back, blubbering crazily, incredulously:

“He’s gone! He’s gone! They’re gone! The boat’s gone!”

“I’m the head of this island, now,” said Comrade Fedossitch, his teeth chattering, when the rope jerked him out of the pit. “And it’s my boot into the teeth of the first one who doesn’t obey orders!”

“Bring Citizen Volkontzev here!” was the first order.

Makar departed obediently and returned wide-eyed, reporting that Citizen Volkontzev had gone, too.

“Well,” laughed Comrade Fedossitch, “the Comrade Commandant was a bigger fool than I thought.”

Up the old tower stairs to the wireless room Comrade Fedossitch ran, stumbling, stopping to cough, shadows dancing crazily around the shaking lantern in his hand. Makar followed, bewildered. Comrade Fedossitch’s boot kicked the door open. The light of the lantern shuddered in a red circle over the crushed remains of the wireless set.

“I’ll get him,” Comrade Fedossitch choked. “I’ll get him! That great red hero! That arrogant Beast!”

Then he raised his lantern, and waved it triumphantly, and yelled, pointing to a dark object in a corner:

“The spotlight, Makar! The spotlight! We’ll signal the coast! We’ll get him! Connect it and bring it up! To the bell tower!”

Comrade Fedossitch’s woolen scarf slapped him furiously in the face when he emerged upon the platform of the bell tower. He threw himself forward against the wind, as if pushing aside an unseen, gigantic hand that tried to hurl him back down the stairs; his long shadow leaped dizzily over the parapet and into space.

He put his lantern down and seized the rope of the bells. It burned his bare hand. He tore the scarf off his neck and wound it around his fingers. Then he pulled the rope.

In clear weather the bells could be heard on the mainland. The sky was clear. The wind was blowing towards the coast.

The bells gave a long, moaning cry. Frozen snow showered Comrade Fedossitch’s shoulders. A shudder ran through the old monastery, from the tower down to the pit.

The bells roared in agony, the brass ringing in long, clamorous sobs. Furious blows hammered like a huge metal whip, and the droning thunder rose heavily, floating slowly away, high over the sea.

Comrade Fedossitch swung the rope ferociously. He dropped his scarf. He did not feel his bare hands freezing to the rope. He laughed deliriously, coughing. He ran across the platform and swung back, his legs and arms twisted around the rope, flying, swaying over the tower like a monstrous pendulum.

Makar came up the stairs with the spotlight, dragging, like a snake rustling against the steps, a long wire that connected it with a dynamo in the room below. He stood still, terrified. Comrade Fedossitch yelled, swinging, twisting the rope:

“They’ve got to hear! They’ve got to hear!”

Across the sea, at the coast guard station, the moving searchlight stopped suddenly.

“Do you hear?” asked a soldier who wore a peaked khaki cap with a red star.

“Funny,” said his assistant. “Sounds like a bell.”

“Can’t be coming from anywhere but hell, perhaps.”

“It’s from Strastnoy Island.”

And as they stood, listening, peering into the darkness, a bright tongue of light flashed far out on the horizon, like a lance slashing the black sky, and the wound quickly closed again.

“Trouble,” said the soldier in the peaked cap. . . .

Comrade Fedossitch was signaling his message to the mainland. He crouched by the spotlight, on his knees, pressing it feverishly to his chest, as a precious child which he had to shield from the wind, which he could not let go, clasping it with fingers stiff as pliers. He clawed his chest, trying to warm his fingers, tearing his shirt, without feeling the wind on his naked throat. He laughed. His laughter rolled a long howl of moans and coughs and triumph into the wind, following the streaks of light that flashed as darts shooting straight into the breast of an unseen enemy far away in the darkness.

Makar stood, paralyzed, but for one hand that made quickly, fearfully, the sign of the cross.

The soldiers at the coast guard station knew the code. The white streaks beyond the sea panted slowly, letter by letter:

“C-O-M-M-A-N-D-A-N-T C-O-N-V-I-C-T W-I-F-E E-S-C-A-P-E.”

From under eight hoofs eight spurts of snow dust flew up like coils of steam; out of the horses’ nostrils steam flew up like spurts of snow dust. The whip in Commandant Kareyev’s hand whirled over their heads and sank into the horses’ heaving ribs.

Under them the white earth rolled backwards as if streaming like a waterfall down into a precipice under the sleigh. By their side snow and tree stumps melted into a long white belt. Above them huge pines slowly swam past, carried immobile on a speeding ground.

The horses bent into arcs; their fore and hind legs met under their bodies; then they sprang into straight lines, flying over the ground, their legs stretched out, immobile.

Joan’s eyes were fixed on the whip that whistled as if in the hand of the executioner on Strastnoy Island; as if beating the darkness ahead. She could feel the speed with her lips, the wind pounding against her teeth. Michael’s arm held her tightly, his fingers sinking into her coat.

Through miles of forest, where the pines seemed to close, meeting across the road ahead, and the road, like a white knife cut them apart in its flight; through clearings and plains where the black sky swallowed the white snow into one ball of darkness and the road seemed a gray cloud carrying them over an abyss; over ruts, and snow heaps, and fallen logs they flew through the night, every mile and every hour a victory.

“Are you cold, Joan?”

“Button your collar, Frances. It’s open.”

When the lights of a village sparkled ahead through the fog of snow dust, Commandant Kareyev turned abruptly and sent the sleigh bumping through narrow side roads. As they flew past they could see, at a distance, the gleaming cross of the church over the low roofs, and the dark flag—red in the daytime—over the house of the village Soviet. Commandant Kareyev did not look at the flag; only his whip bit ferociously into the horses’ ribs.

Down the dark village streets, dots of lanterns were hurrying, gathering in twinkling groups, rushing away. A bell was ringing, as a long, tremulous, alarming call.

“Hold on to Joan, Volkontzev! Sharp turn!”

The moon had set and clouds, like a black fog, swam slowly up, swallowing the stars. A light down of snow fluttered lazily.

“Look at that snow, Frances,” said Michael. “We won’t see any for a long, long time. This is our farewell to Russia.”

“This is a farewell,” said Kareyev, “for two of us.”

“Yes,” said Michael, “for two of us.”

Ahead of them, a faint white thread, whiter than the snow, cut the sky from the darkness of the earth.

“Tomorrow, at dawn, we’ll be far away at sea,” said Kareyev, “and the boat will be flying towards a new country for Joan.”

“. . . where she can forget all about Strastnoy Island.”

“. . . and all that brought her to it.”

“No matter what the future,” said Joan, “I’ll never forget some of the past. One of us will need this. I want him to remember it.”

“One of us,” said Kareyev, “will not need it. The other one may not want it.”

Joan’s head dropped back. The snow down caught on her eyelashes.

She started with a cry; she jumped up, but the speed of the sleigh threw her down again.

“There . . . there . . . look!”

They turned. The snow plain stretched like a gray fog behind them. Through the fog, far down the road they had passed, a black spot rolled toward them. It looked like a beetle with two long legs clawing the snow. But it moved too fast for a beetle.

Commandant Kareyev’s whip rose straight up in the air, and the sleigh jerked as it fell.

“That’s nothing,” he said. “Some peasant going to town.”

“He’s going pretty fast for a peasant,” said Michael.

Kareyev’s eyes met his over Joan’s head, and Michael understood.

“Nothing to worry about,” said Kareyev.

The horses were exhausted. But the reins tensed like wires in Kareyev’s hands. They flew faster.

As they flew, two things grew slowly, ominously, running a silent race: the white line ahead and the black spot behind them.

“Don’t look at it, Joan!” The whip swished down in Kareyev’s hand. “You’re making yourself nervous.” The whip swished down. “It’s nothing. We’re faster than they are.” The whip swished down. “They can’t . . .”

A shot rang through the silence where hoofbeats drummed like a heart.

Michael seized Joan and threw her brutally down on her knees in the straw on the bottom of the sleigh, bending over her, covering her with his body, holding her down.

“Michael! Let me get up! Let me get up!”

She struggled frantically. He pressed her down roughly.

“That’s it!” shouted Commandant Kareyev. “Keep her down, Volkontzev! Keep her down!”

Commandant Kareyev had jumped to his feet. His tall body swayed, bent forward, his arm one with the tense reins. His whip flashed like a circle. Red streaks tore the horses’ ribs.

“Stop!” came the distant cry. “Stop in the name of the law!”

Michael drew his gun.

“Don’t, Volkontzev!” cried Kareyev. “Save your bullets! They’re too far away! We’ll escape!”

Two more shots ripped the darkness behind them. Joan heaved up convulsively against her living armor. Standing, Kareyev pressed one knee into her back to keep her down.

The road shot straight into a growth of pines and made a sharp turn. They whirled around the corner, Kareyev’s body swaying perilously and straightening again. They lost the white thread in the forest; and the black spot lost them.

A winding side lane branched off the road, disappearing into the wilderness of pines; not even a lane, but a forgotten clearing barely wide enough for a sleigh, leading nowhere. With a quick movement of his whole body, Kareyev pulled the reins and sent the sleigh straight into the side lane, swiftly, as if his body, more than the worn-out horses, had thrown it forward.

They raced blindly through the snow and the pines. They soon lost all trace of a lane. They wound their way between tall, red trunks, tearing through bushes, knocking against trees, their slides cutting into the bark; diving into hollows, crashing and whirling off tree stumps. Low branches flogged them. Joan’s fur cap was torn off. A branch hit Kareyev across the eyes; he shook the snow and pine needles out of his hair, red drops rolling down his temple.

The horses snorted; their ribs heaved; their nostrils quivered in terror. The whip, tearing their flesh, forced them forward; the whip was in the merciless hand of the Beast from Strastnoy Island.

One horse stumbled and fell. For a moment, they heard the silence of the forest, a silence of deep snow and trackless wilderness.

Commandant Kareyev jumped into the snow. His feet were not steady on the ground. He staggered to the horse. He brushed the hair out of his eyes. He looked at the red on his hand, felt his temple; he took a handful of snow and washed the temple; he flung the pink snow away.

Michael waded to him. They pulled the horse to its feet. The whip whistled again.

“Don’t be afraid, Joan. They won’t get us.” Commandant Kareyev’s voice rang clear, vibrant. “One night, many years ago, I was carrying priceless documents for the Red Army. Three horses were shot under me. I delivered the documents. My charge is more precious—tonight.”

——VIII——

When they stumbled out into a clearing, the horses could barely move. Commandant Kareyev’s whip was broken. A bare, wide plain stretched to the black line of another forest. Beyond, the clouds were torn off a broad band of glowing pink.

An old, crumbling shack leaned against the last pines of the forest, its unpainted boards black from age and weather, its roof caved in, one window staring like an empty socket—without glass.

Commandant Kareyev knocked at the door. No answer came. He kicked the door. It was not locked. He went in, then called:

“It’s all right. Come in.”

Michael followed, carrying Joan in his arms.

There was an empty stone hearth, and an old wooden table, and snow under the broken roof, and pine needles on the floor.

“We’re safe here—for a while,” said Kareyev.

The two men looked at each other. Commandant Kareyev’s leather jacket hung in strips. He had lost his muffler. His shirt was torn at the throat. Michael’s head was a tangle of black hair and pine needles. He smiled, flashing sparkling teeth, young and vibrant, a trim, healthy animal in the joy of his first real battle.

“Great work, Commandant,” said Michael.

“Well, we’ve done it,” said Kareyev, “—together.”

It was only a second, but their eyes held each other in the silent understanding of their common danger, with the first, faint, hidden spark of admiration in their understanding. Then they looked at the woman who stood leaning against the open door, her blond hair hanging over one eye, the soft blond hair golden as ripe wheat in the sun, against the white desolation of snow and black pines raw in the frost. They did not look at each other again.

Commandant Kareyev closed the door and pulled an old wooden latch, locking it. He said:

“We’ll let the horses rest. Then we’ll go. The town isn’t far. Just a few more hours.”

Michael spread the fur blanket on the floor. They sat silently. Joan’s head leaned on Kareyev’s shoulder. He ran his fingers through her hair, tenderly, removing pine needles from her tangled curls. She noticed anxiously Michael’s dark eyes that were watching Kareyev fixedly. Michael removed her boots, rubbed her feet in woolen socks damp with snow. She watched Kareyev’s eyes following Michael’s movements silently, his eyebrows drawn tightly in a dark frown.

“Let’s go now,” she said suddenly.

“We can’t, Joan. We have plenty of time.”

“I hate it here.”

“You’ve gone through many things you’ve hated, Frances,” said Michael. “You’ve been brave. It’s the end, now. Think of what’s awaiting us.”

“What’s awaiting us,” said Kareyev slowly, “is for two—only.”

“Yes,” said Michael. “Only. And I hope the third one steps aside as bravely as he has been behaving.”

“I hope he does,” said Kareyev.

“It’s too cold here,” Joan complained.

“I’ll make a fire, Frances.”

“Don’t. They may notice the smoke.”

“Let me hold you close, Joan. You’ll be warmer.”

Commandant Kareyev drew her into his arms.

“Take your hands off her,” said Michael slowly.

“What?”

“I said, take your hands off her.”

Commandant Kareyev did. He put Joan aside gently and rose to his feet. So did Michael.

Joan stood between them, her eyes dark, scornful.

“Keep quiet!” she ordered. “Both of you seem to forget where we are—and when.”

“We may as well settle this now, once and for all,” said Kareyev. “He forgets that he has no more rights to you.”

“And you, Commandant,” said Michael, “forget that you never had any.”

“I bought her from you in exchange for the next fifty years of your life.”

“She wasn’t for sale.”

“I wouldn’t stand in a woman’s way after she had asked me to get out.”

“I wish you would remember that.”

Commandant Kareyev turned to Joan. He said very gently:

“It’s been a game, Joan, and a bad one. I know the truth, but you must tell it to him. You’ve been too cruel with him.”

“Oh, please! please . . .” she begged, backing away from him. “Don’t. Not now. Not here.”

“Right here, Frances,” said Michael. “Now.”

She stood straight, facing them. She raised her head high. Her eyes and her voice were clear. It was not her apology. It was the proud, defiant verdict of her sublime right.

“I love—one of you. No matter what I’ve done, don’t you understand that there is a love beyond all justice?”

“Which one?” asked Michael.

“We want a proof, Joan,” said Kareyev. “One beyond doubt.”

A hand knocked at the door.

“In the name of the law . . . open this door!”

Michael leaped to the window. His gun flashed. He fired.

Shots answered from outside, the bark of several rifles.

Michael dropped his gun. His hand grasped the edge of the window. He pulled himself up to his full height, shuddered, and fell backwards, his arms swinging in a wide circle over his head.

Joan’s cry did not sound like a woman’s voice. She threw herself over his body, tearing his jacket, fumbling for his heart, blood running over her fingers.

“Come here!” she screamed to Kareyev. “Help him!”

Kareyev was pressed to the door, trying to hold it against furious blows, his gun in a crack of the wall, shooting blindly at those outside.

“Come here!” she cried. “Help him! Come here!”

He obeyed. Michael’s head fell limply over his arm. He tore the jacket, felt a faint beating under his fingers, looked at the little hole in the chest that spurted a dark stream with each beat.

“He’s all right, Joan. Just fainted. The wound isn’t serious.”

She looked at the sticky red that thickened into a web between her fingers. She pulled her collar open, tore a piece of her dress, pressed it to the wound.

She did not hear the door crash into splinters under the butts of rifles. She did not see the two soldiers who jumped in through the window, nor the two others who stood at the door.

“Hands up!” said the soldier who entered first. “You’re under arrest.”

Commandant Kareyev rose slowly and raised his arms. Joan looked up indifferently.

The soldiers wore shaggy sheepskin coats that smelled of sweat; the long fur of their big caps stuck to their wet foreheads; their boots left tracks of snow on the floor.

“And that, citizens,” said their leader, “is how all counterrevolutionaries get their white necks twisted.”

His stomach bulged over his cartridge belt. He spread his heavy, square boots wide apart. He pushed his fur cap at the back of his head, scratched his neck, and laughed. He had a wide grin and short teeth.

“Pretty smart, aren’t you, citizens?” The cartridge belt shook under his stomach. “But the hand of the proletarian republic is long, and has good sharp claws.”

“What are the orders from those who sent you?” Commandant Kareyev asked slowly.

“Not so fast, citizen. Why the hurry? You’ll have plenty of time to find out.”

“Let’s go,” said Joan, rising. “This man here is wounded. Take him to a doctor.”

“He won’t need one.”

“Their horses are here, behind the house,” a soldier reported, entering.

“Bring them out. . . . Such is the end, citizens, of all who dare to raise a hand against the great will of the proletariat.”

“What are your orders?” repeated Commandant Kareyev.

“The orders are to save your valuable chests for better bullets than ours. The convict, the woman’s husband, is to be taken right back to Strastnoy Island, to be executed. The woman and the traitor Commandant are to be taken for trial to Nijni Kolimsk, to the GPU. Nice place, your ladyship, right across the street from a rich English merchant.”

Joan’s eyes met Kareyev’s. In the house across the street from the rich English merchant, doors could be left unlocked, guards could be absent, prisoners could disappear without trace: for execution—or for freedom.

There were three of them. Two were saved—if they reached that house. One was doomed.

“And, by the way,” asked the soldier, “which one is your husband?”

Joan stood by the table. She leaned far back against it, her tense arms propped against the edge, her head in her shoulders. Her hands grasping the table seemed to hold her body from falling backwards. But her eyes looked straight at the soldier; there was no fear in them, there was the last, desperate resolution of a cornered animal.

“This is my husband,” she answered and pointed at Kareyev.

Commandant Kareyev looked at her. His eyes were calm and grew calmer as they studied hers. Hers were not pleading; they were proud with a defiant hopelessness.

He had asked for a proof of the truth; one beyond doubt. He had it.

Commandant Kareyev looked at the sky where dawn, like a child, smiled its first hope to the beginning of life. Then, he turned to the soldier.

“Yes,” he said calmly, “I am her husband.”

Joan’s body slid from the edge of the table. Her arms pulled it up again. Her eyes widened looking at that for which she had not dared to hope.

“Let’s go,” said the soldier. “You must be crazy, Citizen Convict. I don’t see anything to be smiling about.”

The soldiers bent over Michael. He stirred faintly.

“The traitor’s all right,” said the leader. “He can make the journey to Nijni Kolimsk. Put him into our sleigh, and the woman, too, and take them to town. I’ll take the convict back to the coast. Send an order to have a boat for Strastnoy waiting there.”

Joan did not look at the men lifting Michael and carrying him out to the sleigh. She did not notice the figures passing before her. Her eyes were frozen, staring at Kareyev.

There was a great calm in Commandant Kareyev’s face; a calm that seemed to erase softly the wrinkles of many years on the Beast’s face. He was not looking at Joan. He was staring, wondering, at something he seemed to understand for the first time. He was not smiling; but his face looked as if it were.

“Well, come on,” said the soldier. “What’s the matter, citizen woman? Stop staring at him like that.”

“May I,” asked Kareyev, “say goodbye . . . to my wife?”

“Go ahead. But make it quick.”

Commandant Kareyev turned and met her eyes. Then, he smiled softly and took her hands.

“Goodbye, Joan.”

She did not answer. She was staring at him.

“There is a love beyond all justice, Joan. I understand.”

She did not seem to hear. He added:

“And also there is a love beyond all sorrow. So don’t worry about me.”

“I can’t let you go,” her lips said almost without sound.

“You have been mine. You gave me life. You have a right to take it.”

“I’d rather . . .”

“You’d rather keep quiet. . . . You have a duty to me, now. You must be happy—for my sake.”

“I’ll be . . . happy,” she whispered.

“You’re not crying, are you, Joan? It’s not as bad as all that. I don’t want to be a ghost who will ruin the life awaiting you. Are you strong enough to promise that you will always smile when you think of me?”

“I’m . . . smiling . . . dear. . . .”

“Remember me only when—in the countries where you’ll be sent by . . . the house across the street from the English merchant—you see the lights . . . dancing.”

She raised her head. She stood straight as a soldier at attention. She said slowly, each word steady and solemn as a step to the scaffold:

“I can’t thank you. I only want you to know that of all the things I’ve done, the one I’m doing now is the hardest.”

He took her in his arms and kissed her. It was a long kiss. He wanted to sum up his life in it.

They walked out together, her hand in his. The sun greeted them, rising over the forest. It rose slowly, and its rays were like arms outstretched in a solemn blessing. Far away in the forest, snow glistened on the branches like tears that had dropped from the flaming sunrise and rolled, overfilling the forest, over the wide plain. But the tall, old trees raised their dark heads straight into the sky, above the snow, triumphant, greeting life that was starting again for the first time. And over the white plain little sparks burned in the snow, little twinkling, dancing lights of all colors, like a rainbow.

“To the glory of the world revolution!” said the soldier and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

Two sleighs were waiting, their horses turned in opposite directions. Two soldiers sat in one sleigh, waiting for their prisoner. In the other, Michael was propped against the seat. He moaned feebly, still unconscious. A soldier sat next to him, holding the reins.

Joan stopped. She had no strength to go on. Commandant Kareyev smiled calmly. He noticed that her fur collar was open and fastened it. The soldiers’ leader pulled her towards the sleigh.

She stopped and turned, facing Kareyev. She stood straight, leaning against the sunrise, her golden hair in the wind. She smiled proudly, gallantly, in sublime sanction of life.

Kareyev walked to the other sleigh, without an order, stepped in calmly, and sat down between the two soldiers.

A rough hand pulled Joan into the sleigh. She put her arm around Michael and held him, his head on her shoulder.

The soldier clicked his whip. The horses jerked forward, into the sunrise. Their harness creaked. Snow spurted up.

Joan turned to look at the other sleigh. Commandant Kareyev did not turn back when the horses tore forward. She saw his hair waving in the wind and above it the white line of his forehead: Commandant Kareyev’s head was held high.

We the Living (unpublished excerpts)

1931

Editor’s Preface

Ayn Rand returned to We the Living in 1932, but interrupted it again the next year to write her first stage play, Night of January 16th, produced in Hollywood in 1934, then on Broadway in 1935. (This play has been separately published by New American Library.) The novel was completed in March 1934, but could find no publisher until 1936. After issuing a first edition of 3,000 copies, the publisher, despite indications of rising sales, destroyed the type, and the book was not to reach its audience for a quarter of a century. In 1959, it was reissued by Random House, and in 1960 in paperback by New American Library. Since that time, more than three million copies of We the Living have been sold.

Ayn Rand’s view of the theme and current relevance of We the Living, and of its place in her work, can be found in her foreword to the reissued edition.

In looking through the manuscript of the novel, I found several passages or “outtakes” that had been cut from the final version. Ayn Rand was a champion of literary economy; she was ruthless in cutting passages she considered inessential. There should not, she held, be an unnecessary scene or word in a piece of writing; in judging any element, the standard is not its interest on its own terms, but its contribution to the total.

Several of the cut passages, however, are of some interest. They can be enjoyed as separate pieces, even while one agrees with Miss Rand that they are not parts of the novel, and must not be viewed as such. I have selected for this anthology two such pieces from the early part of We the Living, both probably written in 1931. Neither has received Ayn Rand’s customary editing and polishing. The titles are my own invention.

“No” is an eloquent montage of life in Soviet Russia after the Revolution. It offers a glimpse of the kind of daily existence Ayn Rand herself had to endure before she could leave for America. Some elements of this montage were retained in the novel, in the form of brief paragraphs integrated with the development of the story. Evidently, Miss Rand judged that a separate extended treatment would be too static. Perhaps she thought also that it would repeat what was already clear elsewhere in the book.

The “month to wait” mentioned in the opening lines is the month Kira, the heroine, must wait between meetings with Leo, the man she loves and is not to see again until October 28.

In the novel, there is one paragraph describing a story about a Viking that the young Kira had read; the Viking became her private symbol of man the hero. I had always loved this brief reference and was delighted to find that the story had originally been given a fuller treatment.

“Kira’s Viking” may be read as a lushly Romantic fairy tale for adults, as well as for children. The language is simple, evocative, Biblical in its cadence and power. Miss Rand’s admirers will recognize the similarity in this regard to her later novelette Anthem—and also to the legends about John Galt in Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand was expert in creating the mood and reality of this kind of haunting, timeless legend, and I could not let this small example of her talent stay buried. (Besides, it is the only fairy tale I know with a viewpoint on the relationship between statism and religion.)

The story was cut, presumably, because it was not necessary for the purpose of the novel at this point—that is, to establish Kira’s character.

The last paragraph of “Kira’s Viking,” which I have placed after a sequence break, originally appeared much later, near the end of the book, in Kira’s death scene; it was cut when the story was cut.

“No” is the world Ayn Rand escaped from. “Kira’s Viking” is why she escaped—what she wanted to find in the world instead.

—L. P.

“No”

A month to wait is a fortnight in Paris, a week in New York, a year in Soviet Russia.

“No,” said the saleslady in the bookstore, “we have no foreign magazines, citizen. Foreign magazines? You must be new in Petrograd. We have no more publications from abroad than from Mars, citizen. Unsuitable ideology, you know. What can one expect of bourgeois countries? . . . Here’s a nice selection, citizen: The Young Communist, Red Weekdays, Red Harvest. . . . No? . . . We have splendid novels, citizen. Naked Year—all about the civil war. Sickle and Hammer—it’s the class awakening of the village—futuristic, you know—but very profound.”

The shelves were bright with white covers and red letters, white letters and red covers—on cheap, brownish paper and with laughing, defiant broken lines and circles cutting triangles, and triangles splitting squares, the new art coming through some crack in the impenetrable barrier, from the new world beyond the borders, whose words could not reach the little store where a picture of Lenin winked slyly at Kira, from above a sign: “State Publishing House.”

“No,” said Galina Petrovna, “we have no money to waste on theater tickets. You ought to be glad we have enough for tramway tickets.”

In the streets, there were big posters with little blue letters announcing the opening season of the “State Academic Theaters”—the three theatrical giants of Petrograd that were called “the Imperial Theaters” five years ago: the Alexandrinsky, with a chariot high on its roof, stone horses’ hoofs suspended over the city, with five balconies of red and gold inside, watching Russia’s best dramas; the Marinsky—blue and silver, solemn and majestic, a temple to operas and the fluttering skirts of ballet; the Michailovsky—orange and silver, friendly and impudent, winking at its two serious brothers with the newest daring plays and the gayest light operas.

“No,” said the cashier, “no tickets under three hundred and fifty rubles. Then we have profunion nights—free tickets from your union. . . . If you’re not a union member, citizen, who cares if you don’t get to see a show?”

“No,” said Irina Dunaeva, “I get no new dresses this winter either. So you don’t have to worry, Kira. We’ll look alike. . . . Yes, I have powder. Soviet powder. Doesn’t stay on very well. But do you know Vava Miloslavsky, Victor’s girl—for the time being? Her father’s a doctor—a Free Profession, they call it—you see, he doesn’t ‘exploit labor’ so they leave him alone—and he makes money—and Vava—now don’t talk about it—she has a box of Coty’s powder . . . yes, French. Yes, real. From abroad. Smuggled. Ten thousand rubles a box. . . . I think Vava uses lipstick. You know, I think it’s going to be a fashion. Daring, isn’t it? But they say they use it—abroad. . . . Vava, she has a pair of silk stockings. Don’t say I told you. She likes to show them off—and I don’t want to give her the satisfaction.”

“No!” said the red letters on a poster. “The Proletarian Consciousness is not Contaminated by Paltry Bourgeois Ideology. Comrades! Tighten our Class Welding!”

The poster showed a milling crowd of workers, the size of ants, in the shadow of a huge wheel.

“No,” said the student in the red bandanna, “you gotta stand in line for the bread, same as us all, citizen. Sure, it might take two hours. And it might take three hours. What’s the hurry, citizen? You ain’t got anything better to do with your time. Expecting privileges, perhaps? Too good to stand in line with us proletarians? Don’t wiggle your feet, citizen. Certainly, I’m cold, too. . . . Sure, you’ll miss the lecture. And I’ll miss a meeting of the Cell. But this is Bread Day.”

Every student had a provision card. The floor of the University shop was covered with sawdust. The clerk at the counter briskly shoved hunks of dried bread at the line moving slowly past him, and dipped his hand into a barrel to fish out the pickles, and wiped his hand on the bread. The bread and pickles disappeared, unwrapped, into briefcases filled with books.

“No,” said the article in Pravda, “the New Economic Policy is not a surrender of our revolutionary ideology. It is a temporary compromise with a historical necessity. The fight isn’t over. Come on, comrades, let’s show the fat-bellied foreign imperialists, our new, united ranks on the front of economic recovery! This is the day of the factory and the tractor instead of the bayonet! This is the day to demonstrate our red discipline in the slow, monotonous routine of proletarian State Construction! This is the time of heroic Red weekdays!”

“No,” said Galina Petrovna, “I didn’t break the kerosene stove. There’s no kerosene. If you mix the coarse flour with cold water, it’ll taste like gruel.”

“No,” said the militia man, “you can’t cross the street, citizen. What’s the hurry? Don’tcha see there’s a demonstration of the toilers?”

A string of women waddled down Nevsky, spreading to fill its broad expanse, stopping the trucks and tramways, mud flying in little spurts from under heavy shoes. The red banner at the head of the demonstration said:

“The Women of the First Factory of the Red Food-trust Protest Against the Imperialistic Greed of England and Lord Chamberlain!”

The women hid their hands in their armpits, to warm them, and sang:

“We are the young red guard
and our aim is set. We’re told: don’t hang your guns
and bravely march ahead . . .”

“No,” said the drunken sailor in the darkness under the window, on the street far below, “I ain’t gonna stop. I’m a free citizen. To hell with your sleep.”

And he pulled the harmonica as if he were going to tear it apart, and it squealed in terror, and he sang, leaning against a lamp post, throwing his raucous words at the moon over the dark roofs above:

“Vanka ’nd Mashka fell in love
and he swore by stars above
‘I will treat you good
and I’ll buy you wood
and the wood is pure birch-tree
lots of heat for you and me’ . . .
Lamtsa-dritsa-tsa-tsa!”

“No,” said the Upravdom, “you can’t be no exception, citizen. Even if you are a student. Social duty comes above all. Every tenant gotta attend the meeting.”

So Kira sat in the long, bare room, the largest in the house, in the apartment of a tramway conductor. Behind her sat Galina Petrovna in her oldest dress, and Alexander Dimitrievitch stretching out his run-down boots, and Lydia shivering in a torn shawl. Every tenant in the house was present. The apartment had electrical connections and one bulb burned in the center of the ceiling. The tenants chewed sunflower seeds.

“Seeing as how I’m the Upravdom,” said the Upravdom, “I declare this meeting of the tenants of the house . . . on Moika open. On the order of the day is the question as regards the chimneys. Now, comrades citizens, seeing as how we are all responsible citizens and conscious of the proper class consciousness, we gotta understand that this ain’t the old days when we had landlords and didn’t care what happened to the house we lived in. Now this is different, comrades. Owing to the new regime and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and seeing as how the chimneys are clogged we gotta do something about it, seeing as how we’re the owners of the house. Now if the chimneys are clogged, the stoves won’t burn, and if the stoves won’t burn we’ll have the house full of smoke, and if we have the house full of smoke—it’s sloppy, and if we’re sloppy—that’s not true proletarian discipline. And so, comrades citizens . . .”

The smell of food burning came from the hall and a housewife fidgeted nervously, glancing anxiously at the clock. A fat man in a red shirt was twiddling his thumbs. A young man, with a pale mouth hanging open, was scratching his head, occasionally producing something which he rolled in his fingers and dropped on the floor.

“. . . and the special assessment will be divided in proportion as to the . . . Is that you, Comrade Argounova, trying to sneak out? Well, you better don’t. You know what we think of people what sabotage their social duties. You better teach your young one the proper consciousness, Citizen Argounova. . . . And the special assessment will be divided in proportion as to the social standing of the tenants. The workers pay three percent, and the free professions, ten, and the private traders the rest. . . . Who’s for—raise your hands. . . . Comrade Secretary, count the citizens’ hands. . . . Who’s against—raise your hands. . . . Comrade Michliuk, you can’t raise your hand for and against on the one and same proposition. . . .”

In the mornings—there was millet and the smell of kerosene when there was no wood, and smoke when there was no kerosene.

In the evenings—there was millet, and Lydia rocking back and forth on a rickety chair, moaning:

“The pagans! The sacrilegious apostates! They’re taking the ikons, and the gold crosses from the churches. To feed their damn famine somewhere. No respect for anything sacred. What’re we coming to?”

And Galina Petrovna wailed:

“What’s Europe waiting for? How far do we have to go?”

And Alexander Dimitrievitch asked timidly:

“May I, Galina? Just a spoonful more?”

And Maria Petrovna came to visit, trembling by the stove, coughing as if her chest were torn into shreds, fighting with words and coughs:

“. . . and Vassia had another fight with Victor . . . over politics . . . and Irina got nothing but dried fish at the University . . . this week . . . no bread . . . and I made a nightgown out of the old blanket . . . old . . . rips if you breathe on it . . . and Acia needs galoshes . . . and Vassia won’t take a Soviet job, won’t hear of it. . . . Yes, I take cough medicine. . . . Did you hear about Boris Koulikov? In a hurry, tried to jump on a crowded tramway—at full speed—both legs cut off. . . . Acia’s learning to spell at school and what words do they teach it with? Marxism and Proletariat and Electrification. . . .”

On the floor crumbled sheets of Pravda rustled underfoot:

“Comrades! True Proletarians have no will but that of the collective. The iron will of the Proletariat, the victorious class, will lead humanity into . . .”

And Kira stood by a window, her hand on the dark, cold glass, and her body felt young, cold and hard as the glass, and she thought that one could stand a lot, and forget a lot, if one kept clear and firm one final aim and cause. She did not know what the aim was; but she did not ask herself the question, for the aim was beyond questions and doubts; she knew only that she was awaiting it. Perhaps, it was the twenty-eighth of October.

Kira’s Viking

There was only one book Kira remembered. She was ten years old when she read it. It was the story of a Viking. It was written in English. Her governess gave it to her. She heard later that the author had died very young. She had not remembered his name; in later years, she had never been able to find it.

She did not remember the books she read before it; she did not want to remember the ones she read after.

The Viking had a body against which the winds broke like a caress. The Viking’s step was like the beating of waves upon the rocks: steady and irrevocable. The Viking’s eyes never looked farther than the point of his sword; but there was no boundary for the point of his sword.

The Viking’s ship had patched sails and blade-scarred flanks; and a banner that had never been lowered. There was on the ship a crew of men whose hearts froze at a home-fire; whose heads never bowed but to the Viking’s voice. Among the northern rocks of his homeland, the ship lay hidden in a harbor no one dared to enter.

The ship had to be hidden, for high in the mountains was a city surrounded by gray walls, where, at night, a smoked lantern burned by the locked gates and a lonely cat walked down the old stone wall. In the city there was a King, and when he passed in the street, the people bowed so low that wrinkled foreheads left marks in the soft dust. The King hated the Viking.

The King hated him, for when peaceful lights twinkled in his subjects’ homes and smoke rose over houses where mothers cooked the evening meal, the Viking watched the city from a high cliff, and the wind carried the smoke high into the mountains, but not high enough to reach the Viking’s feet. The King hated him, for walls fell at a motion of the Viking’s hand, and when he walked in their ruins, the sun made a crown over his head, but he walked, light and straight, without noticing its weight.

So the King had promised a reward for the Viking’s head. And in the narrow streets, on the doorsteps slippery with onion peelings, the people waited and hoped for the reward, so that they could have a big supper.

Far down in a deep valley was a temple that the sun-rays reached but one hour each day; and where the rays struck the temple was a tall window of dark painted glass. When the sun pierced the window, the huge shadow of a tortured saint spread over the backs of those who knelt in prayer, and the gold of the sun turned red as the blood of suffering. The Priest of the temple hated the Viking.

The Priest hated him, for the Viking laughed under the cold, black vaults and his laugh sounded as if the painted window had been broken. The Priest hated him, for the Viking looked at heaven only when he bent for a drink over a mountain brook, and there, overshadowing the sky, he saw his own picture.

So the Priest had promised forgiveness of all sins for the Viking’s head. And skinning their knees on the temple steps, the people waited and hoped for the forgiveness, so that they could sleep safely with their neighbor’s wife.

Far away in the polar seas, where the bridges of northern lights connected the waves and the clouds, and no ship dared to break the connection, stood the sacred city. From a long distance, sailors had seen its white walls rising to the snows of the mountains. But they did not look at the city in spring, for when the spring sun struck the white walls, their blaze sent many a sailor home—blind.

At dawn, from a long distance, sailors could see the queen-priestess rise to the tall white tower. Her white robe and golden hair fell to the ground, but her slender body swaying back in a tense effort, her arms were raised, high and straight, to a pale, young sky. And in the still mirror of the sea, from the bottom of a tall white tower, a slender, white figure stretched her arms down into the depth.

It was spring when the Viking said he was leaving to conquer the sacred city.

People ran into their houses and closed the shutters over their windows. But the King smiled, and offered him forgiveness and the royal banner for his enterprise.

“For your King,” he said.

The Priest smiled, and offered him forgiveness, and the banner of the temple.

“For your Faith,” he said.

But the Viking took neither. When his ship cut the waves towards the blazing white spot, on the tall mast, lashing the wind, was his own banner, that had never been lowered.

There were many days and many storms. When the waves rose high, fighting the wind for his dark cape and light hair, the Viking stood on the prow and looked ahead.

It was night when the Viking’s ship approached the sacred city, and its walls were blue under the stars.

When the stars had gone and the sky glowed, transparent with the coming light, white stones crumbled to meet the waves where the walls had been; over the gates flung wide open to the sea the Viking’s banner was nailed.

Alone over the city, his clothes torn, the Viking stood on top of the tall white tower. There was a wound across his breast and red drops rolled slowly down to his feet.

From the ravaged streets below, conquerors and conquered alike looked up at him. There was much wonder in their eyes, but little hatred. They raised their heads, but did not rise from their knees.

On the tower stairs the slender queen-priestess of the sacred city lay at the Viking’s feet. Her head bent so low that her golden hair swept the steps and he could see her breasts as, breathing tremulously, they touched the ground. Her hands lay still and helpless on the steps, the palms turned up, hungry in silent entreaty. But it was not mercy they were begging of him.

The sun had not risen. A pale sky looked into a pale, still sea, both misty green and transparent, touched by the first faint promise of color. Behind the city, a red glow mounted in the sky, rising slowly, ominously, like a victorious banner unrolling into the sky from the heart of the earth. The Viking’s body stood alone, cutting the fire.

Faint waves beat at the foot of the ruins. The waves had seen unknown shores and lost, faraway cities; beyond the line where they melt into the sky, was a great earth alive with a promise of so much that was possible. And the earth lay still, tense in reverent waiting, as if its very heart and meaning were rising to the morning sky; and the morning was like a slow, triumphant overture for the song to come.

The Viking smiled as men smile when they look up, at heaven; but he was looking down. His right arm was one straight line with his lowered sword; his left arm, straight as the sword, raised a goblet of wine to the sky. The first rays of a coming sun, still unseen to the earth, struck the crystal goblet. It sparkled like a white torch. Its rays lighted the faces of those below.

“To a life,” said the Viking, “which is a reason unto itself.”

A Viking had lived, who had laughed at Kings, who had laughed at Priests, who had laughed at Men, who had held, sacred and inviolable, high over all temples, over all to which men knew how to kneel, his one banner—the sanctity of life. He had known and she knew. He had fought and she was fighting. He had shown her the way. To the banner of life, all could be given, even life itself.

Ideal

1934

Editor’s Preface

Ideal was written in 1934, at a time when Ayn Rand had cause to be unhappy with the world. We the Living was being rejected by a succession of publishers for being “too intellectual” and too opposed to Soviet Russia (this was the time of America’s Red Decade); Night of January 16th had not yet found a producer; and Miss Rand’s meager savings were running out. The story was written originally as a novelette and then, probably within a year or two, was extensively revised and turned into a stage play. It has never been produced.

After the political themes of her first professional work, Ayn Rand now returns to the subject matter of her early stories: the role of values in men’s lives. The focus in this case, as in “Her Second Career,” is negative, but this time the treatment is not jovial; dominantly, it is sober and heartfelt. The issue now is men’s lack of integrity, their failure to act according to the ideals they espouse. The theme is the evil of divorcing ideals from life.

An acquaintance of Miss Rand’s, a conventional middle-aged woman, told her once that she worshiped a certain famous actress and would give her life to meet her. Miss Rand was dubious about the authenticity of the woman’s emotion, and this suggested a dramatic idea: a story in which a famous actress, so beautiful that she comes to represent to men the embodiment of their deepest ideals, actually enters the lives of her admirers. She comes in a context suggesting that she is in grave danger. Until this point, her worshipers have professed their reverence for her—in words, which cost them nothing. Now, however, she is no longer a distant dream, but a reality demanding action on their part, or betrayal.

“What do you dream of?” Kay Gonda, the actress, asks one of the characters, in the play’s thematic statement.

“Nothing,” he answers. “Of what account are dreams?”

“Of what account is life?”

“None. But who made it so?”

“Those who cannot dream.”

“No. Those who can only dream.”

In a journal entry written at the time (dated April 9, 1934), Miss Rand elaborates this viewpoint:

I believe—and I want to gather all the facts to illustrate this—that the worst curse on mankind is the ability to consider ideals as something quite abstract and detached from one’s everyday life. The ability of living and thinking quite differently, in other words eliminating thinking from your actual life. This applied not to deliberate and conscious hypocrites, but to those more dangerous and hopeless ones who, alone with themselves and to themselves, tolerate a complete break between their convictions and their lives, and still believe that they have convictions. To them—either their ideals or their lives are worthless—and usually both.

Such “dangerous and hopeless ones” may betray their ideal in the name of “social respectability” (the small businessman in this story) or in the name of the welfare of the masses (the Communist) or the will of God (the evangelist) or the pleasure of the moment (the playboy Count)—or they may do it for the license of claiming that the good is impossible and therefore the struggle for it unnecessary (the painter). Ideal captures eloquently the essence of each of these diverse types and demonstrates their common denominator. In this regard, it is an intellectual tour de force. It is a philosophical guide to hypocrisy, a dramatized inventory of the kinds of ideas and attitudes that lead to the impotence of ideals—that is, to their detachment from life.

(The inventory, however, is not offered in the form of a developed plot structure. In the body of the play, there is no progression of events, no necessary connection between one encounter and the next. It is a series of evocative vignettes, often illuminating and ingenious, but as theater, I think, unavoidably somewhat static.)

Dwight Langley, the painter, is the pure exponent of the evil the play is attacking; he is, in effect, the spokesman for Platonism, who explicitly preaches that beauty is unreachable in this world and perfection unattainable. Since he insists that ideals are impossible on earth, he cannot, logically enough, believe in the reality of any ideal, even when it actually confronts him. Thus, although he knows every facet of Kay Gonda’s face, he (alone among the characters) does not recognize her when she appears in his life. This philosophically induced blindness, which motivates his betrayal of her, is a particularly brilliant concretization of the play’s theme, and makes a dramatic Act I curtain.

In her journal of the period, Miss Rand singles out religion as the main cause of men’s lack of integrity. The worst of the characters, accordingly, the one who evokes her greatest indignation, is Hix, the evangelist, who preaches earthly suffering as a means to heavenly happiness. In an excellently worked-out scene, we see that it is not his vices, but his religion, including his definition of virtue, that brings him to demand the betrayal of Kay Gonda, her deliberate sacrifice to the lowest of creatures. By gaining a stranglehold on ethics, then preaching sacrifice as an ideal, religion, no matter what its intentions, systematically inculcates hypocrisy: it teaches men that achieving values is low (“selfish”), but that giving them up is noble. “Giving them up,” in practice, means betraying them.

“None of us,” one of the characters complains, “ever chooses the bleak, hopeless life he is forced to lead.” Yet, as the play demonstrates, all these men do choose the lives they lead. When confronted by the ideal they profess to desire, they do not want it. Their vaunted “idealism” is largely a form of self-deception, enabling them to pretend to themselves and others that they aspire to something higher. In fact and in reality, however, they don’t.

Kay Gonda, by contrast, is a passionate valuer; like Irene in “The Husband I Bought,” she cannot accept anything less than the ideal. Her exalted sense of life cannot accept the ugliness, the pain, the “dismal little pleasures” that she sees all around her, and she feels a desperate need to know that she is not alone in this regard. There is no doubt that Ayn Rand herself shared Kay Gonda’s sense of life, and often her loneliness, too—and that Kay’s cry in the play is her own:

I want to see, real, living, and in the hours of my own days, that glory I create as an illusion! I want it real! I want to know that there is someone, somewhere, who wants it, too! Or else what is the use of seeing it, and working, and burning oneself for an impossible vision? A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry.

Emotionally, Ideal is unique among Ayn Rand’s works. It is the polar opposite of “Good Copy.” “Good Copy” was based on the premise of the impotence and insignificance of evil. But Ideal focuses almost exclusively on evil or mediocrity (in a way that even We the Living does not); it is pervaded by Kay Gonda’s feeling of alienation from mankind, the feeling, tinged by bitterness, that the true idealist is in a minuscule minority amid an earthful of value-betrayers with whom no communication is possible. In accordance with this perspective, the hero, Johnnie Dawes, is not a characteristic Ayn Rand figure, but a misfit utterly estranged from the world, a man whose virtue is that he does not know how to live today (and has often wanted to die). If Leo feels this in Soviet Russia, the explanation is political, not metaphysical. But Johnnie feels it in the United States.

In her other works, Ayn Rand herself gave the answer to such a “malevolent universe” viewpoint, as she called it. Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead, for instance, strikingly, resembles Kay and Johnnie in her idealistic alienation from the world, yet she eventually discovers how to reconcile evil with the “benevolent universe” approach. “You must learn,” Roark tells her, “not to be afraid of the world. Not to be held by it as you are now. Never to be hurt by it as you were in that courtroom.” Dominique does learn it; but Kay and Johnnie do not, or at least not fully. The effect is untypical Ayn Rand: a story written approvingly from Dominique’s initial viewpoint.

Undoubtedly, the intensity of Miss Rand’s personal struggle at the time—her intellectual and professional struggle against a seemingly deaf, even hostile culture—helps to account for the play’s approach. Dominique, Miss Rand has said, is “myself in a bad mood.” The same may be said of this aspect of Ideal.

Despite its somber essence, however, Ideal is not entirely a malevolent story. The play does have its lighter, even humorous side, such as its witty satire of Chuck Fink, the “selfless” radical, and of the Elmer Gantry-like Sister Essie Twomey, with her Service Station of the Spirit. The ending, moreover, however unhappy, is certainly not intended as tragedy or defeat. Johnnie’s final action is action—that is the whole point—action to protect the ideal, as against empty words or dreams. His idealism, therefore, is genuine, and Kay Gonda’s search ends on a positive note. In this respect, even Ideal may be regarded as an affirmation (albeit in an unusual form) of the benevolent universe.

—L. P.

Ideal

CHARACTERS

BILL McNITT, screen director

CLAIRE PEEMOLLER, scenario writer

SOL SALZER, associate producer

ANTHONY FARROW, president of the Farrow Film Studios

FREDERICA SAYERS

MICK WATTS, press agent

MISS TERRENCE, Kay Gonda’s secretary

GEORGE S. PERKINS, assistant manager of the Daffodil Canning Co.

MRS. PERKINS, his wife

MRS. SHLY, her mother

KAY GONDA

CHUCK FINK, sociologist

JIMMY, Chuck’s friend

FANNY FINK, Chuck’s wife

DWIGHT LANGLEY, artist

EUNICE HAMMOND

CLAUDE IGNATIUS HIX, evangelist

SISTER ESSIE TWOMEY, evangelist

EZRY

COUNT DIETRICH VON ESTERHAZY

LALO JANS

MRS. MONAGHAN

JOHNNIE DAWES

SECRETARIES, LANGLEY’S GUESTS, POLICEMEN

Place Los Angeles, California

Time Present; from afternoon to early evening of the following day

Synopsis of scenes

Prologue—Office of Anthony Farrow in the Farrow Film Studios

Act I, Scene 1—Living room of George S. Perkins
Scene 2—Living room of Chuck Fink
Scene 3—Studio of Dwight Langley

Act II, Scene 1—Temple of Claude Ignatius Hix
Scene 2—Drawing room of Dietrich von
Esterhazy
Scene 3—Garret of Johnnie Dawes
Scene 4—Entrance hall in the residence of
Kay Gonda

Prologue

Late afternoon. Office of ANTHONY FARROW in the Farrow Film Studios. A spacious, luxurious room in an overdone modernistic style, which looks like the dream of a second-rate interior decorator with no limits set to the bill.

Entrance door is set diagonally in the upstage Right corner. Small private door downstage in wall Right. Window in wall Left. A poster of KAY GONDA, on wall Center; she stands erect, full figure, her arms at her sides, palms up, a strange woman, tall, very slender, very pale; her whole body is stretched up in such a line of reverent, desperate aspiration that the poster gives a strange air to the room, an air that does not belong in it. The words “KAY GONDA IN FORBIDDEN ECSTASY” stand out on the poster.

The curtain rises to disclose CLAIRE PEEMOLLER, SOL SALZER, and BILL McNITT. SALZER, forty, short, stocky, stands with his back to the room, looking hopelessly out of the window, his fingers beating nervously, monotonously, against the glass pane. CLAIRE PEEMOLLER, in her early forties, tall, slender, with a sleek masculine haircut and an exotically tailored outfit, reclines in her chair, smoking a cigarette in a lengthy holder. McNITT, who looks like a brute of a man and acts it, lies rather than sits in a deep armchair, his legs stretched out, picking his teeth with a match. No one moves. No one speaks. No one looks at the others. The silence is tense, anxious, broken only by the sound of SALZER’s fingers on the glass.

McNITT: [Exploding suddenly] Stop it, for Christ’s sake!

[SALZER turns slowly to look at him and turns away again, but stops the beating. Silence]

CLAIRE: [Shrugging] Well? [No one answers] Hasn’t anyone here a suggestion to offer?

SALZER: [Wearily] Aw, shut up!

CLAIRE: I see absolutely no sense in behaving like this. We can talk about something else, can’t we?

McNITT: Well, talk about something else.

CLAIRE: [With unconvincing lightness] I saw the rushes of Love Nest yesterday. It’s a smash, but a smash! You should see Eric in that scene where he kills the old man and . . . [A sudden jerk from the others. She stops short] Oh, I see. I beg your pardon. [Silence. She resumes uneasily] Well, I’ll tell you about my new car. The gorgeous thing is so chic! It’s simply dripping, but dripping with chromium! I was doing eighty yesterday and not a bump! They say this new Sayers Gas is . . . [There is a stunned, involuntary gasp from the others. She looks at two tense faces] Well, what on earth is the matter?

SALZER: Listen, Peemoller, for God’s sake, Peemoller, don’t mention it!

CLAIRE: What?

McNITT: The name!

CLAIRE: What name?

SALZER: Sayers, for God’s sake!

CLAIRE: Oh! [Shrugs with resignation] I’m sorry.

[Silence. McNITT breaks the match in his teeth, spits it out, produces a match folder, tears off another match, and continues with his dental work. A man’s voice is heard in the next room. They all whirl toward the entrance door]

SALZER: [Eagerly] There’s Tony! He’ll tell us! He must know something!

[ANTHONY FARROW opens the door, but turns to speak to someone offstage before entering. He is tall, stately, middle-aged, handsomely tailored and offensively distinguished]

FARROW: [Speaking into the next room] Try Santa Barbara again. Don’t hang up until you get her personally. [Enters, closing the door. The three look at him anxiously, expectantly] My friends, has any of you seen Kay Gonda today? [A great sigh, a moan of disappointment, rises from the others]

SALZER: Well, that’s that. You, too. And I thought you knew something!

FARROW: Discipline, my friends. Let us keep our heads. The Farrow Studios expect each man to do his duty.

SALZER: Skip it, Tony! What’s the latest?

CLAIRE: It’s preposterous! But preposterous!

McNITT: I’ve always expected something like this from Gonda!

FARROW: No panic, please. There is no occasion for panic. I have called you here in order to formulate our policy in this emergency, coolly and calmly and . . . [The interoffice communicator on his desk buzzes sharply. He leaps forward, his great calm forgotten, clicks the switch, speaks anxiously] Yes? . . . You did? Santa Barbara? . . . Give it to me! . . . What?! Miss Sayers won’t speak to me?! . . . She can’t be out, it’s an evasion! Did you tell them it was Anthony Farrow? Of the Farrow Films? . . . Are you sure you made it clear? President of the Farrow Films? . . . [His voice falling dejectedly] I see. . . . When did Miss Sayers leave? . . . It’s an evasion. Try again in half-an-hour. . . . And try again to get the chief of police.

SALZER: [Desperately] That I could have told you! The Sayers dame won’t talk. If the papers could get nothing out of her—we can’t!

FARROW: Let us be systematic. We cannot face a crisis without a system. Let us have discipline, calm. Am I understood? . . . [Breaks in two a pencil he has been playing with nervously] . . . Calm!

SALZER: Calm he wants at a time like this!

FARROW: Let us . . . [The intercom buzzes. He leaps to it] Yes? . . . Fine! Put him on! . . . [Very jovially] Hello, Chief! How are you? I . . . [Sharply] What do you mean you have nothing to say? This is Anthony Farrow speaking! . . . Well, it usually does make a difference. Hel . . . I mean, Chief, there’s only one question I have to ask you, and I think I’m entitled to an answer. Have there or have there not been any charges filed in Santa Barbara? [Through his teeth] Very well. . . . Thank you. [Switches off, trying to control himself]

SALZER: [Anxiously] Well?

FARROW: [Hopelessly] He won’t talk. No one will talk. [Turns to the intercom again] Miss Drake? . . . Have you tried Miss Gonda’s home once more? . . . Have you tried all her friends? . . . I know she hasn’t any, but try them anyway! [Is about to switch off, then adds] And get Mick Watts, if you can find the bast—if you can find him. If anyone knows, he knows!

McNITT: That one won’t talk either.

FARROW: And that is precisely the thing for us to do. Silence. Am I understood? Silence. Do not answer any questions on the lot or outside. Avoid all references to this morning’s papers.

SALZER: Us the papers should avoid!

FARROW: They haven’t said much so far. It’s only rumors. Idle gossip.

CLAIRE: But it’s all over town! Hints, whispers, questions. If I could see any point in it, I’d say someone was spreading it intentionally.

FARROW: Personally, I do not believe the story for a minute. However, I want all the information you can give me. I take it that none of you has seen Miss Gonda since yesterday?

[The others shrug hopelessly, shaking their heads]

SALZER: If the papers couldn’t find her—we can’t.

FARROW: Had she mentioned to any of you that she was going to have dinner with Granton Sayers last night?

CLAIRE: When has she ever told anyone anything?

FARROW: Did you notice anything suspicious in her behavior when you saw her last?

CLAIRE: I . . .

McNITT: I should say I did! I thought at the time it was damn funny. Yesterday morning, it was. I drove up to her beach home and there she was, out at sea, tearing through the rocks in a motorboat till I thought I’d have heart failure watching it.

SALZER: My God! That’s against our contracts! McNITT: What? My having heart failure?

SALZER: To hell with you! Gonda driving her motorboat!

McNITT: Try and stop her! So she climbs up to the road, finally, wet all over. “You’ll get killed someday,” I say to her, and she looks straight at me and she says, “That won’t make any difference to me,” she says, “nor to anyone else anywhere.”

FARROW: She said that?

McNITT: She did. “Listen,” I said, “I don’t give a damn if you break your neck, but you’ll get pneumonia in the middle of my next picture!” She looks at me in that damnable way of hers and she says, “Maybe there won’t be any next picture.” And she walks straight back to the house and her damn flunkey wouldn’t let me in!

FARROW: She actually said that? Yesterday?

McNITT: She did—damn the slut! I never wanted to direct her anyway. I . . .

[Intercom buzzes]

FARROW: [Clicking the switch] Yes? . . . Who? Who is Goldstein and Goldstein? . . . [Exploding] Tell them to go to hell! . . . Wait! Tell them Miss Gonda does not need any attorneys! Tell them you don’t know what on earth made them think she did! [Switches off furiously]

SALZER: God! I wish we’d never signed her! A headache we should have ever since she came on the lot!

FARROW: Sol! You’re forgetting yourself! After all! Our greatest star!

SALZER: Where did we find her? In the gutter we found her! In the gutter in Vienna! What do we get for our pains? Gratitude we get?

CLAIRE: Down-to-earthiness, that’s what she lacks. You know. No finer feelings. But none! No sense of human brotherhood. Honestly, I don’t understand what they all see in her, anyway!

SALZER: Five million bucks net per each picture—that’s what I see!

CLAIRE: I don’t know why she draws them like that. She’s completely heartless. I went down to her house yesterday afternoon—to discuss her next script. And what’s the use? She wouldn’t let me put in a baby or a dog, as I wanted to. Dogs have such human appeal. You know, we’re all brothers under the skin, and . . .

SALZER: Peemoller’s right. She’s got something there.

CLAIRE: And furthermore . . . [Stops suddenly] Wait! That’s funny! I haven’t thought of this before. She did mention the dinner.

FARROW: [Eagerly] What did she say?

CLAIRE: She got up and left me flat, saying she had to dress. “I’m going to Santa Barbara tonight,” she said. Then she added, “I do not like missions of charity.”

SALZER: My God, what did she mean by that?

CLAIRE: What does she mean by anything? So then I just couldn’t resist it, but couldn’t! I said, “Miss Gonda, do you really think you’re so much better than everybody else?” And what did she have the nerve to answer? “Yes,” she said, “I do. I wish I didn’t have to.”

FARROW: Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?

CLAIRE: I had forgotten. I really didn’t know there was anything between Gonda and Granton Sayers.

McNITT: An old story. I thought she was through with him long ago.

CLAIRE: What did he want with her?

FARROW: Well, Granton Sayers—you know Granton Sayers. A reckless fool. Fifty million dollars, three years ago. Today—who knows? Perhaps, fifty thousand. Perhaps, fifty cents. But cut-crystal swimming pools and Greek temples in his garden, and . . .

CLAIRE: . . . And Kay Gonda.

FARROW: Ah, yes, and Kay Gonda. An expensive little plaything or art work, depending on how you want to look at it. Kay Gonda, that is, two years ago. Not today. I know that she had not seen Sayers for over a year, previous to that dinner in Santa Barbara last night.

CLAIRE: Had there been any quarrel between them?

FARROW: None. Never. That fool had proposed to her three times, to my knowledge. She could have had him, Greek temples and oil wells and all, anytime she winked an eyelash.

CLAIRE: Has she had any trouble of any kind lately?

FARROW: None. None whatever. In fact, you know, she was to sign her new contract with us today. She promised me faithfully to be here at five, and . . .

SALZER: [Clutching his head suddenly] Tony! It’s the contract!

FARROW: What about the contract?

SALZER: Maybe she’s changed her mind again, and quit for good.

CLAIRE: A pose, Mr. Salzer, just a pose. She’s said that after every picture.

SALZER: Yeah? You should laugh if you had to crawl after her on your knees like we’ve done for two months. “I’m through,” she says. “Does it really mean anything?” Five million net per each picture—does it mean anything! “Is it really worth doing?” Ha! Twenty thousand a week we offer her and she asks is it worth doing!

FARROW: Now, now, Sol. Control your subconscious. You know, I have an idea that she will come here at five. It would be just like her. She is so utterly unpredictable. We cannot judge her actions by the usual standards. With her—anything is possible.

SALZER: Say, Tony, how about the contract? Did she insist again . . . is there anything in it again about Mick Watts?

FARROW: [Sighing] There is, unfortunately. We had to write it in again. So long as she is with us, Mick Watts will be her personal press agent. Most unfortunate.

CLAIRE: That’s the kind of trash she gathers around her. But the rest of us aren’t good enough for her! Well, if she’s got herself into a mess now—I’m glad. Yes, glad! I don’t see why we should all worry ourselves sick over it.

McNITT: I don’t give a damn myself! I’d much rather direct Joan Tudor anyway.

CLAIRE: And I’d just as soon write for Sally Sweeney. She’s such a sweet kid. And . . .

[The entrance door flies open. MISS DRAKE rushes in, slamming it behind her, as if holding the door against someone]

MISS DRAKE: She’s here!

FARROW: [Leaping to his feet] Who? Gonda?!

MISS DRAKE: No! Miss Sayers! Miss Frederica Sayers!

[They all gasp]

FARROW: What?! Here?!

MISS DRAKE: [Pointing at the door foolishly] In there! Right in there!

FARROW: Good Lord!

MISS DRAKE: She wants to see you, Mr. Farrow. She demands to see you!

FARROW: Well, let her in! Let her right in, for God’s sake! [As MISS DRAKE is about to rush out] Wait! [To the others] You’d better get out of here! It may be confidential. [Rushes them to private door Right]

SALZER: [On his way out] Make her talk, Tony! For God’s sake, make her talk!

FARROW: Don’t worry!

[SALZER, CLAIRE, and McNITT exit Right. FARROW whirls on MISS DRAKE]

FARROW: Don’t stand there shaking! Bring her right in!

[MISS DRAKE exits hurriedly. FARROW flops down behind his desk and attempts a nonchalant attitude. The entrance door is thrown open as FREDERICA SAYERS enters. She is a tall, sparse, stern lady of middle age, gray-haired, erect in her black clothes of mourning. MISS DRAKE hovers anxiously behind her. FARROW jumps to his feet]

MISS DRAKE: Miss Frederica Sayers, Mr. Far—

MISS SAYERS: [Brushing her aside] Abominable discipline in your studio, Farrow! That’s no way to run the place. [MISS DRAKE slips out, closing the door] Five reporters pounced on me at the gate and trailed me to your office. I suppose it will all appear in the evening papers, the color of my underwear included.

FARROW: My dear Miss Sayers! How do you do? So kind of you to come here! Rest assured that I . . .

MISS SAYERS: Where’s Kay Gonda? I must see her. At once.

FARROW: [Looks at her, startled. Then:] Do sit down, Miss Sayers. Please allow me to express my deepest sympathy for your grief at the untimely loss of your brother, who . . .

MISS SAYERS: My brother was a fool. [Sits down] I’ve always known he’d end up like this.

FARROW: [Cautiously] I must admit I have not been able to learn all the unfortunate details. How did Mr. Sayers meet his death?

MISS SAYERS: [Glancing at him sharply] Mr. Farrow, your time is valuable. So is mine. I did not come here to answer questions. In fact, I did not come here to speak to you at all. I came to find Miss Gonda. It is most urgent.

FARROW: Miss Sayers, let us get this clear. I have been trying to get in touch with you since early this morning. You must know who started these rumors. And you must realize how utterly preposterous it is. Miss Gonda happens to have dinner with your brother last night. He is found dead, this morning, with a bullet through him. . . . Most unfortunate and I do sympathize, believe me, but is this ground enough for a suspicion of murder against a lady of Miss Gonda’s standing? Merely the fact that she happened to be the last one seen with him?

MISS SAYERS: And the fact that nobody has seen her since.

FARROW: Did she . . . did she really do it?

MISS SAYERS: I have nothing to say about that.

FARROW: Was there anyone else at your house last night?

MISS SAYERS: I have nothing to say about that.

FARROW: But good God! [Controlling himself] Look here, Miss Sayers, I can well understand that you may not wish to give it out to the press, but you can tell me, in strict confidence, can’t you? What were the exact circumstances of your brother’s death?

MISS SAYERS: I have given my statement to the police.

FARROW: The police refuse to disclose anything!

MISS SAYERS: They must have their reasons.

FARROW: Miss Sayers! Please try to understand the position I’m in! I’m entitled to know. What actually happened at that dinner?

MISS SAYERS: I have never spied on Granton and his mistresses.

FARROW: But . . .

MISS SAYERS: Have you asked Miss Gonda? What did she say?

FARROW: Look here, if you don’t talk—I don’t talk, either.

MISS SAYERS: I have not asked you to talk. In fact, I haven’t the slightest interest in anything you may say. I want to see Miss Gonda. It is to her own advantage. To yours also, I suppose.

FARROW: May I give her the message?

MISS SAYERS: Your technique is childish, my good man.

FARROW: But in heaven’s name, what is it all about? If you’ve accused her of murder, you have no right to come here demanding to see her! If she’s hiding, wouldn’t she be hiding from you above all people?

MISS SAYERS: Most unfortunate, if she is. Highly ill advised. Highly.

FARROW: Look here, I’ll offer you a bargain. You tell me everything and I’ll take you to Miss Gonda. Not otherwise.

MISS SAYERS: [Rising] I have always been told that picture people had abominable manners. Most regrettable. Please tell Miss Gonda that I have tried. I shall not be responsible for the consequences now.

FARROW: [Rushing after her] Wait! Miss Sayers! Wait a moment! [She turns to him] I’m so sorry! Please forgive me! I’m . . . I’m quite upset, as you can well understand. I beg of you, Miss Sayers, consider what it means! The greatest star of the screen! The dream woman of the world! They worship her, millions of them. It’s practically a cult.

MISS SAYERS: I have never approved of motion pictures. Never saw one. The pastime of morons.

FARROW: You wouldn’t say that if you read her fan mail. Do you think it comes from shopgirls and school kids, like the usual kind of trash? No. Not Kay Gonda’s mail. From college professors and authors and judges and ministers! Everybody! Dirt farmers and international names! It’s extraordinary! I’ve never seen anything like it in my whole career.

MISS SAYERS: Indeed?

FARROW: I don’t know what she does to them all—but she does something. She’s not a movie star to them—she’s a goddess. [Correcting himself hastily] Oh, forgive me. I understand how you must feel about her. Of course, you and I know that Miss Gonda is not exactly above reproach. She is, in fact, a very objectionable person who . . .

MISS SAYERS: I thought she was a rather charming young woman. A bit anemic. A vitamin deficiency in her diet, no doubt. [Turning to him suddenly] Was she happy? FARROW: [Looking at her] Why do you ask that?

MISS SAYERS: I don’t think she was.

FARROW: That, Miss Sayers, is a question I’ve been asking myself for years. She’s a strange woman.

MISS SAYERS: She is.

FARROW: But surely you can’t hate her so much as to want to ruin her!

MISS SAYERS: I do not hate her at all.

FARROW: Then for heaven’s sake, help me to save her name! Tell me what happened. One way or the other, only let’s stop these rumors! Let’s stop these rumors!

MISS SAYERS: This is getting tiresome, my good man. For the last time, will you let me see Miss Gonda or won’t you? FARROW: I’m so sorry, but it is impossible, and . . .

MISS SAYERS: Either you are a fool or you don’t know where she is yourself. Regrettable, in either case. I wish you a good day.

[She is at the entrance door when the private door Right is thrown open violently. SALZER and McNITT enter, dragging and pushing MICK WATTS between them. MICK WATTS is tall, about thirty-five, with disheveled platinum-blond hair, the ferocious face of a thug, and the blue eyes of a baby. He is obviously, unquestionably drunk]

McNITT: There’s your precious Mick Watts for you!

SALZER: Where do you think we found him? He was . . . [Stops short seeing MISS SAYERS] Oh, I beg your pardon! We thought Miss Sayers had left!

MICK WATTS: [Tearing himself loose from them] Miss Sayers?! [Reels ferociously toward her] What did you tell them?

MISS SAYERS: [Looking at him coolly] And who are you, young man?

MICK WATTS: What did you tell them?

MISS SAYERS: [Haughtily] I have told them nothing.

MICK WATTS: Well, keep your mouth shut! Keep your mouth shut!

MISS SAYERS: That, young man, is precisely what I am doing. [Exits]

McNITT: [Lurching furiously at MICK WATTS] Why, you drunken fool!

FARROW: [Interfering] Wait a moment! What happened? Where did you find him?

SALZER: Down in the publicity department! Just think of that! He walked right in and there’s a mob of reporters pounced on him and started filling him up with liquor and—

FARROW: Oh, my Lord!

SALZER:—and here’s what he was handing out for a press release! [Straightens out a slip of paper he has crumpled in his hand, reads:] “Kay Gonda does not cook her own meals or knit her own underwear. She does not play golf, adopt babies, or endow hospitals for homeless horses. She is not kind to her dear old mother—she has no dear old mother. She is not just like you and me. She never was like you and me. She’s like nothing you bastards ever dreamed of!”

FARROW: [Clutching his head] Did they get it?

SALZER: A fool you should think I am? We dragged him out of there just in time!

FARROW: [Approaching MICK WATTS, ingratiatingly] Sit down, Mick, do sit down. There’s a good boy.

[MICK WATTS flops down on a chair and sits motionless, staring into space]

McNITT: If you let me punch the bastard just once, he’ll talk all right.

[SALZER nudges him frantically to keep quiet. FARROW hurries to a cabinet, produces a glass and a decanter, pours]

FARROW: [Bending over MICK WATTS, solicitously, offering him the glass] A drink, Mick? [MICK WATTS does not move or answer] Nice weather we’re having, Mick. Nice, but hot. Awfully hot. Supposing you and I have a drink together?

MICK WATTS: [In a dull monotone] I don’t know a thing. Save your liquor. Go to hell.

FARROW: What are you talking about?

MICK WATTS: I’m talking about nothing—and that goes for everything.

FARROW: You could stand a drink once in a while, couldn’t you? You look thirsty to me.

MICK WATTS: I don’t know a thing about Kay Gonda. Never heard of her. . . . Kay Gonda. It’s a funny name, isn’t it? I went to confession once, long ago—and they talked about the redemption of all sins. It’s useless to yell “Kay Gonda” and to think that all your sins are washed away. Just pay two bits in the balcony—and come out pure as snow.

[The others exchange glances and shrug hopelessly]

FARROW: On second thought, Mick, I won’t offer you another drink. You’d better have something to eat.

MICK WATTS: I’m not hungry. I stopped being hungry many years ago. But she is.

FARROW: Who?

MICK WATTS: Kay Gonda.

FARROW: [Eagerly] Any idea where she’s having her next meal?

MICK WATTS: In heaven. [FARROW shakes his head helplessly ] In a blue heaven with white lilies. Very white lilies. Only she’ll never find it.

FARROW: I don’t understand you, Mick.

MICK WATTS: [Looking at him slowly for the first time] You don’t understand? She doesn’t either. Only it’s no use. It’s no use trying to unravel, because if you try, you end up with more dirt on your hands than you care to wipe off. There are not enough towels in the world to wipe it off. Not enough towels. That’s the trouble.

SALZER: [Impatiently] Look here, Watts, you must know something. You’d better play ball with us. Remember, you’ve been fired from every newspaper on both coasts—

MICK WATTS:—and from many others in between.

SALZER:—so that if anything should happen to Gonda, you won’t have a job here unless you help us now and . . .

MICK WATTS: [His voice emotionless] Do you think I’d want to stay with the lousy bunch of you if it weren’t for her?

McNITT: Jesus, it beats me what they all see in that bitch!

[MICK WATTS turns and looks at McNITT fixedly, ominously]

SALZER: [Placatingly] Now, now, Mick, he doesn’t mean it, he’s kidding, he’s—

[MICK WATTS rises slowly, deliberately, walks up to McNITT without hurry, then strikes him flat on the face, a blow that sends him sprawling on the floor. FARROW rushes to help the stunned McNITT. MICK WATTS stands motionless, with perfect indifference, his arms limp]

McNITT: [Raising his head slowly] The damn . . .

FARROW: [Restraining him] Discipline, Bill, discipline, control your . . .

[The door is flung open as CLAIRE PEEMOLLER rushes in breathlessly]

CLAIRE: She’s coming! She’s coming!

FARROW: Who?!

CLAIRE: Kay Gonda! I just saw her car turning the corner!

SALZER: [Looking at his wristwatch] By God! It’s five o’clock! Can you beat that!

FARROW: I knew she would! I knew it! [Rushes to intercom, shouts:] Miss Drake! Bring in the contract!

CLAIRE: [Tugging at FARROW’s sleeve] Tony, you won’t tell her what I said, will you, Tony? I’ve always been her best friend! I’ll do anything to please her! I’ve always . . .

SALZER: [Grabbing a telephone] Get the publicity department! Quick!

McNITT: [Rushing to MICK WATTS] I was only kidding, Mick! You know I was only kidding. No hard feelings, eh, pal?

[MICK WATTS does not move or look at him. WATTS is the only one motionless amid the frantic activity]

SALZER: [Shouting into the phone] Hello, Meagley? . . . Call all the papers! Reserve the front pages! Tell you later! [Hangs up]

[MISS DRAKE enters, carrying a batch of legal documents]

FARROW: [At his desk] Put it right here, Miss Drake! Thank you! [Steps are heard approaching] Smile, all of you! Smile! Don’t let her think that we thought for a minute that she . . .

[Everyone obeys, save MICK WATTS, all eyes turned to the door. The door opens. MISS TERRENCE enters and steps on the threshold. She is a prim, ugly little shrimp of a woman]

MISS TERRENCE: Is Miss Gonda here?

[A moan rises from the others]

SALZER: Oh, God!

MISS TERRENCE: [Looking at the stunned group] Well, what is the matter?

CLAIRE: [Choking] Did you . . . did you drive up in Miss Gonda’s car?

MISS TERRENCE: [With hurt dignity] Why, certainly. Miss Gonda had an appointment here at five o’clock, and I thought it a secretary’s duty to come and tell Mr. Farrow that it looks as if Miss Gonda will not be able to keep it.

FARROW: [Dully] So it does.

MISS TERRENCE: There is also something rather peculiar I wanted to check on. Has anyone from the studio been at Miss Gonda’s home last night?

FARROW: [Perking up] No. Why, Miss Terrence?

MISS TERRENCE: This is most peculiar.

SALZER: What is?

MISS TERRENCE: I’m sure I can’t understand it. I’ve questioned the servants, but they have not taken them.

FARROW: Taken what?

MISS TERRENCE: If no one else took them, then Miss Gonda must have been back at home late last night.

FARROW: [Eagerly] Why, Miss Terrence?

MISS TERRENCE: Because I saw them on her desk yesterday after she left for Santa Barbara. And when I entered her room this morning, they were gone.

FARROW: What was gone?

MISS TERRENCE: Six letters from among Miss Gonda’s fan mail.

[A great sigh of disappointment rises from all]

SALZER: Aw, nuts!

McNITT: And I thought it was something!

[MICK WATTS bursts out laughing suddenly, for no apparent reason]

FARROW: [Angrily] What are you laughing at?

MICK WATTS: [Quietly] Kay Gonda.

McNITT: Oh, throw the drunken fool out!

MICK WATTS: [Without looking at anyone] A great quest. The quest of the hopeless. Why do we hope? Why do we seek it, when we’d be luckier if we didn’t think that it could exist? Why does she? Why does she have to be hurt? [Whirls suddenly upon the others with ferocious hatred] God damn you all! [Rushes out, slamming the door]

CURTAIN

Act I

SCENE 1

When the curtain rises, a motion-picture screen is disclosed and a letter is flashed on the screen, unrolling slowly. It is written in a neat, precise, respectable handwriting:

Dear Miss Gonda,

I am not a regular movie fan, but I have never missed a picture of yours. There is something about you which I can’t give a name to, something I had and lost, but I feel as if you’re keeping it for me, for all of us. I had it long ago, when I was very young. You know how it is: when you’re very young, there’s something ahead of you, so big that you’re afraid of it, but you wait for it and you’re so happy waiting. Then the years pass and it never comes. And then you find, one day, that you’re not waiting any longer. It seems foolish, because you didn’t even know what it was you were waiting for. I look at myself and I don’t know. But when I look at you—I do.

And if ever, by some miracle, you were to enter my life, I’d drop everything, and follow you, and gladly lay down my life for you, because, you see, I’m still a human being.

Very truly yours,
George S. Perkins
. . . S. Hoover Street
Los Angeles, California

When the letter ends, all lights go out, and when they come on again, the screen has disappeared and the stage reveals the living room of GEORGE S. PERKINS.

It is a room such as thousands of other rooms in thousands of other homes whose owners have a respectable little income and a respectable little character.

Center back, a wide glass door opening on the street. Door into the rest of the house in wall Left.

When the curtain rises, it is evening. The street outside is dark. MRS. PERKINS stands in the middle of the room, tense, erect, indignant, watching with smoldering emotion the entrance door where GEORGE S. PERKINS is seen outside turning the key in the lock. MRS. PERKINS looks like a dried-out bird of prey that has never been young. GEORGE S. PERKINS is short, blond, heavy, helpless, and over forty. He is whistling a gay tune as he enters. He is in a very cheerful mood.

MRS. PERKINS: [Without moving, ominously] You’re late.

PERKINS: [Cheerfully] Well, dovey, I have a good excuse for being late.

MRS. PERKINS: [Speaking very fast] I have no doubt about that. But listen to me, George Perkins, you’ll have to do something about Junior. That boy of yours got D again in arithmetic. If a father don’t take the proper interest in his children, what can you expect from a boy who . . .

PERKINS: Aw, honeybunch, we’ll excuse the kid for once—just to celebrate.

MRS. PERKINS: Celebrate what?

PERKINS: How would you like to be Mrs. Assistant Manager of the Daffodil Canning Company?

MRS. PERKINS: I would like it very much. Not that I have any hopes of ever being.

PERKINS: Well, dovey, you are. As of today.

MRS. PERKINS: [Noncommittally] Oh. [Calls into house] Mama! Come here!

[MRS. SHLY waddles in from door Left. She is fat and looks chronically dissatisfied with the whole world. MRS. PERKINS speaks, half-boasting, half-bitter]

Mama, Georgie’s got a promotion.

MRS. SHLY: [Dryly] Well, we’ve waited for it long enough.

PERKINS: But you don’t understand. I’ve been made Assistant Manager—[Looks for the effect on her face, finds none, adds lamely]—of the Daffodil Canning Company.

MRS. SHLY: Well?

PERKINS: [Spreading his hands helplessly] Well . . .

MRS. SHLY: All I gotta say is it’s a fine way to start off on your promotion, coming home at such an hour, keeping us waiting with dinner and . . .

PERKINS: Oh, I . . .

MRS. SHLY: Oh, we ate all right, don’t you worry! Never seen a man that cared two hoops about his family, not two hoops!

PERKINS: I’m sorry. I had dinner with the boss. I should’ve phoned, only I couldn’t keep him waiting, you know, the boss asking me to dinner, in person.

MRS. PERKINS: And here I was waiting for you, I had something to tell you, a nice surprise for you, and . . .

MRS. SHLY: Don’t you tell him, Rosie. Don’t you tell him now. Serves him right.

PERKINS: But I figured you’d understand. I figured you’d be happy—[Corrects his presumption hastily]—well, glad that I’ve been made—

MRS. PERKINS:—Assistant Manager! Lord, do we have to hear it for the rest of our lives?

PERKINS: [Softly] Rosie, it’s twenty years I’ve waited for it.

MRS. SHLY: That, my boy, is nothing to brag about!

PERKINS: It’s a long time, twenty years. One gets sort of tired. But now we can take it easy . . . light . . . [With sudden eagerness] . . . you know, light . . . [Coming down to earth, apologetically] . . . easy, I mean.

MRS. SHLY: Listen to him! How much you got, Mr. Rockafeller?

PERKINS: [With quiet pride] One hundred and sixty-five dollars.

MRS. PERKINS: A week?

PERKINS: Yes, dovey, a week. Every single week.

MRS. SHLY: [Impressed] Well! [Gruffly] Well, what’re you standing there for? Sit down. You must be all tired out.

PERKINS: [Removing his coat] Mind if I slip my coat off? Sort of stuffy tonight.

MRS. PERKINS: I’ll fetch your bathrobe. Don’t you go catching a cold. [Exits Left]

MRS. SHLY: We gotta think it over careful. There’s lots a man can do with one-sixty-five a week. Not that there ain’t some men what get around two hundred. Still, one-sixty-five ain’t to be sneezed at.

PERKINS: I’ve been thinking . . .

MRS. PERKINS: [Returning with a flashy striped flannel bathrobe] Now put it on like a good boy, nice and comfy.

PERKINS: [Obeying] Thanks. . . . Dovey, I was sort of planning . . . I’ve been thinking of it for a long time, nights, you know . . . making plans . . .

MRS. PERKINS: Plans? But your wife’s not let in on it?

PERKINS: Oh, it was only sort of like dreaming . . . I wanted to . . .

[There is a thunderous crash upstairs, the violent scuffle of a battle and a child’s shrill scream]

BOY’S VOICE: [Offstage] No, ya don’t! No, ya don’t! Ya dirty snot!

GIRL’S VOICE: Ma-a-a!

BOY’S VOICE: I’ll learn ya! I’ll . . .

GIRL’S VOICE: Ma-a! He bit me on the pratt!

MRS. PERKINS: [Throws the door Left open, yells upstairs] Keep quiet up there and march straight to bed, or I’ll beat the living Jesus out of the both of you! [Slams the door. The noise upstairs subsides to thin whimpers] For the life of me, I don’t see why of all the children in the world I had to get these!

PERKINS: Please, dovey, not tonight. I’m tired. I wanted to talk about . . . the plans.

MRS. PERKINS: What plans?

PERKINS: I was thinking . . . if we’re very careful, we could take a vacation maybe . . . in a year or two . . . and go to Europe, you know, like Switzerland or Italy . . . [Looks at her hopefully, sees no reaction, adds] . . . It’s where they have mountains, you know.

MRS. PERKINS: Well?

PERKINS: Well, and lakes. And snow high up on the peaks. And sunsets.

MRS. PERKINS: And what would we do?

PERKINS: Oh . . . well . . . just rest, I guess. And look around, sort of. You know, at the swans and the sail-boats. Just the two of us.

MRS. SHLY: Uh-huh. Just the two of you.

MRS. PERKINS: Yes, you were always a great one for making up ways of wasting good money, George Perkins. And me slaving and skimping and saving every little penny. Swans, indeed! Well, before you go thinking of any swans, you’d better get us a new Frigidaire, that’s all I’ve got to say.

MRS. SHLY: And a mayonnaise mixer. And a ’lectric washing machine. And it’s about time to be thinking of a new car, too. The old one’s a sight. And . . .

PERKINS: Look, you don’t understand. I don’t want anything that we need.

MRS. PERKINS: What?

PERKINS: I want something I don’t need at all.

MRS. PERKINS: George Perkins! Have you been drinking?

PERKINS: Rosie, I . . .

MRS. SHLY: [Resolutely] Now I’ve had just about enough of this nonsense! Now you come down to earth, George Perkins. There’s something bigger to think about. Rosie has a surprise for you. A pretty surprise. Tell him, Rosie.

MRS. PERKINS: I just found it out today, Georgie. You’ll be glad to hear it.

MRS. SHLY: He’ll be tickled pink. Go on.

MRS. PERKINS: Well, I . . . I’ve been to the doctor’s this morning. We have a baby coming.

[Silence. The two women look, with bright smiles, at PERKINS’ face, a face that distorts slowly before their eyes into an expression of stunned horror]

PERKINS: [In a choked voice] Another one?

MRS. PERKINS: [Brightly] Uh-huh. A brand-new little baby. [He stares at her silently] Well? [He stares without moving] Well, what’s the matter with you? [He does not move] Aren’t you glad?

PERKINS: [In a slow, heavy voice] You’re not going to have it.

MRS. PERKINS: Mama! What’s he saying?

PERKINS: [In a dull, persistent monotone] You know what I’m saying. You can’t have it. You won’t.

MRS. SHLY: Have you gone plumb outta your mind? Are you thinking of . . . of . . .

PERKINS: [Dully] Yes.

MRS. PERKINS: Mama!!

MRS. SHLY: [Ferociously] D’you know who you’re talking to? It’s my daughter you’re talking to, not a street woman! To come right out with a thing like that . . . to his own wife . . . to his own . . .

MRS. PERKINS: What’s happened to you?

PERKINS: Rosie, I didn’t mean to insult you. It’s not even dangerous nowadays and . . .

MRS. PERKINS: Make him stop, Mama!

MRS. SHLY: Where did you pick that up? Decent people don’t even know about such things! You hear about it maybe with gangsters and actresses. But in a respectable married home!

MRS. PERKINS: What’s happened to you today?

PERKINS: It’s not today, Rosie. It’s for a long, long time back. . . . But I’m set with the firm now. I can take good care of you and the children. But the rest—Rosie, I can’t throw it away for good.

MRS. PERKINS: What are you talking about? What better use can you find for your extra money than to take care of a baby?

PERKINS: That’s just it. Take care of it. The hospital and the doctors. The strained vegetables—at two bits the can. The school and the measles. All over again. And nothing else.

MRS. PERKINS: So that’s how you feel about your duties! There’s nothing holier than to raise a family. There’s no better blessing. Haven’t I spent my life making a home for you? Don’t you have everything every decent man struggles for? What else do you want?

PERKINS: Rosie, it’s not that I don’t like what I’ve got. I like it fine. Only . . . Well, it’s like this bathrobe of mine. I’m glad I have it, it’s warm and comfortable, and I like it, just the same as I like the rest of it. Just like that. And no more. There should be more.

MRS. PERKINS: Well, I like that! The swell bathrobe I picked out for your birthday! Well, if you didn’t like it, why didn’t you exchange it?

PERKINS: Oh, Rosie, it’s not that! It’s only that a man can’t live his whole life for a bathrobe. Or for things that he feels the same way about. Things that do nothing to him—inside, I mean. There should be something that he’s afraid of—afraid and happy. Like going to church—only not in a church. Something he can look up to. Something—high, Rosie . . . that’s it, high.

MRS. PERKINS: Well, if it’s culture you want, didn’t I subscribe to the Book-of-the-Month Club?

PERKINS: Oh, I know I can’t explain it! All I ask is, don’t let’s have that baby, Rosie. That would be the end of it all for me. I’ll be an old man, if I give those things up. I don’t want to be old. Not yet. God, not yet! Just leave me a few years, Rosie!

MRS. PERKINS: [Breaking down into tears] Never, never, never did I think I’d live to hear this!

MRS. SHLY: [Rushing to her] Rosie, sweetheart! Don’t cry like that, baby! [Whirling upon PERKINS] See what you’ve done? Now don’t let me hear another word out of that filthy mouth of yours! Do you want to kill your wife? Take the Chinese, for instance. They go in for abortions, that’s why all the Chinks have rickets. PERKINS: Now, Mother, who ever told you that?

MRS. SHLY: Well, I suppose I don’t know what I’m talking about? I suppose the big businessman is the only one to tell us what’s what?

PERKINS: I didn’t mean . . . I only meant that . . .

MRS. PERKINS: [Through her sobs] You leave Mama alone, George.

PERKINS: [Desperately] But I didn’t . . .

MRS. SHLY: I understand. I understand perfectly, George Perkins. An old mother, these days, is no good for anything but to shut up and wait for the graveyard!

PERKINS: [Resolutely] Mother, I wish you’d stop trying to . . . [Bravely] . . . to make trouble.

MRS. SHLY: So? So that’s it? So I’m making trouble? So I’m a burden to you, am I? Well, I’m glad you came out with it, Mr. Perkins! And here I’ve been, poor fool that I am, slaving in this house like if it was my own! That’s the gratitude I get. Well, I won’t stand for it another minute. Not one minute. [Rushes out Left, slamming the door]

MRS. PERKINS: [With consternation] George! . . . George, if you don’t apologize, Mama will leave us!

PERKINS: [With sudden, desperate courage] Well, let her go.

MRS. PERKINS: [Stares at him incredulously, then:] So it’s come to that? So that’s what it does to you, your big promotion? Coming home, picking a fight with everybody, throwing his wife’s old mother out into the gutter! If you think I’m going to stand for . . .

PERKINS: Listen, I’ve stood about as much of her as I’m going to stand. She’d better go. It was coming to this, sooner or later.

MRS. PERKINS: You just listen to me, George Perkins! If you don’t apologize to Mama, if you don’t apologize to her before tomorrow morning, I’ll never speak to you again as long as I live!

PERKINS: [Wearily] How many times have I heard that before?

[MRS. PERKINS runs to door Left and exits, slamming the door. PERKINS sits wearily, without moving. An old-fashioned clock strikes nine. He rises slowly, turns out the lights, pulls the shade down over the glass entrance door. The room is dim but for one lamp burning by the fireplace. He leans against the mantelpiece, his head on his arm, slumped wearily. The doorbell rings. It is a quick, nervous, somehow furtive sound. PERKINS starts, looks at the entrance door, surprised, hesitates, then crosses to door and opens it. Before we can see the visitor, his voice a stunned explosion:] Oh, my God!! [PERKINS steps aside. KAY GONDA stands on the threshold. She wears an exquisitely plain black suit, very modern, austerely severe; a black hat, black shoes, stockings, bag, and gloves. The sole and startling contrast to her clothes is the pale, luminous gold of her hair and the whiteness of her face. It is a strange face with eyes that make one uncomfortable. She is tall and very slender. Her movements are slow, her steps light, soundless. There is a feeling of unreality about her, the feeling of a being that does not belong on this earth. She looks more like a ghost than a woman]

KAY GONDA: Please keep quiet. And let me in.

PERKINS: [Stuttering foolishly] You . . . you are . . .

KAY GONDA: Kay Gonda. [She enters and closes the door behind her]

PERKINS: W-why . . .

KAY GONDA: Are you George Perkins?

PERKINS: [Foolishly] Yes, ma’am. George Perkins. George S. Perkins. . . . Only how . . .

KAY GONDA: I am in trouble. Have you heard about it?

PERKINS: Y-yes . . . oh my God! . . . Yes. . . .

KAY GONDA: I have to hide. For the night. It is dangerous. Can you let me stay here?

PERKINS: Here?

KAY GONDA: Yes. For one night.

PERKINS: But how . . . that is . . . why did you . . .

KAY GONDA: [Opens her bag and shows him the letter] I read your letter. And I thought that no one would look for me here. And I thought you would want to help me.

PERKINS: I . . . Miss Gonda, you’ll excuse me, please, you know it’s enough to make a fellow . . . I mean, if I don’t seem to make sense or . . . I mean, if you need help, you can stay here the rest of your life, Miss Gonda.

KAY GONDA: [Calmly] Thank you. [She throws her bag on a table, takes off her hat and gloves, indifferently, as if she were quite at home. He keeps staring at her]

PERKINS: You mean . . . they’re really after you?

KAY GONDA: The police. [Adds] For murder.

PERKINS: I won’t let them get you. If there’s anything I can . . . [He stops short. Steps are heard approaching, behind the door Left]

MRS. PERKINS’ VOICE: [Offstage] George!

PERKINS: Yes . . . dovey?

MRS. PERKINS’ VOICE: Who was that who rang the bell?

PERKINS: No . . . no one, dovey. Somebody had the wrong address. [He listens to the steps moving away, then whispers:] That was my wife. We’d better keep quiet. She’s all right. Only . . . she wouldn’t understand.

KAY GONDA: It will be dangerous for you, if they find me here.

PERKINS: I don’t care. [She smiles slowly. He points to the room helplessly] Just make yourself at home. You can sleep right here, on the davenport, and I’ll stay outside and watch to see that no one . . .

KAY GONDA: No. I don’t want to sleep. Stay here. You and I, we have so much to talk about.

PERKINS: Oh, yes. Sure . . . that is . . . about what, Miss Gonda?

[She sits down without answering. He sits down on the edge of a chair, gathering his bathrobe, miserably uncomfortable. She looks at him expectantly, a silent question in her eyes. He blinks, clears his throat, says resolutely:]

Pretty cold night, this is.

KAY GONDA: Yes.

PERKINS: That’s California for you . . . the Golden West . . . Sunshine all day, but cold as the . . . but very cold at night.

KAY GONDA: Give me a cigarette.

[He leaps to his feet, produces a package of cigarettes, strikes three matches before he can light one. She leans back, the lighted cigarette between her fingers]

PERKINS: [He mutters helplessly] I . . . I smoke this kind. Easier on your throat, they are. [He looks at her miserably. He has so much to tell her. He fumbles for words. He ends with:] Now Joe Tucker—that’s a friend of mine—Joe Tucker, he smokes cigars. But I never took to them, never did.

KAY GONDA: You have many friends?

PERKINS: Yes, sure. Sure I have. Can’t complain.

KAY GONDA: You like them?

PERKINS: Yes, I like them fine.

KAY GONDA: And they like you? They approve of you, and they bow to you on the street?

PERKINS: Why . . . I guess so.

KAY GONDA: How old are you, George Perkins?

PERKINS: I’ll be forty-three this coming June.

KAY GONDA: It will be hard to lose your job and to find yourself in the street. In a dark, lonely street, where you’ll see your friends passing by and looking past you, as if you did not exist. Where you will want to scream and tell them of the great things you know, but no one will hear and no one will answer. It will be hard, won’t it?

PERKINS: [Bewildered] Why . . . When should that happen?

KAY GONDA: [Calmly] When they find me here.

PERKINS: [Resolutely] Don’t worry about that. No one will find you here. Not that I’m afraid for myself. Suppose they learn I helped you? Who wouldn’t? Who’d hold that against me? Why should they?

KAY GONDA: Because they hate me. And they hate all those who take my side.

PERKINS: Why should they hate you?

KAY GONDA: [Calmly] I am a murderess, George Perkins.

PERKINS: Well, if you ask me, I don’t believe it. I don’t even want to ask you whether you’ve done it. I just don’t believe it.

KAY GONDA: If you mean Granton Sayers . . . no, I do not want to speak about Granton Sayers. Forget that. But I am still a murderess. You see, I came here and, perhaps, I will destroy your life—everything that has been your life for forty-three years.

PERKINS: [In a low voice] That’s not much, Miss Gonda.

KAY GONDA: Do you always go to see my pictures?

PERKINS: Always.

KAY GONDA: Are you happy when you come out of the theater?

PERKINS: Yes. Sure. . . . No, I guess I’m not. That’s funny, I never thought of it that way. . . . Miss Gonda, you won’t laugh at me if I tell you something?

KAY GONDA: Of course not.

PERKINS: Miss Gonda, I . . . I cry when I come home after seeing a picture of yours. I just lock myself in the bathroom and I cry, every time. I don’t know why.

KAY GONDA: I knew that.

PERKINS: How?

KAY GONDA: I told you I am a murderess. I kill so many things in people. I kill the things they live by. But they come to see me because I am the only one who makes them realize that they want those things to be killed. Or they think they do. And it’s their whole pride, that they think and say they do.

PERKINS: I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Miss Gonda.

KAY GONDA: You’ll understand someday.

PERKINS: Did you really do it?

KAY GONDA: What?

PERKINS: Did you kill Granton Sayers? [She looks at him, smiles slowly, shrugs] I was only wondering why you could have done it.

KAY GONDA: Because I could not stand it any longer. There are times when one can’t stand it any longer.

PERKINS: Yes. There are.

KAY GONDA: [Looking straight at him] Why do you want to help me?

PERKINS: I don’t know . . . only that . . .

KAY GONDA: Your letter, it said . . .

PERKINS: Oh! I never thought you’d read the silly thing.

KAY GONDA: It was not silly.

PERKINS: I bet you have plenty of them, fans, I mean, and letters.

KAY GONDA: I like to think that I mean something to people.

PERKINS: You must forgive me if I said anything fresh, you know, or personal.

KAY GONDA: You said you were not happy.

PERKINS: I . . . I didn’t mean to complain, Miss Gonda, only . . . I guess I’ve missed something along the way. I don’t know what it is, but I know I’ve missed it. Only I don’t know why.

KAY GONDA: Perhaps it is because you wanted to miss it.

PERKINS: No. [His voice is suddenly firm] No. [He rises and stands looking straight at her] You see, I’m not unhappy at all. In fact, I’m a very happy man—as happiness goes. Only there’s something in me that knows of a life I’ve never lived, the kind of life no one has ever lived, but should.

KAY GONDA: You know it? Why don’t you live it?

PERKINS: Who does? Who can? Who ever gets a chance at the . . . the very best possible to him? We all bargain. We take the second best. That’s all there is to be had. But the . . . the God in us, it knows the other . . . the very best . . . which never comes.

KAY GONDA: And . . . if it came?

PERKINS: We’d grab it—because there is a God in us.

KAY GONDA: And . . . the God in you, you really want it?

PERKINS: [Fiercely] Look, I know this: let them come, the cops, let them come now and try to get you. Let them tear this house down. I built it—took me fifteen years to pay for it. Let them tear it down, before I let them take you. Let them come, whoever it is that’s after you . . . [The door Left is flung open. MRS. PERKINS stands on the threshold; she wears a faded corduroy bathrobe and a long nightgown of grayish-pink cotton]

MRS. PERKINS: [Gasping] George! . . .

[KAY GONDA rises and stands looking at them]

PERKINS: Dovey, keep quiet! For God’s sake, keep quiet . . . come in . . . close the door!

MRS. PERKINS: I thought I heard voices . . . I . . . [She chokes, unable to continue]

PERKINS: Dovey . . . this . . . Miss Gonda, may I present—my wife? Dovey, this is Miss Gonda, Miss Kay Gonda! [KAY GONDA inclines her head, but MRS. PERKINS remains motionless, staring at her. PERKINS says desperately:] Don’t you understand? Miss Gonda’s in trouble, you know, you’ve heard about it, the papers said . . . [He stops. MRS. PERKINS shows no reaction. Silence. Then:]

MRS. PERKINS: [To KAY GONDA, her voice unnaturally emotionless] Why did you come here?

KAY GONDA: [Calmly] Mr. Perkins will have to explain that.

PERKINS: Rosie, I . . . [Stops]

MRS. PERKINS: Well?

PERKINS: Rosie, there’s nothing to get excited about, only that Miss Gonda is wanted by the police and—

MRS. PERKINS: Oh.

PERKINS:—and it’s for murder and—

MRS. PERKINS: Oh!

PERKINS:—and she just has to stay here overnight. That’s all.

MRS. PERKINS: [Slowly] Listen to me, George Perkins: either she goes out of the house this minute, or else I go.

PERKINS: But let me explain . . .

MRS. PERKINS: I don’t need any explanations. I’ll pack my things, and I’ll take the children, too. And I’ll pray to God we never see you again. [She waits. He does not answer] Tell her to get out.

PERKINS: Rosie . . . I can’t.

MRS. PERKINS: We’ve struggled together pretty hard, haven’t we, George? Together. For fifteen years.

PERKINS: Rosie, it’s just one night. . . . If you knew . . .

MRS. PERKINS: I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know why my husband should bring such a thing upon me. A fancy woman or a murderess, or both. I’ve been a faithful wife to you, George. I’ve given you the best years of my life. I’ve borne your children.

PERKINS: Yes, Rosie . . .

MRS. PERKINS: It’s not just for me. Think of what will happen to you. Shielding a murderess. Think of the children. [He doesn’t answer] And your job, too. You just got that promotion. We were going to get new drapes for the living room. The green ones. You always wanted them.

PERKINS: Yes . . .

MRS. PERKINS: And that golf club you wanted to join. They have the best of members, solid, respectable members, not men with their fingerprints in the police files.

PERKINS: [His voice barely audible] No . . .

MRS. PERKINS: Have you thought of what will happen when people learn about this?

PERKINS: [Looks desperately for a word, a glance from KAY GONDA. He wants her to decide. But KAY GONDA stands motionless, as if the scene did not concern her at all. Only her eyes are watching him. He speaks to her, his voice a desperate plea] What will happen when people learn about this?

[KAY GONDA does not answer]

MRS. PERKINS: I’ll tell you what will happen. No decent person will ever want to speak to you again. They’ll fire you, down at the Daffodil Company, they’ll throw you right out in the street!

PERKINS: [Repeats softly, dazedly, as if from far away] . . . in a dark, lonely street where your friends will be passing by and looking straight past you . . . and you’ll want to scream . . . [He stares at KAY GONDA, his eyes wide. She does not move]

MRS. PERKINS: That will be the end of everything you’ve ever held dear. And in exchange for what? Back roads and dark alleys, fleeing by night, hunted and cornered, and forsaken by the whole wide world! . . . [He does not answer or turn to her. He is staring at KAY GONDA with a new kind of understanding] Think of the children, George. . . . [He does not move] We’ve been pretty happy together, haven’t we, George? Fifteen years. . . .

[Her voice trails off. There is a long silence. Then PERKINS turns slowly away from KAY GONDA to look at his wife. His shoulders droop, he is suddenly old]

PERKINS: [Looking at his wife] I’m sorry, Miss Gonda, but under the circumstances . . .

KAY GONDA: [Calmly] I understand.

[She puts on her hat, picks up her bag and gloves. Her movements are light, unhurried. She walks to the door Center. When she passes MRS. PERKINS, she stops to say calmly:]

I’m sorry. I had the wrong address.

[She walks out. PERKINS and his wife stand at the open door and watch her go]

PERKINS: [Putting his arm around his wife’s waist] Is mother asleep?

MRS. PERKINS: I don’t know. Why?

PERKINS: I thought I’d go in and talk to her. Make up, sort of. She knows all about raising babies.

CURTAIN

SCENE 2

When the curtain rises, another letter is projected on the screen. This one is written in a small uneven, temperamental handwriting:

Dear Miss Gonda,

The determinism of duty has conditioned me to pursue the relief of my fellow men’s suffering. I see daily before me the wrecks and victims of an outrageous social system. But I gain courage for my cause when I look at you on the screen and realize of what greatness the human race is capable. Your art is a symbol of the hidden potentiality which I see in my derelict brothers. None of them chose to be what he is. None of us ever chooses the bleak, hopeless life he is forced to lead. But in our ability to recognize you and bow to you lies the hope of mankind.

Sincerely yours,
Chuck Fink
. . . Spring Street
Los Angeles, California

Lights go out, screen disappears, and stage reveals living room in the home of CHUCK FINK. It is a miserable room in a run-down furnished bungalow. Entrance door upstage in wall Right; large open window next to it, downstage; door to bedroom in wall Center. Late evening. Although there are electric fixtures in the room, it is lighted by a single kerosene lamp smoking in a corner. The tenants are moving out; two battered trunks and a number of grocery cartons stand in the middle of the room; closets and chests gape open, half emptied; clothes, books, dishes, every conceivable piece of household junk are piled indiscriminately into great heaps on the floor.

At curtain rise, CHUCK FINK is leaning anxiously out of the window; he is a young man of about thirty, slight, anemic, with a rich mane of dark hair, a cadaverous face, and a neat little mustache. He is watching the people seen hurrying past the window in great agitation; there is a dim confusion of voices outside. He sees someone outside and calls:

FINK: Hey, Jimmy!

JIMMY’S VOICE: [Offstage] Yeah?

FINK: Come here a minute!

[JIMMY appears at the window outside; he is a haggard-looking youth, his clothes torn, his eyes swollen, blood running down the side of his face from a gash on his forehead]

JIMMY: Oh, that you, Chuck? Thought it was a cop. What d’you want?

FINK: Have you seen Fanny down there?

JIMMY: Huh! Fanny!

FINK: Have you seen her?

JIMMY: Not since it started.

FINK: Is she hurt?

JIMMY: Might be. I seen her when it started. She threw a brick plumb through their window.

FINK: What’s happened out there?

JIMMY: Tear gas. They’ve arrested a bunch of the pickets. So we beat it.

FINK: But hasn’t anyone seen Fanny?

JIMMY: Oh, to hell with your Fanny! There’s people battered all over the place. Jesus, that was one swell free-for-all!

[JIMMY disappears down the street. FINK leaves the window. Paces nervously, glancing at his watch. The noise subsides in the street. FINK tries to continue his packing, throws a few things into cartons halfheartedly. The entrance door flies open. FANNY FINK enters. She is a tall, gaunt, angular girl in her late twenties, with a sloppy masculine haircut, flat shoes, a man’s coat thrown over her shoulders. Her hair is disheveled, her face white. She leans against the doorjamb for support]

FINK: Fanny! [She does not move] Are you all right? What happened? Where have you been?

FANNY: [In a flat, husky voice] Got any Mercurochrome?

FINK: What?

FANNY: Mercurochrome. [Throws her coat off. Her clothes are torn, her bare arms bruised; there is a bleeding cut on one forearm]

FINK: Jesus!

FANNY: Oh, don’t stand there like an idiot! [Walks resolutely to a cabinet, rummages through the shelves, produces a tiny bottle] Stop staring at me! Nothing to get hysterical over!

FINK: Here, let me help.

FANNY: Never mind. I’m all right. [Dabs her arm with Mercurochrome]

FINK: Where have you been so late?

FANNY: In jail.

FINK: Huh?!

FANNY: All of us. Pinky Thomlinson, Bud Miller, Mary Phelps, and all the rest. Twelve of us.

FINK: What happened?

FANNY: We tried to stop the night shift from going in.

FINK: And?

FANNY: Bud Miller started it by cracking a scab’s skull. But the damn Cossacks were prepared. Biff just sprung us out on bail. Got a cigarette? [She finds one and lights it; she smokes nervously, continuously throughout the scene] Trial next week. They don’t think the scab will recover. It looks like a long vacation in the cooler for yours truly. [Bitterly] You don’t mind, do you, sweetheart? It will be a nice, quiet rest for you here without me.

FINK: But it’s outrageous! I won’t allow it! We have some rights . . .

FANNY: Sure. Rights. C.O.D. rights. Not worth a damn without cash. And where will you get that?

FINK: [Sinking wearily into a chair] But it’s unthinkable!

FANNY: Well, don’t think of it, then. . . . [Looks around] You don’t seem to have done much packing, have you? How are we going to finish with all this damn junk tonight?

FINK: What’s the hurry? I’m too upset.

FANNY: What’s the hurry! If we’re not out of here by morning, they’ll dump it all, right out on the sidewalk.

FINK: If that wasn’t enough! And now this trial! Now you had to get into this! What are we going to do?

FANNY: I’m going to pack. [Starts gathering things, hardly looking at them, and flinging them into the cartons with ferocious hatred] Shall we move to the Ambassador or the Beverly-Sunset, darling? [He does not answer. She flings a book into the carton] The Beverly-Sunset would be nice, I think. . . . We shall need a suite of seven rooms—do you think we could manage in seven rooms? [He does not move. She flings a pile of underwear into the carton] Oh, yes, and a private swimming pool. [Flings a coffee pot into carton viciously] And a two-car garage! For the Rolls-Royce! [Flings a vase down; it misses the carton and shatters against a chair leg. She screams suddenly hysterically] Goddamn them! Why do some people have all of that!

FINK: [Languidly, without moving] Childish escapism, my dear.

FANNY: The heroics is all very well, but I’m so damn sick of standing up to make speeches about global problems and worrying all the time whether the comrades can see the runs in my stockings!

FINK: Why don’t you mend them?

FANNY: Save it, sweetheart! Save the brilliant sarcasm for the magazine editors—maybe it will sell an article for you someday.

FINK: That was uncalled for, Fanny.

FANNY: Well, it’s no use fooling yourself. There’s a name for people like us. At least, for one of us, I’m sure. Know it? Does your brilliant vocabulary include it? Failure’s the word.

FINK: A relative conception, my love.

FANNY: Sure. What’s rent money compared to infinity? [Flings a pile of clothing into a carton] Do you know it’s number five, by the way?

FINK: Number five what?

FANNY: Eviction number five for us, Socrates! I’ve counted them. Five times in three years. All we’ve ever done is paid the first month and waited for the sheriff.

FINK: That’s the way most people live in Hollywood.

FANNY: You might pretend to be worried—just out of decency.

FINK: My dear, why waste one’s emotional reserves in blaming oneself for what is the irrevocable result of an inadequate social system?

FANNY: You could at least refrain from plagiarism.

FINK: Plagiarism?

FANNY: You lifted that out of my article.

FINK: Oh, yes. The article. I beg your pardon.

FANNY: Well, at least it was published.

FINK: So it was. Six years ago.

FANNY: [Carrying an armful of old shoes] Got any acceptance checks to show since then? [Dumps her load into a carton] Now what? Where in hell are we going to go tomorrow?

FINK: With thousands homeless and jobless—why worry about an individual case?

FANNY: [Is about to answer angrily, then shrugs, and turning away stumbles over some boxes in the semidarkness ] Goddamn it! It’s enough that they’re throwing us out. They didn’t have to turn off the electricity!

FINK: [Shrugging] Private ownership of utilities.

FANNY: I wish there was a kerosene that didn’t stink.

FINK: Kerosene is the commodity of the poor. But I understand they’ve invented a new, odorless kind in Russia.

FANNY: Sure. Nothing stinks in Russia. [Takes from a shelf a box full of large brown envelopes] What do you want to do with these?

FINK: What’s in there?

FANNY: [Reading from the envelopes] Your files as trustee of the Clark Institute of Social Research . . . Correspondence as Consultant to the Vocational School for Subnormal Children . . . Secretary to the Free Night Classes of Dialectic Materialism . . . Adviser to the Workers’ Theater . . .

FINK: Throw the Workers’ Theater out. I’m through with them. They wouldn’t put my name on their letter-heads.

FANNY: [Flings one envelope aside] What do you want me to do with the rest? Pack it or will you carry it yourself?

FINK: Certainly I’ll carry it myself. It might get lost. Wrap them up for me, will you?

FANNY: [Picks up some newspapers, starts wrapping the files, stops, attracted by an item in a paper, glances at it] You know, it’s funny, this business about Kay Gonda.

FINK: What business?

FANNY: In this morning’s paper. About the murder.

FINK: Oh, that? Rubbish. She had nothing to do with it. Yellow press gossip.

FANNY: [Wrapping up the files] That Sayers guy sure had the dough.

FINK: Used to have. Not anymore. I know from that time when I helped to picket Sayers Oil last year that the big shot was going by the board even then.

FANNY: It says here that Sayers Oil was beginning to pick up.

FINK: Oh, well, one plutocrat less. So much the better for the heirs.

FANNY: [Picks up a pile of books] Twenty-five copies of Oppress the Oppressors—[Adds with a bow]—by Chuck Fink! . . . What the hell are we going to do with them?

FINK: [Sharply] What do you think we’re going to do with them?

FANNY: God! Lugging all that extra weight around! Do you think there are twenty-five people in the United States who bought one copy each of your great masterpiece?

FINK: The number of sales is no proof of a book’s merit.

FANNY: No, but it sure does help!

FINK: Would you like to see me pandering to the middle-class rabble, like the scribbling lackeys of capitalism? You’re weakening, Fanny. You’re turning petty bourgeois.

FANNY: [Furiously] Who’s turning petty bourgeois? I’ve done more than you’ll ever hope to do! I don’t go running with manuscripts to third-rate publishers. I’ve had an article printed in The Nation! Yes, in The Nation ! If I didn’t bury myself with you in this mudhole of a . . .

FINK: It’s in the mudholes of the slums that the vanguard trenches of social reform are dug, Fanny.

FANNY: Oh, Lord, Chuck, what’s the use? Look at the others. Look at Miranda Lumkin. A column in the Courier and a villa at Palm Springs! And she couldn’t hold a candle to me in college! Everybody always said I was an advanced thinker. [Points at the room] This is what one gets for being an advanced thinker.

FINK: [Softly] I know, dear. You’re tired. You’re frightened. I can’t blame you. But, you see, in our work one must give up everything. All thought of personal gain or comfort. I’ve done it. I have no private ego left. All I want is that millions of men hear the name of Chuck Fink and come to regard it as that of their leader!

FANNY: [Softening] I know. You mean it all right. You’re real, Chuck. There aren’t many unselfish men in the world.

FINK: [Dreamily] Perhaps, five hundred years from now, someone will write my biography and call it Chuck Fink the Selfless.

FANNY: And it will seem so silly, then, that here we were worried about some piddling California landlord! FINK: Precisely. One must know how to take a long view on things. And . . .

FANNY: [Listening to some sound outside, suddenly] Sh-sh! I think there’s someone at the door.

FINK: Who? No one’ll come here. They’ve deserted us. They’ve left us to . . . [There is a knock at the door. They look at each other. FINK walks to the door] Who’s there? [There is no answer. The knock is repeated. He throws the door open angrily] What do you . . . [He stops short as KAY GONDA enters; she is dressed as in the preceding scene. He gasps] Oh! . . . [He stares at her, half frightened, half incredulous. FANNY makes a step forward and stops. They can’t make a sound]

KAY GONDA: Mr. Fink?

FINK: [Nodding frantically] Yes. Chuck Fink. In person. . . . But you . . . you’re Kay Gonda, aren’t you?

KAY GONDA: Yes. I am hiding. From the police. I have no place to go. Will you let me stay here for the night?

FINK: Well, I’ll be damned! . . . Oh, excuse me!

FANNY: You want us to hide you here?

KAY GONDA: Yes. If you are not afraid of it.

FANNY: But why on earth did you pick . . .

KAY GONDA: Because no one would find me here. And because I read Mr. Fink’s letter.

FINK: [Quite recovering himself] But of course! My letter. I knew you’d notice it among the thousands. Pretty good, wasn’t it?

FANNY: I helped him with it.

FINK: [Laughing] What a glorious coincidence! I had no idea when I wrote it, that . . . But how wonderfully things work out!

KAY GONDA: [Looking at him] I am wanted for murder.

FINK: Oh, don’t worry about that. We don’t mind. We’re broadminded.

FANNY: [Hastily pulling down the window shade] You’ll be perfectly safe here. You’ll excuse the . . . informal appearance of things, won’t you? We were considering moving out of here.

FINK: Please sit down, Miss Gonda.

KAY GONDA: [Sitting down, removing her hat] Thank you.

FINK: I’ve dreamed of a chance to talk to you like this. There are so many things I’ve always wanted to ask you.

KAY GONDA: There are many things I’ve always wanted to be asked.

FINK: Is it true, what they say about Granton Sayers? You ought to know. They say he was a regular pervert and what he didn’t do to women . . .

FANNY: Chuck! That’s entirely irrelevant and . . .

KAY GONDA: [With a faint smile at her] No. It isn’t true.

FINK: Of course, I’m not one to censure anything. I despise morality. Then there’s another thing I wanted to ask you: I’ve always been interested, as a sociologist, in the influence of the economic factor on the individual. How much does a movie star actually get?

KAY GONDA: Fifteen or twenty thousand a week on my new contract—I don’t remember.

[FANNY and FINK exchange startled glances]

FINK: What an opportunity for social good! I’ve always believed that you were a great humanitarian.

KAY GONDA: Am I? Well, perhaps I am. I hate humanity.

FINK: You don’t mean that, Miss Gonda!

KAY GONDA: There are some men with a purpose in life. Not many, but there are. And there are also some with a purpose—and with integrity. These are very rare. I like them.

FINK: But one must be tolerant! One must consider the pressure of the economic factor. Now, for instance, take the question of a star’s salary . . .

KAY GONDA: [Sharply] I do not want to talk about it. [With a note that sounds almost like pleading in her voice] Have you nothing to ask me about my work?

FINK: Oh, God, so much! . . . [Suddenly earnest] No. Nothing. [KAY GONDA looks at him closely, with a faint smile. He adds, suddenly simple, sincere for the first time:] Your work . . . one shouldn’t talk about it. I can’t. [Adds] I’ve never looked upon you as a movie star. No one does. It’s not like looking at Joan Tudor or Sally Sweeney, or the rest of them. And it’s not the trashy stories you make—you’ll excuse me, but they are trash. It’s something else.

KAY GONDA: [Looking at him] What?

FINK: The way you move, and the sound of your voice, and your eyes. Your eyes.

FANNY: [Suddenly eager] It’s as if you were not a human being at all, not the kind we see around us.

FINK: We all dream of the perfect being that man could be. But no one has ever seen it. You have. And you’re showing it to us. As if you knew a great secret, lost by the world, a great secret and a great hope. Man washed clean. Man at his highest possibility.

FANNY: When I look at you on the screen, it makes me feel guilty, but it also makes me feel young, new and proud. Somehow, I want to raise my arms like this. . . . [Raises her arms over her head in a triumphant, ecstatic gesture; then, embarrassed:] You must forgive us. We’re being perfectly childish.

FINK: Perhaps we are. But in our drab lives, we have to grasp at any ray of light, anywhere, even in the movies. Why not in the movies, the great narcotic of mankind? You’ve done more for the damned than any philanthropist ever could. How do you do it?

KAY GONDA: [Without looking at him] One can do it just so long. One can keep going on one’s own power, and wring dry every drop of hope—but then one has to find help. One has to find an answering voice, an answering hymn, an echo. I am very grateful to you. [There is a knock at the door. They look at one another. FINK walks to the door resolutely]

FINK: Who’s there?

WOMAN’S VOICE: [Offstage] Say, Chuck, could I borrow a bit of cream?

FINK: [Angrily] Go to hell! We haven’t any cream. You got your nerve disturbing people at this hour! [A muffled oath and retreating steps are heard offstage. He returns to the others] God, I thought it was the police!

FANNY: We mustn’t let anyone in tonight. Any of those starving bums around here would be only too glad to turn you in for a—[Her voice changes suddenly, strangely, as if the last word had dropped out accidentally]—a reward.

KAY GONDA: Do you realize what chance you are taking if they find me here?

FINK: They’ll get you out of here over my dead body.

KAY GONDA: You don’t know what danger . . .

FINK: We don’t have to know. We know what your work means to us. Don’t we, Fanny?

FANNY: [She has been standing aside, lost in thought] What?

FINK: We know what Miss Gonda’s work means to us, don’t we?

FANNY: [In a flat voice] Oh, yes . . . yes . . .

KAY GONDA: [Looking at FINK intently] And that which means to you . . . you will not betray it?

FINK: One doesn’t betray the best in one’s soul.

KAY GONDA: No. One doesn’t.

FINK: [Noticing FANNY’s abstraction] Fanny!

FANNY: [With a jerk] Yes? What?

FINK: Will you tell Miss Gonda how we’ve always . . .

FANNY: Miss Gonda must be tired. We should really allow her to go to bed.

KAY GONDA: Yes. I am very tired.

FANNY: [With brisk energy] You can have our bedroom. . . . Oh, yes, please don’t protest. We’ll be very comfortable here, on the couch. We’ll stay here on guard, so that no one will try to enter.

KAY GONDA: [Rising] It is very kind of you.

FANNY: [Taking the lamp] Please excuse this inconvenience. We’re having a little trouble with our electricity. [Leading the way to the bedroom] This way, please. You’ll be comfortable and safe.

FINK: Good night, Miss Gonda. Don’t worry. We’ll stand by you.

KAY GONDA: Thank you. Good night. [She exits with FANNY into the bedroom. FINK lifts the window shade. A broad band of moonlight falls across the room. He starts clearing the couch of its load of junk. FANNY returns into the room, closing the door behind her]

FANNY: [In a low voice] Well, what do you think of that? [He stretches his arms wide, shrugging] And they say miracles don’t happen!

FINK: We’d better keep quiet. She may hear us. . . . [The band of light goes out in the crack of the bedroom door] How about the packing?

FANNY: Never mind the packing now. [He fishes for sheets and blankets in the cartons, throwing their contents out again. FANNY stands aside, by the window, watching him silently. Then, in a low voice:] Chuck . . .

FINK: Yes?

FANNY: In a few days, I’m going on trial. Me and eleven of the kids.

FINK: [Looking at her, surprised] Yeah.

FANNY: It’s no use fooling ourselves. They’ll send us all up.

FINK: I know they will.

FANNY: Unless we can get money to fight it.

FINK: Yeah. But we can’t. No use thinking about it. [A short silence. He continues with his work]

FANNY: [In a whisper] Chuck . . . do you think she can hear us?

FINK: [Looking at the bedroom door] No.

FANNY: It’s a murder that she’s committed.

FINK: Yeah.

FANNY: It’s a millionaire that she’s killed.

FINK: Right.

FANNY: I suppose his family would like to know where she is.

FINK: [Raising his head, looking at her] What are you talking about?

FANNY: I was thinking that if his family were told where she’s hiding, they’d be glad to pay a reward.

FINK: [Stepping menacingly toward her] You lousy . . . what are you trying to . . .

FANNY: [Without moving] Five thousand dollars, probably.

FINK: [Stopping] Huh?

FANNY: Five thousand dollars, probably.

FINK: You lousy bitch! Shut up before I kill you! [Silence. He starts to undress. Then:] Fanny . . .

FANNY: Yes?

FINK: Think they’d—hand over five thousand?

FANNY: Sure they would. People pay more than that for ordinary kidnappers.

FINK: Oh, shut up! [Silence. He continues to undress]

FANNY: It’s jail for me, Chuck. Months, maybe years in jail.

FINK: Yeah . . .

FANNY: And for the others, too. Bud, and Pinky, and Mary, and the rest. Your friends. Your comrades. [He stops his undressing] You need them. The cause needs them. Twelve of our vanguard.

FINK: Yes . . .

FANNY: With five thousand, we’d get the best lawyer from New York. He’d beat the case. . . . And we wouldn’t have to move out of here. We wouldn’t have to worry. You could continue your great work . . . [He does not answer] Think of all the poor and helpless who need you. . . . [He does not answer] Think of twelve human beings you’re sending to jail . . . twelve to one, Chuck. . . . [He does not answer] Think of your duty to millions of your brothers. Millions to one. [Silence]

FINK: Fanny . . .

FANNY: Yes?

FINK: How would we go about it?

FANNY: Easy. We get out while she’s asleep. We run to the police station. Come back with the cops. Easy.

FINK: What if she hears?

FANNY: She won’t hear. But we got to hurry. [She moves to the door. He stops her]

FINK: [In a whisper] She’ll hear the door opening. [Points to the open window] This way. . . .

[They slip out through the window. The room is empty for a brief moment. Then the bedroom door opens.

KAY GONDA stands on the threshold. She stands still for a moment, then walks across the room to the entrance door and goes out, leaving the door open]

CURTAIN

SCENE 3

The screen unrolls a letter written in a bold, aggressive handwriting:

Dear Miss Gonda,

I am an unknown artist. But I know to what heights I shall rise, for I carry a sacred banner which cannot fail—and which is you. I have painted nothing that was not you. You stand as a goddess on every canvas I’ve done. I have never seen you in person. I do not need to. I can draw your face with my eyes closed. For my spirit is but a mirror of yours.

Someday you shall hear men speak of me. Until then, this is only a first tribute from your devoted priest—

Dwight Langley
. . . Normandie Avenue
Los Angeles, California

Lights go out, screen disappears, and stage reveals studio of DWIGHT LANGLEY. It is a large room, flashy, dramatic, and disreputable. Center back, large window showing the dark sky and the shadows of treetops; entrance door center Left; door into next room upstage Right. A profusion of paintings and sketches on the walls, on the easels, on the floor; all are of KAY GONDA; heads, full figures, in modern clothes, in flowering drapes, naked.

A mongrel assortment of strange types fills the room: men and women in all kinds of outfits, from tails and evening gowns to beach pajamas and slacks, none too prosperous-looking, all having one attribute in common—a glass in hand—and all showing signs of its effect.

DWIGHT LANGLEY lies stretched in the middle of a couch; he is young, with a tense, handsome, sunburnt face, dark, disheveled hair, and a haughty, irresistible smile. EUNICE HAMMOND keeps apart from the guests, her eyes returning constantly, anxiously, to LANGLEY; she is a beautiful young girl, quiet, reticent, dressed in a smart, simple dark dress obviously more expensive than any garment in the room.

As the curtain rises, the guests are lifting their glasses in a grand toast to LANGLEY, their voices piercing the raucous music coming over the radio.

MAN IN DRESS SUIT: Here’s to Lanny!

MAN IN SWEATER: To Dwight Langley of California!

WOMAN IN EVENING GOWN: To the winner and the best of us—from the cheerful losers!

TRAGIC GENTLEMAN: To the greatest artist ever lived!

LANGLEY: [Rising, waving his hand curtly] Thanks.

[ALL drink. Someone drops a glass, breaking it resonantly. As LANGLEY steps aside from the others, EUNICE approaches him]

EUNICE: [Extending her glass to his, whispers softly] To the day we’ve dreamed of for such a long time, dear.

LANGLEY: [Turning to her indifferently] Oh . . . oh, yes . . . [Clinks glass to hers automatically, without looking at her]

WOMAN IN SLACKS: [Calling to her] No monopoly on him, Eunice. Not anymore. From now on—Dwight Langley belongs to the world!

WOMAN IN EVENING GOWN: Well, not that I mean to minimize Lanny’s triumph, but I must say that for the greatest exhibition of the decade, it was rather a fizz, wasn’t it? Two or three canvases with some idea of something, but the rest of the trash people have the nerve to exhibit these days . . .

EFFEMINATE YOUNG MAN: Dear me! It is positively preposterous!

MAN IN DRESS SUIT: But Lanny beat them all! First prize of the decade!

LANGLEY: [With no trace of modesty] Did it surprise you?

TRAGIC GENTLEMAN: Because Lanny’s a geniush!

EFFEMINATE YOUNG MAN: Oh, my yes! Positively a genius!

[LANGLEY walks over to a sideboard to refill his glass. EUNICE, standing beside him, slips her hand over his]

EUNICE: [In a low voice, tenderly] Dwight, I haven’t had a moment with you to congratulate you. And I do want to say it tonight. I’m too happy, too proud of you to know how to say it, but I want you to understand . . . my dearest . . . how much it means to me.

LANGLEY: [Jerking his hand away, indifferently] Thanks.

EUNICE: I can’t help thinking of the years past. Remember, how discouraged you were at times, and I talked to you about your future, and . . .

LANGLEY: You don’t have to bring that up now, do you?

EUNICE: [Trying to laugh] I shouldn’t. I know. Utterly bad form. [Breaking down involuntarily] But I can’t help it. I love you.

LANGLEY: I know it. [Walks away from her]

BLOND GIRL: [Sitting on the couch, next to the woman in slacks] Come here, Lanny! Hasn’t anyone got a chance with a real genius?

LANGLEY: [Flopping down on the couch, between the two girls] Hello.

WOMAN IN SLACKS: [Throwing her arms around his shoulders ] Langley, I can’t get over that canvas of yours. I still see it as it hung there tonight. The damn thing haunts me.

LANGLEY: [Patronizingly] Like it?

WOMAN IN SLACKS: Love it. You do get the damnedest titles, though. What was it called? Hope, faith, or charity? No. Wait a moment. Liberty, equality, or . . .

LANGLEY: Integrity.

WOMAN IN SLACKS: That’s it. “Integrity.” Just what did you really mean by it, darling?

LANGLEY: Don’t try to understand.

MAN IN DRESS SUIT: But the woman! The woman in your painting, Langley! Ah, that, my friend, is a masterpiece!

WOMAN IN SLACKS: That white face. And those eyes. Those eyes that look straight through you!

WOMAN IN EVENING GOWN: You know, of course, who she is?

MAN IN DRESS SUIT: Kay Gonda, as usual.

MAN IN SWEATSHIRT: Say, Lanny, will you ever paint any other female? Why do you always have to stick to that one?

LANGLEY: An artist tells. He does not explain.

WOMAN IN SLACKS: You know, there’s something damn funny about Gonda and that Sayers affair.

MAN IN DRESS SUIT: I bet she did it all right. Wouldn’t put it past her.

EFFEMINATE YOUNG MAN: Imagine Kay Gonda being hanged! The blond hair and the black hood and the noose. My, it would be perfectly thrilling!

WOMAN IN EVENING GOWN: There’s a new theme for you, Lanny. “Kay Gonda on the Gallows.”

LANGLEY: [Furiously] Shut up, all of you! She didn’t do it! I won’t have you discussing her in my house!

[The guests subside for a brief moment]

MAN IN DRESS SUIT: Wonder how much Sayers actually left.

WOMAN IN SLACKS: The papers said he was just coming into a swell setup. A deal with United California Oil or some such big-time stuff. But I guess it’s off now.

MAN IN SWEATER: No, the evening papers said his sister is rushing the deal through.

WOMAN IN EVENING GOWN: But what’re the police doing? Have they issued any warrants?

MAN IN DRESS SUIT: Nobody knows.

WOMAN IN EVENING GOWN: Damn funny. . . .

MAN IN SWEATER: Say, Eunice, any more drinks left in this house? No use asking Lanny. He never knows where anything is.

MAN IN DRESS SUIT: [Throwing his arm around EUNICE] The greatest little mother-sister-and-all-the-rest combination an artist ever had!”

[EUNICE disengages herself, not too brusquely, but obviously displeased]

EFFEMINATE YOUNG MAN: Do you know that Eunice darns his socks? Oh, my, yes! I’ve seen a pair. Positively the cutest things!

MAN IN SWEATER: The woman behind the throne! The woman who guided his footsteps, washed his shirts, and kept up his courage in his dark years of struggle.

WOMAN IN EVENING GOWN: [To the WOMAN IN SLACKS, in a low voice] Kept up his courage—and his bank account.

WOMAN IN SLACKS: No. Really?

WOMAN IN EVENING GOWN: My dear, it’s no secret. Where do you suppose the money came from for the “dark years of struggle”? The Hammond millions. Not that old man Hammond didn’t kick her out of the house. He did. But she had some money of her own.

EFFEMINATE YOUNG MAN: Oh, my yes. The Social Register dropped her, too. But she didn’t care one bit, not one bit.

MAN IN SWEATER: [To EUNICE] How about it, Eunice? Where are the drinks?

EUNICE: [Hesitating] I’m afraid . . .

LANGLEY: [Rising] She’s afraid she doesn’t approve. But we’re going to drink whether she approves of it or not. [Searches through the cupboards frantically]

WOMAN IN SLACKS: Really, folks, it’s getting late and . . .

MAN IN DRESS SUIT: Oh, just one more drink, and we’ll all toddle home.

LANGLEY: Hey, Eunice, where’s the gin?

EUNICE: [Opening a cabinet and producing two bottles, quietly] Here.

MAN IN SWEATER: Hurrah! Wait for baby!

[There is a general rush to the bottles]

MAN IN DRESS SUIT: Just one last drink and we’ll scram. Hey everybody! Another toast. To Dwight Langley and Eunice Hammond!

EUNICE: To Dwight Langley and his future!

[All roar approval and drink]

EVERYONE: [Roaring at once] Speech, Lanny! . . . Yes! . . . Come on, Lanny! . . . Speech! . . . Come on!

LANGLEY: [Climbs up on a chair, stands a little unsteadily, speaks with a kind of tortured sincerity] The bitterest moment of an artist’s life is the moment of his triumph. The artist is but a bugle calling to a battle no one wants to fight. The world does not see and does not want to see. The artist begs men to throw the doors of their lives open to grandeur and beauty, but those doors will remain closed forever . . . forever . . . [Is about to add something, but drops his hand in a gesture of hopelessness and ends in a tone of quiet sadness] . . . forever. . . . [Applause. The general noise is cut short by a knock at the door. LANGLEY jumps off his chair] Come in!

[The door opens, disclosing an irate LANDLADY in a soiled Chinese kimono]

LANDLADY: [In a shrill whine] Mr. Langley, this noise will have to stop! Don’t you know what time it is?

LANGLEY: Get out of here!

LANDLADY: The lady in 315 says she’ll call the police! The gentleman in . . .

LANGLEY: You heard me! Get out! Think I have to stay in a lousy dump like this?

EUNICE: Dwight! [To LANDLADY] We’ll keep quiet, Mrs. Johnson.

LANDLADY: Well, you’d better! [She exits angrily]

EUNICE: Really, Dwight, we shouldn’t . . .

LANGLEY: Oh, leave me alone! No one’s going to tell me what to do from now on!

EUNICE: But I only . . .

LANGLEY: You’re turning into a damnable, nagging, middle-class female!

[EUNICE stares at him, frozen]

WOMAN IN SLACKS: Going a bit too far, Langley!

LANGLEY: I’m sick and tired of people who can’t outgrow their possessiveness! You know the hypocritical trick—the chains of gratitude!

EUNICE: Dwight! You don’t think that I . . .

LANGLEY: I know damn well what you think! Think you’ve bought me, don’t you? Think you own me for the rest of my life in exchange for some grocery bills?

EUNICE: What did you say? [Screaming suddenly] I didn’t hear you right!

MAN IN SWEATER: Look here, Langley, take it easy, you don’t know what you’re saying, you’re . . .

LANGLEY: [Pushing him aside] Go to hell! You can all go to hell if you don’t like it! [To EUNICE] And as for you . . .

EUNICE: Dwight . . . please . . . not now . . .

LANGLEY: Yes! Right here and now! I want them all to hear! [To the guests] So you think I can’t get along without her? I’ll show you! I’m through! [To EUNICE] Do you hear that? I’m through! [EUNICE stands motionless ] I’m free! I’m going to rise in the world! I’m going places none of you ever dreamed of! I’m ready to meet the only woman I’ve ever wanted—Kay Gonda! I’ve waited all these years for the day when I would meet her! That’s all I’ve lived for! And no one’s going to stand in my way!

EUNICE: [She walks to door Left, picks up her hat and coat from a pile of clothing in a corner, turns to him again, quietly] Goodbye, Dwight . . . [Exits]

[There is a second of strained silence in the room: the WOMAN IN SLACKS is the first one to move; she goes to pick up her coat, then turns to LANGLEY]

WOMAN IN SLACKS: I thought you had just done a painting called “Integrity.”

LANGLEY: If that was intended for a dirty crack . . . [The WOMAN IN SLACKS exits, slamming the door] Well, go to hell! [To the others] Get out of here! All of you! Get out!

[There is a general shuffle for hats and coats]

WOMAN IN EVENING GOWN: Well, if we’re being kicked out . . .

MAN IN DRESS SUIT: That’s all right. Lanny’s a bit upset.

LANGLEY: [Somewhat gentler] I’m sorry. I thank you all. But I want to be alone. [The guests are leaving, waving halfhearted goodbyes]

BLOND GIRL: [She is one of the last to leave. She hesitates, whispering tentatively:] Lanny . . .

LANGLEY: Out! All of you! [She exits. The stage is empty but for LANGLEY surveying dazedly the havoc of his studio. There is a knock at the door] Out, I said! Don’t want any of you! [The knock is repeated. He walks to the door, throws it open. KAY GONDA enters. She stands looking at him without a word. He asks impatiently:] Well? [She does not answer] What do you want?

KAY GONDA: Are you Dwight Langley?

LANGLEY: Yes.

KAY GONDA: I need your help.

LANGLEY: What’s the matter?

KAY GONDA: Don’t you know?

LANGLEY: How should I know? Just who are you?

KAY GONDA: [After a pause] Kay Gonda.

LANGLEY: [Looks at her and bursts out laughing] So? Not Helen of Troy? Nor Madame Du Barry? [She looks at him silently] Come on, out with it. What’s the gag?

KAY GONDA: Don’t you know me?

LANGLEY: [Looks her over contemptuously, his hands in his pockets, grinning] Well, you do look like Kay Gonda. So does her stand-in. So do dozens of extra girls in Hollywood. What is it you’re after? I can’t get you into pictures, my girl. I’m not even the kind to promise you a screen test. Drop the racket. Who are you?

KAY GONDA: Don’t you understand? I am in danger. I have to hide. Please let me stay here for the night.

LANGLEY: What do you think this is? A flop house?

KAY GONDA: I have no place to go.

LANGLEY: That’s an old one in Hollywood.

KAY GONDA: They will not look for me here.

LANGLEY: Who?

KAY GONDA: The police.

LANGLEY: Really? And why would Kay Gonda pick my house to hide in of all places? [She starts to open her handbag, but closes it again and says nothing] How do I know you’re Kay Gonda? Have you any proof?

KAY GONDA: None, but the honesty of your vision.

LANGLEY: Oh, cut the tripe! What are you after? Taking me for a . . . [There is a loud knock at the door] What’s this? A frame-up? [Walks to door and throws it open. A uniformed POLICEMAN enters. KAY GONDA turns away quickly, her back to the others]

POLICEMAN: [Good-naturedly] ’Evening. [Looking about him, helplessly] Where’s the drunken party we got a complaint about?

LANGLEY: Of all the nerve! There’s no party, officer. I had a few friends here, but they left long ago.

POLICEMAN: [Looking at KAY GONDA with some curiosity] Between you and me, it’s a lotta cranks that call up complaining about noise. As I see it, there’s no harm in young people having a little fun.

LANGLEY: [Watching curiously the POLICEMAN’s reaction to KAY GONDA] We really weren’t disturbing anyone. I’m sure there’s nothing you want here, is there, officer?

POLICEMAN: No, sir. Sorry to have bothered you.

LANGLEY: We are really alone here—[Points to KAY GONDA]—this lady and I. But you’re welcome to look around.

POLICEMAN: Why, no, sir. No need to. Good night. [Exits]

LANGLEY: [Waits to hear his steps descending the stairs. Then turns to KAY GONDA and bursts out laughing] That gave the show away, didn’t it, my girl?

KAY GONDA: What?

LANGLEY: The cop. If you were Kay Gonda and if the police were looking for you, wouldn’t he have grabbed you?

KAY GONDA: He did not see my face.

LANGLEY: He would have looked. Come on, what kind of racket are you really working?

KAY GONDA: [Stepping up to him, in full light] Dwight Langley! Look at me! Look at all these pictures of me that you’ve painted! Don’t you know me? You’ve lived with me in your hours of work, your best hours. Were you lying in those hours?

LANGLEY: Kindly leave my art out of it. My art has nothing to do with your life or mine.

KAY GONDA: Of what account is an art that preaches things it does not want to exist?

LANGLEY: [Solemnly] Listen. Kay Gonda is the symbol of all the beauty I bring to the world, a beauty we can never reach. We can only sing of her, who is the unattainable. That is the mission of the artist. We can only strive, but never succeed. Attempt, but never achieve. That is our tragedy, but our hopelessness is our glory. Get out of here!

KAY GONDA: I need your help.

LANGLEY: Get out!!

[Her arms fall limply. She turns and walks out. DWIGHT LANGLEY slams the door]

CURTAIN

Act II

SCENE 1

The letter projected on the screen is written in an ornate, old-fashioned handwriting:

Dear Miss Gonda,

Some may call this letter a sacrilege. But as I write it, I do not feel like a sinner. For when I look at you on the screen, it seems to me that we are working for the same cause, you and I. This may surprise you, for I am only a humble Evangelist. But when I speak to men about the sacred meaning of life, I feel that you hold the same Truth which my words struggle in vain to disclose. We are traveling different roads, Miss Gonda, but we are bound to the same destination.

Respectfully yours,
Claude Ignatius Hix
. . . Slosson Blvd.
Los Angeles, California

Lights go out, screen disappears. When the curtain rises on the temple of CLAUDE IGNATIUS HIX, the stage is almost completely black. Nothing can be seen of the room save the dim outline of a door, downstage Right, open upon a dark street. A small cross of electric lights burns high on wall Center. It throws just enough light to show the face and shoulders of CLAUDE IGNATIUS HIX high above the ground (He is standing in the pulpit, but this cannot be distinguished in the darkness). He is tall, gaunt, clothed in black; his hair is receding off a high forehead. His hands rise eloquently as he speaks into the darkness.

HIX: . . . but even in the blackest one of us, there is a spark of the sublime, a single drop in the desert of every barren soul. And all the suffering of men, all the twisted agonies of their lives, come from their treason to that hidden flame. All commit the treason, and none can escape the payment. None can . . . [Someone sneezes loudly in the darkness, by the door Right. HIX stops short, calls in a startled voice:] Who’s there?

[He presses a switch that lights two tall electric tapers by the sides of his pulpit. We can now see the temple. It is a long, narrow barn with bare rafters and unpainted walls. There are no windows and only a single door. Rows of old wooden benches fill the room, facing the pulpit]

[SISTER ESSIE TWOMEY stands downstage Right, by the door. She is a short, plump woman nearing forty, with bleached blond hair falling in curls on her shoulders, from under the brim of a large pink picture hat trimmed with lilies-of-the-valley. Her stocky little figure is draped in the long folds of a sky blue cape]

ESSIE TWOMEY: [She raises her right arm solemnly] Praise the Lord! Good evening, Brother Hix. Keep going. Don’t let me interrupt you.

HIX: [Startled and angry] You? What are you doing here?

ESSIE TWOMEY: I heard you way from the street—it’s a blessed voice you have, though you don’t control your belly tones properly—and I didn’t want to intrude. I just slipped in.

HIX: [Icily] And of what service may I be to you?

ESSIE TWOMEY: Go ahead with the rehearsal. It’s an inspiring sermon you have there, a peach of a sermon. Though a bit on the old-fashioned side. Not modern enough, Brother Hix. That’s not the way I do it.

HIX: I do not recall having solicited advice, Sister Twomey, and I should like to inquire for the reason of this sudden visitation.

ESSIE TWOMEY: Praise the Lord! I’m a harbinger of good news. Yes, indeed. I got a corker for you.

HIX: I shall point out that we have never had any matters of common interest.

ESSIE TWOMEY: Verily, Brother Hix. You smacked the nail right on the head. That’s why you’ll be overjoyed at the proposition. [Settling herself comfortably down on a bench] It’s like this, brother: there’s no room in this neighborhood for you and me both.

HIX: Sister Twomey, these are the first words of truth I have ever heard emerging from your mouth.

ESSIE TWOMEY: The poor dear souls in these parts are heavily laden, indeed. They cannot support two temples. Why, the mangy bums haven’t got enough to feed the fleas on a dog!

HIX: Dare I believe, sister, that your conscience has spoken at last, and you are prepared to leave this neighborhood?

ESSIE TWOMEY: Who? Me leave this neighborhood? [Solemnly ] Why, Brother Hix, you have no idea of the blessed work my temple is doing. The lost souls milling at its portals—praise the Lord! . . . [Sharply] No, brother, keep your shirt on. I’m going to buy you out.

HIX: What?!

ESSIE TWOMEY: Not that I really have to. You’re no competition. But I thought I might as well clear it up once and for all. I want this territory.

HIX: [Beside himself] You had the infernal presumption to suppose that the Temple of Eternal Truth was for sale?

ESSIE TWOMEY: Now, now, Brother Hix, let’s be modern. That’s no way to talk business. Just look at the facts. You’re washed up here, brother.

HIX: I will have you understand . . .

ESSIE TWOMEY: What kind of a draw do you get? Thirty or fifty heads on a big night. Look at me. Two thousand souls every evening, seeking the glory of God! Two thousand noses, actual count! I’m putting on a Midnight Service tonight—“The Night Life of the Angels”—and I’m expecting three thousand.

HIX: [Drawing himself up] There come moments in a man’s life when he is sorely pressed to remember the lesson of charity to all. I have no wish to insult you. But I have always considered you a tool of the Devil. My temple has stood in this neighborhood for . . .

ESSIE TWOMEY: I know. For twenty years. But times change, brother. You haven’t got what it takes anymore. You’re still in the horse-and-buggy age—praise the Lord!

HIX: The faith of my fathers is good enough for me.

ESSIE TWOMEY: Maybe so, brother, maybe so. But not for the customers. Now, for instance, take the name of your place: “Temple of Eternal Truth.” Folks don’t go for that nowadays. What have I got? “The Little Church of the Cheery Corner.” That draws ’em, brother. Like flies.

HIX: I do not wish to discuss it.

ESSIE TWOMEY: Look at what you were just rehearsing here. That’ll put ’em to sleep. Verily. You can’t hand out that line anymore. Now take my last sermon—“The Service Station of the Spirit.” There’s a lesson for you, brother! I had a whole service station built—[Rises, walks to pulpit]—right there, behind my pulpit. Tall pumps, glass and gold, labeled “Purity,” “Prayer,” “Prayer with Faith Super-Mixture.” And young boys in white uniforms—good-lookers, every one of ’em!—with gold wings, and caps inscribed “Creed Oil, Inc.” Clever, eh?

HIX: It’s a sacrilege!

ESSIE TWOMEY: [Stepping up on the pulpit] And the pulpit here was—[Looks at her fingers]—hm, dust, Brother Hix. Bad business! . . . And the pulpit was made up like a gold automobile. [Greatly inspired] Then I preached to my flock that when you travel the hard road of life, you must be sure that your tank is filled with the best gas of Faith, that your tires are inflated with the air of Charity, that your radiator is cooled with the sweet water of Temperance, that your battery is charged with the power of Righteousness, and that you beware of treacherous Detours which lead to perdition! [In her normal voice] Boy, did that wow ’em! Praise the Lord! It brought the house down! And we had no trouble at all when we passed the collection box made up in the shape of a gasoline can!

HIX: [With controlled fury] Sister Twomey, you will please step down from my pulpit!

ESSIE TWOMEY: [Coming down] Well, brother, to make a long story short, I’ll give you five hundred bucks and you can move your junk out.

HIX: Five hundred dollars for the Temple of Eternal Truth?

ESSIE TWOMEY: Well, what’s the matter with five hundred dollars? It’s a lot of money. You can buy a good secondhand car for five hundred dollars.

HIX: Never, in twenty years, have I shown the door to anyone in this temple. But I am doing it now. [He points to the door]

ESSIE TWOMEY: [Shrugging] Well, have it your own way, brother. They have eyes, but they see not! . . . I should worry, by Jesus! [Raising her arm] Praise the Lord! [Exits]

[The minute she is out, EZRY’s head comes peering cautiously from behind the door. EZRY is a lanky, gangling youth, far from bright]

EZRY: [Calls in a whisper] Oh, Brother Hix!

HIX: [Startled] Ezry! What are you doing there? Come in.

EZRY: [Enters, awed] Gee, it was better’n a movie show!

HIX: Have you been listening?

EZRY: Gee! Was that Sister Essie Twomey?

HIX: Yes, Ezry, it was Sister Essie Twomey. Now you mustn’t tell anyone about what you heard here.

EZRY: No, sir. Cross my heart, Brother Hix. [Looking at the door with admiration] My, but Sister Twomey talks pretty!

HIX: You mustn’t say that. Sister Twomey is an evil woman.

EZRY: Yes, sir. . . . Gee, but she’s got such pretty curls!

HIX: Ezry, do you believe in me? Do you like to come here for the services?

EZRY: Yes, sir. . . . The Crump twins, they said Sister Twomey had a airyplane in her temple, honest to goodness!

HIX: [Desperately] My boy, listen to me, for the sake of your immortal soul . . . [He stops short. KAY GONDA enters]

KAY GONDA: Mr. Hix?

HIX: [Without taking his eyes from her, in a choked voice] Ezry. Run along.

EZRY: [Frightened] Yes, sir. [Exits hurriedly]

HIX: You’re not . . .

KAY GONDA: Yes. I am.

HIX: To what do I owe the great honor of . . .

KAY GONDA: To a murder.

HIX: Do you mean that those rumors are true?

KAY GONDA: You can throw me out, if you wish. You can call the police, if you prefer. Only do so now.

HIX: You are seeking shelter?

KAY GONDA: For one night.

HIX: [Walks to the open door, closes it, and locks it] This door has not been closed for twenty years. It shall be closed tonight. [He returns to her and silently hands her the key]

KAY GONDA: [Astonished] Why are you giving it to me?

HIX: The door will not be opened, until you wish to open it.

KAY GONDA: [She smiles, takes the key and slips it into her bag. Then:] Thank you.

HIX: [Sternly] No. Do not thank me. I do not want you to stay here.

KAY GONDA: [Without understanding] You—don’t?

HIX: But you are safe—if this is the safety you want. I have turned the place over to you. You may stay here as long as you like. The decision will be yours.

KAY GONDA: You do not want me to hide here?

HIX: I do not want you to hide.

KAY GONDA: [She looks at him thoughtfully, then walks to a bench and sits down, watching him. She asks slowly:] What would you have me do?

HIX: [He stands before her, austerely erect and solemn] You have taken a heavy burden upon your shoulders.

KAY GONDA: Yes. A heavy burden. And I wonder how much longer I will be able to carry it.

HIX: You may hide from the men who threaten you. But of what importance is that?

KAY GONDA: Then you do not want to save me?

HIX: Oh, yes. I want to save you. But not from the police.

KAY GONDA: From whom?

HIX: From yourself. [She looks at him for a long moment, a fixed, steady glance, and does not answer] You have committed a mortal sin. You have killed a human being. [Points to the room] Can this place—or any place—give you protection from that?

KAY GONDA: No.

HIX: You cannot escape from your crime. Then do not try to run from it. Give up. Surrender. Confess.

KAY GONDA: [Slowly] If I confess, they will take my life.

HIX: If you don’t, you will lose your life—the eternal life of your soul.

KAY GONDA: Is it a choice, then? Must it be one or the other?

HIX: It has always been a choice. For all of us.

KAY GONDA: Why?

HIX: Because the joys of this earth are paid for by damnation in the Kingdom of Heaven. But if we choose to suffer, we are rewarded with eternal happiness.

KAY GONDA: Then we are on earth only in order to suffer?

HIX: And the greater the suffering, the greater our virtue. [Her head drops slowly] You have a sublime chance before you. Accept, of your own will, the worst that can be done to you. The infamy, the degradation, the prison cell, the scaffold. Then your punishment will become your glory.

KAY GONDA: How?

HIX: It will let you enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

KAY GONDA: Why should I want to enter it?

HIX: If you know that a life of supreme beauty is possible—how can you help but want to enter it?

KAY GONDA: How can I help but want it here, on earth?

HIX: Ours is a dark, imperfect world.

KAY GONDA: Why is it not perfect? Because it cannot be? Or because we do not want it to be?

HIX: This world is of no consequence. Whatever beauty it offers us is here only that we may sacrifice it—for the greater beauty beyond. [She is not looking at him. He stands watching her for a moment; then, his voice low with emotion:] You don’t know how lovely you are at this moment. [She raises her head] You don’t know the hours I’ve spent watching you across the infinite distance of a screen. I would give my life to keep you here in safety. I would let myself be torn to shreds, rather than see you hurt. Yet I am asking you to open this door and walk out to martyrdom. That is my chance of sacrifice. I am giving up the greatest thing that ever came to me.

KAY GONDA: [Her voice soft and low] And after you and I have made our sacrifice, what will be left on this earth?

HIX: Our example. It will light the way for all the miserable souls who flounder in helpless depravity. They, too, will learn to renounce. Your fame is great. The story of your conversion will be heard the world over. You will redeem the scrubby wretches who come to this temple and all the wretches in all the slums.

KAY GONDA: Such as that boy who was here?

HIX: Such as that boy. Let him be the symbol, not a nobler figure. That, too, is part of the sacrifice.

KAY GONDA: [Slowly] What do you want me to do?

HIX: Confess your crime. Confess it publicly, to a crowd, to the hearing of all!

KAY GONDA: Tonight?

HIX: Tonight!

KAY GONDA: But there is no crowd anywhere at this hour.

HIX: At this hour . . . [With sudden inspiration] Listen. At this hour, a large crowd is gathered in a temple of error, six blocks away. It is a dreadful place, run by the most contemptible woman I’ve ever known. I’ll take you there. I’ll let you offer that woman the greatest gift—the kind of sensation she’s never dared to imagine for her audience. You will confess to her crowd. Let her take the credit and the praise for your conversion. Let her take the fame. She is the one least worthy of it.

KAY GONDA: That, too, is part of the sacrifice?

HIX: Yes.

[KAY GONDA rises. She walks to the door, unlocks it, and flings it open. Then she turns to HIX and throws the key in his face. It strikes him as she goes out. He stands motionless, only his head dropping and his shoulders sagging]

CURTAIN

SCENE 2

The letter projected on the screen is written in a sharp, precise, cultured handwriting:

Dear Miss Gonda,

I have had everything men ask of life. I have seen it all, and I feel as if I were leaving a third-rate show on a disreputable side street. If I do not bother to die, it is only because my life has all the emptiness of the grave and my death would have no change to offer me. It may happen, any day now, and nobody—not even the one writing these lines—will know the difference.

But before it happens, I want to raise what is left of my soul in a last salute to you, you who are that which the world should have been. Morituri te salutamus.

Dietrich von Esterhazy
Beverly-Sunset Hotel
Beverly Hills, California

Lights go out, screen disappears, and stage reveals drawing room in the hotel suite of DIETRICH von ESTERHAZY . It is a large, luxurious room, modern, exquisitely simple. Wide entrance door in center wall Left. Smaller door to bedroom in wall Right, upstage. Large window in wall Left, showing the dark view of a park far below. Downstage Right a fireplace. One single lamp burning.

As the curtain rises the entrance door opens to admit DIETRICH VON ESTERHAZY and LALO JANS. DIETRICH von ESTERHAZY is a tall, slender man in his early forties, whose air of patrician distinction seems created for the trim elegance of his full dress suit. LALO JANS is an exquisite female, hidden in the soft folds of an ermine wrap over a magnificent evening gown. She walks in first and falls, exhausted, on a sofa downstage, stretching out her legs with a gesture of charming lassitude. DIETRICH VON ESTERHAZY follows her silently. She makes a little gesture, expecting him to take her wrap. But he does not approach her or look at her, and she shrugs, throwing her wrap back, letting it slide halfway down her bare arms.

LALO: [Looking at a clock on the table beside her, lazily] Only two o’clock. . . . Really, we didn’t have to leave so early, darling. . . . [ESTERHAZY does not answer. He does not seem to hear. There is no hostility in his attitude, but a profound indifference and a strange tension. He walks to the window and stands looking out thoughtfully, unconscious of LALO’s presence. She yawns, lighting a cigarette] I think I’ll go home. . . . [No answer] I said, I think I’ll go home. . . . [Coquettishly] Unless, of course, you insist. . . . [No answer. She shrugs and settles down more comfortably. She speaks lazily, watching the smoke of her cigarette] You know, Rikki, we’ll just have to go to Agua Caliente. And this time I’ll put it all on Black Rajah. It’s a cinch. . . . [No answer] By the way, Rikki, my chauffeur’s wages were due yesterday. . . . [Turns to him. Slightly impatient:] Rikki?

ESTERHAZY: [Startled, turning to her abruptly, polite and completely indifferent] What were you saying, my dear?

LALO: [Impatiently] I said my chauffeur’s wages were due yesterday.

ESTERHAZY: [His thoughts miles away] Yes, of course. I shall take care of it.

LALO: What’s the matter, Rikki? Just because I lost that money?

ESTERHAZY: Not at all, my dear. Glad you enjoyed the evening.

LALO: But then you know I’ve always had the damnedest luck at roulette. And if we hadn’t left so early, I’m sure I’d have won it back.

ESTERHAZY: I’m sorry. I was a little tired.

LALO: And anyway, what’s one thousand and seventy something?

ESTERHAZY: [Stands looking at her silently. Then, with a faint smile of something like sudden decision, he reaches into his pocket and calmly hands her a checkbook ] I think you might as well see it.

LALO: [Taking the book indifferently] What’s that? Some bank book?

ESTERHAZY: See what’s left . . . at some bank.

LALO: [Reading] Three hundred and sixteen dollars. . . . [Looks quickly through the check stubs] Rikki! You wrote that thousand-dollar check on this bank! [He nods silently, with the same smile] You’ll have to transfer the money from another bank, first thing in the morning.

ESTERHAZY: [Slowly] I have no other bank.

LALO: Huh?

ESTERHAZY: I have no other money. You’re holding there all that’s left.

LALO: [Her lazy nonchalance gone] Rikki! You’re kidding me!

ESTERHAZY: Far be it from me, my dear.

LALO: But . . . but you’re crazy! Things like that don’t happen like . . . like that! One sees . . . in advance . . . one knows.

ESTERHAZY: [Calmly] I’ve known it. For the last two years. But a fortune does not vanish without a few last convulsions. There has always been something to sell, to pawn, to borrow on. Always someone to borrow from. But not this time. This time, it’s done.

LALO: [Aghast] But . . . but where did it go?

ESTERHAZY: [Shrugging] How do I know? Where did all the rest of it go, those other things, inside, that you start life with? Fifteen years is a long time. When they threw me out of Austria, I had millions in my pocket, but the rest—the rest, I think, was gone already.

LALO: That’s all very beautiful, but what are you going to do?

ESTERHAZY: Nothing.

LALO: But tomorrow . . .

ESTERHAZY: Tomorrow, Count Dietrich von Esterhazy will be called upon to explain the matter of a bad check. May be called upon.

LALO: Stop grinning like that! Do you think it’s funny?

ESTERHAZY: I think it’s curious. . . . The first Count Dietrich von Esterhazy died fighting under the walls of Jerusalem. The second died on the ramparts of his castle, defying a nation. The last one wrote a bad check in a gambling casino with chromium and poor ventilation. . . . It’s curious.

LALO: What are you talking about?

ESTERHAZY: About what a peculiar thing it is—a leaking soul. You go through your days and it slips away from you, drop by drop. With each step. Like a hole in your pocket and coins dropping out, bright little coins, bright and shining, never to be found again.

LALO: To hell with that! What’s to become of me?

ESTERHAZY: I’ve done all I could, Lalo. I’ve warned you before the others.

LALO: You’re not going to stand there like a damn fool and let things . . .

ESTERHAZY: [Softly] You know, I think I’m glad it happened like this. A few hours ago I had problems, a thick web of problems I was much too weary to untangle. Now I’m free. Free at one useless stroke I did not intend striking.

LALO: Don’t you care at all?

ESTERHAZY: I would not be frightened if I still cared.

LALO: Then you are frightened?

ESTERHAZY: I should like to be.

LALO: Why don’t you do something? Call your friends!

ESTERHAZY: Their reaction, my dear, would be precisely the same as yours.

LALO: You’re blaming me, now!

ESTERHAZY: Not at all. I appreciate you. You make my prospect so simple—and so easy.

LALO: But good God! What about the payments on my new Cadillac? And those pearls I charged to you? And . . .

ESTERHAZY: And my hotel bill. And my florist’s bill. And that last party I gave. And the mink coat for Colette Dorsay.

LALO: [Jumping up] What?!

ESTERHAZY: My dear, you really didn’t think you were . . . the only one?

LALO: [Looks at him, her eyes blazing. Is on the point of screaming something. Laughs suddenly instead, a dry insulting laughter] Do you think I care—now? Do you think I’m going to cry over a worthless . . .

ESTERHAZY: [Quietly] Don’t you think you’d better go home now?

LALO: [Tightens her wrap furiously, rushes to the door, turns abruptly] Call me up when you come to your senses. I’ll answer—if I feel like it tomorrow. ESTERHAZY: And if I’m here to call—tomorrow.

LALO: Huh?

ESTERHAZY: I said, if I’m here to call—tomorrow.

LALO: Just what do you mean? Do you intend to run away or . . .

ESTERHAZY: [With quiet affirmation] Or.

LALO: Oh, don’t be a melodramatic fool! [Exits, slamming the door]

[ESTERHAZY stands motionless, lost in thought. Then he shudders slightly, as if recovering himself. Shrugs. Walks into bedroom Right, leaving the door open. The telephone rings. He returns, his evening coat replaced by a trim lounging jacket]

ESTERHAZY: [Picking up receiver] Hello? . . . [Astonished] At this hour? What’s her name? . . . She won’t? . . . All right, have her come up. [Hangs up. Lights a cigarette. There is a knock at the door. He smiles] Come in!

[KAY GONDA enters. His smile vanishes. He does not move. He stands looking at her for a moment, two motionless fingers holding the cigarette at his mouth. Then he flings the cigarette aside with a violent jerk of his wrist—his only reaction—and bows calmly, formally]

Good evening, Miss Gonda.

KAY GONDA: Good evening.

ESTERHAZY: A veil or black glasses?

KAY GONDA: What?

ESTERHAZY: I hope you didn’t let the clerk downstairs recognize you.

KAY GONDA: [Smiles suddenly, pulling her glasses out of her pocket] Black glasses.

ESTERHAZY: It was a brilliant idea.

KAY GONDA: What?

ESTERHAZY: Your coming here to hide.

KAY GONDA: How did you know that?

ESTERHAZY: Because it could have occurred only to you. Because you’re the only one capable of the exquisite sensitiveness to recognize the only sincere letter I’ve ever written in my life.

KAY GONDA: [Looking at him] Was it?

ESTERHAZY: [Studying her openly, speaking casually, matter-of-factly] You look taller than you do on the screen—and less real. Your hair is blonder than I thought. Your voice about a tone higher. It is a pity that the camera does not photograph the shade of your lipstick. [In a different voice, warm and natural] And now that I’ve done my duty as a fan reacting, sit down and let’s forget the unusual circumstances.

KAY GONDA: Do you really want me to stay here?

ESTERHAZY: [Looking at the room] The place is not too uncomfortable. There’s a slight draft from the window at times, and the people upstairs become noisy occasionally, but not often. [Looking at her] No, I won’t tell you how glad I am to see you here. I never speak of the things that mean much to me. The occasions have been too rare. I’ve lost the habit.

KAY GONDA: [Sitting down] Thank you.

ESTERHAZY: For what?

KAY GONDA: For what you didn’t say.

ESTERHAZY: Do you know that it is really I who must thank you? Not only for coming, but for coming tonight of all nights.

KAY GONDA: Why?

ESTERHAZY: Perhaps you have taken a life in order to save another. [Pause] A long time ago—no, isn’t that strange?—it was only a few minutes ago—I was ready to kill myself. Don’t look at me like that. It isn’t frightening. But what did become frightening was that feeling of utter indifference, even to death, even to my own indifference. And then you came. . . . I think I could hate you for coming.

KAY GONDA: I think you will.

ESTERHAZY: [With sudden fire, the first, unexpected emotion ] I don’t want to be proud of myself again. I had given it up. Yet now I am. Just because I see you here. Just because a thing has happened which is like nothing I thought possible on earth.

KAY GONDA: You said you would not tell me how glad you were to see me. Don’t tell me. I do not want to hear it. I have heard it too often. I have never believed it. And I do not think I shall come to believe it tonight.

ESTERHAZY: Which means that you have always believed it. It’s an incurable disease, you know—to have faith in the better spirit of man. I’d like to tell you to renounce it. To destroy in yourself all hunger for anything above the dry rot that others live by. But I can’t. Because you will never be able to do it. It’s your curse. And mine.

KAY GONDA: [Angry and imploring at once] I do not want to hear it!

ESTERHAZY: [Sitting down on the arm of a chair, speaking softly, lightly] You know, when I was a boy—a very young boy—I thought my life would be a thing immense and shining. I wanted to kneel to my own future. . . . [Shrugs] One gets over that.

KAY GONDA: Does one?

ESTERHAZY: Always. But never completely.

KAY GONDA: [Breaking down, suddenly eager and trusting ] I saw a man once, when I was very young. He stood on a rock, high in the mountains. His arms were spread out and his body bent backward, and I could see him as an arc against the sky. He stood still and tense, like a string trembling to a note of ecstasy no man had ever heard. . . . I have never known who he was. I knew only that this was what life should be. . . . [Her voice trails off]

ESTERHAZY: [Eagerly] And?

KAY GONDA: [In a changed voice] And I came home, and my mother was serving supper, and she was happy because the roast had a thick gravy. And she gave a prayer of thanks to God for it. . . . [Jumps up, whirls to him suddenly, angrily] Don’t listen to me! Don’t look at me like that! . . . I’ve tried to renounce it. I thought I must close my eyes and bear anything and learn to live like the others. To make me as they were. To make me forget. I bore it. All of it. But I can’t forget the man on the rock. I can’t!

ESTERHAZY: We never can.

KAY GONDA: [Eagerly] You understand? I’m not alone? . . . Oh, God! I can’t be alone! [Suddenly quiet] Why did you give it up?

ESTERHAZY: [Shrugging] Why does anyone give it up? Because it never comes. What did I get instead? Racing boats, and horses, and cards, and women—all those blind alleys—the pleasures of the moment. All the things I never wanted.

KAY GONDA: [Softly] Are you certain?

ESTERHAZY: There was nothing else to take. But if it came, if one had a chance, a last chance . . .

KAY GONDA: Are you certain?

ESTERHAZY: [Looks at her, then walks resolutely to the telephone and picks up the receiver] Gladstone 2- 1018. . . . Hello, Carl? . . . Those two staterooms on the Empress of Panama that you told me about—do you still want to get rid of them? Yes . . . yes, I do . . . At seven thirty a.m.? . . . I’ll meet you there. . . . I understand. . . . Thank you. [Hangs up. KAY GONDA looks at him questioningly. He turns to her, his manner calm, matter-of-fact] The Empress of Panama leaves San Pedro at seven thirty in the morning. For Brazil. No extradition laws there.

KAY GONDA: What are you attempting?

ESTERHAZY: We’re escaping together. We’re outside the law—both of us. I have something worth fighting for now. My ancestors would envy me if they could see me. For my Holy Grail is of this earth, it is real, alive, possible. Only they would not understand. It is our secret. Yours and mine.

KAY GONDA: You have not asked me whether I want to go.

ESTERHAZY: I don’t have to. If I did—I would have no right to go with you.

KAY GONDA: [Smiles softly; then:] I want to tell you.

ESTERHAZY: [Stops, faces her, earnestly] Tell me.

KAY GONDA: [Looking straight at him, her eyes trusting, her voice a whisper] Yes, I want to go.

ESTERHAZY: [Holds her glance for an instant; then, as if deliberately refusing to underscore the earnestness of the moment, glances at his wristwatch and speaks casually again] We have just a few hours to wait. I’ll make a fire. We’ll be more comfortable. [He speaks gaily as he proceeds to light the fire] I’ll pack a few things. . . . You can get what you need aboard ship. . . . I haven’t much money, but I’ll raise a few thousands before morning. . . . I don’t know where, as yet, but I’ll raise it. . . . [She sits down in an armchair by the fire. He sits down on the floor at her feet, facing her] The sun is terrible down in Brazil. I hope your face doesn’t get sunburnt.

KAY GONDA: [Happily, almost girlishly] It always does.

ESTERHAZY: We’ll build a house somewhere in the jungle. It will be curious to start chopping trees down—that’s another experience I’ve missed. I’ll learn it. And you’ll have to learn to cook.

KAY GONDA: I will. I’ll learn everything we’ll need. We’ll start from scratch, from the beginning of the world—our world.

ESTERHAZY: You’re not afraid?

KAY GONDA: [Smiling softly] I’m terribly afraid. I have never been happy before.

ESTERHAZY: The work will ruin your hands . . . your lovely hands. . . . [He takes her hand, then drops it hurriedly. Speaks with a little effort, suddenly serious:] I’ll be only your architect, your valet, and your watchdog. And nothing else—until I deserve it.

KAY GONDA: [Looking at him] What were you thinking?

ESTERHAZY: [Absently] I was thinking about tomorrow and all the days thereafter. . . . They seem such a long way off. . . .

KAY GONDA: [Gaily] I’ll want a house by the seashore. Or by a great river.

ESTERHAZY: With a balcony off your room, over the water, facing the sunrise. . . . [Involuntarily] And the moonlight streaming in at night. . . .

KAY GONDA: We’ll have no neighbors . . . nowhere . . . not for miles around. . . . No one will look at me . . . no one will pay to look at me. . . .

ESTERHAZY: [His voice low] I shall allow no one to look at you. . . . In the morning, you will swim in the sea . . . alone . . . in the green water . . . with the first sun rays on your body. . . . [He rises, bends over her, whispers ] And then I’ll carry you up to the house . . . up the rocks . . . in my arms . . . [He seizes her and kisses her violently. She responds. He raises his head and chuckles with a sound of cynical intimacy] That’s all we’re really after, you and I, aren’t we? Why pretend?

KAY GONDA: [Not understanding] What?

ESTERHAZY: Why pretend that we’re important? We’re no better than the others. [Tries to kiss her again]

KAY GONDA: Let me go! [She tears herself away]

ESTERHAZY: [Laughing harshly] Where? You have no place to go! [She stares at him, wide-eyed, incredulous] After all, what difference does it make, whether it’s now or later? Why should we take it so seriously? [She whirls toward the door. He seizes her. She screams, a muffled scream, stopped by his hand on her mouth] Keep still! You can’t call for help! . . . It’s a death sentence—or this. . . . [She starts laughing hysterically] Keep still! . . . Why should I care what you’ll think of me afterwards? . . . Why should I care about tomorrow?

[She tears herself away, runs to the door, and escapes. He stands still. He hears her laughter, loud, reckless, moving away]

CURTAIN

SCENE 3

The letter projected on the screen is written in a sharp, uneven handwriting:

Dear Miss Gonda,

This letter is addressed to you, but I am writing it to myself.

I am writing and thinking that I am speaking to a woman who is the only justification for the existence of this earth, and who has the courage to want to be. A woman who does not assume a glory of greatness for a few hours, then return to the children-dinner-friends-football-and-God reality. A woman who seeks that glory in her every minute and her every step. A woman in whom life is not a curse, nor a bargain, but a hymn.

I want nothing except to know that such a woman exists. So I have written this, even though you may not bother to read it, or reading it, may not understand. I do not know what you are. I am writing to what you could have been.

Johnnie Dawes
. . . Main Street
Los Angeles, California

Lights go out, screen disappears, and stage reveals garret of JOHNNIE DAWES. It is a squalid, miserable room with a low, slanting ceiling, with dark walls showing beams under cracked plaster. The room is so bare that it gives the impression of being uninhabited, a strange, intangible impression of unreality. A narrow iron cot, at wall Right; a broken table, a few boxes for chairs. A narrow door opens diagonally in the Left upstage corner. The entire wall Center is a long window checkered into small panes. It opens high over the skyline of Los Angeles. Behind the black shadows of skyscrapers, there is a first hint of pink in the dark sky. When the curtain rises, the stage is empty, dark. One barely distinguishes the room and sees only the faintly luminous panorama of the window. It dominates the stage, so that one forgets the room, and it seems as if the setting is only the city and the sky. (Throughout the scene, the sky lightens slowly, the pink band of dawn grows, rising)

Steps are heard coming up the stairs. A quivering light shows in the cracks of the door. The door opens to admit KAY GONDA. Behind her, MRS. MONAGHAN, an old landlady, shuffles in, with a lighted candle in hand. She puts the candle down on the table, and stands panting as after a long climb, studying KAY GONDA with a suspicious curiosity.

MRS. MONAGHAN: Here ye are. This is it.

KAY GONDA: [Looking slowly over the room] Thank you. MRS. MONAGHAN: And ye’re a relative of him, ye are?

KAY GONDA: No.

MRS. MONAGHAN: [Maliciously] Sure, and I was thinking that.

KAY GONDA: I have never seen him before.

MRS. MONAGHAN: Well, I’m after tellin’ ye he’s no good, that’s what he is, no good. It’s a born bum he is. No rent never. He can’t keep a job more’n two weeks.

KAY GONDA: When will he be back?

MRS. MONAGHAN: Any minute at all—or never, for all I know. He runs around all night, the good Lord only knows where. Just walks the streets like the bum he is, just walks. Comes back drunk like, only he’s not drunk, ’cause I know he don’t drink.

KAY GONDA: I will wait for him.

MRS. MONAGHAN: Suit yerself. [Looks at her shrewdly] Maybe ye got a job for him?

KAY GONDA: No. I have no job for him.

MRS. MONAGHAN: He’s got himself kicked out again, three days ago it was. He had a swell job bellhoppin’. Did it last? It did not. Same as the soda counter. Same as the waitin’ at Hamburger Looey’s. He’s no good, I’m tellin’ ye. I know him. Better’n ye do.

KAY GONDA: I do not know him at all.

MRS. MONAGHAN: And I can’t say I blame his bosses, either. He’s a strange one. Never a laugh, never a joke out of him. [Confidentially] Ye know what Hamburger Looey said to me? He said, “Stuck up little snot,” said Hamburger Looey, “makes a regular guy feel creepy.”

KAY GONDA: So Hamburger Looey said that?

MRS. MONAGHAN: Faith and he did. [Confidentially] And d’ye know? He’s been to college, that boy. Ye’d never believe it from the kind of jobs he can’t keep, but he has. What he learned there the good Lord only knows. It’s no good it done him. And . . . [Stops, listening. Steps are heard rising up the stairs] That’s him now! Nobody else’d be shameless enough to come home at this hour of the night. [At the door] Ye think it over. Maybe ye could do somethin’ for him. [Exits]

[JOHNNIE DAWES enters. He is a tall, slender boy in his late twenties; a gaunt face, prominent cheekbones, a hard mouth, clear, steady eyes. He sees KAY GONDA and stands still. They look at each other for a long moment]

JOHNNIE: [Slowly, calmly, no astonishment and no question in his voice] Good evening, Miss Gonda.

KAY GONDA: [She cannot take her eyes from him, and it is her voice that sounds astonished] Good evening. JOHNNIE: Please sit down.

KAY GONDA: You do not want me to stay here.

JOHNNIE: You’re staying.

KAY GONDA: You have not asked me why I came.

JOHNNIE: You’re here. [He sits down]

KAY GONDA: [She approaches him suddenly, takes his face in her hands and raises it] What’s the matter, Johnnie?

JOHNNIE: Nothing—now.

KAY GONDA: You must not be so glad to see me.

JOHNNIE: I knew you’d come.

KAY GONDA: [She walks away from him, falls wearily down on the cot. She looks at him and smiles; a smile that is not gay, not friendly] People say I am a great star, Johnnie.

JOHNNIE: Yes.

KAY GONDA: They say I have everything one can wish for.

JOHNNIE: Have you?

KAY GONDA: No. But how do you know it?

JOHNNIE: How do you know that I know it?

KAY GONDA: You are never afraid when you speak to people, are you, Johnnie?

JOHNNIE: Yes. I am very much afraid. Always. I don’t know what to say to them. But I’m not afraid—now.

KAY GONDA: I am a very bad woman, Johnnie. Everything you’ve heard about me is true. Everything—and more. I came to tell you that you must not think of me what you said in your letter.

JOHNNIE: You came to tell me that everything I said in my letter was true. Everything—and more.

KAY GONDA: [With a harsh little laugh] You’re a fool! I’m not afraid of you. . . . Do you know that I get twenty thousand dollars a week?

JOHNNIE: Yes.

KAY GONDA: Do you know that I have fifty pairs of shoes and three butlers?

JOHNNIE: I suppose so.

KAY GONDA: Do you know that my pictures are shown in every town on earth?

JOHNNIE: Yes.

KAY GONDA: [Furiously] Stop looking at me like that! . . . Do you know that people pay millions to see me? I don’t need your approval! I have plenty of worshipers! I mean a great deal to them!

JOHNNIE: You mean nothing at all to them. You know it.

KAY GONDA: [Looking at him almost with hatred] I thought I knew it—an hour ago. [Whirling upon him] Oh, why don’t you ask me for something?

JOHNNIE: What do you want me to ask you?

KAY GONDA: Why don’t you ask me to get you a job in the movies, for instance?

JOHNNIE: The only thing I could ask you, you have given to me already.

KAY GONDA: [She looks at him, laughs harshly, speaks in a new voice, strange to her, an unnaturally common voice] Look, Johnnie, let’s stop kidding each other. I’ll tell you something. I’ve killed a man. It’s dangerous, hiding a murderess. Why don’t you throw me out? [He sits looking at her silently] No? That one won’t work? Well, then, look at me. I’m the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen. Don’t you want to sleep with me? Why don’t you? Right now. I won’t struggle. [He does not move] Not that? But listen: do you know that there’s a reward on my head? Why don’t you call the police and turn me over to them? You’d be set for life.

JOHNNIE: [Softly] Are you as unhappy as that?

KAY GONDA: [Walks to him, then falls on her knees at his feet] Help me, Johnnie!

JOHNNIE: [Bends down to her, his hands on her shoulders, asks softly:] Why did you come here?

KAY GONDA: [Raising her head] Johnnie. If all of you who look at me on the screen hear the things I say and worship me for them—where do I hear them? Where can I hear them, so that I might go on? I want to see, real, living, and in the hours of my own days, that glory I create as an illusion! I want it real! I want to know that there is someone, somewhere, who wants it, too! Or else what is the use of seeing it, and working, and burning oneself for an impossible vision? A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry.

JOHNNIE: [He rises, leads her to the cot, makes her sit down, stands before her] I want to tell you only this: there are a few on earth who see you and understand. These few give life its meaning. The rest—well, the rest are what you see they are. You have a duty. To live. Just to remain on earth. To let them know you do and can exist. To fight, even a fight without hope. We can’t give up the earth to all those others.

KAY GONDA: [Looking at him, softly] Who are you, Johnnie?

JOHNNIE: [Astonished] I? . . . I’m—nothing.

KAY GONDA: Where do you come from?

JOHNNIE: I’ve had a home and parents somewhere. I don’t remember much about them . . . I don’t remember much about anything that’s ever happened to me. There’s not a day worth remembering.

KAY GONDA: You have no friends?

JOHNNIE: No.

KAY GONDA: You have no work?

JOHNNIE: Yes . . . no, I was fired three days ago. I forgot.

KAY GONDA: Where have you lived before?

JOHNNIE: Many places. I’ve lost count.

KAY GONDA: Do you hate people, Johnnie?

JOHNNIE: No. I never notice them.

KAY GONDA: What do you dream of?

JOHNNIE: Nothing. Of what account are dreams?

KAY GONDA: Of what account is life?

JOHNNIE: None. But who made it so?

KAY GONDA: Those who cannot dream.

JOHNNIE: No. Those who can only dream.

KAY GONDA: Are you very unhappy?

JOHNNIE: No. . . . I don’t think you should ask me these questions. You won’t get a decent answer from me to anything.

KAY GONDA: There was a great man once who said: “I love those that know not how to live today.”

JOHNNIE: [Quietly] I think I am a person who should never have been born. This is not a complaint. I am not afraid and I am not sorry. But I have often wanted to die. I have no desire to change the world—nor to take any part in it, as it is. I’ve never had the weapons which you have. I’ve never even found the desire to find weapons. I’d like to go, calmly and willingly.

KAY GONDA: I don’t want to hear you say that.

JOHNNIE: There has always been something holding me here. Something that had to come to me before I went. I want to know one living moment of that which is mine, not theirs. Not their dismal little pleasures. One moment of ecstasy, utter and absolute, a moment that must not be survived. . . . They’ve never given me a life. I’ve always hoped I would choose my death.

KAY GONDA: Don’t say that. I need you. I’m here. I’ll never let you go.

JOHNNIE: [After a pause, looking at her in a strange new way, his voice dry, flat] You? You’re a murderess who’ll get caught someday and die on the gallows.

[She looks at him, astonished. He walks to the window, stands looking out. Beyond the window it is now full daylight. The sun is about to rise. Rays of light spread like halos from behind the dark silhouettes of skyscrapers. He asks suddenly, without turning to her:]

You killed him?

KAY GONDA: We don’t have to talk about that, do we?

JOHNNIE: [Without turning] I knew Granton Sayers. I worked for him once, as a caddy, at a golf club in Santa Barbara. A hard kind of man.

KAY GONDA: He was a very unhappy man, Johnnie.

JOHNNIE: [Turning to her] Was anyone present?

KAY GONDA: Where?

JOHNNIE: When you killed him?

KAY GONDA: Do we have to discuss that?

JOHNNIE: It’s something I must know. Did anyone see you kill him?

KAY GONDA: No.

JOHNNIE: Have the police got anything on you?

KAY GONDA: No. Except what I could tell them. But I will not tell it to them. Nor to you. Not now. Don’t question me.

JOHNNIE: How much is the reward on your head?

KAY GONDA: [After a pause, in a strange kind of voice] What did you say, Johnnie?

JOHNNIE: [Evenly] I said, how much is the reward on your head? [She stares at him] Never mind. [He walks to the door, throws it open, calls:] Mrs. Monaghan! Come here!

KAY GONDA: What are you doing? [He does not answer or look at her. MRS. MONAGHAN shuffles up the stairs and appears at the door]

MRS. MONAGHAN: [Angrily] What d’ye want?

JOHNNIE: Mrs. Monaghan, listen carefully. Go downstairs to your phone. Call the police. Tell them to come here at once. Tell them that Kay Gonda is here. You understand? Kay Gonda. Now hurry.

MRS. MONAGHAN: [Aghast] Yes, sir. . . . [Exits hurriedly]

[JOHNNIE closes the door, turns to KAY GONDA. She tries to dash for the door. The table is between them. He opens a drawer, pulls out a gun, points it at her]

JOHNNIE: Stand still. [She does not move. He backs to the door and locks it. She sags suddenly, still standing up]

KAY GONDA: [Without looking at him, in a flat, lifeless voice] Put it away. I will not try to escape. [He slips the gun into his pocket and stands leaning against the door. She sits down, her back turned to him]

JOHNNIE: [Quietly] We have about three minutes left. I am thinking now that nothing has happened to us and nothing will happen. The world stopped a minute ago and in three minutes it will go on again. But this—this pause is ours. You’re here. I look at you. I’ve seen your eyes—and all the truth that man has ever sought. [Her head falls down on her arms] There are no other men on earth right now. Just you and I. There’s nothing but a world in which you live. To breathe for once that air, to move in it, to hear my own voice on waves that touch no ugliness, no pain . . . I’ve never known gratitude. But now, of all the words I’d like to say to you, I’ll say just three: I thank you. When you leave, remember I have thanked you. Remember—no matter what may happen in this room. . . . [She buries her head in her arms. He stands silently, his head thrown back, his eyes closed]

[Hurried steps are heard rising up the stairs. JOHNNIE and KAY GONDA do not move. There is a violent knock at the door. JOHNNIE turns, unlocks the door, and opens it. A police CAPTAIN enters, followed by two POLICEMEN . KAY GONDA rises, facing them]

CAPTAIN: Jesus Christ! [They stare at her, aghast]

POLICEMAN: And I thought it was another crank calling!

CAPTAIN: Miss Gonda, I’m sure glad to see you. We’ve been driven crazy with . . .

KAY GONDA: Take me away from here. Anywhere you wish.

CAPTAIN: [Making a step toward her] Well, we have no . . .

JOHNNIE: [In a quiet voice which is such an implacable command that all turn to him] Stay away from her. [The CAPTAIN stops. JOHNNIE motions to a POLICEMAN and points to the table] Sit down. Take a pencil and paper. [The POLICEMAN looks at the CAPTAIN, who nods, baffled. The POLICEMAN obeys] Now write this: [Dictates slowly, his voice precise, emotionless] I, John Dawes, confess that on the night of May fifth, willfully and with premeditation, I killed Granton Sayers of Santa Barbara, California. [KAY GONDA takes a deep breath, which is almost a gasp] I have been absent from my home for the last three nights, as my landlady, Mrs. Sheila Monaghan, can testify. She can further testify that I was dismissed from my job at the Alhambra Hotel on May third. [KAY GONDA starts laughing suddenly. It is the lightest, happiest laughter in the world] I had worked for Granton Sayers a year ago, at the Greendale Golf Club of Santa Barbara. Being jobless and broke, I went to Granton Sayers on the evening of May fifth, determined to extort money from him through blackmail, under threat of divulging certain information I possessed. He refused my demands even at the point of a gun. I shot him. I disposed of the gun by throwing it into the ocean on my way back from Santa Barbara. I was alone in committing this crime. No other person was or is to be implicated. [Adds] Have you got it all? Give it to me. [The POLICEMAN hands the confession to him. JOHNNIE signs it]

CAPTAIN: [He cannot quite collect his wits] Miss Gonda, what have you got to say about this?

KAY GONDA: [Hysterically] Don’t ask me! Not now! Don’t speak to me!

JOHNNIE: [Hands the confession to the CAPTAIN] You will please let Miss Gonda depart now.

CAPTAIN: Wait a minute, my boy. Not so fast. There’s a lot of explaining you have to do yet. How did you get into the Sayers house? How did you leave it?

JOHNNIE: I have told you all I’m going to tell.

CAPTAIN: What time was it when you did the shooting? And what is Miss Gonda doing here?

JOHNNIE: You know all you have to know. You know enough not to implicate Miss Gonda. You have my confession.

CAPTAIN: Sure. But you’ll have to prove it.

JOHNNIE: It will stand—even if I do not choose to prove it. Particularly if I am not here to prove it.

CAPTAIN: Gonna be tough, eh? Well, you’ll talk at headquarters all right. Come on, boys.

KAY GONDA: [Stepping forward] Wait! You must listen to me now. I have a statement to make. I . . .

JOHNNIE: [Steps back, pulls the gun out of his pocket, covering the group] Stand still, all of you. [To KAY GONDA] Don’t move. Don’t say a word.

KAY GONDA: Johnnie! You don’t know what you’re doing! Wait, my dearest! Put that gun down.

JOHNNIE: [Without lowering the gun, smiles at her] I heard it. Thank you.

KAY GONDA: I’ll tell you everything! You don’t know! I’m safe!

JOHNNIE: I know you’re safe. You will be. Step back. Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt anyone. [She obeys] I want you all to look at me. Years from now you can tell your grandchildren about it. You are looking at something you will never see again and they will never see—a man who is perfectly happy! [Points the gun at himself, fires, falls]

CURTAIN

SCENE 4

Entrance hall in the residence of KAY GONDA. It is high, bare, modern in its austere simplicity. There is no furniture, no ornaments of any kind. The upper part of the hall is a long raised platform, dividing the room horizontally, and three broad continuous steps lead down from it to the foreground. Tall, square columns rise at the upper edge of the steps. Door into the rest of the house downstage in wall Left. The entire back wall is of wide glass panes, with an entrance door in the center.

Beyond the house, there is a narrow path among jagged rocks, a thin strip of the high coast with a broad view of the ocean beyond and of a flaming sunset sky. The hall is dim. There is no light, save the glow of the sunset.

At curtain rise, MICK WATTS is sitting on the top step, leaning down toward a dignified BUTLER who sits on the floor below, stiff, upright, and uncomfortable holding a tray with a full highball glass on it. MICK WATTS’ shirt collar is torn open, his tie hanging loose, his hair disheveled. He is clutching a newspaper ferociously. He is sober.

MICK WATTS: [Continuing a discourse that has obviously been going on for some time, speaking in an even, expressionless monotone, his manner earnest, confidential] . . . and so the king called them all before his throne and he said: “I’m weary and sick of it. I am tired of my kingdom where not a single man is worth ruling. I am tired of my lusterless crown, for it does not reflect a single flame of glory anywhere in my land.” . . . You see, he was a very foolish king. Some scream it, like he did, and squash their damn brains out against a wall. Others stagger on, like a dog chasing a shadow, knowing damn well that there is no shadow to chase, but still going on, their hearts empty and their paws bleeding. . . . So the king said to them on his deathbed—oh, this was another time, he was on his deathbed this time—he said: “It is the end, but I am still hoping. There is no end. Ever shall I go on hoping . . . ever . . . ever.” [Looks suddenly at the BUTLER, as if noticing him for the first time, and asks in an entirely different voice, pointing at him:] What the hell are you doing here?

BUTLER: [Rising] May I observe, sir, that you have been speaking for an hour and a quarter?

MICK WATTS: Have I?

BUTLER: You have, sir. So, if I may be forgiven, I took the liberty of sitting down.

MICK WATTS: [Surprised] Fancy, you were here all the time!

BUTLER: Yes, sir.

MICK WATTS: Well, what did you want here in the first place?

BUTLER: [Extending the tray] Your whiskey, sir.

MICK WATTS: Oh! [Reaches for the glass, but stops, jerks the crumpled newspaper at the BUTLER, asks:] Have you read this?

BUTLER: Yes, sir.

MICK WATTS: [Knocking the tray aside; it falls, breaking the glass] Go to hell! I don’t want any whiskey!

BUTLER: But you ordered it, sir.

MICK WATTS: Go to hell just the same! [As the BUTLER bends to pick up the tray] Get out of here! Never mind! Get out! I don’t want to see any human snoot tonight!

BUTLER: Yes, sir. [Exits Left]

[MICK WATTS straightens the paper out, looks at it, crumples it viciously again. Hears steps approaching outside and whirls about. FREDERICA SAYERS is seen outside, walking hurriedly toward the door; she has a newspaper in her hand. MICK WATTS walks to door and opens it, before she has time to ring]

MISS SAYERS: Good evening.

[He does not answer, lets her enter, closes the door and stands silently, looking at her. She looks around, then at him, somewhat disconcerted]

MICK WATTS: [Without moving] Well?

MISS SAYERS: Is this the residence of Miss Kay Gonda?

MICK WATTS: It is.

MISS SAYERS: May I see Miss Gonda?

MICK WATTS: No.

MISS SAYERS: I am Miss Sayers. Miss Frederica Sayers.

MICK WATTS: I don’t care.

MISS SAYERS: Will you please tell Miss Gonda that I am here? If she is at home.

MICK WATTS: She is not.

MISS SAYERS: When do you expect her back?

MICK WATTS: I don’t expect her.

MISS SAYERS: My good man, this is getting to be preposterous!

MICK WATTS: It is. You’d better get out of here.

MISS SAYERS: Sir?!

MICK WATTS: She’ll be back any minute. I know she will. And there’s nothing to talk about now.

MISS SAYERS: My good man, do you realize . . .

MICK WATTS: I realize everything that you realize, and then some. And I’m telling you there’s nothing to be done. Don’t bother her now.

MISS SAYERS: May I ask who you are and what you’re talking about?

MICK WATTS: Who I am doesn’t matter. I’m talking about—[Extends the newspaper]—this.

MISS SAYERS: Yes, I’ve read it, and I must say it is utterly bewildering and . . .

MICK WATTS: Bewildering? Hell, it’s monstrous! You don’t know the half of it! . . . [Catching himself, adds flatly] I don’t, either.

MISS SAYERS: Look here, I must get to the bottom of this thing. It will go too far and . . .

MICK WATTS: It has gone too far.

MISS SAYERS: Then I must . . .

[KAY GONDA enters from the outside. She is dressed as in all the preceding scenes. She is calm, but very tired]

MICK WATTS: So here you are! I knew you’d be back now!

KAY GONDA: [In a quiet, even voice] Good evening, Miss Sayers.

MISS SAYERS: Miss Gonda, this is the first sigh of relief I’ve breathed in two days! I never thought the time should come when I’d be so glad to see you! But you must understand . . .

KAY GONDA: [Indifferently] I know.

MISS SAYERS: You must understand that I could not foresee the astounding turn of events. It was most kind of you to go into hiding, but, really, you did not have to hide from me.

KAY GONDA: I was not hiding from anyone.

MISS SAYERS: But where were you?

KAY GONDA: Away. It had nothing to do with Mr. Sayers’ death.

MISS SAYERS: But when you heard those preposterous rumors accusing you of his murder, you should have come to me at once! When I asked you, at the house that night, not to disclose to anyone the manner of my brother’s death, I had no way of knowing what suspicions would arise. I tried my best to get in touch with you. Please believe me that I did not start those rumors.

KAY GONDA: I never thought you did.

MISS SAYERS: I wonder who started them.

KAY GONDA: I wonder.

MISS SAYERS: I do owe you an apology. I’m sure you felt it was my duty to disclose the truth at once, but you know why I had to keep silent. However, the deal is closed, and I thought it best to come to you first and tell you that I’m free to speak now.

KAY GONDA: [Indifferently] It was very kind of you.

MISS SAYERS: [Turning to MICK WATTS] Young man, you can tell that ridiculous studio of yours that Miss Gonda did not murder my brother. Tell them they can read his suicide letter in tomorrow’s papers. He wrote that he had no desire to struggle any longer, since his business was ruined and since the only woman he’d ever loved had, that night, refused to marry him.

KAY GONDA: I’m sorry, Miss Sayers.

MISS SAYERS: This is not a reproach, Miss Gonda. [To MICK WATTS] The Santa Barbara police knew everything, but promised me silence. I had to keep my brother’s suicide secret for a while, because I was negotiating a merger with . . .

MICK WATTS: . . . with United California Oil, and you didn’t want them to know the desperate state of the Sayers Company. Very smart. Now you’ve closed the deal and gypped United California. My congratulations.

MISS SAYERS: [Aghast, to KAY GONDA] This peculiar gentleman knew it all?

MICK WATTS: So it seems, doesn’t it?

MISS SAYERS: Then, in heaven’s name, why did you allow everybody to suspect Miss Gonda?

KAY GONDA: Don’t you think it best, Miss Sayers, not to discuss this any further? It’s done. It’s past. Let’s leave it at that.

MISS SAYERS: As you wish. There is just one question I would like to ask you. It baffles me completely. I thought perhaps you may know something about it. [Points at the newspaper] This. That incredible story . . . that boy I’ve never heard of, killing himself . . . that insane confession. . . . What does it mean?

KAY GONDA: [Evenly] I don’t know.

MICK WATTS: Huh?

KAY GONDA: I have never heard of him before.

MISS SAYERS: Then I can explain it only as the act of a crank, an abnormal mind . . .

KAY GONDA: Yes, Miss Sayers. A mind that was not normal.

MISS SAYERS: [After a pause] Well if you’ll excuse me, Miss Gonda, I shall wish you good night. I shall give my statement to the papers immediately and clear your name completely.

KAY GONDA: Thank you, Miss Sayers. Good night.

MISS SAYERS: [Turning at the door] I wish you luck with whatever it is you’re doing. You have been most courteous in this unfortunate matter. Allow me to thank you.

[KAY GONDA bows. MISS SAYERS exits]

MICK WATTS: [Ferociously] Well?

KAY GONDA: Would you mind going home, Mick? I am very tired.

MICK WATTS: I hope you’ve . . .

KAY GONDA: Telephone the studio on your way. Tell them that I will sign the contract tomorrow.

MICK WATTS: I hope you’ve had a good time! I hope you’ve enjoyed it! But I’m through!

KAY GONDA: I’ll see you at the studio tomorrow at nine.

MICK WATTS: I’m through! God, I wish I could quit!

KAY GONDA: You know that you will never quit, Mick.

MICK WATTS: That’s the hell of it! That you know it, too! Why do I serve you like a dog and will go on serving you like a dog for the rest of my days? Why can’t I resist any crazy whim of yours? Why did I have to go and spread rumors about a murder you never committed? Just because you wanted to find out something? Well, have you found it out?

KAY GONDA: Yes.

MICK WATTS: What have you found out?

KAY GONDA: How many people saw my last picture? Do you remember those figures?

MICK WATTS: Seventy-five million, six hundred thousand, three hundred and twelve.

KAY GONDA: Well, Mick, seventy-five million, six hundred thousand people hate me. They hate me in their hearts for the things they see in me, the things they have betrayed. I mean nothing to them, except a reproach. . . . But there are three hundred and twelve others—perhaps only the twelve. There are a few who want the highest possible and will take nothing less and will not live on any other terms. . . . It is with them that I am signing a contract tomorrow. We can’t give up the earth to all those others.

MICK WATTS: [Holding out the newspaper] And what about this?

KAY GONDA: I’ve answered you.

MICK WATTS: But you are a murderess, Kay Gonda! You killed that boy!

KAY GONDA: No, Mick, not I alone.

MICK WATTS: But the poor fool thought that he had to save your life!

KAY GONDA: He has.

MICK WATTS: What?!

KAY GONDA: He wanted to die that I may live. He did just that.

MICK WATTS: But don’t you realize what you’ve done?

KAY GONDA: [Slowly, looking past him] That, Mick, was the kindest thing I have ever done.

CURTAIN

Part III,

THE LATE THIRTIES

Think Twice

1939

Editor’s Preface

The Depression years in New York City (to which she moved in 1934) were a difficult financial struggle for Ayn Rand: she lived on the earnings from Night of January 16th and from a series of jobs she held as reader for various movie companies. She wrote when she could find the time. Nevertheless, the work moved ahead. In 1935, she began making notes for The Fountainhead and planning the architectural research that it would require. Realizing that the novel would be a long-term project, she interrupted it several times to do shorter pieces. In 1937, she wrote the novelette Anthem (published separately by New American Library). In 1939, she wrote a stage adaptation of We the Living, produced on Broadway under the title of The Unconquered (it was not successful). In the same year, she wrote her third and last original stage play, the philosophical murder mystery Think Twice. It has never been produced.

Think Twice, written five years later than Ideal, is finished, mature work, in all major respects characteristic of the author of The Fountainhead. It is the only such piece in the present collection. (Red Pawn is an unedited scenario, and Ideal is not fully representative.) The theme is the distinctive Ayn Rand approach to ethics: the evil of altruism, and the need of man to live an independent, egoistic existence. The hero, who now has primacy over the heroine, is a completely recognizable Ayn Rand type. The plot, fast-moving and logical, has an ingenious twist; the story presents an altruist who, acting on his ideas, specializes in seeking power over others, thereby giving them compelling reasons to want to kill him. (The Russian character was originally a German Nazi; in the 1950s, Miss Rand updated the play, turning him into a Communist.) The style is smoothly assured; the mechanics of alibis, motives, and clues are deftly handled; and the writing displays Ayn Rand’s clarity, her sense of drama, her intellectual wit. There is even the first sign of the science-fiction element which, years later, would become John Galt’s motor in Atlas Shrugged.

One of Ayn Rand’s most impressive literary skills, brilliantly demonstrated in her novels, is her ability to integrate theme and plot. That ability is evidenced in Think Twice—in the union of philosophy and murder mystery. This is not a routine murder story, with some abstract talk thrown in for effect. Nor is it a drawing-room discussion interrupted now and again by some unrelated events. The play is a union of thought and action: the philosophic ideas of the characters actually motivate and explain their actions, which in turn concretize and demonstrate the philosophic point, and acquire significance because of it. The result is a seamless blend of depth and excitement, at once art and entertainment.

A decade later, in her journal of August 28, 1949, Ayn Rand wrote the following:

The idea that “art” and “entertainment” are opposites, that art is serious and dull, while entertainment is empty and stupid, but enjoyable—is the result of the nonhuman, altruistic morality. That which is good [in this view] must be unpleasant. That which is enjoyable is sinful. Pleasure is an indulgence of a low order, to be apologized for. The serious is the performance of a duty, unpleasant and, therefore, uplifting. If a work of art examines life seriously, it must necessarily be unpleasant and unexciting, because such is the nature of life for man. An entertaining, enjoyable play cannot possibly be true to the deeper essence of life, it must be superficial, since life is not to be enjoyed.

It is unlikely that Miss Rand had her early work in mind when she wrote these words, but the present piece does illustrate her point. Think Twice is an entertaining, enjoyable play that is true to the deeper essence of life.

I first read the play in the 1950s, with Miss Rand present, asking me now and then who I thought the murderer was. I guessed just about every possibility, except the right one. Each time, Miss Rand beamed and said: “Think twice.” When I finished, she told me that anyone who knew her and her philosophy should have been able to guess right away. She could not, she went on, ever write a series of mysteries, because everyone would know who the murderers were. “How?” I asked.

Now see if you can guess the murderer. After the play, I will quote her answer.

—L. P.

Think Twice

CHARACTERS

WALTER BRECKENRIDGE

CURTISS

SERGE SOOKIN

HARVEY FLEMING

TONY GODDARD

STEVE INGALLS

BILLY BRECKENRIDGE

FLASH KOZINSKY

ADRIENNE KNOWLAND

HELEN BRECKENRIDGE

GREGORY HASTINGS

DIXON

Place Living room of a home in Connecticut

Time Act I, Scene 1—Afternoon of July 3rd
Act I, Scene 2—That evening
Act II, Scene 1—Half an hour later
Act II, Scene 2—Next morning

Act I

SCENE 1

Afternoon of July 3rd. The living room of a home in Connecticut. A large room, not offensively wealthy, but evidencing both money and an unsuccessful attempt at good taste. The room is stately and Colonial—too deliberately so. Everything is brand-new, resplendently unused; one expects to see price tags on the furniture.

Large French windows, Center, opening upon a lovely view of the grounds with a lake in the distance, a view marred only by a dismal, gray sky. Stairway, Stage Right, leading to a door, and another door downstage, leading to the rest of the ground floor. Entrance door upstage Left. Downstage Left an unused fireplace, with logs stacked neatly, and above the fireplace—a large portrait of WALTER BRECKENRIDGE.

At curtain rise, WALTER BRECKENRIDGE stands alone in front of the fireplace. He is a stately, gray-haired man of fifty, who looks like a saint; a very “human” saint, however: benevolent, dignified, humorous, and a little portly. He stands, looking up at the portrait, deeply absorbed, a gun in his hand.

After a while, CURTISS, the butler, enters from door Right, carrying two empty flower vases. CURTISS is elderly, and severely well-mannered. He deposits the vases on a table and a cabinet. BRECKENRIDGE does not turn and CURTISS does not see the gun.

CURTISS: Anything else, sir? [BRECKENRIDGE does not move] Mr. Breckenridge . . . [No answer] Is anything the matter, sir?

BRECKENRIDGE: [Absently] Oh . . . no . . . no . . . I was just wondering . . . [Points at the portrait] Do you think that in the centuries to come people will say he was a great man? [Turns to face CURTISS] Is it a good likeness of me, Curtiss? [CURTISS sees the gun and steps back with a little gasp] What’s the matter?

CURTISS: Mr. Breckenridge!

BRECKENRIDGE: What’s the matter with you?

CURTISS: Don’t do it, sir! Whatever it is, don’t do it! BRECKENRIDGE: [Looks at him in amazement, then notices the gun in his own hand and bursts out laughing] Oh, that? . . . I’m sorry, Curtiss. I’d quite forgotten I held it.

CURTISS: But, sir . . .

BRECKENRIDGE: Oh, I just sent the car down to meet Mrs. Breckenridge at the station, and I didn’t want her to find this in the car, so I brought it in. We mustn’t tell her about . . . you know, about why I have to carry this. It would only worry her.

CURTISS: Yes, of course, sir. I’m so sorry. It just gave me a jolt.

BRECKENRIDGE: I don’t blame you. You know, I hate the damn thing myself. [Walks to a cabinet and slips the gun into a drawer] Funny, isn’t it? I’m actually afraid of it. And when I think of all the deadly stuff I’ve handled in the laboratory. Radioactive elements. Cosmic rays. Things that could wipe out the whole population of the state of Connecticut. Never been afraid of them. In fact, never felt anything at all. But this . . . [Points to the drawer] Do you suppose it’s my old age and I’m being sensitive about any . . . reminder?

CURTISS: [Reproachfully] Your old age, sir!

BRECKENRIDGE: Well, time passes, Curtiss, time passes. Why do they celebrate birthdays? It’s just one year closer to the grave. And there’s so much to be done. [Looks at the portrait] That’s what I was thinking when you came in. Have I done enough in my life? Have I done enough?

[SERGE SOOKIN enters through the French doors. SERGE is about thirty-two, pale, blond, with the face and the manner of a fervent idealist. His clothes are neat, but very poor. His arms are loaded with an enormous bunch of freshly cut flowers]

Ah, Serge . . . thank you. . . . So kind of you to help us.

SERGE: I hope this flowers Mrs. Breckenridge will like.

BRECKENRIDGE: She loves flowers. We must have lots of flowers. . . . Over here, Serge. . . . [Indicating the vases as SERGE arranges the flowers] We’ll put them here—and over there, on the cabinet—and on the fireplace, just one or two sprays on the fireplace.

SERGE: [Wistfully] By us in Moscow, we had the more beautiful flowers.

BRECKENRIDGE: Try not to think of all that, Serge. There are things it’s best to forget. [To CURTISS] Have you taken care of the cigarettes, Curtiss?

[CURTISS busies himself filling cigarette boxes]

SERGE: [Grimly] There are the things never one can forget. But I am so sorry. That we should not discuss about. Not today, no? This is a great day.

BRECKENRIDGE: Yes, Serge. This is a great day for me. [Indicating an armchair] I don’t think that chair is right, over there. Curtiss, would you move it please this way, to the table? [As CURTISS obeys] That’s better, thank you. We must have everything right, Curtiss. For our guests. They are very important guests.

CURTISS: Yes, sir.

[From offstage, there comes the sound of Tchaikovsky’s “Autumn Song” expertly played on the piano. BRECKENRIDGE looks in the direction of the sound, a little annoyed, then shrugs and turns to SERGE]

BRECKENRIDGE: You will meet some very interesting people today, Serge. I want you to meet them. Perhaps it will give you a better idea of me. You know, one can judge a man best by his friends.

SERGE: [Looking up the stairs, a little grimly] Not always, I hope.

BRECKENRIDGE: [Looking up] Oh, Steve? You mustn’t mind Steve. You mustn’t let him upset you.

SERGE: [Coldly] Mr. Ingalls he is not kind.

BRECKENRIDGE: No. Steve’s never been kind. But then, you know, strictly speaking, Steve is not a friend. He’s my business partner—just a junior partner, as we call it, but darn useful. One of the best physicists in the country.

SERGE: You are so modest, Mr. Breckenridge. You are in the country the greatest physicist. That everybody knows.

BRECKENRIDGE: Perhaps everybody but me.

SERGE: You are to mankind the benefactor. But Mr. Ingalls he is not a friend to the world. In his heart for the world there is no place. Today the world needs friends. BRECKENRIDGE: That’s true. But—

[Doorbell rings. CURTISS opens the door. HARVEY FLEMING stands on the threshold. He is a man in his late forties, tall, gaunt, disreputably unkempt. He looks like anything but an “important” guest: he needs a shave, his clothes need pressing; he is not drunk, but not quite sober. He carries a small, battered overnight bag. He stands for a moment, studying the room glumly]

CURTISS: [Bowing] Good afternoon, sir. Come right in, sir.

FLEMING: [Enters, without removing his hat. Snaps glumly:] Billy arrived yet?

CURTISS: Yes, sir.

BRECKENRIDGE: [Advancing toward FLEMING with a broad smile] Well, Harvey! Greetings and welcome. Harvey, I want you to meet—

FLEMING: [Nods curtly in the general direction of BRECKENRIDGE and SERGE] Hello. [To CURTISS] Where’s Billy’s room?

CURTISS: This way, sir.

[FLEMING exits with him through door Right, without a glance at the others]

SERGE: [A little indignant] But what is the matter?

BRECKENRIDGE: You mustn’t mind him, Serge. He is a very unhappy man. [Looks impatiently in the direction of the music] I do wish Tony would stop playing.

SERGE: It is so sad, this piece. It is not appropriate today.

BRECKENRIDGE: Ask him to stop, will you?

[SERGE exits Right while BRECKENRIDGE continues rearranging the room. The music stops. SERGE returns, followed by TONY GODDARD. TONY is young, tall, slender, modestly dressed, and a little high-strung, which he does his best to conceal. BRECKENRIDGE speaks gaily:]

Did you notice that there’s a phonograph right by the piano, Tony? Why didn’t you put on a record by Egon Richter? He plays that piece ever so much better. TONY: It was the record.

BRECKENRIDGE: Well, well! That’s one on me.

TONY: I know you don’t like to hear me playing.

BRECKENRIDGE: I? Why shouldn’t I, Tony?

TONY: I’m sorry. . . . [Indifferently, but not at all offensively ] Have I wished you a happy birthday, Mr. Breckenridge?

BRECKENRIDGE: Yes, of course you have. When you arrived. Why, Tony! How unflattering!

TONY: Guess I shouldn’t have asked. Makes it worse. I always do things like that.

BRECKENRIDGE: Anything wrong, Tony?

TONY: No. No. [Listlessly] Where are our host and hostess?

BRECKENRIDGE: [With a broad smile] They haven’t arrived.

TONY: Not yet?

BRECKENRIDGE: No.

TONY: Isn’t that rather peculiar?

BRECKENRIDGE: Why, no. Mrs. Dawson asked me to take care of everything—it was very kind of her, she wanted so much to please me.

SERGE: It is unusual, no?—your preparing the party for your own birthday in the house of somebody else?

BRECKENRIDGE: Oh, the Dawsons are old friends of mine—and they insisted that they wanted to give the party and give it here.

TONY: Well, the house isn’t old. It doesn’t look as if they’d ever lived in it.

BRECKENRIDGE: It was built very recently.

STEVE INGALLS: [From the top of the stairway] And in very bad taste.

[INGALLS is a man of about forty, tall and lean, with a hard, inscrutable face. He looks like a man who should have great energy—and his appearance is a contrast to his manner and movements: slow, lazy, casual, indifferent. He wears simple sports clothes. He comes lazily down the stairs, while BRECKENRIDGE speaks sharply, looking up at him:]

BRECKENRIDGE: Was that necessary, Steve?

INGALLS: Not at all. They could have chosen a better architect.

BRECKENRIDGE: That’s not what I meant.

INGALLS: Don’t be obvious, Walter. Was there ever a time when I didn’t know what you meant? [To TONY] Hello, Tony. You here, too? As was to be expected. Sacrificial offerings—needed at one’s birthday party.

SERGE: [Stiffly] It is Mr. Breckenridge’s birthday party.

INGALLS: So it is.

SERGE: If you think you—

BRECKENRIDGE: Please, Serge. Really, Steve, do let’s drop the personal remarks just for today, shall we? Particularly about the house and particularly when the Dawsons arrive.

INGALLS: When or if?

BRECKENRIDGE: What do you mean?

INGALLS: And another thing, Walter, is that you always know what I mean.

BRECKENRIDGE: [Does not answer. Then looks impatiently at door Right] I wish they’d bring Billy out. What is he doing there with Harvey? [Goes to ring bell]

TONY: Who else is coming?

BRECKENRIDGE: We’re almost all here, except Adrienne. I’ve sent the car to meet Helen.

SERGE: Adrienne? It is not perhaps Miss Adrienne Knowland?

BRECKENRIDGE: Yes.

[CURTISS enters Right]

CURTISS: Yes, sir?

BRECKENRIDGE: Please tell Mr. Kozinsky to bring Billy out here.

CURTISS: Yes, sir. [Exits Right]

SERGE: It is not the great Adrienne Knowland?

INGALLS: There’s only one Adrienne Knowland, Serge. But the adjective is optional.

SERGE: Oh, I am so happy that I should meet her in the person! I have seen her in that so beautiful play—Little Women. I have wondered so often what she is like in the real life. I have thought she must be sweet and lovely—like Mademoiselle Shirley Temple in the cinema, when I was a little boy in Moscow. INGALLS: Yeah?

BRECKENRIDGE: Please, Steve. We know you don’t like Adrienne, but couldn’t you control it for just a few hours?

[HARVEY FLEMING enters Right and holds the door open for FLASH KOZINSKY, who comes in pushing BILLY BRECKENRIDGE in a wheelchair. BILLY is a boy of fifteen, pale, thin, strangely quiet and a little too well-mannered. FLASH does not carry a college pennant, but “football hero” is written all over him as plainly as if he did. He is young, husky, pleasant-looking, and not too bright. As he wheels the chair in, he bumps it against the doorjamb]

FLEMING: Careful, you clumsy fool!

BILLY: It’s all right . . . Mr. Fleming.

BRECKENRIDGE: Well, Billy! Feel rested after the trip?

BILLY: Yes, Father.

INGALLS: Hello, Bill.

BILLY: Hello, Steve.

FLASH: [Turns to FLEMING. It has taken all this time to penetrate] Say, you can’t talk to me like that!

FLEMING: Huh?

FLASH: Who are you to talk to me like that?

FLEMING: Skip it.

BRECKENRIDGE: [Indicating SERGE] Billy, you remember Mr. Sookin?

BILLY: How do you do, Mr. Sookin.

SERGE: Good afternoon, Billy. Feeling better, no? You look wonderful.

FLEMING: He looks like hell.

BILLY: I’m all right.

SERGE: You are not comfortable maybe? This pillow it is not right. [Adjusts the pillow behind BILLY’s head] So! It is better?

BILLY: Thank you.

SERGE: I think the footrest it should be higher. [Adjusts the footrest] So?

BILLY: Thank you.

SERGE: I think perhaps it is a little chilly. You want I should bring the warm shawl?

BILLY: [Very quietly] Leave me alone, will you please?

BRECKENRIDGE: There, there! Billy’s just a little nervous. The trip was too much for him—in his condition.

[FLEMING walks brusquely to the sideboard and starts pouring himself a glass of whiskey]

BILLY: [His eyes following FLEMING anxiously, his voice low and almost pleading] Don’t do that, Mr. Fleming.

FLEMING: [Looks at him, then puts the bottle down. Quietly :] Okay, kid.

SERGE: [To BRECKENRIDGE, in what he intends to be a whisper ] Your poor son, how long he has this paralysis? BRECKENRIDGE: Sh-sh.

BILLY: Six years and four months, Mr. Sookin.

[There is a moment of embarrassed silence. FLASH looks from one face to another, then bursts out suddenly and loudly:]

FLASH: Well, I don’t know what the rest of you think, but I think Mr. Sookin shouldn’t’ve asked that.

FLEMING: Keep still.

FLASH: Well, I think—

[There is a frightening screech of brakes offstage and the sound of a car being stopped violently. A car door is slammed with a bang and a lovely, husky feminine voice yells: “Goddamn it!”]

INGALLS: [With a courtly gesture of introduction in the direction of the sound] There’s Mademoiselle Shirley Temple . . . !

[The entrance door flies open as ADRIENNE KNOWLAND enters without ringing. She is as great a contrast to the conception of a Shirley Temple or of LITTLE WOMEN as can be imagined. She is a woman of about twenty-eight, beautiful and completely unconcerned about her beauty, with sharp, angular movements and a tense, restless energy. Her clothes are simple and tailored, such as a woman would wear for a walk in the country, not the kind one would expect from a glamorous actress. She carries a small suitcase. She enters like a gust of wind and whirls upon BRECKENRIDGE]

ADRIENNE: Walter! Why in hell do they have a horse running loose out there?

BRECKENRIDGE: Adrienne, my dear! How do you—

TONY: [At the same time] A horse?

ADRIENNE: A horse. Hello, Tony. Why do they have a horse cavorting in the middle of the driveway? I almost killed the damn beast and I think I should have.

BRECKENRIDGE: I’m so sorry, my dear. Somebody’s carelessness. I shall give orders to—

ADRIENNE: [Forgetting him entirely, to FLEMING] Hello, Harvey. Where have you been hiding yourself lately? Hello, Bill, old pal. I really came here just to see you again. Hello, Flash.

BRECKENRIDGE: Adrienne, my dear, may I present Serge Sookin, a new and very dear friend of mine?

ADRIENNE: How do you do, Mr. Sookin.

SERGE: [Clicking his heels and bowing] I am honored, Miss Knowland.

ADRIENNE: [Looking at the room] Well, I think this place is—[Her glance stops on INGALLS, who is standing aside. She throws at him curtly, as an afterthought:] Hello, Steve. [She turns away from him before he has had time to complete his bow] I think this place is—what one would expect it to be.

BRECKENRIDGE: Would you like to see your room, my dear?

ADRIENNE: No hurry. [Tears her hat off and tosses it halfway across the room. To FLASH, indicating her suitcase: ] Flash, be an angel and take my stuff out of the way, will you? [FLASH exits up the stairs with the suitcase. ADRIENNE walks to sideboard and pours herself a drink] Incidentally, where’s the host? BRECKENRIDGE: Mr. and Mrs. Dawson are not here yet. ADRIENNE: Not here? That’s a new one in etiquette. Oh, and yes, of course, happy birthday.

BRECKENRIDGE: Thank you, my dear.

ADRIENNE: How’s the infernal machine?

BRECKENRIDGE: The what?

ADRIENNE: The gadget with cosmic rays that the papers have been yelping about.

BRECKENRIDGE: The papers might do some real yelping about it soon. Very soon.

TONY: I heard it’s really a colossal invention, Adrienne.

ADRIENNE: Another one? I think it’s outrageous—the amount of space that the Breckenridge Laboratories have always managed to hog in the newspapers. But then, Walter has a genius for not remaining unnoticed. Like a stripteaser.

INGALLS: Or an actress.

ADRIENNE: [Whirls to him, then away, and repeats calmly, her voice a little hard] Or an actress.

SERGE: [Breaks the uncomfortable little silence, speaking hotly and with a defiant sort of respect] The stage—it is a great art. It helps such as suffer and are poor, all the misery and the sadness it makes forget for the few hours. The theater—it is the noble work of the humanitarianism.

ADRIENNE: [Looks at him very coldly, then turns to BRECKENRIDGE and says dryly:] Congratulations, Walter.

BRECKENRIDGE: What?

ADRIENNE: Your very dear friend is a real find, isn’t he? Out of what gutter did you pick him up?

SERGE: [Stiffly] Miss Knowland . . .!

ADRIENNE: But, sweetheart, there’s no need to look so Russian about it. I meant it in the nicest way. Besides, it goes for me, too, and for all of us here. We were all picked up by Walter out of one gutter or another. That’s why he’s a great man.

SERGE: I do not understand.

ADRIENNE: You didn’t know? But it’s no secret. I was singing in a dive, just one step better than a cat house—not a very long step—when Walter discovered me, and he built the Breckenridge Theater. Tony here is studying medicine—on a Breckenridge scholarship. Harvey has nothing but Breckenridge cash between him and the Bowery Mission—only nobody would let him into the Mission, just as nobody will give him a job, because he drinks. That’s all right, Harvey—I do, too, at times. Billy here—

TONY: For God’s sake, Adrienne!

ADRIENNE: But we’re among friends. We’re all in the same boat, aren’t we? Except Steve, of course. Steve is a special case and the less you know about him, the better.

BRECKENRIDGE: Adrienne, my dear, we know you have a wonderful sense of humor, but why overdo it?

ADRIENNE: Oh, I just thought I’d initiate your Volga Boatman here. He’s joining the brotherhood, isn’t he? He’s got all the earmarks.

SERGE: It is very strange, all this, Miss Knowland, but I think it is beautiful.

ADRIENNE: [Dryly] It is very beautiful.

[FLASH comes back down the stairs]

SERGE: And it is the noble thing—the Breckenridge Theater in the so very vile Fourteenth Street, for the poor people to see the drama. The art brought to the masses, as it should. I have often wondered how Mr. Breckenridge can do it, with the such low prices of the tickets.

INGALLS: He can’t. The noble thing costs him a hundred thousand dollars a season, out of his own pocket. SERGE: Miss Knowland?

INGALLS: No, Serge. Not Miss Knowland. The theater. That would have been much more sensible. But Walter never asks anything in return. He discovered her, he built the theater for her, he made her the star of Fourteenth Street, he made her famous—in fact, he made her in every sense but the proper one. Which is outrageous, when you look at Adrienne.

BRECKENRIDGE: Really, Steve!

SERGE: [To INGALLS] You are not able to understand the unselfish action?

INGALLS: No.

SERGE: You do not have the feeling that it is beautiful?

INGALLS: I’ve never had any beautiful feelings, Serge.

SERGE: [To ADRIENNE] I shall beg your forgiveness, Miss Knowland, since the person who should do so will not.

BRECKENRIDGE: Don’t take Steve too seriously, Serge. He’s not really as rotten as he sounds at times.

SERGE: By us in Moscow, a gentleman does not insult an artist.

BRECKENRIDGE: Oh, no matter what Steve says, he’s always attended her every opening night.

ADRIENNE: [It is almost a scream] He . . . what?

BRECKENRIDGE: Didn’t you know it? Steve’s always been there, at every opening of yours—though I never caught him applauding, but the others made up for it; you’ve never lacked applause, have you, my dear?

ADRIENNE: [She has been looking at INGALLS all through BRECKENRIDGE’s speech. She asks, still looking at INGALLS :] Walter . . . with whom?

BRECKENRIDGE: I beg your pardon?

ADRIENNE: With whom did he come to my openings?

BRECKENRIDGE: How can one ever ask “with whom” about Steve? Alone, of course.

ADRIENNE: [To INGALLS, her voice trembling with anger] You didn’t see me in Little Women, did you?

INGALLS: Oh, yes, my dear, I did. You were very sweet and very coy. Particularly the way you let your hands flutter about. Like butterflies.

ADRIENNE: Steve, you didn’t—

INGALLS: Yes, I did. I saw you in Peter Pan. You have beautiful legs. I saw you in Daughter of the Slums—very touching when you died of unemployment. I saw you in The Yellow Ticket.

ADRIENNE: Goddamn you, you didn’t see that!

INGALLS: I did.

TONY: But, Adrienne, why are you so upset about it? Your greatest hits.

ADRIENNE: [She has not even heard TONY] Why did you go to my openings?

INGALLS: Well, my dear, there could be two explanations: either I’m a masochist or I wanted material for a conversation such as this.

[He turns away from her, the conversation ended, as far as he’s concerned. There is a silence. Then FLASH says loudly:]

FLASH: Well, I don’t know about you all, but I don’t think it was a nice conversation.

TONY: [As FLEMING is about to snap at FLASH] Never mind, Harvey. I’ll kill him for you one of these days.

FLEMING: Why in hell should Billy have a moron for a tutor?

BRECKENRIDGE: And why, may I ask, should you exhibit public concern about Billy’s tutors, Harvey?

[FLEMING looks at him, then steps back, somehow defeated]

FLASH: [Belligerently] Whom you calling a moron, huh? Whom?

FLEMING: You.

FLASH: [Taken aback] Oh. . . .

BILLY: Father, could I please be taken back to my room?

BRECKENRIDGE: Why, I didn’t think you’d want to miss the party, Billy. However, if you prefer—

BILLY: [Indifferently] No. It’s all right. I’ll stay here.

[Doorbell rings]

TONY: The Dawsons?

BRECKENRIDGE: [Mysteriously] Yes, I think it’s time for the Dawsons.

[CURTISS enters Right and crosses to open the door. HELEN BRECKENRIDGE enters. She is a woman of about thirty-six, tall, blond, exquisitely groomed. She is the perfect lady in the best sense of the word and she looks like the picture of a perfect wife who has always been perfectly cared for. She carries a small gift package]

HELEN: [Astonished] Why, Curtiss! What are you doing here?

CURTISS: [Bowing] Good afternoon, madam.

BRECKENRIDGE: Helen, my dear! [Kisses her on the cheek] What a pleasant surprise to see you enter! As a matter of fact, it’s always a surprise to me. I can’t get used to it—not after sixteen years of married life.

HELEN: [Smiling] Too nice, Walter, much too nice. [To the others] Shall I say “hello” collectively? I’m afraid I’m late and last, as usual.

[The others answer ad-lib greetings. CURTISS whispers something to BRECKENRIDGE, who nods. CURTISS exits Right]

HELEN: [To BILLY] How do you feel, dear? Was the trip too hard?

BILLY: It was all right.

HELEN: I really don’t quite see why I wasn’t allowed to come down with you.

BRECKENRIDGE: [Smiling] There was a reason, my dear.

HELEN: I had a perfectly beastly time getting away from the city. I envy you, Steve—living right here in Connecticut. You have no idea of the traffic on a holiday eve. Besides, I had to stop at a bookstore—and why is it that they never seem to have any clerks in book-stores? [To BRECKENRIDGE, indicating her package] I bought How Deep the Shadows for Mrs. Dawson. Mrs. Dawson has such a regrettable taste in books. But it was so nice of her—giving this party.

INGALLS: Too nice, Helen, much too nice.

HELEN: Not if it got you out of that laboratory of yours. How long since you last attended a party, Steve?

INGALLS: I’m not sure. Maybe a year.

HELEN: Maybe two?

INGALLS: Possible.

HELEN: But I’m being terribly rude. Shouldn’t I say hello to our hostess? Where is our hostess?

[Nobody answers. Then BRECKENRIDGE steps forward]

BRECKENRIDGE: [His voice gay and solemn at once] Helen, my dear, that is my surprise. You are the hostess. [She looks at him without understanding] You have always wanted a house in the country. This is it. It’s yours. I had it built for you. [She stares at him, frozen] Why, my dear, what’s the matter?

HELEN: [A smile coming very slowly—and not too naturally—to her face] I . . . I’m just . . . speechless . . . Walter. [The smile improving] You can’t expect me not to be a little—overwhelmed, can you? . . . And I haven’t even thanked you yet. I’m late again. I’m always too late. . . . [She looks about, a little helplessly, notices the package in her hand] Well . . . well, I guess I’ll have to read How Deep the Shadows myself. It serves me right.

BRECKENRIDGE: I am fifty years old today, Helen. Fifty. It’s a long time. Half a century. And I was just . . . just vain and human enough to want to mark the occasion. Not for myself—but for others. How can we ever leave a mark—except upon others? This is my gift—to you.

HELEN: Walter . . . when did you start building it . . . this house?

BRECKENRIDGE: Oh, almost a year ago. Think of what I’ve spared you: all the bother and trouble and arguments with architects and contractors, and shopping for furniture and kitchen ranges and bathroom fixtures. Let me tell you, it’s a headache and a heartache.

HELEN: Yes, Walter. You have never let me be exposed to a headache or a heartache. You have been very kind. . . . Well . . . well, I hardly know where to begin . . . if I’m to be hostess—

BRECKENRIDGE: Everything’s taken care of, my dear. Curtiss is here, and Mrs. Pudget is in the kitchen, the dinner is ordered, the drinks are ready, even the soap is in the bathrooms. I wanted you to come and find the party complete—from guests to ashtrays. I planned it that way. I don’t want you to exert yourself at all.

HELEN: Well, I suppose that’s that. . . . BRECKENRIDGE: [Turning to BILLY] And, Billy, I wouldn’t forget you today. Did you see—from the window of your room—that horse out on the lawn?

BILLY: Yes, Father.

BRECKENRIDGE: Well, it’s yours. That’s your present.

[There’s a little gasp—from ADRIENNE]

HELEN: [With shocked reproach] Really, Walter!

BRECKENRIDGE: But why are you all looking at me like that? Don’t you understand? If Billy concentrates on how much he would like to be able to ride that horse—it will help him to get well. It will give him a concrete objective for a healthy mental attitude.

BILLY: Yes, Father. Thank you very much, Father.

FLEMING: [Screams suddenly, to BRECKENRIDGE] Goddamn you! You dirty bastard! You lousy, rotten sadist! You—

INGALLS: [Seizing him as he swings out at BRECKENRIDGE] Easy, Harvey. Take it easy.

BRECKENRIDGE: [After a pause, very gently] Harvey . . . [The kindness of his tone makes FLEMING cringe, almost visibly] I’m sorry, Harvey, that I should be the cause of your feeling as ashamed as you will feel later.

FLEMING: [After a pause, dully] I apologize, Walter. . . . [He turns abruptly, walks to sideboard, pours himself a drink, swallows it, refills the glass. No one is looking at him, except BILLY]

BRECKENRIDGE: It’s all right. I understand. I’m your friend, Harvey. I’ve always been your friend.

[Silence]

FLASH: Well, I think Mr. Fleming is drunk.

[CURTISS enters with a tray bearing filled cocktail glasses]

BRECKENRIDGE: [Brightly] I think Mr. Fleming has the right idea—for the moment. It’s time we all had a drink.

[CURTISS passes the cocktails to the guests. When he comes to ADRIENNE he stands waiting politely. She is lost in thought and does not notice him]

Adrienne, my dear . . .

ADRIENNE: [With a little jerk of returning to reality] What? [Sees CURTISS] Oh . . . [Takes a glass absently]

BRECKENRIDGE: [Taking the last glass, stands solemnly facing the others] My friends! Not I, but you are to be honored today. Not what I have been, but those whom I have served. You—all of you—are the justification of my existence—for help to one’s fellow men is the only justification of anyone’s existence. That is why I chose you as my guests today. That is why we shall drink a toast—not to me, but—[Raising his glass]—to you, my friends! [Drinks. The others stand silently]

SERGE: I would so very much like to give the toast also, please?

BRECKENRIDGE: If you wish, Serge.

SERGE: [Fervently] To the man who has his life devoted so that the other men’s lives should be better. To the man the genius of whom to the world gave the machine for the Vitamin X separating, which little babies makes so healthier. To the man who the new violet-ray diffuser gave us, so cheaper that the poor people in the slums the sunlight could have. To the man who the electric saw for the surgery invented, which so many lives has saved. To the friend of the mankind—Walter Breckenridge!

INGALLS: Sure. Walter’s invented everything but a bust developer for social workers.

FLASH: I think that’s in bad taste.

ADRIENNE: [Rising] And now that we’ve done our duty, may I go up to my room, Walter?

BRECKENRIDGE: Wait, Adrienne, do you mind? There’s something I want you all to hear. [To the others] My friends, I have an announcement to make. It is important. I want you to be the first to hear it.

INGALLS: More gifts?

BRECKENRIDGE: Yes, Steve. One more gift. My greatest—and my last. [To the others] My friends! You have heard of the invention on which I have worked for the last ten years—the one Adrienne referred to so charmingly as a “gadget.” There has been quite a great deal of mystery about it—unavoidably, as you shall see. It is a device to capture the energy of cosmic rays. You may have heard that cosmic rays possess a tremendous potential of energy, which scientists have struggled to harness for years and years. I was fortunate enough to find the secret of it—with Steve’s able assistance, of course. I have been asked so often whether the device is completed. I have refused to answer. But I can say it now: it is completed. It is tried, tested, and proved beyond doubt. Its possibilities are tremendous. [Pauses. Continues, very simply, almost wearily:] Tremendous. And its financial promises are unlimited. [Stops]

INGALLS: Well?

BRECKENRIDGE: Well . . . My friends, a man controlling such an invention and keeping its secret could be rich. Rich. But I am not going to keep it. [Pauses, looks at them, then says slowly:] Tomorrow, at twelve o’clock noon, I shall give this invention to mankind. Give, not sell it. For all and any to use. Without charge. To all mankind. [TONY emits a long whistle. FLASH stands with his mouth hanging open, and utters only one awed: “Gee!”] Think what that will do. Free power—drawn out of space. It will light the poorest slum and the shack of the sharecropper. It will throw the greedy utility companies out of business. It will be mankind’s greatest blessing. And no one will hold private control over it.

ADRIENNE: Beautiful showmanship, Walter. You’ve always been a master of the theater.

TONY: But I suppose it is sort of grand—

ADRIENNE:—opera.

HELEN: What exactly is to happen tomorrow at noon, Walter?

BRECKENRIDGE: I have invited the press to be at the laboratory tomorrow at noon. I shall give them the blueprints—the formulas—everything—to spread in every tabloid.

ADRIENNE: Don’t forget the Sunday magazine sections. BRECKENRIDGE: Adrienne, my dear, surely you don’t disapprove?

ADRIENNE: What’s it to me?

SERGE: Ah, but it is so beautiful! It is an example for the whole world to follow. To me Mr. Breckenridge has spoken about this gift many weeks ago and I said: “Mr. Breckenridge, if you do this, I will be proud a human being to be!”

BRECKENRIDGE: [Turning to INGALLS] Steve?

INGALLS: What?

BRECKENRIDGE: What do you say?

INGALLS: I? Nothing.

BRECKENRIDGE: Of course, Steve doesn’t quite approve. Steve is rather . . . old-fashioned. He would have preferred to keep the whole thing secret in our own hands, and to make a tremendous fortune. Wouldn’t you, Steve?

INGALLS: [Lazily] Oh, yes. I like to make money. I think money is a wonderful thing. I don’t see what’s wrong with making a fortune—if you deserve it and people are willing to pay for what you offer them. Besides, I’ve never liked things that are given away. When you get something for nothing—you always find a string attached somewhere. Like the fish when it swallows the worm. But then, I’ve never had any noble feelings.

SERGE: Mr. Ingalls, that is contemptible!

INGALLS: Cut it, Serge. You bore me.

BRECKENRIDGE: But, Steve, I want you to understand why—

INGALLS: Don’t waste your time, Walter. I’ve never understood the noble, the selfless, or any of those things. Besides, it’s not my fortune you’re giving away. It’s yours. I’m only a junior partner. All I lose is two bits to your dollar. So I’m not going to argue about it.

BRECKENRIDGE: I’m glad, Steve. I made this decision after a great deal of time and meditation.

INGALLS: You did? [Rises] You know, Walter, I think decisions are made quickly. And the more important the step—the quicker. [Walks to stairs]

SERGE: [With a little touch of triumph] I begged Mr. Breckenridge to do this.

INGALLS: [Stops on the stairs on his way up, looks at him. Then:] I know you did. [Exits up the stairs]

HELEN: [Rising] It seems so foolish to ask this—when I’m hostess—but what time is dinner ordered for, Walter?

BRECKENRIDGE: Seven o’clock.

HELEN: Would you mind if I took a look at what my house is like?

BRECKENRIDGE: But of course! How thoughtless of me! Holding you here—when you must be dying of curiosity.

HELEN: [To the others] Shall we make an inspection tour together? The hostess needs someone to guide her.

TONY: I’ll show you. I’ve been all through the house. The laundry in the basement is wonderful.

HELEN: Shall we start with Billy’s room?

BILLY: Yes, please, Mother. I want to go back to my room.

[As FLEMING and FLASH are wheeling BILLY out, Right, BRECKENRIDGE is about to follow]

ADRIENNE: Walter. I’d like to speak to you. [BRECKENRIDGE stops, frowning] For just a few minutes. BRECKENRIDGE: Yes, of course, my dear.

[HELEN and TONY exit after BILLY, FLEMING, and FLASH. SERGE remains]

ADRIENNE: Serge, when you hear someone say to someone else: “I’d like to speak to you”—it usually means “alone.”

SERGE: Ah, but of course! I am so sorry, Miss Knowland! [Bows and exits Right]

BRECKENRIDGE: [Sitting down and indicating a chair] Yes, my dear?

ADRIENNE: [She remains standing, looking at him. After a moment, she says in a flat, hard, expressionless voice:] Walter, I want you to release me from my contract.

BRECKENRIDGE: [Leans back. Then:] You’re not serious, my dear.

ADRIENNE: Walter, please. Please don’t make me say too much. I can’t tell you how serious I am.

BRECKENRIDGE: But I thought it was understood, a year ago, that we would not discuss that subject again.

ADRIENNE: And I’ve stuck it out, haven’t I? For another whole year. I’ve tried. Walter. I can’t go on.

BRECKENRIDGE: You are not happy?

ADRIENNE: Don’t make me say anything else.

BRECKENRIDGE: But I don’t understand. I—

ADRIENNE: Walter. I’m trying so hard not to have another scene like last year. Don’t ask me any questions. Just say that you will release me.

BRECKENRIDGE: [After a pause] If I released you, what would you do?

ADRIENNE: That play I showed you last year.

BRECKENRIDGE: For a commercial producer?

ADRIENNE: Yes.

BRECKENRIDGE: For a cheap, vulgar, commercial Broadway producer?

ADRIENNE: For the cheapest and most vulgar one I could find.

BRECKENRIDGE: Let’s see. If I remember correctly, your part would be that of a very objectionable young woman who wants to get rich, who drinks and swears and—

ADRIENNE: [Coming to life] And how she swears! And she sleeps with men! And she’s ambitious! And she’s selfish! And she laughs! And she’s not sweet—Oh, Walter! She’s not sweet at all!

BRECKENRIDGE: You’re overestimating yourself, my dear. You can’t play a part like that.

ADRIENNE: Maybe not. I’ll try.

BRECKENRIDGE: You want a disastrous flop?

ADRIENNE: Perhaps. I’ll take the chance.

BRECKENRIDGE: You want to be panned?

ADRIENNE: Perhaps. If I have to be.

BRECKENRIDGE: And your audience? What about your audience? [She doesn’t answer] What about the people who love you and respect you for what you represent to them?

ADRIENNE: [Her voice flat and dead again] Walter, skip that. Skip that.

BRECKENRIDGE: But you seem to have forgotten. The Breckenridge Theater is not a mere place of amusement. It was not created just to satisfy your exhibitionism or my vanity. It has a social mission. It brings cheer to those who need it most. It gives them what they like. They need you. They get a great deal from you. You have a duty and a standing above those of a mere actress. Isn’t that precious to you?

ADRIENNE: Oh, Goddamn you! [He stares at her] All right! You asked for it! I hate it! Do you hear me? I hate it! All of it! Your noble theater and your noble plays and all the cheap, trite, trashy, simpering bromides that are so sweet! So sweet! God, so sweet I can hear them grating on my teeth every evening! I’m going to scream in the middle of one of those noble speeches, some night, and bring the curtain down! I can’t go on with it, Goddamn you and your audience! I can’t! Do you understand me? I can’t!

BRECKENRIDGE: Adrienne, my child, I cannot let you ruin yourself.

ADRIENNE: Listen, Walter, please listen. . . . I’ll try to explain it. I’m not ungrateful. I want the audience to like me. But that’s not enough. Just to do what they want me to do, just because they like it—it’s not enough. I’ve got to like it, too. I’ve got to believe in what I’m doing. I’ve got to be proud of it. You can’t do any kind of work without that. That comes first. Then you take a chance—and hope that others will like it.

BRECKENRIDGE: Isn’t that rather selfish?

ADRIENNE: [Simply] I guess it is. I guess I’m selfish. It’s selfish to breathe, also—isn’t it? You don’t breathe for anyone but yourself. . . . All I want is a chance—for myself—to do something strong, living, intelligent, difficult—just once.

BRECKENRIDGE: [Sadly] I believed in you, Adrienne. I did my best for you.

ADRIENNE: I know. And I hate to hurt you. That’s why I’ve stood it for such a long time. But, Walter, the contract—it’s for five more years. I couldn’t take five years. I couldn’t even take it for five days this coming season. I’ve reached my last minute—it’s very terrible, when a person is driven to his last minute, and very ugly. You must let me go.

BRECKENRIDGE: Who’s been talking to you? Steve’s influence?

ADRIENNE: Steve? You know what I think of Steve. When would I talk to him? When do I ever see him?

BRECKENRIDGE: [Shrugging] It just sounds like him.

ADRIENNE: Do you know what made me speak to you today? That stupendous thing you announced. I thought . . . you’re doing so much for humanity, and yet . . . why is it that the people who worry most about mankind have the least concern for any actual human being?

BRECKENRIDGE: My dear, try to understand. I’m acting for your own good. I can’t let you ruin your career.

ADRIENNE: Let me go, Walter. Give me my freedom.

BRECKENRIDGE: Freedom—for what? Freedom to hurt yourself.

ADRIENNE: Yes!—if necessary. To make mistakes. To fail. To be alone. To be rotten. To be selfish. But to be free.

BRECKENRIDGE: [Rising] No, Adrienne.

ADRIENNE: [In a dead, flat voice] Walter . . . do you remember . . . last summer . . . when I ran my car into a tree? . . . Walter, it was not an accident. . . .

BRECKENRIDGE: [Severely] I refuse to understand what you mean. You’re being indecent.

ADRIENNE: [Screams] Goddamn you! Goddamn you, you rotten, holy, saintly bastard!

INGALLS: [Appearing at the top of the stairs] You’ll ruin your voice, Adrienne—and you won’t be able to do Little Women again.

[ADRIENNE whirls around and stops short]

BRECKENRIDGE: [As INGALLS comes down the stairs] I believe this is the kind of performance you’ll enjoy, Steve. So I’ll leave Adrienne to you. You’ll find you have a great deal in common. [Exits Right]

INGALLS: The acoustics in this room are great, Adrienne. Does wonders for your diaphragm—and your vocabulary.

ADRIENNE: [Stands looking at him with hatred] Listen, you. I have something to tell you. Now. I don’t care. If you want to make wisecracks, I’ll give you something real to wisecrack about.

INGALLS: Go ahead.

ADRIENNE: I know what you think of me—and you’re right. I’m just a lousy ham who’s done nothing but trash all her life. I’m no better than a slut—not because I haven’t any talent, but worse: because I have and sold it. Not even for money, but for someone’s stupid, drooling kindness—and I’m more contemptible than an honest whore!

INGALLS: That’s a pretty accurate description.

ADRIENNE: Well, that’s what I am. I know also what you are. You’re a hard, cold, ruthless egoist. You’re just a laboratory machine—all chromium and stainless steel. You’re as efficient and bright and vicious as a car going ninety miles an hour. Only the car would bump if it ran over someone’s body. You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t even know it. You’re going ninety miles every one of the twenty-four hours—through a desert island, as far as you’re concerned. A desert island full of charts, blueprints, coils, tubes, and batteries. You’ve never known a human emotion. You’re worse than any of us. I think you’re the rottenest person I’ve ever met. I’m inexcusably, contemptibly, completely in love with you and have been for years. [She stops. He stands motionless, looking at her silently. She snaps:] Well? [He does not move] You’re not going to pass up a chance like this for one of your brilliant wisecracks? [He does not move] Shouldn’t you answer—something?

INGALLS: [His voice is very soft and very earnest. It is the first sound of simple sincerity to be heard from him:] Adrienne . . . [She looks at him, astonished] I am thinking that I haven’t heard it. I can’t answer. Had you said it to me yesterday—or the day after tomorrow—I’d answer. Today, I can’t.

ADRIENNE: Why?

INGALLS: You know, sound vibrations never die in space. Let’s think that what you said hasn’t reached me yet. It will reach me day after tomorrow. Then—if I’m still able to hear it and if you still want me to hear it—I’ll give you my answer.

ADRIENNE: Steve . . . what’s the matter?

INGALLS: Day after tomorrow, Adrienne. Perhaps sooner. But if not then—then never.

ADRIENNE: Steve, I don’t understa—

INGALLS: [Picking up a magazine from the table, in his normal, conversational tone] Have you seen this week’s World? There’s a very interesting article on the progressive income tax. It demonstrates how the tax works for the protection of mediocrity. . . . The problem of taxation, of course, is extremely complex.

ADRIENNE: [She is turned away from him, her shoulders sagging a little, but she does her best to follow his lead and speaks obediently, in as good an imitation of a conversational tone as she can manage—but her voice sounds very tired] Yes. I’ve never been able to figure out an income tax blank or an insurance policy.

[HELEN, BRECKENRIDGE, SERGE, and TONY enter, coming down the stairs]

INGALLS: Well? What do you think of the house, Helen? HELEN: [Without enthusiasm] It’s lovely. BRECKENRIDGE: [Proudly] She couldn’t think of one thing that I hadn’t thought of already.

INGALLS: As usual.

BRECKENRIDGE: Oh say, I mustn’t forget. I’ll tell you all while Billy isn’t here; it’s a little surprise for him. Tonight, at ten o’clock, when it gets dark, I shall give you a demonstration of my invention. Its first public demonstration. We’ll start celebrating the Fourth of July tonight, a little in advance. We’ll have fireworks—I’ve had them lined up—[Points]—over there, on the other side of the lake. I’ll set them off—from the garden—without touching them, without wires, by remote control—by mere electrical impulses through the air.

TONY: Could I see the machine?

BRECKENRIDGE: No, Tony. Nobody can see the machine till tomorrow. Don’t try to find it. You won’t. But you will all be the first witnesses of its action. [Shrugs gaily] Think of it! If someday they make a movie of my life, you will all be impersonated in that scene.

SERGE: They always make the lives of the great men in the cinema.

INGALLS: All that Walter needs now to be a great man is to get assassinated.

HELEN: Steve!

INGALLS: Well, he came pretty close to it once—so I guess that’ll have to do.

HELEN: He . . . did what?

INGALLS: Didn’t you know that Walter almost got bumped off—about a month ago?

HELEN: [Aghast] No! . . .

INGALLS: Oh, yes. Someone’s tried to get him. Under very mysterious circumstances, too.

BRECKENRIDGE: Just an accident, probably. Why talk about it?

HELEN: Please tell me, Steve.

INGALLS: There isn’t really much to tell. Walter and Serge drove down to Stamford, one evening, and stopped at the laboratory, and dragged me down here to see the house—the “Dawsons’ ” house—it was just being finished then. Well, the three of us got separated, looking around, and then I heard a shot—and I saw Walter picking up his hat, with a hole through it. It was a new hat, too.

HELEN: Oh! . . .

INGALLS: Well, we called the police, and all the building workers were searched, but we never found the man who did it or the gun.

HELEN: But it’s fantastic! Walter doesn’t have an enemy in the world!

INGALLS: I guess you never can tell.

[FLEMING enters, Right, goes to sideboard, pours himself a drink, and stands drinking, ignoring the others]

HELEN: And then?

INGALLS: That’s all. . . . Oh, yes, there was another funny thing. I had a bag in the car—just a small bag with some old junk in it. When we got back to the car, we found the lock of that bag broken open. There was nothing inside that anyone would want, and whoever did it hadn’t even looked inside, because the things were just as I’d left them, but the lock was broken. We never figured that out, either.

HELEN: Walter! . . . Why didn’t you tell me about this?

BRECKENRIDGE: That is precisely why, dear—so that you wouldn’t be upset, as you are now. Besides, it was nothing. An accident or a crank. I told Curtiss about it—told him not to admit any strangers to the house—but nobody came and nothing happened.

INGALLS: I told Walter that he should carry a gun—just in case—but he wouldn’t do it.

HELEN: But you should, Walter!

BRECKENRIDGE: I do. I got one.

INGALLS: I don’t believe it. You know, Walter is afraid of guns.

BRECKENRIDGE: Nonsense.

INGALLS: You said so yourself.

BRECKENRIDGE: [Indicating cabinet] Look in that drawer.

[INGALLS opens the drawer and takes out the gun]

INGALLS: You’re right—for once. [Examining the gun] Nice little job. That will take care of any—emergency.

HELEN: Oh, put it away! I don’t like them myself.

[INGALLS replaces the gun in the drawer and closes it]

TONY: It doesn’t make sense. A man like Mr. Breckenridge—why would anyone—

BRECKENRIDGE: Of course it doesn’t make sense. And I don’t see why Steve had to bring that up—today of all days. . . . Well, shall we go on to look at the grounds? Wait till you see the grounds, Helen!

HELEN: [Rising] Yes, of course.

[FLEMING swallows another drink and exits Right]

BRECKENRIDGE: Adrienne, my dear—coming?

ADRIENNE: [In a flat voice] Yes.

BRECKENRIDGE: No hard feelings, of course?

ADRIENNE: No.

BRECKENRIDGE: I knew you’d be all right. I wasn’t angry. An actress’ temper is like a summer storm.

ADRIENNE: Yes.

[She walks out through the French doors, followed by BRECKENRIDGE, SERGE, and TONY]

HELEN: [Stops at the French doors, turns] Coming, Steve?

[He does not answer and stands looking at her. Then:]

INGALLS: Helen . . .

HELEN: Yes?

INGALLS: You are not happy, are you?

HELEN: [With amused reproach] Steve! That’s one of those questions that should never be answered—one way or the other.

INGALLS: I’m asking it only . . . in self-defense.

HELEN: In . . . your own defense?

INGALLS: Yes.

HELEN: [Decisively] Don’t you think we’d better join the others?

INGALLS: No. [She does not move. She stands looking at him. After a moment, he adds:] You know what I’m going to say.

HELEN: No. I don’t know . . . I don’t know. . . . [Involuntarily ] I don’t want to know . . .!

INGALLS: I love you, Helen.

HELEN: [Trying to be amused] Really, Steve, we’re about ten years too late, aren’t we? I’m sure I am. I thought things like that weren’t being said anymore. At least . . . not to me. . . .

BRECKENRIDGE’S VOICE: [Calling from garden] Helen! . . .

INGALLS: I have wanted to say it for more than ten years.

HELEN: It’s too . . . foolish . . . and conventional, isn’t it? My husband’s partner . . . and . . . and I’m the perfect wife who’s always had everything . . . INGALLS: Have you?

HELEN: . . . and you’ve never seemed to notice that I existed. . . .

INGALLS: Even if I know it’s hopeless—

HELEN: Of course it’s hopeless. . . . It . . . it should be hopeless. . . . [There is the sound of voices approaching from the garden. INGALLS moves suddenly to take her in his arms] Steve! . . . Steve, they’re coming back! They’re—

[The voices are closer. He stops her words with a violent kiss. Her first movement is to struggle against him, then her body relaxes in surrender, her arms rise to embrace him—very eagerly—just as ADRIENNE, BRECKENRIDGE , SERGE, and TONY enter from the garden. HELEN and INGALLS step apart, she shocked, he perfectly calm. INGALLS is first to break the silence]

INGALLS: I’ve always wanted to know what one really did at such a moment.

SERGE: [Choking with indignation] This . . . this . . . it is monstrous! . . . It is unspeakable! . . . It is—

BRECKENRIDGE: [With great poise] Now, Serge. No hysterics please. From anyone. Let us act grown-up. [To HELEN, gently] I’m sorry, Helen. I know this is harder for you than for any of us. I shall try to make it easier, if I can. [Notices ADRIENNE, who looks more stunned and crushed than all the others] What’s the matter, Adrienne?

ADRIENNE: [Barely able to answer] Nothing . . . nothing. . . .

BRECKENRIDGE: Steve, I should like to speak to you alone.

INGALLS: I have wanted to speak to you alone, Walter, for a long time.

CURTAIN

SCENE 2

That evening. The room is in semidarkness, with just one lamp burning on a table.

At curtain rise, BRECKENRIDGE is sitting in an armchair, a little slumped, looking tired and dejected. SERGE sits on a low hassock—at a little distance, but almost as if he were sitting at BRECKENRIDGE’s feet.

SERGE: It is terrible. It is too terrible and I am sick. I cannot help that it should make me sick.

BRECKENRIDGE: You’re young, Serge. . . .

SERGE: Is it only the young who have the feeling of decency?

BRECKENRIDGE: It is only the young who condemn. . . .

SERGE: At the dinner . . . you were . . . as if nothing had happened. . . . You were magnificent.

BRECKENRIDGE: There’s Billy to think about.

SERGE: And now? What is to happen now?

BRECKENRIDGE: Nothing.

SERGE: Nothing?

BRECKENRIDGE: Serge, my position does not allow me to make this public. People believe in me. I cannot have scandal attached to my name. Besides, think what it would do to Helen. Do you suppose I’d do that to her?

SERGE: Mrs. Breckenridge she did not think of you.

BRECKENRIDGE: [Slowly] There’s something about it that I can’t understand. It’s unlike Helen. But it’s much more unlike Steve.

SERGE: Mr. Ingalls? Of him I expect anything. BRECKENRIDGE: That’s not what I mean, Serge. It wouldn’t surprise me that Steve should be unscrupulous. But that he should be stupid!

SERGE: Stupid?

BRECKENRIDGE: If Steve had wanted to carry on a secret love affair with Helen, he could have done so for years and years, and none of us would ever guess—if he didn’t want us to guess. He’s clever. He’s too terribly clever. But to start . . . to start an embrace in broad daylight—when he knew we’d be back for her any moment—a fool wouldn’t do that. That’s what I can’t understand.

SERGE: What did he say when you spoke to him?

BRECKENRIDGE: [Evasively] We spoke of . . . many things.

SERGE: I cannot understand that this to you should happen! The gratitude it does not exist in the world.

BRECKENRIDGE: Ah, Serge. We must never think of gratitude. We must do what we think is good for our fellow men—and let kindness be its own reward. [FLASH enters Right, wheeling BILLY in, followed by FLEMING and HELEN. BRECKENRIDGE rises]

BILLY: You wanted me here, Father?

BRECKENRIDGE: Yes, Billy. Not too tired?

BILLY: No.

BRECKENRIDGE: [To HELEN, indicating his chair] Sit down, my dear. This is the most comfortable chair in the room. [HELEN obeys silently. INGALLS enters from the garden and remains standing at the French doors] But why are we sitting in the dark like this? [Turns more lights on] Your dress is so light, Helen. It’s rather chilly tonight for this time of the year. Are you sure you’re not too cold?

HELEN: No.

BRECKENRIDGE: [Offering her a cigarette box] Cigarette, my dear?

HELEN: No, thank you.

INGALLS: [Without moving] You’re exceptionally rotten tonight, Walter. Worse than usual.

BRECKENRIDGE: I beg your pardon? [ADRIENNE enters, coming down the stairs, but stops and stands watching those below]

INGALLS: You know what I’d do if I were you? I’d yell at Helen at the slightest provocation or without any. I’d swear at her. I think I’d slap her. BRECKENRIDGE: You would.

INGALLS: And do you know what the result would be? It would make things easier for her.

HELEN: Please, Steve.

INGALLS: I’m sorry, Helen . . . I’m terribly sorry.

[Silence. ADRIENNE comes down the stairs. At the bottom, she stops: she sees INGALLS looking at her. For a moment they stand face to face, holding the glance. Then she turns sharply and goes to sit down alone in a corner of the room]

FLASH: [Looking helplessly at everybody] What the hell is going on in this house?

BRECKENRIDGE: Flash. You are not to swear in Billy’s presence.

FLASH: Gee, I beg your pardon. But I feel something. You may not know it, but I’m sensitive.

SERGE: By us in Moscow, things like this would not happen.

INGALLS: [Casually] Say, Serge, I heard something interesting today about some compatriots of yours. About the Soviet Culture and Friendship Society.

SERGE: [Looks at him for a distinct moment, then:] So? What did you hear?

INGALLS: That the FBI has caught up with them. Seems they’re just a front for Soviet espionage in this country. One of the biggest fronts. Heard the FBI has cracked down on them and seized their files.

SERGE: When? That is not true!

INGALLS: Today.

SERGE: I do not believe it!

INGALLS: It ought to be in the papers—by now. I got a tip from my old friend Joe Cheeseman of the New York Courier—the Courier was first to get the story—he said it would be on their front page this afternoon.

BRECKENRIDGE: Never knew you had friends among the press.

SERGE: Do you have the today’s Courier?

INGALLS: No.

SERGE: [To the others] Has anybody the—

INGALLS: Why are you so interested, Serge? What do you know about the Soviet Culture and Friendship Society?

SERGE: What do I know! A great deal I know! I know for long time they are the Soviet spies. I knew Makarov, their president, in Moscow. He was one of the worst. When I escaped during the World War Number Two . . . That is why I escaped—because the men like him they betrayed the people. They had the noble ideals, but the so cruel methods! They did not believe in God. They lost the spirit of our Holy Mother Russia. They lost our beautiful dream of the brotherhood and the equal sharing and the—

BRECKENRIDGE: Don’t talk about it, Serge.

SERGE: All the time I am in this country, I wanted to tell the police what I know about Makarov and the Soviet Culture and Friendship Society. But I could not speak. If I open my mouth . . . [Shudders] You see, my family—they are still in Russia. My mother . . . and my sister.

FLASH: Gee, Mr. Sookin! That’s awful.

SERGE: But if the Soviet Culture and Friendship it got caught now—I’m glad. I’m so glad! . . . Has anyone the today’s Courier here? [All the others answer “No” or shake their heads] But I must see it! Where can I get the New York newspapers?

BRECKENRIDGE: Nowhere around here—at this hour. INGALLS: In Stamford, Serge.

SERGE: Ah, yes? Then I will go to Stamford.

BRECKENRIDGE: Oh, but Serge! It’s a long drive—three quarters of an hour at the least, there and back.

SERGE: But I so much want to read it tonight.

BRECKENRIDGE: You will miss the . . . the surprise.

SERGE: But you will excuse me, Mr. Breckenridge, no? I will try most quick as I can to be back. Would you permit that I take the car?

BRECKENRIDGE: Certainly, if you insist.

SERGE: [To INGALLS] Where do I find the nearest place with the newspapers?

INGALLS: Just follow the road straight to Stamford. The first drugstore you come to—a little place called Law-ton’s, on the corner, near the Breckenridge Laboratories. They have all the papers. Let’s see . . . [Looks at his watch] They get the last city editions at ten o’clock. In fifteen minutes. They’ll have them by the time you get there. Joe Cheeseman said it would be in today’s last edition.

SERGE: Thank you so much. [To BRECKENRIDGE] You will please excuse me?

BRECKENRIDGE: Sure. [SERGE exits Left]

FLASH: [As no one seems inclined to talk] And another thing that bothers me is why nobody ate any dinner tonight. The lobster was wonderful. [There is the distant sound of a small explosion, and far away, beyond the lake, a rocket rises, bursts in the air and vanishes]

BRECKENRIDGE: Our neighbors across the lake are celebrating early.

BILLY: I want to see it.

BRECKENRIDGE: You’ll see something much bigger than this—in a little while.

[FLASH turns the wheelchair toward the French doors. Another rocket goes off in the distance. TONY enters, Left]

TONY: Say, where’s Serge going in such a hurry? Just saw him driving off.

BRECKENRIDGE: To Stamford. To get a newspaper.

INGALLS: You haven’t got today’s Courier by any chance, have you, Tony?

TONY: The Courier? No. [Hesitates, then:] Mr. Breckenridge, could I speak to you? For just a moment. I’ve tried all day—

BRECKENRIDGE: Well, what is it, Tony? What is it?

TONY: It’s . . . about Billy. I didn’t want to—[Looks at BILLY]

FLEMING: About Billy? What?

BRECKENRIDGE: Surely it can’t be a secret. Go ahead.

TONY: If you wish. I saw Professor Doyle this morning.

BRECKENRIDGE: Oh, that? You’re not going to begin again to—

FLEMING: Doyle? That’s the doctor who’s taking care of Billy?

TONY: Yes. He’s my teacher at college.

FLEMING: What did he say?

BRECKENRIDGE: Really, Tony, I thought we had settled—

FLEMING: What did he say?

TONY: [To BRECKENRIDGE] He said that I must speak to you and beg you on my knees if I have to. He said that if you don’t send Billy to Montreal this summer and let Dr. Harlan perform that operation—Billy will never walk again. [FLEMING makes a step forward slowly, ominously]

BRECKENRIDGE: Just a minute, Harvey.

FLEMING: [In a strange, hoarse voice] Why didn’t you tell me about this?

BRECKENRIDGE: Because I didn’t have to.

TONY: Mr. Fleming, it’s Billy’s last chance. He’s almost fifteen now. If we wait longer, the muscles will become atrophied and it will be too late. Professor Doyle said—

BRECKENRIDGE: Did Professor Doyle say also that we’d risk Billy’s life in that operation?

TONY: Yes.

BRECKENRIDGE: That’s my answer.

HELEN: Walter, please. Please let’s reconsider. Professor Doyle said the risk wasn’t too great. It’s a small chance against . . . against the certainty of being a cripple for life!

BRECKENRIDGE: A small chance is too much—where Billy is concerned. I would rather have Billy as he is than take the risk of losing him.

FLEMING: [Screams ferociously] That’s going too far, you lousy bastard! You won’t get away with this! Goddamn you, not with this! I demand, do you hear me?—I demand that you let them do the operation!

BRECKENRIDGE: You demand? By what right? [FLEMING stands looking at him, helplessness coming almost visibly to his gaunt, slumping figure]

INGALLS: [His voice hard] Do you mind if I don’t witness this? [Turns and exits through the French doors] BRECKENRIDGE: I must warn you, Harvey. If we have any more . . . incidents such as this, I shall be forced to forbid you to visit Billy.

HELEN: Oh, no, Walter!

FLEMING: You . . . wouldn’t do that, Walter? You . . . you can’t.

BRECKENRIDGE: You know very well that I can.

BILLY: [It is the first time that his voice is alive—and desperate ] Father! You won’t do that! [As BRECKENRIDGE turns to him] Please, Father. I don’t mind anything else. I don’t have to have the operation. Only you won’t . . . Mr. Fleming, it’s all right about the operation. I don’t mind.

BRECKENRIDGE: Of course, Billy. And I’m sorry that Harvey upsets you so much. You understand. Anything I do is only for your own good. I wouldn’t take a chance on your life with some unproved new method. [As HELEN is about to speak] And so, Helen, we shall consider the matter closed.

[FLEMING turns abruptly. On his way to the stairs, he seizes a bottle from the sideboard and exits up the stairs]

FLASH: Well, I think this is one hell of a birthday party!

BRECKENRIDGE: We mustn’t mind poor Harvey. He is an unfortunate case. [Looks at his watch] And now we’ll turn to a much more cheerful subject. [Rises] Billy, my dear, just watch the lake. You’ll see some-thing interesting in a few minutes. [To the others] Now, please, I don’t want anyone to follow me. I don’t want anyone to see how it’s done. Not till tomor-row. You’ll get the best view from here. [Turns at the French doors] Who knows? Perhaps what you are about to see will be of great importance to all mankind. [Exits through French doors and walks off Right into the garden]

HELEN: [Rises suddenly as if with a decision taken, starts toward the stairs, then stops and says to the others, vaguely, as an afterthought:] You will excuse me, please? . . . [Exits up the stairs]

TONY: I’m sorry, Bill. I’ve tried.

BILLY: It’s all right. . . .When you’ll be a doctor on your own, Tony, I’ll still be . . . like this. And then I’d like you to be my doctor.

TONY: [With an oddly stressed bitterness] When I’ll be . . . a doctor. . . .

BILLY: Everybody says you’ll be a good one. Father says very nice things about you. About your hands, too. He says you have the hands of a great surgeon.

TONY: [Looks at his hands] Yes . . . he does . . . doesn’t he? [Turns abruptly to go]

FLASH: Say, don’t you want to see the fireworks?

TONY: Oh, take your fireworks and shove—[Exits Right]

FLASH: [Looking after him with open mouth] Well, I think he meant . . .

ADRIENNE: Yes, Flash. He meant exactly what you think.

[From offstage Right there comes the sound of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G Minor played on the piano]

BILLY: Don’t go, Miss Knowland. Everybody’s going.

ADRIENNE: I’ll stay, Bill. Let’s open the doors and turn out the light, we’ll see better. [She turns the light off, while FLASH throws the French doors open]

BILLY: Why does Tony always play such sad things?

ADRIENNE: Because he’s very unhappy, Bill.

FLASH: You know, I can’t figure it out. Nobody’s happy in this house.

BILLY: Father is happy. [A magnificent rocket rises over the lake, much closer than the ones we’ve seen, and bursts into showers of stars]

FLASH: There it goes!

BILLY: Oh! . . . [The rockets continue at slow intervals]

FLASH: [Excitedly, between the sounds of the explosions] You see, Billy . . . you see . . . that’s your father’s new invention! . . . It works! . . . Those rockets are set off without any wires . . . without touching them . . . just like that, through space. . . . Imagine? Just some sort of tiny little rays blasting those things to pieces!

ADRIENNE: Lovely precision . . . right on target. . . . What if one chose a larger . . . [Then, suddenly, she gasps; it is almost a stifled scream]

FLASH: What’s the matter?

ADRIENNE: [In a strange voice] I . . . just thought of something. . . . [She is suddenly panicky, as she makes a movement to rush out, stops helplessly before the vast darkness of the garden, whirls around to ask:] Where’s Walter? Where did he go?

FLASH: I don’t know. We’re not supposed to follow him.

ADRIENNE: Where’s Steve?

FLASH: Don’t know. I think he went out.

ADRIENNE: [Screaming into the garden] Steve! . . . Steve! . . .

FLASH: He won’t hear you. This place is so big, there’s miles and miles to the grounds, you can’t find anybody out there at night.

ADRIENNE: I’ve got to—

BILLY: Look, Miss Knowland! Look!

[The fireworks are now forming letters, high over the lake, taking shape gradually, one tiny dot of light after another. The letters spell out: “GOD BLESS . . .”]

ADRIENNE: I’ve got to find Walter!

FLASH: Miss Knowland! Don’t! Mr. Breckenridge will be angry!

[ADRIENNE rushes out and disappears Left into the garden. The fireworks continue to spell: “GOD BLESS AMER . . .” Then, suddenly, the last dot of light flashes on with a jerk, spreads out, the letters tremble, smear, and vanish altogether. There is nothing but darkness and silence]

Well! . . . what’s the matter? . . . What happened? . . . [They wait. Nothing happens] Well, I guess maybe the invention’s not right yet. Something’s gone screwy there. Maybe the great discovery’s not so perfect. . . .

BILLY: It will start again in a minute.

FLASH: Maybe the old-fashioned way is best. [They wait. Nothing happens] Say, Bill. What’s the matter with everybody in this house?

BILLY: Nothing.

FLASH: I can’t figure it out. You’re the nicest people I ever lived with. But there’s something wrong. Very wrong.

BILLY: Skip it, Flash.

FLASH: Now take you, for instance. That operation. You wanted it pretty badly?

BILLY: I guess maybe I did. . . . I don’t know . . . I don’t know how it really feels to want things. I’ve been trying to learn not to.

FLASH: Bill, what do you want most in the world?

BILLY: I? . . . [Thinks for a moment, then:] I guess . . . I guess to get a glass of water.

FLASH: What? Want me to get you a drink?

BILLY: No. You don’t understand. To get a glass of water—myself. [FLASH stares at him] You see what I mean? To get thirsty and not to have to tell anybody about it, but to walk down to the kitchen, and turn the faucet, and fill a glass, and drink it. Not to need anybody, not to thank anybody, not to ask for it. To get it. Flash. You don’t know how important it is—not to need anybody.

FLASH: But people want to help you.

BILLY: Flash, when it’s—everything, all the time, everything I do . . . I can’t be thirsty—alone, without telling somebody. I can’t be hungry—alone. I’m not a person. I’m only something being helped. . . . If I could stand up just once—stand up on my own feet and tell them all to go to hell! Oh, Flash, I wouldn’t tell them to! But just to know that I could! Just once!

FLASH: Well, what for, if you wouldn’t? You don’t make sense. People are very kind to you and—[There is the sound of a distant explosion in the garden] There! There it goes again! [Looks out. There is nothing but darkness] No. Guess it was a dud.

BILLY: They’re kind to me. It’s such a horrible thing—that sort of kindness. Sometimes I want to be nasty just to have somebody snap at me. But they won’t. They don’t respect me enough to get angry. I’m not important enough to resent. I’m only something to be kind to.

FLASH: Listen, how about that glass of water? Do you want me to get it or don’t you?

BILLY: [His head dropping, his voice dull] Yes. Get me a glass of water.

FLASH: Look, water’s not good for you. How about my fixing you some nice hot chocolate and a little toast?

BILLY: Yes.

FLASH: That’s what I said: nobody ate anything tonight. All that grand dinner going to waste. It’s a crazy house. [Turns at the door] Want the light on?

BILLY: No. [FLASH exits Right. BILLY sits alone for a moment, without moving, his head down. INGALLS enters from the garden]

INGALLS: Hello, Bill. What are you doing here alone in the dark? [Switches the light on] The fireworks over?

BILLY: Something went wrong. They stopped.

INGALLS: Oh? Where’s Walter?

BILLY: Fixing it, I guess. He hasn’t come back. [As INGALLS turns to the stairs] Steve.

INGALLS: Yes?

BILLY: Steve, do you know why I like you? . . . Because you’ve never been kind to me.

INGALLS: But I want to be kind to you, kid.

BILLY: That’s not what I mean. You couldn’t be what . . . what I’m talking about. I mean, people who use kindness like some sort of weapon. . . . Steve! It’s a horrible weapon. I think it’s worse than poison gas. It gets in deeper, it hurts more, and there’s no gas mask to wear against it. Because people would say you’re wicked to want such a mask.

INGALLS: Bill. Listen to me. It doesn’t matter. Even your legs and the wheelchair—it doesn’t matter, so long as you don’t let anyone into your mind. Keep your mind, Bill—keep it free and keep it your own. Don’t let anyone help you—inside. Don’t let anyone tell you what you must think. Don’t let anyone tell you what you must feel. Don’t ever let them put your soul in a wheelchair. Then you’ll be all right, no matter what they do.

BILLY: You understand. Steve, you’re the only one who understands. [FLASH enters Right]

FLASH: Come on, Bill. The grub’s ready. Do you want it here?

BILLY: I’m not hungry. Take me to my room, please. I’m tired.

FLASH: Aw, hell! After I went to all the bother—

BILLY: Please, Flash. [FLASH starts wheeling the chair out] Good night, Steve.

INGALLS: Good night, kid. [FLASH and BILLY exit, and we hear TONY’s voice in the next room]

TONY’S VOICE: Going, Billy? Good night.

BILLY’S VOICE: Good night. [TONY enters Right]

TONY: What about the great fireworks? All over?

INGALLS: I guess so. Billy said something went wrong.

TONY: You didn’t watch them?

INGALLS: No.

TONY: I didn’t either.

[HELEN appears at the top of the stairs. She has her hat and coat on, and carries a small suitcase. She stops short, seeing the two men below, then comes resolutely down the stairs]

INGALLS: Helen? Where are you going?

HELEN: Back to town.

TONY: Now?

HELEN: Yes.

INGALLS: But, Helen—

HELEN: Please don’t ask me any questions. I didn’t know that someone would still be here. I wanted to . . . I wanted not to have to talk to anyone.

INGALLS: But what’s happened?

HELEN: Later, Steve. Later. I’ll talk to you afterward. Tomorrow, in town, if you wish. I’ll explain. Please don’t—

[From a distance in the garden there comes ADRIENNE’s scream—a horrified scream. They whirl to the French doors]

INGALLS: Where’s Adrienne?

HELEN: I don’t know. She—

[INGALLS rushes out into the garden. TONY follows him. FLASH comes running in, Right]

FLASH: What was that?

HELEN: I . . . don’t . . . know. . . .

FLASH: Miss Knowland! It’s Miss Knowland! [CURTISS enters Right]

CURTISS: Madam! What happened!

[INGALLS, TONY, and ADRIENNE enter from the garden.

INGALLS is supporting ADRIENNE. She is trembling and out of breath]

INGALLS: All right. Take it easy. Now what is it?

ADRIENNE: It’s Walter . . . out there . . . in the garden. . . . He’s dead. [Silence, as they all look at her] It was dark . . . I couldn’t see. . . . He was lying on his face. . . . And then I ran. . . . I think he’s shot. . . . [HELEN gasps and sinks into a chair]

INGALLS: Did you touch anything?

ADRIENNE: No . . . no. . . .

INGALLS: Curtiss.

CURTISS: Yes, sir?

INGALLS: Go down there. Stand by. Don’t touch anything. And don’t let anyone near.

CURTISS: Yes, sir.

ADRIENNE: [Pointing] There . . . to the left . . . down the path. . . . [CURTISS exits into the garden]

INGALLS: Tony, take Helen to her room. Flash, go to Billy. Don’t tell him. Put him to bed.

FLASH: Y-yes, sir.

[Exits Right. TONY helps HELEN up the stairs and they exit, while INGALLS reaches for the telephone]

ADRIENNE: Steve! What are you doing?

INGALLS: [Into phone] Operator? . . .

ADRIENNE: Steve! Wait!

INGALLS: [Into phone] Give me District Attorney Hastings.

ADRIENNE: No! . . . Wait! . . . Steve, I—

INGALLS: [Into phone] Hello, Greg? Steve Ingalls speaking. From the house of Walter Breckenridge. Mr. Breckenridge has been—[ADRIENNE seizes his arm. He pushes her aside, not violently, but firmly]—murdered. . . . Yes. . . . Yes, I shall. . . . Yes, the new house. . . . [Hangs up]

ADRIENNE: Steve . . . you wouldn’t let me tell you . . .

INGALLS: Well? What is it?

ADRIENNE: [Pulls a man’s handkerchief from her pocket and hands it to him] This. [He looks at the initials on the handkerchief] It’s yours.

INGALLS: Yes.

ADRIENNE: It was caught on a branch—there—near the . . . body.

INGALLS: [Looks at the handkerchief, then at her] It’s good evidence, Adrienne. [Slips the handkerchief calmly into his pocket] It’s evidence that you still love me—in spite of everything—in spite of what happened this afternoon.

ADRIENNE: [Stiffening] Merely circumstantial evidence.

INGALLS: Oh, yes. But one can do a lot with circumstantial evidence.

CURTAIN

SCENE 1

Half an hour later. Before the curtain rises we hear the sound of Chopin’s “Butterfly Etude” played on the piano. It is played violently, exultantly—the gay notes dancing in laughter and release. The music continues as the curtain rises.

STEVE INGALLS is alone on stage. He is pacing the room impatiently; he glances at his wristwatch. Then there is the sound of a car driving up. He looks out. He walks to the entrance door Left and throws it open suddenly, at the right moment, before the bell is rung. SERGE stands outside.

SERGE: [As he enters, angrily] How thoughtful of you. [Pulls the Courier out of his pocket and throws it to him] There is nothing in the Courier about the Soviet Culture and Friendship Society. Or the FBI.

INGALLS: No?

SERGE: No! I make all the long trip for nothing.

INGALLS: [Glancing through the paper] Guess Joe Cheeseman gave me the wrong dope.

SERGE: And where is everybody? [INGALLS slips the paper into his pocket and doesn’t answer] Why is it in the house all the windows dark? [INGALLS stands watching him silently] What is the matter?

INGALLS: Serge.

SERGE: Yes?

INGALLS: Mr. Breckenridge has been murdered.

SERGE: [Stands stock-still for a long moment, then emits one short, sick gasp—like a moan. Then snaps hoarsely and crudely:] You are crazy! . . .

INGALLS: [Without moving] Mr. Breckenridge is lying dead in the garden.

SERGE: [Sinks down into a chair, his head in his hands, and moans] Boje moy! . . . Boje moy! . . .

INGALLS: Save it for the others, Serge. Save it for an audience.

SERGE: [Jerks his head up, his voice harsh and deadly] Who did it?

INGALLS: You. Or I. Or any of us.

SERGE: [Jumping up, ferociously] I?!

INGALLS: Pipe down, Serge. You see, it’s the one question that none of us must ask—under the circumstances. Leave that to Greg Hastings.

SERGE: Who?

INGALLS: Greg Hastings. The district attorney. He will be here any moment. I’m sure he’ll answer your question. He always does.

SERGE: I hope he’s good, I hope—

INGALLS: He’s very good. Not one unsolved murder in his whole career. You see, he doesn’t believe that there can be such a thing as a perfect crime.

SERGE: I hope he should find the monster, the fiend, the unspeakable—

INGALLS: Let me give you a tip, Serge. Cut down on that kind of stuff around Greg Hastings. I know him quite well. He won’t fall for the obvious. He’ll always look further than that. He’s clever. Too clever.

SERGE: [His voice rising angrily] But why do you say this to me? Why do you look at me? You do not think that I . . .

INGALLS: I haven’t even begun to think, Serge. [TONY enters Right]

TONY: [Gaily] The cops arrived? [Sees SERGE] Oh, it’s you, Serge, old boy, old pal.

SERGE: [Startled] I beg your pardon?

TONY: You look wonderful. The ride’s done you good. It’s wonderful to drive fast at night, against the wind, with nothing to stop you! To drive fast, so fast—and free!

SERGE: [Aghast] But what is this? [Whirls on INGALLS] Oh, I see! It was the joke. It was the horrible joke from you. . . . [To TONY] Mr. Breckenridge he is not dead?

TONY: [Lightly] Oh yes, Mr. Breckenridge is dead. Dead as a doornail. Dead as a tombstone. Good and dead.

SERGE: [To INGALLS] He has lost his mind!

INGALLS: Or just found it. [HELEN enters, coming down the stairs]

HELEN: Tony, why did you—

SERGE: Oh, Mrs. Breckenridge! Permit me to express the deepest sympathy at this terrible—

HELEN: Thank you, Serge. [Her manner is now simple, young, more natural than it has ever been] Why did you stop playing, Tony? It was so lovely. I’ve never heard you play like this before.

TONY: But you will hear me again. You will—for years—and years—and years—[INGALLS exits up the stairs] SERGE: Mrs. Breckenridge—

HELEN: I will give you a piano, Tony. Now. Tomorrow.

[There is the distant sound of a police siren approaching. SERGE looks up nervously. The others pay no attention]

TONY: You won’t give me a piano! Nobody’s going to give me anything ever again! I think I can get a job at Gimbel’s, and I will, and I’ll save three dollars a week, and in a year I’ll have a piano—a good, secondhand piano of my own! . . . But I like you, Helen. HELEN: Yes. Forgive me.

SERGE: Mrs. Breckenridge! . . . What has happened? HELEN: We don’t know, Serge.

TONY: What’s the difference?

SERGE: But who did it?

TONY: Who cares?

[Doorbell rings. TONY opens the door. GREGORY HASTINGS enters. He is a man in his early forties, tall, suave, distinguished, and self-possessed. He enters calmly, he speaks quietly, as naturally and undramatically as possible—without overdoing it. He enters, stops, looks at HELEN]

HASTINGS: Mrs. Breckenridge?

HELEN: Yes.

HASTINGS: [Bowing] Gregory Hastings.

HELEN: How do you do, Mr. Hastings.

HASTINGS: I am truly sorry, Mrs. Breckenridge, that I should have to be here tonight.

HELEN: We’ll be glad to help you in any way we can, Mr. Hastings. If you wish to question us—

HASTINGS: A little later. First, I shall have to see the scene of—

HELEN: [Pointing] In the garden. . . . Tony, will you show—

HASTINGS: It won’t be necessary. I’ll keep my men out of your way as much as possible. [Exits Left]

TONY: This is going to be interesting.

SERGE: But . . . you are inhuman!

TONY: Probably. [INGALLS enters, coming down the stairs] INGALLS: Was that Greg Hastings?

TONY: Yes. The police.

INGALLS: Where are they?

TONY: [Pointing to garden] Sniffing at footprints, I guess.

SERGE: There will not be any footprints. There will not be anything. It is going to be terrible.

INGALLS: How do you know there won’t be anything, Serge?

SERGE: There never is in a case like this.

INGALLS: You never can tell. [Pulls the Courier out of his pocket] Anyone here want the evening paper that Serge was nice enough to bring us?

TONY: [Taking the paper] Does the Courier have any comic strips? I love comic strips. [Turns the paper to the funny page] They don’t have “Little Orphan Annie,” though. That’s my favorite—“Little Orphan Annie.”

HELEN: [Looking over his shoulder] I like “Popeye the Sailor.”

TONY: Oh, no! Annie’s better. But Popeye has his points—particularly when they bring in Mr. Wimpy. Mr. Wimpy is good.

HELEN: Lord Plushbottom is good, too.

TONY: Lord Plushbottom is from another strip.

SERGE: That’s what I drive the three-quarters of an hour for!

HELEN: Oh, yes, Serge, wasn’t there some story you wanted to read?

SERGE: There was! But there isn’t! Not a word in the damn paper about the Soviet Culture and Friendship Society!

TONY: And not even “Little Orphan Annie” or “Popeye the Sailor.”

[FLEMING comes down the stairs. He is sober and walks calmly, steadily. There is an air about him as if he were holding his head up for the first time in his life. His clothes are still disreputable, but he is shaved and his tie is straight]

FLEMING: Steve, you won’t—by any chance—need a janitor down at the laboratory?

INGALLS: No. But we will need an engineer.

FLEMING: A has-been engineer?

INGALLS: No. A shall-be engineer.

FLEMING: [Looks at him, then in a low voice:] Steve, you’re—

INGALLS:—a cold-blooded egoist. I’ve never been called anything else. I wouldn’t know what to do if I were. Let it go at that.

FLEMING: [Nods slowly, solemnly. Then sits down and picks up part of the newspaper] The police are out there in the garden. Guess they’ll want us all here. INGALLS: Yes, it won’t be long now.

SERGE: [Walks to sideboard, pours himself a drink] Do you want a drink, Mr. Fleming?

FLEMING: [With slow emphasis] No, thank you.

SERGE: [Swallows a stiff drink in one gulp. Then:] The laboratory—who will run it now?

INGALLS: I will.

SERGE: And . . . what is to happen to the invention?

INGALLS: Ah, yes, the invention. Well, Serge, only two men knew the secret of that invention—Walter and I. Walter is dead.

SERGE: He wanted to give it to mankind.

INGALLS: He did. Now I’m going to sit and loaf and collect a fortune. It’s too bad about mankind.

SERGE: You have no respect for the wishes of a—

INGALLS: I have no respect for anything, Serge.

SERGE: [Cautiously] But if you should now carry out the wish of Mr. Breckenridge—then perhaps the police will not think that you had a reason to kill him.

INGALLS: Oh, but Serge! You wouldn’t suggest that I try to deceive the police, would you? [HASTINGS enters from the garden. His face looks earnest]

HASTINGS: Mrs. Breckenridge . . . [Sees INGALLS] Oh, hello, Steve.

INGALLS: Hello, Greg.

HASTINGS: I’m glad you’re here. It will make things easier for me.

INGALLS: Or harder—if I did it.

HASTINGS: Or hopeless, if you did it. But I know one or two things already which seem to let you out. [To HELEN] Mrs. Breckenridge, I’m sorry, but certain facts make it necessary for everyone here to be fingerprinted.

HELEN: Of course. I’m sure none of us will object. HASTINGS: If you will please ask everybody to step into the library—my assistant is there with the necessary equipment. After that I should like to have everybody here.

HELEN: Very well.

HASTINGS: Steve, will you please go down there—[Points to the garden]—and take a look at that electrical apparatus that Breckenridge was operating? I have the butler’s statement about the invention and the fireworks display that was interrupted. I want to know what interrupted it. I want you to tell me whether that machine is out of order in any way.

INGALLS: Will you take my word for it?

HASTINGS: I’ll have to. You’re the only one who can tell us. Besides, my men are there and they’ll be watching you. But first, come to the library and get fingerprinted.

INGALLS: All right.

[They all exit, Right. HELEN is the last to go. She turns out the lights, then follows the others. The stage is dark and empty for a few moments. Then a man’s figure enters Right. We cannot see who it is. The man gathers quickly all the sheets of the newspaper, twists them into one roll, and kneels by the fireplace. He strikes a match and sets fire to the paper. We see his two hands, but nothing else. He lets the paper burn halfway, then blows out the fire. Then he rises and exits Right]

[After a moment, HELEN and HASTINGS come back, Right. HELEN turns on the light. We can see part of the rolled newspaper among the logs in the fireplace]

HASTINGS: May I apologize in advance, Mrs. Breckenridge, for anything that I might have to say or do? I’m afraid this is going to be a difficult case.

HELEN: Will you forgive me if I say that I hope it will be a difficult case?

HASTINGS: You do not wish me to find the murderer?

HELEN: I suppose I should, but . . . No. I don’t.

HASTINGS: It might mean that you know who it is. Or—it could mean something much worse.

HELEN: I don’t know who it is. As to the “much worse”—well, we’ll all deny that, so I don’t think my denial would be worth more than any of the others. [CURTISS enters Right]

CURTISS: Mr. Hastings, could you ask the coroner please to attend to Mrs. Pudget?

HELEN: Good God, Curtiss! You don’t mean that Mrs. Pudget has been—

CURTISS: Oh no, madam. But Mrs. Pudget has a bad case of hysterics. [FLEMING and SERGE enter Right]

HASTINGS: What’s the matter with her?

CURTISS: She says that she positively refuses to work for people who get murdered.

HASTINGS: All right, ask the coroner to give her a pill. Then come back here.

CURTISS: Yes, sir. [Exits Right]

HASTINGS: [To HELEN] I understand that your son witnessed the fireworks from this room?

HELEN: Yes, I believe so.

HASTINGS: Then I’m afraid I shall have to ask you to have him brought here.

FLEMING: And get him out of bed? At this hour? [HASTINGS looks at him with curiosity]

HELEN: But of course, Harvey. It can’t be avoided. It’s quite all right. I’ll ask Flash to bring him down.

FLEMING: I will. [Exits Right, as TONY enters]

HASTINGS: [To HELEN] Do you know why I think this case is going to be difficult? Because motive is always the most important thing. Motive is the key to any case. And I’m afraid I’ll have a hard time finding one single motive among all the people here. I can’t imagine any reason for killing a man of Mr. Breckenridge’s character.

HELEN: Neither could Walter. And I hope whoever did it told him the reason before he died. [He looks at her, astonished] Yes, I’m really as cruel as that—though I didn’t know it before. [ADRIENNE enters Right. She is pale, tense and barely able to control herself]

TONY: I didn’t know fingerprinting was as simple as that, did you, Adrienne? Wasn’t it fun?

ADRIENNE: [Curtly] No.

TONY: [Taken aback] Oh . . . I’m sorry, Adrienne. . . . But I thought . . . you’d be the one to feel better than any of us.

ADRIENNE: [Bitterly] Oh, you did?

HELEN: Adrienne, may I get you a drink?

ADRIENNE: [Looks at her with hatred. Then, to HASTINGS:] Get this over with, will you, so I can get out of here?

HASTINGS: I shall try, Miss Knowland. [INGALLS enters from the garden] What about the machine, Steve?

INGALLS: In perfect order.

HASTINGS: Nothing the matter with it?

INGALLS: Nothing.

HASTINGS: Doesn’t look as if anybody had tried to monkey with it?

INGALLS: No. [CURTISS enters Right]

HASTINGS: Now, I should like to ask you all to sit down and be as comfortable as we can be under the circumstances. I won’t have a stenographer taking down anybody’s words or gestures. I shan’t need that. Let’s just relax and talk sensibly. [To HELEN] Is everybody here now?

HELEN: Yes, except Billy and his tutor and Mr. Fleming.

HASTINGS: Now as to the servants—there are the butler, the cook and her husband, the chauffeur. Is that all?

HELEN: Yes.

HASTINGS: And—who are the nearest neighbors?

HELEN: I . . . don’t know.

INGALLS: The nearest house is two miles away.

HASTINGS: I see. All right. Now we can begin. As you see, I don’t believe in conducting an investigation behind closed doors and trying to play people against one another. I prefer to keep everything in the open. I know that none of you will want to talk. But my job requires that I make you talk. So I shall start by giving you all an example. I don’t believe it’s necessary—though it’s usually done—to keep from you the facts in my possession. What for? The murderer knows them—and the others should want to help me. Therefore, I shall tell you what I know so far. [Pauses. Then:] Mr. Breckenridge was shot—in the back. The shot was fired at some distance—there are no powder burns around the wound. The body was lying quite a few steps away from the electrical machine which Mr. Breckenridge was using for the fireworks display. The watch on Mr. Breckenridge’s wrist was broken and stopped at four minutes past ten. There was nothing but grass and soft earth where the body had fallen, so the watch crystal could not have been smashed like that by the fall. It looks as if someone stepped on the watch. The gun was lying on the ground, near the machine. Curtiss has identified it as Mr. Breckenridge’s own gun. Only one shot had been fired. The gun shows an excellent set of fingerprints. We shall soon know whether they are the prints of anyone here. That’s all—so far. Now I should like to—[FLEMING and FLASH enter Right wheeling BILLY in. BILLY wears a bathrobe over his pajamas]

HELEN: This is Billy, Mr. Hastings.

HASTINGS: How do you do, Billy. I’m sorry I had to get you out of bed.

HELEN: [Looks questioningly at FLEMING, who shakes his head. She turns to BILLY, says gently:] Billy, dear, you must try to be calm and grown-up about what I’m going to tell you. It’s about Father. You see, dear, there was an accident and . . . and . . .

BILLY: You mean he’s dead?

HELEN: Yes, dear.

BILLY: You mean he’s been murdered?

HELEN: You mustn’t say that. We don’t know. We’re trying to find out what happened.

BILLY: [Very simply] I’m glad. [Silence as they all look at him. Then:]

HASTINGS: [Softly] Why did you say that, Billy?

BILLY: [Very simply] Because he wanted to keep me a cripple.

HASTINGS: [This is too much even for him] Billy . . . how can you think such a thing?

BILLY: That’s all he wanted me for in the first place.

HASTINGS: What do you mean?

BILLY: [In a flat monotone] He wanted a cripple because a cripple has to depend on him. If you spend your time helping people, you’ve got to have people to help. If everybody were independent, what would happen to the people who’ve got to help everybody?

FLEMING: [To HASTINGS, angrily] Will you stop this? Ask him whatever you have to ask and let him go.

HASTINGS: [Looks at him, then:] What’s your name?

FLEMING: Harvey Fleming.

HASTINGS: [Turns to BILLY] Billy, what made you think that about Mr. Breckenridge?

BILLY: [Looks at him, almost contemptuously, as if the answer were too enormous and too obvious. Then says wearily:] Today, for instance.

HASTINGS: What happened today?

BILLY: They asked him to let me have an operation—the last thing they could do for me or I’d never walk at all. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t, even when—[Looks at FLEMING. Stops short]

HASTINGS: [Softly] Even when—what, Billy?

BILLY: That’s all.

FLEMING: Say it, kid. It’s all right. Even when I cursed him and threatened him.

HASTINGS: You did? [Looks at him, then:] Mr. Fleming, why are you so concerned about Billy?

FLEMING: [Astonished by the question, as if his answer were a well-known fact] Why? Because I’m his father. [HASTINGS turns to look at HELEN] No, not what your dirty mind is thinking. I thought you knew. They all know. Billy’s my own legitimate son—and my wife’s. My wife is dead. Walter adopted him five years ago. [HASTINGS looks at him, startled. FLEMING takes it for reproach and continues angrily:] Don’t tell me I was a Goddamn fool to agree to it. I know I was. But I didn’t know it then. How was I to know? [Points at the others] How were any of them to know what would happen to them? I was out of work. My wife had just died. Billy’d had infantile paralysis for a year. I’d have given anything to cure him. I gave all I had to give— I gave him up, when Walter asked to adopt him. Walter was rich. Walter could afford the best doctors. Walter had been so kind to us. When I saw what it really was—it took me two years to begin to guess—there was nothing I could do . . . nothing. . . . Walter owned him.

HASTINGS: [Slowly] I see.

FLEMING: No, you don’t. Do you know that we came from the same small town, Walter and I? That we had no money, neither one of us? That I was the brilliant student in school and Walter hated me for it? That people said I’d be a great engineer, and I’d made a good beginning, only I didn’t have Walter’s gift for using people? That he wanted to see me down, as far down as a man can go? That he helped me when I was out of work—because he knew it would keep me out of work, because he knew I was drinking—when my wife died—and I didn’t care—and it seemed so easy. . . . He knew I’d never work again, when he took the last thing I had away from me—when he took Billy to make it easier for me—to make it easier! If you want to finish a man, just take all burdens—and all goals—away from him! . . . He gave me money—all these years—and I took it. I took it! [Stops. Then says, in a low, dead voice:] Listen. I didn’t kill Walter Breckenridge. But I would have slept prouder—all the rest of my life—if it was I who’d killed him.

HASTINGS: [Turns slowly to HELEN] Mrs. Breckenridge . . .

HELEN: [Her voice flat, expressionless] It’s true. All of it. You see, we couldn’t have any children, Walter and I. I had always wanted a child. I remember I told him once—I was watching children playing in a park—I told him that I wanted a child, a child’s running feet in the house. . . . Then he adopted Billy. . . . [Silence]

BILLY: [To FLEMING] I didn’t want to say anything . . . Dad. . . . [To HELEN, a little frightened] It’s all right, now?

HELEN: [Her voice barely audible] Yes, dear. . . .You know it wasn’t I who demanded that you . . . [She doesn’t finish]

BILLY: [To FLEMING] I’m sorry, Dad. . . .

FLEMING: [Puts his hand on BILLY’s shoulder, and BILLY buries his face against FLEMING’s arm] It’s all right, Bill. Everything will be all right now. . . . [Silence]

HASTINGS: I’m sorry, Mr. Fleming. I almost wish you hadn’t told me. Because, you see, you did have a good motive.

FLEMING: [Simply, indifferently] I thought everybody knew I had.

TONY: What of it? He wasn’t the only one.

HASTINGS: No? And what is your name?

TONY: Tony Goddard.

HASTINGS: Now, Mr. Goddard, when you make a statement of that kind, you’re usually asked to—

TONY:—finish it? What do you suppose I started for? You won’t have to question me. I’ll tell you. It’s very simple. I’m not sure you’ll understand, but I don’t care. [Stretches his hands out] Look at my hands. Mr. Breckenridge told me that they were the hands of a great surgeon. He told me how much good I could do, how many suffering people I could help—and he gave me a scholarship in a medical college. A very generous scholarship.

HASTINGS: Well?

TONY: That’s all. Except that I hate medicine more than anything else in the world. And what I wanted to be was a pianist. [HASTINGS looks at him. TONY continues, calmly, bitterly:] All right, say I was a weakling. Who wouldn’t be? I was poor—and very lonely. Nobody had ever taken an interest in me before. Nobody seemed to care whether I lived or died. I had a long struggle ahead of me—and I wasn’t even sure that I had any musical talent. How can you ever be sure at the beginning? And the road looks so long and so hopeless—and you’re hurt so often. And he told me it was a selfish choice, and that I’d be so much more useful to men as a doctor, and he was so kind to me, and he made it sound so right.

HASTINGS: But why wouldn’t he help you through a music school, instead?

TONY: [Looks at him, almost pityingly, like an older man at a child, says wearily, without bitterness:] Why? [Shrugs in resignation] Mr. Hastings, if you want to have men dependent on you, don’t allow them to be happy. Happy men are free men.

HASTINGS: But if you were unhappy, why didn’t you leave it all? What held you?

TONY: [In the same wise, tired voice] Mr. Hastings, you don’t know what a ghastly weapon kindness can be. When you’re up against an enemy, you can fight him. But when you’re up against a friend, a gentle, kindly, smiling friend—you turn against yourself. You think that you’re low and ungrateful. It’s the best in you that destroys you. That’s what’s horrible about it. . . . And it takes you a long time to understand. I think I understood it only today.

HASTINGS: Why?

TONY: I don’t know. Everything. The house, the horse, the gift to mankind . . . [Turns to the others] One of us here is the murderer. I don’t know who it is. I hope I never learn—for his sake. But I want him to know that I’m grateful . . . so terribly grateful. . . . [Silence] HASTINGS: [Turns to INGALLS] Steve?

INGALLS: Yes?

HASTINGS: What did you think of Walter Breckenridge?

INGALLS: [In a calm, perfectly natural voice] I loathed him in every way and for every reason possible. You can make any motive you wish out of that. [HASTINGS looks at him]

ADRIENNE: Stop staring at him like that. People usually prefer to look at me. Besides, I’m not accustomed to playing a supporting part.

HASTINGS: You, Miss Knowland? But you didn’t hate Mr. Breckenridge.

ADRIENNE: No?

HASTINGS: But—why?

ADRIENNE: Because he kept me doing a noble, useful work which I couldn’t stand. Because he had a genius for finding people of talent and for the best way of destroying them. Because he held me all right—with a five-year contract. Today, I begged him to let me go. He refused. We had a violent quarrel. Ask Steve. He heard me screaming.

HELEN: Adrienne, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know about this.

ADRIENNE: [Looks at her, doesn’t answer, turns to HASTINGS] How soon will you allow us to leave? It was bad enough staying here when it was Walter’s house. I won’t stand it for very long—when it’s hers.

HASTINGS: Why, Miss Knowland?

TONY: Adrienne, we don’t have to—

ADRIENNE: Oh, what’s the difference? He’ll hear about it sooner or later, so he might as well have it now. [To HASTINGS] This afternoon, Walter and I and the others came in from the garden just in time to interrupt a love scene, a very beautiful love scene, between Helen and Steve. I’ve never been able to get any leading man of mine to kiss me like that. [To HELEN] Was Steve as good at it as he looked, my dear? [HELEN stands staring at her, frozen. ADRIENNE whirls to HASTINGS] You didn’t know that?

HASTINGS: No. I didn’t know either of these two very interesting facts.

ADRIENNE: Two?

HASTINGS: First—the love scene. Second—that it should have impressed you in this particular manner.

ADRIENNE: Well, you know it now.

INGALLS: Adrienne, you’d better stop it.

ADRIENNE: Stop what?

INGALLS: What you’re doing.

ADRIENNE: You don’t know what I’m doing.

INGALLS: Oh, yes, I think I do.

HASTINGS: Well, I don’t know if any of you noticed it, but I’ve made one mistake about this case already. I thought nobody would want to talk.

INGALLS: I noticed it.

HASTINGS: You would. [Turns to BILLY] Now, Billy, I’ll try not to hold you here too long. But you were here in this room all evening, weren’t you?

BILLY: Yes.

HASTINGS: Now I want you to tell me everything you remember, who left this room and when.

BILLY: Well, I think . . . I think Steve left first. When we were talking about the operation. He walked out.

HASTINGS: Where did he go?

BILLY: In the garden.

HASTINGS: Who went next?

BILLY: It was Dad. He went upstairs.

FLASH: And he took a bottle from the sideboard with him.

HASTINGS: You’re Billy’s tutor, aren’t you?

FLASH: Yes. Flash Kozinsky—Stanislaw Kozinsky.

HASTINGS: And you stayed here with Billy all evening?

FLASH: Yes.

HASTINGS: Now who went next?

BILLY: Mr. Breckenridge. He went into the garden. And he said that he didn’t want anybody to follow him.

HASTINGS: What time was that?

FLASH: About ten o’clock.

HASTINGS: And then?

FLASH: Then Mrs. Breckenridge got up and said “Excuse me” and went upstairs. And then Tony told me to . . . to do something with the fireworks which I couldn’t possibly do—and went into the library.

BILLY: And then we heard Tony playing the piano in the library.

FLASH: Then the fireworks started—and nobody was there to see it but us two and Miss Knowland. They were very beautiful fireworks, though. And Miss Knowland said that it was lovely, good target shooting, or something like that—and suddenly she kind of screamed and said she had thought of something and wanted to find Mr. Breckenridge right away.

[INGALLS makes a step forward]

HASTINGS: Ah. . . . What did you think of, Miss Knowland?

ADRIENNE: I thought . . . [Looks at INGALLS. He is watching her]

INGALLS: [Slowly] What did you think of, Adrienne?

ADRIENNE: I thought . . . I thought that Steve would take advantage of Walter’s absence and . . . and that Steve would be upstairs with Helen, and I wanted to tell Walter about it.

HASTINGS: I see. And what did you do?

ADRIENNE: I went out into the garden—to find Walter.

HASTINGS: And then?

BILLY: Then the fireworks stopped.

HASTINGS: How soon after Miss Knowland left did the fireworks stop?

FLASH: Almost immediately. Almost before she could’ve been a step away.

HASTINGS: And then?

FLASH: Then we waited, but nothing happened. We just talked and—[Stops. Gasps:] Jesus Christ!

HASTINGS: What is it?

FLASH: Jesus Christ, I think we heard it when Mr. Breckenridge was murdered!

HASTINGS: When?

FLASH: Bill, do you remember the dud? Remember there was a kind of crack outside and I thought the fireworks were starting again, but nothing happened and I said it was a dud?

BILLY: Yes.

CURTISS: I heard it too, Mr. Hastings. But there had been so many rockets outside that I thought nothing of it at the time.

HASTINGS: Now that’s interesting. You heard it after the fireworks had stopped?

FLASH: Yes. Quite a bit after. Five minutes or more.

HASTINGS: What happened after that?

BILLY: Nothing. Then Steve came back from the garden, and we talked, and then Flash took me to my room.

HASTINGS: You didn’t see Mrs. Breckenridge or Mr. Fleming come back down these stairs while you were here?

BILLY: No.

HASTINGS: Now, Curtiss, you were in the pantry all that time?

CURTISS: Yes, sir. I was polishing the silver.

HASTINGS: Could you see the back stairway from the second floor all the time you were there?

CURTISS: Yes, sir. The pantry door was open.

HASTINGS: Did you see anyone coming down the stairs?

CURTISS: No, sir.

HASTINGS: [To FLEMING] Well, I guess that lets you out.

FLEMING: [Shrugging] Not necessarily. There’s a window in my room.

HASTINGS: What were you doing in your room? Getting drunk?

FLEMING: Staying drunk.

HASTINGS: And you, Mrs. Breckenridge, were you in your room?

HELEN: Yes.

HASTINGS: Since I can’t see you climbing out of a window, I presume at least that it lets you out.

HELEN: Not necessarily. There’s a balcony outside my room with a perfectly functional stairway leading to the garden.

HASTINGS: Oh. . . . What were you doing in your room?

HELEN: Packing.

HASTINGS: What?

HELEN: My suitcase. I wanted to go back to New York.

HASTINGS: Tonight?

HELEN: Yes.

HASTINGS: Why?

HELEN: Because I felt that I couldn’t stay in this house. [HASTINGS looks at her. She continues quietly:] Don’t you see? I had always wanted a house of my own. I wanted a small, very modern house, simple and healthy, with huge windows and glass brick and clean walls. I wanted to hunt for the latest refrigerators and colored washstands and plastic floor tiles and . . . I wanted to work on it for months, to plan every bit of it. . . . But I was never allowed to plan anything in my life. . . . [Controls herself. Continues in a matter-of-fact voice:] I was ready to leave. I came downstairs. Steve and Tony were here. I was about to go when we heard Adrienne scream . . . and . . . [Finishes with a gesture of her hand, as if to say: “And that was that”]

HASTINGS: I see. . . . Now, Miss Knowland. What were you doing in the garden?

ADRIENNE: I was looking for Walter. But I went in the wrong direction. I went toward the lake. I got lost in the dark. Then I came back and—I found him. Dead. [Looks at HASTINGS, adds:] Of course, I could have been doing anything.

HASTINGS: Is that what you want me to think?

ADRIENNE: I don’t care what you think.

HASTINGS: You know, I would think it—if it weren’t for one fact. The fireworks stopped too soon after you left. You wouldn’t have had the time to get from here to the spot where Mr. Breckenridge was found. And I think it was the murderer who stopped those fireworks—or interrupted Mr. Breckenridge and caused him to stop. Because there’s nothing wrong with the machine it-self. I think the murderer got there when the fire-works stopped. Perhaps earlier. But not later. [Turns to INGALLS] Now, Steve. What were you doing in the garden?

INGALLS: I have no alibi at all, Greg.

HASTINGS: None?

INGALLS: None. I just went for a walk through the grounds. I saw no one and no one saw me.

HASTINGS: Hm. . . . Now, Mr. Goddard. You were playing the piano in the library?

TONY: Yes.

HASTINGS: [To BILLY and FLASH] How long did you hear him playing? Till after the fireworks stopped?

BILLY: Yes, till quite a bit after.

FLASH: Yes.

HASTINGS: [To TONY] Well, that lets you out.

TONY: Not necessarily. If you look through the phonograph records, you will see that there is one of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G Minor.

HASTINGS: [Leans back in his chair, disgusted] Is there anyone here who does not want to be the murderer?

FLASH: Oh, I don’t.

SERGE: I think it is horrible! It is horrible that these people should act like this after the death of their benefactor!

HASTINGS: [Turns to look at him with curiosity. Then, to HELEN:] Who is this gentleman?

HELEN: Mr. Serge Sookin. A friend of my husband’s.

HASTINGS: Mr. Sookin, we seem to have forgotten you. Where were you all that time?

SERGE: I was not here at all.

HASTINGS: You weren’t?

BILLY: That’s right. I forgot him. Mr. Sookin left long before everybody else. He went to Stamford.

HASTINGS: [Interested, to SERGE:] You drove to Stamford?

SERGE: Yes. To get the evening newspaper.

HASTINGS: What newspaper?

SERGE: The Courier.

HASTINGS: What time did you leave?

SERGE: I am not certain, I think it was—

INGALLS: A quarter to ten. I looked at my watch. Remember?

SERGE: That is right. You did.

HASTINGS: When did you get back?

SERGE: Just a few minutes before you arrived here. HASTINGS: Which was at ten-thirty. Well, you made pretty good time. You couldn’t have gotten to Stamford and back any faster than that. I presume you didn’t stop anywhere on your way?

SERGE: No.

HASTINGS: Did anyone see you buying that newspaper?

SERGE: No. It was the drugstore, you know, with the newspapers on the box outside the door, and I just took the newspaper and left the five cents. HASTINGS: What drugstore was it?

SERGE: It was . . . yes, it was called Lawton’s.

HASTINGS: You didn’t speak to anybody at Lawton’s?

SERGE: No. [Begins to understand, looks startled for a second, then laughs suddenly] Oh, but it is funny! HASTINGS: What is?

SERGE: [Very pleased] You see, there is no place between here and the Lawton’s drugstore where I could buy a newspaper.

HASTINGS: No, there isn’t.

SERGE: And Mr. Ingalls he said that the Lawton’s drugstore they do not get the last edition of the Courier until ten o’clock, so I could not have had it with me earlier. And I left here at one quarter to ten. And I came back with the last edition of the Courier. And I could not have waited somewhere till four minutes past ten and killed Mr. Breckenridge, because then I could have only twenty-six minutes to get to Stamford and back, and you say that this would not be possible. And it is funny, because it was Mr. Ingalls who gave me the real alibi like that.

INGALLS: I sincerely regret it.

HASTINGS: Where is the paper you brought, Mr. Sookin?

SERGE: Why, right here . . . right . . . [Looks around. Others look also] But that is strange. It was right here. They were reading it.

TONY: That’s true. I saw the paper. I read the comic strips.

HASTINGS: It was the Courier?

TONY: Yes.

HASTINGS: Who else saw it here?

INGALLS: I did.

HELEN: I did.

FLEMING: I did, too.

HASTINGS: Did any of you notice whether it was the last edition?

INGALLS: No, I didn’t. [The others shake their heads]

HASTINGS: And Mr. Sookin did not seem to mind your reading that paper he brought? He did not seem in a hurry to take it away from you?

HELEN: Why, no.

[INGALLS, TONY, and FLEMING shake their heads]

HASTINGS: No. What I’m thinking wouldn’t be like Mr. Sookin at all.

SERGE: [Still looking for it] But where is it? It was right here.

HASTINGS: Did anyone take that paper?

[They all answer “No” or shake their heads]

SERGE: But this is ridicable!

HASTINGS: Oh, I guess we’ll find it. Sit down, Mr. Sookin. So you have a perfect alibi . . . unless, of course, you telephoned to some accomplice to get that paper for you.

SERGE: What?!

HASTINGS: Did anyone see Mr. Sookin using the telephone? [They ad-lib denials] And, of course, there’s no other place to phone from, closer than Lawton’s. No, I don’t really think you phoned, Mr. Sookin. I just mentioned it. . . . How long have you been in this country, Mr. Sookin?

SERGE: I escaped from Russia during the World War Number Two.

HASTINGS: How long have you known Mr. Breckenridge?

SERGE: About three months.

HASTINGS: What do you do for a living?

SERGE: In my country I was a physicist. That is why Mr. Breckenridge he took an interest in me. Now I am unemployed.

HASTINGS: What do you live on?

SERGE: I get from the Refugees’ Committee the fifteen dollars each week. It is quite sufficient for me.

HASTINGS: And Mr. Breckenridge didn’t help you?

SERGE: Ah, Mr. Breckenridge he offered many times to help me. But money I would not take from him. I wanted to get work. And Mr. Breckenridge wanted to give me the job in his laboratories. But Mr. Ingalls refused.

HASTINGS: Oh? [To INGALLS] Is that right, Steve?

INGALLS: That’s right.

HASTINGS: Why did you refuse?

INGALLS: Well, I’ll tell you: I don’t like people who talk too much about their love for humanity.

HASTINGS: But how could you override Mr. Breckenridge’s wish?

INGALLS: That was a condition of our partnership. Walter received seventy-five percent of the profits and he had sole authority over the disposition to be made of our products. But I had sole authority over the work in the laboratory.

HASTINGS: I see. . . . Now tell me, Steve, how many hours a day did you usually spend in the laboratory?

INGALLS: I don’t know. About twelve, I guess, on the average.

HASTINGS: Perhaps nearer to sixteen—on the average?

INGALLS: Yes, I guess so.

HASTINGS: And how many hours a day did Mr. Breckenridge spend in the laboratory?

INGALLS: He didn’t come to the laboratory every day.

HASTINGS: Well, average it for the year. What would it make per day?

INGALLS: About an hour and a half.

HASTINGS: I see. . . . [Leans back] Well, it’s very interesting. Any of you could have committed the murder. Most of you have halfway alibis, the kind that make it possible, but not probable. You’re worse off than the rest, Steve. You have no alibi at all. At the other end—there’s Mr. Sookin. He has a perfect alibi. [Pauses, then:] Here’s what makes it interesting: someone deliberately smashed Mr. Breckenridge’s watch. Someone was anxious that there should be no doubt about the time of the murder. Yet the only person who has a good alibi for that particular time is Mr. Sookin—who was, at four minutes past ten, just about driving into Stamford.

SERGE: Well?

HASTINGS: I’m just thinking aloud, Mr. Sookin.

[DIXON enters Right, carrying some papers in his hand. He is an energetic, efficient young man who does not waste much time. He walks to HASTINGS, and puts one paper on the table before him]

DIXON: The statements of the cook and the chauffeur, Chief.

HASTINGS: [With a brief glance at the paper] What do they say?

DIXON: They went to bed at nine o’clock. Saw nothing. Heard nothing—except Curtiss in the pantry.

HASTINGS: Okay.

DIXON: [Handing him the other papers. His voice a little less casual:] And here are the fingerprints off the gun—and another set.

HASTINGS: [Looks carefully at two cards of fingerprints. Then puts them on the table, facedown. Then raises his head and looks slowly at all the people in the room, from face to face. Then says slowly:] Yes. The fingerprints on that gun are those of someone in this room. [Silence. He turns to DIXON] Dixon.

DIXON: Yes, Chief?

HASTINGS: Have the boys examine the shrubbery and the ground under Mr. Fleming’s window. Have them examine the balcony and the stairs leading down from it. Look through the phonograph records and see if you find one of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G Minor. Search the house and bring me all the newspapers you find. Look particularly for a copy of today’s Courier.

DIXON: Okay, Chief. [Exits Right]

SERGE: [Jumping up suddenly] Mr. Hastings! I know who did it! [They all look at him] I know! And I will tell you! You are wasting the time when it is so clear! I know who did it! It was Mr. Ingalls!

INGALLS: By us in America, Serge, when you say a thing like that—you’re expected to prove it.

HASTINGS: Now, Mr. Sookin, why do you think that Mr. Ingalls did it?

SERGE: Mr. Ingalls hated Mr. Breckenridge, because Mr. Breckenridge was fine and noble, and Mr. Ingalls is cold and cruel and without principles.

HASTINGS: Is he?

SERGE: But is it not clear? Mr. Ingalls he seduced the wife of Mr. Breckenridge. Mr. Breckenridge discovered it this afternoon.

HASTINGS: Now there, Mr. Sookin, you have an interesting point. Very interesting. There’s never been any trouble between Mr. Ingalls and Mr. Breckenridge—until this afternoon. This evening, Mr. Breckenridge is found murdered. Convenient. A bit too convenient, don’t you think? If Mr. Ingalls murdered Mr. Breckenridge—wouldn’t it be dangerous for him to do it tonight? On the other hand, if someone else murdered Mr. Breckenridge—wouldn’t he choose precisely tonight, when suspicion could be thrown so easily on Mr. Ingalls?

SERGE: But that is not all! Mr. Breckenridge he wanted to give this great invention to all the poor humanity. But Mr. Ingalls wanted to make the money for himself. Is it not to his advantage to kill Mr. Breckenridge?

HASTINGS: Sure. Except that Steve never cared for money.

SERGE: No? When he said so himself? When he shouted so? When I heard him?

HASTINGS: Sure. I heard him, too. Many times. Except that Steve never shouts.

SERGE: But then, if you heard it, too—

HASTINGS: Come on, Mr. Sookin, you can’t be as stupid as you’re trying to appear. Who doesn’t care for money? You name one. But here’s the difference: the man who admits that he cares for money is all right. He’s usually worth the money he makes. He won’t kill for it. He doesn’t have to. But watch out for the man who yells too loudly how much he scorns money. Watch out particularly for the one who yells that others must scorn it. He’s after something much worse than money.

INGALLS: Thanks, Greg.

HASTINGS: Don’t thank me too soon. [Picks up the fingerprint cards] You see, the fingerprints on that gun are yours. [The others gasp]

ADRIENNE: [Jumping up] That’s horrible! It’s horrible! It’s unfair! Of course they’re Steve’s. Steve handled that gun today! Everybody saw him do it!

HASTINGS: Oh? . . . Tell me about that, Miss Knowland.

ADRIENNE: It was . . . it was this afternoon. We were talking about Walter being afraid of guns. Walter said he wasn’t, said he had a gun and he told Steve to look in that drawer. Steve took the gun out, and looked at it, and then put it back. And we all saw it. And someone . . . someone got the horrible idea . . .

HASTINGS: Yes, Miss Knowland, I think so, too. [Walks to cabinet, opens the drawer, looks in, then closes it] Yes, it’s gone. . . . Sit down, Miss Knowland. There’s no need to be upset about this. Nobody who’s ever seen a movie would commit murder holding a gun with his bare hand. Now, if Steve did it, he would certainly think of wiping off the fingerprints that he’d left on that gun earlier. But if somebody else did it, he’d certainly be damn glad to leave Steve’s fingerprints where they were. Convenient, isn’t it? . . . Now, who saw Steve handling that gun today? All of you here?

ADRIENNE: All—except Billy and Flash and Curtiss.

HASTINGS: [Nods] Interesting. . . . You see, Steve, that was one of the reasons why I said I thought certain things let you out. I saw that there were prints on that gun and I didn’t think you’d be stupid enough to leave them there. I didn’t think you’d drop the gun like that, either. Not with a deep lake close by. . . . The other reason was that I don’t think you’d shoot a man in the back.

TONY: [Gasps at a sudden thought] Mr. Hastings! . . . I just thought of something!

HASTINGS: Yes?

TONY: What if Serge is a Communist spy? [SERGE gasps and leaps to his feet]

HASTINGS: [Shakes his head at TONY reproachfully] Why, Tony. You didn’t really think that I hadn’t thought of that already?

SERGE: [To TONY] You swine! I—a Communist? I who go to church? I who have suffered—

HASTINGS: Look, Mr. Sookin, be sensible about it. If you’re not a Communist spy—you’d be angry. But if you are a Communist spy—you’d be much angrier, so where does it get you?

SERGE: But it is the insult! I, who have faith in the Holy Mother Russia—

HASTINGS: All right. Drop it. [To TONY] You see, Mr. Goddard, it’s possible, but it doesn’t jell. If Mr. Sookin were a Soviet agent, he’d be after the invention, of course. But nobody touched that machine. Besides, I understand that Mr. Sookin heartily supported Mr. Breckenridge in his decision to give this invention away to the world.

SERGE: I did! I am a humanitarian.

HASTINGS: What? Another one?

INGALLS: He did more than that. It was he who gave Walter the idea of the gift in the first place.

SERGE: That is true! But how did you know it?

INGALLS: I guessed it.

HASTINGS: Tell me, what is that invention actually good for? I mean, in practical application.

INGALLS: Oh, for a source of cheap power. For lighting the slums, for instance, or running factory motors.

HASTINGS: Is that all?

INGALLS: That’s all.

HASTINGS: Well, you see? If it’s a purely commercial invention, why should the Soviets be anxious to get exclusive control of it? They would try to steal it, of course. But once Mr. Breckenridge had decided to save them the trouble and give it away, they would cheer him as their best friend. They spend billions trying to prompt giveaways of that kind. They would guard his life—at least until tomorrow noon. They wouldn’t send any spies around to kill him.

SERGE: But Mr. Hastings!

HASTINGS: Yes?

SERGE: I am not a Soviet spy!

HASTINGS: Okay. I haven’t said you were. [To the others] Well, here’s how we stand. On one side, we have Steve, who had not one, but two possible motives. He has no alibi at all and his fingerprints are on the gun. On the other side, we have Mr. Sookin, who has a perfect alibi and no possible motive.

SERGE: But then why do you not act? What more do you want? When you have the so good case against Mr. Ingalls?

HASTINGS: That’s why, Serge—because it is so good. It’s too good.

SERGE: Why do you not let the jury decide that?

HASTINGS: Because I am afraid that the average jury would agree with you.

[DIXON enters from the garden. He carries on his palm a tiny object wrapped in cellophane. He hands it to HASTINGS]

DIXON: Found in the grass near the machine.

HASTINGS: [Unwraps the cellophane. Looks, sighs with disgust] Oh Lord! . . . A cigarette butt. . . . I didn’t think murderers went around doing that anymore. [Waves to DIXON, who exits into the garden. HASTINGS picks up the cigarette butt, examines it] A Camel . . . burned just to the brand. . . . How convenient. . . . [Puts the butt down. Says wearily:] All right, who smokes Camels around here? [INGALLS takes out his cigarette case, opens it, and extends it to HASTINGS. HASTINGS looks and nods]

INGALLS: It doesn’t surprise you?

HASTINGS: No. [To the others] Does anyone else here smoke Camels? [They shake their heads]

ADRIENNE: I do.

INGALLS: You don’t smoke, Adrienne.

ADRIENNE: I do—on the stage. . . . I’m very good at staging things.

HASTINGS: I’m not too sure of that.

INGALLS: [In a warning tone] Adrienne . . .

ADRIENNE: [To HASTINGS] Keep him out of this. Are you running this investigation or is he? You’ve been reviewing things a lot around here. How about my doing that for a change?

HASTINGS: Go right ahead.

ADRIENNE: Well, for instance, look at me. I had two motives. I wanted to break my contract. If you wish to know how badly I wanted it—well, I tried to kill myself a year ago. If I’d try that, wouldn’t I try something else, as desperate—or worse? Today I asked Walter, for the last time, to release me. He refused. That alone would be enough, wouldn’t it? But that’s not all. I love Steve Ingalls. I’ve been in love with him for years. Oh, it’s all right for me to say that—because he doesn’t give a damn about me. Today—I learned that he loves Helen. [Looks at HASTINGS] Well? Am I going to finish? Or will you?

INGALLS: [To ADRIENNE] You’re going to shut up.

HASTINGS: No, Steve, I’d rather let Miss Knowland finish.

ADRIENNE: All right. Wouldn’t I be smart enough to kill Walter and frame Steve for it? Wouldn’t I figure that even if he’s not convicted, Helen will never be able to get him—because if he married her, it would be like signing a confession? How’s that? Pretty good case?

HASTINGS: Very good.

INGALLS: [Stepping forward] Adrienne . . .

ADRIENNE: [Snaps angrily] It’s your turn to shut up! [To HASTINGS] And besides, that business about the murderer interrupting the fireworks—that’s nothing but your own guess. What is there to prove it? Drop that—and my alilbi is as bad as Steve’s. Worse. Because I went out looking for Walter. Nothing wrong with this case, is there?

HASTINGS: Yes. There is. That’s why it’s good.

INGALLS: Greg, I won’t allow this.

HASTINGS: Come on, Steve, that’s the first foolish thing I’ve heard you say. What’s the matter with you? How can you stop me? [To ADRIENNE] Miss Knowland, have you noticed that you’re the only one here who’s been contradicting herself?

ADRIENNE: How?

HASTINGS: That’s why I like your case. Because it’s not perfect. I don’t like perfect cases. . . . How? Well, if Steve was framed, I see only two people who had a motive for framing him. Mr. Sookin and you. Mr. Sookin hates Steve. You love him—which is much more damning. Now look at Mr. Sookin. If he framed Steve, he’s been acting like a fool here, laying it on too thick. Now what would he do if he weren’t a fool?

SERGE: [With a new kind of dangerous, mocking note in his voice] He’d pretend to be one.

HASTINGS: [Looks at him with new interest, says slowly:]

Quite so. [Then lightly again:] Congratulations, Mr. Sookin. You’re beginning to understand my ways of thinking. You may be right. But there’s another possible method of being clever. The person who framed Steve might do his best to act afterward as if he were protecting him.

INGALLS: Greg!

HASTINGS: [His voice driving on intensely] Keep still, all of you! Do you see, Miss Knowland? You’ve put on a beautiful show of protecting Steve. And yet, it was you who gave away the story of that interrupted love scene. Why? To show us that you were jealous? Or to damn Steve?

INGALLS: [In a tone of such authority that HASTINGS has to remain silent] All right, Greg. That’s enough. [His tone makes everyone look at him] You wanted to know how I could stop you? Very simply. [Takes a notebook out of his pocket and throws it down on the table. Takes out a pencil and stands holding it in his hand, over the paper] Unless you leave Adrienne out of this, I’m going to write a confession that I did it.

[ADRIENNE stands stock-still, like a person hit over the head]

HASTINGS: But, Steve, you didn’t do it!

INGALLS: That’s your concern. Mine is only that she didn’t do it. I’m not going to put on a show of protecting her—as she’s been trying to protect me, very crudely. I’m not going to hint and throw suspicion on myself. That’s been done for me—quite adequately. I’m simply going to blackmail you. You understand? If I sign a confession—with the evidence you have on me, you’ll be forced to put me on trial. You’ll have no choice. You might know that I didn’t do it, but the jury won’t be so subtle. The jury will be glad to pounce upon the obvious. Have I made myself clear? Leave Adrienne out of this, unless you want an unsolved murder on your record—and on your conscience.

ADRIENNE: [It is a scream of terror, of triumph, of release all at once—and the happiest sound in the world] Steve! [He turns to look at her. They stand holding the glance. It is more revealing than any love scene. They look at each other as if they were alone in the room and in the world. . . . Then she whispers, choking:] Steve . . . you, who’ve never believed in self-sacrifice . . . you, who’ve preached selfishness and egoism and . . . you wouldn’t do this, unless . . . unless it’s—

INGALLS: [In a low, tense voice, more passionate than the tone of a love confession]—unless it’s for the most selfish reason in the world. [She closes her eyes. He turns away from her slowly. HELEN, who has been watching them, lets her head drop, hopelessly]

HASTINGS: [Breaking the silence] God help us when people begin protecting each other! When they start that—I’m through. [Throws the notebook to INGALLS] All right, Steve. Put it away. You win—for the moment. I’ll have a few questions to ask you about this—but not right now. [To ADRIENNE] Miss Knowland, if you were actually protecting him, you have no respect for my intelligence at all. You should have known I wouldn’t believe that Steve is guilty. I know a frame-up when I see one. [To the others] And for the information of the scoundrel who did this, I’d like to say that he’s an incredible fool. Did he really expect me to believe that Steve Ingalls—with his brilliant, methodical, scientific mind—would commit a sloppy crime like this? I could readily accept Steve as capable of murder. But if he ever committed one, it would be the finest job in the world. There wouldn’t be a hair’s weight of a clue. He’d have an alibi—as perfect as a precision instrument. But to think of Steve leaving fingerprints and cigarette butts behind! . . . I’d like to get the bastard who planned this and punch him in the nose. It’s not a case, it’s a personal insult to me! TONY: And to Steve.

HASTINGS: [Rising] I’ve had enough of this for tonight. Let’s get some sleep and some sense. I shall ask everybody not to leave this house, of course. I’ll have my men remain here—in this room and in the garden. I’ll be back early in the morning. I won’t ask you who killed Walter Breckenridge. I’ll know that when I find the answer to another question: who framed Steve Ingalls? . . . Good night. [Exits into the garden, calling:] Dixon! [As the others move to rise slowly or look at one another, INGALLS turns and walks to the stairs. ADRIENNE—who has looked at no one but him—makes a step to follow him. He stops on the stairs, turns to her, says calmly:]

INGALLS: I told you to wait. Sound vibrations travel very slowly, Adrienne. Not yet. [Turns and exits up the stairs, as she stands looking after him]

CURTAIN

SCENE 2

Early next morning. The room seems to be glowing. There is a clear blue sky outside and the house is flooded with sunlight.

HELEN and FLEMING are sitting at a table, deep in conversation. It is a serious conversation, but their voices are simple, light, natural.

FLEMING: Would we go by boat or by train?

HELEN: A plane would be best, don’t you think? Easier for Billy and he’ll enjoy it.

FLEMING: Do we have to make arrangements with Dr. Harlan in advance?

HELEN: I think so. I’ll telephone him today.

FLEMING: Long-distance?

HELEN: Yes, of course. Why not?

FLEMING: Helen . . . is it going to be very expensive—the operation and all?

HELEN: We don’t have to worry about that.

FLEMING: Yes, Helen. We do.

HELEN: [Looks at him. Then:] Of course. Forgive me. Bad habits are very hard to lose.

FLEMING: I thought—

[ARIENNE comes down the stairs. She walks as if her feet do not need to touch the ground. She wears a gay, simple summer dress. She looks like a person whose presence in a room would compete with the sunlight. But her manner is very simple; it is the manner of so profound a happiness that it cannot be anything but simple]

ADRIENNE: Good morning.

FLEMING: [Brightly] Good morning, Adrienne.

HELEN: [With a little effort] Good morning.

ADRIENNE: Mr. Hastings arrived?

FLEMING: Not yet.

ADRIENNE: [Looking through cigarette boxes] Any Camels around here? I think I’ll take up smoking. Camels are wonderful things. God bless every Camel butt in the world! [Finds a cigarette and lights it]

FLEMING: Never saw you look like that, Adrienne. Slept well?

ADRIENNE: [Walking to French doors] Haven’t slept at all. I don’t see why people insist on sleeping. You feel so much better if you don’t. And how can anybody want to lose a minute—a single minute of being alive?

FLEMING: What’s the matter, Adrienne?

ADRIENNE: Nothing. [Points to the garden] It’s the Fourth of July. [Exits into the garden]

HELEN: [Looks after her, then forces herself to return to the conversation] When we go to Montreal—

FLEMING: Look, Helen, here’s what I thought: I’ll have to take the money from you for Billy’s operation. That’s one time when it’s proper for a man to accept help. But don’t give me the money. Lend it. And charge me a fair interest on it. That, you see, would really be an act of humanity.

HELEN: Yes, Harvey. That’s what we’ll do.

FLEMING: [In a low voice] Thank you.

HELEN: And, of course, we’ll take legal steps to make him “Billy Fleming” again. . . . But you won’t forbid me to visit him, will you?

FLEMING: [Smiles happily, shaking his head. Then, at a sudden grim thought:] Helen. There’s one more thing. It’s still possible that they’ll decide that one of us . . . that . . .

HELEN: Yes. That one of us is the murderer.

FLEMING: Well . . . shall we agree that . . . if it’s one of us . . . the other will take Billy to Montreal?

HELEN: Yes, Harvey. And if it’s not one of us, then we’ll go together.

[INGALLS enters, coming down the stairs]

INGALLS: Good morning.

HELEN: Good morning, Steve.

FLEMING: [Looks at the two of them, then:] Is Billy up yet?

INGALLS: Don’t know. I haven’t been downstairs.

FLEMING: Guess I’ll go to see if he’s up. [Exits Right]

INGALLS: [Turning to HELEN] Helen.

HELEN: [Quietly] I know.

INGALLS: Helen, will you marry me?

HELEN: [Looks at him, startled, then shakes her head slowly] No, Steve.

INGALLS: Do you think that I am afraid?

HELEN: No. But if I told you what I think of this, you’d be very angry. You’re never angry, except when people say nice things about you. [As he is about to speak] No, Steve. You don’t love me. Perhaps you thought you did. Perhaps you didn’t know who it was that you really loved. I think you know it now. I do. You can’t hurt me, Steve, except if you refuse to admit this. Because, then, I’ll know that you have no respect for me at all.

INGALLS: [In a low voice] I’m sorry, Helen.

HELEN: [Nods her head slowly. Then forces herself to say lightly:] Besides, you should have noticed that I never said I loved you.

INGALLS: I noticed something else.

HELEN: Oh, that? Well, you must be generous, Steve. You mustn’t hold a moment’s weakness against me. After all, you’re very attractive, and . . . and Adrienne was right about your manner of making love.

INGALLS: Helen, I’m making it harder for you.

HELEN: [Calmly, her head high, looking straight at him] No, Steve, no. I wanted to say it. And now I want you to forget it. No, I don’t love you. I’ve never loved you. I’ve known you all these years—I’ve seen you so often—I’ve looked at you—I’ve heard your voice. . . . But I never loved you.

INGALLS: Helen . . .

HELEN: And that, Steve, is all you have a right to remember.

[She turns, walks to stairs. The doorbell rings. She stops on the stairs. INGALLS opens the door. HASTINGS enters]

HASTINGS: Good morning.

HELEN: Good morning, Mr. Hastings.

INGALLS: Hello, Greg.

HASTINGS: [To INGALLS] It would be your face that I’d have to see first. All right, I suppose I’d better take you first. [To HELEN] Will you excuse me, Mrs. Breckenridge? This case has upset all my theories. I’ll have to revert to the conventional and question some of the people in private.

HELEN: Yes, of course. I shall be upstairs if you want me. [Exits up the stairs]

HASTINGS: [Sitting down] Goddamn this case. Couldn’t eat a bite of breakfast this morning.

INGALLS: Oh, I did. I had scrambled eggs and bacon and fresh strawberries and coffee and—

HASTINGS: All right, all right. It doesn’t prove anything. You’d eat as well whether you’d done it or not. Did you do it?

INGALLS: What do you think?

HASTINGS: You know what I think. But damn it, Steve, if I don’t solve this, it’s you that they’ll throw to the lions. The jury lions.

INGALLS: I don’t think I’m a good type for a martyr.

HASTINGS: No. But a swell type for a murderer.

INGALLS: Oh yes.

[DIXON enters Right, carrying a stack of newspapers and a phonograph record]

DIXON: Good morning, Chief. Here it is. [Deposits his load on a table]

HASTINGS: What about the shrubbery outside and the balcony?

DIXON: In perfect order. No broken branches. No footprints. Nothing. [Picking up the record] Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G Minor all right. And the newspapers.

HASTINGS: [Looks through the newspapers, stops at one] Who reads the Red Worker?

DIXON: Mrs. Pudget.

HASTINGS: [Having gone to the bottom of the pile] No Courier?

DIXON: No Courier.

HASTINGS: Damn it, Dixon, we’ve got to find it—or prove that it wasn’t here at all!

INGALLS: But it was here. I saw it.

HASTINGS: That’s the hell of it! Too many of you saw it. I don’t think that little Holy Russian rat would’ve had the guts to fake it with an earlier edition. And yet I know there’s something phony about that alibi. Dixon, look through the garbage cans, the incinerators, everything!

DIXON: We did.

HASTINGS: Look again.

DIXON: Okay, Chief. [Exits Right]

HASTINGS: Steve, don’t be too damn noble and tell me who’d really have a reason to frame you around here!

INGALLS: If you’ll take my word for it—and I wish you would—no one.

HASTINGS: No one?

INGALLS: I wouldn’t vouch for Serge. But I know of no reason why he’d kill Walter.

HASTINGS: You know, I’m sure he’s done it. Look at how it was done. So crude, so obvious. I don’t see anyone else staging a frame-up quite so blatantly and hoping to get away with it. It just smells “Serge” all over. A dull, presumptuous, Communist mind that counts on its insolence to overcome the intelligence of anyone else.

INGALLS: But you’ve got to prove it.

HASTINGS: Yes. And I can’t. Well, let’s see about the others. Tony Goddard? No reason for him to frame you. Fleming? Possible. Out of fear. Drunkards are not very strong people.

INGALLS: I’ll vouch for Fleming.

HASTINGS: Mrs. Breckenridge? No reason. Miss Knowland? . . . Now don’t pull out any notebooks. Steve, don’t refuse to answer this. I’ve got to ask it. You’re in love with Adrienne Knowland, aren’t you?

INGALLS: Desperately. Miserably. Completely. For many years.

HASTINGS: Why “miserably” for many years—when she loves you?

INGALLS: Because neither of us thought it possible of the other. . . . Why did you have to ask this?

HASTINGS: Because—what, then, was that love scene with Mrs. Breckenridge?

INGALLS: [Shrugging] A moment’s weakness. Despair, perhaps. Because I didn’t think that I could ever have the woman I wanted.

HASTINGS: You chose a nice day to be weak on.

INGALLS: Yes, didn’t I?

HASTINGS: [Rising] Well, I think I’ll have a little talk with Fleming now.

INGALLS: Will you be long?

HASTINGS: I don’t think so. [SERGE enters Right. HASTINGS turns at the stairs] Ah, good morning, Commissar.

SERGE: [Stiffly] That is not funny.

HASTINGS: No. But it could be. [Exits up the stairs]

SERGE: [Sees the papers, hurries to look through them] Ah, the newspapers. Have they the Courier found?

INGALLS: No.

SERGE: But that is unbelievable! I cannot understand it!

INGALLS: Don’t worry. They’ll find it—when the time comes. . . . You have nothing to worry about. Look at me.

SERGE: [Interested] You are worried?

INGALLS: Well, wouldn’t you be? It’s all right for Greg to amuse himself with fancy deductions and to believe the most improbable. A jury won’t do that. A jury will love a case like mine. It’s easy on their conscience.

SERGE: [As persuasively as he can make it] That is true. I think the jury it would convict you. I think you have no chance.

INGALLS: Oh, I might have a chance. But it will take money.

SERGE: [Attentively] Money?

INGALLS: Lots of money. I’ll need a good lawyer.

SERGE: Yes. You will need a very good lawyer. And that is expensive.

INGALLS: Very expensive.

SERGE: Your case it is bad.

INGALLS: Very bad.

SERGE: You feel certain that you will be put on trial?

INGALLS: Looks like it.

SERGE: And . . . you do not have the money?

INGALLS: Oh, I suppose I can scrape some together, but you see, I’ve never made very much. Not like Walter. And what I made I put back into the laboratory. Oh, I guess I could raise some cash on that, but what’s the use? Even if I’m acquitted, I’ll be broke when I get out of it.

SERGE: You are not the type of man who will like it—being broke.

INGALLS: I won’t like it at all.

SERGE: And besides, you believe that your own interest—it comes first?

INGALLS: That’s what I believe.

SERGE: [Throws a quick glance around, then leans over the table, close to INGALLS, and speaks rapidly, in a low, hard, tense voice—a new SERGE entirely. Even his English is better, but his accent remains] Listen. No jokes and no clowning about what you knew or what you guessed. We haven’t the time. And it’s your neck to be saved. Five hundred thousand dollars—now—in your hands—for that invention.

INGALLS: [Whistles] Why, Serge, at the rate of fifteen dollars a week, it will take you—

SERGE: Cut it out. You know. You knew all the time. I knew that you knew. And it didn’t do you any good, did it? There’s no time for showing how smart you are. Now it’s either you want it or you don’t. And it must be quick.

INGALLS: Well, looks like you’ve got me, doesn’t it?

SERGE: Yes. So don’t start talking about your conscience or your patriotism or things like that. You and I, we understand each other.

INGALLS: I think we’ve understood each other from the first. [Chuckles] A gift to mankind, eh, Serge? Just to light the slums and put the greedy utility companies out of business?

SERGE: We have not time for laughing. Yes or no?

INGALLS: Do you carry five hundred thousand bucks, like that, in your pocket?

SERGE: I will write you a check.

INGALLS: How will I know it’s any good?

SERGE: You’ll know it when you see on whose account it’s drawn. Beyond that, you’ll have to take the chance. Because I want that graph right now.

INGALLS: Now?

SERGE: I can’t come for it when you’re in jail, can I? [Pulls a sheet of paper and a pencil out of a drawer and throws them down on the table] Now. On this sheet of paper. Before you touch the check.

INGALLS: Aren’t you afraid of giving me a check? It could be used as evidence against you.

SERGE: You had evidence against me yesterday. You didn’t use it. You saved me. Why?

INGALLS: I think you know that.

SERGE: Yes. There was one thing which you said yesterday—and when you said it, I knew I could have you.

INGALLS: I know what that was. But Greg Hastings didn’t notice it.

SERGE: There were many things he didn’t notice. Of course, you and I we know who killed Breckenridge.

INGALLS: I’m sure one of us does.

SERGE: It was Adrienne Knowland.

INGALLS: Was it?

SERGE: Good God, it’s obvious, isn’t it? But we don’t care who did it, you and I. It was very convenient, that’s all.

INGALLS: Yes.

SERGE: Well, do I get the graph?

INGALLS: I have no choice, have I? I suppose I’ll get used to it in time, but it’s rather uncomfortable—becoming a scoundrel.

SERGE: That won’t bother you for long.

INGALLS: No, not for long. . . . Write that check.

[SERGE takes a checkbook and a pen out of his pocket, sits down at the table, across from INGALLS, writes the check, then extends it, showing it to INGALLS, but not letting him touch it. INGALLS looks at the check, reads:]

“The Soviet Culture and Friendship Society.” Fancy that! What a coincidence.

SERGE: [Contemptuously] If I were doing what you are doing, at least I would not laugh about it.

INGALLS: That’s the trouble with you, Serge. You have no sense of humor.

SERGE: You are a very contemptible person.

INGALLS: But I thought you knew that. [Extends his hand for the check]

SERGE: [Pulls the check back, puts it down on the table in front of himself, and pushes the sheet of paper toward INGALLS] Now get to work. Quick.

INGALLS: Why quite so much hurry? Can’t you let me degrade myself gracefully?

SERGE: Shut up! The graph now!

INGALLS: [Picking up the pencil] Oh yes, the graph. [Taps his chin with the pencil thoughfully] Have you ever thought, Serge, what a strange thing life is? There’s so much about it that we don’t understand.

SERGE: Hurry up, you fool!

INGALLS: Oh yes. [Leans over the paper, the pencil ready, then looks up] And when we don’t understand things, we make mistakes.

SERGE: Shut up! Write!

INGALLS: What? Oh, the graph. Well you see cosmic rays are tiny particles which bombard the earth from outer space, carrying an electric charge of—[Looks up] For instance, we never understood that incident when someone shot at Walter a month ago. Or did we? [SERGE looks at him. INGALLS holds the glance. Then:] Shall I write?

SERGE: What about that incident?

INGALLS: Doesn’t anything strike you as funny, Serge?

SERGE: What about that incident?

INGALLS: Oh, I thought you knew that I knew everything. Well, I know, for instance, that what you planned then—has succeeded now. Brilliantly, completely, and as you wanted it. Only much better planned than the first time. And a little late. One month too late. [SERGE jumps up] I’m sorry. You want the graph. Cosmic rays, when drawn into a single stream by means of . . . Incidentally, you’re not a good shot, Serge. You’re much better at housebreaking—or at breaking locks on bags, to be exact. You should have searched that bag, though. It would have looked less obvious.

SERGE: You understood—

INGALLS: Of course, Serge. If that murder had succeeded, the gun would have been found in my bag. And you wouldn’t have had time to break the lock after the shot. You were very foresighted. But obvious. SERGE: You can’t prove that.

INGALLS: No. I can’t prove it. And the gun in my bag wouldn’t have proved much, either. Not much. Just enough to put me on trial. And you would have had one man who knew that graph dead, and the other in desperate need of money. But you’re a bad shot. You’re a much better psychologist. The gift to mankind idea worked smoother and safer.

SERGE: You can’t prove—

INGALLS: No. I can’t prove anything. And you know, Serge, I don’t really think that you did it, this time. But doesn’t it strike you as funny that someone has done it for you?

SERGE: I don’t care what you think or know. It worked.

INGALLS: Yes. It worked.

SERGE: Then write, Goddamn you!

INGALLS: If you wish.

[There is the sound of a door opening upstairs. SERGE whirls around. INGALLS slams his right hand, palm down, over the check on the table, as HASTINGS comes down the stairs]

HASTINGS: [Notices INGALLS’ hand at once, says lightly:] I’m not interrupting anything, am I?

[SERGE stands by the table, doing a very bad job of disguising his anxiety. INGALLS is perfectly calm]

INGALLS: No. No.

HASTINGS: Imagine finding the two of you in a friendly tête-à-tête.

INGALLS: Oh, we were discussing going into vaudeville together. In a mind-reading act. We’re very good at reading each other’s mind. Though I think I’m better at it than Serge.

HASTINGS: [Looks at INGALLS’ right hand on the table, imitating his tone] You have an interesting hand, Steve. Ever had your palm read?

INGALLS: No. I don’t believe in palmistry.

HASTINGS: [Takes out a cigarette] Give me a light, Steve. [INGALLS reaches into his pocket, takes out his lighter, snaps it on, and offers it to HASTINGS—all with his left hand] Didn’t know you were left-handed.

INGALLS: I’m not. I’m just versatile.

HASTINGS: Come on, Steve, how long are you going to play the fool? Lift that hand.

INGALLS: Well, Serge enjoyed it. [Lifts his hand as SERGE leaps toward it, but HASTINGS pushes SERGE aside and seizes the check]

HASTINGS: [Reading the check] “Pay to the order of Steven Ingalls . . .” Well, well, well. Had I come down a minute later, you’d have been half-a-millionaire, Steve.

INGALLS: Yes. Why did you have to hurry?

SERGE: [Screams at the top of his voice, whirling upon INGALLS] You swine! You did it on purpose!

HASTINGS: [In mock astonishment] No?

SERGE: [To INGALLS] You lied! You betrayed me! You never intended to sell yourself! You’re unprincipled and dishonest!

INGALLS: You shouldn’t have trusted me like that.

[HELEN and TONY enter hurriedly at the top of the stairs]

HELEN: [Anxiously] What’s going on here?

HASTINGS: Nothing much. Just Serge throwing five-hundred-thousand-dollar checks around.

[HELEN gasps. TONY follows her down the stairs]

SERGE: [Screaming defiantly to INGALLS and HASTINGS] Well? What are you going to do about it? You can’t prove anything!

[FLEMING hurries in Right and stops short at the door]

HASTINGS: [Reproachfully] Now, Serge. We can prove that you’re defrauding the Refugees’ Committee out of fifteen bucks a week, for instance. And we can prove that I’m right about people who have no motive.

TONY: [Almost regretfully] Gee, I hoped it wouldn’t be Serge. I hate having to be grateful to Serge for the rest of my life.

[ADRIENNE comes in from the garden, followed a little later by DIXON]

SERGE: What motive? What can you prove? That I tried to buy an invention from a murderer who needed the money—nothing else. It’s just a simple commercial invention. Isn’t it, Mr. Ingalls?

INGALLS: Yes.

HASTINGS: Goddamn it, we’ve got to find that newspaper!

SERGE: Now you understand, Mr. Hastings? Prove that I wasn’t in Stamford! Prove it! I don’t care whether you find that paper or not! Your own dear friends will have to swear they saw it!

HASTINGS: They don’t know what edition it was.

SERGE: That’s right! They don’t know! Then how do they know it wasn’t the last one? Prove that!

FLEMING: [Looking around the room uselessly, frantically ] We ought to tear this house down and find the lousy sheet! [TONY joins him in searching]

SERGE: Prove that I lied to you! Find a jury, even a dumb American jury, that will want to look at me, when they hear of this very heroic genius—[Points at INGALLS]—alone in the garden, leaving his fingerprints on the gun!

[During the last few speeches, INGALLS takes out his cigarette case, takes a cigarette, takes a match folder from the table, strikes a match, lights the cigarette and tosses the lighted match into the fireplace. ADRIENNE, who has been looking at him, follows it with her eyes, screams suddenly, and dives for the fireplace to put out the fire set to the charred, rolled remnant of a newspaper]

ADRIENNE: Steve! Look! [Rises from her knees, with the rolled newspaper in her hand. HASTINGS seizes it from her. He unrolls it frantically, looks for the upper front page. Stands perfectly still and silent for a moment. Then raises his head to look at the others, and says quietly, almost wearily:]

HASTINGS: The early edition of yesterday’s Courier.

[Silence. Then SERGE lunges for the paper]

SERGE: You’re lying!

HASTINGS: [Pushing him aside] Oh no, you don’t!

[DIXON steps to SERGE’s side. HASTINGS extends the newspaper headline toward SERGE, but at a safe distance]

See for yourself. But don’t touch it.

SERGE: It’s not the paper! It’s not the same paper! It was the last edition! I know it was! I looked for the mark when I got it! It was the last edition that I specially wanted!

HASTINGS: [Shaking his head] And that, Serge, proves I’m right about people who have good alibis.

SERGE: Who put it in that fireplace? Who burned it like this? I didn’t do that! [Whirls on INGALLS] He did it! Of course! I gave it to him! When I arrived I gave the paper to him! He changed it for this one! He put it there in the fireplace and—

HASTINGS:—and almost burned the evidence, just now, that’s going to save his life? Come on, Serge, how much do you expect me to believe?

SERGE: But I didn’t—

HASTINGS: You did. But very badly. Like all the rest of it. You were in a hurry when you started burning that paper. You were interrupted. So you stuck it there, hoping to get it later. But you couldn’t—not with my man here all night. . . . Well, I’m almost as big a fool as you are. Do you know why I took that alibi of yours seriously? Because I didn’t think you’d have the guts to pull what you pulled. You could shoot a man in the back all right. But to risk showing a paper to all those people—when your life depended on whether they’d notice the edition or not—that took the kind of courage you haven’t got. Or so I thought. I owe you an apology there.

SERGE: But you can’t prove I did it! You can’t prove this is the paper I brought!

HASTINGS: All right, produce the other one.

SERGE: You can’t convict me on that!

HASTINGS: I can have a pretty good try at it.

SERGE: [Real terror showing in his face for the first time] You’re going to—

HASTINGS: I’m going to let you explain it all to a jury.

SERGE: [Screaming] But you can’t! You can’t! Listen! I’m innocent! But if you put me on trial, they’ll kill me, don’t you understand? Not your jury! My own chiefs! All right! I am a Soviet agent! And they don’t forgive an agent who gets put on trial! They’ll kill me—my own chiefs at home! Don’t you understand? Even if I’m acquitted, it will be a death sentence for me just the same! [Pulls a gun out] Stand still, all of you!

[SERGE whirls around and rushes out through the French doors. DIXON flies after him, pulling out his gun. They disappear in the garden, as HASTINGS starts to follow them. There are two shots. After a moment, HASTINGS comes back slowly]

HASTINGS: That’s that.

HELEN: Is he dead?

HASTINGS: Yes. [Then adds:] Perhaps it’s best this way. It saves us from a long and painful trial. The case is closed. I’m glad—for all of you. [To HELEN] I hope, Mrs. Breckenridge, that when you’ve been a neighbor of ours longer, you will forgive us for giving you on your first day here—

HELEN: I shall be a neighbor of yours, Mr. Hastings—perhaps—later. Not this summer. I’m going to sell this house. Harvey and I are going to Montreal.

TONY: And I’m going to Gimbel’s.

[HASTINGS bows as HELEN exits up the stairs with TONY. FLEMING exits Right]

HASTINGS: [Walks to door Left, turns to INGALLS] It’s as I’ve always said, Steve. There is no perfect crime.

INGALLS: [Who has not moved from near the fireplace] No, Greg. There isn’t.

[HASTINGS exits Left. INGALLS turns to look at Adrienne]

ADRIENNE: What are you going to do now, Steve?

INGALLS: I’m going to ask you to marry me. [As she makes a movement forward] But before you answer, there’s something I’m going to tell you. Yesterday, when you looked at those fireworks and suddenly thought of something—it was not of me or of Helen, was it?

ADRIENNE: No.

INGALLS: I know what you thought. You see, I know who killed Walter Breckenridge. I want you to know it. Listen and don’t say anything until I finish.

[The lights black out completely. Then a single spotlight hits the center of the stage. We can see nothing beyond, only the figures of the two men in the spotlight: WALTER BRECKENRIDGE and STEVE INGALLS. BRECKENRIDGE is operating the levers of a portable electric switchboard. INGALLS stands beside him. INGALLS speaks slowly, evenly, quietly, in the expressionless tone of an irrevocable decision]

INGALLS: If, tomorrow at noon, Walter, you give this invention to the world—then, the day after tomorrow, Soviet Russia, Communist China, and every other dictatorship, every other scum on the face of the earth, will have the secret of the greatest military weapon ever invented.

BRECKENRIDGE: Are you going to start on that again? I thought we had settled it this afternoon.

INGALLS: This afternoon, Walter, I begged you. I had never begged a man before. I am not doing that now.

BRECKENRIDGE: You’re interfering with the fireworks. Drop it, Steve. I’m not interested.

INGALLS: No, you’re not interested in the consequences. Humanitarians never are. All you see ahead is lighted slums and free electric power on the farms. But you don’t want to know that the same invention and the same grand gesture of yours will also send death through the air, and blow up ammunition depots, and turn cities into rubble.

BRECKENRIDGE: I am not concerned with war. I am taking a much farther perspective. I am looking down the centuries. What if one or two generations have to suffer?

INGALLS: And so, at a desperate time, when your country needs the exclusive secret and control of a weapon such as this, you will give it away to anyone and everyone.

BRECKENRIDGE: My country will have an equal chance with the rest of the world.

INGALLS: An equal chance to be destroyed? Is that what you’re after? But you will never understand. You have no concern for your country, for your friends, for your property, or for yourself. You don’t have the courage to hold that which is yours, to hold it proudly, wisely, openly, and to use it for your own honest good. You don’t even know that that takes courage.

BRECKENRIDGE: I do not wish to discuss it.

INGALLS: You are not concerned with mankind, Walter. If you were, you’d know that when you give things to mankind, you give them also to mankind’s enemies.

BRECKENRIDGE: You have always lacked faith in your fellow men. Your narrow patriotism is old-fashioned, Steve. And if you think that my decision is so dangerous, why don’t you report me to the government?

INGALLS: There are too many friends of Serge Sookin’s in the government—at present. It’s I who must stop you.

BRECKENRIDGE: You? There’s nothing you can do about it. You’re only a junior partner.

INGALLS: Yes, Walter, that’s all I am. Sixteen years ago, when we formed our partnership and started the Breckenridge Laboratories, I was very young. I did not care for mankind and I did not care for fame. I was willing to give you most of the profits, and all the glory, and your name on my inventions—they were my inventions, Walter, mine alone, all of them, and nobody knew it outside the laboratory. I cared for nothing but my work. You knew how to handle people. I didn’t. And I agreed to everything you wanted—just to have a chance at the work I loved. You told me that I was selfish, while you—you loved people and wanted to help them. Well, I’ve seen your kind of help. And I’ve seen also that it was I, I the selfish individualist, who helped mankind by producing the Vitamin X separator and the cheap violet ray and the electric saw—[Points to machine]—and this. While you accepted gratitude for it—and ruined all those you touched. I’ve seen what you’ve done to men. It was I who gave you the means to do it. It was I who made it possible for you. It is my responsibility now. I created you—I’m going to destroy you. [BRECKENRIDGE glances up at him swiftly, understands, jerks his hand away from the machine and to his coat pocket] What are you looking for? This? [Takes the gun out of his pocket and shows it to BRECKENRIDGE. Then slips it back into his pocket] Don’t move, Walter.

BRECKENRIDGE: [His voice a little hoarse, but still assured] Have you lost your mind? Do you expect me to believe that you’re going to kill me, here, now, with a house full of people a few steps away?

INGALLS: Yes, Walter.

BRECKENRIDGE: Are you prepared to hang for it?

INGALLS: No.

BRECKENRIDGE: How do you expect to get away with it? [INGALLS does not answer, but takes out a cigarette and lights it] Stop playing for effects! Answer me!

INGALLS: I am answering you. [Indicating the cigarette] Watch this cigarette, Walter. You have as long a time left to live as it will take this cigarette to burn. When it burns down to the brand, I’m going to throw it here in the grass. It will be found near your body. The gun will be found here—with my fingerprints on it. My handkerchief will be found here on a branch. Your watch will be smashed to set the time. I will have no alibi of any kind. It will be the sloppiest and most obvious murder ever committed. And that is why it will be the perfect crime.

BRECKENRIDGE: [Fear coming a little closer to him] You . . . you wouldn’t . . .

INGALLS: But that’s not all. I’m going to let your friend Serge Sookin hang for your murder. He’s tried once to do just what I’m going to do for him. Let him take his punishment now. I’m going to frame myself. And I’m also going to frame him to look as if he’d framed me. I’ll give him an alibi—and then I’ll blow it up. Right now, he is in Stamford, buying a newspaper. But it won’t do him any good, because, at this moment, up in my room, I have an early edition of today’s Courier. Do you understand, Walter?

BRECKENRIDGE: [His voice hoarse, barely audible] You . . . Goddamn fiend . . .!

INGALLS: You wanted to know why I let you see me kissing Helen today. To give myself a plausible motive of sorts. Just the kind that would tempt a Serge to frame me. You see, I can’t let Greg Hastings guess my real motive. I didn’t know that Helen would play her part so well. I never dreamed that possible or I wouldn’t have done it. It’s the only thing that I regret.

BRECKENRIDGE: You . . . won’t . . . get away with it. . . .

INGALLS: The greatest chance I’m taking is that I must not let Greg Hastings guess the real nature of my invention. If he guesses that—he’ll know I did it. But I have to take that chance. [Looks at his cigarette] Your time is up. [Puts the butt out and tosses it aside]

BRECKENRIDGE: [In utter panic] No! You won’t! You won’t! You can’t! [Makes a movement to run]

INGALLS: [Whipping the gun out] I told you not to move. [BRECKENRIDGE stops] Don’t run, Walter. Take it straight for once. If you run—you’ll only help me. I’m a good shot—and nobody would believe that I’d shoot a man in the back. [And now this is the real STEVE INGALLS—hard, alive, taut with energy, his voice ringing—the inventor, the chance-taker, the genius—as he stands pointing the gun at BRECKENRIDGE] Walter! I won’t let you do to the world what you’ve done to all your friends. We can protect ourselves against men who would do us evil. But God save us from the men who would do us good! This is the only humanitarian act I’ve ever committed—the only one any man can ever commit. I’m setting men free. Free to suffer. Free to struggle. Free to take chances. But free, Walter, free! Don’t forget, tomorrow is Independence Day!

[BRECKENRIDGE whirls around and disappears in the dark. INGALLS does not move from the spot, only turns without hurry, lifts the gun, and fires into the darkness]

[The spotlight vanishes. Blackout]

[When the full lights come back, INGALLS is sitting calmly in a chair, finishing his story. ADRIENNE stands tensely, silently before him]

INGALLS: I’ve told you this because I wanted you to know that I don’t regret it. Had circumstances forced me to take a valuable life—I wouldn’t hesitate to offer my own life in return. But I don’t think that of Walter. Nor of Serge. . . . Now you know what I am. [Rises, stands looking at her] Now, Adrienne, repeat it—if you still want me to hear it.

ADRIENNE: [Looking at him, her head high] No, Steve. I can’t repeat it now. I said that I was inexcusably, contemptibly in love with you and had been for years. I can’t say that any longer. I will say that I’m in love with you—so terribly proudly in love with you—and will be for years . . . and years . . . and forever. . . . [He does not move, only bows his head slowly, accepting his vindication]

CURTAIN

“Do you think,” Ayn Rand said to me when I finished reading, “that I would ever give the central action in a story of mine to anyone but the hero?”

The Fountainhead (unpublished excerpts)

1938

Editor’s Preface

In 1938, after devoting about three years to architectural research, Ayn Rand started writing The Fountainhead. She finished in late 1942, and the novel was published the next year. In less than a decade, the book became world-famous; by now, it has sold more than six million copies. Ayn Rand’s own view of The Fountainhead can be found in her introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition.

For this anthology, I have selected two sets of excerpts cut by Miss Rand from the original manuscript; these are the only unpublished passages of substantial length. Both are from the early part of the novel, written in 1938. As is true of the passages from We the Living, neither has received Ayn Rand’s customary final editing, and the titles are my own invention.

“Vesta Dunning” is the story of Howard Roark’s first love affair, with a young actress, before he found Dominique. In the manuscript, the story is interwoven with other plot developments; it is offered here as a continuous, uninterrupted narrative.

Vesta Dunning is an eloquent example of a person of “mixed premises,” to use a term of Ayn Rand’s. In part, Vesta shares Howard Roark’s view of life; in part, she is a secondhander, willing to prostitute her talent in order to win the approval of others, a policy she tries to defend as a means to a noble end. Miss Rand cut Vesta from the novel, she told me, when she realized that there was too great a similarity between Vesta and Gail Wynand, the newspaper publisher (who also pursued a secondhander’s course in the name of achieving noble ends). In some respects, there is a marked similarity between Vesta and Peter Keating, too; in fact, as the material makes plain, some of Keating’s dialogue was written originally for Vesta.

“Roark and Cameron” comprises two distinct scenes involving both men. The first takes place when Roark is working in New York City for Henry Cameron, the once-famous architect who is now forgotten by the world; the second occurs some time later, at the site of the Heller house, Roark’s first commission after starting in private architectural practice on his own. Evidently, Miss Rand cut the scenes because she decided that so detailed a treatment of Roark’s relationship to Cameron was inessential to the purpose of the novel at this point—that is, the establishing of Roark’s character and the development of the plot.

Despite the intrinsic interest of this manuscript material, I have serious misgivings about publishing it. In certain respects, the scenes are inconsistent with the final novel (which may very well have contributed to their being cut). It is doubtful to me whether Roark, as presented in the novel, would have had an affair with Vesta. It is doubtful whether, in the Cameron scene, Roark would have lost his temper to the extent of punching a man. Furthermore, Roark’s statements are not always as exact philosophically as Miss Rand’s final editing would have made them. The Roark in the novel, for instance, would not have said that he is too selfish to love anyone (in the novel he says that selfishness is a precondition of love); nor would he have said, without a clearer context, that he hates the world. Aside from these specifics, the general tone of Roark’s characterization does not always seem right; without the context of the rest of the novel, he comes across, I think, as overly severe at times to Vesta, and also as overly abstracted and antisocial. Undoubtedly, this is also partly an issue of exact nuance and wording, which Miss Rand would have adjusted had she decided to retain the material.

The admirers of The Fountainhead see the novel, and Roark, as finished realities. The author obviously shared this view. I must therefore stress that the following is not to be taken as part of The Fountainhead. These scenes do not contribute to the novel’s theme or meaning, and they do not cast further light on Roark’s character or motivation. They are offered as individual, self-contained pieces, to be read as such. If I may state the point paradoxically, for emphasis: these events did not happen to Roark—they are pure fiction!

Despite my misgivings, I could not convince myself to keep the material hidden, for a single reason: it is too well written. Miss Rand told me once that she regretted having to cut the Vesta Dunning affair because it contained “some of my best writing.” This is true, and it is from this perspective that the passages are best approached. Even in this unedited material, one can see some characteristic features of Ayn Rand’s mature literary style. More than any other single attribute of her writing, her style reveals the extent of her growth in the space of a decade.

The feature of Ayn Rand’s style most apparent in these scenes is one that perfectly reflects her basic philosophy. I mean her ability to integrate concretes and abstractions.

Philosophically, Ayn Rand is Aristotelian. She does not believe in any Platonic world of abstractions; nor does she accept the view that concepts are merely arbitrary social conventions, with its implication that reality consists of unintelligible concretes. Following Aristotle, she holds that the world of physical entities is reality, and that it can be understood by man through the use of his conceptual faculty. Concepts, she holds, are not supernatural or conventional; they are objective forms of cognition based on, and ultimately making comprehensible, the facts of reality perceived by our senses. (Ayn Rand’s distinctive theory of concepts is presented in her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.) For man, therefore, the proper method of knowledge is not perception alone or conception alone, but the integration of the two—which means, in effect, the union of concretes and abstractions.

One literary expression of this epistemology is Ayn Rand’s commitment to integrating theme and plot. The plot of an Ayn Rand novel is a purposeful progression of events, not a series of random occurrences. The events add up to a general thematic idea, which is thus implicit in and conveyed by the story, not arbitrarily superimposed on it. The plot, in short, is a progression of concretes integrated by and conveying an abstraction.

The same epistemology is essential to Ayn Rand’s style of writing, whether she is describing physical nature, human action, or the most delicate, hidden emotion. The style consists in integrating the facts being described and their meaning.

Consider, for example, the following paragraph, which describes Vesta on the screen:

. . . She had not learned the proper camera angles, she had not learned the correct screen makeup; her mouth was too large, her cheeks too gaunt, her hair uncombed, her movements too jerky and angular. She was like nothing ever seen in a film before, she was a contradiction to all standards, she was awkward, crude, shocking, she was like a breath of fresh air. The studio had expected her to be hated; she was suddenly worshiped by the public. She was not pretty, nor gracious, nor gentle, nor sweet; she played the part of a young girl not as a tubercular flower, but as a steel knife. A reviewer said that she was a cross between a medieval pageboy and a gun moll. She achieved the incredible: she was the first woman who ever allowed herself to make strength attractive on the screen.

The paragraph begins with a description of Vesta’s mouth, her hair, her movements, etc. This description re-creates the concrete reality, sets the physical essentials of a young Katharine Hepburn type before us, so that we can, in effect, perceive the event (Vesta onscreen) through our own eyes. On this basis, we are offered some preliminary abstractions, giving a first layer of meaning to these facts; Vesta comes across, we learn, not as pretty, gentle, sweet, but as crude, shocking, fresh—and we accept this account, we see its inner logic, because we know the supporting facts. Then we are given some vivid images comparing Vesta to utterly different entities of a similar meaning (a steel knife, a gun moll, etc.); this helps both to keep the reality real (i.e., to keep it concrete) and to develop the meaning further. The images seem to flow naturally out of the earlier material; they do not strike us as forced or as superfluous, “literary” embellishments. Finally, after this buildup, we are given a single abstraction which unites all of it—the facts, the preliminary abstractions, the images. We are given an integrating concept, which names a definitive meaning, to carry forward with us: “. . . she was the first woman who ever allowed herself to make strength attractive on the screen.” By this time, we do not have to guess at the meaning of “strength,” even though it is a very broad abstraction; we know what is meant by it in this context, because we have seen the data that give rise to the concept here. And we believe the term; we do not feel that it is empty or arbitrary, or that we have to take the author’s word for it. We do not even feel that it is the conclusion of an extended argument (though in effect it is). We take it here virtually as a statement of the self-evident, as a statement of what we ourselves by now are ready to conclude.

This method is not, of course, repeated in every paragraph. It is applied only where the material requires it. Nor is the order of development always the same; nor are the specific steps—there may be more or fewer of them. But this kind of approach, in some form and on some level, is always present. It is one of the elements that make Ayn Rand’s writing so powerful. Concretes by themselves are meaningless, and cannot even be retained for long; abstractions by themselves are vague or empty. But concretes illuminated by an abstraction acquire meaning, and thereby permanence in our minds; and abstractions illustrated by concretes acquire specificity, reality, the power to convince. The result is that both aspects of the writing become important to the reader, who experiences at once the vividness of sensory perception and the clarity of a rational thought process.

Essential to Ayn Rand’s method is that the concretes really be concrete, i.e., perceptual. The entity or attribute must be described as the reader would actually see it if he were present. Yet, at the same time, the description must pave the way for the abstraction. The description, therefore, must be highly selective; it must dispense with all premature commentary and all irrelevant data, however naturalistic. It must present those facts, and those only, that are essential if the reader is to apprehend the scene from the angle the author requires. This demands of the writing an extreme ingenuity and purposefulness. The author must continuously invent the telling detail, the fresh perspective, the eloquent juxtaposition, that will create in the reader the awareness of a perceptual reality—which contains an implicit meaning, the specific meaning intended by the author.

As a small instance: at one point, Miss Rand wishes to convey Vesta’s feeling of helplessness in Roark’s bed, her desperate need to confess her love to him and yet at the same time to hide it because of his aloofness. Miss Rand does not describe this conflict in any such terms, which are mere generalities. She makes the conflict real by a perceptual description, at once strikingly original and yet nothing more than a selective account of an ordinary physical fact: “He listened silently to her breathless voice whispering to him, when she could not stop it: ‘I love you, Howard . . . I love you . . . I love you . . .’ her lips pressed to his arm, to his shoulder, as if her mouth were telling it to his skin, and it was not from her nor for him.” One can see the mouth on the skin as a kind of movie close-up; and implicit in the sight, in this context, is the meaning, the attempt at concealment (“and it was not from her nor for him”).

A further requirement of Ayn Rand’s method is that she use language exactly.

Miss Rand must name the precise data which lead to the abstraction, and the precise abstraction to which they lead. On either level, a mere approximation, or any touch of vagueness, will not do; such defaults would weaken or destroy the inner logic of the writing, and thereby its power and integrity. Miss Rand, therefore, is sensitive to the slightest shade of wording or connotation that might possibly be overgeneralized, unclear, or misleading; she is sensitive to any wording that might blur what she is seeking to capture. She wishes both the facts and the meaning to confront the reader cleanly, starkly, unmistakably. (Thus her scorn for those writers who equate artistry with ambiguity.)

When Roark first meets Vesta, for instance, he likes her—that is the fact—but “liking” by itself is not enough here. What is his exact feeling? “He liked that face, coldly, impersonally, almost indifferently; but sharply and quite personally, he liked the thing in her voice which he had heard before he entered.” Or, on the level of meaning: when Vesta feels Roark’s aloofness in bed, “it was as if the nights they shared gave her no rights.” The last two words are followed immediately by: “. . . not the right to the confidence of a friend, not the right to the consideration of an acquaintance, not even the right to the courtesy of a stranger passing her on the street.” Now we know what it means for her to have “no rights.”

The same use of language governs Ayn Rand’s dialogue. An admirer of her work once observed that her characters do not talk naturalistically—that is, the way people talk. They state the essence of what people mean. And they state it exactly. (This is true even of villains in her novels, who seek not to communicate, but to evade.) When Vesta feels ambivalence for Roark, as an example, there is a kind of surgical conscientiousness involved as she struggles to name it, to name the exact shade of her feeling, in all its complexity and contradiction.

Howard, I love you. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know why it should be like this. I love you and I can’t stand you. And also, I wouldn’t love you if I could stand you, if you were any different. But what you are—that frightens me, Howard. I don’t know why. It frightens me because it’s something in me which I don’t want. No. Because it’s something in me which I do want, but I’d rather not want it. . . .

Such painstaking, virtually scientific precision could by itself constitute an admirable literary style. But in Ayn Rand’s work it is integrated with what may seem to some to be an opposite, even contradictory feature: extravagant drama, vivid imagery, passionate evaluations (by the characters and the author)—in short, a pervasive emotional quality animating the writing. The emotional quality is not a contradiction; it is an essential attribute of the style, a consequence of the element of abstractions. A writer who identifies the conceptual meaning of the facts he conveys is able to judge and communicate their value significance. The mind that stops to ask about something, “What is it?” goes on to ask, “So what?” and to let us know the answer. A style describing concretes without reference to their abstract meaning would tend to emerge as dry or repressed (for example, the style of Sinclair Lewis or John O’Hara). A style featuring abstractions without reference to concretes would, if it tried to be evaluative, emerge as bombastic or feverish (for example, the style of Thomas Wolfe). In contrast to both types, Ayn Rand offers us a rare combination: the most scrupulous, subtly analyzed factuality, giving rise to the most violent, freewheeling emotionality. The first makes the second believable and worthy of respect; the second makes the first exciting.

Serious Romantic writers in the nineteenth century (there are none left now) stressed values in their work, and often achieved color, drama, passion. But they did it, usually, by retreating to a realm of remote history or of fantasy—that is, by abandoning actual, contemporary reality. Serious Naturalists of one or two generations ago stressed facts, and often achieved an impressively accurate reproduction of contemporary reality—but, usually, at the price of abandoning broad abstractions, universal meanings, value judgments. (Today’s writers generally abandon everything and achieve nothing.) By uniting the two essentials of human cognition, perception and conception, Ayn Rand’s writing (like her philosophy) is able to unite facts and values.

Ayn Rand described her literary orientation as Romantic Realism (see The Romantic Manifesto). The term is applicable on every level of her writing. For her, “romanticism” does not mean escape from life; nor does “realism” mean escape from values. The universe she creates in her novels is not a realm of impossible fantasy, but the world as it might be (the principle of Realism)—and as it ought to be (the principle of Romanticism). Her characters are not knights in armor or Martians in spaceships, but architects, businessmen, scientists, politicians—men of our era dealing with real, contemporary problems (Realism)—and she presents these characters not as helpless victims of society, but as heroes (or villains) shaped by their own choices and values (Romanticism).

“Romantic Realism” applies equally to her style. The re-creation of concretes, the commitment to perceptual fact, the painstaking precision and clarity of the descriptions—this is Realism in a sense deeper than fidelity to the man on the street. It is fidelity to physical reality as such. The commitment to abstractions, to broader significance, to evaluation, drama, passion—this is the Romanticist element.

Ayn Rand’s writing (like everyone else’s) is made only of abstractions (words). Because of her method, however, she can make words convey at the same time the reality of a given event, its meaning, and its feeling. The reader experiences the material as a surge of power that reaches him on all levels: it reaches his senses and his mind, his mind and his emotions.

Although Ayn Rand’s writing is thoroughly conscious, it is not self-conscious; it is natural, economical, flowing. It does not strike one as literary pyrotechnics (although it is that). Like all great literature, it strikes one as a simple statement of the inevitable.

The above indicates my reasons for wanting to publish these scenes. Taken by themselves as pieces of writing, “Vesta Dunning” and “Roark and Cameron” are a fitting conclusion to this survey of Ayn Rand’s early work and development.

The following is what the author of “The Husband I Bought” was capable of twelve years later.

—L. P.

Vesta Dunning

The snow fell in a thick curtain, as if a pillow were being shaken from the top windows of the tenement, and through the flakes sticking to his eyelashes, Roark could barely see the entrance of his home. He shook the iced drops from the upturned collar of his coat, a threadbare coat that served meagerly through the February storms of New York. He found the entrance and stopped in the dark hall, where a single yellow light bulb made a mosaic of glistening snakes in the melting slush on the floor, and he shook his cap out, gathering a tiny pool of cold, biting water in the palm of his hand. He swung into the black hole of the stairway, for the climb to the sixth floor.

It was long past the dinner hour, and only a faint odor of grease and onions remained in the stairshaft, floating from behind the closed, grimy doors on the landings. He had worked late. Three new commissions had come unexpectedly into the office, and Cameron had exhausted his stock of blasphemy, a bracing, joyous blasphemy ringing through the drafting room as a tonic. “Just like in the old days,” Simpson had said, and in the early dusk of the office, in the unhealthy light, in the freezing drafts from the snow piled on the window ledges there had reigned for days an air of morning and spring. Roark was tired tonight, and he went up the stairs closing his eyes often, pressing his lids down to let them rest from the strain of microscopically thin black lines that had had to be drawn unerringly all day long, lines that stood now as a white cobweb on dark red whenever he closed his eyes. But he went up swiftly, his body alive in a bright, exhilarating exhaustion, a weariness demanding action, not rest, to relieve it.

He had reached the fourth floor, and he stopped. High on the dark wall facing the smeared window, the red glow of a soda-biscuit sign across the river lighted the landing, and black dots of snowflakes’ shadows rolled, whirling, over the red patch. Two flights up, behind the closed door of his room, he heard a voice speaking.

He rose a few steps, and stood pressed to the wall, and listened. It was a woman’s voice, young, clear, resonant, and it was raised in full force, as if addressing a huge crowd. He heard, incredibly, this:

. . . but do not question me. I do not answer questions.
You have a choice to make: accept me now
or go your own silent, starless way
to an unsung defeat in uncontested battle.
I stand before you here, I am unarmed;
I offer you tonight my only weapon—
the weapon of that certainty I carry,
unchangeable, untouched and unshared.
Tomorrow’s battle I have won tonight
if you but follow me. We’ll lift together
the siege of Orleans and win the freedom
I am alone to see and to believe. . . .

The voice was exultant, breaking under an emotion it could not control. It seemed to fail suddenly in the wrong places, speaking the words not as they should have been spoken on a stage, but as a person would fling them out in delirium, unable to hold them, choking upon them. It was the voice of a somnambulist, unconscious of its own sounds, knowing only the violence and the ecstasy of the dream from which it came.

Then it stopped and there was no sound in the room above. Roark went up swiftly and threw the door open.

A girl stood in the middle of the room, with her back to him. She whirled about, when she heard the door knock against the wall. His eyes could not catch the speed of her movement. He had not seen her turn. But there she was suddenly, facing him, as if she had sprung up from the floor and frozen for a second. Her short brown hair stood up wildly with the wind of the motion. Her thin body stood as it had stopped, twisted in loose, incredible angles, awkward, except for her long, slim legs that could not be awkward, even when planted firmly, stubbornly wide apart, as they were now.

“What do you want here?” she snapped ferociously.

“Well,” said Roark, “don’t you think that I should ask you that?”

She looked at him, at the room.

“Oh,” she said, something extinguishing itself in her voice, “I suppose it’s your room. I’m sorry.”

She made a brusque movement to go. But he stepped in front of the door.

“What were you doing here?” he asked.

“It’s your own fault. You should lock your room when you go out. Then you won’t have to be angry at people for coming in.”

“I’m not angry. And there’s nothing here to lock up.”

“Well, I am angry! You heard me here, didn’t you? Why didn’t you knock?”

But she was looking at him closely, her eyes widening, clearing slowly with the perception of his face; he could almost see each line of his face being imprinted, reflected upon hers; and suddenly she smiled, a wide, swift, irresistible smile that seemed to click like a windshield wiper and sweep everything else, the anger, the doubt, the wonder, off her face. He could not decide whether she was attractive or not; somehow, one couldn’t be aware of her face, but only of its expressions: changing, snapping, jerking expressions, like projections of a jolting film that unrolled somewhere beyond the muscles of her face. He noticed a wide mouth, a short, impertinent nose turned up, dark, greenish eyes. There was a certain quality for which he looked unconsciously upon every face that passed him; a quality of awareness, of will, of purpose, a quality hard and precise; lacking it, the faces passed him unnoticed; with its presence—and he found it rarely—they stopped his eyes for a brief, curious moment of wonder. He saw it now, undefinable and unmistakable, upon her face; he liked that face, coldly, impersonally, almost indifferently; but sharply and quite personally, he liked the thing in her voice which he had heard before he entered.

“I’m sorry you heard me,” she said, smiling, still with a hard little tone of reproach in her voice. “I don’t want anyone to hear that. . . . But then, it’s you,” she added. “So I guess it’s all right.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“Yes, I think so. It is all right. What were you reciting?”

“Joan d’Arc. It’s from an old German play I found. It’s of no interest to you or anyone.”

“Where are you going to do it?”

“I’m not doing it anywhere—yet. It’s never been produced here. What I’m doing is the part of Polly Mae—five sides—in You’re Telling Me at the Majestic. Opens February the nineteenth. Don’t come. I won’t give you any passes and I don’t want you to see it.”

“I don’t want to see it. But I want to know how you got here.”

“Oh. . . .” She laughed, suddenly at ease. “Well, sit down. . . . Oh, it’s really you who should invite me to sit down.” With which she was sitting on the edge of his table, her shoulders hunched, her legs flung out, sloppily contorted, one foot twisted, pointing in, and grotesquely graceful. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I haven’t touched anything here. It’s on account of Helen. She’s my roommate. I have nothing against her, except the eight-hour working day.”

“What?”

“I mean she’s got to be home at five. I wish someone’d exploit her good and hard for a change, but no, she gets off every single evening. She’s secretary to a warehouse around here. You have a marvelous room. Sloppy, but look at the space! You can’t appreciate what it means to live in a clothes closet—or have you seen the other rooms in this house? Anyway, mine’s on the fifth floor, just below you. And when I want to rehearse in the evenings, with Helen down there, I have to do it on the stairs. You see?”

“No.”

“Well, go out and see how cold it is on the stairs today. And I saw your door half open. So I couldn’t resist it. And then, it was too grand a chance up here to waste it on Polly Mae. Did you ever notice what space will do to your voice? I guess I forgot that someone would come here eventually. . . . My name’s Vesta Dunning. Yours is Howard Roark—it’s plastered here all over the place—you have a funny handwriting—and you’re an architect.”

“So you haven’t touched anything here?”

“Oh, I just looked at the drawings. There’s one—it’s crazy, but it’s marvelous!” She was up and across the room in a streak, and she stopped, as if she had applied brakes at full speed, at the shelf he had built for his drawings. She always stopped in jerks, as if the momentum of her every movement would carry her on forever and it took a conscious effort to end it. She had the inertia of motion; only stillness seemed to require the impulse of energy.

“This one,” she said, picking out a sketch. “What on earth ever gave you an idea like that? When I’m a famous actress, I’ll hire you to build this for me.”

He was standing beside her; she felt his sleeve against her arm as he took the sketch from her, looked at it, put it back on the shelf.

“When you’re a famous actress,” he said, “you won’t want a house like that.”

“Why?” she asked. “Oh, you mean because of Polly Mae, don’t you?” Her voice was hard. “You’re a strange person. I didn’t think anyone would understand it like that, like I do. . . . But you’ve heard the other also.”

“Yes,” he said, looking at her.

“You’ve heard it. You know. You know what it will mean when I’m a famous actress.”

“Do you think your public will like it?”

“What?”

“Joan d’Arc.”

“I don’t care if they don’t. I’ll make them like it. I don’t want to give them what they ask for. I want to make them ask for what I want to give. What are you laughing at?”

“Nothing. I’m not laughing. Go on.”

“I know, you think it’s cheap and shabby, acting and all that. I do too. But not what I’m going to make of it. I don’t want to be a star with a permanent wave. I’m not good-looking anyway. That’s not what I’m after. I hate her—Polly Mae. But I’m not afraid of her. I’ve got to use her to go where I’m going. And where I’m going—it’s to the murder of Polly Mae. The end of her in all the minds that have been told to like her. Just to show them what else is possible, what can exist, but doesn’t, but will exist through me, to make it real when God failed to . . . Look, I’ve never spoken of it to anyone, why am I telling it to you? . . . Well, I don’t care if you hear this also, whether you understand it or not, and I think you understand, but what I want is . . .”

“. . . the weapon of that certainty I carry, unchangeable, untouched and unshared.”

“Don’t!” she screamed furiously. “Oh,” she said softly, “how did you remember it? You liked it, didn’t you?” She stood close to him, her face hard. “Didn’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. She was smiling. “Don’t be pleased,” he added. “It probably means that no one else will.”

She shrugged. “To hell with that.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen. Why?”

“Don’t people always ask you that when you speak of something that’s important to you? They always ask me.”

“Have you noticed that? What is it that happens to them when they grow older?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe we’ll never know, you and I.”

“Maybe.”

She saw a package of cigarettes in his coat pocket, extended her hand for it, took it out, calmly offered it to him, and took one for herself. She stood smoking, looking at him through the smoke.

“Do you know,” she said, “you’re terribly good-looking.”

“What?” He laughed. “It’s the first time I’ve ever heard that.”

“Well, you really aren’t. Only I like to look at your face. It’s so . . . untouchable. It makes me want to see you break down.”

“Well, you’re honest.”

“So are you. And terribly conceited.”

“Probably. Call it that. Why?”

“Because you didn’t seem to notice that I paid you a compliment.”

She was smiling at him openly, unconcerned and impersonal. There was no invitation, no coquetry in her face, only a cool, wondering interest. But, somehow, it was not the same face that had spoken of Joan d’Arc, and he frowned, remembering that he was tired.

“Don’t pay me any compliments,” he said, “if you want to come here again.”

“May I come here again?” she asked eagerly.

“Look, here’s what we’ll do. I’ll leave you my key in the mornings—I’d better lock the room from now on, I don’t want anyone else studying my handwriting around here—I’ll slip the key under your door. You can rehearse here all day long, but try to get out by seven. I don’t want visitors when I get home. Drop the key in my mailbox.”

She looked at him, her eyes radiant.

“It’s the nastiest way I’ve ever heard anyone offering the nicest thing,” she said. “All right, I won’t bother you again. But leave the key. It’s the third door down the hall, to the right.”

“You’ll have it tomorrow. Now run along. I have work to do.”

“Can’t I,” she asked, “be a little late some evenings and overstep the seven-o’clock deadline by ten minutes?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Goodnight, Howard.” She smiled at him from the threshold. “Thank you.”

“Goodnight, Vesta.”

In the spring, the windows of Roark’s room stood open, and through the long, bright evenings Vesta Dunning sat on a windowsill, strands of lights twinkling through the dark silhouettes of the city behind her, the luminous spire of a building far away at the tip of her nose. Roark lay stretched on his stomach on the floor, his elbows propped before him, his chin in his hands, and looked up at her and at the glowing sky. Usually, he saw neither. But she had noticed that in him long ago and had come to take it for granted, without resentment or wonder. She breathed the cool air of the city and smiled secretly to herself, to the thought that he allowed her sitting there and that he did notice it sometimes.

She had broken her deadline often, remaining in his room to see him come home; at first, because she forgot the time in her work; then, because she forgot the work and watched the clock anxiously for the hour of his return. On some evenings, he ordered her out because he was busy; on others he let her stay for an hour or two; it did not seem to matter much, in either case, and this made her hate him, at first, then hate herself—for the joy of the pain of his indifference.

They talked lazily, aimlessly, of many things, alone over the city in the evenings. She talked, usually; sometimes, he listened. She had few friends; he had none. It was impossible to predict what subject she would fling out suddenly in her eager, jerking voice; everything seemed to interest her; nothing interested him. She would speak of plays, of men, of books, of holdups, of perfumes, of buildings; she would say suddenly: “What do you think of that gas-station murder?” “What gas-station murder?” “Don’t you read the news? You should see what the Wynand papers are making of it. It’s beautiful, what an orgy they’re having with it.” “Nobody reads the Wynand papers but housewives and whores.” “Oh, but they have such nice grisly pictures!” . . . Then: “Howard, do you think that there is such a thing as infinity? Because if you try to think of it one way or the other, it doesn’t make sense—and I thought that . . .” Then: “Howard, Howard, do you still think that I’ll be a great actress someday? You said so once.” Then her voice would be low, and even, and hard, and reluctant somehow.

He noticed that this was the one thing which made her hesitant and still and drawn. When she spoke of her future, she was like an arrow, stripped to a thin shaft, poised, ready, aimed at a single point far away, an arrow resting on so taut a string that one wished it to start upon its flight before the string would break. She hated to speak of it; but she had to speak of it, and something in him forced her to speak, and then she would talk for hours, her voice flat, unfriendly, without expression, but her lips trembling. Then she would not notice him listening; and then he would be listening, and his eyes would be open, as if a shutter had clicked off, and his eyes would be aware of her, of her thin, slouched shoulders, of the line of her throat against the sky, of her twisted [pose],³ always wrong, always graceful.

She did not know that she had courage or purpose. She struggled as she was struggling because she had been born that way and she had no choice in the matter, nor the time to wonder about an alternative. She did not notice her own dismal poverty, nor her fear of the landlord, nor the days when she went without dinner. You’re Telling Me, the show which she would not allow Roark to see, had closed within two weeks. She had made the rounds of theatrical producers, after that, grimly, stubbornly, without plaints or questions. She had found no work, and it gave her no anger and no doubts.

She was eighteen, without parents, censors, or morals, and she was, indifferently and incongruously, a virgin.

She was desperately in love with Roark.

She knew that he knew it, even though she had never spoken of it. He seemed neither flattered nor annoyed. She wondered sometimes why he allowed her to see him so often and why they were friends when she meant nothing to him. Then she thought that she did mean something, but what or how she could never decide. He liked her presence, but he liked it in that strange way which seemed to tell her that he would not turn his head were she to drop suddenly beyond the window ledge. Her body grew rigid sometimes with the sudden desire to touch his arm, to run her fingers on the soft edge of the collarbone in his open shirt; yet she knew that were she to sink her fingers into his freckled skin, were she to hold that head by its orange hair, she could never hold it close enough, nor reach it, nor own it. There were days when she hated him and felt relieved at the knowledge that she could exist without needing him. She always came back, for that look of indifferent curiosity in his eyes; it was indifferent, but it was curiosity and it was directed at her. She had learned it was more than others ever drew from him.

Sometimes, in the warm spring evenings, they would go together for a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. It was a trip he liked, and she loved and dreaded. She loved to be alone with him, late at night, on a half-empty deck, with the sky black and low, pressing down to her forehead, so that she felt lost in a vast darkness, in spite of the raw lights on deck, as if she could see in the dark, and see the hard, straight, slanting line of his nose, his chin against the black water beyond them, and the night gathered in little pools on his hollow cheeks. Then he would lean against the railing and stand looking at the city, at the high pillars of twinkling dots pierced through an empty sky where no buildings could be seen or seemed to have existed. Then she knew how it would feel to die, because she did not exist then, save in the knowledge of her nonbeing, because the boat did not exist, nor the water, nothing but the man at the railing and what he saw beyond those strings of light. Sometimes, she would lean close to him and let her hand on the railing press against his; he would not move his hand away; he would do worse; he would not notice it.

In the summer, she went away for three months with the road tour of a stock company. She did not write to him and he had not asked her to write. When she returned, in the fall, he was glad to see her, glad enough to show her that he was glad; but it did not make her happy, because he showed also that he knew she would return and return exactly as she did: hard, unsmiling, hungrier for him than ever, angry and tingling under the pleasure of the contempt in his slow, understanding smile.

She managed—by losing her patience and calling a producer the names she had always wanted to call him—to get a part in a new play, that fall. It was not a big part, but she had one good scene. She let Roark come to the opening. What he saw, for six minutes on that stage, was a wild, incredible little creature whom he barely recognized as Vesta Dunning, a thing so free and natural and simple that she seemed fantastic. She was unconscious of the room, of the eyes watching her, and of all rules: her postures absurd, reversed, her limbs swinging loosely, aimlessly—and ending in the precision of a sudden gesture, unexpected and thrillingly right, her voice stopping on the wrong words, hard in tenderness, smiling in sorrow, everything wrong and everything exactly as it had to be, inevitable in a crazy perfection of her own. And for six minutes, there was no theater and no stage, only a young, radiant voice too full of its own power and its own promise. One review, on the following day, mentioned the brilliant scene of a girl named Vesta Dunning, a beginner, it stated, worth watching. Vesta cut the review out of the paper and carried it about with her for weeks; she would take it out of her bag, in Roark’s room, and spread it on the floor and sit before it, her chin in her hands, her eyes glowing; until, one night, he kicked it with his foot from under her face and across the room.

“You’re disgusting,” he said. “Why such concern over something someone said about you?”

“But, Howard, he liked me. I want them all to like me.”

He shrugged. She picked up her review and folded it carefully, but never brought it to his room again.

The play settled down for a run of many months. And as the months advanced into winter, she found herself cursing the first hit in which she had ever appeared, watching the audience anxiously each night, looking hopefully for the holes of empty seats, waiting for signs of the evening when the show would close; the evening when she would be free to sit again in Roark’s room and wait for his return from work and hear his steps up the stairs. Now she could only drop in on him, late at night, and she rushed home after the performance, without stopping to remove her makeup, ignoring the people in the subway, who stared at the bright-tan greasepaint on her face. She flew up the stairs, she burst into his room without knocking, she stood breathless, not knowing why she had had to hurry, not knowing what to do now that she was here; she stood, mascara smeared on her cheeks, her dress buttoned hastily on the wrong buttons. Sometimes he allowed her to remain there for a while. Sometimes he said: “You look like hell. Go take the filth off your face.” She resolved fiercely not to see him too often; every night, she came up, promising herself to miss the next time.

On the evenings when he was willing to stop and rest and talk to her, it was she who often broke off the conversation and left him as soon as she could. She had accepted the feeling of her disappearance, which she had known so often with him; but she could not bear the feeling of his own destruction. On those evenings, between long stretches of work, he sat there before her, he spoke, he listened, he answered her and it seemed normal and reasonable, but she felt cold with panic suddenly, without tangible cause. It was as if something had wiped them out of existence; it was as if he did not know in what position his limbs had fallen as he lay stretched on his old cot, or whether he had any limbs; he did not know his words beyond the minute. He was vague, quiet, tired. She could have faced active hatred toward her, toward the room, toward the world. But the utter void of a complete indifference made her shudder and think of things she had learned vaguely in physics, things supposed to be impossible on earth: the absolute zero, the total vacuum. Sometimes, he would stop in the middle of a sentence and not know that he had stopped. He would sit still, looking at something so definite that she would turn and follow the direction of his glance but find nothing there. Then she would guess, not see, the hint of a shadow of a smile in the hard corners of his lips. She would see the long fingers of his hand grow tense and move strangely, stretching, spreading slowly. Then it would stop abruptly, and he would raise his head and ask: “Was I saying something?”

Long in advance, she had asked him to let her celebrate the New Year with him, the two of them together, she planned, alone in his room. He had promised. Then, one night, he told her quietly: “Look, Vesta, stay away from here, will you? I’m busy. Leave me alone for a couple of weeks.”

“But, Howard,” she whispered, her heart sinking, “the New Year . . .”

“That’s ten days off. That will be fine. Come back New Year’s Eve. I’ll be waiting for you then.”

She stayed away. And through the fury of her desire for him there grew slowly a burning resentment. She found that his absence was a relief. It was a gray relief, but it was comfortable. She felt as if she were returning to a green cow pasture after the white crystal of the north pole. She went to parties with her friends from the theater, she danced, she laughed, she felt insignificant and safe. The relief was not in his absence, but in the disappearance of that feeling of her own importance which his mere presence, even his contempt gave her. Without him, she did not have to look up to herself.

She decided that she would never see him again. She made the violence of her longing for him into the violence of her rebellion. She resolved to make of the one night, which she had awaited breathlessly for so many weeks, the symbol of her defiance: she would not spend New Year’s Eve with him. She accepted an invitation to a party for that night. And at eleven o’clock, her head high, her lips set, enjoying the torture of her new hatred, she climbed firmly the stairs to his room, to tell him that she was not coming.

She knew, when she entered, that he had forgotten the day and the date. He was sitting on a low box by the window, one shoulder raised, contorted behind him, his elbow resting on the windowsill, his head thrown back, his eyes closed. She saw the fingers of his hand hanging at his shoulder, the long line of his thigh thrust forward, his knee bent, his leg stretched limply, slanting down to the floor. She had never seen him in such exhaustion. He raised his head slowly and looked at her. His eyes were not tired. She stood still under his glance. She had never loved him as in that moment.

“Hello, Vesta,” he said. He seemed a little astonished to see her. She knew, in the bright clarity of one swift instant, that she was afraid of him; not of her love for him, but of something deeper, more important, more permanent in the substance of his being. She wanted to escape it. She wanted to be free of him. She felt her muscles become rigid with the spasm of all the hatred she had felt for him in the days of his absence and felt more sharply now. She said, her voice precise, measured, husky:

“I came to tell you that I’m not staying here tonight.”

“Tonight?” he asked, astonished. “Why come to tell me that?”

“Because it’s New Year’s Eve, as of course you’ve forgotten.”

“Oh, yes. So it is.”

“And you can celebrate it alone, if at all. I’m not staying.”

“No?” he said. “Why?”

“Because I’m going to a party.” She knew, without his mocking glance, that it had sounded silly. She said through her teeth: “Or, if you want to know, because I don’t want to see you.”

He looked at her, his lower lids raised across his eyes.

“I don’t want to see you,” she said. “Not tonight or ever. I wanted you to know that. You see, here, I’m saying it to you. I don’t want to see you. I don’t need you. I want you to know that.”

He did not seem surprised by the irrelevance of her words. He understood what had never been said between them, what should have been said to make her words coherent. He sat watching her silently.

“You think you know what I think of you, don’t you?” she said, her voice rising. “Well, you don’t. It isn’t that. I can’t stand you. You’re not a human being. You’re a monster of some kind. I would like to hurt you. You’re abnormal. You’re a perverted egotist. You’re a monster of egotism. You shouldn’t exist.”

It was not the despair of her love. It was hatred and it was real. Her voice, clear and breaking, was free of him. But she could not move. His presence held her there, rooted to one spot. She threw her shoulders back, her arms taut behind her, bent slightly at the elbows, her hands closed, her wrists heavy, beating. She said, her voice choked:

“I’m saying this because I’ve always wanted to say it and now I can. I just want to say it, like this, to your face. It’s wonderful. Just to say that you don’t own me and you never will. Not you. Anyone but you. To say that you’re nothing, you, nothing, and I can laugh at you. And I can loathe you. Do you hear me? You . . .”

And then she saw that he was looking at her as he had never looked before. He was leaning forward, his arm across his knee, and his hand, hanging in the air, seemed to support the whole weight of his body, a still, heavy, gathered weight. In his eyes, she saw for the first time a new, open, eager interest, an attention so avid that her breath stopped. What she saw in his face terrified her: it was cold, bare, raw cruelty. She was conscious suddenly, overwhelmingly of what she had never felt in that room before: that a man was looking at her.

She could not move from that spot. She whispered, her eyes closed:

“I don’t want you . . . I don’t want you . . .”

He was beside her. She was in his arms, her body jerked tight against his, his mouth on hers.

She knew that it was not love and that she was to expect no love. She knew that she did not want that which would happen to her, because she was afraid, because she had never thought of that as real. She knew also that none of this mattered, nothing mattered except his desire and that she could grant him his desire. When he threw her down on the bed, she thought that the sole thing existing, the substance of all reality for her and for everyone, was only to do what he wanted.

[One] evening, Keating climbed, unannounced, to Roark’s room and knocked, a little nervously, and entered cheerfully, brisk, smiling, casual. He found Roark sitting on the windowsill, smoking, swinging one leg absentmindedly, and Vesta Dunning on the floor, by a lamp, sewing buttons on his old shirt.

“Just passing by,” said Keating brightly, having acknowledged an introduction to Vesta, “just passing by with an evening to kill and happened to think that that’s where you live, Howard, and thought I’d drop in to say hello, haven’t seen you for such a long time.”

“I know what you want,” said Roark. “All right. How much?”

“How . . . What do you mean, Howard?”

“You know what I mean. How much do you offer?”

“I . . . Fifty a week,” Keating blurted out involuntarily. This was not at all the elaborate approach he had prepared, but he had not expected to find that no approach would be necessary. “Fifty to start with. Of course, if you think it’s not enough, I could maybe . . .”

“Fifty will do.”

“You . . . you’ll come with us, Howard?”

“When do you want me to start?”

“Why . . . God! as soon as you can. Monday?”

“All right.”

Gee, Howard, thanks!” said Keating and wondered while pronouncing it why he was saying this, when Roark should have been the one to thank him, and wondered what it was that Roark always did to him to throw him off the track completely.

“Now listen to me,” said Roark. “I’m not going to do any designing. No, not any. No details. No Louis XV skyscrapers. Just keep me off aesthetics if you want to keep me at all. I have nothing to learn about design at Francon & Heyer’s. Put me in the engineering department. Send me on inspections. I want to get out in the field. That’s all I can learn at your place. Now, do you still want me?”

“Oh, sure, Howard, sure, anything you say. You’ll like the place, just wait and see. You’ll like Francon. He’s one of Cameron’s men himself.”

“He shouldn’t boast about it.”

“Well . . . that is . . .”

“No. Don’t worry. I won’t say it to his face. I won’t say anything to anyone. I won’t embarrass you. I won’t preach any modernism. I won’t say what I think of the work I’ll see there. I’ll behave. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“Oh, no, Howard, I know I can trust your good judgment, really, I wasn’t worried, I wasn’t even thinking of it.”

“Well, it’s all settled then? Goodnight. See you Monday.”

“Well, yes . . . that is . . . I . . . I’m in no special hurry to go, really I came to see you and . . .”

“What’s the matter, Peter? Something bothering you?”

“Why, no . . . I . . .”

“You want to know why I’m doing it?” Roark looked at him and smiled, without resentment or interest. “Is that it? I’ll tell you, if you want to know. I don’t give a damn where I work next. There’s no architect in town that I’d cross the street to work for. And since I have to work somewhere, it might as well be your Francon—if I can get what I want from you. Don’t worry. I’m selling myself, and I’ll play the game that way—for the time being.”

“Really, Howard, you don’t have to look at it like that. There’s no limit to how far you can go with us, once you get used to it. You’ll see, for a change, what a real office looks like. After Cameron’s, you’ll find such a scope for your talent that . . .”

“We’ll shut up about that, won’t we, Peter?”

“Oh . . . I . . . I didn’t mean to . . . I didn’t mean anything.” And he kept still. He did not quite know what to say nor what he should feel. It was a victory, but it was hollow somehow. Still, it was a victory and he felt that he wanted to feel affection for Roark.

Keating smiled warmly, cheerily, and he saw Vesta smiling in answer, in approval and understanding; but Roark would not smile; Roark looked at him steadily, his gray eyes at their most exasperating, without expression, without hint of thought or feeling.

“Gee, Howard,” Keating tried with resolute brightness, “it will be wonderful to have you with us. Just like in the old days. Just like . . .” It petered out; he had nothing to say.

“It’s wonderful of you to be doing this, Mr. Keating,” said Vesta. She was not looking at Roark.

“Oh, not at all, Miss Dunning, not at all.” It was like a shot in the arm to Keating, and the sudden, supple lift of his head was his own again, his usual own, in the manner with which he moved everywhere else. He loved Roark in that moment. “Say, Howard, how about our going out for a little drink somewhere, Miss Dunning and you and I, just sort of to celebrate the occasion?”

“Swell,” said Vesta. “I’d love to.”

“Sorry, Peter,” said Roark. “That isn’t part of the job.”

“Well, as you wish,” said Keating, rising. “See you Monday, Howard.” He looked at Roark, and his eyes narrowed, and he smiled, too pleasantly. “Nine o’clock, Howard. Do be on time. That’s one thing we insist upon. We’ve had a time clock installed for the draftsmen—my idea—you won’t mind, of course?” He swung his overcoat closed, with a swift, sweeping gesture he had learned from Francon, a gesture that seemed to display the luster of the cloth and the cost of it and everything that the cost implied. He stood buttoning it casually, with straight fingertips, not looking down at his hands. “I shall be responsible for you, Howard. You’ll be under me personally, by the way. Goodnight, Howard.”

He left. Roark lit a cigarette and sat down, one foot on the windowsill, his knee bent, his head thrown back. Vesta looked at the curve of his neck, at the smoke rising in a straight, even streak with his even breathing. She knew that he had forgotten her presence.

“Why did you have to act like that?” she snapped.

“Huh?” he asked, his eyes closed.

“Why did you have to insult Mr. Keating?”

“Oh? Did I?”

“It was darn decent of him. And he tried so hard to be friendly. I thought he’s such a nice person. Why did you have to go out of your way to be nasty? Can’t you ever be human? After all, he was doing you a favor. And you accepted it. You took it and you treated him like dirt under your feet. You . . . Are you listening to me, Howard?”

“No.”

She stood looking at him, her hands tight, grasping the cloth of her blouse at her shoulders, pulling it savagely so that she felt the collar cutting the back of her neck. She tried to think of something that would bring him to the humiliation of anger. She couldn’t. She felt the anger growing within her instead, and she forced herself to say nothing until she could keep her voice from shaking.

It was not the scene she had witnessed that made her hate him for the moment. It was something she had felt present in that scene, something in him which she could not name, the thing she dreaded, the thing she had fought—and loved—for a year.

That year of her life had given her no happiness; only bewilderment and doubts and fear; a fear underscored by rare moments of a joy which was too much to bear. . . . She never felt the distance between them as she felt it lying in his arms, in his bed. It was as if the nights they shared gave her no rights, not the right to the confidence of a friend, not the right of the consideration of an acquaintance, not even the right to the courtesy of a stranger passing her on the street. He listened silently to her breathless voice whispering to him, when she could not stop it: “I love you, Howard . . . I love you . . . I love you . . .” her lips pressed to his arm, to his shoulder, as if her mouth were telling it to his skin, and it was not from her nor for him. She could be grateful only that he heard. He never answered.

She spoke to him of his meaning to her, of her life, of every thought, every spring of her life. He said nothing. He shared nothing. He never came to her for consolation, for encouragement, not even as to a mirror to reflect him and to listen. He had never known the need of someone listening. He had never known need. He did not need her. It was this—hidden, unconfessed, unacknowledged, but present, there, there within her—which made her afraid. She would have given anything, she would have lost him happily afterwards, if only she could see once one sign, one hint of his need for her, for anything of her. She could never see it.

She asked sometimes, her arms about him: “Howard, do you love me?” He answered: “No.” She expected no other answer; somehow, the simple honesty in his voice, as he answered, the gentleness, the quiet unconsciousness of any cruelty made her accept it without hurt.

“Howard, do you think you’ll ever love anyone?”

“No.”

“You’re too selfish!”

“Oh, yes.”

“And conceited.”

“No. I’m too selfish to be conceited.”

Yet he was not indifferent to her. There were moments when she felt his attention, to her voice, to her every movement in the room, and behind his silence a question mark that was almost admiration. In such moments, she was not afraid of him and she felt closer to him than to any being in the world. Those were the moments when she did not laugh and did not feel comfortable, but felt happy instead and spoke of her work. She had had several parts after her first small success; they were not good parts and the shows had not lasted, and on some she had received no notice at all. But she was moving forward, and the more she hated the empty words she had to speak each evening in some half-empty theater, the more eagerly she could think of things she would do some day, when she reached the freedom to do them, of the women she would play, of Joan d’Arc. She found that she could speak of it to Roark, that it was easier, speaking of it to him than dreaming it secretly. His mere presence, his silence, his eyes, still and listening to her, gave it a reality she could not create alone. She was so aware of him, when she spoke of it, that she could forget his presence and yet feel it in all of her body, in the sharp, quickened, exhilarated tension of her muscles, and she could read the words of Joan d’Arc aloud, turned away from him, not seeing him, not knowing him, but reading it to him for him, with every vibration of her ecstatic voice. “Howard,” she said sometimes, breaking off her lines, her back turned to him, not feeling the necessity to face him, because he was everywhere around her, and his name was only a mechanical convention for the thing she was addressing, “there are things that are normal and comfortable and easy, and that’s most of life for all of us. And then there are also things above it, things so much more than human, and not many can bear it and then not often, but that’s the only reason for living at all. Things that make you very quiet and still and it’s difficult to breathe. Can I explain that to the people who’ve never seen it? Can I show it to them? Can I? That’s what I’ll do someday with her, with Joan d’Arc, to make them look up, up, Howard. . . . You see it, don’t you?” And when she looked at him, his eyes were wide and open to her, and in that instant there were no secrets in him hidden from her, and she knew him, knowing also that she would lose him again in a moment, and she felt that her legs could not hold her, and she was sitting on the floor, her head buried against his knees, and she was whispering: “Howard, I’m afraid of you . . . I’m afraid of myself because of you . . . Howard . . . Howard . . .” She felt his lips on the back of her neck and she felt a thing incredible from him, incredible and right, right only in that moment: tenderness.

Then she knew, not that he loved her, but that he granted her a strange value, not for him, but in herself alone, apart from him, not needing her, but admiring her. And she felt at once that this was right and what she wanted and what she loved in him, and also that it was inhuman, bewildering, cold, and not the love others called love. She felt both things, confused, inextricable, and she knew only, with a certainty beyond explanation, that she was happy in that moment and would hate him for it when the moment passed and life became normal again.

That norm, the hours succeeding one another, the days and the months, were becoming easier and pleasanter for her; the pleasanter they became the heavier was the burden of a mere thought about him. She had never had many friends, but she was acquiring them now, because people in her profession, in the producers’ offices, in the drugstores where actors gathered, were beginning to know her, to notice her and to like her. She was asked to parties, to luncheons, she was given passes to shows. He would never accompany her. He refused to meet her friends. The few whom she introduced to him told her afterwards that they had never encountered a man more unpleasant than that friend of hers . . . what was his name? Roark? who does he think he is?—even though Roark had said very little to them and had been very polite. He would go with her to the theater sometimes and would seldom enjoy the play. He would never go to a movie nor to a speakeasy, nor dance, nor accept invitations.

“What for, Vesta? I have nothing to talk about.”

“Don’t you want to meet people, to know them, to exchange ideas?”

“I know them. I haven’t any ideas to exchange.”

“Don’t you ever get bored?”

“Always. Terribly. Except when I’m alone.”

“You’re not normal, Howard!”

“No.”

“Why don’t you do something about it? It bothers everyone who meets you.”

“It doesn’t bother me.”

There had been—in all their life together—no gay memories, no tender moments to relive, no companionship, very little laughter; there had been “no fun,” she said to herself sometimes, and felt dimly guilty of the word, then angry. When she was away from him, among people, the thought of him was like a weight in her mind, spoiling the comfortable gaiety of the moment. It was like a silent reproach somewhere—and she defied it by drinking a little too much and laughing too loudly. After all, she said to herself, looking at the couples dancing around her, one could not be a Joan d’Arc all the time.

And tonight, alone with him after Keating had left, she felt the resentment rising even here, in his room, in his presence. She looked at him, angry, trying to think of how she could make him understand, angry because she knew that he understood it already, and it was useless, and no word could reach him.

“Howard, listen to me please. Why did you have to do that? Why couldn’t you be nice to Mr. Keating?”

“What have I done?”

“It isn’t what you did. It’s what you didn’t do.”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing . . . everything! Why do you hate him?”

“But I don’t hate him.”

“Well, that’s it! Why don’t you hate him at least?”

“For what?”

“Just to give him something. You can’t like anyone, so you can at least be courteous enough to show it. And kind enough.”

“I’m not kind, Vesta.”

“How do you expect to get along in the world? You have to live with people, you know. Look, I . . . I want to understand. There are two ways. You can join people or you can fight them. But you don’t seem to be doing either.”

“What is it? What are you after specifically right now?”

“Well, for instance, why couldn’t you go out with Keating for a drink? When he asked you so nicely. And I wanted to go.”

“But I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“What for?”

“Do you always have to have a purpose for everything? Do you always have to be so serious? Can’t you ever do things, just do them, without reason, just like everybody? Can’t you . . . oh, for God’s sake, can’t you be simple and silly, just once?”

“No.”

“What’s the matter with you, Howard? Can’t you be natural?”

“But I am.”

“Can’t you relax, just once in your life?”

He looked at her and smiled, because he was sitting on the windowsill, leaning sloppily against the wall, his legs sprawled, his limbs loose, in perfect relaxation.

“That’s not what I mean,” she said angrily. “That’s just sheer laziness. I don’t know whether you’re the tensest or the laziest man on earth.”

“Well, make up your mind.”

“It won’t make any difference, if I do.”

“No.”

“Howard, do you ever think of how hard this is for me?”

“No.”

“I always think of how you’ll react to everything I do.”

“Don’t. I don’t like it.”

“But it is hard for me, Howard.”

“Leave me then.”

“You want me to?”

“No. Not yet.”

“But you’d let me go, rather than do anything for me?”

“Yes.”

“Howard!”

“But you haven’t asked me to do anything for you.”

“Well . . . oh, God damn you, Howard, it’s so difficult to speak to you! I know what I want to say and I don’t know how to say it!”

“That’s because you don’t want to know what you’re really trying to say. Not yet. But I know it and I’m not going to help you say it. Because when you do say it, I’ll throw you out of here. Only it won’t be necessary. You won’t want to be here then. . . . Is that of any help?”

He had said it evenly, quietly, without emphasis or concern. She felt cold with panic. It had suddenly been too near, that possibility of losing him, and she was not prepared to face it. She stood, her hands clutching the shirt at her sides, moving convulsively through the cloth, hanging on, because she wanted to reach for him, to grasp him, to hold him. But she could not trust herself to touch him, not then, because she would betray too much. After a while, she walked to him, and then she could slip her arms gently about him and put her chin on his shoulder, her head against his.

“All right, Howard,” she whispered, “I won’t say anything. . . . Can I . . . can I congratulate you on the job, at least? I’m really terribly glad you got it.”

“Thanks.”

“Look, Howard, are you going to move out of here? I’d hate to see you go, but you can get a better place somewhere close by or maybe right in the building.”

“No. I’m staying here.”

“But on fifty a week you can afford not to live in this horrible dump. And we’ll see each other just as often.”

“I’ll need every cent of that money.”

“But why?”

“Because I won’t last there.”

She looked at him in consternation.

“Howard, why do you start in with an attitude like that? Are you planning to quit already?”

“No. They’ll fire me.”

“When?”

“Sooner or later.”

“Why will they fire you?”

“That would take much too long to explain.”

“You’re not awfully glad of the job, are you?”

“I expected it.”

“It’s pretty grand, though, isn’t it? I’ve heard of them vaguely—Francon & Heyer. They’re really awfully big and famous, aren’t they?”

“They are.”

“You could really get somewhere with them.”

“I doubt it.”

“But isn’t it going to be better than that hopeless place where you worked? Won’t you be happier in a real, important office, successful and respected and . . .”

“We’ll keep still about that, Vesta, and we’ll do it damn fast.”

“Oh, Howard!” she cried, losing all control. “I can’t talk to you at all! What’s the matter with you tonight?”

“Why tonight?”

“No, that’s true! It’s not tonight! It’s always! I can’t stand it, Howard!”

He looked at her without moving. He asked:

“What do you want?”

“Listen, Howard . . .” she whispered gently. Her fingers were rolled together in a little ball at her throat, her eyes were wide and pleading and defenseless; she had never looked lovelier. “Listen, my darling, my dearest one, I love you. I’m not reproaching you. I’m only begging you. I want you. I’ve never really had you, Howard. I want to know you. I want to understand. I’m . . . lonely.”

“I’m not a crutch, Vesta.”

“But I want you to help me! I want to know that you want to help me!”

“I wouldn’t, if I were you. If I come to wanting to help a person, I’ll not want that person nor to help any longer.”

“Howard!” she screamed. “Howard, how can you say a thing like that!”

And then she was sobbing suddenly, before she could stop it, sobbing openly, convulsively, not trying to hide the single, shameful fact of pain, sobbing with her head against the crook of his elbow. He said nothing and did not move. Her head slipped down to his hand, she pressed her face against it, she could feel her tears on the skin of his hand. The hand did not move; it did not seem alive. When she raised her head, at last, empty of tears, of sounds, even of pain, the pain swallowed under a numb stupor, only her throat still jerking silently, when she looked at him, she saw a face that had not changed, had not been reached, had no answer to give her. He asked:

“Can you go now?”

She nodded, humbly, almost indifferently, indifferent to her own pain and to the lack of answer which was such an eloquent answer. She backed slowly to the door, she went out silently, her eyes fastened to the last moment, incredulous and bewildered, upon his face, upon the vast, incomprehensible cruelty of his face.

At the end of March, a new play opened in New York and on the following morning the dramatic reviews dedicated most of their space to Vesta Dunning.

Her part was described officially as the second feminine lead, but for those who saw the opening performance there had been no leads and no other actors in the cast and hardly any play: there had been only a miracle, the impossible made real, a woman no one had ever met, yet everyone knew and recognized and believed boundlessly for two and a half hours. It was the part of a wild, stubborn, sparkling, dreadful girl who drove to despair her family and all those approaching her. Vesta Dunning streaked across the stage with her swift, broken, contorted gait; or she stood still, her body an arc, her arms flung out, her voice a whisper; or she destroyed a profound speech with one convulsed shrug of her thin shoulders; or she laughed and all the words on that stage were wiped off by her laughter. She did not hear the applause afterwards. She bowed to it, not knowing that anyone applauded her, not knowing that she bowed.

She did not hear what was said to her in the dressing room that night. She did not wait for the reviews. She ran away to find Roark, who was waiting for her at the stage door, and she seized his arm to help her stand up, but she said nothing, and they rode home in a cab, silently, not touching each other. Then, in his room, she stood before him, she looked at him, she was speaking, not knowing that she spoke aloud, words like fragments of the thing that was bursting within her:

“Howard . . . that was it . . . there it was . . . you see, I liked her . . . she’s the first one I ever liked doing . . . it was right . . . oh, Howard, Howard! It was right . . . I don’t care what they’ll say . . . I don’t care about the reviews . . . whether it runs or not, I’ve done it once . . . I’ve done it . . . and that’s the way now, Howard . . . it’s open . . . to Joan d’Arc . . . they’ll let me do it . . . they’ll let me do it someday. . . .”

He drew her close to him, and she stood while he sat, his arms tight about her, his face buried against her stomach, holding her, holding something that was not to be lost. In that moment, she forgot the fear that had been following her for days, the fear of the slow, open, inevitable growth of his indifference.

He did not tell Vesta about it for several days. He had seen her seldom in the last few months; her success was working a change in her, which he did not want to see. When he told her at last that he had lost his job, she looked at him coldly and shrugged: “It may teach you a few things for the future.”

“It did,” said Roark.

“Don’t expect me to sympathize. Whatever it was that you did, I’m sure you jolly well deserved it.”

“I did.”

“For God’s sake, Howard, when are you going to come down to earth? You can’t think that you’re the only one who’s always right and everybody else wrong!”

“I’m too tired to quarrel with you tonight, Vesta.”

“You’ve got to learn to curb yourself and cooperate with other people. That’s it, cooperate. People aren’t as stupid as you think. They appreciate real worth when there’s any to appreciate.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Stop talking as if you’re throwing sentences in the wastebasket! Stop being so damn smug! Don’t you realize what’s happened to you? You had a chance at a real career with a real, first-class firm and you didn’t have sense enough to keep it! You had a chance to get out of the gutter and you threw it away! You had to be Joan d’Arc’ish all over the place and . . .”

“Shut up, Vesta,” he said quietly.

When he came home in the evenings, Vesta was there sometimes, waiting for him. She asked: “Found anything?” When he answered, “No,” she put her arms around him and said she felt sure he would find it. But secretly, involuntarily, hating herself for it, she felt glad of his failure: it was a vindication of her own unspoken thoughts, of the new appearance the world was presenting to her, of her new security, of her reconciliation with the world, a security which he threatened, a reconciliation against which he stood as a reproach, even though he said nothing and, perhaps, saw nothing. She did not want to acknowledge these thoughts; she needed him, she would not be torn away from him. She could not tell whether he guessed. She knew only that his eyes were watching her, and he said nothing.

Vesta entered the room in a streak, without knocking, and stopped abruptly, her skirt flying in a wide triangle and flapping back tightly against her knees. She stood, her mouth half open, her hair thrown back, as she always stood—as if in a gust of wind, her thin body braced, her eyes wide, impatient, full of a flame that seemed to flicker in the wind.

“Howard! I have something to tell you! Where on earth have you been? I’ve come up three times this evening. You weren’t looking for work at this hour, were you?—you couldn’t.”

“I . . .” he began, but she went on:

“Something wonderful’s happened to me! I’m signing the contract tomorrow. I’m going to Hollywood.”

He sat silently, his arms on the table before him, and looked at her.

“I’m going as soon as the play closes,” she said, and threw her hands up, and whirled on one toe, her skirt flaring like a dancer’s. “I didn’t tell you, but they took a test of me—weeks ago—and I saw it, I don’t really look very pretty, but they said they could fix that and that I had personality and they’ll give me a chance, and I’m signing a contract!”

“For how long?” he asked.

“Oh, that? That’s nothing. It’s for five years, but it’s only options, you know, I don’t have to stay there that long.”

He snapped his finger against the edge of a sheet of newspaper and the click of his nail sent it across the table with a thin, whining crackle, like a string plucked, and he said nothing.

“Oh, no,” she said, too emphatically, “I’m not giving up the stage. It’s just to make some quick money.”

“You don’t need it. You said you could have any part you chose next year.”

“Sure. I can always have that—after those notices.”

“Next year, you could do what you’ve wanted to do.”

“I’m doing that.”

“So I see.”

“Well, why not? It’s such a chance.”

“For what?”

“Oh, for . . . for . . . Hell, I don’t see why you have to disapprove!”

“I haven’t said that.”

“Oh, no! You never say anything. Well, what’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing. Only that you’re lying.”

“How?”

“You’re not going for the money.”

“Well . . . well, for what then? And isn’t it better— whatever you mean than to go for money? I thought you wouldn’t approve of my going after money.”

“No, Vesta. You thought I might approve. That’s why you said it.”

“Well, is it all right if it’s for the money?”

“It might be. But that’s not what you’re after.”

“What am I after?”

“People.”

“What people?”

“Millions of them. Carloads. Tons. Swarms of them. To look at you. To admire you. No matter what they’re admiring you for.”

“You’re being silly. I don’t know what you’re driving at. And besides, if I make good, I don’t have to play in stupid movies. I can select my parts. I can do as much as on the stage. More. Because it will reach so many more people and . . .” He was laughing. “Oh, all right, don’t be so smart! You’ll see. I can do what I want on the screen, too. Just give me time. I’ll do everything I want.”

“Joan d’Arc?”

“Why not? Besides, it’ll help. I’ll make a name for myself, then watch me come back to the stage and do Joan d’Arc! And furthermore . . .”

“Look, Vesta, I’m not arguing. You’re going. That’s fine. Don’t explain too much.”

“You don’t have to look like a judge dishing out a life sentence! And I don’t care whether you approve or not!”

“I haven’t said I didn’t.”

“I thought you’d be glad for me. Everybody else was. But you have to spoil it.”

“How?”

“Oh, how! How do you always manage to spoil everything? And here I was so anxious to tell you! I couldn’t wait. Where on earth have you been all evening, by the way?”

“Working.”

“What? Where?”

“In the office.”

“What office? Have you found a job?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“Oh! . . . Well, how nice. . . . Doing what?”

“Well, what do you suppose?”

“Oh, you got a real job? With an architect? So you found one to take you after all?”

“Yes.”

“Well . . . it’s wonderful . . . I’m awfully glad. . . . Oh, I’m awfully glad. . . .” She heard her own voice, flat and empty and with a thin, strange, distant note in it, a note that was anger without reason; she wondered whether it sounded like that to him also. She said quickly: “I hope you’re set this time. I hope you’ll be successful someday—like everybody else.”

He leaned back and looked at her. She stood defiantly, holding his eyes, saying nothing, flaunting her consciousness of the meaning of his silence.

“You’re not glad that I got it,” he said. “You hope I won’t last. That’s the next best to the thing you really hope—that I’ll be successful someday like everybody else.”

“You’re talking nonsense. I don’t know what you’re saying.”

He sat, looking at her, without moving. She shrugged and turned away; she picked up the newspaper and flipped its pages violently, as if the loud crackling could shut out the feeling of his eyes on her.

“All right,” he said slowly. “Now say it.”

“What?” she snapped, whirling around.

“What you’ve wanted to say for a long time.”

She flung the newspaper aside. She said: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Say it, Vesta.”

“Oh, you’re impossible! You’re . . .” And then her voice dropped suddenly, and she spoke softly, simply, pleading: “Howard, I love you. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know why it should be like this. I love you and I can’t stand you. And also, I wouldn’t love you if I could stand you, if you were any different. But what you are—that frightens me, Howard. I don’t know why. It frightens me because it’s something in me which I don’t want. No. Because it’s something in me which I do want, but I’d rather not want it, and . . . Oh, you can’t understand any of it!”

“Go on.”

“Yes, damn you, you do understand! . . . Oh, don’t look at me like that! . . . Howard, Howard, please listen. It’s this: you want the impossible. You are the impossible yourself—and you expect the impossible. I can’t feel human around you. I can’t feel simple, natural, comfortable. And one’s got to be comfortable sometime! It’s like . . . like as if you had no weekdays at all in your life, nothing but Sundays, and you expect me always to be on my Sunday behavior. Everything is important to you, everything is great, significant in some way, every minute, even when you keep still. God, Howard, one can’t stand that! It becomes unbearable . . . if . . . if I could only put it into words!”

“You have. Very nicely.”

“Oh, please, Howard, don’t look like that! I’m not . . . I’m not criticizing you. I understand. I know what you want of life. I want it too. That’s why I love you. But, Howard! You can’t be that all the time! God, not all the time! One’s got to be human also.”

“What?”

“Human! One has to relax. One gets tired of the heroic.”

“What’s heroic about me?”

“Nothing. Everything! . . . No, you don’t do anything. You don’t say anything. I don’t know. It’s only what you make people feel in your presence.”

“What?”

“The abnormal. The overnormal. The strain. When I’m with you—it’s always like a choice. A choice between you—and the rest of the world. I don’t want such a choice. I’m afraid because I want you too much—but I don’t want to give up everybody, everything. I want to be a part of the world. They like me, they recognize me now, I don’t want to be an outsider. There’s so much that’s beautiful in the world, and gay and simple and pleasant. It’s not all a fight and a renunciation. It doesn’t have to be. It is—with you.”

“What have I ever renounced?”

“Oh, you’ll never renounce anything. You’ll walk over corpses for what you want. But it’s what you’ve renounced by never wanting it. What you’ve closed your eyes to—what you were born with your eyes closed to.”

“Don’t you think that perhaps one can’t have one’s eyes open to both?”

“Everybody else can! Everybody but you. You’re so old, Howard. So old, so serious. . . . And there’s something else. What you said about my going after people. Look, Howard, don’t other people mean anything to you at all? I know, you like some of them and you hate others, but neither really makes much difference to you. That’s what’s horrifying. Everyone’s a blank around you. They’re there, but they don’t touch you in any way, not in any single way. You’re so closed, so finished. It’s unbearable. All of us react upon one another in some way, I don’t mean that we have to be slaves of others, or be influenced, or changed, no, not that, but we react. You don’t. We’re aware of others. You’re not. You don’t hate people—that’s the ghastliness of it. If you did—it would be simple to face. But you’re worse. You’re a fiend. You’re the real enemy of all mankind—because one can’t do anything against your kind of weapon—your utter, horrible, inhuman indifference!”

She stood waiting. She stood, as if she had slapped his face and triumphantly expected the answer. He looked at her. She saw that his lips were opening wide, his mouth loose, young, easy; she could not believe for a moment that he was laughing. She did not believe what he said either. He said:

“I’m sorry, Vesta.”

Then she felt frightened. He said very gently:

“I didn’t want it to come to this. I think I knew also that it would, from the first. I’m sorry. There are chances I shouldn’t take. You see—I’m weak, like everybody else. I’m not closed enough nor certain enough. I see hope sometimes where I shouldn’t. Now forget me. It will be easier than it seems to you right now.”

“You . . . you don’t mean for me . . . to leave you?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, no, Howard! Not like that! Not now!”

“Like that, Vesta. Now.”

“Why?”

“You know that.”

“Howard . . .”

“I think you know also that you’ll be glad of it later. Maybe tomorrow. Just forget me. If you want to see me affected by someone else—well, I’ll tell you that I’m sorry.”

“No, you aren’t. Not to lose me.”

“No. Not any more. But to see what will happen to you . . . no. Not that either. But this: to see what will never happen to you.”

“What?”

“That is what you don’t want to know. So forget it.”

“Oh, Howard! Howard . . .”

Her voice broke, as the consciousness of what had happened, like a blow delayed, reached her at last. She stood, her shoulders drooping forward, her hands hanging uselessly, awkwardly, suddenly conscious of her hands and not knowing where to put them, her body huddled and loose, looking at him, her eyes clear and too brilliant, her mouth twisted. She swallowed slowly, with a hard effort, as if her whole energy had gone into the movement of her throat, into the purpose of knowing that her throat could be made to move. It was a bewilderment of pain, helpless and astonished, as an animal wondering what had happened, knowing only that it was hurt, but not how or why, puzzled that it should be hurt and that this was the shape of pain.

“Howard . . .” she whispered softly, as simply as if she were addressing herself and no stress, no emotion, no clarity of words were necessary. “It’s funny . . . what is it? . . . It couldn’t happen like this . . . and it did . . . I think I’m hurt, Howard . . . terribly . . . I want to cry or do something . . . and I can’t. . . . What is it? . . . I can’t do anything before you . . . I want to say something . . . I should . . . it doesn’t happen like this . . . and I can’t . . . It’s funny . . . isn’t it? . . . You understand?”

“Yes,” he said softly.

“Are you hurt too?” she asked, suddenly eager, as if she had caught at the thread of a purpose. “Are you? Are you? You must be!”

“Yes, Vesta.”

“No, you aren’t! You don’t say it as it would sound if you . . . You can’t be hurt. You can never be hurt!”

“I suppose not.”

“Howard, why? Why do this? When I need you so much!”

“To end it before we start hating each other. You’ve started already.”

“Oh, no, Howard! No! I don’t! Not now! Can’t you believe me?”

“I believe you. Not now. But the moment you leave this room. And at every other time.”

“Howard, I’ll try . . .”

“No, Vesta. Those things can’t be tried. You’d better go now.”

“Howard, can’t you feel . . . sorry for me? I know, it’s a terrible thing to say. I wouldn’t want it from anyone else. But that . . . that’s all I can have from you. . . . Howard? Can’t you?”

“No, Vesta.”

She spread her hands out helplessly, still wondering, a bewildered question remaining in her eyes, and moved her lips to speak, but didn’t, and turned, small, awkward, uncertain, and left.

She walked down the stairs and knew that she would cry in her room, cry for many hours. But one sentence he had spoken came back to her, one sentence clear and alone in the desolate emptiness of her mind: “You’ll be glad of it later. Maybe tomorrow.” She knew that she was glad already. It terrified her, it made the pain sharper. But she was glad.

He had not seen Vesta again before she left for California. She did not write to him and he had long since forgotten her, except for wondering occasionally, when passing by a movie theater, why he’d heard of no film in which she was to appear. Hollywood seemed to have forgotten her also; she was given no parts.

Then, in the spring, he saw her picture in the paper; she stood, dressed in a polka-dot bathing suit, holding coyly, unnaturally a huge beach ball over her head; except for the pose, it was still Vesta, the odd, impatient face, the wild hair, the ease and freedom in the lines of the body; but one had to look twice to notice it; the photograph was focused upon her long, bare legs, as all the photographs appearing in that corner of that section had always been. The caption read: “This cute little number is Sally Ann Blainey, Lux Studio’s starlet. Before she was discovered by Lux scouts, Miss Blainey achieved some measure of distinction on the Broadway stage, where she was known as Vesta Dunning. The studio bosses, however, have given her a less ungainly name.” It was not mentioned when she would be put to work.

“Child of Divorce” was released in January 1927, and it made film history. It was not an unusual picture and it starred an actor who was quite definitely on his downgrade, but it had Sally Ann Blainey in a smaller part. Lux Studios had not expected much of Sally Ann Blainey; she had not been advertised, and a week after the picture’s completion her contract had been dropped. But on the day after the film’s release, she was signed again, on quite different terms, and her name appeared in electric lights upon the marquees of theaters throughout the country, over that of the forgotten star.

Roark went to see the picture. It was still Vesta, as he had seen her last. She had lost nothing and learned nothing. She had not learned the proper camera angles, she had not learned the correct screen makeup; her mouth was too large, her cheeks too gaunt, her hair uncombed, her movements too jerky and angular. She was like nothing ever seen in a film before, she was a contradiction to all standards, she was awkward, crude, shocking, she was like a breath of fresh air. The studio had expected her to be hated; she was suddenly worshiped by the public. She was not pretty, nor gracious, nor gentle, nor sweet; she played the part of a young girl not as a tubercular flower, but as a steel knife. A reviewer said that she was a cross between a medieval pageboy and a gun moll. She achieved the incredible: she was the first woman who ever allowed herself to make strength attractive on the screen.

For a few moments after he left the theater, Roark almost wished to have her back. But he forgot it by the time he got home. Afterwards, he remembered, sometimes, that magnificent performance; he wondered whether he had been wrong and she would win her battle, after all; but he could no longer feel it as a thing too close to him.

Roark and Cameron

In the daytime, Cameron’s feelings were not expressed in any way, save, perhaps, in the fact that he seldom called Roark by name. “Here, pokerface,” he would say, “get this done and step on it.” “Look, carrot-top, what in hell did you mean by this? Lost your senses, have you?” “That’s great. That’s splendid. Excellent. Now throw it in the wastebasket and do it over again, you damned icicle.” Loomis was baffled and Simpson scratched his head, wondering: a casual familiarity toward an employee was not a thing that Simpson had ever observed in his forty years of service with Cameron.

At night, when the work was done and the others had gone, Cameron asked Roark, sometimes, to remain. Then they sat together for hours in his dim office, and Cameron talked. The radiators of the building were usually out of order and Cameron had an old Franklin heater burning in the middle of the room. He would pull his chair to the heater, and Roark would sit on the floor, the bluish glow of the flame upon the knuckles of his hands clasping his knees. When he spoke, Cameron was no longer an old man starving slowly in an office near the Battery; nor was he a great architect scorning his vain competitors; he was the only builder in the world and he was reshaping the face of America. His words pressed down like the plunger of a fuse box setting off the explosion; and the explosion swept out the miles, the thousands of miles of houses upon which every sin of their owners stood written as a scar, as a sore running in crumbling plaster; the houses like mirrors, flaunting to the streets the naked soul of those within and the ugliness of it; the vanity, gathering soot upon twisted, flowered ledges, the ostentation, swelling like a goiter in bloated porches, the fear, the fear of the herd, cringing under columns stuck there because all the neighbors had them, the stupidity, choking in fetid air under the gables of garrets. After the explosion, his voice, his hands moving slowly as he spoke, like planes smoothing unseen walls, raised broad, clean streets and houses in the likeness of what those within should be and would be made to become by these houses: straight and simple and honest, wise and clear in their purpose, copying nothing, following nothing but the needs of those living within—and let the needs of no [one] living be those of his neighbor! To give them, Cameron was saying, what they want, but first to teach them to want—to want with their own eyes, their own brains, their own hearts. To teach them to dream—then give the dream to them in steel and mortar, and let them follow it with dreams in muscle and blood. To make them true, Howard, to make them true to themselves and give them the selves, to kill the slave in them, Howard, Howard, don’t you see?—the slaves of slaves served by slaves for the sake of slaves!

He was the only builder in the world, as he spoke, but even he was not there, in that room, nor the boy who sat, taut and silent, at his feet; only that thing, that truth trembling in his hard voice, was present; he spoke of that alone and, speaking of it, he made real, tangible in the dark room, his own being and that of the boy. The heater hissed softly, with little puffing, choked explosions. The two lines on Cameron’s face stood out like black gashes on the lighted patches of his cheeks, two patches floating upon the blackness that swallowed his forehead, his eyes, his beard. There was, turned up to him from the dark, a wedge of soft, living gold cut by the fringe of long lashes, then darkness again like a soft black stone and, rising upon it, a luminous vein in the stone cut as a cameo, a chin with a long mouth, a speck of fire trembling on the lower lip.

He never spoke again of his past nor of Roark’s future. He never said why he talked to him thus through the long winter evenings, admitting no questions and no wonder upon it, not saying what necessity drove him to speak nor what granted Roark the right to listen. He never said whether he cared for Roark’s presence there or in the world, whether it mattered to him that Roark heard or existed. Only once did he say suddenly, at the end of a long speech: “. . . and, yes, it may seem strange to give a life for the sake of steel skeletons and windows, your life also—my dearest one—because it’s necessary. . . .” He had gone on to speak about windows, and he had never said it again.

But in the mornings, as Cameron entered his office sharply on the dot of nine, he would stop first at the door of the drafting room, throw a long, sharp glance at the men, then slam the door behind him. Loomis had said once, not suspecting the accuracy of what he thought to be a good joke, that Cameron had the look of a man who’d seen a miracle and wanted to make sure it hadn’t gone.

Then came the morning when Cameron was late. The clock on the wall of the drafting room was moving past the mark of ten, and Roark noticed that Loomis and Simpson were exchanging glances, silent, significant glances heavy with a secret he did not share. Loomis clucked his tongue once, looking at the clock, with a wet, bitter, mocking sound. Simpson sighed heavily and bent over his table, his old head bobbing softly up and down several times, in hopeless resignation.

At half past ten, Trager shuffled into the drafting room and stood on the threshold, seeing nobody.

“Mr. Darrow calling,” he said to no one at all, the sounds of his voice like a string of precision dancers, all stiff and all alike, “says something awful’s happened at the Huston Street job and he’s going down there and for Mr. Cameron to meet him there at once. I guess one of you guys will have to go.”

Darrow was the consulting structural engineer on the Huston Street job, and such a message from him went like a cold gust through the room. But it was the “I guess” that seemed to leap out of Trager’s words, weighted with the secret meaning of why he guessed so and of why he expected them to know it. Loomis and Simpson looked helplessly at one another, and Loomis chuckled. Roark said brusquely, not knowing what had put anger into his voice: “Mr. Cameron said yesterday that he was going to inspect the Huston Street job. That’s probably why he’s late. Tell Darrow that he’s on his way there now.”

Loomis whistled through his teeth, and it seemed to Roark that the sound was laughing, bursting like steam from under tons of pressure of contempt. Trager would not move, would not look at Roark, but glanced slowly at the others. The others had nothing to say.

“Okay,” said Trager, at last, to Roark, a flat, short sound concentrating within it a long sentence, saying that Trager would obey, because he didn’t give a damn, even though he hadn’t believed a single word of Roark’s, because Roark knew better, or should. Trager turned and shuffled back to his telephone.

Half an hour later, he returned.

“Mr. Darrow calling from Huston Street,” he said, his voice dull and even and sleepy, as if he were reporting on the amount of new pencils to be ordered, “he says to please send someone over and pour Mr. Cameron out of there, also to see what’s to be done.”

In the silence, Roark’s T-square clattered loudly to the floor. The three men looked at him, and Loomis grinned viciously, triumphantly. But there was nothing to be seen on Roark’s face. Roark turned to Trager slowly.

“I’m going there,” said Roark.

“No, I guess you can’t,” mumbled Simpson. “I guess I gotta go.”

“What can you do there?” Loomis snapped at Roark, more insolently than he had ever dared before. “What in hell do you know about construction? Let Simpson go.”

“I’m going,” said Roark.

He had his coat and cap on, he was out, before the others knew what to say; they knew also that they had better keep quiet.

Roark jumped into a cab, ordering: “Step on it! Fly, go through the lights!” He had in his pocket five dollars and forty-six cents, saved painstakingly from seven months of work. He hoped it would be enough to pay for the cab.

The Huston Street job was a twenty-story office building in a squalid block of lofts. It was the most important commission that Cameron had had for a long time. He had said nothing about it, but Roark knew that it was precious to the old master as a newborn child, as a first son. Once again, Cameron thought, he had a chance to show the indifferent city what he could do, how cheaply, how efficiently he could do it. Cameron, the bitter, the cynical, the hater of all men, had never lost the expectation of a miracle. He kept waiting, saying to himself always, “Next time,” next time someone would see, next time the men who spent fortunes on grocery displays of marble vegetables and cursed the twisted, botched space within would realize the simplicity, the economy, the wisdom of his work, would come to him if he gave them but one more example. The example was granted to him again. And Cameron, who cursed all builders and owners, who laughed in their faces, prayed now that nothing would go wrong with the Huston Street job. Everything had gone wrong with it from the beginning.

The structure was owned by two brothers. It was the younger one who had insisted upon choosing Cameron as the architect, because he had seen Cameron’s old buildings and a glimmer of sense had settled itself stubbornly within his brain; it was the older who had resented it, while giving in, had doubted the choice, and had selected as contractor for the building an old friend of his, who had little reputation but much contempt for architects. It had been a silent, vicious war from the beginning, with the contractor disregarding Cameron’s orders, botching instructions, ignoring specifications, then running to the owners with complaints against ignorant architects whom he intended to teach a thing or two about building. The owners always took the side of the contractor, who was, they felt certain, protecting their interests against malignant strangers. There had been delays. There had been strikes among the building workers, due to unfair, planless, purposeless management. The delays cost money. It was not Cameron’s fault, but there was no court before which he could prove it. The court that passed judgment upon him would be the spreading whispers: “Oh, yeah, Cameron. He starts with a budget of four hundred thousand and it’s six hundred before the steel’s up. Have you heard what that building of his down in Huston Street has cost?”

Roark thought of that as the cab whirled into Huston Street. Then he forgot it for a moment, forgot Cameron, forgot everything else. He was looking at a cage of steel rising in a gash between streaked, sooted brick walls. There it was, steel columns pointing at the sky, gray arches of floors mounting like even shelves, tangled in wires, in ropes and cables and grimy planks, with scaffoldings clinging to its empty flanks, gray overalls burrowing through its bowels, derricks like fountains of iron flung up from its veins. It was only a raw chaos of beams to those passing it in the street, but Roark thought that those on the street had the narrow, dissecting eyes of the X-ray marking nothing save bones, while he saw the whole body completed, the shape of living flesh, the walls, the angles, the windows. He could never look at the structure of a building, which he had seen born in lines and dots and squares upon a piece of paper, without feeling his throat tighten, his breath plunge to his stomach, and the silly desire, dim and real in his hand, to take his hat off. His fingers tightened on the edge of the cab window. When the car stopped, he got out supplely, he walked to the building swiftly, confidently, his head high and light as if he were coming home, as if the steel hulk were gathering assurance from him and he—from its naked beams. Then, he stopped.

Cameron stood leaning against the boards of the superintendent’s shanty. Cameron was erect, with an air of self-possessed, utter, terrifying dignity. Only his eyes, dun, swimming, unfocused, were blinking at Roark with a heavy, offensive persistence.

“Who are you?” asked Cameron.

The voice, thick, blurred, spongy, was not one that Roark had ever heard.

Cameron lunged towards him, swayed, stretched an arm to hold on to the wall, stood uncertainly, the weight of his short, thick body sagging suspended to his arm, with five stubby fingers spread on the planks, like leeches sucking into wood.

“Hey, you,” he said to Roark softly, waving a limp finger in his face, “I’ll tell you something. I’ve got something to tell you. It’s on account of the drill. You know the drill? It drills a little hole, so softly, it purrs like a bee in springtime, it drills right down through your throat, through your stomach, through the earth below, there’s no bottom to that hole, no end, no stopping. There’s a hole in the earth and it widens all the time and things whirl in it, spirals, widening. It hurts so very terribly . . . I know a fellow who’s hurt so much that I hear him screaming all the time. But I don’t know him very well. . . . That’s why I’ve got something to tell you. If you’re looking at this thing here behind us, go and get a good laugh. It’s wonderful what they’ve done to it. But walk carefully, there’s spirals in the ground, widening . . . you see? . . .”

“Mr. Cameron,” said Roark softly, “sit down.” His strong hands closed over the old man’s forearms, forcing him gently down upon a pile of planks. Cameron did not resist; he sat, looking up, muttering feebly: “That’s funny . . . very funny . . . I know someone who looks just like you. . . .”

Then Roark noticed the men who stood watching him curiously. Among them, he saw Darrow, a lanky, stooped, elderly giant with an impassive face; and the contractor’s chief estimator, a muscular individual with his hands in his pockets, a pale, puffed face, a dab of mustache in the too wide space between his nose and mouth. He knew the contractor’s estimator; Cameron had thrown him out of his office two weeks ago, concluding the last of his too frequent visits.

“What’s happened here?” Roark asked.

“Oh, what the hell!” said the estimator. “Darrow’s been calling your place all morning and then this shows up all of a sudden!” He jerked his thumb at Cameron.

“What were you calling about? Where’s the trouble?”

“Well, Roark, I don’t know if you can do anything about it . . .” Darrow began, but the estimator interrupted him.

“Aw, what the hell! We got no time to waste explaining to punk kids!”

Roark was looking at Darrow.

“Well?” Roark asked, and the question was a command.

“It’s the concrete,” said Darrow impassively. “The penthouse, the elevator machinery-room floor arches. It’s running under test. It won’t stand the load. I told the bastards not to pour it in this weather. But they went right ahead. Now it’s set. And it’s no good. What are you going to do about it?”

Roark stood, his head thrown back, looking at the gray shadow of the penthouse among the gray clouds far away. Then he turned to the estimator.

“Well?” Roark asked.

“Well, what?” the estimator snapped, and added, his voice whining: “Aw, we couldn’t help it!”

“Talk fast,” said Roark.

“Aw, what the hell! We were behind schedule and the boss was stepping on us and the old man’s sniveling about all the dough this thing’s costing him as it is, and so we figured we’d save time, what the hell, nothing’s ever happened before, and anyway you know how concrete is, it’s a killer, you never can tell how the damn stuff will set, it’s not our fault, it can happen to anybody, we couldn’t help it. . . . And anyway, if your damn drawings weren’t so damn fancy, we could’ve . . . A good architect’d know how to fix it up, even if . . .” His voice just petered out before the eyes that faced him.

“Well, what’s the use of bellyaching now?” the estimator snapped as Roark said nothing. “I say, let it go. It’ll stand all right. If Darrow here wasn’t so damn finicky . . . And anyway, it’s a fine time to be getting soused on us! What can you expect with the kind of fine architect we got around here?”

“Look, Roark,” Darrow said quietly, “the work’s held up. Someone’s got to decide.”

Behind them, Cameron burst into laughter suddenly, a high, monotonous, senseless, agonized laughter. He was still sitting there, on the planks, and he looked up, and his face seemed contorted, even though not a muscle of it moved.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, staring at Roark, his eyes stubbornly insistent and disturbed. “That’s what I want to know, what you’re doing here. You look funny. You look damn funny. I like your face, do you know that? Yes, I like it. Look, get out of here. You should be home. You should be home and in bed. You don’t feel well. Look, don’t worry about what you see here, about this . . .” He waved his arm vaguely at the building. “It’s no use. It’s absolutely no use. It doesn’t matter. Also they have a drill in there. You don’t see it, but that’s because they’re clever, they’ve hidden it. What do you want to get hurt for? It doesn’t matter anyway.”

“There!” said the estimator triumphantly. “See?”

Cameron sat, breathing heavily, wisps of steam trembling from his open mouth up into the frozen air, his stiff, cold fingers convulsed on the edge of a plank, and he looked up at the men.

“You think I’m drunk, don’t you?” he asked, his eyes narrow and sly. “You damn fools! All of you, the red-headed one in particular! You think I’m drunk. That’s where you’re wrong. This is the time when I’m sober. The only time. And then I can have peace. Otherwise, I’m drunk always. Drunk all the time. Seeing things that don’t exist. Me, I drink to stop the DT’s. I drink to see clearly for once. To know that it doesn’t matter . . . Nothing. . . . Not at all. . . . It’s so easy. Drink to learn to hate things. I’ve never felt better in my life.”

“Pretty, ain’t it?” said the estimator.

“Shut up,” said Darrow.

“God damn you all!” the estimator screamed suddenly. “We wouldn’t have had any trouble if they’d hired a real architect! That’s what happens when people get charitable and pick out a worthless bum who’s never been any good, an old drunk who . . .”

Roark turned to him. Roark’s arm went back and down, and then forward slowly, as if gathering the weight of air upon the crook of his elbow; it was only a flash, but it seemed to last for minutes, the movement stopped, the taut arm motionless in speed, and then his knuckles shot up, to the man’s jaw, and the estimator was on the ground, his knees bent, upturned, his hand on his cheek. Roark stood, his legs spread apart, his arms hanging indifferently by his sides.

“Let’s go up,” said Roark, turning to Darrow. “Get the superintendent. I’ll tell you what’s to be done.”

They went inside the structure, behind them Cameron staring stupidly ahead and the estimator scrambling slowly to his feet, dusting himself, muttering to no one: “Aw, what the hell, I didn’ mean no harm, what the hell, you can’t do that to me, you son of a bitch, I’ll get you canned for this, I didn’ mean no harm . . .”

The construction superintendent followed Roark and Darrow to the elevator, silently, reluctantly, glancing dubiously at Roark. The elevator—a few planks with a precarious railing—shot upward along the side of the building, swaying, shuddering, its cables creaking. The pavements dropped below them, the tops of automobiles descending softly down into an abyss till only flat little squares remained, flowing evenly through the thin channels of streets; the windows of houses streamed down, past them, and roofs flashed by, as flat breaks in the stream, as pedals pressing the houses down, out of the way of their flight. The superintendent picked his teeth thoughtfully; Darrow held on to the wooden railing; Roark stood, his hand closed about a cable, his legs apart, and looked at the structure, at the layers of floor arches flying past.

Twenty floors above the pavement, they stepped out onto a gray mat of concrete in the open cages that were to be the penthouse. “You can see,” Darrow was saying, “it’s worse than the tests showed.”

Roark saw it at once, the odd gray color of the concrete, not the healthy, normal gray of the floors below; he could hear it with his eyes, the cry of warning, the alarm bell rising from the cold, hard, flat stretch of gray under his feet. It was as a disease written upon the skin of this thing he loved, this thing delivered suddenly to his care, and he stood over it as a doctor too sure of the symptoms when he had not wanted to be sure. He ran his fingers over the cold edge of a column encased in that treacherous gray; softly, absently, as if caressing the hand of a precious patient in sympathy, in understanding, in reassurance, to give comfort and to gain it in return.

“Well, Mr. Roark?” the superintendent asked. “What’s going to happen?”

“Just this,” said Roark. “When you get your elevator machinery up here, it will go straight through this, straight down to the basement.”

“But, Jesus! What’re we going to do now?”

Roark walked away from the two men, who stood watching him; he walked slowly, his eyes taking in every column, every beam, every foot of space, his steps ringing hard and hollow against the naked concrete. Then he stopped; he stood, his hands in his pockets, his collar raised, a tall figure against the empty gray sky beyond, one strand of red hair fluttering under his old cap. It was up to him, he thought, and each hour counted, each hour adding to that cost that stood as a monster somewhere, leering at them all; to do it over, to remove that concrete—it would mean two weeks of blasting to destroy one day’s work, of blasting that might shake the building to its roots, if it could stand the strain at all. He would have to let the concrete remain, he thought, and then he would have to devise supports for these floors—when so little space was available, when every foot of it had been assigned to a purpose in the strict, meticulous economy of Cameron’s plan. To devise it somehow, he thought, and to change nothing, not to alter one foot, one line of the building’s silhouette, of its crown, of its proud profile, that had to be as Cameron had wished it to be, as each clear, powerful, delicate line rising from the ground demanded it to be. To decide, he thought, to take that into his hands, Cameron’s work, to save it, to put his own thoughts irrevocably into steel and mortar—and he was not ready for that, he could not be ready. But it was only one part of him that thought this, dimly, not in words and logic, only as a twisted little ball of emotion in the pit of his stomach, a ball that would have broken into these words had he stopped to unravel it. He did not stop. The ball was only driving on the rest of him, and the rest of him was cold, clear, precise.

He stood without moving for a long time. Then he seized a piece of board from the ground and a pencil from his pocket. He stood, one foot resting on a pile of planks, the board on his knee, his hand flashing in swift, straight jerks, the outlines of steel supports rising on the wood. He sketched for a long time. The two men walked to him, stood watching his hand silently from behind his shoulder. Then, as the scheme became clear, it was the superintendent who spoke first, to gasp incredulously: “Jesus! It’ll work! So that’s what you’re driving at!” Roark nodded and went on.

When he had finished, he handed the board to the superintendent, saying briefly, unnecessarily, because the crude, hurried lines on the board said everything: “Take the columns you have stored down below . . . put supports here . . . see? . . . and here . . . you clear the elevator shafts like this, see? . . . and here . . . clear the conduits . . . there’s the general scheme.”

“Jesus!” said the superintendent, frightened and delighted. “It’s never been done that way before.”

“You’re going to do it.”

“It’ll hold,” said Darrow, studying the sketch. “We may have to check some of these beams of yours . . . this business here, for instance . . . but it’ll hold.”

“The owners won’t like it,” said the superintendent, as a regretful afterthought.

“They’ll take it and keep their damn mouths shut,” said Roark. “Give me another board. Now look. Here’s what you do on the two floors below.” He went on drawing for a long time, throwing words over his shoulder once in a while.

“Yes,” whispered the superintendent. “But . . . but what’ll I say if someone asks if . . .”

“Say I gave the orders. Now keep these and get started.” He turned to Darrow. “I’ll draw up the plans and you’ll have them this afternoon to check, and let him have them as soon as possible.” He turned to the superintendent. “Now go ahead.”

“Yes, sir,” said the superintendent. He said it respectfully.

They went down silently in the elevator. The superintendent was studying the drawings, Darrow was studying Roark, Roark was looking at the building.

They reached the ground below and Roark went back to Cameron. He took Cameron’s elbows and helped him slowly to his feet. The estimator had disappeared.

“I’ll take you home, Mr. Cameron,” Roark said gently.

“Huh?” muttered Cameron. “Yes . . . oh, yes. . . .” He nodded vaguely, in assent to nothing comprehensible.

Roark led him away. Then Cameron shook off the hands holding him, tottered and turned around. He stood, looking up at the steel skeleton, his head thrown back. He flung his arms out wide, and stood still, only his fingers moving weakly, uselessly, as if reaching for something. His lips moved; he wanted to speak; he said nothing.

“Look . . .” he whispered at last. “Look . . .” His voice was soft, choked, pleading, pleading desperately for the words he could not find. “Look . . .” He had so much to say. “Look . . .” he muttered hopelessly.

When Roark took his arm again, he did not resist. Roark led him to a cab and they drove to Cameron’s home. Roark knew Cameron’s address, but had never been inside his one stuffy, unkempt furnished room that bore on its walls, as its single distinction, framed photographs of his buildings. The bed stood untouched, unused the night before. Cameron had followed docilely up the stairs. But the sight of his room seemed to awaken something in his brain. He jerked loose suddenly; he whirled upon Roark, and his face was white with rage.

“What are you doing here?” he screamed, choking, his voice gulping in his throat. “What are you following me for? I hate you, whoever you are. I know what’s the matter with me. It’s because I can’t bear the sight of you. There you stand reproaching me!”

“I don’t,” whispered Roark.

“God damn you! That’s what’s been following me. You’re the one who’s making me miserable. Everything else’s all right, but you’re the one who’s putting me through hell. You’re out to kill me, you . . .” And then there followed a torrent of such blasphemy as Roark had never heard on any waterfront, in any construction gang. Roark stood silently, waiting.

“Get out!” roared Cameron, lurching toward him. “Get out of here! Get out of my sight! Get out!”

Roark did not move. Cameron raised his hand and struck him across the mouth.

Roark fell back against a bedstand, but caught his balance, his feet steady, his body huddled against the stand, his hands behind him, pressed to its sides. He looked at Cameron. The sound of the blow had knocked Cameron into a sudden, lucid, sober pause of consciousness. He stared at Roark, his mouth half-open, his eyes dull, blank, frightened, but focused.

“Howard . . .” he muttered. “Howard, what are you doing here?”

His hand went across his wet forehead, trying vainly to remember.

“Howard, what was it? What happened?”

“Nothing, Mr. Cameron,” Roark whispered, his handkerchief hidden in his hand, pressed to his mouth, swiftly wiping off the blood. “Nothing.”

“Something’s happened. Are you all right, Howard?”

“I’m all right, Mr. Cameron. But you’d better go to bed. I’ll help you.”

The old man did not resist, his legs giving way under him, his eyes empty, while Roark undressed him and pulled the blanket over him.

“Howard,” he whispered, his face white on the pillow, his eyes closed, “I never wanted you to see it. But now you’ve seen it. Now you know.”

“Try to sleep, Mr. Cameron.”

“An honor . . .” Cameron whispered, without opening his eyes, “an honor that I could not have deserved. . . . Who said that?”

“Go to sleep, Mr. Cameron. You’ll be all right tomorrow.”

“You hate me now,” said Cameron, raising his head, looking at Roark, a soft, lost, unexpecting smile in his eyes, “don’t you?”

“No,” said Roark. “But I hate everyone else in the world.”

Cameron’s head fell back on the pillow. He lay still, his hands small, drawn, and yellow on the white bed-cloth. Then he was asleep.

There was no one to call. Roark asked the sleepy, indifferent landlady to look after Cameron, and returned to the office.

He went straight to his table, noticing no one. He pulled a sheet of paper forward and went to work silently.

“Well?” asked Loomis. “What happened down there?” asked Simpson.

“Penthouse floor arches,” Roark answered without raising his head.

“Jesus!” gasped Simpson. “Now what?”

“It will be all right,” said Roark. “You’ll take these down to Huston Street when I finish, Loomis.”

“Yes,” said Loomis, his mouth hanging open.

That afternoon, Trager came into the drafting room, his glance directed, fixed upon a definite object.

“There’s a Mr. Mead outside,” he said. “He had an appointment with Mr. Cameron about that hotel down in Connecticut. What shall I tell him, Mr. Roark?”

Roark jerked his thumb at the door of Cameron’s office.

“Send him in,” said Roark. “I’ll see him.”

On a day when the [Heller] house was nearing completion, Roark noticed, driving towards it one morning, an old, hunched figure standing at the foot of the hill, alone on the rocky shore, ignored by the cars flying past and by the noisy activity of the workers above. He knew the broad, bent back of that figure, but what it appeared to be was incredible. He stopped his car with a violent screech of brakes, and leaped out, and ran forward, frightened. He saw the heavy cane and the two hands leaning agonizingly upon its handle, the old body braced in supreme effort against one steady shaft, grinding its tip into the earth.

Roark stood before him and opened his mouth and said nothing.

“Well?” asked Cameron. “What are you staring at?”

Roark couldn’t answer.

“Now you’re not going to say anything,” Cameron snapped. “Why the hell did you have to come here today? I didn’t want you to know.”

“How . . . how could Miss Cameron let you . . .”

“She didn’t let me,” said Cameron triumphantly. “I escaped.” His eyes twinkled slyly, with the boasting of a boy playing hookey. “I just sneaked out of the house when she went to church. I can hire taxis and get on trains just like anybody else. I’ll slap your face if you go on standing there with that stupid look proclaiming to the world that it’s so unusual for me to crawl out of the grave. Really, you know, you’re more of a fool than I thought you were. You should have expected me here someday.” The cane staggered and he caught at Roark’s arm for support. He added softly: “Do you know what Victor Hugo said? Victor Hugo said that there may be indifferent fathers, but there can’t be indifferent grandfathers. Help me up the hill.”

“No!” said Roark. “You can’t!”

“I said help me up the hill,” Cameron pronounced slowly, icily, with the tone of addressing an insolent draftsman.

Roark had to obey. His hands closed about Cameron’s elbows, and he pulled the old body gently, tightly against his own, and they went forward slowly. Cameron’s feet stepped with long, deliberate precision, each step—a purpose begun and carried on and completed consciously, his mind concentrated upon each step. The cane left a long, zigzagging string of dots stamped on the earth behind them. Cameron barely felt the pressure of Roark’s hands on his elbows, but the hands led him, held him in tight safety, as if some fluid energy of motion flowed from these hands through his body, as if Cameron were carried forward not by his feet, but by Roark’s hands. They stopped frequently, upon each ledge they reached, and stood silently, Cameron trying to hide the gasps of his breath, and looked up. Then they went on.

When they reached the top, they sat down on the steps of the entrance and rested for a long time. Then they walked slowly through all the rooms of the house. The workers looked with indifferent curiosity upon the old cripple whom it pleased the architect to drag through the building. No one knew Cameron. Cameron made no comments, beyond snapping briefly, once in a while: “That’s a bum job of plastering here. Don’t let them get away with it. Have it done over. . . . Watch out for air currents in this hall. Adjust the ventilation. . . . You’ll want another electric outlet on these stairs. . . .” Then they came out again and Cameron stood, without help, leaning on his cane, his back to the house, looking over the vast spread of the countryside for a long time. When he turned his head to Roark, he said nothing, but nodded slowly in a great, silent affirmation.

After a while, Roark said: “I’ll drive you back now.”

“No,” said Cameron. “I’ll stay here till evening—while I’m here. You go ahead with whatever you have to do. I’ll just sit here. Don’t make such a fuss about me.”

Roark brought the leather seats from his car, and spread them on the ground in the shade of a tree, and helped Cameron to settle down comfortably upon them. Then he went back to his work in the house. Cameron sat looking at the sea and at the walls before him. His cane, stretched limply forward between his hands, tapped softly against a stone, once in a while, two brief little thumps, then two more a long time later, as if punctuating the course of his thoughts.

At noon, they shared the box lunch Roark had brought with him; they ate, Roark sitting on the ground beside him, and they spoke of the various qualities of Connecticut granite as compared with the stone from other quarries. And later, when Roark had nothing further to do for the day, he stretched down beside Cameron, and they sat through many hours, unconscious of their long silences and of the few sentences they spoke, vague, unfinished, half-answered sentences, unconscious of the time that passed and of the necessity for any aim in sitting there.

Long after the workers had left, when the sea became a soft purple and the windows of the empty, silent house flared up in unmoving yellow fire, Roark said: “We’re going now,” and Cameron nodded silently.

When they had reached the car below, Cameron leaned suddenly against its door, his face white from an exhaustion he could not hide. He pushed Roark’s hands away. “In a moment . . .” he whispered humbly. “All right in a moment. . . .” Then he raised his head and said: “Okay.” Roark helped him into the car.

They had driven for half a mile, before Roark asked: “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’m not,” said Cameron. “To hell with that. I’ll have to go back to the wheelchair for a month, I suppose. . . . Keep still. You know better than to regret it.”

The Simplest Thing in the World

1940

Editor’s Preface

This 1940 story, with Ayn Rand’s prefatory note, is reprinted from The Romantic Manifesto.

She wrote it about a creative writer, while she was deep in the writing of The Fountainhead. By that time, The Fountainhead had been rejected by some twelve publishers.

—R.E.R.

The Simplest Thing in the World

(This story was written in 1940. It did not appear in print until the November 1967 issue of THE OBJECTIVIST, where it was published in its original form, as written.

The story illustrates the nature of the creative process—the way in which an artist’s sense of life directs the integrating functions of his subconscious and controls his creative imagination.—A. R.)

Henry Dorn sat at his desk and looked at a sheet of blank paper. Through a feeling of numb panic, he said to himself: this is going to be the easiest thing you’ve ever done.

Just be stupid, he said to himself. That’s all. Just relax and be as stupid as you can be. Easy, isn’t it? What are you scared of, you damn fool? You don’t think you can be stupid, is that it? You’re conceited, he said to himself angrily. That’s the whole trouble with you. You’re conceited as hell. So you can’t be stupid, can you? You’re being stupid right now. You’ve been stupid about this thing all your life. Why can’t you be stupid on order?

I’ll start in a minute, he said. Just one minute more and then I’ll start. I will, this time. I’ll just rest for a minute, that’s all right, isn’t it? I’m very tired. You’ve done nothing today, he said. You’ve done nothing for months. What are you tired of? That’s why I’m tired—because I’ve done nothing. I wish I could . . . I’d give anything if I could again . . . Stop that. Stop it quick. That’s the one thing you mustn’t think about. You’re to start in a minute and you were almost ready. You won’t be ready if you think of that.

Don’t look at it. Don’t look at it. Don’t look at . . . He had turned. He was looking at a thick book in a ragged blue jacket, lying on a shelf, under old magazines. He could see, on its spine, the white letters merging with the faded blue: Triumph by Henry Dorn.

He got up and pushed the magazines down to hide the book. It’s better if you don’t see it while you’re doing it, he said. No. It’s better if it doesn’t see you doing it. You’re a sentimental fool, he said.

It was not a good book. How do you know it was a good book? No, that won’t work. All right, it was a good book. It’s a great book. There’s nothing you can do about that. It would be much easier if you could. It would be much easier if you could make yourself believe that it was a lousy book and that it had deserved what had happened to it. Then you could look people straight in the face and write a better one. But you didn’t believe it. And you had tried very hard to believe that. But you didn’t.

All right, he said. Drop that. You’ve gone over that, over and over again, for two years. So drop it. Not now . . . It wasn’t the bad reviews that I minded. It was the good ones. Particularly the one by Fleurette Lumm who said it was the best book she’d ever read—because it had such a touching love story.

He had not even known that there was a love story in his book, and he had not known that what there was of it was touching. And the things that were there, in his book, the things he had spent five years thinking of and writing, writing as carefully, as scrupulously, as delicately as he knew how—these things Fleurette Lumm had not mentioned at all. At first, after he had read the reviews, he had thought that these things were not in his book at all; he had only imagined they were; or else the printer had left them out—only the book seemed very thick, and if the printer had left them out, what filled all those pages? And it wasn’t possible that he had not written the book in English, and it wasn’t possible that so many bright people couldn’t read English, and it wasn’t possible that he was insane. So he read his book over again, very carefully, and he was happy when he found a bad sentence in it, or a muddled paragraph, or a thought that did not seem clear; he said, they’re right, it isn’t there, it isn’t clear at all, it was perfectly fair of them to miss it and the world is a human place to live in. But after he had read all of his book, to the end, he knew that it was there, that it was clear and beautiful and very important, that he could not have done it any better—and that he’ll never understand the answer. That he had better not try to understand it, if he wished to remain alive.

All right, he said. That’s about enough now, isn’t it? You’ve been at it longer than a minute. And you said you would start.

The door was open and he looked into the bedroom. Kitty sat there at a table, playing solitaire. Her face looked as if she were very successful at making it look as if everything were all right. She had a lovely mouth. You could always tell things about people by their mouth. Hers looked as if she wanted to smile at the world, and if she didn’t it was her own fault, and she really would in a moment, because she was all right and so was the world. In the lamplight her neck looked white and very thin, bent attentively over the cards. It didn’t cost any money to play solitaire. He heard the cards thumping down gently, and the steam crackling in the pipe in the corner.

The doorbell rang, and Kitty came in quickly to open the door, not looking at him, her body tight and purposeful under the childish, wide-skirted, print dress, a very lovely dress, only it had been bought two years ago and for summer wear. He could have opened the door, but he knew why she wanted to open it.

He stood, his feet planted wide apart, his stomach drawn, not looking at the door, listening. He heard a voice and then he heard Kitty saying: “No, I’m sorry, but we really don’t need an Electrolux.” Kitty’s voice was almost a song of release; as if she were making an effort not to sound too foolish; as if she loved the Electrolux man and wished she could ask him in to visit. He knew why Kitty’s voice sounded like that. She had thought it was the landlord.

Kitty closed the door, and looked at him, crossing the room, and smiled as if she were apologizing—humbly and happily—for her existence, and said: “I don’t want to interrupt you, dear,” and went back to her solitaire.

All you have to do, he said to himself, is think of Fleurette Lumm and try to imagine what she likes. Just imagine that and then write it down. That’s all there is to it. And you’ll have a good commercial story that will sell immediately and make you a lot of money. It’s the simplest thing in the world.

You can’t be the only one who’s right and everybody else wrong, he said. Everybody’s told you that that’s what you must do. You’ve asked for a job and nobody would give you one. Nobody would help you find one. Nobody had even seemed interested or serious about it. They said, a brilliant young man like you! Look at Paul Pattison, they said. Eighty thousand a year and not half your brain. But Paul knows what the public likes to read and gives it to them. If you’d just stop being so stubborn, they said. You don’t have to be intellectual all the time. Why not be practical for a while, and then, after you’ve made your first fifty thousand dollars, you can sit back and indulge yourself in some more high literature which will never sell. They said, why waste your time on a job? What can you do? You’ll be lucky if you get twenty-five a week. It’s foolish, when you’ve got a great talent for words, you know you have, if you’d only be sensible about it. It ought to be easy for you. If you can write fancy, difficult stuff like that, it ought to be a cinch to toss off a popular serial or two. Any fool can do it. They said, stop dramatizing yourself. Do you enjoy being a martyr? They said, look at your wife. They said, if Paul Pattison can do it, why can’t you?

Think of Fleurette Lumm, he said to himself, sitting down at his desk. You imagine that you can’t understand her, but you can, if you want to. Don’t try to be so complicated. Be simple. She’s simple to understand. That’s it. Be simple about everything. Just write a simple story. The simplest, most unimportant story you can imagine. For God’s sake, can’t you think of anything that’s not important, not important at all, not of the slightest possible importance? Can’t you? Are you as good as that, you conceited fool? Do you really think you’re as good as that? That you can’t do anything unless it’s great, profound, important? Do you have to be a world-saver all the time? Do you have to be a damn Joan d’Arc?

Stop kidding yourself, he said. You can. You’re no better than anyone else. He chuckled. That’s the kind of rotter you are. People tell themselves they’re no worse than anyone else when they need courage. You tell yourself you’re no better. I wish you’d tell me where you got that infernal conceit of yours. That’s all it is. Not any great talent, not any brilliant mind—just conceit. You’re not a noble martyr to your art. You’re an inflated egotist—and you’re getting just what you deserve.

Good, are you? What makes you think you’re good? What right have you to hate what you’re going to do? You haven’t written anything for months. You couldn’t. You can’t write any more. You never will again. And if you can’t write what you want to write—what business have you to despise the things people want you to write? That’s all you’re good for anyway, not for any great epics with immortal messages, and you ought to be damn glad to try and do it, not sit here like a convict in a death cell waiting for his picture to be taken for the front pages.

Now that’s better. I think you have the right spirit now. Now you can start.

How does one start those things? . . . Well, let’s see . . . It must be a simple, human story. Try to think of something human . . . How does one make one’s mind work? How does one invent a story? How can people ever be writers? Come on, you’ve written before. How did you start then? No, you can’t think of that. Not of that. If you do—you’ll go completely blank again, or worse. Think that you’ve never written before. It’s a new start. You’re turning over a new leaf. There! That was good. If you can think in lousy bromides like that, you’ll do it. You’re beginning to get it . . .

Think of something human . . . Oh, come on, think hard . . . Well, try it this way: think of the word “human,” think of what it means—you’ll get an idea somewhere . . . Human . . . What’s the most human thing there is? What’s the quality that all the people you know have got, the outstanding quality in all of them? Their motive power? Fear. Not fear of anyone in particular, just fear. Just a great, blind force without object. Malicious fear. The kind that makes them want to see you suffer. Because they know that they, too, will have to suffer and it makes it easier, to know that you do also. The kind that makes them want to see you being small and funny and smutty. Small people are safe. It’s not really fear, it’s more than that. Like Mr. Crawford, for instance, who’s a lawyer and who’s glad when a client of his loses a suit. He’s glad, even though he loses money on it; even though it hurts his reputation. He’s glad, and he doesn’t even know that he’s glad. God, what a story there is in Mr. Crawford! If you could put him down on paper as he is, and explain just why he is like that, and . . .

Yeah, he said to himself. In three volumes which no one would ever publish, because they’d say it was not true and call me a hater of humanity. Stop it. Stop it fast. That’s not at all what they mean when they say a story is human. But it’s human. But it’s not what they mean. What do they mean? You’ll never know. Oh yes, you do. You know it. You know it very well—without knowing. Oh, stop this! . . .

Why must you always know the meaning of everything? There’s your first mistake—right there. Do it without thinking. It mustn’t have any meaning. It must be written as if you’d never tried to find any meaning in anything, not ever in your life. It must sound as if that’s the kind of person you are. Why do people resent people who look for a meaning? What’s the real reason that . . .

STOP IT! . . .

All right. Let’s try to go at it in a different way entirely. Don’t start with an abstraction. Start with something definite. Anything. Think of something simple, obvious and bad. So bad that you won’t care, one way or the other. Say the first thing you can think of.

For instance, a story about a middle-aged millionaire who tries to seduce a poor young working girl. That’s good. That’s very good. Now go on with it. Quick. Don’t think. Go on with it.

Well, he’s a man of about fifty. He’s made a fortune, unscrupulously, because he’s ruthless. She’s only twenty-two, and very beautiful, and very sweet, and she works in the five-and-ten. Yes, in the five-and-ten. And he owns it. That’s what he is—a big tycoon who owns a whole slew of five-and-ten’s. This is good.

One day he comes to this particular store, and he sees this girl and he falls in love with her. Why would he fall in love with her? Well, he’s lonely. He’s very terribly lonely. He hasn’t got a friend in the world. People don’t like him. People never like a man who’s made a success of himself. Also, he’s ruthless. You can’t make a success of yourself unless you hold onto your one goal and drop everything else. When you have a great devotion to a goal—people call you ruthless. And when you work harder than anyone else, when you work like a freight engine while others take it easy, and so you beat them at it—people call you unscrupulous. That’s human also.

You don’t work like that just to make money. It’s something else. It’s a great, driving energy—a creative energy?—no, it’s the principle of creation itself. It’s what makes everything in the world. Dams and skyscrapers and transatlantic cables. Everything we’ve got. It comes from men like that. When he started the shipyards—oh, he’s a five-and-ten tycoon—no, he isn’t, to hell with the five-and-ten!—when he started the shipyards that he made his fortune from, there was nothing there but a few shacks and a lot of clam shells. He made the town, he made the harbor, he gave jobs to hundreds of people, they’d still be digging for clams if he hadn’t come along. And now they hate him. And he’s not bitter about it. He’s accepted that long ago. He just doesn’t understand. Now he’s fifty years old, and circumstances have forced him to retire. He’s got millions—and he’s the most miserable man in the world. Because he wants to work—not to make money, just to work, just to fight and take chances—because that great energy cannot be kept still.

Now when he meets the girl—what girl?—oh, the one in the five-and-ten . . . Oh, to hell with her! What do you need her for? He’s married long ago—and that’s not the story at all. What he meets is a poor, struggling young man. And he envies this boy—because the boy’s great struggle is still ahead of him. But this boy—now that’s the point—this boy doesn’t want to struggle at all. He’s a nice, able, likeable kid, but he has no real, driving desire for anything. He’s been adequate at several different jobs and he’s dropped them all. There’s no passion to him, no goal. What he wants above all is security. He doesn’t care what he does or how or who tells him to do it. He’s never created anything. He’s given nothing to the world and he never will. But he wants security from the world. And he’s liked by everybody. And he has everybody’s sympathy. And there they are—the two men. Which one is right? Which one is good? Which one’s got the truth? What happens when life brings them face to face?

Oh, what a story! Don’t you see? It’s not just the two of them. It’s more, much more. It’s the whole tragedy of the world today. It’s our greatest problem. It’s the most important . . .

Oh, God!

Do you think you can? Do you think you’ll get away with it maybe, if you’re very clever, if you disguise it, so they’ll think it’s just a story about an old man, nothing very serious, I don’t mind if they miss it, I hope they miss it, let them think they’re reading trash, if they’ll only let me write it. I don’t have to stress it, I don’t have to have much of it, of what’s good, I can hide it, I can apologize for it with a lot of human stuff about boats and women and swimming pools. They won’t know. They’ll let me.

No, he said, they won’t. Don’t fool yourself. They’re as good at it as you are. They know their kind of story just like you do yours. They might not even be able to explain it, what it is or where, but they’ll know. They always know what’s theirs and what isn’t. Besides, it’s a controversial issue. The leftists won’t like it. It will antagonize a lot of people. What do you want a controversial issue for—in a popular magazine story?

No, go back to the beginning, where he’s a five-and-ten tycoon . . . No. I can’t. I can’t waste it. I’ve got to use that story. I’ll write it. But not now. I’ll write it after I’ve written this one commercial piece. That will be the first thing I’ll write after I have money. That’s worth waiting for.

Now start all over again. On something else. Come on, it isn’t so bad now, is it? You see, it wasn’t difficult at all, thinking. It came by itself. Just start on something else.

Get an interesting beginning, something good and startling, even if you don’t know what it’s all about and where to go from there. Suppose you open with a young girl who lives on a rooftop, in one of those storerooms above a loft-building, and she’s sitting there on the roof, all alone, it’s a beautiful summer evening, and suddenly there’s a shot and a window in the next building cracks open, glass flying all over the place, and a man jumps out of the window onto her roof.

There! You can’t possibly go wrong on that. It’s so bad that it’s sure to be right.

Well . . . Why would a girl live in a loft-building? Because it’s cheap. No, the Y.W.C.A. would be cheaper. Or sharing a furnished room with a girlfriend. That’s what a girl would do. No, not this girl. She can’t get along with people. She doesn’t know why. But she can’t. So she’d rather be alone. She’s been very much alone all her life. She works in a huge, busy, noisy, stupid office. She likes her rooftop because when she’s there alone at night, she has the whole city to herself, and she sees it, not as it is, but as it could have been. As it should have been. That’s her trouble—always wanting things to be what they should be, and never are. She looks at the city and she thinks of what’s going on in the penthouses, little islands of light in the sky, and she thinks of great, mysterious, breath-stopping things, not of cocktail parties, and drunks in bathrooms, and kept women with dogs.

And the building next door—it’s a smart hotel, and there’s this one large window right over her roof, and the window is of frosted glass, because the view is so ugly. She can’t see anything in that window—only the silhouettes of people against the light. Only the shadows. And she sees this one man there—he’s tall and slender and he holds his shoulders as if he were giving orders to the whole world. And he moves as if that were a light and easy job for him to do. And she falls in love with him. With his shadow. She’s never seen him and she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t know anything about him and she never tries to learn. She doesn’t care. It’s not what he is. It’s what she thinks of him as being. It’s a love without future, without hope or the need of hope, a love great enough to find happiness in nothing but its own greatness, unreal, inexpressible, undemanding—and more real than anything around her. And . . .

Henry Dorn sat at his desk, seeing what men cannot see except when they do not know they are seeing it, seeing his own thoughts in a way of sight brighter than any perception of the things around him, seeing them, not pushing them forward, but seeing them as a detached observer without control of their shape, each thought a corner, and a bright astonishment meeting him behind each corner, not creating anything, but being carried along, not helping and not resisting, through minutes of a feeling like a payment for all the agony he would ever bear, a feeling continuing only while you do not know that you feel it . . .

And then, that evening, she is sitting alone on the roof, and there’s a shot, and that window is shattered, and that man leaps out onto her roof. She sees him for the first time—and this is the miracle: for once in her life, he is what she had wanted him to be, he looks as she had wanted him to look. But he has just committed a murder. I suppose it will have to be some kind of justifiable murder . . . No! No! No! It’s not a justifiable murder at all. We don’t even know what it is—and she doesn’t know. But here is the dream, the impossible, the ideal—against the laws of the whole world. Her own truth—against all mankind. She has to . . .

Oh, stop it! Stop it! Stop it!

Well . . . ?

Pull yourself together, man. Pull yourself together . . .

Well? For whom is it you’re writing that story? For the Women’s Kitchen Friend?

No, you’re not tired. You’re all right. It’s all right. You’ll write this story later. You’ll write it after you have money. It’s all right. It won’t be taken away from you. Now sit quiet. Count ten.

No! I tell you, you can. You can. You haven’t tried hard enough. You let it get away with you. You begin to think. Can’t you think without thinking?

Listen, can’t you understand a different way of doing it? Don’t think of the fantastic, don’t think of the unusual, don’t think of the opposite of what anyone else’d want to think, but go after the obvious, the easy. Easy—for whom? Come on now. It’s this: it’s because you ask yourself “what if . . . ?” That starts the whole trouble. “What if it’s not what it seems to be at all . . . Wouldn’t it be interesting if . . .” That’s what you do, and you mustn’t. You mustn’t think of what would be interesting. But how can I do anything if I know it isn’t interesting? But it will be—to them. That’s just why it will be to them—because it isn’t to you. That’s the whole secret. But then how do I know what, or where, or why?

Listen, can’t you stop it for a little while? Can’t you turn it off—that brain of yours? Can’t you make it work without letting it work? Can’t you be stupid? Can’t you be consciously, deliberately, cold-bloodedly stupid? Can’t that be done in some way? Everybody is stupid about some things, the best of us and the brightest. Everybody has blind spots, they say. Can’t you make it be this?

Dear God, let me be stupid! Let me be dishonest! Let me be contemptible! Just once. Because I must.

Don’t you see? It’s a matter of one reversal. Just make one single reversal: instead of believing that one must try to be intelligent, different, honest, challenging, that one must do the best possible to the best of one’s ability and then stretch it some more to do still better—believe that one must be dull, stale, sweet, dishonest and safe. That’s all. Is that the way other people do it? No, I don’t think so. They’d end up in an insane asylum in six months. Then what is it? I don’t know. It isn’t that—but it works out like that. Maybe if we were told from the beginning to reverse it . . . But we aren’t. But some of us get wise to it early—and then they’re all right. But why should it be like that? Why should we . . .

Drop it. You’re not settling world problems. You’re writing a commercial story.

All right. Quick and cold now. Hold yourself tight and don’t let yourself like the story. Above all, don’t let yourself like it.

Let’s make it a detective story. A murder mystery. You can’t possibly have a murder mystery with any serious meaning. Come on. Quick, cold and simple.

There must be two villains in a mystery story: the victim and the murderer—so nobody would feel too sorry for either of them. That’s the way it’s always done. Well, you can have some leeway on the victim, but the murderer’s got to be a villain . . . Now the murderer must have a motive. It must be a contemptible motive . . . Let’s see . . . I’ve got it: the murderer is a professional blackmailer who’s holding a lot of people in his clutches, and the victim is the man who’s about to expose him, so the blackmailer kills this man. That’s as low a motive as you could imagine. There’s no excuse for that . . . Or is there? What if . . . Wouldn’t it be interesting if you could prove that the murderer was justified?

What if all those people he blackmails are utter lice? The kind that do horrible things, but just manage to remain within the law, so there’s no way of defending yourself against them. And this man chooses deliberately to become a crusading blackmailer. He gets things on all those people and he forces them to do justice. A lot of men make careers for themselves by knowing where some body or other is buried. Well, this man goes out after such “bodies,” only he doesn’t use them for personal advancement, he uses them to undo the harm these people are doing. He’s a Robin Hood of blackmail. He gets them in the only way they can be gotten. For instance, one of them is a corrupt politician, and the hero—no, the murderer—no, the hero gets the dope on him and forces him to vote right on a certain measure. Another one is a big Hollywood producer who’s ruined a lot of lives—and the hero makes him give a talented actress a break without forcing her to become his mistress. Another one is a crooked businessman—and the hero forces him to play straight. And when the worst one of the lot—what’s the worst one of the lot? a hypocritical reformer, I think—no, that’s dangerous to touch, too controversial—oh, what the hell!—when this reformer traps the hero and is about to expose him, the hero kills him. Why shouldn’t he? And the interesting thing about the story is that all those people will be presented just as they appear in real life. Nice people, pillars of society, liked, admired and respected. And the hero is just a hard, lonely kind of outcast.

Oh, what a story! Prove that! Prove what some of our popular people are really like! Blow the lid off society! Show it for what it’s worth! Prove that the lone wolf is not always a wolf! Prove honesty and courage and strength and dedication! Prove it through a blackmailer and a murderer! Have a story with a murderer for a hero and let him get away with it! A great story! An important story which . . .

Henry Dorn sat very still, his hands folded in his lap, hunched, seeing nothing, thinking of nothing.

Then he pushed the sheet of blank paper aside and reached for the Times’ “Help Wanted” ads.

1

The Fountainhead, 25th Anniversary Edition, Introduction.

2

Ibid.

3

The manuscript is illegible at this point.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Preface to the Revised Edition

Introduction

Part I - THE TWENTIES

The Husband I Bought

The Night King

Good Copy

Escort

Her Second Career

Part II - THE EARLY THIRTIES

Red Pawn

We the Living (unpublished excerpts)

Ideal

Part III, - THE LATE THIRTIES

Think Twice

The Fountainhead (unpublished excerpts)

The Simplest Thing in the World

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

PREFACE

For the New Intellectual

We the Living

Anthem

The Fountainhead

Atlas Shrugged

Who are to be the New Intellectuals?

“Any man or woman who is willing to think. All those who know that man’s life must be guided by reason, those who value their own life and are not willing to surrender it to the cult of despair in the modern jungle of cynical impotence, just as they are not willing to surrender the world to the Dark Ages and the rule of the brutes.”

This book presents the essentials of Ayn Rand’s philosophy “for those who wish to acquire an integrated view of existence.” In the title essay, she offers an analysis of Western culture, discusses the causes of its progress, its decline, its present bankruptcy, and points the road to an intellectual renaissance.

Ayn Rand raises the standard of “reason, individualism, and capitalism” against today’s prevalent doctrines of mysticism, altruism, and collectivism. The novels that present her unconventional views have become modern classics.

THE GENIUS OF AYN RAND

ATLAS SHRUGGED

Introduction by Leonard Peikoff. First published in 1957, this epochal novel has been a bestseller for more than four decades as well as an intellectual landmark. Peopled with larger-than-life heroes and villains, and charged with towering questions of good and evil, it is a philosophical revolution told in the form of an action thriller. 0-451-19114-5

THE FOUNTAINHEAD

Afterword by Leonard Peikoff. Vividly written and boldly original, The Fountainhead has been a phenomenal bestseller since it was first published in 1943. As explosive and dazzling today as it was when it was written, this novel reinvents man the hero—and exposes the evil of those who try to destroy him. 0-451-19115-3

THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS:

A New Concept of Egoism

Ayn Rand explains what “selfishness” is, and why the pursuit of his own rational self-interest is every individual’s highest moral obligation. 0-451-16393-1

RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE:

The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Edited with an introduction and additional essays by Peter Schwartz. Ayn Rand identifies the intellectual roots of “political correctness,” urging people to repudiate its mindless nihilism and to uphold a philosophy of reason, individualism, capitalism, and technological progress. 0-452-01184-1

Available wherever books are sold, or
to order call: 1-800-788-6262

SIGNET
Published by New American Library, a division of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2,
Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,
Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,
New Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany,
Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First Signet Printing, December 1963

Copyright © Ayn Rand, 1961

All rights reserved

Excerpts from books by Ayn Rand were

The Bobbs-Merrill Company, New York & Indianapolis: The Fountainhead, copyright The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1943. Copyright © Ayn Rand, 1968. Cassell and Company Ltd., London: The Fountainhead and We the Living. Caxton Printers, Ltd., Caldwell, Idaho; Anthem, copyright Pamphleteers, Inc., 1946. Random House, Inc., New York: We the Living, copyright © Ayn Rand O’Connor, 1936, 1959; Atlas Shrugged, copyright © Ayn Rand, 1957.

Information about other books by Ayn Rand and her philosophy, Objectivism, may be obtained by writing to OBJECTIVISM, Box 177, Murray Hill Station, New York, New York 10157 USA.

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

eISBN : 978-1-101-13768-0

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

http://us.penguingroup.com

PREFACE

This book is intended for those who wish to assume the responsibility of becoming the new intellectuals. It contains the main philosophical passages from my novels and presents the outline of a new philosophical system.

The full system is implicit in these excerpts (particularly in Galt’s speech), but its fundamentals are indicated only in the widest terms and require a detailed, systematic presentation in a philosophical treatise. I am working on such a treatise at present; it will deal predominantly with the issue which is barely touched upon in Galt’s speech: epistemology, and will present a new theory of the nature, source and validation of concepts. This work will require several years; until then, I offer the present book as a lead or a summary for those who wish to acquire an integrated view of existence. They may regard it as a basic outline; it will give them the guidance they need, but only if they think through and understand the exact meaning and the full implications of these excerpts.

I am often asked whether I am primarily a novelist or a philosopher. The answer is: both. In a certain sense, every novelist is a philosopher, because one cannot present a picture of human existence without a philosophical framework; the novelist’s only choice is whether that framework is present in his story explicitly or implicitly, whether he is aware of it or not, whether he holds his philosophical convictions consciously or subconsciously. This involves another choice: whether his work is his individual projection of existing philosophical ideas or whether he originates a philosophical framework of his own. I did the second. That is not the specific task of a novelist; I had to do it, because my basic view of man and of existence was in conflict with most of the existing philosophical theories. In order to define, explain and present my concept of man, I had to become a philosopher in the specific meaning of the term.

For those who may be interested in the chronological development of my thinking, I have included excerpts from all four of my novels. They may observe the progression from a political theme in We the Living to a metaphysical theme in Atlas Shrugged.

These excerpts are necessarily condensed summaries, because the full statement of the subjects involved is presented, in each novel, by means of the events of the story. The events are the concretes and the particulars, of which the speeches are the abstract summations.

When I say that these excerpts are merely an outline, I do not mean to imply that my full system is still to be defined or discovered; I had to define it before I could start writing Atlas Shrugged. Galt’s speech is its briefest summary.

Until I complete the presentation of my philosophy in a fully detailed form, this present book may serve as an outline or a program or a manifesto.

For reasons which are made clear in the following pages, the name I have chosen for my philosophy is Objectivism.

—AYN RAND

October, 1960

For the New Intellectual

When a man, a business corporation or an entire society is approaching bankruptcy, there are two courses that those involved can follow: they can evade the reality of their situation and act on a frantic, blind, range-of-the-moment expediency—not daring to look ahead, wishing no one would name the truth, yet desperately hoping that something will save them somehow—or they can identify the situation, check their premises, discover their hidden assets and start rebuilding.

America, at present, is following the first course. The grayness, the stale cynicism, the noncommittal cautiousness, the guilty evasiveness of our public voices suggest the attitude of the courtiers in the story “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who professed admiration for the Emperor’s non-existent garments, having accepted the assertion that anyone who failed to perceive them was morally depraved at heart.

Let me be the child in the story and declare that the Emperor is naked—or that America is culturally bankrupt.

In any given period of history, a culture is to be judged by its dominant philosophy, by the prevalent trend of its intellectual life as expressed in morality, in politics, in economics, in art. Professional intellectuals are the voice of a culture and are, therefore, its leaders, its integrators and its bodyguards. America’s intellectual leadership has collapsed. Her virtues, her values, her enormous power are scattered in a silent underground and will remain private, subjective, historically impotent if left without intellectual expression. America is a country without voice or defense—a country sold out and abandoned by her intellectual bodyguards.

Bankruptcy is defined as the state of being at the end of one’s resources. What are the intellectual values or resources offered to us by the present guardians of our culture? In philosophy, we are taught that man’s mind is impotent, that reality is unknowable, that knowledge is an illusion, and reason a superstition. In psychology, we are told that man is a helpless automaton, determined by forces beyond his control, motivated by innate depravity. In literature, we are shown a line-up of murderers, dipsomaniacs, drug addicts, neurotics and psychotics as representatives of man’s soul—and are invited to identify our own among them—with the belligerent assertions that life is a sewer, a foxhole or a rat race, with the whining injunctions that we must love everything, except virtue, and forgive everything, except greatness. In politics, we are told that America, the greatest, noblest, freest country on earth, is politically and morally inferior to Soviet Russia, the bloodiest dictatorship in history—and that our wealth should be given away to the savages of Asia and Africa, with apologies for the fact that we have produced it while they haven’t. If we look at modern intellectuals, we are confronted with the grotesque spectacle of such characteristics as militant uncertainty, crusading cynicism, dogmatic agnosticism, boastful self-abasement and self-righteous depravity—in an atmosphere of guilt, of panic, of despair, of boredom and of all-pervasive evasion. If this is not the state of being at the end of one’s resources, there is no further place to go.

Everybody seems to agree that civilization is facing a crisis, but nobody cares to define its nature, to discover its cause and to assume the responsibility of formulating a solution. In times of danger, a morally healthy culture rallies its values, its self-esteem and its crusading spirit to fight for its moral ideals with full, righteous confidence. But this is not what we see today. If we ask our intellectual leaders what are the ideals we should fight for, their answer is such a sticky puddle of stale syrup—of benevolent bromides and apologetic generalities about brother love, global progress and universal prosperity at America’s expense—that a fly would not die for it or in it.

One of America’s tragic errors is that too many of her best minds believe—as they did in the past—that the solution is to turn anti-intellectual and rely on some cracker-barrel sort of folksy wisdom. The exact opposite is true. What we need most urgently is to recognize the enormous power and the crucial importance of the intellectual professions. A culture cannot exist without a constant stream of ideas and the alert, independent minds who originate them; it cannot exist without a philosophy of life, without those who formulate it and express it. A country without intellectuals is like a body without a head. And that is precisely the position of America today. Our present state of cultural disintegration is not maintained and prolonged by intellectuals as such, but by the fact that we haven’t any. The majority of those who posture as intellectuals today are frightened zombies, posturing in a vacuum of their own making, who admit their abdication from the realm of the intellect by embracing such doctrines as Existentialism and Zen Buddhism.

After decades of preaching that the hallmark of an intellectual consists of proclaiming the impotence of the intellect, these modern zombies are left aghast before the fact that they have succeeded—that they are impotent to ignite the lights of civilization, which they have extinguished—that they are impotent to halt the triumphant advance of the primordial brute, whom they have released—that they have no answer to give to those voices out of the Dark Ages who gloat that reason and freedom have had their chance and have failed, and that the future, like the long night of the past, belongs once more to faith and force.

If all the manufacturers of railroad engines suddenly went irrational and began to manufacture covered wagons instead, nobody would accept the claim that this is a progressive innovation or that the iron horse has failed; and many men would step into the industrial vacuum to start manufacturing railroad engines. But when this happens in philosophy—when we are offered Zen Buddhism and its equivalents as the latest word in human thought—nobody, so far, has chosen to step into the intellectual vacuum to carry on the work of man’s mind.

Thus our great industrial civilization is now expected to run railroads, airlines, intercontinental missiles and H-bomb stock piles by the guidance of philosophical doctrines created by and for barefoot savages who lived in mudholes, scratched the soil for a handful of grain and gave thanks to the statues of distorted animals whom they worshipped as superior to man.

Historically, the professional intellectual is a very recent phenomenon: he dates only from the industrial revolution. There are no professional intellectuals in primitive, savage societies, there are only witch doctors. There were no professional intellectuals in the Middle Ages, there were only monks in monasteries. In the post-Renaissance era, prior to the birth of capitalism, the men of the intellect—the philosophers, the teachers, the writers, the early scientists—were men without a profession, that is: without a socially recognized position, without a market, without a means of earning a livelihood. Intellectual pursuits had to depend on the accident of inherited wealth or on the favor and financial support of some wealthy protector. And wealth was not earned on an open market, either; wealth was acquired by conquest, by force, by political power, or by the favor of those who held political power. Tradesmen were more vulnerably and precariously dependent on favor than the intellectuals.

The professional businessman and the professional intellectual came into existence together, as brothers born of the industrial revolution. Both are the sons of capitalism—and if they perish, they will perish together. The tragic irony will be that they will have destroyed each other; and the major share of the guilt will belong to the intellectual.

With very rare and brief exceptions, pre-capitalist societies had no place for the creative power of man’s mind, neither in the creation of ideas nor in the creation of wealth. Reason and its practical expression—free trade—were forbidden as a sin and a crime, or were tolerated, usually as ignoble activities, under the control of authorities who could revoke the tolerance at whim. Such societies were ruled by faith and its practical expression: force. There were no makers of knowledge and no makers of wealth; there were only witch doctors and tribal chiefs. These two figures dominate every anti-rational period of history, whether one calls them tribal chief and witch doctor—or absolute monarch and religious leader—or dictator and logical positivist.

“The tragic joke of human history”—I am quoting John Galt in Atlas Shrugged—“is that on any of the altars men erected, it was always man whom they immolated and the animal whom they enshrined. It was always the animal’s attributes, not man’s, that humanity worshipped: the idol of instinct and the idol of force—the mystics and the kings—the mystics, who longed for an irresponsible consciousness and ruled by means of the claim that their dark emotions were superior to reason, that knowledge came in blind, causeless fits, blindly to be followed, not doubted—and the kings, who ruled by means of claws and muscles, with conquest as their method and looting as their aim, with a club or a gun as sole sanction of their power. The defenders of man’s soul were concerned with his feelings, and the defenders of man’s body were concerned with his stomach—but both were united against his mind.”

These two figures—the man of faith and the man of force—are philosophical archetypes, psychological symbols and historical reality. As philosophical archetypes, they embody two variants of a certain view of man and of existence. As psychological symbols, they represent the basic motivation of a great many men who exist in any era, culture or society. As historical reality, they are the actual rulers of most of mankind’s societies, who rise to power whenever men abandon reason.¹

The essential characteristics of these two remain the same in all ages: Attila, the man who rules by brute force, acts on the range of the moment, is concerned with nothing but the physical reality immediately before him, respects nothing but man’s muscles, and regards a fist, a club or a gun as the only answer to any problem—and the Witch Doctor, the man who dreads physical reality, dreads the necessity of practical action, and escapes into his emotions, into visions of some mystic realm where his wishes enjoy a supernatural power unlimited by the absolute of nature.

Superficially, these two may appear to be opposites, but observe what they have in common: a consciousness held down to the perceptual method of functioning, an awareness that does not choose to extend beyond the automatic, the immediate, the given, the involuntary, which means: an animal’s “epistemology” or as near to it as a human consciousness can come.

Man’s consciousness shares with animals the first two stages of its development: sensations and perceptions; but it is the third state, conceptions, that makes him man. Sensations are integrated into perceptions automatically, by the brain of a man or of an animal. But to integrate perceptions into conceptions by a process of abstraction, is a feat that man alone has the power to perform—and he has to perform it by choice. The process of abstraction, and of concept-formation is a process of reason, of thought; it is not automatic nor instinctive nor involuntary nor infallible. Man has to initiate it, to sustain it and to bear responsibility for its results. The pre-conceptual level of consciousness is nonvolitional; volition begins with the first syllogism. Man has the choice to think or to evade—to maintain a state of full awareness or to drift from moment to moment, in a semi-conscious daze, at the mercy of whatever associational whims the unfocused mechanism of his consciousness produces.

But the living organisms that possess the faculty of consciousness need to exercise it in order to survive. An animal’s consciousness functions automatically; an animal perceives what it is able to perceive and survives accordingly, no further than the perceptual level permits and no better. Man cannot survive on the perceptual level of his consciousness; his senses do not provide him with an automatic guidance, they do not give him the knowledge he needs, only the material of knowledge, which his mind has to integrate. Man is the only living species who has to perceive reality—which means: to be conscious—by choice. But he shares with other species the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. For an animal, the question of survival is primarily physical; for man, primarily epistemological.

Man’s unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself. If a drought strikes them, animals perish—man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish—man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them animals perish—man writes the Constitution of the United States. But one does not obtain food, safety or freedom—by instinct.

It is against this faculty, the faculty of reason, that Attila and the Witch Doctor rebel. The key to both their souls is their longing for the effortless, irresponsible, automatic consciousness of an animal. Both dread the necessity, the risk and the responsibility of rational cognition. Both dread the fact that “nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” Both seek to exist, not by conquering nature, but by adjusting to the given, the immediate, the known. There is only one means of survival for those who do not choose to conquer nature: to conquer those who do.

The physical conquest of men is Attila’s method of survival. He regards men as others regard fruit trees or farm animals: as objects in nature, his for the seizing. But while a good farmer knows, at least, that fruit trees and animals have a specific nature and require a specific kind of handling, the perceptual mentality of Attila does not extend to so abstract a level: men, to him, are a natural phenomenon and an irreducible primary, as all natural phenomena are irreducible primaries to an animal. Attila feels no need to understand, to explain, nor even to wonder, how men manage to produce the things he covets—“somehow” is a fully satisfactory answer inside his skull, which refuses to consider such questions as “how?” and “why?” or such concepts as identity and causality. All he needs, his “urges” tell him, is bigger muscles, bigger clubs or a bigger gang than theirs in order to seize their bodies and their products, after which their bodies will obey his commands and will provide him, somehow, with the satisfaction of any whim. He approaches men as a beast of prey, and the consequences of his actions or the possibility of exhausting his victims never enters his consciousness, which does not choose to extend beyond the given moment. His view of the universe does not include the power of production. The power of destruction, of brute force, is, to him, metaphysically omnipotent.

An Attila never thinks of creating, only of taking over. Whether he conquers a neighboring tribe or overruns a continent, material looting is his only goal and it ends with the act of seizure: he has no other purpose, no plan, no system to impose on the conquered, no values. His pleasures are closer to the level of sensations than of perceptions: food, drink, palatial shelter, rich clothing, indiscriminate sex, contests of physical prowess, gambling—all those activities which do not demand or involve the use of the conceptual level of consciousness. He does not originate his pleasures: he desires and pursues whatever those around him seem to find desirable. Even in the realm of desires, he does not create, he merely takes over.

But a human being cannot live his life moment by moment; a human consciousness preserves a certain continuity and demands a certain degree of integration, whether a man seeks it or not. A human being needs a frame of reference, a comprehensive view of existence, no matter how rudimentary, and, since his consciousness is volitional, a sense of being right, a moral justification of his actions, which means: a philosophical code of values. Who, then, provides Attila with values? The Witch Doctor.

If Attila’s method of survival is the conquest of those who conquer nature, the Witch Doctor’s method of survival is safer, he believes, and spares him the risks of physical conflict. His method is the conquest of those who conquer those who conquer nature. It is not men’s bodies that he seeks to rule, but men’s souls.

To Attila, as to an animal, the phenomena of nature are an irreducible primary. To the Witch Doctor, as to an animal, the irreducible primary is the automatic phenomena of his own consciousness.

An animal has no critical faculty; he has no control over the function of his brain and no power to question its content. To an animal, whatever strikes his awareness is an absolute that corresponds to reality—or rather, it is a distinction he is incapable of making: reality, to him, is whatever he senses or feels. And this is the Witch Doctor’s epistemological ideal, the mode of consciousness he strives to induce in himself. To the Witch Doctor, emotions are tools of cognition, and wishes take precedence over facts. He seeks to escape the risks of a quest for knowledge by obliterating the distinction between consciousness and reality, between the perceiver and the perceived, hoping that an automatic certainty and an infallible knowledge of the universe will be granted to him by the blind, unfocused stare of his eyes turned inward, contemplating the sensations, the feelings, the urgings, the muggy associational twistings projected by the rudderless mechanism of his undirected consciousness. Whatever his mechanism produces is an absolute not to be questioned; and whenever it clashes with reality, it is reality that he ignores.

Since the clash is constant, the Witch Doctor’s solution is to believe that what he perceives is another, “higher” reality—where his wishes are omnipotent, where contradictions are possible and A is non-A, where his assertions, which are false on earth, become true and acquire the status of a “superior” truth which he perceives by means of a special faculty denied to other, “inferior,” beings. The only validation of his consciousness he can obtain on earth is the belief and the obedience of others, when they accept his “truth” as superior to their own perception of reality. While Attila extorts their obedience by means of a club, the Witch Doctor obtains it by means of a much more powerful weapon: he pre-empts the field of morality.

There is no way to turn morality into a weapon of enslavement except by divorcing it from man’s reason and from the goals of his own existence. There is no way to degrade man’s life on earth except by the lethal opposition of the moral and the practical. Morality is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions; when it is set to oppose his own life and mind, it makes him turn against himself and blindly act as the tool of his own destruction. There is no way to make a human being accept the role of a sacrificial animal except by destroying his self-esteem. There is no way to destroy his self-esteem except by making him reject his own consciousness. There is no way to make him reject his own consciousness except by convincing him of its impotence.

The damnation of this earth as a realm where nothing is possible to man but pain, disaster and defeat, a realm inferior to another, “higher,” reality; the damnation of all values, enjoyment, achievement and success on earth as a proof of depravity; the damnation of man’s mind as a source of pride, and the damnation of reason as a “limited,” deceptive, unreliable, impotent faculty, incapable of perceiving the “real” reality and the “true” truth; the split of man in two, setting his consciousness (his soul) against his body, and his moral values against his own interest; the damnation of man’s nature, body and self as evil; the commandment of self-sacrifice, renunciation, suffering, obedience, humility and faith, as the good; the damnation of life and the worship of death, with the promise of rewards beyond the grave—these are the necessary tenets of the Witch Doctor’s view of existence, as they have been in every variant of Witch Doctor philosophy throughout the course of mankind’s history.

The secret of the Witch Doctor’s power lies in the fact that man needs an integrated view of life, a philosophy, whether he is aware of his need or not—and whenever, through ignorance, cowardice or mental sloth, men choose not to be aware of it, their chronic sense of guilt, uncertainty and terror makes them feel that the Witch Doctor’s philosophy is true.

The first to feel it is Attila.

The man who lives by brute force, at the whim and mercy of the moment, lives on a narrow island suspended in a fog of the unknown, where invisible threats and unpredictable disasters can descend upon him any morning. He is willing to surrender his consciousness to the man who offers him protection against those intangible questions which he does not wish to consider, yet dreads.

Attila’s fear of reality is as great as the Witch Doctor’s. Both hold their consciousness on a subhuman level and method of functioning: Attila’s brain is a jumble of concretes unintegrated by abstractions; the Witch Doctor’s brain is a miasma of floating abstractions unrelated to concretes. Both are guided and motivated—ultimately—not by thoughts, but by feelings and whims. Both cling to their whims as to their only certainty. Both feel secretly inadequate to the task of dealing with existence.

Thus they come to need each other. Attila feels that the Witch Doctor can give him what he lacks: a long-range view, an insurance against the dark unknown of tomorrow or next week or next year, a code of moral values to sanction his actions and to disarm his victims. The Witch Doctor feels that Attila can give him the material means of survival, can protect him from physical reality, can spare him the necessity of practical action, and can enforce his mystic edicts on any recalcitrant who may choose to challenge his authority. Both of them are incomplete parts of a human being, who seek completion in each other: the man of muscle and the man of feelings, seeking to exist without mind.

Since no man can fully escape the conceptual level of consciousness, it is not the case that Attila and the Witch Doctor cannot or do not think; they can and do—but thinking, to them, is not a means of perceiving reality, it is a means of justifying their escape from the necessity of rational perception. Reason, to them, is a means of defeating their victims, a menial servant charged with the task of rationalizing the metaphysical validity and power of their whims. Just as a bank robber will spend years of planning, ingenuity and effort in order to prove to himself that he can exist without effort, so both Attila and the Witch Doctor will go to any length of cunning, calculation and thought in order to demonstrate the impotence of thought and preserve the image of a pliable universe where miracles are possible and whims are efficacious. The power of ideas has no reality for either of them, and neither cares to learn that the proof of that power lies in his own chronic sense of guilt and terror.

Thus Attila and the Witch Doctor form an alliance and divide their respective domains. Attila rules the realm of men’s physical existence—the Witch Doctor rules the realm of men’s consciousness. Attila herds men into armies—the Witch Doctor sets the armies’ goals. Attila conquers empires—the Witch Doctor writes their laws. Attila loots and plunders—the Witch Doctor exhorts the victims to surpass their selfish concern with material property. Attila slaughters—the Witch Doctor proclaims to the survivors that scourges are a retribution for their sins. Attila rules by means of fear, by keeping men under a constant threat of destruction—the Witch Doctor rules by means of guilt, by keeping men convinced of their innate depravity, impotence and insignificance. Attila turns men’s life on earth into a living hell—the Witch Doctor tells them that it could not be otherwise.

But the alliance of the two rulers is precarious: it is based on mutual fear and mutual contempt. Attila is an extrovert, resentful of any concern with consciousness—the Witch Doctor is an introvert, resentful of any concern with physical existence. Attila professes scorn for values, ideals, principles, theories, abstractions—the Witch Doctor professes scorn for material property, for wealth, for man’s body, for this earth. Attila considers the Witch Doctor unpractical—the Witch Doctor considers Attila immoral. But, secretly, each of them believes that the other possesses a mysterious faculty he lacks, that the other is the true master of reality, the true exponent of the power to deal with existence. In terms, not of thought, but of chronic anxiety, it is the Witch Doctor who believes that brute force rules the world—and it is Attila who believes in the supernatural; his name for it is “fate” or “luck.”

Against whom is this alliance formed? Against those men whose existence and character both Attila and the Witch Doctor refuse to admit into their view of the universe: the men who produce. In any age or society, there are men who think and work, who discover how to deal with existence, how to produce the intellectual and the material values it requires. These are the men whose effort is the only means of survival for the parasites of all varieties: the Attilas, the Witch Doctors and the human ballast. The ballast consists of those who go through life in a state of unfocused stupor, merely repeating the words and the motions they learned from others. But the men from whom they learn, the men who are first to discover any scrap of new knowledge, are the men who deal with reality, with the task of conquering nature, and who, to that extent, assume the responsibility of cognition: of exercising their rational faculty.

A producer is any man who works and knows what he is doing. He may function on a fully human, conceptual level of awareness only some part of his time, but, to that extent, he is the Atlas who supports the existence of mankind; he may spend the rest of his time in an unthinking daze, like the others, and, to that extent, he is the exploited, drained, tortured, self-destroying victim of their schemes.

Men’s epistemology—or, more precisely, their psycho-epistemology, their method of awareness—is the most fundamental standard by which they can be classified. Few men are consistent in that respect; most men keep switching from one level of awareness to another, according to the circumstances or the issues involved, ranging from moments of full rationality to an almost somnambulistic stupor. But the battle of human history is fought and determined by those who are predominantly consistent, those who, for good or evil, are committed to and motivated by their chosen psycho-epistemology and its corollary view of existence—with echoes responding to them, in support or opposition, in the switching, flickering souls of the others.

A man’s method of using his consciousness determines his method of survival. The three contestants are Attila, the Witch Doctor and the Producer—or the man of force, the man of feelings, the man of reason—or the brute, the mystic, the thinker. The rest of mankind calls it expedient to be tossed by the current of events from one of those roles to another, not choosing to identify the fact that those three are the source which determines the current’s direction.

The producers, so far, have been the forgotten men of history. With the exception of a few brief periods, the producers have not been the leaders or the term-setters of men’s societies, although the degree of their influence and freedom was the degree of a society’s welfare and progress. Most societies have been ruled by Attila and the Witch Doctor. The cause is not some innate tendency to evil in human nature, but the fact that reason is a volitional faculty which man has to choose to discover, employ and preserve. Irrationality is a state of default, the state of an unachieved human stature. When men do not choose to reach the conceptual level, their consciousness has no recourse but to its automatic, perceptual, semi-animal functions. If a missing link between the human and the animal species is to be found, Attila and the Witch Doctor are that missing link—the profiteers on men’s default.

The sound of the first human step in recorded history, the prelude to the entrance of the producer on the historical scene, was the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece. All earlier cultures had been ruled, not by reason, but by mysticism: the task of philosophy—the formulation of an integrated view of man, of existence, of the universe—was the monopoly of various religions that enforced their views by the authority of a claim to supernatural knowledge and dictated the rules that controlled men’s lives. Philosophy was born in a period when Attila was impotent to assist the Witch Doctor—when a comparative degree of political freedom undercut the power of mysticism and, for the first time, man was free to face an unobstructed universe, free to declare that his mind was competent to deal with all the problems of his existence and that reason was his only means of knowledge.

Even though the influence of the Witch Doctor’s views permeated the works of the early philosophers, reason, for the first time, was identified and acknowledged as man’s ruling faculty, a recognition it had never been granted before. Plato’s system was a monument to the Witch Doctor’s metaphysics—with its two realities, with the physical world as a semi-illusory, imperfect, inferior realm, subordinated to a realm of abstractions (which means, in fact, though not in Plato’s statement: subordinated to man’s consciousness), with reason in the position of an inferior but necessary servant that paves the way for the ultimate burst of mystic revelation which discloses a “superior” truth. But Aristotle’s philosophy was the intellect’s Declaration of Independence. Aristotle, the father of logic, should be given the title of the world’s first intellectual, in the purest and noblest sense of that word. No matter what remnants of Platonism did exist in Aristotle’s system, his incomparable achievement lay in the fact that he defined the basic principles of a rational view of existence and of man’s consciousness: that there is only one reality, the one which man perceives—that it exists as an objective absolute (which means: independently of the consciousness, the wishes or the feelings of any perceiver)—that the task of man’s consciousness is to perceive, not to create, reality—that abstractions are man’s method of integrating his sensory material—that man’s mind is his only tool of knowledge—that A is A.

If we consider the fact that to this day everything that makes us civilized beings, every rational value that we possess—including the birth of science, the industrial revolution, the creation of the United States, even the structure of our language—is the result of Aristotle’s influence, of the degree to which, explicitly or implicitly, men accepted his epistemological principles, we would have to say: never have so many owed so much to one man.

Just as the Witch Doctor is impotent without Attila, so Attila is impotent without the Witch Doctor; neither can make his power last without the other. Politically, the centuries of the Greco-Roman civilization were still dominated by Attila (by the rule of local tyrants or tribal aristocracies), but it was a tame, uncertain, subdued Attila, who had to contend with the influence of philosophy (not of faith) in men’s minds. The best aspects of Western civilization still owe their roots to the intellectual achievements of that era.

Attila regained his power with the rise of statism in the Roman Empire. What followed was the fall of Rome, as a drained hulk, bankrupt in spirit and body, unable to muster any power of resistance to the invasion of barbarian hordes—then the looting and devastation of Europe by the literal Attila, and the centuries of brute violence, of bloody tribal warfare, of unrecorded chaos, known as the Dark Ages. The Witch Doctors were re-emerging, with a new version of mysticism, in answer to the pleas for help of the various local Attilas, who were bowing to them voluntarily, in speedy conversions, in exchange for the guidance of some form of basic principles to help them stabilize their power.

The Middle Ages was a period ruled by the Witch Doctor, in a firm, if mutually jealous, alliance with Attila. The Witch Doctors controlled every aspect of human life and thought, while the feudal Attilas looted one another’s domains, collected material tributes from serfs—who worked, lived and starved in subhuman conditions—and maintained the Witch Doctors’ monopoly on spiritual law and order, by the power to burn heretics at the stake.

Philosophy, in that era, existed as a “handmaiden of theology,” and the dominant influence was, appropriately, Plato’s in the form of Plotinus and Augustine. Aristotle’s works were lost to the scholars of Europe for centuries. The prelude to the Renaissance was the return of Aristotle via Thomas Aquinas.

The Renaissance—the rebirth of man’s mind—blasted the rule of the Witch Doctor sky-high, setting the earth free of his power. The liberation was not total, nor was it immediate: the convulsions lasted for centuries, but the cultural influence of mysticism—of avowed mysticism—was broken. Men could no longer be told to reject their mind as an impotent tool, when the proof of its potency was so magnificently evident that the lowest perceptual-level mentality was not able fully to evade it: men were seeing the achievements of science.

The Renaissance did not dethrone Attila at once: he clung to his fading power a while longer, building his absolute monarchies on the remnants of his crumbling feudal state. But once again, as in the Greco-Roman era, Attila was ineffectual when left on his own. He was mentally helpless and scared, unable to cope with the tide of liberation sweeping the world. He ran blindly amuck in the practice of his only skill and purpose, that of material extortion, bringing nations to ragged poverty by his constant wars and levies, taxing away the last of his subjects’ possessions. But when it came to intellectual issues, he kept appeasing the advocates of freedom, he assumed the role of their pupil, protector and “patron of the arts,” lapsing occasionally into frantic bursts of censorship and persecution, then returning to the role of “enlightened monarch.” Attila, like any bully and like many animals, feels confident only when he smells fear in his opponents—and it is not fear that thinkers project when they fight for the freedom of the mind. “The divine right of kings” was not much of a weapon against men who were discovering the rights of man.

The industrial revolution completed the task of the Renaissance: it blasted Attila off his throne. For the first time in history, men gained control over physical nature and threw off the control of men over men—that is: men discovered science and political freedom.

The first society in history whose leaders were neither Attilas nor Witch Doctors, a society led, dominated and created by the Producers, was the United States of America. The moral code implicit in its political principles was not the Witch Doctor’s code of self-sacrifice. The political principles embodied in its Constitution were not Attila’s blank check on brute force, but men’s protection against any future Attila’s ambition.

The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipping mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters; as a political group, they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action. They had rejected the soul-body dichotomy, with its two corollaries: the impotence of man’s mind and the damnation of this earth; they had rejected the doctrine of suffering as man’s metaphysical fate, they proclaimed man’s right to the pursuit of happiness and were determined to establish on earth the conditions required for man’s proper existence, by the “unaided” power of their intellect.

A society based on and geared to the conceptual level of man’s consciousness, a society dominated by a philosophy of reason, has no place for the rule of fear and guilt. Reason requires freedom, self-confidence and self-esteem. It requires the right to think and to act on the guidance of one’s thinking—the right to live by one’s own independent judgment. Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.

The unprecedented social system whose fundamentals were established by the Founding Fathers, the system which set the terms, the example and the pattern for the nineteenth century—spreading to all the countries of the civilized world—was capitalism.

To be exact, it was not a full, perfect, totally unregulated laissez-faire capitalism. Various degrees of government interference and control still remained, even in America, as deadly cracks in the system’s foundations. But during the nineteenth century, the world came close to economic freedom, for the first and only time in history. The degree of any given country’s economic freedom was the exact degree of its progress. America, the freest, achieved the most.

Capitalism wiped out slavery in matter and in spirit. It replaced Attila and the Witch Doctor, the looter of wealth and the purveyor of revelations, with two new types of man: the producer of wealth and the purveyor of knowledge—the businessman and the intellectual.

Capitalism demands the best of every man—his rationality—and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him. His success depends on the objective value of his work and on the rationality of those who recognize that value. When men are free to trade, with reason and reality as their only arbiter, when no man may use physical force to extort the consent of another, it is the best product and the best judgment that win in every field of human endeavor, and raise the standard of living—and of thought—ever higher for all those who take part in mankind’s productive activity.

In this complex pattern of human co-operation, two key figures act as the twin-motors of progress, the integrators of the entire system, the transmission belts that carry the achievements of the best minds to every level of society: the intellectual and the businessman.

The professional intellectual is the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the philosopher. The intellectual carries the application of philosophical principles to every field of human endeavor. He sets a society’s course by transmitting ideas from the “ivory tower” of the philosopher to the university professor—to the writer—to the artist—to the newspaperman—to the politician—to the movie maker—to the night-club singer—to the man in the street. The intellectual’s specific professions are in the field of the sciences that study man, the so-called “humanities,” but for that very reason his influence extends to all other professions. Those who deal with the sciences studying nature have to rely on the intellectual for philosophical guidance and information: for moral values, for social theories, for political premises, for psychological tenets and, above all, for the principles of epistemology, that crucial branch of philosophy which studies man’s means of knowledge and makes all other sciences possible. The intellectual is the eyes, ears and voice of a free society: it is his job to observe the events of the world, to evaluate their meaning and to inform the men in all the other fields. A free society has to be an informed society. In the stagnation of feudalism, with castes and guilds of serfs repeating the same motions generation after generation, the services of traveling minstrels chanting the same old legends were sufficient. But in the racing torrent of progress which is capitalism, where the free choices of individual men determine their own lives and the course of the entire economy, where opportunities are unlimited, where discoveries are constant, where the achievements of every profession affect all the others, men need a knowledge wider than their particular specialties, they need those who can point the way to the better mousetrap—or the better cyclotron, or the better symphony, or the better view of existence. The more specialized and diversified a society, the greater its need for the integrating power of knowledge; but the acquisition of knowledge on so wide a scale is a full-time profession. A free society has to count on the honor of its intellectuals: it has to expect them to be as efficient, reliable, precise and objective as the printing presses and the television sets that carry their voices.

The professional businessman is the field agent of the army whose lieutenant-commander-in-chief is the scientist. The businessman carries scientific discoveries from the laboratory of the inventor to industrial plants, and transforms them into material products that fill men’s physical needs and expand the comfort of men’s existence. By creating a mass market, he makes these products available to every income level of society. By using machines, he increases the productivity of human labor, thus raising labor’s economic rewards. By organizing human effort into productive enterprises, he creates employment for men of countless professions. He is the great liberator who, in the short span of a century and a half, has released men from bondage to their physical needs, has released them from the terrible drudgery of an eighteen-hour workday of manual labor for their barest subsistence, has released them from famines, from pestilences, from the stagnant hopelessness and terror in which most of mankind had lived in all the pre-capitalist centuries—and in which most of it still lives, in non-capitalist countries.

It is on this fundamental division of labor and of responsibility that the intellectual has defaulted. His twin brother, the businessman, has done a superlative job and has brought men to an unprecedented material prosperity. But the intellectual has sold him out, has betrayed their common source, has failed in his own job and has brought men to spiritual bankruptcy. The businessman has raised men’s standard of living—but the intellectual has dropped men’s standard of thought to the level of an impotent savage.

It has often been noted that mankind has achieved an enormous material progress, but has remained on the level of the primitive brute in spirit. (The solution usually offered is to abandon material progress.) The cause of the discrepancy is ignored or evaded. The cause is to be found at that crossroads of the post-Renaissance period where man’s physical existence and his philosophy broke apart and went in different directions.

Just as a man’s actions are preceded and determined by some form of idea in his mind, so a society’s existential conditions are preceded and determined by the ascendancy of a certain philosophy among those whose job is to deal with ideas. The events of any given period of history are the result of the thinking of the preceding period. The nineteenth century—with its political freedom, science, industry, business, trade, all the necessary conditions of material progress—was the result and the last achievement of the intellectual power released by the Renaissance. The men engaged in those activities were still riding on the remnants of an Aristotelian influence in philosophy, particularly on an Aristotelian epistemology (more implicitly than explicitly). But they were like men living on the energy of the light rays of a distant star, who did not know (it was not their primary task to know) that that star had been extinguished.

It had been extinguished by those whose primary task was to sustain it.

From the start of the post-Renaissance period, philosophy—released from its bondage as handmaiden of theology—went seeking a new form of servitude, like a frightened slave, broken in spirit, who recoils from the responsibility of freedom. Descartes set the direction of the retreat by bringing the Witch Doctor back into philosophy. While promising a philosophical system as rational, demonstrable and scientific as mathematics, Descartes began with the basic epistemological premise of every Witch Doctor (a premise he shared explicitly with Augustine): “the prior certainty of consciousness,” the belief that the existence of an external world is not self-evident, but must be proved by deduction from the contents of one’s consciousness—which means: the concept of consciousness as some faculty other than the faculty of perception—which means: the indiscriminate contents of one’s consciousness as the irreducible primary and absolute, to which reality has to conform. What followed was the grotesquely tragic spectacle of philosophers struggling to prove the existence of an external world by staring, with the Witch Doctor’s blind, inward stare, at the random twists of their conceptions—then of perceptions—then of sensations.

When the medieval Witch Doctor had merely ordered men to doubt the validity of their mind, the philosophers’ rebellion against him consisted of proclaiming that they doubted whether man was conscious at all and whether anything existed for him to be conscious of.

It is at this point that Attila entered the philosophical scene.

Attila—the type of man who longs to live on the perceptual level of consciousness, without the “interference” of any concepts, to act on the whim and range of the moment, without the “hampering restriction” of principles or theories, without the necessity of integrating one experience with another or one moment with the next—saw his chance to escape from his subservience to the Witch Doctor, which he had always resented (to muscle in on the racket, one would have to say), and to obtain from science the sanction of his actions and of his psycho-epistemology. Attila, who hated and feared intellectual issues, saw his chance to take over the intellect and found his voice.

When Hume declared that he saw objects moving about, but never saw such a thing as “causality”—it was the voice of Attila that men were hearing. It was Attila’s soul that spoke when Hume declared that he experienced a flow of fleeting states inside his skull, such as sensations, feelings or memories, but had never caught the experience of such a thing as consciousness or self. When Hume declared that the apparent existence of an object did not guarantee that it would not vanish spontaneously next moment, and the sunrise of today did not prove that the sun would rise tomorrow; when he declared that philosophical speculation was a game, like chess or hunting, of no significance whatever to the practical course of human existence, since reason proved that existence was unintelligible and only the ignorant maintained the illusion of knowledge—all of this accompanied by vehement opposition to the mysticism of the Witch Doctor and by protestations of loyalty to reason and science—what men were hearing was the manifesto of a philosophical movement that can be designated only as Attila-ism.

If it were possible for an animal to describe the content of his consciousness, the result would be a transcript of Hume’s philosophy. Hume’s conclusions would be the conclusions of a consciousness limited to the perceptual level of awareness, passively reacting to the experience of immediate concretes, with no capacity to form abstractions, to integrate perceptions into concepts, waiting in vain for the appearance of an object labeled “causality” (except that such a consciousness would not be able to draw conclusions).

To negate man’s mind, it is the conceptual level of his consciousness that has to be invalidated. Under all the tortuous complexities, contradictions, equivocations, rationalizations of the post-Renaissance philosophy—the one consistent line, the fundamental that explains the rest, is: a concerted attack on man’s conceptual faculty. Most philosophers did not intend to invalidate conceptual knowledge, but its defenders did more to destroy it than did its enemies. They were unable to offer a solution to the “problem of universals,” that is: to define the nature and source of abstractions, to determine the relationship of concepts to perceptual data—and to prove the validity of scientific induction. Ignoring the lead of Aristotle, who had not left them a full answer to the problem, but had shown the direction and the method by which the answer could be found, the philosophers were unable to refute the Witch Doctor’s claim that their concepts were as arbitrary as his whims and that their scientific knowledge had no greater metaphysical validity than his revelations.

The philosophers chose to solve the problem by conceding the Witch Doctor’s claim and by surrendering to him the conceptual level of man’s consciousness—a victory no Witch Doctor could have hoped to achieve on his own. The form of that absurd concession was the philosophers’ ultimate division into two camps: those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge of the world by deducing it exclusively from concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the perception of physical facts (the Rationalists)—and those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts (the Empiricists). To put it more simply: those who joined the Witch Doctor, by abandoning reality—and those who clung to reality, by abandoning their mind.

Thus reason was pushed off the philosophical scene, by default, by implication, by evasion. What had started as a serious problem between two camps of serious thinkers soon degenerated to the level where nothing was left on the field of philosophy but a battle between Witch Doctors and Attila-ists.

The man who formalized this state, and closed the door of philosophy to reason, was Immanuel Kant.

Kant gave metaphysical expression to the psycho-epistemology of Attila and the Witch Doctor and to their primordial existential relationship, shutting out of his universe the existence and the psycho-epistemology of the Producer. He surrendered philosophy to Attila—and insured its future delivery back into the power of the Witch Doctor. He turned the world over to Attila, but reserved to the Witch Doctor the realm of morality. Kant’s expressly stated purpose was to save the morality of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice. He knew that it could not survive without a mystic base—and what it had to be saved from was reason.

Attila’s share of Kant’s universe includes this earth, physical reality, man’s senses, perceptions, reason and science, all of it labeled the “phenomenal” world. The Witch Doctor’s share is another, “higher,” reality, labeled the “noumenal” world, and a special manifestation, labeled the “categorical imperative,” which dictates to man the rules of morality and which makes itself known by means of a feeling, as a special sense of duty.

The “phenomenal” world, said Kant, is not real: reality, as perceived by man’s mind, is a distortion. The distorting mechanism is man’s conceptual faculty: man’s basic concepts (such as time, space, existence) are not derived from experience or reality, but come from an automatic system of filters in his consciousness (labeled “categories” and “forms of perception”) which impose their own design on his perception of the external world and make him incapable of perceiving it in any manner other than the one in which he does perceive it. This proves, said Kant, that man’s concepts are only a delusion, but a collective delusion which no one has the power to escape. Thus reason and science are “limited,” said Kant; they are valid only so long as they deal with this world, with a permanent, pre-determined collective delusion (and thus the criterion of reason’s validity was switched from the objective to the collective), but they are impotent to deal with the fundamental, metaphysical issues of existence, which belong to the “noumenal” world. The “noumenal” world is unknowable; it is the world of “real” reality, “superior” truth and “things in themselves” or “things as they are”—which means: things as they are not perceived by man.

Even apart from the fact that Kant’s theory of the “categories” as the source of man’s concepts was a preposterous invention, his argument amounted to a negation, not only of man’s consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as such. His argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them.

As to Kant’s version of morality, it was appropriate to the kind of zombies that would inhabit that kind of universe: it consisted of total, abject selflessness. An action is moral, said Kant, only if one has no desire to perform it, but performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of any sort, neither material nor spiritual; a benefit destroys the moral value of an action. (Thus, if one has no desire to be evil, one cannot be good; if one has, one can.)

Those who accept any part of Kant’s philosophy—metaphysical, epistemological or moral—deserve it.

If one finds the present state of the world unintelligible and inexplicable, one can begin to understand it by realizing that the dominant intellectual influence today is still Kant’s—and that all the leading modern schools of philosophy are derived from a Kantian base.

The popular slang expression “head-shrinker,” applied to psychologists, is much more literally applicable to Kant: observe the sharp drop in the intellectual stature of the post-Kantian philosophers, and the progressively thickening veil of grayness, superficiality, casuistry that descends on the history of philosophy thereafter—like a fog enveloping a sluggish river that runs thinner and thinner and finally vanishes in the swamps of the twentieth century.

The major line of philosophers rejected Kant’s “noumenal” world quite speedily, but they accepted his “phenomenal” world and carried it to its logical consequences: the view of reality as mere appearance; the view of man’s conceptual faculty as a mechanism for producing arbitrary “constructs” not derived from experience or facts; the view of rational certainty as impossible, of science as unprovable, of man’s mind as impotent—and, above all, the equation of morality with selflessness. They rejected the root or cause of Kant’s system, but accepted all of its deadly effects. They accepted it as some monstrous spider hanging in midair, in a web of unintelligible, almost unreadable verbiage—and, today, few people know that that spider is not supported by a single thread of proof.

Such was the intellectual equipment with which philosophers approached the task of observing the unprecedented historical events of the nineteenth century, and the responsibility of providing guidance for the new, free society of capitalism.

While scientists were performing astounding feats of disciplined reason, breaking down the barriers of the “unknowable” in every field of knowledge, charting the course of light rays in space or the course of blood in the capillaries of man’s body—what philosophy was offering them, as interpretation of and guidance for their achievements, was the plain Witch-doctory of Hegel, who proclaimed that matter does not exist at all, that everything is Idea (not somebody’s idea, just Idea), and that this Idea operates by the dialectical process of a new “super-logic” which proves that contradictions are the law of reality, that A is non-A, and that omniscience about the physical universe (including electricity, gravitation, the solar system, etc.) is to be derived, not from the observation of facts, but from the contemplation of that Idea’s triple somersaults inside his, Hegel’s, mind. This was offered as a philosophy of reason.

While businessmen were rising to spectacular achievements of creative ability and self-confidently ambitious courage, challenging the primordial dogma of man’s poverty and misery on earth, breaking open the trade routes of the world, releasing mankind’s productive energy and placing in its service the liberating power of machines (against the scornful resistance of loafing, ex-feudal aristocrats and the destructive violence of those who were to profit most: the workers)—what philosophy was offering, as an evaluation of their achievements and as guidance for the rest of society, was the pure Attila-ism of Marx, who proclaimed that the mind does not exist, that everything is matter, that matter develops itself by the dialectical process of its own “super-logic” of contradictions, and what is true today, will not be true tomorrow, that the material tools of production determine men’s “ideological superstructure” (which means: machines create men’s thinking, not the other way around), that muscular labor is the source of wealth, that physical force is the only practical means of existence, and that the seizure of the omnipotent machines will transfer omnipotence to the rule of brute violence. Never had Attila’s psycho-epistemology been transcribed so accurately. This was offered as a philosophy of history and of political economy.

What was offered as philosophical antidote to those who would not accept these theories?

As a defense against the Witch-doctory of Kant and Hegel, the businessman was offered the neo-mystic Attila-ism of the Pragmatists. They declared that philosophy must be practical and that practicality consists of dispensing with all absolute principles and standards—that there is no such thing as objective reality or permanent truth—that truth is that which works, and its validity can be judged only by its consequences—that no facts can be known with certainty in advance, and anything may be tried by rule-of-thumb—that reality is not firm, but fluid and “indeterminate,” that there is no such thing as a distinction between an external world and a consciousness (between the perceived and the perceiver), there is only an undifferentiated package-deal labeled “experience,” and whatever one wishes to be true, is true, whatever one wishes to exist, does exist, provided it works or makes one feel better.

A later school of more Kantian Pragmatists amended this philosophy as follows. If there is no such thing as an objective reality, men’s metaphysical choice is whether the selfish, dictatorial whims of an individual or the democratic whims of a collective are to shape that plastic goo which the ignorant call “reality”; therefore this school decided that objectivity consists of collective subjectivism—that knowledge is to be gained by means of public polls among special elites of “competent investigators” who can “predict and control” reality—that whatever people wish to be true, is true, whatever people wish to exist, does exist, and anyone who holds any firm convictions of his own is an arbitrary, mystic dogmatist, since reality is indeterminate and people determine its actual nature.

The scientist was offered a slightly different version of philosophy. As a defense against the Witch-doctory of Hegel, who claimed universal omniscience, the scientist was offered the combined neo-mystic Witch-doctory and Attila-ism of the Logical Positivists. They assured him that such concepts as metaphysics or existence or reality or thing or matter or mind are meaningless—let the mystics care whether they exist or not, a scientist does not have to know it; the task of theoretical science is the manipulation of symbols, and scientists are the special elite whose symbols have the magic power of making reality conform to their will (“matter is that which fits mathematical equations”). Knowledge, they said, consists, not of facts, but of words, words unrelated to objects, words of an arbitrary social convention, as an irreducible primary; thus knowledge is merely a matter of manipulating language. The job of scientists, they said, is not the study of reality, but the creation of arbitrary constructs by means of arbitrary sounds, and any construct is as valid as another, since the criterion of validity is only “convenience” and the definition of science is “that which the scientists do.” But this omnipotent power, surpassing the dreams of ancient numerologists or of medieval alchemists, was granted to the scientist by philosophical Attila-ism on two conditions: a. that he never claim certainty for his knowledge, since certainty is unknowable to man, and that he claim, instead, “percentages of probability,” not troubling himself with such questions as how one calculates percentages of the unknowable; b. that he claim as absolute knowledge the proposition that all values lie outside the sphere of science, that reason is impotent to deal with morality, that moral values are a matter of subjective choice, dictated by one’s feelings, not one’s mind.

The great treason of the philosophers was that they never stepped out of the Middle Ages: they never challenged the Witch Doctor’s code of morality. They were willing to doubt the existence of physical objects, they were willing to doubt the validity of their own senses, they were willing to defy the authority of absolute monarchies, they were willing (occasionally) to proclaim themselves to be skeptics or agnostics or atheists—but they were not willing to doubt the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal, that he has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.

Under all its countless guises, variations and adaptations, that doctrine—best designated as the morality of altruism—has come from prehistoric swamps to New York City, unchanged. In savage societies, men practiced the ritual of human sacrifices, immolating individual men on sacrificial altars, for the sake of what they regarded as their collective, tribal good. Today, they are still doing it, only the agony is slower and the slaughter greater—but the doctrine that demands it and sanctions it, is the same doctrine of moral cannibalism.

The philosophers preserved it, by leaving the subject of morality to the mystics—or by consigning it to the province of subjective feelings, which means: to the mystics—or by the vehement rejection of reason’s capacity to deal with moral values and the branding of all value-judgments as “unscientific,” which means: the re-affirmation and perpetuation of the mystics’ monopoly on morality—or, worst of all, by accepting the mystics’ moral code in its irrational entirety, then translating it into earthly terms and propagating it in the name of reason.

The convolutions of this last attempt provide what is, perhaps, the most grotesquely terrible chapter in the history of Western thought. The political “me-too-ism,” abjectly displayed by the “conservatives” of today toward their brazenly socialistic adversaries, is only the result and the feeble reflection of the ethical “me-too-ism” displayed by the philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by the alleged champions of reason, toward the Witch Doctors of morality.

Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism, the champion of science, advocated a “rational,” “scientific” social system based on the total subjugation of the individual to the collective, including a “Religion of Humanity” which substituted Society for the Gods or gods who collect the blood of sacrificial victims. It is not astonishing that Comte was the coiner of the term Altruism, which means: the placing of others above self, of their interests above one’s own.

Nietzsche’s rebellion against altruism consisted of replacing the sacrifice of oneself to others by the sacrifice of others to oneself. He proclaimed that the ideal man is moved, not by reason, but by his “blood,” by his innate instincts, feelings and will to power—that he is predestined by birth to rule others and sacrifice them to himself, while they are predestined by birth to be his victims and slaves—that reason, logic, principles are futile and debilitating, that morality is useless, that the “superman” is “beyond good and evil,” that he is a “beast of prey” whose ultimate standard is nothing but his own whim. Thus Nietzsche’s rejection of the Witch Doctor consisted of elevating Attila into a moral ideal—which meant: a double surrender of morality to the Witch Doctor.

Jeremy Bentham, the champion of capitalism, defended it by proclaiming “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” as its moral justification—and pro-pounded a “hedonistic calculus” for men’s moral guidance, which enunciated the principle that before taking any action one must consider all the possible forms and amounts of happiness and unhappiness to accrue to all the people possibly to be affected by the consequences of one’s action (including oneself as one unit among the dozens or hundreds or millions), one must compute them all, then act accordingly and sacrifice the “hedonistic” minority to the majority.

Herbert Spencer, another champion of capitalism, chose to decide that the theory of evolution and of adaptation to environment was the key to man’s morality—and declared that the moral justification of capitalism was the survival of the species, of the human race; that whoever was of no value to the race, had to perish; that man’s morality consisted of adapting oneself to one’s social environment, and seeking one’s own happiness in the welfare of society; and that the automatic processes of evolution would eventually obliterate the distinction between selfishness and unselfishness.

And when Karl Marx, the most consistent translator of the altruist morality into practical action and political theory, advocated a society where all would be sacrificed to all, starting with the immediate immolation of the able, the intelligent, the successful and the wealthy—whatever opposition he did encounter, nobody opposed him on moral grounds. Predominantly, he was granted the status of a noble, but impractical, idealist.

The great treason of the philosophers was that they, the thinkers, defaulted on the responsibility of providing a rational society with a code of rational morality. They, whose job it was to discover and define man’s moral values, stared at the brilliant torrent of man’s released energy and had nothing better to offer for its guidance than the Witch Doctor’s morality of human sacrifices—of self-denial, self-abasement, self-immolation—of suffering, guilt and death.

The failure of philosophers to challenge the Witch Doctor’s morality, has cost them their kingdom: philosophy. The relationship of reason and morality is reciprocal: the man who accepts the role of a sacrificial animal, will not achieve the self-confidence necessary to uphold the validity of his mind—the man who doubts the validity of his mind, will not achieve the self-esteem necessary to uphold the value of his person and to discover the moral premises that make man’s value possible.

The intellectuals share the philosophers’ guilt. The intellectuals—all those whose professions deal with the “humanities” and require a firm philosophical base—have known for a long time that no such base existed. They knew that they were functioning in a philosophical vacuum and that the currency they were passing was rubber checks which would bounce, some day, wrecking their culture.

One can never know, only surmise, what tragedies, despair and silent devastation have been going on for over a century in the invisible underground of the intellectual professions—in the souls of their practitioners—nor what incalculable potential of human ability and integrity perished in those hidden, lonely conflicts. The young minds who came to the field of the intellect with the inarticulate sense of a crusade, seeking rational answers to the problems of achieving a meaningful human existence, found a philosophical con game in place of guidance and leadership. Some of them gave up the field of ideas, in hopeless, indignant frustration, and vanished into the silence of subjectivity. Others gave in, and saw their eagerness turn into bitterness, their quest into apathy, their crusade into a cynical racket. They condemned themselves to the chronic anxiety of a con man dreading exposure when they accepted the roles of enlightened leaders, while knowing that their knowledge rested on nothing but fog and that its only validation was somebody’s feelings.

They, the standard bearers of the mind, found themselves dreading reason as an enemy, logic as a pursuer, thought as an avenger. They, the proponents of ideas, found themselves clinging to the belief that ideas were impotent: their choice was the futility of a charlatan or the guilt of a traitor. They were not mediocrities when they began their careers; they were pretentious mediocrities when they ended. The exceptions are growing rarer with every generation. No one can accept with psychological impunity the function of a Witch Doctor under the banner of the intellect.

With nothing but quicksands to stand on—the shifting mixture of Witch-doctory and Attila-ism as their philosophical base—the intellectuals were unable to grasp, to identify or to evaluate the historical drama taking place before them: the industrial revolution and capitalism. They were like men who did not see the splendor of a rocket bursting over their heads, because their eyes were lowered in guilt. It was their job to see and to explain—to a society of men stumbling dazedly out of a primeval dungeon—the cause and the meaning of the events that were sweeping them faster and farther than the motion of all the centuries behind them. The intellectuals did not choose to see.

The men in the other professions were not able to step back and observe. If some men found themselves leaving their farms for a chance to work in a factory, that was all they knew. If their children now had a chance to survive beyond the age of ten (child mortality had been about fifty percent in the pre-capitalist era), they were not able to identify the cause. They could not tell why the periodic famines—that had been striking every twenty years to wipe out the “surplus” population which pre-capitalist economies could not feed—now came to an end, as did the carnages of religious wars, nor why fear seemed to be lifting away from people’s voices and from the streets of growing cities, nor why an enormous exultation was suddenly sweeping the world. The intellectuals did not choose to tell them.

The intellectuals, or their predominant majority, remained centuries behind their time: still seeking the favor of noble protectors, some of them were bewailing the “vulgarity” of commercial pursuits, scoffing at those whose wealth was “new,” and, simultaneously, blaming these new wealth-makers for all the poverty inherited from the centuries ruled by the owners of nobly “noncommercial” wealth. Others were denouncing machines as “inhuman,” and factories as a blemish on the beauty of the countryside (where gallows had formerly stood at the crossroads). Still others were calling for a movement “back to nature,” to the handicrafts, to the Middle Ages. And some were attacking scientists for inquiring into forbidden “mysteries” and interfering with God’s design.

The victim of the intellectuals’ most infamous injustice was the businessman.

Having accepted the premises, the moral values and the position of Witch Doctors, the intellectuals were unwilling to differentiate between the businessman and Attila, between the producer of wealth and the looter. Like the Witch Doctor, they scorned and dreaded the realm of material reality, feeling secretly inadequate to deal with it. Like the Witch Doctor’s, their secret vision (almost their feared and envied ideal) of a practical, successful man, a true master of reality, was Attila; like the Witch Doctor, they believed that force, fraud, lies, plunder, expropriation, enslavement, murder were practical. So they did not inquire into the source of wealth or ever ask what made it possible (they had been taught that causality is an illusion and that only the immediate moment is real). They took it as their axiom, as an irreducible primary, that wealth can be acquired only by force—and that a fortune as such is the proof of plunder, with no further distinctions or inquiries necessary.

With their eyes still fixed on the Middle Ages, they were maintaining this in the midst of a period when a greater amount of wealth than had ever before existed in the world was being brought into existence all around them. If the men who produced that wealth were thieves, from whom had they stolen it? Under all the shameful twists of their evasions, the intellectuals’ answer was: from those who had not produced it. They were refusing to acknowledge the industrial revolution (they are still refusing today). They were refusing to admit into their universe what neither Attila nor the Witch Doctor can afford to admit: the existence of man, the Producer.

Evading the difference between production and looting, they called the businessman a robber. Evading the difference between freedom and compulsion, they called him a slave driver. Evading the difference between reward and terror, they called him an exploiter. Evading the difference between pay checks and guns, they called him an autocrat. Evading the difference between trade and force, they called him a tyrant. The most crucial issue they had to evade was the difference between the earned and the unearned.

Ignoring the existence of the faculty they were betraying, the faculty of discrimination, the intellect, they refused to identify the fact that industrial wealth was the product of man’s mind: that an incalculable amount of intellectual power, of creative intelligence, of disciplined energy, of human genius had gone into the creation of industrial fortunes. They could not afford to identify it, because they could not afford to admit the fact that the intellect is a practical faculty, a guide to man’s successful existence on earth, and that its task is the study of reality (as well as the production of wealth), not the contemplation of unintelligible feelings nor a special monopoly on the “unknowable.”

The Witch Doctor’s morality of altruism—the morality that damns all those who achieve success or enjoyment on earth—provided the intellectuals with the means to make a virtue of evasion. It gave them a weapon that disarmed their victims; it gave them an automatic substitute for self-esteem, and a chance at an unearned moral stature. They proclaimed themselves to be the defenders of the poor against the rich, righteously evading the fact that the rich were not Attilas any longer—and the defenders of the weak against the strong, righteously evading the fact that the strength involved was not the strength of brute muscles any longer, but the strength of man’s mind.

But while the intellectuals regarded the businessman as Attila, the businessman would not behave as they, from the position of Witch Doctors, expected Attila to behave: he was impervious to their power. The businessman was as bewildered by events as the rest of mankind, he had no time to grasp his own historical role, he had no moral weapons, no voice, no defense, and—knowing no morality but the altruist code, yet knowing also that he was functioning against it, that self-sacrifice was not his role—he was helplessly vulnerable to the intellectuals’ attack. He would have welcomed eagerly the guidance of Aristotle, but had no use for Immanuel Kant. That which today is called “common sense” is the remnant of an Aristotelian influence, and that was the businessman’s only form of philosophy. The businessman asked for proof and expected things to make sense—an expectation that kicked the intellectuals into the category of the unemployed. They had nothing to offer to a man who did not buy any shares of any version of the “noumenal” world.

To understand the course the intellectuals chose to take, it is important to remember the Witch Doctor’s psycho-epistemology and his relationship to Attila: the Witch Doctor expects Attila to be his protector against reality, against the necessity of rational cognition, and, at the same time, he expects to rule his own protector, who needs an unintelligible mystic sanction as a narcotic to relieve his chronic guilt. They derive their mutual security, not from any form of strength, but from the fact that each has a hold on the other’s secret weakness. It is not the security of two traders, who count on the values they offer each other, but the security of two blackmailers, who count on each other’s fear.

The Witch Doctor feels like a metaphysical outcast in a capitalist society—as if he were pushed into some limbo outside of any universe he cares to recognize. He has no means to deal with innocence; he can get no hold on a man who does not seek to live in guilt, on a businessman who is confident of his ability to earn his living—who takes pride in his work and in the value of his product—who drives himself with inexhaustible energy and limitless ambition to do better and still better and ever better—who is willing to bear penalties for his mistakes and expects rewards for his achievements—who looks at the universe with the fearless eagerness of a child, knowing it to be intelligible—who demands straight lines, clear terms, precise definitions—who stands in full sunlight and has no use for the murky fog of the hidden, the secret, the unnamed, the furtively evocative, for any code of signals from the psycho-epistemology of guilt.

What the businessman offered to the intellectuals was the spiritual counterpart of his own activity, that which the Witch Doctor dreads most: the freedom of the market place of ideas.

To live by the work of one’s mind, to offer men the products of one’s thinking, to provide them with new knowledge, to stand on nothing but the merit of one’s ideas and to rely on nothing but objective truth, in a market open to any man who is willing to think and has to judge, accept or reject on his own—is a task that only a man on the conceptual level of psycho-epistemology can welcome or fulfill. It is not the place for a Witch Doctor nor for any mystic “elite.” A Witch Doctor has to live by the favor of a protector, by a special dispensation, by a reserved monopoly, by exclusion, by suppression, by censorship.

Having accepted the philosophy and the psycho-epistemology of the Witch Doctor, the intellectuals had to cut the ground from under their own feet and turn against their own historical distinction: against the first chance men had ever had to make a professional living by means of the intellect. When the intellectuals rebelled against the “commercialism” of a capitalist society, what they were specifically rebelling against was the open market of ideas, where feelings were not accepted and ideas were expected to demonstrate their validity, where the risks were great, injustices were possible and no protector existed but objective reality.

Just as Attila, since the Renaissance, was looking for a Witch Doctor of his own, so the intellectuals, since the industrial revolution, were looking for an Attila of their own. The altruist morality brought them together and gave them the weapon they needed. The field where they found each other was socialism.

It was not the businessmen or the industrialists or the workers or the labor unions or the remnants of the feudal aristocracy that began the revolt against freedom and the demand for the return of the absolute state: it was the intellectuals. It was the alleged guardians of reason who brought mankind back to the rule of brute force.

Growing throughout the nineteenth century, originated in and directed from intellectual salons, sidewalk cafés, basement beer joints and university classrooms, the industrial counter-revolution united the Witch Doctors and the Attila-ists. They demanded the right to enforce ideas at the point of a gun, that is: through the power of government, and compel the submission of others to the views and wishes of those who would gain control of the government’s machinery. They extolled the State as the “Form of the Good,” with man as its abject servant, and they proposed as many variants of the socialist state as there had been of the altruist morality. But, in both cases, the variations merely played with the surface, while the cannibal essence remained the same: socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.

It is only the Attila-ist, pragmatist, positivist, anti-conceptual mentality—which grants no validity to abstractions, no meaning to principles and no power to ideas—that can still wonder why a theoretical doctrine of that kind had to lead in practice to the torrent of blood and brute, non-human horror of such socialist societies as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Only the Attila-ist mentality can still claim that nobody can prove that these had to be the necessary results—or still try to blame it on the “imperfection” of human nature or on the evil of some specific gang who “betrayed a noble ideal,” and still promise that its own gang would do it better and make it work—or still mumble in a quavering voice that the motive was love of humanity.

The pretenses have worn thin, the evasions do not work any longer; the intellectuals are aware of their guilt, but are still struggling to evade its cause and to pass it on to the universe at large, to man’s metaphysically predestined impotence.

Guilt and fear are the disintegrators of a man’s consciousness or of a society’s culture. Today, America’s culture is being splintered into disintegration by the three injunctions which permeate our intellectual atmosphere and which are typical of guilt: don’t look—don’t judge—don’t be certain.

The psycho-epistemological meaning and implementation of these three are: don’t integrate—don’t evaluate—give up.

The last stand of Attila-ism, both in philosophy and in science, is the concerted assertion of all the neo-mystics that integration is impossible and unscientific. The escape from the conceptual level of consciousness, the progressive contraction of man’s vision down to Attila’s range, has now reached its ultimate climax. Withdrawing from reality and responsibility, the neo-mystics proclaim that no entities exist, only relationships, and that one may study relationships without anything to relate, and, simultaneously, that every datum is single and discrete, and no datum can ever be related to any other data—that context is irrelevant, that anything may be proved or disproved in midair and midstream, and the narrower the subject of study, the better—that myopia is the hallmark of a thinker or a scientist.

System-building—the integration of knowledge into a coherent sum and a consistent view of reality—is denounced by all the Attila-ists as irrational, mystical and unscientific. This is Attila’s perennial way of surrendering to the Witch Doctor—and it explains why so many scientists are turning to God or to such flights of mysticism of their own as would make even an old-fashioned Witch Doctor blush. No consciousness can accept disintegration as a normal and permanent state. Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical (particularly epistemological) base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go.

The abdication of philosophy is all but complete. Today’s philosophers, qua Witch Doctors, declare that nobody can define what is philosophy or what is its specific task, but this need not prevent anyone from practicing it as a profession. Qua Attila-ists, they declare that the use of wide abstractions or concepts is the prerogative of the layman or of the ignorant or of the man in the street—while a philosopher is one who, knowing all the difficulties involved in the problem of abstractions, deals with nothing but concretes.

The injunction “don’t judge” is the ultimate climax of the altruist morality which, today, can be seen in its naked essence. When men plead for forgiveness, for the nameless, cosmic forgiveness of an unconfessed evil, when they react with instantaneous compassion to any guilt, to the perpetrators of any atrocity, while turning away indifferently from the bleeding bodies of the victims and the innocent—one may see the actual purpose, motive and psychological appeal of the altruist code. When these same compassionate men turn with snarling hatred upon anyone who pronounces moral judgments, when they scream that the only evil is the determination to fight against evil—one may see the kind of moral blank check that the altruist morality hands out.

Perhaps the most craven attitude of all is the one expressed by the injunction “don’t be certain.” As stated explicitly by many intellectuals, it is the suggestion that if nobody is certain of anything, if nobody holds any firm convictions, if everybody is willing to give in to everybody else, no dictator will rise among us and we will escape the destruction sweeping the rest of the world. This is the secret voice of the Witch Doctor confessing that he sees a dictator, an Attila, as a man of confident strength and uncompromising conviction. Nothing but a psycho-epistemological panic can blind such intellectuals to the fact that a dictator, like any thug, runs from the first sign of confident resistance; that he can rise only in a society of precisely such uncertain, compliant, shaking compromisers as they advocate, a society that invites a thug to take over; and that the task of resisting an Attila can be accomplished only by men of intransigent conviction and moral certainty—not by chickens hiding their heads in the sand (“ostrich” is too big and dignified a metaphor for this instance).

And, paving the way for Attila, the intellectuals are still repeating, not by conviction any longer, but by rote, that the growth of government power is not an abridgment of freedom—that the demand of one group for an unearned share of another group’s income is not socialism—that the destruction of property rights will not affect any other rights—that man’s mind, intelligence, creative ability are a “national resource” (like mines, forests, waterfalls, buffalo reserves and national parks) to be taken over, subsidized and disposed of by the government—that businessmen are selfish autocrats because they are struggling to preserve freedom, while the “liberals” are the true champions of liberty because they are fighting for more government controls—that the fact that we are sliding down a road which has destroyed every other country, does not prove that it will destroy ours—that dictatorship is not dictatorship if nobody calls it by that abstract name—and that none of us can help it, anyway.

Nobody believes any of it any longer, yet nobody opposes it. To oppose anything, one needs a firm set of principles, which means: a philosophy.

If America perishes, it will perish by intellectual default. There is no diabolical conspiracy to destroy it: no conspiracy could be big enough and strong enough. Such cafeteria-socialist conspiracies as do undoubtedly exist are groups of scared, neurotic mediocrities who find themselves pushed into national leadership because nobody else steps forward; they are like pickpockets who merely intended to snatch a welfare-regulation or two and who suddenly find that their victim is unconscious, that they are alone in an enormous mansion of fabulous wealth, with all the doors open and a seasoned burglar’s job on their hands; watch them now screaming that they didn’t mean it, that they had never advocated the nationalization of a country’s economy. As to the communist conspirators in the service of Soviet Russia, they are the best illustration of victory by default: their successes are handed to them by the concessions of their victims. There is no national movement for socialism or dictatorship in America, no “man on horseback” or popular demagogue, nothing but fumbling compromisers and frightened opportunists. Yet we are moving toward full, totalitarian socialism, with worn, cynical voices telling us that such is the irresistible trend of history. History, fate and malevolent conspiracy are easier to believe than the actual truth: that we are moved by nothing but the sluggish inertia of unfocused minds.

Collectivism, as a social ideal, is dead, but capitalism has not yet been discovered. It cannot be discovered by the psycho-epistemology of Witch Doctors and Attila-ists—and as to the businessman, he is struggling to forget that he had ever known it. That is his guilt.

The businessman, historically, had started as the victim of the intellectuals; but no injustice or exploitation can succeed for long without the sanction of the victim. The businessman, who could not accept the intellectual leadership of post-Kantian Witch Doctors, made his fatal error when he conceded to them the field of the intellect. He gave them the benefit of the doubt, at his own expense: he concluded that their meaningless verbiage could not be as bad as it sounded to him, that he lacked understanding, but had no stomach for trying to understand that sort of stuff and would leave it respectfully alone. No Witch Doctor could have hoped for a deadlier concession.

By becoming anti-intellectual, the businessman condemned himself to the position of an Attila. By restricting his goals, concerns and vision exclusively to his specific productive activity, he was forced to restrict his interests to Attila’s narrow range of the physical, the material, the immediately present. Thus he tore himself in two by an inner contradiction: he functioned on a confidently rational, conceptual level of psycho-epistemology in business, but repressed all the other aspects of his life and thought, letting himself be carried passively along by the general cultural current, in the semi-unfocused, perceptual-level daze of a man who considers himself impotent to judge what he perceives. It is thus that he turned too often into the tragic phenomenon of a genius in business who is a Babbitt in his private life.

He repressed and renounced any interest in ideas, any quest for intellectual values or moral principles. He could not accept the altruist morality, as no man of self-esteem can accept it, and he found no other moral philosophy. He lived by a subjective code of his own—the code of justice, the code of a fair trader—without knowing what a superlative moral virtue it represented. His private version or understanding of altruism—particularly in America—took the form of an enormous generosity, the joyous, innocent, benevolent generosity of a self-confident man, who is too innocent to suspect that he is hated for his success, that the moralists of altruism want him to pay financial tributes, not as kindness, but as atonement for the guilt of having succeeded. There were exceptions; there were businessmen who did accept the full philosophical meaning of altruism and its ugly burden of guilt, but they were not the majority.

They are the majority today. No man or group of men can live indefinitely under the pressure of moral injustice: they have to rebel or give in. Most of the businessmen gave in; it would have taken a philosopher to provide them with the intellectual weapons of rebellion, but they had given up any interest in philosophy. They accepted the burden of an unearned guilt; they accepted the brand of “vulgar materialists”; they accepted the accusations of “predatory greed”—predatory toward the wealth which they had created, greed for the fortunes which, but for them, would not have existed. As a result, consciously or subconsciously, they were driven to the cynical bitterness of the conviction that men are irrational, that reason is impotent in human relationships, that the field of ideas is some dark, gigantic, incomprehensible fraud.

No one can accept unearned guilt with psychological impunity. Starting as the most courageous class of men in history, the businessmen have slipped slowly into the position of men motivated by chronic fear—in all the social, political, moral, intellectual aspects of their existence. Their public policy consists of appeasing their worst enemies, placating their most contemptible attackers, trying to make terms with their own destroyers, pouring money into the support of leftist publications and “liberal” politicians, placing avowed collectivists in charge of their public relations and then voicing—in banquet speeches and full-page ads—socialistic protestations that selfless service to society is their only goal, and altruistic apologies for the fact that they still keep two or three percent of profit out of their multi-million-dollar enterprises.

There are many different motives behind that policy. Some men are moved by actual guilt: they are the new type of businessmen, the product of a “mixed” economy, who make fortunes, not by productive ability and competition in a free market, but by political pull, by government favors, subsidies, franchises and special privileges; these are psycho-epistemologically and economically closer to Attila than to the Producer, and have good reason to feel guilty. Others are forced reluctantly into a mixed position, where they still live by productive ability, yet have to depend on government favors in order to function; these are the closest to the position of self-destroyers. The majority of businessmen—perhaps the ablest and best—work in silence and are never heard from publicly. Most businessmen have probably given up the expectation of any justice from the public. But there is one motive which is shared by too many businessmen and which is the penalty for renouncing the intellect: an unconfessed fear of ideas under the professed conviction that ideas are futile, which leads to a nervously stubborn evasiveness, an anxious feeling or hope that wealth as such is power, that only material possessions are of practical importance.

Today, the businessman and the intellectual face each other with the mutual fear and the mutual contempt of Attila and the Witch Doctor. The businessman has lost confidence in all theories, and functions on a range-of-the-moment expediency, not daring to look at the future. The intellectual has cut himself off from reality and plays a futile word-game with ideas, not daring to look at the past. The businessman considers the intellectual unpractical; the intellectual considers the businessman immoral. But, secretly, each of them believes that the other possesses a mysterious faculty he lacks, that the other is the true master of reality, the true exponent of the power to deal with existence.

It is by this mutual attitude and the philosophical premises from which it comes that they are destroying each other. The major share of the guilt belongs to the intellectual: philosophical leadership was his responsibility, which he betrayed and is now deserting under fire.

The most grotesquely anachronistic and atavistic spectacle in history is the spectacle of the modern intellectuals raising the primordial voice of the Witch Doctor and, in the midst of an industrial civilization, wailing about the hopeless misery of life on earth, the depravity of man, the impotence of man’s mind, the ignoble vulgarity of material pursuits, and the nobility of longing for the supernatural.

The echoes answering them are the voices of the plain, medieval Witch Doctors that are beginning to be heard again, preaching the doctrine of man’s innate, preordained impotence, of humility, passivity, submission and resignation—here, in New York City, the greatest monument to the potency of man’s mind—and proclaiming that all the disasters of the modern age are man’s punishment for the pride of relying on his intellect, for his attempt to improve his condition, to establish a rational society and to achieve a perfect way of life on earth.

On a recent television panel discussion, an alleged conservative intellectual was asked to define the difference between a “conservative” and a “liberal.” He answered that a “liberal” is one who does not believe in Original Sin. To which a liberal intellectual replied hastily: “Oh, yes, we do!”—but proceeded to add that the liberals believe they can improve man’s life just a little.

Such is the bankruptcy of a culture.

It is into the midst of this dismal gray vacuum that the New Intellectuals must step—and must challenge the worshippers of doom, resignation and death, with an attitude best expressed by a paraphrase of an ancient salute: “We who are not about to die . . .”

Who are to be the New Intellectuals? Any man or woman who is willing to think. All those who know that man’s life must be guided by reason, those who value their own life and are not willing to surrender it to the cult of despair in the modern jungle of cynical impotence, just as they are not willing to surrender the world to the Dark Ages and the rule of the brutes.

The need for intellectual leadership was never as great as now. No human being who has a trace of personal worth can be willing to surrender his life without lifting a hand—or a mind—to defend it, particularly not in America, the country based on the premise of man’s self-reliance and self-esteem. Americans have known how to erect a superlative material achievement in the midst of an untouched wilderness, against the resistance of savage tribes. What we need today is to erect a corresponding philosophical structure, without which the material greatness cannot survive. A skyscraper cannot stand on crackerbarrels, nor on wall mottoes, nor on full-page ads, nor on prayers, nor on meta-language. The new wilderness to reclaim is philosophy, now all but deserted, with the weeds of prehistoric doctrines rising again to swallow the ruins. To support a culture, nothing less than a new philosophical foundation will do. The present state of the world is not the proof of philosophy’s impotence, but the proof of philosophy’s power. It is philosophy that has brought men to this state—it is only philosophy that can lead them out.

Those who could become the New Intellectuals are America’s hidden assets; their number is probably greater than anyone can estimate; they exist in every profession, even among the present intellectuals. But they are scattered in silent helplessness throughout the country, or hidden in that underground which, in human history, has too often swallowed the best of men’s potential: subjectivity. They are the men who have long since lost respect for the cultural standards to which they conform, but who hide their own convictions or repress their ideas or suppress their minds, each feeling that he has no chance against the others, each serving as both victim and destroyer. The New Intellectuals will be those men who will come out into the open and have the courage to break that vicious circle.

If they glance at the state of our culture, they will see that the entire miserable show is kept up by nothing but routine and pretense, which disguise bewilderment and fear: nobody dares to take the first new step, everybody waits for his neighbor’s initiative. If a society reaches the stage where every man accepts the feeling that he is “a stranger and afraid in a world [he] never made,” the world it gives up will be made by Attila. The greatest need today is for men who are not strangers to reality, because they are not afraid of thought. The New Intellectuals will be those who will take the initiative and the responsibility: they will check their own philosophical premises, identify their convictions, integrate their ideas into coherence and consistency, then offer to the country a view of existence to which the wise and honest can repair.

The New Intellectual will be the man who lives up to the exact meaning of his title: a man who is guided by his intellect—not a zombie guided by feelings, instincts, urges, wishes, whims or revelations. Ending the rule of Attila and the Witch Doctor, he will discard the basic premise that made them possible: the soul-body dichotomy. He will discard its irrational conflicts and contradictions, such as: mind versus heart, thought versus action, reality versus desire, the practical versus the moral. He will be an integrated man, that is: a thinker who is a man of action. He will know that ideas divorced from consequent action are fraudulent, and that action divorced from ideas is suicidal. He will know that the conceptual level of psycho-epistemology—the volitional level of reason and thought—is the basic necessity of man’s survival and his greatest moral virtue. He will know that men need philosophy for the purpose of living on earth.

The New Intellectual will be a reunion of the twins who should never have been separated: the intellectual and the businessman. He can come from among the best—that is: the most rational—men who may still exist in both camps. In place of an involuntary Witch Doctor and a reluctant Attila, the reunion will produce two new types: the practical thinker and the philosophical businessman.

The best among the present intellectuals should consider the tremendous power which they are holding, but have never fully exercised or understood. If any man among them feels that he is the helpless, ineffectual step-son of a “materialistic” culture that grants him neither wealth nor recognition, let him remember the meaning of his title: his power is his intellect, not his feelings, emotions or intuitions. It is not the businessmen who have robbed him of efficacy, but those of his colleagues who have degraded his profession to the level of soothsayers, tea-leaf readers and jungle oracles. Let him break with the neo-mystics; let him realize that ideas are not an escape from reality, not a hobby for “disinterested” neurotics in ivory towers, but the most crucial and practical power in human existence. Then let him become an intellectual leader who assumes full responsibility for the practical consequences of his theories.

The best among the businessmen should consider the function of wealth, and realize that the power behind the incomprehensible evil now unleashed against them is their own. Wealth, as such, is only a tool; by renouncing his intellect, the businessman has placed his wealth in the service of his own destroyers. They do not need to nationalize his property: they nationalized his mind long ago. Let him now realize that practical action without a theoretical base achieves the opposite of his goals, and that intellectual irresponsibility is not a way of escape from his enemies. Then let him discover the function of philosophy.

Instead of those ludicrous programs of “student exchanges” between America and Soviet Russia, for the alleged purpose of “gaining mutual understanding,” there ought to be a private, voluntary program of “student exchanges” between the intellectuals and the businessmen, the two groups that need each other most, yet know less and understand less about each other than about any alien society in any distant corner of the globe. The businessmen need to discover the intellect; the intellectuals need to discover reality. Let the intellectuals understand the nature and the function of a free market in order to offer the businessmen, as well as the public at large, the guidance of an intelligible theoretical framework for dealing with men, with society, with politics, with economics. Let the businessmen learn the basic issues and principles of philosophy in order to know how to judge ideas, then let them assume full responsibility for the kind of ideologies they choose to finance and support.

Let them both discover the nature, the theory and the actual history of capitalism; both groups are equally ignorant of it. No other subject is hidden by so many distortions, misconceptions, misrepresentations and falsifications. Let them study the historical facts and discover that all the evils popularly ascribed to capitalism were caused, necessitated and made possible only by government controls imposed on the economy. Whenever they hear capitalism being denounced, let them check the facts and discover which of the two opposite political principles—free trade or government controls—was responsible for the alleged iniquities. When they hear it said that capitalism has had its chance and has failed, let them remember that what ultimately failed was a “mixed” economy, that the controls were the cause of the failure, and that the way to save a country is not by making it swallow a full, “unmixed” glass of the poison which is killing it.

The Founding Fathers were America’s first intellectuals and, so far, her last. It is their basic political line that the New Intellectuals have to continue. Today, that line is lost under layer upon layer of evasions, equivocations and plain falsehood; today’s Witch Doctors claim that the basic premise of the Founding Fathers was faith and uncritical compliance with tradition; today’s Attila-ists claim that that basic premise was the subordination of the individual to the collective and his sacrifice to the public good. The New Intellectuals must remind the world that the basic premise of the Founding Fathers was man’s right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness—which means: man’s right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; and that the political implementation of this right is a society where men deal with one another as traders, by voluntary exchange to mutual benefit.

The moral premises implicit in the political philosophy of the Founding Fathers, in the social system they established and in the economics of capitalism, must now be recognized and accepted in the form of an explicit moral philosophy. That which is merely implicit is not in men’s conscious control; they can lose it by means of other implications, without knowing what it is that they are losing or when or why. It was the morality of altruism that undercut America and is now destroying her. From her start, America was torn by the clash of her political system with the altruist morality. Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.

The world crisis of today is a moral crisis—and nothing less than a moral revolution can resolve it: a moral revolution to sanction and complete the political achievement of the American Revolution. Evasions, equivocations and guilty apologies will not work any longer. The disgraceful injustice which penalized virtue for being virtue, which forced businessmen to apologize for their ability, for their success, for their achievements, has now been projected onto a global scale and translated into the disgraceful spectacle of America apologizing for her virtues and greatness to that bloody slaughterhouse of embodied altruism which is Soviet Russia.

The New Intellectuals must fight for capitalism, not as a “practical” issue, not as an economic issue, but, with the most righteous pride, as a moral issue. That is what capitalism deserves, and nothing less will save it.

The New Intellectuals must assume the task of building a new culture on a new moral foundation, which, for once, will not be the culture of Attila and the Witch Doctor, but the culture of the Producer. They will have to be radicals in the literal and reputable sense of the word: “radical” means “fundamental.” The representatives of intellectual orthodoxy, conventionality and status quo, the Babbitts of today, are the collectivists. Let those who do care about the future, those willing to crusade for a perfect society, realize that the new radicals are the fighters for capitalism.

It is not an easy task and it cannot be achieved overnight. But the New Intellectuals have an inestimable advantage: they have reality on their side. The difficulties they will encounter on their way are not stone barriers, but fog: the heavy fog of passive disintegration, through which it will be hard for them to find one another. They will encounter no opposition, since, in this context, an opposition would have to possess intellectual weapons. As to their enemies, they should comply with their enemies’ request—and leave them to heaven.

The process of identifying, judging, accepting and upholding a new philosophy of life is a long, complicated process, which requires thought, proof, full understanding and conviction. But there are two principles on which all men of intellectual integrity and good will can agree, as a “basic minimum,” as a precondition of any discussion, co-operation or movement toward an intellectual Renaissance. One principle is epistemological, the other is moral; they are not axioms, but until a man has proved them to himself and has accepted them, he is not fit for an intellectual discussion. These two principles are: a. that emotions are not tools of cognition; b. that no man has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others.

a. The first of these two principles represents one’s basic rejection of the Witch Doctor’s psycho-epistemology. It means that one must differentiate between one’s thoughts and one’s emotions with full clarity and precision. One does not have to be omniscient in order to possess knowledge; one merely has to know that which one does know, and distinguish it from that which one feels. Nor does one need a full system of philosophical epistemology in order to distinguish one’s own considered judgment from one’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears. Those who claim that they cannot do it are merely confessing that they have never learned how to use their mind and are incapable of perceiving, judging or evaluating reality. This may be a psychological problem, but it becomes an intellectual fraud when such persons enter a philosophical discussion and demand consideration for their ideas. No discussion, co-operation, agreement or understanding is possible among men who substitute emotion for proof.

b. This second principle represents one’s basic rejection of Attila’s psycho-epistemology. To claim the right to initiate the use of physical force against another man—the right to compel his agreement by the threat of physical destruction—is to evict oneself automatically from the realm of rights, of morality and of the intellect. Perhaps the most obscene legacy of altruism among modern intellectuals is their axiomatic acceptance of brute force and of somebody’s sacrifice as a normal and necessary part of a human society, and their refusal to consider the possibility of a non-sacrificial, non-compulsory co-existence and co-operation among men. Observe that they cannot conceive of “selfishness” except in terms of sacrificing others to oneself, and they cannot conceive of anyone who does not regard such sacrificing as to his own interest. This, of course, is a psychological confession about the nature of their own desires and about the Attila in their souls. When they declare that they see no difference between economic power and political power—which means: no difference between an employer and a holdup man, no difference between the United States and Soviet Russia—they are confessing a Witch Doctor’s abject fear of reality, which makes them equate a Producer with an Attila.

One would suppose that any man who makes claim to the title of moralist, humanitarian or intellectual would spend his life trying to devise—as an ideal—a social system where no man or group of men may initiate the use of physical force against others or demand the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. But when one remembers that such a system was devised and did exist less than a hundred years ago, one knows how to evaluate the brutes and thugs of the spirit who refuse to consider it possible.²

So long as men believe that the initiation of physical force by some men against others is a proper part of an organized society—hatred, violence, brutality, destruction, slaughter and the savage gang warfare of group against group are all they can or will achieve. When physical force is the ultimate arbiter, men are driven to connive, conspire and gang up on one another in order to destroy rather than be destroyed; the best perish, but the Attilas rise to the top. It might be understandable that primitive, savage tribes could not conceive of a way of life without resort to physical violence—and the bloody chaos of tribal warfare was all they achieved, as those who remained on that level still demonstrate today. But when men propose to live in an industrial civilization by the moral concepts of those jungle savages, with nuclear missiles and H-bombs at their disposal—they deserve the catastrophes they ask for. Let no man posture as an advocate of peace if he proposes or supports any social system that initiates the use of physical force against individual men, in any form whatever. Let no man posture as an advocate of freedom if he claims the right to establish his version of a good society where individual dissenters are to be suppressed by means of physical force. Let no man posture as an intellectual if he proposes to elevate a thug into the position of final authority over the intellect—or if he equates the power of physical compulsion with the power of persuasion—or if he equates the power of muscles with the power of ideas.

No advocate of reason can claim the right to force his ideas on others. No advocate of the free mind can claim the right to force the minds of others. No rational society, no co-operation, no agreement, no understanding, no discussion are possible among men who propose to substitute guns for rational persuasion.

If men of good will wish to come together for the purpose of upholding reason and establishing a rational society, they should begin by following the example of the cowboys in Western movies when the sheriff tells them at the door to a conference room: “Gentlemen, leave your guns outside.”

Those who will accept the “basic minimum” of civilization, the two principles stated above, will have made the first step toward the building of a new culture in the wide-open spaces of today’s intellectual vacuum. There is an ancient slogan that applies to our present position: “The king is dead—long live the king!” We can say, with the same dedication to the future: “The intellectuals are dead—long live the intellectuals!”—and then proceed to fulfill the responsibility which that honorable title had once implied.

We the Living

This novel was published in 1936 and reissued in 1959. Its theme is: the individual against the state; the supreme value of a human life and the evil of the totalitarian state that claims the right to sacrifice it. The story takes place in Soviet Russia. The excerpt below is the speech of Kira Argounova to Andrei Taganov, in the following context: Kira has been having a love affair with Andrei in order to obtain money to save the life of Leo Kovalensky, the man she loves; Andrei, an idealistic young Communist, who is profoundly in love with her, was beginning to discover the importance of personal values, when, in the course of arresting Leo for a political crime, he learns the truth about Kira’s relationship to both of them.

“No, you didn’t know. But it was very simple. And not very unusual. Go through the garrets and basements where men live in your Red cities and see how many cases like this you can find. He wanted to live. You think everything that breathes can live? You’ve learned differently, I know. But he was one who could have lived. There aren’t many of them, so they don’t count with you. The doctor said he was going to die. And I loved him. You’ve learned what that means, too, haven’t you? He didn’t need much. Only rest, and fresh air, and food. He had no right to that, had he? Your State said so. We tried to beg. We begged humbly. Do you know what they said? There was a doctor in a hospital and he said he had hundreds on his waiting list. . . .

“You see, you must understand this thoroughly. No one does. No one sees it, but I do, I can’t help it, I see it, you must see it, too. You understand? Hundreds. Thousands. Millions. Millions of what? Stomachs, and heads, and legs, and tongues, and souls. And it doesn’t even matter whether they fit together. Just millions. Just flesh. Human flesh. And they—it—had been registered and numbered, you know, like tin cans on a store shelf. I wonder if they’re registered by the person or by the pound? And they had a chance to go on living. But not Leo. He was only a man. All stones are cobblestones to you. And diamonds—they’re useless, because they sparkle too brightly in the sun, and it’s too hard on the eyes, and it’s too hard under the hoofs marching into the proletarian future. You don’t pave roads with diamonds. They may have other uses in the world, but of those you’ve never learned. That is why you had sentenced him to death, and others like him, an execution without a firing squad. There was a big commissar and I went to see him. He told me that a hundred thousand workers had died in the civil war and why couldn’t one aristocrat die—in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics? And what is the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics in the face of one man? But that is a question not for you to answer. I’m grateful to that commissar. He gave me permission to do what I’ve done. I don’t hate him. You should hate him. What I’m doing to you—he did it first! . . .

“That’s the question, you know, don’t you? Why can’t one aristocrat die in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics? You don’t understand that, do you? You and your great commissar, and a million others, like you, like him, that’s what you brought to the world, that question and your answer to it! A great gift, isn’t it? But one of you has been paid. I paid it. In you and to you. For all the sorrow your comrades brought to a living world. How do you like it, Comrade Andrei Taganov of the All-Union Communist Party? If you taught us that our life is nothing before that of the State—well then, are you really suffering? If I brought you to the last hell of despair—well then, why don’t you say that one’s own life doesn’t really matter? . . . You loved a woman and she threw your love in your face? But the proletarian mines in the Don Basin have produced a hundred tons of coal last month! You had two altars and you saw suddenly that a harlot stood on one of them, and Citizen Morozov on the other? But the Proletarian State has exported ten thousand bushels of wheat last month! You’ve had every beam knocked from under your life? But the Proletarian Republic is building a new electric plant on the Volga! Why don’t you smile and sing hymns to the toil of the Collective? It’s still there, your Collective. Go and join it. Did anything really happen to you? It’s nothing but a personal problem of a private life, the kind that only the dead old world could worry about, isn’t it? Don’t you have something greater—greater is the word your comrades use—left to live for? Or do you, Comrade Taganov? . . .

“Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think I’m alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which knows how to want—isn’t that life itself? And who—in this damned universe—who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want? Who can answer that in human sounds that speak for human reason? . . . But you’ve tried to tell us what we should want. You came as a solemn army to bring a new life to men. You tore that life you knew nothing about, out of their guts—and you told them what it had to be. You took their every hour, every minute, every nerve, every thought in the farthest corners of their souls—and you told them what it had to be. You came and you forbade life to the living. You’ve driven us all into an iron cellar and you’ve closed all doors, and you’ve locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst! Then you stare and wonder what it’s doing to us. Well, then, look! All of you who have eyes left—look!”

Anthem

This novelette was first published in England in 1938. Its theme is: the meaning of man’s ego. It projects a society of the future, which has accepted total collectivism with all of its ultimate consequences: men have relapsed into primitive savagery and stagnation; the word “I” has vanished from the human language, there are no singular pronouns, a man refers to himself as “we” and to another man as “they.” The story presents the gradual rediscovery of the word “I” by a man of intransigent mind. The following excerpt is from his statement about his discovery.

“I am. I think. I will. . . .

“What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer.

“I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This—my body and spirit—this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. . . .

“I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.

“Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars. . . .

“I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others. I covet no man’s soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.

“I am neither foe nor friend to my brothers, but such as each of them shall deserve of me. And to earn my love, my brothers must do more than to have been born. I do not grant my love without reason, nor to any chance passer-by who may wish to claim it. I honor men with my love. But honor is a thing to be earned.

“I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire. For in the temple of his spirit, each man is alone. Let each man keep his temple untouched and undefiled. Then let him join hands with others if he wishes, but only beyond his holy threshold.

“For the word ‘We’ must never be spoken, save by one’s choice and as a second thought. This word must never be placed first within man’s soul, else it becomes a monster, the root of all the evils on earth, the root of man’s torture by men, and of an unspeakable lie.

“The word ‘We’ is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the gray of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages.

“What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and the impotent, are my masters? What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree and to obey?

“But I am done with this creed of corruption.

“I am done with the monster of ‘We,’ the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame.

“And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride.

“This god, this one word: I.”

The Fountainhead

This novel was published in 1943. Its theme is: individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul; the psychological motivations and the basic premises that produce the character of an individualist or a collectivist. The story presents the career of Howard Roark, an architect and innovator, who breaks with tradition, recognizes no authority but that of his own independent judgment, struggles for the integrity of his creative work against every form of social opposition—and wins.

THE NATURE OF THE SECOND-HANDER

This excerpt is from a conversation between Roark and his friend Gail Wynand, in which Roark explains what he has discovered about the psychology of those whose basic motivation is the opposite of his own.

“It’s what I couldn’t understand about people for a long time. They have no self. They live within others. They live second-hand. Look at Peter Keating. . . . I’ve looked at him—at what’s left of him—and it’s helped me to understand. He’s paying the price and wondering for what sin and telling himself that he’s been too selfish. In what act or thought of his has there ever been a self? What was his aim in life? Greatness—in other people’s eyes. Fame, admiration, envy—all that which comes from others. Others dictated his convictions, which he did not hold, but he was satisfied that others believed he held them. Others were his motive power and his prime concern. He didn’t want to be great, but to be thought great. He didn’t want to build, but to be admired as a builder. He borrowed from others in order to make an impression on others. There’s your actual selflessness. It’s his ego that he’s betrayed and given up. But everybody calls him selfish. . . .

“Isn’t that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he’s honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he’s great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison. . . . They’re second-handers. . . .

“They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people. They don’t ask: ‘Is this true?’ They ask: ‘Is this what others think is true?’ Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull. What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egoists. You don’t think through another’s brain and you don’t work through another’s hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life. Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation—anchored to nothing. That’s the emptiness I couldn’t understand in people. That’s what stopped me whenever I faced a committee. Men without an ego. Opinion without a rational process. Motion without brakes or motor. Power without responsibility. The second-hander acts, but the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person. It’s everywhere and nowhere and you can’t reason with him. He’s not open to reason. You can’t speak to him—he can’t hear. You’re tried by an empty bench. A blind mass running amuck, to crush you without sense or purpose. . . .”

“Notice how they’ll accept anything except a man who stands alone. They recognize him at once. . . . There’s a special, insidious kind of hatred for him. They forgive criminals. They admire dictators. Crime and violence are a tie. A form of mutual dependence. They need ties. They’ve got to force their miserable little personalities on every single person they meet. The independent man kills them—because they don’t exist within him and that’s the only form of existence they know. Notice the malignant kind of resentment against any idea that pro-pounds independence. Notice the malice toward an independent man. . . .”

“After centuries of being pounded with the doctrine that altruism is the ultimate ideal, men have accepted it in the only way it could be accepted. By seeking self-esteem through others. By living second-hand. And it has opened the way for every kind of horror. It has become the dreadful form of selfishness which a truly selfish man couldn’t have conceived. And now, to cure a world perishing from selflessness, we’re asked to destroy the self. Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You’ve wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he’s ever held a truly personal desire, he’d find the answer. He’d see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He’s not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander’s delusion—prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can’t say about a single thing: ‘This is what I wanted because I wanted it not because it made my neighbors gape at me.’ Then he wonders why he’s unhappy. Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched. The things which are sacred or precious to us are the things we withdraw from promiscuous sharing. But now we are taught to throw everything within us into public light and common pawing. To seek joy in meeting halls. We haven’t even got a word for the quality I mean—for the self-sufficiency of man’s spirit. It’s difficult to call it selfishness or egoism, the words have been perverted, they’ve come to mean Peter Keating. Gail, I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I’ve always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I’ve always recognized it at once—and it’s the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that. Now I know what it is. A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.”

THE SOUL OF A COLLECTIVIST

This excerpt is the confession of Roark’s antipode and archenemy, Ellsworth M. Toohey, an architectural critic and sociologist, who spends his life plotting the future establishment of a collectivist society. He is addressing one of his own victims.

“I’ve always said just that. Clearly, precisely and openly. It’s not my fault if you couldn’t hear. You could, of course. You didn’t want to. Which was safer than deafness—for me. I said I intended to rule. Like all my spiritual predecessors. But I’m luckier than they were. I inherited the fruit of their efforts and I shall be the one who’ll see the great dream made real. I see it all around me today. I recognize it. I don’t like it. I didn’t expect to like it. Enjoyment is not my destiny. I shall find such satisfaction as my capacity permits. I shall rule. . . .

“It’s only a matter of discovering the lever. If you learn how to rule one single man’s soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It’s the soul, Peter, the soul. Not whips or swords or fire or guns. That’s why the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons were fools and did not last. We will. The soul, Peter, is that which can’t be ruled. It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it—and the man is yours. You won’t need a whip—he’ll bring it to you and ask to be whipped. Set him in reverse—and his own mechanism will do your work for you. Use him against himself. Want to know how it’s done? See if I ever lied to you. See if you haven’t heard all this for years, but didn’t want to hear, and the fault is yours, not mine. There are many ways. Here’s one. Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity. That’s difficult. The worst among you gropes for an ideal in his own twisted way. Kill integrity by internal corruption. Use it against itself. Direct it toward a goal destructive of all integrity. Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. Tell men that altruism is the ideal. Not a single one of them has ever achieved it and not a single one ever will. His every living instinct screams against it. But don’t you see what you accomplish? Man realizes that he’s incapable of what he’s accepted as the noblest virtue—and it gives him a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness. Since the supreme ideal is beyond his grasp he gives up eventually all ideals, all aspiration, all sense of his personal value. He feels himself obliged to preach what he can’t practice. But one can’t be good halfway or honest approximately. To preserve one’s integrity is a hard battle. Why preserve that which one knows to be corrupt already? His soul gives up its self-respect. You’ve got him. He’ll obey. He’ll be glad to obey—because he can’t trust himself, he feels uncertain, he feels unclean. That’s one way. Here’s another. Kill man’s sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognize greatness or to achieve it. Great men can’t be ruled. We don’t want any great men. Don’t deny the conception of greatness. Destroy it from within. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept—and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. . . . Don’t set out to raze all shrines—you’ll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity—and the shrines are razed. Then there’s another way. Kill by laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction. Turn it into a sneer. It’s simple. Tell them to laugh at everything. Tell them that a sense of humor is an unlimited virtue. Don’t let anything remain sacred in a man’s soul—and his soul won’t be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you’ve killed the hero in man. One doesn’t reverence with a giggle. He’ll obey and he’ll set no limits to his obedience—anything goes—nothing is too serious. Here’s another way. This is most important. Don’t allow men to be happy. Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men. So kill their joy in living. Take away from them whatever is dear or important to them. Never let them have what they want. Make them feel that the mere fact of a personal desire is evil. Bring them to a state where saying ‘I want’ is no longer a natural right, but a shameful admission. Altruism is of great help in this. Unhappy men will come to you. They’ll need you. They’ll come for consolation, for support, for escape. Nature allows no vacuum. Empty man’s soul—and the space is yours to fill. I don’t see why you should look so shocked, Peter. This is the oldest one of all. Look back at history. Look at any great system of ethics, from the Orient up. Didn’t they all preach the sacrifice of personal joy? Under all the complications of verbiage, haven’t they all had a single leitmotif: sacrifice, renunciation, self-denial? Haven’t you been able to catch their theme song—‘Give up, give up, give up, give up’? Look at the moral atmosphere of today. Everything enjoyable, from cigarettes to sex to ambition to the profit motive, is considered depraved or sinful. Just prove that a thing makes men happy—and you’ve damned it. That’s how far we’ve come. We’ve tied happiness to guilt. And we’ve got mankind by the throat. Throw your first-born into a sacrificial furnace— lie on a bed of nails—go into the desert to mortify the flesh—don’t dance—don’t go to the movies on Sunday—don’t try to get rich—don’t smoke—don’t drink. It’s all the same line. The great line. Fools think that taboos of this nature are just nonsense. Something left over, old-fashioned. But there’s always a purpose in nonsense. Don’t bother to examine a folly—ask yourself only what it accomplishes. Every system of ethics that preached sacrifice grew into a world power and ruled millions of men. Of course, you must dress it up. You must tell people that they’ll achieve a superior kind of happiness by giving up everything that makes them happy. You don’t have to be too clear about it. Use big vague words. ‘Universal Harmony’—‘Eternal Spirit’—‘Divine Purpose’—‘Nirvana’—‘Paradise’—‘Racial Supremacy’—‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.’ Internal corruption, Peter. That’s the oldest one of all. The farce has been going on for centuries and men still fall for it. Yet the test should be so simple: just listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice—run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it’s your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself—that will be the man who’s not after your soul. That will be the man who has nothing to gain from you. But let him come and you’ll scream your empty heads off, howling that he’s a selfish monster. So the racket is safe for many, many centuries. But here you might have noticed something. I said, ‘It stands to reason.’ Do you see? Men have a weapon against you. Reason. So you must be very sure to take it away from them. Cut the props from under it. But be careful. Don’t deny outright. Never deny anything outright, you give your hand away. Don’t say reason is evil—though some have gone that far and with astonishing success. Just say that reason is limited. That there’s something above it. What? You don’t have to be too clear about it either. The field’s inexhaustible. ‘Instinct’—‘Feeling’—‘Revelation’—‘Divine Intuition’—‘Dialectical Materialism.’ If you get caught at some crucial point and somebody tells you that your doctrine doesn’t make sense—you’re ready for him. You tell him that there’s something above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel. He must believe. Suspend reason and you play it deuces wild. Anything goes in any manner you wish whenever you need it. You’ve got him. Can you rule a thinking man? We don’t want any thinking men. . . .

“Peter, you’ve heard all this. You’ve seen me practicing it for ten years. You see it being practiced all over the world. Why are you disgusted? You have no right to sit there and stare at me with the virtuous superiority of being shocked. You’re in on it. You’ve taken your share and you’ve got to go along. You’re afraid to see where it’s leading. I’m not. I’ll tell you. The world of the future. The world I want. A world of obedience and unity. A world where the thought of each man will not be his own, but an attempt to guess the thought in the brain of his neighbor who’ll have no thought of his own but an attempt to guess the thought of the next neighbor who’ll have no thought—and so on, Peter, around the globe. Since all must agree with all. A world where no man will hold a desire for himself, but will direct all his efforts to satisfy the desires of his neighbor who’ll have no desires except to satisfy the desires of the next neighbor who’ll have no desires—around the globe, Peter. Since all must serve all. A world in which man will not work for so innocent an incentive as money, but for that headless monster—prestige. The approval of his fellows—their good opinion—the opinion of men who’ll be allowed to hold no opinion. An octopus, all tentacles and no brain. Judgment, Peter? Not judgment, but public polls. An average drawn upon zeros—since no individuality will be permitted. A world with its motor cut off and a single heart, pumped by hand. My hand—and the hands of a few, a very few other men like me. Those who know what makes you tick—you great, wonderful average, you who have not risen in fury when we called you the average, the little, the common, you who’ve liked and accepted those names. You’ll sit enthroned and enshrined, you, the little people, the absolute ruler to make all past rulers squirm with envy, the absolute, the unlimited, God and Prophet and King combined. Vox populi. The average, the common, the general. Do you know the proper antonym for Ego? Bromide, Peter. The rule of the bromide. But even the trite has to be originated by someone at some time. We’ll do the originating. Vox dei. We’ll enjoy unlimited submission—from men who’ve learned nothing except to submit. We’ll call it ‘to serve.’ We’ll give out medals for service. You’ll fall over one another in a scramble to see who can submit better and more. There will be no other distinction to seek. No other form of personal achievement. Can you see Howard Roark in the picture? No? Then don’t waste time on foolish questions. Everything that can’t be ruled, must go. And if freaks persist in being born occasionally, they will not survive beyond their twelfth year. When their brain begins to function, it will feel the pressure and it will explode. The pressure gauged to a vacuum. Do you know the fate of deep-sea creatures brought out to sunlight? So much for future Roarks. The rest of you will smile and obey. Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles? Man’s first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought. But we’ll have neither God nor thought. Only voting by smiles. Automatic levers—all saying yes . . . Now if you were a little more intelligent—like your ex-wife, for instance—you’d ask: What of us, the rulers? What of me, Ellsworth Monkton Toohey? And I’d say, Yes, you’re right. I’ll achieve no more than you will. I’ll have no purpose save to keep you contented. To lie, to flatter you, to praise you, to inflate your vanity. To make speeches about the people and the common good. Peter, my poor old friend, I’m the most selfless man you’ve ever known. I have less independence than you, whom I just forced to sell your soul. You’ve used people at least for the sake of what you could get from them for yourself. I want nothing for myself. I use people for the sake of what I can do to them. It’s my only function and satisfaction. I have no private purpose. I want power. I want my world of the future. Let all live for all. Let all sacrifice and none profit. Let all suffer and none enjoy. Let progress stop. Let all stagnate. There’s equality in stagnation. All subjugated to the will of all. Universal slavery—without even the dignity of a master. Slavery to slavery. A great circle—and a total equality. The world of the future. . . .

“Look around you. Pick up any newspaper and read the headlines. Isn’t it coming? Isn’t it here? Every single thing I told you? Isn’t Europe swallowed already and we’re stumbling on to follow? Everything I said is contained in a single word—collectivism. And isn’t that the god of our century? To act together. To think—together. To feel—together. To unite, to agree, to obey. To obey, to serve, to sacrifice. Divide and conquer—first. But then—unite and rule. We’ve discovered that one at last. Remember the Roman Emperor who said he wished humanity had a single neck so he could cut it? People have laughed at him for centuries. But we’ll have the last laugh. We’ve accomplished what he couldn’t accomplish. We’ve taught men to unite. This makes one neck ready for one leash. We’ve found the magic word. Collectivism. Look at Europe, you fool. Can’t you see past the guff and recognize the essence? One country is dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the collective is all. The individual held as evil, the mass—as God. No motive and no virtue permitted—except that of service to the proletariat. That’s one version. Here’s another. A country dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the State is all. The individual held as evil, the race—as God. No motive and no virtue permitted—except that of service to the race. Am I raving or is this the cold reality of two continents already? Watch the pincer movement. If you’re sick of one version, we push you into the other. We get you coming and going. We’ve closed the doors. We’ve fixed the coin. Heads—collectivism, and tails—collectivism. Fight the doctrine which slaughters the individual with a doctrine which slaughters the individual. Give up your soul to a council—or give it up to a leader. But give it up, give it up, give it up. My technique, Peter. Offer poison as food and poison as antidote. Go fancy on the trimmings, but hang on to the main objective. Give the fools a choice, let them have their fun—but don’t forget the only purpose you have to accomplish. Kill the individual. Kill man’s soul. The rest will follow automatically.”

THE SOUL OF AN INDIVIDUALIST

This is the speech that Howard Roark makes in his own defense, while on trial for having dynamited a government housing project under construction; he had designed the project for another architect, Peter Keating, on the agreement that it would be built exactly as he designed it; the agreement was broken by the government agency; the two architects had no recourse to law, not being permitted to sue the government.

“Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. He was considered an evildoer who had dealt with a demon mankind dreaded. But thereafter men had fire to keep them warm, to cook their food, to light their caves. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had lifted darkness off the earth. Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he had taught his brothers to build. He was considered a transgressor who ventured into forbidden territory. But thereafter, men could travel past any horizon. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had opened the roads of the world.

“That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning. Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures—because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer—because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that that one paid for his courage.

“Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received—hatred. The great creators—the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors—stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.

“No creator was prompted by a desire to serve his brothers, for his brothers rejected the gift he offered and that gift destroyed the slothful routine of their lives. His truth was his only motive. His own truth, and his own work to achieve it in his own way. A symphony, a book, an engine, a philosophy, an airplane or a building—that was his goal and his life. Not those who heard, read, operated, believed, flew or inhabited the thing he had created. The creation, not its users. The creation, not the benefits others derived from it. The creation which gave form to his truth. He held his truth above all things and against all men.

“His vision, his strength, his courage came from his own spirit. A man’s spirit, however, is his self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego.

“The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power—that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover. The creator served nothing and no one. He lived for himself.

“And only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement.

“Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons—a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.

“But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred.

“We inherit the products of the thought of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make a cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane. But all through the process what we receive from others is only the end product of their thinking. The moving force is the creative faculty which takes this product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator. Men learn from one another. But all learning is only the exchange of material. No man can give another the capacity to think. Yet that capacity is our only means of survival.

“Nothing is given to man on earth. Everything he needs has to be produced. And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways—by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows. The creator faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary.

“The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.

“The creator lives for his work. He needs no other men. His primary goal is within himself. The parasite lives second-hand. He needs others. Others become his prime motive.

“The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary.

“The basic need of the second-hander is to secure his ties with men in order to be fed. He places relations first. He declares that man exists in order to serve others. He preaches altruism.

“Altruism is the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self.

“No man can live for another. He cannot share his spirit just as he cannot share his body. But the second-hander has used altruism as a weapon of exploitation and reversed the base of mankind’s moral principles. Men have been taught every precept that destroys the creator. Men have been taught dependence as a virtue.

“The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption. It is impossible in concept. The nearest approach to it in reality—the man who lives to serve others—is the slave. If physical slavery is repulsive, how much more repulsive is the concept of servility of the spirit? The conquered slave has a vestige of honor. He has the merit of having resisted and of considering his condition evil. But the man who enslaves himself voluntarily in the name of love is the basest of creatures. He degrades the dignity of man and he degrades the conception of love. But this is the essence of altruism.

“Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. Creation comes before distribution—or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement.

“Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the suffering of others. But suffering is a disease. Should one come upon it, one tries to give relief and assistance. To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then man must wish to see others suffer—in order that he may be virtuous. Such is the nature of altruism. The creator is not concerned with disease, but with life. Yet the work of the creators has eliminated one form of disease after another, in man’s body and spirit, and brought more relief from suffering than any altruist could ever conceive.

“Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.

“Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egoist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self.

“Here the basic reversal is most deadly. The issue has been perverted and man has been left no alternative—and no freedom. As poles of good and evil, he was offered two conceptions: egoism and altruism. Egoism was held to mean the sacrifice of others to self. Altruism—the sacrifice of self to others. This tied man irrevocably to other men and left him nothing but a choice of pain: his own pain borne for the sake of others or pain inflicted upon others for the sake of self. When it was added that man must find joy in self-immolation, the trap was closed. Man was forced to accept masochism as his ideal—under the threat that sadism was his only alternative. This was the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on mankind.

“This was the device by which dependence and suffering were perpetuated as fundamentals of life.

“The choice is not self-sacrifice or domination. The choice is independence or dependence. The code of the creator or the code of the second-hander. This is the basic issue. It rests upon the alternative of life or death. The code of the creator is built on the needs of the reasoning mind which allows man to survive. The code of the second-hander is built on the needs of a mind incapable of survival. All that which proceeds from man’s independent ego is good. All that which proceeds from man’s dependence upon men is evil.

“The egoist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He does not exist for any other man—and he asks no other man to exist for him. This is the only form of brotherhood and mutual respect possible between men.

“Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man’s independence, initiative and personal love for his work determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn’t done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.

“In all proper relationships there is no sacrifice of anyone to anyone. An architect needs clients, but he does not subordinate his work to their wishes. They need him, but they do not order a house just to give him a commission. Men exchange their work by free, mutual consent to mutual advantage when their personal interests agree and they both desire the exchange. If they do not desire it, they are not forced to deal with each other. They seek further. This is the only possible form of relationship between equals. Anything else is a relation of slave to master, or victim to executioner.

“No work is ever done collectively, by a majority decision. Every creative job is achieved under the guidance of a single individual thought. An architect requires a great many men to erect his building. But he does not ask them to vote on his design. They work together by free agreement and each is free in his proper function. An architect uses steel, glass, concrete, produced by others. But the materials remain just so much steel, glass and concrete until he touches them. What he does with them is his individual product and his individual property. This is the only pattern for proper co-operation among men.

“The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man’s first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men. This includes the whole sphere of his creative faculty, his thinking, his work. But it does not include the sphere of the gangster, the altruist and the dictator.

“A man thinks and works alone. A man cannot rob, exploit or rule—alone. Robbery, exploitation and ruling presuppose victims. They imply dependence. They are the province of the second-hander.

“Rulers of men are not egoists. They create nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of others. Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving. They are as dependent as the beggar, the social worker and the bandit. The form of dependence does not matter.

“But men were taught to regard second-handers—tyrants, emperors, dictators—as exponents of egoism. By this fraud they were made to destroy the ego, themselves and others. The purpose of the fraud was to destroy the creators. Or to harness them. Which is a synonym.

“From the beginning of history, the two antagonists have stood face to face: the creator and the second-hander. When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander responded. He invented altruism.

“The creator—denied, opposed, persecuted, exploited—went on, moved forward and carried all humanity along on his energy. The second-hander contributed nothing to the process except the impediments. The contest has another name: the individual against the collective.

“The ‘common good’ of a collective—a race, a class, a state—was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism? Does the fault lie in men’s hypocrisy or in the nature of the principle? The most dreadful butchers were the most sincere. They believed in the perfect society reached through the guillotine and the firing squad. Nobody questioned their right to murder since they were murdering for an altruistic purpose. It was accepted that man must be sacrificed for other men. Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with declarations of love for mankind and ends with a sea of blood. It goes on and will go on so long as men believe that an action is good if it is unselfish. That permits the altruist to act and forces his victims to bear it. The leaders of collectivist movements ask nothing for themselves. But observe the results.

“The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is—Hands off!

“Now observe the results of a society built on the principle of individualism. This, our country. The noblest country in the history of men. The country of greatest achievement, greatest prosperity, greatest freedom. This country was not based on selfless service, sacrifice, renunciation or any precept of altruism. It was based on a man’s right to the pursuit of happiness. His own happiness. Not anyone else’s. A private, personal, selfish motive. Look at the results. Look into your own conscience.

“It is an ancient conflict. Men have come close to the truth, but it was destroyed each time and one civilization fell after another. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

“Now, in our age, collectivism, the rule of the second-hander and second-rater, the ancient monster, has broken loose and is running amuck. It has brought men to a level of intellectual indecency never equaled on earth. It has reached a scale of horror without precedent. It has poisoned every mind. It has swallowed most of Europe. It is engulfing our country.

“I am an architect. I know what is to come by the principle on which it is built. We are approaching a world in which I cannot permit myself to live.

“Now you know why I dynamited Cortlandt.

“I designed Cortlandt. I gave it to you. I destroyed it.

“I destroyed it because I did not choose to let it exist. It was a double monster. In form and in implication. I had to blast both. The form was mutilated by two second-handers who assumed the right to improve upon that which they had not made and could not equal. They were permitted to do it by the general implication that the altruistic purpose of the building superseded all rights and that I had no claim to stand against it.

“I agreed to design Cortlandt for the purpose of seeing it erected as I designed it and for no other reason. That was the price I set for my work. I was not paid.

“I do not blame Peter Keating. He was helpless. He had a contract with his employers. It was ignored. He had a promise that the structure he offered would be built as designed. The promise was broken. The love of a man for the integrity of his work and his right to preserve it are now considered a vague intangible and an inessential. You have heard the prosecutor say that. Why was the building disfigured? For no reason. Such acts never have any reason, unless it’s the vanity of some second-handers who feel they have a right to anyone’s property, spiritual or material. Who permitted them to do it? No particular man among the dozens in authority. No one cared to permit or to stop it. No one was responsible. No one can be held to account. Such is the nature of all collective action.

“I did not receive the payment I asked. But the owners of Cortlandt got what they needed from me. They wanted a scheme devised to build a structure as cheaply as possible. They found no one else who could do it to their satisfaction. I could and did. They took the benefit of my work and made me contribute it as a gift. But I am not an altruist. I do not contribute gifts of this nature.

“It is said that I have destroyed the home of the destitute. It is forgotten that but for me the destitute could not have had this particular home. Those who were concerned with the poor had to come to me, who have never been concerned, in order to help the poor. It is believed that the poverty of the future tenants gave them a right to my work. That their need constituted a claim on my life. That it was my duty to contribute anything demanded of me. This is the second-hander’s credo now swallowing the world.

“I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.

“I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.

“It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.

“I wished to come here and say that the integrity of a man’s creative work is of greater importance than any charitable endeavor. Those of you who do not understand this are the men who’re destroying the world.

“I wished to come here and state my terms. I do not care to exist on any others.

“I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society. To my country, I wish to give the ten years which I will spend in jail if my country exists no longer. I will spend them in memory and in gratitude for what my country has been. It will be my act of loyalty, my refusal to live or work in what has taken its place.

“My act of loyalty to every creator who ever lived and was made to suffer by the force responsible for the Cortlandt I dynamited. To every tortured hour of loneliness, denial, frustration, abuse he was made to spend—and to the battles he won. To every creator whose name is known—and to every creator who lived, struggled and perished unrecognized before he could achieve. To every creator who was destroyed in body or in spirit. To Henry Cameron. To Steven Mallory. To a man who doesn’t want to be named, but who is sitting in this courtroom and knows that I am speaking of him.”

Atlas Shrugged

This novel was published in 1957. Its theme is: the role of the mind in man’s existence—and, as corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest.

The story shows what happens to the world when the mind goes on strike—when the men of creative ability, in every profession, quit and disappear. To quote John Galt, the leader and initiator of the strike: “There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in human history. Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable—except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race. Well, their turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what happens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of the men of the mind.”

THE MEANING OF MONEY

This is a speech made by Francisco d’Anconia, copper industrialist, heir to an enormous fortune, Galt’s closest friend and first to join him in going on strike.

“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

“When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor—your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

“Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

“But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made—before it can be looted or mooched—made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.

“To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss—the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery—that you must offer them values, not wounds—that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade—with reason, not force, as their final arbiter—it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability—and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

“But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality—the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

“Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth—the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

“Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a penny’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

“Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

“Or did you say it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money—and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That setence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another—their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

“But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich—will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt—and of his life, as he deserves.

“Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard—the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money—the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law—men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims—then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: ‘Account overdrawn.’

“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world?’ You are.

“You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it’s crumbling around you, while you’re damning its life-blood—money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men’s history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves—slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody’s mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers—as industrialists.

“To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money—and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being—the self-made man—the American industrialist.

“If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose—because it contains all the others—the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity—to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.

“Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters’ continents. Now the looters’ credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide—as, I think, he will.

“Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other—and your time is running out.”

THE MARTYRDOM OF THE INDUSTRIALISTS

This is part of a conversation between Francisco d’Anconia and Hank Rearden, a self-made man who has risen to the position of the country’s greatest steel industrialist. (Francisco speaking.)

“You, who would not submit to the hardships of nature, but set out to conquer it and placed it in the service of your joy and your comfort—to what have you submitted at the hands of men? You, who know from your work that one bears punishment only for being wrong—what have you been willing to bear and for what reason? All your life, you have heard yourself denounced, not for your faults, but for your greatest virtues. You have been hated, not for your mistakes, but for your achievements. You have been scorned for all those qualities of character which are your highest pride. You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgment and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been called anti-social for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads. You have been called ruthless for the strength and self-discipline of your drive to your purpose. You have been called greedy for the magnificence of your power to create wealth. You, who’ve expended an inconceivable flow of energy, have been called a parasite. You, who’ve created abundance where there had been nothing but wastelands and helpless, starving men before you, have been called a robber. You, who’ve kept them all alive, have been called an exploiter. You, the purest and most moral man among them, have been sneered at as a ‘vulgar materialist.’ Have you stopped to ask them: by what right?—by what code?—by what standard? No, you have borne it all and kept silent. You bowed to their code and you never upheld your own. You knew what exacting morality was needed to produce a single metal nail, but you let them brand you as immoral. You knew that man needs the strictest code of values to deal with nature, but you thought that you needed no such code to deal with men. You left the deadliest weapon in the hands of your enemies, a weapon you never suspected or understood. Their moral code is their weapon. Ask yourself how deeply and in how many terrible ways you have accepted it. Ask yourself what it is that a code of moral values does to a man’s life, and why he can’t exist without it, and what happens to him if he accepts the wrong standard, by which the evil is the good. Shall I tell you why you’re drawn to me, even though you think you ought to damn me? It’s because I’m the first man who has given you what the whole world owes you and what you should have demanded of all men before you dealt with them: a moral sanction. . . .

“You’re guilty of a great sin, Mr. Rearden, much guiltier than they tell you, but not in the way they preach. The worst guilt is to accept an undeserved guilt—and that is what you have been doing all your life. You have been paying blackmail, not for your vices, but for your virtues. You have been willing to carry the load of an unearned punishment—and to let it grow the heavier the greater the virtues you practiced. But your virtues were those which keep men alive. Your own moral code—the one you lived by, but never stated, acknowledged or defended—was the code that preserves man’s existence. If you were punished for it, what was the nature of those who punished you? Yours was the code of life. What, then, is theirs? What standard of value lies at its root? What is its ultimate purpose? Do you think that what you’re facing is merely a conspiracy to seize your wealth? You, who know the source of wealth, should know it’s much more and much worse than that. Did you ask me to name man’s motive power? Man’s motive power is his moral code. Ask yourself where their code is leading you and what it offers you as your final goal. A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. A viler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to demand that he leap in, of his own will, and that he build the furnace, besides. By their own statement, it is they who need you and have nothing to offer you in return. By their own statement, you must support them because they cannot survive without you. Consider the obscenity of offering their impotence and their need—their need of you—as a justification for your torture. Are you willing to accept it? Do you care to purchase—at the price of your great endurance, at the price of your agony—the satisfaction of the needs of your own destroyers? . . .

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders—what would you tell him to do?”

“I . . . don’t know. What . . . could he do? What would you tell him?”

“To shrug.”

THE MORAL MEANING OF CAPITALISM

This is a statement made by Hank Rearden at his trial for an illegal sale of a metal alloy which he had created and which has been placed under government rationing and control.

“I do not want my attitude to be misunderstood. I shall be glad to state it for the record. . . . I work for nothing but my own profit—which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it. I do not produce it for their benefit at the expense of mine, and they do not buy it for my benefit at the expense of theirs; I do not sacrifice my interests to them nor do they sacrifice theirs to me; we deal as equals by mutual consent to mutual advantage—and I am proud of every penny that I have earned in this manner. I am rich and I am proud of every penny I own. I have made my money by my own effort, in free exchange and through the voluntary consent of every man I dealt with—the voluntary consent of those who employed me when I started, the voluntary consent of those who work for me now, the voluntary consent of those who buy my product. I shall answer all the questions you are afraid to ask me openly. Do I wish to pay my workers more than their services are worth to me? I do not. Do I wish to sell my product for less than my customers are willing to pay me? I do not. Do I wish to sell it at a loss or give it away? I do not. If this is evil, do whatever you please about me, according to whatever standards you hold. These are mine. I am earning my own living, as every honest man must. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence and the fact that I must work in order to support it. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am able to do it and to do it well. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am able to do it better than most people—the fact that my work is of greater value than the work of my neighbors and that more men are willing to pay me. I refuse to apologize for my ability—I refuse to apologize for my success—I refuse to apologize for my money. If this is evil, make the most of it. If this is what the public finds harmful to its interests let the public destroy me. This is my code—and I will accept no other. I could say to you that I have done more good for my fellow man than you can ever hope to accomplish—but I will not say it, because I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life. I will not say that the good of others was the purpose of my work—my own good was my purpose, and I despise the man who surrenders his. I could say to you that you do not serve the public good—that nobody’s good can be achieved at the price of human sacrifices—that when you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction. I could say to you that you will and can achieve nothing but universal devastation—as any looter must, when he runs out of victims. I could say it, but I won’t. It is not your particular policy that I challenge, but your moral premise. If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and I were asked to immolate myself for the sake of creatures who wanted to survive at the price of my blood, if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own—I would refuse, I would reject it as the most contemptible evil, I would fight it with every power I possess, I would fight the whole of mankind, if one minute were all I could last before I were murdered, I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being’s right to exist. Let there be no misunderstanding about me. If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!”

THE MEANING OF SEX

This is from a conversation between Francisco d’Anconia and Hank Rearden, who are in love with the same woman, though neither one of them knows it. (Francisco speaking.)

“Do you remember what I said about money and about the men who seek to reverse the law of cause and effect? The men who try to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind? Well, the man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures—which can’t be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man’s sense of his own value. . . .

“The men who think that wealth comes from material resources and has no intellectual root or meaning, are the men who think—for the same reason—that sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of one’s mind, choice or code of values. They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you—just about in some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails of its own volition. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he’s taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment—just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity!—an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience—or to fake—a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer—because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut. . . . He does not seek to gain his value, he seeks to express it. There is no conflict between the standards of his mind and the desires of his body.

“But the man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises—because she will reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective reality in which he is a fraud, she will give him a momentary illusion of his own value and a momentary escape from the moral code that damns him. Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives—and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy. One proceeds from the other. Love is our response to our highest values—and can be nothing else. Let a man corrupt his values and his view of existence, let him profess that love is not self-enjoyment but self-denial, that virtue consists, not of pride, but of pity or pain or weakness or sacrifice, that the noblest love is born, not of admiration, but of charity, not in response to values, but in response to flaws—and he will have cut himself in two. His body will not obey him, it will not respond, it will make him impotent toward the woman he professes to love and draw him to the lowest type of whore he can find. His body will always follow the ultimate logic of his deepest convictions; if he believes that flaws are values, he has damned existence as evil and only the evil will attract him. He has damned himself and he will feel that depravity is all he is worthy of enjoying. He has equated virtue with pain and he will feel that vice is the only realm of pleasure. Then he will scream that his body has vicious desires of its own which his mind cannot conquer, that sex is sin, that true love is a pure emotion of the spirit. And then he will wonder why love brings him nothing but boredom, and sex—nothing but shame. . . .

“You’d never accept any part of their vicious creed. You wouldn’t be able to force it upon yourself. If you tried to damn sex as evil, you’d still find yourself, against your will, acting on the proper moral premise. You’d be attracted to the highest woman you met. You’d always want a heroine. You’d be incapable of self-contempt. You’d be unable to believe that existence is evil and that you’re a helpless creature caught in an impossible universe. You’re the man who’s spent his life shaping matter to the purpose of his mind. You’re the man who would know that just as an idea unexpressed in physical action is contemptible hypocrisy, so is platonic love—and just as physical action unguided by an idea is a fool’s self-fraud, so is sex when cut off from one’s code of values. It’s the same issue, and you would know it. Your inviolate sense of self-esteem would know it. You would be incapable of desire for a woman you despised. Only the man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love. But observe that most people are creatures cut in half who keep swinging desperately to one side or to the other. One kind of half is the man who despises money, factories, skyscrapers and his own body. He holds undefined emotions about non-conceivable subjects as the meaning of life and as his claim to virtue. And he cries with despair, because he can feel nothing for the women he respects, but finds himself in bondage to an irresistible passion for a slut from the gutter. He is the man whom people call an idealist. The other kind of half is the man whom people call practical, the man who despises principles, abstractions, art, philosophy and his own mind. He regards the acquisition of material objects as the only goal of existence—and he laughs at the need to consider their purpose or their source. He expects them to give him pleasure—and he wonders why the more he gets, the less he feels. He is the man who spends his time chasing women. Observe the triple fraud which he perpetrates upon himself. He will not acknowledge his need of self-esteem, since he scoffs at such a concept as moral values; yet he feels the profound self-contempt which comes from believing that he is a piece of meat. He will not acknowledge, but he knows that sex is the physical expression of a tribute to personal values. So he tries, by going through the motions of the effect, to acquire that which should have been the cause. He tries to gain a sense of his own value from the women who surrender to him—and he forgets that the women he picks have neither character nor judgment nor standard of value. He tells himself that all he’s after is physical pleasure—but observe that he tires of his women in a week or a night, that he despises professional whores and that he loves to imagine he is seducing virtuous girls who make a great exception for his sake. It is the feeling of achievement that he seeks and never finds. What glory can there be in the conquest of a mindless body?”

“FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITY, TO EACH ACCORDING TO HIS NEED”

This is the story of what happened at the Twentieth Century Motor Company, which put the above slogan into practice—as told by one of the survivors.

“Well there was something that happened at that plant where I worked for twenty years. It was when the old man died and his heirs took over. There were three of them, two sons and a daughter, and they brought a new plan to run the factory. They let us vote on it, too, and everybody—almost everybody—voted for it. We didn’t know. We thought it was good. No, that’s not true, either. We thought that we were supposed to think it was good. The plan was that everybody in the factory would work according to his ability, but would be paid according to his need. . . .

“We voted for that plan at a big meeting, with all of us present, six thousand of us, everybody that worked in the factory. The Starnes heirs made long speeches about it, and it wasn’t too clear, but nobody asked any questions. None of us knew just how the plan would work, but every one of us thought that the next fellow knew it. And if anybody had doubts, he felt guilty and kept his mouth shut—because they made it sound like anyone who’d oppose the plan was a child-killer at heart and less than a human being. They told us that this plan would achieve a noble ideal. Well, how were we to know otherwise? Hadn’t we heard it all our lives—from our parents and our schoolteachers and our ministers, and in every newspaper we ever read and every movie and every public speech? Hadn’t we always been told that this was righteous and just? Well, maybe there’s some excuse for what we did at that meeting. Still, we voted for the plan—and what we got, we had it coming to us. You know, ma’am, we are marked men, in a way, those of us who lived through the four years of that plan in the Twentieth Century factory. What is it that hell is supposed to be? Evil—plain, naked, smirking evil, isn’t it? Well, that’s what we saw and helped to make—and I think we’re damned, every one of us, and maybe we’ll never be forgiven. . . .

“Do you know how it worked, that plan, and what it did to people? Try pouring water into a tank where there’s a pipe at the bottom draining it out faster than you pour it, and each bucket you bring breaks that pipe an inch wider, and the harder you work the more is demanded of you, and you stand slinging buckets forty hours a week, then forty-eight, then fifty-six—for your neighbor’s supper—for his wife’s operation—for his child’s measles—for his mother’s wheel chair—for his uncle’s shirt—for his nephew’s schooling—for the baby next door—for the baby to be born—for anyone anywhere around you—it’s theirs to receive, from diapers to dentures—and yours to work, from sunup to sun-down, month after month, year after year, with nothing to show for it but your sweat, with nothing in sight for you but their pleasure, for the whole of your life, without rest, without hope, without end. . . . From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. . . .

“We’re all one big family, they told us, we’re all in this together. But you don’t all stand working an acetylene torch ten hours a day—together, and you don’t all get a bellyache—together. What’s whose ability and which of whose needs comes first? When it’s all one pot, you can’t let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim that he needs a yacht—and if his feelings is all you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not? If it’s not right for me to own a car until I’ve worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on earth—why can’t he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability not to have collapsed? No? He can’t? Then why can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee until he’s replastered his living room? . . . Oh well . . . Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We voted on it. Yes, ma’am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars—rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn’t belong to him, it belonged to ‘the family,’ and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his ‘need’—so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife’s head colds, hoping that ‘the family’ would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because it’s miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm—so it turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that his need was worse than his brother’s. How else could it be done? Do you care to guess what happened, what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got away with the jackpot?

“But that wasn’t all. There was something else that we discovered at the same meeting. The factory’s production had fallen by forty per cent, in that first half-year, so it was decided that somebody hadn’t delivered ‘according to his ability.’ Who? How would you tell it? The family voted on that, too. They voted which men were the best, and these men were sentenced to work overtime each night for the next six months. Overtime without pay—because you weren’t paid by time and you weren’t paid by work, only by need.

“Do I have to tell you what happened after that—and into what sort of creatures we all started turning, we who had once been human? We began to hide whatever ability we had, to slow down and watch like hawks that we never worked any faster or better than the next fellow. What else could we do, when we knew that if we did our best for ‘the family,’ it’s not thanks or rewards that we’d get, but punishment? We knew that for every stinker who’d ruin a batch of motors and cost the company money—either through his sloppiness, because he didn’t have to care, or through plain incompetence—it’s we who’d have to pay with our nights and our Sundays. So we did our best to be no good.

“There was one young boy who started out, full of fire for the noble ideal, a bright kid without any schooling, but with a wonderful head on his shoulders. The first year, he figured out a work process that saved us thousands of man-hours. He gave it to ‘the family,’ didn’t ask anything for it, either, couldn’t ask, but that was all right with him. It was for the ideal, he said. But when he found himself voted as one of our ablest and sentenced to night work, because we hadn’t gotten enough from him, he shut his mouth and his brain. You can bet he didn’t come up with any ideas, the second year.

“What was it they’d always told us about the vicious competition of the profit system, where men had to compete for who’d do a better job than his fellows? Vicious, wasn’t it? Well, they should have seen what it was like when we all had to compete with one another for who’d do the worst job possible. There’s no surer way to destroy a man than to force him into a spot where he has to aim at not doing his best, where he has to struggle to do a bad job, day after day. That will finish him quicker than drink or idleness or pulling stick-ups for a living. But there was nothing else for us to do except to fake unfitness. The one accusation we feared was to be suspected of ability. Ability was like a mortgage on you that you could never pay off. And what was there to work for? You knew that your basic pittance would be given to you anyway, whether you worked or not—your ‘housing and feeding allowance,’ it was called—and above that pittance, you had no chance to get anything, no matter how hard you tried. You couldn’t count on buying a new suit of clothes next year—they might give you a ‘clothing allowance’ or they might not, according to whether nobody broke a leg, needed an operation or gave birth to more babies. And if there wasn’t enough money for new suits for everybody, then you couldn’t get yours, either.

“There was one man who’d worked hard all his life, because he’d always wanted to send his son through college. Well, the boy graduated from high school in the second year of the plan—but ‘the family’ wouldn’t give the father any ‘allowance’ for the college. They said his son couldn’t go to college, until we had enough to send everybody’s sons to college—and that we first had to send everybody’s children through high school, and we didn’t even have enough for that. The father died the following year, in a knife fight with somebody in a saloon, a fight over nothing in particular—such fights were beginning to happen among us all the time.

“Then there was an old guy, a widower with no family, who had one hobby: phonograph records. I guess that was all he ever got out of life. In the old days, he used to skip meals just to buy himself some new recording of classical music. Well, they didn’t give him any ‘allowance’ for records—‘personal luxury,’ they called it. But at that same meeting, Millie Bush, somebody’s daughter, a mean, ugly little eight-year-old, was voted a pair of gold braces for her buck teeth—this was ‘medical need,’ because the staff psychologist had said that the poor girl would get an inferiority complex if her teeth weren’t straightened out. The old guy who loved music, turned to drink, instead. He got so you never saw him fully conscious any more. But it seems like there was one thing he couldn’t forget. One night, he came staggering down the street, saw Millie Bush, swung his fist and knocked all her teeth out. Every one of them.

“Drink, of course, was what we all turned to, some more, some less. Don’t ask how we got the money for it. When all the decent pleasures are forbidden, there’s always ways to get the rotten ones. You don’t break into grocery stores after dark and you don’t pick your fellow’s pockets to buy classical symphonies or fishing tackle, but if it’s to get stinking drunk and forget—you do. Fishing tackle? Hunting guns? Snapshot cameras? Hobbies? There wasn’t any ‘amusement allowance’ for anybody. ‘Amusement’ was the first thing they dropped. Aren’t you always supposed to be ashamed to object when anybody asks you to give up anything, if it’s something that gave you pleasure? Even our ‘tobacco allowance’ was cut to where we got two packs of cigarettes a month—and this, they told us, was because the money had to go into the babies’ milk fund. Babies was the only item of production that didn’t fall, but rose and kept on rising—because people had nothing else to do, I guess, and because they didn’t have to care, the baby wasn’t their burden, it was ‘the family’s.’ In fact, the best chance you had of getting a raise and breathing easier for a while was a ‘baby allowance.’ Either that, or a major disease.

“It didn’t take us long to see how it all worked out. Any man who tried to play straight, had to refuse himself everything. He lost his taste for any pleasure, he hated to smoke a nickel’s worth of tobacco or chew a stick of gum, worrying whether somebody had more need for that nickel. He felt ashamed of every mouthful of food he swallowed, wondering whose weary nights of overtime had paid for it, knowing that his food was not his by right, miserably wishing to be cheated rather than to cheat, to be a sucker, but not a blood-sucker. He wouldn’t marry, he wouldn’t help his folks back home, he wouldn’t put an extra burden on ‘the family.’ Besides, if he still had some sort of sense of responsibility, he couldn’t marry or bring children into the world, when he could plan nothing, promise nothing, count on nothing. But the shiftless and the irresponsible had a field day of it. They bred babies, they got girls into trouble, they dragged in every worthless relative they had from all over the country, every unmarried pregnant sister, for an extra ‘disability allowance,’ they got more sicknesses than any doctor could disprove, they ruined their clothing, their furniture, their homes—what the hell, ‘the family’ was paying for it! They found more ways of getting in ‘need’ than the rest of us could ever imagine—they developed a special skill for it, which was the only ability they showed.

“God help us, ma’am! Do you see what we saw? We saw that we’d been given a law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which punished those who observed it—for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got. Your honesty was like a tool left at the mercy of the next man’s dishonesty. The honest ones paid, the dishonest collected. The honest lost, the dishonest won. How long could men stay good under this sort of law of goodness? We were a pretty decent bunch of fellows when we started. There weren’t many chiselers among us. We knew our jobs and we were proud of it and we worked for the best factory in the country, where old man Starnes hired nothing but the pick of the country’s labor. Within one year under the new plan, there wasn’t an honest man left among us. That was the evil, the sort of hell-horror evil that preachers used to scare you with, but you never thought to see alive. Not that the plan encouraged a few bastards, but that it turned decent people into bastards, and there was nothing else that it could do—and it was called a moral ideal!

“What was it we were supposed to want to work for? For the love of our brothers? What brothers? For the bums, the loafers, the moochers we saw all around us? And whether they were cheating or plain incompetent, whether they were unwilling or unable—what difference did that make to us? If we were tied for life to the level of their unfitness, faked or real, how long could we care to go on? We had no way of knowing their ability, we had no way of controlling their needs—all we knew was that we were beasts of burden struggling blindly in some sort of place that was half-hospital, half-stockyards—a place geared to nothing but disability, disaster, disease—beasts put there for the relief of whatever whoever chose to say was whichever’s need.

“Love of our brothers? That’s when we learned to hate our brothers for the first time in our lives. We began to hate them for every meal they swallowed, for every small pleasure they enjoyed, for one man’s new shirt, for another’s wife’s hat, for an outing with their family, for a paint job on their house—it was taken from us, it was paid for by our privations, our denials, our hunger. We began to spy on one another, each hoping to catch the others lying about their needs, so as to cut their ‘allowance’ at the next meeting. We began to have stool pigeons who informed on people, who reported that somebody had bootlegged a turkey to his family on some Sunday—which he’d paid for by gambling, most likely. We began to meddle into one another’s lives. We provoked family quarrels, to get somebody’s relatives thrown out. Any time we saw a man starting to go steady with a girl, we made life miserable for him. We broke up many engagements. We didn’t want anyone to marry, we didn’t want any more dependents to feed.

“In the old days, we used to celebrate if somebody had a baby, we used to chip in and help him out with the hospital bills, if he happened to be hard-pressed for the moment. Now, if a baby was born, we didn’t speak to the parents for weeks. Babies, to us, had become what locusts were to farmers. In the old days, we used to help a man if he had a bad illness in the family. Now—well, I’ll tell you about just one case. It was the mother of a man who had been with us for fifteen years. She was a kindly old lady, cheerful and wise, she knew us all by our first names and we all liked her—we used to like her. One day, she slipped on the cellar stairs and fell and broke her hip. We knew what that meant at her age. The staff doctor said that she’d have to be sent to a hospital in town, for expensive treatments that would take a long time. The old lady died the night before she was to leave for town. They never established the cause of death. No, I don’t know whether she was murdered. Nobody said that. Nobody would talk about it at all. All I know is that I—and that’s what I can’t forget!—I, too, had caught myself wishing that she would die. This—may God forgive us!—was the brotherhood, the security, the abundance that the plan was supposed to achieve for us!

“Was there any reason why this sort of horror would ever be preached by anybody? Was there anybody who got any profit from it? There was. The Starnes heirs. I hope you’re not going to remind me that they’d sacrificed a fortune and turned the factory over to us as a gift. We were fooled by that one, too. Yes, they gave up the factory. But profit, ma’am, depends on what it is you’re after. And what the Starnes heirs were after, no money on earth could buy. Money is too clean and innocent for that.

“Eric Starnes, the youngest—he was a jellyfish that didn’t have the guts to be after anything in particular. He got himself voted as Director of our Public Relations Department, which didn’t do anything, except that he had a staff for the not doing of anything, so he didn’t have to bother sticking around the office. The pay he got—well, I shouldn’t call it ‘pay,’ none of us was ‘paid’—the alms voted to him was fairly modest, about ten times what I got, but that wasn’t riches. Eric didn’t care for money—he wouldn’t have known what to do with it. He spent his time hanging around among us, showing how chummy he was and democratic. He wanted to be loved, it seems. The way he went about it was to keep reminding us that he had given us the factory. We couldn’t stand him.

“Gerald Starnes was our Director of Production. We never learned just what the size of his rake-off—his alms—had been. It would have taken a staff of accountants to figure that out, and a staff of engineers to trace the way it was piped, directly or indirectly, into his office. None of it was supposed to be for him—it was all for company expenses. Gerald had three cars, four secretaries, five telephones, and he used to throw champagne and caviar parties that no tax-paying tycoon in the country could have afforded. He spent more money in one year than his father had earned in profits in the last two years of his life. We saw a hundred-pound stack—a hundred pounds, we weighed them—of magazines in Gerald’s office, full of stories about our factory and our noble plan, with big pictures of Gerald Starnes, calling him a great social crusader. Gerald liked to come into the shops at night, dressed in his formal clothes, flashing diamond cuff links the size of a nickel and shaking cigar ashes all over. Any cheap show-off who’s got nothing to parade but his cash, is bad enough—except that he makes no bones about the cash being his, and you’re free to gape at him or not, as you wish, and mostly you don’t. But when a bastard like Gerald Starnes puts on an act and keeps spouting that he doesn’t care for material wealth, that he’s only serving ‘the family,’ that all the lushness is not for himself, but for our sake and for the common good, because it’s necessary to keep up the prestige of the company and of the noble plan in the eyes of the public—then that’s when you learn to hate the creature as you’ve never hated anything human.

“But his sister Ivy was worse. She really did not care for material wealth. The alms she got was no bigger than ours, and she went about in scuffed, flat-heeled shoes and shirtwaists—just to show how selfless she was. She was our Director of Distribution. She was the lady in charge of our needs. She was the one who held us by the throat. Of course, distribution was supposed to be decided by voting—by the voice of the people. But when the people are six thousand howling voices, trying to decide without yardstick, rhyme or reason, when there are no rules to the game and each can demand anything, but has a right to nothing, when everybody holds power over everybody’s life except his own—then it turns out, as it did, that the voice of the people is Ivy Starnes. By the end of the second year, we dropped the pretense of the ‘family meetings’—in the name of ‘production efficiency and time economy,’ one meeting used to take ten days—and all the petitions of need were simply sent to Miss Starnes’ office. No, not sent. They had to be recited to her in person by every petitioner. Then she made up a distribution list, which she read to us for our vote of approval at a meeting that lasted three-quarters of an hour. We voted approval. There was a ten-minute period on the agenda for discussion and objections. We made no objections. We knew better by that time. Nobody can divide a factory’s income among thousands of people, without some sort of a gauge to measure people’s value. Her gauge was bootlicking. Selfless? In her father’s time, all of his money wouldn’t have given him a chance to speak to his lousiest wiper and get away with it, as she spoke to our best skilled workers and their wives. She had pale eyes that looked fishy, cold and dead. And if you ever want to see pure evil, you should have seen the way her eyes glinted when she watched some man who’d talked back to her once and who’d just heard his name on the list of those getting nothing above basic pittance. And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who’s ever preached the slogan: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’

“This was the whole secret of it. At first, I kept wondering how it could be possible that the educated, the cultured, the famous men of the world could make a mistake of this size and preach, as righteousness, this sort of abomination—when five minutes of thought should have told them what would happen if somebody tried to practice what they preached. Now I know that they didn’t do it by any kind of mistake. Mistakes of this size are never made innocently. If men fall for some vicious piece of insanity, when they have no way to make it work and no possible reason to explain their choice—it’s because they have a reason that they do not wish to tell. And we weren’t so innocent either, when we voted for that plan at the first meeting. We didn’t do it just because we believed that the drippy old guff they spewed was good. We had another reason, but the guff helped us to hide it from our neighbors and from ourselves. The guff gave us a chance to pass off as virtue something that we’d be ashamed to admit otherwise. There wasn’t a man voting for it who didn’t think that under a setup of this kind he’d muscle in on the profits of the men abler than himself. There wasn’t a man rich and smart enough but that he didn’t think that somebody was richer and smarter, and this plan would give him a share of his better’s wealth and brain. But while he was thinking that he’d get unearned benefits from the men above, he forgot about the men below who’d get unearned benefits, too. He forgot about all his inferiors who’d rush to drain him just as he hoped to drain his superiors. The worker who liked the idea that his need entitled him to a limousine like his boss’s, forgot that every bum and beggar on earth would come howling that their need entitled them to an icebox like his own. That was our real motive when we voted—that was the truth of it—but we didn’t like to think it, so the less we liked it, the louder we yelled about our love for the common good.

“Well, we got what we asked for. By the time we saw what it was that we’d asked for, it was too late. We were trapped, with no place to go. The best men among us left the factory in the first week of the plan. We lost our best engineers, superintendents, foremen and highest-skilled workers. A man of self-respect doesn’t turn into a milch cow for anybody. Some able fellows tried to stick it out, but they couldn’t take it for long. We kept losing our men, they kept escaping from the factory like from a pesthole—till we had nothing left except the men of need, but none of the men of ability.

“And the few of us who were still any good, but stayed on, were only those who had been there too long. In the old days, nobody ever quit the Twentieth Century—and, somehow, we couldn’t make ourselves believe that it was gone. After a while, we couldn’t quit, because no other employer would have us—for which I can’t blame him. Nobody would deal with us in any way, no respectable person or firm. All the small shops, where we traded, started moving out of Starnesville fast—till we had nothing left but saloons, gambling joints and crooks who sold us trash at gouging prices. The alms we got kept falling, but the cost of our living went up. The list of the factory’s needy kept stretching, but the list of its customers shrank. There was less and less income to divide among more and more people. In the old days, it used to be said that the Twentieth Century Motor trademark was as good as the karat mark on gold. I don’t know what it was that the Starnes heirs thought, if they thought at all, but I suppose that like all social planners and like savages, they thought that this trademark was a magic stamp which did the trick by some sort of voodoo power and that it would keep them rich, as it had kept their father. Well, when our customers began to see that we never delivered an order on time and never put out a motor that didn’t have something wrong with it—the magic stamp began to work the other way around: people wouldn’t take a motor as a gift, if it was marked Twentieth Century. And it came to where our only customers were men who never paid and never meant to pay their bills. But Gerald Starnes, doped by his own publicity, got huffy and went around, with an air of moral superiority, demanding that businessmen place orders with us, not because our motors were good, but because we needed the orders so badly.

“By that time, a village half-wit could see what generations of professors had pretended not to notice. What good would our need do to a power plant when its generators stopped because of our defective engines? What good would it do to a man caught on an operating table when the electric light went out? What good would it do to the passengers of a plane when its motor failed in mid-air? And if they bought our product, not because of its merit, but because of our need, would that be the good, the right, the moral thing to do for the owner of that power plant, the surgeon in that hospital, the maker of that plane?

“Yet this was the moral law that the professors and leaders and thinkers had wanted to establish all over the earth. If this is what it did in a single small town where we all knew one another, do you care to think what it would do on a world scale? Do you care to imagine what it would be like, if you had to live and to work, when you’re tied to all the disasters and all the malingering of the globe? To work—and whenever any men failed anywhere, it’s you who would have to make up for it. To work—with no chance to rise, with your meals and your clothes and your home and your pleasure depending on any swindle, any famine, any pestilence anywhere on earth. To work—with no chance for an extra ration, till the Cambodians have been fed and the Patagonians have been sent through college. To work—on a blank check held by every creature born, by men whom you’ll never see, whose needs you’ll never know, whose ability or laziness or sloppiness or fraud you have no way to learn and no right to question—just to work and work and work—and leave it up to the Ivys and the Geralds of the world to decide whose stomach will consume the effort, the dreams and the days of your life. And this is the moral law to accept? This—a moral ideal?

“Well, we tried it—and we learned. Our agony took four years, from our first meeting to our last, and it ended the only way it could end: in bankruptcy. At our last meeting, Ivy Starnes was the one who tried to brazen it out. She made a short, nasty, snippy little speech in which she said that the plan had failed because the rest of the country had not accepted it, that a single community could not succeed in the midst of a selfish, greedy world—and that the plan was a noble ideal, but human nature was not good enough for it. A young boy—the one who had been punished for giving us a useful idea in our first year—got up, as we all sat silent, and walked straight to Ivy Starnes on the platform. He said nothing. He spat in her face. That was the end of the noble plan and of the Twentieth Century.”

THE FORGOTTEN MAN OF SOCIALIZED MEDICINE

This is the explanation given by a distinguished brain surgeon of why he joined Galt’s strike.

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only ‘to serve.’ That a man who’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards—never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind—yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”

THE NATURE OF AN ARTIST

This is an excerpt from a conversation between Dagny Taggart, the heroine of the story, and Richard Halley, a great composer, who is now on strike.

“Miss Taggart, how many people are there to whom my work means as much as it does to you? . . . That is the payment I demand. Not many can afford it. I don’t mean your enjoyment, I don’t mean your emotion—emotions be damned!—I mean your understanding and the fact that your enjoyment was of the same nature as mine, that it came from the same source: from your intelligence, from the conscious judgment of a mind able to judge my work by the standard of the same values that went to write it—I mean, not the fact that you felt, but that you felt what I wished you to feel, not the fact that you admire my work, but that you admire it for the things I wished to be admired. . . . There’s only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive. But it’s a fear I’ve never shared. I do not fool myself about my work or the response I seek—I value both too highly. I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively—or blindly. I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show—or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone’s heart—only by someone’s head. And when I find a customer with that invaluable capacity, then my performance is a mutual trade to mutual profit. An artist is a trader, Miss Taggart, the hardest and most exacting of all traders. . . .

“Do you see why I’d give three dozen modern artists for one real businessman? . . . Whether it’s a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one’s own eyes—which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification—which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before. That shining vision which they talk about as belonging to the authors of symphonies and novels—what do they think is the driving faculty of men who discover how to use oil, how to run a mine, how to build an electric motor? That sacred fire which is said to burn within musicians and poets—what do they suppose moves an industrialist to defy the whole world for the sake of his new metal, as the inventors of the airplane, the builders of the railroads, the discoverers of new germs or new continents have done through all the ages? . . . An intransigent devotion to the pursuit of truth, Miss Taggart? Have you heard the moralists and the art lovers of the centuries talk about the artist’s intransigent devotion to the pursuit of truth? Name me a greater example of such devotion than the act of a man who says that the earth does turn, or the act of a man who says that an alloy of steel and copper has certain properties which enable it to do certain things, that it is and does—and let the world rack him or ruin him, he will not bear false witness to the evidence of his mind! This, Miss Taggart, this sort of spirit, courage and love for truth—as against a sloppy bum who goes around proudly assuring you that he has almost reached the perfection of a lunatic, because he’s an artist who hasn’t the faintest idea what his art work is or means, he’s not restrained by such crude concepts as ‘being’ or ‘meaning,’ he’s the vehicle of higher mysteries, he doesn’t know how he created his work or why, it just came out of him spontaneously, like vomit out of a drunkard, he did not think, he wouldn’t stoop to thinking, he just felt it, all he has to do is feel—he feels, the flabby, loose-mouthed, shifty-eyed, drooling, shivering, uncongealed bastard! I, who know what discipline, what effort, what tension of mind, what unrelenting strain upon one’s power of clarity are needed to produce a work of art—I, who know that it requires a labor which makes a chain gang look like rest and a severity no army-drilling sadist could impose—I’ll take the operator of a coal mine over any walking vehicle of higher mysteries. The operator knows that it’s not his feelings that keep the coal carts moving under the earth—and he knows what does keep them moving. Feelings? Oh yes, we do feel, he, you and I—we are, in fact, the only people capable of feeling—and we know where our feelings come from. But what we did not know and have delayed learning for too long is the nature of those who claim that they cannot account for their feelings. We did not know what it is that they feel. We are learning it now. It was a costly error. And those most guilty of it, will pay the hardest price—as, in justice, they must. Those most guilty of it were the real artists, who will now see that they are first to be exterminated and that they had prepared the triumph of their own exterminators by helping to destroy their only protectors. For if there is more tragic a fool than the businessman who doesn’t know that he’s an exponent of man’s highest creative spirit—it’s the artist who thinks that the businessman is his enemy.”

“THIS IS JOHN GALT SPEAKING”

This is the philosophy of Objectivism.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said a voice that came from the radio receiver—a man’s clear, calm, implacable voice, the kind of voice that had not been heard on the airwaves for years—“Mr. Thompson will not speak to you tonight. His time is up. I have taken it over. You were to hear a report on the world crisis. That is what you are going to hear. . . .

“For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing—you who dread knowledge—I am the man who will now tell you. . . .

“You have heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis. You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the words had no meaning. You have cried that man’s sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster. In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.

“You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, you have wished it, and I—I am the man who has granted you your wish.

“Your ideal had an implacable enemy, which your code of morality was designed to destroy. I have withdrawn that enemy. I have taken it out of your way and out of your reach. I have removed the source of all those evils you were sacrificing one by one. I have ended your battle. I have stopped your motor. I have deprived your world of man’s mind.

“Men do not live by the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those who do. The mind is impotent, you say? I have withdrawn those whose mind isn’t. There are values higher than the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those for whom there aren’t.

“While you were dragging to your sacrificial altars the men of justice, of independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem—I beat you to it, I reached them first. I told them the nature of the game you were playing and the nature of that moral code of yours, which they had been too innocently generous to grasp. I showed them the way to live by another morality—mine. It is mine that they chose to follow.

“All the men who have vanished, the men you hated, yet dreaded to lose, it is I who have taken them away from you. Do not attempt to find us. We do not choose to be found. Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don’t. Do not beg us to return. We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.

“We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one’s happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.

“There is a difference between our strike and all those you’ve practiced for centuries: our strike consists, not of making demands, but of granting them. We are evil, according to your morality. We have chosen not to harm you any longer. We are useless, according to your economics. We have chosen not to exploit you any longer. We are dangerous and to be shackled, according to your politics. We have chosen not to endanger you, nor to wear the shackles any longer. We are only an illusion, according to your philosophy. We have chosen not to blind you any longer and have left you free to face reality—the reality you wanted, the world as you see it now, a world without mind.

“We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it. We have no demands to present to you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.

“Are you now crying: No, this was not what you wanted? A mindless world of ruins was not your goal? You did not want us to leave you? You moral cannibals, I know that you’ve always known what it was that you wanted. But your game is up, because now we know it, too.

“Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. Your victims took the blame and struggled on, with your curses as reward for their martyrdom—while you went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good?—by what standard?

“You wanted to know John Galt’s identity. I am the man who has asked that question.

“Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that’s through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality—you who have never known any—but to discover it.

“You have heard no concepts of morality but the mystical or the social. You have been taught that morality is a code of behavior imposed on you by whim, the whim of a supernatural power or the whim of society, to serve God’s purpose or your neighbor’s welfare, to please an authority beyond the grave or else next door—but not to serve your life or pleasure. Your pleasure, you have been taught, is to be found in immorality, your interests would best be served by evil, and any moral code must be designed not for you, but against you, not to further your life, but to drain it.

“For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors—between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.

“Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your self-interest and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are opposites, that morality is not the province of reason, but the province of faith and force. Both sides agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is no right or wrong in reason—that in reason there’s no reason to be moral.

“Whatever else they fought about, it was against man’s mind that all your moralists have stood united. It was man’s mind that all their schemes and systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life.

“Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch—or build a cyclotron—without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.

“But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human nature,’ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival—so that for you, who are a human being, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is the question ‘to think or not to think.’

“A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. ‘Value’ is that which one acts to gain and keep, ‘virtue’ is the action by which one gains and keeps it. ‘Value’ presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? ‘Value’ presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.

“There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.

“A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue; its life is the standard of value directing its actions. But a plant has no choice of action; there are alternatives in the conditions it encounters, but there is no alternative in its function: it acts automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction.

“An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its senses provide it with an automatic code of action, an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or evil. It has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In conditions where its knowledge proves inadequate, it dies. But so long as it lives, it acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable to ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.

“Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An ‘instinct’ is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man’s desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love for life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

“A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind.

“Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice—and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a value—by choice; he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues—by choice.

“A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

“Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to whatever living remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human, to your mind, and I say: There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard of value.

“All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.

“Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being—not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement—not survival at any price, since there’s only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason.

“Man’s life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose. If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man—for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.

“Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, capable of nothing but pain.

“Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness—to value the failure of your values—is an insolent negation of morality. A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

“But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

“Sweep aside those parasites of subsidized classrooms, who live on the profits of the mind of others and proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code of behavior. They, who pose as scientists and claim that man is only an animal, do not grant him inclusion in the law of existence they have granted to the lowest of insects. They recognize that every living species has a way of survival demanded by its nature, they do not claim that a fish can live out of water or that a dog can live without its sense of smell—but man, they claim, the most complex of beings, man can survive in any way whatever, man has no identity, no nature, and there’s no practical reason why he cannot live with his means of survival destroyed, with his mind throttled and placed at the disposal of any orders they might care to issue.

“Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man’s instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live.

“No, you do not have to live; it is your basic act of choice; but if you choose to live, you must live as a man—by the work and the judgment of your mind.

“No, you do not have to live as a man; it is an act of moral choice. But you cannot live as anything else—and the alternative is that state of living death which you now see within you and around you, the state of a thing unfit for existence, no longer human and less than animal, a thing that knows nothing but pain and drags itself through its span of years in the agony of unthinking self-destruction.

“No, you do not have to think; it is an act of moral choice. But someone had to think to keep you alive; if you choose to default, you default on existence and you pass the deficit to some moral man, expecting him to sacrifice his good for the sake of letting you survive by your evil.

“No, you do not have to be a man; but today those who are, are not there any longer. I have removed your means of survival—your victims.

“If you wish to know how I have done it and what I told them to make them quit, you are hearing it now. I told them, in essence, the statement I am making tonight. They were men who had lived by my code, but had not known how great a virtue it represented. I made them see it. I brought them, not a re-evaluation, but only an identification of their values.

“We, the men of the mind, are now on strike against you in the name of a single axiom, which is the root of our moral code, just as the root of yours is the wish to escape it: the axiom that existence exists.

“Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.

“If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.

“Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.

“To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors—the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

“Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.

“Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders’ attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.

“Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.

“All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identify it as a solid object; he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

“Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

“The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answers is: Yours. No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth—and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.

“You who speak of a ‘moral instinct’ as if it were some separate endowment opposed to reason—man’s reason is his moral faculty. A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False?—Right or Wrong? Is a seed to be planted in soil in order to grow—right or wrong? Is a man’s wound to be disinfected in order to save his life—right or wrong? Does the nature of atmospheric electricity permit it to be converted into kinetic power—right or wrong? It is the answers to such questions that gave you everything you have—and the answers came from a man’s mind, a mind of intransigent devotion to that which is right.

“A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest—but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

“That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call ‘free will’ is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

“Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think—not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment—on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict ‘It is.’ Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say ‘It is,’ you are refusing to say ‘I am.’ By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: ‘Who am I to know?’—he is declaring: ‘Who am I to live?’

“This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.

“To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.

“You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island—it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today—and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

“If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man’s only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a ‘moral commandment’ is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

“My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.

“Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking—that the mind is one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide of action—that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise—that a concession to the irrational invalidates one’s consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality—that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind—that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one’s consciousness.

“Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it—that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life—that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.

“Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence—that man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and that he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions—that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may not sacrifice his convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole of mankind shouting pleas or threats against him—that courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one’s own consciousness.

“Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud—that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee—that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling—that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.

“Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

“Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live—that productive work is the process by which man’s consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one’s purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one’s values—that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others—that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human—that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind’s full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay—that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live—that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road—that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up—that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.

“Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned—that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character—that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind—that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining—that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul—that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice—that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself—and that the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul’s shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others.

“Are you beginning to see who is John Galt? I am the man who has earned the thing you did not fight for, the thing you have renounced, betrayed, corrupted, yet were unable fully to destroy and are now hiding as your guilty secret, spending your life in apologies to every professional cannibal, lest it be discovered that somewhere within you, you still long to say what I am now saying to the hearing of the whole of mankind: I am proud of my own value and of the fact that I wish to live.

“This wish—which you share, yet submerge as an evil—is the only remnant of the good within you, but it is a wish one must learn to deserve. His own happiness is man’s only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it. Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue—and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.

“Just as your body has two fundamental sensations, pleasure and pain, as signs of its welfare or injury, as a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death, so your consciousness has two fundamental emotions, joy and suffering, in answer to the same alternative. Your emotions are estimates of that which furthers your life or threatens it, lightning calculators giving you a sum of your profit or loss. You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value. Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.

“If you hold the irrational as your standard of value and the impossible as your concept of the good, if you long for rewards you have not earned, for a fortune or a love you don’t deserve, for a loophole in the law of causality, for an A that becomes non-A at your whim, if you desire the opposite of existence—you will reach it. Do not cry, when you reach it, that life is frustration and that happiness is impossible to man; check your fuel: it brought you where you wanted to go.

“Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy— a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.

“Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but earn it by my own achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of the lives of others. Just as there are no contradictions in my values and no conflicts among my desires—so there are no victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned and do not view one another with a cannibal’s lust, men who neither make sacrifices nor accept them.

“The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does not ask to be paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for his flaws. A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his soul as alms. Just as he does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit—his love, his friendship, his esteem—except in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure, which he receives from men he can respect. The mystic parasites who have, throughout the ages, reviled the traders and held them in contempt, while honoring the beggars and the looters, have known the secret motive of their sneers: a trader is the entity they dread—a man of justice.

“Do you ask what moral obligation I owe to my fellow men? None—except the obligation I owe to myself, to material objects and to all of existence: rationality. I deal with men as my nature and theirs demands: by means of reason. I seek or desire nothing from them except such relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice. It is only with their mind that I can deal and only for my own self-interest, when they see that my interest coincides with theirs. When they don’t, I enter no relationship; I let dissenters go their way and I do not swerve from mine. I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs. I have nothing to gain from fools or cowards; I have no benefits to seek from human vices: from stupidity, dishonesty or fear. The only value men can offer me is the work of their mind. When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.

“Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate—do you hear me? no man may start—the use of physical force against others.

“To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man’s capacity to live.

“Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. When you declare that men are irrational animals and propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own character and can no longer claim the sanction of reason—as no advocate of contradictions can claim it. There can be no ‘right’ to destroy the source of rights, the only means of judging right and wrong: the mind.

“To force a man to drop his own mind and to accept your will as a substitute, with a gun in place of a syllogism, with terror in place of proof, and death as the final argument—is to attempt to exist in defiance of reality. Reality demands of man that he act for his own rational interest; your gun demands of him that he act against it. Reality threatens man with death if he does not act on his rational judgment; you threaten him with death if he does. You place him in a world where the price of his life is the surrender of all the virtues required by life—and death by a process of gradual destruction is all that you and your system will achieve, when death is made to be the ruling power, the winning argument in a society of men.

“Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum: ‘Your money or your life,’ or a politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: ‘Your children’s education or your life,’ the meaning of that ultimatum is: ‘Your mind or your life’—and neither is possible to man without the other.

“If there are degrees of evil, it is hard to say who is the more contemptible: the brute who assumes the right to force the mind of others or the moral degenerate who grants to others the right to force his mind. That is the moral absolute one does not leave open to debate. I do not grant the terms of reason to men who propose to deprive me of reason. I do not enter discussions with neighbors who think they can forbid me to think. I do not place my moral sanction upon a murderer’s wish to kill me. When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him—by force.

“It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own. He uses force to seize a value; I use it only to destroy destruction. A holdup man seeks to gain wealth by killing me; I do not grow richer by killing a holdup man. I seek no values by means of evil, nor do I surrender my values to evil.

“In the name of all the producers who had kept you alive and received your death ultimatums in payment, I now answer you with a single ultimatum of our own: Our work or your guns. You can choose either; you can’t have both. We do not initiate the use of force against others or submit to force at their hands. If you desire ever again to live in an industrial society, it will be on our moral terms. Our terms and our motive power are the antithesis of yours. You have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours.

“You who are worshippers of the zero—you have never discovered that achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not ‘the absence of pain,’ intelligence is not ‘the absence of stupidity,’ light is not ‘the absence of darkness,’ an entity is not ‘the absence of a nonentity.’ Building is not done by abstaining from demolition; centuries of sitting and waiting in such abstinence will not raise one single girder for you to abstain from demolishing—and now you can no longer say to me, the builder: ‘Produce, and feed us in exchange for our not destroying your production.’ I am answering in the name of all your victims: Perish with and in your own void. Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. Perish, because we have learned that a zero cannot hold a mortgage over life.

“You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.

“You, who have lost the concept of the difference, you who claim that fear and joy are incentives of equal power—and secretly add that fear is the more ‘practical’—you do not wish to live, and only fear of death still holds you to the existence you have damned. You dart in panic through the trap of your days, looking for the exit you have closed, running from a pursuer you dare not name to a terror you dare not acknowledge, and the greater your terror the greater your dread of the only act that could save you: thinking. The purpose of your struggle is not to know, not to grasp or name or hear the thing I shall now state to your hearing: that yours is the Morality of Death.

“Death is the standard of your values, death is your chosen goal, and you have to keep running, since there is no escape from the pursuer who is out to destroy you or from the knowledge that that pursuer is yourself. Stop running, for once—there is no place to run—stand naked, as you dread to stand, but as I see you, and take a look at what you dared to call a moral code.

“Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means and end. Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.

“It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him—it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.

“The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.

“A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.

“Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a ‘tendency’ to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.

“What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge—he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil—he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor—he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire—he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy—all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was—that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love—he was not man.

“Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

“They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man.

“No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say, against his pain—and they point at the torture rack to which they’ve tied him, the rack with two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body.

“They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth—and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.

“They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost—yet such is their image of man’s nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists.

“Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore? It was man’s mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and a soul moved by mystic revelations—he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone.

“And as he now crawls through the wreckage, groping blindly for a way to live, your teachers offer him the help of a morality that proclaims that he’ll find no solution and must seek no fulfillment on earth. Real existence, they tell him, is that which he cannot perceive, true consciousness is the faculty of perceiving the non-existent—and if he is unable to understand it, that is the proof that his existence is evil and his consciousness impotent.

“As products of the split between man’s soul and body, there are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelations, the other to their reflexes. No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter—the enslavement of man’s body, in spirit—the destruction of his mind.

“The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive—a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society—a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself. Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. Man’s mind, say the mystics of muscle, must be subordinated to the will of Society. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of muscle, is the pleasure of Society, whose standards are beyond man’s right of judgment and must be obeyed as a primary absolute. The purpose of man’s life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. His reward, say the mystics of spirit, will be given to him beyond the grave. His reward, say the mystics of muscle, will be given on earth—to his great-grandchildren.

“Selfishness—say both—is man’s evil. Man’s good—say both—is to give up his personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man’s good is to negate the life he lives. Sacrifice—cry both—is the essence of morality, the highest virtue within man’s reach.

“Whoever is now within reach of my voice, whoever is man the victim, not man the killer, I am speaking at the deathbed of your mind, at the brink of that darkness in which you’re drowning, and if there still remains within you the power to struggle to hold on to those fading sparks which had been yourself—use it now. The word that has destroyed you is ‘sacrifice.’ Use the last of your strength to understand its meaning. You’re still alive. You have a chance.

“‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. ‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. ‘Sacrifice’ is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.

“If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor’s child and let your own die, it is.

“If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself—that is the virtue of sacrifice in full.

“If you renounce all personal desires and dedicate your life to those you love, you do not achieve full virtue: you still retain a value of your own, which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers, it is an act of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men you hate—that is the greatest of the virtues you can practice.

“A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values. If you wish to achieve full virtue, you must seek no gratitude in return for your sacrifice, no praise, no love, no admiration, no self-esteem, not even the pride of being virtuous; the faintest trace of any gain dilutes your virtue. If you pursue a course of action that does not taint your life by any joy, that brings you no value in matter, no value in spirit, no gain, no profit, no reward—if you achieve this state of total zero, you have achieved the ideal of moral perfection.

“You are told that moral perfection is impossible to man—and, by this standard, it is. You cannot achieve it so long as you live, but the value of your life and of your person is gauged by how closely you succeed in approaching that ideal zero which is death.

“If you start, however, as a passionless blank, as a vegetable seeking to be eaten, with no values to reject and no wishes to renounce, you will not win the crown of sacrifice. It is not a sacrifice to renounce the unwanted. It is not a sacrifice to give your life for others, if death is your personal desire. To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you—you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body. It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture.

“Do not remind me that it pertains only to this life on earth. I am concerned with no other. Neither are you.

“If you wish to save the last of your dignity, do not call your best actions a ‘sacrifice’: that term brands you as immoral. If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty. If a man dies fighting for his own freedom, it is not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a slave; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of man who’s willing. If a man refuses to sell his convictions, it is not a sacrifice, unless he is the sort of man who has no convictions.

“Sacrifice could be proper only for those who have nothing to sacrifice—no values, no standards, no judgment—those whose desires are irrational whims, blindly conceived and lightly surrendered. For a man of moral stature, whose desires are born of rational values, sacrifice is the surrender of the right to the wrong, of the good to the evil.

“The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral—a morality that declares its own bankruptcy by confessing that it can’t impart to men any personal stake in virtues or values, and that their souls are sewers of depravity, which they must be taught to sacrifice. By its own confession, it is impotent to teach men to be good and can only subject them to constant punishment.

“Are you thinking, in some foggy stupor, that it’s only material values that your morality requires you to sacrifice? And what do you think are material values? Matter has no value except as a means for the satisfaction of human desires. Matter is only a tool of human values. To what service are you asked to give the material tools your virtue has produced? To the service of that which you regard as evil: to a principle you do not share, to a person you do not respect, to the achievement of a purpose opposed to your own—else your gift is not a sacrifice.

“Your morality tells you to renounce the material world and to divorce your values from matter. A man whose values are given no expression in material form, whose existence is unrelated to his ideals, whose actions contradict his convictions, is a cheap little hypocrite—yet that is the man who obeys your morality and divorces his values from matter. The man who loves one woman, but sleeps with another—the man who admires the talent of a worker, but hires another—the man who considers one cause to be just, but donates his money to the support of another—the man who holds high standards of craftsmanship, but devotes his effort to the production of trash—these are the men who have renounced matter, the men who believe that the values of their spirit cannot be brought into material reality.

“Do you say it is the spirit that such men have renounced? Yes, of course. You cannot have one without the other. You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness. Renounce your consciousness and you become a brute. Renounce your body and you become a fake. Renounce the material world and you surrender it to evil.

“And that is precisely the goal of your morality, the duty that your code demands of you. Give to that which you do not enjoy, serve that which you do not admire, submit to that which you consider evil—surrender the world to the values of others, deny, reject, renounce your self. Your self is your mind; renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow.

“It is your mind that they want you to surrender—all those who preach the creed of sacrifice, whatever their tags or their motives, whether they demand it for the sake of your soul or of your body, whether they promise you another life in heaven or a full stomach on this earth. Those who start by saying: ‘It is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of others’—end up by saying: ‘It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must sacrifice them to the convictions of others.’

“This much is true: the most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth. You are asked to sacrifice your intellectual integrity, your logic, your reason, your standard of truth—in favor of becoming a prostitute whose standard is the greatest good for the greatest number.

“If you search your code for guidance, for an answer to the question: ‘What is the good?’—the only answer you will find is ‘The good of others.’ The good is whatever others wish, whatever you feel they feel they wish, or whatever you feel they ought to feel. ‘The good of others’ is a magic formula that transforms anything into gold, a formula to be recited as a guarantee of moral glory and as a fumigator for any action, even the slaughter of a continent. Your standard of virtue is not an object, not an act, not a principle, but an intention. You need no proof, no reasons, no success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others—all you need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the ‘non-good for me.’

“Your code—which boasts that it upholds eternal, absolute, objective moral values and scorns the conditional, the relative and the subjective—your code hands out, as its version of the absolute, the following rule of moral conduct: If you wish it, it’s evil; if others wish it, it’s good; if the motive of your action is your welfare, don’t do it; if the motive is the welfare of others, then anything goes.

“As this double-jointed, double-standard morality splits you in half, so it splits mankind into two enemy camps: one is you, the other is all the rest of humanity. You are the only outcast who has no right to wish or live. You are the only servant, the rest are the masters, you are the only giver, the rest are the takers, you are the eternal debtor, the rest are the creditors never to be paid off. You must not question their right to your sacrifice, or the nature of their wishes and their needs: their right is conferred upon them by a negative, by the fact that they are ‘non-you.’

“For those of you who might ask questions, your code provides a consolation prize and booby-trap: it is for your own happiness, it says, that you must serve the happiness of others, the only way to achieve your joy is to give it up to others, the only way to achieve your prosperity is to surrender your wealth to others, the only way to protect your life is to protect all men except yourself—and if you find no joy in this procedure, it is your own fault and the proof of your evil; if you were good, you would find your happiness in providing a banquet for others, and your dignity in existing on such crumbs as they might care to toss you.

“You who have no standard of self-esteem, accept the guilt and dare not ask the questions. But you know the unadmitted answer, refusing to acknowledge what you see, what hidden premise moves your world. You know it, not in honest statement, but as a dark uneasiness within you, while you flounder between guiltily cheating and grudgingly practicing a principle too vicious to name.

“I, who do not accept the unearned, neither in values nor in guilt, am here to ask the questions you evaded. Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your own? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? If the sensation of eating a cake is a value, why is it an immoral indulgence in your stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the stomach of others? Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it? Does virtue consist of serving vice? Is the moral purpose of those who are good, self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil?

“The answer you evade, the monstrous answer is: No, the takers are not evil, provided they did not earn the value you gave them. It is not immoral for them to accept it, provided they are unable to produce it, unable to deserve it, unable to give you any value in return. It is not immoral for them to enjoy it, provided they do not obtain it by right.

“Such is the secret core of your creed, the other half of your double standard: it is immoral to live by your own effort, but moral to live by the effort of others—it is immoral to consume your own product, but moral to consume the products of others—it is immoral to earn, but moral to mooch—it is the parasites who are the moral justification for the existence of the producers, but the existence of the parasites is an end in itself—it is evil to profit by achievement, but good to profit by sacrifice—it is evil to create your own happiness, but good to enjoy it at the price of the blood of others.

“Your code divides mankind into two castes and commands them to live by opposite rules: those who may desire anything and those who may desire nothing, the chosen and the damned, the riders and the carriers, the eaters and the eaten. What standard determines your caste? What passkey admits you to the moral elite? The passkey is lack of value.

“Whatever the value involved, it is your lack of it that gives you a claim upon those who don’t lack it. It is your need that gives you a claim to rewards. If you are able to satisfy your need, your ability annuls your right to satisfy it. But a need you are unable to satisfy gives you first right to the lives of mankind.

“If you succeed, any man who fails is your master; if you fail, any man who succeeds is your serf. Whether your failure is just or not, whether your wishes are rational or not, whether your misfortune is undeserved or the result of your vices, it is misfortune that gives you a right to rewards. It is pain, regardless of its nature or cause, pain as a primary absolute, that gives you a mortgage on all of existence.

“If you heal your pain by your own effort, you receive no moral credit: your code regards it scornfully as an act of self-interest. Whatever value you seek to acquire, be it wealth or food or love or rights, if you acquire it by means of your virtue, your code does not regard it as a moral acquisition: you occasion no loss to anyone, it is a trade, not alms; a payment, not a sacrifice. The deserved belongs in the selfish, commercial realm of mutual profit; it is only the undeserved that calls for that moral transaction which consists of profit to one at the price of disaster to the other. To demand rewards for your virtue is selfish and immoral; it is your lack of virtue that transforms your demand into a moral right.

“A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness—non-existence—as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw—the zero.

“Who provides the account to pay these claims? Those who are cursed for being non-zeros, each to the extent of his distance from that ideal. Since all values are the product of virtues, the degree of your virtue is used as the measure of your penalty; the degree of your faults is used as the measure of your gain. Your code declares that the rational man must sacrifice himself to the irrational, the independent man to parasites, the honest man to the dishonest, the man of justice to the unjust, the productive man to thieving loafers, the man of integrity to compromising knaves, the man of self-esteem to sniveling neurotics. Do you wonder at the meanness of soul in those you see around you? The man who achieves these virtues will not accept your moral code; the man who accepts your moral code will not achieve these virtues.

“Under a morality of sacrifice, the first value you sacrifice is morality; the next is self-esteem. When need is the standard, every man is both victim and parasite. As a victim, he must labor to fill the needs of others, leaving himself in the position of a parasite whose needs must be filled by others. He cannot approach his fellow men except in one of two disgraceful roles: he is both a beggar and a sucker.

“You fear the man who has a dollar less than you, that dollar is rightfully his, he makes you feel like a moral defrauder. You hate the man who has a dollar more than you, that dollar is rightfully yours, he makes you feel that you are morally defrauded. The man below is a source of your guilt, the man above is a source of your frustration. You do not know what to surrender or demand, when to give and when to grab, what pleasure in life is rightfully yours and what debt is still unpaid to others—you struggle to evade, as ‘theory,’ the knowledge that by the moral standard you’ve accepted you are guilty every moment of your life, there is no mouthful of food you swallow that is not needed by someone somewhere on earth—and you give up the problem in blind resentment, you conclude that moral perfection is not to be achieved or desired, that you will muddle through by snatching as snatch can and by avoiding the eyes of the young, of those who look at you as if self-esteem were possible and they expected you to have it. Guilt is all that you retain within your soul—and so does every other man, as he goes past, avoiding your eyes. Do you wonder why your morality has not achieved brotherhood on earth or the good will of man to man?

“The justification of sacrifice, that your morality pro-pounds, is more corrupt than the corruption it purports to justify. The motive of your sacrifice, it tells you, should be love—the love you ought to feel for every man. A morality that professes the belief that the values of the spirit are more precious than matter, a morality that teaches you to scorn a whore who gives her body indiscriminately to all men—this same morality demands that you surrender your soul to promiscuous love for all comers.

“As there can be no causeless wealth, so there can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards. To love is to value. The man who tells you that it is possible to value without values, to love those whom you appraise as worthless, is the man who tells you that it is possible to grow rich by consuming without producing and that paper money is as valuable as gold.

“Observe that he does not expect you to feel a causeless fear. When his kind get into power, they are expert at contriving means of terror, at giving you ample cause to feel the fear by which they desire to rule you. But when it comes to love, the highest of emotions, you permit them to shriek at you accusingly that you are a moral delinquent if you’re incapable of feeling causeless love. When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.

“Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. Your morality demands that you divorce your love from values and hand it down to any vagrant, not as response to his worth, but as response to his need, not as reward, but as alms, not as a payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices. Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral judgment, that true love transcends, forgives and survives every manner of evil in its object, and the greater the love the greater the depravity it permits to the loved. To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, it tells you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love to those who don’t deserve it, and the less they deserve it, the more love you owe them—the more loathsome the object, the nobler your love—the more unfastidious your love, the greater your virtue—and if you can bring your soul to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection.

“Such is your morality of sacrifice and such are the twin ideals it offers: to refashion the life of your body in the image of a human stockyard, and the life of your spirit in the image of a dump.

“Such was your goal—and you’ve reached it. Why do you now moan complaints about man’s impotence and the futility of human aspirations? Because you were unable to prosper by seeking destruction? Because you were unable to find joy by worshipping pain? Because you were unable to live by holding death as your standard of value?

“The degree of your ability to live was the degree to which you broke your moral code, yet you believe that those who preach it are friends of humanity, you damn yourself and dare not question their motives or their goals. Take a look at them now, when you face your last choice—and if you choose to perish, do so with full knowledge of how cheaply how small an enemy has claimed your life.

“The mystics of both schools, who preach the creed of sacrifice, are germs that attack you through a single sore: your fear of relying on your mind. They tell you that they possess a means of knowledge higher than the mind, a mode of consciousness superior to reason—like a special pull with some bureaucrat of the universe who gives them secret tips withheld from others. The mystics of spirit declare that they possess an extra sense you lack: this special sixth sense consists of contradicting the whole of the knowledge of your five. The mystics of muscle do not bother to assert any claim to extrasensory perception: they merely declare that your senses are not valid, and that their wisdom consists of perceiving your blindness by some manner of unspecified means. Both kinds demand that you invalidate your own consciousness and surrender yourself into their power. They offer you, as proof of their superior knowledge, the fact that they assert the opposite of everything you know, and as proof of their superior ability to deal with existence, the fact that they lead you to misery, self-sacrifice, starvation, destruction.

“They claim that they perceive a mode of being superior to your existence on this earth. The mystics of spirit call it ‘another dimension,’ which consists of denying dimensions. The mystics of muscle call it ‘the future,’ which consists of denying the present. To exist is to possess identity. What identity are they able to give to their superior realm? They keep telling you what it is not, but never tell you what it is. All their identifications consist of negating: God is that which no human mind can know, they say—and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge—God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.

“It is only the metaphysics of a leech that would cling to the idea of a universe where a zero is a standard of identification. A leech would want to seek escape from the necessity to name its own nature—escape from the necessity to know that the substance on which it builds its private universe is blood.

“What is the nature of that superior world to which they sacrifice the world that exists? The mystics of spirit curse matter, the mystics of muscle curse profit. The first wish men to profit by renouncing the earth, the second wish men to inherit the earth by renouncing all profit. Their non-material, non-profit worlds are realms where rivers run with milk and coffee, where wine spurts from rocks at their command, where pastry drops on them from clouds at the price of opening their mouth. On this material, profit-chasing earth, an enormous investment of virtue—of intelligence, integrity, energy, skill—is required to construct a railroad to carry them the distance of one mile; in their non-material, non-profit world, they travel from planet to planet at the cost of a wish. If an honest person asks them: ‘How?’—they answer with righteous scorn that a ‘how’ is the concept of vulgar realists; the concept of superior spirits is ‘Somehow.’ On this earth restricted by matter and profit, rewards are achieved by thought; in a world set free of such restrictions rewards are achieved by wishing.

“And that is the whole of their shabby secret. The secret of all their esoteric philosophies, of all their dialectics and super-senses, of their evasive eyes and snarling words, the secret for which they destroy civilization, language, industries and lives, the secret for which they pierce their own eyes and eardrums, grind out their senses, blank out their minds, the purpose for which they dissolve the absolutes of reason, logic, matter, existence, reality—is to erect upon that plastic fog a single holy absolute: their Wish.

“The restriction they seek to escape is the law of identity. The freedom they seek is freedom from the fact that an A will remain an A, no matter what their tears or tantrums—that a river will not bring them milk, no matter what their hunger—that water will not run uphill, no matter what comforts they could gain if it did, and if they want to lift it to the roof of a skyscraper, they must do it by a process of thought and labor, in which the nature of an inch of pipeline counts, but their feelings do not—that their feelings are impotent to alter the course of a single speck of dust in space or the nature of any action they have committed.

“Those who tell you that man is unable to perceive a reality undistorted by his senses, mean that they are unwilling to perceive a reality undistorted by their feelings. ‘Things as they are’ are things as perceived by your mind; divorce them from reason and they become ‘things as perceived by your wishes.’

“There is no honest revolt against reason—and when you accept any part of their creed, your motive is to get away with something your reason would not permit you to attempt. The freedom you seek is freedom from the fact that if you stole your wealth, you are a scoundrel, no matter how much you give to charity or how many prayers you recite—that if you sleep with sluts, you’re not a worthy husband, no matter how anxiously you feel that you love your wife next morning—that you are an entity, not a series of random pieces scattered through a universe where nothing sticks and nothing commits you to anything, the universe of a child’s nightmare where identities switch and swim, where the rotter and the hero are interchangeable parts arbitrarily assumed at will—that you are a man—that you are an entity—that you are.

“No matter how eagerly you claim that the goal of your mystic wishing is a higher mode of life, the rebellion against identity is the wish for non-existence. The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.

“Your teachers, the mystics of both schools, have reversed causality in their consciousness, then strive to reverse it in existence. They take their emotions as a cause, and their mind as a passive effect. They make their emotions their tool for perceiving reality. They hold their desires as an irreducible primary, as a fact superseding all facts. An honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of his desire. He says: ‘It is, therefore I want it.’ They say: ‘I want it, therefore it is.’

“They want to cheat the axiom of existence and consciousness, they want their consciousness to be an instrument not of perceiving but of creating existence, and existence to be not the object but the subject of their consciousness—they want to be that God they created in their image and likeness, who creates a universe out of a void by means of an arbitrary whim. But reality is not to be cheated. What they achieve is the opposite of their desire. They want an omnipotent power over existence; instead, they lose the power of their consciousness. By refusing to know, they condemn themselves to the horror of a perpetual unknown.

“Those irrational wishes that draw you to their creed, those emotions you worship as an idol, on whose altar you sacrifice the earth, that dark, incoherent passion within you, which you take as the voice of God or of your glands, is nothing more than the corpse of your mind. An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.

“Whenever you committed the evil of refusing to think and to see, of exempting from the absolute of reality some one small wish of yours, whenever you chose to say: Let me withdraw from the judgment of reason the cookies I stole, or the existence of God, let me have my one irrational whim and I will be a man of reason about all else—that was the act of subverting your consciousness, the act of corrupting your mind. Your mind then became a fixed jury who takes orders from a secret underworld, whose verdict distorts the evidence to fit an absolute it dares not touch—and a censored reality is the result, a splintered reality where the bits you chose to see are floating among the chasms of those you didn’t, held together by that embalming fluid of the mind which is an emotion exempted from thought.

“The links you strive to drown are causal connections. The enemy you seek to defeat is the law of causality: it permits you no miracles. The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature. An action not caused by an entity would be caused by a zero, which would mean a zero controlling a thing, a non-entity controlling an entity, the non-existent ruling the existent—which is the universe of your teachers’ desire, the cause of their doctrines of causeless action, the reason of their revolt against reason, the goal of their morality, their politics, their economics, the ideal they strive for: the reign of the zero.

“The law of identity does not permit you to have your cake and eat it, too. The law of causality does not permit you to eat your cake before you have it. But if you drown both laws in the blanks of your mind, if you pretend to yourself and to others that you don’t see—then you can try to proclaim your right to eat your cake today and mine tomorrow, you can preach that the way to have a cake is to eat it first, before you bake it, that the way to produce is to start by consuming, that all wishers have an equal claim to all things, since nothing is caused by anything. The corollary of the causeless in matter is the unearned in spirit.

“Whenever you rebel against causality, your motive is the fraudulent desire, not to escape it, but worse: to reverse it. You want unearned love, as if love, the effect, could give you personal value, the cause—you want unearned admiration, as if admiration, the effect, could give you virtue, the cause—you want unearned wealth, as if wealth, the effect, could give you ability, the cause—you plead for mercy, mercy, not justice, as if an unearned forgiveness could wipe out the cause of your plea. And to indulge your ugly little shams, you support the doctrines of your teachers, while they run hog-wild proclaiming that spending, the effect, creates riches, the cause, that machinery, the effect, creates intelligence, the cause, that your sexual desires, the effect, create your philosophical values, the cause.

“Who pays for the orgy? Who causes the causeless? Who are the victims, condemned to remain unacknowledged and to perish in silence, lest their agony disturb your pretense that they do not exist? We are, we, the men of the mind.

“We are the cause of all the values that you covet, we who perform the process of thinking, which is the process of defining identity and discovering causal connections. We taught you to know, to speak, to produce, to desire, to love. You who abandon reason—were it not for us who preserve it, you would not be able to fulfill or even to conceive your wishes. You would not be able to desire the clothes that had not been made, the automobile that had not been invented, the money that had not been devised, as exchange for goods that did not exist, the admiration that had not been experienced for men who had achieved nothing, the love that belongs and pertains only to those who preserve their capacity to think, to choose, to value.

“You—who leap like a savage out of the jungle of your feelings into the Fifth Avenue of our New York and proclaim that you want to keep the electric lights, but to destroy the generators—it is our wealth that you use while destroying us, it is our values that you use while damning us, it is our language that you use while denying the mind.

“Just as your mystics of spirit invented their heaven in the image of our earth, omitting our existence, and promised you rewards created by miracle out of non-matter—so your modern mystics of muscle omit our existence and promise you a heaven where matter shapes itself of its own causeless will into all the rewards desired by your non-mind.

“For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket—by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners. We, the men of the mind, were the unnamed victims of their creed, we who were willing to break their moral code and to bear damnation for the sin of reason—we who thought and acted, while they wished and prayed—we who were moral outcasts, we who were bootleggers of life when life was held to be a crime—while they basked in moral glory for the virtue of surpassing material greed and of distributing in selfless charity the material goods produced by—blank-out.

“Now we are chained and commanded to produce by savages who do not grant us even the identification of sinners—by savages who proclaim that we do not exist, then threaten to deprive us of the life we don’t possess, if we fail to provide them with the goods we don’t produce. Now we are expected to continue running railroads and to know the minute when a train will arrive after crossing the span of a continent, we are expected to continue running steel mills and to know the molecular structure of every drop of metal in the cables of your bridges and in the body of the airplanes that support you in mid-air—while the tribes of your grotesque little mystics of muscle fight over the carcass of our world, gibbering in sounds of non-language that there are no principles, no absolutes, no knowledge, no mind.

“Dropping below the level of a savage, who believes that the magic words he utters have the power to alter reality, they believe that reality can be altered by the power of the words they do not utter—and their magic tool is the blank-out, the pretense that nothing can come into existence past the voodoo of their refusal to identify it.

“As they feed on stolen wealth in body, so they feed on stolen concepts in mind, and proclaim that honesty consists of refusing to know that one is stealing. As they use effects while denying causes, so they use our concepts while denying the roots and the existence of the concepts they are using. As they seek, not to build, but to take over industrial plants, so they seek, not to think, but to take over human thinking.

“As they proclaim that the only requirement for running a factory is the ability to turn the cranks of the machines, and blank out the question of who created the factory—so they proclaim that there are no entities, that nothing exists but motion, and blank out the fact that motion presupposes the thing which moves, that without the concept of entity, there can be no such concept as ‘motion.’ As they proclaim their right to consume the unearned, and blank out the question of who’s to produce it—so they proclaim that there is no law of identity, that nothing exists but change, and blank out the fact that change presupposes the concepts of what changes, from what and to what, that without the law of identity no such concept as ‘change’ is possible. As they rob an industrialist while denying his value, so they seek to seize power over all of existence while denying that existence exists.

“ ‘We know that we know nothing,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are claiming knowledge—‘There are no absolutes,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute—‘You cannot prove that you exist or that you’re conscious,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge: the existence of something to know, of a consciousness able to know it, and of a knowledge that has learned to distinguish between such concepts as the proved and the unproved.

“When a savage who has not learned to speak declares that existence must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of non-existence—when he declares that your consciousness must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of unconsciousness—he is asking you to step into a void outside of existence and consciousness to give him proof of both—he is asking you to become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero.

“When he declares that an axiom is a matter of arbitrary choice and he doesn’t choose to accept the axiom that he exists, he blanks out the fact that he has accepted it by uttering that sentence, that the only way to reject it is to shut one’s mouth, expound no theories and die.

“An axiom is a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others, whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it. Let the caveman who does not choose to accept the axiom of identity, try to present his theory without using the concept of identity or any concept derived from it—let the anthropoid who does not choose to accept the existence of nouns, try to devise a language without nouns, adjectives or verbs—let the witch doctor who does not choose to accept the validity of sensory perception, try to prove it without using the data he obtained by sensory perception—let the head-hunter who does not choose to accept the validity of logic, try to prove it without using logic—let the pigmy who proclaims that a skyscraper needs no foundation after it reaches its fiftieth story, yank the base from under his building, not yours—let the cannibal who snarls that the freedom of man’s mind was needed to create an industrial civilization, but is not needed to maintain it, be given an arrowhead and bear-skin, not a university chair of economics.

“Do you think they are taking you back to dark ages? They are taking you back to darker ages than any your history has known. Their goal is not the era of pre-science, but the era of pre-language. Their purpose is to deprive you of the concept on which man’s mind, his life and his culture depend: the concept of an objective reality. Identify the development of a human consciousness—and you will know the purpose of their creed.

“A savage is a being who has not grasped that A is A and that reality is real. He has arrested his mind at the level of a baby’s, at the stage when a consciousness acquires its initial sensory perceptions and has not learned to distinguish solid objects. It is to a baby that the world appears as a blur of motion, without things that move—and the birth of his mind is the day when he grasps that the streak that keeps flickering past him is his mother and the whirl beyond her is a curtain, that the two are solid entities and neither can turn into the other, that they are what they are, that they exist. The day when he grasps that matter has no volition is the day when he grasps that he has—and this is his birth as a human being. The day when he grasps that the reflection he sees in a mirror is not a delusion, that it is real, but it is not himself, that the mirage he sees in a desert is not a delusion, that the air and the light rays that cause it are real, but it is not a city, it is a city’s reflection—the day when he grasps that he is not a passive recipient of the sensations of any given moment, that his senses do not provide him with automatic knowledge in separate snatches independent of context, but only with the material of knowledge, which his mind must learn to integrate—the day when he grasps that his senses cannot deceive him, that physical objects cannot act without causes, that his organs of perception are physical and have no volition, no power to invent or to distort, that the evidence they give him is an absolute, but his mind must learn to understand it, his mind must discover the nature, the causes, the full context of his sensory material, his mind must identify the things that he perceives—that is the day of his birth as a thinker and scientist.

“We are the men who reach that day; you are the men who choose to reach it partly; a savage is a man who never does.

“To a savage, the world is a place of unintelligible miracles where anything is possible to inanimate matter and nothing is possible to him. His world is not the unknown, but that irrational horror: the unknowable. He believes that physical objects are endowed with a mysterious volition, moved by causeless, unpredictable whims, while he is a helpless pawn at the mercy of forces beyond his control. He believes that nature is ruled by demons who possess an omnipotent power and that reality is their fluid plaything, where they can turn his bowl of meal into a snake and his wife into a beetle at any moment, where the A he has never discovered can be any non-A they choose, where the only knowledge he possesses is that he must not attempt to know. He can count on nothing, he can only wish, and he spends his life on wishing, on begging his demons to grant him his wishes by the arbitrary power of their will, giving them credit when they do, taking the blame when they don’t, offering them sacrifices in token of his gratitude and sacrifices in token of his guilt, crawling on his belly in fear and worship of sun and moon and wind and rain and of any thug who announces himself as their spokesman, provided his words are unintelligible and his mask sufficiently frightening—he wishes, begs and crawls, and dies, leaving you, as a record of his view of existence, the distorted monstrosities of his idols, part-man, part-animal, part-spider, the embodiments of the world of non-A.

“His is the intellectual state of your modern teachers and his is the world to which they want to bring you.

“If you wonder by what means they propose to do it, walk into any college classroom and you will hear your professors teaching your children that man can be certain of nothing, that his consciousness has no validity whatever, that he can learn no facts and no laws of existence, that he’s incapable of knowing an objective reality. What, then, is his standard of knowledge and truth? Whatever others believe, is their answer. There is no knowledge, they teach, there’s only faith: your belief that you exist is an act of faith, no more valid than another’s faith in his right to kill you; the axioms of science are an act of faith, no more valid than a mystic’s faith in revelations; the belief that electric light can be produced by a generator is an act of faith, no more valid than the belief that it can be produced by a rabbit’s foot kissed under a stepladder on the first of the moon—truth is whatever people want it to be, and people are everyone except yourself; reality is whatever people choose to say it is, there are no objective facts, there are only people’s arbitrary wishes—a man who seeks knowledge in a laboratory by means of test tubes and logic is an old-fashioned, superstitious fool; a true scientist is a man who goes around taking public polls—and if it weren’t for the selfish greed of the manufacturers of steel girders, who have a vested interest in obstructing the progress of science, you would learn that New York City does not exist, because a poll of the entire population of the world would tell you by a landslide majority that their beliefs forbid its existence.

“For centuries, the mystics of spirit have proclaimed that faith is superior to reason, but have not dared deny the existence of reason. Their heirs and product, the mystics of muscle, have completed their job and achieved their dream: they proclaim that everything is faith, and call it a revolt against believing. As revolt against unproved assertions, they proclaim that nothing can be proved; as revolt against supernatural knowledge, they proclaim that no knowledge is possible; as revolt against the enemies of science, they proclaim that science is superstition; as revolt against the enslavement of the mind, they proclaim that there is no mind.

“If you surrender your power to perceive, if you accept the switch of your standard from the objective to the collective and wait for mankind to tell you what to think, you will find another switch taking place before the eyes you have renounced: you will find that your teachers become the rulers of the collective, and if you then refuse to obey them, protesting that they are not the whole of mankind, they will answer: ‘By what means do you know that we are not? Are, brother? Where did you get that old-fashioned term?’

“If you doubt that such is their purpose, observe with what passionate consistency the mystics of muscle are striving to make you forget that a concept such as ‘mind’ has ever existed. Observe the twists of undefined verbiage, the words with rubber meanings, the terms left floating in midstream, by means of which they try to get around the recognition of the concept of ‘thinking.’ Your consciousness, they tell you, consists of ‘reflexes,’ ‘reactions, ’ ‘experiences,’ ‘urges,’ and ‘drives’—and refuse to identify the means by which they acquired that knowledge, to identify the act they are performing when they tell it or the act you are performing when you listen. Words have the power to ‘condition’ you, they say and refuse to identify the reason why words have the power to change your—blank-out. A student reading a book understands it through a process of—blank-out. A scientist working on an invention is engaged in the activity of—blank-out. A psychologist helping a neurotic to solve a problem and untangle a conflict, does it by means of—blank-out. An industrialist—blank-out—there is no such person. A factory is a ‘natural resource,’ like a tree, a rock or a mud puddle.

“The problem of production, they tell you, has been solved and deserves no study or concern; the only problem left for your ‘reflexes’ to solve is now the problem of distribution. Who solved the problem of production? Humanity, they answer. What was the solution? The goods are here. How did they get here? Somehow. What caused it? Nothing has causes.

“They proclaim that every man born is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his ‘minimum sustenance’—his food, his clothes, his shelter—with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it—from whom? Blank-out. Every man, they announce, owns an equal share of the technological benefits created in the world. Created—by whom? Blank-out. Frantic cowards who posture as defenders of industrialists now define the purpose of economics as ‘an adjustment between the unlimited desires of men and the goods supplied in limited quantity.’ Supplied—by whom? Blank-out. Intellectual hoodlums who pose as professors, shrug away the thinkers of the past by declaring that their social theories were based on the impractical assumption that man was a rational being—but since men are not rational, they declare, there ought to be established a system that will make it possible for them to exist while being irrational, which means: while defying reality. Who will make it possible? Blank-out. Any stray mediocrity rushes into print with plans to control the production of mankind—and whoever agrees or disagrees with his statistics, no one questions his right to enforce his plans by means of a gun. Enforce—on whom? Blank-out. Random females with causeless incomes flitter on trips around the globe and return to deliver the message that the backward peoples of the world demand a higher standard of living. Demand—of whom? Blank-out.

“And to forestall any inquiry into the cause of the difference between a jungle village and New York City, they resort to the ultimate obscenity of explaining man’s industrial progress—skyscrapers, cable bridges, power motors, railroad trains—by declaring that man is an animal who possesses an ‘instinct of tool-making.’

“Did you wonder what is wrong with the world? You are now seeing the climax of the creed of the uncaused and unearned. All your gangs of mystics, of spirit or muscle, are fighting one another for power to rule you, snarling that love is the solution for all the problems of your spirit and that a whip is the solution for all the problems of your body—you who have agreed to have no mind. Granting man less dignity than they grant to cattle, ignoring what an animal trainer could tell them—that no animal can be trained by fear, that a tortured elephant will trample its torturer, but will not work for him or carry his burdens—they expect man to continue to produce electronic tubes, supersonic airplanes, atom-smashing engines and interstellar telescopes, with his ration of meat for reward and a lash on his back for incentive.

“Make no mistake about the character of mystics. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages—and power, the power to rule you by force, has always been their only lust.

“From the rites of the jungle witch doctors, which distorted reality into grotesque absurdities, stunted the minds of their victims and kept them in terror of the supernatural for stagnant stretches of centuries—to the supernatural doctrines of the Middle Ages, which kept men huddling on the mud floors of their hovels, in terror that the devil might steal the soup they had worked eighteen hours to earn—to the seedy little smiling professor who assures you that your brain has no capacity to think, that you have no means of perception and must blindly obey the omnipotent will of that supernatural force: Society—all of it is the same performance for the same and only purpose: to reduce you to the kind of pulp that has surrendered the validity of its consciousness.

“But it cannot be done to you without your consent. If you permit it to be done, you deserve it.

“When you listen to a mystic’s harangue on the impotence of the human mind and begin to doubt your consciousness, not his, when you permit your precariously semi-rational state to be shaken by any assertion and decide it is safer to trust his superior certainty and knowledge, the joke is on both of you: your sanction is the only source of certainty he has. The supernatural power that a mystic dreads, the unknowable spirit he worships, the consciousness he considers omnipotent is—yours.

“A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others. Somewhere in the distant reaches of his childhood, when his own understanding of reality clashed with the assertions of others, with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to so craven a fear of independence that he renounced his rational faculty. At the crossroads of the choice between ‘I know’ and ‘They say,’ he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think. Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others. His surrender took the form of the feeling that he must hide his lack of understanding, that others possess some mysterious knowledge of which he alone is deprived, that reality is whatever they want it to be, through some means forever denied to him.

“From then on, afraid to think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings. His feelings become his only guide, his only remnant of personal identity, he clings to them with ferocious possessiveness—and whatever thinking he does is devoted to the struggle of hiding from himself that the nature of his feelings is terror.

“When a mystic declares that he feels the existence of a power superior to reason, he feels it all right, but that power is not an omniscient super-spirit of the universe, it is the consciousness of any passer-by to whom he has surrendered his own. A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness of others. ‘They’ are his only key to reality, he feels that he cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting their unaccountable consent. ‘They’ are his only means of perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live. To control the consciousness of others becomes his only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

“Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims—as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force—he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious; reason, to him, is a means of deception; he feels that men possess some power more potent than reason—and only their causeless belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he lacked. His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and rests on the absolute of an objective reality. What he seeks is power over reality and over men’s means of perceiving it, their mind, the power to interpose his will between existence and consciousness, as if, by agreeing to fake the reality he orders them to fake, men would, in fact, create it.

“Just as the mystic is a parasite in matter, who expropriates the wealth created by others—just as he is a parasite in spirit, who plunders the ideas created by others—so he falls below the level of a lunatic who creates his own distortion of reality, to the level of a parasite of lunacy who seeks a distortion created by others.

“There is only one state that fulfills the mystic’s longing for infinity, non-causality, non-identity: death. No matter what unintelligible causes he ascribes to his incommunicable feelings, whoever rejects reality rejects existence—and the feelings that move him from then on are hatred for all the values of man’s life, and lust for all the evils that destroy it. A mystic relishes the spectacle of suffering, of poverty, subservience and terror; these give him a feeling of triumph, a proof of the defeat of rational reality. But no other reality exists.

“No matter whose welfare he professes to serve, be it the welfare of God or of that disembodied gargoyle he describes as ‘The People,’ no matter what ideal he proclaims in terms of some supernatural dimension—in fact, in reality, on earth, his ideal is death, his craving is to kill, his only satisfaction is to torture.

“Destruction is the only end that the mystics’ creed has ever achieved as it is the only end that you see them achieving today, and if the ravages wrought by their acts have not made them question their doctrines, if they profess to be moved by love, yet are not deterred by piles of human corpses, it is because the truth about their souls is worse than the obscene excuse you have allowed them, the excuse that the end justifies the means and that the horrors they practice are means to nobler ends. The truth is that those horrors are their ends.

“You who’re depraved enough to believe that you could adjust yourself to a mystic’s dictatorship and could please him by obeying his orders—there is no way to please him; when you obey, he will reverse his orders; he seeks obedience for the sake of obedience and destruction for the sake of destruction. You who are craven enough to believe that you can make terms with a mystic by giving in to his extortions—there is no way to buy him off, the bribe he wants is your life, as slowly or as fast as you are willing to give it in—and the monster he seeks to bribe is the hidden blank-out in his mind, which drives him to kill in order not to learn that the death he desires is his own.

“You who are innocent enough to believe that the forces let loose in your world today are moved by greed for material plunder—the mystics’ scramble for spoils is only a screen to conceal from their mind the nature of their motive. Wealth is a means of human life, and they clamor for wealth in imitation of living beings, to pretend to themselves that they desire to live. But their swinish indulgence in plundered luxury is not enjoyment, it is escape. They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself.

“You who’ve never grasped the nature of evil, you who describe them as ‘misguided idealists’—may the God you invented forgive you!—they are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.

“It is a conspiracy without leader or direction, and the random little thugs of the moment who cash in on the agony of one land or another are chance scum riding the torrent from the broken dam of the sewer of centuries, from the reservoir of hatred for reason, for logic, for ability, for achievement, for joy, stored by every whining anti-human who ever preached the superiority of the ‘heart’ over the mind.

“It is a conspiracy of all those who seek, not to live, but to get away with living, those who seek to cut just one small corner of reality and are drawn, by feeling, to all the others who are busy cutting other corners—a conspiracy that unites by links of evasion all those who pursue a zero as a value: the professor who, unable to think, takes pleasure in crippling the mind of his students, the businessman who, to protect his stagnation, takes pleasure in chaining the ability of competitors, the neurotic who, to defend his self-loathing, takes pleasure in breaking men of self-esteem, the incompetent who takes pleasure in defeating achievement, the mediocrity who takes pleasure in demolishing greatness, the eunuch who takes pleasure in the castration of all pleasure—and all their intellectual munition-makers, all those who preach that the immolation of virtue will transform vices into virtue. Death is the premise at the root of their theories, death is the goal of their actions in practice—and you are the last of their victims.

“We, who were the living buffers between you and the nature of your creed, are no longer there to save you from the effects of your chosen beliefs. We are no longer willing to pay with our lives the debts you incurred in yours or the moral deficit piled up by all the generations behind you. You had been living on borrowed time—and I am the man who has called in the loan.

“I am the man whose existence your blank-outs were intended to permit you to ignore. I am the man whom you did not want either to live or to die. You did not want me to live, because you were afraid of knowing that I carried the responsibility you dropped and that your lives depended upon me; you did not want me to die, because you knew it.

“Twelve years ago, when I worked in your world, I was an inventor. I was one of a profession that came last in human history and will be first to vanish on the way back to the subhuman. An inventor is a man who asks ‘Why?’ of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.

“Like the man who discovered the use of steam or the man who discovered the use of oil, I discovered a source of energy which was available since the birth of the globe, but which men had not known how to use except as an object of worship, of terror and of legends about a thundering god. I completed the experimental model of a motor that would have made a fortune for me and for those who had hired me, a motor that would have raised the efficiency of every human installation using power and would have added the gift of higher productivity to every hour you spend at earning your living.

“Then, one night at a factory meeting, I heard myself sentenced to death by reason of my achievement. I heard three parasites assert that my brain and my life were their property, that my right to exist was conditional and depended on the satisfaction of their desires. The purpose of my ability, they said, was to serve the needs of those who were less able. I had no right to live, they said, by reason of my competence for living; their right to live was unconditional, by reason of their incompetence.

“Then I saw what was wrong with the world, I saw what destroyed men and nations, and where the battle for life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality—and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it. Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a slavery they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my self-immolation to provide them with the means of their plan—so throughout the world and throughout men’s history, in every version and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collectivized countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for their own values—the impotence of death. I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win—and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was ‘No.’

“I quit that factory. I quit your world. I made it my job to warn your victims and to give them the method and the weapon to fight you. The method was to refuse to deflect retribution. The weapon was justice.

“If you want to know what you lost when I quit and when my strikers deserted your world—stand on an empty stretch of soil in a wilderness unexplored by men and ask yourself what manner of survival you would achieve and how long you would last if you refused to think, with no one around to teach you the motions, or, if you chose to think, how much your mind would be able to discover—ask yourself how many independent conclusions you have reached in the course of your life and how much of your time was spent on performing the actions you learned from others—ask yourself whether you would be able to discover how to till the soil and grow your food, whether you would be able to invent a wheel, a lever, an induction coil, a generator, an electronic tube—then decide whether men of ability are exploiters who live by the fruit of your labor and rob you of the wealth that you produce, and whether you dare to believe that you possess the power to enslave them. Let your women take a look at a jungle female with her shriveled face and pendulous breasts, as she sits grinding meal in a bowl, hour after hour, century by century—then let them ask themselves whether their ‘instinct of tool-making’ will provide them with their electric refrigerators, their washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and, if not, whether they care to destroy those who provided it all, but not ‘by instinct.’

“Take a look around you, you savages who stutter that ideas are created by men’s means of production, that a machine is not the product of human thought, but a mystical power that produces human thinking. You have never discovered the industrial age—and you cling to the morality of the barbarian eras when a miserable form of human subsistence was produced by the muscular labor of slaves. Every mystic had always longed for slaves, to protect him from the material reality he dreaded. But you, you grotesque little atavists, stare blindly at the skyscrapers and smokestacks around you and dream of enslaving the material providers who are scientists, inventors, industrialists. When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind. I have taught my strikers that the answer you deserve is only: ‘Try and get it.’

“You proclaim yourself unable to harness the forces of inanimate matter, yet propose to harness the minds of men who are able to achieve the feats you cannot equal. You proclaim that you cannot survive without us, yet propose to dictate the terms of our survival. You proclaim that you need us, yet indulge the impertinence of asserting your right to rule us by force—and expect that we, who are not afraid of that physical nature which fills you with terror, will cower at the sight of any lout who has talked you into voting him a chance to command us.

“You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you’re incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others—that you’re unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler—that you’re unable to earn your living by the use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and to vote men into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic industries where you, by your own definition of your capacity, would be unable successfully to fill the job of assistant greaser.

“This idol of your cult of zero-worship, this symbol of impotence—the congenital dependent—is your image of man and your standard of value, in whose likeness you strive to refashion your soul. ‘It’s only human,’ you cry in defense of any depravity, reaching the stage of self-abasement where you seek to make the concept ‘human’ mean the weakling, the fool, the rotter, the liar, the failure, the coward, the fraud, and to exile from the human race the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventor, the strong, the purposeful, the pure—as if ‘to feel’ were human, but to think were not, as if to fail were human, but to succeed were not, as if corruption were human, but virtue were not—as if the premise of death were proper to man, but the premise of life were not.

“In order to deprive us of honor, that you may then deprive us of our wealth, you have always regarded us as slaves who deserve no moral recognition. You praise any venture that claims to be non-profit, and damn the men who made the profits that make the venture possible. You regard as ‘in the public interest’ any project serving those who do not pay; it is not in the public interest to provide any services for those who do the paying. ‘Public benefit’ is anything given as alms; to engage in trade is to injure the public. ‘Public welfare’ is the welfare of those who do not earn it; those who do, are entitled to no welfare. ‘The public,’ to you, is whoever has failed to achieve any virtue or value; whoever achieves it, whoever provides the goods you require for survival, ceases to be regarded as part of the public or as part of the human race.

“What blank-out permitted you to hope that you could get away with this muck of contradictions and to plan it as an ideal society, when the ‘No’ of your victims was sufficient to demolish the whole of your structure? What permits any insolent beggar to wave his sores in the face of his betters and to plead for help in the tone of a threat? You cry, as he does, that you are counting on our pity, but your secret hope is the moral code that has taught you to count on our guilt. You expect us to feel guilty of our virtues in the presence of your vices, wounds and failures—guilty of succeeding at existence, guilty of enjoying the life that you damn, yet beg us to help you to live.

“Did you want to know who is John Galt? I am the first man of ability who refused to regard it as guilt. I am the first man who would not do penance for my virtues or let them be used as the tools of my destruction. I am the first man who would not suffer martyrdom at the hands of those who wished me to perish for the privilege of keeping them alive. I am the first man who told them that I did not need them, and until they learned to deal with me as traders, giving value for value, they would have to exist without me, as I would exist without them; then I would let them learn whose is the need and whose the ability—and if human survival is the standard, whose terms would set the way to survive.

“I have done by plan and intention what had been done throughout history by silent default. There have always been men of intelligence who went on strike, in protest and despair, but they did not know the meaning of their action. The man who retires from public life, to think, but not to share his thoughts—the man who chooses to spend his years in the obscurity of menial employment, keeping to himself the fire of his mind, never giving it form, expression or reality, refusing to bring it into a world he despises—the man who is defeated by revulsion, the man who renounces before he has started, the man who gives up rather than give in, the man who functions at a fraction of his capacity, disarmed by his longing for an ideal he has not found—they are on strike, on strike against unreason, on strike against your world and your values. But not knowing any values of their own, they abandoned the quest to know—in the darkness of their hopeless indignation, which is righteous without knowledge of the right, and passionate without knowledge of desire, they concede to you the power of reality and surrender the incentives of their mind—and they perish in bitter futility, as rebels who never learned the object of their rebellion, as lovers who never discovered their love.

“The infamous times you call the Dark Ages were an era of intelligence on strike, when men of ability went underground and lived undiscovered, studying in secret, and died, destroying the works of their mind, when only a few of the bravest of martyrs remained to keep the human race alive. Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence, working for less than their barest survival, leaving nothing but scraps for their rulers to loot, refusing to think, to venture, to produce, when the ultimate collector of their profits and the final authority on truth or error was the whim of some gilded degenerate sanctioned as superior to reason by divine right and by grace of a club. The road of human history was a string of blank-outs over sterile stretches eroded by faith and force, with only a few brief bursts of sunlight, when the released energy of the men of the mind performed the wonders you gaped at, admired and promptly extinguished again.

“But there will be no extinction, this time. The game of the mystics is up. You will perish in and by your own unreality. We, the men of reason, will survive.

“I have called out on strike the kind of martyrs who had never deserted you before. I have given them the weapon they had lacked: the knowledge of their own moral value. I have taught them that the world is ours, whenever we choose to claim it, by virtue and grace of the fact that ours is the Morality of Life. They, the great victims who had produced all the wonders of humanity’s brief summer, they, the industrialists, the conquerors of matter, had not discovered the nature of their right. They had known that theirs was the power. I taught them that theirs was the glory.

“You, who dare to regard us as the moral inferiors of any mystic who claims supernatural visions—you, who scramble like vultures for plundered pennies, yet honor a fortune-teller above a fortune-maker—you, who scorn a businessman as ignoble, but esteem any posturing artist as exalted—the root of your standards is that mystic miasma which comes from primordial swamps, that cult of death, which pronounces a businessman immoral by reason of the fact that he keeps you alive. You, who claim that you long to rise above the crude concerns of the body, above the drudgery of serving mere physical needs—who is enslaved by physical needs: the Hindu who labors from sunrise to sunset at the shafts of a hand-plow for a bowl of rice, or the American who is driving a tractor? Who is the conqueror of physical reality: the man who sleeps on a bed of nails or the man who sleeps on an inner-spring mattress? Which is the monument to the triumph of the human spirit over matter: the germ-eaten hovels on the shorelines of the Ganges or the Atlantic skyline of New York?

“Unless you learn the answers to these questions—and learn to stand at reverent attention when you face the achievements of man’s mind—you will not stay much longer on this earth, which we love and will not permit you to damn. You will not sneak by with the rest of your lifespan. I have foreshortened the usual course of history and have let you discover the nature of the payment you had hoped to switch to the shoulders of others. It is the last of your own living power that will now be drained to provide the unearned for the worshippers and carriers of Death. Do not pretend that a malevolent reality defeated you—you were defeated by your own evasions. Do not pretend that you will perish for a noble ideal—you will perish as fodder for the haters of man.

“But to those of you who still retain a remnant of the dignity and will to love one’s life, I am offering the chance to make a choice. Choose whether you wish to perish for a morality you have never believed or practiced. Pause on the brink of self-destruction and examine your values and your life. You had known how to take an inventory of your wealth. Now take an inventory of your mind.

“Since childhood, you have been hiding the guilty secret that you feel no desire to be moral, no desire to seek self-immolation, that you dread and hate your code, but dare not say it even to yourself, that you’re devoid of those moral ‘instincts’ which others profess to feel. The less you felt, the louder you proclaimed your selfless love and servitude to others, in dread of ever letting them discover your own self, the self that you betrayed, the self that you kept in concealment, like a skeleton in the closet of your body. And they, who were at once your dupes and your deceivers, they listened and voiced their loud approval, in dread of ever letting you discover that they were harboring the same unspoken secret. Existence among you is a giant pretense, an act you all perform for one another, each feeling that he is the only guilty freak, each placing his moral authority in the unknowable known only to others, each faking the reality he feels they expect him to fake, none having the courage to break the vicious circle.

“No matter what dishonorable compromise you’ve made with your impracticable creed, no matter what miserable balance, half-cynicism, half-superstition, you now manage to maintain, you still preserve the root, the lethal tenet: the belief that the moral and the practical are opposites. Since childhood, you have been running from the terror of a choice you have never dared fully to identify: If the practical, whatever you must practice to exist, whatever works, succeeds, achieves your purpose, whatever brings you food and joy, whatever profits you, is evil—and if the good, the moral, is the impractical, whatever fails, destroys, frustrates, whatever injures you and brings you loss or pain—then your choice is to be moral or to live.

“The sole result of that murderous doctrine was to remove morality from life. You grew up to believe that moral laws bear no relation to the job of living, except as an impediment and threat, that man’s existence is an amoral jungle where anything goes and anything works. And in that fog of switching definitions which descends upon a frozen mind, you have forgotten that the evils damned by your creed were the virtues required for living, and you have come to believe that actual evils are the practical means of existence. Forgetting that the impractical ‘good’ was self-sacrifice, you believe that self-esteem is impractical; forgetting that the practical ‘evil’ was production, you believe that robbery is practical.

“Swinging like a helpless branch in the wind of an uncharted moral wilderness, you dare not fully to be evil or fully to live. When you are honest, you feel the resentment of a sucker; when you cheat, you feel terror and shame. When you are happy, your joy is diluted by guilt; when you suffer, your pain is augmented by the feeling that pain is your natural state. You pity the men you admire, you believe they are doomed to fail; you envy the men you hate, you believe they are the masters of existence. You feel disarmed when you come up against a scoundrel: you believe that evil is bound to win, since the moral is the impotent, the impractical.

“Morality, to you, is a phantom scarecrow made of duty, of boredom, of punishment, of pain, a cross-breed between the first schoolteacher of your past and the tax collector of your present, a scarecrow standing in a barren field, waving a stick to chase away your pleasures—and pleasure, to you, is a liquor-soggy brain, a mindless slut, the stupor of a moron who stakes his cash on some animal’s race, since pleasure cannot be moral.

“If you identify your actual belief, you will find a triple damnation—of yourself, of life, of virtue—in the grotesque conclusion you have reached: you believe that morality is a necessary evil.

“Do you wonder why you live without dignity, love without fire and die without resistance? Do you wonder why, wherever you look, you see nothing but unanswerable questions, why your life is torn by impossible conflicts, why you spend it straddling irrational fences to evade artificial choices, such as soul or body, mind or heart, security or freedom, private profit or public good?

“Do you cry that you find no answers? By what means did you hope to find them? You reject your tool of perception—your mind—then complain that the universe is a mystery. You discard your key, then wail that all doors are locked against you. You start out in pursuit of the irrational, then damn existence for making no sense.

“The fence you have been straddling for two hours—while hearing my words and seeking to escape them—is the coward’s formula contained in the sentence: ‘But we don’t have to go to extremes!’ The extreme you have always struggled to avoid is the recognition that reality is final, that A is A and that the truth is true. A moral code impossible to practice, a code that demands imperfection or death, has taught you to dissolve all ideas in fog, to permit no firm definitions, to regard any concept as approximate and any rule of conduct as elastic, to hedge on any principle, to compromise on any value, to take the middle of any road. By extorting your acceptance of supernatural absolutes, it has forced you to reject the absolute of nature. By making moral judgments impossible, it has made you incapable of rational judgment. A code that forbids you to cast the first stone, has forbidden you to admit the identity of stones and to know when or if you’re being stoned.

“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter’s stomach, is an absolute.

“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.

“You, who are half-rational, half-coward, have been playing a con game with reality, but the victim you have conned is yourself. When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil. As you surrendered to the mystics of muscle when they told you that ignorance consists of claiming knowledge, so now you surrender to them when they shriek that immorality consists of pronouncing moral judgment. When they yell that it is selfish to be certain that you are right, you hasten to assure them that you’re certain of nothing. When they shout that it’s immoral to stand on your convictions, you assure them that you have no convictions whatever. When the thugs of Europe’s People’s States snarl that you are guilty of intolerance, because you don’t treat your desire to live and their desire to kill you as a difference of opinion—you cringe and hasten to assure them that you are not intolerant of any horror. When some barefoot bum in some pesthole of Asia yells at you: How dare you be rich—you apologize and beg him to be patient and promise him you’ll give it all away.

“You have reached the blind alley of the treason you committed when you agreed that you had no right to exist. Once, you believed it was ‘only a compromise’: you conceded it was evil to live for yourself, but moral to live for the sake of your children. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your children, but moral to live for your community. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your community, but moral to live for your country. Now, you are letting this greatest of countries be devoured by any scum from any corner of the earth, while you concede that it is selfish to live for your country and that your moral duty is to live for the globe. A man who has no right to life, has no right to values and will not keep them.

“At the end of your road of successive betrayals, stripped of weapons, of certainty, of honor, you commit your final act of treason and sign your petition of intellectual bankruptcy: while the muscle-mystics of the People’s States proclaim that they’re the champions of reason and science, you agree and hasten to proclaim that faith is your cardinal principle, that reason is on the side of your destroyers, but yours is the side of faith. To the struggling remnants of rational honesty in the twisted, bewildered minds of your children, you declare that you can offer no rational argument to support the ideas that created this country, that there is no rational justification for freedom, for property, for justice, for rights, that they rest on a mystical insight and can be accepted only on faith, that in reason and logic the enemy is right, but faith is superior to reason. You declare to your children that it is rational to loot, to torture, to enslave, to expropriate, to murder, but that they must resist the temptations of logic and stick to the discipline of remaining irrational—that skyscrapers, factories, radios, airplanes were the products of faith and mystic intuition, while famines, concentration camps and firing squads are the products of a reasonable manner of existence—that the industrial revolution was the revolt of the men of faith against that era of reason and logic which is known as the Middle Ages. Simultaneously, in the same breath, to the same child, you declare that the looters who rule the People’s States will surpass this country in material production, since they are the representatives of science, but that it’s evil to be concerned with physical wealth and that one must renounce material prosperity—you declare that the looters’ ideals are noble, but they do not mean them, while you do; that your purpose in fighting the looters is only to accomplish their aims, which they cannot accomplish, but you can; and that the way to fight them is to beat them to it and give one’s wealth away. Then you wonder why your children join the People’s thugs or become half-crazed delinquents, you wonder why the looters’ conquests keep creeping closer to your doors—and you blame it on human stupidity, declaring that the masses are impervious to reason.

“You blank out the open, public spectacle of the looters’ fight against the mind, and the fact that their bloodiest horrors are unleashed to punish the crime of thinking. You blank out the fact that most mystics of muscle started out as mystics of spirit, that they keep switching from one to the other, that the men you call materialists and spiritualists are only two halves of the same dissected human, forever seeking completion, but seeking it by swinging from the destruction of the flesh to the destruction of the soul and vice versa—that they keep running from your colleges to the slave pens of Europe to an open collapse into the mystic muck of India, seeking any refuge against reality, any form of escape from the mind.

“You blank it out and cling to your hypocrisy of ‘faith’ in order to blank out the knowledge that the looters have a stranglehold upon you, which consists of your moral code—that the looters are the final and consistent practitioners of the morality you’re half-obeying, half-evading—that they practice it the only way it can be practiced: by turning the earth into a sacrificial furnace—that your morality forbids you to oppose them in the only way they can be opposed: by refusing to become a sacrificial animal and proudly asserting your right to exist—that in order to fight them to the finish and with full rectitude, it is your morality that you have to reject.

“You blank it out, because your self-esteem is tied to that mystic ‘unselfishness’ which you’ve never possessed or practiced, but spent so many years pretending to possess that the thought of denouncing it fills you with terror. No value is higher than self-esteem, but you’ve invested it in counterfeit securities—and now your morality has caught you in a trap where you are forced to protect your self-esteem by fighting for the creed of self-destruction. The grim joke is on you: that need of self-esteem, which you’re unable to explain or to define, belongs to my morality, not yours; it’s the objective token of my code, it is my proof within your own soul.

“By a feeling he has not learned to identify, but has derived from his first awareness of existence, from his discovery that he has to make choices, man knows that his desperate need of self-esteem is a matter of life or death. As a being of volitional consciousness, he knows that he must know his own value in order to maintain his own life. He knows that he has to be right; to be wrong in action means danger to his life; to be wrong in person, to be evil, means to be unfit for existence.

“Every act of man’s life has to be willed; the mere act of obtaining or eating his food implies that the person he preserves is worthy of being preserved; every pleasure he seeks to enjoy implies that the person who seeks it is worthy of finding enjoyment. He has no choice about his need of self-esteem, his only choice is the standard by which to gauge it. And he makes his fatal error when he switches this gauge protecting his life into the service of his own destruction, when he chooses a standard contradicting existence and sets his self-esteem against reality.

“Every form of causeless self-doubt, every feeling of inferiority and secret unworthiness is, in fact, man’s hidden dread of his inability to deal with existence. But the greater his terror, the more fiercely he clings to the murderous doctrines that choke him. No man can survive the moment of pronouncing himself irredeemably evil; should he do it, his next moment is insanity or suicide. To escape it—if he’s chosen an irrational standard—he will fake, evade, blank out; he will cheat himself of reality, of existence, of happiness, of mind; and he will ultimately cheat himself of self-esteem by struggling to preserve its illusion rather than to risk discovering its lack. To fear to face an issue is to believe that the worst is true.

“It is not any crime you have ever committed that infects your soul with permanent guilt, it is none of your failures, errors or flaws, but the blank-out by which you attempt to evade them—it is not any sort of Original Sin or unknown prenatal deficiency, but the knowledge and fact of your basic default, of suspending your mind, of refusing to think. Fear and guilt are your chronic emotions, they are real and you do deserve them, but they don’t come from the superficial reasons you invent to disguise their cause, not from your ‘selfishness,’ weakness or ignorance, but from a real and basic threat to your existence: fear, because you have abandoned your weapon of survival, guilt, because you know you have done it volitionally.

“The self you have betrayed is your mind; self-esteem is reliance on one’s power to think. The ego you seek, that essential ‘you’ which you cannot express or define, is not your emotions or inarticulate dreams, but your intellect, that judge of your supreme tribunal whom you’ve impeached in order to drift at the mercy of any stray shyster you describe as your ‘feeling.’ Then you drag yourself through a self-made night, in a desperate quest for a nameless fire, moved by some fading vision of a dawn you had seen and lost.

“Observe the persistence, in mankind’s mythologies, of the legend about a paradise that men had once possessed, the city of Atlantis or the Garden of Eden or some kingdom of perfection, always behind us. The root of that legend exists, not in the past of the race, but in the past of every man. You still retain a sense—not as firm as a memory, but diffused like the pain of hopeless longing—that somewhere in the starting years of your childhood, before you had learned to submit, to absorb the terror of unreason and to doubt the value of your mind, you had known a radiant state of existence, you had known the independence of a rational consciousness facing an open universe. That is the paradise which you have lost, which you seek—which is yours for the taking.

“Some of you will never know who is John Galt. But those of you who have known a single moment of love for existence and of pride in being its worthy lover, a moment of looking at this earth and letting your glance be its sanction, have known the state of being a man, and I—I am only the man who knew that that state is not to be betrayed. I am the man who knew what made it possible and who chose consistently to practice and to be what you had practiced and been in that one moment.

“That choice is yours to make. That choice—the dedication to one’s highest potential—is made by accepting the fact that the noblest act you have ever performed is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four.

“Whoever you are—you who are alone with my words in this moment, with nothing but your honesty to help you understand—the choice is still open to be a human being, but the price is to start from scratch, to stand naked in the face of reality and, reversing a costly historical error, to declare: ‘I am, therefore I’ll think.’

“Accept the irrevocable fact that your life depends upon your mind. Admit that the whole of your struggle, your doubts, your fakes, your evasions, was a desperate quest for escape from the responsibility of a volitional consciousness—a quest for automatic knowledge, for instinctive action, for intuitive certainty—and while you called it a longing for the state of an angel, what you were seeking was the state of an animal. Accept, as your moral ideal, the task of becoming a man.

“Do not say that you’re afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little that you know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience—that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible—that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error. In place of your dream of an omniscient automaton, accept the fact that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and that that is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his morality, his glory.

“Discard that unlimited license to evil which consists of claiming that man is imperfect. By what standard do you damn him when you claim it? Accept the fact that in the realm of morality nothing less than perfection will do. But perfection is not to be gauged by mystic commandments to practice the impossible, and your moral stature is not to be gauged by matters not open to your choice. Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality—not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.

“Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any breach of morality. Give the benefit of the doubt to those who seek to know; but treat as potential killers those specimens of insolent depravity who make demands upon you, announcing that they have and seek no reasons, proclaiming, as a license, that they ‘just feel it’—or those who reject an irrefutable argument by saying: ‘It’s only logic,’ which means: ‘It’s only reality.’ The only realm opposed to reality is the realm and premise of death.

“Accept the fact that the achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness—not pain or mindless self-indulgence—is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values. Happiness was the responsibility you dreaded, it required the kind of rational discipline you did not value yourself enough to assume—and the anxious staleness of your days is the monument to your evasion of the knowledge that there is no moral substitute for happiness, that there is no more despicable coward than the man who deserted the battle for his joy, fearing to assert his right to existence, lacking the courage and the loyalty to life of a bird or a flower reaching for the sun. Discard the protective rags of that vice which you call a virtue: humility—learn to value yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness—and when you learn that pride is the sum of all virtues, you will learn to live like a man.

“As a basic step of self-esteem, learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man’s demand for your help. To demand it is to claim that your life is his property—and loathsome as such claim might be, there’s something still more loathsome: your agreement. Do you ask if it’s ever proper to help another man? No—if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes—if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle. Suffering as such is not a value; only man’s fight against suffering, is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his fight to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. But to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim—is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values. A man who has no virtues is a hater of existence who acts on the premise of death; to help him is to sanction his evil and to support his career of destruction. Be it only a penny you will not miss or a kindly smile he has not earned, a tribute to a zero is treason to life and to all those who struggle to maintain it. It is of such pennies and smiles that the desolation of your world was made.

“Do not say that my morality is too hard for you to practice and that you fear it as you fear the unknown. Whatever living moments you have known, were lived by the values of my code. But you stifled, negated, betrayed it. You kept sacrificing your virtues to your vices, and the best among men to the worst. Look around you: what you have done to society, you had done it first within your soul; one is the image of the other. This dismal wreckage, which is now your world, is the physical form of the treason you committed to your values, to your friends, to your defenders, to your future, to your country, to yourself.

“We—whom you are now calling, but who will not answer any longer—we had lived among you, but you failed to know us, you refused to think and to see what we were. You failed to recognize the motor I invented—and it became, in your world, a pile of dead scrap. You failed to recognize the hero in your soul—and you failed to know me when I passed you in the street. When you cried in despair for the unattainable spirit which you felt had deserted your world, you gave it my name, but what you were calling was your own betrayed self-esteem. You will not recover one without the other.

“When you failed to give recognition to man’s mind and attempted to rule human beings by force—those who submitted had no mind to surrender; those who had, were men who don’t submit. Thus the man of productive genius assumed in your world the disguise of a playboy and became a destroyer of wealth, choosing to annihilate his fortune rather than surrender it to guns. Thus the thinker, the man of reason, assumed in your world the role of a pirate, to defend his values by force against your force, rather than submit to the rule of brutality. Do you hear me, Francisco d’Anconia and Ragnar Danneskjöld, my first friends, my fellow fighters, my fellow outcasts, in whose name and honor I speak?

“It was the three of us who started what I am now completing. It was the three of us who resolved to avenge this country and to release its imprisoned soul. This greatest of countries was built on my morality—on the inviolate supremacy of man’s right to exist—but you dreaded to admit it and live up to it. You stared at an achievement unequaled in history, you looted its effects and blanked out its cause. In the presence of that monument to human morality, which is a factory, a highway or a bridge—you kept damning this country as immoral and its progress as ‘material greed,’ you kept offering apologies for this country’s greatness to the idol of primordial starvation, to decaying Europe’s idol of a leprous, mystic bum.

“This country—the product of reason—could not survive on the morality of sacrifice. It was not built by men who sought self-immolation or by men who sought hand-outs. It could not stand on the mystic split that divorced man’s soul from his body. It could not live by the mystic doctrine that damned this earth as evil and those who succeeded on earth as depraved. From its start, this country was a threat to the ancient rule of mystics. In the brilliant rocket-explosion of its youth, this country displayed to an incredulous world what greatness was possible to man, what happiness was possible on earth. It was one or the other: America or mystics. The mystics knew it; you didn’t. You let them infect you with the worship of need—and this country became a giant in body with a mooching midget in place of its soul, while its living soul was driven underground to labor and feed you in silence, unnamed, unhonored, negated, its soul and hero: the industrialist. Do you hear me now, Hank Rearden, the greatest of the victims I have avenged?

“Neither he nor the rest of us will return until the road is clear to rebuild this country—until the wreckage of the morality of sacrifice has been wiped out of our way. A country’s political system is based on its code of morality. We will rebuild America’s system on the moral premise which had been its foundation, but which you treated as a guilty underground, in your frantic evasion of the conflict between that premise and your mystic morality: the premise that man is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others, that man’s life, his freedom, his happiness are his by inalienable right.

“You who’ve lost the concept of a right, you who swing in impotent evasiveness between the claim that rights are a gift of God, a supernatural gift to be taken on faith, or the claim that rights are a gift of society, to be broken at its arbitrary whim—the source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man’s rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.

“Rights are a moral concept—and morality is a matter of choice. Men are free not to choose man’s survival as the standard of their morals and their laws, but not free to escape from the fact that the alternative is a cannibal society, which exists for a while by devouring its best and collapses like a cancerous body, when the healthy have been eaten by the diseased, when the rational have been consumed by the irrational. Such has been the fate of your societies in history, but you’ve evaded the knowledge of the cause. I am here to state it: the agent of retribution was the law of identity, which you cannot escape. Just as man cannot live by means of the irrational, so two men cannot, or two thousand, or two billion. Just as man can’t succeed by defying reality, so a nation can’t, or a country, or a globe. A is A. The rest is a matter of time, provided by the generosity of victims.

“Just as man can’t exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality—to think, to work and to keep the results—which means: the right of property. The modern mystics of muscle who offer you the fraudulent alternative of ‘human rights’ versus ‘property rights,’ as if one could exist without the other, are making a last, grotesque attempt to revive the doctrine of soul versus body. Only a ghost can exist without material property; only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort. The doctrine that ‘human rights’ are superior to ‘property rights’ simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others; since the competent have nothing to gain from the incompetent, it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle. Whoever regards this as human and right, has no right to the title of ‘human.’

“The source of property rights is the law of causality. All property and all forms of wealth are produced by man’s mind and labor. As you cannot have effects without causes, so you cannot have wealth without its source: without intelligence. You cannot force intelligence to work: those who’re able to think, will not work under compulsion; those who will, won’t produce much more than the price of the whip needed to keep them enslaved. You cannot obtain the products of a mind except on the owner’s terms, by trade and by volitional consent. Any other policy of men toward man’s property is the policy of criminals, no matter what their numbers. Criminals are savages who play it short-range and starve when their prey runs out—just as you’re starving today, you who believed that crime could be ‘practical’ if your government decreed that robbery was legal and resistance to robbery illegal.

“The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality: such a government reverses its only moral purpose and switches from the role of protector to the role of man’s deadliest enemy, from the role of policeman to the role of a criminal vested with the right to the wielding of violence against victims deprived of the right of self-defense. Such a government substitutes for morality the following rule of social conduct: you may do whatever you please to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his.

“Only a brute, a fool or an evader can agree to exist on such terms or agree to give his fellow men a blank check on his life and his mind, to accept the belief that others have the right to dispose of his person at their whim, that the will of the majority is omnipotent, that the physical force of muscles and numbers is a substitute for justice, reality and truth. We, the men of the mind, we who are traders, not masters or slaves, do not deal in blank checks or grant them. We do not live or work with any form of the non-objective.

“So long as men, in the era of savagery, had no concept of objective reality and believed that physical nature was ruled by the whim of unknowable demons—no thought, no science, no production were possible. Only when men discovered that nature was a firm, predictable absolute were they able to rely on their knowledge, to choose their course, to plan their future and, slowly, to rise from the cave. Now you have placed modern industry, with its immense complexity of scientific precision, back into the power of unknowable demons—the unpredictable power of the arbitrary whims of hidden, ugly little bureaucrats. A farmer will not invest the effort of one summer if he’s unable to calculate his chances of a harvest. But you expect industrial giants—who plan in terms of decades, invest in terms of generations and undertake ninety-nine-year contracts—to continue to function and produce, not knowing what random caprice in the skull of what random official will descend upon them at what moment to demolish the whole of their effort. Drifters and physical laborers live and plan by the range of a day. The better the mind, the longer the range. A man whose vision extends to a shanty, might continue to build on your quicksands, to grab a fast profit and run. A man who envisions skyscrapers, will not. Nor will he give ten years of unswerving devotion to the task of inventing a new product, when he knows that gangs of entrenched mediocrity are juggling the laws against him, to tie him, restrict him and force him to fail, but should he fight them and struggle and succeed, they will seize his rewards and his invention.

“Look past the range of the moment, you who cry that you fear to compete with men of superior intelligence, that their mind is a threat to your livelihood, that the strong leave no chance to the weak in a market of voluntary trade. What determines the material value of your work? Nothing but the productive effort of your mind—if you lived on a desert island. The less efficient the thinking of your brain, the less your physical labor would bring you—and you could spend your life on a single routine, collecting a precarious harvest or hunting with bow and arrows, unable to think any further. But when you live in a rational society, where men are free to trade, you receive an incalculable bonus: the material value of your work is determined not only by your effort, but by the effort of the best productive minds who exist in the world around you.

“When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing.

“The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics’ Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.

“Every man is free to rise as far as he’s able or willing, but it’s only the degree to which he thinks that determines the degree to which he’ll rise. Physical labor as such can extend no further than the range of the moment. The man who does no more than physical labor, consumes the material value-equivalent of his own contribution to the process of production, and leaves no further value, neither for himself nor others. But the man who produces an idea in any field of rational endeavor—the man who discovers new knowledge—is the permanent benefactor of humanity. Material products can’t be shared, they belong to some ultimate consumer; it is only the value of an idea that can be shared with unlimited numbers of men, making all sharers richer at no one’s sacrifice or loss, raising the productive capacity of whatever labor they perform. It is the value of his own time that the strong of the intellect transfers to the weak, letting them work on the jobs he discovered, while devoting his time to further discoveries. This is mutual trade to mutual advantage; the interests of the mind are one, no matter what the degree of intelligence, among men who desire to work and don’t seek or expect the unearned.

“In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most of all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the ‘competition’ between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of ‘exploitation’ for which you have damned the strong.

“Such was the service we had given you and were glad and willing to give. What did we ask in return? Nothing but freedom. We required that you leave us free to function—free to think and to work as we choose—free to take our own risks and to bear our own losses—free to earn our own profits and to make our own fortunes—free to gamble on your rationality, to submit our products to your judgment for the purpose of a voluntary trade, to rely on the objective value of our work and on your mind’s ability to see it—free to count on your intelligence and honesty, and to deal with nothing but your mind. Such was the price we asked, which you chose to reject as too high. You decided to call it unfair that we, who had dragged you out of your hovels and provided you with modern apartments, with radios, movies and cars, should own our palaces and yachts—you decided that you had a right to your wages, but we had no right to our profits, that you did not want us to deal with your mind, but to deal, instead, with your gun. Our answer to that, was: ‘May you be damned!’ Our answer came true. You are.

“You did not care to compete in terms of intelligence—you are now competing in terms of brutality. You did not care to allow rewards to be won by successful production—you are now running a race in which rewards are won by successful plunder. You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade value for value—you have now established an unselfish society where they trade extortion for extortion. Your system is a legal civil war, where men gang up on one another and struggle for possession of the law, which they use as a club over rivals, till another gang wrests it from their clutch and clubs them with it in their turn, all of them clamoring protestations of service to an unnamed public’s unspecified good. You had said that you saw no difference between economic and political power, between the power of money and the power of guns—no difference between reward and punishment, no difference between purchase and plunder, no difference between pleasure and fear, no difference between life and death. You are learning the difference now.

“Some of you might plead the excuse of your ignorance, of a limited mind and a limited range. But the damned and the guiltiest among you are the men who had the capacity to know, yet chose to blank out reality, the men who were willing to sell their intelligence into cynical servitude to force: the contemptible breed of those mystics of science who profess a devotion to some sort of ‘pure knowledge’—the purity consisting of their claim that such knowledge has no practical purpose on this earth—who reserve their logic for inanimate matter, but believe that the subject of dealing with men requires and deserves no rationality, who scorn money and sell their souls in exchange for a laboratory supplied by loot. And since there is no such thing as ‘non-practical knowledge’ or any sort of ‘disinterested’ action, since they scorn the use of their science for the purpose and profit of life, they deliver their science to the service of death, to the only practical purpose it can ever have for looters: to inventing weapons of coercion and destruction. They, the intellects who seek escape from moral values, they are the damned on this earth, theirs is the guilt beyond forgiveness. Do you hear me, Dr. Robert Stadler?

“But it is not to him that I wish to speak. I am speaking to those among you who have retained some sovereign shred of their soul, unsold and unstamped: ‘—to the order of others.’ If, in the chaos of the motives that have made you listen to the radio tonight, there was an honest, rational desire to learn what is wrong with the world, you are the man whom I wished to address. By the rules and terms of my code, one owes a rational statement to those whom it does concern and who’re making an effort to know. Those who’re making an effort to fail to understand me, are not a concern of mine.

“I am speaking to those who desire to live and to recapture the honor of their soul. Now that you know the truth about your world, stop supporting your own destroyers. The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it. Withdraw your sanction. Withdraw your support. Do not try to live on your enemies’ terms or to win at a game where they’re setting the rules. Do not seek the favor of those who enslaved you, do not beg for alms from those who have robbed you, be it subsidies, loans or jobs, do not join their team to recoup what they’ve taken by helping them rob your neighbors. One cannot hope to maintain one’s life by accepting bribes to condone one’s destruction. Do not struggle for profit, success or security at the price of a lien on your right to exist. Such a lien is not to be paid off; the more you pay them, the more they will demand; the greater the values you seek or achieve, the more vulnerably helpless you become. Theirs is a system of white blackmail devised to bleed you, not by means of your sins, but by means of your love for existence.

“Do not attempt to rise on the looters’ terms or to climb a ladder while they’re holding the ropes. Do not allow their hands to touch the only power that keeps them in power: your living ambition. Go on strike—in the manner I did. Use your mind and skill in private, extend your knowledge, develop your ability, but do not share your achievements with others. Do not try to produce a fortune, with a looter riding on your back. Stay on the lowest rung of their ladder, earn no more than your barest survival, do not make an extra penny to support the looters’ state. Since you’re captive, act as a captive, do not help them pretend that you’re free. Be the silent, incorruptible enemy they dread. When they force you, obey—but do not volunteer. Never volunteer a step in their direction, or a wish, or a plea, or a purpose. Do not help a holdup man to claim that he acts as your friend and benefactor. Do not help your jailers to pretend that their jail is your natural state of existence. Do not help them to fake reality. That fake is the only dam holding off their secret terror, the terror of knowing they’re unfit to exist; remove it and let them drown; your sanction is their only life belt.

“If you find a chance to vanish into some wilderness out of their reach, do so, but not to exist as a bandit or to create a gang competing with their racket; build a productive life of your own with those who accept your moral code and are willing to struggle for a human existence. You have no chance to win on the Morality of Death or by the code of faith and force; raise a standard to which the honest will repair: the standard of Life and Reason.

“Act as a rational being and aim at becoming a rallying point for all those who are starved for a voice of integrity—act on your rational values, whether alone in the midst of your enemies, or with a few of your chosen friends, or as the founder of a modest community on the frontier of mankind’s rebirth.

“When the looters’ state collapses, deprived of the best of its slaves, when it falls to a level of impotent chaos, like the mystic-ridden nations of the Orient, and dissolves into starving robber gangs fighting to rob one another—when the advocates of the morality of sacrifice perish with their final ideal—then and on that day we will return.

“We will open the gates of our city to those who deserve to enter, a city of smokestacks, pipe lines, orchards, markets and inviolate homes. We will act as the rallying center for such hidden outposts as you’ll build. With the sign of the dollar as our symbol—the sign of free trade and free minds—we will move to reclaim this country once more from the impotent savages who never discovered its nature, its meaning, its splendor. Those who choose to join us, will join us; those who don’t, will not have the power to stop us; hordes of savages have never been an obstacle to men who carried the banner of the mind.

“Then this country will once more become a sanctuary for a vanishing species: the rational being. The political system we will build is contained in a single moral premise: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force. Every man will stand or fall, live or die by his rational judgment. If he fails to use it and falls, he will be his only victim. If he fears that his judgment is inadequate, he will not be given a gun to improve it. If he chooses to correct his errors in time, he will have the unobstructed example of his betters, for guidance in learning to think; but an end will be put to the infamy of paying with one life for the errors of another.

“In that world, you’ll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you had known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe. No child is afraid of nature; it is your fear of men that will vanish, the fear that has stunted your soul, the fear you acquired in your early encounters with the incomprehensible, the unpredictable, the contradictory, the arbitrary, the hidden, the faked, the irrational in men. You will live in a world of responsible beings, who will be as consistent and reliable as facts; the guarantee of their character will be a system of existence where objective reality is the standard and the judge. Your virtues will be given protection, your vices and weaknesses will not. Every chance will be open to your good, none will be provided for your evil. What you’ll receive from men will not be alms, or pity, or mercy, or forgiveness of sins, but a single value: justice. And when you’ll look at men or at yourself, you will feel, not disgust, suspicion and guilt, but a single constant: respect.

“Such is the future you are capable of winning. It requires a struggle; so does any human value. All life is a purposeful struggle and your only choice is the choice of a goal. Do you wish to continue the battle of your present or do you wish to fight for my world? Do you wish to continue a struggle that consists of clinging to precarious ledges in a sliding descent to the abyss, a struggle where the hardships you endure are irreversible and the victories you win bring you closer to destruction? Or do you wish to undertake a struggle that consists of rising from ledge to ledge in a steady ascent to the top, a struggle where the hardships are investments in your future, and the victories bring you irreversibly closer to the world of your moral ideal, and should you die without reaching full sunlight, you will die on a level touched by its rays? Such is the choice before you. Let your mind and your love of existence decide.

“The last of my words will be addressed to those heroes who might still be hidden in the world, those who are held prisoner, not by their evasions, but by their virtues and their desperate courage. My brothers in spirit, check on your virtues and on the nature of the enemies you’re serving. Your destroyers hold you by means of your endurance, your generosity, your innocence, your love—the endurance that carries their burdens—the generosity that responds to their cries of despair—the innocence that is unable to conceive of their evil and gives them the benefit of every doubt, refusing to condemn them without understanding and incapable of understanding such motives as theirs—the love, your love of life, which makes you believe that they are men and that they love it, too. But the world of today is the world they wanted; life is the object of their hatred. Leave them to the death they worship. In the name of your magnificent devotion to this earth, leave them, don’t exhaust the greatness of your soul on achieving the triumph of the evil of theirs. Do you hear me . . . my love?

“In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustation for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.

“But to win it requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute recitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.

“You will win when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my battle—and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I shall now repeat it to the hearing of the world:

“I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

1

I am indebted to Nathaniel Branden for many valuable observations on this subject and for his eloquent designation of the two archetypes, which I shall use hereafter: Attila and the Witch Doctor.

2

The epistemological chaos of today makes it necessary to stress that men have the right and the moral obligation of self-defense, that is: the right to use physical force only as retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. For a detailed discussion, see Galt’s speech.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

PREFACE

For the New Intellectual

We the Living

Anthem

The Fountainhead

Atlas Shrugged

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Chapter 1. - The Objectivist Ethics

Chapter 2. - Mental Health versus Mysticism and Self-Sacrifice

Chapter 3. - The Ethics of Emergencies

Chapter 4. - The “Conflicts” of Men’s Interests

Chapter 5. - Isn’t Everyone Selfish?

Chapter 6. - The Psychology of Pleasure

Chapter 7. - Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?

Chapter 8. - How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?

Chapter 9. - The Cult of Moral Grayness

Chapter 10. - Collectivized Ethics

Chapter 11. - The Monument Builders

Chapter 12. - Man’s Rights

Chapter 13. - Collectivized “Rights”

Chapter 14. - The Nature of Government

Chapter 15. - Government Financing in a Free Society

Chapter 16. - The Divine Right of Stagnation

Chapter 17. - Racism

Chapter 18. - Counterfeit Individualism

Chapter 19. - The Argument from Intimidation

INDEX

THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS

“Ethics is not a mystic fantasy—nor a social convention—nor a dispensable, subjective luxury.... Ethics is an objective necessity of man’s survival—not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life.”

“The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness—which means: the values required for man’s survival qua man—which means: the values required for human survival—not the values produced by the desires, the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices.”

Ever since their first publication, Ayn Rand’s works have had a major impact on the intellectual scene. Her new morality—the ethics of rational self-interest—challenges the altruist-collectivist fashions of our day. Known as Objectivism, her unique philosophy is the underlying theme of her famous novels.

MORE WRITINGS BY AYN RAND

FICTION
WE THE LIVING
THE EARLY AYN RAND
NIGHT OF JANUARY 16TH

PHILOSOPHY
General
OBJECTIVISM: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
THE AYN RAND LEXICON
THE AYN RAND READER
PHILOSOPHY: Who Needs It?
THE VOICE OF REASON
FOR THE NEW INTELLECTUAL
THE OMINOUS PARALLELS by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS
Epistemology
AN INTRODUCTION TO OBJECTIVIST EPISTEMOLOGY
Politics / Economics
CAPITALISM: The Unknown Ideal
RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE

Art, Literature & Letters
THE ROMANTIC MANIFESTO
THE ART OF FICTION
THE ART OF NONFICTION
JOURNALS OF AYN RAND
LETTERS OF AYN RAND

Available wherever books are sold or at
penguin.com

SIGNET
Published by New American Library, a division of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2,
Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,
Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,
New Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore,
Auckland 1311, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Signet Printing, November 1964

eISBN : 978-1-101-13722-2

Copyright © Ayn Rand, 1961, 1964 Copyright © The Objectivist Newsletter, Inc., 1962, 1963, 1964

All rights reserved

Permission requests for college or textbook use should be addressed to the Estate of Ayn Rand, PO Box 51808, Irvine, California 92619.

Information about other books by Ayn Rand and her philosphy, Objectivism, may be obtained by writing to OBJECTIVISM, PO Box 51808, Irvine, California 92619.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

http://us.penguingroup.com

Introduction

The title of this book may evoke the kind of question that I hear once in a while: “Why do you use the word ‘selfishness’ to denote virtuous qualities of character, when that word antagonizes so many people to whom it does not mean the things you mean?”

To those who ask it, my answer is: “For the reason that makes you afraid of it.”

But there are others, who would not ask that question, sensing the moral cowardice it implies, yet who are unable to formulate my actual reason or to identify the profound moral issue involved. It is to them that I will give a more explicit answer.

It is not a mere semantic issue nor a matter of arbitrary choice. The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual “package-deal,” which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.

Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests.

This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.

The ethics of altruism has created the image of the brute, as its answer, in order to make men accept two inhuman tenets: (a) that any concern with one’s own interests is evil, regardless of what these interests might be, and (b) that the brute’s activities are in fact to one’s own interest (which altruism enjoins man to renounce for the sake of his neighbors).

For a view of the nature of altruism, its consequences and the enormity of the moral corruption it perpetrates, I shall refer you to Atlas Shrugged—or to any of today’s newspaper headlines. What concerns us here is altruism’s default in the field of ethical theory.

There are two moral questions which altruism lumps together into one “package-deal”: (1) What are values? (2) Who should be the beneficiary of values? Altruism substitutes the second for the first; it evades the task of defining a code of moral values, thus leaving man, in fact, without moral guidance.

Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one’s own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value—and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.

Hence the appalling immorality, the chronic injustice, the grotesque double standards, the insoluble conflicts and contradictions that have characterized human relationships and human societies throughout history, under all the variants of the altruist ethics.

Observe the indecency of what passes for moral judgments today. An industrialist who produces a fortune, and a gangster who robs a bank are regarded as equally immoral, since they both sought wealth for their own “selfish” benefit. A young man who gives up his career in order to support his parents and never rises beyond the rank of grocery clerk is regarded as morally superior to the young man who endures an excruciating struggle and achieves his personal ambition. A dictator is regarded as moral, since the unspeakable atrocities he committed were intended to benefit “the people,” not himself.

Observe what this beneficiary-criterion of morality does to a man’s life. The first thing he learns is that morality is his enemy; he has nothing to gain from it, he can only lose; self-inflicted loss, self-inflicted pain and the gray, debilitating pall of an incomprehensible duty is all that he can expect. He may hope that others might occasionally sacrifice themselves for his benefit, as he grudgingly sacrifices himself for theirs, but he knows that the relationship will bring mutual resentment, not pleasure—and that, morally, their pursuit of values will be like an exchange of unwanted, unchosen Christmas presents, which neither is morally permitted to buy for himself. Apart from such times as he manages to perform some act of self-sacrifice, he possesses no moral significance: morality takes no cognizance of him and has nothing to say to him for guidance in the crucial issues of his life; it is only his own personal, private, “selfish” life and, as such, it is regarded either as evil or, at best, amoral.

Since nature does not provide man with an automatic form of survival, since he has to support his life by his own effort, the doctrine that concern with one’s own interests is evil means that man’s desire to live is evil—that man’s life, as such, is evil. No doctrine could be more evil than that.

Yet that is the meaning of altruism, implicit in such examples as the equation of an industrialist with a robber. There is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery. The evil of a robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interests, but in what he regards as to his own interest; not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value; not in the fact that he wants to live, but in the fact that he wants to live on a subhuman level (see “The Objectivist Ethics”).

If it is true that what I mean by “selfishness” is not what is meant conventionally, then this is one of the worst indictments of altruism: it means that altruism permits no concept of a self-respecting, self-supporting man—a man who supports his life by his own effort and neither sacrifices himself nor others. It means that altruism permits no view of men except as sacrificial animals and profiteers-on-sacrifice, as victims and parasites—that it permits no concept of a benevolent co-existence among men—that it permits no concept of justice.

If you wonder about the reasons behind the ugly mixture of cynicism and guilt in which most men spend their lives, these are the reasons: cynicism, because they neither practice nor accept the altruist morality—guilt, because they dare not reject it.

To rebel against so devastating an evil, one has to rebel against its basic premise. To redeem both man and morality, it is the concept of “selfishness” that one has to redeem.

The first step is to assert man’s right to a moral existence —that is: to recognize his need of a moral code to guide the course and the fulfillment of his own life.

For a brief outline of the nature and the validation of a rational morality, see my lecture on “The Objectivist Ethics” which follows. The reasons why man needs a moral code will tell you that the purpose of morality is to define man’s proper values and interests, that concern with his own interests is the essence of a moral existence, and that man must be the beneficiary of his own moral actions.

Since all values have to be gained and/or kept by men’s actions, any breach between actor and beneficiary necessitates an injustice: the sacrifice of some men to others, of the actors to the nonactors, of the moral to the immoral. Nothing could ever justify such a breach, and no one ever has.

The choice of the beneficiary of moral values is merely a preliminary or introductory issue in the field of morality. It is not a substitute for morality nor a criterion of moral value, as altruism has made it. Neither is it a moral primary: it has to be derived from and validated by the fundamental premises of a moral system.

The Objectivist ethics holds that the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action and that man must act for his own rational self-interest. But his right to do so is derived from his nature as man and from the function of moral values in human life—and, therefore, is applicable only in the context of a rational, objectively demonstrated and validated code of moral principles which define and determine his actual self-interest. It is not a license “to do as he pleases” and it is not applicable to the altruists’ image of a “selfish” brute nor to any man motivated by irrational emotions, feelings, urges, wishes or whims.

This is said as a warning against the kind of “Nietzschean egoists” who, in fact, are a product of the altruist morality and represent the other side of the altruist coin: the men who believe that any action, regardless of its nature, is good if it is intended for one’s own benefit. Just as the satisfaction of the irrational desires of others is not a criterion of moral value, neither is the satisfaction of one’s own irrational desires. Morality is not a contest of whims. (See Mr. Branden’s articles “Counterfeit Individualism” and “Isn’t Everyone Selfish?” which follow.)

A similar type of error is committed by the man who declares that since man must be guided by his own independent judgment, any action he chooses to take is moral if he chooses it. One’s own independent judgment is the means by which one must choose one’s actions, but it is not a moral criterion nor a moral validation: only reference to a demonstrable principle can validate one’s choices.

Just as man cannot survive by any random means, but must discover and practice the principles which his survival requires, so man’s self-interest cannot be determined by blind desires or random whims, but must be discovered and achieved by the guidance of rational principles. This is why the Objectivist ethics is a morality of rational self-interest—or of rational selfishness.

Since selfishness is “concern with one’s own interests,” the Objectivist ethics uses that concept in its exact and purest sense. It is not a concept that one can surrender to man’s enemies, nor to the unthinking misconceptions, distortions, prejudices and fears of the ignorant and the irrational. The attack on “selfishness” is an attack on man’s self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other.

Now a word about the material in this book. With the exception of the lecture on ethics, it is a collection of essays that have appeared in The Objectivist Newsletter, a monthly journal of ideas, edited and published by Nathaniel Branden and myself. The Newsletter deals with the application of the philosophy of Objectivism to the issues and problems of today’s culture—more specifically, with that intermediary level of intellectual concern which lies between philosophical abstractions and the journalistic concretes of day-by-day existence. Its purpose is to provide its readers with a consistent philosophical frame of reference.

This collection is not a systematic discussion of ethics, but a series of essays on those ethical subjects which needed clarification, in today’s context, or which had been most confused by altruism’s influence. You may observe that the titles of some of the essays are in the form of a question. These come from our “Intellectual Ammunition Department” that answers questions sent in by our readers.

—AYN RAND

New York, September 1964

P.S. Nathaniel Branden is no longer associated with me, with my philosophy or with The Objectivist (formerly The Objectivist Newsletter).

New York, November 1970—A. R.

1.

The Objectivist Ethics

by Ayn Rand

Since I am to speak on the Objectivist Ethics, I shall begin by quoting its best representative—John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged:

“Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought /about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code.... You went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good?—by what standard?

“You wanted to know John Galt’s identity. I am the man who has asked that question.

“Yes, this is an age of moral crisis.... Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality ... but to discover it.”¹

What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code.

The first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics, is: Why does man need a code of values?

Let me stress this. The first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question is: Does man need values at all—and why?

Is the concept of value, of “good or evil” an arbitrary human invention, unrelated to, underived from and unsupported by any facts of reality—or is it based on a metaphysical fact, on an unalterable condition of man’s existence? (I use the word “metaphysical” to mean: that which pertains to reality, to the nature of things, to existence.) Does an arbitrary human convention, a mere custom, decree that man must guide his actions by a set of principles—or is there a fact of reality that demands it? Is ethics the province of whims: of personal emotions, social edicts and mystic revelations—or is it the province of reason? Is ethics a subjective luxury—or an objective necessity?

In the sorry record of the history of mankind’s ethics—with a few rare, and unsuccessful, exceptions—moralists have regarded ethics as the province of whims, that is: of the irrational. Some of them did so explicitly, by intention—others implicitly, by default. A “whim” is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.

No philosopher has given a rational, objectively demonstrable, scientific answer to the question of why man needs a code of values. So long as that question remained unanswered, no rational, scientific, objective code of ethics could be discovered or defined. The greatest of all philosophers, Aristotle, did not regard ethics as an exact science; he based his ethical system on observations of what the noble and wise men of his time chose to do, leaving unanswered the questions of: why they chose to do it and why he evaluated them as noble and wise.

Most philosophers took the existence of ethics for granted, as the given, as a historical fact, and were not concerned with discovering its metaphysical cause or objective validation. Many of them attempted to break the traditional monopoly of mysticism in the field of ethics and, allegedly, to define a rational, scientific, nonreligious morality. But their attempts consisted of trying to justify them on social grounds, merely substituting society for God.

The avowed mystics held the arbitrary, unaccountable “will of God” as the standard of the good and as the validation of their ethics. The neomystics replaced it with “the good of society,” thus collapsing into the circularity of a definition such as “the standard of the good is that which is good for society.” This meant, in logic—and, today, in worldwide practice—that “society” stands above any principles of ethics, since it is the source, standard and criterion of ethics, since “the good” is whatever it wills, whatever it happens to assert as its own welfare and pleasure. This meant that “society” may do anything it pleases, since “the good” is whatever it chooses to do because it chooses to do it. And—since there is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men—this meant that some men (the majority or any gang that claims to be its spokesman) are ethically entitled to pursue any whims (or any atrocities) they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in the service of that gang’s desires.

This could hardly be called rational, yet most philosophers have now decided to declare that reason has failed, that ethics is outside the power of reason, that no rational ethics can ever be defined, and that in the field of ethics—in the choice of his values, of his actions, of his pursuits, of his life’s goals—man must be guided by something other than reason. By what? Faith—instinct—intuition—revelation—feeling—taste—urge—wish—whim Today, as in the past, most philosophers agree that the ultimate standard of ethics is whim (they call it “arbitrary postulate” or “subjective choice” or “emotional commitment”)—and the battle is only over the question or whose whim: one’s own or society’s or the dictator’s or God’s. Whatever else they may disagree about, today’s moralists agree that ethics is a subjective issue and that the three things barred from its field are: reason—mind—reality.

If you wonder why the world is now collapsing to a lower and ever lower rung of hell, this is the reason.

If you want to save civilization, it is this premise of modern ethics—and of all ethical history—that you must challenge.

To challenge the basic premise of any discipline, one must begin at the beginning. In ethics, one must begin by asking: What are values? Why does man need them?

“Value” is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept “value” is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.

I quote from Galt’s speech: “There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.”

To make this point fully clear, try to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed. Such an entity would not be able to have any values; it would have nothing to gain or to lose; it could not regard anything as for or against it, as serving or threatening its welfare, as fulfilling or frustrating its interests. It could have no interests and no goals.

Only a living entity can have goals or can originate them. And it is only a living organism that has the capacity for self-generated, goal-directed action. On the physical level, the functions of all living organisms, from the simplest to the most complex—from the nutritive function in the single cell of an amoeba to the blood circulation in the body of a man—are actions generated by the organism itself and directed to a single goal: the maintenance of the organism’s life. ²

An organism’s life depends on two factors: the material or fuel which it needs from the outside, from its physical background, and the action of its own body, the action of using that fuel properly. What standard determines what is proper in this context? The standard is the organism’s life, or: that which is required for the organism’s survival.

No choice is open to an organism in this issue: that which is required for its survival is determined by its nature, by the kind of entity it is. Many variations, many forms of adaptation to its background are possible to an organism, including the possibility of existing for a while in a crippled, disabled or diseased condition, but the fundamental alternative of its existence remains the same: if an organism fails in the basic functions required by its nature—if an amoeba’s protoplasm stops assimilating food, or if a man’s heart stops beating—the organism dies. In a fundamental sense, stillness is the antithesis of life. Life can be kept in existence only by a constant process of self-sustaining action. The goal of that action, the ultimate value which, to be kept, must be gained through its every moment, is the organism’s life.

An ultimate value is that final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means—and it sets the standard by which all lesser goals are evaluated. An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.

Without an ultimate goal or end, there can be no lesser goals or means: a series of means going off into an infinite progression toward a nonexistent end is a metaphysical and epistemological impossibility. It is only an ultimate goal, an end in itself, that makes the existence of values possible. Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action. Epistemologically, the concept of “value” is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of “life.” To speak of “value” as apart from “life” is worse than a contradiction in terms. “It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible.”

In answer to those philosophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between “is” and “ought.”

Now in what manner does a human being discover the concept of “value”? By what means does he first become aware of the issue of “good or evil” in its simplest form? By means of the physical sensations of pleasure or pain. Just as sensations are the first step of the development of a human consciousness in the realm of cognition, so they are its first step in the realm of evaluation.

The capacity to experience pleasure or pain is innate in a man’s body; it is part of his nature, part of the kind of entity he is. He has no choice about it, and he has no choice about the standard that determines what will make him experience the physical sensation of pleasure or of pain. What is that standard? His life.

The pleasure-pain mechanism in the body of man—and in the bodies of all the living organisms that possess the faculty of consciousness—serves as an automatic guardian of the organism’s life. The physical sensation of pleasure is a signal indicating that the organism is pursuing the right course of action. The physical sensation of pain is a warning signal of danger, indicating that the organism is pursuing the wrong course of action, that something is impairing the proper function of its body, which requires action to correct it. The best illustration of this can be seen in the rare, freak cases of children who are born without the capacity to experience physical pain; such children do not survive for long; they have no means of discovering what can injure them, no warning signals, and thus a minor cut can develop into a deadly infection, or a major illness can remain undetected until it is too late to fight it.

Consciousness—for those living organisms which possess it—is the basic means of survival.

The simpler organisms, such as plants, can survive by means of their automatic physical functions. The higher organisms, such as animals and man, cannot: their needs are more complex and the range of their actions is wider. The physical functions of their bodies can perform automatically only the task of using fuel, but cannot obtain that fuel. To obtain it, the higher organisms need the faculty of consciousness. A plant can obtain its food from the soil in which it grows. An animal has to hunt for it. Man has to produce it.

A plant has no choice of action; the goals it pursues are automatic and innate, determined by its nature. Nourishment, water, sunlight are the values its nature has set it to seek. Its life is the standard of value directing its actions. There are alternatives in the conditions it encounters in its physical background—such as heat or frost, drought or flood—and there are certain actions which it is able to perform to combat adverse conditions, such as the ability of some plants to grow and crawl from under a rock to reach the sunlight. But whatever the conditions, there is no alternative in a plant’s function: it acts automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction.

The range of actions required for the survival of the higher organisms is wider: it is proportionate to the range of their consciousness. The lower of the conscious species possess only the faculty of sensation, which is sufficient to direct their actions and provide for their needs. A sensation is produced by the automatic reaction of a sense organ to a stimulus from the outside world; it lasts for the duration of the immediate moment, as long as the stimulus lasts and no longer. Sensations are an automatic response, an automatic form of knowledge, which a consiousness can neither seek nor evade. An organism that possesses only the faculty of sensation is guided by the pleasure-pain mechanism of its body, that is: by an automatic knowledge and an automatic code of values. Its life is the standard of value directing its actions. Within the range of action possible to it, it acts automatically to further its life and cannot act for its own destruction.

The higher organisms possess a much more potent form of consciousness: they possess the faculty of retaining sensations, which is the faculty of perception. A “perception” is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of single stimuli, but of entities, of things. An animal is guided, not merely by immediate sensations, but by percepts. Its actions are not single, discrete responses to single, separate stimuli, but are directed by an integrated awareness of the perceptual reality confronting it. It is able to grasp the perceptual concretes immediately present and it is able to form automatic perceptual associations, but it can go no further. It is able to learn certain skills to deal with specific situations, such as hunting or hiding, which the parents of the higher animals teach their young. But an animal has no choice in the knowledge and the skills that it acquires; it can only repeat them generation after generation. And an animal has no choice in the standard of value directing its actions: its senses provide it with an automatic code of values, an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or evil, what benefits or endangers its life. An animal has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In situations for which its knowledge is inadequate, it perishes—as, for instance, an animal that stands paralyzed on the track of a railroad in the path of a speeding train. But so long as it lives, an animal acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice: it cannot suspend its own consciousness—it cannot choose not to perceive—it cannot evade its own perceptions—it cannot ignore its own good, it cannot decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.

Man has no automatic code of survival. He has no automatic course of action, no automatic set of values. His senses do not tell him automatically what is good for him or evil, what will benefit his life or endanger it, what goals he should pursue and what means will achieve them, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. His own consciousness has to discover the answers to all these questions—but his consciousness will not function automatically. Man, the highest living species on this earth—the being whose consciousness has a limitless capacity for gaining knowledge—man is the only living entity born without any guarantee of remaining conscious at all. Man’s particular distinction from all other living species is the fact that his consciousness is volitional.

Just as the automatic values directing the functions of a plant’s body are sufficient for its survival, but are not sufficient for an animal’s—so the automatic values provided by the sensory-perceptual mechanism of its consciousness are sufficient to guide an animal, but are not sufficient for man. Man’s actions and survival require the guidance of conceptual values derived from conceptual knowledge. But conceptual knowledge cannot be acquired automatically.

A “concept” is a mental integration of two or more perceptual concretes, which are isolated by a process of abstraction and united by means of a specific definition. Every word of man’s language, with the exception of proper names, denotes a concept, an abstraction that stands for an unlimited number of concretes of a specific kind. It is by organizing his perceptual material into concepts, and his concepts into wider and still wider concepts that man is able to grasp and retain, to identify and integrate an unlimited amount of knowledge, a knowledge extending beyond the immediate perceptions of any given, immediate moment. Man’s sense organs function automatically; man’s brain integrates his sense data into percepts automatically; but the process of integrating percepts into concepts—the process of abstraction and of concept-formation—is not automatic.

The process of concept-formation does not consist merely of grasping a few simple abstractions, such as “chair,” “table,” “hot,” “cold,” and of learning to speak. It consists of a method of using one’s consciousness, best designated by the term “conceptualizing.” It is not a passive state of registering random impressions. It is an actively sustained process of identifying one’s impressions in conceptual terms, of integrating every event and every observation into a conceptual context, of grasping relationships, differences, similarities in one’s perceptual material and of abstracting them into new concepts, of drawing inferences, of making deductions, of reaching conclusions, of asking new questions and discovering new answers and expanding one’s knowledge into an ever-growing sum. The faculty that directs this process, the faculty that works by means of concepts, is: reason. The process is thinking.

Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. It is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one’s consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reatity—or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make.

When man unfocuses his mind, he may be said to be conscious in a subhuman sense of the word, since he experiences sensations and perceptions. But in the sense of the word applicable to man—in the sense of a consciousness which is aware of reality and able to deal with it, a consciousness able to direct the actions and provide for the survival of a human being—an unfocused mind is not conscious.

Psychologically, the choice “to think or not” is the choice “to focus or not.” Existentially, the choice “to focus or not” is the choice “to be conscious or not.” Metaphysically, the choice “to be conscious or not” is the choice of life or death.

Consciousness—for those living organisms which possess it—is the basic means of survival. For man, the basic means of survival is reason. Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts. A sensation of hunger will tell him that he needs food (if he has learned to identify it as “hunger”), but it will not tell him how to obtain his food and it will not tell him what food is good for him or poisonous. He cannot provide for his simplest physical needs without a process of thought. He needs a process of thought to discover how to plant and grow his food or how to make weapons for hunting. His percepts might lead him to a cave, if one is available—but to build the simplest shelter, he needs a process of thought. No percepts and no “instincts” will tell him how to light a fire, how to weave cloth, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to make an airplane, how to perform an appendectomy, how to produce an electric light bulb or an electronic tube or a cyclotron or a box of matches. Yet his life depends on such knowledge—and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it.

But man’s responsibility goes still further: a process of thought is not automatic nor “instinctive” nor involuntary—nor infallible. Man has to initiate it, to sustain it and to bear responsibility for its results. He has to discover how to tell what is true or false and how to correct his own errors; he has to discover how to validate his concepts, his conclusions, his knowledge; he has to discover the rules of thought, the laws of logic, to direct his thinking. Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of the efficacy of his mental effort.

Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced by him—by his own choice, by his own effort, by his own mind.

A being who does not know automatically what is true or false, cannot know automatically what is right or wrong, what is good for him or evil. Yet he needs that knowledge in order to live. He is not exempt from the laws of reality, he is a specific organism of a specific nature that requires specific actions to sustain his life. He cannot achieve his survival by arbitrary means nor by random motions nor by blind urges nor by chance nor by whim. That which his survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every “is” implies an “ought.” Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

What, then, are the right goals for man to pursue? What are the values his survival requires? That is the question to be answered by the science of ethics. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why man needs a code of ethics.

Now you can assess the meaning of the doctrines which tell you that ethics is the province of the irrational, that reason cannot guide man’s life, that his goals and values should be chosen by vote or by whim—that ethics has nothing to do with reality, with existence, with one’s practical actions and concerns—or that the goal of ethics is beyond the grave, that the dead need ethics, not the living.

Ethics is not a mystic fantasy—nor a social convention—nor a dispensable, subjective luxury, to be switched or discarded in any emergency. Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man’s survival—not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life.

I quote from Galt’s speech: “Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice—and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a value—by choice; he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues—by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.”

The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics—the standard by which one judges what is good or evil—is man’s life, or: that which is required for man’s survival qua man.

Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.

Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are: thinking and productive work.

If some men do not choose to think, but survive by imitating and repeating, like trained animals, the routine of sounds and motions they learned from others, never making an effort to understand their own work, it still remains true that their survival is made possible only by those who did choose to think and to discover the motions they are repeating. The survival of such mental parasites depends on blind chance; their unfocused minds are unable to know whom to imitate, whose motions it is safe to follow. They are the men who march into the abyss, trailing after any destroyer who promises them to assume the responsibility they evade: the responsibility of being conscious.

If some men attempt to survive by means of brute force or fraud, by looting, robbing, cheating or enslaving the men who produce, it still remains true that their survival is made possible only by their victims, only by the men who choose to think and to produce the goods which they, the looters, are seizing. Such looters are parasites incapable of survival, who exist by destroying those who are capable, those who are pursuing a course of action proper to man.

The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals. But just as animals would not be able to survive by attempting the method of plants, by rejecting locomotion and waiting for the soil to feed them—so men cannot survive by attempting the method of animals, by rejecting reason and counting on productive men to serve as their prey. Such looters may achieve their goals for the range of a moment, at the price of destruction: the destruction of their victims and their own. As evidence, I offer you any criminal or any dictatorship.

Man cannot survive, like an animal, by acting on the range of the moment. An animal’s life consists of a series of separate cycles, repeated over and over again, such as the cycle of breeding its young, or of storing food for the winter; an animal’s consciousness cannot integrate its entire lifespan; it can carry just so far, then the animal has to begin the cycle all over again, with no connection to the past. Man’s life is a continuous whole: for good or evil, every day, year and decade of his life holds the sum of all the days behind him. He can alter his choices, he is free to change the direction of his course, he is even free, in many cases, to atone for the consequences of his past—but he is not free to escape them, nor to live his life with impunity on the range of the moment, like an animal, a playboy or a thug. If he is to succeed at the task of survival, if his actions are not to be aimed at his own destruction, man has to choose his course, his goals, his values in the context and terms of a lifetime. No sensations, percepts, urges or “instincts” can do it; only a mind can.

Such is the meaning of the definition: that which is required for man’s survival qua man. It does not mean a momentary or a merely physical survival. It does not mean the momentary physical survival of a mindless brute, waiting for another brute to crush his skull. It does not mean the momentary physical survival of a crawling aggregate of muscles who is willing to accept any terms, obey any thug and surrender any values, for the sake of what is known as “survival at any price,” which may or may not last a week or a year. “Man’s survival qua man” means the terms, methods, conditions and goals required for the survival of a rational being through the whole of his lifespan—in all those aspects of existence which are open to his choice.

Man cannot survive as anything but man. He can abandon his means of survival, his mind, he can turn himself into a subhuman creature and he can turn his life into a brief span of agony—just as his body can exist for a while in the process of disintegration by disease. But he cannot succeed, as a subhuman, in achieving anything but the subhuman—as the ugly horror of the antirational periods of mankind’s history can demonstrate. Man has to be man by choice—and it is the task of ethics to teach him how to live like man.

The Objectivist ethics holds man’s life as the standard of value—and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual man.

The difference between “standard” and “purpose” in this context is as follows: a “standard” is an abstract principle that serves as a measurement or gauge to guide a man’s choices in the achievement of a concrete, specific purpose. “That which is required for the survival of man qua man” is an abstract principle that applies to every individual man. The task of applying this principle to a concrete, specific purpose—the purpose of living a life proper to a rational being—belongs to every individual man, and the life he has to live is his own.

Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man—in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life.

Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep—virtue is the act by which one gains and/or keeps it. The three cardinal values of the Objectivist ethics—the three values which, together, are the means to and the realization of one’s ultimate value, one’s own life—are: Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem, with their three corresponding virtues: Rationality, Productiveness, Pride.

Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man’s life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work—pride is the result.

Rationality is man’s basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues. Man’s basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. Irrationality is the rejection of man’s means of survival and, therefore, a commitment to a course of blind destruction; that which is anti-mind, is anti-life,

The virtue of Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action. It means one’s total commitment to a state of full, conscious awareness, to the maintenance of a full mental focus in all issues, in all choices, in all of one’s waking hours. It means a commitment to the fullest perception of reality within one’s power and to the constant, active expansion of one’s perception, i.e., of one’s knowledge. It means a commitment to the reality of one’s own existence, i.e., to the principle that all of one’s goals, values and actions take place in reality and, therefore, that one must never place any value or consideration whatsoever above one’s perception of reality. It means a commitment to the principle that all of one’s convictions, values, goals, desires and actions must be based on, derived from, chosen and validated by a process of thought—as precise and scrupulous a process of thought, directed by as ruthlessly strict an application of logic, as one’s fullest capacity permits. It means one’s acceptance of the responsibility of forming one’s own judgments and of living by the work of one’s own mind (which is the virtue of Independence). It means that one must never sacrifice one’s convictions to the opinions or wishes of others (which is the virtue of Integrity)—that one must never attempt to fake reality in any manner (which is the virtue of Honesty) —that one must never seek or grant the unearned and undeserved, neither in matter nor in spirit (which is the virtue of Justice). It means that one must never desire effects without causes, and that one must never enact a cause without assuming full responsibility for its effects—that one must never act like a zombie, i.e., without knowing one’s own purposes and motives—that one must never make any decisions, form any convictions or seek any values out of context, i.e., apart from or against the total, integrated sum of one’s knowledge—and, above all, that one must never seek to get away with contradictions. It means the rejection of any form of mysticism, i.e., any claim to some nonsensory, nonrational, nondefinable, supernatural source of knowledge. It means a commitment to reason, not in sporadic fits or on selected issues or in special emergencies, but as a permanent way of life.

The virtue of Productiveness is the recognition of the fact that productive work is the process by which man’s mind sustains his life, the process that sets man free of the necessity to adjust himself to his background, as all animals do, and gives him the power to adjust his background to himself. Productive work is the road of man’s unlimited achievement and calls upon the highest attributes of his character: his creative ability, his ambitiousness, his self-assertiveness, his refusal to bear uncontested disasters, his dedication to the goal of reshaping the earth in the image of his values. “Productive work” does not mean the unfocused performance of the motions of some job. It means the consciously chosen pursuit of a productive career, in any line of rational endeavor, great or modest, on any level of ability. It is not the degree of a man’s ability nor the scale of his work that is ethically relevant here, but the fullest and most purposeful use of his mind.

The virtue of Pride is the recognition of the fact “that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining—that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.” (Atlas Shrugged.) The virtue of Pride can best be described by the term: “moral ambitiousness.” It means that one must earn the right to hold oneself as one’s own highest value by achieving one’s own moral perfection—which one achieves by never accepting any code of irrational virtues impossible to practice and by never failing to practice the virtues one knows to be rational—by never accepting an unearned guilt and never earning any, or, if one has earned it, never leaving it uncorrected—by never resigning oneself passively to any flaws in one’s character—by never placing any concern, wish, fear or mood of the moment above the reality of one’s own self-esteem. And, above all, it means one’s rejection of the role of a sacrificial animal, the rejection of any doctrine that preaches self-immolation as a moral virtue or duty.

The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others—and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.

In psychological terms, the issue of man’s survival does not confront his consciousness as an issue of “life or death,” but as an issue of “happiness or suffering.” Happiness is the successful state of life, suffering is the warning signal of failure, of death. Just as the pleasure-pain mechanism of man’s body is an automatic indicator of his body’s welfare or injury, a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death—so the emotional mechanism of man’s consciousness is geared to perform the same function, as a barometer that registers the same alternative by means of two basic emotions: joy or suffering. Emotions are the automatic results of man’s value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man’s values or threatens them, that which is for him or against him—lightning calculators giving him the sum of his profit or loss.

But while the standard of value operating the physical pleasure-pain mechanism of man’s body is automatic and innate, determined by the nature of his body—the standard of value operating his emotional mechanism, is not. Since man has no automatic knowledge, he can have no automatic values; since he has no innate ideas, he can have no innate value judgments.

Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but, at birth, both are “tabula rasa.” It is man’s cognitive faculty, his mind, that determines the content of both. Man’s emotional mechanism is like an electronic computer, which his mind has to program—and the programming consists of the values his mind chooses.

But since the work of man’s mind is not automatic, his values, like all his premises, are the product either of his thinking or of his evasions: man chooses his values by a conscious process of thought—or accepts them by default, by subconscious associations, on faith, on someone’s authority, by some form of social osmosis or blind imitation. Emotions are produced by man’s premises, held consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly.

Man has no choice about his capacity to feel that something is good for him or evil, but what he will consider good or evil, what will give him joy or pain, what he will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on his standard of value. If he chooses irrational values, he switches his emotional mechanism from the role of his guardian to the role of his destroyer. The irrational is the impossible; it is that which contradicts the facts of reality; facts cannot be altered by a wish, but they can destroy the wisher. If a man desires and pursues contradictions—if he wants to have his cake and eat it, too—he disintegrates his consciousness; he turns his inner life into a civil war of blind forces engaged in dark, incoherent, pointless, meaningless conflicts (which, incidentally, is the inner state of most people today).

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. If a man values productive work, his happiness is the measure of his success in the service of his life. But if a man values destruction, like a sadist—or self-torture, like a masochist—or life beyond the grave, like a mystic—or mindless “kicks,” like the driver of a hotrod car—his alleged happiness is the measure of his success in the service of his own destruction. It must be added that the emotional state of all those irrationalists cannot be properly designated as happiness or even as pleasure: it is merely a moment’s relief from their chronic state of terror.

Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive by any random means, as a parasite, a moocher or a looter, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment—so he is free to seek his happiness in any irrational fraud, any whim, any delusion, any mindless escape from reality, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment nor to escape the consequences.

I quote from Galt’s speech: “Happiness is a state of noncontradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction.... Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.”

The maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not two separate issues. To hold one’s own life as one’s ultimate value, and one’s own happiness as one’s highest purpose are two aspects of the same achievement. Existentially, the activity of pursuing rational goals is the activity of maintaining one’s life; psychologically, its result, reward and concomitant is an emotional state of happiness. It is by experiencing happiness that one lives one’s life, in any hour, year or the whole of it. And when one experiences the kind of pure happiness that is an end in itself—the kind that makes one think: “This is worth living for”—what one is greeting and affirming in emotional terms is the metaphysical fact that life is an end in itself.

But the relationship of cause to effect cannot be reversed. It is only by accepting “man’s life” as one’s primary and by pursuing the rational values it requires that one can achieve happiness—not by taking “happiness” as some undefined, irreducible primary and then attempting to live by its guidance. If you achieve that which is the good by a rational standard of value, it will necessarily make you happy; but that which makes you happy, by some undefined emotional standard, is not necessarily the good. To take “whatever makes one happy” as a guide to action means: to be guided by nothing but one’s emotional whims. Emotions are not tools of cognition; to be guided by whims—by desires whose source, nature and meaning one does not know—is to turn oneself into a blind robot, operated by unknowable demons (by one’s stale evasions), a robot knocking its stagnant brains out against the walls of reality which it refuses to see.

This is the fallacy inherent in hedonism—in any variant of ethical hedonism, personal or social, individual or collective. “Happiness” can properly be the purpose of ethics, but not the standard. The task of ethics is to define man’s proper code of values and thus to give him the means of achieving happiness. To declare, as the ethical hedonists do, that “the proper value is whatever gives you pleasure” is to declare that “the proper value is whatever you happen to value”—which is an act of intellectual and philosophical abdication, an act which merely proclaims the futility of ethics and invites all men to play it deuces wild.

The philosophers who attempted to devise an allegedly rational code of ethics gave mankind nothing but a choice of whims: the “selfish” pursuit of one’s own whims (such as the ethics of Nietzsche)—or “selfless” service to the whims of others (such as the ethics of Bentham, Mill, Comte and of all social hedonists, whether they allowed man to include his own whims among the millions of others or advised him to turn himself into a totally selfless “shmoo” that seeks to be eaten by others).

When a “desire,” regardless of its nature or cause, is taken as an ethical primary, and the gratification of any and all desires is taken as an ethical goal (such as “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”)—men have no choice but to hate, fear and fight one another, because their desires and their interests will necessarily clash. If “desire” is the ethical standard, then one man’s desire to produce and another man’s desire to rob him have equal ethical validity; one man’s desire to be free and another man’s desire to enslave him have equal ethical validity; one man’s desire to be loved and admired for his virtues and another man’s desire for undeserved love and unearned admiration have equal ethical validity. And if the frustration of any desire constitutes a sacrifice, then a man who owns an automobile and is robbed of it, is being sacrificed, but so is the man who wants or “aspires to” an automobile which the owner refuses to give him—and these two “sacrifices” have equal ethical status. If so, then man’s only choice is to rob or be robbed, to destroy or be destroyed, to sacrifice others to any desire of his own or to sacrifice himself to any desire of others; then man’s only ethical alternative is to be a sadist or a masochist.

The moral cannibalism of all hedonist and altruist doctrines lies in the premise that the happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another.

Today, most people hold this premise as an absolute not to be questioned. And when one speaks of man’s right to exist for his own sake, for his own rational self-interest, most people assume automatically that this means his right to sacrifice others. Such an assumption is a confession of their own belief that to injure, enslave, rob or murder others is in man’s self-interest—which he must selflessly renounce. The idea that man’s self-interest can be served only by a non-sacrificial relationship with others has never occurred to those humanitarian apostles of unselfishness, who proclaim their desire to achieve the brotherhood of men. And it will not occur to them, or to anyone, so long as the concept “rational” is omitted from the context of “values,” “desires,” “self-interest” and ethics.

The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness—which means: the values required for man’s survival qua man—which means: the values required for human survival—not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the “aspirations,” the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices, have never discovered an industrial society and can conceive of no self-interest but that of grabbing the loot of the moment.

The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interests of men do not clash—that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.

The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material. It is the principle of justice.

A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. He does not treat men as masters or slaves, but as independent equals. He deals with men by means of a free, voluntary, unforced, uncoerced exchange—an exchange which benefits both parties by their own independent judgment. A trader does not expect to be paid for his defaults, only for his achievements. He does not switch to others the burden of his failures, and he does not mortgage his life into bondage to the failures of others.

In spiritual issues—(by “spiritual” I mean: “pertaining to man’s consciousness”)—the currency or medium of exchange is different, but the principle is the same. Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character. Only a brute or an altruist would claim that the appreciation of another person’s virtues is an act of selflessness, that as far as one’s own selfish interest and pleasure are concerned, it makes no difference whether one deals with a genius or a fool, whether one meets a hero or a thug, whether one marries an ideal woman or a slut. In spiritual issues, a trader is a man who does not seek to be loved for his weaknesses or flaws, only for his virtues, and who does not grant his love to the weaknesses or the flaws of others, only to their virtues.

To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love—because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.

It is only on the basis of rational selfishness—on the basis of justice—that men can be fit to live together in a free, peaceful, prosperous, benevolent, rational society.

Can man derive any personal benefit from living in a human society? Yes—if it is a human society. The two great values to be gained from social existence are: knowledge and trade. Man is the only species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; the knowledge potentially available to man is greater than any one man could begin to acquire in his own lifespan; every man gains an incalculable benefit from the knowledge discovered by others. The second great benefit is the division of labor: it enables a man to devote his effort to a particular field of work and to trade with others who specialize in other fields. This form of cooperation allows all men who take part in it to achieve a greater knowledge, skill and productive return on their effort than they could achieve if each had to produce everything he needs, on a desert island or on a self-sustaining farm.

But these very benefits indicate, delimit and define what kind of men can be of value to one another and in what kind of society: only rational, productive, independent men in a rational, productive, free society. Parasites, moochers, looters, brutes and thugs can be of no value to a human being—nor can he gain any benefit from living in a society geared to their needs, demands and protection, a society that treats him as a sacrificial animal and penalizes him for his virtues in order to reward them for their vices, which means: a society based on the ethics of altruism. No society can be of value to man’s life if the price is the surrender of his right to his life.

The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is: no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man—or group or society or government—has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The ethical principle involved is simple and clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense. A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man. The principle is: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force.

The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence—to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

I will not attempt, in a brief lecture, to discuss the political theory of Objectivism. Those who are interested will find it presented in full detail in Atlas Shrugged. I will say only that every political system is based on and derived from a theory of ethics—and that the Objectivist ethics is the moral base needed by that politico-economic system which, today, is being destroyed all over the world, destroyed precisely for lack of a moral, philosophical defense and validation: the original American system, Capitalism. If it perishes, it will perish by default, undiscovered and unidentified: no other subject has ever been hidden by so many distortions, misconceptions and misrepresentations. Today, few people know what capitalism is, how it works and what was its actual history.

When I say “capitalism,” I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church. A pure system of capitalism has never yet existed, not even in America; various degrees of government control had been undercutting and distorting it from the start. Capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future—if mankind is to have a future.

For those who are interested in the history and the psychological causes of the philosophers’ treason against capitalism, I will mention that I discuss them in the title essay of my book For the New Intellectual. ³

The present discussion has to be confined to the subject of ethics. I have presented the barest essentials of my system, but they are sufficient to indicate in what manner the Objectivist ethics is the morality of life—as against the three major schools of ethical theory, the mystic, the social, the subjective, which have brought the world to its present state and which represent the morality of death.

These three schools differ only in their method of approach, not in their content. In content, they are merely variants of altruism, the ethical theory which regards man as a sacrificial animal, which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value. The differences occur only over the question of who is to be sacrificed to whom. Altruism holds death as its ultimate goal and standard of value—and it is logical that renunciation, resignation, self-denial, and every other form of suffering, including self-destruction, are the virtues it advocates. And, logically, these are the only things that the practitioners of altruism have achieved and are achieving now.

Observe that these three schools of ethical theory are anti-life, not merely in content, but also in their method of approach.

The mystic theory of ethics is explicitly based on the premise that the standard of value of man’s ethics is set beyond the grave, by the laws or requirements of another, supernatural dimension, that ethics is impossible for man to practice, that it is unsuited for and opposed to man’s life on earth, and that man must take the blame for it and suffer through the whole of his earthly existence, to atone for the guilt of being unable to practice the impracticable. The Dark Ages and the Middle Ages are the existential monument to this theory of ethics.

The social theory of ethics substitutes “society” for God—and although it claims that its chief concern is life on earth, it is not the life of man, not the life of an individual, but the life of a disembodied entity, the collective, which, in relation to every individual, consists of everybody except himself. As far as the individual is concerned, his ethical duty is to be the selfless, voiceless, rightless slave of any need, claim or demand asserted by others. The motto “dog eat dog”—which is not applicable to capitalism nor to dogs—is applicable to the social theory of ethics. The existential monuments to this theory are Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

The subjectivist theory of ethics is, strictly speaking, not a theory, but a negation of ethics. And more: it is a negation of reality, a negation not merely of man’s existence, but of all existence. Only the concept of a fluid, plastic, indeterminate, Heraclitean universe could permit anyone to think or to preach that man needs no objective principles of action—that reality gives him a blank check on values—that anything he cares to pick as the good or the evil, will do—that a man’s whim is a valid moral standard, and that the only question is how to get away with it. The existential monument to this theory is the present state of our culture.

It is not men’s immorality that is responsible for the collapse now threatening to destroy the civilized world, but the kind of moralities men have been asked to practice. The responsibility belongs to the philosophers of altruism. They have no cause to be shocked by the spectacle of their own success, and no right to damn human nature: men have obeyed them and have brought their moral ideals into full reality.

It is philosophy that sets men’s goals and determines their course; it is only philosophy that can save them now. Today, the world is facing a choice: if civilization is to survive, it is the altruist morality that men have to reject.

I will close with the words of John Galt, which I address, as he did, to all the moralists of altruism, past or present:

“You have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours.”

2.

Mental Health versus Mysticism and Self-Sacrifice

by Nathaniel Branden

The standard of mental health—of biologically appropriate mental functioning—is the same as that of physical health: man’s survival and well-being. A mind is healthy to the extent that its method of functioning is such as to provide man with the control over reality that the support and furtherance of his life require.

The hallmark of this control is self-esteem. Self-esteem is the consequence, expression and reward of a mind fully committed to reason. Reason, the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by the senses, is man’s basic tool of survival. Commitment to reason is commitment to the maintenance of a full intellectual focus, to the constant expansion of one’s understanding and knowledge, to the principle that one’s actions must be consistent with one’s convictions, that one must never attempt to fake reality or place any consideration above reality, that one must never permit oneself contradictions—that one must never attempt to subvert or sabotage the proper function of consciousness.

The proper function of consciousness is: perception, cognition, and the control of action.

An unobstructed consciousness, an integrated consciousness, a thinking consciousness, is a healthy consciousness. A blocked consciousness, an evading consciousness, a consciousness torn by conflict and divided against itself, a consciousness disintegrated by fear or immobilized by depression, a consciousness dissociated from reality, is an unhealthy consciousness. (For a fuller discussion of this issue, see the chapter entitled “Objectivism and Psychology” in my book Who Is Ayn Rand?)

In order to deal with reality successfully—to pursue and achieve the values which his life requires—man needs self-esteem: he needs to be confident of his efficacy and worth.

Anxiety and guilt, the antipodes of self-esteem and the insignia of mental illness, are the disintegrators of thought, the distorters of values and the paralyzers of action.

When a man of self-esteem chooses his values and sets his goals, when he projects the long-range purposes that will unify and guide his actions—it is like a bridge thrown to the future, across which his life will pass, a bridge supported by the conviction that his mind is competent to think, to judge, to value, and that he is worthy of enjoying values.

This sense of control over reality is not the result of special skills, ability or knowledge. It is not dependent on particular successes or failures. It reflects one’s fundamental relationship to reality, one’s conviction of fundamental efficacy and worthiness. It reflects the certainty that, in essence and in principle, one is right for reality. Self-esteem is a metaphysical estimate.

It is this psychological state that traditional morality makes impossible, to the extent that a man accepts it.

Neither mysticism nor the creed of self-sacrifice is compatible with mental health or self-esteem. These doctrines are destructive existentially and psychologically.

(1) The maintenance of his life and the achievement of self-esteem require of man the fullest exercise of his reason—but morality, men are taught, rests on and requires faith.

Faith is the commitment of one’s consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof.

When a man rejects reason as his standard of judgment, only one alternative standard remains to him: his feelings. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.

To practice the “virtue” of faith, one must be willing to suspend one’s sight and one’s judgment; one must be willing to live with the unintelligible, with that which cannot be conceptualized or integrated into the rest of one’s knowledge, and to induce a trancelike illusion of understanding. One must be willing to repress one’s critical faculty and hold it as one’s guilt; one must be willing to drown any questions that rise in protest—to strangle any trust of reason convulsively seeking to assert its proper function as the protector of one’s life and cognitive integrity.

Remember that all of man’s knowledge and all his concepts have a hierarchical structure. The foundation and starting point of man’s thinking are his sensory perceptions; on this base, man forms his first concepts, then goes on building the edifice of his knowledge by identifying and integrating new concepts on a wider and wider scale. If man’s thinking is to be valid, this process must be guided by logic, “the art of noncontradictory identification”—and any new concept man forms must be integrated without contradiction into the hierarchical structure of his knowledge. To introduce into one’s consciousness any idea that cannot be so integrated, an idea not derived from reality, not validated by a process of reason, not subject to rational examination or judgment—and worse: an idea that clashes with the rest of one’s concepts and understanding of reality—is to sabotage the integrative function of consciousness, to undercut the rest of one’s convictions and kill one’s capacity to be certain of anything. This is the meaning of John Galt’s statement in Atlas Shrugged that “the alleged shortcut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short circuit destroying the mind.”

There is no greater self-delusion than to imagine that one can render unto reason that which is reason’s and unto faith that which is faith’s. Faith cannot be circumscribed or delimited; to surrender one’s consciousness by an inch, is to surrender one’s consciousness in total. Either reason is an absolute to a mind or it is not—and if it is not, there is no place to draw the line, no principle by which to draw it, no barrier faith cannot cross, no part of one’s life faith cannot invade: one remains rational until and unless one’s feelings decree otherwise.

Faith is a malignancy that no system can tolerate with impunity; and the man who succumbs to it, will call on it in precisely those issues where he needs his reason most. When one turns from reason to faith, when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one’s consciousness—and one’s mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion.

(2) Man’s need of self-esteem entails the need for a sense of control over reality—but no control is possible in a universe which, by one’s own concession, contains the supernatural, the miraculous and the causeless, a universe in which one is at the mercy of ghosts and demons, in which one must deal, not with the unknown, but with the unknowable; no control is possible if man proposes, but a ghost disposes; no control is possible if the universe is a haunted house.

(3) His life and self-esteem require that the object and concern of man’s consciousness be reality and this earth—but morality, men are taught, consists of scorning this earth and the world available to sensory perception, and of contemplating, instead, a “different” and “higher” reality, a realm inaccessible to reason and incommunicable in language, but attainable by revelation, by special dialectical processes, by that superior state of intellectual lucidity known to Zen-Buddhists as “No-Mind,” or by death.

There is only one reality—the reality knowable to reason. And if man does not choose to perceive it, there is nothing else for him to perceive; if it is not of this world that he is conscious, then he is not conscious at all.

The sole result of the mystic projection of “another” reality, is that it incapacitates man psychologically for this one. It was not by contemplating the transcendental, the ineffable, the undefinable—it was not by contemplating the nonexistent—that man lifted himself from the cave and transformed the material world to make a human existence possible on earth.

If it is a virtue to renounce one’s mind, but a sin to use it; if it is a virtue to approximate the mental state of a schizophrenic, but a sin to be in intellectual focus; if it is a virtue to denounce this earth, but a sin to make it livable; if it is a virtue to mortify the flesh, but a sin to work and act; if it is a virtue to despise life, but a sin to sustain and enjoy it—then no self-esteem or control or efficacy are possible to man, nothing is possible to him but the guilt and terror of a wretch caught in a nightmare universe, a universe created by some metaphysical sadist who has cast man into a maze where the door marked “virtue” leads to self-destruction and the door marked “efficacy” leads to self-damnation.

(4) His life and self-esteem require that man take pride in his power to think, pride in his power to live—but morality, men are taught, holds pride, and specifically intellectual pride, as the gravest of sins. Virtue begins, men are taught, with humility: with the recognition of the helplessness, the smallness, the impotence of one’s mind.

Is man omniscient?—demand the mystics. Is he infallible? Then how dare he challenge the word of God, or of God’s representatives, and set himself up as the judge of—anything?

Intellectual pride is not—as the mystics preposterously imply it to be—a pretense at omniscience or infallibility. On the contrary, precisely because man must struggle for knowledge, precisely because the pursuit of knowledge requires an effort, the men who assume this responsibility properly feel pride.

Sometimes, colloquially, pride is taken to mean a pretense at accomplishments one has not in fact achieved. But the braggart, the boaster, the man who affects virtues he does not possess, is not proud; he has merely chosen the most humiliating way to reveal his humility.

Pride is one’s response to one’s power to achieve values, the pleasure one takes in one’s own efficacy. And it is this that mystics hold as evil.

But if doubt, not confidence, is man’s proper moral state; if self-distrust, not self-reliance, is the proof of his virtue; if fear, not self-esteem, is the mark of perfection; if guilt, not pride, is his goal—then mental illness is a moral ideal, the neurotics and psychotics are the highest exponents of morality, and the thinkers, the achievers, are the sinners, those who are too corrupt and too arrogant to seek virtue and psychological well-being through the belief that they are unfit to exist.

Humility is, of necessity, the basic virtue of a mystical morality; it is the only virtue possible to men who have renounced the mind.

Pride has to be earned; it is the reward of effort and achievement; but to gain the virtue of humility, one has only to abstain from thinking—nothing else is demanded—and one will feel humble quickly enough.

(5) His life and self-esteem require of man loyalty to his values, loyalty to his mind and its judgments, loyalty to his life—but the essence of morality, men are taught, consists of self-sacrifice: the sacrifice of one’s mind to some higher authority, and the sacrifice of one’s values to whoever may claim to require it.

It is not necessary, in this context, to analyze the almost countless evils, entailed by the precept of self-sacrifice. Its irrationality and destructiveness have been thoroughly exposed in Atlas Shrugged. But there are two aspects of the issue that are especially pertinent to the subject of mental health.

The first is the fact that self-sacrifice means—and can only mean—mind-sacrifice.

A sacrifice, it is necessary to remember, means the surrender of a higher value in favor of a lower value or of a nonvalue. If one gives up that which one does not value in order to obtain that which one does value—or if one gives up a lesser value in order to obtain a greater one—this is not a sacrifice, but a gain.

Remember further that all of a man’s values exist in a hierarchy; he values some things more than others; and, to the extent that he is rational, the hierarchical order of his values is rational: that is, he values things in proportion to their importance in serving his life and well-being. That which is inimical to his life and well-being, that which is inimical to his nature and needs as a living being, he disvalues.

Conversely, one of the characteristics of mental illness is a distorted value structure; the neurotic does not value things according to their objective merit, in relation to his nature and needs; he frequently values the very things that will lead him to self-destruction. Judged by objective standards, he is engaged in a chronic process of self-sacrifice.

But if sacrifice is a virtue, it is not the neurotic but the rational man who must be “cured.” He must learn to do violence to his own rational judgment—to reverse the order of his value hierarchy—to surrender that which his mind has chosen as the good—to turn against and invalidate his own consciousness.

Do mystics declare that all they demand of man is that he sacrifice his happiness? To sacrifice one’s happiness is to sacrifice one’s desires; to sacrifice one’s desires is to sacrifice one’s values; to sacrifice one’s values is to sacrifice one’s judgment; to sacrifice one’s judgment is to sacrifice one’s mind—and it is nothing less than this that the creed of self-sacrifice aims at and demands.

The root of selfishness is man’s right—and need—to act on his own judgment. If his judgment is to be an object of sacrifice—what sort of efficacy, control, freedom from conflict, or serenity of spirit will be possible to man?

The second aspect that is pertinent here, involves not only the creed of self-sacrifice but all the foregoing tenents of traditional morality.

An irrational morality, a morality set in opposition to man’s nature, to the facts of reality and to the requirements of man’s survival, necessarily forces men to accept the belief that there is an inevitable clash between the moral and the practical—that they must choose either to be virtuous or to be happy, to be idealistic or to be successful, but they cannot be both. This view establishes a disastrous conflict on the deepest level of man’s being, a lethal dichotomy that tears man apart: it forces him to choose between making himself able to live and making himself worthy of living. Yet self-esteem and mental health require that he achieve both.

If man holds life on earth as the good, if he judges his values by the standard of that which is proper to the existence of a rational being, then there is no clash between the requirements of survival and of morality—no clash between making himself able to live and making himself worthy of living; he achieves the second by achieving the first. But there is a clash, if man holds the renunciation of this earth as the good, the renunciation of life, of mind, of happiness, of self. Under an anti-life morality, man makes himself worthy of living to the extent that he makes himself unable to live—and to the extent that he makes himself able to live, he makes himself unworthy of living.

The answer given by many defenders of traditional morality is: “Oh, but people don’t have to go to extremes!”—meaning: “We don’t expect people to be fully moral. We expect them to smuggle some self-interest into their lives. We recognize that people have to live, after all.”

The defense, then, of this code of morality is that few people will be suicidal enough to attempt to practice it consistently. Hypocrisy is to be man’s protector against his professed moral convictions. What does that do to his self-esteem?

And what of the victims who are insufficiently hypocritical?

What of the child who withdraws in terror into an autistic universe because he cannot cope with the ravings of parents who tell him that he is guilty by nature, that his body is evil, that thinking is sinful, that question-asking is blasphemous, that doubting is depravity, and that he must obey the orders of a supernatural ghost because, if he doesn’t, he will burn forever in hell?

Or the daughter who collapses in guilt over the sin of not wanting to devote her life to caring for the ailing father who has given her cause to feel only hatred?

Or the adolescent who flees into homosexuality because he has been taught that sex is evil and that women are to be worshiped, but not desired?

Or the businessman who suffers an anxiety attack because, after years of being urged to be thrifty and industrious, he has finally committed the sin of succeeding, and is now told that it shall be easier for the camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven?

Or the neurotic who, in hopeless despair, gives up the attempt to solve his problems because he has always heard it preached that this earth is a realm of misery, futility and doom, where no happiness or fulfillment is possible to man?

If the advocates of these doctrines bear a grave moral responsibility, there is a group who, perhaps, bears a graver responsibility still: the psychologists and psychiatrists who see the human wreckage of these doctrines, but who remain silent and do not protest—who declare that philosophical and moral issues do not concern them, that science cannot pronounce value judgments—who shrug off their professional obligations with the assertion that a rational code of morality is impossible, and, by their silence, lend their sanction to spiritual murder.

(March 1963)

3.

The Ethics of Emergencies

by Ayn Rand

The psychological results of altruism may be observed in the fact that a great many people approach the subject of ethics by asking such questions as: “Should one risk one’s life to help a man who is: a) drowning, b) trapped in a fire, c) stepping in front of a speeding truck, d) hanging by his fingernails over an abyss?”

Consider the implications of that approach. If a man accepts the ethics of altruism, he suffers the following consequences (in proportion to the degree of his acceptance):

1. Lack of setf-esteem—since his first concern in the realm of values is not how to live his life, but how to sacrifice it.

2. Lack of respect for others—since he regards mankind as a herd of doomed beggars crying for someone’s help.

3. A nightmare view of existence—since he believes that men are trapped in a “malevolent universe” where disasters are the constant and primary concern of their lives.

4. And, in fact, a lethargic indifference to ethics, a hopelessly cynical amorality—since his questions involve situations which he is not likely ever to encounter, which bear no relation to the actual problems of his own life and thus leave him to live without any moral principles whatever.

By elevating the issue of helping others into the central and primary issue of ethics, altruism has destroyed the concept of any authentic benevolence or good will among men. It has indoctrinated men with the idea that to value another human being is an act of selflessness, thus implying that a man can have no personal interest in others—that to value another means to sacrifice oneself—that any love, respect or admiration a man may feel for others is not and cannot be a source of his own enjoyment, but is a threat to his existence, a sacrificial blank check signed over to his loved ones.

The men who accept that dichotomy but choose its other side, the ultimate products of altruism’s dehumanizing influence, are those psychopaths who do not challenge altruism’s basic premise, but proclaim their rebellion against self-sacrifice by announcing that they are totally indifferent to anything living and would not lift a finger to help a man or a dog left mangled by a hit-and-run driver (who is usually one of their own kind).

Most men do not accept or practice either side of altruism’s viciously false dichotomy, but its result is a total intellectual chaos on the issue of proper human relationships and on such questions as the nature, purpose or extent of the help one may give to others. Today, a great many well-meaning, reasonable men do not know how to identify or conceptualize the moral principles that motivate their love, affection or good will, and can find no guidance in the field of ethics, which is dominated by the stale platitudes of altruism.

On the question of why man is not a sacrificial animal and why help to others is not his moral duty, I refer you to Atlas Shrugged. This present discussion is concerned with the principles by which one identifies and evaluates the instances involving a man’s nonsacrificial help to others.

“Sacrifice” is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue. Thus, altruism gauges a man’s virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less “selfish,” than help to those one loves). The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one.

This applies to all choices, including one’s actions toward other men. It requires that one possess a defined hierarchy of rational values (values chosen and validated by a rational standard). Without such a hierarchy, neither rational conduct nor considered value judgments nor moral choices are possible.

Love and friendship are profoundly personal, selfish values: love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one’s own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one’s own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love.

A “selfless,” “disinterested” love is a contradiction in terms: it means that one is indifferent to that which one values.

Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one’s selfish interests. If a man who is passionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a “sacrifice” for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies.

Any action that a man undertakes for the benefit of those he loves is not a sacrifice if, in the hierarchy of his values, in the total context of the choices open to him, it achieves that which is of greatest personal (and rational) importance to him. In the above example, his wife’s survival is of greater value to the husband than anything else that his money could buy, it is of greatest importance to his own happiness and, therefore, his action is not a sacrifice.

But suppose he let her die in order to spend his money on saving the lives of ten other women, none of whom meant anything to him—as the ethics of altruism would require. That would be a sacrifice. Here the difference between Objectivism and altruism can be seen most clearly: if sacrifice is the moral principle of action, then that husband should sacrifice his wife for the sake of ten other women. What distinguishes the wife from the ten others? Nothing but her value to the husband who has to make the choice-nothing but the fact that his happiness requires her survival.

The Objectivist ethics would tell him: your highest moral purpose is the achievement of your own happiness, your money is yours, use it to save your wife, that is your moral right and your rational, moral choice.

Consider the soul of the altruistic moralist who would be prepared to tell that husband the opposite. (And then ask yourself whether altruism is motivated by benevolence.)

The proper method of judging when or whether one should help another person is by reference to one’s own rational self-interest and one’s own hierarchy of values: the time, money or effort one gives or the risk one takes should be proportionate to the value of the person in relation to one’s own happiness.

To illustrate this on the altruists’ favorite example: the issue of saving a drowning person. If the person to be saved is a stranger, it is morally proper to save him only when the danger to one’s own life is minimal; when the danger is great, it would be immoral to attempt it: only a lack of self-esteem could permit one to value one’s life no higher than that of any random stranger. (And, conversely, if one is drowning, one cannot expect a stranger to risk his life for one’s sake, remembering that one’s life cannot be as valuable to him as his own.)

If the person to be saved is not a stranger, then the risk one should be willing to take is greater in proportion to the greatness of that person’s value to oneself. If it is the man or woman one loves, then one can be willing to give one’s own life to save him or her—for the selfish reason that life without the loved person could be unbearable.

Conversely, if a man is able to swim and to save his drowning wife, but becomes panicky, gives in to an unjustified, irrational fear and lets her drown, then spends his life in loneliness and misery—one would not call him “selfish”; one would condemn him morally for his treason to himself and to his own values, that is: his failure to fight for the preservation of a value crucial to his own happiness. Remember that values are that which one acts to gain and/or keep, and that one’s own happiness has to be achieved by one’s own effort. Since one’s own happiness is the moral purpose of one’s life, the man who fails to achieve it because of his own default, because of his failure to fight for it, is morally guilty.

The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not “selflessness” or “sacrifice,” but integrity. Integrity is loyalty to one’s convictions and values; it is the policy of acting in accordance with one’s values, of expressing, upholding and translating them into practical reality. If a man professes to love a woman, yet his actions are indifferent, inimical or damaging to her, it is his lack of integrity that makes him immoral.

The same principle applies to relationships among friends. If one’s friend is in trouble, one should act to help him by whatever nonsacrificial means are appropriate. For instance, if one’s friend is starving, it is not a sacrifice, but an act of integrity to give him money for food rather than buy some insignificant gadget for oneself, because his welfare is important in the scale of one’s personal values. If the gadget means more than the friend’s suffering, one had no business pretending to be his friend.

The practical implementation of friendship, affection and love consists of incorporating the welfare (the rational welfare) of the person involved into one’s own hierarchy of values, then acting accordingly.

But this is a reward which men have to earn by means of their virtues and which one cannot grant to mere acquaintances or strangers.

What, then, should one properly grant to strangers? The generalized respect and good will which one should grant to a human being in the name of the potential value he represents—until and unless he forfeits it.

A rational man does not forget that life is the source of all values and, as such, a common bond among living beings (as against inanimate matter), that other men are potentially able to achieve the same virtues as his own and thus be of enormous value to him. This does not mean that he regards human lives as interchangeable with his own. He recognizes the fact that his own life is the source, not only of all his values, but of his capacity to value. Therefore, the value he grants to others is only a consequence, an extension, a secondary projection of the primary value which is himself.

“The respect and good will that men of self-esteem feel toward other human beings is profoundly egoistic; they feel, in effect: ‘Other men are of value because they are of the same species as myself.’ In revering living entities, they are revering their own life. This is the psychological base of any emotion of sympathy and any feeling of species solidarity.’ ”⁴

Since men are born tabula rasa, both cognitively and morally, a rational man regards strangers as innocent until proved guilty, and grants them that initial good will in the name of their human potential. After that, he judges them according to the moral character they have actualized. If he finds them guilty of major evils, his good will is replaced by contempt and moral condemnation. (If one values human life, one cannot value its destroyers.) If he finds them to be virtuous, he grants them personal, individual value and appreciation, in proportion to their virtues.

It is on the ground of that generalized good will and respect for the value of human life that one helps strangers in an emergency—and only in an emergency.

It is important to differentiate between the rules of conduct in an emergency situation and the rules of conduct in the normal conditions of human existence. This does not mean a double standard of morality: the standard and the basic principles remain the same, but their application to either case requires precise definitions.

An emergency is an unchosen, unexpected event, limited in time, that creates conditions under which human survival is impossible—such as a flood, an earthquake, a fire, a shipwreck. In an emergency situation, men’s primary goal is to combat the disaster, escape the danger and restore normal conditions (to reach dry land, to put out the fire, etc.).

By “normal” conditions I mean metaphysically normal, normal in the nature of things, and appropriate to human existence. Men can live on land, but not in water or in a raging fire. Since men are not omnipotent, it is metaphysically possible for unforeseeable disasters to strike them, in which case their only task is to return to those conditions under which their lives can continue. By its nature, an emergency situation is temporary; if it were to last, men would perish.

It is only in emergency situations that one should volunteer to help strangers, if it is in one’s power. For instance, a man who values human life and is caught in a shipwreck, should help to save his fellow passengers (though not at the expense of his own life). But this does not mean that after they all reach shore, he should devote his efforts to saving his fellow passengers from poverty, ignorance, neurosis or whatever other troubles they might have. Nor does it mean that he should spend his life sailing the seven seas in search of shipwreck victims to save.

Or to take an example that can occur in everyday life: suppose one hears that the man next door is ill and penniless. Illness and poverty are not metaphysical emergencies, they are part of the normal risks of existence; but since the man is temporarily helpless, one may bring him food and medicine, if one can afford it (as an act of good will, not of duty) or one may raise a fund among the neighbors to help him out. But this does not mean that one must support him from then on, nor that one must spend one’s life looking for starving men to help.

In the normal conditions of existence, man has to choose his goals, project them in time, pursue them and achieve them by his own effort. He cannot do it if his goals are at the mercy of and must be sacrificed to any misfortune happening to others. He cannot live his life by the guidance of rules applicable only to conditions under which human survival is impossible.

The principle that one should help men in an emergency cannot be extended to regard all human suffering as an emergency and to turn the misfortune of some into a first mortgage on the lives of others.

Poverty, ignorance, illness and other problems of that kind are not metaphysical emergencies. By the metaphysical nature of man and of existence, man has to maintain his life by his own effort; the values he needs—such as wealth or knowledge—are not given to him automatically, as a gift of nature, but have to be discovered and achieved by his own thinking and work. One’s sole obligation toward others, in this respect, is to maintain a social system that leaves men free to achieve, to gain and to keep their values.

Every code of ethics is based on and derived from a metaphysics, that is: from a theory about the fundamental nature of the universe in which man lives and acts. The altruist ethics is based on a “malevolent universe” metaphysics, on the theory that man, by his very nature, is helpless and doomed—that success, happiness, achievement are impossible to him—that emergencies, disasters, catastrophes are the norm of his life and that his primary goal is to combat them.

As the simplest empirical refutation of that metaphysics—as evidence of the fact that the material universe is not inimical to man and that catastrophes are the exception, not the rule of his existence—observe the fortunes made by insurance companies.

Observe also that the advocates of altruism are unable to base their ethics on any facts of men’s normal existence and that they always offer “lifeboat” situations as examples from which to derive the rules of moral conduct. (“What should you do if you and another man are in a lifeboat that can carry only one?” etc.)

The fact is that men do not live in lifeboats—and that a lifeboat is not the place on which to base one’s metaphysics.

The moral purpose of a man’s life is the achievement of his own happiness. This does not mean that he is indifferent to all men, that human life is of no value to him and that he has no reason to help others in an emergency. But it does mean that he does not subordinate his life to the welfare of others, that he does not sacrifice himself to their needs, that the relief of their suffering is not his primary concern, that any help he gives is an exception, not a rule, an act of generosity, not of moral duty, that it is marginal and incidental —as disasters are marginal and incidental in the course of human existence—and that values, not disasters, are the goal, the first concern and the motive power of his life.

(February 1963)

4.

The “Conflicts” of Men’s Interests

by Ayn Rand

Some students of Objectivism find it difficult to grasp the Objectivist principle that “there are no conflicts of interests among rational men.”

A typical question runs as follows: “Suppose two men apply for the same job. Only one of them can be hired. Isn’t this an instance of a conflict of interests, and isn’t the benefit of one man achieved at the price of the sacrifice of the other?”

There are four interrelated considerations which are involved in a rational man’s view of his interests, but which are ignored or evaded in the above question and in all similar approaches to the issue. I shall designate these four as: (a) “Reality,” (b) “Context,” (c) “Responsibility,” (d) “Effort. ”

(a) Reality. The term “interests” is a wide abstraction that covers the entire field of ethics. It includes the issues of: man’s values, his desires, his goals and their actual achievement in reality. A man’s “interests” depend on the kind of goals he chooses to pursue, his choice of goals depends on his desires, his desires depend on his values—and, for a rational man, his values depend on the judgment of his mind.

Desires (or feelings or emotions or wishes or whims) are not tools of cognition; they are not a valid standard of value, nor a valid criterion of man’s interests. The mere fact that a man desires something does not constitute a proof that the object of his desire is good, nor that its achievement is actually to his interest.

To claim that a man’s interests are sacrificed whenever a desire of his is frustrated—is to hold a subjectivist view of man’s values and interests. Which means: to believe that it is proper, moral and possible for man to achieve his goals, regardless of whether they contradict the facts of reality or not. Which means: to hold an irrational or mystical view of existence. Which means: to deserve no further consideration.

In choosing his goals (the specific values he seeks to gain and/or keep), a rational man is guided by his thinking (by a process of reason)—not by his feelings or desires. He does not regard desires as irreducible primaries, as the given, which he is destined irresistibly to pursue. He does not regard “because I want it” or “because I feel like it” as a sufficient cause and validation of his actions. He chooses and/or identifies his desires by a process of reason, and he does not act to achieve a desire until and unless he is able rationally to validate it in the full context of his knowledge and of his other values and goals. He does not act until he is able to say: “I want it because it is right.”

The Law of Identity (A is A) is a rational man’s paramount consideration in the process of determining his interests. He knows that the contradictory is the impossible, that a contradiction cannot be achieved in reality and that the attempt to achieve it can lead only to disaster and destruction. Therefore, he does not permit himself to hold contradictory values, to pursue contradictory goals, or to imagine that the pursuit of a contradiction can ever be to his interest.

Only an irrationalist (or mystic or subjectivist—in which category I place all those who regard faith, feelings or desires as man’s standard of value) exists in a perpetual conflict of “interests.” Not only do his alleged interests clash with those of other men, but they clash also with one another.

No one finds it difficult to dismiss from philosophical consideration the problem of a man who wails that life entraps him in an irreconcilable conflict because he cannot eat his cake and have it, too. That problem does not acquire intellectual validity by being expanded to involve more than cake—whether one expands it to the whole universe, as in the doctrines of Existentialism, or only to a few random whims and evasions, as in most people’s views of their interests.

When a person reaches the stage of claiming that man’s interests conflict with reality, the concept “interests” ceases to be meaningful—and his problem ceases to be philosophical and becomes psychological.

(b) Context. Just as a rational man does not hold any conviction out of context—that is: without relating it to the rest of his knowledge and resolving any possible contradictions—so he does not hold or pursue any desire out of context. And he does not judge what is or is not to his interest out of context, on the range of any given moment.

Context-dropping is one of the chief psychological tools of evasion. In regard to one’s desires, there are two major ways of context-dropping: the issues of range and of means.

A rational man sees his interests in terms of a lifetime and selects his goals accordingly. This does not mean that he has to be omniscient, infallible or clairvoyant. It means that he does not live his life short-range and does not drift like a bum pushed by the spur of the moment. It means that he does not regard any moment as cut off from the context of the rest of his life, and that he allows no conflicts or contradictions between his short-range and long-range interests. He does not become his own destroyer by pursuing a desire today which wipes out all his values tomorrow.

A rational man does not indulge in wistful longings for ends divorced from means. He does not hold a desire without knowing (or learning) and considering the means by which it is to be achieved. Since he knows that nature does not provide man with the automatic satisfaction of his desires, that a man’s goals or values have to be achieved by his own effort, that the lives and efforts of other men are not his property and are not there to serve his wishes—a rational man never holds a desire or pursues a goal which cannot be achieved directly or indirectly by his own effort.

It is with a proper understanding of this “indirectly” that the crucial social issue begins.

Living in a society, instead of on a desert island, does not relieve a man of the responsibility of supporting his own life. The only difference is that he supports his life by trading his products or services for the products or services of others. And, in this process of trade, a rational man does not seek or desire any more or any less than his own effort can earn. What determines his earnings? The free market, that is: the voluntary choice and judgment of the men who are willing to trade him their effort in return.

When a man trades with others, he is counting—explicitly or implicitly—on their rationality, that is: on their ability to recognize the objective value of his work. (A trade based on any other premise is a con game or a fraud.) Thus, when a rational man pursues a goal in a free society, he does not place himself at the mercy of whims, the favors or the prejudices of others; he depends on nothing but his own effort: directly, by doing objectively valuable work—indirectly, through the objective evaluation of his work by others.

It is in this sense that a rational man never holds a desire or pursues a goal which cannot be achieved by his own effort. He trades value for value. He never seeks or desires the unearned. If he undertakes to achieve a goal that requires the cooperation of many people, he never counts on anything but his own ability to persuade them and their voluntary agreement.

Needless to say, a rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards and judgment in order to appeal to the irrationality, stupidity or dishonesty of others. He knows that such a course is suicidal. He knows that one’s only practical chance to achieve any degree of success or anything humanly desirable lies in dealing with those who are rational, whether there are many of them or few. If, in any given set of circumstances, any victory is possible at all, it is only reason that can win it. And, in a free society, no matter how hard the struggle might be, it is reason that ultimately wins.

Since he never drops the context of the issues he deals with, a rational man accepts that struggle as to his interest—because he knows that freedom is to his interest. He knows that the struggle to achieve his values includes the possibility of defeat. He knows also that there is no alternative and no automatic guarantee of success for man’s effort, neither in dealing with nature nor with other men. So he does not judge his interests by any particular defeat nor by the range of any particular moment. He lives and judges long-range. And he assumes the full responsibility of knowing what conditions are necessary for the achievement of his goals.

(c) Responsibility. This last is the particular form of intellectual responsibility that most people evade. That evasion is the major cause of their frustrations and defeats.

Most people hold their desires without any context whatever, as ends hanging in a foggy vacuum, the fog hiding any concept of means. They rouse themselves mentally only long enough to utter an “I wish,” and stop there, and wait, as if the rest were up to some unknown power.

What they evade is the responsibility of judging the social world. They take the world as the given. “A world I never made” is the deepest essence of their attitude—and they seek only to adjust themselves uncritically to the incomprehensible requirements of those unknowable others who did make the world, whoever those might be.

But humility and presumptuousness are two sides of the same psychological medal. In the willingness to throw oneself blindly on the mercy of others there is the implicit privilege of making blind demands on one’s masters.

There are countless ways in which this sort of “metaphysical humility” reveals itself. For instance, there is the man who wishes to be rich, but never thinks of discovering what means, actions and conditions are required to achieve wealth. Who is he to judge? He never made the world—and “nobody gave him a break.”

There is the girl who wishes to be loved, but never thinks of discovering what love is, what values it requires, and whether she possesses any virtues to be loved for. Who is she to judge? Love, she feels, is an inexplicable favor—so she merely longs for it, feeling that somebody has deprived her of her share in the distribution of favors.

There are the parents who suffer deeply and genuinely, because their son (or daughter) does not love them, and who, simultaneously, ignore, oppose or attempt to destroy everything they know of their son’s convictions, values and goals, never thinking of the connection between these two facts, never making an attempt to understand their son. The world they never made and dare not challenge, has told them that children love parents automatically.

There is the man who wants a job, but never thinks of discovering what qualifications the job requires or what constitutes doing one’s work well. Who is he to judge? He never made the world. Somebody owes him a living. How? Somehow.

A European architect of my acquaintance was talking, one day, of his trip to Puerto Rico. He described—with great indignation at the universe at large—the squalor of the Puerto Ricans’ living conditions. Then he described what wonders modem housing could do for them, which he had daydreamed in detail, including electric refrigerators and tiled bathrooms. I asked: “Who would pay for it?” He answered, in a faintly offended, almost huffy tone of voice: “Oh, that’s not for me to worry about! An architect’s task is only to project what should be done. Let somebody else think about the money.”

That is the psychology from which all “social reforms” or “welfare states” or “noble experiments” or the destruction of the world have come.

In dropping the responsibility for one’s own interests and life, one drops the responsibility of ever having to consider the interests and lives of others—of those others who are, somehow, to provide the satisfaction of one’s desires.

Whoever allows a “somehow” into his view of the means by which his desires are to be achieved, is guilty of that “metaphysical humility” which, psychologically, is the premise of a parasite. As Nathaniel Branden pointed out in a lecture, “somehow” always means “somebody.”

(d) Effort. Since a rational man knows that man must achieve his goals by his own effort, he knows that neither wealth nor jobs nor any human values exist in a given, limited, static quantity, waiting to be divided. He knows that all benefits have to be produced, that the gain of one man does not represent the loss of another, that a man’s achievement is not earned at the expense of those who have not achieved it.

Therefore, he never imagines that he has any sort of unearned, unilateral claim on any human being—and he never leaves his interests at the mercy of any one person or single, specific concrete. He may need clients, but not any one particular customer—he may need a job, but not any one particular job.

If he encounters competition, he either meets it or chooses another line of work. There is no job so slow that a better, more skillful performance of it would pass unnoticed and unappreciated; not in a free society. Ask any office manager.

It is only the passive, parasitical representatives of the “humility metaphysics” school who regard any competitor as a threat, because the thought of earning one’s position by personal merit is not part of their view of life. They regard themselves as interchangeable mediocrities who have nothing to offer and who fight, in a “static” universe, for someone’s causeless favor.

A rational man knows that one does not live by means of “luck,” “breaks” or favors, that there is no such thing as an “only chance” or a single opportunity, and that this is guaranteed precisely by the existence of competition. He does not regard any concrete, specific goal or value as irreplaceable. He knows that only persons are irreplaceable—only those one loves.

He knows also that there are no conflicts of interests among rational men even in the issue of love. Like any other value, love is not a static quantity to be divided, but an unlimited response to be earned. The love for one friend is not a threat to the love for another, and neither is the love for the various members of one’s family, assuming they have earned it. The most exclusive form—romantic love—is not an issue of competition. If two men are in love with the same woman, what she feels for either of them is not determined by what she feels for the other and is not taken away from him. If she chooses one of them, the “loser” could not have had what the “winner” has earned.

It is only among the irrational, emotion-motivated persons, whose love is divorced from any standards of value, that chance rivalries, accidental conflicts and blind choices prevail. But then, whoever wins does not win much. Among the emotion-driven, neither love nor any other emotion has any meaning.

Such, in brief essence, are the four major considerations involved in a rational man’s view of his interests.

Now let us return to the question originally asked—about the two men applying for the same job—and observe in what manner it ignores or opposes these four considerations.

(a) Reality. The mere fact that two men desire the same job does not constitute proof that either of them is entitled to it or deserves it, and that his interests are damaged if he does not obtain it.

(b) Context. Both men should know that if they desire a job, their goal is made possible only by the existence of a business concern able to provide employment—that that business concern requires the availability of more than one applicant for any job—that if only one applicant existed, he would not obtain the job, because the business concern would have to close its doors—and that their competition for the job is to their interest, even though one of them will lose in that particular encounter.

(c) Responsibility. Neither man has the moral right to declare that he doesn’t want to consider all those things, he just wants a job. He is not entitled to any desire or to any “interest” without knowledge of what is required to make its fulfillment possible.

(d) Effort. Whoever gets the job, has earned it (assuming that the employer’s choice is rational). This benefit is due to his own merit—not to the “sacrifice” of the other man who never had any vested right to that job. The failure to give to a man what had never belonged to him can hardly be described as “sacrificing his interests.”

All of the above discussion applies only to the relationships among rational men and only to a free society. In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.

In a nonfree society, no pursuit of any interests is possible to anyone; nothing is possible but gradual and general destruction.

(August 1962)

5.

Isn’t Everyone Selfish?

by Nathaniel Branden

Some variety of this question is often raised as an objection to those who advocate an ethics of rational self-interest. For example, it is sometimes claimed: “Everyone does what he really wants to do—otherwise, he wouldn’t do it.” Or: “No one ever really sacrifices himself. Since every purposeful action is motivated by some value or goal that the actor desires, one always acts selfishly, whether one knows it or not.”

To untangle the intellectual confusion involved in this viewpoint, let us consider what facts of reality give rise to such an issue as selfishness versus self-sacrifice, or egoism versus altruism, and what the concept of “selfishness” means and entails.

The issue of selfishness versus self-sacrifice arises in an ethical context. Ethics is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and course of his life. In choosing his actions and goals, man faces constant alternatives. In order to choose, he requires a standard of value—a purpose which his actions are to serve or at which they are to aim. “‘Value’ presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what?” (Atlas Shrugged.) What is to be the goal or purpose of a man’s actions? Who is to be the intended beneficiary of his actions? Is he to hold, as his primary moral purpose, the achievement of his own life and happiness—or should his primary moral purpose be to serve the wishes and needs of others?

The clash between egoism and altruism lies in their conflicting answers to these questions. Egoism holds that man is an end in himself; altruism holds that man is a means to the ends of others. Egoism holds that, morally, the beneficiary of an action should be the person who acts; altruism holds that, morally, the beneficiary of an action should be someone other than the person who acts.

To be selfish is to be motivated by concern for one’s self-interest. This requires that one consider what constitutes one’s self-interest and how to achieve it—what values and goals to pursue, what principles and policies to adopt. If a man were not concerned with this question, he could not be said objectively to be concerned with or to desire his self-interest; one cannot be concerned with or desire that of which one has no knowledge.

Selfishness entails: (a) a hierarchy of values set by the standard of one’s self-interest, and (b) the refusal to sacrifice a higher value to a lower one or to a nonvalue.

A genuinely selfish man knows that only reason can determine what is, in fact, to his self-interest, that to pursue contradictions or attempt to act in defiance of the facts of reality is self-destructive—and self-destruction is not to his self-interest. “To think, is to man’s self-interest; to suspend his consciousness, is not. To choose his goals in the full context of his knowledge, his values and his life, is to man’s self-interest; to act on the impulse of the moment, without regard for his long-range context, is not. To exist as a productive being, is to man’s self-interest; to attempt to exist as a parasite, is not. To seek the life proper to his nature, is to man’s self-interest; to seek to live as an animal, is not.”⁵

Because a genuinely selfish man chooses his goals by the guidance of reason—and because the interests of rational men do not clash—other men may often benefit from his actions. But the benefit of other men is not his primary purpose or goal; his own benefit is his primary purpose and the conscious goal directing his actions.

To make this principle fully clear, let us consider an extreme example of an action which, in fact, is selfish, but which conventionally might be called self-sacrificial: a man’s willingness to die to save the life of the woman he loves. In what way would such a man be the beneficiary of his action?

The answer is given in Atlas Shrugged—in the scene when Galt, knowing he is about to be arrested, tells Dagny: “If they get the slightest suspicion of what we are to each other, they will have you on a torture rack—I mean, physical torture—before my eyes, in less than a week. I am not going to wait for that. At the first mention of a threat to you, I will kill myself and stop them right there.... I don’t have to tell you that if I do it, it won’t be an act of self-sacrifice. I do not care to live on their terms. I do not care to obey them and I do not care to see you enduring a drawn-out murder. There will be no values for me to seek after that—and I do not care to exist without values.” If a man loves a woman so much that he does not wish to survive her death, if life can have nothing more to offer him at that price, then his dying to save her is not a sacrifice.

The same principle applies to a man, caught in a dictatorship, who willingly risks death to achieve freedom. To call his act a “self-sacrifice,” one would have to assume that he preferred to live as a slave. The selfishness of a man who is willing to die, if necessary, fighting for his freedom, lies in the fact that he is unwilling to go on living in a world where he is no longer able to act on his own judgment—that is, a world where human conditions of existence are no longer possible to him.

The selfishness or unselfishness of an action is to be determined objectively: it is not determined by the feelings of the person who acts. Just as feelings are not a tool of cognition, so they are not a criterion in ethics.

Obviously, in order to act, one has to be moved by some personal motive; one has to “want,” in some sense, to perform the action. The issue of an action’s selfishness or unselfishness depends, not on whether or not one wants to perform it, but on why one wants to perform it. By what standard was the action chosen? To achieve what goal?

If a man proclaimed that he felt he would best benefit others by robbing and murdering them, men would not be willing to grant that his actions were altruistic. By the same logic and for the same reasons, if a man pursues a course of blind self-destruction, his feeling that he has something to gain by it does not establish his actions as selfish.

If, motivated solely by a sense of charity, compassion, duty or altruism, a person renounces a value, desire or goal in favor of the pleasure, wishes or needs of another person whom he values less than the thing he renounced—that is an act of self-sacrifice. The fact that a person may feel that he “wants” to do it, does not make his action selfish or establish objectively that he is its beneficiary.

Suppose, for example, that a son chooses the career he wants by rational standards, but then renounces it in order to please his mother who prefers that he pursue a different career, one that will have more prestige in the eyes of the neighbors. The boy accedes to his mother’s wish because he has accepted that such is his moral duty: he believes that his duty as a son consists of placing his mother’s happiness above his own, even if he knows that his mother’s demand is irrational and even if he knows that he is sentencing himself to a life of misery and frustration. It is absurd for the advocates of the “everyone is selfish” doctrine to assert that since the boy is motivated by the desire to be “virtuous” or to avoid guilt, no self-sacrifice is involved and his action is really selfish. What is evaded is the question of why the boy feels and desires as he does. Emotions and desires are not causeless, irreducible primaries: they are the product of the premises one has accepted. The boy “wants” to renounce his career only because he has accepted the ethics of altruism; he believes that it is immoral to act for his self-interest. That is the principle directing his actions.

Advocates of the “everyone is selfish” doctrine do not deny that, under the pressure of the altruist ethics, men can knowingly act against their own long-range happiness. They merely assert that in some higher, undefinable sense such men are still acting “selfishly.” A definition of “selfishness” that includes or permits the possibility of knowingly acting against one’s long-range happiness, is a contradiction in terms.

It is only the legacy of mysticism that permits men to imagine that they are still speaking meaningfully when they declare that one can seek one’s happiness in the renunciation of one’s happiness.

The basic fallacy in the “everyone is selfish” argument consists of an extraordinarily crude equivocation. It is a psychological truism—a tautology—that all purposeful behavior is motivated. But to equate “motivated behavior” with “selfish behavior” is to blank out the distinction between an elementary fact of human psychology and the phenomenon of ethical choice. It is to evade the central problem of ethics, namely: by what is man to be motivated?

A genuine selfishness—that is: a genuine concern with discovering what is to one’s self-interest, an acceptance of the responsibility of achieving it, a refusal ever to betray it by acting on the blind whim, mood, impulse or feeling of the moment, an uncompromising loyalty to one’s judgment, convictions and values—represents a profound moral achievement. Those who assert that “everyone is selfish” commonly intend their statement as an expression of cynicism and contempt. But the truth is that their statement pays mankind a compliment it does not deserve.

(September 1962)

6.

The Psychology of Pleasure

by Nathaniel Branden

Pleasure, for man, is not a luxury, but a profound psychological need.

Pleasure (in the widest sense of the term) is a metaphysical concomitant of life, the reward and consequence of successful action—just as pain is the insignia of failure, destruction, death.

Through the state of enjoyment, man experiences the value of life, the sense that life is worth living, worth struggling to maintain. In order to live, man must act to achieve values. Pleasure or enjoyment is at once an emotional payment for successful action and an incentive to continue acting.

Further, because of the metaphysical meaning of pleasure to man, the state of enjoyment gives him a direct experience of his own efficacy, of his competence to deal with the facts of reality, to achieve his values, to live. Implicitly contained in the experience of pleasure is the feeling: “I am in control of my existence”—just as implicitly contained in the experience of pain is the feeling: “I am helpless.” As pleasure emotionally entails a sense of efficacy, so pain emotionally entails a sense of impotence.

Thus, in letting man experience, in his own person, the sense that life is a value and that he is a value, pleasure serves as the emotional fuel of man’s existence.

Just as the pleasure-pain mechanism of man’s body works as a barometer of health or injury, so the pleasure-pain mechanism of his consciousness works on the same principle, acting as a barometer of what is for him or against him, what is beneficial to his life or inimical. But man is a being of volitional consciousness, he has no innate ideas, no automatic or infallible knowledge of what his survival depends on. He must choose the values that are to guide his actions and set his goals. His emotional mechanism will work according to the kind of values he chooses. It is his values that determine what a man feels to be for him or against him; it is his values that determine what a man seeks for pleasure.

If a man makes an error in his choice of values, his emotional mechanism will not correct him: it has no will of its own. If a man’s values are such that he desires things which, in fact and in reality, lead to his destruction, his emotional mechanism will not save him, but will, instead, urge him on toward destruction: he will have set it in reverse, against himself and against the facts of reality, against his own life. Man’s emotional mechanism is like an electronic computer: man has the power to program it, but no power to change its nature—so that if he sets the wrong programming, he will not be able to escape the fact that the most self-destructive desires will have, for him, the emotional intensity and urgency of lifesaving actions. He has, of course, the power to change the programming—but only by changing his values.

A man’s basic values reflect his conscious or subconscious view of himself and of existence. They are the expression of (a) the degree and nature of his self-esteem or lack of it, and (b) the extent to which he regards the universe as open to his understanding and action or closed—i.e., the extent to which he holds a benevolent or malevolent view of existence. Thus, the things which a man seeks for pleasure or enjoyment are profoundly revealing psychologically; they are the index of his character and soul. (By “soul,” I mean: a man’s consciousness and his basic motivating values.)

There are, broadly, five (interconnected) areas that allow man to experience the enjoyment of life: productive work, human relationships, recreation, art, sex.

Productive work is the most fundamental of these: through his work man gains his basic sense of control over existence—his sense of efficacy—which is the necessary foundation of the ability to enjoy any other value. The man whose life lacks direction or purpose, the man who has no creative goal, necessarily feels helpless and out of control; the man who feels helpless and out of control, feels inadequate to and unfit for existence; and the man who feels unfit for existence is incapable of enjoying it.

One of the hallmarks of a man of self-esteem, who regards the universe as open to his effort, is the profound pleasure he experiences in the productive work of his mind; his enjoyment of life is fed by his unceasing concern to grow in knowledge and ability—to think, to achieve, to move forward, to meet new challenges and overcome them—to earn the pride of a constantly expanding efficacy.

A different kind of soul is revealed by the man who, predominantly, takes pleasure in working only at the routine and familiar, who is inclined to enjoy working in a semi-daze, who sees happiness in freedom from challenge or struggle or effort: the soul of a man profoundly deficient in self-esteem, to whom the universe appears as unknowable and vaguely threatening, the man whose central motivating impulse is a longing for safety, not the safety that is won by efficacy, but the safety of a world in which efficacy is not demanded.

Still a different kind of soul is revealed by the man who finds it inconceivable that work—any form of work—can be enjoyable, who regards the effort of earning a living as a necessary evil, who dreams only of the pleasures that begin when the workday ends, the pleasure of drowning his brain in alcohol or television or billiards or women, the pleasure of not being conscious: the soul of a man with scarcely a shred of self-esteem, who never expected the universe to be comprehensible and takes his lethargic dread of it for granted, and whose only form of relief and only notion of enjoyment is the dim flicker of undemanding sensations.

Still another kind of soul is revealed by the man who takes pleasure, not in achievement, but in destruction, whose action is aimed, not at attaining efficacy, but at ruling those who have attained it: the soul of a man so abjectly lacking in self-value, and so overwhelmed by terror of existence, that his sole form of self-fulfillment is to unleash his resentment and hatred against those who do not share his state, those who are able to live—as if, by destroying the confident, the strong and the healthy, he could convert impotence into efficacy.

A rational, self-confident man is motivated by a love of values and by a desire to achieve them. A neurotic is motivated by fear and by a desire to escape it. This difference in motivation is reflected, not only in the things each type of man will seek for pleasure, but in the nature of the pleasure they will experience.

The emotional quality of the pleasure experienced by the four men described above, for instance, is not the same. The quality of any pleasure depends on the mental processes that give rise to and attend it, and on the nature of the values involved. The pleasure of using one’s consciousness properly, and the “pleasure” of being unconscious, are not the same—just as the pleasure of achieving real values, of gaining an authentic sense of efficacy, and the “pleasure” of temporarily diminishing one’s sense of fear and helplessness, are not the same. The man of self-esteem experiences the pure, unadulterated enjoyment of using his faculties properly and of achieving actual values in reality—a pleasure of which the other three men can have no inkling, just as he has no inkling of the dim, murky state which they call “pleasure.”

This same principle applies to all forms of enjoyment. Thus, in the realm of human relationships, a different form of pleasure is experienced, a different sort of motivation is involved, and a different kind of character is revealed, by the man who seeks for enjoyment the company of human beings of intelligence, integrity and self-esteem, who share his exacting standards—and by the man who is able to enjoy himself only with human beings who have no standards whatever and with whom, therefore, he feels free to be himself—or by the man who finds pleasure only in the company of people he despises, to whom he can compare himself favorably—or by the man who finds pleasure only among people he can deceive and manipulate, from whom he derives the lowest neurotic substitute for a sense of genuine efficacy: a sense of power.

For the rational, psychologically healthy man, the desire for pleasure is the desire to celebrate his control over reality. For the neurotic, the desire for pleasure is the desire to escape from reality.

Now consider the sphere of recreation. For instance, a party. A rational man enjoys a party as an emotional reward for achievement, and he can enjoy it only if in fact it involves activities that are enjoyable, such as seeing people whom he likes, meeting new people whom he finds interesting, engaging in conversations in which something worth saying and hearing is being said and heard. But a neurotic can “enjoy” a party for reasons unrelated to the real activities taking place; he may hate or despise or fear all the people present, he may act like a noisy fool and feel secretly ashamed of it—but he will feel that he is enjoying it all, because people are emitting the vibrations of approval, or because it is a social distinction to have been invited to this party, or because other people appear to be gay, or because the party has spared him, for the length of an evening, the terror of being alone.

The “pleasure” of being drunk is obviously the pleasure of escaping from the responsibility of consciousness. And so are the kind of social gatherings, held for no other purpose than the expression of hysterical chaos, where the guests wander around in an alcoholic stupor, prattling noisily and senselessly, and enjoying the illusion of a universe where one is not burdened with purpose, logic, reality or awareness.

Observe, in this connection, the modern “beatniks”—for instance, their manner of dancing. What one sees is not smiles of authentic enjoyment, but the vacant, staring eyes, the jerky, disorganized movements of what looks like decentralized bodies, all working very hard—with a kind of flat-footed hysteria—at projecting an air of the purposeless, the senseless, the mindless. This is the “pleasure” of unconsciousness.

Or consider the quieter kind of “pleasures” that fill many people’s lives: family picnics, ladies’ parties or “coffee klatches,” charity bazaars, vegetative kinds of vacation—all of them occasions of quiet boredom for all concerned, in which the boredom is the value. Boredom, to such people, means safety, the known, the usual, the routine—the absence of the new, the exciting, the unfamiliar, the demanding.

What is a demanding pleasure? A pleasure that demands the use of one’s mind; not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness.

One of the cardinal pleasures of life is offered to man by works of art. Art, at its highest potential, as the projection of things “as they might be and ought to be,” can provide man with an invaluable emotional fuel. But, again, the kind of art works one responds to, depends on one’s deepest values and premises.

A man can seek the projection of the heroic, the intelligent, the efficacious, the dramatic, the purposeful, the stylized, the ingenious, the challenging; he can seek the pleasure of admiration, of looking up to great values. Or he can seek the satisfaction of contemplating gossip-column variants of the folks next door, with nothing demanded of him, neither in thought nor in value standards; he can feel himself pleasantly warmed by projections of the known and familiar, seeking to feel a little less of “a stranger and afraid in a world [he] never made.” Or his soul can vibrate affirmatively to projections of horror and human degradation, he can feel gratified by the thought that he’s not as bad as the dope-addicted dwarf or the crippled lesbian he’s reading about; he can relish an art which tells him that man is evil, that reality is unknowable, that existence is unendurable, that no one can help anything, that his secret terror is normal.

Art projects an implicit view of existence—and it is one’s own view of existence that determines the art one will respond to. The soul of the man whose favorite play is Cyrano de Bergerac is radically different from the soul of the man whose favorite play is Waiting for Godot.

Of the various pleasures that man can offer himself, the greatest is pride—the pleasure he takes in his own achievements and in the creation of his own character. The pleasure he takes in the character and achievements of another human being is that of admiration. The highest expression of the most intense union of these two responses—pride and admiration—is romantic love. Its celebration is sex.

It is in this sphere above all—in a man’s romantic-sexual responses—that his view of himself and of existence stands eloquently revealed. A man falls in love with and sexually desires the person who reflects his own deepest values.

There are two crucial respects in which a man’s romantic-sexual responses are psychologically revealing: in his choice of partner—and in the meaning, to him, of the sexual act.

A man of self-esteem, a man in love with himself and with life, feels an intense need to find human beings he can admire—to find a spiritual equal whom he can love. The quality that will attract him most is self-esteem—self-esteem and an unclouded sense of the value of existence. To such a man, sex is an act of celebration, its meaning is a tribute to himself and to the woman he has chosen, the ultimate form of experiencing concretely and in his own person the value and joy of being alive.

The need for such an experience is inherent in man’s nature. But if a man lacks the self-esteem to earn it, he attempts to fake it—and he chooses his partner (subconsciously) by the standard of her ability to help him fake it, to give him the illusion of a self-value he does not possess and of a happiness he does not feel.

Thus, if a man is attracted to a woman of intelligence, confidence and strength, if he is attracted to a heroine, he reveals one kind of soul; if, instead, he is attracted to an irresponsible, helpless scatterbrain, whose weakness enables him to feel masculine, he reveals another kind of soul; if he is attracted to a frightened slut, whose lack of judgment and standards allows him to feel free of reproach, he reveals another kind of soul.

The same principle, of course, applies to a woman’s romantic-sexual choices.

The sexual act has a different meaning for the person whose desire is fed by pride and admiration, to whom the pleasurable self-experience it affords is an end in itself—and for the person who seeks in sex the proof of masculinity (or femininity), or the amelioration of despair, or a defense against anxiety, or an escape from boredom.

Paradoxically, it is the so-called pleasure-chasers—the men who seemingly live for nothing but the sensation of the moment, who are concerned only with having “a good time”—who are psychologically incapable of enjoying pleasure as an end in itself. The neurotic pleasure-chaser imagines that, by going through the motions of a celebration, he will be able to make himself feel that he has something to celebrate.

One of the hallmarks of the man who lacks self-esteem —and the real punishment for his moral and psychological default—is the fact that all his pleasures are pleasures of escape from the two pursuers whom he has betrayed and from whom there is no escape: reality and his own mind.

Since the function of pleasure is to afford man a sense of his own efficacy, the neurotic is caught in a deadly conflict: he is compelled, by his nature as man, to feel a desperate need for pleasure, as a confirmation and expression of his control over reality—but he can find pleasure only in an escape from reality. That is the reason why his pleasures do not work, why they bring him, not a sense of pride, fulfillment, inspiration, but a sense of guilt, frustration, hopelessness, shame. The effect of pleasure on a man of self-esteem is that of a reward and a confirmation. The effect of pleasure on a man who lacks self-esteem is that of a threat—the threat of anxiety, the shaking of the precarious foundation of his pseudo-self-value, the sharpening of the ever-present fear that the structure will collapse and he will find himself face to face with a stern, absolute, unknown and unforgiving reality.

One of the commonest complaints of patients who seek psychotherapy, is that nothing has the power to give them pleasure, that authentic enjoyment seems impossible to them. This is the inevitable dead end of the policy of pleasure-as-escape.

To preserve an unclouded capacity for the enjoyment of life, is an unusual moral and psychological achievement. Contrary to popular belief, it is the prerogative, not of mindlessness, but of an unremitting devotion to the act of perceiving reality, and of a scrupulous intellectual integrity. It is the reward of self-esteem.

(February 1964)

7.

Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?

by Ayn Rand

A compromise is an adjustment of conflicting claims by mutual concessions. This means that both parties to a compromise have some valid claim and some value to offer each other. And this means that both parties agree upon some fundamental principle which serves as a base for their deal.

It is only in regard to concretes or particulars, implementing a mutually accepted basic principle, that one may compromise. For instance, one may bargain with a buyer over the price one wants to receive for one’s product, and agree on a sum somewhere between one’s demand and his offer. The mutually accepted basic principle, in such case, is the principle of trade, namely: that the buyer must pay the seller for his product. But if one wanted to be paid and the alleged buyer wanted to obtain one’s product for nothing, no compromise, agreement or discussion would be possible, only the total surrender of one or the other.

There can be no compromise between a property owner and a burglar; offering the burglar a single teaspoon of one’s silverware would not be a compromise, but a total surrender—the recognition of his right to one’s property. What value or concession did the burglar offer in return? And once the principle of unilateral concessions is accepted as the base of a relationship by both parties, it is only a matter of time before the burglar would seize the rest. As an example of this process, observe the present foreign policy of the United States.

There can be no compromise between freedom and government controls; to accept “just a few controls” is to surrender the principle of inalienable individual rights and to substitute for it the principle of the government’s unlimited, arbitrary power, thus delivering oneself into gradual enslavement. As an example of this process, observe the present domestic policy of the United States.

There can be no compromise on basic principles or on fundamental issues. What would you regard as a “compromise” between life and death? Or between truth and falsehood? Or between reason and irrationality?

Today, however, when people speak of “compromise,” what they mean is not a legitimate mutual concession or a trade, but precisely the betrayal of one’s principles—the unilateral surrender to any groundless, irrational claim. The root of that doctrine is ethical subjectivism, which holds that a desire or a whim is an irreducible moral primary, that every man is entitled to any desire he might feel like asserting, that all desires have equal moral validity, and that the only way men can get along together is by giving in to anything and “compromising” with anyone. It is not hard to see who would profit and who would lose by such a doctrine.

The immorality of this doctrine—and the reason why the term “compromise” implies, in today’s general usage, an act of moral treason—lies in the fact that it requires men to accept ethical subjectivism as the basic principle superseding all principles in human relationships and to sacrifice anything as a concession to one another’s whims.

The question “Doesn’t life require compromise?” is usually asked by those who fail to differentiate between a basic principle and some concrete, specific wish. Accepting a lesser job than one had wanted is not a “compromise.” Taking orders from one’s employer on how to do the work for which one is hired, is not a “compromise.” Failing to have a cake after one has eaten it, is not a “compromise.”

Integrity does not consist of loyalty to one’s subjective whims, but of loyalty to rational principles. A “compromise” (in the unprincipled sense of that word) is not a breach of one’s comfort, but a breach of one’s convictions. A “compromise” does not consist of doing something one dislikes, but of doing something one knows to be evil. Accompanying one’s husband or wife to a concert, when one does not care for music, is not a “compromise”; surrendering to his or her irrational demands for social conformity, for pretended religious observance or for generosity toward boorish in-laws, is. Working for an employer who does not share one’s ideas, is not a “compromise”; pretending to share his ideas, is. Accepting a publisher’s suggestions to make changes in one’s manuscript, when one sees the rational validity of his suggestions, is not a “compromise”; making such changes in order to please him or to please “the public,” against one’s own judgment and standards, is.

The excuse, given in all such cases, is that the “compromise” is only temporary and that one will reclaim one’s integrity at some indeterminate future date. But one cannot correct a husband’s or wife’s irrationality by giving in to it and encouraging it to grow. One cannot achieve the victory of one’s ideas by helping to propagate their opposite. One cannot offer a literary masterpiece, “when one has become rich and famous,” to a following one has acquired by writing trash. If one found it difficult to maintain one’s loyalty to one’s own convictions at the start, a succession of betrayals—which helped to augment the power of the evil one lacked the courage to fight—will not make it easier at a later date, but will make it virtually impossible.

There can be no compromise on moral principles. “In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.” (Atlas Shrugged.) The next time you are tempted to ask: “Doesn’t life require compromise?” translate that question into its actual meaning: “Doesn’t life require the surrender of that which is true and good to that which is false and evil?” The answer is that that precisely is what life forbids—if one wishes to achieve anything but a stretch of tortured years spent in progressive self-destruction.

(July 1962)

8.

How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?

by Ayn Rand

I will confine my answer to a single, fundamental aspect of this question. I will name only one principle, the opposite of the idea which is so prevalent today and which is responsible for the spread of evil in the world. That principle is: One must never fail to pronounce moral judgment.

Nothing can corrupt and disintegrate a culture or a man’s character as thoroughly as does the precept of moral agnosticism, the idea that one must never pass moral judgment on others, that one must be morally tolerant of anything, that the good consists of never distinguishing good from evil.

It is obvious who profits and who loses by such a precept. It is not justice or equal treatment that you grant to men when you abstain equally from praising men’s virtues and from condemning men’s vices. When your impartial attitude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you—whom do you betray and whom do you encourage?

But to pronounce moral judgment is an enormous responsibility. To be a judge, one must possess an unimpeachable character; one need not be omniscient or infallible, and it is not an issue of errors of knowledge; one needs an un-breached integrity, that is, the absence of any indulgence in conscious, willful evil. Just as a judge in a court of law may err, when the evidence is inconclusive, but may not evade the evidence available, nor accept bribes, nor allow any personal feeling, emotion, desire or fear to obstruct his mind’s judgment of the facts of reality—so every rational person must maintain an equally strict and solemn integrity in the courtroom within his own mind, where the responsibility is more awesome than in a public tribunal, because he, the judge, is the only one to know when he has been impeached.

There is, however, a court of appeal from one’s judgments: objective reality. A judge puts himself on trial every time he pronounces a verdict. It is only in today’s reign of amoral cynicism, subjectivism and hooliganism that men may imagine themselves free to utter any sort of irrational judgment and to suffer no consequences. But, in fact, a man is to be judged by the judgments he pronounces. The things which he condemns or extols exist in objective reality and are open to the independent appraisal of others. It is his own moral character and standards that he reveals, when he blames or praises. If he condemns America and extols Soviet Russia—or if he attacks businessmen and defends juvenile delinquents—or if he denounces a great work of art and praises trash—it is the nature of his own soul that he confesses.

It is their fear of this responsibility that prompts most people to adopt an attitude of indiscriminate moral neutrality. It is the fear best expressed in the precept: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” But that precept, in fact, is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.

There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.

The moral principle to adopt in this issue, is: “Judge, and be prepared to be judged. ”

The opposite of moral neutrality is not a blind, arbitrary, self-righteous condemnation of any idea, action or person that does not fit one’s mood, one’s memorized slogans or one’s snap judgment of the moment. Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion. To declare that “everybody is white” or “everybody is black” or “everybody is neither white nor black, but gray,” is not a moral judgment, but an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment.

To judge means: to evaluate a given concrete by reference to an abstract principle or standard. It is not an easy task; it is not a task that can be performed automatically by one’s feelings, “instincts” or hunches. It is a task that requires the most precise, the most exacting, the most ruthlessly objective and rational process of thought. It is fairly easy to grasp abstract moral principles; it can be very difficult to apply them to a given situation, particularly when it involves the moral character of another person. When one pronounces moral judgment, whether in praise or in blame, one must be prepared to answer “Why?” and to prove one’s case—to oneself and to any rational inquirer.

The policy of always pronouncing moral judgment does not mean that one must regard oneself as a missionary charged with the responsibility of “saving everyone’s soul”—nor that one must give unsolicited moral appraisals to all those one meets. It means: (a) that one must know clearly, in full, verbally identified form, one’s own moral evaluation of every person, issue and event with which one deals, and act accordingly; (b) that one must make one’s moral evaluation known to others, when it is rationally appropriate to do so.

This last means that one need not launch into unprovoked moral denunciations or debates, but that one must speak up in situations where silence can objectively be taken to mean agreement with or sanction of evil. When one deals with irrational persons, where argument is futile, a mere “I don’t agree with you” is sufficient to negate any implication of moral sanction. When one deals with better people, a full statement of one’s views may be morally required. But in no case and in no situation may one permit one’s own values to be attacked or denounced, and keep silent.

Moral values are the motive power of a man’s actions. By pronouncing moral judgment, one protects the clarity of one’s own perception and the rationality of the course one chooses to pursue. It makes a difference whether one thinks that one is dealing with human errors of knowledge or with human evil.

Observe how many people evade, rationalize and drive their minds into a state of blind stupor, in dread of discovering that those they deal with—their “loved ones” or friends or business associates or political rulers—are not merely mistaken, but evil. Observe that this dread leads them to sanction, to help and to spread the very evil whose existence they fear to acknowledge.

If people did not indulge in such abject evasions as the claim that some contemptible liar “means well”—that a mooching bum “can’t help it”—that a juvenile delinquent “needs love”—that a criminal “doesn’t know any better”—that a power-seeking politician is moved by patriotic concern for “the public good”—that communists are merely “agrarian reformers”—the history of the past few decades, or centuries, would have been different.

Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible “noble purpose,” but to plain, naked human evil.

Observe also that moral neutrality necessitates a progressive sympathy for vice and a progressive antagonism to virtue. A man who struggles not to acknowledge that evil is evil, finds it increasingly dangerous to acknowledge that the good is the good. To him, a person of virtue is a threat that can topple all of his evasions—particularly when an issue of justice is involved, which demands that he take sides. It is then that such formulas as “Nobody is ever fully right or fully wrong” and “Who am I to judge?” take their lethal effect. The man who begins by saying: “There is some good in the worst of us,” goes on to say: “There is some bad in the best of us”—then: “There’s got to be some bad in the best of us”—and then: “It’s the best of us who make life difficult—why don’t they keep silent?—who are they to judge?”

And then, on some gray, middle-aged morning, such a man realizes suddenly that he has betrayed all the values he had loved in his distant spring, and wonders how it happened, and slams his mind shut to the answer, by telling himself hastily that the fear he had felt in his worst, most shameful moments was right and that values have no chance in this world.

An irrational society is a society of moral cowards—of men paralyzed by the loss of moral standards, principles and goals. But since men have to act, so long as they live, such a society is ready to be taken over by anyone willing to set its direction. The initiative can come from only two types of men: either from the man who is willing to assume the responsibility of asserting rational values—or from the thug who is not troubled by questions of responsibility.

No matter how hard the struggle, there is only one choice that a rational man can make in the face of such an alternative.

(April 1962)

9.

The Cult of Moral Grayness

by Ayn Rand

One of the most eloquent symptoms of the moral bankruptcy of today’s culture, is a certain fashionable attitude toward moral issues, best summarized as: “There are no blacks and whites, there are only grays.”

This is asserted in regard to persons, actions, principles of conduct, and morality in general. “Black and white,” in this context, means “good and evil.” (The reverse order used in that catch phrase is interesting psychologically.)

In any respect one cares to examine, that notion is full of contradictions (foremost among them is the fallacy of “the stolen concept”). If there is no black and white, there can be no gray—since gray is merely a mixture of the two.

Before one can identify anything as “gray,” one has to know what is black and what is white. In the field of morality, this means that one must first identify what is good and what is evil. And when a man has ascertained that one alternative is good and the other is evil, he has no justification for choosing a mixture. There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil. In morality, “black” is predominantly the result of attempting to pretend to oneself that one is merely “gray.”

If a moral code (such as altruism) is, in fact, impossible to practice, it is the code that must be condemned as “black,” not its victims evaluated as “gray.” If a moral code prescribes irreconcilable contradictions—so that by choosing the good in one respect, a man becomes evil in another—it is the code that must be rejected as “black.” If a moral code is inapplicable to reatity—if it offers no guidance except a series of arbitrary, groundless, out-of-context injunctions and commandments, to be accepted on faith and practiced automatically, as blind dogma—its practitioners cannot properly be classified as “white” or “black” or “gray”: a moral code that forbids and paralyzes moral judgment is a contradiction in terms.

If, in a complex moral issue, a man struggles to determine what is right, and fails or makes an honest error, he cannot be regarded as “gray”; morally, he is “white.” Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.

But if, in order to escape the responsibility of moral judgment, a man closes his eyes and mind, if he evades the facts of the issue and struggles not to know, he cannot be regarded as “gray”; morally, he is as “black” as they come.

Many forms of confusion, uncertainty and epistemological sloppiness help to obscure the contradictions and to disguise the actual meaning of the doctrine of moral grayness.

Some people believe that it is merely a restatement of such bromides as “Nobody is perfect in this world”—i.e., everybody is a mixture of good and evil, and, therefore, morally “gray.” Since the majority of those one meets are likely to fit that description, people accept it as some sort of natural fact, without further thought. They forget that morality deals only with issues open to man’s choice (i.e., to his free will)—and. therefore, that no statistical generalizations are valid in this matter.

If man is “gray” by nature, no moral concepts are applicable to him, including “grayness,” and no such thing as morality is possible. But if man has free will, then the fact that ten (or ten million) men made the wrong choice, does not necessitate that the eleventh one will make it; it necessitates nothing—and proves nothing—in regard to any given individual.

There are many reasons why most people are morally imperfect, i.e., hold mixed, contradictory premises and values (the altruist morality is one of the reasons), but that is a different issue. Regardless of the reasons of their choices, the fact that most people are morally “gray,” does not invalidate man’s need of morality and of moral “whiteness”; if anything, it makes the need more urgent. Nor does it warrant the epistemological “package deal” of dismissing the problem by consigning all men to moral “grayness” and thus refusing to recognize or to practice “whiteness.” Nor does it serve as an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment: unless one is prepared to dispense with morality altogether and to regard a petty chiseller and a murderer as morally equal, one still has to judge and evaluate the many shadings of “gray” that one may encounter in the characters of individual men. (And the only way to judge them is by a clearly defined criterion of “black” and “white.”)

A similar notion, involving similar errors, is held by some people who believe that the doctrine of moral grayness is merely a restatement of the proposition: “There are two sides to every issue,” which they take to mean that nobody is ever fully right or fully wrong. But that is not what that proposition means or implies. It implies only that in judging an issue, one should take cognizance of or give a hearing to both sides. This does not mean that the claims of both sides will necessarily be equally valid, nor even that there will be some modicum of justice on both sides. More often than not, justice will be on one side, and unwarranted presumption (or worse) on the other.

There are, of course, complex issues in which both sides are right in some respects and wrong in others—and it is here that the “package deal” of pronouncing both sides “gray” is least permissible. It is in such issues that the most rigorous precision of moral judgment is required to identify and evaluate the various aspects involved—which can be done only by unscrambling the mixed elements of “black” and “white.”

The basic error in all these various confusions is the same: it consists of forgetting that morality deals only with issues open to man’s choice—which means: forgetting the difference between “unable” and “unwilling.” This permits people to translate the catch phrase “There are no blacks and whites” into: “Men are unable to be wholly good or wholly evil”—which they accept, in foggy resignation, without questioning the metaphysical contradictions it entails.

But not many people would accept it, if that catch phrase were translated into the actual meaning it is intended to smuggle into their minds: “Men are unwilling to be wholly good or wholly evil.”

The first thing one would say to any advocate of such a proposition, is: “Speak for yourself, brother!” And that, in effect, is what he is actually doing; consciously or subconsciously, intentionally or inadvertently, when a man declares: “There are no blacks and whites,” he is making a psychological confession, and what he means is: “I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don’t regard me as wholly evil!”

Just as, in epistemology, the cult of uncertainty is a revolt against reason—so, in ethics, the cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values. Both are a revolt against the absolutism of reality.

Just as the cult of uncertainty could not succeed by an open rebellion against reason and, therefore, struggles to elevate the negation of reason into some sort of superior reasoning—so the cult of moral grayness could not succeed by an open rebellion against morality, and struggles to elevate the negation of morality into a superior kind of virtue.

Observe the form in which one encounters that doctrine: it is seldom presented as a positive, as an ethical theory or a subject of discussion; predominantly, one hears it as a negative, as a snap objection or reproach, uttered in a manner implying that one is guilty of breaching an absolute so self-evident as to require no discussion. In tones ranging from astonishment to sarcasm to anger to indignation to hysterical hatred, the doctrine is thrown at you in the form of an accusatory: “Surely you don’t think in terms of black-and-white, do you?”

Prompted by confusion, helplessness and fear of the entire subject of morality, most people hasten to answer guiltily: “No, of course, I don’t,” without any clear idea of the nature of the accusation. They do not pause to grasp that that accusation is saying, in effect: “Surely you are not so unfair as to discriminate between good and evil, are you?”—or: “Surely you are not so evil as to seek the good, are you?”—or: “Surely you are not so immoral as to believe in morality!”

Moral guilt, fear of moral judgment, and a plea for blanket forgiveness, are so obviously the motive of that catch phrase that a glance at reality would be sufficient to tell its proponents what an ugly confession they are uttering. But escape from reality is both the precondition and the goal of the cult of moral grayness.

Philosophically, that cult is a negation of morality—but, psychologically, this is not its adherents’ goal. What they seek is not amorality, but something more profoundly irrational a nonabsolute, fluid, elastic, middle-of-the-road morality. They do not proclaim themselves “beyond good and evil”—they seek to preserve the “advantages” of both. They are not moral challengers, nor do they represent a medieval version of flamboyant evil worshipers. What gives them their peculiarly modern flavor is that they do not advocate selling one’s soul to the Devil; they advocate selling it piecemeal, bit by bit, to any retail bidder.

They are not a philosophical school of thought; they are the typical product of philosophical default—of the intellectual bankruptcy that has produced irrationalism in epistemology, a moral vacuum in ethics, and a mixed economy in politics. A mixed economy is an amoral war of pressure groups, devoid of principles, values or any reference to justice, a war whose ultimate weapon is the power of brute force, but whose outward form is a game of compromise. The cult of moral grayness is the ersatz morality which made it possible and to which men now cling in a panicky attempt to justify it.

Observe that their dominant overtone is not a quest for the “white,” but an obsessive terror of being branded “black” (and with good reason). Observe that they are pleading for a morality which would hold compromise as its standard of value and would thus make it possible to gauge virtue by the number of values one is willing to betray.

The consequences and the “vested interests” of their doctrine are visible all around us.

Observe, in politics, that the term extremism has become a synonym of “evil,” regardless of the content of the issue (the evil is not what you are “extreme” about, but that you are “extreme”—i.e., consistent). Observe the phenomenon of the so-called neutralists in the United Nations: the “neutralists” are worse than merely neutral in the conflict between the United States and Soviet Russia; they are committed, on principle, to see no difference between the two sides, never to consider the merits of an issue, and always to seek a compromise, any compromise in any conflict—as, for instance, between an aggressor and an invaded country.

Observe, in literature, the emergence of a thing called anti-hero, whose distinction is that he possesses no distinction—no virtues, no values, no goals, no character, no significance—yet who occupies, in plays and novels, the position formerly held by a hero, with the story centered on his actions, even though he does nothing and gets nowhere. Observe that the term “good guys and bad guys” is used as a sneer—and, particularly in television, observe the revolt against happy endings, the demands that the “bad guys” be given an equal chance and an equal number of victories.

Like a mixed economy, men of mixed premises may be called “gray”; but, in both cases, the mixture does not remain “gray” for long. “Gray,” in this context, is merely a prelude to “black.” There may be “gray” men, but there can be no “gray” moral principles. Morality is a code of black and white. When and if men attempt a compromise, it is obvious which side will necessarily lose and which will necessarily profit.

Such are the reasons why—when one is asked: “Surely you don’t think in terms of black-and-white, do you?”—the proper answer (in essence, if not in form) should be: “You’re damn right I do!”

(June 1964)

10.

Collectivized Ethics

by Ayn Rand

Certain questions, which one frequently hears, are not philosophical queries, but psychological confessions. This is particularly true in the field of ethics. It is especially in discussions of ethics that one must check one’s premises (or remember them), and more: one must learn to check the premises of one’s adversaries.

For instance, Objectivists will often hear a question such as: “What will be done about the poor or the handicapped in a free society?”

The altruist-collectivist premise, implicit in that question, is that men are “their brothers’ keepers” and that the misfortune of some is a mortgage on others. The questioner is ignoring or evading the basic premises of Objectivist ethics and is attempting to switch the discussion onto his own collectivist base. Observe that he does not ask: “Should anything be done?” but: “What will be done?”—as if the collectivist premise had been tacitly accepted and all that remains is a discussion of the means to implement it.

Once, when Barbara Branden was asked by a student: “What will happen to the poor in an Objectivist society?”—she answered: “If you want to help them, you will not be stopped.”

This is the essence of the whole issue and a perfect example of how one refuses to accept an adversary’s premises as the basis of discussion.

Only individual men have the right to decide when or whether they wish to help others; society—as an organized political system—has no rights in the matter at all.

On the question of when and under what conditions it is morally proper for an individual to help others, I refer you to Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged. What concerns us here is the collectivist premise of regarding this issue as political, as the problem or duty of “society as a whole.”

Since nature does not guarantee automatic security, success and survival to any human being, it is only the dictatorial presumptuousness and the moral cannibalism of the altruist-collectivist code that permits a man to suppose (or idly to daydream) that he can somehow guarantee such security to some men at the expense of others.

If a man speculates on what “society” should do for the poor, he accepts thereby the collectivist premise that men’s lives belong to society and that he, as a member of society, has the right to dispose of them, to set their goals or to plan the “distribution” of their efforts.

This is the psychological confession implied in such questions and in many issues of the same kind.

At best, it reveals a man’s psycho-epistemological chaos; it reveals a fallacy which may be termed “the fallacy of the frozen abstraction” and which consists of substituting some one particular concrete for the wider abstract class to which it belongs—in this case, substituting a specific ethics (altruism) for the wider abstraction of “ethics.” Thus, a man may reject the theory of altruism and assert that he has accepted a rational code—but, failing to integrate his ideas, he continues unthinkingly to approach ethical questions in terms established by altruism.

More often, however, that psychological confession reveals a deeper evil: it reveals the enormity of the extent to which altruism erodes men’s capacity to grasp the concept of rights or the value of an individual life; it reveals a mind from which the reality of a human being has been wiped out.

Humility and presumptuousness are always two sides of the same premise, and always share the task of filling the space vacated by self-esteem in a collectivized mentality. The man who is willing to serve as the means to the ends of others, will necessarily regard others as the means to his ends. The more neurotic he is or the more conscientious in the practice of altruism (and these two aspects of his psychology will act reciprocally to reinforce each other), the more he will tend to devise schemes “for the good of mankind” or of “society” or of “the public” or of “future generations” —or of anything except actual human beings.

Hence the appalling recklessness with which men propose, discuss and accept “humanitarian” projects which are to be imposed by political means, that is, by force, on an unlimited number of human beings. If, according to collectivist caricatures, the greedy rich indulged in profligate material luxury, on the premise of “price no object”—then the social progress brought by today’s collectivized mentalities consists of indulging in altruistic political planning, on the premise of “human lives no object.”

The hallmark of such mentalities is the advocacy of some grand scale public goal, without regard to context, costs or means. Out of context, such a goal can usually be shown to be desirable; it has to be public, because the costs are not to be earned, but to be expropriated; and a dense patch of venomous fog has to shroud the issue of means—because the means are to be human lives.

“Medicare” is an example of such a project. “Isn’t it desirable that the aged should have medical care in times of illness?” its advocates clamor. Considered out of context, the answer would be: yes, it is desirable. Who would have a reason to say no? And it is at this point that the mental processes of a collectivized brain are cut off; the rest is fog. Only the desire remains in his sight—it’s the good, isn’t it?—it’s not for myself, it’s for others, it’s for the public, for a helpless, ailing public ... The fog hides such facts as the enslavement and, therefore, the destruction of medical science, the regimentation and disintegration of all medical practice, and the sacrifice of the professional integrity, the freedom, the careers, the ambitions, the achievements, the happiness, the lives of the very men who are to provide that “desirable” goal—the doctors.

After centuries of civilization, most men—with the exception of criminals—have learned that the above mental attitude is neither practical nor moral in their private lives and may not be applied to the achievement of their private goals. There would be no controversy about the moral character of some young hoodlum who declared: “Isn’t it desirable to have a yacht, to live in a penthouse and to drink champagne?”—and stubbornly refused to consider the fact that he had robbed a bank and killed two guards to achieve that “desirable” goal.

There is no moral difference between these two examples; the number of beneficiaries does not change the nature of the action, it merely increases the number of victims. In fact, the private hoodlum has a slight edge of moral superiority: he has no power to devastate an entire nation and his victims are not legally disarmed.

It is men’s views of their public or political existence that the collectivized ethics of altruism has protected from the march of civilization and has preserved as a reservoir, a wildlife sanctuary, ruled by the mores of prehistorical savagery. If men have grasped some faint glimmer of respect for individual rights in their private dealings with one another, that glimmer vanishes when they turn to public issues—and what leaps into the political arena is a caveman who can’t conceive of any reason why the tribe may not bash in the skull of any individual if it so desires.

The distinguishing characteristic of such tribal mentality is: the axiomatic, the almost “instinctive” view of human life as the fodder, fuel or means for any public project.

The examples of such projects are innumerable: “Isn’t it desirable to clean up the slums?” (dropping the context of what happens to those in the next income bracket)—“Isn’t it desirable to have beautiful, planned cities, all of one harmonious style?” (dropping the context of whose choice of style is to be forced on the home builders)—“Isn’t it desirable to have an educated public?” (dropping the context of who will do the educating, what will be taught, and what will happen to dissenters)—“Isn’t it desirable to liberate the artists, the writers, the composers from the burden of financial problems and leave them free to create?” (dropping the context of such questions as: which artists, writers and composers?—chosen by whom?—at whose expense?—at the expense of the artists, writers and composers who have no political pull and whose miserably precarious incomes will be taxed to “liberate” that privileged elite?)—“Isn’t science desirable? Isn’t it desirable for man to conquer space?”

And here we come to the essence of the unreality—the savage, blind, ghastly, bloody unreality—that motivates a collectivized soul.

The unanswered and unanswerable question in all of their “desirable” goals is: To whom? Desires and goals presuppose beneficiaries. Is science desirable? To whom? Not to the Soviet serfs who die of epidemics, filth, starvation, terror and firing squads—while some bright young men wave to them from space capsules circling over their human pig-sties. And not to the American father who died of heart failure brought on by overwork, struggling to send his son through coUege—or to the boy who could not afford college—or to the couple killed in an automobile wreck, because they could not afford a new car—or to the mother who lost her child because she could not afford to send him to the best hospital—not to any of those people whose taxes pay for the support of our subsidized science and public research projects.

Science is a value only because it expands, enriches and protects man’s life. It is not a value outside that context. Nothing is a value outside that context. And “man’s life” means the single, specific, irreplaceable lives of individual men.

The discovery of new knowledge is a value to men only when and if they are free to use and enjoy the benefits of the previously known. New discoveries are a potential value to all men, but not at the price of sacrificing all of their actual values. A “progress” extended into infinity, which brings no benefit to anyone, is a monstrous absurdity. And so is the “conquest of space” by some men, when and if it is accomplished by expropriating the labor of other men who are left without means to acquire a pair of shoes.

Progress can come only out of men’s surplus, that is: from the work of those men whose ability produces more than their personal consumption requires, those who are intellectually and financially able to venture out in pursuit of the new. Capitalism is the only system where such men are free to function and where progress is accompanied, not by forced privations, but by a constant rise in the general level of prosperity, of consumption and of enjoyment of life.

It is only to the frozen unreality inside a collectivized brain that human lives are interchangeable—and only such a brain can contemplate as “moral” or “desirable” the sacrifice of generations of living men for the alleged benefits which public science or public industry or public concerts will bring to the unborn.

Soviet Russia is the clearest, but not the only, illustration of the achievements of collectivized mentalities. Two generations of Russians have lived, toiled and died in misery, waiting for the abundance promised by their rulers, who pleaded for patience and commanded austerity, while building public “industrialization” and killing public hope in five-year installments. At first, the people starved while waiting for electric generators and tractors; they are still starving, while waiting for atomic energy and interplanetary travel.

That waiting has no end—the unborn profiteers of that wholesale sacrificial slaughter will never be bom—the sacrificial animals will merely breed new hordes of sacrificial animals—as the history of all tyrannies has demonstrated—while the unfocused eyes of a collectivized brain will stare on, undeterred, and speak of a vision of service to mankind, mixing interchangeably the corpses of the present with the ghosts of the future, but seeing no men.

Such is the status of reality in the soul of any Milquetoast who looks with envy at the achievements of industrialists and dreams of what beautiful public parks he could create if only everyone’s lives, efforts and resources were turned over to him.

All public projects are mausoleums, not always in shape, but always in cost.

The next time you encounter one of those “public-spirited” dreamers who tells you rancorously that “some very desirable goals cannot be achieved without everybody’s participation,” tell him that if he cannot obtain everybody’s voluntary participation, his goals had jolly well better remain un-achieved—and that men’s lives are not his to dispose of.

And, if you wish, give him the following example of the ideals he advocates. It is medically possible to take the corneas of a man’s eyes immediately after his death and transplant them to the eyes of a living man who is blind, thus restoring his sight (in certain types of blindness). Now, according to collectivized ethics, this poses a social problem. Should we wait until a man’s death to cut out his eyes, when other men need them? Should we regard everybody’s eyes as public property and devise a “fair method of distribution”? Would you advocate cutting out a living man’s eye and giving it to a blind man, so as to “equalize” them? No? Then don’t struggle any further with questions about “public projects” in a free society. You know the answer. The principle is the same.

(January 1963)

11.

The Monument Builders

by Ayn Rand

What had once been an alleged ideal is now a ragged skeleton rattling like a scarecrow in the wind over the whole world, but men lack the courage to glance up and to discover the grinning skull under the bloody rags. That skeleton is socialism.

Fifty years ago, there might have been some excuse (though not justification) for the widespread belief that socialism is a political theory motivated by benevolence and aimed at the achievement of men’s well-being. Today, that belief can no longer be regarded as an innocent error. Socialism has been tried on every continent of the globe. In the light of its results, it is time to question the motives of socialism’s advocates.

The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights; under socialism, the right to property (which is the right of use and disposal) is vested in “society as a whole,” i.e., in the collective, with production and distribution controlled by the state, i.e., by the government.

Socialism may be established by force, as in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—or by vote, as in Nazi (National Socialist) Germany. The degree of socialization may be total, as in Russia—or partial, as in England. Theoretically, the differences are superficial; practically, they are only a matter of time. The basic principle, in all cases, is the same.

The alleged goals of socialism were: the abolition of poverty, the achievement of general prosperity, progress, peace and human brotherhood. The results have been a terrifying failure—terrifying, that is, if one’s motive is men’s welfare.

Instead of prosperity, socialism has brought economic paralysis and/or collapse to every country that tried it. The degree of socialization has been the degree of disaster. The consequences have varied accordingly.

England, once the freest and proudest nation of Europe, has been reduced to the status of a second-rate power and is perishing slowly from hemophilia, losing the best of her economic blood: the middle class and the professions. The able, competent, productive, independent men are leaving by the thousands, migrating to Canada or the United States, in search of freedom. They are escaping from the reign of mediocrity, from the mawkish poorhouse where, having sold their rights in exchange for free dentures, the inmates are now whining that they’d rather be Red than dead.

In more fully socialized countries, famine was the start, the insignia announcing socialist rule—as in Soviet Russia, as in Red China, as in Cuba. In those countries, socialism reduced the people to the unspeakable poverty of the pre-industrial ages, to literal starvation, and has kept them on a stagnant level of misery.

No, it is not “just temporary,” as socialism’s apologists have been saying—for half a century. After forty-five years of government planning, Russia is still unable to solve the problem of feeding her population.

As far as superior productivity and speed of economic progress are concerned, the question of any comparisons between capitalism and socialism has been answered once and for all—for any honest person—by the present difference between West and East Berlin.

Instead of peace, socialism has introduced a new kind of gruesome lunacy into international relations—the “cold war,” which is a state of chronic war with undeclared periods of peace between wantonly sudden invasions—with Russia seizing one-third of the globe, with socialist tribes and nations at one another’s throats, with socialist India invading Goa, and communist China invading socialist India.

An eloquent sign of the moral corruption of our age is the callous complacency with which most of the socialists and their sympathizers, the “liberals,” regard the atrocities perpetrated in socialistic countries and accept rule by terror as a way of life—while posturing as advocates of “human brotherhood.” In the 1930’s, they did protest against the atrocities of Nazi Germany. But, apparently, it was not an issue of principle, but only the protest of a rival gang fighting for the same territory—because we do not hear their voices any longer.

In the name of “humanity,” they condone and accept the following: the abolition of all freedom and all rights, the expropriation of all property, executions without trial, torture chambers, slave-labor camps, the mass slaughter of countless millions in Soviet Russia—and the bloody horror of East Berlin, including the bullet-riddled bodies of fleeing children.

When one observes the nightmare of the desperate efforts made by hundreds of thousands of people struggling to escape from the socialized countries of Europe, to escape over barbed-wire fences, under machine-gun fire—one can no longer believe that socialism, in any of its forms, is motivated by benevolence and by the desire to achieve men’s welfare.

No man of authentic benevolence could evade or ignore so great a horror on so vast a scale.

Socialism is not a movement of the people. It is a movement of the intellectuals, originated, led and controlled by the intellectuals, carried by them out of their stuffy ivory towers into those bloody fields of practice where they unite with their allies and executors: the thugs.

What, then, is the motive of such intellectuals? Power-lust. Power-lust—as a manifestation of helplessness, of self-loathing and of the desire for the unearned.

The desire for the unearned has two aspects: the unearned in matter and the unearned in spirit. (By “spirit” I mean: man’s consciousness.) These two aspects are necessarily inter-related, but a man’s desire may be focused predominantly on one or the other. The desire for the unearned in spirit is the more destructive of the two and the more corrupt. It is a desire for unearned greatness; it is expressed (but not defined) by the foggy murk of the term “prestige. ”

The seekers of unearned material benefits are merely financial parasites, moochers, looters or criminals, who are too limited in number and in mind to be a threat to civilization, until and unless they are released and legalized by the seekers of unearned greatness.

Unearned greatness is so unreal, so neurotic a concept that the wretch who seeks it cannot identify it even to himself: to identify it, is to make it impossible. He needs the irrational, undefinable slogans of altruism and collectivism to give a semiplausible form to his nameless urge and anchor it to reality—to support his own self-deception more than to deceive his victims. “The public,” “the public interest,” “service to the public” are the means, the tools, the swinging pendulums of the power-luster’s self-hypnosis.

Since there is no such entity as “the public,” since the public is merely a number of individuals, any claimed or implied conflict of “the public interest” with private interests means that the interests of some men are to be sacrificed to the interests and wishes of others. Since the concept is so conveniently undefinable, its use rests only on any given gang’s ability to proclaim that “The public, c’est moi”—and to maintain the claim at the point of a gun.

No such claim has ever been or can ever be maintained without the help of a gun—that is, without physical force. But, on the other hand, without that claim, gunmen would remain where they belong: in the underworld, and would not rise to the councils of state to rule the destinies of nations.

There are two ways of claiming that “The public, c’est moi”: one is practiced by the crude material parasite who clamors for government handouts in the name of a “public” need and pockets what he has not earned; the other is practiced by his leader, the spiritual parasite, who derives his illusion of “greatness”—like a fence receiving stolen goods—from the power to dispose of that which he has not earned and from the mystic view of himself as the embodied voice of “the public.”

Of the two, the material parasite is psychologically healthier and closer to reality: at least, he eats or wears his loot. But the only source of satisfaction open to the spiritual parasite, his only means to gain “prestige” (apart from giving orders and spreading terror), is the most wasteful, useless and meaningless activity of all: the building of public monuments.

Greatness is achieved by the productive effort of a man’s mind in the pursuit of clearly defined, rational goals. But a delusion of grandeur can be served only by the switching, undefinable chimera of a public monument—which is presented as a munificent gift to the victims whose forced labor or extorted money had paid for it—which is dedicated to the service of all and none, owned by all and none, gaped at by all and enjoyed by none.

This is the ruler’s only way to appease his obsession: “prestige.” Prestige—in whose eyes? In anyone’s. In the eyes of his tortured victims, of the beggars in the streets of his kingdom, of the bootlickers at his court, of the foreign tribes and their rulers beyond the borders. It is to impress all those eyes—the eyes of everyone and no one—that the blood of generations of subjects has been spilled and spent.

One may see, in certain biblical movies, a graphic image of the meaning of public monument building: the building of the pyramids. Hordes of starved, ragged, emaciated men straining the last effort of their inadequate muscles at the inhuman task of pulling the ropes that drag large chunks of stone, straining like tortured beasts of burden under the whips of overseers, collapsing on the job and dying in the desert sands—that a dead Pharaoh might lie in an imposingly senseless structure and thus gain eternal “prestige” in the eyes of the unborn of future generations.

Temples and palaces are the only monuments left of mankind’s early civilizations. They were created by the same means and at the same price—a price not justified by the fact that primitive peoples undoubtedly believed, while dying of starvation and exhaustion, that the “prestige” of their tribe, their rulers or their gods was of value to them somehow.

Rome fell, bankrupted by statist controls and taxation, while its emperors were building coliseums. Louis XIV of France taxed his people into a state of indigence, while he built the palace of Versailles, for his contemporary monarchs to envy and for modern tourists to visit. The marble-lined Moscow subway, built by the unpaid “volunteer” labor of Russian workers, including women, is a public monument, and so is the Czarist-like luxury of the champagne-and-caviar receptions at the Soviet embassies, which is needed—while the people stand in line for inadequate food rations—to “maintain the prestige of the Soviet Union.”

The great distinction of the United States of America, up to the last few decades, was the modesty of its public monuments. Such monuments as did exist were genuine: they were not erected for “prestige,” but were functional structures that had housed events of great historical importance. If you have seen the austere simplicity of Independence Hall, you have seen the difference between authentic grandeur and the pyramids of “public-spirited” prestige-seekers.

In America, human effort and material resources were not expropriated for public monuments and public projects, but were spent on the progress of the private, personal, individual well-being of individual citizens. America’s greatness lies in the fact that her actual monuments are not public.

The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach. But America’s skyscrapers were not built by public funds nor for a public purpose: they were built by the energy, initiative and wealth of private individuals for personal profit. And, instead of impoverishing the people, these skyscrapers, as they rose higher and higher, kept raising the people’s standard of living—including the inhabitants of the slums, who lead a life of luxury compared to the life of an ancient Egyptian slave or of a modem Soviet Socialist worker.

Such is the difference—both in theory and practice—be—tween capitalism and socialism.

It is impossible to compute the human suffering, degradation, deprivation and horror that went to pay for a single, much-touted skyscraper of Moscow, or for the Soviet factories or mines or dams, or for any part of their loot-and-blood-supported “industrialization.” What we do know, however, is that forty-five years is a long time: it is the span of two generations; we do know that, in the name of a promised abundance, two generations of human beings have lived and died in subhuman poverty; and we do know that today’s advocates of socialism are not deterred by a fact of this kind.

Whatever motive they might assert, benevolence is one they have long since lost the right to claim.

The ideology of socialization (in a neo-fascist form) is now floating, by default, through the vacuum of our intellectual and cultural atmosphere. Observe how often we are asked for undefined “sacrifices” to unspecified purposes. Observe how often the present administration is invoking “the public interest.” Observe what prominence the issue of international prestige has suddenly acquired and what grotesquely suicidal policies are justified by references to matters of “prestige.” Observe that during the recent Cuban crisis—when the factual issue concerned nuclear missiles and nuclear war—our diplomats and commentators found it proper seriously to weigh such things as the “prestige,” the personal feelings and the “face-saving” of the sundry socialist rulers involved.

There is no difference between the principles, policies and practical results of socialism—and those of any historical or prehistorical tyranny. Socialism is merely democratic absolute monarchy—that is, a system of absolutism without a fixed head, open to seizure of power by all comers, by any ruthless climber, opportunist, adventurer, demagogue or thug.

When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.” No human rights can exist without property rights. Since material goods are produced by the mind and effort of individual men, and are needed to sustain their lives, if the producer does not own the result of his effort, he does not own his life. To deny property rights means to turn men into property owned by the state. Whoever claims the “right” to “redistribute” the wealth produced by others is claiming the “right” to treat human beings as chattel.

When you consider the global devastation perpetrated by socialism, the sea of blood and the millions of victims, remember that they were sacrificed, not for “the good of mankind” nor for any “noble ideal,” but for the festering vanity of some scared brute or some pretentious mediocrity who craved a mantle of unearned “greatness”—and that the monument to socialism is a pyramid of public factories, public theaters and public parks, erected on a foundation of human corpses, with the figure of the ruler posturing on top, beating his chest and screaming his plea for “prestige” to the starless void above him.

(December 1962)

12.

Man’s Rights

by Ayn Rand

If one wishes to advocate a free society—that is, capitalism—one must realize that its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights. If one wishes to uphold individual rights, one must realize that capitalism is the only system that can uphold and protect them. And if one wishes to gauge the relationship of freedom to the goals of today’s intellectuals, one may gauge it by the fact that the concept of individual rights is evaded, distorted, perverted and seldom discussed, most conspicuously seldom by the so-called “conservatives.”

“Rights” are a moral concept—the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others—the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context—the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

Every political system is based on some code of ethics. The dominant ethics of mankind’s history were variants of the altruist-collectivist doctrine which subordinated the individual to some higher authority, either mystical or social. Consequently, most political systems were variants of the same statist tyranny, differing only in degree, not in basic principle, limited only by the accidents of tradition, of chaos, of bloody strife and periodic collapse. Under all such systems, morality was a code applicable to the individual, but not to society. Society was placed outside the moral law, as its embodiment or source or exclusive interpreter—and the inculcation of self-sacrificial devotion to social duty was regarded as the main purpose of ethics in man’s earthly existence.

Since there is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men, this meant, in practice, that the rulers of society were exempt from moral law; subject only to traditional rituals, they held total power and exacted blind obedience—on the implicit principle of: “The good is that which is good for society (or for the tribe, the race, the nation), and the ruler’s edicts are its voice on earth.”

This was true of all statist systems, under all variants of the altruist-collectivist ethics, mystical or social. “The Divine Right of Kings” summarizes the political theory of the first—“Vox populi, vox dei” of the second. As witness: the theocracy of Egypt, with the Pharaoh as an embodied god—the unlimited majority rule or democracy of Athens—the welfare state run by the Emperors of Rome—the Inquisition of the late Middle Ages—the absolute monarchy of France—the welfare state of Bismarck’s Prussia—the gas chambers of Nazi Germany—the slaughterhouse of the Soviet Union.

All these political systems were expressions of the altruist-collectivist ethics—and their common characteristic is the fact that society stood above the moral law, as an omnipotent, sovereign whim worshiper. Thus, politically, all these systems were variants of an amoral society.

The most profoundly revolutionary achievement of the United States of America was the subordination of society to moral law.

The principle of man’s individual rights represented the extension of morality into the social system—as a limitation on the power of the state, as man’s protection against the brute force of the collective, as the subordination of might to right. The United States was the first moral society in history.

All previous systems had regarded man as a sacrificial means to the ends of others, and society as an end in itself. The United States regarded man as an end in himself, and society as a means to the peaceful, orderly, voluntary co-existence of individuals. All previous systems had held that man’s life belongs to society, that society can dispose of him in any way it pleases, and that any freedom he enjoys is his only by favor, by the permission of society, which may be revoked at any time. The United States held that man’s life is his by right (which means: by moral principle and by his nature), that a right is the property of an individual, that society as such has no rights, and that the only moral purpose of a government is the protection of individual rights.

A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)

The concept of a “right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.

Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive—of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.

The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.

The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day. In accordance with the two theories of ethics, the mystical or the social, some men assert that rights are a gift of God—others, that rights are a gift of society. But, in fact, the source of rights is man’s nature.

The Declaration of Independence stated that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Whether one believes that man is the product of a Creator or of nature, the issue of man’s origin does not alter the fact that he is an entity of a specific kind—a rational being—that he cannot function successfully under coercion, and that rights are a necessary condition of his particular mode of survival.

“The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational.” (Atlas Shrugged.)

To violate man’s rights means to compel him to act against his own judgment, or to expropriate his values. Basically, there is only one way to do it: by the use of physical force. There are two potential violators of man’s rights: the criminals and the government. The great achievement of the United States was to draw a distinction between these two—by forbidding to the second the legalized version of the activities of the first.

The Declaration of Independence laid down the principle that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.” This provided the only valid justification of a government and defined its only proper purpose: to protect man’s rights by protecting him from physical violence.

Thus the government’s function was changed from the role of ruler to the role of servant. The government was set to protect man from criminals—and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed against private citizens, but against the government—as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power.

The result was the pattern of a civilized society which—for the brief span of some hundred and fifty years—America came close to achieving. A civilized society is one in which physical force is banned from human relationships—in which the government, acting as a policeman, may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.

This was the essential meaning and intent of America’s political philosophy, implicit in the principle of individual rights. But it was not formulated explicitly, nor fully accepted nor consistently practiced.

America’s inner contradiction was the altruist-collectivist ethics. Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights. One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal.

It was the concept of individual rights that had given birth to a free society. It was with the destruction of individual rights that the destruction of freedom had to begin.

A collectivist tyranny dare not enslave a country by an outright confiscation of its values, material or moral. It has to be done by a process of internal corruption. Just as in the material realm the plundering of a country’s wealth is accomplished by inflating the currency—so today one may witness the process of inflation being applied to the realm of rights. The process entails such a growth of newly promulgated “rights” that people do not notice the fact that the meaning of the concept is being reversed. Just as bad money drives out good money, so these “printing-press rights” negate authentic rights.

Consider the curious fact that never has there been such a proliferation, all over the world, of two contradictory phenomena: of alleged new “rights” and of slave-labor camps.

The “gimmick” was the switch of the concept of rights from the political to the economic realm.

The Democratic Party platform of 1960 summarizes the switch boldly and explicitly. It declares that a Democratic Administration “will reaffirm the economic bill of rights which Franklin Roosevelt wrote into our national conscience sixteen years ago.”

Bear clearly in mind the meaning of the concept of “rights” when you read the list which that platform offers:

“1. The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.

“2. The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.

“3. The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.

“4. The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home and abroad.

“5. The right of every family to a decent home.

“6. The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.

“7. The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accidents and unemployment.

“8. The right to a good education.”

A single question added to each of the above eight clauses would make the issue clear: At whose expense?

Jobs, food, clothing, recreation (!), homes, medical care, education, etc., do not grow in nature. These are man-made values—goods and services produced by men. Who is to provide them?

If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.

Any alleged “right” of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.

No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as “the right to enslave. ”

A right does not include the material implementation of that right by other men; it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one’s own effort.

Observe, in this context, the intellectual precision of the Founding Fathers: they spoke of the right to the pursuit of happiness—not of the right to happiness. It means that a man has the right to take the actions he deems necessary to achieve his happiness; it does not mean that others must make him happy.

The right to life means that a man has the right to support his life by his own work (on any economic level, as high as his ability will carry him); it does not mean that others must provide him with the necessities of life.

The right to property means that a man has the right to take the economic actions necessary to earn property, to use it and to dispose of it; it does not mean that others must provide him with property.

The right of free speech means that a man has the right to express his ideas without danger of suppression, interference or punitive action by the government. It does not mean that others must provide him with a lecture hall, a radio station or a printing press through which to express his ideas.

Any undertaking that involves more than one man, requires the voluntary consent of every participant. Every one of them has the right to make his own decision, but none has the right to force his decision on the others.

There is no such thing as “a right to a job”—there is only the right of free trade, that is: a man’s right to take a job if another man chooses to hire him. There is no “right to a home,” only the right of free trade: the right to build a home or to buy it. There are no “rights to a ‘fair’ wage or a ‘fair’ price” if no one chooses to pay it, to hire a man or to buy his product. There are no “rights of consumers” to milk, shoes, movies or champagne if no producers choose to manufacture such items (there is only the right to manufacture them oneself). There are no “rights” of special groups, there are no “rights of farmers, of workers, of businessmen, of employees, of employers, of the old, of the young, of the unborn.” There are only the Rights of Man— rights possessed by every individual man and by all men as individuals.

Property rights and the right of free trade are man’s only “economic rights” (they are, in fact, political rights)—and there can be no such thing as “an economic bill of rights.” But observe that the advocates of the latter have all but destroyed the former.

Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man’s freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men. Private citizens are not a threat to one another’s rights or freedom. A private citizen who resorts to physical force and violates the rights of others is a criminal—and men have legal protection against him.

Criminals are a small minority in any age or country. And the harm they have done to mankind is infinitesimal when compared to the horrors—the bloodshed, the wars, the persecutions, the confiscations, the famines, the enslavements, the wholesale destructions—perpetrated by mankind’s governments. Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights, a government is men’s deadliest enemy. It is not as protection against private actions, but against governmental actions that the Bill of Rights was written.

Now observe the process by which that protection is being destroyed.

The process consists of ascribing to private citizens the specific violations constitutionally forbidden to the government (which private citizens have no power to commit) and thus freeing the government from all restrictions. The switch is becoming progressively more obvious in the field of free speech. For years, the collectivists have been propagating the notion that a private individual’s refusal to finance an opponent is a violation of the opponent’s right of free speech and an act of “censorship.”

It is “censorship,” they claim, if a newspaper refuses to employ or publish writers whose ideas are diametrically opposed to its policy.

It is “censorship,” they claim, if businessmen refuse to advertise in a magazine that denounces, insults and smears them.

It is “censorship,” they claim, if a TV sponsor objects to some outrage perpetrated on a program he is financing—such as the incident of Alger Hiss being invited to denounce former Vice-President Nixon.

And then there is Newton N. Minow who declares: “There is censorship by ratings, by advertisers, by networks, by affiliates which reject programming offered to their areas.” It is the same Mr. Minow who threatens to revoke the license of any station that does not comply with his views on programming—and who claims that that is not censorship.

Consider the implications of such a trend.

“Censorship” is a term pertaining only to governmental action. No private action is censorship. No private individual or agency can silence a man or suppress a publication; only the government can do so. The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right not to agree, not to listen and not to finance one’s own antagonists.

But according to such doctrines as the “economic bill of rights,” an individual has no right to dispose of his own material means by the guidance of his own convictions—and must hand over his money indiscriminately to any speakers or propagandists, who have a “right” to his property.

This means that the ability to provide the material tools for the expression of ideas deprives a man of the right to hold any ideas. It means that a publisher has to publish books he considers worthless, false or evil—that a TV sponsor has to finance commentators who choose to affront his convictions—that the owner of a newspaper must turn his editorial pages over to any young hooligan who clamors for the enslavement of the press. It means that one group of men acquires the “right” to unlimited license—while another group is reduced to helpless irresponsibility.

But since it is obviously impossible to provide every claimant with a job, a microphone or a newspaper column, who will determine the “distribution” of “economic rights” and select the recipients, when the owners’ right to choose has been abolished? Well, Mr. Minow has indicated that quite clearly.

And if you make the mistake of thinking that this applies only to big property owners, you had better realize that the theory of “economic rights” includes the “right” of every would-be playwright, every beatnik poet, every noise-composer and every nonobjective artist (who have political pull) to the financial support you did not give them when you did not attend their shows. What else is the meaning of the project to spend your tax money on subsidized art?

And while people are clamoring about “economic rights,” the concept of political rights is vanishing. It is forgotten that the right of free speech means the freedom to advocate one’s views and to bear the possible consequences, including disagreement with others, opposition, unpopularity and lack of support. The political function of “the right of free speech” is to protect dissenters and unpopular minorities from forcible suppression—not to guarantee them the support, advantages and rewards of a popularity they have not gained.

The Bill of Rights reads: “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ...” It does not demand that private citizens provide a microphone for the man who advocates their destruction, or a passkey for the burglar who seeks to rob them, or a knife for the murderer who wants to cut their throats.

Such is the state of one of today’s most crucial issues: political rights versus “economic rights.” It’s either-or. One destroys the other. But there are, in fact, no “economic rights,” no “collective rights,” no “public-interest rights.” The term “individual rights” is a redundancy: there is no other kind of rights and no one else to possess them.

Those who advocate laissez-faire capitalism are the only advocates of man’s rights.

(April 1963)

13.

Collectivized “Rights”

by Ayn Rand

Rights are a moral principle defining proper social relationships. Just as a man needs a moral code in order to survive (in order to act, to choose the right goals and to achieve them), so a society (a group of men) needs moral principles in order to organize a social system consonant with man’s nature and with the requirements of his survival.

Just as a man can evade reality and act on the blind whim of any given moment, but can achieve nothing save progressive self-destruction—so a society can evade reality and establish a system ruled by the blind whims of its members or its leader, by the majority gang of any given moment, by the current demagogue or by a permanent dictator. But such a society can achieve nothing save the rule of brute force and a state of progressive self-destruction.

What subjectivism is in the realm of ethics, collectivism is in the realm of politics. Just as the notion that “Anything I do is right because I chose to do it,” is not a moral principle, but a negation of morality—so the notion that “Anything society does is right because society chose to do it,” is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles and the banishment of morality from social issues.

When “might” is opposed to “right,” the concept of “might” can have only one meaning: the power of brute, physical force—which, in fact, is not a “power” but the most hopeless state of impotence; it is merely the “power” to destroy; it is the “power” of a stampede of animals running amuck.

Yet that is the goal of most of today’s intellectuals. At the root of all their conceptual switches, there lies another, more fundamental one: the switch of the concept of rights from the individual to the collective—which means: the replacement of “The Rights of Man” by “The Rights of Mob.”

Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression “individual rights” is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today’s intellectual chaos). But the expression “collective rights” is a contradiction in terms.

Any group or “collective,” large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the “rights” of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary, individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking. Every legitimate group undertaking is based on the participants’ right of free association and free trade. (By “legitimate,” I mean: noncriminal and freely formed, that is, a group which no one was forced to join.)

For instance, the right of an industrial concern to engage in business is derived from the right of its owners to invest their money in a productive venture—from their right to hire employees—from the right of the employees to sell their services—from the right of all those involved to produce and to sell their products—from the right of the customers to buy (or not to buy) those products. Every link of this complex chain of contractual relationships rests on individual rights, individual choices, individual agreements. Every agreement is delimited, specified and subject to certain conditions, that is, dependent upon a mutual trade to mutual benefit.

This is true of all legitimate groups or associations in a free society: partnerships, business concerns, professional associations, labor unions (voluntary ones), political parties, etc. It applies also to all agency agreements: the right of one man to act for or represent another or others is derived from the rights of those he represents and is delegated to him by their voluntary choice, for a specific, delimited purpose—as in the case of a lawyer, a business representative, a labor union delegate, etc.

A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations.

Any group that does not recognize this principle is not an association, but a gang or a mob.

Any doctrine of group activities that does not recognize individual rights is a doctrine of mob rule or legalized lynching.

The notion of “collective rights” (the notion that rights belong to groups, not to individuals) means that “rights” belong to some men, but not to others—that some men have the “right” to dispose of others in any manner they please—and that the criterion of such privileged position consists of numerical superiority.

Nothing can ever justify or validate such a doctrine—and no one ever has. Like the altruist morality from which it is derived, this doctrine rests on mysticism: either on the old-fashioned mysticism of faith in supernatural edicts, like “The Divine Right of Kings”—or on the social mystique of modem collectivists who see society as a super-organism, as some supernatural entity apart from and superior to the sum of its individual members.

The amorality of that collectivist mystique is particularly obvious today in the issue of national rights.

A nation, like any other group, is only a number of individuals and can have no rights other than the rights of its individual citizens. A free nation—a nation that recognizes, respects and protects the individual rights of its citizens—has a right to its territorial integrity, its social system and its form of government. The government of such a nation is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of its citizens and has no rights other than the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific, delimited task (the task of protecting them from physical force, derived from their right of self-defense).

The citizens of a free nation may disagree about the specific legal procedures or methods of implementing their rights (which is a complex problem, the province of political science and of the philosophy of law), but they agree on the basic principle to be implemented: the principle of individual rights. When a country’s constitution places individual rights outside the reach of public authorities, the sphere of political power is severely delimited—and thus the citizens may, safely and properly, agree to abide by the decisions of a majority vote in this delimited sphere. The lives and property of minorities or dissenters are not at stake, are not subject to vote and are not endangered by any majority decision; no man or group holds a blank check on power over others.

Such a nation has a right to its sovereignty (derived from the rights of its citizens) and a right to demand that its sovereignty be respected by all other nations.

But this right cannot be claimed by dictatorships, by savage tribes or by any form of absolutist tyranny. A nation that violates the rights of its own citizens cannot claim any rights whatsoever. In the issue of rights, as in all moral issues, there can be no double standard. A nation ruled by brute physical force is not a nation, but a horde—whether it is led by Attila, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Khrushchev or Castro. What rights could Attila claim and on what grounds?

This applies to all forms of tribal savagery, ancient or modern, primitive or “industrialized.” Neither geography nor race nor tradition nor previous state of development can confer on some human beings the “right” to violate the rights of others.

The right of “the self-determination of nations” applies only to free societies or to societies seeking to establish freedom; it does not apply to dictatorships. Just as an individual’s right of free action does not include the “right” to commit crimes (that is, to violate the rights of others), so the right of a nation to determine its own form of government does not include the right to establish a slave society (that is, to legalize the enslavement of some men by others). There is no such thing as “the right to enslave.” A nation can do it, just as a man can become a criminal—but neither can do it by right.

It does not matter, in this context, whether a nation was enslaved by force, like Soviet Russia, or by vote, like Nazi Germany. Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual). Whether a slave society was conquered or chose to be enslaved, it can claim no national rights and no recognition of such “rights” by civilized countries—just as a mob of gangsters cannot demand a recognition of its “rights” and a legal equality with an industrial concern or a university, on the ground that the gangsters chose by unanimous vote to engage in that particular kind of group activity.

Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the nonexistent “rights” of gang rulers. It is not a free nation’s duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses.

This right, however, is conditional. Just as the suppression of crimes does not give a policeman the right to engage in criminal activities, so the invasion and destruction of a dictatorship does not give the invader the right to establish another variant of a slave society in the conquered country.

A slave country has no national rights, but the individual rights of its citizens remain valid, even if unrecognized, and the conqueror has no right to violate them. Therefore, the invasion of an enslaved country is morally justified only when and if the conquerors establish a free social system, that is, a system based on the recognition of individual rights.

Since there is no fully free country today, since the so-called “Free World” consists of various “mixed economies,” it might be asked whether every country on earth is morally open to invasion by every other. The answer is: No. There is a difference between a country that recognizes the principle of individual rights, but does not implement it fully in practice, and a country that denies and flouts it explicitly. All “mixed economies” are in a precarious state of transition which, ultimately, has to turn to freedom or collapse into dictatorship. There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule—executions without trial or with a mock trial, for political offenses—the nationalization or expropriation of private property—and censorship. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw.

Observe, on this particular issue, the shameful end-of- , trail and the intellectual disintegration of modem “liberals.”

Internationalism had always been one of the “liberals’ ” basic tenets. They regarded nationalism as a major social evil, as a product of capitalism and as the cause of wars. They opposed any form of national self-interest; they refused to differentiate between rational patriotism and blind, racist chauvinism, denouncing both as “fascist.” They advocated the dissolution of national boundaries and the merging of all nations into “One World.” Next to property rights, “national rights” were the special target of their attacks.

Today, it is “national rights” that they invoke as their last, feeble, fading hold on some sort of moral justification for the results of their theories—for the brood of little statist dictatorships spreading, like a skin disease, over the surface of the globe, in the form of so-called “newly emerging nations,” semi-socialist, semi-communist, semi-fascist, and wholly committed only to the use of brute force.

It is the “national right” of such countries to choose their own form of government (any form they please) that the “liberals” offer as a moral validation and ask us to respect. It is the “national right” of Cuba to its form of government, they claim, that we must not violate or interfere with. Having all but destroyed the legitimate national rights of free countries, it is for dictatorships that the “liberals” now claim the sanction of “national rights.”

And worse: it is not mere nationalism that the “liberals” champion, but racism—primordial tribal racism.

Observe the double standard: while, in the civilized countries of the West, the “liberals” are still advocating internationalism and global self-sacrifice-the savage tribes of Asia and Africa are granted the sovereign “right” to slaughter one another in racial warfare. Mankind is reverting to a pre-industrial, prehistorical view of society: to racial collectivism.

Such is the logical result and climax of the “liberals’ ” moral collapse which began when, as a prelude to the collectivization of property, they accepted the collectivization of rights.

Their own confession of guilt lies in their terminology. Why do they use the word “rights” to denote the things they are advocating? Why don’t they preach what they practice? Why don’t they name it openly and attempt to justify it, if they can?

The answer is obvious.

(June 1963)

14.

The Nature of Government

by Ayn Rand

A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area.

Do men need such an institution—and why?

Since man’s mind is his basic tool of survival, his means of gaining knowledge to guide his actions—the basic condition he requires is the freedom to think and to act according to his rational judgment. This does not mean that a man must live alone and that a desert island is the environment best suited to his needs. Men can derive enormous benefits from dealing with one another. A social environment is most conducive to their successful survival—but only on certain conditions.

“The two great values to be gained from social existence are: knowledge and trade. Man is the only species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; the knowledge potentially available to man is greater than any one man could begin to acquire in his own lifespan; every man gains an incalculable benefit from the knowledge discovered by others. The second great benefit is the division of labor: it enables a man to devote his effort to a particular field of work and to trade with others who specialize in other fields. This form of cooperation allows all men who take part in it to achieve a greater knowledge, skill and productive return on their effort than they could achieve if each had to produce everything he needs, on a desert island or on a self-sustaining farm.

“But these very benefits indicate, delimit and define what kind of men can be of value to one another and in what kind of society: only rational, productive, independent men in a rational, productive, free society.” (“The Objectivist Ethics.”)

A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind; or compels him to act against his own rational judgment—a society that sets up a conflict between its edicts and the requirements of man’s nature—is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule. Such a society destroys all the values of human coexistence, has no possible justification and represents, not a source of benefits, but the deadliest threat to man’s survival. Life on a desert island is safer than and incomparably preferable to existence in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.

If men are to live together in a peaceful, productive, rational society and deal with one another to mutual benefit, they must accept the basic social principle without which no moral or civilized society is possible: the principle of individual rights. (See Chapters 12 and 13.)

To recognize individual rights means to recognize and accept the conditions required by man’s nature for his proper survival.

Man’s rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.

The precondition of a civilized society is the barring of physical force from social relationships—thus establishing the principle that if men wish to deal with one another, they may do so only by means of reason: by discussion, persuasion and voluntary, uncoerced agreement.

The necessary consequence of man’s right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

If some “pacifist” society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it.

If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door—or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang-rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into perpetual tribal warfare of prehistorical savages.

The use of physical force—even its retaliatory use—cannot be left at the discretion of individual citizens. Peaceful coexistence is impossible if a man has to live under the constant threat of force to be unleashed against him by any of his neighbors at any moment. Whether his neighbors’ intentions are good or bad, whether their judgment is rational or irrational, whether they are motivated by a sense of justice or by ignorance or by prejudice or by malice—the use of force against one man cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another.

Visualize, for example, what would happen if a man missed his wallet, concluded that he had been robbed, broke into every house in the neighborhood to search it, and shot the first man who gave him a dirty look, taking the look to be a proof of guilt.

The retaliatory use of force requires objective rules of evidence to establish that a crime has been committed and to prove who committed it, as well as objective rules to define punishments and enforcement procedures. Men who attempt to prosecute crimes, without such rules, are a lynch mob. If a society left the retaliatory use of force in the hands of individual citizens, it would degenerate into mob rule, lynch law and an endless series of bloody private feuds or vendettas.

If physical force is to be barred from social relationships, men need an institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective code of rules.

This is the task of a government—of a proper government—its basic task, is only moral justification and the reason why men do need a government.

A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws.

The fundamental difference between private action and governmental action—a difference thoroughly ignored and evaded today—lies in the fact that a government holds a monopoly on the legal use of physical force. It has to hold such a monopoly, since it is the agent of restraining and combating the use of force; and for that very same reason, its actions have to be rigidly defined, delimited and circumscribed; no touch of whim or caprice should be permitted in its performance; it should be an impersonal robot, with the laws as its only motive power. If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled.

Under a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.

This is the means of subordinating “might” to “right.” This is the American concept of “a government of laws and not of men.”

The nature of the laws proper to a free society and the source of its government’s authority are both to be derived from the nature and purpose of a proper government. The basic principle of both is indicated in The Declaration of Independence: “to secure these [individual] rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ...”

Since the protection of individual rights is the only proper purpose of a government, it is the only proper subject of legislation: all laws must be based on individual rights and aimed at their protection. All laws must be objective (and objectively justifiable): men must know clearly, and in advance of taking an action, what the law forbids them to do (and why), what constitutes a crime and what penalty they will incur if they commit it.

The source of the government’s authority is “the consent of the governed.” This means that the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose.

There is only one basic principle to which an individual must consent if he wishes to live in a free, civilized society: the principle of renouncing the use of physical force and delegating to the government his right of physical self-defense, for the purpose of an orderly, objective, legally defined enforcement. Or, to put it another way, he must accept the separation of force and whim (any whim, including his own).

Now what happens in case of a disagreement between two men about an undertaking in which both are involved?

In a free society, men are not forced to deal with one another. They do so only by voluntary agreement and, when a time element is involved, by contract. If a contract is broken by the arbitrary decision of one man, it may cause a disastrous financial injury to the other—and the victim would have no recourse except to seize the offender’s property as compensation. But here again, the use of force cannot be left to the decision of private individuals. And this leads to one of the most important and most complex functions of the government: to the function of an arbiter who settles disputes among men according to objective laws.

Criminals are a small minority in any semicivilized society. But the protection and enforcement of contracts through courts of civil law is the most crucial need of a peaceful society; without such protection, no civilization could be developed or maintained.

Man cannot survive, as animals do, by acting on the range of the immediate moment. Man has to project his goals and achieve them across a span of time; he has to calculate his actions and plan his life long-range. The better a man’s mind and the greater his knowledge, the longer the range of his planning. The higher or more complex a civilization, the longer the range of activity it requires—and, therefore, the longer the range of contractual agreements among men, and the more urgent their need of protection for the security of such agreements.

Even a primitive barter society could not function if a man agreed to trade a bushel of potatoes for a basket of eggs and, having received the eggs, refused to deliver the potatoes. Visualize what this sort of whim-directed action would mean in an industrial society where men deliver a billion dollars’ worth of goods on credit, or contract to build multimillion-dollar structures, or sign ninety-nine-year leases.

A unilateral breach of contract involves an indirect use of physical force: it consists, in essence, of one man receiving the material values, goods or services of another, then refusing to pay for them and thus keeping them by force (by mere physical possession), not by right—i.e., keeping them without the consent of their owner. Fraud involves a similarly indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values without their owner’s consent, under false pretenses or false promises. Extortion is another variant of an indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values, not in exchange for values, but by the threat of force, violence or injury.

Some of these actions are obviously criminal. Others, such as a unilateral breach of contract, may not be criminally motivated, but may be caused by irresponsibility and irrationality. Still others may be complex issues with some claim to justice on both sides. But whatever the case may be, all such issues have to be made subject to objectively defined laws and have to be resolved by an impartial arbiter, administering the laws, i.e., by a judge (and a jury, when appropriate).

Observe the basic principle governing justice in all these cases: it is the principle that no man may obtain any values from others without the owners’ consent—and, as a corollary, that a man’s rights may not be left at the mercy of the unilateral decision, the arbitrary choice, the irrationality, the whim of another man.

Such, in essence, is the proper purpose of a government: to make social existence possible to men, by protecting the benefits and combating the evils which men can cause to one another.

The proper functions of a government fall into three broad categories, all of them involving the issues of physical force and the protection of men’s rights: the police, to protect men from criminals—the armed services, to protect men from foreign invaders—the law courts, to settle disputes among men according to objective laws.

These three categories involve many corollary and derivative issues—and their implementation in practice, in the form of specific legislation, is enormously complex. It belongs to the field of a special science: the philosophy of law. Many errors and many disagreements are possible in the field of implementation, but what is essential here is the principle to be implemented: the principle that the purpose of law and of government is the protection of individual rights.

Today, this principle is forgotten, ignored and evaded. The result is the present state of the world, with mankind’s retrogression to the lawlessness of absolutist tyranny, to the primitive savagery of rule by brute force.

In unthinking protest against this trend, some people are raising the question of whether government as such is evil by nature and whether anarchy is the ideal social system. Anarchy, as a political concept, is a naive floating abstraction: for all the reasons discussed above, a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare. But the possibility of human immorality is not the only objection to anarchy: even a society whose every member were fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy; it is the need of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitates the establishment of a government.

A recent variant of anarchistic theory, which is befuddling some of the younger advocates of freedom, is a weird absurdity called “competing governments.” Accepting the basic premise of the modern statists—who see no difference between the functions of government and the functions of industry, between force and production, and who advocate government ownership of business—the proponents of “competing governments” take the other side of the same coin and declare that since competition is so beneficial to business, it should also be applied to government. Instead of a single, monopolistic government, they declare, there should be a number of different governments in the same geographical area, competing for the allegiance of individual citizens, with every citizen free to “shop” and to patronize whatever government he chooses.

Remember that forcible restraint of men is the only service a government has to offer. Ask yourself what a competition in forcible restraint would have to mean.

One cannot call this theory a contradiction in terms, since it is obviously devoid of any understanding of the terms “competition” and “government.” Nor can one call it a floating abstraction, since it is devoid of any contact with or reference to reality and cannot be concretized at all, not even roughly or approximately. One illustration will be sufficient: suppose Mr. Smith, a customer of Government A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of Government B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones’ house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith’s complaint and do not recognize the authority of Government A. What happens then? You take it from there.

The evolution of the concept of “government” has had a long, tortuous history. Some glimmer of the government’s proper function seems to have existed in every organized society, manifesting itself in such phenomena as the recognition of some implicit (if often nonexistent) difference between a government and a robber gang—the aura of respect and of moral authority granted to the government as the guardian of “law and order”—the fact that even the most evil types of government found it necessary to maintain some semblance of order and some pretense at justice, if only by routine and tradition, and to claim some sort of moral justification for their power, of a mystical or social nature. Just as the absolute monarchs of France had to invoke “The Divine Right of Kings,” so the modem dictators of Soviet Russia have to spend fortunes on propaganda to justify their rule in the eyes of their enslaved subjects.

In mankind’s history, the understanding of the government’s proper function is a very recent achievement: it is only two hundred years old and it dates from the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. Not only did they identify the nature and the needs of a free society, but they devised the means to translate it into practice. A free society—like any other human product—cannot be achieved by random means, by mere wishing or by the leaders’ “good intentions.” A complex legal system, based on objectively valid principles, is required to make a society free and to keep it free—a system that does not depend on the motives, the moral character or the intentions of any given official, a system that leaves no opportunity, no legal loophole for the development of tyranny.

The American system of checks and balances was just such an achievement. And although certain contradictions in the Constitution did leave a loophole for the growth of statism, the incomparable achievement was the concept of a constitution as a means of limiting and restricting the power of the government.

Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.

Now consider the extent of the moral and political inversion in today’s prevalent view of government. Instead of being a protector of man’s rights, the government is becoming their most dangerous violator; instead of guarding freedom, the government is establishing slavery; instead of protecting men from the initiators of physical force, the government is initiating physical force and coercion in any manner and issue it pleases; instead of serving as the instrument of objectivity in human relationships, the government is creating a deadly, subterranean reign of uncertainty and fear, by means of nonobjective laws whose interpretation is left to the arbitrary decisions of random bureaucrats; instead of protecting men from injury by whim, the government is arrogating to itself the power of unlimited whim—so that we are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

It has often been remarked that in spite of its material progress, mankind has not achieved any comparable degree of moral progress. That remark is usually followed by some pessimistic conclusion about human nature. It is true that the moral state of mankind is disgracefully low. But if one considers the monstrous moral inversions of the governments (made possible by the altruist-collectivist morality) under which mankind has had to live through most of its history, one begins to wonder how men have managed to preserve even a semblance of civilization, and what indestructible vestige of self-esteem has kept them walking upright on two feet.

One also begins to see more clearly the nature of the political principles that have to be accepted and advocated, as part of the battle for man’s intellectual Renaissance.

(December 1963)

15.

Government Financing in a Free Society

by Ayn Rand

“What would be the proper method of financing the government in a fully free society?”

This question is usually asked in connection with the Objectivist principle that the government of a free society may not initiate the use of physical force and may use force only in retaliation against those who initiate its use. Since the imposition of taxes does represent an initiation of force, how, it is asked, would the government of a free country raise the money needed to finance its proper services?

In a fully free society, taxation—or, to be exact, payment for governmental services—would be voluntary. Since the proper services of a government—the police, the armed forces, the law courts—are demonstrably needed by individual citizens and affect their interests directly, the citizens would (and should) be willing to pay for such services, as they pay for insurance.

The question of how to implement the principle of voluntary government financing—how to determine the best means of applying it in practice—is a very complex one and belongs to the field of the philosophy of law. The task of political philosophy is only to establish the nature of the principle and to demonstrate that it is practicable. The choice of a specific method of implementation is more than premature today—since the principle will be practicable only in a fully free society, a society whose government has been constitutionally reduced to its proper, basic functions. (For a discussion of these functions, see Chapter 14.)

There are many possible methods of voluntary government financing. A government lottery, which has been used in some European countries, is one such method. There are others.

As an illustration (and only as an illustration), consider the following possibility. One of the most vitally needed services, which only a government can render, is the protection of contractual agreements among citizens. Suppose that the government were to protect—i.e., to recognize as legally valid and enforceable—only those contracts which had been insured by the payment, to the government, of a premium in the amount of a legally fixed percentage of the sums involved in the contractual transaction. Such an insurance would not be compulsory; there would be no legal penalty imposed on those who did not choose to take it—they would be free to make verbal agreements or to sign uninsured contracts, if they so wished. The only consequence would be that such agreements or contracts would not be legally enforceable; if they were broken, the injured party would not be able to seek redress in a court of law.

All credit transactions are contractual agreements. A credit transaction is any exchange which involves a passage of time between the payment and the receipt of goods or services. This includes the vast majority of economic transactions in a complex industrial society. Only a very small part of the gigantic network of credit transactions ever ends up in court, but the entire network is made possible by the existence of the courts, and would collapse overnight without that protection. This is a government service which people need, use, rely upon and should pay for. Yet, today, this service is provided gratuitously and amounts, in effect, to a subsidy.

When one considers the magnitude of the wealth involved in credit transactions, one can see that the percentage required to pay for such governmental insurance would be infinitesimal—much smaller than that paid for other types of insurance—yet it would be sufficient to finance all the other functions of a proper government. (If necessary, that percentage could be legally increased in time of war; or other, but similar, methods of raising money could be established for clearly defined wartime needs.)

This particular “plan” is mentioned here only as an illustration of a possible method of approach to the problem—not as a definitive answer nor as a program to advocate at present. The legal and technical difficulties involved are enormous: they include such questions as the need of an ironclad constitutional provision to prevent the government from dictating the content of private contracts (an issue which exists today and needs much more objective definitions) -the need of objective standards (or safeguards) for establishing the amount of the premiums, which cannot be left to the arbitrary discretion of the government, etc.

Any program of voluntary government financing is the last, not the first, step on the road to a free society—the last, not the first, reform to advocate. It would work only when the basic principles and institutions of a free society have been established. It would not work today.

Men would pay voluntarily for insurance protecting their contracts. But they would not pay voluntarily for insurance against the danger of aggression by Cambodia. Nor would the plywood manufacturers of Wisconsin and their workers pay voluntarily for insurance to assist the development of the plywood industry of Japan which would put them out of business.

A program of voluntary government financing would be amply sufficient to pay for the legitimate functions of a proper government. It would not be sufficient to provide unearned support for the entire globe. But no type of taxation is sufficient for that—onty the suicide of a great country might be and then only temporarily.

Just as the growth of controls, taxes and “government obligations” in this country was not accomplished overnight—so the process of liberation cannot be accomplished overnight. A process of liberation would be much more rapid than the process of enslavement had been, since the facts of reality would be its ally. But still, a gradual process is required—and any program of voluntary government financing has to be regarded as a goal for a distant future.

What the advocates of a fully free society have to know, at present, is only the principle by which that goal can be achieved.

The principle of voluntary government financing rests on the following premises: that the government is not the owner of the citizens’ income and, therefore, cannot hold a blank check on that income—that the nature of the proper governmental services must be constitutionally defined and delimited, leaving the government no power to enlarge the scope of its services at its own arbitrary discretion. Consequently, the principle of voluntary government financing regards the government as the servant, not the ruler, of the citizens—as an agent who must be paid for his services, not as a benefactor whose services are gratuitous, who dispenses something for nothing.

This last, along with the notion of compulsory taxation, is a remnant of the time when the government was regarded as the omnipotent ruler of the citizens. An absolute monarch, who owned the work, income, property and lives of his subjects, had to be an unpaid “benefactor,” protector and dispenser of favors. Such a monarch would have considered it demeaning to be paid for his services—just as the atavistic mentalities of his descendants-in-spirit (the remnants of Europe’s ancient feudal aristocracy, and the modern welfare statists) still consider an earned, commercial income as demeaning and as morally inferior to an unearned one which is acquired by mooching or looting, by charitable donations or governmental force.

When a government, be it a monarch or a “democratic” parliament, is regarded as a provider of gratuitous services, it is only a question of time before it begins to enlarge its services and the sphere of the gratuitous (today, this process is called the growth of “the public sector of the economy”) until it becomes, and has to become, the instrument of pressure-group warfare—of economic groups looting one another.

The premise to check (and to challenge) in this context is the primordial notion that any governmental services (even the legitimate ones) should be given to the citizens gratuitously. In order fully to translate into practice the American concept of the government as a servant of the citizens, one has to regard the government as a paid servant. Then, on that basis, one can proceed to devise the appropriate means of tying government revenues directly to the government services rendered.

It may be observed, in the example given above, that the cost of such voluntary government financing would be automatically proportionate to the scale of an individual’s economic activity; those on the lowest economic levels (who seldom, if ever, engage in credit transactions) would be virtually exempt—though they would still enjoy the benefits of legal protection, such as that offered by the armed forces, by the police and by the courts dealing with criminal offenses. These benefits may be regarded as a bonus to the men of lesser economic ability, made possible by the men of greater economic ability—without any sacrifice of the latter to the former.

It is in their own interests that the men of greater ability have to pay for the maintenance of armed forces, for the protection of their country against invasion; their expenses are not increased by the fact that a marginal part of the population is unable to contribute to these costs. Economically, that marginal group is nonexistent as far as the costs of war are concerned. The same is true of the costs of maintaining a police force: it is in their own interests that the abler men have to pay for the apprehension of criminals, regardless of whether the specific victim of a given crime is rich or poor.

It is important to note that this type of free protection for the noncontributors represents an indirect benefit and is merely a marginal consequence of the contributors’ own interests and expenses. This type of bonus cannot be stretched to cover direct benefits, or to claim—as the welfare statists are claiming—that direct handouts to the non-producers are in the producers’ own interests.

The difference, briefly, is as follows: if a railroad were running a train and allowed the poor to ride without payment in the seats left empty, it would not be the same thing (nor the same principle) as providing the poor with first-class carriages and special trains.

Any type of nonsacrificial assistance, of social bonus, gratuitous benefit or gift value possible among men, is possible only in a free society, and is proper so long as it is nonsacrificial. But, in a free society, under a system of voluntary government financing, there would be no legal loophole, no legal possibility, for any “redistribution of wealth”—for the unearned support of some men by the forced labor and extorted income of others—for the draining, exploitation and destruction of those who are able to pay the costs of maintaining a civilized society, in favor of those who are unable or unwilling to pay the cost of maintaining their own existence.

(February 1964)

16.

The Divine Right of Stagnation

by Nathaniel Branden

For every living species, growth is a necessity of survival. Life is motion, a process of self-sustaining action that an organism must carry on in order to remain in existence. This principle is equally evident in the simple energy-conversions of a plant and in the long-range, complex activities of man. Biologically, inactivity is death.

The nature and range of possible motion and development varies from species to species. The range of a plant’s action and development is far less than an animal’s; an animal’s is far less than man’s. An animal’s capacity for development ends at physical maturity and thereafter its growth consists of the action necessary to maintain itself at a fixed level; after reaching maturity, it does not, to any significant extent, continue to grow in efficacy—that is, it does not significantly increase its ability to cope with the environment. But man’s capacity for development does not end at physical maturity; his capacity is virtually limitless. His power to reason is man’s distinguishing characteristic, his mind is man’s basic means of survival—and his ability to think, to learn, to discover new and better ways of dealing with reality, to expand the range of his efficacy, to grow intellectually, is an open door to a road that has no end.

Man survives, not by adjusting himself to his physical environment in the manner of an animal, but by transforming his environment through productive work. “If a drought strikes them, animals perish—man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish—man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them, animals perish— man writes the Constitution of the United States.” (Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual.)

If life is a process of self-sustaining action, then this is the distinctly human mode of action and survival: to think—to produce—to meet the challenges of existence by a never-ending effort and inventiveness.

When man discovered how to make fire to keep himself warm, his need of thought and effort was not ended; when he discovered how to fashion a bow and arrow, his need of thought and effort was not ended; when he discovered how to build a shelter out of stone, then out of brick, then out of glass and steel, his need of thought and effort was not ended; when he moved his life expectancy from nineteen to thirty to forty to sixty to seventy, his need of thought and effort was not ended; so long as he lives, his need of thought and effort is never ended.

Every achievement of man is a value in itself, but it is also a stepping-stone to greater achievements and values. Life is growth; not to move forward, is to fall backward; life remains life, only so long as it advances. Every step upward opens to man a wider range of action and achievement—and creates the need for that action and achievement. There is no final, permanent “plateau.” The problem of survival is never “solved,” once and for all, with no further thought or motion required. More precisely, the problem of survival is solved, by recognizing that survival demands constant growth and creativeness.

Constant growth is, further, a psychological need of man. It is a condition of his mental well-being. His mental well-being requires that he possess a firm sense of control over reality, of control over his existence—the conviction that he is competent to live. And this requires, not omniscience or omnipotence, but the knowledge that one’s methods of dealing with reality—the principles by which one functions—are right. Passivity is incompatible with this state. Self-esteem is not a value that, once achieved, is maintained automatically thereafter; like every other human value, including life itself, it can be maintained only by action. Self-esteem, the basic conviction that one is competent to live, can be maintained only so long as one is engaged in a process of growth, only so long as one is committed to the task of increasing one’s efficacy. In living entities, nature does not permit stillness: when one ceases to grow, one proceeds to disintegrate—in the mental realm no less than in the physical.

Observe, in this connection, the widespread phenomenon of men who are old by the time they are thirty. These are men who, having in effect concluded that they have “thought enough,” drift on the diminishing momentum of their past effort—and wonder what happened to their fire and energy, and why they are dimly anxious, and why their existence seems so desolately impoverished, and why they feel themselves sinking into some nameless abyss—and never identify the fact that, in abandoning the will to think, one abandons the will to live.

Man’s need to grow—and his need, therefore, of the social or existential conditions that make growth possible—are facts of crucial importance to be considered in judging or evaluating any politico-economic system. One should be concerned to ask: Is a given politico-economic system pro-life or anti-life, conducive or inimical to the requirements of man’s survival?

The great merit of capitalism is its unique appropriateness to the requirements of human survival and to man’s need to grow. Leaving men free to think, to act, to produce, to attempt the untried and the new, its principles operate in a way that rewards effort and achievement, and penalizes passivity.

This is one of the chief reasons for which it is denounced.

In Who Is Ayn Rand?, discussing the nineteenth-century attacks on capitalism, I wrote: “In the writings of both medievalists and socialists, one can observe the unmistakable longing for a society in which man’s existence will be automatically guaranteed to him—that is, in which man will not have to bear responsibility for his own survival. Both camps project their ideal society as one characterized by that which they call ‘harmony,’ by freedom from rapid change or challenge or the exacting demands of competition; a society in which each must do his prescribed part to contribute to the well-being of the whole, but in which no one will face the necessity of making choices and decisions that will crucially affect his life and future; in which the question of what one has or has not earned, and does or does not deserve, will not come up; in which rewards will not be tied to achievement and in which someone’s benevolence will guarantee that one need never bear the consequences of one’s errors. The failure of capitalism to conform to what may be termed this pastoral view of existence, is essential to the medievalists’ and socialists’ indictment of a free society. It is not a Garden of Eden that capitalism offers men.”

Among the arguments used by those who long for a “pastoral” existence, is a doctrine which, translated into explicit statement, consists of: the divine right of stagnation.

This doctrine is illustrated in the following incident. Once, on a plane trip, I became engaged in conversation with an executive of a labor union. He began to decry the “disaster” of automation, asserting that increasing thousands of workers would be permanently unemployed as a result of new machines and that “something ought to be done about it.” I answered that this was a myth that had been exploded many times; that the introduction of new machines invariably resulted in increasing the demand for labor as well as in raising the general standard of living; that this was demonstrable theoretically and observable historically. I remarked that automation increased the demand for skilled labor relative to unskilled labor, and that doubtless many workers would need to learn new skills. “But,” he asked indignantly, “what about the workers who don’t want to learn new skills? Why should they have troubles?”

This means that the ambition, the farsightedness, the drive to do better and still better, the living energy of creative men are to be throttled and suppressed—for the sake of men who have “thought enough” and “learned enough” and do not wish to be concerned with the future nor with the bothersome question of what their jobs depend on.

Alone on a desert island, bearing sole responsibility for his own survival, no man could permit himself the delusion that tomorrow is not his concern, that he can safely rest on yesterday’s knowledge and skills, and that nature owes him “security.” It is only in society—where the burden of a man’s default can be passed to the shoulders of a man who did not default—that such a delusion can be indulged in. (And it is here that the morality of altruism becomes indispensable, to provide a sanction for such parasitism.)

The claim that men doing the same type of job should all be paid the same wages, regardless of differences in their performance or output, thus penalizing the superior worker in favor of the inferior—this is the doctrine of the divine right of stagnation.

The claim that men should keep their jobs or be promoted on grounds, not of merit, but of seniority, so that the mediocrity who is “in” is favored above the talented newcomer, thus blocking the newcomer’s future and that of his potential employer—this is the doctrine of the divine right of stagnation.

The claim that an employer should be compelled to deal with a specific union which has an arbitrary power to exclude applicants for membership, so that the chance to work at a certain craft is handed down from father to son and no newcomer can enter to threaten the established vested interests, thus blocking progress in the entire field, like the guild system of the Middle Ages—this is the doctrine of the divine right of stagnation.

The claim that men should be retained in jobs that have become unnecessary, doing work that is wasteful or superfluous, to spare them the difficulties of retraining for new jobs—thus contributing, as in the case of railroads, to the virtual destruction of an entire industry—this is the doctrine of the divine right of stagnation.

The denunciation of capitalism for such “iniquities” as allowing an old corner grocer to be driven out of business by a big chain store, the denunciation implying that the economic well-being and progress of the old grocer’s customers and of the chain store owners should be throttled to protect the limitations of the old grocer’s initiative or skill—this is the doctrine of the divine right of stagnation.

The court’s decree, under the antitrust laws, that a successful business establishment does not have a right to its patents, but must give them, royalty-free, to a would-be competitor who cannot afford to pay for them (General Electric case, 1948)—this is the doctrine of the divine right of stagnation.

The court’s edict convicting and blocking a business concern for the crime of farsightedness, the crime of anticipating future demand and expanding plant capacity to meet it, and of thereby possibly “discouraging” future competitors (ALCOA case, 1945)—this is the legal penalizing of growth, this is the penalizing of ability for being abitity—and this is the naked essence and goal of the doctrine of the divine right of stagnation.

Capitalism, by its nature, entails a constant process of motion, growth and progress. It creates the optimum social conditions for man to respond to the challenges of nature in such a way as best to further his life. It operates to the benefit of all those who choose to be active in the productive process, whatever their level of ability. But it is not geared to the demands of stagnation. Neither is reality.

When one considers the spectacular success, the unprecedented prosperity, that capitalism has achieved in practice (even with hampering controls)—and when one considers the dismal failure of every variety of collectivism—it should be clear that the enemies of capitalism are not motivated, at root, by economic considerations. They are motivated by metaphysical considerations—by a rebellion against the human mode of survival, a rebellion against the fact that life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action—and by the dream that, if only they can harness the men who do not resent the nature of life, they will make existence tolerable for those who do resent it.

(August 1963)

17.

Racism

by Ayn Rand

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.

Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.

The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes in order to “protect the family name” (as if the moral stature of one man could be damaged by the actions of another)—the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her maternal great-uncle was a state senator and her third cousin gave a concert at Carnegie Hall (as if the achievements of one man could rub off on the mediocrity of another)—the parents who search genealogical trees in order to evaluate their prospective sons-in-law—the celebrity who starts his autobiography with a detailed account of his family history—all these are samples of racism, the atavistic manifestations of a doctrine whose full expression is the tribal warfare of prehistorical savages, the wholesale slaughter of Nazi Germany, the atrocities of today’s so-called “newly emerging nations.”

The theory that holds “good blood” or “bad blood” as a moral-intellectual criterion, can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice. Brute force is the only avenue of action open to men who regard themselves as mindless aggregates of chemicals.

Modern racists attempt to prove the superiority or inferiority of a given race by the historical achievements of some of its members. The frequent historical spectacle of a great innovator who, in his lifetime, is jeered, denounced, obstructed, persecuted by his countrymen, and then, a few years after his death, is enshrined in a national monument and hailed as a proof of the greatness of the German (or French or Italian or Cambodian) race—is as revolting a spectacle of collectivist expropriation, perpetrated by racists, as any expropriation of material wealth perpetrated by communists.

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements—and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

Even if it were proved—which it is not—that the incidence of men of potentially superior brain power is greater among the members of certain races than among the members of others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual and it would be irrelevant to one’s judgment of him. A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a Negro genius should be treated as an inferior because his race has “produced” some brutes—or the claim of a German brute to the status of a superior because his race has “produced” Goethe, Schiller and Brahms.

These are not two different claims, of course, but two applications of the same basic premise. The question of whether one alleges the superiority or the inferiority of any given race is irrelevant; racism has only one psychological root: the racist’s sense of his own inferiority.

Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge—for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment—and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem).

To ascribe one’s virtues to one’s racial origin, is to confess that one has no knowledge of the process by which virtues are acquired and, most often, that one has failed to acquire them. The overwhelming majority of racists are men who have earned no sense of personal identity, who can claim no individual achievement or distinction, and who seek the illusion of a “tribal self-esteem” by alleging the inferiority of some other tribe. Observe the hysterical intensity of the Southern racists; observe also that racism is much more prevalent among the poor white trash than among their intellectual betters.

Historically, racism has always risen or fallen with the rise or fall of collectivism. Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to “society,” to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force—and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism.

The absolute state is merely an institutionalized form of gang-rule, regardless of which particular gang seizes power. And—since there is no rational justification for such rule, since none has ever been or can ever be offered—the mystique of racism is a crucial element in every variant of the absolute state. The relationship is reciprocal: statism rises out of prehistorical tribal warfare, out of the notion that the men of one tribe are the natural prey for the men of another—and establishes its own internal subcategories of racism, a system of castes determined by a man’s birth, such as inherited titles of nobility or inherited serfdom.

The racism of Nazi Germany—where men had to fill questionnaires about their ancestry for generations back, in order to prove their Aryan descent—has its counterpart in Soviet Russia, where men had to fill similar questionnaires to show that their ancestors had owned no property and thus to prove their proletarian descent. The Soviet ideology rests on the notion that men can be conditioned to communism genetically—that is, that a few generations conditioned by dictatorship will transmit communist ideology to their descendants, who will be communists at birth. The persecution of racial minorities in Soviet Russia, according to the racial descent and whim of any given commissar, is a matter of record; anti-Semitism is particularly prevalent—only the official pogroms are now called “political purges.”

There is only one antidote to racism: the philosophy of individualism and its politico-economic corollary, laissez-faire capitalism.

Individualism regards man—every man—as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful coexistence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights—and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members. (See Chapters 12 and 13.)

It is not a man’s ancestors or relatives or genes or body chemistry that count in a free market, but only one human attribute: productive ability. It is by his own individual ability and ambition that capitalism judges a man and rewards him accordingly.

No political system can establish universal rationality by law (or by force). But capitalism is the only system that functions in a way which rewards rationality and penalizes all forms of irrationality, including racism.

A fully free, capitalist system has not yet existed anywhere. But what is enormously significant is the correlation of racism and political controls in the semifree economies of the nineteenth century. Racial and/or religious persecutions of minorities stood in inverse ratio to the degree of a country’s freedom. Racism was strongest in the more controlled economies, such as Russia and Germany—and weakest in England, the then freest country of Europe.

It is capitalism that gave mankind its first steps toward freedom and a rational way of life. It is capitalism that broke through national and racial barriers, by means of free trade. It is capitalism that abolished serfdom and slavery in all the civilized countries of the world. It is the capitalist North that destroyed the slavery of the agrarian-feudal South in the United States.

Such was the trend of mankind for the brief span of some hundred and fifty years. The spectacular results and achievements of that trend need no restatement here.

The rise of collectivism reversed that trend.

When men began to be indoctrinated once more with the notion that the individual possesses no rights, that supremacy, moral authority and unlimited power belong to the group, and that a man has no significance outside his group—the inevitable consequence was that men began to gravitate toward some group or another, in self-protection, in bewilderment and in subconscious terror. The simplest collective to join, the easiest one to identify—particularly for people of limited intelligence—the least demanding form of “belonging” and of “togetherness” is: race.

It is thus that the theoreticians of collectivism, the “humanitarian” advocates of a “benevolent” absolute state, have led to the rebirth and the new, virulent growth of racism in the twentieth century.

In its great era of capitalism, the United States was the freest country on earth—and the best refutation of racist theories. Men of all races came here, some from obscure, culturally undistinguished countries, and accomplished feats of productive ability which would have remained stillborn in their control-ridden native lands. Men of racial groups that had been slaughtering one another for centuries, learned to live together in harmony and peaceful cooperation. America had been called “the melting pot,” with good reason. But few people realized that America did not melt men into the gray conformity of a collective: she united them by means of protecting their right to individuality.

The major victims of such race prejudice as did exist in America were the Negroes. It was a problem originated and perpetuated by the noncapitalist South, though not confined to its boundaries. The persecution of Negroes in the South was and is truly disgraceful. But in the rest of the country, so long as men were free, even that problem was slowly giving way under the pressure of enlightenment and of the white men’s own economic interests.

Today, that problem is growing worse—and so is every other form of racism. America has become race-conscious in a manner reminiscent of the worst days in the most backward countries of nineteenth-century Europe. The cause is the same: the growth of collectivism and statism.

In spite of the clamor for racial equality, propagated by the “liberals” in the past few decades, the Census Bureau reported recently that “[the Negro’s] economic status relative to whites has not improved for nearly 20 years.” It had been improving in the freer years of our “mixed economy”; it deteriorated with the progressive enlargement of the “liberals’ ” Welfare State.

The growth of racism in a “mixed economy” keeps step with the growth of government controls. A “mixed economy” disintegrates a country into an institutionalized civil war of pressure groups, each fighting for legislative favors and special privileges at the expense of one another.

The existence of such pressure groups and of their political lobbies is openly and cynically acknowledged today. The pretense at any political philosophy, any principles, ideals or long-range goals is fast disappearing from our scene—and it is all but admitted that this country is now floating without direction, at the mercy of a blind, short-range power game played by various statist gangs, each intent on getting hold of a legislative gun for any special advantage of the immediate moment.

In the absence of any coherent political philosophy, every economic group has been acting as its own destroyer, selling out its future for some momentary privilege. The policy of the businessmen has, for some time, been the most suicidal one in this respect. But it has been surpassed by the current policy of the Negro leaders.

So long as the Negro leaders were fighting against government-enforced discrimination—right, justice and morality were on their side. But that is not what they are fighting any longer. The confusions and contradictions surrounding the issue of racism have now reached an incredible climax.

It is time to clarify the principles involved.

The policy of the Southern states toward Negroes was and is a shameful contradiction of this country’s basic principles. Racial discrimination, imposed and enforced by law, is so blatantly inexcusable an infringement of individual rights that the racist statutes of the South should have been declared unconstitutional long ago.

The Southern racists’ claim of “states’ rights” is a contradiction in terms: there can be no such thing as the “right” of some men to violate the rights of others. The constitutional concept of “states’ rights” pertains to the division of power between local and national authorities, and serves to protect the states from the Federal government; it does not grant to a state government an unlimited, arbitrary power over its citizens or the privilege of abrogating the citizens’ individual rights.

It is true that the Federal government has used the racial issue to enlarge its own power and to set a precedent of encroachment upon the legitimate rights of the states, in an unnecessary and unconstitutional manner. But this merely means that both governments are wrong; it does not excuse the policy of the Southern racists.

One of the worst contradictions, in this context, is the stand of many so-called “conservatives” (not confined exclusively to the South) who claim to be defenders of freedom, of capitalism, of property rights, of the Constitution, yet who advocate racism at the same time. They do not seem to possess enough concern with principles to realize that they are cutting the ground from under their own feet. Men who deny individual rights cannot claim, defend or uphold any rights whatsoever. It is such alleged champions of capitalism who are helping to discredit and destroy it.

The “liberals” are guilty of the same contradiction, but in a different form. They advocate the sacrifice of all individual rights to unlimited majority rule—yet posture as defenders of the rights of minorities. But the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

This accumulation of contradictions, of shortsighted pragmatism, of cynical contempt for principles, of outrageous irrationality, has now reached its climax in the new demands of the Negro leaders.

Instead of fighting against racial discrimination, they are demanding that racial discrimination be legalized and enforced. Instead of fighting against racism, they are demanding the establishment of racial quotas. Instead of fighting for “color-blindness” in social and economic issues, they are proclaiming that “color-blindness” is evil and that “color” should be made a primary consideration. Instead of fighting for equal rights, they are demanding special race privileges

They are demanding that racial quotas be established in regard to employment and that jobs be distributed on a racial basis, in proportion to the percentage of a given race among the local population. For instance, since Negroes constitute 25 per cent of the population of New York City, they demand 25 per cent of the jobs in a given establishment.

Racial quotas have been one of the worst evils of racist regimes. There were racial quotas in the universities of Czarist Russia, in the population of Russia’s major cities, etc. One of the accusations against the racists in this country is that some schools practice a secret system of racial quotas. It was regarded as a victory for justice when employment questionnaires ceased to inquire about an applicant’s race or religion.

Today, it is not an oppressor, but an oppressed minority group that is demanding the establishment of racial quotas. (!)

This particular demand was too much even for the “liberals.” Many of them denounced it—properly—with shocked indignation.

Wrote The N. Y. Times (July 23, 1963): “The demonstrators are following a truly vicious principle in playing the ‘numbers game.’ A demand that 25 per cent (or any other percentage) of jobs be given to Negroes (or any other group) is wrong for one basic reason: it calls for a ‘quota system,’ which is in itself discriminatory.... This newspaper has long fought a religious quota in respect to judge-ships; we equally oppose a racial quota in respect to jobs from the most elevated to the most menial.”

As if the blatant racism of such a demand were not enough, some Negro leaders went still farther. Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, made the following statement (N. Y. Times, August 1):

“The white leadership must be honest enough to grant that throughout our history there has existed a special privileged class of citizens who received preferred treatment. That class was white. Now we’re saying this: If two men, one Negro and one white, are equally qualified for a job, hire the Negro.”

Consider the implications of that statement. It does not merely demand special privileges on racial grounds—it demands that white men be penalized for the sins of their ancestors. It demands that a white laborer be refused a job because his grandfather may have practiced racial discrimination. But perhaps his grandfather had not practiced it. Or perhaps his grandfather had not even lived in this country. Since these questions are not to be considered, it means that that white laborer is to be charged with collective racial guilt, the guilt consisting merely of the color of his skin.

But that is the principle of the worst Southern racist who charges all Negroes with collective racial guilt for any crime committed by an individual Negro, and who treats them all as inferiors on the ground that their ancestors were savages.

The only comment one can make about demands of that kind, is: “By what right?—By what code?—By what standard?”

That absurdly evil policy is destroying the moral base of the Negroes’ fight. Their case rested on the principle of individual rights. If they demand the violation of the rights of others, they negate and forfeit their own. Then the same answer applies to them as to the Southern racists: there can be no such thing as the “right” of some men to violate the rights of others.

Yet the entire policy of the Negro leaders is now moving in that direction. For instance, the demand for racial quotas in schools, with the proposal that hundreds of children, white and Negro, be forced to attend school in distant neighborhoods—for the purpose of “racial balance.” Again, this is pure racism. As opponents of this demand have pointed out, to assign children to certain schools by reason of their race, is equally evil whether one does it for purposes of segregation or integration. And the mere idea of using children as pawns in a political game should outrage all parents, of any race, creed or color.

The “civil rights” bill, now under consideration in Congress, is another example of a gross infringement of individual rights. It is proper to forbid all discrimination in government-owned facilities and establishments: the government has no right to discriminate against any citizens. And by the very same principle, the government has no right to discriminate for some citizens at the expense of others. It has no right to violate the right of private property by forbidding discrimination in privately owned establishments.

No man, neither Negro nor white, has any claim to the property of another man. A man’s rights are not violated by a private individual’s refusal to deal with him. Racism is an evil, irrational and morally contemptible doctrine—but doctrines cannot be forbidden or prescribed by law. Just as we have to protect a communist’s freedom of speech, even though his doctrines are evil, so we have to protect a racist’s right to the use and disposal of his own property. Private racism is not a legal, but a moral issue—and can be fought only by private means, such as economic boycott or social ostracism.

Needless to say, if that “civil rights” bill is passed, it will be the worst breach of property rights in the sorry record of American history in respect to that subject.⁶

It is an ironic demonstration of the philosophical insanity and the consequently suicidal trend of our age, that the men who need the protection of individual rights most urgently—the Negroes—are now in the vanguard of the destruction of these rights.

A word of warning: do not become victims of the same racists by succumbing to racism; do not hold against all Negroes the disgraceful irrationality of some of their leaders. No group has any proper intellectual leadership today or any proper representation.

In conclusion, I shall quote from an astonishing editorial in The N. Y. Times of August 4—astonishing because ideas of this nature are not typical of our age:

“But the question must be not whether a group recognizable in color, features or culture has its rights as a group. No, the question is whether any American individual, regardless of color, features or culture, is deprived of his rights as an American. If the individual has all the rights and privileges due him under the laws and the Constitution, we need not worry about groups and masses—those do not, in fact, exist, except as figures of speech.”

(September 1963)

18.

Counterfeit Individualism

by Nathaniel Branden

The theory of individualism is a central component of the Objectivist philosophy. Individualism is at once an ethical-political concept and an ethical-psychological one. As an ethical-political concept, individualism upholds the supremacy of individual rights, the principle that man is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others. As an ethical-psychological concept, individualism holds that man should think and judge independently, valuing nothing higher than the sovereignty of his intellect.

The philosophical base and validation of individualism, as Ayn Rand has shown in Atlas Shrugged, is the fact that individualism, ethically, politically and psychologically, is an objective requirement of man’s proper survival, of man’s survival qua man, qua rational being. It is implicit in, and necessitated by, a code of ethics that holds man’s life as its standard of value.

The advocacy of individualism as such is not new; what is new is the Objectivist validation of the theory of individualism and the definition of a consistent way to practice it.

Too often, the ethical-political meaning of individualism is held to be: doing whatever one wishes, regardless of the rights of others. Writers such as Nietzsche and Max Stirner are sometimes quoted in support of this interpretation. Altruists and collectivists have an obvious vested interest in persuading men that such is the meaning of individualism, that the man who refuses to be sacrificed intends to sacrifice others.

The contradiction in, and refutation of, such an interpretation of individualism is this: since the only rational base of individualism as an ethical principle is the requirements of man’s survival qua man, one man cannot claim the moral right to violate the rights of another. If he denies inviolate rights to other men, he cannot claim such rights for himself; he has rejected the base of rights. No one can claim the moral right to a contradiction.

Individualism does not consist merely of rejecting the belief that man should live for the collective. A man who seeks escape from the responsibility of supporting his life by his own thought and effort, and wishes to survive by conquering, ruling and exploiting others, is not an individualist. An individualist is a man who lives for his own sake and by his own mind; he neither sacrifices himself to others nor sacrifices others to himself; he deals with men as a trader—not as a looter; as a Producer—not as an Attila.

It is the recognition of this distinction that altruists and collectivists wish men to lose: the distinction between a trader and a looter, between a Producer and an Attila.

If the meaning of individualism, in its ethical-political context, has been perverted and debased predominantly by its avowed antagonists, the meaning of individualism, in its ethical-psychological context, has been perverted and debased predominantly by its professed supporters: by those who wish to dissolve the distinction between an independent judgment and a subjective whim. These are the alleged “individualists” who equate individualism, not with independent thought, but with “independent feelings.” There are no such things as “independent feelings.” There is only an independent mind.

An individualist is, first and foremost, a man of reason. It is upon the ability to think, upon his rational faculty, that man’s life depends; rationality is the precondition of independence and self-reliance. An “individualist” who is neither independent nor self-reliant, is a contradiction in terms; individualism and independence are logically inseparable. The basic independence of the individualist consists of his loyalty to his own mind: it is his perception of the facts of reality, his understanding, his judgment, that he refuses to sacrifice to the unproved assertions of others. That is the meaning of intellectual independence—and that is the essence of an individualist. He is dispassionately and intransigently fact-centered.

Man needs knowledge in order to survive, and only reason can achieve it; men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason, can exist only as parasites on the thinking of others. And a parasite is not an individualist. The irrationalist, the whim-worshiper who regards knowledge and objectivity as “restrictions” on his freedom, the range-of-the-moment hedonist who acts on his private feelings, is not an individualist. The “independence” that an irrationalist seeks is independence from reality—likeDostoevsky’s Underground man who cries: “What do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason, I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four?”

To the irrationalist, existence is merely a clash between his whims and the whims of others; the concept of an objective reality has no reality to him.

Rebelliousness or unconventionality as such do not constitute proof of individualism. Just as individualism does not consist merely of rejecting collectivism, so it does not consist merely of the absence of conformity. A conformist is a man who declares, “It’s true because others believe it”—but an individualist is not a man who declares, “It’s true because I believe it.” An individualist declares, “I believe it because I see in reason that it’s true.”

There is an incident in The Fountainhead that is worth recalling in this connection. In the chapter on the life and career of collectivist Ellsworth Toohey, Ayn Rand describes the various groups of writers and artists that Toohey organized : there was “... a woman who never used capitals in her books, and a man who never used commas ... and another who wrote poems that neither rhymed nor scanned ... There was a boy who used no canvas, but did something with bird cages and metronomes ... A few friends pointed out to Ellsworth Toohey that he seemed guilty of inconsistency; he was so deeply opposed to individualism, they said, and here were all these writers and artists of his, and every one of them was a rabid individualist. ‘Do you really think so?” said Toohey, smiling blandly.”⁷

What Toohey knew—and what students of Objectivism would do well to understand—is that such subjectivists, in their rebellion against “the tyranny of reality,” are less independent and more abjectly parasitical than the most commonplace Babbitt whom they profess to despise. They originate or create nothing; they are profoundly selfless— and they struggle to fill the void of the egos they do not possess, by means of the only form of “self-assertiveness” they recognize: defiance for the sake of defiance, irrationality for the sake of irrationality, destruction for the sake of destruction, whims for the sake of whims.

A psychotic is scarcely likely to be accused of conformity; but neither a psychotic nor a subjectivist is an exponent of individualism.

Observe the common denominator in the attempts to corrupt the meaning of individualism as an ethical-political concept and as an ethical-psychological concept: the attempt to divorce individualism from reason. But it is only in the context of reason and man’s needs as a rational being that the principle of individualism can be justified. Tom out of this context, any advocacy of “individualism” becomes as arbitrary and irrational as the advocacy of collectivism.

This is the basis of Objectivism’s total opposition to any alleged “individualists” who attempt to equate individualism with subjectivism.

And this is the basis of Objectivism’s total repudiation of any self-styled “Objectivists” who permit themselves to believe that any compromise, meeting ground or rapprochement is possible between Objectivism and that counterfeit individualism which consists of declaring: “It’s right because I feel it” or “It’s good because I want it” or “It’s true because I believe it.”

(April 1962)

19.

The Argument from Intimidation

by Ayn Rand

There is a certain type of argument which, in fact, is not an argument, but a means of forestalling debate and extorting an opponent’s agreement with one’s undiscussed notions. It is a method of bypassing logic by means of psychological pressure. Since it is particularly prevalent in today’s culture and is going to grow more so in the next few months, one would do well to learn to identify it and be on guard against it.

This method bears a certain resemblance to the fallacy ad hominem, and comes from the same psychological root, but is different in essential meaning. The ad hominem fallacy consists of attempting to refute an argument by impeaching the character of its proponent. Example: “Candidate X is immoral, therefore his argument is false.”

But the psychological pressure method consists of threatening to impeach an opponent’s character by means of his argument, thus impeaching the argument without debate. Example: “Only the immoral can fail to see that Candidate X’s argument is false.”

In the first case, Candidate X’s immorality (real or invented) is offered as proof of the falsehood of his argument. In the second case, the falsehood of his argument is asserted arbitrarily and offered as proof of his immorality.

In today’s epistemological jungle, that second method is used more frequently than any other type of irrational argument. It should be classified as a logical fallacy and may be designated as “The Argument from Intimidation.”

The essential characteristic of the Argument from Intimidation is its appeal to moral self-doubt and its reliance on the fear, guilt or ignorance of the victim. It is used in the form of an ultimatum demanding that the victim renounce a given idea without discussion, under threat of being considered morally unworthy. The pattern is always: “Only those who are evil (dishonest, heartless. insensitive, ignorant, etc.) can hold such an idea.”

The classic example of the Argument from Intimidation is the story The Emperor’s New Clothes.

In that story, some charlatans sell nonexistent garments to the Emperor by asserting that the garments’ unusual beauty makes them invisible to those who are morally depraved at heart. Observe the psychological factors required to make this work: the charlatans rely on the Emperor’s self-doubt; the Emperor does not question their assertion nor their moral authority; he surrenders at once, claiming that he does see the garments—thus denying the evidence of his own eyes and invalidating his own consciousness—rather than face a threat to his precarious self-esteem. His distance from reality may be gauged by the fact that he prefers to walk naked down the street, displaying his nonexistent garments to the people—rather than risk incurring the moral condemnation of two scoundrels. The people, prompted by the same psychological panic, try to surpass one another in loud exclamations on the splendor of his ctothes—until a child cries out that the Emperor is naked.

This is the exact pattern of the working of the Argument from Intimidation, as it is being worked all around us today.

We have all heard it and are hearing it constantly:

“Only those who lack finer instincts can fail to accept the morality of altruism.”—“Only the ignorant can fail to know that reason has been invalidated.”—“Only black-hearted reactionaries can advocate capitalism.”—“Only war-mongers can oppose the United Nations.”—“Onlythe lunatic fringe can still believe in freedom.”—“Only cowards can fail to see that life is a sewer.”—“Only the superficial can seek beauty, happiness, achievement, values or heroes.”

As an example of an entire field of activity based on nothing but the Argument from Intimidation, I give you modern art—where, in order to prove that they do possess the special insight possessed only by the mystic “elite,” the populace are trying to surpass one another in loud exclamations on the splendor of some bare (but smudged) piece of canvas.

The Argument from Intimidation dominates today’s discussions in two forms. In public speeches and print, it flourishes in the form of long, involved, elaborate structures of unintelligible verbiage, which convey nothing clearly except a moral threat. (“Only the primitive-minded can fail to realize that clarity is oversimplification.”) But in private, day-to-day experience, it comes up wordlessly, between the lines, in the form of inarticulate sounds conveying unstated implications. It relies, not on what is said, but on how it is said—not on content, but on tone of voice.

The tone is usually one of scornful or belligerent incredulity. “Surely you are not an advocate of capitalism, are you?” And if this does not intimidate the prospective victim—who answers, properly: “I am,”—the ensuing dialogue goes something like this: “Oh, you couldn’t be! Not really!” “Really.” “But everybody knows that capitalism is outdated!” “I don’t.” “Oh, come now!” “Since I don’t know it, will you please tell me the reasons for thinking that capitalism is outdated?” “Oh, don’t be ridiculous!” “Will you tell me the reasons?” “Well, really, if you don’t know, I couldn’t possibly tell you!”

All this is accompanied by raised eyebrows, wide-eyed stares, shrugs, grunts, snickers and the entire arsenal of nonverbal signals communicating ominous innuendoes and emotional vibrations of a single kind: disapproval.

If those vibrations fail, if such debaters are challenged, one finds that they have no arguments, no evidence, no proof, no reason, no ground to stand on—that their noisy aggressiveness serves to hide a vacuum—that the Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.

The primordial archetype of that Argument is obvious (and so are the reasons of its appeal to the neo-mysticism of our age): “To those who understand, no explanation is necessary; to those who don’t, none is possible.”

The psychological source of that Argument is social metaphysics. ⁸

A social metaphysician is one who regards the consciousness of other men as superior to his own and to the facts of reality. It is to a social metaphysician that the moral appraisal of himself by others is a primary concern which supersedes truth, facts, reason, logic. The disapproval of others is so shatteringly terrifying to him that nothing can withstand its impact within his consciousness; thus he would deny the evidence of his own eyes and invalidate his own consciousness for the sake of any stray charlatan’s moral sanction. It is only a social metaphysician who could conceive of such absurdity as hoping to win an intellectual argument by hinting: “But people won’t like you!”

Strictly speaking, a social metaphysician does not conceive of his Argument in conscious terms: he finds it “instinctively” by introspection—since it represents his psycho-epistemological way of life. We have all met the exasperating type of person who does not listen to what one says, but to the emotional vibrations of one’s voice, anxiously translating them into approval or disapproval, then answering accordingly. This is a kind of self-imposed Argument from Intimidation, to which a social metaphysician surrenders in most of his human encounters. And thus when he meets an adversary, when his premises are challenged, he resorts automatically to the weapon that terrifies him most: the withdrawal of a moral sanction.

Since that kind of terror is unknown to psychologically healthy men, they may be taken in by the Argument from Intimidation, precisely because of their innocence. Unable to understand that Argument’s motive or to believe that it is merely a senseless bluff, they assume that its user has some sort of knowledge or reasons to back up his seemingly self-confident, belligerent assertions; they give him the benefit of the doubt—and are left in helplessly bewildered confusion. It is thus that the social metaphysicians can victimize the young, the innocent, the conscientious.

This is particularly prevalent in college classrooms. Many professors use the Argument from Intimidation to stifle independent thinking among the students, to evade questions they cannot answer, to discourage any critical analysis of their arbitrary assumptions or any departure from the intellectual status quo.

“Aristotle? My dear fellow—” (a weary sigh) “if you had read Professor Spiffkin’s piece in—” (reverently) “the January 1912 issue of Intellect magazine, which—” (contemptuously) “you obviously haven’t, you would know—” (airily) “that Aristotle has been refuted.”

“Professor X?” (X standing for the name of a distinguished theorist of free-enterprise economics.) “Are you quoting Professor X? Oh no, not really!”—followed by a sarcastic chuckle intended to convey that Professor X had been thoroughly discredited. (By whom? Blank out.)

Such teachers are frequently assisted by the “liberal” goon squad of the classroom, who burst into laughter at appropriate moments.

In our political life, the Argument from Intimidation is the almost exclusive method of discussion. Predominantly, today’s political debates consist of smears and apologies, or imtimidation and appeasement. The first is usually (though not exclusively) practiced by the “liberals,” the second by the “conservatives.” The champions, in this respect, are the “liberal” Republicans who practice both: the first, toward their “conservative” fellow Republicans—the second, toward the Democrats.

All smears are Arguments from Intimidation: they consist of derogatory assertions without any evidence or proof, offered as a substitute for evidence or proof, aimed at the moral cowardice or unthinking credulity of the hearers.

The Argument from Intimidation is not new; it has been used in all ages and cultures, but seldom on so wide a scale as today. It is used more crudely in politics than in other fields of activity, but it is not confined to politics. It permeates our entire culture. It is a symptom of cultural bankruptcy.

How does one resist that Argument? There is only one weapon against it: moral certainty.

When one enters any intellectual battle, big or small, public or private, one cannot seek, desire or expect the enemy’s sanction. Truth or falsehood must be one’s sole concern and sole criterion of judgment—not anyone’s approval or disapproval; and, above all, not the approval of those whose standards are the opposite of one’s own.

Let me emphasize that the Argument from Intimidation does not consist of introducing moral judgment into intellectual issues, but of substituting moral judgment for intellectual argument. Moral evaluations are implicit in most intellectual issues; it is not merely permissible, but mandatory to pass moral judgment when and where appropriate; to suppress such judgment is an act of moral cowardice. But a moral judgment must always follow, not precede (or supersede), the reasons on which it is based.

When one gives reasons for one’s verdict, one assumes responsibility for it and lays oneself open to objective judgment: if one’s reasons are wrong or false, one suffers the consequences. But to condemn without giving reasons is an act of irresponsibility, a kind of moral “hit-and-run” driving, which is the essence of the Argument from Intimidation.

Observe that the men who use that Argument are the ones who dread a reasoned moral attack more than any other kind of battle—and when they encounter a morally confident adversary, they are loudest in protesting that “moralizing” should be kept out of intellectual discussions. But to discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it.

The Argument from Intimidation illustrates why it is important to be certain of one’s premises and of one’s moral ground. It illustrates the kind of intellectual pitfall that awaits those who venture forth without a full, clear, consistent set of convictions, wholly integrated all the way down to fundamentals—those who recklessly leap into battle, armed with nothing but a few random notions floating in a fog of the unknown, the unidentified, the undefined, the unproved, and supported by nothing but their feelings, hopes and fears. The Argument from Intimidation is their Nemesis. In moral and intellectual issues, it is not enough to be right: one has to know that one is right.

The most illustrious example of the proper answer to the Argument from Intimidation was given in American history by the man who, rejecting the enemy’s moral standards and with full certainty of his own rectitude, said:

“If this be treason, make the most of it.”

(July 1964)

INDEX

Prepared by Allan Gotthelf

Altruism

definition of

psychological results of

see also Collectivism: psychology of

see also Collectivism; Mysticism

Anarchy

Antitrust Laws

Aristotle

Art

anti-hero in

as enjoyment

modern

subsidized

Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)

Automation

Bentham, Jeremy

Berlin, East and West

Bill of Rights, The

“Black-and-White” in Ethics

Branden, Barbara

Branden, Nathaniel

Capitalism

attacks on

and progress

Censorship

Collectivism

definition of

psychology of

see also Altruism

Compromise

see also “Black-and-White” in Ethics

Comte, Auguste

Concepts

definition of

formation of

see also Reason

Consciousness

as basic means of survival

man’s

focusing of

proper function of

sabotage of

unfocusing of

volitional; see Volition

see also Concepts; Life: man’s; Perception; Reason; Sensation

“Conservatives”

Constitution of the United States

Context

-dropping

Contracts

Cuba

Declaration of Independence, The.

Democratic Party Platform (1960)

Desires

in relation to ethics see also Emotions; Whims

Dictatorship

characteristics of see also Cuba; Germany, Nazi; Russia, Soviet

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

Egoism; see Selfishness

Emotions

emotional mechanism

see also Desires; Whims

End in Itself

England

Ethical Subjectivism; see Subjectivism, Ethical

Ethical Theories

Ethics, Objectivist

fundamentals of

basic political principle

basic social principle

beneficiary of moral action

cardinal values

cardinal virtues

definition of good and evil

highest moral purpose

man’s need of ethics

standard of value

validation of a rational ethics

see also Metaethics; Rationality; Reason; Rights

Evil

definition of

Existentialism

“Extremism”

Faith

definition of

and mental health

and morality see also Mysticism

Fallacy of the Argument from Intimidation

For The New Intellectual (Ayn Rand)

Force

initiation of

in retaliation

see also Government

Fountainhead, The (Ayn Rand)

Free Speech see also Censorship

Free Trade

Free Will; see Volition

Freedom; see Capitalism; Rights

Friendship

Germany, Nazi

Good

definition of see also Ethics, Objectivist

Government

nature of

proper functions of

purpose of

voluntary financing of see also Dictatorship

Happiness

definition of

the fallacy in Hedonism

and life

as moral purpose

and reason

and values see also Pleasure

Hedonism

Help to Others, Non-sacrificial

Henry, Patrick, quoted

Honesty

Humility

Independence

Individualism see also Selfishness

Integrity

Interests, “Conflicts” of

Justice

Laissez-faire Capitalism; see Capitalism

Law, Objective

Law of Identity

“Liberals”

Life

animal

derivation of value from

as ethical purpose

and happiness

man’s

plant

as standard of value

as ultimate value

Love

and altruism

romantic-sexual

as selfish

Man, Nature of see also Life: man’s; Rationality; Reason

Mental Health

standard of see also Self-esteem

Metaethics

definition of ethics

definition of value

first question of ethics see also Ethics, Objectivist: validation of a rational ethics

Mill, John Stuart

Mind; see Reason

Minow, Newton N.

Mixed Economy

Moral Judgment, Necessity of

Mysticism

in ethics see also Faith

Neurosis

New York Times, The

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Notes From Underground (F. Dostoevsky)

Objectivist Newsletter, The

Perception

Pleasure

in art

in human relationships

pleasure-pain mechanism

in productive work

quality of

in recreation.

in sex

and values

Pride

Productiveness

“Public Interest”

Public Projects

Racism

and Collectivism

in Nazi Germany

and Negroes

in Soviet Russia

Rand, Ayn

Rationality

as man’s basic virtue see also Reason

Reason

definition of see also Rationality

Rights

economic “rights”

and government

of groups

national

nature and validation of

property

states’ see also Force; Government

Russia, Soviet

Self-defense; see Force:‘in retaliation

Self-esteem

pseudo-

requirements of

Self-interest; see Selfishness

Self-sacrifice

definition of sacrifice see also Altruism

Selfishness

common misconception of

definition of

Sensation

Social Metaphysics

Socialism see also Collectivism

Statism see also Collectivism

Stirner, Max

Subjectivism, Ethical

Taxation; see Government: voluntary financing of

Teleology

United States of America

Value

cardinal values of Objectivist ethics

definition of

derivation of “value” from “life”

hierarchy of

of social existence

standard of

ultimate

Virtue

basic virtue

definition of see also Ethics, Objectivist

Volition. see also Consciousness: man’s: focusing of

Whims

definition of

and ethics

Who Is Ayn Rand? (Nathaniel Branden)

Young, Whitney M., Jr.

1

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, New York: Random House, 1957; New American Library, 1959.

Paper delivered by Ayn Rand at the University of Wisconsin Symposium on “Ethics in Our Time” in Madison, Wisconsin, on February 9, 1961.

2

When applied to physical phenomena, such as the automatic functions of an organism, the term “goal-directed” is not to be taken to mean “purposive” (a concept applicable only to the actions of a consciousness) and is not to imply the existence of any teleological principle operating in insentient nature. I use the term “goal-directed,” in this context, to designate the fact that the automatic functions of living organisms are actions whose nature is such that they result in the preservation of an organism’s life.

3

Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual, New York: Random House, 1961; New American Library, 1963.

4

Nathaniel Branden, “Benevolence versus Altruism,” The Objectivist Newsletter, July 1962.

5

Nathaniel Branden, Who Is Ayn Rand? New York: Random House, 1962; Paperback Library, 1964.

6

The bill was passed in 1964, including the sections that violate property rights.

7

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1943; New York: New American Library, 1952.

8

See: Nathaniel Branden, “Social Metaphysics,” The Objectivist Newsletter, November 1962.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Chapter 1. - The Objectivist Ethics

Chapter 2. - Mental Health versus Mysticism and Self-Sacrifice

Chapter 3. - The Ethics of Emergencies

Chapter 4. - The “Conflicts” of Men’s Interests

Chapter 5. - Isn’t Everyone Selfish?

Chapter 6. - The Psychology of Pleasure

Chapter 7. - Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?

Chapter 8. - How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?

Chapter 9. - The Cult of Moral Grayness

Chapter 10. - Collectivized Ethics

Chapter 11. - The Monument Builders

Chapter 12. - Man’s Rights

Chapter 13. - Collectivized “Rights”

Chapter 14. - The Nature of Government

Chapter 15. - Government Financing in a Free Society

Chapter 16. - The Divine Right of Stagnation

Chapter 17. - Racism

Chapter 18. - Counterfeit Individualism

Chapter 19. - The Argument from Intimidation

INDEX

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Theory and History

1. WHAT IS CAPITALISM?

2. THE ROOTS OF WAR

3. AMERICA’S PERSECUTED MINORITY: BIG BUSINESS

4. ANTITRUST

5. COMMON FALLACIES ABOUT CAPITALISM

6. GOLD AND ECONOMIC FREEDOM

7. NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN FREE ENTERPRISE

8. THE EFFECTS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION ON WOMEN AND CHILDREN

9. THE ASSAULT ON INTEGRITY

10. THE PROPERTY STATUS OF AIRWAVES

11. PATENTS AND COPYRIGHTS

12. THEORY AND PRACTICE

13. LET US ALONE!

Current State

14. THE ANATOMY OF COMPROMISE

15. IS ATLAS SHRUGGING?

16. THE PULL PEDDLERS

17. “EXTREMISM,” OR THE ART OF SMEARING

18. THE OBLITERATION OF CAPITALISM

19. CONSERVATISM: AN OBITUARY

20. THE NEW FASCISM: RULE BY CONSENSUS

21. THE WRECKAGE OF THE CONSENSUS

22. THE CASHING-IN: THE STUDENT “REBELLION”

23. ALIENATION

24. REQUIEM FOR MAN

APPENDIX: MAN’S RIGHTS

APPENDIX: THE NATURE OF GOVERNMENT

RECOMMENDED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

CAPITALISM

is the only system geared to the life of a rational being and the only moral politico-economic system in history.

AYN RAND

and the Objectivists launch a major offensive in the name of a new morality. In one fiery article after another they show that capitalism is still an unknown ideal, threatened with destruction without a hearing, “without any public knowledge of its principles, its nature, its history, or its moral meaning.”

The political philosophy of Miss Rand’s bestselling novels is presented here in a challenging new appraisal of our era, by the “radicals for capitalism.”

SIGNET

Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,

Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a New American Library edition.

First Signet Printing, November

Copyright © Ayn Rand, 1946, 1962, 1964, 1966

Copyright © The Objectivist Newsletter, Inc., 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965 Copyright © The Objectivist, Inc., 1966, 1967

Copyright © Alan Greenspan, 1962

All rights reserved

Permission requests for college or textbook use should be addressed to the Estate of Ayn Rand, PO Box 51808, Irving, California 92619-9930. Information about other books by Ayn Rand and her philosophy, Objectivism, may be obtained by writing to OBJECTIVISM, PO Box 51808, Irvine, California 92619-9930.

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

eISBN : 978-1-101-13769-7

http://us.penguingroup.com

INTRODUCTION

This book is not a treatise on economics. It is a collection of essays on the moral aspects of capitalism.

Our approach can best be summarized by my statement in the first issue of The Objectivist Newsletter (January 1962):

“Objectivism is a philosophical movement; since politics is a branch of philosophy, Objectivism advocates certain political principles—specifically, those of laissez-faire capitalism—as the consequence and the ultimate practical application of its fundamental philosophical principles. It does not regard politics as a separate or primary goal, that is: as a goal that can be achieved without a wider ideological context.

“Politics is based on three other philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology and ethics—on a theory of man’s nature and of man’s relationship to existence. It is only on such a base that one can formulate a consistent political theory and achieve it in practice. . . . Objectivists are not ‘conservatives.’ We are radicals for capitalism; we are fighting for that philosophical base which capitalism did not have and without which it was doomed to perish.”

I want to stress that our primary interest is not politics or economics as such, but “man’s nature and man’s relationship to existence”—and that we advocate capitalism because it is the only system geared to the life of a rational being.

In this respect, there is a fundamental difference between our approach and that of capitalism’s classical defenders and modern apologists. With very few exceptions, they are responsible—by default—for capitalism’s destruction. The default consisted of their inability or unwillingness to fight the battle where it had to be fought: on moral-philosophical grounds.

No politico-economic system in history has ever proved its value so eloquently or has benefited mankind so greatly as capitalism—and none has ever been attacked so savagely, viciously, and blindly. The flood of misinformation, misrepresentation, distortion, and outright falsehood about capitalism is such that the young people of today have no idea (and virtually no way of discovering any idea) of its actual nature. While archeologists are rummaging through the ruins of millennia for scraps of pottery and bits of bones, from which to reconstruct some information about prehistorical existence—the events of less than a century ago are hidden under a mound more impenetrable than the geological debris of winds, floods, and earthquakes: a mound of silence.

To obliterate the truth on such a large scale, to hide an open secret from the world, to hide—without any power of censorship, yet without any significant sound of protest—the fact that an ideal social system had once been almost within men’s reach, cannot be done by any conspiracy of evildoers; it cannot be done except with the tacit compliance of those who know better.

By their silence—by their evasion of the clash between capitalism and altruism—it is capitalism’s alleged champions who are responsible for the fact that capitalism is being destroyed without a hearing, without a trial, without any public knowledge of its principles, its nature, its history, or its moral meaning. It is being destroyed in the manner of a nightmare lynching—as if a blind, despair-crazed mob were burning a straw man, not knowing that the grotesquely deformed bundle of straw is hiding the living body of the ideal.

The method of capitalism’s destruction rests on never letting the world discover what it is that is being destroyed—on never allowing it to be identified within the hearing of the young.

The purpose of this book is to identify it.

The guilt for the present state of the world rests on the shoulders of those who are over forty years old today (with a very few exceptions)—those who, when they spoke, said less than they knew and said it less clearly than the subject demanded.

This book is addressed to the young—in years or in spirit—who are not afraid to know and are not ready to give up.

What they have to discover, what all the efforts of capitalism’s enemies are frantically aimed at hiding, is the fact that capitalism is not merely the “practical,” but the only moral system in history. (See Atlas Shrugged.)

The political aspects of Atlas Shrugged are not its theme. Its theme is primarily ethical-epistemological: the role of the mind in man’s existence—and politics, necessarily, is one of the theme’s consequences. But the epistemological chaos of our age, fostered by modern philosophy, is such that many young readers find it difficult to translate abstractions into political principles and apply them to the evaluation of today’s events. This present book may help them. It is a nonfiction footnote to Atlas Shrugged.

Since every political system rests on some theory of ethics, I suggest to those readers who are actually interested in understanding the nature of capitalism, that they read first The Virtue of Selfishness, a collection of essays on the Objectivist ethics, which is a necessary foundation for this present book. Since no political discussion can be meaningful or intelligible without a clear understanding of two crucial concepts: “rights” and “government”—yet these are the two most strenuously evaded in today’s technique of obfuscation—I suggest that you begin this book by reading (or rereading) two essays from that earlier collection, which you will find here reprinted in the appendix: “Man’s Rights” and “The Nature of Government.”

Most of the essays in this book appeared originally in The Objectivist Newsletter (now, in magazine format, The Objectivist); others are based on lectures or papers, as indicated. Some of the essays cover, in brief summary, the answers to the most widely spread fallacies about the economics of capitalism. These essays appeared in the “Intellectual Ammunition Department” of The Objectivist Newsletter and were written in answer to questions from our readers. Those who are interested in studying political economy will find, in the appendix, a recommended bibliography on that subject.

Now a word about the contributors to this book. Robert Hessen is presently completing his doctorate in history at Columbia University, and is teaching in Columbia’s Graduate School of Business. Alan Greenspan is president of Townsend-Greenspan & Co., Inc., economic consultants.

—AYN RAND

New York, July 1966

P.S. Nathaniel Branden is no longer associated with me, with my philosophy or with The Objectivist.

A.R.

New York, November 1970

Theory and History

1. WHAT IS CAPITALISM?

by Ayn Rand

The disintegration of philosophy in the nineteenth century and its collapse in the twentieth have led to a similar, though much slower and less obvious, process in the course of modern science.

Today’s frantic development in the field of technology has a quality reminiscent of the days preceding the economic crash of 1929: riding on the momentum of the past, on the unacknowledged remnants of an Aristotelian epistemology, it is a hectic, feverish expansion, heedless of the fact that its theoretical account is long since overdrawn—that in the field of scientific theory, unable to integrate or interpret their own data, scientists are abetting the resurgence of a primitive mysticism. In the humanities, however, the crash is past, the depression has set in, and the collapse of science is all but complete.

The clearest evidence of it may be seen in such comparatively young sciences as psychology and political economy. In psychology, one may observe the attempt to study human behavior without reference to the fact that man is conscious. In political economy, one may observe the attempt to study and to devise social systems without reference to man.

The Objectivist Newsletter, November and December 1965.

It is philosophy that defines and establishes the epistemological criteria to guide human knowledge in general and specific sciences in particular. Political economy came into prominence in the nineteenth century, in the era of philosophy’s post-Kantian disintegration, and no one rose to check its premises or to challenge its base. Implicitly, uncritically, and by default, political economy accepted as its axioms the fundamental tenets of collectivism.

Political economists—including the advocates of capitalism—defined their science as the study of the management or direction or organization or manipulation of a “community’s” or a nation’s “resources.” The nature of these “resources” was not defined; their communal ownership was taken for granted—and the goal of political economy was assumed to be the study of how to utilize these “resources” for “the common good.”

The fact that the principal “resource” involved was man himself, that he was an entity of a specific nature with specific capacities and requirements, was given the most superficial attention, if any. Man was regarded simply as one of the factors of production, along with land, forests, or mines—as one of the less significant factors, since more study was devoted to the influence and quality of these others than to his role or quality.

Political economy was, in effect, a science starting in midstream: it observed that men were producing and trading, it took for granted that they had always done so and always would—it accepted this fact as the given, requiring no further consideration—and it addressed itself to the problem of how to devise the best way for the “community” to dispose of human effort.

There were many reasons for this tribal view of man. The morality of altruism was one; the growing dominance of political statism among the intellectuals of the nineteenth century was another. Psychologically, the main reason was the soul-body dichotomy permeating European culture: material production was regarded as a demeaning task of a lower order, unrelated to the concerns of man’s intellect, a task assigned to slaves or serfs since the beginning of recorded history. The institution of serfdom had lasted, in one form or another, till well into the nineteenth century; it was abolished, politically, only by the advent of capitalism; politically, but not intellectually.

The concept of man as a free, independent individual was profoundly alien to the culture of Europe. It was a tribal culture down to its roots; in European thinking, the tribe was the entity, the unit, and man was only one of its expendable cells. This applied to rulers and serfs alike: the rulers were believed to hold their privileges only by virtue of the services they rendered to the tribe, services regarded as of a noble order, namely, armed force or military defense. But a nobleman was as much chattel of the tribe as a serf: his life and property belonged to the king. It must be remembered that the institution of private property, in the full, legal meaning of the term, was brought into existence only by capitalism. In the pre-capitalist eras, private property existed de facto, but not de jure, i.e., by custom and sufferance, not by right or by law. In law and in principle, all property belonged to the head of the tribe, the king, and was held only by his permission, which could be revoked at any time, at his pleasure. (The king could and did expropriate the estates of recalcitrant noblemen throughout the course of Europe’s history.)

The American philosophy of the Rights of Man was never grasped fully by European intellectuals. Europe’s predominant idea of emancipation consisted of changing the concept of man as a slave of the absolute state embodied by a king, to the concept of man as a slave of the absolute state embodied by “the people”—i.e., switching from slavery to a tribal chief into slavery to the tribe. A non-tribal view of existence could not penetrate the mentalities that regarded the privilege of ruling material producers by physical force as a badge of nobility.

Thus Europe’s thinkers did not notice the fact that during the nineteenth century, the galley slaves had been replaced by the inventors of steamboats, and the village blacksmiths by the owners of blast furnaces, and they went on thinking in such terms (such contradictions in terms) as “wage slavery” or “the antisocial selfishness of industrialists who take so much from society without giving anything in return”—on the unchallenged axiom that wealth is an anonymous, social, tribal product.

That notion has not been challenged to this day; it represents the implicit assumption and the base of contemporary political economy.

As an example of this view and its consequences, I shall cite the article on “Capitalism” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The article gives no definition of its subject; it opens as follows:

CAPITALISM, a term used to denote the economic system that has been dominant in the western world since the breakup of feudalism. Fundamental to any system called capitalist are the relations between private owners of nonpersonal means of production (land, mines, industrial plants, etc., collectively known as capital) [italics mine] and free but capitalless workers, who sell their labour services to employers. . . . The resulting wage bargains determine the proportion in which the total product of society will be shared between the class of labourers and the class of capitalist entrepreneurs. ¹

(I quote from Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged, from a passage describing the tenets of collectivism: “An industrialist—blank-out—there is no such person. A factory is a ‘natural resource,’ like a tree, a rock or a mud-puddle.”)

The success of capitalism is explained by the Britannica as follows:

Productive use of the “social surplus” was the special virtue that enabled capitalism to outstrip all prior economic systems. Instead of building pyramids and cathedrals, those in command of the social surplus chose to invest in ships, warehouses, raw materials, finished goods and other material forms of wealth. The social surplus was thus converted into enlarged productive capacity.

This is said about a time when Europe’s population subsisted in such poverty that child mortality approached fifty percent, and periodic famines wiped out the “surplus” population which the pre-capitalist economies were unable to feed. Yet, making no distinction between tax-expropriated and industrially produced wealth, the Britannica asserts that it was the surplus wealth of that time that the early capitalists “commanded” and “chose to invest”—and that this investment was the cause of the stupendous prosperity of the age that followed.

What is a “social surplus”? The article gives no definition or explanation. A “surplus” presupposes a norm; if subsistence on a chronic starvation level is above the implied norm, what is that norm? The article does not answer.

There is, of course, no such thing as a “social surplus.” All wealth is produced by somebody and belongs to somebody. And “the special virtue that enabled capitalism to outstrip all prior economic systems” was freedom (a concept eloquently absent from the Britannica’s account), which led, not to the expropriation, but to the creation of wealth.

I shall have more to say later about that disgraceful article (disgraceful on many counts, not the least of which is scholarship). At this point, I quoted it only as a succinct example of the tribal premise that underlies today’s political economy. That premise is shared by the enemies and the champions of capitalism alike; it provides the former with a certain inner consistency, and disarms the latter by a subtle, yet devastating aura of moral hypocrisy—as witness, their attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of “the common good” or “service to the consumer” or “the best allocation of resources.” (Whose resources?)

If capitalism is to be understood, it is this tribal premise that has to be checked—and challenged.

Mankind is not an entity, an organism, or a coral bush. The entity involved in production and trade is man. It is with the study of man—not of the loose aggregate known as a “community”—that any science of the humanities has to begin.

This issue represents one of the epistemological differences between the humanities and the physical sciences, one of the causes of the former’s well-earned inferiority complex in regard to the latter. A physical science would not permit itself (not yet, at least) to ignore or bypass the nature of its subject. Such an attempt would mean: a science of astronomy that gazed at the sky, but refused to study individual stars, planets, and satellites—or a science of medicine that studied disease, without any knowledge or criterion of health, and took, as its basic subject of study, a hospital as a whole, never focusing on individual patients.

A great deal may be learned about society by studying man; but this process cannot be reversed: nothing can be learned about man by studying society—by studying the inter-relationships of entities one has never identified or defined. Yet that is the methodology adopted by most political economists. Their attitude, in effect, amounts to the unstated, implicit postulate: “Man is that which fits economic equations.” Since he obviously does not, this leads to the curious fact that in spite of the practical nature of their science, political economists are oddly unable to relate their abstractions to the concretes of actual existence.

It leads also to a baffling sort of double standard or double perspective in their way of viewing men and events: if they observe a shoemaker, they find no difficulty in concluding that he is working in order to make a living; but as political economists, on the tribal premise, they declare that his purpose (and duty) is to provide society with shoes. If they observe a panhandler on a street corner, they identify him as a bum; in political economy, he becomes “a sovereign consumer.” If they hear the communist doctrine that all property should belong to the state, they reject it emphatically and feel, sincerely, that they would fight communism to the death; but in political economy, they speak of the government’s duty to effect “a fair redistribution of wealth,” and they speak of businessmen as the best, most efficient trustees of the nation’s “natural resources.”

This is what a basic premise (and philosophical negligence) will do; this is what the tribal premise has done.

To reject that premise and begin at the beginning—in one’s approach to political economy and to the evaluation of various social systems—one must begin by identifying man’s nature, i.e., those essential characteristics which distinguish him from all other living species.

Man’s essential characteristic is his rational faculty. Man’s mind is his basic means of survival—his only means of gaining knowledge.

Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts. . . . He cannot provide for his simplest physical needs without a process of thought. He needs a process of thought to discover how to plant and grow his food or how to make weapons for hunting. His percepts might lead him to a cave, if one is available—but to build the simplest shelter, he needs a process of thought. No percepts and no “instincts” will tell him how to light a fire, how to weave cloth, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to make an airplane, how to perform an appendectomy, how to produce an electric light bulb or an electronic tube or a cyclotron or a box of matches. Yet his life depends on such knowledge—and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it.²

A process of thought is an enormously complex process of identification and integration, which only an individual mind can perform. There is no such thing as a collective brain. Men can learn from one another, but learning requires a process of thought on the part of every individual student. Men can cooperate in the discovery of new knowledge, but such cooperation requires the independent exercise of his rational faculty by every individual scientist. Man is the only living species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; but such transmission requires a process of thought on the part of the individual recipients. As witness, the breakdowns of civilization, the dark ages in the history of mankind’s progress, when the accumulated knowledge of centuries vanished from the lives of men who were unable, unwilling, or forbidden to think.

In order to sustain its life, every living species has to follow a certain course of action required by its nature. The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort. Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival.

If some men do not choose to think, they can survive only by imitating and repeating a routine of work discovered by others—but those others had to discover it, or none would have survived. If some men do not choose to think or to work, they can survive (temporarily) only by looting the goods produced by others—but those others had to produce them, or none would have survived. Regardless of what choice is made, in this issue, by any man or by any number of men, regardless of what blind, irrational, or evil course they may choose to pursue—the fact remains that reason is man’s means of survival and that men prosper or fail, survive or perish in proportion to the degree of their rationality.

Since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are properties of the individual, since the choice to exercise his rational faculty or not depends on the individual, man’s survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don’t. Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man’s mind.

A rational mind does not work under compulsion; it does not subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone’s orders, directives, or controls; it does not sacrifice its knowledge, its view of the truth, to anyone’s opinions, threats, wishes, plans, or “welfare.” Such a mind may be hampered by others, it may be silenced, proscribed, imprisoned, or destroyed; it cannot be forced; a gun is not an argument. (An example and symbol of this attitude is Galileo.)

It is from the work and the inviolate integrity of such minds—from the intransigent innovators—that all of mankind’s knowledge and achievements have come. (See The Fountainhead.) It is to such minds that mankind owes its survival. (See Atlas Shrugged.)

The same principle applies to all men, on every level of ability and ambition. To the extent that a man is guided by his rational judgment, he acts in accordance with the requirements of his nature and, to that extent, succeeds in achieving a human form of survival and well-being; to the extent that he acts irrationally, he acts as his own destroyer.

The social recognition of man’s rational nature—of the connection between his survival and his use of reason—is the concept of individual rights.

I shall remind you that “rights” are a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context, that they are derived from man’s nature as a rational being and represent a necessary condition of his particular mode of survival. I shall remind you also that the right to life is the source of all rights, including the right to property.³

In regard to political economy, this last requires special emphasis: man has to work and produce in order to support his life. He has to support his life by his own effort and by the guidance of his own mind. If he cannot dispose of the product of his effort, he cannot dispose of his effort; if he cannot dispose of his effort, he cannot dispose of his life. Without property rights, no other rights can be practiced.

Now, bearing these facts in mind, consider the question of what social system is appropriate to man.

A social system is a set of moral-political-economic principles embodied in a society’s laws, institutions, and government, which determine the relationships, the terms of association, among the men living in a given geographical area. It is obvious that these terms and relationships depend on an identification of man’s nature, that they would be different if they pertain to a society of rational beings or to a colony of ants. It is obvious that they will be radically different if men deal with one another as free, independent individuals, on the premise that every man is an end in himself—or as members of a pack, each regarding the others as the means to his ends and to the ends of “the pack as a whole.”

There are only two fundamental questions (or two aspects of the same question) that determine the nature of any social system: Does a social system recognize individual rights?—and: Does a social system ban physical force from human relationships? The answer to the second question is the practical implementation of the answer to the first.

Is man a sovereign individual who owns his person, his mind, his life, his work and its products—or is he the property of the tribe (the state, the society, the collective) that may dispose of him in any way it pleases, that may dictate his convictions, prescribe the course of his life, control his work and expropriate his products? Does man have the right to exist for his own sake—or is he born in bondage, as an indentured servant who must keep buying his life by serving the tribe but can never acquire it free and clear?

This is the first question to answer. The rest is consequences and practical implementations. The basic issue is only: Is man free?

In mankind’s history, capitalism is the only system that answers: Yes.

Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.

The recognition of individual rights entails the banishment of physical force from human relationships: basically, rights can be violated only by means of force. In a capitalist society, no man or group may initiate the use of physical force against others. The only function of the government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man’s rights, i.e., the task of protecting him from physical force; the government acts as the agent of man’s right of self-defense, and may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use; thus the government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of force under objective control.⁴

It is the basic, metaphysical fact of man’s nature—the connection between his survival and his use of reason—that capitalism recognizes and protects.

In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions, and interests dictate. They can deal with one another only in terms of and by means of reason, i.e., by means of discussion, persuasion, and contractual agreement, by voluntary choice to mutual benefit. The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial. It is the institution of private property that protects and implements the right to disagree—and thus keeps the road open to man’s most valuable attribute (valuable personally, socially, and objectively): the creative mind.

This is the cardinal difference between capitalism and collectivism.

The power that determines the establishment, the changes, the evolution, and the destruction of social systems is philosophy. The role of chance, accident, or tradition, in this context, is the same as their role in the life of an individual: their power stands in inverse ratio to the power of a culture’s (or an individual’s) philosophical equipment, and grows as philosophy collapses. It is, therefore, by reference to philosophy that the character of a social system has to be defined and evaluated. Corresponding to the four branches of philosophy, the four keystones of capitalism are: metaphysically, the requirements of man’s nature and survival—epistemologically, reason—ethically, individual rights—politically, freedom.

This, in substance, is the base of the proper approach to political economy and to an understanding of capitalism—not the tribal premise inherited from prehistorical traditions.

The “practical” justification of capitalism does not lie in the collectivist claim that it effects “the best allocation of national resources.” Man is not a “national resource” and neither is his mind—and without the creative power of man’s intelligence, raw materials remain just so many useless raw materials.

The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve “the common good.” It is true that capitalism does—if that catch-phrase has any meaning—but this is merely a secondary consequence. The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature, that it protects man’s survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice.

Every social system is based, explicitly or implicitly, on some theory of ethics. The tribal notion of “the common good” has served as the moral justification of most social systems—and of all tyrannies—in history. The degree of a society’s enslavement or freedom corresponded to the degree to which that tribal slogan was invoked or ignored.

“The common good” (or “the public interest”) is an undefined and undefinable concept: there is no such entity as “the tribe” or “the public”; the tribe (or the public or society) is only a number of individual men. Nothing can be good for the tribe as such; “good” and “value” pertain only to a living organism—to an individual living organism—not to a disembodied aggregate of relationships.

“The common good” is a meaningless concept, unless taken literally, in which case its only possible meaning is: the sum of the good of all the individual men involved. But in that case, the concept is meaningless as a moral criterion: it leaves open the question of what is the good of individual men and how does one determine it?

It is not, however, in its literal meaning that that concept is generally used. It is accepted precisely for its elastic, undefinable, mystical character which serves, not as a moral guide, but as an escape from morality. Since the good is not applicable to the disembodied, it becomes a moral blank check for those who attempt to embody it.

When “the common good” of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals. It is tacitly assumed, in such cases, that “the common good” means “the good of the majority” as against the minority or the individual. Observe the significant fact that that assumption is tacit: even the most collectivized mentalities seem to sense the impossibility of justifying it morally. But “the good of the majority,” too, is only a pretense and a delusion: since, in fact, the violation of an individual’s rights means the abrogation of all rights, it delivers the helpless majority into the power of any gang that proclaims itself to be “the voice of society” and proceeds to rule by means of physical force, until deposed by another gang employing the same means.

If one begins by defining the good of individual men, one will accept as proper only a society in which that good is achieved and achievable. But if one begins by accepting “the common good” as an axiom and regarding individual good as its possible but not necessary consequence (not necessary in any particular case), one ends up with such a gruesome absurdity as Soviet Russia, a country professedly dedicated to “the common good,” where, with the exception of a minuscule clique of rulers, the entire population has existed in subhuman misery for over two generations.

What makes the victims and, worse, the observers accept this and other similar historical atrocities, and still cling to the myth of “the common good”? The answer lies in philosophy—in philosophical theories on the nature of moral values.

There are, in essence, three schools of thought on the nature of the good: the intrinsic, the subjective, and the objective. The intrinsic theory holds that the good is inherent in certain things or actions as such, regardless of their context and consequences, regardless of any benefit or injury they may cause to the actors and subjects involved. It is a theory that divorces the concept of “good” from beneficiaries, and the concept of “value” from valuer and purpose—claiming that the good is good in, by, and of itself.

The subjectivist theory holds that the good bears no relation to the facts of reality, that it is the product of a man’s consciousness, created by his feelings, desires, “intuitions,” or whims, and that it is merely an “arbitrary postulate” or an “emotional commitment.”

The intrinsic theory holds that the good resides in some sort of reality, independent of man’s consciousness; the subjectivist theory holds that the good resides in man’s consciousness, independent of reality.

The objective theory holds that the good is neither an attribute of “things in themselves” nor of man’s emotional states, but an evaluation of the facts of reality by man’s consciousness according to a rational standard of value. (Rational, in this context, means: derived from the facts of reality and validated by a process of reason.) The objective theory holds that the good is an aspect of reality in relation to man—and that it must be discovered, not invented, by man. Fundamental to an objective theory of values is the question: Of value to whom and for what? An objective theory does not permit context-dropping or “concept-stealing”; it does not permit the separation of “value” from “purpose,” of the good from beneficiaries, and of man’s actions from reason.

Of all the social systems in mankind’s history, capitalism is the only system based on an objective theory of values.

The intrinsic theory and the subjectivist theory (or a mixture of both) are the necessary base of every dictatorship, tyranny, or variant of the absolute state. Whether they are held consciously or subconsciously—in the explicit form of a philosopher’s treatise or in the implicit chaos of its echoes in an average man’s feelings—these theories make it possible for a man to believe that the good is independent of man’s mind and can be achieved by physical force.

If a man believes that the good is intrinsic in certain actions, he will not hesitate to force others to perform them. If he believes that the human benefit or injury caused by such actions is of no significance, he will regard a sea of blood as of no significance. If he believes that the beneficiaries of such actions are irrelevant (or interchangeable), he will regard wholesale slaughter as his moral duty in the service of a “higher” good. It is the intrinsic theory of values that produces a Robespierre, a Lenin, a Stalin, or a Hitler. It is not an accident that Eichmann was a Kantian.

If a man believes that the good is a matter of arbitrary, subjective choice, the issue of good or evil becomes, for him, an issue of: my feelings or theirs? No bridge, understanding, or communication is possible to him. Reason is the only means of communication among men, and an objectively perceivable reality is their only common frame of reference; when these are invalidated (i.e., held to be irrelevant) in the field of morality, force becomes men’s only way of dealing with one another. If the subjectivist wants to pursue some social ideal of his own, he feels morally entitled to force men “for their own good,” since he feels that he is right and that there is nothing to oppose him but their misguided feelings.

Thus, in practice, the proponents of the intrinsic and the subjectivist schools meet and blend. (They blend in terms of their psycho-epistemology as well: by what means do the moralists of the intrinsic school discover their transcendental “good,” if not by means of special, non-rational intuitions and revelations, i.e., by means of their feelings?) It is doubtful whether anyone can hold either of these theories as an actual, if mistaken, conviction. But both serve as a rationalization of power-lust and of rule by brute force, unleashing the potential dictator and disarming his victims.

The objective theory of values is the only moral theory incompatible with rule by force. Capitalism is the only system based implicitly on an objective theory of values—and the historic tragedy is that this has never been made explicit.

If one knows that the good is objective—i.e., determined by the nature of reality, but to be discovered by man’s mind—one knows that an attempt to achieve the good by physical force is a monstrous contradiction which negates morality at its root by destroying man’s capacity to recognize the good, i.e., his capacity to value. Force invalidates and paralyzes a man’s judgment, demanding that he act against it, thus rendering him morally impotent. A value which one is forced to accept at the price of surrendering one’s mind, is not a value to anyone; the forcibly mindless can neither judge nor choose nor value. An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes. Values cannot exist (cannot be valued) outside the full context of a man’s life, needs, goals, and knowledge.

The objective view of values permeates the entire structure of a capitalist society.

The recognition of individual rights implies the recognition of the fact that the good is not an ineffable abstraction in some supernatural dimension, but a value pertaining to reality, to this earth, to the lives of individual human beings (note the right to the pursuit of happiness). It implies that the good cannot be divorced from beneficiaries, that men are not to be regarded as interchangeable, and that no man or tribe may attempt to achieve the good of some at the price of the immolation of others.

The free market represents the social application of an objective theory of values. Since values are to be discovered by man’s mind, men must be free to discover them—to think, to study, to translate their knowledge into physical form, to offer their products for trade, to judge them, and to choose, be it material goods or ideas, a loaf of bread or a philosophical treatise. Since values are established contextually, every man must judge for himself, in the context of his own knowledge, goals, and interests. Since values are determined by the nature of reality, it is reality that serves as men’s ultimate arbiter: if a man’s judgment is right, the rewards are his; if it is wrong, he is his only victim.

It is in regard to a free market that the distinction between an intrinsic, subjective, and objective view of values is particularly important to understand. The market value of a product is not an intrinsic value, not a “value in itself” hanging in a vacuum. A free market never loses sight of the question: Of value to whom? And, within the broad field of objectivity, the market value of a product does not reflect its philosophically objective value, but only its socially objective value.

By “philosophically objective,” I mean a value estimated from the standpoint of the best possible to man, i.e., by the criterion of the most rational mind possessing the greatest knowledge, in a given category, in a given period, and in a defined context (nothing can be estimated in an undefined context). For instance, it can be rationally proved that the airplane is objectively of immeasurably greater value to man (to man at his best) than the bicycle—and that the works of Victor Hugo are objectively of immeasurably greater value than true-confession magazines. But if a given man’s intellectual potential can barely manage to enjoy true confessions, there is no reason why his meager earnings, the product of his effort, should be spent on books he cannot read—or on subsidizing the airplane industry, if his own transportation needs do not extend beyond the range of a bicycle. (Nor is there any reason why the rest of mankind should be held down to the level of his literary taste, his engineering capacity, and his income. Values are not determined by fiat nor by majority vote.)

Just as the number of its adherents is not a proof of an idea’s truth or falsehood, of an art work’s merit or demerit, of a product’s efficacy or inefficacy—so the free-market value of goods or services does not necessarily represent their philosophically objective value, but only their socially objective value, i.e., the sum of the individual judgments of all the men involved in trade at a given time, the sum of what they valued, each in the context of his own life.

Thus, a manufacturer of lipstick may well make a greater fortune than a manufacturer of microscopes—even though it can be rationally demonstrated that microscopes are scientifically more valuable than lipstick. But—valuable to whom?

A microscope is of no value to a little stenographer struggling to make a living; a lipstick is; a lipstick, to her, may mean the difference between self-confidence and self-doubt, between glamour and drudgery.

This does not mean, however, that the values ruling a free market are subjective. If the stenographer spends all her money on cosmetics and has none left to pay for the use of a microscope (for a visit to the doctor) when she needs it, she learns a better method of budgeting her income; the free market serves as her teacher: she has no way to penalize others for her mistakes. If she budgets rationally, the microscope is always available to serve her own specific needs and no more, as far as she is concerned: she is not taxed to support an entire hospital, a research laboratory, or a space ship’s journey to the moon. Within her own productive power, she does pay a part of the cost of scientific achievements, when and as she needs them. She has no “social duty,” her own life is her only responsibility—and the only thing that a capitalist system requires of her is the thing that nature requires: rationality, i.e., that she live and act to the best of her own judgment.

Within every category of goods and services offered on a free market, it is the purveyor of the best product at the cheapest price who wins the greatest financial rewards in that field—not automatically nor immediately nor by fiat, but by virtue of the free market, which teaches every participant to look for the objective best within the category of his own competence, and penalizes those who act on irrational considerations.

Now observe that a free market does not level men down to some common denominator—that the intellectual criteria of the majority do not rule a free market or a free society—and that the exceptional men, the innovators, the intellectual giants, are not held down by the majority. In fact, it is the members of this exceptional minority who lift the whole of a free society to the level of their own achievements, while rising further and ever further.

A free market is a continuous process that cannot be held still, an upward process that demands the best (the most rational) of every man and rewards him accordingly. While the majority have barely assimilated the value of the automobile, the creative minority introduces the airplane. The majority learn by demonstration, the minority are free to demonstrate. The “philosophically objective” value of a new product serves as the teacher for those who are willing to exercise their rational faculty, each to the extent of his ability. Those who are unwilling remain unrewarded—as well as those who aspire to more than their ability produces. The stagnant, the irrational, the subjectivist have no power to stop their betters.

(The small minority of adults who are unable rather than unwilling to work have to rely on voluntary charity; misfortune is not a claim to slave labor; there is no such thing as the right to consume, control, and destroy those without whom one would be unable to survive. As to depressions and mass unemployment, they are not caused by the free market, but by government interference into the economy.)

The mental parasites—the imitators who attempt to cater to what they think is the public’s known taste—are constantly being beaten by the innovators whose products raise the public’s knowledge and taste to ever higher levels. It is in this sense that the free market is ruled, not by the consumers, but by the producers. The most successful ones are those who discover new fields of production, fields which had not been known to exist.

A given product may not be appreciated at once, particularly if it is too radical an innovation; but, barring irrelevant accidents, it wins in the long run. It is in this sense that the free market is not ruled by the intellectual criteria of the majority, which prevail only at and for any given moment; the free market is ruled by those who are able to see and plan long-range—and the better the mind, the longer the range.

The economic value of a man’s work is determined, on a free market, by a single principle: by the voluntary consent of those who are willing to trade him their work or products in return. This is the moral meaning of the law of supply and demand; it represents the total rejection of two vicious doctrines: the tribal premise and altruism. It represents the recognition of the fact that man is not the property nor the servant of the tribe, that a man works in order to support his own life—as, by his nature, he must—that he has to be guided by his own rational self-interest, and if he wants to trade with others, he cannot expect sacrificial victims, i.e., he cannot expect to receive values without trading commensurate values in return. The sole criterion of what is commensurate, in this context, is the free, voluntary, uncoerced judgment of the traders.

The tribal mentalities attack this principle from two seemingly opposite sides: they claim that the free market is “unfair” both to the genius and to the average man. The first objection is usually expressed by a question such as: “Why should Elvis Presley make more money than Einstein?” The answer is: Because men work in order to support and enjoy their own lives—and if many men find value in Elvis Presley, they are entitled to spend their money on their own pleasure. Presley’s fortune is not taken from those who do not care for his work (I am one of them) nor from Einstein—nor does he stand in Einstein’s way—nor does Einstein lack proper recognition and support in a free society, on an appropriate intellectual level.

As to the second objection, the claim that a man of average ability suffers an “unfair” disadvantage on a free market—

Look past the range of the moment, you who cry that you fear to compete with men of superior intelligence, that their mind is a threat to your livelihood, that the strong leave no chance to the weak in a market of voluntary trade. . . . When you live in a rational society, where men are free to trade, you receive an incalculable bonus: the material value of your work is determined not only by your effort, but by the effort of the best productive minds who exist in the world around you. . . .

The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. . . . Every man is free to rise as far as he’s able or willing, but it’s only the degree to which he thinks that determines the degree to which he’ll rise. Physical labor as such can extend no further than the range of the moment. The man who does no more than physical labor, consumes the material value-equivalent of his own contribution to the process of production, and leaves no further value, neither for himself nor others. But the man who produces an idea in any field of rational endeavor—the man who discovers new knowledge—is the permanent benefactor of humanity. . . . It is only the value of an idea that can be shared with unlimited numbers of men, making all sharers richer at no one’s sacrifice or loss, raising the productive capacity of whatever labor they perform. . . .

In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the “competition” between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of “exploitation” for which you have damned the strong. (Atlas Shrugged)

And such is the relationship of capitalism to man’s mind and to man’s survival.

The magnificent progress achieved by capitalism in a brief span of time—the spectacular improvement in the conditions of man’s existence on earth—is a matter of historical record. It is not to be hidden, evaded, or explained away by all the propaganda of capitalism’s enemies. But what needs special emphasis is the fact that this progress was achieved by non-sacrificial means.

Progress cannot be achieved by forced privations, by squeezing a “social surplus” out of starving victims. Progress can come only out of individual surplus, i.e., from the work, the energy, the creative over-abundance of those men whose ability produces more than their personal consumption requires, those who are intellectually and financially able to seek the new, to improve on the known, to move forward. In a capitalist society, where such men are free to function and to take their own risks, progress is not a matter of sacrificing to some distant future, it is part of the living present, it is the normal and natural, it is achieved as and while men live—and enjoy—their lives.

Now consider the alternative—the tribal society, where all men throw their efforts, values, ambitions, and goals into a tribal pool or common pot, then wait hungrily at its rim, while the leader of a clique of cooks stirs it with a bayonet in one hand and a blank check on all their lives in the other. The most consistent example of such a system is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Half a century ago, the Soviet rulers commanded their subjects to be patient, bear privations, and make sacrifices for the sake of “industrializing” the country, promising that this was only temporary, that industrialization would bring them abundance, and Soviet progress would surpass the capitalistic West.

Today, Soviet Russia is still unable to feed her people—while the rulers scramble to copy, borrow, or steal the technological achievements of the West. Industrialization is not a static goal; it is a dynamic process with a rapid rate of obsolescence. So the wretched serfs of a planned tribal economy, who starved while waiting for electric generators and tractors, are now starving while waiting for atomic power and interplanetary travel. Thus, in a “people’s state,” the progress of science is a threat to the people, and every advance is taken out of the people’s shrinking hides.

This was not the history of capitalism.

America’s abundance was not created by public sacrifices to “the common good,” but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance—and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.

Do not, however, make the error of reversing cause and effect: the good of the country was made possible precisely by the fact that it was not forced on anyone as a moral goal or duty; it was merely an effect; the cause was a man’s right to pursue his own good. It is this right—not its consequences—that represents the moral justification of capitalism.

But this right is incompatible with the intrinsic or the subjectivist theory of values, with the altruist morality and the tribal premise. It is obvious which human attribute one rejects when one rejects objectivity; and, in view of capitalism’s record, it is obvious against which human attribute the altruist morality and the tribal premise stand united: against man’s mind, against intelligence—particularly against intelligence applied to the problems of human survival, i.e., productive ability.

While altruism seeks to rob intelligence of its rewards, by asserting that the moral duty of the competent is to serve the incompetent and sacrifice themselves to anyone’s need—the tribal premise goes a step further: it denies the existence of intelligence and of its role in the production of wealth.

It is morally obscene to regard wealth as an anonymous, tribal product and to talk about “redistributing” it. The view that wealth is the result of some undifferentiated, collective process, that we all did something and it’s impossible to tell who did what, therefore some sort of equalitarian “distribution” is necessary—might have been appropriate in a primordial jungle with a savage horde moving boulders by crude physical labor (though even there someone had to initiate and organize the moving). To hold that view in an industrial society—where individual achievements are a matter of public record—is so crass an evasion that even to give it the benefit of the doubt is an obscenity.

Anyone who has ever been an employer or an employee, or has observed men working, or has done an honest day’s work himself, knows the crucial role of ability, of intelligence, of a focused, competent mind—in any and all lines of work, from the lowest to the highest. He knows that ability or the lack of it (whether the lack is actual or volitional) makes a difference of life-or-death in any productive process. The evidence is so overwhelming— theoretically and practically, logically and “empirically,” in the events of history and in anyone’s own daily grind—that no one can claim ignorance of it. Mistakes of this size are not made innocently.

When great industrialists made fortunes on a free market (i.e., without the use of force, without government assistance or interference), they created new wealth—they did not take it from those who had not created it. If you doubt it, take a look at the “total social product”—and the standard of living—of those countries where such men are not permitted to exist.

Observe how seldom and how inadequately the issue of human intelligence is discussed in the writings of the tribal-statist-altruist theoreticians. Observe how carefully today’s advocates of a mixed economy avoid and evade any mention of intelligence or ability in their approach to politico-economic issues, in their claims, demands, and pressure-group warfare over the looting of “the total social product.”

It is often asked: Why was capitalism destroyed in spite of its incomparably beneficent record? The answer lies in the fact that the lifeline feeding any social system is a culture’s dominant philosophy and that capitalism never had a philosophical base. It was the last and (theoretically) incomplete product of an Aristotelian influence. As a resurgent tide of mysticism engulfed philosophy in the nineteenth century, capitalism was left in an intellectual vacuum, its lifeline cut. Neither its moral nature nor even its political principles had ever been fully understood or defined. Its alleged defenders regarded it as compatible with government controls (i.e., government interference into the economy), ignoring the meaning and implications of the concept of laissez-faire. Thus, what existed in practice, in the nineteenth century, was not pure capitalism, but variously mixed economies. Since controls necessitate and breed further controls, it was the statist element of the mixtures that wrecked them; it was the free, capitalist element that took the blame.

Capitalism could not survive in a culture dominated by mysticism and altruism, by the soul-body dichotomy and the tribal premise. No social system (and no human institution or activity of any kind) can survive without a moral base. On the basis of the altruist morality, capitalism had to be—and was—damned from the start.⁵

For those who do not fully understand the role of philosophy in politico-economic issues, I offer—as the clearest example of today’s intellectual state—some further quotations from the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s article on capitalism.

Few observers are inclined to find fault with capitalism as an engine of production. Criticism usually proceeds either from moral or cultural disapproval of certain features of the capitalist system, or from the short-run vicissitudes (crises and depressions) with which long-run improvement is interspersed. [Italics mine.]

The “crises and depressions” were caused by government interference, not by the capitalist system. But what was the nature of the “moral or cultural disapproval”? The article does not tell us explicitly, but gives one eloquent indication:

Such as they were, however, both tendencies and realizations [of capitalism] bear the unmistakable stamp of the businessman’s interests and still more the businessman’s type of mind. Moreover it was not only policy but the philosophy of national and individual life, the scheme of cultural values, that bore that stamp. Its materialistic utilitarianism, its naive confidence in progress of a certain type, its actual achievements in the field of pure and applied science, the temper of its artistic creations, may all be traced to the spirit of rationalism that emanates from the businessman’s office. [Italics mine.]

The author of the article, who is not “naive” enough to believe in a capitalistic (or rational) type of progress, holds, apparently, a different belief:

At the end of the middle ages western Europe stood about where many underdeveloped countries stand in the 20th century. [This means that the culture of the Renaissance was about the equivalent of today’s Congo; or else, it means that people’s intellectual development has nothing to do with economics.] In underdeveloped economies the difficult task of statesmanship is to get under way a cumulative process of economic development, for once a certain momentum is attained, further advances appear to follow more or less automatically.

Some such notion underlies every theory of a planned economy. It is on some such “sophisticated” belief that two generations of Russians have perished, waiting for automatic progress.

The classical economists attempted a tribal justification of capitalism on the ground that it provides the best “allocation” of a community’s “resources.” Here are their chickens coming home to roost:

The market theory of resource allocation within the private sector is the central theme of classical economics. The criterion for allocation between the public and private sectors is formally the same as in any other resource allocation, namely that the community should receive equal satisfaction from a marginal increment of resources used in the public and private spheres. . . . Many economists have asserted that there is substantial, perhaps overwhelming, evidence that total welfare in capitalist United States, for example, would be increased by a reallocation of resources to the public sector—more schoolrooms and fewer shopping centers, more public libraries and fewer automobiles, more hospitals and fewer bowling alleys.

This means that some men must toil all their lives without adequate transportation (automobiles), without an adequate number of places to buy the goods they need (shopping centers), without the pleasures of relaxation (bowling alleys)—in order that other men may be provided with schools, libraries, and hospitals.

If you want to see the ultimate results and full meaning of the tribal view of wealth—the total obliteration of the distinction between private action and government action, between production and force, the total obliteration of the concept of “rights,” of an individual human being’s reality, and its replacement by a view of men as interchangeable beasts of burden or “factors of production”—study the following:

Capitalism has a bias against the public sector for two reasons. First, all products and income accrue [?] initially to the private sector while resources reach the public sector through the painful process of taxation. Public needs are met only by sufferance of consumers in their role as taxpayers [what about producers?], whose political representatives are acutely conscious of their constituents’ tender feelings [!] about taxation. That people know better than governments what to do with their income is a notion more appealing than the contrary one, that people get more for their tax money than for other types of spending. [By what theory of values? By whose judgment?] . . .

Second, the pressure of private business to sell leads to the formidable array of devices of modern salesmanship which influence consumer choice and bias consumer values toward private consumption . . . [This means that your desire to spend the money you earn rather than have it taken away from you, is a mere bias.] Hence, much private expenditure goes for wants that are not very urgent in any fundamental sense. [Urgent—to whom? Which wants are “fundamental,” beyond a cave, a bearskin, and a chunk of raw meat?] The corollary is that many public needs are neglected because these superficial private wants, artificially generated, compete successfully for the same resources. [Whose resources?] . . .

A comparison of resource allocation to the public and private sectors under capitalism and under socialist collectivism is illuminating. [It is.] In a collective economy all resources operate in the public sector and are available for education, defense, health, welfare, and other public needs without any transfer through taxation. Private consumption is restricted to the claims that are permitted [by whom?] against the social product, much as public services in a capitalist economy are limited to the claims permitted against the private sector. [Italics mine.] In a collective economy public needs enjoy the same sort of built-in priority that private consumption enjoys in a capitalist economy. In the Soviet Union teachers are plentiful, but automobiles are scarce, whereas the opposite condition prevails in the United States.

Here is the conclusion of that article:

Predictions concerning the survival of capitalism are, in part, a matter of definition. One sees everywhere in capitalist countries a shifting of economic activity from the private to the public sphere. . . . At the same time [after World War II] private consumption appeared destined to increase in communist countries. [Such as the consumption of wheat?] The two economic systems seemed to be drawing closer together by changes converging from both directions. Yet significant differences in the economic structures still existed. It seemed reasonable to assume that the society which invested more in people would advance more rapidly and inherit the future. In this important respect capitalism, in the eyes of some economists, labours under a fundamental but not inescapable disadvantage in competition with collectivism.

The collectivization of Soviet agriculture was achieved by means of a government-planned famine—planned and carried out deliberately to force peasants into collective farms; Soviet Russia’s enemies claim that fifteen million peasants died in that famine; the Soviet government admits the death of seven million.

At the end of World War II, Soviet Russia’s enemies claimed that thirty million people were doing forced labor in Soviet concentration camps (and were dying of planned malnutrition, human lives being cheaper than food); Soviet Russia’s apologists admit to the figure of twelve million people.

This is what the Encyclopaedia Britannica refers to as “investment in people.”

In a culture where such a statement is made with intellectual impunity and with an aura of moral righteousness, the guiltiest men are not the collectivists; the guiltiest men are those who, lacking the courage to challenge mysticism or altruism, attempt to bypass the issues of reason and morality and to defend the only rational and moral system in mankind’s history—capitalism—on any grounds other than rational and moral.

2. THE ROOTS OF WAR

by Ayn Rand

It is said that nuclear weapons have made wars too horrible to contemplate. Yet every nation on earth feels, in helpless terror, that such a war might come.

The overwhelming majority of mankind—the people who die on the battlefields or starve and perish among the ruins—do not want war. They never wanted it. Yet wars have kept erupting throughout the centuries, like a long trail of blood underscoring mankind’s history.

Men are afraid that war might come because they know, consciously or subconsciously, that they have never rejected the doctrine which causes wars, which has caused the wars of the past and can do it again—the doctrine that it is right or practical or necessary for men to achieve their goals by means of physical force (by initiating the use of force against other men) and that some sort of “good” can justify it. It is the doctrine that force is a proper or unavoidable part of human existence and human societies.

Observe one of the ugliest characteristics of today’s world: the mixture of frantic war preparations with hysterical peace propaganda, and the fact that both come from the same source—from the same political philosophy. The bankrupt, yet still dominant, political philosophy of our age is statism.

The Objectivist, June 1966.

Observe the nature of today’s alleged peace movements. Professing love and concern for the survival of mankind, they keep screaming that the nuclear-weapons race should be stopped, that armed force should be abolished as a means of settling disputes among nations, and that war should be outlawed in the name of humanity. Yet these same peace movements do not oppose dictatorships; the political views of their members range through all shades of the statist spectrum, from welfare statism to socialism to fascism to communism. This means that they are opposed to the use of coercion by one nation against another, but not by the government of a nation against its own citizens; it means that they are opposed to the use of force against armed adversaries, but not against the disarmed.

Consider the plunder, the destruction, the starvation, the brutality, the slave-labor camps, the torture chambers, the wholesale slaughter perpetrated by dictatorships. Yet this is what today’s alleged peace-lovers are willing to advocate or tolerate—in the name of love for humanity.

It is obvious that the ideological root of statism (or collectivism) is the tribal premise of primordial savages who, unable to conceive of individual rights, believed that the tribe is a supreme, omnipotent ruler, that it owns the lives of its members and may sacrifice them whenever it pleases to whatever it deems to be its own “good.” Unable to conceive of any social principles, save the rule of brute force, they believed that the tribe’s wishes are limited only by its physical power and that other tribes are its natural prey, to be conquered, looted, enslaved, or annihilated. The history of all primitive peoples is a succession of tribal wars and intertribal slaughter. That this savage ideology now rules nations armed with nuclear weapons should give pause to anyone concerned with mankind’s survival.

Statism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war. It leaves men no choice but to fight to seize political power—to rob or be robbed, to kill or be killed. When brute force is the only criterion of social conduct, and unresisting surrender to destruction is the only alternative, even the lowest of men, even an animal—even a cornered rat—will fight. There can be no peace within an enslaved nation.

The bloodiest conflicts of history were not wars between nations, but civil wars between men of the same nation, who could find no peaceful recourse to law, principle, or justice. Observe that the history of all absolute states is punctuated by bloody uprisings—by violent eruptions of blind despair, without ideology, program, or goals—which were usually put down by ruthless extermination.

In a full dictatorship, statism’s chronic “cold” civil war takes the form of bloody purges, when one gang deposes another—as in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. In a mixed economy, it takes the form of pressure-group warfare, each group fighting for legislation to extort its own advantages by force from all other groups.

The degree of statism in a country’s political system, is the degree to which it breaks up the country into rival gangs and sets men against one another. When individual rights are abrogated, there is no way to determine who is entitled to what; there is no way to determine the justice of anyone’s claims, desires, or interests. The criterion, therefore, reverts to the tribal concept of: one’s wishes are limited only by the power of one’s gang. In order to survive under such a system, men have no choice but to fear, hate, and destroy one another; it is a system of underground plotting, of secret conspiracies, of deals, favors, betrayals, and sudden, bloody coups.

It is not a system conducive to brotherhood, security, cooperation, and peace.

Statism—in fact and in principle—is nothing more than gang rule. A dictatorship is a gang devoted to looting the effort of the productive citizens of its own country. When a statist ruler exhausts his own country’s economy, he attacks his neighbors. It is his only means of postponing internal collapse and prolonging his rule. A country that violates the rights of its own citizens, will not respect the rights of its neighbors. Those who do not recognize individual rights, will not recognize the rights of nations: a nation is only a number of individuals.

Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.

Observe that the major wars of history were started by the more controlled economies of the time against the freer ones. For instance, World War I was started by monarchist Germany and Czarist Russia, who dragged in their freer allies. World War II was started by the alliance of Nazi Germany with Soviet Russia and their joint attack on Poland.

Observe that in World War II, both Germany and Russia seized and dismantled entire factories in conquered countries, to ship them home—while the freest of the mixed economies, the semi-capitalistic United States, sent billions worth of lend-lease equipment, including entire factories, to its allies.⁶

Germany and Russia needed war; the United States did not and gained nothing. (In fact, the United States lost, economically, even though it won the war: it was left with an enormous national debt, augmented by the grotesquely futile policy of supporting former allies and enemies to this day.) Yet it is capitalism that today’s peace-lovers oppose and statism that they advocate—in the name of peace.

Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships. By the nature of its basic principles and interests, it is the only system fundamentally opposed to war.

Men who are free to produce have no incentive to loot; they have nothing to gain from war and a great deal to lose. Ideologically, the principle of individual rights does not permit a man to seek his own livelihood at the point of a gun, inside or outside his country. Economically, wars cost money; in a free economy, where wealth is privately owned, the costs of war come out of the income of private citizens—there is no overblown public treasury to hide that fact—and a citizen cannot hope to recoup his own financial losses (such as taxes or business dislocations or property destruction) by winning the war. Thus his own economic interests are on the side of peace.

In a statist economy, where wealth is “publicly owned,” a citizen has no economic interests to protect by preserving peace—he is only a drop in the common bucket—while war gives him the (fallacious) hope of larger handouts from his masters. Ideologically, he is trained to regard men as sacrificial animals; he is one himself; he can have no concept of why foreigners should not be sacrificed on the same public altar for the benefit of the same state.

The trader and the warrior have been fundamental antagonists throughout history. Trade does not flourish on battlefields, factories do not produce under bombardments, profits do not grow on rubble. Capitalism is a society of traders—for which it has been denounced by every would-be gunman who regards trade as “selfish” and conquest as “noble.”

Let those who are actually concerned with peace observe that capitalism gave mankind the longest period of peace in history—a period during which there were no wars involving the entire civilized world—from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

It must be remembered that the political systems of the nineteenth century were not pure capitalism, but mixed economies. The element of freedom, however, was dominant; it was as close to a century of capitalism as mankind has come. But the element of statism kept growing throughout the nineteenth century, and by the time it blasted the world in 1914, the governments involved were dominated by statist policies.

Just as, in domestic affairs, all the evils caused by statism and government controls were blamed on capitalism and the free market—so, in foreign affairs, all the evils of statist policies were blamed on and ascribed to capitalism. Such myths as “capitalistic imperialism,” “warprofiteering,” or the notion that capitalism has to win “markets” by military conquest are examples of the superficiality or the unscrupulousness of statist commentators and historians.

The essence of capitalism’s foreign policy is free trade—i.e., the abolition of trade barriers, of protective tariffs, of special privileges—the opening of the world’s trade routes to free international exchange and competition among the private citizens of all countries dealing directly with one another. During the nineteenth century, it was free trade that liberated the world, undercutting and wrecking the remnants of feudalism and the statist tyranny of absolute monarchies.

As with Rome, the world accepted the British empire because it opened world channels of energy for commerce in general. Though repressive (status) government was still imposed to a considerable degree on Ireland with very bad results, on the whole England’s invisible exports were law and free trade. Practically speaking, while England ruled the seas any man of any nation could go anywhere, taking his goods and money with him, in safety.⁷

As in the case of Rome, when the repressive element of England’s mixed economy grew to become her dominant policy and turned her to statism, her empire fell apart. It was not military force that had held it together.

Capitalism wins and holds its markets by free competition, at home and abroad. A market conquered by war can be of value (temporarily) only to those advocates of a mixed economy who seek to close it to international competition, impose restrictive regulations, and thus acquire special privileges by force. The same type of businessmen who sought special advantages by government action in their own countries sought special markets by government action abroad. At whose expense? At the expense of the overwhelming majority of businessmen who paid the taxes for such ventures, but gained nothing. Who justified such policies and sold them to the public? The statist intellectuals who manufactured such doctrines as “the public interest” or “national prestige” or “manifest destiny.”

The actual war profiteers of all mixed economies were and are of that type: men with political pull who acquire fortunes by government favor, during or after a war—fortunes which they could not have acquired on a free market.

Remember that private citizens—whether rich or poor, whether businessmen or workers—have no power to start a war. That power is the exclusive prerogative of a government. Which type of government is more likely to plunge a country into war: a government of limited powers, bound by constitutional restrictions—or an unlimited government, open to the pressure of any group with warlike interests or ideologies, a government able to command armies to march at the whim of a single chief executive?

Yet it is not a limited government that today’s peace-lovers are advocating.

(Needless to say, unilateral pacifism is merely an invitation to aggression. Just as an individual has the right of self-defense, so has a free country if attacked. But this does not give its government the right to draft men into military service—which is the most blatantly statist violation of a man’s right to his own life. There is no contradiction between the moral and the practical: a volunteer army is the most efficient army, as many military authorities have testified. A free country has never lacked volunteers when attacked by a foreign aggressor. But not many men would volunteer for such ventures as Korea or Vietnam. Without drafted armies, the foreign policies of statist or mixed economies would not be possible.)

So long as a country is even semi-free, its mixed-economy profiteers are not the source of its warlike influences or policies, and are not the primary cause of its involvement in war. They are merely political scavengers cashing-in on a public trend. The primary cause of that trend is the mixed-economy intellectuals.

Observe the link between statism and militarism in the intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Just as the destruction of capitalism and the rise of the totalitarian state were not caused by business or labor or any economic interests, but by the dominant statist ideology of the intellectuals—so the resurgence of the doctrines of military conquest and armed crusades for political “ideals” were the product of the same intellectuals’ belief that “the good” is to be achieved by force.

The rise of a spirit of nationalistic imperialism in the United States did not come from the right, but from the left, not from big-business interests, but from the collectivist reformers who influenced the policies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. For a history of these influences, see The Decline of American Liberalism by Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.⁸

In such instances [writes Professor Ekirch] as the progressives’ increasing acceptance of compulsory military training and of the white man’s burden, there were obvious reminders of the paternalism of much of their economic reform legislation. Imperialism, according to a recent student of American foreign policy, was a revolt against many of the values of traditional liberalism. “The spirit of imperialism was an exaltation of duty above rights, of collective welfare above individual self-interest, the heroic values as opposed to materialism, action instead of logic, the natural impulse rather than the pallid intellect.”⁹

In regard to Woodrow Wilson, Professor Ekirch writes:

Wilson no doubt would have preferred the growth of United States foreign trade to come about as a result of free international competition, but he found it easy with his ideas of moralism and duty to rationalize direct American intervention as a means of safeguarding the national interest.¹⁰

And: “He [Wilson] seemed to feel that the United States had a mission to spread its institutions—which he conceived as liberal and democratic—to the more benighted areas of the world.”¹¹ It was not the advocates of capitalism who helped Wilson to whip up a reluctant, peace-loving nation into the hysteria of a military crusade—it was the “liberal” magazine The New Republic. Its editor, Herbert Croly, used such arguments as: “The American nation needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure.”

Just as Wilson, a “liberal” reformer, led the United States into World War I, “to make the world safe for democracy”—so Franklin D. Roosevelt, another “liberal” reformer, led it into World War II, in the name of the “Four Freedoms.” In both cases, the “conservatives”—and the big-business interests—were overwhelmingly opposed to war but were silenced. In the case of World War II, they were smeared as “isolationists,” “reactionaries,” and “America-First’ers.”

World War I led, not to “democracy,” but to the creation of three dictatorships: Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany. World War II led, not to “Four Freedoms,” but to the surrender of one-third of the world’s population into communist slavery.

If peace were the goal of today’s intellectuals, a failure of that magnitude—and the evidence of unspeakable suffering on so large a scale—would make them pause and check their statist premises. Instead, blind to everything but their hatred for capitalism, they are now asserting that “poverty breeds wars” (and justifying war by sympathizing with a “material greed” of that kind). But the question is: what breeds poverty? If you look at the world of today and if you look back at history, you will see the answer: the degree of a country’s freedom is the degree of its prosperity.

Another current catch-phrase is the complaint that the nations of the world are divided into the “haves” and the “have-nots.” Observe that the “haves” are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the “havenots” have not.

If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged “good” can justify it—there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations.

It is true that nuclear weapons have made wars too horrible to contemplate. But it makes no difference to a man whether he is killed by a nuclear bomb or a dynamite bomb or an old-fashioned club. Nor does the number of other victims or the scale of the destruction make any difference to him. And there is something obscene in the attitude of those who regard horror as a matter of numbers, who are willing to send a small group of youths to die for the tribe, but scream against the danger to the tribe itself—and more: who are willing to condone the slaughter of defenseless victims, but march in protest against wars between the well-armed.

So long as men are subjugated by force, they will fight back and use any weapons available. If a man is led to a Nazi gas chamber or a Soviet firing squad, with no voices raised to defend him, would he feel any love or concern for the survival of mankind? Or would he be more justified in feeling that a cannibalistic mankind, which tolerates dictatorships, does not deserve to survive?

If nuclear weapons are a dreadful threat and mankind cannot afford war any longer, then mankind cannot afford statism any longer. Let no man of good will take it upon his conscience to advocate the rule of force—outside or inside his own country. Let all those who are actually concerned with peace—those who do love man and do care about his survival—realize that if war is ever to be outlawed, it is the use of force that has to be outlawed.

3. AMERICA’S PERSECUTED MINORITY: BIG BUSINESS

by Ayn Rand

If a small group of men were always regarded as guilty, in any clash with any other group, regardless of the issues or circumstances involved, would you call it persecution? If this group were always made to pay for the sins, errors, or failures of any other group, would you call that persecution? If this group had to live under a silent reign of terror, under special laws, from which all other people were immune, laws which the accused could not grasp or define in advance and which the accuser could interpret in any way he pleased—would you call that persecution? If this group were penalized, not for its faults, but for its virtues, not for its incompetence, but for its ability, not for its failures, but for its achievements, and the greater the achievement, the greater the penalty—would you call that persecution?

If your answer is “yes”—then ask yourself what sort of monstrous injustice you are condoning, supporting, or perpetrating. That group is the American businessmen.

The defense of minority rights is acclaimed today, virtually by everyone, as a moral principle of a high order. But this principle, which forbids discrimination, is ap-plied by most of the “liberal” intellectuals in a discriminatory manner: it is applied only to racial or religious minorities. It is not applied to that small, exploited, denounced, defenseless minority which consists of businessmen.

Lecture given at The Ford Hall Forum, Boston, on December 17, 1961, and at Columbia University on February 15, 1962. Published by Nathaniel Branden Institute, New York, 1962.

Yet every ugly, brutal aspect of injustice toward racial or religious minorities is being practiced toward businessmen. For instance, consider the evil of condemning some men and absolving others, without a hearing, regardless of the facts. Today’s “liberals” consider a businessman guilty in any conflict with a labor union, regardless of the facts or issues involved, and boast that they will not cross a picket line “right or wrong.” Consider the evil of judging people by a double standard and of denying to some the rights granted to others. Today’s “liberals” recognize the workers’ (the majority’s) right to their livelihood (their wages), but deny the businessmen’s (the minority’s) right to their livelihood (their profits). If workers struggle for higher wages, this is hailed as “social gains”; if businessmen struggle for higher profits, this is damned as “selfish greed.” If the workers’ standard of living is low, the “liberals” blame it on the businessmen; but if the businessmen attempt to improve their economic efficacy, to expand their markets, and to enlarge the financial returns of their enterprises, thus making higher wages and lower prices possible, the same “liberals” denounce it as “commercialism.” If a non-commercial foundation—i.e., a group which did not have to earn its funds—sponsors a television show, advocating its particular views, the “liberals” hail it as “enlightenment,” “education,” “art,” and “public service”; if a businessman sponsors a television show and wants it to reflect his views, the “liberals” scream, calling it “censorship,” “pressure,” and “dictatorial rule.” When three locals of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters deprived New York City of its milk supply for fifteen days—no moral indignation or condemnation was heard from the “liberal” quarters; but just imagine what would happen if businessmen stopped that milk supply for one hour—and how swiftly they would be struck down by that legalized lynching or pogrom known as “trust-busting.”

Whenever, in any era, culture, or society, you encounter the phenomenon of prejudice, injustice, persecution, and blind, unreasoning hatred directed at some minority group—look for the gang that has something to gain from that persecution, look for those who have a vested interest in the destruction of these particular sacrificial victims. Invariably, you will find that the persecuted minority serves as a scapegoat for some movement that does not want the nature of its own goals to be known. Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.

America has not yet reached the stage of a dictatorship. But, paving the way to it, for many decades past, the businessmen have served as the scapegoat for statist movements of all kinds: communist, fascist, or welfare. For whose sins and evils did the businessmen take the blame? For the sins and evils of the bureaucrats.

A disastrous intellectual package-deal, put over on us by the theoreticians of statism, is the equation of economic power with political power. You have heard it expressed in such bromides as: “A hungry man is not free,” or “It makes no difference to a worker whether he takes orders from a businessman or from a bureaucrat.” Most people accept these equivocations—and yet they know that the poorest laborer in America is freer and more secure than the richest commissar in Soviet Russia. What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.

The difference between political power and any other kind of social “power,” between a government and any private organization, is the fact that a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force. This distinction is so important and so seldom recognized today that I must urge you to keep it in mind. Let me repeat it: a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.

No individual or private group or private organization has the legal power to initiate the use of physical force against other individuals or groups and to compel them to act against their own voluntary choice. Only a government holds that power. The nature of governmental action is: coercive action. The nature of political power is: the power to force obedience under threat of physical injury—the threat of property expropriation, imprisonment, or death.

Foggy metaphors, sloppy images, unfocused poetry, and equivocations—such as “A hungry man is not free”—do not alter the fact that only political power is the power of physical coercion and that freedom, in a political context, has only one meaning: the absence of physical coercion.

The only proper function of the government of a free country is to act as an agency which protects the individual’s rights, i.e., which protects the individual from physical violence. Such a government does not have the right to initiate the use of physical force against anyone—a right which the individual does not possess and, therefore, cannot delegate to any agency. But the individual does possess the right of self-defense and that is the right which he delegates to the government, for the purpose of an orderly, legally defined enforcement. A proper government has the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect men from criminals; the military forces, to protect men from foreign invaders; and the law courts, to protect men’s property and contracts from breach by force or fraud, and to settle disputes among men according to objectively defined laws.

These, implicitly, were the political principles on which the Constitution of the United States was based; implicitly, but not explicitly. There were contradictions in the Constitution, which allowed the statists to gain an entering wedge, to enlarge the breach, and, gradually, to wreck the structure.

A statist is a man who believes that some men have the right to force, coerce, enslave, rob, and murder others. To be put into practice, this belief has to be implemented by the political doctrine that the government—the state—has the right to initiate the use of physical force against its citizens. How often force is to be used, against whom, to what extent, for what purpose and for whose benefit are irrelevant questions. The basic principle and the ultimate results of all statist doctrines are the same: dictatorship and destruction. The rest is only a matter of time.

Now let us consider the question of economic power.

What is economic power? It is the power to produce and to trade what one has produced. In a free economy, where no man or group of men can use physical coercion against anyone, economic power can be achieved only by voluntary means: by the voluntary choice and agreement of all those who participate in the process of production and trade. In a free market, all prices, wages, and profits are determined—not by the arbitrary whim of the rich or of the poor, not by anyone’s “greed” or by anyone’s need—but by the law of supply and demand. The mechanism of a free market reflects and sums up all the economic choices and decisions made by all the participants. Men trade their goods or services by mutual consent to mutual advantage, according to their own independent, uncoerced judgment. A man can grow rich only if he is able to offer better values—better products or services, at a lower price—than others are able to offer.

Wealth, in a free market, is achieved by a free, general, “democratic” vote—by the sales and the purchases of every individual who takes part in the economic life of the country. Whenever you buy one product rather than another, you are voting for the success of some manufacturer. And, in this type of voting, every man votes only on those matters which he is qualified to judge: on his own preferences, interests, and needs. No one has the power to decide for others or to substitute his judgment for theirs; no one has the power to appoint himself “the voice of the public” and to leave the public voiceless and disfranchised.

Now let me define the difference between economic power and political power: economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman’s tool is values; the bureaucrat’s tool is fear.

America’s industrial progress, in the short span of a century and a half, has acquired the character of a legend: it has never been equaled anywhere on earth, in any period of history. The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most spectacular achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind. What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats.

A system of pure, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism has never yet existed anywhere. What did exist were only so-called mixed economies, which means: a mixture, in varying degrees, of freedom and controls, of voluntary choice and government coercion, of capitalism and statism. America was the freest country on earth, but elements of statism were present in her economy from the start. These elements kept growing, under the influence of her intellectuals who were predominantly committed to the philosophy of statism. The intellectuals—the ideologists, the interpreters, the assessors of public events—were tempted by the opportunity to seize political power, relinquished by all other social groups, and to establish their own versions of a “good” society at the point of a gun, i.e., by means of legalized physical coercion. They denounced the free businessmen as exponents of “selfish greed” and glorified the bureaucrats as “public servants.” In evaluating social problems, they kept damning “economic power” and exonerating political power, thus switching the burden of guilt from the politicians to the businessmen.

All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy. The giants of American industry—such as James Jerome Hill or Commodore Vanderbilt or Andrew Carnegie or J. P. Morgan—were self-made men who earned their fortunes by personal ability, by free trade on a free market. But there existed another kind of businessmen, the products of a mixed economy, the men with political pull, who made fortunes by means of special privileges granted to them by the government, such men as the Big Four of the Central Pacific Railroad. It was the political power behind their activities—the power of forced, unearned, economically unjustified privileges—that caused dislocations in the country’s economy, hardships, depressions, and mounting public protests. But it was the free market and the free businessmen that took the blame. Every calamitous consequence of government controls was used as a justification for the extension of the controls and of the government’s power over the economy.

If I were asked to choose the date which marks the turning point on the road to the ultimate destruction of American industry, and the most infamous piece of legislation in American history, I would choose the year 1890 and the Sherman Act—which began that grotesque, irrational, malignant growth of unenforceable, uncompliable, unjudicable contradictions known as the antitrust laws.

Under the antitrust laws, a man becomes a criminal from the moment he goes into business, no matter what he does. If he complies with one of these laws, he faces criminal prosecution under several others. For instance, if he charges prices which some bureaucrats judge as too high, he can be prosecuted for monopoly, or, rather, for a successful “intent to monopolize”; if he charges prices lower than those of his competitors, he can be prosecuted for “unfair competition” or “restraint of trade”; and if he charges the same prices as his competitors, he can be prosecuted for “collusion” or “conspiracy.”

I recommend to your attention an excellent book entitled The Antitrust Laws of the U.S.A. by A. D. Neale.¹² It is a scholarly, dispassionate, objective study; the author, a British civil servant, is not a champion of free enterprise; as far as one can tell, he may probably be classified as a “liberal.” But he does not confuse facts with interpretations, he keeps them severely apart; and the facts he presents are a horror story.

Mr. Neale points out that the prohibition of “restraint of trade” is the essence of antitrust—and that no exact definition of what constitutes “restraint of trade” can be given. Thus no one can tell what the law forbids or permits one to do; the interpretation of these laws is left entirely up to the courts. A businessman or his lawyer has to study the whole body of the so-called case law—the whole record of court cases, precedents, and decisions—in order to get even a generalized idea of the current meaning of these laws; except that the precedents may be upset and the decisions reversed tomorrow or next week or next year. “The courts in the United States have been engaged ever since 1890 in deciding case by case exactly what the law proscribes. No broad definition can really unlock the meaning of the statute. . .”¹³

This means that a businessman has no way of knowing in advance whether the action he takes is legal or illegal, whether he is guilty or innocent. It means that a businessman has to live under the threat of a sudden, unpredictable disaster, taking the risk of losing everything he owns or being sentenced to jail, with his career, his reputation, his property, his fortune, the achievement of his whole lifetime left at the mercy of any ambitious young bureaucrat who, for any reason, public or private, may choose to start proceedings against him.

Retroactive (or ex post facto) law—i.e., a law that punishes a man for an action which was not legally defined as a crime at the time he committed it—is rejected by and contrary to the entire tradition of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. It is a form of persecution practiced only in dictatorships and forbidden by every civilized code of law. It is specifically forbidden by the United States Constitution. It is not supposed to exist in the United States and it is not applied to anyone—except to businessmen. A case in which a man cannot know until he is convicted whether the action he took in the past was legal or illegal is certainly a case of retroactive law.

I recommend to you a brilliant little book entitled Ten Thousand Commandments by Harold Fleming.¹⁴ It is written for the layman and presents—in clear, simple, logical terms, with a wealth of detailed, documented evidence—such a picture of the antitrust laws that “nightmare” is too feeble a word to describe it.

One of the hazards [writes Mr. Fleming] that sales managers must now take into account is that some policy followed today in the light of the best legal opinion may next year be reinterpreted as illegal. In such case the crime and the penalty may be retroactive. . . . Another kind of hazard consists in the possibility of treble damage suits, also possibly retroactive. Firms which, with the best of intentions, run afoul of the law on one of the above counts, are open to treble damage suits under the antitrust laws, even though their offense was a course of conduct that everyone considered, at the time, quite legal as well as ethical, but that a subsequent reinterpretation of the law found to be illegal.¹⁵

What do businessmen say about it? In a speech entitled “Guilty Before Trial” (May 18, 1950), Benjamin F. Fairless, then President of United States Steel Corporation, said:

Gentlemen, I don’t have to tell you that if we persist in that kind of a system of law—and if we enforce it impartially against all offenders—virtually every business in America, big and small, is going to have to be run from Atlanta, Sing Sing, Leavenworth, or Alcatraz.

The legal treatment accorded to actual criminals is much superior to that accorded to businessmen. The criminal’s rights are protected by objective laws, objective procedures, objective rules of evidence. A criminal is presumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty. Only businessmen—the producers, the providers, the supporters, the Atlases who carry our whole economy on their shoulders—are regarded as guilty by nature and are required to prove their innocence, without any definable criteria of innocence or proof, and are left at the mercy of the whim, the favor, or the malice of any publicity-seeking politician, any scheming statist, any envious mediocrity who might chance to work his way into a bureaucratic job and who feels a yen to do some trust-busting.

The better or more honorable kind of government officials have repeatedly protested against the non-objective nature of the antitrust laws. In the same speech, Mr. Fairless quotes a statement made by Lowell Mason, who was then a member of the Federal Trade Commission:

American business is being harassed, bled, and even blackjacked under a preposterous crazyquilt system of laws, many of which are unintelligible, unenforceable and unfair. There is such a welter of laws governing interstate commerce that the Government literally can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. I say that this system is an outrage.

Further, Mr. Fairless quotes a comment written by Supreme Court Justice Jackson when he was the head of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice:

It is impossible for a lawyer to determine what business conduct will be pronounced lawful by the Courts. This situation is embarrassing to businessmen wishing to obey the law and to Government officials attempting to enforce it.

That embarrassment, however, is not shared by all members of the government. Mr. Fleming’s book quotes the following statement made by Emanuel Celler, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, at a symposium of the New York State Bar Association, in January 1950:

I want to make it clear that I would vigorously oppose any antitrust laws that attempted to particularize violations, giving bills of particulars to replace general principles. The law must remain fluid, allowing for a dynamic society.¹⁶

I want to make it clear that “fluid law” is a euphemism for “arbitrary power”—that “fluidity” is the chief characteristic of the law under any dictatorship—and that the sort of “dynamic society” whose laws are so fluid that they flood and drown the country may be seen in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.

The tragic irony of that whole issue is the fact that the antitrust laws were created and, to this day, are supported by the so-called “conservatives,” by the alleged defenders of free enterprise. This is a grim proof of the fact that capitalism has never had any proper, philosophical defenders—and a measure of the extent to which its alleged champions lacked any political principles, any knowledge of economics, and any understanding of the nature of political power. The concept of free competition enforced by law is a grotesque contradiction in terms. It means: forcing people to be free at the point of a gun. It means: protecting people’s freedom by the arbitrary rule of unanswerable bureaucratic edicts.

What were the historical causes that led to the passage of the Sherman Act? I quote from the book by Mr. Neale:

The impetus behind the movement for the earliest legislation gathered strength during the 1870’s and the 1880’s. . . . After the Civil War the railways with their privileges, charters, and subsidies became the main objects of suspicion and hostility. Many bodies with revealing names like “The National Anti-Monopoly Cheap Freight Railway League” sprang up.¹⁷

This is an eloquent example of the businessmen serving as scapegoat, taking the blame for the sins of the politicians. It was the politically granted privileges—the charters and subsidies of the railroads—that people rebelled against; it was these privileges that had placed the railroads of the West outside the reach of competition and had given them a monopolistic power, with all its consequent abuses. But the remedy, written into law by a Republican Congress, consisted of destroying the businessmen’s freedom and of extending the power of political controls over the economy.

If you wish to observe the real American tragedy, compare the ideological motivation of the antitrust laws to their actual results. I quote from Mr. Neale’s book:

It seems likely that American distrust of all sources of unchecked power is a more deep-rooted and persistent motive behind the antitrust policy than any economic belief or any radical political trend. This distrust may be seen in many spheres of American life . . . It is expressed in the theories of “checks and balances” and of “separation of powers.” In the United States the fact that some men possess power over the activities and fortunes of others is sometimes recognized as inevitable but never accepted as satisfactory. It is always hoped that any particular holder of power, whether political or economic, will be subject to the threat of encroachment by other authorities. . . . [Italics mine.]

At one with this basic motivation of antitrust is its reliance on legal process and judicial remedy rather than on administrative regulation. The famous prescription of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights—“to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men”—is a favourite American quotation and an essential one for understanding antitrust. Without this factor it would be impossible to explain the degree of acceptance—so astonishing to those outside the United States—that is accorded to the antitrust policy by those interests, especially “big business” interests, which are frequently and expensively subject to its discipline.¹⁸

Here is the tragedy of what happens to human intentions without a clearly defined philosophical theory to guide their practical implementation. The first free society in history destroyed its freedom—in the name of protecting freedom. The failure to differentiate between political and economic power allowed men to suppose that coercion could be a proper “balance” to production, that both were activities of the same order which could serve as a “check” on each other, that the “authority” of a businessman and the “authority” of a bureaucrat were interchangeable rivals for the same social function. Seeking “a government of laws and not of men,” the advocates of antitrust delivered the entire American economy into the power of as arbitrary a government of men as any dictatorship could hope to establish.

In the absence of any rational criteria of judgment, people attempted to judge the immensely complex issues of a free market by so superficial a standard as “bigness.” You hear it to this day: “big business,” “big government,” or “big labor” are denounced as threats to society, with no concern for the nature, source, or function of the “bigness,” as if size as such were evil. This type of reasoning would mean that a “big” genius, like Edison, and a “big” gangster, like Stalin, were equal malefactors: one flooded the world with immeasurable values and the other with incalculable slaughter, but both did it on a very big scale. I doubt whether anyone would care to equate these two—yet this is the precise difference between big business and big government. The sole means by which a government can grow big is physical force; the sole means by which a business can grow big, in a free economy, is productive achievement.

The only actual factor required for the existence of free competition is: the unhampered, unobstructed operation of the mechanism of a free market. The only action which a government can take to protect free competition is: Laissez-faire!—which, in free translation, means: Hands off! But the antitrust laws established exactly opposite conditions—and achieved the exact opposite of the results they had been intended to achieve.

There is no way to legislate competition; there are no standards by which one could define who should compete with whom, how many competitors should exist in any given field, what should be their relative strength or their so-called “relevant markets,” what prices they should charge, what methods of competition are “fair” or “unfair.” None of these can be answered, because these precisely are the questions that can be answered only by the mechanism of a free market.

With no principles, standards, or criteria to guide it, the antitrust case law is the record of seventy years of sophistry, casuistry, and hair-splitting, as absurd and as removed from any contact with reality as the debates of medieval scholastics. With only this difference: the scholastics had better reasons for the questions they raised—and no specific human lives or fortunes hung on the outcome of their debates.

Let me give you a few examples of antitrust cases. In the case of Associated Press v. United States of 1945, the Associated Press was found guilty, because its bylaws restricted its membership and made it very difficult for newly established newspapers to join. I quote from Mr. Neale’s book:

It was argued in defense of the Associated Press that there were other news agencies from which new entrants might draw their news. . . . The Court held that . . . Associated Press was collectively organized to secure competitive advantages for members over non-members and, as such, was in restraint of trade, even though the non-members were not necessarily prevented altogether from competing. [The Associated Press news service was considered so important a facility that] by keeping it exclusive to themselves the members of the association impose a real hardship on would-be competitors. . . . It is no defense that the members have built up a facility . . . for themselves; new entrants must still be allowed to share it on reasonable terms unless it is practicable for them to compete without it. [Italics mine.]¹⁹

Whose rights are here being violated? And whose whim is being implemented by the power of the law? What qualifies one to be “a would-be competitor”? If I decided to start competing with General Motors tomorrow, what part of their facilities would they have to share with me in order to make it “practicable” for me to compete with them?

In the case of Milgram v. Loew’s, of 1951, the consistent refusal of the major distributors of motion pictures to grant first-runs to a drive-in theater was held to be a proof of collusion. Each company had obviously valid reasons for its refusal, and the defense argued that each had made its own independent decision without knowing the decisions of the others. But the Court ruled that “consciously parallel business practices” are sufficient proof of conspiracy and that “further proof of actual agreement among the defendants is unnecessary.” The Court of Appeals upheld this decision, suggesting that evidence of parallel action should transfer the burden of proof to the defendants “to explain away the inference of joint action,” which they had not, apparently, explained away.

Consider for a moment the implications of this case. If three businessmen reach independently the same blatantly obvious business decision—do they then have to prove that they did not conspire? Or if two businessmen observe an intelligent business policy originated by the third—should they refrain from adopting it, for fear of a conspiracy charge? Or if they do adopt it, should he then find himself dragged into court and charged with conspiracy, on the ground of the actions taken by two men he had never heard of? And how, then, is he “to explain away” his presumed guilt and prove himself innocent?

In the case of patents, the antitrust laws seem to respect a patent owner’s right—so long as he is alone in using his patent and does not share it with anyone else. But if he decides not to engage in a patent war with a competitor who holds patents of the same general category—if they both decide to abandon that alleged “dog-eat-dog” policy of which businessmen are so often accused—if they decide to pool their patents and to license them to a few other manufacturers of their own choice—then the antitrust laws crack down on them both. The penalties, in such patent-pool cases, involve compulsory licensing of the patents to any and all comers—or the outright confiscation of the patents.

I quote from Mr. Neale’s book:

The compulsory licensing of patents—even valid patents lawfully acquired through the research efforts of the company’s own employees—is intended not as punishment but as a way in which rival companies may be brought into the market. . . . In the I.C.I. and duPont case of 1952, for example, Judge Ryan . . . ordered the compulsory licensing of their existing patents in the fields to which their restrictive agreements applied and improvement patents but not new patents in these fields. In this case an auxiliary remedy was awarded which has become common in recent years. Both I.C.I. and duPont were ordered to provide applicants, at a reasonable charge, with technical manuals which would show in detail how the patents were practiced.²⁰

This, mind you, is not regarded as “punitive”!

Whose mind, ability, achievement, and rights are here sacrificed—and for whose unearned benefit?

The most shocking court decision in this grim progression (up to, but not including, the year 1961) was written—as one would almost expect—by a distinguished “conservative,” Judge Learned Hand. The victim was ALCOA. The case was United States v. Aluminum Company of America of 1945.

Under the antitrust laws, monopoly, as such, is not illegal; what is illegal is the “intent to monopolize.” To find ALCOA guilty, Judge Learned Hand had to find evidence that ALCOA had taken aggressive action to exclude competitors from its market. Here is the kind of evidence which he found and on which he based the ruling that has blocked the energy of one of America’s greatest industrial concerns. I quote from Judge Hand’s opinion:

It was not inevitable that it [ALCOA] should always anticipate increases in the demand for ingot and be prepared to supply them. Nothing compelled it to keep doubling and redoubling its capacity before others entered the field. It insists that it never excluded competitors; but we can think of no more effective exclusion than progressively to embrace each new opportunity as it opened, and to face every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organization, having the advantage of experience, trade connections and the elite of personnel.²¹

Here, the meaning and purpose of the antitrust laws come blatantly and explicitly into the open, the only meaning and purpose these laws could have, whether their authors intended it or not: the penalizing of ability for being ability, the penalizing of success for being success, and the sacrifice of productive genius to the demands of envious mediocrity.

If such a principle were applied to all productive activity, if a man of intelligence were forbidden “to embrace each new opportunity as it opened,” for fear of discouraging some coward or fool who might wish to compete with him, it would mean that none of us, in any profession, should venture forward, or rise, or improve, because any form of personal progress—be it a typist’s greater speed, or an artist’s greater canvas, or a doctor’s greater percentage of cures—can discourage the kind of newcomers who haven’t yet started, but who expect to start competing at the top.

As a small, but crowning touch, I will quote Mr. Neale’s footnote to his account of the ALCOA case:

It is of some interest to note that the main ground on which economic writers have condemned the aluminum monopoly has been precisely that ALCOA consistently failed to embrace opportunities for expansion and so underestimated the demand for the metal that the United States was woefully short of productive capacity at the outset of both world wars.²²

Now I will ask you to bear in mind the nature, the essence, and the record of the antitrust laws, when I mention the ultimate climax which makes the rest of that sordid record seem insignificant: the General Electric case of 1961.

The list of the accused in that case reads like a roll call of honor of the electrical-equipment industry: General Electric, Westinghouse, Allis-Chalmers, and twenty-six other, smaller companies. Their crime was that they had provided you with all the matchless benefits and comforts of the electrical age, from bread toasters to power generators. It is for this crime that they were punished—because they could not have provided any of it, nor remained in business, without breaking the antitrust laws.

The charge against them was that they had made secret agreements to fix the prices of their products and to rig bids. But without such agreements, the larger companies could have set their prices so low that the smaller ones would have been unable to match them and would have gone out of business, whereupon the larger companies would have faced prosecution, under these same antitrust laws, for “intent to monopolize.”

I quote from an article by Richard Austin Smith entitled “The Incredible Electrical Conspiracy,” in Fortune (April and May 1961): “If G.E. were to drive for 50 per cent of the market, even strong companies like I-T-E Circuit Breaker might be mortally wounded.” This same article shows that the price-fixing agreements did not benefit General Electric, that they worked to its disadvantage, that General Electric was, in effect, “the sucker” and that its executives knew it, wanted to leave the “conspiracy,” but had no choice (by reason of antitrust and other government regulations).

The best evidence of the fact that the antitrust laws were a major factor in forcing the “conspiracy” upon the electrical industry, can be seen in the aftermath of that case—in the issue of the “consent decree.” When General Electric announced that it now intended to charge the lowest prices possible, it was the smaller companies and the government, the Antitrust Division, who objected.

Mr. Smith’s article mentions the fact that the meetings of the “conspirators” started as a result of the O.P.A. During the war, the prices of electrical equipment were fixed by the government, and the executives of the electrical industry held meetings to discuss a common policy. They continued this practice, after the O.P.A. was abolished.

By what conceivable standard can the policy of price-fixing be a crime, when practiced by businessmen, but a public benefit, when practiced by the government? There are many industries, in peacetime—trucking, for instance—whose prices are fixed by the government. If price-fixing is harmful to competition, to industry, to production, to consumers, to the whole economy, and to the “public interest”—as the advocates of the antitrust laws have claimed—then how can that same harmful policy become beneficial in the hands of the government? Since there is no rational answer to this question, I suggest that you question the economic knowledge, the purpose, and the motives of the champions of antitrust.

The electrical companies offered no defense to the charge of “conspiracy.” They pleaded “nolo contendere,” which means: “no contest.” They did it, because the antitrust laws place so deadly a danger in the path of any attempt to defend oneself that defense becomes virtually impossible. These laws provide that a company convicted of an antitrust violation can be sued for treble damages by any customer who might claim that he was injured. In a case of so large a scale as the electrical industry case, such treble damage suits could, conceivably, wipe all the defendants out of existence. With that kind of threat hanging over him, who can or will take the risk of offering a defense in a court where there are no objective laws, no objective standards of guilt or innocence, no objective way to estimate one’s chances?

Try to project what clamor of indignation and what protests would be heard publicly all around us, if some other group of men, some other minority group, were subjected to a trial in which defense was made impossible—or in which the laws prescribed that the more serious the offense, the more dangerous the defense. Certainly the opposite is true in regard to actual criminals: the more serious the crime, the greater the precautions and protections prescribed by the law to give the defendant a chance and the benefit of every doubt. It is only businessmen who have to come to court, bound and gagged.

Now what started the government’s investigation of the electrical industry? Mr. Smith’s article states that the investigation was started because of complaints by T.V.A. and demands by Senator Kefauver. This was in 1959, under Eisenhower’s Republican Administration. I quote from Time of February 17, 1961:

Often the Government has a hard time gathering evidence in antitrust cases, but this time it got a break. In October 1959, four Ohio businessmen were sentenced to jail after pleading nolo contendere in an antitrust case. (One of them committed suicide on the way to jail.) This news sent a chill through the electrical-equipment executives under investigation, and some agreed to testify about their colleagues under the security of immunity. With the evidence gathered from them (most are still with their companies), the Government sewed up its case.

It is not gangsters, racketeers, or dope peddlers that are here being discussed in such terms, but businessmen—the productive, creative, efficient, competent members of society. Yet the antitrust laws, now, in this new phase, are apparently aimed at transforming business into an underworld, with informers, stool pigeons, double-crossers, special “deals,” and all the rest of the atmosphere of The Untouchables.

Seven executives of the electrical industry were sentenced to jail. We shall never know what went on behind the scenes of this case or in the negotiations between the companies and the government. Were these seven responsible for the alleged “conspiracy”? If it be guilt, were they guiltier than others? Who “informed” on them—and why? Were they framed? Were they double-crossed? Whose purposes, ambitions, or goals were served by their immolation? We do not know. Under a set-up such as the antitrust laws have created, there is no way to know.

When these seven men, who could not defend themselves, came into the courtroom to hear their sentences, their lawyers addressed the judge with pleas for mercy. I quote from the same story in Time: “First before the court came the lawyer for . . . a vice president of Westinghouse, to plead for mercy. His client, said the lawyer, was a vestryman of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Sharon, Pa. and a benefactor of charities for crippled children.” Another defendant’s lawyer pleaded that his client was “the director of a boy’s club in Schenectady, N.Y. and the chairman of a campaign to build a new Jesuit seminary in Lenox, Mass.”

It was not these men’s achievements or their productive ability or their executive talent or their intelligence or their rights that their lawyers found it necessary to cite—but their altruistic “service” to the “welfare of the needy.” The needy had a right to welfare—but those who produced and provided it had not. The welfare and the rights of the producers were not regarded as worthy of consideration or recognition. This is the most damning indictment of the present state of our culture.

The final touch on that whole gruesome farce was Judge Ganey’s statement. He said: “What is really at stake here is the survival of the kind of economy under which America has grown to greatness, the free-enterprise system.” He said it, while delivering the most staggering blow that the free-enterprise system had ever sustained, while sentencing to jail seven of its best representatives and thus declaring that the very class of men who brought America to greatness—the businessmen—are now to be treated, by their nature and profession, as criminals. In the person of these seven men, it is the free-enterprise system that he was sentencing.

These seven men were martyrs. They were treated as sacrificial animals—they were human sacrifices, as truly and more cruelly than the human sacrifices offered by prehistorical savages in the jungle.

If you care about justice to minority groups, remember that businessmen are a small minority—a very small minority, compared to the total of all the uncivilized hordes on earth. Remember how much you owe to this minority—and what disgraceful persecution it is enduring. Remember also that the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

What should we do about it? We should demand a re-examination and revision of the entire issue of antitrust. We should challenge its philosophical, political, economic, and moral base. We should have a Civil Liberties Union—for businessmen. The repeal of the antitrust laws should be our ultimate goal; it will require a long intellectual and political struggle; but, in the meantime and as a first step, we should demand that the jail-penalty provisions of these laws be abolished. It is bad enough if men have to suffer financial penalties, such as fines, under laws which everyone concedes to be non-objective, contradictory, and undefinable, since no two jurists can agree on their meaning and application; it is obscene to impose prison sentences under laws of so controversial a nature. We should put an end to the outrage of sending men to jail for breaking unintelligible laws which they cannot avoid breaking.

Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world. All the other social groups—workers, farmers, professional men, scientists, soldiers—exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery, and in progressive self-destruction. But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictatorship. Their place is taken by armed thugs: by bureaucrats and commissars. Businessmen are the symbol of a free society—the symbol of America. If and when they perish, civilization will perish. But if you wish to fight for freedom, you must begin by fighting for its unrewarded, unrecognized, unacknowledged, yet best representatives—the American businessmen.

4. ANTITRUST

by Alan Greenspan

The world of antitrust is reminiscent of Alice’s Wonder-land: everything seemingly is, yet apparently isn’t, simultaneously. It is a world in which competition is lauded as the basic axiom and guiding principle, yet “too much” competition is condemned as “cutthroat.” It is a world in which actions designed to limit competition are branded as criminal when taken by businessmen, yet praised as “enlightened” when initiated by the government. It is a world in which the law is so vague that businessmen have no way of knowing whether specific actions will be declared illegal until they hear the judge’s verdict—after the fact.

In view of the confusion, contradictions, and legalistic hairsplitting which characterize the realm of antitrust, I submit that the entire antitrust system must be opened for review. It is necessary to ascertain and to estimate: (a) the historical roots of the antitrust laws, and (b) the economic theories upon which these laws were based.

Americans have always feared the concentration of arbitrary power in the hands of politicians. Prior to the Civil War, few attributed such power to businessmen. It was recognized that government officials had the legal power to compel obedience by the use of physical force—and that businessmen had no such power. A businessman needed customers. He had to appeal to their self-interest.

Based on a paper given at the Antitrust Seminar of the National Association of Business Economists, Cleveland, September 25, 1961. Published by Nathaniel Branden Institute, New York, 1962.

This appraisal of the issue changed rapidly in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, particularly with the coming of the railroad age. Outwardly, the railroads did not have the backing of legal force. But to the farmers of the West, the railroads seemed to hold the arbitrary power previously ascribed solely to the government. The railroads appeared unhampered by the laws of competition. They seemed able to charge rates calculated to keep the farmers in seed grain—no higher, no lower. The farmers’ protest took the form of the National Grange movement, the organization responsible for the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887.

The industrial giants, such as Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, which were rising during this period, were also alleged to be immune from competition, from the law of supply and demand. The public reaction against the trusts culminated in the Sherman Act of 1890.

It was claimed then—as it is still claimed today—that business, if left free, would necessarily develop into an institution vested with arbitrary power. Is this assertion valid? Did the post-Civil War period give birth to a new form of arbitrary power? Or did the government remain the source of such power, with business merely providing a new avenue through which it could be exercised? This is the crucial historical question.

The railroads developed in the East, prior to the Civil War, in stiff competition with one another as well as with the older forms of transportation—barges, riverboats, and wagons. By the 1860’s there arose a political clamor demanding that the railroads move west and tie California to the nation: national prestige was held to be at stake. But the traffic volume outside of the populous East was insufficient to draw commercial transportation westward. The potential profit did not warrant the heavy cost of investment in transportation facilities. In the name of “public policy” it was, therefore, decided to subsidize the railroads in their move to the West.

Between 1863 and 1867, close to one hundred million acres of public lands were granted to the railroads. Since these grants were made to individual roads, no competing railroads could vie for traffic in the same area in the West. Meanwhile, the alternative forms of competition (wagons, riverboats, etc.) could not afford to challenge the railroads in the West. Thus, with the aid of the federal government, a segment of the railroad industry was able to “break free” from the competitive bounds which had prevailed in the East.

As might be expected, the subsidies attracted the kind of promoters who always exist on the fringe of the business community and who are constantly seeking an “easy deal.” Many of the new western railroads were shabbily built: they were not constructed to carry traffic, but to acquire land grants.

The western railroads were true monopolies in the textbook sense of the word. They could, and did, behave with an aura of arbitrary power. But that power was not derived from a free market. It stemmed from governmental subsidies and governmental restrictions.²³

When, ultimately, western traffic increased to levels which could support other profit-making transportation carriers, the railroads’ monopolistic power was soon undercut. In spite of their initial privileges, they were unable to withstand the pressure of free competition.

In the meantime, however, an ominous turning point had taken place in our economic history: the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887.

That Act was not necessitated by the “evils” of the free market. Like subsequent legislation controlling business, the Act was an attempt to remedy the economic distortions which prior government interventions had created, but which were blamed on the free market. The Interstate Commerce Act, in turn, produced new distortions in the structure and finances of the railroads. Today, it is proposed that these distortions be corrected by means of further subsidies. The railroads are on the verge of final collapse, yet no one challenges the original misdiagnosis to discover—and correct—the actual cause of their illness.

To interpret the railroad history of the nineteenth century as “proof” of the failure of a free market is a disastrous error. The same error—which persists to this day—was the nineteenth century’s fear of the “trusts.”

The most formidable of the “trusts” was Standard Oil. Nevertheless, at the time of the passage of the Sherman Act, a pre-automotive period, the entire petroleum industry amounted to less than one percent of the Gross National Product and was barely one-third as large as the shoe industry. It was not the absolute size of the trusts, but their dominance within their own industries that gave rise to apprehension. What the observers failed to grasp, however, was the fact that the control by Standard Oil, at the turn of the century, of more than eighty percent of refining capacity made economic sense and accelerated the growth of the American economy.

Such control yielded obvious gains in efficiency, through the integration of divergent refining, marketing, and pipeline operations; it also made the raising of capital easier and cheaper. Trusts came into existence because they were the most efficient units in those industries which, being relatively new, were too small to support more than one large company.

Historically, the general development of industry has taken the following course: an industry begins with a few small firms; in time, many of them merge; this increases efficiency and augments profits. As the market expands, new firms enter the field, thus cutting down the share of the market held by the dominant firm. This has been the pattern in steel, oil, aluminum, containers, and numerous other major industries.

The observable tendency of an industry’s dominant companies eventually to lose part of their share of the market is not caused by antitrust legislation, but by the fact that it is difficult to prevent new firms from entering the field when the demand for a certain product increases. Texaco and Gulf, for example, would have grown into large firms even if the original Standard Oil Trust had not been dissolved. Similarly, the United States Steel Corporation’s dominance of the steel industry half a century ago would have been eroded with or without the Sherman Act.

It takes extraordinary skill to hold more than fifty percent of a large industry’s market in a free economy. It requires unusual productive ability, unfailing business judgment, unrelenting effort at the continuous improvement of one’s product and technique. The rare company which is able to retain its share of the market year after year and decade after decade does so by means of productive efficiency—and deserves praise, not condemnation.

The Sherman Act may be understandable when viewed as a projection of the nineteenth century’s fear and economic ignorance. But it is utter nonsense in the context of today’s economic knowledge. The seventy additional years of observing industrial development should have taught us something.

If the attempts to justify our antitrust statutes on historical grounds are erroneous and rest on a misinterpretation of history, the attempts to justify them on theoretical grounds come from a still more fundamental misconception.

In the early days of the United States, Americans enjoyed a large measure of economic freedom. Each individual was free to produce what he chose, and sell to whomever he chose, at a price mutually agreed upon. If two competitors concluded that it was to their mutual self-interest to set joint price policies, they were free to do so. If a customer requested a rebate in exchange for his business, a firm (usually a railroad) could comply or deny as it saw fit. According to classical economics, which had a profound influence on the nineteenth century, competition would keep the economy in balance.

But while many theories of the classical economists—such as their description of the working of a free economy—were valid, their concept of competition was ambiguous and led to confusion in the minds of their followers. It was understood to mean that competition consists merely of producing and selling the maximum possible, like a robot, passively accepting the market price as a law of nature, never making any attempt to influence the conditions of the market.

The businessmen of the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, aggressively attempted to affect the conditions of their markets by advertising, varying production rates, and bargaining on price with suppliers and customers.

Many observers assumed that these activities were incompatible with the classical theory. They concluded that competition was no longer working effectively. In the sense in which they understood competition, it had never worked or existed, except possibly in some isolated agricultural markets. But in a meaningful sense of the word, competition did, and does, exist—in the nineteenth century as well as today.

“Competition” is an active, not a passive, noun. It applies to the entire sphere of economic activity, not merely to production, but also to trade; it implies the necessity of taking action to affect the conditions of the market in one’s own favor.

The error of the nineteenth-century observers was that they restricted a wide abstraction—competition—to a narrow set of particulars, to the “passive” competition projected by their own interpretation of classical economics. As a result, they concluded that the alleged “failure” of this fictitious “passive competition” negated the entire theoretical structure of classical economics, including the demonstration of the fact that laissez-faire is the most efficient and productive of all possible economic systems. They concluded that a free market, by its nature, leads to its own destruction—and they came to the grotesque contradiction of attempting to preserve the freedom of the market by government controls, i.e., to preserve the benefits of laissez-faire by abrogating it.

The crucial question which they failed to ask is whether “active” competition does inevitably lead to the establishment of coercive monopolies, as they supposed—or whether a laissez-faire economy of “active” competition has a built-in regulator that protects and preserves it. That is the question which we must now examine.

A “coercive monopoly” is a business concern that can set its prices and production policies independent of the market, with immunity from competition, from the law of supply and demand. An economy dominated by such monopolies would be rigid and stagnant.

The necessary precondition of a coercive monopoly is closed entry—the barring of all competing producers from a given field. This can be accomplished only by an act of government intervention, in the form of special regulations, subsidies, or franchises. Without government assistance, it is impossible for a would-be monopolist to set and maintain his prices and production policies independent of the rest of the economy. For if he attempted to set his prices and production at a level that would yield profits to new entrants significantly above those available in other fields, competitors would be sure to invade his industry.

The ultimate regulator of competition in a free economy is the capital market. So long as capital is free to flow, it will tend to seek those areas which offer the maximum rate of return.

The potential investor of capital does not merely consider the actual rate of return earned by companies within a specific industry. His decision concerning where to invest depends on what he himself could earn in that particular line. The existing profit rates within an industry are calculated in terms of existing costs. He has to consider the fact that a new entrant might not be able to achieve at once as low a cost structure as that of experienced producers.

Therefore, the existence of a free capital market does not guarantee that a monopolist who enjoys high profits will necessarily and immediately find himself confronted by competition. What it does guarantee is that a monopolist whose high profits are caused by high prices, rather than low costs, will soon meet competition originated by the capital market.

The capital market acts as a regulator of prices, not necessarily of profits. It leaves an individual producer free to earn as much as he can by lowering his costs and by increasing his efficiency relative to others. Thus, it constitutes the mechanism that generates greater incentives to increased productivity and leads, as a consequence, to a rising standard of living.

The history of the Aluminum Company of America prior to World War II illustrates the process. Envisaging its self-interest and long-term profitability in terms of a growing market, ALCOA kept the price of primary aluminum at a level compatible with the maximum expansion of its market. At such a price level, however, profits were forthcoming only by means of tremendous efforts to step up efficiency and productivity.

ALCOA was a monopoly—the only producer of primary aluminum—but it was not a coercive monopoly, i.e., it could not set its price and production policies independent of the competitive world. In fact, only because the company stressed cost-cutting and efficiency, rather than raising prices, was it able to maintain its position as sole producer of primary aluminum for so long. Had ALCOA attempted to increase its profits by raising prices, it soon would have found itself competing with new entrants in the primary aluminum business.

In analyzing the competitive processes of a laissez-faire economy, one must recognize that capital outlays (investments in new plant and equipment either by existing producers or new entrants) are not determined solely by current profits. An investment is made or not made depending upon the estimated discounted present worth of expected future profits. Consequently, the issue of whether or not a new competitor will enter a hitherto monopolistic industry is determined by his expected future returns.

The present worth of the discounted expected future profits of a given industry is represented by the market price of the common stock of the companies in that industry.²⁴ If the price of a particular company’s stock (or an average for a particular industry) rises, the move implies a higher present worth for expected future earnings.

Statistical evidence demonstrates the correlation between stock prices and capital outlays, not only for industry as a whole, but also within major industry groups.²⁵ Moreover, the time between the fluctuations of stock prices and the corresponding fluctuations of capital expenditures is rather short, a fact which implies that the process of relating new capital investments to profit expectations is relatively fast. If such a correlation works as well as it does, considering today’s governmental impediments to the free movement of capital, one must conclude that in a completely free market the process would be much more efficient.

The churning of a nation’s capital, in a fully free economy, would be continuously pushing capital into profitable areas—and this would effectively control the competitive price and production policies of business firms, making a coercive monopoly impossible to maintain. It is only in a so-called mixed economy that a coercive monopoly can flourish, protected from the discipline of the capital markets by franchises, subsidies, and special privileges from governmental regulators.

To sum up: the entire structure of antitrust statutes in this country is a jumble of economic irrationality and ignorance. It is the product: (a) of a gross misinterpretation of history, and (b) of rather naive, and certainly unrealistic, economic theories.

As a last resort, some people argue that at least the antitrust laws haven’t done any harm. They assert that even though the competitive process itself inhibits coercive monopolies, there is no harm in making doubly sure by declaring certain economic actions to be illegal.

But the very existence of those undefinable statutes and contradictory case law inhibits businessmen from undertaking what would otherwise be sound productive ventures. No one will ever know what new products, processes, machines, and cost-saving mergers failed to come into existence, killed by the Sherman Act before they were born. No one can ever compute the price that all of us have paid for that Act which, by inducing less effective use of capital, has kept our standard of living lower than would otherwise have been possible.

No speculation, however, is required to assess the injustice and the damage to the careers, reputations, and lives of business executives jailed under the antitrust laws.

Those who allege that the purpose of the antitrust laws is to protect competition, enterprise, and efficiency need to be reminded of the following quotation from Judge Learned Hand’s indictment of ALCOA’s so-called monopolistic practices.

It was not inevitable that it should always anticipate increases in the demand for ingot and be prepared to supply them. Nothing compelled it to keep doubling and redoubling its capacity before others entered the field. It insists that it never excluded competitors; but we can think of no more effective exclusion than progressively to embrace each new opportunity as it opened, and to face every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organization, having the advantage of experience, trade connections and the elite of personnel.

ALCOA is being condemned for being too successful, too efficient, and too good a competitor. Whatever damage the antitrust laws may have done to our economy, whatever distortions of the structure of the nation’s capital they may have created, these are less disastrous than the fact that the effective purpose, the hidden intent, and the actual practice of the antitrust laws in the United States have led to the condemnation of the productive and efficient members of our society because they are productive and efficient.

5. COMMON FALLACIES ABOUT CAPITALISM

by Nathaniel Branden

MONOPOLIES

IN A SOCIETY OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE CAPITALISM, WHAT WOULD PREVENT THE FORMATION OF POWERFUL MONOPOLIES ABLE TO GAIN CONTROL OVER THE ENTIRE ECONOMY?

One of the worst fallacies in the field of economics—propagated by Karl Marx and accepted by almost everyone today, including many businessmen—is the notion that the development of monopolies is an inescapable and intrinsic result of the operation of a free, unregulated economy. In fact, the exact opposite is true. It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible.

It is imperative that one be clear and specific in one’s definition of “monopoly.” When people speak, in an economic or political context, of the dangers and evils of monopoly, what they mean is a coercive monopoly—i.e., exclusive control of a given field of production which is closed to and exempt from competition, so that those controlling the field are able to set arbitrary production policies and charge arbitrary prices, independent of the market, immune from the law of supply and demand. Such a monopoly, it is important to note, entails more than the absence of competition; it entails the impossibility of competition. That is a coercive monopoly’s characteristic attribute, which is essential to any condemnation of such a monopoly.

These articles appeared originally in the “Intellectual Ammunition Department” of The Objectivist Newsletter. They are brief answers to the economic questions most frequently asked by readers—questions that reflect the most widely spread misconceptions about capitalism.

In the entire history of capitalism, no one has been able to establish a coercive monopoly by means of competition on a free market. There is only one way to forbid entry into a given field of production: by law. Every coercive monopoly that exists or has ever existed—in the United States, in Europe, or anywhere else in the world—was created and made possible only by an act of government: by special franchises, licenses, subsidies, by legislative actions which granted special privileges (not obtainable on a free market) to a man or a group of men, and forbade all others to enter that particular field.

A coercive monopoly is not the result of laissez-faire; it can result only from the abrogation of laissez-faire and from the introduction of the opposite principle—the principle of statism.

In this country, a utility company is a coercive monopoly: the government grants it a franchise for an exclusive territory, and no one else is allowed to engage in that service in that territory; a would-be competitor, attempting to sell electric power, would be stopped by law. A telephone company is a coercive monopoly. As recently as World War II, the government ordered the two then existing telegraph companies, Western Union and Postal Telegraph, to merge into one monopoly.

In the comparatively free days of American capitalism, in the late-nineteenth-early-twentieth century, there were many attempts to “corner the market” on various commodities (such as cotton and wheat, to mention two famous examples)—then close the field to competition and gather huge profits by selling at exorbitant prices. All such attempts failed. The men who tried it were compelled to give up—or go bankrupt. They were defeated, not by legislative action, but by the action of the free market.

The question is often asked: What if a large, rich company kept buying out its smaller competitors or kept forcing them out of business by means of undercutting prices and selling at a loss—would it not be able to gain control of a given field and then start charging high prices and be free to stagnate with no fear of competition? The answer is: No, it could not be done. If a company assumed heavy losses in order to drive out competitors, then began to charge high prices to regain what it had lost, this would serve as an incentive for new competitors to enter the field and take advantage of the high profitability, without any losses to recoup. The new competitors would force prices down to the market level. The large company would have to abandon its attempt to establish monopoly prices—or go bankrupt, fighting off the competitors that its own policies would attract.

It is a matter of historical fact that no “price war” has ever succeeded in establishing a monopoly or in maintaining prices above the market level, outside the law of supply and demand. (“Price wars” have, however, acted as spurs to the economic efficiency of competing companies—and have thereby resulted in enormous benefits to the public, in terms of better products at lower prices.)

In considering this issue, people frequently ignore the crucial role of the capital market in a free economy. As Alan Greenspan observes in his article “Antitrust”²⁶: If entry into a given field of production is not impeded by government regulations, franchises, or subsidies, “the ultimate regulator of competition in a free economy is the capital market. So long as capital is free to flow, it will tend to seek those areas which offer the maximum rate of return.” Investors are constantly seeking the most profitable uses of their capital. If, therefore, some field of production is seen to be highly profitable (particularly when the profitability is due to high prices rather than to low costs), businessmen and investors necessarily will be attracted to that field; and, as the supply of the product in question is increased relative to the demand for it, prices fall accordingly. “The capital market,” writes Mr. Greenspan, “acts as a regulator of prices, not necessarily of profits. It leaves an individual producer free to earn as much as he can by lowering his costs and by increasing his efficiency relative to others. Thus it constitutes the mechanism that generates greater incentives to increased productivity and leads, as a consequence, to a rising standard of living.”

The free market does not permit inefficiency or stagnation—with economic impunity—in any field of production. Consider, for instance, a well-known incident in the history of the American automobile industry. There was a period when Henry Ford’s Model-T held an enormous part of the automobile market. But when Ford’s company attempted to stagnate and to resist stylistic changes—“You can have any color of the Model-T you want, so long as it’s black”—General Motors, with its more attractively styled Chevrolet, cut into a major segment of Ford’s market. And the Ford Company was compelled to change its policies in order to compete. One will find examples of this principle in the history of virtually every industry.

Now if one considers the only kind of monopoly that can exist under capitalism, a non-coercive monopoly, one will see that its prices and production policies are not independent of the wider market in which it operates, but are fully bound by the law of supply and demand; that there is no particular reason for or value in retaining the designation of “monopoly” when one uses it in a non-coercive sense; and that there are no rational grounds on which to condemn such “monopolies.”

For instance, if a small town has only one drugstore, which is barely able to survive, the owner might be described as enjoying a “monopoly”—except that no one would think of using the term in this context. There is no economic need or market for a second drugstore, there is not enough trade to support it. But if that town grew, its one drugstore would have no way, no power, to prevent other drugstores from being opened.

It is often thought that the field of mining is particularly vulnerable to the establishment of monopolies, since the materials extracted from the earth exist in limited quantity and since, it is believed, some firm might gain control of all the sources of some raw material. But observe that International Nickel of Canada produces more than two-thirds of the world’s nickel—yet it does not charge monopoly prices. It prices its product as though it had a great many competitors—and the truth is that it does have a great many competitors. Nickel (in the form of alloy and stainless steels) is competing with aluminum and a variety of other materials. The seldom recognized principle involved in such cases is that no single product, commodity, or material is or can be indispensable to an economy regardless of price. A commodity can be only relatively preferable to other commodities. For example, when the price of bituminous coal rose (which was due to John L. Lewis’ forcing an economically unjustified wage raise), this was instrumental in bringing about a large-scale conversion to the use of oil and gas in many industries. The free market is its own protector.

Now if a company were able to gain and hold a non-coercive monopoly, if it were able to win all the customers in a given field, not by special government-granted privileges, but by sheer productive efficiency—by its ability to keep its costs low and/or to offer a better product than any competitor could—there would be no grounds on which to condemn such a monopoly. On the contrary, the company that achieved it would deserve the highest praise and esteem.

No one can morally claim the right to compete in a given field if he cannot match the productive efficiency of those with whom he hopes to compete. There is no reason why people should buy inferior products at higher prices in order to maintain less efficient companies in business. Under capitalism, any man or company that can surpass competitors is free to do so. It is in this manner that the free market rewards ability and works for the benefit of everyone—except those who seek the undeserved.

A bromide commonly cited in this connection by capitalism’s opponents is the story of the old corner grocer who is driven out of business by the big chain store. What is the clear implication of their protest? It is that the people who live in the neighborhood of the old grocer have to continue buying from him, even though a chain store could give them better service at lower prices and thereby let them save money. Thus both the owners of the chain store and the people in the neighborhood are to be penalized—in order to protect the stagnation of the old grocer. By what right? If that grocer is unable to compete with the chain store, then, properly, he has no choice but to move elsewhere or go into another line of business or seek employment from the chain store. Capitalism, by its nature, entails a constant process of motion, of growth, of progress; no one has a vested right to a position if others can do better than he can.

When people denounce the free market as “cruel,” the fact they are decrying is that the market is ruled by a single moral principle: justice. And that is the root of their hatred for capitalism.

There is only one kind of monopoly that men may rightfully condemn—the only kind for which the designation of “monopoly” is economically significant: a coercive monopoly. (Observe that in the non-coercive meaning of the term, every man may be described as a “monopolist”—since he is the exclusive owner of his effort and product. But this is not regarded as evil—except by socialists.)

In the issue of monopolies, as in so many other issues, capitalism is commonly blamed for the evils perpetrated by its destroyers: it is not free trade on a free market that creates coercive monopolies, but government legislation, government action, government controls. If men are concerned about the evils of monopolies, let them identify the actual villain in the picture and the actual cause of the evils: government intervention into the economy. Let them recognize that there is only one way to destroy monopolies: by the separation of State and Economics—that is, by instituting the principle that the government may not abridge the freedom of production and trade.

(JUNE 1962.)

DEPRESSIONS

ARE PERIODIC DEPRESSIONS INEVITABLE IN A SYSTEM OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE CAPITALISM?

It is characteristic of the enemies of capitalism that they denounce it for evils which are, in fact, the result not of capitalism but of statism: evils which result from and are made possible only by government intervention in the economy.

I have discussed a flagrant example of this policy: the charge that capitalism leads to the establishment of coercive monopolies. The most notorious instance of this policy is the claim that capitalism, by its nature, inevitably leads to periodic depressions.

Statists repeatedly assert that depressions (the phenomenon of the so-called business cycle, of “boom and bust”) are inherent in laissez-faire, and that the great crash of 1929 was the final proof of the failure of an unregulated, free-market economy. What is the truth of the matter?

A depression is a large-scale decline in production and trade; it is characterized by a sharp drop in productive output, in investment, in employment, and in the value of capital assets (plants, machinery, etc.). Normal business fluctuations, or a temporary decline in the rate of industrial expansion, do not constitute a depression. A depression is a nation-wide contraction of business activity—and a general decline in the value of capital assets—of major proportions.

There is nothing in the nature of a free-market economy to cause such an event. The popular explanations of depression as caused by “over-production,” “underconsumption,” monopolies, labor-saving devices, maldistribution, excessive accumulations of wealth, etc., have been exploded as fallacies many times.²⁷

Readjustments of economic activity, shifts of capital and labor from one industry to another, due to changing conditions, occur constantly under capitalism. This is entailed in the process of motion, growth, and progress that characterizes capitalism. But there always exists the possibility of profitable endeavor in one field or another, there is always the need and demand for goods, and all that can change is the kind of goods it becomes most profitable to produce.

In any one industry, it is possible for supply to exceed demand, in the context of all the other existing demands. In such a case, there is a drop in prices, in profitableness, in investment, and in employment in that particular industry; capital and labor tend to flow elsewhere, seeking more rewarding uses. Such an industry undergoes a period of stagnation, as a result of unjustified, that is, uneconomic, unprofitable, unproductive investment.

In a free economy that functions on a gold standard, such unproductive investment is severely limited; unjustified speculation does not rise, unchecked, until it engulfs an entire nation. In a free economy, the supply of money and credit needed to finance business ventures is determined by objective economic factors. It is the banking system that acts as the guardian of economic stability. The principles governing money supply operate to forbid large-scale unjustified investment.

Most businesses finance their undertakings, at least in part, by means of bank loans. Banks function as an investment clearing house, investing the savings of their customers in those enterprises which promise to be most successful. Banks do not have unlimited funds to loan; they are limited in the credit they can extend by the amount of their gold reserves. In order to remain successful, to make profits and thus attract the savings of investors, banks must make their loans judiciously: they must seek out those ventures which they judge to be most sound and potentially profitable.

If, in a period of increasing speculation, banks are confronted with an inordinate number of requests for loans, then, in response to the shrinking availability of money, they (a) raise their interest rates, and (b) scrutinize more severely the ventures for which loans are requested, setting more exacting standards of what constitutes a justifiable investment. As a consequence, funds are more difficult to obtain, and there is a temporary curtailment and contraction of business investment. Businessmen are often unable to borrow the funds they desire and have to reduce plans for expansion. The purchase of common stocks, which reflects the investors’ estimates of the future earnings of companies, is similarly curtailed; overvalued stocks fall in price. Businesses engaged in uneconomic ventures, now unable to obtain additional credit, are obliged to close their doors; a further waste of productive factors is stopped and economic errors are liquidated.

At worst, the economy may experience a mild recession, i.e., a slight general decline in investment and production. In an unregulated economy, readjustments occur quite swiftly, and then production and investment begin to rise again. The temporary recession is not harmful but beneficial; it represents an economic system in the process of correcting its errors, of curtailing disease and returning to health.

The impact of such a recession may be significantly felt in a few industries, but it does not wreck an entire economy. A nation-wide depression, such as occurred in the United States in the thirties, would not have been possible in a fully free society. It was made possible only by government intervention in the economy—more specifically, by government manipulation of the money supply.

The government’s policy consisted, in essence, of anesthetizing the regulators, inherent in a free banking system, that prevent runaway speculation and consequent economic collapse.

All government intervention in the economy is based on the belief that economic laws need not operate, that principles of cause and effect can be suspended, that everything in existence is “flexible” and “malleable,” except a bureaucrat’s whim, which is omnipotent; reality, logic, and economics must not be allowed to get in the way.

This was the implicit premise that led to the establishment, in 1913, of the Federal Reserve System—an institution with control (through complex and often indirect means) over the individual banks throughout the country. The Federal Reserve undertook to free individual banks from the “limitations” imposed on them by the amount of their own individual reserves, to free them from the laws of the market—and to arrogate to government officials the right to decide how much credit they wished to make available at what times.

A “cheap money” policy was the guiding idea and goal of these officials. Banks were no longer to be limited in making loans by the amount of their gold reserves. Interest rates were no longer to rise in response to increasing speculation and increasing demands for funds. Credit was to remain readily available—until and unless the Federal Reserve decided otherwise.²⁸

The government argued that by taking control of money and credit out of the hands of private bankers, and by contracting or expanding credit at will, guided by considerations other than those influencing the “selfish” bankers, it could—in conjunction with other interventionist policies—so control investment as to guarantee a state of virtually constant prosperity. Many bureaucrats believed that the government could keep the economy in a state of unending boom.

To borrow an invaluable metaphor from Alan Greenspan: if, under laissez-faire, the banking system and the principles controlling the availability of funds act as a fuse that prevents a blowout in the economy—then the government, through the Federal Reserve System, put a penny in the fuse-box. The result was the explosion known as the Crash of 1929.

Throughout most of the 1920’s, the government compelled banks to keep interest rates artificially and uneconomically low. As a consequence, money was poured into every sort of speculative venture. By 1928, the warning signals of danger were clearly apparent: unjustified investment was rampant and stocks were increasingly overvalued. The government chose to ignore these danger signals.

A free banking system would have been compelled, by economic necessity, to put the brakes on this process of runaway speculation. Credit and investment, in such a case, would be drastically curtailed; the banks which made unprofitable investments, the enterprises which proved unproductive, and those who dealt with them, would suffer—but that would be all; the country as a whole would not be dragged down. However, the “anarchy” of a free banking system had been abandoned—in favor of “enlightened” government planning.

The boom and the wild speculation—which had preceded every major depression—were allowed to rise unchecked, involving, in a widening network of malinvestments and miscalculations, the entire economic structure of the nation. People were investing in virtually everything and making fortunes overnight—on paper. Profits were calculated on hysterically exaggerated appraisals of the future earnings of companies. Credit was extended with promiscuous abandon, on the premise that somehow the goods would be there to back it up. It was like the policy of a man who passes out rubber checks, counting on the hope that he will somehow find a way to obtain the necessary money and to deposit it in the bank before anyone presents his checks for collection.

But A is A—and reality is not infinitely elastic. In 1929, the country’s economic and financial structure had become impossibly precarious. By the time the government finally and frantically raised the interest rates, it was too late. It is doubtful whether anyone can state with certainty what events first set off the panic—and it does not matter: the crash had become inevitable; any number of events could have pulled the trigger. But when the news of the first bank and commercial failures began to spread, uncertainty swept across the country in widening waves of terror. People began to sell their stocks, hoping to get out of the market with their gains, or to obtain the money they suddenly needed to pay bank loans that were being called in—and other people, seeing this, apprehensively began to sell their stocks— and, virtually overnight, an avalanche hurled the stock market downward, prices collapsed, securities became worthless, loans were called in, many of which could not be paid, the value of capital assets plummeted sickeningly, fortunes were wiped out, and, by 1932, business activity had come almost to a halt. The law of causality had avenged itself.

Such, in essence, was the nature and cause of the 1929 depression.

It provides one of the most eloquent illustrations of the disastrous consequences of a “planned” economy. In a free economy, when an individual businessman makes an error of economic judgment, he (and perhaps those who immediately deal with him) suffers the consequences; in a controlled economy, when a central planner makes an error of economic judgment, the whole country suffers the consequences.

But it was not the Federal Reserve, it was not government intervention that took the blame for the 1929 depression—it was capitalism. Freedom—cried statists of every breed and sect—had had its chance and had failed. The voices of the few thinkers who pointed to the real cause of the evil were drowned out in the denunciations of businessmen, of the profit motive, of capitalism.

Had men chosen to understand the cause of the crash, the country would have been spared much of the agony that followed. The depression was prolonged for tragically unnecessary years by the same evil that had caused it: government controls and regulations.

Contrary to popular misconception, controls and regulations began long before the New Deal; in the 1920’s, the mixed economy was already an established fact of American life. But the trend toward statism began to move faster under the Hoover Administration—and, with the advent of Roosevelt’s New Deal, it accelerated at an unprecedented rate. The economic adjustments needed to bring the depression to an end were prevented from taking place—by the imposition of strangling controls, increased taxes, and labor legislation. This last had the effect of forcing wage rates to unjustifiably high levels, thus raising the businessman’s costs at precisely the time when costs needed to be lowered, if investment and production were to revive.

The National Industrial Recovery Act, the Wagner Act, and the abandonment of the gold standard (with the government’s subsequent plunge into inflation and an orgy of deficit spending) were only three of the many disastrous measures enacted by the New Deal for the avowed purpose of pulling the country out of the depression; all had the opposite effect.

As Alan Greenspan points out in “Stock Prices and Capital Evaluation,”²⁹ the obstacle to business recovery did not consist exclusively of the specific New Deal legislation passed; more harmful still was the general atmosphere of uncertainty engendered by the Administration. Men had no way to know what law or regulation would descend on their heads at any moment; they had no way to know what sudden shifts of direction government policy might take; they had no way to plan long-range.

To act and produce, businessmen require knowledge, the possibility of rational calculation, not “faith” and “hope”—above all, not “faith” and “hope” concerning the unpredictable twistings within a bureaucrat’s head.

Such advances as business was able to achieve under the New Deal collapsed in 1937—as a result of an intensification of uncertainty regarding what the government might choose to do next. Unemployment rose to more than ten million and business activity fell almost to the low point of 1932, the worst year of the depression.

It is part of the official New Deal mythology that Roosevelt “got us out of the depression.” How was the problem of the depression finally “solved”? By the favorite expedient of all statists in times of emergency: a war.

The depression precipitated by the stock market crash of 1929 was not the first in American history—though it was incomparably more severe than any that had preceded it. If one studies the earlier depressions, the same basic cause and common denominator will be found: in one form or another, by one means or another, government manipulation of the money supply. It is typical of the manner in which interventionism grows that the Federal Reserve System was instituted as a proposed antidote against those earlier depressions—which were themselves products of monetary manipulation by the government.

The financial mechanism of an economy is the sensitive center, the living heart, of business activity. In no other area can government intervention produce quite such disastrous consequences. For a general discussion of the business cycle and its relation to government manipulation of the money supply, see Ludwig von Mises, Human Action.³⁰

One of the most striking facts of history is men’s failure to learn from it. For further details, see the policies of the present Administration.

(AUGUST 1962.)

THE ROLE OF LABOR UNIONS

DO LABOR UNIONS RAISE THE GENERAL STANDARD OF LIVING?

One of the most widespread delusions of our age is the belief that the American worker owes his high standard of living to unions and to “humanitarian” labor legislation. This belief is contradicted by the most fundamental facts and principles of economics—facts and principles which are systematically evaded by labor leaders, legislators, and intellectuals of the statist persuasion.

A country’s standard of living, including the wages of its workers, depends on the productivity of labor; high productivity depends on machines, inventions, and capital investment; which depend on the creative ingenuity of individual men; which requires, for its exercise, a politico-economic system that protects the individual’s rights and freedom.

The productive value of physical labor as such is low. If the worker of today produces more than the worker of fifty years ago, it is not because the former exerts more physical effort; quite the contrary: the physical effort required of him is far less. The productive value of his effort has been multiplied many times by the tools and machines with which he works; they are crucial in determining the economic worth of his services. To illustrate this principle: consider what would be a man’s economic reward, on a desert island, for pushing his finger the distance of half an inch; then consider the wages paid, for pushing a button, to an elevator operator in New York City. It is not muscles that make the difference.

As Ludwig von Mises observes:

American wages are higher than wages in other countries because the capital invested per head of the worker is greater and the plants are thereby in the position to use the most efficient tools and machines. What is called the American way of life is the result of the fact that the United States has put fewer obstacles in the way of saving and capital accumulation than other nations. The economic backwardness of such countries as India consists precisely in the fact that their policies hinder both the accumulation of capital and the investment of foreign capital. As the capital required is lacking, the Indian enterprises are prevented from employing sufficient quantities of modern equipment, are therefore producing much less per man hour and can only afford to pay wage rates which, compared with American wage rates, appear as shockingly low.³¹

In a free-market economy, employers must bid competitively for the services of workers, just as they must bid competitively for all the other factors of production. If an employer attempts to pay wages which are lower than his workers can obtain elsewhere, he will lose his workers and thus will be compelled to change his policy or go out of business. If, other things being equal, an employer pays wages which are above the market level, his higher costs will put him at a competitive disadvantage in the sale of his products, and again he will be compelled to change his policy or go out of business. Employers do not lower wages because they are cruel, nor raise wages because they are kind. Wages are not determined by the employer’s whim. Wages are the prices paid for human labor and, like all other prices in a free economy, are determined by the law of supply and demand.

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism, wage rates have risen steadily—as an inevitable economic consequence of rising capital accumulation, technological progress, and industrial expansion. As capitalism created countless new markets, so it created an ever-widening market for labor: it multiplied the number and kinds of jobs available, increased the demand and competition for the worker’s services, and thus drove wage rates upward.

It was the economic self-interest of employers that led them to raise wages and shorten working hours—not the pressure of labor unions. The eight-hour day was established in most American industries long before unions acquired any significant size or economic power. At a time when his competitors were paying their workers between two and three dollars a day, Henry Ford offered five dollars a day, thereby attracting the most efficient labor force in the country, and thus raising his own production and profits. In the 1920’s, when the labor movement in France and Germany was far more dominant than in the United States, the standard of living of the American worker was greatly superior. It was the consequence of economic freedom.

Needless to say, men have a right to organize into unions, provided they do so voluntarily, that is, provided no one is forced to join. Unions can have value as fraternal organizations, or as a means of keeping members informed of current market conditions, or as a means of bargaining more effectively with employers—particularly in small, isolated communities. It may happen that an individual employer is paying wages that, in the overall market context, are too low; in such a case, a strike, or the threat of a strike, can compel him to change his policy, since he will discover that he cannot obtain an adequate labor force at the wages he offers. However, the belief that unions can cause a general rise in the standard of living is a myth.

Today, the labor market is no longer free. Unions enjoy a unique, near-monopolistic power over many aspects of the economy. This has been achieved through legislation which has forced men to join unions, whether they wished to or not, and forced employers to deal with these unions, whether they wished to or not. As a consequence, wage rates in many industries are no longer determined by a free market; unions have been able to force wages substantially above their normal market level. These are the “social gains” for which unions are usually given credit. In fact, however, the result of their policy has been (a) a curtailment of production, (b) widespread unemployment, and (c) the penalizing of workers in other industries, as well as the rest of the population.

a. With the rise of wage rates to inordinately high levels, production costs are such that cutbacks in production are often necessary, new undertakings become too expensive, and growth is hindered. At the increased costs, marginal producers—those who have been barely able to compete in the market—find themselves unable to remain in business. The overall result: goods and services that would have been produced are not brought into existence.

b. As a result of the high wage rates, employers can afford to hire fewer workers; as a result of curtailed production, employers need fewer workers. Thus, one group of workers obtains unjustifiably high wages at the expense of other workers who are unable to find jobs at all. This—in conjunction with minimum wage laws—is the cause of widespread unemployment. Unemployment is the inevitable result of forcing wage rates above their free-market level. In a free economy, in which neither employers nor workers are subject to coercion, wage rates always tend toward the level at which all those who seek employment will be able to obtain it. In a frozen, controlled economy, this process is blocked. As a result of allegedly “pro-labor” legislation and of the monopolistic power that labor unions enjoy, unemployed workers are not free to compete in the labor market by offering their services for less than the prevailing wage rates; employers are not free to hire them. In the case of strikes, if unemployed workers attempted to obtain the jobs vacated by union strikers, by offering to work for a lower wage, they often would be subjected to threats and physical violence at the hands of union members. These facts are as notorious as they are evaded in most current discussions of the unemployment problem—particularly by government officials.

c. When market conditions are such that producers whose labor costs have risen cannot raise the prices of the goods they sell, a curtailment of production results, as indicated above; and the general population accordingly suffers a loss of potential goods and services. (The notion that producers can “absorb” such wage increases, by “taking them out of profits,” without a detriment to future production, is worse than economically naive; it is profits that make future production possible; the amount of profits that go, not into investment, but into the producer’s personal consumption, is negligible in the overall economic context.) To the extent that market conditions do allow, producers whose labor costs have risen are obliged to raise the prices of their goods. Then, workers in other industries find that their living costs have gone up, that they must now pay higher prices for the goods they purchase. Then, they in turn demand a raise in their industries, which leads to new price rises, which leads to new wage increases, etc. (Union leaders typically express indignation whenever prices are raised; the only prices they consider it moral to raise are the prices paid for labor, i.e., wages.) Non-unionized workers, and the rest of the population generally, face this same steady rise in their living costs; they are made to subsidize the unjustifiably high wages of union workers—and are the unacknowledged victims of the unions’ “social gains.” And one observes the spectacle of bricklayers receiving two or even three times the salary of office workers and professors.

It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that it is not unionism as such but government controls and regulations which make this state of affairs possible. In a free, unregulated economy, in a market from which coercion is barred, no economic group can acquire the power so to victimize the rest of the population. The solution does not lie in new legislation directed against unions, but in the repeal of the legislation that made the present evil possible.

The inability of unions to achieve real, widespread raises in wage rates—to raise the standard of living generally—is in part obscured by the phenomenon of inflation. As a consequence of the government’s policy of deficit spending and credit expansion, the purchasing power of the monetary unit, the dollar, has diminished drastically across the years. Nominal wage rates have increased considerably more than real wage rates, that is, wages measured in terms of actual purchasing power.

What has further served to obscure this issue is the fact that real wage rates have risen considerably since the start of the century. In spite of destructive and increasing governmental restraints on the freedom of production and trade, major advances in science, technology, and capital accumulation have been made and have raised the general standard of living. It should be added that these advances are less than would have occurred in a fully free economy and, as controls continue to tighten, such advances become slower and rarer.

It is relevant to consider against what obstacles businessmen have had to fight and to go on producing—when one hears labor leaders proclaiming, in indignant tones, the workers’ right to a “larger share” of the “national product.” To paraphrase John Galt: A larger share—provided by whom? Blank out.

Economic progress, like every other form of progress, has only one ultimate source: man’s mind—and can exist only to the extent that man is free to translate his thought into action.

Let anyone who believes that a high standard of living is the achievement of labor unions and government controls ask himself the following question: If one had a “time machine” and transported the united labor chieftains of America, plus three million government bureaucrats, back to the tenth century—would they be able to provide the medieval serf with electric light, refrigerators, automobiles, and television sets? When one grasps that they would not, one should identify who and what made these things possible.³²

Postscript: After completing the above, I noticed an article in The New York Times of September 8 that is too apropos to let pass without acknowledgment. The article, entitled “10 U.A.W. Leaders Find Unions Are Losing Members’ Loyalty,” by Damon Stetson, reports that executives of the United Automobile Workers met to discuss the problem of workers’ increasing lack of loyalty to union leadership and union solidarity. One U.A.W. official is quoted as declaring: “How can we get greater loyalty from the individual to the union? All the things we fought for, the corporation is now giving the workers. What we have to find are other things the workers want which the employer is not willing to give him, and we have to develop our program around these things as reasons for belonging to the union.”

Is any comment necessary?

(NOVEMBER 1963.)

PUBLIC EDUCATION

SHOULD EDUCATION BE COMPULSORY AND TAX-SUPPORTED, AS IT IS TODAY?

The answer to this question becomes evident if one makes the question more concrete and specific, as follows: Should the government be permitted to remove children forcibly from their homes, with or without the parents’ consent, and subject the children to educational training and procedures of which the parents may or may not approve? Should citizens have their wealth expropriated to support an educational system which they may or may not sanction, and to pay for the education of children who are not their own? To anyone who understands and is consistently committed to the principle of individual rights, the answer is clearly: No.

There are no moral grounds whatever for the claim that education is the prerogative of the State—or for the claim that it is proper to expropriate the wealth of some men for the unearned benefit of others.

The doctrine that education should be controlled by the State is consistent with the Nazi or communist theory of government. It is not consistent with the American theory of government.

The totalitarian implications of State education (preposterously described as “free education”) have in part been obscured by the fact that in America, unlike Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, private schools are legally tolerated. Such schools, however, exist not by right but only by permission.

Further, the facts remain that: (a) most parents are effectively compelled to send their children to State schools, since they are taxed to support these schools and cannot afford to pay the additional fees required to send their children to private schools; (b) the standards of education, controlling all schools, are prescribed by the State; (c) the growing trend in American education is for the government to exert wider and wider control over every aspect of education.

As an example of this last: when many parents, who objected to the pictographic method of teaching school-children to read, undertook to teach their children at home by the phonetic method—a proposal was made legally to forbid parents to do so. What is the implication of this, if not that the child’s mind belongs to the State?

When the State assumes financial control of education, it is logically appropriate that the State should progressively assume control of the content of education—since the State has the responsibility of judging whether or not its funds are being used “satisfactorily.” But when a government enters the sphere of ideas, when it presumes to prescribe in issues concerning intellectual content, that is the death of a free society.

To quote Isabel Paterson in The God of the Machine:

Educational texts are necessarily selective, in subject matter, language, and point of view. Where teaching is conducted by private schools, there will be a considerable variation in different schools; the parents must judge what they want their children taught, by the curriculum offered. Then each must strive for objective truth. . . . Nowhere will there be any inducement to teach the “supremacy of the state” as a compulsory philosophy. But every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later, whether as the divine right of kings, or the “will of the people” in “democracy.” Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property, and mind in its clutches from infancy.³³

The disgracefully low level of education in America today is the predictable result of a State-controlled school system. Schooling, to a marked extent, has become a status symbol and a ritual. More and more people are entering college—and fewer and fewer people are emerging properly educated. Our educational system is like a vast bureaucracy, a vast civil service, in which the trend is toward a policy of considering everything about a teacher’s qualifications (such as the number of his publications) except his teaching ability; and of considering everything about a student’s qualifications (such as his “social adaptability”) except his intellectual competence.

The solution is to bring the field of education into the marketplace.

There is an urgent economic need for education. When educational institutions have to compete with one another in the quality of the training they offer—when they have to compete for the value that will be attached to the diplomas they issue—educational standards will necessarily rise. When they have to compete for the services of the best teachers, the teachers who will attract the greatest number of students, then the caliber of teaching—and of teachers’ salaries—will necessarily rise. (Today, the most talented teachers often abandon their profession and enter private industry, where they know their efforts will be better rewarded.) When the economic principles that have resulted in the superlative efficiency of American industry are permitted to operate in the field of education, the result will be a revolution, in the direction of unprecedented educational development and growth.

Education should be liberated from the control or intervention of government, and turned over to profit-making private enterprise, not because education is unimportant, but because education is so crucially important.

What must be challenged is the prevalent belief that education is some sort of “natural right”—in effect, a free gift of nature. There are no such free gifts. But it is in the interests of statism to foster this delusion—in order to throw a smokescreen over the issue of whose freedom must be sacrificed to pay for such “free gifts.”

As a result of the fact that education has been tax-supported for such a long time, most people find it difficult to project an alternative. Yet there is nothing unique about education that distinguishes it from the many other human needs which are filled by private enterprise. If, for many years, the government had undertaken to provide all the citizens with shoes (on the grounds that shoes are an urgent necessity), and if someone were subsequently to propose that this field should be turned over to private enterprise, he would doubtless be told indignantly: “What! Do you want everyone except the rich to walk around barefoot?”

But the shoe industry is doing its job with immeasurably greater competence than public education is doing its job.

To quote Isabel Paterson once more:

The most vindictive resentment may be expected from the pedagogic profession for any suggestion that they should be dislodged from their dictatorial position; it will be expressed mainly in epithets, such as “reactionary,” at the mildest. Nevertheless, the question to put to any teacher moved to such indignation is: Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you and pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion? ³⁴

(JUNE 1963.)

INHERITED WEALTH

DOES INHERITED WEALTH GIVE SOME INDIVIDUALS AN UNFAIR ADVANTAGE IN A COMPETITIVE ECONOMY?

In considering the issue of inherited wealth, one must begin by recognizing that the crucial right involved is not that of the heir but of the original producer of the wealth. The right of property is the right of use and disposal; just as the man who produces wealth has the right to use it and dispose of it in his lifetime, so he has the right to choose who shall be its recipient after his death. No one else is entitled to make that choice. It is irrelevant, therefore, in this context, to consider the worthiness or unworthiness of any particular heir; his is not the basic right at stake; when people denounce inherited wealth, it is the right of the producer that they, in fact, are attacking.

It has been argued that, since the heir did not work to produce the wealth, he has no inherent right to it; that is true: the heir’s is a derived right; the only primary right is the producer’s. But if the future heir has no moral claim to the wealth, except by the producer’s choice, neither has anyone else—certainly not the government or “the public.”

In a free economy, inherited wealth is not an impediment or a threat to those who do not possess it. Wealth, it is necessary to remember, is not a static, limited quantity that can only be divided or looted; wealth is produced; its potential quantity is virtually unlimited.

If an heir is worthy of his money, i.e., if he uses it productively, he brings more wealth into existence, he raises the general standard of living—and, to that extent, he makes the road to the top easier for any talented newcomer. The greater the amount of wealth, of industrial development, in existence, the higher the economic rewards (in wages and profits) and the wider the market for ability—for new ideas, products and services.

The less the wealth in existence, the longer and harder the struggle for everyone. In the beginning years of an industrial economy, wages are low; there is little market yet for unusual ability. But with every succeeding generation, as capital accumulation increases, the economic demand for men of ability rises. The existing industrial establishments desperately need such men; they have no choice but to bid ever higher wages for such men’s services—and thus to train their own future competitors—so that the time required for a talented newcomer to accumulate his own fortune and establish his own business grows continually shorter.

If the heir is not worthy of his money, the only person threatened by it is himself. A free, competitive economy is a constant process of improvement, innovation, progress; it does not tolerate stagnation. If an heir who lacks ability acquires a fortune and a great industrial establishment from his successful father, he will not be able to maintain it for long; he will not be equal to the competition. In a free economy, where bureaucrats and legislators would not have the power to sell or grant economic favors, all of the heir’s money would not be able to buy him protection for his incompetence; he would have to be good at his work or lose his customers to companies run by men of superior ability. There is nothing as vulnerable as a large, mismanaged company that competes with small, efficient ones.

The personal luxuries or drunken parties that the incompetent heir may enjoy on his father’s money are of no economic significance. In business, he would not be able to stand in the way of talented competitors or serve as an impediment to men of ability. He would find no automatic security anywhere.

At the turn of the century, there was a popular phrase that is very eloquent with regard to the foregoing: “From shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” If a self-made man rose by ability and left his business to unworthy heirs, his grandson went back to the shirtsleeves of obscure employment. (He did not end up with the governorship of a state.)

It is a mixed economy—such as the semi-socialist or semi-fascist variety we have today—that protects the non-productive rich by freezing a society on a given level of development, by freezing people into classes and castes and making it increasingly more difficult for men to rise or fall or move from one caste to another; so that whoever inherited a fortune before the freeze can keep it with little fear of competition, like an heir in a feudal society.

It is significant how many heirs of great industrial fortunes, the second- and third-generation millionaires, are welfare statists, clamoring for more and more controls. The target and victims of these controls are the men of ability who, in a free economy, would displace these heirs; the men with whom the heirs would be unable to compete.

As Ludwig von Mises writes in Human Action:

Today taxes often absorb the greater part of the newcomer’s “excessive” profits. He cannot accumulate capital; he cannot expand his own business; he will never become big business and a match for the vested interests. The old firms do not need to fear his competition; they are sheltered by the tax collector. They may with impunity indulge in routine. . . . It is true, the income tax prevents them, too, from accumulating new capital. But what is more important for them is that it prevents the dangerous newcomer from accumulating any capital. They are virtually privileged by the tax system. In this sense progressive taxation checks economic progress and makes for rigidity. . . .

The interventionists complain that big business is getting rigid and bureaucratic and that it is no longer possible for competent newcomers to challenge the vested interests of the old rich families. However, as far as their complaints are justified, they complain about things which are merely the result of their own policies.³⁵

(JUNE 1963.)

CAPITALISM’S PRACTICALITY

IS THERE ANY VALIDITY TO THE CLAIM THAT LAISSEZ-FAIRE CAPITALISM BECOMES LESS PRACTICABLE AS SOCIETY BECOMES MORE COMPLEX?

This claim is the sort of collectivist bromide that “liberals” repeat ritualistically, without any attempt to prove or substantiate it. To examine it is to perceive its absurdity.

The same condition of freedom that is necessary in order to attain a high level of industrial development—a high level of “complexity”—is necessary in order to keep it. To say that a society has become more complex merely means that more men live in the same geographical area and deal with one another, that they engage in a greater volume of trading, and in a greater number and diversity of productive activities. There is nothing in these facts which conceivably could justify the abandonment of economic freedom in favor of government “planning.”

On the contrary: the more “complex” an economy, the greater the number of choices and decisions that have to be made—and, therefore, the more blatantly impracticable it becomes for this process to be taken over by a central government authority. If there are degrees of irrationality, it would be more plausible to imagine that a primitive, pre-industrial economy could be managed, non-disastrously, by the state; but the notion of running a scientific, highly industrialized society with slave labor is barbaric in the ignorance it reveals.

Observe that the same type of persons who espouse this doctrine also declare that the under-developed nations of the world are not suited for economic freedom, that their primitive level of development makes socialism imperative. Thus, they simultaneously argue that a country should not be permitted freedom because it is too undeveloped economically—and that a country should not be permitted freedom because it is too highly developed economically.

Both positions are crude rationalizations on the part of statist mentalities who have never grasped what makes industrial civilization possible.

(NOVEMBER 1963.)

6. GOLD AND ECONOMIC FREEDOM

by Alan Greenspan

An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense—perhap more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire—that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.

In order to understand the source of their antagonism, it is necessary first to understand the specific role of gold in a free society.

Money is the common denominator of all economic transactions. It is that commodity which serves as a medium of exchange, is universally acceptable to all participants in an exchange economy as payment for their goods or services, and can, therefore, be used as a standard of market value and as a store of value, i.e., as a means of saving.

The existence of such a commodity is a precondition of a division of labor economy. If men did not have some commodity of objective value which was generally acceptable as money, they would have to resort to primitive barter or be forced to live on self-sufficient farms and forgo the inestimable advantages of specialization. If men had no means to store value, i.e., to save, neither long-range planning nor exchange would be possible.

The Objectivist, July 1966.

What medium of exchange will be acceptable to all participants in an economy is not determined arbitrarily. First, the medium of exchange should be durable. In a primitive society of meager wealth, wheat might be sufficiently durable to serve as a medium, since all exchanges would occur only during and immediately after the harvest, leaving no value-surplus to store. But where store-of-value considerations are important, as they are in richer, more civilized societies, the medium of exchange must be a durable commodity, usually a metal. A metal is generally chosen because it is homogeneous and divisible: every unit is the same as every other and it can be blended or formed in any quantity. Precious jewels, for example, are neither homogeneous nor divisible.

More important, the commodity chosen as a medium must be a luxury. Human desires for luxuries are unlimited and, therefore, luxury goods are always in demand and will always be acceptable. Wheat is a luxury in underfed civilizations, but not in a prosperous society. Cigarettes ordinarily would not serve as money, but they did in post-World War II Europe where they were considered a luxury. The term “luxury good” implies scarcity and high unit value. Having a high unit value, such a good is easily portable; for instance, an ounce of gold is worth a half-ton of pig iron.

In the early stages of a developing money economy, several media of exchange might be used, since a wide variety of commodities would fulfill the foregoing conditions. However, one of the commodities will gradually displace all others, by being more widely acceptable. Preferences on what to hold as a store of value will shift to the most widely acceptable commodity, which, in turn, will make it still more acceptable. The shift is progressive until that commodity becomes the sole medium of exchange. The use of a single medium is highly advantageous for the same reasons that a money economy is superior to a barter economy: it makes exchanges possible on an incalculably wider scale.

Whether the single medium is gold, silver, seashells, cattle, or tobacco is optional, depending on the context and development of a given economy. In fact, all have been employed, at various times, as media of exchange. Even in the present century, two major commodities, gold and silver, have been used as international media of exchange, with gold becoming the predominant one. Gold, having both artistic and functional uses and being relatively scarce, has always been considered a luxury good. It is durable, portable, homogeneous, divisible, and, therefore, has significant advantages over all other media of exchange. Since the beginning of World War I, it has been virtually the sole international standard of exchange.

If all goods and services were to be paid for in gold, large payments would be difficult to execute, and this would tend to limit the extent of a society’s division of labor and specialization. Thus a logical extension of the creation of a medium of exchange is the development of a banking system and credit instruments (bank notes and deposits) which act as a substitute for, but are convertible into, gold.

A free banking system based on gold is able to extend credit and thus to create bank notes (currency) and deposits, according to the production requirements of the economy. Individual owners of gold are induced, by payments of interest, to deposit their gold in a bank (against which they can draw checks). But since it is rarely the case that all depositors want to withdraw all their gold at the same time, the banker need keep only a fraction of his total deposits in gold as reserves. This enables the banker to loan out more than the amount of his gold deposits (which means that he holds claims to gold rather than gold as security for his deposits). But the amount of loans which he can afford to make is not arbitrary: he has to gauge it in relation to his reserves and to the status of his investments.

When banks loan money to finance productive and profitable endeavors, the loans are paid off rapidly and bank credit continues to be generally available. But when the business ventures financed by bank credit are less profitable and slow to pay off, bankers soon find that their loans outstanding are excessive relative to their gold reserves, and they begin to curtail new lending, usually by charging higher interest rates. This tends to restrict the financing of new ventures and requires the existing borrowers to improve their profitability before they can obtain credit for further expansion. Thus, under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy’s stability and balanced growth.

When gold is accepted as the medium of exchange by most or all nations, an unhampered free international gold standard serves to foster a world-wide division of labor and the broadest international trade. Even though the units of exchange (the dollar, the pound, the franc, etc.) differ from country to country, when all are defined in terms of gold the economies of the different countries act as one—so long as there are no restraints on trade or on the movement of capital. Credit, interest rates, and prices tend to follow similar patterns in all countries. For example, if banks in one country extend credit too liberally, interest rates in that country will tend to fall, inducing depositors to shift their gold to higher-interest paying banks in other countries. This will immediately cause a shortage of bank reserves in the “easy money” country, inducing tighter credit standards and a return to competitively higher interest rates again.

A fully free banking system and fully consistent gold standard have not as yet been achieved. But prior to World War I, the banking system in the United States (and in most of the world) was based on gold, and even though governments intervened occasionally, banking was more free than controlled. Periodically, as a result of overly rapid credit expansion, banks became loaned up to the limit of their gold reserves, interest rates rose sharply, new credit was cut off, and the economy went into a sharp, but short-lived recession. (Compared with the depressions of 1920 and 1932, the pre-World War I business declines were mild indeed.) It was limited gold reserves that stopped the unbalanced expansions of business activity, before they could develop into the post- World War I type of disaster. The readjustment periods were short and the economies quickly re-established a sound basis to resume expansion.

But the process of cure was misdiagnosed as the disease: if shortage of bank reserves was causing a business decline—argued economic interventionists—why not find a way of supplying increased reserves to the banks so they never need be short! If banks can continue to loan money indefinitely—it was claimed—there need never be any slumps in business. And so the Federal Reserve System was organized in 1913. It consisted of twelve regional Federal Reserve banks nominally owned by private bankers, but in fact government sponsored, controlled, and supported. Credit extended by these banks is in practice (though not legally) backed by the taxing power of the federal government. Technically, we remained on the gold standard; individuals were still free to own gold, and gold continued to be used as bank reserves. But now, in addition to gold, credit extended by the Federal Reserve banks (“paper” reserves) could serve as legal tender to pay depositors.

When business in the United States underwent a mild contraction in 1927, the Federal Reserve created more paper reserves in the hope of forestalling any possible bank reserve shortage. More disastrous, however, was the Federal Reserve’s attempt to assist Great Britain who had been losing gold to us because the Bank of England refused to allow interest rates to rise when market forces dictated (it was politically unpalatable). The reasoning of the authorities involved was as follows: if the Federal Reserve pumped excessive paper reserves into American banks, interest rates in the United States would fall to a level comparable with those in Great Britain; this would act to stop Britain’s gold loss and avoid the political embarrassment of having to raise interest rates.

The “Fed” succeeded: it stopped the gold loss, but it nearly destroyed the economies of the world, in the process. The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market—triggering a fantastic speculative boom. Belatedly, Federal Reserve officials attempted to sop up the excess reserves and finally succeeded in braking the boom. But it was too late: by 1929 the speculative imbalances had become so overwhelming that the attempt precipitated a sharp retrenching and a consequent demoralizing of business confidence. As a result, the American economy collapsed. Great Britain fared even worse, and rather than absorb the full consequences of her previous folly, she abandoned the gold standard completely in 1931, tearing asunder what remained of the fabric of confidence and inducing a world-wide series of bank failures. The world economies plunged into the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

With a logic reminiscent of a generation earlier, statists argued that the gold standard was largely to blame for the credit debacle which led to the Great Depression. If the gold standard had not existed, they argued, Britain’s abandonment of gold payments in 1931 would not have caused the failure of banks all over the world. (The irony was that since 1913, we had been, not on a gold standard, but on what may be termed “a mixed gold standard”; yet it is gold that took the blame.)

But the opposition to the gold standard in any form—from a growing number of welfare-state advocates—was prompted by a much subtler insight: the realization that the gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state). Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale.

Under a gold standard, the amount of credit that an economy can support is determined by the economy’s tangible assets, since every credit instrument is ultimately a claim on some tangible asset. But government bonds are not backed by tangible wealth, only by the government’s promise to pay out of future tax revenues, and cannot easily be absorbed by the financial markets. A large volume of new government bonds can be sold to the public only at progressively higher interest rates. Thus, government deficit spending under a gold standard is severely limited.

The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. They have created paper reserves in the form of government bonds which—through a complex series of steps—the banks accept in place of tangible assets and treat as if they were an actual deposit, i.e., as the equivalent of what was formerly a deposit of gold. The holder of a government bond or of a bank deposit created by paper reserves believes that he has a valid claim on a real asset. But the fact is that there are now more claims outstanding than real assets.

The law of supply and demand is not to be conned. As the supply of money (of claims) increases relative to the supply of tangible assets in the economy, prices must eventually rise. Thus the earnings saved by the productive members of the society lose value in terms of goods. When the economy’s books are finally balanced, one finds that this loss in value represents the goods purchased by the government for welfare or other purposes with the money proceeds of the government bonds financed by bank credit expansion.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the “hidden” confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.

7. NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN FREE ENTERPRISE

by Ayn Rand

If a detailed, factual study were made of all those instances in the history of American industry which have been used by the statists as an indictment of free enterprise and as an argument in favor of a government-controlled economy, it would be found that the actions blamed on businessmen were caused, necessitated, and made possible only by government intervention in business. The evils, popularly ascribed to big industrialists, were not the result of an unregulated industry, but of government power over industry. The villain in the picture was not the businessman, but the legislator, not free enterprise, but government controls.

Businessmen were the victims, yet the victims have taken the blame (and are still taking it), while the guilty parties have used their own guilt as an argument for the extension of their power, for wider and wider opportunities to commit the same crime on a greater and greater scale. Public opinion has been so misinformed about the true facts that we have now reached the stage where, as a cure for the country’s problems, people are asking for more and more of the poison which made them sick in the first place.

Published by Nathaniel Branden Institute, New York, 1959.

As illustration, I will list below some examples which I have found in the course of my research into the history of just one industry—the American railroads.

One of the statists’ arguments in favor of government controls is the notion that American railroads were built mainly through the financial help of the government and would have been impossible without it. Actually, government help to the railroads amounted to ten percent of the cost of all the railroads in the country—and the consequences of this help have been disastrous to the railroads. I quote from The Story of American Railroads by Stewart H. Holbrook:

In a little more than two decades, three transcontinental railroads were built with government help. All three wound up in bankruptcy courts. And thus, when James Jerome Hill said he was going to build a line from the Great Lakes to Puget Sound, without government cash or land grant, even his close friends thought him mad. But his Great Northern arrived at Puget Sound without a penny of federal help, nor did it fail. It was an achievement to shame the much-touted construction of the Erie Canal.³⁶

The degree of government help received by any one railroad stood in direct proportion to that railroad’s troubles and failures. The railroads with the worst histories of scandal, double-dealing, and bankruptcy were the ones that had received the greatest amount of help from the government. The railroads that did best and never went through bankruptcy were the ones that had neither received nor asked for government help. There may be exceptions to this rule, but in all my reading on railroads I have not found one yet.

It is generally believed that in the period when railroads first began to be built in this country, there was a great deal of useless “over-building,” a great many lines which were started and abandoned after being proved worthless and ruining those involved. The statists often use this period as an example of “the unplanned chaos” of free enterprise. The truth is that most (and perhaps all) of the useless railroads were built, not by men who intended to build a railroad for profit, but by speculators with political pull, who started these ventures for the sole purpose of obtaining money from the government.

There were many forms of government help for these projects, such as federal land grants, subsidies, state bonds, municipal bonds, etc. A great many speculators started railroad projects as a quick means to get some government cash, with no concern for the future or the commercial possibilities of their railroads. They went through the motions of laying so many miles of shoddy rail, anywhere at all, without inquiring whether the locations they selected had any need for a railroad or any economic future. Some of those men collected the cash and vanished, never starting any railroad at all. This is the source of the popular impression that the origin of American railroads was a period of wild, unscrupulous speculation. But the railroads of this period which were planned and built by businessmen for a proper, private, commercial purpose were the ones that survived, prospered, and proved unusual foresight in the choice of their locations.

Among our major railroads, the most scandalous histories were those of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific (now called Southern Pacific). These were the two lines built with a federal government subsidy. The Union Pacific collapsed into bankruptcy soon after its construction, with what was, perhaps, the most disgraceful scandal in the history of any railroad; the scandal involved official corruption. The road did not become properly organized and managed until it was taken over by a private capitalist, Edward H. Harriman.

The Central Pacific—which was built by the “Big Four” of California, on federal subsidies—was the railroad which was guilty of all the evils popularly held against railroads. For almost thirty years, the Central Pacific controlled California, held a monopoly, and permitted no competitor to enter the state. It charged disastrous rates, changed them every year, and took virtually the entire profit of the California farmers or shippers, who had no other railroad to turn to. What made this possible? It was done through the power of the California legislature. The Big Four controlled the legislature and held the state closed to competitors by legal restrictions—such as, for instance, a legislative act which gave the Big Four exclusive control of the entire coastline of California and forbade any other railroad to enter any port. During these thirty years, many attempts were made by private interests to build competing railroads in California and break the monopoly of the Central Pacific. These attempts were defeated—not by methods of free trade and free competition, but by legislative action.

This thirty-year monopoly of the Big Four and the practices in which they engaged are always cited as an example of the evils of big business and free enterprise. Yet the Big Four were not free enterprisers; they were not businessmen who had achieved power by means of unregulated trade. They were typical representatives of what is now called a mixed economy. They achieved power by legislative intervention in business; none of their abuses would have been possible in a free, unregulated economy.

The same Central Pacific is notorious for a land deal which led to the dispossession of farmers and to bloody riots in the late 1870’s. This is the incident which served as the basis for the anti-business novel, The Octopus, by Frank Norris, the incident which caused great public indignation and led to hatred of all railroads and of all big business. But this deal involved land given to the Big Four by the government—and the subsequent injustice was made possible only by legislative and judicial assistance. Yet it was not government intervention in business that took the blame, it was business.³⁷

At the other side of the scale, the railroad that had the cleanest history, was most efficiently built in the most difficult circumstances, and was responsible, single-handed, for the development of the entire American Northwest, was the Great Northern, built by J. J. Hill without any federal help whatever. Yet Hill was persecuted by the government all his life—under the Sherman Act, for being a monopolist (!).

The worst injustice has been done by popular misconception to Commodore Vanderbilt of the New York Central. He is always referred to as “an old pirate,” “a monster of Wall Street,” etc., and always denounced for the alleged ruthlessness of his Wall Street activities. But here is the actual story. When Vanderbilt began to organize several small, obscure railroads into what was to become the New York Central system, he had to obtain a franchise from the City Council to permit his railroad, the New York and Harlem, to enter New York City. The Council was known to be corrupt, and if one wanted a franchise, one had to pay for it, which Vanderbilt did. (Should he be blamed for this, or does the blame rest on the fact that the government held an arbitrary, unanswerable power in the matter and Vanderbilt had no choice?) The stock of his company went up, once it was known that his railroad had permission to enter the city. A little while later, the Council suddenly revoked the franchise—and the Vanderbilt stock began to fall. The aldermen (who had taken Vanderbilt’s money), together with a clique of speculators, were selling the Vanderbilt stock short. Vanderbilt fought them and saved his railroad. His ruthlessness consisted of buying his stock as fast as it was being dumped on the market, and thus preventing its price from crashing down to the level that the short-sellers needed. He risked everything he owned in this battle, but he won. The clique and the aldermen went broke.

And, as if this were not enough, the same trick was repeated again a little later, this time involving the New York State Legislature. Vanderbilt needed an act of the legislature to permit him to consolidate the two railroads which he owned. Again, he had to pay the legislators for a promise to pass the necessary bill. The stock of his company went up, the legislators started selling it short and denied Vanderbilt the promised legislation. He had to go through the same Wall Street battle again, he took on a frightening responsibility, he risked everything he owned plus millions borrowed from friends, but he won and ruined the Albany statesmen. “We busted the whole legislature,” he said, “and some of the honorable members had to go home without paying their board bills.”

Nothing is said or known nowadays about the details of this story, and it is viciously ironic that Vanderbilt is now used as one of the examples of the evils of free enterprise by those who advocate government controls. The Albany statesmen are forgotten and Vanderbilt is made to be a villain. If you now ask people just what was evil about Vanderbilt, they will answer: “Why, he did something cruel in Wall Street and ruined a lot of people.”³⁸

The best illustration of the general confusion on the subject of business and government can be found in Holbrook’s The Story of American Railroads. On page 231, Mr. Holbrook writes:

Almost from the first, too, the railroads had to undergo the harassments of politicians and their catch-poles, or to pay blackmail in one way or another. The method was almost sure-fire; the politico, usually a member of a state legislature, thought up some law or regulation that would be costly or awkward to the railroads in his state. He then put this into the form of a bill, talked loudly about it, about how it must pass if the sovereign people were to be protected against the monster railroad, and then waited for some hireling of the railroad to dissuade him by a method as old as man. There is record of as many as thirty-five bills that would harass railroads being introduced at one sitting of one legislature.

And the same Mr. Holbrook in the same book just four pages later (pages 235-236) writes:

In short, by 1870, to pick an arbitrary date, railroads had become, as only too many orators of the day pointed out, a law unto themselves. They had bought United States senators and congressmen, just as they bought rails and locomotives—with cash. They owned whole legislatures, and often the state courts. . . . To call the roads of 1870 corrupt is none too strong a term.

The connection between these two statements and the conclusion to be drawn from them has, apparently, never occurred to Mr. Holbrook. It is the railroads that he blames and calls “corrupt.” Yet what could the railroads do, except try to “own whole legislatures,” if these legislatures held the power of life or death over them? What could the railroads do, except resort to bribery, if they wished to exist at all? Who was to blame and who was “corrupt”—the businessmen who had to pay “protection money” for the right to remain in business—or the politicians who held the power to sell that right?

Still another popular accusation against big business is the idea that selfish, private interests restrain and delay progress, when they are threatened with a new invention that might destroy their market. No private interest could or ever has done this, except with government help. The early history of the railroads is a good illustration. The railroads were violently opposed by the owners of canals and steamship companies, who were doing most of the transportation at the time. A great number of laws, regulations, and restrictions were passed by various legislatures, at the instigation of the canal interests, in an attempt to hamper and stop the development of the railroads. This was done in the name of the “public welfare” (!). When the first railroad bridge was built across the Mississippi, the river steamship interests brought suit against its builder, and the court ordered the bridge destroyed as a “material obstruction and a nuisance.” The Supreme Court reversed the ruling, by a narrow margin, and allowed the bridge to stand.³⁹ Ask yourself what the fate of the entire industrial development of the United States would have been, if that narrow margin had been different—and what is the fate of all economic progress when it is left, not to objective demonstration, but to the arbitrary decision of a few men armed with political power.

It is important to note that the railroad owners did not start in business by corrupting the government. They had to turn to the practice of bribing legislators only in self-protection. The first and best builders of railroads were free enterprisers who took great risks on their own, with private capital and no government help. It was only when they demonstrated to the country that the new industry held a promise of tremendous wealth that the speculators and the legislators rushed into the game to milk the new giant for all it was worth. It was only when the legislatures began the blackmail of threatening to pass disastrous and impossible regulations that the railroad owners had to turn to bribery.

It is significant that the best of the railroad builders, those who started out with private funds, did not bribe legislatures to throttle competitors nor to obtain any kind of special legal advantage or privilege. They made their fortunes by their own personal ability—and if they resorted to bribery at all, like Commodore Vanderbilt, it was only to buy the removal of some artificial restriction, such as a permission to consolidate. They did not pay to get something from the legislature, but only to get the legislature out of their way. But the builders who started out with government help, such as the Big Four of the Central Pacific, were the ones who used the government for special advantages and owed their fortunes to legislation more than to personal ability. This is the inevitable result of any kind or degree of mixed economy. It is only with the help of government regulations that a man of lesser ability can destroy his better competitors—and he is the only type of man who runs to government for economic help.

It is not a matter of accidental personalities, of “dishonest businessmen” or “dishonest legislators.” The dishonesty is inherent in and created by the system. So long as a government holds the power of economic control, it will necessarily create a special “elite,” an “aristocracy of pull,” it will attract the corrupt type of politician into the legislature, it will work to the advantage of the dishonest businessman, and will penalize and, eventually, destroy the honest and the able.

The examples quoted are only a few of the more obvious ones; there is a great number of others, all demonstrating the same point. These were taken from the history of a single industry. One can well imagine what one would discover if one went through the history of other American industries in similar detail.

It is time to clarify in the public mind the pernicious confusion which was created by Marxism and which most people have unthinkingly accepted: the notion that economic controls are the proper function of government, that government is a tool of economic class interests, and that the issue is only which particular class or pressure group shall be served by the government. Most people believe that free enterprise is a controlled economy allegedly serving the interests of the industrialists—as opposed to the welfare state, which is a controlled economy allegedly serving the interests of the workers. The idea or possibility of an uncontrolled economy has been entirely forgotten and is now being deliberately ignored. Most people would see no difference between businessmen such as J. J. Hill of the Great Northern and businessmen such as the Big Four of the Central Pacific. Most people would simply dismiss the difference by saying that businessmen are crooks who will always corrupt the government and that the solution is to let the government be corrupted by labor unions.

The issue is not between pro-business controls and pro-labor controls, but between controls and freedom. It is not the Big Four against the welfare state, but the Big Four and the welfare state on one side—against J. J. Hill and every honest worker on the other. Government control of the economy, no matter in whose behalf, has been the source of all the evils in our industrial history—and the solution is laissez-faire capitalism, i.e., the abolition of any and all forms of government intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State.

8. THE EFFECTS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION ON WOMEN AND CHILDREN

by Robert Hessen

CHILD LABOR AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

The least understood and most widely misrepresented aspect of the history of capitalism is child labor.

One cannot evaluate the phenomenon of child labor in England during the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, unless one realizes that the introduction of the factory system offered a livelihood, a means of survival, to tens of thousands of children who would not have lived to be youths in the pre-capitalistic eras.

The factory system led to a rise in the general standard of living, to rapidly falling urban death rates and decreasing infant mortality—and produced an unprecedented population explosion.

In 1750, England’s population was six million; it was nine million in 1800 and twelve million in 1820, a rate of increase without precedent in any era. The age distribution of the population shifted enormously; the proportion of children and youths increased sharply. “The proportion of those born in London dying before five years of age” fell from 74.5 percent in 1730-49 to 31.8 percent in 1810-29.⁴⁰ Children who hitherto would have died in infancy now had a chance for survival.

The Objectivist Newsletter, April and November 1962.

Both the rising population and the rising life expectancy give the lie to the claims of socialist and fascist critics of capitalism that the conditions of the laboring classes were progressively deteriorating during the Industrial Revolution.

One is both morally unjust and ignorant of history if one blames capitalism for the condition of children during the Industrial Revolution, since, in fact, capitalism brought an enormous improvement over their condition in the preceding age. The source of that injustice was ill-informed, emotional novelists and poets, like Dickens and Mrs. Browning; fanciful medievalists, like Southey; political tract writers posturing as economic historians, like Engels and Marx. All of them painted a vague, rosy picture of a lost “golden age” of the working classes, which, allegedly, was destroyed by the Industrial Revolution. Historians have not supported their assertions. Investigation and common sense have deglamorized the pre-factory system of domestic industry. In that system, the worker made a costly initial investment, or paid heavy rentals, for a loom or frame, and bore most of the speculative risks involved. His diet was drab and meager, and even subsistence often depended on whether work could be found for his wife and children. There was nothing romantic or enviable about a family living and working together in a badly lighted, improperly ventilated, and poorly constructed cottage.

How did children thrive before the Industrial Revolution? In 1697, John Locke wrote a report for the Board of Trade on the problem of poverty and poor-relief. Locke estimated that a laboring man and his wife in good health could support no more than two children, and he recommended that all children over three years of age should be taught to earn their living at working schools for spinning and knitting, where they would be given food. “What they can have at home, from their parents,” wrote Locke, “is seldom more than bread and water, and that very scantily too.”

Professor Ludwig von Mises reminds us:

The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job. They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them. Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless much more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them. It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchen and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation.⁴¹

Factory children went to work at the insistence of their parents. The children’s hours of labor were very long, but the work was often quite easy—usually just attending a spinning or weaving machine and retying threads when they broke. It was not on behalf of such children that the agitation for factory legislation began. The first child labor law in England (1788) regulated the hours and conditions of labor of the miserable children who worked as chimney sweeps—a dirty, dangerous job which long antedated the Industrial Revolution, and which was not connected with factories. The first Act which applied to factory children was passed to protect those who had been sent into virtual slavery by the parish authorities, a government body: they were deserted or orphaned pauper children who were legally under the custody of the poor-law officials in the parish, and who were bound by these officials into long terms of unpaid apprenticeship in return for a bare subsistence.

Conditions of employment and sanitation are acknowledged to have been best in the larger and newer factories. As successive Factory Acts, between 1819 and 1846, placed greater and greater restrictions on the employment of children and adolescents, the owners of the larger factories, which were more easily and frequently subject to visitation and scrutiny by the factory inspectors, increasingly chose to dismiss children from employment rather than be subjected to elaborate, arbitrary, and ever-changing regulations on how they might run a factory which employed children. The result of legislative intervention was that these dismissed children, who needed to work in order to survive, were forced to seek jobs in smaller, older, and more out-of-the-way factories, where the conditions of employment, sanitation, and safety were markedly inferior. Those who could not find new jobs were reduced to the status of their counterparts a hundred years before, that is, to irregular agricultural labor, or worse—in the words of Professor von Mises—to “infest the country as vagabonds, beggars, tramps, robbers and prostitutes.”

Child labor was not ended by legislative fiat; child labor ended when it became economically unnecessary for children to earn wages in order to survive—when the income of their parents became sufficient to support them. The emancipators and benefactors of those children were not legislators or factory inspectors, but manufacturers and financiers. Their efforts and investments in machinery led to a rise in real wages, to a growing abundance of goods at lower prices, and to an incomparable improvement in the general standard of living.

The proper answer to the critics of the Industrial Revolution is given by Professor T. S. Ashton:

There are today on the plains of India and China men and women, plague-ridden and hungry, living lives little better, to outward appearance, than those of the cattle that toil with them by day and share their places of sleep by night. Such Asiatic standards, and such un-mechanized horrors, are the lot of those who increase their numbers without passing through an industrial revolution.⁴²

Let me add that the Industrial Revolution and its consequent prosperity were the achievement of capitalism and cannot be achieved under any other politico-economic system. As proof, I offer you the spectacle of Soviet Russia which combines industrialization—and famine.

WOMEN AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

To condemn capitalism one must first misrepresent its history. The notion that industrial capitalism led to nothing but misery and degradation for women is an article of faith among critics of capitalism. It is as prevalent as the view that children were victimized and exploited by the Industrial Revolution—and it is as false.

Let us examine the source of this view. To appreciate the benefits that capitalism brought to women, one must compare their status under capitalism with their condition in the preceding centuries. But the nineteenth-century critics of capitalism did not do this; instead, they distorted and falsified history, glamorizing the past and disparaging everything modern by contrast.

For instance, Richard Oastler, one of the most fanatical nineteenth-century enemies of capitalism, claimed that everyone was better off spiritually and materially in the Middle Ages than in the early nineteenth century. Describing medieval England, Oastler rhapsodized about the lost golden age: “Oh, what a beautiful ship was England once! She was well built, well manned, well provisioned, well rigged! All were then merry, cheerful and happy on board.”

This was said of centuries in which “the bulk of the population were peasants in a servile condition, bound by status, not free to change their mode of life or to move from their birthplace”⁴³—when people had only the promise of happiness in the life beyond the grave to succor them against decimating plagues, recurring famines and at best half-filled stomachs—when people lived in homes so infested with dirt and vermin that one historian’s verdict about these cottages is: “From a health point of view the only thing to be said in their favor was that they burnt down very easily!”⁴⁴

Oastler represented the viewpoint of the medievalists. The socialists, who agreed with them, were equally inaccurate historians.

For example, describing the conditions of the masses in the pre-industrial seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Friedrich Engels alleged: “The workers vegetated throughout a passably comfortable existence, leading a righteous and peaceful life in all piety and probity; and their material position was far better off than their successors.”

This was written of an age characterized by staggeringly high mortality rates, especially among children—crowded towns and villages untouched by sanitation—notoriously high gin consumption. The working-class diet consisted mainly of oatmeal, milk, cheese, and beer; while bread, potatoes, coffee, tea, sugar, and meat were still expensive luxuries. Bathing was infrequent and laundering a rarity because soap was so costly, and clothing—which had to last a decade or generation—would not last if washed too often.

The most rapid change wrought by the Industrial Revolution was the shifting of textile production out of the home and into the factory. Under the previous system, called “domestic industry,” the spinning and weaving was done in the worker’s own home with the aid of his wife and children. When technological advances caused the shifting of textile production into factories, this led, said one critic of capitalism, “to the breakup of the home as a social unit.”⁴⁵

Mrs. Neff writes approvingly that “under the system of domestic industry the parents and the children had worked together, the father the autocratic head, pocketing the family earnings and directing their expenditure.” Her tone turns to condemnation when she recounts: “But under the factory system the members of the family all had their own earnings, they worked in separate departments of the mill, coming home only for food and sleep. The home was little but a shelter.”

The factories were held responsible, by such critics, for every social problem of that age, including promiscuity, infidelity, and prostitution. Implicit in the condemnation of women working in the factories was the notion that a woman’s place is in the home and that her only proper role is to keep house for her husband and to rear his children. The factories were blamed simultaneously for removing girls from the watchful restraints of their parents and for encouraging early marriages; and later, for fostering maternal negligence and incompetent housekeeping, as well as for encouraging lack of female subordination and the desire for luxuries.

It is a damning indictment of the pre-factory system to consider what kind of “luxuries” the Industrial Revolution brought within reach of the working-class budget. Women sought such luxuries as shoes instead of clogs, hats instead of shawls, “delicacies” (like coffee, tea, and sugar) instead of “plain food.”

Critics denounced the increasing habit of wearing ready-made clothes, and they viewed the replacement of wools and linens by inexpensive cottons as a sign of growing poverty. Women were condemned for not making by hand that which they could buy more cheaply, thanks to the revolution in textile production. Dresses no longer had to last a decade—women no longer had to wear coarse petticoats until they disintegrated from dirt and age; cheap cotton dresses and undergarments were a revolution in personal hygiene.

The two most prevalent nineteenth-century explanations of why women worked in the factories were: (a) that their “husbands preferred to remain home idle, supported by their wives,” and (b) that the factory system “displaced adult men and imposed on women ‘the duty and burden of supporting their husbands and families.’ ” These charges are examined in Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry, a definitive study by Dr. Margaret Hewitt of the University of Exeter. Her conclusion is: “Neither of these assumptions proves to have any statistical foundation whatsoever.”⁴⁶

In fact, women worked in the factories for far more conventional reasons. Dr. Hewitt enumerates them: many women worked because “their husbands’ wages were insufficient to keep the home going”; others were widowed or deserted; others were barren, or had grown-up children; some had husbands who were unemployed, or employed in seasonal jobs; and a few chose to work in order to earn money for extra comforts in the home, although their husbands’ wages were sufficient to cover necessities.⁴⁷

What the factory system offered these women was—not misery and degradation—but a means of survival, of economic independence, of rising above the barest subsistence. Harsh as nineteenth-century factory conditions were, compared to twentieth-century conditions, women increasingly preferred work in the factories to any other alternatives open to them, such as domestic service, or back-breaking work in agricultural gangs, or working as haulers and pullers in the mines; moreover, if a woman could support herself, she was not driven into early marriage.

Even Professor Trevelyan, who persistently disparaged the factories and extolled “the good old days,” admitted:

. . . the women who went to work in the factories though they lost some of the best things in life [Trevelyan does not explain what he means], gained independence. . . . The money they earned was their own. The factory hand acquired an economic position personal to herself, which in the course of time other women came to envy.

And Trevelyan concluded: “The working class home often became more comfortable, quiet and sanitary by ceasing to be a miniature factory.” ⁴⁸

Critics of the factory system still try to argue that the domestic spinners or weavers could have a creator’s pride in their work, which they lost by becoming mere cogs in a huge industrial complex. Dr. Dorothy George easily demolishes this thesis: “It seems unlikely that the average weaver, toiling hour after hour throwing the shuttle backwards and forwards on work which was monotonous and exhausting, had the reactions which would satisfy a modern enthusiast for peasant arts.”⁴⁹

Finally, it was charged that factory work made women too concerned with material comforts at the expense of spiritual considerations.

The misery in which women lived before capitalism, might have made them cherish the New Testament injunction: “Love not the world, nor the things that are in the world.” But the productive splendor of capitalism vanquished that view. Today, the foremost champions of that viewpoint are Professor Galbraith and the austerity-preachers behind the Iron Curtain.

9. THE ASSAULT ON INTEGRITY

by Alan Greenspan

Protection of the consumer against “dishonest and unscrupulous business practices” has become a cardinal ingredient of welfare statism. Left to their own devices, it is alleged, businessmen would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings. Thus, it is argued, the Pure Food and Drug Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the numerous building regulatory agencies are indispensable if the consumer is to be protected from the “greed” of the businessman.

But it is precisely the “greed” of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking, which is the unexcelled protector of the consumer.

What collectivists refuse to recognize is that it is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product. Since the market value of a going business is measured by its money-making potential, reputation or “good will” is as much an asset as its physical plant and equipment. For many a drug company, the value of its reputation, as reflected in the salability of its brand name, is often its major asset. The loss of reputation through the sale of a shoddy or dangerous product would sharply reduce the market value of the drug company, though its physical resources would remain intact. The market value of a brokerage firm is even more closely tied to its good-will assets. Securities worth hundreds of millions of dollars are traded every day over the telephone. The slightest doubt as to the trustworthiness of a broker’s word or commitment would put him out of business overnight.

The Objectivist Newsletter, August 1963.

Reputation, in an unregulated economy, is thus a major competitive tool. Builders who have acquired a reputation for top quality construction take the market away from their less scrupulous or less conscientious competitors. The most reputable securities dealers get the bulk of the commission business. Drug manufacturers and food processors vie with one another to make their brand names synonymous with fine quality.

Physicians have to be just as scrupulous in judging the quality of the drugs they prescribe. They, too, are in business and compete for trustworthiness. Even the corner grocer is involved: he cannot afford to sell unhealthy foods if he wants to make money. In fact, in one way or another, every producer and distributor of goods or services is caught up in the competition for reputation.

It requires years of consistently excellent performance to acquire a reputation and to establish it as a financial asset. Thereafter, a still greater effort is required to maintain it: a company cannot afford to risk its years of investment by letting down its standards of quality for one moment or one inferior product; nor would it be tempted by any potential “quick killing.” Newcomers entering the field cannot compete immediately with the established, reputable companies, and have to spend years working on a more modest scale in order to earn an equal reputation. Thus the incentive to scrupulous performance operates on all levels of a given field of production. It is a built-in safeguard of a free enterprise system and the only real protection of consumers against business dishonesty.

Government regulation is not an alternative means of protecting the consumer. It does not build quality into goods, or accuracy into information. Its sole “contribution” is to substitute force and fear for incentive as the “protector” of the consumer. The euphemisms of government press releases to the contrary notwithstanding, the basis of regulation is armed force. At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun. What are the results?

To paraphrase Gresham’s Law: bad “protection” drives out good. The attempt to protect the consumer by force undercuts the protection he gets from incentive. First, it undercuts the value of reputation by placing the reputable company on the same basis as the unknown, the newcomer, or the fly-by-nighter. It declares, in effect, that all are equally suspect and that years of evidence to the contrary do not free a man from that suspicion. Second, it grants an automatic (though, in fact, unachievable) guarantee of safety to the products of any company that complies with its arbitrarily set minimum standards. The value of a reputation rested on the fact that it was necessary for the consumers to exercise judgment in the choice of the goods and services they purchased. The government’s “guarantee” undermines this necessity; it declares to the consumers, in effect, that no choice or judgment is required—and that a company’s record, its years of achievement, is irrelevant.

The minimum standards, which are the basis of regulation, gradually tend to become the maximums as well. If the building codes set minimum standards of construction, a builder does not get very much competitive advantage by exceeding those standards and, accordingly, he tends to meet only the minimums. If minimum specifications are set for vitamins, there is little profit in producing something of above-average quality. Gradually, even the attempt to maintain minimum standards becomes impossible, since the draining of incentives to improve quality ultimately undermines even the minimums.

The guiding purpose of the government regulator is to prevent rather than to create something. He gets no credit if a new miraculous drug is discovered by drug company scientists; he does if he bans thalidomide. Such emphasis on the negative sets the framework under which even the most conscientious regulators must operate. The result is a growing body of restrictive legislation on drug experimentation, testing, and distribution. As in all research, it is impossible to add restrictions to the development of new drugs without simultaneously cutting off the secondary rewards of such research—the improvement of existing drugs. Quality improvement and innovation are inseparable.

Building codes are supposed to protect the public. But by being forced to adhere to standards of construction long after they have been surpassed by new technological discoveries, builders divert their efforts to maintaining the old rather than adopting new and safer techniques of construction.

Regulation—which is based on force and fear—undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. A fly-by-night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public. In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to spend a number of years in reputable dealings before he could earn a position of trust sufficient to induce a number of investors to place funds with him.

Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory. Rather than isolating the consumer from the dishonest businessman, it is gradually destroying the only reliable protection the consumer has: competition for reputation.

While the consumer is thus endangered, the major victim of “protective” regulation is the producer: the businessman. Regulation which acts to destroy the competition of businessmen for reputation undermines the market value of the good will which businessmen have built up over the years. It is an act of expropriation of wealth created by integrity. Since the value of a business—its wealth—rests on its ability to make money, the acts of a government seizing a company’s plant or devaluing its reputation are in the same category: both are acts of expropriation.

Moreover, “protective” legislation falls in the category of preventive law. Businessmen are being subjected to governmental coercion prior to the commission of any crime. In a free economy, the government may step in only when a fraud has been perpetrated, or a demonstrable damage has been done to a consumer; in such cases the only protection required is that of criminal law.

Government regulations do not eliminate potentially dishonest individuals, but merely make their activities harder to detect or easier to hush up. Furthermore, the possibility of individual dishonesty applies to government employees fully as much as to any other group of men. There is nothing to guarantee the superior judgment, knowledge, and integrity of an inspector or a bureaucrat—and the deadly consequences of entrusting him with arbitrary power are obvious.

The hallmark of collectivists is their deep-rooted distrust of freedom and of the free-market processes; but it is their advocacy of so-called “consumer protection” that exposes the nature of their basic premises with particular clarity. By preferring force and fear to incentive and reward as a means of human motivation, they confess their view of man as a mindless brute functioning on the range of the moment, whose actual self-interest lies in “flying-by-night” and making “quick kills.” They confess their ignorance of the role of intelligence in the production process, of the wide intellectual context and long-range vision required to maintain a modern industry. They confess their inability to grasp the crucial importance of the moral values which are the motive power of capitalism. Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtues, not of vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventive law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.

10. THE PROPERTY STATUS OF AIRWAVES

by Ayn Rand

Any material element or resource which, in order to become of use or value to men, requires the application of human knowledge and effort should be private property—by the right of those who apply the knowledge and effort.

This is particularly true of broadcasting frequencies or waves, because they are produced by human action and do not exist without it. What exists in nature is only the potential and the space through which those waves must travel.

Just as two trains cannot travel on the same section of track at the same time, so two broadcasts cannot use the same frequency at the same time in the same area without “jamming” each other. There is no difference in principle between the ownership of land and the ownership of airways. The only issue is the task of defining the application of property rights to this particular sphere. It is on this task that the American government has failed dismally, with incalculably disastrous consequences.

The Objectivist Newsletter, April 1964.

There is no essential difference between a broadcast and a concert: the former merely transmits sounds over a longer distance and requires more complex technical equipment. No one would venture to claim that a pianist may own his fingers and his piano, but the space inside the concert hall—through which the sound waves he produces travel—is “public property” and, therefore, he has no right to give a concert without a license from the government. Yet this is the absurdity foisted on our broadcasting industry.

The chief argument in support of the notion that broadcasting frequencies should be “public property” has been stated succinctly by Justice Frankfurter: “[Radio] facilities are limited; they are not available to all who may wish to use them; the radio spectrum simply is not large enough to accommodate everybody. There is a fixed natural limitation upon the number of stations that can operate without interfering with one another.”

The fallacy of this argument is obvious. The number of broadcasting frequencies is limited; so is the number of concert halls; so is the amount of oil or wheat or diamonds; so is the acreage of land on the surface of the globe. There is no material element or value that exists in unlimited quantity. And if a “wish” to use a certain “facility” is the criterion of the right to use it, then the universe is simply not large enough to accommodate all those who harbor wishes for the unearned.

It is the proper task of the government to protect individual rights and, as part of it, to formulate the laws by which these rights are to be implemented and adjudicated. It is the government’s responsibility to define the application of individual rights to a given sphere of activity—to define (i.e., to identify), not to create, invent, donate, or expropriate. The question of defining the application of property rights has arisen frequently, in the wake of major scientific discoveries or inventions, such as the question of oil rights, vertical space rights, etc. In most cases, the American government was guided by the proper principle: it sought to protect all the individual rights involved, not to abrogate them.

A notable example of the proper method of establishing private ownership from scratch, in a previously ownerless area, is the Homestead Act of 1862, by which the government opened the western frontier for settlement and turned “public land” over to private owners. The government offered a 160-acre farm to any adult citizen who would settle on it and cultivate it for five years, after which it would become his property. Although that land was originally regarded, in law, as “public property,” the method of its allocation, in fact, followed the proper principle (in fact, but not in explicit ideological intention). The citizens did not have to pay the government as if it were an owner; ownership began with them, and they earned it by the method which is the source and root of the concept of “property”: by working on unused material resources, by turning a wilderness into a civilized settlement. Thus, the government, in this case, was acting not as the owner but as the custodian of ownerless resources who defines objectively impartial rules by which potential owners may acquire them.

This should have been the principle and pattern of the allocation of broadcasting frequencies.

As soon as it became apparent that radio broadcasting had opened a new realm of material resources which, in the absence of legal definitions, would become a wilderness of clashing individual claims, the government should have promulgated the equivalent of a Homestead Act of the airways—an act defining private property rights in the new realm, establishing the rule that the user of a radio frequency would own it after he had operated a station for a certain number of years, and allocating all frequencies by the rule of priority, i.e., “first come, first served.”

Bear in mind that the development of commercial radio took many years of struggle and experimentation, and that the goldrush of the “wishers” did not start until the pioneers—who had taken the risks of venturing into the unknown—had built it into a bright promise of great commercial value. By what right, code, or standard was anyone entitled to that value except the men who had created it?

If the government had adhered to the principle of private property rights, and the pioneers’ ownership had been legally established, then a latecomer who wished to acquire a radio station would have had to buy it from one of the original owners (as is the case with every other type of property). The fact that the number of available frequencies was limited would have served, not to entrench the original owners, but to threaten their hold, if they did not make the best economic use of their property (which is what free competition does to every other type of property). With a limited supply and a growing demand, competition would have driven the market value of a radio (and later, TV) station so high that only the most competent men could have afforded to buy it or to keep it; a man, unable to make a profit could not have long afforded to waste so valuable a property. Who, on a free market, determines the economic success or failure of an enterprise? The public (the public as a sum of individual producers, viewers, and listeners, each making his own decisions—not as a single, helpless, disembodied collective with a few bureaucrats posturing as the spokesmen of its will on earth).

Contrary to the “argument from scarcity,” if you want to make a “limited” resource available to the whole people, make it private property and throw it on a free, open market.

The “argument from scarcity,” incidentally, is outdated, even in its literal meaning: with the discovery of ultra-high frequencies, there are more broadcasting channels available today than prospective applicants willing to pioneer in their development. As usual, the “wishers” seek, not to create, but to take over the rewards and advantages created by others.

The history of the collectivization of radio and television demonstrates, in condensed form, in a kind of microcosm, the process and the causes of capitalism’s destruction. It is an eloquent illustration of the fact that capitalism is perishing by the philosophical default of its alleged defenders.

Collectivists frequently cite the early years of radio as an example of the failure of free enterprise. In those years, when broadcasters had no property rights in radio, no legal protection or recourse, the airways were a chaotic no man’s land where anyone could use any frequency he pleased and jam anyone else. Some professional broadcasters tried to divide their frequencies by private agreements, which they could not enforce on others; nor could they fight the interference of stray, maliciously mischievous amateurs. This state of affairs was used, then and now, to urge and justify government control of radio.

This is an instance of capitalism taking the blame for the evils of its enemies.

The chaos of the airways was an example, not of free enterprise, but of anarchy. It was caused, not by private property rights, but by their absence. It demonstrated why capitalism is incompatible with anarchism, why men do need a government and what is a government’s proper function. What was needed was legality, not controls.

What was imposed was worse than controls: outright nationalization. By a gradual, uncontested process—by ideological default—it was taken for granted that the airways belong to “the people” and are “public property.”

If you want to know the intellectual state of the time, I will ask you to guess the political ideology of the author of the following quotation:

Radio communication is not to be considered as merely a business carried on for private gain, for private advertisement, or for entertainment of the curious. It is a public concern impressed with the public trust and to be considered primarily from the standpoint of public interest in the same extent and upon the basis of the same general principles as our other public utilities.

No, this was not said by a business-hating collectivist eager to establish the supremacy of the “public interest” over “private gain”; it was not said by a socialist planner nor by a communist conspirator; it was said by Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, in 1924.

It was Hoover who fought for government control of radio and, as Secretary of Commerce, made repeated attempts to extend government power beyond the limits set by the legislation of the time, attempts to attach detailed conditions to radio licenses, which he had no legal authority to do and which were repeatedly negated by the courts. It was Hoover’s influence that was largely responsible for that tombstone of the radio (and the then unborn television) industry known as the Act of 1927, which established the Federal Radio Commission with all of its autocratic, discretionary, undefined, and undefinable powers. (That Act—with minor revisions and amendments, including the Act of 1934 that changed the Federal Radio Commission into the Federal Communications Commission—is still, in all essential respects, the basic legal document ruling the broadcasting industry today.)

“What we are doing,” said F.C.C. Chairman Newton N. Minow in 1962, “did not begin with the New Frontier.” He was right.

The Act of 1927 did not confine the government to the role of a traffic policeman of the air who protects the rights of broadcasters from technical interference (which is all that was needed and all that a government should properly do). It established service to the “public interest, convenience, or necessity” as the criterion by which the Federal Radio Commission was to judge applicants for broadcasting licenses and accept or reject them. Since there is no such thing as the “public interest” (other than the sum of the individual interests of individual citizens), since that collectivist catch-phrase has never been and can never be defined, it amounted to a blank check on totalitarian power over the broadcasting industry, granted to whatever bureaucrats happened to be appointed to the Commission.

“The public interest”—that intellectual knife of collectivism’s sacrificial guillotine, which the operators of broadcasting stations have to test by placing their heads on the block every three years—was not raised over their heads by capitalism’s enemies, but by their own leaders.

It was the so-called “conservatives”—including some of the pioneers, some of the broadcasting industry’s executives who, today, are complaining and protesting—who ran to the government for regulations and controls, who cheered the notion of “public property” and service to the “public interest,” and thus planted the seeds of which Mr. Minow and Mr. Henry are merely the logical, consistent flowers. The broadcasting industry was enslaved with the sanction of the victims—but they were not fully innocent victims.

Many businessmen, of the mixed-economy persuasion, resent the actual nature of capitalism; they believe that it is safer to hold a position, not by right, but by favor; they dread the competition of a free market and they feel that a bureaucrat’s friendship is much easier to win. Pull, not merit, is their form of “social security.” They believe that they will always succeed at courting, pressuring, or bribing a bureaucrat, who is “a good fellow” they can “get along with” and who will protect them from that merciless stranger: the abler competitor.

Consider the special privileges to be found in the status of a certified servant of the “public interest” and a licensed user of “public property.” Not only does it place a man outside the reach of economic competition, but it also spares him the responsibility and the costs entailed in private property. It grants him gratuitously the use of a broadcasting frequency for which he would have had to pay an enormous price on a free market and would not have been able to keep for long, if he sent forth through the air the kind of unconscionable trash he is sending forth today.

Such are the vested interests made possible by the doctrine of the “public interest”—and such are the beneficiaries of any form, version, or degree of the doctrine of “public property.”

Now observe the practical demonstration of the fact that without property rights, no other rights are possible. If censorship and the suppression of free speech ever get established in this country, they will have originated in radio and television.

The Act of 1927 granted to a government Commission total power over the professional fate of broadcasters, with the “public interest” as the criterion of judgment—and, simultaneously, forbade the Commission to censor radio programs. From the start, and progressively louder through the years, many voices have been pointing out that this is a contradiction impossible to practice. If a commissioner has to judge which applicant for a broadcasting license will best serve the “public interest,” how can he judge it without judging the content, nature, and value of the programs the applicants have offered or will offer?

If capitalism had had any proper intellectual defenders, it is they who should have been loudest in opposing a contradiction of that kind. But such was not the case: it was the statists who seized upon it, not in defense of free speech, but in support of the Commission’s “right” to censor programs. And, so long as the criterion of the “public interest” stood unchallenged, logic was on the side of the statists.

The result was what it had to be (illustrating once more the power of basic principles): by gradual, unobtrusive, progressively accelerating steps, the Commission enlarged its control over the content of radio and television programs—leading to the open threats and ultimatums of Mr. Minow, who merely made explicit what had been known implicitly for many years. No, the Commission did not censor specific programs: it merely took cognizance of program content at license-renewal time. What was established was worse than open censorship (which could be knocked out in a court of law): it was the unprovable, intangible, insidious censorship-by-displeasure —the usual, and only, result of any nonobjective legislation.⁵⁰

All media of communication influence one another. It is impossible to compute the extent to which the gray, docile, fear-ridden, appeasement-minded mediocrity of so powerful a medium as television has contributed to the demoralization of our culture.

Nor can the freedom of one medium of communication be destroyed without affecting all the others. When censorship of radio and television becomes fully accepted, as a fait accompli, it will not be long before all the other media—books, magazines, newspapers, lectures—follow suit, unobtrusively, unofficially, and by the same method: overtly, in the name of the “public interest”; covertly, for fear of government reprisals. (This process is taking place already.)

So much for the relationship of “human” rights to property rights.

Since “public property” is a collectivist fiction, since the public as a whole can neither use nor dispose of its “property,” that “property” will always be taken over by some political “elite,” by a small clique which will then rule the public—a public of literal, dispossessed proletarians.

If you want to gauge a collectivist theory’s distance from reality, ask yourself: by what inconceivable standard can it be claimed that the broadcasting airways are the property of some illiterate sharecropper who will never be able to grasp the concept of electronics, or of some hillbilly whose engineering capacity is not quite sufficient to cope with a corn-liquor still—and that broadcasting, the product of an incalculable amount of scientific genius, is to be ruled by the will of such owners?

Remember that this literally is the alleged principle at the base of the entire legal structure of our broadcasting industry.

There is only one solution to this problem, and it has to start at the base; nothing less will do. The airways should be turned over to private ownership. The only way to do it now is to sell radio and television frequencies to the highest bidders (by an objectively defined, open, impartial process)—and thus put an end to the gruesome fiction of “public property.”

Such a reform cannot be accomplished overnight; it will take a long struggle; but that is the ultimate goal which the advocates of capitalism should bear in mind. That is the only way to correct the disastrous, atavistic error made by capitalism’s alleged defenders.

I say “atavistic,” because it took many centuries before primitive, nomadic tribes of savages reached the concept of private property—specifically, land property, which marked the beginning of civilization. It is a tragic irony that in the presence of a new realm opened by a gigantic achievement of science, our political and intellectual leaders reverted to the mentality of primitive nomads and, unable to conceive of property rights, declared the new realm to be a tribal hunting ground.

The breach between man’s scientific achievements and his ideological development is growing wider every day. It is time to realize that men cannot keep this up much longer if they continue to retrogress to ideological savagery with every step of scientific progress.

11. PATENTS AND COPYRIGHTS

by Ayn Rand

Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his mind.

Every type of productive work involves a combination of mental and physical effort: of thought and of physical action to translate that thought into a material form. The proportion of these two elements varies in different types of work. At the lowest end of the scale, the mental effort required to perform unskilled manual labor is minimal. At the other end, what the patent and copyright laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mental effort in the production of material values; these laws protect the mind’s contribution in its purest form: the origination of an idea. The subject of patents and copyrights is intellectual property.

An idea as such cannot be protected until it has been given a material form. An invention has to be embodied in a physical model before it can be patented; a story has to be written or printed. But what the patent or copyright protects is not the physical object as such, but the idea which it embodies. By forbidding an unauthorized reproduction of the object, the law declares, in effect, that the physical labor of copying is not the source of the object’s value, that that value is created by the originator of the idea and may not be used without his consent; thus the law establishes the property right of a mind to that which it has brought into existence.

The Objectivist Newsletter, May 1964.

It is important to note, in this connection, that a discovery cannot be patented, only an invention. A scientific or philosophical discovery, which identifies a law of nature, a principle or a fact of reality not previously known, cannot be the exclusive property of the discoverer because: (a) he did not create it, and (b) if he cares to make his discovery public, claiming it to be true, he cannot demand that men continue to pursue or practice falsehoods except by his permission. He can copyright the book in which he presents his discovery and he can demand that his authorship of the discovery be acknowledged, that no other man appropriate or plagiarize the credit for it—but he cannot copyright theoretical knowledge. Patents and copyrights pertain only to the practical application of knowledge, to the creation of a specific object which did not exist in nature—an object which, in the case of patents, may never have existed without its particular originator; and in the case of copyrights, would never have existed.

The government does not “grant” a patent or copyright, in the sense of a gift, privilege, or favor; the government merely secures it—i.e., the government certifies the origination of an idea and protects its owner’s exclusive right of use and disposal. A man is not forced to apply for a patent or copyright; he may give his idea away, if he so chooses; but if he wishes to exercise his property right, the government will protect it, as it protects all other rights. A patent or copyright represents the formal equivalent of registering a property deed or title. The patent or copyright notice on a physical object represents a public statement of the conditions on which the inventor or author is willing to sell his product: for the purchaser’s use, but not for commercial reproduction.

The right to intellectual property cannot be exercised in perpetuity. Intellectual property represents a claim, not on material objects, but on the idea they embody, which means: not merely on existing wealth, but on wealth yet to be produced—a claim to payment for the inventor’s or author’s work. No debt can be extended into infinity.

Material property represents a static amount of wealth already produced. It can be left to heirs, but it cannot remain in their effortless possession in perpetuity: the heirs can consume it or must earn its continued possession by their own productive work. The greater the value of the property, the greater the effort demanded of the heir. In a free, competitive society, no one could long retain the ownership of a factory or of a tract of land without exercising a commensurate effort.

But intellectual property cannot be consumed. If it were held in perpetuity, it would lead to the opposite of the very principle on which it is based: it would lead, not to the earned reward of achievement, but to the unearned support of parasitism. It would become a cumulative lien on the production of unborn generations, which would ultimately paralyze them. Consider what would happen if, in producing an automobile, we had to pay royalties to the descendants of all the inventors involved, starting with the inventor of the wheel and on up. Apart from the impossibility of keeping such records, consider the accidental status of such descendants and the unreality of their unearned claims.

The inheritance of material property represents a dynamic claim on a static amount of wealth; the inheritance of intellectual property represents a static claim on a dynamic process of production.

Intellectual achievement, in fact, cannot be transferred, just as intelligence, ability, or any other personal virtue cannot be transferred. All that can be transferred is the material results of an achievement, in the form of actually produced wealth. By the very nature of the right on which intellectual property is based—a man’s right to the product of his mind—that right ends with him. He cannot dispose of that which he cannot know or judge: the yet-unproduced, indirect, potential results of his achievement four generations—or four centuries—later.

It is in this issue that our somewhat collectivistic terminology might be misleading: on the expiration of a patent or copyright, the intellectual property involved does not become “public property” (though it is labeled as “in the public domain”); it ceases to exist qua property. And if the invention or the book continues to be manufactured, the benefit of that former property does not go to the “public,” it goes to the only rightful heirs: to the producers, to those who exercise the effort of embodying that idea in new material forms and thus keeping it alive.

Since intellectual property rights cannot be exercised in perpetuity, the question of their time limit is an enormously complex issue. If they were restricted to the originator’s life-span, it would destroy their value by making long-term contractual agreements impossible: if an inventor died a month after his invention were placed on the market, it could ruin the manufacturer who may have invested a fortune in its production. Under such conditions, investors would be unable to take a long-range risk; the more revolutionary or important an invention, the less would be its chance of finding financial backers. Therefore, the law has to define a period of time which would protect the rights and interests of all those involved.

In the case of copyrights, the most rational solution is Great Britain’s Copyright Act of 1911, which established the copyright of books, paintings, movies, etc., for the lifetime of the author and fifty years thereafter.

In the case of patents, the issue is much more complex. A patented invention often tends to hamper or restrict further research and development in a given area of science. Many patents cover overlapping areas. The difficulty lies in defining the inventor’s specific rights without including more than he can properly claim, in the form of indirect consequences or yet-undiscovered implications. A lifetime patent could become an unjustifiable barrier to the development of knowledge beyond the inventor’s potential power or actual achievement. The legal problem is to set a time limit which would secure for the inventor the fullest possible benefit of his invention without infringing the right of others to pursue independent research. As in many other legal issues, that time limit has to be determined by the principle of defining and protecting all the individual rights involved.

As an objection to the patent laws, some people cite the fact that two inventors may work independently for years on the same invention, but one will beat the other to the patent office by an hour or a day and will acquire an exclusive monopoly, while the loser’s work will then be totally wasted. This type of objection is based on the error of equating the potential with the actual. The fact that a man might have been first does not alter the fact that he wasn’t. Since the issue is one of commercial rights, the loser in a case of that kind has to accept the fact that in seeking to trade with others he must face the possibility of a competitor winning the race, which is true of all types of competition.

Today, patents are the special target of the collectivists’ attacks—directly and indirectly, through such issues as the proposed abolition of trademarks, brand names, etc. While the so-called “conservatives” look at those attacks indifferently or, at times, approvingly, the collectivists seem to realize that patents are the heart and core of property rights, and that once they are destroyed, the destruction of all other rights will follow automatically, as a brief postscript.

The present state of our patent system is a nightmare. The inventors’ rights are being infringed, eroded, chipped, gnawed, and violated in so many ways, under cover of so many non-objective statutes, that industrialists are beginning to rely on secrecy to protect valuable inventions which they are afraid to patent. (Consider the treatment accorded to patents under the antitrust laws, as just one example out of many.)

Those who observe the spectacle of the progressive collapse of patents—the spectacle of mediocrity scrambling to cash-in on the achievements of genius—and who understand its implications, will understand why in the closing paragraphs of Chapter VII, Part II, of Atlas Shrugged, one of the guiltiest men is the passenger who said: “Why should Rearden be the only one permitted to manufacture Rearden Metal?”

12. THEORY AND PRACTICE

by Ayn Rand

THE MAN-HATERS

Few errors are as naive and suicidal as the attempts of the “conservatives” to justify capitalism on altruist-collectivist grounds.

Many people believe that altruism means kindness, benevolence, or respect for the rights of others. But it means the exact opposite: it teaches self-sacrifice, as well as the sacrifice of others, to any unspecified “public need”; it regards man as a sacrificial animal.

Believing that collectivists are motivated by an authentic concern for the welfare of mankind, capitalism’s alleged defenders assure its enemies that capitalism is the practical road to the socialists’ goal, the best means to the same end, the best “servant” of public needs.

Then they wonder why they fail—and why the bloody muck of socialization keeps oozing forward over the face of the globe.

They fail, because no one’s welfare can be achieved by anyone’s sacrifice—and because man’s welfare is not the socialists’ goal. It is not for its alleged flaws that the altruist-collectivists hate capitalism, but for its virtues.

If you doubt it, consider a few examples.

These two articles appeared originally in Ayn Rand’s column in the Los Angeles Times, 1962.

Many collectivist historians criticize the Constitution of the United States on the ground that its authors were rich landowners who, allegedly, were motivated, not by any political ideals, but only by their own “selfish” economic interests.

This, of course, is not true. But it is true that capitalism does not require the sacrifice of anyone’s interests. And what is significant here is the nature of the morality behind the collectivists’ argument.

Prior to the American Revolution, through centuries of feudalism and monarchy, the interests of the rich lay in the expropriation, enslavement, and misery of the rest of the people. A society, therefore, where the interests of the rich require general freedom, unrestricted productiveness, and the protection of individual rights, should have been hailed as an ideal system by anyone whose goal is man’s well-being.

But that is not the collectivists’ goal.

A similar criticism is voiced by collectivist ideologists about the American Civil War. The North, they claim disparagingly, was motivated, not by self-sacrificial concern for the plight of the slaves, but by the “selfish” economic interests of capitalism—which requires a free labor market.

This last clause is true. Capitalism cannot work with slave labor. It was the agrarian, feudal South that maintained slavery. It was the industrial, capitalistic North that wiped it out—as capitalism wiped out slavery and serfdom in the whole civilized world of the nineteenth century.

What greater virtue can one ascribe to a social system than the fact that it leaves no possibility for any man to serve his own interests by enslaving other men? What nobler system could be desired by anyone whose goal is man’s well-being?

But that is not the collectivists’ goal.

Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man’s well-being is not their goal.

The “under-developed” nations are an alleged problem to the world. Most of them are destitute. Some, like Brazil, loot (or nationalize) the property of foreign investors; others, like the Congo, slaughter foreigners, including women and children; after which, all of them scream for foreign help, for technicians and money. It is only the indecency of altruistic doctrines that permits them to hope to get away with it.

If those nations were taught to establish capitalism, with full protection of property rights, their problems would vanish. Men who could afford it would invest private capital in the development of natural resources, expecting to earn profits. They would bring the technicians, the funds, the civilizing influence, and the employment which those nations need. Everyone would profit, at no one’s expense or sacrifice.

But this would be “selfish” and, therefore, evil—according to the altruists’ code. Instead, they prefer to seize men’s earnings—through taxation—and pour them down any foreign drain, and watch our own economic growth slow down year by year.

Next time you refuse yourself some necessity you can’t afford or some small luxury which would have made the difference between pleasure and drudgery—ask yourself what part of your money has gone to pay for a crumbling road in Cambodia or for the support of those “selfless” little altruists of the Peace Corps, who play the role of big shots in the jungle, at taxpayers’ expense.

If you wish to stop it, you must begin by realizing that altruism is not a doctrine of love, but of hatred for man.

Collectivism does not preach sacrifice as a temporary means to some desirable end. Sacrifice is its end—sacrifice as a way of life. It is man’s independence, success, prosperity, and happiness that collectivists wish to destroy.

Observe the snarling, hysterical hatred with which they greet any suggestion that sacrifice is not necessary, that a non-sacrificial society is possible to men, that it is the only society able to achieve man’s well-being.

If capitalism had never existed, any honest humanitarian should have been struggling to invent it. But when you see men struggling to evade its existence, to misrepresent its nature, and to destroy its last remnants—you may be sure that whatever their motives, love for man is not one of them.

BLIND CHAOS

There is an important political lesson to be learned from the current events in Algeria.

President Kennedy has been waging an ideological war against ideology. He has been stating repeatedly that political philosophy is useless and that “sophistication” consists of acting on the expediency of the moment.

On July 31, he declared to a group of Brazilian students that there are no rules or principles governing “the means of providing progress” and that any political system is as good as any other, including socialism, as long as it represents “a free choice” of the people.

On August 31, just one month later, history—like a well-constructed play—gave him an eloquent answer. The people of Algiers marched through the streets of the city, in desperate protest against the new threat of civil war, shouting: “We want peace! We want a government!”

How are they to go about getting it?

Through the years of civil war, they had been united, not by any political philosophy, but only by a racial issue. They were fighting, not for any program, but only against French rule. When they won their independence, they fell apart—into rival tribes and armed “willayas” fighting one another.

The New York Times (September 2, 1962) described it as “a bitter scramble for power among the men who were expected to lead the country.” But to lead it—where? In the absence of political principles, the issue of government is an issue of seizing power and ruling by brute force.

The people of Algeria and their various tribal chieftains, who represent the majority that fought the war against France, are being taken over by a well-organized minority that did not appear on the scene until after the victory. That minority is led by Ben Bella and was armed by Soviet Russia.

A majority without an ideology is a helpless mob, to be taken over by anyone.

Now consider the meaning of Mr. Kennedy’s advice to the Brazilians and to the world. It was not the political philosophy of the United States that he was enunciating, but the principle of unlimited majority rule—the doctrine that the majority may choose anything it wishes, that anything done by the majority is right and practical, because its will is omnipotent.

This means that the majority may vote away the rights of a minority—and dispose of an individual’s life, liberty, and property, until such time, if ever, as he is able to gather his own majority gang. This, somehow, will guarantee political freedom.

But wishing won’t make it so—neither for an individual nor for a nation. Political freedom requires much more than the people’s wish. It requires an enormously complex knowledge of political theory and of how to implement it in practice.

It took centuries of intellectual, philosophical development to achieve political freedom. It was a long struggle, stretching from Aristotle to John Locke to the Founding Fathers. The system they established was not based on unlimited majority rule, but on its opposite: on individual rights, which were not to be alienated by majority vote or minority plotting. The individual was not left at the mercy of his neighbors or his leaders: the Constitutional system of checks and balances was scientifically devised to protect him from both.

This was the great American achievement—and if concern for the actual welfare of other nations were our present leaders’ motive, this is what we should have been teaching the world.

Instead, we are deluding the ignorant and the semi-savage by telling them that no political knowledge is necessary—that our system is only a matter of subjective preference—that any prehistorical form of tribal tyranny, gang rule, and slaughter will do just as well, with our sanction and support.

It is thus that we encourage the spectacle of Algerian workers marching through the streets and shouting the demand: “Work, not blood!”—without knowing what great knowledge and virtue are required to achieve it.

In the same way, in 1917, the Russian peasants were demanding: “Land and Freedom!” But Lenin and Stalin is what they got.

In 1933, the Germans were demanding: “Room to live!” But what they got was Hitler.

In 1793, the French were shouting: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!” What they got was Napoleon.

In 1776, the Americans were proclaiming “The Rights of Man”—and, led by political philosophers, they achieved it.

No revolution, no matter how justified, and no movement, no matter how popular, has ever succeeded without a political philosophy to guide it, to set its direction and goal.

The United States—history’s magnificent example of a country created by political theorists—has abandoned its own philosophy and is falling apart. As a nation, we are splintering into warring tribes which—only by the fading momentum of a civilized tradition—are called “economic pressure groups,” at present. As opposition to our growing statism, we have nothing but the futile “willayas” of the so-called “conservatives,” who are fighting, not for any political principles, but only against the “liberals.”

Embittered by Algeria’s collapse into chaos, one of her leaders remarked: “We used to laugh at the Congolese; now it goes for us.”

And it goes for us, as well.

13. LET US ALONE!

by Ayn Rand

Since “economic growth” is today’s great problem, and our present Administration is promising to “stimulate” it—to achieve general prosperity by ever wider government controls, while spending an unproduced wealth—I wonder how many people know the origin of the term laissez-faire?

France, in the seventeenth century, was an absolute monarchy. Her system has been described as “absolutism limited by chaos.” The king held total power over everyone’s life, work, and property—and only the corruption of government officials gave people an unofficial margin of freedom.

Louis XIV was an archetypical despot: a pretentious mediocrity with grandiose ambitions. His reign is regarded as one of the brilliant periods of French history: he provided the country with a “national goal,” in the form of long and successful wars; he established France as the leading power and the cultural center of Europe. But “national goals” cost money. The fiscal policies of his government led to a chronic state of crisis, solved by the immemorial expedient of draining the country through ever-increasing taxation.

Based on a column in the Los Angeles Times, August 1962.

Colbert, chief adviser of Louis XIV, was one of the early modern statists. He believed that government regulations can create national prosperity and that higher tax revenues can be obtained only from the country’s “economic growth”; so he devoted himself to seeking “a general increase in wealth by the encouragement of industry.” The encouragement consisted of imposing countless government controls and minute regulations that choked business activity; the result was dismal failure.

Colbert was not an enemy of business; no more than is our present Administration. Colbert was eager to help fatten the sacrificial victims—and on one historic occasion, he asked a group of manufacturers what he could do for industry. A manufacturer named Legendre answered: “Laissez-nous faire!” (“Let us alone!”)

Apparently, the French businessmen of the seventeenth century had more courage than their American counterparts of the twentieth, and a better understanding of economics. They knew that government “help” to business is just as disastrous as government persecution, and that the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.

To say that that which was true in the seventeenth century cannot possibly be true today, because we travel in jet planes while they traveled in horse carts—is like saying that we do not need food, as men did in the past, because we are wearing trenchcoats and slacks, instead of powdered wigs and hoop skirts. It is that sort of concrete-bound superficiality—or inability to grasp principles, to distinguish the essential from the non-essential—that blinds people to the fact that the economic crisis of our day is the oldest and stalest one in history.

Consider the essentials. If government controls could achieve nothing but paralysis, starvation, and collapse in a pre-industrial age, what happens when one imposes controls on a highly industrialized economy? Which is easier for bureaucrats to regulate: the operation of hand looms and hand forges—or the operation of steel mills, aircraft plants, and electronics concerns? Who is more likely to work under coercion: a horde of brutalized men doing unskilled manual labor—or the incalculable number of individual men of creative genius required to build and to maintain an industrial civilization? And if government controls fail even with the first, what depth of evasion permits modern statists to hope that they can succeed with the second?

The statists’ epistemological method consists of endless debates about single, concrete, out-of-context, range-of-the-moment issues, never allowing them to be integrated into a sum, never referring to basic principles or ultimate consequences—and thus inducing a state of intellectual disintegration in their followers. The purpose of that verbal fog is to conceal the evasion of two fundamentals: (a) that production and prosperity are the product of men’s intelligence, and (b) that government power is the power of coercion by physical force.

Once these two facts are acknowledged, the conclusion to be drawn is inevitable: that intelligence does not work under coercion, that man’s mind will not function at the point of a gun.

This is the essential issue to consider; all other considerations are trivial details by comparison.

The details of a country’s economy are as varied as the many cultures and societies that have existed. But all of mankind’s history is the practical demonstration of the same basic principle, no matter what the variants of form: the degree of human prosperity, achievement, and progress is a direct function and corollary of the degree of political freedom. As witness: ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the nineteenth century.

In our own age, the difference between West Germany and East Germany is so eloquent a demonstration of the efficacy of a (comparatively) free economy versus a controlled economy that no further discussion is necessary. And no theorist can deserve serious consideration if he evades the existence of that contrast, leaving its implications unanswered, its causes unidentified, and its lesson unlearned.

Now consider the fate of England, “the peaceful experiment in socialism,” the example of a country that committed suicide by vote: there was no violence, no bloodshed, no terror, merely the throttling process of “democratically” imposed government controls—but observe the present cries about England’s “brain drain,” about the fact that the best and ablest men, particularly the scientists and engineers, are deserting England and running to whatever small remnant of freedom they can find anywhere in today’s world.

Remember that the Berlin wall was erected to stop a similar “brain drain” from East Germany; remember that after forty-five years of a totally controlled economy, Soviet Russia, who possesses some of the best agricultural land in the world, is unable to feed her population and has to import wheat from semi-capitalist America; read East Minus West = Zero by Werner Keller, ⁵¹ for a graphic (and unrefuted) picture of the Soviet economy’s impotence—and then, judge the issue of freedom versus controls.

Regardless of the purpose for which one intends to use it, wealth must first be produced. As far as economics is concerned, there is no difference between the motives of Colbert and of President Johnson. Both wanted to achieve national prosperity. Whether the wealth extorted by taxation is drained for the unearned benefit of Louis XIV or for the unearned benefit of the “underprivileged” makes no difference to the economic productivity of a nation. Whether one is chained for a “noble” purpose or an ignoble one, for the benefit of the poor or the rich, for the sake of somebody’s “need” or somebody’s “greed”—when one is chained, one cannot produce.

There is no difference in the ultimate fate of all chained economies, regardless of any alleged justifications for the chains.

Consider some of these justifications:

The creation of “consumer demand”? It would be interesting to compute how many housewives with relief checks would equal the “consumer demands” provided by Madame de Maintenon and her numerous colleagues.

A “fair” distribution of wealth? The privileged favorites of Louis XIV did not enjoy so unfair an advantage over other people as do our “aristocrats of pull,” the actual and potential variants of Billie Sol Estes or Bobby Baker.

The requirements of the “national interest”? If there is such a thing as a “national interest,” achieved by sacrificing the rights and the interests of individuals, then Louis XIV acquitted himself superlatively. The greater part of his extravagance was not “selfish”: he did build France up into a major international power—and wrecked her economy. (Which means: he achieved “prestige” among other totalitarian rulers—at the price of the welfare, the future, and the lives of his own subjects.)

The furtherance of our “cultural” or “spiritual” progress? It is doubtful that a government-subsidized theater project will ever produce an array of genius comparable to that supported by the court of Louis XIV in his role of “patron of the arts” (Corneille, Racine, Molière, etc.). But no one will ever compute the still-born genius of those who perish under systems of that kind, unwilling to learn the art of bootlicking required by any political patron of the arts. (Read Cyrano de Bergerac.)

The fact is that motives do not alter facts. The paramount requirement of a nation’s productivity and prosperity is freedom; men cannot—and, morally, will not—produce under compulsion and controls.

There is nothing new or mysterious about today’s economic problems. Like Colbert, President Johnson is appealing to various economic groups, seeking advice on what he can do for them. And if he does not wish to go down in history with a record similar to Colbert’s, he would do well to heed the voice of a modern Legendre, if such exists, who could give him the same immortal advice in a single word: “De-control!”

Current State

14. THE ANATOMY OF COMPROMISE

by Ayn Rand

A major symptom of a man’s—or a culture’s—intellectual and moral disintegration is the shrinking of vision and goals to the concrete-bound range of the immediate moment. This means: the progressive disappearance of abstractions from a man’s mental processes or from a society’s concerns. The manifestation of a disintegrating consciousness is the inability to think and act in terms of principles.

A principle is “a fundamental, primary, or general truth, on which other truths depend.” Thus a principle is an abstraction which subsumes a great number of concretes. It is only by means of principles that one can set one’s long-range goals and evaluate the concrete alternatives of any given moment. It is only principles that enable a man to plan his future and to achieve it.

The Objectivist Newsletter, January 1964.

The present state of our culture may be gauged by the extent to which principles have vanished from public discussion, reducing our cultural atmosphere to the sor-did, petty senselessness of a bickering family that haggles over trivial concretes, while betraying all its major values, selling out its future for some spurious advantage of the moment.

To make it more grotesque, that haggling is accompanied by an aura of hysterical self-righteousness, in the form of belligerent assertions that one must compromise with anybody on anything (except on the tenet that one must compromise) and by panicky appeals to “practicality.”

But there is nothing as impractical as a so-called “practical” man. His view of practicality can best be illustrated as follows: if you want to drive from New York to Los Angeles, it is “impractical” and “idealistic” to consult a map and to select the best way to get there; you will get there much faster if you just start out driving at random, turning (or cutting) any corner, taking any road in any direction, following nothing but the mood and the weather of the moment.

The fact is, of course, that by this method you will never get there at all. But while most people do recognize this fact in regard to the course of a journey, they are not so perceptive in regard to the course of their life and of their country.

There is only one science that could produce blindness on so large a scale, the science whose job it was to provide men with sight: philosophy. Since modern philosophy, in essence, is a concerted attack against the conceptual level of man’s consciousness—a sustained attempt to invalidate reason, abstractions, generalizations, and any integration of knowledge—men have been emerging from universities, for many decades past, with the helplessness of epistemological savages, with no inkling of the nature, function, or practical application of principles. These men have been groping blindly for some direction through the bewildering mass of (to them) incomprehensible concretes in the daily life of a complex industrial civilization—groping, struggling, failing, giving up, and perishing, unable to know in what manner they had acted as their own destroyers.

It is, therefore, important—for those who do not care to continue that suicidal process—to consider a few rules about the working of principles in practice and about the relationship of principles to goals.

The three rules listed below are by no means exhaustive; they are merely the first leads to the understanding of a vast subject.

1. In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins.

2. In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins.

3. When opposite basic principles are clearly and openly defined, it works to the advantage of the rational side; when they are not clearly defined, but are hidden or evaded, it works to the advantage of the irrational side.

1. When two men (or groups) hold the same basic principles, yet oppose each other on a given issue, it means that at least one of them is inconsistent. Since basic principles determine the ultimate goal of any long-range process of action, the person who holds a clearer, more consistent view of the end to be achieved will be more consistently right in his choice of means; and the contradictions of his opponent will work to his advantage, psychologically and existentially.

Psychologically, the inconsistent person will endorse and propagate the same ideas as his adversary, but in a weaker, diluted form—and thus will sanction, assist, and hasten his adversary’s victory, creating in the minds of their disputed following the impression of his adversary’s greater honesty and courage, while discrediting himself by an aura of evasion and cowardice.

Existentially, every step or measure taken to achieve their common goal will necessitate further and more crucial steps or measures in the same direction (unless the goal is rejected and the basic principles reversed)—thus strengthening the leadership of the consistent person and reducing the inconsistent one to impotence.

The conflict will follow that course regardless of whether the basic principles shared by the two adversaries are right or wrong, true or false, rational or irrational.

For instance, consider the conflict between the Republicans and the Democrats (and, within each party, the same conflict between the “conservatives” and the “liberals”). Since both parties hold altruism as their basic moral principle, both advocate a welfare state or mixed economy as their ultimate goal. Every government control imposed on the economy (regardless in whose favor) necessitates the imposition of further controls, to alleviate—momentarily—the disasters caused by the first control. Since the Democrats are more consistently committed to the growth of government power, the Republicans are reduced to helpless “me-too’ing,” to inept plagiarism of any program initiated by the Democrats, and to the disgraceful confession implied in their claim that they seek to achieve “the same ends” as the Democrats, but by different means.

It is precisely those ends (altruism-collectivism-statism) that ought to be rejected. But if neither party chooses to do it, the logic of the events created by their common basic principles will keep dragging them both further and further to the left. If and when the “conservatives” are kicked out of the game altogether, the same conflict will continue between the “liberals” and the avowed socialists; when the socialists win, the conflict will continue between the socialists and the communists; when the communists win, the ultimate goal of altruism will be achieved: universal immolation.

There is no way to stop or change that process except at the root: by a change of basic principles.

The evidence of that process is mounting in every country on earth. And, observing it, the unthinking begin to whisper about some mysterious occult power called a “historical necessity” which, in some unspecified way, by some unknowable means, has preordained mankind to collapse into the abyss of communism. But there are no fatalistic “historical necessities”: the “mysterious” power moving the events of the world is the awesome power of men’s principles—which is mysterious only to the “practical” modern savages who were taught to discard it as “impotent.”

But—it might be argued—since the advocates of a mixed economy are also advocating freedom, at least in part, why does the irrational part of their mixture have to win? This leads us to the fact that—

2. In any collaboration between two men (or groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins.

The rational (principle, premise, idea, policy, or action) is that which is consonant with the facts of reality; the irrational is that which contradicts the facts and attempts to get away with it. A collaboration is a joint undertaking, a common course of action. The rational (the good) has nothing to gain from the irrational (the evil), except a share of its failures and crimes; the irrational has everything to gain from the rational: a share of its achievements and values. An industrialist does not need the help of a burglar in order to succeed; a burglar needs the industrialist’s achievement in order to exist at all. What collaboration is possible between them and to what end?

If an individual holds mixed premises, his vices undercut, hamper, defeat, and ultimately destroy his virtues. What is the moral status of an honest man who steals once in a while? In the same way, if a group of men pursues mixed goals, its bad principles drive out the good. What is the political status of a free country whose government violates the citizens’ rights once in a while?

Consider the case of a business partnership: if one partner is honest and the other is a swindler, the latter contributes nothing to the success of the business; but the reputation of the former disarms the victims and provides the swindler with a wide-scale opportunity which he could not have obtained on his own.

Now consider the collaboration of the semi-free countries with the communist dictatorships, in the United Nations. To identify that institution is to damn it, so that any criticism is superfluous. It is an institution allegedly dedicated to peace, freedom, and human rights, which includes Soviet Russia—the most brutal aggressor, the bloodiest dictatorship, the largest-scale mass-murderer and mass-enslaver in all history—among its charter members. Nothing can be added to that fact and nothing can mitigate it. It is so grotesquely evil an affront to reason, morality, and civilization that no further discussion is necessary, except for a glance at the consequences.

Psychologically, the U.N. has contributed a great deal to the gray swamp of demoralization—of cynicism, bitterness, hopelessness, fear and nameless guilt—which is swallowing the Western world. But the communist world has gained a moral sanction, a stamp of civilized respectability from the Western world—it has gained the West’s assistance in deceiving its victims—it has gained the status and prestige of an equal partner, thus establishing the notion that the difference between human rights and mass slaughter is merely a difference of political opinion.

The declared goal of the communist countries is the conquest of the world. What they stand to gain from a collaboration with the (relatively) free countries is the latter’s material, financial, scientific, and intellectual resources; the free countries have nothing to gain from the communist countries. Therefore, the only form of common policy or compromise possible between two such parties is the policy of property owners who make piecemeal concessions to an armed thug in exchange for his promise not to rob them.

The U.N. has delivered a larger part of the globe’s surface and population into the power of Soviet Russia than Russia could ever hope to conquer by armed force. The treatment accorded to Katanga versus the treatment accorded to Hungary is a sufficient example of U.N. policies. An institution allegedly formed for the purpose of using the united might of the world to stop an aggressor has become the means of using the united might of the world to force the surrender of one helpless country after another into the aggressor’s power.

Who, but a concrete-bound epistemological savage, could have expected any other results from such an “experiment in collaboration”? What would you expect from a crime-fighting committee whose board of directors included the leading gangsters of the community?

Only a total evasion of basic principles could make this possible. And this illustrates the reason why—

3. When opposite basic principles are clearly and openly defined, it works to the advantage of the rational side; when they are not clearly defined, but are hidden or evaded, it works to the advantage of the irrational side.

In order to win, the rational side of any controversy requires that its goals be understood; it has nothing to hide, since reality is its ally. The irrational side has to deceive, to confuse, to evade, to hide its goals. Fog, murk, and blindness are not the tools of reason; they are the only tools of irrationality.

No thought, knowledge, or consistency is required in order to destroy; unremitting thought, enormous knowledge, and a ruthless consistency are required in order to achieve or create. Every error, evasion, or contradiction helps the goal of destruction; only reason and logic can advance the goal of construction. The negative requires an absence (ignorance, impotence, irrationality); the positive requires a presence, an existent (knowledge, efficacy, thought).

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

“In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.” (Atlas Shrugged)

15. IS ATLAS SHRUGGING?

by Ayn Rand

As the title of this discussion indicates, its theme is: the relationship of the events presented in my novel Atlas Shrugged to the actual events of today’s world.

Or, to put the question in a form which has often been addressed to me: “Is Atlas Shrugged a prophetic novel—or a historical one?”

The second part of the question seems to answer the first: if some people believe that Atlas Shrugged is a historical novel, this means that it was a successful prophecy.

The truth of the matter can best be expressed as follows: although the political aspects of Atlas Shrugged are not its central theme nor its main purpose, my attitude toward these aspects—during the years of writing the novel—was contained in a brief rule I had set for myself: “The purpose of this book is to prevent itself from becoming prophetic.”

The book was published in 1957. Since then, I have received many letters and heard many comments which amounted, in essence, to the following: “When I first read Atlas Shrugged, I thought that you were exaggerating, but then I realized suddenly—while reading the newspapers—that the things going on in the world today are exactly like the things in your book.”

Lecture given at The Ford Hall Forum, Boston, on April 19, 1964. Published in The Objectivist Newsletter, August 1964.

And so they are. Only more so.

The present state of the world, the political events, proposals, and ideas of today are so grotesquely irrational that neither I nor any other novelist could ever put them into fiction: no one would believe them. A novelist could not get away with it; only a politician might imagine that he can.

The political aspects of Atlas Shrugged are not its theme, but one of the consequences of its theme. The theme is: the role of the mind in man’s existence and, as a corollary, the presentation of a new code of ethics—the morality of rational self-interest.

The story of Atlas Shrugged shows what happens to the world when the men of the mind—the originators and innovators in every line of rational endeavor—go on strike and vanish, in protest against an altruist-collectivist society.

There are two key passages in Atlas Shrugged that give a brief summary of its meaning. The first is a statement of John Galt:

There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in human history. Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable—except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race. Well, their turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what happens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of the men of the mind, Miss Taggart. This is the mind on strike.

The second passage—which explains the title of the novel—is:

“Mr. Rearden,” said Francisco, his voice solemnly calm, “if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders—what would you tell him to do?”

“I . . . don’t know. What . . . could he do? What would you tell him?”

“To shrug.”

The story of Atlas Shrugged presents the conflict of two fundamental antagonists, two opposite schools of philosophy, or two opposite attitudes toward life. As a brief means of identification, I shall call them the “reasonindividualism-capitalism axis” versus the “mysticismaltruism-collectivism axis.” The story demonstrates that the basic conflict of our age is not merely political or economic, but moral and philosophical—that the dominant philosophy of our age is a virulent revolt against reason—that the so-called redistribution of wealth is only a superficial manifestation of the mysticism-altruism-collectivism axis—that the real nature and deepest, ultimate meaning of that axis is anti-man, anti-mind, anti-life.

Do you think that I was exaggerating?

During—and after—the writing of Atlas Shrugged, I kept a file which, formally, should be called a “Research or Documentation File.” For myself, I called it “The Horror File.” Let me give you a few samples from it.

Here is an example of modern ideology—from an Alumni-Faculty Seminar, entitled “The Distrust of Reason,” at Wesleyan University, in June 1959.

Perhaps in the future reason will cease to be important. Perhaps for guidance in time of trouble, people will turn not to human thought, but to the human capacity for suffering. Not the universities with their thinkers, but the places and people in distress, the inmates of asylums and concentration camps, the helpless decision-makers in bureaucracy and the helpless soldiers in foxholes—these will be the ones to lighten man’s way, to refashion his knowledge of disaster into something creative. We may be entering a new age. Our heroes may not be intellectual giants like Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein, but victims like Anne Frank, who will show us a greater miracle than thought. They will teach us how to endure—how to create good in the midst of evil and how to nurture love in the presence of death. Should this happen, however, the university will still have its place. Even the intellectual man can be an example of creative suffering.

Do you think that this is a rare exception, a weird extreme? On January 4, 1963, Time published the following news story:

“Ultimate performance in society”—not just brains and grades—should be the admissions criterion of top colleges, says Headmaster Leslie R. Severinghaus of the Haverford School near Philadelphia. In the Journal of the Association of College Admissions Counselors, he warns against the “highly intelligent, aggressive, personally ambitious, and socially indifferent and unconcerned egotist.” Because these self-centered bright students have “little to offer, either now or later,” colleges should be ready to welcome other good qualities. “Who says that brains and motivated performance represent the dimensions of excellence? Is not social concern a facet of excellence? Is it not exciting to find a candidate who believes that ‘no man liveth unto himself?’ What about leadership? Integrity? The ability to communicate both ideas and friendship? May we discount spiritual eagerness? And why should we pass over cooperation with others in good causes, even at some sacrifice of one’s own scholastic achievement? What about graciousness and decency?” None of this shows up on college board scores, chides Severinghaus. “Colleges must themselves believe in the potential of young people of this sort.”

Consider the meaning of this. If your husband, wife, or child were stricken with a deadly disease, of what use would the doctor’s “social concern” or “graciousness” be to you, if that doctor had sacrificed his “own scholastic achievement”? If our country is threatened with nuclear destruction, will our lives depend on the intelligence and ambition of our scientists, or on their “spiritual eagerness” and “capacity to communicate friendship”?

I would not put a passage of that kind into the mouth of a character in the most exaggerated farce-satire—I would consider it too absurdly grotesque—and yet, this is said, heard, and discussed seriously in an allegedly civilized society.

Are you inclined to believe that theories of this kind will have no results in practice? I quote from the Rochester Times Union, of February 18, 1960, from an article entitled “Is Our Talent Running Out?”

Is this mighty nation running short of talent?

At this point in history, with Russia and the United States “in deadly competition,” could this nation fall behind because of a lack of brainpower?

Dr. Harry Lionel Shapiro, chairman of the department of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, says, “There is a growing uneasiness, not yet fully expressed . . . that the supply of competence is running short.”

The medical profession, he says, is “profoundly worried” about the matter. Studies have shown that today’s medical students, on the basis of grades, are inferior to those of a decade ago.

Some spokesmen for the profession have been inclined to blame this on the dramatic and financial appeal of other professions in this space age—engineering and other technological fields.

But, Dr. Shapiro says, “This seems to be a universal complaint.”

The anthropologist spoke before a group of science writers at Ardsley-on-Hudson. This same group listened to some 25 scientists over a 2-week period—and heard the same lament from engineers, physicists, a meteorologist and many others.

These scientists, outstanding spokesmen for their fields, found this subject of far greater importance than the need for more money.

Dr. William O. Baker, vice president in charge of research at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., one of the top scientists in the country, said more research is needed—but that it will come not as a result of more money.

“It all depends on ideas,” he said, “not very many, but they have to be new ideas.”

Dr. Baker argued that the National Institute of Health has continually increased its grants but the results of the work have remained on a level, “if they are not on the downgrade.”

Eugene Kone, public relations director of the American Physical Society, said that in physics, “We are not getting anywhere near enough first-class people.”

Dr. Sidney Ingram, vice president of the Engineering Manpower Commission, said the situation “is absolutely unique in the history of Western Civilization.”

This news story was not given any prominence in our press. It reflects the first symptoms of anxiety over a situation which may still be hidden from the general public. But the same situation in Great Britain has become so obvious that it cannot be hidden any longer, and it is being discussed in terms of headlines. The British have coined a name for it: they call it “the brain drain.”

Let me remind you, parenthetically, that in Atlas Shrugged, John Galt states, referring to the strike: “I have done by plan and intention what had been done throughout history by silent default.” And he lists the various ways in which exceptional men had perished, in which intelligence had gone on strike against tyranny psychologically, deserting any mystic-altruist-collectivist society. You may also remember Dagny’s description of Galt before she meets him, which he later repeats to her: “The man who’s draining the brains of the world.”

No, I do not mean to imply that the British have plagiarized my words. What is much more significant is that they haven’t; most of them, undoubtedly, have never read Atlas Shrugged. What is significant is that they are facing—and groping to identify—the same phenomenon.

I quote from a news story in The New York Times of February 11, 1964:

The Labor party is calling for a Government study of the emigration of British scientists to the United States, a problem known here as the “brain drain.” Labor’s action . . . followed the disclosure that Prof. Ian Bush and his research team are leaving Birmingham University for the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Shrewsbury, Mass.

Professor Bush, who is 35 years old, heads the department of physiology at Birmingham. His team of nine scientists has been investigating the treatment of mental diseases with drugs.

Tonight it was learned that a leading physicist, Prof. Maurice Pryce, and a top cancer research pathologist, Dr. Leonard Weiss, would take posts in the United States. . . .

Tom Dalyell, a Labor spokesman on science, will ask if the Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, will appoint a royal commission “to consider the whole problem of the training, recruitment, and retention of scientific manpower for service in Britain”. . . .

Professor Bush’s decision was termed “tragic” by Sir George Pickering, president of the British Medical Association. He described the professor as the “most brilliant pupil I ever had and one of the most brilliant people I have ever met.”

From The New York Times of February 12:

The furor over Britain’s loss of scientific talent was intensified today when a foremost theoretical physicist said he was leaving for the United States.

Dr. John Anthony Pople, superintendent of the Basic Physics Division at the National Physical Laboratory, said he was going to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh in about a month.

Afternoon newspapers used large headlines to report the move, the 13th since the weekend. One paper’s front-page headline read: “Another One Down the Brain Drain.”

From The New York Times of February 13:

With the announcement today of the impending departure of at least five more scientists from Britain, the nation began searching with new anxiety for root causes of the exodus.

The story names two of the departing scientists: Dr. Ray Guillery, 34-year-old associate professor of anatomy at University College, London, and also from University College, Dr. Eric Shooter, 39, an assistant professor of biochemistry.

From The New York Times of February 16:

With Britain in a furor over the steady departure of her scientists, the nation is again searching for the causes of the exodus and demanding remedies. . . .

The “brain drain,” as the departure of scientists is called here, is not new to Britain. For decades, foreign universities and other institutions of learning and research, especially in the United States, have been drawing scientific talent from Britain.

In the last academic year Britain lost 160 senior university teachers, about 60 of them to the United States, according to a survey published by the Association of University Teachers. . . .

British scientists with newly acquired Ph.D.’s have been leaving the country permanently at a rate of at least 140 a year, according to a report last year by the Royal Society. This would be about 12 per cent of the nation’s output. . . .

Most commonly, the scientists who depart permanently explain that funds available for research equipment and staff in the United States cannot be matched at home.

Some say frankly that they are attracted by salaries two or three times higher than they get in Britain and also by what they consider a greater general regard in the United States for scientific effort and achievement.

Others complain about the shortage of senior posts in universities, about the administrative jungle through which research grants must pass in Britain and about what they term the mean, controlling hand of the Treasury in all university grants.

What intellectual arguments are being offered to the scientists as an inducement to prevent them from leaving, and what practical remedies are being proposed? Quintin Hogg, Secretary of State for Education and Science, “appealed to the patriotism of scientists to stay at home. ‘It is better to be British than anything else,’ he said.” An earlier story (The New York Times, October 31, 1963) stated that a “report, submitted by a committee headed by Sir Burke Trend, Secretary of the Cabinet, calls for reshaping Britain’s civil science set-up and for giving increased powers to the Minister of Science.” [Italics mine.]

There is, of course, a great deal of implicit and explicit indignation against American wealth and big business, which the British seem to regard as chiefly to blame for the flight of their scientific talent.

Now I want to call your attention to two significant facts: the age and the professions of the scientists who were mentioned by name in these stories. Most of them are in their thirties; most of them are connected with theoretical medicine.

Socialized medicine is an established institution of Britain’s political system. What future would brilliant young men be able to achieve under socialized medicine? Draw your own conclusions about the causes of the “brain drain”—about the future welfare of those left behind in the welfare state—and about the role of the mind in man’s existence.

The next time you hear or read reports about the success of socialized medicine in Great Britain and in the other welfare states of Europe—the reports brought by the superficial, concrete-bound mentalities who cannot see beyond the range of the moment and who declare that they observe no change in the conscientious efficiency of the family doctors—remember that the source of the family doctors’ efficiency, knowledge, and power lies in the laboratories of theoretical medicine, and that that source is drying up. This is the real price which a country pays for socialized medicine—a price which does not appear on the cost sheets of the state planners, but which will not take long to appear in reality.

At present, we lag behind Great Britain on the road to the collectivist abyss—but not very far behind. In recent years, our newspapers have been mentioning alarming reports on the state of the enrollment in our medical schools. There was a time when these schools had a much greater number of applicants than could be accepted—and only the ablest students, those with the highest academic grades and records, had a chance to be admitted. Today, the number of applicants is falling—and, according to some reports, will soon be less than the number of openings available in our medical schools.

Consider the growth of socialized medicine throughout the world—consider the Medicare plan in this country—consider the strike of the Canadian doctors in Saskatchewan, and the recent strike of the doctors in Belgium. Consider the fact that in every instance the overwhelming majority of the doctors fought against socialization and that the moral cannibalism of the welfare-statists did not hesitate to force them into slavery at the point of a gun. The picture was particularly eloquent in Belgium, with thousands of doctors fleeing blindly, escaping from the country—with the allegedly “humanitarian” government resorting to the crude, Nazi-like, militaristic measure of drafting the doctors into the army in order to force them back into practice.

Consider it—and then read the statement of Dr. Hendricks in Atlas Shrugged, the surgeon who went on strike in protest against socialized medicine: “I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind—yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands?”

That is the question that should be asked of the altruistic slave-drivers of Belgium.

The next time you hear a discussion of Medicare, give some thought to the future—particularly to the future of your children, who will live at a time when the best brains available will no longer choose to go into medicine.

Ragnar Danneskjöld, the pirate in Atlas Shrugged, said that he was fighting against “the idea that need is a sacred idol requiring human sacrifices—that the need of some men is the knife of a guillotine hanging over others and that the extent of our ability is the extent of our danger, so that success will bring our heads down on the block, while failure will give us the right to pull the cord.” This is the essence of the morality of altruism: the greater a man’s achievement and the greater society’s need of him—the more vicious the treatment he receives and the closer he comes to the status of a sacrificial animal.

Businessmen—who provide us with the means of livelihood, with jobs, with labor-saving devices, with modern comforts, with an ever-rising standard of living—are the men most immediately and urgently needed by society. They have been the first victims, the hated, smeared, denounced, exploited scapegoats of the mystic-altruist-collectivist axis. Doctors come next; it is precisely because their services are so crucially important and so desperately needed that the doctors are now the targets of the altruists’ attack, on a world-wide scale.

As to the present condition of businessmen, let me mention the following. After completing Atlas Shrugged, I submitted it, in galley-proofs, to a railroad expert, for a technical check-up. The first question he asked me, after he had read it, was: “Do you realize that all the laws and directives you invented are on our statute books already?” “Yes,” I answered, “I realize it.”

And that is what I want my readers to realize.

In my novel, I presented these issues in terms of abstractions which expressed the essence of government controls and of statist legislation at any time and in any country. But the principles of every edict and every directive presented in Atlas Shrugged—such as “The Equalization of Opportunity Bill” or “Directive 10- 289”—can be found, and in cruder forms, in our antitrust laws.

In that accumulation of non-objective, undefinable, unjudicable statutes, you will find every variant of penalizing ability for being ability, of penalizing success for being success, of sacrificing productive genius to the demands of envious mediocrity. You will find such rulings as: the forced break-up of large companies or the “divorcement” of companies from their subsidiaries (which is my “Equalization of Opportunity Bill”)—the forcing of established concerns to share with any newcomer the facilities it had taken them years to create—the compulsory licensing or the outright confiscation of patents—and, on top of this last, the order that the victims teach their own competitors how to use these patents.

The only thing that stands between us and the level of social disintegration presented in Atlas Shrugged is the fact that the statists do not dare as yet to enforce the antitrust laws to the full extent of their power. But the power is there—and you can observe the accelerating process of its widening application year by year.

Now you might think, however, that the “Railroad Unification Plan” and the “Steel Unification Plan,” which I introduced toward the end of Atlas Shrugged, have no counterpart in real life. I thought so, too. I invented them—as a development dictated by the logic of events—to illustrate the last stages of a society’s collapse. These two plans were typical collectivist devices for helping the weakest members of an industry at the expense of the strongest, by means of forcing them to “pool” their resources. I thought these plans were a bit ahead of our time.

I was wrong.

I quote from a news story of March 17, 1964:

The three television networks have been asked by the Federal Government to consider a tentative plan under which each would turn over a share of its programs to existing or new TV stations that might operate from a competitive disadvantage. . . .

A companion suggestion, also put forth for discussion by the [Federal Communications] Commission, would compel some stations now affiliated with one network to accept affiliation with an alternative chain.

The proposals, which in effect call upon the “haves” of the television industry to help the “have nots,” drew strenuous objections over the weekend from the Columbia Broadcasting System. . . .

The thinking behind the F.C.C. proposals is to help sustain existing ultra-high frequency stations and encourage the start of additional such outlets by guaranteeing them program resources that would win audiences. Most advertisers normally prefer the more powerful very-high frequency stations. . . .

Under the controversial proposals, the total pool of network programming would be carved up among two V.H.F. stations and one U.H.F. station.

The alleged justification for these proposals is the desire to correct “competitive imbalance.”

Now observe today’s situation in the sphere of labor.

In Atlas Shrugged, I showed that at a time of desperate shortages of transportation, due to shortages of motive power, track, and fuel, the railroads of the country were ordered to run shorter trains at lower speeds. Today, at a time when the railroads are perishing, with most of them on the brink of bankruptcy, the railroad unions are demanding the preservation of “featherbedding” practices (that is, of useless, unneeded jobs) and of antiquated work and payment rules.

The press comments on this issue were mixed. But one editorial deserves a moment’s special attention: it is from the Star Herald of Camden, New Jersey, of August 16, 1963, and it was sent to me by a fan.

The money-makers, the powerful business leaders of America, have failed to realize that prosperity can be inhuman. They have failed to understand that people take precedence over profits. . . .

Ambition and the drive for profit is a good thing. It spurs man to higher achievements. But it must be tempered by concern for society and its members. It must be slowed down in the light of human needs. . . .

These are the thoughts that trouble us when we ponder the railroad stalemate. Crying “featherbed!” like a war whoop, the managers of the railroads have insisted on eliminating tens of thousands of jobs . . . jobs that are the mainstays of homes . . . jobs that mean the difference between a man’s feeling dignified or futile. . . . Before you vote yes for such painful progress, imagine your husband or brother or father as one of those destined to be sacrificed on the altar of progress. Far better, in our view, to have the government nationalize the railroads and prevent another human disaster on their one-way track of making profit at human expense.

This editorial had no byline, but my anonymous admirer had written on it in penciled block letters: “By Eugene Lawson???”

That kind of “humanitarian” attitude is not directed against profits, but against achievement; it is not directed against the rich, but against the competent. Do you think that the only victims of the mystic-altruist-collectivist axis are a few exceptional men on the top of the social pyramid, a few men of financial and intellectual genius?

Here is an old clipping from my “Horror File,” a news story dating years back:

Britain is currently stirred by the story of a young coal miner who has quit his job to prevent 2,000 miners from striking at Doncaster.

Alan Bulmer, 31, got in trouble with his fellow workers when he finished a week’s assignment three hours ahead of time. Instead of sitting down for three hours, he started on a new stint of work.

More than 2,000 miners held a meeting last Sunday to object to his working too hard. They demanded that he be demoted for three months and his pay cut from $36 a week to $25.

Bulmer quit his job to end the crisis, with the statement that it always has been his belief that “a man should do a full day’s work for a full day’s pay.”

Officials of the government-operated mines say the affair is up to the unions.

Ask yourself, what will become of that young man in the future? How long will he preserve his integrity and his ambition if he knows that they will bring him punishments, not rewards? Will he continue to exercise his ability if he is to be demoted for it? This is how a nation loses the best of its men.

Do you remember the scene in Atlas Shrugged when Hank Rearden finally decided to go on strike? The last straw, which made the situation clear to him, was James Taggart’s statement that he, Rearden, would always find a way to “do something”—even in the face of the most irrational and impossible demands. Compare that with the following quotation in a news story of December 28, 1959—which is a statement by Michael J. Quill, head of the Transport Workers’ Union, commenting on a threatened city transit strike: “A lot of people are thinking we are taking this to the brink. But it so happens that every time we went to the well before, there was something there.”

In the closing chapters of Atlas Shrugged, I described the labor situation of the country as follows:

“Give us men!” The plea began to hammer progressively louder upon the desk of the Unification Board, from all parts of a country ravaged by unemployment, and neither the pleaders nor the Board dared to add the dangerous words which the cry was implying: “Give us men of ability!” There were waiting lines years’ long for the jobs of janitors, greasers, porters, and bus boys; there was no one to apply for the jobs of executives, managers, superintendents, engineers.

An editorial in the July 29, 1963, issue of Barron’s mentions:

the mounting scarcity of skilled labor including, as Dr. Arthur F. Burns noted in a recent critique of official unemployment statistics, “extensive shortages of scientists, teachers, engineers, doctors, nurses, typists, stenographers, automobile and TV mechanics, tailors and domestic servants.”

Do you remember the story of the Minnesota harvest disaster in Atlas Shrugged? A bumper crop of wheat perished along the roadsides—around the overfilled silos and grain elevators—for lack of railroad freight cars which, by government order, had been sent to carry a harvest of soybeans.

The following news story is from the Chicago Sun Times of November 2, 1962:

Illinois farm officials and grain dealers met Thursday in an effort to relieve an acute freight car shortage which is threatening the Midwest’s bumper grain harvest. . . .

Farmers and grain dealers agreed that the shortage of railroad boxcars has become “critical,” and saw little hope of relief for at least two weeks.

Some grain elevator operators showed the group photographs of corn piled on the ground near elevators plugged up with corn which can’t be shipped. . . .

The boxcar shortage was blamed on the harvesting of three major crops—corn, soybeans and milo—at the same time this year. In addition, there have been heavy movements of government-owned grain.

In Atlas Shrugged, Ragnar Danneskjöld denounced Robin Hood as the particular image of evil that he wanted to destroy in men’s minds. “He is the man who became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don’t have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does.”

I shall never know whether Ragnar was or was not the inspiration of an article denouncing Robin Hood, which appeared last year in a British journal called Justice of the Peace and Local Government Review, a magazine of law and police affairs. The occasion for the article was the revival of the Robin Hood festival.

Having regard to the fact [said the article] that the exploits of this legendary hero were chiefly concerned with robbing the rich under the specious motive of giving to the poor, a function which, in modern times, has been taken over by the welfare state, it is a question of some doubt whether a Robin Hood festival is not contrary to public policy.

But now we come to a composition that beats anything presented in Atlas Shrugged. I concede that I would have been unable to invent it and that no matter how low my estimate of the altruist-collectivist mentalities—and it is very low—I would not have believed this possible. It is not fiction. It is a news story, which appeared, on March 23, 1964, on the front page of The New York Times.

Every American should be guaranteed an adequate income as a matter of right whether he works or not, a 32-member group calling itself the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution urged today. . . .

The three revolutions listed in their statement, which they sent to President Johnson, were “the cybernation revolution,” “the weaponry revolution” and “the human rights revolution.”

“The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the United States is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people’s rights as consumers,” the committee said.

“Up to this time,” it continued, “economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings.

“The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand—for granting the right to consume—now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system.”

The Committee urged that the link be broken by “an unqualified commitment” by society to provide, through its appropriate legal and governmental institutions, “every individual and every family with an adequate income as a matter of right.” [All italics mine.]

To be provided—by whom? Blank out.

One would expect a proclamation of this kind to be issued by a group of small-town crackpots dissociated from reality and from any knowledge of economics. Or one would expect it to be issued by a group of rabblerousers, for the purpose of inciting the lowest elements of the population to violence against any business office that owns an electronic computer and thus deprives them of their “right to consume.”

But such was not the case.

This proclamation was issued by a group of professors, economists, educators, writers, and other “intellectuals.” What is frightening—as a symptom of the present state of our culture—is that it received front-page attention, and that apparently-civilized people are willing to regard it as within the bounds of civilized discussion.

What is the cultural atmosphere of our day? See whether the following description fits it. I quote from Atlas Shrugged—from a passage referring to a series of accelerating disasters and catastrophes:

The newspapers did not mention it. The editorials went on speaking of self-denial as the road to future progress, of self-sacrifice as the moral imperative, of greed as the enemy, of love as the solution—their threadbare phrases as sickeningly sweet as the odor of ether in a hospital.

Rumors went spreading through the country in whispers of cynical terror—yet people read the newspapers and acted as if they believed what they read, each competing with the others on who would keep most blindly silent, each pretending that he did not know what he knew, each striving to believe that the unnamed was the unreal. It was as if a volcano were cracking open, yet the people at the foot of the mountain ignored the sudden fissures, the black fumes, the boiling trickles, and went on believing that their only danger was to acknowledge the reality of these signs.

The purpose of my discussing this today was, not to boast nor to leave you with the impression that I possess some mystical gift of prophecy, but to demonstrate the exact opposite: that that gift is not mystical. Contrary to the prevalent views of today’s alleged scholars, history is not an unintelligible chaos ruled by chance and whim—historical trends can be predicted, and changed—men are not helpless, blind, doomed creatures carried to destruction by incomprehensible forces beyond their control.

There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man’s rational faculty—the power of ideas. If you know a man’s convictions, you can predict his actions. If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society, you can predict its course. But convictions and philosophy are matters open to man’s choice.

There is no fatalistic, predetermined historical necessity. Atlas Shrugged is not a prophecy of our unavoidable destruction, but a manifesto of our power to avoid it, if we choose to change our course.

It is the philosophy of the mysticism-altruism-collectivism axis that has brought us to our present state and is carrying us toward a finale such as that of the society presented in Atlas Shrugged. It is only the philosophy of the reason-individualism-capitalism axis that can save us and carry us, instead, toward the Atlantis projected in the last two pages of my novel.

Since men have free will, no one can predict with certainty the outcome of an ideological conflict nor how long such a conflict will last. It is too early to tell which choice this country will make. I can say only that if part of the purpose of Atlas Shrugged was to prevent itself from becoming prophetic, there are many, many signs to indicate that it is succeeding in that purpose.

(Postscript. Over a year after this article was written, there occurred an event worth noting here.

In the last chapter of Atlas Shrugged, which describes the collapse of the collectivists’ rule, there is the following paragraph:

The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly, with the abruptness of a shudder, as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city disappeared from the face of the earth. It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations—and that the lights of New York had gone out.

On November 9, 1965, the lights of New York and of the entire Eastern seaboard went out. The situation was not exactly parallel to that in my story, but a great many readers recognized the symbolic meaning of the event. I quote some of the letters and wires I received in the next few days:

A wire from Austin, Texas, signed by a number of names: “We thought you said the novel was not prophetic.”

A wire from Marion, Wisconsin: “There is a John Galt.”

From a letter from Indianapolis: “But it didn’t even take a panic, did it, Miss Rand? Just that same old irresponsibility and incompetence. The train wrecks [etc.] have made us chuckle, but this fulfilled prophecy also brings a shudder.”

A note from Dundee, Scotland: “I could not help but think of your book Atlas Shrugged when we saw on television New York without its lights—there on the screen the black canyons of the buildings and the low lights of the cars trying to find a way out.”

From Memphis, Tennessee (a postcard sent by his mother to a reader who sent it to me): “I just had to pass this on: Last night in the blackout in the Northeast [a friend] called and asked if you were there. I said no, and she said ‘Well, I’m sorry, I wanted to ask him if Atlas had shrugged!’ ”

A note from Chicago: “We waited expectantly for the one rational explanation for the ‘blackout’ of 11/9/65. ‘This is John Galt Speaking.’ ”)

16. THE PULL PEDDLERS

by Ayn Rand

America’s foreign policy is so grotesquely irrational that most people believe there must be some sensible purpose behind it. The extent of the irrationality acts as its own protection: like the technique of the “Big Lie,” it makes people assume that so blatant an evil could not possibly be as evil as it appears to them and, therefore, that somebody must understand its meaning, even though they themselves do not.

The sickening generalities and contradictions cited in justification of the foreign aid program fall roughly into two categories which are offered to us simultaneously: the “idealistic” and the “practical,” or mush and fear.

The “idealistic” arguments consist of appeals to altruism and swim out of focus in a fog of floating abstractions about our duty to support the “under-developed” nations of the entire globe, who are starving and will perish without our selfless help.

The “practical” arguments consist of appeals to fear and emit a different sort of fog, to the effect that our own selfish interest requires that we go bankrupt buying the favor of the “under-developed” nations, who, otherwise, will become a dangerous threat to us.

The Objectivist Newsletter, September 1962.

It is useless to point out to the advocates of our foreign policy that it’s either-or: either the “under-developed” nations are so weak that they are doomed without our help, in which case they cannot become a threat to us—or they are so strong that with some other assistance they can develop to the point of endangering us, in which case we should not drain our economic power to help the growth of potential enemies who are that powerful.

It is useless to discuss the contradiction between these two assertions, because neither of them is true. Their proponents are impervious to facts, to logic, and to the mounting evidence that after two decades of global altruism, our foreign policy is achieving the exact opposite of its alleged goals; it is wrecking our economy—it is reducing us internationally to the position of an impotent failure who has nothing but a series of compromises, retreats, defeats, and betrayals on his record—and, instead of bringing progress to the world, it is bringing the bloody chaos of tribal warfare and delivering one helpless nation after another into the power of communism.

When a society insists on pursuing a suicidal course, one may be sure that the alleged reasons and proclaimed slogans are mere rationalizations. The question is only: what is it that these rationalizations are hiding?

Observe that there is no consistent pattern in the erratic chaos of our foreign aid. And although in the long run it leads to the benefit of Soviet Russia, Russia is not its direct, immediate beneficiary. There is no consistent winner, only a consistent loser: the United States.

In the face of such a spectacle, some people give up the attempt to understand; others imagine that some omnipotent conspiracy is destroying America, that the rationalizations are hiding some malevolent, fantastically powerful giant.

The truth is worse than that: the truth is that the rationalizations are hiding nothing—that there is nothing at the bottom of the fog but a nest of scurrying cockroaches.

I submit in evidence excerpts from an article in the editorial section of The New York Times, of July 15, 1962, entitled: “Role of Foreign Lobbies.”

A “non-diplomatic corps” of foreign agents [states the article] has bloomed in recent years [in Washington] . . .

Lobbying in Congress to obtain—or prevent—the passage of legislation of interest to their foreign clients, seeking to pressure the Administration into adopting certain political or economic policies, or attempting to mold public opinion through a myriad of methods and techniques, this legion of special agents has become an elusive shadow for operating in Washington and the width and the length of the land.

“Lobbying” is the activity of attempting to influence legislation by privately influencing the legislators. It is the result and creation of a mixed economy—of government by pressure groups. Its methods range from mere social courtesies and cocktail-party or luncheon “friendships” to favors, threats, bribes, blackmail.

All lobbyists, whether serving foreign or domestic interests, are required—by laws passed in the last three decades—to register with the government. The registrations have been growing at such a rate—with the foreign lobbyists outnumbering the domestic ones—that legislators are beginning to be alarmed. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has announced that it is preparing an investigation of these foreign agents’ activities.

The New York Times article describes foreign lobbying as follows:

The theory behind this whole enterprise is that for a fee or a retainer and often for hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising, publicity and expense money, a foreign government or a foreign economic or political interest can purchase a favorable legislation in the United States Congress, a friendly policy of the Administration or a positive image in the eyes of the American public opinion, leading in turn to profitable political or economic advantage. [Italics mine.]

Who are these lobbyists? Men with political pull—with “access” to influential Washington figures—American men hired by foreign interests. The article mentions that most of these men are “Washington lawyers” or “New York public relations firms.”

Russia is one of these foreign interests and is served by registered lobbyists in Washington; but she is merely cashing-in on the situation, like the others. The success of her conspiracy in this country is the result, not the cause, of our self-destruction; she is winning by default. The cause is much deeper than that.

The issue of lobbies has attracted attention recently through the struggle of foreign lobbyists to obtain sugar quotas from the American government.

Their efforts [states the article] were centered on Representative Harold D. Cooley, Democrat of North Carolina, chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, who at least until this year held almost the complete power in the distribution of quotas. It has never been too clear what criteria Mr. Cooley used in allocating these quotas, and, by the same token, it is impossible to determine what was the actual effect of the lobbyists’ entreaties on him.

But in offering their services to foreign governments or sugar growers’ associations, these representatives were, in effect, offering for sale their real or alleged friendship with Mr. Cooley.

This is the core and essence of the issue of lobbying—and of our foreign aid—and of a mixed economy.

The trouble is not that “it has never been too clear what criteria Mr. Cooley used in allocating these quotas”—but that it has never been and never can be too clear what criteria he was expected to use by the legislation that granted him these powers. No criteria can ever be defined in this context; such is the nature of non-objective law and of all economic legislation.

So long as a concept such as “the public interest” (or the “social” or “national” or “international” interest) is regarded as a valid principle to guide legislation—lobbies and pressure groups will necessarily continue to exist. Since there is no such entity as “the public,” since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that “the public interest” supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.

If so, then all men and all private groups have to fight to the death for the privilege of being regarded as “the public.” The government’s policy has to swing like an erratic pendulum from group to group, hitting some and favoring others, at the whim of any given moment—and so grotesque a profession as lobbying (selling “influence”) becomes a full-time job. If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.

Since there is no rational justification for the sacrifice of some men to others, there is no objective criterion by which such a sacrifice can be guided in practice. All “public interest” legislation (and any distribution of money taken by force from some men for the unearned benefit of others) comes down ultimately to the grant of an undefined, undefinable, non-objective, arbitrary power to some government officials.

The worst aspect of it is not that such a power can be used dishonestly, but that it cannot be used honestly. The wisest man in the world, with the purest integrity, cannot find a criterion for the just, equitable, rational application of an unjust, inequitable, irrational principle. The best that an honest official can do is to accept no material bribe for his arbitrary decision; but this does not make his decision and its consequences more just or less calamitous.

A man of clear-cut convictions is impervious to anyone’s influence. But when clear-cut convictions are impossible, personal influences take over. When a man’s mind is trapped in the foggy labyrinth of the non-objective, that has no exits and no solutions, he will welcome any quasi-persuasive, semi-plausible argument. Lacking certainty, he will follow anyone’s facsimile thereof. He is the natural prey of social “manipulators,” of propaganda salesmen, of lobbyists.

When any argument is as inconclusive as any other, the subjective, emotional, or “human” element becomes decisive. A harried legislator may conclude, consciously or subconsciously, that the friendly man who smiled at him at the cocktail party last week was a good person who would not deceive him and whose opinion can be trusted safely. It is by considerations such as these that officials may dispose of your money, your effort, and your future.

Although cases of actual corruption do undoubtedly exist among legislators and government officials, they are not a major motivating factor in today’s situation. It is significant that in such cases as have been publicly exposed, the bribes were almost pathetically small. Men who held the power to dispose of millions of dollars, sold their favors for a thousand-dollar rug or a fur coat or a refrigerator.

The truth, most likely, is that they did not regard it as bribery or as a betrayal of their public trust; they did not think that their particular decision could matter one way or another, in the kind of causeless choices they had to make, in the absence of any criteria, in the midst of the general orgy of tossing away an apparently ownerless wealth. Men who would not sell out their country for a million dollars are selling it out for somebody’s smile and a vacation trip to Florida. Paraphrasing John Galt: “It is of such pennies and smiles that the destruction of your country is made.”

The general public is helplessly bewildered. The “intellectuals” do not care to look at our foreign policy too closely. They feel guilt; they sense that their own worn-out ideologies, which they dare not challenge, are the cause of the consequences which they dare not face. The more they evade, the greater their eagerness to grasp at any fashionable straw or rationalization and to uphold it with glassy-eyed aggressiveness. The threadbare cloak of altruism serves to cover it up and to sanction the evasions by a fading aura of moral righteousness. The exhausted cynicism of a bankrupt culture, of a society without values, principles, convictions, or intellectual standards, does the rest: it leaves a vacuum, for anyone to fill.

The motive power behind the suicidal bleeding of the greatest country in the world is not an altruistic fervor or a collectivist crusade any longer, but the manipulations of little lawyers and public relations men pulling the mental strings of lifeless automatons.

These—the lobbyists in the pay of foreign interests, the men who could not hope to get, in any other circumstances, the money they are getting now—are the real and only profiteers on the global sacrifice, as their ilk has always been at the close of every altruistic movement in history. It is not the “under-developed” nations nor the “underprivileged” masses nor the starving children of jungle villages who benefit from America’s self-immolation—it is only the men who are too small to start such movements and small enough to cash in at the end.

It is not any “lofty ideal” that the altruism-collectivism doctrine accomplishes or can ever accomplish. Its end-of-trail is as follows:

A local railroad had gone bankrupt in North Dakota, abandoning the region to the fate of a blighted area, the local banker had committed suicide, first killing his wife and children—a freight train had been taken off the schedule in Tennessee, leaving a local factory without transportation at a day’s notice, the factory owner’s son had quit college and was now in jail, awaiting execution for a murder committed with a gang of raiders—a way station had been closed in Kansas, and the station agent, who had wanted to be a scientist, had given up his studies and become a dishwasher—that he, James Taggart, might sit in a private barroom and pay for the alcohol pouring down Orren Boyle’s throat, for the waiter who sponged Boyle’s garments when he spilled his drink over his chest, for the carpet burned by the cigarettes of an ex-pimp from Chile who did not want to take the trouble of reaching for an ashtray across a distance of three feet. (Atlas Shrugged)

17. “EXTREMISM,” OR THE ART OF SMEARING

by Ayn Rand

Among the many symptoms of today’s moral bankruptcy, the performance of the so-called “moderates” at the Republican National Convention was the climax, at least to date. It was an attempt to institutionalize smears as an instrument of national policy—to raise those smears from the private gutters of yellow journalism to the public summit of a proposed inclusion in a political party platform. The “moderates” were demanding a repudiation of “extremism” without any definition of that term.

Ignoring repeated challenges to define what they meant by “extremism,” substituting vituperation for identification, they kept the debate on the level of concretes and would not name the wider abstractions or principles involved. They poured abuse on a few specific groups and would not disclose the criteria by which these groups had been chosen. The only thing clearly perceivable to the public was a succession of snarling faces and hysterical voices screaming with violent hatred—while denouncing “purveyors of hate” and demanding “tolerance.”

The Objectivist Newsletter, September 1964.

When men feel that strongly about an issue, yet refuse to name it, when they fight savagely for some seemingly incoherent, unintelligible goal—one may be sure that their actual goal would not stand public identification. Let us, therefore, proceed to identify it.

First, observe the peculiar incongruity of the concretes chosen as the objects of the “moderates’ ” hatred: “the Communist Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society.” If one attempts to abstract the common attribute, the principle, by which these three groups could be linked together, one finds none—or none more specific than “political group.” Obviously, this is not what the “moderates” had in mind.

The common attribute—the “moderates” would snarl at this point—is “evil.” Okay, what evil? The Communist Party is guilty of the wholesale slaughter of countless millions spread through every continent of the globe. The Ku Klux Klan is guilty of murdering innocent victims by the mob violence of lynchings. What is the John Birch Society guilty of? The only answer elicited from the “moderates” was: “They accused General Eisenhower of being a communist.”

The worst category of crime in which this accusation could be placed is libel. Let us leave aside the fact that libel is what every anti-welfare-statist is chronically subjected to in public discussions. Let us agree that libel is a serious offense and ask only one question: does libel belong to the same category of evil as the actions of the Communist Party and the Ku Klux Klan?

Are we to regard wholesale slaughter, lynch-murders, and libel as equal evils?

If one heard a man declaring: “I am equally opposed to bubonic plague, to throwing acid in people’s faces, and to my mother-in-law’s nagging”—one would conclude that the mother-in-law was the only object of his hatred and that her elimination was his only goal. The same principle applies to both examples of the same technique.

No one truly opposed to the Communist Party and the Ku Klux Klan would take their evil so lightly as to equate it with the activities of a futile, befuddled organization whose alleged sin, at worst, might be irresponsible recklessness in making unproved or libelous assertions.

And more: the Communist Party as such is not a campaign issue, neither for the Republicans nor the Democrats nor the electorate at large; virtually everybody is denouncing the Communist Party these days and nobody needs the reassurance of a formal repudiation. The Ku Klux Klan is not a Republican issue or problem; its members, traditionally, are Democrats; for the Republicans to repudiate their vote would be like repudiating the vote of Tammany Hall, which is not theirs to repudiate.

This leaves only the John Birch Society as a real issue for a Republican convention. And it was the real issue—but in a deeper and more devious sense than might appear on the surface.

The real issue was not the John Birch Society as such: that Society was merely an artificial and somewhat unworthy straw man, picked by the “moderates” as a focal point for the intended destruction of much greater and much more important victims.

Observe that everyone at the Republican Convention seemed to understand the implicit purpose behind the issue of “extremism,” but nobody would name it explicitly. The debate was conducted in terms of enormous, undefined “package-deals,” as if words were merely approximations intended to connote an issue no one dared to denote. The result gave the impression of a life-and-death struggle conducted out of focus.

The same atmosphere dominates the public controversy now raging over this issue. People are arguing about “extremism” as if they knew what that word meant, yet no two statements use it in the same sense and no two speakers seem to be talking about the same subject. If there ever was a tower-of-Babel situation, this is surely it. Please note that that is an important part of the issue.

In fact, most people do not know the meaning of the word “extremism”; they merely sense it. They sense that something is being put over on them by some means which they cannot grasp.

In order to understand what is done and how it is being done, let us observe some earlier instances of the same technique.

A large-scale instance, in the 1930’s, was the introduction of the world “isolationism” into our political vocabulary. It was a derogatory term, suggesting something evil, and it had no clear, explicit definition. It was used to convey two meanings: one alleged, the other real—and to damn both.

The alleged meaning was defined approximately like this: “Isolationism is the attitude of a person who is interested only in his own country and is not concerned with the rest of the world.” The real meaning was: “Patriotism and national self-interest.”

What, exactly, is “concern with the rest of the world”? Since nobody did or could maintain the position that the state of the world is of no concern to this country, the term “isolationism” was a straw man used to misrepresent the position of those who were concerned with this country’s interests. The concept of patriotism was replaced by the term “isolationism” and vanished from public discussion.

The number of distinguished patriotic leaders smeared, silenced, and eliminated by that tag would be hard to compute. Then, by a gradual, imperceptible process, the real purpose of the tag took over: the concept of “concern” was switched into “selfless concern.” The ultimate result was a view of foreign policy which is wrecking the United States to this day: the suicidal view that our foreign policy must be guided, not by considerations of national self-interest, but by concern for the interests and welfare of the world, that is, of all countries except our own.

In the late 1940’s, another newly coined term was shot into our cultural arteries: “McCarthyism.” Again, it was a derogatory term, suggesting some insidious evil, and without any clear definition. Its alleged meaning was: “Unjust accusations, persecutions, and character assassinations of innocent victims.” Its real meaning was: “Anti-communism.”

Senator McCarthy was never proved guilty of those allegations, but the effect of that term was to intimidate and silence public discussions. Any uncompromising denunciation of communism or communists was—and still is—smeared as “McCarthyism.” As a consequence, opposition to and exposes of communist penetration have all but vanished from our intellectual scene. (I must mention that I am not an admirer of Senator McCarthy, but not for the reasons implied in that smear.)

Now consider the term “extremism.” Its alleged meaning is: “Intolerance, hatred, racism, bigotry, crackpot theories, incitement to violence.” Its real meaning is: “The advocacy of capitalism.”

Observe the technique involved in these three examples. It consists of creating an artificial, unnecessary, and (rationally) unusable term, designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concepts—a term which sounds like a concept, but stands for a “package-deal” of disparate, incongruous, contradictory elements taken out of any logical conceptual order or context, a “packagedeal” whose (approximately) defining characteristic is always a non-essential. This last is the essence of the trick.

Let me remind you that the purpose of a definition is to distinguish the things subsumed under a single concept from all other things in existence; and, therefore, their defining characteristic must always be that essential characteristic which distinguishes them from everything else.

So long as men use language, that is the way they will use it. There is no other way to communicate. And if a man accepts a term with a definition by non-essentials, his mind will substitute for it the essential characteristic of the objects he is trying to designate.

For instance, “concern (or non-concern) with the rest of the world” is not an essential characteristic of any theory of foreign relations. If a man hears the term “isolationists” applied to a number of individuals, he will observe that the essential characteristic distinguishing them from other individuals is patriotism—and he will conclude that “isolationism” means “patriotism” and that patriotism is evil. Thus the real meaning of the term will automatically replace the alleged meaning.

If a man hears the term “McCarthyism,” he will observe that the best-known characteristic distinguishing Senator McCarthy from other public figures is an anti-communist stand, and he will conclude that anti-communism is evil.

If a man hears the term “extremism” and is offered the innocuous figure of the John Birch Society as an example, he will observe that its best-known characteristic is “conservatism,” and he will conclude that “conservatism” is evil—as evil as the Communist Party and the Ku Klux Klan. (“Conservatism” is itself a loose, undefined, badly misleading term—but in today’s popular usage it is taken to mean “pro-capitalism.”)

Such is the function of modern smear-tags, and such is the process by which they destroy our public communications, making rational discussion of political issues impossible.

The same mentalities that create an “anti-hero” in order to destroy heroes, and an “anti-novel” in order to destroy novels, are creating “anti-concepts” in order to destroy concepts.

The purpose of “anti-concepts” is to obliterate certain concepts without public discussion; and, as a means to that end, to make public discussion unintelligible, and to induce the same disintegration in the mind of any man who accepts them, rendering him incapable of clear thinking or rational judgment. No mind is better than the precision of its concepts.

(I call this to the special attention of two particular classes of men who aid and abet the dissemination of “anti-concepts”: the academic ivory-tower philosophers who claim that definitions are a matter of arbitrary social whim or convention, and that there can be no such thing as right or wrong definitions—and the “practical” men who believe that so abstract a science as epistemology can have no effect on the political events of the world.)

Of all the “anti-concepts” polluting our cultural atmosphere, “extremism” is the most ambitious in scale and implications; it goes much beyond politics. Let us now examine it in detail.

To begin with, “extremism” is a term which, standing by itself, has no meaning. The concept of “extreme” denotes a relation, a measurement, a degree. The dictionary gives the following definitions: “Extreme, adj.—1. of a character or kind farthest removed from the ordinary or average. 2. utmost or exceedingly great in degree.”

It is obvious that the first question one has to ask, before using that term, is: a degree—of what?

To answer: “Of anything!” and to proclaim that any extreme is evil because it is an extreme—to hold the degree of a characteristic, regardless of its nature, as evil—is an absurdity (any garbled Aristotelianism to the contrary notwithstanding). Measurements, as such, have no value-significance—and acquire it only from the nature of that which is being measured.

Are an extreme of health and an extreme of disease equally undesirable? Are extreme intelligence and extreme stupidity—both equally far removed “from the ordinary or average”—equally unworthy? Are extreme honesty and extreme dishonesty equally immoral? Are a man of extreme virtue and a man of extreme depravity equally evil?

The examples of such absurdities can be multiplied indefinitely—particularly in the field of morality where only an extreme (i.e., unbreached, uncompromised) degree of virtue can be properly called a virtue. (What is the moral status of a man of “moderate” integrity?)

But “don’t bother to examine a folly—ask yourself only what it accomplishes.” What is the “anti-concept” of “extremism” intended to accomplish in politics?

The basic and crucial political issue of our age is: capitalism versus socialism, or freedom versus statism. For decades, this issue has been silenced, suppressed, evaded, and hidden under the foggy, undefined rubber-terms of “conservatism” and “liberalism” which had lost their original meaning and could be stretched to mean all things to all men.

The goal of the “liberals”—as it emerges from the record of the past decades—was to smuggle this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot—by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli. (The goal of the “conservatives” was only to retard that process.)

The “liberals’ ” program required that the concept of capitalism be obliterated—not merely as if it could not exist any longer, but as if it had never existed. The actual nature, principles, and history of capitalism had to be smeared, distorted, misrepresented and thus kept out of public discussion—because socialism has not won and cannot win in open debate, in an uncorrupted marketplace of ideas, neither on the ground of logic nor economics nor morality nor historical performance. Socialism can win only by default—by the moral default of its alleged opponents.

That blackout seemed to work for a while. But “you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” Today, the frayed, worn tags of “conservatism” and “liberalism” are cracking up—and what is showing underneath is: capitalism versus socialism.

The welfare-statists need a new cover. What we are witnessing now is a desperate, last-ditch attempt to put over two “anti-concepts”: the “extremists” and the “moderates.”

To put over an “anti-concept,” one needs a straw man (or scarecrow or scapegoat) to serve as an example of its alleged meaning. That is the role for which the “liberals” have chosen the John Birch Society.

That Society was thrust into public prominence by the “liberal” press, a few years ago, and overpublicized out of all proportion to its actual importance. It has no clear, specific political philosophy (it is not for capitalism, but merely against communism), no real political program, no intellectual influence; it represents a confused, non-intellectual, “cracker-barrel” type of protest; it is certainly not the spokesman nor the rallying point of pro-capitalism or even of “conservatism.” These precisely are the reasons why it was chosen by the “liberals.”

The intended technique was: first, to ignore the existence of any serious, reputable, intellectual advocacy of capitalism and the growing body of literature on that subject, past and present—by literally pretending that it did not and does not exist; then, to publicize the John Birch Society as the only representative of the “right”; then to smear all “rightists” by equating them with the John Birch Society.

An explicit proof of this intention was given in a TV interview last year (September 15, 1963) by Governor Rockefeller, who later led the attack on “extremism” at the Republican Convention. Asked to define what he meant by “the radical right,” he said:

The best illustration was what happened at the Young Republican Convention in San Francisco a number of months ago, where a man was elected, a Young Republican was elected on a platform to abolish the income tax, to withdraw from the United Nations, I don’t know whether he included impeachment of Earl Warren, but that is part of this whole concept, and the idea that General Eisenhower was a crypto-communist. [Italics mine.]

Part of what concept?

The first two tenets listed are legitimate “rightist” positions, backed by many valid reasons; the third is a sample of purely Birchite foolishness; the fourth is a sample of the irresponsibility of just one Birchite. The total is a sample of the art of smearing.

Now consider the meaning ascribed to the term “rightist” within the “package-deal” of “extremism.” In general usage, the terms “rightists” and “leftists” designate advocates of capitalism and socialism. But observe the abnormal, artificial stress of the attempt to associate racism and violence with “the extreme right”—two evils of which even the straw man, the Birch Society, is not guilty, and which can be much more plausibly associated with the Democratic Party (via the Ku Klux Klan). The purpose is to revive that old saw of pre-World War II vintage, the notion that the two political opposites confronting us, the two “extremes,” are: fascism versus communism.

The political origin of that notion is more shameful than the “moderates” would care publicly to admit. Mussolini came to power by claiming that that was the only choice confronting Italy. Hitler came to power by claiming that that was the only choice confronting Germany. It is a matter of record that in the German election of 1933, the Communist Party was ordered by its leaders to vote for the Nazis—with the explanation that they could later fight the Nazis for power, but first they had to help destroy their common enemy: capitalism and its parliamentary form of government.

It is obvious what the fraudulent issue of fascism versus communism accomplishes: it sets up, as opposites, two variants of the same political system; it eliminates the possibility of considering capitalism; it switches the choice of “Freedom or dictatorship?” into “Which kind of dictatorship?”—thus establishing dictatorship as an inevitable fact and offering only a choice of rulers. The choice—according to the proponents of that fraud—is: a dictatorship of the rich (fascism) or a dictatorship of the poor (communism).

That fraud collapsed in the 1940’s, in the aftermath of World War II. It is too obvious, too easily demonstrable that fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory—that both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state—that both are socialistic, in theory, in practice, and in the explicit statements of their leaders—that under both systems, the poor are enslaved and the rich are expropriated in favor of a ruling clique—that fascism is not the product of the political “right,” but of the “left”—that the basic issue is not “rich versus poor,” but man versus the state, or: individual rights versus totalitarian government—which means: capitalism versus socialism.⁵²

The smear of capitalism’s advocates as “fascists” has failed in this country and, for over a decade, has been moldering in dark corners, seldom venturing to be heard openly, in public—coming only as an occasional miasma from under the ground, from the sewers of actual left-ism. And this is the kind of notion that the “liberals” are unfastidious enough to attempt to revive. But it is obvious what vested interest that notion can serve.

If it were true that dictatorship is inevitable and that fascism and communism are the two “extremes” at the opposite ends of our course, then what is the safest place to choose? Why, the middle of the road. The safely undefined, indeterminate, mixed-economy, “moderate” middle—with a “moderate” amount of government favors and special privileges to the rich and a “moderate” amount of government handouts to the poor—with a “moderate” respect for rights and a “moderate” degree of brute force—with a “moderate” amount of freedom and a “moderate” amount of slavery—with a “moderate” degree of justice and a “moderate” degree of injustice—with a “moderate” amount of security and a “moderate” amount of terror—and with a moderate degree of tolerance for all, except those “extremists” who uphold principles, consistency, objectivity, morality and who refuse to compromise.

The notion of compromise as the supreme virtue superseding all else is the moral imperative, the moral precondition of a mixed economy.⁵³ A mixed economy is an explosive, untenable mixture of two opposite elements, which cannot remain stable, but must ultimately go one way or the other; it is a mixture of freedom and controls, which means: not of fascism and communism, but of capitalism and statism (including all its variants). Those who wish to support the un-supportable, disintegrating status quo, are screaming in panic that it can be prolonged by eliminating the two “extremes” of its basic components; but the two extremes are: capitalism or total dictatorship.

Dictatorship feeds on the ideological chaos of bewildered, demoralized, cynically flexible, unresisting men. But capitalism requires an uncompromising stand. (Destruction can be done blindly, at random; but construction requires strict adherence to specific principles.) The welfare-statists hope to eliminate capitalism by smear and silence—and to “avoid” dictatorship by “voluntary” compliance, by a policy of bargaining and compromise with the government’s growing power.

This brings us to the deeper implications of the term “extremism.” It is obvious that an uncompromising stand (on anything) is the actual characteristic which that “anti-concept” is designed to damn. It is also obvious that compromise is incompatible with morality. In the field of morality, compromise is surrender to evil.

There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.

If an uncompromising stand is to be smeared as “extremism,” then that smear is directed at any devotion to values, any loyalty to principles, any profound conviction, any consistency, any steadfastness, any passion, any dedication to an unbreached, inviolate truth—any man of integrity.

And it is against all these that that “anti-concept” has been and is being used.

Here we can see the deeper roots, the source that has made the spread of “anti-concepts” possible. The mentally paralyzed, anxiety-ridden neurotics produced by the disintegration of modern philosophy—with its cult of uncertainty, its epistemological irrationalism and ethical subjectivism—come out of our colleges, broken by chronic dread, seeking escape from the absolutism of reality with which they feel themselves impotent to deal. Fear drives them to unite with slick political manipulators and pragmatist ward-heelers to make the world safe for mediocrity by raising to the status of a moral ideal that archetypical citizen of a mixed economy: the docile, pliable, moderate Milquetoast who never gets excited, never makes trouble, never cares too much, adjusts to anything and upholds nothing.

The best proof of an intellectual movement’s collapse is the day when it has nothing to offer as an ultimate ideal but a plea for “moderation.” Such is the final proof of collectivism’s bankruptcy. The vision, the courage, the dedication, the moral fire are now on the barely awakening side of the crusaders for capitalism.

It will take more than an “anti-concept” to stop them.

18. THE OBLITERATION OF CAPITALISM

by Ayn Rand

In my article “ ‘Extremism,’ or The Art of Smearing,” I discussed the subject of “anti-concepts”—i.e., artificial, unnecessary, undefined and (rationally) unusable terms intended to replace and obliterate certain legitimate concepts in people’s minds.

I said that the “liberals” are coining and spreading “anti-concepts” in order to smuggle this country into statism by an imperceptible process—and that the primary target marked for obliteration is the concept of “capitalism,” which, if lost, would carry away with it the knowledge that a free society can and did exist.

But there is something much less attractive (and, politically, much more disastrous) than capitalism’s enemies: its alleged defenders—some of whom are muscling in on the game of manufacturing “anti-concepts” of their own.

Have you ever felt a peculiar kind of embarrassment when witnessing a grossly inappropriate human performance, such as the antics of an unfunny comedian? It is a depersonalized, almost metaphysical embarrassment at having to witness so undignified a behavior on the part of a member of the human species.

The Objectivist Newsletter, October 1965.

That is what I feel at having to hear the following statement of Governor Romney, which was his alleged answer to the communists’ boast that they would bury capitalism:

“But what they do not understand—and what we have failed to tell the world—is that Americans buried capitalism long ago, and moved on to consumerism.”

The implications of such a statement are too sickeningly obvious. The best comment on it came from The Richardson Digest (Richardson, Texas, April 28, 1965), from the column “Lively Comments” by Earl Lively, who wrote: “Afraid to stand alone, even on his knees, Romney then tells the rest of us that we do not know the definition of capitalism, we do not understand our economic principles, and we’d be better off if we quit going around defending such an unpopular concept as capitalism.”

Mr. Lively is admirably precise in his description of the posture involved. But Mr. Romney is not alone in it. A number of intellectually more reputable men (including some distinguished free-enterprise economists) have adopted the same stance and the same line for the same psychological reasons.

There are the economists who proclaim that the essence (and the moral justification) of capitalism is “service to others—to the consumers,” that the consumers’ wishes are the absolute edicts ruling the free market, etc. (This is an example of what a definition by non-essentials accomplishes, and of why a half-truth is worse than a lie: what all such theorists fail to mention is the fact that capitalism grants economic recognition to only one kind of consumer: the producer—that only traders, i.e., producers who have something to offer, are recognized on a free market, not “consumers” as such—that, in a capitalist economy, as in reason, in justice, and in reality, production is the pre-condition of consumption.)

There are the businessmen who spend fortunes on ideological ads, allegedly in defense of capitalism, which assure the public that all but a tiny fraction of an industry’s income goes to labor (wages), to government (taxes), etc., with these shares represented as big chunks in full-color process, and, lost among them, an apologetic little sliver is marked “2½ percent” and labeled “profits.”

There is the display of charts and models, in a hallway of the New York Stock Exchange, presenting the achievements of free enterprise and captioned: “The People’s Capitalism.”

Since none of these attempts can succeed in disguising the nature of capitalism nor in degrading it to the level of an altruistic stockyard, their sole result is to convince the public that capitalism hides some evil secret which imbues its alleged defenders with such an aura of abject guilt and hypocrisy. But, in fact, the secret they are struggling to hide is capitalism’s essence and greatest virtue: that it is a system based on the recognition of individual rights—on man’s right to exist (and to work) for his own sake—not on the altruistic view of man as a sacrificial animal. Thus it is capitalism’s virtue that the public is urged—by such defenders—to regard as evil, and it is altruism that all their efforts help to reinforce and reaffirm as the standard of the good.

What they dare not allow into their minds is the fact that capitalism and altruism are incompatible; so they wonder why the more they propagandize, the more unpopular capitalism becomes. They blame it on people’s stupidity (because people refuse to believe that a successful industrialist is an exponent of altruistic self-sacrifice)—and on people’s greed for the unearned (because, after being battered with assurances that the industrialist’s wealth is “morally” theirs, people do come to believe it).

No “anti-concept” launched by the “liberals” goes so far so crudely as the tag “consumerism.” It implies loudly and clearly that the status of “consumer” is separate from and superior to the status of “producer”; it suggests a social system dedicated to the service of a new aristocracy which is distinguished by the ability to “consume” and vested with a special claim on the caste of serfs marked by the ability to produce. If taken seriously, such a tag would lead to the ultimate absurdity of the communists proclaiming: “Who does not toil, shall not eat”—and the alleged representatives of capitalism replying: “Oh yes, he shall!” And if the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution propounds such a moral obscenity as “the right to consume”—who inspired it, Karl Marx or Governor Romney?

It is true that we are not a capitalist system any longer: we are a mixed economy, i.e., a mixture of capitalism and statism, of freedom and controls. A mixed economy is a country in the process of disintegration, a civil war of pressure-groups looting and devouring one another. In this sense, “consumerism” might be the appropriate name for it.

Now to whom is it that the friends, the semi-friends, and even the acquaintances of capitalism are so anxiously apologizing?

As the clearest illustration of the psychological motives, the moral meaning and the intellectual technique involved in the manufacture of “anti-concepts,” I offer you a column by C. L. Sulzberger, entitled “Should the Old Labels Be Changed,” in the July 1964 issue of The New York Times.

A research report of the United States Information Agency [writes Mr. Sulzberger] has ruefully discovered that the more our propaganda advertises the virtues of “capitalism” and attacks “Socialism,” the less the world likes us. . . . Confused semantics make bad public relations. . . . Having analyzed conclusions of its poll-takers in both hemispheres, the U.S.I.A. study observes: “Capitalism is evil. The United States is the leading capitalist country. Therefore, the United States is evil.” It would be difficult to exaggerate the harm that this line of thinking has done. In the Soviet Union and Communist China it sustains attitudes and actions that greatly increase the danger of thermonuclear war.

What is meant here by such a foggy expression as “sustains attitudes and actions”? The smear of capitalism as evil was originated and is constantly reiterated by the communists. Does the above mean that their own smear sustains their attitudes? And does it mean that the way to avoid thermonuclear war is for us to agree that the smear is true?

The report does not say. It merely goes on:

“In the non-Communist world it tends to poison the atmosphere in which we are trying to carry on our aid programs and other international cooperation.”

This means that the harm, to us, lies in the danger that the recipients of our charity might refuse to take our money—and that in order to gain their “cooperation,” we must spit in our own face and join in smearing the system which produced the wealth which is saving their lives.

“Capitalism” is a dirty word to millions of non-Marxists who see “Socialism” as vaguely benevolent. When the U.S.I.A. sampled foreign opinion it found that to the majority “Socialism” did not mean government ownership and was not necessarily related to communism. Rather it seemed to imply a system favoring welfare of common people.

If you have doubted that the philosophy of Pragmatism actually teaches that truth is to be established by public polls—here is a sample of it, in pure and naked form. Volumes of theory, a century of history, and the bloody practice of five continents to the contrary notwithstanding, “socialism” does not mean government ownership and is not related to communism—because a sampling of majority opinion said so. And what is meant by “a system favoring welfare of common people”? How does one “favor” the “common people”? At the expense of the uncommon? A “favor” means the unearned—since the earned is a right, not a favor. Whose rights and earnings are to be abrogated and expropriated—for whose benefit? The only variant of socialism that can distribute “favors” without government ownership is fascism. Draw your own conclusions about the political inclinations of the moral cannibals involved in that poll.

Most foreigners apparently don’t regard “capitalism” as descriptive of an efficient economy or a safeguard of individual rights. To them it means little concern for the poor, unfair distribution of wealth, and undue influence of the rich.

How does one combine the safeguard of individual rights with a government-enforced “concern for the poor” and a government-distributed wealth and “influence”? No answer.

U.S.I.A. found an impressive percentage of British, West Germans, Italians, Japanese, Mexicans and Brazilians have a favorable opinion of “Socialism” and a strongly unfavorable opinion of “capitalism.”

Consider the philosophical trends, the intellectual commitments, the moral records of these countries—and their political results. Germany, Italy, and Japan were fascist dictatorships; their claims to political wisdom consist of giving the world a demonstration of horror equaled only by their ideological brothers in Soviet Russia and Red China. Britain, Mexico, and Brazil are mixed economies which have long since gone over the borderline state of mixture into the category—and the economic bankruptcy—of socialistic countries. And these are the nations whose opinions we are asked to value, whose favor we are asked to court—these are the moral authorities to whom we must apologize for the noblest political system in history: ours—these are the judges whom we must placate by denying our system, dishonoring its record, and obliterating its name.

Is there any conceivable motive that could prompt a nation to so base a betrayal? Conceivable—no, if one refers to the realm of rational concepts. But—

“Capitalism” abroad is frequently a pejorative word. Efforts to purge it of negative connotations by phrases like “people’s capitalism” have failed. . . . But “Socialism” is chic. [Yes, chic.] Even in Britain and West Germany, where private ownership is the mode, the majority expressed itself sympathetic to “Socialism,” while abhorring Communism.

If the term “social metaphysics” occurs to you at this point, you would be right—except that even that term seems too clean, almost too innocent, to explain the following:

Leaders of underdeveloped nations, spurning “capitalism,” boast of special brands of “Socialism.” Leopold Senghor of Senegal says “Socialism is a sense of community which is a return to Africanism.” Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika insists “no underdeveloped country can afford to be anything but ‘Socialist.’ ” Tunisia’s Habib Bourguiba claims Mohammed’s companions “were Socialists before the invention of the word.” And Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk contends “our Socialism is first and foremost an application of Buddhism.”

The above is true, totally true, true all the way down to the deepest philosophical, psychological, political, and moral fundamentals. And this is the most damning indictment of socialism that a rational person could need to see. Socialism is a regression to primitive barbarism. But that is not the appraisal or the conclusion of the U.S.I.A. report. It is to the Mohammedans, the Buddhists, and the cannibals (the literal cannibals, this time)—to the under-developed, the undeveloped, and the not-to-be-developed cultures—that the Capitalist United States of America is asked to apologize for her skyscrapers, her automobiles, her plumbing, and her smiling, confident, untortured, un-skinned-alive, un-eaten young men!

The column ends as follows:

The study concludes that foreigners attribute to the U.S.A. “a high degree of capitalist exploitation and of capitalist power over the society as a whole, as well as a great absence of those social welfare measures which, to them, are the decisive criterion of Socialism.” [U.S.I.A.’s own italics.]

There is surely no sense in proclaiming our philosophy in terms that are unsalable and peculiarly vulnerable to our opponents’ attacks. . . .

Our system of capitalism has evolved immensely from the outmoded economic doctrine to which the label was originally applied by Marx and other 19thcentury thinkers. Might not the U.S.I.A. attempt another survey seeking ways of announcing our social and political system in a manner more acceptable to those abroad whose opinions we would influence?

Influence—how? In what direction? To what purpose? If, for the sake of appeasement, we renounce our philosophy and adopt theirs, if we discard the last remnants of capitalism and proclaim ourselves to be a “National Socialist Welfare State,” who would have “influenced”—and buried—whom?

A great many things may be observed about this unusually revealing column. It is true, of course, that if American propagandists are defending capitalism abroad as they do at home, the results would be precisely as described in that U.S.I.A. study, or worse. At home, it is the “conservatives” who are appeasing the “liberals” and losing the battle, because they dare not uphold the true nature of capitalism. Abroad, it is the “liberals” who are appeasing the communists and losing the battle, for the same reason: there is no way to defend capitalism without upholding man’s right to exist, which means, without rejecting altruism.

Observe the appalling indifference to the issue of truth or falsehood on the part of capitalism’s alleged defenders. They attach no significance to such contradictions as sympathizing with socialism while abhorring communism—or to the fact that capitalism is the only opposite of and the only defense against communism. They attach no significance to the ignorance, the dishonesty, the injustice, the irrationality of capitalism’s critics. In the face of a moral-philosophical issue, their response is an immediate, uncritical acceptance of the critics’ terms, a surrender to ignorance, dishonesty, injustice, irrationality. In the face of the knowledge that capitalism is being smeared by the communists, by the very enemy they intend to fight, their policy is not to blast the smear, not to enlighten the world, not to defend the victim, not to speak out for justice—but to sanction the smear, to hide the truth, to sacrifice the victim, to join the lynching. What they feel is: Of what account is truth in the face of such a consideration as “people don’t like us”? What they cry is: “But this is the way we’ll make people like the victim!”—after we’ve helped them grind her to bits in the mud. Then they wonder why contempt is all they earn, from betrayed allies and sworn enemies alike. Moral cowardice is not an attractive nor an inspiring nor a very practical trait.

Observe the obscenity of those Europeans who—in this day and age, in the rising tide of global bloodshed, in the face of the unspeakable atrocities of the “newly emerging” nations—dare prattle about “little concern for the poor” and criticize the United States for that. Whatever their motives, concern for human suffering is not one of them.

We may observe all that, but it seems almost irrelevant beside the one central, overwhelming fact: the intellectual leaders of today’s world are willing to condone and accept anything, they are willing to recognize the right of Buddhism and Africanism to their boastfully asserted traditions (remember the nature and record of those traditions)—but they make one exception. There is one country—the United States of America—who is not acceptable to them, who must renounce her tradition and, in atonement, must crawl on her knees, begging the savages of five continents to choose a new name for her system, which would obliterate the guilt of her past. What is her guilt? That for one brief moment in human history, she offered the world the vision of unsacrificed man in a non-sacrificial way of life.

When one grasps this, one knows that it is no use arguing over political trivia, or wondering about the nature of altruism and why the reign of the altruists is leading the world to an ever widening spread of horror. This is the nature of altruism, this—not any sort of benevolence, good will, or concern for human misfortune. Hatred of man, not the desire to help him—hatred of life, not the desire to further it—hatred of the successful state of life—and that ultimate, apocalyptic evil: hatred of the good for being the good.

What every successful man (successful at any human value, spiritual or material) has encountered, has sensed, has been bewildered by, but has seldom identified, can now be seen in the open, with nations, instead of individual men, re-enacting the same unspeakable evil on a world scale where it cannot be hidden any longer. It is not for her flaws that the United States of America is hated, but for her virtues—not for her weaknesses, but for her achievements—not for her failures, but for her success—her magnificent, shining, life-giving success.

It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man. It is a conspiracy without leader or direction, and the random little thugs of the moment who cash in on the agony of one land or another are chance scum riding the torrent from the broken dam of the sewer of centuries, from the reservoir of hatred for reason, for logic, for ability, for achievement, for joy, stored by every whining anti-human who ever preached the superiority of the “heart” over the mind. (Atlas Shrugged)

With most of the world in ruins, with the voice of philosophy silent and the last remnants of civilization vanishing undefended, in an unholy alliance of savagery and decadence, bloody thugs are fighting over the spoils, while the cynical pragmatists left in charge and way out of their depth are trying to drown their panic at Europe’s cocktail parties, where emasculated men and hysterical, white-lipped women determine the fate of the world by declaring that socialism is chic.

This is the face of our age. To attempt to fight it by means of compromise, conciliation, equivocation, and circumlocution is worse than grotesque. This is not a battle to be fought by joining the enemy in any manner—nor by borrowing any of his slogans or his bloody ideological equipment—nor by deluding the world about the nature of the battle—nor by pretending that one is “in” with that sort of crowd.

It is a battle only for those who know why it is necessary to be “out”—as far out of that stream as words will carry—why, when moral issues are at stake, one must begin by blasting the enemy’s base and cutting off any link to it, any bridge, any toehold—and if one is to be misunderstood, let it be on the side of intransigence, not on the side of any resemblance to any part of so monstrous an evil.

It is a battle only for those who—paraphrasing a character in Atlas Shrugged—are prepared to say:

“Capitalism was the only system in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only system that stood for man’s right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself. If this is evil, by the present standards of the world, if this is the reason for damning us, then we—we, the champions of man—accept it and choose to be damned by that world. We choose to wear the name ‘Capitalism’ printed on our foreheads, proudly, as our badge of nobility.”

This is what the battle demands. Nothing less will do.

19. CONSERVATISM: AN OBITUARY

by Ayn Rand

Both the “conservatives” and the “liberals” stress a fact with which everybody seems to agree: that the world is facing a deadly conflict and that we must fight to save civilization.

But what is the nature of that conflict? Both groups answer: it is a conflict between communism and . . . and what?—blank out. It is a conflict between two ways of life, they answer, the communist way and . . . what?—blank out. It is a conflict between two ideologies, they answer. What is our ideology? Blank out.

The truth which both groups refuse to face and to admit is that, politically, the world conflict of today is the last stage of the struggle between capitalism and statism.

We stand for freedom, say both groups—and proceed to declare what kind of controls, regulations, coercions, taxes, and “sacrifices” they would impose, what arbitrary powers they would demand, what “social gains” they would hand out to various groups, without specifying from what other groups these “gains” would be expropriated. Neither of them cares to admit that government control of a country’s economy—any kind or degree of such control, by any group, for any purpose whatsoever—rests on the basic principle of statism, the principle that man’s life belongs to the state. A mixed economy is merely a semi-socialized economy—which means: a semi-enslaved society—which means: a country torn by irreconcilable contradictions, in the process of gradual disintegration.

Based on a lecture given at Princeton University on December 7, 1960. Published by Nathaniel Branden Institute, New York, 1962.

Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, or freedom from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state—and nothing else.

The world conflict of today is the conflict of the individual against the state, the same conflict that has been fought throughout mankind’s history. The names change, but the essence—and the results—remain the same, whether it is the individual against feudalism, or against absolute monarchy, or against communism or fascism or Nazism or socialism or the welfare state.

If one upholds freedom, one must uphold man’s individual rights; if one upholds man’s individual rights, one must uphold his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness—which means: one must uphold a political system that guarantees and protects these rights—which means: the politico-economic system of capitalism.

Individual rights, freedom, justice, progress were the philosophical values, the theoretical goals, and the practical results of capitalism. No other system can create them or maintain them; no other system ever has or will. For proof, consider the nature and function of basic principles; for evidence, consult history—and the present state of the different countries of Europe.

The issue is not slavery for a “good” cause versus slavery for a “bad” cause; the issue is not dictatorship by a “good” gang versus dictatorship by a “bad” gang. The issue is freedom versus dictatorship. It is only after men have chosen slavery and dictatorship that they can begin the usual gang warfare of socialized countries—today, it is called pressure-group warfare—over whose gang will rule, who will enslave whom, whose property will be plundered for whose benefit, who will be sacrificed to whose “noble” purpose. All such arguments come later and are, in fact, of no consequence: the results will always be the same. The first choice—and the only one that matters—is: freedom or dictatorship, capitalism or statism.

That is the choice which today’s political leaders are determined to evade. The “liberals” are trying to put statism over by stealth—statism of a semi-socialist, semi-fascist kind—without letting the country realize what road they are taking to what ultimate goal. And while such a policy is reprehensible, there is something more reprehensible still: the policy of the “conservatives,” who are trying to defend freedom by stealth.

If the “liberals” are afraid to identify their program by its proper name, if they advocate every specific step, measure, policy, and principle of statism, but squirm and twist themselves into semantic pretzels with such euphemisms as the “Welfare State,” the “New Deal,” the “New Frontier,” they still preserve a semblance of logic, if not of morality: it is the logic of a con man who cannot afford to let his victims discover his purpose. Besides, the majority of those who are loosely identified by the term “liberals” are afraid to let themselves discover that what they advocate is statism. They do not want to accept the full meaning of their goal; they want to keep all the advantages and effects of capitalism, while destroying the cause, and they want to establish statism without its necessary effects. They do not want to know or to admit that they are the champions of dictatorship and slavery. So they evade the issue, for fear of discovering that their goal is evil.

Immoral as this might be, what is one to think of men who evade the issue for fear of discovering that their goal is good? What is the moral stature of those who are afraid to proclaim that they are the champions of freedom? What is the integrity of those who outdo their enemies in smearing, misrepresenting, spitting at, and apologizing for their own ideal? What is the rationality of those who expect to trick people into freedom, cheat them into justice, fool them into progress, con them into preserving their rights, and, while indoctrinating them with statism, put one over on them and let them wake up in a perfect capitalist society some morning?

These are the “conservatives”—or most of their intellectual spokesmen.

One need not wonder why they are losing elections or why this country is stumbling anxiously, reluctantly toward statism. One need not wonder why any cause represented or upheld in such a manner is doomed. One need not wonder why any group with such a policy does, in fact, declare its own bankruptcy, forfeiting any claim to moral, intellectual, or political leadership.

The meaning of the “liberals’ ” program is pretty clear by now. But what are the “conservatives”? What is it that they are seeking to “conserve”?

It is generally understood that those who support the “conservatives” expect them to uphold the system which has been camouflaged by the loose term of “the American way of life.” The moral treason of the “conservative” leaders lies in the fact that they are hiding behind that camouflage: they do not have the courage to admit that the American way of life was capitalism, that that was the politico-economic system born and established in the United States, the system which, in one brief century, achieved a level of freedom, of progress, of prosperity, of human happiness, unmatched in all the other systems and centuries combined—and that that is the system which they are now allowing to perish by silent default.

If the “conservatives” do not stand for capitalism, they stand for and are nothing; they have no goal, no direction, no political principles, no social ideals, no intellectual values, no leadership to offer anyone.

Yet capitalism is what the “conservatives” dare not advocate or defend. They are paralyzed by the profound conflict between capitalism and the moral code which dominates our culture: the morality of altruism. Altruism holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue, and value. Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. The conflict between capitalism and altruism has been undercutting America from her start and, today, has reached its climax.

The American political system was based on a different moral principle: on the principle of man’s inalienable right to his own life—which means: on the principle that man has the right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself, and that men must deal with one another as traders, by voluntary choice to mutual benefit.

But this moral principle was merely implied in the American political system: it was not stated explicitly, it was not identified, it was not formulated into a full, philosophical code of ethics. This was the unfulfilled task which remained as a deadly flaw in our culture and which is destroying America today. Capitalism is perishing for lack of a moral base and of a full philosophical defense.

The social system based on and consonant with the altruist morality—with the code of self-sacrifice—is socialism, in all or any of its variants: fascism, Nazism, communism. All of them treat man as a sacrificial animal to be immolated for the benefit of the group, the tribe, the society, the state. Soviet Russia is the ultimate result, the final product, the full, consistent embodiment of the altruist morality in practice; it represents the only way that that morality can ever be practiced.

Not daring to challenge the morality of altruism, the “conservatives” have been struggling to evade the issue of morality or to bypass it. This has cost them their confidence, their courage, and their cause. Observe the guilty evasiveness, the apologetic timidity, the peculiarly non-intellectual, non-philosophical attitude projected by most “conservatives” in their speeches and in their writings. No man, and no movement, can succeed without moral certainty—without a full, rational conviction of the moral rightness of one’s cause.

Just as the “conservatives” feel guilty, uncertain, morally disarmed in fighting the “liberals,” so the “liberals” feel guilty, uncertain, morally disarmed in fighting the communists. When men share the same basic premise, it is the most consistent ones who win. So long as men accept the altruist morality, they will not be able to stop the advance of communism. The altruist morality is Soviet Russia’s best and only weapon.

The hypocrisy of America’s position in international affairs, the evasiveness, the self-effacing timidity, the apologies for her wealth, her power, her success, for all the greatest virtues of her system, the avoidance of any mention of “capitalism,” as if it were the skeleton in her closet—have done more for the prestige of Soviet Russia and for the growing spread of communism through the world than the Russians’ own cheap, bombastic propaganda could ever accomplish. An attitude of moral guilt is not becoming to the leader of a world crusade and will not rouse men to follow us.

And what do we ask men to fight for? They would join a crusade for freedom versus slavery, which means: for capitalism versus communism. But who will care to fight in a crusade for socialism versus communism? Who will want to fight and die to defend a system under which he will have to do voluntarily—or rather, by public vote—what a dictator would accomplish faster and much more thoroughly: the sacrifice of everyone to everyone? Who will want to crusade against murder—for the privilege of committing suicide?

In recent years, the “conservatives” have gradually come to a dim realization of the weakness in their position, of the philosophical flaw that had to be corrected. But the means by which they are attempting to correct it are worse than the original weakness; the means are discrediting and destroying the last remnants of their claim to intellectual leadership.

There are three interrelated arguments used by today’s “conservatives” to justify capitalism, which can best be designated as: the argument from faith—the argument from tradition—the argument from depravity.

Sensing their need of a moral base, many “conservatives” decided to choose religion as their moral justification; they claim that America and capitalism are based on faith in God. Politically, such a claim contradicts the fundamental principles of the United States: in America, religion is a private matter which cannot and must not be brought into political issues.

Intellectually, to rest one’s case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one’s enemies—that one has no rational arguments to offer. The “conservatives’ ” claim that their case rests on faith, means that there are no rational arguments to support the American system, no rational justification for freedom, justice, property, individual rights, that these rest on a mystic revelation and can be accepted only on faith—that in reason and logic the enemy is right, but men must hold faith as superior to reason.

Consider the implications of that theory. While the communists claim that they are the representatives of reason and science, the “conservatives” concede it and retreat into the realm of mysticism, of faith, of the supernatural, into another world, surrendering this world to communism. It is the kind of victory that the communists’ irrational ideology could never have won on its own merits.

Observe the results. On the occasion of Khrushchev’s first visit to America, he declared, at a televised luncheon, that he had threatened to bury us because it has been “scientifically” proved that communism is the system of the future, destined to rule the world. What did our spokesman answer? Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge answered that our system is based on faith in God. Prior to Khrushchev’s arrival, the “conservative” leaders—including senators and House members—were issuing indignant protests against his visit, but the only action they suggested to the American people, the only “practical” form of protest, was: prayer and the holding of religious services for Khrushchev’s victims. To hear prayer offered as their only weapon by the representatives of the most powerful country on earth—a country allegedly dedicated to the fight for freedom—was enough to discredit America and capitalism in anyone’s eyes, at home and abroad.

Now consider the second argument: the attempt to justify capitalism on the ground of tradition. Certain groups are trying to switch the word “conservative” into the exact opposite of its modern American usage, to switch it back to its nineteenth-century meaning, and to put this over on the public. These groups declare that to be a “conservative” means to uphold the status quo, the given, the established, regardless of what it might be, regardless of whether it is good or bad, right or wrong, defensible or indefensible. They declare that we must defend the American political system not because it is right, but because our ancestors chose it, not because it is good, but because it is old.

America was created by men who broke with all political traditions and who originated a system unprecedented in history, relying on nothing but the “unaided” power of their own intellect. But the “neo-conservatives” are now trying to tell us that America was the product of “faith in revealed truths” and of uncritical respect for the traditions of the past (!).

It is certainly irrational to use the “new” as a standard of value, to believe that an idea or a policy is good merely because it is new. But it is much more preposterously irrational to use the “old” as a standard of value, to claim that an idea or a policy is good merely because it is ancient. The “liberals” are constantly asserting that they represent the future, that they are “new,” “progressive,” “forward-looking,” etc.—and they denounce the “conservatives” as old-fashioned representatives of a dead past. The “conservatives” concede it, and thus help the “liberals” to propagate one of today’s most grotesque inversions: collectivism, the ancient, frozen, status society, is offered to us in the name of progress—while capitalism, the only free, dynamic, creative society ever devised, is defended in the name of stagnation.

The plea to preserve “tradition” as such, can appeal only to those who have given up or to those who never intended to achieve anything in life. It is a plea that appeals to the worst elements in men and rejects the best: it appeals to fear, sloth, cowardice, conformity, self-doubt—and rejects creativeness, originality, courage, independence, self-reliance. It is an outrageous plea to address to human beings anywhere, but particularly outrageous here, in America, the country based on the principle that man must stand on his own feet, live by his own judgment, and move constantly forward as a productive, creative innovator.

The argument that we must respect “tradition” as such, respect it merely because it is a “tradition,” means that we must accept the values other men have chosen, merely because other men have chosen them—with the necessary implication of: who are we to change them? The affront to a man’s self-esteem, in such an argument, and the profound contempt for man’s nature are obvious.

This leads us to the third—and the worst—argument, used by some “conservatives”: the attempt to defend capitalism on the ground of man’s depravity.

This argument runs as follows: since men are weak, fallible, non-omniscient and innately depraved, no man may be entrusted with the responsibility of being a dictator and of ruling everybody else; therefore, a free society is the proper way of life for imperfect creatures. Please grasp fully the implications of this argument: since men are depraved, they are not good enough for a dictatorship; freedom is all that they deserve; if they were perfect, they would be worthy of a totalitarian state.

Dictatorship—this theory asserts—believe it or not, is the result of faith in man and in man’s goodness; if people believed that man is depraved by nature, they would not entrust a dictator with power. This means that a belief in human depravity protects human freedom—that it is wrong to enslave the depraved, but would be right to enslave the virtuous. And more: dictatorships—this theory declares—and all the other disasters of the modern world are man’s punishment for the sin of relying on his intellect and of attempting to improve his life on earth by seeking to devise a perfect political system and to establish a rational society. This means that humility, passivity, lethargic resignation and a belief in Original Sin are the bulwarks of capitalism. One could not go farther than this in historical, political, and psychological ignorance or subversion. This is truly the voice of the Dark Ages rising again—in the midst of our industrial civilization.

The cynical, man-hating advocates of this theory sneer at all ideals, scoff at all human aspirations and deride all attempts to improve men’s existence. “You can’t change human nature,” is their stock answer to the socialists. Thus they concede that socialism is the ideal, but human nature is unworthy of it; after which, they invite men to crusade for capitalism—a crusade one would have to start by spitting in one’s own face. Who will fight and die to defend his status as a miserable sinner? If, as a result of such theories, people become contemptuous of “conservatism,” do not wonder and do not ascribe it to the cleverness of the socialists.

Such are capitalism’s alleged defenders—and such are the arguments by which they propose to save it.

It is obvious that with this sort of theoretical equipment and with an unbroken record of defeats, concessions, compromises, and betrayals in practice, today’s “conservatives” are futile, impotent and, culturally, dead. They have nothing to offer and can achieve nothing. They can only help to destroy intellectual standards, to disintegrate thought, to discredit capitalism, and to accelerate this country’s uncontested collapse into despair and dictatorship.

But to those of you who do wish to contest it—particularly those of you who are young and are not ready to surrender—I want to give a warning: nothing is as dead as the stillborn. Nothing is as futile as a movement without goals, or a crusade without ideals, or a battle without ammunition. A bad argument is worse than ineffectual: it lends credence to the arguments of your opponents. A half-battle is worse than none: it does not end in mere defeat—it helps and hastens the victory of your enemies.

At a time when the world is torn by a profound ideological conflict, do not join those who have no ideology—no ideas, no philosophy—to offer you. Do not go into battle armed with nothing but stale slogans, pious platitudes, and meaningless generalities. Do not join any so-called “conservative” group, organization, or person that advocates any variant of the arguments from “faith,” from “tradition,” or from “depravity.” Any home-grown sophist in any village debate can refute those arguments and can drive you into evasions in about five minutes. What would happen to you, with such ammunition, on the philosophical battlefield of the world? But you would never reach that battlefield: you would not be heard on it, since you would have nothing to say.

It is not by means of evasions that one saves civilization. It is not by means of empty slogans that one saves a world perishing for lack of intellectual leadership. It is not by means of ignoring its causes that one cures a deadly disease.

So long as the “conservatives” ignore the issue of what destroyed capitalism, and merely plead with men to “go back,” they cannot escape the question of: back to what? And none of their evasions can camouflage the fact that the implicit answer is: back to an earlier stage of the cancer which is devouring us today and which has almost reached its terminal stage. That cancer is the morality of altruism.

So long as the “conservatives” evade the issue of altruism, all of their pleas and arguments amount, in essence, to this: Why can’t we just go back to the nineteenth century when capitalism and altruism seemed somehow to co-exist? Why do we have to go to extremes and think of surgery, when the early stages of the cancer were painless?

The answer is that the facts of reality—which includes history and philosophy—are not to be evaded. Capitalism was destroyed by the morality of altruism. Capitalism is based on individual rights—not on the sacrifice of the individual to the “public good” of the collective. Capitalism and altruism are incompatible. It’s one or the other. It’s too late for compromises, for platitudes, and for aspirin tablets. There is no way to save capitalism—or freedom, or civilization, or America—except by intellectual surgery, that is: by destroying the source of the destruction, by rejecting the morality of altruism.

If you want to fight for capitalism, there is only one type of argument that you should adopt, the only one that can ever win in a moral issue: the argument from self-esteem. This means: the argument from man’s right to exist—from man’s inalienable individual right to his own life.

I quote from my book For the New Intellectual:

The world crisis of today is a moral crisis—and nothing less than a moral revolution can resolve it: a moral revolution to sanction and complete the political achievement of the American Revolution. . . . The New Intellectual must fight for capitalism, not as a “practical” issue, not as an economic issue, but, with the most righteous pride, as a moral issue. That is what capitalism deserves, and nothing less will save it.

Capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future—if mankind is to have a future. Those who wish to fight for it must discard the title of “conservatives.” “Conservatism” has always been a misleading name, inappropriate to America. Today, there is nothing left to “conserve”: the established political philosophy, the intellectual orthodoxy, and the status quo are collectivism. Those who reject all the basic premises of collectivism are radicals in the proper sense of the word: “radical” means “fundamental.” Today, the fighters for capitalism have to be, not bankrupt “conservatives,” but new radicals, new intellectuals and, above all, new, dedicated moralists.

20. THE NEW FASCISM: RULE BY CONSENSUS

by Ayn Rand

I shall begin by doing a very unpopular thing that does not fit today’s intellectual fashions and is, therefore, “anti-consensus”: I shall begin by defining my terms, so that you will know what I am talking about.

Let me give you the dictionary definitions of three political terms: socialism, fascism, and statism:

Socialism—a theory or system of social organization which advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production, capital, land, etc. in the community as a whole.

Fascism—a governmental system with strong centralized power, permitting no opposition or criticism, controlling all affairs of the nation (industrial, commercial, etc.)

Statism—the principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic, political, and related controls in the state at the cost of individual liberty.⁵⁴

Based on a lecture given at The Ford Hall Forum, Boston, on April 18, 1965. Published in The Objectivist Newsletter, May and June 1965.

It is obvious that “statism” is the wider, generic term, of which the other two are specific variants. It is also obvious that statism is the dominant political trend of our day. But which of those two variants represents the specific direction of that trend?

Observe that both “socialism” and “fascism” involve the issue of property rights. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Observe the difference in those two theories: socialism negates private property rights altogether, and advocates “the vesting of ownership and control ” in the community as a whole, i.e., in the state; fascism leaves ownership in the hands of private individuals, but transfers control of the property to the government.

Ownership without control is a contradiction in terms: it means “property,” without the right to use it or to dispose of it. It means that the citizens retain the responsibility of holding property, without any of its advantages, while the government acquires all the advantages without any of the responsibility.

In this respect, socialism is the more honest of the two theories. I say “more honest,” not “better”—because, in practice, there is no difference between them: both come from the same collectivist-statist principle, both negate individual rights and subordinate the individual to the collective, both deliver the livelihood and the lives of the citizens into the power of an omnipotent government—and the differences between them are only a matter of time, degree, and superficial detail, such as the choice of slogans by which the rulers delude their enslaved subjects.

Which of these two variants of statism are we moving toward: socialism or fascism?

To answer this question, one must first ask: Which is the dominant ideological trend of today’s culture?

The disgraceful and terrifying answer is: there is no ideological trend today. There is no ideology. There are no political principles, theories, ideals, or philosophy. There is no direction, no goal, no compass, no vision of the future, no intellectual element of leadership. Are there any emotional elements dominating today’s culture? Yes. One. Fear.

A country without a political philosophy is like a ship drifting at random in mid-ocean, at the mercy of any chance wind, wave, or current, a ship whose passengers huddle in their cabins and cry: “Don’t rock the boat!”—for fear of discovering that the captain’s bridge is empty.

It is obvious that a boat which cannot stand rocking is doomed already and that it had better be rocked hard, if it is to regain its course—but this realization presupposes a grasp of facts, of reality, of principles and a long-range view, all of which are precisely the things that the “non-rockers” are frantically struggling to evade.

Just as a neurotic believes that the facts of reality will vanish if he refuses to recognize them—so, today, the neurosis of an entire culture leads men to believe that their desperate need of political principles and concepts will vanish if they succeed in obliterating all principles and concepts. But since, in fact, neither an individual nor a nation can exist without some form of ideology, this sort of anti-ideology is now the formal, explicit, dominant ideology of our bankrupt culture.

This anti-ideology has a new and very ugly name: it is called “Government by Consensus.”

If some demagogue were to offer us, as a guiding creed, the following tenets: that statistics should be substituted for truth, vote-counting for principles, numbers for rights, and public polls for morality—that pragmatic, range-of-the-moment expediency should be the criterion of a country’s interests, and that the number of its adherents should be the criterion of an idea’s truth or falsehood—that any desire of any nature whatsoever should be accepted as a valid claim, provided it is held by a sufficient number of people—that a majority may do anything it pleases to a minority—in short, gang rule and mob rule—if a demagogue were to offer it, he would not get very far. Yet all of it is contained in—and camouflaged by—the notion of “Government by Consensus.”

This notion is now being plugged, not as an ideology, but as an anti-ideology; not as a principle, but as a means of obliterating principles; not as reason, but as rationalization, as a verbal ritual or a magic formula to assuage the national anxiety neurosis—a kind of pep pill or goof-ball for the “non-boat-rockers,” and a chance to play it deuces wild, for the others.

It is only today’s lethargic contempt for the pronouncements of our political and intellectual leaders that blinds people to the meaning, implications, and consequences of the notion of “Government by Consensus.” You have all heard it and, I suspect, dismissed it as politicians’ oratory, giving no thought to its actual meaning. But that is what I urge you to consider.

A significant clue to that meaning was given in an article by Tom Wicker in The New York Times (October 11, 1964). Referring to “what Nelson Rockefeller used to call ‘the mainstream of American thought,’ ” Mr. Wicker writes:

That mainstream is what political theorists have been projecting for years as “the national consensus”—what Walter Lippmann has aptly called “the vital center.” . . . Political moderation, almost by definition, is at the heart of the consensus. That is, the consensus generally sprawls over all acceptable political views—all ideas that are not totally repugnant to and do not directly threaten some major segment of the population. Therefore, acceptable ideas must take the views of others into account and that is what is meant by moderation.

Now let us identify what this means. “The consensus generally sprawls over all acceptable political views . . .” Acceptable—to whom? To the consensus. And since the government is to be ruled by the consensus, this means that political views are to be divided into those which are “acceptable” and those which are “unacceptable” to the government. What would be the criterion of “acceptability”? Mr. Wicker supplies it. Observe that the criterion is not intellectual, not a question of whether certain views are true or false; the criterion is not moral, not a question of whether the views are right or wrong; the criterion is emotional: whether the views are or are not “repugnant.” To whom? “To some major segment of the population.” There is also the additional proviso that those views must not “directly threaten” that major segment.

What about the minor segments of the population? Are the views that threaten them “acceptable”? What about the smallest segment: the individual? Obviously, the individual and the minority groups are not to be considered; no matter how repugnant an idea may be to a man and no matter how gravely it may threaten his life, his work, his future, he is to be ignored or sacrificed by the omnipotent consensus and its government—unless he has a gang, a sizable gang, to support him.

What exactly is a “direct threat” to any part of the population? In a mixed economy, every government action is a direct threat to some men and an indirect threat to all. Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others. By what criterion of justice is a consensus-government to be guided? By the size of the victim’s gang.

Now note Mr. Wicker’s last sentence: “Therefore, acceptable ideas must take the views of others into account and that is what is meant by moderation.” And just what is meant here by “the views of others”? Of which others? Since it is not the views of individuals nor of minorities, the only discernible meaning is that every “major segment” must take into account the views of all the other “major segments.” But suppose that a group of socialists wants to nationalize all factories, and a group of industrialists wants to keep its properties? What would it mean, for either group, to “take into account” the views of the other? And what would “moderation” consist of, in such a case? What would constitute “moderation” in a conflict between a group of men who want to be supported at public expense—and a group of taxpayers who have other uses for their money? What would constitute “moderation” in a conflict between the member of a smaller group, such as a Negro in the South, who believes that he has an inalienable right to a fair trial—and the larger group of Southern racists who believe that the “public good” of their community permits them to lynch him? What would constitute “moderation” in a conflict between me and a communist (or between our respective followers), when my views are that I have an inalienable right to my life, liberty, and happiness—and his views are that the “public good” of the state permits him to rob, enslave, or murder me?

There can be no meeting ground, no middle, no compromise between opposite principles. There can be no such thing as “moderation” in the realm of reason and of morality. But reason and morality are precisely the two concepts abrogated by the notion of “Government by Consensus.”

The advocates of that notion would declare at this point that any idea which permits no compromise constitutes “extremism”—that any form of “extremism,” any uncompromising stand, is evil—that the consensus “sprawls” only over those ideas which are amenable to “moderation”—and that “moderation” is the supreme virtue, superseding reason and morality.

This is the clue to the core, essence, motive, and real meaning of the doctrine of “Government by Consensus”: the cult of compromise. Compromise is the pre-condition, the necessity, the imperative of a mixed economy. The “consensus” doctrine is an attempt to translate the brute facts of a mixed economy into an ideological—or anti-ideological—-system and to provide them with a semblance of justification.

A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and controls—with no principles, rules, or theories to define either. Since the introduction of controls necessitates and leads to further controls, it is an unstable, explosive mixture which, ultimately, has to repeal the controls or collapse into dictatorship. A mixed economy has no principles to define its policies, its goals, its laws—no principles to limit the power of its government. The only principle of a mixed economy—which, necessarily, has to remain unnamed and unacknowledged—is that no one’s interests are safe, everyone’s interests are on a public auction block, and anything goes for anyone who can get away with it. Such a system—or, more precisely, anti-system—breaks up a country into an ever-growing number of enemy camps, into economic groups fighting one another for self-preservation in an indeterminate mixture of defense and offense, as the nature of such a jungle demands. While, politically, a mixed economy preserves the semblance of an organized society with a semblance of law and order, economically it is the equivalent of the chaos that had ruled China for centuries: a chaos of robber gangs looting—and draining—the productive elements of the country.

A mixed economy is rule by pressure groups. It is an amoral, institutionalized civil war of special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another’s expense by an act of government—i.e., by force. In the absence of individual rights, in the absence of any moral or legal principles, a mixed economy’s only hope to preserve its precarious semblance of order, to restrain the savage, desperately rapacious groups it itself has created, and to prevent the legalized plunder from running over into plain, unlegalized looting of all by all—is compromise; compromise on everything and in every realm—material, spiritual, intellectual—so that no group would step over the line by demanding too much and topple the whole rotted structure. If the game is to continue, nothing can be permitted to remain firm, solid, absolute, untouchable; everything (and everyone) has to be fluid, flexible, indeterminate, approximate. By what standard are anyone’s actions to be guided? By the expediency of any immediate moment.

The only danger, to a mixed economy, is any not-to-be-compromised value, virtue, or idea. The only threat is any uncompromising person, group, or movement. The only enemy is integrity.

It is unnecessary to point out who will be the steady winners and who the constant losers in a game of that kind.

It is also clear what sort of unity (of consensus) that game requires: the unity of a tacit agreement that anything goes, anything is for sale (or for “negotiation”), and the rest is up to the free-for-all of pressuring, lobbying, manipulating, favor-swapping, public-relation’ing, give-and-taking, double-crossing, begging, bribing, betraying—and chance, the blind chance of a war in which the prize is the privilege of using legal armed force against legally disarmed victims.

Observe that this type of prize establishes one basic interest held in common by all the players: the desire to have a strong government—a government of unlimited power, strong enough to let the winners and would-be winners get away with whatever they’re seeking; a government uncommitted to any policy, unrestrained by any ideology, a government that hoards an ever-growing power, power for power’s sake—which means: for the sake and use of any “major” gang who might seize it momentarily to ram their particular piece of legislation down the country’s throat. Observe, therefore, that the doctrine of “compromise” and “moderation” applies to everything except one issue: any suggestion to limit the power of the government.

Observe the torrents of vilification, abuse, and hysterical hatred unleashed by the “moderates” against any advocate of freedom, i.e., of capitalism. Observe that such designations as “extreme middle” or “militant middle” are being used by people seriously and self-righteously. Observe the inordinately vicious intensity of the smear-campaign against Senator Goldwater, which had the overtones of panic: the panic of the “moderates,” the “vital-centrists,” the “middle-of-the-roaders” in the face of the possibility that a real, pro-capitalism movement might put an end to their game. A movement, incidentally, which does not exist, as yet, since Senator Goldwater was not an advocate of capitalism—and since his meaningless, unphilosophical, unintellectual campaign has contributed to the entrenchment of the consensus-advocates. But what is significant here is the nature of their panic: it gave us a glimpse of their vaunted “moderation,” their “democratic” respect for the people’s choices and their tolerance of disagreements or opposition.

In a letter to The New York Times (June 23, 1964), an assistant professor of political science, fearing Goldwater’s nomination, wrote as follows:

The real danger lies in the divisive campaign which his nomination would provoke. . . . The result of a Goldwater candidacy would be a divided and embittered electorate. . . . To be effective, American government requires a high degree of consensus and bipartisanship on basic issues. . . .

When and by whom has statism been accepted as the basic principle of America—and as a principle which should now be placed beyond debate or dissension, so that no basic issues are to be raised any longer? Isn’t that the formula of a one-party government? The professor did not specify.

Another letter-writer in The New York Times (June 24, 1964), identified in print as a “Liberal Democrat,” went a little farther.

Let the American people choose in November. If they choose overwhelmingly for Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats, then once and for all the Federal Government can get on, with no excuses, with the job millions of Negroes, unemployed, aged, sick and otherwise handicapped persons expect it to do—to say nothing of our overseas commitments.

If the people choose Goldwater, then it would seem the nation was hardly worth saving after all.

Woodrow Wilson once said that there is such a thing as being too proud to fight; then he had to go to war. Once and for all let us have it out, while the battle yet can be fought with ballots instead of bullets.

Does this gentleman mean that if we don’t vote his way, he will resort to bullets? Your guess is as good as mine.

The New York Times, which had been a conspicuous advocate of “Government by Consensus,” said some curious things in its comment on President Johnson’s victory. Its editorial of November 8, 1964, stated:

No matter how massive the electoral victory—and it was massive—the Administration cannot merely ride the crest of the popular wave rolling along on a sea of platitudinous generalizations and euphoric promises . . . now that it has a broad popular mandate, it has the moral as well as the political obligation not to try to be all things to all men but to settle down to a hard, concrete, purposeful course of action.

What kind of purposeful action? If the voters were offered nothing but “platitudinous generalizations and euphoric promises,” how can their vote be taken as a “broad popular mandate”? A mandate for an unnamed purpose? A political blank check? And if Mr. Johnson did win a massive victory by trying “to be all things to all men,” then which things is he now expected to be, which voters is he to disappoint or betray—and what becomes of the broad popular consensus?

Morally and philosophically, that editorial is highly dubious and contradictory. But it becomes clear and consistent in the context of a mixed economy’s anti-ideology. The president of a mixed economy is not expected to have a specific program or policy. A blank check on power is all that he asks the voters to give him. Thereafter, it’s up to the pressure-group game, which everybody is supposed to understand and endorse, but never mention. Which things he will be to which men depends on the chances of the game—and on the “major segments of the population.” His job is only to hold the power—and to dispense the favors.

In the 1930’s, the “liberals” had a program of broad social reforms and a crusading spirit, they advocated a planned society, they talked in terms of abstract principles, they propounded theories of a predominantly socialistic nature—and most of them were touchy about the accusation that they were enlarging the government’s power; most of them were assuring their opponents that government power was only a temporary means to an end—a “noble end,” the liberation of the individual from his bondage to material needs.

Today, nobody talks of a planned society in the “liberal” camp; long-range programs, theories, principles, abstractions, and “noble ends” are not fashionable any longer. Modern “liberals” deride any political concern with such large-scale matters as an entire society or an economy as a whole; they concern themselves with single, concrete-bound, range-of-the-moment projects and demands, without regard to cost, context, or consequences. “Pragmatic”—not “idealistic”—is their favorite adjective when they are called upon to justify their “stance,” as they call it, not “stand.” They are militantly opposed to political philosophy; they denounce political concepts as “tags,” “labels,” “myths,” “illusions”—and resist any attempt to “label”—i.e., to identify—their own views. They are belligerently anti-theoretical and—with a faded mantle of intellectuality still clinging to their shoulders—they are anti-intellectual. The only remnant of their former “idealism” is a tired, cynical, ritualistic quoting of shopworn “humanitarian” slogans, when the occasion demands it.

Cynicism, uncertainty, and fear are the insignia of the culture which they are still dominating by default. And the only thing that has not rusted in their ideological equipment, but has grown savagely brighter and clearer through the years, is their lust for power—for an autocratic, statist, totalitarian government power. It is not a crusading brightness, it is not the lust of a fanatic with a mission—it is more like the glassy-eyed brightness of a somnambulist whose stuporous despair has long since swallowed the memory of his purpose, but who still clings to his mystic weapon in the stubborn belief that “there ought to be a law,” that everything will be all right if only somebody will pass a law, that every problem can be solved by the magic power of brute force. . . .

Such is the present intellectual state and ideological trend of our culture.

Now I shall ask you to consider the question I raised at the beginning of this discussion: Which of these two variants of statism are we moving toward: socialism or fascism?

Let me submit in evidence, as part of the answer, a quotation from an editorial that appeared in the Washington Star (October 1964). It is an eloquent mixture of truth and misinformation, and a typical example of the state of today’s political knowledge:

Socialism is quite simply the state ownership of the means of production. This has never been proposed by a major party candidate for the Presidency and is not now proposed by Lyndon Johnson. [True.]

There is, however, a whole series of American legislative acts that increase either government regulation of private business or government responsibility for individual welfare. [True.] It is to such legislation that warning cries of “socialism!” refer.

Besides the Constitutional provision for Federal regulation of interstate commerce, such “intrusion” of government into the market-place begins with the antitrust laws. [Very true.] To them we owe the continued existence of competitive capitalism and the non-arrival of cartel capitalism. [Untrue.] Inasmuch as socialism is the product, one way or another, of cartel capitalism [untrue], it may reasonably be said that such government interference with business has in fact prevented socialism. [Worse than untrue.]

As to welfare legislation, it is still light years away from the “cradle to grave” security sponsored by contemporary socialism. [Not quite true.] It seems much more like ordinary human concern for human distress than like an ideological program of any kind. [The last part of this sentence is true: it is not an ideological program. As to the first part, ordinary human concern for human distress does not manifest itself ordinarily in the form of a gun aimed at the wallets and earnings of one’s neighbors.]

This editorial did not mention, of course, that a system in which the government does not nationalize the means of production, but assumes total control over the economy is fascism.

It is true that the welfare-statists are not socialists, that they never advocated or intended the socialization of private property, that they want to “preserve” private property—with government control of its use and disposal. But that is the fundamental characteristic of fascism.

Here is another piece of evidence. This one is less crudely naive than the first and much more insidiously wrong. This is from a letter to The New York Times (November 1, 1964), written by an assistant professor of economics:

Viewed by almost every yardstick, the United States today is more committed to private enterprise than probably any other industrial country and is not even remotely approaching a socialist system. As the term is understood by students of comparative economic systems and others who do not use it loosely, socialism is identified with extensive nationalization, a dominant public sector, a strong cooperative movement, egalitarian income distribution, a total welfare state and central planning.

In the United States not only has there been no nationalization, but Government concerns have been turned over to private enterprise. . . .

Income distribution in this country is one of the most unequal among the developed nations, and tax cuts and tax loopholes have blunted the moderate progressivity of our tax structure. Thirty years after the New Deal, the United States has a very limited welfare state, compared with the comprehensive social security and public housing schemes in many European countries.

By no stretch of the imagination is the real issue in this campaign a choice between capitalism and socialism or between a free and a planned economy. The issue is about two differing concepts of the role of government within the framework of an essentially private enterprise system.

The role of government in a private enterprise system is that of a policeman who protects man’s individual rights (including property rights) by protecting men from physical force; in a free economy, the government does not control, regulate, coerce, or interfere with men’s economic activities.

I do not know the political views of the writer of that letter; he may be a “liberal” or he may be an alleged defender of capitalism. But if he is this last, then I must point out that such views as his—which are shared by many “conservatives”—are more damaging and derogatory to capitalism than the ideas of its avowed enemies.

Such “conservatives” regard capitalism as a system compatible with government controls, and thus help to spread the most dangerous misconceptions. While full, laissez-faire capitalism has not yet existed anywhere, while some (unnecessary) government controls were allowed to dilute and undercut the original American system (more through error than through theoretical intention)—such controls were minor impediments, the mixed economies of the nineteenth century were predominantly free, and it is this unprecedented freedom that brought about mankind’s unprecedented progress. The principles, the theory, and the actual practice of capitalism rest on a free, unregulated market, as the history of the last two centuries has amply demonstrated. No defender of capitalism can permit himself to ignore the exact meaning of the term “laissez-faire”—and of the term “mixed economy,” which clearly indicates the two opposite elements involved in the mixture: the element of economic freedom, which is capitalism, and the element of government controls, which is statism.

An insistent campaign has been going on for years to make us accept the Marxist view that all governments are tools of economic class interests and that capitalism is not a free economy, but a system of government controls serving some privileged class. The purpose of that campaign is to distort economics, rewrite history, and obliterate the existence and the possibility of a free country and an uncontrolled economy. Since a system of nominal private property ruled by government controls is not capitalism, but fascism, the only choice this obliteration would leave us is the choice between fascism and socialism (or communism)—which all the statists in the world, of all varieties, degrees, and denominations, are struggling frantically to make us believe. (The destruction of freedom is their common goal, after which they hope to fight one another for power.)

It is thus that the views of that professor and of many “conservatives” lend credence and support to the vicious leftist propaganda which equates capitalism with fascism.

But there is a bitter kind of justice in the logic of events. That propaganda is having an effect which may be advantageous to the communists, but which is the opposite of the effect intended by the “liberals,” the welfare-statists, the socialists, who share the guilt of spreading it: instead of smearing capitalism, that propaganda has succeeded in whitewashing and disguising fascism.

In this country, few people care to advocate, to defend, or even to understand capitalism; yet fewer still wish to give up its advantages. So if they are told that capitalism is compatible with controls, with the particular controls which further their particular interests—be it government handouts, or minimum wages, or price-supports, or subsidies, or antitrust laws, or censorship of dirty movies—they will go along with such programs, in the comforting belief that the results will be nothing worse than a “modified” capitalism. And thus a country which does abhor fascism is moving by imperceptible degrees—through ignorance, confusion, evasion, moral cowardice, and intellectual default—not toward socialism or any mawkish altruistic ideal, but toward a plain, brutal, predatory, power-grubbing, de facto fascism.

No, we have not reached that stage. But we are certainly not “an essentially private enterprise system” any longer. At present, we are a disintegrating, unsound, precariously unstable mixed economy—a random, mongrel mixture of socialistic schemes, communistic influences, fascist controls, and shrinking remnants of capitalism still paying the costs of it all—the total of it rolling in the direction of a fascist state.

Consider our present Administration. I don’t think I’ll be accused of unfairness if I say that President Johnson is not a philosophical thinker. No, he is not a fascist, he is not a socialist, he is not a pro-capitalist. Ideologically, he is not anything in particular. Judging by his past record and by the consensus of his own supporters, the concept of an ideology is not applicable in his case. He is a politician—a very dangerous, yet very appropriate phenomenon in our present state. He is an almost fiction-like, archetypical embodiment of the perfect leader of a mixed economy: a man who enjoys power for power’s sake, who is expert at the game of manipulating pressure groups, of playing them all against one another, who loves the process of dispensing smiles, frowns, and favors, particularly sudden favors, and whose vision does not extend beyond the range of the next election.

Neither President Johnson nor any of today’s prominent groups would advocate the socialization of industry. Like his modern predecessors in office, Mr. Johnson knows that businessmen are the milch-cows of a mixed economy, and he does not want to destroy them, he wants them to prosper and to feed his welfare projects (which the next election requires), while they, the businessmen, are eating out of his hand, as they seem to be anxiously eager to do. The business lobby is certain to get its fair share of influence and of recognition—just like the labor lobby or the farm lobby or the lobby of any “major segment”—on his own terms. He will be particularly adept at the task of creating and encouraging the type of businessmen whom I call “the aristocracy of pull.” This is not a socialistic pattern; it is the typical pattern of fascism.

The political, intellectual, and moral meaning of Mr. Johnson’s policy toward businessmen was summed up eloquently in an article in The New York Times of January 4, 1965:

Mr. Johnson is an out-and-out Keynesian in his assiduous wooing of the business community. Unlike President Roosevelt, who delighted in attacking businessmen until World War II forced him into a reluctant truce, and President Kennedy, who also incurred business hostility, President Johnson has worked long and hard to get businessmen to join ranks in a national consensus for his programs.

This campaign may perturb many Keynesians, but it is pure Keynes. Indeed, Lord Keynes, who once was regarded as a dangerous and Machiavellian figure by American businessmen, made specific suggestions for improving relations between the President and the business community.

He set down his views in 1938 in a letter to President Roosevelt, who was running into renewed criticism from businessmen following the recession that took place the previous year. Lord Keynes, who always sought to transform capitalism in order to save it, recognized the importance of business confidence and tried to convince Mr. Roosevelt to repair the damage that had been done.

He advised the President that businessmen were not politicians and did not respond to the same treatment. They are, he wrote “much milder than politicians, at the same time allured and terrified by the glare of publicity, easily persuaded to be ‘patriots,’ perplexed, bemused, indeed terrified, yet only too anxious to take a cheerful view, vain perhaps but very unsure of themselves, pathetically responsive to a kind word. . . .”

He was confident that Mr. Roosevelt could tame them and make them do his bidding, provided he followed some simple Keynesian rules.

“You could do anything you liked with them,” the letter continued, “if you would treat them (even the big ones), not as wolves and tigers, but as domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish.”

President Roosevelt ignored his advice. So, apparently, did President Kennedy. But President Johnson seems to have got the message. . . . By kind words and frequent pats on the head, he had had the business community eating out of his hand.

Mr. Johnson appears to agree with Lord Keynes’s view that there is little to be gained by carrying on a feud with businessmen. As he put it, “If you work them into the surly, obstinate, terrified mood of which domestic animals, wrongly handled, are capable, the nation’s burden will not get carried to market; and in the end, public opinion will veer their way.”

The view of businessmen as “domestic animals” who carry “the nation’s burden” and who must be “trained” by the President “to do his bidding” is certainly not a view compatible with capitalism. It is not a view applicable to socialism, since there are no businessmen in a socialist state. It is a view that expresses the economic essence of fascism, of the relationship between business and government in a fascist state.

No matter what the verbal camouflage, such is the actual meaning of any variant of “transformed” (or “modified” or “modernized” or “humanized”) capitalism. In all such doctrines, the “humanization” consists of turning some members of society (the most productive ones) into beasts of burden.

The formula by which the sacrificial animals are to be fooled and tamed is being repeated today with growing insistence and frequency: businessmen, it is said, must regard the government, not as an enemy, but as a “partner.” The notion of a “partnership” between a private group and public officials, between business and government, between production and force, is a linguistic corruption (an “anti-concept”) typical of a fascist ideology—an ideology that regards force as the basic element and ultimate arbiter in all human relationships.

“Partnership” is an indecent euphemism for “government control.” There can be no partnership between armed bureaucrats and defenseless private citizens who have no choice but to obey. What chance would you have against a “partner” whose arbitrary word is law, who may give you a hearing (if your pressure group is big enough), but who will play favorites and bargain your interests away, who will always have the last word and the legal “right” to enforce it on you at the point of a gun, holding your property, your work, your future, your life in his power? Is that the meaning of “partnership”?⁵⁵

But there are men who may find such a prospect attractive; they exist among businessmen as among every other group or profession: the men who dread the competition of a free market and would welcome an armed “partner” to extort special advantages over their abler competitors; men who seek to rise, not by merit but by pull, men who are willing and eager to live not by right, but by favor. Among businessmen, this type of mentality was responsible for the passage of the antitrust laws and is still supporting them today.

A substantial number of Republican businessmen switched to the side of Mr. Johnson in the last election. Here are some interesting observations on this subject, from a survey by The New York Times (September 16, 1964):

Interviews in five cities in the industrial Northeast and Midwest disclose striking differences in political outlook between officials of large corporations and men who operate smaller businesses. . . . The business executives who expect to cast the first Democratic Presidential vote of their lives are nearly all affiliated with large companies. . . . There is more support for President Johnson among business executives who are in their 40’s and 50’s than there is among either older or younger businessmen. . . . Many businessmen in their 40’s and 50’s say they find relatively little shifting toward support of Mr. Johnson on the part of younger business executives. Interviews with those in their 30’s confirm this. . . . The younger executives themselves speak with pride of their generation as the one that interrupted and reversed the trend toward more liberalism in younger persons. . . . It is on the issue of Government deficits that the division of opinion between small and large businessmen emerges most dramatically. Officials of giant corporations have a far greater tendency to accept the idea that budget deficits are sometimes necessary and even desirable. The typical small businessman, however, reserves a very special scorn for deficit spending. . . .

This gives us an indication of who are the vested interests in a mixed economy—and what such an economy does to the beginners or the young.

An essential aspect of the socialistically inclined mentality is the desire to obliterate the difference between the earned and the unearned, and, therefore, to permit no differentiation between such businessmen as Hank Rearden and Orren Boyle. To a concrete-bound, range-of-the-moment, primitive socialist mentality—a mentality that clamors for a “redistribution of wealth” without any concern for the origin of wealth—the enemy is all those who are rich, regardless of the source of their riches. Such mentalities, those aging, graying “liberals,” who had been the “idealists” of the 30’s, are clinging desperately to the illusion that we are moving toward some sort of socialist state inimical to the rich and beneficial to the poor—while frantically evading the spectacle of what kind of rich are being destroyed and what kind are flourishing under the system they, the “liberals,” have established. The grim joke is on them: their alleged “ideals” have paved the way, not toward socialism, but toward fascism. The collector of their efforts is not the helplessly, brainlessly virtuous “little man” of their flat-footed imagination and shopworn fiction, but the worst type of predatory rich, the rich-by-force, the rich-by-political-privilege, the type who has no chance under capitalism, but who is always there to cash in on every collectivist “noble experiment.”

It is the creators of wealth, the Hank Reardens, who are destroyed under any form of statism—socialist, communist, or fascist; it is the parasites, the Orren Boyles, who are the privileged “elite” and the profiteers of statism, particularly of fascism. (The special profiteers of socialism are the James Taggarts; of communism—the Floyd Ferrises.) The same is true of their psychological counterparts among the poor and among the men of all the economic levels in-between.

The particular form of economic organization, which is becoming more and more apparent in this country, as an outgrowth of the power of pressure groups, is one of the worst variants of statism: guild socialism. Guild socialism robs the talented young of their future—by freezing men into professional castes under rigid rules. It represents an open embodiment of the basic motive of most statists, though they usually prefer not to confess it: the entrenchment and protection of mediocrity from abler competitors, the shackling of the men of superior ability down to the mean average of their professions. That theory is not too popular among socialists (though it has its advocates)—but the most famous instance of its large-scale practice was Fascist Italy.

In the 1930’s, a few perceptive men said that Roosevelt’s New Deal was a form of guild socialism and that it was closer to Mussolini’s system than to any other. They were ignored. Today, the evidence is unmistakable.

It was also said that if fascism ever came to the United States, it would come disguised as socialism. In this connection, I recommend that you read or re-read Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here—with special reference to the character, style, and ideology of Berzelius Windrip, the fascist leader.

Now let me mention, and answer, some of the standard objections by which today’s “liberals” attempt to camouflage (to differentiate from fascism) the nature of the system they are supporting.

“Fascism requires one-party rule.” What will the notion of “Government by Consensus” amount to in practice?

“Fascism’s goal is the conquest of the world.” What is the goal of those global-minded, bipartisan champions of the United Nations? And, if they reach it, what positions do they expect to acquire in the power-structure of “One World”?

“Fascism preaches racism.” Not necessarily. Hitler’s Germany did; Mussolini’s Italy did not.

“Fascism is opposed to the welfare state.” Check your premises and your history books. The father and originator of the welfare state, the man who put into practice the notion of buying the loyalty of some groups with money extorted from others, was Bismarck—the political ancestor of Hitler. Let me remind you that the full title of the Nazi Party was: the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany.

Let me remind you also of some excerpts from the political program of that party, adopted in Munich, on February 24, 1920:

We ask that the government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living.

The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within its confines and be for the good of all. Therefore, we demand: . . . an end to the power of the financial interests.

We demand profit sharing in big business.

We demand a broad extension of care for the aged.

We demand . . . the greatest possible consideration of small business in the purchases of the national, state, and municipal governments.

In order to make possible to every capable and industrious [citizen] the attainment of higher education and thus the achievement of a post of leadership, the government must provide an all-around enlargement of our entire system of public education. . . . We demand the education at government expense of gifted children of poor parents. . . .

The government must undertake the improvement of public health—by protecting mother and child, by prohibiting child labor . . . by the greatest possible support for all clubs concerned with the physical education of youth.

[We] combat the . . . materialistic spirit within and without us, and are convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of The Common Good Before the Individual Good.⁵⁶

There is, however, one difference between the type of fascism toward which we are drifting, and the type that ravaged European countries: ours is not a militant kind of fascism, not an organized movement of shrill demagogues, bloody thugs, hysterical third-rate intellectuals, and juvenile delinquents—ours is a tired, worn, cynical fascism, fascism by default, not like a flaming disaster, but more like the quiet collapse of a lethargic body slowly eaten by internal corruption.

Did it have to happen? No. Can it still be averted? Yes.

If you doubt the power of philosophy to set the course and shape the destiny of human societies, observe that our mixed economy is the literal, faithfully carried-out product of Pragmatism—and of the generation brought up under its influence. Pragmatism is the philosophy which holds that there is no objective reality or permanent truth, that there are no absolute principles, no valid abstractions, no firm concepts, that anything may be tried by rule-of-thumb, that objectivity consists of collective subjectivism, that whatever people wish to be true, is true, whatever people wish to exist, does exist—provided a consensus says so.

If you want to avert the final disaster, it is this type of thinking—every one of those propositions and all of them—that you must face, grasp, and reject. Then you will have grasped the connection of philosophy to politics and to the daily events of your life. Then you will have learned that no society is better than its philosophical foundation. And then—to paraphrase John Galt—you will be ready, not to return to capitalism, but to discover it.

21. THE WRECKAGE OF THE CONSENSUS

by Ayn Rand

Two years ago, on April 18, 1965, I spoke at this Forum on the subject of “The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus.” I said: “The clue to the core, essence, motive, and real meaning of the doctrine of ‘Government by Consensus’ [is] the cult of compromise. Compromise is the precondition, the necessity, the imperative of a mixed economy. The ‘consensus’ doctrine is an attempt to translate the brute facts of a mixed economy into an ideological—or anti-ideological—system and to provide them with a semblance of justification.” The brute facts of a mixed economy are gang-rule, i.e., a scramble for power by various pressure groups—without any moral or political principles, without any program, direction, purpose, or long-range goal—with the tacit belief in rule by force, as their only common denominator, and, unless the trend is changed, a fascist state as the ultimate result.

In September of 1965, writing in The Objectivist Newsletter, I said: “Contrary to the fanatical belief of its advocates, compromise does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everyone; it does not lead to general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to be all things to all men end up by not being anything to anyone.”

Lecture given at The Ford Hall Forum, Boston, on April 16, 1967. Published in The Objectivist, April and May, 1967.

It is startling to observe how rapidly this principle took effect—in an age that takes no cognizance of principles.

Where is President Johnson’s consensus today? And where, politically, is President Johnson? To descend—in two years, in an era of seeming prosperity, without the push of any obvious national disaster—to descend from the height of a popular landslide to the status of a liability to his own party in the elections of 1966, is a feat that should give pause to anyone concerned with modern politics.

If there were any way to make compromise work, President Johnson is the man who would have done it. He was an expert at the game of manipulating pressure groups—a game that consists of making promises and friends, and keeping the second, but not the first. His skill as a manipulator was the one characteristic that his “public-image builders” were selling us at the height of his popularity. If he could not make it, no amateur can.

The practical efficacy of compromise is the first premise that Johnson’s history should prompt people to check. And, I believe, a great many people are checking it. People, but not Republicans—or, at least, not all of them. Not those who are now pushing an unformed, soft-shelled thing like Romney to succeed where a pro has failed.

What are we left with, now that the consensus has collapsed? Nothing but the open spectacle of a mixed economy’s intellectual and moral bankruptcy, the random wreckage of its naked mechanism, with the screeching of its gears as the only sound in our public silence—the sound of crude, range-of-the-moment demands by pressure groups who have abandoned even the pretense at any political ideals or moral justification.

The consensus-doctrine was a disguise, a shoddy, cheesecloth one, but still a disguise to give a semblance of theoretical status to the practice of plain gang warfare. Today, even the cheesecloth is gone, leaving the anti-ideology to function in the open, more brazenly than ever.

A political ideology is a set of principles aimed at establishing or maintaining a certain social system; it is a program of long-range action, with the principles serving to unify and integrate particular steps into a consistent course. It is only by means of principles that men can project the future and choose their actions accordingly.

Anti-ideology consists of the attempts to shrink men’s minds down to the range of the immediate moment, without regard to past or future, without context or memory—above all, without memory, so that contradictions cannot be detected, and errors or disasters can be blamed on the victims.

In anti-ideological practice, principles are used implicitly and are relied upon to disarm the opposition, but are never acknowledged, and are switched at will, when it suits the purpose of the moment. Whose purpose? The gang’s. Thus men’s moral criterion becomes, not “my view of the good—or of the right—or of the truth,” but “my gang, right or wrong.”

This is what makes today’s public issues and discussions so sickeningly false and futile. Most issues rest on so many wrong premises and carry so many contradictions that instead of the question: “Who is right?” one is constantly and tacitly confronted with the question: “Which gang do you want to support?”

For example, consider the issue of the war in Vietnam.

Everything is wrong about that hideous mess (but not for the reasons which are shouted most loudly), starting from its designation. A “cold war” is a brazen contradiction in terms. It is not very “cold” for the American soldiers killed on battlefields, nor for their families, nor for any of us.

A “cold war” is a typically Hegelian term. It rests on the premise that A is non-A, that things are not what they are, so long as we don’t name them; or, practically speaking, things are what our leaders tell us they are—and, unless they tell us, we have no way of knowing. This sort of epistemology is not working too well even in regard to the ignorant hordes of Russian peasants. That this should be attempted in regard to American citizens is, perhaps, the most disgraceful symptom of our cultural disintegration.

When men are being killed by a foreign army in military action, it is a war, a whole war and nothing but a war—regardless of what temperature anyone chooses to ascribe to it.

But observe what advantages the Hegelian terminology offers to the leaders of a mixed economy. When a country is at war, it has to use all of its power to fight and win as fast as possible. It cannot fight and non-fight at the same time. It cannot send its soldiers to die as cannon fodder, forbidding them to win. When a country is at war, its leaders cannot prattle about “cultural exchanges” and about “building bridges” to the enemy, as our leaders are doing—trade bridges to bolster the enemy’s economy and enable it to produce the planes and guns which are killing our own soldiers.

A country at war often resorts to smearing its enemy by spreading atrocity stories—a practice which a free, civilized country need not and should not resort to. A civilized country, with a free press, can let the facts speak for themselves. But what is the moral-intellectual state of a country that spreads smears and atrocity stories about itself and ignores or suppresses the facts known about the enemy’s atrocities? What is the moral-intellectual state of a country that permits its citizens to stage parades carrying the enemy’s—the Vietcong’s—flag? Or to collect funds for the enemy on university campuses? What makes this possible? The claim that we are not, allegedly, at war—only at “cold war.”

A country’s morale is crucially important, in wartime. In World War II, the British Lord Haw-Haw was, properly, regarded as a traitor—for the crime of trying to undercut the British soldiers’ morale by broadcasting scare stories about Nazi Germany’s invincible power. In a “cold war,” such as we have today, Lord Haw-Haw’s job is performed by our own public leaders. The sickening scare stories about “escalation,” about our fear of war with China, would be morally shameful if indulged in by the leaders of Monaco or Luxemburg. When they come from the leaders of the most powerful country on earth, “shameful” is not an adequate word to describe their moral meaning.

If a country knows that it cannot fight another country, it does not undertake to fight. If a country is actually weak, it does not go into battle screaming: “Please don’t take me seriously—I won’t go very far!” It does not proclaim its fear as proof of its desire for peace.

There is only one sense in which that ghastly phenomenon has to be classified as a non-war: the United States has nothing to gain from it. Wars are the second greatest evil that human societies can perpetrate. (The first is dictatorship, the enslavement of their own citizens, which is the cause of wars.) When a nation resorts to war, it has some purpose, rightly or wrongly, something to fight for—and the only justifiable purpose is self-defense. If you want to see the ultimate, suicidal extreme of altruism, on an international scale, observe the war in Vietnam—a war in which American soldiers are dying for no purpose whatever.

This is the ugliest evil of the Vietnam war, that it does not serve any national interest of the United States—that it is a pure instance of blind, senseless, altruistic, self-sacrificial slaughter. This is the evil—not the revolting stuff that the Vietniks are howling about.

None of us knows why we are in that war, how we got in, or what will take us out. Whenever our public leaders attempt to explain it to us, they make the mystery greater. They tell us simultaneously that we are fighting for the interests of the United States—and that the United States has no “selfish” interests in that war. They tell us that communism is the enemy—and they attack, denounce, and smear any anti-communists in this country. They tell us that the spread of communism must be contained in Asia—but not in Africa. They tell us that communist aggression must be resisted in Vietnam—but not in Europe. They tell us that we must defend the freedom of South Vietnam—but not the freedom of East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Katanga, etc. They tell us that North Vietnam is a threat to our national security—but Cuba is not. They tell us that we must defend South Vietnam’s right to hold a “democratic” election, and to vote itself into communism, if it wishes, provided it does so by vote—which means that we are not fighting for any political ideal or any principle of justice, but only for unlimited majority rule, and that the goal for which American soldiers are dying is to be determined by somebody else’s vote. They tell us also that we must force South Vietnam to accept communists into a coalition government—a process by which we delivered China to the communists, which fact we must not mention. They tell us that we must defend South Vietnam’s right to “national self-determination”—and that anyone upholding the national sovereignty of the United States is an isolationist, that nationalism is evil, that the globe is our homeland and we must be prepared to die for any part of it, except the continent of North America.

Is it any wonder that no one believes the pronouncements of our public leaders any longer, neither the American people nor foreign nations? Our anti-ideologists are beginning to worry about this problem. But—in their typical style—they do not say that somebody is lying, they say that there exists a “credibility gap.”>

Observe the terms in which the war in Vietnam is discussed. There are no stated goals, no intellectual issues. But there are, apparently, two opposing sides which are designated, not by any specific ideological concepts, but by images, which is appropriate to the primitive epistemology of savages: the “hawks” and the “doves.” But the “hawks” are cooing apologetically, and the “doves” are snarling their heads off.

The same groups that coined the term “isolationist” in World War II—to designate anyone who held that the internal affairs of other countries are not the responsibility of the United States—these same groups are screaming that the United States has no right to interfere in the internal affairs of Vietnam.

Nobody has proposed a goal which, if achieved, would terminate that war—except President Johnson, who has offered a billion dollars as the price of peace; not a billion dollars paid to us, but a billion dollars paid by us for the economic development of Vietnam; which means that we are fighting for the privilege of turning every American taxpayer into a serf laboring part of his time for the benefit of his Vietnamese masters. But, demonstrating that irrationality is not a monopoly of the United States, North Vietnam has rejected that offer.

No, there is no proper solution for the war in Vietnam: it is a war we should never have entered. To continue it is senseless—to withdraw from it would be one more act of appeasement on our long, shameful record. The ultimate result of appeasement is a world war, as demonstrated by World War II; in today’s context, it may mean a nuclear world war.

That we let ourselves be trapped into a situation of that kind is the consequence of fifty years of a suicidal foreign policy. One cannot correct a consequence without correcting its cause; if such disasters could be solved “pragmatically,” i.e., out of context, on the spur and range of the moment, a nation would not need any foreign policy. And this is an example of why we do need a policy based on long-range principles, i.e., an ideology. But a revision of our foreign policy, from its basic premises on up, is what today’s anti-ideologists dare not contemplate. The worse its results, the louder our public leaders proclaim that our foreign policy is bipartisan.

A proper solution would be to elect statesmen—if such appeared—with a radically different foreign policy, a policy explicitly and proudly dedicated to the defense of America’s rights and national self-interests, repudiating foreign aid and all forms of international self-immolation. On such a policy, we could withdraw from Vietnam at once—and the withdrawal would not be misunderstood by anyone, and the world would have a chance to achieve peace. But such statesmen do not exist at present. In today’s conditions, the only alternative is to fight that war and win it as fast as possible—and thus gain time to develop new statesmen with a new foreign policy, before the old one pushes us into another “cold war,” just as the “cold war” in Korea pushed us into Vietnam.

The institution that enables our leaders to indulge in such recklessly irresponsible ventures is the military draft.

The question of the draft is, perhaps, the most important single issue debated today. But the terms in which it is being debated are a sorry manifestation of our anti-ideological “mainstream.”

Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man’s fundamental right—the right to life—and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man’s life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.

If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state’s discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom—then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man’s protector any longer. What else is there left to protect?

The most immoral contradiction—in the chaos of today’s anti-ideological groups—is that of the so-called “conservatives,” who posture as defenders of individual rights, particularly property rights, but uphold and advocate the draft. By what infernal evasion can they hope to justify the proposition that creatures who have no right to life have the right to a bank account? A slightly higher—though not much higher—rung of hell should be reserved for those “liberals” who claim that man has the “right” to economic security, public housing, medical care, education, recreation, but no right to life, or: that man has the right to livelihood, but not to life.

One of the notions used by all sides to justify the draft is that “rights impose obligations.” Obligations, to whom?—and imposed, by whom? Ideologically, that notion is worse than the evil it attempts to justify: it implies that rights are a gift from the state, and that a man has to buy them by offering something (his life) in return. Logically, that notion is a contradiction: since the only proper function of a government is to protect man’s rights, it cannot claim title to his life in exchange for that protection.

The only “obligation” involved in individual rights is an obligation imposed, not by the state, but by the nature of reality (i.e., by the law of identity): consistency, which, in this case, means the obligation to respect the rights of others, if one wishes one’s own rights to be recognized and protected.

Politically, the draft is clearly unconstitutional. No amount of rationalization, neither by the Supreme Court nor by private individuals, can alter the fact that it represents “involuntary servitude.”

A volunteer army is the only proper, moral—and practical—way to defend a free country. Should a man volunteer to fight, if his country is attacked? Yes—if he values his own rights and freedom. A free (or even semi-free) country has never lacked volunteers in the face of foreign aggression. Many military authorities have testified that a volunteer army—an army of men who know what they are fighting for and why—is the best, most effective army, and that a drafted one is the least effective.

It is often asked: “But what if a country cannot find a sufficient number of volunteers?’ Even so, this would not give the rest of the population a right to the lives of the country’s young men. But, in fact, the lack of volunteers occurs for one of two reason: (1) If a country is demoralized by a corrupt, authoritarian government, its citizens will not volunteer to defend it. But neither will they fight for long, if drafted. For example, observe the literal disintegration of the Czarist Russian army in World War I. (2) If a country’s government undertakes to fight a war for some reason other than self-defense, for a purpose which the citizens neither share nor understand, it will not find many volunteers. Thus a volunteer army is one of the best protectors of peace, not only against foreign aggression, but also against any warlike ideologies or projects on the part of a country’s own government.

Not many men would volunteer for such wars as Korea or Vietnam. Without the power to draft, the makers of our foreign policy would not be able to embark on adventures of that kind. This is one of the best practical reasons for the abolition of the draft.

Consider another practical reason. The age of large, mass armies is past. A modern war is a war of technology; it requires a highly trained, scientific personnel, not hordes of passive, unthinking, bewildered men; it requires brains, not brawn—intelligence, not blind obedience. One can force men to die; one cannot force them to think. Observe that the more technological branches of our armed services—such as the Navy and the Air Force—do not accept draftees and are made up of volunteers. The draft, therefore, applies only to the least efficacious and—in today’s conditions—the least essential part of our armed forces: the infantry. If so, then is national defense the main consideration of those who advocate and uphold the draft?

The practical question of the country’s military protection is not the issue at stake; it is not the chief concern of the draft’s supporters. Some of them may be motivated by routine, traditional notions and fears; but, on a national scale, there is a deeper motive involved.

When a vicious principle is accepted implicitly, it does not take long to become explicit: pressure groups are quick to find practical advantages in its logical implications. For instance, in World War II, the military draft was used as a justification for proposals to establish labor conscription—i.e., compulsory labor service for the entire population, with the government empowered to assign anyone to any job of its choice. “If men can be drafted to die for their country,” it was argued, “why can’t they be drafted to work for their country?” Two bills embodying such proposals were introduced in Congress, but, fortunately, were defeated. The second of those bills had an interesting quirk: drafted labor, it proposed, would be paid a union scale of wages—in order not to undercut union scales—but, in “fairness” to the military draftees, the labor draftees would be given only the equivalent of army pay, and the rest of their wages would go to the government (!).

What political group, do you suppose, came up with a notion of this kind? Both bills were introduced by Republicans—and were defeated by organized labor, which was the only large economic group standing between us and a totalitarian state.

Now observe the terms in which the draft is being debated today. The main reason advanced for the continuation of the draft is not military, but financial (!). It is generally conceded that the draft is unnecessary, but, it is argued, a volunteer army would cost too much.

As matters stand, the army is one of the lowest paid groups in the country; a drafted soldier’s pay, in cash or equivalent (i.e., including room and board), amounts to about one dollar an hour. To attract volunteers, it would be necessary to offer higher pay and better conditions, thus making an army career comparable to the standards of the civilian labor market.

No exact estimates of the cost of a volunteer army have been offered, but the approximate estimates place it at about four billion dollars a year.

Hold this figure in mind. Hold it while you read about our national budget in the daily papers—and while you hold also, clearly and specifically, the image of what this figure would buy.

The years from about fifteen to twenty-five are the crucial formative years of a man’s life. This is the time when he confirms his impressions of the world, of other men, of the society in which he is to live, when he acquires conscious convictions, defines his moral values, chooses his goals, and plans his future, developing or renouncing ambition. These are the years that mark him for life. And it is these years that an allegedly humanitarian society forces him to spend in terror—the terror of knowing that he can plan nothing and count on nothing, that any road he takes can be blocked at any moment by an unpredictable power, that, barring his vision of the future, there stands the gray shape of the barracks, and, perhaps, beyond it, death for some unknown reason in some alien jungle.

A pressure of that kind is devastating to a young man’s psychology, if he grasps the issue consciously—and still worse, if he doesn’t.

The first thing he is likely to give up, in either case, is his intellect: an intellect does not function on the premise of its own impotence. If he acquires the conviction that existence is hopeless, that his life is in the hands of some enormous, incomprehensible evil, if he develops a helpless, searing contempt for the hypocrisy of his elders, and a profound hatred for all mankind—if he seeks to escape from that inhuman psychological pressure by turning to the beatnik cult of the immediate moment, by screaming: “Now, now, now!” (he has nothing else but that “now”), or by dulling his terror and killing the last of his mind with LSD—don’t blame him. Brothers, you asked for it!

This is what four billion dollars would buy—this is what it would spare him and every other young man in the country and every person who loves them. Remember down what drains our money is being poured today: according to the Federal budget for fiscal year 1968, we will spend 4.5 billion on foreign aid and allied projects, 5.3 billion on space programs, 11.3 billion on just one of the many, many departments dealing with public welfare—yet we claim that we cannot afford four billion dollars to save our youth from the agony of a mangling, brutalizing psychological torture.

But, of course, the real motive behind that social crime is not financial; the issue of costs is merely a rationalization. The real motive may be detected in the following statement made by Lieutenant General Lewis B. Hershey, Director of the Selective Service System, on June 24, 1966: “I am not concerned with the uncertainty involved in keeping our citizenry believing that they owe something to their country. There are too many, too many people that think individualism has to be completely recognized, even if the group rights go to the devil.”

The same motive was made fully clear in a proposal which was advanced by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and is now being plugged with growing insistence by the press.

On May 18, 1966, Mr. McNamara said the following: “As matters stand, our present Selective system draws on only a minority of eligible young men. That is an inequity. It seems to me that we could move toward remedying that inequity by asking every young person in the United States to give two years of service to his country—whether in one of the military services, in the Peace Corps or in some other volunteer developmental work at home or abroad.”

“Developmental” work—devoted to whose development?

Apparently, planting rice or digging ditches in Asia, Africa, and South America constitutes service to the United States—but preparing oneself for a productive career does not. Teaching our own illiterates in hillbilly regions or city slums constitutes service to the United States—but going to college does not. Teaching retarded children to weave baskets constitutes service to the United States—but acquiring a Ph.D. does not.

Isn’t the unnamed principle clear? Developing yourself into a productive, ambitious, independent person is not regarded as a value to the United States; turning yourself into an abject sacrificial animal is.

This, I submit, is a moral obscenity.

Whatever country such a principle could apply to, it is not the United States. It is not even Soviet Russia—where they do destroy the minds of their youth, but not in so mawkishly, wantonly senseless a manner.

That proposal represents the naked essence of altruism in its pure and fully consistent form. It does not seek to sacrifice men for the alleged benefit of the state—it seeks to sacrifice them for the sake of sacrifice. It seeks to break man’s spirit—to destroy his mind, his ambition, his self-esteem, his self-confidence, his self, during the very years when he is in the process of acquiring them.

Mr. McNamara’s trial balloon did not go over too well, at first. There were outcries of protest and indignation, which compelled the government to issue a hasty disclaimer. “The Johnson Administration,” said The New York Times of May 20, 1966, “quickly made it plain today that it had no plans to draft young Americans for civilian duty or to let such duty become an alternative to military service.” The same news story said that “officials called upon to interpret his [McNamara’s] words stressed that he had suggested ‘asking’ rather than ‘compelling’ young people to serve.” Well, I want to stress that if a government intends to “ask” rather than “compel,” it does not choose the Secretary of Defense to do the “asking,” and he does not “ask” it in the context of a passage dealing with the military draft.

The suggestion of “voluntary service” under a threat to one’s life is blackmail—blackmail directed at the entire American youth—blackmail demanding their surrender into explicit serfdom.

After that initial suggestion—obviously, as an intermediary step, to “condition” the sacrificial animals—the statist-altruist gangs began to plug the notion of “voluntary” social service.

On September 14, 1966, James Reston of The New York Times quoted President Johnson as saying: “I hope to see a day when some form of voluntary service to the community and the nation and the world is as common in America as going to school; when no man has truly lived who only served himself.”

The motivation of all this is obvious. The draft is not needed for military purposes, it is not needed for the protection of this country, but the statists are struggling not to relinquish the power it gave them and the unnamed principle (and precedent) it established—above all, not to relinquish the principle: that man’s life belongs to the state.

This is the real issue—and the only issue—and there is no way to fight it or to achieve the abolition of the draft except by upholding the principle of man’s right to his own life. There is no way to uphold that right without a full, consistent, moral-political ideology. But that is not the way the issue is now debated by the frantic anti-ideologists of all sides.

It is the “conservatives,” the alleged defenders of freedom and capitalism, who should be opposing the draft. They are not; they are supporting it. Early in the presidential election campaign of 1964, Barry Goldwater made a vague suggestion favoring the abolition of the draft, which aroused the public’s hopeful attention; he promptly dropped it, and devoted his campaign to denouncing the morals of Bobby Baker. Who brought the issue of the draft into public focus and debate, demanding its repeal? The extreme left—the Vietniks and Peaceniks.

In line with the anti-ideological methods of all other groups, the Vietniks—whose sympathies are on the side of Russia, China, and North Vietnam—are screaming against the draft in the name of their “individual rights”—individual rights, believe it or not. They are proclaiming their right to choose which war they’ll fight in—while sympathizing with countries where the individual does not even have the right to choose and utter a thought of his own. What is still worse is the fact that they are the only group that even mentions individual rights (if newspaper reports are to be trusted).

But of all this anti-ideological mess, I would pick one small incident as, morally, the worst. I quote from The New York Times of February 6, 1967:

Leaders of 15 student organizations representing both political extremes as well as the center called today for the abolition of the draft and the encouragement of voluntary service in humanitarian pursuits. In a resolution ending a two-day conference on the draft and national service at the Shoreham Hotel [Washington, D.C.], the student leaders declared: “The present draft system with its inherent injustices is incompatible with traditional American principles of individual freedom within a democratic society, and for this reason the draft should be eliminated. An urgent need exists within our society for young people to become involved in the elimination of such social ills as ignorance, poverty, racial discrimination and war.” Among those who signed the resolution were leading members of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society, the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom, and the moderate Youth and College Division of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. . . . Although no unanimity on concrete recommendations was arrived at, Mr. Chickering [the sponsor of the conference] said he believed that most of the student leaders favored his proposal for the creation of a system of voluntary national service. Under this proposal . . . students at campuses throughout the country will be asked to fill out cards expressing their willingness to serve in humanitarian work.

(Observe the formulation “traditional American principles of individual freedom within a democratic society”—instead of “individual right to life.” What is “individual freedom within a democratic society”? What is a “democratic society”? “Individual freedom” is not a primary political principle and cannot be defined, defended, or practiced without the primary principle of individual rights. And a “democratic society,” traditionally, means: unlimited majority rule. This is an example of the method by which today’s anti-ideologists are obliterating the concept of rights. Observe also that the leaders of the “conservative” Young Americans for Freedom signed a document of that kind.)

These are not men who are being whipped: these are men who take the lash obediently and whip themselves.

Politically, that proposal is much worse than the draft. The draft, at least, offers the excuse that one is serving one’s own country in time of danger—and its political implications are diluted by a long historical tradition associated with patriotism. But if young men accept the belief that it is their duty to spend their irreplaceable formative years on growing rice and carrying bedpans—they’re done for psychologically, and so is this country.

The same news story carried some shocking statistics on the attitude of college students at large. It quoted a poll conducted by the National Students Association at twenty-three campuses throughout the country. If that poll is to be trusted, “Approximately 75 per cent said they preferred the establishment of some means to allow work in the Peace Corps, the Teacher Corps or Volunteers in Service to America as an alternative to military service. About 90 per cent, however, said they believed that the Government has a right to conscript its citizens, and 68 per cent thought such conscription was necessary in periods other than those of a declared national emergency.”

This is an example, on a grand scale, of what I call “the sanction of the victim.” It is also an example of the fact that men cannot be enslaved politically until they have been disarmed ideologically. When they are so disarmed, it is the victims who take the lead in the process of their own destruction.

Such is the swamp of contradictions swallowing the two most immediately prominent issues of today—Vietnam and the draft. The same is true of all the other issues and pseudo-issues now clogging all the avenues of public communication. And, adding insult to injury, the anti-ideologists,who are responsible for it, are complaining about the public’s lethargy.

Lethargy is only a precarious psychological cover for confusion, disgust, and despair.

The country at large is bitterly dissatisfied with the status quo, disillusioned with the stale slogans of welfare statism, and desperately seeking an alternative, i.e., an intelligible program and course. The intensity of that need may be gauged by the fact that a single good speech raised a man, who had never held public office, to the governorship of California. The statists of both parties, who are now busy smearing Governor Reagan, are anxious not to see and not to let others discover the real lesson and meaning of his election: that the country is starved for a voice of consistency, clarity, and moral self-confidence—which were the outstanding qualities of his famous speech, and which cannot be achieved or projected by consensus-seeking anti-ideologists.

As of this date, Governor Reagan seems to be a promising public figure—I do not know him and cannot speak for the future. It is difficult to avoid a certain degree of skepticism: we have been disappointed too often. But whether he lives up to the promise or not, the people’s need, quest for, and response to clear-cut ideas remain a fact—and will become a tragic fact if the intellectual leaders of this country continue to ignore it.

Since the elections of 1966, some commentators have been talking about the country’s “swing to the right.” There was no swing to the right (except, perhaps, in California)—there was only a swing against the left (if by “right,” we mean capitalism—and by “left,” statism). Without a firm, consistent ideological program and leadership, the people’s desperate protest will be dissipated in the blind alleys of the same statism that they are opposing. It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for. A merely negative trend or movement cannot win and, historically, has never won: it leads nowhere.

The consensus-doctrine has achieved the exact opposite of its alleged goal: instead of creating unity or agreement, it has disintegrated and atomized the country to such an extent that no communication, let alone agreement, is possible. It is not unity, but intellectual coherence that a country needs. That coherence can be achieved only by fundamental principles, not by compromises among groups of men—by the primacy of ideas, not of gangs.

The task of defining ideas and goals is not the province of politicians and is not accomplished at election time: elections are merely consequences. The task belongs to the intellectuals. The need is more urgent than ever.

(Postscript. Once in a while, I receive letters from young men asking me for personal advice on problems connected with the draft. Morally, no one can give advice in any issue where choices and decisions are not voluntary: “Morality ends where a gun begins.” As to the practical alternatives available, the best thing to do is to consult a good lawyer.

There is, however, one moral aspect of the issue that needs clarification. Some young men seem to labor under the misapprehension that since the draft is a violation of their rights, compliance with the draft law would constitute a moral sanction of that violation. This is a serious error. A forced compliance is not a sanction. All of us are forced to comply with many laws that violate our rights, but so long as we advocate the repeal of such laws, our compliance does not constitute a sanction. Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom. To quote from an editorial on this subject in the April 1967 issue of Persuasion: “One does not stop the juggernaut by throwing oneself in front of it. . . .”)

22. THE CASHING-IN: THE STUDENT “REBELLION”

by Ayn Rand

The so-called student “rebellion,” which was started and keynoted at the University of California at Berkeley, has profound significance, but not of the kind that most commentators have ascribed to it. And the nature of the misrepresentations is part of its significance.

The events at Berkeley began, in the fall of 1964, ostensibly as a student protest against the University administration’s order forbidding political activity—specifically, the recruiting, fund-raising, and organizing of students for political action off-campus—on a certain strip of ground adjoining the campus, which was owned by the University. Claiming that their rights had been violated, a small group of “rebels” rallied thousands of students of all political views, including many “conservatives,” and assumed the title of the “Free Speech Movement.” The Movement staged “sit-in” protests in the administration building, and committed other acts of physical force, such as assaults on the police and the seizure of a police car for use as a rostrum.

The Objectivist Newsletter, July, August, and September 1965.

The spirit, style, and tactics of the rebellion are best illustrated by one particular incident. The University administration called a mass meeting, which was attended by eighteen thousand students and faculty members, to hear an address on the situation by the University President, Clark Kerr; it had been expressly announced that no student speakers would be allowed to address the meeting. Kerr attempted to end the rebellion by capitulating: he promised to grant most of the rebels’ demands; it looked as if he had won the audience to his side. Whereupon, Mario Savio, the rebel leader, seized the microphone, in an attempt to take over the meeting, ignoring the rules and the fact that the meeting had been adjourned. When he was—properly—dragged off the platform, the leaders of the F.S.M. admitted, openly and jubilantly, that they had almost lost their battle, but had saved it by provoking the administration to an act of “violence” (thus admitting that the victory of their publicly proclaimed goals was not the goal of their battle).

What followed was nation-wide publicity, of a peculiar kind. It was a sudden and, seemingly, spontaneous out-pouring of articles, studies, surveys, revealing a strange unanimity of approach in several basic aspects: in ascribing to the F.S.M. the importance of a national movement, unwarranted by the facts—in blurring the facts by means of unintelligible generalities—in granting to the rebels the status of spokesmen for American youth, acclaiming their “idealism” and “commitment” to political action, hailing them as a symptom of the “awakening” of college students from “political apathy.” If ever a “puff-job” was done by a major part of the press, this was it.

In the meantime, what followed at Berkeley was a fierce, three-cornered struggle among the University administration, its Board of Regents, and its faculty, a struggle so sketchily reported in the press that its exact nature remains fogbound. One can gather only that the Regents were, apparently, demanding a “tough” policy toward the rebels, that the majority of the faculty were on the rebels’ side and that the administration was caught in the “moderate” middle of the road.

The struggle led to the permanent resignation of the University’s Chancellor (as the rebels had demanded)—the temporary resignation, and later reinstatement, of President Kerr—and, ultimately, an almost complete capitulation to the F.S.M., with the administration granting most of the rebels’ demands. (These included the right to advocate illegal acts and the right to an unrestricted freedom of speech on campus.)

To the astonishment of the naive, this did not end the rebellion: the more demands were granted, the more were made. As the administration intensified its efforts to appease the F.S.M., the F.S.M. intensified its provocations. The unrestricted freedom of speech took the form of a “Filthy Language Movement,” which consisted of students carrying placards with four-letter words, and broadcasting obscenities over the University loudspeakers (which Movement was dismissed with mild reproof by most of the press, as a mere “adolescent prank”).

This, apparently, was too much even for those who sympathized with the rebellion. The F.S.M. began to lose its following—and was, eventually, dissolved. Mario Savio quit the University, declaring that he “could not keep up with the undemocratic procedures that the administration is following” [italics mine]—and departed, reportedly to organize a nation-wide revolutionary student movement.

This is a bare summary of the events as they were reported by the press. But some revealing information was provided by volunteers, outside the regular news channels, such as in the letters-to-the-editor columns.

An eloquent account was given in a letter to The New York Times (March 31, 1965) by Alexander Grendon, a biophysicist in the Donner Laboratory, University of California:

The F.S.M. has always applied coercion to insure victory. One-party “democracy,” as in the Communist countries or the lily-white portions of the South, corrects opponents of the party line by punishment. The punishment of the recalcitrant university administration (and more than 20,000 students who avoided participation in the conflict) was to “bring the university to a grinding halt” by physical force.

To capitulate to such corruption of democracy is to teach students that these methods are right. President Kerr capitulated repeatedly. . . .

Kerr agreed the university would not control “advocacy of illegal acts,” an abstraction until illustrated by examples: In a university lecture hall, a self-proclaimed anarchist advises students how to cheat to escape military service; a nationally known Communist uses the university facilities to condemn our Government in vicious terms for its action in Vietnam, while funds to support the Vietcong are illegally solicited; propaganda for the use of marijuana, with instructions where to buy it, is openly distributed on campus.

Even the abstraction “obscenity” is better understood when one hears a speaker, using the university’s amplifying equipment, describe in vulgar words his experiences in group sexual intercourse and homosexuality and recommend these practices, while another suggests students should have the same sexual freedom on campus as dogs. . . .

Clark Kerr’s “negotiation”—a euphemism for surrender—on each deliberate defiance of orderly university processes contributes not to a liberal university but to a lawless one.

David S. Landes, Professor of History, Harvard University, made an interesting observation in a letter to The New York Times (December 29, 1964). Stating that the Berkeley revolt represents potentially one of the most serious assaults on academic freedom in America, he wrote:

In conclusion, I should like to point out the deleterious implications of this dispute for the University of California. I know personally of five or six faculty members who are leaving, not because of lack of sympathy with “free speech” or “political action,” but because, as one put it, who wants to teach at the University of Saigon?

The clearest account and most perceptive evaluation were offered in an article in the Columbia University Forum (Spring 1965), entitled “What’s Left at Berkeley,” by William Petersen, Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He writes:

The first fact one must know about the Free Speech Movement is that it has little or nothing to do with free speech. . . . If not free speech, what then is the issue? In fact, preposterous as this may seem, the real issue is the seizure of power. . . .

That a tiny number, a few hundred out of a student body of more than 27,000, was able to disrupt the campus is the consequence of more than vigor and skill in agitation. This minuscule group could not have succeeded in getting so many students into motion without three other, at times unwitting, sources of support: off-campus assistance of various kinds, the University administration, and the faculty.

Everyone who has seen the efficient, almost military organization of the agitators’ program has a reasonable basis for believing that skilled personnel and money are being dispatched into the Berkeley battle. . . . Around the Berkeley community a dozen “ad hoc committees to support” this or that element of the student revolt sprang up spontaneously, as though out of nowhere.

The course followed by the University administration . . . could hardly have better fostered a rebellious student body if it had been devised to do so. To establish dubious regulations and when they are attacked to defend them by unreasonable argument is bad enough; worse still, the University did not impose on the students any sanctions that did not finally evaporate. . . . Obedience to norms is developed when it is suitably rewarded, and when noncompliance is suitably punished. That professional educators should need to be reminded of this axiom indicates how deep the roots of the Berkeley crisis lie.

But the most important reason that the extremists won so many supporters among the students was the attitude of the faculty. Perhaps their most notorious capitulation to the F.S.M. was a resolution passed by the Academic Senate on December 8, by which the faculty notified the campus not only that they supported all of the radicals’ demands but also that, in effect, they were willing to fight for them against the Board of Regents, should that become necessary. When that resolution passed by an overwhelming majority—824 to 115 votes—it effectively silenced the anti-F.S.M. student organizations. . . .

The Free Speech Movement is reminiscent of the Communist fronts of the 1930’s, but there are several important differences. The key feature, that a radical core uses legitimate issues ambiguously in order to manipulate a large mass, is identical. The core in this case, however, is not the disciplined Communist party, but a heterogeneous group of radical sects.

Professor Petersen lists the various socialist, Trotskyist, communist, and other groups involved. His conclusion is:

The radical leaders on the Berkeley campus, like those in Latin American or Asian universities, are not the less radical for being, in many cases, outside the discipline of a formal political party. They are defined not by whether they pay dues to a party, but by their actions, their vocabulary, their way of thinking. The best term to describe them, in my opinion, is Castroite. [This term, he explains, applies primarily to their choice of tactics, to the fact that] in critical respects all of them imitate the Castro movement. . . .

At Berkeley, provocative tactics applied not against a dictatorship but against the liberal, divided, and vacillating University administration proved to be enormously effective. Each provocation and subsequent victory led to the next.

Professor Petersen ends his article on a note of warning:

By my diagnosis . . . not only has the patient [the University] not recovered but he is sicker than ever. The fever has gone down temporarily, but the infection is spreading and becoming more virulent.

Now let us consider the ideology of the rebels, from such indications as were given in the press reports. The general tone of the reports was best expressed by a headline in The New York Times (March 15, 1965): “The New Student Left: Movement Represents Serious Activists in Drive for Changes.”

What kind of changes? No specific answer was given in the almost full-page story. Just “changes.”

Some of these activists “who liken their movement to a ‘revolution,’ want to be called radicals. Most of them, however, prefer to be called ‘organizers.’ ”

Organizers—of what? Of “deprived people.” For what? No answer. Just “organizers.”

Most express contempt for any specific labels, and they don’t mind being called cynics. . . . The great majority of those questioned said they were as skeptical of Communism as they were of any other form of political control. . . . “You might say we’re a-Communist,” said one of them, “just as you might say we’re amoral and a-almost everything else.”

There are exceptions, however. A girl from the University of California, one of the leaders of the Berkeley revolt, is quoted as saying: “At present the socialist world, even with all its problems, is moving closer than any other countries toward the sort of society I think should exist. In the Soviet Union, it has almost been achieved.”

Another student, from the City College of New York, is quoted as concurring: “ ‘The Soviet Union and the whole Socialist bloc are on the right track,’ he said.”

In view of the fact that most of the young activists were active in the civil rights movement, and that the Berkeley rebels had started by hiding behind the issue of civil rights (attempting, unsuccessfully, to smear all opposition as of “racist” origin), it is interesting to read that: “There is little talk among the activists about racial integration. Some of them consider the subject passé. They declare that integration will be almost as evil as segregation if it results in a complacent, middle-class interracial society.”

The central theme and basic ideology of all the activists is: anti-ideology. They are militantly opposed to all “labels,” definitions, and theories; they proclaim the supremacy of the immediate moment and commitment to action—to subjectively, emotionally motivated action. Their anti-intellectual attitude runs like a stressed leitmotif through all the press reports.

An article in The New York Times Magazine (February 14, 1965) declares:

The Berkeley mutineers did not seem political in the sense of those student rebels in the Turbulent Thirties. They are too suspicious of all adult institutions to embrace wholeheartedly even those ideologies with a stake in smashing the system. An anarchist or I.W.W. strain seems as pronounced as any Marxist doctrine. “Theirs is a sort of political existentialism,” says Paul Jacobs, a research associate at the university’s Center for the Study of Law and Society, who is one of the F.S.M.’s applauders. “All the old labels are out. . . .”

The proudly immoderate zealots of the F.S.M. pursue an activist creed—that only commitment can strip life of its emptiness, its absence of meaning in a great “knowledge factory” like Berkeley.

An article in The Saturday Evening Post (May 8, 1965), discussing the various youth groups on the left, quotes a leader of Students for a Democratic Society:

“We began by rejecting the old sectarian left and its ancient quarrels, and with a contempt for American society, which we saw as depraved. We are interested in direct action and specific issues. We do not spend endless hours debating the nature of Soviet Russia or whether Yugoslavia is a degenerate workers’ state.” [And]: “With sit-ins we saw for the first time the chance for direct participation in meaningful social revolution.”

In their off-picket-line hours, [states the same article] the P.L. [Progressive Labor] youngsters hang out at the experimental theaters and coffee shops of Manhattan’s East Village. Their taste in reading runs more to Sartre than to Marx.

With an interesting touch of unanimity, a survey in Newsweek (March 22, 1965) quotes a young man on the other side of the continent: “ ‘These students don’t read Marx,’ said one Berkeley Free Student Movement leader. ‘They read Camus.’ ”

“If they are rebels,” the survey continues, “they are rebels without an ideology, and without long-range revolutionary programs. They rally over issues, not philosophies, and seem unable to formulate or sustain a systematized political theory of society, either from the left or right.”

“Today’s student seeks to find himself through what he does, not what he thinks,” the survey declares explicitly—and quotes some adult authorities in sympathetic confirmation. “ ‘What you have now, as in the 30’s,’ says New York Post editor James A. Wechsler, ‘are groups of activists who really want to function in life.’ But not ideologically. ‘We used to sit around and debate Marxism, but students now are working for civil-rights and peace.’ ” Richard Unsworth, chaplain at Dartmouth, is quoted as saying: “In the world of today’s campus ‘the avenue now is doing and then reflecting on your doing, instead of reflecting, then deciding, and then doing, the way it was a few years ago.’ ” Paul Goodman, described as writer, educator and “one of the students’ current heroes,” is quoted as hailing the Berkeley movement because: “The leaders of the insurrection, he says, ‘didn’t play it cool, they took risks, they were willing to be confused, they didn’t know whether it all would be a success or a failure. Now they don’t want to be cool any more, they want to take over.’ ” [Italics mine. The same tribute could be paid to any drunken driver.]

The theme of “taking over” is repeated again and again. The immediate target, apparently, is the take-over of the universities. The New York Times Magazine article quotes one of the F.S.M. leaders: “Our idea is that the university is composed of faculty, students, books, and ideas. In a literal sense, the administration is merely there to make sure the sidewalks are kept clean. It should be the servant of the faculty and the students.”

The climax of this particular line was a news story in The New York Times (March 29, 1965) under the heading: “Collegians Adopt a ‘Bill of Rights.’ ”

A group of Eastern college students declared here [in Philadelphia] this weekend that college administrators should be no more than housekeepers in the educational community.

“The modern college or university,” they said, “should be run by the students and the professors; administrators would be maintenance, clerical and safety personnel whose purpose is to enforce the will of faculty and students.”

A manifesto to this effect was adopted at a meeting held at the University of Pennsylvania and attended by two hundred youths

from 39 colleges in the Philadelphia and New York areas, Harvard, Yale, the University of California at Berkeley, and from schools in the Midwest.

A recurring theme in the meeting was that colleges and universities had become servants of the “financial, industrial, and military establishment,” and that students and faculty were being “sold down the river” by administrators.

Among the provisions of the manifesto were declarations of freedom to join, organize or hold meetings of any organization . . . abolition of tuition fees; control of law enforcement by the students and faculty; an end to the Reserve Officer Training Corps; abolition of loyalty oaths; student-faculty control over curriculum. . . .

The method used to adopt that manifesto is illuminating: “About 200 students attended the meeting, 45 remaining until the end when the ‘Student Bill of Rights’ was adopted.” So much for “democratic procedures” and for the activists’ right to the title of spokesmen for American youth.

What significance is ascribed to the student rebellion by all these reports and by the authorities they choose to quote? Moral courage is not a characteristic of today’s culture, but in no other contemporary issue has moral cowardice been revealed to such a naked, ugly extent. Not only do most of the commentators lack an independent evaluation of the events, not only do they take their cue from the rebels, but of all the rebels’ complaints, it is the most superficial, irrelevant and, therefore, the safest, that they choose to support and to accept as the cause of the rebellion: the complaint that the universities have grown “too big.”

As if they had mushroomed overnight, the “bigness” of the universities is suddenly decried by the consensus as a national problem and blamed for the “unrest” of the students, whose motives are hailed as youthful “idealism.” In today’s culture, it has always been safe to attack “bigness.” And since the meaningless issue of mere size has long served as a means of evading real issues, on all sides of all political fences, a new catch-phrase has been added to the list of “Big Business,” “Big Labor,” “Big Government,” etc.: “Big University.”

For a more sophisticated audience, the socialist magazine The New Leader (December 21, 1964) offers a Marxist-Freudian appraisal, ascribing the rebellion primarily to “alienation” (quoting Savio: “Somehow people are being separated off from something”) and to “generational revolt” (“Spontaneously the natural idiom of the student political protest was that of sexual protest against the forbidding university administrator who ruled in loco parentis”).

But the prize for expressing the moral-intellectual essence of today’s culture should go to Governor Brown of California. Remember that the University of California is a state institution, that its Regents are appointed by the Governor and that he, therefore, was the ultimate target of the revolt, including all its manifestations, from physical violence to filthy language.

Have we made our society safe for students with ideas? [said Governor Brown at a campus dinner.] We have not. Students have changed but the structure of the university and its attitudes towards its students have not kept pace with that change.

Therefore, some students felt they had the right to go outside the law to force the change. But in so doing, they displayed the height of idealistic hypocrisy. [Italics mine.] On the one hand, they held up the Federal Constitution, demanding their rights of political advocacy. But at the same time, they threw away the principle of due process in favor of direct action.

In doing so, they were as wrong as the university. This, then, is the great challenge that faces us, the challenge of change.⁵⁷

Consider the fact that Governor Brown is generally regarded as a powerful chief executive and, by California Republicans, as a formidable opponent. Consider the fact that “according to the California Public Opinion Poll, 74 percent of the people disapprove of the student protest movement in Berkeley.”⁵⁸ Then observe that Governor Brown did not dare denounce a movement led or manipulated by a group of forty-five students—and that he felt obliged to qualify the term “hypocrisy” by the adjective “idealistic,” thus creating one of the weirdest combinations in today’s vocabulary of evasion.

Now observe that in all that mass of comments, appraisals, and interpretations (including the ponderous survey in Newsweek which offered statistics on every imaginable aspect of college life), not one word was said about the content of modern education, about the nature of the ideas that are being inculcated by today’s universities. Every possible question was raised and considered, except: What are the students taught to think? This, apparently, was what no one dared discuss.

This is what we shall now proceed to discuss.

If a dramatist had the power to convert philosophical ideas into real, flesh-and-blood people, and attempted to create the walking embodiments of modern philosophy—the result would be the Berkeley rebels.

These “activists” are so fully, literally, loyally, devastatingly the products of modern philosophy that someone should cry to all the university administrations and faculties: “Brothers, you asked for it!”

Mankind could not expect to remain unscathed after decades of exposure to the radiation of intellectual fission-debris, such as: “Reason is impotent to know things as they are—reality is unknowable—certainty is impossible—knowledge is mere probability—truth is that which works—mind is a superstition—logic is a social convention—ethics is a matter of subjective commitment to an arbitrary postulate.” And the consequent mutations are those contorted young creatures who scream, in chronic terror, that they know nothing and want to rule everything.

If that dramatist were writing a movie, he could justifiably entitle it “Mario Savio, Son of Immanuel Kant.”

With rare and academically neglected exceptions, the philosophical “mainstream” that seeps into every classroom, subject, and brain in today’s universities, is: epistemological agnosticism, avowed irrationalism, ethical subjectivism. Our age is witnessing the ultimate climax, the cashing-in on a long process of destruction, at the end of the road laid out by Kant.

Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach. In the name of reason, Pragmatism established a range-of-the-moment view as an enlightened perspective on life, context-dropping as a rule of epistemology, expediency as a principle of morality, and collective subjectivism as a substitute for metaphysics. Logical Positivism carried it farther and, in the name of reason, elevated the immemorial psycho-epistemology of shyster-lawyers to the status of a scientific epistemological system—by proclaiming that knowledge consists of linguistic manipulations. Taking this seriously, Linguistic Analysis declared that the task of philosophy is, not to identify universal principles, but to tell people what they mean when they speak, which they are otherwise unable to know (which last, by that time, was true—in philosophical circles). This was the final stroke of philosophy breaking its moorings and floating off, like a lighter-than-air balloon, losing any semblance of connection to reality, any relevance to the problems of man’s existence.

No matter how cautiously the proponents of such theories skirted any reference to the relationship between theory and practice, no matter how coyly they struggled to treat philosophy as a parlor or classroom game—the fact remained that young people went to college for the purpose of acquiring theoretical knowledge to guide them in practical action. Philosophy teachers evaded questions about the application of their ideas to reality, by such means as declaring that “reality is a meaningless term,” or by asserting that philosophy has no purpose other than the amusement of manufacturing arbitrary “constructs,” or by urging students to temper every theory with “common sense”—the common sense they had spent countless hours trying to invalidate.

As a result, a student came out of a modern university with the following sediment left in his brain by his four to eight years of study: existence is an uncharted, unknowable jungle, fear and uncertainty are man’s permanent state, skepticism is the mark of maturity, cynicism is the mark of realism, and, above all, the hallmark of an intellectual is the denial of the intellect.

When and if academic commentators gave any thought to the practical results of their theories, they were predominantly united in claiming that uncertainty and skepticism are socially valuable traits which would lead to tolerance of differences, flexibility, social “adjustment,” and willingness to compromise. Some went so far as to maintain explicitly that intellectual certainty is the mark of a dictatorial mentality, and that chronic doubt—the absence of firm convictions, the lack of absolutes—is the guarantee of a peaceful, “democratic” society.

They miscalculated.

It has been said that Kant’s dichotomy led to two lines of Kantian philosophers, both accepting his basic premises, but choosing opposite sides: those who chose reason, abandoning reality—and those who chose reality, abandoning reason. The first delivered the world to the second.

The collector of the Kantian rationalizers’ efforts—the receiver of the bankrupt shambles of sophistry, casuistry, sterility, and abysmal triviality to which they had reduced philosophy—was Existentialism.

Existentialism, in essence, consists of pointing to modern philosophy and declaring: “Since this is reason, to hell with it!”

In spite of the fact that the pragmatists-positivists-analysts had obliterated reason, the existentialists accepted them as reason’s advocates, held them up to the world as examples of rationality and proceeded to reject reason altogether, proclaiming its impotence, rebelling against its “failure,” calling for a return to reality, to the problems of human existence, to values, to action—to subjective values and mindless action. In the name of reality, they proclaimed the moral supremacy of “instincts,” urges, feelings—and the cognitive powers of stomachs, muscles, kidneys, hearts, blood. It was a rebellion of headless bodies.

The battle is not over. The philosophy departments of today’s universities are the battleground of a struggle which, in fact, is only a family quarrel between the analysts and the existentialists. Their progeny are the activists of the student rebellion.

If these activists choose the policy of “doing and then reflecting on your doing”—hasn’t Pragmatism taught them that truth is to be judged by consequences? If they “seem unable to formulate or sustain a systematized political theory of society,” yet shriek with moral righteousness that they propose to achieve their social goals by physical force—hasn’t Logical Positivism taught them that ethical propositions have no cognitive meaning and are merely a report on one’s feelings or the equivalent of emotional ejaculations? If they are savagely blind to everything but the immediate moment—hasn’t Logical Positivism taught them that nothing else can be claimed with certainty to exist? And while the linguistic analysts are busy demonstrating that “The cat is on the mat” does not mean that “the mat” is an attribute of “the cat,” nor that “on-the-mat” is the genus to which “the cat” belongs, nor yet that “the-cat” equals “on-the-mat”—is it any wonder that students storm the Berkeley campus with placards inscribed “Strike now, analyze later”? (This slogan is quoted by Professor Petersen in the Columbia University Forum.)

On June 14, CBS televised a jumbled, incoherent, unintelligible—and for these very reasons, authentic and significant—documentary entitled The Berkeley Story. There is method in every kind of madness—and for those acquainted with modern philosophy, that documentary was like a display of sideshow mirrors throwing off twisted reflections and random echoes of the carnage perpetrated in the academic torture-chambers of the mind.

“Our generation has no ideology,” declared the first boy interviewed, in the tone of defiance and hatred once reserved for saying: “Down with Wall Street!”—clearly projecting that the enemy now is not the so-called Robber Barons, but the mind. The older generation, he explained scornfully, had “a neat little pill” to solve everything, but the pill didn’t work and they merely “got their hearts busted.” “We don’t believe in pills,” he said.

“We’ve learned that there are no absolute rules,” said a young girl, hastily and defensively, as if uttering an axiom—and proceeded to explain inarticulately, with the help of gestures pointing inward, that “we make rules for ourselves” and that what is right for her may not be right for others.

A girl described her classes as “words, words, words, paper, paper, paper”—and quietly, in a tone of authentic despair, said that she stopped at times to wonder: “What am I doing here? I’m not learning anything.”

An intense young girl who talked volubly, never quite finishing a sentence nor making a point, was denouncing society in general, trying to say that since people are social products, society has done a bad job. In the middle of a sentence, she stopped and threw in, as a casual aside: “Whatever way I turn out, I still am a product,” then went on. She said it with the simple earnestness of a conscientious child acknowledging a self-evident fact of nature. It was not an act: the poor little creature meant it.

The helpless bewilderment on the face of Harry Reasoner, the commentator, when he tried to sum up what he had presented, was an eloquent indication of why the press is unable properly to handle the student rebellion. “Now—immediacy—any situation must be solved now,” he said incredulously, describing the rebels’ attitude, neither praising nor blaming, in the faintly astonished, faintly helpless tone of a man unable to believe that he is seeing savages running loose on the campus of one of America’s great universities.

Such are the products of modern philosophy. They are the type of students who are too intelligent not to see the logical consequences of the theories they have been taught—but not intelligent nor independent enough to see through the theories and reject them.

So they scream their defiance against “The System,” not realizing that they are its most consistently docile pupils, that theirs is a rebellion against the status quo by its archetypes, against the intellectual “Establishment” by its robots who have swallowed every shopworn premise of the “liberals” of the 1930’s, including the catch-phrases of altruism, the dedication to “deprived people,” to such a safely conventional cause as “the war on poverty.” A rebellion that brandishes banners inscribed with bromides is not a very convincing nor very inspiring sight.

As in any movement, there is obviously a mixture of motives involved: there are the little shysters of the intellect, who have found a gold mine in modern philosophy, who delight in arguing for argument’s sake and stumping opponents by means of ready-to-wear paradoxes—there are the little role-players, who fancy themselves as heroes and enjoy defiance for the sake of defiance—there are the nihilists, who, moved by a profound hatred, seek nothing but destruction for the sake of destruction—there are the hopeless dependents, who seek to “belong” to any crowd that would have them—and there are the plain hooligans, who are always there, on the fringes of any mob action that smells of trouble. Whatever the combination of motives, neurosis is stamped in capital letters across the whole movement, since there is no such thing as rejecting reason through an innocent error of knowledge. But whether the theories of modern philosophy serve merely as a screen, a defense-mechanism, a rationalization of neurosis or are, in part, its cause—the fact remains that modern philosophy has destroyed the best in these students and fostered the worst.

Young people do seek a comprehensive view of life, i.e., a philosophy, they do seek meaning, purpose, ideals—and most of them take what they get. It is in their teens and early twenties that most people seek philosophical answers and set their premises, for good or evil, for the rest of their lives. Some never reach that stage; some never give up the quest; but the majority are open to the voice of philosophy for a few brief years. These last are the permanent, if not innocent, victims of modern philosophy.

They are not independent thinkers nor intellectual originators; they are unable to answer or withstand the flood of modern sophistries. So some of them give up, after one or two unintelligible courses, convinced that thinking is a waste of time—and turn into lethargic cynics or stultified Babbitts by the time they reach twenty-five. Others accept what they hear; they accept it blindly and literally; these are today’s activists. And no matter what tangle of motives now moves them, every teacher of modern philosophy should cringe in their presence, if he is still open to the realization that it is by means of the best within them, by means of their twisted, precarious groping for ideas, that he has turned them into grotesque little monstrosities.

Now what happens to the better minds in modern universities, to the students of above average intelligence who are actually eager to learn? What they find and have to endure is a long, slow process of psycho-epistemological torture.

Directly or indirectly, the influence of philosophy sets the epistemological standards and methods of teaching for all departments, in the physical sciences as well as in the humanities. The consequence, today, is a chaos of subjective whims setting the criteria of logic, of communication, demonstration, evidence, proof, which differ from class to class, from teacher to teacher. I am not speaking of a difference in viewpoint or content, but of the absence of basic epistemological principles and the consequent difference in the method of functioning required of a student’s mind. It is as if each course were given in a different language, each requiring that one think exclusively in that language, none providing a dictionary. The result—to the extent that one would attempt to comply—is intellectual disintegration.

Add to this: the opposition to “system-building,” i.e., to the integration of knowledge, with the result that the material taught in one class contradicts the material taught in the others, each subject hanging in a vacuum and to be accepted out of context, while any questions on how to integrate it are rejected, discredited, and discouraged.

Add to this: the arbitrary, senseless, haphazard conglomeration of most curricula, the absence of any hierarchical structure of knowledge, any order, continuity or rationale—the jumble of courses on out-of-context minutiae and out-of-focus surveys—the all-pervading unintelligibility—the arrogantly self-confessed irrationality—and, consequently, the necessity to memorize, rather than learn, to recite, rather than understand, to hold in one’s mind a cacophony of undefined jargon long enough to pass the next exam.

Add to this: the professors who refuse to answer questions—the professors who answer by evasion and ridicule—the professors who turn their classes into bull-sessions on the premise that “we’re here to mull things over together”—the professors who do lecture, but, in the name of “anti-dogmatism,” take no stand, express no viewpoint and leave the students in a maze of contradictions with no lead to a solution—the professors who do take a stand and invite the students’ comments, then penalize dissenters by mean of lower grades (particularly in political courses).

Add to this: the moral cowardice of most university administrations, the policy of permanent moral neutrality, of compromising on anything, of evading any conflict at any price—and the students’ knowledge that the worst classroom injustice will remain uncorrected, that no appeal is practicable and no justice is to be found anywhere.

Yes, of course, there are exceptions—there are competent educators, brilliant minds, and rational men on the university staffs—but they are swallowed in the rampaging “mainstream” of irrationality and, too often, defeated by the hopeless pessimism of bitter, long-repressed frustration.

And further: most professors and administrators are much more competent and rational as individuals than they are in their collective performance. Most of them realize and, privately, complain about the evils of today’s educational world. But each of them feels individually impotent before the enormity of the problem. So they blame it on some nameless, disembodied, almost mystical power, which they designate as “The System”—and too many of them take it to be a political system, specifically capitalism. They do not realize that there is only one human discipline which enables men to deal with large-scale-problems, which has the power to integrate and unify human activities—and that that discipline is philosophy, which they have set, instead, to the task of disintegrating and destroying their work.

What does all this do to the best minds among the students? Most of them endure their college years with the teeth-clenched determination of serving out a jail sentence. The psychological scars they acquire in the process are incalculable. But they struggle as best they can to preserve their capacity to think, sensing dimly that the essence of the torture is an assault on their mind. And what they feel toward their schools ranges from mistrust to resentment to contempt to hatred—intertwined with a sense of exhaustion and excruciating boredom.

To various extents and various degrees of conscious awareness, these feelings are shared by the entire pyramid of the student body, from intellectual top to bottom. This is the reason why the handful of Berkeley rebels was able to attract thousands of students who did not realize, at first, the nature of what they were joining and who withdrew when it became apparent. Those students were moved by a desperate, incoherent frustration, by a need to protest, not knowing fully against what, by a blind desire to strike out at the university somehow.

I asked a small group of intelligent students at one of New York’s best universities—who were ideologically opposed to the rebels—whether they would fight for the university administration, if the rebellion came to their campus. All of them shook their heads, with faint, wise, bitter smiles.

The philosophical impotence of the older generation is the reason why the adult authorities—from the Berkeley administration to the social commentators to the press to Governor Brown—were unable to take a firm stand and had no rational answer to the Berkeley rebellion. Granting the premises of modern philosophy, logic was on the side of the rebels. To answer them would require a total philosophical re-evaluation, down to basic premises—which none of those adults would dare attempt.

Hence the incredible spectacle of brute force, hoodlum tactics, and militantly explicit irrationality being brought to a university campus—and being met by the vague, uncertain, apologetic concessions, the stale generalities, the evasive platitudes of the alleged defenders of academic law and order.

In a civilized society, a student’s declaration that he rejects reason and proposes to act outside the bounds of rationality would be taken as sufficient grounds for immediate expulsion—let alone if he proceeded to engage in mob action and physical violence on a university campus. But modern universities have long since lost the moral right to oppose the first—and are, therefore, impotent against the second.

The student rebellion is an eloquent demonstration of the fact that when men abandon reason, they open the door to physical force as the only alternative and the inevitable consequence.

The rebellion is also one of the clearest refutations of the argument of those intellectuals who claimed that skepticism and chronic doubt would lead to social harmony.

When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil. (Atlas Shrugged)

Who stands to profit by that rebellion? The answer lies in the nature and goals of its leadership.

If the rank-and-file of the college rebels are victims, at least in part, this cannot be said of their leaders. Who are their leaders? Any and all of the statist-collectivist groups that hover, like vultures, over the remnants of capitalism, hoping to pounce on the carcass—and to accelerate the end, whenever possible. Their minimal goal is just “to make trouble”—to undercut, to confuse, to demoralize, to destroy. Their ultimate goal is to take over.

To such leadership, the college rebels are merely cannon-fodder, intended to stick their headless necks out, to fight on campuses, to go to jail, to lose their careers and their future—and eventually, if the leadership succeeds, to fight in the streets and lose their “nonabsolute” lives, paving the way for the absolute dictatorship of whoever is the bloodiest among the thugs scrambling for power. Young fools who refuse to look beyond the immediate “now” have no way of knowing whose long-range goals they are serving.

The communists are involved, among others; but, like the others, they are merely the manipulators, not the cause, of the student rebellion. This is an example of the fact that whenever they win, they win by default—like germs feeding on the sores of a disintegrating body. They did not create the conditions that are destroying American universities—they did not create the hordes of embittered, aimless, neurotic teen-agers—but they do know how to attack through the sores which their opponents insist on evading. They are professional ideologists, and it is not difficult for them to move into an intellectual vacuum and to hang the cringing advocates of “antiideology” by their own contradictions.

For its motley leftist leadership, the student rebellion is a trial balloon, a kind of cultural temperature-taking. It is a test of how much they can get away with and what sort of opposition they will encounter.

For the rest of us, it is a miniature preview—in the microcosm of the academic world—of what is to happen to the country at large, if the present cultural trend remains unchallenged.

The country at large is a mirror of its universities. The practical result of modern philosophy is today’s mixed economy with its moral nihilism, its range-of-the-moment pragmatism, its anti-ideological ideology, and its truly shameful recourse to the notion of “Government by Consensus.”

Rule by pressure groups is merely the prelude, the social conditioning for mob rule. Once a country has accepted the obliteration of moral principles, of individual rights, of objectivity, of justice, of reason, and has submitted to the rule of legalized brute force—the elimination of the concept “legalized” does not take long to follow. Who is to resist it—and in the name of what?

When numbers are substituted for morality, and no individual can claim a right, but any gang can assert any desire whatever, when compromise is the only policy expected of those in power, and the preservation of the moment’s “stability,” of peace at any price, is their only goal—the winner, necessarily, is whoever presents the most unjust and irrational demands; the system serves as an open invitation to do so. If there were no communists or other thugs in the world, such a system would create them.

The more an official is committed to the policy of compromise, the less able he is to resist anything: to give in is his “instinctive” response in any emergency, his basic principle of conduct, which makes him an easy mark.

In this connection, the extreme of naive superficiality was reached by those commentators who expressed astonishment that the student rebellion had chosen Berkeley as its first battleground and President Kerr as its first target in spite of his record as a “liberal” and as a renowned mediator and arbitrator. “Ironically, some of the least mature student spokesmen . . . tried to depict Mr. Kerr as the illiberal administrator,” said an editorial in The New York Times (March 11, 1965). “This was, of course, absurd in view of Mr. Kerr’s long and courageous battle to uphold academic freedom and students’ rights in the face of those right-wing pressures that abound in California.” Other commentators pictured Mr. Kerr as an innocent victim caught between the conflicting pressures of the “conservatives” on the Board of Regents and the “liberals” on the faculty. But, in fact and in logic, the middle of the road can lead to no other final destination—and it is clear that the rebels chose Clark Kerr as their first target, not in spite of, but because of his record.

Now project what would happen if the technique of the Berkeley rebellion were repeated on a national scale. Contrary to the fanatical belief of its advocates, compromise does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody; it does not lead to general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to be all things to all men end up by not being anything to anyone. And more: the partial victory of an unjust claim encourages the claimant to try further; the partial defeat of a just claim discourages and paralyzes the victim. If a determined, disciplined gang of statists were to make an assault on the crumbling remnants of a mixed economy, boldly and explicitly proclaiming the collectivist tenets which the country had accepted by tacit default—what resistance would they encounter? The dispirited, demoralized, embittered majority would remain lethargically indifferent to any public event. And many would support the gang, at first, moved by a desperate, incoherent frustration, by a need to protest, not knowing fully against what, by a blind desire to strike out somehow at the suffocating hopelessness of the status quo.

Who would feel morally inspired to fight for Johnson’s “consensus”? Who fought for the aimless platitudes of the Kerensky government in Russia—of the Weimar Republic in Germany—of the Nationalist government in China?

But no matter how badly demoralized and philosophically disarmed a country might be, it has to reach a certain psychological turning point before it can be pushed from a state of semi-freedom into surrender to full-fledged dictatorship. And this was the main ideological purpose of the student rebellion’s leaders, whoever they were: to condition the country to accept force as the means of settling political controversies.

Observe the ideological precedents which the Berkeley rebels were striving to establish: all of them involved the abrogation of rights and the advocacy of force. These notions have been publicized, yet their meaning has been largely ignored and left unanswered.

1. The main issue was the attempt to make the country accept mass civil disobedience as a proper and valid tool of political action. This attempt has been made repeatedly in connection with the civil rights movement. But there the issue was confused by the fact that the Negroes were the victims of legalized injustice and, therefore, the matter of breaching legality did not become unequivocally clear. The country took it as a fight for justice, not as an assault on the law.

Civil disobedience may be justifiable, in some cases, when and if an individual disobeys a law in order to bring an issue to court, as a test case. Such an action involves respect for legality and a protest directed only at a particular law which the individual seeks an opportunity to prove to be unjust. The same is true of a group of individuals when and if the risks involved are their own.

But there is no justification, in a civilized society, for the kind of mass civil disobedience that involves the violation of the rights of others—regardless of whether the demonstrators’ goal is good or evil. The end does not justify the means. No one’s rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others. Mass disobedience is an assault on the concept of rights: it is a mob’s defiance of legality as such.

The forcible occupation of another man’s property or the obstruction of a public thoroughfare is so blatant a violation of rights that an attempt to justify it becomes an abrogation of morality. An individual has no right to do a “sit-in” in the home or office of a person he disagrees with—and he does not acquire such a right by joining a gang. Rights are not a matter of numbers—and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.

The only power of a mob, as against an individual, is greater muscular strength—i.e., plain, brute physical force. The attempt to solve social problems by means of physical force is what a civilized society is established to prevent. The advocates of mass civil disobedience admit that their purpose is intimidation. A society that tolerates intimidation as a means of settling disputes—the physical intimidation of some men or groups by others—loses its moral right to exist as a social system, and its collapse does not take long to follow.

Politically, mass civil disobedience is appropriate only as a prelude to civil war—as the declaration of a total break with a country’s political institutions. And the degree of today’s intellectual chaos and context-dropping was best illustrated by some “conservative” California official who rushed to declare that he objects to the Berkeley rebellion, but respects civil disobedience as a valid American tradition. “Don’t forget the Boston Tea Party,” he said, forgetting it.

If the meaning of civil disobedience is somewhat obscured in the civil rights movement—and, therefore, the attitude of the country is inconclusive—that meaning becomes blatantly obvious when a sit-in is staged on a university campus. If the universities—the supposed citadels of reason, knowledge, scholarship, civilization—can be made to surrender to the rule of brute force, the rest of the country is cooked.

2. To facilitate the acceptance of force, the Berkeley rebels attempted to establish a special distinction between force and violence: force, they claimed explicitly, is a proper form of social action, but violence is not. Their definition of the terms was as follows: coercion by means of a literal physical contact is “violence” and is reprehensible; any other way of violating rights is merely “force” and is a legitimate, peaceful method of dealing with opponents.

For instance, if the rebels occupy the administration building, that is “force”; if policemen drag them out, that is “violence.” If Savio seizes a microphone he has no right to use, that is “force”; if a policeman drags him away from it, that is “violence.”

Consider the implications of that distinction as a rule of social conduct: if you come home one evening, find a stranger occupying your house and throw him out bodily, he has merely committed a peaceful act of “force,” but you are guilty of “violence,” and you are to be punished.

The theoretical purpose of that grotesque absurdity is to establish a moral inversion: to make the initiation of force moral, and resistance to force immoral—and thus to obliterate the right of self-defense. The immediate practical purpose is to foster the activities of the lowest political breed: the provocateurs, who commit acts of force and place the blame on their victims.

3. To justify that fraudulent distinction, the Berkeley rebels attempted to obliterate a legitimate one: the distinction between ideas and actions. They claimed that freedom of speech means freedom of action and that no clear line of demarcation can be drawn between them.

For instance, if they have the right to advocate any political viewpoint—they claimed—they have the right to organize, on campus, any off-campus activities, even those forbidden by law. As Professor Petersen put it, they were claiming the right “to use the University as a sanctuary from which to make illegal raids on the general community.”

The difference between an exchange of ideas and an exchange of blows is self-evident. The line of demarcation between freedom of speech and freedom of action is established by the ban on the initiation of physical force. It is only when that ban is abrogated that such a problem can arise—but when that ban is abrogated, no political freedom of any kind can remain in existence.

At a superficial glance, the rebels’ “package-deal” may seem to imply a sort of anarchistic extension of freedom; but, in fact and in logic, it implies the exact opposite—which is a grim joke on those unthinking youths who joined the rebellion in the name of “free speech.” If the freedom to express ideas were equated with the freedom to commit crimes, it would not take long to demonstrate that no organized society can exist on such terms and, therefore, that the expression of ideas has to be curtailed and some ideas have to be forbidden, just as criminal acts are forbidden. Thus the gullible would be brought to concede that the right of free speech is undefinable and “impracticable.”

4. An indication of such a motive was given by the rebels’ demand for unrestricted freedom of speech on campus—with the consequent “Filthy Language Movement.”

There can be no such thing as the right to an unrestricted freedom of speech (or of action) on someone else’s property. The fact that the University at Berkeley is owned by the state merely complicates the issue, but does not alter it. The owners of a state university are the voters and taxpayers of that state. The University administration, appointed (directly or indirectly) by an elected official, is, theoretically, the agent of the owners—and has to act as such, so long as state universities exist. (Whether they should exist is a different question.)

In any undertaking or establishment involving more than one man, it is the owner or owners who set the rules and terms of appropriate conduct; the rest of the participants are free to go elsewhere and seek different terms, if they do not agree. There can be no such thing as the right to act on whim, to be exercised by some participants at the expense of others.

Students who attend a university have the right to expect that they will not be subjected to hearing the kind of obscenities for which the owner of a semi-decent barroom would bounce hoodlums out on the street. The right to determine what sort of language is permissible belongs to the administration of a university—fully as much as to the owner of a barroom.

The technique of the rebels, as of all statists, was to take advantage of the principles of a free society in order to undercut them by an alleged demonstration of their “impracticability”—in this case, the “impracticability” of the right of free speech. But, in fact, what they have demonstrated is a point farthest removed from their goals: that no rights of any kind can be exercised without property rights.

It is only on the basis of property rights that the sphere and application of individual rights can be defined in any given social situation. Without property rights, there is no way to solve or to avoid a hopeless chaos of clashing views, interests, demands, desires, and whims.

There was no way for the Berkeley administration to answer the rebels except by invoking property rights. It is obvious why neither modern “liberals” nor “conservatives” would care to do so. It is not the contradictions of a free society that the rebels were exposing and cashing-in on, but the contradictions of a mixed economy.

As to the question of what ideological policy should properly be adopted by the administration of a state university, it is a question that has no answer. There are no solutions for the many contradictions inherent in the concept of “public property,” particularly when the property is directly concerned with the dissemination of ideas. This is one of the reasons why the rebels would choose a state university as their first battleground.

A good case could be made for the claim that a state university has no right to forbid the teaching or advocacy of any political viewpoint whatever, as, for instance, of communism, since some of the taxpaying owners may be communists. An equally good case could be made for the claim that a state university has no right to permit the teaching and advocacy of any political viewpoint which (as, for instance, communism) is a direct threat to the property, freedom, and lives of the majority of the taxpaying owners. Majority rule is not applicable in the realm of ideas; an individual’s convictions are not subject to a majority vote; but neither an individual nor a minority nor a majority should be forced to support their own destroyers.

On the one hand, a government institution has no right to forbid the expression of any ideas. On the other hand, a government institution has no right to harbor, assist, and finance the country’s enemies (as, for instance, the collectors of funds for the Vietcong).

The source of these contradictions does not lie in the principle of individual rights, but in their violation by the collectivist institution of “public property.”

This issue, however, has to be fought in the field of constitutional law, not on campus. As students, the rebels have no greater rights in a state university than in a private one. As taxpayers, they have no greater rights than the millions of other California taxpayers involved. If they object to the policies of the Board of Regents, they have no recourse except at the polls at the next election—if they can persuade a sufficient number of voters. This is a pretty slim chance—and this is a good argument against any type of “public property.” But it is not an issue to be solved by physical force.

What is significant here is the fact that the rebels—who, to put it mildly, are not champions of private property—refused to abide by the kind of majority rule which is inherent in public ownership. That is what they were opposing when they complained that universities have become servants of the “financial, industrial, and military establishment.” It is the rights of these particular groups of taxpayers (the right to a voice in the management of state universities) that they were seeking to abrogate.

If anyone needs proof of the fact that the advocates of public ownership are not seeking “democratic” control of property by majority rule, but control by dictatorship—this is one eloquent piece of evidence.

5. As part of the ideological conditioning for that ultimate goal, the rebels attempted to introduce a new variant on an old theme that has been the object of an intense drive by all statist-collectivists for many years past: the obliteration of the difference between private action and government action.

This has always been attempted by means of a “package-deal” ascribing to private citizens the specific violations constitutionally forbidden to the government, and thus destroying individual rights while freeing the government from any restrictions. The most frequent example of this technique consists of accusing private citizens of practicing “censorship” (a concept applicable only to the government) and thus negating their right to disagree.⁵⁹

The new variant provided by the rebels was their protest against alleged “double jeopardy.” It went as follows: if the students commit illegal acts, they will be punished by the courts and must not, therefore, be penalized by the university for the same offense.

“Double jeopardy” is a concept applicable only to the government, and only to one branch of the government, the judiciary, and only to a specific judiciary action: it means that a man must not be put on trial twice for the same offense.

To equate private judgment and action (or, in this context, a government official’s judgment and action) with a court trial is worse than absurd. It is an outrageous attempt to obliterate the right to moral judgment and moral action. It is a demand that a lawbreaker suffer no civil consequences of his crime.

If such a notion were accepted, individuals would have no right to evaluate the conduct of others nor to act according to their evaluation. They would have to wait until a court had decreed whether a given man was guilty or innocent—and even after he was pronounced guilty, they would have no right to change their behavior toward him and would have to leave the task of penalizing him exclusively to the government.

For instance, if a bank employee were found guilty of embezzlement and had served his sentence, the bank would have no right to refuse to give him back his former job—since a refusal would constitute “double jeopardy.”

Or: a government official would have no right to watch the legality of the actions of his department’s employees, nor to lay down rules for their strict observance of the law, but would have to wait until a court had found them guilty of law-breaking—and would have to reinstate them in their jobs, after they had served their sentences for influence-peddling or bribe-taking or treason.

The notion of morality as a monopoly of the government (and of a single branch or group within the government) is so blatantly a part of the ideology of a dictatorship that the rebels’ attempt to get away with it is truly shocking.

6. The rebels’ notion that universities should be run by students and faculties was an open, explicit assault on the right attacked implicitly by all their other notions: the right of private property. And of all the various statist-collectivist systems, the one they chose as their goal is, politico-economically, the least practical; intellectually, the least defensible; morally, the most shameful: guild socialism.

Guild socialism is a system that abolishes the exercise of individual ability by chaining men into groups according to their line of work, and delivering the work into the group’s power, as its exclusive domain, with the group dictating the rules, standards, and practices of how the work is to be done and who shall or shall not do it.

Guild socialism is the concrete-bound, routine-bound mentality of a savage, elevated into a social theory. Just as a tribe of savages seizes a piece of jungle territory and claims it as a monopoly by reason of the fact of being there—so guild socialism grants a monopoly, not on a jungle forest or water-hole, but on a factory or a university—not by reason of a man’s ability, achievement, or even “public service,” but by reason of the fact that he is there.

Just as savages have no concept of causes or consequences, of past or future, and no concept of efficacy beyond the muscular power of their tribe—so guild socialists, finding themselves in the midst of an industrial civilization, regard its institutions as phenomena of nature and see no reason why the gang should not seize them.

If there is any one proof of a man’s incompetence, it is the stagnant mentality of a worker (or of a professor) who, doing some small, routine job in a vast undertaking, does not care to look beyond the lever of a machine (or the lectern of a classroom), does not choose to know how the machine (or the classroom) got there or what makes his job possible, and proclaims that the management of the undertaking is parasitical and unnecessary. Managerial work—the organization and integration of human effort into purposeful, large-scale, long-range activities—is, in the realm of action, what man’s conceptual faculty is in the realm of cognition. It is beyond the grasp and, therefore, is the first target of the self-arrested, sensory-perceptual mentality.

If there is any one way to confess one’s own mediocrity, it is the willingness to place one’s work in the absolute power of a group, particularly a group of one’s professional colleagues. Of any forms of tyranny, this is the worst; it is directed against a single human attribute: the mind—and against a single enemy: the innovator. The innovator, by definition, is the man who challenges the established practices of his profession. To grant a professional monopoly to any group is to sacrifice human ability and abolish progress; to advocate such a monopoly is to confess that one has nothing to sacrifice.

Guild socialism is the rule of, by, and for mediocrity. Its cause is a society’s intellectual collapse; its consequence is a quagmire of stagnation; its historical example is the guild system of the Middle Ages (or, in modern times, the fascist system of Italy under Mussolini).

The rebels’ notion that students (along with faculties) should run universities and determine their curricula is a crude absurdity. If an ignorant youth comes to an institution of learning in order to acquire knowledge of a certain science, by what means is he to determine what is relevant and how he should be taught? (In the process of learning, he can judge only whether his teacher’s presentation is clear or unclear, logical or contradictory; he cannot determine the proper course and method of teaching, ahead of any knowledge of the subject.) It is obvious that a student who demands the right to run a university (or to decide who should run it) has no knowledge of the concept of knowledge, that his demand is self-contradictory and disqualifies him automatically. The same is true—with a much heavier burden of moral guilt—of the professor who taught him to make such demands and who supports them.

Would you care to be treated in a hospital where the methods of therapy were determined by a vote of doctors and patients?

Yet the absurdity of these examples is merely more obvious—not more irrational nor more vicious—than the standard collectivist claim that workers should take over the factories created by men whose achievement they can neither grasp nor equal. The basic epistemological-moral premise and pattern are the same: the obliteration of reason obliterates the concept of reality, which obliterates the concept of achievement, which obliterates the concept of the distinction between the earned and the unearned. Then the incompetent can seize factories, the ignorant can seize universities, the brutes can seize scientific research laboratories—and nothing is left in a human society but the power of whim and fist.

What makes guild socialism cruder than (but not different from) most statist-collectivist theories is the fact that it represents the other, the usually unmentioned, side of altruism: it is the voice, not of the givers, but of the receivers. While most altruistic theorists proclaim “the common good” as their justification, advocate self-sacrificial service to the “community,” and keep silent about the exact nature or identity of the recipients of sacrifices—guild socialists brazenly declare themselves to be the recipients and present their claims to the community, demanding its services. If they want a monopoly on a given profession, they claim, the rest of the community must give up the right to practice it. If they want a university, they claim, the community must provide it.

And if “selfishness” is taken, by the altruists, to mean the sacrifice of others to self, I challenge them to name an uglier example of it than the pronouncement of the little Berkeley collectivist who declared: “Our idea is that the university is composed of faculty, students, books, and ideas. In a literal sense, the administration is merely there to make sure the sidewalks are kept clean. It should be the servant of the faculty and the students.”

What did that little disembodied mystic omit from his idea of a university? Who pays the salaries of the faculty? Who provides the livelihood of the students? Who publishes the books? Who builds the classrooms, the libraries, the dormitories—and the sidewalks? Leave it to a modern “mystic of muscle” to display the kind of contempt for “vulgar material concerns” that an old-fashioned mystic would not quite dare permit himself.

Who—besides the university administration—is to be the voiceless, rightless “servant” and sidewalk-sweeper of the faculty and students? No, not only the men of productive genius who create the material wealth that makes universities possible, not only the “tycoons of big business,” not only the “financial, industrial, and military establishment”—but every taxpayer of the state of California, every man who works for a living, high or low, every human being who earns his sustenance, struggles with his budget, pays for what he gets, and does not permit himself to evade the reality of “vulgar material concerns.”

Such is the soul revealed by the ideology of the Berkeley rebellion. Such is the meaning of the rebels’ demands and of the ideological precedents they were trying to establish.

Observe the complexity, the equivocations, the tricks, the twists, the intellectual acrobatics performed by these avowed advocates of unbridled feelings—and the ideological consistency of these activists who claim to possess no ideology.

The first round of the student rebellion has not gone over too well. In spite of the gratuitous “puff-job” done by the press, the attitude of the public is a mixture of bewilderment, indifference, and antagonism. Indifference—because the evasive vagueness of the press reports was self-defeating: people do not understand what it is all about and see no reason to care. Antagonism—because the American public still holds a profound respect for universities (as they might be and ought to be, but are not any longer), and the commentators’ half-laudatory, half-humorous platitudes about the “idealism of youth” have not succeeded in white-washing the fact that brute physical force was brought to a university campus. That fact has aroused a vague sense of uneasiness in people, a sense of undefined, apprehensive condemnation.

The rebellion’s attempt to invade other campuses did not get very far. There were some disgraceful proclamations of appeasement by some university administrators and commencement orators this spring, but no discernible public sympathy.

There were a few instances of a proper attitude on the part of university administrations—an attitude of firmness, dignity and uncompromising severity—notably at Columbia University. A commencement address by Dr. Meng, President of Hunter College, is also worth noting. Declaring that the violation of the rights of others “is intolerable” in an academic community and that any student or teacher guilty of it deserves “instant expulsion,” he said: “Yesterday’s ivory tower has become today’s foxhole. The leisure of the theory class is increasingly occupied in the organization of picket lines, teach-ins, think-ins, and stake-outs of one sort or another.”⁶⁰

But even though the student rebellion has not aroused much public sympathy, the most ominous aspect of the situation is the fact that it has not met any ideological opposition, that the implications of the rebels’ stand have neither been answered nor rejected, that such criticism as it did evoke was, with rare exceptions, evasively superficial.

As a trial balloon, the rebellion has accomplished its leaders’ purpose: it has demonstrated that they may have gone a bit too far, bared their teeth and claws a bit too soon, and antagonized many potential sympathizers, even among the “liberals”—but that the road ahead is empty, with no intellectual barricades in sight.

The battle is to continue. The long-range intentions of the student rebellion have been proclaimed repeatedly by the same activists who proclaim their exclusive dedication to the immediate moment. The remnants of the “Free Speech Movement” at Berkeley have been reorganized into a “Free Student Union,” which is making militant noises in preparation for another assault. No matter how absurd their notions, the rebels’ assaults are directed at the most important philosophical-political issues of our age. These issues cannot be ignored, evaded, or bribed away by compromise. When brute force is on the march, compromise is the red carpet. When reason is attacked, common sense is not enough.

Neither a man nor a nation can exist without some form of philosophy. A man has the free will to think or not; if he does not, he takes what he gets. The free will of a nation is its intellectuals; the rest of the country takes what they offer; they set the terms, the values, the course, the goal.

In the absence of intellectual opposition, the rebels’ notions will gradually come to be absorbed into the culture. The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other—until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology. That is the way welfare statism came to be accepted in this country.

What we are witnessing today is an acceleration of the attempts to cash-in on the ideological implications of welfare statism and to push beyond it. The college rebels are merely the commandos, charged with the task of establishing ideological beachheads for a full-scale advance of all the statist-collectivist forces against the remnants of capitalism in America; and part of their task is the take-over of the ideological control of America’s universities.

If the collectivists succeed, the terrible historical irony will lie in the fact that what looks like a noisy, reckless, belligerent confidence is, in fact, a hysterical bluff. The acceleration of collectivism’s advance is not the march of winners, but the blind stampede of losers. Collectivism has lost the battle for men’s minds; its advocates know it; their last chance consists of the fact that no one else knows it. If they are to cash-in on decades of philosophical corruption, on all the gnawing, scrapping, scratching, burrowing to dig a maze of philosophical rat-holes which is about to cave in, it’s now or never.

As a cultural-intellectual power and a moral ideal, collectivism died in World War II. If we are still rolling in its direction, it is only by the inertia of a void and the momentum of disintegration. A social movement that began with the ponderous, brain-cracking, dialectical constructs of Hegel and Marx, and ends up with a horde of morally unwashed children stamping their foot and shrieking: “I want it now!”—is through.

All over the world, while mowing down one helpless nation after another, collectivism has been steadily losing the two elements that hold the key to the future: the brains of mankind and its youth. In regard to the first, observe Britain’s “brain drain.” In regard to the second, consider the fact (which was not mentioned in the press comments on the student rebellion) that in a predominant number of American universities, the political views of the faculty are perceptibly more “liberal” than those of the student body. (The same is true of the youth of the country at large—as against the older generation, the thirty-five to fifty age bracket, who were reared under the New Deal and who hold the country’s leadership, at present.) That is one of the facts which the student rebellion was intended to disguise.

This is not to say that the anti-collectivists represent a numerical majority among college students. The passive supporters of the status quo are always the majority in any group, culture, society, or age. But it is not by passive majorities that the trends of a nation are set. Who sets them? Anyone who cares to do so, if he has the intellectual ammunition to win on the battlefield of ideas, which belongs to those who do care. Those who don’t, are merely social ballast by their own choice and predilection.

The fact that the “non-liberals” among college students (and among the youth of the world) can be identified at present only as “anti-collectivists” is the dangerous element and the question mark in today’s situation. They are the young people who are not ready to give up, who want to fight against a swamp of evil, but do not know what is the good. They have rejected the sick, worn platitudes of collectivism (along with all of its cultural manifestations, including the cult of despair and depravity—the studied mindlessness of jerk-and-moan dancing, singing or acting—the worship of anti-heroes—the experience of looking up to the dissection of a psychotic’s brain, for inspiration, and to the bare feet of an inarticulate brute, for guidance—the stupor of reduction to sensory stimuli—the sense of life of a movie such as Tom Jones). But they have found, as yet, no direction, no consistent philosophy, no rational values, no long-range goals. Until and unless they do, their incoherent striving for a better future will collapse before the final thrust of the collectivists.

Historically, we are now in a kind of intellectual no man’s land—and the future will be determined by those who venture out of the trenches of the status quo. Our direction will depend on whether the venturers are crusaders fighting for a new Renaissance or scavengers pouncing upon the wreckage left of yesterday’s battles. The crusaders are not yet ready; the scavengers are.

That is why—in a deeper sense than the little zombies of college campuses will ever grasp—“Now, now, now!” is the last slogan and cry of the ragged, bearded stragglers who had once been an army rallied by the promise of a scientifically (!) planned society.

The two most accurate characterizations of the student rebellion, given in the press, were: “Political Existentialism” and “Castroite.” Both are concepts pertaining to intellectual bankruptcy: the first stands for the abdication of reason—the second, for that state of hysterical panic which brandishes a fist as its sole recourse.

In preparation for its published survey (March 22, 1965), Newsweek conducted a number of polls among college students at large, on various subjects, one of which was the question of who are the students’ heroes. The editors of Newsweek informed me that my name appeared on the resultant list, and sent an interviewer to question me about my views on the state of modern universities. For reasons best known to themselves, they chose not to publish any part of that interview. What I said (in briefer form) was what I am now saying in this article—with the exception of the concluding remarks which follow and which I want to address most particularly to those college students who chose me as one of their heroes.

Young people are constantly asking what they can do to fight today’s disastrous trends; they are seeking some form of action, and wrecking their hopes in blind alleys, particularly every four years, at election time. Those who do not realize that the battle is ideological had better give up, because they have no chance. Those who do realize it should grasp that the student rebellion offers them a chance to train themselves for the kind of battle they will have to fight in the world, when they leave the university; a chance, not only to train themselves, but to win the first rounds of that wider battle.

If they seek an important cause, they have the opportunity to fight the rebels, to fight ideologically, on moral-intellectual grounds—by identifying and exposing the meaning of the rebels’ demands, by naming and answering the basic principles which the rebels dare not admit. The battle consists, above all, of providing the country (or all those within hearing) with ideological answers—a field of action from which the older generation has deserted under fire.

Ideas cannot be fought except by means of better ideas. The battle consists, not of opposing, but of exposing; not of denouncing, but of disproving; not of evading, but of boldly proclaiming a full, consistent, and radical alternative.

This does not mean that rational students should enter debates with the rebels or attempt to convert them: one cannot argue with self-confessed irrationalists. The goal of an ideological battle is to enlighten the vast, helpless, bewildered majority in the universities—and in the country at large—or, rather, the minds of those among the majority who are struggling to find answers or those who, having heard nothing but collectivist sophistries for years, have withdrawn in revulsion and given up.

The first goal of such a battle is to wrest from a handful of beatniks the title of “spokesmen for American youth,” which the press is so anxious to grant them. The first step is to make oneself heard, on the campus and outside. There are many civilized ways to do it: protest meetings, public petitions, speeches, pamphlets, letters-to-editors. It is a much more important issue than picketing the United Nations or parading in support of the House Un-American Activities Committee. And while such futile groups as Young Americans for Freedom are engaged in such undertakings, they are letting the collectivist vanguard speak in their name—in the name of American college students—without any audible sound of protest.

But in order to be heard, one must have something to say. To have that, one must know one’s case. One must know it fully, logically, consistently, all the way down to philosophical fundamentals. One cannot hope to fight nuclear experts with Republican pea-shooters. And the leaders behind the student rebellion are experts at their particular game.

But they are dangerous only to those who stare at the issues out of focus and hope to fight ideas by means of faith, feelings, and fund-raising. You would be surprised how quickly the ideologists of collectivism retreat when they encounter a confident, intellectual adversary. Their case rests on appealing to human confusion, ignorance, dishonesty, cowardice, despair. Take the side they dare not approach: appeal to human intelligence.

Collectivism has lost the two crucial weapons that raised it to world power and made all of its victories possible: intellectuality and idealism, or reason and morality. It had to lose them precisely at the height of its success, since its claim to both was a fraud: the full, actual reality of socialist-communist-fascist states has demonstrated the brute irrationality of collectivist systems and the inhumanity of altruism as a moral code.

Yet reason and morality are the only weapons that determine the course of history. The collectivists dropped them, because they had no right to carry them. Pick them up; you have.

23. ALIENATION

by Nathaniel Branden

And how am I to face the odds
of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
in a world I never made.

In the writings of contemporary psychologists and sociologists, one encounters these lines from A. E. Housman’s poem more and more often today—quoted as an eloquent summation of the sense of life and psychological plight of twentieth-century man.

In book after book of social commentary, one finds the same message: modern man is overwhelmed by anxiety, modern man suffers from an “identity crisis,” modern man is alienated. “ ‘Who am I?’ ‘Where am I going?’ ‘Do I belong?’: these are the crucial questions man asks himself in modern mass society,” declares the sociologist and psychoanalyst Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek, in The Individual and the Crowd—A Study of Identity in America.⁶¹

The concept of alienation, in its original psychiatric usage, denoted the mentally ill, the severely mentally ill—often, particularly in legal contexts, the insane. It conveyed the notion of the breakdown of rationality and self-determination, the notion of a person driven by forces which he cannot grasp or control, which are expe-rienced by him as compelling and alien, so that he feels estranged from himself.

The Objectivist Newsletter, July, August, and September 1965.

Centuries earlier, medieval theologians had spoken with distress of man’s alienation from God—of an over-concern with the world of the senses that caused man to become lost to himself, estranged from his proper spiritual estate.

It was the philosopher Hegel who introduced the concept of alienation (outside of its psychiatric context) to the modern world. The history of man, maintained Hegel, is the history of man’s self-alienation: man is blind to his true essence, he is lost in the “dead world” of social institutions and of property, which he himself has created, he is estranged from the Universal Being of which he is a part—and human progress consists of man’s motion toward that Whole, as he transcends the limitations of his individual perceptions.

“Alienation” was taken over by Karl Marx and given a narrower, less cosmic meaning. He applied the concept primarily to the worker. The worker’s alienation was inevitable, he asserted, with the development of the division of labor, specialization, exchange, and private property. The worker must sell his services; thus he comes to view himself as a “commodity,” he becomes alienated from the product of his own labor, and his work is no longer the expression of his powers, of his inner self. The worker, who is alive, is ruled by that which is “dead” (i.e., capital, machinery). The consequence, says Marx, is spiritual impoverishment and mutilation: the worker is alienated from himself, from nature and from his fellow-men; he exists only as an animated object, not as a human being.

Since the time of Marx, the idea of alienation has been used more and more extensively by psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers—gathering to itself a wide variety of usages and meanings. But from Hegel and Marx onward, there appears to be an almost universal reluctance, on the part of those who employ the term, to define it precisely; it is as if one were expected to feel its meaning, rather than to grasp it conceptually. In a two-volume collection of essays entitled Alienation, the editor, Gerald Sykes, specifically scorns those who are too eager for a definition of the term; haste for a definition, he declares, reveals that one suffers from “an advanced case of—alienation.”⁶²

Certain writers—notably those of a Freudian or Jungian orientation—declare that the complexity of modern industrial society has caused man to become “overcivilized,” to have lost touch with the deeper roots of his being, to have become alienated from his “instinctual nature.” Others—notably those of an existentialist or Zen Buddhist orientation—complain that our advanced technological society compels man to live too intellectually, to be ruled by abstractions, thus alienating him from the real world which can be experienced in its “wholeness” only via his emotions. Others—notably those of a petulant mediocrity orientation—decry specifically the alienation of the artist; they assert that, with the vanishing of the age of patrons, with the artist thrown on his own resources to struggle in the marketplace—which is ruled by “philistines”—the artist is condemned to fight a losing battle for the preservation of his spiritual integrity: he is too besieged by material temptations.

Most of these writers declare that the problem of alienation—and of man’s search for identity—is not new, but has been a source of anguish to man in every age and culture. But they insist that today, in Western civilization—above all, in America—the problem has reached an unprecedented severity. It has become a crisis.

What is responsible for this crisis? What has alienated man and deprived him of identity? The answer given by most writers on alienation is not always stated explicitly, but—in their countless disparaging references to “the dehumanizing effects of industrialism,” “soul-destroying commercialism,” “the arid rationalism of a technological culture,” “the vulgar materialism of the West,” etc.—the villain in their view of things, the destroyer whom they hold chiefly responsible, is not hard to identify. It is capitalism.

This should not be startling. Since its birth, capitalism has been made the scapegoat responsible for almost every real or imagined evil denounced by anyone. As the distinguished economist Ludwig von Mises observes:

Nothing is more unpopular today than the free market economy, i.e., capitalism. Everything that is considered unsatisfactory in present-day conditions is charged to capitalism. The atheists make capitalism responsible for the survival of Christianity. But the papal encyclicals blame capitalism for the spread of irreligion and the sins of our contemporaries, and the Protestant churches and sects are no less vigorous in their indictment of capitalist greed. Friends of peace consider our wars as an offshoot of capitalist imperialism. But the adamant nationalist warmongers of Germany and Italy indicted capitalism for its “bourgeois” pacifism, contrary to human nature and to the inescapable laws of history. Sermonizers accuse capitalism of disrupting the family and fostering licentiousness. But the “progressives” blame capitalism for the preservation of allegedly outdated rules of sexual restraint. Almost all men agree that poverty is an outcome of capitalism. On the other hand many deplore the fact that capitalism, in catering lavishly to the wishes of people intent upon getting more amenities and a better living, promotes a crass materialism. These contradictory accusations of capitalism cancel one another. But the fact remains that there are few people left who would not condemn capitalism altogether.⁶³

It is true that a great many men suffer from a chronic feeling of inner emptiness, of spiritual impoverishment, the sense of lacking personal identity. It is true that a great many men feel alienated—from something—even if they cannot say from what—from themselves or other men or the universe. And it is profoundly significant that capitalism should be blamed for this. Not because there is any justification for the charge, but because, by analyzing the reasons given for the accusation, one can learn a good deal about the nature and meaning of men’s sense of alienation and non-identity—and, simultaneously, about the psychological motives that give rise to hostility toward capitalism.

The writers on alienation, as I have indicated, are not an intellectually homogeneous group. They differ in many areas: in their view of what the problem of alienation exactly consists of, in the aspects of modern industrial society and a free-market economy which they find most objectionable, in the explicitness with which they identify capitalism as the villain, and in the details of their own political inclinations. Some of these writers are socialists, some are fascists, some are medievalists, some are supporters of the welfare state, some scorn politics altogether. Some believe that the problem of alienation is largely or entirely solvable by a new system of social organization; others believe that the problem, at bottom, is metaphysical and that no entirely satisfactory solution can be found.

Fortunately for the purposes of this analysis, however, there is one contemporary writer who manages to combine in his books virtually all of the major errors perpetrated by commentators in this field: psychologist and sociologist Erich Fromm. Let us, therefore, consider Fromm’s view of man and his theory of alienation in some detail.

Man, declares Erich Fromm, is “the freak of the universe.”

This theme is crucial and central throughout his writings: man is radically different from all other living species, he is “estranged” and “alienated” from nature, he is overwhelmed by a feeling of “isolation” and “separateness”—he has lost, in the process of evolution, the undisturbed tranquillity of other organisms, he has lost the “pre-human harmony” with nature which is enjoyed by an animal, a bird, or a worm. The source of his curse is the fact that he possesses a mind.

“Self-awareness, reason, and imagination,” Fromm writes in Man for Himself, “have disrupted the ‘harmony’ which characterizes animal existence. Their emergence has made man into an anomaly, into the freak of the universe.” Man cannot live as an animal: he is not equipped to adapt himself automatically and unthinkingly to his environment. An animal blindly “repeats the pattern of the species,” its behavior is biologically prescribed and stereotyped, it “either fits in or it dies out”—but it does not have to solve the problem of survival, it is not conscious of life and death as an issue. Man does and is; this is his tragedy. “Reason, man’s blessing, is also his curse. . . .”⁶⁴

In The Art of Loving, he writes:

What is essential in the existence of man is the fact that he has emerged from the animal kingdom, from instinctive adaptation, that he has transcended nature—although he never leaves it; he is part of it—and yet once torn away from nature, he cannot return to it; once thrown out of paradise—a state of original oneness with nature—cherubim with flaming swords block his way, if he should try to return.⁶⁵

That man’s rational faculty deprives man of “paradise,” alienating and estranging him from nature, is clearly revealed, says Fromm, in the “existential dichotomies” which his mind dooms man to confront—“contradictions” inherent in life itself. What are these tragic “dichotomies”? He names three as central and basic. Man’s mind permits him to “visualize his own end: death”—yet “his body makes him want to be alive.”⁶⁶ Man’s nature contains innumerable potentialities—yet “the short span of his life does not permit their full realization under even the most favorable circumstances.” ⁶⁷ Man “must be alone when he has to judge or to make decisions solely by the power of his reason”—yet “he cannot bear to be alone, to be unrelated to his fellow men.”⁶⁸

These “contradictions,” says Fromm, constitute the dilemma of the “human situation”—contradictions with which man is compelled to struggle, but which he can never resolve or annul, and which alienate man from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature.

If the logic of the foregoing is not readily perceivable, the reason does not lie in the brevity of the synopsis. It lies in the unmitigated arbitrariness of Fromm’s manner of presenting his ideas; he writes, not like a scientist, but like an oracle who is not obliged to give reasons or proof.

It is true that man differs fundamentally from all other living species, by virtue of possessing a rational, conceptual faculty. It is true that, for man, survival is a problem to be solved—by the exercise of his intelligence. It is true that no man lives long enough to exhaust his every potentiality. It is true that every man is alone, separate, and unique. It is true that thinking requires independence. These are the facts that grant glory to man’s existence. Why would one choose to regard these facts as a terrifying cosmic paradox and to see in them the evidence of monumentally tragic human problems?

There are men who resent the fact that their life is their responsibility and that the task of their reason is to discover how to maintain it. Large numbers of such men—men who prefer the state of animals—may be found (or used to be found) sleeping on the benches of any public park; they are called tramps. There are men who find thought abnormal and unnatural. Large numbers of such men may be found in mental institutions; they are called morons. There are men who suffer a chronic preoccupation with death; who bitterly resent the fact that they cannot simultaneously be a concert pianist, a business tycoon, a railroad engineer, a baseball player, and a deep-sea diver; who find their existence as separate, independent entities an unendurable burden. Large numbers of such men may be found in the offices of psychotherapists; they are called neurotics. But why does Fromm choose tramps, morons, and neurotics as his symbols of humanity, as his image of man—and why does he choose to claim that theirs is the state in which all men are destined to start, and out of which they must struggle to rise?

Fromm does not tell us. Nowhere does he establish any logical connection between the facts he observes and the conclusions he announces.

If we are not to regard his conclusions as arbitrary—as mystical revelations, in effect—then we must assume that he does not bother to give reasons for his position because he regards his conclusions as virtually self-evident, as irresistibly conveyed by the facts he cites, easily available to everyone’s experience and introspection. But if he feels it is readily apparent, by introspection, that the facts he cites constitute an agonizing problem for man—the most appropriate answer one can give is: “Speak for yourself, brother!”

Reason, Fromm insists, and the self-awareness which reason makes possible, turns man’s “separate, disunited existence” into an “unbearable prison”—and man “would become insane could he not liberate himself from this prison and reach out, unite himself in some form or other with men, with the world outside.”⁶⁹

The following paragraph is typical of what Fromm considers an explanation:

The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety. Being separate means being cut off, without any capacity to use my human powers. Hence to be separate means to be helpless, unable to grasp the world—things and people—actively; it means that the world can invade me without my ability to react. Thus, separateness is the source of intense anxiety. Beyond that, it arouses shame and the feeling of guilt. This experience of guilt and shame in separateness is expressed in the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. After Adam and Eve have eaten of the “tree of knowledge of good and evil,” after they have disobeyed . . . after they have become human by having emancipated themselves from the original animal harmony with nature, i.e., after their birth as human beings—they saw “that they were naked—and they were ashamed.” Should we assume that a myth as old and elementary as this has the prudish morals of the nineteenth-century outlook, and that the important point the story wants to convey to us is the embarrassment that their genitals were visible? This can hardly be so, and by understanding the story in a Victorian spirit, we miss the main point, which seems to be the following: after man and woman have become aware of themselves and of each other, they are aware of their separateness, and of their difference, inasmuch as they belong to different sexes. But while recognizing their separateness they remain strangers, because they have not yet learned to love each other (as is also made very clear by the fact that Adam defends himself by blaming Eve, rather than by trying to defend her). The awareness of human separation, without reunion by love—is the source of shame. It is at the same time the source of guilt and anxiety.⁷⁰

All social institutions, all cultures, all religions and philosophies, all progress, asserts Fromm, are motivated by man’s need to escape the terrifying sense of helplessness and aloneness to which his reason condemns him.

The necessity to find ever-new solutions for the contradictions in his existence, to find ever-higher forms of unity with nature, his fellowmen and himself, is the source of all psychic forces which motivate man. . . .⁷¹

In Man for Himself, Fromm states that only through “reason, productiveness and love” can man solve the problem of his “separateness” and achieve a “new union” with the world around him. Fromm’s claim to be an advocate of reason is disingenuous, to say the least. He speaks of reason and love as being “only two different forms of comprehending the world.”⁷² As if this were not an unequivocal proof of his mysticism, he goes on to speak, in The Art of Loving, of the “paradoxical logic” of Eastern religions, which, he tells us approvingly, is not encumbered by the Aristotelian law of contradiction and which teaches that “man can perceive reality only in contradictions.”⁷³ (Hegel and Marx, he asserts—correctly—belong to his “paradoxical” epistemological line.) His discussion of what he means by “productiveness” is scarcely more gratifying.

In The Art of Loving, written some years after Man for Himself, he declares that reason and productive work, though certainly important, provide only partial and, by themselves, very unsatisfactory solutions: the “unity” they achieve is “not interpersonal,” and the “desire for interpersonal fusion is the most powerful striving in man.”⁷⁴ Fromm pulls an unexplained switch at this point. What began as a problem between man and nature is now to be solved (in some unspecified manner) by human “togetherness.” One is not surprised; in reading Fromm, this is the sort of pronouncement for which one is waiting—there is a sense of inevitability about it. Love and love alone, he tells us with wonderful originality, can allay man’s terror—“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”⁷⁵

Only through “relating” oneself positively to others, only through feeling “care and responsibility” for them—while preserving one’s personal integrity, he adds somewhat mysteriously—can man establish new ties, a new union, that will release him from alienated aloneness.

The cat is now ready to be let fully out of the bag. The preceding is Fromm’s view of alienation as a metaphysical problem; its full meaning and implication become clear when one turns to his social-political analysis of alienation. In the context of the latter, one can see clearly what sort of “ties,” what sort of “union” and what sort of “love” Fromm has in mind.

Every society, as a system of human relationships, may be evaluated by how well it satisfies man’s basic psychological needs, says Fromm—i.e., he explains, by the possibilities for love, relatedness, and the experience of personal identity which it offers man.

Capitalism, Fromm declares, has been disastrous in this regard: far from solving the problem of man’s alienation, it worsens it immeasurably in many respects. In liberating man from medieval regulation and authority, in breaking the chains of ecclesiastical, economic and social tyranny, in destroying the “stability” of the feudal order, capitalism and individualism thrust upon man an unprecedented freedom that was “bound to create a deep feeling of insecurity, powerlessness, doubt, aloneness, and anxiety.”⁷⁶

Scratch a collectivist and you will usually find a medievalist. Fromm is not an exception. Like so many socialists, he is a glamorizer of the Middle Ages. He perfunctorily acknowledges the faults of that historical period—but in contrasting it with the capitalism that succeeded it, he is enchanted by what he regards as its virtues.

What characterizes medieval in contrast to modern society is its lack of individual freedom. . . . But although a person was not free in the modern sense, neither was he alone and isolated. In having a distinct, unchangeable, and unquestionable place in the social world from the moment of birth, man was rooted in a structuralized whole, and thus life had a meaning which left no place, and no need, for doubt. A person was identical with his role in society; he was a peasant, an artisan, a knight, and not an individual who happened to have this or that occupation. The social order was conceived as a natural order, and being a definite part of it gave man a feeling of security and of belonging. There was comparatively little competition. One was born into a certain economic position which guaranteed a livelihood determined by tradition, just as it carried economic obligations to those higher in the social hierarchy. But within the limits of his social sphere the individual actually had much freedom to express his self in his work and in his emotional life. Although there was no individualism in the modern sense of the unrestricted choice between many possible ways of life (a freedom of choice which is largely abstract), there was a great deal of concrete individualism in real life.⁷⁷

It is not uncommon to encounter this sort of perspective on the Middle Ages, among writers on alienation. But what makes the above passage especially shocking and offensive, in the case of Fromm, is that he repeatedly professes to be a lover of freedom and a valuer of human life.

The complete lack of control over any aspect of one’s existence, the ruthless suppression of intellectual freedom, the paralyzing restrictions on any form of individual initiative and independence—these are cardinal characteristics of the Middle Ages. But all of this is swept aside by Fromm—along with the famines, the plagues, the exhausting labor from sunrise to sunset, the suffocating routine, the superstitious terror, the attacks of mass hysteria afflicting entire towns, the nightmare brutality of men’s dealings with one another, the use of legalized torture as a normal way of life—all of this is swept aside, so entranced is Fromm by the vision of a world in which men did not have to invent and compete, they had only to submit and obey.

Nowhere does he tell us what specifically the medieval man’s “concrete individualism” consisted of. One is morbidly curious to know what he would say.

With the collapse of medievalism and the emergence of a free-market society, Fromm declares, man was compelled to assume total responsibility for his own survival: he had to produce and to trade—he had to think and to judge—he had no authority to guide him, and nothing but his own ability to keep him in existence. No longer could he, by virtue of the class into which he was born, inherit his sense of personal identity: henceforward, he had to achieve it. This posed a devastating psychological problem for man, intensifying his basic feeling of isolation and separateness.

“It is true,” Fromm remarks, “that the capitalistic mode of production is conducive to political freedom, while any centrally planned social order is in danger of leading to political regimentation and eventually to dictatorship.” ⁷⁸ Capitalism, he further concedes, has proven itself superlatively capable of producing goods and of raising men’s material standard of living to undreamedof heights. But a “sane society” must have more to offer man than political freedom and material well-being. Capitalism, Fromm insists, is destructive of man’s spirit. He offers several reasons for this charge, which are very revealing.

(1) Like Marx, Fromm decries the humiliating predicament of the worker who has to sell his services. Capitalism condemns the worker to experience himself, not as a man, but as a commodity, as a thing to be traded. Furthermore, since he is only a tiny part of a vast production process, since, for example, he does not build an entire automobile himself (and then drive home in it), but builds only a small part of it (the total being subsequently sold to some unknown, distant party), the worker feels alienated from the product of his own labor and, therefore, feels alienated from his own labor as such—unlike the artisan of the Middle Ages, whose labor could express the “full richness” of his personality.

It is an elementary fact of economics that specialization and exchange, under a division of labor, make a level of productivity possible which otherwise would not be remotely attainable. In pre-capitalist centuries, when a man’s economic well-being was limited by the goods he himself could produce with his own primitive tools, an unconscionable amount of labor was required to make or acquire the simplest necessities—and the general standard of living was appallingly low: human existence was a continual, exhausting struggle against imminent starvation. About half of the children born perished before the age of ten. But with the development of the wages system under capitalism, the introduction of machinery and the opportunity for a man to sell his labor, life (to say nothing of an ever-increasing standard of material well-being) was made possible for millions who could have had no chance at survival in pre-capitalist economies. However, for Fromm and those who share his viewpoint, these considerations are, doubtless, too “materialistic.” To offer men a chance to enjoy an unprecedented material well-being, is, evidently, to sentence them to alienation; whereas to hold them down to the stagnant level of a medieval serf or guildsman, is to offer them spiritual fulfillment.

(2) Fromm decries the “anonymity of the social forces . . . inherent in the structure of the capitalistic mode of production.”⁷⁹ The laws of the market, of supply and demand, of economic cause and effect, are ominously impersonal: no single individual’s wishes control them. Is it the worker who determines how much he is to be paid? No. It is not even the employer. It is that faceless monster, the market. It determines the wage level in some manner beyond the worker’s power to grasp. As for the capitalist, his position is scarcely better: he, too, is helpless. “The individual capitalist expands his enterprise not primarily because he wants to, but because he has to, because . . . postponement of further expansion would mean regression.”⁸⁰ If he attempts to stagnate, he will go out of business. Under such a system, asks Fromm, how can man not feel alienated?

Consider what Fromm is denouncing. Under capitalism, the wages paid to a man for his work are determined objectively—by the law of supply and demand. The market—reflecting the voluntary judgments of all those who participate in it, all those who buy and sell, produce and consume, offer or seek employment—establishes the general price level of goods and services. This is the context which men are obliged to consider in setting the prices they will ask for their work or offer for the work of others; if a man demands more than the market value of his work, he will remain unemployed; if a particular employer offers him less than the market value of his work, the man will seek—and find—employment elsewhere. The same principle applies to the capitalist who offers his goods for sale. If the prices and quality of his goods are comparable or preferable to those of other men in the same field of production, he will be able to compete; if others can do better than he can, if they can offer superior goods and/or lower prices, he will be obliged to improve, to grow, to equal their achievement, or else he will lose his customers. The standard determining a producer’s success or failure is the objective value of his product—as judged, within the context of the market (and of their knowledge), by those to whom he offers his product. This is the only rational and just principle of exchange. But this is what Fromm considers evil.

What he rebels against is objectivity. How—he demands—can a man not feel alienated in a system where his wishes are not omnipotent, where the unearned is not to be had, where growth is rewarded and stagnation is penalized?

It is clear from the foregoing that Fromm’s basic quarrel is with reality—since nature confronts man with the identical conditions, which a free economy merely reflects: nature, too, holds man to the law of cause and effect; nature, too, makes constant growth a condition of successful life.

There are writers on alienation who recognize this and do not bother to center their attacks on capitalism: they damn nature outright. They declare that man’s life is intrinsically and inescapably tragic—since reality is “tyrannical,” since contradictory desires cannot be satisfied, since objectivity is a “prison,” since time is a “net” that no one can elude, etc. Existentialists, in particular, specialize in this sort of pronouncement.

(3) As consumer in a capitalist economy, Fromm contends, man is subject to further alienating pressures. He is overwhelmed with innumerable products among which he must choose. He is bewildered and brainwashed by the blandishments of advertisers, forever urging him to buy their wares. This staggering multiplicity of possible choices is threatening to his sanity. Moreover, he is “conditioned” to consume for the sake of consuming—to long for an ever-higher standard of living—merely in order to keep the “system” going. With automatic washing machines, automatic cameras, and automatic can openers, modern man’s relationship to nature becomes more and more remote. He is increasingly condemned to the nightmare of an artificial world.

No such problem confronted the feudal serf.

This much is true: sleeping on an earthen floor, the medieval serf—to say nothing of the caveman—was much closer to nature, in one uncomfortable and unhygienic sense of the word.

The above criticism of capitalism has become very fashionable among social commentators. What is remarkable is that almost invariably, as in the case of Fromm, the criticism is made by the same writers who are loudest in crying that man needs more leisure. Yet the purpose of the “gadgets” they condemn is, specifically, to liberate man’s time. Thus they wish to provide man with more leisure, while damning the material means that make leisure possible.

As for the charge—equally popular—that the multiplicity of choices offered to man in capitalistic society is threatening to his mental equilibrium, it should be remembered that fear of choices and decisions is a basic symptom of mental illness. To whose mentality, then, do these critics of capitalism demand that society be adjusted?

(4) The development of a complex, highly industrialized society requires an extreme degree of quantification and abstraction in men’s method of thinking, observes Fromm—and this, in still another way, estranges man from the world around him: he loses the ability to relate to things in “their concreteness and uniqueness.”⁸¹

One can agree with Fromm in part: an industrial technological society demands the fullest development and exercise of man’s conceptual faculty, i.e., of his distinctively human form of cognition. The sensory-perceptual level of consciousness—the level of an animal’s cognition—will not do.

Those who assert that the conceptual level of consciousness alienates man from the real world merely confess that their concepts bear no relation to reality—or that they do not understand the relation of concepts to reality. But it should be remembered that the capacity to abstract and conceptualize offers man—to the extent that he is rational—a means of “relating” to the world around him immeasurably superior to that enjoyed by any other species. It does not “alienate” man from nature, it makes him nature’s master: an animal obeys nature blindly; man obeys her intelligently—and thereby acquires the power to command her.

(5) Finally, most alienating of all, perhaps, are the sort of relationships that exist among men under capitalism, says Fromm.

What is the modern man’s relationship to his fellow man? It is one between two abstractions, two living machines, who use each other. The employer uses the ones whom he employs; the salesman uses his customers. . . . There is not much love or hate to be found in human relations of our day. There is, rather, a superficial friendliness, and a more than superficial fairness, but behind that surface is distance and indifference. . . . The alienation between man and man results in the loss of those general and social bonds which characterize medieval as well as most other pre-capitalist societies.⁸²

Fromm is claiming that there existed, in pre-capitalist societies, a mutual good will among men, an attitude of respect and benevolent solidarity, a regard for the value of the human person, that vanished with the rise of a free-market society. This is worse than false. The claim is absurd historically and disgraceful morally.

It is notorious that, in the Middle Ages, human relationships were characterized by mutual suspiciousness, hostility, and cruelty: everyone regarded his neighbor as a potential threat, and nothing was held more cheaply than human life. Such invariably is the case in any society where men are ruled by brute force. In putting an end to slavery and serfdom, capitalism introduced a social benevolence that would have been impossible under earlier systems. Capitalism valued a man’s life as it had never been valued before. Capitalism is the politico-economic expression of the principle that a man’s life, freedom, and happiness are his by moral right.

There is a passage in The Fountainhead that bears on this issue. “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”

Under capitalism, men are free to choose their “social bonds”—meaning: to choose whom they will associate with. Men are not trapped within the prison of their family, tribe, caste, class, or neighborhood. They choose whom they will value, whom they will befriend, whom they will deal with, what kind of relationships they will enter. This implies and entails man’s responsibility to form independent value-judgments. It implies and entails, also, that a man must earn the social relationships he desires. But this, clearly, is anathema to Fromm.

“Love,” he has told us, “is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence”—but, he asserts, love and capitalism are inimical. “The principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompatible.”⁸³ The principle of capitalism, says Fromm, is that of “fairness ethics,” of trade, of the exchange of values, without recourse to force or fraud; individuals deal with one another only on the premise of mutual self-interest; they engage only in those transactions from which they expect a profit, reward, or gain. “It may even be said that the development of fairness ethics is the particular ethical contribution of capitalist society.”⁸⁴

But to approach love with any concern for one’s self-interest is—he asserts—to negate the very essence of love. To love an individual is to feel care and responsibility for him; it is not to appraise his character or personality as a “commodity” from which one expects pleasure. To love “ideally” is to love “unconditionally”—it is to love a human being, not for the fact of what he is, but for the fact that he is—it is to love without reference to values or standards or judgment. “In essence, all human beings are identical. We are all part of One; we are One. This being so, it should not make any difference whom we love.”⁸⁵

It should not, in other words, make any difference whether the person we love is a being of stature or a total nonentity, a genius or a fool, a hero or a scoundrel. “We are all part of One.” Is it necessary to point out who stands to gain and who to lose by this view of love?

The desire to be loved “unconditionally,” the desire to be loved with no concern for his objective personal worth, is one of man’s “deepest longings,” Fromm insists; whereas to be loved on the basis of merit, “because one deserves it,” invokes doubt and uncertainty, since merit has to be struggled for and since such love can be withdrawn should the merit cease to exist. “Furthermore, ‘deserved’ love easily leaves a bitter feeling that one is not loved for oneself, that one is loved only because one pleases . . .”⁸⁶

It is typical of Fromm that he should deliver what is in fact (though not in Fromm’s estimate) a deadly insult to human nature, without offering any justification for his charge. He assumes that all men, by nature, are so profoundly lacking in self-esteem that they crave a love which bears no relation to their actions, achievements, or character, a love not to be earned but to be received only as a free gift.

What does it mean to be loved “for oneself”? In reason, it can mean only: to be loved for the values one has achieved in one’s character and person. The highest compliment one can be paid by another human being is to be told: “Because of what you are, you are essential to my happiness.” But this is the love that, according to Fromm, leaves one with “a bitter feeling.”

It is the capitalistic culture, he declares, that inculcates such concepts as the “deserved” and the “undeserved”—the earned and the unearned—and thus poisons the growth of proper love. Proper love, Fromm tells us, should be given solely out of the richness of the spirit of the giver, in demonstration of the giver’s “potency.” Fromm nowhere reveals the exact nature of this “potency,” of course. “Love is an act of faith . . .”⁸⁷ Proper love should raise no questions about the virtue or character of its object; it should desire no joy from such virtue as the object might possess—for, if it does, it is not proper love, it is only capitalistic selfishness.

But, Fromm asks, “how can one act within the framework of existing society and at the same time practice love?”⁸⁸ He does not declare that love is impossible under capitalism—merely that it is exceptionally difficult.

Commenting, in Who Is Ayn Rand?, on Fromm’s theory of love, I wrote:

To love . . . is to value; love, properly, is the consequence and expression of admiration—“the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.” [Atlas Shrugged] Love is not alms, but a moral tribute.

If love did not imply admiration, if it did not imply an acknowledgment of moral qualities that the recipient of love possessed—what meaning or significance would love have, and why would Fromm or anyone consider it desirable? Only one answer is possible, and it is not an attractive one: when love is divorced from values, then “love” becomes, not a tribute, but a moral blank check: a promise that one will be forgiven anything, that one will not be abandoned, that one will be taken care of.⁸⁹

This view of love is not, of course, peculiar to Fromm; it is a central component of the mystic-altruist tradition—and is as prevalent among psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers as it is among religionists. Perhaps the simplest and most eloquent answer to this view of love is one sentence of John Galt in Atlas Shrugged: “A morality that professes the belief that the values of the spirit are more precious than matter, a morality that teaches you to scorn a whore who gives her body indiscriminately to all men—this same morality demands that you surrender your soul to promiscuous love for all comers.”

To divorce love from values (and value-judgments) is to confess one’s longing for the unearned. The idealization of this longing as a proper moral goal is a constant theme running through Fromm’s writing.

That the underlying motive is the desire to be taken care of, the desire to be spared the responsibility of independence, is revealed explicitly in Fromm’s socio-political “solution” to the problem of alienation.

In order that man may be enabled to conquer his feeling of aloneness and alienation, to practice love and to achieve a full sense of personal identity, a new social system must be established, Fromm declares.

Private ownership of the means of production must be abolished. The profit motive must be forbidden. Industry must be decentralized. Society should be divided into self-governing industrial guilds; factories should be owned and run by all those who work in them.

Why—according to Fromm’s social philosophy—should a janitor in an industrial plant not have the same right to determine its management as the man who happened to create the plant? Does not the janitor’s personality require as much self-expression as anyone else’s?

Under capitalism, says Fromm, men are overwhelmed by and are the pawns of a complex industrial machine whose omnipotent forces and laws are beyond their comprehension or control. Under the decentralized, “democratic” system he proposes—which is some sort of blend of guild socialism and syndicalism—industrial establishments will be broken down into units whose function is within everyone’s easy comprehension, with no “alienating” demands made on anyone’s abstract capacity.

Under this system, he explains, every person will be provided with his minimum subsistence, whether the person wishes to work or not. This is necessary if man is to develop healthily and happily. However, to discourage parasitism, Fromm suggests that this support should not extend beyond two years. Who is to provide this support, whether they will be willing to do so, and what will happen if they are not willing, are questions Fromm does not discuss.

So long as men are occupied with the problem of survival, Fromm feels, their spiritual concerns—the concerns that really matter—are almost inevitably neglected. How can the worker’s personality not be impoverished, if he must face daily the necessity of earning a livelihood? How can the businessman develop his creative potentialities, if he is in bondage to his obsession with production? How can the artist preserve his soul’s integrity, if he is plagued with temptations by Hollywood and Madison Avenue? How can the consumer cultivate individual tastes and preferences, if he is surrounded by the standardized commodities begotten by mass production?

If one wishes to understand the relevance of epistemology to politics, one should observe what is gained for Fromm by that “paradoxical logic” of which he writes so approvingly. If, as it teaches, “man can perceive reality only in contradictions,” then Fromm does not have to be troubled by the conflict between his claim to be an advocate of reason and his enthusiasm for Eastern mysticism—nor does he have to be troubled by the conflict between his claim to be a defender of individualism and his advocacy of political collectivism. His disdain for the law of contradiction permits him to announce that true individualism is possible only in the collectivized community—that true freedom is possible only when production is taken out of the hands of private individuals and placed under the absolute control of the group—that men will cease to be objects of “use” by others, only when they are willing to renounce personal profit and make social usefulness the goal of their lives.⁹⁰

Fromm calls his proposed system “Humanistic Communitarian Socialism.” Under it, he maintains, man will achieve “a new harmony with nature” to replace the one he has lost—man will enjoy the tranquillity and self-fulfillment of the animals whose state Fromm finds so enviable.

If, often, Fromm is more than a little disingenuous in the presentation of his views, he is, nonetheless, extremely explicit. This is what is unusual about him. Most writers of his persuasion twist themselves for pages and pages in order to obscure their advocacy of the ideas—and contradictions—which he announces openly. With rare exceptions, one will find comparable candor only among the existentialists and Zen Buddhists, many of whose premises Fromm shares.

His explicitness notwithstanding, he is very representative culturally and should be recognized as such. The recurrent themes running through the literature on alienation—and through today’s social commentary generally—are the themes which Fromm brings into naked focus: that reason is “unnatural,” that a non-contradictory, objective reality “restricts” one’s individuality, that the necessity of choice is an awesome burden, that it is “tragic” not to be able to eat one’s cake and have it, too, that self-responsibility is frightening, that the achievement of personal identity is a social problem—that “love” is the omnipotent solution—and that the political implementation of this solution is socialism.

The transparent absurdity or the unintelligibility of most discussions of alienation might tempt one to believe that the issue is entirely illusory. But this would be an error. Although the explanations offered for it are spurious, the problem of alienation is real. A great many men do recognize the painful emotional state which writers on alienation describe. A great many men do lack a sense of personal identity. A great many men do feel themselves to be strangers and afraid in a world they never made.

But why? What is the problem of alienation? What is personal identity? Why should so many men experience the task of achieving it as a dreaded burden? And what is the significance of the attacks on capitalism in connection with this issue?

These are the questions we must now proceed to answer.

The problem of alienation and the problem of personal identity are inseparable. The man who lacks a firm sense of personal identity feels alienated; the man who feels alienated lacks a firm sense of personal identity.

Pain is an organism’s alarm-signal, warning of danger; the particular species of pain which is the feeling of alienation announces to a man that he is existing in a psychological state improper to him—that his relationship to reality is wrong.

No animal faces such questions as: What should I make of myself? What manner of life is proper to my nature? Such questions are possible only to a rational being, i.e., a being whose characteristic method of cognitive functioning (of apprehending reality) is conceptual, who is not only conscious but also self-conscious, and whose power of abstraction enables him to project many alternative courses of action. Further, such questions are possible only to a being whose cognitive faculty is exercised volitionally (thinking is not automatic)—a being who is self-directing and self-regulating in thought and in action, and whose existence, therefore, entails a constant process of choice.

As a living entity, man is born with specific needs and capacities; these constitute his species identity, so to speak—i.e., they constitute his human nature. How he exercises his capacities to satisfy his needs—i.e., how he deals with the facts of reality, how he chooses to function, in thought and in action—constitutes his personal or individual identity. His sense of himself—his implicit concept or image of the kind of person he is (including his self-esteem or lack of it)—is the cumulative product of the choices he makes. This is the meaning of Ayn Rand’s statement that “man is a being of self-made soul.”

A man’s “I,” his ego, his deepest self, is his faculty of awareness, his capacity to think. To choose to think, to identify the facts of reality—to assume the responsibility of judging what is true or false, right or wrong—is man’s basic form of self-assertiveness. It is his acceptance of his own nature as a rational being, his acceptance of the responsibility of intellectual independence, his commitment to the efficacy of his own mind.

The essence of selflessness is the suspension of one’s consciousness. When and to the extent that a man chooses to evade the effort and responsibility of thinking, of seeking knowledge, of passing judgment, his action is one of self-abdication. To relinquish thought is to relinquish one’s ego—and to pronounce oneself unfit for existence, incompetent to deal with the facts of reality.

To the extent that a man chooses to think, his premises and values are acquired first-hand and they are not a mystery to him; he experiences himself as the active cause of his character, behavior, and goals. To the extent that a man attempts to live without thinking, he experiences himself as passive, his person and actions are the accidental products of forces he does not understand, of his range-of-the-moment feelings and random environmental influences. When a man defaults on the responsibility of thought, he is left at the mercy of his involuntary, subconscious reactions—and these will be at the mercy of the outside forces impinging upon him, at the mercy of whoever and whatever is around him. By his default, such a person turns himself into the social determinists’ view of man: into an empty mold waiting to be filled, into a will-less robot waiting to be taken over by any environment and any conditioners.

A strong sense of personal identity is the product of two things: a policy of independent thinking—and, as a consequence, the possession of an integrated set of values. Since it is his values that determine a man’s emotions and goals, and give direction and meaning to his life, a man experiences his values as an extension of himself, as an integral part of his identity, as crucial to that which makes him himself.

“Values,” in this context, refers to fundamental and abstract values, not to concrete value-judgments. For example, a man holding rationality as his abstract value may choose a friend who appears to embody this value; if, subsequently, he decides that he was mistaken in his judgment, that his friend is not rational and that their relationship should be ended, this does not alter his personal identity; but if, instead, he decides that he no longer values rationality, his personal identity is altered.

If a man holds contradictory values, these necessarily do violence to his sense of personal identity. They result in a splintered sense of self, a self broken into unintegratable fragments. To avoid this painful experience of a splintered identity, a man whose values are contradictory will commonly seek to escape knowledge of his contradictions by means of evasion, repression, rationalization, etc. Thus, to escape a problem created by a failure of thought, he suspends thinking. To escape a threat to his sense of personal identity, he suspends his ego—he suspends his self qua thinking, judging entity.

Thus, he displaces his sense of self downward, so to speak, from his reason, which is the active, initiating element in man, to his emotions, which are the passive, reactive element. Moved by feelings whose source he does not understand, and by contradictions whose existence he does not acknowledge, he suffers a progressive sense of self-estrangement, of self-alienation. A man’s emotions are the product of his premises and values, of the thinking he has done or has failed to do. But the man who is run by his emotions, attempting to make them a substitute for rational judgment, experiences them as alien forces. The paradox of his position is this: his emotions become his only source of personal identity, but his experience of identity becomes: a being ruled by demons.

It is important to observe that the experience of self-alienation and the feeling of being alienated from reality, from the world around one, proceed from the same cause: one’s default on the responsibility of thinking. The suspension of proper cognitive contact with reality and the suspension of one’s ego are a single act. A flight from reality is a flight from self.

One of the consequences is a feeling of alienation from other men, the sense that one is not part of the human race—that one is, in effect, a freak. In betraying one’s status as a human being, one makes oneself a metaphysical outcast. This is not altered by the knowledge that many other human beings have committed the same betrayal. One feels alone and cut off—cut off by the unreality of one’s own existence, by one’s desolate inner sense of spiritual impoverishment.

The same failure of rationality and independence by which men rob themselves of personal identity leads them, most commonly, to the self-destructive policy of seeking a substitute for identity—or, more precisely, seeking a second-hand identity—through mindless conformity to the values of others. This is the psychological phenomenon which I have designated as social metaphysics. In my article “Rogues Gallery,”⁹¹ dealing with different types of social metaphysicians, I commented on the type most relevant to the present context, the “Conventional” social metaphysician:

This is the person who accepts the world and its prevailing values ready-made; his is not to reason why. What is true? What others say is true. What is right? What others believe is right. How should one live? As others live. . . . [This is] the person whose sense of identity and personal worth is explicitly a function of his ability to satisfy the values, terms and expectations of those omniscient and omnipresent “others.” . . . In a culture such as the present one, with its disintegrating values, its intellectual chaos, its moral bankruptcy—where the familiar guideposts and rules are vanishing, where the authoritative mirrors reflecting “reality” are splintering into a thousand unintelligible subcults, where “adjustment” is becoming harder and harder—the Conventional social metaphysician is the first to run to a psychiatrist, crying that he has lost his identity, because he no longer knows unequivocally what he is supposed to do and be.

It would never occur to a person of self-esteem and independent judgment that one’s “identity” is a thing to be gained from or determined by others. To a person untouched by self-doubt, the wails heard today about the anguish of modern man as he confronts the question “Who am I?” are incomprehensible. But in the light of the above, the wailing becomes more intelligible. It is the cry of social metaphysicians who no longer know which authorities to obey—and who are moaning that it is someone’s duty to herd them to a sense of self, that “The System” must provide them with self-esteem.

This is the psychological root of the modern intellectuals’ mystique of the Middle Ages, of the dazed longing for that style of life—and of the massive evasion concerning the actual conditions of existence during that period. The Middle Ages represents the social metaphysician’s unconfessed dream: a system in which his dread of independence and self-responsibility is proclaimed to be a virtue and is made a social imperative.

When—in any age—a man attempts to evade the responsibility of intellectual independence, and to derive his sense of identity from “belonging,” he pays a deadly price in terms of the sabotaging of his mental processes thereafter. The degree to which a man substitutes the judgment of others for his own, failing to look at reality directly, is the degree to which his mental processes are alienated from reality. He functions not by means of concepts, but by means of memorized cue-words, i.e., learned sounds associated with certain contexts and situations, but lacking authentic cognitive content for their user. This is the unidentified, unrecognized phenomenon that prompts unthinking people today to grant validity to the charge that modern man lives “too abstractly,” “too intellectually,” and that he needs to “get back to nature.” They sense dimly that they are out of contact with reality, that something is wrong with their grasp of the world around them. But they accept an entirely fallacious interpretation of their problem. The truth is not that they are lost among “abstractions,” but that they have failed to discover the nature and proper use of abstractions; they are not lost among concepts, they are lost among cue-words. They are cut off from reality not because they attempt to grasp it too intellectually, but because they attempt to grasp it only as seen by others; they attempt to grasp it second-hand. And they move through an unreal world of verbal rituals, mouthing the slogans and phrases they hear repeated by others, falsely imagining that those empty words are concepts, and never apprehending the proper use of their conceptual faculty, never learning what first-hand, conceptual knowledge consists of. Then they are ready for the Zen Buddhist who tells them that the solution to their alienation from reality is to empty their mind of all thought and sit for an hour, cross-legged, contemplating the pattern of veins on a leaf.

It is a well-known psychological fact that when men are neurotically anxious, when they suffer from feelings of dread for which they cannot account, they often attempt to make their plight more tolerable by directing their fear at some external object: they seek to persuade themselves that their fear is a rational response to the threat of germs, or the possible appearance of burglars, or the danger of lightning, or the brain-controlling radiations of Martians. The process by which men decide that the cause of their alienation is capitalism is not dissimilar.

There are reasons, however, why capitalism is the target for their projection and rationalization.

The alienated man is fleeing from the responsibility of a volitional (i.e., self-directing) consciousness: the freedom to think or not to think, to initiate a process of reason or to evade it, is a burden he longs to escape. But since this freedom is inherent in his nature as man, there is no escape from it; hence his guilt and anxiety when he abandons reason and sight in favor of feelings and blindness. But there is another level on which man confronts the issue of freedom: the existential or social level—and here escape is possible. Political freedom is not a metaphysical given: it has to be achieved—hence it can be rejected. The psychological root of the revolt against freedom in one’s existence is the revolt against freedom in one’s consciousness. The root of the revolt against self-responsibility in action is the revolt against self-direction in thought. The man who does not want to think does not want to bear responsibility for the consequences of his actions nor for his own life.

It is appropriate, in this connection, to quote a passage from Who Is Ayn Rand? in which I discuss the similarity of the attacks against capitalism launched by nineteenth-century medievalists and socialists:

In the writings of both medievalists and socialists, one can observe the unmistakable longing for a society in which man’s existence will be automatically guaranteed to him—that is, in which man will not have to bear responsibility for his own survival. Both camps project their ideal society as one characterized by that which they call “harmony,” by freedom from rapid change or challenge or the exacting demands of competition; a society in which each must do his prescribed part to contribute to the well-being of the whole, but in which no one will face the necessity of making choices and decisions that will crucially affect his life and future; in which the question of what one has or has not earned, and does or does not deserve, will not come up; in which rewards will not be tied to achievement and in which someone’s benevolence will guarantee that one need never bear the consequences of one’s errors. The failure of capitalism to conform to what may be termed this pastoral view of existence, is essential to the medievalists’ and socialists’ indictment of a free society. It is not a Garden of Eden that capitalism offers men.⁹²

Today, of course, capitalism has largely been abandoned in favor of a mixed economy, i.e., a mixture of freedom and statism—moving steadily in the direction of increasing statism. Today, we are far closer to the “ideal society” of the socialists than when Marx first wrote of the worker’s “alienation.” Yet with every advance of collectivism, the cries concerning man’s alienation grow louder. The problem, we are told, is getting worse. In communist countries, when such criticisms are allowed to be voiced, some commentators are beginning to complain that the Marxist solution to the worker’s alienation has failed, that man under communism is still alienated, that the “new harmony” with nature and one’s fellow men has not come.

It didn’t come to the medieval serf or guildsman, either—the propaganda of commentators such as Erich Fromm notwithstanding.

Man cannot escape from his nature, and if he establishes a social system which is inimical to the requirements of his nature—a system which forbids him to function as a rational, independent being—psychological and physical disaster is the result.

A free society, of course, cannot automatically guarantee the mental well-being of all its members. Freedom is not a sufficient condition to assure man’s proper fulfillment, but it is a necessary condition. And capitalism—laissez-faire capitalism—is the only system which provides that condition.

The problem of alienation is not metaphysical; it is not man’s natural fate, never to be escaped, like some sort of Original Sin; it is a disease. It is not the consequence of capitalism or industrialism or “bigness”—and it cannot be legislated out of existence by the abolition of property rights. The problem of alienation is psycho-epistemological: it pertains to how man chooses to use his own consciousness. It is the product of man’s revolt against thinking—which means: against reality.

If a man defaults on the responsibility of seeking knowledge, choosing values and setting goals—if this is the sphere he surrenders to the authority of others—how is he to escape the feeling that the universe is closed to him? It is. By his own choice.

The proper answer to the question—

And how am I to face the odds
of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
in a world I never made

—is: Why didn’t you?

24. REQUIEM FOR MAN

by Ayn Rand

In advocating capitalism, I have said and stressed for years that capitalism is incompatible with altruism and mysticism. Those who chose to doubt that the issue is “either-or” have now heard it from the highest authority of the opposite side: Pope Paul VI.

The encyclical “Populorum Progressio” (“On the Development of Peoples”) is an unusual document: it reads as if a long-repressed emotion broke out into the open, past the barrier of carefully measured, cautiously calculated sentences, with the hissing pressure of centuries of silence. The sentences are full of contradictions; the emotion is consistent.

The encyclical is the manifesto of an impassioned hatred for capitalism; but its evil is much more profound and its target is more than mere politics. It is written in terms of a mystic-altruist “sense of life.” A sense of life is the subconscious equivalent of metaphysics: a pre-conceptual, emotionally integrated appraisal of man’s nature and of his relationship to existence. To a mystic-altruist sense of life, words are mere approximations; hence the encyclical’s tone of evasion. But what is eloquently revealing is the nature of that which is being evaded.

The Objectivist, July, August, and September 1967.

On the question of capitalism, the encyclical’s position is explicit and unequivocal. Referring to the industrial revolution, the encyclical declares: “But it is unfortunate that on these new conditions of society a system has been constructed which considers profit as the key motive for economic progress, competition as the supreme law of economics, and private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right that has no limits and carries no corresponding social obligation. . . . But if it is true that a type of capitalism has been the source of excessive suffering, injustices and fratricidal conflicts whose effects still persist, it would also be wrong to attribute to industrialization itself evils that belong to the woeful system which accompanied it.” (Paragraph 26)

The Vatican is not the city room of a third-rate Marxist tabloid. It is an institution geared to a perspective of centuries, to scholarship and timeless philosophical deliberation. Ignorance, therefore, cannot be the explanation of the above. Even the leftists know that the advent of capitalism and industrialization was not an “unfortunate” coincidence, and that the first made the second possible.

What are the “excessive suffering, injustices and fratricidal conflicts” caused by capitalism? The encyclical gives no answer. What social system, past or present, has a better record in respect to any social evil that anyone might choose to ascribe to capitalism? Has the feudalism of the Middle Ages? Has absolute monarchy? Has socialism or fascism? No answer. If one is to consider “excessive suffering, injustices and fratricidal conflicts,” what aspect of capitalism can be placed in the same category with the terror and wholesale slaughter of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia? No answer. If there is no causal connection between capitalism and the people’s progress, welfare, and standard of living, why are these highest in the countries whose systems have the largest element of capitalistic economic freedom? No answer.

Since the encyclical is concerned with history and with fundamental political principles, yet does not discuss or condemn any social system other than capitalism, one must conclude that all other systems are compatible with the encyclical’s political philosophy. This is supported by the fact that capitalism is condemned, not for some lesser characteristics, but for its essentials, which are not the base of any other system: the profit motive, competition, and private ownership of the means of production.

By what moral standard does the encyclical judge a social system? Its most specific accusation directed at capitalism reads as follows: “The desire for necessities is legitimate, and work undertaken to obtain them is a duty: ‘If any man will not work, neither let him eat.’ But the acquiring of temporal goods can lead to greed, to the insatiable desire for more, and can make increased power a tempting objective. Individuals, families and nations can be overcome by avarice, be they poor or rich, and all can fall victim to a stifling materialism.” (18)

Since time immemorial and pre-industrial, “greed” has been the accusation hurled at the rich by the concrete-bound illiterates who were unable to conceive of the source of wealth or of the motivation of those who produce it. But the above was not written by an illiterate.

Terms such as “greed” and “avarice” connote the caricature image of two individuals, one fat, the other lean, one indulging in mindless gluttony, the other starving over chests of hoarded gold—both symbols of the acquisition of riches for the sake of riches. Is that the motive-power of capitalism?

If all the wealth spent on personal consumption by all the rich of the United States were expropriated and distributed among our population, it would amount to less than a dollar per person. (Try to figure out the amount, if distributed to the entire population of the globe.) The rest of American wealth is invested in production—and it is this constantly growing investment that raises America’s standard of living by raising the productivity of its labor. This is primer economics which Pope Paul VI cannot fail to know.

To observe the technique of epistemological manipulation, read that quoted paragraph again—and look past the images invoked by the window-dressing of “greed” and “avarice.” You will observe that the evil being denounced is: “the insatiable desire for more.” Of what? Of “increased power.” What sort of power? No direct answer is given in that paragraph, but the entire encyclical provides the answer by means of a significant omission: no distinction is drawn between economic power and political power (between production and force), they are used interchangeably in some passages and equated explicitly in others. If you look at the facts of reality, you will observe that the “increased power” which men of wealth seek under capitalism is the power of independent production, the power of an “insatiable” ambition to expand their productive capacity—and that this is what the encyclical damns. The evil is not work, but ambitious work.

These implications are supported and gently stressed in a subsequent paragraph, which lists the encyclical’s view of “less human” conditions of social existence: “The lack of material necessities for those who are without the minimum essential for life, the moral deficiencies of those who are mutilated by selfishness. . . . Oppressive social structures, whether due to the abuses of ownership or to the abuses of power . . .” And, as “more human” conditions: “the passage from misery toward the possession of necessities. . . .” (21)

What “necessities” are the “minimum essential for life”? For what kind of life? Is it for mere physical survival? If so, for how long a survival? No answer is given. But the encyclical’s principle is clear: only those who rise no higher than the barest minimum of subsistence have the right to material possessions—and this right supersedes all the rights of all other men, including their right to life. This is stated explicitly:

“The Bible, from the first page on, teaches us that the whole of creation is for man, that it is his responsibility to develop it by intelligent effort and by means of his labor to perfect it, so to speak, for his use. If the world is made to furnish each individual with the means of livelihood and the instruments for his growth and progress, each man has therefore the right to find in the world what is necessary for himself. The recent Council reminded us of this: ‘God intended the earth and all that it contains for the use of every human being and people. Thus, as all men follow justice and charity, created goods should abound for them on a reasonable basis.’ All other rights whatsoever, including those of property and of free commerce, are to be subordinated to this principle.” (22)

Observe what element is missing from this view of the world, what human faculty is regarded as inessential or non-existent. I shall discuss this aspect later in more detail. For the moment, I shall merely call your attention to the use of the word “man” in the above paragraph (which man?)—and to the term “created goods.” Created—by whom? Blank out.

That missing element becomes blatant in the encyclical’s next paragraph: “It is well known how strong were the words used by the fathers of the church to describe the proper attitude of persons who possess anything toward persons in need. To quote St. Ambrose: ‘You are not making a gift of your possessions to the poor person. You are handing over to him what is his. For what has been given in common for the use of all, you have arrogated to yourself. The world is given to all, and not only to the rich.’ That is, private property does not constitute for anyone an absolute and unconditional right. No one is justified in keeping for his exclusive use what he does not need, when others lack necessities.” (23)

St. Ambrose lived in the fourth century, when such views of property could conceivably have been explicable, if not justifiable. From the nineteenth century on, they can be neither.

What solution does the encyclical offer to the problems of today’s world? “Individual initiative alone and the mere free play of competition could never assure successful development. One must avoid the risk of increasing still more the wealth of the rich and the dominion of the strong, while leaving the poor in their misery and adding to the servitude of the oppressed. Hence programs are necessary in order ‘to encourage, stimulate, coordinate, supplement and integrate’ the activity of individuals and of intermediary bodies. It pertains to the public authorities to choose, even to lay down, the objectives to be pursued, the ends to be achieved, and the means for attaining these, and it is for them to stimulate all the forces engaged in this common activity.” (33)

A society in which the government (“the public authorities”) chooses and lays down the objectives to be pursued, the ends to be achieved, and the means for achieving them is a totalitarian state. It is, therefore, morally shocking to read the very next sentence:

“But let them take care to associate private initiative and intermediary bodies with this work. They will thus avoid the danger of complete collectivization or of arbitrary planning, which, by denying liberty, would prevent the exercise of the fundamental rights of the human person.” (33)

What are “the fundamental rights of the human person” (which are never defined in the encyclical) in a state where “all other rights whatsoever . . . are to be subordinated to this principle [the “right” to minimum sustenance]”? (22) What is “liberty” or “private initiative” in a state where the government lays down the ends and commandeers the means? What is incomplete collectivization?

It is difficult to believe that modern compromisers, to whom that paragraph is addressed, could stretch their capacity for evasion far enough to take it to mean the advocacy of a mixed economy. A mixed economy is a mixture of capitalism and statism; when the principles and practices of capitalism are damned and annihilated at the root, what is to prevent the statist collectivization from becoming complete?

(The moral shock comes from the realization that the encyclical regards some men’s capacity for evasion as infinitely elastic. Judging by the reactions it received, the encyclical did not miscalculate.)

I have always maintained that every political theory is based on some code of ethics. Here again, the encyclical confirms my statement, though from the viewpoint of a moral code which is the opposite of mine. “The same duty of solidarity that rests on individuals exists also for nations: ‘Advanced nations have a very heavy obligation to help the developing peoples.’ It is necessary to put this teaching of the council into effect. Although it is normal that a nation should be the first to benefit from the gifts that Providence has bestowed on it as the fruit of the labors of its people, still no country can claim on that account to keep its wealth for itself alone.” (48)

This seems clear enough, but the encyclical takes pains not to be misunderstood. “In other words, the rule of free trade, taken by itself, is no longer able to govern international relations. . . . One must recognize that it is the fundamental principle of liberalism, as the rule for commercial exchange, which is questioned here.” (58)

“We must repeat once more that the superfluous wealth of rich countries should be placed at the service of poor nations, the rule which up to now held good for the benefit of those nearest to us, must today be applied to all the needy of this world.” (49)

If need—global need—is the criterion of morality, if minimum subsistence (the standard of living of the least developed savages) is the criterion of property rights, then every new shirt or dress, every ice cream cone, every automobile, refrigerator, or television set becomes “superfluous wealth.”

Remember that “rich” is a relative concept and that the share-croppers of the United States are fabulously rich compared to the laborers of Asia or Africa. Yet the encyclical denounces, as “unjust,” free trade among unequally developed countries, on the grounds that “highly industrialized nations export for the most part manufactured goods, while countries with less developed economies have only food, fibers, and other raw materials to sell.” (57) Alleging that this perpetuates the poverty of the undeveloped countries, the encyclical demands that international trade be ruled, not by the laws of the free market, but by the need of its neediest participants.

How this would work in practice is made explicitly clear: “This demands great generosity, much sacrifice and unceasing effort on the part of the rich man. Let each one examine his conscience, a conscience that conveys a new message for our times. . . . Is he ready to pay higher taxes so that the public authorities can intensify their efforts in favor of development? Is he ready to pay a higher price for imported goods so that the producer may be more justly rewarded?” (47)

It is not only the rich who pay taxes; the major share of the tax burden in the United States is carried by the middle and lower income classes. It is not for the exclusive personal consumption of the rich that foreign goods or raw materials are imported. The price of food is not a major concern to the rich; it is a crucial concern to the poor. And since food is listed as one of the chief products of the undeveloped countries, project what the encyclical’s proposal would mean: it would mean that an American housewife would have to buy food produced by men who scratch the soil with bare hands or hand-plows, and would pay prices which, if paid to America’s mechanized farmers, would have given her a hundred or a thousand times more. Which items of her family budget would she have to sacrifice so that those undeveloped producers “may be more justly rewarded”? Would she sacrifice some purchases of clothing? But her clothing budget would have shrunk in the same manner and proportion—since she would have to provide the “just rewards” of the producers of “fibers and other raw materials.” And so on. What, then, would happen to her standard of living? And what would happen to the American farmers and producers of raw materials? Forced to compete, not in terms of productive competence, but of need, they would have to arrest their “development” and revert to the methods of the hand-plow. What, then, would happen to the standard of living of the whole world?

No, it is not possible that Pope Paul VI was so ignorant of economics and so lacking in the capacity to concretize his theories that he offered such proposals in the name of “humanism” without realizing the unspeakably inhuman cruelty they entail.

It seems inexplicable. But there is a certain basic premise that would explain it. It would integrate the encyclical’s clashing elements—the contradictions, the equivocations, the omissions, the unanswered questions—into a consistent pattern. To discover it, one must ask: What is the encyclical’s view of man’s nature?

That particular view is seldom admitted or fully identified by those who hold it. It is less a matter of conscious philosophy than of a feeling dictated by a sense of life. The conscious philosophy of those who hold it, consists predominantly of attempts to rationalize it.

To identify that view, let us go to its roots, to the kind of phenomena which give rise to it, in sense-of-life terms.

I will ask you to project the look on a child’s face when he grasps the answer to some problem he has been striving to understand. It is a radiant look of joy, of liberation, almost of triumph, which is unself-conscious, yet self-assertive, and its radiance seems to spread in two directions: outward, as an illumination of the world—inward, as the first spark of what is to become the fire of an earned pride. If you have seen this look, or experienced it, you know that if there is such a concept as “sacred”—meaning: the best, the highest possible to man—this look is the sacred, the not-to-be betrayed, the not-to-be-sacrificed for anything or anyone.

This look is not confined to children. Comic-strip artists are in the habit of representing it by means of a light-bulb flashing on, above the head of a character who has suddenly grasped an idea. In simple, primitive terms, this is an appropriate symbol: an idea is a light turned on in a man’s soul.

It is the steady, confident reflection of that light that you look for in the faces of adults—particularly of those to whom you entrust your most precious values. You look for it in the eyes of a surgeon performing an operation on the body of a loved one; you look for it in the face of a pilot at the controls of the plane in which you are flying; and, if you are consistent, you look for it in the person of the man or woman you marry.

That light-bulb look is the flash of a human intelligence in action; it is the outward manifestation of man’s rational faculty; it is the signal and symbol of man’s mind. And, to the extent of your humanity, it is involved in everything you seek, enjoy, value, or love.

But suppose that admiration is not your response to that look on the face of a child or adult? Suppose that your response is a nameless fear? Then you will spend your life and your philosophical capacity on the struggle never to let that fear be named. You will find rationalizations to hide it, and you will call that child’s look a look of “selfishness” or “arrogance” or “intransigence” or “pride”—all of which will be true, but not in the way you will struggle to suggest. You will feel that that look in man’s eyes is your greatest, most dangerous enemy—and the desire to vanquish that look will become your only absolute, taking precedence over reason, logic, consistency, existence, reality. The desire to vanquish that look is the desire to break man’s spirit.

Thus you will acquire the kind of sense of life that produced the encyclical “Populorum Progressio.” It was not produced by the sense of life of any one person, but by the sense of life of an institution.

The dominant chord of the encyclical’s sense of life is hatred for man’s mind—hence hatred for man—hence hatred for life and for this earth—hence hatred for man’s enjoyment of his life on earth—and hence, as a last and least consequence, hatred for the only social system that makes all these values possible in practice: capitalism.

I could maintain this on the grounds of a single example. Consider the proposal to condemn Americans to a lifetime of unrewarded drudgery at forced labor, making them work as hard as they do or harder, with nothing to gain but the barest subsistence—while savages collect the products of their effort. When you hear a proposal of this sort, what image leaps into your mind? What I see is the young people who start out in life with self-confident eagerness, who work their way through school, their eyes fixed on their future with a joyous, uncomplaining dedication—and what meaning a new coat, a new rug, an old car bought second-hand, or a ticket to the movies has in their lives, as the fuel of their courage. Anyone who evades that image while he plans to dispose of “the fruit of the labors of people” and declares that human effort is not a sufficient reason for a man to keep his own product—may claim any motive but love of humanity.

I could rest my case on this alone, but I shan’t. The encyclical offers more than a sense of life: it contains specific, conscious, philosophical corroboration.

Observe that it is not aimed at destroying man’s mind, but at a slower, more agonizing equivalent: at enslaving it.

The key to understanding the encyclical’s social theories is contained in a statement of John Galt: “I am the man whose existence your blank-outs were intended to permit you to ignore. I am the man whom you did not want either to live or to die. You did not want me to live, because you were afraid of knowing that I carried the responsibility you dropped and that your lives depended upon me; you did not want me to die, because you knew it.” (Atlas Shrugged)

The encyclical neither denies nor acknowledges the existence of human intelligence: it merely treats it as an inconsequential human attribute requiring no consideration. The main, and virtually only, reference to the role of intelligence in man’s existence reads as follows: “The introduction of industry is a necessity for economic growth and human progress; it is also a sign of development and contributes to it. By persistent work and use of his intelligence, man gradually wrests nature’s secrets from her and finds a better application for her riches. As his self-mastery increases, he develops a taste for research and discovery, an ability to take a calculated risk, boldness in enterprises, generosity in what he does and a sense of responsibility.” (25)

Observe that the creative power of man’s mind (of his basic means of survival, of the faculty that distinguishes him from animals) is described as an acquired “taste”—like a taste for olives or for ladies’ fashions. Observe that even this paltry acknowledgment is not allowed to stand by itself: lest “research and discovery” be taken as a value, they are enmeshed in such irrelevancies as “generosity.”

The same pattern is repeated in discussing the subject of work. The encyclical warns that “it [work] can sometimes be given exaggerated significance,” but admits that work is a creative process, then adds that “when work is done in common, when hope, hardship, ambition and joy are shared . . . men find themselves to be brothers.” (27) And then: “Work, of course, can have contrary effects, for it promises money, pleasure and power, invites some to selfishness, others to revolt . . .” (28)

This means that pleasure (the kind of pleasure which is earned by productive work) is evil—power (economic power, the kind earned by productive work) is evil—and money (the thing which the entire encyclical begs for passionately) is evil if kept in the hands of those who earned it.

Do you see John Galt doing work “in common,” sharing “hope, hardship, ambition and joy” with James Taggart, Wesley Mouch, and Dr. Floyd Ferris? But these are only fiction characters, you say? Okay. Do you see Pasteur? Do you see Columbus? Do you see Galileo—and what happened to him when he tried to share his “hope, hardship, ambition and joy” with the Catholic Church?

No, the encyclical does not deny the existence of men of genius; if it did, it would not have to plead so hard for global sharing. If all men were interchangeable, if degrees of ability were of no consequence, everyone would produce the same amount and there would be no benefits for anyone to derive from sharing. The encyclical assumes that the unnamed, unrecognized, unacknowledged fountainheads of wealth would somehow continue to function—and proceeds to set up conditions of existence which would make their functioning impossible.

Remember that intelligence is not an exclusive monopoly of genius; it is an attribute of all men, and the differences are only a matter of degree. If conditions of existence are destructive to genius, they are destructive to every man, each in proportion to his intelligence. If genius is penalized, so is the faculty of intelligence in every other man. There is only this difference: the average man does not possess the genius’s power of self-confident resistance, and will break much faster; he will give up his mind, in hopeless bewilderment, under the first touch of pressure.

There is no place for the mind in the world proposed by the encyclical, and no place for man. The entities populating it are insentient robots geared to perform prescribed tasks in a gigantic tribal machine, robots deprived of choice, judgment, values, convictions and self-esteem—above all, of self-esteem.

“You are not making a gift of your possessions to the poor person. You are handing over to him what is his.” (23) Does the wealth created by Thomas A. Edison belong to the bushmen who did not create it? Does the paycheck you earned this week belong to the hippies next door who did not earn it? A man would not accept that notion; a robot would. A man would take pride in his achievement; it is the pride of achievement that has to be burned out of the robots of the future.

“For what has been given in common for the use of all, you have arrogated to yourself.” (23) “God intended the earth and all that it contains for the use of every human being and people.” (22) You are one of the things that the earth contains; are you, therefore, intended “for the use of every human being and people”? The encyclical’s answer is apparently “Yes”—since the world it proposes is based on that premise in every essential respect.

A man would not accept that premise. A man, such as John Galt, would say: “You have never discovered the industrial age—and you cling to the morality of the barbarian eras when a miserable form of human subsistence was produced by the muscular labor of slaves. Every mystic had always longed for slaves, to protect him from the material reality he dreaded. But you, you grotesque little atavists, stare blindly at the skyscrapers and smokestacks around you and dream of enslaving the material providers who are scientists, inventors, industrialists. When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind.” (Atlas Shrugged)

But a robot would not say it. A robot would be programmed not to question the source of wealth—and would never discover that the source of wealth is man’s mind.

On hearing such notions as “The whole of creation is for man” (22) and “The world is given to all” (23), a man would grasp that these are equivocations which evade the question of what is necessary to make use of natural resources. He would know that nothing is given to him, that the transformation of raw materials into human goods requires a process of thought and labor, which some men will perform and others will not—and that, in justice, no man can have a primary right to the goods created by the thought and labor of others. A robot would not protest; it would see no difference between itself and raw materials; it would take its own motions as the given.

A man who loves his work and knows what enormous virtue—what discipline of thought, of energy, of purpose, of devotion—it requires, would rebel at the prospect of letting it serve those who scorn it. And scorn for material production is splattered all over the encyclical. “Less well off peoples can never be sufficiently on their guard against this temptation, which comes to them from wealthy nations.” This temptation is “a way of acting that is principally aimed at the conquest of material prosperity.” (41) Advocating a “dialogue” between different civilizations for the purpose of founding “world solidarity,” the encyclical stresses that it must be: “A dialogue based on man and not on commodities or technical skills. . . .” (73) Which means that technical skills are a negligible characteristic, that no virtue was needed to acquire them, that the ability to produce commodities deserves no acknowledgment and is not part of the concept “man.”

Thus, while the entire encyclical is a plea for the products of industrial wealth, it is scornfully indifferent to their source; it asserts a right to the effects, but ignores the cause; it purports to speak on a lofty moral plane, but leaves the process of material production outside the realm of morality—as if that process were an activity of a low order that neither involved nor required any moral principles.

I quote from Atlas Shrugged: “An industrialist—blank-out—there is no such person. A factory is a ‘natural resource,’ like a tree, a rock or a mud puddle. . . . Who solved the problem of production? Humanity, they answer. What was the solution? The goods are here. How did they get here? Somehow. What caused it? Nothing has causes.” (The last sentence is inapplicable; the encyclical’s answer would be: “Providence.”)

The process of production is directed by man’s mind. Man’s mind is not an indeterminate faculty; it requires certain conditions in order to function—and the cardinal one among them is freedom. The encyclical is singularly, eloquently devoid of any consideration of the mind’s requirements, as if it expected human thought to keep on gushing forth anywhere, under any conditions, from under any pressures—or as if it intended that gusher to stop.

If concern for human poverty and suffering were one’s primary motive, one would seek to discover their cause. One would not fail to ask: Why did some nations develop, while others did not? Why have some nations achieved material abundance, while others have remained stagnant in subhuman misery? History and, specifically, the unprecedented prosperity-explosion of the nineteenth century, would give an immediate answer: capitalism is the only system that enables men to produce abundance—and the key to capitalism is individual freedom.

It is obvious that a political system affects a society’s economics, by protecting or impeding men’s productive activities. But this is what the encyclical will neither admit nor permit. The relationship of politics and economics is the thing it most emphatically ignores or evades and denies. It declares that no such relationship exists.

In projecting its world of the future, where the civilized countries are to assume the burden of helping and developing the uncivilized ones, the encyclical states: “And the receiving countries could demand that there be no interference in their political life or subversion of their social structures. As sovereign states they have the right to conduct their own affairs, to decide on their policies and to move freely toward the kind of society they choose.” (54)

What if the kind of society they choose makes production, development, and progress impossible? What if it practices communism, like Soviet Russia?—or exterminates minorities, like Nazi Germany?—or establishes a religious caste system, like India?—or clings to a nomadic, anti-industrial form of existence, like the Arab countries?—or simply consists of tribal gangs ruled by brute force, like some of the new countries of Africa? The encyclical’s tacit answer is that these are the prerogatives of sovereign states—that we must respect different “cultures”—and that the civilized nations of the world must make up for these deficits, somehow.

Some of the answer is not tacit. “Given the increasing needs of the underdeveloped countries, it should be considered quite normal for an advanced country to devote a part of its production to meet their needs, and to train teachers, engineers, technicians and scholars prepared to put their knowledge and their skill at the disposal of less fortunate peoples.” (48)

The encyclical gives severely explicit instructions to such emissaries. “They ought not to conduct themselves in a lordly fashion, but as helpers and co-workers. A people quickly perceives whether those who come to help them do so with or without affection . . . Their message is in danger of being rejected if it is not presented in the context of brotherly love.” (71) They should be free of “all nationalistic pride”; they should “realize that their competence does not confer on them a superiority in every field.” They should realize that theirs “is not the only civilization, nor does it enjoy a monopoly of valuable elements.” They should “be intent on discovering, along with its history, the component elements of the cultural riches of the country receiving them. Mutual understanding will be established which will enrich both cultures.” (72)

This is said to civilized men who are to venture into countries where sacred cows are fed, while children are left to starve—where female infants are killed or abandoned by the roadside—where men go blind, medical help being forbidden by their religion—where women are mutilated, to insure their fidelity—where unspeakable tortures are ceremonially inflicted on prisoners—where cannibalism is practiced. Are these the “cultural riches” which a Western man is to greet with “brotherly love”? Are these the “valuable elements” which he is to admire and adopt? Are these the “fields” in which he is not to regard himself as superior? And when he discovers entire populations rotting alive in such conditions, is he not to acknowledge, with a burning stab of pride—of pride and gratitude—the achievements of his nation and his culture, of the men who created them and left him a nobler heritage to carry forward?

The encyclical’s implicit answer is “No.” He is not to judge, not to question, not to condemn—only to love; to love without cause, indiscriminately, unconditionally, in violation of any values, standards, or convictions of his own.

(The only valuable assistance that Western men could, in fact, offer to undeveloped countries is to enlighten them on the nature of capitalism and help them to establish it. But this would clash with the natives’ “cultural traditions”; industrialization cannot be grafted onto superstitious irrationality; the choice is either-or. Besides, it is a knowledge which the West itself has lost; and it is the specific element which the encyclical damns.)

While the encyclical demands a kind of unfastidious relativism in regard to cultural values and stressedly urges respect for the right of primitive cultures to hold any values whatever, it does not extend this tolerance to Western civilization. Speaking of Western businessmen who deal with countries “recently opened to industrialization,” the encyclical states: “Why, then, do they return to the inhuman principles of individualism when they operate in less developed countries?” (70)

Observe that the horrors of tribal existence in those undeveloped countries evoke no condemnation from the encyclical; only individualism—the principle that raised mankind out of the primordial swamps—is branded as “inhuman.”

In the light of that statement, observe the encyclical’s contempt for conceptual integrity, when it advocates “the construction of a better world, one which shows deeper respect for the rights and the vocation of the individual.” (65) What are the rights of the individual in a world that regards individualism as “inhuman”? No answer.

There is another remark pertaining to Western nations, which is worth noting. The encyclical states: “We are pleased to learn that in certain nations ‘military service’ can be partially accomplished by doing ‘social service, ’ a ‘service pure and simple.’ ” (74)

It is interesting to discover the probable source of the notion of substituting social work for military service, of the claim that American youths owe their country some years of servitude pure and simple—a vicious notion, more evil than the draft, a singularly un-American notion in that it contradicts every fundamental principle of the United States.

The philosophy that created the United States is the encyclical’s target, the enemy it seeks to obliterate. A casual reference that seems aimed at Latin America is a bit of window-dressing, a booby-trap for compromisers, upon which they did pounce eagerly. That reference states: “If certain landed estates impede the general prosperity because they are extensive, unused or poorly used . . . the common good sometimes demands their expropriation.” (24)

But whatever the sins of Latin America, capitalism is not one of them. Capitalism—a system based on the recognition and protection of individual rights—has never existed in Latin America. In the past and at present, Latin America was and is ruled by a primitive form of fascism: an unorganized, unstructured rule by coup d’état, by militaristic gangs, i.e., by physical force, which tolerates a nominal pretense at private property subject to expropriation by any gang in power (which is the cause of Latin America’s economic stagnation).

The encyclical is concerned with help to the undeveloped nations of the world. Latin America is high on the list of the undeveloped; it is unable to feed its own people. Can anyone imagine Latin America in the role of global provider, supplying the needs of the entire world? It is only the United States—the country created by the principles of individualism, the freest example of capitalism in history, the first and last exponent of the Rights of Man—that could attempt such a role and would thereby be induced to commit suicide.

Now observe that the encyclical is not concerned with man, with the individual; the “unit” of its thinking is the tribe: nations, countries, peoples—and it discusses them as if they had a totalitarian power to dispose of their citizens, as if such entities as individuals were of no significance any longer. This is indicative of the encyclical’s strategy: the United States is the highest achievement of the millennia of Western civilization’s struggle toward individualism, and its last, precarious remnant. With the obliteration of the United States—i.e., of capitalism—there will be nothing left to deal with on the face of the globe but collectivized tribes. To hasten that day, the encyclical treats it as a fait accompli and addresses itself to the relationships among tribes.

Observe that the same morality—altruism, the morality of self-immolation—which, for centuries, has been preached against the individual, is now preached against the civilized nations. The creed of self-sacrifice—the primordial weapon used to penalize man’s success on earth, to undercut his self-confidence, to cripple his independence, to poison his enjoyment of life, to emasculate his pride, to stunt his self-esteem and paralyze his mind—is now counted upon to wreak the same destruction on civilized nations and on civilization as such.

I quote John Galt: “You have reached the blind alley of the treason you committed when you agreed that you had no right to exist. Once, you believed it was ‘only a compromise’: you conceded it was evil to live for yourself, but moral to live for the sake of your children. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your children, but moral to live for your community. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your community, but moral to live for your country. Now, you are letting this greatest of countries be devoured by any scum from any corner of the earth, while you concede that it is selfish to live for your country and that your moral duty is to live for the globe. A man who has no right to life, has no right to values and will not keep them.” (Atlas Shrugged)

Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival qua man—i.e., qua rational being. They are not compatible with altruism.

Man’s soul or spirit is his consciousness; the motor of his consciousness is reason; deprive him of freedom, i.e., of the right to use his mind—and what is left of him is only a physical body, ready to be manipulated by the strings of any tribe.

Ask yourself whether you have ever read a document as body-oriented as that encyclical. The inhabitants of the world it proposes to establish are robots tuned to respond to a single stimulus: need—the lowest, grossest, physical, physicalistic need of any other robots anywhere: the minimum necessities, the barely sufficient to keep all robots in working order, eating, sleeping, eliminating, and procreating, to produce more robots to work, eat, sleep, eliminate, and procreate. The most dehumanizing level of poverty is the level on which bare animal necessities become one’s only concern and goal; this is the level which the encyclical proposes to institutionalize and on which it proposes to immobilize all of mankind forever, with the animal needs of all as the only motivation of all (“all other rights whatsoever . . . are to be subordinated to this principle”).

If the encyclical charges that in a capitalist society men fall victim to “a stifling materialism,” what is the atmosphere of that proposed world?

The survivor of one such plan described it as follows: “We had no way of knowing their ability [the ability of others], we had no way of controlling their needs—all we knew was that we were beasts of burden struggling blindly in some sort of place that was half-hospital, halfstockyards—a place geared to nothing but disability, disaster, disease—beasts put there for the relief of whatever whoever chose to say was whichever’s need. . . . To work—with no chance for an extra ration, till the Cambodians have been fed and the Patagonians have been sent through college. To work—on a blank check held by every creature born, by men whom you’ll never see, whose needs you’ll never know, whose ability or laziness or sloppiness or fraud you have no way to learn and no right to question—just to work and work and work—and leave it up to the Ivys and the Geralds of the world to decide whose stomach will consume the effort, the dreams and the days of your life.” (Atlas Shrugged)

Do you think that I was exaggerating and that no one preaches ideals of that kind?

But, you say, the encyclical’s ideal will not work? It is not intended to work.

It is not intended to relieve suffering or to abolish poverty; it is intended to induce guilt. It is not intended to be accepted and practiced; it is intended to be accepted and broken—broken by man’s “selfish” desire to live, which will thus be turned into a shameful weakness. Men who accept as an ideal an irrational goal which they cannot achieve never lift their heads thereafter—and never discover that their bowed heads were the only goal to be achieved.

The relief of suffering is not altruism’s motive, it is only its rationalization. Self-sacrifice is not altruism’s means to a happier end, it is its end—self-sacrifice as man’s permanent state, as a way of life and joyless toil in the muck of a desolate earth where no “Why?” is ever to flash on in the veiled, extinguished eyes of children.

The encyclical comes close to admitting this prospect, and does not attempt to offer any earthly justification for altruistic martyrdom. It declares: “Far from being the ultimate measure of all things, man can only realize himself by reaching beyond himself.” (42) (Beyond the grave?) And: “This road toward a greater humanity requires effort and sacrifice, but suffering itself, accepted for the love of our brethren, favors the progress of the entire human family.” (79) And: “We are all united in this progress toward God.” (80)

As to the attitude toward man’s mind, the clearest admission is to be found outside the encyclical. In a speech to a national conference of Italian bishops, on April 7, 1967, Pope Paul VI denounced the questioning of “any dogma that does not please and that demands the humble homage of the mind to be received.” And he urged the bishops to combat the “cult of one’s own person.” (The New York Times, April 8, 1967.)

On the question of what political system it advocates, the encyclical is scornfully indifferent: it would, apparently, find any political system acceptable provided it is a version of statism. The vague allusions to some nominal form of private property make it probable that the encyclical favors fascism. On the other hand, the tone, style, and vulgarity of argumentation suggest a shopworn Marxism. But this very vulgarity seems to indicate a profound indifference to intellectual discourse—as if, contemptuous of its audience, the encyclical picked whatever clichés were deemed to be safely fashionable today.

The encyclical insists emphatically on only two political demands: that the nations of the future embrace statism, with a totalitarian control of their citizens’ economic activities—and that these nations unite into a global state, with a totalitarian power over global planning. “This international collaboration on a worldwide scale requires institutions that will prepare, coordinate and direct it . . . Who does not see the necessity of thus establishing progressively a world authority, capable of acting effectively in the juridical and political sectors?” (78)

Is there any difference between the encyclical’s philosophy and communism? I am perfectly willing, on this matter, to take the word of an eminent Catholic authority. Under the headline: “Encyclical Termed Rebuff to Marxism,” The New York Times of March 31, 1967, reports: “The Rev. John Courtney Murray, the prominent Jesuit theologian, described Pope Paul’s newest encyclical yesterday as ‘the church’s definitive answer to Marxism.’ . . . ‘The Marxists have proposed one way, and in pursuing their program they rely on man alone,’ Father Murray said. ‘Now Pope Paul VI has issued a detailed plan to accomplish the same goal on the basis of true humanism—humanism that recognizes man’s religious nature.’ ”

Amen.

So much for those American “conservatives” who claim that religion is the base of capitalism—and who believe that they can have capitalism and eat it, too, as the moral cannibalism of the altruist ethics demands.

And so much for those modern “liberals” who pride themselves on being the champions of reason, science, and progress—and who smear the advocates of capitalism as superstitious, reactionary representatives of a dark past. Move over, comrades, and make room for your latest fellow-travelers, who had always belonged on your side—then take a look, if you dare, at the kind of past they represent.

This is the spectacle of religion climbing on the band-wagon of statism, in a desperate attempt to recapture the power it lost at the time of the Renaissance.

The Catholic Church has never given up the hope to re-establish the medieval union of church and state, with a global state and a global theocracy as its ultimate goal. Since the Renaissance, it has always been cautiously last to join that political movement which could serve its purpose at the time. This time, it is too late: collectivism is dead intellectually; the band-wagon on which the Church has climbed is a hearse. But, counting on that vehicle, the Catholic Church is deserting Western civilization and calling upon the barbarian hordes to devour the achievements of man’s mind.

There is an element of sadness in this spectacle. Catholicism had once been the most philosophical of all religions. Its long, illustrious philosophical history was illuminated by a giant: Thomas Aquinas. He brought an Aristotelian view of reason (an Aristotelian epistemology ) back into European culture, and lighted the way to the Renaissance. For the brief span of the nineteenth century, when his was the dominant influence among Catholic philosophers, the grandeur of his thought almost lifted the Church close to the realm of reason (though at the price of a basic contradiction). Now, we are witnessing the end of the Aquinas line—with the Church turning again to his primordial antagonist, who fits it better, to the mind-hating, life-hating St. Augustine. One could only wish they had given St. Thomas a more dignified requiem.

The encyclical is the voice of the Dark Ages, rising again in today’s intellectual vacuum, like a cold wind whistling through the empty streets of an abandoned civilization.

Unable to resolve a lethal contradiction, the conflict between individualism and altruism, the West is giving up. When men give up reason and freedom, the vacuum is filled by faith and force.

No social system can stand for long without a moral base. Project a magnificent skyscraper being built on quicksands: while men are struggling upward to add the hundredth and two-hundredth stories, the tenth and twentieth are vanishing, sucked under by the muck. That is the history of capitalism, of its swaying, tottering attempt to stand erect on the foundation of the altruist morality.

It’s either-or. If capitalism’s befuddled, guilt-ridden apologists do not know it, two fully consistent representatives of altruism do know it: Catholicism and communism.

Their rapprochement, therefore, is not astonishing. Their differences pertain only to the supernatural, but here, in reality, on earth, they have three cardinal elements in common: the same morality, altruism—the same goal, global rule by force—the same enemy, man’s mind.

There is a precedent for their strategy. In the German election of 1933, the communists supported the Nazis, on the premise that they could fight each other for power later, but must first destroy their common enemy, capitalism. Today, Catholicism and communism may well cooperate, on the premise that they will fight each other for power later, but must first destroy their common enemy, the individual, by forcing mankind to unite to form one neck ready for one leash.

The encyclical was endorsed with enthusiasm by the communist press the world over. “The French Commu nist party newspaper, L’Humanité, said the encyclical was ‘often moving’ and constructive for highlighting the evils of capitalism long emphasized by Marxists,” reports The New York Times (March 30, 1967).

Those who do not understand the role of moral self-confidence in human affairs will not appreciate the sardonically ludicrous quality of the following item from the same report: “The French Communists, however, deplored the failure of the Pope to make a distinction between rich Communist countries and rich capitalist countries in his general strictures against imbalance between the ‘have’ and ‘have-not’ nations.”

Thus, wealth acquired by force is rightful property, but wealth earned by production is not; looting is moral, but producing is not. And while the looters’ spokesmen object to the encyclical’s damnation of wealth, the producers’ spokesmen crawl, evading the issues, accepting the insults, promising to give their wealth away. If capitalism does not survive, this is the spectacle that will have made it unworthy of survival.

The New York Times (March 30, 1967) declared editorially that the encyclical “is remarkably advanced in its economic philosophy. It is sophisticated, comprehensive and penetrating . . .” If, by “advanced,” the editorial meant that the encyclical’s philosophy has caught up with that of modern “liberals,” one would have to agree—except that the Times is mistaken about the direction of the motion involved: it is not that the encyclical has progressed to the twentieth century, it is that the “liberals” have reverted to the fourth.

The Wall Street Journal (May 10, 1967) went further. It declared, in effect, that the Pope didn’t mean it. The encyclical, it alleged, was just a misunderstanding caused by some mysterious conspiracy of the Vatican translators who misinterpreted the Pope’s ideas in transferring them from the original Latin into English. “His Holiness may not be showering compliments on the free market system. But he is not at all saying what the Vatican’s English version appeared to make him say.”

Through minute comparisons of Latin paragraphs with their official and unofficial translations, and columns of casuistic hair-splitting, The Wall Street Journal reached the conclusion that it was not capitalism that the Pope was denouncing, but only “some opinions” of capitalism. Which opinions? According to the unofficial translation, the encyclical’s paragraph 26 reads as follows: “But out of these new conditions, we know not how, some opinions have crept into human society according to which profit was regarded (in these opinions) as the foremost incentive to encourage economic progress, free competition as the supreme rule of economics, private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right which would accept neither limits nor a social duty related to it. . . .”

“In the Latin,” said the article, “Pope Paul is acknowledging the hardships . . . in the development of ‘some kinds of capitalism.’ But he puts the blame for that not on ‘the whole woeful system’—i.e., the whole capitalistic system—but on some corrupt views of it.”

If the views advocating the profit motive, free competition, and private property are “corrupt,” just what is capitalism? Blank out. What is The Wall Street Journal’s definition of capitalism? Blank out. What are we to designate as “capitalism” once all of its essential characteristics are removed? Blank out.

This last question indicates the unstated meaning of that article: since the Pope does not attack capitalism, but only its fundamental principles, we don’t have to worry.

And for what, do you suppose, did that article find courage to reproach the encyclical? “What might have been wished for in the encyclical was an acknowledgment that capitalism can accept, and in the United States as well as other places does accept, a great many social responsibilities.”

Sic transit gloria viae Wall.

A similar attitude, with a similar range of vision, is taken by Time magazine (April 7, 1967). “Although Pope Paul had probably tried to give a Christian message relevant to the world’s contemporary economic situation, his encyclical virtually ignored the fact that old-style laissez-faire capitalism is about as dead as Das Kapital. Quite clearly, the Pope’s condemnation of capitalism was addressed to the unreconstructed variety that persists, for example, in Latin America.”

If this were a competition, the prize would go to Fortune, the businessmen’s magazine (May 1967). Its attitude is aggressively amoral and a-philosophical; it is proudly determined to maintain the separation of economics and ethics. “Capitalism is only an economic system,” it says.

First acknowledging the Pope’s “praiseworthy purpose,” Fortune declares: “But despite its modern and global vision, Populorum Progressio may be a self-defeating document. It takes a dated and suspicious view of the workings of economic enterprise. . . . The Pope has set up a straw man that has few defenders—if this passage [paragraph 26] is taken literally. Unalloyed laissez-faire in fact governs no significant part of the world’s commerce. . . . ‘Ownership,’ in advanced countries, has evolved in a way that subsumes ‘social obligations.’ . . . ‘Absolute’ private rights are irrelevant in advanced industrial societies.”

After conceding all that, Fortune seems to be astonished and hurt that the Pope did not find it necessary to include businessmen among the “men of good will” whom he calls upon to combat global poverty. “In omitting any specific reference to the businessman, he slights a natural and necessary ally, who, indeed is already deeply committed in many parts of the world to the kind of effort that Paul urges. Perhaps the businessman is taken for granted, as a kind of primordial force that can be counted upon to provide motive power, and that needs only to be tamed and harnessed and carefully watched. [And isn’t that Fortune’s own view of businessmen in their “unalloyed” state?]

“The Vatican has seldom seemed able to look at capitalism as other than a necessary evil, at best, and Populorum Progressio suggests that a better understanding still comes hard. This is not to suggest that capitalism is a complete formula for social enlightenment and progress; it is only an economic system that men of good will can use—more successfully than any other system yet conceived—to attain the social goals that politics and religion help to define.”

Observe the indecency of trying to justify capitalism on the grounds of altruistic service. Observe also the naiveté of the cynical: it is not their wealth nor the relief of poverty that the encyclical is after.

Militantly concrete-bound, equating cynicism with “practicality,” modern pragmatists are unable to see beyond the range of the moment or to grasp what moves the world and determines its direction. Men who are willing to swim with any current, to compromise on anything, to serve as means to anyone’s ends, lose the ability to understand the power of ideas. And while two hordes of man-haters, who do understand it, are converging on civilization, they sit in the middle, declaring that principles are straw men.

I have heard the same accusation directed at Objectivism: we are fighting a straw man, they say, nobody preaches the kind of ideas we are opposing.

Well, as a friend of mine observed, only the Vatican, the Kremlin, and the Empire State Building⁹³ know the real issues of the modern world.

APPENDIX: MAN’S RIGHTS

by Ayn Rand

If one wishes to advocate a free society—that is, capitalism—one must realize that its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights. If one wishes to uphold individual rights, one must realize that capitalism is the only system that can uphold and protect them. And if one wishes to gauge the relationship of freedom to the goals of today’s intellectuals, one may gauge it by the fact that the concept of individual rights is evaded, distorted, perverted and seldom discussed, most conspicuously seldom by the so-called “conservatives.”

“Rights” are a moral concept—the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others—the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context—the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

Reprinted from The Virtue of Selfishness.

Every political system is based on some code of ethics. The dominant ethics of mankind’s history were variants of the altruist-collectivist doctrine which subordinated the individual to some higher authority, either mystical or social. Consequently, most political systems were variants of the same statist tyranny, differing only in degree, not in basic principle, limited only by the accidents of tradition, of chaos, of bloody strife and periodic collapse. Under all such systems, morality was a code applicable to the individual, but not to society. Society was placed outside the moral law, as its embodiment or source or exclusive interpreter—and the inculcation of self-sacrificial devotion to social duty was regarded as the main purpose of ethics in man’s earthly existence.

Since there is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men, this meant, in practice, that the rulers of society were exempt from moral law; subject only to traditional rituals, they held total power and exacted blind obedience—on the implicit principle of: “The good is that which is good for society (or for the tribe, the race, the nation), and the ruler’s edicts are its voice on earth.”

This was true of all statist systems, under all variants of the altruist-collectivist ethics, mystical or social. “The Divine Right of Kings” summarizes the political theory of the first—“Vox populi, vox dei” of the second. As witness: the theocracy of Egypt, with the Pharaoh as an embodied god—the unlimited majority rule or democracy of Athens—the welfare state run by the Emperors of Rome—the Inquisition of the late Middle Ages—the absolute monarchy of France—the welfare state of Bismarck’s Prussia—the gas chambers of Nazi Germany—the slaughterhouse of the Soviet Union.

All these political systems were expressions of the altruist-collectivist ethics—and their common characteristic is the fact that society stood above the moral law, as an omnipotent, sovereign whim worshiper. Thus, politically, all these systems were variants of an amoral society.

The most profoundly revolutionary achievement of the United States of America was the subordination of society to moral law.

The principle of man’s individual rights represented the extension of morality into the social system—as a limitation on the power of the state, as man’s protection against the brute force of the collective, as the subordination of might to right. The United States was the first moral society in history.

All previous systems had regarded man as a sacrificial means to the ends of others, and society as an end in itself. The United States regarded man as an end in himself, and society as a means to the peaceful, orderly, voluntary coexistence of individuals. All previous systems had held that man’s life belongs to society, that society can dispose of him in any way it pleases, and that any freedom he enjoys is his only by favor, by the permission of society, which may be revoked at any time. The United States held that man’s life is his by right (which means: by moral principle and by his nature), that a right is the property of an individual, that society as such has no rights, and that the only moral purpose of a government is the protection of individual rights.

A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.)

The concept of a “right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.

Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive—of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.

The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.

The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day. In accordance with the two theories of ethics, the mystical or the social, some men assert that rights are a gift of God—others, that rights are a gift of society. But, in fact, the source of rights is man’s nature.

The Declaration of Independence stated that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Whether one believes that man is the product of a Creator or of nature, the issue of man’s origin does not alter the fact that he is an entity of a specific kind—a rational being—that he cannot function successfully under coercion, and that rights are a necessary condition of his particular mode of survival.

“The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational.” (Atlas Shrugged)

To violate man’s rights means to compel him to act against his own judgment, or to expropriate his values. Basically, there is only one way to do it: by the use of physical force. There are two potential violators of man’s rights: the criminals and the government. The great achievement of the United States was to draw a distinction between these two—by forbidding to the second the legalized version of the activities of the first.

The Declaration of Independence laid down the principle that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.” This provided the only valid justification of a government and defined its only proper purpose: to protect man’s rights by protecting him from physical violence.

Thus the government’s function was changed from the role of ruler to the role of servant. The government was set to protect man from criminals—and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed against private citizens, but against the government—as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power.

The result was the pattern of a civilized society which—for the brief span of some hundred and fifty years—America came close to achieving. A civilized society is one in which physical force is banned from human relationships—in which the government, acting as a policeman, may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.

This was the essential meaning and intent of America’s political philosophy, implicit in the principle of individual rights. But it was not formulated explicitly, nor fully accepted nor consistently practiced.

America’s inner contradiction was the altruist-collectivist ethics. Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights. One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal.

It was the concept of individual rights that had given birth to a free society. It was with the destruction of individual rights that the destruction of freedom had to begin.

A collectivist tyranny dare not enslave a country by an outright confiscation of its values, material or moral. It has to be done by a process of internal corruption. Just as in the material realm the plundering of a country’s wealth is accomplished by inflating the currency—so today one may witness the process of inflation being applied to the realm of rights. The process entails such a growth of newly promulgated “rights” that people do not notice the fact that the meaning of the concept is being reversed. Just as bad money drives out good money, so these “printing-press rights” negate authentic rights.

Consider the curious fact that never has there been such a proliferation, all over the world, of two contradictory phenomena: of alleged new “rights” and of slave-labor camps.

The “gimmick” was the switch of the concept of rights from the political to the economic realm.

The Democratic Party platform of 1960 summarizes the switch boldly and explicitly. It declares that a Democratic Administration “will reaffirm the economic bill of rights which Franklin Roosevelt wrote into our national conscience sixteen years ago.”

Bear clearly in mind the meaning of the concept of “rights” when you read the list which that platform offers:

“1. The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.

“2. The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.

“3. The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.

“4. The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home and abroad.

“5. The right of every family to a decent home.

“6. The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.

“7. The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accidents and unemployment.

“8. The right to a good education.”

A single question added to each of the above eight clauses would make the issue clear: At whose expense?

Jobs, food, clothing, recreation (!), homes, medical care, education, etc., do not grow in nature. These are man-made values—goods and services produced by men. Who is to provide them?

If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.

Any alleged “right” of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.

No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as “the right to enslave.”

A right does not include the material implementation of that right by other men; it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one’s own effort.

Observe, in this context, the intellectual precision of the Founding Fathers: they spoke of the right to the pursuit of happiness—not of the right to happiness. It means that a man has the right to take the actions he deems necessary to achieve his happiness; it does not mean that others must make him happy.

The right to life means that a man has the right to support his life by his own work (on any economic level, as high as his ability will carry him); it does not mean that others must provide him with the necessities of life.

The right to property means that a man has the right to take the economic actions necessary to earn property, to use it and to dispose of it; it does not mean that others must provide him with property.

The right of free speech means that a man has the right to express his ideas without danger of suppression, interference or punitive action by the government. It does not mean that others must provide him with a lecture hall, a radio station or a printing press through which to express his ideas.

Any undertaking that involves more than one man requires the voluntary consent of every participant. Every one of them has the right to make his own decision, but none has the right to force his decision on the others.

There is no such thing as “a right to a job”—there is only the right of free trade, that is: a man’s right to take a job if another man chooses to hire him. There is no “right to a home,” only the right of free trade: the right to build a home or to buy it. There are no “rights to a ‘fair’ wage or a ‘fair’ price” if no one chooses to pay it, to hire a man or to buy his product. There are no “rights of consumers” to milk, shoes, movies or champagne if no producers choose to manufacture such items (there is only the right to manufacture them oneself). There are no “rights” of special groups, there are no “rights of farmers, of workers, of businessmen, of employees, of employers, of the old, of the young, of the unborn.”

There are only the Rights of Man—rights possessed by every individual man and by all men as individuals.

Property rights and the right of free trade are man’s only “economic rights” (they are, in fact, political rights)—and there can be no such thing as “an economic bill of rights.” But observe that the advocates of the latter have all but destroyed the former.

Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man’s freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men. Private citizens are not a threat to one another’s rights or freedom. A private citizen who resorts to physical force and violates the rights of others is a criminal—and men have legal protection against him.

Criminals are a small minority in any age or country. And the harm they have done to mankind is infinitesimal when compared to the horrors—the bloodshed, the wars, the persecutions, the confiscations, the famines, the enslavements, the wholesale destructions—perpetrated by mankind’s governments. Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights, a government is man’s deadliest enemy. It is not as protection against private actions, but against governmental actions that the Bill of Rights was written.

Now observe the process by which that protection is being destroyed.

The process consists of ascribing to private citizens the specific violations constitutionally forbidden to the government (which private citizens have no power to commit) and thus freeing the government from all restrictions. The switch is becoming progressively more obvious in the field of free speech. For years, the collectivists have been propagating the notion that a private individual’s refusal to finance an opponent is a violation of the opponent’s right of free speech and an act of “censorship.”

It is “censorship,” they claim, if a newspaper refuses to employ or publish writers whose ideas are diametrically opposed to its policy.

It is “censorship,” they claim, if businessmen refuse to advertise in a magazine that denounces, insults and smears them.

It is “censorship,” they claim, if a TV sponsor objects to some outrage perpetrated on a program he is financing—such as the incident of Alger Hiss being invited to denounce former Vice-President Nixon.

And then there is Newton N. Minow who declares: “There is censorship by ratings, by advertisers, by networks, by affiliates which reject programming offered to their areas.” It is the same Mr. Minow who threatens to revoke the license of any station that does not comply with his views on programming—and who claims that that is not censorship.

Consider the implications of such a trend.

“Censorship” is a term pertaining only to governmental action. No private action is censorship. No private individual or agency can silence a man or suppress a publication; only the government can do so. The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right not to agree, not to listen and not to finance one’s own antagonists.

But according to such doctrines as the “economic bill of rights,” an individual has no right to dispose of his own material means by the guidance of his own convictions—and must hand over his money indiscriminately to any speakers or propagandists, who have a “right” to his property.

This means that the ability to provide the material tools for the expression of ideas deprives a man of the right to hold any ideas. It means that a publisher has to publish books he considers worthless, false or evil—that a TV sponsor has to finance commentators who choose to affront his convictions—that the owner of a newspaper must turn his editorial pages over to any young hooligan who clamors for the enslavement of the press. It means that one group of men acquires the “right” to unlimited license—while another group is reduced to helpless irresponsibility.

But since it is obviously impossible to provide every claimant with a job, a microphone or a newspaper column, who will determine the “distribution” of “economic rights” and select the recipients, when the owners’ right to choose has been abolished? Well, Mr. Minow has indicated that quite clearly.

And if you make the mistake of thinking that this applies only to big property owners, you had better realize that the theory of “economic rights” includes the “right” of every would-be playwright, every beatnik poet, every noise-composer and every non-objective artist (who have political pull) to the financial support you did not give them when you did not attend their shows. What else is the meaning of the project to spend your tax money on subsidized art?

And while people are clamoring about “economic rights,” the concept of political rights is vanishing. It is forgotten that the right of free speech means the freedom to advocate one’s views and to bear the possible consequences, including disagreement with others, opposition, unpopularity and lack of support. The political function of “the right of free speech” is to protect dissenters and unpopular minorities from forcible suppression—not to guarantee them the support, advantages and rewards of a popularity they have not gained.

The Bill of Rights reads: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . .” It does not demand that private citizens provide a microphone for the man who advocates their destruction, or a passkey for the burglar who seeks to rob them, or a knife for the murderer who wants to cut their throats.

Such is the state of one of today’s most crucial issues: political rights versus “economic rights.” It’s either-or. One destroys the other. But there are, in fact, no “economic rights,” no “collective rights,” no “public-interest rights.” The term “individual rights” is a redundancy: there is no other kind of rights and no one else to possess them.

Those who advocate laissez-faire capitalism are the only advocates of man’s rights.

APPENDIX: THE NATURE OF GOVERNMENT

by Ayn Rand

A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area.

Do men need such an institution—and why?

Since man’s mind is his basic tool of survival, his means of gaining knowledge to guide his actions—the basic condition he requires is the freedom to think and to act according to his rational judgment. This does not mean that a man must live alone and that a desert island is the environment best suited to his needs. Men can derive enormous benefits from dealing with one another. A social environment is most conducive to their successful survival—but only on certain conditions.

“The two great values to be gained from social existence are: knowledge and trade. Man is the only species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; the knowledge potentially available to man is greater than any one man could begin to acquire in his own lifespan; every man gains an incalculable benefit from the knowledge discovered by others. The second great benefit is the division of labor: it enables a man to devote his effort to a particular field of work and to trade with others who specialize in other fields. This form of cooperation allows all men who take part in it to achieve a greater knowledge, skill and productive return on their effort than they could achieve if each had to produce everything he needs, on a desert island or on a self-sustaining farm.

Reprinted from The Virtue of Selfishness.

“But these very benefits indicate, delimit and define what kind of men can be of value to one another and in what kind of society: only rational, productive, independent men in a rational, productive, free society.” (“The Objectivist Ethics” in The Virtue of Selfishness.)

A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment—a society that sets up a conflict between its edicts and the requirements of man’s nature—is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule. Such a society destroys all the values of human coexistence, has no possible justification and represents, not a source of benefits, but the deadliest threat to man’s survival. Life on a desert island is safer than and incomparably preferable to existence in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.

If men are to live together in a peaceful, productive, rational society and deal with one another to mutual benefit, they must accept the basic social principle without which no moral or civilized society is possible: the principle of individual rights.

To recognize individual rights means to recognize and accept the conditions required by man’s nature for his proper survival.

Man’s rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.

The precondition of a civilized society is the barring of physical force from social relationships—thus establishing the principle that if men wish to deal with one another, they may do so only by means of reason: by discussion, persuasion and voluntary, uncoerced agreement.

The necessary consequence of man’s right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

If some “pacifist” society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it.

If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door—or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang-rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into the perpetual tribal warfare of prehistorical savages.

The use of physical force—even its retaliatory use—cannot be left at the discretion of individual citizens. Peaceful coexistence is impossible if a man has to live under the constant threat of force to be unleashed against him by any of his neighbors at any moment. Whether his neighbors’ intentions are good or bad, whether their judgment is rational or irrational, whether they are motivated by a sense of justice or by ignorance or by prejudice or by malice—the use of force against one man cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another.

Visualize, for example, what would happen if a man missed his wallet, concluded that he had been robbed, broke into every house in the neighborhood to search it, and shot the first man who gave him a dirty look, taking the look to be a proof of guilt.

The retaliatory use of force requires objective rules of evidence to establish that a crime has been committed and to prove who committed it, as well as objective rules to define punishments and enforcement procedures. Men who attempt to prosecute crimes, without such rules, are a lynch mob. If a society left the retaliatory use of force in the hands of individual citizens, it would degenerate into mob rule, lynch law and an endless series of bloody private feuds or vendettas.

If physical force is to be barred from social relationships, men need an institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective code of rules.

This is the task of a government—of a proper government—its basic task, its only moral justification and the reason why men do need a government.

A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws.

The fundamental difference between private action and governmental action—a difference thoroughly ignored and evaded today—lies in the fact that a government holds a monopoly on the legal use of physical force. It has to hold such a monopoly, since it is the agent of restraining and combating the use of force; and for that very same reason, its actions have to be rigidly defined, delimited and circumscribed; no touch of whim or caprice should be permitted in its performance; it should be an impersonal robot, with the laws as its only motive power. If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled.

Under a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.

This is the means of subordinating “might” to “right.” This is the American concept of “a government of laws and not of men.”

The nature of the laws proper to a free society and the source of its government’s authority are both to be derived from the nature and purpose of a proper government. The basic principle of both is indicated in The Declaration of Independence: “to secure these [individual] rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .”

Since the protection of individual rights is the only proper purpose of a government, it is the only proper subject of legislation: all laws must be based on individual rights and aimed at their protection. All laws must be objective (and objectively justifiable): men must know clearly, and in advance of taking an action, what the law forbids them to do (and why), what constitutes a crime and what penalty they will incur if they commit it.

The source of the government’s authority is “the consent of the governed.” This means that the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose.

There is only one basic principle to which an individual must consent if he wishes to live in a free, civilized society: the principle of renouncing the use of physical force and delegating to the government his right of physical self-defense, for the purpose of an orderly, objective, legally defined enforcement. Or, to put it another way, he must accept the separation of force and whim (any whim, including his own).

Now what happens in case of a disagreement between two men about an undertaking in which both are involved?

In a free society, men are not forced to deal with one another. They do so only by voluntary agreement and, when a time element is involved, by contract. If a contract is broken by the arbitrary decision of one man, it may cause a disastrous financial injury to the other—and the victim would have no recourse except to seize the offender’s property as compensation. But here again, the use of force cannot be left to the decision of private individuals. And this leads to one of the most important and most complex functions of the government: to the function of an arbiter who settles disputes among men according to objective laws.

Criminals are a small minority in any semi-civilized society. But the protection and enforcement of contracts through courts of civil law is the most crucial need of a peaceful society; without such protection, no civilization could be developed or maintained.

Man cannot survive, as animals do, by acting on the range of the immediate moment. Man has to project his goals and achieve them across a span of time; he has to calculate his actions and plan his life long-range. The better a man’s mind and the greater his knowledge, the longer the range of his planning. The higher or more complex a civilization, the longer the range of activity it requires—and, therefore, the longer the range of contractual agreements among men, and the more urgent their need of protection for the security of such agreements.

Even a primitive barter society could not function if a man agreed to trade a bushel of potatoes for a basket of eggs and, having received the eggs, refused to deliver the potatoes. Visualize what this sort of whim-directed action would mean in an industrial society where men deliver a billion dollars’ worth of goods on credit, or contract to build multimillion-dollar structures, or sign ninety-nine-year leases.

A unilateral breach of contract involves an indirect use of physical force: it consists, in essence, of one man receiving the material values, goods or services of another, then refusing to pay for them and thus keeping them by force (by mere physical possession), not by right—i.e., keeping them without the consent of their owner. Fraud involves a similarly indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values without their owner’s consent, under false pretenses or false promises. Extortion is another variant of an indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values, not in exchange for values, but by the threat of force, violence or injury.

Some of these actions are obviously criminal. Others, such as a unilateral breach of contract, may not be criminally motivated, but may be caused by irresponsibility and irrationality. Still others may be complex issues with some claim to justice on both sides. But whatever the case may be, all such issues have to be made subject to objectively defined laws and have to be resolved by an impartial arbiter, administering the laws, i.e., by a judge (and a jury, when appropriate).

Observe the basic principle governing justice in all these cases: it is the principle that no man may obtain any values from others without the owners’ consent— and, as a corollary, that a man’s rights may not be left at the mercy of the unilateral decision, the arbitrary choice, the irrationality, the whim of another man.

Such, in essence, is the proper purpose of a government, to make social existence possible to men, by protecting the benefits and combating the evils which men can cause to one another.

The proper functions of a government fall into three broad categories, all of them involving the issues of physical force and the protection of men’s rights: the police, to protect men from criminals—the armed services, to protect men from foreign invaders—the law courts, to settle disputes among men according to objective laws.

These three categories involve many corollary and derivative issues—and their implementation in practice, in the form of specific legislation, is enormously complex. It belongs to the field of a special science: the philosophy of law. Many errors and many disagreements are possible in the field of implementation, but what is essential here is the principle to be implemented: the principle that the purpose of law and of government is the protection of individual rights.

Today, this principle is forgotten, ignored and evaded. The result is the present state of the world, with mankind’s retrogression to the lawlessness of absolutist tyranny, to the primitive savagery of rule by brute force.

In unthinking protest against this trend, some people are raising the question of whether government as such is evil by nature and whether anarchy is the ideal social system. Anarchy, as a political concept, is a naive floating abstraction: for all the reasons discussed above, a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare. But the possibility of human immorality is not the only objection to anarchy: even a society whose every member were fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy; it is the need of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitates the establishment of a government.

A recent variant of anarchistic theory, which is befuddling some of the younger advocates of freedom, is a weird absurdity called “competing governments.” Accepting the basic premise of the modern statists—who see no difference between the functions of government and the functions of industry, between force and production, and who advocate government ownership of business—the proponents of “competing governments” take the other side of the same coin and declare that since competition is so beneficial to business, it should also be applied to government. Instead of a single, monopolistic government, they declare, there should be a number of different governments in the same geographical area, competing for the allegiance of individual citizens, with every citizen free to “shop” and to patronize whatever government he chooses.

Remember that forcible restraint of men is the only service a government has to offer. Ask yourself what a competition in forcible restraint would have to mean.

One cannot call this theory a contradiction in terms, since it is obviously devoid of any understanding of the terms “competition” and “government.” Nor can one call it a floating abstraction, since it is devoid of any contact with or reference to reality and cannot be concretized at all, not even roughly or approximately. One illustration will be sufficient: suppose Mr. Smith, a customer of Government A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of Government B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones’s house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith’s complaint and do not recognize the authority of Government A. What happens then? You take it from there.

The evolution of the concept of “government” has had a long, tortuous history. Some glimmer of the government’s proper function seems to have existed in every organized society, manifesting itself in such phenomena as the recognition of some implicit (if often non-existent) difference between a government and a robber gang—the aura of respect and of moral authority granted to the government as the guardian of “law and order”—the fact that even the most evil types of government found it necessary to maintain some semblance of order and some pretense at justice, if only by routine and tradition, and to claim some sort of moral justification for their power, of a mystical or social nature. Just as the absolute monarchs of France had to invoke “The Divine Right of Kings,” so the modern dictators of Soviet Russia have to spend fortunes on propaganda to justify their rule in the eyes of their enslaved subjects.

In mankind’s history, the understanding of the government’s proper function is a very recent achievement: it is only two hundred years old and it dates from the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. Not only did they identify the nature and the needs of a free society, but they devised the means to translate it into practice. A free society—like any other human product—cannot be achieved by random means, by mere wishing or by the leaders’ “good intentions.” A complex legal system, based on objectively valid principles, is required to make a society free and to keep it free—a system that does not depend on the motives, the moral character or the intentions of any given official, a system that leaves no opportunity, no legal loophole for the development of tyranny.

The American system of checks and balances was just such an achievement. And although certain contradictions in the Constitution did leave a loophole for the growth of statism, the incomparable achievement was the concept of a constitution as a means of limiting and restricting the power of the government.

Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.

Now consider the extent of the moral and political inversion in today’s prevalent view of government. Instead of being a protector of man’s rights, the government is becoming their most dangerous violator; instead of guarding freedom, the government is establishing slavery; instead of protecting men from the initiators of physical force, the government is initiating physical force and coercion in any manner and issue it pleases; instead of serving as the instrument of objectivity in human relationships, the government is creating a deadly, subterranean reign of uncertainty and fear, by means of non-objective laws whose interpretation is left to the arbitrary decisions of random bureaucrats; instead of protecting men from injury by whim, the government is arrogating to itself the power of unlimited whim—so that we are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

It has often been remarked that in spite of its material progress, mankind has not achieved any comparable degree of moral progress. That remark is usually followed by some pessimistic conclusion about human nature. It is true that the moral state of mankind is disgracefully low. But if one considers the monstrous moral inversions of the governments (made possible by the altruist-collectivist morality) under which mankind has had to live through most of its history, one begins to wonder how men have managed to preserve even a semblance of civilization, and what indestructible vestige of self-esteem has kept them walking upright on two feet.

One also begins to see more clearly the nature of the political principles that have to be accepted and advocated, as part of the battle for man’s intellectual Renaissance.

RECOMMENDED BIBLIOGRAPHY

For a study of Objectivism:

Branden, Nathaniel, Who Is Ayn Rand?, New York: Random House, 1962; Paperback Library, 1964.

The Objectivist, a monthly journal published by The Objectivist, Inc., The Empire State Building, 350 Fifth Avenue, New York City. (Formerly The Objectivist Newsletter.)

Rand, Ayn, Anthem, Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1953; New York: New American Library (Signet ), 1961.

——, Atlas Shrugged, New York: Random House, 1957; New York: New American Library (Signet), 1959.

——, For the New Intellectual, New York: Random House, 1961; New York: New American Library (Signet), 1963.

——, The Fountainhead, New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1943; New York: New American Library (Signet), 1952.

——, The Virtue of Selfishness, New York: The New American Library (Signet), 1964; New York: New American Library, 1965.

——, We the Living, New York: Random House, 1959; New York: New American Library (Signet), 1960.

The following authors are not exponents of Objectivism, and these recommendations should not be understood as an unqualified endorsement of their total intellectual positions.

Anderson, Benjamin M., Economics and the Public Welfare: Financial and Economic History of the United States, 1914-1946, Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1949.

Anderson, Martin, The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949-1962, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1964.

Ashton, T. S., An Economic History of England: The Eighteenth Century, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1955.

——, The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830, London: Oxford University Press, 1948.

Ballvé, Faustino, Essentials of Economics, Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1963.

Bastiat, Frédéric, Economic Sophisms, Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1964.

——, Selected Essays on Political Economy, Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1964.

Boehm-Bawerk, Eugen von, The Exploitation Theory, South Holland, Illinois: Libertarian Press, 1960.

Buer, Mabel C., Health, Wealth and Population in the Early Days of the Industrial Revolution, 1760-1815, London: George Routledge & Sons, 1926.

Chu, Valentin, Ta Ta, Tan Tan (Fight fight, talk talk); The Inside Story of Communist China, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1963.

Crocker, George N., Roosevelt’s Road to Russia, Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1959.

Dallin, David J., and Nicolaevsky, Boris I., Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1947.

Ekirch, Arthur A., Jr., The Decline of American Liberalism, New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1955.

Fertig, Lawrence, Prosperity Through Freedom, Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1961.

Fleming, Harold, Ten Thousand Commandments: A Story of the Antitrust Laws, New York: Prentice-Hall, 1951.

Flynn, John T., The Roosevelt Myth, revised edition, New York: The Devin-Adair Co., 1956.

George, M. Dorothy, England in Transition: Life and Work in the Eighteenth Century, London: Penguin, 1953.

——, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, 3rd edition, London: reprinted by The London School of Economics and Political Science, 1951; New York: Harper and Row (Harper Torchbooks), 1964.

Hazlitt, Henry, ed., The Critics of Keynesian Economics, Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960.

——, Economics in One Lesson, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946.

——, The Failure of the “New Economics”: An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies, Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1959.

——, What You Should Know About Inflation, 2nd edition, Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1965.

Hewitt, Margaret, Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry, London: Rockliff, 1958.

Keller, Werner, East Minus West = Zero: Russia’s Debt to the Western World. 1862-1962, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962. (Published in Great Britain as Are the Russians Ten Feet Tall?, London: Thames and Hudson, 1961.)

Kubek, Anthony, How the Far East Was Lost: American Policy and the Creation of Communist China, 1941- 1949, Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1963.

Lynch, Matthew J., and Raphael, Stanley S., Medicine and the State, Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas, 1963.

Mason, Lowell B., The Language of Dissent, New Canaan, Connecticut: The Long House. (Originally published Cleveland, Ohio: The World Publishing Co., 1959.)

Neale, A. D., The Antitrust Laws of the United States of America: A Study of Competition Enforced by Law, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1960.

Paterson, Isabel, The God of the Machine, Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1964. (Originally published New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1943.)

Snyder, Carl, Capitalism the Creator: The Economic Foundations of Modern Industrial Society, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1940.

von Mises, Ludwig, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1956.

——, Bureaucracy, New Haven, Connecticut, and London: Yale University Press, 1944.

——, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1949.

——, Omnipotent Government, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1944.

——, Planned Chaos, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York: The Foundation for Economic Education, 1947.

——, Planning for Freedom, 2nd edition, South Holland, Illinois: Libertarian Press, 1962.

——, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1951.

——, The Theory of Money and Credit, new edition, New Haven, Connecticut, and London: Yale University Press, 1953.

INDEX

INDEX

Prepared by Allan Gotthelf,
Department of Philosophy, Wesleyan University

Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution

Algeria

Alienation

Alienation (G. Sykes, ed.)

Altruism, viii also “Common Good”

Aluminum Company of America; see Antitrust: ALCOA case

Ambrose, St.

American College Dictionary, The.

Anarchy

Anderson, Benjamin M. .

“Anti-concepts,”

Antitrust

ALCOA case

General Electric cases

Sherman Act (1890)

Antitrust Laws of the U.S.A., The (A. D. Neale)

Aquinas, St. Thomas

Aristotle

Art of Loving, The (E. Fromm)

Ashton, T. S.

Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand), theme of

Augustine, St.

Banking System

Barron’s

Belgium

Big Four, The (O. Lewis) .

Bill of Rights

Branden, Nathaniel

Broadcasting Industry

Brown, Governor Edmund

Buer, Mabel C.

Capitalism, passim

attacks on

classical defenses of , see also “Conservatives”: pseudo-justifications

definition of

foreign policy of

and the free market

and imperialism

moral base of

and philosophy

and progress

see also Competition; Government; Rights

Capitalism, the Creator (C. Snyder).

Catholicism

Celler, Representative Emanuel

Censorship

Chicago Sun Times

Child Labor

Civil Disobedience

Colbert, Jean Baptiste

Collectivism; see “Common Good”; Statism

Columbia University Forum

“Common Good,” see also “Public Interest”

Communism see also Russia: Soviet; Statism

Communist Party

Competition

Compromise

“Conservatives,”

pseudo-justifications of capitalism by

Constitution of the United States

Consumer “Protection,”

Cooley, Representative Harold D.

Copyrights

Cyrano de Bergerac (E. Rostand)

Declaration of Independence

Decline of American Liberalism, The (A. Ekirch)

Democratic Party

Platform of

Depressions

Draft, Military

East Minus West = Zero (W. Keller).

Economic Power vs. Political Power

Economic Values; see Values: economic

Economics and the Public Welfare (B. M. Anderson) .

Economics in One Lesson (H. Hazlitt).

Education

public

state of contemporary

Efron, Edith.

Ekirch, Arthur A.

Encyclopaedia Britannica

Engels, Friedrich

England

“brain drain,”

England in Transition (M. D. George)

English Social History (G. M. Trevelyan)

Escape from Freedom (E. Fromm)

Existentialism

“Extremism,”

Fairless, Benjamin P.

Fascism ; see also Statism

Fascist New Frontier, The (Ayn Rand) .

Federal Communications Commission

Federal Reserve System ; see also Banking System

Fleming, Harold

For the New Intellectual (Ayn Rand).

Force; see Government

Foreign Policy

Fortune

Fountainhead, The (Ayn Rand)

France

Frankfurter, Justice Felix

Free Market; see Capitalism

Freedom; see Capitalism; Rights

Freedom of Speech

Fromm, Erich

Ganey, Judge J. Cullen

George, M. Dorothy

Germany

Nazi

post-Nazi

pre-Nazi

God of the Machine, The (I. Paterson)

Gold Standard

Goldwater, Senator Barry

Government

intervention into economy; see Mixed Economy

nature of

see also Statism

Grand Central (D. Marshall) .

Greenspan, Alan, x.

Grendon, Alexander

Hand, Judge Learned

Harlow, Alvin F..

Hazlitt, Henry.

Health, Wealth and Population in the Early Days of the Industrial Revolution (M. C. Buer)

Hegel, Georg

Hershey, Lt. Gen. Lewis B.

Hessen, Robert

Hewitt, Margaret

Hill, James J.

Hitler, Adolf

Holbrook, Stewart H.

Hoover, President Herbert

Housman, A. E.

Hugo, Victor

Human Action (L. von Mises)

Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Policy (R. E. Osgood)

India

Individual and the Crowd, The (H. M. Ruitenbeek)

Industrial Revolution

Industrial Revolution, The (T. S. Ashton)

Inherited Wealth

Interstate Commerce Act of

It Can’t Happen Here (S. Lewis)

Italy

Jackson, Justice Robert H.

John Birch Society

Johnson, President Lyndon B.

Kant, Immanuel

Keller, Werner

Kennedy, President John F.

Kerr, Clark

Keynes, John Maynard

Ku Klux Klan

Labor Unions

“Laissez-faire,” Origin of

Landes, David S.

Latin America

Law; see Government: nature of

Lenin.

Lewis, Oscar.

Lewis, Sinclair

“Liberals,”

Linguistic Analysis

Lively, Earl

Locke, John

Logical Positivism

Louis XIV,

McCarthy, Senator Joseph

McNamara, Robert S.

Man, Nature of

Man for Himself (E. Fromm)

Marshall, David.

Marx, Karl

Mason, Lowell

Meng, John J.

Minow, Newton N.

Mixed Economy ; see also Statism

Money; see Gold Standard

Monopoly

Murray, Rev. John C.

Mussolini, Benito

Neale, A. D.

Neff, Wanda

New Leader, The

New Republic, The

New York Times, The

Newsweek

Norris, Frank

Oastler, Richard

Objectivist Newsletter,

Octopus, The (F. Norris)

Osgood, R. E.

Patents

Paterson, Isabel

Peace Movements

Persuasion

Petersen, William

Planning for Freedom (L. von Mises).

Pope Paul VI,

“Populorum Progressio,”

Political Economy, viii ; see also Capitalism: and philosophy

Pragmatism

“Price Wars,”

Property; see Rights: property

“Public Interest,” see also “Common Good”

Railroads

Rand, Ayn; see also Atlas Shrugged; For the New Intellectual; Fountainhead, The; Virtue Of Selfishness, The

Reagan, Governor Ronald

Reasoner, Harry

Republican Party

National Convention (1964)

Reston, James

Richardson (Texas) Digest

Rights

economic “rights,”

nature and validation of

property

Road of the Century, The, (A. F. Harlow).

Rochester (N.Y.) Times Union

Rockefeller, Governor Nelson A.

Romney, Governor George

Roosevelt, President Franklin D.

Roosevelt, President Theodore

Ruitenbeek, Hendrik M.

Russia

pre-Soviet

Soviet ; See also Communism

Sane Society, The (E. Fromm) .

Saturday Evening Post

Savio, Mario

Snyder, Carl.

Socialism

Guild

see also Statism

Socialism (L. von Mises)

Socialized Medicine

Spearman, Frank.

Stalin, Josef

Standard Oil Company

Star Herald (Camden, N.J.)

Statism ; see also Mixed Economy; Welfare State

Story of American Railroads, The (S. Holbrook)

Strategy of the Great Railroads, The (F. Spearman)

Sulzberger, C. L.

Sykes, Gerald

Television; see Broadcasting Industry

Ten Thousand Commandments (H. Fleming)

Time

Trevelyan, G. M.

TV Guide.

“Under-developed” Nations

Unemployment

United Nations

United States Information Agency

United States of America, passim

University of California at Berkeley

Values economic moral

Vanderbilt, Cornelius

Victorian Working Women (W. Neff)

Vietnam War

Virtue of Selfishness, The (Ayn Rand) ..

von Mises, Ludwig .

Wages

Wall Street Journal, The

War “cold war,”; see also Vietnam War

Warren, Justice Earl

Washington (D.C.) Star

Welfare State ; see also Mixed Economy; Statism

Who Is Ayn Rand? (Nathaniel Branden)

Wicker, Tom

Wilson, President Woodrow

Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry (M. Hewitt)

1

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1964, Vol. IV, pp. 839-845.

2

Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness.

3

For a fuller discussion of rights, I refer you to my articles “Man’s Rights” in the appendix, and “Collectivized ‘Rights’ ” in The Virtue of Selfishness.

4

For a fuller discussion of this subject, see my article “The Nature of Government” in the appendix.

5

For a discussion of the philosophers’ default in regard to capitalism, see the title essay in my book For the New Intellectual.

6

For a detailed, documented account of the full extent of Russia’s looting, see Werner Keller, East Minus West = Zero, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962.

7

Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1964, p. 121. Originally published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1943.

8

New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1955.

9

Ibid., p. 189. The quotation on “the spirit of imperialism” comes from R. E. Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, p. 47.

10

Ibid., p. 199.

11

Ibid.

12

A. D. Neale, The Antitrust Laws of the United States of America: A Study of Competition Enforced by Law, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1960.

13

Ibid., p. 13.

14

Ten Thousand Commandments: A Story of the Antitrust Laws, New York: Prentice-Hall, 1951.

15

Ibid., pp. 16-17.

16

Ibid., p. 22.

17

Neale, p. 23.

18

Ibid., pp. 422-423.

19

Ibid., pp. 70-71.

20

Ibid., p. 410.

21

Ibid., p. 114.

22

Ibid.

23

I am indebted to Ayn Rand for her identification of this principle. See her “Notes on the History of American Free Enterprise” (chapter 7).

24

Alan Greenspan, “Stock Prices and Capital Evaluation.” Paper delivered before a joint session of the American Statistical Association and the American Finance Association on December 27, 1959.

25

For a detailed analysis of this correlation, see Alan Greenspan, “Business Investment Decisions and Full Employment Models,” American Statistical Association, 1961 Proceedings of the Business and Economic Statistics Section.

26

See chapter 4.

27

See, in this connection, Carl Snyder, Capitalism the Creator, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1940.

28

See Benjamin M. Anderson, Economics and the Public Welfare, Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1949. This is the best financial and economic history of the United States from 1914 through 1946.

29

Paper delivered before a joint session of the American Statistical Association and the American Finance Association on December 27, 1959.

30

New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1949.

31

Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom, 2nd edition, South Holland, Illinois: Libertarian Press, 1962, pp. 151-152.

32

For excellent, more detailed discussions of these issues, see Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom, especially the chapter entitled “Wages, Unemployment and Inflation,” and Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946), especially the chapters entitled “Minimum Wage Laws” and “Do Unions Really Raise Wages?”

33

Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1964, pp. 271-272. Originally published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1943.

34

Ibid., p. 274.

35

pp. 804-805.

36

New York: Crown Publishers, 1947, pp. 8-9.

37

For a good factual history of the Central Pacific, see Oscar Lewis, The Big Four, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938.

38

For details of this story, see David Marshall, Grand Central, New York: McGraw-Hill (Whittlesey House), 1946, pp. 60-64, and Alvin F. Harlow, The Road of the Century, New York: Creative Age Press, 1947, pp. 166-173.

39

See Frank H. Spearman, The Strategy of Great Railroads, New York: Scribner’s, 1904, pp. 273-276.

40

Mabel C. Buer, Health, Wealth and Population in the Early Days of the Industrial Revolution, 1760-1815, London: George Routledge & Sons, 1926, p. 30.

41

Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1949, p. 615.

42

T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830, London: Oxford University Press, 1948, p. 161.

43

Buer, p. 250.

44

Ibid., p. 88.

45

Wanda Neff, Victorian Working Women, New York: Columbia University Press, 1920, p. 51.

46

London: Rockliff, 1958, p. 190.

47

Ibid., pp. 192, 194.

48

George M. Trevelyan, English Social History, New York and London: Longmans, Green & Company, 1942, p. 487.

49

M. Dorothy George, England in Transition: Life and Work in the Eighteenth Century, London: Penguin, 1953, p. 139.

50

See my articles “Have Gun, Will Nudge” and “Vast Quicksands” in The Objectivist Newsletter, March 1962 and July 1963. For a graphic report on the state of the television industry, see Edith Efron’s articles “TV: The Timid Giant” and “Why the Timid Giant Treads Softly” in TV Guide, May 18 and August 10, 1963.

51

New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962.

52

See my lecture The Fascist New Frontier, published by Nathaniel Branden Institute, New York, 1963.

53

See the chapter “The Cult of Moral Grayness” in The Virtue of Selfishness.

54

These definitions are from The American College Dictionary, New York: Random House, 1957.

55

Ayn Rand, The Fascist New Frontier, New York: Nathaniel Branden Institute, 1963, p. 8.

56

Der Nationalsozialismus Dokumente 1933-1945, edited by Walther Hofer, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Bucherei, 1957, pp. 29-31.

For many more quotations of this kind, revealing the altruist-collectivist base of the Nazi and fascist ideology, I refer you to The Fascist New Frontier.

57

The New York Times, May 22, 1965.

58

The New Leader, April 12, 1965.

59

See my article “Man’s Rights” in the appendix.

60

The New York Times, June 18, 1965.

61

New York: The New American Library (Mentor), 1965, p. 15.

62

New York: George Braziller, 1964, Vol. I, p. xiii.

63

Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1951, p. 527.

64

Erich Fromm, Man for Himself, New York: Rinehart & Co., 1947, pp. 39, 40.

65

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956, p. 7.

66

Man for Himself, p. 40.

67

Ibid., p. 42.

68

Ibid., p. 43.

69

The Art of Loving, p. 8.

70

I bid., pp. 8-9.

71

Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, New York: Rinehart & Co., 1955, p. 25.

72

Man for Himself, p. 97.

73

The Art of Loving, p. 77.

74

Ibid., p. 18.

75

Ibid., p. 133.

76

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, New York: Rinehart & Co., 1941, p. 63.

77

Ibid., pp. 41-42.

78

The Sane Society, p. 138.

79

Ibid.

80

Ibid., p. 86.

81

Ibid., p. 114.

82

Ibid., p. 139.

83

The Art of Loving, p. 131.

84

Ibid., p. 129.

85

Ibid., p. 55.

86

Ibid., p. 42.

87

Ibid., p. 128.

88

Ibid., pp. 130-131.

89

Nathaniel Branden, Who Is Ayn Rand?, New York: Random House, 1962, pp. 38-39; Paperback Library, 1964.

90

For the most detailed presentation of these doctrines, see Fromm’s The Sane Society.

91

The Objectivist Newsletter, February 1965.

92

Branden, Who Is Ayn Rand?, pp. 15-16.

93

This publication moved its offices to the Empire State Building in September.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Theory and History

1. WHAT IS CAPITALISM?

2. THE ROOTS OF WAR

3. AMERICA’S PERSECUTED MINORITY: BIG BUSINESS

4. ANTITRUST

5. COMMON FALLACIES ABOUT CAPITALISM

6. GOLD AND ECONOMIC FREEDOM

7. NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN FREE ENTERPRISE

8. THE EFFECTS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION ON WOMEN AND CHILDREN

9. THE ASSAULT ON INTEGRITY

10. THE PROPERTY STATUS OF AIRWAVES

11. PATENTS AND COPYRIGHTS

12. THEORY AND PRACTICE

13. LET US ALONE!

Current State

14. THE ANATOMY OF COMPROMISE

15. IS ATLAS SHRUGGING?

16. THE PULL PEDDLERS

17. “EXTREMISM,” OR THE ART OF SMEARING

18. THE OBLITERATION OF CAPITALISM

19. CONSERVATISM: AN OBITUARY

20. THE NEW FASCISM: RULE BY CONSENSUS

21. THE WRECKAGE OF THE CONSENSUS

22. THE CASHING-IN: THE STUDENT “REBELLION”

23. ALIENATION

24. REQUIEM FOR MAN

APPENDIX: MAN’S RIGHTS

APPENDIX: THE NATURE OF GOVERNMENT

RECOMMENDED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Chapter 1. - The Psycho-Epistemology of Art

Chapter 2. - Philosophy and Sense of Life

Chapter 3. - Art and Sense of Life

Chapter 4. - Art and Cognition

Chapter 5. - Basic Principles of Literature

Chapter 6. - What Is Romanticism?

Chapter 7. - The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age

Chapter 8. - Bootleg Romanticism

Chapter 9. - Art and Moral Treason

Chapter 10. - Introduction to Ninety-Three

Chapter 11. - The Goal of My Writing

Chapter 12. - The Simplest Thing in the World

Index

“THIS MANIFESTO IS NOT ISSUED IN THE NAME OF AN ORGANIZATION OR A MOVEMENT. I SPEAK ONLY FOR MYSELF. THERE IS NO ROMANTIC MOVEMENT TODAY. IF THERE IS TO BE ONE IN THE ART OF THE FUTURE, THIS BOOK WILL HAVE HELPED IT TO COME INTO BEING.”

In this searching and courageous work, Ayn Rand cuts through the haze of sentimentality and vague thinking that surrounds the subject of art. For the first time a precise definition is given to art, and a careful analysis made of its nature. With the uncompromising honesty Ayn Rand’s millions of readers have come to expect, the author presents a devastating case against both naturalistic and abstract art—and explains the force that drives her to write, and the goals she strives to attain. The Romantic Manifesto takes its place as a keystone book in the towering intellectual edifice raised by one of the most remarkable writers and thinkers of our age.

SIGNET

Published by New American Library, a division of

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2,

Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,

Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

New Delhi - 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745,

Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,

Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First Signet Printing, January 1971

First Signet Printing (Second Revised Editon),

Copyright © The Objectivist, Inc., 1966, 1968, 1969 Copyright © The Objectivist Newsletter, Inc., 1962, 1963, 1965 Copyright © Bantam Books, Inc., 1962 Copyright © The Objectivist, Inc., 1971

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, except for brief passages included in a review appearing in a newspaper or magazine. For information address Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 100 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011.

Permission requests for college or textbook use should be addressed to the Estate of Ayn Rand, PO Box 51808, Irvine, California 92619.

Information about other books by Ayn Rand and her philosophy, Objectivism, may be obtained by writing to OBJECTIVISM, PO Box 51808, Irvine, California 92619.

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

eISBN: 9781101348215

http://us.penguingroup.com

Introduction

THE dictionary definition of “manifesto” is: “a public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives or motives, as one issued by a government, sovereign, or organization.” (The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, College Edition, 1968.)

I must state, therefore, that this manifesto is not issued in the name of an organization or a movement. I speak only for myself. There is no Romantic movement today. If there is to be one in the art of the future, this book will have helped it to come into being.

According to my philosophy, one must not express “intentions, opinions, objectives or motives” without stating one’s reasons for them—i.e., without identifying their basis in reality. Therefore, the actual manifesto—the declaration of my personal objectives or motives—is at the end of this book, after the presentation of the theoretical grounds that entitle me to these particular objectives and motives. The declaration is in Chapter 11, “The Goal of My Writing,” and, partly, in Chapter 10, “Introduction to Ninety-Three.”

Those who feel that art is outside the province of reason would be well advised to leave this book alone: it is not for them. Those who know that nothing is outside the province of reason will find in this book the base of a rational esthetics. It is the absence of such a base that has made today’s obscenely grotesque degradation of art possible.

To quote from Chapter 6: “The destruction of Romanticism in esthetics—like the destruction of individualism in ethics or of capitalism in politics—was made possible by philosophical default. . . . In all three cases, the nature of the fundamental values involved had never been defined explicitly, the issues were fought in terms of non-essentials, and the values were destroyed by men who did not know what they were losing or why.”

In regard to Romanticism, I have often thought that I am a bridge from the unidentified past to the future. As a child, I saw a glimpse of the pre-World War I world, the last afterglow of the most radiant cultural atmosphere in human history (achieved not by Russian, but by Western culture). So powerful a fire does not die at once: even under the Soviet regime, in my college years, such works as Hugo’s Ruy Blas and Schiller’s Don Carlos were included in theatrical repertories, not as historical revivals, but as part of the contemporary esthetic scene. Such was the level of the public’s intellectual concerns and standards. If one has glimpsed that kind of art—and wider: the possibility of that kind of culture—one is unable to be satisfied with anything less.

I must emphasize that I am not speaking of concretes, nor of politics, nor of journalistic trivia, but of that period’s “sense of life.” Its art projected an overwhelming sense of intellectual freedom, of depth, i.e., concern with fundamental problems, of demanding standards, of inexhaustible originality, of unlimited possibilities and, above all, of profound respect for man. The existential atmosphere (which was then being destroyed by Europe’s philosophical trends and political systems) still held a benevolence that would be incredible to the men of today, i.e., a smiling, confident good will of man to man, and of man to life.

It has been said and written by many commentators that the atmosphere of the Western world before World War I is incommunicable to those who have not lived in that period. I used to wonder how men could say it, know it, yet give it up—until I observed more closely the men of my own and the preceding generations. They had given it up and, along with it, they had given up everything that makes life worth living: conviction, purpose, values, future. They were drained, embittered hulks whimpering occasionally about the hopelessness of life.

Whatever spiritual treason they had committed, they could not accept the cultural sewer of the present, they could not forget that they had once seen a higher, nobler possibility. Unable or unwilling to grasp what had destroyed it, they kept cursing the world, or kept calling men to return to meaningless dogmas, such as religion and tradition, or kept silent. Unable to stifle their vision or to fight for it, they took the “easy” way out: they renounced valuing. To fight, in this context, means: to think. Today, I wonder at how stubbornly men cling to their vices and how easily they give up whatever they regard as the good.

Renunciation is not one of my premises. If I see that the good is possible to men, yet it vanishes, I do not take “Such is the trend of the world” as a sufficient explanation. I ask such questions as: Why?—What caused it?—What or who determines the trends of the world? (The answer is: philosophy.)

The course of mankind’s progress is not a straight, automatic line, but a tortuous struggle, with long detours or relapses into the stagnant night of the irrational. Mankind moves forward by the grace of those human bridges who are able to grasp and transmit, across years or centuries, the achievements men had reached—and to carry them further. Thomas Aquinas is one illustrious example: he was the bridge between Aristotle and the Renaissance, spanning the infamous detour of the Dark and Middle Ages.

Speaking only of the pattern, with no presumptuous comparison of stature intended, I am a bridge of that kind—between the esthetic achievements of the nineteenth century and the minds that choose to discover them, wherever and whenever such minds might exist.

It is impossible for the young people of today to grasp the reality of man’s higher potential and what scale of achievement it had reached in a rational (or semi-rational) culture. But I have seen it. I know that it was real, that it existed, that it is possible. It is that knowledge that I want to hold up to the sight of men—over the brief span of less than a century—before the barbarian curtain descends altogether (if it does) and the last memory of man’s greatness vanishes in another Dark Ages.

I made it my task to learn what made Romanticism, the greatest achievement in art history, possible and what destroyed it. I learned—as in other, similar cases involving philosophy—that Romanticism was defeated by its own spokesmen, that even in its own time it had never been properly recognized or identified. It is Romanticism’s identity that I want to transmit to the future.

As for the present, I am not willing to surrender the world to the jerky contortions of self-inducedly brainless bodies with empty eye sockets, who perform, in stinking basements, the immemorial rituals of staving off terror, which are a dime a dozen in any jungle—and to the quavering witch doctors who call it “art.”

Our day has no art and no future. The future, in the context of progress, is a door open only to those who do not renounce their conceptual faculty; it is not open to mystics, hippies, drug addicts, tribal ritualists—or to anyone who reduces himself to a subanimal, subperceptual, sensory level of awareness.

Will we see an esthetic Renaissance in our time? I do not know. What I do know is this: anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.

All the essays in this book, with one exception, appeared originally in my magazine The Objectivist (formerly The Objectivist Newsletter). The date at the end of each essay indicates the specific issue. The exception is “Introduction to Ninety-Three,” which is a condensed version of the introduction I wrote for a new edition of Ninety-Three by Victor Hugo, translated by Lowell Bair, published by Bantam Books, Inc., in 1962.

The Objectivist is a magazine that deals with the application of my philosophy to the problems and issues of today’s culture. For further information, those interested may write to OBJECTIVISM, PO Box 51808, Irvine, California 92619.

AYN RAND

New York City
June 1969

1.

The Psycho-Epistemology of Art

THE position of art in the scale of human knowledge is, perhaps, the most eloquent symptom of the gulf between man’s progress in the physical sciences and his stagnation (or, today, his retrogression) in the humanities.

The physical sciences are still ruled by some remnants of a rational epistemology (which is rapidly being destroyed), but the humanities have been virtually abandoned to the primitive epistemology of mysticism. While physics has reached the level where men are able to study subatomic particles and interplanetary space, a phenomenon such as art has remained a dark mystery, with little or nothing known about its nature, its function in human life or the cause of its tremendous psychological power. Yet art is of passionately intense importance and profoundly personal concern to most men—and it has existed in every known civilization, accompanying man’s steps from the early hours of his prehistorical dawn, earlier than the birth of written language.

While, in other fields of knowledge, men have outgrown the practice of seeking the guidance of mystic oracles whose qualification for the job was unintelligibility, in the field of esthetics this practice has remained in full force and is becoming more crudely obvious today. Just as savages took the phenomena of nature for granted, as an irreducible primary not to be questioned or analyzed, as the exclusive domain of unknowable demons—so today’s epistemological savages take art for granted, as an irreducible primary not to be questioned or analyzed, as the exclusive domain of a special kind of unknowable demons: their emotions. The only difference is that the prehistorical savages’ error was innocent.

One of the grimmest monuments to altruism is man’s culturally induced selflessness: his willingness to live with himself as with the unknown, to ignore, evade, repress the personal (the non-social) needs of his soul, to know least about the things that matter most, and thus to consign his deepest values to the impotent underground of subjectivity and his life to the dreary wasteland of chronic guilt.

The cognitive neglect of art has persisted precisely because the function of art is non-social. (This is one more instance of altruism’s inhumanity, of its brutal indifference to the deepest needs of man—of an actual, individual man. It is an instance of the inhumanity of any moral theory that regards moral values as a purely social matter.) Art belongs to a non-socializable aspect of reality, which is universal (i.e., applicable to all men) but non-collective: to the nature of man’s consciousness.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of a work of art (including literature) is that it serves no practical, material end, but is an end in itself; it serves no purpose other than contemplation—and the pleasure of that contemplation is so intense, so deeply personal that a man experiences it as a self-sufficient, self-justifying primary and, often, resists or resents any suggestion to analyze it: the suggestion, to him, has the quality of an attack on his identity, on his deepest, essential self.

No human emotion can be causeless, nor can so intense an emotion be causeless, irreducible and unrelated to the source of emotions (and of values): to the needs of a living entity’s survival. Art does have a purpose and does serve a human need; only it is not a material need, but a need of man’s consciousness. Art is inextricably tied to man’s survival—not to his physical survival, but to that on which his physical survival depends: to the preservation and survival of his consciousness.

The source of art lies in the fact that man’s cognitive faculty is conceptual—i.e., that man acquires knowledge and guides his actions, not by means of single, isolated percepts, but by means of abstractions.

To understand the nature and function of art, one must understand the nature and function of concepts.

A concept is a mental integration of two or more units which are isolated by a process of abstraction and united by a specific definition. By organizing his perceptual material into concepts, and his concepts into wider and still wider concepts, man is able to grasp and retain, to identify and integrate an unlimited amount of knowledge, a knowledge extending beyond the immediate concretes of any given, immediate moment.

In any given moment, concepts enable man to hold in the focus of his conscious awareness much more than his purely perceptual capacity would permit. The range of man’s perceptual awareness—the number of percepts he can deal with at any one time—is limited. He may be able to visualize four or five units—as, for instance, five trees. He cannot visualize a hundred trees or a distance of ten light-years. It is only his conceptual faculty that makes it possible for him to deal with knowledge of that kind.

Man retains his concepts by means of language. With the exception of proper names, every word we use is a concept that stands for an unlimited number of concretes of a certain kind. A concept is like a mathematical series of specifically defined units, going off in both directions, open at both ends and including all units of that particular kind. For instance, the concept “man” includes all men who live at present, who have ever lived or will ever live—a number of men so great that one would not be able to perceive them all visually, let alone to study them or discover anything about them.

Language is a code of visual-auditory symbols that serves the psycho-epistemological function of converting abstractions into concretes or, more precisely, into the psycho-epistemological equivalent of concretes, into a manageable number of specific units.

(Psycho-epistemology is the study of man’s cognitive processes from the aspect of the interaction between the conscious mind and the automatic functions of the subconscious.)

Consider the enormous conceptual integration involved in any statement, from the conversation of a child to the discourse of a scientist. Consider the long conceptual chain that starts from simple, ostensive definitions and rises to higher and still higher concepts, forming a hierarchical structure of knowledge so complex that no electronic computer could approach it. It is by means of such chains that man has to acquire and retain his knowledge of reality.

Yet this is the simpler part of his psycho-epistemological task. There is another part which is still more complex.

The other part consists of applying his knowledge—i.e., evaluating the facts of reality, choosing his goals and guiding his actions accordingly. To do that, man needs another chain of concepts, derived from and dependent on the first, yet separate and, in a sense, more complex: a chain of normative abstractions.

While cognitive abstractions identify the facts of reality, normative abstractions evaluate the facts, thus prescribing a choice of values and a course of action. Cognitive abstractions deal with that which is; normative abstractions deal with that which ought to be (in the realms open to man’s choice).

Ethics, the normative science, is based on two cognitive branches of philosophy: metaphysics and epistemology. To prescribe what man ought to do, one must first know what he is and where he is—i.e., what is his nature (including his means of cognition) and the nature of the universe in which he acts. (It is irrelevant, in this context, whether the metaphysical base of a given system of ethics is true or false; if it is false, the error will make the ethics impracticable. What concerns us here is only the dependence of ethics on metaphysics.)

Is the universe intelligible to man, or unintelligible and unknowable? Can man find happiness on earth, or is he doomed to frustration and despair? Does man have the power of choice, the power to choose his goals and to achieve them, the power to direct the course of his life—or is he the helpless plaything of forces beyond his control, which determine his fate? Is man, by nature, to be valued as good, or to be despised as evil? These are metaphysical questions, but the answers to them determine the kind of ethics men will accept and practice; the answers are the link between metaphysics and ethics. And although metaphysics as such is not a normative science, the answers to this category of questions assume, in man’s mind, the function of metaphysical value-judgments, since they form the foundation of all of his moral values.

Consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly, man knows that he needs a comprehensive view of existence to integrate his values, to choose his goals, to plan his future, to maintain the unity and coherence of his life—and that his metaphysical value-judgments are involved in every moment of his life, in his every choice, decision and action.

Metaphysics—the science that deals with the fundamental nature of reality—involves man’s widest abstractions. It includes every concrete he has ever perceived, it involves such a vast sum of knowledge and such a long chain of concepts that no man could hold it all in the focus of his immediate conscious awareness. Yet he needs that sum and that awareness to guide him—he needs the power to summon them into full, conscious focus.

That power is given to him by art.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.

By a selective re-creation, art isolates and integrates those aspects of reality which represent man’s fundamental view of himself and of existence. Out of the countless number of concretes—of single, disorganized and (seemingly) contradictory attributes, actions and entities—an artist isolates the things which he regards as metaphysically essential and integrates them into a single new concrete that represents an embodied abstraction.

For instance, consider two statues of man: one as a Greek god, the other as a deformed medieval monstrosity. Both are metaphysical estimates of man; both are projections of the artist’s view of man’s nature; both are concretized representations of the philosophy of their respective cultures.

Art is a concretization of metaphysics. Art brings man’s concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts.

This is the psycho-epistemological function of art and the reason of its importance in man’s life (and the crux of the Objectivist esthetics).

Just as language converts abstractions into the psycho-epistemological equivalent of concretes, into a manageable number of specific units—so art converts man’s metaphysical abstractions into the equivalent of concretes, into specific entities open to man’s direct perception. The claim that “art is a universal language” is not an empty metaphor, it is literally true—in the sense of the psycho-epistemological function performed by art.

Observe that in mankind’s history, art began as an adjunct (and, often, a monopoly) of religion. Religion was the primitive form of philosophy: it provided man with a comprehensive view of existence. Observe that the art of those primitive cultures was a concretization of their religion’s metaphysical and ethical abstractions.

The best illustration of the psycho-epistemological process involved in art can be given by one aspect of one particular art: by characterization in literature. Human character—with all of its innumerable potentialities, virtues, vices, inconsistencies, contradictions—is so complex that man is his own most bewildering enigma. It is very difficult to isolate and integrate human traits even into purely cognitive abstractions and to bear them all in mind when seeking to understand the men one meets.

Now consider the figure of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. He is the concretization of an abstraction that covers an incalculable sum of observations and evaluations of an incalculable number of characteristics possessed by an incalculable number of men of a certain type. Lewis has isolated their essential traits and has integrated them into the concrete form of a single character—and when you say of someone, “He’s a Babbitt,” your appraisal includes, in a single judgment, the enormous total conveyed by that figure.

When we come to normative abstractions—to the task of defining moral principles and projecting what man ought to be—the psycho-epistemological process required is still harder. The task demands years of study—and the results are almost impossible to communicate without the assistance of art. An exhaustive philosophical treatise defining moral values, with a long list of virtues to be practiced, will not do it; it will not convey what an ideal man would be like and how he would act: no mind can deal with so immense a sum of abstractions. When I say “deal with” I mean retranslate all the abstractions into the perceptual concretes for which they stand—i.e., reconnect them to reality—and hold it all in the focus of one’s conscious awareness. There is no way to integrate such a sum without projecting an actual human figure—an integrated concretization that illuminates the theory and makes it intelligible.

Hence the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel toward such discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions, offering them a goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their souls in its image, thus leaving them with a burden of undefinable moral guilt. Art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal.

Observe that every religion has a mythology—a dramatized concretization of its moral code embodied in the figures of men who are its ultimate product. (The fact that some of these figures are more convincing than others depends on the comparative rationality or irrationality of the moral theory they exemplify.)

This does not mean that art is a substitute for philosophical thought: without a conceptual theory of ethics, an artist would not be able successfully to concretize an image of the ideal. But without the assistance of art, ethics remains in the position of theoretical engineering: art is the model-builder.

Many readers of The Fountainhead have told me that the character of Howard Roark helped them to make a decision when they faced a moral dilemma. They asked themselves: “What would Roark do in this situation?”—and, faster than their mind could identify the proper application of all the complex principles involved, the image of Roark gave them the answer. They sensed, almost instantly, what he would or would not do—and this helped them to isolate and to identify the reasons, the moral principles that would have guided him. Such is the psycho-epistemological function of a personified (concretized) human ideal.

It is important to stress, however, that even though moral values are inextricably involved in art, they are involved only as a consequence, not as a causal determinant: the primary focus of art is metaphysical, not ethical. Art is not the “handmaiden” of morality, its basic purpose is not to educate, to reform or to advocate anything. The concretization of a moral ideal is not a textbook on how to become one. The basic purpose of art is not to teach, but to show—to hold up to man a concretized image of his nature and his place in the universe.

Any metaphysical issue will necessarily have an enormous influence on man’s conduct and, therefore, on his ethics; and, since every art work has a theme, it will necessarily convey some conclusion, some “message,” to its audience. But that influence and that “message” are only secondary consequences. Art is not the means to any didactic end. This is the difference between a work of art and a morality play or a propaganda poster. The greater a work of art, the more profoundly universal its theme. Art is not the means of literal transcription. This is the difference between a work of art and a news story or a photograph.

The place of ethics in any given work of art depends on the metaphysical views of the artist. If, consciously or subconsciously, an artist holds the premise that man possesses the power of volition, it will lead his work to a value orientation (to Romanticism). If he holds the premise that man’s fate is determined by forces beyond his control, it will lead his work to an anti-value orientation (to Naturalism). The philosophical and esthetic contradictions of determinism are irrelevant in this context, just as the truth or falsehood of an artist’s metaphysical views is irrelevant to the nature of art as such. An art work may project the values man is to seek and hold up to him the concretized vision of the life he is to achieve. Or it may assert that man’s efforts are futile and hold up to him the concretized vision of defeat and despair as his ultimate fate. In either case, the esthetic means—the psycho-epistemological processes involved—remain the same.

The existential consequences, of course, will differ. Amidst the incalculable number and complexity of choices that confront a man in his day-by-day existence, with the frequently bewildering torrent of events, with the alternation of successes and failures, of joys that seem too rare and suffering that lasts too long—he is often in danger of losing his perspective and the reality of his own convictions. Remember that abstractions as such do not exist: they are merely man’s epistemological method of perceiving that which exists—and that which exists is concrete. To acquire the full, persuasive, irresistible power of reality, man’s metaphysical abstractions have to confront him in the form of concretes—i.e., in the form of art.

Consider the difference it would make if—in his need of philosophical guidance or confirmation or inspiration—man turns to the art of Ancient Greece or to the art of the Middle Ages. Reaching his mind and emotions simultaneously, with the combined impact of abstract thought and of immediate reality, one type of art tells him that disasters are transient, that grandeur, beauty, strength, self-confidence are his proper, natural state. The other tells him that happiness is transient and evil, that he is a distorted, impotent, miserable little sinner, pursued by leering gargoyles, crawling in terror on the brink of an eternal hell.

The consequences of both experiences are obvious—and history is their practical demonstration. It is not art alone that was responsible for the greatness or the horror of those two eras, but art as the voice of philosophy—of the particular philosophy that dominated those cultures.

As to the role of emotions in art and the subconscious mechanism that serves as the integrating factor both in artistic creation and in man’s response to art, they involve a psychological phenomenon which we call a sense of life. A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. But this is a different, though corollary, subject (which I discuss in Chapters 2 and 3). The present subject is only the psycho-epistemological role of art.

A question raised at the start of this discussion should now be clear. The reason why art has such a profoundly personal significance for men is that art confirms or denies the efficacy of a man’s consciousness, according to whether an art work supports or negates his own fundamental view of reality.

Such is the meaning and the power of a medium which, today, is predominantly in the hands of practitioners who boastfully offer, as their credentials, the fact that they do not know what they are doing.

Let us take them at their word: they don’t. We do.

(April 1965)

2.

Philosophy and Sense of Life

SINCE religion is a primitive form of philosophy—an attempt to offer a comprehensive view of reality—many of its myths are distorted, dramatized allegories based on some element of truth, some actual, if profoundly elusive, aspect of man’s existence. One of such allegories, which men find particularly terrifying, is the myth of a supernatural recorder from whom nothing can be hidden, who lists all of a man’s deeds—the good and the evil, the noble and the vile—and who confronts a man with that record on judgment day.

That myth is true, not existentially, but psychologically. The merciless recorder is the integrating mechanism of a man’s subconscious; the record is his sense of life.

A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. It sets the nature of a man’s emotional responses and the essence of his character.

Long before he is old enough to grasp such a concept as metaphysics, man makes choices, forms value-judgments, experiences emotions and acquires a certain implicit view of life. Every choice and value-judgment implies some estimate of himself and of the world around him—most particularly, of his capacity to deal with the world. He may draw conscious conclusions, which may be true or false; or he may remain mentally passive and merely react to events (i.e., merely feel). Whatever the case may be, his subconscious mechanism sums up his psychological activities, integrating his conclusions, reactions or evasions into an emotional sum that establishes a habitual pattern and becomes his automatic response to the world around him. What began as a series of single, discrete conclusions (or evasions) about his own particular problems, becomes a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics with the compelling motivational power of a constant, basic emotion—an emotion which is part of all his other emotions and underlies all his experiences. This is a sense of life.

To the extent to which a man is mentally active, i.e., motivated by the desire to know, to understand, his mind works as the programmer of his emotional computer—and his sense of life develops into a bright counterpart of a rational philosophy. To the extent to which a man evades, the programming of his emotional computer is done by chance influences; by random impressions, associations, imitations, by undigested snatches of environmental bromides, by cultural osmosis. If evasion or lethargy is a man’s predominant method of mental functioning, the result is a sense of life dominated by fear—a soul like a shapeless piece of clay stamped by footprints going in all directions. (In later years, such a man cries that he has lost his sense of identity; the fact is that he never acquired it.)

Man, by his nature, cannot refrain from generalizing; he cannot live moment by moment, without context, without past or future; he cannot eliminate his integrating capacity, i.e., his conceptual capacity, and confine his consciousness to an animal’s perceptual range. Just as an animal’s consciousness cannot be stretched to deal with abstractions, so man’s consciousness cannot be shrunk to deal with nothing but immediate concretes. The enormously powerful integrating mechanism of man’s consciousness is there at birth; his only choice is to drive it or to be driven by it. Since an act of volition—a process of thought—is required to use that mechanism for a cognitive purpose, man can evade that effort. But if he evades, chance takes over: the mechanism functions on its own, like a machine without a driver; it goes on integrating, but integrating blindly, incongruously, at random—not as an instrument of cognition, but as an instrument of distortion, delusion and nightmare terror, bent on wrecking its defaulting processor’s consciousness.

A sense of life is formed by a process of emotional generalization which may be described as a subconscious counterpart of a process of abstraction, since it is a method of classifying and integrating. But it is a process of emotional abstraction: it consists of classifying things according to the emotions they invoke—i.e., of tying together, by association or connotation, all those things which have the power to make an individual experience the same (or a similar) emotion. For instance: a new neighborhood, a discovery, adventure, struggle, triumph—or: the folks next door, a memorized recitation, a family picnic, a known routine, comfort. On a more adult level: a heroic man, the skyline of New York, a sunlit landscape, pure colors, ecstatic music—or: a humble man, an old village, a foggy landscape, muddy colors, folk music.

Which particular emotions will be invoked by the things in these examples, as their respective common denominators, depends on which set of things fits an individual’s view of himself. For a man of self-esteem, the emotion uniting the things in the first part of these examples is admiration, exaltation, a sense of challenge; the emotion uniting the things in the second part is disgust or boredom. For a man who lacks self-esteem, the emotion uniting the things in the first part of these examples is fear, guilt, resentment; the emotion uniting the things in the second part is relief from fear, reassurance, the undemanding safety of passivity.

Even though such emotional abstractions grow into a metaphysical view of man, their origin lies in an individual’s view of himself and of his own existence. The sub-verbal, subconscious criterion of selection that forms his emotional abstractions is: “That which is important to me” or: “The kind of universe which is right for me, in which I would feel at home.” It is obvious what immense psychological consequences will follow, depending on whether a man’s subconscious metaphysics is consonant with the facts of reality or contradicts them.

The key concept, in the formation of a sense of life, is the term “important.” It is a concept that belongs to the realm of values, since it implies an answer to the question: Important—to whom? Yet its meaning is different from that of moral values. “Important” does not necessarily mean “good.” It means “a quality, character or standing such as to entitle to attention or consideration” (The American College Dictionary). What, in a fundamental sense, is entitled to one’s attention or consideration? Reality.

“Important”—in its essential meaning, as distinguished from its more limited and superficial uses—is a metaphysical term. It pertains to that aspect of metaphysics which serves as a bridge between metaphysics and ethics: to a fundamental view of man’s nature. That view involves the answers to such questions as whether the universe is knowable or not, whether man has the power of choice or not, whether he can achieve his goals in life or not. The answers to such questions are “metaphysical value-judgments,” since they form the base of ethics.

It is only those values which he regards or grows to regard as “important,” those which represent his implicit view of reality, that remain in a man’s subconscious and form his sense of life.

“It is important to understand things”—“It is important to obey my parents”—“It is important to act on my own”—“It is important to please other people”—“It is important to fight for what I want”—“It is important not to make enemies”—“My life is important”—“Who am I to stick my neck out?” Man is a being of self-made soul—and it is of such conclusions that the stuff of his soul is made. (By “soul” I mean “consciousness.”)

The integrated sum of a man’s basic values is his sense of life.

A sense of life represents a man’s early value-integrations, which remain in a fluid, plastic, easily amendable state, while he gathers knowledge to reach full conceptual control and thus to drive his inner mechanism. A full conceptual control means a consciously directed process of cognitive integration, which means: a conscious philosophy of life.

By the time he reaches adolescence, a man’s knowledge is sufficient to deal with broad fundamentals; this is the period when he becomes aware of the need to translate his incoherent sense of life into conscious terms. This is the period when he gropes for such things as the meaning of life, for principles, ideals, values and, desperately, for self-assertion. And—since nothing is done, in our anti-rational culture, to assist a young mind in this crucial transition, and everything possible is done to hamper, cripple, stultify it—the result is the frantic, hysterical irrationality of most adolescents, particularly today. Theirs is the agony of the unborn—of minds going through a process of atrophy at the time set by nature for their growth.

The transition from guidance by a sense of life to guidance by a conscious philosophy takes many forms. For the rare exception, the fully rational child, it is a natural, absorbing, if difficult, process—the process of validating and, if necessary, correcting in conceptual terms what he had merely sensed about the nature of man’s existence, thus transforming a wordless feeling into clearly verbalized knowledge, and laying a firm foundation, an intellectual roadbed, for the course of his life. The result is a fully integrated personality, a man whose mind and emotions are in harmony, whose sense of life matches his conscious convictions.

Philosophy does not replace a man’s sense of life, which continues to function as the automatically integrated sum of his values. But philosophy sets the criteria of his emotional integrations according to a fully defined and consistent view of reality (if and to the extent that a philosophy is rational). Instead of deriving, subconsciously, an implicit metaphysics from his value-judgments, he now derives, conceptually, his value-judgments from an explicit metaphysics. His emotions proceed from his fully convinced judgments. The mind leads, the emotions follow.

For many men, the process of transition never takes place: they make no attempt to integrate their knowledge, to acquire any conscious convictions, and are left at the mercy of their inarticulate sense of life as their only guide.

For most men, the transition is a tortured and not fully successful process, leading to a fundamental inner conflict—a clash between a man’s conscious convictions and his repressed, unidentified (or only partially identified) sense of life. Very often, the transition is incomplete, as in the case of a man whose convictions are not part of a fully integrated philosophy, but are merely a collection of random, disconnected, often contradictory ideas, and, therefore, are unconvincing to his own mind against the power of his subconscious metaphysics. In some cases, a man’s sense of life is better (closer to the truth) than the kind of ideas he accepts. In other cases, his sense of life is much worse than the ideas he professes to accept but is unable fully to practice. Ironically enough, it is man’s emotions, in such cases, that act as the avengers of his neglected or betrayed intellect.

In order to live, man must act; in order to act, he must make choices; in order to make choices, he must define a code of values; in order to define a code of values, he must know what he is and where he is—i.e., he must know his own nature (including his means of knowledge) and the nature of the universe in which he acts—i.e., he needs metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, which means: philosophy. He cannot escape from this need; his only alternative is whether the philosophy guiding him is to be chosen by his mind or by chance.

If his mind does not provide him with a comprehensive view of existence, his sense of life will. If he succumbs to centuries of concerted assaults on the mind—to traditions offering vicious irrationality or unconscionable nonsense in the guise of philosophy—if he gives up, in lethargy or in bewilderment, evades fundamental issues and concerns himself only with the concretes of his day-by-day existence, his sense of life takes over: for good or evil (and, usually, for evil), he is left at the mercy of a subconscious philosophy which he does not know, has never checked, has never been aware of accepting.

Then, as his fear, anxiety and uncertainty mount year by year, he finds himself living with a sense of unknown, undefinable doom, as if in expectation of some approaching judgment day. What he does not know is that every day of his life is judgment day—the day of paying for the defaults, the lies, the contradictions, the blank-outs recorded by his subconscious on the scrolls of his sense of life. And on that kind of psychological record, the blank entries are the blackest sins.

A sense of life, once acquired, is not a closed issue. It can be changed and corrected—easily, in youth, while it is still fluid, or by a longer, harder effort in later years. Since it is an emotional sum, it cannot be changed by a direct act of will. It changes automatically, but only after a long process of psychological retraining, when and if a man changes his conscious philosophical premises.

Whether he corrects it or not, whether it is objectively consonant with reality or not, at any stage or state of its specific content, a sense of life always retains a profoundly personal quality; it reflects a man’s deepest values; it is experienced by him as a sense of his own identity.

A given person’s sense of life is hard to identify conceptually, because it is hard to isolate: it is involved in everything about that person, in his every thought, emotion, action, in his every response, in his every choice and value, in his every spontaneous gesture, in his manner of moving, talking, smiling, in the total of his personality. It is that which makes him a “personality.”

Introspectively, one’s own sense of life is experienced as an absolute and an irreducible primary—as that which one never questions, because the thought of questioning it never arises. Extrospectively, the sense of life of another person strikes one as an immediate, yet undefinable, impression—on very short acquaintance—an impression which often feels like certainty, yet is exasperatingly elusive, if one attempts to verify it.

This leads many people to regard a sense of life as the province of some sort of special intuition, as a matter perceivable only by some special, non-rational insight. The exact opposite is true: a sense of life is not an irreducible primary, but a very complex sum; it can be felt, but it cannot be understood, by an automatic reaction; to be understood, it has to be analyzed, identified and verified conceptually. That automatic impression—of oneself or of others—is only a lead; left untranslated, it can be a very deceptive lead. But if and when that intangible impression is supported by and unites with the conscious judgment of one’s mind, the result is the most exultant form of certainty one can ever experience: it is the integration of mind and values.

There are two aspects of man’s existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art.

I am referring here to romantic love, in the serious meaning of that term—as distinguished from the superficial infatuations of those whose sense of life is devoid of any consistent values, i.e., of any lasting emotions other than fear. Love is a response to values. It is with a person’s sense of life that one falls in love—with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person’s character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul—the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness. It is one’s own sense of life that acts as the selector, and responds to what it recognizes as one’s own basic values in the person of another. It is not a matter of professed convictions (though these are not irrelevant); it is a matter of much more profound, conscious and subconscious harmony.

Many errors and tragic disillusionments are possible in this process of emotional recognition, since a sense of life, by itself, is not a reliable cognitive guide. And if there are degrees of evil, then one of the most evil consequences of mysticism—in terms of human suffering—is the belief that love is a matter of “the heart,” not the mind, that love is an emotion independent of reason, that love is blind and impervious to the power of philosophy. Love is the expression of philosophy—of a subconscious philosophical sum—and, perhaps, no other aspect of human existence needs the conscious power of philosophy quite so desperately. When that power is called upon to verify and support an emotional appraisal, when love is a conscious integration of reason and emotion, of mind and values, then—and only then—it is the greatest reward of man’s life.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments. It is the integrator and concretizer of man’s metaphysical abstractions. It is the voice of his sense of life. As such, art is subject to the same aura of mystery, the same dangers, the same tragedies—and, occasionally, the same glory—as romantic love.

Of all human products, art is, perhaps, the most personally important to man and the least understood—as I shall discuss in the next chapter.

(February 1966)

3.

Art and Sense of Life

IF ONE saw, in real life, a beautiful woman wearing an exquisite evening gown, with a cold sore on her lips, the blemish would mean nothing but a minor affliction, and one would ignore it.

But a painting of such a woman would be a corrupt, obscenely vicious attack on man, on beauty, on all values—and one would experience a feeling of immense disgust and indignation at the artist. (There are also those who would feel something like approval and who would belong to the same moral category as the artist.)

The emotional response to that painting would be instantaneous, much faster than the viewer’s mind could identify all the reasons involved. The psychological mechanism which produces that response (and which produced the painting) is a man’s sense of life.

(A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence.)

It is the artist’s sense of life that controls and integrates his work, directing the innumerable choices he has to make, from the choice of subject to the subtlest details of style. It is the viewer’s or reader’s sense of life that responds to a work of art by a complex, yet automatic reaction of acceptance and approval, or rejection and condemnation.

This does not mean that a sense of life is a valid criterion of esthetic merit, either for the artist or the viewer. A sense of life is not infallible. But a sense of life is the source of art, the psychological mechanism which enables man to create a realm such as art.

The emotion involved in art is not an emotion in the ordinary meaning of the term. It is experienced more as a “sense” or a “feel,” but it has two characteristics pertaining to emotions: it is automatically immediate and it has an intense, profoundly personal (yet undefined) value-meaning to the individual experiencing it. The value involved is life, and the words naming the emotion are: “This is what life means to me.”

Regardless of the nature or content of an artist’s metaphysical views, what an art work expresses, fundamentally, under all of its lesser aspects is: “This is life as I see it.” The essential meaning of a viewer’s or reader’s response, under all of its lesser elements, is: “This is (or is not) life as I see it.”

The psycho-epistemological process of communication between an artist and a viewer or reader goes as follows: the artist starts with a broad abstraction which he has to concretize, to bring into reality by means of the appropriate particulars; the viewer perceives the particulars, integrates them and grasps the abstraction from which they came, thus completing the circle. Speaking metaphorically, the creative process resembles a process of deduction; the viewing process resembles a process of induction.

This does not mean that communication is the primary purpose of an artist: his primary purpose is to bring his view of man and of existence into reality; but to be brought into reality, it has to be translated into objective (therefore, communicable) terms.

In Chapter 1, I discussed why man needs art—why, as a being guided by conceptual knowledge, he needs the power to summon the long chain and complex total of his metaphysical concepts into his immediate conscious awareness. “He needs a comprehensive view of existence to integrate his values, to choose his goals, to plan his future, to maintain the unity and coherence of his life.” Man’s sense of life provides him with the integrated sum of his metaphysical abstractions; art concretizes them and allows him to perceive—to experience—their immediate reality.

The function of psychological integrations is to make certain connections automatic, so that they work as a unit and do not require a conscious process of thought every time they are evoked. (All learning consists of automatizing one’s knowledge in order to leave one’s mind free to pursue further knowledge.) There are many special or “cross-filed” chains of abstractions (of interconnected concepts) in man’s mind. Cognitive abstractions are the fundamental chain, on which all the others depend. Such chains are mental integrations, serving a special purpose and formed accordingly by a special criterion.

Cognitive abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is essential? (epistemologically essential to distinguish one class of existents from all others). Normative abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is good? Esthetic abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is important?

An artist does not fake reality—he stylizes it. He selects those aspects of existence which he regards as metaphysically significant—and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting the insignificant and accidental, he presents his view of existence. His concepts are not divorced from the facts of reality—they are concepts which integrate the facts and his metaphysical evaluation of the facts. His selection constitutes his evaluation: everything included in a work of art—from theme to subject to brushstroke or adjective—acquires metaphysical significance by the mere fact of being included, of being important enough to include.

An artist (as, for instance, the sculptors of Ancient Greece) who presents man as a god-like figure is aware of the fact that men may be crippled or diseased or helpless; but he regards these conditions as accidental, as irrelevant to the essential nature of man—and he presents a figure embodying strength, beauty, intelligence, self-confidence, as man’s proper, natural state.

An artist (as, for instance, the sculptors of the Middle Ages) who presents man as a deformed monstrosity is aware of the fact that there are men who are healthy, happy or confident; but he regards these conditions as accidental or illusory, as irrelevant to man’s essential nature—and he presents a tortured figure embodying pain, ugliness, terror, as man’s proper, natural state.

Now consider the painting described at the start of this discussion. The cold sore on the lips of a beautiful woman, which would be insignificant in real life, acquires a monstrous metaphysical significance by virtue of being included in a painting. It declares that a woman’s beauty and her efforts to achieve glamor (the beautiful evening gown) are a futile illusion undercut by a seed of corruption which can mar and destroy them at any moment—that this is reality’s mockery of man—that all of man’s values and efforts are impotent against the power, not even of some great cataclysm, but of a miserable little physical infection.

The Naturalistic type of argument—to the effect that, in real life, a beautiful woman might get a cold sore—is irrelevant esthetically. Art is not concerned with actual occurrences or events as such, but with their metaphysical significance to man.

An indication of the metaphysical slant of art can be seen in the popular notion that a reader of fiction “identifies himself with” some character or characters of the story. “To identify with” is a colloquial designation for a process of abstraction: it means to observe a common element between the character and oneself, to draw an abstraction from the character’s problems and apply it to one’s own life. Subconsciously, without any knowledge of esthetic theory, but by virtue of the implicit nature of art, this is the way in which most people react to fiction and to all other forms of art.

This illustrates one important aspect of the difference between a real-life news story and a fiction story: a news story is a concrete from which one may or may not draw an abstraction, which one may or may not find relevant to one’s own life; a fiction story is an abstraction that claims universality, i.e., application to every human life, including one’s own. Hence one may be impersonal and indifferent in regard to a news story, even though it is real; and one feels an intensely personal emotion about a fiction story, even though it is invented. This emotion may be positive, when one finds the abstraction applicable to oneself—or resentfully negative, when one finds it inapplicable and inimical.

It is not journalistic information or scientific education or moral guidance that man seeks from a work of art (though these may be involved as secondary consequences), but the fulfillment of a more profound need: a confirmation of his view of existence—a confirmation, not in the sense of resolving cognitive doubts, but in the sense of permitting him to contemplate his abstractions outside his own mind, in the form of existential concretes.

Since man lives by reshaping his physical background to serve his purpose, since he must first define and then create his values—a rational man needs a concretized projection of these values, an image in whose likeness he will re-shape the world and himself. Art gives him that image; it gives him the experience of seeing the full, immediate, concrete reality of his distant goals.

Since a rational man’s ambition is unlimited, since his pursuit and achievement of values is a lifelong process—and the higher the values, the harder the struggle—he needs a moment, an hour or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully achieved. It is like a moment of rest, a moment to gain fuel to move farther. Art gives him that fuel; the pleasure of contemplating the objectified reality of one’s own sense of life is the pleasure of feeling what it would be like to live in one’s ideal world.

“The importance of that experience is not in what man learns from it, but in that he experiences it. The fuel is not a theoretical principle, not a didactic ‘message, ’ but the life-giving fact of experiencing a moment of metaphysical joy—a moment of love for existence.” (See Chapter 11.)

The same principle applies to an irrational man, though in different terms, according to his different views and responses. For an irrational man, the concretized projection of his malevolent sense of life serves, not as fuel and inspiration to move forward, but as permission to stand still: it declares that values are unattainable, that the struggle is futile, that fear, guilt, pain and failure are mankind’s predestined end—and that he couldn’t help it. Or, on a lower level of irrationality, the concretized projection of a malignant sense of life provides a man with an image of triumphant malice, of hatred for existence, of vengeance against life’s best exponents, of the defeat and destruction of all human values; his kind of art gives him a moment’s illusion that he is right—that evil is metaphysically potent.

Art is man’s metaphysical mirror; what a rational man seeks to see in that mirror is a salute; what an irrational man seeks to see is a justification—even if only a justification of his depravity, as a last convulsion of his betrayed self-esteem.

Between these two extremes, there lies the immense continuum of men of mixed premises—whose sense of life holds unresolved, precariously balanced or openly contradictory elements of reason and unreason—and works of art that reflect these mixtures. Since art is the product of philosophy (and mankind’s philosophy is tragically mixed), most of the world’s art, including some of its greatest examples, falls into this category.

The truth or falsehood of a given artist’s philosophy, as such, is not an esthetic matter; it may affect a given viewer’s enjoyment of his work, but it does not negate its esthetic merit. Some sort of philosophical meaning, however, some implicit view of life, is a necessary element of a work of art. The absence of any metaphysical values whatever, i.e., a gray, uncommitted, passively indeterminate sense of life, results in a soul without fuel, motor or voice, and renders a man impotent in the field of art. Bad art is, predominantly, the product of imitation, of secondhand copying, not of creative expression.

Two distinct, but interrelated, elements of a work of art are the crucial means of projecting its sense of life: the subject and the style—what an artist chooses to present and how he presents it.

The subject of an art work expresses a view of man’s existence, while the style expresses a view of man’s consciousness. The subject reveals an artist’s metaphysics, the style reveals his psycho-epistemology.

The choice of subject declares what aspects of existence the artist regards as important—as worthy of being re-created and contemplated. He may choose to present heroic figures, as exponents of man’s nature—or he may choose statistical composites of the average, the undistinguished, the mediocre—or he may choose crawling specimens of depravity. He may present the triumph of heroes, in fact or in spirit (Victor Hugo), or their struggle (Michelangelo), or their defeat (Shakespeare). He may present the folks next door: next door to palaces (Tolstoy), or to drugstores (Sinclair Lewis), or to kitchens (Vermeer), or to sewers (Zola). He may present monsters as objects of moral denunciation (Dostoevsky), or as objects of terror (Goya)—or he may demand sympathy for his monsters, and thus crawl outside the limits of the realm of values, including esthetic ones.

Whatever the case may be, it is the subject (qualified by the theme) that projects an art work’s view of man’s place in the universe.

The theme of an art work is the link uniting its subject and its style. “Style” is a particular, distinctive or characteristic mode of execution. An artist’s style is the product of his own psycho-epistemology—and, by implication, a projection of his view of man’s consciousness, of its efficacy or impotence, of its proper method and level of functioning.

Predominantly (though not exclusively), a man whose normal mental state is a state of full focus, will create and respond to a style of radiant clarity and ruthless precision—a style that projects sharp outlines, cleanliness, purpose, an intransigent commitment to full awareness and clear-cut identity—a level of awareness appropriate to a universe where A is A, where everything is open to man’s consciousness and demands its constant functioning.

A man who is moved by the fog of his feelings and spends most of his time out of focus will create and respond to a style of blurred, “mysterious” murk, where outlines dissolve and entities flow into one another, where words connote anything and denote nothing, where colors float without objects, and objects float without weight—a level of awareness appropriate to a universe where A can be any non-A one chooses, where nothing can be known with certainty and nothing much is demanded of one’s consciousness.

Style is the most complex element of art, the most revealing and, often, the most baffling psychologically. The terrible inner conflicts from which artists suffer as much as (or, perhaps, more than) other men are magnified in their work. As an example: Salvador Dali, whose style projects the luminous clarity of a rational psycho-epistemology, while most (though not all) of his subjects project an irrational and revoltingly evil metaphysics. A similar, but less offensive, conflict may be seen in the paintings of Vermeer, who combines a brilliant clarity of style with the bleak metaphysics of Naturalism. At the other extreme of the stylistic continuum, observe the deliberate blurring and visual distortions of the so-called “painterly” school, from Rembrandt on down—down to the rebellion against consciousness, expressed by a phenomenon such as Cubism which seeks specifically to disintegrate man’s consciousness by painting objects as man does not perceive them (from several perspectives at once).

A writer’s style may project a blend of reason and passionate emotion (Victor Hugo)—or a chaos of floating abstractions, of emotions cut off from reality (Thomas Wolfe)—or the dry, bare, concrete-bound, humor-tinged raucousness of an intelligent reporter (Sinclair Lewis)—or the disciplined, perceptive, lucid, yet muted understatement of a represser (John O’Hara)—or the carefully superficial, over-detailed precision of an amoralist (Flaubert)—or the mannered artificiality of a second-hander (several moderns not worthy of mention).

Style conveys what may be called a “psychoepistemological sense of life,” i.e., an expression of that level of mental functioning on which the artist feels most at home. This is the reason why style is crucially important in art—both to the artist and to the reader or viewer—and why its importance is experienced as a profoundly personal matter. To the artist, it is an expression, to the reader or viewer a confirmation, of his own consciousness—which means: of his efficacy—which means: of his self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem).

Now a word of warning about the criteria of esthetic judgment. A sense of life is the source of art, but it is not the sole qualification of an artist or of an esthetician, and it is not a criterion of esthetic judgment. Emotions are not tools of cognition. Esthetics is a branch of philosophy—and just as a philosopher does not approach any other branch of his science with his feelings or emotions as his criterion of judgment, so he cannot do it in the field of esthetics. A sense of life is not sufficient professional equipment. An esthetician—as well as any man who attempts to evaluate art works—must be guided by more than an emotion.

The fact that one agrees or disagrees with an artist’s philosophy is irrelevant to an esthetic appraisal of his work qua art. One does not have to agree with an artist (nor even to enjoy him) in order to evaluate his work. In essence, an objective evaluation requires that one identify the artist’s theme, the abstract meaning of his work (exclusively by identifying the evidence contained in the work and allowing no other, outside considerations), then evaluate the means by which he conveys it—i.e., taking his theme as criterion, evaluate the purely esthetic elements of the work, the technical mastery (or lack of it) with which he projects (or fails to project) his view of life.

(The esthetic principles which apply to all art, regardless of an individual artist’s philosophy, and which must guide an objective evaluation, are outside the scope of this discussion. I will mention only that such principles are defined by the science of esthetics—a task at which modern philosophy has failed dismally.)

Since art is a philosophical composite, it is not a contradiction to say: “This is a great work of art, but I don’t like it,”—provided one defines the exact meaning of that statement: the first part refers to a purely esthetic appraisal, the second to a deeper philosophical level which includes more than esthetic values.

Even in the realm of personal choices, there are many different aspects from which one may enjoy a work of art—other than sense-of-life affinity. One’s sense of life is fully involved only when one feels a profoundly personal emotion about a work of art. But there are many other levels or degrees of liking; the differences are similar to the difference between romantic love and affection or friendship.

For instance: I love the work of Victor Hugo, in a deeper sense than admiration for his superlative literary genius, and I find many similarities between his sense of life and mine, although I disagree with virtually all of his explicit philosophy—I like Dostoevsky, for his superb mastery of plot structure and for his merciless dissection of the psychology of evil, even though his philosophy and his sense of life are almost diametrically opposed to mine—I like the early novels of Mickey Spillane, for his plot ingenuity and moralistic style, even though his sense of life clashes with mine, and no explicit philosophical element is involved in his work—I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.

Now, to demonstrate the difference between an intellectual approach and a sense of life, I will restate the preceding paragraph in sense-of-life terms: Hugo gives me the feeling of entering a cathedral—Dostoevsky gives me the feeling of entering a chamber of horrors, but with a powerful guide—Spillane gives me the feeling of hearing a military band in a public park—Tolstoy gives me the feeling of an unsanitary backyard which I do not care to enter.

When one learns to translate the meaning of an art work into objective terms, one discovers that nothing is as potent as art in exposing the essence of a man’s character. An artist reveals his naked soul in his work—and so, gentle reader, do you when you respond to it.

(March 1966)

4.

Art and Cognition

A FREQUENT question, which the estheticians have failed to answer, is: What kinds of objects may be properly classified as works of art? What are the valid forms of art—and why these?

An examination of the major branches of art will give a clue to the answer.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments. Man’s profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires knowledge by means of abstractions, and needs the power to bring his widest metaphysical abstractions into his immediate, perceptual awareness. Art fulfills this need: by means of a selective re-creation, it concretizes man’s fundamental view of himself and of existence. It tells man, in effect, which aspects of his experience are to be regarded as essential, significant, important. In this sense, art teaches man how to use his consciousness. It conditions or stylizes man’s consciousness by conveying to him a certain way of looking at existence.

Bearing this in mind, consider the nature of the major branches of art, and of the specific physical media they employ.

Literature re-creates reality by means of language—Painting, by means of color on a two-dimensional surface—Sculpture, by means of a three-dimensional form made of a solid material. Music employs the sounds produced by the periodic vibrations of a sonorous body, and evokes man’s sense-of-life emotions. Architecture is in a class by itself, because it combines art with a utilitarian purpose and does not re-create reality, but creates a structure for man’s habitation or use, expressing man’s values. (There are also the performing arts, whose medium is the person of the artist; we shall discuss them later.)

Now observe the relation of these arts to man’s cognitive faculty: Literature deals with the field of concepts—Painting, with the field of sight—Sculpture, with the combined fields of sight and touch—Music, with the field of hearing. (Architecture, qua art, is close to sculpture: its field is three-dimensional, i.e., sight and touch, but transposed to a grand spatial scale.)

The development of human cognition starts with the ability to perceive things, i.e., entities. Of man’s five cognitive senses, only two provide him with a direct awareness of entities: sight and touch. The other three senses—hearing, taste and smell—give him an awareness of some of an entity’s attributes (or of the consequences produced by an entity): they tell him that something makes sounds, or something tastes sweet, or something smells fresh; but in order to perceive this something, he needs sight and/or touch.

The concept “entity” is (implicitly) the start of man’s conceptual development and the building-block of his entire conceptual structure. It is by perceiving entities that man perceives the universe. And in order to concretize his view of existence, it is by means of concepts (language) or by means of his entity-perceiving senses (sight and touch) that he has to do it.

Music does not deal with entities, which is the reason why its psycho-epistemological function is different from that of the other arts, as we shall discuss later.

The relation of literature to man’s cognitive faculty is obvious: literature re-creates reality by means of words, i.e., concepts. But in order to re-create reality, it is the sensory-perceptual level of man’s awareness that literature has to convey conceptually: the reality of concrete, individual men and events, of specific sights, sounds, textures, etc.

The so-called visual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture) produce concrete, perceptually available entities and make them convey an abstract, conceptual meaning.

All these arts are conceptual in essence, all are products of and addressed to the conceptual level of man’s consciousness, and they differ only in their means. Literature starts with concepts and integrates them to percepts—painting, sculpture and architecture start with percepts and integrate them to concepts. The ultimate psycho-epistemological function is the same: a process that integrates man’s forms of cognition, unifies his consciousness and clarifies his grasp of reality.

The visual arts do not deal with the sensory field of awareness as such, but with the sensory field as perceived by a conceptual consciousness.

The sensory-perceptual awareness of an adult does not consist of mere sense data (as it did in his infancy), but of automatized integrations that combine sense data with a vast context of conceptual knowledge. The visual arts refine and direct the sensory elements of these integrations. By means of selectivity, of emphasis and omission, these arts lead man’s sight to the conceptual context intended by the artist. They teach man to see more precisely and to find deeper meaning in the field of his vision.

It is a common experience to observe that a particular painting—for example, a still life of apples—makes its subject “more real than it is in reality.” The apples seem brighter and firmer, they seem to possess an almost self-assertive character, a kind of heightened reality which neither their real-life models nor any color photograph can match. Yet if one examines them closely, one sees that no real-life apple ever looked like that. What is it, then, that the artist has done? He has created a visual abstraction.

He has performed the process of concept-formation—of isolating and integrating—but in exclusively visual terms. He has isolated the essential, distinguishing characteristics of apples, and integrated them into a single visual unit. He has brought the conceptual method of functioning to the operations of a single sense organ, the organ of sight.

No one can perceive literally and indiscriminately every accidental, inconsequential detail of every apple he happens to see; everyone perceives and remembers only some aspects, which are not necessarily the essential ones; most people carry in mind a vaguely approximate image of an apple’s appearance. The painting concretizes that image by means of visual essentials, which most men have not focused on or identified, but recognize at once. What they feel, in effect, is: “Yes, that’s how an apple looks to me!” In fact, no apple ever looked that way to them—only to the selectively focused eye of an artist. But, psycho-epistemologically, their sense of heightened reality is not an illusion: it comes from the greater clarity which the artist has given to their mental image. The painting has integrated the sum of their countless random impressions, and thus has brought order to the visual field of their experience.

Apply the same process to the paintings of more complex subjects—of landscapes, of cities, of human figures, of human faces—and you will see the psycho-epistemological power of the art of painting.

The closer an artist comes to a conceptual method of functioning visually, the greater his work. The greatest of all artists, Vermeer, devoted his paintings to a single theme: light itself. The guiding principle of his compositions is: the contextual nature of our perception of light (and of color). The physical objects in a Vermeer canvas are chosen and placed in such a way that their combined interrelationships feature, lead to and make possible the painting’s brightest patches of light, sometimes blindingly bright, in a manner which no one has been able to render before or since.

(Compare the radiant austerity of Vermeer’s work to the silliness of the dots-and-dashes Impressionists who allegedly intended to paint pure light. He raised perception to the conceptual level; they attempted to disintegrate perception into sense data.)

One might wish (and I do) that Vermeer had chosen better subjects to express his theme, but to him, apparently, the subjects were only the means to his end. What his style projects is a concretized image of an immense, nonvisual abstraction: the psycho-epistemology of a rational mind. It projects clarity, discipline, confidence, purpose, power—a universe open to man. When one feels, looking at a Vermeer painting: “This is my view of life,” the feeling involves much more than mere visual perception.

As I have mentioned in “Art and Sense of Life,” all the other elements of painting, such as theme, subject, composition, are involved in projecting an artist’s view of existence, but for this present discussion, style is the most important element: it demonstrates in what manner an art confined to a single sense modality, using exclusively visual means, can express and affect the total of man’s consciousness.

In this connection, I should like to relate, without comment, a personal incident. At the age of 16, for one summer, I joined a drawing class given by a man who would have become a great artist had he survived, which I doubt (this was in Russia); his paintings were magnificent, even then. He forbade the class ever to draw a curved line: he taught us that every curve must be broken into facets of intersecting straight lines. I fell in love with this style; I still am. Today, I know the reason fully. What I felt then (and still do) was not: “This is for me,” but: “This is me.”

Compared to painting, sculpture is more limited a form of art. It expresses an artist’s view of existence through his treatment of the human figure, but it is confined to the human figure. (For a discussion of sculpture’s means, I will refer you to “Metaphysics in Marble” by Mary Ann Sures, The Objectivist, February- March 1969.)

Dealing with two senses, sight and touch, sculpture is restricted by the necessity to present a three-dimensional shape as man does not perceive it: without color. Visually, sculpture offers shape as an abstraction; but touch is a somewhat concrete-bound sense and confines sculpture to concrete entities. Of these, only the figure of man can project a metaphysical meaning. There is little that one can express in the statue of an animal or of an inanimate object.

Psycho-epistemologically, it is the requirements of the sense of touch that make the texture of a human body a crucial element in sculpture, and virtually a hallmark of great sculptors. Observe the manner in which the softness, the smoothness, the pliant resiliency of the skin is conveyed by rigid marble in such statues as the Venus de Milo or Michelangelo’s Pietà.

It is worth noting that sculpture is almost a dead art. Its great day was in Ancient Greece which, philosophically, was a man-centered civilization. A Renaissance is always possible, but the future of sculpture depends to a large extent on the future of architecture. The two arts are closely allied; one of the problems of sculpture lies in the fact that one of its most effective functions is to serve as architectural ornament.

I shall not include architecture in this discussion—I assume the reader knows which book I will refer him to.

This brings us to the subject of music.

The fundamental difference between music and the other arts lies in the fact that music is experienced as if it reversed man’s normal psycho-epistemological process.

The other arts create a physical object (i.e., an object perceived by man’s senses, be it a book or a painting) and the psycho-epistemological process goes from the perception of the object to the conceptual grasp of its meaning, to an appraisal in terms of one’s basic values, to a consequent emotion. The pattern is: from perception—to conceptual understanding—to appraisal—to emotion.

The pattern of the process involved in music is: from perception—to emotion—to appraisal—to conceptual understanding.

Music is experienced as if it had the power to reach man’s emotions directly.

As in the case of all emotions, existential or esthetic, the psycho-epistemological processes involved in the response to music are automatized and are experienced as a single, instantaneous reaction, faster than one can identify its components.

It is possible to observe introspectively (up to a certain point) what one’s mind does while listening to music: it evokes subconscious material—images, actions, scenes, actual or imaginary experiences—that seems to flow haphazardly, without direction, in brief, random snatches, merging, changing and vanishing, like the progression of a dream. But, in fact, this flow is selective and consistent: the emotional meaning of the subconscious material corresponds to the emotions projected by the music.

Subconsciously (i.e., implicitly), man knows that he cannot experience an actually causeless and objectless emotion. When music induces an emotional state without external object, his subconscious suggests an internal one. The process is wordless, directed, in effect, by the equivalent of the words: “I would feel this way if . . .” if I were in a beautiful garden on a spring morning . . . if I were dancing in a great, brilliant ballroom . . . if I were seeing the person I love . . . “I would feel this way if . . .” if I were fighting a violent storm at sea . . . if I were climbing up the crumbling side of a mountain . . . if I were on the barricades . . . “I would feel this way if . . .” if I reached the top of that mountain . . . if I stood in full sunlight . . . if I leaped over that barrier, as I did today . . . as I will tomorrow . . .

Observe three aspects of this phenomenon: (1) It is induced by deliberately suspending one’s conscious thoughts and surrendering to the guidance of one’s emotions. (2) The subconscious material has to flow because no single image can capture the meaning of the musical experience, the mind needs a succession of images, it is groping for that which they have in common, i.e., for an emotional abstraction. (3) The process of emotional abstraction—i.e., the process of classifying things according to the emotions they evoke—is the process by which one formed one’s sense of life.

A sense of life is a preconceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. It is in terms of his fundamental emotions—i.e., the emotions produced by his own metaphysical value-judgments—that man responds to music.

Music cannot tell a story, it cannot deal with concretes, it cannot convey a specific existential phenomenon, such as a peaceful countryside or a stormy sea. The theme of a composition entitled “Spring Song” is not spring, but the emotions which spring evoked in the composer. Even concepts which, intellectually, belong to a complex level of abstraction, such as “peace,” “revolution,” “religion,” are too specific, too concrete to be expressed in music. All that music can do with such themes is convey the emotions of serenity, or defiance, or exaltation. Liszt’s “St. Francis Walking on the Waters” was inspired by a specific legend, but what it conveys is a passionately dedicated struggle and triumph—by whom and in the name of what, is for each individual listener to supply.

Music communicates emotions, which one grasps, but does not actually feel; what one feels is a suggestion, a kind of distant, dissociated, depersonalized emotion—until and unless it unites with one’s own sense of life. But since the music’s emotional content is not communicated conceptually or evoked existentially, one does feel it in some peculiar, subterranean way.

Music conveys the same categories of emotions to listeners who hold widely divergent views of life. As a rule, men agree on whether a given piece of music is gay or sad or violent or solemn. But even though, in a generalized way, they experience the same emotions in response to the same music, there are radical differences in how they appraise this experience—i.e., how they feel about these feelings.

On a number of occasions, I made the following experiment: I asked a group of guests to listen to a recorded piece of music, then describe what image, action or event it evoked in their minds spontaneously and inspirationally, without conscious devising or thought (it was a kind of auditory Thematic Apperception Test). The resulting descriptions varied in concrete details, in clarity, in imaginative color, but all had grasped the same basic emotion—with eloquent differences of appraisal. For example, there was a continuum of mixed responses between two pure extremes which, condensed, were: “I felt exalted because this music is so light-heartedly happy,” and: “I felt irritated because this music is so light-heartedly happy and, therefore, superficial.”

Psycho-epistemologically, the pattern of the response to music seems to be as follows: one perceives the music, one grasps the suggestion of a certain emotional state and, with one’s sense of life serving as the criterion, one appraises this state as enjoyable or painful, desirable or undesirable, significant or negligible, according to whether it corresponds to or contradicts one’s fundamental feeling about life.

When the emotional abstraction projected by the music corresponds to one’s sense of life, the abstraction acquires a full, bright, almost violent reality—and one feels, at times, an emotion of greater intensity than any experienced existentially. When the emotional abstraction projected by the music is irrelevant to or contradicts one’s sense of life, one feels nothing except a dim uneasiness or resentment or a special kind of enervating boredom.

As corroborating evidence: I have observed a number of cases involving persons who, over a period of time, underwent a significant change in their fundamental view of life (some, in the direction of improvement; others, of deterioration). Their musical preferences changed accordingly; the change was gradual, automatic and subconscious, without any decision or conscious intention on their part.

It must be stressed that the pattern is not so gross and simple as preferring gay music to sad music or vice versa, according to a “benevolent” or “malevolent” view of the universe. The issue is much more complex and much more specifically musical than that: it is not merely what particular emotion a given composition conveys, but how it conveys it, by what musical means or method. (For instance, I like operetta music of a certain kind, but I would take a funeral march in preference to “The Blue Danube Waltz” or to the Nelson Eddy-Jeanette Mac-Donald kind of music.)

As in the case of any other art or any human product, the historical development of music followed the development of philosophy. But the differences in the music produced by various cultures in the various eras of history are deeper than those among the other arts (even the sounds used and the scales are different). Western man can understand and enjoy Oriental painting; but Oriental music is unintelligible to him, it evokes nothing, it sounds like noise. In this respect, the differences in the music of various cultures resemble the differences in language; a given language is unintelligible to foreigners. But language expresses concepts, and different languages can be translated into one another; different kinds of music cannot. There is no common vocabulary of music (not even among the individual members of the same culture). Music communicates emotions—and it is highly doubtful whether the music of different cultures communicates the same emotions. Man’s emotional capacity as such is universal, but the actual experience of particular emotions is not: the experience of certain sense-of-life emotions precludes the experience of certain others.

This brings us to the great, unanswered question: Why does music make us experience emotions?

In the other arts, whose works are perceived by the normal cognitive process, the answer can be found in the work itself by a conceptual analysis of its nature and meaning; a common vocabulary and an objective criterion of esthetic judgment can be established. There is no such vocabulary or criterion, at present, in the field of music—neither among different cultures nor within the same culture.

It is obvious that the answer lies in the nature of the work, since it is the work that evokes the emotions. But how does it do it? Why does a succession of sounds produce an emotional reaction? Why does it involve man’s deepest emotions and his crucial, metaphysical values? How can sounds reach man’s emotions directly, in a manner that seems to by-pass his intellect? What does a certain combination of sounds do to man’s consciousness to make him identify it as gay or sad?

No one has yet discovered the answers and, I hasten to add, neither have I. The formulation of a common vocabulary of music would require these answers. It would require: a translation of the musical experience, the inner experience, into conceptual terms; an explanation of why certain sounds strike us a certain way; a definition of the axioms of musical perception, from which the appropriate esthetic principles could be derived, which would serve as a base for the objective validation of esthetic judgments.

This means that we need a clear, conceptual distinction and separation of object from subject in the field of musical perception, such as we do possess in the other arts and in the wider field of our cognitive faculty. Conceptual cognition necessitates this separation: until a man is able to distinguish his inner processes from the facts which he perceives, he remains on the perceptual level of awareness. An animal cannot grasp such a distinction; neither can a very young child. Man has grasped it in regard to his other senses and his other arts; he can tell whether a blurring of his vision is produced by a thick fog or by his failing eyesight. It is only in the field of specifically musical perception that man is still in a state of early infancy.

In listening to music, a man cannot tell clearly, neither to himself nor to others—and, therefore, cannot prove—which aspects of his experience are inherent in the music and which are contributed by his own consciousness. He experiences it as an indivisible whole, he feels as if the magnificent exaltation were there, in the music—and he is helplessly bewildered when he discovers that some men do experience it and some do not. In regard to the nature of music, mankind is still on the perceptual level of awareness.

Until a conceptual vocabulary is discovered and defined, no objectively valid criterion of esthetic judgment is possible in the field of music. (There are certain technical criteria, dealing mainly with the complexity of harmonic structures, but there are no criteria for identifying the content, i.e., the emotional meaning of a given piece of music and thus demonstrating the esthetic objectivity of a given response.)

At present, our understanding of music is confined to the gathering of material, i.e., to the level of descriptive observations. Until it is brought to the stage of conceptualization, we have to treat musical tastes or preferences as a subjective matter—not in the metaphysical, but in the epistemological sense; i.e., not in the sense that these preferences are, in fact, causeless and arbitrary, but in the sense that we do not know their cause. No one, therefore, can claim the objective superiority of his choices over the choices of others. Where no objective proof is available, it’s every man for himself—and only for himself.

The nature of musical perception has not been discovered because the key to the secret of music is physiological—it lies in the nature of the process by which man perceives sounds—and the answer would require the joint effort of a physiologist, a psychologist and a philosopher (an esthetician).

The start of a scientific approach to this problem and the lead to an answer were provided by Helmholtz, the great physiologist of the nineteenth century. He concludes his book, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, with the following statement: “Here I close my work. It appears to me that I have carried it as far as the physiological properties of the sensation of hearing exercise a direct influence on the construction of a musical system, that is, as far as the work especially belongs to natural philosophy. . . . The real difficulty would lie in the development of the psychical motives which here [in the esthetics of music] assert themselves. Certainly this is the point where the more interesting part of musical esthetics begins, the aim being to explain the wonders of great works of art, and to learn the utterances and actions of the various affections of the mind. But, however alluring such an aim may be, I prefer leaving others to carry out such investigations, in which I should feel myself too much of an amateur, while I myself remain on the safe ground of natural philosophy, in which I am at home.” (New York, Dover Publications, 1954, p. 371.)

To my knowledge, no one has attempted “to carry out such investigations.” The context and the shrinking scale of modern psychology and philosophy, would have made an undertaking of this kind impossible.

From the standpoint of psycho-epistemology, I can offer a hypothesis on the nature of man’s response to music, but I urge the reader to remember that it is only a hypothesis.

If man experiences an emotion without existential object, its only other possible object is the state or actions of his own consciousness. What is the mental action involved in the perception of music? (I am not referring to the emotional reaction, which is the consequence, but to the process of perception.)

We must remember that integration is a cardinal function of man’s consciousness on all the levels of his cognitive development. First, his brain brings order into his sensory chaos by integrating sense data into percepts; this integration is performed automatically; it requires effort, but no conscious volition. His next step is the integration of percepts into concepts, as he learns to speak. Thereafter, his cognitive development consists in integrating concepts into wider and ever wider concepts, expanding the range of his mind. This stage is fully volitional and demands an unremitting effort. The automatic processes of sensory integration are completed in his infancy and closed to an adult.

The single exception is in the field of sounds produced by periodic vibrations, i.e., music.

The sounds produced by nonperiodic vibrations are noise. One may listen to noise for an hour, a day or a year, and it remains just noise. But musical tones heard in a certain kind of succession produce a different result—the human ear and brain integrate them into a new cognitive experience, into what may be called an auditory entity: a melody. The integration is a physiological process; it is performed unconsciously and automatically. Man is aware of the process only by means of its results.

Helmholtz has demonstrated that the essence of musical perception is mathematical: the consonance or dissonance of harmonies depends on the ratios of the frequencies of their tones. The brain can integrate a ratio of one to two, for instance, but not of eight to nine. (This does not mean that dissonances cannot be integrated; they can, in the proper musical context.)

Helmholtz was concerned mainly with tones heard simultaneously. But his demonstration indicates the possibility that the same principles apply to the process of hearing and integrating a succession of musical tones, i.e., a melody—and that the psycho-epistemological meaning of a given composition lies in the kind of work it demands of a listener’s ear and brain.

A composition may demand the active alertness needed to resolve complex mathematical relationships—or it may deaden the brain by means of monotonous simplicity. It may demand a process of building an integrated sum—or it may break up the process of integration into an arbitrary series of random bits—or it may obliterate the process by a jumble of sounds mathematically-physiologically impossible to integrate, and thus turn into noise.

The listener becomes aware of this process in the form of a sense of efficacy, or of strain, or of boredom, or of frustration. His reaction is determined by his psycho-epistemological sense of life—i.e., by the level of cognitive functioning on which he feels at home.

Epistemologically, a man who has an active mind regards mental effort as an exciting challenge; metaphysically, he seeks intelligibility. He will enjoy the music that requires a process of complex calculations and successful resolution. (I refer not merely to the complexities of harmony and orchestration, but primarily to their core, the complexity of melody, on which they depend.) He will be bored by too easy a process of integration, like an expert in higher mathematics who is put to the task of solving problems in kindergarten arithmetic. He will feel a mixture of boredom and resentment when he hears a series of random bits with which his mind can do nothing. He will feel anger, revulsion and rebellion against the process of hearing jumbled musical sounds; he will experience it as an attempt to destroy the integrating capacity of his mind.

A man of mixed cognitive habits has, epistemologically, a limited interest in mental effort and, metaphysically, tolerates a great deal of fog in his field of awareness. He will feel strain when listening to the more demanding type of music, but will enjoy the simpler types. He may enjoy the broken, random kind of music (if he is pretentious)—and may even become conditioned to accept the jumbled music (if he is sufficiently lethargic).

There may be many other kinds of reactions, according to the many different aspects of musical compositions and to the many variants of men’s cognitive habits. The above examples merely indicate the hypothetical pattern of man’s response to music.

Music gives man’s consciousness the same experience as the other arts: a concretization of his sense of life. But the abstraction being concretized is primarily epistemological, rather than metaphysical; the abstraction is man’s consciousness, i.e., his method of cognitive functioning, which he experiences in the concrete form of hearing a specific piece of music. A man’s acceptance or rejection of that music depends on whether it calls upon or clashes with, confirms or contradicts, his mind’s way of working. The metaphysical aspect of the experience is the sense of a world which he is able to grasp, to which his mind’s working is appropriate.

Music is the only phenomenon that permits an adult to experience the process of dealing with pure sense data. Single musical tones are not percepts, but pure sensations; they become percepts only when integrated. Sensations are man’s first contact with reality; when integrated into percepts, they are the given, the self-evident, the not-to-be-doubted. Music offers man the singular opportunity to reenact, on the adult level, the primary process of his method of cognition: the automatic integration of sense data into an intelligible, meaningful entity. To a conceptual consciousness, it is a unique form of rest and reward.

Conceptual integrations require constant effort and impose a permanent responsibility: they involve the risk of error and failure. The process of musical integration is automatic and effortless. (It is experienced as effortless, since it is unconscious; it is a process of cashing in on the kinds of mental habits one has, or has not, spent effort to acquire.) One’s reaction to music carries a sense of total certainty, as if it were simple, self-evident, not to be doubted; it involves one’s emotions, i.e., one’s values, and one’s deepest sense of oneself—it is experienced as a magic union of sensations and thought, as if thought had acquired the immediate certainty of direct awareness.

(Hence all the mystic clamor about the “spiritual” or supernatural character of music. Mysticism, the perennial parasite, here appropriates a phenomenon which is a product of the union, not the dichotomy, of man’s body and mind: it is part physiological, part intellectual.)

In regard to the relationship of music to man’s state of mind, Helmholtz indicates the following, in a discussion of the difference between the major and minor keys: “The major mode is well suited for all frames of mind which are completely formed and clearly understood, for strong resolve, and for soft and gentle or even for sorrowing feelings, when the sorrow has passed into the condition of dreamy and yielding regret. But it is quite unsuited for indistinct, obscure, unformed frames of mind, or for the expression of the dismal, the dreary, the enigmatic, the mysterious, the rude, and whatever offends against artistic beauty;—and it is precisely for these that we require the minor mode, with its veiled harmoniousness, its changeable scale, its ready modulation, and less intelligible basis of construction. The major mode would be an unsuitable form for such purposes, and hence the minor mode has its own proper artistic justification as a separate system.” (On the Sensations of Tone, p. 302.)

My hypothesis would explain why men hear the same emotional content in a given piece of music even though they differ in their evaluations. Cognitive processes affect man’s emotions which affect his body, and the influence is reciprocal. For instance, the successful solution of an intellectual problem creates a joyous, triumphant mood; failure to solve a problem creates a painful mood of dejection or discouragement. And conversely: a joyous mood tends to sharpen, accelerate, energize one’s mind; a mood of sadness tends to blur the mind, to burden it, to slow it down. Observe the melodic and rhythmic characteristics of the types of music we regard as gay or sad. If a given process of musical integration taking place in a man’s brain resembles the cognitive processes that produce and/or accompany a certain emotional state, he will recognize it, in effect, physiologically, then intellectually. Whether he will accept that particular emotional state, and experience it fully, depends on his sense-of-life evaluation of its significance.

The epistemological aspect of music is the fundamental, but not the exclusive, factor in determining one’s musical preferences. Within the general category of music of equal complexity, it is the emotional element that represents the metaphysical aspect controlling one’s enjoyment. The issue is not merely that one is able to perceive successfully, i.e., to integrate a series of sounds into a musical entity, but also: what sort of entity does one perceive? The process of integration represents the concretized abstraction of one’s consciousness, the nature of the music represents the concretized abstraction of existence—i.e., a world in which one feels joyous or sad or triumphant or resigned, etc. According to one’s sense of life, one feels: “Yes, this is my world and this is how I should feel!” or: “No, this is not the world as I see it.” (As in the other arts, one may appreciate the esthetic value of a given composition, yet neither like nor enjoy it.)

The scientific research that would be needed to prove this hypothesis is enormous. To indicate just a few of the things which proof would require: a computation of the mathematical relationships among the tones of a melody—a computation of the time required by the human ear and brain, to integrate a succession of musical sounds, including the progressive steps, the duration and the time limits of the integrating process (which would involve the relationship of tones to rhythm)—a computation of the relationships of tones to bars, of bars to musical phrases, of phrases to ultimate resolution—a computation of the relationships of melody to harmony, and of their sum to the sounds of various musical instruments, etc. The work involved is staggering, yet this is what the human brain—the composer’s, the performer’s and the listener’s—does, though not consciously.

If such calculations were made and reduced to a manageable number of equations, i.e., of principles, we would have an objective vocabulary of music. It would be a mathematical vocabulary, based on the nature of sound and on the nature of man’s faculty of hearing (i.e., on what is possible to this faculty). The esthetic criterion to be derived from such a vocabulary would be: integration—i.e., the range (or complexity) of the integration achieved by a given composition. Integration—because it is the essence of music, as distinguished from noise; range—because it is the measure of any intellectual achievement.

Until my theory is proved or disproved by scientific evidence of this kind, it has to be regarded as a mere hypothesis.

There is, however, a great deal of evidence pertaining to the nature of music which we can observe, not on the physiological, but on the psychological-existential level (which tends to support my hypothesis).

The connection of music to man’s cognitive faculty is supported by the fact that certain kinds of music have a paralyzing, narcotic effect on man’s mind. They induce a state of trancelike stupor, a loss of context, of volition, of self-awareness. Primitive music and most Oriental music fall into this category. The enjoyment of such music is the opposite of the emotional state that a Western man would call enjoyment: to the Western man, music is an intensely personal experience and a confirmation of his cognitive power—to the primitive man, music brings the dissolution of self and of consciousness. In both cases, however, music is the means of evoking that psycho-epistemological state which their respective philosophies regard as proper and desirable for man.

The deadly monotony of primitive music—the endless repetition of a few notes and of a rhythmic pattern that beats against the brain with the regularity of the ancient torture of water drops falling on a man’s skull—paralyzes cognitive processes, obliterates awareness and disintegrates the mind. Such music produces a state of sensory deprivation, which—as modern scientists are beginning to discover—is caused by the absence or the monotony of sense stimuli.

There is no evidence to support the contention that the differences in the music of various cultures are caused by innate physiological differences among various races. There is a great deal of evidence to support the hypothesis that the cause of the musical differences is psycho-epistemological (and, therefore, ultimately philosophical).

A man’s psycho-epistemological method of functioning is developed and automatized in his early childhood; it is influenced by the dominant philosophy of the culture in which he grows up. If, explicitly and implicitly (through the general emotional attitude), a child grasps that the pursuit of knowledge, i.e., the independent work of his cognitive faculty, is important and required of him by his nature, he is likely to develop an active, independent mind. If he is taught passivity, blind obedience, fear and the futility of questioning or knowing, he is likely to grow up as a mentally helpless savage, whether in the jungle or in New York City. But—since one cannot destroy a human mind totally, so long as its possessor remains alive—his brain’s frustrated needs become a restless, incoherent, unintelligible groping that frightens him. Primitive music becomes his narcotic: it wipes out the groping, it reassures him and reinforces his lethargy, it offers him temporarily the sense of a reality to which his stagnant stupor is appropriate.

Now observe that the modern diatonic scale used in Western civilization is a product of the Renaissance. It was developed over a period of time by a succession of musical innovators. What motivated them? This scale permits the greatest number of consonant harmonies—i.e., of sound-combinations pleasant to the human ear (i.e., integratable by the human brain). The man-reason-science-oriented culture of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance periods represented the first era in history when such a concern as man’s pleasure could motivate composers, who had the freedom to create.

Today, when the influence of Western civilization is breaking up the static, tradition-bound culture of Japan, young Japanese composers are doing talented work in the Western style of music.

The products of America’s anti-rational, anti-cognitive “Progressive” education, the hippies, are reverting to the music and the drumbeat of the jungle.

Integration is the key to more than music; it is the key to man’s consciousness, to his conceptual faculty, to his basic premises, to his life. And lack of integration will lead to the same existential results in anyone born with a potentially human mind, in any century, in any place on earth.

A brief word about so-called modern music: no further research or scientific discoveries are required to know with full, objective certainty that it is not music. The proof lies in the fact that music is the product of periodic vibrations—and, therefore, the introduction of nonperiodic vibrations (such as the sounds of street traffic or of machine gears or of coughs and sneezes), i.e., of noise, into an allegedly musical composition eliminates it automatically from the realm of art and of consideration. But a word of warning in regard to the vocabulary of the perpetrators of such “innovations” is in order: they spout a great deal about the necessity of “conditioning” your ear to an appreciation of their “music.” Their notion of conditioning is unlimited by reality and by the law of identity; man, in their view, is infinitely conditionable. But, in fact, you can condition a human ear to different types of music (it is not the ear, but the mind that you have to condition in such cases); you cannot condition it to hear noise as if it were music; it is not personal training or social conventions that make it impossible, but the physiological nature, the identity, of the human ear and brain.

Let us turn now to the performing arts (acting, playing a musical instrument, singing, dancing).

In these arts, the medium employed is the person of the artist. His task is not to re-create reality, but to implement the re-creation made by one of the primary arts.

This does not mean that the performing arts are secondary in esthetic value or importance, but only that they are an extension of and dependent on the primary arts. Nor does it mean that performers are mere “interpreters”: on the higher levels of his art, a performer contributes a creative element which the primary work could not convey by itself; he becomes a partner, almost a co-creator—if and when he is guided by the principle that he is the means to the end set by the work.

The basic principles which apply to all the other arts, apply to the performing artist as well, particularly stylization, i.e., selectivity: the choice and emphasis of essentials, the structuring of the progressive steps of a performance which lead to an ultimately meaningful sum. The performing artist’s own metaphysical value-judgments are called upon to create and apply the kind of technique his performance requires. For instance, an actor’s view of human grandeur or baseness or courage or timidity will determine how he projects these qualities on the stage. A work intended to be performed leaves a wide latitude of creative choice to the artist who will perform it. In an almost literal sense, he has to embody the soul created by the author of the work; a special kind of creativeness is required to bring that soul into full physical reality.

When the performance and the work (literary or musical) are perfectly integrated in meaning, style and intention, the result is a magnificent esthetic achievement and an unforgettable experience for the audience.

The psycho-epistemological role of the performing arts—their relationship to man’s cognitive faculty—lies in the full concretization of the metaphysical abstractions projected by a work of the primary arts. The distinction of the performing arts lies in their immediacy—in the fact that they translate a work of art into existential action, into a concrete event open to direct awareness. This is also their danger. Integration is the hallmark of art—and unless the performance and the primary work are fully integrated, the result is the opposite of the cognitive function of art: it gives the audience an experience of psycho-epistemological disintegration.

A performed event may contain a certain degree of imbalance among its many elements, yet still be regarded as art. For example, a great actor is often able to impart some stature and meaning to an undistinguished play—or a great play may project its power in spite of an undistinguished cast. Such events leave the audience with a sense of wistful frustration, but they still offer some partial element of esthetic value. When, however, the imbalance becomes outright contradiction, the event falls apart and tumbles outside the boundaries of art. For example, an actor may decide to rewrite the play without changing a line, merely by playing a villain as a hero or vice versa (because he disagrees with the author’s ideas, or wants to play a different kind of role, or simply doesn’t know any better)—and proceeds to present a characterization that clashes with every line he utters; the result is an incoherent mess, the more so the better the lines and the performance. In such a case, the event degenerates into meaningless posturing or lower: into clowning.

The disastrously inverted approach to the performing arts is exemplified by the mentality that regards plays as “vehicles” for stars. The traffic smash-ups of such vehicles and their riders are written all over the esthetic police blotters, and are not confined to Hollywood. The wreckage includes great actors performing trashy plays—great plays rewritten for a performance by simpering amateurs—pianists mangling compositions to show off their virtuosity, etc.

The common denominator is a crude reversal of ends and means. The “how” can never replace the “what”—neither in the primary nor in the performing arts, neither in the form of an exquisite style of writing used to say nothing, nor in the form of Greta Garbo exquisitely uttering a truck driver’s idea of a love scene.

Among the performing arts, dancing requires a special discussion. Is there an abstract meaning in dancing? What does dancing express?

The dance is the silent partner of music and participates in a division of labor: music presents a stylized version of man’s consciousness in action—the dance presents a stylized version of man’s body in action. “Stylized” means condensed to essential characteristics, which are chosen according to an artist’s view of man.

Music presents an abstraction of man’s emotions in the context of his cognitive processes—the dance presents an abstraction of man’s emotions in the context of his physical movements. The task of the dance is not the projection of single, momentary emotions, not a pantomime version of joy or sorrow or fear, etc., but a more profound issue: the projection of metaphysical value-judgments, the stylization of man’s movements by the continuous power of a fundamental emotional state—and thus the use of man’s body to express his sense of life.

Every strong emotion has a kinesthetic element, experienced as an impulse to leap or cringe or stamp one’s foot, etc. Just as a man’s sense of life is part of all his emotions, so it is part of all his movements and determines his manner of using his body: his posture, his gestures, his way of walking, etc. We can observe a different sense of life in a man who characteristically stands straight, walks fast, gestures decisively—and in a man who characteristically slumps, shuffles heavily, gestures limply. This particular element—the overall manner of moving—constitutes the material, the special province of the dance. The dance stylizes it into a system of motion expressing a metaphysical view of man.

A system of motion is the essential element, the precondition of the dance as an art. An indulgence in random movements, such as those of children romping in a meadow, may be a pleasant game, but it is not art. The creation of a consistently stylized, metaphysically expressive system is so rare an achievement that there are very few distinctive forms of dancing to qualify as art. Most dance performances are conglomerations of elements from different systems and of random contortions, arbitrarily thrown together, signifying nothing. A male or a female skipping, jumping or rolling over a stage is no more artistic than the children in the meadow, only more pretentious.

Consider two distinctive systems, ballet and the Hindu dance, which are examples of the dance as an art.

The keynote of the stylization achieved in ballet is: weightlessness. Paradoxically, ballet presents man as almost disembodied: it does not distort man’s body, it selects the kinds of movements that are normally possible to man (such as walking on tiptoe) and exaggerates them, stressing their beauty—and defying the law of gravitation. A gracefully effortless floating, flowing and flying are the essentials of the ballet’s image of man. It projects a fragile kind of strength and a certain inflexible precision, but it is man with a fine steel skeleton and without flesh, man the spirit, not controlling, but transcending this earth.

By contrast, the Hindu dance presents a man of flesh without skeleton. The keynote of its stylization is: flexibility, undulation, writhing. It does distort man’s body, imparting to it the motions of a reptile; it includes dislocations normally impossible to man and uncalled for, such as the sideways jerking of the torso and of the head which momentarily suggests decapitation. This is an image of man as infinitely pliable, man adapting himself to an incomprehensible universe, pleading with unknowable powers, reserving nothing, not even his identity.

Within each system, specific emotions may be projected or faintly suggested, but only as the basic style permits. Strong passions or negative emotions cannot be projected in ballet, regardless of its librettos; it cannot express tragedy or fear—or sexuality; it is a perfect medium for the expression of spiritual love. The Hindu dance can project passions, but not positive emotions; it cannot express joy or triumph, it is eloquent in expressing fear, doom—and a physicalistic kind of sexuality.

I want to mention a form of dancing that has not been developed into a full system, but possesses the key elements on which a full, distinctive system could be built: tap dancing. It is of American Negro origin; it is singularly appropriate to America and distinctly un-European. Its best exponents are Bill Robinson and Fred Astaire (who combines it with some elements of the ballet).

Tap dancing is completely synchronized with, responsive and obedient to the music—by means of a common element crucial to music and to man’s body: rhythm. This form permits the dancer no pause, no stillness: his feet can touch the ground only long enough to accent the rhythm’s beat. From start to finish, no matter what the action of his body, his feet continue that even, rapid tapping; it is like a long series of dashes underscoring his movements; he can leap, whirl, kneel, yet never miss a beat. It looks, at times, as if it is a contest between the man and the music, as if the music is daring him to follow—and he is following lightly, effortlessly, almost casually. Complete obedience to the music? The impression one gets is: complete control—man’s mind in effortless control of his expertly functioning body. The keynote is: precision. It conveys a sense of purpose, discipline, clarity—a mathematical kind of clarity—combined with an unlimited freedom of movement and an inexhaustible inventiveness that dares the sudden, the unexpected, yet never loses the central, integrating line: the music’s rhythm. No, the emotional range of tap dancing is not unlimited: it cannot express tragedy or pain or fear or guilt; all it can express is gaiety and every shade of emotion pertaining to the joy of living. (Yes, it is my favorite form of the dance.)

Music is an independent, primary art; the dance is not. In view of their division of labor, the dance is entirely dependent on music. With the emotional assistance of music, it expresses an abstract meaning; without music, it becomes meaningless gymnastics. It is music, the voice of man’s consciousness, that integrates the dance to man and to art. Music sets the terms; the task of the dance is to follow, as closely, obediently and expressively as possible. The tighter the integration of a given dance to its music—in rhythm, in mood, in style, in theme—the greater its esthetic value.

A clash between dance and music is worse than a clash between actor and play: it is an obliteration of the entire performance. It permits neither the music nor the dance to be integrated into an esthetic entity in the viewer’s mind—and it becomes a series of jumbled motions superimposed on a series of jumbled sounds.

Observe that the modern anti-art trend takes precisely this form in the field of the dance. (I am not speaking of the so-called modern dance, which is neither modern nor dance.) Ballet, for instance, is being “modernized” by being danced to inappropriate, un-danceable music, which is used as a mere accompaniment, like the tinkling piano in the days of the silent movies, only less synchronized with the action. Add to it the vast infusion of pantomime, which is not an art, but a childish game (it is not acting, but expository signaling), and you get a form of self-affronting compromise more abject than anything seen in politics. I submit in evidence Marguerite and Armand as presented by the Royal Ballet. (Even the pratfalls or the walking-heels-first of the so-called modern dance seem innocent by comparison: their perpetrators have nothing to betray or to disfigure.)

Dancers are performing artists; music is the primary work they perform—with the help of an important intermediary: the choreographer. His creative task is similar to that of a stage director, but carries a more demanding responsibility: a stage director translates a primary work, a play, into physical action—a choreographer has to translate a primary work, a composition of sounds, into another medium, into a composition of movements, and create a structured, integrated work: a dance.

This task is so difficult and its esthetically qualified practitioners so rare that the dance has always been slow in its development and extremely vulnerable. Today, it is all but extinct.

Music and/or literature are the base of the performing arts and of the large-scale combinations of all the arts, such as opera or motion pictures. The base, in this context, means that primary art which provides the metaphysical element and enables the performance to become a concretization of an abstract view of man.

Without this base, a performance may be entertaining, in such fields as vaudeville or the circus, but it has nothing to do with art. The performance of an aerialist, for instance, demands an enormous physical skill—greater, perhaps, and harder to acquire than the skill demanded of a ballet dancer—but what it offers is merely an exhibition of that skill, with no further meaning, i.e., a concrete, not a concretization of anything.

In operas and operettas, the esthetic base is music, with the libretto serving only to provide an appropriate emotional context or opportunity for the musical score, and an integrating line for the total performance. (In this respect, there are very few good librettos.) In motion pictures or television, literature is the ruler and term-setter, with music serving only as an incidental, background accompaniment. Screen and television plays are subcategories of the drama, and in the dramatic arts “the play is the thing.” The play is that which makes it art; the play provides the end, to which all the rest is the means.

In all the arts that involve more than one performer, a crucially important artist is the director. (In music, his counterpart is the conductor.) The director is the link between the performing and the primary arts. He is a performer in relation to the primary work, in the sense that his task is the means to the end set by the work—he is a primary artist in relation to the cast, the set designer, the cameramen, etc., in the sense that they are the means to his end, which is the translation of the work into physical action as a meaningful, stylized, integrated whole. In the dramatic arts, the director is the esthetic integrator.

This task requires a first-hand understanding of all the arts, combined with an unusual power of abstract thought and of creative imagination. Great directors are extremely rare. An average director alternates between the twin pitfalls of abdication and usurpation. Either he rides on the talents of others and merely puts the actors through random motions signifying nothing, which results in a hodgepodge of clashing intentions—or he hogs the show, putting everyone through senseless tricks unrelated to or obliterating the play (if any), on the inverted premise that the play is the means to the end of exhibiting his skill, thus placing himself in the category of circus acrobats, except that he is much less skillful and much less entertaining.

As an example of film direction at its best, I shall mention Fritz Lang, particularly in his earlier work; his silent film Siegfried is as close to a great work of art as the films have yet come. Though other directors seem to grasp it occasionally, Lang is the only one who has fully understood the fact that visual art is an intrinsic part of films in a much deeper sense than the mere selection of sets and camera angles—that a “motion picture” is literally that, and has to be a stylized visual composition in motion.

It has been said that if one stopped the projection of Siegfried and cut out a film frame at random, it would be as perfect in composition as a great painting. Every action, gesture and movement in this film is calculated to achieve that effect. Every inch of the film is stylized, i.e., condensed to those stark, bare essentials which convey the nature and spirit of the story, of its events, of its locale. The entire picture was filmed indoors, including the magnificent legendary forests whose every branch was man-made (but does not look so on the screen). While Lang was making Siegfried, it is reported, a sign hung on the wall of his office: “Nothing in this film is accidental.” This is the motto of great art. Very few artists, in any field, have ever been able to live up to it. Fritz Lang did.

There are certain flaws in Siegfried, particularly the nature of the story, which is a tragic, “malevolent universe” legend—but this is a metaphysical, not an esthetic, issue. From the aspect of a director’s creative task, this film is an example of the kind of visual stylization that makes the difference between a work of art and a glorified newsreel.

Potentially, motion pictures are a great art, but that potential has not as yet been actualized, except in single instances and random moments. An art that requires the synchronization of so many esthetic elements and so many different talents cannot develop in a period of philosophical-cultural disintegration such as the present. Its development requires the creative cooperation of men who are united, not necessarily by their formal philosophical convictions, but by their fundamental view of man, i.e., by their sense of life.

Whatever the variety and the vast potential of the performing arts, one must always remember that they are a consequence and an extension of the primary arts—and that the primary arts give them the abstract meaning without which no human product or activity can be classified as art.

The question asked at the start of this discussion was: What are the valid forms of art—and why these? It can now be answered: the proper forms of art present a selective re-creation of reality in terms needed by man’s cognitive faculty, which includes his entity-perceiving senses, and thus assist the integration of the various elements of a conceptual consciousness. Literature deals with concepts, the visual arts with sight and touch, music with hearing. Each art fulfills the function of bringing man’s concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allowing him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts. (The performing arts are a means of further concretization.) The different branches of art serve to unify man’s consciousness and offer him a coherent view of existence. Whether that view is true or false is not an esthetic matter. The crucially esthetic matter is psycho-epistemological: the integration of a conceptual consciousness.

This is the reason why all the arts were born in prehistoric times, and why man can never develop a new form of art. The forms of art do not depend on the content of man’s consciousness, but on its nature—not on the extent of man’s knowledge, but on the means by which he acquires it. (In order to develop a new form of art, man would have to acquire a new sense organ.)

The growth of man’s knowledge makes possible an unlimited growth and development of the arts. Scientific discoveries give rise to new subcategories in the various branches of art. But these are variants and subcategories (or combinations) of the same fundamental arts. Such variants require new rules, new methods, new techniques, but not a change of basic principles. For example, different techniques are required to write for the stage or screen or television; but all these media are subcategories of the drama (which is a subcategory of literature) and all are subject to the same basic principles. The wider a given principle, the more innovations and variations it permits and subsumes; but it itself is changeless. The breach of a basic principle is not a “new form of art,” but merely the destruction of that particular art.

For example, the change from Classicism to Romanticism in the theater was a legitimate esthetic innovation; so was the change from Romanticism to Naturalism, even if motivated by false metaphysical views. But the introduction of a narrator into a stage play is not an innovation, but a breach of the theater’s basic principle, which demands that a story be dramatized, i.e., presented in action; such a breach is not a “new form of art,” but simply an encroachment by incompetence on a very difficult form, and a wedge for the eventual destruction of that particular form.

A certain type of confusion about the relationship between scientific discoveries and art, leads to a frequently asked question: Is photography an art? The answer is: No. It is a technical, not a creative, skill. Art requires a selective re-creation. A camera cannot perform the basic task of painting: a visual conceptualization, i.e., the creation of a concrete in terms of abstract essentials. The selection of camera angles, lighting or lenses is merely a selection of the means to reproduce various aspects of the given, i.e., of an existing concrete. There is an artistic element in some photographs, which is the result of such selectivity as the photographer can exercise, and some of them can be very beautiful—but the same artistic element (purposeful selectivity) is present in many utilitarian products: in the better kinds of furniture, dress design, automobiles, packaging, etc. The commercial art work in ads (or posters or postage stamps) is frequently done by real artists and has greater esthetic value than many paintings, but utilitarian objects cannot be classified as works of art.

(If it is asked, at this point: But why, then, is a film director to be regarded as an artist?—the answer is: It is the story that provides an abstract meaning which the film concretizes; without a story, a director is merely a pretentious photographer.)

A similar type of confusion exists in regard to the decorative arts. The task of the decorative arts is to ornament utilitarian objects, such as rugs, textiles, lighting fixtures, etc. This is a valuable task, often performed by talented artists, but it is not an art in the esthetic-philosophical meaning of the term. The psycho-epistemological base of the decorative arts is not conceptual, but purely sensory: their standard of value is appeal to the senses of sight and/or touch. Their material is colors and shapes in nonrepresentational combinations conveying no meaning other than visual harmony; the meaning or purpose is concrete and lies in the specific object which they decorate.

As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art. On the other hand, a representational element is a detriment in the decorative arts: it is an irrelevant distraction, a clash of intentions. And although designs of little human figures or landscapes or flowers are often used to decorate textiles or wallpaper, they are artistically inferior to the nonrepresentational designs. When recognizable objects are subordinated to and treated as a mere pattern of colors and shapes, they become incongruous.

(Color harmony is a legitimate element, but only one out of many more significant elements, in the art of painting. But, in painting, colors and shapes are not treated as a decorative pattern.)

Visual harmony is a sensory experience and is determined primarily by physiological causes. There is a crucial difference between the perception of musical sounds and the perception of colors: the integration of musical sounds produces a new cognitive experience which is sensory-conceptual, i.e., the awareness of a melody; the integration of colors does not, it conveys nothing beyond the awareness of pleasant or unpleasant relationships. Cognitively, the sensation of color qua color is of no significance because color serves an incomparably more important function: the sensation of color is the central element of the faculty of sight, it is one of the fundamental means of perceiving entities. Color as such (and its physical causes) is not an entity, but an attribute of entities and cannot exist by itself.

This fact is ignored by the men who make pretentious attempts to create “a new art” in the form of “color symphonies” which consist in projecting moving blobs of color on a screen. This produces nothing, in a viewer’s consciousness, but the boredom of being unemployed. It could conceivably produce an appropriate decorative effect at a carnival or in a night club on New Year’s Eve, but it has no relation to art.

Such attempts, however, can be classified as anti-art for the following reason: the essence of art is integration, a kind of super-integration in the sense that art deals with man’s widest abstractions, his metaphysics, and thus expands the power of man’s consciousness. The notion of “color symphonies” is a trend in the opposite direction: it is an attempt to disintegrate man’s consciousness and reduce it to a pre-perceptual level by breaking up percepts into mere sensations.

This brings us to the subject of modern art.

If a gang of men—no matter what its slogans, motives or goals—were roaming the streets and gouging out people’s eyes, people would rebel and would find the words of a righteous protest. But when such a gang is roaming the culture, bent on annihilating men’s minds, people remain silent. The words they need can be supplied only by philosophy, but modern philosophy is the sponsor and spawner of that gang.

Man’s mind is much more complex than the best computer, and much more vulnerable. If you have seen a news photograph of brutes smashing a computer, you have seen a physical concretization of the psychological process now going on, which is initiated in the plate-glass windows of art galleries, on the walls of fashionable restaurants and of multibillion-dollar business offices, in the glossy pages of popular magazines, in the technological radiance of movie and television screens.

Decomposition is the postscript to the death of a human body; disintegration is the preface to the death of a human mind. Disintegration is the keynote and goal of modern art—the disintegration of man’s conceptual faculty, and the retrogression of an adult mind to the state of a mewling infant.

To reduce man’s consciousness to the level of sensations, with no capacity to integrate them, is the intention behind the reducing of language to grunts, of literature to “moods,” of painting to smears, of sculpture to slabs, of music to noise.

But there is a philosophically and psychopathologically instructive element in the spectacle of that gutter. It demonstrates—by the negative means of an absence—the relationships of art to philosophy, of reason to man’s survival, of hatred for reason to hatred for existence. After centuries of the philosophers’ war against reason, they have succeeded—by the method of vivisection—in producing exponents of what man is like when deprived of his rational faculty, and these in turn are giving us images of what existence is like to a being with an empty skull.

While the alleged advocates of reason oppose “systembuilding” and haggle apologetically over concrete-bound words or mystically floating abstractions, its enemies seem to know that integration is the psycho-epistemological key to reason, that art is man’s psycho-epistemological conditioner, and that if reason is to be destroyed, it is man’s integrating capacity that has to be destroyed.

It is highly doubtful that the practitioners and admirers of modern art have the intellectual capacity to understand its philosophical meaning; all they need to do is indulge the worst of their subconscious premises. But their leaders do understand the issue consciously: the father of modern art is Immanuel Kant (see his Critique of Judgment).

I do not know which is worse: to practice modern art as a colossal fraud or to do it sincerely.

Those who do not wish to be the passive, silent victims of frauds of this kind, can learn from modern art the practical importance of philosophy, and the consequences of philosophical default. Specifically, it is the destruction of logic that disarmed the victims, and, more specifically, the destruction of definitions. Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.

Works of art—like everything else in the universe—are entities of a specific nature: the concept requires a definition by their essential characteristics, which distinguish them from all other existing entities. The genus of art works is: man-made objects which present a selective re-creation of reality according to the artist’s metaphysical value-judgments, by means of a specific material medium. The species are the works of the various branches of art, defined by the particular media which they employ and which indicate their relation to the various elements of man’s cognitive faculty.

Man’s need of precise definitions rests on the Law of Identity: A is A, a thing is itself. A work of art is a specific entity which possesses a specific nature. If it does not, it is not a work of art. If it is merely a material object, it belongs to some category of material objects—and if it does not belong to any particular category, it belongs to the one reserved for such phenomena: junk.

“Something made by an artist” is not a definition of art. A beard and a vacant stare are not the defining characteristics of an artist.

“Something in a frame hung on a wall” is not a definition of painting.

“Something with a number of pages in a binding” is not a definition of literature.

“Something piled together” is not a definition of sculpture.

“Something made of sounds produced by anything” is not a definition of music.

“Something glued on a flat surface” is not a definition of any art. There is no art that uses glue as a medium. Blades of grass glued on a sheet of paper to represent grass might be good occupational therapy for retarded children—though I doubt it—but it is not art.

“Because I felt like it” is not a definition or validation of anything.

There is no place for whim in any human activity—if it is to be regarded as human. There is no place for the unknowable, the unintelligible, the undefinable, the non-objective in any human product. This side of an insane asylum, the actions of a human being are motivated by a conscious purpose; when they are not, they are of no interest to anyone outside a psychotherapist’s office. And when the practitioners of modern art declare that they don’t know what they are doing or what makes them do it, we should take their word for it and give them no further consideration.

(April-June 1971)

5.

Basic Principles of Literature

THE MOST important principle of the esthetics of literature was formulated by Aristotle, who said that fiction is of greater philosophical importance than history, because “history represents things as they are, while fiction represents them as they might be and ought to be.”

This applies to all forms of literature and most particularly to a form that did not come into existence until twenty-three centuries later: the novel.

A novel is a long, fictional story about human beings and the events of their lives. The four essential attributes of a novel are: Theme—Plot—Characterization—Style.

These are attributes, not separable parts. They can be isolated conceptually for purposes of study, but one must always remember that they are interrelated and that a novel is their sum. (If it is a good novel, it is an indivisible sum.)

These four attributes pertain to all forms of literature, i.e., of fiction, with one exception. They pertain to novels, plays, scenarios, librettos, short stories. The single exception is poems. A poem does not have to tell a story; its basic attributes are theme and style.

A novel is the major literary form—in respect to its scope, its inexhaustible potentiality, its almost unlimited freedom (including the freedom from physical limitations of the kind that restrict a stage play) and, most importantly, in respect to the fact that a novel is a purely literary form of art which does not require the intermediary of the performing arts to achieve its ultimate effect.

I shall discuss the four major attributes of a novel, but I shall ask you to remember that the same basic principles apply, with appropriate qualifications, to the other literary forms.

1. Theme. A theme is the summation of a novel’s abstract meaning. For instance, the theme of Atlas Shrugged is: “The role of the mind in man’s existence.” The theme of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is: “The injustice of society toward its lower classes.” The theme of Gone With the Wind is: “The impact of the Civil War on Southern society.”

A theme may be specifically philosophical or it may be a narrower generalization. It may present a certain moral-philosophical position or a purely historical view, such as the portrayal of a certain society in a certain era. There are no rules or restrictions on the choice of a theme, provided it is communicable in the form of a novel. But if a novel has no discernible theme—if its events add up to nothing—it is a bad novel; its flaw is lack of integration.

Louis H. Sullivan’s famous principle of architecture, “Form follows function,” can be translated into: “Form follows purpose.” The theme of a novel defines its purpose. The theme sets the writer’s standard of selection, directing the innumerable choices he has to make and serving as the integrator of the novel.

Since a novel is a re-creation of reality, its theme has to be dramatized, i.e., presented in terms of action. Life is a process of action. The entire content of man’s consciousness—thought, knowledge, ideas, values—has only one ultimate form of expression: in his actions; and only one ultimate purpose: to guide his actions. Since the theme of a novel is an idea about or pertaining to human existence, it is in terms of its effects on or expression in human actions that that idea has to be presented.

This leads to the crucial attribute of a novel—the plot.

2. Plot. To present a story in terms of action means: to present it in terms of events. A story in which nothing happens is not a story. A story whose events are haphazard and accidental is either an inept conglomeration or, at best, a chronicle, a memoir, a reportorial recording, not a novel.

A chronicle, real or invented, may possess certain values; but these values are primarily informative—historical or sociological or psychological—not primarily esthetic or literary; they are only partly literary. Since art is a selective re-creation and since events are the building blocks of a novel, a writer who fails to exercise selectivity in regard to events defaults on the most important aspect of his art.

The means of exercising that selectivity and of integrating the events of a story is the plot.

A plot is a purposeful progression of logically connected events leading to the resolution of a climax.

The word “purposeful” in this definition has two applications: it applies to the author and to the characters of a novel. It demands that the author devise a logical structure of events, a sequence in which every major event is connected with, determined by and proceeds from the preceding events of the story—a sequence in which nothing is irrelevant, arbitrary or accidental, so that the logic of the events leads inevitably to a final resolution.

Such a sequence cannot be constructed unless the main characters of the novel are engaged in the pursuit of some purpose—unless they are motivated by some goals that direct their actions. In real life, only a process of final causation—i.e., the process of choosing a goal, then taking the steps to achieve it—can give logical continuity, coherence and meaning to a man’s actions. Only men striving to achieve a purpose can move through a meaningful series of events.

Contrary to the prevalent literary doctrines of today, it is realism that demands a plot structure in a novel. All human actions are goal-directed, consciously or subconsciously; purposelessness is contrary to man’s nature: it is a state of neurosis. Therefore, if one is to present man as he is—as he is metaphysically, by his nature, in reality—one has to present him in goal-directed action.

The Naturalists object that a plot is an artificial contrivance, because in “real life” events do not fall into a logical pattern. That claim depends on the observer’s viewpoint, in the literal sense of the word “viewpoint.” A nearsighted man standing two feet away from the wall of a house and staring at it, would declare that the map of the city’s streets is an artificial, invented contrivance. That is not what an airplane pilot would say, flying two thousand feet above the city. The events of men’s lives follow the logic of men’s premises and values—as one can observe if one looks past the range of the immediate moment, past the trivial irrelevancies, repetitions and routines of daily living, and sees the essentials, the turning points, the direction of a man’s life. And, from that viewpoint, one can also observe that the accidents or disasters, which interfere with or defeat human goals, are a minor and marginal, not a major and determining, element in the course of human existence.

The Naturalists object that most men do not lead purposeful lives. But it has been said that if a writer writes about dull people, he does not have to be dull. In the same way, if a writer writes about purposeless people, his story structure does not have to be purposeless (provided some of his characters do have a purpose).

The Naturalists object that the events of men’s lives are inconclusive, diffuse and seldom fall into the clear-cut, dramatic situations required by a plot structure. This is predominantly true—and this is the chief esthetic argument against the Naturalist position. Art is a selective re-creation of reality, its means are evaluative abstractions, its task is the concretization of metaphysical essentials. To isolate and bring into clear focus, into a single issue or a single scene, the essence of a conflict which, in “real life,” might be atomized and scattered over a lifetime in the form of meaningless clashes, to condense a long, steady drizzle of buckshot into the explosion of a blockbuster—that is the highest, hardest and most demanding function of art. To default on that function is to default on the essence of art and to engage in child’s play along its periphery.

For example: most men have inner conflicts of values; these conflicts, in most lives, take the form of small irrationalities, petty inconsistencies, mean little evasions, shabby little acts of cowardice, with no crucial moments of choice, no vital issues or great, decisive battles—and they add up to the stagnant, wasted life of a man who has betrayed all his values by the method of a leaking faucet. Compare that to Gail Wynand’s conflict of values in regard to Howard Roark’s trial in The Fountainhead—and decide which, esthetically, is the right way to present the ravages of a conflict of values.

From the aspect of universality as an important attribute of art, I will add that Gail Wynand’s conflict, being a wide abstraction, can be reduced in scale and made applicable to the value-conflicts of a grocery clerk. But the value-conflicts of a grocery clerk cannot be made applicable to Gail Wynand, nor even to another grocery clerk.

The plot of a novel serves the same function as the steel skeleton of a skyscraper: it determines the use, placement and distribution of all the other elements. Matters such as number of characters, background, descriptions, conversations, introspective passages, etc. have to be determined by what the plot can carry, i.e., have to be integrated with the events and contribute to the progression of the story. Just as one cannot pile extraneous weight or ornamentation on a building without regard for the strength of its skeleton, so one cannot burden a novel with irrelevancies without regard for its plot. The penalty, in both cases, is the same: the collapse of the structure.

If the characters of a novel engage in lengthy abstract discussions of their ideas, but their ideas do not affect their actions or the events of the story, it is a bad novel. An example of that kind is The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Its characters periodically interrupt the story to philosophize about life, after which the story—or lack of it—goes on.

A related, though somewhat different, example of a bad novel is An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser. Here, the author attempts to give significance to a trite story by tacking on to it a theme which is not related to or demonstrated by its events. The events deal with an age-old subject: the romantic problem of a rotten little weakling who murders his pregnant sweetheart, a working girl, in order to attempt to marry a rich heiress. The alleged theme, according to the author’s assertions, is: “The evil of capitalism.”

In judging a novel, one must take the events as expressing its meaning, because it is the events that present what the story is about. No amount of esoteric discussions on transcendental topics, attached to a novel in which nothing happens except “boy meets girl,” will transform it into anything other than “boy meets girl.”

This leads to a cardinal principle of good fiction: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated—as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.

The link between the theme and the events of a novel is an element which I call the plot-theme. It is the first step of the translation of an abstract theme into a story, without which the construction of a plot would be impossible. A “plot-theme” is the central conflict or “situation” of a story—a conflict in terms of action, corresponding to the theme and complex enough to create a purposeful progression of events.

The theme of a novel is the core of its abstract meaning—the plot-theme is the core of its events.

For example, the theme of Atlas Shrugged is: “The role of the mind in man’s existence.” The plot-theme is: “The men of the mind going on strike against an altruist-collectivist society.”

The theme of Les Misérables is: “The injustice of society toward its lower classes.” The plot-theme is: “The life-long flight of an ex-convict from the pursuit of a ruthless representative of the law.”

The theme of Gone With the Wind is: “The impact of the Civil War on Southern society.” The plot-theme is: “The romantic conflict of a woman who loves a man representing the old order, and is loved by another man, representing the new.” (Margaret Mitchell’s skill, in this novel, lies in the fact that the developments of the romantic triangle are determined by the events of the Civil War and involve, in a single plot structure, other characters who are representative of the various levels of Southern society.)

The integration of an important theme with a complex plot structure is the most difficult achievement possible to a writer, and the rarest. Its great masters are Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky. If you wish to see literary art at its highest, study the manner in which the events of their novels proceed from, express, illustrate and dramatize their themes: the integration is so perfect that no other events could have conveyed the theme, and no other theme could have created the events.

(I must mention, parenthetically, that Victor Hugo interrupts his stories to insert historical essays dealing with various aspects of his subject. It is a very bad literary error, but it was a convention shared by many writers of the nineteenth century. It does not detract from Hugo’s achievement, because these essays can be omitted without affecting the structure of the novels. And, although they do not properly belong in a novel, these essays, as such, are brilliant literarily.)

Since a plot is the dramatization of goal-directed action, it has to be based on conflict; it may be one character’s inner conflict or a conflict of goals and values between two or more characters. Since goals are not achieved automatically, the dramatization of a purposeful pursuit has to include obstacles; it has to involve a clash, a struggle—an action struggle, but not a purely physical one. Since art is a concretization of values, there are not many errors as bad esthetically—or as dull—as fist fights, chases, escapes and other forms of physical action, divorced from any psychological conflict or intellectual value-meaning. Physical action, as such, is not a plot nor a substitute for a plot—as many bad writers attempt to make it, particularly in today’s television dramas.

This is the other side of the mind-body dichotomy that plagues literature. Ideas or psychological states divorced from action do not constitute a story—and neither does physical action divorced from ideas and values.

Since the nature of an action is determined by the nature of the entities that act, the action of a novel has to proceed from and be consistent with the nature of its characters. This leads to the third major attribute of a novel—

3. Characterization. Characterization is the portrayal of those essential traits which form the unique, distinctive personality of an individual human being.

Characterization requires an extreme degree of selectivity. A human being is the most complex entity on earth; a writer’s task is to select the essentials out of that enormous complexity, then proceed to create an individual figure, endowing it with all the appropriate details down to the telling small touches needed to give it full reality. That figure has to be an abstraction, yet look like a concrete; it has to have the universality of an abstraction and, simultaneously, the unrepeatable uniqueness of a person.

In real life, we have only two sources of information about the character of the people around us: we judge them by what they do and by what they say (particularly the first). Similarly, characterization in a novel can be achieved only by two major means: action and dialogue. Descriptive passages dealing with a character’s appearance, manner, etc. can contribute to a characterization; so can introspective passages dealing with a character’s thoughts and feelings; so can the comments of other characters. But all these are merely auxiliary means, which are of no value without the two pillars: action and dialogue. To re-create the reality of a character, one must show what he does and what he says.

One of the worst errors that a writer can make in the field of characterization is to assert the nature of his characters in narrative passages, with no evidence to support his assertions in the characters’ actions. For instance, if an author keeps telling us that his hero is “virtuous,” “benevolent,” “sensitive,” “heroic,” but the hero does nothing except that he loves the heroine, smiles at the neighbors, contemplates the sunset and votes for the Democratic Party—the result can hardly be called characterization.

A writer, like any other artist, must present an evaluative re-creation of reality, not merely assert his evaluations without any image of reality. In the field of characterization, one action is worth a thousand adjectives.

Characterization requires the portrayal of essential traits. Now what are the essentials of a man’s character?

What do we mean, in real life, when we say that we do not understand a person? We mean that we do not understand why he acts as he does. And when we say that we know a person well, we mean that we understand his actions and know what to expect of him. What is it that we know? His motivation.

Motivation is a key-concept in psychology and in fiction. It is a man’s basic premises and values that form his character and move him to action—and in order to understand a man’s character, it is the motivation behind his actions that we must understand. To know “what makes a man tick,” we must ask: “What is he after?”

To re-create the reality of his characters, to make both their nature and their actions intelligible, it is their motivation that a writer has to reveal. He may do it gradually, revealing it bit by bit, building up the evidence as the story progresses, but at the end of the novel the reader must know why the characters did the things they did.

The depth of a characterization depends on the psychological level of motivation which a writer regards as sufficient to illuminate human behavior. For instance, in an average detective story, the criminals are motivated by the superficial notion of “material greed”—but a novel such as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment reveals the soul of a criminal all the way down to his philosophical premises.

Consistency is a major requirement of characterization. This does not mean that a character has to hold nothing but consistent premises—some of the most interesting characters in fiction are men torn by inner conflicts. It means that the author has to be consistent in his view of a character’s psychology and permit him no inexplicable actions, no actions unprepared by or contradictory to the rest of his characterization. It means that a character’s contradictions should never be unintentional on the part of the author.

To maintain the inner logic of his characterizations, a writer must understand the logical chain that leads from the motives of his characters to their actions. To maintain their motivational consistency, he must know their basic premises and the key actions to which these premises will lead them in the course of the story. When he writes the actual scenes in which the characters appear, their premises act as the selectors of all the details and small touches he decides to include. Such details are innumerable, the opportunities for revealing a character’s nature are virtually inexhaustible, and it is the knowledge of what he has to reveal that guides the writer’s selections.

The best way to demonstrate what the process of characterization accomplishes, the means by which it is done, and the disastrous consequences of contradictions, is to illustrate it in action on a specific example.

I shall do it by means of two scenes reproduced below: one is a scene from The Fountainhead, as it stands in the novel—the other is the same scene, as I rewrote it for the purpose of this demonstration. Both versions present only the bare skeleton of the scene, only the dialogue, omitting the descriptive passages. It will be sufficient to illustrate the process.

It is the first scene in which Howard Roark and Peter Keating appear together. It takes place on the evening of the day when Roark was expelled from college and Keating graduated with high honors. The action of the scene consists of one young man asking the advice of another about a professional choice he has to make. But what kind of young men are they? What are their attitudes, premises and motives? Observe what one can learn from a single scene and how much your, the reader’s, mind registers automatically.

Here is the scene as originally written, as it stands in the novel:

“Congratulations, Peter,” said Roark.

“Oh . . . Oh, thanks . . . I mean . . . do you know or . . . Has mother been telling you?”

“She has.”

“She shouldn’t have!”

“Why not?”

“Look, Howard, you know that I’m terribly sorry about your being . . .”

“Forget it.”

“I . . . there’s something I want to speak to you about, Howard, to ask your advice. Mind if I sit down?”

“What is it?”

“You won’t think that it’s awful of me to be asking about my business, when you’ve just been . . . ?”

“I said forget about that. What is it?”

“You know, I’ve often thought that you’re crazy. But I know that you know many things about it—architecture, I mean—which those fools never knew. And I know that you love it as they never will.”

“Well?”

“Well, I don’t know why I should come to you, but—Howard, I’ve never said it before, but you see, I’d rather have your opinion on things than the Dean’s— I’d probably follow the Dean’s, but it’s just that yours means more to me myself, I don’t know why. I don’t know why I’m saying this, either.”

“Come on, you’re not being afraid of me, are you? What do you want to ask about?”

“It’s about my scholarship. The Paris prize I got.”

“Yes?”

“It’s for four years. But, on the other hand, Guy Francon offered me a job with him some time ago. Today he said it’s still open. And I don’t know which to take.”

“If you want my advice, Peter, you’ve made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don’t you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?”

“You see, that’s what I admire about you, Howard.

You always know.”

“Drop the compliments.”

“But I mean it. How do you always manage to decide?”

“How can you let others decide for you?”

This was the scene as it stands in the novel. Now here is the same scene, rewritten:

“Congratulations, Peter,” said Roark.

“Oh . . . Oh, thanks . . . I mean . . . do you know or . . . Has mother been telling you?”

“She has.”

“She shouldn’t have!”

“Oh well, I didn’t mind it.”

“Look, Howard, you know that I’m terribly sorry about your being expelled.”

“Thank you, Peter.”

“I . . . there’s something I want to speak to you about, Howard, to ask your advice. Mind if I sit down?”

“Go right ahead. I’ll be glad to help you, if I can.”

“You won’t think that it’s awful of me to be asking about my business, when you’ve just been expelled?”

“No. But it’s nice of you to say that, Peter. I appreciate it.”

“You know, I’ve often thought that you’re crazy.”

“Why?”

“Well, the kind of ideas you’ve got about architecture—there’s nobody that’s ever agreed with you, nobody of importance, not the Dean, not any of the professors . . . and they know their business. They’re always right. I don’t know why I should come to you.”

“Well, there are many different opinions in the world. What did you want to ask me?”

“It’s about my scholarship. The Paris prize I got.”

“Personally, I wouldn’t like it. But I know it’s important to you.”

“It’s for four years. But, on the other hand, Guy Francon offered me a job with him some time ago. Today he said it’s still open. And I don’t know which to take.”

“If you want my advice, Peter, take the job with Guy Francon. I don’t care for his work, but he’s a very prominent architect and you’ll learn how to build.”

“You see, that’s what I admire about you, Howard. You always know how to decide.”

“I try my best.”

“How do you do it?”

“I guess I just do it.”

“But you see, I’m not sure, Howard. I’m never sure of myself. You always are.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. But I guess I’m sure about my work.”

This is an example of “humanizing” a character.

A young reader to whom I showed this scene said with astonished indignation: “He’s not awful—he’s just completely ordinary!”

Let us analyze what the two scenes have conveyed. In the original scene, Roark is impervious to Keating’s or the world’s view of his expulsion. He does not even conceive of any “comparative standard,” of any relation between his expulsion and Keating’s success.

Roark is courteous to Keating, but completely indifferent.

Roark relents and shows a touch of friendliness only when Keating acknowledges his respect for Roark’s architectural ideas and only when Keating shows an earnest sincerity.

Roark’s advice to Keating about independence shows the generosity of taking Keating’s problem seriously—Roark gives him advice, not about a specific choice, but about a crucial basic principle. The essence of the difference between their fundamental premises is focused in two lines of dialogue. Keating: “How do you always manage to decide?”—Roark: “How can you let others decide for you?”

In the rewritten scene, Roark accepts the standards of Keating and his mother—the estimate of his expulsion as disaster and of Keating’s graduation as triumph—but he is generously tolerant about it.

Roark shows interest in Keating’s future and eagerness to help him.

Roark accepts the charity of Keating’s condolences.

At Keating’s insulting comment on his ideas, Roark shows concern by asking: “Why?”

Roark shows a tolerant respect for all differences of opinion, thus confessing a non-objective, relativistic view of ideas and values.

Roark gives Keating specific advice about his choice, finding nothing wrong in Keating’s reliance on another man’s judgment.

Roark is modest about his self-confidence and tries to minimize it. He does not hold self-confidence as a major virtue, he sees no wider principle, no reason why he should be confident in issues other than his work. Thus he indicates that he is merely a superficial, concrete-bound professional man, who might have some integrity in regard to his work, but no wider concept of integrity, no wider principles, no philosophical convictions or values.

If Roark were that type of man, he would not be able to withstand for more than a year or two the kind of battle he had to fight for the next eighteen years; nor would he be able to win it. If that rewritten scene were used in the novel, instead of the original scene (with a few other “softening” touches to match it), none of the subsequent events of the story would make sense, Roark’s later actions would become incomprehensible, unjustifiable, psychologically impossible, his characterization would fall apart, and so would the story, and so would the novel.

Now it should be clear why the major elements of a novel are attributes, not separable parts, and in what manner they are interrelated. The theme of a novel can be conveyed only through the events of the plot, the events of the plot depend on the characterization of the men who enact them—and the characterization cannot be achieved except through the events of the plot, and the plot cannot be constructed without a theme.

This is the kind of integration required by the nature of a novel. And this is why a good novel is an indivisible sum: every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.

There is no rule about which of these three attributes should come first to a writer’s mind and initiate the process of constructing a novel. A writer may begin by choosing a theme, then translate it into the appropriate plot and the kind of characters needed to enact it. Or he may begin by thinking of a plot, that is, a plot-theme, then determine the characters he needs and define the abstract meaning his story will necessarily imply. Or he may begin by projecting certain characters, then determine what conflicts their motives will lead to, what events will result, and what will be the story’s ultimate meaning. It does not matter where a writer begins, provided he knows that all three attributes have to unite into so well integrated a sum that no starting point can be discerned.

As to the fourth major attribute of a novel, the style, it is the means by which the other three are presented.

4. Style. The subject of style is so complex that it cannot be covered in a single discussion. I shall merely indicate a few essentials.

A literary style has two fundamental elements (each subsuming a large number of lesser categories): the “choice of content” and the “choice of words.” By “choice of content” I mean those aspects of a given passage (whether description, narrative or dialogue) which a writer chooses to communicate (and which involve the consideration of what to include or to omit). By “choice of words” I mean the particular words and sentence structures a writer uses to communicate them.

For instance, when a writer describes a beautiful woman, his stylistic “choice of content” will determine whether he mentions (or stresses) her face or body or manner of moving or facial expression, etc.; whether the details he includes are essential and significant or accidental and irrelevant; whether he presents them in terms of facts or of evaluations; etc. His “choice of words” will convey the emotional implications or connotations, the value-slanting, of the particular content he has chosen to communicate. (He will achieve a different effect if he describes a woman as “slender” or “thin” or “svelte” or “lanky,” etc.)

Let us compare the literary style of two excerpts from two different novels, reproduced below. Both are descriptions of the same subject: New York City at night. Observe which one of them re-creates the visual reality of a specific scene, and which one deals with vague, emotional assertions and floating abstractions.

First excerpt:

Nobody ever walked across the bridge, not on a night like this. The rain was misty enough to be almost fog-like, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy, yellow lights off in the distance.

Some place over there I had left my car and started walking, burying my head in the collar of my raincoat, with the night pulled in around me like a blanket. I walked and I smoked and I flipped the spent butts ahead of me and watched them arch to the pavement and fizzle out with one last wink.

Second excerpt:

That hour, that moment, and that place struck with a peerless co-incision upon the very heart of his own youth, the crest and zenith of his own desire. The city had never seemed as beautiful as it looked that night. For the first time he saw that New York was supremely, among the cities of the world, the city of the night. There had been achieved here a loveliness that was astounding and incomparable, a kind of modern beauty, inherent to its place and time, that no other place nor time could match. He realized suddenly that the beauty of other cities of the night—of Paris spread below one from the butte of Sacré-Coeur, in its vast, mysterious blossoms of nocturnal radiance; of London with its smoky nimbus of fogged light, which was so peculiarly thrilling because it was so vast, so lost in the illimitable—had each its special quality, so lovely and mysterious, but had yet produced no beauty that could equal this.

The first excerpt is by Mickey Spillane, from his novel One Lonely Night. The second excerpt is by Thomas Wolfe, from his novel The Web and the Rock.

Both writers had to re-create a visual scene and convey a certain mood. Observe the difference in their methods. There is not a single emotional word or adjective in Spillane’s description; he presents nothing save visual facts; but he selects only those facts, only those eloquent details, which convey the visual reality of the scene and create a mood of desolate loneliness. Wolfe does not describe the city; he does not give us a single characteristic visual detail. He asserts that the city is “beautiful,” but does not tell us what makes it beautiful. Such words as “beautiful,” “astounding,” “incomparable,” “thrilling,” “lovely” are estimates; in the absence of any indication of what aroused these estimates, they are arbitrary assertions and meaningless generalities.

Spillane’s style is reality-oriented and addressed to an objective psycho-epistemology: he provides the facts and expects the reader to react accordingly. Wolfe’s style is emotion-oriented and addressed to a subjective psycho-epistemology: he expects the reader to accept emotions divorced from facts, and to accept them second-hand.

Spillane has to be read in full focus, because the reader’s own mind has to estimate the given facts and evoke an appropriate emotion; if one reads him out of focus, one gets nothing—there are no loose, ready-made generalizations, no pre-digested emotions. If one reads Wolfe out of focus, one gets a vague, grandiloquent approximation, suggesting that he has said something important or uplifting; if one reads him in full focus, one sees that he has said nothing.

These are not the only attributes of a literary style. I have used these examples only to indicate some very broad categories. A great many other elements are involved in these two excerpts and in any piece of writing. Style is the most complex aspect of literature and, psychologically, the most revealing.

But style is not an end in itself, it is only a means to an end—the means of telling a story. The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.

The typical literary product of such writers—and of their imitators, who possess no style—are so-called “mood-studies,” popular among today’s literati, which are little pieces conveying nothing but a certain mood. Such pieces are not an art-form, they are merely finger-exercises that never develop into art.

Art is a re-creation of reality, which can and does affect a reader’s mood; this, however, is merely one of the by-products of art. But the attempt to affect the reader’s mood, by-passing any meaningful re-creation of reality, is an attempt to divorce consciousness from existence—to make consciousness, not reality, the focal point of art, to regard a momentary emotion, a mood, as an end in itself.

Observe that a modern painter offers some smears of paint over a crudely inept drawing and boasts about his “color-harmonies”—while to a real painter color-harmony is only one of the means he has to master for the achievement of a much more complex and important end. Similarly, a modern writer offers some evocative sentences, adding up to a trivial vignette, and boasts about the “mood” he has created—while to a real writer the re-creation of a mood is only one of the means he has to master for the achievement of such complex elements as theme, plot, characterization, which have to be integrated into so gigantic an end as a novel.

This particular issue is an eloquent illustration of the relationship between philosophy and art. Just as modern philosophy is dominated by the attempt to destroy the conceptual level of man’s consciousness and even the perceptual level, reducing man’s awareness to mere sensations—so modern art and literature are dominated by the attempt to disintegrate man’s consciousness and reduce it to mere sensations, to the “enjoyment” of meaningless colors, noises and moods.

The art of any given period or culture is a faithful mirror of that culture’s philosophy. If you see obscene, dismembered monstrosities leering at you from today’s esthetic mirrors—the aborted creations of mediocrity, irrationality and panic—you are seeing the embodied, concretized reality of the philosophical premises that dominate today’s culture. Only in this sense can those manifestations be called “art”—not by the intention or accomplishment of their perpetrators, but only by grace of the fact that even in usurping the field of art, one cannot escape from its revelatory power.

It is a frightening sight, but it has a certain didactic value: those who do not wish to surrender their future to the mercy and power of unfocused gargoyles, can learn from them what swamp is their breeding ground and what disinfectant is needed to fight them. The swamp is modern philosophy; the disinfectant is reason.

(July-August 1968)

6.

What Is Romanticism?

ROMANTICISM is a category of art based on the recognition of the principle that man possesses the faculty of volition.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments. An artist re-creates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man and of existence. In forming a view of man’s nature, a fundamental question one must answer is whether man possesses the faculty of volition—because one’s conclusions and evaluations in regard to all the characteristics, requirements and actions of man depend on the answer.

Their opposite answers to this question constitute the respective basic premises of two broad categories of art: Romanticism, which recognizes the existence of man’s volition—and Naturalism, which denies it.

In the field of literature, the logical consequences of these basic premises (whether held consciously or subconsciously) determine the form of the key elements of a literary work.

1. If man possesses volition, then the crucial aspect of his life is his choice of values—if he chooses values, then he must act to gain and/or keep them—if so, then he must set his goals and engage in purposeful action to achieve them. The literary form expressing the essence of such action is the plot. (A plot is a purposeful progression of logically connected events leading to the resolution of a climax.)

The faculty of volition operates in regard to the two fundamental aspects of man’s life: consciousness and existence, i.e., his psychological action and his existential action, i.e., the formation of his own character and the course of action he pursues in the physical world. Therefore, in a literary work, both the characterizations and the events are to be created by the author, according to his view of the role of values in human psychology and existence (and according to the code of values he holds to be right). His characters are abstract projections, not reproductions of concretes; they are invented conceptually, not copied reportorially from the particular individuals he might have observed. The specific characters of particular individuals are merely the evidence of their particular value-choices and have no wider metaphysical significance (except as material for the study of the general principles of human psychology); they do not exhaust man’s characterological potential.

2. If man does not possess volition, then his life and his character are determined by forces beyond his control—if so, then the choice of values is impossible to him—if so, then such values as he appears to hold are only an illusion, predetermined by the forces he has no power to resist—if so, then he is impotent to achieve his goals or to engage in purposeful action—and if he attempts the illusion of such action, he will be defeated by those forces, and his failure (or occasional success) will have no relation to his actions. The literary form expressing the essence of this view is plotlessness (since there can be no purposeful progression of events, no logical continuity, no resolution, no climax).

If man’s character and the course of his life are the product of unknown (or unknowable) forces, then, in a literary work, both the characterizations and the events are not to be invented by the author, but are to be copied from such particular characters and events as he has observed. Since he denies the existence of any effective motivational principle in human psychology, he cannot create his characters conceptually. He can only observe the people he meets, as he observes inanimate objects, and reproduce them—in the implicit hope that some clue to the unknown forces controlling human destiny may be discovered in such reproductions.

These basic premises of Romanticism and Naturalism (the volition or anti-volition premise) affect all the other aspects of a literary work, such as the choice of theme and the quality of the style, but it is the nature of the story structure—the attribute of plot or plotlessness—that represents the most important difference between them and serves as the main distinguishing characteristic for classifying a given work in one category or the other.

This is not to say that a writer identifies and applies all the consequences of his basic premise by a conscious process of thought. Art is the product of a man’s subconscious integrations, of his sense of life, to a larger extent than of his conscious philosophical convictions. Even the choice of the basic premise may be subconscious—since artists, like any other men, seldom translate their sense of life into conscious terms. And, since an artist’s sense of life may be as full of contradictions as that of any other man, these contradictions become apparent in his work; the dividing line between Romanticism and Naturalism is not always maintained consistently in every aspect of every given work of art (particularly since one of these basic premises is false). But if one surveys the field of art and studies the works produced, one will observe that the degree of consistency in the consequences of these two basic premises is a remarkably eloquent demonstration of the power of metaphysical premises in the realm of art.

With very rare (and partial) exceptions, Romanticism is non-existent in today’s literature. This is not astonishing when one considers the crushing weight of the philosophical wreckage under which generations of men have been brought up—a wreckage dominated by the doctrines of irrationalism and determinism. In their formative years, young people could not find much evidence on which to develop a rational, benevolent, value-oriented sense of life, neither in philosophical theory nor in its cultural echoes nor in the daily practice of the passively deteriorating society around them.

But observe the psychological symptoms of an unrecognized, unidentified issue: the virulently intense antagonism of today’s esthetic spokesmen to any manifestation of the Romantic premise in art. It is particularly the attribute of plot in literature that arouses an impassioned hostility among them—a hostility with deeply personal overtones, too violent for a mere issue of literary canons. If plot were a negligible and inappropriate element of literature, as they claim it to be, why the hysterical hatred in their denunciations? This type of reaction pertains to metaphysical issues, i.e., to issues that threaten the foundations of a person’s entire view of life (if that view is irrational). What they sense in a plot structure is the implicit premise of volition (and, therefore, of moral values). The same reaction, for the same subconscious reason, is evoked by such elements as heroes or happy endings or the triumph of virtue, or, in the visual arts, beauty. Physical beauty is not a moral or volitional issue—but the choice to paint a beautiful human being rather than an ugly one, implies the existence of volition: of choice, standards, values.

The destruction of Romanticism in esthetics—like the destruction of individualism in ethics or of capitalism in politics—was made possible by philosophical default. It is one more demonstration of the principle that that which is not known explicitly is not in man’s conscious control. In all three cases, the nature of the fundamental values involved had never been defined explicitly, the issues were fought in terms of non-essentials, and the values were destroyed by men who did not know what they were losing or why.

This was the predominant pattern of issues in the field of esthetics, which, throughout history, has been a virtual monopoly of mysticism. The definition of Romanticism given here is mine—it is not a generally known or accepted one. There is no generally accepted definition of Romanticism (nor of any key element in art, nor of art itself).

Romanticism is a product of the nineteenth century—a (largely subconscious) result of two great influences: Aristotelianism, which liberated man by validating the power of his mind—and capitalism, which gave man’s mind the freedom to translate ideas into practice (the second of these influences was itself the result of the first). But while the practical consequences of Aristotelianism were reaching men’s daily existence, its theoretical influence was long since gone: philosophy, since the Renaissance, had been retrogressing overwhelmingly to the mysticism of Plato. Thus the historically unprecedented events of the nineteenth century—the Industrial Revolution, the child-prodigy speed in the growth of science, the skyrocketing standard of living, the liberated torrent of human energy—were left without intellectual direction or evaluation. The nineteenth century was guided, not by an Aristotelian philosophy, but by an Aristotelian sense of life. (And, like a brilliantly violent adolescent who fails to translate his sense of life into conscious terms, it burned itself out, choked by the blind confusions of its own overpowering energy.)

Whatever their conscious convictions, the artists of that century’s great new school—the Romanticists—picked their sense of life out of the cultural atmosphere: it was an atmosphere of men intoxicated by the discovery of freedom, with all the ancient strongholds of tyranny—of church, state, monarchy, feudalism—crumbling around them, with unlimited roads opening in all directions and no barriers set to their newly unleashed energy. It was an atmosphere best expressed by that century’s naive, exuberant and tragically blind belief that human progress, from here on, was to be irresistible and automatic.

Esthetically, the Romanticists were the great rebels and innovators of the nineteenth century. But, in their conscious convictions, they were for the most part anti-Aristotelian and leaning toward a kind of wild, freewheeling mysticism. They did not see their own rebellion in fundamental terms; they were rebelling—in the name of the individual artist’s freedom—not against determinism, but, much more superficially, against the esthetic “Establishment” of the time: against Classicism.

Classicism (an example of a much deeper superficiality) was a school that had devised a set of arbitrary, concretely detailed rules purporting to represent the final and absolute criteria of esthetic value. In literature, these rules consisted of specific edicts, loosely derived from the Greek (and French) tragedies, which prescribed every formal aspect of a play (such as the unity of time, place and action) down to the number of acts and the number of verses permitted to a character in every act. Some of that stuff was based on Aristotle’s esthetics and can serve as an example of what happens when concrete-bound mentalities, seeking to by-pass the responsibility of thought, attempt to transform abstract principles into concrete prescriptions and to replace creation with imitation. (For an example of Classicism that survived well into the twentieth century, I refer you to the architectural dogmas represented by Howard Roark’s antagonists in The Fountainhead.)

Even though the Classicists had no answer to why their rules were to be accepted as valid (except the usual appeal to tradition, to scholarship and to the prestige of antiquity), this school was regarded as the representative of reason.(!)

Such were the roots of one of the grimmest ironies in cultural history: the early attempts to define the nature of Romanticism declared it to be an esthetic school based on the primacy of emotions—as against the champions of the primacy of reason, which were the Classicists (and, later, the Naturalists). In various forms, this definition has persisted to our day. It is an example of the intellectually disastrous consequences of definitions by non-essentials—and an example of the penalty one pays for a non-philosophical approach to cultural phenomena.

One can observe the misapprehended element of truth that gave rise to that early classification. What the Romanticists brought to art was the primacy of values, an element that had been missing in the stale, arid, third-and fourth-hand (and rate) repetitions of the Classicists’ formula-copying. Values (and value-judgments) are the source of emotions; a great deal of emotional intensity was projected in the work of the Romanticists and in the reactions of their audiences, as well as a great deal of color, imagination, originality, excitement and all the other consequences of a value-oriented view of life. This emotional element was the most easily perceivable characteristic of the new movement and it was taken as its defining characteristic, without deeper inquiry.

Such issues as the fact that the primacy of values in human life is not an irreducible primary, that it rests on man’s faculty of volition, and, therefore, that the Romanticists, philosophically, were the champions of volition (which is the root of values) and not of emotions (which are merely the consequences)—were issues to be defined by philosophers, who defaulted in regard to esthetics as they did in regard to every other crucial aspect of the nineteenth century.

The still deeper issue, the fact that the faculty of reason is the faculty of volition, was not known at the time, and the various theories of free will were for the most part of an anti-rational character, thus reinforcing the association of volition with mysticism.

The Romanticists saw their cause primarily as a battle for their right to individuality and—unable to grasp the deepest metaphysical justification of their cause, unable to identify their values in terms of reason—they fought for individuality in terms of feelings, surrendering the banner of reason to their enemies.

There were other, lesser consequences of this fundamental error, all of them symptoms of the intellectual confusion of the age. Groping blindly for a metaphysically oriented, grand-scale, exalted way of life, the Romanticists, predominantly, were enemies of capitalism, which they regarded as a prosaic, materialistic, “petty bourgeois” system—never realizing that it was the only system that could make freedom, individuality and the pursuit of values possible in practice. Some of them chose to be advocates of socialism; some turned for inspiration to the Middle Ages and became shameless glamorizers of that nightmare era; some ended up where most champions of the non-rational end up: in religion. All of it served to accelerate Romanticism’s growing break with reality.

When, in the later half of the nineteenth century, Naturalism rose to prominence and, assuming the mantle of reason and reality, proclaimed the artists’ duty to portray “things as they are”—Romanticism did not have much of an opposition to offer.

It must be noted that philosophers contributed to the confusion surrounding the term “Romanticism.” They attached the name “Romantic” to certain philosophers (such as Schelling and Schopenhauer) who were avowed mystics advocating the supremacy of emotions, instincts or will over reason. This movement in philosophy had no significant relation to Romanticism in esthetics, and the two movements must not be confused. The common nomenclature, however, is significant in one respect: it indicates the depth of the confusion on the subject of volition. The “Romantic” philosophers’ theories were a viciously malevolent, existence-hating attempt to uphold volition in the name of whim worship, while the esthetic Romanticists were groping blindly to uphold volition in the name of man’s life and values here, on earth. In terms of essentials, the brilliant sunlight of Victor Hugo’s universe is the diametrical opposite of the venomous muck of Schopenhauer’s. It was only philosophical package-dealing that could throw them in the same category. But the issue demonstrates the profound importance of the subject of volition, and the grotesque distortions it assumes when men are unable to grasp its nature. This issue may also serve as an illustration of the importance of establishing that volition is a function of man’s rational faculty.

In recent times, some literary historians have discarded, as inadequate, the definition of Romanticism as an emotion-oriented school and have attempted to redefine it, but without success. Following the rule of fundamentality, it is as a volition-oriented school that Romanticism must be defined—and it is in terms of this essential characteristic that the nature and history of Romantic literature can be traced and understood.

The (implicit) standards of Romanticism are so demanding that in spite of the abundance of Romantic writers at the time of its dominance, this school has produced very few pure, consistent Romanticists of the top rank. Among novelists, the greatest are Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky, and, as single novels (whose authors were not always consistent in the rest of their works), I would name Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Among playwrights, the greatest are Friedrich Schiller and Edmond Rostand.

The distinguishing characteristic of this top rank (apart from their purely literary genius) is their full commitment to the premise of volition in both of its fundamental areas: in regard to consciousness and to existence, in regard to man’s character and to his actions in the physical world. Maintaining a perfect integration of these two aspects, unmatched in the brilliant ingenuity of their plot structures, these writers are enormously concerned with man’s soul (i.e., his consciousness). They are moralists in the most profound sense of the word; their concern is not merely with values, but specifically with moral values and with the power of moral values in shaping human character. Their characters are “larger than life,” i.e., they are abstract projections in terms of essentials (not always successful projections, as we shall discuss later). In their stories, one will never find action for action’s sake, unrelated to moral values. The events of their plots are shaped, determined and motivated by the characters’ values (or treason to values), by their struggle in pursuit of spiritual goals and by profound value-conflicts. Their themes are fundamental, universal, timeless issues of man’s existence—and they are the only consistent creators of the rarest attribute of literature: the perfect integration of theme and plot, which they achieve with superlative virtuosity.

If philosophical significance is the criterion of what is to be taken seriously, then these are the most serious writers in world literature.

The second rank of Romanticists (who are still writers of considerable merit, but of lesser stature) indicates the direction of Romanticism’s future decline. This rank is represented by such writers as Walter Scott and Alexander Dumas. The distinguishing characteristic of their work is the emphasis on action, without spiritual goals or significant moral values. Their stories have well-built, imaginative, suspenseful plot structures, but the values pursued by their characters and motivating the action are of a primitive, superficial, emphatically non-metaphysical order: loyalty to a king, the reclaiming of a heritage, personal revenge, etc. The conflicts and story lines are predominantly external. The characters are abstractions, they are not Naturalistic copies, but they are abstractions of loosely generalized virtues or vices, and characterization is minimal. In time, they become a writer’s own self-made bromides, such as “a brave knight,” “a noble lady,” “a vicious courtier”—so that they are neither created nor drawn from life, but picked from a kind of ready-to-wear collection of stock characters of Romanticism. The absence of any metaphysical meaning (apart from the affirmation of volition implicit in a plot structure) is evident in the fact that these novels have plots, but no abstract themes—with the story’s central conflict serving as the theme, usually in the form of some actual or fictionalized historical event.

Going farther down, one can observe the breakup of Romanticism, the contradictions that proceed from a premise held subconsciously. On this level, there emerges a class of writers whose basic premise, in effect, is that man possesses volition in regard to existence, but not to consciousness, i.e., in regard to his physical actions, but not in regard to his own character. The distinguishing characteristic of this class is: stories of unusual events enacted by conventional characters. The stories are abstract projections, involving actions one does not observe in “real life,” the characters are commonplace concretes. The stories are Romantic, the characters Naturalistic. Such novels seldom have plots (since value-conflicts are not their motivational principle), but they do have a form resembling a plot: a coherent, imaginative, often suspenseful story held together by some one central goal or undertaking of the characters.

The contradictions in such a combination of elements are obvious; they lead to a total breach between action and characterization, leaving the action unmotivated and the characters unintelligible. The reader is left to feel: “These people couldn’t do these things!”

With its emphasis on sheer physical action and neglect of human psychology, this class of novels stands on the borderline between serious and popular literature. No top-rank novelists belong to this category; the better-known ones are writers of science fiction, such as H. G. Wells or Jules Verne. (Occasionally, a good writer of the Naturalistic school, with a repressed element of Romanticism, attempts a novel on an abstract theme that requires a Romantic approach; the result falls into this category. For example, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here.) It is obvious why the novels of this category are enormously unconvincing. And, no matter how skillfully or suspensefully their action is presented, they always have an unsatisfying, uninspiring quality.

On the other side of the same dichotomy, there are Romanticists whose basic premise, in effect, is that man possesses volition in regard to consciousness, but not to existence, i.e., in regard to his own character and choice of values, but not in regard to the possibility of achieving his goals in the physical world. The distinguishing characteristics of such writers are grand-scale themes and characters, no plots and an overwhelming sense of tragedy, the sense of a “malevolent universe.” The chief exponents of this category were poets. The leading one is Byron, whose name has been attached to this particular, “Byronic,” view of existence: its essence is the belief that man must lead a heroic life and fight for his values even though he is doomed to defeat by a malevolent fate over which he has no control.

Today, the same view is advocated philosophically by the existentialists, but without the grand-scale element and with Romanticism replaced by a kind of sub-Naturalism.

Philosophically, Romanticism is a crusade to glorify man’s existence; psychologically, it is experienced simply as the desire to make life interesting.

This desire is the root and motor of Romantic imagination. Its greatest example, in popular literature, is O. Henry, whose unique characteristic is the pyrotechnical virtuosity of an inexhaustible imagination projecting the gaiety of a benevolent, almost childlike sense of life. More than any other writer, O. Henry represents the spirit of youth—specifically, the cardinal element of youth: the expectation of finding something wonderfully unexpected around all of life’s corners.

In the field of popular literature, Romanticism’s virtues and potential flaws may be seen in a simplified, more obvious form.

Popular literature is fiction that does not deal with abstract problems; it takes moral principles as the given, accepting certain generalized, common-sense ideas and values as its base. (Common-sense values and conventional values are not the same thing; the first can be justified rationally, the second cannot. Even though the second may include some of the first, they are justified, not on the ground of reason, but on the ground of social conformity.)

Popular fiction does not raise or answer abstract questions; it assumes that man knows what he needs to know in order to live, and it proceeds to show his adventures in living (which is one of the reasons for its popularity among all types of readers, including the problem-laden intellectuals). The distinctive characteristic of popular fiction is the absence of an explicitly ideational element, of the intent to convey intellectual information (or misinformation).

Detective, adventure, science-fiction novels and Westerns belong, for the most part, to the category of popular fiction. The best writers of this category come close to the Scott-Dumas group: their emphasis is on action, but their heroes and villains are abstract projections, and a loosely generalized view of moral values, of a struggle between good and evil, motivates the action. (As contemporary examples of the best in this class: Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming, Donald Hamilton.)

When we go below the top level of popular fiction, we descend into a kind of no man’s land where literary principles are barely applicable (particularly if we include the field of movies and television). Here, the distinctive characteristics of Romanticism become almost indistinguishable. On this level, writing is not the product of subconscious premises: it is a mixture of elements picked by random imitation rather than by sense-of-life creation.

A certain characteristic is typical of this level: it is not merely the use of conventional, Naturalistic characters to enact Romantic events, but worse: the use of characters who are romanticized embodiments of conventional values. Such embodiments represent canned values, empty stereotypes that serve as an automatic substitute for value-judgments. This method lacks the essential attribute of Romanticism: the independent, creative projection of an individual writer’s values—and it lacks the reportorial honesty of the (better) Naturalists: it does not present concrete men “as they are,” it presents human pretensions (a collective role-playing or an indiscriminate collective daydream) and palms this off as reality.

Most of the “slick-magazine” fiction popular before World War II belongs to this class, with its endless variations on the Cinderella theme, the motherhood theme, the costume-drama theme, or the common-man-with-a-heart-of-gold theme. (For example, Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst, Barry Benefield.) This type of fiction has no plots, only more or less cohesive stories, and no discernible characterizations: the characters are false journalistically, and meaningless metaphysically. (It is an open question whether this group belongs to the category of Romanticism; it is usually regarded as Romantic simply because it is far removed from anything perceivable in reality concretely or abstractly.)

As far as their fiction aspects are concerned, movies and television, by their nature, are media suited exclusively to Romanticism (to abstractions, essentials and drama). Unfortunately, both media came too late: the great day of Romanticism was gone, and only its sunset rays reached a few exceptional movies. (Fritz Lang’s Siegfried is the best among them.) For a while, the movie field was dominated by the equivalent of the slick-magazine Romanticism, with a still less discriminating level of taste and imagination, and an incommunicable vulgarity of spirit.

Partly in reaction against this debasement of values, but mainly in consequence of the general philosophical-cultural disintegration of our time (with its anti-value trend), Romanticism vanished from the movies and never reached television (except in the form of a few detective series, which are now gone also). What remains is the occasional appearance of cowardly pieces, whose authors apologize for their Romantic attempts, by means of comedy—or mongrel pieces, whose authors beg not to be mistaken for advocates of human values (or human greatness), by means of coyly, militantly commonplace characters who enact world-shaking events and perform fantastic feats, particularly in the realm of science. The nature of this type of scenario can best be encapsulated by a line of dialogue on the order of: “Sorry, baby, I can’t take you to the pizza joint tonight, I’ve got to go back to the lab and split the atom.”

The next, and final, level of disintegration is the attempt to eliminate Romanticism from Romantic fiction—i.e., to dispense with the element of values, morality and volition. This used to be called the “hardboiled” school of detective fiction; today, it is plugged as “realistic.” This school makes no distinction between heroes and villains (or detectives and criminals, or victims and executioners) and presents, in effect, two mobs of gangsters fighting savagely and incomprehensibly (no motivation is offered) for the same territory, neither side being able to do otherwise.

This is the dead end where, arriving by different roads, Romanticism and Naturalism meet, blend and vanish: deterministically helpless, compulsively evil characters go through a series of inexplicably exaggerated events and engage in purposeful conflicts without purpose.

Beyond this point, the field of literature, both “serious” and popular, is taken over by a genre compared to which Romanticism and Naturalism are clean, civilized and innocently rational: the Horror Story. The modern ancestor of this phenomenon is Edgar Allan Poe; its archetype or purest esthetic expression is Boris Karloff movies.

Popular literature, more honest in this respect, presents its horrors in the form of physical monstrosities. In “serious” literature, the horrors become psychological and bear less resemblance to anything human; this is the literary cult of depravity.

The Horror Story, in either variant, represents the metaphysical projection of a single human emotion: blind, stark, primitive terror. Those who live in such terror seem to find a momentary sense of relief or control in the process of reproducing that which they fear—as savages find a sense of mastery over their enemies by reproducing them in the form of dolls. Strictly speaking, this is not a metaphysical, but a purely psychological projection; such writers are not presenting their view of life; they are not looking at life; what they are saying is that they feel as if life consisted of werewolves, Draculas and Frankenstein monsters. In its basic motivation, this school belongs to psychopathology more than to esthetics.

Historically, neither Romanticism nor Naturalism could survive the collapse of philosophy. There are individual exceptions, but I am speaking of these schools as broad, active, creative movements. Since art is the expression and product of philosophy, it is the first to mirror the vacuum at the base of a culture and the first to crumble.

This general cause had special consequences affecting Romanticism, which hastened its decline and collapse. There were also special consequences affecting Naturalism, which were of a different character, and their destructive potential worked at a slower rate.

The archenemy and destroyer of Romanticism was the altruist morality.

Since Romanticism’s essential characteristic is the projection of values, particularly moral values, altruism introduced an insolvable conflict into Romantic literature from the start. The altruist morality cannot be practiced (except in the form of self-destruction) and, therefore, cannot be projected or dramatized convincingly in terms of man’s life on earth (particularly in the realm of psychological motivation). With altruism as the criterion of value and virtue, it is impossible to create an image of man at his best—“as he might be and ought to be.” The major flaw that runs through the history of Romantic literature is the failure to present a convincing hero, i.e., a convincing image of a virtuous man.

It is the abstract intention—the grandeur of the author’s view of man—that one admires in the characters of Victor Hugo, not their actual characterizations. The greatest Romanticist never succeeded in projecting an ideal man or any convincing major characters of a positive nature. His most ambitious attempt, Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, remains a giant abstraction that never integrates into a person, in spite of isolated touches of profound psychological perceptiveness on the part of the author. In the same novel, Marius, the young man who is supposed to be Hugo’s autobiographical projection, acquires a certain stature only by means of what the author says about him, not by means of what he shows. As far as characterization is concerned, Marius is not a person, but the suggestion of a person squeezed into a straitjacket of cultural bromides. The best-drawn and most interesting characters in Hugo’s novels are the semi-villains (his benevolent sense of life made him un able to create a real villain): Javert in Les Misérables, Josiana in The Man Who Laughs, Claude Frollo in Notre-Dame de Paris.

Dostoevsky (whose sense of life was the diametrical opposite of Hugo’s) was a passionate moralist whose blind quest for values was expressed only in the fiercely merciless condemnation with which he presented evil characters; no one has equaled him in the psychological depth of his images of human evil. But he was totally incapable of creating a positive or virtuous character; such attempts as he made were crudely inept (for example, Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov). It is significant that according to Dostoevsky’s preliminary notes for The Possessed, his original intention was to create Stavrogin as an ideal man—an embodiment of the Russian-Christian-altruist soul. As the notes progressed, that intention changed gradually, in logically inexorable steps dictated by Dostoevsky’s artistic integrity. In the final result, in the actual novel, Stavrogin is one of Dostoevsky’s most repulsively evil characters.

In Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis, the best-drawn, most colorful character, who dominates the novel, is Petronius, the symbol of Roman decadence—while Vinicius, the author’s hero, the symbol of the rise of Christianity, is a cardboard figure.

This phenomenon—the fascinating villain or colorful rogue, who steals the story and the drama from the anemic hero—is prevalent in the history of Romantic literature, serious or popular, from top to bottom. It is as if, under the dead crust of the altruist code officially adopted by mankind, an illicit, subterranean fire were boiling chaotically and erupting once in a while; forbidden to the hero, the fire of self-assertiveness burst forth from the apologetic ashes of a “villain.”

The highest function of Romanticism—the projection of moral values—is an extremely difficult task under any moral code, rational or not, and, in literary history, only the top rank of Romanticists were able to attempt it. Given the added burden of an irrational code, such as altruism, the majority of Romantic writers had to avoid that task—which led to the weakness and neglect of the element of characterization in their writing. In addition, the impossibility of applying altruism to reality, to men’s actual existence, led many Romantic writers to avoid the problem by escaping into history, i.e., by choosing to place their stories in some distant past (such as the Middle Ages). Thus, the emphasis on action, the neglect of human psychology, the lack of convincing motivation were progressively dissociating Romanticism from reality—until the final remnants of Romanticism became a superficial, meaningless, “unserious” school that had nothing to say about human existence.

The disintegration of Naturalism brought it to the same state, for different reasons.

Although Naturalism is a product of the nineteenth century, its spiritual father, in modern history, was Shakespeare. The premise that man does not possess volition, that his destiny is determined by an innate “tragic flaw,” is fundamental in Shakespeare’s work. But, granted this false premise, his approach is metaphysical, not journalistic. His characters are not drawn from “real life,” they are not copies of observed concretes nor statistical averages: they are grand-scale abstractions of the character traits which a determinist would regard as inherent in human nature: ambition, power-lust, jealousy, greed, etc.

Some of the famous Naturalists attempted to maintain Shakespeare’s abstract level, i.e., to present their views of human nature in metaphysical terms (for example, Balzac, Tolstoy). But the majority, following the lead of Émile Zola, rejected metaphysics, as they rejected values, and adopted the method of journalism: the recording of observed concretes.

The contradictions inherent in determinism were obvious in this movement from the start. One does not read fiction except on the implicit premise of volition—i.e., on the premise that some element (some abstraction) of the fiction story is applicable to oneself, that one will learn, discover or contemplate something of value and that this experience will make a difference. If one were to accept the deterministic premise fully and literally—if one were to believe that the characters of a fiction story are as distant and irrelevant to oneself as the unknowable inhabitants of another galaxy and that they cannot affect one’s life in any way whatever, since neither they nor the reader have any power of choice—one would not be able to read beyond the first chapter.

Nor would one be able to write. Psychologically, the whole of the Naturalist movement rode on the premise of volition as on an unidentified, subconscious “stolen concept.” Choosing “society” as the factor that determines man’s fate, most of the Naturalists were social reformers, advocating social changes, claiming that man has no volition, but society, somehow, has. Tolstoy preached resignation and passive obedience to society’s power. In Anna Karenina, the most evil book in serious literature, he attacked man’s desire for happiness and advocated its sacrifice to conformity.

No matter how concrete-bound their theories forced them to be, the writers of the Naturalist school still had to exercise their power of abstraction to a significant extent: in order to reproduce “real-life” characters, they had to select the characteristics they regarded as essential, differentiating them from the non-essential or accidental. Thus they were led to substitute statistics for values as a criterion of selectivity: that which is statistically prevalent among men, they held, is metaphysically significant and representative of man’s nature; that which is rare or exceptional, is not. (See Chapter 7.)

At first, having rejected the element of plot and even of story, the Naturalists concentrated on the element of characterization—and psychological perceptiveness was the chief value that the best of them had to offer. With the growth of the statistical method, however, that value shrank and vanished: characterization was replaced by indiscriminate recording and buried under a catalogue of trivia, such as minute inventories of a character’s apartment, clothing and meals. Naturalism lost the attempted universality of Shakespeare or Tolstoy, descending from metaphysics to photography with a rapidly shrinking lens directed at the range of the immediate moment—until the final remnants of Naturalism became a superficial, meaningless, “unserious” school that had nothing to say about human existence.

There were several reasons why Naturalism outlasted Romanticism, even if not for long. Chief among them is the fact that Naturalism’s standards are much less demanding. A third-rate Naturalist may still have some perceptive observations to offer; a third-rate Romanticist has nothing.

Romanticism demands mastery of the primary element of fiction: the art of storytelling—which requires three cardinal qualities: ingenuity, imagination, a sense of drama. All this (and more) goes into the construction of an original plot integrated to theme and characterization. Naturalism discards these elements and demands nothing but characterization, in as shapeless a narrative, as “uncontrived” (i.e., purposeless) a progression of events (if any) as a given author pleases.

The value of a Romanticist’s work has to be created by its author; he owes no allegiance to men (only to man), only to the metaphysical nature of reality and to his own values. The value of a Naturalist’s work depends on the specific characters, choices and actions of the men he reproduces—and he is judged by the fidelity with which he reproduces them.

The value of a Romanticist’s story lies in what might happen; the value of a Naturalist’s story lies in that it did happen. If the spiritual ancestor or symbol of the Romanticist is the medieval troubadour who roamed the countryside, inspiring men with visions of life’s potential beyond the dreary boundaries of their daily toil—then the symbol of the Naturalist is the back-fence gossip (as one contemporary Naturalist has somewhat boastfully admitted).

Contributing to the (temporary) dominance of Naturalism was the fact that precious stones attract a greater number of seekers of the unearned than do the more commonly available minerals. The essential element of Romanticism, the plot, can be purloined and disguised by recutting, even though it loses fire, brilliance and value with every stroke of a dime-store chisel. The original plots of Romantic literature have been borrowed in countless variations by countless imitators, losing color and meaning with each successive copy.

For example, compare the dramatic structure of The Lady of the Camellias (Camille) by Alexander Dumas fils, which is an unusually good play, to the endless series of dramas about a prostitute caught between her true love and her past, from Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie on down (or, properly speaking, on up) to Hollywood variants. The esthetic parasites of Romanticism helped to run it into the ground, turning its examples of inventiveness into worn-out bromides. This, however, does not detract from the original authors’ achievements; if anything, it underscores them.

Naturalism does not offer such opportunities to imitators. The essential element of Naturalism—the presentation of “a slice of life” at a specific time and place—cannot be borrowed literally. A writer cannot copy the Russian society of 1812 as presented in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. He has to employ some thought and effort of his own, at least in the sense of using his own observations to present the people of his own time and place. Thus, paradoxically, on its lower levels Naturalism offers a chance for some minimal originality, which Romanticism does not. In this respect, Naturalism would appeal to some writers seeking the possibility of a literary achievement on a modest scale.

There were, however, many imitators (of a less obvious kind) among the Naturalists, and many pretentious mediocrities, particularly in Europe. (For example, Romain Rolland, a romanticizing Naturalist who, in intellectual stature, belongs with the slick-magazine Romanticists.) But at Naturalism’s height, the movement included writers of genuine literary talent, particularly in America. Its best representative is Sinclair Lewis, whose novels display a perceptive, critical, first-rate intelligence at work. The best of Naturalism’s contemporary survivors is John O’Hara, who combines a sensitive intelligence with a beautifully disciplined style.

Just as there was a kind of naively innocent, optimistic benevolence in the great Romanticists of the nineteenth century, so there was in the better Naturalists of the twentieth. The first were individual-oriented; the second, society-oriented. World War I marked the end of the great era of Romanticism, and accelerated the fading of individualism. (One may take as a tragic symbol the fact that Edmond Rostand died in 1918, in the flu epidemic following that war.) World War II marked the end of Naturalism, exposing the bankruptcy of collectivism, blasting the vague hopes and illusions of achieving a “benevolent” welfare state. These wars demonstrated existentially what their literary consequences demonstrated psychologically: that man cannot live without philosophy, and neither can he write.

In the eclectic shambles of today’s literature, it is hard to tell which is worse: a Western that explains the deeds of a cattle rustler by reference to his Oedipus complex—or a gory, cynical, “realistic” account of sundry horrors which reveals the message that love is the solution to everything.

Except for the exceptions, there is no literature (and no art) today—in the sense of a broad, vital cultural movement and influence. There are only bewildered imitators with nothing to imitate—and charlatans who rise to split-second notoriety, as they always did in periods of cultural collapse.

Some remnants of Romanticism may still be found in the popular media—but in such a mangled, disfigured form that they achieve the opposite of Romanticism’s original purpose.

The best symbolic projection of these remnants’ meaning (whether the author intended it or not) was given in a brief television story of The Twilight Zone series, some years ago. In some indeterminate world of another dimension, the shadowy, white-clad, authoritarian figures of doctors and social scientists are deeply concerned with the problem of a young girl who looks so different from everyone else that she is shunned as a freak, a disfigured outcast unable to lead a normal life. She has appealed to them for help, but all plastic surgery operations have failed—and now the doctors are grimly preparing to give her a last chance: one more attempt at plastic surgery; if it fails, she will remain a monstrosity for life. In heavily tragic tones, the doctors speak of the girl’s need to be like others, to belong, to be loved, etc. We are not shown any of the characters’ faces, but we hear the tense, ominous, oddly lifeless voices of their dim figures, as the last operation progresses. The operation fails. The doctors declare, with contemptuous compassion, that they will have to find a young man as deformed as this girl, who might be able to accept her. Then, for the first time, we see the girl’s face: lying motionless on the pillow of a hospital bed, it is a face of perfect, radiant beauty. The camera moves to the faces of the doctors: it is an unspeakably horrifying row, not of human faces, but of mangled, distorted, disfigured pigs’ heads, recognizable only by their snouts. Fade-out.

The last remnants of Romanticism are sneaking apologetically on the outskirts of our culture, wearing the masks of a similar plastic surgery operation which has been partially successful.

Under the pressure of conformity to the pigs’ snouts of decadence, today’s Romanticists are escaping, not into the past, but into the supernatural—explicitly giving up reality and this earth. The exciting, the dramatic, the unusual—their policy is declaring, in effect—do not exist; please don’t take us seriously, what we’re offering is only a spooky daydream.

Rod Serling, one of the most talented writers of television, started as a Naturalist, dramatizing controversial journalistic issues of the moment, never taking sides, conspicuously avoiding value-judgments, writing about ordinary people—except that these people spoke the most beautifully, eloquently romanticized dialogue, a purposeful, intellectual, sharply focused dialogue-by-essentials, of a kind that people do not speak in “real life,” but should. Prompted, apparently, by the need to give full scope to his colorful imagination and brilliant sense of drama, Rod Serling turned to Romanticism—but placed his stories in another dimension, in The Twilight Zone.

Ira Levin, who started with an excellent first novel (A Kiss Before Dying), now comes out with Rosemary’s Baby, which goes beyond the physical trappings of the Middle Ages, straight to that era’s spirit, and presents (seriously) a story about witchcraft in a modern setting; and, since the original version of the Virgin Birth, involving God, would probably be regarded as “camp” by today’s intellectual establishment, this story revolves around the obscenity of a Virgin Birth authored by the Devil.

Fredric Brown, an unusually ingenious writer, had been devoting his ingenuity to turning science fiction into stories of earthly or supernatural evil; now, he has stopped writing.

Alfred Hitchcock, the last movie-maker who has managed to preserve his stature and his following, gets away with Romanticism by means of an overemphasis on malevolence or on sheer horror.

This is the manner in which men of imagination now express their need to make life interesting. Romanticism—which started, in defiance of primordial evils, as a violent, passionate torrent of righteous self-assertiveness—ends up by dribbling through the fingers of tottering heirs who disguise their works and motives by paying lip service to evil.

I do not mean to imply that this type of appeasement is the product of conscious cowardice; I do not believe it is: which makes it worse.

Such is the esthetic state of our day. But so long as men exist, the need of art will exist, since that need is rooted metaphysically in the nature of man’s consciousness—and it will survive a period when, under the reign of irrationality run amuck, men produce and accept tainted scraps to satisfy that need.

As in the case of an individual, so in the case of a culture: disasters can be accomplished subconsciously, but a cure cannot. A cure in both cases requires conscious knowledge, i.e., a consciously grasped, explicit philosophy.

It is impossible to predict the time of a philosophical Renaissance. One can only define the road to follow, but not its length. What is certain, however, is that every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics—a rational ethics—as a precondition of rebirth. And, perhaps, no aspect needs it more desperately than the realm of art.

When reason and philosophy are reborn, literature will be the first phoenix to rise out of today’s ashes. And, armed with a code of rational values, aware of its own nature, confident of the supreme importance of its mission, Romanticism will have come of age.

(May-July 1969)

7.

The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age

PRIOR to the nineteenth century, literature presented man as a helpless being whose life and actions were determined by forces beyond his control: either by fate and the gods, as in the Greek tragedies, or by an innate weakness, “a tragic flaw,” as in the plays of Shakespeare. Writers regarded man as metaphysically impotent; their basic premise was determinism. On that premise, one could not project what might happen to men; one could only record what did happen—and chronicles were the appropriate literary form of such recording.

Man as a being who possesses the faculty of volition did not appear in literature until the nineteenth century. The novel was his proper literary form—and Romanticism was the great new movement in art. Romanticism saw man as a being able to choose his values, to achieve his goals, to control his own existence. The Romantic writers did not record the events that had happened, but projected the events that should happen; they did not record the choices men had made, but projected the choices men ought to make.

With the resurgence of mysticism and collectivism, in the later part of the nineteenth century, the Romantic novel and the Romantic movement vanished gradually from the cultural scene.

Man’s new enemy, in art, was Naturalism. Naturalism rejected the concept of volition and went back to a view of man as a helpless creature determined by forces beyond his control; only now the new ruler of man’s destiny was held to be society. The Naturalists proclaimed that values have no power and no place, neither in human life nor in literature, that writers must present men “as they are,” which meant: must record whatever they happen to see around them—that they must not pronounce value-judgments nor project abstractions, but must content themselves with a faithful transcription, a carbon copy, of any existing concretes.

This was a return to the literary principle of the chronicle—but since a novel was to be an invented chronicle, the novelist was faced with the problem of what to use as his standard of selection. When values are declared to be impossible, how is one to know what to record, what to regard as important or significant? Naturalism solved the problem by substituting statistics for a standard of value. That which could be claimed to be typical of a large number of men, in any given geographical area or period of time, was regarded as metaphysically significant and worthy of being recorded. That which was rare, unusual, exceptional, was regarded as unimportant and unreal.

Just as the new schools of philosophy became progressively dedicated to the negation of philosophy, so Naturalism was dedicated to the negation of art. Instead of presenting a metaphysical view of man and of existence, the Naturalists presented a journalistic view. In answer to the question: “What is man?”—they said: “This is what the village grocers are, in the south of France, in the year 1887,” or: “This is what the inhabitants of the slums are, in New York, in 1921,” or: “These are the folks next door.”

Art—the integrator of metaphysics, the concretizer of man’s widest abstractions—was shrinking to the level of a plodding, concrete-bound dolt who has never looked past the block he lives on or beyond the range of the moment.

It did not take long for the philosophical roots of Naturalism to come out into the open. At first, by the standard that substituted the collective for the objective, the Naturalists consigned the exceptional man to unreality and presented only the men who could be taken as typical of some group or another, high or low. Then, since they saw more misery than prosperity on earth, they began to regard prosperity as unreal and to present only misery, poverty, the slums, the lower classes. Then, since they saw more mediocrity than greatness around them, they began to regard greatness as unreal, and to present only the mediocre, the average, the common, the undistinguished. Since they saw more failure than success, they took success to be unreal and presented only human failure, frustration, defeat. Since they saw more suffering than happiness, they took happiness to be unreal and presented only suffering. Since they saw more ugliness than beauty, they took beauty to be unreal and presented only ugliness. Since they saw more vice than virtue, they took virtue to be unreal and presented only vice, crime, corruption, perversion, depravity.

Now take a look at modern literature.

Man—the nature of man, the metaphysically significant, important, essential in man—is now represented by dipsomaniacs, drug addicts, sexual perverts, homicidal maniacs and psychotics. The subjects of modern literature are such themes as: the hopeless love of a bearded lady for a mongoloid pinhead in a circus side show—or: the problem of a married couple whose child was born with six fingers on her left hand—or: the tragedy of a gentle young man who just can’t help murdering strangers in the park, for kicks.

All this is still presented to us under the Naturalistic heading of “a slice of life” or “real life”—but the old slogans have worn thin. The obvious question, to which the heirs of statistical Naturalism have no answer, is: if heroes and geniuses are not to be regarded as representative of mankind, by reason of their numerical rarity, why are freaks and monsters to be regarded as representative? Why are the problems of a bearded lady of greater universal significance than the problems of a genius? Why is the soul of a murderer worth studying, but not the soul of a hero?

The answer lies in the basic metaphysical premise of Naturalism, whether its practitioners ever chose it consciously or not: as an outgrowth of modern philosophy, that basic premise is anti-man, anti-mind, anti-life; and, as an outgrowth of the altruist morality, Naturalism is a frantic escape from moral judgment—a long, wailing plea for pity, for tolerance, for the forgiveness of anything.

The literary cycle has swung all the way around. What one reads today is not Naturalism any longer: it is Symbolism; it is the presentation of a metaphysical view of man, as opposed to a journalistic or statistical view. But it is the Symbolism of primitive terror. According to this modern view, depravity represents man’s real, essential, metaphysical nature, while virtue does not; virtue is only an accident, an exception or an illusion; therefore, a monster is an appropriate projection of man’s essence, but a hero is not.

The Romanticists did not present a hero as a statistical average, but as an abstraction of man’s best and highest potentiality, applicable to and achievable by all men, in various degrees, according to their individual choices. For the same reasons, in the same manner, but on an opposite metaphysical premise, today’s writers do not present a monster as a statistical average, but as an abstraction of man’s worst and lowest potentiality, which they regard as applicable to and essential in all men—not, however, as a potentiality, but as a hidden actuality. The Romanticists presented heroes as “larger than life”; now, monsters are presented as “larger than life”—or, rather, man is presented as “smaller than life.”

If men hold a rational philosophy, including the conviction that they possess volition, the image of a hero guides and inspires them. If men hold an irrational philosophy, including the conviction that they are helpless automatons, the image of a monster serves to reassure them; they feel, in effect: “I am not that bad.”

The philosophical meaning or the vested interest of presenting man as a loathsome monstrosity is the hope and the demand for a moral blank check.

Now consider a curious paradox: the same estheticians and intellectuals who advocate collectivism, with the subordination of all values and of everyone’s life to the rule of “the masses,” with art as the voice of “the people”—these same men are resentfully antagonistic toward all popular values in art. They engage in virulent denunciations of the mass media, of the so-called “commercial” producers or publishers who happen to attract large audiences and to please the public. They demand government subsidies for the artistic ventures which “the people” do not enjoy and do not choose to support voluntarily. They feel that any financially successful, that is, popular, work of art is automatically worthless, while any unpopular failure is automatically great—provided it is unintelligible. Anything that can be understood, they feel, is vulgar and primitive; only inarticulate language, smears of paint and the noise of radio static are civilized, sophisticated and profound.

The popularity or unpopularity, the box-office success or failure, of a work of art is not, of course, a criterion of esthetic merit. No value—esthetic, philosophical or moral—can be established by counting noses; fifty million Frenchmen can be as wrong as one. But while a crude “philistine,” who takes financial success as proof of artistic merit, can be regarded merely as a mindless parasite on art—what is one to think of the standards, motives and intentions of those who take financial failure as the proof of artistic merit? If the snobbery of mere financial success is reprehensible, what is the meaning of a snobbery of failure? Draw your own conclusions.

If you wonder what is the ultimate destination toward which modern philosophy and modern art are leading you, you may observe its advance symptoms all around us. Observe that literature is returning to the art form of the pre-industrial ages, to the chronicle—that fictionalized biographies of “real” people, of politicians, baseball players or Chicago gangsters, are given preference over works of imaginative fiction, in the theater, in the movies, in television—and that a favored literary form is the documentary. Observe that in painting, sculpture and music the current fashion and inspirational model is the primitive art of the jungle.

If you rebel against reason, if you succumb to the old bromides of the Witch Doctors, such as: “Reason is the enemy of the artist” or “The cold hand of reason dissects and destroys the joyous spontaneity of man’s creative imagination”—I suggest that you take note of the following fact: by rejecting reason and surrendering to the unhampered sway of their unleashed emotions (and whims), the apostles of irrationality, the existentialists, the Zen Buddhists, the non-objective artists, have not achieved a free, joyous, triumphant sense of life, but a sense of doom, nausea and screaming, cosmic terror. Then read the stories of O. Henry or listen to the music of Viennese operettas and remember that these were the products of the spirit of the nineteenth century—a century ruled by the “cold, dissecting” hand of reason. And then ask yourself: which psycho-epistemology is appropriate to man, which is consonant with the facts of reality and with man’s nature?

Just as a man’s esthetic preferences are the sum of his metaphysical values and the barometer of his soul, so art is the sum and the barometer of a culture. Modern art is the most eloquent demonstration of the cultural bankruptcy of our age.

(November 1962)

8.

Bootleg Romanticism

ART (including literature) is the barometer of a culture. It reflects the sum of a society’s deepest philosophical values: not its professed notions and slogans, but its actual view, of man and of existence. The image of an entire society stretched out on a psychologist’s couch, revealing its naked subconscious, is an impossible concept; yet that is what art accomplishes: it presents the equivalent of such a session, a transcript which is more eloquent and easier to diagnose than any other set of symptoms.

This does not mean that an entire society is bound by the mediocrities who may choose to posture in the field of art at any given time; but it does mean that if no better men chose to enter the field, this tells us something about the state of that society. There are always exceptions who rebel against the dominant trend in the art of their age; but the fact that they are exceptions tells us something about the state of that age. The dominant trend may not, in fact, express the soul of an entire people; it may be rejected, resented or ignored by an overwhelming majority; but if it is the dominant voice of a given period, this tells us something about the state of the people’s souls.

In politics, the panic-blinded advocates of today’s status quo, clinging to the shambles of their mixed economy in a rising flood of statism, are now adopting the line that there’s nothing wrong with the world, that this is a century of progress, that we are morally and mentally healthy, that we never had it so good. If you find political issues too complex to diagnose, take a look at today’s art: it will leave you no doubt in regard to the health or disease of our culture.

The composite picture of man that emerges from the art of our time is the gigantic figure of an aborted embryo whose limbs suggest a vaguely anthropoid shape, who twists his upper extremity in a frantic quest for a light that cannot penetrate its empty sockets, who emits inarticulate sounds resembling snarls and moans, who crawls through a bloody muck, red froth dripping from his jaws, and struggles to throw the froth at his own non-existent face, who pauses periodically and, lifting the stumps of his arms, screams in abysmal terror at the universe at large.

Engendered by generations of anti-rational philosophy, three emotions dominate the sense of life of modern man: fear, guilt and pity (more precisely, self-pity). Fear, as the appropriate emotion of a creature deprived of his means of survival, his mind; guilt, as the appropriate emotion of a creature devoid of moral values; pity, as the means of escape from these two, as the only response such a creature could beg for. A sensitive, discriminating man, who has absorbed that sense of life, but retained some vestige of self-esteem, will avoid so revealing a profession as art. But this does not stop the others.

Fear, guilt and the quest for pity combine to set the trend of art in the same direction, in order to express, justify and rationalize the artists’ own feelings. To justify a chronic fear, one has to portray existence as evil; to escape from guilt and arouse pity, one has to portray man as impotent and innately loathsome. Hence the competition among modern artists to find ever lower levels of depravity and ever higher degrees of mawkishness—a competition to shock the public out of its wits and jerk its tears. Hence the frantic search for misery, the descent from compassionate studies of alcoholism and sexual perversion to dope, incest, psychosis, murder, cannibalism.

To illustrate the moral implications of this trend—the fact that pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent—I submit an enthusiastic review that commends a current movie for arousing compassion for kidnappers. “One’s attention and, indeed, one’s anxiety is centered more upon them than upon the kidnapped youngster,” states the review. And: “As a matter of fact, the motivation is not so clearly defined that it bears analysis or criticism on psychological grounds. But it is sufficiently established to compel our anguished sympathy for the two incredible kidnappers.” (The New York Times, November 6, 1964.)

Sewers are not very rich nor very deep, and today’s dramatists seem to be scratching bottom. As to literature, it has shot its bolt. There is no way to beat the following, which I reproduce in full from the August 30, 1963, issue of Time. The heading is “Books,” the subhead “Best Reading,” then: “Cat and Mouse, by Günter Grass. Best-selling novelist Grass (The Tin Drum) relates the torment of a young man whose prominent Adam’s apple makes him an outcast to his classmates. He strives for achievement and wins it, but to the ‘cat’—human conformity—he is still a curiosity.”

No, all this is not presented to us “tongue in cheek.” There is an old French theater that specializes in presenting that sort of stuff “tongue-in-cheek.” It is called “Grand Guignol.” But today the spirit of Grand Guignol has been elevated into a metaphysical system and demands to be taken seriously. What, then, is not to be taken seriously? Any representation of human virtue.

One would think that that maudlin preoccupation with chambers of horror, that waxworks-museum view of life, was bad enough. But there is something still worse and, morally, more evil: the recent attempts to concoct so-called “tongue-in-cheek” thrillers.

The trouble with the sewer school of art is that fear, guilt and pity are self-defeating dead ends: after the first few “daring revelations of human depravity,” people cease to be shocked by anything; after experiencing pity for a few dozen of the depraved, the deformed, the demented, people cease to feel anything. And just as the “non-commercial” economics of modern “idealists” tells them to take over commercial establishments, so the “non-commercial” esthetics of modern “artists” prompts them to attempt the takeover of commercial (i.e., popular) art forms.

“Thrillers” are detective, spy or adventure stories. Their basic characteristic is conflict, which means: a clash of goals, which means: purposeful action in pursuit of values. Thrillers are the product, the popular offshoot, of the Romantic school of art that sees man, not as a helpless pawn of fate, but as a being who possesses volition, whose life is directed by his own value-choices. Romanticism is a value-oriented, morality-centered movement: its material is not journalistic minutiae, but the abstract, the essential, the universal principles of man’s nature—and its basic literary commandment is to portray man “as he might be and ought to be.”

Thrillers are a simplified, elementary version of Romantic literature. They are not concerned with a delineation of values, but, taking certain fundamental values for granted, they are concerned with only one aspect of a moral being’s existence: the battle of good against evil in terms of purposeful action—a dramatized abstraction of the basic pattern of: choice, goal, conflict, danger, struggle, victory.

Thrillers are the kindergarten arithmetic, of which the higher mathematics is the greatest novels of world literature. Thrillers deal only with the skeleton—the plot structure—to which serious Romantic literature adds the flesh, the blood, the mind. The plots in the novels of Victor Hugo or Dostoevsky are pure thriller-plots, un-equaled and unsurpassed by the writers of thrillers.

In today’s culture, Romantic art is virtually nonexistent (but for some very rare exceptions): it requires a view of man incompatible with modern philosophy. The last remnants of Romanticism are flickering only in the field of popular art, like bright sparks in a stagnant gray fog. Thrillers are the last refuge of the qualities that have vanished from modern literature: life, color, imagination; they are like a mirror still holding a distant reflection of man.

Bear that in mind when you consider the meaning of the attempt to present thrillers “tongue-in-cheek.”

Humor is not an unconditional virtue; its moral character depends on its object. To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue; to laugh at the good, is a hideous vice. Too often, humor is used as the camouflage of moral cowardice.

There are two types of cowards in this connection. One type is the man who dares not reveal his profound hatred of existence and seeks to undercut all values under cover of a chuckle, who gets away with offensive, malicious utterances and, if caught, runs for cover by declaring: “I was only kidding.”

The other type is the man who dares not reveal or uphold his values and seeks to smuggle them into existence under cover of a chuckle, who tries to get away with some concept of virtue or beauty and, at the first sign of opposition, drops it and runs, declaring: “I was only kidding.”

In the first case, humor serves as an apology for evil; in the second—as an apology for the good. Which, morally, is the more contemptible policy?

The motives of both types can be united and served by a phenomenon such as “tongue-in-cheek” thrillers.

What are such thrillers laughing at? At values, at man’s struggle for values, at man’s capacity to achieve his values, at man; at man the hero.

Regardless of their creators’ conscious or subconscious motives, such thrillers, in fact, carry a message or intention of their own, implicit in their nature: to arouse people’s interest in some daring venture, to hold them in suspense by the intricacy of a battle for great stakes, to inspire them by the spectacle of human efficacy, to evoke their admiration for the hero’s courage, ingenuity, endurance and unswerving integrity of purpose, to make them cheer his triumph—and then to spit in their faces, declaring: “Don’t take me seriously—I was only kidding—who are we, you and I, to aspire to be anything but absurd and swinish?”

To whom are such thrillers apologizing? To the sewer school of art. In today’s culture, the gutter-worshiper needs and makes no apology. But the hero-worshiper chooses to crawl on his belly, crying: “I didn’t mean it, boys! It’s all in fun! I’m not so corrupt as to believe in virtue, I’m not so cowardly as to fight for values, I’m not so evil as to long for an ideal—I’m one of you!”

The social status of thrillers reveals the profound gulf splitting today’s culture—the gulf between the people and its alleged intellectual leaders. The people’s need for a ray of Romanticism’s light is enormous and tragically eager. Observe the extraordinary popularity of Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming. There are hundreds of thriller writers who, sharing the modern sense of life, write sordid concoctions that amount to a battle of evil against evil or, at best, gray against black. None of them have the ardent, devoted, almost addicted following earned by Spillane and Fleming. This is not to say that the novels of Spillane and Fleming project a faultlessly rational sense of life; both are touched by the cynicism and despair of today’s “malevolent universe”; but, in strikingly different ways, both offer the cardinal element of Romantic fiction: Mike Hammer and James Bond are heroes.

This universal need is precisely what today’s intellectuals cannot grasp or fill. A seedy, emasculated, unventilated “elite”—a basement “elite” transported, by default, into vacant drawing rooms and barricaded behind dusty curtains against light, air, grammar and reality—today’s intellectuals cling to the stagnant illusion of their altruist-collectivist upbringing: the vision of a cloddish, humble, inarticulate people whose “voice” (and masters) they were to be.

Observe their anxious, part-patronizing, part-obsequious pursuit of “folk” art, of the primitive, the anonymous, the undeveloped, the unintellectual—or their “lusty,” “earthy” movies that portray man as an obscene subanimal. Politically, the reality of a non-cloddish people would destroy them: the collectivist jig would be up. Morally, the existence, possibility or image of a hero would be intolerable to their overwhelming sense of guilt; it would wipe out the slogan that permits them to go on wallowing in sewers: “I couldn’t help it!” A heroes-seeking people is what they cannot admit into their view of the universe.

A sample of that cultural gulf—a small sample of a vast modern tragedy—may be seen in an interesting little article in TV Guide (May 9, 1964), under the title “Violence Can Be Fun” and with the eloquent subtitle: “In Britain, everybody laughs at ‘The Avengers’—except the audience.”

The Avengers is a sensationally successful British television series featuring the adventures of secret agent John Steed and his attractive assistant Catherine Gale—“surrounded by some delightfully ingenious plots . . .” states the article. “The Avengers is compulsive viewing for a huge audience. Steed and Mrs. Gale are household words.”

But recently “the secret sorrow of producer John Bryce was revealed: The Avengers was conceived as a satire of counterespionage thrillers, but the British public still insists on taking it seriously.”

The manner in which that “revelation” came about is interesting. “The fact that The Avengers is satire was probably the best-kept secret in British television for almost a year. It might have remained that way, but the series came up for discussion during another show called The Critics . . .” One of these critics—to the astonishment of the others—declared that “surely everybody realized it was being played for laughs.” Nobody had, but the producer of The Avengers confirmed that view and “moodily” blamed the public for its failure to understand his intentions: its failure to laugh at his product.

Bear in mind that Romantic thrillers are an exceedingly difficult job: they require such a degree of skill, ingenuity, inventiveness, imagination and logic—such a great amount of talent on the part of the producer or the director or the writer or the cast, or all of them—that it is virtually impossible to fool an entire nation for a whole year. Somebody’s values were being shamefully exploited and betrayed, besides the public’s.

It is obvious that the modern intellectuals’ rush to the thriller bandwagon was precipitated by the spectacular figure and success of James Bond. But, in keeping with modern philosophy, they want to ride the wagon and spit at it, too.

If you think that the producers of mass-media entertainment are motivated primarily by commercial greed, check your premises and observe that the producers of the James Bond movies seem to be intent on undercutting their own success.

Contrary to somebody’s strenuously spread assertions, there was nothing “tongue-in-cheek” about the first of these movies, Dr. No. It was a brilliant example of Romantic screen art—in production, direction, writing, photography and, most particularly, in the performance of Sean Connery. His first introduction on the screen was a gem of dramatic technique, elegance, wit and understatement: when, in response to a question about his name, we saw his first close-up and he answered quietly: “Bond. James Bond”—the audience, on the night I saw it, burst into applause.

There wasn’t much applause on the night when I saw his second movie, From Russia with Love. Here, Bond was introduced pecking with schoolboy kisses at the face of a vapid-looking girl in a bathing suit. The story was muddled and, at times, unintelligible. The skillfully constructed, dramatic suspense of Fleming’s climax was replaced by conventional stuff, such as old-fashioned chases, involving nothing but crude physical danger.

I shall still go to see the third movie, Goldfinger, but with heavy misgivings. The misgivings are based on an article by Richard Maibaum, who adapted all three novels to the screen (The New York Times, December 13, 1964).

“Fleming’s tongue-in-cheek attitude toward his material (intrigue, expertise, violence, love, death) finds a ready mass response in a world where audiences enjoy sick jokes,” writes Mr. Maibaum. “Incidentally, it is the aspect of Fleming which the films have most developed.” So much for his understanding of the appeal of Romantic thrillers—or of Fleming.

Discussing his own work, Mr. Maibaum remarks: “Do I hear anyone asking sotto voce about the screenwriter’s blushes? If he was the blushing type he wouldn’t be doing Bond screenplays in the first place. Besides, it’s good clean fun, or so he tells himself.”

Draw your own conclusions about the nature of the ethical standards involved. Note also that the writer of the movie about “the two incredible [but sympathetic] kidnappers” did not feel called upon to blush.

“The actual characterization of James Bond . . .” Mr. Maibaum continues, “was also a departure from the novels. . . . That concept retained a basic super-sleuth, super-fighter, super-hedonist, super-lover of Fleming’s, but added another large dimension: humor. Humor vocalized in wry comments at critical moments. In the books, Bond was singularly lacking in this.” Which is not true, as any reader of the books can ascertain.

And finally: “A bright young producer accosted me one day with glittering eyes. ‘I’m making a parody of the James Bond films.’ How, I asked myself, does one make a parody of a parody? For that is precisely, in the final analysis, what we have done with Fleming’s books. Parodied them. I’m not sure that Ian himself ever completely realized this.”

This is said about the work of a man whose talent, achievement and fame gave a group of previously undistinguished persons their chance at distinction and at piles of money.

Observe that in the issue of humor versus thrillers, modern intellectuals are using the term “humor” as an anti-concept, i.e., as a “package-deal” of two meanings, with the proper meaning serving to cover and to smuggle the improper one into people’s minds. The purpose is to obliterate the distinction between “humor” and “mockery,” particularly self-mockery—and thus bring men to defile their own values and self-esteem, for fear of being accused of lacking “a sense of humor.”

Remember that humor is not an unconditional virtue and depends on its object. One may laugh with a hero, but never at him—just as a satire may laugh at some object, but never at itself. A composition that laughs at itself is a fraud on the audience.

In Fleming’s novels, James Bond is constantly making witty, humorous remarks, which are part of his charm. But, apparently, this is not what Mr. Maibaum meant by the word “humor.” What he meant, apparently, was humor at Bond’s expense—the sort of humor intended to undercut Bond’s stature, to make him ridiculous, which means: to destroy him.

Such is the basic contradiction—and the terrible, parasitic immorality—of any attempt to create “tongue-in-cheek” thrillers. It requires that one employ all the values of a thriller in order to hold the audience’s interest, yet turn these values against themselves, that one damage the very elements one is using and counting on. It means an attempt to cash in on the thing one is mocking, to profit by the audience’s hunger for Romanticism while seeking to destroy it. This is not the method of a legitimate satire: a satire does not share the values of that which it denounces; it denounces by means and in the context of an opposite set of values.

The failure to understand the nature and appeal of Romanticism is an eloquent measure of the modern intellectuals’ epistemological disintegration. Only an appallingly concrete-bound, anti-conceptual mentality would lose its faculty of abstraction to such an extent as to be incapable of grasping an abstract meaning which an unskilled laborer can grasp and a United States President can enjoy. Only an arrested modern mentality would go on protesting that the events portrayed in a thriller are incredible or improbable, that there are no heroes, that “life is not like that”—all of which is thoroughly irrelevant.

Nobody takes thrillers literally, nor cares about their specific events, nor harbors any frustrated desire to become a secret agent or a private eye. Thrillers are taken symbolically; they dramatize one of man’s widest and most crucial abstractions: the abstraction of moral conflict.

What people seek in thrillers is the spectacle of man’s efficacy: of his ability to fight for his values and to achieve them. What they see is a condensed, simplified pattern, reduced to its essentials: a man fighting for a vital goal—overcoming one obstacle after another—facing terrible dangers and risks—persisting through an excruciating struggle—and winning. Far from suggesting an easy or “unrealistic” view of life, a thriller suggests the necessity of a difficult struggle; if the hero is “largerthan-life,” so are the villains and the dangers.

An abstraction has to be “larger-than-life”—to encompass any concretes that individual men may be concerned with, each according to the scale of his own values, goals and ambition. The scale varies; the psychological relationships involved remain the same. The obstacles confronting an average man are, to him, as formidable as Bond’s adversaries; but what the image of Bond tells him is: “It can be done.”

What men find in the spectacle of the ultimate triumph of the good is the inspiration to fight for one’s own values in the moral conflicts of one’s own life.

If the proclaimers of human impotence, the seekers of automatic security, protest that “life is not like that, happy endings are not guaranteed to man”—the answer is: a thriller is more realistic than such views of existence, it shows men the only road that can make any sort of happy ending possible.

Here, we come to an interesting paradox. It is only the superficiality of the Naturalists that classifies Romanticism as “an escape”; this is true only in the very superficial sense of contemplating a glamorous vision as a relief from the gray burden of “real-life” problems. But in the deeper, metaphysical-moral-psychological sense, it is Naturalism that represents an escape—an escape from choice, from values, from moral responsibility—and it is Romanticism that trains and equips man for the battles he has to face in reality.

In the privacy of his own soul, nobody identifies himself with the folks next door, unless he has given up. But the generalized abstraction of a hero permits every man to identify himself with James Bond, each supplying his own concretes which are illuminated and supported by that abstraction. It is not a conscious process, but an emotional integration, and most people may not know that that is the reason of the enjoyment they find in thrillers. It is not a leader or a protector that they seek in a hero, since his exploits are always highly individualistic and un-social. What they seek is profoundly personal: self-confidence and self-assertion. Inspired by James Bond, a man may find the courage to rebel against the impositions of his in-laws—or to ask for a deserved raise—or to change his job—or to propose to the girl he loves—or to embark on the career he wants—or to defy the whole world for the sake of his new invention.

This is what Naturalistic art can never give him.

For example, consider one of the best works of modern Naturalism—Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty. It is an extremely sensitive, perceptive, touching portrayal of a humble man’s struggle for self-assertion. One can feel sympathy for Marty, and a sad kind of pleasure at his final success. But it is highly doubtful that anyone—including the thousands of real-life Martys—would be inspired by his example. No one could feel: “I want to be like Marty.” Everyone (except the most corrupt) can feel: “I want to be like James Bond.”

Such is the meaning of that popular art form which today’s “friends of the people” are attacking with hysterical hatred.

The guiltiest men involved—both among the professionals and the public—are the moral cowards who do not share that hatred, but seek to appease it, who are willing to regard their own Romantic values as a secret vice, to keep them underground, to slip them furtively to black-market customers, and to pay off the established intellectual authorities, in the currency demanded: self-mockery.

The game will continue, and the bandwagon-riders will destroy James Bond, as they have destroyed Mike Hammer, as they have destroyed Eliot Ness, then will look for another victim to “parody”—until some future sacrificial worm turns and declares that he’ll be damned if he’ll allow Romanticism to be treated as bootleg merchandise.

The public, too, will have to do its share: it will have to cease being satisfied with esthetic speakeasies, and demand the repeal of the Joyce-Kafka Amendment, which prohibits the sale and drinking of clean water, unless denatured by humor, while unconscionable rot-gut is being sold and drunk at every bookstore counter.

(January 1965)

9.

Art and Moral Treason

WHEN I saw Mr. X for the first time, I thought that he had the most tragic face I had ever seen: it was not the mark left by some specific tragedy, not the look of a great sorrow, but a look of desolate hopelessness, weariness and resignation that seemed left by the chronic pain of many lifetimes. He was twenty-six years old.

He had a brilliant mind, an outstanding scholastic record in the field of engineering, a promising start in his career—and no energy to move farther. He was paralyzed by so extreme a state of indecision that any sort of choice filled him with anxiety—even the question of moving out of an inconvenient apartment. He was stagnating in a job which he had outgrown and which had become a dull, uninspiring routine. He was so lonely that he had lost the capacity to know it, he had no concept of friendship, and his few attempts at a romantic relationship had ended disastrously—he could not tell why.

At the time I met him, he was undergoing psychotherapy, struggling desperately to discover the causes of his state. There seemed to be no existential cause for it. His childhood had not been happy, but no worse and, in some respects, better than the average childhood. There were no traumatic events in his past, no major shocks, disappointments or frustrations. Yet his frozen impersonality suggested a man who neither felt nor wanted anything any longer. He was like a gray spread of ashes that had never been on fire.

Discussing his childhood, I asked him once what he had been in love with (what, not whom). “Nothing,” he answered—then mentioned uncertainly a toy that had been his favorite. On another occasion, I mentioned a current political event of shocking irrationality and injustice, which he conceded indifferently to be evil. I asked whether it made him indignant. “You don’t understand,” he answered gently. “I never feel indignation about anything.”

He had held some erroneous philosophical views (under the influence of a college course in contemporary philosophy), but his intellectual goals and motives seemed to be a confused struggle in the right direction, and I could not discover any major ideological sin, any crime commensurate with the punishment he was suffering.

Then, one day, as an almost casual remark in a conversation about the role of human ideals in art, he told me the following story. Some years earlier, he had seen a certain semi-Romantic movie and had felt an emotion he was unable to describe, particularly in response to the character of an industrialist who was moved by a passionate, intransigent, dedicated vision of his work. Mr. X was speaking incoherently, but conveying clearly that what he had experienced was more than admiration for a single character: it was the sense of seeing a different kind of universe—and his emotion had been exaltation. “It was what I wanted life to be,” he said. His eyes were sparkling, his voice was eager, his face was alive and young—he was a man in love, for the span of that moment. Then, the gray lifelessness came back and he concluded in a dull tone of voice, with a trace of tortured wistfulness: “When I came out of the theater, I felt guilty about it—about having felt this.” “Guilty? Why?” I asked. He answered: “Because I thought that what made me react this way to the industrialist, is the part of me that’s wrong . . . It’s the impractical element in me . . . Life is not like that . . .”

What I felt was a cold shudder. Whatever the root of his problems, this was the key; it was the symptom, not of amorality, but of a profound moral treason. To what and to whom can a man be willing to apologize for the best within him? And what can he expect of life after that?

(Ultimately, what saved Mr. X was his commitment to reason; he held reason as an absolute, even if he did not know its full meaning and application; an absolute that survived through the hardest periods he had to endure in his struggle to regain his psychological health—to remark and release the soul he had spent his life negating. Due to his determined perseverance, he won his battle. Today—after quitting his job and taking many calculated risks—he is a brilliant success, in a career he loves, and on his way up to an ever-increasing range of achievement. He is still struggling with some remnants of his past errors. But, as a measure of his recovery and of the distance he has traveled, I would suggest that you reread my opening paragraph before I tell you that I saw a recent snapshot of him which caught him smiling, and of all the characters in Atlas Shrugged the one whom the quality of that smile would suit best is Francisco d’Anconia.)

There are countless cases similar to this; this is merely the most dramatically obvious one in my experience and involves a man of unusual stature. But the same tragedy is repeated all around us, in many hidden, twisted forms—like a secret torture chamber in men’s souls, from which an unrecognizable cry reaches us occasionally and then is silenced again. The person, in such cases, is both “man the victim” and “man the killer.” And certain principles apply to them all.

Man is a being of self-made soul—which means that his character is formed by his basic premises, particularly by his basic value-premises. In the crucial, formative years of his life—in childhood and adolescence—Romantic art is his major (and, today, his only) source of a moral sense of life. (In later years, Romantic art is often his only experience of it.)

Please note that art is not his only source of morality, but of a moral sense of life. This requires careful differentiation.

A “sense of life” is a preconceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. Morality is an abstract, conceptual code of values and principles.

The process of a child’s development consists of acquiring knowledge, which requires the development of his capacity to grasp and deal with an ever-widening range of abstractions. This involves the growth of two interrelated but different chains of abstractions, two hierarchical structures of concepts, which should be integrated, but seldom are: the cognitive and the normative. The first deals with knowledge of the facts of reality—the second, with the evaluation of these facts. The first forms the epistemological foundation of science—the second, of morality and of art.

In today’s culture, the development of a child’s cognitive abstractions is assisted to some minimal extent, even if ineptly, half-heartedly, with many hampering, crippling obstacles (such as anti-rational doctrines and influences which, today, are growing worse). But the development of a child’s normative abstractions is not merely left unaided, it is all but stifled and destroyed. The child whose valuing capacity survives the moral barbarism of his upbringing has to find his own way to preserve and develop his sense of values.

Apart from its many other evils, conventional morality is not concerned with the formation of a child’s character. It does not teach or show him what kind of man he ought to be and why; it is concerned only with imposing a set of rules upon him—concrete, arbitrary, contradictory and, more often than not, incomprehensible rules, which are mainly prohibitions and duties. A child whose only notion of morality (i.e., of values) consists of such matters as: “Wash your ears!”—“Don’t be rude to Aunt Rosalie!”—“Do your homework!”—“Help papa to mow the lawn (or mama to wash the dishes)!”—faces the alternative of: either a passively amoral resignation, leading to a future of hopeless cynicism, or a blind rebellion. Observe that the more intelligent and independent a child, the more unruly he is in regard to such commandments. But, in either case, the child grows up with nothing but resentment and fear or contempt for the concept of morality which, to him, is only “a phantom scarecrow made of duty, of boredom, of punishment, of pain . . . a scarecrow standing in a barren field, waving a stick to chase away [his] pleasures . . .” (Atlas Shrugged).

This type of upbringing is the best, not the worst, that an average child may be subjected to, in today’s culture. If parents attempt to inculcate a moral ideal of the kind contained in such admonitions as: “Don’t be selfish—give your best toys away to the children next door!” or if parents go “progressive” and teach a child to be guided by his whims—the damage to the child’s moral character may be irreparable.

Where, then, can a child learn the concept of moral values and of a moral character in whose image he will shape his own soul? Where can he find the evidence, the material from which to develop a chain of normative abstractions? He is not likely to find a clue in the chaotic, bewildering, contradictory evidence offered by the adults in his day-by-day experience. He may like some adults and dislike others (and, often, dislike them all), but to abstract, identify and judge their moral characteristics is a task beyond his capacity. And such moral principles as he might be taught to recite are, to him, floating abstractions with no connection to reality.

The major source and demonstration of moral values available to a child is Romantic art (particularly Romantic literature). What Romantic art offers him is not moral rules, not an explicit didactic message, but the image of a moral person—i.e., the concretized abstraction of a moral ideal. It offers a concrete, directly perceivable answer to the very abstract question which a child senses, but cannot yet conceptualize: What kind of person is moral and what kind of life does he lead?

It is not abstract principles that a child learns from Romantic art, but the precondition and the incentive for the later understanding of such principles: the emotional experience of admiration for man’s highest potential, the experience of looking up to a hero—a view of life motivated and dominated by values, a life in which man’s choices are practicable, effective and crucially important—that is, a moral sense of life.

While his home environment taught him to associate morality with pain, Romantic art teaches him to associate it with pleasure—an inspiring pleasure which is his own, profoundly personal discovery.

The translation of this sense of life into adult, conceptual terms would, if unimpeded, follow the growth of the child’s knowledge—and the two basic elements of his soul, the cognitive and normative, would develop together in serenely harmonious integration. The ideal which, at the age of seven, was personified by a cowboy, may become a detective at twelve, and a philosopher at twenty—as the child’s interests progress from comic strips to mystery stories to the great sunlit universe of Romantic literature, art and music.

But whatever his age, morality is a normative science—i.e., a science that projects a value-goal to be achieved by a series of steps, of choices—and it cannot be practiced without a clear vision of the goal, without a concretized image of the ideal to be reached. If man is to gain and keep a moral stature, he needs an image of the ideal, from the first thinking day of his life to the last.

In the translation of that ideal into conscious, philosophical terms and into his actual practice, a child needs intellectual assistance or, at least, a chance to find his own way. In today’s culture, he is given neither. The battering which his precarious, unformed, barely glimpsed moral sense of life receives from parents, teachers, adult “authorities” and little second-hander goons of his own generation, is so intense and so evil that only the toughest hero can withstand it—so evil that of the many sins of adults toward children, this is the one for which they would deserve to burn in hell, if such a place existed.

Every form of punishment—from outright prohibition to threats to anger to condemnation to crass indifference to mockery—is unleashed against a child at the first signs of his Romanticism (which means: at the first signs of his emerging sense of moral values). “Life is not like that!” and “Come down to earth!” are the catchphrases which best summarize the motives of the attackers, as well as the view of life and of this earth which they seek to inculcate.

The child who withstands it and damns the attackers, not himself and his values, is a rare exception. The child who merely suppresses his values, avoids communication and withdraws into a lonely private universe, is almost as rare. In most cases, the child represses his values and gives up. He gives up the entire realm of valuing, of value choices and judgments—without knowing that what he is surrendering is morality.

The surrender is extorted by a long, almost imperceptible process, a constant, ubiquitous pressure which the child absorbs and accepts by degrees. His spirit is not broken at one sudden blow: it is bled to death in thousands of small scratches.

The most devastating part of this process is the fact that a child’s moral sense is destroyed, not only by means of such weaknesses or flaws as he might have developed, but by means of his barely emerging virtues. An intelligent child is aware that he does not know what adult life is like, that he has an enormous amount to learn and is anxiously eager to learn it. An ambitious child is incoherently determined to make something important of himself and his life. So when he hears such threats as “Wait till you grow up!” and “You’ll never get anywhere with those childish notions!” it is his virtues that are turned against him: his intelligence, his ambition and whatever respect he might feel for the knowledge and judgment of his elders.

Thus the foundation of a lethal dichotomy is laid in his consciousness: the practical versus the moral, with the unstated, preconceptual implication that practicality requires the betrayal of one’s values, the renunciation of ideals.

His rationality is turned against him by means of a similar dichotomy: reason versus emotion. His Romantic sense of life is only a sense, an incoherent emotion which he can neither communicate nor explain nor defend. It is an intense, yet fragile emotion, painfully vulnerable to any sarcastic allegation, since he is unable to identify its real meaning.

It is easy to convince a child, and particularly an adolescent, that his desire to emulate Buck Rogers is ridiculous: he knows that it isn’t exactly Buck Rogers he has in mind and yet, simultaneously, it is—he feels caught in an inner contradiction—and this confirms his desolately embarrassing feeling that he is being ridiculous.

Thus the adults—whose foremost moral obligation toward a child, at this stage of his development, is to help him understand that what he loves is an abstraction, to help him break through into the conceptual realm—accomplish the exact opposite. They stunt his conceptual capacity, they cripple his normative abstractions, they stifle his moral ambition, i.e., his desire for virtue, i.e., his self-esteem. They arrest his value-development on a primitively literal, concrete-bound level: they convince him that to be like Buck Rogers means to wear a space helmet and blast armies of Martians with a disintegrator-gun, and that he’d better give up such notions if he ever expects to make a respectable living. And they finish him off with such gems of argumentation as: “Buck Rogers—ha-ha!—never gets any colds in the head. Do you know any real people who never get them? Why, you had one last week. So don’t you go on imagining that you’re better than the rest of us!”

Their motive is obvious. If they actually regarded Romanticism as an “impractical fantasy,” they would feel nothing but a friendly or indifferent amusement—not the passionate resentment and uncontrollable rage which they do feel and exhibit.

While the child is thus driven to fear, mistrust and repress his own emotions, he cannot avoid observing the hysterical violence of the adults’ emotions unleashed against him in this and other issues. He concludes, subconsciously, that all emotions as such are dangerous, that they are the irrational, unpredictably destructive element in people, which can descend upon him at any moment in some terrifying way for some incomprehensible purpose. This is the brick before last in the wall of repression which he erects to bury his own emotions. The last is his desperate pride misdirected into a decision such as: “I’ll never let them hurt me again!” The way never to be hurt, he decides, is never to feel anything.

But an emotional repression cannot be complete; when all other emotions are stifled, a single one takes over: fear.

The element of fear was involved in the process of the child’s moral destruction from the start. His victimized virtues were not the only cause; his faults were active as well: fear of others, particularly of adults, fear of independence, of responsibility, of loneliness—as well as self-doubt and the desire to be accepted, to “belong.” But it is the involvement of his virtues that makes his position so tragic and, later, so hard to correct.

As he grows up, his amorality is reinforced and reaffirmed. His intelligence prevents him from accepting any of the current schools of morality: the mystical, the social or the subjective. An eager young mind, seeking the guidance of reason, cannot take the supernatural seriously and is impervious to mysticism. It does not take him long to perceive the contradictions and the sickeningly self-abasing hypocrisy of the social school of morality. But the worst influence of all, for him, is the subjective school.

He is too intelligent and too honorable (in his own twisted, tortured way) not to know that the subjective means the arbitrary, the irrational, the blindly emotional. These are the elements which he has come to associate with people’s attitudes in moral issues, and to dread. When formal philosophy tells him that morality, by its very nature, is closed to reason and can be nothing but a matter of subjective choice, this is the kiss or seal of death on his moral development. His conscious conviction now unites with his subconscious feeling that value choices come from the mindless element in people and are a dangerous, unknowable, unpredictable enemy. His conscious decision is: not to get involved in moral issues; its subconscious meaning is: not to value anything (or worse: not to value anything too much, not to hold any irreplaceable, nonexpendable values).

From this to the policy of a moral coward existentially and to an overwhelming sense of guilt psychologically, is not a very long step for an intelligent man. The result is a man such as I described.

Let it be said to his credit that he was unable to “adjust” to his inner contradictions—and that it was precisely his early professional success that broke him psychologically: it exposed his value-vacuum, his lack of personal purpose and thus the self-abnegating futility of his work.

He knew—even though not in fully conscious terms—that he was achieving the opposite of his original, pre-conceptual goals and motives. Instead of leading a rational (i.e., reason-guided and reason-motivated) life, he was gradually becoming a moody, subjectivist whim-worshiper, acting on the range of the moment, particularly in his personal relationships—by default of any firmly defined values. Instead of reaching independence from the irrationality of others, he was being forced—by the same default—either into actual second-handness or into an equivalent code of behavior, into blind dependence on and compliance with the value-systems of others, into a state of abject conformity. Instead of pleasure, the glimpse of any higher value or nobler experience brought him pain, guilt, terror—and prompted him, not to seize it and fight for it, but to escape, to evade, to betray it (or to apologize for it) in order to placate the standards of the conventional men whom he despised. Instead of “man the victim.” as he had largely been, he was becoming “man the killer.”

The clearest evidence of it was provided by his attitude toward Romantic art. A man’s treason to his art values is not the primary cause of his neurosis (it is a contributory cause), but it becomes one of its most revealing symptoms.

This last is of particular importance to the man who seeks to solve his psychological problems. The chaos of his personal relationships and values may, at first, be too complex for him to untangle. But Romantic art offers him a clear, luminous, impersonal abstraction—and thus a clear, objective test of his inner state, a clue available to his conscious mind.

If he finds himself fearing, evading and negating the highest experience possible to man, a state of unclouded exaltation, he can know that he is in profound trouble and that his only alternatives are: either to check his value-premises from scratch, from the start, from the repressed, forgotten, betrayed figure of his particular Buck Rogers, and painfully to reconstruct his broken chain of normative abstractions—or to become completely the kind of monster he is in those moments when, with an obsequious giggle, he tells some fat Babbitt that exaltation is impractical.

Just as Romantic art is a man’s first glimpse of a moral sense of life, so it is his last hold on it, his last lifeline.

Romantic art is the fuel and the spark plug of a man’s soul; its task is to set a soul on fire and never let it go out. The task of providing that fire with a motor and a direction belongs to philosophy.

(March 1965)

10.

Introduction to Ninety-Three¹

HAVE you ever wondered what they felt, those first men of the Renaissance, when—emerging from the long nightmare of the Middle Ages, having seen nothing but the deformed monstrosities and gargoyles of medieval art as the only reflections of man’s soul—they took a new, free, unobstructed look at the world and rediscovered the statues of Greek gods, forgotten under piles of rubble? If you have, that unrepeatable emotional experience is yours when you rediscover the novels of Victor Hugo.

The distance between his world and ours is astonishingly short—he died in 1885—but the distance between his universe and ours has to be measured in esthetic light-years. He is virtually unknown to the American public but for some vandalized remnants on our movie screens. His works are seldom discussed in the literary courses of our universities. He is buried under the esthetic rubble of our day—while gargoyles leer at us again, not from the spires of cathedrals, but from the pages of shapeless, unfocused, ungrammatical novels about drug addicts, bums, killers, dipsomaniacs, psychotics. He is as invisible to the neo-barbarians of our age as the art of Rome was to their spiritual ancestors, and for the same reasons. Yet Victor Hugo is the greatest novelist in world literature. . . .

Romantic literature did not come into existence until the nineteenth century, when men’s life was politically freer than in any other period of history, and when Western culture was still reflecting a predominantly Aristotelian influence—the conviction that man’s mind is competent to deal with reality. The Romanticists were far from Aristotelian in their avowed beliefs; but their sense of life was the beneficiary of his liberating power. The nineteenth century saw both the start and the culmination of an illustrious line of great Romantic novelists.

And the greatest of these was Victor Hugo. . . .

Modern readers, particularly the young, who have been brought up on the kind of literature that makes Zola seem Romantic by comparison, should be cautioned that a first encounter with Hugo might be shocking to them: it is like emerging from a murky underground, filled with the moans of festering half-corpses, into a blinding burst of sunlight. So, by way of providing an intellectual first-aid kit, I would suggest the following:

Do not look for familiar landmarks—you won’t find them; you are not entering the backyard of “the folks next door,” but a universe you did not know existed.

Do not look for “the folks next door”—you are about to meet a race of giants, who might have and ought to have been your neighbors.

Do not say that these giants are “unreal” because you have never seen them before—check your eyesight, not Hugo’s, and your premises, not his; it was not his purpose to show you what you had seen a thousand times before.

Do not say that the actions of these giants are “impossible” because they are heroic, noble, intelligent, beautiful—remember that the cowardly, the depraved, the mindless, the ugly are not all that is possible to man.

Do not say that this glowing new universe is an “escape”—you will witness harder, more demanding, more tragic battles than any you have seen on poolroom street corners; the difference is only this: these battles are not fought for penny ante.

Do not say that “life is not like that”—ask yourself: whose life?

This warning is made necessary by the fact that the philosophical and cultural disintegration of our age—which is bringing men’s intellect down to the concrete-bound, range-of-the-moment perspective of a savage—has brought literature to the stage where the concept of “abstract universality” is now taken to mean “statistical majority.” To approach Hugo with such intellectual equipment and such a criterion is worse than futile. To criticize Hugo for the fact that his novels do not deal with the daily commonplaces of average lives, is like criticizing a surgeon for the fact that he does not spend his time peeling potatoes. To regard as Hugo’s failure the fact that his characters are “larger than life” is like regarding as an airplane’s failure the fact that it flies.

But for those readers who do not see why the kind of people that bore them to death or disgust them in “real life” should hold a monopoly on the role of literary subjects, for those readers who are deserting “serious” literature in growing numbers and searching for the last afterglow of Romanticism in detective fiction, Hugo is the new continent they have been longing to discover.

Ninety-Three (Quatrevingt-treize) is Hugo’s last novel and one of his best. It is an excellent introduction to his works: it presents—in story, style and spirit—the condensed essence of that which is uniquely “Hugo-esque.”

The novel’s background is the French Revolution—“Ninety-three” stands for 1793, the year of the terror, the Revolution’s climax. The events of the story take place during the civil war of the Vendée—an uprising of the royalist peasants of Brittany, led by aristocrats who returned from exile for a desperate attempt to restore the monarchy—a civil war characterized by savage ruthlessness on both sides.

A great many irrelevant things have been said and written about this novel. At the time of its publication, in 1874, it was not favorably received by Hugo’s enormous public or by the critics. The explanation usually given by literary historians is that the French public was not sympathetic to a novel that seemed to glorify the first Revolution, at a time when the recent blood and horror of the Paris Commune of 1871 were still fresh in the public’s memory. Two of Hugo’s modern biographers refer to the novel as follows: Matthew Josephson, in Victor Hugo, mentions it disapprovingly as a “historical romance” with “idealized characters”; André Maurois, in Olympio ou la Vie de Victor Hugo, lists a number of Hugo’s personal connections with the setting of the story (such as the fact that Hugo’s father fought in the Vendee, on the republican side), then remarks: “The dialogue [of the novel] is theatrical. But the French Revolution had been theatrical and dramatic. Its heroes had struck sublime poses and had held them to the death.” (Which is a purely Naturalistic approach or attempt at justification.)

The fact is that Ninety-Three is not a novel about the French Revolution.

To a Romanticist, a background is a background, not a theme. His vision is always focused on man—on the fundamentals of man’s nature, on those problems and those aspects of his character which apply to any age and any country. The theme of Ninety-Three—which is played in brilliantly unexpected variations in all the key incidents of the story, and which is the motive power of all the characters and events, integrating them into an inevitable progression toward a magnificent climax—is: man’s loyalty to values.

To dramatize that theme, to isolate that aspect of man’s soul and show it in its purest form, to put it to the test under the pressure of deadly conflicts, a revolution is an appropriate background to select. Hugo’s story is not devised as a means of presenting the French Revolution; the French Revolution is used as a means of presenting his story.

It is not any specific code of values that concerns him here, but the wider abstraction: man’s loyalty to values, whatever any man’s particular values might be. Although Hugo’s personal sympathy is obviously on the side of the republicans, he presents his characters with impersonal detachment, or rather, with an impartial admiration granted equally to both sides of the conflict. In spiritual grandeur, intransigent integrity, unflinching courage and ruthless dedication to his cause, the old Marquis de Lantenac, the leader of the royalists, is the equal of Cimourdain, the ex-priest who became the leader of the republicans. (And, perhaps, Lantenac is Cimourdain’s superior, as far as the color and power of his characterization are concerned.) Hugo’s sympathy for the gay, boisterous exuberance of the republican soldiers is matched by his sympathy for the grim, desperate stubbornness of the royalist peasants. The emphasis he projects is not: “What great values men are fighting for!” but: “What greatness men are capable of, when they fight for their values!”

Hugo’s inexhaustible imagination is at its virtuoso best in an extremely difficult aspect of a novelist’s task: the integration of an abstract theme to the plot of a story. While the events of Ninety-Three are a sweeping emotional torrent directed by the inexorable logic of a plot structure, every event features the theme, every event is an instance of man’s violent, tortured, agonized, yet triumphant dedication to his values. This is the invisible chain, the corollary of the plot-line, that unites such scenes as: the ragged, disheveled young mother, staggering blindly, with savage endurance, through flaming villages and devastated fields, searching desperately for the children she has lost in the chaos of the civil war—the beggar who acts as host to his former feudal master, in a cave under the roots of a tree—the humble sailor who has to make a choice, knowing that for a few brief hours, in a rowboat, in the darkness of night, he holds the fate of the monarchy in his hands—the tall, proud figure of a man with the clothes of a peasant and the bearing of an aristocrat, who looks up from the bottom of a ravine at the distant reflection of a fire and finds himself confronted by a terrible alternative—the young revolutionary, pacing back and forth in the darkness, in front of a breach in a crumbling tower, torn between treason to the cause he has served all his life and the voice of a higher loyalty—the white-faced figure of a man who rises to pronounce the verdict of a revolutionary tribunal, while the crowd waits in total stillness to hear whether he will spare or sentence to death the only man he had ever loved.

The greatest example of the power of dramatic integration is an unforgettable scene which only Hugo could have written, a scene in which the agonizing intensity and suspense of a complex development are resolved and surpassed by two simple lines of dialogue: “Je t’arrete.”—“Je t’approuve.” (“I arrest you.”—“You are right.”) The reader will have to reach these lines in their full context to discover who speaks them and what enormous psychological significance and grandeur the author makes them convey.

“Grandeur” is the one word that names the leitmotif of Ninety-Three and of all of Hugo’s novels—and of his sense of life. And perhaps the most tragic conflict is not in his novels, but in their author. With so magnificent a view of man and of existence, Hugo never discovered how to implement it in reality. He professed conscious beliefs which contradicted his subconscious ideal and made its application to reality impossible.

He never translated his sense of life into conceptual terms, he did not ask himself what ideas, premises or psychological conditions were necessary to enable men to achieve the spiritual stature of his heroes. His attitude toward the intellect was highly ambiguous. It is as if Hugo the artist had overwhelmed Hugo the thinker; as if a great mind had never drawn a distinction between the processes of artistic creation and of rational cognition (two different methods of using one’s consciousness, which need not clash, but are not the same); as if his thinking consisted of images, in his work and in his own life; as if he thought in metaphors, not in concepts, in metaphors that stood for enormous emotional complexities, as hurried symbols and mere approximations. It is as if the wide emotional abstractions he handled as an artist made him too impatient for the task of rigorous defining and of identifying that which he sensed rather than knew—and so he reached for any available theories that seemed to connote, rather than denote, his values.

Toward the close of Ninety-Three, Hugo the artist sets up two superlatively dramatic opportunities for his characters to express their ideas, to declare the intellectual grounds of their stand: one, a scene between Lantenac and Gauvain, in which the old royalist is supposed to defy the young revolutionary by an impassioned defense of the monarchy; the other, between Cimourdain and Gauvain, in which they are supposed to confront each other as the spokesmen for two different aspects of the revolutionary spirit. I say “supposed,” because Hugo the thinker was unable to do it: the characters’ speeches are not expressions of ideas, but only rhetoric, metaphors and generalities. His fire, his eloquence, his emotional power seemed to desert him when he had to deal with theoretical subjects.

Hugo the thinker was archetypical of the virtues and the fatal errors of the nineteenth century. He believed in an unlimited, automatic human progress. He believed that ignorance and poverty were the only causes of human evil. Feeling an enormous, incoherent benevolence, he was impatiently eager to abolish any form of human suffering and he proclaimed ends, without thinking of means: he wanted to abolish poverty, with no idea of the source of wealth; he wanted the people to be free, with no idea of what is necessary to secure political freedom; he wanted to establish universal brotherhood, with no idea that force and terror will not establish it. He took reason for granted and did not see the disastrous contradiction of attempting to combine it with faith—though his particular form of mysticism was not of the abject Oriental variety, but was closer to the proud legends of the Greeks, and his God was a symbol of human perfection, whom he worshiped with a certain arrogant confidence, almost like an equal or a personal friend.

The theories by which Hugo the thinker sought to implement it do not belong in the universe of Hugo the artist. When and as they are put into practice, they achieve the opposite of those values which he knew only as a sense of life. Hugo the artist paid for that lethal contradiction. Even though no other artist had ever projected so deeply joyous a universe as his, there is a somber touch of tragedy in all his writing. Most of his novels have tragic endings—as if he were unable to concretize the form in which his heroes could triumph on earth, and he could only let them die in battle, with an unbroken integrity of spirit as the only assertion of their loyalty to life; as if, to him, it was the earth, not heaven, that represented an object of longing, which he could never fully reach or win.

Such was the nature of his conflict: a professed mystic in his conscious convictions, he was passionately in love with this earth; a professed altruist, he worshiped man’s greatness, not his suffering, weaknesses or evils; a professed advocate of socialism, he was a fiercely intransigent individualist; a professed champion of the doctrine that emotions are superior to reason, he achieved the grandeur of his characters by making them all superbly conscious, fully aware of their motives and desires, fully focused on reality and acting accordingly—from the peasant mother in Ninety-Three to Jean Valjean in Les Misérables. And this is the secret of their peculiar cleanliness, this is what gives a beggar the stature of a giant, this absence of blind irrationality and stuporous, unfocused drifting; this is the hallmark of all of Hugo’s characters; it is also the hallmark of human self-esteem.

On whose political-philosophical side does Victor Hugo belong? It is not an accident that in our day, in a culture dominated by altruistic collectivism, he is not a favorite of those whose alleged ideals he allegedly shared.

I discovered Victor Hugo when I was thirteen, in the stifling, sordid ugliness of Soviet Russia. One would have to have lived on some pestilent planet in order fully to understand what his novels—and his radiant universe—meant to me then, and mean now. And that I am writing an introduction to one of his novels—in order to present it to the American public—has, for me, the sense of the kind of drama that he would have approved and understood. He helped to make it possible for me to be here and to be a writer. If I can help another young reader to find what I found in his work, if I can bring to the novels of Victor Hugo some part of the kind of audience he deserves, I shall regard it as a payment on an incalculable debt that can never be computed or repaid.

11.

The Goal of My Writing

THE motive and purpose of my writing is the projection of an ideal man. The portrayal of a moral ideal, as my ultimate literary goal, as an end in itself—to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means.

Let me stress this: my purpose is not the philosophical enlightenment of my readers, it is not the beneficial influence which my novels may have on people, it is not the fact that my novels may help a reader’s intellectual development. All these matters are important, but they are secondary considerations, they are merely consequences and effects, not first causes or prime movers. My purpose, first cause and prime mover is the portrayal of Howard Roark or John Galt or Hank Rearden or Francisco d’Anconia as an end in himself—not as a means to any further end. Which, incidentally, is the greatest value I could ever offer a reader.

This is why I feel a very mixed emotion—part patience, part amusement and, at times, an empty kind of weariness—when I am asked whether I am primarily a novelist or a philosopher (as if these two were antonyms), whether my stories are propaganda vehicles for ideas, whether politics or the advocacy of capitalism is my chief purpose. All such questions are so enormously irrelevant, so far beside the point, so much not my way of coming at things.

My way is much simpler and, simultaneously, much more complex than that, speaking from two different aspects. The simple truth is that I approach literature as a child does: I write—and read—for the sake of the story. The complexity lies in the task of translating that attitude into adult terms.

The specific concretes, the forms of one’s values, change with one’s growth and development. The abstraction “values” does not. An adult’s values involve the entire sphere of human activity, including philosophy—most particularly philosophy. But the basic principle—the function and meaning of values in man’s life and in literature—remains the same.

My basic test for any story is: Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life? Is this story an experience worth living through for its own sake? Is the pleasure of contemplating these characters an end in itself?

It’s as simple as that. But that simplicity involves the total of man’s existence.

It involves such questions as: What kind of men do I want to see in real life—and why? What kind of events, that is, human actions, do I want to see taking place—and why? What kind of experience do I want to live through, that is, what are my goals—and why?

It is obvious to what field of human knowledge all these questions belong: to the field of ethics. What is the good? What are the right actions for man to take? What are man’s proper values?

Since my purpose is the presentation of an ideal man, I had to define and present the conditions which make him possible and which his existence requires. Since man’s character is the product of his premises, I had to define and present the kind of premises and values that create the character of an ideal man and motivate his actions; which means that I had to define and present a rational code of ethics. Since man acts among and deals with other men, I had to present the kind of social system that makes it possible for ideal men to exist and to function—a free, productive, rational system, which demands and rewards the best in every man, great or average, and which is, obviously, laissez-faire capitalism.

But neither politics nor ethics nor philosophy are ends in themselves, neither in life nor in literature. Only Man is an end in himself.

Now observe that the practitioners of the literary school diametrically opposed to mine—the school of Naturalism—claim that a writer must reproduce what they call “real life,” allegedly “as it is,” exercising no selectivity and no value-judgments. By “reproduce,” they mean “photograph”; by “real life,” they mean whatever given concretes they happen to observe; by “as it is,” they mean “as it is lived by the people around them.” But observe that these Naturalists—or the good writers among them—are extremely selective in regard to two attributes of literature: style and characterization. Without selectivity, it would be impossible to achieve any sort of characterization whatever, neither of an unusual man nor of an average one who is to be offered as statistically typical of a large segment of the population. Therefore, the Naturalists’ opposition to selectivity applies to only one attribute of literature: the content or subject. It is in regard to his choice of subject that a novelist must exercise no choice, they claim.

Why?

The Naturalists have never given an answer to that question—not a rational, logical, noncontradictory answer. Why should a writer photograph his subjects indiscriminately and unselectively? Because they “really” happened? To record what really happened is the job of a reporter or of a historian, not of a novelist. To enlighten readers and educate them? That is the job of science, not of literature, of nonfiction writing, not of fiction. To improve men’s lot by exposing their misery? But that is a value-judgment and a moral purpose and a didactic “message”—all of which are forbidden by the Naturalist doctrine. Besides, to improve anything one must know what constitutes an improvement—and to know that, one must know what is the good and how to achieve it—and to know that, one must have a whole system of value-judgments, a system of ethics, which is anathema to the Naturalists.

Thus, the Naturalists’ position amounts to giving a novelist full esthetic freedom in regard to means, but not in regard to ends. He may exercise choice, creative imagination, value-judgments in regard to how he portrays things, but not in regard to what he portrays—in regard to style or characterization, but not in regard to subject. Man—the subject of literature—must not be viewed or portrayed selectively. Man must be accepted as the given, the unchangeable, the not-to-be-judged, the status quo. But since we observe that men do change, that they differ from one another, that they pursue different values, who, then, is to determine the human status quo? Naturalism’s implicit answer is: everybody except the novelist.

The novelist—according to the Naturalist doctrine—must neither judge nor value. He is not a creator, but only a recording secretary whose master is the rest of mankind. Let others pronounce judgments, make decisions, select goals, fight over values and determine the course, the fate and the soul of man. The novelist is the only outcast and deserter of that battle. His is not to reason why—his is only to trot behind his master, notebook in hand, taking down whatever the master dictates, picking up such pearls or such swinishness as the master may choose to drop.

As far as I am concerned, I have too much self-esteem for a job of that kind.

I see the novelist as a combination of prospector and jeweler. The novelist must discover the potential, the gold mine, of man’s soul, must extract the gold and then fashion as magnificent a crown as his ability and vision permit.

Just as men of ambition for material values do not rummage through city dumps, but venture out into lonely mountains in search of gold—so men of ambition for intellectual values do not sit in their backyards, but venture out in quest of the noblest, the purest, the costliest elements. I would not enjoy the spectacle of Benvenuto Cellini making mud-pies.

It is the selectivity in regard to subject—the most severely, rigorously, ruthlessly exercised selectivity—that I hold as the primary, the essential, the cardinal aspect of art. In literature, this means: the story—which means: the plot and the characters—which means: the kind of men and events that a writer chooses to portray.

The subject is not the only attribute of art, but it is the fundamental one, it is the end to which all the others are the means. In most esthetic theories, however, the end—the subject—is omitted from consideration, and only the means are regarded as esthetically relevant. Such theories set up a false dichotomy and claim that a slob portrayed by the technical means of a genius is preferable to a goddess portrayed by the technique of an amateur. I hold that both are esthetically offensive; but while the second is merely esthetic incompetence, the first is an esthetic crime.

There is no dichotomy, no necessary conflict between ends and means. The end does not justify the means—neither in ethics nor in esthetics. And neither do the means justify the end: there is no esthetic justification for the spectacle of Rembrandt’s great artistic skill employed to portray a side of beef.

That particular painting may be taken as a symbol of everything I am opposed to in art and in literature. At the age of seven, I could not understand why anyone should wish to paint or to admire pictures of dead fish, garbage cans or fat peasant women with triple chins. Today, I understand the psychological causes of such esthetic phenomena—and the more I understand, the more I oppose them.

In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other.

That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art.

Misery, disease, disaster, evil, all the negatives of human existence, are proper subjects of study in life, for the purpose of understanding and correcting them—but are not proper subjects of contemplation for contemplation’s sake. In art, and in literature, these negatives are worth re-creating only in relation to some positive, as a foil, as a contrast, as a means of stressing the positive—but not as an end in themselves.

The “compassionate” studies of depravity which pass for literature today are the dead end and the tombstone of Naturalism. If their perpetrators still claim the justification that these things are “true” (most of them aren’t)—the answer is that this sort of truth belongs in psychological case histories, not in literature. The picture of an infected ruptured appendix may be of great value in a medical textbook—but it does not belong in an art gallery. And an infected soul is a much more repulsive spectacle.

That one should wish to enjoy the contemplation of values, of the good—of man’s greatness, intelligence, ability, virtue, heroism—is self-explanatory. It is the contemplation of the evil that requires explanation and justification; and the same goes for the contemplation of the mediocre, the undistinguished, the commonplace, the meaningless, the mindless.

At the age of seven, I refused to read the children’s equivalent of Naturalistic literature—the stories about the children of the folks next door. They bored me to death. I was not interested in such people in real life; I saw no reason to find them interesting in fiction.

This is still my position today; the only difference is that today I know its full philosophical justification.

As far as literary schools are concerned, I would call myself a Romantic Realist.

Consider the significance of the fact that the Naturalists call Romantic art an “escape.” Ask yourself what sort of metaphysics—what view of life—that designation confesses. An escape—from what? If the projection of value-goals—the projection of an improvement on the given, the known, the immediately available—is an “escape,” then medicine is an “escape” from disease, agriculture is an “escape” from hunger, knowledge is an “escape” from ignorance, ambition is an “escape” from sloth, and life is an “escape” from death. If so, then a hard-core realist is a vermin-eaten brute who sits motionless in a mud puddle, contemplates a pigsty and whines that “such is life.” If that is realism, then I am an escapist. So was Aristotle. So was Christopher Columbus.

There is a passage in The Fountainhead that deals with this issue: the passage in which Howard Roark explains to Steven Mallory why he chose him to do a statue for the Stoddard Temple. In writing that passage, I was consciously and deliberately stating the essential goal of my own work—as a kind of small, personal manifesto: “I think you’re the best sculptor we’ve got. I think it, because your figures are not what men are, but what men could be—and should be. Because you’ve gone beyond the probable and made us see what is possible, but possible only through you. Because your figures are more devoid of contempt for humanity than any work I’ve ever seen. Because you have a magnificent respect for the human being. Because your figures are the heroic in man.”

Today, more than twenty years later, I would want to change—or, rather, to clarify—only two small points. First, the words “more devoid of contempt for humanity” are not too exact grammatically; what I wanted to convey was “untouched” by contempt for humanity, while the work of others was touched by it to some extent. Second, the words “possible only through you” should not be taken to mean that Mallory’s figures were impossible metaphysically, in reality; I meant that they were possible only because he had shown the way to make them possible.

“Your figures are not what men are, but what men could be—and should be.”

This line will make it clear whose great philosophical principle I had accepted and was following and had been groping for, long before I heard the name “Aristotle.” It was Aristotle who said that fiction is of greater philosophical importance than history, because history represents things only as they are, while fiction represents them “as they might be and ought to be.”

Why must fiction represent things “as they might be and ought to be”?

My answer is contained in one statement of Atlas Shrugged—and in the implications of that statement: “As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.”

Just as man’s physical survival depends on his own effort, so does his psychological survival. Man faces two corollary, interdependent fields of action in which a constant exercise of choice and a constant creative process are demanded of him: the world around him and his own soul (by “soul,” I mean his consciousness). Just as he has to produce the material values he needs to sustain his life, so he has to acquire the values of character that enable him to sustain it and that make his life worth living. He is born without the knowledge of either. He has to discover both—and translate them into reality—and survive by shaping the world and himself in the image of his values.

Growing from a common root, which is philosophy, man’s knowledge branches out in two directions. One branch studies the physical world or the phenomena pertaining to man’s physical existence; the other studies man or the phenomena pertaining to his consciousness. The first leads to abstract science, which leads to applied science or engineering, which leads to technology—to the actual production of material values. The second leads to art.

Art is the technology of the soul.

Art is the product of three philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics. Metaphysics and epistemology are the abstract base of ethics. Ethics is the applied science that defines a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions which determine the course of his life; ethics is the engineering that provides the principles and blueprints. Art creates the final product. It builds the model.

Let me stress this analogy: art does not teach—it shows, it displays the full, concretized reality of the final goal. Teaching is the task of ethics. Teaching is not the purpose of an art work, any more than it is the purpose of an airplane. Just as one can learn a great deal from an airplane by studying it or taking it apart, so one can learn a great deal from an art work—about the nature of man, of his soul, of his existence. But these are merely fringe benefits. The primary purpose of an airplane is not to teach man how to fly, but to give him the actual experience of flying. So is the primary purpose of an art work.

Although the representation of things “as they might be and ought to be” helps man to achieve these things in real life, this is only a secondary value. The primary value is that it gives him the experience of living in a world where things are as they ought to be. This experience is of crucial importance to him: it is his psychological life line.

Since man’s ambition is unlimited, since his pursuit and achievement of values is a lifelong process—and the higher the values, the harder the struggle—man needs a moment, an hour or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully achieved. It is like a moment of rest, a moment to gain fuel to move farther. Art gives him that fuel. Art gives him the experience of seeing the full, immediate, concrete reality of his distant goals.

The importance of that experience is not in what he learns from it, but in that he experiences it. The fuel is not a theoretical principle, not a didactic “message,” but the life-giving fact of experiencing a moment of metaphysical joy—a moment of love for existence.

A given individual may choose to move forward, to translate the meaning of that experience into the actual course of his own life; or he may fail to live up to it and spend the rest of his life betraying it. But whatever the case may be, the art work remains intact, an entity complete in itself, an achieved, realized, immovable fact of reality—like a beacon raised over the dark crossroads of the world, saying: “This is possible.”

No matter what its consequences, that experience is not a way station one passes, but a stop, a value in itself. It is an experience about which one can say: “I am glad to have reached this in my life.” There are not many experiences of that kind to be found in the modern world.

I have read a great many novels of which nothing remains in my mind but the dry rustle of scraps long since swept away. But the novels of Victor Hugo, and a very few others, were an unrepeatable experience to me, a beacon whose every brilliant spark is as alive as ever.

This aspect of art is difficult to communicate—it demands a great deal of the viewer or reader—but I believe that many of you will understand me introspectively.

There is a scene in The Fountainhead which is a direct expression of this issue. I was, in a sense, both characters in that scene, but it was written primarily from the aspect of myself as the consumer, rather than the producer, of art; it was based on my own desperate longing for the sight of human achievement. I regarded the emotional meaning of that scene as entirely personal, almost subjective—and I did not expect it to be shared by anyone. But that scene proved to be the one most widely understood and most frequently mentioned by the readers of The Fountainhead.

It is the opening scene of Part IV, between Howard Roark and the boy on the bicycle.

The boy thought that “man’s work should be a higher step, an improvement on nature, not a degradation. He did not want to despise men; he wanted to love and admire them. But he dreaded the sight of the first house, poolroom and movie poster he would encounter on his way. . . . He had always wanted to write music, and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. . . . Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. . . . Don’t work for my happiness, my brothers—show me yours—show me that it is possible—show me your achievement—and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.”

This is the meaning of art in man’s life.

It is from this perspective that I will now ask you to consider the meaning of Naturalism—the doctrine which proposes to confine men to the sight of slums, poolrooms, movie posters and on down, much farther down.

It is the Romantic or value-oriented vision of life that the Naturalists regard as “superficial”—and it is the vision which extends as far as the bottom of a garbage can that they regard as “profound.”

It is rationality, purpose and values that they regard as naive—while sophistication, they claim, consists of discarding one’s mind, rejecting goals, renouncing values and writing four-letter words on fences and sidewalks.

Scaling a mountain, they claim, is easy—but rolling in the gutter is a noteworthy achievement.

Those who seek the sight of beauty and greatness are motivated by fear, they claim—they who are the embodiments of chronic terror—while it takes courage to fish in cesspools.

Man’s soul—they proclaim with self-righteous pride—is a sewer.

Well, they ought to know.

It is a significant commentary on the present state of our culture that I have become the object of hatred, smears, denunciations, because I am famous as virtually the only novelist who has declared that her soul is not a sewer, and neither are the souls of her characters, and neither is the soul of man.

The motive and purpose of my writing can best be summed up by saying that if a dedication page were to precede the total of my work, it would read: To the glory of Man.

And if anyone should ask me what it is that I have said to the glory of Man, I will answer only by paraphrasing Howard Roark. I will hold up a copy of Atlas Shrugged and say: “The explanation rests.”

(October-November 1963)

12.

The Simplest Thing in the World

A Short Story

(This story was written in 1940. It did not appear in print until the November 1967 issue of THE OBJECTIVIST, where it was published in its original form, as written.

The story illustrates the nature of the creative process—the way in which an artist’s sense of life directs the integrating functions of his subconscious and controls his creative imagination.)

HENRY DORN sat at his desk and looked at a sheet of blank paper. Through a feeling of numb panic, he said to himself: this is going to be the easiest thing you’ve ever done.

Just be stupid, he said to himself. That’s all. Just relax and be as stupid as you can be. Easy, isn’t it? What are you scared of, you damn fool? You don’t think you can be stupid, is that it? You’re conceited, he said to himself angrily. That’s the whole trouble with you. You’re conceited as hell. So you can’t be stupid, can you? You’re being stupid right now. You’ve been stupid about this thing all your life. Why can’t you be stupid on order?

I’ll start in a minute, he said. Just one minute more and then I’ll start. I will, this time. I’ll just rest for a minute, that’s all right, isn’t it? I’m very tired. You’ve done nothing today, he said. You’ve done nothing for months. What are you tired of? That’s why I’m tired—because I’ve done nothing. I wish I could . . . I’d give anything if I could again . . . Stop that. Stop it quick. That’s the one thing you mustn’t think about. You’re to start in a minute and you were almost ready. You won’t be ready if you think of that.

Don’t look at it. Don’t look at it. Don’t look at . . . He had turned. He was looking at a thick book in a ragged blue jacket, lying on a shelf, under old magazines. He could see, on its spine, the white letters merging with the faded blue: Triumph by Henry Dorn.

He got up and pushed the magazines down to hide the book. It’s better if you don’t see it while you’re doing it, he said. No. It’s better if it doesn’t see you doing it. You’re a sentimental fool, he said.

It was not a good book. How do you know it was a good book? No, that won’t work. All right, it was a good book. It’s a great book. There’s nothing you can do about that. It would be much easier if you could. It would be much easier if you could make yourself believe that it was a lousy book and that it had deserved what had happened to it. Then you could look people straight in the face and write a better one. But you didn’t believe it. And you had tried very hard to believe that. But you didn’t.

All right, he said. Drop that. You’ve gone over that, over and over again, for two years. So drop it. Not now . . . It wasn’t the bad reviews that I minded. It was the good ones. Particularly the one by Fleurette Lumm who said it was the best book she’d ever read—because it had such a touching love story.

He had not even known that there was a love story in his book, and he had not known that what there was of it was touching. And the things that were there, in his book, the things he had spent five years thinking of and writing, writing as carefully, as scrupulously, as delicately as he knew how—these things Fleurette Lumm had not mentioned at all. At first, after he had read the reviews, he had thought that these things were not in his book at all; he had only imagined they were; or else the printer had left them out—only the book seemed very thick, and if the printer had left them out, what filled all those pages? And it wasn’t possible that he had not written the book in English, and it wasn’t possible that so many bright people couldn’t read English, and it wasn’t possible that he was insane. So he read his book over again, very carefully, and he was happy when he found a bad sentence in it, or a muddled paragraph, or a thought that did not seem clear; he said, they’re right, it isn’t there, it isn’t clear at all, it was perfectly fair of them to miss it and the world is a human place to live in. But after he had read all of his book, to the end, he knew that it was there, that it was clear and beautiful and very important, that he could not have done it any better—and that he’ll never understand the answer. That he had better not try to understand it, if he wished to remain alive.

All right, he said. That’s about enough now, isn’t it? You’ve been at it longer than a minute. And you said you would start.

The door was open and he looked into the bedroom. Kitty sat there at a table, playing solitaire. Her face looked as if she were very successful at making it look as if everything were all right. She had a lovely mouth. You could always tell things about people by their mouth. Hers looked as if she wanted to smile at the world, and if she didn’t it was her own fault, and she really would in a moment, because she was all right and so was the world. In the lamplight her neck looked white and very thin, bent attentively over the cards. It didn’t cost any money to play solitaire. He heard the cards thumping down gently, and the steam crackling in the pipe in the corner.

The doorbell rang, and Kitty came in quickly to open the door, not looking at him, her body tight and purposeful under the childish, wide-skirted, print dress, a very lovely dress, only it had been bought two years ago and for summer wear. He could have opened the door, but he knew why she wanted to open it.

He stood, his feet planted wide apart, his stomach drawn, not looking at the door, listening. He heard a voice and then he heard Kitty saying: “No, I’m sorry, but we really don’t need an Electrolux.” Kitty’s voice was almost a song of release; as if she were making an effort not to sound too foolish; as if she loved the Electrolux man and wished she could ask him in to visit. He knew why Kitty’s voice sounded like that. She had thought it was the landlord.

Kitty closed the door, and looked at him, crossing the room, and smiled as if she were apologizing—humbly and happily—for her existence, and said: “I don’t want to interrupt you, dear,” and went back to her solitaire.

All you have to do, he said to himself, is think of Fleurette Lumm and try to imagine what she likes. Just imagine that and then write it down. That’s all there is to it. And you’ll have a good commercial story that will sell immediately and make you a lot of money. It’s the simplest thing in the world.

You can’t be the only one who’s right and everybody else wrong, he said. Everybody’s told you that that’s what you must do. You’ve asked for a job and nobody would give you one. Nobody would help you find one. Nobody had even seemed interested or serious about it. They said, a brilliant young man like you! Look at Paul Pattison, they said. Eighty thousand a year and not half your brain. But Paul knows what the public likes to read and gives it to them. If you’d just stop being so stubborn, they said. You don’t have to be intellectual all the time. Why not be practical for a while, and then, after you’ve made your first fifty thousand dollars, you can sit back and indulge yourself in some more high literature which will never sell. They said, why waste your time on a job? What can you do? You’ll be lucky if you get twenty-five a week. It’s foolish, when you’ve got a great talent for words, you know you have, if you’d only be sensible about it. It ought to be easy for you. If you can write fancy, difficult stuff like that, it ought to be a cinch to toss off a popular serial or two. Any fool can do it. They said, stop dramatizing yourself. Do you enjoy being a martyr? They said, look at your wife. They said, if Paul Pattison can do it, why can’t you?

Think of Fleurette Lumm, he said to himself, sitting down at his desk. You imagine that you can’t understand her, but you can, if you want to. Don’t try to be so complicated. Be simple. She’s simple to understand. That’s it. Be simple about everything. Just write a simple story. The simplest, most unimportant story you can imagine. For God’s sake, can’t you think of anything that’s not important, not important at all, not of the slightest possible importance? Can’t you? Are you as good as that, you conceited fool? Do you really think you’re as good as that? That you can’t do anything unless it’s great, profound, important? Do you have to be a world-saver all the time? Do you have to be a damn Joan d’Arc?

Stop kidding yourself, he said. You can. You’re no better than anyone else. He chuckled. That’s the kind of rotter you are. People tell themselves they’re no worse than anyone else when they need courage. You tell yourself you’re no better. I wish you’d tell me where you got that infernal conceit of yours. That’s all it is. Not any great talent, not any brilliant mind—just conceit. You’re not a noble martyr to your art. You’re an inflated egotist—and you’re getting just what you deserve.

Good, are you? What makes you think you’re good? What right have you to hate what you’re going to do? You haven’t written anything for months. You couldn’t. You can’t write any more. You never will again. And if you can’t write what you want to write—what business have you to despise the things people want you to write? That’s all you’re good for anyway, not for any great epics with immortal messages, and you ought to be damn glad to try and do it, not sit here like a convict in a death cell waiting for his picture to be taken for the front pages.

Now that’s better. I think you have the right spirit now. Now you can start.

How does one start those things? . . . Well, let’s see . . . It must be a simple, human story. Try to think of something human . . . How does one make one’s mind work? How does one invent a story? How can people ever be writers? Come on, you’ve written before. How did you start then? No, you can’t think of that. Not of that. If you do—you’ll go completely blank again, or worse. Think that you’ve never written before. It’s a new start. You’re turning over a new leaf. There! That was good. If you can think in lousy bromides like that, you’ll do it. You’re beginning to get it . . .

Think of something human . . . Oh, come on, think hard . . . Well, try it this way: think of the word “human,” think of what it means—you’ll get an idea somewhere . . . Human . . . What’s the most human thing there is? What’s the quality that all the people you know have got, the outstanding quality in all of them? Their motive power? Fear. Not fear of anyone in particular, just fear. Just a great, blind force without object. Malicious fear. The kind that makes them want to see you suffer. Because they know that they, too, will have to suffer and it makes it easier, to know that you do also. The kind that makes them want to see you being small and funny and smutty. Small people are safe. It’s not really fear, it’s more than that. Like Mr. Crawford, for instance, who’s a lawyer and who’s glad when a client of his loses a suit. He’s glad, even though he loses money on it; even though it hurts his reputation. He’s glad, and he doesn’t even know that he’s glad. God, what a story there is in Mr. Crawford! If you could put him down on paper as he is, and explain just why he is like that, and . . .

Yeah, he said to himself. In three volumes which no one would ever publish, because they’d say it was not true and call me a hater of humanity. Stop it. Stop it fast. That’s not at all what they mean when they say a story is human. But it’s human. But it’s not what they mean. What do they mean? You’ll never know. Oh yes, you do. You know it. You know it very well—without knowing. Oh, stop this! . . .

Why must you always know the meaning of everything? There’s your first mistake—right there. Do it without thinking. It mustn’t have any meaning. It must be written as if you’d never tried to find any meaning in anything, not ever in your life. It must sound as if that’s the kind of person you are. Why do people resent people who look for a meaning? What’s the real reason that. . .

STOP IT! . . .

All right. Let’s try to go at it in a different way entirely. Don’t start with an abstraction. Start with something definite. Anything. Think of something simple, obvious and bad. So bad that you won’t care, one way or the other. Say the first thing you can think of.

For instance, a story about a middle-aged millionaire who tries to seduce a poor young working girl. That’s good. That’s very good. Now go on with it. Quick. Don’t think. Go on with it.

Well, he’s a man of about fifty. He’s made a fortune, unscrupulously, because he’s ruthless. She’s only twenty-two, and very beautiful, and very sweet, and she works in the five-and-ten. Yes, in the five-and-ten. And he owns it. That’s what he is—a big tycoon who owns a whole slew of five-and-ten’s. This is good.

One day he comes to this particular store, and he sees this girl and he falls in love with her. Why would he fall in love with her? Well, he’s lonely. He’s very terribly lonely. He hasn’t got a friend in the world. People don’t like him. People never like a man who’s made a success of himself. Also, he’s ruthless. You can’t make a success of yourself unless you hold onto your one goal and drop everything else. When you have a great devotion to a goal—people call you ruthless. And when you work harder than anyone else, when you work like a freight engine while others take it easy, and so you beat them at it—people call you unscrupulous. That’s human also.

You don’t work like that just to make money. It’s something else. It’s a great, driving energy—a creative energy?—no, it’s the principle of creation itself. It’s what makes everything in the world. Dams and skyscrapers and transatlantic cables. Everything we’ve got. It comes from men like that. When he started the shipyards—oh, he’s a five-and-ten tycoon—no, he isn’t, to hell with the five-and-ten!—when he started the shipyards that he made his fortune from, there was nothing there but a few shacks and a lot of clam shells. He made the town, he made the harbor, he gave jobs to hundreds of people, they’d still be digging for clams if he hadn’t come along. And now they hate him. And he’s not bitter about it. He’s accepted that long ago. He just doesn’t understand. Now he’s fifty years old, and circumstances have forced him to retire. He’s got millions—and he’s the most miserable man in the world. Because he wants to work—not to make money, just to work, just to fight and take chances—because that great energy cannot be kept still.

Now when he meets the girl—what girl?—oh, the one in the five-and-ten . . . Oh, to hell with her! What do you need her for? He’s married long ago—and that’s not the story at all. What he meets is a poor, struggling young man. And he envies this boy—because the boy’s great struggle is still ahead of him. But this boy—now that’s the point—this boy doesn’t want to struggle at all. He’s a nice, able, likeable kid, but he has no real, driving desire for anything. He’s been adequate at several different jobs and he’s dropped them all. There’s no passion to him, no goal. What he wants above all is security. He doesn’t care what he does or how or who tells him to do it. He’s never created anything. He’s given nothing to the world and he never will. But he wants security from the world. And he’s liked by everybody. And he has everybody’s sympathy. And there they are—the two men. Which one is right? Which one is good? Which one’s got the truth? What happens when life brings them face to face?

Oh, what a story! Don’t you see? It’s not just the two of them. It’s more, much more. It’s the whole tragedy of the world today. It’s our greatest problem. It’s the most important . . .

Oh, God!

Do you think you can? Do you think you’ll get away with it maybe, if you’re very clever, if you disguise it, so they’ll think it’s just a story about an old man, nothing very serious, I don’t mind if they miss it, I hope they miss it, let them think they’re reading trash, if they’ll only let me write it. I don’t have to stress it, I don’t have to have much of it, of what’s good, I can hide it, I can apologize for it with a lot of human stuff about boats and women and swimming pools. They won’t know. They’ll let me.

No, he said, they won’t. Don’t fool yourself. They’re as good at it as you are. They know their kind of story just like you do yours. They might not even be able to explain it, what it is or where, but they’ll know. They always know what’s theirs and what isn’t. Besides, it’s a controversial issue. The leftists won’t like it. It will antagonize a lot of people. What do you want a controversial issue for—in a popular magazine story?

No, go back to the beginning, where he’s a five-and-ten tycoon . . . No. I can’t. I can’t waste it. I’ve got to use that story. I’ll write it. But not now. I’ll write it after I’ve written this one commercial piece. That will be the first thing I’ll write after I have money. That’s worth waiting for.

Now start all over again. On something else. Come on, it isn’t so bad now, is it? You see, it wasn’t difficult at all, thinking. It came by itself. Just start on something else.

Get an interesting beginning, something good and startling, even if you don’t know what it’s all about and where to go from there. Suppose you open with a young girl who lives on a rooftop, in one of those storerooms above a loft-building, and she’s sitting there on the roof, all alone, it’s a beautiful summer evening, and suddenly there’s a shot and a window in the next building cracks open, glass flying all over the place, and a man jumps out of the window onto her roof.

There! You can’t possibly go wrong on that. It’s so bad that it’s sure to be right.

Well . . . Why would a girl live in a loft-building? Because it’s cheap. No, the Y.W.C.A. would be cheaper. Or sharing a furnished room with a girlfriend. That’s what a girl would do. No, not this girl. She can’t get along with people. She doesn’t know why. But she can’t. So she’d rather be alone. She’s been very much alone all her life. She works in a huge, busy, noisy, stupid office. She likes her rooftop because when she’s there alone at night, she has the whole city to herself, and she sees it, not as it is, but as it could have been. As it should have been. That’s her trouble—always wanting things to be what they should be, and never are. She looks at the city and she thinks of what’s going on in the penthouses, little islands of light in the sky, and she thinks of great, mysterious, breath-stopping things, not of cocktail parties, and drunks in bathrooms, and kept women with dogs.

And the building next door—it’s a smart hotel, and there’s this one large window right over her roof, and the window is of frosted glass, because the view is so ugly. She can’t see anything in that window—only the silhouettes of people against the light. Only the shadows. And she sees this one man there—he’s tall and slender and he holds his shoulders as if he were giving orders to the whole world. And he moves as if that were a light and easy job for him to do. And she falls in love with him. With his shadow. She’s never seen him and she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t know anything about him and she never tries to learn. She doesn’t care. It’s not what he is. It’s what she thinks of him as being. It’s a love without future, without hope or the need of hope, a love great enough to find happiness in nothing but its own greatness, unreal, inexpressible, undemanding—and more real than anything around her. And . . .

Henry Dorn sat at his desk, seeing what men cannot see except when they do not know they are seeing it, seeing his own thoughts in a way of sight brighter than any perception of the things around him, seeing them, not pushing them forward, but seeing them as a detached observer without control of their shape, each thought a corner, and a bright astonishment meeting him behind each corner, not creating anything, but being carried along, not helping and not resisting, through minutes of a feeling like a payment for all the agony he would ever bear, a feeling continuing only while you do not know that you feel it . . .

And then, that evening, she is sitting alone on the roof, and there’s a shot, and that window is shattered, and that man leaps out onto her roof. She sees him for the first time—and this is the miracle: for once in her life, he is what she had wanted him to be, he looks as she had wanted him to look. But he has just committed a murder. I suppose it will have to be some kind of justifiable murder . . . No! No! No! It’s not a justifiable murder at all. We don’t even know what it is—and she doesn’t know. But here is the dream, the impossible, the ideal—against the laws of the whole world. Her own truth—against all mankind. She has to . . .

Oh, stop it! Stop it! Stop it!

Well . . . ?

Pull yourself together, man. Pull yourself together . . .

Well? For whom is it you’re writing that story? For the Women’s Kitchen Friend?

No, you’re not tired. You’re all right. It’s all right. You’ll write this story later. You’ll write it after you have money. It’s all right. It won’t be taken away from you. Now sit quiet. Count ten.

No! I tell you, you can. You can. You haven’t tried hard enough. You let it get away with you. You begin to think. Can’t you think without thinking?

Listen, can’t you understand a different way of doing it? Don’t think of the fantastic, don’t think of the unusual, don’t think of the opposite of what anyone else’d want to think, but go after the obvious, the easy. Easy—for whom? Come on now. It’s this: it’s because you ask yourself “what if . . . ?” That starts the whole trouble. “What if it’s not what it seems to be at all . . . Wouldn’t it be interesting if . . .” That’s what you do, and you mustn’t. You mustn’t think of what would be interesting. But how can I do anything if I know it isn’t interesting? But it will be—to them. That’s just why it will be to them—because it isn’t to you. That’s the whole secret. But then how do I know what, or where, or why?

Listen, can’t you stop it for a little while? Can’t you turn it off—that brain of yours? Can’t you make it work without letting it work? Can’t you be stupid? Can’t you be consciously, deliberately, cold-bloodedly stupid? Can’t that be done in some way? Everybody is stupid about some things, the best of us and the brightest. Everybody has blind spots, they say. Can’t you make it be this?

Dear God, let me be stupid! Let me be dishonest! Let me be contemptible! Just once. Because I must.

Don’t you see? It’s a matter of one reversal. Just make one single reversal: instead of believing that one must try to be intelligent, different, honest, challenging, that one must do the best possible to the best of one’s ability and then stretch it some more to do still better—believe that one must be dull, stale, sweet, dishonest and safe. That’s all. Is that the way other people do it? No, I don’t think so. They’d end up in an insane asylum in six months. Then what is it? I don’t know. It isn’t that—but it works out like that. Maybe if we were told from the beginning to reverse it . . . But we aren’t. But some of us get wise to it early—and then they’re all right. But why should it be like that? Why should we . . .

Drop it. You’re not settling world problems. You’re writing a commercial story.

All right. Quick and cold now. Hold yourself tight and don’t let yourself like the story. Above all, don’t let yourself like it.

Let’s make it a detective story. A murder mystery. You can’t possibly have a murder mystery with any serious meaning. Come on. Quick, cold and simple.

There must be two villains in a mystery story: the victim and the murderer—so nobody would feel too sorry for either of them. That’s the way it’s always done. Well, you can have some leeway on the victim, but the murderer’s got to be a villain . . . Now the murderer must have a motive. It must be a contemptible motive . . . Let’s see . . . I’ve got it: the murderer is a professional blackmailer who’s holding a lot of people in his clutches, and the victim is the man who’s about to expose him, so the blackmailer kills this man. That’s as low a motive as you could imagine. There’s no excuse for that . . . Or is there? What if . . . Wouldn’t it be interesting if you could prove that the murderer was justified?

What if all those people he blackmails are utter lice? The kind that do horrible things, but just manage to remain within the law, so there’s no way of defending yourself against them. And this man chooses deliberately to become a crusading blackmailer. He gets things on all those people and he forces them to do justice. A lot of men make careers for themselves by knowing where some body or other is buried. Well, this man goes out after such “bodies,” only he doesn’t use them for personal advancement, he uses them to undo the harm these people are doing. He’s a Robin Hood of blackmail. He gets them in the only way they can be gotten. For instance, one of them is a corrupt politician, and the hero—no, the murderer—no, the hero gets the dope on him and forces him to vote right on a certain measure. Another one is a big Hollywood producer who’s ruined a lot of lives—and the hero makes him give a talented actress a break without forcing her to become his mistress. Another one is a crooked businessman—and the hero forces him to play straight. And when the worst one of the lot—what’s the worst one of the lot? a hypocritical reformer, I think—no, that’s dangerous to touch, too controversial—oh, what the hell!—when this reformer traps the hero and is about to expose him, the hero kills him. Why shouldn’t he? And the interesting thing about the story is that all those people will be presented just as they appear in real life. Nice people, pillars of society, liked, admired and respected. And the hero is just a hard, lonely kind of outcast.

Oh, what a story! Prove that! Prove what some of our popular people are really like! Blow the lid off society! Show it for what it’s worth! Prove that the lone wolf is not always a wolf! Prove honesty and courage and strength and dedication! Prove it through a blackmailer and a murderer! Have a story with a murderer for a hero and let him get away with it! A great story! An important story which . . .

Henry Dorn sat very still, his hands folded in his lap, hunched, seeing nothing, thinking of nothing.

Then he pushed the sheet of blank paper aside and reached for the Times’ “Help Wanted” ads.

Index

Abstractions: and man’s cognitive faculty; converting of, by language, into psycho-epistemological equivalents of concretes ; normative and cognitive ; metaphysical, converting of, by art, into equivalent of concretes ; emotional; criteria of; esthetic; development of child’s cognitive and normative abstractions

Altruism: and man’s culturally induced selflessness; as archenemy and destroyer of Romanticism

American Tragedy, An (Dreiser), as a bad novel

Anna Christie (O’Neill), as imitation of Camille (Dumas fils)

Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), as an evil book

Anti-art, classification and examples of

Aquinas, Thomas, as bridge between Aristotle and Renaissance

Architecture: special attributes of as art; dependence of sculpture upon

Aristotle: his principle of esthetics of literature ; 19th century guided by Aristotelian sense of life; Romanticism of 19th century, and Aristotelian influence on

Art: as an end in itself; as selective re-creation of reality according to artist’s metaphysical value-judgments ; as concretiztion of metaphysics ; psycho-epistemological function of; as a universal language; beginning of, as adjunct of religion ; psycho-epistemology of, as illustrated by characterization in literature ; as indispensable medium for communication of a moral ideal; primary focus of, as metaphysical, not ethical; not the means of literal transcription ; place of ethics in, dependent on metaphysical views of artist; of Ancient Greece compared to art of Middle Ages, in impact on man; as voice of the philosophy dominant in a culture; role of emotions in; profoundly personal significance of, for men; as special province and expression of sense of life ; as human product most personally important to man and least understood ; metaphysical significance of everything included in; and man’s confirmation of his view of existence; and the rational man; and the irrational man; as man’s metaphysical mirror ; bad, as production of imitation, second-hand copying, lack of creative expression; philosophical meaning as necessary element of work of; subject of an art work; style of an art work ; and mixtures of contradictory elements of reason and unreason; theme of an art work; objective evaluation of work of; and personal choices in enjoyment of; translating meaning of art work into objective terms; conceptual nature of; valid forms of ; as a unifier of man’s consciousness; how new subcategories arise; limits on freedom of stylization in; integration as the essence of; as man’s psycho-epistemological conditioner ; universality as important attribute of; as concretization of values ; and philosophy, relationship between; nonexistence of, today, as vital cultural movement; and attitudes of collectivist estheticians and intellectuals toward popular values in; as barometer of a culture; the end and the means in, as worthy of each other ; as the technology of the soul; as product of philosophical disciplines—metaphysics, epistemology, ethics ; see also Modern art

Astaire, Fred

Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand): theme of; plot-theme of; quoted on conventional view of morality; quoted on man as a being of self-made soul

Avengers, The, successful British TV series

Ballet: as a system of dance ; essentials of its image of man; “modernization” of

Balzac, Honoré de, as Naturalist writer

Benefield, Barry, as popular-fiction writer

Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoevsky), characterization in

Brown, Fredric, science fiction writing of

Byron, Lord, and “Byronic” view of existence

Camille (Dumas fils), and imitations of

Capitalism: destruction of, in politics; 19th-century Romanticists as enemies of

Cat and Mosue (Günter Grass), Time quoted on

Characterization in novel: as essential attribute ; definition of; extreme degree of selectivity required in; achieved by action and dialogue; error of asserting nature of characters in narrative passages without supporting action; and portrayal of essential traits of personality ; and revelation of motivation; consistency as a major requirement of; maintaining inner logic of; and faculty of volition; and Romantic novelists ; and popular fiction; and the Naturalists

Chayefsky, Paddy, and modern Naturalist work Marty

Child’s development: of moral sense of life; contribution of Romantic art to; of cognitive and normative abstractions ; and imposition of set of rules by conventional morality ; learning concept of moral values; and sins of adults in regard to child’s understanding of morality; dichotomy in consciousness of the practical versus the moral

Choreographer: nature and demands of his role

Chronicle: characteristics of ; return of modern literature to art form of

Classicism: Romanticism as rebellion against; rules of, as improper criteria of esthetic value; school of, improperly regarded as representative of reason

Cognitive faculty: as determining the proper forms of art

Collectivism: resurgence of, and effect of, on Romanticism ; advocacy of, by today’s estheticians and intellectuals ; altruistic, today’s culture as dominated by

Color harmony: a legitimate element in painting

“Color symphonies”: as anti-art

Concepts, nature and function of

Conceptual consciousness: disintegration of, as the goal of modern art

Connery, Sean, performance of, in Dr. No

Consciousness: of man, art as serving a need of; art as confirming or denying efficacy of; integrating mechanism of, and sense of life; as soul ; and faculty of volition ; concern of top-rank Romantic writers with

Creative process, a short story by Ayn Rand as illustrative of nature of

Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), motivation revealed in

Cubism

Culture: art as mirror of a culture’s philosophy ; art as barometer of ; state of, and today’s art

Dali, Salvador, style of

Dance: as a performing art ; as system of motion expressing a metaphysical view of man; its relation to music

Decorative arts: their nature and proper task

Definitions: as guardians of rationality

Determinism: philosophical and esthetic contradictions in; philosophy dominated by doctrine of; as basic premise of writers’ presentation of man prior to 19th century

Diatonic scale: development of

Dr. No (Fleming)

Don Carlos (Schiller)

Dostoevsky, Feodor: choice of subject by; reasons for liking work of; as master of integration of theme and plot structure; and use of motivation in Crime and Punishment; as top-rank Romantic novelist ; characterizations in novels of

Dramatic arts: subcategories of; importance of the play; director as integrator

Dreiser, Theodore, and a bad novel

Dumas, Alexander, as Romantic novelist

Emotional abstractions ; and individual’s view of himself; “important to me” as criterion of selection in

Epistemology: of physical sciences and of humanities; man’s need of; as abstract base of ethics ; see also Psycho-epistemology

Esthetics: Objectivist; criteria of judgment in; as branch of philosophy ; principles of; of literature, Aristotelian principle of; destruction of Romanticism in; field of, and mysticism; Romanticism in, as unrelated to theories of “Romantic” philosophers; state of, today, and prospects for philosophical Renaissance ; vacuum in, of our age

Ethics: as normative science ; link between metaphysics and; and artist’s conceptual theory of; place of, in work of art dependent on metaphysical views of artist ; metaphysical value-judgments as base of; man’s need of; destruction of individualism in; need of Western culture for a new code of ; epistemology, as abstract base of; relation of, to art; teaching as task of

Existentialists: philosophical view of existence of; sense of life achieved by

Ferber, Edna, as popular-fiction writer

Fiction: and identification of reader with characters in ; difference between real-life news story and ; four essential attributes of; and history, difference between representations of; integration of theme and plot as cardinal principle of; motivation as a key-concept in; see also Novel; Popular fiction

Film directors: Fritz Lang’s work

Flaubert, Gustave, style of

Fleming, Ian: as top-rank writer of popular fiction ; thrillers of

Fountainhead, The (Ayn Rand): character of Howard Roark in; Gail Wynand’s conflict of values in ; two scenes from, as illustration of process of characterization; example from, of Classicism surviving into 20th century ; quotation from; quoted on meaning of art in man’s life; “The explanation rests,” paraphrase of quotation from

From Russia with Love (Fleming)

Goldfinger (Fleming)

Gone With the Wind (Mitchell): theme of; plot-theme of

Goya, Francisco de, choice of subject by

Grand Guignol of old French theater

Grass, Günter, Time quoted on Cat and Mouse of

Hamilton, Donald, as top-rank writer of popular fiction

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, as writer of top-rank Romantic novel

Helmholtz, Herman Ludwig Ferdinand von: on mathematical nature of musical perception; on major and minor keys

Henry, O., as great Romantic writer

Hindu dance: its image of man

Hippies: as products of “Progressive” education; their reversion to the music of the jungle

Hitchcock, Alfred

Horror Story, in “serious” and popular fiction

Hugo, Victor: choice of subject by; style of, as blend of reason and passionate emotion; reasons for liking work of; as master of integration of theme and plot structure ; historical essays interrupting stories of; universe of, contrasted with Schopenhauer’s; as top-rank Romantic novelist ; characterizations in novels of ; introduction by Ayn Rand to his Ninety-Three ; rediscovering novels of ; as greatest novelist in world literature; intellectual first-aid kit for reading and appreciation of ; and conflict in his sense of life; the thinker, as archetypical of the virtues and fatal errors of 19th century; novels of, as experience for the reader

Humor, in “tongue-in-cheek” thrillers

Hurst, Fannie, as popular-fiction writer

Identity, Law of: man’s need of definitions as resting on

Impressionists, their work contrasted with Vermeer’s

Industrial Revolution

Integration: as psycho-epistemological key to reason

Irrationalism: philosophy dominated by doctrine of ; sense of life achieved by apostles of

It Can’t Happen Here (Lewis), as novel of Naturalistic school with Romantic approach

Josephson, Matthew, as biographer of Victor Hugo

Karloff, Boris, movies of, as archetype of the Horror Story

Lady of the Camellias, The (Dumas fils), and imitations of

Lang, Fritz: as director ; his film Siegfried as best of Romantic movies

Language: as means of retaining concepts; function of, in converting abstractions into concretes

Les Misérables (Hugo): theme of; plot-theme of; characterizations in

Levin, Ira, the supernatural in writing of

Lewis, Sinclair: and his characterization of Babbitt; choice of subject by; style of; as writer of Naturalistic school

Libretto, its function in operas and operettas

Liszt, Franz, his musical composition St. Francis Walking on the Waters

Literary style: fundamental elements of; and choice of words; and choice of content; comparison of, in excerpts from two novels; as most complex aspect of literature, and as most revealing psychologically ; not an end in itself ; see also Style of novel

Literature: by what means it re-creates reality; its integration of concepts to percepts; as ruler and term-setter in movies and television; Aristotelian principle of esthetics of ; novel as major literary form; and mind-body dichotomy that plagues it ; and basic premises of Romanticism and Naturalism regarding existence of man’s volition; and rules of Classicism; “serious” and popular, and the Horror Story ; eclectic shambles of today’s; nonexistence of today, as vital cultural movement; and presentation of man, prior to 19th century; modern, essential nature of man as represented in ; modern, return of, to art form of the chronicle ; as barometer of a culture ; selectivity of subject in, as cardinal aspect of; the ends and the means in, as worthy of each other; see also Fiction; Novel; Popular fiction; Thrillers

Logic: how its destruction made modern art possible

Magic Mountain, The (Mann), as bad novel

Maibaum, Richard, quoted on screenplays of Fleming’s novels

Man: as a being of self-made soul; and his need of philosophy; art as his psycho-epistemological conditioner; as an end in himself

Man Who Laughs, The (Hugo), characterization in

Manifesto, dictionary definition of

Mann, Thomas, and a bad novel

Marguerite and Armand (ballet)

Marty (Chayefsky), as work of modern Naturalism

Maurois, André, as biographer of Victor Hugo

Metaphysics: link between ethics and ; as science dealing with fundamental nature of reality ; and value-judgments; art as concretization of ; man’s need of ; of artist, and subject of his art work; of Naturalism ; music and dance as expressive of metaphysical view

Metaphysics in Marble (Sures), magazine article

Michelangelo, choice of subject by; his Pieta‘

Mind, man’s: current assaults on

Mitchell, Margaret, and plot structure in Gone With the Wind

Modern art: disintegration of man’s consciousness as goal of; its practitioners and admirers; as demonstration of cultural bankruptcy of our age; and composite picture of man; and presentation of emotions dominating modern man’s sense of life; and moral implications of trend toward lower levels of depravity in

Modern dance, characterized as neither modern nor dance

Modern philosophy, as source and sponsor of modern art

Moral sense of life: development of, in child; contribution of Romantic art to developing of ; and morality, differentiation between ; sins of adults toward child in developing of

Moral treason, and art

Morality: and moral sense of life, differentiation between ; and imposition of set of rules on the developing child; as a normative science ; mystical, social, subjective schools of

Motion pictures: role of literature and visual arts in ; work of Fritz Lang as director; reason for failure to develop as great art

Motivation, as a key-concept in psychology and in fiction

Movies, and Romanticism

Music: distinguished from other arts; pattern from musical perception to emotional response; psycho-epistemological nature of man’s response to ; role of sense of life in the response to ; hypothesis as to how and why it evokes emotions; mathematical nature of musical perception; metaphysical factors in enjoyment of; effects on mind of primitive and Oriental types; so-called “modern,” why it is not music; as related to the various performing arts

Mysticism: primitive epistemology of; and esthetics ; of Plato, resurgence of, in later part of 19th century, and effect of on Romanticism

Myths of religion

Naturalism: and anti-value orientation in work of art ; type of argument in evaluating work of art; and objection to plot of novel as artificial contrivance ; and denial of existence of man’s faculty of volition ; and assumption of mantle of reason and reality; disintegration of; Shakespeare as spiritual father of; journalistic approach of Naturalist writers; and substitution of statistics for standard of value ; and element of characterization ; final remnants of, with nothing to say about human existence ; Romanticism outlasted by; value in a Naturalist’s work and in a Romanticist’s; and imitator’s; and end of, with WW II; as man’s new enemy in art in later part of 19th century ; as dedicated to negation of art; and substitution of the collective for the objective; basic metaphysical premise of; doctrines of literary school of; and “compassionate” studies of depravity

Ninety-Three (Hugo): Introduction to, by Ayn Rand ; as uniquely “Hugo-esque,”; appraisal by two of Hugo’s biographers of; man’s loyalty to values as theme of; characterization in ; and integration of theme and plot; grandeur as leitmotif of

Notre-Dame de Paris (Hugo), characterization in

Novel: essential attributes of ; theme of ; plot of ; characterization of ; style of; as major literary form; shortcomings resulting in a bad novel; as recreation of reality; plot-theme of; and integration of major attributes of; top-rank Romantic novelists; second-rank Romantic novelists ; relation of thrillers to novels of serious Romantic literature; Victor Hugo as greatest novelist in world literature; and start and culmination of illustrious line of Romantic novelists in 19th century; and the Naturalist; see also Fiction; Popular fiction; Thrillers

Objectivism: passim

Objectivist, The, magazine

O’Hara, John: style of; as best of Naturalism’s contemporary survivors

Olympio ou la Vie de Victor Hugo (Maurois), appraisal of Ninety-Three in

One Lonely Night (Spillane), style of

O’Neill, Eugene, as imitator of Dumas fils, in Anna Christie

On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (Helmholtz)

Opera, function of music and libretto in

Oriental music Painting: distinguished from other arts; role of sensory and conceptual factors in; color harmony in

Pantomine: dance distinguished from; classified as non-art

Performing artist: his task ; basic principles applicable to

Performing arts: relation to primary arts psycho-epistemological role of; application of basic artistic principles to inversion of ends and means in

Philosophy: as determinant of trends of world; of life, and full conceptual control; and setting of criteria of emotional integrations ; man’s need of; of man, as chosen by his mind or by chance; love as expression of; of artist, truth or falsehood of; and art, relationship between ; its practical importance ; the consequences of default in; Aristotle’s esthetics of literature ; modern, as swamp breeding ground of aborted art; dominated by doctrines of irrationalism and determinism ; since Renaissance, retrogression of, to mysticism of Plato; Romantic movement in, as unrelated to Romanticism in esthetics; new schools of, as progressively dedicated to negation of; antirational, and emotions dominating modern man’s sense of life

Photography: as not an art

Pieta‘ (Michelangelo)

Plot of novel: as essential attribute ; definition of; as dramatization of goal-directed action ; Naturalists’ objection to, as artificial contrivance ; and presentation of conflict of values; serving same function as steel skeleton of skyscraper; and events, as expressing meaning of novel; as not represented by physical action divorced from ideas and values; and premise of man’s possession of faculty of volition; plotlessness, and premise of man’s lack of volition; and antagonism of today’s esthetic spokesmen toward Romantic premise in; and top-rank Romantic novelists; and second rank of Romantic novelists ; and popular fiction; and imitators of Romanticists

Plot-theme of novel ; as core of its events ; and top-rank Romantic novelists

Poe, Edgar Allan, as modern ancestor of the Horror Story

Poem, basic attributes of

Popular fiction: common-sense ideas and values as base of; and absence of explicitly ideational element ; categories of ; contemporary examples of best writers of; characteristics of writing below top level of; “slick-magazine” type of ; and the Horror Story

Possessed, The (Dostoevsky), characterization in

Primitive music

“Progressive” education, hippies as products of

Psycho-epistemology: definition of; in art as illustrated by characterization in literature; and concretization of cognitive abstractions ; and concretization of normative abstractions; and metaphysical views of artist ; and process of communication between artist and viewer or reader; of artist, and style of his art work; role of in man’s musical responses ; art as the conditioner of; consonant with reality and man’s nature

Quo Vadis (Sienkiewicz): as top-rank Romantic novel ; characterizations in

Rand, Ayn: hypothesis on nature of man’s response to music; favorite form of dance; goal of writing of; projection of an ideal man as motive and purpose ; portrayal of a moral ideal as end in itself ; what is not the purpose of; and irrelevancy of questions about primacy of the novelist or the philosopher in her writing ; and basic test for any story; defining and presenting conditions making possible an ideal man; presentation of Man as an end in himself ; Naturalism, as literary school diametrically opposed to; selectivity in regard to subject ; as Romantic Realist ; manifesto of, as stated by Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, quoted; and esthetic principle of Aristotle; and present state of our culture

Reality: man’s acquiring and retaining his knowledge of ; man’s applying his knowledge of; art as selective re-creation of, according to artist’s metaphysical value-judgments ; metaphysics as science dealing with fundamental nature of; and an art work’s support or negation of one’s fundamental view of; religion as attempt to offer comprehensive view of; and artist’s metaphysical evaluation of facts; stylizing of, by artist ; novel as re-creation of; Romanticism’s break with; psycho-epistemology consonant with facts of

Reason: its relation to man’s survival; modern philosophers’ war against

Religion: beginning of art as adjunct to; mythology of, as concretization of its moral code; as primitive form of philosophy ; myths of; and Romanticists

Robinson, Bill

Rolland, Romain, as romanticizing Naturalist writer

Romanticism: and value orientation in work of art; and recognition of man’s faculty of volition ; practically non-existent in today’s literature ; antagonism of today’s esthetic spokesmen toward Romantic premise in art; destruction of, in esthetics; of 19th century, and influences of Aristotelianism and capitalism; as rebellion against Classicism; primacy of values brought to art by; and irony of definition declaring it as based on primacy of emotions ; and break with reality; philosophers as contributors to confusion surrounding term; definition of, as volition-oriented school ; and top-rank Romantic novelists and playwrights ; and second rank of Romantic writers; and writers with mixed premise of volition; philosophically as crusade to glorify man’s existence ; psychologically experienced as desire to make life interesting; virtues and potential flaws of, as seen in popular literature ; and movies and television ; and attempt to eliminate from Romantic fiction; altruist morality as archenemy and destroyer of; final remnants of; outlasted by Naturalism; value in a Romanticist’s work and in a Naturalist’s ; and end of great era of, with WW I; remnants of, in popular media; and escape into the supernatural ; and coming of age, with rebirth of reason and philosophy; as great new movement in art in 19th century; treated as bootleg merchandise ; and development of moral sense of life

Rosemary’s Baby (Levin), use of the supernatural in

Rostand, Edmond, as top-rank Romantic playwright

Royal Ballet, performance of Marguerite and Armand

Ruy Blas (Hugo)

Satire, legitimate, contrasted with “tongue-in-cheek” thrillers

Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), as top-rank Romantic novel

Schelling, Friedrich

Schiller, Friedrich, as top-rank Romantic playwright

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Scott, Walter, as Romantic novelist

Sculpture: of Ancient Greece and of Middle Ages, difference in presentation of man in; nature of, and relation to other arts

Selectivity, as a basic principle of the arts

Sense of life: definition of ; and integrating mechanism of the subconscious; and rational philosophy; dominated by fear ; formed by process of emotional generalization ; and early value-integrations; as integrated sum of a man’s basic values; and adolescence ; matching conscious convictions, in fully integrated personality ; transition from guidance by, to guidance by conscious philosophy; and conflict between conscious convictions; changing and correcting of ; profoundly personal quality of; relation of, to personality; as sense of one’s own identity ; as integration of mind and values; love and art, as special province and expression of; of artist, and control and integration of his work ; of viewer or reader, and response to work of art; projecting of, in subject and style of work of art; and intellectual approach, difference between, in response to work of art; and evaluation of work of specific writers; role of in music; role of in dance; Aristotelian h century guided by; of Romanticists, and cultural atmosphere of 19th century; of modern man, emotions dominating; see also Moral sense of life

Serling, Rod, as Naturalist writer, and as Romanticist

Shakespeare, William: choice of subject by; as spiritual father of Naturalism

Siegfried (Fritz Lang), as best of Romantic movies

Sienkiewicz, Henryk: as writer of top-rank Romantic novel; and characterizations in Quo Vadis

“Slick-magazine” type of Romanticists

Soul: man as a being of self-made soul; art as the technology of

Spillane, Mickey: reasons for liking work of; style of, in One Lonely Night ; as top-rank writer of popular fiction; thrillers of

St. Francis Walking on the Waters (Liszt), a musical composition

Stage director: nature and demands of his role

Style of art work: as expression of view of man’s consciousness ; as product of artist’s psycho-epistemology ; response of man to; as most complex element of art ; and so-called “painterly” school; Cubism ; importance of, to artist and to reader or viewer; and psycho-epistemological sense of life

Style of novel: as a major attribute ; as means by which other attributes are presented; comparison of, in excerpts from two novels; see also Literary style

Stylization, see Selectivity

Subject of art work: as expression of view of man’s existence ; artist’s choice of ; and projection of view of man’s place in universe ; selectivity in, as cardinal aspect of art

Sullivan, Louis H., principle of architecture of

Symbolism of primitive terror in presentation of man

Tap dancing

Television: physical action in dramas of; and Romanticism ; The Twilight Zone, series on; The Avengers, British series on

Theater: legitimate vs. illegitimate innovations in

Theme of art work, as link uniting subject and style

Theme of novel: as essential attribute; purpose of novel defined by; presented in terms of action; as core of its abstract meaning; and top-rank Romantic novelists ; and second rank of Romantic novelists; and popular fiction; in modern literature

Thrillers: “tongue-in-cheek,” ; as detective, spy, or adventure stories ; conflict as basic characteristic of; as simplified version of Romantic literature; relation of, to novels of serious Romantic literature ; humor in “tongue-in-cheek” thrillers ; social status of, and gulf between the people and their alleged intellectual leaders; modern intellectuals’ rush to the bandwagon of; as dramatization of abstraction of moral conflict; as spectacle of man’s efficacy ; and ultimate triumph of the good

Tolstoy, Leo: choice of subject by; evaluating work of; as Naturalist writer

Twilight Zone, The, series on TV, as symbolic projection of remnants of Romanticism

Value-judgments, metaphysical: as foundation of moral values; of artist, and selective re-creation of reality ; as base of ethics ; derived from an explicit metaphysics

Values: conflicts of; art as concretization of; primacy of, brought to art by Romanticists; common-sense values distinguished from conventional; moral, child’s learning concept of

Venus de Milo

Vermeer, Jan: choice of subject by; style of

Verne, Jules, as writer of science fiction

Victor Hugo (Josephson), appraisal of Ninety-Three in

“Violence Can be Fun,” article in TV Guide on The Avengers, quoted

Volition: man’s possession of, as premise of Romanticism ; man as not possessed of, as premise of Naturalism ; and importance of establishing as function of man’s rational faculty; confusion on, between esthetic Romanticists and “Romantic” philosophers; full commitment to premise of, by Romantic writers; commitment to premise of, by writers in regard to existence but not to consciousness ; commitment to premise of, by writers in regard to consciousness but not to existence

War and Peace (Tolstoy)

Web and the Rock, The (Wolfe), style of

Wells, H. G., as writer of science fiction

Wolfe, Thomas: style of; in The Web and the Rock

Zen Buddhists, sense of life achieved by

Zola, Émile: choice of subject by; as Naturalist writer

1

From the Introduction by Ayn Rand to Ninety-Three by Victor Hugo, translated by Lowell Bair. Copyright © 1962 by Bantam Books, Inc. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Chapter 1. - The Psycho-Epistemology of Art

Chapter 2. - Philosophy and Sense of Life

Chapter 3. - Art and Sense of Life

Chapter 4. - Art and Cognition

Chapter 5. - Basic Principles of Literature

Chapter 6. - What Is Romanticism?

Chapter 7. - The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age

Chapter 8. - Bootleg Romanticism

Chapter 9. - Art and Moral Treason

Chapter 10. - Introduction to Ninety-Three

Chapter 11. - The Goal of My Writing

Chapter 12. - The Simplest Thing in the World

Index

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Philosophy: Who Needs It

Chapter 2 - Philosophical Detection

Chapter 3 - The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made

Chapter 4 - The Missing Link

Chapter 5 - Selfishness Without a Self

Chapter 6 - An Open Letter to Boris Spassky

Chapter 7 - Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World

Chapter 8 - From the Horse’s Mouth

Chapter 9 - Kant Versus Sullivan

Chapter 10 - Causality Versus Duty

Chapter 11 - An Untitled Letter

Chapter 12 - Egalitarianism and Inflation

Chapter 13 - The Stimulus and the Response

Chapter 14 - The Establishing of an Establishment

Chapter 15 - Censorship: Local and Express

Chapter 16 - Fairness Doctrine for Education

Chapter 17 - What Can One Do?

Chapter 18 - Don’t Let It Go

Index

From Philosophy: Who Needs It

A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought . . . or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions. . . .

—AYN RAND

“AYN RAND’s writings have altered and shaped the lives of millions. This selection of essays is an example of her best.”

—Dr. Alan Greenspan

“Her essays are lively, spirited and challenging. . . .”

—Best Sellers

“In essay after essay her thoughts ring out in a bold and lucid prose.”

—Houston Post

“For those who want to understand the philosophic implications of our era, this collection by Ayn Rand is an excellent place to begin.”

—Richmond, Virginia, News-Leader

SIGNET

Published by New American Library, a division of

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First Printing, November 1984

Copyright © Leonard Peikoff, Executor, Estate of Ayn Rand, 1982

Introduction copyright © Leonard Peikoff, 1982

All rights reserved

Information about other books by Ayn Rand and her philosophy, Objectivism, may be obtained by writing to OBJECTIVISM, P.O. Box 51808, Irvine, California 92619-9930.

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

eISBN : 978-1-101-13770-3

http://us.penguingroup.com

Introduction

Ayn Rand was not only a novelist and philosopher; she was also a salesman of philosophy—the greatest salesman philosophy has ever had.

Who else could write a Romantic best seller such as Atlas Shrugged—in which the heroes and the villains are differentiated fundamentally by their metaphysics; in which the wrong epistemology is shown to lead to train wrecks, furnace breakouts, and sexual impotence; in which the right ethics is shown to be the indispensable means to the rebuilding of New York City and of man’s soul? Who else could write a book called Philosophy: Who Needs It—and have an answer to offer?

Ayn Rand’s power to sell philosophy is a consequence of her particular philosophy, Objectivism.

“. . . I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism,” she wrote a decade ago; “and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows. This—the supremacy of reason—was, is and will be the primary concern of my work, and the essence of Objectivism.” (The Objectivist, September 1971.)

Reason, according to Objectivism, is not merely a distinguishing attribute of man; it is his fundamental attribute—his basic means of survival. Therefore, whatever reason requires in order to function is a necessity of human life.

Reason functions by integrating perceptual data into concepts. This process, Ayn Rand holds, ultimately requires the widest integrations—those which give man knowledge of the universe in which he acts, of his means of knowledge, and of his proper values.

Man, therefore, needs metaphysics, epistemology and ethics; i.e., he needs philosophy. He needs it by his essential nature and for a practical purpose: in order to be able to think, to act, to live.

In today’s world, this view of the role of philosophy is unique—just as, in today’s neo-mystic culture, Objectivism’s advocacy of reason is all but unique.

To Ayn Rand, philosophy is not a senseless parade of abstractions created to fill out the ritual at cocktail parties or in Sunday morning services. It is not a ponderous Continental wail of futility resonating with Oriental overtones. It is not a chess game divorced from reality designed by British professors for otherwise unemployable colleagues. To Ayn Rand, philosophy is the fundamental factor in human life; it is the basic force that shapes the mind and character of men and the destiny of nations. It shapes them for good or for evil, depending on the kind of philosophy men accept.

A man’s choice, according to Ayn Rand, is not whether to have a philosophy, but only which philosophy to have. His choice is whether his philosophy will be conscious, explicit, logical, and therefore practical—or random, unidentified, contradictory, and therefore lethal.

In these essays, Ayn Rand explains some of the steps necessary to achieve a conscious, rational philosophy. She teaches the reader how to identify, and then evaluate, the hidden premises at work in his own soul or nation. She makes clear the mechanism by which philosophy rules men and societies, the forms that abstract theory takes in daily life, and the profound existential consequences that flow from even the most abstruse ideas, ideas which may seem at first glance to be of merely academic concern. She shows that, when an idea is rational, its consequence, ultimately, is the preservation of man’s life; and that when an idea is irrational, its consequence is the opposite.

Contrary to the injunctions issued to men for millennia, Ayn Rand did not equate objectivity with “disinterest”; she was interested in philosophy, in the Objectivist sense of “self-interest”; she wanted—selfishly, for the sake of her own actions and life—to know which ideas are right. If man needs philosophy, she held, he needs one that is true, i.e., in accordance with reality.

Philosophy: Who Needs It is the last work planned by Ayn Rand before her death in March of this year.

The book was first suggested by a Canadian Objectivist, Walter Huebscher. In the fall of 1981, he wrote to Miss Rand: “In [your articles], you detail dramatically how everyone, through each statement he makes, uses philosophical premises. . . . If [such] articles were published in a single volume, I believe that it would focus direct attention on philosophy’s powerful influence, identify the philosophical roots of some of today’s most dangerous trends, [and] indicate that it is possible to reverse a cultural trend, that everyone can and should get involved in doing just that.”

Miss Rand was pleased with Mr. Huebscher’s idea of a collection taken largely from her newsletter, The Ayn Rand Letter, and featuring as its title piece one of her favorites among her own articles, “Philosophy: Who Needs It”—originally a speech given at the United States Military Academy at West Point. In subsequent months—with her publisher at Bobbs-Merrill, Grace Shaw, and with friends and associates—she several times discussed her concept of the book. She indicated its content and structure in general terms. She mentioned articles whose inclusion would be mandatory, and others that she regarded as optional. She did not live long enough, however, to determine the final selection of pieces or their sequence. It has fallen to me to make these decisions, guided, wherever possible, by Miss Rand’s stated wishes.

Following her policy in other anthologies, I have placed the more theoretical articles in the first part of the book, and followed them by more concrete applications and/or essentially critical articles. None of the pieces has been published before in book form.

The title article is followed by one written originally as its companion piece. Next comes a group dealing with the Objectivist philosophy. The first of these (Chapter 3), her analysis of what is or is not open to change, represents Ayn Rand’s fullest discussion in print of one element of the Objectivist metaphysics—the primacy of existence. The following discussions of the anti-conceptual mentality (Chapters 4 and 5) are a demonstration, in reverse, of one element of the Objectivist epistemology: they show what happens to men who never fully develop the human form of knowledge—concepts. The open letter to Boris Spassky (Chapter 6), the Soviet chessmaster, is a tour de force summarizing, in the form of a single startling example, the role in man’s life of every branch of philosophy.

With one exception, all the articles in this book were written between 1970 and 1975. The exception is “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World” (Chapter 7), a speech given initially at Yale University in 1960, a few years after the publication of Atlas Shrugged. This speech is an excellent, simple introduction to Objectivism and to Ayn Rand’s view of today’s world. Until now, it has not been easily available. Those unfamiliar with Miss Rand’s work might be well advised to begin their reading with this chapter.

There follows an essentially critical section (Chapters 8-13) dealing with Kant, and with some of his heirs, such as the egalitarian movement and B. F. Skinner.

Miss Rand was frequently asked why there are so few advocates of good ideas in positions of power today. To indicate her answer, at least in part, I have included two political pieces (Chapters 14 and 15); they discuss some current methods used by the government to corrupt our cultural life. These are followed by two pieces (Chapters 16 and 17) relating to another question Ayn Rand was repeatedly asked: What can anyone do about the state of today’s world?

I have ended the book as, I think, Miss Rand would have ended it. “Don’t Let It Go” presents the American sense of life as the basis of hope for this country’s future.

When articles written years apart are published in book form, editorial changes are occasionally necessary. I have enclosed such changes in square brackets. In a few cases, where Miss Rand uses a term that would be unfamiliar to new readers, I have offered a brief definition, also in square brackets. Otherwise, aside from minor copy-editing, the text is exactly as worded (and in some cases later reworded) by Ayn Rand herself. (Please note that square brackets within a quotation are in every case Miss Rand’s, and represent her own additions to or comments on the quotation.)

Since Miss Rand’s death, her associates in New York have received a great deal of mail inquiring how one can learn more about her ideas; how one can obtain back issues of her magazines; what current publications, schools, courses now carry on her philosophy; what work is done by the Foundation for the New Intellectual; etc. If you are interested in any of the above, I suggest that you write to: Objectivism PW, P.O. Box 51808, Irvine, California 92619-9930. I regret that, owing to the volume of mail, you will probably not receive a personal reply; but in due course you will receive literature from several sources indicating the direction to pursue if you wish to investigate Ayn Rand’s ideas further, or to support them.

Meanwhile, if you are about to read these essays for the first time, I envy you, because of what you still have in store for you. Ayn Rand has changed many people’s minds and lives. Perhaps she will change yours, too.

LEONARD PEIKOFF
New York City
May 1982

1

Philosophy: Who Needs It

1974

(An address given to the graduating class of the United States Military Academy at West Point on March 6, 1974.)

Since I am a fiction writer, let us start with a short short story. Suppose that you are an astronaut whose spaceship gets out of control and crashes on an unknown planet. When you regain consciousness and find that you are not hurt badly, the first three questions in your mind would be: Where am I? How can I discover it? What should I do?

You see unfamiliar vegetation outside, and there is air to breathe; the sunlight seems paler than you remember it and colder. You turn to look at the sky, but stop. You are struck by a sudden feeling: if you don’t look, you won’t have to know that you are, perhaps, too far from the earth and no return is possible; so long as you don’t know it, you are free to believe what you wish—and you experience a foggy, pleasant, but somehow guilty, kind of hope.

You turn to your instruments: they may be damaged, you don’t know how seriously. But you stop, struck by a sudden fear: how can you trust these instruments? How can you be sure that they won’t mislead you? How can you know whether they will work in a different world? You turn away from the instruments.

Now you begin to wonder why you have no desire to do anything. It seems so much safer just to wait for something to turn up somehow; it is better, you tell yourself, not to rock the spaceship. Far in the distance, you see some sort of living creatures approaching; you don’t know whether they are human, but they walk on two feet. They, you decide, will tell you what to do.

You are never heard from again.

This is fantasy, you say? You would not act like that and no astronaut ever would? Perhaps not. But this is the way most men live their lives, here, on earth.

Most men spend their days struggling to evade three questions, the answers to which underlie man’s every thought, feeling and action, whether he is consciously aware of it or not: Where am I? How do I know it? What should I do?

By the time they are old enough to understand these questions, men believe that they know the answers. Where am I? Say, in New York City. How do I know it? It’s self-evident. What should I do? Here, they are not too sure—but the usual answer is: whatever everybody does. The only trouble seems to be that they are not very active, not very confident, not very happy—and they experience, at times, a causeless fear and an undefined guilt, which they cannot explain or get rid of.

They have never discovered the fact that the trouble comes from the three unanswered questions—and that there is only one science that can answer them: philosophy.

Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man’s relationship to existence. As against the special sciences, which deal only with particular aspects, philosophy deals with those aspects of the universe which pertain to everything that exists. In the realm of cognition, the special sciences are the trees, but philosophy is the soil which makes the forest possible.

Philosophy would not tell you, for instance, whether you are in New York City or in Zanzibar (though it would give you the means to find out). But here is what it would tell you: Are you in a universe which is ruled by natural laws and, therefore, is stable, firm, absolute—and knowable? Or are you in an incomprehensible chaos, a realm of inexplicable miracles, an unpredictable, unknowable flux, which your mind is impotent to grasp? Are the things you see around you real—or are they only an illusion? Do they exist independent of any observer—or are they created by the observer? Are they the object or the subject of man’s consciousness? Are they what they are—or can they be changed by a mere act of your consciousness, such as a wish?

The nature of your actions—and of your ambition—will be different, according to which set of answers you come to accept. These answers are the province of metaphysics—the study of existence as such or, in Aristotle’s words, of “being qua being”—the basic branch of philosophy.

No matter what conclusions you reach, you will be confronted by the necessity to answer another, corollary question: How do I know it? Since man is not omniscient or infallible, you have to discover what you can claim as knowledge and how to prove the validity of your conclusions. Does man acquire knowledge by a process of reason—or by sudden revelation from a supernatural power? Is reason a faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses—or is it fed by innate ideas, implanted in man’s mind before he was born? Is reason competent to perceive reality—or does man possess some other cognitive faculty which is superior to reason? Can man achieve certainty—or is he doomed to perpetual doubt?

The extent of your self-confidence—and of your success—will be different, according to which set of answers you accept. These answers are the province of epistemology, the theory of knowledge, which studies man’s means of cognition.

These two branches are the theoretical foundation of philosophy. The third branch—ethics—may be regarded as its technology. Ethics does not apply to everything that exists, only to man, but it applies to every aspect of man’s life: his character, his actions, his values, his relationship to all of existence. Ethics, or morality, defines a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the course of his life.

Just as the astronaut in my story did not know what he should do, because he refused to know where he was and how to discover it, so you cannot know what you should do until you know the nature of the universe you deal with, the nature of your means of cognition—and your own nature. Before you come to ethics, you must answer the questions posed by metaphysics and epistemology: Is man a rational being, able to deal with reality—or is he a helplessly blind misfit, a chip buffeted by the universal flux? Are achievement and enjoyment possible to man on earth—or is he doomed to failure and disaster? Depending on the answers, you can proceed to consider the questions posed by ethics: What is good or evil for man—and why? Should man’s primary concern be a quest for joy—or an escape from suffering? Should man hold self-fulfillment—or self-destruction—as the goal of his life? Should man pursue his values—or should he place the interests of others above his own? Should man seek happiness—or self-sacrifice?

I do not have to point out the different consequences of these two sets of answers. You can see them everywhere—within you and around you.

The answers given by ethics determine how man should treat other men, and this determines the fourth branch of philosophy: politics, which defines the principles of a proper social system. As an example of philosophy’s function, political philosophy will not tell you how much rationed gas you should be given and on which day of the week—it will tell you whether the government has the right to impose any rationing on anything.

The fifth and last branch of philosophy is esthetics, the study of art, which is based on metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Art deals with the needs—the refueling—of man’s consciousness.

Now some of you might say, as many people do: “Aw, I never think in such abstract terms—I want to deal with concrete, particular, real-life problems—what do I need philosophy for?” My answer is: In order to be able to deal with concrete, particular, real-life problems—i.e., in order to be able to live on earth.

You might claim—as most people do—that you have never been influenced by philosophy. I will ask you to check that claim. Have you ever thought or said the following? “Don’t be so sure—nobody can be certain of anything.” You got that notion from David Hume (and many, many others), even though you might never have heard of him. Or: “This may be good in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice.” You got that from Plato. Or: “That was a rotten thing to do, but it’s only human, nobody is perfect in this world.” You got it from Augustine. Or: “It may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.” You got it from William James. Or: “I couldn’t help it! Nobody can help anything he does.” You got it from Hegel. Or: “I can’t prove it, but I feel that it’s true.” You got it from Kant. Or: “It’s logical, but logic has nothing to do with reality.” You got it from Kant. Or: “It’s evil, because it’s selfish.” You got it from Kant. Have you heard the modern activists say: “Act first, think afterward”? They got it from John Dewey.

Some people might answer: “Sure, I’ve said those things at different times, but I don’t have to believe that stuff all of the time. It may have been true yesterday, but it’s not true today.” They got it from Hegel. They might say: “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” They got it from a very little mind, Emerson. They might say: “But can’t one compromise and borrow different ideas from different philosophies according to the expediency of the moment?” They got it from Richard Nixon—who got it from William James.

Now ask yourself: if you are not interested in abstract ideas, why do you (and all men) feel compelled to use them? The fact is that abstract ideas are conceptual integrations which subsume an incalculable number of concretes—and that without abstract ideas you would not be able to deal with concrete, particular, real-life problems. You would be in the position of a newborn infant, to whom every object is a unique, unprecedented phenomenon. The difference between his mental state and yours lies in the number of conceptual integrations your mind has performed.

You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational convictions—or a grab-bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often than not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew.

But the principles you accept (consciously or subconsciously) may clash with or contradict one another; they, too, have to be integrated. What integrates them? Philosophy. A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.

You might say, as many people do, that it is not easy always to act on abstract principles. No, it is not easy. But how much harder is it, to have to act on them without knowing what they are?

Your subconscious is like a computer—more complex a computer than men can build—and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don’t reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance—and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted. But one way or the other, your computer gives you print-outs, daily and hourly, in the form of emotions—which are lightning-like estimates of the things around you, calculated according to your values. If you programmed your computer by conscious thinking, you know the nature of your values and emotions. If you didn’t, you don’t.

Many people, particularly today, claim that man cannot live by logic alone, that there’s the emotional element of his nature to consider, and that they rely on the guidance of their emotions. Well, so did the astronaut in my story. The joke is on him—and on them: man’s values and emotions are determined by his fundamental view of life. The ultimate programmer of his subconscious is philosophy—the science which, according to the emotionalists, is impotent to affect or penetrate the murky mysteries of their feelings.

The quality of a computer’s output is determined by the quality of its input. If your subconscious is programmed by chance, its output will have a corresponding character. You have probably heard the computer operators’ eloquent term “gigo”—which means: “Garbage in, garbage out.” The same formula applies to the relationship between a man’s thinking and his emotions.

A man who is run by emotions is like a man who is run by a computer whose print-outs he cannot read. He does not know whether its programming is true or false, right or wrong, whether it’s set to lead him to success or destruction, whether it serves his goals or those of some evil, unknowable power. He is blind on two fronts: blind to the world around him and to his own inner world, unable to grasp reality or his own motives, and he is in chronic terror of both. Emotions are not tools of cognition. The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently: they are most helplessly in its power.

The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them—from schools, colleges, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television, etc. Who sets the tone of a culture? A small handful of men: the philosophers. Others follow their lead, either by conviction or by default. For some two hundred years, under the influence of Immanuel Kant, the dominant trend of philosophy has been directed to a single goal: the destruction of man’s mind, of his confidence in the power of reason. Today, we are seeing the climax of that trend.

When men abandon reason, they find not only that their emotions cannot guide them, but that they can experience no emotions save one: terror. The spread of drug addiction among young people brought up on today’s intellectual fashions, demonstrates the unbearable inner state of men who are deprived of their means of cognition and who seek escape from reality—from the terror of their impotence to deal with existence. Observe these young people’s dread of independence and their frantic desire to “belong,” to attach themselves to some group, clique or gang. Most of them have never heard of philosophy, but they sense that they need some fundamental answers to questions they dare not ask—and they hope that the tribe will tell them how to live. They are ready to be taken over by any witch doctor, guru, or dictator. One of the most dangerous things a man can do is to surrender his moral autonomy to others: like the astronaut in my story, he does not know whether they are human, even though they walk on two feet.

Now you may ask: If philosophy can be that evil, why should one study it? Particularly, why should one study the philosophical theories which are blatantly false, make no sense, and bear no relation to real life?

My answer is: In self-protection—and in defense of truth, justice, freedom, and any value you ever held or may ever hold.

Not all philosophies are evil, though too many of them are, particularly in modern history. On the other hand, at the root of every civilized achievement, such as science, technology, progress, freedom—at the root of every value we enjoy today, including the birth of this country—you will find the achievement of one man, who lived over two thousand years ago: Aristotle.

If you feel nothing but boredom when reading the virtually unintelligible theories of some philosophers, you have my deepest sympathy. But if you brush them aside, saying: “Why should I study that stuff when I know it’s nonsense?”—you are mistaken. It is nonsense, but you don’t know it—not so long as you go on accepting all their conclusions, all the vicious catch phrases generated by those philosophers. And not so long as you are unable to refute them.

That nonsense deals with the most crucial, the life-or-death issues of man’s existence. At the root of every significant philosophic theory, there is a legitimate issue—in the sense that there is an authentic need of man’s consciousness, which some theories struggle to clarify and others struggle to obfuscate, to corrupt, to prevent man from ever discovering. The battle of philosophers is a battle for man’s mind. If you do not understand their theories, you are vulnerable to the worst among them.

The best way to study philosophy is to approach it as one approaches a detective story: follow every trail, clue and implication, in order to discover who is a murderer and who is a hero. The criterion of detection is two questions: Why? and How? If a given tenet seems to be true—why? If another tenet seems to be false—why? and how is it being put over? You will not find all the answers immediately, but you will acquire an invaluable characteristic: the ability to think in terms of essentials.

Nothing is given to man automatically, neither knowledge, nor self-confidence, nor inner serenity, nor the right way to use his mind. Every value he needs or wants has to be discovered, learned and acquired—even the proper posture of his body. In this context, I want to say that I have always admired the posture of West Point graduates, a posture that projects man in proud, disciplined control of his body. Well, philosophical training gives man the proper intellectual posture—a proud, disciplined control of his mind.

In your own profession, in military science, you know the importance of keeping track of the enemy’s weapons, strategy and tactics—and of being prepared to counter them. The same is true in philosophy: you have to understand the enemy’s ideas and be prepared to refute them, you have to know his basic arguments and be able to blast them.

In physical warfare, you would not send your men into a booby trap: you would make every effort to discover its location. Well, Kant’s system is the biggest and most intricate booby trap in the history of philosophy—but it’s so full of holes that once you grasp its gimmick, you can defuse it without any trouble and walk forward over it in perfect safety. And, once it is defused, the lesser Kantians—the lower ranks of his army, the philosophical sergeants, buck privates, and mercenaries of today—will fall of their own weightlessness, by chain reaction.

There is a special reason why you, the future leaders of the United States Army, need to be philosophically armed today. You are the target of a special attack by the Kantian-Hegelian-collectivist establishment that dominates our cultural institutions at present. You are the army of the last semi-free country left on earth, yet you are accused of being a tool of imperialism—and “imperialism” is the name given to the foreign policy of this country, which has never engaged in military conquest and has never profited from the two world wars, which she did not initiate, but entered and won. (It was, incidentally, a foolishly overgenerous policy, which made this country waste her wealth on helping both her allies and her former enemies.) Something called “the military-industrial complex”—which is a myth or worse—is being blamed for all of this country’s troubles. Bloody college hoodlums scream demands that R.O.T.C. units be banned from college campuses. Our defense budget is being attacked, denounced and undercut by people who claim that financial priority should be given to ecological rose gardens and to classes in esthetic self-expression for the residents of the slums.

Some of you may be bewildered by this campaign and may be wondering, in good faith, what errors you committed to bring it about. If so, it is urgently important for you to understand the nature of the enemy. You are attacked, not for any errors or flaws, but for your virtues. You are denounced, not for any weaknesses, but for your strength and your competence. You are penalized for being the protectors of the United States. On a lower level of the same issue, a similar kind of campaign is conducted against the police force. Those who seek to destroy this country, seek to disarm it—intellectually and physically. But it is not a mere political issue; politics is not the cause, but the last consequence of philosophical ideas. It is not a communist conspiracy, though some communists may be involved—as maggots cashing in on a disaster they had no power to originate. The motive of the destroyers is not love for communism, but hatred for America. Why hatred? Because America is the living refutation of a Kantian universe.

Today’s mawkish concern with and compassion for the feeble, the flawed, the suffering, the guilty, is a cover for the profoundly Kantian hatred of the innocent, the strong, the able, the successful, the virtuous, the confident, the happy. A philosophy out to destroy man’s mind is necessarily a philosophy of hatred for man, for man’s life, and for every human value. Hatred of the good for being the good, is the hallmark of the twentieth century. This is the enemy you are facing.

A battle of this kind requires special weapons. It has to be fought with a full understanding of your cause, a full confidence in yourself, and the fullest certainty of the moral rightness of both. Only philosophy can provide you with these weapons.

The assignment I gave myself for tonight is not to sell you on my philosophy, but on philosophy as such. I have, however, been speaking implicitly of my philosophy in every sentence—since none of us and no statement can escape from philosophical premises. What is my selfish interest in the matter? I am confident enough to think that if you accept the importance of philosophy and the task of examining it critically, it is my philosophy that you will come to accept. Formally, I call it Objectivism, but informally I call it a philosophy for living on earth. You will find an explicit presentation of it in my books, particularly in Atlas Shrugged.

In conclusion, allow me to speak in personal terms. This evening means a great deal to me. I feel deeply honored by the opportunity to address you. I can say—not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political and esthetic roots—that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world. There is a kind of quiet radiance associated in my mind with the name West Point—because you have preserved the spirit of those original founding principles and you are their symbol. There were contradictions and omissions in those principles, and there may be in yours—but I am speaking of the essentials. There may be individuals in your history who did not live up to your highest standards—as there are in every institution—since no institution and no social system can guarantee the automatic perfection of all its members; this depends on an individual’s free will. I am speaking of your standards. You have preserved three qualities of character which were typical at the time of America’s birth, but are virtually nonexistent today: earnestness—dedication—a sense of honor. Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.

You have chosen to risk your lives for the defense of this country. I will not insult you by saying that you are dedicated to selfless service—it is not a virtue in my morality. In my morality, the defense of one’s country means that a man is personally unwilling to live as the conquered slave of any enemy, foreign or domestic. This is an enormous virtue. Some of you may not be consciously aware of it. I want to help you to realize it.

The army of a free country has a great responsibility: the right to use force, but not as an instrument of compulsion and brute conquest—as the armies of other countries have done in their histories—only as an instrument of a free nation’s self-defense, which means: the defense of a man’s individual rights. The principle of using force only in retaliation against those who initiate its use, is the principle of subordinating might to right. The highest integrity and sense of honor are required for such a task. No other army in the world has achieved it. You have.

West Point has given America a long line of heroes, known and unknown. You, this year’s graduates, have a glorious tradition to carry on—which I admire profoundly, not because it is a tradition, but because it is glorious.

Since I came from a country guilty of the worst tyranny on earth, I am particularly able to appreciate the meaning, the greatness and the supreme value of that which you are defending. So, in my own name and in the name of many people who think as I do, I want to say, to all the men of West Point, past, present and future: Thank you.

2

Philosophical Detection

1974

My [lecture at West Point was] devoted to a brief presentation of an enormous subject: “Philosophy: Who Needs It.” I covered the essentials, but a more detailed discussion of certain points will be helpful to those who wish to study philosophy (particularly today, because philosophy has been abolished by the two currently fashionable schools, Linguistic Analysis and Existentialism).

I said that the best way to study philosophy is to approach it as one approaches a detective story. A detective seeks to discover the truth about a crime. A philosophical detective must seek to determine the truth or falsehood of an abstract system and thus discover whether he is dealing with a great achievement or an intellectual crime. A detective knows what to look for, or what clues to regard as significant. A philosophical detective must remember that all human knowledge has a hierarchical structure; he must learn to distinguish the fundamental from the derivative, and in judging a given philosopher’s system, he must look—first and above all else—at its fundamentals. If the foundation does not hold, neither will anything else.

In philosophy, the fundamentals are metaphysics and epistemology. On the basis of a knowable universe and of a rational faculty’s competence to grasp it, you can define man’s proper ethics, politics and esthetics. (And if you make an error, you retain the means and the frame of reference necessary to correct it.) But what will you accomplish if you advocate honesty in ethics, while telling men that there is no such thing as truth, fact or reality? What will you do if you advocate political freedom on the grounds that you feel it is good, and find yourself confronting an ambitious thug who declares that he feels quite differently?

The layman’s error, in regard to philosophy, is the tendency to accept consequences while ignoring their causes—to take the end result of a long sequence of thought as the given and to regard it as “self-evident” or as an irreducible primary, while negating its preconditions. Examples can be seen all around us, particularly in politics. There are liberals who want to preserve individual freedom while denying its source: individual rights. There are religious conservatives who claim to advocate capitalism while attacking its root: reason. There are sundry “libertarians” who plagiarize the Objectivist theory of politics, while rejecting the metaphysics, epistemology and ethics on which it rests. That attitude, of course, is not confined to philosophy: its simplest example is the people who scream that they need more gas and that the oil industry should be taxed out of existence.

As a philosophical detective, you must remember that nothing is self-evident except the material of sensory perception—and that an irreducible primary is a fact which cannot be analyzed (i.e., broken into components) or derived from antecedent facts. You must examine your own convictions and any idea or theory you study, by asking: Is this an irreducible primary—and, if not, what does it depend on? You must ask the same question about any answer you obtain, until you do come to an irreducible primary: if a given idea contradicts a primary, the idea is false. This process will lead you to the field of metaphysics and epistemology—and you will discover in what way every aspect of man’s knowledge depends on that field and stands or falls with it.

There is an old fable which I read in Russian (I do not know whether it exists in English). A pig comes upon an oak tree, devours the acorns strewn on the ground and, when his belly is full, starts digging the soil to undercut the oak tree’s roots. A bird perched on a high branch upbraids him, saying: “If you could lift your snoot, you would discover that the acorns grow on this tree.”

In order to avoid that pig’s role in the forest of the intellect, one must know and protect the metaphysical-epistemological tree that produces the acorns of one’s convictions, goals and desires. And, conversely, one must not gobble up any brightly colored fruit one finds, without bothering to discover that it comes from a deadly yew tree. If laymen did no more than learn to identify the nature of such fruit and stop munching it or passing it around, they would stop being the victims and the unwary transmission belts of philosophical poison. But a minimal grasp of philosophy is required in order to do it.

If an intelligent and honest layman were to translate his implicit, common-sense rationality (which he takes for granted) into explicit philosophical premises, he would hold that the world he perceives is real (existence exists), that things are what they are (the Law of Identity), that reason is the only means of gaining knowledge and logic is the method of using reason. Assuming this base, let me give you an example of what a philosophical detective would do with some of the catch phrases I cited in [“Philosophy: Who Needs It”].

“It may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.” What is the meaning of the concept “truth”: Truth is the recognition of reality. (This is known as the correspondence theory of truth.) The same thing cannot be true and untrue at the same time and in the same respect. That catch phrase, therefore, means: a. that the Law of Identity is invalid; b. that there is no objectively perceivable reality, only some indeterminate flux which is nothing in particular, i.e., that there is no reality (in which case, there can be no such thing as truth); or c. that the two debaters perceive two different universes (in which case, no debate is possible). (The purpose of the catch phrase is the destruction of objectivity.)

“Don’t be so sure—nobody can be certain of anything.” Bertrand Russell’s gibberish to the contrary notwithstanding, that pronouncement includes itself; therefore, one cannot be sure that one cannot be sure of anything. The pronouncement means that no knowledge of any kind is possible to man, i.e., that man is not conscious. Furthermore, if one tried to accept that catch phrase, one would find that its second part contradicts its first: if nobody can be certain of anything, then everybody can be certain of everything he pleases—since it cannot be refuted, and he can claim he is not certain he is certain (which is the purpose of that notion).

“This may be good in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice.” What is a theory? It is a set of abstract principles purporting to be either a correct description of reality or a set of guidelines for man’s actions. Correspondence to reality is the standard of value by which one estimates a theory. If a theory is inapplicable to reality, by what standards can it be estimated as “good”? If one were to accept that notion, it would mean: a. that the activity of man’s mind is unrelated to reality; b. that the purpose of thinking is neither to acquire knowledge nor to guide man’s actions. (The purpose of that catch phrase is to invalidate man’s conceptual faculty.)

“It’s logical, but logic has nothing to do with reality.” Logic is the art or skill of non-contradictory identification. Logic has a single law, the Law of Identity, and its various corollaries. If logic has nothing to do with reality, it means that the Law of Identity is inapplicable to reality. If so, then: a. things are not what they are; b. things can be and not be at the same time, in the same respect, i.e., reality is made up of contradictions. If so, by what means did anyone discover it? By illogical means. (This last is for sure.) The purpose of that notion is crudely obvious. Its actual meaning is not: “Logic has nothing to do with reality,” but: “I, the speaker, have nothing to do with logic (or with reality).” When people use that catch phrase, they mean either “It’s logical, but I don’t choose to be logical” or: “It’s logical, but people are not logical, they don’t think—and I intend to pander to their irrationality.”

This is a clue to the kind of error (or epistemological sloppiness) that permits the spread of such catch phrases. Most people use them in regard to some concrete, particular instance and are not aware of the fact that they are uttering a devastating metaphysical generalization. When they say: “It may be true for you, but it’s not true for me,” they usually mean some optional matter of taste, involving some minor value-judgment. The meaning they intend to convey is closer to: “You may like it, but I don’t.” The unchallenged idea that value-preferences and emotions are unaccountable primaries, is at the root of their statement. And, in defense of their failure of introspection, they are recklessly willing to wipe the universe out of existence.

When people hear the catch phrase: “It may have been true yesterday, but it’s not true today,” they usually think of man-made issues or customs, such as: “Men fought duels yesterday, but not today” or: “Women wore hoop skirts yesterday, but not today” or: “We’re not in the horse-and-buggy age any longer.” The proponents of that catch phrase are seldom innocent, and the examples they give are usually of the above kind. So their victims—who have never discovered the difference between the metaphysical and the man-made—find themselves, in helpless bewilderment, unable to refute such conclusions as: “Freedom was a value yesterday, but not today” or: “Work was a human necessity yesterday, but not today” or: “Reason was valid yesterday, but not today.”

Now observe the method I used to analyze those catch phrases. You must attach clear, specific meanings to words, i.e., be able to identify their referents in reality. This is a precondition, without which neither critical judgment nor thinking of any kind is possible. All philosophical con games count on your using words as vague approximations. You must not take a catch phrase—or any abstract statement—as if it were approximate. Take it literally. Don’t translate it, don’t glamorize it, don’t make the mistake of thinking, as many people do: “Oh, nobody could possibly mean this!” and then proceed to endow it with some whitewashed meaning of your own. Take it straight, for what it does say and mean.

Instead of dismissing the catch phrase, accept it—for a few brief moments. Tell yourself, in effect: “If I were to accept it as true, what would follow?” This is the best way of unmasking any philosophical fraud. The old saying of plain con men holds true for intellectual ones: “You can’t cheat an honest man.” Intellectual honesty consists in taking ideas seriously. To take ideas seriously means that you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true. Philosophy provides man with a comprehensive view of life. In order to evaluate it properly, ask yourself what a given theory, if accepted, would do to a human life, starting with your own.

Most people would be astonished by this method. They think that abstract thinking must be “impersonal”—which means that ideas must hold no personal meaning, value or importance to the thinker. This notion rests on the premise that a personal interest is an agent of distortion. But “personal” does not mean “non-objective”; it depends on the kind of person you are. If your thinking is determined by your emotions, then you will not be able to judge anything personally or impersonally. But if you are the kind of person who knows that reality is not your enemy, that truth and knowledge are of crucial, personal, selfish importance to you and to your own life—then, the more passionately personal the thinking, the clearer and truer.

Would you be willing and able to act, daily and consistently, on the belief that reality is an illusion? That the things you see around you, do not exist? That it makes no difference whether you drive your car down a road or over the edge of an abyss—whether you eat or starve—whether you save the life of a person you love or push him into a blazing fire? It is particularly important to apply this test to any moral theory. Would you be willing and able to act on the belief that altruism is a moral ideal? That you must sacrifice everything—everything you love, seek, own, or desire, including your life—for the benefit of any and every stranger?

Do not evade such issues by means of self-abasement—by saying: “Maybe reality is unreal, but I’m not wise enough to transcend my low-grade, materialistic bondage” or: “Yes, altruism is an ideal, but I’m not good enough to practice it.” Self-abasement is not an answer—and it is not a license to apply to others the precepts from which you exempt yourself; it is merely a trap set by the very philosophers you are trying to judge. They have spent a prodigious effort to teach you to assume an unearned guilt. Once you assume it, you pronounce your mind incompetent to judge, you renounce morality, integrity and thought, and you condemn yourself to the gray fog of the approximate, the uncertain, the uninspiring, the flameless, through which most men drag their lives—which is the purpose of that trap.

The acceptance of unearned guilt is a major cause of philosophical passivity. There are other causes—and other kinds of guilt which are earned.

A major source of men’s earned guilt in regard to philosophy—as well as in regard to their own minds and lives—is failure of introspection. Specifically, it is the failure to identify the nature and causes of their emotions.

An emotion as such tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something. Without a ruthlessly honest commitment to introspection—to the conceptual identification of your inner states—you will not discover what you feel, what arouses the feeling, and whether your feeling is an appropriate response to the facts of reality, or a mistaken response, or a vicious illusion produced by years of self-deception. The men who scorn or dread introspection take their inner states for granted, as an irreducible and irresistible primary, and let their emotions determine their actions. This means that they choose to act without knowing the context (reality), the causes (motives), and the consequences (goals) of their actions.

The field of extrospection is based on two cardinal questions: “What do I know?” and “How do I know it?” In the field of introspection, the two guiding questions are: “What do I feel?” and “Why do I feel it?”

Most men can give themselves only some primitively superficial answers—and they spend their lives struggling with incomprehensible inner conflicts, alternately repressing their emotions and indulging in emotional fits, regretting it, losing control again, rebelling against the mystery of their inner chaos, trying to unravel it, giving up, deciding to feel nothing—and feeling the growing pressure of fear, guilt, self-doubt, which makes the answers progressively harder to find.

Since an emotion is experienced as an immediate primary, but is, in fact, a complex, derivative sum, it permits men to practice one of the ugliest of psychological phenomena: rationalization. Rationalization is a cover-up, a process of providing one’s emotions with a false identity, of giving them spurious explanations and justifications—in order to hide one’s motives, not just from others, but primarily from oneself. The price of rationalizing is the hampering, the distortion and, ultimately, the destruction of one’s cognitive faculty. Rationalization is a process not of perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one’s emotions.

Philosophical catch phrases are handy means of rationalization. They are quoted, repeated and perpetuated in order to justify feelings which men are unwilling to admit.

“Nobody can be certain of anything” is a rationalization for a feeling of envy and hatred toward those who are certain. “It may be true for you, but it’s not true for me” is a rationalization for one’s inability and unwillingness to prove the validity of one’s contentions. “Nobody is perfect in this world” is a rationalization for the desire to continue indulging in one’s imperfections, i.e., the desire to escape morality. “Nobody can help anything he does” is a rationalization for the escape from moral responsibility. “It may have been true yesterday, but it’s not true today” is a rationalization for the desire to get away with contradictions. “Logic has nothing to do with reality” is a crude rationalization for a desire to subordinate reality to one’s whims.

“I can’t prove it, but I feel that it’s true” is more than a rationalization: it is a description of the process of rationalizing. Men do not accept a catch phrase by a process of thought, they seize upon a catch phrase—any catch phrase—because it fits their emotions. Such men do not judge the truth of a statement by its correspondence to reality—they judge reality by its correspondence to their feelings.

If, in the course of philosophical detection, you find yourself, at times, stopped by the indignantly bewildered question: “How could anyone arrive at such nonsense?”—you will begin to understand it when you discover that evil philosophies are systems of rationalization.

The nonsense is never accidental, if you observe what subjects it deals with. The elaborate structures in which it is presented are never purposeless. You may find a grim proof of reality’s power in the fact that the most virulently rabid irrationalist senses the derivative nature of emotions and will not proclaim their primacy, their sovereign causelessness, but will seek to justify them as responses to reality—and if reality contradicts them, he will invent another reality of which they are the humble reflectors, not the rulers.

In modern history, the philosophy of Kant is a systematic rationalization of every major psychological vice. The metaphysical inferiority of this world (as a “phenomenal” world of mere “appearances”), is a rationalization for the hatred of reality. The notion that reason is unable to perceive reality and deals only with “appearances,” is a rationalization for the hatred of reason; it is also a rationalization for a profound kind of epistemological egalitarianism which reduces reason to equality with the futile puttering of “idealistic” dreamers. The metaphysical superiority of the “noumenal” world, is a rationalization for the supremacy of emotions, which are thus given the power to know the unknowable by ineffable means.

The complaint that man can perceive things only through his own consciousness, not through any other kinds of consciousnesses, is a rationalization for the most profound type of second-handedness ever confessed in print: it is the whine of a man tortured by perpetual concern with what others think and by inability to decide which others he should conform to. The wish to perceive “things in themselves” unprocessed by any consciousness, is a rationalization for the wish to escape the effort and responsibility of cognition—by means of the automatic omniscience a whim-worshiper ascribes to his emotions. The moral imperative of the duty to sacrifice oneself to duty, a sacrifice without beneficiaries, is a gross rationalization for the image (and soul) of an austere, ascetic monk who winks at you with an obscenely sadistic pleasure—the pleasure of breaking man’s spirit, ambition, success, self-esteem, and enjoyment of life on earth. Et cetera. These are just some of the highlights.

Observe that the history of philosophy reproduces—in slow motion, on a macrocosmic screen—the workings of ideas in an individual man’s mind. A man who has accepted false premises is free to reject them, but until and unless he does, they do not lie still in his mind, they grow without his conscious participation and reach their ultimate logical conclusions. A similar process takes place in a culture: if the false premises of an influential philosopher are not challenged, generations of his followers—acting as the culture’s subconscious—milk them down to their ultimate consequences.

Since Kant substituted the collective for the objective (in the form of “categories” collectively creating a “phenomenal” world), the next step was the philosophy of Hegel—which is a rationalization for subjectivism, for the power-lust of an ambitious elite who would create a “noumenal,” non-material world (by means of establishing the brute force of an absolute state in the “phenomenal,” material one). Since those outside the elite could not be counted upon to obey or accept such a future, the next side step was Pragmatism—which is a rationalization for the concrete-bound, range-of-the-moment, anti-conceptual mentalities that long for liberation from principles and future.

Today, there is the philosophy of Linguistic Analysis—which is a rationalization for men who are able to focus on single words, but unable to integrate them into sentences, paragraphs or philosophical systems, yet who wish to be philosophers. And there is the philosophy of Existentialism—which discards the politeness of rationalization, takes Kant straight, and proclaims the supremacy of emotions in an unknowable, incomprehensible, inexplicable, nauseating non-world.

Observe that, in spite of their differences, altruism is the untouched, unchallenged common denominator in the ethics of all these philosophies. It is the single richest source of rationalizations. A morality that cannot be practiced is an unlimited cover for any practice. Altruism is the rationalization for the mass slaughter in Soviet Russia—for the legalized looting in the welfare state—for the power-lust of politicians seeking to serve the “common good”—for the concept of a “common good”—for envy, hatred, malice, brutality—for the arson, robbery, highjacking, kidnapping, murder perpetrated by the selfless advocates of sundry collectivist causes—for sacrifice and more sacrifice and an infinity of sacrificial victims. When a theory achieves nothing but the opposite of its alleged goals, yet its advocates remain undeterred, you may be certain that it is not a conviction or an “ideal,” but a rationalization.

Philosophical rationalizations are not always easy to detect. Some of them are so complex that an innocent man may be taken in and paralyzed by intellectual confusion. At their first encounter with modern philosophy, many people make the mistake of dropping it and running, with the thought: “I know it’s false, but I can’t prove it. I know something’s wrong there, but I can’t waste my time and effort trying to untangle it.” Here is the danger of such a policy: you might forget all about Kant’s “categories” and his “noumenal” world, but someday, under the pressure of facing some painfully difficult choice, when you feel tempted to evade the responsibility or to make a dishonest decision, when you need all of your inner strength, confidence and courage, you will find yourself thinking: “How do I know what’s true? Nobody knows it. Nobody can be certain of anything.” This is all Kant wanted of you.

A thinker like Kant does not want you to agree with him: all he wants is that you give him the benefit of the doubt. He knows that your own subconscious does the rest. What he dreads is your conscious mind: once you understand the meaning of his theories, they lose their power to threaten you, like a Halloween mask in bright sunlight.

One further suggestion: if you undertake the task of philosophical detection, drop the dangerous little catch phrase which advises you to keep an “open mind.” This is a very ambiguous term—as demonstrated by a man who once accused a famous politician of having “a wide open mind.” That term is an anti-concept: it is usually taken to mean an objective, unbiased approach to ideas, but it is used as a call for perpetual skepticism, for holding no firm convictions and granting plausibility to anything. A “closed mind” is usually taken to mean the attitude of a man impervious to ideas, arguments, facts and logic, who clings stubbornly to some mixture of unwarranted assumptions, fashionable catch phrases, tribal prejudices—and emotions. But this is not a “closed” mind, it is a passive one. It is a mind that has dispensed with (or never acquired) the practice of thinking or judging, and feels threatened by any request to consider anything.

What objectivity and the study of philosophy require is not an “open mind,” but an active mind—a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them critically. An active mind does not grant equal status to truth and falsehood; it does not remain floating forever in a stagnant vacuum of neutrality and uncertainty; by assuming the responsibility of judgment, it reaches firm convictions and holds to them. Since it is able to prove its convictions, an active mind achieves an unassailable certainty in confrontations with assailants—a certainty untainted by spots of blind faith, approximation, evasion and fear.

If you keep an active mind, you will discover (assuming that you started with common-sense rationality) that every challenge you examine will strengthen your convictions, that the conscious, reasoned rejection of false theories will help you to clarify and amplify the true ones, that your ideological enemies will make you invulnerable by providing countless demonstrations of their own impotence.

No, you will not have to keep your mind eternally open to the task of examining every new variant of the same old falsehoods. You will discover that they are variants or attacks on certain philosophical essentials—and that the entire, gigantic battle of philosophy (and of human history) revolves around the upholding or the destruction of these essentials. You will learn to recognize at a glance a given theory’s stand on these essentials, and to reject the attacks without lengthy consideration—because you will know (and will be able to prove) in what way any given attack, old or new, is made of contradictions and “stolen concepts.”¹

I will list these essentials for your future reference. But do not attempt the shortcut of accepting them on faith (or as semi-grasped approximations and floating abstractions). That would be a fundamental contradiction and it would not work.

The essentials are: in metaphysics, the Law of Identity—in epistemology, the supremacy of reason—in ethics, rational egoism—in politics, individual rights (i.e., capitalism)—in esthetics, metaphysical values.

If you reach the day when these essentials become your absolutes, you will have entered Atlantis—at least psychologically; which is a precondition of the possibility ever to enter it existentially.

3

The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made

1973

“God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

This remarkable statement is attributed to a theologian with whose ideas I disagree in every fundamental respect: Reinhold Niebuhr. But—omitting the form of a prayer, i.e., the implication that one’s mental-emotional states are a gift from God—that statement is profoundly true, as a summary and a guideline: it names the mental attitude which a rational man must seek to achieve. The statement is beautiful in its eloquent simplicity; but the achievement of that attitude involves philosophy’s deepest metaphysical-moral issues.

I was startled to learn that that statement has been adopted as a prayer by Alcoholics Anonymous, which is not exactly a philosophical organization. In view of the fact that today’s social-psychological theories stress emotional, not intellectual, needs and frustrations as the cause of human suffering (e.g., the lack of “love”), that organization deserves credit for discovering that such a prayer is relevant to the problems of alcoholics—that the misery of confusion on those issues has devastating consequences and is one of the factors driving men to drink—i.e., to seek escape from reality. This is just one more example of the way in which philosophy rules the lives of men who have never heard or cared to hear about it.

Most men spend their lives in futile rebellion against things they cannot change, in passive resignation to things they can, and—never attempting to learn the difference—in chronic guilt and self-doubt on both counts.

Observe what philosophical premises are implicit in that advice and are required for an attempt to live up to it. If there are things that man can change, it means that he possesses the power of choice, i.e., the faculty of volition. If he does not possess it, he can change nothing, including his own actions and characteristics, such as courage or lack of it. If there are things that man cannot change, it means that there are things that cannot be affected by his actions and are not open to his choice. This leads to the basic metaphysical issue that lies at the root of any system of philosophy: the primacy of existence or the primacy of consciousness.

The primacy of existence (of reality) is the axiom that existence exists, i.e., that the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness), that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity. The epistemological corollary is the axiom that consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists—and that man gains knowledge of reality by looking outward. The rejection of these axioms represents a reversal: the primacy of consciousness—the notion that the universe has no independent existence, that it is the product of a consciousness (either human or divine or both). The epistemological corollary is the notion that man gains knowledge of reality by looking inward (either at his own consciousness or at the revelations it receives from another, superior consciousness).

The source of this reversal is the inability or unwillingness fully to grasp the difference between one’s inner state and the outer world, i.e., between the perceiver and the perceived (thus blending consciousness and existence into one indeterminate package-deal).² This crucial distinction is not given to man automatically; it has to be learned. It is implicit in any awareness, but it has to be grasped conceptually and held as an absolute. As far as can be observed, infants and savages do not grasp it (they may, perhaps, have some rudimentary glimmer of it). Very few men ever choose to grasp it and fully to accept it. The majority keep swinging from side to side, implicitly recognizing the primacy of existence in some cases and denying it in others, adopting a kind of hit-or-miss, rule-of-thumb epistemological agnosticism, through ignorance and/or by intention—the result of which is the shrinking of their intellectual range, i.e., of their capacity to deal with abstractions. And although few people today believe that the singing of mystic incantations will bring rain, most people still regard as valid an argument such as: “If there is no God, who created the universe?”

To grasp the axiom that existence exists, means to grasp the fact that nature, i.e., the universe as a whole, cannot be created or annihilated, that it cannot come into or go out of existence. Whether its basic constituent elements are atoms, or subatomic particles, or some yet undiscovered forms of energy, it is not ruled by a consciousness or by will or by chance, but by the Law of Identity. All the countless forms, motions, combinations and dissolutions of elements within the universe—from a floating speck of dust to the formation of a galaxy to the emergence of life—are caused and determined by the identities of the elements involved. Nature is the metaphysically given—i.e., the nature of nature is outside the power of any volition.

Man’s volition is an attribute of his consciousness (of his rational faculty) and consists in the choice to perceive existence or to evade it. To perceive existence, to discover the characteristics or properties (the identities) of the things that exist, means to discover and accept the metaphysically given. Only on the basis of this knowledge is man able to learn how the things given in nature can be rearranged to serve his needs (which is his method of survival).

The power to rearrange the combinations of natural elements is the only creative power man possesses. It is an enormous and glorious power—and it is the only meaning of the concept “creative.” “Creation” does not (and metaphysically cannot) mean the power to bring something into existence out of nothing. “Creation” means the power to bring into existence an arrangement (or combination or integration) of natural elements that had not existed before. (This is true of any human product, scientific or esthetic: man’s imagination is nothing more than the ability to rearrange the things he has observed in reality.) The best and briefest identification of man’s power in regard to nature is Francis Bacon’s “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” In this context, “to be commanded” means to be made to serve man’s purposes; “to be obeyed” means that they cannot be served unless man discovers the properties of natural elements and uses them accordingly.

For example, two hundred years ago, men would have said that it is impossible to hear a human voice at a distance of 238,000 miles. It is as impossible today as it was then. But if we are able to hear an astronaut’s voice coming from the moon, it is by means of the science of electronics, which discovered certain natural phenomena and enabled men to build the kind of equipment that picks up the vibrations of that voice, transmits them, and reproduces them on earth. Without this knowledge and this equipment, centuries of wishing, praying, screaming and foot-stamping would not make a man’s voice heard at the distance of ten miles.

Today, this is (implicitly) understood and (more or less) accepted in regard to the physical sciences (hence their progress). It is neither understood nor accepted—and is, in fact, vociferously denied—in regard to the humanities, the sciences dealing with man (hence their stagnant barbarism). Almost unanimously, man is regarded as an unnatural phenomenon: either as a supernatural entity, whose mystic (divine) endowment, the mind (“soul”), is above nature—or as a subnatural entity, whose mystic (demoniacal) endowment, the mind, is an enemy of nature (“ecology”). The purpose of all such theories is to exempt man from the Law of Identity.

But man exists and his mind exists. Both are part of nature, both possess a specific identity. The attribute of volition does not contradict the fact of identity, just as the existence of living organisms does not contradict the existence of inanimate matter. Living organisms possess the power of self-initiated motion, which inanimate matter does not possess; man’s consciousness possesses the power of self-initiated motion in the realm of cognition (thinking), which the consciousnesses of other living species do not possess. But just as animals are able to move only in accordance with the nature of their bodies, so man is able to initiate and direct his mental action only in accordance with the nature (the identity) of his consciousness. His volition is limited to his cognitive processes; he has the power to identify (and to conceive of rearranging) the elements of reality, but not the power to alter them. He has the power to use his cognitive faculty as its nature requires, but not the power to alter it nor to escape the consequences of its misuse. He has the power to suspend, evade, corrupt or subvert his perception of reality, but not the power to escape the existential and psychological disasters that follow. (The use or misuse of his cognitive faculty determines a man’s choice of values, which determine his emotions and his character. It is in this sense that man is a being of self-made soul.)

Man’s faculty of volition as such is not a contradiction of nature, but it opens the way for a host of contradictions—when and if men do not grasp the crucial difference between the metaphysically given and any object, institution, procedure, or rule of conduct made by man.

It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary. Man is not omniscient or infallible: he can make innocent errors through lack of knowledge, or he can lie, cheat and fake. The man-made may be a product of genius, perceptiveness, ingenuity—or it may be a product of stupidity, deception, malice, evil. One man may be right and everyone else wrong, or vice versa (or any numerical division in between). Nature does not give man any automatic guarantee of the truth of his judgments (and this is a metaphysically given fact, which must be accepted). Who, then, is to judge? Each man, to the best of his ability and honesty. What is his standard of judgment? The metaphysically given.

The metaphysically given cannot be true or false, it simply is—and man determines the truth or falsehood of his judgments by whether they correspond to or contradict the facts of reality. The metaphysically given cannot be right or wrong—it is the standard of right or wrong, by which a (rational) man judges his goals, his values, his choices. The metaphysically given is, was, will be, and had to be. Nothing made by man had to be: it was made by choice.

To rebel against the metaphysically given is to engage in a futile attempt to negate existence. To accept the man-made as beyond challenge is to engage in a successful attempt to negate one’s own consciousness. Serenity comes from the ability to say “Yes” to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say “No” to the wrong choices made by others.

Any natural phenomenon, i.e., any event which occurs without human participation, is the metaphysically given, and could not have occurred differently or failed to occur; any phenomenon involving human action is the man-made, and could have been different. For example, a flood occurring in an uninhabited land, is the metaphysically given; a dam built to contain the flood water, is the man-made; if the builders miscalculate and the dam breaks, the disaster is metaphysical in its origin, but intensified by man in its consequences. To correct the situation, men must obey nature by studying the causes and potentialities of the flood, then command nature by building better flood controls.

But to declare that all of man’s efforts to improve the conditions of his existence are futile, to declare that nature is unknowable because we cannot prove that there will be a flood next year, even though there has been one every year in memory, to declare that human knowledge is an illusion because the original dam builders were certain that the dam would hold, but it did not—is to drive men back to the primordial confusion on the relationship of consciousness to existence, and thus to rob men of serenity and courage (as well as of many other things). Yet this is what modern philosophy has been declaring for two hundred years or longer.

Observe that the philosophical system based on the axiom of the primacy of existence (i.e., on recognizing the absolutism of reality) led to the recognition of man’s identity and rights. But the philosophical systems based on the primacy of consciousness (i.e., on the seemingly megalomaniacal notion that nature is whatever man wants it to be) lead to the view that man possesses no identity, that he is infinitely flexible, malleable, usable and disposable. Ask yourself why.

A major part of the philosophers’ attack on man’s mind is devoted to attempts to obliterate the difference between the metaphysically given and the man-made. The confusion on this issue started as an ancient error (to which even Aristotle contributed in some of his Platonist aspects); but today it is running deliberately and inexcusably wild.

A typical package-deal, used by professors of philosophy, runs as follows: to prove the assertion that there is no such thing as “necessity” in the universe, a professor declares that just as this country did not have to have fifty states, there could have been forty-eight or fifty-two—so the solar system did not have to have nine planets, there could have been seven or eleven. It is not sufficient, he declares, to prove that something is, one must also prove that it had to be—and since nothing had to be, nothing is certain and anything goes.

The technique of undercutting man’s mind consists in palming off the man-made as if it were the metaphysically given, then ascribing to nature the concepts that refer only to men’s lack of knowledge, such as “chance” or “contingency,” then reversing the two elements of the package-deal. From the assertion: “Man is unpredictable, therefore nature is unpredictable,” the argument goes to: “Nature possesses volition, man does not—nature is free, man is ruled by unknowable forces—nature is not to be conquered, man is.”

Most people believe that an issue of this kind is empty academic talk, of no practical significance to anyone—which blinds them to its consequences in their own lives. If one were to tell them that the package-deal made of this issue is part of the nagging uncertainty, the quiet hopelessness, the gray despair of their daily inner state, they would deny it: they would not recognize it introspectively. But the inability to introspect is one of the consequences of this package-deal.

Most men have no knowledge of the nature or the functioning of a human consciousness and, consequently, no knowledge of what is or is not possible to them, what one can or cannot demand of oneself and of others, what is or is not one’s fault. On the implicit premise that consciousness has no identity, men alternate between the feeling that they possess some sort of omnipotent power over their consciousness and can abuse it with impunity (“It doesn’t matter, it’s only in my mind”)—and the feeling that they have no choice, no control, that the content of consciousness is innately predetermined, that they are victims of the impenetrable mystery inside their own skulls, prisoners of an unknowable enemy, helpless automatons driven by inexplicable emotions (“I can’t help it, that’s the way I am”).

Many men are crippled by the influence of this uncertainty. When such a man considers a goal or desire he wants to achieve, the first question in his mind is: “Can I do it?”—not: “What is required to do it?” His question means: “Do I have the innate ability?” For example: “I want to be a composer more than anything else on earth, but I have no idea of how it’s done. Do I have that mysterious gift which will do it for me, somehow?” He has never heard of a premise such as the primacy of consciousness, but that is the premise moving him as he embarks on a hopeless search through the dark labyrinth of his consciousness (hopeless, because without reference to existence, nothing can be learned about one’s consciousness).

If he does not give up his desire right then, he stumbles uncertainly to attempt to achieve it. Any small success augments his anxiety: he does not know what caused it and whether he can repeat it. Any small failure is a crushing blow: he takes it as proof that he lacks the mystic endowment. When he makes a mistake, he does not ask himself: “What do I need to learn?”—he asks: “What’s wrong with me?” He waits for an automatic and omnipotent inspiration, which never comes. He spends years on a cheerless struggle, with his eyes focused inward, on the growing, leering monster of self-doubt, while existence drifts by, unseen, on the periphery of his mental vision. Eventually, he gives up.

Substitute for “composer” any other profession, goal or desire—to be a scientist, a businessman, a reporter or a headwaiter, to get rich, to find friends, to lose weight—and the pattern remains the same. Some of the pattern’s victims are phonies, but not all. It is impossible to tell what amount of authentic intelligence, particularly in the arts, has been hampered, stunted or crushed by the myth of “innate endowment.”

Unable to determine what they can or cannot change, some men attempt to “rewrite reality,” i.e., to alter the nature of the metaphysically given. Some dream of a universe in which man experiences nothing but happiness—no pain, no frustration, no illness—and wonder why they lose the desire to improve their life on earth. Some feel that they would be brave, honest, ambitious in a world where everyone automatically shared these virtues—but not in the world as it is. Some dread the thought of eventual death—and never undertake the task of living. Some grant omniscience to the passage of time and regard tradition as the equivalent of nature: if people have believed an idea for centuries, they feel, it must be true. Some grant omnipotence and the status of the metaphysically given, not even to people’s ideas, but to people’s feelings, and pander to the irrationality of others, to their blind emotions (such as prejudices, superstitions, envy), regardless of the truth or falsehood of the issues involved—on the premise that “It doesn’t matter whether this is true if people feel that it’s true.”

Some men switch to others (who were helpless in the matter) the blame for their own actions; some men, who were helpless in the matter, accept the blame for the actions of others. Some feel guilty because they do not know what they have no way of knowing. Some feel guilty for not having known yesterday what they have learned today. Some feel guilty for not being able to convert the whole world to their own ideas effortlessly and overnight.

The question of how to deal with nature is partially understood, at least by some people; but the question of how to deal with men and how to judge them is still in the state of a primeval jungle. It is man’s faculty of volition that sets him apart (even in the eyes of those who deny the existence of that faculty), and makes men regard themselves and others as unintelligible, unknowable, exempt from the Law of Identity.

But nothing is exempt from the Law of Identity. A man-made product did not have to exist, but, once made, it does exist. A man’s actions did not have to be performed, but, once performed, they are facts of reality. The same is true of a man’s character: he did not have to make the choices he made, but, once he has formed his character, it is a fact, and it is his personal identity. (Man’s volition gives him great, but not unlimited, latitude to change his character; if he does, the change becomes a fact.)

Things of human origin (whether physical or psychological) may be designated as “man-made facts”—as distinguished from the metaphysically given facts. A skyscraper is a man-made fact, a mountain is a metaphysically given fact. One can alter a skyscraper or blow it up (just as one can alter or blow up a mountain), but so long as it exists, one cannot pretend that it is not there or that it is not what it is. The same principle applies to men’s actions and characters. A man does not have to be a worthless scoundrel, but so long as he chooses to be, he is a worthless scoundrel and must be treated accordingly; to treat him otherwise is to contradict a fact. A man does not have to be a heroic achiever; but so long as he chooses to be, he is a heroic achiever and must be treated accordingly; to treat him otherwise is to contradict a fact. Men did not have to build a skyscraper; but, once they did, it is worse than a contradiction to regard a skyscraper as a mountain, as a metaphysically given fact which, on this view, “just happened to happen.”

The faculty of volition gives man a special status in two crucial respects: 1. unlike the metaphysically given, man’s products, whether material or intellectual, are not to be accepted uncritically—and 2. by its metaphysically given nature, a man’s volition is outside the power of other men. What the unalterable basic constituents are to nature, the attribute of a volitional consciousness is to the entity “man.” Nothing can force a man to think. Others may offer him incentives or impediments, rewards or punishments, they may destroy his brain by drugs or by the blow of a club, but they cannot order his mind to function: this is in his exclusive, sovereign power. Man is neither to be obeyed nor to be commanded.

What has to be “obeyed” is man’s metaphysically given nature—in the sense in which one “obeys” the nature of all existents; this means, in man’s case, that one must recognize the fact that his mind is not to be “commanded” in any sense, including the sense applicable to the rest of nature. Natural objects can be reshaped to serve men’s goals and are to be regarded as means to men’s ends, but man himself cannot and is not.

In regard to nature, “to accept what I cannot change” means to accept the metaphysically given; “to change what I can” means to strive to rearrange the given by acquiring knowledge—as science and technology (e.g., medicine) are doing; “to know the difference” means to know that one cannot rebel against nature and, when no action is possible, one must accept nature serenely.

In regard to man, “to accept” does not mean to agree, and “to change” does not mean to force. What one must accept is the fact that the minds of other men are not in one’s power, as one’s own mind is not in theirs; one must accept their right to make their own choices, and one must agree or disagree, accept or reject, join or oppose them, as one’s mind dictates. The only means of “changing” men is the same as the means of “changing” nature: knowledge—which, in regard to men, is to be used as a process of persuasion, when and if their minds are active; when they are not, one must leave them to the consequences of their own errors. “To know the difference” means that one must never accept man-made evils (there are no others) in silent resignation, one must never submit to them voluntarily—and even if one is imprisoned in some ghastly dictatorship’s jail, where no action is possible, serenity comes from the knowledge that one does not accept it.

To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion—which is the policy of savages, who rule men by force and plead with nature by prayers, incantations and bribes (sacrifices). It does not work and has not worked in any human society in history. Yet this is the policy to which modern philosophers are urging mankind to revert—as they have reverted to the notion of the primacy of consciousness. They urge a passive, mystic, “ecological” submission to nature—and the rule of brute force for men.

The philosophers’ denial of the Law of Identity permits them to evade man’s identity and the requirements of his survival. It permits them to evade the fact that man cannot survive for long in a state of nature, that reason is his tool of survival, that he survives by means of man-made products, and that the source of man-made products is man’s intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to grasp the facts of reality and to deal with them long-range (i.e., conceptually). On the axiom of the primacy of existence, intelligence is man’s most precious attribute. But it has no place in a society ruled by the primacy of consciousness: it is such a society’s deadliest enemy.

Today, intelligence is neither recognized nor rewarded, but is being systematically extinguished in a growing flood of brazenly flaunted irrationality. As just one example of the extent to which today’s culture is dominated by the primacy of consciousness, observe the following: in politics, people hold a ruthless, absolutist, either-or attitude toward elections, they expect a man either to win or not and are concerned only with the winner, ignoring the loser altogether (even though, in some cases, the loser was right)—while in economics, in the realm of production, they evade the absolutism of reality, of the fact that man either produces or not, and destroy the winners in favor of the losers. To them, men’s decisions are an absolute; reality’s demands are not.

The climax of that trend, the ultimate cashing-in on the package-deal of the metaphysical and the man-made, is the egalitarian movement and its philosophical manifesto, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice.³ This obscenely evil theory proposes to subordinate man’s nature and mind to the desires (including the envy), not merely of the lowest human specimens, but of the lowest non-existents—to the emotions these would have felt before they were born—and requires that men make lifelong choices on the premise that they are all equally devoid of brains. The fact that a brain cannot project an alteration of its own nature and power, that a genius cannot project himself into the state of a moron, and vice versa, that the needs and desires of a genius and a moron are not identical, that a genius reduced to the existential level of a moron would perish in unspeakable agony, and a moron raised to the existential level of a genius would paint graffiti on the sides of a computer, then die of starvation—all this does not enter the skulls of men who have dispensed with the Law of Identity (and, therefore, with reality), who demand “equal results” regardless of unequal causes, and who propose to alter metaphysical facts by the power of whims and guns.

This is being preached, touted and demanded today. There can be no intellectual—or moral—neutrality on such an issue. The moral cowards who try to evade it by pleading ignorance, confusion or helplessness, who keep silent and avoid the battle, yet feel a growing sense of guilty terror over the question of what they can or cannot change, are paving the way for the egalitarians’ atrocities, and will end up like the derelicts whom Alcoholics Anonymous is struggling to help.

The least that any decent man can do today is to fight that book’s doctrine—to fight it intransigently on moral grounds. A proposal to annihilate intelligence by slow torture cannot be treated as a difference of civilized opinion.

If any man feels that the world is too complex and its evil is too big to cope with, let him remember that it is too big to drown in a glass of whiskey.

4

The Missing Link

1973

I shall begin by giving you four examples and asking you to identify what psychological element they have in common.

1. I once knew a businessman in a large Midwestern city, who was an unusually hard-working, active, energetic person. He had built a small business of his own and had risen from poverty to affluence. He was the adviser and protector of an enormous conglomeration of relatives, friends, and friends of friends, who ran to him, not merely for loans, but for help with problems of any kind. He was in his late thirties, but acted as a sort of tribal patriarch.

It was hard to tell whether he enjoyed or resented his role; he seemed to take it for granted, as a kind of metaphysical duty: he had probably never thought of questioning it. He did enjoy acting as a small big shot, however, and doing favors for people, about which he was very generous. He had, apparently, some marginal connections with his particular district’s political machine and he loved obtaining for his friends the sort of favors that were unobtainable without special pull, such as extra ration coupons (in World War II) or the fixing of traffic tickets. The concept of “friends” had some peculiar significance to him. He watched their intentions like a hypochondriac watches his health—in a manner that projected a touchy suspiciousness and a fierce loyalty to some unwritten moral code.

Politically, he tended to be a conservative, and was usually complaining about this country’s trends. One day, he launched into a passionate denunciation of the liberals, the government, the unfairness to businessmen, the arbitrary power of political machines. “Do you know how powerful they are?” he asked bitterly, and proceeded to tell me that he had tried to run for some minuscule city office, but “they” had ordered him to withdraw his candidacy “or else,” and he had complied.

I said that such problems would always exist so long as government controls existed, and that the only solution was a system of full, laissez-faire capitalism, under which no groups could acquire economic privileges or special pull, so that everyone would have to stand on his own. “That’s impossible!” he snapped; his voice was peculiarly tense, abrupt, defensive, as if he were slamming a mental door on some barely glimpsed fact; the voice conveyed fear. I did not pursue the subject: I had grasped a psychological issue that was new to me.

2. A well-known lady novelist once wrote an essay on the nature of fiction. Adopting an extreme Naturalist position, she declared: “The distinctive mark of the novel is its concern with the actual world, the world of fact . . .” And by “fact,” she meant the immediately available facts—“the empiric element in experience.” “The novel does not permit occurrences outside the order of nature—miracles. . . . You remember how in The Brothers Karamazov when Father Zossima dies, his faction (most of the sympathetic characters in the book) expects a miracle: that his body will stay sweet and fresh because he died ‘in the odor of sanctity.’ But instead he begins to stink. The stink of Father Zossima is the natural, generic smell of the novel. By the same law, a novel cannot be laid in the future, since the future, until it happens, is outside the order of nature . . .”

She declared that “the novel’s characteristic tone is one of gossip and tittletattle. . . . Here is another criterion: if the breath of scandal has not touched it, the book is not a novel. . . . The scandals of a village or a province, the scandals of a nation or of the high seas feed on facts and breed speculation. But it is of the essence of a scandal that it be finite . . . It is impossible, except for theologians, to conceive of a world-wide scandal or a universe-wide scandal; the proof of this is the way people have settled down to living with nuclear fission, radiation poisoning, hydrogen bombs, satellites, and space rockets.” Why facts of this kind should be regarded as the province of theology, she did not explain. “Yet these ‘scandals,’ in the theological sense, of the large world and the universe have dwarfed the finite scandals of the village and the province . . .”

She then proceeded to explain what she regards as “the dilemma of the novelist”: we forget or ignore the events of the modern world, “because their special quality is to stagger belief.” But if we think of them, “our daily life becomes incredible to us. . . . The coexistence of the great world and us, when contemplated, appears impossible.” From this, she drew a conclusion: since the novelist is motivated by his love of truth, “ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone,” the novel is “of all forms the least adapted to encompass the modern world, whose leading characteristic is irreality. And that, so far as I can understand, is why the novel is dying.”

3. The following story was told to me by an American businessman. In his youth, he took a job as efficiency-expert adviser to the manager of a factory in South America. The factory was using U.S. machines, but was getting only 45 percent of the machines’ potential productivity. Observing the low wage scale, he concluded that the men were given no incentive to work—and suggested the introduction of pay by piecework. The elderly manager told him, with a skeptical smile, that this would be futile, but agreed to try it.

In the first three weeks of the new plan, productivity soared. In the fourth week, no one showed up for work: virtually the entire labor force vanished—and did not come back until a week later. Having earned a month’s wages in three weeks, the workers saw no reason to work that extra week; they had no desire to earn more than they had been earning. No arguments could persuade them; the plan was discontinued.

4. A professor of philosophy once invited me to address his class on ethics; they were studying the subject of “justice,” and he asked me to present the Objectivist view of justice. The format he proposed was a fifteen-minute presentation, followed by a question period. I pointed out to him that it would be very difficult to present, in fifteen minutes, the basis of the Objectivist ethics and thus give the reasons for my definition of justice. “Oh, you don’t have to give the reasons,” he said, “just present your views.” (I did not comply.)

The circumstances and the people in these four examples are different; the type of mentality they display is the same. This mentality is self-made, but many different factors can contribute to its formation. These factors may be social, as in the case of the South American workers—or personal, as in the case of the lady novelist—or both, as in the case of the Midwestern businessman. As to the professor of philosophy, the modern trend of his profession is the factor responsible for all the rest.

These cases are examples of the anti-conceptual mentality.

The main characteristic of this mentality is a special kind of passivity: not passivity as such and not across-the-board, but passivity beyond a certain limit—i.e., passivity in regard to the process of conceptualization and, therefore, in regard to fundamental principles. It is a mentality which decided, at a certain point of development, that it knows enough and does not care to look further. What does it accept as “enough”? The immediately given, directly perceivable concretes of its background—“the empiric element in experience.”

To grasp and deal with such concretes, a human being needs a certain degree of conceptual development, a process which the brain of an animal cannot perform. But after the initial feat of learning to speak, a child can counterfeit this process, by memorization and imitation. The anti-conceptual mentality stops on this level of development—on the first levels of abstractions, which identify perceptual material consisting predominantly of physical objects—and does not choose to take the next, crucial, fully volitional step: the higher levels of abstraction from abstractions, which cannot be learned by imitation. (See my book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.) Such a mind can grasp the scandals of a village or a province or (at secondhand) a nation; it cannot grasp the concepts of “world” or “universe”—or the fact that their events are not “scandals.”

The anti-conceptual mentality takes most things as irreducible primaries and regards them as “self-evident.” It treats concepts as if they were (memorized) percepts; it treats abstractions as if they were perceptual concretes. To such a mentality, everything is the given: the passage of time, the four seasons, the institution of marriage, the weather, the breeding of children, a flood, a fire, an earthquake, a revolution, a book are phenomena of the same order. The distinction between the metaphysical and the man-made is not merely unknown to this mentality, it is incommunicable.

The two cardinal questions, the prime movers of a human mind—“Why?” and “What for?”—are alien to an anti-conceptual mentality. If asked, they elicit nothing beyond the conventionally accepted answers. The answers are usually some equivalent of “Such is life” or “One is supposed to.” Whose life? Blank out. Supposed—by whom? Blank out.

The absence of concern with the “Why?” eliminates the concept of causality and cuts off the past. The absence of concern with the “What for?” eliminates long-range purpose and cuts off the future. Thus only the present is fully real to an anti-conceptual mentality. Something of the past remains with it, in the form of stagnant bits of a random chronicle, like a kind of small talk of memory, without goal or meaning. But the future is a blank; the future cannot be grasped perceptually.

In this respect, paradoxically enough, the hidebound traditionalist and the modern college activist are two sides of the same psycho-epistemological coin.⁴ The first seeks to escape the terror of an unknowable future by seeking safety in the alleged wisdom of the past. (“What was good enough for my father, is good enough for me!”) The second seeks to escape the terror of an unintelligible past by screaming his way into an indefinable future. (“If it’s not good for my father, it’s not good enough for me!”) And, paradoxically enough, neither of them is able to live in the present—because man’s life span is a continuum whose only integrator is his conceptual faculty.

In the brain of an anti-conceptual person, the process of integration is largely replaced by a process of association. What his subconscious stores and automatizes is not ideas, but an indiscriminate accumulation of sundry concretes, random facts, and unidentified feelings, piled into unlabeled mental file folders. This works, up to a certain point—i.e., so long as such a person deals with other persons whose folders are stuffed similarly, and thus no search through the entire filing system is ever required. Within such limits, the person can be active and willing to work hard—like the Midwestern businessman, who exercised a great deal of initiative and ingenuity, within the limits set by his particular city district—like the lady novelist, who wrote many books, within the terms set by her college teachers—like the professor of philosophy, who spent his time analyzing results, without bothering about their causes.

A person of this mentality may uphold some abstract principles or profess some intellectual convictions (without remembering where or how he picked them up). But if one asks him what he means by a given idea, he will not be able to answer. If one asks him the reasons of his convictions, one will discover that his convictions are a thin, fragile film floating over a vacuum, like an oil slick in empty space—and one will be shocked by the number of questions it had never occurred to him to ask.

This kind of psycho-epistemology works so long as no part of it is challenged. But all hell breaks loose when it is—because what is threatened then is not a particular idea, but that mind’s whole structure. The hell ranges from fear to resentment to stubborn evasion to hostility to panic to malice to hatred.

The best illustration of an anti-conceptual mentality is a small incident in a novel published years ago, whose title, unfortunately, I do not remember. A commonplace kind of blonde goes out on a date with a college boy; when she is asked later whether she had a good time, she answers: “No. He was awfully boring. He never said anything I’d ever heard before.”

The concrete-bound, anti-conceptual mentality can cope only with men who are bound by the same concretes—by the same kind of “finite” world. To this mentality, it means a world in which men do not have to deal with abstract principles: principles are replaced by memorized rules of behavior, which are accepted uncritically as the given. What is “finite” in such a world is not its extension, but the degree of mental effort required of its inhabitants. When they say “finite,” they mean “perceptual.”

Within the limits of their rules (which are usually called “traditions”), the inhabitants of such worlds are free to function—i.e., to deal with concretes without worrying about consequences, to deal with results without bothering about causes, to deal with “facts” as discrete phenomena, unhampered by the “intangibles” of theory—and to feel safe. Safe from what? Consciously, they would answer “Safe from outsiders.” Actually, the answer is: safe from the necessity of dealing with fundamental principles (and, consequently, safe from full responsibility for one’s own life).

It is the fundamentals of philosophy (particularly, of ethics) that an anti-conceptual person dreads above all else. To understand and to apply them requires a long conceptual chain, which he has made his mind incapable of holding beyond the first, rudimentary links. If his professed beliefs—i.e., the rules and slogans of his group—are challenged, he feels his consciousness dissolving in fog. Hence, his fear of outsiders. The word “outsiders,” to him, means the whole wide world beyond the confines of his village or town or gang—the world of all those people who do not live by his “rules.” He does not know why he feels that outsiders are a deadly threat to him and why they fill him with helpless terror. The threat is not existential, but psycho-epistemological: to deal with them requires that he rise above his “rules” to the level of abstract principles. He would die rather than attempt it.

“Protection from outsiders” is the benefit he seeks in clinging to his group. What the group demands in return is obedience to its rules, which he is eager to obey: those rules are his protection—from the dreaded realm of abstract thought. By whom are those rules established? In theory, by tradition. In fact, by those who happen to be the leaders of his group; the way it stands in his mind is: by those who know the mysteries he does not have to know.

Thus, his survival depends on the substitution of men for ideas—and on the subordination of the metaphysical to the man-made. The metaphysical is beyond his grasp—laws of nature cannot be grasped perceptually—but man-made rules are absolutes that protect him from the unknowable, psychologically and existentially. The group comes to his rescue if he gets into trouble—and he does not have to earn their help, it is given to him automatically, it is not at the precarious mercy of his own virtues, flaws or errors, it is his by grace of the fact that he belongs to the group.

As an example of the principle that the rational is the moral, observe that the anti-conceptual is the profoundly anti-moral. The basic commandment of all such groups, which takes precedence over any other rules, is: loyalty to the group—not to ideas, but to people; not to the group’s beliefs, which are minimal and chiefly ritualistic, but to the group’s members and leaders. Whether a given member is right or wrong, the others must protect him from outsiders; whether he is innocent or guilty, the others must stand by him against outsiders; whether he is competent or not, the others must employ him or trade with him in preference to outsiders. Thus a physical qualification—the accident of birth in a given village or tribe—takes precedence over morality and justice. (But the physical is only the most frequently apparent and superficial qualification, since such groups reject the nonconforming children of their own members. The actual qualification is psycho-epistemological: men bound by the same concretes.)

Primitive tribes are an obvious example of the anti-conceptual mentality—perhaps, with some justification: savages, like children, are on the preconceptual level of development. Their later counterparts, however, demonstrate that this mentality is not the product of ignorance (nor is it caused by lack of intelligence): it is self-made, i.e., self-arrested. It has resisted the rise of civilization and has manifested itself in countless forms throughout history. Its symptom is always an attempt to circumvent reality by substituting men for ideas, the man-made for the metaphysical, favors for rights, special pull for merit—i.e., an attempt to reduce man’s life to a small back-yard (or rat hole) exempt from the absolutism of reason. (The driving motive of these attempts is deeper than power-lust: the rulers of such groups seek protection from reality as anxiously as the followers.)

Racism is an obvious manifestation of the anti-conceptual mentality. So is xenophobia—the fear or hatred of foreigners (“outsiders”). So is any caste system, which prescribes a man’s status (i.e., assigns him to a tribe) according to his birth; a caste system is perpetuated by a special kind of snobbishness (i.e., group loyalty) not merely among the aristocrats, but, perhaps more fiercely, among the commoners or even the serfs, who like to “know their place” and to guard it jealously against the outsiders from above or from below. So is guild socialism. So is any kind of ancestor worship or of family “solidarity” (the family including uncles, aunts and third cousins). So is any criminal gang.

Tribalism (which is the best name to give to all the group manifestations of the anti-conceptual mentality) is a dominant element in Europe, as a reciprocally reinforcing cause and result of Europe’s long history of caste systems, of national and local (provincial) chauvinism, of rule by brute force and endless, bloody wars. As an example, observe the Balkan nations, which are perennially bent upon exterminating one another over minuscule differences of tradition or language. Tribalism had no place in the United States—until recent decades. It could not take root here, its imported seedlings were withering away and turning to slag in the melting pot whose fire was fed by two inexhaustible sources of energy: individual rights and objective law; these two were the only protection man needed.

The remnants of European tribalism, imported by the more timid immigrants, took the innocuous form of “ethnic” neighborhoods in cities, each neighborhood offering its own customs, traditional festivals, old-country restaurants, and words in its native language on battered store-signs. Those signs were battered, because the men who clung to the tribal rule of giving trade priorities to fellow-tribesmen, remained in the backwaters of impoverished neighborhoods, while the torrent of productive energy that placed merit above tribe, swept past them, carrying away the best of their children.

There was no harm in such backwaters, so long as no one was forced to remain in them. The pressure of enlightenment by example was undercutting the group loyalty of the most stubbornly anti-conceptual mentalities, urging them to venture out into the great world where no man is an “outsider” (or all men are, as far as special privileges are concerned).

The disintegration of philosophy reversed this trend. Tribalism is a product of fear, and fear is the dominant emotion of any person, culture or society that rejects man’s power of survival: reason. As philosophy slithered into the primitive swamp of irrationalism, men were driven—existentially and psychologically—into its primordial corollary: tribalism. Existentially, the rise of the welfare state broke up the country into pressure groups, each fighting for special privileges at the expense of the others—so that an individual unaffiliated with any group became fair game for tribal predators. Psychologically, Pragmatism lobotomized the country’s intellectuals: John Dewey’s theory of “Progressive” education (which has dominated the schools for close to half a century), established a method of crippling a child’s conceptual faculty and replacing cognition with “social adjustment.” It was and is a systematic attempt to manufacture tribal mentalities. (See my article “The Comprachicos” in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.)

Observe that today’s resurgence of tribalism is not a product of the lower classes—of the poor, the helpless, the ignorant—but of the intellectuals, the college-educated “elitists” (which is a purely tribalistic term). Observe the proliferation of grotesque herds or gangs—hippies, yippies, beatniks, peaceniks, Women’s Libs, Gay Libs, Jesus Freaks, Earth Children—which are not tribes, but shifting aggregates of people desperately seeking tribal “protection.”

The common denominator of all such gangs is the belief in motion (mass demonstrations), not action—in chanting, not arguing—in demanding, not achieving—in feeling, not thinking—in denouncing “outsiders,” not in pursuing values—in focusing only on the “now,” the “today” without a “tomorrow”—in seeking to return to “nature,” to “the earth,” to the mud, to physical labor, i.e., to all the things which a perceptual mentality is able to handle. You don’t see advocates of reason and science clogging a street in the belief that using their bodies to stop traffic, will solve any problem.

Most of those embryonic tribal gangs are leftist or collectivist. But as a demonstration of the fact that the cause of tribalism is deeper than politics, there are tribalists still further removed from reality, who claim to be rightists. They are champions of individualism, they claim, which they define as the right to form one’s own gang and use physical force against others—and they intend to preserve capitalism, they claim, by replacing it with anarchism (establishing “private” or “competing” governments, i.e., tribal rule). The common denominator of such individualists is the desire to escape from objectivity (objectivity requires a very long conceptual chain and very abstract principles), to act on whim, and to deal with men rather than with ideas—i.e., with the men of their own gang bound by the same concretes.

These rightists’ distance from reality may be gauged by the fact that they are unable to recognize the actual examples of their ideals in practice. One such example is the Mafia. The Mafia (or “family”) is a “private government,” with subjects who chose to join it voluntarily, with a rigid set of rules rigidly, efficiently and bloodily enforced, a “government” that undertakes to protect you from “outsiders” and to enforce your immediate interests—at the price of your selling your soul, i.e., of your total obedience to any “favor” it may demand. Another example of a “government” without territorial sovereignty is offered by the Palestinian guerrillas, who have no country of their own, but who engage in terroristic attacks and slaughter of “outsiders” anywhere on earth.

The activist manifestations of modern tribalism, of Left or “Right,” are crude extremes. It is the subtler manifestations of the anti-conceptual mentality that are more tragic and harder to deal with. These are the “mixed economies” of the spirit—the men torn inwardly between tribal emotions and scattered fragments of thought—the products of modern education who do not like the nature of what they feel, but have never learned to think.

Since early childhood, their emotions have been conditioned by the tribal premise that one must “belong,” one must be “in,” one must swim with the “mainstream,” one must follow the lead of “those who know.” A man’s frustrated mind adds another emotion to the tribal conditioning: a blindly bitter resentment of his own intellectual subservience. Modern men are gregarious and antisocial at the same time. They have no inkling of what constitutes a rational human association.

There is a crucial difference between an association and a tribe. Just as a proper society is ruled by laws, not by men, so a proper association is united by ideas, not by men, and its members are loyal to the ideas, not to the group. It is eminently reasonable that men should seek to associate with those who share their convictions and values. It is impossible to deal or even to communicate with men whose ideas are fundamentally opposed to one’s own (and one should be free not to deal with them). All proper associations are formed or joined by individual choice and on conscious, intellectual grounds (philosophical, political, professional, etc.)—not by the physiological or geographical accident of birth, and not on the ground of tradition. When men are united by ideas, i.e., by explicit principles, there is no room for favors, whims, or arbitrary power: the principles serve as an objective criterion for determining actions and for judging men, whether leaders or members.

This requires a high degree of conceptual development and independence, which the anti-conceptual mentality is desperately struggling to avoid. But this is the only way men can work together justly, benevo-lently and safely. There is no way for men to survive on the perceptual level of consciousness.

I am not a student of the theory of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its supporter nor its opponent. But a certain hypothesis has haunted me for years; I want to stress that it is only a hypothesis. There is an enormous breach of continuity between man and all the other living species. The difference lies in the nature of man’s consciousness, in its distinctive characteristic: his conceptual faculty. It is as if, after aeons of physiological development, the evolutionary process altered its course, and the higher stages of development focused primarily on the consciousness of living species, not their bodies. But the development of a man’s consciousness is volitional: no matter what the innate degree of his intelligence, he must develop it, he must learn how to use it, he must become a human being by choice. What if he does not choose to? Then he becomes a transitional phenomenon—a desperate creature that struggles frantically against his own nature, longing for the effortless “safety” of an animal’s consciousness, which he cannot recapture, and rebelling against a human consciousness, which he is afraid to achieve.

For years, scientists have been looking for a “missing link” between man and animals. Perhaps that missing link is the anti-conceptual mentality.

5

Selfishness Without a Self

1974

In [“The Missing Link”], I discussed the anti-conceptual mentality and its social (tribal) manifestations. All tribalists are anti-conceptual in various degrees, but not all anti-conceptual mentalities are tribalists. Some are lone wolves (stressing that species’ most predatory characteristics).

The majority of such wolves are frustrated tribalists, i.e., persons rejected by the tribe (or by the people of their immediate environment): they are too unreliable to abide by conventional rules, and too crudely manipulative to compete for tribal power. Since a perceptual mentality cannot provide a man with a way of survival, such a person, left to his own devices, becomes a kind of intellectual hobo, roaming about as an eclectic second-hander or brainpicker, snatching bits of ideas at random, switching them at whim, with only one constant in his behavior: the drifting from group to group, the need to cling to people, any sort of people, and to manipulate them.

Whatever theoretical constructs he may be able to spin and juggle in various fields, it is the field of ethics that fills him with the deepest sense of terror and of his own impotence. Ethics is a conceptual discipline; loyalty to a code of values requires the ability to grasp abstract principles and to apply them to concrete situations and actions (even on the most primitive level of practicing some rudimentary moral commandments). The tribal lone wolf has no firsthand grasp of values. He senses that this is a lack he must conceal at any price—and that this issue, for him, is the hardest one to fake. The whims that guide him and switch from moment to moment or from year to year, cannot help him to conceive of an inner state of lifelong dedication to one’s chosen values. His whims condition him to the opposite: they automatize his avoidance of any permanent commitment to anything or anyone. Without personal values, a man can have no sense of right or wrong. The tribal lone wolf is an amoralist all the way down.

The clearest symptom by which one can recognize this type of person, is his total inability to judge himself, his actions, or his work by any sort of standard. The normal pattern of self-appraisal requires a reference to some abstract value or virtue—e.g., “I am good because I am rational,” “I am good because I am honest,” even the second-hander’s notion of “I am good because people like me.” Regardless of whether the value-standards involved are true or false, these examples imply the recognition of an essential moral principle: that one’s own value has to be earned.

The amoralist’s implicit pattern of self-appraisal (which he seldom identifies or admits) is: “I am good because it’s me.”

Beyond the age of about three to five (i.e., beyond the perceptual level of mental development), this is not an expression of pride or self-esteem, but of the opposite: of a vacuum—of a stagnant, arrested mentality confessing its impotence to achieve any personal value or virtue.

Do not confuse this pattern with psychological subjectivism. A psychological subjectivist is unable fully to identify his values or to prove their objective validity, but he may be profoundly consistent and loyal to them in practice (though with terrible psycho-epistemological difficulty). The amoralist does not hold subjective values; he does not hold any values. The implicit pattern of all his estimates is: “It’s good because I like it”—“It’s right because I did it”—“It’s true because I want it to be true.” What is the “I” in these statements? A physical hulk driven by chronic anxiety.

The frequently encountered examples of this pattern are: the writer who rehashes some ancient bromides and feels that his work is new, because he wrote it—the non-objective artist who feels that his smears are superior to those made by a monkey’s tail, because he made them—the businessman who hires mediocrities because he likes them—the political “idealist” who claims that racism is good if practiced by a minority (of his choice), but evil if practiced by a majority—and any advocate of any sort of double standard.

But even such shoddy substitutes for morality are only a pretense: the amoralist does not believe that “I am good because it’s me.” That implicit policy is his protection against his deepest, never-to-be-identified conviction: “I am no good through and through.”

Love is a response to values. The amoralist’s actual self-appraisal is revealed in his abnormal need to be loved (but not in the rational sense of the word)—to be “loved for himself,” i.e., causelessly. James Taggart reveals the nature of such a need: “I don’t want to be loved for anything. I want to be loved for myself—not for anything I do or have or say or think. For myself—not for my body or mind or words or works or actions.” (Atlas Shrugged.) When his wife asks: “But then . . . what is yourself?” he has no answer.

As a real-life example: Years ago, I knew an older woman who was a writer and very intelligent, but inclined toward mysticism, embittered, hostile, lonely, and very unhappy. Her views of love and friendship were similar to James Taggart’s. At the time of the publication of The Fountainhead, I told her that I was very grateful to Archibald Ogden, the editor who had threatened to resign if his employers did not publish it. She listened with a peculiar kind of skeptical or disapproving look, then said: “You don’t have to feel grateful to him. He did not do it for you. He did it to further his own career, because he thought it was a good book.” I was truly appalled. I asked: “Do you mean that his action would be better—and that I should prefer it—if he thought it was a worthless book, but fought for its publication out of charity to me?” She would not answer and changed the subject. I was unable to get any explanation out of her. It took me many years to begin to understand.

A similar phenomenon, which had puzzled me for a long time, can be observed in politics. Commentators often exhort some politician to place the interests of the country above his own (or his party’s) and to compromise with his opponents—and such exhortations are not addressed to petty grafters, but to reputable men. What does this mean? If the politician is convinced that his ideas are right, it is the country that he would betray by compromising. If he is convinced that his opponents’ ideas are wrong, it is the country that he would be harming. If he is not certain of either, then he should check his views for his own sake, not merely the country’s—because the truth or falsehood of his ideas should be of the utmost personal interest to him.

But these considerations presuppose a conceptual consciousness that takes ideas seriously—i.e., that derives its views from principles derived from reality. A perceptual consciousness is unable to believe that ideas can be of personal importance to anyone; it regards ideas as a matter of arbitrary choice, as means to some immediate ends. On this view, a man does not seek to be elected to a public office in order to carry out certain policies—he advocates certain policies in order to be elected. If so, then why on earth should he want to be elected? Perceptual mentalities never ask such a question: the concept of a long-range goal is outside their limits. (There are a great many politicians and a great many commentators of that type—and since that mentality is taken for granted as proper and normal, what does this indicate about the intellectual state of today’s culture?)

If a man subordinates ideas and principles to his “personal interests,” what are his personal interests and by what means does he determine them? Consider the senseless, selfless drudgery to which a politician condemns himself if the goal of his work—the proper administration of the country—is of no personal interest to him (or a lawyer, if justice is of no personal interest to him; or a writer, if the objective value of his books is of no personal interest to him, as the woman I quoted was suggesting). But a perceptual mentality is incapable of generating values or goals, and has to pick them secondhand, as the given, then go through the expected motions. (Not all such men are tribal lone wolves—some are faithful, bewildered tribalists out of their psycho-epistemological depth—but all are anti-conceptual mentalities.)

With all of his emphasis on “himself” (and on being “loved for himself”), the tribal lone wolf has no self and no personal interests, only momentary whims. He is aware of his own immediate sensations and of very little else. Observe that whenever he ventures to speak of spiritual (i.e., intellectual) values—of the things he personally loves or admires—one is shocked by the triteness, the vulgarity, the borrowed trashiness of what comes out of him.

A tribal lone wolf feels that his “self” is dissociated from his actions, his work, his pursuits, his ideas. All these, he feels, are things that some outside power—society or reality or the material universe—has somehow forced on him. His real “self,” he feels, is some ineffable entity devoid of attributes. One thing is true: his “self” is ineffable, i.e., non-existent. A man’s self is his mind—the faculty that perceives reality, forms judgments, chooses values. To a tribal lone wolf, “reality” is a meaningless term; his metaphysics consists in the chronic feeling that life, somehow, is a conspiracy of people and things against him, and he will walk over piles of corpses—in order to assert himself? no—in order to hide (or fill) the nagging inner vacuum left by his aborted self.

The grim joke on mankind is the fact that he is held up as a symbol of selfishness. This encourages him in his depredations: it gives him the hope of success in faking a stature he knows to be beyond his power. Selfishness is a profoundly philosophical, conceptual achievement. Anyone who holds a tribal lone wolf as an image of selfishness, is merely confessing the perceptual nature of his own mental functioning.

Yet the tribalists keep proclaiming that morality is an exclusively social phenomenon and that adherence to a tribe—any tribe—is the only way to keep men moral. But the docile members of a tribe are no better than their rejected wolfish brother and fully as amoral: their standard is “We’re good because it’s us.”

The abdication and shriveling of the self is a salient characteristic of all perceptual mentalities, tribalist or lone-wolfish. All of them dread self-reliance; all of them dread the responsibilities which only a self (i.e., a conceptual consciousness) can perform, and they seek escape from the two activities which an actually selfish man would defend with his life: judgment and choice. They fear reason (which is exercised volition-ally) and trust their emotions (which are automatic)—they prefer relatives (an accident of birth) to friends (a matter of choice)—they prefer the tribe (the given) to outsiders (the new)—they prefer commandments (the memorized) to principles (the understood)—they welcome every theory of determinism, every notion that permits them to cry: “I couldn’t help it!”

It is obvious why the morality of altruism is a tribal phenomenon. Prehistorical men were physically unable to survive without clinging to a tribe for leadership and protection against other tribes. The cause of altruism’s perpetuation into civilized eras is not physical, but psycho-epistemological: the men of self-arrested, perceptual mentality are unable to survive without tribal leadership and “protection” against reality. The doctrine of self-sacrifice does not offend them: they have no sense of self or of personal value—they do not know what it is that they are asked to sacrifice—they have no firsthand inkling of such things as intellectual integrity, love of truth, personally chosen values, or a passionate dedication to an idea. When they hear injunctions against “selfishness,” they believe that what they must renounce is the brute, mindless whim-worship of a tribal lone wolf. But their leaders—the theoreticians of altruism—know better. Immanuel Kant knew it; John Dewey knew it; B. F. Skinner knows it; John Rawls knows it. Observe that it is not the mindless brute, but reason, intelligence, ability, merit, self-confidence, self-esteem that they are out to destroy.

Today, we are seeing a ghastly spectacle: a magnificent scientific civilization dominated by the morality of prehistorical savagery. The phenomenon that makes it possible is the split psycho-epistemology of “com-partmentalized” minds. Its best example are men who escape into the physical sciences (or technology or industry or business), hoping to find protection from human irrationality, and abandoning the field of ideas to the enemies of reason. Such refugees include some of mankind’s best brains. But no such refuge is possible. These men, who perform feats of conceptual integration and rational thinking in their work, become helplessly anti-conceptual in all the other aspects of their lives, particularly in human relationships and in social issues. (E.g., compare Einstein’s scientific achievement to his political views.)

Man’s progress requires specialization. But a division-of-labor society cannot survive without a rational philosophy—without a firm base of fundamental principles whose task is to train a human mind to be human, i.e., conceptual.

6

An Open Letter to Boris Spassky

1974

Dear Comrade Spassky:

I have been watching with great interest your world chess championship match with Bobby Fischer. I am not a chess enthusiast or even a player, and know only the rudiments of the game. I am a novelist-philosopher by profession.

But I watched some of your games, reproduced play by play on television, and found them to be a fascinating demonstration of the enormous complexity of thought and planning required of a chess player—a demonstration of how many considerations he has to bear in mind, how many factors to integrate, how many contingencies to be prepared for, how far ahead to see and plan. It was obvious that you and your opponent had to have an unusual intellectual capacity.

Then I was struck by the realization that the game itself and the players’ exercise of mental virtuosity are made possible by the metaphysical absolutism of the reality with which they deal. The game is ruled by the Law of Identity and its corollary, the Law of Causality. Each piece is what it is: a queen is a queen, a bishop is a bishop—and the actions each can perform are determined by its nature: a queen can move any distance in any open line, straight or diagonal, a bishop cannot; a rook can move from one side of the board to the other, a pawn cannot; etc. Their identities and the rules of their movements are immutable—and this enables the player’s mind to devise a complex, long-range strategy, so that the game depends on nothing but the power of his (and his opponent’s) ingenuity.

This led me to some questions that I should like to ask you.

1. Would you be able to play if, at a crucial moment—when, after hours of brain-wrenching effort, you had succeeded in cornering your opponent—an unknown, arbitrary power suddenly changed the rules of the game in his favor, allowing, say, his bishops to move like queens? You would not be able to continue? Yet out in the living world, this is the law of your country—and this is the condition in which your countrymen are expected, not to play, but to live.

2. Would you be able to play if the rules of chess were updated to conform to a dialectic reality, in which opposites merge—so that, at a crucial moment, your queen turned suddenly from White to Black, becoming the queen of your opponent, and then turned Gray, belonging to both of you? You would not be able to continue? Yet in the living world, this is the view of reality your countrymen are taught to accept, to absorb, and to live by.

3. Would you be able to play if you had to play by teamwork—i.e., if you were forbidden to think or act alone and had to play not with a group of advisers, but with a team that determined your every move by vote? Since, as champion, you would be the best mind among them, how much time and effort would you have to spend persuading the team that your strategy is the best? Would you be likely to succeed? And what would you do if some pragmatist, range-of-the-moment mentalities voted to grab an opponent’s knight at the price of a checkmate to you three moves later? You would not be able to continue? Yet in the living world, this is the theoretical ideal of your country, and this is the method by which it proposes to deal (someday) with scientific research, industrial production, and every other kind of activity required for man’s survival.

4. Would you be able to play if the cumbersome mechanism of teamwork were streamlined, and your moves were dictated simply by a man standing behind you, with a gun pressed to your back—a man who would not explain or argue, his gun being his only argument and sole qualification? You would not be able to start, let alone continue, playing? Yet in the living world, this is the practical policy under which men live—and die—in your country.

5. Would you be able to play—or to enjoy the professional understanding, interest and acclaim of an international Chess Federation—if the rules of the game were splintered, and you played by “proletarian” rules while your opponent played by “bourgeois” rules? Would you say that such “polyrulism” is more preposterous than polylogism? Yet in the living world, your country professes to seek global harmony and understanding, while proclaiming that she follows “proletarian” logic and that others follow “bourgeois” logic, or “Aryan” logic, or “third-world” logic, etc.

6. Would you be able to play if the rules of the game remained as they are at present, with one exception: that the pawns were declared to be the most valuable and non-expendable pieces (since they may symbolize the masses) which had to be protected at the price of sacrificing the more efficacious pieces (the individuals)? You might claim a draw on the answer to this one—since it is not only your country, but the whole living world that accepts this sort of rule in morality.

7. Would you care to play, if the rules of the game remained unchanged, but the distribution of rewards were altered in accordance with egalitarian principles: if the prizes, the honors, the fame were given not to the winner, but to the loser—if winning were regarded as a symptom of selfishness, and the winner were penalized for the crime of possessing a superior intelligence, the penalty consisting in suspension for a year, in order to give others a chance? Would you and your opponent try playing not to win, but to lose? What would this do to your mind?

You do not have to answer me, Comrade. You are not free to speak or even to think of such questions—and I know the answers. No, you would not be able to play under any of the conditions listed above. It is to escape this category of phenomena that you fled into the world of chess.

Oh yes, Comrade, chess is an escape—an escape from reality. It is an “out,” a kind of “make-work” for a man of higher than average intelligence who was afraid to live, but could not leave his mind unemployed and devoted it to a placebo—thus surrendering to others the living world he had rejected as too hard to understand.

Please do not take this to mean that I object to games as such: games are an important part of man’s life, they provide a necessary rest, and chess may do so for men who live under the constant pressure of purposeful work. Besides, some games—such as sports contests, for instance—offer us an opportunity to see certain human skills developed to a level of perfection. But what would you think of a world champion runner who, in real life, moved about in a wheelchair? Or of a champion high jumper who crawled about on all fours? You, the chess professionals, are taken as exponents of the most precious of human skills: intellectual power—yet that power deserts you beyond the confines of the sixty-four squares of a chessboard, leaving you confused, anxious, and helplessly unfocused. Because, you see, the chessboard is not a training ground, but a substitute for reality.

A gifted, precocious youth often finds himself bewildered by the world: it is people that he cannot understand, it is their inexplicable, contradictory, messy behavior that frightens him. The enemy he rightly senses, but does not choose to fight, is human irrationality. He withdraws, gives up, and runs, looking for some sanctuary where his mind would be appreciated—and he falls into the booby trap of chess.

You, the chess professionals, live in a special world—a safe, protected, orderly world, in which all the great, fundamental principles of existence are so firmly established and obeyed that you do not even have to be aware of them. (They are the principles involved in my seven questions.) You do not know that these principles are the preconditions of your game—and you do not have to recognize them when you encounter them, or their breach, in reality. In your world, you do not have to be concerned with them: all you have to do is think.

The process of thinking is man’s basic means of survival. The pleasure of performing this process successfully—of experiencing the efficacy of one’s own mind—is the most profound pleasure possible to men, and it is their deepest need, on any level of intelligence, great or small. So one can understand what attracts you to chess: you believe that you have found a world in which all irrelevant obstacles have been eliminated, and nothing matters, but the pure, triumphant exercise of your mind’s powers. But have you, Comrade?

Unlike algebra, chess does not represent the abstraction—the basic pattern—of mental effort; it represents the opposite: it focuses mental effort on a set of concretes, and demands such complex calculations that a mind has no room for anything else. By creating an illusion of action and struggle, chess reduces the professional player’s mind to an uncritical, unvaluing passivity toward life. Chess removes the motor of intellectual effort—the question “What for?”—and leaves a somewhat frightening phenomenon: intellectual effort devoid of purpose.

If—for any number of reasons, psychological or existential—a man comes to believe that the living world is closed to him, that he has nothing to seek or to achieve, that no action is possible, then chess becomes his antidote, the means of drugging his own rebellious mind that refuses fully to believe it and to stand still. This, Comrade, is the reason why chess has always been so popular in your country, before and since its present regime—and why there have not been many American masters. You see, in this country, men are still free to act.

Because the rulers of your country have proclaimed this championship match to be an ideological issue, a contest between Russia and America, I am rooting for Bobby to win—and so are all my friends. The reason why this match has aroused an unprecedented interest in our country is the longstanding frustration and indignation of the American people at your country’s policy of attacks, provocations, and hooligan insolence—and at our own government’s overtolerant, overcourteous patience. There is a widespread desire in our country to see Soviet Russia beaten in any way, shape or form, and—since we are all sick and tired of the global clashes among the faceless, anonymous masses of collectives—the almost medieval drama of two individual knights fighting the battle of good against evil, appeals to us symbolically. (But this, of course, is only a symbol; you are not necessarily the voluntary defender of evil—for all we know, you might be as much its victim as the rest of the world.)

Bobby Fischer’s behavior, however, mars the symbolism—but it is a clear example of the clash between a chess expert’s mind, and reality. This confident, disciplined, obviously brilliant player falls to pieces when he has to deal with the real world. He throws tantrums like a child, breaks agreements, makes arbitrary demands, and indulges in the kind of whim worship one touch of which in the playing of chess would disqualify him for a high-school tournament. Thus he brings to the real world the very evil that made him escape it: irrationality. A man who is afraid to sign a letter, who fears any firm commitment, who seeks the guidance of the arbitrary edicts of a mystic sect in order to learn how to live his life—is not a great, confident mind, but a tragically helpless victim, torn by acute anxiety and, perhaps, by a sense of treason to what might have been a great potential.

But, you may wish to say, the principles of reason are not applicable beyond the limit of a chessboard, they are merely a human invention, they are impotent against the chaos outside, they have no chance in the real world. If this were true, none of us would have survived nor even been born, because the human species would have perished long ago. If, under irrational rules, like the ones I listed above, men could not even play a game, how could they live? It is not reason, but irrationality that is a human invention—or, rather, a default.

Nature (reality) is just as absolutist as chess, and her rules (laws) are just as immutable (more so)—but her rules and their applications are much, much more complex, and have to be discovered by man. And just as a man may memorize the rules of chess, but has to use his own mind in order to apply them, i.e., in order to play well—so each man has to use his own mind in order to apply the rules of nature, i.e., in order to live successfully. A long time ago, the grandmaster of all grandmasters gave us the basic principles of the method by which one discovers the rules of nature and of life. His name was Aristotle.

Would you have wanted to escape into chess, if you lived in a society based on Aristotelian principles? It would be a country where the rules were objective, firm and clear, where you could use the power of your mind to its fullest extent, on any scale you wished, where you would gain rewards for your achievements, and men who chose to be irrational would not have the power to stop you nor to harm anyone but themselves. Such a social system could not be devised, you say? But it was devised, and it came close to full existence—only, the mentalities whose level was playing jacks or craps, the men with the guns and their witch doctors, did not want mankind to know it. It was called Capitalism.

But on this issue, Comrade, you may claim a draw: your country does not know the meaning of that word—and, today, most people in our country do not know it, either.

Sincerely, AYN RAND

7

Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World

1960

(A lecture delivered at Yale University on February 17, 1960; at Brooklyn College on April 4, 1960; and at Columbia University on May 5, 1960.)

If you want me to name in one sentence what is wrong with the modern world, I will say that never before has the world been clamoring so desperately for answers to crucial problems—and never before has the world been so frantically committed to the belief that no answers are possible.

Observe the peculiar nature of this contradiction and the peculiar emotional atmosphere of our age. There have been periods in history when men failed to find answers because they evaded the existence of the problems, pretended that nothing threatened them and denounced anyone who spoke of approaching disaster. This is not the predominant attitude of our age. Today, the voices proclaiming disaster are so fashionable a bromide that people are battered into apathy by their monotonous insistence; but the anxiety under that apathy is real. Consciously or subconsciously, intellectually or emotionally, most people today know that the world is in a terrible state and that it cannot continue on its present course much longer.

The existence of the problems is acknowledged, yet we hear nothing but meaningless generalities and shameful evasions from our so-called intellectual leaders. Wherever you look—whether in philosophical publications, or intellectual magazines, or newspaper editorials or political speeches of either party—you find the same mental attitude, made of two characteristics: staleness and superficiality. People seem to insist on talking—and on carefully saying nothing. The eva-siveness, the dullness, the gray conformity of today’s intellectual expressions sound like the voices of men under censorship—where no censorship exists. Never before has there been an age characterized by such a grotesque combination of qualities as despair and boredom.

You might say that this is the honest exhaustion of men who have done their best in the struggle to find answers, and have failed. But the dignity of an honestly helpless resignation is certainly not the emotional atmosphere of our age. An honest resignation would not be served or expressed by repeating the same worn-out bromides over and over again, while going through the motions of a quest. A man who is honestly convinced that he can find no answers, would not feel the need to pretend that he is looking for them.

You might say that the explanation lies in our modern cynicism and that people fail to find answers because they really don’t care. It is true that people are cynical today, but this is merely a symptom, not a cause. Today’s cynicism has a special twist: we are dealing with cynics who do care—and the ugly secret of our age lies in that which they do care about, that which they are seeking.

The truth about the intellectual state of the modern world, the characteristic peculiar to the twentieth century, which distinguishes it from other periods of cultural crises, is the fact that what people are seeking is not the answers to problems, but the reassurance that no answers are possible.

A friend of mine once said that today’s attitude, paraphrasing the Bible, is: “Forgive me, Father, for I know not what I’m doing—and please don’t tell me.”

Observe how noisily the modern intellectuals are seeking solutions for problems—and how swiftly they blank out the existence of any theory or idea, past or present, that offers the lead to a solution. Observe that these modern relativists—with their credo of intellectual tolerance, of the open mind, of the anti-absolute—turn into howling dogmatists to denounce anyone who claims to possess knowledge. Observe that they tolerate anything, except certainty—and approve of anything, except values. Observe that they profess to love mankind, and drool with sympathy over any literary study of murderers, dipsomaniacs, drug addicts and psychotics, over any presentation of their loved object’s depravity—and scream with anger when anyone dares to claim that man is not depraved. Observe that they profess to be moved by compassion for human suffering—and close their ears indignantly to any suggestion that man does not have to suffer.

What you see around you today, among modern intellectuals, is the grotesque spectacle of such attributes as militant uncertainty, crusading cynicism, dogmatic agnosticism, boastful self-abasement and self-righteous depravity. The two absolutes of today’s non-absolutists are that ignorance consists of claiming knowledge, and that immorality consists of pronouncing moral judgments.

Now why would people want to cling to the conviction that doom, darkness, depravity and ultimate disaster are inevitable? Well, psychologists will tell you that when a man suffers from neurotic anxiety, he seizes upon any rationalization available to explain his fear to himself, and he clings to that rationalization in defiance of logic, reason, reality or any argument assuring him that the danger can be averted. He does not want it to be averted because the rationalization serves as a screen to hide from himself the real cause of his fear, the cause he does not dare to face.

Ladies and gentlemen, what you are seeing today is the neurotic anxiety of an entire culture. People do not want to find any answers to avert their danger: all they want, all they’re looking for, is only some excuse to yell: “I couldn’t help it!”

If certain centuries are to be identified by their dominant characteristics, like the Age of Reason or the Age of Enlightenment, then ours is the Age of Guilt.

What is it that people dread—and what do they feel guilty of?

They dread the unadmitted knowledge that their culture is bankrupt. They feel guilty, because they know that they have brought it to bankruptcy and that they lack the courage to make a fresh start.

They dread the knowledge that they have reached the dead end of the traditional evasions of the centuries behind them, that the contradictions of Western civilization have caught up with them, that no compromises or middle-of-the-roads will work any longer and that the responsibility of resolving those contradictions by making a fundamental choice is theirs, now, today. They are temporizing, in order to evade the fact that we have to check our basic premises, or pay the price of all unresolved contradictions, which is: destruction.

The three values which men had held for centuries and which have now collapsed are: mysticism, collectivism, altruism. Mysticism—as a cultural power—died at the time of the Renaissance. Collectivism—as a political ideal—died in World War II. As to altruism—it has never been alive. It is the poison of death in the blood of Western civilization, and men survived it only to the extent to which they neither believed nor practiced it. But it has caught up with them—and that is the killer which they now have to face and to defeat. That is the basic choice they have to make. If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

Some of you will recognize my next sentences. Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality, but to discover it.

What is morality? It is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices which determine the purpose and the course of his life. It is a code by means of which he judges what is right or wrong, good or evil.

What is the moral code of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.

Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means: self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.

Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you. The issue is whether the need of others is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence. The issue is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal. Any man of self-esteem will answer: “No.” Altruism says: “Yes.”

Now there is one word—a single word—which can blast the morality of altruism out of existence and which it cannot withstand—the word: “Why?” Why must man live for the sake of others? Why must he be a sacrificial animal? Why is that the good? There is no earthly reason for it—and, ladies and gentlemen, in the whole history of philosophy no earthly reason has ever been given.

It is only mysticism that can permit moralists to get away with it. It was mysticism, the unearthly, the supernatural, the irrational that has always been called upon to justify it—or, to be exact, to escape the necessity of justification. One does not justify the irrational, one just takes it on faith. What most moralists—and few of their victims—realize is that reason and altruism are incompatible. And this is the basic contradiction of Western civilization: reason versus altruism. This is the conflict that had to explode sooner or later.

The real conflict, of course, is reason versus mysticism. But if it weren’t for the altruist morality, mysticism would have died when it did die—at the Renaissance—leaving no vampire to haunt Western culture. A “vampire” is supposed to be a dead creature that comes out of its grave only at night—only in the darkness—and drains the blood of the living. The description, applied to altruism, is exact.

Western civilization was the child and product of reason—via ancient Greece. In all other civilizations, reason has always been the menial servant—the handmaiden—of mysticism. You may observe the results. It is only Western culture that has ever been dominated—imperfectly, incompletely, precariously and at rare intervals—but still, dominated by reason. You may observe the results of that.

The conflict of reason versus mysticism is the issue of life or death—of freedom or slavery—of progress or stagnant brutality. Or, to put it another way, it is the conflict of consciousness versus unconsciousness.

Let us define our terms. What is reason? Reason is the faculty which perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. Reason integrates man’s perceptions by means of forming abstractions or conceptions, thus raising man’s knowledge from the perceptual level, which he shares with animals, to the conceptual level, which he alone can reach. The method which reason employs in this process is logic—and logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.

What is mysticism? Mysticism is the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one’s senses and one’s reason. Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge, such as “instinct,” “intuition,” “revelation,” or any form of “just knowing.”

Reason is the perception of reality, and rests on a single axiom: the Law of Identity.

Mysticism is the claim to the perception of some other reality—other than the one in which we live— whose definition is only that it is not natural, it is supernatural, and is to be perceived by some form of unnatural or supernatural means.

You realize, of course, that epistemology—the theory of knowledge—is the most complex branch of philosophy, which cannot be covered exhaustively in a single lecture. So I will not attempt to cover it. I will say only that those who wish a fuller discussion will find it in Atlas Shrugged. For the purposes of tonight’s discussion, the definitions I have given you contain the essence of the issue, regardless of whose theory, argument or philosophy you choose to accept.

I will repeat: Reason is the faculty which perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. Mysticism is the claim to a non-sensory means of knowledge.

In Western civilization, the period ruled by mysticism is known as the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages. I will assume that you know the nature of that period and the state of human existence in those ages. The Renaissance broke the rule of the mystics. “Renais-sance” means “rebirth.” Few people today will care to remind you that it was a rebirth of reason—of man’s mind.

In the light of what followed—most particularly, in the light of the industrial revolution—nobody can now take faith, or religion, or revelation, or any form of mysticism as his basic and exclusive guide to existence, not in the way it was taken in the Middle Ages. This does not mean that the Renaissance has automatically converted everybody to rationality; far from it. It means only that so long as a single automobile, a single skyscraper or a single copy of Aristotle’s Logic remains in existence, nobody will be able to arouse men’s hope, eagerness and joyous enthusiasm by telling them to ditch their mind and rely on mystic faith. This is why I said that mysticism, as a cultural power, is dead. Observe that in the attempts at a mystic revival today, it is not an appeal to life, hope and joy that the mystics are making, but an appeal to fear, doom and despair. “Give up, your mind is impotent, life is only a foxhole,” is not a motto that can revive a culture.

Now, if you ask me to name the man most responsible for the present state of the world, the man whose influence has almost succeeded in destroying the achievements of the Renaissance—I will name Immanuel Kant. He was the philosopher who saved the morality of altruism, and who knew that what it had to be saved from was—reason.

This is not a mere hypothesis. It is a known historical fact that Kant’s interest and purpose in philosophy was to save the morality of altruism, which could not survive without a mystic base. His metaphysics and his epistemology were devised for that purpose. He did not, of course, announce himself as a mystic—few of them have, since the Renaissance. He announced himself as a champion of reason—of “pure” reason.

There are two ways to destroy the power of a concept: one, by an open attack in open discussion—the other, by subversion, from the inside; that is: by subverting the meaning of the concept, setting up a straw man and then refuting it. Kant did the second. He did not attack reason—he merely constructed such a version of what is reason that it made mysticism look like plain, rational common sense by comparison. He did not deny the validity of reason—he merely claimed that reason is “limited,” that it leads us to impossible contradictions, that everything we perceive is an illusion and that we can never perceive reality or “things as they are.” He claimed, in effect, that the things we perceive are not real, because we perceive them.

A “straw man” is an odd metaphor to apply to such an enormous, cumbersome, ponderous construction as Kant’s system of epistemology. Nevertheless, a straw man is what it was—and the doubts, the uncertainty, the skepticism that followed, skepticism about man’s ability ever to know anything, were not, in fact, applicable to human consciousness, because it was not a human consciousness that Kant’s robot represented. But philosophers accepted it as such. And while they cried that reason had been invalidated, they did not notice that reason had been pushed off the philosophical scene altogether and that the faculty they were arguing about was not reason.

No, Kant did not destroy reason; he merely did as thorough a job of undercutting as anyone could ever do.

If you trace the roots of all our current philosophies—such as Pragmatism, Logical Positivism, and all the rest of the neo-mystics who announce happily that you cannot prove that you exist—you will find that they all grew out of Kant.

As to Kant’s version of the altruist morality, he claimed that it was derived from “pure reason,” not from revelation—except that it rested on a special instinct for duty, a “categorical imperative” which one “just knows.” His version of morality makes the Christian one sound like a healthy, cheerful, benevolent code of selfishness. Christianity merely told man to love his neighbor as himself; that’s not exactly rational—but at least it does not forbid man to love himself. What Kant propounded was full, total, abject selflessness: he held that an action is moral only if you perform it out of a sense of duty and derive no benefit from it of any kind, neither material nor spiritual; if you derive any benefit, your action is not moral any longer. This is the ultimate form of demanding that man turn himself into a “shmoo”—the mystic little animal of the Li’l Abner comic strip, that went around seeking to be eaten by somebody.

It is Kant’s version of altruism that is generally accepted today, not practiced—who can practice it?—but guiltily accepted. It is Kant’s version of altruism that people, who have never heard of Kant, profess when they equate self-interest with evil. It is Kant’s version of altruism that’s working whenever people are afraid to admit the pursuit of any personal pleasure or gain or motive—whenever men are afraid to confess that they are seeking their own happiness—whenever businessmen are afraid to say that they are making profits—whenever the victims of an advancing dictatorship are afraid to assert their “selfish” rights.

The ultimate monument to Kant and to the whole altruist morality is Soviet Russia.

If you want to prove to yourself the power of ideas and, particularly, of morality—the intellectual history of the nineteenth century would be a good example to study. The greatest, unprecedented, undreamed of events and achievements were taking place before men’s eyes—but men did not see them and did not understand their meaning, as they do not understand it to this day. I am speaking of the industrial revolution, of the United States and of capitalism. For the first time in history, men gained control over physical nature and threw off the control of men over men—that is: men discovered science and political freedom. The creative energy, the abundance, the wealth, the rising standard of living for every level of the population were such that the nineteenth century looks like a fiction-Utopia, like a blinding burst of sunlight, in the drab progression of most of human history. If life on earth is one’s standard of value, then the nineteenth century moved mankind forward more than all the other centuries combined.

Did anyone appreciate it? Does anyone appreciate it now? Has anyone identified the causes of that historical miracle?

They did not and have not. What blinded them? The morality of altruism.

Let me explain this. There are, fundamentally, only two causes of the progress of the nineteenth century—the same two causes which you will find at the root of any happy, benevolent, progressive era in human history. One cause is psychological, the other existential—or: one pertains to man’s consciousness, the other to the physical conditions of his existence. The first is reason, the second is freedom. And when I say “freedom,” I do not mean poetic sloppiness, such as “freedom from want” or “freedom from fear” or “freedom from the necessity of earning a living.” I mean “freedom from compulson—freedom from rule by physical force.” Which means: political freedom.

These two—reason and freedom—are corollaries, and their relationship is reciprocal: when men are rational, freedom wins; when men are free, reason wins.

Their antagonists are: faith and force. These, also, are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny. Look at the Middle Ages—and look at the political systems of today.

The nineteenth century was the ultimate product and expression of the intellectual trend of the Renaissance and the Age of Reason, which means: of a predominantly Aristotelian philosophy. And, for the first time in history, it created a new economic system, the necessary corollary of political freedom, a system of free trade on a free market: capitalism.

No, it was not a full, perfect, unregulated, totally laissez-faire capitalism—as it should have been. Various degrees of government interference and control still remained, even in America—and this is what led to the eventual destruction of capitalism. But the extent to which certain countries were free was the exact extent of their economic progress. America, the freest, achieved the most.

Never mind the low wages and the harsh living conditions of the early years of capitalism. They were all that the national economies of the time could afford. Capitalism did not create poverty—it inherited it. Compared to the centuries of precapitalist starvation, the living conditions of the poor in the early years of capitalism were the first chance the poor had ever had to survive. As proof—the enormous growth of the European population during the nineteenth century, a growth of over 300 percent, as compared to the previous growth of something like 3 percent per century.

Now why was this not appreciated? Why did capitalism, the truly magnificent benefactor of mankind, arouse nothing but resentment, denunciations and hatred, then and now? Why did the so-called defenders of capitalism keep apologizing for it, then and now? Because, ladies and gentlemen, capitalism and altruism are incompatible.

Make no mistake about it—and tell it to your Republican friends: capitalism and altruism cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society.

Tell it to anyone who attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of the “public good” or the “general welfare” or “service to society” or the benefit it brings to the poor. All these things are true, but they are the by-products, the secondary consequences of capitalism—not its goal, purpose or moral justification. The moral justification of capitalism is man’s right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; it is the recognition that man—every man—is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others, not a sacrificial animal serving anyone’s need.

This is implicit in the function of capitalism, but, until now, it has never been stated explicitly, in moral terms. Why not? Because this is the base of a morality diametrically opposed to the morality of altruism which, to this day, people are afraid to challenge.

There is a tragic, twisted sort of compliment to mankind involved in this issue: in spite of all their irrationalities, inconsistencies, hypocrisies and evasions, the majority of men will not act, in major issues, without a sense of being morally right and will not oppose the morality they have accepted. They will break it, they will cheat on it, but they will not oppose it; and when they break it, they take the blame on themselves. The power of morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers—and mankind’s tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code men have accepted destroys them by means of the best within them.

So long as altruism was their moral ideal, men had to regard capitalism as immoral; capitalism certainly does not and cannot work on the principle of selfless service and sacrifice. This was the reason why the majority of the nineteenth-century intellectuals regarded capitalism as a vulgar, uninspiring, materialistic necessity of this earth, and continued to long for their unearthly moral ideal. From the start, while capitalism was creating the splendor of its achievements, creating it in silence, unacknowledged and undefended (morally undefended), the intellectuals were moving in greater and greater numbers towards a new dream: socialism.

Just as a small illustration of how ineffectual a defense of capitalism was offered by its most famous advocates, let me mention that the British socialists, the Fabians, were predominantly students and admirers of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham.

The socialists had a certain kind of logic on their side: if the collective sacrifice of all to all is the moral ideal, then they wanted to establish this ideal in practice, here and on this earth. The arguments that socialism would not and could not work, did not stop them: neither has altruism ever worked, but this has not caused men to stop and question it. Only reason can ask such questions—and reason, they were told on all sides, has nothing to do with morality, morality lies outside the realm of reason, no rational morality can ever be defined.

The fallacies and contradictions in the economic theories of socialism were exposed and refuted time and time again, in the nineteenth century as well as today. This did not and does not stop anyone: it is not an issue of economics, but of morality. The intellectuals and the so-called idealists were determined to make socialism work. How? By that magic means of all irrationalists: somehow.

It was not the tycoons of big business, it was not the labor unions, it was not the working classes, it was the intellectuals who reversed the trend toward political freedom and revived the doctrines of the absolute State, of totalitarian government rule, of the government’s right to control the lives of the citizens in any manner it pleases. This time, it was not in the name of the “divine right of kings,” but in the name of the divine right of the masses. The basic principle was the same: the right to enforce at the point of a gun the moral doctrines of whoever happens to seize control of the machinery of government.

There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, the socialists got their dream. They got it in the twentieth century and they got it in triplicate, plus a great many lesser carbon copies; they got it in every possible form and variant, so that now there can be no mistake about its nature: Soviet Russia—Nazi Germany—Socialist England.

This was the collapse of the modern intellectuals’ most cherished tradition. It was World War II that destroyed collectivism as a political ideal. Oh, yes, people still mouth its slogans, by routine, by social conformity and by default—but it is not a moral crusade any longer. It is an ugly, horrifying reality—and part of the modern intellectuals’ guilt is the knowledge that they have created it. They have seen for themselves the bloody slaughterhouse which they had once greeted as a noble experiment—Soviet Russia. They have seen Nazi Germany—and they know that “Nazi” means “National Socialism.” Perhaps the worst blow to them, the greatest disillusionment, was Socialist England: here was their literal dream, a bloodless socialism, where force was not used for murder, only for expropriation, where lives were not taken, only the products, the meaning and the future of lives, here was a country that had not been murdered, but had voted itself into suicide. Most of the modern intellectuals, even the more evasive ones, have now understood what socialism—or any form of political and economic collectivism—actually means.

Today, their perfunctory advocacy of collectivism is as feeble, futile and evasive as the alleged conservatives’ defense of capitalism. The fire and the moral fervor have gone out of it. And when you hear the liberals mumble that Russia is not really socialistic, or that it was all Stalin’s fault, or that socialism never had a real chance in England, or that what they advocate is something that’s different somehow—you know that you are hearing the voices of men who haven’t a leg to stand on, men who are reduced to some vague hope that “somehow, my gang would have done it better.”

The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia is the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced. If service and self-sacrifice are a moral ideal, and if the “selfishness” of human nature prevents men from leaping into sacrificial furnaces, there is no reason—no reason that a mystic moralist could name—why a dictator should not push them in at the point of bayonets—for their own good, or the good of humanity, or the good of posterity, or the good of the latest bureaucrat’s latest five-year plan. There is no reason that they can name to oppose any atrocity. The value of a man’s life? His right to exist? His right to pursue his own happiness? These are concepts that belong to individualism and capitalism—to the antithesis of the altruist morality.

Twenty years ago, the conservatives were uncertain, evasive, morally disarmed before the aggressive moral self-righteousness of the liberals. Today, both are uncertain, evasive, morally disarmed before the aggressiveness of the communists. It is not a moral aggressiveness any longer, it is the plain aggressiveness of a thug—but what disarms the modern intellectuals is the secret realization that a thug is the inevitable, ultimate and only product of their cherished morality.

I have said that faith and force are corollaries, and that mysticism will always lead to the rule of brutality. The cause of it is contained in the very nature of mysticism. Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion, communication or understanding are possible. Why do we kill wild animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is open to us. And that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind—a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence. And more: no man or mystical elite can hold a whole society subjugated to their arbitrary assertions, edicts and whims, without the use of force. Anyone who resorts to the formula: “It’s so, because I say so,” will have to reach for a gun, sooner or later. Communists, like all materialists, are neo-mystics: it does not matter whether one rejects the mind in favor of revelations or in favor of conditioned reflexes. The basic premise and the results are the same.

Such is the nature of the evil which modern intellectuals have helped to let loose in the world—and such is the nature of their guilt.

Now take a look at the state of the world. The signs and symptoms of the Dark Ages are rising again all over the earth. Slave labor, executions without trial, torture chambers, concentration camps, mass slaughter—all the things which the capitalism of the nineteenth century had abolished in the civilized world, are now brought back by the rule of the neo-mystics.

Look at the state of our intellectual life. In philosophy, the climax of the Kantian version of reason has brought us to the point where alleged philosophers, forgetting the existence of dictionaries and grammar primers, run around studying such questions as: “What do we mean when we say ‘The cat is on the mat’?”—while other philosophers proclaim that nouns are an illusion, but such terms as “if-then,” “but” and “or” have profound philosophical significance—while still others toy with the idea of an “index of prohibited words” and desire to place on it such words as—I quote—“entity—essence—mind—matter—reality—thing.”

In psychology, one school holds that man, by nature, is a helpless, guilt-ridden, instinct-driven automaton—while another school objects that this is not true, because there is no scientific evidence to prove that man is conscious.

In literature, man is presented as a mindless cripple, inhabiting garbage cans. In art, people announce that they do not paint objects, they paint emotions. In youth movements—if that’s what it can be called—young men attract attention by openly announcing that they are “beat.”

The spirit of it all, both the cause of it and the final climax, is contained in a quotation which I am going to read to you. I will preface it by saying that in Atlas Shrugged I stated that the world is being destroyed by mysticism and altruism, which are anti-man, anti-mind and anti-life. You have undoubtedly heard me being accused of exaggeration. I shall now read to you an excerpt from the paper of a professor, published by an alumni faculty seminar of a prominent university.

“Perhaps in the future reason will cease to be important. Perhaps for guidance in time of trouble, people will turn not to human thought, but to the human capacity for suffering. Not the universities with their thinkers, but the places and people in distress, the inmates of asylums and concentration camps, the helpless decision makers in bureaucracy and the helpless soldiers in foxholes—these will be the ones to lighten man’s way, to refashion his knowledge of disaster into something creative. We may be entering a new age. Our heroes may not be intellectual giants like Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein, but victims like Anne Frank, who will show us a greater miracle than thought. They will teach us how to endure—how to create good in the midst of evil and how to nurture love in the presence of death. Should this happen, however, the university will still have its place. Even the intellectual man can be an example of creative suffering.”

Observe that we are not to question “the helpless decision makers in bureaucracy”—we are not to discover that they are the cause of the concentration camps, of the foxholes and of victims like Anne Frank—we are not to help such victims, we are merely to feel suffering and to learn to suffer some more—we can’t help it, the helpless bureaucrats can’t help it, nobody can help it—the inmates of asylums will guide us, not intellectual giants—suffering is the supreme value, not reason.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is cultural bankruptcy.

Since “challenge” is your slogan, I will say that if you are looking for a challenge, you are facing the greatest one in history. A moral revolution is the most difficult, the most demanding, the most radical form of rebellion, but that is the task to be done today, if you choose to accept it. When I say “radical,” I mean it in its literal and reputable sense: fundamental. Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are winning only by default. But in order to fight them to the finish and with full rectitude, it is the altruist morality that you have to reject.

Now, if you want to know what my philosophy, Objectivism, offers you—I will give you a brief indication. I will not attempt, in one lecture, to present my whole philosophy. I will merely indicate to you what I mean by a rational morality of self-interest, what I mean by the opposite of altruism, what kind of morality is possible to man and why. I will preface it by reminding you that most philosophers—especially most of them today—have always claimed that morality is outside the province of reason, that no rational morality can be defined, and that man has no practical need of morality. Morality, they claim, is not a necessity of man’s existence, but only some sort of mystical luxury or arbitrary social whim; in fact, they claim, nobody can prove why we should be moral at all; in reason, they claim, there’s no reason to be moral.

I cannot summarize for you the essence and the base of my morality any better than I did it in Atlas Shrugged. So, rather than attempt to paraphrase it, I will read to you the passages from Atlas Shrugged which pertain to the nature, the base and the proof of my morality.

“Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch—or build a cyclotron—without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.

“But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human nature,’ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival—so that for you, who are a human being, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is the question ‘to think or not to think.’

“A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. ‘Value’ is that which one acts to gain and keep, ‘virtue’ is the action by which one gains and keeps it. ‘Value’ presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? ‘Value’ presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.

“There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.

“A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue; its life is the standard of value directing its actions. But a plant has no choice of action; there are alternatives in the conditions it encounters, but there is no alternative in its function: it acts automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction.

“An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its senses provide it with an automatic code of action, an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or evil. It has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In conditions where its knowledge proves inadequate, it dies. But so long as it lives, it acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable to ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.

“Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An ‘instinct’ is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man’s desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love for life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history. . . .

“Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice—and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a value—by choice; he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues—by choice.

“A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

“Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to whatever living remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human, to your mind, and I say: There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard of value.

“All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.

“Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being—not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement—not survival at any price, since there’s only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason.

“Man’s life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose. If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man—for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.”

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what Objectivism offers you.

And when you make your choice, I would like you to remember that the only alternative to it is communist slavery. The “middle-of-the-road” is like an unstable, radioactive element that can last only so long—and its time is running out. There is no more chance for a middle-of-the-road.

The issue will be decided, not in the middle, but between the two consistent extremes. It’s Objectivism or communism. It’s a rational morality based on man’s right to exist—or altruism, which means: slave labor camps under the rule of such masters as you might have seen on the screens of your TV last year. If that is what you prefer, the choice is yours.

But don’t make that choice blindly. You, the young generation, have been betrayed in the most dreadful way by your elders—by those liberals of the thirties who armed Soviet Russia, and destroyed the last remnants of American capitalism. All that they have to offer you now is foxholes, or the kind of attitude expressed in the quotation on “creative suffering” that I read to you. This is all that you will hear on any side: “Give up before you have started. Give up before you have tried.” And to make sure that you give up, they do not even let you know what the nineteenth century was. I hope this may not be fully true here, but I have met too many young people in universities, who have no clear idea, not even in the most primitive terms, of what capitalism really is. They do not let you know what the theory of capitalism is, nor how it worked in practice, nor what was its actual history.

Don’t give up too easily; don’t sell out your life. If you make an effort to inquire on your own, you will find that it is not necessary to give up and that the allegedly powerful monster now threatening us will run like a rat at the first sign of a human step.

It is not physical danger that threatens you, and it is not military considerations that make our so-called intellectual leaders tell you that we are doomed. That is merely their rationalization. The real danger is that communism is an enemy whom they do not dare to fight on moral grounds, and it can be fought only on moral grounds.

This, then, is the choice. Think it over. Consider the subject, check your premises, check past history and find out whether it is true that men can never be free. It isn’t true, because they have been. Find out what made it possible. See for yourself. And then if you are convinced—rationally convinced—then let us save the world together. We still have time.

To quote Galt once more, such is the choice before you. Let your mind and your love of existence decide.

8

From the Horse’s Mouth

1975

While recovering from [an] illness, I had a chance to catch up on some reading I had wanted to do for a long time. Opening one interesting book, I almost leaped out of bed. I read some statements which shocked me much more profoundly than any of today’s pronouncements in the news magazines or on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. I had been reporting on some of those journalistic writings occasionally, as a warning against the kinds of intellectual dangers (and booby traps) they represented. But they looked like cheap little graffiti compared to the sweep of wholesale destruction presented in a few sentences of that book.

Just as, at the end of Atlas Shrugged, Francisco saw a radiant future contained in a few words, so I saw the long, dismal, slithering disintegration of the twentieth century held implicitly in a few sentences. I wanted to scream a warning, but it was too late: that book had been published in 1898. Written by Friedrich Paulsen, it is entitled Immanuel Kant: His Life and Doctrine.

Professor Paulsen is a devoted Kantian; but, judging by his style of writing, he is an honest commentator— in the sense that he does not try to disguise what he is saying: “There are three attitudes of the mind towards reality which lay claim to truth—Religion, Philosophy, and Science. . . . In general, philosophy occupies an intermediate place between science and religion. . . . The history of philosophy shows that its task consists simply in mediating between science and religion. It seeks to unite knowledge and faith, and in this way to restore the unity of the mental life. . . . As in the case of the individual, it mediates between the head and the heart, so in society it prevents science and religion from becoming entirely strange and indifferent to each other, and hinders also the mental life of the people from being split up into a faith-hating science and a science-hating faith or superstition.” (New York, Ungar, 1963, pp. 1-2.)

This means that science and mystic fantasies are equally valid as methods of gaining knowledge; that reason and feelings—the worst kinds of feelings: fear, cowardice, self-abnegation—have equal value as tools of cognition; and that philosophy, “the love of wisdom,” is a contemptible middle-of-the-roader whose task is to seek a compromise—a detente—between truth and falsehood.

Professor Paulsen’s statement is an accurate presentation of Kant’s attitude, but it is not Kant that shocked me, it is Paulsen. Philosophic system-builders, such as Kant, set the trends of a nation’s culture (for good or evil), but it is the average practitioners who serve as a barometer of a trend’s success or failure. What shocked me was the fact that a modest commentator would start his book with a statement of that kind. I thought (no, hoped) that in the nineteenth century a man upholding the cognitive pretensions of religion to an equal footing with science, would have been laughed off any serious lectern. I was mistaken. Here was Professor Paulsen casually proclaiming—in the nineteenth century—that philosophy is the handmaiden of theology.

Existentially (i.e., in regard to conditions of living, scale of achievement, and rapidity of progress), the nineteenth century was the best in Western history. Philosophically, it was one of the worst. People thought they had entered an era of inexhaustible radiance; but it was merely the sunset of Aristotle’s influence, which the philosophers were extinguishing. If you have felt an occasional touch of wistful envy at the thought that there was a time when men went to the opening of a new play, and what they saw was not Hair or Grease, but Cyrano de Bergerac, which opened in 1897—take a wider look. I wish that, borrowing from Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, someone had pointed to the Paulsen book, then to the play, and said: “This will kill that.” But there was no such person.

I do not mean to imply that the Paulsen book had so fateful an influence; I am citing the book as a symptom, not a cause. The cause and the influence were Kant’s. Paulsen merely demonstrates how thoroughly that malignancy had spread through Western culture at the dawn of the twentieth century.

The conflict between knowledge and faith, Paulsen explains, “has extended through the entire history of human thought” (p. 4) and Kant’s great achievement, he claims, consisted in reconciling them. “. . . the critical [Kantian] philosophy solves the old problem of the relation of knowledge and faith. Kant is convinced that by properly fixing the limits of each he has succeeded in furnishing a basis for an honorable and enduring peace between them. Indeed, the significance and vitality of his philosophy will rest principally upon this. . . . it is [his philosophy’s] enduring merit to have drawn for the first time, with a firm hand and in clear outline, the dividing line between knowledge and faith. This gives to knowledge what belongs to it—the entire world of phenomena for free investigation; it conserves, on the other hand, to faith its eternal right to the interpretation of life and of the world from the standpoint of value.” (P. 6.)

This means that the ancient mind-body dichotomy—which the rise of science had been healing slowly, as men were learning how to live on earth—was revived by Kant, and man was split in two, not with old daggers, but with a meat-ax. It means that Kant gave to science the entire material world (which, however, was to be regarded as unreal), and left (“conserved”) one thing to faith: morality. If you are not entirely sure of which side would win in a division of that kind, look around you today.

Material objects as such have neither value nor disvalue; they acquire value-significance only in regard to a living being—particularly, in regard to serving or hindering man’s goals. Man’s goals and values are determined by his moral code. The Kantian division allows man’s reason to conquer the material world, but eliminates reason from the choice of the goals for which material achievements are to be used. Man’s goals, actions, choices and values—according to Kant—are to be determined irrationally, i.e., by faith.

In fact, man needs morality in order to discover the right way to live on earth. In Kant’s system, morality is severed from any concern with man’s existence. In fact, man’s every problem, goal or desire involves the material world. In Kant’s system, morality has nothing to do with this world, nor with reason, nor with science, but comes—via feelings—from another, unknowable, “noumenal” dimension.

If you share the error prevalent among modern businessmen, and tend to believe that nonsense such as Kant’s is merely a verbal pastime for mentally unemployed academicians, that it is too preposterous to be of any practical consequence—look again at the opening quotation from Professor Paulsen’s book. Yes, it is nonsense and vicious nonsense—but, by grace of the above attitude, it has conquered the world.

There is more than one way of accepting and spreading a philosophic theory. The guiltiest group, which has contributed the most to the victory of Kantianism, is the group that professes to despise it: the scientists. Adopting one variant or another of Logical Positivism (a Kantian offshoot), they rejected Kant’s noumenal dimension, but agreed that the material world is unreal, that reality is unknowable, and that science does not deal with facts, but with constructs. They rejected any concern with morality, agreeing that morality is beyond the power of reason or science and must be surrendered to subjective whims.

Now observe the breach between the physical sciences and the humanities. Although the progress of theoretical science is slowing down (by reason of a flawed epistemology, among other things), the momentum of the Aristotelian past is so great that science is still moving forward, while the humanities are bankrupt. Spatially, science is reaching beyond the solar system—while, temporally, the humanities are sliding back into the primeval ooze. Science is landing men on the moon and monitoring radio emissions from other galaxies—while astrology is the growing fashion here on earth; while courses in astrology and black magic are given in colleges; while horoscopes are sent galloping over the airwaves of a great scientific achievement, television.

Scientists are willing to produce nuclear weapons for the thugs who rule Soviet Russia—just as they were willing to produce military rockets for the thugs who ruled Nazi Germany. There was a story in the press that during the first test of an atom bomb in New Mexico, Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Los Alamos group who had produced the bomb, carried a four-leaf clover in his pocket. More recently, there was the story of Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut who conducted ESP experiments on his way to the moon. There was the story of a space scientist who is a believer in occultism and black magic.

Such is the “honorable and enduring peace” between knowledge and faith, achieved by the Kantian philosophy.

Now what if one of those men gained political power and had to consider the question of whether to unleash a nuclear war? As a Kantian, he would have to make his decision, not on the grounds of reason, knowledge and facts, but on the urgings of faith, i.e., of feelings, i.e., on whim.

There are many examples of Kantianism ravaging the field of today’s politics in slower, but equally lethal, ways. Observe the farce of inflation versus “compassion.” The policies of welfare statism have brought this country (and the whole civilized world) to the edge of economic bankruptcy, the forerunner of which is inflation—yet pressure groups are demanding larger and larger handouts to the nonproductive, and screaming that their opponents lack “compassion.” Compassion as such cannot grow a blade of grass, let alone of wheat. Of what use is the “compassion” of a man (or a country) who is broke—i.e., who has consumed his resources, is unable to produce, and has nothing to give away?

If you cannot understand how anyone can evade reality to such an extent, you have not understood Kantianism. “Compassion” is a moral term, and moral issues—to the thoroughly Kantianized intellectuals—are independent of material reality. The task of morality—they believe—is to make demands, with which the world of material “phenomena” has to comply; and, since that material world is unreal, its problems or shortages cannot affect the success of moral goals, which are dictated by the “noumenal” real reality.

Dear businessmen, why do you worry about a half-percent of interest on a loan or investment—when your money supports the schools where those notions are taught to your children?

No, most people do not know Kant’s theories, nor care. What they do know is that their teachers and intellectual leaders have some deep, tricky justification—the trickier, the better—for the net result of all such theories, which the average person welcomes: “Be rational, except when you don’t feel like it.”

Note the motivation of those who accepted the grotesque irrationality of Kant’s system in the first place—as declared by his admirer, Professor Paulsen: “There is indeed no doubt that the great influence which Kant exerted upon his age was due just to the fact that he appeared as a deliverer from unendurable suspense. The old view regarding the claims of the feelings and the understanding on reality had been more and more called in question during the second half of the eighteenth century. . . . Science seemed to demand the renunciation of the old faith. On the other hand, the heart still clung to it. . . . Kant showed a way of escape from the dilemma. His philosophy made it possible to be at once a candid thinker and an honest man of faith. For that, thousands of hearts have thanked him with passionate devotion.” (Pp. 6-7; emphasis added—no other comment is necessary.)

Philosophy is a necessity for a rational being: philosophy is the foundation of science, the organizer of man’s mind, the integrator of his knowledge, the programmer of his subconscious, the selector of his values. To set philosophy against reason, i.e., against man’s power of cognition, to turn philosophy into an apologist for and a protector of superstition—is such a crime against humanity that no modern atrocities can equal it: it is the cause of modern atrocities.

If Paulsen is representative of the nineteenth century, the twentieth never had a chance. But if men grasp the source of their destruction—if they dedicate themselves to the greatest of all crusades: a crusade for the absolutism of reason—the twenty-first century will have a chance once more.

9

Kant Versus Sullivan

1970

In the title essay of For the New Intellectual, discussing modern philosophy’s concerted attack on man’s mind, I referred to the philosophers’ division into two camps, “those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge of the world by deducing it exclusively from concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the perception of physical facts (the Rationalists)—and those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts (the Empiricists). To put it more simply: those who joined the Witch Doctor, by abandoning reality—and those who clung to reality, by abandoning their mind.”

For the past several decades, the dominant fashion among academic philosophers was empiricism—a militant kind of empiricism. Its exponents dismissed philosophical problems by declaring that fundamental concepts—such as existence, entity, identity, reality—are meaningless; they declared that concepts are arbitrary social conventions and that only sense data, “unpro-cessed” by conceptualization, represent a valid or “scientific” form of knowledge; and they debated such issues as whether man may claim with certainty that he perceives a tomato or only a patch of red.

Sooner or later, it had to become apparent that cooks, let alone scientists, do something with that patch of red by some means which is not direct and immediate sensory perception. And—as in any field of activity ruled by fashion, not facts—the philosophical pendulum began to swing to the other side of the same coin.

Accepting the empiricists’ basic premise that concepts have no necessary relation to sense data, a new breed of rationalists is floating up to the surface of the academic mainstream, declaring that scientific knowledge does not require any sense data at all (which means: that man does not need his sense organs).

If the empiricist trend—with its glib, glossy, up-to-the-minute modernism of quasi-technological jargon and pseudo-mathematical equations—may be regarded as the miniskirt period of philosophical fashion, then the rationalist revival brings in the maxiskirt period, an old, bedraggled, pavement-sweeping, unsanitary maxiskirt, as unsuited for climbing into a modern car or airplane (or for any kind of climbing) as its equivalent in the field of ladies’ garments.

How low this new fashion can fall and what its hem-line can pick up may be observed in the November 20, 1969 issue of The Journal of Philosophy—a magazine regarded as the most “prestigious” of the American journals of the philosophic profession, published at Columbia University.

The lead article is entitled “Science Without Experience” by Paul K. Feyerabend of the University of California and London University. (Remember that what is meant here by “experience” is the evidence of man’s senses.) The article declares: “It must be possible to imagine a natural science without sensory elements, and it should perhaps also be possible to indicate how such a science is going to work.

“Now experience is said to enter science at three points: testing; assimilation of the results of test; understanding of theories.”

Whoever is said to have said this, did not include observation among his three points, implying that science begins with “testing.” If so, what does one “test”? No answer is given.

“It is easily seen that experience is needed at none of the three points just mentioned.

“To start with, it does not need to enter the process of test: we can put a theory into a computer, provide the computer with suitable instruments directed by him (her, it) so that relevant measurements are made which return to the computer, leading there to an evaluation of the theory. The computer can give a simple yes-no response from which a scientist may learn whether or not a theory has been confirmed without having in any way participated in the test (i.e., without having been subjected to some relevant experience).” (All italics in original.)

One might feel, at this point, that one’s brain is being paralyzed by too many questions. Just to name a few of them: Who built the computer, and was he able to do it without sensory experience? Who programs the computer and by what means? Who provides the computer with “suitable instruments” and how does he know what is suitable? How does the scientist know that the object he is dealing with is a computer?

But such questions become unnecessary if one remembers two fallacies identified in Objectivist epistemology, which can help, not to elucidate, but to account for that paragraph: the fallacies of context-dropping and of “concept-stealing”—which the article seems to flaunt as valid epistemological methods, proceeding, as it does, from the basic premise that the computers are here.

This still leaves the question: by what means does the scientist learn the computer’s verdict? To this one, the article’s author provides an answer—which is point 2 of his theory of knowledge.

“Usually such information travels via the senses, giving rise to distinct sensations. But this is not always the case. Subliminal perception [of what?] leads to reactions directly, and without sensory data. Latent learning leads to memory traces [of what?] directly, and without sensory data. Posthypnotic suggestion [by whom and by what means?] leads to (belated) reactions directly, and without sensory data. In addition there is the whole unexplored field of telepathic phenomena.”

Apparently in order not to let this sink in fully, the article’s next sentence continues the paragraph uninterrupted. But I have interrupted it precisely to let this sink in fully.

The paragraph’s next sentence is: “I am not asserting that the natural sciences as we know them today could be built on these phenomena alone and could be freed from sensations entirely. Considering the peripheral nature of the phenomena and considering also how little attention is given to them in our education (we are not trained to use effectively our ability for latent learning) this would be both unwise and impractical. But the point is made that sensations are not necessary for the business of science and that they occur for practical reasons only.”

What would be the meaning or value of an impractical process of consciousness? Since the practice of the faculty of consciousness is to give us information about reality, an impractical process would be one that fails in this function. Yet it is some such process that the author advocates as superior or, at least, as equal to the processes of sensory experience—and urges our educators to develop in us.

Turning now to point 3 of his theory of knowledge—the relationship of experience to the understanding of theories—the author announces that “experience arises together with theoretical assumptions, not before them . . .” He proves it as follows: “eliminate part of the theoretical knowledge of a sensing subject and you have a person who is completely disoriented, incapable of carrying out the simplest action.”

A disoriented person is an adult who, losing part of his acquired conceptual knowledge, is unable to function on a purely sensory-perceptual level, i.e., unable to revert to the stage of infancy. Normally developing infants and children are not disoriented. It is the abnormal state of an adult that the article offers as a demonstration of the cognitive impotence of sense data.

Then the article’s author plunges rapidly into his theory of a child’s cognitive development, as follows: the development “gets started only because the child reacts correctly toward signals, interprets them correctly, because he possesses means of interpretation even before he has experienced his first clear sensation.”

The possession of means and their use are not the same thing: e.g., a child possesses the means of digesting food, but would you accept the notion that he performs the process of digestion before he has taken in any food? In the same way, a child possesses the means of “interpreting” sense data, i.e., a conceptual faculty, but this faculty cannot interpret anything, let alone interpret it “correctly,” before he has experienced his first clear sensation. What would it be interpreting?

“Again we can imagine that this interpretative apparatus acts without being accompanied by sensations (as do all reflexes and all well-learned movements such as typing). The theoretical knowledge it contains certainly can be applied correctly, though it is perhaps not understood. But what do sensations contribute to our understanding? Taken by themselves, i.e., taken as they would appear to a completely disoriented person, they are of no use, either for understanding, or for action.”

After a few more sentences of the same kind, the paragraph concludes: “Understanding in the sense demanded here thus turns out to be ineffective and superfluous. Result: sensations can be eliminated from the process of understanding also (though they may of course continue to accompany it, just as a headache accompanies deep thought).”

Let me now summarize the preceding, i.e., that article’s theory of man and of knowledge: a zombie whose mental apparatus produces theoretical knowledge which he does not understand, but which “interprets” signals “correctly” and enables him to “apply” it correctly, i.e., to act without any understanding—directed by his ultimate cognitive authority, the scientist, a blind-deaf-mute who engages in mental telepathy with a computer.

Now for the article’s payoff or cashing-in: “Why is it preferable to interpret theories on the basis of an observational language rather than on the basis of a language of intuitively evident statements (as was done only a few centuries ago and as must be done anyway, for observation does not help a disoriented person), or on the basis of a language containing short sentences (as is done in every elementary physics course)? . . . Knowledge can enter our brain without touching our senses. And some knowledge resides in the individual brain without ever having entered it. Nor is observational knowledge the most reliable knowledge we possess. Science took a big step forward when the Aristotelian idea of the reliability of our everyday experience was given up and was replaced by an empiricism of a more subtle kind. . . . Empiricism . . . is therefore an unreasonable doctrine, not in agreement with scientific practice.”

Summing up his procedure, the article’s author concludes with: “Proceeding in this way of course means leaving the confines of empiricism and moving on to a more comprehensive and more satisfactory kind of philosophy.” The “confines of empiricism,” in this context, means: the confines of reality.

Before we return to the morgue for the task of dissection, let us pause for a breath of fresh air—for a moment’s tribute to the lonely giant whom, two thousand three hundred years after his death, the enemies of man’s mind still have to try to attack before they can destroy the rest of us.

A graphic description of what a non-observational, non-Aristotelian language would be like is given in an academically less prestigious journal—Look magazine, January 13, 1970. An article entitled “Growl to Me Softly and I’ll Understand” declares: “On a personal level, there’ll be no need to cling to formal grammar to convey meaning. Speech doesn’t have to be linear; it can come out as a compressed overlay of facts and sensations and moods and ideas and images. Words can serve as signals, and others will understand. The way a man feels can be unashamedly expressed in sheer sound, such as a low, glottal hum, like the purring of a cat, to indicate contentment. . . . Feelings have meaning. Sounds have meaning. Open language can be a joy—a language we can grow with, growl with. Words can cramp your style.”

Suppose that you are on trial for a crime you did not commit; you need the clearest focus, the fullest concentration on facts, the strictest justice in the minds of those you face, in order to prove your innocence; but what “comes out” of the judge and jury is “a compressed overlay of facts and sensations and moods and ideas and images.”

Suppose that the government issues a decree which expropriates everything you own, sends your children to a concentration camp, your wife to a firing squad, yourself to forced labor, and your country into a nuclear war; you struggle frantically to understand why; but what “comes out” of your country’s leaders is “a compressed overlay of facts and sensations and moods and ideas and images.”

These examples are not exaggerations; they are precisely what the two articles quoted mean, and the only things they can mean—in that factual, existential reality where your sole tool of protection and survival is concepts, i.e., language.

The Look article wears a thin fig leaf, in the form of restricting the growls to the “personal level” (which cannot be done, since the human mind is unable to carry for long that kind of double psycho-epistemology). But The Journal of Philosophy article advocates the method of the “compressed overlay”—a non-observational language—for the mental activities of scientists.

“Science Without Experience” heralds the retrogression of philosophy to the primordial, pre-philosophical rationalism of the jungle (“as was done only a few centuries ago,” states the author, in support of a non-observational language). But what is innocent and explicable in an infant or a savage becomes senile corruption when the snake oil, totem poles and magic potions are replaced by a computer. This is the sort of rationalism that Plato, Descartes and all the others of that school would be ashamed of; but not Kant. This is his baby and his ultimate triumph, since he is the most fertile father of the doctrine equating the means of consciousness with its content—I refer you to his notion that the machinery of consciousness produces its own (categorial) content.

“Science Without Experience” is an article without significance and would not be worth considering or discussing if it were not for the shocking fact that it was published in the leading American journal of the philosophic profession. If this is the view of man, of reason, of knowledge, of science, of existence sanctioned and propagated by the philosophic authorities of our time, can you blame the hippies and yippies who are their products? Can you blame an average youth who is thrown out into the world with this kind of mental equipment? Do you need any committees, commissions or multi-million-dollar studies to tell you the causes of campus violence and drug addiction?

A brilliant young professor of philosophy gave me the following explanation of the appearance of that article: “They [the academic philosophers] would enjoy it because it attacks philosophy, in a hooligan manner, including some of their own most cherished beliefs, such as empiricism. They get a kick out of it. They will read and publish anything, so long as it does not imply or advocate a broad, consistent, integrated system of ideas.”

For a long time, the academic philosophers have been able to do nothing but attack and refute one another (which is not difficult) without being able to offer any theory of a constructive or positive nature. Every new attack confirms their notion that nothing else is possible to their profession and nothing else can be demanded of them. If the style of the attack is hooligan, it reassures them: they don’t have to take it (or philosophy) seriously. They will tolerate anything, so long as it does not require that they check the validity of their own premises—i.e., so long as it does not threaten the belief that one set of (arbitrary) assumptions is as good as another.

In For the New Intellectual, I mentioned the central cause of the post-Renaissance philosophy’s disaster, the issue that brought its eventual collapse. “They [the philosophers] were unable to offer a solution to the ‘problem of universals,’ that is: to define the nature and source of abstractions, to determine the relationship of concepts to perceptual data—and to prove the validity of scientific induction. . . . [They] were unable to refute the Witch Doctor’s claim that their concepts were as arbitrary as his whims and that their scientific knowledge had no greater metaphysical validity than his revelations.”

(Observe that the demands for this sort of epistemological equality is still the irrationalists’ policy, strategy and goal. “Why is it preferable to interpret theories on the basis of an observational language rather than on the basis of a language of intuitively evident statements . . . ?” asks the author of “Science Without Experience.” This is the perverse form in which mystics are compelled to acknowledge the supremacy of reason and to confess their motive, their envy and their fear; an advocate of reason does not ask that his knowledge be granted equality with the intuitions and revelations of mystics.)

Concepts are the products of a mental process that integrates and organizes the evidence provided by man’s senses. (See my Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. ) Man’s senses are his only direct cognitive contact with reality and, therefore, his only source of information. Without sensory evidence, there can be no concepts; without concepts, there can be no language; without language, there can be no knowledge and no science.

The answer to the question of the relationship of concepts to perceptual data determines man’s evaluation of the cognitive efficacy of his mind; it determines the course of every individual life and the fate of nations, of empires, of science, of art, of civilization. There are not many men who would die for the sake of protecting the right answer to that question, yet countless millions have died because of the wrong answers.

Through all the ages, a major attack on man’s conceptual faculty was directed at its foundation, i.e., at his senses—in the form of the allegation that man’s senses are “unreliable.” It remained for the brazen-ness of the twentieth century to declare that man’s senses are superfluous.

If you want to grasp fully the abysmal nature of that claim and, simultaneously, to grasp the origin of concepts and their dependence on sensory evidence, I will refer you to a famous play. One might think that such a subject cannot be dramatized, but it has been—simply, eloquently, heartbreakingly—and it is not a work of fiction, but a dramatization of historical facts. It is The Miracle Worker by William Gibson and it tells the story of how Annie Sullivan brought Helen Keller to grasp the nature of language.

If you have seen the superlative performance of Patty Duke in the role of Helen Keller, in the stage or screen version of the play, you have seen the image of man projected by “Science Without Experience”—or as near to it as a living human being can come. Helen Keller was not that article’s ideal—a creature devoid of all sensory contact with reality—but she came close to it: blind and deaf since infancy, i.e., deprived of sight and hearing, she was left with nothing but the sense of touch to guide her (she retained also the senses of smell and taste, which are not of great cognitive value to a human being).

Try to remember the incommunicable horror of that child’s state, communicated by Patty Duke: a creature who is neither human nor animal, with all the power of a human potential, but reduced to a sub-animal helplessness; a savage, violent, hostile creature fighting desperately for self-preservation in an unknowable world, fighting to live somehow with a chronic state of terror and hopeless bewilderment; a human mind (proved later to be an unusually intelligent mind) struggling frantically, in total darkness and silence, to perceive, to grasp, to understand, but unable to understand its own need, goal or struggle.

“Without being accompanied by sensations,” her “interpretative apparatus” did not act; it did not act “as do all reflexes”; it did not produce any knowledge at all, let alone any “theoretical knowledge.” “Knowledge,” that article declares, “can enter our brain without touching our senses.” None entered hers. Would she have been able to operate a computer? She was not able to learn to use a fork or to fold her napkin.

Annie Sullivan, her young teacher (superlatively portrayed by Anne Bancroft), is fiercely determined to transform this creature into a human being, and she knows the only means that can do it: language, i.e., the development of the conceptual faculty. But how does one communicate the nature and function of language to a blind-deaf-mute? The entire action of the play is concerned with this single central issue: Annie’s struggle to make Helen’s mind grasp a word—not a signal, but a word.

The form of the language is a code of tactile symbols, a touch alphabet by means of which Annie keeps spelling words into Helen’s palm, always making her other hand touch the objects involved. Helen catches on, in part, very rapidly: she learns to repeat the signals into Annie’s palm, but with no relation to the objects, she learns to spell many words, but she does not grasp the connection of the signals to their referents, she thinks it is a game, she is merely mimicking motions at random, without any understanding. (At this stage, she is learning “language” as most of today’s college students are taught to use it—as a totally non-observational set of motions denoting nothing.)

When Helen’s father compliments Annie on the fact that she has taught Helen the rudiments of discipline, Annie, discouraged, answers: “. . . to do nothing but obey is—no gift, obedience without understanding is a—blindness, too.”

Annie’s determination leads her through as heroic a struggle as has ever been portrayed on the stage. She has to fight the doubts, the weary resignation, of Helen’s parents; she has to fight their love and pity for the child, their accusations that she is treating Helen too severely; she has to fight Helen’s stubborn resistance and uncomprehending fear, which grows into obvious hatred for the teacher; she has to fight her own doubts, the moments of discouragement when she wonders whether the achievement of the goal she has set herself is possible: she does not know what to do, in the face of one disappointment after another, she does not know whether an arrested human mind can be reached and awakened—it has never been done before. Her only weapon is to go on, hour after hour, day after day, endlessly pulling Helen’s hand to touch the objects they encounter (to gain sensory evidence) and spelling into her palm “C-A-K-E . . . M-I-L-K . . . W-A-T-E-R . . .” over and over again, without any results.

Helen’s older half-brother, James, skeptical of Annie’s efforts, remarks that Helen might not want to learn, that maybe “there’s such a thing as—dullness of heart. Acceptance. And letting go. Sooner or later we all give up, don’t we?

“Annie. Maybe you all do. It’s my idea of the original sin.

“James. What is?”

“Annie. Giving up.

“James. You won’t open her. Why can’t you let her be? Have some—pity on her, for being what she is—

“Annie. If I’d ever once thought like that, I’d be dead!”

In today’s world, many physically healthy but intellectually crippled people (particularly college students) need Annie Sullivan’s help, which they can use if they have retained the capacity to grasp (not merely look at and repeat, but grasp) the full meaning of two statements of Annie Sullivan:

Addressed to Helen’s father: “. . . words can be her eyes, to everything in the world outside her, and inside too, what is she without words? With them she can think, have ideas, be reached, there’s not a thought or fact in the world that can’t be hers. . . . And she has them already . . . eighteen nouns and three verbs, they’re in her fingers now, I need only time to push one of them into her mind! One, and everything under the sun will follow.”

Addressed to Helen, who cannot hear her: “I wanted to teach you—oh, everything the earth is full of, Helen, everything on it that’s ours for a wink and it’s gone, and what we are on it, the—light we bring to it and leave behind in—words, why, you can see five thousand years back in a light of words everything we feel, think, know—and share, in words, so not a soul is in darkness, or done with, even in the grave. And I know, I know, one word and I can—put the world in your hand—and whatever it is to me, I won’t take less!”

(“Words can cramp your style,” answers Look magazine.)

To my knowledge, The Miracle Worker is the only epistemological play ever written. It holds the viewer in tensely mounting suspense, not over a chase or a bank robbery, but over the question of whether a human mind will come to life. Its climax is magnificent: after Annie’s crushing disappointment at Helen’s seeming retrogression, water from a pump spills over Helen’s hand, while Annie is automatically spelling “W-A-T-E-R” into her palm, and suddenly Helen understands. The two great moments of that climax are incommunicable except through the art of acting: one is the look on Patty Duke’s face when she grasps that the signals mean the liquid—the other is the sound of Anne Bancroft’s voice when she calls Helen’s mother and cries: “She knows!”

The quietly sublime intensity of that word—with everything it involves, connotes and makes possible—is what modern philosophy is out to destroy.

I suggest that you read The Miracle Worker and study its implications. I am not acquainted with William Gibson’s other works; I believe that I would disagree with many aspects of his philosophy (as I disagree with much of Helen Keller’s adult philosophy), but this particular play is an invaluable lesson in the fundamentals of a rational epistemology.

I suggest that you consider Annie Sullivan’s titanic struggle to arouse a child’s conceptual faculty by means of a single sense, the sense of touch, then evaluate the meaning, motive and moral status of the notion that man’s conceptual faculty does not require any sensory experience.

I suggest that you consider what an enormous intellectual feat Helen Keller had to perform in order to develop a full conceptual range (including a college education, which required more in her day than it does now), then judge those normal people who learn their first, perceptual-level abstractions without any difficulty and freeze on that level, and keep the higher ranges of their conceptual development in a chaotic fog of swimming, indeterminate approximations, playing a game of signals without referents, as Helen Keller did at first, but without her excuse. Then check on whether you respect and how carefully you employ your priceless possession: language.

And, lastly, I suggest that you try to project what would have happened if, instead of Annie Sullivan, a sadist had taken charge of Helen Keller’s education. A sadist would spell “water” into Helen’s palm, while making her touch water, stones, flowers and dogs interchangeably; he would teach her that water is called “water” today, but “milk” tomorrow; he would endeavor to convey to her that there is no necessary connection between names and things, that the signals in her palm are a game of arbitrary conventions and that she’d better obey him without trying to understand.

If this projection is too monstrous to hold in one’s mind for long, remember that this is what today’s academic philosophers are doing to the young—to minds as confused, as plastic and almost as helpless (on the higher conceptual levels) as Helen Keller’s mind was at her start.

10

Causality Versus Duty

1974

One of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy is the term “duty.”

An anti-concept is an artificial, unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The term “duty” obliterates more than single concepts; it is a metaphysical and psychological killer: it negates all the essentials of a rational view of life and makes them inapplicable to man’s actions.

The legitimate concept nearest in meaning to the word “duty” is “obligation.” The two are often used interchangeably, but there is a profound difference between them which people sense, yet seldom identify.

The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Unabridged Edition, 1966) describes the difference as follows: “Duty, obligation refer to what one feels bound to do. Duty is what one performs, or avoids doing, in fulfillment of the permanent dictates of conscience, piety, right, or law: duty to one’s country; one’s duty to tell the truth, to raise children properly. An obligation is what one is bound to do to fulfill the dictates of usage, custom, or propriety, and to carry out a particular, specific, and often personal promise or agreement: financial or social obligations.”

From the same dictionary: “Dutiful—Syn. 1. respectful, docile, submissive . . .”

An older dictionary is somewhat more open about it: “Duty—1. Conduct due to parents and superiors, as shown in obedience or submission . . .” “Dutiful—1. Performing, or ready to perform, the duties required by one who has the right to claim submission, obedience, or deference . . .” (Webster’s International Dictionary, Second Edition, 1944.)

The meaning of the term “duty” is: the moral necessity to perform certain actions for no reason other than obedience to some higher authority, without regard to any personal goal, motive, desire or interest.

It is obvious that that anti-concept is a product of mysticism, not an abstraction derived from reality. In a mystic theory of ethics, “duty” stands for the notion that man must obey the dictates of a supernatural authority. Even though the anti-concept has been secularized, and the authority of God’s will has been ascribed to earthly entities, such as parents, country, State, mankind, etc., their alleged supremacy still rests on nothing but a mystic edict. Who in hell can have the right to claim that sort of submission or obedience? This is the only proper form—and locality—for the question, because nothing and no one can have such a right or claim here on earth.

The arch-advocate of “duty” is Immanuel Kant; he went so much farther than other theorists that they seem innocently benevolent by comparison. “Duty,” he holds, is the only standard of virtue; but virtue is not its own reward: if a reward is involved, it is no longer virtue. The only moral motivation, he holds, is devotion to duty for duty’s sake; only an action motivated exclusively by such devotion is a moral action (i.e., an action performed without any concern for “inclination” [desire] or self-interest).

“It is a duty to preserve one’s life, and moreover everyone has a direct inclination to do so. But for that reason the often anxious care which most men take of it has no intrinsic worth, and the maxim of doing so has no moral import. They preserve their lives according to duty, but not from duty. But if adversities and hopeless sorrow completely take away the relish for life, if an unfortunate man, strong in soul, is indignant rather than despondent or dejected over his fate and wishes for death, and yet preserves his life without loving it and from neither inclination nor fear but from duty—then his maxim has a moral import.” (Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. R. P. Wolff, New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1969, pp. 16-17.)

And: “It is in this way, undoubtedly, that we should understand those passages of Scripture which command us to love our neighbor and even our enemy, for love as an inclination cannot be commanded. But beneficence from duty, when no inclination impels it and even when it is opposed by a natural and unconquerable aversion, is practical love, not pathological love; it resides in the will and not in the propensities of feeling, in principles of action and not in tender sympathy; and it alone can be commanded.

“[Thus the first proposition of morality is that to have moral worth an action must be done from duty.]” (Ibid., pp. 18-19; the sentence in brackets is Wolff’s.)

If one were to accept it, the anti-concept “duty” destroys the concept of reality: an unaccountable, supernatural power takes precedence over facts and dictates one’s actions regardless of context or consequences.

“Duty” destroys reason: it supersedes one’s knowledge and judgment, making the process of thinking and judging irrelevant to one’s actions.

“Duty” destroys values: it demands that one betray or sacrifice one’s highest values for the sake of an inexplicable command—and it transforms values into a threat to one’s moral worth, since the experience of pleasure or desire casts doubt on the moral purity of one’s motives.

“Duty” destroys love: who could want to be loved not from “inclination,” but from “duty”?

“Duty” destroys self-esteem: it leaves no self to be esteemed.

If one accepts that nightmare in the name of morality, the infernal irony is that “duty” destroys morality. A deontological (duty-centered) theory of ethics confines moral principles to a list of prescribed “duties” and leaves the rest of man’s life without any moral guidance, cutting morality off from any application to the actual problems and concerns of man’s existence. Such matters as work, career, ambition, love, friendship, pleasure, happiness, values (insofar as they are not pursued as duties) are regarded by these theories as amoral, i.e., outside the province of morality. If so, then by what standard is a man to make his daily choices, or direct the course of his life?

In a deontological theory, all personal desires are banished from the realm of morality; a personal desire has no moral significance, be it a desire to create or a desire to kill. For example, if a man is not supporting his life from duty, such a morality makes no distinction between supporting it by honest labor or by robbery. If a man wants to be honest, he deserves no moral credit; as Kant would put it, such honesty is “praise-worthy,” but without “moral import.” Only a vicious represser, who feels a profound desire to lie, cheat and steal, but forces himself to act honestly for the sake of “duty,” would receive a recognition of moral worth from Kant and his ilk.

This is the sort of theory that gives morality a bad name.

The widespread fear and/or resentment of morality—the feeling that morality is an enemy, a musty realm of suffering and senseless boredom—is not the product of mystic, ascetic or Christian codes as such, but a monument to the ugliest repository of hatred for life, man and reason: the soul of Immanuel Kant.

(Kant’s theories are, of course, mysticism of the lowest order [of the “noumenal” order], but he offered them in the name of reason. The primitive level of men’s intellectual development is best demonstrated by the fact that he got away with it.)

If “genius” denotes extraordinary ability, then Kant may be called a genius in his capacity to sense, play on and perpetuate human fears, irrationalities and, above all, ignorance. His influence rests not on philosophical but on psychological factors. His view of morality is propagated by men who have never heard of him—he merely gave them a formal, academic status. A Kantian sense of “duty” is inculcated by parents whenever they declare that a child must do something because he must. A child brought up under the constant battering of causeless, arbitrary, contradictory, inexplicable “musts” loses (or never acquires) the ability to grasp the distinction between realistic necessity and human whims—and spends his life abjectly, dutifully obeying the second and defying the first. In the full meaning of the term, he grows up without a clear grasp of reality.

As an adult, such a man may reject all forms of mysticism, but his Kantian psycho-epistemology remains (unless he corrects it). He continues to regard any difficult or unpleasant task as some inexplicable imposition upon him, as a duty which he performs, but resents; he believes that it is his “duty” to earn a living, that it is his “duty” to be moral, and, in extreme cases, even that it is his “duty” to be rational.

In reality and in the Objectivist ethics, there is no such thing as “duty.” There is only choice and the full, clear recognition of a principle obscured by the notion of “duty”: the Law of Causality.

The proper approach to ethics, the start from a metaphysically clean slate, untainted by any touch of Kantianism, can best be illustrated by the following story. In answer to a man who was telling her that she’s got to do something or other, a wise old Negro woman said: “Mister, there’s nothing I’ve got to do except die.”

Life or death is man’s only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.

Reality confronts man with a great many “musts,” but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is: “You must, if—” and the “if” stands for man’s choice: “—if you want to achieve a certain goal.” You must eat, if you want to survive. You must work, if you want to eat. You must think, if you want to work. You must look at reality, if you want to think—if you want to know what to do—if you want to know what goals to choose—if you want to know how to achieve them.

In order to make the choices required to achieve his goals, a man needs the constant, automatized awareness of the principle which the anti-concept “duty” has all but obliterated in his mind: the principle of causality—specifically, of Aristotelian final causation (which, in fact, applies only to a conscious being), i.e., the process by which an end determines the means, i.e., the process of choosing a goal and taking the actions necessary to achieve it.

In a rational ethics, it is causality—not “duty”—that serves as the guiding principle in considering, evaluating and choosing one’s actions, particularly those necessary to achieve a long-range goal. Following this principle, a man does not act without knowing the purpose of his action. In choosing a goal, he considers the means required to achieve it, he weighs the value of the goal against the difficulties of the means and against the full, hierarchical context of all his other values and goals. He does not demand the impossible of himself, and he does not decide too easily which things are impossible. He never drops the context of the knowledge available to him, and never evades reality, realizing fully that his goal will not be granted to him by any power other than his own action, and, should he evade, it is not some Kantian authority that he could be cheating, but himself.

If he becomes discouraged by difficulties, he reminds himself of the goal that requires them, knowing that he is fully free to reconsider—to ask: “Is it worth it?”—and that no punishment is involved except the renunciation of the value he desires. (One seldom gives up in such cases, unless one finds that it is rationally necessary.)

In similar circumstances, a Kantian does not focus on his goal, but on his own moral character. His automatic reaction is guilt and fear—fear of failing his “duty,” fear of some weakness which “duty” forbids, fear of proving himself morally “unworthy.” The value of his goal vanishes from his mind, drowned in a flood of self-doubt. He might drive himself on in this cheerless fashion for a while, but not for long. A Kantian seldom carries out or undertakes important goals: they are a threat to his self-esteem.

This is one of the crucial psychological differences between the principle of “duty” and the principle of final causation. A disciple of causation looks outward, he is value-oriented and action-oriented, which means: reality-oriented. A disciple of “duty” looks inward, he is self-centered, not in the rational-existential, but in the psychopathological sense of the term, i.e., concerned with a self cut off from reality; “self-centered” in this context means: “self-doubt-centered.”

There are many other differences between the two principles. A disciple of causation is profoundly dedicated to his values, knowing that he is able to achieve them. He is incapable of desiring contradictions, of relying on a “somehow,” of rebelling against reality. He knows that in all such cases, it is not some Kantian authority that he would be defying and injuring, but himself—and that the penalty would be not some mystic brand of “immorality,” but the frustration of his own desires and the destruction of his values.

A Kantian or even a semi-Kantian cannot permit himself to value anything profoundly, since an inexplicable “duty” may demand the sacrifice of his values at any moment, wiping out any long-range plan or struggle he might have undertaken to achieve them. In the absence of personal goals, any task, such as earning a living, becomes a senseless drudgery, but he regards it as a “duty”—and he regards compliance with the requirements of reality as a “duty.” Then, in blind rebellion against “duty,” it is reality that he begins to resent and, ultimately, to escape, in search of some realm where wishes are granted automatically and ends are achieved without means. This is the subconscious process by which Kant makes recruits for mysticism.

The notion of “duty” is intrinsically anti-causal. In its origin, a “duty” defies the principle of efficient causation—since it is causeless (or supernatural); in its effects, it defies the principle of final causation—since it must be performed regardless of consequences. This is the kind of irresponsibility that a disciple of causation would not permit himself. He does not act without considering—and accepting—all the foreseeable consequences of his actions. Knowing the causal efficacy of his actions, seeing himself as a causal agent (and never seeking to get away with contradictions), he develops a virtue killed by Kantianism: a sense of responsibility.

Accepting no mystic “duties” or unchosen obligations, he is the man who honors scrupulously the obligations which he chooses. The obligation to keep one’s promises is one of the most important elements in proper human relationships, the element that leads to mutual confidence and makes cooperation possible among men. Yet observe Kant’s pernicious influence: in the dictionary description quoted earlier, personal obligation is thrown in almost as a contemptuous footnote; the source of “duty” is defined as “the permanent dictates of conscience, piety, right, or law”; the source of “obligation,” as “the dictates of usage, custom, or propriety”—then, as an afterthought: “and to carry out a particular, specific, and often personal promise or agreement.” (Italics mine.) A personal promise or agreement is the only valid, binding obligation, without which none of the others can or do stand.

The acceptance of full responsibility for one’s own choices and actions (and their consequences) is such a demanding moral discipline that many men seek to escape it by surrendering to what they believe is the easy, automatic, unthinking safety of a morality of “duty.” They learn better, often when it is too late.

The disciple of causation faces life without inexplicable chains, unchosen burdens, impossible demands or supernatural threats. His metaphysical attitude and guiding moral principle can best be summed up by an old Spanish proverb: “God said: ‘Take what you want and pay for it.’ ” But to know one’s own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.

11

An Untitled Letter

1973

The most appropriate title for this discussion would be “I told you so.” But since that would be in somewhat dubious taste, I shall leave this [issue of The Ayn Rand Letter] untitled.

In Atlas Shrugged, and in many subsequent articles, I said that the advocates of mysticism are motivated not by a quest for truth, but by hatred for man’s mind; that the advocates of altruism are motivated not by compassion for suffering, but by hatred for man’s life; that the advocates of collectivism are motivated not by a desire for men’s happiness, but by hatred for man; that their three doctrines come from the same root and blend into a single passion: hatred of the good for being the good; and that the focus of that hatred, the target of its passionate fury, is the man of ability.

Those who thought that I was exaggerating have seen event after event confirm my diagnosis. Reality has been providing me with references and footnotes, including explicit admissions by the advocates of those doctrines. The admissions are becoming progressively louder and clearer.

The major ideological campaigns of the mystic-altruist-collectivist axis are usually preceded by trial balloons that test the public reaction to an attack on certain fundamental principles. Today, a new kind of intellectual balloon is beginning to bubble in the popular press—testing the climate for a large-scale attack intended to obliterate the concept of justice.

The new balloons acquire the mark of a campaign by carrying, like little identification tags, the code words: “A New Justice.” This does not mean that the campaign is consciously directed by some mysterious powers. It is a conspiracy, not of men, but of basic premises—and the power directing it is logic: if, at the desperate stage of a losing battle, some men point to a road logically necessitated by their basic premises, those who share the premises will rush to follow.

Since my capacity for intellectual slumming is limited, I do not know who originated this campaign at this particular time (its philosophical roots are ancient). The first instance that came to my attention was a brief news item over a year ago. Dr. Jan Tinbergen from the Netherlands, who had received a Nobel Prize in Economic Science, spoke at an international conference in New York City and suggested “that there be a tax on personal capabilities. ‘A modest first step might be a special tax on persons with high academic scores,’ he said.” We reprinted this item in the “Horror File” of The Objectivist (June 1971). The reaction of my friends, when they read it, was an incredulously indignant amusement, with remarks such as: “He’s crazy!”

But it is not amusing any longer when a news item in The New York Times (January 2, 1973) announces that Pope Paul VI “issued a call today for a ‘new justice.’ True justice recognizes that all men are in substance equal, the Pontiff said. . . . ‘The littler, the poorer, the more suffering, the more defenseless, even the lower a man has fallen, the more he deserves to be assisted, raised up, cared for, and honored. We learn this from the Gospel.’ ”

Observe the package-deal: to be “little,” “poor,” “suffering,” “defenseless” is not necessarily to be immoral (it depends on the cause of these conditions). But “even the lower a man has fallen” implies, in this context, not misfortune but immorality. Are we asked to absorb the notion that the lower a man’s vices, the more concern he deserves—and the more honor? Another package-deal: to be “assisted,” “raised up,” “cared for” obviously does not apply to those who are great, rich, happy or strong; they do not need it. But—“to be honored”? They are the men who would have to do the assisting, the raising up, the caring for—but they do not deserve to be honored? They deserve less honor than the man who is saved by their virtues and values?

In Atlas Shrugged, exposing the meaning of altruism, John Galt says: “What passkey admits you to the moral elite? The passkey is lack of value. Whatever the value involved, it is your lack of it that gives you a claim upon those who don’t lack it. . . . To demand rewards for your virtue is selfish and immoral; it is your lack of virtue that transforms your demand into a moral right.”

What is an abstract ethical suggestion in the Pope’s message, becomes specific and political in a brief piece that appeared in the Times on January 20, 1973—“The New Inequality” by Peregrine Worsthorne, a columnist for The Sunday Telegraph of London. In addition to altruism, which is its base, this piece was made possible by two premises: 1. the refusal to recognize the difference between mind and force (i.e., between economic and political power); and 2. the refusal to recognize the difference between existence and consciousness (i.e., between the metaphysical and the man-made). Those who ignore or evade the crucial importance of these distinctions will find Mr. Peregrine Worsthorne ready to welcome them at the end of their road.

There was a time, Mr. Worsthorne begins, when “gross hereditary inequalities of wealth, status and power were universally accepted as a divinely ordained fact of life.” He is speaking of feudalism and of the British caste system. But modern man, he says, “finds this awfully difficult to understand. To him it seems absolutely axiomatic that each individual ought to be allowed to make his grade according to merit, regardless of the accident of birth. All positions of power, wealth and status should be open to talent. To the extent that this ideal is achieved a society is deemed to be just.”

If you think that this is a proclamation of individualism, think twice. Modern liberals, Mr. Worsthorne continues, “have tended to believe it to be fair enough that the man of merit should be on top and the man without merit should be underneath.” On top—of what? Underneath—what? Mr. Worsthorne doesn’t say. Judging by the rest of the piece, his answer would be: on top of anything—political power, self-made wealth, scientific achievement, artistic genius, the status of earned respect or of a government-granted title of nobility—anything anyone may ever want or envy.

The current social “malaise,” he explains, is caused by “the increasing evidence that this assumption [about a just society] should be challenged. The ideal of a meritocracy no longer commands such universal assent.”

“Meritocracy” is an old anti-concept and one of the most contemptible package-deals. By means of nothing more than its last five letters, that word obliterates the difference between mind and force: it equates the men of ability with political rulers, and the power of their creative achievements with political power. There is no difference, the word suggests, between freedom and tyranny: an “aristocracy” is tyranny by a politically established elite, a “democracy” is tyranny by the majority—and when a government protects individual rights, the result is tyranny by talent or “merit” (and since “to merit” means “to deserve,” a free society is ruled by the tyranny of justice).

Mr. Worsthorne makes the most of it. His further package-dealing becomes easier and cruder. “It used to be considered manifestly unjust that a child should be given an enormous head-start in life simply because he was the son of an earl, or a member of the landed gentry. But what about a child today born of affluent, educated parents whose family life gets him off to a head-start in the educational ladder? Is he not the beneficiary of a form of hereditary privilege no less unjust than that enjoyed by the aristocracy?”

What about Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, Commodore Vanderbilt, Henry Ford, Sr. or, in politics, Abraham Lincoln, and their “enormous head-start in life”? On the other hand, what about the Park Avenue hippies or the drug-eaten children of college-bred intellectuals and multi-millionaires?

Mr. Worsthorne, it seems, had counted on “universal public education” to level things down, but it has disappointed him. “Family life,” he declares, “is more important than school life in determining brain power. . . . Educational qualifications are today what armorial quarterings were in feudal times. Yet access to them is almost as unfairly determined by accidents of birth as was access to the nobility.” This, he says, defeats “any genuine faith in equality of opportunity”—and “accounts for the current populist clamor to do away with educational distinctions such as exams and diplomas, since they are seen as the latest form of privilege which, in a sense, they are.”

This means that if a young student (named, say, Thomas Hendricks), after days and nights of conscientious study, proves that he knows the subject of medicine, and passes an exam, he is given an arbitrary privilege, an unfair advantage over a young student (named Lee Hunsacker) who spent his time in a drugged daze, listening to rock music. And if Hendricks gets a diploma and a job in a hospital, while Hunsacker does not, Hunsacker will scream that he could not help it and that he never had a chance. Volitional effort? There is no such thing. Brain power? It’s determined by family life—and he couldn’t help it if Mom and Pop did not condition him to be willing to study. He is entitled to a job in a hospital, and a just society would guarantee it to him. The fate of the patients? He’s as good as any other fellow—“all men are in substance equal”—and the only difference between him and the privileged bastards is a diploma granted as unfairly as armorial quarterings! Equal opportunity? Don’t make him laugh!

Socialists, Mr. Worsthorne remarks, have used “the ideal of equality of opportunity” as “a way of moving in the right, that is to say the Left, direction.” They regarded it as “the thin end of the egalitarian wedge.”

Then, suddenly, Mr. Worsthorne starts dispensing advice to the Right—which the Left has always insisted on doing (and with good reason: any “rightist” who accepts it, deserves it). His advice, as usual, involves a threat and counts on fear. “But there is a problem here for the Right quite as much as for the Left. It seems to me certain that there will be a growing awareness in the coming decades of the unfairness of existing society, of the new forms of arbitrary allocation of power, status and privilege. Resentment will build up against the new meritocracy just as it built up against the old aristocracy and plutocracy.”

The Right, he claims, must “devise new ways of disarming this resentment, without so curbing the high-flyers, so penalizing excellence, or so imposing uniformity as to destroy the spirit of a free and dynamic society.” Observe that he permits himself to grasp and cynically to admit that such an issue as the penalizing of excellence is involved, but he regards it as the Right’s concern, not his own—and he does not object to penalizing virtue for being virtue, provided the penalties do not go to extremes. This—in an article written as an appeal for justice.

Mr. Worsthorne has a solution to offer to the Right—and here comes the full flowering of altruism’s essence and purpose, spreading out its petals like a hideous jungle plant, the kind that traps insects and eats them. The purpose is not to burn sacrificial victims, but to have them leap into the furnaces of their own free will: “What will be required of the new meritocracy is a formidably revived and reanimated spirit of noblesse oblige, rooted in the recognition that they are immensely privileged and must, as a class, behave accordingly, being prepared to pay a far higher social price, in terms of taxation, in terms of service, for the privilege of exercising their talents.”

Who granted them “the privilege of exercising their talents”? Those who have no talent. To whom must they “pay a higher social price”? To those who have no social value to offer. Who will impose taxation on their productive work? Those who have produced nothing. Whom do they have to serve? Those who would be unable to survive without them.

“Did you want to know who is John Galt? I am the first man of ability who refused to regard it as guilt. I am the first man who would not do penance for my virtues or let them be used as the tools of my destruction. I am the first man who would not suffer martyrdom at the hands of those who wished me to perish for the privilege of keeping them alive.” (Atlas Shrugged.)

“This [the ‘social price’] is not an easy idea for a meritocracy to accept,” Mr. Worsthorne concludes. “They like to think that they deserve their privileges, having won them by their own efforts. But this is an illusion, or at any rate a half truth. The other half of the truth is that they are terribly lucky and if their luck is not to run out they must be prepared to pay much more for their good fortune than they had hoped or even feared.”

I submit that any man who ascribes success to “luck” has never achieved anything and has no inkling of the relentless effort which achievement requires. I submit that a successful man who ascribes his own (legitimate) success in part to luck is either a modest, concrete-bound represser who does not understand the issue—or an appeaser who tries to mollify the resentment of envious mediocrities. (For the nature of such resentment, see my article “The Age of Envy” in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.)

Envy is a widespread sentiment in Europe, not in America. Most Americans admire success: they know what it takes. They believe that one must pay for one’s sins, not for one’s virtues—and the monstrous notion of paying ransoms for good fortune would not occur to them, nor would they take it seriously.

Resentment against “meritocracy”? Our last Presidenital election [the landslide against McGovern] was a spectacular demonstration of America’s loyalty to achievement (on any level)—and of resentment against those egalitarian intellectuals who are trying to smuggle this country into a new caste system proposed by their British mentors: a mediocracy.

Politically, statism breeds a swarm of “little Caesars,” who are motivated by power-lust. Culturally, statism breeds still lower a species: a swarm of “little Neros,” who sing odes to depravity while the lives of their forced audiences go up in smoke.

I have said repeatedly that American intellectuals, with rare exceptions, are the slavish dependents and followers of Europe’s intellectual trends. The notion of a cultural aristocracy established and financed by the government is so grotesque in this country that one wonders how an article such as Mr. Peregrine Worsthorne’s got published here. Can you see any group or class in America posturing about in the “spirit of noblesse oblige”? Can you see Americans bowing to, say, Sir Burrhus Frederic (Skinner) or Dame Jane (Fonda), thanking them for their charitable contributions? Yet this is the goal of Britain’s little Neros—and of their American followers. I refer you to [The Ayn Rand Letter] of January 1, 1973, “To Dream the Non-Commercial Dream,” for a discussion of why such “aristocrats” would have a vested interest in altruism and why they would be eager to pay a social price “for the privilege of exercising their talents.”

If, by “meritocracy,” Mr. Worsthorne means a government-picked elite (for instance, the B.B.C.), then it is true that such an elite owes its privileges to luck (and pull) more than to merit. If he means the men of ability who demonstrate their merit in the free marketplace (of ideas or of material goods), then his notions are worse than false. Package-dealing is essential to the selling of such notions. Mr. Worsthorne’s technique consists in making no distinction between these two kinds of “merit”—which means: in seeing no difference between Homer and Nero.

An article such as Mr. Worsthorne’s (and its various equivalents) would not appear in a newspaper, without some heavy academic-philosophical base. Newspapers are not published by or for theoretical innovators. Journalists do not venture to propagate an outrageous theory unless they know that they can refer to some “reputable” source able, they hope, to explain the inexplicable and defend the indefensible. An enormous amount of unconscionable nonsense comes out of the academic world each year; most of it is stillborn. But when echoes of a specific work begin to spurt in the popular press, they acquire significance as an advance warning—as an indication of the fact that some group(s) has a practical interest in shooting these particular bubbles into the country’s cultural arteries.

In the case of the new egalitarianism, an academic source does exist. It may not be the first book of that kind, but it is the one noticeably touted at present. It is A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, professor of philosophy at Harvard University.

The New York Times Book Review (December 3, 1972) lists it among “Five Significant Books of 1972” and explains: “Although it was published in 1971, it was not widely reviewed until 1972, because critics needed time to get a grip on its complexities. In fact, it may not be properly understood until it has been studied for years. . . .” The Book Review itself did not review it until July 16, 1972, at which time it published a front-page review written by Marshall Cohen, professor of philosophy at the City University of New York. The fact that the timing of that review coincided with the period of George McGovern’s campaign may or may not be purely coincidental.

Let me say that I have not read and do not intend to read that book. But since one cannot judge a book by its reviews, please regard the following discussion as the review of a review. Mr. Cohen’s remarks deserve attention in their own right.

According to the review, Rawls “is not an equalitarian, for he allows that inequalities of wealth, power and authority may be just. He argues, however, that these inequalities are just only when they can reasonably be expected to work out to the advantage of those who are worst off. The expenses incurred [by whom?] in training a doctor, like the rewards that encourage better performance from an entrepreneur, are permissible only if eliminating them, or reducing them further, would leave the worst off worse off still. If, however, permitting such inequalities contributes to improving the health or raising the material standards of those who are least advantaged, the inequalities are justified. But they are justified only to that extent—never as rewards for ‘merit,’ never as the just deserts of those who are born with greater natural advantages or into more favorable social circumstances.”

I assume that this is an accurate summary of Mr. Rawls’s thesis. The Book Review’s plug of December 3 offers corroboration: “The talented or socially advantaged person hasn’t earned anything: ‘Those who have been favored by nature, whoever they are,’ he [Rawls] writes, ‘may gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out.’ ”

(“. . . it is the parasites who are the moral justification for the existence of the producers, but the existence of the parasites is an end in itself. . . .” John Galt, analyzing altruism, in Atlas Shrugged.)

Certain evils are protected by their own magnitude: there are people who, reading that quotation from Rawls, would not believe that it means what it says, but it does. It is not against social institutions that Mr. Rawls (and Mr. Cohen) rebels, but against the existence of human talent—not against political privileges, but against reality—not against governmental favors, but against nature (against “those who have been favored by nature,” as if such a term as “favor” were applicable here)—not against social injustice, but against metaphysical “injustice,” against the fact that some men are born with better brains and make better use of them than others are and do.

The new “theory of justice” demands that men counteract the “injustice” of nature by instituting the most obscenely unthinkable injustice among men: deprive “those favored by nature” (i.e., the talented, the intelligent, the creative) of the right to the rewards they produce (i.e., the right to life)—and grant to the incompetent, the stupid, the slothful a right to the effortless enjoyment of the rewards they could not produce, could not imagine, and would not know what to do with.

Mr. Cohen would object to my formulation. “It is important to understand,” he writes, “that according to Rawls it is neither just nor unjust that men are born with differing natural abilities into different social positions. These are simply natural facts. [True, but if so, what is the purpose of the next sentence?] To be sure, no one deserves his greater natural capacity or merits a more favorable starting point in society. The natural and social ‘lottery’ is arbitrary from a moral point of view. But it does not follow, as the equalitarian supposes, that we should eliminate these differences. There is another way to deal with them. As we have seen, they can be put to work for the benefit of all and, in particular, for the benefit of those who are worst off.” If a natural fact is neither just nor unjust, by what mental leap does it become a moral problem and an issue of justice? Why should those “favored by nature” be made to atone for what is not an injustice and is not of their making?

Mr. Cohen does not explain. He continues: “What justice requires, then, is that natural chance and social fortune be treated as a collective resource and put to work for the common good. Justice does not require equality, but it does require that men share one another’s fate.” This is the conclusion that required reading a 607-page book and taking a year “to get a grip on its complexities.” That this is regarded as a new theory, raises the question of where Mr. Rawls’s readers and admirers have been for the last two thousand years. There is more than this to the book, but let us pause at this point for a moment.

Observe that Mr. Cohen’s (and the egalitarians’) view of man is literally the view of a children’s fairy tale—the notion that man, before birth, is some sort of indeterminate thing, an entity without identity, something like a shapeless chunk of human clay, and that fairy godmothers proceed to grant or deny him various attributes (“favors”): intelligence, talent, beauty, rich parents, etc. These attributes are handed out “arbitrarily” (this word is preposterously inapplicable to the processes of nature), it is a “lottery” among pre-embryonic non-entities, and—the supposedly adult mentalities conclude—since a winner could not possibly have “deserved” his “good fortune,” a man does not deserve or earn anything after birth, as a human being, because he acts by means of “undeserved,” “unmerited,” “unearned” attributes. Implication: to earn something means to choose and earn your personal attributes before you exist.

Stuff of that kind has a certain value: it is a psychological confession projecting the enormity of that envy and hatred for the man of ability which are the root of all altruistic theories. By preaching the basest variant of the old altruist tripe, Mr. Rawls’s book reveals altruism’s ultimate meaning—which may be regarded as an ethical innovation. But A Theory of Justice is not primarily a book on ethics: it is a treatise on politics. And, believe it or not, it might be taken by some people as a way to save capitalism—since Mr. Rawls allegedly offers a “new” moral justification for the existence of social inequalities. It is fascinating to observe against whom Mr. Rawls’s polemic is directed: against the utilitarians.

Virtually all the defenders of capitalism, from the nineteenth century to the present, accept the ethics of utilitarianism (with its slogan “The greatest happiness of the greatest number”) as their moral base and justification—evading the appalling contradiction between capitalism and the altruist-collectivist nature of the utilitarian ethics. Mr. Cohen points out that utilitarianism is incompatible with justice, because it endorses the sacrifice of minorities to the interests of the majority. (I said this in 1946—see my old pamphlet Textbook of Americanism.) If the alleged defenders of capitalism insist on clinging to altruism, Mr. Rawls is the retribution they have long since deserved: with far greater consistency than theirs, he substitutes a new standard of ethics for their old, utilitarian one: “The greatest happiness for the least deserving.”

His main purpose, however, is to revive, as a moral-political base, the theory of social contract, which utilitarianism had replaced. In the opinion of John Rawls, writes Mr. Cohen, “the social contract theory of Rousseau and Kant” (wouldn’t you know it?) provides an alternative to utilitarianism.

Mr. Cohen proceeds to offer a summary of the way Mr. Rawls would proceed to establish a “social contract.” Men would be placed in what he calls the “original position”—which is not a state of nature, but “a hypothetical situation that can be entered into at any time.” Justice would be ensured “by requiring that the principles which are to govern society be chosen behind a ‘veil of ignorance.’ This veil prevents those who occupy the ‘original position’ from knowing their own natural abilities or their own positions in the social order. What they do not know they cannot turn to their own advantage; this ignorance guarantees that their choice will be fair. And since everyone in the ‘original position’ is assumed to be rational [?!], everyone will be convinced by the same arguments [??!!]. In the social contract tradition the choice of political principles is unanimous.” No, Mr. Cohen does not explain or define what that “original position” is—probably, with good reason. As he goes on, he seems to hint that that “hypothetical situation” is the state of the pre-embryonic human clay.

“Rawls argues that given the uncertainties that characterize the ‘original position’ (men do not know whether they are well- or ill-endowed, rich or poor) and given the fateful nature of the choice to be made (these are the principles by which they will live) rational men would choose according to the ‘maximin’ rules of game theory. This rule defines a conservative strategy—in making a choice among alternatives, we should choose that alternative whose worst possible outcome is superior to the worst possible outcome of the others.” And thus, men would “rationally” choose to accept Mr. Rawls’s ethical-political principles.

Regardless of any Rube Goldberg complexities erected to arrive at that conclusion, I submit that it is impossible for men to make any choice on the basis of ignorance, i.e., using ignorance as a criterion: if men do not know their own identities, they will not be able to grasp such things as “principles to live by,” “alternatives” or what is a good, bad or worst “possible outcome.” Since in order to be “fair” they must not know what is to their own advantage, how would they be able to know which is the least advantageous (the “worst possible”) outcome?

As to the “maximin” rule of choice, I can annul Mr. Rawls’s social contract, which requires unanimity, by saying that in long-range issues I choose that alternative whose best possible outcome is superior to the best possible outcome of the others. “You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.” (Atlas Shrugged.)

Mr. Cohen is not in full agreement with Mr. Rawls. He seems to think that Mr. Rawls is not egalitarian enough: “. . . one would like to be clearer about the sorts of inequalities that are in fact justified in order to ‘encourage’ better performance. And is it in fact legitimate for Rawls to exclude considerations of what he calls envy from the calculations that are made in the ‘original position’? It is arguable that including them would lead to the choice of more equalitarian principles.” Does this mean that pre-embryos without attributes are able to experience envy of other pre-embryos without attributes? Does this mean that a just society must grind its best members down to the level of its worst, in order to pander to envy?

I am inclined to guess that the answer is affirmative, because Mr. Cohen continues as follows: “However that may be, I, for one, am inclined to argue that once an adequate social minimum has been reached, justice requires the elimination of many economic and social inequalities, even if their elimination inhibits a further raising of the minimum.” Is this motivated by the desire to uplift the weak or to degrade the strong—to help the incompetent or to destroy the able? Is this the voice of love or of hatred—of compassion or of envy?

What value would be gained by such a cerebrocidal atrocity? “I ought to forgo some economic benefits,” says Mr. Cohen, “if doing so will reduce the evils of social distance, strengthen communal ties, and enhance the possibilities for a fuller participation in the common life.” Whose life? In common with whom? On whose standard of value: the folks’ next door?—the corner louts’?—the hippies’?—the drug addicts’?

“Dagny . . . I had seen . . . what it was that I had to fight for . . . I had to save you . . . not to let you stumble the years of your life away, struggling on through a poisoned fog . . . struggling to find, at the end of your road, not the towers of a city, but a fat, soggy, mindless cripple performing his enjoyment of life by means of swallowing the gin your life had gone to pay for!” (Atlas Shrugged.)

Mr. Cohen mentions that Mr. Rawls rejects “the perfectionistic doctrines of Aristotle.” (Wouldn’t you know that?) Mr. Rawls, by the way, is an American, educated in American universities, but he completed his education in Great Britain, at Oxford, on a Fulbright Fellowship.

What is the cause of today’s egalitarian trend? For over two hundred years, Europe’s predominantly altruist-collectivist intellectuals had claimed to be the voice of the people—the champions of the downtrodden, disinherited masses and of unlimited majority rule. “Majority” was the omnipotent word of the intellectuals’ theology. “Majority will” and “majority welfare” were their moral base and political goal which—they claimed—permitted, vindicated and justified anything. With varying degrees of consistency, this belief was shared by most of Europe’s social thinkers, from Marx to Bentham to John Stuart Mill (whose On Liberty is the most pernicious piece of collectivism ever adopted by suicidal defenders of liberty).

In mid-twentieth century, the intellectuals were traumatized by seeing their axiomatic bedrock disintegrate into thin ice. The concept of “majority will” collapsed when they saw that the majority was not with them and did not share their “ideals.” The concept of “majority welfare” collapsed when they discovered—through the experiences of communist Russia, Nazi Germany, welfare-state England, and sundry lesser socialist regimes—that only their hated adversary, the free, selfish, individualistic system of capitalism, is able to benefit the majority of the people (in fact, all of the people).

Some intellectuals began to stumble toward the Right—a bankrupt Right, which had nothing to offer. Some gave up, turning to drugs and astrology. The vanguard—stripped of cover, of respect, of credibility, and of safely popular bromides—began to reveal their hidden motives in the open glare of verbalized theory.

The cult of the “majority” has come to an end among the altruist-collectivists. They are not declaring any longer: “Why shouldn’t a minuscule elite of geniuses and millionaires be sacrificed to the broad masses of mankind?”—they are declaring that the broad masses of mankind should be sacrificed to a minuscule elite, not of gods, kings or heroes, but of congenital incompetents. They are not declaring that greedy capitalists are exploiting and stifling men of talent—they are declaring that men of talent should not be permitted to function. They are not declaring that capitalism is impeding technological progress—they are declaring that technological progress should be retarded or abolished. They are not deriding the promise of “pie in the sky”—they are demanding that pie on earth be forbidden. They are not promising to raise men’s standard of living—they are proclaiming that it should be lowered. They are not seeking to redistribute wealth—they are seeking to wipe it out. What, then, remains of their former creed? Only one constant: sacrifice—which they are now preaching openly in the form they had always endorsed secretly: sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice.

“It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.” (Atlas Shrugged.)

Anyone who proposes to reduce mankind to the level of its lowest specimens, cannot claim benevolence as his motive. Anyone who proposes to deprive men of aspiration, ambition or hope, and sentence them to stagnation for life, cannot claim compassion as his motive. Anyone who proposes to forbid men’s progress beyond the limit accessible to a cripple, cannot claim love for men as his motive. Anyone who proposes to forbid to a genius any achievement which is not of value to a moron, cannot claim any motive but envy and hatred.

Observe that it has never been possible to preach an evil notion on the basis of reason, of facts, of this earth. The advocates of man-destroying theories have always had to step outside reality, to seek a mystic base or sanction. Just as religionists had to invoke the myth of Adam’s sin in order to propagate the notion of man’s prenatal guilt—just as Kant had to rely on a noumenal world in order to destroy the world that exists—just as Hegel had to call on the Absolute Idea, and Marx had to call on Hegel—so today, on the grubby scale of our shrinking culture, those who want to deprive man of his right to life are proclaiming the rights of the fetus, and those who want to deny all rights to the man of ability, are demanding that he atone for what he did not earn before he was a fetus and for nature’s prenatal unfairness to the Mongolian idiot next door.

Observe also that an honest theoretician does not try to present his ideas in the guise of their opposites. But Kant’s philosophy is presented as “pure reason”—altruism is presented as a doctrine of “love”—communism is presented as “liberation”—and egalitarianism is presented as “justice.”

“Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature . . . that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly . . . that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil . . . and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices. . . .” (Atlas Shrugged.)

Mr. Rawls’s book is entitled A Theory of Justice, and yet, curiously enough, Mr. Cohen never mentions Mr. Rawls’s definition of “justice”—which, I suspect, may not be Mr. Cohen’s fault.

In Atlas Shrugged, in the sequence dealing with the tunnel catastrophe, I list the train passengers who were philosophically responsible for it, in hierarchical order, from the less guilty to the guiltiest. The last one on the list is a humanitarian who had said: “The men of ability? I do not care what or if they are made to suffer. They must be penalized in order to support the incompetent. Frankly, I do not care whether this is just or not. I take pride in not caring to grant any justice to the able, where mercy to the needy is concerned.” Today, a “scientific” volume of 607 pages is devoted to claiming that this constitutes justice.

In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, I wrote: “The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature, that it protects man’s survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice.” If capitalism and its moral-metaphysical base, man’s rational nature, are to be destroyed, then it is the concept of justice that has to be destroyed. Apparently, the egalitarians understand this; the utilitarian defenders of capitalism do not.

Is A Theory of Justice likely to be widely read? No. Is it likely to be influential? Yes—precisely for that reason.

If you wonder how so grotesquely irrational a philosophy as Kant’s came to dominate Western culture, you are now witnessing an attempt to repeat that process. Mr. Rawls is a disciple of Kant—philosophically and psycho-epistemologically. Kant originated the technique required to sell irrational notions to the men of a skeptical, cynical age who have formally rejected mysticism without grasping the rudiments of rationality. The technique is as follows: if you want to propagate an outrageously evil idea (based on traditionally accepted doctrines), your conclusion must be brazenly clear, but your proof unintelligible. Your proof must be so tangled a mess that it will paralyze a reader’s critical faculty—a mess of evasions, equivocations, obfuscations, circumlocutions, non sequiturs, endless sentences leading nowhere, irrelevant side issues, clauses, sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses, a meticulously lengthy proving of the obvious, and big chunks of the arbitrary thrown in as self-evident, erudite references to sciences, to pseudo-sciences, to the never-to-be-sciences, to the untraceable and the improvable—all of it resting on a zero: the absence of definitions. I offer in evidence the Critique of Pure Reason.

Mr. Cohen gives some indications that such is the style of Mr. Rawls’s book. E.g.: “. . . the boldness and simplicity of Rawls’s formulations depend on a considered, but questionable, looseness in his understanding of some fundamental political concepts.” (Emphasis added.) “Considered” means “deliberate.”

Like any overt school of mysticism, a movement seeking to achieve a vicious goal has to invoke the higher mysteries of an incomprehensible authority. An unread and unreadable book serves this purpose. It does not count on men’s intelligence, but on their weaknesses, pretensions and fears. It is not a tool of enlightenment, but of intellectual intimidation. It is not aimed at the reader’s understanding, but at his inferiority complex.

An intelligent man will reject such a book with contemptuous indignation, refusing to waste his time on untangling what he perceives to be gibberish—which is part of the book’s technique: the man able to refute its arguments will not (unless he has the endurance of an elephant and the patience of a martyr). A young man of average intelligence—particularly a student of philosophy or of political science—under a barrage of authoritative pronouncements acclaiming the book as “scholarly,” “significant,” “profound,” will take the blame for his failure to understand. More often than not, he will assume that the book’s theory has been scientifically proved and that he alone is unable to grasp it; anxious, above all, to hide his inability, he will profess agreement, and the less his understanding, the louder his agreement—while the rest of the class are going through the same mental process. Most of them will accept the book’s doctrine, reluctantly and uneasily, and lose their intellectual integrity, condemning themselves to a chronic fog of approximation, uncertainty, self doubt. Some will give up the intellect (particularly philosophy) and turn belligerently into “pragmatic,” anti-intellectual Babbitts. A few will see through the game and scramble eagerly for the driver’s seat on the bandwagon, grasping the possibilities of a road to the mentally unearned.

Within a few years of the book’s publication, commentators will begin to fill libraries with works analyzing, “clarifying” and interpreting its mysteries. Their notions will spread all over the academic map, ranging from the appeasers, who will try to soften the book’s meaning—to the glamorizers, who will ascribe to it nothing worse than their own pet inanities—to the compromisers, who will try to reconcile its theory with its exact opposite—to the avant-garde, who will spell out and demand the acceptance of its logical consequences. The contradictory, antithetical nature of such interpretations will be ascribed to the book’s profundity—particularly by those who function on the motto: “If I don’t understand it, it’s deep.” The students will believe that the professors know the proof of the book’s theory, the professors will believe that the commentators know it, the commentators will believe that the author knows it—and the author will be alone to know that no proof exists and that none was offered.

Within a generation, the number of commentaries will have grown to such proportions that the original book will be accepted as a subject of philosophical specialization, requiring a lifetime of study—and any refutation of the book’s theory will be ignored or rejected, if unaccompanied by a full discussion of the theories of all the commentators, a task which no one will be able to undertake.

This is the process by which Kant and Hegel acquired their dominance. Many professors of philosophy today have no idea of what Kant actually said. And no one has ever read Hegel (even though many have looked at every word on his every page).

This process has already begun in regard to Mr. Rawls’s book, in the form of such manifestations as Mr. Peregrine Worsthorne’s “The New Inequality.” But the process is being forced by P.R. techniques; it is being pushed artificially and in the wrong direction: toward the popular press and the man in the street, who, in this country, is the least likely prospect for the role of sucker. Furthermore, Mr. Rawls is not in Kant’s league: he is a politically oriented lightweight, who has scrambled together the worst of the old philosophic traditions, adding nothing new. His two outstanding points of similarity to Kant are: the method—and the motive.

The danger lies in the cultural similarity of Kant’s time and ours. An age ruled by skepticism and cynicism can be swayed by anyone, even Mr. Rawls. There is no intellectual opposition to anything today—as there was none to Kant. Kant’s opponents were men who shared all his fundamental premises (particularly altruism and mysticism), and merely engaged in nit-picking, thus hastening his victory. Today, the utilitarians, the religionists, and sundry other “conservatives” share all of Mr. Rawls’s fundamental premises (particularly altruism). If his book does not make them see the nature of altruism and its logical consequences, if it does not make them realize that altruism is the destroyer of man (and of reason, justice, morality, civilization), then nothing will. When and if they get Mr. Rawls’s world, they will have deserved it. So will the “practical” men whose lard-encrusted souls feel that ideas are innocuous playthings to be left to impractical intellectuals, and that any idea can be circumvented by making a deal with the government.

But it is only by default—by intellectual default—that theories such as Kant’s or Rawls’s can win. An intransigent, rational opposition could have stopped Kant in his time. Rawls is easier to defeat—particularly in this country, which is the living monument to a diametrically opposite philosophy (he would have had a better chance in Europe). If there is any spirit of rebellion on American campuses (and elsewhere), here is an evil to rebel against, to rebel intellectually, righteously, intransigently: any hint, touch, smell, or trial balloon of A Theory of Justice and of the egalitarian movement.

If rational men do not rebel, the egalitarians will succeed. Succeed in establishing a world of shoddy equality and brotherly stagnation? No—but this is not their purpose. Just as Kant’s purpose was to corrupt and paralyze man’s mind, so the egalitarians’ purpose is to shackle and paralyze the men of ability (even at the price of destroying the world).

If you wish to know the actual motive behind the egalitarians’ theories—behind all their maudlin slogans, mawkish pleas, and ponderous volumes of verbal rat-traps—if you wish to grasp the enormity of the smallness of spirit for the sake of which they seek to immolate mankind, it can be presented in a few lines:

“‘When a man thinks he’s good—that’s when he’s rotten. Pride is the worst of all sins, no matter what he’s done.’

“‘But if a man knows that what he’s done is good?’

“‘Then he ought to apologize for it.’

“‘To whom?’

“‘To those who haven’t done it.’ ” (Atlas Shrugged.)

12

Egalitarianism and Inflation

1974

The classic example of vicious irresponsibility is the story of Emperor Nero who fiddled, or sang poetry, while Rome burned. An example of similar behavior may be seen today in a less dramatic form. There is nothing imperial about the actors, they are not one single bloated monster, but a swarm of undernourished professors, there is nothing resembling poetry, even bad poetry, in the sounds they make, except for pretentiousness—but they are prancing around the fire and, while chanting that they want to help, are pouring paper refuse on the flames. They are those amorphous intellectuals who are preaching egalitarianism to a leaderless country on the brink of an unprecedented disaster.

Egalitarianism is so evil—and so silly—a doctrine that it deserves no serious study or discussion. But that doctrine has a certain diagnostic value: it is the open confession of the hidden disease that has been eating away the insides of civilization for two centuries (or longer) under many disguises and cover-ups. Like the half-witted member of a family struggling to preserve a reputable front, egalitarianism has escaped from a dark closet and is screaming to the world that the motive of its compassionate, “humanitarian,” altruistic, collectivist brothers is not the desire to help the poor, but to destroy the competent. The motive is hatred of the good for being the good—a hatred focused specifically on the fountainhead of all goods, spiritual or material: the men of ability.

The mental process underlying the egalitarians’ hope to achieve their goal consists of three steps: 1. they believe that that which they refuse to identify does not exist; 2. therefore, human ability does not exist; and 3. therefore, they are free to devise social schemes which would obliterate this nonexistent. Of special significance to the present discussion is the egalitarians’ defiance of the Law of Causality: their demand for equal results from unequal causes—or equal rewards for unequal performance.

As an example, I shall quote from a review by Bennett M. Berger, professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego (The New York Times Book Review, January 6, 1974). The review discusses a book entitled More Equality by Herbert Gans. I have not read and do not intend to read that book: it is the reviewer’s own notions that are particularly interesting and revealing. “[Herbert Gans] makes it clear from the start,” writes Mr. Berger, “that he’s not talking about equality of opportunity, which almost nobody seems to be against anymore, but about equality of ‘results,’ what used to be called ‘equality of condition.’ . . . What he cares most about is reducing inequalities of income, wealth and political power. . . . More equality could be achieved, according to Gans, by income redistribution (mostly through a version of the Credit Income Tax) and by decentralizations of power ranging from more equality in hierarchical organizations (e.g., corporations and universities) to a kind of ‘community control’ that would provide to those minorities most victimized by inequality some insulation against being consistently outvoted by the relatively affluent majorities of the larger political constituencies.”

If being consistently outvoted is a social injustice, what about big businessmen, who are the smallest minority and would always be consistently outvoted by other groups? Mr. Berger does not say, but since he consistently equates economic power with political power, and seems to believe that money can buy anything, one can guess what his answer would be. And, in any case, he is not an admirer of “democracy.”

Mr. Berger reveals some of his motivation when he describes Herbert Gans as a “policy scientist” who suffers from a certain “malaise.” “Part of this malaise is a nightmare in which ‘the policy scientist’—not poorly prepared, but in full possession of the facts, reasons and plans he needs to promote persuasively the changes he advocates . . .—is frustrated, defeated, humiliated by Congressional committees and executive staffs politically beholden to the constituencies and the patrons who keep them in office.” In other words: they did not let him have his way.

Lest you think it is only material wealth that Mr. Berger is out to destroy, consider the following: “Decentralization of power, for example, doesn’t necessarily produce more equality. . . . Even the direct democracy of the New England town meeting . . . does very little to rid the local political community of the excessive influence exercised by the more educated, the more articulate, the more politically hip.” This means that the educated and the ignorant, the articulate and the incoherent, the politically active and the passive or inert should have an equal influence and an equal power over everyone’s life. There is only one instrument that can create an equality of this kind: a gun.

Mr. Berger stresses that he agrees with Mr. Gans’s egalitarian goal, but he doubts that it can be achieved by the open advocacy of more equality. And, with remarkably open cynicism, Mr. Berger suggests “another strategy”: “The advocacy of equality inevitably comes into conflict with other liberal values, such as individualism and achievement. But . . . the advocacy of ‘citizenship’ does not, and the history of democracy is a history of political struggles to win more and more ‘rights’ for more and more people to bring ever larger proportions of the population to fully functioning citizenship. . . . in the 20th century there have been struggles to remove racial and sexual impediments . . . to win rights to decent housing, medical care, education—all on the grounds not of ‘equality,’ but on the grounds that they are necessary conditions for citizens, equal by definition, to exercise their responsibility to govern themselves. Who knows what ‘rights’ lie over the horizon: a right to orgasm, to feel beautiful? I think these will make people better citizens.” In other words, he suggests that egalitarian goals can be achieved by blowing up the term “citizenship” into a totalitarian concept, i.e., a concept embracing all of life.

If Mr. Berger is that open in advising the setting up of an ideological booby trap, who are the boobs he expects to catch? The underendowed? The general public? Or the intellectuals, whom he tempts with such bait as “a right to orgasm” in exchange for forgetting individualism and achievement? I hope your guess is as good as mine.

I will not argue against egalitarian doctrines by defending individualism, achievement, and the men of ability—not after writing Atlas Shrugged. I will let reality speak for me—it usually does.

Under the heading of “Allende’s Legacy,” an article in The Wall Street Journal (April 19, 1974) offers some concrete, real-life examples of what happens when income, wealth and power are distributed equally among all men, regardless of their competence, character, knowledge, achievement, or brains.

“By the time the military acted to overthrow the Allende government, prices had soared more than 1000 percent in two years and were climbing at the rate of 3 percent a day at the very end. The national treasury was practically empty.” The socialist government had seized a number of American-owned industrial firms. The new military government invited the American managements to come back. Most of them accepted.

Among them was the Dow Chemical Company, which owned a plastics plant in Chile. Bob G. Caldwell, Dow’s director of operations for South America, came with a technical team to inspect the remains of their plant. “ ‘What we found was unbelievable to us,’ he recalls. ‘The plant was still operable, but in another six months we wouldn’t have had any plant at all. They never checked anything. We found valves that hadn’t been maintained leaking corrosive chemicals that would have eventually eaten away practically everything.’ . . . Worse yet, the highly inflammable chemicals handled at the plant were in imminent danger of blowing up. ‘Safety went to pot,’ Mr. Caldwell says. ‘The fire-sprinkler system was disconnected and the valves taken away for some other use outside. Then they were smoking in the most dangerous areas. They told us, “You didn’t have any fires while you were here before, so it must not be as dangerous as you said.”’”

I submit that the mentality represented by this last sentence, a mentality capable of functioning in this manner, is the loathsomely evil root of all human evils.

Apparently, some mentalities in the new Chilean government belong to the same category: they have the same range and scope, but the consequences of their actions are not so immediately perceivable, though not much farther away. In order to avoid labor disputes, the new government has frozen all labor contracts in the form and on the terms established under the Allende regime. For example, the Dow Company’s contract includes a “requirement that all the plant’s plastic scrap be given to the union, which then sells it. ‘We hope to get that one changed,’ a company official says, ‘because it’s a clear incentive to produce almost nothing but scrap.’ ”

Then there is the case of a big Santiago textile firm. “Its contract with 1,300 workers virtually guarantees bankruptcy. The textile firm’s employees get a certain amount of cloth free as part of their wages and can buy unlimited quantities at a 37 percent discount; at those prices the firm loses money. Under President Allende the workers sold the cloth on the black market at huge profits, and it was an important factor in assuring their backing for the Allende government.”

How long can a company—or a country, or mankind—survive under a policy of this sort? Most people today do not see the answer, but some do. Material shortages are the consequence of another, much more profound shortage, which is created by egalitarian governments and ignored by the public—until it is too late. “Chile’s experiment with Marxism has also left the country with a shortage of engineers and technicians that could reach serious proportions. Thousands of them left during the Allende regime. Despite incentives offered by the junta, they haven’t been coming back, and many more key people continue to leave for higher-paying jobs abroad. . . . ‘Here in Chile [says a business executive] we must get used to the fact that good people must be paid well.’ ”

But here in the United States, we are told to get used to the idea that they must not.

There is no such thing as “good people,” cries Professor Berger—or Professor Gans, or Professor Rawls—and if some are good, it’s because they’re exploiting those who aren’t. There is no such thing as “key people,” says Professor Berger, we’re all equal by definition. No, says Professor Rawls, some were born with unfair advantages, such as intelligence, and should be made to atone for it to those who weren’t. We want more equality, says Professor Gans, so that those who devise sprinkler systems and those who smoke around inflammable chemicals would have equal pay, equal influence, and an equal voice in the community control of science and production.

The term “brain drain” is known the world over: it names a problem which various governments are beginning to recognize, and are trying to solve by chaining the men of ability to their homelands—yet social theoreticians see no connection between intelligence and production. The best among men are running—from every corner and slave-pen of the globe—running in search of freedom. Their refusal to cooperate with slave drivers is the noblest moral action they could take—and, incidentally, the greatest service they could render mankind—but they don’t know it. No voices are raised anywhere in their honor, in acknowledgment of their value, in recognition of their importance. Those whose job it is to know—those who profess concern with the plight of the world—look on and say nothing. The intellectuals turn their eyes away, refusing to know—the practical men do know, but keep silent.

One can’t blame the dazed brutes of Chile, who swoop down on an industrial plant and cavort at a black-market fiesta, for not understanding that the plant cannot run at a loss—if their social superiors tell them that they are entitled to more equality. One can’t blame savages for not understanding that everything has its price, and what they steal, seize or extort today will be paid for by their own starvation tomorrow—if their social superiors, in management offices, in university classrooms, in newspaper columns, in parliamentary halls, are afraid to tell them.

What are all those people counting on? If a Chilean factory goes bankrupt, the equalizers will find another factory to loot. If that other factory starts crumbling, it will get a loan from the bank. If the bank has no money, it will get a loan from the government. If the government has no money, it will get a loan from a foreign government. If no foreign government has any money, all of them will get a loan from the United States.

What they don’t know—and neither does this country—is that the United States is broke.

Justice does exist in the world, whether people choose to practice it or not. The men of ability are being avenged. The avenger is reality. Its weapon is slow, silent, invisible, and men perceive it only by its consequences—by the gutted ruins and the moans of agony it leaves in its wake. The name of the weapon is: inflation.

Inflation is a man-made scourge, made possible by the fact that most men do not understand it. It is a crime committed on so large a scale that its size is its protection: the integrating capacity of the victims’ minds breaks down before the magnitude—and the seeming complexity—of the crime, which permits it to be committed openly, in public. For centuries, inflation has been wrecking one country after another, yet men learn nothing, offer no resistance, and perish—not like animals driven to slaughter, but worse: like animals stampeding in search of a butcher.

If I told you that the precondition of inflation is psycho-epistemological—that inflation is hidden under perceptual illusions created by broken conceptual links—you would not understand me. That is what I propose to explain and to prove.

Let us start at the beginning. Observe the fact that, as a human being, you are compelled by nature to eat at least once a day. In a modern American city, this is not a major problem. You can carry your sustenance in your pocket—in the form of a few coins. You can give it no thought, you can skip meals, and, when you’re hungry, you can grab a sandwich or open a can of food—which, you believe, will always be there.

But project what the necessity to eat would mean in nature, i.e., if you were alone in a primeval wilderness. Hunger, nature’s ultimatum, would make demands on you daily, but the satisfaction of the demands would not be available immediately: the satisfaction takes time—and tools. It takes time to hunt and to make your weapons. You have other needs as well. You need clothing—it takes time to kill a leopard and to get its skin. You need shelter—it takes time to build a hut, and food to sustain you while you’re building it. The satisfaction of your daily physical needs would absorb all of your time. Observe that time is the price of your survival, and that it has to be paid in advance.

Would it make any difference if there were ten of you, instead of one? If there were a hundred of you? A thousand? A hundred thousand? Do not let the numbers confuse you: in regard to nature, the facts will remain inexorably the same. Socially, the large numbers may enable some men to enslave others and to live without effort, but unless a sufficient number of men are able to hunt, all of you will perish and so will your rulers.

The issue becomes much clearer when you discover agriculture. You can survive more safely and comfortably by planting seeds and collecting a harvest months later—on condition that you comply with two absolutes of nature: you must save enough of your harvest to feed you until the next harvest, and, above all, you must save enough seeds to plant your next harvest. You may run short on your own food, you may have to skimp and go half-hungry, but, under penalty of death, you do not touch your stock seed; if you do, you’re through.

Agriculture is the first step toward civilization, because it requires a significant advance in men’s conceptual development: it requires that they grasp two cardinal concepts which the perceptual, concrete-bound mentality of the hunters could not grasp fully: time and savings. Once you grasp these, you have grasped the three essentials of human survival: time-savings-production. You have grasped the fact that production is not a matter confined to the immediate moment, but a continuous process, and that production is fueled by previous production. The concept of “stock seed” unites the three essentials and applies not merely to agriculture, but much, much more widely: to all forms of productive work. Anything above the level of a savage’s precarious, hand-to-mouth existence requires savings. Savings buy time.

If you live on a self-sustaining farm, you save your grain: you need the saved harvest of your good years to carry you through the bad ones; you need your saved seed to expand your production—to plant a larger field. The safer your supply of food, the more time it buys for the upkeep or improvement of the other things you need: your clothing, your shelter, your water well, your livestock and, above all, your tools, such as your plow. You make a gigantic step forward when you discover that you can trade with other farmers, which leads you all to the discovery of the road to an advanced civilization: the division of labor. Let us say that there are a hundred of you; each learns to specialize in the production of some goods needed by all, and you trade your products by direct barter. All of you become more expert at your tasks—therefore, more productive—therefore, your time brings you better returns.

On a self-sustaining farm, your savings consisted mainly of stored grain and foodstuffs; but grain and foodstuffs are perishable and cannot be kept for long, so you ate what you could not save; your time-range was limited. Now, your horizon has been pushed immeasurably farther. You don’t have to expand the storage of your food: you can trade your grains for some commodity which will keep longer, and which you can trade for food when you need it. But which commodity? It is thus that you arrive at the next gigantic discovery: you devise a tool of exchange—money.

Money is the tool of men who have reached a high level of productivity and a long-range control over their lives. Money is not merely a tool of exchange: much more importantly, it is a tool of saving, which permits delayed consumption and buys time for future production. To fulfill this requirement, money has to be some material commodity which is imperishable, rare, homogeneous, easily stored, not subject to wide fluctuations of value, and always in demand among those you trade with. This leads you to the decision to use gold as money. Gold money is a tangible value in itself and a token of wealth actually produced. When you accept a gold coin in payment for your goods, you actually deliver the goods to the buyer; the transaction is as safe as simple barter. When you store your savings in the form of gold coins, they represent the goods which you have actually produced and which have gone to buy time for other producers, who will keep the productive process going, so that you’ll be able to trade your coins for goods any time you wish.

Now project what would happen to your community of a hundred hard-working, prosperous, forward-moving people, if one man were allowed to trade on your market, not by means of gold, but by means of paper—i.e., if he paid you, not with a material commodity, not with goods he had actually produced, but merely with a promissory note on his future production. This man takes your goods, but does not use them to support his own production; he does not produce at all—he merely consumes the goods. Then, he pays you higher prices for more goods—again in promissory notes—assuring you that he is your best customer, who expands your market.

Then, one day, a struggling young farmer, who suffered from a bad flood, wants to buy some grain from you, but your price has risen and you haven’t much grain to spare, so he goes bankrupt. Then, the dairy farmer, to whom he owed money, raises the price of milk to make up for the loss—and the truck farmer, who needs the milk, gives up buying the eggs he had always bought—and the poultry farmer kills some of his chickens, which he can’t afford to feed—and the alfalfa grower, who can’t afford the higher price of eggs, sells some of his stock seed and cuts down on his planting—and the dairy farmer can’t afford the higher price of alfalfa, so he cancels his order to the blacksmith—and you want to buy the new plow you have been saving for, but the blacksmith has gone bankrupt. Then all of you present the promissory notes to your “best customer,” and you discover that they were promissory notes not on his future production, but on yours—only you have nothing left to produce with. Your land is there, your structures are there, but there is no food to sustain you through the coming winter, and no stock seed to plant.

Would it make any difference if that community consisted of a thousand farmers? A hundred thousand? A million? Two hundred and eleven million? The entire globe? No matter how widely you spread the blight, no matter what variety of products and what incalculable complexity of deals become involved, this, dear readers, is the cause, the pattern, and the outcome of inflation.

There is only one institution that can arrogate to itself the power legally to trade by means of rubber checks: the government. And it is the only institution that can mortgage your future without your knowledge or consent: government securities (and paper money) are promissory notes on future tax receipts, i.e., on your future production.

Now project the mentality of a savage, who can grasp nothing but the concretes of the immediate moment, and who finds himself transported into the midst of a modern, industrial civilization. If he is an intelligent savage, he will acquire a smattering of knowledge, but there are two concepts he will not be able to grasp: “credit” and “market.”

He observes that people get food, clothes, and all sorts of objects simply by presenting pieces of paper called checks—and he observes that skyscrapers and gigantic factories spring out of the ground at the command of very rich men, whose bookkeepers keep switching magic figures from the ledgers of one to those of another and another and another. This seems to be done faster than he can follow, so he concludes that speed is the secret of the magic power of paper—and that everyone will work and produce and prosper, so long as those checks are passed from hand to hand fast enough. If that savage breaks into print with his discovery, he will find that he has been anticipated by John Maynard Keynes.

Then the savage observes that the department stores are full of wonderful goods, but people do not seem to buy them. “Why is that?” he asks a floorwalker. “We don’t have enough of a market,” the floorwalker tells him. “What is that?” he asks. “Well,” his new teacher answers, “goods are produced for people to consume, it’s the consumers that make the world go ’round, but we don’t have enough consumers.” “Is that so?” says the savage, his eyes flashing with the fire of a new idea. Next day, he obtains a check from a big educational foundation, he hires a plane, he flies away—and comes back, a while later, bringing his entire naked, barefoot tribe along. “You don’t know how good they are at consuming,” he tells his friend, the floorwalker, “and there’s plenty more where these came from. Pretty soon you’ll get a raise in pay.” But the store, pretty soon, goes bankrupt.

The poor savage is unable to understand it to this day—because he had made sure that many, many people agreed with his idea, among them many noble tribal chiefs, such as Governor Romney, who sang incantations to “consumerism,” and warrior Nader, who fought for the consumers’ rights, and big business chieftains who recited formulas about serving the consumers, and chiefs who sat in Congress, and chiefs in the White House, and chiefs in every government in Europe, and many more professors than he could count.

Perhaps it is harder for us to understand that the mentality of that savage has been ruling Western civilization for almost a century.

Trained in college to believe that to look beyond the immediate moment—to look for causes or to foresee consequences—is impossible, modern men have developed context-dropping as their normal method of cognition. Observing a bad, small-town shopkeeper, the kind who is doomed to fail, they believe—as he does—that lack of customers is his only problem; and that the question of the goods he sells, or where these goods come from, has nothing to do with it. The goods, they believe, are here and will always be here. Therefore, they conclude, the consumer—not the producer—is the motor of an economy. Let us extend credit, i.e., our savings, to the consumers—they advise—in order to expand the market for our goods.

But, in fact, consumers qua consumers are not part of anyone’s market; qua consumers, they are irrelevant to economics. Nature does not grant anyone an innate title of “consumer”; it is a title that has to be earned—by production. Only producers constitute a market—only men who trade products or services for products or services. In the role of producers, they represent a market’s “supply”; in the role of consumers, they represent a market’s “demand.” The law of supply and demand has an implicit subclause: that it involves the same people in both capacities. When this subclause is forgotten, ignored or evaded—you get the economic situation of today.

A successful producer can support many people, e.g., his children, by delegating to them his market power of consumer. Can that capacity be unlimited? How many men would you be able to feed on a self-sustaining farm? In more primitive times, farmers used to raise large families in order to obtain farm labor, i.e., productive help. How many non-productive people could you support by your own effort? If the number were unlimited, if demand became greater than supply—if demand were turned into a command, as it is today—you would have to use and exhaust your stock seed. This is the process now going on in this country.

There is only one institution that could bring it about: the government—with the help of a vicious doctrine that serves as a cover-up: altruism. The visible profiteers of altruism—the welfare recipients—are part victims, part window dressing for the statist policies of the government. But no government could have got away with it, if people had grasped the other concept which the savage was unable to grasp: the concept of “credit.”

If you understand the function of stock seed—of savings—in a primitive farm community, apply the same principle to a complex industrial economy.

Wealth represents goods that have been produced, but not consumed. What would a man do with his wealth in terms of direct barter? Let us say a successful shoe manufacturer wants to enlarge his production. His wealth consists of shoes; he trades some shoes for the things he needs as a consumer, but he saves a large number of shoes and trades them for building materials, machinery and labor to build a new factory—and another large number of shoes, for raw materials and for the labor he will employ to manufacture more shoes. Money facilitates this trading, but does not change its nature. All the physical goods and services he needs for his project must actually exist and be available for trade—just as his payment for them must actually exist in the form of physical goods (in this case, shoes). An exchange of paper money (or even of gold coins) would not do any good to any of the parties involved, if the physical things they needed were not there and could not be obtained in exchange for the money.

If a man does not consume his goods at once, but saves them for the future, whether he wants to enlarge his production or to live on his savings (which he holds in the form of money)—in either case, he is counting on the fact that he will be able to exchange his money for the things he needs, when and as he needs them. This means that he is relying on a continuous process of production—which requires an uninterrupted flow of goods saved to fuel further and further production. This flow is “investment capital,” the stock seed of industry. When a rich man lends money to others, what he lends to them is the goods which he has not consumed.

This is the meaning of the concept “investment.” If you have wondered how one can start producing, when nature requites time paid in advance, this is the beneficent process that enables men to do it: a successful man lends his goods to a promising beginner (or to any reputable producer)—in exchange for the payment of interest. The payment is for the risk he is taking: nature does not guarantee man’s success, neither on a farm nor in a factory. If the venture fails, it means that the goods have been consumed without a productive return, so the investor loses his money; if the venture succeeds, the producer pays the interest out of the new goods, the profits, which the investment enabled him to make.

Observe, and bear in mind above all else, that this process applies only to financing the needs of production, not of consumption—and that its success rests on the investor’s judgment of men’s productive ability, not on his compassion for their feelings, hopes or dreams.

Such is the meaning of the term “credit.” In all its countless variations and applications, “credit” means money, i.e., unconsumed goods, loaned by one productive person (or group) to another, to be repaid out of future production. Even the credit extended for a consumption purpose, such as the purchase of an automobile, is based on the productive record and prospects of the borrower. Credit is not—as the savage believed—a magic piece of paper that reverses cause and effect, and transforms consumption into a source of production.

Consumption is the final, not the efficient, cause of production. The efficient cause is savings, which can be said to represent the opposite of consumption: they represent unconsumed goods. Consumption is the end of production, and a dead end, as far as the productive process is concerned. The worker who produces so little that he consumes everything he earns, carries his own weight economically, but contributes nothing to future production. The worker who has a modest savings account, and the millionaire who invests a fortune (and all the men in between), are those who finance the future. The man who consumes without producing is a parasite, whether he is a welfare recipient or a rich playboy.

An industrial economy is enormously complex: it involves calculations of time, of motion, of credit, and long sequences of interlocking contractual exchanges. This complexity is the system’s great virtue and the source of its vulnerability. The vulnerability is psycho-epistemological. No human mind and no computer—and no planner—can grasp the complexity in every detail. Even to grasp the principles that rule it, is a major feat of abstraction. This is where the conceptual links of men’s integrating capacity break down: most people are unable to grasp the working of their home-town’s economy, let alone the country’s or the world’s. Under the influence of today’s mind-shrinking, anti-conceptual education, most people tend to see economic problems in terms of immediate concretes: of their paychecks, their landlords, and the corner grocery store. The most disastrous loss—which broke their tie to reality—is the loss of the concept that money stands for existing, but unconsumed goods.

The system’s complexity serves, occasionally, as a temporary cover for the operations of some shady characters. You have all heard of some manipulator who does not work, but lives in luxury by obtaining a loan, which he repays by obtaining another loan elsewhere, which he repays by obtaining another loan, etc. You know that his policy can’t go on forever, that it catches up with him eventually and he crashes. But what if that manipulator is the government?

The government is not a productive enterprise. It produces nothing. In respect to its legitimate functions—which are the police, the army, the law courts—it performs a service needed by a productive economy. When a government steps beyond these functions, it becomes an economy’s destroyer.

The government has no source of revenue, except the taxes paid by the producers. To free itself—for a while—from the limits set by reality, the government initiates a credit con game on a scale which the private manipulator could not dream of. It borrows money from you today, which is to be repaid with money it will borrow from you tomorrow, which is to be repaid with money it will borrow from you day after tomorrow, and so on. This is known as “deficit financing.” It is made possible by the fact that the government cuts the connection between goods and money. It issues paper money, which is used as a claim check on actually existing goods—but that money is not backed by any goods, it is not backed by gold, it is backed by nothing. It is a promissory note issued to you in exchange for your goods, to be paid by you (in the form of taxes) out of your future production.

Where does your money go? Anywhere and nowhere. First, it goes to establish an altruistic excuse and window dressing for the rest: to establish a system of subsidized consumption—a “welfare” class of men who consume without producing—a growing dead end, imposed on a shrinking production. Then the money goes to subsidize any pressure group at the expense of any other—to buy their votes—to finance any project conceived at the whim of any bureaucrat or his friends—to pay for the failure of that project, to start another, etc. The welfare recipients are not the worst part of the producers’ burden. The worst part are the bureaucrats—the government officials who are given the power to regulate production. They are not merely unproductive consumers: their jobs consist in making it harder and harder and, ultimately, impossible for the producers to produce. (Most of them are men whose ultimate goal is to place all producers in the position of welfare recipients.)

While the government struggles to save one crumbling enterprise at the expense of the crumbling of another, it accelerates the process of juggling debts, switching losses, piling loans on loans, mortgaging the future and the future’s future. As things grow worse, the government protects itself not by contracting this process, but by expanding it. The process becomes global: it involves foreign aid, and unpaid loans to foreign governments, and subsidies to other welfare states, and subsidies to the United Nations, and subsidies to the World Bank, and subsidies to foreign producers, and credits to foreign consumers to enable them to consume our goods—while, simultaneously, the American producers, who are paying for it all, are left without protection, and their properties are seized by any sheik in any pesthole of the globe, and the wealth they have created, as well as their energy, is turned against them, as, for example, in the case of Middle Eastern oil.

Do you think a spending orgy of this kind could be paid for out of current production? No, the situation is much worse than that. The government is consuming this country’s stock seed—the stock seed of industrial production: investment capital, i.e., the savings needed to keep production going. These savings were not paper, but actual goods. Under all the complexities of private credit, the economy was kept going by the fact that, in one form or another, in one place or another, somewhere within it, actual material goods existed to back its financial transactions. It kept going long after that protection was breached. Today, the goods are almost gone.

A piece of paper will not feed you when there is no bread to eat. It will not build a factory when there are no steel girders to buy. It will not make shoes when there is no leather, no machines, no fuel. You have heard it said that today’s economy is afflicted by sudden, unpredictable shortages of various commodities. These are the advance symptoms of what is to come.

You have heard economists say that they are puzzled by the nature of today’s problem: they are unable to understand why inflation is accompanied by recession—which is contrary to their Keynesian doctrines; and they have coined a ridiculous name for it: “stagflation.” Their theories ignore the fact that money can function only so long as it represents actual goods—and that at a certain stage of inflating the money supply, the government begins to consume a nation’s investment capital, thus making production impossible.

The value of the total tangible assets of the United States at present, was estimated—in terms of 1968 dollars—at 3.1 trillion dollars. If government spending continues, that incredible wealth will not save you. You may be left with all the magnificent skyscrapers, the giant factories, the rich farmlands—but without fuel, without electricity, without transportation, without steel, without paper, without seeds to plant the next harvest.

If that time comes, the government will declare explicitly the premise on which it has been acting implicitly: that its only “capital asset” is you. Since you will not be able to work any longer, the government will take over and will make you work—on a slope descending to sub-industrial production. The only substitute for technological energy is the muscular labor of slaves. This is the way an economic collapse leads to dictatorship—as it did in Germany and in Russia. And if anyone thinks that government planning is a solution to the problems of human survival, observe that after half a century of total dictatorship, Soviet Russia is begging for American wheat and for American industrial “know-how.”

A dictatorship would find it impossible to rule this country in the foreseeable future. What is possible is the blind chaos of a civil war.

It is at a time like this, in the face of an approaching economic collapse, that the intellectuals are preaching egalitarian notions. When the curtailment of government spending is imperative, they demand more welfare projects. When the need for men of productive ability is desperate, they demand more equality for the incompetents. When the country needs the accumulation of capital, they demand that we soak the rich. When the country needs more savings, they demand a “redistribution of income.” They demand more jobs and less profits—more jobs and fewer factories—more jobs and no fuel, no oil, no coal, no “pollution”—but, above all, more goods for free to more consumers, no matter what happens to jobs, to factories, or to producers.

The results of their Keynesian economics are wrecking every industrial country, but they refuse to question their basic assumptions. The examples of Soviet Russia, of Nazi Germany, of Red China, of Marxist Chile, of socialist England are multiplying around them, but they refuse to see and to learn. Today, production is the world’s most urgent need, and the threat of starvation is spreading through the globe; the intellectuals know the only economic system that can and did produce unlimited abundance, but they give it no thought and keep silent about it, as if it had never existed. It is almost irrelevant to blame them for their default at the task of intellectual leadership: the smallness of their stature is overwhelming.

Is there any hope for the future of this country? Yes, there is. This country has one asset left: the matchless productive ability of its people. If, and to the extent that, this ability is liberated, we might still have a chance to avoid a collapse. We cannot expect to reach the ideal overnight, but we must at least reveal its name. We must reveal to this country the secret which all those posturing intellectuals of any political denomination, who clamor for openness and truth, are trying so hard to cover up: that the name of that miraculous productive system is Capitalism.

As to such things as taxes and the rebuilding of a country, I will say that in his goals, if not his methods, the best economist in Atlas Shrugged was Ragnar Danneskjöld.

13

The Stimulus and the Response

1972

THE STIMULUS

There are occasions when a worthless, insignificant book acquires significance as a scrap of litmus paper exposing a culture’s intellectual state. Such a book is Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B. F. Skinner.

“Skinner is the most influential of living American psychologists . . .” says Time magazine (September 20, 1971). “Skinner has remained a highly influential figure among U.S. college students for well over a decade,” says Newsweek (September 20, 1971). “Burrhus Frederic Skinner is the most influential psychologist alive today, and he is second only to Freud as the most important psychologist of all time. This, at least, is the feeling of 56 percent of the members of the American Psychological Association, who were polled on the question. And it should be reason enough to make Dr. Skinner’s new book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, one of the most important happenings in 20th-century psychology,” says Science News (August 7, 1971).

One cannot evaluate the cultural significance of such statements until one identifies the nature of their object.

The book itself is like Boris Karloff’s embodiment of Frankenstein’s monster: a corpse patched with nuts, bolts and screws from the junkyard of philosophy (Pragmatism, Social Darwinism, Positivism, Linguistic Analysis, with some nails by Hume, threads by Russell, and glue by the New York Post). The book’s voice, like Karloff’s, is an emission of inarticulate, moaning growls—directed at a special enemy: “Autonomous Man.”

“Autonomous Man” is the term used by Mr. Skinner to denote man’s consciousness in all those aspects which distinguish it from the sensory level of an animal’s consciousness—specifically: reason, mind, values, concepts, thought, judgment, volition, purpose, memory, independence, self-esteem. These, he asserts, do not exist; they are an illusion, a myth, a “prescientific” superstition. His term may be taken to include everything we call “man’s inner world,” except that Mr. Skinner would never allow such an expression; whenever he has to refer to man’s inner world, he says: “Inside your skin.”

“Inside his skin,” man is totally determined by his environment (and by his genetic endowment, which was determined by his ancestors’ environment), Mr. Skinner asserts, and totally malleable. By controlling the environment, “behavioral technologists” could—and should—control men inside out. If people were brought to give up individual autonomy and to join Mr. Skinner in proclaiming: “To man qua man we readily say good riddance” (p. 201), the behavioral technologists would create a new species and a perfect world. This is the book’s thesis.

One expects that an assertion of this kind would be supported by some demonstration or indication of the methods these technologists will use in order to manipulate those non-autonomous bipeds. Curiously enough, there is no such indication in the book. I may be flattering Mr. Skinner, but it occurred to me that perhaps the book itself was intended to be a demonstration of the methods he envisions.

There are certain conditions which the book requires of its readers: (a) Being out of focus. (b) Skimming. (c) Self-doubt. (d) The premise, when confronted with outrageous absurdity: “I don’t get it, but he must have reasons for saying it.”

These conditions will bring the reader to miss the main ingredients of the book’s epistemological method, which are: 1. Equivocation. 2. Substituting metaphors for proof, and examples for definitions. 3. Setting up and knocking down straw men. 4. Mentioning a given notion as controversial, following it up with two or three pages of irrelevant small talk, then mentioning it again and treating it as if it had been proved. 5. Raising valid questions (to indicate that the author is aware of them) and, by the same technique, leaving them unanswered. 6. Overtalking and overloading the reader’s consciousness with overelaborate discussions of trivia, then smuggling in enormous essentials without discussion, as if they were incontrovertible. 7. Assuming an authoritarian tone to enunciate dogmatic absolutes—and the more dubious the absolute, the more authoritarian the tone. 8. Providing a brief summary at the end of each chapter, which summary includes, as if they had been proved, notions not included or barely mentioned in the chapter’s text.

All of this (and more) is done grossly, crudely, obviously, which leaves the book pockmarked with gaping craters of contradictions, like a moon landscape and as lifelessly dull.

In Atlas Shrugged, I discussed two variants of mysticism: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, “those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelations, the other to their reflexes.” I said that their aims are alike: “in matter—the enslavement of man’s body, in spirit—the destruction of his mind.”

Mr. Skinner is a mystic of muscle—so extreme, complete, all-out a mystic of muscle that one could not use him in fiction: he sounds like a caricature.

At the start of his book, what he demands of his readers is: faith. “In what follows, these issues are discussed ‘from a scientific point of view,’ but this does not mean that the reader will need to know the details of a scientific analysis of behavior. A mere interpretation will suffice. . . . The instances of behavior cited in what follows are not offered as ‘proof’ of the interpretation. The proof is to be found in the basic analysis. The principles used in interpreting the instances have a plausibility which would be lacking in principles drawn entirely from casual observation.” (Pp. 22-23.)

This means: the proof of Mr. Skinner’s theory is inaccessible to laymen, who must take him on faith, substituting “plausibility” for logic: if his “interpretation” sounds plausible, it means that he has valid (“non-casual”) reasons for expounding it. This is offered as scientific epistemology.

(It must be noted that Mr. Skinner’s interpretations of the “scientific analysis of behavior” are rejected by a great many experts initiated into its higher mysteries, not only by psychiatrists and by psychologists of different schools, but even by his own fellow-behaviorists.)

As a cover against criticism, Mr. Skinner resorts to the mystics’ usual scapegoat: language. “The text will often seem inconsistent. English, like all languages, is full of prescientific terms . . . but the issues are important to the nonspecialist and need to be discussed in a nontechnical fashion.” (Pp. 23-24.) The mystics of spirit accuse language of being “materialistic”; Mr. Skinner accuses it of being “mentalistic.” Both regard their own theories as ineffable, i.e., incommunicable in language.

Many psychologists are envious of the prestige—and the achievements—of the physical sciences, which they try not to emulate, but to imitate. Mr. Skinner is archetypical in this respect: he is passionately intent on being accepted as a “scientist” and complains that only “Autonomous Man” stands in the way of such acceptance (which, I am sure, is true). Mr. Skinner points out scornfully that primitive men, who were unable to see the difference between living beings and inanimate objects, ascribed the objects’ motions to conscious gods or demons, and that science could not begin until this belief was discarded. In the name of science, Mr. Skinner switches defiantly to the other side of the same basic coin: accepting the belief that consciousness is supernatural, he refuses to accept the existence of man’s mind.

All human behavior, he asserts, is the product of a process called “operant conditioning”—and all the functions we ascribe to “Autonomous Man” are performed by a single agent called a “reinforcer.” In view of the omnipotence ascribed to this agent throughout the book, a definition would have been very helpful, but here is all we get: “When a bit of behavior is followed by a certain kind of consequence, it is more likely to occur again, and a consequence having this effect is called a reinforcer. Food, for example, is a reinforcer to a hungry organism; anything the organism does that is followed by the receipt of food is more likely to be done again whenever the organism is hungry. . . . Negative reinforcers are called aversive in the sense that they are the things organisms ‘turn away from.’ ” (P. 27.)

If you assume this means that a “reinforcer” is something which causes pleasure or pain, you will be wrong, because, on page 107, Mr. Skinner declares: “There is no important causal connection between the reinforcing effect of a stimulus and the feelings to which it gives rise. . . . What is maximized or minimized, or what is ultimately good or bad, are things, not feelings, and men work to achieve them or to avoid them not because of the way they feel but because they are positive or negative reinforcers.” Then by what means or process do these “reinforcers” affect man’s actions? In the whole of the book, no answer is given.

The only social difference between positive and negative “reinforcers” is the fact that the latter provoke “counterattack” or rebellion, and the former do not. Both are means of controlling man’s behavior. “Productive labor, for example, was once the result of punishment: the slave worked to avoid the consequences of not working. Wages exemplify a different principle: a person is paid when he behaves in a given way so that he will continue to behave in that way.” (P. 32.)

From this bit of package-dealing, context-dropping, and definition-by-nonessentials, Mr. Skinner slides to the assertion that slave-driving and wage-paying are both “techniques of control,” then to the gigantic equivocation which underlies most of the others in his book: that every human relationship, every instance of men dealing with one another, is a form of control. You are “controlled” by the grocer across the street, because if he were not there, you would shop elsewhere. You are controlled by the person who praises you (praise is a “positive reinforcer”), and by the person who blames you (blame is an “aversive reinforcer”), etc., etc., etc.

Here Mr. Skinner revives the ancient saw to the effect that volition is an illusion, because one is not free if one has reasons for one’s actions—and that true volition would consist in acting on whim, a causeless, unaccountable, inexplicable whim exercised in a vacuum, free of any contact with reality.

From this, Mr. Skinner’s next step is easy: political freedom, he declares, necessitates the use of “aversive reinforcers,” i.e., punishment for evil behavior. Since you are not free anyway, but controlled by everyone at all times, why not let specialists control you in a scientific way and design for you a world consisting of nothing but “positive reinforcers”?

What kind of world would that be? Here, Mr. Skinner seems to make a “Freudian slip”: he is surprisingly explicit. “. . . it should be possible to design a world in which behavior likely to be punished seldom or never occurs. We try to design such a world for those who cannot solve the problem of punishment for themselves, such as babies, retardates, or psychotics, and if it could be done for everyone, much time and energy would be saved.” (P. 66.)

“. . . There is no reason,” he declares, “why progress toward a world in which people may be automatically good should be impeded.” (P. 67.) No reason at all—provided you are willing to view yourself as a baby, a retardate or a psychotic.

“Dignity” is Mr. Skinner’s odd choice of a designation for what is normally called “moral worth”—and he disposes of it by asserting that it consists in gaining the admiration of other people. Through a peculiar jumble of examples, which includes unrequited love, heroic deeds, and scientific (i.e., intellectual) achievements, Mr. Skinner labors to convince us that: “. . . we are likely to admire behavior more as we understand it less” (P. 53), and: “. . . the behavior we admire is the behavior we cannot yet explain.” (P. 58.) It is mere vanity, he asserts, that makes our heroes cling to “dignity” and resist “scientific” analysis, because, once their achievements are explained, they will deserve no greater admiration—and no greater credit—than anyone else.

This last is the core, essence and purpose of his jumbled argument; the rest of the verbiage is merely a haphazard cover. There is a kind of veiled, subterranean intensity in Mr. Skinner’s tired prose whenever he stresses the point that men should be given no credit for their virtues or their achievements. The behavior of a creative genius (my expression, not Mr. Skinner’s) is determined by “contingencies of reinforcement,” just like the behavior of a criminal, and neither of them can help it, and neither should be admired or blamed. Unlike other modern determinists, Mr. Skinner is not concerned primarily with the elimination of blame, but with the elimination of credit.

This sort of concern is almost self-explanatory. But I did find it surprising that Mr. Skinner includes achievement among the roots of moral worth (of “dignity”). He and I are probably the only two theoreticians who understand—from opposite moral poles—how much depends on this issue.

In reason, one would expect that so thorough a determinist as Mr. Skinner would not deal with questions of morality; but his abolition of reason frees him from concern with contradictions. Beyond Freedom and Dignity is a normative tract, prescribing the actions men ought to take (even though they have no volition), and the motives and beliefs they ought to adopt (even though there are no such things).

From the casual observation that “ethos and mores refer to the customary practices of a group” (pp. 112- 113), Mr. Skinner slides to the assertion that morality is exclusively social, that moral principles are inculcated through socially designed contingencies of reinforcement “under which a person is induced to behave for the good of others,” (p. 112)—then to the notion, smuggled in as an undiscussed absolute, that morality is behavior for the good of others—and then to the following remarkable passage: “The value or validity of the reinforcers used by other people and by organized agencies may be questioned: ‘Why should I seek the admiration or avoid the censure of my fellow men?’ ‘What can my government—or any government—really do to me?’ ‘Can a church actually determine whether I am to be eternally damned or blessed?’ ‘What is so wonderful about money—do I need all the things it buys?’ ‘Why should I study the things set forth in a college catalogue?’ In short, ‘Why should I behave “for the good of others”?’ ” (Pp. 117-118.)

Yes, read that quotation over again. I had to, before I realized what Mr. Skinner means: he means that the asking of such questions is a violation of the good of others, because it challenges socially inculcated principles of behavior (so that even the pursuit of money or of a college education represents, not one’s own good, but the good of others). And wider: all principles of long-range action, moral or practical, represent the good of others, because all principles are a social product.

This is supported by the statements immediately following the above quotation: “When the control exercised by others is thus evaded or destroyed, only the personal reinforcers are left. The individual turns to immediate gratification, possibly through sex or drugs.” (P. 118.) Just as altruism is the primeval moral code of all mystics, of spirit or muscle, so this view of an individual’s self-interest is their primordial cliche. But Mr. Skinner adds some epistemological “explanations” of his own.

Man, he asserts, is aware of nothing but the immediate moment: he has no capacity to form abstractions, to act by intention, to project the future. “Behavior is shaped and maintained by its consequences” (p. 18), and: “Behavior cannot really be affected by anything which follows it, but if a ‘consequence’ is immediate, it may overlap the behavior.” (P. 120.) Evolution, he asserts, did the rest. “The process of operant conditioning presumably evolved when those organisms which were more sensitively affected by the consequences of their behavior were better able to adjust to the environment and survive.” (P. 120.) What is this “sensitivity” and through what organ or faculty docs it operate? No answer.

Claiming that man’s first discoveries (such as banking a fire) were purely accidental (pp. 121-122), Mr. Skinner concludes that other men learned, somehow, to imitate those lucky practices. “One advantage in being a social animal is that one need not discover practices for oneself.” (P. 122.) As to the time-range of man’s awareness, Mr. Skinner asserts: “Probably no one plants in the spring simply because he then harvests in the fall. Planting would not be adaptive or ‘reasonable’ if there were no connection with a harvest, but one plants in the spring because of more immediate contingencies, most of them arranged by the social environment.” (P. 122.) How is this done by a social environment consisting of men who are unable to think long-range? No answer.

The phenomenon of language is a problem to a mystic of muscle. Mr. Skinner gets around it semantically, by calling it “verbal behavior.” “Verbal behavior presumably arose under contingencies involving practical social interactions . . .” (P. 122.) How? No answer. “Verbal behavior” is a means of controlling men, because words, somehow, become associated with physical “reinforcers.” To be exact, one cannot use the word “words” in Mr. Skinner’s context: it is sounds or marks on paper that acquire an associational link with the omnipotent “reinforcers” and stick inside a man’s skin, forming “a repertoire of verbal behavior.” This would require an incredible feat of memorizing. But Mr. Skinner denies the existence of memory—he calls it “storage” and declares: “Evolutionary and environmental histories change an organism, but they are not stored within it.” (Pp. 195-196.) His view of the nature of language, therefore, is as simple as the views of black-magic practitioners: verbal incantations have a mystic power to effect physical changes in a living organism.

“The verbal community” (i.e., society), Mr. Skinner asserts, is the source and cause of man’s self-awareness and introspection. How? This time an answer is given: “It [the verbal community] asks such questions as: What did you do yesterday? What are you doing now? What will you do tomorrow? Why did you do that? Do you really want to do that? How do you feel about that? The answers help people to adjust to each other effectively. And it is because such questions are asked that a person responds to himself and his behavior in the special way called knowing or being aware. Without the help of a verbal community all behavior would be unconscious. Consciousness is a social product.” (P. 192; emphasis added.) But how did such questions occur to men who were incapable of discovering introspection? No answer.

Apparently to appease man’s defenders, Mr. Skinner offers the following: “In shifting control from autonomous man to the observable environment we do not leave an empty organism. A great deal goes on inside the skin, and physiology will eventually tell us more about it.” (P. 195.) This means: No, man is not empty, he is a solid piece of meat.

Inexorably, like all mystics, Mr. Skinner reverts to a mystic dualism—to an equivalent of the mind-body split, which becomes a body-bodies split. In Mr. Skinner’s version, it is not a conflict between God and the Devil, but between man’s two conditioners: social environment and genetic endowment. The conflict takes place inside man’s skin, in the form of two selves. “A self is a repertoire of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies.” (P. 199.) The conflict, therefore, is between two repertoires. “The controlling self (the conscience or superego) is of social origin, but the controlled self is more likely to be the product of genetic susceptibilities to reinforcement (the id, or the Old Adam). The controlling self generally represents the interests of others, the controlled self the interests of the individual.” (P. 199.)

Where have we heard this before, and for how many “prescientific” millennia?

Mr. Skinner’s voice is loud and clear when he declares: “To be for oneself is to be almost nothing.” (P. 123.) As proof, he revives another ancient saw: the capacity of the human species to transmit knowledge deprives man of any claim to individuality (or to individual achievement) because he has to start by learning from others. “The great individualists so often cited to show the value of personal freedom have owed their successes to earlier social environments. The involuntary individualism of a Robinson Crusoe and the voluntary individualism of a Henry David Thoreau show obvious debts to society. If Crusoe had reached the island as a baby, and if Thoreau had grown up unattended on the shores of Walden Pond, their stories would have been different. We must all begin as babies, and no degree of self-determination, self-sufficiency, or self-reliance will make us individuals in any sense beyond that of single members of the human species.” (Pp. 123-124.)

This means: we all begin as babies and remain in that state; since a baby is not self-sufficient, neither is an adult; nothing has happened in between. Observe also the same method of setting up a straw man that was used in regard to volition: setting it up outside of reality. E.g., in order to be an individual, Thomas A. Edison would have had to appear in the jungle by parthenogenesis, as an infant without human parents, then rediscover, all by himself, the entire course of the science of physics, from the first fire to the electric light bulb. Since no one has done this, there is no such thing as individualism.

From a foundation of this kind, Mr. Skinner proceeds to seek “justice or fairness” or a “reasonable balance” in the “exchange between the individual and his social environment.” (P. 124.) But, he announces, such questions “cannot be answered simply by pointing to what is personally good or what is good for others. There is another kind of value to which we must now turn.” (P. 125.)

Now we come to the payoff.

A mystic code of morality demanding self-sacrifice cannot be promulgated or propagated without a supreme ruler that becomes the collector of the sacrificing. Traditionally, there have been two such collectors: either God or society. The collector had to be inaccessible to mankind at large, and his authority had to be revealed only through an elite of special intermediaries, variously called “high priests,” “commissars,” “Gauleiters,” etc. Mr. Skinner follows the same pattern, but he has a new collector and supreme ruler to hoist: the culture.

A culture, he explains, is “the customs, the customary behaviors of people.” (P. 127.) “A culture, like a species, is selected by its adaptation to an environment: to the extent that it helps its members to get what they need and avoid what is dangerous, it helps them to survive and transmit the culture. The two kinds of evolution are closely interwoven. The same people transmit both a culture and a genetic endowment—though in very different ways and for different parts of their lives.” (P. 129.) “A culture is not the product of a creative ‘group mind’ or the expression of a ‘general will.’ . . . A culture evolves when new practices further the survival of those who practice them.” (Pp. 133-134.) Thus we owe our survival to the culture. Therefore, Mr. Skinner announces, to the two values discussed—personal good and the good of others—“we must now add a third, the good of the culture.” (P. 134.)

What is the good of a culture? Survival. Whose survival? Its own. A culture is an end in itself. “When it has become clear that a culture may survive or perish, some of its members may begin to act to promote its survival.” (P. 134.) Which members? By what means are they able to grasp such a goal? No answer.

Mr. Skinner stresses repeatedly that the survival of a culture is a value different from, and superior to, the survival of its members, of oneself or of others—a value one ought to live and die for. Why? Mr. Skinner is suddenly explicit: “None of this will explain what we might call a pure concern for the survival of a culture, but we do not really need an explanation. . . . The simple fact is that a culture which for any reason induces its members to work for its survival, or for the survival of some of its practices, is more likely to survive. Survival is the only value according to which a culture is eventually to be judged, and any practice that furthers survival has survival value by definition.” (P. 136.) Whose survival? No answer. Mr. Skinner lets it ride on an equivocation of this kind.

If survival “is the only value according to which a culture is eventually to be judged,” then the Nazi culture, which lasted twelve years, had a certain degree of value—the Soviet culture, which has lasted fifty-five years, has a higher value—the feudal culture of the Middle Ages, which lasted five centuries, had a still higher value—but the highest value of all must be ascribed to the culture of ancient Egypt, which, with no variations or motion of any kind, lasted unchanged for thirty centuries.

A “culture,” in Mr. Skinner’s own terms, is not a thing, not an idea, not even people, but a collection of practices, a “behavior,” a disembodied behavior that supersedes those who behave—i.e., a way of acting to which the actors must be sacrificed. This is mysticism of a kind that makes God or society seem sensibly realistic rulers by comparison. It is also conservatism of a metaphysical kind that makes political conservatism seem innocuously childish. It demands that we live, work and die not for ourselves or for others, but for the sake of preserving and transmitting to yet unborn generations and in perpetuity the way we dress, the way we ride the subway, the way we get drunk, the way we deal with baseball or religion or economics, etc.

Thus Mr. Skinner, the arch-materialist, ends up as a worshipper of disembodied motion—and the arch-revolutionary, as a guardian of the status quo, any status quo.

In order to be induced to sacrifice for the good of the culture, the victims are promised “deferred advantages” (indeterminately deferred). “But what is its [an economic system’s] answer to the question: ‘Why should I be concerned about the survival of a particular kind of economic system?’ The only honest answer to that kind of question seems to be this: ‘There is no good reason why you should be concerned, but if your culture has not convinced you that there is, so much the worse for your culture.’ ” (P. 137.) This means: in order to survive, a culture must convince its members that there is a good reason to be concerned with its survival, even though there is none.

This is Social Darwinism of a kind that Herbert Spencer would not dream of. The nearest approach to an exponent in practice was Adolf Hitler who “reinforced” his followers by demanding sacrifices for the survival of the German Kultur.

But Mr. Skinner envisions a grander scale. He advocates “a single culture for all mankind,” which, he admits, is difficult to explain to the sacrificial victims. “We can nevertheless point to many reasons why people should now be concerned for the good of all mankind. The great problems of the world today are all global. . . . But pointing to consequences is not enough. We [who?] must arrange contingencies under which consequences have an effect.” (Pp. 137-138.) This “arranger of contingencies” is to be a single totalitarian world state, serving the survival of a single culture, ruling every cell of every man’s brain and every moment of his life.

What are the “great problems” this state would solve? What are the “terrifying possibilities” from which we must be saved—at the price of giving up our freedom, dignity, reason, mind, values, self-esteem? Mr. Skinner answers: “Overpopulation, the depletion of resources, the pollution of the environment, and the possibility of a nuclear holocaust—these are the not-so-remote consequences of present courses of action.” (P. 138.)

If lightning struck Mount Sinai, and Moses appeared on the mountaintop, carrying sacred tablets, and silenced the lost, frightened, desperate throng below in order to read a revelation of divine wisdom, and read a third-rate editorial from a random tabloid—the dramatic, intellectual and moral effect would be similar (except that Moses was less pretentious).

Mr. Skinner’s book falls to pieces in its final chapters. The author’s “verbal behavior” becomes so erratic that he sounds as if he has lost all interest in his subject. Tangled in contradictions, equivocations and non sequiturs, he seems to stumble wearily in circles, seizing any rationalization at random—not to defend his thesis, but to attack his critics, throwing feeble little jabs, projecting an odd kind of stale, lethargic, perfunctory malice, almost a “reflex-malice.” He sounds like a man filling empty pages with something, anything, in order to circumvent the accumulated weight of unanswered questions—or like a man who resents being questioned.

Who will be the “designers” of his proposed global culture and the rulers of mankind? He answers unequivocally: the “technologists of behavior.” What qualifies them for such a job? They are “scientists.” What is science? In the whole of the book, no definition is given, as if the term were a self-evident, mystically hallowed primary.

Since man, according to Mr. Skinner, is biologically unable to project a time span of three months—from spring planting to fall harvest—how are these technologists able to see the course and plan the future of a global culture? No answer. What sort of men are they? The closest approach to an answer is: “those who have been induced by their culture to act to further its survival. . . .” (P. 180.)

It is futile to ask by what means and through what agencies the culture (i.e., the behavior) of birdbrained creatures can accomplish such a feat, because here we are obviously dealing with a standard requirement of mysticism: Mr. Skinner is establishing an opportunity for the high priesthood to “hear voices”—not the voice of God or of the people, but the voice of the culture inducing them to act. But the culture “induces” a great many people to different courses of action, including the people who paint prophecies of doom on rocks by the side of highways. How are the culture-designers (and the rest of us) to know that theirs is the true voice of the culture? No answer. One must assume that they feel it.

Now we come to the grand cashing-in on the book’s basic equivocation. Mr. Skinner keeps stressing that mankind needs “more controls, not less”; in a polemical passage, he quotes his critics asking: “Who is to control?”—and answers them as follows: “The relation between the controller and the controlled is reciprocal. The scientist in the laboratory, studying the behavior of a pigeon, designs contingencies and observes their effects. His apparatus exerts a conspicuous control on the pigeon, but we must not overlook the control exerted by the pigeon. The behavior of the pigeon has determined the design of the apparatus and the procedures in which it is used. Some such reciprocal control is characteristic of all science. . . . [Here I omit one sentence, which is an unconscionable misuse of a famous statement.] The scientist who designs a cyclotron is under the control of the particles he is studying. The behavior with which a parent controls his child, either aversively or through positive reinforcement, is shaped and maintained by the child’s responses. A psychotherapist changes the behavior of his patient in ways which have been shaped and maintained by his success in changing that behavior. A government or religion prescribes and imposes sanctions selected by their effectiveness in controlling citizen or communicant. An employer induces his employees to work industriously and carefully with wage systems determined by their effects on behavior. The classroom practices of the teacher are shaped and maintained by the effects on his students. In a very real sense, then, the slave controls the slave driver, the child the parent, the patient the therapist, the citizen the government, the communicant the priest, the employee the employer, and the student the teacher.” (P. 169.)

To this, I shall add just one more example: the victim controls the torturer, because if the victim screams very loudly at a particular method of torture, this is the method the torturer will select to use.

The above quotation is sufficient to convey the book’s intellectual stature, the logic of its arguments, and the validity of its thesis.

As far as one can judge the book’s purpose, the establishment of a dictatorship does not seem to be Mr. Skinner’s personal ambition. If it were, he would have been more clever about it. His goal seems to be: 1. to clear the way for a dictatorship by eliminating its enemies; 2. to see how much he can get away with.

The book’s motive power is hatred of man’s mind and virtue (with everything they entail: reason, achievement, independence, enjoyment, moral pride, self-esteem)—so intense and consuming a hatred that it consumes itself, and what we read is only its gray ashes, with feeble, snickering obscenities (such as the title) as a few last, smoking, stinking coals. To destroy “Autonomous Man”—to strike at him, to punch, to stab, to jab, and, if all else fails, to spit at him—is the book’s apparent purpose, and it is precisely the long-range, cultural consequences that the author does not seem to give a damn about.

The passages dealing with the Global State are so rambling, incoherent and diffuse, that they sound, not like a plan, but like a daydream—the kind of daydream Mr. Skinner, apparently, finds “reinforcing.” But he remains unoriginal even in his fantasy: borrowing Plato’s notion of a philosopher-king, Mr. Skinner fancies a world ruled by a psychologist-king—in terms which sound as if a small-time manipulator were tempted by the image of a big shot.

If only we would abolish “Autonomous Man”—Mr. Skinner declares with a kind of growling wistfulness—we would be able to turn “from the miraculous to the natural, from the inaccessible to the manipulable.” (P. 201; emphasis added.) This, I submit, is the secret behind the book—and behind the modern intellectuals’ response to it.

In Les Misérables, describing the development of an independent young man, Victor Hugo wrote: “. . . and he blesses God for having given him these two riches which many of the rich are lacking: work, which gives him freedom, and thought, which gives him dignity.”

I doubt that B. F. Skinner ever did or could read Victor Hugo—he wouldn’t know what it’s all about—but it is not a mere coincidence that made him choose the title of his book. Victor Hugo knew the two essentials that man’s life requires. B. F. Skinner knows the two essentials that have to be destroyed if man qua man is to be destroyed.

THE RESPONSE

“The attention lavished on Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner and his new book has been nothing short of remarkable,” states The New York Times Book Review (October 24, 1971), in a special box on its front page. After citing a long list of Mr. Skinner’s press interviews and television appearances, the statement continues: “The American Psychological Association gave him its annual award in September and hailed him as ‘a pioneer in psychological research, leader in theory, master in technology, who has revolutionized the study of behavior in our time. A superlative scholar, scientist, teacher and writer.’ ”

Bear in mind the fact that the above testimonial was given to a theoretician whose theory consists in proclaiming that man is a mindless automaton—to a technologist whose technology consists in urging people to accept totalitarian control—to a scholar who substitutes the oldest of old wives’ tales for a knowledge of philosophy—to a scientist who commits the kinds of logical fallacies for which a freshman would be flunked.

It would be unfair to assume that that testimonial represents the intellectual level of the entire psychological profession. Obviously, it does not—and we all know how such testimonials (or resolutions or protests) are put over by a special clique on a busy, confused, indifferent majority. But which is worse: a profession that actually subscribes to that testimonial—or a profession that does not, yet permits this sort of thing to be issued in its name? I think the latter is worse. Manipulators, such as Mr. Skinner’s clique, do not seek to persuade, but to put something over on people. The fact that Mr. Skinner got away with the mere title of the book (let alone its thesis) indicates that the cultural field is empty, that no serious opposition is to be expected, that anything goes.

To be exact, I would say: not quite anything and not quite yet, but the cultural prognosis is pretty bleak. Mr. Skinner’s trial balloon has been punctured by many different people, including some able sharp-shooters, but if he studies the shreds, he will notice that only buckshot was used. The book deserves no heavier ammunition; its thesis does.

With a few exceptions, the superlatives hailing the book’s importance came from press agents or blurb writers, not from reviewers. Most of the reviews were mixed or negative. As a whole, they conveyed an odd feeling, not the violence of a storm, but the sadness of a steady drizzle, as if exhausted men were still unable to accept the evil brazenly offered to them for appraisal, but unable without knowing why, their reasons long since forgotten, moved by some remnant of decency as by a faint echo from a very distant past. What deserved a scream of indignation, was received with a sigh.

The two best—i.e., thoroughly unfavorable—reviews appear in The New Republic and The New York Review of Books. The rest of them attack Mr. Skinner, but concede his case. They accept him as an exponent of reason and science—and seize the opportunity to damn reason and science.

The review in The New Republic (October 16, 1971) is quietly firm and civilized. Its primary target is Mr. Skinner’s—and behaviorism’s—view of man, which it describes as “psychology without a psyche.” As an example of its approach: Skinner’s argument “goes like this: physics used to attribute human characteristics to physical objects (such as growing more jubilant as they approached their natural places); only when it stopped doing this did scientific progress follow. Would not scientific progress follow in psychology if we could stop attributing human characteristics to human beings? He does not, naturally, put it quite in those terms, but I have given the structural essence of the matter.” As an example of its appraisal of other aspects: “. . . the argumentation is often sloppy, the sensibility often philistine, the language often eccentric.” As an apparent rebuke for Mr. Skinner’s expression “inside man’s skin”: “And something inside my skull is reluctant to accept the simple, unproblematic world that Skinner offers, not just because it doesn’t like it but because it thinks it all wrong for people whose skulls contain similarly complex apparatus.” In all the reviews I read, this is the only passage that defends intelligence.

A cautious little piece in the Saturday Review (October 9, 1971) praises the book for the following: “First of all, Dr. Skinner pays admirable attention to social problems. . . . Skinner’s sharp critique of punishment as largely ineffectual control is pertinent to the pressing question of prisons.” In the context of the profound philosophical fundamentals that Mr. Skinner challenges, this sort of comment cannot even be classified as journalistic or range-of-the-moment: this is range-of-the-split-second. After which, the reviewer proceeds gently to blame Mr. Skinner for “his lust to objectivize everything.” This, he complains, destroys the “mystery of man.” Therefore, he concludes placatingly: “Another dream of reason has ended as a nightmare of an eminent psychologist, in this case perhaps the most influential of living American psychologists. But was it a good dream to begin with? Was it even an especially rational one? [I.e.: Is it rational to use reason?] We all know some of the devastating results of following the old imperative to control and subdue nature outside man, of adopting the dictum of Skinner’s spiritual forebear, Francis Bacon, that ‘knowledge is power.’ Are we about to try the same experiment with ‘manipulable man’?” This means that Mr. Skinner is a man of reason and a great scientist, whose theory would lead us to triumphs as brilliant as those achieved by the physical sciences, but we must not try it. The reviewer concludes sweetly: “Thus only if the views of this book are for the most part rejected will it really have a good effect on the social environment.” (I suppose, on prison reform.) This sort of mealy-mouthed insult is unfair to any book, even Mr. Skinner’s.

The review in Psychotherapy & Social Science Review (January 1972) is of a much higher caliber. It blasts many aspects of Mr. Skinner’s notions, competently and effectively—then blasts itself by the following indications of its own viewpoint: “But what in individual terms may be a struggle between narcissism and object-love, between indulgence in self and love of others, in societal terms becomes a struggle between anarchy and overcontrol. It is hard to know what the remedy should be.” The reviewer mentions “the vicissitudes of the personal and social super ego”—and “the slowly accumulating evidence that man will always have to struggle with his dual and decisive nature” (which consists of the capacity to think and to feel). He concludes: “But to pursue the last path, to attempt to turn pure instinct into pure reason is to fly in the face of the ambivalent nature of man . . .” (This means that Mr. Skinner is an advocate or representative of pure reason.) And: “Perhaps to be able to face these unresolvable dilemmas and painful paradoxes without recourse to either impotence or grandiosity may finally deserve the name of dignity.” If behaviorism declares, through Mr. Skinner: “I can resolve anything (somehow),” and its major rival school of psychology, Freudianism, advises: “Resign yourself to unresolvable dilemmas,” behaviorism will win.

The review in The Atlantic (October 1971) is a peculiar mixture. The reviewer (properly) condemns Mr. Skinner for his “love of power over others.” He attacks Mr. Skinner on a crucial issue: the destruction of language and, therefore, of judgment. But observe the following statement: “Let us be clear: it is not the sublime dumbness of mysticism [?!] toward which Skinner’s idealism [?] moves. It is rather closer to the societies of 1984 and their Newspeak—the atrophy of consciousness through the shriveling of language.” In his best paragraph, the reviewer states that Skinner’s “own gospel of environmental determinism is one of the most serious threats conceivable to human survival. By eroding the sense of responsibility, it licenses people to shift the blame from themselves to ‘the system. ’ It provides universal exoneration for atrocity after atrocity, or for compliance after compliance. It works to increase the amount of evil in the world.” This is eminently true. But a few paragraphs earlier the reviewer said: “Determinism may be true, false, or both. But whatever it is, if it is used as Skinner uses it, the doom of conscious life is announced.” How else can determinism “be used”? If a man cannot help what he does, how can he be held responsible for it? And if a given idea could be “true, false, or both” (at the same time and in the same respect), what sort of conscious life would be possible?

The mystery of that reviewer’s stand is solved in his last paragraph: “Skinner believes that we can survive only if we allow a gigantic simplification of life. By that he means—he must finally mean—the atrophy of consciousness. He does not think that introspective, complex, self-doubting, self-torturing, self-indulgent, dissident, wordy people are efficient. He can set things up, he is sure, so that fewer such people occur. Does he not see that only silly geese lay golden eggs?” This means: Mr. Skinner represents reason, order, efficiency, but it is the emotion-ridden, contradiction-riddled, self-confessedly silly and sloppy souls who give value or meaning to life.

The review in The New Leader (January 10, 1972) is cruder and more open. It declares: “ ‘The reasonable man,’ Shaw said, ‘tries to adapt himself to the world’ (certainly the behaviorist’s approach), ‘the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’ ” Also: “And behaviorism is still, thank God, a science, not a technology.” Also: “History, no less than behavioristic experiments, proves that man is innately selfish. The manipulation of mankind is unacceptable not because man is a noble being, but precisely because he is not. Those with power have always used it for their own ends, and there is no reason to suppose that their selfish preoccupations will diminish.” (This means, one must assume, that the totalitarian control and manipulation of noble, selfless beings by noble, selfless beings would be all right.)

Then there is a batch of small-fry reviews which echo similar sentiments or no sentiments at all, make feeble objections, carefully miss the point, and do not commit themselves to anything. An astonishing one is a piece in Science News (August 7, 1971), which seems to be written by a teen-ager and makes a remarkable statement. Mr. Skinner’s new book, it announces, may be one of the most important of the century: “Not only because it represents the summation of the Harvard psychologist’s behavioristic approach to psychology, but because it goes beyond psychology into philosophy. And because Dr. Skinner’s philosophy will probably be insulting to a great many people.” Further, this particular expert declares that “Dr. Skinner makes [his] arguments logically and rationally . . .”

After a collection of this kind, it is a relief to read the essay in The New York Review of Books (December 30, 1971), entitled “The Case Against B. F. Skinner.” The essay is neither apologetic nor sentimental. It is bright and forceful. It is a demolition job. What it demolishes is Mr. Skinner’s scientific pretensions—and, to this extent, it is a defense of science.

“His [Skinner’s] speculations are devoid of scientific content and do not even hint at general outlines of a possible science of human behavior.” In regard to Skinner’s claims: “Claims . . . must be evaluated according to the evidence presented for them. In the present instance, this is a simple task, since no evidence is presented . . . In fact, the question of evidence is beside the point, since the claims dissolve into triviality or incoherence under analysis.”

The reviewer employs one of the best methods of dealing with a false theory: he takes it literally. “If Skinner’s thesis is false, then there is no point in his having written the book or our reading it. But if his thesis is true, then there is also no point in his having written the book or our reading it. For the only point could be to modify behavior, and behavior, according to the thesis, is entirely controlled by arrangement of reinforcers. Therefore reading the book can modify behavior only if it is a reinforcer, that is, if reading the book will increase the probability of the behavior that led to reading the book (assuming an appropriate state of deprivation). At this point, we seem to be reduced to gibberish.”

There are many other notable passages in that review. But its author is Noam Chomsky who, philosophically, is a Cartesian linguist advocating a theory to the effect that man’s mental processes are determined by innate ideas—and who, politically, belongs to the New Left.

I shall [discuss shortly] the two significant reviews that appeared in The New York Times. But the picture of our cultural devastation is clear. There are no defenders of reason—in the country that was created not by historical accident, but by philosophical design. There are no defenders of freedom—in what had once been the only moral social system on earth. There are no defenders of man’s mind—in the world’s greatest scientific-technological civilization. All that is left is a battle between the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle—between men guided by their feelings and men guided by their reflexes.

We are passengers on a plane flying at tremendous speed. One of these days, we will discover that its cockpit is empty.

Newspapers do not create a culture, they are its product. They are transmission belts that carry ideas from the universities to the general public. The New York Times is one of the most influential newspapers in this country and a good indicator of our cultural trends. It published two reviews of Mr. Skinner’s book, which—in different ways—are the most objectionable ones of the lot.

“There is just no gainsaying the profound importance of B. F. Skinner’s new book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity. If you plan to read only one book this year, this is probably the one you should choose.” This is the opening of the review in the daily Times (September 22, 1971)—the only essentially favorable review I have found.

“Dr. Skinner’s message is hard to take,” the reviewer claims, but warns that “it cannot be dismissed so frivolously . . .” Then, without protective evasions, he summarizes accurately the brutal essentials of Mr. Skinner’s thesis, and declares: “All of which is logically unassailable . . .” (Emphasis added.) Attempting, apparently, to resist the thesis, he states that “one tries reviewing the traditional criticisms of behaviorism. But even here, Skinner is not nearly so vulnerable as he once seemed. For he has confronted his many critics with telling counterarguments. . . . To those who call his program totalitarian, he replies that ‘the relation between the controller and the controlled is reciprocal’ . . .” This refers to the passage on page 169 of Mr. Skinner’s book, which is quoted [above, pages 202-203]. Please reread it in order to judge whether that is a “telling counterargument.”

“No, none of the familiar objections to behaviorism will suffice to demolish Beyond Freedom and Dignity,” the reviewer sighs. “. . . the book remains logically tenable. I don’t like it, which is to say that it doesn’t reinforce me in the manner to which I am accustomed.” To make a concession of this kind is to confess that one has no grounds for one’s convictions, and that one is not aware of one’s own mental processes. The concession is followed by an odd statement: “But for the moment the only retort that I can think of is that conceived by Dostoyevsky’s ‘underground man’— to ‘deliberately go mad to prove’ that all behavior cannot be predicted or controlled. But such a response might not prove very useful to me or the culture. . . . So we may indeed be trapped in a Skinnerian maze.” What is odd here is the fact that the quotation from Dostoyevsky’s “underground man” is not a retort the reviewer thought of spontaneously: this very quotation is discussed by Mr. Skinner on pages 164-165 of his book and is, properly, dismissed.

At first glance, the review creates the impression that it was written by an earnest intellectual who struggled desperately against the necessity of accepting a totalitarian state, but failed to find counterarguments and gave in, reluctantly, to the power of unanswerable logic. After one has read the book, one asks: Is that the reviewer’s case? Or is it the case of a man eager to convince us that Mr. Skinner’s thesis is unanswerable?

The review in The New York Times Book Review (October 24, 1971) is different. It is unfavorable. It declares that Skinner has a secret motive (a “hidden agenda”) which is unknown to him, but known to the reviewer. “The actual text of Skinner’s new book reveals a man desperately in search of some way to preserve the old-fashioned virtues associated with 19th-century individualism in a world where self-reliance no longer makes sense.” Which virtues? Hard work, believe it or not. “First, behavior control appears to him a way to get people hard at work again in an age where indolence is rife.” If hard work is the essential characteristic of individualism, then the Nazi and Soviet forced labor camps are examples of individualism unmatched in the nineteenth or any other century. But there is no discussion or advocacy of “hard work” in Mr. Skinner’s book, and nothing to justify the allegation that this is his first concern.

“This hidden agenda can first be detected in the way Skinner talks about controlling behavior. All his attention is centered on situations where one person is being controlled; he employs such phrases as ‘a person’s behavior’ or ‘operant conditioning of the subject. ’ He seldom refers to different controls for different kinds of social groups.” Even Mr. Skinner does not deserve a reviewer of this kind. Many people are unable to deal with metaphysical questions, but this one is militantly aggressive about it. He is so rabid a collectivist that he will not tolerate any concern with the individual, even for the purpose of destroying him. He does not see that if his own beliefs are to be put into practice, it is Mr. Skinner who is laying the necessary foundation.

If a doctor stated that man needs food, and were criticized as follows: ‘Which man does he mean, Smith or Jones? Different men need different foods. And he hasn’t said anything about the poor, the black, the young, and the women”—the Skedunk Gazette would not publish it. Yet this type of mentality is published on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. If you think I am exaggerating, judge the following. The reviewer picks on a passage in which Mr. Skinner attempts to teach us behaviorist language by describing a young man’s emotional states in behaviorist terms—e.g., Mr. Skinner translates “he feels uneasy or anxious” into “his behavior frequently has unavoidable aversive consequences which have emotional effects.” The reviewer’s comment: “But Professor, there’s a war on! Why aren’t you talking about the social cause of his behavior? Why do you treat him as if he lives in a vacuum?”

Mr. Skinner is not only too individualistic, the reviewer claims, but also too rational. “While Heisenberg contemplated the unpredictable behavior of matter, Skinner insists that we must find unambiguous facts about human behavior; the difference is between wanting to explore the world as it is and wanting to possess knowledge. The possession of knowledge, of hard facts you can act on, is an echo of 19th-century positivistic science, just as Skinner’s beliefs are an echo of that century’s small-town society.”

If “the possession of knowledge” is unattainable, what do you acquire when you “explore the world as it is”—and why do you explore it? What is a “soft” fact? What do you act on, when you cannot act on knowledge or facts? (That review may be an example of such action.) But I shall borrow a phrase from Noam Chomsky’s essay, and say that these are questions “which I happily leave to others to decode.”

The daily Times reviewer may be taken as typical of the present—a frightened liberal trying to convince us (and himself) that Mr. Skinner’s totalitarian state is the wave of the future. But the Sunday Times reviewer is the future—the future of Mr. Skinner’s theories, their successful product and embodiment, who has been molded by the “contingencies of reinforcement” in our universities, who sees reason, individualism and “autonomy” as incontrovertibly nonexistent, sees no point in arguing about them, sees nothing beyond the range of the immediate moment, regards Mr. Skinner as old-fashioned, and goes on from there. If you have read The Fountainhead, you will understand the relationship: he is the Gus Webb to Mr. Skinner’s Ellsworth Toohey.

The Times chose the publication of Beyond Freedom and Dignity as an occasion to go beyond B. F. Skinner. A different push in the same direction was provided by Time magazine. The headline on its cover (September 20, 1971) announced: “B. F. Skinner Says: WE CAN’T AFFORD FREEDOM”—not a very original statement, but regarded, apparently, as important or valuable enough to justify placing Mr. Skinner’s picture on the cover, and giving him a lengthy story. The story, however, is flattering only in its length; otherwise, it is noncommittal and empty, playing both sides of the fence in the “safe” modern manner, i.e., praising Mr. Skinner, and insulting him by quoting his enemies.

If you wonder what motives could bring Mr. Skinner to his theories, what frustration could lead him to so profound a hatred of mankind, and who would be his first victims, the Time story offers three passages that provide eloquent clues. The first is a quotation from Mr. Skinner’s novel Walden Two. The speaker, Time explains, “is T. E. Frazier, a character in Walden Two and the fictional founder of the Utopian community described in that novel. He is also an alter ego of the author . . .” The quotation: “I’ve had only one idea in my life—a true idée fixe. To put it as bluntly as possible—the idea of having my own way. ‘Control!’ expresses it. The control of human behavior. In my early experimental days it was a frenzied, selfish desire to dominate. I remember the rage I used to feel when a prediction went awry. I could have shouted at the subjects of my experiments, ‘Behave, damn you! Behave as you ought!’ ”

The second passage deals with Mr. Skinner’s youth. In his college days, he wrote short stories and “sent three of them to Robert Frost, who praised them warmly. That encouragement convinced Fred Skinner that he should become a writer. The decision, he says, was ‘disastrous.’ . . . In his own words, he ‘failed as a writer’ because he ‘had nothing important to say.’ ”

The third passage is about Twin Oaks, a real-life commune founded on a farm in Virginia, and “governed by Skinner’s laws of social engineering.” “Private property is forbidden, except for such things as books and clothing. . . . No one is allowed to boast of individual accomplishments . . . What is considered appropriate behavior—cooperating, showing affection, turning the other cheek and working diligently—is, on the other hand, applauded, or ‘reinforced,’ by the group.” “The favorite sports are ‘cooperation volley-ball’ and skinny-dipping in the South Anna River—false modesty is another of the sins that are not reinforced—and there is plenty of folk singing and dancing.” In regard to the consequences: “After starting with only $35,000, Twin Oaks, four years later, still finds survival a struggle. The farm brings more emotional than monetary rewards; members would find it cheaper to work at other jobs and buy their food at the market. . . . Beyond economics, there are serious psychological problems at Twin Oaks, and few members have stayed very long. [Emotional rewards?] Turnover last year was close to 70 percent. The ones who leave first, in fact, are often the most competent members, who still expect special recognition for their talents. ‘Competent people are hard to get along with,’ says Richard Stutsman, one of Twin Oaks’ trained psychologists. ‘They tend to make demands, not requests. We cannot afford to reinforce ultimatum behavior, although we recognize our need for their competence. . . .’ When they leave, the community not only loses their skills but also sacrifices a potential rise in its standard of living.”

For my comments on this, see Atlas Shrugged.

The cultural establishment has pushed Beyond Freedom and Dignity to the best-seller lists. The most dangerous part of its potential impact—particularly on young readers—is not that the book is convincing or eloquent, but that it is so bad. If it were less crudely irrational and inept, a reader could give the benefit of the doubt to those who were taken in by some trickily complex arguments. But if so evil a thesis as the advocacy of totalitarian dictatorship is offered in such illogical, unconvincing terms, yet is acclaimed as “important,” what is one to think of the intellectual and moral state of our culture? A rational reader may become paralyzed—not by fear, fear is not his psychological danger—but by disgust, contempt, discouragement and, ultimately, withdrawal from the realm of the intellect (which, perhaps, is Mr. Skinner’s hope).

But before you draw the “malevolent-universe” conclusion that falsehood always wins over truth, or that men prefer irrationality to reason, and dictatorship to freedom (and, therefore, “What’s the use?”)—consider the following. Human Events (January 15, 1972) reports that “the National Institute of Mental Health had granted $283,000 to Dr. B. F. Skinner . . .” which, apparently, financed the writing of his book. The New Republic (January 28, 1972) gives some details: the Skinner grant “was one of 20 Senior Research Career Awards, that is, plums for scientific leaders in ‘mental health’ across the board rather than a unique grant. . . . The particular award was made for the purpose of ‘integrating and consolidating’ Skinner’s findings and ‘considering the application of the science of behavior to the problems of society’[!]. . . .”

This is the way an “establishment” is formed and placed beyond the reach of dissent. What chance would a beginner, a nonconformist, an opponent of behaviorism, have against the entrenched power of a clique supported by government funds? This is not a free marketplace of ideas any longer. Evil, falsehood, irrationality are not winning in free competition with virtue, truth, reason. Today’s culture is ruled by intellectual pressure groups which have become intellectual monopolies backed, like all monopolies, by the government’s gun and the money of the victims.

(The solution, of course, is not to censor research projects, but to abolish all government subsidies in the field of the social sciences and, eventually, in all fields. But this is a different subject, which I shall discuss [in the next chapter].)

The significance of B. F. Skinner’s book lies in its eloquent demonstration of the results of philosophical collapse and governmental power: when the intellectual default of the victims permits the dead hand of the government to get a stranglehold on the field of ideas, a nation will necessarily be pushed beyond freedom and dignity.

14

The Establishing of an Establishment

1972

Staleness is the dominant characteristic of today’s culture—and, at first glance, it may appear to be a puzzling phenomenon.

There is an air of impoverished drabness, of tired routine, of stagnant monotony in all our cultural activities—from stage and screen, to literature and the arts, to the allegedly intellectual publications and discussions. There is nothing to see or to hear. Every thing produces the effect of déjà vu or déjà entendu. How long since you have read anything startling, different, fresh, unexpected?

Intellectually, people are wearing paste jewelry copied from paste jewelry by artisans who have never seen the original gems. Originality is a forgotten experience. The latest fads are withering at birth. The substitutes for daring and vitality—such as the screeching hippies—are mere camouflage, like too much make-up on the lined face of an aging slut.

The symptoms of today’s cultural disease are: conformity, with nothing to conform to—timidity, expressed in a self-shrinking concern with trivia—a kind of obsequious anxiety to please the unknown standards of some nonexistent authority—and a pall of fear without object. Psychologically, this is the cultural atmosphere of a society living under censorship.

But there is no censorship in the United States.

I have said that the fundamental cause of a culture’s disintegration is the collapse of philosophy, which leaves men without intellectual guidance. But this is the fundamental cause; its consequences are not always direct or obvious, and its working may raise many questions. By what intermediary processes does this cause affect men’s lives? Does it work only by psychological means, from within, or is it assisted, from without, by practical, existential measures? When philosophy collapses, why are there no thinkers to step into the vacuum and rebuild a system of thought on a new foundation? Since there was no philosophical unanimity, why did the collapse of falsehoods paralyze the men who had never believed them? Why do the falsehoods linger on, unchallenged—like a cloud of dust over the rubble? Philosophy affects education, and a false philosophy can cripple men’s minds in childhood; but it cannot cripple them all, nor does it cripple most men irreparably—so what becomes of those who manage to survive? Why are they not heard from? What—except physical force—can silence active minds?

The answer to this last question is: nothing. Only the use of physical force can protect falsehoods from challenge and perpetuate them. Only the intrusion of force into the realm of the intellect—i.e., only the action of government—can silence an entire nation. But then how does the cultural wreckage maintain its power over the United States? There is no governmental repression or suppression of ideas in this country.

As a mixed economy, we are chained by an enormous tangle of government controls; but, it is argued, they affect our incomes, not our minds. Such a distinction is not tenable; a chained aspect of a man’s—or a nation’s—activity will gradually and necessarily affect the rest. But it is true that the government, so far, has made no overt move to repress or control the intellectual life of this country. Anyone is still free to say, write and publish anything he pleases. Yet men keep silent—while their culture is perishing from an entrenched, institutionalized epidemic of mediocrity. It is not possible that mankind’s intellectual stature has shrunk to this extent. And it is not possible that all talent has vanished suddenly from this country and this earth.

If you find it puzzling, the premise to check is the idea that governmental repression is the only way a government can destroy the intellectual life of a country. It is not. There is another way: governmental encouragement.

Governmental encouragement does not order men to believe that the false is true: it merely makes them indifferent to the issue of truth or falsehood.

Bearing this preface in mind, let us consider an example of the methods, processes and results of that policy.

In December 1971, Representative Cornelius E. Gallagher (D.-N.J.) declared in the House that “the National Institute of Mental Health has granted to Dr. B. F. Skinner the sum of $283,000 for the purpose of writing Beyond Freedom and Dignity.” On further inquiry, he discovered that “this merely represents the tip of the iceberg.” (Congressional Record, December 15, 1971, H12623.)

Human Events (January 15, 1972) summarized his findings as follows: “When Gallagher sought information about the Skinner grant and the scope and amount of government spending in the behavioral research field, the General Accounting Office reported back that the task was virtually impossible. Agency officials stated that there were tens of thousands of behavioral research projects being financed by government agencies. A preliminary check turned up 70,000 grants and contracts at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and 10,000 within the Manpower Administration of the Labor Department. Thousands of additional behavioral projects, costing millions of dollars, also are being financed by the Defense Department, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Atomic Energy Commission, according to the General Accounting Office’s survey.”

In his speech to the House, Representative Gallagher declared: “The Congress has authorized and appropriated every single dollar in these grants and contracts yet, for the most part, we are unaware of how they are being spent.” And further: “. . . the Federal grant and contract system has inextricably intertwined colleges and universities with moneys authorized and appropriated by the Congress. I mean to imply no suggestion of a lessening of academic freedom in the Nation, but I do suggest that the Congress should at the very least be fully informed and, if need be, have the tools and expertise at our own disposal to counter antidemocratic thoughts launched with Federal funds.” (Congressional Record, H12624.)

Mr. Gallagher stated that he believes in Dr. Skinner’s right to advocate his ideas. “But what I question is whether he should be subsidized by the Federal Government [—] especially since, in my judgment, he is advancing ideas which threaten the future of our system of government by denigrating the American traditions of individualism, human dignity, and self-reliance.” (Ibid., H12623.)

If Mr. Gallagher were a consistent supporter of the American traditions he describes in the second half of his sentence, he would have stopped after its first half. But, apparently, he was not aware of the contradiction, because his solution was a proposal to create “a Select Committee on Privacy, Human Values, and Democratic Institutions . . . designed to deal specifically with the type of threats to our Constitution, our Congress, and our constituents which are contained in the thoughts of B. F. Skinner.” (Ibid., H12624.)

Nothing could be as dangerous a threat to our institutions as a proposal to establish a government committee to deal with “antidemocratic thoughts” or B. F. Skinner’s thoughts or anyone’s thoughts. The liberal New Republic was quick to sense the danger and to protest (January 28, 1972). But, not questioning the propriety of government grants, it merely expounded the other side of the same contradiction: it objected to the notion of the government determining which ideas are right or acceptable and thus establishing a kind of intellectual orthodoxy.

Yet both contentions are true: it is viciously improper for the government to subsidize the enemies of our political system; it is also viciously improper for the government to assume the role of an ideological arbiter. But neither Representative Gallagher nor The New Republic chose to see the answer: that those evils are inherent in the vicious impropriety of the government subsidizing ideas. Both chose to ignore the fact that any intrusion of government into the field of ideas, for or against anyone, withers intellectual freedom and creates an official orthodoxy, a privileged elite. Today, it is called an “Establishment.”

Ironically enough, it is The New Republic that offered an indication of the mechanics by which an Establishment gets established—apparently, without realizing the social implications of its own argument. Objecting to Gallagher’s contention that a deliberate policy may be favoring the behaviorist school of psychology, The New Republic stated: “The Gallagher account did not note that the Skinner grant was one of 20 Senior Research Career Awards, that is, plums for scientific leaders in ‘mental health’ across the board rather than a unique grant. No new awards of this kind have been made by NIMH since 1964, but 18 of them, which were originally for five years, have been renewed. Skinner’s was renewed in 1969, so his $283,000 amounts to $28,300 a year ending in 1974. . . . Skinner has continued to teach roughly one seminar a year at Harvard since 1964. In other words, his Harvard salary will be paid by the feds until [1974], a bonanza perhaps more rewarding to Harvard than to him, since he could command at least as large a salary . . . in a number of other places.”

Consider the desperate financial plight of private universities, then ask yourself what a “bonanza” of this kind will do to them. It is generally known that most universities now depend on government research projects as one of their major sources of income. The government grants to those “Senior” researchers establish every recipient as an unofficially official power. It is his influence—his ideas, his theories, his preferences in faculty hiring—that will come to dominate the school, in a silent, unadmitted way. What debt-ridden college administrator would dare antagonize the carrier of the bonanza?

Now observe that these grants were given to senior researchers, that they were “plums”—as The New Republic calls them coyly and cynically—for “scientific leaders.” How would Washington bureaucrats—or Congressmen, for that matter—know which scientist to encourage, particularly in so controversial a field as social science? The safest method is to choose men who have achieved some sort of reputation. Whether their reputation is deserved or not, whether their achievements are valid or not, whether they rose by merit, pull, publicity or accident, are questions which the awarders do not and cannot consider. When personal judgment is inoperative (or forbidden), men’s first concern is not how to choose, but how to justify their choice. This will necessarily prompt committee members, bureaucrats and politicians to gravitate toward “prestigious names.” The result is to help establish those already established—i.e., to entrench the status quo.

The worst part of it is the fact that this method of selection is not confined to the cowardly or the corrupt, that the honest official is obliged to use it. The method is forced on him by the terms of the situation. To pass an informed, independent judgment on the value of every applicant or project in every field of science, an official would have to be a universal scholar. If he consults “experts” in the field, the dilemma remains: either he has to be a scholar who knows which experts to consult—or he has to surrender his judgment to men trained by the very professors he is supposed to judge. The awarding of grants to famous “leaders,” therefore, appears to him as the only fair policy—on the premise that “somebody made them famous, somebody knows, even if I don’t.”

(If the officials attempted to bypass the “leaders” and give grants to promising beginners, the injustice and irrationality of the situation would be so much worse that most of them have the good sense not to attempt it. If universal scholarship is required to judge the value of the actual in every field, nothing short of omniscience would be required to judge the value of the potential—as various privately sponsored contests to discover future talent, even in limited fields, have amply demonstrated.)

Furthermore, the terms of the situation actually forbid an honest official to use his own judgment. He is supposed to be “impartial” and “fair”—while considering awards in the social sciences. An official who does not have some knowledge and some convictions in this field, has no moral right to be a public official. Yet the kind of “fairness” demanded of him means that he must suspend, ignore or evade his own convictions (these would be challenged as “prejudices” or “censorship”) and proceed to dispose of large sums of public money, with incalculable consequences for the future of the country—without judging the nature of the recipients’ ideas, i.e., without using any judgment whatever.

The awarders may hide behind the notion that, in choosing recognized “leaders,” they are acting “democratically” and rewarding men chosen by the public. But there is no “democracy” in this field. Science and the mind do not work by vote or by consensus. The best-known is not necessarily the best (nor is the least-known, for that matter). Since no rational standards are applicable, the awarders’ method leads to concern with personalities, not ideas; pull, not merit; “prestige,” not truth. The result is: rule by press agents.

The profiteers of government grants are usually among the loudest protesters against “the tyranny of money”: science and the culture, they cry, must be liberated from the arbitrary private power of the rich. But there is this difference: the rich can neither buy an entire nation nor force one single individual. If a rich man chooses to support cultural activities, he can do so only on a very limited scale, and he bears the consequences of his actions. If he does not use his judgment, but merely indulges his irrational whims, he achieves the opposite of his intention: his projects and his protégés are ignored or despised in their professions, and no amount of money will buy him any influence over the culture. Like vanity publishing, his venture remains a private waste without any wider significance. The culture is protected from him by three invincible elements: choice, variety, competition. If he loses his money in foolish ventures, he hurts no one but himself. And, above all: the money he spends is his own; it is not extorted by force from unwilling victims.

The fundamental evil of government grants is the fact that men are forced to pay for the support of ideas diametrically opposed to their own. This is a profound violation of an individual’s integrity and conscience. It is viciously wrong to take the money of rational men for the support of B. F. Skinner—or vice versa. The Constitution forbids a governmental establishment of religion, properly regarding it as a violation of individual rights. Since a man’s beliefs are protected from the intrusion of force, the same principle should protect his reasoned convictions and forbid governmental establishments in the field of thought.

Socially, the most destructive consequences of tyranny are spread by an indeterminate, unofficial class of rulers: the officials’ favorites. In the histories of absolute monarchies, it was the king’s favorites who perpetrated the worst iniquities. Even an absolute monarch was restrained, to some minimal extent, by the necessity to pretend to maintain some semblance of justice, in order to protect his image from the people’s indignation. But the recipients of his arbitrary, capricious favor held all the privileges of power without any of the restraints. It was among the scrambling, conniving, bootlicking, backstabbing climbers of a royal court that the worst exponents of power for power’s sake were to be found. This holds true in any political system that leaves an opportunity open to them: in an absolute monarchy, in a totalitarian dictatorship, in a mixed economy.

Today, what we see in this country’s intellectual field is one of the worst manifestations of political power: rule by favorites, by the unofficially privileged—by private groups with governmental power, but without governmental responsibility. They are shifting, switching groups, often feuding among themselves, but united against outsiders; they are scrambling to catch momentary favors, their precise status unknown to their members, their rivals, or their particular patrons among the hundreds of Congressmen and the thousands of bureaucrats—who are now bewildered and intimidated by these Frankensteinian creations. As in any other game devoid of objective rules, success and power in this one depend on barkers (press agents) and bluff.

Private cliques have always existed in the intellectual field, particularly in the arts, but they used to serve as checks and balances on one another, so that a nonconformist could enter the field and rise without the help of a clique. Today, the cliques are consolidated into an Establishment.

The term “Establishment” was not generally used or heard in this country until about a decade ago. The term originated in Great Britain, where it was applied to the upper-class families which traditionally preempted certain fields of activity. The British aristocracy is a politically created caste—an institution abolished and forbidden by the political system of the United States. The origin of an aristocracy is the king’s power to confer on a chosen individual the privilege of receiving an unearned income from the involuntary servitude of the inhabitants of a given district.

Now, the same policy is operating in the United States—only the privileges are granted not in perpetuity, but in a lump sum for a limited time, and the involuntary servitude is imposed not on a group of serfs in a specific territory, but on all the citizens of the country. This does not change the nature of the policy or its consequences.

Observe the character of our intellectual Establishment. It is about a hundred years behind the times. It holds as dogma the basic premises fashionable at the turn of the century: the mysticism of Kant, the collectivism of Marx, the altruism of street-corner evangelists. Two world wars, three monstrous dictatorships—in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Red China—plus every lesser variant of devastating socialist experimentation in a global spread of brutality and despair, have not prompted modern intellectuals to question or revise their dogma. They still think that it is daring, idealistic and unconventional to denounce the rich. They still believe that money is the root of all evil—except government money, which is the solution to all problems. The intellectual Establishment is frozen on the level of those elderly “leaders” who were prominent when the system of governmental “encouragement” took hold. By controlling the schools, the “leaders” perpetuated their dogma and gradually silenced the opposition.

Dissent still exists among the intellectuals, but it is a nit-picking dissent over trivia, which never challenges fundamental premises. This sort of dissent is permitted even in the Catholic Church, so long as it does not challenge the dogma—or in the “self-criticism” sessions of Soviet institutions, so long as it does not challenge the tenets of communism. A disagreement that does not challenge fundamentals serves only to reinforce them. It is particularly in this respect that the collapse of philosophy and the growth of government power work together to entrench the Establishment.

Rule by unofficially privileged private groups spreads a special kind of fear, like a slow poison injected into the culture. It is not fear of a specific ruler, but of the unknown power of anonymous cliques, which grows into a chronic fear of unknowable enemies. Most people do not hold any firm convictions on fundamental issues; today, people are more confused and uncertain than ever—yet the system demands of them a heroic kind of integrity, which they do not possess: they are destroyed by means of fundamental issues which they are unable to recognize in seemingly inconsequential concretes. Many men are capable of dying on the barricades for a big issue, but few—very few—are able to resist the gray suction of small, unheralded, day-by-day surrenders. Few want to start trouble, make enemies, risk their position and, perhaps, their livelihood over such issues as a colleague’s objectionable abstract notions (which should be opposed, but are not), or the vaguely improper demands of a faculty clique (which should be resisted, but are not), or the independent attitude of a talented instructor (who should be hired, but is not). If a man senses that he ought to speak up, he is stopped by the routine “Who am I to know?” of modern skepticism—to which another, paralyzing clause is added in his mind: “Whom would I displease?”

Most men are quick to sense whether truth does or does not matter to their superiors. The atmosphere of cautious respect for the recipients of undeserved grants awarded by a mysterious governmental power, rapidly spreads the conviction that truth does not matter because merit does not matter, that something takes precedence over both. (And the issue of grants is only one of the countless ways in which the same arbitrary power intrudes into men’s lives.) From the cynical notion: “Who cares about justice?” a man descends to: “Who cares about truth?” and then to: “Who cares?” Thus most men succumb to an intangible corruption, and sell their souls on the installment plan—by making small compromises, by cutting small corners—until nothing is left of their minds except the fear.

In business, the rise of the welfare state froze the status quo, perpetuating the power of the big corporations of the pre-income-tax era, placing them beyond the competition of the tax-strangled newcomers. A similar process took place in the welfare state of the intellect. The results, in both fields, are the same.

If you talk to a typical business executive or college dean or magazine editor, you can observe his special, modern quality: a kind of flowing or skipping evasiveness that drips or bounces automatically off any fundamental issue, a gently noncommittal blandness, an ingrained cautiousness toward everything, as if an inner tape recorder were whispering: “Play it safe, don’t antagonize—whom?—anybody.”

Whom would these men fear most, psychologically—and least, existentially? The brilliant loner—the beginner, the young man of potential genius and innocently ruthless integrity, whose only weapons are talent and truth. They reject him “instinctively,” saying that “he doesn’t belong” (to what?), sensing that he would put them on the spot by raising issues they prefer not to face. He might get past their protective barriers, once in a while, but he is handicapped by his virtues—in a system rigged against intelligence and integrity.

We shall never know how many precociously perceptive youths sensed the evil around them, before they were old enough to find an antidote—and gave up, in helplessly indignant bewilderment; or how many gave in, stultifying their minds. We do not know how many young innovators may exist today and struggle to be heard—but we will not hear of them because the Establishment would prefer not to recognize their existence and not to take any cognizance of their ideas.

So long as a society does not take the ultimate step into the abyss by establishing censorship, some men of ability will always succeed in breaking through. But the price—in effort, struggle and endurance—is such that only exceptional men can afford it. Today, originality, integrity, independence have become a road to martyrdom, which only the most dedicated will choose, knowing that the alternative is much worse. A society that sets up these conditions as the price of achievement, is in deep trouble.

The following is for the consideration of those “humanitarian” Congressmen (and their constituents) who think that a few public “plums” tossed to some old professors won’t hurt anyone: it is the moral character of decent average men that has no chance under the rule of entrenched mediocrity. The genius can and will fight to the last. The average man cannot and does not.

In Atlas Shrugged, I discussed the “pyramid of ability” in the realm of economics. There is another kind of social pyramid. The genius who fights “every form of tyranny over the mind of man” is fighting a battle for which lesser men do not have the strength, but on which their freedom, their dignity, and their integrity depend. It is the pyramid of moral endurance.

15

Censorship: Local and Express

1973

I have been saying, for many years, that statism is winning by default—by the intellectual default of capitalism’s alleged defenders; that freedom and capitalism have never had a firm, philosophical base; that today’s conservatives share all the fundamental premises of today’s liberals and thus have paved, and are still paving, the road to statism. I have also said repeatedly that the battle for freedom is primarily philosophical and cannot be won by any lesser means—because philosophy rules human existence, including politics.

But philosophy is a science that deals with the broadest abstractions and, therefore, many people do not know how to observe its influence in practice or how to grasp the process by which it affects the conditions of their daily life. A recent event, however, offers a clear, striking illustration of that process. It shows philosophy’s influence in action, and reveals the essence (and the contradictions) of both the conservative and the liberal ideologies. This event is the decision of the Supreme Court in five recent “obscenity” cases.

In [The Ayn Rand Letter] of November 20, 1972, I expressed hope in regard to the four men appointed to the Supreme Court by President Nixon, even though it was too early to tell the exact nature of their views. “But,” I said, “if they live up to their enormous responsibility, we may forgive Mr. Nixon a great many of his defaults: the Supreme Court is the last remnant of a philosophical influence in this country.” Today, less than a year later, the evidence is sufficient to indicate that there are no intellectual grounds left for forgiving Mr. Nixon.

Since inconsistent premises lead to inconsistent actions, it is not impossible that the present Supreme Court may make some liberating decisions. For instance, the Court made a great contribution to justice and to the protection of individual rights when it legalized abortion. I am not in agreement with all of the reasoning given in that decision, but I am in enthusiastic agreement with the result—i.e., with the recognition of a woman’s right to her own body. But the Court’s decision in regard to obscenity takes an opposite stand: it denies a man’s (or a woman’s) right to the exercise of his own mind—by establishing the legal and intellectual base of censorship.

Before proceeding to discuss that decision, I want to state, for the record, my own view of what is called “hard-core” pornography. I regard it as unspeakably disgusting. I have not read any of the books or seen any of the current movies belonging to that category, and I do not intend ever to read or see them. The descriptions provided in legal cases, as well as the “modern” touches in “soft-core” productions, are sufficient grounds on which to form an opinion. The reason of my opinion is the opposite of the usual one: I do not regard sex as evil—I regard it as good, as one of the most important aspects of human life, too important to be made the subject of public anatomical display. But the issue here is not one’s view of sex. The issue is freedom of speech and of the press—i.e., the right to hold any view and to express it.

It is not very inspiring to fight for the freedom of the purveyors of pornography or their customers. But in the transition to statism, every infringement of human rights has begun with the suppression of a given right’s least attractive practitioners. In this case, the disgusting nature of the offenders makes it a good test of one’s loyalty to a principle.

In the five “obscenity” cases decided on June 21, 1973, the Court was divided five to four. In each case, the majority opinion was written by Chief Justice Burger, joined by Justices Blackmun, Powell, Rehnquist (all four appointed by Nixon) and Justice White (appointed by Kennedy); in each case, the dissenting opinion was written by Justice Brennan, joined by Justices Stewart and Marshall; Justice Douglas, in each case, wrote a separate dissenting opinion. The two most important cases are Miller v. California and Paris Adult Theater I v. Slaton.

The Miller case involves a man who was convicted in California of mailing unsolicited, sexually explicit material, which advertised pornographic books. It is in the Miller decision that Chief Justice Burger promulgated the new criteria for judging whether a given work is obscene or not. They are as follows:

“The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether ‘the average person, applying contemporary community standards’ would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest . . . (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

These criteria are based on previous Supreme Court decisions, particularly on Roth v. United States, 1957. Nine years later, in the case of Memoirs v. Massachusetts, 1966, the Supreme Court introduced a new criterion: “A book cannot be proscribed unless it is found to be utterly without redeeming social value.” This was bad enough, but the present decision emphatically rejects that particular notion and substitutes a horrendous criterion of its own: “whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

Morally, this criterion, as well as the rest of Chief Justice Burger’s decision, taken as a whole, is a proclamation of collectivism—not so much political as specifically moral collectivism. The intellectual standard which is here set up to rule an individual’s mind—to prescribe what an individual may write, publish, read or see—is the judgment of an average person applying community standards. Why? No reason is given—which means that the will of the collective is here taken for granted as the source, justification and criterion of value judgments.

What is a community? No definition is given—it may, therefore, be a state, a city, a neighborhood, or just the block you live on. What are community standards ? No definition is given. In fact, the standards of a community, when and if they can be observed as such, as distinguished from the standards of its individual citizens, are a product of chance, lethargy, hypocrisy, second-handedness, indifference, fear, the manipulations of local busybodies or small-time power-lusters—and, occasionally, the traditional acceptance of some decent values inherited from some great mind of the past. But the great mind is now to be outlawed by the ruling of the Supreme Court.

Who is the average person? No definition is given. There is some indication that the term, in this context, means a person who is neither particularly susceptible or sensitive nor totally insensitive in regard to sex. But to find a sexually average person is a more preposterously impossible undertaking than to find the average representative of any other human characteristic—and, besides, this is not what the Court decision says. It says simply “average”—which, in an issue of judgment, means intellectually average: average in intelligence, in ability, in ideas, in feelings, in tastes, which means: a conformist or a nonentity. Any proposition concerned with establishing a human “average” necessarily eliminates the top and the bottom, i.e., the best and the worst. Thus the standards of a genius and the standards of a moron are automatically eliminated, suppressed or prohibited—and both are ordered to subordinate their own views to those of the average. Why is the average person to be granted so awesome a privilege? By reason of the fact that he possesses no special distinction. Nothing can justify such a notion, except the theory of collectivism, which is itself unjustifiable.

The Court’s decision asserts repeatedly—just asserts—that this ruling applies only to hard-core pornography or obscenity, i.e., to certain ideas dealing with sex, not to any other kinds of ideas. Other kinds of ideas—it keeps asserting—are protected by the First Amendment, but ideas dealing with sex are not. Apart from the impossibility of drawing a line between these two categories (which we shall discuss later), this distinction is contradicted and invalidated right in the text of this same decision: the trial judges and juries are empowered to determine whether a work that contains sexual elements “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

This means—and can mean nothing else—that the government is empowered to judge literary, artistic, political, and scientific values, and to permit or suppress certain works accordingly.

The alleged limits on that power, the conditions of when, where and by whom it may be exercised, are of no significance—once the principle that the government holds such a power has been established. The rest is only a matter of details—and of time. The present Supreme Court may seek to suppress only sexual materials; on the same basis (the will of the community), a future Court may suppress “undesirable” scientific discussions; still another Court may suppress political discussions (and a year later all discussions in all fields would be suppressed). The law functions by a process of deriving logical consequences from established precedents.

The “average person’s community standards” criterion, was set up in the Roth case. But the Roth criterion, of “utterly without redeeming social value” was too vague to be immediately dangerous—anything may be claimed to have some sort of “social value.” So, logically, on the basis of that precedent, the present Court took the next step toward censorship. It gave to the government the power of entry into four specific intellectual fields, with the power to judge whether the values of works in these fields are serious or not.

“Serious” is an unserious standard. Who is to determine what is serious, to whom, and by what criterion? Since no definition is given, one must assume that the criterion to apply is the only one promulgated in those guidelines: what the average person would find serious. Do you care to contemplate the spectacle of the average person as the ultimate authority—the censor—in the field of literature? In the field of art? In the field of politics? In the field of science? An authority whose edict is to be imposed by force and is to determine what will be permitted or suppressed in all these fields? I submit that no pornographic movie can be as morally obscene as a prospect of this kind.

No first-rate talent in any of those fields will ever be willing to work by the intellectual standards and under the orders of any authority, even if it were an authority composed of the best brains in the world (who would not accept the job), let alone an authority consisting of “average persons.” And the greater the talent, the less the willingness.

As to those who would be willing, observe the moral irony of the fact that they do exist today in large numbers and are generally despised: they are the hacks, the box-office chasers, who try to please what they think are the tastes—and the standards—of the public, for the sake of making money. Apparently, intellectual prostitution is evil, if done for a “selfish” motive—but noble, if accepted in selfless service to the “moral purity” of the community.

In another of the five “obscenity” cases (U.S. v. 12 200-Ft. Reels of Super 8mm. Film), but in a totally different context, Chief Justice Burger himself describes the danger created by the logical implications of a precedent: “The seductive plausibility of single steps in a chain of evolutionary development of a legal rule is often not perceived until a third, fourth or fifth ‘logical’ extension occurs. Each step, when taken, appeared a reasonable step in relation to that which preceded it, although the aggregate or end result is one that would never have been seriously considered in the first instance. This kind of gestative propensity calls for the ‘line drawing’ familiar in the judicial, as in the legislative process: ‘thus far but not beyond.’ ”

I would argue that since a legal rule is a principle, the development of its logical consequences cannot be cut off, except by repealing the principle. But assuming that such a cutoff were possible, no line of any sort is drawn in the Miller decision: the community standards of average persons are explicitly declared to be a sovereign power over sexual matters and over the works that deal with sexual matters.

In the same Miller decision, Chief Justice Burger admits that no such line can be drawn. “Nothing in the First Amendment requires that a jury must consider hypothetical and unascertainable ‘national standards’ when attempting to determine whether certain materials are obscene as a matter of fact.” He quotes Chief Justice Warren saying in an earlier case: “I believe that there is no provable ‘national standard.’ . . . At all events, this Court has not been able to enunciate one, and it would be unreasonable to expect local courts to divine one.”

By what means are local courts to divine a local one? Actually, the only provable standard of what constitutes obscenity would be an objective standard, philosophically proved and valid for all men. Such a standard cannot be defined or enforced in terms of law: it would require the formulation of an entire philosophic system; but even this would not grant anyone the right to enforce that standard on others. When the Court, however, speaks of a “provable national standard,” it does not mean an objective standard; it substitutes the collective for the objective, and seeks to enunciate a standard held by all the average persons of the nation. Since even a guess at such a concept is patently impossible, the Court concludes that what is impossible (and improper) nationally, is permissible locally—and, in effect, passes the buck to state legislatures, granting them the power to enforce arbitrary (unprovable) local standards.

Chief Justice Burger’s arguments, in the Miller decision, are not very persuasive. “It is neither realistic nor constitutionally sound to read the First Amendment as requiring that the people of Maine or Mississippi accept public depiction of conduct found tolerable in Las Vegas, or New York City.” I read the First Amendment as not requiring any person anywhere to accept any depiction he does not wish to read or see, but forbidding him to abridge the rights and freedom of those who do wish to read or see it.

In another argument against a national standard of what constitutes obscenity, the decision declares: “People in different States vary in their tastes and attitudes, and this diversity is not to be strangled by the absolutism of imposed uniformity.” What about the absolutism of imposed uniformity within a state? What about the non-conformists in that state? What about communication between citizens of different states? What about the freedom of a national marketplace of ideas? No answers are given.

The following argument, offered in a footnote, is unworthy of a serious tribunal: “The mere fact juries may reach different conclusions as to the same material does not mean that constitutional rights are abridged. As this Court observed in Roth v. United States . . . ‘It is common experience that different juries may reach different results under any criminal statute. That is one of the consequences we accept under our jury system. . . .’ ” In a criminal case, the jury’s duty is only to determine whether a particular defendant committed the crime which is clearly and specifically defined by the statute. Under the new “obscenity” ruling, a jury is expected to determine whether the defendent committed an undefined crime and, simultaneously, to determine what that crime is.

Thus the Nixon Court’s notion of censorship-sharing by diffusing it at random over the entire country, is as illusory as Nixon’s notion of returning power to the states by means of revenue-sharing. While the public rides on the creaking train of local censorship, with delays, derailments and chaos at every whistle stop— the express of statism is flying full speed on an unobstructed track.

Four of the Justices who handed down the Miller decision are regarded as conservatives; the fifth, Justice White, is regarded as middle-of-the-road. On the other hand, Justice Douglas is the most liberal or the most leftward-leaning member of the Court. Yet his dissent in the Miller case is an impassioned cry of protest and indignation. He rejects the notion that the First Amendment allows an implied exception in the case of obscenity. “I do not think it does and my views on the issue have been stated over and over again.” He declares: “Obscenity—which even we cannot define with precision—is a hodge-podge. To send men to jail for violating standards they cannot understand, construe, and apply is a monstrous thing to do in a Nation dedicated to fair trials and due process.”

What about the antitrust laws, which are responsible for precisely this kind of monstrous thing? Justice Douglas does not mention them—but antitrust, as we shall see later, is a chicken that comes home to roost on both sides of this issue.

On the subject of censorship, however, Justice Douglas is eloquently consistent: “The idea that the First Amendment permits punishment for ideas that are ‘offensive’ to the particular judge or jury sitting in judgment is astounding. No greater leveler of speech or literature has ever been designed. To give the power to the censor, as we do today, is to make a sharp and radical break with the traditions of a free society. The First Amendment was not fashioned as a vehicle for dispensing tranquilizers to the people. Its prime function was to keep debate open to ‘offensive’ as well as to ‘staid’ people. The tendency throughout history has been to subdue the individual and to exalt the power of government. The use of the standard ‘offensive’ gives authority to government that cuts the very vitals out of the First Amendment. As is intimated by the Court’s opinion, the materials before us may be garbage. But so is much of what is said in political campaigns, in the daily press, on TV or over the radio. By reason of the First Amendment—and solely because of it—speakers and publishers have not been threatened or subdued because their thoughts and ideas may be ‘offensive’ to some.”

I can only say “Amen” to this statement.

Observe that such issues as the individual against the State are never mentioned in the Supreme Court’s majority decision. It is Justice Douglas, the arch-liberal, who defends individual rights. It is the conservatives who speak as if the individual did not exist, as if the unit of social concern were the collective—the “community.”

A profound commitment to moral collectivism does not occur in a vacuum, as a causeless primary: it requires an epistemological foundation. The Supreme Court’s majority decision in the case of Paris Adult Theater I v. Slaton reveals that foundation.

This case involves two movie theaters in Atlanta, Georgia, which exhibited allegedly obscene films, admitting only adults. The local trial court ruled that this was constitutionally permissible, but the Georgia Supreme Court reversed the decision—on the grounds that hard-core pornography is not protected by the First Amendment. Thus the issue before the U.S. Supreme Court was whether it is constitutional to abridge the freedom of consenting adults. The Court’s majority decision said: “Yes.”

Epistemologically, this decision is a proclamation of non-objectivity: it supports and defends explicitly the most evil of social phenomena: non-objective law.

The decision, written by Chief Justice Burger, declares: “we hold that there are legitimate state interests at stake in stemming the tide of commercialized obscenity . . . These include the interest of the public in the quality of life and the total community environment, the tone of commerce in the great city centers, and, possibly, the public safety itself.” (Emphasis added.) Try to find a single issue or action that would be exempt from this kind of “legitimate” state interest.

Quoting a book by Professor Bickel, the decision declares: “A man may be entitled to read an obscene book in his room . . . But if he demands a right to obtain the books and pictures he wants in the market . . . then to grant him his right is to affect the world about the rest of us, and to impinge on other privacies . . . what is commonly read and seen and heard and done intrudes upon us all, want it or not.” Which human activity would be exempt from a declaration of this kind? And what advocate of a totalitarian dictatorship would not endorse that declaration?

Mr. Burger concedes that “there is no scientific data which conclusively demonstrates that exposure to obscene materials adversely affects men and women or their society.” But he rejects this as an argument against the suppression of such materials. And there follows an avalanche of statements and of quotations from earlier Court decisions—all claiming (in terms broader than the issue of pornography) that scientific knowledge and conclusive proof are not required as a basis for legislation, that the State has the right to enact laws on the grounds of what does or might exist.

“Scientific data” (in the proper, literal sense of these words) means knowledge of reality, reached by a process of reason; and “conclusive demonstration” means that the content of a given proposition is proved to be a fact of reality. It is reason and reality that are here being removed as a limitation on the power of the State. It is the right to legislate on the basis of any assumption, any hypothesis, any guess, any feeling, any whim—on any grounds or none—that is here being conferred on the government.

“We do not demand of legislatures ‘scientifically certain criteria of legislation,’ ” the decision affirms. “Although there is no conclusive proof of a connection between antisocial behavior and obscene material, the legislature of Georgia could quite reasonably determine that such a connection does or might exist. In deciding Roth, this Court implicitly accepted that a legislature could legitimately act on such a conclusion to protect ‘the social interest in order and morality.’ ”

If the notion that something might be a threat to the “social interest” is sufficient to justify suppression, then the Nazi or the Soviet dictatorship is justified in exterminating anyone who, in its belief, might be a threat to the “social interest” of the Nazi or the Soviet “community.”

Whatever theory of government such a notion represents, it is not the theory of America’s Founding Fathers. Strangely enough, Chief Justice Burger seems to be aware of it, because he proceeds to call on a pre-American precedent. “From the beginning of civilized societies, legislators and judges have acted on various unprovable assumptions. Such assumptions underlie much lawful state regulation of commercial and business affairs.”

This is preeminently true—and look at the results. Look at the history of all the governments in the world prior to the birth of the United States. Ours was the first government based on and strictly limited by a written document—the Constitution—which specifically forbids it to violate individual rights or to act on whim. The history of the atrocities perpetrated by all the other kinds of governments—unrestricted governments acting on unprovable assumptions—demonstrates the value and validity of the original political theory on which this country was built. Yet here is the Supreme Court citing all those bloody millennia of tyranny, as a precedent for us to follow.

If this seems inexplicable, the very next sentence of Mr. Burger’s decision gives a clue to the reasons—and a violently clear demonstration of the role of precedent in the development of law. That next sentence seems to unleash a whirling storm of feathers, as chickens come flying home from every direction to roost on everyone’s coop, perch or fence—in retribution for every evasion, compromise, injustice, and violation of rights perpetrated in past decades.

That next sentence is: “The same [a basis of unprovable assumptions] is true of the federal securities, antitrust laws and a host of other federal regulations.”

Formally, I would have to say: “Oh, Mr. Chief Justice!” Informally, I want to say: “Oh, brother!”

“On the basis of these assumptions,” Mr. Burger goes on, “both Congress and state legislatures have, for example, drastically restricted associational rights by adopting antitrust laws, and have strictly regulated public expression by issuers of and dealers in securities, profit sharing ‘coupons,’ and ‘trading stamps,’ commanding what they must and may not publish and announce. . . . Understandably those who entertain an absolutist view of the First Amendment find it uncomfortable to explain why rights of association, speech, and press should be severely restrained in the marketplace of goods and money, but not in the marketplace of pornography.”

On the collectivist premise, there is, of course, no answer. The only answer, in today’s situation, is to check that premise and reject it—and start repealing all those catastrophically destructive violations of individual rights and of the Constitution. But this is not what the Court majority has decided. Forgetting his own warning about the “gestative propensity” of the judicial and legislative processes, Chief Justice Burger accepts the precedent as an irrevocable absolute and pushes the country many steps further toward the abyss of statism.

“Likewise,” the decision continues, “when legislatures and administrators act to protect the physical environment from pollution and to preserve our resources of forests, streams and parks, they must act on such imponderables as the impact of a new highway near or through an existing park or wilderness area. . . . Thus the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968 . . . and the Department of Transportation Act of 1966 . . . have been described by Mr. Justice Black as ‘a solemn determination of the highest law-making body of this Nation that beauty and health-giving facilities of our parks are not to be taken away for public roads without hearings, fact-findings, and policy determinations under the supervision of a Cabinet officer. . . .’ The fact that a congressional directive reflects unprovable assumptions about what is good for the people, including imponderable aesthetic assumptions, is not a sufficient reason to find that statute unconstitutional.”

Isn’t it? If it is not, then the imponderable aesthetic assumptions of government officials are entitled to invade the field of literature and art—as Mr. Burger’s decision is inviting them to do.

The ugly hand of altruism slithers into the decision, in a passage that sideswipes the concept of free will. “We have just noted, for example, that neither the First Amendment nor ‘free will’ precludes States from having ‘blue sky’ laws to regulate what sellers of securities may write or publish about their wares. . . . Such laws are to protect the weak, the uninformed, the unsuspecting, and the gullible from the exercise of their own volition.” It is for this kind of purpose that the rest of us—who are not weak, uninformed, unsuspecting, and gullible—are to be protected from our volition and deprived of the right to exercise it. So much for the relation of altruism to rights and to freedom.

Here is another chicken flying home: “States are told by some that they must await a ‘laissez-faire’ market solution to the obscenity-pornography problem, paradoxically ‘by people who have never otherwise had a kind word to say for laissez-faire,’ particularly in solving urban, commercial, and environmental pollution problems.”

The decision contains many other homing chickens of this kind—an entire barnyard of them—many more than I have space to quote. But these are sufficient to give you the nature, style and spirit of that ruling.

In his dissenting opinion, Justice Brennan, joined by Justice Stewart and Marshall, offers some good arguments to support the conclusion that censorship in regard to consenting adults is unconstitutional. But he wavers, hesitates to go that far, and tries to compromise, to strike “a better balance between the guarantee of free expression and the States’ legitimate interests.”

He concedes the notion that obscene material is not protected by the First Amendment, but expresses an anxious concern over the Court’s failure to draw a clear line between protected and unprotected speech. He cites the chaotic, contradictory record of the Court’s decisions in “obscenity” cases, but sidesteps the issue by saying, in a footnote: “Whether or not a class of ‘obscene’ and thus entirely unprotected speech does exist, I am forced to conclude that the class is incapable of definition with sufficient clarity to withstand attack on vagueness grounds. Accordingly, it is on principles of the void-for-vagueness doctrine that this opinion exclusively relies.”

Justice Brennan speaks eloquently about the danger of vague laws, and quotes Chief Justice Warren, who said that “the constitutional requirement of definiteness is violated by a criminal statute that fails to give a person of ordinary intelligence fair notice that his contemplated conduct is forbidden by the statute.” But Justice Brennan does not mention the antitrust laws, which do just that. He states: “The resulting level of uncertainty is utterly intolerable, not alone because it makes ‘bookselling . . . a hazardous profession,’ . . . but as well because it invites arbitrary and erratic enforcement of the law.” He deplores the fact that “obscenity” judgments are now made on “a case-by-case, sight-by-sight” basis. He observes that the Court has been struggling “to fend off legislative attempts ‘to pass to the courts—and ultimately to the Supreme Court—the awesome task of making case by case at once the criminal and the constitutional law.’ ” But he does not mention the living hell of antitrust, the grim monument to law made case by case.

However, a greater respect for principles and a greater understanding of their consequences are revealed in Justice Brennan’s dissenting opinion than in the majority decision. He declares that on the basis of that majority decision: “it is hard to see how state-ordered regimentation of our minds can ever be forestalled. For if a State may, in an effort to maintain or create a particular moral tone, prescribe what its citizens cannot read or cannot see, then it would seem to follow that in pursuit of that same objective a State could decree that its citizens must read certain books or must view certain films.”

The best statement, however, is made again by Justice Douglas, who ends his forceful dissent with the words: “But our society—unlike most in the world—presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that make the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas. That is the philosophy of the First Amendment; and it is the article of faith that sets us apart from most nations in the world.”

I concur—except that it is not an “article of faith,” but a provable, rational conviction.

In the life of a nation, the law plays the same role as a decision-making process of thought does in the life of an individual. An individual makes decisions by applying his basic premises to a specific choice—premises which he can change, but seldom does. The basic premises of a nation’s laws are set by its dominant political philosophy and implemented by the courts, whose task is to determine the application of broad principles to specific cases; in this task, the equivalent of basic premises is precedent, which can be challenged, but seldom is.

How far a loosely worded piece of legislation can go in the role of precedent, is horrifyingly demonstrated by the Supreme Court’s majority decision in another one of the five “obscenity” cases, U.S. v. Orito. This case involves a man charged with knowingly transporting obscene material by common carrier in interstate commerce.

The clause giving Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce is one of the major errors in the Constitution. That clause, more than any other, was the crack in the Constitution’s foundation, the entering wedge of statism, which permitted the gradual establishment of the welfare state. But I would venture to say that the framers of the Constitution could not have conceived of what that clause has now become. If, in writing it, one of their goals was to facilitate the flow of trade and prevent the establishment of trade barriers among the states, that clause has reached the opposite destination. You may now expect fifty different frontiers inside this country, with customs officials searching your luggage and pockets for books or magazines permitted in one state but prohibited in another.

Chief Justice Burger’s decision declares, quoting an earlier Court decision: “The motive and purpose of a regulation of interstate commerce are matters for the legislative judgment upon the exercise of which the Constitution places no restriction and over which the courts are given no control.” Such an interpretation means that legislative judgment is given an absolute power, beyond the restraint of any principle, beyond the reach of any checks or balances. This is an outrageous instance of context-dropping: the Constitution, taken as a whole, is a fundamental restriction on the power of the government, whether in the legislative or in any other branch.

“It is sufficient to reiterate,” Mr. Burger declares, “the well-settled principle that Congress may impose relevant conditions and requirements on those who use the channels of interstate commerce in order that those channels will not become the means of promoting or spreading evil, whether of a physical, moral or economic nature.” As if this were not clear enough, a footnote is added: “Congress can certainly regulate interstate commerce to the extent of forbidding and punishing the use of such commerce as an agency to promote immorality, dishonesty, or the spread of any evil or harm to the people of other states from the state of origin.” Immorality, evil and harm—by what standard?

The only rights which the five majority decisions leave you are the right to read and see what you wish in your own room, but not outside it—and the right to think whatever you please in the privacy of your own mind. But this is a right which even a totalitarian dictatorship is unable to suppress. (You are free to think in Soviet Russia, but not to act on your thinking.) Again, Justice Douglas’s dissent is the only voice raised in desperate protest: “Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds.”

The division between the conservative and the liberal viewpoints in the opinions of the Supreme Court, is sharper and clearer than in less solemn writings or in purely political debates. By the nature of its task, the Supreme Court has to and does become the voice of philosophy.

The necessity to deal with principles makes the members of the Supreme Court seem archetypical of the ideas—almost, of the soul—of the two political camps they represent. They were not chosen as archetypes: in the undefined, indeterminate, contradictory chaos of political views loosely labeled “conservative” and “liberal,” it would be impossible to choose an essential characteristic or a typical representative. Yet, as one reads the Supreme Court’s opinions, the essential premises stand out with an oddly bright, revealing clarity—and one grasps that under all the lesser differences and inconsistencies of their followers, these are the basic premises of one political camp or of the other. It is almost as if one were seeing not these antagonists’ philosophy, but their sense of life.

The subject of the five “obscenity” cases was not obscenity as such—which is a marginal and inconsequential matter—but a much deeper issue: the sexual aspect of man’s life. Sex is not a separate nor a purely physical attribute of man’s character: it involves a complex integration of all his fundamental values. So it is not astonishing that cases dealing with sex (even in its ugliest manifestations) would involve the influence of all the branches of philosophy. We have seen the influence of ethics, epistemology, politics, esthetics (this last as the immediate victim of the debate). What about the fifth branch of philosophy, the basic one, the fundamental of the science of fundamentals: metaphysics? Its influence is revealed in—and explains—the inner contradictions of each camp. The metaphysical issue is their view of man’s nature.

Both camps hold the same premise—the mind-body dichotomy—but choose opposite sides of this lethal fallacy.

The conservatives want freedom to act in the material realm; they tend to oppose government control of production, of industry, of trade, of business, of physical goods, of material wealth. But they advocate government control of man’s spirit, i.e., man’s consciousness; they advocate the State’s right to impose censorship, to determine moral values, to create and enforce a governmental establishment of morality, to rule the intellect. The liberals want freedom to act in the spiritual realm; they oppose censorship, they oppose government control of ideas, of the arts, of the press, of education (note their concern with “academic freedom”). But they advocate government control of material production, of business, of employment, of wages, of profits, of all physical property—they advocate it all the way down to total expropriation.

The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories—with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe—but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.

Yet it is the conservatives who are predominantly religionists, who proclaim the superiority of the soul over the body, who represent what I call the “mystics of spirit.” And it is the liberals who are predominantly materialists, who regard man as an aggregate of meat, and who represent what I call the “mystics of muscle.”

This is merely a paradox, not a contradiction: each camp wants to control the realm it regards as metaphysically important; each grants freedom only to the activities it despises. Observe that the conservatives insult and demean the rich or those who succeed in material production, regarding them as morally inferior—and that the liberals treat ideas as a cynical con game. “Control,” to both camps, means the power to rule by physical force. Neither camp holds freedom as a value. The conservatives want to rule man’s consciousness; the liberals, his body.

On that premise, neither camp has permitted itself to observe that force is a killer in both realms. The conservatives, frozen in their mystic dogmas, are paralyzed, terrified and impotent in the realm of ideas. The liberals, waiting for the unearned, are paralyzed, terrified and, frequently, incompetent in or hostile to the realm of material production (observe the ecology crusade).

Why do both camps cling to blind faith in the power of physical force? I quote from Atlas Shrugged: “Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine [the mind-body dichotomy] was designed to destroy? It was man’s mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart.” Both camps, conservatives and liberals alike, are united in their hatred of man’s mind—i.e., of reason. The conservatives reject reason in favor of faith; the liberals, in favor of emotions. The conservatives are either lethargically indifferent to intellectual issues, or actively anti-intellectual. The liberals are smarter in this respect: they use intellectual weapons to destroy and negate the intellect (they call it “to redefine”). When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another—except brute, physical force.

I quote from Atlas Shrugged: “. . . the men you call materialists and spiritualists are only two halves of the same dissected human, forever seeking completion, but seeking it by swinging from the destruction of the flesh to the destruction of the soul and vice versa . . . seeking any refuge against reality, any form of escape from the mind.” Since the two camps are only two sides of the same coin—the same counterfeit coin—they are now moving closer and closer together. Observe the fundamental similarity of their philosophical views: in metaphysics—the mind-body dichotomy; in epistemology—irrationalism; in ethics—altruism; in politics—statism.

The conservatives used to claim that they were loyal to tradition—while the liberals boasted of being “progressive.” But observe that it is Chief Justice Burger, a conservative, who propounds a militant collectivism, and formulates general principles that stretch the power of the State way beyond the issue of pornography—and it is Justice Douglas, a liberal, who invokes “the traditions of a free society” and pleads for “our constitutional heritage.”

If someone had said in 1890 that antitrust laws for the businessmen would, sooner or later, lead to censorship for the intellectuals, no one would have believed it. You can see it today. When Chief Justice Burger declares to the liberals that they cannot explain why rights “should be severely restrained in the marketplace of goods and money, but not in the marketplace of pornography,” I am tempted to feel that it serves them right—except that all of us are the victims.

If this censorship ruling is not revoked, the next step will be more explicit: it will replace the words “marketplace of pornography” with the words “marketplace of ideas.” This will serve as a precedent for the liberals, enabling them to determine which ideas they wish to suppress—in the name of the “social interest”—when their turn comes. No one can win a contest of this kind—except the State.

I do not know how the conservative members of the Supreme Court can bear to look at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, where his words are engraved in marble: “I have sworn . . . eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

Permit me to add without presumptuousness: “So have I.”

16

Fairness Doctrine for Education

1972

The “Fairness Doctrine” is a messy little makeshift of the mixed economy, and a poor substitute for freedom of speech. It has, however, served as a minimal retarder of the collectivist trend: it has prevented the Establishment’s total takeover of the airwaves. For this reason—as a temporary measure in a grave national emergency—the fairness doctrine should now be invoked in behalf of education.

The doctrine is a typical product of the socialist sentimentality that dreams of combining government ownership with intellectual freedom. As applied to television and radio broadcasting, the fairness doctrine demands that equal opportunity be given to all sides of a controversial issue—on the grounds of the notion that “the people owns the airwaves” and, therefore, all factions of “the people” should have equal access to their communal property.

The trouble with the fairness doctrine is that it cannot be applied fairly. Like any ideological product of the mixed economy, it is a vague, indefinable approximation and, therefore, an instrument of pressure-group warfare. Who determines which issues are controversial? Who chooses the representatives of the different sides in a given controversy? If there are too many conflicting viewpoints, which are to be given a voice and which are to be kept silent? Who is “the people” and who is not?

It is clear that the individual’s views are barred altogether and that the “fairness” is extended only to groups. The formula employed by the television stations in New York declares that they recognize their obligation to provide equal time to “significant opposing viewpoints.” Who determines which viewpoint is “significant”? Is the standard qualitative or quantitative? It is obviously this last, as one may observe in practice: whenever an answer is given to a TV editorial, it is given by a representative of some group involved in the debated subject.

The fairness doctrine (as well as the myth of public ownership) is based on the favorite illusion of the mushy socialists, i.e., those who want to combine force and freedom, as distinguished from the bloody socialists, i.e., the communists and the fascists. That illusion is the belief that the people (“the masses”) would be essentially unanimous, that dissenting groups would be rare and easily accommodated, that a monolithic majority-will would prevail, and that any injustice done would be done only to recalcitrant individuals, who, in socialist theory, do not count anyway. (For a discussion of why the airwaves should be private property, see “The Property Status of Airwaves” in my book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.)

In practice, the fairness doctrine has led to the precarious rule of a “centrist” attitude: of timidity, compromise and fear (with the “center” slithering slowly, inexorably to the left)—i.e., control by the Establishment, limited only by the remnants of a tradition of freedom: by lip service to “impartiality,” by fear of being caught at too obvious an “unfairness,” and by the practice of “window dressing,” which consists in some occasional moments of air time tossed to some representatives of extreme and actually significant opposing viewpoints. Such a policy, by its very nature, is temporary. Nevertheless, this “window dressing” is the last chance that the advocates of freedom have, as far as the airwaves are concerned.

There is no equivalent of the fairness doctrine in the field which is much more important to a nation’s future than its airwaves—the field which determines a country’s intellectual trends, i.e., the dominant ideas in people’s minds, in the culture, in the Establishment, in the press and, ultimately, on the air: the field of higher education.

So long as higher education was provided predominantly by private colleges and universities, no problem of unfairness existed. A private school has the right to teach any ideas of its owners’ choice, and to exclude all opposing ideas; but it has no power to force such exclusion on the rest of the country. The opponents have the right to establish schools of their own and to teach their ideas or a wider spectrum of viewpoints, if they so choose. The competition of the free marketplace of ideas does the rest, determining every school’s success or failure—which, historically, was the course of the development of the great private universities. But the growth of government power, of state universities, and of taxation brought the private universities under a growing control by and dependence on the government. (On this point, see also “Tax Credits for Education,” in The Ayn Rand Letter of March 13, 1972.) The current bill providing Federal “aid” to higher education will make the control and dependence all but total, thus establishing a governmental monopoly on education.

The most ominously crucial question now hanging over this country’s future is: what will our universities teach at our expense and without our consent? What ideas will be propagated or excluded? (This question applies to all public and semi-public institutions of learning. By “semi-public” I mean those formerly private institutions which are to be supported in part by public funds and controlled in full by the government.)

The government has no right to set itself up as the arbiter of ideas and, therefore, its establishments—the public and semi-public schools—have no right to teach a single viewpoint, excluding all others. They have no right to serve the beliefs of any one group of citizens, leaving others ignored and silenced. They have no right to impose inequality on the citizens who bear equally the burden of supporting them.

As in the case of governmental grants to science, it is viciously wrong to force an individual to pay for the teaching of ideas diametrically opposed to his own; it is a profound violation of his rights. The violation becomes monstrous if his ideas are excluded from such public teaching: this means that he is forced to pay for the propagation of that which he regards as false and evil, and for the suppression of that which he regards as true and good. If there is a viler form of injustice, I challenge any resident of Washington, D.C., to name it.

Yet this is the form of injustice committed by the present policy of an overwhelming majority of our public and semi-public universities.

There is a widespread impression that television and the press are biased and slanted to the left. But they are models of impartiality and fairness compared to the ferocious intolerance, the bias, the prejudices, the distortions, the savage obscurantism now running riot in most of our institutions of higher learning—in regard to matters deeper than mere politics. With rare exceptions, each of the various departments and disciplines is ruled by its own particular clique that gets in and virtually excludes the teaching of any theory or viewpoint other than its own. If a private school permits this, it has the right to do so; a public or semi-public school has not.

Controversy is the hallmark of our age; there is no subject, particularly in the humanities, which is not regarded in fundamentally different ways by many different schools of thought. (This is not to say that all of them are valid, but merely to observe that they exist.) Yet most university departments, particularly in the leading universities, offer a single viewpoint (camouflaged by minor variations) and maintain their monopoly by the simple means of evasion: by ignoring anything that does not fit their viewpoint, by pretending that no others exist, and by reducing dissent to trivia, thus leaving fundamentals unchallenged.

Most of today’s philosophy departments are dominated by Linguistic Analysis (the unsuccessful product of crossbreeding between philosophy and grammar, a union whose offspring is less viable than a mule), with some remnants of its immediate progenitors, Pragmatism and Logical Positivism, still clinging to its bandwagon. The more “broadminded” departments include an opposition—the other side of the same Kantian coin, Existentialism. (One side claims that philosophy is grammar, the other that philosophy is feelings.)

Psychology departments have a sprinkling of Freudians, but are dominated by Behaviorism, whose leader is B. F. Skinner. (Here the controversy is between the claim that man is moved by innate ideas, and the claim that he has no ideas at all.)

Economics departments are dominated by Marxism, which is taken straight or on the rocks, in the form of Keynesianism.

What the political science departments and the business administration schools are dominated by is best illustrated by the following example: in a distinguished Ivy League university, a dean of the School of Business recently suggested that it be renamed “School of Management,” explaining that profit-making is unpopular with students and that most of them want to work for non-profit institutions, such as government or charities.

Sociology departments are dominated by the fact that no one has ever defined what sociology is.

English departments are dominated by The New York Times Book Review.

I do not know the state of the various departments in the physical sciences, but we have seen an indication of it: the “scientific” writings of the ecologists.

As a result of today’s educational policies, the majority of college graduates are virtually illiterate, in the literal and the wider sense of the word. They do not necessarily accept their teachers’ views, but they do not know that any other views exist or have ever existed. There are philosophy majors who graduate without having taken a single course on Aristotle (except as part of general surveys). There are economics majors who have no idea of what capitalism is or was, theoretically or historically, and not the faintest notion of the mechanism of a free market. There are literature majors who have never heard of Victor Hugo (but have acquired a full vocabulary of four-letter words).

So long as there were variations among university departments in the choice of their dominant prejudices—and so long as there were some distinguished survivors of an earlier, freer view of education—non-conformists had some chance. But with the spread of “unpolarized” unity and Federal “encouragement”—the spread of the same gray, heavy-footed, deaf-dumb-and-blind, hysterically stagnant dogma—that chance is vanishing. It is becoming increasingly harder for an independent mind to get or keep a job on a university faculty—or for the independent mind of a student to remain independent.

This is the logical result of generations of post-Kantian statist philosophy and of the vicious circle which it set up: as philosophy degenerates into irrationalism, it promotes the growth of government power, which, in turn, promotes the degeneration of philosophy.

It is a paradox of our age of skepticism—with its proliferations of bromides to the effect that “Man can be certain of nothing,” “Reality is unknowable,” “There are no hard facts or hard knowledge—everything is soft [except the point of a gun]”—that the overbearing dogmatism of university departments would make a medieval enforcer of religious dogma squirm with envy. It is a paradox but not a contradiction, because it is the necessary consequence—and purpose—of skepticism, which disarms its opponents by declaring: “How can you be sure?” and thus enables its leaders to propound absolutes at whim.

It is this kind of intellectual atmosphere and these types of cynical, bigoted, envy-ridden, decadent cliques that the Federal Government now proposes to support with public funds, and with the piously reiterated assurance that the profiteering institutions will retain their full freedom to teach whatever they please, that there will be “no strings attached.”

Well, there is one string which all the opponents of the intellectual status quo now have the right to expect and demand: the fairness doctrine.

If the public allegedly owns universities, as it allegedly owns the airwaves, then for all the same reasons no specific ideology can be permitted to hold a monopoly in any department of any public or semi-public university. In all such institutions, every “significant viewpoint” must be given representation. (By “ideology,” in this context, I mean a system of ideas derived from a theoretical base or frame of reference.)

The same considerations that led to the fairness doctrine in broadcasting, apply to educational institutions, only more crucially, more urgently, more desperately so, because much more is involved than some ephemeral electronic sounds or images, because the mind of the young and the future of human knowledge are at stake.

Would this doctrine work in regard to universities? It would work as well—and as badly—as it has worked in broadcasting. It would work not as a motor of freedom, but as a brake on total regimentation. It would not achieve actual fairness, impartiality or objectivity. But it would act as a temporary impediment to intellectual monopolies, a retarder of the Establishment’s takeover, a breach in the mental lethargy of the status quo, and, occasionally, an opening for a brilliant dissenter who would know how to make it count.

Remember that dissenters, in today’s academic world, are not the advocates of mysticism-altruism-collectivism, who are the dominant cliques, the representatives of the entrenched status quo. The dissenters are the advocates of reason-individualism—capitalism. (If there are universities somewhere that bar the teaching of overtly vicious theories, such as communism, the advocates of these theories would be entitled to the protection of the fairness doctrine, so long as the university received government funds—because there are tax-paying citizens who are communists. The protection would apply to the right to teach ideas—not to criminal actions, such as campus riots or any form of physical violence.)

Since the fairness doctrine cannot be defined objectively, its application to specific cases would depend in large part on subjective interpretations, which would often be arbitrary and, at best, approximate. But there is no such approximation in the universities of Soviet Russia, as there was not in the universities of Nazi Germany. The purpose of the approximation is to preserve, to keep alive in men’s minds, the principle of intellectual freedom—until the time when it can be implemented fully once more, in free, i.e., private, universities.

The main function of the fairness doctrine would be a switch of the burden of fear, from the victim to the entrenched gang—and a switch of moral right, from the entrenched gang to the victim. A dissenter would not have to be in the position of a martyr facing the power of a vast Establishment with all the inter-lockings of unknowable cliques, with the mysterious lines of secret pull leading to omnipotent governmental authorities. He would have the protection of a recognized right. On the other hand, the Establishment’s hatchet men would have to be cautious, knowing that there is a limitation (at least, in principle) on the irresponsible power granted by the use of public funds “with no strings attached.”

But the fight for the fairness doctrine would require intellectual clarity, objectivity, and good, i.e., contextual, judgment—because the elements to consider are extremely complex. For instance, the concept of “equal time” would not be entirely relevant: an hour in the class of an able professor can undo the harm done by a semester in the classes of the incompetent ones. And it would be impossible to burden the students with courses on every viewpoint in every subject.

There is no precise way to determine which professors’ viewpoints are the appropriate opposites of which—particularly in the midst of today’s prevalent eclecticism. The policy of lip service to impartiality and of window dressing is practiced in many schools; and the eclecticism in some of the smaller colleges is such that no specific viewpoint can be discerned at all. It is the cases of extremes, of ideological unity on the faculty and monopolistic monotony in teaching—particularly in the leading universities (which set the trends for all the rest)—that require protest by an informed public opinion, by the dissenting faculty members, and by the main victims: the students.

Intellectual diversity and ideological opposites can be determined only in terms of essentials—but it is an essential of modern philosophy to deny the existence or validity of essentials (which are called “oversimpli-fication”). The result is that some advocates of a guaranteed minimum income are regarded as defenders of capitalism, advocates of theories of innate ideas are regarded as champions of reason, the tribal conformity of hippies is regarded as an expression of individualism, etc. And most college students have lost or never developed the ability to think in terms of essentials.

But—as in the case of political election campaigns, in which essentials are evaded more stringently than in modern universities—everyone knows implicitly which side he is for or against, though no public voices care to identify the issues explicitly. The consistency of such politicians’ or professors’ followers is remarkable for men who claim man’s inability to distinguish essentials. (Which is one clue to the motives of the advocates of the “non-simplified,” i.e., concrete-bound, approach.)

The ability explicitly to identify the essentials of any subject he studies, is the first requirement of a student who would want to fight for the fairness doctrine. Then, if he sees that he is offered only one viewpoint on a given fundamental issue—and knows that other “significant” viewpoints exist—he can protest, on the grounds of his right to know and to make an informed choice.

“Significance,” in this context, should be gauged by one of two standards: the degree of historical influence achieved by a given theory or, if the theory is contemporary, its value in providing original answers to fundamental questions. As in the case of broadcasting, it would be impossible to present every individual’s viewpoint. But if the great historical schools of thought were presented, the fairness doctrine would achieve its purpose (or perform its “trustbusting” function, if you will): the breakup of that one-sided indoctrination which is the hallmark of government-controlled schools.

In all fields that the government enters (outside of its proper sphere), two motives—one vicious, the other virtuous—produce the same results. In the case of schools, the vicious motive is power-lust, which prompts a teacher or an educational bureaucrat to indoctrinate students with a single viewpoint (of the kind that disarms them mentally, stunts their critical faculty, and conditions them to the passive acceptance of memorized dogma). The virtuous motive is a teacher’s integrity: a man of integrity has firm convictions about what he regards as true; he teaches according to his convictions, and he does not propagate or support the theories which he regards as false (though he is able to present them objectively, when necessary). Such a teacher would be invaluable in a private university; but in a government-controlled school, his monopolistic position makes him as tyrannical an indoctrinator as the power-luster. (The solution is not what the opponents of any firm convictions suggest: that the honest teacher turn into a flexible pragmatist who’ll switch his ideas from moment to moment, or into a skeptical pig who’ll eat anything.) The consequences of any attempt to rule or to support intellectual activities by means of force will be evil, regardless of motives. (This does not mean that dissent is essential to intellectual freedom: the possibility of dissent, is.)

Who would enforce the fairness doctrine in education? Not the executive branch of the government, which is the distributor of the funds and has a vested interest in uniformity, i.e., conformity. The doctrine has to be invoked and upheld by private individuals and groups. This is another opportunity for those who wish to take practical action against the growth of statism. This issue could become the goal of an ad hoc movement, uniting all men of good will, appealing (in the name of intellectual justice) to whatever element of nineteenth-century liberalism still exists in the minds of academic liberals—as distinguished from the Marcuseans, who openly propose to drive all dissenters off the university faculties. (Is the Marcuseans’ goal to be achieved at public expense and with government support?)

If a fairness movement enlisted the talents of some intelligent young lawyers, it could conceivably find support in the courts of law, which are still supposed to protect an individual’s civil rights. The legal precedent for a fairness doctrine is to be found in the field of broadcasting. The practical implementation, i.e., the challenge to the Establishment in specific cases, is up to the voluntary effort, the dedication, and the persuasiveness of individuals.

It must be remembered firmly that a fairness doctrine is not a string on the universities’ freedom, but a string on the government’s power to distribute public funds. That power has already demonstrated its potential for fantastically evil and blatantly unconstitutional control over the universities. Under threat of withholding government funds and contracts, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare is now imposing racial and sexual quotas on university faculties, demanding that some unspecified number of teachers consist of ethnic minority-members and women. To add insult to injury, HEW insists that this is not a demand for quotas, nor a demand to place racial considerations above merit, but a demand for “proof” that a university (e.g., Columbia) has made an effort “to find” teachers of equal merit among those groups. Try and prove it. Try and prove that you have “searched.” Try to measure and prove the various applicants’ merit—when no precise, objective standards of comparison are given or known. The result is that almost any female or minority-member is given preference over anyone else. The consequence is a growing anxiety about their future among young teachers who are male and do not belong to an ethnic minority: they are now the victims of the most obscenely vicious discrimination—obscene, because perpetrated in the name of fighting discrimination.

If the rights of various physiological minorities are so loudly claimed today, what about the rights of intellectual minorities?

I have said that the fairness doctrine is a product of the mixed economy. The whole precarious structure of a mixed economy, in its transition from freedom to totalitarian statism, rests on the power of pressure groups. But pressure-group warfare is a game that two (or more) ideological sides can play as well as one. The disadvantage of the statists is the fact that up to the last minute (and even beyond it) they have to play under cover of the slogans of individual rights and freedom. The advocates of freedom can beat them at their own game—by taking them at their word, but playing it straight. The time is right for it. The Establishment is not very popular at present, neither politically nor intellectually, neither with the country at large nor with many of its own members. A movement of the serious students and of the better teachers, defending the rights of intellectual minorities and demanding a fairness doctrine for education, would have a good chance to grow and succeed. But taking part in such a movement would be much more difficult and demanding (and rewarding) than chanting slogans and dancing ring-around-a-rosy on some campus lawn.

If student minorities have succeeded in demanding that they be given courses on such subjects as Zen Buddhism, guerrilla warfare, Swahili, and astrology, then an intellectual student minority can succeed in demanding courses on, for instance, Aristotle in philosophy, von Mises in economics, Montessori in education, Hugo in literature. At the very least, such courses would save the students’ mind; potentially, they would save the culture.

No, the fairness doctrine would not reform the universities’ faculties and administrations. There would be a great deal of hypocrisy, of compromising, of cheating, of hiring weak advocates to teach the unfashionable theories, of “tokenism,” of window dressing.

But think of what one window can do for a sealed, airless, lightless room.

17

What Can One Do?

1972

This question is frequently asked by people who are concerned about the state of today’s world and want to correct it. More often than not, it is asked in a form that indicates the cause of their helplessness: “What can one person do?”

I was in the process of preparing this article when I received a letter from a reader who presents the problem (and the error) still more eloquently: “How can an individual propagate your philosophy on a scale large enough to effect the immense changes which must be made in every walk of American life in order to create the kind of ideal country which you picture?”

If this is the way the question is posed, the answer is: he can’t. No one can change a country single-handed. So the first question to ask is: why do people approach the problem this way?

Suppose you were a doctor in the midst of an epidemic. You would not ask: “How can one doctor treat millions of patients and restore the whole country to perfect health?” You would know, whether you were alone or part of an organized medical campaign, that you have to treat as many people as you can reach, according to the best of your ability, and that nothing else is possible.

It is a remnant of mystic philosophy—specifically, of the mind-body split—that makes people approach intellectual issues in a manner they would not use to deal with physical problems. They would not seek to stop an epidemic overnight, or to build a skyscraper single-handed. Nor would they refrain from renovating their own crumbling house, on the grounds that they are unable to rebuild the entire city. But in the realm of man’s consciousness, the realm of ideas, they still tend to regard knowledge as irrelevant, and they expect to perform instantaneous miracles, somehow—or they paralyze themselves by projecting an impossible goal.

(The reader whose letter I quoted was doing the right things, but felt that some wider scale of action was required. Many others merely ask the question, but do nothing.)

If you are seriously interested in fighting for a better world, begin by identifying the nature of the problem. The battle is primarily intellectual (philosophical), not political. Politics is the last consequence, the practical implementation, of the fundamental (metaphysical-epistemological-ethical) ideas that dominate a given nation’s culture. You cannot fight or change the consequences without fighting and changing the cause; nor can you attempt any practical implementation without knowing what you want to implement.

In an intellectual battle, you do not need to convert everyone. History is made by minorities—or, more precisely, history is made by intellectual movements, which are created by minorities. Who belongs to these minorities? Anyone who is able and willing actively to concern himself with intellectual issues. Here, it is not quantity, but quality, that counts (the quality—and consistency—of the ideas one is advocating).

An intellectual movement does not start with organized action. Whom would one organize? A philosophical battle is a battle for men’s minds, not an attempt to enlist blind followers. Ideas can be propagated only by men who understand them. An organized movement has to be preceded by an educational campaign, which requires trained—self-trained—teachers (self-trained in the sense that a philosopher can offer you the material of knowledge, but it is your own mind that has to absorb it). Such training is the first requirement for being a doctor during an ideological epidemic—and the precondition of any attempt to “change the world.”

“The immense changes which must be made in every walk of American life” cannot be made singly, piecemeal or “retail,” so to speak; an army of crusaders would not be enough to do it. But the factor that underlies and determines every aspect of human life is philosophy; teach men the right philosophy—and their own minds will do the rest. Philosophy is the wholesaler in human affairs.

Man cannot exist without some form of philosophy, i.e., some comprehensive view of life. Most men are not intellectual innovators, but they are receptive to ideas, are able to judge them critically and to choose the right course, when and if it is offered. There are also a great many men who are indifferent to ideas and to anything beyond the concrete-bound range of the immediate moment; such men accept subconsciously whatever is offered by the culture of their time, and swing blindly with any chance current. They are merely social ballast—be they day laborers or company presidents—and, by their own choice, irrelevant to the fate of the world.

Today, most people are acutely aware of our cultural-ideological vacuum; they are anxious, confused, and groping for answers. Are you able to enlighten them?

Can you answer their questions? Can you offer them a consistent case? Do you know how to correct their errors? Are you immune from the fallout of the constant barrage aimed at the destruction of reason—and can you provide others with antimissile missiles? A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war.

If you want to influence a country’s intellectual trend, the first step is to bring order to your own ideas and integrate them into a consistent case, to the best of your knowledge and ability. This does not mean memorizing and reciting slogans and principles, Objectivist or otherwise: knowledge necessarily includes the ability to apply abstract principles to concrete problems, to recognize the principles in specific issues, to demonstrate them, and to advocate a consistent course of action. This does not require omniscience or omnipotence; it is the subconscious expectation of automatic omniscience in oneself and in others that defeats many would-be crusaders (and serves as an excuse for doing nothing). What is required is honesty—intellectual honesty, which consists in knowing what one does know, constantly expanding one’s knowledge, and never evading or failing to correct a contradiction. This means: the development of an active mind as a permanent attribute.

When or if your convictions are in your conscious, orderly control, you will be able to communicate them to others. This does not mean that you must make philosophical speeches when unnecessary and inappropriate. You need philosophy to back you up and give you a consistent case when you deal with or discuss specific issues.

If you like condensations (provided you bear in mind their full meaning), I will say: when you ask “What can one do?”—the answer is “SPEAK” (provided you know what you are saying).

A few suggestions: do not wait for a national audience. Speak on any scale open to you, large or small—to your friends, your associates, your professional organizations, or any legitimate public forum. You can never tell when your words will reach the right mind at the right time. You will see no immediate results—but it is of such activities that public opinion is made.

Do not pass up a chance to express your views on important issues. Write letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines, to TV and radio commentators and, above all, to your Congressman (who depend on their constituents). If your letters are brief and rational (rather than incoherently emotional), they will have more influence than you suspect.

The opportunities to speak are all around you. I suggest that you make the following experiment: take an ideological “inventory” of one week, i.e., note how many times people utter the wrong political, social and moral notions as if these were self-evident truths, with your silent sanction. Then make it a habit to object to such remarks—no, not to make lengthy speeches, which are seldom appropriate, but merely to say: “I don’t agree.” (And be prepared to explain why, if the speaker wants to know.) This is one of the best ways to stop the spread of vicious bromides. (If the speaker is innocent, it will help him; if he is not, it will undercut his confidence the next time.) Most particularly, do not keep silent when your own ideas and values are being attacked.

Do not “proselytize” indiscriminately, i.e., do not force discussions or arguments on those who are not interested or not willing to argue. It is not your job to save everyone’s soul. If you do the things that are in your power, you will not feel guilty about not doing—“somehow”—the things that are not.

Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements, in order to “do something.” By “ideological” (in this context), I mean groups or movements proclaiming some vaguely generalized, undefined (and, usually, contradictory) political goals. (E.g., the Conservative Party, which subordinates reason to faith, and substitutes theocracy for capitalism; or the “libertarian” hippies, who subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for capitalism.) To join such groups means to reverse the philosophical hierarchy and to sell out fundamental principles for the sake of some superficial political action which is bound to fail. It means that you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies. (For a discussion of the reasons, see “The Anatomy of Compromise” in my book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.)

The only groups one may properly join today are ad hoc committees, i.e., groups organized to achieve a single, specific, clearly defined goal, on which men of differing views can agree. In such cases, no one may attempt to ascribe his views to the entire membership, or to use the group to serve some hidden ideological purpose (and this has to be watched very, very vigilantly).

I am omitting the most important contribution to an intellectual movement—writing—because this discussion is addressed to men of every profession. Books, essays, articles are a movement’s permanent fuel, but it is worse than futile to attempt to become a writer solely for the sake of a “cause.” Writing, like any other work, is a profession and must be approached as such.

It is a mistake to think that an intellectual movement requires some special duty or self-sacrificial effort on your part. It requires something much more difficult: a profound conviction that ideas are important to you and to your own life. If you integrate that conviction to every aspect of your life, you will find many opportunities to enlighten others.

The reader whose letter I quoted, indicates the proper pattern of action: “As a teacher of astronomy, for several years, I have been actively engaged in demonstrating the power of reason and the absolutism of reality to my students . . . I have also made an effort to introduce your works to my associates, following their reading with discussion when possible; and have made it a point to insist on the use of reason in all of my personal dealings.”

These are some of the right things to do, as often and as widely as possible.

But that reader’s question implied a search for some shortcut in the form of an organized movement. No shortcut is possible.

It is too late for a movement of people who hold a conventional mixture of contradictory philosophical notions. It is too early for a movement of people dedicated to a philosophy of reason. But it is never too late or too early to propagate the right ideas—except under a dictatorship.

If a dictatorship ever comes to this country, it will be by the default of those who keep silent. We are still free enough to speak. Do we have time? No one can tell. But time is on our side—because we have an indestructible weapon and an invincible ally (if we learn how to use them): reason and reality.

18

Don’t Let It Go

1971

In order to form a hypothesis about the future of an individual, one must consider three elements: his present course of action, his conscious convictions, and his sense of life. The same elements must be considered in forming a hypothesis about the future of a nation.

A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. It represents an individual’s unidentified philosophy (which can be identified—and corrected, if necessary); it affects his choice of values and his emotional responses, influences his actions, and, frequently, clashes with his conscious convictions. (For a detailed discussion, see “Philosophy and Sense of Life” in my book The Romantic Manifesto.)

A nation, like an individual, has a sense of life, which is expressed not in its formal culture, but in its “life style”—in the kinds of actions and attitudes which people take for granted and believe to be self-evident, but which are produced by complex evaluations involving a fundamental view of man’s nature.

A “nation” is not a mystic or supernatural entity: it is a large number of individuals who live in the same geographical locality under the same political system. A nation’s culture is the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men, which their fellow-citizens have accepted in whole or in part, and which have influenced the nation’s way of life. Since a culture is a complex battleground of different ideas and influences, to speak of a “culture” is to speak only of the dominant ideas, always allowing for the existence of dissenters and exceptions.

(The dominance of certain ideas is not necessarily determined by the number of their adherents: it may be determined by majority acceptance, or by the greater activity and persistence of a given faction, or by default, i.e., the failure of the opposition, or—when a country is free—by a combination of persistence and truth. In any case, ideas and the resultant culture are the product and active concern of a minority. Who constitutes this minority? Whoever chooses to be concerned.)

Similarly, the concept of a nation’s sense of life does not mean that every member of a given nation shares it, but only that a dominant majority shares its essentials in various degrees. In this matter, however, the dominance is numerical: while most men may be indifferent to cultural-ideological trends, no man can escape the process of subconscious integration which forms his sense of life.

A nation’s sense of life is formed by every individual child’s early impressions of the world around him: of the ideas he is taught (which he may or may not accept) and of the way of acting he observes and evaluates (which he may evaluate correctly or not). And although there are exceptions at both ends of the psychological spectrum—men whose sense of life is better (truer philosophically) or worse than that of their fellow-citizens—the majority develop the essentials of the same subconscious philosophy. This is the source of what we observe as “national characteristics.”

A nation’s political trends are the equivalent of a man’s course of action and are determined by its culture. A nation’s culture is the equivalent of a man’s conscious convictions. Just as an individual’s sense of life can clash with his conscious convictions, hampering or defeating his actions, so a nation’s sense of life can clash with its culture, hampering or defeating its political course. Just as an individual’s sense of life can be better or worse than his conscious convictions, so can a nation’s. And just as an individual who has never translated his sense of life into conscious convictions is in terrible danger—no matter how good his subconscious values—so is a nation.

This is the position of America today.

If America is to be saved from destruction—specifically, from dictatorship—she will be saved by her sense of life.

As to the two other elements that determine a nation’s future, one (our political trend) is speeding straight to disaster, the other (culture) is virtually nonexistent. The political trend is pure statism and is moving toward a totalitarian dictatorship at a speed which, in any other country, would have reached that goal long ago. The culture is worse than nonexistent: it is operating below zero, i.e., performing the opposite of its function. A culture provides a nation’s intellectual leadership, its ideas, its education, its moral code. Today, the concerted effort of our cultural “Establishment” is directed at the obliteration of man’s rational faculty. Hysterical voices are proclaiming the impotence of reason, extolling the “superior power” of irrationality, fostering the rule of incoherent emotions, attacking science, glorifying the stupor of drugged hippies, delivering apologies for the use of brute force, urging mankind’s return to a life of rolling in primeval muck, with grunts and groans as means of communication, physical sensations as means of inspiration, and a club as means of argumentation.

This country, with its magnificent scientific and technological power, is left in the vacuum of a pre-intellectual era, like the wandering hordes of the Dark Ages—or in the position of an adolescent before he has fully learned to conceptualize. But an adolescent has his sense of life to guide his choices. So has this country.

What is the specifically American sense of life?

A sense of life is so complex an integration that the best way to identify it is by means of concrete examples and by contrast with the manifestations of a different sense of life.

The emotional keynote of most Europeans is the feeling that man belongs to the State, as a property to be used and disposed of, in compliance with his natural, metaphysically determined fate. A typical European may disapprove of a given State and may rebel, seeking to establish what he regards as a better one, like a slave who might seek a better master to serve—but the idea that he is the sovereign and the government is his servant, has no emotional reality in his consciousness. He regards service to the State as an ultimate moral sanction, as an honor, and if you told him that his life is an end in itself, he would feel insulted or rejected or lost. Generations brought up on statist philosophy and acting accordingly, have implanted this in his mind from the earliest, formative years of his childhood.

A typical American can never fully grasp that kind of feeling. An American is an independent entity. The popular expression of protest against “being pushed around” is emotionally unintelligible to Europeans, who believe that to be pushed around is their natural condition. Emotionally, an American has no concept of service (or of servitude) to anyone. Even if he enlists in the army and hears it called “service to his country,” his feeling is that of a generous aristocrat who chose to do a dangerous task. A European soldier feels that he is doing his duty.

“Isn’t my money as good as the next fellow’s?” used to be a popular American expression. It would not be popular in Europe: a fortune, to be good, must be old and derived by special favor from the State; to a European, money earned by personal effort is vulgar, crude or somehow disreputable.

Americans admire achievement; they know what it takes. Europeans regard achievement with cynical suspicion and envy. Envy is not a widespread emotion in America (not yet); it is an overwhelmingly dominant emotion in Europe.

When Americans feel respect for their public figures, it is the respect of equals; they feel that a government official is a human being, just as they are, who has chosen this particular line of work and has earned a certain distinction. They call celebrities by their first names, they refer to Presidents by their initials (like “F.D.R.” or “J.F.K.”), not in insolence or egalitarian pretentiousness, but in token of affection. The custom of addressing a person as “Herr Doktor Doktor Schmidt” would be impossible in America. In England, the freest country of Europe, the achievement of a scientist, a businessman or a movie star is not regarded as fully real until he has been clunked on the head with the State’s sword and declared to be a knight.

There are practical consequences of these two different attitudes.

An American economist told me the following story. He was sent to England by an American industrial concern, to investigate its European branch: in spite of the latest equipment and techniques, the productivity of the branch in England kept lagging far behind that of the parent-factory in the U.S. He found the cause: a rigidly circumscribed mentality, a kind of psychological caste system, on all the echelons of British labor and management. As he explained it: in America, if a machine breaks down, a worker volunteers to fix it, and usually does; in England, work stops and people wait for the appropriate department to summon the appropriate engineer. It is not a matter of laziness, but of a profoundly ingrained feeling that one must keep one’s place, do one’s prescribed duty, and never venture beyond it. It does not occur to the British worker that he is free to assume responsibility for anything beyond the limits of his particular job. Initiative is an “instinctive” (i.e., automatized) American characteristic; in an American consciousness, it occupies the place which, in a European one, is occupied by obedience.

As to the differences in the social atmosphere, here is an example. An elderly European woman, a research biochemist from Switzerland, on a visit to New York, told me that she wanted to buy some things at the five-and-ten. Since she could barely speak English, I offered to go with her; she hesitated, looking astonished and disturbed, then asked: “But wouldn’t that embarrass you?” I couldn’t understand what she meant: “Embarrass—how?” “Well,” she explained, “you are a famous person, and what if somebody sees you in the five-and-ten?” I laughed. She explained to me that in Switzerland, by unwritten law, there are different stores for different classes of people, and that she, as a professional, has to shop in certain stores, even though her salary is modest, that better goods at lower prices are available in the workingmen’s stores, but she would lose social status if she were seen shopping there. Can you conceive of living in an atmosphere of that kind? (We did go to the five-and-ten.)

A European, on any social level, lives emotionally in a world made by others (he never knows clearly by whom), and seeks or accepts his place in it. The American attitude is best expressed by a line from a poem: “The world began when I was born and the world is mine to win.” (“The Westerner” by Badger Clark.)

Years ago, at a party in Hollywood, I met Eve Curie, a distinguished Frenchwoman, the daughter of Marie Curie. Eve Curie was a best-selling author of non-fiction books and, politically, a liberal; at the time, she was on a lecture tour of the United States. She stressed her astonishment at American audiences. “They are so happy,” she kept repeating, “so happy. . . .” She was saying it without disapproval and without admiration, with only the faintest touch of amusement; but her astonishment was genuine. “People are not like that in Europe. . . . Everybody is happy in America—except the intellectuals. Oh, the intellectuals are unhappy everywhere.”

This incident has remained in my mind because she had named, unwittingly, the nature of the breach between the American people and the intellectuals. The culture of a worn, crumbling Europe—with its mysticism, its lethargic resignation, its cult of suffering, its notion that misery and impotence are man’s fate on earth, and that unhappiness is the hallmark of a sensitive spirit—of what use could it be to a country like America?

It was a European who discovered America, but it was Americans who were the first nation to discover this earth and man’s proper place in it, and man’s potential for happiness, and the world which is man’s to win. What they failed to discover is the words to name their achievement, the concepts to identify it, the principles to guide it, i.e., the appropriate philosophy and its consequence: an American culture.

America has never had an original culture, i.e., a body of ideas derived from her philosophical (Aristotelian) base and expressing her profound difference from all other countries in history.

American intellectuals were Europe’s passive dependents and poor relatives almost from the beginning. They lived on Europe’s drying crumbs and discarded fashions, including even such hand-me-downs as Freud and Wittgenstein. America’s sole contribution to philosophy—Pragmatism—was a bad recycling of Kantian-Hegelian premises.

America’s best minds went into science, technology, industry—and reached incomparable heights of achievement. Why did they neglect the field of ideas? Because it represented Augean stables of a kind no joyously active man would care to enter. America’s childhood coincided with the rise of Kant’s influence in European philosophy and the consequent disintegration of European culture. America was in the position of an eager, precocious child left in the care of a scruffy, senile, decadent guardian. The child had good reason to play hooky.

An adolescent can ride on his sense of life for a while. But by the time he grows up, he must translate it into conceptual knowledge and conscious convictions, or he will be in deep trouble. A sense of life is not a substitute for explicit knowledge. Values which one cannot identify, but merely senses implicitly, are not in one’s control. One cannot tell what they depend on or require, what course of action is needed to gain and/or keep them. One can lose or betray them without knowing it. For close to a century, this has been America’s tragic predicament. Today, the American people is like a sleepwalking giant torn by profound conflicts. (When I speak of “the American people,” in this context, I mean every group, including scientists and businessmen—except the intellectuals, i.e., those whose professions deal with the humanities. The intellectuals are a country’s guardians.)

Americans are the most reality-oriented people on earth. Their outstanding characteristic is the childhood form of reasoning: common sense. It is their only protection. But common sense is not enough where theoretical knowledge is required: it can make simple, concrete-bound connections—it cannot integrate complex issues, or deal with wide abstractions, or forecast the future.

For example, consider the statist trend in this country. The doctrine of collectivism has never been submitted explicitly to the American voters; if it had been, it would have sustained a landslide defeat (as the various socialist parties have demonstrated). But the welfare state was put over on Americans piecemeal, by degrees, under cover of some undefined “Americanism”—culminating in the absurdity of a President’s declaration that America owes its greatness to “the willingness for self-sacrifice.” People sense that something has gone wrong; they cannot grasp what or when. This is the penalty they pay for remaining a silent (and deaf) majority.

Americans are anti-intellectual (with good grounds, in view of current specimens), yet they have a profound respect for knowledge and education (which is being shaken now). They are self-confident, trusting, generous, enormously benevolent and innocent. “. . . that celebrated American ‘innocence’ [is] a quality which in philosophical terms is simply an ignorance of how questionable a being man really is and which strikes the European as alien . . .” declares an existentialist (William Barrett, Irrational Man). The word “questionable” is a euphemism for miserable, guilty, impotent, groveling, evil—which is the European view of man. Europeans do believe in Original Sin, i.e., in man’s innate depravity; Americans do not. Americans see man as a value—as clean, free, creative, rational. But the American view of man has not been expressed or upheld in philosophical terms (not since the time of our first Founding Father, Aristotle; see his description of the “magnanimous man”).

Barrett continues: “Sartre recounts a conversation he had with an American while visiting in this country. The American insisted that all international problems could be solved if men would just get together and be rational; Sartre disagreed and after a while discussion between them became impossible. ‘I believe in the existence of evil,’ says Sartre, ‘and he does not.’ ” This, again, is a euphemism: it is not merely the existence but the power of evil that Europeans believe in. Americans do not believe in the power of evil and do not understand its nature. The first part of their attitude is (philosophically) true, but the second makes them vulnerable. On the day when Americans grasp the cause of evil’s impotence—its mindless, fear-ridden, envy-eaten smallness—they will be free of all the man-hating manipulators of history, foreign and domestic.

So far, America’s protection has been a factor best expressed by a saying attributed to con men: “You can’t cheat an honest man.” The innocence and common sense of the American people have wrecked the plans, the devious notions, the tricky strategies, the ideological traps borrowed by the intellectuals from the European statists, who devised them to fool and rule Europe’s impotent masses. There have never been any “masses” in America: the poorest American is an individual and, subconsciously, an individualist. Marxism, which has conquered our universities, is a dismal failure as far as the people are concerned: Americans cannot be sold on any sort of class war; American workers do not see themselves as a “proletariat,” but are among the proudest of property owners. It is professors and businessmen who advocate cooperation with Soviet Russia—American labor unions do not.

The enormous propaganda effort to make Americans fear fascism but not communism, has failed: Americans hate them both. The terrible hoax of the United Nations has failed. Americans were never enthusiastic about that institution, but they gave it the benefit of the doubt for too long. The current polls, however, indicate that the majority have turned against the U.N. (better late than never).

The latest assault on human life—the ecology crusade—will probably end in defeat for its ideological leadership: Americans will enthusiastically clean their streets, their rivers, their backyards, but when it comes to giving up progress, technology, the automobile, and their standard of living, Americans will prove that the man-haters “ain’t seen nothing yet.”

The sense-of-life emotion which, in Europe, makes people uncertain, malleable and easy to rule, is unknown in America: fundamental guilt. No one, so far, has been able to infect America with that contemptible feeling (and I doubt that anyone ever will). Americans cannot begin to grasp the kind of corruption implied and demanded by that feeling.

But an honest man can cheat himself. His trusting innocence can lead him to swallow sugar-coated poisons—the deadliest of which is altruism. Americans accept it—not for what it is, not as a vicious doctrine of self-immolation—but in the spirit of a strong, confident man’s overgenerous desire to relieve the suffering of others, whose character he does not understand. When such a man awakens to the betrayal of his trust—to the fact that his generosity has brought him within reach of a permanent harness which is about to be slipped on him by his sundry beneficiaries—the consequences are unpredictable.

There are two ways of destroying a country: dictatorship or chaos, i.e., immediate rigor mortis or the longer agony of the collapse of all civilized institutions and the breakup of a nation into roving armed gangs fighting and looting one another, until some one Attila conquers the rest. This means: chaos as a prelude to tyranny—as was the case in Western Europe in the Dark Ages, or in the three hundred years preceding the Romanoff dynasty in Russia, or under the war lords regime in China.

A European is disarmed in the face of a dictatorship: he may hate it, but he feels that he is wrong and, metaphysically, the State is right. An American would rebel to the bottom of his soul. But this is all that his sense of life can do for him: it cannot solve his problems.

Only one thing is certain: a dictatorship cannot take hold in America today. This country, as yet, cannot be ruled—but it can explode. It can blow up into the helpless rage and blind violence of a civil war. It cannot be cowed into submission, passivity, malevolence, resignation. It cannot be “pushed around.” Defiance, not obedience, is the American’s answer to overbearing authority. The nation that ran an underground railroad to help human beings escape from slavery, or began drinking on principle in the face of Prohibition, will not say “Yes, sir,” to the enforcers of ration coupons and cereal prices. Not yet.

If America drags on in her present state for a few more generations (which is unlikely), dictatorship will become possible. A sense of life is not a permanent endowment. The characteristically American one is being eroded daily all around us. Large numbers of Americans have lost it (or have never developed it) and are collapsing to the psychological level of Europe’s worst rabble.

This is prevalent among the two groups that are the main supporters of the statist trend: the very rich and the very poor—the first, because they want to rule; the second, because they want to be ruled. (The leaders of the trend are the intellectuals, who want to do both.) But this country has never had an unearned, hereditary “elite.” America is still the country of self-made men, which means: the country of the middle class—the most productive and exploited group in any modern society.

The academia-jet set coalition is attempting to tame the American character by the deliberate breeding of helplessness and resignation—in those incubators of lethargy known as “Progressive” schools, which are dedicated to the task of crippling a child’s mind by arresting his cognitive development. (See “The Comprachicos” in my book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.) It appears, however, that the “progressive” rich will be the first victims of their own social theories: it is the children of the well-to-do who emerge from expensive nursery schools and colleges as hippies, and destroy the remnants of their paralyzed brains by means of drugs.

The middle class has created an antidote which is perhaps the most helpful movement of recent years: the spontaneous, unorganized, grass-roots revival of the Montessori system of education—a system aimed at the development of a child’s cognitive, i.e., rational, faculty. But that is a long-range prospect.

At present, even so dismal a figure as President Nixon is a hopeful sign—precisely because he is so dismal. If any other country were in as desperately precarious a state of confusion as ours, a dozen flamboyant Führers would have sprung up overnight to take it over. It is to America’s credit that no such Führer has appeared, and if any did, it is doubtful that he would have a chance.

Can this country achieve a peaceful rebirth in the foreseeable future? By all precedents, it is not likely. But America is an unprecedented phenomenon. In the past, American perseverance became, on occasion, too long-bearing a patience. But when Americans turned, they turned. What may happen to the welfare state is what happened to the Prohibition Amendment.

Is there enough of the American sense of life left in people—under the constant pressure of the cultural-political efforts to obliterate it? It is impossible to tell. But those of us who hold it, must fight for it. We have no alternative: we cannot surrender this country to a zero—to men whose battle cry is mindlessness.

We cannot fight against collectivism, unless we fight against its moral base: altruism. We cannot fight against altruism, unless we fight against its epistemological base: irrationalism. We cannot fight against anything, unless we fight for something—and what we must fight for is the supremacy of reason, and a view of man as a rational being.

These are philosophical issues. The philosophy we need is a conceptual equivalent of America’s sense of life. To propagate it, would require the hardest intellectual battle. But isn’t that a magnificent goal to fight for?

Index

Abortion

Absolutism

Abstractions

anti-conceptual mentality

evaluation of

Achievements

credit for

Actions

Active mind

“Age of Envy, The”

Agriculture

Alcoholics Anonymous

“Allende’s Legacy”

Altruism

American

Atlas Shrugged and

capitalism and

defined

governments and

intellectual opposition to

Kant and

morality and

motivation for

rationalization and

reason versus

rights, freedom and

Stalin and

threat of

“Americanism”

American Psychological Association

Amoralism

Anarchism

“Anatomy of Compromise, The”

Anti-conceptual mentality abstractions and

association and

disintegration of philosophy and

examples of

future and

irreducible primaries and

lady novelist and

Anti-conceptual mentality (cont.)

lone wolves and, see Tribal lone wolf

manifestations of

Midwestern businessman and

outsiders and

passivity and

personal interest and

professor of philosophy and

psycho-epistemology and

rules and

safety of

South American workers and

substitution of men for ideas and

tribalism and

Antitrust law

“An Untitled Letter”

Anxiety over the state of world affairs

Appearances

Aristocracy

Aristotle

Art

esthetics

Association, process of

Associations

Atlantic, The

Atlas Shrugged (Rand)

Augustine, Saint

“Autonomous Man”

“Average person”

Ayn Rand Letter, The

Bacon, Francis

Bancroft, Anne

Barrett, William

Behavioral technologists

Behaviorism

“Belonging”

Bentham, Jeremy

“Be rational, except when you don’t feel like it”

Berger, Bennett M.

Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Skinner)

Atlantic on

controlling behavior and

credit for achievements and

culture and

dignity and

epistemological method of

financing the writing of

global state and

Hugo and

individualism and

language and

morality and

mysticism and

New Leader on

New Republic on

New York Review of Books on

New York Times on

New York Times Book Review on

potential impact of

Psychotherapy & Social Science Review on

reinforcers and

requirements for readers of

Saturday Review on

Science News on

thesis of

Time on

Bible

Black, Justice Hugo

Blackmun, Justice Harry A.

“Blue sky” laws

Boredom

“Brain drain”

Brennan, Justice William J., Jr.

Broadcast media

Burger, Chief Justice Warren E.

non-objective law and

on precedents

Caldwell, Bob G.

Capitalism

altruism and

in the nineteenth century

justice and

morality and

socialism versus

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (Rand)

Caste system

“Categorical imperative”

Catholic Church

Causality versus duty

Censorship

“obscenity” and

Certainty

Chaos

Checks

Chess

altered rules of

as an escape from reality

Chile

China

Choice

Chomsky, Noam

Christianity

Citizenship

Civilization

Clark, Badger

Cliques

rule by

“Closed mind”

Cognition

in children

philosophy and

replacement of

senses and

use or misuse of

Cohen, Marshall

Collectivism

motivation for

Supreme Court and

Common sense

Communism

Objectivism versus

teaching of

Community

Community standards

Compartmentalization

Compassion

“Comprachicos, The”

“Compressed overlay”

Concepts

destruction of

sensory perception and

Conceptual consciousness

Conceptual integrations

time and

Conclusive proof

Congress, U.S.

interstate commerce and

Congressional Record

Consciousness

anti-conceptual mentality and

conceptual

culture and

perceiving that which exists via

perceptual

primach of, see Primacy of consciousness

Rationalism and

rationalization and

Skinner and

uncertainty concerning

unconsciousness versus

volitional

Conservative Party

Conservatives

mind-body dichotomy and

religious

Supreme Court, and

Constitution, U.S.

First Amendment to

interstate commerce and

Consumerism

Context-dropping

Contradiction of Western civilization

Controlling man’s behavior

Convictions

Correspondence theory of truth

Courage

“Creation”

Credit

Culture

American

national

philosophy and

Skinner and

staleness of

Curie, Eve

Cynicism

Dedication

Deficit financing

Demand and supply

Democracy

Deontology

Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, U.S.

Descartes, Rene

Despair

Destroyers of the modern world

altruism and

Kant and

mysticism

Objectivism versus

Determinism

Dewey, John

Dignity

Dissent

Division of labor

“Don’t be so sure—nobody can be certain of anything”

“Don’t Let It Go”

Dostoyevsky, Feodor

Double standards

Douglas, Justice William O.

Dow Chemical Company

Duke, Patty

Duty

causality versus

defined

destructive power of

mysticism and

Earned guilt

Earnestness

Ecology

Economics

complexity of

egalitarianism and inflation

in universities

Kantianism and

Skinner and

Education

fairness doctrine for

government support of

Egalitarianism

Chile and

epistemological

inflation and

Law of Causality and

new

Egoism, rational

Einstein, Albert

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Emotions

earned guilt and

Existentialism and

rationalization and

reality and

Empiricism

England

sense of life in

Envy

Epistemological egalitarianism

Epistemology

errors in

irreducible primaries and

Miracle Worker and

philosophy and

Equalitarianism

rebellion against

Equality of opportunity

Establishing an Establishment

brilliant loner and

governmental encouragement and

government controls and

rule by favorites and

staleness of our culture and

Esthetics

philosophy and

Ethics

anti-conceptual mentality and

philosophy and

questions posed by

rational

tribal lone wolf and

Ethnic neighborhoods

Europe

sense of life in

tribalism in

Evil

Existence

integrated view of

metaphysically given and

philosophy and

primacy of, see Primacy of existence

see also Reality

Existentialism

Expressing views

Extrospection

Fabians

Facts

of reality

Fairness doctrine

for the broadcast media

for education

“Faith and Force: the Destroyers of the Modern World”

Fascism

Feudalism

Feyerabend, Paul K.

Fiction

Final causation

Fischer, Bobby

Force

conservatives, liberals, and

faith and

freedom from

mysticism and

persuasion versus

For the New Intellectual (Rand)

Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (Wolff)

Fountainhead, The (Rand)

Frank, Anne

Freedom

censorship and

fairness doctrine and

Skinner and

Free will

“From the Horses Mouth”

Future, the

anti-conceptual mentality and

determinants of

Gallagher, Cornelius E.

Games

Gans, Herbert

General Accounting Office

Genius

Gibson, William

Goals and final causation

God

“God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”

Gold

Government

attitude toward

controls of

establishing an establishment by

inflation and

intellectuals and

private

socialism and

subsidizing of ideas by

Supreme Court

“Growl to Me Softly and I’ll Understand”

Guilt

Age of

earned

metaphysically given and

sense-of-life

unearned

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

Hitler, Adolf

Honest resignation

Honesty

in ethics

intellectual

Honor

“new justice” and

sense of

Hugo, Victor

Human Events

Humanitarians

Humanities

breach between science and

Hume, David

“I can’t prove it, but I feel that it’s true”

Ideas

dominance of

personal interest and

Identity

personal

see also Law of Identity

Ideological groups

Imagination

Immanuel Kant: His Life and Doctrine (Paulsen)

Imperialism

Independence

Individual freedom

Individualism

Skinner and

Individual rights

Supreme Court and

Industrial revolution

Inflation

consumerism and

credit and

egalitarianism and

government and

psycho-epistemological precondition of

Initiative

Instinct

Intellectual honesty

Intellectual movement

Intellectual opposition

Intellectuals

American

answers to problems from

change and

culture and

government and

“majority will” and

sense of life and

socialism and

Intellectual tolerance

Intelligence

Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (Rand)

Introspection

failure of

Investment

Investment capital

Irrationalism

technique for selling

tribalism and

Irreducible primary

anti-conceptual mentality and

emotions as

“It may be true for you, but it’s not true for me”

“It may have been true yesterday, but it’s not true today”

James, William

Journal of Philosophy, The

Justice

education and

meritocracy and

“new”

Rawls and

Kant, Immanuel

altruism versus reason and

consciousness and

duty and

intellectual opposition to

Paulsen on

rationalization and

religion versus science and

Sullivan versus

unmasking of

Keller, Helen

Keynes, John Maynard

Knowledge

faith versus

Feyerabend’s theory of

hierarchical structure of

inward versus outward

possibility of

sensory perception and

Language

as scapegoat of mysticism

Helen Keller and

non-observational

Skinner and

Law of Causality

egalitarianism and

Law of Identity

exemption from

man’s volition and

primacy of existence and

Leftists

meritocracy and

tribalism and

Les Misérable (Hugo)

Liberals

mind-body dichotomy and

Supreme Court and

Libertarians

Life style

Linguistic Analysis

Literature

Logic

reality and

reason and

Logical Positivism

“Logic has nothing to do with reality”

Lone wolves, see Tribal lone wolf

Look magazine

Love

amoralism and

Kant on

Loyalty

Luck

McGovern, George

Mafia

“Magnanimous man”

“Majority welfare”

“Majority will”

Man

hatred of

metaphysically given nature of

survival of

volition and

“Man-made facts”

Man-made versus the metaphysical

“Man’s inner world”

Man’s life

Marcuseans

Market

Marshall, Justice Thurgood

Marx, Karl

Materialists

“Maximin” rule of game theory

Memoirs v. Massachusetts

Merit

tribalism and

Meritocracy

Metaphysical absolutism

Metaphysically given

acceptance of

altering the

man-made facts and

natural phenomenon as

rejection of

volition and

“Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made, The”

egalitarian movement and

man-made facts and

man’s nature and

obliteration of the differences between

volition and

see also Metaphysically given; Primacy of consciousness

Metaphysics

anti-conceptual mentality and

errors in

irreducible primaries and

man-made versus

man’s nature and

philosophy and

rationalization and

Military-industrial complex

Military science

Mill, John Stuart

Miller v. California

Mind

cognitive efficacy of

hatred of

self as

Mind-body dichotomy

Minorities

dominance of ideas and

intellectual movements and

Miracle Worker, The, (Gibson)

“Missing Link, The”

Mitchell, Edgar

Mixed economy

Money

credit and

gold

intellectuals and

Montessori schools

Moral autonomy

Moral endurance, pyramid of

Morality

altruism and

that cannot be practiced

defined

desire to escape

duty and

faith and

Kant and

lack of

man’s life and

Objectivism and

power of

reason and

revolution of

Skinner and

theories of

United States and

see also Ethics

Moral rightness

Moral worth

More Equality (Gans)

Mysticism

culture and

defined

dualism

duty and

justification of altruism via

motivation for

of muscle

of spirit

philosophy, science and

problem of universals and

reason versus

scapegoat of

violence and

Nader, Ralph

Nation

National characteristics

National Institute of Mental Health

National standards

Naturalists

Natural phenomenon

Nature

metaphysically given and

novels and the order of

package-dealing and

penalizing those favored by

rules of

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed”

Nazi Germany

Nero

Neurotic anxiety

“New Inequality, The”

“New Justice”

New Leader, The

New Left

New Left: Anti-Industrial Revolution, The (Rand).

New Republic, The

Newsweek

Newton, Isaac

New York Review of Books, The

New York Times, The

New York Times Book Review, The

Niebuhr, Reinhold

Nineteenth century

Nixon, Richard

Noblesse oblige

“Nobody can help anything he does”

“Nobody is perfect in this world”

Non-contradictory identification

Non-objectivity

“Noumenal” world

Novels

Obedience

Objective law

Objectivism

in Atlas Shrugged

communism versus

“duty” and

Objectivity

destruction of

escape from

Obligation

“Obscenity”

Ogden, Archibald

On Liberty (Mill)

“Open Letter to Boris Spassky, An”

“Open mind”

“Operant conditioning”

Oppenheimer, Robert

Package-dealing

egalitarian movement and

meritocracy and

“necessity” in the universe

Palestinian guerrillas

Paris Adult Theater I v. Slaton

Passive mind

Passivity

Paul VI, Pope

Paulsen, Friedrich

Penalizing excellence

Perceptual consciousness

see also anti-conceptual mentalities

Personal interests

Personal thinking

Persuasion

force versus

“Phenomenal” world

Philosophers

academic

current

“Philosophical Detection”

altruism and

catch phrases and

evaluation of theories and

false premises and

fundamentals and

Hegel and

irreducible primaries and

Kant and

layman’s error in regard to

rationalization and

Philosophical frauds

Philosophic system

Philosophy

abandonment of reason and

abstractions and

Aristotle and

battle over

collapse of

culture and

emotions and

epistemology and

essentials and

esthetics and

ethics and

evilness of

existence and

history of

influence of

integration of

in universities

Kant and

man’s mind and

metaphysics and

need for

politics and

principles and

religion, science and

sense of life

students of

study of, see “Philosophical Detection”

tribalism and disintegration of

weapons of

“Philosophy and Sense of Life”

“Philosophy: Who Needs it”

Physical sciences

Plato

“Policy scientist”

Political freedom

Political science

Politics

absolutism in

accepting consequences while ignoring causes

change and

egalitarianism and inflation

Kantianism in

meritocracy and

personal interest and

philosophy and

Skinner and

social contract and

trends in

Pornography

Positivism

Powell, Justice Lewis F., Jr.

Pragmatism

Press, the

Pressure groups

Primacy of consciousness

domination of

reversion to

Primacy of existence

intelligence and

Principles

associations and

“Problem of universals”

Producers

Production

government and

survival and

Profits

“Progressive” education

Prohibition

Promissory notes

government and

“Property Status of Airwaves, The”

Psycho-epistemology

altruism and

Psychological subjectivism

Psychology

Beyond Freedom and Dignity and

Psychotherapy & Social Science Review

“Pure reason”

Racism

Rational egoism

Rationalists

Rationality

“duty” and

Rationalization

altruism and

detection of

evil philosophies and

Kant and

neurotic anxiety and

Rawls, John

Reality

absolutism and

“duty” and

emotions and

escape from

intelligence and

logic and

rationalization and

Social contract

Social Darwinism

Socialism

fairness doctrine and

Socialist England

Sociology

Soul

Soviet Russia

as Kantian state

rules of life in

socialism and

Spassky, Boris

Spencer, Herbert

Spiritualists

Stagflation

Staleness

Stalin, Joseph

Statism

in America

in Europe

Stewart, Justice Potter

“Stolen concepts”

“Straw man”

Stutsman, Richard

Subconscious

as programmer

Subjectivism

Suffering

Sullivan, Annie

Superficiality

Supply and demand

Supreme Court, U.S.

“obscenity” cases

precedents and

Survival

essentials of

method of

Objectivism and

reason and

rejection of altruism and

Skinner and

“Tax Credits for Education”

Tax on personal capabilities

Terror

Textbook of Americanism (Rand)

Theories

evaluation of

Theory of Justice, A (Rawls)

Thinking

chess and

emotions and

personal

volition and

“This may be good in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice,”

Time

Time magazine

Tinbergen, Dr. Jan

“To Dream the Non-Commercial Dream

Totalitarianism

future and

sense of life and

Skinner and

Traditions

Tribalism

associations and

European

intellectual

manifestations

resurgence of

see also Tribal lone wolf

Tribal lone wolf

altruism and

as amoralist

as frustrated tribalist

ethics and

personal interest and

self and

self-appraisal of

selfishness and

Truth

novels and

Twin Oaks

Unconsciousness

Unearned guilt

United Nations

United States

future of

in the nineteenth century

law and

meritocracy in

production and

sense of life of

tribalism in

see also Government

U.S. v Orito

U.S. v. 12 200-Ft Reels of Super 8mm. Film

Universities

Utilitarianism

Values

acquisition of

“duty” and

Kant and

lack of

nature of

tribal lone wolf and

Virtue

lack of

value and

Volition

consciousness and

man-made facts and

metaphysically given and

Skinner and

special status given by

Walden Two (Skinner)

Wall Street Journal, The

Warren, Chief Justice Earl

Wealth

Welfare state

Kantianism and

tribalism and

Western civilization

altruism and

basic contradiction of

mysticism and

West Point

“What Can One Do?”

“What for?”

“Where am I? How do I know it? What should I do?”

White, Justice Byron R.

“Why?”

Wolff, R. P.

World War II

Worsthorne, Peregrine

Xenophobia

Youth movements

1

[The “stolen concept” fallacy, first identified by Ayn Rand, is the fallacy of using a concept while denying the validity of its genetic roots, i.e., of an earlier concept(s) on which it logically depends. See The Objectivist Newsletter, Vol. II, No. 1, January 1963.]

2

[“Package-dealing” is the fallacy of failing to discriminate crucial differences. It consists of treating together, as parts of a single conceptual whole or “package,” elements which differ essentially in nature, truth-status, importance or value.]

3

[A fuller discussion of Rawls’s viewpoint is offered in Chapter 11.]

4

[“Psycho-epistemology,” a term coined by Ayn Rand, pertains not to the content of a man’s ideas, but to his method of awareness, i.e., the method by which his mind habitually deals with its content. “Psycho-epistemology is the study of man’s cognitive processes from the aspect of the interaction between man’s conscious mind and the automatic functions of his subconscious.” See “The Comprachicos” in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Philosophy: Who Needs It

Chapter 2 - Philosophical Detection

Chapter 3 - The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made

Chapter 4 - The Missing Link

Chapter 5 - Selfishness Without a Self

Chapter 6 - An Open Letter to Boris Spassky

Chapter 7 - Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World

Chapter 8 - From the Horse’s Mouth

Chapter 9 - Kant Versus Sullivan

Chapter 10 - Causality Versus Duty

Chapter 11 - An Untitled Letter

Chapter 12 - Egalitarianism and Inflation

Chapter 13 - The Stimulus and the Response

Chapter 14 - The Establishing of an Establishment

Chapter 15 - Censorship: Local and Express

Chapter 16 - Fairness Doctrine for Education

Chapter 17 - What Can One Do?

Chapter 18 - Don’t Let It Go

Index

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Editor’s Preface

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Z

FROM AYN RAND’S PHILOSOPHY OF RATIONAL SELF-INTEREST:

AMERICA: I can say—not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political and esthetic roots—that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world. (Philosophy: Who Needs It)

CAPITALISM: When I say “capitalism,” I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

(The Objectivist Ethics)

EMOTION: An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise. (Atlas Shrugged)

MORALITY: The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live. (Atlas Shrugged)

DR. HARRY BINSWANGER, an associate of Ayn Rand, received his doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University. He taught philosophy for many years at Hunter College and gave courses on Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, at The New School for Social Research in New York City. He is now editor of The Objectivist Forum, a magazine that applies Objectivism to philosophical and cultural issues.

THE WRITINGS OF AYN RAND

MERIDIAN
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 STZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

Published by Meridian, an imprint of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

First Meridian Printing, January, 1988

Copyright © 1986 by Harry Binswanger

Introduction copyright ©1986 by Leonard Peikoft All rights reserved. For information address Dutton Signet.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Excerpts from The Ominous Parallels, by Leonard Peikoff. Copyright © 1982 by Leonard Peikoff. Reprinted with permission of Stein and Day Publishers.

Excerpts from The Romantic Manifesto, by Ayn Rand. Copyright © 1971, by The Objectivist.

Excerpts from Atlas Shrugged, copyright © 1957 by Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, copyright © 1943 by Ayn Rand, and The New Intellectual, copyright © 1961 by Ayn Rand.

Excerpts from Philosophy: Who Needs It, by Ayn Rand. Copyright © 1982 by Leonard Peikoff, Executor, Estate of Ayn Rand.

Excerpts from “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series. Copyright © 1976 by Leonard Peikoff.

Excerpts from Alvin Toffler’s interview with Ayn Rand, which first appeared in Playboy magazine. Copyright © Alvin Toffler 1964.

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rand, Ayn.

The Ayn Rand lexicon.

Includes index.

1. Philosophy, I. Binswanger, Harry. II. Title.

III. Title: Objectivism from A to Z.

B945.R233A-15291

eISBN : 978-1-101-13724-6

BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCIS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN BOOKS USA INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

Information about other books by Ayn Rand and her philosophy,
Objectivism, may be obtained by writing to OBJECTIVISM, Box 177,
Murray Hill Station, New York, New York 10157, USA.

http://us.penguingroup.com

Introduction

AYN RAND WAS a philosopher in the classical sense: she was intent not on teasing apart some random sentences, but on defining a full system of thought, from epistemology to esthetics. Her writing, accordingly, is extensive, and the range of issues she covers enormous—so much so that it is often difficult for a reader to know where in her many books and articles to look for a specific formulation or topic. Even Miss Rand herself was sometimes hard-pressed in this regard.

The Ayn Rand Lexicon solves this problem. It is a compilation of key statements from Ayn Rand (and from a few other authorized Objectivist texts) on several hundred alphabetized topics in philosophy and related fields. The book was initially conceived by Harry Binswanger, who undertook it during Miss Rand’s lifetime with her permission and approval.

Two different audiences can profit from the Lexicon. Those who know Miss Rand’s works will find it a comprehensive guide to the literature. It will enable them to locate topics or passages easily, and—by virtue of its detailed indexes and cross-references—to check on their wider context and ramifications. Newcomers to Ayn Rand will find the book an intriguing introduction to her thought, one eminently suited to browsing. Many such browsers, I venture to say, after sampling the entries under REASON, SELFISHNESS, CAPITALISM, and a few more such topics, will become hooked by the logic and originality of Ayn Rand’s ideas. If this happens to you, the next step is to turn to one of her books.

By its nature, this kind of project requires an editor with a professional knowledge of philosophy in general and of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, in particular. Harry Binswanger qualifies on both counts. He is a Ph.D. from Columbia University and taught philosophy for many years at Hunter College. Dr. Binswanger was an associate of Miss Rand’s. He taught Objectivism at the New School in New York City, and assisted in a course on the subject at the University of California (Berkeley). At present, Dr. Binswanger is editor of The Objectivist Forum, a magazine that applies Objectivism to philosophical and cultural issues.

In preparing the Lexicon, Dr. Binswanger has done a thorough and meticulous job. He has covered not only the familiar works of Ayn Rand, but also obscure and little-known sources. He has done the excerpting skillfully and accurately, always selecting essentials; as a result, the passages he offers are generally self-contained and self-intelligible. And he has arranged the material within a given topic in a logical sequence, each excerpt building on the earlier ones. If one reads straight through a topic, one will discover not a series of disconnected sentences, but a definite structure and development; this makes the reading even more illuminating and enjoyable.

The Lexicon is a welcome addition to the growing Ayn Rand Library, of which it is Volume IV. It is going to be extremely helpful to me personally, and I am happy to recommend it to anyone interested in the thought of Ayn Rand. She herself, I know, would have been pleased to see it become a reality.

—Leonard Peikoff South Laguna, California January 1986

Editor’s Preface

THE philosophic WRITINGS of Ayn Rand and her associates have grown to include almost two thousand pages distributed among eight books—plus various lecture courses, newsletter articles, and pamphlets. Accordingly, I conceived the idea of creating a reference work, organized by topic, to function as an Objectivist dictionary or mini-encyclopedia.

I first proposed this idea to Ayn Rand in 1977. She was originally somewhat skeptical about its feasibility, being concerned as to whether her writings would lend themselves to the kind of excerpting that would be required. To sell her on the project, I wrote a detailed prospectus of the book and worked up a sample—the entries beginning with the letter “N.” She was favorably impressed with the results and gave me permission to go ahead. She commented extensively on several dozen entries, helping me to define appropriate standards for excerpting and topic selection.

As the work progressed, Miss Rand became increasingly enthusiastic about the project. One value of the book had special meaning to her: it eliminates any shred of excuse (if ever there had been one) for the continual gross misrepresentation of her philosophy at the hands of hostile commentators. As she quipped to me, “People will be able to took up BREAKFAST and see that I did not advocate eating babies for breakfast.”

Miss Rand had intended to read over the entire book, but after cornpleting the letter “A” I had to shelve the project in order to found and edit The Objectivist Forum, and did not resume work on it until two years after her death. Consequently, she read only about 10 percent of the material.

I have endeavored to cull from the Objectivist corpus all the significant topics in philosophy and closely allied fields, such as psychology, economics, and intellectual history. The Lexicon, however, does not cover Ayn Rand’s fiction writings, except for those philosophical passages from her novels that were reprinted in her book For the New Intellectual. Material by authors other than Miss Rand is included only if she had given it an explicit public endorsement—as with Leonard Peikoff’s book The Ominous Parallels and his lecture course “The Philosophy of Objectivism”—or if it was originally published under her editorship in The Objectivist Neusletier, The Objectivist, or The Ayn Rand Letter. I have also made use of four Objectivist Forum articles that Miss Rand read and approved.

To keep the book to a manageable size, I have had to omit many passages which could have been included. I have sought to include under each heading only the essential passages, roughly proportioning the length of the entries to their scope and importance, within the limits of the amount of material available in the sources. The entry under Immanuel Kant, for instance, is as long as it is not merely because Miss Rand had so much to say about Kant’s philosophy, but because of his immense influence on the history of philosophy, and thus on history proper. Miss Rand regarded Kant as her chief philosophical antagonist. Nevertheless, I may have missed some passages that merit inclusion, and readers are invited to send me any such passages c/o New American Library for their possible inclusion in future editions. For some headings (e.g., KNOWLEDGE), I give only the term’s definition and rely on the cross-references to lead the reader to other topics for elaboration.

In accordance with Miss Rand’s wishes, I have included statements about other philosophies only in selected instances: on Aristotle (whose system is the closest to that of Objectivism), on Kant (whose system is the diametrical opposite of Objectivism), on Friedrich Nietzsche (whose views, though fundamentally opposed to Ayn Rand’s, are often taken to be similar), on John Stuart Mill (the philosophical father of today’s “conservatives”), and on some influential contemporary schools: Pragmatism, Logical Positivism, and Linguistic Analysis. Those interested in the Objectivist analysis of other philosophies may consult For the New Intellectual and The Ominous Parallels.

In a number of instances, I have used oral material from Leonard Peikoff’s tape-recorcfed lecture courses. Dr. Peikoff has edited these passages for this purpose. I have also included a few statements by Miss Rand from the question-and-answer periods following these lectures. Miss Rand’s answers, which were wholly extemporaneous, are presented virtually unedited.

In excerpting from written material, I have sought to minimize the clutter of ellipses and square brackets. Where I have excised material from within a continuous passage, I have, of course, used ellipses to indicate that deletion. But I have not used ellipses at the beginning or end of entire passages, even when I have made initial or terminal cuts. Thus, the reader is put on notice that, at the beginning of a passage, some words from the start of the original sentence may have been dropped. Likewise, at the end of a passage, sentences in the original may continue on beyond where they end here.

Square brackets are used to indicate my own interpolated words or introductory notes (except that I have retained the square brackets used by Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, etc. to insert their own comments within a direct quotation from someone else). In a few instances, I have deleted italics, but as a rule they are as they appear in the original texts; in no case did I add italics.

Some entry headings appear in quotation marks. The quotes are used to indicate either a concept that Objectivism regards as invalid or obfuscatory (as with “COLLECTIVE RIGHTS”), or a term used in a new or special sense (as with “STOLEN CONCEPT,” FALLACY OF). The content of the entry should make clear which function, in a given case, these quotation marks serve.

Some explanation is necessary about the manner in which I have identified the sources of the passages quoted. The references include page numbers for both hardcover and paperback editions when possible (only paperback editions are currently available for Intruductiun to Objectivist Epistemology, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal). I have cited the page number only for the passage’s beginning even when it continues beyond that page in the original (e.g., a page reference normally given as “54-56” would appear here only as ”54”). And, unless otherwise stated, all quotations are from Ayn Rand.

Note also that paperback page references for The Romantic Manifesto and The New Left refer to the second editions of these works. The first edition of the former did not include “Art and Cognition,” and “The Age of Envy” was not included in the first edition of the latter.

All the books cited are available in paperback editions from New American Library. Much of the other material, including back issues of Miss Rand’s periodicals and some separate pamphlets, is available from The Objectivist Forum, P.O. Box 5311, FDR Station, New York, NY 10150. (When an article published in a periodical has been reprinted in a book, only the book reference is given.)

I wish to thank Leonard Peikoff for his continued encouragement and editorial advice. Thanks are also due to Allison Thomas Kunze for identifying several passages that were worthy of inclusion and to Michael Palumbo for his meticulous assistance in assembling the manuscript.

I must stress that the Lexicon is not intended as a substitute for the primary sources from which it is derived. It is a fundamental tenet of Objectivism that philosophy is not a haphazard collecaion of out-of-context pronouncements, but an integrated, hierarchically structured system, which has to be studied and judged as such. For a brief indication of what Objectivism as a philosophic system advocates, the reader may refer to the entry, OBJECTIVISM. For a fuller statement, the best single source is Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged (reprinted in For the New Intellectual).

-Harry Binswanger
New York City
February 1986

Conceptual Index

THIS INDEX groups the topics under the headings: Philosophy, Psychology, Economics, and General. Philosophy is broken down into its branches: metaphysics (the study of the fundamental nature of reality and of man), epistemology (the theory of knowledge), ethics (the science of moral values), politics (including both political theory and more concrete public policy issues), and esthetics (the philosophy of art).

PHILOSOPHY: Metaphysics

Absolutes
Abstractions and Concretes
Atheism
Benevolent Universe Premise
Byronic View of Existence
Causality
Chance
Change
Consciousness
Contradictions
Creation
Determinism
Entity
Existence
Existent
Final Causation
Free Will
Goal-Directed Action
God
Identity
Infinity
Life
Malevolent Universe Premise
Man
Matter
Metaphysical
Metaphysical vs. Man-Made
Metaphysics
Miracles
Motion
Nature
Necessity
Non-Existence
Objectivity
Primacy of Existence vs. Primacy
of Consciousness
Prior Certainty of Consciousness
Religion
Self
Soul-Body Dichotomy
Space
Subjectivism
Supernaturalism
Time
Universe
Volitional
Zero, Reification of

PHILOSOPHY: Epistemology

Absolutes
Abstraction (process of)
Abstractions and Concretes
Agnosticism
Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy
“Anti-Concepts”
“A Priori”
Arbitrary
Argument from Intimidation
Axiomatic Concepts
Axioms
Certainty
Chance
Common Sense
Communication
Concept-Formation
Concepts
Conceptual Common
Denominator
Consciousness
Context
Context-Dropping
Contradictions
Corollaries
Definitions
Dogma
Emotions
Epistemology
Esthetic Abstractions
Faith
Falsehood
“Frozen Abstraction,” Fallacy of
Fundamentality, Rule of
Genus and Species
Grammar
Hierarchy of Knowledge
Implicit Knowledge
Induction and Deduction
“Instinct”
Integration (Mental)
Introspection
Invalid Concepts
Irrationalism
Irreducible Primaries
Knowledge
Language
Learning
Linguistic Analysis
Logic
Logical Positivism
Materials, Concepts of
Mathematics
Meaning (of Concepts)
Measurement
Method, Concepts of
Mysticism
Mystics of Spirit and of Muscle
Nominalism
Normative Abstractions
Numbers
Objectivity
“Open Mind” and “Closed Mind”
Ostensive Definition
“Package-Dealing,” Fallacy of
Perception
Platonic Realism
Polylogism
Possible
Pragmatism
Primacy of Existence vs. Primacy
of Consciousness
Principles
Prior Certainty of Consciousness
Proof
Propositions
“Rand’s Razor”
Rationalism vs. Empiricism
Reason
Religion
“Rewriting Reality”
Science
Self-Evident
Sensations
Similarity
Skepticism
“Stolen Concept,” Fallacy of
Subjectivism
Tabula Rasa
Teleological Measurement
Theory-Practice Dichotomy
Thought/Thinking
Truth
Understanding
Unit
Unit-Economy
Validation
Words
Zero, Reification of

PHILOSOPHY: Ethics

Abortion
Altruism
Ambition
Amoralism
Appeasement
Birth Control
Career
Character
Charity
Collectivism
Compassion
Competition
Compromise
Cooperation
Courage and Confidence
Creators
Cynicism
“Duty”
Emergencies
Emotions
End in Itself
Envy/Hatred of the Good for
Being the Good
Errors of Knowledge vs. Breaches
of Morality
Evasion
Evil
Faith
Final Causation
Focus
Free Will
Good, the
Happiness
Hedonism
Honesty
Honor
Humility
Independence
Individualism
Integrity
Intrinsic Theory of Values
Irrationality
“Is”-“Ought” Dichotomy
Justice
Life
Love
Man-Worship
Marriage
Mediocrity
Mercy
Metaphysical Value-,Judgments
Money
Moral Cowardice
Moral Judgment
Moral-Practical Dichotomy
Morality
Mystical Ethics
Normative Abstractions
Objective Theory of Values
“Open Mind” and “Closed Mind”
Original Sin
Physical Force
Pity
Prestige
Pride
Productiveness
Purpose
Racism
Rationality
Religion
Responsibility/Obligation
Sacred
Sacrifice
Sanction
Sanction of the Victim
Self
Self-Esteem
Self-Interest
Selfishness
Selflessness
Sex
Social Theory of Ethics
Standard of Value
Subjectivism
Suffering
Tactfulness
Trader Principle
Ultimate Value
Utilitarianism
Values
Virtue
Whims/Whim-Worship

PHILOSOPHY: Politics

Abortion
Ambition
America
Anarchism
Antitrust Laws
Birth Control
Businessmen
Businessmen vs. Bureaucrats
Capitalism
Censorship
Civil Disobedience
“Collective Rights”
Collectivism
“Common Good”
Communism
“Conservatives”
“Conservatives” vs. “Liberals”
Constitution
“Consumerism”
Contracts
Corporations
Creators
Crime
Democracy
Dictator
Dictatorship
Draft
Ecology/Environmental
Movement
Economic Power vs. Political
Power
Egalitarianism
“Ethnicity”
Fascism/Nazism
Fascism and Communism/
Socialism
Founding Fathers
Foreign Policy
Fraud
Free Market
Free Speech
Freedom
Genocide
Government
Government Grants and
Scholarships
Guild Socialism
Human Rights and Property
Rights
Ideology
Inalienability
Individual Rights
Individualism
“Isolationism”
Justice
Law, Objective and Non-Objective
“Liberals”
“Libertarians”
Life, Right to
Lobbying
“McCarthyism”
“Meritocracy”
Middle Class
Minority Rights
Mixed Economy
Monopoly
National Rights
New Left
Pacifism
Patents and Copyrights
Peace Movements
Permission (vs. Rights)
Physical Force
Politics
Pollution
Poverty
Production
Property Rights
“Public Interest,” the
“Public Property”
Pursuit of Happiness. Right to
Pyramid of Ability
Quotas
Racism
“Redistribution” of Wealth
Representative Government
Republic
Retaliatory Force
Retroactive Law
Revolution vs. Putsch
Rightists vs. Leftists
Rights of the Accused
Sanction of the Victim
Secession
Self-Defense
Self-Determination of Nations
Service
Socialism
Social System
Society
Soviet Russia
States’ Rights
Statism
Taxation
Technology
Trader Principle
Tradition
Tribalism
Tyranny
Unions
United Nations
Utilitarianism
Voting
War
Welfare State
“Window-Dressing”

PHILOSOPHY: Esthetics

Ancient Greece
Art
Artistic Creation
Ballet
Beauty
Bytonic View of Existence
Characterization
Choreographer
Classicism
Culture
Dance
Decorative Arts
Director
Esthetic Abstractions
Esthetic Judgment
Esthetics
Literature
Man-Worship
Metaphysical Value-Judgments
Modern Art
Motion Pictures
Music
Naturalism
Novel
Opera and Operetta
Painting
Performing Arts
Photography
Plot
Plot-Theme
Popular Literature
Romanticism
Sculpture
Sense of Life
Style
Stylization
Subject (in Art)
Subjectivism
Theme (Literary)
Thrillers
Visual Arts

PSYCHOLOGY

Ambition
Anti-Conceptual Mentality
Automatization
Behaviorism
Benevolent Universe Premise
Byronic View of Existence
Consciousness
Cynicism
Emotions
Envy/Hatred of the Good for
Being the Good
Evasion
Femininity
Focus
Free Will
Freud
Happiness
Hostility
Humility
Humor
Imagination
Independence
“Instinct”
Integration (Mental)
Intelligence
Introspection
Language
Learning
Loneliness
Love
Malevolent Universe Premise
Mental Health
Metaphysical Value-Judgments
Motivation
Motivation by Love vs. by Fear
Neurosis vs. Psychosis
“Open Mind” and “Closed Mind”
Pleasure and Pain
Prestige
Pride
Psycho-Epistemology
“Psychologizing”
Psychology
Rationalization
Second-Handers
Self
Self-Esteem
Sensations
Sense of Life
Sex
Soul-Body Dichotomy
Subconscious
Subjectivism (Psychological)
Suffering
Tabula Rasa
Thought/Thinking
tradition
Understanding
Whims/Whim-Worship

ECONOMICS

Antitrust Laws
Capitalism
Competition
Consumption
Corporations
Credit
Deficit Financing
Economic Good
Economic Growth
Economic Power vs. Political
Power
Free Market
Gold Standard
Inflation
Interest (on Loans)
Interventionism (Economic)
Investment
Managerial Work
Market Value
Mixed Economy
Money
Monopoly
Poverty
Production
Purchasing Power
Pyramid of Ability
Savings
Socialism
Taxation
Technology
Tribal Premise (in Economics)
Unemployment

GENERAL

America
Ancient Greece
Aristotle
Christmas
Civilization
Common Sense
Communication
Culture
Dark Ages
Education
Emergencies
Enlightenment, Age of
Founding Fathers
Goal-Directed Action
History
Intellectuals
Kant, Immanuel
Linguistic Analysis
Logical Positivism
Man
Marriage
Mediocrity
Middle Ages
Middle Class
Mill, John Stuart
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Nineteenth Century
Objectivism
“Open Mind” and “Closed Mind”
Philosophy
Pragmatism
Religion
Renaissance
Sacred
Technology
Thanksgiving

Abbreviations

A

Abortion. An embryo has no riglels. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).

Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?

[“Of Living Death,” TO, Oct. 1968, 6.]

Never mind the vicious nonsense of claiming that an embryo has a “right to life.” A piece of protoplasm has no rights—and no life in the human sense of the term. One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months. To equate a potential with an actual, is vicious; to advocate the sacrifice of the latter to the former, is unspeakable.... Observe that by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the antiabortionists obliterate the rights of the living: the right of young people to set the course of their own lives. The task of raising a child is a tremendous, lifelong responsibility, which no one should undertake unwittingly or unwillingly. Procreation is not a duty: human beings are not stock-farm animals. For conscientious persons, an unwanted pregnancy is a disaster; to oppose its termination is to advocate sacrifice, not for the sake of anyone’s benefit, but for the sake of misery qua misery, for the sake of forbidding happiness and fulfillment to living human beings.

[“A Last Survey,” ARL, IV, 2, 3.]

If any among you are confused or taken in by the argument that the cells of an embryo are living human cells, remember that so are all the cells of your body, including the cells of your skin, your tonsils, or your ruptured appendix—and that cutting them is murder, according to the notions of that proposed law. Remember also that a potentiality is not the equivalent of an actuality—and that a human being’s life begins at birth.

The question of abortion involves much more than the termination of a pregnancy: it is a question of the entire life of the parents. As I have said before, parenthood is an enormous responsibility; it is an impossible responsibility for young people who are ambitious and struggling, but poor; particularly if they are intelligent and conscientious enough not to abandon their child on a doorstep nor to surrender it to adoption. For such young people, pregnancy is a death sentence: parenthood would force them to give up their future, and condemn them to a life of hopeless drudgery, of slavery to a child’s physical and financial needs. The situation of an unwed mother, abandoned by her lover, is even worse.

I cannot quite imagine the state of mind of a person who would wish to condemn a fellow human being to such a horror. I cannot project the degree of hatred required to make those women run around in crusades against abortion. Hatred is what they certainly project, not love for the embryos, which is a piece of nonsense no one could experience, but hatred, a virulent hatred for an unnamed object. Judging by the degree of those women’s intensity, I would say that it is an issue of self-esteem and that their fear is metaphysical. Their hatred is directed against human beings as such, against the mind, against reason, against ambition, against success, against love, against any value that brings happiness to human life. In compliance with the dishonesty that dominates today’s intellectual field, they call themselves “pro-life.”

By what right does anyone claim the power to dispose of the lives of others and to dictate their personal choices?

[“The Age of Mediocrity,” TOF, June 1981, 3.]

A proper, philosophically valid definition of man as “a rational animal,” would not permit anyone to ascribe the status of “person” to a few human cells.

[Ibid., 2.]

See also BIRTH CONTROL; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; LIFE, RIGHT to; MAN; SEX.

Absolutes. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter’s stomach, is an absolute.

[GS, FNI, 216; pb 173.]

“There are no absolutes,” they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute.

[Ibid., 192; pb 154.]

Just as, in epistemology, the cult of uncertainty is a revolt against reason—so, in ethics, the cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values. Both are a revolt against the absolutism of reality.

[“The Cult of Moral Grayness,” VOS, 99; pb 77.]

A moral code impossible to practice, a code that demands imperfection or death, has taught you to dissolve all ideas in fog, to permit no firm definitions, to regard any concept as approximate and any rule of conduct as elastic, to hedge on any principle, to compromise on any value, to take the middle of any road. By extorting your acceptance of supernatural absolutes, it has forced you to reject the absolute of nature.

[GS, FNI, 216; pb 172.]

See also AXIOMS; COMPROMISE; METAPHYSICAL vs. MAN-MADE; PRAGMATISM; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRlMACY CONSCIOUSNESS.

Abstraction (process of). The act of isolation involved [in concept-formation] is a process of abstraction: i.e., a selective mental focus that takes out or separates a certain aspect of reality from all others (e.g., isolates a certain attribute from the entities possessing it, or a certain action from the entities performing it, etc.).

[ITOE, 11.]

The higher animals are able to perceive entities, motions, attributes, and certain numbers of entities. But what an animal cannot perform is the process of abstraction—of mentally separating attributes, motions or numbers from entities. It has been said that an animal can perceive two oranges or two potatoes, but cannot grasp the concept “two.”

[Ibid., 19.]

See also CONCEPT-FORMATION; CONCEPTS; INTEGRATION (MENTAL ).

Abstractions and Concretes. Abstractions as such do not exist: they are merely man’s epistemological method of perceiving that which exists—and that which exists is concrete.

[“The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” RM, 27; pb 23.]

See also CONCEPTS; ENTITY; PERCEPTION; PLATONIC REALLSM.

Acting. See Performing Arts.

Agnosticism. [There is] a widespread approach to ideas which Objectivism repudiates altogether: agnosticism. I mean this term in a sense which applies to the question of God, but to many other issues also, such as extra-sensory perception or the claim that the stars influence man’s destiny. In regard to all such claims, the agnostic is the type who says, “I can’t prove these claims are true, but you can’t prove they are false, so the only proper conclusion is: I don’t know; no one knows; no one can know one way or the other.”

The agnostic viewpoint poses as fair, impartial, and balanced. See how many fallacies you can find in it. Here are a few obvious ones: First, the agnostic allows the arbitrary into the realm of human cognition. He treats arbitrary claims as ideas proper to consider, discuss, evaluate—and then he regretfully says, “I don’t know,” instead of dismissing the arbitrary out of hand. Second, the onus-of-proof issue: the agnostic demands proof of a negative in a context where there is no evidence for the positive. “It’s up to you,” he says, “to prove that the fourth moon of Jupiter did not cause your sex life and that it was not a result of your previous incarnation as the Pharaoh of Egypt.” Third, the agnostic says, “Maybe these things will one day be proved.” In other words, he asserts possibilities or hypotheses with no jot of evidential basis.

The agnostic miscalculates. He thinks he is avoiding any position that will antagonize anybody. In fact, he is taking a position which is much more irrational than that of a man who takes a definite but mistaken stand on a given issue, because the agnostic treats arbitrary claims as meriting cognitive consideration and epistemological respect. He treats the arbitrary as on a par with the rational and evidentially supported. So he is the ultimate epistemological egalitarian: he equates the groundless and the proved. As such, he is an epistemological destroyer. The agnostic thinks that he is not taking any stand at all and therefore that he is safe, secure, invulnerable to attack. The fact is that his view is one of the falsest—and most cowardly—stands there can be.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism lecture series (1976), Lecture 6.]

See also ARBITRARY; ATHEISM; CERTAINTY; “OPEN MIND” and “CLOSED MIND”; SKEPTICISM.

Altruism.

Theory

What is the moral code of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.

Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selffess as a standard of the good.

Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist zuithnut giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you. The issue is whether the need of others is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence. The issue is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal. Any man of self-esteem will answer: “No.” Altruism says: “Yes.”

[“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 74; pb 61.]

There are two moral questions which altruism lumps together into one “package-deal”: (1) What are values? (2) Who should be the beneficiary of values? Altruism substitutes the second for the first; it evades the task of defining a code of moral values, thus leaving man, in fact, without moral guidance.

Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one’s own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value—and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.

[“Introduction,” VOS, x; pb viii.]

It is your mind that they want you to surrender—all those who preach the creed of sacrifice, whatever their tags or their motives, whether they demand it for the sake of your soul or of your body, whether they promise you another life in heaven or a full stomach on this earth. Those who start by saying: “It is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of others”—end up by saying: “It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must sacrifice them to the convictions of others.”

(GS, FNI, 176; pb 142.]

Now there is one word—a single word—which can blast the morality of altruism out of existence and which it cannot withstand—the word: “Why?” Why must man live for the sake of others? Why must he be a sacrificial animal? why is that the good? There is no earthly reason for it—and. ladies and gentlemen, in the whole history of philosophy no earthly reason has ever been given.

It is only mysticism that can permit moralists to get away with it. It was mysticism, the unearthly, the supernatural, the irrational that has always been called upon to justify it—or, to be exact, to escape the necessity of justification. One does not justify the irrational, one just takes it on faith. What most moralists—and few of their victims—realize is that reason and altruism are incompatible.

[“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 74; pb 61 .]

Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your own? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? If the sensation of eating a cake is a value, why is it an immoral indulgence in your stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the stomach of others? Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it? Does virtue consist of serving vice? Is the moral purpose of those who are good, self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil?

The answer you evade, the monstrous answer is: No, the takers are not evil, provided they did not earn the value you gave them. It is not immoral for them to accept it, provided they are unable to produce it, unable to deserve it, unable to give you any value in return. It is not immoral for them to enjoy it, provided they do not obtain it by right.

Such is the secret core of your creed, the other half of your double standard: it is immoral to live by your own effort, but moral to live by the effort of others—it is immoral to consume your own product, but moral to consume the products of others—it is immoral to earn, but moral to mooch—it is the parasites who are the moral justification for the existence of the producers, but the existence of the parasites is an end in itself—it is evil to profit by achievement, but good to profit by sacrifice—it is evil to create your own happiness, but good to enjoy it at the price of the blood of others.

Your code divides mankind into two castes and commands them to live by opposite rules: those who may desire anything and those who may desire nothing, the chosen and the damned, the riders and the carriers, the eaters and the eaten. What standard determines your caste? What passkey admits you to the moral elite? The passkey is lack of value.

Whatever the value involved, it is your lack of it that gives you a claim upon those who don’t lack it. It is your need that gives you a claim to rewards. If you are able to satisfy your need, your ability annuls your right to satisfy it. But a need you are unable to satisfy gives you first right to the lives of mankind.

If you succeed, any man who fails is your master; if you fail, any man who succeeds is your serf. Whether your failure is just or not, whether your wishes are rational or not, whether your misfortune is undeserved or the result of your vices, it is misfortune that gives you a right to rewards. It is pain, regardless of its nature or cause, pain as a primary absolute, that gives you a mortgage on all of existence.

If you heal your pain by your own effort, you receive no moral credit: your code regards it scornfully as an act of self-interest. Whatever value you seek to acquire, be it wealth or food or love or rights, if you acquire it by means of your virtue, your code does not regard it as a moral acquisition: you occasion no loss to anyone, it is a trade, not alms; a payment, not a sacrifice. The deserved belongs in the selfish, commercial realm of mutual profit; it is only the undeserved that calls for that moral transaction which consists of profit to one at the price of disaster to the other. To demand rewards for your virtue is selfish and immoral; it is your lack of virtue that transforms your demand into a moral right.

A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness—non-existence —as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw—the zero.

[GS, FNI, 178; pb 144.]

Altruism holds death as its ultimate goal and standard of value.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 33; pb 34.]

Since nature does not provide man with an automatic form of survival, since he has to support his life by his own effort, the doctrine that concern with one’s own interests is evil means that man’s desire to live is evil—that man’s life, as such, is evil. No doctrine could be more evil than that.

Yet that is the meaning of altruism.

[“Introdttction,” VOS, xii; pb ix.]

Practice

Observe what this beneficiary-criterion of [the altruist] morality does to a man’s life. the first thing he learns is that morality is his enemy: he has nothing to gain from it, he can only lose; self-inflicted loss, self-inflicted pain and the gray, debilitating pall of an incomprehensible duty is all that he can expect. He may hope that others might occasionally sacrifice themselves for his benefit, as he grudgingly sacrifices himself for theirs, but he knows that the relationship will bring mutual resentment, not pleasure—and that, morally, their pursuit of values will be like an exchange of unwanted, unchosen Christmas presents, which neither is morally permitted to buy for himself. Apart from such times as he manages to perform some act of self-sacrifice, he possesses no moral significance: morality takes no cognizance of him and has nothing to say to him for guidance in the crucial issues of his life; it is only his own personal, private, “selfish” life and, as such, it is regarded either as evil or, at best, amoral.

[Ibid., xi; pb viii.]

Even though altruism declares that “it is more blessed to give than to receive,” it does not work that way in practice. The givers are never blessed; the more they give, the more is demanded of them; complaints, reproaches and insults are the only response they get for practicing altruism’s virtues (or for their actual virtues). Altruism cannot permit a recognition of virtue; it cannot permit self-esteem or moral innocence. Guilt is altruism’s stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuation. If the giver is not kept under a torrent of degrading, demeaning accusations, he might take a look around and put an end to the self-sacrificing.

Altruists are concerned only with those who suffer—not with those who provide relief from suffering, not even enough to care whether they are able to survive. When no actual suffering can be found, the altruists are compelled to invent or manufacture it.

[“Moral Inflation,” ARL., III, 13, 2.]

Some unphilosophical, eclectic altruists, invoking such concepts as “inalienable rights,” “personal freedom,” “private choice,” have claimed that service to others, though morally obligatory, should not be compulsory. The committed, philosophical altruists, however, are consistent: recognizing that such concepts represent an individualist approach to ethics and that this is incompatible with the altruist morality, they declare that there is nothing wrong with compulsion in a good cause—that the use of force to counteract selfishness is ethically justified—and more: that it is ethically mandatory.

Every man, they argue, is morally the property of others—of those others it is his lifelong duty to serve; as such, he has no moral right to invest the major part of his time and energy in his own private concerns. If he attempts it, if he refuses voluntarily to make the requisite sacrifices, he is by that fact harming others, i.e., depriving them of what is morally theirs—he is violating men’s rights, i.e., the right of others to his service —he is a moral delinquent, and it is an assertion of morality if others forcibly intervene to extract from him the fulfillment of his altiuist obligations, on which he is attempting to default. Justice, they conclude, “social justice,” demands the initiation of force against the non-sacrificial individual; it demands that others put a stop to his evil. Thus has moral fervor been joined to the rule of physical force, raising it from a criminal tactic to a governing principle of human relationships. [Leonard Peikoff, “Altruism, Pragmatism, and Brutality,” ARL. II, 6, 3.]

The social system based on and consonant with the altruist morality —with the code of self-sacrifice—is socialism, in all or any of its variants: fascism, Nazism, communism. All of them treat man as a sacrificial animal to be immolated for the benefit of the group, the tribe, the society, the state. Soviet Russia is the ultimate result, the final product, the full, consistent embodiment of the altruist morality in practice; it represents the only way that that morality can ever be practiced.

[“Conservatism: An Obituary,” CUI, 195.]

America’s inner contradiction was the altruist-collectivist ethics. Alauism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights. One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal.

[“Man’s Rights,., VOS, 127; pb 95.]

From her start, America was torn by the clash of her political system with the altruist morality. Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.

[“For the New Intellecrual.” FNI. 62: pb 54.]

Psychology

It is obvious why the morality of altruism is a tribal phenomenon. Prehistorical men were physically unable to survive without clinging to a tribe for leadership and protection against other tribes. The cause of altruism’s perpetuation into civilized eras is not physical, but psycho-epistemological : the men of self-arrested, perceptual mentality ate unable to survive without tribal leadership and “protection” against reality. The doctrine of self-sacrifice does not offend them: they have no sense of self or of personal value—they do not know what it is that they are asked to sacrifice—they have no firsthand inkling of such things as intellectual integrity, love of truth, personally chosen values, or a passionate dedication to an idea. When they hear injunctions against “selfishness,” they believe that what they must renounce is the brute, mindless whim-worship of a tribal lone wolf. But their leaders—the theoreticians of ahruism—know better. Immanuel Kant knew it; John Dewey knew it; B. F. Skinner knows it; John Rawls knows it. Observe that it is not the mindless brute, but reason, intelligence, ability, merit, self-confidence, self-esteem that they are out to destroy.

[“Selfishness Without a Self,” PWNI, 61; pb 50.]

The advocates of mysticism are motivated not by a quest for truth, but by hatred for man’s mind; ... the advocates of altruism are motivated not by compassion for suffering, but by hatred for man’s life.

[“An Untitled Letter,” PWNI, 123; pb 102.]

The psychological results of altruism may be observed in the fact that a great many people approach the subject of ethics by asking such questions as: “Should one risk one’s life to help a man who is: a) drowning, b) trapped in a fire, c) stepping in front of a speeding truck, d) hanging by his fingernails over an abyss?”

Consider the implications of that approach. If a man accepts the ethics of altruism, he suffers the following consequences (in proportion to the degree of his acceptance):

1. Lack of seif-esteem—since his first concern in the realm of values is not how to live his life, but how to sacrifice it.

2. Lack of respect for others—since he regards mankind as a herd of doomed beggars crying for someone’s help.

3. A nightmare view of existence—since he believes that men are trapped in a “malevolent universe” where disasters are the constant and primary concern of their lives.

4. And, in fact, a lethargic indifference to ethics, a hopelessly cynical amorality—since his questions involve situations which he is not likely ever to encounter, which bear no relation to the actual problems of his own life and thus leave him to live without any moral principles whatever.

By elevating the issue of helping others into the central and primary issue of ethics, altruism has destroyed the concept of any authentic benevolence or good will among men. It has indoctrinated men with the idea that to value another human being is an act of selflessness, thus implying that a man can have no personal interest in others—that to value another means to sacrifice oneself—that any love, respect or admiration a man may feel for others is not and cannot be a source of his own enjoyment, but is a threat to his existence, a sacrifical blank check signed over to his loved ones.

The men who accept that dichotomy but choose its other side, the ultimate products of altruism’s dehumanizing influence, are those psychopaths who do not challenge altruism’s basic premise, but proclaim their rebellion against self-sacrifice by announcing that they are totally indifferent to anything living and would not lift a finger to help a man or a dog left mangled by a hit-and-run driver (who is usually one of their own kind).

[“The Ethics of Emergencies,” VOS, 46; pb 43.]

[Intellectual appeasement] is an attempt to apologize for his intellectual concerns and to escape from the loneliness of a thinker by professing that his thinking is dedicated to some social-altruistic goal. It is an attempt that amounts to the wordless equivalent of the plea: “I’m not an outsider! I’m your friend! Please forgive me for using my mind—I’m using it only in order to serve you!”

Whatever remnants of personal value he may preserve after a deal of that kind, self-esteern is not one of them.

Such decisions are seldom, if ever, made consciously. They are made gradually, by subconscious emotional motivation and semi-conscious rationalization. Altruism offers an arsenal of such rationalizations: if an unformed adolescent can tell himself that his cowardice is humanitarian love, that his subservience is unselfishrress, that his moral treason is spiritual nobility, he is hooked.

[“Altruism as Appeasement,” TO, Jan. 1966, 2.]

The injunction “don’t judge” is the ultimate climax of the altruist morality which, today, can be seen in its naked essence. When men plead for forgiveness, for the nameless, cosmic forgiveness of an unconfessed evil, when they react with instantaneous compassion to any guilt, to the perpetrators of any atrocity, while turning away indifferently from the bleeding bodies of the victims and the innocent—one may see the actual purpose, motive and psychological appeal of the altruist code. When these same compassionate men turn with snarling hatred upon anyone who pronounces moral judgments, when they scream that the only evil is the determination to fight against evil—one may see the kind of moral blank check that the altruist morality hands out.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 50; pb 45.]

See also CHARITY; COLLECTIVISM; “DUTY”; KANT, IMMANUEL; MORALITY; MYSTICISM; SACRIFICE; SELFISHNESS; SELFLESSNESS; SOVIET RUSSIA; SUFFERING; TRIBALISM.

Ambition. “Ambition” means the systematic pursuit of achievement and of constant improvement in respect to one’s goal. Like the word “selfishness,” and for the same reasons, the word “ambition” has been perverted to mean only the pursuit of dubious or evil goals, such as the pursuit of power; this left no concept to designate the pursuit of actual values. But “ambition” as such is a neutral concept: the evaluation of a given ambition as moral or immoral depends on the nature of the goal. A great scientist or a great artist is the most passionately ambitious of men. A demagogue seeking political power is ambitious. So is a social climber seeking “prestige.” So is a modest laborer who works conscientiously to acquire a home of his own. The common denominator is the drive to improve the conditions of one’s existence, however broadly or narrowly conceived. (“Improvement” is a moral term and depends on one’s standard of values. An ambition guided by an irrational standard does not, in fact, lead to improvement, but to self-destruction.)

[“Tax Credits for Education,” ARL, I, 12, 1.]

Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trend is statism. Philosophically, the goal is the obliteration of reason; psychologically, it is the erosion of ambition.

The political goal presupposes the two others. The human characteristic required by statism is docility, which is the product of hopelessness and intellectual stagnation. Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate.

[Ibid.]

See also C:AREER; PRODUCTIVENESS; PURPOSE; VALUES.

America. I can say—not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political and esthetic roots—that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.

[“Philosophy: Who Needs It,” PWNI, 12; pb 10.]

Since the golden age of Greece, there has been only one era of reason in twenty-three centuries of Western philosophy. During the final decades of that era, the United States of America was created as an independent nation. This is the key to the country—to its nature, its development, and its uniqueness: the United States is the nation of the Enlightenment.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 101; pb 100.]

America’s founding ideal was the princeple of individual rights. Nothing more—and nothing less. The rest—everything that America achieved, everything she became, everything “noble and just,” and heroic, and great, and unprecedented in human history—was the logical consequence of fidelity to that one principle. The first consequence was the principle of political freedom, i.e., an individual’s freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by the government. The next was the economic implementation of political freedom: the system of capitalism.

[“A Preview,” ARL, 1, 24, 5.]

The most profoundly revolutionary y achievement of the United States of America was the subordination of society to moral law.

The principle of man’s individual rights represented the extension of morality into the social system—as a limitation on the power of the state, as man’s protection against the brute force of the collective, as the subordination of might to right. The United States was the first moral society in history.

All previous systems had regarded man as a sacrificial means to the ends of others, and society as an end in itself, The United States regarded man as an end in himself, and society as a means to the peaceful, orderly, voluntary co-existence of individuals. All previous systems had held that man’s life belongs to society, that society can dispose of him in any way it pleases, and that any freedom he enjoys is his only by favor, by the permission of society, which may be revoked at any time. The United States held that man’s life is his by right (which means: by moral principle and by his nature), that a right is the property of an individual, that society as such has no rights, and that the only moral purpose of a government is the protection of individual rights.

[“Man’s Rights,” VOS, 124; pb 93.]

It took centuries of intellectual, philosophical development to achieve political freedom. It was a long struggle, stretching from Aristotle to John Locke to the Founding Fathers. The system they established was not based on unlimited majority rule, but on its opposite: on individual rights, which were not to be alienated by majority vote or minority plotting. The individual was not left at the mercy of his neighbors or his leaders: the Constitutional system of checks and balances was scientifically devised to protect him from both.

This was the great American achievement—and if concern for the actual welfare of other nations were our present leaders’ motive, this is what we should have been teaching the world.

[“Theory and Practice,” CUI, 138.]

To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money—and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being—the self-made man—the American industrialist.

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose—because it contains all the others—the fact that they were the people who created the phrase “to make money.” No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity—to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.

[“The Meaning of Money,” FNI, 111; pb 93.]

America’s abundance was not created by public sacrifices to “the common good,” but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance—and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 29.]

In its great era of capitalism, the United States was the freest country on earth—and the best refutation of racist theories. Men of all races came here, some from obscure, culturally undistinguished countries, and accomplished feats of productive ability which would have remained stillborn in their control-ridden native lands. Men of racial groups that had been slaughtering one another for centuries, learned to live together in harmony and peaceful cooperation. America had been called “the melting pot,” with good reason. But few people realized that America did not melt men into the gray conformity of a collective: she united them by means of protecting their right to individuality.

The major victims of such race prejudice as did exist in America were the Negroes. It was a problem originated and perpetuated by the non-capitalist South, though not confined to its boundaries. The persecution of Negroes in the South was and is truly disgraceful. But in the rest of the country, so long as men were free, even that problem was slowly giving way under the pressure of enlightenment and of the white men’s own economic interests.

Today, that problem is growing worse—and so is every other form of racism. America has become race-conscious in a manner reminiscent of the worst days in the most backward countries of nineteenth-century Europe. The cause is the same: the growth of collectivism and statism.

[“Racism,” VOS, 178; pb 130.1 ]

The Americans were political revolutionaries but not ethical revolutionaries. Whatever their partial (and largely implicit) acceptance of the principle of ethical egoism, they remained explicitly within the standard European tradition, avowing their primary allegiance to a moral code stressing philanthropic service and social duty. Such was the American conflict: an impassioned politics presupposing one kind of ethics, within a cultural atmosphere professing the sublimity of an opposite kind of ethics.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 117; pb 115.]

America’s inner contradiction was the altruist-collectivist ethics. Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights. One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal.

[“Man’s Rights,” VOS, 127; pb 95.]

This country—the product of reason—could not survive on the morality of sacrifice. It was not built by men who sought self-immolation or by men who sought handouts. It could not stand on the mystic split that divorced man’s soul from his body. It could not live by the mystic doctrine that damned this earth as evil and those who succeeded on earth as depraved. From its start, this country was a threat to the ancient rule of mystics. In the brilliant rocket-explosion of its youth, this country displayed to an incredulous world what greatness was possible to man, what happiness was possible on earth. It was one or the other: America or mystics. The mystics knew it; you didn’t. You let them infect you with the worship of need-and this country became a giant in body with a mooching midget in place of its soul, while its living soul was driven underground to labor and feed you in silence, unnamed, unhonored, negated, its soul and hero: the industrialist.

[GS, FNI, 228; pb 181.]

A dictatorship cannot take hold in America today. This country, as yet, cannot be ruled—but it can explode. It can blow up into the helpless rage and blind violence of a civil war. It cannot be cowed into submission, passivity, malevolence, resignation. It cannot be “pushed around.” Defiance, not obedience, is the American’s answer to overbearing authority. The nation that ran an underground railroad to help human beings escape from slavery, or began drinking on principle in the face of Prohibition, will not say “Yes, sir,” to the enforcers of ration coupons and cereal prices. Not yet.

[“Don’t Let It Go,” PWNI, 260; pb 213.]

Americans have known how to erect a superlative material achievement in the midst of an untouched wilderness, against the resistance of savage tribes. What we need today is to erect a corresponding philosophical structure, without which the material greatness cannot survive. A skyscraper cannot stand on crackerbarrels, nor on wall mottoes, nor on full-page ads, nor on prayers, nor on meta-language. The new wilderness to reclaim is philosophy, now all but deserted, with the weeds of prehistoric doctrines rising again to swallow the ruins. To support a culture, nothing less than a new philosophical foundation will do.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 58; pb 50.]

America vs. Europe

It was a European who discovered America, but it was Americans who were the first nation to discover this earth and man’s proper place in it, and man’s potential for happiness, and the world which is man’s to win. What they failed to discover is the words to name their achievement, the concepts to identify it, the principles to guide it, i.e., the appropriate philosophy and its consequence: an American culture.

America has never had an original culture, i.e., a body of ideas derived from her philosophical (Aristotelian) base and expressing her profound difference from all other countries in history.

American intellectuals were Europe’s passive dependents and poor relatives almost from the beginning. They lived on Europe’s drying crumbs and discarded fashions, including even such hand-me-downs as Freud and Wittgenstein. America’s sole contribution* to philosophy—Pragmatism—was a bad recycling of Kantian-Hegelian premises.

[“Don’t Let It Go,” PWNI, 256; pb 210.]

Europeans do believe in Original Sin, i.e., in man’s innate depravity; Americans do not. Americans see man as a value—as clean, free, creative, rational. But the American view of man has not been expressed or upheld in philosophical terms (not since the time of our first Founding Father, Aristotle; see his description of the “magnanimous man”).

[Ibid., 258; pb 211.]

There have never been any “masses” in America: the poorest American is an individual and, subconsciously, an individualist. Marxism, which has conquered our universities, is a dismal failure as far as the people are concerned: Americans cannot be sold on any sort of class war; American workers do not see themselves as a “proletariat,” but are among the proudest of property owners. It is professors and businessmen who advocate cooperation with Soviet Russia—American labor unions do not.

[Ibid., 258; pb 212.]

America is the land of the uncommon man. It is the land where man is free to develop his genius—and to get its just rewards. It is the land where each man tries to develop whatever quality he may possess and to rise to whatever degree he can, great or modest. It is not the land where one glories or is taught to glory in one’s mediocrity.

No self-respecting man in America is or thinks of himself as “little,” no matter how poor he may be. That, precisely, is the difference he-tween an American working man and a European serf.

[“Screen Guide for Americans,” Plain Talk, Nov. 1947, 40.]

Tribalism (which is the best name to give to all the group manifestations of the anti-conceptual mentality) is a dominant element in Europe, as a reciprocally reinforcing cause and result of Europe’s long history of caste systems, of national and local (provincial) chauvinism, of rule by brute force and endless, bloody wars. As an example, observe the Balkan nations, which are perennially bent upon exterminating one another over minuscule differences of tradition or language. Tribalism had no place in the United States—until recent decades. It could not take root here, its imported seedlings were withering away and turning to slag in the melting pot whose fire was fed by two inexhaustible sources of energy: individual rights and objective law; these two were the only protection man needed.

“The Missing Link,” PWNI, 51: pb 42.]

A European is disarmed in the face of a dictatorship: he may hate it. but he feels that he is wrong and, metaphysically, the State is right. An American would rebel to the bottom of his soul.... I)efiance, not ol)e-dience, is the American’s answer to overbearing authority.

[“Don’t Let It Go,” PWNI, 260; pb 2l;i.J

See also ARISTOTLE; CAPITALISM; CONSTITUTION; ENLIGHTEN MENT, AGE of; FOUNDING FATHERS: INDIVIDUALISM; INDIVID UAL RIGHTS; REPUBLIC.

Amoralism. The clearest symptom by which one can recognize [the amoralist] is his total inability to judge himself, his actions, or his work by any sort of standard. The normal pattern of self-appraisal requires a reference to some abstract value or virtue—e.g.. “I am good because I am rational,” “I am good because I am honest,” even the second-hander’s notion of “I am good because people like me.” Regardless of whether the value-standards involved are true or false, these examples imply the recognition of an essential moral principle: that one’s own value has to be earned.

The amoralist’s implicit pattern of self-appraisal (which he seldom identifies or admits) is: “I am good because it’s me.”

Beyond the age of about three to five (i.e., beyond the perceptual level of mental development), this is not an expression of pride or self-esteem, but of the opposite: of a vacuum—of a stagnant, arrested mentality confessing its impotence to achieve any personal value or virtue.

Do not confuse this pattern with psychological subjectivism. A psychological subjectivist is unable fully to identify his values or to prove their objective validity, but he may be profoundly consistent and loyal to them in practice (though with terrible psycho-epistemological difficulty). The amoralist does not hold subjective values; he does not hold any values. The implicit pattern of all his estimates is: “It’s good because I like it”—“It’s right because I did it”—“It’s true because I want it to be true.” What is the “I” in these statements? A physical hulk driven by chronic anxiety.

[“Selfishness Without a Self,” PWNI, 60; pb 47.]

[The amoralist] will walk over piles of corpses—in order to assert himself? no—in order to hide (or fill) the nagging inner vacuum left by his aborted self.

The grim joke on mankind is the fact that he is held up as a symbol of selfishness.

[Ibid., 58; pb 5(l.]

See also ANTI-CONCEPTUAL MENTALITY; MORALITY; SELFISII-NESS; SELF; SELF-ESTEEM; TRIBALISM.

Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. The assault on man’s conceptual faculty has been accelerating since Kant, widening the breach between man’s mind and reality. The cognitive function of concepts was undercut by a series of grotesque devices—such, for instance, as the “analytic-synthetic” dichotomy which, by a route of tortuous circumlocutions and equivocations, leads to the dogma that a “necessarily” true proposition cannot be factual, and a factual proposition cannot be “necessarily” true.

[ITOF, 102.]

Objectivism rejects the theory of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy as false—in principle, at root, and in every one of its variants....

An analytic proposition is defined as one which can be validated merely by an analysis of the meaning of its constituent concepts. The critical question is: What is included in “the meaning of a concept”? Does a concept mean the existents which it subsumes, including all their characteristics? Or does it mean only certain aspects of these existents, designating some of their characteristics but excluding others?

The latter viewpoint is fundamental to every version of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy. The advocates of this dichotomy divide the characteristics of the existents subsumed under a concept into two groups: those which are included in the meaning of the concept, and those—the great majority—which, they claim, are excluded from its meaning. The dichotomy among propositions follows directly. If a proposition links the “included” characteristics with the concept, it can be validated merely by an “analysis” of the concept; if it links the “excluded” characteristics with the concept, it represents an act of “synthesis.”

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 127.]

The Objectivist theory of concepts undercuts the theory of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy at its root.... Since a concept is an integration of units, it has no content or meaning apart from its units. The meaning of a concept consists of the units-the existents-which it incilidilig all the characteristics of these units.

Observe that concepts mean existents, not arbitrarily selected portions of existents. There is no basis whatever—neither metaphysical nor epistemological, neither in the nature of reality nor of a conceptual consciousness—for a division of the characteristics of a concept’s units into two groups, one of which is excluded from the concept’s meaning....

The fact that certain characteristics are, at a given time, unknown to man, does not indicate that these characteristics are excluded from the entity—or from the concept. A is A; existents are what they are, independent of the state of human knowledge; and a concept means the existents which it integrates. Thus, a concept subsumes and includes all the characteristics of its referents, known and not-yet-known.

[ibid., 131.]

The theory of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy has its roots in two types of error: one epistemological, the other metaphysical. The epistemological error, as I have discussed, is an incorrect view of the nature of concepts. The metaphysical error is: the dichotomy between necessary and contingent facts.

[ibid., 144.]

Only in regard to the man-made is it valid to claim: “It happens to be, but it could have been otherwise.” Even here, the term “contingent” is highly misleading. Historically, that term has been used to designate a metaphysical category of much wider scope than the realm of human action; and it has always been associated with a metaphysics which, in one form or another, denies the facts of Identity and Causality. The “necessary-contingent” terminology serves only to introduce confusion, and should be abandoned. What is required in this context is the distinction between the “metaphysical” and the “man-made.” ... Truths about metaphysical and about man-made facts are learned and validated by the same process: by observation; and, qua truths, both are equally necessary. Some facts are not necessary, but all truths are.

[Ibid., 150.1

The failure to recognize that logic is man’s method of cognition, has produced a brood of artificial splits and dichotomies which represent restatements of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy from various aspects. Three in particular are prevalent today: logical truth vs. factual truth; the logically possible vs. the empirically possible; and the a priori vs. the a posteriori.

[Ibid., 152.]

The theory of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy presents men with the following choice: If your statement is proved, it says nothing about that which exists; if it is about existents, it cannot be proved. If it is demonstrated by logical argument, it represents a subjective convention; if it asserts a fact, logic cannot establish it. If you validate it by an appeal to the meanings of your concepts, then it is cut off from reality; if you validate it by an appeal to your percepts, then you cannot be certain of it.

[Ibid., 126.]

See also CAUSALITY; CONCEPT-FORMATION; CONCEPTS; DEFINITIONS; MEANING (of CONCEPTS); METAPHYSICAL vs. MAN-MADE; NECESSITY.

Anarchism. Anarchy, as a political concept, is a naive floating abstraction: ... a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare. But the possibility of human immorality is not the only objection to anarchy: even a society whose every member were fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy; it is the need of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitates the establishment of a government.

[“The Nature of Government,” VOS, 152; pb 112.]

If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door—or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang-rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into perpetual tribal warfare of prehistorical savages.

The use of physical force—even its retaliatory use—cannot be left at the discretion of individual citizens. Peaceful coexistence is impossible if a man has to live under the constant threat of force to he unleashed against him by any of his neighbors at any moment. Whether his neighbors’ intentions are good or bad, whether their judgment is rational or irrational, whether they are motivated by a sense of justice or by ignorance or by prejudice or by malice—the use of force against one man cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another.

[Ibid., 146; pb 108.]

A recent variant of anarchistic theory, which is befuddling some of the younger advocates of freedom, is a weird absurdity called “competing governments.” Accepting the basic premise of the modern statists—who see no difference between the functions of government and the functions of industry, between force and production, and who advocate government ownership of business—the proponents of “competing governments” take the other side of the same coin and declare that since competition is so beneficial to business, it should also be applied to government. Instead of a single, monopolistic government, they declare, there should be a number of different governments in the same geographical area, competing for the allegiance of individual citizens. with every citizen free to “shop” and to patronize whatever government he chooses.

Remember that forcible restraint of men is the only service a government has to offer. Ask yourself what a competition in forcible restraint would have to mean.

One cannot call this theory a contradiction in terms, since it is ohviously devoid of any understanding of the terms “competition” and “government.” Nor can one call it a floating abstraction, since it is devoid of any contact with or reference to reality and cannot be concretized at all, not even roughly or approximately. One illustration will be sufficient : suppose Mr. Smith, a customer of Government A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of Government B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones’ house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith’s complaint and do not recognize the authority of Government A. What happens then? You take it from there.

[Ibid., 152; pb 112.]

The common denominator of such [advocates of “competing governments”] is the desire to escape from objectivity (objectivity requires a very long conceptual chain and very abstract principles), to act on whim, and to deal with men rather than with ideas—i.e., with the men of their own gang bound by the same concretes.

[“The Missing Link,” PWNI, 53; pb 44.]

Picture a band of strangers marching down Main Street, submachine guns at the ready. When confronted by the police, the leader of the band announces: “Me and the boys are only here to see that justice is done, so you have no right to interfere with us.” According to the “libertarian” anarchists, in such a confrontation the police are morally bound to withdraw, on pain of betraying the rights of self-defense and free trade.

[Harry Binswanger. “Q & A Department: Anarchism,” TOF, Aug. 1981, 12.]

Private force is force not authorized by the government, not validated by its procedural safeguards, and not subject to its supervision. The government has to regard such private force as a threat—i.e., as a potential violation of individual rights. In barring such private force, the government is retaliating against that threat.

[Ibid., 11.]

See also COMPETITION; GOVERNMENT; ECONOMIC POWER vs. POLITICAL POWER; LAW, OBJECTIVE and NON-OBJECTIVE; OBJECTIVITY; RETALIATORY FORCE; WHIMS/WHIM-WORSHIP.

Ancient Greece. The sound of the first human step in recorded history, the prelude to the entrance of the producer on the historical scene, was the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece. All earlier cultures had been ruled, not by reason, but by mysticism: the task of philosophy --the formulation of an integrated view of man, of existence, of the universe—was the monopoly of various religions. that enforced their views by the authority of a claim to supernatural knowledge and dictated the rules that controlled men’s lives. Philosophy was born in a period when ... a comparative degree of political freedom undercut the power of mysticism and, for the first time, man was free to face an unobstructed universe, free to declare that his mind was competent to deal with all the problems of his existence and that reason was his only means of knowledge.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 19; pb 22.]

Ancient Greece tore away the heavy shroud of mysticism woven for centuries in murky temples, and achieved, in three centuries, what Egypt had not dreamed of in thirty: a civilization that was essentially pro-man and pro-life. The achievements of the Greeks rested on their confidence in the power of man’s mind—the power of reason. For the first time, men sought to understand the causes of natural phenomena, and gradually replaced superstition with the beginnings of science. For the first time, men sought to guide their lives by the judgment of reason, instead of resorting exclusively to divine will and revelation.

The Greeks built temples for their gods, but they conceived of their gods as perfect human beings, rejecting the cats, crocodiles and cow-headed monstrosities enshrined and worshiped by the Egyptians. Greek gods personified abstractions such as Beauty, Wisdom, Justice, Victory, which are proper human values. In the Greek religion, there was no omnipotent mystical authority and no organized priesthood. The Greek had only a vague idea of, and little interest in, an afterlife.

[Mary Ann Sures, “Metaphysics in Marble,” TO, Feb. 1969, 12.]

See also ART; HISTORY; MYSTICISM; REASON; PHILOSOPHY.

“Anti-Concepts.” An anti-concept is an unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The use of anti-concepts gives the listeners a sense of approximate understanding. But in the realm of cognition, nothing is as bad as the approximate....

One of today’s fashionable anti-concepts is “polarization.” Its meaning is not very clear, except that it is something bad—undesirabte, socially destructive, evil—something that would split the country into irrecortcilable camps and conflicts. It is used mainly in political issues and serves as a kind of “argument from intimidation”: it replaces a discussion of the merits (the truth or falsehood) of a given idea by the menacing accusation that such an idea would “polarize” the country—which is supposed to make one’s opponents retreat, protesting that they didn’t mean it. Mean—what? ...

It is doubtfut—even in the midst of today’s intellectual decadence—that one could get away with declaring explicitly: “Let us abolish all debate on fundamental principles!” (though some men have tried it). If, however, one declares: “Don’t let us polarize,” and suggests a vague image of warring camps ready to fight (with no mention of the fight’s object), one has a chance to silence the mentally weary. The use of “polarization” as a pejorative term means: the suppression of fundamental principles. Such is the pattern of the function of anti-concepts.

[“Credibility and Polarization,” ARL, I, 1, 1.]

Observe the technique involved ... It consists of creating an artificial, unnecessary, and (rationally) unusable term, designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concepts—a term which sounds like a concept, but stands for a “package-deal” of disparate, incongruous, contradictory elements taken out of any logical conceptual order or context, a “package-deal” whose (approximately) defining characteristic is always a non-essential. This last is the essence of the trick.

Let me remind you that the purpose of a definition is to distinguish the things subsumed under a single concept from all other things in existence; and, therefore, their defining characteristic must always be that essential characteristic which distinguishes them from everything else.

So long as men use language, that is the way they will use it. There is no other way to communicate. And if a man accepts a term with a definition by non-essentials, his mind will substitute for it the essential characteristic of the objects he is trying to designate.... Thus the real meaning of the term will automatically replace the alleged meaning.

[“ ‘Extremism,’ or The Art of Smearing,” CUI, 176.]

[Some other terms that Ayn Rand identified as anti-concepts are “consumerisrn,” “duty,” “ethnicity,” “extremism,” “isolationism,” “McCarthyism,” “meritocracy,” and “simplistic.”]

See also ARGUMENT from INTIMIDATION; CONCEPTS; DEFINITIONS; INVALID CONCEPTS; “PACKAGE-DEALING,” FALLACY of.

Anti-Conceptual Mentality. The main characteristic of this mentality is a special kind of passivity: not passivity as such and not across-the-board, but passivity beyond a certain limit—i.e., passivity in regard to the process of conceptualization and, therefore, in regard to fundamental principles. It is a mentality which decided, at a certain point of development, that it knows enough and does not care to look further. What does it accept as “enough”? The immediately given, directly perceivable concretes of its background....

To grasp and deal with such concretes, a human being needs a certain degree of conceptual development, a process which the brain of an animal cannot perform. But after the initial feat of learning to speak, a child can counterfeit this process, by memorization and imitation. The anti-conceptual mentality stops on this level of development—on the first levels of abstractions, which identify perceptual material consisting predominantly of physical objects—and does not choose to take the next, crucial, fully volitional step: the higher levels of abstraction from abstractions, which cannot be learned by imitation. (See my book Introduction to Objectivist Epestencology.) ...

The anti-conceptual mentality takes most things as irreducible primaries and regards them as “self-evident.” It treats concepts as if they were (memorized) percepts; it treats abstractions as if they were perceptual concretes. To such a mentality, everything is the given: the passage of time, the four seasons, the institution of marriage, the weather, the breeding of children, a flood, a fire, an earthquake, a revolution, a book are phenomena of the same order. The distinction between the metaphysical and the man-made is not merely unknown to this mentality, it is incommunicable.

[“The Missing Link,” PWNI, 45; pb 38.]

[This type of mentality] has learned to speak, but has never grasped the process of conceptualization. Concepts, to him, are merely some sort of code signals employed by other people for some inexplicable reason, signals that have no relation to reality or to himself. He treats concepts as if they were percepts, and their meaning changes with any change of circumstances. Whatever he learns or happens to retain is treated, in his mind, as if it had always been there, as if it were an item of direct awareness, with no memory of how he acquired it—as a random store of unprocessed material that comes and goes at the mercy of chance.... He does not seek knowledge-he “exposes himself” to “experience,” hoping, in effect, that it will push something into his mind; if nothing happens, he feels with self-righteous rancor that there is nothing he can do about it. Mental action, i.e., mental effort—any sort of processing, identifying, organizing, integrating, critical evaluation or control of his mental content—is an alien realm.

[“The Age of Envy,” NL, 177.]

This mentality is not the product of ignorance (nor is it caused by lack of intelligence): it is self-made, i.e., self-arrested.

[“The Missing Link,” PWNI, 50; pb 42.]

In the brain of an anti-conceptual person, the process of integration is largely replaced by a process of association. What his subconscious stores and automatizes is not ideas, but an indiscriminate accumulation of sundry concretes, random facts, and unidentified feelings, piled into unlabeled mental file folders. This works, up to a certain point—i.e., so long as such a person deals with other persons whose folders are stuffed similarly, and thus no search through the entire filing system is ever required. Within such limits, the person can be active and willing to work hard....

A person of this mentality may uphold some abstract principles or profess some intellectual convictions (without remembering where or how he picked them up). But if one asks him what he means by a given idea, he will not be able to answer. If one asks him the reasons of his convictions, one will discover that his convictions are a thin, fragile film floating over a vacuum, like an oil slick in empty space—and one will be shocked by the number of questions it had never occurred to him to ask.

[Ibid., 47; pb 39.]

He seems able to understand a discussion or a rational argument, sometimes even on an abstract, theoretical level. He is able to participate, to agree or disagree after what appears to be a critical examination of the issue. But the next time one meets him, the conclusions he reached are gone from his mind, as if the discussion had never occurred even though he remembers it: he remembers the event, i.e., a discussion, not its intellectual content.

It is beside the point to accuse him of hypocrisy or lying (though some part of both is necessarily involved). His problem is much worse than that: he was sincere, he meant what he said in and for that moment. But it ended with that moment. Nothing happens in his mind to an idea he accepts or rejects; there is no processing, no integration, no application to himself, his actions or his concerns; he is unable to use it or even to retain it. Ideas, i.e., abstractions, have no reality to him; abstractions involve the past and the future, as well as the present; nothing is fully real to him except the present. Concepts, in his mind, become percepts —percepts of people uttering sounds; and percepts end when the stimuli vanish. When he uses words, his mental operations are closer to those of a parrot than of a human being. In the strict sense of the word, he has not learned to speak.

But there is one constant in his mental flux. The subconscious is an integrating mechanism; when left without conscious control, it goes on integrating on its own—and, like an automatic blender, his subconscious squeezes its clutter of trash to produce a single basic emotion: fear.

[“The Comprachicos,” NI., 218.]

It is the fundamentals of philosophy (particularly, of ethics) that an anti-conceptual person dreads above all else. To understand and to apply them requires a long conceptual chain, which he has made his mind incapable of holding beyond the first, rudimentary links. If his professed beiiefs—i.e., the rules and slogans of his group—are challenged, he feels his consciousness dissolving in fog. Hence, his fear of outsiders. The word “outsiders,” to him, means the whole wide world beyond the confines of his village or town or gang—the world of all those people who do not live by his “rules.” He does not know why he feels that outsiders are a deadly threat to him and why they fill him with helpless terror. The threat is not existential, but psycho-episternulogical: to deal with them requires that he rise above his “rules” to the level of abstract principles. He would die rather than attempt it.

“Protection from outsiders” is the benefit he seeks in clinging to his group. What the group demands in return is obedience to its rules, which he is eager to obey: those rules are his protection—from the dreaded realm of abstract thought.

[“The Missing Link,” PWNI, 49; pb 40.]

Racism is an obvious manifestation of the anti-conceptual mentality. So is xenophobia—the fear or hatred of foreigners (“outsiders”). So is any caste system, which prescribes a man’s status (i.e., assigns him to a tribe) according to his birth; a caste system is perpetuated by a special kind of snobbishness (i.e., group loyalty) not merely among the aristocrats, but, perhaps more fiercely, among the commoners or even the serfs, who like to “know their place” and to guard it jealously against the outsiders from above or from below. So is guild socialism. So is any kind of ancestor worship or of family “solidarity” (the family including uncles, aunts and third cousins). So is any criminal gang.

Tribalism ... is the best name to give to all the group manifestations of the anti-conceptual mentality.

[Ibid., 50; pb 42.]

Observe that today’s resurgence of tribalism is not a product of the lower classes—of the poor, the helpless, the ignorant—but of the intellectuals, the college-educated “elitists” (which is a purely tribalistic term). Observe the proliferation of grotesque herds or gangs—hippies, yippies, beatniks, peaceniks, Women’s Libs, Gay Libs, Jesus Freaks, Earth Children—which are not tribes, but shifting aggregates of people desperately seeking tribal “protection.”

The common denominator of all such gangs is the belief in motion (mass demonstrations), not action—in chanting, not arguing—in demanding, not achieving—in feeling, not thinking—in denouncing “outsiders,” not in pursuing values—in focusing only on the “now,” the “today” without a “tomorrow”—in seeking to return to “nature,” to “the earth,” to the mud, to physical labor, i.e., to all the things which a perceptual mentality is able to handle. You don’t see advocates of reason and science clogging a street in the belief that using their bodies to stop traffic, will solve any problem.

[Ibid., 52; pb 43.1

See also CONCEPTS; PERCEPTION; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; RAC ISM; REASON; TRIBALISM.

Antitrust Laws. The Antitrust laws—an unenforceable, uncompliable, unjudicable mess of contradictions—have for decades kept American businessmen under a silent, growing reign of terror. Yet these laws were created and, to this day, are upheld by the “conservatives,” as a grim monument to their lack of political philosophy, of economic knowledge and of any concern with principles. Under the Antitrust laws, a man becomes a criminal from the moment he goes into business, no matter what he does. For instance, if he charges prices which some but eaucrats judge as too high, he can be prosecuted for monopoly or for a successful “intent to monopolize”; if he charges prices lower than those of his competitors, he can be prosecuted for “unfair competition” or “restraint of trade”; and if he charges the same prices as his competitors, he can be prosecuted for “collusion” or “conspiracy.” There is only one difference in the legal treatment accorded to a criminal or to a businessman: the criminal’s rights are protected much more securely and objectively than the businessman’s.

[“Choose Your Issues,” TON, Jan. 1962, 1.]

The alleged purpose of the Antitrust laws was to protect competition; that purpose was based on the socialistic fallacy that a free, unregulated market will inevitably lead to the establishment of coercive monopolies. But, in fact, no coercive monopoly has ever been or ever can be established by means of free trade on a free market. Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action. (For a full demonstration of this fact, I refer you to the works of the best economists.) The Antitrust laws were the classic example of a moral inversion prevalent in the history of capitalism: an example of the victims, the businessmen, taking the blame for the evils caused by the government, and the government using its own guilt as a justification for acquiring wider powers, on the pretext of “correcting” the evils.

“Free competition enforced by law” is a grotesque contradiction in terms.

[“Antitrust: The Rule of Unreason,” TON, Feb. 1962, 1.]

[There is only one] meaning and purpose these laws could have, whether their authors intended it or not: the penalizing of ability for being ability. the penalizing of success for being success, and the sacrifice of productive genius to the demands of envious mediocrity.

[“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 57.]

See also CAPITALISM; COMPETITION; ECONOMIC POWER vs. POLITICAL POWER; FREE MARKET; LAW, OBJECTIVE AND NON-OBJECTIVE; MONOPOLY; PROPERTY RIGHTS.

Appeasement. Do not confuse appeasement with tactfulness or generosity. Appeasement is not consideration for the feelings of others, it is consideration for and compliance with the unjust, irrational and evil feelitigs of others. It is a policy of exempting the emotions of others from moral judgment, and of willingness to sacrifice innocent, virtuous victims to the evil malice of such emotions.

[“The Age of Envy.” NL, 160.]

The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser’s intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture’s dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.

[“Altruism as Appeasement,” TO, Jan. 1966. 6.]

It is understandable that men might seek to hide their vices from the eyes of people whose judgment they respect. But there are men who hide their virtues from the eyes of monsters. There are men who apologize for their own achievements, deride their own values. debase their own character—for the sake of pleasing those they know to be stupid, corrupt, malicious, evil.

[“The Age of Envy,” NL, 158.]

[Intellectual appeasement] is an attempt to apologize for his intellectual concerns and to escape from the loneliness of a thinker by professing that his thinking is dedicated to some social-altruistic goal. It is an attempt that amounts to the wordless equivalent of the plea: “I’m not an outsider! I’m your friend! Please forgive me for using my mind—I’m using it only in order to serve you!” ... An intellectual appeaser surrenders morality, the realm of values, in order to be permitted to use his mind.

[“Altruism as Appeasement,” TO. Jan. 1966, 2.]

See also COMPROMISE; EVIL,- INTEGRITY; MORAL COWARDICE; MORAL JUDGMENT; TACTFULNESS.

“A Priori.” The failure to recognize that logic is man’s method of cognition, has produced a brood of artificial splits and dichotomies which represent restatements of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy from various aspects. Three in particular are prevalent today: logical truth vs. factual truth; the logically possible vs. the empirically possible; and the a priori vs. the a posteriori.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 152.]

Any theory that propounds an opposition between the logical and the empirical, represents a failure to grasp the nature of logic and its role in human cognition. Man’s knowledge is not acquired by logic apart from experience or by experience apart from logic, but by the application of logic to experience. All truths are the product of a logical identification of the facts of experience.

[Ibid., 151.]

See also ANALYTIC-SYNTHETIC DICHOTOMY; LOGIC; TRUTH.

Arbitrary. “Arbitrary” means a claim put forth in the absence of evidence of any sort, perceptual or conceptual; its basis is neither direct observation nor any kind of theoretical argument. [An arbitrary idea is] a sheer assertion with no attempt to validate it or connect it to reality.

If a man asserts such an idea, whether he does so by error or ignorance or corruption, his idea is thereby epistemologically invalidated. lt has no relation to reality or to human cognition.

Remember that man’s consciousness is not automatic, and not automatically correct. So if man is to be able to claim any proposition as true, or even as possible, he must follow definite epistemological rules, rules designed to guide his mental processes and keep his conclusions in correspondence to reality. In sum, if man is to achieve knowledge, he must adhere to objective validating methods—i.e., he must shun the arbitrary....

Since an arbitrary statement has no connection to man’s means of knowledge or his grasp of reality, cognitively speaking such a statement must be treated as though nothing had been said.

Let me elaborate this point. An arbitrary claim has no cognitive status whatever. According to Objectivism, such a claim is not to be regarded as true or as false. If it is arbitrary, it is entitled to no epistemological assessment at all; it is simply to be dismissed as though it hadn’t come up.... The truth is established by reference to a body of evidence and within a context; the false is pronounced false because it contradicts the evidence. The arbitrary, however, has no relation to evidence, facts, or context. It is the human equivalent of [noises produced by] a parrot ... sounds without any tie to reality, without content or significance.

In a sense, therefore, the arbitrary is even worse than the false. The false at least has a relation (albeit a negative one) to reality; it has reached the field of human cognition, although it represents an error—but in that sense it is closer to reality than the brazenly arbitrary.

I want to note here parenthetically that the words expressing an arbitrary claim may perhaps be judged as true or false in some other cognitive context (if and when they are no longer put forth as arbitrary), but this is in elevant to the present issue, because it changes the epistemological situation. For instance, if a savage utters “Two plus two equals four” as a memorized lesson which he doesn’t understand or see any reason for, then in that context it is arbitrary and the savage did not utter truth or falsehood (it’s just like the parrot example). In this sort of situation, the utterance is only sounds; in a cognitive context, when the speaker does know the meaning and the reasons, the same sounds may be used to utter a true proposition. It is inexact to describe this situation by saying, “The same idea is arbitrary in one case and true in another.” The exact description would be: in the one case the verbiage does not express an idea at all, it is merely noise unconnected to reality; to the rational man, the words do express an idea: they are conceptual symbols denoting facts.

It is not your responsibility to refute someone’s arbitrary assertion—to try to find or imagine arguments that will show that his assertion is false. It is a fundamental error on your part even to try to do this. The rational procedure in regard to an arbitrary assertion is to dismiss it out of hand, merely identifying it as arbitrary, and as such inadmissible and undiscussable.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 6.J

There is no escape from the law of identity, neither in the universe with which [one] deals nor in the working of his own consciousness, and if he is to acquire knowledge of the first, he must discover the proper method of using the second; ... there is no room for the arbitrary in any activity of man, least of all in his method of cognition—and just as he has learned to be guided by objective criteria in making his physical tools, so he must be guided by objective criteria in forming his tools of cognition: his concepts.

[ITOE, 110. ]

See also AGNOSTICISM; CERTAINTY; OBJECTIVITY; POSSIBLE; PROOF; SKEPTICISM; TRUTH.

Argument from Intimidation. There is a certain type of argument which, in fact, is not an argument, but a means of forestalling debate and extorting an opponent’s agreement with one’s undiscussed notions. It is a method of bypassing logic by means of psychological pressure.... [It] consists of threatening to impeach an opponent’s character by means of his argument, thus impeaching the argument without debate. Example: “Only the immoral can fail to see that Candidate X’s argument is false.” ... The falsehood of his argument is asserted arhitrarily and offered as proof of his immorality.

In today’s epistemological jungle, that second method is used more frequently than any other type of irrational argument. It should be classified as a logical fallacy and may be designated as “The Argument from Intimidation.”

The essential characteristic of the Argument from Intimidation is its appeal to moral self-doubt and its reliance on the fear, guilt or ignorance of the victim. It is used in the form of an ultimatum demanding that the victim renounce a given idea without discussion, under threat of being considered morally unworthy. The pattern is always: “Only those who are evil (dishonest, heartless, insensitive, ignorant, etc.) can hold such an idea.”

[“The Argument from Intimidation,” VOS,191: pb 139.]

The Argument from Intimidation dominates today’s discussions in two forms. In public speeches and print, it flourishes in the form of long, involved, elaborate structures of unintelligible verbiage, which convey nothing clearly except a moral threat. (“Only the primitive-minded can fail to realize that clarity is oversimplification.”) But in private, day-by-day experience, it comes up wordlessly, between the lines, in the form of inarticulate sounds conveying unstated implica-. tions. It relies, not on what is said, but on how it is said—not on content, but on tone of voice.

The tone is usually one of scornful or belligerent incredulity. “Surely you are not an advocate of capitalism, are you?” And if this does not intimidate the prospective victim—who answers, properly: “I am,”—the ensuing dialogue goes something like this: “Oh, you couldn’t be! Not really!” “Really.” “But everybody knows that capitalism is outdated!” “I don’t.” “Oh, come now!” “Since I don’t know it, will you please tell me the reasons for thinking that capitalism is outdated?” “Oh. don’t be ridiculous!” “Will you tell me the reasons?” “Well, really, if you don’t know, I couldn’t possibly tell you!”

All this is accompanied by raised eyebrows, wide-eyed stares, shrugs, grunts, snickers and the entire arsenal of nonverbal signals communicating ominous innuendoes and emotional vibrations of a single kind: disapproval.

If those vibrations fail, if such debaters are challenged, one finds that they have no arguments, no evidence, no proof, no reasons, no ground to stand on—that their noisy aggressiveness serves to hide a vacuum—that the Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.

[Ibid., 193; pb 140.]

Let me emphasize that the Argument from Intimidation does not consist of introducing moral judgment into intellectual issues, but of substituting moral judgment for intellectual argument. Moral evaluations are implicit in most intellectual issues; it is not merely permissible. but mandatory to pass moral judgment when and where appropriate: to suppress such judgment is an act of moral cowardice. But a moral judgment must always follow, not precede (or supersede), the reasons on which it is based.

[Ibid.. 197: pb 143.]

How does one resist that Argument? There is only one weapon against it: moral certainty.

When one enters any intellectual battle, big or small, public or private, one cannot seek, desire or expect the enemy’s sanction. Truth or falsehood must be one’s sole concern and sole criterion of judgment—not anyone’s approval or disapproval; and, above all, not the approval of those whose standards are the opposite of one’s own.

[Ibid.]

The most illustrious example of the proper answer to the Argument from Intimidation was given in American history by the man who, rejecting the enemy’s moral standards and with full certainty of his own rectitude, said:

“If this be treason, make the most of it.”

[Ibid., 198; pb 144.]

See also CERTAINTY; LOGIC; MORAL COWARDICE; “PSYCHOLOGIZING. ”

Aristotle. If there is a philosophical Atlas who carries the whole of Western civilization on his shoulders, it is Aristotle. He has been opposed, misinterpreted, misrepresented, and—iike an axiom—used by his enemies in the very act of denying him. Whatever intellectual progress men have achieved rests on his achievements.

Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history’s brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind. The Aristotelian revival of the thirteenth century brought men to the Renaissance. The intellectual counter-revolution turned them back toward the cave of his antipode: Plato.

There is only one fundamental issue in philosophy: the cognitive efficacy of man’s mind. The conflict of Aristotle versus Plato is the conflict of reason versus mysticism. It was Plato who formulated most of philosophy’s basic questions-and doubts. It was Aristotle who laid the foundation for most of the answers. Thereafter, the record of their duel is the record of man’s long struggle to deny and surrender or to uphold and assert the validity of his particular mode of consciousness.

[Review of J.H. Randall’s Aristotle, TON, May 1963, 18.]

Aristotle’s philosophy was the intellect’s Declaration of Independence. Aristotle, the father of logic, should be given the title of the world’s first intellectual, in the purest and noblest sense of that word. No matter what remnants of Platonism did exist in Aristotle’s system, his incomparable achievement lay in the fact that he defined the basic principles of a rational view of existence and of man’s consciousness: that there is only one reality, the one which man perceives—that it exists as an objective absolute (which means: independently of the consciousness, the wishes or the feelings of any perceiver)—that the task of man’s consciousness is to perceive0, not to create, reality—that abstractions are man’s method of integrating his sensory materia)—that man’s mind is his only tool of knowledge—that A is A.

If we consider the fact that to this day everything that makes us civilized beings, every rational value that we possess—inctuding the birth of science, the industrial revolution, the creation of the United States, even the structure of our language—is the result of Aristotle’s influence, of the degree to which, explicitly or implicitly, mert accepted his epistemological principles, we would have to say: never have so many owed so much to one man.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 20; pb 22.]

Aristotle is the champion of this world, the champion of nature, as against the supernaturalism of Plato. Denying Plato’s World of Forms, Aristotle maintains that there is only one reality: the world of particulars in which we live, the world men perceive by means of their physical senses. Universals, he holds, are merely aspects of existing entities, isolated in thought by a process of selective attention; they have no existence apart from particulars. Reality is comprised, not of Platonic abstractions, but of concrete, individual entities, each with a definite nature, each obeying the laws inherent in its nature. Aristotle’s universe is the universe of science. The physical world, in his view, is not a shadowy projection controlled by a divine dimension, but an autonomous, self-sufficient realm. It is an orderly, intelligible, natural realm, open to the mind of man.

In such a universe, knowledge cannot be acquired by special revelations from another dimension; there is no place for ineffable intuitions of the beyond. Repudiating the mystical elements in Plato’s epistemology, Aristotle is the father of logic and the champion of reason as man’s only means of knowledge. Knowledge, he holds, must be based on and derived from the data of sense experience; it must be formulated in terms of objectively defined concepts; it must be validated by a process of logic.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 21; pb 19.]

Indicating that the early scientists had discarded Aristotle in rebellion against his religious interpreters, Professor Randall points out that their scientific achievements had, in fact, an unacknowledged Aristotelian base and were carrying out the implications of Aristotle’s theories.

[Review of J.H. Randall’s Aristotle, TON, May 1963, 18.]

Let us note ... the radical difference between Aristotle’s view of concepts and the Objectivist view, particularly in regard to tire issue of essential characteristics.

It is Aristotle who first formulated the principles of correct definition. It is Aristotle who identified the fact that only concretes exist. But Aristotle held that definitions refer to metaphysical essences, which exist in concretes as a special element or formative power, and he held that the process of concept-formation depends on a kind of direct intuition by which man’s mind grasps these essences and forms concepts accordingly.

Aristotle regarded “essence” as metaphysical; Objectivism regards it as epistemological.

[ITOE, 68.]

For Aristotle, the good life is one of personal selE-fulfillment. Man should enjoy the values of this world. Using his mind to the fullest, each man should work to achieve his own happiness here on earth. And in the process he should be conscious of his own value. Pride, writes Aristotle—a rational pride in oneself and in one’s moral character—is, when it is earned, the “crown of the virtues.”

A proud man does not negate his own identity. He does not sink selflessly into the community. He is not a promising subject for the Platonic state.

Although Aristotle’s writings do include a polemic against the more extreme features of Plato’s collectivism, Aristotle himself is not a consistent advocate of political individualism. His own politics is a mixture of statist and antistatist elements. But the primary significance of Aristotle, or of any philosopher, does not lie in his politics. It lies in the fundamentals of his system: his metaphysics and epistemology.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 21; pb 30.]

Throughout history the influence of Aristotle’s philosophy (particularly of his epistemology) has led in the direction of individual freedom, of man’s liberation from the power of the state ... Aristotle (via John Locke) was the philosophical father of the Constitution of the United States and thus of capitalism ... it is Plato and Hegel, not Aristotle, who have been the philosophical ancestors of all totalitarian and welfare states, whether Bismarck’s, Lenin’s or Hitler’s.

[Review of J.H. Randall’s Aristotle, TON, May 1963, 19.]

There is no future for the world except through a rebirth of the Aristotelian approach to philosophy. This would require an Aristotelian affirmation of the reality of existence, of the sovereignty of reason, of life on earth—and of the splendor of man.

Aristotle and ()bjectivism agree on fundamentals and, as a result, on this last point, also. Both hold that man can deal with reality, can achieve values, can live non-tragically. Neither believes in man the worm or man the monster; each upholds man the thinker and therefore man the hero. Aristotle calls him “the great-souled man.” Ayn Rand calls him Howard Roark, or John Gait.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 337; pb 311.]

See also ANCIENT GREECE; DEFINITIONS; IDENTITY; LOGIC; OBJECTIVISM; PRIDE; RENAISSANCE; ROMANTICISM; SCIENCE; TABULA RASA.

Art. Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments. Man’s profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires knowledge by means of abstractions, and needs the power to bring his widest metaphysical abstractions into his immediate, perceptual awareness. Art fulfills this need: by means of a selective re-creation, it concretizes man’s fundamental view of himself and of existence. It tells man, in effect, which aspects of his experience are to be regarded as essential, significant, important. In this sense, art teaches man how to use his consciousness. It conditions or stylizes man’s consciousness by conveying to him a certain way of looking at existence.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 45.]

By a selective re-creatiott, art isolates and integrates those aspects of reality which represent man’s fundamental view of himself and of existence. Out of the countless number of concretes—of single, disorganized and (seemingly) contradictory attributes, actions and entities—an artist isolates the things which he regards as metaphysically essential and integrates them into a single new concrete that represents an embodied abstraction.

For instance, consider two statues of man: one as a Greek god, the other as a deformed medieval monstrosity. Both are metaphysical estimates of man; both are projections of the artist’s view of man’s nature; both are concretized representations of the philosophy of their respective cultures.

Art is a concretization of metaphysics. Art brings man’s concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts.

This is the psycho-epistemological function of art and the reason of its importance in man’s life (and the crux of the Objectivist esthetics).

[“The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” RM, 23; pb 19.]

Is the universe intelligible to man, or unintelligible and unknowable? Can man find happiness on earth, or is he doomed to frustration and despair? Does man have the power of choice, the power to choose his goals and to achieve them, the power to direct the course of his life—or is he the helpless plaything of forces beyond his control, which determine his fate? Is man, by nature, to be valued as good, or to be despised as evil? These are metaphysical questions, but the answers to them determine the kind of ethics men will accept and practice; the answers are the link between metaphysics and ethics. And although metaphysics as such is not a normative science, the answers to this category of questions assume, in man’s mind, the function of metaphysical value-judgments, since they form the foundation of all of his moral values.

Consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly, man knows that he needs a comprehensive view of existence to integrate his values, to choose his goals, to plan his future, to maintain the unity and coherence of his life—and that his metaphysical value-judgments are involved in every moment of his life, in his every choice, decision and action.

Metaphysics—the science that deals with the fundamental nature of reality-involves man’s widest abstractions. It includes every concrete he has ever perceived, it involves such a vast sum of knowledge and such a long chain of concepts that no man could hold it all in the focus of his immediate conscious awareness. Yet he needs that sum and that awareness to guide him—he needs the power to summon them into full, conscious focus.

That power is given to him by art.

[Ibid., 21; pb 19.]

It is not journalistic information or scientific education or moral guidance that man seeks from a work of art (though these may be involved as secondary consequences), but the fulfillment of a more profound need: a confirmation of his view of existence—a confirmation, not in the sense of resolving cognitive doubts, but in the sense of permitting him to contemplate his abstractions outside his own mind, in the form of existential concretes.

[“Art and Sense of Life,” RM, 48; pb 38.]

As to the role of emotions in art and the subconscious mechanism that serves as the integrating factor both in artistic creation and in man’s response to art, they involve a psychological phenomenon which we call a sense of life. A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence.

[“The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” RM, 28; pb 24.1

The emotion involved in art is not an emotion in the ordinary meaning of the term. It is experienced more as a “sense” or a “feel,” but it has two characteristics pertaining to emotions: it is automatically immediate and it has an intense, profoundly personal (yet undefined) value-meaning to the individual experiencing it. The value involved is life, and the words naming the emotion are: “This is what life means to me.”

[“Art and Sense of Life,” RM, 44; pb 35.]

Since man lives by reshaping his physical background to serve his purpose, since he must first define and then create his values—a rational man needs a concretized projection of these values, an image in whose likeness he will re-shape the world and himself. Art gives him that image; it gives him the experience of seeing the full, immediate, concrete reality of his distant goals.

Since a rational man’s ambition is unlimited, since his pursuit and achievement of values is a lifelong process—and the higher the values, the harder the struggte—he needs a moment, an hour or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully achieved. It is like a moment of rest, a moment to gain fuel to move farther. Art gives him that fuel; the pleasure of contemplating the objectified reality of one’s own sense of life is the pleasure of feeling what it would be like to live in one’s ideal world.

[Ibid., 48; pb 38.]

The importance of that experience is not in what he learns from it, but in that he experiences it. The fuel is not a theoretical principle, not a didactic “message,” but the life-giving fact of experiencing a moment of metaphysical joy—moment of love for existence.

[“The Goal of My Writing,” RM, 171; pb 170.]

Art is man’s metaphysical mirror; what a rational man seeks to see in that mirror is a salute; what an irrational man seeks to see is a justification—even if only a justification of his depravity, as a last convulsion of his betrayed self-esteem.

Between these two extremes, there lies the immense continuum of men of mixed premises—whose sense of life holds unresolved, precariously balanced or openly contradictory elements of reason and unreason—and works of art that reflect these mixtures. Since art is the product of philosophy (and mankind’s philosophy is tragically mixed), most of the world’s art, including some of its greatest examples, falls into this category.

[“Art and Sense of Life,” RM, 49; pb 39.]

Art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal.... This does not mean that art is a substitute for philosophical thought: without a conceptual theory of ethics, an artist would not be able successfully to concretize an image of the ideal. But without the assistance of art, ethics remains in the position of theoretical engineering: art is the model-builder....

It is important to stress, however, that even though moral values are inextricably involved in art, they are involved only as a consequence, not as a causal determinant: the primary focus of art is metaphysical, not ethical. Art is not the “handmaiden” of morality, its basic purpose is not to educate, to reform or to advocate anything. The concretization of a moral ideal is not a textbook on how to become one. The basic purpose of art is not to teach, but to show—to hold up to man a concretized image of his nature and his place in the universe.

Any metaphysical issue will necessarily have an enormous influence on man’s conduct and, therefore, on his ethics; and, since every art work has a theme, it will necessarily convey some conclusion, some “message,” to its audience. But that influence and that “message” are only secondary consequences. Art is not the means to any didactic end. This is the difference between a work of art and a morality play or a propaganda poster. The greater a work of art, the more profoundly universal its theme. Art is not the means of literal transcription. This is the difference between a work of art and a news story or a photograph.

[“The Psycho-Epistetnology of Art,” RM, 25; ph 21.]

As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 75.]

What are the valid forms of art—and why these? ... The proper forms of art present a selective re-creation of reality in terms needed by man’s cognitive faculty, which includes his entity-perceiving senses, and thus assist the integration of the various elements of a conceptual consciousness. Literature deals with concepts, the visual arts with sight and touch, music with hearing. Each art fulfills the function of bringing man’s concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allowing him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts. (The performing arts are a means of further concretization.) The different branches of art serve to unify man’s consciousness and offer him a coherent view of existence. Whether that view is true or false is not an esthetic matter. The crucially esthetic matter is psycho-epistemological: the integration of a conceptual consciousness.

[Ibid., 73.]

Art (including literature) is the barometer of a culture. It reflects the sum of a society’s deepest philosophical values: not its professed notions and slogans, but its actual view of man and of existence.

[“Bootleg Romanticism,” RM, 121; pb 129.1

See Conceptual Index: Esthetics.

Artistic Creation. As to the role of emotions in art and the subconscious mechanism that serves as the integrating factor both in artistic creation and in man’s response to art, they involve a psychological phenomenon which we call a sense of lifr. A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence.

[“The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” RM, 28; pb 24.]

It is the artist’s sense of life that controls and integrates his work, directing the innumerable choices he has to make, from the choice of subject to the subtlest details of style. It is the viewer’s or reader’s sense of life that responds to a work of art by a complex, yet automatic reaction of acceptance and approval, or rejection and condemnation.

[“Art and Sense of Life,” RM, 43; pb 34.]

The psycho-epistemological process of communication between an artist and a viewer or reader goes as follows: the artist starts with a broad abstraction which he has to concretize, to bring into reality by means of the appropriate particulars; the viewer perceives the particulars, integrates them and grasps the abstraction from which they came, thus completing the circle. Speaking metaphorically, the creative process resembles a process of deduction; the viewing process resembles a process of induction.

This does not mean that communication is the primary purpose of an artist: his primary purpose is to bring his view of man and of existence into reality; but to be brought into reality, it has to be translated into objective (therefore, communicable) terms.

I Ibid., 44; pb 35.]

An artist does not fake reality—he .stylize.s it. He selects those aspects of existence which he regards as metaphysically significant—and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting the insignificant and accidental, he presents his view of existence. His concepts are not divorced from the facts of reality-they are concepts which integrate the facts and his metaphysical evaluation of the facts. His selection constitutes his evaluation: everything included in a work of art—from theme to subject to brushstroke or adjective—acquires metaphysical significance by the mere fact of being included, of being important enough to include.

An artist (as, for instance, the sculptors of Ancient Greece) who presents man as a god-like figure is aware of the fact that men may be crippled or diseased or helpless; but he regards these conditions as accidental, as irrelevant to the essential nature of man-and he presents a figure embodying strength, beauty, intelligence, self-confidence, as man’s proper, natural state.

[Ibid., 46; pb 36.]

See also ART; CREATION ; EMOTIONS; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; SENSE of LIFE; STYLIZATION.

Associations. See Cooperation.

Atheism. Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics....

Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to postulate something beyond existence-some supernatural realm—you must do it by openly denying reason, dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments, and saying flatly, “To Hell with argument, I have faith.” That, of course, is a willful rejection of reason.

Objectivism advocates reason as man’s sole means of knowledge, and therefore, for the reasons I have already given, it is atheist. It denies any supernatural dimension presented as a contradiction of nature, of existence. This applies not only to God, but also to every variant of the supernatural ever advocated or to be advocated. In other words, we accept reality, and that’s all.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 2.]

See also AGNOSTICISM; EXISTENCE; GOD; MIRACLES; NATURE; RELIGION; SUPERNATURALISM.

Automatization. All learning involves a process of automatizing, i.e., of first acquiring knowledge by fully conscious, focused attention and observation, then of establishing mental connections which make that knowledge automatic (instantly available as a context), thus freeing man’s mind to pursue further, more complex knowledge.

[ITOE, 86.]

The function of psychological integrations is to make certain connections automatic, so that they work as a unit and do not require a conscious process of thought every time they are evoked.

[“Art and Sense of Life,” RM, 45; pb 36.1

A mind’s cognitive development involves a continual process of automatization. For example, you cannot perceive a table as an infant perceives it—as a mysterious object with four legs. You perceive it as a table, i.e., a man-made piece of furniture, serving a certain purpose belonging to a human habitation, etc.; you cannot separate these attributes from your sight of the table, you experience it as a single, indivisible percept—yet all you see is a four-legged object; the rest is an automatized integration of a vast amount of conceptual knowledge which, at one time, you had to learn bit by bit. The same is true of everything you perceive or experience; as an adult, you cannot perceive or experience in a vacuum, you do it in a certain automatized context—and the efficiency of your mental operations depends on the kind of context your subconscious has automatized.

[“The Comprachicos,” NL, 192.]

The status of automatized knowledge in his mind is experienced by man as if it had the direct, effortless, self-evident quality (and certainty) of perceptual awareness. But it is conceptual knowtedge—and its validity depends on the precision of his concepts, which require as strict a precision of meaning (i.e., as strict a knowledge of what specific referents they subsume) as the definitions of mathematical terms. (It is obvious what disasters will follow if one automatizes errors, contradictions and undefined approximations.)

[ITOE, 86.)

See also INTEGRATION (MENTAL); LEARNING; PSYCHO-EPISTF. MOLOGY; SUBCONSCIOUS.

Awareness. See Consciousness.

Axiomatic Concepts. Axioms are usually considered to be propositions identifying a fundamental, self-evident truth. But explicit propositions as such are not primaries: they are made of concepts. The base of man’s knowledge-of all other concepts, all axioms, propositions and thought—consists of axiomatic concepts.

An axiomatic concept is the identification of a primary fact of reality, which cannot be analyzed, i.e., reduced to other facts or broken into component parts. It is implicit in all facts and in all knowledge. It is the fundamentally given and directly perceived or experienced, which requires no proof or explanation, but on which all proofs and explanations rest.

The first and primary axiomatic concepts are “existence,” “identity” (which is a corollary of “existence”) and “consciousness.” One can study what exists and how consciousness functions; but one cannot analyze (or “prove”) existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to “prove” them is self-contradictory: it is an attempt to “prove” existence by means of non-existence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness.)

[ITOE, 73.1

[The] underscoring of primary facts is one of the crucial epistemological functions of axiomatic concepts. It is also the reason why they can be translated into a statement only in the form of a repetition (as a base and a reminder): Existence exists—Consciousness is conscious—A is A. (This converts axiomatic concepts into formal axioms.)

[Ibid., 78.]

Epistemologically, the formation of axiomatic concepts is an act of abstraction, a selective focusing on and mental isolation of metaphysical fundamentals; but metaphysically, it is an act of integration—the widest integration possible to man: it unites and embraces the total of his experience.

The units of the concepts “existence” and “identity” are every entity, attribute, action, event or phenomenon (including consciousness) that exists, has ever existed or will ever exist. The units of the concept “consciousness” are every state or process of awareness that one experiences, has ever experienced or will ever experience (as well as similar units, a similar faculty, which one infers in other living entities).

[Ibid., 74.]

Since axiomatic concepts refer to facts of reality and are not a matter of “faith” or of man’s arbitrary choice, there is a way to ascertain whether a given concept is axiomatic or not: one ascertains it by observing the fact that an axiomatic concept cannot be escaped, that it is implicit in all knowledge, that it has to be accepted and used even in the process of any attempt to deny it.

For instance, when modern philosophers declare that axioms are a matter of arbitrary choice, and proceed to choose complex, derivative concepts as the alleged axioms of their alleged reasoning, one can observe that their statements imply and depend on “existence,” “consciousness,” “identity,” which they profess to negate, but which are smuggled into their arguments in the form of unacknowledged, “stolen” concepts.

It is worth noting, at this point, that what the enemies of reason seem to know, but its alleged defenders have not discovered, is the fact that axiomatic concepts are the guardians of man’s mind and the foundation of reason —the keystone, touchstone and hallmark of reason—and if reason is to be destroyed, it is axiomatic concepts that have to be destroyed.

[Ibid., 79.J

It is only conceptual awareness that can grasp and hold the total of its experience—extrospectivety, the continuity of existence; introspectively, the continuity of consciousness—and thus enable its possessor to project his course long-range. It is by means of axiomatic concepts that man grasps and holds this continuity, bringing it into his conscious awareness and knowledge. It is axiomatic concepts that identify the precondition of knowledge: the distinction between existence and consciousness, between reality and the awareness of reality, between the object and the subject of cognition. Axiomatic concepts are the foundation of objectivity.

[Ibid., 75.]

It is only man’s consciousness, a consciousness capable of conceptual errors, that needs a special identification of the directly given, to embrace and delimit the entire field of its awareness—to delimit it from the void of unreality to which conceptual errors can lead. Axiomatic concepts are epistemological guidelines. They sum up the essence of all human cognition: something exists of which I am conscious; I must discover its identitv.

| Ibid., 78.]

Since axiomatic concepts are identifications of irreducible primaries, the only way to define one is by means of an ostensive definition—e.g., to define “existence,” one would have to sweep one’s arm around and say: “I mean this.”

[Ibid., 53.]

See also AXIOMS; CONCEPTS; CONSCIOUSNESS; COROLLARIES; EXISTENCE ; HIERARCHY of KNOWLEDGE; IDENTITY; IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE; IRREDUCIBLE PRIMARIES; OBJECTIVITY; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY nf CONSCIOUSNESS; “STOLEN CONCEPT,” FALLACY of.

Axioms. An axiom is a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others, whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it.

[GS, FNI, 193; pb 155.]

Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.

If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.

Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.

To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of nonexistence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors —the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

[Ibid., 152; pb 124.]

“You cannot prove that you exist or that you’re conscious,” they chatter, blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge: the existence of something to know, of a consciousness able to know it, and of a knowledge that has learned to distinguish between such concepts as the proved and the unproved.

When a savage who has not learned to speak declares that existence must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of non-existence —when he declares that your consciousness must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of unconsciousness—he is asking you to step into a void outside of existence and consciousness to give him proof of both—he is asking you to become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero.

When he declares that an axiom is a matter of arbitrary choice and he doesn’t choose to accept the axiom that he exists, he blanks out the fact that he has accepted it by uttering that sentence, that the only way to reject it is to shut one’s mouth, expound no theories and die.

[Ibid., 192; pb 154.]

See also AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS; CONSCIOUSNESS; COROLLARIES; EXISTENCE; HIERARCHY of KNOWLEDGE; IDENTITY; IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE; OBJECTIVITY ; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; SELF-EVIDENT; “STOLEN CONCEPT,” FALLACY of.

B

Ballet. The keynote of the stylization achieved in ballet is: weightlessness. Paradoxically, ballet presents man as almost disembodied: it does not distort man’s body, it selects the kinds of movements that are normally possible to man (such as walking on tiptoe) and exaggerates them, stressing their beauty—and defying the law of gravitation. A gracefully effortless floating, flowing and flying are the essentials of the ballet’s image of man. It projects a fragile kind of strength and a certain inflexible precision, but it is man with a fine steel skeleton and without flesh, man the spirit, not controlling, but transcending this earth....

Strong passions or negative emotions cannot be projected in ballet, regardless of its librettos; it cannot express tragedy or fear—or sexuality ; it is a perfect medium for the expression of spiritual love.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 68.]

See also ART; CHOREOGRAPHER; DANCE; MUSIC; PERFORMING ARTS.

Beauty. Beauty is a sense of harmony. Whether it’s an image, a human face, a body, or a sunset, take the object which you call beautiful, as a unit [and ask yourself]: what parts is it made up of, what are its constituent elements, and are they all harmonious? If they are, the result is beautiful. If there are contradictions and clashes, the result is marred or positively ugly.

For instance, the simplest example would be a human face. You know what features belong in a human face. Well, if the face is lopsided, [with a] very indefinite jawline, very small eyes, beautiful mouth, and a long nose, you would have to say that’s not a beautiful face. But if all these features are harmoniously integrated, if they all fit your view of the importance of all these features on a human face, then that face is beautiful.

In this respect, a good example would be the beauty of different races of people. For instance, the black face, or an Oriental face, is built on a different standard, and therefore what would be beautiful on a white face will not be beautiful for them (or vice-versa), because there is a certain racial standard of features by which you judge which features, which face, in that classification is harmonious or distorted.

That’s in regard to human beauty. In regard to a sunset, for instance, or a landscape, you will regard it as beautiful if all the colors complement each other, or go well together, or are dramatic together. And you will call it ugly if it is a bad rainy afternoon, and the sky isn’t exactly pink nor exactly gray, but sort of “modern.”

Now since this is an objective definition of beauty, there of course can be universal standards of beauty—provided you define the terms of what objects you are going to classify as beautiful and what you take as the ideal harmonious relationship of the elements of that particular object. To say, “It’s in the eyes of the beholder”—that, of course, would be pure subjectivism, if taken literally. It isn’t [a matter of] what you, for unknown reasons, decide to regard as beautiful. It is true, of course, that if there were no valuers, then nothing could be valued as beautiful or ugly, because values are created by the observing consciousness-but they are created by a standard based on reality. So here the issue is: values, including beauty, have to be judged as objective, not subjective or intrinsic.

[Ayn Rand, question period following Lecture 11 of Leonard Peikoft’s series “The Philosophy of Objectivism” (1976).]

See also ART; ESTHETICS; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); OBJECTIVITY.

Behaviorism. Many psychologists are envious of the prestige—and the achievements—of the physical sciences, which they try not to emulate, but to imitate. [B.F.] Skinner is archetypical in this respect: he is passionately intent on being accepted as a “scientist” and complains that only [the concept of] “Autonomous Man” stands in the way of such acceptance (which, I am sure, is true). Mr. Skinner points out scornfully that primitive men, who were unable to see the difference between living beings and inanimate objects, ascribed the objects’ motions to conscious gods or demons, and that science could not begin until this belief was discarded. In the name of science, Mr. Skinner switches defiantly to the other side of the same basic coin: accepting the belief that consciousness is supernatural, he refuses to accept the existence of man’s mind.

[“The Stimulus and the Response,” PWNI, 169; pb 140.]

Apparently to appease man’s defenders, Mr. Skinner offers the fullowing: “In shifting control from autonomous man to the observable environment we do not leave an empty organism. A great deal goes on inside the skin, and physiology will eventually tell us more about it” [Beyond Freedom and Dignity, p. 195]. This means: No, man is not empty, he is a solid piece of meat.

[Ibid., 175; pb 144.]

Behaviorists define psychology as the study of “observable behavior” (their term for action) and claim that man’s behavior is controlled by the environment. In Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner states that “a person does not act upon the world, the world acts upon him.” Thoughts do not cause actions, according to Skinner, but are simply another type of behavior: “covert behavior.” Learning is not defined cognitively (as the acquisition of knowledge) but as a change in behavior, caused by the environment. Behaviorism dispenses with such concepts as the self or personality, emotion, and mental illness, and replaces them with behaviorally defined notions such as response repertoire, bodily reaction, and abnormal behavior.

[Edwin A. Locke, “Behaviorism and Psychoanalysis,” TOF, Feb. 1980, 10.]

Behaviorism’s substitute for the mind is certain entities in the environment called “reinforcers.” A “reinforcer,” say the Behaviorists, is an event which follows a response and makes subsequent responses of the same type more likely. “What type of events change the probability of responding?” we ask. “Reinforcing events,” we are told. “What is a reinforcing event?” we inquire. “One which modifies response probability,” they reply. “Why does a reinforcer reinforce?” we ask. “‘That’s not a relevant question,” they answer.... To understand why a “reinforcer” reinforces, Behaviorists would have to make reference to the individual’s mental contents and processes—i.e., they would have to abandon Behaviorism.

[Ibid., 14.]

See also CONSCIOUSNESS; DETERMINISM; FREE WILL; FREUD; MAN; PSYCHOLOGY.

Benevolent Universe Premise. There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days—the conviction that ideas matter.... That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one’s mind matters....

Its consequence is the inability to believe in the power or the triumph of evil. No matter what corruption one observes in one’s immediate background, one is unable to accept it as normal, permanent or metaphysically right. One feels: “This injustice (or terror or falsehood or frustration or pain or agony) is the exception in life, not the rule.” One feels certain that somewhere on earth-even if not anywhere in one’s surroundings or within one’s reach—proper, human way of life is possible to human beings, and justice matters.

[“The Inexplicable Personal Alchemy,” NL, 118.]

Although accidents and failures are possible, they are not, according to Objectivism, the essence of human life. On the contrary, the achievement of values is the norm—speaking now for the moral man, moral by the Objectivist definition. Success and happiness are the metaphysically to-be-expected. In other words, Objectivism rejects the view that human fulfillment is impossible, that man is doomed to misery, that the universe is malevolent. We advocate the “benevolent universe” premise.

The “benevolent universe” does not mean that the universe feels kindly to man or that it is out to help him achieve his goals. No, the universe is neutral; it simply is; it is indifferent to you. You must care about and adapt to it, not the other way around. But reality is “benevolent” in the sense that if you do adapt to it-i.e., if you do think, value, and act rationally, then you can (and barring accidents you will) achieve your values. You will, because those values are based on reality.

Pain, suffering, failure do not have metaphysical significance-they do not reveal the nature of reality. Ayn Rand’s heroes, accordingly, refuse to take pain seriously, i.e., metaphysically. You remember when Dagny asks Ragnar in the valley how his wife can live through the months he is away at sea, and he answers (I quote just part of this passage):

“We do not think that tragedy is our natura) state. We do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it, and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering, that we consider unnatural. It is not success but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life.”

This is why Ayn Rand’s heroes respond to disaster, when it does strike, with a single instantaneous response: action-what can they do? If there’s any chance at all, they refuse to accept defeat. They do what they can to counter the danger, because they are on the premise that success, not failure, is the to-be-expected.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 8.J

See also EVIL; MALEVOLENT UNIVERSE PREMISE; METAPHYSICAL VALUE-JUDGMENTS; SENSE of LIFE; SUFFERING.

Birth Control. The capacity to procreate is rnerely a potential which man is not obligated to actualize. The choice to have children or not is morally optional. Nature endows man with a variety of potentials —and it is his mind that must decide which capacities he chooses to exercise, according to his own hierarchy of rational goals and values. The mere fact that man has the capacity to kill, does not mean that it is his duty to become a murderer; in the same way, the mere fact that man has the capacity to procreate, does not mean that it is his duty to commit spiritual suicide by making procreation his primary goal and turning himself into a stud-farm animal....

To an animal, the rearing of its young is a matter of temporary cycles. To man, it is a lifelong responsibitity—a grave responsibility that must not be undertaken causelessly, thoughtlessly or accidentally.

In regard to the moral aspects of birth control, the primary right involved is not the “right” of an unborn child, nor of the family, nor of society, nor of God. The primary right is one which—in today’s public clamor on the subject—few, if any, voices have had the courage to uphold: the right of man and woman to their own life and happiness—the right not to be regarded as the means to any end.

[“Of Living Death,” TO, Oct. 1968, 3.]

See also ABORTION; LIFE; MAN; RELIGION; SEX.

Blanking Out. See Evasion.

Businessmen. The professional businessman is the field agent of the army whose lieutenant-commander-in-chief is the scientist. The businessman carries scientific discoveries from the laboratory of the inventor to industrial plants, and transforms them into material products that fill men’s physical needs and expand the comfort of men’s existence. By creating a mass market, he makes these products available to every income level of society. By using machines, he increases the productivity of human labor, thus raising labor’s economic rewards. By ot ganizing human effort into productive enterprises, he creates employment for men of countless professions. He is the great liberator who, in the short span of a century and a half, has released men from bondage to their physical needs, has released them from the terrible drudgery of an eighteen-hour workday of manual labor for their barest subsistence, has released them from famines, from pestilences, from the stagnant hopelessness and terror in which most of mankind had lived in all the precapitalist centuries—and in which most of it still lives, in non-capitalist countries.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 26; pb 27.1

America’s industrial progress, in the short span of a century and a half, has acquired the character of a legend: it has never been equaled anywhere on earth, in any period of history. The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most spectacular achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind. What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats.

[“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 48.]

If a small group of men were always regarded as guilty, in any dash with any other group, regardless of the issues or circumstances involved, would you call it persecution? If this group were always made to pay for the sins, errors, or failures of any other group, would you call that persecution? If this group had to live under a silent reign of terror, under special laws, from which all other people were immune, laws which the accused could not grasp or define in advance and which the accuser could interpret in any way he pleased-would you call that persecution? If this group were penalized, not for its faults, but for its virtues, not for its incompetence, but for its ability, not for its failures, but for its achievements, and the greater the achievement, the greater the penalty—would you call that persecution?

If your answer is “yes”—then ask yourself what sort of monstrous injustice you are condoning, supporting, or perpetrating. That group is the American businessmen....

Every ugly, brutal aspect of injustice toward racial or religious minorities is being practiced toward businessmen.... Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.

[Ibid., 44.]

The legal treatment accorded to actual criminals is much superior to that accorded to businessmen. The criminal’s rights are protected by objective laws, objective procedures, objective rules of evidence. A criminal is presumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty. Only businessmen —the producers, the providers, the supporters, the Atlases who carry our whole economy on their shoulders—are regarded as guilty by nature and are required to prove their innocence, without any definable criteria of innocence or proof, and are left at the mercy of the whim, the favor, or the malice of any publicity-seeking politician, any scheming statist, any envious mediocrity who might chance to work his way into a bureaucratic job and who feels a yen to do some trust-busting.

[Ibid., 51.]

All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy. The giants of American industry—such as James Jerome Hill or Commodore Vanderbilt or Andrew Carnegie or J. P. Morgan—were self-made men who earned their fortunes by personal ability, by free trade on a free market. But there existed another kind of businessmen, the products of a mixed economy, the men with political pull, who made fortunes by means of special privileges granted to them by the government, such men as the Big Four of the Central Pacific Railroad. It was the political power behind their activities—the power of forced, unearned, economically unjustified privileges—that caused dislocations in the country’s economy, hardships, depressions, and mounting public protests. But it was the free market and the free businessmen that took the blame.

[Ibid., 48.]

As a group, businessmen have been withdrawing for decades from the ideological battlefield, disarmed by the deadly combination of altruism and Pragmatism. Their public policy has consisted in appeasing, compromising and apologizing: appeasing their crudest, loudest antagonists ; compromising with any attack, any lie, any insult; apologizing for their own existence. Abandoning the field of ideas to their enemies, they have been relying on lobbying, i.e., on private rnanipulations, on pull, on seeking momentary favors from government officials. Today, the last group one can expect to fight for capitalism is the capitalists.

[‘°1’he Moratorium on Brains,” ARL, I, 3, 2.]

Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world. All the other social groups-workers, farmers, professional men, scientists, soldiers-exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery, and in progressive self-destruction. But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictalorship. Their place is taken by armed thugs: by bureaucrats and commissars. Businessmen are the symbol of a free society—the symbol of America. If and when they perish, civilization will perish. But if you wish to fight for freedom, you must begin by fighting for its unrewarded, unrecognized, unacknowledged, yet best representatives-the American businessmen.

[“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 62.J

See also ANTITRUST LAWS; BUSINESSMEN v,s. BUREAUCRATS; CAPITALISM; COMPETITION; CREATORS; LAW, OBJECTIVE and NON-OBJECTIVE; MANAGERIAL WORK; PRAGMATISM; RETROACTIVE LAW.

Businessmen vs. Bureaucrats. A businessman’s success depends on his intelligence, his knowledge, his productive ability, his economic judgment-and on the voluntary agreement of all those he deals with: his customers, his suppliers, his employees, his creditors or investors. A bureaucrat’s success depends on his political pull. A businessman cannot force you to buy his product; if he makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences; if he fails, he takes the loss. A bureaucrat forces you to obey his decisions, whether you agree with him or not—and the more advanced the stage of a country’s statism, the wider and more discretionary the powers wielded by a bureaucrat. If he makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences; if he fails, he passes the loss on to you, in the form of heavier taxes.

A businessman cannot force you to work for him or to accept the wages he offers; you are free to seek employment elsewhere and to accept a better offer, if you can find it. (Remember, in this context, that jobs do not exist “in nature,” that they do not grow on trees, that someone has to create the job you need, and that that someone, the businessman, will go out of business if he pays you more than the market permits him to pay you.) A bureaucrat can force you to work for him, when he achieves the totalitarian power he seeks; he can force you to accept any payment he offers-or none, as witness the forced labor camps in the countries of full statism.

[“From My ‘Future File,’ ” ARL, III, 26. 5.]

1 he businessman’s tool is values; the bureaucrat’s tool is fear.

[“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 48.]

See also BUSINESSMEN ; CAPITALISM; ECONOMIC POWER vs. POLITICAL POWER; PHYSICAL FORCE.

Byronic View of Existence. There are Romanticists whose hasic premise, in effect, is that man possesses volition in regard to consciousness, but not to existence, i.e., in regard to his own character and choice of values, but not in regard to the possibility of achieving his goals in the physical world. The distinguishing characteristics of such writers are grand-scale themes and characters, no plots and an overwhelming sense of tragedy, the sense of a “malevolent universe.” The chief exponents of this category were poets. The leading one is Byron, whose name has been attached to this particular, “Byronic,” view of existence: its essence is the belief that man must lead a heroic life and fight for his values even though he is doomed to defeat by a malevolent fate over which he has no control.

[“What Is Romanticism?” RM, 94; pb 109.]

See also ART; FREE WILL; MALEVOLENT UNIVERSE PREMISE; ROMANTICISM ; SENSE of LIFE.

C

Capitalism.

Theory

Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privatelv owned.

The recognition of individual rights entails the banishment of physical force from human relationships: basically, rights can be violated only by means of force. In a capitalist society, no man or group may initiate the use of physical force against others. The only function of the government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man’s rights, i.e., the task of protecting him from physical force; the government acts as the agent of man’s right of self-defense, and may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use; thus the government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of force under objective control.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 19.]

When I say “capitalism,” I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 32; pb 33.]

The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve “the common good.” It is true that capitalism does—if that catch-phrase has any meaning—but this is merely a secondary consequence. The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature, that it protects man’s survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 20.]

The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort. Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival....

Since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are properties of the individual, since the choice to exercise his rational faculty or not depends on the individual, man’s survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don’t. Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man’s mind.

[Ibid., 17.]

It is the basic, metaphysical fact of man’s nature—the connection between his survival and his use of reason—that capitalism recognizes and protects.

In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions, and interests dictate. They can deal with one another only in terms of and by means of reason, i.e., by means of discussion, persuasion, and contractual agreement, by voluntary choice to mutual benefit. The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial. It is the institution of private property that protects and implements the right to disagree—and thus keeps the road open to man’s most valuable attribute (valuable personally, socially, and objectively): the creative mind.

[Ibid., 19.]

It is ... by reference to philosophy that the character of a social system has to be defined and evaluated. Corresponding to the four branches of philosophy, the four keystones of capitalism are: metaphysically, the requirements of man’s nature and survival—epistemotogically, reason—ethicaUy, individual rights, politically, freedom.

[Ibid., 20.]

Capitalism demands the best of every man-his rationatity—and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him. His success depends on the objective value of his work and on the rationality of those who recognize that value. When men are free to trade, with reason and reality as their only arbiter, when no man may use physical force to extort the consent of another, it is the best product and the best judgment that win in every field of human endeavor, and raise the standard of living—and of thought—ever higher for all those who take part in mankind’s productive activity.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 24; pb 25.]

The economic value of a man’s work is determined, on a free market, by a single principle: by the voluntary consent of those who are willing to trade him their work or products in return. This is the moral meaning of the law of supply and demand.

[“What Is Capitalism” CUI, 26.]

The essence of capitalism’s foreign policy is free trade—i.e., the abolition of trade barriers, of protective tariffs, of special privileges—the opening of the world’s trade routes to free international exchange and competition among the private citizens of all countries dealing directly with one another.

[“The Roots of War,” CUI, 39.]

Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships. By the nature of its basic principles and interests, it is the only system fundamentally opposed to war.

[Ibid., 38.]

History

The flood of misinformation, misrepresentation, distortion, and outright falsehood about capitalism is such that the young people of today have no idea (and virtually no way of discovering any idea) of its actual nature. While archeologists are rummaging through the ruins of millennia for scraps of pottery and bits of bones, from which to reconstruct some information about prehistorical existence—the events of less than a century ago are hidden under a mound more impenetrable than the geological debris of winds, floods, and earthquakes: a mound of silence.

[“Introduction,” CUI, vii.J

The nineteenth century was the ultimate product and expression of the intellectual trend of the Renaissance and the Age of Reason, which means: of a predominantly Aristotelian philosophy. And, for the first time in history, it created a new economic system, the necessary corollary of political freedom, a system of free trade on a free market: capitalism.

No, it was not a full, perfect, unregulated, totally laissez-faire capitalism—as it should have been. Various degrees of government interference and control still remained, even in America—and this is what led to the eventual destruction of capitalism. But the extent to which certain countries were free was the exact extent of their economic progress. America, the freest, achieved the most.

Never mind the low wages and the harsh living conditions of the early years of capitalism. They were all that the national economies of the time could afford. Capitalism did not create poverty—it inherited it. Compared to the centuries of precapitalist starvation, the living conditions of the poor in the early years of capitalism were the first chance the poor had ever had to survive. As proof—the enormous growth of the European population during the nineteenth century, a growth of over 300 per cent, as compared to the previous growth of something like 3 per cent per century.

[“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 80; pb 66.]

Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man’s well-being is not their goal.

[“Theory and Practice,” CUI, 136.]

If a detailed, factual study were made of all those instances in the history of American industry which have been used by the statists as an indictment of free enterprise and as an argument in favor of a government-controlled economy, it would be found that the actions blamed on businessmen were caused, necessitated, and made possible only by government intervention in business. The evils, popularly ascribed to big industrialists, were not the result of an unregulated industry, but of government power over industry. The villain in the picture was not the businessman, but the legislator, not free enterprise, but government controls.

[“Notes on the History of American Free Enterprise,” CUI, 102.]

Capitalism cannot work with slave labor. It was the agrarian, feudal South that maintained slavery. It was the industrial, capitalistic North that wiped it out—as capitalism wiped out slavery and serfdom in the whole civilized world of the nineteenth century.

What greater virtue can one ascribe to a social system than the fact that it leaves no possibility for any man to serve his own interests by enslaving other men? What nobler system could be desired by anyone whose goal is man’s well-being?

[“Theory and Practice,” CUI, 136.]

Let those who are actually concerned with peace observe that capitalism gave mankind the longest period of peace in history—a period during which there were no wars involving the entire civilized orld—from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

It must be remembered that the political systems of the nineteenth century were not pure capitalism, but mixed economies. The element of freedom, however, was dominant; it was as close to a century of capitalism as mankind has come. But the element of statism kept growing throughout the nineteenth century, and by the time it blasted the world in 1914, the governments involved were dominated by statist policies.

Just as, in domestic affairs, all the evils caused by statism and government controls were blamed on capitalism and the free market—so, in foreign affairs, all the evils of statist policies were blamed on and ascribed to capitalism. Such myths as “capitalistic imperialism,” “war-profiteering,” or the notion that capitalism has to win “markets” by military conquest are examples of the superficiality or the unscrupulousness of statist commentators and historians.

[“The Roots of War,” CUI, 38.]

Observe the paradoxes built up about capitalism. It has been called a system of selfishness (which, in my sense of the term, it is)—yet it is the only system that drew men to unite on a large scale into great countries, and peacefully to cooperate across national boundaries, while all the collectivist, internationalist, One-World systems are splitting the world into Balkanized tribes.

Capitalism has been called a system of greed—yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal, and no tribal gang can conceive of.

Capitalism has been called nationalistic—yet it is the only system that banished ethnicity, and made it possible, in the United States, for men of various, formerly antagonistic nationalities to live together in peace.

Capitalism has been called cruel—yet it brought such hope, progress and general good will that the young people of today, who have not seen it, find it hard to believe.

As to pride, dignity, self-confidence, self-esteem—these are characteristics that mark a man for martyrdom in a tribal society and under any social system except capitalism.

[“Global Balkanization,” pamphlet, 15.]

It is often asked: Why was capitalism destroyed in spite of its incomparably beneficent record? The answer lies in the fact that the lifeline feeding any social system is a culture’s dominant philosophy and that capitalism never had a philosophical base. It was the last and (theoretically) incomplete product of an Aristotelian influence. As a resurgent tide of mysticism engulfed philosophy in the nineteenth century, capitalism was left in an intellectual vacuum, its lifeline cut. Neither its moral nature nor even its political principles had ever been fully understood or defined. Its alleged defenders regarded it as compatible with government controls (i.e., government interference into the economy), ignoring the meaning and implications of the concept of laissez-faire. Thus, what existed in practice, in the nineteenth century, was not pure capitalism, but variously mixed economies. Since controls necessitate and breed further controls, it was the statist element of the mixtures that wrecked them; it was the free, capitalist element that took the blame.

Capitalism could not survive in a culture dominated by mysticism and altruism, by the soul-body dichotomy and the tribal premise. No social system (and no human institution or activity of any kind) can survive without a moral base. On the basis of the altruist morality, capitalism had to be—and was—damned from the start.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 30.]

If the good, the virtuous, the morally ideal is suffering and selfsacrince—then, by that standard, capitalism had to be damned as evil. Capitalism does not tell men to suffer, but to pursue enjoyment and achievement, here, on earth—capitaHsm does not tell men to serve and sacrifice, but to produce and profit -capitalism does not preach passivity, humility, resignation, but independence, self-confidence, self-reliance—and, above all, capitalism does not permit anyone to expect or demand, to give or to take the unearned. In all human relationships-private or public, spiritual or material, social or political or economic or moral—capitalism requires that men be guided by a principle which is the antithesis of altruism: the principle of justice.

[“The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age,” pamphlet, 9.]

See also AMERICA; “CONSERVATIVES”; FREE MARKET; FREEDOM; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; INDIVIDUALISM; INTERVENTIONISM (ECONOMIC); JUSTICE; MIXED ECONOMY; NINETEENTH CENTURY; PHYSICAL FORCE; POLITICS; PROPERTY RIGHTS; TRADER PRINCIPLE; TRIBAI, PREMISE (in ECONOMICS); STATISM; TAXATION; WELFARE STATE.

Career. In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose—a productive purpose.... A central purpose serves to integrate all the other concerns of a man’s life. It establishes the hierarchy, the relative importance, of his values, it saves him from pointless inner conflicts, it permits him to enjoy life on a wide scale and to carry that enjoyment into any area open to his mind; whereas a man without a purpose is lost in chaos. He does not know what his values are. He does not know how to judge. He cannot tell what is or is not important to him, and, therefore, he drifts helplessly at the mercy of any chance stimulus or any whim of the moment. He can enjoy nothing. He spends his life searching for some value which he will never find.

[“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” March 1964, pamphlet, 6.]

“Productive work” does not mean the blind performance of the motions of some job. It means the conscious, rational pursuit of productive career. In popular usage, the term “career” is applied only to the more ambitious types of work; but, in fact, it applies to all work: it denotes a man’s attitude toward his work.

The difference between a career-man and a job-holder is as follows: a career-man regards his work as constant progress, as a constant upward motion from one achievement to another, higher one, driven by the constant expansion of his mind, his knowledge, his ability, his creative ingenuity, never stopping to stagnate on any level. A job-holder regards his work as a punishment imposed on him by the incomprehensible malevolence of reality or of society, which, somehow, does not let him exist without effort; so his policy is to go through the least amount of motions demanded of him by somebody and to stay put in any job or drift off to another, wherever chance, circumstances or relatives might happen to push him.

In this sense, a man of limited ability who rises by his own purposeful effort from unskilled laborer to shop-foreman, is a career-man in the proper, ethical meaning of the word—whi!e an intelligent man who stagnates in the role of a company president, using one-tenth of his potential ability, is a mere job-holder. And so is a parasite posturing in a job too big for his ability. It is not the degree of a man’s ability that is ethically relevant in this issue, but the full, purposeful use of his ability.

[“From My ‘Future File,’ ” ARL, III, 26, 3.]

A career requires the ability to sustain a purpose over a long period of time, through many separate steps, choices, decisions, adding up to a steady progression toward a goal.... In the course of a career, every achievement is an end in itself and, simultaneously, a step toward further achievements.... In a career, there is no such thing as achieving too much: the more one does, the more one loves one’s work.

[“Why I Like Stamp Collecting,” Minkus Stamp Journal, v. 6 (1971), no. 2, 2.]

PLAYBOY: Do you believe that women as well as men should organize their lives around work—and if so, what kind of work?

RAND: Of course. I believe that women are human beings. What is proper for a man is proper for a woman. The basic principles are the same. I would not attempt to prescribe what kind of work a man should do, and I would not attempt it in regard to women. There is no particular work which is specifically feminine. Women can choose their work according to their own purpose and premises in the same manner as men do.

PLAYBOY: In your opinion, is a woman immoral who chooses to devote herself to home and family instead of a career?

RAND: Not immoral—I would say she is impractical, because a home cannot be a full-time occupation, except when her children are young. However, if she wants a family and wants to make that her career, at least for a while, it would be proper—if she approaches it as a career, that is, if she studies the subject, if she defines the rules and principles by which she wants to bring up her children, if she approaches her task in an intellectual manner. It is a very responsible task and a very important one, but only when treated as a science, not as a mere emotional indulgence.

[“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 7.]

See also AMBITION ; PRODUCTIVENESS ; PURPOSE.

Causality. The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature.... The law of identity does not permit you to have your cake and eat it, too. The law of causality does not permit you to eat your cake before you have it.

[GS, FNI, 188; pb 151.]

To grasp the axiom that existence exists, means to grasp the fact that nature, i.e., the universe as a whole, cannot be created or annihilated, that it cannot come into or go out of existence. Whether its basic constituent elements are atoms, or subatomic particles, or some yet undiscovered forms of energy, it is not ruled by a consciousness or by will or by chance, but by the law of identity. All the countless forms, motions, combinations and dissolutions of elements within the universe—from a floating speck of dust to the formation of a galaxy to the emergence of tife—are caused and determined by the identities of the elements involved.

[“The Metaphysical vs. the Man-Made,” PWNI, 30; pb 25.]

Since things are what they are, since everything that exists possesses a specific identity, nothing in reality can occur causelessly or by chance.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” IT‘OE, 147.1

Choice ... is not chance. Volition is not an exception to the Law of Causality: it is a type of causation.

(Ibid., 149.]

See also CHANGE; FINAL CAUSATION; FREE WILL; IDENTITY; MIRACLES; NECESSITY.

Censorship. “Censorship” is a term pertaining only to governmental action. No private action is censorship. No private individual or agency can silence a man or suppress a publication; only the government can do so. The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right not to agree, not to listen and not to finance one’s own antagonists.

[“Man’s Rights,” VO.S, 132; pb 98.]

Censorship, in its old-fashioned meaning, is a government edict that forbids the discussion of some specific subjects or ideas—such, for instance, as sex, religion or criticism of government officials—an edict enforced by the government’s scrutiny of all forms of communication prior to their public release. But for stifling the freedom of men’s minds the modern method is much more potent; it rests on the power of non-objective law; it neither forbids nor permits anything; it never defines or specifies; it merely delivers men’s lives, fortunes, careers, ambitions into the arbitrary power of a bureaucrat who can reward or punish at whim. It spares the bureaucrat the troublesome necessity of committing himself to rigid rules—and it places upon the victims the burden of discovering how to please him, with a fluid unknowable as their only guide.

No, a federal commissioner may never utter a single word for or against any program. But what do you suppose will happen if and when, with or without his knowledge, a third-assistant or a second cousin or just a nameless friend from Washington whispers to a television executive that the commissioner does not like producer X or does not approve of writer Y or takes a great interest in the career of starlet Z or is anxious to advance the cause of the United Nations?

[“Have Gun, Will Nudge,” TON, March 1962, 9.)

For years, the collectivists have been propagating the notion that a private individual’s refusal to finance an opponent is a violation of the opponent’s right of free speech and an act of “censorship.”

It is “censorship,” they claim, if a newspaper refuses to employ or publish writers whose ideas are diametrically opposed to its policy.

It is “censorship,” they claim, if businessmen refuse to advertise in a magazine that denounces, insults and smears them....

And then there is Newton N. Minow [then chairman of the Federal Communications Commission] who declares: “There is censorship by ratings, by advertisers, by networks, by affiliates which reject programming offered to their areas.” It is the same Mr. Minow who threatens to revoke the license of any station that does not comply with his views on programming-and who claims that that is not censorship....

[This collectivist notion] means that the ability to provide the material tools for the expression of ideas deprives a man of the right to hold any ideas. It means that a publisher has to publish books he considers worthless, false or evil-that a TV sponsor has to finance commentators who choose to affront his convictions—that the owner of a newspaper must turn his editorial pages over to any young hooligan who clamors for the enslavement of the press. It means that one group of men acquires the “right” to unlimited license—while another group is reduced to helpless irresponsibility.

[“Man’s Rights,” VOS, I 31; pb 98.]

See also “CONSERVATIVES” vs. “LIBERALS”; DICTATORSHIP; FREE SPEECH; GOVERNMENT; GOVERNMENT GRANTS and SCHOLARSHIPS; PROPERTY RIGHTS.

Certainty. “Certain” represents an assessment of the evidence for a conclusion; it is usually contrasted with two other broad types of assessment : “possible” and “probable.” ...

Idea X is “certain” if, in a given context of knowledge, the evidence for X is conclusive. In such a context, all the evidence supports X and there is no evidence to support any alternative....

You cannot challenge a claim to certainty by means of an arbitrary declaration of a counter-possibility, ... you cannot manufacture possibilities without evidence....

All the main attacks on certainty depend on evading its contextual character....

The alternative is not to feign omniscience, erecting every discovery into an out-of-context absolute, or to embrace skepticism and claim that knowledge is impossible. Both these policies accept omniscience as the standard: the dogmatists pretend to have it, the skeptics bemoan their lack of it. The rational policy is to discard the very notion of omniscience. Knowledge is contextuat—it is knowledge, it is valid, contextually.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 6.]

Infallibility is not a precondition of knowing what one does know, of firmness in one’s convictions, and of loyalty to one’s values.

[“The Shanghai Gesture.” ARL, 1, 14, 3.]

“Don’t be so sure—nobody can be certain of anything.” Bertrand Russell’s gibberish to the contrary notwithstanding, that pronouncement includes itself; therefore, one cannot be sure that one cannot be sure of anything. The pronouncement means that no knowledge of any kind is possible to man, i.e., that man is not conscious. Furthermore, if one tried to accept that catch phrase, one would find that its second part contradicts its first: if nobody can be certain of anything, then everybody can be certain of everything he pteases—since it cannot be refuted, and he can claim he is not certain he is certain (which is the purpose of that notion).

[“Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 17; pb 14.]

See also ABSOLUTES ; AGNOSTICISM; ARBITRARY; AXIOMS; CONTEXT;KNOWLEDGE; “OPEN MIND” and “CLOSED MIND”; POSSIBLE; REASON.

Chance. Since things are what they are, since everything that exists possesses a specific identity, nothing in reality can occur causelessly or by chance.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ILOF, 147.]

Choice, however, is not chance. Volition is not an exception to the I.aw of Causality: it is a type of causation.

[Ibid., 149.]

See also CAUSALITY; FREE WILL; IDENTITY; POSSIBLE.

Change. They proclaim that there is no law of identity, that nothing exists but change, and blank out the fact that change presupposes the concepts of what changes, from what and to what, that without the law of identity no such concept as “change” is possible.

[GS, FNI, 192; pb 154.]

See also CAUSALITY; ENTITY; IDENTITY; MOTION; “STOLEN CONCEPT,” .. FALLACY of

Character. “Character” means a man’s nature or identity insofar as this is shaped by the moral values he accepts and automatizes. By “moral values” I mean values which are volitionally chosen, and which are fundamental, i.e., shape the whole course of a man’s action, not merely a specialized, delimited area of his life.... So a man’s character is, in effect, his moral essence—his self-made identity as expressed in the principles he lives by.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), question period, Lecture 2.]

We have only two sources of information about the character of the people around us: we judge them by what they do and by what they say (particularly the first).

[“Basic Principles of Literature,” RM, 66; pb 87.]

As’man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.

[GS,FNI, 160; pb 131.]

Just as man’s physical survival depends on his own effort, so does his psychological survival. Man faces two corollary, interdependent fields of action in which a constant exercise of choice and a constant creative process are demanded of him: the world around him and his own soul (by “soul,” I mean his consciousness). Just as he has to produce the material values he needs to sustain his life, so he has to acquire the values of character that enable him to sustain it and that make his life worth living. He is born without the knowledge of either. He has to discover both—and translate them into reatity—and survive by shaping the world and himself in the image of his values.

[“The Goal of My Writing,” RM, 169; pb 169.]

See also AUTOMATIZATION; FREE WILL; IDENTITY; MORALITY; VALUES.

Characterization. Characterization is the portrayal of those essential traits which form the unique, distinctive personality of an individual human being.

Characterization requires an extreme degree of selectivity. A human being is the most complex entity on earth; a writer’s task is to select the essentials out of that enormous complexity, then proceed to create an individual figure, endowing it with all the appropriate details down to the telling small touches needed to give it full reality. That figure has to be an abstraction, yet look like a concrete; it has to have the universality of an abstraction and, simultaneously, the unrepeatable uniqueness of a person.

In real life, we have only two sources of information about the character of the people around us: we judge them by what they do and by what they say (particularly the first). Similarly, characterization in a novel can be achieved only by two major means: action and dialogue. Descriptive passages dealing with a character’s appearance, manner, etc. can contribute to a characterization; so can introspective passages dealing with a character’s thoughts and feelings; so can the comments of other characters. But all these are merely auxiliary means, which are of no value without the two pillars: action and dialogue. to re-create the reality of a character, one must show what he does and what he says.

[“Basic Principles of Literature,” RM, 66; pb 87.]

See also CHARACTER; LITERATURE; MOTIVATION.

Charity. My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.

[“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 10.]

The fact that a man has no claim on others (i.e., that it is not their moral duty to help him and that he cannot demand their help as his right) does not preclude or prohibit good will among men and does not make it immoral to offer or to accept voluntary, non-sacrificial assistance.

It is altruism that has corrupted and perverted human benevolence by regarding the giver as an object of immolation, and the receiver as a helplessly miserable object of pity who holds a mortgage on the lives of others—a doctrine which is extremely offensive to both parties, leaving men no choice but the roles of sacrificial victim or moral cannibal....

To view the question in its proper perspective, one must begin by rejecting altruism’s terms and all of its ugly emotional aftertaste—then take a fresh look at human relationships. It is morally proper to accept help, when it is offered, not as a moral duty, but as an act of good will and generosity, when the giver can afford it (i.e., when it does not involve self-sacrifice on his part), and when it is offered in response to the receiver’s vir-tues, not in response to his flaws, weaknesses or moral failures, and not on the ground of his need as such.

[“The Question of Scholarships.” TO, June 1966, 11.]

The proper method of judging when or whether one should help another person is by reference to one’s own rational self-interest and one’s own hierarchy of values: the time, money or effort one gives or the risk one takes should be proportionate to the value of the person in relation to one’s own happiness.

To illustrate this on the altruists’ favorite example: the issue of saving a drowning person. If the person to be saved is a stranger, it is morally proper to save him only when the danger to one’s own life is minimal; when the danger is great, it would be immoral to attempt it: only a lack of self-esteem could permit one to value one’s life no higher than that of any random stranger. (And, conversely, if one is drowning, one cannot expect a stranger to risk his life for one’s sake, remembering that one’s life cannot be as valuable to him as his own.)

If the person to be saved is not a stranger, then the risk one should be willing to take is greater in proportion to the greatness of that person’s value to oneself. If it is the man or woman one loves, then one can be willing to give one’s own life to save him or her—for the selfish reason that life without the loved person could be unbearable.

[“The Ethics of Emergencies,” VOS, 50; pb 45.]

The small minority of adults who are unable rather than unwilling to work, have to rely on voluntary charity; misfortune is not a claim to slave labor; there is no such thing as the right to consume, control, and destroy those without whom one would be unable to survive.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 26.]

See also ALTRUISM; “DUTY”; EMERGENCIES; POVERTY; SACRIFICE ; SELFISHNESS; VIRTUE; WELFARE STATE.

Choreographer. Dancers are performing artists; music is the primary work they perform—with the help of an important intermediary: the choreographer. His creative task is similar to that of a stage director, but carries a more demanding responsibility: a stage director translates a primary work, a play, into physical action—a choreographer has to translate a primary work, a composition of sounds, into another medium, into a composition of movements, and create a structured, integrated work: a dance.

This task is so difficult and its esthetically qualified practitioners so rare that the dance has always been slow in its development and extremely vulnerable. Today, it is all but extinct.

[Art and Cognition,“ RM, pb 70.]

See also ART; BALLET; DANCE ; DIRECTOR; PERFORMING ARTS.

Christmas. [In answer to the question of whether it is appropriate for an atheist to celebrate Christmas:]

Yes, of course. A national holiday, in this country, cannot have an exclusively religious meaning. The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion: it is good will toward men—a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property (though it is supposed to be part, but is a largely unobserved part) of the Christian religion.

The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: “Merry Christmas”—not “Weep and Repent.” And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form—by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance....

The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying ... stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only “commercial greed” could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.

[The Objectivist Calendar, Dec. 1976.]

See also AMERICA; ATHEISM; MYSTICISM; RELIGION; THANKSGIVING.

Civil Disobedience. Civil disobedience may be justifiable, in some cases, when and if an individual disobeys a law in order to bring an issue to court, as a test case. Such an action involves respect for legality and a protest directed only at a particular law which the individual seeks an opportunity to prove to be unjust. The same is true of a group of individuals when and if the risks involved are their own.

But there is no justification, in a civilized society, for the kind of mass civil disobedience that involves the violation of the rights of others—regardless of whether the demonstrators’ goal is good or evil. The end does not justify the means. No one’s rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others. Mass disobedience is an assault on the concept of rights: it is a mob’s defiance of legality as such.

The forcible occupation of another man’s property or the obstruction of a public thoroughfare is so blatant a violation of rights that an attempt to justify it becomes an abrogation of morality. An individual has no right to do a “sit-in” in the home or office of a person he disagrees with—and he does not acquire such a right by joining a gang. Rights are not a matter of numbers—and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.

The only power of a mob, as against an individual, is greater muscular strength—i.e., plain, brute physical force. The attempt to solve social problems by means of physical force is what a civilized society is established to prevent. The advocates of mass civil disobedience admit that their purpose is intimidation. A society that tolerates intimidation as a means of settling disputes—the physical intimidation of some men or groups by others—)oses its moral right to exist as a social system, and its collapse does not take long to follow.

Politically, mass civil disobedience is appropriate only as a prelude to civil war—as the declaration of a total break with a country’s political institutions.

[“The Cashing-In: The Student ‘Rebellion,’ ” CUI, 256.]

See also INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; LAW, OBJECTIVE and NON-OBJECTIVE; NEW LEFT; PHYSICAL FORCE.

Civilization. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

[“The Soul of an Individualist,” FNI, 98; pb 84.]

The precondition of a civiliced society is the barring of physical force from social relationships—thus establishing the principle that if men wish to deal with one another, they may do so only by means of reason: by discussion, persuasion and voluntary, uncoerced agreement.

The necessary consequence of man’s right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.

[“The Nature of Government,” VOS, 146; pb 108.]

See also CULTURE; FREEDOM; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; PHYSICAL FORCE.

Classicism. Classicism... was a school that had devised a set of arbitrary, concretely detailed rules purporting to represent the final and absolute criteria of esthetic value, In literature, these rules consisted of specific edicts, loosely derived from the Greek (and French) tragedies, which prescribed every formal aspect of a play (such as the unity of time, place and action) down to the number of acts and the number of verses permitted to a character in every act. Some of that stuff was based on Aristotle’s esthetics and can serve as an example of what happens when concrete-bound mentalities, seeking to by-pass the responsibility of thought, attempt to transform abstract principles into concrete prescriptions and to replace creation with imitation. (For an example of Classicism that survived well into the twentieth century, I refer you to the architectural dogmas represented by Howard Roark’s antagonists in The Fountainhead.)

Even though the Classicists had no answer to why their rules were to be accepted as valid (except the usual appeal to tradition, to scholarship and to the prestige of antiquity), this school was regarded as the representative of reason.(!)

[“What Is Romanticism?” RM, 87; pb 104.J

See also ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; ART; NATURALISM; PRINCIPLES; ROMANTICISM.

Coercion. See Physical Force.

“Collective Rights.” Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression “individual rights” is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today’s intellectual chaos). But the expression “collective rights” is a contradiction in terms.

Any group or “collective,” large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.

[“Collectivized ‘Rights,’ ” VOS, 136; pb 101.1

A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations.

Any group that does not recognize this principle is not an association, but a gang or a mob....

The notion of “collective rights” (the notion that rights belong to groups, not to individuals) means that “rights” belong to some men, but not to others—that some men have the “right” to dispose of others in any manner they please—and that the criterion of such privileged position consists of numerical superiority.

[Ibid., 137; pb 102.]

The notion that “Anything society does is right because society chose to do it,” is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles and the banishment of morality from social issues.

[Ibid., 136; pb 101.]

See also COLLECTIVISM; FOREIGN POLICY; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; MORALITY; NATIONAL RIGHTS; SELF-DETERMINATION of NATIONS.

Collectivism. Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group—whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called “the common good.”

[“The Only Path to Tomorrow,” Reader’s Digest, Jan. 1944, 8.]

Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective—society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc.—is the unit of reality and the standard of value. On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 7; pb 17.]

Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group ... and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force—and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism.

[“Racism,” VUS, 175; pb 128.]

Fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory ... both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state.

[“ ‘Extremism,’ or the Art of Smearing,” CUI, 180.]

Modern collectivists ... see society as a super-organism, as some supernatural entity apart from and superior to the sum of its individual members.

[“Collectivized ‘Rights,’ ” VOS, 138; pb 103. J

The philosophy of collectivism upholds the existence of a mystic (and unperceivable) social organism, while denying the reality of perceived individuals—a view which implies that man’s senses are not a valid instrument for perceiving reality. Collectivism maintains that an elite endowed with special mystic insight should rule men—which implies the existence of an elite source of knowledge, a fund of revelations inaccessible to logic and transcending the mind. Collectivism denies that men should deal with one another by voluntary means, settling their disputes by a process of rational persuasion; it declares that men should live under the reign of physical force (as wielded by the dictator of the omnipotent state)—a position which jettisons reason as the guide and arbiter of human relationships.

From every aspect, the theory of collectivism points to the same conclusion: collectivism and the advocacy of reason are philosophically antithetical ; it is one or the other.

[Leonard Peikoff, “Nazism vs. Reason,” TO, Oct. 1969, 1.]

The political philosophy of collectivism is based on a view of man as a congenital incompetent, a helpless, mindless creature who must be fuoled and ruled by a special elite with some unspecified claim to superior wisdom and a lust for power.

[“Who Will Protect Us from Our Protectors?” TON, May 1962, 17.]

What subjectivism is in the realm of ethics, collectivism is in the realm of politics. Just as the notion that “Anything I do is right because I chose to do it,” is not a moral principle, but a negation of morality—so the notion that “Anything society does is right because society chose to do it,” is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles and the banishment of morality from social issues.

[“Collectivized ‘Rights,’ ” VOS, 135; pb 101.]

As a cultural-intellectual power and a moral ideal, collectivism died in World War II. If we are still rolling in its direction, it is only by the inertia of a void and the momentum of disintegration. A social movement that began with the ponderous, brain-cracking, dialectical constructs of Hegel and Marx, and ends up with a horde of morally unwashed children stamping their foot and shrieking: “I want it now!” —is through.

[“The Cashing-In : The Student ‘Rebellion,’ ” CUI, 266.]

Collectivism has lost the two crucial weapons that raised it to world power and made all of its victories possible: intellectuality and idealism, or reason and morality. It had to lose them precisely at the height of its success, since its claim to buth was a fraud: the full, actual reality of socialist-cornnrunist-fascist states has demonstrated the brute irrationality of collectivist systems and the inhumanity of altruism as a moral code.

[Ibid., 269.]

Collectivism does not preach sacrifice as a temporary means to some desirable end. Sacrifice is its end—sacrifice as a way of life. It is man’s independence, success, prosperity, and happiness that collectivists wish to destroy.

Observe the snarling, hysterical hatred with which they greet any suggestion that sacrifice is not necessary, that a non-sacrificial society is possible to men, that it is the only society able to achieve man’s well-being.

[“Theory and Practice,” CUI, 137.]

The advocates of collectivism are motivated not by a desire for men’s happiness, but by hatred for man ... hatred of the good for being the good; ... the focus of that hatred, the target of its passionate fury, is the man of ability.

[“An Untitled Letter,” PWNI, 123; pb 102.)

See also ALTRUISM; “COLLECTIVE RIGHTS”; “COMMON GOOD”; DICTATORSHIP; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; INDIVIDUALISM; SELFISHNESS; SOCIAL SYSTEM; SOCIETY; STATISM; TRIBALISM; TRIBAL PREMISE (in ECONOMICS).

“Common Good.” The tribal notion of “the common good” has served as the moral justification of most social systems-and of all tyrannies—in history. The degree of a society’s enslavement or freedom corresponded to the degree to which that tribal slogan was invoked or ignored.

“The common good” (or “the public interest”) is an undefined and undefinable concept: there is no such entity as “the tribe” or “the public” ; the tribe (or the public or society) is only a number of individual men. Nothing can be good for the tribe as such; “good” and “value” pertain only to a living organism—to an individual living organism-not to a disembodied aggregate of relationships.

“The common good” is a meaningless concept, unless taken literally, in which case its only possible meaning is: the sum of the good of all the individual men involved. But in that case, the concept is meaningless as a moral criterion: it leaves open the question of what is the good of individual men and how does one determine it?

It is not, however, in its literal meaning that that concept is generally used. It is accepted precisely for its elastic, undefinable, mystical character which serves, not as a moral guide, but as an escape from morality. Since the good is not applicable to the disembodied, it becomes a moral blank check for those who attempt to embody it.

When “the common good” of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals. It is tacitly assumed, in such cases, that “the common good” means “the good of the majority” as against the minority or the individual. Observe the significant fact that that assumption is tacit: even the most collectivized mentalities seem to sense the impossibility of justifying it morally. But “the good of the majority,” too, is only a pretense and a delusion: since, in fact, the violation of an individual’s rights means the abrogation of all rights, it delivers the helpless majority into the power of any gang that proclaims itself to be “the voice of society” and proceeds to rule by means of physical force, until deposed by another gang employing the same means.

If one begins by defining the good of individual men, one will accept as proper only a society in which that good is achieved and achievable. But if one begins by accepting “the common good” as an axiom and regarding individual good as its possible but not necessary consequence (not necessary in any particular case), one ends up with such a gruesome absurdity as Soviet Russia, a country professedly dedicated to “the common good,” where, with the exception of a minuscule clique of rulers, the entire population has existed in subhuman misery for over two generations.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 20.]

Only on the basis of individual rights can any good—private or public —be defined and achieved. Only when each man is free to exist for his own sake—neither sacrificing others to himself nor being sacrificed to others—onty then is every man free to work for the greatest good he can achieve for himself by his own choice and by his own effort. And the sum total of such individual efforts is the only kind of general, social good possible.

[“Textbook of Americanism,” pamphlet. 1 1.]

See also ALTRUISM; COLLECTIVISM; DEMOCRACY; lNDIVIDUAL RIGHTS: MINORITY RIGHTS; “PUBLIC INTEREST,” the; SOVIET RUSSIA; TRIBALISM.

Common Sense. Common sense is a simple and non-self-conscious use of logic.

[Ayn Rand, question period following Lecture I 1 of Leonard Peikoff’s series “The Philosophy of Objectivism” (1976).]

That which today is called “common sense” is the remnant of an Aristotelian influence.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 45; pb 41.]

Americans are the most reality-oriented people on earth. Their outstanding characteristic is the childhood form of reasoning: common sense. It is their only protection. But common sense is not enough where theoretical knowledge is required: it can make simple, concrete-bound connections—it cannot integrate complex issues, or deal with wide abstractions, or forecast the future.

[“Don’t Let It Go,” PWNI, 257; pb 211.]

See also AMERICA; ARISTOTLE; LOGIC.

Communication. Reason is the only means of communication among men, and an objectively perceivable reality is their only common frame of reference; when these are invalidated (i.e., held to be irrelevant) in the field of morality, force becomes men’s only way of dealing with one another.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 22.]

Concepts and, therefore, language are primarily a tool of cognition—not of communication, as is usually assumed. Communication is merely the consequence, not the cause nor the primary purpose of concept-formation—a crucial consequence, of invaluable importance to men, but still only a consequence. Cognition precedes communication; the necessary precondition of communication is that one have something to communicate. (This is true even of communication among animals, or of communication by grunts and growls among inarticulate men, let alone of communication by means of so complex and exacting a tool as language.)

[ITOE, 92.]

See also CONCEPTS; LANGUAGE; PHYSICAL FORCE; REASON.

Communism. When, at the age of twelve, at the time of the Russian revolution, I first heard the Communist principle that Man must exist for the sake of the State, I perceived that this was the essential issue, that this principle was evil, and that it could lead to nothing but evil, regardless of any methods, details, decrees, policies, promises and pious platitudes. This was the reason for my opposition to Communism then —and it is my reason now. I am still a little astonished, at times, that too many adult Americans do not understand the nature of the fight against Communism as clearly as I understood it at the age of twelve: they continue to believe that only Communist methods are evil, while Communist ideals are noble. All the victories of Communism since the year 1917 are due to that particular belief among the men who are still free.

[“Foreword,” WTL, vii.]

Communists, like all materialists, are neo-mystics: it does not matter whether one rejects the mind in favor of revelations or in favor of conditioned reflexes. The basic premise and the results are the same.

[“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 85; pb 70.]

The Communists’ chief-purpose is to destroy every form of independence—independent work, independent action, independent property, independent thought, an independent mind, or an independent man. Conformity, alikeness, servility, submission and obedience are necessary to establish a Communist slave-state.

[“Screen Guide for Americans,” Plain Talk, Nov. 1947, 41.]

It is the Communists’ intention to make people think that personal success is somehow achieved at the expense of others and that every successful man has hurt somebody by becoming successful. It is the Communists’ aim to discourage all personal effort and to drive men into a hopeless, dispirited, gray herd of robots who have lost all personal ambition, who are easy to rule, willing to obey and willing to exist in selfless servitude to the State.

[Ibid., 39.]

If America perishes, it will perish by intellectual default. There is no diabolical conspiracy to destroy it: no conspiracy could be big enough and strong enough.... As to the communist conspirators in the service of Soviet Russia, they are the best illustration of victory by default: their successes are handed to them by the concessions of their victims.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 52; pb 46.]

When men share the same basic premise, it is the most consistent ones who win. So long as men accept the altruist morality, they will not be able to stop the advance of communism. The altruist morality is Soviet Russia’s best and only weapon.

[“Conservatism: An Obituary,” CUI, 196.]

See also COLLECTIVISM; DICTATORSHIP; EGALITARIANISM; FASCISM and COMMUNISM/SOCIALISM; HUMAN RIGHTS and PROPERTY RIGHTS; “McCARTHYISM”; POLYLOGISM; PROPERTY RIGHTS; SOCIALISM; SOVIET RUSSIA; STATISM.

Compassion. I regard compassion as proper only toward those who are innocent victims, but not toward those who are morally guilty. If one feels compassion for the victims of a concentration camp, one cannot feel it for the torturers. If one does feel compassion for the torturers, it is an act of moral treason toward the victims.

[“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 10.]

See also ALTRUISM; JUSTICE; MERCY; PITY.

Competition. Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

[“The Moratorium on Brains,” ARI., 1,2,4.]

A competition presupposes some basic principles held in common by all the competitors, such as the rules of the game in athletics, or the functions of the free market in business.

[“Apollo 11,” TO, Sept. 1969, 9.]

The only actual factor required for the existence of free competition is: the unhampered, unobstructed operation of the mechanism of a free market. The only action which a government can take to protect free competition is: Laissez-faire!—which, in free translation, means: Hands off! But the antitrust laws established exactly opposite conditions—and achieved the exact opposite of the results they had been intended to achieve.

There is no way to legislate competition; there are no standards by which one could define who should compete with whom, how many competitors should exist in any given field, what should be their relative strength or their so-called “relevant markets,” what prices they should charge, what methods of competition are “fair” or “unfair.” None of these can be answered, because these precisely are the questions that can be answered only by the mechanism of a free market.

[“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 54.]

The concept of free competition enforced by law is a grotesque contradiction in terms. It means: forcing people to be free at the point of a gun. It means: protecting people’s freedom by the arbitrary rule of unanswerable bureaucratic edicts.

[Ibid., 52.]

Competition, properly so-called, rests on the activity of separate, independent individuals owning and exchanging private property in the pursuit of their self-interest. It arises when two or more such individuals become rivals for the same trade.

[George Reisman, “Platonic Competition,” TO, Aug. 1968, 9.]

The competition which takes place under capitalism acts to regulate prices simply in accordance with the full costs of production and with the requirements of earning a rate of profit. It does not act to drive prices to the level of “marginal costs” or to the point where they reflect a “scarcity” of capacity.

[Ibid., 11.]

The competitor who cuts his price is fully aware of the impact on other competitors and that they will try to match his price. He acts in the knowledge that some of them will not he able to afford the cut, while he is, and that he will eventually pick up their business. He is able to afford the cut when and if his productive efficiency is greater than theirs, which lowers his costs to a level they cannot match.... Thus price competition, under capitalism, is the result of a contest of efficiency, competence, ability.

[Ibid., Sept. 1968, 9.]

“Competition” is an active, not a passive, noun. It applies to the entite sphere of economic activity, not merely to production, but also to trade; it implies the necessity of taking action to affect the conditions of the market in one’s own favor.

The error of the nineteenth-century observers was that they restricted a wide abstraction—competition—to a narrow set of particulars, to the “passive” competition projected by their own interpretation of classical economics. As a result, they concluded that the alleged “failure” of this fictitious “passive competition” negated the entire theoretical structure of classical economics, including the demonstration of the fact that laissez-faire is the most efficient and productive of all possible economic systems. They concluded that a free market, by its nature, leads to its own destruction—and they came to the grotesque contradiction of attempting to preserve the freedom of the market by government controls, i.e., to preserve the benefits of laissez-faire by abrogating it.

[Alan Greenspan, “Antitrust,” CUI, 67.]

See also ANTITRUST LAWS; CAPITALISM; COMPROMISE; FREE MARKET; FREEDOM; MONOPOLY; PRODUCTlVENESS.

Compromise. A compromise is an adjustment of conflicting claims by mutual concessions. This means that both parties to a compromise have some valid claim and some value to offer each other. And this means that both parties agree upon some fundamental principle which serves as a base for their deal.

[“Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?” VOS, 85; pb 68.]

There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.

[“ ‘Extremism,’ or The Art of Smearing,” CUI, 182.]

It is only in regard to concretes or particulars, implementing a mutually accepted basic principle, that one may compromise. For instance, one may bargain with a buyer over the price one wants to receive for one’s product, and agree on a sum somewhere between one’s demand and his offer. The mutually accepted basic principle, in such case, is the principle of trade, namely: that the buyer must pay the seller for his product. But if one wanted to be paid and the alleged buyer wanted to obtain one’s product for nothing, no compromise, agreement or discussion would be possible, only the total surrender of one or the other.

There can be no compromise between a property owner and a burglar; offering the burglar a single teaspoon of one’s silverware would not be a compromise, but a total surrender—the recognition of his right to one’s property.

[“Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?” VOS, 85; pb 68.]

Contrary to the fanatical belief of its advocates, compromise [on basic principles] does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody; it does not lead to general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to be all things to all men, end up by not being anything to anyone. And more: the partial victory of an unjust claim, encourages the claimant to try further; the partial defeat of a just claim, discourages and paralyzes the victim.

[“The Cashing-In: The Student ‘Rebellion,’ ” CUI, 255.]

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube....

When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.

[GS, FNI, 217; pb 173.]

The three rules listed below are by no means exhaustive; they are merely the first leads to the understanding of a vast subject.

1. In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins.

2. In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins.

3. When opposite basic principles are clearly and openly defined, it works to the advantage of the rational side; when they are not clearly defined, but are hidden or evaded, it works to the advantage of the irrational side.

(“The Anatomy of Compromise,” CUI, 145.]

See also ABSOLUTES; APPEASEMENT; COOPERATION; INTEGRITY; JUSTICE; MORAL COWARDICE; MORAL JUDGMENT; PRAGMATISM; PRINCIPLES.

Concept-Formation. According to Objectivism, concepts “represent classifications of observed existents according to their relationships to other observed existents.” (Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology; all further quotations in this section, unless otherwise identified, are from this work.) To form a concept, one mentally isolates a group of concretes (of distinct perceptual units), on the basis of observed similarities which distinguish them from all other known concretes (similarity is “the relationship between two or more existents which possess the same characteristic(s), but in different measure or degree”); then, by a process of omitting the particular measurements of these concretes, one integrates them into a single new mental unit: the concept, which subsumes all concretes of this kind (a potentially unlimited number). The integration is completed and retained by the selection of a perceptual symbol (a word) to designate it. “A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted.”

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 131.]

Bear firmly in mind that the term “measurements omitted” does not mean, in this context, that measurements are regarded as non-existent; it means that measurements exist, but are not specified. That measurements must exist is an essential part of the process. The principle is: the relevant measurements must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity.

[ITOE, 14.]

Let us now examine the process of forming the simplest concept, the concept of a single attribute (chronologically, this is not the first concept that a child would grasp; but it is the simplest one epistemologically)—for instance, the concept “length.” If a child considers a match, a pencil and a stick, he observes that length is the attribute they have in common, but their specific lengths differ. The difference is one of measurement. In order to form the concept “length,” the child’s mind retains the attribute and omits its particular measurements. Or, more precisely, if the process were identified in words, it would consist of the following: “Length must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity. I shall identify as ‘length’ that attribute of any existent possessing it which can be quantitatively related to a unit of length, without specifying the quantity.”

The child does not think in such words (he has, as yet, no knowledge of words), but that is the nature of the process which his mind performs wordlessly. And that is the principle which his mind follows, when, having grasped the concept “length” by observing the three objects, he uses it to identify the attribute of length in a piece of string, a ribbon, a belt, a corridor or a street.

The same principle directs the process of forming concepts of entities —for instance, the concept “table.” The child’s mind isolates two or more tables from other objects, by focusing on their distinctive characteristic: their shape. He observes that their shapes vary, but have one characteristic in common: a Hat, level surface and support(s). He forms the concept “table” by retaining that characteristic and omitting all particular measurements, not only the measurements of the shape, but of all the other characteristics of tables (many of which he is not aware of at the time).

[Ibid., 12.]

Observe the multiple role of measurements in the process of concept-formation, in both of its two essential parts: differentiation and integration. Concepts cannot be formed at random. All concepts are formed by first differentiating two or more existents from other existents. All conceptual differentiations are made in terms of commensurable characteristics (i.e., characteristics possessing a common unit of measurement). No concept could be formed, for instance, by attempting to distinguish long objects from green objects. Incommensurable characteristics cannot be integrated into one unit.

Tables, for instance, are first differentiated from chairs, beds and other objects by means of the characteristic of shape, which is an attribute possessed by all the objects involved. Then, their particular kind of shape is set as the distinguishing characteristic of tables—i.e., a certain category of geometrical measurements of shape is specified. Then, within that category, the particular measurements of individual table-shapes are omitted.

Please note the fact that a given shape represents a certain category or set of geometrical measurements. Shape is an attribute; differences of shape—whether cubes, spheres, cones or any complex combinations —are a matter of differing measurements; any shape can be reduced to or expressed by a set of figures in terms of linear measurement. When, in the process of concept-formation, man observes that shape is a commensurable characteristic of certain objects, he does not have to measure all the shapes involved nor even to know how to measure them; he merely has to observe the element of similarity.

Similarity is grasped perceptually; in observing it, man is not and does not have to be aware of the fact that it involves a matter of measurement. It is the task of philosophy and of science to identify that fact.

[Ibid., 16.]

A commensurable characteristic (such as shape in the case of tables, or hue in the case of colors) is an essential element in the process of concept-formation. I shall designate it as the “Conceptual Common Denominator” and define it as “The characteristic(s) reducible to a unit of measurement, by means of which man differentiates two or more existents from other existents possessing it.”

The distinguishing characteristic(s) of a concept represents a specitied category of measurements within the “Conceptual Common Denominator” involved.

New concepts can be formed by integrating earlier-formed concepts into wider categories, or by subdividing them into narrower categories (a process which we shall discuss later). But all concepts are ultimately reducible to their base in perceptual entities, which are the base (the given) of man’s cognitive development.

[Ibid., 18.]

When concepts are integrated into a wider one, the new concept includes all the characteristics of its constituent units; but their distinguishing characteristics are regarded as omitted measurements, and one of their common characteristics determines the distinguishing characteristic of the new concept: the one representing their “Conceptual Common Denominator” with the existents from which they are being differentiated.

When a concept is subdivided into narrower ones, its distinguishing characteristic is taken as their “Conceptual Common Denominator”—and is given a narrower range of specified measurements or is combined with an additional characteristic(s), to form the individual distinguishing characteristics of the new concepts.

[Ibid., 30.]

The formation of introspective concepts follows the same principles as the formation of extrospective concepts. A concept pertaining to consciousness is a mental integration of two or more instances of a psychological process possessing the same distinguishing characteristics, with the particular contents and the measurements of the action’s intensity omitted—on the principle that these omitted measurements must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity (i.e., a given psychological process must possess some content and some degree of intensity, but may possess any content or degree of the appropriate category).

[Ibid., 40.]

Concepts are not and cannot be formed in a vacuum; they are formed in a context; the process of conceptualization consists of observing the differences and similarities of the existents within the field of one’s awareness (and organizing them into concepts accordingly). From a child’s grasp of the simplest concept integrating a group of perceptually given concretes, to a scientist’s grasp of the most complex abstractions integrating long conceptual chains—alt conceptualization is a contextual process; the context is the entire field of a mind’s awareness or knowledge at any level of its cognitive development.

This does not mean that conceptualization is a subjective process or that the content of concepts depends on an individual’s subjective (i.e., arbitrary) choice. The only issue open to an individual’s choice in this matter is how much knowledge he will seek to acquire and, consequently, what conceptual complexity he will be able to reach. But so long as and to the extent that his mind deals with concepts (as distinguished from memorized sounds and floating abstractions), the content of his concepts is determined and dictated by the cognitive content of his mind, i.e., by his grasp of the facts of reality.

[Ibid., 55.]

Objectivity begins with the realization that man (including his every attribute and faculty, including his consciousness) is an entity of a specific nature who must act accordingly; that there is no escape from the law of identity, neither in the universe with which he deals nor in the working of his own consciousness, and if he is to acquire knowledge of the first, he must discover the proper method of using the second; that there is no room for the arbitrary in any activity of man, least of all in his method of cognition—and just as he has learned to be guided by objective criteria in making his physical tools, so he must be guided by objective criteria in forming his tools of cognition: his concepts.

Just as man’s physical existence was liberated when he grasped the principle that “nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed,” so his consciousness will be liberated when he grasps that nature, to be apprehended, must be obeyed—that the rules of cognition must be derived from the nature of existence and the nature, the identity, of his cognitive faculty.

[Ibid., 110.]

Man’s sense organs function automatically; man’s brain integrates his sense data into percepts automatically; but the process of integrating percepts into concepts—the process of abstraction and of concept-formation—is not automatic.

The process of concept-formation does not consist merely of grasping a few simple abstractions, such as “chair,” “table,” “hot,” “cold,” and of learning to speak. It consists of a method of using one’s consciousness, best designated by the term “conceptualizing.” It is not a passive state of registering random impressions. It is an actively sustained process of identifying one’s impressions in conceptual terms, of integrating every event and every observation into a conceptual context, of grasping relationships, differences, similarities in one’s perceptual material and of abstracting them into new concepts, of drawing inferences, of making deductions, of reaching conclusions, of asking new questions and discovering new answers and expanding one’s knowledge into an ever-growing sum. The faculty that directs this process, the faculty that works by means of concepts, is: reason. The process is thinking.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 12; pb 20.]

See also ABSTRACTION (PROCESS of); ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; CONCEPTUAL COMMON DENOMINATOR; CONCEPTS; DEFINITIONS; GENUS and SPECIES; INTEGRATlON (MENTAL); LANGUAGE; MEASUREMENT; UNIT; WORDS.

Concepts. A concept is a mental integration of two or more units which are isolated by a process of abstraction and united by a specific definition. By organizing his perceptual material into concepts, and his concepts into wider and still wider concepts, man is able to grasp and retain, to identify and integrate an unlimited amount of knowledge, a knowledge extending beyond the immediate concretes of any given, immediate moment.

In any given moment, concepts enable man to hold in the focus of his conscious awareness much more than his purely perceptual capacity would permit. The range of man’s perceptual awareness—the number of percepts he can deal with at any one time—is limited. He may be able to visualize four or five units—as, for instance, five trees. He cannot visualize a hundred trees or a distance of ten light-years. It is only his conceptual faculty that makes it possible for him to deal with knowledge of that kind.

Man retains his concepts by means of language. With the exception of proper names, every word we use is a concept that stands for an unlimited number of concretes of a certain kind. A concept is like a mathematical series of specifically defined units, going off in both directions, open at both ends and including all units of that particular kind. For instance, the concept “man” includes all men who live at present, who have ever lived or will ever live—a number of men so great that one would not be able to perceive them all visually, let alone to study them or discover anything about them.

[“The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” RM, 19; pb 17.]

To what precisely do we refer when we designate three persons as “men”? We refer to the fact that they are living beings who possess the same characteristic distinguishing them from all other living species: a rational faculty—though the specific measurements of their distinguishing characteristic qua men, as well as of all their other characteristics qua living beings, are different. (As living beings of a certain kind, they possess innumerable characteristics in common: the same shape, the same range of size, the same facial features, the same vital organs, the same fingerprints, etc., and all these characteristics differ only in their measurements.)

[ITOE, 21.]

A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted.

[Ibid., 15.]

The basic principle of concept-formation (which states that the omitted measurements must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity) is the equivalent of the basic principle of algebra, which states that algebraic symbols must be given some numerical value, but may be given any value. In this sense and respect, perceptual awareness is the arithmetic, but conceptual awareness is the algebra of cognition.

[Ibid., 22.]

None of [the traditional theories of concepts] regards concepts as objective, i.e., as neither revealed nor invented, but as produced by man’s consciousness in accordance with the facts of reality, as mental integrations of factual data computed by man—as the products of a cognitive method of classification whose processes must be performed by man, but whose content is dictated by reality.

[Ibid., 71.]

Concepts represent condensations of knowledge, which make further study and the division of cognitive labor possible.

[Ibid., 87.]

Conceptualization is a method of expanding man’s consciousness by reducing the number of its content’s units—a systematic means to an unlimited integration of cognitive data.

[Ibid., 85.]

It is crucially important to grasp the fact that a concept is an “open-end” classification which includes the yet-to-be-discovered characteristics of a given group of existents. All of man’s knowledge rests on that fact.

[Ibid., 87.]

Concepts and, therefore, language are primarily a tool of cognition—not of communication, as is usually assumed. Communication is merely the consequence, not the cause nor the primary purpose of concept-formation—a crucial consequence, of invaluable importance to men, but still only a consequence. Cognition precedes communication; the necessary precondition of communication is that one have something to communicate....

The primary purpose of concepts and of language is to provide man with a system of cognitive classification and organization, which enables him to acquire knowledge on an unlimited scale; this means: to keep order in man’s mind and enable him to think.

[Ibid., 92.]

Abstract ideas are conceptual integrations which subsume an incalculable number of concretes—and ... without abstract ideas you would not be able to deal with concrete, particular, real-life problems. You would be in the position of a newborn infant, to whom every object is a unique, unprecedented phenomenon. The difference between his mental state and yours lies in the number of conceptual integrations your mind has performed.

[“Philosophy: Who Needs It,” PWNI, 6; pb 5.]

Conceptual awareness is the only type of awareness capable of integrating past, present and future. Sensations are merely an awareness of the present and cannot be retained beyond the immediate moment; percepts are retained and, through automatic memory, provide a certain rudimentary link to the past, but cannot project the future. It is only conceptual awareness that can grasp and hold the total of its experience—extrospectivety, the continuity of existence; introspectively, the continuity of consciousness—and thus enable its possessor to project his course long-range.

[ITOE, 75.]

There are many special or “cross-filed” chains of abstractions (of interconnected concepts) in man’s mind. Cognitive abstractions are the fundamental chain, on which all the others depend. Such chains are mental integrations, serving a special purpose and formed accordingly by a special criterion.

Cognitive abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is essential? (epistemologically essential to distinguish one class of existents from all others). Normative abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is good? Esthetic abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is important?

[“Art and Sense of Life,” RM, 45; pb 36.]

See also “ANTI-CONCEPTS”; ANTI-CONCEPTUAL MENTALITY; AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS; COMMUNICATION; DEFINITIONS; ESTHETIC ABSTRACTIONS; “FROZEN ABSTRACTION,” FALLACY of; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); INVALID CONCEPTS; LANGUAGE; MATERIALS, CONCEPTS of; MEANING (of CONCEPTS); METHOD, CONCEPTS of; NORMATIVE ABSTRACTIONS; “PACKAGE-DEALING,” FALLACY of; PERCEPTION; PLATONIC REALISM; “RAND’S RAZOR”; REASON; “STOLEN CONCEPT,” FALLACY of; UNIT; UNIT-ECONOMY; WORDS.

Conceptual Common Denominator. A commensurable characteristic (such as shape in the case of tables, or hue in the case of colors) is an essential element in the process of concept-formation. I shall designate it as the “Conceptual Common Denominator” and define it as “The characteristic(s) reducible to a unit of measurement, by means of which man differentiates two or more existents from other existents possessing it.”

The distinguishing characteristic(s) of a concept represents a specified category of measurements within the “Conceptual Common Denominator” involved.

[ITOE, 18.]

Two fundamental attributes are involved in every state, aspect or function of man’s consciousness: content and action—the content of awareness, and the action of consciousness in regard to that content. These two attributes are the fundamental Conceptual Common Denominator of all concepts pertaining to consciousness.

[Ibid., 38.]

When concepts are integrated into a wider one, the new concept includes all the characteristics of its constituent units; but their distinguishing characteristics are regarded as omitted measurements, and one of their common characteristics determines the distinguishing characteristic of the new concept: the one representing their “Conceptual Common Denominator” with the existents from which they are being differentiated.

When a concept is subdivided into narrower ones, its distinguishing characteristic is taken as their “Conceptual Common Denominator”—and is given a narrower range of specified measurements or is combined with an additional characteristic(s), to form the individual distinguishing characteristics of the new concepts.

[Ibid., 30.]

The rules of correct definition are derived from the process of concept-formation. The units of a concept were differentiated—by means of a distinguishing characteristic(s)—from other existents possessing a commensurable characteristic, a Conceptual Common Denominator. A definition follows the same principle: it specifies the distinguishing characteristic (s) of the units, and indicates the category of existents from which they were differentiated.

The distinguishing characteristic(s) of the units becomes the differentia of the concept’s definition; the existents possessing a Conceptual Common Denominator become the genus.

[Ibid., 53.]

Since axiomatic concepts are not formed by differentiating one group of existents from others, but represent an integration of all existents, they have no Conceptual Common Denominator with anything else. They have no contraries, no alternatives.

[Ibid., 77.]

See also AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS; CONCEPT-FORMATION; DEFINITIONS ; GENUS and SPECIES; MEASUREMENT; UNIT.

Concretes. See Abstractions and Concretes.

Confidence. See Courage and Confidence; Self-Esteem.

Consciousness. Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.

If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.

Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.... Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

[GS, FNI, 152; pb 124.]

Consciousness is the faculty of awareness—the faculty of perceiving that which exists.

Awareness is not a passive state, but an active process. On the lower levels of awareness, a complex neurological process is required to enable man to experience a sensation and to integrate sensations into percepts; that process is automatic and non-volitional: man is aware of its results, but not of the process itself. On the higher, conceptual level, the process is psychological, conscious and volitional. In either case, awareness is achieved and maintained by continuous action.

Directly or indirectly, every phenomenon of consciousness is derived from one’s awareness of the external world. Some object, i.e., some content, is involved in every state of awareness. Extrospection is a process of cognition directed outward—a process of apprehending some existent (s) of the external world. Introspection is a process of cognition directed inward—a process of apprehending one’s own psychological actions in regard to some existent(s) of the external world, such actions as thinking, feeling, reminiscing, etc. It is only in relation to the external world that the various actions of a consciousness can be experienced, grasped, defined or communicated. Awareness is awareness of something. A content-less state of consciousness is a contradiction in terms.

[ITOE, 37.1

The first and primary axiomatic concepts are “existence,” “identity” (which is a corollary of “existence”) and “consciousness.” One can study what exists and how consciousness functions; but one cannot analyze (or “prove”) existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to “prove” them is self-contradictory: it is an attempt to “prove” existence by means of non-existence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness.)

[Ibid., 73.]

Consciousness—for those living organisms which possess it—is the basic means of survival.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 9: pb 18.]

Man’s consciousness is his least known and most abused vital organ. Most people believe that consciousness as such is some sort of indeterminate faculty which has no nature, no specific identity and, therefore, no requirements, no needs, no rules for being properly or improperly used. The simplest example of this belief is people’s willingness to lie or cheat, to fake reality on the premise that “I’m the only one who’ll know” or “It’s only in my mind”—without any concern for what this does to one’s mind, what complex, untraceable, disastrous impairments it produces, what crippling damage may result.

The loss of control over one’s consciousness is the most terrifying of human experiences: a consciousness that doubts its own efficacy is in a monstrously intolerable state. Yet men abuse, subvert and starve their consciousness in a manner they would not dream of applying to their hair, toenails or stomachs. They know that these things have a specific identity and specific requirements, and, if one wishes to preserve them, one must comb one’s hair, trim one’s toenails and refrain from swallowing rat poison. But one’s mind? Aw, it needs nothing and can swallow anything. Or so most people believe. And they go on believing it while they toss in agony on a psychologist’s couch, screaming that their mind keeps them in a state of chronic terror for no reason whatever....

The fact [is] that man’s consciousness possesses a specific nature with specific cognitive needs, that it is not infinitely malleable and cannot be twisted, like a piece of putty, to fit any private evasions or any public “conditioning.”

[“Our Cultural Value-Deprivation,” TO, April 1966, 1.]

Just as man’s physical existence was liberated when he grasped the principle that “nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed,” so his consciousness will be liberated when he grasps that nature, to be apprehended, must be obeyed—that the rules of cognition must be derived from the nature of existence and the nature, the identity, of his cognitive faculty.

[ITOE, 110.]

The hallmark of a mystic is the savagely stubborn refusal to accept the fact that consciousness, like any other existent, possesses identity, that it is a faculty of a specific nature, functioning through specific means. While the advance of civilization has been eliminating one area of magic after another, the last stand of the believers in the miraculous consists of their frantic attempts to regard identity as the disqualifying element of consciousness.

The implicit, but unadmitted premise of the neo-mystics of modern philosophy, is the notion that only an ineffable consciousness can acquire a valid knowledge of reality, that “true” knowledge has to be causeless, i.e., acquired without any means of cognition.

[Ibid., 106.]

Two fundamental attributes are involved in every state, aspect or function of man’s consciousness: content and action—the content of awareness, and the action of consciousness in regard to that content.

These two attributes are the fundamental Conceptual Common Denominator of all concepts pertaining to consciousness....

To form concepts of consciousness, one must isolate the action from the content of a given state of consciousness, by a process of abstraction. Just as, extrospectively, man can abstract attributes from entities—so, introspectively, he can abstract the actions of his consciousness from its contents, and observe the differences among these various actions.

For instance (on the adult level), when a man sees a woman walking down the street, the action of his consciousness is perception; when he notes that she is beautiful, the action of his consciousness is evaluation; when he experiences an inner state of pleasure and approval, of admiration, the action of his consciousness is emotion; when he stops to watch her and draws conclusions, from the evidence, about her character, age, social position, etc., the action of his consciousness is thought; when, later, he recalls the incident, the action of his consciousness is reminiscence; when he projects that her appearance would be improved if her hair were blond rather than brown, and her dress were blue rather than red, the action of his consciousness is imagination.

[Ibid., 38.]

In the realm of introspection, the concretes, the units which are integrated into a single concept, are the specific instances of a given psychological process. The measurable attributes of a psychological process are its object or content and its intensity.

The content is some aspect of the external world (or is derived from some aspect of the external world) and is measurable by the various methods of measurement applicable to the external world. The intensity of a psychological process is the automatically summed up result of many factors: of its scope, its clarity, its cognitive and motivational context, the degree of mental energy or effort required, etc.

There is no exact method of measuring the intensity of all psychotogical processes, but—as in the case of forming concepts of colors—conceptualization does not require the knowledge of exact measurements. Degrees of intensity can be and are measured approxitnately, on a comparative scale. For instance, the intensity of the emotion of joy in response to certain facts varies according to the importance of these facts in one’s hierarchy of values; it varies in such cases as buying a new suit, or getting a raise in pay, or marrying the person one loves. The intensity of a process of thought and of the intellectual effort required varies according to the scope of its content; it varies when one grasps the concept “table” or the concept “justice,” when one grasps that 2 + 2 = 4 or that e = mc2.

[Ibid., 39.]

See also AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS; EMOTIONS; FOCUS; FREE WILL; INTROSPECTION; PERCEPTION; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE us. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; PRIOR CERTAINTY of CONSCIOUSNESS; PSYCHOLOGY; REASON; SELF; SENSATIONS; SOUL-BODY DICHOTOMY; SUBCONSCIOUS; TABULA RASA; UNDERSTANDING.

“Conservatives.” Objectivists are not “conservatives.” We are radicals for capitalism; we are fighting for that philosophical base which capitalism did not have and without which it was doomed to perish....

Politics is based on three other philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology and ethics—on a theory of man’s nature and of man’s relationship to existence. It is only on such a base that one can formulate a consistent political theory and achieve it in practice. When, however, men attempt to rush into politics without such a base, the result is that embarrassing conglomeration of impotence, futility, inconsistendy y and superficiality which is loosely designated today as “conservatism.” ...

Today’s culture is dominated by the philosophy of mysticism (irrationalism) —altruism—collectivism, the base from which only statism can be derived; the statists (of any brand: communist, fascist or welfare) are merely cashing in on it—white the “conservatives” are scurrying to ride on the enemy’s premises and, somehow, to achieve political freedom by stealth. It can’t be done.

[“Choose Your Issues,” TON, Jan. 1962, 1.]

What are the “conservatives”? What is it that they are seeking to “conserve”?

It is generally understood that those who support the “conservatives,” expect them to uphold the system which has been camouflaged by the loose term of “the American way of life.” The moral treason of the “conservative” leaders lies in the fact that they are hiding behind that camouflage: they do not have the courage to admit that the American way of life was capitalism, that that was the politico-economic system born and established in the United States, the system which, in one brief century, achieved a level of freedom, of progress, of prosperity, of human happiness, unmatched in all the other systems and centuries combined—and that that is the system which they are now allowing to perish by silent default.

If the “conservatives” do not stand for capitalism, they stand for and are nothing; they have no goal, no direction, no political principles, no social ideals, no intellectual values, no leadership to offer anyone.

Yet capitalism is what the “conservatives” dare not advocate or defend. They are paralyzed by the profound conflict between capitalism and the moral code which dominates our culture: the morality of altruism.... Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society.

[“Conservatism: An Obituary,” CUI, 194.]

What is the moral stature of those who are afraid to proclaim that they are the champions of freedom? What is the integrity of those who outdo their enemies in smearing, misrepresenting, spitting at, and apologizing for their own ideal? What is the rationality of those who expect to trick people into freedom, cheat them into justice, fool them into progress, con them into preserving their rights, and, while indoctrinating them with statism, put one over on them and let them wake up in a perfect capitalist society some morning?

These are the “conservatives”—or most of their intellectual spokesmen.

[Ibid.]

There are three interrelated arguments used by today’s “conservatives” to justify capitalism, which can best be designated as: the argument from faith—the argument from tradition—the argument from depravity.

Sensing their need of a moral base, many “conservatives” decided to choose religion as their moral justification; they claim that America and capitalism are based on faith in God. Politically, such a claim contradicts the fundamental principles of the United States: in America, religion is a private matter which cannot and must not be brought into political issues.

Intellectually, to rest one’s case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one’s enemies—that one has no rational arguments to offer. The “conservatives’ ” claim that their case rests on faith, means that there are no rational arguments to support the American system, no rational justification for freedom, justice, property, individual rights, that these rest on a mystic revelation and can be accepted only on faith —that in reason and logic the enemy is right, but men must hold faith as superior to reason.

Consider the implications of that theory. While the communists claim that they are the representatives of reason and science, the “conservatives” concede it and retreat into the realm of mysticism, of faith, of the supernatural, into another world, surrendering this world to communism. It is the kind of victory that the communists’ irrational ideology could never have won on its own merits....

Now consider the second argument: the attempt to justify capitalism on the ground of tradition. Certain groups are trying to switch the word “conservative” into the exact opposite of its modern American usage, to switch it back to its nineteenth-century meaning, and to put this over on the public. These groups declare that to be a “conservative” means to uphold the status quo, the given, the established, regardless of what it might be, regardless of whether it is good or bad, right or wrong, defensible or indefensible. They declare that we must defend the American political system not because it is right, but because our ancestors chose it, not because it is good, but because it is old....

The argument that we must respect “tradition” as such, respect it merely because it is a “tradition,” means that we must accept the values other men have chosen, merely because other men have chosen them—with the necessary implication of: who are we to change them? The affront to a man’s self-esteem, in such an argument, and the profound contempt for man’s nature are obvious.

This leads us to the third—and the worst—argument, used by some “conservatives”: the attempt to defend capitalism on the ground of man’s depravity.

This argument runs as follows: since men are weak, fallible, non-omniscient and innately depraved, no man may be entrusted with the responsibility of being a dictator and of ruling everybody else; therefore, a free society is the proper way of life for imperfect creatures. Please grasp fully the implications of this argument: since men are depraved, they are not good enough for a dictatorship; freedom is all that they deserve; if they were perfect, they would be worthy of a totalitarian state.

Dictatorship—this theory asserts—believe it or not, is the result of faith in man and in man’s goodness; if people believed that man is depraved by nature, they would not entrust a dictator with power. This means that a belief in human depravity protects human freedom—that it is wrong to enslave the depraved, but would be right to enslave the virtuous. And more: dictatorships—this theory declares—and all the other disasters of the modern world are man’s punishment for the sin of relying on his intellect and of attempting to improve his life on earth by seeking to devise a perfect political system and to establish a rational society. This means that humility, passivity, lethargic resignation and a belief in Original Sin are the bulwarks of capitalism. One could not go farther than this in historical, political, and psychological ignorance or subversion. This is truly the voice of the Dark Ages rising again—in the midst of our industrial civilization.

The cynical, man-hating advocates of this theory sneer at all ideals, scoff at all human aspirations and deride all attempts to improve men’s existence. “You can’t change human nature,” is their stock answer to the socialists. Thus they concede that socialism is the ideal, but human nature is unworthy of it; after which, they invite men to crusade for capitalism—a crusade one would have to start by spitting in one’s own face. Who will fight and die to defend his status as a miserable sinner? If, as a result of such theories, people become contemptuous of “conservatism,” do not wonder and do not ascribe it to the cleverness of the socialists.

[Ibid., 196.]

Today’s “conservatives” are futile, impotent and, culturally, dead. They have nothing to offer and can achieve nothing. They can only help to destroy intellectual standards, to disintegrate thought, to discredit capitalism, and to accelerate this country’s uncontested collapse into despair and dictatorship.

[Ibid., 199.]

The most immoral contradiction—in the chaos of today’s anti-ideological groups—is that of the so-called “conservatives,” who posture as defenders of individual rights, particularly property rights, but uphold and advocate the draft. By what infernal evasion can they hope to justify the proposition that creatures who have no right to life, have the right to a bank account?

[“The Wreckage of the Consensus,” CUI, 227.]

The Antitrust laws—an unenforceable, uncompliable, unjudicable mess of contradictions—have for decades kept American businessmen under a silent, growing reign of terror. Yet these laws were created and, to this day, are upheld by the “conservatives,” as a grim monument to their lack of political philosophy, of economic knowledge and of any concern with principles.

[“Choose Your Issues,” TON, Jan. 1962, 1.]

It was the so-called “conservatives” ... who ran to the government for regulations and controls [over the broadcasting industry], and who cheered the notion of “public property” and service to the “public interest.”

[“The Property Status of the Airwaves,” CUI, 126.]

Escalation of controls has been the policy of conservatives in regard to antitrust laws, labor legislation, the military draft, taxation, the “negative income tax,” etc.

[“Ideas v. Men,” ARL, III, 15, 4.]

If the religionist wing of conservatism is futile, the secular one is, perhaps, worse. The religionists preach the morality of altruism, knowing that the liberals and the extreme left are its much more consistent practitioners, but hoping—since consistency is a requirement of reason, not of faith—that a miracle will wipe out that fact. The secular conservatives solve the contradiction by discarding morality altogether, by surrendering it to the enemy and declaring that social-political-economic problems are amoral.

[“Moral Inflation,” ARL, III, 12, 2.]

Capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future —if mankind is to have a future. Those who wish to fight for it, must discard the title of “conservatives.” “Conservatism” has always been a misleading name, inappropriate to America. Today, there is nothing left to “conserve”: the established political philosophy, the intellectual orthodoxy, and the status quo are collectivism. Those who reject all the basic premises of collectivism are radicals in the proper sense of the word: “radical” means “fundamental.” Today, the fighters for capitalism have to be, not bankrupt “conservatives,” but new radicals, new intellectuals and, above all, new, dedicated moralists.

[“Conservatism: An Obituary,” CUI, 201.]

See also ALTRUISM; CAPITALISM; COMPROMISE; “CONSERVATIVES ” vs. “LIBERALS”; FAITH; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; “LIBERALS”; “LIBERTARIANS”; ORIGINAL SIN; RELIGION; STATISM; TRADITION.

“Conservatives” vs. “Liberals.” Both [conservatives and liberals] hold the same premise—the mind-body dichotomy—but choose opposite sides of this lethal fallacy.

The conservatives want freedom to act in the material realm; they tend to oppose government control of production, of industry, of trade, of business, of physical goods, of material wealth. But they advocate government control of man’s spirit, i.e., man’s consciousness; they advocate the State’s right to impose censorship, to determine moral values, to create and enforce a governmental establishment of morality, to rule the intellect. The liberals want freedom to act in the spiritual realm; they oppose censorship, they oppose government control of ideas, of the arts, of the press, of education (note their concern with “academic freedom”). But they advocate government control of material production, of business, of employment, of wages, of profits, of all physical property—they advocate it all the way down to total expropriation.

The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories—with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe—but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.

Yet it is the conservatives who are predominantly religionists, who proclaim the superiority of the soul over the body, who represent what I call the “mystics of spirit.” And it is the liberals who are predominantly materialists, who regard man as an aggregate of meat, and who represent what I call the “mystics of muscle.”

This is merely a paradox, not a contradiction: each camp wants to control the realm it regards as metaphysically important; each grants freedom only to the activities it despises. Observe that the conservatives insult and demean the rich or those who succeed in material production, regarding them as morally inferior—and that the liberals treat ideas as a cynical con game. “Control,” to both camps, means the power to rule by physical force. Neither camp holds freedom as a value. The conservatives want to rule man’s consciousness; the liberals, his body.

[“Censorship: Local and Express,” PWNI, 228; pb 186.]

See also CENSORSHIP; “CONSERVATIVES”; FREEDOM; “LIBERALS”; MYSTICS of SPIRIT and MUSCLE; PROPERTY RIGHTS; RELIGION; RIGHTISTS and LEFTISTS; SOUL-BODY DICHOTOMY; “WINDOW-DRESSING. ”

Constitution. Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.

[“The Nature of Government,” VOS, 154; pb 114.]

Ours was the first government based on and strictly limited by a written document—the Constitution—which specifically forbids it to violate individual rights or to act on whim. The history of the atrocities perpetrated by all the other kinds of governments—unrestricted governments acting on unprovable assumptions—demonstrates the value and validity of the original political theory on which this country was built.

[“Censorship: Local and Express,” PWNI, 221; pb 181.]

A complex legal system, based on objectively valid principles, is required to make a society free and to keep it free—a system that does not depend on the motives, the moral character or the intentions of any given official, a system that leaves no opportunity, no legal loophole for the development of tyranny.

The American system of checks and balances was just such an achievement. And although certain contradictions in the Constitution did leave a loophole for the growth of statism, the incomparable achievement was the concept of a constitution as a means of limiting and restricting the power of the government.

[“The Nature of Government,” VOS, 154; pb 113.]

The clause giving Congress the power to regulate interstate cornmerce is one of the major errors in the Constitution. That clause, more than any other, was the crack in the Constitution’s foundation, the entering wedge of’ statism, which permitted the gradual establishment of the welfare state. But I would venture to say that the framers of the Constitution could not have conceived of what that clause has now become. If, in writing it, one of their goals was to facilitate the flow of trade and prevent the establishment of trade barriers among the states, that clause has reached the opposite destination.

[“Censorship: Local and Express,” PWNI, 225; pb 184.]

See also AMERICA; FOUNDING FATHERS; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; LAW, OBJECTIVE and NON-OBJECTIVE; PHYSICAL FORCE.

“Consumerism.” No “anti-concept” launched by the “liberals” goes so far so crudely as the [conservatives’] tag “consumerism.” It implies loudly and clearly that the status of “consumer” is separate from and superior to the status of “producer”; it suggests a social system dedicated to the service of a new aristocracy which is distinguished by the ability to “consume” and vested with a special claim on the caste of serfs marked by the ability to produce.

[“The Obliteration of Capitalism,” CUI, 185.]

There is no such thing as “consumers’ rights,” just as there can be no “rights” belonging to some special group or race and to no others. There are only the rights of man—rights possessed by every individual man and by all men as individuals. The right to be protected from physical injury or fraud belongs to all men, not merely to “consumers,” and does not require any special protection other than that provided by the criminal law....

If a businessman—or any other citizen—willfully and knowingly cheats or injures others (“consumers” or otherwise), it is a matter to be proved and punished in a criminal court. But the precedent which [the “consumer protection” movement] is here attempting to establish is the legal hallmark of a dictatorship: preventive law—the concept that a man is guilty until he is proved innocent by the permissive rubber stamp of a commissar or a Gauleiter.

What protects us from any private citizen who may choose to turn criminal and injure or defraud us? That, precisely, is the proper duty of a government. But if the government assumes a totalitarian power and its officials are not subject to any law, then who will protect us from our protectors? What will be our recourse against the dishonesty, vindictiveness, cupidity or stupidity of a bureaucrat?

If matters such as science are to be placed into the unanswerable power of a single bureau, what will guarantee the superior wisdom, justice and integrity of the bureaucrats? Why, the vote of the people, a statist would answer—of the people who choose the ruler who then appoints the bureaucrats—of the same people whom [he] does not consider competent to choose electric toasters, credit contracts, face lotions, laxative tablets or canned vegetables.

[“Who Will Protect Us from Our Protectors?” TON, May 1962, 20.]

You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you’re incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others—that you’re unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler—that you’re unable to earn your living by the use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and to vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic industries where you, by your own definition of your capacity, would be unable successfully to fill the job of assistant greaser.

[GS, FNI, 208; pb 167.]

See also “ANTI-CONCEPTS”; CONSUMPTION; FRAUD; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; PRODUCTION; SERVICE; TRIBAL PREMISE (in ECONOMICS).

Consumption. Consumption is the final, not the efficient, cause of production. The efficient cause is savings, which can be said to represent the opposite of consumption: they represent unconsumed goods. Consumption is the end of production, and a dead end, as far as the productive process is concerned. The worker who produces so little that he consumes everything he earns, carries his own weight economically, but contributes nothing to future production. The worker who has a modest savings account, and the millionaire who invests a fortune (and all the men in between), are those who finance the future. The man who consumes without producing is a parasite, whether he is a welfare recipient or a rich playboy.

[“Egalitarianism and Inflation,” PWNI, 160; pb 132.]

Trained in college to believe that to look beyond the immediate moment—to look for causes or to foresee consequences—is impossible, modern men have developed context-dropping as their normal method of cognition. Observing a bad, small-town shopkeeper, the kind who is doomed to fail, they believe—as he does—that lack of customers is his only problem; and that the question of the goods he sells, or where these goods come from, has nothing to do with it. The goods, they believe, are here and will always be here. Therefore, they conclude, the consumer —not the producer—is the motor of an economy. Let us extend credit, i.e., our savings, to the consumers—they advise—in order to expand the market for our goods.

But, in fact, consumers qua consumers are not part of anyone’s market; qua consumers, they are irrelevant to economics. Nature does not grant anyone an innate title of “consumer”; it is a title that has to be earned—by production. Only producers constitute a market—only men who trade products or services for products or services. In the role of producers, they represent a market’s “supply”; in the role of consumers, they represent a market’s “demand.” The law of supply and demand has an implicit subclause: that it involves the same people in both capacities.

When this subclause is forgotten, ignored or evaded—you get the economic situation of today.

[Ibid., 157; pb 130.]

See also “CONSUMERISM”; FINAL CAUSATION; INVESTMENT; PRODUCTION; PURCHASING POWER; SAVINGS.

Context. Knowledge is contextual.... By “context” we mean the sum of cognitive elements conditioning the acquisition, validity or application of any item of human knowledge. Knowledge is an organization or integration of interconnected elements, each relevant to the others.... Knowledge is not a mosaic of independent pieces each of which stands apart from the rest....

In regard to any concept, idea, proposal, theory, or item of knowledge, never forget or ignore the context on which it depends and which conditions its validity and use.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 5.1

Concepts are not and cannot be formed in a vacuum; they are formed in a context; the process of conceptualization consists of observing the differences and similarities of the existents within the field of one’s awareness (and organizing them into concepts accordingly). From a child’s grasp of the simplest concept integrating a group of perceptually given concretes, to a scientist’s grasp of the most complex abstractions integrating long conceptual chains—all conceptualization is a contextual process; the context is the entire field of a mind’s awareness or knowledge at any level of its cognitive development.

This does not mean that conceptualization is a subjective process or that the content of concepts depends on an individual’s subjective (i.e., arbitrary) choice. The only issue open to an individual’s choice in this matter is how much knowledge he will seek to acquire and, consequently, what conceptual complexity he will be able to reach. But so long as and to the extent that his mind deals with concepts (as distinguished from memorized sounds and floating abstractions), the content of his concepts is determined and dictated by the cognitive content of his mind, i.e., by his grasp of the facts of reality. If his grasp is noncontradictory, then even if the scope of his knowledge is modest and the content of his concepts is primitive, it will not contradict the content of the same concepts in the mind of the most advanced scientists.

The same is true of definitions. All definitions are contextual, and a primitive definition does not contradict a more advanced one: the latter merely expands the former.

[ITOE, 55. ]

No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge.

[GS, FNI, 154; pb 126.]

One must never make any decisions, form any convictions or seek any values out of context, i.e., apart from or against the total, integrated sum of one’s knowledge.

[“The Ohjectivist Ethics,” VOS, 21; pb 26.]

See also CERTAINTY; CONTEXT-DROPPING; CONTRADlCTIONS; DEFINITIONS; HIERARCHY of KNOWLEDGE; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); KNOWLEDGE; PRINCIPLES.

Context-Dropping. Context-dropping is one of the chief psychological tools of evasion. In regard to one’s desires, there are two major ways of context-dropping: the issues of range and of means.

A rational man sees his interests in terms of a lifetime and selects his goals accordingly. This does not mean that he has to be omniscient, infallible or clairvoyant. It means that he does not live his life short-range and does not drift like a bum pushed by the spur of the moment. It means that he does not regard any moment as cut off from the context of the rest of his life, and that he allows no conflicts or contradictions between his short-range and long-range interests. He does not become his own destroyer by pursuing a desire today which wipes out all his values tomorrow.

A rational man does not indulge in wistful longings for ends divorced from means. He does not hold a desire without knowing (or learning) and considering the means by which it is to be achieved.

[“The ‘Conflicts’ of Men’s Interests,” VOS, 60; pb 51.]

Whenever you tear an idea from its context and treat it as though it were a self-sufficient, independent item, you invalidate the thought process involved. If you omit the context, or even a crucial aspect of it, then no matter what you say it will not be valid....

A context-dropper forgets or evades any wider context. He stares at only one element, and he thinks, “I can change just this one point, and everything else will remain the same.” In fact, everything is interconnected. That one element involves a whole context, and to assess a change in one element, you must see what it means in the whole context.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 5.]

See also CONTEXT; EVASION; SELF- INTEREST.

“Contingent Truth.” See Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy.

Contracts. In a free society, men are not forced to deal with one another. They do so only by voluntary agreement and, when a time element is involved, by contract. If a contract is broken by the arbitrary decision of one man, it may cause a disastrous financial injury to the other.... This leads to one of the most important and most complex functions of the government: to the function of an arbiter who settles disputes among men according to objective laws.

[“The Nature of Government,” VOS, 149; pb 110.]

A unilateral breach of contract involves an indirect use of physical force: it consists, in essence, of one man receiving the material values, goods or services of another, then refusing to pay for them and thus keeping them by force (by mere physical possession), not by right—i.e., keeping them without the consent of the owner.

[Ibid., 150; pb 111.]

In a free society, the “rights” of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary, individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking. Every legitimate group undertaking is based on the participants’ right of free association and free trade. (By “legitimate,” I mean: noncriminal and freely formed, that is, a group which no one was forced to join.)

For instance, the right of an industrial concern to engage in business is derived from the right of its owners to invest their money in a productive venture—from their right to hire employees—from the right of the employees to sell their services—from the right of all those involved to produce and to sell their products—from the right of the customers to buy (or not to buy) those products. Every link of this complex chain of contractual relationships rests on individual rights, individual choices, individual agreements. Every agreement is delimited, specified and subject to certain conditions, that is, dependent upon a mutual trade to mutual benefit.

[“Collectivized ‘Rights,’ ” VOS, 136; pb 102.]

See also COOPERATION; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; PHYSICAL FORCE; PROPERTY RIGHTS.

Contradictions. A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

[GS, FNI, 154; pb 126.]

[Objectivism agrees with Aristotle’s formulation of the Law of Non-Contradiction]: These truths hold good for everything that is, and not for some special genus apart from others. And all men use them, because they are true of being qua being.... For a principle which everyone must have who understands anything that is, is not a hypothesis.... Evidently then such a principle is the most certain of all; which principle this is, let us proceed to say. It is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect.

[Aristotle, Metaphysics, IV, 3 (W. 1). Ross, trans.).]

The Law of Identity (A is A) is a rational man’s paramount consideration in the process of determining his interests. He knows that the contradictory is the impossible, that a contradiction cannot be achieved in reality and that the attempt to achieve it can lead only to disaster and destruction. Therefore, he does not permit himself to hold contradictory values, to pursue contradictory goals, or to imagine that the pursuit of a contradiction can ever be to his interest.

[“The ‘Conflicts’ of Men’s Interests,” VOS, 58; pb 51.]

See also ARISTOTLE; AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS; AXIOMS; CAUSALITY; EXISTENCE; IDENTITY; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); LOGIC.

Cooperation. Cooperation is the free association of men who work together by voluntary agreement, each deriving from it his own personal benefit.

[“Screen Guide for Americans,” Plain Talk, Nov. 1947, 40.]

A proper association is united by ideas, not by men, and its members are loyal to the ideas, not to the group. It is eminently reasonable that men should seek to associate with those who share their convictions and values. It is impossible to deal or even to communicate with men whose ideas are fundamentally opposed to one’s own (and one should be free not to deal with them). All proper associations are formed or joined by individual choice and on conscious, intellectual grounds (philosophical, political, professional, etc.)—not by the physiological or geographical accident of birth, and not on the ground of tradition. When men are united by ideas, i.e., by explicit principles, there is no room for favors, whims, or arbitrary power: the principles serve as an objective criterion for determining actions and for judging men, whether leaders or members.

This requires a high degree of conceptual development and independence.... But this is the only way men can work together justly, benevolently and safely.

[“The Missing Link,” PWNI, 54; pb 45.]

The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations. Any group that does not recognize this principle is not an association, but a gang or a mob.

[“Collectivized ‘Rights,’ ” VOS, 137; pb 102.]

See also INDEPENDENCE; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; INDIVIDUALISM; TRIBALISM.

Copyrights. See Patents and Copyrights.

Corollaries. A corollary is a self-evident implication of already established knowledge.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 2.]

Many of the most important truths in philosophy are neither primary axioms nor theorems susceptible of discursive proof; rather, they are corollaries—most often, corollaries of axioms.

[Ibid.]

See also AXIOMS; LOGIC; PROOF; SELF-EVIDENT; VALIDATION.

Corporations. A corporation is a union of human beings in a voluntary, cooperative endeavor. It exemplifies the principle of free association, which is an expression of the right to freedom. Any attributes which corporations have are attributes (or rights) which the individuals have—inctuding the right to combine in a certain way, offer products under certain terms, and deal with others according to certain rules, for instance, limited liability.

An individual can say to a storekeeper, “I would like to have credit, but I put you on notice that if I can’t pay, you can’t attach my home—take it or leave it.” The storekeeper is free to accept those terms, or not. A corporation is a cooperative productive endeavor which gives a similar warning explicitly. It has no mystical attributes, no attributes that don’t go back to the rights of individuals, including their right of free association.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), question period, Lecture 9.]

See also BUSINESSMEN; CONTRACTS; COOPERATION; FREEDOM; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS.

Courage and Confidence. Courage and confidence are practical necessities... courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one’s own consciousness.

[GS, FNI, 158; pb 129.]

See also INTEGRITY; MORALITY; RATIONALITY; TRUTH; VIRTUE.

Creation. The power to rearrange the combinations of natural elements is the only creative power man possesses. It is an enormous and glorious power—and it is the only meaning of the concept “creative.” “Creation” does not (and metaphysically cannot) mean the power to bring something into existence out of nothing. “Creation” means the power to bring into existence an arrangement (or combination or integration) of natural elements that had not existed before. (This is true of any human product, scientific or esthetic: man’s imagination is nothing more than the ability to rearrange the things he has observed in reality.) The best and briefest identification of man’s power in regard to nature is Francis Bacon’s “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” In this context, “to be commanded” means to be made to serve man’s purposes; “to be obeyed” means that they cannot be served unless man discovers the properties of natural elements and uses them accordingly.

[“The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 31; pb 25.]

See also ARTISTIC CREATION; EXISTENCE; IMAGINATION; MATTER; METAPHYSlCAL vs. MAN-MADE.

Creators. Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received—hatred. The great creators—the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors—stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.

No creator was prompted by a desire to serve his brothers, for his brothers rejected the gift he offered and that gift destroyed the slothful routine of their lives. His truth was his only motive. His own truth, and his own work to achieve it in his own way. A symphony, a book, an engine, a philosophy, an airplane or a building—that was his goal and his life. Not those who heard, read, operated, believed, flew or inhabited the thing he had created. The creation, not its users. The creation, not the benefits others derived from it. The creation which gave form to his truth. He held his truth above all things and against all men.

His vision, his strength, his courage came from his own spirit. A man’s spirit, however, is his self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego.

The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power—that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover. The creator served nothing and no one. He lived for himself.

And only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement.

[“The Soul of an Individualist,” FNl, 90; pb 77.]

We inherit the products of the thought of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make a cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane. But all through the process what we receive from others is only the end product of their thinking. The moving force is the creative faculty which takes this product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator. Men learn from one another. But all learning is only the exchange of material. No man can give another the capacity to think. Yet that capacity is our only means of survival.

[Ibid., 92; pb 79.]

The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or surbordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary.

[Ibid.]

Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. Creation comes before distribution—or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement.

[Ibid., 93; pb 80.]

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.

Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egoist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self.

[Ibid., 94; pb 80.]

See also ALTRUISM; COOPERATION; INDEPENDENCE; INDIVIDUALISM; INTELLIGENCE; PRODUCTIVENESS; PYRAMID of ABILITY; SECOND-HANDERS; SELFISHNESS.

Credit. In all its countless variations and applications, “credit” means money, i.e., unconsumed goods, loaned by one productive person (or group) to another, to be repaid out of future production. Even the credit extended for a consumption purpose, such as the purchase of an automobile, is based on the productive record and prospects of the borrower. Credit is not... a magic piece of paper that reverses cause and effect, and transforms consumption into a source of production.

[“Egalitarianism and Inflation,” PWNI, 160; pb 132.]

All credit transactions are contractual agreements. A credit transaction is any exchange which involves a passage of time between the payment and the receipt of goods or services. This includes the vast majority of economic transactions in a complex industrial society.

[“Government Financing in a Free Society,” VOS, 158; pb 117.]

See also CONSUMPTION; DEFICIT FINANCING; INTEREST (on LOANS); INVESTMENT; MONEY; PURCHASING POWER; SAVINGS.

Crime. A crime is a violation of the right(s) of other men by force (or fraud). It is only the initiation of physical force against others—i.e., the recourse to violence—that can be classified as a crime in a free society (as distinguished from a civil wrong). Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime—and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.

[“ ‘Political’ Crimes,” NL, 99.]

There can be no such thing as a political crime under the American system of law. Since an individual has the right to hold and to propagate any ideas he chooses (obviously including political ideas), the government may not infringe his right; it may neither penalize nor reward him for his ideas; it may not take any judicial cognizance whatever of his ideology.

By the same principle, the government may not give special leniency to the perpetrator of a crime, on the grounds of the nature of his ideas.

[Ibid.]

All actions defined as criminal in a free society are actions involving force—and only such actions are answered by force.

Do not be misled by sloppy expressions such as “A murderer commits a crime against society.” It is not society that a murderer murders, but an individual man. It is not a social right that he breaks, but an individual right. He is not punished for hurting a collective—he has not hurt a whole collective—he has hurt one man. If a criminal robs ten men—it is still not “society” that he has robbed, but ten individuals. There are no “crimes against society”—all crimes are committed against specific men, against individuals. And it is precisely the duty of a proper social system and of a proper government to protect an individual against criminal attack—against force.

[“Textbook of Americanism,” pamphlet, 7.]

See also FRAUD; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; PHYSICAL FORCE; RETROACTIVE LAW; RIGHTS of the ACCUSED; SOCIETY.

“Crow Epistemology.” See Unit-Economy.

Culture. Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements—and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

[“Racism,” VOS, 174; pb 127.]

A nation’s culture is the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men, which their fellow-citizens have accepted in whole or in part, and which have influenced the nation’s way of life. Since a culture is a complex battleground of different ideas and influences, to speak of a “culture” is to speak only of the dominant ideas, always allowing for the existence of dissenters and exceptions.

[“Don’t Let It Go,” PWNI, 250; pb 205.]

The acceptance of the achievements of an individual by other individuals does not represent “ethnicity”: it represents a cultural division of labor in a free market; it represents a conscious, individual choice on the part of all the men involved; the achievements may be scientific or technological or industrial or intellectual or esthetic—and the sum of such accepted achievements constitutes a free, civilized nation’s culture. Tradition has nothing to do with it; tradition is being challenged and blasted daily in a free, civilized society: its citizens accept ideas and products because they are true and/or good—not because they are old nor because their ancestors accepted them. In such a society, concretes change, but what remains immutable—by individual conviction, not by tradition—are those philosophical principles which correspond to reality, i.e., which are true.

[“Global Balkanization,” pamphlet, 6.]

See also CIVILIZATION; COLLECTIVISM; “ETHNICITY”; INDIVIDUALISM; TRADITION.

Cynicism. There is nothing so naive as cynicism. A cynic is one who believes that men are innately depraved, that irrationality and cowardice are their basic characteristics, that fear is the most potent of human incentives—and. therefore, that the most practical method of dealing with men is to count on their stupidity, appeal to their knavery, and keep them in constant terror.

In private life, this belief creates a criminal; in politics, it creates a statist. But, contrary to the cynic’s belief, crime and statism do not pay.

A criminal might thrive on human vices, but is reduced to impotence when he comes up against the fact that “you can’t cheat an honest man.” A statist might ride to power by dispensing promises, threats and handouts to the seekers of the unearned—but he finds himself impotent in a national emergency, because the language, methods and policies which were successful with parasites, do not work when the country needs producers.

[“From My ‘Future File,’ ” ARL, III, 26, 3.]

When one discards ideals, the fact that a given policy (such as government controls) is evil, does not constitute a reason for rejecting it. On the contrary, such an estimate serves as an incentive to adopt and expand that policy: to a cynic’s mind, that which is evil, is potent and practical.

[“Ideas v. Goods,” ARL, III. II. 4.]

See also AMORALISM; APPEASEMENT; BENEVOLENT UNIVERSE PREMISE; HONOR; MALEVOLENT UNIVERSE PREMISE; MORAL COWARDICE; MORAL-PRACTICAL DICHOTOMY; MORALITY; VALUES; VIRTUE.

D

Dance. Among the performing arts, dancing requires a special discussion. Is there an abstract meaning in dancing? What does dancing express?

The dance is the silent partner of music and participates in a division of labor: music presents a stylized version of man’s consciousness in action—the dance presents a stylized version of man’s body in action. “Stylized” means condensed to essential characteristics, which are chosen according to an artist’s view of man.

Music presents an abstraction of man’s emotions in the context of his cognitive processes—the dance presents an abstraction of man’s emotions in the context of his physical movements. The task of the dance is not the projection of single, momentary emotions, not a pantomime version of joy or sorrow or fear, etc., but a more profound issue: the projection of metaphysical value-judgments, the stylization of man’s movements by the continuous power of a fundamental emotional state —and thus the use of man’s body to express his sense of life.

Every strong emotion has a kinesthetic element, experienced as an impulse to leap or cringe or stamp one’s foot, etc. Just as a man’s sense of life is part of all his emotions, so it is part of all his movements and determines his manner of using his body: his posture, his gestures, his way of walking, etc. We can observe a different sense of life in a man who characteristically stands straight, walks fast, gestures decisively—and in a man who characteristically slumps, shuffles heavily, gestures limply. This particular etement—the overall manner of moving—constitutes the material, the special province of the dance. The dance stylizes it into a system of motion expressing a metaphysical view of man.

A system of motion is the essential element, the pre-condition of the dance as an art. An indulgence in random movements, such as those of children romping in a meadow, may be a pleasant game, but it is not art. The creation of a consistently stylized, metaphysically expressive system is so rare an achievement that there are very few distinctive forms of dancing to qualify as art. Most dance performances are conglomerations of elements from different systems and of random contortions, arbitrarily thrown together, signifying nothing. A male or a female skipping, jumping or rolling over a stage is no more artistic than the children in the meadow, only more pretentious.

[“Art and Cognition.” RM, pb 66.]

Within each system, specific emotions may be projected or faintly suggested, but only as the basic style permits. Strong passions or negative emotions cannot be projected in ballet, regardless of its librettos; it cannot express tragedy or fear—or sexuality; it is a perfect medium for the expression of spiritual love. The Hindu dance can project passions, but not positive emotions; it cannot express joy or triumph, it is eloquent in expressing fear, doom—and a physicalistic kind of sexuality.

[Ibid., 68.]

Music is an independent, primary art; the dance is not. In view of their division of labor, the dance is entirely dependent on music. With the emotional assistance of music, it expresses an abstract meaning; without music, it becomes meaningless gymnastics. It is music, the voice of man’s consciousness, that integrates the dance to man and to art. Music sets the terms; the task of the dance is to follow, as closely, obediently and expressively as possible. The tighter the integration of a given dance to its music—in rhythm, in mood, in style, in theme—the greater its esthetic value.

A clash between dance and music is worse than a clash between actor and play: it is an obliteration of the entire performance. It permits neither the music nor the dance to be integrated into an esthetic entity in the viewer’s mind—and it becomes a series of jumbled motions superimposed on a series of jumbled sounds.

[Ibid., 69.]

See also ART; RALLET; CHOREOGRAPHER; MUSIC; PERFORMING ARTS; STYLIZATION.

Dark Ages. The infamous times you call the Dark Ages were an era of intelligence on strike, when men of ability went underground and lived undiscovered, studying in secret, and died, destroying the works of their mind, when only a few of the bravest martyrs remained to keep the human race alive. Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence, working for less than their barest survival, leaving nothing but scraps for their rulers to loot, refusing to think, to venture, to produce, when the ultimate collector of their profits and the final authority on truth or error was the whim of some gilded degenerate sanctioned as superior to reason by divine right and by grace of a club.

[GS, FNI, 211; pb 169.]

In the history of Western civilization, the period known as the Dark Ages, after the fall of the Roman Empire, was a period when Western Europe existed without any social organization beyond chance local groupings clustered around small villages, large castles, and remnants of various traditions—swept periodically by massive barbarian invasions, warring robber bands, and sundry local looters. It was as close to a state of pure anarchy as men could come.

[“A Nation’s Unity,” ARL, II, 2, 2.]

See also HISTORY; MIDDLE AGES; MYSTICISM; PHILOSOPHY; REASON; RENAISSANCE.

Decorative Arts. The task of the decorative arts is to ornament utilitarian objects, such as rugs, textiles, lighting fixtures, etc. This is a valuable task, often performed by talented artists, but it is not an art in the esthetic-philosophical meaning of the term. The psycho-epistemological base of the decorative arts is not conceptual, but purely sensory: their standard of value is appeal to the senses of sight and/or touch. Their material is colors and shapes in nonrepresentational combinations conveying no meaning other than visual harmony; the meaning or purpose is concrete and lies in the specific object which they decorate.

As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art. On the other hand, a representational element is a detriment in the decorative arts: it is an irrelevant distraction, a clash of intentions. And although designs of little human figures or landscapes or flowers are often used to decorate textiles or wallpaper, they are artistically inferior to the nonrepresentational designs. When recognizable objects are subordinated to and treated as a mere pattern of colors and shapes, they become incongruous.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 74.]

See also: ART; BEAUTY; ESTHETICS; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; VISUAL ARTS.

Deficit Financing. The government has no source of revenue, except the taxes paid by the producers. To free itself—for a while—from the limits set by reality, the government initiates a credit con game on a scale which the private manipulator could not dream of. It borrows money from you today, which is to be repaid with money it will borrow from you tomorrow, which is to be repaid with money it will borrow from you day after tomorrow, and so on. This is known as “deficit financing.” It is made possible by the fact that the government cuts the connection between goods and money. It issues paper money, which is used as a claim check on actually existing goods—but that money is not backed by any goods, it is not backed by gold, it is backed by nothing. It is a promissory note issued to you in exchange for your goods, to be paid by you (in the form of taxes) out of your future production.

[“Egalitarianism and Inflation,” PWNI, 161; pb 133.]

See also CREDIT, GOLD STANDARD; GOVERNMENT; INFLATION; MONEY; TAXATION; WELFARE STATE.

Definitions. A definition is a statement that identifies the nature of the units subsumed under a concept.

It is often said that definitions state the meaning of words. This is true, but it is not exact. A word is merely a visual-auditory symbol used to represent a concept; a word has no meaning other than that of the concept it symbolizes, and the meaning of a concept consists of its units. It is not words, but concepts that man defines—by specifying their referents.

The purpose of a definition is to distinguish a concept from all other concepts and thus to keep its units differentiated from all other existents.

Since the definition of a concept is formulated in terms of other concepts, it enables man, not only to identify and retain a concept, but also to establish the relationships, the hierarchy, the integration of all his concepts and thus the integration of his knowledge. Definitions preserve, not the chronological order in which a given man may have learned concepts, but the logical order of their hierarchical interdependence.

With certain significant exceptions, every concept can be defined and communicated in terms of other concepts. The exceptions are concepts referring to sensations, and metaphysical axioms. [ITOE, 52.]

The rules of correct definition are derived from the process of concept-formation. The units of a concept were differentiated—by means of a distinguishing characteristic(s)—from other existents possessing a commensurable characteristic, a Conceptual Common Denominator. A definition follows the same principle: it specifies the distinguishing characteristic (s) of the units, and indicates the category of existents from which they were differentiated.

The distinguishing characteristic(s) of the units becomes the differentia of the concept’s definition; the existents possessing a Conceptual Common Denominator become the genus.

Thus a definition complies with the two essential functions of consciousness: differentiation and integration. The differentia isolates the units of a concept from all other existents; the genus indicates their connection to a wider group of existents.

For instance, in the definition of table (“An item of furniture, consisting of a flat, level surface and supports, intended to support other, smaller objects”), the specified shape is the differentia, which distinguishes tables from the other entities belonging to the same genus: furniture. In the definition of man (“A rational animal”), “rational” is the differentia, “animal” is the genus.

[Ibid., 53.]

A definition must identify the nature of the units, i.e., the essential characteristics without which the units would not be the kind of existents they are.

[Ibid., 55.]

It is the principle of unit-economy that necessitates the definition of concepts in terms of essential characteristics. If, when in doubt, a man recalls a concept’s definition, the essential characteristic(s) will give him an instantaneous grasp of the concept’s meaning, i.e., of the nature of its referents. For example, if he is considering some social theory and recalls that “man is a rational animal,” he will evaluate the validity of the theory accordingly; but if, instead, he recalls that “man is an animal possessing a thumb,” his evaluation and conclusion will be quite different.

[Ibid., 86.]

Now observe... the process of determining an essential characteristic: the rule of fundamentality. When a given group of existents has more than one characteristic distinguishing it from other existents, man must observe the relationships among these various characteristics and discover the one on which all the others (or the greatest number of others) depend, i.e., the fundamental characteristic without which the others would not be possible. This fundamental characteristic is the essential distinguishing characteristic of the existents involved. and the proper defining characteristic of the concept.

Metaphysically, a fundamental characteristic is that distinctive characteristic which makes the greatest number of others possible; epistemologically, it is the one that explains the greatest number of others.

[Ibid., 59.]

All definitions are contextual, and a primitive definition does not contradict a more advanced one: the latter merely expands the former.

[Ibid., 56.]

Since man is not omniscient, a definition cannot be changelessly absolute, because it cannot establish the relationship of a given group of existents to everything else in the universe, including the undiscovered and unknown. And for the very same reasons, a definition is false and worthless if it is not contextually absolute—if it does not specify the known relationships among existents (in terms of the known essential characteristics) or if it contradicts the known (by omission or evasion).

[Ibid., 62.]

An objective definition, valid for all men, is one that designates the essential distinguishing characteristic(s) and genus of the existents subsumed under a given concept—according to all the relevant knowledge available at that stage of mankind’s development.

[Ibid., 61.]

Truth is the product of the recognition (i.e., identification) of the facts of reality. Man identifies and integrates the facts of reality by means of concepts. He retains concepts in his mind by means of definitions. He organizes concepts into propositions—and the truth or falsehood of his propositions rests, not only on their relation to the facts he asserts, but also on the truth or falsehood of the definitions of the concepts he uses to assert them, which rests on the truth or falsehood of his designations of essential characteristics.

[Ibid., 63.]

The truth or falsehood of all of man’s conclusions, inferences, thought and knowledge rests on the truth or falsehood of his definitions.

[Ibid., 65.]

Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 77.]

To know the exact meaning of the concepts one is using, one must know their correct definitions, one must be able to retrace the specific (logical, not chronological) steps by which they were formed, and one must be able to demonstrate their connection to their base in perceptual reality.

When in doubt about the meaning or the definition of a concept, the best method of clarification is to look for its referents—i.e., to ask oneself : What fact or facts of reality gave rise to this concept? What distinguishes it from all other concepts?

[ITOE, 67.]

Let us note, at this point, the radical difference between Aristotle’s view of concepts and the Objectivist view, particularly in regard to the issue of essential characteristics.

It is Aristotle who first formulated the principles of correct definition. It is Aristotle who identified the fact that only concretes exist. But Aristotle held that definitions refer to metaphysical essences, which exist in concretes as a special element or formative power, and he held that the process of concept-formation depends on a kind of direct intuition by which man’s mind grasps these essences and forms concepts accordingly.

Aristotle regarded “essence” as metaphysical; Objectivism regards it as epistemological.

Objectivism holds that the essence of a concept is that fundamental characteristic(s) of its units on which the greatest number of other characteristics depend, and which distinguishes these units from all other existents within the field of a man’s knowledge. Thus the essence of a concept is determined contextually and may be altered with the growth of man’s knowledge. The metaphysical referent of man’s concepts is not a special, separate metaphysical essence, but the total of the facts of reality he has observed, and this total determines which characteristics of a given group of existents he designates as essential. An essential characteristic is factual, in the sense that it does exist, does determine other characteristics and does distinguish a group of existents from all others; it is epistemological in the sense that the classification of “essential characteristic” is a device of man’s method of cognition—a means of classifying, condensing and integrating an ever-growing body of knowledge.

[Ibid., 68.]

It is important to remember that a definition implies all the characteristics of the units, since it identifies their essential, not their exhaustive, characteristics; since it designates existents, not their isolated aspects; and since it is a condensation of, not a substitute for, a wider knowledge of the existents involved.

[Ibid., 55.]

When “rational animal” is selected as the definition of “man,” this does not mean that the concept “man” becomes a shorthand tag for “anything whatever that has rationality and animality.” It does not mean that the concept “man” is interchangeable with the phrase “rational animal,” and that all of man’s other characteristics are excluded from the concept. It means: A certain type of entity, including all its characteristics, is, in the present context of knowledge, most fundamentally distinguished from all other entities by the fact that it is a rational animal. All the presently available knowledge of man’s other characteristics is required to validate this definition, and is implied by it. All these other characteristics remain part of the content of the concept “man.”

[Leonard Peikoff, ‘“The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 139.]

See also ANALYTIC-SYNTHETIC DICHOTOMY; ARISTOTLE; COMMUNICATION; CONCEPTS; CONCEPTUAL COMMON DENOMINATOR; CONTEXT; GENUS and SPECIES; HIERARCHY of KNOWLEDGE; LANGUAGE; OSTENSIVE DEFINITION; SENSATIONS; UNIT; UNIT-ECONOMY; WORDS.

Democracy. “Democratic” in its original meaning [refers to] unlimited majority rule ... a social system in which one’s work, one’s property, one’s mind, and one’s life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority at any moment for any purpose.

[“How to Read (and Not to Write),” ARL, I, 26, 4.]

If we discard morality and substitute for it the Collectivist doctrine of unlimited majority rule, if we accept the idea that a majority may do anything it pleases, and that anything done by a majority is right because it’s done by a majority (this being the only standard of right and wrong) —how are men to apply this in practice to their actual lives? Who is the majority? In relation to each particular man, all other men are potential members of that majority which may destroy him at its pleasure at any moment. Then each man and all men become enemies; each has to fear and suspect all; each must try to rob and murder first, before he is robbed and murdered.

[“Textbook of Americanism,” pamphlet, 9.]

The American system is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic. A democracy, if you attach meaning to terms, is a system of unlimited majority rule; the classic example is ancient Athens. And the symbol of it is the fate of Socrates, who was put to death legally, because the majority didn’t like what he was saying, although he had initiated no force and had violated no one’s rights.

Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom....

The American system is a constitutionally limited republic, restricted to the protection of individual rights. In such a system, majority rule is applicable only to lesser details, such as the selection of certain personnel. But the majority has no say over the basic principles governing the government. It has no power to ask for or gain the infringement of individual rights.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 9.]

See also COLLECTIVISM; DICTATORSHIP; FREEDOM; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; MINORITY RIGHTS; REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT; REPUBLIC; SOCIALISM; STATISM; TYRANNY; VOTING.

Deontological Theory of Ethics. See “Duty.”

Determinism. Determinism is the theory that everything that happens in the universe—including every thought, feeling, and action of man—is necessitated by previous factors, so that nothing could ever have happened differently from the way it did, and everything in the future is already pre-set and inevitable. Every aspect of man’s life and character, on this view, is merely a product of factors that are ultimately outside his control. Objectivism rejects this theory.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series, Lecture 1.]

Dictatorship and determinism are reciprocally reinforcing corollaries. if one seeks to enslave men, one has to destroy their reliance on the validity of their own judgments and choices—if one believes that reason and volition are impotent, one has to accept the rule of force.

[“Representation Without Authorization,” ARL, I, 21, I.]

See also AXIOMS; CAUSALITY; DICTATORSHIP; EMOTIONS; FREE WILL; METAPHYSICAL vs. MAN-MADE; NATURALISM; NECESSITY.

Dictator. A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness of others. “They” are his only key to reality, he feels that he cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting their unaccountable consent. “They” are his only means of perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live. To control the consciousness of others becomes his only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims—as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force—he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious; reason, to him, is a means of deception; he feels that men possess some power more potent than reason—and only their causeless belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he lacked. His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and rests on the absolute of an objective reality. What he seeks is power over reality and over men’s means of perceiving it, their mind, the power to interpose his will between existence and consciousness, as if, by agreeing to fake the reality he orders them to fake, men would, in fact, create it.

[GS, FNI, 201; pb 161.]

Destruction is the only end that the mystics’ creed has ever achieved, as it is the only end that you see them achieving today, and if the ravages wrought by their acts have not made them question their doctrines, if they profess to be moved by love, yet are not deterred by piles of human corpses, it is because the truth about their souls is worse than the obscene excuse you have allowed them, the excuse that the end justifies the means and that the horrors they practice are means to nobler ends. The truth is that those horrors are their ends.

You who’re depraved enough to believe that you could adjust yourself to a mystic’s dictatorship and could please him by obeying his orders—there is no way to please him; when you obey, he will reverse his orders; he seeks obedience for the sake of obedience and destruction for the sake of destruction. You who are craven enough to believe that you can make terms with a mystic by giving in to his extortions—there is no way to buy him off, the bribe he wants is your life, as slowly or as fast as you are willing to give it in—and the monster he seeks to bribe is the hidden blank-out in his mind, which drives him to kill in order not to learn that the death he desires is his own.

[Ibid., 203; pb 162.]

Perhaps the most craven attitude of all is the one expressed by the injunction “don’t be certain.” As stated explicitly by many intellectuals, it is the suggestion that if nobody is certain of anything, if nobody holds any firm convictions, if everybody is willing to give in to everybody else, no dictator will rise among us and we will escape the destruction sweeping the rest of the world. This is the secret voice of the Witch Doctor confessing that he sees a dictator, an Attila, as a man of confident strength and uncompromising conviction. Nothing but a psycho-epistemological panic can blind such intellectuals to the fact that a dictator, like any thug, runs from the first sign of confident resistance; that he can rise only in a society of precisely such uncertain, compliant, shaking compromisers as they advocate, a society that invites a thug to take over; and that the task of resisting an Attila can be accomplished only by men of intransigent conviction and moral certainty.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 51; pb 45.]

See also COMPROMISE; DICTATORSHIP; MYSTICISM; PHYSICAL. FORCE; SECOND-HANDERS; STATISM; TYRANNY.

Dictatorship. A dictatorship is a country that does not recognize individual rights, whose government holds total, unlimited power over men.

[“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 15.]

There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule—executions without trial or with a mock trial, for political offenses—the nationalization or expropriation of private property—and censorship. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw.

[“Collectivized ‘Rights,’ ” VOS, 141; pb 105.]

Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?

[“Foreword,” WTL, viii.]

The right of a nation to determine its own form of government does not include the right to establish a slave society (that is, to legalize the enslavement of some men by others). There is no such thing as “the right to enslave.” A nation can do it, just as a man can become a criminal—but neither can do it by right.

It does not matter, in this context, whether a nation was enslaved by force, like Soviet Russia, or by vote, like Nazi Germany. Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual). Whether a slave society was conquered or chose to be enslaved, it can claim no national rights and no recognition of such “rights” by civilized countries....

Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the non-existent “rights” of gang rulers. It is not a free nation’s duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses.

This right, however, is conditional. Just as the suppression of crimes does not give a policeman the right to engage in criminal activities, so the invasion and destruction of a dictatorship does not give the invader the right to establish another variant of a slave society in the conquered country.

[“Collectivized ‘Rights,’ ” VOS, 139; pb 104.]

Dictatorship and determinism are reciprocally reinforcing corollaries: if one seeks to enslave men, one has to destroy their reliance on the validity of their own judgments and choices—if one believes that reason and volition are impotent, one has to accept the rule of force.

[“Representation Without Authorization,” ARL, I, 21, 1.]

It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men’s spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear.

[“Antitrust: The Rule of Unreason,” TON, Feb. 1962. 5.]

The legal hallmark of a dictatorship [is] preventive law—the concept that a man is guilty until he is proved innocent by the permissive rubber stamp of a commissar or a Gauleiter.

[“Who Will Protect Us from Our Protectors?” TON, May 1962, 20.]

A dictatorship has to promulgate some sort of distant goals and moral ideals in order to justify its rule and the people’s immolation; the extent to which it succeeds in convincing its victims, is the extent of its own danger; sooner or later, its contradictions are thrown in its face by the best of its subjects: the ablest, the most intelligent, the most honest. Thus a dictatorship is forced to destroy and to keep on destroying the best of its “human resources.” And be it fifty years or five centuries later, ambitious thugs and lethargic drones are all a dictatorship will have left to exploit and rule; the rest will die young, physically or spiritually.

[“The ‘Inexplicable Personal Alchemy,”’ NL, 119.]

Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.

[“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 45.]

It makes no difference whether government controls allegedly favor the interests of labor or business, of the poor or the rich, of a special class or a special race: the results are the same. The notion that a dictatorship can benefit any one social group at the expense of others is a worn remnant of the Marxist mythology of class warfare, refuted by half a century of factual evidence. All men are victims and losers under a dictatorship; nobody wins—except the ruling clique.

[“The Fascist New Frontier,” pamphlet, 13.]

See also COLLECTIVISM; COMMUNISM; DETERMINISM; DICTATOR; FASCISM/NAZISM; FASCISM and COMMUNISM/SOCIALISM; FOREIGN POLICY; FREEDOM; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; SOVIET RUSSIA; SELF-DETERMINATION of NATIONS; STATISM; TYRANNY.

Director. In all the arts that involve more than one performer, a crucially important artist is the director. (In music, his counterpart is the conductor.) The director is the link between the performing and the primary arts. He is a performer in relation to the primary work, in the sense that his task is the means to the end set by the work—he is a primary artist in relation to the cast, the set designer, the cameraman, etc., in the sense that they are the means to his end, which is the translation of the work into physical action as a meaningful, stylized, integrated whole. In the dramatic arts, the director is the esthetic integrator.

This task requires a first-hand understanding of all the arts, combined with an unusual power of abstract thought and of creative imagination. Great directors are extremely rare. An average director alternates between the twin pitfalls of abdication and usurpation. Either he rides on the talents of others and merely puts the actors through random motions signifying nothing, which results in a hodgepodge of clashing intentions—or he hogs the show, putting everyone through senseless tricks unrelated to or obliterating the play (if any), on the inverted premise that the play is the means to the end of exhibiting his skill, thus placing himself in the category of circus acrobats, except that he is much less skillful and much less entertaining.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 71.]

See also ART; CHOREOGRAPHER; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); MOTION PICTURES: PERFORMING ARTS.

Distinguishing Characteristic. See Concept-Formation.

Dogma. A dogma is a set of beliefs accepted on faith; that is, without rational justification or against rational evidence. A dogma is a matter of blind faith.

[“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 9.]

PLAYBOY: If widely accepted, couldn’t Objectivism harden into a dogma?

RAND: No. I have found that Objectivism is its own protection against people who might attempt to use it as a dogma. Since Objectivism requires the use of one’s mind, those who attempt to take broad principles and apply them unthinkingly and indiscriminately to the concretes of their own existence find that it cannot be done. They are then compelled either to reject Objectivism or to apply it. When I say apply, I mean that they have to use their own mind, their own thinking, in order to know how to apply Objectivist principles to the specific problems of their own lives.

[Ibid.]

See also FAITH; LOGIC; MYSTICISM; OBJECTIVISM; PROOF; REASON; RF.I,IGION.

Draft. Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man’s fundamental right—the right to life—and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man’s life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.

If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state’s discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom—then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man’s protector any longer. What else is there left to protect?

The most immoral contradiction—in the chaos of today’s anti-ideological groups—is that of the so-called “conservatives,” who posture as defenders of individual rights, particularly property rights, but uphold and advocate the draft. By what infernal evasion can they hope to justify the proposition that creatures who have no right to life, have the right to a bank account? A slightly higher—though not much higher—rung of hell should be reserved for those “liberals” who claim that man has the “right” to economic security, public housing, medical care, education, recreation, but no right to life, or: that man has the right to livelihood, but not to life.

One of the notions used by all sides to justify the draft, is that “rights impose obligations.” Obligations, to whom?—and imposed, by whom? Ideologically, that notion is worse than the evil it attempts to justify: it implies that rights are a gift from the state, and that a man has to buy them by offering something (his life) in return. Logically, that notion is a contradiction: since the only proper function of a government is to protect man’s rights, it cannot claim title to his life in exchange for that protection.

The only “obligation” involved in individual rights is an obligation imposed, not by the state, but by the nature of reality (i.e., by the law of identity): consistency, which, in this case, means the obligation to respect the rights of others, if one wishes one’s own rights to be recognized and protected.

Politically, the draft is clearly unconstitutional. No amount of rationalization, neither by the Supreme Court nor by private individuals, can alter the fact that it represents “involuntary servitude.”

A volunteer army is the only proper, morat—and practical—way to defend a free country. Should a man volunteer to fight, if his country is attacked? Yes—if he values his own rights and freedom. A free (or even semi-free) country has never lacked volunteers in the face of foreign aggression. Many military authorities have testified that a volunteer army—an army of men who know what they are fighting for and why —is the best, most effective army, and that a drafted one is the least effective.

It is often asked: “But what if a country cannot find a sufficient number of volunteers?” Even so, this would not give the rest of the population a right to the lives of the country’s young men. But, in fact, the lack of volunteers occurs for one of two reasons: (1) If a country is demoralized by a corrupt, authoritarian government, its citizens will not volunteer to defend it. But neither will they fight for long, if drafted. For example, observe the literal disintegration of the Czarist Russian army in World War I. (2) If a country’s government undertakes to fight a war for some reason other than self-defense, for a purpose which the citizens neither share nor understand, it will not find many volunteers. Thus a volunteer army is one of the best protectors of peace, not only against foreign aggression, but also against any warlike ideologies or projects on the part of a country’s own government.

Not many men would volunteer for such wars as Korea or Vietnam. Without the power to draft, the makers of our foreign policy would not be able to embark on adventures of that kind. This is one of the best practical reasons for the abolition of the draft.

[“The Wreckage of the Consensus,” CUI, 226.]

The years from about fifteen to twenty-five are the crucial formative years of a man’s life. This is the time when he confirms his impressions of the world, of other men, of the society in which he is to live, when he acquires conscious convictions, defines his moral values, chooses his goals, and plans his future, developing or renouncing ambition. These are the years that mark him for life. And it is these years that an allegedly humanitarian society forces him to spend in terror—the terror of knowing that he can plan nothing and count on nothing, that any road he takes can be blocked at any moment by an unpredictable power, that, barring his vision of the future, there stands the gray shape of the barracks, and, perhaps, beyond it, death for some unknown reason in some alien jungle.

[Ibid., 229.]

Once in a while, I receive letters from young men asking me for personal advice on problems connected with the draft. Morally, no one can give advice in any issue where choices and decisions are not voluntary: “Morality ends where a gun begins.” As to the practical alternatives available, the best thing to do is to consult a good lawyer.

There is, however, one moral aspect of the issue that needs clarification. Some young men seem to labor under the misapprehension that since the draft is a violation of their rights, compliance with the draft law would constitute a moral sanction of that violation. This is a serious error. A forced compliance is not a sanction. All of us are forced to comply with many laws that violate our rights, but so long as we advocate the repeal of such laws, our compliance does not constitute a sanction. Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom. To quote from an editorial on this subject in the April 1967 issue of Persuasion: “One does not stop the juggernaut by throwing oneself in front of it....”

[Ibid., 235.]

See also COLLECTIVISM; “DUTY”; FREEDOM; INDIVIDUAI. RIGHTS; LIFE, RIGHT to; RESPONSIBILITY/OBLIGATION; WAR.

“Duty.” One of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy is the term “duty.”

An anti-concept is an artificial, unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The term “duty” obliterates more than single concepts; it is a metaphysical and psychological killer: it negates all the essentials of a rational view of life and makes them inapplicable to man’s actions....

The meaning of the term “duty” is: the moral necessity to perform certain actions for no reason other than obedience to some higher authority, without regard to any personal goal, motive, desire or interest.

It is obvious that that anti-concept is a product of mysticism, not an abstraction derived from reality. In a mystic theory of ethics, “duty” stands for the notion that man must obey the dictates of a supernatural authority. Even though the anti-concept has been secularized, and the authority of God’s will has been ascribed to earthly entities, such as parents, country, State, mankind, etc., their alleged supremacy still rests on nothing but a mystic edict. Who in hell can have the right to claim that sort of submission or obedience? This is the only proper form—and locality—for the question, because nothing and no one can have such a right or claim here on earth.

The arch-advocate of “duty” is Immanuel Kant; he went so much farther than other theorists that they seem innocently benevolent by comparison. “Duty,” he holds, is the only standard of virtue; but virtue is not its own reward: if a reward is involved, it is no longer virtue. The only moral motivation, he holds, is devotion to duty for duty’s sake; only an action motivated exclusively by such devotion is a moral action....

If one were to accept it, the anti-concept “duty” destroys the concept of reality: an unaccountable, supernatural power takes precedence over facts and dictates one’s actions regardless of context or consequences.

“Duty” destroys reason: it supersedes one’s knowledge and judgment, making the process of thinking and judging irrelevant to one’s actions.

“Duty” destroys values: it demands that one betray or sacrifice one’s highest values for the sake of an inexplicable command—and it transforms values into a threat to one’s moral worth, since the experience of pleasure or desire casts doubt on the moral purity of one’s motives.

“Duty” destroys love: who could want to be loved not from “inclination,” but from “duty”?

“Duty” destroys self-esteem: it leaves no self to be esteemed.

If one accepts that nightmare in the name of morality, the infernal irony is that “duty” destroys morality. A deontological (duty-centered) theory of ethics confines moral principles to a list of prescribed “duties” and leaves the rest of man’s life without any moral guidance, cutting morality off from any application to the actual problems and concerns of man’s existence. Such matters as work, career, ambition, love, friendship, pleasure, happiness, values (insofar as they are not pursued as duties) are regarded by these theories as amoral, i.e., outside the province of morality. If so, then by what standard is a man to make his daily choices, or direct the course of his life?

In a deontological theory, all personal desires are banished from the realm of morality; a personal desire has no moral significance, be it a desire to create or a desire to kill. For example, if a man is not supporting his life from duty, such a morality makes no distinction between supporting it by honest labor or by robbery. If a man wants to be honest, he deserves no moral credit; as Kant would put it, such honesty is “praiseworthy,” but without “moral import.” Only a vicious represser, who feels a profound desire to lie, cheat and steal, but forces himself to act honestly for the sake of “duty,” would receive a recognition of moral worth from Kant and his ilk.

This is the sort of theory that gives morality a bad name.

[“Causality Versus Duty,” PWNI, 114; pb 95.]

In reality and in the Objectivist ethics, there is no such thing as “duty.” There is only choice and the full, clear recognition of a principle obscured by the notion of “duty”: the law of causality....

In order to make the choices required to achieve his goals, a man needs the constant, automatized awareness of the principle which the anti-concept “duty” has all but obliterated in his mind: the principle of causality—specifically, of Aristotelian final causation (which, in fact, applies only to a conscious being), i.e., the process by which an end determines the means, i.e., the process of choosing a goal and taking the actions necessary to achieve it.

In a rational ethics, it is causality—not “duty”—that serves as the guiding principle in considering, evaluating and choosing one’s actions, particularly those necessary to achieve a long-range goal. Following this principle, a man does not act without knowing the purpose of his action. In choosing a goal, he considers the means required to achieve it, he weighs the value of the goal against the difficulties of the means and against the full, hierarchical context of all his other values and goals. He does not demand the impossible of himself, and he does not decide too easily which things are impossible. He never drops the context of the knowledge available to him, and never evades reality, realizing fully that his goal will not be granted to him by any power other than his own action, and, should he evade, it is not some Kantian authority that he would be cheating, but himself.

[Ibid., 118; pb 98.]

A Kantian or even a semi-Kantian cannot permit himself to value anything profoundly, since an inexplicable “duty” may demand the sacrifice of his values at any moment, wiping out any long-range plan or struggle he might have undertaken to achieve them....

The notion of “duty” is intrinsically anti-causal. In its origin, a “duty” defies the principle of efficient causation—since it is causeless (or supernatural); in its effects, it defies the principle of final causation—since it must be performed regardless of consequences.

[Ibid., 120; pb 100.]

The acceptance of full responsibility for one’s own choices and actions (and their consequences) is such a demanding moral discipline that many men seek to escape it by surrendering to what they believe is the easy, automatic, unthinking safety of a morality of “duty.” They learn better, often when it is too late.

The disciple of causation faces life without inexplicable chains, unchosen burdens, impossible demands or supernatural threats. His metaphysical attitude and guiding moral principle can best be summed up by an old Spanish proverb: “God said: ‘Take what you want and pay for it.’ ” But to know one’s own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.

[Ibid., 121; pb 101.]

See also ALTRUISM; “ANTI-CONCEPTS”; FREE WILL; KANT, IMMANUEL; MORALITY; MYSTICAL ETHICS; RATIONALITY; RELIGION; RESPONSIBILITY/OBLIGATION; SACRIFICE; SELF-ESTEEM; SELF-INTEREST; SELFISHNESS; SELFLESSNESS.

E

Ecology/Environmental Movement. Ecology as a social principle ... condemns cities, culture, industry, technology, the intellect, and advocates men’s return to “nature,” to the state of grunting subanimals digging the soil with their bare hands.

[“‘The Lessons of Vietnam,” ARL, III, 25, 1.]

An Asian peasant who labors through all of his waking hours, with tools created in Biblical times—a South American aborigine who is devoured by piranha in a jungle stream—an African who is bitten by the tsetse fly—an Arab whose teeth are green with decay in his mouth—these do live with their “natural environment,” but are scarcely able to appreciate its beauty. Try to tell a Chinese mother, whose child is dying of cholera: “Should one do everything one can? Of course not.” Try to tell a Russian housewife, who trudges miles on foot in sub-zero weather in order to spend hours standing in line at a state store dispensing food rations, that America is defiled by shopping centers, expressways and family cars. [“The Left: Old and New,” NL, 88.]

In Western Europe, in the preindustrial Middle Ages, man’s life expectancy was 30 years. In the nineteenth century, Europe’s population grew by 300 percent—which is the best proof of the fact that for the first time in human history, industry gave the great masses of people a chance to survive.

If it were true that a heavy concentration of industry is destructive to human life, one would find life expectancy declining in the more advanced countries. But it has been rising steadily. Here are the figures on life expectancy in the United States (from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company):

1900—47.3 years
1920-53 years
1940-60 years
1968-70.2 years (the latest figures compiled)

Anyone over 30 years of age today, give a silent “Thank you” to the nearest, grimiest, sootiest smokestacks you can find.

[“The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” NL, 137.]

The dinosaur and its fellow-creatures vanished from this earth long before there were any industrialists or any men.... But this did not end life on earth. Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of “equilibrium” that guarantees the survival of any particular species—teast of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.

[Ibid., 134.]

Now observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for “harmony with nature”—there is no discussion of man’s needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision—i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears....

In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production. The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus brought to man. The ecologists are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire.

[Ibid., 136.]

Without machines and technology, the task of mere survival is a terrible, mind-and-body-wrecking ordeal. In “nature,” the struggle for food, clothing and shelter consumes all of a man’s energy and spirit; it is a losing struggte—the winner is any flood, earthquake or swarm of locusts. (Consider the 500,000 bodies left in the wake of a single flood in Pakistan; they had been men who lived without technology.) To work only for bare necessities is a luxury that mankind cannot afford.

[Ibid., 149.]

It has been reported in the press many times that the issue of pollution is to be the next big crusade of the New Left activists, after the war in Vietnam peters out. And just as peace was not their goal or motive in that crusade, so clean air is not their goal or motive in this one.

[“The Left: Old and New,” NL, 89.]

The immediate goal is obvious: the destruction of the remnants of capitalism in today’s mixed economy, and the establishment of a global dictatorship. This goal does not have to be inferred—many speeches and books on the subject state explicitly that the ecological crusade is a means to that end.

[“The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” NL, 140.]

If, after the failure of such accusations as “Capitalism leads you to the poorhouse” and “Capitalism leads you to war,” the New Left is left with nothing better than: “Capitalism defiles the beauty of your countryside,” one may justifiably conclude that, as an intellectual power, the collectivist movement is through.

[“The Left: Old and New,” NL., 93.]

City smog and filthy rivers are not good for men (though they are not the kind of danger that the ecological panic-mongers proclaim them to be). This is a scientific, technological probtem—not a political one—and it can be solved only by technology. Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.

[“The Anti-Industrial Revolution,“ NL, 142.]

See also CAPITALISM; MAN; NEW LEFT; POLLUTION; PRODUC-TlON; SCIENCE; TECHNOLOGY.

Economic Good. In order for a thing to become a good, three conditions must be fulfilled. Not only must it satisfy a human need, but also one must know that it satisfies one’s need, and one must have disposal over it.

[George Reisman, “The Revolt Against Affluence: Galbraith’s Neo-Feudalism,” pamphlet, 6.]

See aGco MARKET VALUE; PROPERTY RIGHTS.

Economic Growth. “Economic growth” means the rise of an economy’s productivity, due to the discovery of new products, new techniques, which means: due to the achievements of men’s productive ability.

[“Promises to Parasites Fail to Bring Results,” Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1962.]

Nothing can raise a country’s productivity except technology, and technology is the final product of a complex of sciences (including philosophy), each of them kept alive and moving by the achievements of a few independent minds.

[“The Moratorium on Brains,” ARL, 1, 3, 5.]

See also CAPITALISM; ECOLOGY/ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT; NEW LEFT; PRODUCTION; TECHNOLOGY.

Economic Power vs. Political Power. A disastrous intellectual package-deal, put over on us by the theoreticians of statism, is the equation of economic power with political power. You have heard it expressed in such bromides as: “A hungry man is not free,” or “It makes no difference to a worker whether he takes orders from a businessman or from a bureaucrat.” Most people accept these equivocations—and yet they know that the poorest laborer in America is freer and more secure than the richest commissar in Soviet Russia. What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.

The difference between political power and any other kind of social “power,” between a government and any private organization, is the fact that a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.

[“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 46.]

What is economic power? It is the power to produce and to trade what one has produced. In a free economy, where no man or group of men can use physical coercion against anyone, economic power can be achieved only by voluntary means: by the voluntary choice and agreement of all those who participate in the process of production and trade. In a free market, all prices, wages, and profits are determined—not by the arbitrary whim of the rich or of the poor, not by anyone’s “greed” or by anyone’s need—but by the law of supply and demand. The mechanism of a free market reflects and sums up all the economic choices and decisions made by all the participants. Men trade their goods or services by mutual consent to mutual advantage, according to their own independent, uncoerced judgment. A man can grow rich only if he is able to offer better values——better products or services, at a lower price —than others are able to offer.

Wealth, in a free market, is achieved by a free, general, “democratic” vote—by the sales and the purchases of every individual who takes part in the economic life of the country. Whenever you buy one product rather than another, you are voting for the success of some manufacturer. And, in this type of voting, every man votes only on those matters which he is qualified to judge: on his own preferences, interests, and needs. No one has the power to decide for others or to substitute his judgment for theirs; no one has the power to appoint himself “the voice of the public” and to leave the public voiceless and disfranchised.

Now let me define the difference between economic power and political power: economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury. imprisonment, destruction. The businessman’s tool is values; the bureaucrat’s tool is fear.

[ibid., 47.]

Evading the difference between production and looting, they called the businessman a robber. Evading the difference between freedom and compulsion, they called him a slave driver. Evading the difference between reward and terror, they called him an exploiter. Evading the difference between pay checks and guns, they called him an autocrat. Evading the difference between trade and force, they called him a tyrant. The most crucial issue they had to evade was the difference between the earned and the unearned.

[“For the New Intellectual,” , 44; pb 40.]

You had said that you saw no difference between economic and political power, between the power of money and the power of guns—no difference between reward and punishment, no difference between purchase and plunder, no difference between pleasure and fear, no difference between life and death. You are learning the difference now.

[GS, FNI, 236; pb 187.]

See also BUSINESSMEN vs. BUREAUCRATS; CAPITALISM; FREE MARKET; FREEDOM; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; MONEY; MOTIVATION hy LOVE vs. by FEAR; “PACKAGE-DEALING.” FALLACY of; PHYSICAL FORCE; STATISM.

Education. The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life—by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past—and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.

[“The Comprachicos,” NL, 231.]

The academia-jet set coalition is attempting to tame the American character by the deliberate breeding of helplessness and resignation—in those incubators of lethargy known as “Progressive” schools, which are dedicated to the task of crippling a child’s mind by arresting his cognitive development. (See “The Comprachicos” in my book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.) It appears, however, that the “progressive” rich will be the first victims of their own social theories: it is the children of the well-to-do who emerge from expensive nursery schools and colleges as hippies, and destroy the remnants of their paralyzed brains by means of drugs.

The middle class has created an antidote which is perhaps the most helpful movement of recent years: the spontaneous, unorganized, grass-roots revival of the Montessori system of education—a system aimed at the development of a child’s cognitive, i.e., rational, faculty.

[“Don’t Let It Go,” PWNI, 261; pb 214.1

See also CONCEPTS; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); LEARNING; UNDERSTANDING.

Egalitlriarilsm. Egalitarianism means the belief in the equality of all men. If the word “equality” is to be taken in any serious or rational sense, the crusade for this belief is dated by about a century or more: the United States of America has made it an anachronism—by establishing a system based on the principle of individual rights. “Equality,” in a human context, is a political term: it means equality before the law, the equality of fundamental, inalienable rights which every man possesses by virtue of his birth as a human being, and which may not be infringed or abrogated by man-made institutions, such as titles of nobility or the division of men into castes established by law, with special privileges granted to some and denied to others. The rise of capitalism swept away all castes, including the institutions of aristocracy and of slavery or serfdom.

But this is not the meaning that the altruists ascribe to the word “equality.”

They turn the word into an anti-concept: they use it to mean, not political, but metaphysical equality—the equality of personal attributes and virtues, regardless of natural endowment or individual choice, performance and character. It is not man-made institutions, but nature, i.e., reality, that they propose to fight—by means of man-made institutions.

Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the “unfairness” of nature and of volition, and to establish universal equality in fact—in defiance of facts. Since the Law of Identity is impervious to human manipulation, it is the Law of Causality that they struggle to abrogate. Since personal attributes or virtues cannot be “redistributed,” they seek to deprive men of their consequences—of the rewards, the benefits, the achievements created by personal attributes and virtues.

It is not equality before the law that they seek, but inequality: the establishment of an inverted social pyramid, with a new aristocracy on top—the aristocracy of non-value.

[“The Age of Envy,” NL, 164.]

To understand the meaning and motives of egalitarianism, project it into the field of medicine. Suppose a doctor is called to help a man with a broken leg and, instead of setting it, proceeds to break the legs of ten other men, explaining that this would make the patient feel better; when all these men become crippled for life, the doctor advocates the passage of a law compelling everyone to walk on crutches—in order to make the cripples feel better and equalize the “unfairness” of nature.

If this is unspeakable, how does it acquire an aura of morality—or even the benefit of a moral doubt—when practiced in regard to man’s mind?

[Ibid., 170.]

Of special significance to the present discussion is the egalitarians’ defiance of the Law of Causality: their demand for equal results from unequal causes—or equal rewards for unequal performance.

[“Egalitarianism and Inflation.” PWNI, 146; pb 121.]

The new “theory of justice” [of John Rawls] demands that men counteract the “injustice” of nature by instituting the most obscenely unthinkable injustice among men: deprive “those favored by nature” (i.e., the talented, the intelligent, the creative) of the right to the rewards they produce (i.e., the right to life)—and grant to the incompetent, the stupid, the slothful a right to the effortless enjoyment of the rewards they could not produce, could not imagine, and would not know what to do with.

[“An Untitled Letter,” PWNI, 132; pb 110.]

Observe that ... the egalitarians’ view of man is literally the view of a children’s fairy tale—the notion that man, before birth, is some sort of indeterminate thing, an entity without identity, something like a shapeless chunk of human clay, and that fairy godmothers proceed to grant or deny him various attributes (“favors”): intelligence, talent, beauty, rich parents, etc. These attributes are handed out “arbitrarily” (this word is preposterously inapplicable to the processes of nature), it is a “lottery” among pre-embryonic non-entities, and—the supposedly adult mentalities conclude—since a winner could not possibly have “deserved” his “good fortune,” a man does not deserve or earn anything after birth, as a human being, because he acts by means of “undeserved,” “unmerited,” “unearned” attributes. Implication: to earn something means to choose and earn your personal attributes before you exist.

[Ibid., 133; pb 111.]

If there were such a thing as a passion for equality (not equality de jure, but de facto), it would be obvious to its exponents that there are only two ways to achieve it: either by raising all men to the mountaintop—or by razing the mountains. The first method is impossible because it is the faculty of volition that determines a man’s stature and actions; but the nearest approach to it was demonstrated by the United States and capitalism, which protected the freedom, the rewards and the incentives for every individual’s achievement, each to the extent of his ability and ambition, thus raising the intellectual, moral and economic state of the whole society. The second method is impossible because, if mankind were leveled down to the common denominator of its least competent members, it would not be able to survive (and its best would not choose to survive on such terms). Yet it is the second method that the altruist-egalitarians are pursuing. The greater the evidence of their policy’s consequences, i.e., the greater the spread of misery, of injustice, of vicious inequality throughout the world, the more frantic their pursuit —which is one demonstration of the fact that there is no such thing as a benevolent passion for equality and that the claim to it is only a rationalization to cover a passionate hatred of the good for being the good.

[“The Age of Envy,” NL, 169.]

See also ALTRUISM; ENVY/HATRED of the GOOD for BEING the GOOD; FREE WILL; JUSTICE; METAPHYSICAL vs. MAN-MADE; STATISM.

Egoism. See Selfishness.

Emergencies. It is important to differentiate between the rules of conduct in an emergency situation and the rules of conduct in the normal conditions of human existence. This does not mean a double standard of morality: the standard and the basic principles remain the same, but their application to either case requires precise definitions.

An emergency is an unchosen, unexpected event, limited in time, that creates conditions under which human survival is impossible—such as a flood, an earthquake, a fire, a shipwreck. In an emergency situation, men’s primary goal is to combat the disaster, escape the danger and restore normal conditions (to reach dry land, to put out the fire. etc.).

By “normal” conditions I mean metaphysically normal, normal in the nature of things, and appropriate to human existence. Men can live on land, but not in water or in a raging fire. Since men are not omnipotent, it is metaphysically possible for unforeseeable disasters to strike them, in which case their only task is to return to those conditions under which their lives can continue. By its nature, an emergency situation is temporary; if it were to last, men would perish.

It is only in emergency situations that one should volunteer to help strangers, if it is in one’s power. For instance, a man who values human life and is caught in a shipwreck, should help to save his fellow passengers (though not at the expense of his own life). But this does not mean that after they all reach shore, he should devote his efforts to saving his fellow passengers from poverty, ignorance, neurosis or whatever other troubles they might have. Nor does it mean that he should spend his life sailing the seven seas in search of shipwreck victims to save....

The principle that one should help men in an emergency cannot be extended to regard all human suffering as an emergency and to turn the misfortune of some into a first mortgage on the lives of others.

[“The Ethics of Emergencies.” VOS, 53; pb 47.]

See also BENEVOLENT UNIVERSE PREMISE; CHARITY: POVERTY; SELFISHNESS; SUFFERING.

Emotions. Just as the pleasure-pain mechanism of man’s body is an automatic indicator of his body’s welfare or injury, a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death—so the emotional mechanism of man’s consciousness is geared to perform the same function, as a barometer that registers the same alternative by means of two basic emotions: joy or suffering. Emotions are the automatic results of man’s value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man’s values or threatens them, that which is for him or against him—lightning calculators giving him the sum of his profit or loss.

But while the standard of value operating the physical pleasure-pain mechanism of man’s body is automatic and innate, determined by the nature of his body—the standard of value operating his emotional mechanism, is not. Since man has no automatic knowledge, he can have no automatic values; since he has no innate ideas, he can have no innate value judgments.

Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but, at birth, both are “tabula rasa.” It is man’s cognitive faculty, his mind, that determines the content of both. Man’s emotional mechanism is like an electronic computer, which his mind has to program—and the programming consists of the values his mind chooses.

But since the work of man’s mind is not automatic, his values, like all his premises, are the product either of his thinking or of his evasions: man chooses his values by a conscious process of thought—or accepts them by default, by subconscious associations, on faith, on someone’s authority, by some form of social osmosis or blind imitation. Emotions are produced by man’s premises, held consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 23; pb 27.]

Your subconscious is like a computer—more complex a computer than men can build—and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don’t reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance—and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted. But one way or the other, your computer gives you print-outs, daily and hourly, in the form of emotions-which are lightning-like estimates of the things around you, calculated according to your values.

[“Philosophy: Who Needs It,” PWNI, 7; pb 5.]

An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man’s value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man’s reason and his emotions—provided he observes their proper relationship. A rational man knows—or makes it a point to discover—the source of his emotions, the basic premises from which they come; if his premises are wrong, he corrects them. He never acts on emotions for which he cannot account, the meaning of which he does not understand. In appraising a situation, he knows why he reacts as he does and whether he is right. He has no inner conflicts, his mind and his emotions are integrated, his consciousness is in perfect harmony. His emotions are not his enemies, they are his means of enjoying life. But they are not his guide; the guide is his mind. This relationship cannot be reversed, however. If a man takes his emotions as the cause and his mind as their passive effect, if he is guided by his emotions and uses his mind only to rationalize or justify them somehow—then he is acting immorally, he is condemning himself to misery, failure, defeat, and he will achieve nothing but destruction—his own and that of others.

[“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 6.]

An emotion as such tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something. Without a ruthlessly honest commitment to introspection—to the conceptual identification of your inner states—you will not discover what you feel, what arouses the feeling, and whether your feeling is an appropriate response to the facts of reality, or a mistaken response, or a vicious illusion produced by years of self-deception....

In the field of introspection, the two guiding questions are: “What do I feel?” and “Why do I feel it?”

[“Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 20; pb 17.]

There can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards.

[GS, FNI, 182; pb 147.]

Man has no choice about his capacity to feel that something is good for him or evil, but what he will consider good or evil, what will give him joy or pain, what he will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on his standard of value. If he chooses irrational values, he switches his emotional mechanism from the role of his guardian to the role of his destroyer. The irrational is the impossible; it is that which contradicts the facts of reality; facts cannot be altered by a wish, but they can destroy the wisher. If a man desires and pursues contradictions—if he wants to have his cake and eat it, too—he disintegrates his consciousness; he turns his inner life into a civil war of blind forces engaged in dark, incoherent, pointless, meaningless conflicts (which, incidentally, is the inner state of most people today).

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 24; pb 28.]

An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.

[GS, FNI, 187; pb 151.]

The quality of a computer’s output is determined by the quality of its input. If your subconscious is programmed by chance, its output will have a corresponding character. You have probably heard the computer operators’ eloquent term “gigo”—which means: “Garbage in, garbage out.” The same formula applies to the relationship between a man’s thinking and his emotions.

A man who is run by emotions is like a man who is run by a computer whose print-outs he cannot read. He does not know whether its programming is true or false, right or wrong, whether it’s set to lead him to success or destruction, whether it serves his goals or those of some evil, unknowable power. He is blind on two fronts: blind to the world around him and to his own inner world, unable to grasp reality or his own motives, and he is in chronic terror of both.

[“Philosophy: Who Needs It,” PWNI, 7; pb 6.]

Emotions are not tools of cognition... one must differentiate between one’s thoughts and one’s emotions with full clarity and precision. One does not have to be omniscient in order to possess knowledge; one merely has to know that which one does know, and distinguish it from that which one feels. Nor does one need a full system of philosophical epistemology in order to distinguish one’s own considered judgment from one’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 64; pb 55.]

The concept “emotion” is formed by retaining the distinguishing characteristics of the psychological action (an automatic response proceeding from an evaluation of an existent) and by omitting the particular contents (the existents) as well as the degree of emotional intensity.

[ITOE, 41.]

See also AUTOMATIZATION; ENVY/HATRED of the GOOD for BEING the GOOD; FREUD; HAPPINESS; HOSTILITY; INTROSPECTION; LONELINESS; I.OVE; MOTIVATION; MOTIVATION by LOVE vs. by FEAR; PLEASURE and PAIN; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; RATIONALITY; RATIONALIZATION; REASON; SENSE of LIFE; SOUL-BODY DICHOTOMY; SUBCONSClOUS; VALUES; WHIMS/WHIM-WORSHIP.

End in Itself. See Ultimate Value.

Enlightenment, Age of. The development from Aquinas through Locke and Newton represents more than four hundred years of stumbling, tortuous, prodigious effort to secularize the Western mind, i.e., to liberate man from the medieval shackles. It was the buildup toward a climax: the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. For the first time in modern history, an authentic respect for reason became the mark of an entire culture; the trend that had been implicit in the centuries-long crusade of a handful of innovators now swept the West explicitly, reaching and inspiring educated men in every field. Reason, for so long the wave of the future, had become the animating force of the present.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 102; pb 101.]

Confidence in the power of man replaced dependence on the grace of God—and that rare intellectual orientation emerged, the key to the Enlightenment approach in every branch of philosophy: secularism without skepticism.

In metaphysics, this meant a fundamental change in emphasis: from God to this world, the world of particulars in which men live, the realm of nature.... Men’s operative conviction was that nature is an autonomous realm—solid, eternal, real in its own right. For centuries, nature had been regarded as a realm of miracles manipulated by a personal deity, a realm whose significance lay in the clues it offered to the purposes of its author. Now the operative conviction was that nature is a realm governed by scientific laws, which permit no miracles and which are intelligible without reference to the supernatural.

[Ibid., 107; pb 106.]

Just as there are no limits to man’s knowledge, many [Enlightenment era] thinkers held, so there are no limits to man’s moral improvement. If man is not yet perfect, they held, he is at least perfectible. Just as there are objective, natural laws in science, so there are objective, natural laws in ethics; and man is capable of discovering such laws and of acting in accordance with them. He is capable not only of developing his intellect, but also of living by its guidance. (This, at least, was the Enlightenment’s ethical program and promise.)

Whatever the vacillations or doubts of particular thinkers, the dominant trend represented a new vision and estimate of man: man as a self-sufficient, rational being and, therefore, as basically good, as potentially noble, as a value.

[Ibid., 109; pb 107.]

The father of this new world was a single philosopher: Aristotle. On countless issues, Aristotle’s views differ from those of the Enlightenment. But, in terms of broad fundamentals, the philosophy of Aristotle is the philosophy of the Enlightenment.

[Ibid., Ill; pb 109.]

In epistemology, the European champions of the intellect had been unable to formulate a tenable view of the nature of reason or, therefore, to validate their proclaimed confidence in its power. As a result, from the beginning of the eighteenth century (and even earlier), the philosophy advocating reason was in the process of gradual, but accelerating, disintegration.

[Ibid., 115; pb 113.]

See also AMERICA; ARISTOTLE; DARK AGES; FOUNDING FATHERS; HISTORY; MIDDLE AGES; NATURE; REASON; RELIGION; RENAISSANCE; SKEPTICISM.

Entity. To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes.

[GS, FNI, 152; pb 125.]

The development of human cognition starts with the ability to perceive things, i.e., entities. Of man’s five cognitive senses, only two provide him with a direct awareness of entities: sight and touch. The other three senses—hearing, taste and smell—give him an awareness of some of an entity’s attributes (or of the consequences produced by an entity): they tell him that something makes sounds, or something tastes sweet, or something smells fresh; but in order to perceive this something, he needs sight and/or touch.

The concept “entity” is (implicitly) the start of man’s conceptual development and the building-block of his entire conceptual structure. It is by perceiving entities that man perceives the universe.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 46.]

The first concepts man forms are concepts of entities—since entities are the only primary existents. (Attributes cannot exist by themselves, they are merely the characteristics of entities; motions are motions of entities; relationships are relationships among entities.)

[ITOE, 18.]

This term [entity] may be used in several senses. If you speak in the primary sense, “entity” has to be defined ostensively- that is to say, by pointing. I can, however, give you three descriptive characteristics essential to the primary, philosophic use of the term, according to Objectivism. This is not a definition, because I’d have to rely ultimately on pointing to make these points clear, but it will give you certain criteria for the application of the term in the primary sense....

1. An entity means a self-sufficient form of existence—as against a quality, an action, a relationship, etc., which are simply aspects of an entity that we separate out by specialized focus. An entity is a thing.

2. An entity, in the primary sense, is a solid thing with a definite boundary—as against a fluid, such as air. In the literal sense, air is not an entity. There are contexts, such as when the wind moves as one mass, when you can call it that, by analogy, but in the primary sense, fluids are not entities.

3. An entity is perceptual in scale, in size. In other words it is a “this” which you can point to and grasp by human perception. In an extended sense you can call molecules—or the universe as a whole—“entities,” because they are self-sufficient things. But in the primary sense when we say that entities are what is given in sense perception, we mean solid things which we can directly perceive.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), question period, Lecture 3.]

An entity is a solid thing open to human perception and capable of independent action.

[Ibid., question period, Lecture 2.]

See also CAUSALITY; CHANGE; EXISTENCE; EXISTENT; IDENTITY; MOTION; UNIVERSE.

Environmentalism. See Ecology/Environmental Movement.

Envy/Hatred of the Good for Being the Good. Today, we live in the Age of Envy.

“Envy” is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.

Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves.... That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good.

This hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the good with which one does not agree.... Hatred of the good for being the good means hatred of that which one regards as good by one’s own (conscious or subconscious) judgment. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable.

If a child wants to get good grades in school, but is unable or unwilling to achieve them and begins to hate the children who do, that is hatred of the good. If a man regards intelligence as a value, but is troubled by self-doubt and begins to hate the men he judges to be intelligent, that is hatred of the good.

The nature of the particular values a man chooses to hold is not the primary factor in this issue (although irrational values may contribute a great deal to the formation of that emotion). The primary factor and distinguishing characteristic is an emotional mechanism set in reverse: a response of hatred, not toward human vices, but toward human virtues.

To be exact, the emotional mechanism is not set in reverse, but is set one way: its exponents do not experience love for evil men; their emotional range is limited to hatred or indifference. It is impossible to experience love, which is a response to values, when one’s automatized response to values is hatred.

[“The Age of Envy,” NL, 152.]

Consider the full meaning of this attitude. Values are that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Values are a necessity of man’s survival, and wider: of any living organism’s survival. Life is a process of sen-sustain ing and self-generated action, and the successful pursuit of values is a precondition of remaining alive. Since nature does not provide man with an automatic knowledge of the code of values he requires, there are differences in the codes which men accept and the goals they pursue. But consider the abstraction “value,” apart from the particular content of any given code, and ask yourself: What is the nature of a creature in which the sight of a value arouses hatred and the desire to destroy? In the most profound sense of the term, such a creature is a killer, not a physical, but a metaphysical one—it is not an enemy of your values, but of all values, it is an enemy of anything that enables men to survive, it is an enemy of life as such and of everything living.

[Ibid., 157.]

They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself.... They are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.

[GS, FNI, 203; pb 163.]

See also AMORALISM; ANTI-CONCEPTUAL MENTALITY; APPEASE MENT; EMOTIONS; EVIL; GOOD, the; HOSTILITY; VALUES.

Epistemology. Epistemology is a science devoted to the discovery of the proper methods of acquiring and validating knowledge.

[ITOE, 47.]

Since man is not omniscient or infallible, you have to discover what you can claim as knowledge and how to prove the validity of your conclusions. Does man acquire knowledge by a process of reason—or by sudden revelation from a supernatural power? Is reason a faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses—or is it fed by innate ideas, implanted in man’s mind before he was born? Is reason competent to perceive reality—or does man possess some other cognitive faculty which is superior to reason? Can man achieve certainty —or is he doomed to perpetual doubt? The extent of your self-confidence—and of your success—will be different, according to which set of answers you accept.

[“Philosophy: Who Needs It,” PWNI, 3; pb 3.]

Man is neither infallible nor omniscient; if he were, a discipline such as epistemoiogy—the theory of knowledge—would not be necessary nor possible: his knowledge would be automatic, unquestionable and total. But such is not man’s nature. Man is a being of volitional consciousness: beyond the level of percepts—a level inadequate to the cognitive requirements of his survival—man has to acquire knowledge by his own effort, which he may exercise or not, and by a process of reason, which he may apply correctly or not. Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of his mental efficacy; he is capable of error, of evasion, of psychological distortion. He needs a method of cognition, which he himself has to discover: he must discover how to use his rational faculty, how to validate his conclusions, how to distinguish truth from falsehood, how to set the criteria of what he may accept as knowledge. Two questions are involved in his every conclusion, conviction, decision, choice or claim: What do I know?—and: How do I know it?

It is the task of epistemology to provide the answer to the “How?”—which then enables the special sciences to provide the answers to the “What?”

In the history of philosophy—with some very rare exceptions—epistemological theories have consisted of attempts to escape one or the other of the two fundamental questions which cannot be escaped. Men have been taught either that knowledge is impossible (skepticism) or that it is available without effort (mysticism). These two positions appear to be antagonists, but are, in fact, two variants on the same theme, two sides of the same fraudulent coin: the attempt to escape the responsibility of rational cognition and the absolutism of reatity—the attempt to assert the primacy of consciousness over existence.

[ITOE, 104.]

See Conceptual Index: Epistemology.

Equality (Social-Political). See Egalitarianism.

Errors of Knowledge vs. Breaches of Morality. Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any breach of morality. Give the benefit of the doubt to those who seek to know; but treat as potential killers those specimens of insolent depravity who make demands upon you, announcing that they have and seek no reasons, proclaiming, as a license, that they “just feel it”—or those who reject an irrefutable argument by saying: “It’s only logic,” which means: “It’s only reality.” The only realm opposed to reality is the realm and premise of death.

[GS, FNI, 224; pb 179.]

See also EVASION; EVIL; FREE WILL; GOOD, the; IRRATIONALITY; KNOWLEDGE; MORALITY; STANDARD of VALUE.

Essence/Essential Characteristic. See Definitions.

Esthetic Abstractions. There are many special or “cross-filed” chains of abstractions (of interconnected concepts) in man’s mind. Cognitive abstractions are the fundamental chain, on which all the others depend. Such chains are mental integrations, serving a special purpose and formed accordingly by a special criterion.

Cognitive abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is essential? (epistemologically essential to distinguish one class of existents from all others). Normative abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is good? Esthetic abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is important?

An artist does not fake reatity—he stylizes it. He selects those aspects of existence which he regards as metaphysically signihcant—and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting the insignificant and accidental, he presents his view of existence. His concepts are not divorced from the facts of reality—they are concepts which integrate the facts and his metaphysical evaluation of the facts. His selection constitutes his evaluation: everything included in a work of art—from theme to subject to brushstroke or adjective—acquires metaphysical significance by the mere fact of being included, of being important enough to include.

An artist (as, for instance, the sculptors of Ancient Greece) who presents man as a god-like figure is aware of the fact that men may be crippled or diseased or helpless; but he regards these conditions as accidental, as irrelevant to the essential nature of man—and he presents a figure embodying strength, beauty, intelligence, self-confidence, as man’s proper, natural state.

An artist (as, for instance, the sculptors of the Middle Ages) who presents man as a deformed monstrosity is aware of the fact that there are men who are healthy, happy or confident; but he regards these conditions as accidental or illusory, as irrelevant to man’s essential nature—and he presents a tortured figure embodying pain, ugliness, terror, as man’s proper, natural state.

[“Art and Sense of Life,” RM, 45; pb 36.]

See also ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; ART; CONCEPTS; ESTHETICS ; METAPHYSICAL VALUE-JUDGMENTS; NORMATIVE ABSTRACTIONS; SENSE of LIFE.

Esthetic Judgment. Now a word of warning about the criteria of esthetic judgment. A sense of life is the source of art, but it is not the sole qualification of an artist or of an esthetician, and it is not a criterion of esthetic judgment. Emotions are not tools of cognition. Esthetics is a branch of phiiosophy—and just as a philosopher does not approach any other branch of his science with his feelings or emotions as his criterion of judgment, so he cannot do it in the field of esthetics. A sense of life is not sufficient professional equipment. An esthetician—as well as any man who attempts to evaluate art works—must be guided by more than an emotion.

The fact that one agrees or disagrees with an artist’s philosophy is irrelevant to an esthetic appraisal of his work qua art. One does not have to agree with an artist (nor even to enjoy him) in order to evaluate his work. In essence, an objective evaluation requires that one identify the artist’s theme, the abstract meaning of his work (exclusively by identifying the evidence contained in the work and allowing no other, outside considerations), then evaluate the means by which he conveys it—i.e., taking his theme as criterion, evaluate the purely esthetic elements of the work, the technical mastery (or lack of it) with which he projects for fails to project) his view of life....

Since art is a philosophical composite, it is not a contradiction to say: “This is a great work of art, but I don’t like it,” provided one defines the exact meaning of that statement: the first part refers to a purely esthetic appraisal, the second to a deeper philosophical level which includes more than esthetic values.

[“Art and Sense of Life,” RM, 53; pb 42.]

See also ART; ESTHETICS; MORAL JUDGMENT; SENSE of LIFE.

Esthetics. The fifth and last branch of philosophy is esthetics, the study of art, which is based on metaphysics, epistemology and ethics.

[“Philosophy: Who Needs It,” PWNI, 4; pb 4.]

The esthetic principles which apply to all art, regardless of an individual artist’s philosophy, and which must guide an objective evaluation ... are defined by the science of esthetics—a task at which modern philosophy has failed dismally.

[“Art and Sense of Life,” RM, 54: pb 42.]

The position of art in the scale of human knowledge is, perhaps, the most eloquent symptom of the gulf between man’s progress in the physical sciences and his stagnation (or, today, his retrogression) in the humanities....

While, in other fields of knowledge, men have outgrown the practice of seeking the guidance of mystic oracles whose qualification for the job was unintelligibility, in the field of esthetics this practice has remained in full force and is becoming more crudely obvious today. Just as savages took the phenomena of nature for granted, as an irreducible primary not to be questioned or analyzed, as the exclusive domain of unknowable demons—so today’s epistemological savages take art for granted, as an irreducible primary not to be questioned or analyzed, as the exclusive domain of a special kind of unknowable demons: their emotions. The only difference is that the prehistorical savages’ error was innocent.

[“The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” RM, 17; pb 15.]

See Conceptual Index: Esthetics

Ethics. See Morality.

“Ethnicity.” “Ethnicity” is an anti-concept, used as a disguise for the word “racism”—and it has no clearly definable meaning.... The term “ethnicity” stresses the traditional, rather than the physiological characteristics of a group, such as language—but physiology, i.e., race, is involved.... So the advocacy of “ethnicity,” means racism plus tradition —i.e., racism plus conformity—i.e., racism plus staleness.

[“Global Balkanization,” pamphlet, 6.]

Ethnicity is not a valid consideration, morally or politically, and does not endow anyone with any special rights.

[Ibid., 14.]

See also “ANTI-CONCEPTS”; COLLECTIVISM; CULTURE; RACISM; TRADITION; TRIBALISM.

Evasion. Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think—not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment—on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict “It is.” Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say “It is,” you are refusing to say “I am.” By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: “Who am I to know? he is declaring: ”Who am I to live?”

[GS, FNI, 155, pb 127.]

Dropping below the level of a savage, who believes that the magic-words he utters have the power to alter reality, they believe that reality can be altered by the power of the words they do not utter—and their magic tool is the blank-out, the pretense that nothing can come into existence past the voodoo of their refusal to identify it.

[Ibid., 191; pb 154.]

It is not any crime you have ever committed that infects your soul with permanent guilt, it is none of your failures, errors or Haws, but the blank-out by which you attempt to evade them—it is not any sort of Original Sin or unknown prenatal deficiency, but the knowledge and fact of your basic default, of suspending your mind, of refusing to think. Fear and guilt are your chronic emotions, they are real and you do deserve them, but they don’t come from the superficial reasons you invent to disguise their cause, not from your “selfishness,” weakness or ignorance, but from a real and basic threat to your existence: fear, because you have abandoned your weapon of survival, guilt, because you know you have done it volitionally.

[Ibid..22) ; pb 176.]

See also CONTEXT-DROPPING; EVIL; FOCUS; FREE WILL; IRRATIONALITY; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; RATIONALITY; RATIONALIZATION; SUBJECTIVISM.

Evil. The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics—the standard by which one judges what is good or evil—is man’s life, or: that which is required for man’s survival qua man.

Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS. 16; pb 23.

Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think—not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment—on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict “It is.”

[GS, FNI, 155; pb 127.]

Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us.

[Ibid., 167; pb 135.]

I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.

[Ibid.. 206; pb 165.]

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

[“The Anatomy of Compromise,” CUI, 149.]

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

[GS, FNl. 217; pb 173.]

The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser’s intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture’s dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.

[“Altruism as Appeasement,” TO, Jan. 1966, 6.]

When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.

[GS, FNI, 217; pb 173.]

As a being of volitional consciousness, [man] knows that he must know his own value in order to maintain his own life. He knows that he has to be right; to be wrong in action means danger to his life; to be wrong in person, to be evil, means to be unfit for existence.... No man can survive the moment of pronouncing himself irredeemably evil; should he do it, his next moment is insanity or suicide.

[lbid., 221; pb 176.]

See also ABSOLUTES; AMORALISM; APPEASEMENT; COMPROMISE; CYNICISM; ENVY/HATRED of the GOOD for BEING the GOOD; ERRORS of KNOWLEDGE vs. BREACHES of MORALITY; EVASION; FREE WILL; GOOD, the; IRRATIONALITY; MORAL COWARDICE; MORAL JUDGMENT; MORALITY; ORIGINAL SIN; STANDARD of VALUE; VIRTUE.

Existence. Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.

If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.

Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.

To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of nonexistence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors —the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

[GS, FNI, 152; pb 124.]

Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason.

[Ibid., 154; pb 126.]

Existence is a self-sufficient primary. It is not a product of a supernatural dimension, or of anything else. There is nothing antecedent to existence, nothing apart from it—and no alternative to it. Existence exists—and only existence exists. Its existence and its nature are irreducible and unalterable.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 148.]

The first and primary axiomatic concepts are “existence,” “identity” (which is a corollary of “existence”) and “consciousness.”

[ITOE, 73.]

An axomatic concept is the identification of a primary fact of reality, which cannot be analyzed, i.e., reduced to other facts or broken into component parts. It is implicit in all facts and in all knowledge. It is the fundamentally given and directly perceived or experienced, which requires no proof or explanation, but on which all proofs and explanations rest.

[Ibid.]

One can study what exists and how consciousness functions; but one cannot analyze (or “prove”) existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to “prove” them is self-contradictory : it is an attempt to “prove” existence by means of nonexistence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness.)

[Ibid.]

Existence and identity are not attributes of existents, they are the existents.... The units of the concepts “existence” and “identity” are every entity, attribute, action, event or phenomenon (including consciousness) that exists, has ever existed or will ever exist.

[Ibid., 74.]

See also ABSOLUTES; ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; ATHEISM; AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS; AXIOMS; EXISTENT; IDENTITY; INFINITY; METAPHYSICS; METAPHYSICAL; NATURE; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; SPACE; TIME; UNIVERSE; ZERO, REIFICATION of.

Existent. The building-block of man’s knowledge is the concept of an “existent”—of something that exists, be it a thing, an attribute or an action. Since it is a concept, man cannot grasp it explicitly until he has reached the conceptual stage. But it is implicit in every percept (to perceive a thing is to perceive that it exists) and man grasps it implicitly on the perceptual level—i.e., he grasps the constituents of the concept “existent,” the data which are later to be integrated by that concept. It is this implicit knowledge that permits his consciousness to develop further.

(It may be supposed that the concept “existent” is implicit even on the level of sensations—if and to the extent that a consciousness is able to discriminate on that level. A sensation is a sensation of something, as distinguished from the nothing of the preceding and succeeding moments. A sensation does not tell man what exists, but only that it exists.)

The (implicit) concept “existent” undergoes three stages of development in man’s mind. The first stage is a child’s awareness of objects, of things—which represents the (implicit) concept “entity.” The second and closely allied stage is the awareness of specific, particular things which he can recognize and distinguish from the rest of his perceptual fiefd—which represents the (implicit) concept “identity.”

The third stage consists of grasping relationships among these entities by grasping the similarities and differences of their identities. This requires the transformation of the (implicit) concept “entity” into the (implicit) concept “unit.”

[ITOE, 6.]

See also CONCEPT-FORMATION; ENTITY; EXISTENCE; IDENTITY; IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE; SENSATIONS; UNIT.

F

Faith “Faith” designates blind acceptance of a certain ideational content, acceptance induced by feeling in the absence of evidence or proof.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 48; pb 54.]

Do not say that you’re afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little that you know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience—that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible—that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.

[GS, FNI, 223; pb 178.]

The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.

[Ibid., 157; pb 128.]

Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others.

[Ibid., 200; pb 161.]

Faith and force . . . are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.

[“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 80; pb 66.]

See also ATHEISM; DOGMA; GOD; KNOWLEDGE; LOGIC; MYSTICISM; PHYSICAL FORCE; REASON; RELIGION; STATISM; SUPERNATURALISM.

Falsehood. “True” and “false” are assessments within the field of human cognition: they designate a relationship [of] correspondence or contradiction between an idea and reality.... The false is established as false by reference to a body of evidence and within a context, and is pronounced false because it contradicts the evidence.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 6.]

All falsehoods are self-contradictions.

When making a statement about an existent, one has, ultimately, only two alternatives: “X (which means X, the existent, including all its characteristics) is what it is”—or: “X is not what it is.” The choice between truth and falsehood is the choice between “tautology” (in the sense explained) and self-contradiction.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 136.]

See also ANALYTIC-SYNTHETIC DICHOTOMY; ARBITRARY; CONTRADICTIONS; IDENTITY; TRUTH.

Fascism/Nazism. The difference between [socialism and fascism] is superficial and purely formal, but it is significant psychologically: it brings the authoritarian nature of a planned economy crudely into the open.

The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal.

The dictionary definition of fascism is: “a governmental system with strong centralized power, permitting no opposition or criticism, controlling all affairs of the nation (industrial, commercial, etc.), emphasizing an aggressive nationalism ...” [The American College Dictionary, New York: Random House, 1957.]

Under fascism, citizens retain the responsibilities of owning property, without freedom to act and without any of the advantages of ownership. Under socialism, government officials acquire all the advantages of ownership, without any of the responsibilities, since they do not hold title to the property, but merely the right to use it—at least until the next purge. In either case, the government officials hold the economic, political and legal power of life or death over the citizens.

Needless to say, under either system, the inequalities of income and standard of living are greater than anything possible under a free economy—and a man’s position is determined, not by his productive ability and achievement, but by political pull and force.

Under both systems, sacrifice is invoked as a magic, omnipotent solution in any crisis--and “the public good” is the altar on which victims are immolated. But there are stylistic differences of emphasis. The socialist-communist axis keeps promising to achieve abundance, material comfort and security for its victims, in some indeterminate future. The fascist-Nazi axis scorns material comfort and security, and keeps extolling some undefined sort of spiritual duty, service and conquest. The socialist-communist axis offers its victims an alleged social ideal. The fascist-Nazi axis offers nothing but loose talk about some unspecified form of racial or national “greatness.” The socialist-communist axis proclaims some grandiose economic plan, which keeps receding year by year. The fascist-Nazi axis merely extols leadership—teadership without purpose, program or direction—and power for power’s sake.

[“The Fascist New Frontier,” pamphlet, 5]

If the term “statism” designates concentration of power in the state at the expense of individual liberty, then Nazism in politics was a form of statism. In principle, it did not represent a new approach to government; it was a continuation of the political absolutism—the absolute monarchies, the oligarchies, the theocracies, the random tyrannies—which has characterized most of human history.

In degree, however, the total state does differ from its predecessors: it represents statism pressed to its limits, in theory and in practice, devouring the last remnants of the individual. Although previous dictators (and many today, e.g., in Latin America) often preached the unlimited power of the state, they were on the whole unable to enforce such power. As a rule, citizens of such countries had a kind of partial “freedom,” not a freedom-on-principle, but at least a freedom-by-default.

Even the latter was effectively absent in Nazi Germany. The efficiency of the government in dominating its subjects, the all-encompassing character of its coercion, the complete mass regimentation on a scale involving millions of men—and, one might add, the enormity of the slaughter, the planned, systematic mass slaughter, in peacetinte, initiated by a government against its own citizens—these are the insignia of twentieth-century totalitarianism (Nazi and communist), which are without parallel in recorded history. In the totalitarian regimes, as the Germans found out after only a few months of Hitler’s rule, every detail of life is prescribed, or proscribed. There is no longer any distinction between private matters and public matters. “There are to be no more private Germans,” said Friedrich Sieburg, a Nazi writer; “each is to attain significance only by his service to the state, and to find complete self-fulfillment in this service.” “The only person who is still a private individual in Germany,” boasted Robert Ley, a member of the Nazi hierarchy, after several years of Nazi rule, “is somebody who is asleep.”

In place of the despised “private individuals,” the Germans heard daily or hourly about a different kind of entity, a supreme entity, whose will, it was said, is what determines the course and actions of the state: the nation, the whole, the group. Over and over, the Germans heard the idea that underlies the advocacy of omnipotent government, the idea that totalitarians of every kind stress as the justification of their total states: collectivism.

Collectivism is the theory that the group (the collective) has primacy over the individual. Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective—society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc. —is the unit of reality and the standard of value. On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it; on his own he has no political rights; he is to be sacrificed for the group whenever it—or its representative, the state—deems this desirable.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 6; pb 16.]

Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation’s economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property—so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property.

If “ownership” means the right to determine the use and disposal of material goods, then Nazism endowed the state with every real prerogative of ownership. What the individual retained was merely a formal deed, a contentless deed, which conferred no rights on its holder. Under communism, there is collective ownership of property de jure. Under Nazism, there is the same collective ownership de facto.

[Ibid., 9; pb 18.]

It took centuries and a brain-stopping chain of falsehoods to bring a whole people to the state of Hitler-worship. Modern German culture, including its Nazi climax, is the result of a complex development in the history of philosophy, involving dozens of figures stretching back to the beginnings of Western thought. The same figures helped to shape every Western nation; but in other countries, to varying extents, the results were mixed, because there was also an opposite influence or antidote at work. In Germany, by the turn of our century, the cultural atmosphere was unmixed : the traces of the antidote had long since disappeared, and the intellectual establishment was monolithic.

If we view the West’s philosophic development in terms of essentials, three fateful turning points stand out, three major philosophers who, above all others, are responsible for generating the disease of collectivism and transmitting it to the dictators of our century.

The three are: Plato—Kant—Hegel. (The antidote to them is: Aristotle.)

[Ibid., 17; pb 26.]

No weird cultural aberration produced Nazism. No intellectual lunatic fringe miraculously overwhelmed a civilized country. It is modern phitosophy—not some peripheral aspect of it, but the most central of its mainstreams—which turned the Germans into a nation of killers.

The land of poets and philosophers was brought down by its poets and philosophers.

Twice in our century Germany fought to rule and impose its culture on the rest of the world. It lost both wars. But on a deeper level it is achieving its goal nevertheless. It is on the verge of winning the philosophical war against the West, with everything this implies.

[Ibid., 98; pb 98.]

I have stated repeatedly that the trend in this country is toward a fascist system with communist slogans. But what all of today’s pressure groups are busy evading is the fact that neither business nor labor nor anyone else, except the ruling clique, gains anything under fascism or communism or any form of statism—that all become victims of an impartial, egalitarian destruction.

[“The Moratorium on Brains,” ARL, I, 3, 3.]

See also ALTRUISM; CAPITALISM; COLLECTIVISM; DICTATORSHIP; FASCISM and COMMUNISM/SOCIALISM; HUMAN RIGHTS and PROPERTY RIGHTS; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; INDIVIDUALISM; PROPERTY RIGHTS; RACISM; RIGHTISTS vs. LEFTISTS; STATISM; TYRANNY; WAR.

Fascism and Communism/Socialism. For many decades, the leftists have been propagating the false dichotomy that the choice confronting the world is only: communism or fascism—a dictatorship of the left or of an alleged right—with the possibility of a free society, of capitalism, dismissed and obliterated, as if it had never existed.

[“The Presidential Candidates 1968,” TO, June 1968, 5.]

[Some “moderates” are trying to] revive that old saw of pre—\Vor)d War II vintage, the notion that the two political opposites confronting us, the two “extremes,” are: fascism versus communism.

The political origin of that notion is more shameful than the “moderates” would care publicly to admit. Mussolini came to power by claiming that that was the only choice confronting Italy. Hitler came to power by claiming that that was the only choice confronting Germany. It is a matter of record that in the German election of 1933, the Communist Party was ordered by its leaders to vote for the Nazis—with the explanation that they could later fight the Nazis for power, but first they had to help destroy their common enemy: capitalism and its parliamentary form of government.

It is obvious what the fraudulent issue of fascism versus communism accomplishes: it sets up, as opposites, two variants of the same political system; it eliminates the possibility of considering capitalism; it switches the choice of “Freedom or dictatorship?” into “Which kind of dictatorship?” —thus establishing dictatorship as an inevitable fact and offering only a choice of rulers. The choice—according to the proponents of that fraud—is: a dictatorship of the rich (fascism) or a dictatorship of the poor (communism).

That fraud collapsed in the 1940’s, in the aftermath of World War II. It is too obvious, too easily demonstrable that fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory—that both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state—that both are socialistic, in theory, in practice, and in the explicit statements of their leaders—that under both systems, the poor are enslaved and the rich are expropriated in favor of a ruling clique—that fascism is not the product of the political “right,” but of the “left”—that the basic issue is not “rich versus poor,” but man versus the state, or: individual rights versus totalitarian government—which means: capitalism versus socialism.

[“ ‘Extremism,’ or The Art of Smearing,” CUI, 180.]

The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal....

Under fascism, citizens retain the responsibilities of owning property, without freedom to act and without any of the advantages of ownership. Under socialism, government officials acquire all the advantages of ownership, without any of the responsibilities, since they do not hold title to the property, but merely the right to use it—at least until the next purge. In either case, the government officials hold the economic, political and legal power of life or death over the citizens....

Under both systems, sacrifice is invoked as a magic, omnipotent solution in any crisis—and “the public good” is the altar on which victims are immolated. But there are stylistic differences of emphasis. The socialist-communist axis keeps promising to achieve abundance, material comfort and security for its victims, in some indeterminate future. The fascist-Nazi axis scorns material comfort and security, and keeps extolling some undefined sort of spiritual duty, service and conquest. The socialist-communist axis offers its victims an alleged social ideal. The fascist-Nazi axis offers nothing but loose talk about some unspecified form of racial or national “greatness.” The socialist-communist axis proclaims some grandiose economic plan, which keeps receding year by year. The fascist-Nazi axis merely extols leadership—leadership without purpose, program or direction—and power for power’s sake.

[“The Fascist New Frontier,” pamphlet, 5.]

Look at Europe.... Can’t you see past the guff and recognize the essence? One country is dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the collective is all. The individual held as evil, the mass—as God. No motive and no virtue permitted—except that of service to the proletariat. That’s one version [communism]. Here’s another. A country dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the State is all. The individual held as evil, the race—as God. No motive and no virtue permitted—except that of service to the race [fascism]. Am I raving or is this the cold reality of two continents already? Watch the pincer movement. If you’re sick of one version, we push you into the other. We get you coming and going. We’ve closed the doors. We’ve fixed the coin. Heads—colectivism, and tails—collectivism. Fight the doctrine which slaughters the individual with a doctrine which slaughters the individual. Give up your soul to a council—or give it up to a leader. But give it up, give it up, give it up. My technique.... Offer poison as food and poison as antidote.

[“The Soul of a Collectivist,” FNI, 88; pb 76.]

[Adolf Hitler on Nazism and socialism:] “Each activity and each need of the individual will thereby be regulated by the party as the representative of the general good. There will be no license, no free space, in which the individual belongs to himself. This is Sociatism—not such trifles as the private possession of the means of production. Of what importance is that if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them then own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the party, is supreme over them, regardless whether they are owners or workers. All that, you see, is unessential. Our Socialism goes far deeper....

“[T]he people about us are unaware of what is really happening to them. They gaze fascinated at one or two familiar superficialities, such as possessions and income and rank and other outworn conceptions. As long as these are kept intact, they are quite satisfied. But in the meantime they have entered a new relation; a powerful social force has caught them up. They themselves are changed. What are ownership and income to that? Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories ? We socialize human beings.”

[Adolf Hitler to Hermann Rauschning, quoted in Leonard Peikoff, OP, 248; pb 231.]

Through the agency of three new guilds (the Food Estate, the Estate of Trade and Industry, and the Labor Front), the government assumed control of every group of producers and consumers in the country. In accordance with the method of “German socialism,” the facade of a market economy was retained. All prices, wages, and interest rates, however, were “fixed by the central authority. They [were] prices, wages, and interest rates in appearance only; in reality they [were] merely determinations of quantity relations in the government’s orders.... This is socialism in the outward guise of capitalism.”

The nation’s businessmen retained the responsibility to produce and suffered the losses attendant on failure. The state determined the purpose and conditions of their production, and reaped the benefits; directly or indirectly, it expropriated all profits. “The time is past,” explained the Nazi Minister of Economics, “when the notion of economic self-seeking and unrestricted use of profits made can be allowed to dominate.... The economic system must serve the nation.”

“What a dummkopf I was!” cried steel baron Fritz Thyssen, an early Nazi supporter, who fled the country....

As to Hitler’s pledges to the poorer groups: the Republic’s social insurance budgets were greatly increased, and a variety of welfare funds, programs, agencies, and policies were introduced or expanded, including special provisions for such items as unemployment relief, workmen’s compensation, health insurance, pensions, Winter Help campaigns for the destitute, the Reich Mothers’ Service for indigent mothers and children, and the National Socialist People’s Welfare organization.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 246; pb 230.]

During the Hitler years—in order to finance the party’s programs, including the war expenditures—every social group in Germany was mercilessly exploited and drained. White-collar salaries and the earnings of small businessmen were deliberately held down by government controls, freezes, taxes. Big business was bled by taxes and “special contributions” of every kind, and strangled by the bureaucracy.... At the same time the income of the farmers was held down, and there was a desperate flight to the cities—where the middle class, especially the small tradesmen, were soon in desperate straits, and where the workers were forced to labor at low wages for increasingly longer hours (up to 60 or more per week).

But the Nazis defended their policies, and the country did not rebel; it accepted the Nazi argument. Selfish individuals may be unhappy, the Nazis said, but what we have established in Germany is the ideal system, socialism. In its Nazi usage this term is not restricted to a theory of economics; it is to be understood in a fundamental sense. “Socialism” for the Nazis denotes the principle of collectivism as such and its corollary, statism—in every field of human action, including but not limited to economics.

“To be a socialist,” says Goebbels, “is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.”

By this definition, the Nazis practiced what they preached. They practiced it at home and then abroad. No one can claim that they did not sacrifice enough individuals.

[Ibid., 9; pb 19.]

See also ALTRUISM; CAPITALISM; COLLECTIVISM; COMMUNISM; DICTATORSHIP; FASCISM/NAZISM; MYSTICS OF SPIRIT and of MUSCLE; POLYLOGISM; RIGHTISTS vs. LEFTISTS; SOCIALISM; SOVIET RUSSIA; STATISM.

Femininity. For a woman qua woman, the essence of femininity is hero-worship—the desire to look up to man. “To look up” does not mean dependence, obedience or anything implying inferiority. It means an intense kind of admiration; and admiration is an emotion that can be experienced only by a person of strong character and independent value-judgments. A “clinging vine” type of woman is not an admirer, but an exploiter of men. Hero-worship is a demanding virtue: a woman has to be worthy of it and of the hero she worships. Intellectually and morally, i.e., as a human being, she has to be his equal; then the object of her worship is specifically his masculinity, not any human virtue she might lack.

This does not mean that a feminine woman feels or projects hero-worship for any and every individual man; as human beings, many of them may, in fact, he her inferiors. Her worship is an abstract emotion for the metaphysical concept of masculinity as such—which she experiences fully and concretely only for the man she loves, but which colors her attitude toward all men. This does not mean that there is a romantic or sexual intention in her attitude toward all men; quite the contrary: the higher her view of masculinity, the more severely demanding her standards. It means that she never loses the awareness of her own sexual identity and theirs. It means that a properly feminine woman does not treat men as if she were their pal, sister, mother-or leader.

[“An Answer to Readers (About a Woman President),” TO, Dec. 1968, 1.]

See also CAREER; INDEPENDENCE; LOVE; SEX; VIRTUE.

Final Causation. In order to make the choices required to achieve his goals, a man needs the constant, automatized awareness of the principle which the anti-concept “duty” has all but obliterated in his mind: the principle of causality—specincaity, of Aristotelian final causation (which, in fact, applies only to a conscious being), i.e., the process by which an end determines the means, i.e., the process of choosing a goal and taking the actions necessary to achieve it.

In a rational ethics, it is causality—not “duty”—that serves as the guiding principle in considering, evaluating and choosing one’s actions, particularly those necessary to achieve a long-range goal. Following this principle, a man does not act without knowing the purpose of his action. In choosing a goal, he considers the means required to achieve it, he weighs the value of the goal against the difficulties of the means and against the full, hierarchical context of all his other values and goals. He does not demand the impossible of himself, and he does not decide too easily which things are impossible. He never drops the context of the knowledge available to him, and never evades reality, realizing fully that his goal will not be granted to him by any power other than his own action, and, should he evade, it is not some Kantian authority that he would be cheating, but himself.

[“Causality Versus Duty,” PWNI, 119; pb 99.]

Only a process of final causation—i.e., the process of choosing a goal, then taking the steps to achieve it—can give logical continuity, coherence and meaning to a man’s actions.

[“Basic Principles of Literature,” RM, 60; pb 82.]

See also “ANTI-CONCEPTS”; CONTEXT-DROPPlNG; “DUTY”; GOAL-DIRECTED ACTION; KANT, IMMANUEL; PURPOSE; STANDARD of VALUE; TELEOLOGICAL MEASUREMENT.

Focus. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one’s consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality—or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make.

When man unfocuses his mind, he may be said to be conscious in a subhuman sense of the word, since he experiences sensations and perceptions. But in the sense of the word applicable to man—in the sense of a consciousness which is aware of reality and able to deal with it, a consciousness able to direct the actions and provide for the survival of a human being—an unfocused mind is not conscious.

Psychologically, the choice “to think or not” is the choice “to focus or not.” Existentially, the choice “to focus or not” is the choice “to be conscious or not.” Metaphysically, the choice “to be conscious or not” is the choice of life or death.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 13; pb 20.]

“Focus” designates a quality of one’s mental state, a quality of active alertness. “Focus” means the state of a goal-directed mind committed to attaining full awareness of reality. It’s the state of a mind committed to seeing, to grasping, to understanding, to knowing.

“Full awareness” does not mean omniscience. It means: commitment to grasp all the facts relevant to one’s concern and activity at any given time ... as against a splintered grasp, a grasp of some facts while others which you know to be relevant are left in fog. By “full” I include also the commitment to grasp the relevant facts clearly, with the fullest clarity and precision one is capable of.

“Focus” is not synonymous with “thinking,” in the sense of step-by-step problem-solving or the drawing of new conclusions. You may be walking down the street, merely contemplating the sights, but you can do it in focus or out of focus. “In focus” would mean you have some purpose directing your mental activity—in this case, a simple one: to observe the sights. But this is still a purpose, and it implies that you know what you are doing mentally, that you have set yourself a goal and are carrying it out, that you have assumed the responsibility of taking control of your consciousness and directing it....

The process of focus is not the same as the process of thought; it is the precondition of thought.... Just as you must first focus your eyes, and then, if you choose, you can turn your gaze systematically to the objects on the table in front of you and inventory them, so first you must focus your mind, and then, when you choose, you can direct that focus to the step-by-step resolution of a specific problem—which latter is thinking.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 3.]

[In answer to the question “What is the difference between concentration and focus?”]

Briefly: concentration means undivided attention on some particular task or object.... It is an attention, an activity, devoted to a particular subject. Now, focus is more fundamental than that. You need to be in focus in order to concentrate, but focus is the particular “set” of your consciousness which is not delimited by the particular task, object, or action that you are concentrating on. You do have to focus on something, but focus is not [limited to] the continuing task that you are performing. The concept “focus” isn’t tied to the concrete ... it remains the same no matter what you are focused on. It is the “set” of your mind.

[Ayn Rand, question period following Lecture 6 of Leonard Peikoff’s series “The Philosophy of Objectivism” (1976).]

See also CONSCIOUSNESS; EVASION; FREE WILL; MORALITY; RATIONALITY; THOUGHT/THINKING.

Foreign Policy. We do need a policy based on long-range principles, i.e., an ideology. But a revision of our foreign policy, from its basic premises on up, is what today’s anti-ideologists dare not contemplate. The worse its results, the louder our public leaders proclaim that our foreign policy is bipartisan.

A proper solution would be to elect statesmen—if such appeared—with a radically different foreign policy, a policy explicitly and proudly dedicated to the defense of America’s rights and national self-interests, repudiating foreign aid and all forms of international self-immolation.

[“The Wreckage of the Consensus,” CUI, 226.]

The essence of capitalism’s foreign policy is free trade—i.e., the abolition of trade barriers, of protective tariffs, of special privileges—the opening of the world’s trade routes to free international exchange and competition among the private citizens of all countries dealing directly with one another. During the nineteenth century, it was free trade that liberated the world, undercutting and wrecking the remnants of feudalism and the statist tyranny of absolute monarchies.

[“The Roots of War,” CUI, 39.]

PLAYBOY: What about force in foreign policy? You have said that any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany during World WarII...

RAND: Certainly.

PLAYBOY: ... And that any free nation today has the moral right—though not the duty—to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba, or any other “slave pen.” Correct?

RAND: Correct. A dictatorship—a country that violates the rights of its own citizens—is an outlaw and can claim no rights.

PLAYBOY: Would you actively advocate that the United States invade Cuba or the Soviet Union?

RAND: Not at present. I don’t think it’s necessary. I would advocate that which the Soviet Union fears above all else: economic boycott, I would advocate a blockade of Cuba and an economic boycott of Soviet Russia; and you would see both of those regimes collapse without the loss of a single American life.

PLAYBOY: Would you favor U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations?

RAND: Yes. I do not sanction the grotesque pretense of an organization allegedly devoted to world peace and human rights, which includes Soviet Russia, the worst aggressor and bloodiest butcher in history, as one of its members. The notion of protecting rights, with Soviet Russia among the protectors, is an insult to the concept of rights and to the intelligence of any man who is asked to endorse or sanction such an organization. I do not believe that an individual should cooperate with criminals, and, for all the same reasons, I do not believe that free countries should cooperate with dictatorships.

PLAYBOY: Would you advocate severing diplomatic relations with Russia ?

RAND: Yes.

[“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 11.]

Russia, like Nazi Germany, like any bully, feeds on appeasement and will retreat placatingly at the first sound of firm opposition.

[“U.S. Position on Cuba Endangered by U.N.,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 11, 1962.]

When certain statist groups, counting, apparently, on a total collapse of American self-esteem, dare go so far as to urge America’s surrender into slavery without a fight, under the slogan “Better Red Than Dead”— the “conservatives” rush to proclaim that they prefer to be dead, thus helping to spread the idea that our only alternative is communism or destruction, forgetting that the only proper answer to an ultimatum of that kind is: “Better See The Reds Dead.”

[“Choose Your Issues,” TON,jan. 1962, 1.]

See also “COLLECTIVE RIGHTS”; COMMUNISM; DICTATORSHIP; DRAFT; FREEDOM; GOVERNMENT; IDEOLOGY; “ISOLATIONISM”; NATIONAL RIGHTS; PACIFISM; PEACE MOVEMENTS; SELF-DEFENSE; SELF-DETERMINATION of NATIONS; SOVIET RUSSlA; UNITED NATIONS; WAR.

Founding Fathers. The basic premise of the Founding Fathers was man’s right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness—which means: man’s right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; and that the political implementation of this right is a society where men deal with one another as traders, by voluntary exchange to mutual benefit.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 62; pb 53.]

The Founding Fathers were neither passive, death-worshipping mystics nor mindless, power-seeking looters; as a political group, they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action. They had rejected the soul-body dichotomy, with its two corollaries: the impotence of man’s mind and the damnation of this earth; they had rejected the doctrine of suffering as man’s metaphysical fate, they proclaimed man’s right to the pursuit of happiness and were determined to establish on earth the conditions required for man’s proper existence, by the “unaided” power of their intellect.

[Ibid., 23; pb 25.]

In the modern world, under the influence of the pervasive new climate, a succession of thinkers developed a new conception of the nature of government. The most important of these men and the one with the greatest influence on America was John Locke. The political philosophy Locke bequeathed to the Founding Fathers is what gave rise to the new nation’s distinctive institutions. That political philosophy is the social implementation of the Aristotelian spirit.

Throughout history the state had been regarded, implicitly or explicitly, as the ruler of the individual—as a sovereign authority (with or without supernatural mandate), an authority logically antecedent to the citizen and to which he must submit. The Founding Fathers challenged this primordial notion. They started with the premise of the primacy and sovereignty of the individual. The individual, they held, logically precedes the group or the institution of government. Whether or not any social organization exists, each man possesses certain indinidual rights. And “among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—or, in the words of a New Hampshire state document, “among which are the enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; and in a word, of seeking and obtaining happiness.”

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, III; pb 109.]

The genius of the Founding Fathers was their ability not only to grasp the revolutionary ideas of the period, but to devise a means of implementing those ideas in practice, a means of translating them from the realm of philosophic abstraction into that of sociopolitical reality. By defining in detail the division of powers within the government and the ruling procedures, including the brilliant mechanism of checks and balances, they established a system whose operation and integrity were independent, so far as possible, of the moral character of any of its temporary officials—a system impervious, so far as possible, to subversion by an aspiring dictator or by the public mood of the moment.

The heroism of the Founding Fathers was that they recognized an unprecedented opportunity, the chance to create a country of individual liberty for the first time in history—and that they staked everything on their judgment: the new nation and their own “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.”

[Ibid., 114; pb 112.]

“I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

Jefferson—and the other Founding Fathers—meant it. They did not confine their efforts to the battle against theocracy and monarchy; they fought, on the same grounds, invoking the same principle of individual rights—against democracy, i.e., the system of unlimited majority rule. They recognized that the cause of freedom is not advanced by the multiplication of despots, and they did not propose to substitute the tyranny of a mob for that of a handful of autocrats....

When the framers of the American republic spoke of “the people,” they did not mean a collectivist organism one part of which was authorized to consume the rest. They meant a sum of individuals, each of whom—whether strong or weak, rich or poor—retains his inviolate guarantee of individual rights.

[Ibid., 113; pb III.)

The political philosophy of America’s Founding Fathers is so thoroughly buried under decades of statist misrepresentations on one side and empty lip-service on the other, that it has to be re-discovered, not ritualistically repeated. It has to be rescued from the shameful barnacles of platitudes now hiding it. It has to be expanded—because it was only a magnificent beginning, not a completed job, it was only a pulitical philosophy without a full philosophical and moral foundation, which the “conservatives” cannot provide.

[“It Is Earlier Than You Think,” TON, Dec. 1964, 52.]

See also AMERICA; ARISTOTLE; CONSTITUTION; ENLIGHTENMENT, AGE of; FREEDOM; INDIVIDUALISM; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; LIFE, RIGHT to; PURSUIT of HAPPINESS, RIGHT to; RELIGION; REPUBLIC; SOUL-BODY DICHOTOMY.

Fraud. A unilateral breach of contract involves an indirect use of physical force: it consists, in essence, of one man receiving the material values, goods or services of another, then refusing to pay for them and thus keeping them by force (by mere physical possession), not by right —i.e., keeping them without the consent of their owner. Fraud involves a similarly indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values without then owner’s consent, under false pretenses or false promises.

[“The Nature of Government.” VOS, 150; ph III.]

See also CONTRACTS: PHYSICAL FORCE.

Free Market. In a free economy, where no man or group of men can use physical coercion against anyone, economic power can be achieved only by voluntarymeans: by the voluntary choice and agreement of all those who participate in the process of production and trade. In a free market, all prices, wages, and profits are determined—not by the arbitrary whim of the rich or of the poor, not by anyone’s “greed” or by anyone’s need—but by the law of supply and demand. The mechanism of a free market reflects and sums up all the economic choices and decisions made by all the participants. Men trade their goods or services by mutual consent to mutual advantage, according to their own independent, uncoerced judgment. A man can grow rich only if he is able to offer better values—better products or services, at a lower price - than others are able to offer.

Wealth, in a free market, is achieved by a free, general, “democratic” vote—by the sales and the purchases of every individual who takes part in the economic life of the country. Whenever you buy one product rather than another, you are voting for the success of some manufacturer. And, in this type of voting, every man votes only on those matters which he is qualified to judge: on his own preferences, interests, and needs. No one has the power to decide for others or to substitute his judgment for theirs; no one has the power to appoint himself “the voice of the public” and to leave the public voiceless and disfranchised.

[“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 47.]

Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 23; pb 25.]

The free market represents the social application of an objective theory of values. Since values are to be discovered by man’s mind, men must be free to discover them—to think, to study, to translate their knowledge into physical form, to offer their products for trade, to judge them, and to choose, be it material goods or ideas, a loaf of bread or a philosophical treatise. Since values are established contextually, every man must judge for himself, in the context of his own knowledge, goals, and interests. Since values are determined by the nature of reality, it is reality that serves as men’s ultimate arbiter: if a man’s judgment is right, the rewards are his; if it is wrong, he is his only victim.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 24.]

Now observe that a free market does not level men down to some common denominator—that the intellectual criteria of the majority do not rule a free market or a free society—and that the exceptional men, the innovators, the intellectual giants, are not held down by the majority. In fact, it is the members of this exceptional minority who lift the whole of a free society to the level of their own achievements, while rising further and ever further.

A free market is a rontinuous process that cannot be held still, an upward process that demands the best (the most rational) of every man and rewards him accordingly. While the majority have barely assimilated the value of the automobile, the creative minority introduces the airplane. The majority learn by demonstration, the minority is free to demonstrate. The “philosophically objective” value of a new product serves as the teacher for those who are willing to exercise their rational faculty, each to the extent of his ability. those who are unwilling remain unrewarded—as well as those who aspire to more than their ability produces. The stagnant, the irrational, the subjectivist have no power to stop their betters....

The mental parasites—the imitators who attempt to cater to what they think is the public’s known taste—are constantly being beaten by the innovators whose products raise the public’s knowledge and taste to ever higher levels. It is in this sense that the free market is ruled, not by the consumers, but by the producers. The most successful ones are those who discover new fields of production, fields which had not been known to exist.

A given product may not be appreciated at once, particularly if it is too radical an innovation; but, barring irrelevant accidents, it wins in the long run. It is in this sense that the free market is not ruled by the intellectual criteria of the majority, which prevail only at and for any given moment; the free market is ruled by those who are able to see and plan tong-range—and the better the mind, the longer the range.

[Ibid., 25.]

All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy.

[“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 48.]

See also CAPITALISM; INTERVENTIONISM (ECONOMIC); MARKET VALUE.

Free Speech. Freedom of speech means freedom from interference, suppression or punitive action by the government—and nothing else. It does not mean the right to demand the financial support or the material means to express your views at the expense of other men who may not wish to support you. Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to agree, not to listen and not to support one’s own antagonists. A “right” does not include the material implementation of that right by other men; it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one’s own effort. Private citizens cannot use physical force or coercion; they cannot censor or suppress anyone’s views or publications. Only the government can do so. And censorship is a concept that pertains only to governmental action.

[“The Fascist New Frontier,” pamphlet, 10.]

While people are clamoring about “economic rights,” the concept of political rights is vanishing. It is forgotten that the right of free speech means the freedom to advocate one’s views and to bear the possible consequences, including disagreement with others, opposition, unpopularity and lack of support. The political function of “the right of free speech” is to protect dissenters and unpopular minorities from forcible suppression—not to guarantee them the support, advantages and rewards of a popularity they have not gained.

The Bill of Rights reads: “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ...” It does not demand that private citizens provide a microphone for the man who advocates their destruction, or a passkey for the burglar who seeks to rob them, or a knife for the murderer who wants to cut their throats.

[“Man’s Rights,” VOS, 133; pb 99.]

The communists and the Nazis are merely two variants of the same evil notion: collectivism. But both should be free to speak—evil ideas are dangerous only by default of men advocating better ideas.

[The Objectivist Calendar, June 1978.]

The difference between an exchange of ideas and an exchange of blows is self-evident. The line of demarcation between freedom of speech and freedom of action is established by the ban on the initiation of physical force.

[“The Cashing-In: The Student ‘Rebellion,’ ”CUI, 258.]

[In regard to the lawsuit to prevent a Nazi group from marching in Skokie, Illinois:]

What I challenge (and not only because of that particular case) is the interpretation of demonstrations and of other actions as so-called “symbolic speech.” When you lose the distinction between action and speech, you lose, eventually, the freedom of both. The Skokie case is a good illustration of that principle. There is no such thing as “symbolic speech.” You do not have the right to parade through the public streets or to obstruct public thoroughfares. You have the right of assembly, yes, on your own property, and on the property of your adherents or your friends. But nobody has the “right” to clog the streets. The streets are only for passage. The hippies, in the 60s, should have been forbidden to lie down on city pavements. (They used to lie down across a street and cause dreadful traffic snarls, in order to display their views, to attract attention, to register a protest.) If they were permitted to do it, the Nazis should be permitted as well. Properly, both should have been forbidden. They may speak, yes. They may not take action at whim on public property.

[The Objectivist Calendar, June 1978.]

I want to state, for the record, my own view of what is called “hardcore” pornography. I regard it as unspeakably disgusting. I have not read any of the books or seen any of the current movies belonging to that category, and I do not intend ever to read or see them. The descriptions provided in legal cases, as well as the “modern” touches in “soft-core” productions, are sufficient grounds on which to form an opinion. The reason of my opinion is the opposite of the usual one: I do not regard sex as evil—I regard it as good, as one of the most important aspects of human life, too important to be made the subject of public anatomical display. But the issue here is not one’s view of sex. The issue is freedom of speech and of the press—i.e., the right to hold any view and to express it.

It is not very inspiring to fight for the freedom of the purveyors of pornography or their customers. But in the transition to statism, every infringement of human rights has begun with the suppression of a given right’s least attractive practitioners. In this case, the disgusting nature of the offenders makes it a good test of one’s loyalty to a principle.

[“Censorship: Local and Express,” PWNI, 211; pb 173.]

Only one aspect of sex is a legitimate field for legislation: the protection of minors and of unconsenting adults. Apart from criminal actions (such as rape), this aspect includes the need to ‘protect people from being confronted with sights they regard as loathsome. (A corollary of the freedom to see and hear, is the freedom not to look or listen.) Legal restraints on certain types of public displays, such as posters or window displays, are proper—but this is an issue of procedure, of etiquette, not of morality....

The rights of those who seek pornography would not be infringed by rules protecting the rights of those who find pornography offensive—e.g., sexually explicit posters may properly be forbidden in public places; warning signs, such as “For Adults Only.” may properly be required of private places which are open to the public. This protects the unconsenting, and has nothing to do with censorship, i.e., with prohibiting thought or speech.

[“Thought Control,” ARL, III, 2. 2.J

See also CENSORSHIP; HUMAN RIGHTS and PROPERTYRIGHTS; INDIVIDUAL, RIGHTS,- PROPERTY RIGHTS.

Free Will. That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call “free will” is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

[GS, FNI, 155; pb 127.]

To think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call “human nature,” the open secret you live with, yet dread to name. is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival—so that for you, who are a human being, the question “to be or not to be” is the question “to think or not to think.” “A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions.

(Ibid.. 146; pb 120.]

Man’s consciousness shares with animals the first two stages of its development: sensations and perceptions; but it is the third state, conceptions, that makes him man. Sensations are integrated into perceptions automatically, by the brain of a man or of an animal. But to integrate perceptions into conceptions by a process of abstraction, is a feat that man alone has the power to perform—and he has to perform it by choice. The process of abstraction, and of concept-formation is a process of reason, of thought; it is not automatic nor instinctive nor involuntary nor infallible. Man has to initiate it, to sustain it and to bear responsibility for its results. The pre-conceptual level of consciousness is nonvolitional ; volition begins with the first syllogism. Man has the choice to think or to evade—to maintain a state of full awareness or to drift from moment to moment, in a semi-conscious daze, at the mercy of whatever associational whims the unfocused mechanism of his consciousness produces.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 9; pb 14.]

Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. It is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one’s consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality—or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make.

When man unfocuses his mind, he may be said to be conscious in a subhuman sense of the word, since he experiences sensations and perceptions. But in the sense of the word applicable to man—in the sense of a consciousness which is aware of reality and able to deal with it, a consciousness able to direct the actions and provide for the survival of a human being—an unfocused mind is not conscious.

Psychologically, the choice “to think or not” is the choice “to focus or not.” Existentially, the choice “to focus or not” is the choice “to be conscious or not.” Metaphysically, the choice “to be conscious or not” is the choice of life or death....

A process of thought is not automatic nor “instinctive” nor involuntary—nor infallible. Man has to initiate it, to sustain it and to bear responsibility for its results. He has to discover how to tell what is true or false and how to correct his own errors; he has to discover how to validate his concepts, his conclusions, his knowledge; he has to discover the rules of thought, the laws of logic, to direct his thinking. Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of the efficacy of his mental effort.

Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced by him—by his own choice, by his own effort, by his own mind....

That which [man’s] survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every “is” implies an “ought.” Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 13; pb 21.]

The faculty of volition operates in regard to the two fundamental aspects of man’s life: consciousness and existence, i.e., his psychological action and his existential action, i.e., the formation of his own character and the course of action he pursues in the physical world.

[“What Is Romanticism?” RM, 82; pb 100.]

A social environment can neither force a man to think nor prevent him from thinking. But a social environment can offer incentives or impediments; it can make the exercise of one’s rational faculty easier or harder; it can encourage thinking and penalize evasion or vice versa.

[“Our Cultural Value-Deprivation,” TO, April 1966, 2.]

A man’s volition is outside the power of other men. What the unalterable basic constituents are to nature, the attribute of a volitional consciousness is to the entity “man.” Nothing can force a man to think. Others may offer him incentives or impediments, rewards or punishments, they may destroy his brain by drugs or by the blow of a club, but they cannot order his mind to function: this is in his exclusive, sovereign power. Man is neither to be obeyed nor to be commanded.

[“The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 38; pb 31.]

Because man has free will, no human choice—and no phenomenon which is a product of human choice—is metaphysically necessary. In regard to any man-made fact, it is valid to claim that man has chosen thus, but it was not inherent in the nature of existence for him to have done so: he could have chosen otherwise.

Choice, however, is not chance. Volition is not an exception to the Law of Causality; it is a type of causation.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 149.]

Man exists and his mind exists. Both are part of nature, both possess a specific identity. The attribute of volition does not contradict the fact of identity, just as the existence of living organisms does not contradict the existence of inanimate matter. Living organisms possess the power of self-initiated motion, which inanimate matter does not possess; man’s consciousness possesses the power of self-initiated motion in the realm of cognition (thinking), which the consciousnesses of other living species do not possess. But just as animals are able to move only in accordance with the nature of their bodies, so man is able to initiate and direct his mental action only in accordance with the nature (the identity) of his consciousness. His volition is limited to his cognitive processes; he has the power to identify (and to conceive of rearranging) the elements of reality, but not the power to alter them. He has the power to use his cognitive faculty as its nature requires, but not the power to alter it nor to escape the consequences of its misuse. He has the power to suspend, evade, corrupt or subvert his perception of reality, but not the power to escape the existential and psychological disasters that follow. (The use or misuse of his cognitive faculty deterrnines a man’s choice of values, which determine his emotions and his character. It is in this sense that man is a being of self-made soul.)

[“The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 32; pb 26. |

See also CAUSALITY; CONSCIOUSNESS; DETERMINISM; EVASION; FOCUS; METAPHYSICAL us. MAN-MADE; MORALITY; PERCEPTION; ROMANTICISM; REASON; THOUGHT/THINKING; SENSATIONS; STANDARD of VALUE; VOLITIONAL.

Freedom. What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.

[“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 46.]

Freedom, in a political context, has only one meaning: the absence of pltYlical coercion.

[Ibid.]

Since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are properties of the individual, since the choice to exercise his rational faculty or not depends on the individual, man’s survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don’t. Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man’s mind.

A rational mind does not work under compulsion; it does not subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone’s orders, directives, or controls; it does not sacrifice its knowledge, its view of the truth, to anyone’s opinions, threats, wishes, plans, or “welfare.” Such a mind may be hampered by others, it may be silenced, proscribed, imprisoned, or destroyed; it cannot be forced; a gun is not an argument. (An example and symbol of this attitude is Galileo.)

It is from the work and the inviolate integrity of such minds—from the intransigent innovators—that all of mankind’s knowledge and achievements have come. (See The Fountainhead.) It is to such minds that mankind owes its survival. (See Atlas Shrugged.)

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 17.]

Foggy metaphors, sloppy images, unfocused poetry, and equivocations—such as “A hungry man is not free”—do not alter the fact that only political power is the power of physical coercion.

[“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 46.]

Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, or freedom from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state—and nothing else.

[“Conservatism: An Obituary,” CUI, 192.]

The issue is not slavery for a “good” cause versus slavery for a “bad” cause; the issue is not dictatorship by a “good” gang versus dictatorship by a “bad” gang. The issue is freedom versus dictatorship.

[Ibid., 193.]

A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.

[“Man’s Rights,” VOS, 124; pb 93.)

If one upholds freedom, one must uphold man’s individual rights; it one upholds man’s individual rights, one must uphold his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness—which means: one must uphold a political system that guarantees and protects these rights—which means: the potitico-economic system of capitalism.

[“Conservatism: An Obituary,” CUI, 193.]

During the nineteenth century, mankind came close to economic freedom, for the first and only time in history. Observe the results. Observe also that the degree of a country’s freedom from government control, was the degree of its progress. America was the freest and achieved the most.

[“‘The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age,” pamphlet, 7.]

Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without ecoraomic freedom; a free mind and a free nearket are corollaries.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 23; pb 25.]

These two—reason and freedom—are corollaries, and their relationship is reciprocal: when men are rational, freedom wins; when men are free, reason wins.

[“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 80; pb 66.]

Do not be misled ... by an old collectivist trick which goes like this: there is no absolute freedom anyway, since you are not free to murder; society limits your freedom when it does not permit you to kill; therefore, society holds the right to limit your freedom in any manner it sees fit; therefore, drop the delusion of freedom—freedom is whatever society decides it is.

It is not society, nor any social right, that forbids you to kill—but the inalienable individual right of another man to live. This is not a “compromise” between two rights—but a line of division that preserves both rights untouched. The division is not derived from an edict of society—but from your own inalienable individual right. The definition of this limit is not set arbitrarily by society—but is implicit in the definition of your own right.

Within the sphere of your own rights, your freedom is absolute.

[“Textbook of Americanism,” pamphlet, 6.]

See also CAPITALISM; DICTATORSHIP; ECONOMIC POWER us. PO-LlTICAL POWER; FREE MARKET; GOVERNMENT; MIXED ECONOMY; PHYSICAL FORCE; RETALIATORY FORCE; STATISM.

Freud. According to [Freud’s] theory, the prime mover in human nature is an unperceivable entity with a will and purpose of its own, the unconscious—which is basically an “id,” i.e., a contradictory, amoral “it” seething with innate, bestial, primevally inherited, imperiously insistent cravings or “instincts.” In deadly combat with this element is man’s conscience or “superego,” which consists essentially, not of reasoned moral convictions, but of primitive, illogical, largely unconscious taboos or categorical imperatives, representing the mores of the child’s parents (and ultimately of society), whose random injunctions every individual unquestioningly “introjects” and cowers before. Caught in the middle between these forces—between a psychopathic hippie screaming: satisfaction now! and a jungle chieftain intoning: tribal obedience!—sentenced by nature to ineradicable conflict, guilt, anxiety, and neurosis is man, i.e., man’s mind, his reason or “ego,” the faculty which is able to grasp reality, and which exists primarily to mediate between the clashing demands of the psyche’s two irrational masters.

As this theory makes eloquently clear, Freud’s view of reason is fundamentally Kantian. Both men hold that human thought is ultimately governed, not by a man’s awareness of external fact, but by inner mental elements independent of such fact. Both see the basic task of the mind not as perception, but as creation, the creation of a subjective world in compliance with the requirements of innate (or “introjected”) mental structures....

The real root of the outrage his own doctrines provoked, Freud says with a certain pride, is their assault on “the self-love of humanity.” Whatever the “wounds” that men have suffered from earlier scientific theories, he explains, the “blow” of psychoanalysis “is probably the most wounding.” The blow, he states, is the idea that man is not “supreme in his own soul,” “that the ego is not master in its own house.” ...

Freud offers to the world not man the dutiful, decorous nonperceiver (as in Kant); not man the defeated plaything of grand-scale forces, such as a malevolent reality or God or society or a “tragic flaw” (as in the works of countless traditional cynics and pessimists); but man the defeated plaything of the gutter; man the smutty pawn shaped by sexual aberrations and toilet training, itching to rape his mother, castrate his father, hoard his excrement; man the sordid cheat who pursues science because he is a frustrated voyeur, practices surgery because he is a sublimating sadist, and creates the David because he craves, secretly, to mold his own feces.

Man as a loathsomely small, ordure-strewn pervert: such is the sort of “wound” that Freud inflicted on the being who had once been defined, in a radiantly different age, as the “rational animal.”

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 211; pb 198.]

See also BEHAVIORISM; EMOTIONS; KANT, IMMANUEL; MAN; PSYCHOLOGY; RATIONALIZATION; SELF; SUBCONSCIOUS.

“Frozen Abstraction,” Fallacy of. A fallacy which may be termed “the fallacy of the frozen abstraction” ... consists of substituting some one particular concrete for the wider abstract class to which it belongs—[e.g.,] substituting a specific ethics (altruism) for the wider abstraction of “ethics.” Thus, a man may reject the theory of altruism and assert that he has accepted a rational code—but, failing to integrate his ideas, he continues unthinkingly to approach ethical questions in terms established by altruism.

[“Collectivized Ethics,” VOS, 104; pb 81.]

See also ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; ALTRUISM; MORALITY; PRINCIPLES.

Fundamentality, Rule of. Now observe, on the above example [the definition of “man”], the process of determining an essential characteristic : the rule of furedamentality. When a given group of existents has more than one characteristic distinguishing it from other existents, man must observe the relationships among these various characteristics and discover the one on which all the others (or the greatest number of others) depend, i.e., the fundamental characteristic without which the others would not be possible. This fundamental characteristic is the essential distinguishing characteristic of the existents involved, and the proper defining characteristic of the concept.

Metaphysically, a fundamental characteristic is that distinctive characteristic which makes the greatest number of others possible; epistemologically, it is the one that explains the greatest number of others.

For instance, one could observe that man is the only animal who speaks English, wears wristwatches, flies airplanes, manufactures lipstick, studies geometry, reads newspapers, writes poems, darns socks, etc. None of these is an essential characteristic: none of them explains the others; none of them applies to all men; omit any or all of them, assume a man who has never done any of these things, and he will still be a man. But observe that all these activities (and innumerable others) require a conceptual grasp of reality, that an animal would not be able to understand them, that they are the expressions and consequences of man’s rational Faculty, that an organism without that faculty would not be a man—and you will know why man’s rational faculty is his essential distinguishing and defining characteristic.

[ITOE, 59.]

See also CONCEPTS; DEFINITIONS; IDENTITY.

G

Genocide. There is no principle by which genocide—a crime against a group of men—can be regarded as morally different from (or worse than) a crime against an individual: the difference is only quantitative, not moral. It can be easily demonstrated that Communism means and requires the extermination—the genocide, if you wish—of a particular human species: the men of ability.

[The Objectivist Calendar, June 1978.]

See also CRIME; INDIVIDUALISM; LIFE, RIGHT to; WAR.

Genus and Species. Just as a concept becomes a unit when integrated with others into a wider concept, so a genus becomes a single unit, a species, when integrated with others into a wider genus. For instance, “table” is a species of the genus “furniture,” which is a species of the genus “household goods,” which is a species of the genus “man-made objects.” “Man” is a species of the genus “animal,” which is a species of the genus “organism,” which is a species of the genus “entity.”

[ITOE, 54.]

See also CONCEPT-FORMATION; DEFINITIONS.

Goal-Directed Action. Only a living entity can have goals or can originate them. And it is only a living organism that has the capacity for self-generated, goal-directed action. On the physical level. the functions of all living organisms, from the simplest to the most complex—from the nutritive function in the single cell of an amoeba to the blood circulation in the body of a man—are actions generated by the organism itself and directed to a single goal: the maintenance of the organism’s life.

When applied to physical phenomena, such as the automatic functions of an organism, the term “goal-directed” is not to be taken to mean “purposive” (a concept applicable only to the actions of a consciousness) and is not to imply the existence of any teleological principle operating in insentient nature. I use the term “goal-directed,” in this context, to designate the fact that the automatic functions of living organisms are actions whose nature is such that they result in the preservation of an organism’s life.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 6; pb 16.]

See also LIFE; ULTIMATE VALUE: VALUES.

God. They claim that they perceive a mode of being superior to your existence on this earth. The mystics of spirit call it “another dimension,” which consists of denying dimensions. The mystics of muscle call it “the future,” which consists of denying the present. To exist is to possess identity. What identity are they able to give to their superior realm? They keep telling you what it is not, but never tell you what it is. All their identifications consist of negating: God is that which no human mind can know, they say—and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge—God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.

[GS, FNI, 184; pb 148.]

Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics.

For instance, God is infinite. Nothing can be infinite, according to the Law of Identity. Everything is what it is, and nothing else. It is limited in its qualities and in its quantity: it is this much, and no more. “Infinite” as applied to quantity does not mean “very large”: it means “larger than any specific quantity.” That means: no specific quantity—i.e.. a quantity without identity. This is prohibited by the Law of Identity.

Is God the creator of the universe? There can be no creation of something out of nothing. There is no nothing.

Is God omnipotent? Can he do anything? Entities can act only in accordance with their natures; nothing can make them violate their natures....

“God” as traditionally defined is a systematic contradiction of every valid metaphysical principle. The point is wider than just the Judeo-Christian concept of God. No argument will get you from this world to a supernatural world. No reason will lead you to a world contradicting this one. No method of inference will enable you to leap from existence to a “super-existence.”

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 2.]

See also AGNOSTICISM; ATHEISM; FAITH; IDENTITY; MYSTICISM; MYSTICS of SPIRIT and of MUSCLE; NATURE; REASON; RELIGION; SUPERNATURALISM; UNIVERSE.

Gold Standard. Gold and economic freedom are inseparable, ... the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and ... each implies and requires the other.

What medium of exchange will be acceptable to all participants in an economy is not determined arbitrarily. Where store-of-value considerations are important, as they are in richer, more civilized societies, the medium of exchange must be a durable commodity, usually a metal. A metal is generally chosen because it is homogeneous and divisible: every y unit is the same as every other and it can be blended or formed in any quantity. Precious jewels, for example, are neither homogeneous nor divisible.

More important, the commodity chosen as a medium must be a luxury. Human desires for luxuries are unlimited and, therefore, luxury goods are always in demand and will always be acceptable....

The term “luxury good” implies scarcity and high unit value. Having a high unit value, such a good is easily portable; for instance, an ounce of gold is worth a half-ton of pig iron....

Under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy’s stability and balanced growth.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold....

The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the “hidden” confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.

[Alan Greenspan, “Gold and Economic Freedom,” CUI, 96.]

See also DEFICIT FINANCING; FREEDOM; INFLATION; MONEY; PROPERTY RIGHTS; SAVINGS; WELFARE STATE.

Good, the. All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.

[GS, FNI, 149; pb 122.]

For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors—between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.

[Ibid.. 145; pb 120.]

There are, in essence, three schools of thought on the nature of the good: the intrinsic, the subjective, and the objective. The intrinsic theory holds that the good is inherent in certain things or actions as such, regardless of their context and consequences, regardless of any benefit or injury they may cause to the actors and subjects involved. It is a theory that divorces the concept of “good” from beneficiaries, and the concept of “value” from valuer and purpose—claiming that the good is good in, by, and of itself.

The subjectivist theory holds that the good bears no relation to the facts of reality, that it is the product of a man’s consciousness, created by his feelings, desires, “intuitions,” or whims, and that it is merely an “arbitrary postulate” or an “emotional commitment.”

The intrinsic theory holds that the good resides in some sort of reality, independent of man’s consciousness; the subjectivist theory holds that the good resides in man’s consciousness, independent of reality.

The objective theory holds that the good is neither an attribute of “things in themselves” nor of man’s emotional states, but an evaluation of the facts of reality by man’s consciousness according to a rational standard of value. (Rational, in this context, means: derived from the facts of reality and validated by a process of reason.) The objective theory holds that the good is an aspect of reality in relation to man—and that it must be discovered, not invented, by man. Fundamental to an objective theory of values is the question: Of value to whom and for what? An objective theory does not permit context-dropping or “concept-stealing”; it does not permit the separation of “value” from “purpose,” of the good from beneficiaries, and of man’s actions from reason.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 21.]

See also EVIL; INTRINSIC THEORY of ETHICS; LIFE; MORALITY; MYSTICAL ETHICS; SOCIAL THEORY of ETHICS; STANDARD of VALUE; SUBJECTIVISM.

Government. A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area.

[“The Nature of Government,” VOS, 144; pb 107.]

If physical force is to be barred from social relationships, men need an institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective code of rules.

This is the task of a government—of a proper government—its basic task, its only moral justification and the reason why men do need a government.

A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objertive control—i.e.. under objectively defined laws.

[Ibid., 147; pb 109.]

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality: such a government reverses its only moral purpose and switches from the role of protector to the role of man’s deadliest enemy, from the role of policeman to the role of a criminal vested with the right to the wielding of violence against victims deprived of the right of self-defense. Such a government substitutes for morality the following rule of social conduct: you may do whatever you please to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his.

[GS, FNI, 231; pb 183.]

The source of the government’s authority is “the consent of the governed.” This means that the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose.

[“The Nature of Government,” VOS, 149; pb 110.]

The difference between political power and any other kind of social “power,” between a government and any private organization, is the fact that a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force. This distinction is so important and so seldom recognized today that I must urge you to keep it in mind. Let me repeat it: a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.

No individual or private group or private organization has the legal power to initiate the use of physical force against other individuals or groups and to compel them to act against their own voluntary choice. Only a government holds that power. The nature of governmental action is: coercive action. The nature of political power is: the power to force obedience under threat of physical injury—the threat of property expropriation, imprisonment, or death.

[“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 46.]

The fundamental difference between private action and governmental action—a difference thoroughly ignored and evaded today—lies in the fact that a government holds a monopoly on the legal use of physical force. It has to hold such a monopoly, since it is the agent of restraining and combating the use of force; and for that very same reason, its actions have to be rigidly defined, delimited and circumscribed; no touch of whim or caprice should be permitted in its performance; it should be an impersonal robot, with the laws as its only motive power. If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled.

Under a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.

This is the means of subordinating “might” to “right.” This is the American concept of “a government of laws and not of men.”

[“The Nature of Government,” VOS, 148; pb 109.]

See also ANARCHISM; CAPITALISM; CUNSTITUTION; DICTATORSHIP; ECONOMIC POWER vs. POLITICAL POWER; FREEDOM; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; LAW, OBJECTIVE and NON-OBJECTIVE; PACIFISM; PHYSICAL FORCE; PROPERTY RIGHTS; RETALIATORY FORCE; SELF-DEFENSE; STATISM; WAR.

Government Grants and Scholarships. The fundamental evil of government grants is the fact that men are forced to pay for the support of ideas diametrically opposed to their own. This is a profound violation of an individual’s integrity and conscience. It is viciously wrong to take the money of rational men for the support of B.F. Skinner—or vice versa. The Constitution forbids a governmental establishment of religion, properly regarding it as a violation of individual rights. Since a man’s beliefs are protected from the intrusion of force, the same principle should protect his reasoned convictions and forbid governmental establishments in the field of thought.

[“The Establishing of an Establishment,” PWNI, 204; pb 168.]

How would Washington bureaucrats—or Congressmen, for that matter—know which scientist to encourage, particularly in so controversial a field as social science? The safest method is to choose men who have achieved some sort of reputation. Whether their reputation is deserved or not, whether their achievements are valid or not, whether they rose by merit, pull, publicity or accident, are questions which the awarders do not and cannot consider. When personal judgment is inoperative (or forbidden), men’s first concern is not how to choose, but how to justify their choice. This will necessarily prompt committee members, bureaucrats and politicians to gravitate toward “prestigious names.” The result is to help establish those already established—i.e., to entrench the status quo.

The worst part of it is the fact that this method of selection is not confined to the cowardly or the corrupt, that the honest official is obliged to use it. The method is forced on him by the terms of the situation. To pass an informed, independent judgment on the value of every applicant or project in every field of science, an official would have to be a universal scholar. If he consults “experts” in the field, the dilemma remains: either he has to be a scholar who knows which experts to consult—or he has to surrender his judgment to men trained by the very professors he is supposed to judge. The awarding of grants to famous “leaders,” therefore, appears to him as the only fair policy—on the premise that “somebody made them famous, somebody knows, even if I don’t.”

(If the officials attempted to by-pass the “leaders” and give grants to promising beginners, the injustice and irrationality of the situation would be so much worse that most of them have the good sense not to attempt it. If universal scholarship is required to judge the value of the actual in every field, nothing short of omniscience would be required to judge the value of the potentiat—as various privately sponsored contests to discover future talent, even in limited fields, have amply demonstrated.)

Furthermore, the terms of the situation actually forbid an honest official to use his own judgment. He is supposed to be “impartial” and “fair”—white considering awards in the social sciences. An official who does not have some knowledge and some convictions in this field, has no moral right to be a public official. Yet the kind of “fairness” demanded of him means that he must suspend, ignore or evade his own convictions (these would be challenged as “prejudices” or “censorship”) and proceed to dispose of large sums of public money, with incalculable consequences for the future of the country—without judging the nature of the recipients’ ideas, i.e., without using any judgment whatever.

The awarders may hide behind the notion that, in choosing recognized “leaders,” they are acting “democratically” and rewarding men chosen by the public. But there is no “democracy” in this field. Science and the mind do not work by vote or by consensus. The best-known is not necessarily the best (nor is the least-known, for that matter). Since no rational standards are applicable, the awarders’ method leads to concern with personalities, not ideas; pull, not merit; “prestige,” not truth. The result is: rule by press agents.

[Ibid., 202; pb 166.]

Many students of Objectivism ate troubled by a certain kind of moral dilemma confronting them in today’s society. We are frequently asked the questions: “Is it morally proper to accept scholarships, private or public?” and: “Is it morally proper for an advocate of capitalism to accept a government research grant or a government job?”

I shall hasten to answer: “Yes”—then proceed to explain and qualify it. There are many confusions on these issues, created by the influence and implications of the altruist morality.

There is nothing wrong in accepting private scholarships. The fact that a man has no claim on others (i.e., that it is not their moral duty to help him and that he cannot demand their help as his right) does not preclude or prohibit good will among men and does not make it immoral to offer or to accept voluntary, non-sacrificial assistance.

A different principle and different considerations are involved in the case of public (i.e., governmental) scholarships. The right to accept them rests on the right of the victims to the property (or some part of it) which was taken from them by force.

The recipient of a public scholarship is morally justified only so long as he regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism. Those who advocate public scholarships, have no right to them; those who oppose them, have. If this sounds like a paradox, the fault lies in the moral contradictions of welfare statism, not in its victims.

Since there is no such thing as the right of some men to vote away the rights of others, and no such thing as the right of the government to seize the property of some men for the unearned benefit of others—the advocates and supporters of the welfare state are morally guilty of robbing their opponents, and the fact that the robbery is legalized makes it morally worse, not better. The victims do not have to add self-inflicted martyrdom to the injury done to them by others; they do not have to let the looters profit doubly, by letting them distribute the money exclusively to the parasites who clamored for it. Whenever the welfare-state laws offer them some small restitution, the victims should take it....

The same moral principles and considerations apply to the issue of accepting social security, unemployment insurance or other payments of that kind. It is obvious, in such cases, that a man receives his own money which was taken from him by force, directly and specifically, without his consent, against his own choice. Those who advocated such laws are morally guilty, since they assumed the “right” to force employers and unwilling co-workers. But the victims, who opposed such laws, have a clear right to any refund of their own money—and they would not advance the cause of freedom if they left their money, unclaimed, for the benefit of the welfare-state administration.

The same moral principles and considerations apply to the issue of government research grants.

The growth of the welfare state is approaching the stage where virtually the only money available for scientific research will be government money. (The disastrous effects of this situation and the disgraceful state of government-sponsored science are apparent already, but that is a different subject. We are concerned here only with the moral dilemma of scientists.) Taxation is destroying private resources, while government money is flooding and taking over the field of research.

In these conditions, a scientist is morally justified in accepting government grants_so long as he opposes forms of welfare statism.As in case of scholarship-recipients, a scientist does not have to add self-martyrdom to the injustices he suffers.

[“The Question of Scholarships,” TO, June 1966, II.]

See also ALTRUISM; CENSORSHIP; CHARITY; FREE SPEECH; WEL-PARE STATE.

Grammar. Grammar is a science dealing with the formulation of the proper methods of verbal expression and communication, i.e., the methods of organizing words (concepts) into sentences. Grammar pertains to the actions of consciousness, and involves a number of special concepts—such as conjunctions, which are concepts denoting relationships among thoughts (“and,” “but,” “or,” etc.). These concepts are formed by retaining the distinguishing characteristics of the relationship and omitting the particular thoughts involved. [ITOE, 48.]

[ITOE, 48.]

Adverbs are concepts of the characteristics of motion (or action); they are formed by specifying a characteristic and omitting the measurements of the motion and of the entities invoked—e.g., “rapidly,” which may be applied to “walking” or “swimming” or “speaking,” etc., with the measurement of what is “rapid” left open and depending, in any given case, on the type of motion involved.

Prepositions are concepts of relationships, predominantly of spatial or temporal relationships, among existents; they are formed by specifying the relationship and omitting the measurements of the existents and of the space or time involved—e.g., “on,” “in,” “above,” “after,” etc.

Adjectives are concepts of attributes or of characteristics. Pronouns belong to the category of concepts of entities. Conjunctions. are concepts of relationships among thoughts, and belong to the category of concepts of consciousness.

[Ibid.,20.J

The purpose of conjunctions is verbal economy: they serve to integrate and/or condense the content of certain thoughts.

For instance, the word “and” serves to integrate a number of facts into one thought. If one says: “Smith, Jones and Brown are walking,” the “and” indicates that the observation “are walking” applies to the three individuals named. Is there an object in reality corresponding to the word “and”? No. Is there a fact in reality corresponding to the word “and”? Yes. The fact is that three men are walking—and that the word “and” integrates into one thought a fact which otherwise would have to be expressed by: “Smith is walking. Jones is walking. Brown is walking.”

The word “but” serves to indicate an exception to or a contradiction of the possible implications of a given thought. If one says: “She is beautiful, but dumb,” the “but” serves to condense the following thoughts: “This girl is beautiful. Beauty is a positive attribute, a value. Before you conclude that this girl is valuable, you must consider also her negative attribute: she is dumb.” If one says: “I work every day, but not on Sunday,” the “but” indicates an exception and condenses the following: “I work on Monday. I work on Tuesday. (And so on, four more times.) My activity on Sunday is different: I do not work on Sunday.”

(These examples are for the benefit of those victims of modern philosophy who are taught by Linguistic Analysis that there is no way to derive conjunctions from experience, i.e., from the facts of reality.)

[Ibid., 48.]

See also COMMUNICATION; CONCEPTS; LANGUAGE; LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS; PROPOSITIONS; WORDS.

Greece. See Ancient Greece.

Guild Socialism. The particulai form of economic organization, which is becoming more and more apparent in this country, as an outgrowth of the power of pressure groups, is one of the worst variants of statism: guild socialism. Guild socialism robs the talented young of their future—by freezing men into professional castes under rigid rules. It represents an open embodiment of the basic motive of most statists, though they usually prefer not to confess it: the entrenchment and protection of mediocrity from abler competitors, the shackling of the men of superior ability down to the mean average of their professions. That theory is not too popular among socialists (though it has its advocates) —but the most famous instance of its large-scale practice was Fascist Italy.

In the 1930’s, a few perceptive men said that Roosevelt’s New Deal was a form of guild socialism and that it was closer to Mussolini’s system than to any other. They were ignored. Today, the evidence is unmistakable.

It was also said that if fascism ever came to the United States, it would come disguised as socialism.

[“The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus,” CUI, 218.]

The [student] rebels’ notion that universities should be run by students and faculties was an open, explicit assault on the right attacked implicitly by all their other notions: the right of private property. And of all the various statist-collectivist systems, the one they chose as their goal is, politico-economically, the least practical; intellectually, the least defensible; morally, the most shameful: guild socialism.

Guild socialism is a system that abolishes the exercise of individual ability by chaining men into groups according to their line of work, and delivering the work into the group’s power, as its exclusive domain, with the group dictating the rules, standards, and practices of how the work is to be done and who shall or shall not do it.

Guild socialism is the concrete-bound, routine-bound mentality of a savage, elevated into a social theory. Just as a tribe of savages seizes a piece of jungle territory and claims it as a monopoly by reason of the fact of being there—so guild socialism grants a monopoly, not on a jungle forest or waterhole, but on a factory or a university—not by reason of a man’s ability, achievement, or even “public service,” but by reason of the fact that he is there.

Just as savages have no concept of causes or consequences, of past or future, and no concept of efficacy beyond the muscular power of their tribe—so guild socialists, finding themselves in the midst of an industrial civilization, regard its institutions as phenomena of nature and see no reason why the gang should not seize them.

If there is any one proof of a man’s incompetence, it is the stagnant mentality of a worker (or of a professor) who, doing some small, routine job in a vast undertaking, does not care to look beyond the lever of a machine (or the lectern of a classroom), does not choose to know how the machine (or the classroom) got there or what makes his job possible, and proclaims that the management of the undertaking is parasitical and unnecessary. Managerial work—the organization and integration of human effort into purposeful, large-scale, long-range activities—is. in the realm of action, what man’s conceptual faculty is in the realm of cognition. It is beyond the grasp and, therefore, is the first target of the self-arrested, sensory-perceptual mentality.

If there is any one way to confess one’s own mediocrity, it is the willingness to place one’s work in the absolute power of a group, particularly a group of one’s professional colleagues. Of any forms of tyranny, this is the worst; it is directed against a single human attribute: the mind —and against a single enemy: the innovator. The innovator, by definition, is the man who challenges the established practices of his profession. To grant a professional monopoly to any group, is to sacrifice human ability and abolish progress; to advocate such a monopoly, is to confess that one has nothing to sacrifice.

Guild socialism is the rule of, by, and for mediocrity. Its cause is a society’s intellectual collapse; its consequence is a quagmire of stagnation ; its historical example is the guild system of the Middle Ages (or, in modern times, the fascist system of Italy under Mussolini).

[“The Cashing-in: The Student ‘Rebellion,’ ” CUI, 261.]

What makes guild socialism cruder than (but not different from) most statist-collectivist theories is the fact that it represents the other, the usually unmentioned, side of altruism: it is the voice, not of the givers, but of the receivers. While most altruistic theorists proclaim “the common good” as their justification, advocate self-sacrificial service to the “community.” and keep silent about the exact nature or identity of the recipients of sacrifices—guild socialists brazenly declare themselves to he the recipients and present their claims to the community, demanding its services. If they want a monopoly on a given profession, they claim, the rest of the community must give up the right to practice it. If they want a university. they claim, the community must provide it.

[Ibid., 263.]

See also ALTRUISM; COLLECTIVISM; FASCISMINAZISM; MEDIOCRITY; NEW LEFT; SOCIALISM; STATISM.

H

Happiness. Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness—to value the failure of your values—is an insolent negation of morality. A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

[GS, FNI, 150; pb 123.]

Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy —a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.

Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but earn it by my own achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of the lives of others. Just as there are no contradictions in my values and no conflicts among my desires—so there are no victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned and do not view one another with a cannibal’s lust, men who neither make sacrifices nor accept them.

[Ibid., 162; pb 132.]

In psychological terms, the issue of man’s survival does not confront his consciousness as an issue of “life or death,” but as an issue of “happiness or suffering.” Happiness is the successful state of life, suffering is the warning signal of failure, of death. Just as the pleasure-pain mechanism of man’s body is an automatic indicator of his body’s welfare or injury, a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death—so the emotional mechanism of man’s consciousness is geared to perform the same function, as a barometer that registers the same alternative by means of two basic emotions: joy or suffering. Emotions are the automatic results of man’s value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man’s values or threatens them, that which is for him or against him—Hghtning calculators giving him the sum of his profit or loss.

But while the standard of value operating the physical pleasure-pain mechanism of man’s body is automatic and innate, determined by the nature of his body—the standard of value operating his emotional mechanism, is not. Since man has no automatic knowledge, he can have no automatic values; since he has no innate ideas, he can have no innate value judgments.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS. 23; pb 27.]

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. If a man values productive work, his happiness is the measure of his success in the service of his life. But if a man values destruction, like a sadist—or self-torture, like a masochist—or life beyond the grave, like a mystic—or mindless “kicks,” like the driver of a hotrod car—his alleged happiness is the measure of his success in the service of his own destruction. It must be added that the emotional state of all those irrationalists cannot be properly designated as happiness or even as pleasure: it is merely a moment’s relief from their chronic state of terror.

Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive by any random means, as a parasite, a moocher or a looter, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment—so he is free to seek his happiness in any irrational fraud, any whim, any delusion, any mindless escape from reality, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment nor to escape the consequences.

[Ibid., 24; pb 28.]

The maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not two separate issues. To hold one’s own life as one’s ultimate value, and one’s own happiness as one’s highest purpose are two aspects of the same achievement. Existentially, the activity of pursuing rational goals is the activity of maintaining one’s life; psychologically, its result, reward and concomitant is an emotional state of happiness. It is by experiencing happiness that one lives one’s life, in any hour, year or the whole of it. And when one experiences the kind of pure happiness that is an end in itself—the kind that makes one think: “This is worth living for”—what one is greeting and affirming in emotional terms is the metaphysical fact that life is an end in itself.

But the relationship of cause to effect cannot be reversed. It is only by accepting “man’s life” as one’s primary and by pursuing the rational values it requires that one can achieve happiness—not by taking “happiness” as some undefined, irreducible primary and then attempting to live by its guidance. If you achieve that which is the good by a rational standard of value, it will necessarily make you happy; but that which makes you happy, by some undefined emotional standard, is not necessarily the good. To take “whatever makes one happy” as a guide to action means: to be guided by nothing but one’s emotional whims. Emotions are not tools of cognition; to be guided by whims—by desires whose source, nature and meaning one does not know—is to turn oneself into a blind robot, operated by unknowable demons (by one’s stale evasions), a robot knocking its stagnant brains out against the walls of reality which it refuses to see.

[Ibid., 25; pb 29.]

See also BENEVOLENT UNIVERSE PREMISE; EMOTIONS; HEDONISM; LIFE; PLEASURE AND PAIN; SUFFERING; ULTIMATE VALUE; VALUES; WHIMSIWHIM-WORSHIP.

Hatred of the Good for Being the Good. See EnvylHatred of the Good for Being the Good..

Hedonism. I am profoundly opposed to the philosophy of hedonism. Hedonism is the doctrine which holds that the good is whatever gives you pleasure and, therefore, pleasure is the standard of morality. Objectivism holds that the good must be defined by a rational standard of value, that,pleasure is not a first cause, but only a consequence, that only the pleasure which proceeds from a rational value judgment can be regarded as moral, that pleasure, as such, is not a guide to action nor a standard of morality. To say that pleasure should be the standard of morality simply means that whichever values you happen to have chosen, consciously or subconsciously, rationally or irrationally, are right and moral. This means that you are to be guided by chance feelings, emotions and whims, not by your mind. My philosophy is the opposite of hedonism. I hold that one cannot achieve happiness by random, arbitrary or subjective means. One can achieve happiness only on the basis of rational values. By rational values, I do not mean anything that a man may arbitrarily or blindly declare to be rational. It is the province of morality, of the science of ethics, to define for men what is a national standard and what are the rational values to pursue.

[“Playboy’s, Interview with Ayn Rand.” pamphlet. 8.]

This is the fallacy inherent in hedonism—in any variant of ethical hedonism, personal or social, individual or collective. “Happiness” can properly be the purpose of ethics, but not the standard. The task of ethics is to define man’s proper code of values and thus to give him the means of achieving happiness. To declare, as the ethical hedonists do, that “the proper value is whatever gives you pleasure” is to declare that “the proper value is whatever you happen to value”—which is an act of intellectual and philosophical abdication, an act which merely proclaims the futility of ethics and invites all men to play it deuces wild.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS. 26; pb 29.]

In practice, men have no way of obeying the tenets of hedonism, except by taking their already formed feelings—their desires and aversions, their loves and fears—as the given, as irreducible primaries the satisfaction of which is the purpose of morality, regardless of whether the value judgments that caused these feelings are rational or irrational, consistent or contradictory, consonant with reality or in flagrant defiance of it.

Objectivism holds that such a policy is suicidal; that if man is to survive, he needs the guidance of an objective and rational morality, a code of values based on and derived from man’s nature as a specific type of living organism, and the nature of the universe in which he lives. Objectivism rejects any subjectivist ethics that begins, not with facts, but with: “I (we, they) wish...” Which means: it rejects hedonism of any variety.

[Leonard Peikoff, “Ethical Hedonism,” TON, Feb. 1962.7.]

See also EMOTIONS; HAPPINESS; PLEASURE and PAIN; UTILITARIANISM; STANDARD of VALUE; SUBJECTIVISM.

Hierarchy of Knowledge. Concepts have a hierarchical structure, i.e., ... the higher, more complex abstractions are derived from the simpler, basic ones (starting with the concepts of perceptually given concretes).

[ITOE, 41.]

[There is a] long conceptual chain that starts from simple, ostensive definitions and rises to higher and still higher concepts, forming a hierarchical structure of knowledge so complex that no electronic computer could approach it. It is by means of such chains that man has to acquire and retain his knowledge of reality.

[“The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” RM. 20; pb 18.]

Starting from the base of conceptual deveiopment—from the concepts that identify perceptual concretes—the process of cognition moves in two interacting directions: toward more extensive and more intensive knowledge, toward wider integrations and more precise differentiations. Following the process and in accordance with cognitive evidence, earlier-formed concepts are integrated into wider ones or subdivided into narrower ones.

[ITOE, 24.]

Observe that the concept “furniture” is an abstraction one step further removed from perceptual reality than any of its constituent concepts. “Table” is an abstraction, since it designates any table, but its meaning can be conveyed simply by pointing to one or two perceptual objects. There is no such perceptual object as “furniture”; there are only tables, chairs, beds, etc. The meaning of “furniture” cannot be grasped unless one has first grasped the meaning of its constituent concepts; these are its link to reality. (On the lower levels of an unlimited conceptual chain, this is an illustration of the hierarchical structure of concepts.)

[Ibid., 28.]

The first concepts man forms are concepts of entities—since entities are the only primary existents. (Attributes cannot exist by themselves, they are merely the characteristics of entities; motions are motions of entities; relationships are relationships among entities.)

[Ibid., 18.]

Since the definition of a concept is formulated in terms of other concepts, it enables man, not only to identify and retain a concept, but also to establish the relationships, the hierarchy, the integration of all his concepts and thus the integration of his knowledge. Definitions preserve, not the chronological order in which a given man may have learned concepts, but the logical order of their hierarchical interdependence.

[Ibid., 52.]

To know the exact meaning of the concepts one is using, one must know their correct definitions, one must be able to retrace the specific (logical, not chronological) steps by which they were formed, and one must be able to demonstrate their connection to their base in perceptual reality.

[Ibid., 67.]

See also AXlOMATlC CONCEPTS; AXIOMS; GENUS and SPECIES; IRREDUCIBLE PRIMARIES; KNOWLEDGE; LOGIC; PERCEPTION; “STOLEN CONCEPT,” FALLACY of; TABULA RASA.

History. Contrary to the prevalent views of today’s alleged scholars, history is not an unintelligible chaos ruled by chance and whim—historical trends can be predicted, and changed—men are not helpless, blind, doomed creatures carried to destruction by incomprehensible forces beyond their control.

There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man’s rational faculty—the power of ideas. If you know a man’s convictions, you can predict his actions. If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society, you can predict its course. But convictions and philosophy are matters open to man’s choice.

There is no fatalistic, predetermined historical necessity. Atlas Shrugged is not a prophecy of our unavoidable destruction, but a manifesto of our power to avoid it, if we choose to change our course.

It is the philosophy of the mysticism-altruism-collectivism axis that has brought us to our present state and is carrying us toward a finale such as that of the society presented in Atlas Shrugged. It is only the philosophy of the reason-individualism-capitalism axis that can save us and carry us, instead, toward the Atlantis projected in the last two pages of my novel.

[“Is Atlas Shrugging?” CUI, 165.]

Just as a man’s actions are preceded and determined by some form of idea in his mind, so a society’s existential conditions are preceded and determined by the ascendancy of a certain philosophy among those whose job is to deal with ideas. The events of any given period of history are the result of the thinking of the preceding period. The nineteenth century—with its political freedom, science, industry, business, trade, all the necessary conditions of material progress—was the result and the last achievement of the intellectual power released by the Renaissance. The men engaged in those activities were still riding on the remnants of an Aristotelian influence in philosophy, particularly on an Aristotelian epistemology (more implicitly than explicitly).

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 27; pb 28.]

History is made by minorities—or, more precisely, history is made by intellectual movements, which are created by minorities. Who belongs to these minorities? Anyone who is able and willing actively to concern himself with intellectual issues. Here, it is not quantity, but quality that counts (the quality—and consistency—of the ideas one is advocating).

[“What Can One Do?” PWNI, 245; pb 200.]

The battle of human history is fought and determined by those who are predominantly consistent, those who, for good or evil, are committed to and motivated by their chosen psycho-epistemology and its corollary view of existence.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 18; pb 21.]

See also ANCIENT GREECE; CIVILIZATION; CULTURE; DARK AGES; ENLIGHTENMENT, AGE of; INTELLECTUALS; MIDDLE AGES; NINETEENTH CENTURY; PHILOSOPHY; RENAISSANCE; TRADITION.

Honesty. Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud—that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness becomes the enemies you have to dread and flee—that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in footing—that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.

[GS, FNI, 158; pb 129.]

Self-esteem is reliance on one’s power to think. It cannot be replaced by one’s power to deceive. The self-confidence of a scientist and the self-confidence of a con man are not interchangeable states, and do not come from the same psychological universe. The success of a man who deals with reality augments his self-confidence. The success of a con man augments his panic.

The intellectual con man has only one defense against panic: the momentary relief he finds by succeeding at further and further frauds.

[“The Comprachicos,” NL, 181.]

The mark of an honest man ... is that he means what he says and knows what he means.

[‘Textbook of Americanism,“ 12.]

Intellectual honesty consists in taking ideas seriously. To take ideas seriously means that you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true.

[“Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 19; pb 16.]

Intellectual honesty [involves] knowing what one does know, constantly expanding one’s knowledge, and never evading or failing to correct a contradiction. This means: the development of an active mind as a permanent attribute.

[“What Can One Do?” PWNI, 247; pb 201.]

See also EVASION; INDEPENDENCE; INTEGRITY; MORALITY; RATIONALITY; TRUTH; VIRTUE.

Honor. Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.

[“Philosophy: Who Needs It,” PWNI, 12; pb 10.]

See also MORALITY; PRIDE; SELF-ESTEEM; VALUES.

Hostility. Caused by a profound self-doubt, self-condemnation and fear, hostility is a type of projection that directs toward other people the hatred which the hostile person feels toward himself. Blaming the evil of others for his own shortcomings, he feels a chronic need to justify himself by demonstrating their evil, by seeking it, by hunting for it—and by inventing it.

[“The Psychology of Psychologizing,” TO, March 1971, 3.]

See also AMORALISM; EMOTIONS; ENVYlHATRED of the GOOD for BEING the GOOD; EVASION.

Human Rights and Property Rights. The modern mystics of muscle who offer you the fraudulent alternative of “human rights” versus “property rights,” as if one could exist without the other, are making a last, grotesque attempt to revive the doctrine of soul versus body. Only a ghost can exist without material property; only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort. The doctrine that “human rights” are superior to “property rights” simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others; since the competent have nothing to gain from the incompetent, it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle. Whoever regards this as human and right, has no right to the title of “human.”

[GS, FNI, 230; pb 183.]

There is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.” No human rights can exist without property rights. Since material goods are produced by the mind and effort of individual men, and are needed to sustain their lives, if the producer does not own the result of his effort, he does not own his life. To deny property rights means to turn men into property owned by the state. Whoever claims the “right” to “redistribute” the wealth produced by others is claiming the “right” to treat human beings as chattel.

[“The Monument Builders,” VOS, 120; pb 91.]

See also FASCISM and COMMUNISM/SOCIALISM; FREEDOM; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; PROPERTY RIGHTS; SOUL-BODY DICHOTOMY.

Humility. There is no more despicable coward than the man who deserted the battle for his joy, fearing to assert his right to existence, lacking the courage and the loyalty to life of a bird or a flower reaching for the sun. Discard the protective rags of that vice which you call a virtue: humility—learn to value yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness—and when you learn that pride is the sum of all virtues, you will learn to live like a man.

[GS, FNI, 225; pb 179.]

Humility and presumptuousness are always two sides of the same premise, and always share the task of filling the space vacated by self esteem in a collectivized mentality. The man who is willing to serve as the means to the ends of others, will necessarily regard others as the means to his ends.

[“Collectivized Ethics,” VOS, 105; pb 81.]

Self-abasement is the antithesis of morality. If a man has acted immorally, but regrets it and wants to atone for it, it is not self-abasement that prompts him, but some remnant of love for moral values—and it is not self-abasement that he expresses, but a longing to regain his self-esteem. Humility is not a recognition of one’s failings, but a rejection of morality. “I am no good” is a statement that may be uttered only in the past tense. To say: “I am no good” is to declare: “—and I never intend to be any better.”

[“Moral Inflation,” ARL, III, 13, 1.]

See also ALTRUISM; MORALITY; PRIDE; SACRIFICE; SELF-ESTEEM.

Humor. Humor is the denial of metaphysical importance to that which you laugh at. The classic example: you see a very snooty, very well dressed dowager walking down the street, and then she slips on a banana peel.... What’s funny about it? It’s the contrast of the woman’s pretensions to reality. She acted very grand, but reality undercut it with a plain banana peel. That’s the denial of the metaphysical validity or importance of the pretensions of that woman.

Therefore, humor is a destructive element -which is quite all right, but its value and its morality depend on what it is that you are laughing at. If what you are laughing at is the evil in the world (provided that you take it seriously, but occasionally you permit yourself to laugh at it), that’s fine. [To] laugh at that which is good, at heroes, at values, and above all at yourself [is] monstrous.... The worst evil that you can do, psychulogically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face.

[Ayn Rand, question period following Lecture 11 of Leonard Peikoff’s series “The Philosophy of Objectivism” (1976).]

Humor is not an unconditional virtue; its moral character depends on its object. To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue; to laugh at the good, is a hideous vice. Too often, humor is used as the camouflage of moral cowardice.

[“Bootleg Romanticism,” RM, 126; pb 133.]

See also METAPHYSICAL; MORAL COWARDICE; SELF-ESTEEM; VIRTUE.

I

Identity. To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors—the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.

Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders’ attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.

[GS, FNI, 152; pb 125.]

A thing is—what it is; its characteristics constitute its identity. An existent apart from its characteristics, would be an existent apart from its identity, which means: a nothing, a non-existent.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” lTOE, 142.]

No matter how eagerly you claim that the goal of your mystic wishing is a higher mode of life, the rebellion against identity is the wish for non-existence. The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.

[GS, FNl, 187; pb 150.]

A characteristic is an aspect of an existent. It is not a disembodied, Platonic universal. Just as a concept cannot mean existents apart from their identity, so it cannot mean identities apart from that which exists. Existence is Identity.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 143. ]

The concept “identity” does not indicate the particular natures of the existents it subsumes; it merely underscores the primary fact that they are what they are.

[ITOE, 78.]

The law of identity does not permit you to have your cake and eat it, too. The law of causality does not permit you to eat your cake before you have it....

The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature.

[GS, FNI, 188; pb 152.]

The (implicit) concept “existent” undergoes three stages of development in man’s mind. The first stage is a child’s awareness of objects, of things—which represents the (implicit) concept “entity.” The second and closely allied stage is the awareness of specific, particular things which he can recognize and distinguish from the rest of his perceptual field—which represents the (implicit) concept “identity.”

[ITOE, 6.]

They proclaim that there is no law of identity, that nothing exists but change, and blank out the fact that change presupposes the concepts of what changes, from what and to what, that without the law of identity no such concept as “change” is possible.

[GS, FNI, 192; pb 154.]

See also ARIST0TLE; AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS; AXIOMS; CAc/.M/./rr: CHARACTER; ENTITY; EXISTENCE; IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE: INFINITY; LOGIC: SUBJECTIVISM; ZERO, REIFICATION of.

Ideology. A political ideology is a set of principles aimed at establishing or maintaining a certain social system; it is a program of long-range action, with the principles serving to unify and integrate particular steps into a consistent course. It is only by means of principles that men can project the future and choose their actions accordingly.

Anti-ideology consists of the attempts to shrink men’s minds down to the range of the immediate moment, without regard to past or future, without context or memory—above all, without memory, so that contradictions cannot be detected, and errors or disasters can be blamed on the victims.

In anti-ideological practice, principles are used implicitly and are relied upon to disarm the opposition, but are never acknowledged, and are switched’at will, when it suits the purpose of the moment. Whose purpose? The gang’s. Thus men’s moral criterion becomes, not “my view of the good—or of the right—or of the truth,” but “my gang, right or wrong.”

[“The Wreckage of the Consensus,” CUI, 222.]

A majority without an ideology is a helpless mob, to be taken over by anyone.... Political freedom requires much more than the people’s wish. It requires an enormously complex knowledge of political theory and of how to implement it in practice.

[“Theory and Practice,” CUI, 138.]

See also POLITICS; PHILOSOPHY; PRINCIPLES; REVOLUTION u.s. PUTSCH.

Imagination. Man’s imagination is nothing more than the ability to rearrange the things he has observed in reality.

[“The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 31; pb 25.]

Imagination is not a faculty for escaping reality, but a faculty for rearranging the elements of reality to achieve human values; it requires and presupposes some knowledge of the elements one chooses to rearrange. An imagination divorced from knowledge has only one product: a nightmare.... An imagination that replaces cognition is one of the surest ways to create neurosis.

[Ayn Rand, quoted in “The Montessori Method,” TO, July 1970, 7.]

See also CONSCIOUSNESS; CREATION; KNOWLEDGE; MENTAL HEALTH.

Immorality. See Evil.

Implicit Knowledge. Axiomatic concepts identify explicitly what is merely implicit in the consciousness of an infant or of an animal. (Implicit knowledge is passively held material which, to be grasped, requires a special focus and process of consciousness—a process which an infant learns to perform eventually, but which an animal’s consciousness is unable to perform.)

[ITOE, 76.]

Man grasps [the concept of “existent”] implicitly on the perceptual level—i.e., he grasps the constituents of the concept “existent,” the data which are later to be integrated by that concept. It is this implicit knowledge that permits his consciousness to develop further.

[Ibid., 6.]

That which is merely implicit is not in men’s conscious control; they can lose it by means of other implications, without knowing what it is that they are losing or when or why.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 62; pb 53.]

See also CONCEPTS; EXISTENT: KNOWLEDGE; PERCEPTION,- UNIT.

Important. See Metaphysical Value-Judgments.

Inalienability. When we say that we hold individual rights to be inalienable, we must mean just that. Inalienable means that which we may not take away, suspend, infringe, restrict or violate—not ever, not at any time, not for any purpose whatsoever.

You cannot say that “man has inalienable rights except in cold weather and on every second Tuesday,” just as you cannot say that “man has inalienable rights except in an emergency,” or “man’s rights cannot be violated except for a good purpose.”

Either man’s rights are inalienable, or they are not. You cannot say a thing such as “semi-inalienable” and consider yourself either honest or sane. When you begin making conditions, reservations and exceptions, you admit that there is something or someone above man’s rights, who may violate them at his discretion. Who? Why, society—that is, the Collective. For what reason? For the good of the Collective. Who decides when rights should be violated? The Collective. If this is what you believe, move over to the side where you belong and admit that you are a Collectivist.

[“Textbook of Americanism,” pamphlet, 12.]

See also ABSOLUTES; COLLECTIVISM; COMPROMISE; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS: PRINCIPLES.

Independence. Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it—that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life—that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.

[GS, FNI, 157; pb 128.]

No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth—and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.

[Ibid., 134; pb 126.]

Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience—that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible—that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error. In place of your dream of an omniscient automaton, accept the fact that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and that that is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his morality, his glory.

[Ibid., 224; pb 178.]

[An] error is committed by the man who declares that since man must be guided by his own independent judgment, any action he chooses to take is moral if he chooses it. One’s own independent judgment is the means by which one must choose one’s actions, but it is not a moral criterion nor a moral validation: only reference to a demonstrable principle can validate one’s choices.

[“Introduction,” VOS xiv; pb x.]

See also CREATORS; INTEGRITY; RATIONALITY; SFCOND-HANDERS; SELFISHNESS; VIRTUE.

Individual Rights. A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)

The concept of a “right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.

Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive-of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.

The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.

[“Man’s Rights,” VOS, 124; pb 93.|

“Rights” are a moral concept—the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others—the concept that preserves and protects inetividual morality in a social context—the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the meansof subordinating society to moral law.

[Ibid., ) 122; pb 92.]

Man holds these rights, not from the Collective nor for the Collective, but against the Collective-as a barrier which the Collective cannot cross; ... these rights are man’s protection against all other men.

[“Textbook of Americanism,” pamphlet, 5.]

The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man’s rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.

[GS, FNI, 229; pb 182.]

Since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are properties of the individual, since the choice to exercise his rational faculty or not depends on the individual, man’s survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don’t. Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man’s mind.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 17.]

Individual rights is the only proper principle of human coexistence, because it rests on man’s nature, i.e., the nature and requirements of a conceptual consciousness. Man gains enormous values from dealing with other men; living in a human society is his proper way of life—but only on certain conditions. Man is not a lone wolf and he is not a social animal. He is a contractual animal. He has to plan his life long-range, make his own choices, and deal with other men by voluntary agreement (and he has to be able to rely on their observance of the agreements they entered).

[“A Nation’s Unity,” ARL, II, 2, 3.]

A right is the sanction of independent action. A right is that which can be exercised without anyone’s permission.

If you exist only because society permits you to exist—you have no right to your own life. A permission can be revoked at any time.

If, before undertaking some action, you must obtain the permission of society—you are not free, whether such permission is granted to you or not. Only a slave acts on permission. A permission is not a right.

Do not make the mistake, at this point, of thinking that a worker is a slave and that he holds his job by his employer’s permission. He does not hold it by permission—but by contract that is, by a voluntary mutual agreement. A worker can quit his job. A slave cannot.

[“Textbook of Americanism,” pamphlet, 5.]

The Right to the Pursuit of Happiness means man’s right to live for himself, to choose what constitutes his own private, personal, individual happiness and to work for its achievement, so long as he respects the same right in others. It means that Man cannot be forced to devote his life to the happiness of another man nor of any number of other men. It means that the collective cannot decide what is to be the pur pose of a man’s existence nor prescribe his choice of happiness.

[ lbid.,]

Since Man has inalienable individual rights, this means that the same rights are held, individually, by every man, by all men, at all times. Therefore, the rights of one man cannot and must not violate the rights of another.

For instance: a man has the right to live, but he has no right to take the life of another. He has the right to be free, but no right to enslave another. He has the right to choose his own happiness, but no right to decide that his happiness lies in the misery (or murder or robbery or enslavement) of another. The very right upon which he acts defines the same right of another man, and serves as a guide to tell him what he may or may not do.

[Ibid., 6.]

It is not society, nor any social right, that forbids you to kill—but the inalienable individual right of another man to live, This is not a “compromise” between two rights—but a line of division that preserves both rights untouched. The division is not derived from an edict of society—but from your own inalienable individual right. The definition of this limit is not set arbitrarily by society—but is implicit in the definition of your own right.

Within the sphere of your own rights, your freedom is absolute.

[Ibid., 7.]

A right cannot be violated except by physical force. One man cannot deprive another of his life, nor enslave him, nor forbid him to pursue his happiness, except by using force against him. Whenever a man is made to act without his own free, personal, individual, voluntary consent —his right has been violated.

Therefore, we can draw a clear-cut division between the rights of one man and those of another. It is an objective division—not subject to differences of opinion, nor to majority decision, nor to the arbitrary decree of society. No man has the right to initiate the useof physical force against another man.

[ Ibid., 6.]

There is no such thing as “a right to a job”—there is only the right of free trade, that is: a man’s right to take a job if another man chooses to hire him. There is no “right to a home,” only the right of free trade: the right to build a home or to buy it. There are no “rights to a ‘fair’ wage or a ‘fair’ price” if no one chooses to pay it, to hire a man or to buy his product. There are no “rights of consumers” to milk, shoes, movies or champagne if no producers choose to manufacture such items (there is only the right to manufacture them oneself). There are no “rights” of special groups, there are no “rights of farmers, of workers, of businessmen, of employees, of employers, of the old, of the young, of the unborn.” There are only the Rights of Man—rights possessed by every individual man and by all men as individuals.

[“Man’s Rights,” VOS, 130; pb 97.]

If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.

Any alleged “right” of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.

No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as “the right to enslave.”

[Ibid., 129; pb 96.]

The end does not justify the means. No one’s rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others.

[“The Cashing-In: The Student ‘Rebellion,’ ” CUI, 256.]

Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression “individual rights” is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today’s intellectual chaos). But the expression “collective rights” is a contradiction in terms.

[“Collectivized ‘Rights,’ ” VOS, 136; pb 101.]

A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations.

[Ibid., 137; pb 102.]

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

[Ibid., 140; pb 104.]

When individual rights are abrogated, there is no way to determine who is entitled to what; there is no way to determine the justice of anyone’s claims, desires, or interests. The criterion, therefore, reverts to the tribal concept of: one’s wishes are limited only by the power of one’s gang. In order to survive under such a system, men have no choice but to fear, hate, and destroy one another; it is a system of underground plotting, of secret conspiracies, of deals, favors, betrayals, and sudden, bloody coups.

[“The Roots of War,” CUI, 37.]

One of the notions used by all sides to justify the draft, is that “rights impose obligations. Obligations, to whom?—and imposed, by whom? Ideologically, that notion is worse than the evil it attempts to justify: it implies that rights are a gift from the state, and that a man has to buy them by offering something (his life) in return. Logically, that notion is a contradiction: since the only proper function of a government is to protect man’s rights, it cannot claim title to his life in exchange for that protection.

The only “obligation” involved in individual rights is an obligation imposed, not by the state, but by the nature of reality (i.e., by the law of identity): consistency, which, in this case, means the obligation to respect the rights of others, if one wishes one’s own rights to be recognized and protected.

[“The Wreckage of the Consensus,” CUI, 227.]

An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).

[“Of Living Death,” TO, Oct. 1968, 6.]

The concept of individual rights is so prodigious a feat of political thinking that few men grasp it fully—and two hundred years have not been enough for other countries to understand it. But this is the concept to which we owe our lives—the concept which made it possible for us to bring into reality everything of value that any of us did or will achieve or experience.

[“A Nation’s Unity,” ARL, II,2,3.]

See also AMERICA; CAPITALISM; COLLECTIVISM; DICTATORSHIP; FREEDOM; HUMAN RIGHTS and PROPERTY RIGHTS; INALIENABILITY; INDIVIDUALISM; LIFE, RIGHT to; PERMISSION (vs. RIGHTS); PHYSICAL FORCE; POLITICS; PRINCIPLES; PROPERTY RIGHTS; PURSUIT of HAPPINESS, RIGHT to; RETALIATORY FORCE; SELF-DEFENSE; STATISM; TYRANNY.

Individualism. Individualism regards man—every man—as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful coexistence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights—and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.

[“Racism,” VOS, 176; pb 129.]

Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: “I’ll do as I please at everybody else’s expense.” An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man—his own and those of others.

An individualist is a man who says: “I will not run anyone’s life—nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule nor be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave.will not sacrifice myself to anyone—nor sacrifice anyone to myself.”

[“Textbook of Americanism,” pamphlet, 6.]

The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred.

We inherit the products of the thought of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make a cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane. But all through the process what we receive from others is only the end product of their thinking. The moving force is the creative faculty which takes this product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator. Men learn from one another. But all learning is only the exchange of material. No man can give another the capacity to think. Yet that capacity is our only means of survival.

[“The Soul of an Individualist,” FNI, 91; pb 78.]

Mankind is not an entity, an organism, or a coral bush. The entity involved in production and trade is man. It is with the study of man— not of the loose aggregate known as a “community”—that any science of the humanities has to begin....

A great deal may be learned about society by studying man; but this process cannot be reversed: nothing can be learned about man by studying society—by studying the inter-relationships of entities one has never identified or defined.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 15.]

See also CAPITALISM; COLLECTIVISM; “COMMON GOOD”; COOPERATION; FREE WILL; FREEDOM; INDEPENDENCE; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH; REASON; SACRIFICE; SELFISHNESS; SOCIAL SYSTEM; SOCIETY.

Induction and Deduction. The process of forming and applying concepts contains the essential pattern of two fundamental methods of cognition: induction and deduction.

The process of observing the facts of reality and of integrating them into concepts is, in essence, a process of induction. The process of subsuming new instances under a known concept is, in essence, a process of deduction.

[ITOE, 36.]

See also CONCEPT-FORMATION; LOGIC; PROPOSITIONS; RATIONALISM vs. EMPIRICISM.

Infinity. There is a use of [the concept) “infinity” which is valid, as Aristotle observed, and that is the mathematical use. It is valid only when used to indicate a potentiality, never an actuality. Take the number series as an example. You can say it is infinite in the sense that, no matter how many numbers you count, there is always another number. You can always keep on counting; there’s no end. In that sense it is infinite—as a potential. But notice that, actually, however many numbers you count, wherever you stop, you only reached that point, you only got so far.... That’s Aristotle’s point that the actual is always finite. Infinity exists only in the form of the ability of certain series to be extended indefinitely; but however much they are extended, in actual fact, wherever you stop it is finite.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), question period, Lecture 3.]

An arithmetical sequence extends into infinity, without implying that infinity actually exists; such extension means only that whatever number of units does exist, it is to be included in the same sequence.

[ITOE, 22.]

Every unit of length, no matter how small, has some specific extension; every unit of time,‘ no matter how small, has some specific duration. The idea of an infinitely small amount of length or temporal duration has validity only as a mathematical device useful for making certain calculations, not as a description of components of reality. Reality does not contain either points or instants (in the mathematical sense). By analogy: the average family has 2.2 children, but no actual family has 2.2 children; the “average family” exists only as a mathematical device.

[Harry Binswanger, “Q & A Department: Identity and Motion,” TOF, Dec. 1981, 13.]

See also IDENTITY; MATHEMATICS; NUMBERS; UNIVERSE.

Inflation. “Inflation” is defined in the dictionary as “undue expansion or increase of the currency of a country, esp. by the issuing of paper money not redeemable in specie” (Random House Dictionary). It is interesting to note that the word “inflated” is defined as “distended with air or gas; swollen.”

This last is not a coincidence: in regard to social issues, “inflation” does not mean growth, enlargement or expansion, it means an “undue” —or improper or fraudulent—expansion. The expansion of a country’s currency (which, incidentally, cannot be perpetrated by private citizens, only by the government) consists in palming off, as values, a stream of paper backed by nothing but promises (or hot air) and getting actual values, the citizens’ goods or services, in return—until the country’s wealth is drained. A similar activity, in private performance, is the passing of checks on a non-existent bank account. But, in private performance, this is regarded as a crime—and most people understand why such an activity cannot last for long.

Today, people are beginning to understand that the government’s account is overdrawn, that a piece of paper is not the equivalent of a gold coin, or an automobile, or a loaf of bread—and that if you attempt to falsify monetary values, you do not achieve abundance, you merely debase the currency and go bankrupt.

[“Moral Inflation,” ARL, III, 12, 1.]

Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the gouvernment: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people’s savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments.

[“Who Will Protect Us from Our Protectors?” TON, May 1962, 18.]

The law of supply and demand is not to be conned. As the supply of money (of claims) increases relative to the supply of tangible assets in the economy, prices must eventually rise. Thus the earnings saved by the productive members of the society lose value in terms of goods. When the economy’s books are finally balanced, one finds that this loss in value represents the goods purchased by the government for welfare on other purposes with the money proceeds of the government bonds financed by bank credit expansion.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold.

[Alan Greenspan, “Gold and Economic Freedom,” CUI, 101.]

There is only one institution that can arrogate to itself the power legally to trade by means of rubber checks: the government. And it is the only institution that can mortgage your future without your knowledge or consent: government securities (and paper money) are promissory notes on future tax receipts, i.e., on your future production.

[“Egalitarianism and Inflation,” PWNI, 156; pb 128.]

The “wage-price spiral,” which is merely a consequence of inflation, is being blamed as its cause, thus deflecting the blame from the real culprit: the government. But the government’s guilt is hidden by the esoteric intricacies of the national budget and of international finance —which the public cannot be expected to understand—while the disaster of nationwide strikes is directly perceivable by everyone and gives plausibility to the public’s growing resentment of labor unions.

[“The Moratorium on Brains,” ARI., 1, 3, 3.]

You have heard economists say that they are puzzled by the nature of today’s problem: they are unable to understand why inflation is accompanied by recession—which is contrary to their Keynesian doctrines; and they have coined a ridiculous name for it: “stagflation.” Their theories ignore the fact that money can function only so long as it represents actual goods—and that at a certain stage of inflating the money supply, the government begins to consume a nation’s investment capital, thus making production impossible.

[“Egalitarianism and Inflation,” PWNI, 163; pb 134.]

See also CAPITALISM; DEFICIT FINANCING; GOLD STANDARD; MONEY; SAVINGS.

Innate Ideas. See Tabula Rasa.

“Instinct.” An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An “instinct” is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man’s desire to live is not automatic.... Your fear of death is not a love for life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

[GS, FNI, 148; pb 121.]

[Man] is born naked and unarmed, without fangs, claws, horns or “instinctual” knowledge.

[“The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” NL, 136.]

Man has no automatic code of survival. He has no automatic course of action, no automatic set of values. His senses do not tell him automatically what is good for him or evil, what will benefit his life or endanger it, what goals he should pursue and what means will achieve them, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. His own consciousness has to discover the answers to all these questions—but his consciousness will not function automatically.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS , 11; pb 19.]

Since man has no automatic knowledge, he can have no automatic values; since he has no innate ideas, he can have no innate value judgments.

Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but. at birth, both are “tabula rasa.”

[Ibid., 23; pb 27.]

See also EMOTIONS; FREE WILL; FREUD; GOAL-DIRECTED ACTION; TABULA RASA.

Integration (Mental). Consciousness, as a state of awareness, is not a passive state, but an active process that consists of two essentials: differentiation and integration.

[ITOE, 5.]

Integration is a cardinal function of man’s consciousness on all the levels of his cognitive development. First, his brain brings order into his sensory chaos by integrating sense data into percepts; this integration is performed automatically; it requires effort, but no conscious volition.

His next step is the integration of percepts into concepts, as he learns to speak. Thereafter, his cognitive development consists in integrating concepts into wider and ever wider concepts, expanding the range of his mind. This stage is fully volitional and demands an unremitting effort.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 57.]

A concept is a mental integration of two or more units which are isolated according to a specific characteristic(s) and united by a specific definition.... [In concept-formation], the uniting involved is not a mere sum, but an integration, i.e., a blending of the units into a single, new mental entity which is used thereafter as a single unit of thought (but which can be broken into its component units whenever required).

[ITOE, 11.]

[The] enemies of reason seem to know that integration is the psycho-epistemological key to reason ... and that if reason is to be destroyed, it is man’s integrating capacity that has to be destroyed.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 77.]

Integration is the essential part of understanding.

[“The Comprachicos,” NL, 208.]

See also CONCEPT-FORMATION; CONCEPTS; CONSCIOUSNESS; LEARNING; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; SENSATIONS; UNDERSTANDING.

Integrity. Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence—that man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and that he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions—that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may not sacrifice his convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole of mankind shouting pleas or threats against him—that courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one’s own consciousness.

[GS, FNI, 157; pb 128.]

The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not “selflessness” or “sacrifice,” but integrity. Integrity is loyalty to one’s convictions and values; it is the policy of acting in accordance with one’s values, of expressing, upholding and translating them into practical reality. If a man professes to love a woman, yet his actions are indifferent, inimical or damaging to her, it is his lack of integrity that makes him immoral.

[“The Ethics of Emergencies,” VOS, 51 ; pb 46.]

Integrity does not consist of loyalty to one’s subjective whims, but of loyalty to rational principles.

[“Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?” VOS, 87; pb 69.]

See also COMPROMISE; HONESTY; RATIONALITY; SUBJECTIVISM; SACRIFICE; VIRTUE; WHIMS/WHIM-WORSHIP.

Intellectuals. The professional intellectual is the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the philosopher. The intellectual carries the application of philosophical principles to every field of human endeavor. He sets a society’s course by transmitting ideas from the “ivory tower” of the philosopher to the university professor—to the writer—to the artist—to the newspaperman—to the politician—to the movie maker—to the night-club singer—to the man in the street. The intellectual’s specific professions are in the field of the sciences that study man, the so-called “humanities,” but for that very reason his influence extends to all other professions. Those who deal with the sciences studying nature have to rely on the intellectual for philosophical guidance and information: for moral values, for social theories, for political premises, for psychological tenets and, above all, for the principles of epistemology, that crucial branch of philosophy which studies man’s means of knowledge and makes all other sciences possible. The intellectual is the eyes, ears and voice of a free society: it is his job to observe the events of the world, to evaluate their meaning and to inform the men in all the other fields.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 25: pb 27.]

[The intellectuals] are a group that holds a unique prerogative: the potential of being either the most productive or the most parasitical of all social groups.

The intellectuals serve as guides, as trend-setters, as the transmission belts or middlemen between philosophy and the culture. If they adopt a philosophy of reason—if their goal is the development of man’s rational faculty and the pursuit of knowledge—they are a society’s most productive and most powerful group, because their work provides the base and the integration of all other human activities. If the intellectuals are dominated by a philosophy of irrationalism, they become a society’s unemployed and unemployable.

From the early nineteenth century on, American intellectuals—with very rare exceptions—were the humbly obedient followers of European philosophy, which had entered its age of decadence. Accepting its fundamentals, they were unable to deal with or even to grasp the nature of this country.

[“A Preview,” ARL, 1, 24, 1.]

Historically, the professional intellectual is a very recent phenomenon : he dates only from the industrial revolution. There are no professional intellectuals in primitive, savage societies, there are only witch doctors. There were no professional intellectuals in the Middle Ages, there were only monks in monasteries. In the post-Renaissance era, prior to the birth of capitalism, the men of the intellect—the philosophers, the teachers, the writers, the early scientists—were men without a profession, that is: without a socially recognized position, without a market, without a means of earning a livelihood. Intellectual pursuits had to depend on the accident of inherited wealth or on the favor and financial support of some wealthy protector. And wealth was not earned on an open market, either; wealth was acquired by conquest, by force, by political power, or by the favor of those who held political power. Tradesmen were more vulnerably and precariously dependent on favor than the intellectuals.

The professional businessman and the professional intellectual came into existence together, as brothers born of the industrial revolution. Both are the sons of capitalism—and if they perish. they will perish together. The tragic irony will be that they will have destroyed each other; and the major share of the guilt will belong to the intellectual.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 6; pb 12.]

See also BUSINESSMEN; CULTURE; HISTORY; PHILOSOPHY.

Intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to deal with a broad range of abstractions. Whatever a child’s natural endowment, the use of intelligence is an acquired skill. It has to be acquired by a child’s own effort and automatized by his own mind, but adults can help or hinder him in this crucial process.

[“The Comprachicos,” NL. 195.]

[Man] survives by means of man-made products, and ... the source of man-made products is man’s intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to grasp the facts of reality and to deal with them long-range (i.e., conceptually). On the axiom of the primacy of existence, intelligence is man’s most precious attribute. But it has no place in a society ruled by the primacy of consciousness: it is such a society’s deadliest enemy.

Today, intelligence is neither recognized nor rewarded, but is being systematically extinguished in a growing flood of brazenly flaunted irrationality.

[“The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWN1, 40; pb 32.]

Intelligence is not an exclusive monopoly of genius; it is an attribute of all men, and the differences are only a matter of degree. If conditions of existence are destructive to genius, they are destructive to every man, each in proportion to his intelligence. If genius is penalized, so is the faculty of intelligence in every other man. There is only this difference: the average man does not possess the genius’s power of self-confident resistance, and will break much faster; he will give up his mind, in hopeless bewilderment, under the first touch of pressure.

[“Requiem for Man,” CUI, 306.]

See also ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; AUTOMATIZATION; CONCEPTS; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; REASON; UNDERSTANDING.

Interest (on loans). If you have wondered how one can start producing, when nature requires time paid in advance, this is the beneficent process that enables men to do it: a successful man lends his goods to a promising beginner (or to any reputable producer)—in exchange for the payment of interest. The payment is for the risk he is taking: nature does not guarantee man’s success, neither on a farm nor in a factory. If the venture fails, it means that the goods have been consumed without a productive return, so the investor loses his money; if the venture succeeds, the producer pays the interest out of the new goods, the profits, which the investment enabled him to make.

[“Egalitarianism and Inflation,” PWNI, 159; pb 131.]

See also CREDIT; INVESTMENT; MONEY; SAVINGS.

Interventionism (economic). A “mixed economy” is a society in the process of committing suicide.

If a nation cannot survive half-slave, half-free, consider the condition of a nation in which every social group becomes both the slave and the enslaver of every other group. Ask yourself how long such a condition can last and what is its inevitable outcome.

When government controls are introduced into a free economy, they create economic dislocations, hardships, and problems which, if the controls are not repealed, necessitate still further controls, which necessitate still further controls, etc. Thus a chain reaction is set up: the victimized groups seek redress by imposing controls on the profiteering groups, who retaliate in the same manner, on an ever widening scale.

[“Statism Is the Only Victor in Cold Civil War,” Los Angeles Times, July 22, 1962.]

Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others. By what criterion of justice is a consensus-government to be guided? By the size of the victim’s gang.

[“The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus,” CUI, 205.]

If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.

Since there is no rational justification for the sacrifice of some men to others, there is no objective criterion by which such a sacrifice can be guided in practice. All “public interest” legislation (and any distribution of money taken by force from some men for the unearned benefit of others) comes down ultimately to the grant of an undefined, undefinable, non-objective, arbitrary power to some government officials.

The worst aspect of it is not that such a power can be used dishonestly, but that it cannot be used honestly.

[“The Pull Peddlers,” CUI, 170.]

See also CAPITALISM; FREE MARKET; GOVERNMENT; LOBBYING; MIXED ECONOMY; “PUBLIC INTEREST,” the; WELFARE STATE.

Intrinsic Theory of Values. There are, in essence, three schools of thought on the nature of the good: the intrinsic, the subjective, and the objective. The intrinsic theory holds that the good is inherent in certain things or actions as such, regardless of their context and consequences, regardless of any benefit or injury they may cause to the actors and subjects involved. It is a theory that divorces the concept of “good” from beneficiaries, and the concept of “value” from valuer and purpose —claiming that the good is good in, by, and of itself.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 21.]

The intrinsic theory holds that the good resides in some sort of reality, independent of man’s consciousness.

[Ibid., 22.]

If a man believes that the good is intrinsic in certain actions, he will not hesitate to force others to perform them. If he believes that the human benefit or injury caused by such actions is of no significance, he will regard a sea of blood as of no significance. If he believes that the beneficiaries of such actions are irrelevant (or interchangeable), he will regard wholesale slaughter as his moral duty in the service of a “higher” good. It is the intrinsic theory of values that produces a Robespierre, a Lenin, a Stalin, or a Hitler. It is not an accident that Eichmann was a Kantian.

[Ibid.]

See also GOOD, the; MORALITY; MYSTICAL ETHICS; OBJECTIVE THEORY OF VALUES; OBJECTIVITY; PHYSICAL FORCE; SOCIAL THEORY OF ETHICS; SUBJECTIVISM.

Introspection. Extrospection is a process of cognition directed outward—a process of apprehending some existent(s) of the external world. Introspection is a process of cognition directed inward—a process of apprehending one’s own psychological actions in regard to some existent(s) of the external world, such actions as thinking, feeling, reminiscing, etc. It is only in relation to the external world that the various actions of a consciousness can be experienced, grasped, defined or communicated.

[ITOE, 37.]

A major source of men’s earned guilt in regard to philosophy—as well as in regard to their own minds and lives—is failure of introspection. Specifically, it is the failure to identify the nature and causes of their emotions.

An emotion as such tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something. Without a ruthlessly honest commitment to introspection—to the conceptual identification of your inner states—you will not discover what you feel, what arouses the feeling, and whether your feeling is an appropriate response to the facts of reality, or a mistaken response, or a vicious illusion produced by years of self-deception. The men who scorn or dread introspection take their inner states for granted, as an irreducible and irresistible primary, and let their emotions determine their actions. This means that they choose to act without knowing the context (reality), the causes (motives), and the consequences (goals) of their actions.

The field of extrospection is based on two cardinal questions: “What do I know?” and “How do I know it?” In the field of introspection, the two guiding questions are: “What do I feel?” and “Why do I feel it?”

[“Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 20; pb 17.]

In regard to one’s own feelings, only a rigorously conscientious habit of introspection can enable one to be certain of the nature and causes of one’s emotional responses.

[“The Age of Envy,” NL, 154.]

The formation of introspective concepts follows the same principles as the formation of extrospective concepts. A concept pertaining to consciousness is a mental integration of two or more instances of a psychological process possessing the same distinguishing characteristics, with the particular contents and the measurements of the action’s intensity omitted—on the principle that these omitted measurements must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity (i.e., a given psychological process must possess some content and some degree of intensity, but may possess any content or degree of the appropriate category).

[ITOE, 40.]

See also BEHAVIORISM; CONCEPTS; CONSCIOUSNESS; EMOTIONS; PSYCHOLOGY; RATIONALIZATION; VALUES.

Invalid Concepts. There are such things as invalid concepts, i.e., words that represent attempts to integrate errors, contradictions or false propositions, such as concepts originating in mysticism—or words without specific definitions, without referents, which can mean anything to anyone, such as modern “anti-concepts.” Invalid concepts appear occasionally in men’s languages, but are usually—though not necessarily—short-lived, since they lead to cognitive dead-ends. An invalid concept invalidates every proposition or process of thought in which it is used as a cognitive assertion.

[ITOE, 65.]

No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge.

[GS, FNI, 154; pb 126.]

See also “ANTI-CONCEPTS”; CONCEPTS; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); MYSTICISM; “STOLEN CONCEPT,” FALLACY of.

Investment. If a man does not consume his goods at once, but saves them for the future, whether he wants to enlarge his production or to live on his savings (which he holds in the form of money)—in either case, he is counting on the fact that he will be able to exchange his money for the things he needs, when and as he needs them. This means that he is relying on a continuous process of production—which requires an uninterrupted flow of goods saved to fuel further and further production. This How is “investment capital,” the stock seed of industry. When a rich man lends money to others, what he lends to them is the goods which he has not consumed.

This is the meaning of the concept “investment.” If you have wondered how one can start producing, when nature requires time paid in advance, this is the beneficent process that enables men to do it: a successful man lends his goods to a promising beginner (or to any reputable producer)—in exchange for the payment of interest. The payment is for the risk he is taking: nature does not guarantee man’s success, neither on a farm nor in a factory. If the venture fails, it means that the goods have been consumed without a productive return, so the investor loses his money; if the venture succeeds, the producer pays the interest out of the new goods, the profits, which the investment enabled him to make.

Observe, and bear in mind above all else, that this process applies only to financing the needs of production, not of consumption—and that its success rests on the investor’s judgment of men’s productive ability, not on his compassion for their feelings, hopes or dreams.

[“Egalitarianism and Inflation,” PWNI, 159; pb 131.]

See also CONSUMPTION; CREDIT; PRODUCTION; SAVINGS.

Irrationalism. Reason is the faculty that identifies, in conceptual terms, the material provided by man’s senses. “Irrationalism” is the doctrine that reason is not a valid means of knowledge or a proper guide to action.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 41 ; pb 47.]

See also IRRATIONALITY; MYSTICISM; REASON; SKEPTICISM.

Irrationality. Man’s basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. Irrationality is the rejection of man’s means of survival and, therefore, a commitment to a course of blind destruction; that which is anti-mind, is anti-life.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 20; pb 25.]

To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.

[GS, FNl, 156; pb 127.]

The irrational is the impossible; it is that which contradicts the facts of reality; facts cannot be altered by a wish, but they can destroy the wisher.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 24; pb 28.]

Irrationality is a state of default, the state of an unachieved human stature. When men do not choose to reach the conceptual level, their consciousness has no recourse but to its automatic, perceptual, semi-animal functions.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 19; pb 21.]

See also CONTRADICTIONS; EMOTIONS; EVASION; EVIL; FOCUS; RATIONALITY; REASON; WHIMS/WHIM-WORSHIP.

Irreducible Primaries. An irreducible primary is a fact which cannot be analyzed (i.e., broken into components) or derived from antecedent facts.

[“Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 15; pb 13.]

See also AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS; AXIOMS; COROLLARIES; HIERARCHY of KNOWLEDGE; OSTENSIVE DEFINITION; SELF-EVIDENT.

“Is”-“Ought” Dichotomy. It is only an ultimate goal, and end in itself, that makes the existence of values possible. Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action. Epistemologically, the concept of “value” is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of “life.” To speak of “value” as apart from “life” is worse than a contradiction in terms. “It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible.”

In answer to those philosophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between “is” and “ought.”

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 7; pb 17.]

See also GOAL-DIRECTED ACTION; GOOD, the; LIFE; MORALITY; STANDARD of VALUE; ULTIMATE VALUE; VALUES.

“Isolationism.” A large-scale instance [of political smear-tactics], in the 1930’s, was the introduction of the word “isolationism” into our political vocabulary. It was a derogatory term, suggesting something evil, and it had no clear, explicit definition. It was used to convey two meanings: one alleged, the other real—and to damn both.

The alleged meaning was defined approximately like this: “Isolationism is the attitude of a person who is interested only in his own country and is not concerned with the rest of the world.” The real meaning was: “Patriotism and national self-interest.”

What, exactly, is “concern with the rest of the world”? Since nobody did or could maintain the position that the state of the world is of no concern to this country, the term “isolationism” was a straw man used to misrepresent the position of those who were concerned with this country’s interests. The concept of patriotism was replaced by the term “isolationism” and vanished from public discussion.

The number of distinguished patriotic leaders smeared, silenced, and eliminated by that tag would be hard to compute. Then, by a gradual, imperceptible process, the real purpose of the tag took over: the concept of “concern” was switched into “selfless concern.” The ultimate result was a view of foreign policy which is wrecking the United States to this day: the suicidal view that our foreign policy must be guided, not by considerations of national self-interest, but by concern for the interests and welfare of the world, that is, of all countries except our own.

[“ ‘Extremism,’ or The Art of Smearing,” CUI, 175.]

Observe the double-standard switch of the anti-concept of “isolationism.” The same intellectual groups (and even some of the same aging individuals) who coined that anti-concept in World War II—and used it to denounce any patriotic opponent of America’s self-immolation—the same groups who screamed that it was our duty to save the world (when the enemy was Germany or Italy or fascism), are now rabid isolationists who denounce any U.S. concern with countries fighting for freedom, when the enemy is communism and Soviet Russia.

[“The Lessons of Vietnam,” ARL, III, 24, 4.]

See also “ANTI-CONCEPTS”; COMMUNISM; FOREIGN POLlCY; SOVIET RUSSIA.

J

Judgment. See Moral Judgment.

Justice. Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

[GS, FNI, 158; pb 129.]

What fact of reality gave rise to the concept “justice”? The fact that man must draw conclusions about the things, people and events around him, i.e., must judge and evaluate them. Is his judgment automatically right? No. What causes his judgment to be wrong? The lack of sufficient evidence, or his evasion of the evidence, or his inclusion of considerations other than the facts of the case. How, then, is he to arrive at the right judgment? By basing it exclusively on the factual evidence and by considering all the relevant evidence available. But isn’t this a description of “objectivity”? Yes, “objective judgment” is one of the wider categories to which the concept “justice” belongs. What distinguishes “justice” from other instances of objective judgment? When one evaluates the nature or actions of inanimate objects, the criterion of judgment is determined by the particular purpose for which one evaluates them. But how does one determine a criterion for evaluating the character and actions of men, in view of the fact that men possess the faculty of volition? What science can provide an objective criterion of evaluation in regard to volitional matters? Ethics. Now, do I need a concept to designate the act of judging a man’s character and/or actions exclusively on the basis of all the factual evidence available, and of evaluating it by means of an objective moral criterion? Yes. That concept is “justice.”

[ITOE, 67.]

It is not justice or equal treatment that you grant to men when you abstain equally from praising men’s virtues and from condemning men’s vices. When your impartial attitude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you—whom do you betray and whom do you encourage?

[“How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society,” VOS, 89; pb 71.]

Since men are born tabula rasa, both cognitively and morally, a rational man regards strangers as innocent until proved guilty, and grants them that initial good will in the name of their human potential. After that, he judges them according to the moral character they have actualized. If he finds them guilty of major evils, his good will is replaced by contempt and moral condemnation. (If one values human life, one cannot value its destroyers.) If he finds them to be virtuous, he grants them personal, individual value and appreciation, in proportion to their virtues.

[“The Ethics of Emergencies,” VOS, 52: pb 47.]

The new “theory of justice” [of John Rawls] demands that men counteract the “injustice” of nature by instituting the most obscenely unthinkable injustice among men: deprive “those favored by nature” (i.e., the talented, the intelligent, the creative) of the right to the rewards they produce (i.e., the right to life)—and grant to the incompetent, the stupid, the slothful a right to the effortless enjoyment of the rewards they could not produce, could not imagine, and would not know what to do with.

[“An Untitled Letter,” PWNI, 132; pb 110.]

See also CAPITALISM; COMPASSION; EGALITARIANISM; HONESTY; MERCY; MORAL JUDGMENT; MORALITY; OBJECTIVITY; RATIONALITY; TRADER PRINCIPLE; VIRTUE.

K

Kant, Immanuel. On every fundamental issue, Kant’s philosophy is the exact opposite of Objectivism.

[“Brief Summary,” TO, Sept. 1971, 4.]

Metaphysics and Epistemology

The man who ... closed the door of philosophy to reason, was Immanuel Kant....

Kant’s expressly stated purpose was to save the morality of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice. He knew that it could not survive without a mystic base—and what it had to be saved from was reason.

Attila’s share of Kant’s universe includes this earth, physical reality, man’s senses, perceptions, reason and science, all of it labeled the “phenomenal” world. The Witch Doctor’s share is another, “higher,” reality, labeled the “noumenal” world, and a special manifestation, labeled the “categorical imperative,” which dictates to man the rules of morality and which makes itself known by means of a feeling, as a special sense of duty.

The “phenomenal” world, said Kant, is not real: reality, as perceived by man’s mind, is a distortion. The distorting mechanism is man’s conceptual faculty: man’s basic concepts (such as time, space, existence) are not derived from experience or reality, but come from an automatic system of filters in his consciousness (labeled “categories” and “forms of perception”) which impose their own design on his perception of the external world and make him incapable of perceiving it in any manner other than the one in which he does perceive it. This proves, said Kant, that man’s concepts are only a delusion, but a collective delusion which no one has the power to escape. Thus reason and science are “limited,” said Kant; they are valid only so long as they deal with this world, with a permanent, pre-determined collective delusion (and thus the criterion of reason’s validity was switched from the objective to the collective), but they are impotent to deal with the fundamental, metaphysical issues of existence, which belong to the “noumenal” world. The “noumenal” world is unknowable; it is the world of “real” reality, “superior” truth and “things in themselves” or “things as they are”—which means: things as they are not perceived by man.

Even apart from the fact that Kant’s theory of the “categories” as the source of man’s concepts was a preposterous invention, his argument amounted to a negation, not only of man’s consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as such. His argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 31; pb 30.]

The motive of all the attacks on man’s rational faculty—from any quarter, in any of the endless variations, under the verbal dust of all the murky volumes—is a single, hidden premise: the desire to exempt consciousness from the law of identity. The hallmark of a mystic is the savagely stubborn refusal to accept the fact that consciousness, like any other existent, possesses identity, that it is a faculty of a specific nature, functioning through specific means. While the advance of civilization has been eliminating one area of magic after another, the last stand of the believers in the miraculous consists of their frantic attempts to regard identity as the disqualifying element of consciousness.

The implicit, but unadmitted premise of the neo-mystics of modern philosophy, is the notion that only an ineffable consciousness can acquire a valid knowledge of reality, that “true” knowledge has to be causeless, i.e., acquired without any means of cognition.

The entire apparatus of Kant’s system, like a hippopotamus engaged in belly-dancing, goes through its gyrations while resting on a single point: that man’s knowledge is not valid because his consciousness possesses identity....

This is a negation, not only of man’s consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as such, whether man’s, insect’s or God’s. (If one supposed the existence of God, the negation would still apply: either God perceives through no means whatever, in which case he possesses no identity—or he perceives by some divine means and no others, in which case his perception is not valid.) As Berkeley negated existence by claiming that “to be, is to be perceived,” so Kant negates consciousness by implying that to be perceived, is not to be....

From primordial mysticism to this, its climax, the attack on man’s consciousness and particularly on his conceptual faculty has rested on the unchallenged premise that any knowledge acquired by a process of consciousness is necessarily subjective and cannot correspond to the facts of reality, since it is “processed knowledge.”

Make no mistake about the actual meaning of that premise: it is a revolt, not only against being conscious, but against being alive—since in fact, in reality, on earth, every aspect of being alive involves a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. (This is an example of the fact that the revolt against identity is a revolt against existence. “The desire not to be anything, is the desire not to be.” Atlas Shrugged.)

All knowledge is processed knowledge—whether on the sensory. perceptual or conceptual level. An “unprocessed” knowledge would be a knowledge acquired without means of cognition. Consciousness ... is not a passive state, but an active process. And more: the satisfaction of every need of a living organism requires an act of processing by that organism, be it the need of air, of food or of knowledge.

[ITOE. 106.]

A “straw man” is an odd metaphor to apply to such an enormous, cumbersome, ponderous construction as Kant’s system of epistemology. Nevertheless, a straw man is what it was—and the doubts, the uncertainty, the skepticism that followed, skepticism about man’s ability ever to know anything, were not, in fact, applicable to human conscionsness, because it was not a human consciousness that Kant’s robot represented. But philosophers accepted it as such. And while they cried that reason had been invalidated, they did not notice that reason had been pushed off the philosophical scene altogether and that the faculty they were arguing about was not reason.

No, Kant did not destroy reason; he merely did as thorough a job of undercutting as anyone could ever do.

If you trace the roots of all our current philosophies—such as pragmatism, logical positivism, and all the rest of the neo-mystics who announce happily that you cannot prove that you exist—you will find that they all grew out of Kant.

[“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the ‘Modern World,” PWNI, 77; pb 64.]

One of Kant’s major goals was to save religion (including the essence of religious morality) from the onslaughts of science. His system represents a massive effort to raise the principles of Platonism, in a somewhat altered form, once again to a position of commanding authority over Western culture.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 23; pb 31.]

Plato was more than a Platonist; despite his mysticism, he was also a pagan Greek. As such he exhibited a certain authentic respect for reason, a respect which was implicit in Greek philosophy no matter how explicitly irrational it became. The Kantian mysticism, however, suffers from no such pagan restraints. It flows forth triumphantly, sweeping the prostrate human mind before it. Since man can never escape the distorting agents inherent in the structure of his consciousness, says Kant, “things in themselves” are in principle unknowable. Reason is impotent to discover anything about reality; if it tries, it can only bog down in impenetrable contradictions. Logic is merely a subjective human device, devoid of reference to or basis in reality. Science, while useful as a means of ordering the data of the world of appearances, is limited to describing a surface world of man’s own creation and says nothing about things as they really are.

Must men then resign themselves to a total skepticism? No, says Kant, there is one means of piercing the barrier between man and existence. Since reason, logic, and science are denied access to reality, the door is now open for men to approach reality by a different, nonrational method. The door is now open to faith. Taking their cue from their needs, men can properly believe (for instance, in God and in an afterlife), even though they cannot prove the truth of their beliefs.... “I have,” writes Kant, “therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”

[Ibid., 24; pb 32.]

There are two different kinds of subjectivism, distinguished by their answers to the question: whose consciousness creates reality? Kant rejected the older of these two, which was the view that each man’s feelings create a private universe for him. Instead, Kant ushered in the era of social subjectivism—the view that it is not the consciousness of individuals, but of groups, that creates reality. In Kant’s system, mankind as a whole is the decisive group; what creates the phenomenal world is not the idiosyncrasies of particular individuals, but the mental structure common to all men.

Later philosophers accepted Kant’s fundamental approach, but carried it a step further. If, many claimed, the mind’s structure is a brute given, which cannot be explained—as Kant had said—then there is no reason why all men should have the same mental structure. There is no reason why mankind should not be splintered into competing groups, each defined by its own distinctive type of consciousness, each vying with the others to capture and control reality.

The first world movement thus to pluralize the Kantian position was Marxism, which propounded a social subjectivism in terms of competing economic classes. On this issue, as on many others, the Nazis follow the Marxists, but substitute race for class.

[Ibid., 59; pb 63.]

A man’s self, [Kant] maintains, like everything else, is a part of reality —it, too, is something in itself—and if reality is unknowable, then so is a man’s self. A man is able, Kant concludes, to know only his phenomenal ego, his self as it appears to him (in introspection); he cannot know his noumenal ego, his “ego as it is in itself.”

Man is, therefore, a creature in metaphysical conflict. He is so to speak a metaphysical biped, with one (unreal) foot in the phenomenal world and one (unknowable) foot in the noumenal world.

[Ibid., 75; pb 77.]

Ethics

As to Kant’s version of morality, it was appropriate to the kind of zombies that would inhabit that kind of [Kantian] universe: it consisted of total, abject selflessness. An action is moral, said Kant, only if one has no desire to perform it, but performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of any sort, neither material nor spiritual; a benefit destroys the moral value of an action. (Thus, if one has no desire to be evil, one cannot be good; if one has, one can.)

Those who accept any part of Kant’s philosophy—metaphysical, epistemological or moral—deserve it.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 33; pb 32.]

The arch-advocate of “duty” is Immanuel Kant; he went so much farther than other theorists that they seem innocently benevolent by comparison. “Duty,” he holds, is the only standard of virtue; but virtue is not its own reward: if a reward is involved, it is no longer virtue. The only moral motivation, he holds, is devotion to duty for duty’s sake; only an action motivated exclusively by such devotion is a moral action (i.e., an action performed without any concern for “inclination” [desire] or self-interest).

“It is a duty to preserve one’s life, and moreover everyone has a direct inclination to do so. But for that reason the often anxious care which most men take of it has no intrinsic worth, and the maxim of doing so has no moral import. They preserve their lives according to duty, but not from duty. But if adversities and hopeless sorrow completely take away the relish for life, if an unfortunate man, strong in soul, is indignant rather than despondent or dejected over his fate and wishes for death, and yet preserves his life without loving it and from neither inclination nor fear but from duty—then his maxim has a moral import” (Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. R. P. Wolff, New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1969, pp. 16-17).

[“Causality Versus Duty,” PWNI, 115; pb 96.]

His view of morality is propagated by men who have never heard of him—he merely gave them a formal, academic status. A Kantian sense of “duty” is inculcated by parents whenever they declare that a child must do something because he must. A child brought up under the constant battering of causeless, arbitrary, contradictory, inexplicable “musts” loses (or never acquires) the ability to grasp the distinction between realistic necessity and human whims—and spends his life abjectly, dutifully obeying the second and defying the first. In the full meaning of the term, he grows up without a clear grasp of reality.

[Ibid., 118; pb 98.]

In a deontological [duty-centered] theory, all personal desires are banished from the realm of morality; a personal desire has no moral significance, be it a desire to create or a desire to kill. For example, if a man is not supporting his life from duty, such a morality makes no distinction between supporting it by honest labor or by robbery. If a man wants to be honest, he deserves no moral credit; as Kant would put it, such honesty is “praiseworthy,” but without “moral import.” Only a vicious represser, who feels a profound desire to lie, cheat and steal, but forces himself to act honestly for the sake of “duty,” would receive a recognition of moral worth from Kant and his ilk.

This is the sort of theory that gives morality a bad name.

The widespread fear and/or resentment of morality—the feeling that morality is an enemy, a musty realm of suffering and senseless boredom —is not the product of mystic, ascetic or Christian codes as such, but a monument to the ugliest repository of hatred for life, man and reason: the soul of Immanuel Kant.

[Ibid., 117; pb 97.]

In theory, Kant states, a man deserves moral credit for an action done from duty, even if his inclinations also favor it—but only insofar as the latter are incidental and play no role in his motivation. But in practice, Kant maintains, whenever the two coincide no one can know that he has escaped the influence of inclination. For all practical purposes, therefore, a moral man must have no private stake in the outcome of his actions, no personal motive, no expectation of profit or gain of any kind.

Even then, however, he cannot be sure that no fragment of desire is “secretly” moving him. The far clearer case, the one case in which a man can at least come close to knowing that he is moral, occurs when the man’s desires clash with his duty and he acts in defiance of his desires.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 73; pb 75.]

Kant is the first philosopher of self-sacrifice to advance this ethics as a matter of philosophic principle, explicit, self-conscious, uncompromised-essentially uncontradicted by any remnants of the Greek, pro-self viewpoint.

Thus, although he believed that the dutiful man would be rewarded with happiness after death (and that this is proper), Kant holds that the man who is motivated by such a consideration is nonmoral (since he is still acting from inclination, albeit a supernaturally oriented one). Nor will Kant permit the dutiful man to be motivated even by the desire to feel a sense of moral self-approval.

The main line of pre-Kantian moralists had urged man to perform certain actions in order to reach a goal of some kind. They had urged man to love the object which is the good (however it was conceived) and strive to gain it, even if most transferred the quest to the next life. They had asked man to practice a code of virtues as a means to the attainment of values. Kant dissociates virtue from the pursuit of any goal. He dissociates it from man’s love of or even interest in any object. Which means: he dissociates morality from values, any values, values as such.

[Ibid., 76; pb 78.]

It is not inner peace that Kant holds out to man, not otherworldly serenity or ethereal tranquillity, but war, a bloody, unremitting war against passionate, indomitable temptation. It is the lot of the moral man to struggle against undutiful feelings inherent in his nature, and the more intensely he feels and the more desperately he struggles, the greater his claim to virtue. It is the lot of the moral man to burn with desire and then, on principle—the principle of duty—to thwart it. The hallmark of the moral man is to suffer.

[Ibid., 80; pb 82.]

If men lived the sort of life Kant demands, who or what would gain from it? Nothing and no one. The concept of “gain” has been expunged from morality. For Kant, it is the dutiful sacrifice as such that constitutes a man’s claim to virtue; the welfare of any recipient is morally incidental. Virtue, for Kant, is not the service of an interest—neither of the self nor of God nor of others. (A man can claim moral credit for service to others in this view, not because they benefit, but only insofar as he loses.)

Here is the essence and climax of the ethics of self-sacrifice, finally, after two thousand years, come to full, philosophic expression in the Western world: your interests—of whatever kind, including the interest in being moral—are a mark of moral imperfection because they are interests. Your desires, regardless of their content, deserve no respect because they are desires. Do your duty, which is yours because you have desires, and which is sublime because, unadulterated by the stigma of any gain, it shines forth unsullied, in loss, pain, conflict, torture. Sacrifice the thing you want, without beneficiaries, supernatural or social; sacrifice your values, your self-interest, your happiness, your self, because they are your values, your self-interest, your happiness, your self; sacrifice them to morality, i.e., to the noumenal dimension, i.e., to nothing knowable or conceivable to man, i.e., as far as man living on this earth is concerned, to nothing.

The moral commandment is: thou shalt sacrifice, sacrifice everything, sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice, as an end in itself.

[Ibid., 82; pb 83.]

Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.... It is not a sacrifice to renounce the unwanted. It is not a sacrifice to give your life to others, if death is your personal desire. To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you—you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body. It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture.

[G5, FNI, 172; pb 140.]

You may also find it hard to believe that anyone could advocate the things Kant is advocating. If you doubt it, I suggest that you look up the references given and read the original works. Do not seek to escape the subject by thinking: “Oh, Kant didn’t mean it!” He did....

Kant is the most evil man in mankind’s history.

[“Brief Summary,” TO, Sept. 1971, 4.]

Psychological Techniques

Kant originated the technique required to sell irrational notions to the men of a skeptical, cynical age who have formally rejected mysticism without grasping the rudiments of rationality. The technique is as follows: if you want to propagate an outrageously evil idea (based on traditionally accepted doctrines), your conclusion must be brazenly clear, but your proof unintelligible. Your proof must be so tangled a mess that it will paralyze a reader’s critical faculty—a mess of evasions, equivocations, obfuscations, circumlocutions, non sequiturs, endless sentences leading nowhere, irrelevant side issues, clauses, sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses, a meticulously lengthy proving of the obvious, and big chunks of the arbitrary thrown in as self-evident, erudite references to sciences, to pseudo-sciences, to the never-to-be-sciences, to the untraceable and the unprovable—all of it resting on a zero: the absence of definitions. I offer in evidence the Critique of Pure Reason.

[“An Untiled Letter,” PWNI, 141; pb 116.]

If “genius” denotes extraordinary ability, then Kant may be called a genius in his capacity to sense, play on and perpetuate human fears, irrationalities and, above all, ignorance. His influence rests not on philosophical but on psychological factors.

[“Causality Versus Duty,” PWNI, 117; ph 98.]

The philosophy of Kant is a systematic rationalization of every major psychological vice. The metaphysical inferiority of this world (as a “phenomenal” world of mere “appearances”), is a rationalization for the hatred of reality. The notion that reason is unable to perceive reality and deals only with “appearances,” is a rationalization for the hatred of reason; it is also a rationalization for a profound kind of epistemological egalitarianism which reduces reason to equality with the futile puttering of “idealistic” dreamers. The metaphysical superiority of the “noumenal” world, is a rationalization for the supremacy of emotions, which are thus given the power to know the unknowable by ineffable means.

The complaint that man can perceive things only through his own consciousness, not through any other kinds of consciousnesses, is a rationalization for the most profound type of second-handedness ever confessed in print: it is the whine of a man tortured by perpetual concern with what others think and by inability to decide which others he should conform to. The wish to perceive “things in themselves” unprocessed by any consciousness, is a rationalization for the wish to escape the effort and responsibility of cognition—by means of the automatic omniscience a whim-worshiper ascribes to his emotions. The moral imperative of the duty to sacrifice oneself to duty, a sacrifice without beneficiaries, is a gross rationalization for the image (and soul) of an austere, ascetic monk who winks at you with an obscenely sadistic pleasure—the pleasure of breaking man’s spirit, ambition, success, self-esteem, and enjoyment of life on earth. Et cetera. These are just some of the highlights.

[“Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 22; pb 19.]

See also ALTRUISM; CONCEPTS; DUTY“; FAITH; IDENTITY; KNOWLEDGE; LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS; LOGIC; LOGICAL POSITIVISM; MODERN ART; MYSTICISM; OBJECTIVITY; PRAGMATISM; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; RATIONALIZATION; REASON; RELIGION; SACRIFICE; SELF; SELFISHNESS; SELFLESSNESS; SUBJECTIVISM.

Knowledge. “Knowledge” is ... a mental grasp of a fact(s) of reality, reached either by perceptual observation or by a process of reason based on perceptual observation.

[ITOE, 45.]

See also CERTAINTY; EPISTEMOLOGY; LOGIC; PERCEPTION; REASON.

L

Language. In order to be used as a single unit, the enormous sum integrated by a concept has to be given the form of a single, specific, perceptual concrete, which will differentiate it from all other concretes and from all other concepts. This is the function performed by language. Language is a code of visual-auditory symbols that serves the psycho-epistemological function of converting concepts into the mental equivalent of concretes. Language is the exclusive domain and tool of concepts. Every word we use (with the exception of proper names) is a symbol that denotes a concept, i.e., that stands for an unlimited number of concretes of a certain kind.

(Proper names are used in order to identify and include particular entities in a conceptual method of cognition. Observe that even proper names, in advanced civilizations, follow the definitional principles of genus and differentia: e.g., John Smith, with “Smith” serving as genus and “John” as differentia—or New York, U.S.A.)

[ITOE, 11.]

Concepts represent a system of mental filing and cross-filing, so complex that the largest electronic computer is a child’s toy by comparison. This system serves as the context, the frame-of-reference, by means of which man grasps and classifies (and studies further) every existent he encounters and every aspect of reality. Language is the physical (visual-audible) implementation of this system.

Concepts and, therefore, language are primarily a tool of cognition—not of communication, as is usually assumed. Communication is merely the consequence, not the cause nor the primary purpose of concept-formation—a crucial consequence, of invaluable importance to men, but still only a consequence. Cognition precedes communication; the necessary pre-condition of communication is that one have something to communicate. (This is true even of communication among animals, or of communication by grunts and growls among inarticulate men, let alone of communication by means of so complex and exacting a tool as language.) The primary purpose of concepts and of language is to provide man with a system of cognitive classification and organization, which enables him to acquire knowledge on an unlimited scale; this means: to keep order in man’s mind and enable him to think.

[Ibid., 91.]

The first words a child learns are words denoting visual objects, and he retains his first concepts visually. Observe that the visual form he gives them is reduced to those essentials which distinguish the particular kind of entities from all others—for instance, the universal type of a child’s drawing of man in the form of an oval for the torso, a circle for the head, four sticks for extremities, etc. Such drawings are a visual record of the process of abstraction and concept-formation in a mind’s transition from the perceptual level to the full vocabulary of the conceptual level.

There is evidence to suppose that written language originated in the form of drawings—as the pictographic writing of the Oriental peoples seems to indicate. With the growth of man’s knowledge and of his power of abstraction, a pictorial representation of concepts could no longer be adequate to his conceptual range, and was replaced by a fully symbolic code.

[Ibid., 15.]

Language is a conceptual tool—a code of visual-auditory symbols that denote concepts. To a person who understands the function of language, it makes no difference what sounds are chosen to name things, provided these sounds refer to clearly defined aspects of reality. But to a tribalist, language is a mystic heritage, a string of sounds handed down from his ancestors and memorized, not understood. To him, the importance lies in the perceptual concrete, the sound of a word, not its meaning....

The learning of another language expands one’s abstract capacity and vision. Personally, I speak four—or rather three-and-a-half—languages: English, French, Russian and the half is German, which I can read, but not speak. I found this knowledge extremely helpful when I began writing: it gave me a wider range and choice of concepts, it showed me four different styles of expression, it made me grasp the nature of language as such, apart from any set of concretes.

(Speaking of concretes, I would say that every civilized language has its own inimitable power and beauty, but the one I love is English—the language of my choice, not of my birth. English is the most eloquent, the most precise, the most economical and, therefore, the most powerful. English fits me best—but I would be able to express my identity in any Western language.)

[“Global Balkanization,” pamphlet, 8.]

The Miracle Worker by William Gibson ... tells the story of how Annie Sullivan brought Helen Keller to grasp the nature of language....

I suggest that you read The Miracle Worker and study its implications.... this particular play is an invaluable lesson in the fundamentals of a rational epistemology.

I suggest that you consider Annie Sullivan’s titanic struggle to arouse a child’s conceptual faculty by means of a single sense, the sense of touch, then evaluate the meaning, motive and moral status of the notion that man’s conceptual faculty does not require any sensory experience.

I suggest that you consider what an enormous intellectual feat Helen Keller had to perform in order to develop a full conceptual range (including a college education, which required more in her day than it does now), then judge those normal people who learn their first, perceptual-level abstractions without any difficulty and freeze on that level, and keep the higher ranges of their conceptual development in a chaotic fog of swimming, indeterminate approximations, playing a game of signals without referents, as Helen Keller did at first, but without her excuse. Then check on whether you respect and how carefully you employ your priceless possession: language.

And, lastly, I suggest that you try to project what would have happened if, instead of Annie Sullivan, a sadist had taken charge of Helen Keller’s education. A sadist would spell “water” into Helen’s palm, while making her touch water, stones, flowers and dogs interchangeably; he would teach her that water is called “water” today, but “milk” tomorrow; he would endeavor to convey to her that there is no necessary connection between names and things, that the signals in her palm are a game of arbitrary conventions and that she’d better obey him without trying to understand.

If this projection is too monstrous to hold in one’s mind for long, remember that this is what today’s academic philosophers are doing to the young—to minds as confused, as plastic and almost as helpless (on the higher conceptual levels) as Helen Keller’s mind was at her start.

[“Kant Versus Sullivan,” PWNI, 109; pb 90.]

See also COMMUNICATION; CONCEPT-FORMATION; CONCEPTS; GRAMMAR; LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS; PERCEPTION; PSYCHO. EPISTEMOLOGY; REASON; WORDS.

Law, Objective and Non-Objective. All laws must be objective (and objectively justifiable): men must know clearly, and in advance of taking an action, what the law forbids them to do (and why), what constitutes a crime and what penalty they will incur if they commit it.

[“The Nature of Government,” VOS, 149; pb 110.]

The retaliatory use of force requires objective rules of evidence to establish that a crime has been committed and to prove who committed it, as well as objective rules to define punishments and enforcement procedures. Men who attempt to prosecute crimes, without such rules, are a lynch mob. If a society left the retaliatory use of force in the hands of individual citizens, it would degenerate into mob rule, lynch law and an endless series of bloody private feuds or vendettas.

If physical force is to be barred from social relationships, men need an institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective code of rules.

This is the task of a government—of a proper government—its basic task, its only moral justification and the reason why men do need a government.

A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws.

[Ibid., 147; pb 109.]

When men are caught in the trap of non-objective law, when their work, future and livelihood are at the mercy of a bureaucrat’s whim, when they have no way of knowing what unknown “influence” will crack down on them for which unspecified offense, fear becomes their basic motive, if they remain in the industry at all—and compromise, conformity, staleness, dullness, the dismal grayness of the middle-of-the-road are all that can be expected of them. Independent thinking does not submit to bureaucratic edicts, originality does not follow “public policies,” integrity does not petition for a license, heroism is not fostered by fear, creative genius is not summoned forth at the point of a gun.

Non-objective law is the most effective weapon of human enslavement: its victims become its enforcers and enslave themselves.

[“Vast Quicksands,” TON, July 1963, 25.]

That which cannot be formulated into an objective law, cannot be made the subject of legislation—not in a free country, not if we are to have “a government of laws and not of men.” An undefineable law is not a law, but merely a license for some men to rule others.

[Ibid., 28.]

It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men’s spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear.

[“Antitrust: The Rule of Unreason,” TON. Feb. 1962, 5.]

An objective law protects a country’s freedom; only a non-objective law can give a statist the chance he seeks: a chance to impose his arbitrary will—his policies, his decisions, his interpretations, his enforcement, his punishment or favor—on disarmed, defenseless victims.

[Ibid.. 5.]

The threat of sudden destruction, of unpredictable retaliation for unnamed offenses, is a much more potent means of enslavement than explicit dictatorial laws. It demands more than mere obedience; it leaves men no policy save one: to please the authorities; to please—blindly, uncritically, without standards or principles; to please—in any issue, matter or circumstance, for fear of an unknowable, unprovable vengeance.

[Ibid., 8.]

See also ANARCHISM; ANTITRUST LAWS; CONSTITUTION; CRIME; DICTATORSHIP; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL, RIGHTS; RETALIATORY FORCE; RETROACTIVE I.AW; STATISM.

Learning. Men can learn from one another, but learning requires a process of thought on the part of every individual student. Men can cooperate in the discovery of new knowledge, but such cooperation requires the independent exercise of his rational faculty by every individual scientist. Man is the only living species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; but such transmission requires a process of thought on the part of the individual recipients.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI. 16.]

All learning involves a process of automatizing, i.e., of first acquiring knowledge by fully conscious, focused attention and observation, then of establishing mental connections which make that knowledge automatic (instantly available as a context), thus freeing man’s mind to pursue further, more complex knowledge.

[ITOE, 86.]

There are two different methods of learning: by memorizing and by understanding. The first belongs primarily to the perceptual level of a human consciousness, the second to the conceptual.

The first is achieved by means of repetition and concrete-bound association (a process in which one sensory concrete leads automatically to another, with no regard to content or meaning). The best illustration of this process is a song which was popular some twenty years ago, called “Mairzy Doats.” Try to recall some poem you had to memorize in grade school; you will find that you can recall it only if you recite the sounds automatically, by the “Mairzy Doats” method; if you focus on the meaning, the memory vanishes. This form of learning is shared with man by the higher animals: all animal training consists of making the animal memorize a series of actions by repetition and association.

The second method of learning—by a process of understanding—is possible only to man. To understand means to focus on the content of a given subject (as against the sensory—visual or auditory—form in which it is communicated), to isolate its essentials, to establish its relationship to the previously known, and to integrate it with the appropriate categories of other subjects. Integration is the essential part of understanding.

The predominance of memorizing is proper only in the first few years of a child’s education, while he is observing and gathering perceptual material. From the time he reaches the conceptual level (i.e., from the time he learns to speak), his education requires a progressively larger scale of understanding and progressively smaller amounts of memorizing.

[“The Comprachicos,” NL, 207.]

Learning is a conceptual process; an educational method devised to ignore, by-pass and contradict the requirements of conceptual development, cannot arouse any interest in learning. The “adjusted” are bored because they are unable actively to absorb knowledge. The independent are bored because they seek knowledge, not games of “class projects” or group “discussions.” The first are unable to digest their lessons; the second are starved.

[Ibid., 216.]

The process of forming, integrating and using concepts is not an automatic, but a volitional process—i.e., a process which uses both new and automatized material, but which is directed volitionally. It is not an innate, but an acquired skill; it has to be learned—it is the most crucially important part of learning—and all of man’s other capacities depend on how well or how badly he learns it.

This skill does not pertain to the particular content of a man’s knowledge at any given age, but to the method by which he acquires and organizes knowledge—the method by which his mind deals with its content. The method programs his subconscious computer, determining how efficiently, lamely or disastrously his cognitive processes will function.

[Ibid., 193.]

See also AUTOMATIZATION; CONCEPTS; EDUCATION; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); SUBCONSCIOUS; UNDERSTANDING.

Leftists. See Rightists vs. Leftists.

“Liberals.” The basic and crucial political issue of our age is: capitalism versus socialism, or freedom versus statism. For decades, this issue has been silenced, suppressed, evaded, and hidden under the foggy, undefined rubber-terms of “conservatism” and “liberalism” which had lost their original meaning and could be stretched to mean all things to all men.

The goal of the “liberals”—as it emerges from the record of the past decades—was to smuggle this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot—by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli. (The goal of the “conservatives” was only to retard that process.)

[“ ‘Extremism,’ or The Art of Smearing,” CUI, 178.]

The most timid, frightened, conservative defenders of the status quo —of the intellectual status quo—are today’s liberals (the leaders of the conservatives never ventured into the realm of the intellect). What they dread to discover is the fact that the intellectual status quo they inherited is bankrupt, that they have no ideological base to stand on and no capacity to construct one. Brought up on the philosophy of Pragmatism, they have been taught that principles are unprovable, impractical or non-existent—which has destroyed their ability to integrate ideas, to deal with abstractions, and to see beyond the range of the immediate moment. Abstractions, they claim, are “simplistic” (another anti-concept); myopia is sophisticated. “Don’t polarize!” and “Don’t rock the boat!” are expressions of the same kind of panic.

[“Credibility and Polarization,” ARL, I, 1, 2.]

In the 1930’s, the “liberals” had a program of broad social reforms and a crusading spirit, they advocated a planned society, they talked in terms of abstract principles, they propounded theories of a predominantly socialistic nature—and most of them were touchy about the accusation that they were enlarging the government’s power; most of them were assuring their opponents that government power was only a temporary means to an end—a “noble end,” the liberation of the individual from his bondage to material needs.

Today, nobody talks of a planned society in the “liberal” camp; long-range programs, theories, principles, abstractions, and “noble ends” are not fashionable any longer. Modern “liberals” deride any political concern with such large-scale matters as an entire society or an economy as a whole; they concern themselves with single, concrete-bound, range-of-the-moment projects and demands, without regard to cost, context, or consequences. “Pragmatic”—not “idealistic”—is their favorite adjective when they are called upon to justify their “stance,” as they call it, not “stand.” They are militantly opposed to political philosophy; they denounce political concepts as “tags,” “labels,” “myths,” “illusions”—and resist any attempt to “label”—i.e., to identify—their own views. They are belligerently anti-theoretical and—with a faded mantle of intellectuality still clinging to their shoulders—they are anti-intellectual. The only remnant of their former “idealism” is a tired, cynical, ritualistic quoting of shopworn “humanitarian” slogans, when the occasion demands it.

Cynicism, uncertainty, and fear are the insignia of the culture which they are still dominating by default. And the only thing that has not rusted in their ideological equipment, but has grown savagely brighter and clearer through the years, is their lust for power—for an autocratic, statist, totalitarian government power. It is not a crusading brightness, it is not the lust of a fanatic with a mission—it is more like the glassy-eyed brightness of a somnambulist whose stuporous despair has long since swallowed the memory of his purpose, but who still clings to his mystic weapon in the stubborn belief that “there ought to be a law,” that everything will be all right if only somebody will pass a law, that every problem can be solved by the magic power of brute force.

[“The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus,” CUI, 209.]

The majority of those who are loosely identified by the term “liberals” are afraid to let themselves discover that what they advocate is statism. They do not want to accept the full meaning of their goal; they want to keep all the advantages and effects of capitalism, while destroying the cause, and they want to establish statism without its necessary effects. They do not want to know or to admit that they are the champions of dictatorship and slavery.

[“Conservatism: An Obituary,” CUI, 194.]

For more than fifty years, the West’s liberal intellectuals have proclaimed their love for mankind, while being bored by the rivers of blood pouring out of the Soviet Union. Professing their compassion for human suffering, they have none for the victims in Russia. Unable or unwilling to give up their faith in collectivism, they evade the existence of Soviet atrocities, of terror, secret police and concentration camps—and publish glowing tributes to Soviet technology, production and art. Posturing as humanitarians, they man the barricades to fight the “injustice,” “exploitation,” “repression,” and “persecution” they claim to find in America; as to the full reality of such things in Russia, they keep silent.

[Susan Ludel, review of Anatoly Marchenko’s My Testimony, TO, July 1970, I5.]

See also CAPITALISM; COLLECTIVISM; COMPROMISE; “CONSERVATIVES”; “CONSERVATIVES” vs. “LIBERALS”; CYNICISM; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; MIXED ECONOMY; NEW LEFT; PRAGMATISM; SOCIALISM; SOVIET RUSSIA; STATISM; WELFARE STATE.

“Libertarians.” For the record, I shall repeat what I have said many times before: I do not join or endorse any political group or movement. More specifically, I disapprove of, disagree with, and have no connection with, the latest aberration of some conservatives, the so-called “hippies of the right,” who attempt to snare the younger or more careless ones of my readers by claiming simultanteously to be followers of my philosophy and advocates of anarchism. Anyone offering such a combination confesses his inability to understand either. Anarchism is the most irrational, anti-intellectual notion ever spun by the concrete-bound, context-dropping, whim-worshiping fringe of the collectivist movement, where it properly belongs.

[“Brief Summary,” TO, Sept. 1971, 1.]

Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements, in order to “do something.” By “ideological” (in this context), I mean groups or movements proclaiming some vaguely generalized, undefined (and, usually, contradictory) political goals. (E.g., the Conservative Party, which subordinates reason to faith, and substitutes theocracy for capitalism; or the “libertarian” hippies, who subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for capitalism.) To join such groups means to reverse the philosophical hierarchy and to sell out fundamental principles for the sake of some superficial political action which is bound to fail. It means that you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies. (For a discussion of the reasons, see “The Anatomy of Compromise” in my book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.)

[“What Can One Do?” PWNI, 248; pb 202.]

The “libertarians” ... plagiarize Ayn Rand’s principle that no man may initiate the use of physical force, and treat it as a mystically revealed, out-of-context absolute....

In the philosophical battle for a free society, the one crucial connection to be upheld is that between capitalism and reason. The religious conservatives are seeking to tie capitalism to mysticism; the “libertarians” are tying capitalism to the whim-worshipping subjectivism and chaos of anarchy. To cooperate with either group is to betray capitalism, reason, and one’s own future.

[Harry Binswanger, “Q & A Department: Anarchism,” TOF, Aug. 1981, 12.]

See also ANARCHISM; COMPROMISE; CONTEXT-DROPPING; GOVERNMENT; PHYSICAL FORCE; SUBJECTIVISM; WHIMSIWHIM-WORSHIP.

Life. There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of “Life” that makes the concept of “Value” possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.

[GS, FNI, 147; pb 121.]

Only a living entity can have goals or can originate them. And it is only a living organism that has the capacity for self-generated, goal-directed action. On the physical level, the functions of all living organisms, from the simplest to the most complex—from the nutritive function in the single cell of an amoeba to the blood circulation in the body of a man—are actions generated by the organism itself and directed to a single goal: the maintenance of the organism’s life.

An organism’s life depends on two factors: the material or fuel which it needs from the outside, from its physical background, and the action of its own body, the action of using that fuel properly. What standard determines what is proper in this context? The standard is the organism’s life, or: that which is required for the organism’s survival.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 6; pb 16.]

When applied to physical phenomena, such as the automatic functions of an organism, the term “goal-directed” is not to be taken to mean “purposive” (a concept applicable only to the actions of a consciousness) and is not to imply the existence of any teleological principle operating in insentient nature. I use the term “goal-directed,” in this context, to designate the fact that the automatic functions of living organisms are actions whose nature is such that they result in the preservation of an organism’s life.

[Ibid.]

In a fundamental sense, stillness is the antithesis of life. Life can be kept in existence only by a constant process of self-sustaining action. The goal of that action, the ultimate value which, to be kept, must be gained through its every moment, is the organism’s life.

[Ibid., 7; pb 16.]

See also HAPPINESS; LIFE, RIGHT to; MAN; MORALITY; STANDARD of VALUE; ULTIMATE VALUE; VALUES.

Life, Right to. A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)

[“Man’s Rights,” VOS, 124; pb 93.]

The right to life means that a man has the right to support his life by his own work (on any economic level, as high as his ability will carry him); it does not mean that others must provide him with the necessities of life.

[Ibid., 129; pb 97.]

The Right of Life means that Man cannot be deprived of his life for the benefit of another man nor of any number of other men.

[“Textbook of Americanism,” pamphlet, 5.]

See also INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; LIFE.

Linguistic Analysis. There is an element of grim irony in the emergence of Linguistic Analysis on the philosophical scene. The assault on man’s conceptual faculty has been accelerating since Kant, widening the breach between man’s mind and reality. The cognitive function of concepts was undercut by a series of grotesque devices—such, for instance, as the “analytic-synthetic” dichotomy which, by a route of tortuous circumlocutions and equivocations, leads to the dogma that a “necessarily” true proposition cannot be factual, and a factual proposition cannot be “necessarily” true. The crass skepticism and epistemological cynicism of Kant’s influence have been seeping from the universities to the arts, the sciences, the industries, the legislatures, saturating our culture, decomposing language and thought. If ever there was a need for a Herculean philosophical effort to clean up the Kantian stables—particularly, to redeem language by establishing objective criteria of meaning and definition, which average men could not attempt —the time was now. As if sensing that need, Linguistic Analysis came on the scene for the avowed purpose of “clarifying” language—and proceeded to declare that the meaning of concepts is determined in the minds of average men, and that the job of philosophers consists of observing and reporting on how people use words.

The reductio ad absurdum of a long line of mini-Kantians, such as pragmatists and positivists, Linguistic Analysis holds that words are an arbitrary social product immune from any principles or standards, an irreducible primary not subject to inquiry about its origin or purpose—and that we can “dissolve” all philosophical problems by “clarifying” the use of these arbitrary, causeless, meaningless sounds which hold ultimate power over reality....

Proceeding from the premise that words (concepts) are created by whim, Linguistic Analysis offers us a choice of whims: individual or collective. It declares that there are two kinds of definitions: “stipulative,” which may be anything anyone chooses, and “reportive,” which are ascertained by polls of popular use.

As reporters, linguistic analysts were accurate: Wittgenstein’s theory that a concept refers to a conglomeration of things vaguely tied together by a “family resemblance” is a perfect description of the state of a mind out of focus.

[ITOE, 102.]

Linguistic Analysis declares that the ultimate reality is not even percepts, but words, and that words have no specific referents, but mean whatever people want them to mean.... Linguistic Analysis is vehemently opposed to ... any kinds of principles or broad generalizations —i.e., to consistency. It is opposed to basic axioms (as “analytic” and “redundant”)—i.e., to the necessity of any grounds for one’s assertions. It is opposed to the hierarchical structure of concepts (i.e., to the process of abstraction) and regards any word as an isolated primary (i.e., as a perceptually given concrete). It is opposed to “system-building”—i.e., to the integration of knowledge.

[“The Comprachicos,” NL, 225.]

Through decades of promulgating such doctrines as Pragmatism, Logical Positivism, Linguistic Analysis, [philosophers] refused to consider the fact that these doctrines would disarm and paralyze the best among men, those who take philosophy seriously, and that they would unleash the worst, those who, scorning philosophy, reason, justice, morality, would have no trouble brushing the disarmed out of the way.... To what sort of problems had [today’s philosophers] been giving priority over the problems of politics? Among the papers to be read at that [1969 American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division)] convention were: “Pronouns and Proper Names”—“Can Grammar Be Thought?”—“Propositions as the Only Realities.”

[“The Chickens’ Homecoming,” NL, 112.]

It is the claim of Linguistic Analysis that its purpose is not the communication of any particular philosophic content, but the training of a student’s mind. This is true—in the terrible, butchering sense of a comprachico operation. The detailed discussions of inconsequential minutiae—the discourses on trivia picked at random and in midstream, without base, context or conclusion—the shocks of self-doubt at the professor’s sudden revelations of some such fact as the student’s inability to define the word “but,” which, he claims, proves that they do not understand their own statements—the countering of the question: “What is the meaning of philosophy?” with: “Which sense of ‘meaning’ do you mean?” followed by a discourse on twelve possible uses of the word “meaning,” by which time the question is lost—and, above all, the necessity to shrink one’s focus to the range of a flea’s, and to keep it there—will cripple the best of minds, if it attempts to comply.

“Mind-training” pertains to psycho-epistemology; it consists in making a mind automatize certain processes, turning them into permanent habits. What habits does Linguistic Analysis inculcate? Context-dropping, “concept-stealing,” disintegration, purposelessness, the inability to grasp, retain or deal with abstractions. Linguistic Analysis is not a philosophy, it is a method of eliminating the capacity for philosophical thought—it is a course in brain-destruction, a systematic attempt to turn a rational animal into an animal unable to reason.

[“The Comprachicos,” NL, 226.]

See also ANALYTIC-SYNTHETIC DICHOTOMY; GRAMMAR; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); KANT, IMMANUEL; LANGUAGE; LOGICAL POSITIVISM; MEANING (of CONCEPTS); PHILOSOPHY; PRAGMATISM; PRINCIPLES; “STOLEN CONCEPT,” FALLACY of; WORDS.

Literature. Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments. Man’s profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires knowledge by means of abstractions, and needs the power to bring his widest metaphysical abstractions into his immediate, perceptual awareness....

Literature re-creates reality by means of language.... The relation of literature to man’s cognitive faculty is obvious: literature re-creates reality by means of words, i.e., concepts. But in order to re-create reality, it is the sensory-perceptual level of man’s awareness that literature has to convey conceptually: the reality of concrete, individual men and events, of specific sights, sounds, textures, etc.

All these arts are conceptual in essence, all are products of and addressed to the conceptual level of man’s consciousness, and they differ only in their means. Literature starts with concepts and integrates them to percepts—painting, sculpture and architecture start with percepts and integrate them to concepts. The ultimate psycho-epistemological function is the same: a process that integrates man’s forms of cognition, unifies his consciousness and clarifies his grasp of reality.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 45.]

The most important principle of the esthetics of literature was formulated. by Aristotle, who said that fiction is of greater philosophical importance than history, because “history represents things as they are, while fiction represents them as they might be and ought to be.”

This applies to all forms of literature and most particularly to a form that did not come into existence until twenty-three centuries later: the novel.

A novel is a long, fictional story about human beings and the events of their lives. The four essential attributes of a novel are: Theme—Plot —Characterization—Style.

These are attributes, not separable parts. They can be isolated conceptually for purposes of study, but one must always remember that they are interrelated and that a novel is their sum. (If it is a good novel, it is an indivisible sum.)

These four attributes pertain to all forms of literature, i.e., of fiction, with one exception. They pertain to novels, plays, scenarios, librettos, short stories. The single exception is poems. A poem does not have to tell a story; its basic attributes are theme and style.

A novel is the major literary form—in respect to its scope, its inexhaustible potentiality, its almost unlimited freedom (including the freedom from physical limitations of the kind that restrict a stage play) and, most importantly, in respect to the fact that a novel is a purely literary form of art which does not require the intermediary of the performing arts to achieve its ultimate effect.

[“Basic Principles of Literature,” RM, 57; pb 80.]

An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man and of existence. In forming a view of man’s nature, a fundamental question one must answer is whether man possesses the faculty of volition—because one’s conclusions and evaluations in regard to all the characteristics, requirements and actions of man depend on the answer.

Their opposite answers to this question constitute the respective basic premises of two broad categories of art: Romanticism, which recognizes the existence of man’s volition—and Naturalism, which denies it.

[“What Is Romanticism?” RM, 81; pb 99.]

Prior to the nineteenth century, literature presented man as a helpless being whose life and actions were determined by forces beyond his control: either by fate and the gods, as in the Greek tragedies, or by an innate weakness, “a tragic flaw,” as in the plays of Shakespeare. Writers regarded man as metaphysically impotent; their basic premise was determinism. On that premise, one could not project what might happen to men; one could only record what did happen—and chronicles were the appropriate literary form of such recording.

Man as a being who possesses the faculty of volition did not appear in literature until the nineteenth century. The novel was his proper literary form—and Romanticism was the great new movement in art. Romanticism saw man as a being able to choose his values, to achieve his goals, to control his own existence. The Romantic writers did not record the events that had happened, but projected the events that should happen; they did not record the choices men had made. but projected the choices men ought to make.

With the resurgence of mysticism and collectivism, in the later part of the nineteenth century, the Romantic novel and the Romantic movement vanished gradually from the cultural scene.

Man’s new enemy, in art, was Naturalism. Naturalism rejected the concept of volition and went back to a view of man as a helpless creature determined by forces beyond his control; only now the new ruler of man’s destiny was held to be society. The Naturalists proclaimed that values have no power and no place, neither in human life nor in literature, that writers must present men “as they are,” which meant: must record whatever they happen to see around them—that they must not pronounce value-judgments nor project abstractions, but must content themselves with a faithful transcription, a carbon copy, of any existing concretes.

[“The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age,” RM, 113; pb 123.]

[The] basic premises of Romanticism and Naturalism (the volition or anti-volition premise) affect all the other aspects of a literary work, such as the choice of theme and the quality of the style, but it is the nature of the story structure—the attribute of plot or plotlessness—that represents the most important difference between them and serves as the main distinguishing characteristic for classifying a given work in one category or the other.

[“What Is Romanticism?” RM, 83; pb 101.]

The theme of a novel can be conveyed only through the events of the plot, the events of the plot depend on the characterization of the men who enact them—and the characterization cannot be achieved except through the events of the plot, and the plot cannot be constructed without a theme.

This is the kind of integration required by the nature of a novel. And this is why a good novel is an indivisible sum: every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.

[“Basic Principles of Literature,” RM, 74; pb 93.]

A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated—as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.

[“Basic Principles of Literature,” RM, 63; pb 85.]

In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other.

That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art.

[“The Goal of My Writing,” RM, 166; pb 166.]

The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.

The typical literary product of such writers—and of their imitators, who possess no style—are so-called “mood-studies,” popular among today’s literati, which are little pieces conveying nothing but a certain mood. Such pieces are not an art-form, they are merely finger-exercises that never develop into art.

[“Basic Principles of Literature.” RM, 78; pb 96.]

Now take a look at modern literature.

Man—the nature of man, the metaphysically significant, important, essential in man—is now represented by dipsomaniacs, drug addicts, sexual perverts, homicidal maniacs and psychotics. The subjects of modern literature are such themes as: the hopeless love of a bearded lady for a mongoloid pinhead in a circus side show—or: the problem of a married couple whose child was born with six fingers on her left hand —or: the tragedy of a gentle young man who just can’t help murdering strangers in the park, for kicks.

All this is still presented to us under the Naturalistic heading of “a slice of life” or “real life”—but the old slogans have worn thin. The obvious question, to which the heirs of statistical Naturalism have no answer, is: if heroes and geniuses are not to be regarded as representative of mankind, by reason of their numerical rarity, why are freaks and monsters to be regarded as representative? Why are the problems of a bearded lady of greater universal significance than the problems of a genius? Why is the soul of a murderer worth studying, but not the soul of a hero?

[“The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age,” RM. 115; pb 125.]

If you wonder what is the ultimate destination toward which modern philosophy and modern art are leading you, you may observe its advance symptoms all around us. Observe that literature is returning to the art form of the pre-industrial ages, to the chronicle—that fictionalized biographies of “real” people, of politicians, baseball players or Chicago gangsters, are given preference over works of imaginative fiction, in the theater, in the movies, in television—and that a favored literary form is the doctementary.

[“The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age,” RM, 118; pb 127.]

Except for the exceptions, there is no literature (and no art) today—in the sense of a broad, vital cultural movement and influence. There are only bewildered imitators with nothing to imitate—and charlatans who rise to split-second notoriety, as they always did in periods of cultural collapse.

Some remnants of Romanticism may still be found in the popular media—but in such a mangled, disfigured form that they achieve the opposite of Romanticism’s original purpose.

[“What Is Romanticism?” RM, 108; pb 119.]

See also ARISTOTLE; ART; CHARACTERIZATI0N; CLASSICISM; CONCEPTS; DETERMINISM; MODERN ART; NATURALISM; NOVEL; PLOT; PLOT-THEME; POPULAR LITERATURE; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; ROMANTICISM; SENSE of LIFE; STYLE; THEME (LITERARY ); THRILLERS.

Lobbying. “Lobbying” is the activity of attempting to influence legislation by privately influencing the legislators. It is the result and creation of a mixed economy—of government by pressure groups. Its methods range from mere social courtesies and cocktail-party or luncheon “friendships” to favors, threats, bribes, blackmail.

[“The Pull Peddlers,” CUI, 168.]

See also INTERVENTIONISM (ECONOMIC); MIXED ECONOMY; WELFARE STATE.

Logic. All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identify it as a solid object; he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe ; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

[GS, FNI, 153; pb 125.]

The fundamental concept of method, the one on which all the others depend, is logic. The distinguishing characteristic of logic (the art of non-contradictory identification) indicates the nature of the actions (actions of consciousness required to achieve a correct identification) and their goal (knowledge)—white omitting the length, complexity or specific steps of the process of logical inference, as well as the nature of the particular cognitive problem involved in any given instance of using logic.

[ITOE, 46.]

“It’s logical, but logic has nothing to do with reality.” Logic is the art or skill of non-contradictory identification. Logic has a single law, the Law of Identity, and its various corollaries. If logic has nothing to do with reality, it means that the Law of Identity is inapplicable to reality. If so, then: a. things are not what they are; b. things can be and not be at the same time, in the same respect, i.e., reality is made up of contradictions. If so, by what means did anyone discover it? By illogical means. (This last is for sure.) The purpose of that notion is crudely obvious. Its actual meaning is not: “Logic has nothing to do with reality,” but: “I, the speaker, have nothing to do with logic (or with reality).” When people use that catch phrase, they mean either: “It’s logical, but I don’t choose to be logical” or: “It’s logical, but people are not logical, they don’t think—and I intend to pander to their irrationality.”

[“Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 17; pb 15.J

Logic is man’s method of reaching conclusions ubjectively by deriving them without contradiction from the facts of reality—ultimately, from the evidence provided by man’s senses. If men reject logic, then the tie between their mental processes and reality is severed; all cognitive standards are repudiated, and anything goes; any contradiction, on any subject, may be endorsed (and simultaneously rejected) by anyone, as and when he feels like it.

[Leonard Peikoff, “Nazism and Subjectivism,” TO, Feb. 1971, 12.]

Any theory that propounds an opposition between the logical and the empirical, represents a failure to grasp the nature of logic and its role in human cognition. Man’s knowledge is not acquired by logic apart from experience or by experience apart from logic, but by the application of logic to experience. All truths are the product of a logical identification of the facts of experience.

Man is born tabula rasa; all his knowledge is based on and derived from the evidence of his senses. To reach the distinctively human level of cognition, man must conceptualize his perceptual data—and conceptualization is a process which is neither automatic nor infallible. Man needs to discover a method to guide this process, if it is to yield conclusions which correspond to the facts of reality—i.e., which represent knowledge. The principle at the base of the proper method is the fundamental principle of metaphysics: the Law of Identity. In reality, contradictions cannot exist; in a cognitive process, a contradiction is the proof of an error. Hence the method man must follow: to identify the facts he observes, in a non-contradictory manner. This method is logic —“the art of non-contradictory identification.” (Atlas Shrugged.) Logic must be employed at every step of a man’s conceptual development, from the formation of his first concepts to the discovery of the most complex scientific laws and theories. Only when a conclusion is based on a non-contradictory identification and integration of all the evidence available at a given time, can it qualify as knowledge.

The failure to recognize that logic is man’s method of cognition, has produced a brood of artificial splits and dichotomies which represent restatements of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy from various aspects. Three in particular are prevalent today: logical truth vs. factual truth; the logically possible vs. the empirically possible; and the a priori vs. the a posteriori.

The logical-factual dichotomy opposes truths which are validated “merely” by the use of logic (the analytic ones), and truths which describe the facts of experience (the synthetic ones). Implicit in this dichotomy is the view that logic is a subjective game, a method of manipulating arbitrary symbols, not a method of acquiring knowledge.

It is the use of logic that enables man to determine what is and what is not a fact. To introduce an opposition between the “logical” and the “factual” is to create a split between consciousness and existence, between truths in accordance with man’s method of cognition and truths in accordance with the facts of reality. The result of such a dichotomy is that logic is divorced from reality (“Logical truths are empty and conventional”)—and reality becomes unknowable (“Factual truths are contingent and uncertain”). This amounts to the claim that man has no method of cognition, i.e., no way of acquiring knowledge.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 151.]

See also ANALYTlC-SYNTHETIC DICHOTOMY; ARISTOTLE; AXIOMS; CONTRADICTIONS; EPISTEMOLOGY; IDENTITY; INDUCTION and DEDUCTION; METHOD, CONCEPTS of; MYSTICISM; OBJECTIVITY; PROOF; REASON; VALIDATION.

Logical Positivism. As a defense against the Witch-doctory of Hegel, who claimed universal omniscience, the scientist was offered the combined neo-mystic Witch-doctory and Attila-ism of the Logical Positivists. They assured him that such concepts as metaphysics or existence or reality or thing or matter or mind are meaningless—let the mystics care whether they exist or not, a scientist does not have to know it; the task of theoretical science is the manipulation of symbols, and scientists are the special elite whose symbols have the magic power of making reality conform to their will (“matter is that which fits mathematical equations”). Knowledge, they said, consists, not of facts, but of words, words unrelated to objects, words of an arbitrary social convention, as an irreducible primary; thus knowledge is merely a matter of manipulating language. The job of scientists, they said, is not the study of reality, but the creation of arbitrary constructs by means of arbitrary sounds, and any construct is as valid as another, since the criterion of validity is only “convenience” and the definition of science is “that which the scientists do.” But this omnipotent power, surpassing the dreams of ancient numerologists or of medieval alchemists, was granted to the scientist by philosophical Attila-ism on two conditions: a. that he never claim certainty for his knowledge, since certainty is unknown to man, and that he claim, instead, “percentages of probability,” not troubling himself with such questions as how one calculates percentages of the unknowable; b. that he claim as absolute knowledge the proposition that all values lie outside the sphere of science, that reason is impotent to deal with morality, that moral values are a matter of subjective choice, dictated by one’s feelings, not one’s mind.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 36; pb 34.]

Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach. In the name of reason, Pragmatism established a range-of-the-moment view as an enlightened perspective on life, context-dropping as a rule of epistemology, expediency as a principle of morality, and collective subjectivism as a substitute for metaphysics. Logical Positivism carried it farther and, in the name of reason, elevated the immemorial psycho-epistemology of shyster-lawyers to the status of a scientific epistemological system—by proclaiming that knowledge consists of linguistic manipulations.

[“The Cashing-in: The Student ‘Rebellion,’ ” CUI, 246.]

If [the student “rebels”] “seem unable to formulate or sustain a systematized political theory of society,” yet shriek with moral righteousness that they propose to achieve their social goals by physical force—hasn’t Logical Positivism taught them that ethical propositions have no cognitive meaning and are merely a report on one’s feelings or the equivalent of emotional ejaculations? If they are savagely blind to everything but the immediate moment—hasn’t Logical Positivism taught them that nothing else can be claimed with certainty to exist?

[tbid.,248.]

Logical Positivism declares that “reality,” “identity,” “existence,” “mind” are meaningless terms, that man can be certain of nothing but the sensory perceptions of the immediate moment ... it declares that the meaning of the proposition: “Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo” is your walk to the library where you read it in a book.

[“The Comprachicos,” NL, 225.]

See also ANALYTIC-SYNTHETIC DICHOTOMY; BEHAVIORISM; CERTAINTY;KANT, IMMANUEL; MEANING (of CONCEPTS); PHILOSOPHY;PRAGMATISM; SCIENCE; SUBJECTIVISM; WORDS.

Loneliness. The thinking child is not antisocial (he is, in fact, the only type of child fit for social relationships). When he develops his first values and conscious convictions, particularly as he approaches adolescence, he feels an intense desire to share them with a friend who would understand him; if frustrated, he feels an acute sense of loneliness. (Loneliness is specifically the experience of this type of child—or adult; it is the experience of those who have something to offer. The emotion that drives conformists to “belong,” is not loneliness, but fear—the fear of intellectual independence and responsibility. The thinking child seeks equals; the conformist seeks protectors.)

[“The Comprachicos,” NL, 213.]

See also EMOTIONS; INDEPENDENCE; RATIONALITY; SECOND-HANDERS.

Love. Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character. Only a brute or an altruist would claim that the appreciation of another person’s virtues is an act of selflessness, that as far as one’s own selfish interest and pleasure are concerned, it makes no difference whether one deals with a genius or a fool, whether one meets a hero or a thug, whether one marries an ideal woman or a slut.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 29; pb 31.]

Romantic love, in the full sense of the term, is an emotion possible only to the man (or woman) of unbreached self-esteem: it is his response to his own highest values in the person of another—an integrated response of mind and body, of love and sexual desire. Such a man (or woman) is incapable of experiencing a sexual desire divorced from spiritual values.

[“Of Living Death,” TO, Oct. 1968, 2.]

Man is an end in himself. Romantic love—the profound, exalted, lifelong passion that unites his mind and body in the sexual act—is the living testimony to that principle.

[Ibid., 3.]

There are two aspects of man’s existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art.

I am referring here to romantic love, in the serious meaning of that term—as distinguished from the superficial infatuations of those whose sense of life is devoid of any consistent values, i.e., of any lasting emotions other than fear. Love is a response to values. It is with a person’s sense of life that one falls in love—with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person’s character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul—the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness. It is one’s own sense of life that acts as the selector, and responds to what it recognizes as one’s own basic values in the person of another. It is not a matter of professed convictions (though these are not irrelevant); it is a matter of much more profound, conscious and subconscious harmony.

Many errors and tragic disillusionments are possible in this process of emotional recognition, since a sense of life, by itself, is not a reliable cognitive guide. And if there are degrees of evil, then one of the most evil consequences of mysticism—in terms of human suffering—is the belief that love is a matter of’ “the heart,” not the mind, that love is an emotion independent of reason, that love is blind and impervious to the power of philosophy. Love is the expression of philosophy—of a subconscious philosophical sum—and, perhaps, no other aspect of human existence needs the conscious power of philosophy quite so desperately. When that power is called upon to verify and support an emotional appraisal, when love is a conscious integration of reason and emotion, of mind and values, then—and only then—it is the greatest reward of man’s life.

[“Philosophy and Sense of Life,” RM, 40; pb 32.]

To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love—because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 29; pb 32.]

[In The Fountainhead] the hero utters a line that has often been quoted by readers: “To say ‘I love you’ one must know first how to say the ‘I.’ ”

[“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 7.]

[Selfless love] would have to mean that you derive no personal pleasure or happiness from the company and the existence of the person you love, and that you are motivated only by self-sacrificial pity for that person’s need of you. I don’t have to point out to you that no one would be flattered by, nor would accept, a concept of that kind. Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person.

[Ibid.]

One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one’s own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love.

A “selfless,” “disinterested” love is a contradiction in terms: it means that one is indifferent to that which one values.

Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one’s selfish interests. If a man who is passionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a “sacrifice” for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies.

[“The Ethics of Emergencies,” VOS, 48; pb 44.]

The practical implementation of friendship, affection and love consists of incorporating the welfare (the rational welfare) of the person involved into one’s own hierarchy of values, then acting accordingly.

[Ibid., 51; pb 46.]

To love is to value. The man who tells you that it is possible to value without values, to love those whom you appraise as worthless, is the man who tells you that it is possible to grow rich by consuming without producing and that paper money is as valuable as gold.... When it comes to love, the highest of emotions, you permit them to shriek at you accusingly that you are a moral delinquent if you’re incapable of feeling causeless love. When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.

Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. Your morality demands that you divorce your love from values and hand it down to any vagrant, not as response to his worth, but as response to his need, not as reward, but as alms, not as a payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices. Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral judgment, that true love transcends, forgives and survives every manner of evil in its object, and the greater the love the greater the depravity it permits to the loved. To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, it tells you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love to those who don’t deserve it, and the less they deserve it, the more love you owe them—the more loathsome the object, the nobler your love—the more unfastidious your love, the greater your virtue—and if you can bring your soul to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection.

[GS, FNI, 182; pb 147.]

Like any other value, love is not a static quantity to be divided, but an unlimited response to be earned. The love for one friend is not a threat to the love for another, and neither is the love for the various members of one’s family, assuming they have earned it. The most exclusive form —romantic love—is not an issue of competition. If two men are in love with the same woman, what she feels for either of them is not determined by what she feels for the other and is not taken away from him. If she chooses one of them, the “loser” could not have had what the “winner” has earned.

It is only among the irrational, emotion-motivated persons, whose love is divorced from any standards of value, that chance rivalries, accidental conflicts and blind choices prevail. But then, whoever wins does not win much. Among the emotion-driven, neither love nor any other emotion has any meaning.

[“The ‘Conflicts’ of Men’s Interests,” VOS, 65; pb 55.]

Let us answer the question: “Can you measure love?”

The concept “love” is formed by isolating two or more instances of the appropriate psychological process, then retaining its distinguishing characteristics (an emotion proceeding from the evaluation of an existent as a positive value and as a source of pleasure) and omitting the object and the measurements of the process’s intensity.

The object may he a thing, an event, an activity, a condition or a person. The intensity varies according to one’s evaluation of the object, as, for instance, in such cases as one’s love for ice cream, or for parties, or for reading, or for freedom, or for the person one marries. The concept “love” subsumes a vast range of values and, consequently, of intensity: it extends from the lower levels (designated by the subcategory “liking”) to the higher level (designated by the subcategory “affection,” which is applicable only in regard to persons) to the highest level, which includes romantic love.

If one wants to measure the intensity of a particular instance of love, one does so by reference to the hierarchy of values of the person experiencing it. A man may love a woman, yet may rate the neurotic satisfactions of sexual promiscuity higher than her value to him. Another man may love a woman, but may give her up, rating his fear of the disapproval of others (of his family, his friends or any random strangers) higher than her value. Still another man may risk his life to save the woman he loves, because all his other values would lose meaning without her. The emotions in these examples are not emotions of the same intensity or dimension. Do not let a James Taggart type of mystic tell you that love is immeasurable.

[ITOE, 44.]

See also ALTRUISM; CHARACTER; EMOTIONS; FEMININITY; MARRIAGE; PHILOSOPHY; SACRIFICE; SELF-ESTEEM; SELFISHNESS; SELFLESSNESS; SENSE of LIFE; SEX; TELEOLOGICAL MEASUREMENT; VALUES; VIRTUE.

M

Malevolent Universe Premise. The altruist ethics is based on a “malevolent universe” metaphysics, on the theory that man, by his very nature, is helpless and doomed—that success, happiness, achievement are impossible to him—that emergencies, disasters, catastrophes are the norm of his life and that his primary goal is to combat them.

As the simplest empirical refutation of that metaphysics—as evidence of the fact that the material universe is not inimical to man and that catastrophes are the exception, not the rule of his existence—observe the fortunes made by insurance companies.

[“The Ethics of Emergencies,” VOS, 55; pb 48.]

If you hold the wrong ideas on any fundamental philosophic issue, that will undercut or destroy the benevolent universe premise.... For example, any departure in metaphysics from the view that this world in which we live is reality, the full, final, absolute reality—any such departure will necessarily undercut a man’s confidence in his ability to deal with the world, and thus will inject the malevolent-universe element. The same applies in epistemology: if you conclude in any form that reason is not valid, then man has no tool of achieving values; so defeat and tragedy are unavoidable.

This is true also of ethics. If men hold values incompatible with life—such as self-sacrifice and altruism-obviously they can’t achieve such values; they will soon come to feel that evil is potent, whereas they are doomed to misery, suffering, failure. It is irrational codes of ethics above all else that feed the malevolent-universe attitude in people and lead to the syndrome eloquently expressed by the philosopher Schopenhauer: “Whatever one may say, the happiest moment of the happy man is the moment of his falling asleep, and the unhappiest moment of the unhappy that of his waking. Human life must be some kind of mistake.”

Now there is certainly “some kind of mistake” here. But it’s not life. It’s the kind of philosophies used to wreck man—to make him incapable of living—philosophies, I may say, which are perfectly exemplified by the ideas of Schopenhauer.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 8.]

See also ALTRUISM; BENEVOLENT UNIVERSE PREMISE; EVIL; HAPPINESS; MAN; METAPHYSICAL VALUE-JUDGMENTS; SENSE of LIFE; SUFFERING.

Man. Man’s distinctive characteristic is his type of consciousness—a consciousness able to abstract, to form concepts, to apprehend reality by a process of reason ... [The] valid definition of man, within the context of his knowledge and of all of mankind’s knowledge to-date [is]: “A rational animal.”

(“Rational,” in this context, does not mean “acting invariably in accordance with reason”; it means “possessing the faculty of reason.” A full biological definition of man would include many subcategories of “animal,” but the general category and the ultimate definition remain the same.)

[ITOE, 58.]

Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being—not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement—not survival at any price, since there’s only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason.

[GS, FNI, 149; pb 122.]

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice—and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a value—by choice; he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues—by choice.

[Ihid.]

The key to what you so recklessly call “human nature,” the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness.

[Ibid., 146; pb 120.]

Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An “instinct” is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man’s desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love for life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it.

[Ibid., 148; pb 121.]

Man cannot survive on the perceptual level of his consciousness; his senses do not provide him with an automatic guidance, they do not give him the knowledge he needs, only the material of knowledge, which his mind has to integrate. Man is the only living species who has to perceive reality—which means: to be conscious—by choice. But he shares with other species the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. For an animal, the question of survival is primarily physical: for man, primarily epistemological.

Man’s unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself. If a drought strikes them, animals perish—man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish—man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them animals perish—man writes the Constitution of the United States. But one does not obtain food, safety or freedom—by instinct.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 10; pb 15.]

Consciousness—for those living organisms which possess it——is the basic means of survival. For man, the basic means of survival is reason. Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts. A sensation of hunger will tell him that he needs food (if he has learned to identify it as “hunger”), but it will not tell him how to obtain his food and it will not tell him what food is good for him or poisonous. He cannot provide for his simplest physical needs without a process of thought. He needs a process of thought to discover how to plant and grow his food or how to make weapons for hunting. His percepts might lead him to a cave, if one is available—but to build the simplest shelter. he needs a process of thought. No percepts and no “instincts” will tell him how to light a fire, how to weave cloth, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to make an airplane, how to perform an appendectomy, how to produce an electric light bulb or an electronic tube or a cyclotron or a box of matches. Yet his life depends on such knowledge —and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 13: ph 21.]

To the extent that a man is guided by his rational judgment, he acts in accordance with the requirements of his nature and, to that extent, succeeds in achieving a human form of survival and well-being; to the extent that he acts irrationally, he acts as his own destroyer.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 21.]

If some men do not choose to think. they can survive only by imitating and repeating a routine of work discovered by others but those others had to discover it, or none would have survived. If some men do not choose to think or to work, they can survive (temporarily) only by looting the goods produced by others—but those others had to produce them, or none would have survived. Regardless of what choice is made, in this issue, by any man or by any number of men, regardless of what blind, irrational, or evil course they may choose to pursue—the fact remains that reason is man’s means of survival and that men prosper or fail, survive or perish in proportion to the degree of their rationality.

[Ibid.]

Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced by him—by his own choice, by his own effort, by his own mind.

A being who does not know automatically what is true or false, cannot know automatically what is right or wrong, what is good for him or evil. Yet he needs that knowledge in order to live. He is not exempt from the laws of reality, he is a specific organism of a specific nature that requires specific actions to sustain his life. He cannot achieve his survival by arbitrary means nor by random motions nor by blind urges nor by chance nor by whim. That which his survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 14; pb 22.]

The faculty of volition gives man a special status in two crucial respects: 1. unlike the metaphysically given, man’s products, whether material or intellectual, are not to be accepted uncritically—and 2. by its metaphysically given nature, a man’s volition is outside the power of other men. What the unalterable basic constituents are to nature, the attribute of a volitional consciousness is to the entity “man.” Nothing can force a man to think. Others may offer him incentives or impediments, rewards or punishments, they may destroy his brain by drugs or by the blow of a club, but they cannot order his mind to function: this is in his exclusive, sovereign power. Man is neither to be obeyed nor to be commanded.

[“The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 38; pb 31.]

To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.

[Ibid., 39; pb 32.]

An animal’s life consists of a series of separate cycles, repeated over and over again, such as the cycle of breeding its young, or of storing food for the winter; an animal’s consciousness cannot integrate its entire lifespan; it can carry just so far, then the animal has to begin the cycle all over again, with no connection to the past. Man’s life is a continuous whole: for good or evil, every day, year and decade of his life holds the sum of all the days behind him.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 18; pb 24.]

Man is the only living species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; but such transmission requires a process of thought on the part of the individual recipients. As witness, the breakdowns of civilization, the dark ages in the history of mankind’s progress, when the accumulated knowledge of centuries vanished from the lives of men who were unable, unwilling, or forbidden to think.

[“What Is Capitalism?” GUI, 16.]

Man gains enormous values from dealing with other men; living in a human society is his proper way of life—but only on certain conditions. Man is not a lone wolf and he is not a social animal. He is a contractual animal. He has to plan his life long-range, make his own choices, and deal with other men by voluntary agreement (and he has to be able to rely on their observance of the agreements they entered).

[“A Nation’s Unity,” ARL, II, 2, 3.]

A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind.

[GS, FNI, 148; pb 122.]

Almost unanimously, man is regarded as an unnatural phenomenon: either as a supernatural entity, whose mystic (divine) endowment, the mind (“soul”), is above nature—or as a subnatural entity, whose mystic (demoniacal) endowment, the mind, is an enemy of nature (“ecology”). The purpose of all such theories is to exempt man from the law of identity.

But man exists and his mind exists. Both are part of nature, both possess a specific identity. The attribute of volition does not contradict the fact of identity, just as the existence of living organisms does not contradict the existence of inanimate matter. Living organisms possess the power of self-initiated motion, which inanimate matter does not possess; man’s consciousness possesses the power of self-initiated motion in the realm of cognition (thinking), which the consciousnesses of other living species do not possess. But just as animals are able to move only in accordance with the nature of their bodies, so man is able to initiate and direct his mental action only in accordance with the nature (the identity) of his consciousness. His volition is limited to his cognitive processes; he has the power to identify (and to conceive of rearranging) the elements of reality, but not the power to alter them. He has the power to use his cognitive faculty as its nature requires, but not the power to alter it nor to escape the consequences of its misuse. He has the power to suspend, evade, corrupt or subvert his perception of reality, but not the power to escape the existential and psychological disasters that follow. (The use or misuse of his cognitive faculty determines a man’s choice of values, which determine his emotions and his character. It is in this sense that man is a being of self-made soul.)

[“The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 32; pb 26.]

Whatever he was—that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love—he was not man.

[GS, FNI, 169; pb 137.]

They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth—and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.

They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost—yet such is their image of man’s nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists.

Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore? It was man’s mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and a soul moved by mystic revelations—he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone.

[Ibid., 170; pb 138.]

Man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and ... he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions.

[Ibid., 157; pb 129.]

Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision—i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears. In that sense, man is the weakest of animals: he is born naked and unarmed, without fangs, claws, horns or “instinctual” knowledge. Physically, he would fall an easy prey, not only to the higher animals, but also to the lowest bacteria: he is the most complex organism and, in a contest of brute force, extremely fragile and vulnerable. His only weapon—his basic means of survival—is his mind.

In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production. The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus brought to man. The ecologists are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire.

[“The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” NL, 136.]

“It’s only human,” you cry in defense of any depravity, reaching the stage of self-abasement where you seek to make the concept “human” mean the weakling, the fool, the rotter, the liar, the failure, the coward, the fraud, and to exile from the human race the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventor, the strong, the purposeful, the pure—as if “to feel” were human, but to think were not, as if to fail were human, but to succeed were not, as if corruption were human, but virtue were not —as if the premise of death were proper to man, but the premise of life were not.

[GS, FNI, 209; pb 167.]

In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads.

[Ibid., 241; pb 191.]

See also CONCEPTS; EMOTIONS; FREE WILL; HISTORY; MAN-WORSHIP; METAPHYSICAL vs. MAN-MADE; MORALITY; OBJECTIVISM; PERCEPTION; PHYSICAL FORCE; PRODUCTION; REASON; SOUL-BODY DICHOTOMY; THOUGHT/THINKING.

Man-Worship. Just as religion has pre-empted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man’s reach. “Exaltation” is usually taken to mean an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. “Worship” means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man. “Reverence” means the emotion of a sacred respect, to be experienced on one’s knees. “Sacred” means superior to and not-to-be-touched-by any concerns of man or of this earth. Etc.

But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions. What, then, is their source or referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man’s dedication to a moral ideal. Yet apart from the man-degrading aspects introduced by religion, that emotional realm is left unidentified, without concepts, words or recognition.

It is this highest level of man’s emotions that has to be redeemed from the murk of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.

It is in this sense, with this meaning and intention, that I would identify the sense of life dramatized in The Fountainhead as man worship.

It is an emotion that a few—a very few-men experience consistently; some men experience it in rare, single sparks that flash and die without consequences; some do not know what I am talking about; some do and spend their lives as frantically virulent spark-extinguishers.

Do not confuse “man worship” with the many attempts, not to emancipate morality from religion and bring it into the realm of reason, but to substitute a secular meaning for the worst, the most profoundly irrational elements of religion. For instance, there are all the variants of modern collectivism (communist, fascist, Nazi, etc.), which preserve the religious-altruist ethics in full and merely substitute “society” for God as the beneficiary of man’s self-immolation. There are the various schools of modern philosophy which, rejecting the law of identity, proclaim that reality is an indeterminate flux ruled by miracles and shaped by whims—not God’s whims, but man’s or “society’s.” These neomystics are not man-worshipers; they are merely the secularizers of as profound a hatred for man as that of their avowedly mystic predecessors.

A cruder variant of the same hatred is represented by those concrete-bound, “statistical” mentalities who—unable to grasp the meaning of man’s volition—declare that man cannot be an object of worship, since they have never encountered any specimens of humanity who deserved it.

The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man’s highest potential and strive to actualize it.... [Man-worshipers are] those dedicated to the exaltation of man’s self-esteem and the sacred-ness of his happiness on earth.

[“Introduction to The Fountainhead,” TO, March 1968, 4.]

This view of man has rarely been expressed in human history. Today, it is virtually non-existent. Yet this is the view with which—in various degrees of longing, wistfulness, passion and agonized confusion—the best of mankind’s youth start out in life. It is not even a view, for most of them, but a foggy, groping, undefined sense made of raw pain and incommunicable happiness. It is a sense of enormous expectation, the sense that one’s life is important, that great achievements are within one’s capacity, and that great things lie ahead.

It is not in the nature of man—nor of any living entity—to start out by giving up, by spitting in one’s own face and damning existence; that requires a process of corruption, whose rapidity differs from man to man. Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it. Then all of these vanish in the vast swamp of their elders who tell them persistently that maturity consists of abandoning one’s mind; security, of abandoning one’s values; practicality, of losing self-esteem. Yet a few hold on and move on, knowing that that fire is not to be betrayed, learning how to give it shape, purpose and reality. But whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man’s nature and of life’s potential.

[Ibid., 6.]

See also FEMININITY; MAN; HAPPINESS; RELIGION; SACRED; SELF-ESTEEM; SENSE of LIFE.

Managerial Work. Managerial work—the organization and integration of human effort into purposeful, large-scale, long-range activities—is, in the realm of action, what man’s conceptual faculty is in the realm of cognition.

[“The Cashing-in: The Student ‘Rebellion,’ ” CUI, 262.]

If there is any one proof of a man’s incompetence, it is the stagnant mentality of a worker (or of a professor) who, doing some small, routine job in a vast undertaking, does not care to look beyond the lever of a machine (or the lectern of a classroom), does not choose to know how the machine (or the classroom) got there or what makes his job possible, and proclaims that the management of the undertaking is parasitical and unnecessary.

[Ibid.]

See also BUSINESSMEN; CAREER.

Market Value. It is in regard to a free market that the distinction between an intrinsic, subjective, and objective view of values is particularly important to understand. The market value of a product is not an intrinsic value, not a “value in itself” hanging in a vacuum. A free market never loses sight of the question: Of value to whom? And, within the broad field of objectivity, the market value of a product does not reflect its philosophically objective value, but only its socially objective value.

By “philosophically objective,” I mean a value estimated from the standpoint of the best possible to man, i.e., by the criterion of the most rational mind possessing the greatest knowledge, in a given category, in a given period, and in a defined context (nothing can be estimated in an undefined context). For instance, it can be rationally proved that the airplane is objectively of immeasurably greater value to man (to man at his best) than the bicycle—and that the works of Victor Hugo are objectively of immeasurably greater value than true-confession magazines. But if a given man’s intellectual potential can barely manage to enjoy true confessions, there is no reason why his meager earnings, the product of his effort, should be spent on books he cannot read—or on subsidizing the airplane industry, if his own transportation needs do not extend beyond the range of a bicycle. (Nor is there any reason why the rest of mankind should be held down to the level of his literary taste, his engineering capacity, and his income. Values are not determined by fiat nor by majority vote.)

Just as the number of its adherents is not a proof of an idea’s truth or falsehood, of an art work’s merit or demerit, of a product’s efficacy or inefficacy—so the free-market value of goods or services does not necessarily represent their philosophically objective value, but only their socially objective value, i.e., the sum of the individual judgments of all the men involved in trade at a given time, the sum of what they valued, each in the context of his own life.

Thus, a manufacturer of lipstick may well make a greater fortune than a manufacturer of microscopes—even though it can be rationally demonstrated that microscopes are scientifically more valuable than lipstick. But—valuable to whom?

A microscope is of no value to a little stenographer struggling to make a living; a lipstick is; a lipstick, to her, may mean the difference between self-confidence and self-doubt, between glamour and drudgery.

This does not mean, however, that the values ruling a free market are subjective. If the stenographer spends all her money on cosmetics and has none left to pay for the use of a microscope (for a visit to the doctor) when she needs it, she learns a better method of budgeting her income; the free market serves as her teacher: she has no way to penalize others for her mistakes. If she budgets rationally, the microscope is always available to serve her own specific needs and no more, as far as she is concerned: she is not taxed to support an entire hospital, a research laboratory, or a space ship’s journey to the moon. Within her own productive power, she does pay a part of the cost of scientific achievements, when and as she needs them.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 24.]

Within every category of goods and services offered on a free market, it is the purveyor of the best product at the cheapest price who wins the greatest financial rewards in that field—not automatically nor immediately nor by fiat, but by virtue of the free market, which teaches every participant to look for the objective best within the category of his own competence, and penalizes those who act on irrational considerations.

[Ibid., 25.]

The “philosophically objective” value of a new product serves as the teacher for those who are willing to exercise their rational faculty, each to the extent of his ability. Those who are unwilling remain unrewarded —as well as those who aspire to more than their ability produces....

A given product may not be appreciated at once, particularly if it is too radical an innovation; but, barring irrelevant accidents, it wins in the long run. It is in this sense that the free market is not ruled bv the intellectual criteria of the majority, which prevail only at and for any given moment; the free market is ruled by those who are able to see and plan long-range—and the better the mind, the longer the range.

The economic value of a man’s work is determined, on a free market, by a single principle: by the voluntary consent of those who are willing to trade him their work or products in return.

[Ibid., 26.]

[An] objection is usually expressed by a question such as: “Why should Elvis Presley make more money than Einstein?” The answer is: Because men work in order to support and enjoy their own lives—and if many men find value in Elvis Presley, they are entitled to spend their money on their own pleasure. Presley’s fortune is not taken from those who do not care for his work (I am one of them) nor from Einstein—nor does he stand in Einstein’s way—nor does Einstein lack proper recognition and support in a free society, on an appropriate intellectual level.

[Ibid., 27.]

See also CAPITALISM; COMPETITION; FREE MARKET; MONEY; PURCHASING POWER; TRADER PRINCIPLE.

Marriage. I consider marriage a very important institution, but it is important when and if two people have found the person with whom they wish to spend the rest of their lives—a question of which no man or woman can be automatically certain. When one is certain that one’s choice is final, then marriage is, of course, a desirable state. But this does not mean that any relationship based on less than total certainty is improper. I think the question of an affair or a marriage depends on the knowledge and the position of the two persons involved and should be left up to them. Either is moral, provided only that both parties take the relationship seriously and that it is based on values.

[“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 8.]

See also LOVE; SEX.

Materials, Concepts of. Concepts of materials are formed by observing the differences in the constituent materials of entities. (Materials exist only in the form of specific entities, such as a nugget of gold, a plank of wood, a drop or an ocean of water.) The concept of “gold,” for instance, is formed by isolating gold objects from all others, then abstracting and retaining the material, the gold, and omitting the measurements of the objects (or of the alloys) in which gold may exist. Thus, the material is the same in all the concrete instances subsumed under the concept, and differs only in quantity.

[ITOE. 19.]

See also CONCEPT-FORMATION; CONCEPT; MATTER.

Mathematics. Mathematics is a science of method (the science of measurement, i.e., of establishing quantitative relationships), a cognitive method that enables man to perform an unlimited series of integrations. Mathematics indicates the pattern of the cognitive role of concepts and the psycho-epistemological need they fulfill.

[ITOE, 85.]

With the grasp of the (implicit) concept “unit,” man reaches the conceptual level of cognition which consists of two interrelated fields: the conceptual and the mathematical. The process of concept-formation is, in large part, a mathematical process.

[Ibid., 8.]

A vast part of higher mathematics, from geometry on up, is devoted to the task of discovering methods by which various shapes can be measured—complex methods which consist of reducing the problem to the terms of a simple, primitive method, the only one available to man in this field: linear measurement. (Integral calculus, used to measure the area of circles, is just one example.)

In this respect, concept-formation and applied mathematics have a similar task, just as philosophical epistemology and theoretical mathematics have a similar goal: the goal and task of bringing the universe within the range of man’s knowledge—by identifying relationships to perceptual data.

[lbid., 17.]

See also EPISTEMOLOGY; MEASUREMENT; METHOD, CONCEPTS of; NUMBERS; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; SCIENCE; UNIT; UNIT-ECONOMY.

Matter. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist.

[GS, FNI, 147; pb 121.]

The day when [one] grasps that matter has no volition is the day when he grasps that he has—and this is his birth as a human being.

[Ibid., 194; pb 156.]

To grasp the axiom that existence exists, means to grasp the fact that nature, i.e., the universe as a whole, cannot be created or annihilated, that it cannot come into or go out of existence. Whether its basic constituent elements are atoms, or subatomic particles, or some yet undiscovered forms of energy, it is not ruled by a consciousness or by will or by chance, but by the Law of Identity. All the countless forms, motions, combinations and dissolutions of elements within the universe—from a floating speck of dust to the formation of a galaxy to the emergence of life—are caused and determined by the identities of the elements involved. Nature is the metaphysically given—i.e., the nature of nature is outside the power of any volition.

[“The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 30; pb 25.]

See also EXISTENCE; FREE WILL; LIFE; MATERIALS, CONCEPTS of; UNIVERSE.

“McCarthyism.” In the late 1940’s, another newly coined term was shot into our cultural arteries: “McCarthyism.” Again, it was a derogatory term, suggesting some insidious evil, and without any clear definition. Its alleged meaning was: “Unjust accusations, persecutions, and character assassinations of innocent victims.” Its real meaning was: “Anti-communism.”

Senator McCarthy was never proved guilty of those allegations, but the effect of that term was to intimidate and silence public discussions. Any uncompromising denunciation of communism or communists was —and still is—smeared as “McCarthyism.” As a consequence, opposition to and exposes of communist penetration have all but vanished from our intellectual scene. (I must mention that I am not an admirer of Senator McCarthy, but not for the reasons implied in that smear.)

[“ ‘Extremism,’ or The Art of Smearing,” CUI, 176.]

See also “ANTI-CONCEPTS”; COMMUNISM; SOVIET RUSSIA.

Meaning (of Concepts). A word has no meaning other than that of the concept it symbolizes, and the meaning of a concept consists of its units.

[ITOE, 52.]

A widespread error, in this context, holds that the wider the concept, the less its cognitive content—on the ground that its distinguishing characteristic is more generalized than the distinguishing characteristics of its constituent concepts. The error lies in assuming that a concept consists of nothing but its distinguishing characteristic. But the fact is that in the process of abstracting from abstractions, one cannot know what is a distinguishing characteristic unless one has observed other characteristics of the units involved and of the existents from which they are differentiated.

Just as the concept “man” does not consist merely of “rational faculty” (if it did, the two would be equivalent and interchangeable, which they are not), but includes all the characteristics of “man,” with “rational faculty” serving as the distinguishing characteristic—so, in the case of wider concepts, the concept “animal” does not consist merely of “consciousness and locomotion,” but subsumes all the characteristics of all the animal species, with “consciousness and locomotion” serving as the distinguishing characteristic.

[Ibid., 34.]

To know the exact meaning of the concepts one is using, one must know their correct definitions, one must be able to retrace the specific (logical, not chronological) steps by which they were formed, and one must be able to demonstrate their connection to their base in perceptual reality.

When in doubt about the meaning or the definition of a concept, the best method of clarification is to look for its referents—i.e., to ask oneself: What fact or facts of reality gave rise to this concept? What distinguishes it from all other concepts?

For instance: what fact of reality gave rise to the concept “justice”? The fact that man must draw conclusions about the things, people and events around him, i.e., must judge and evaluate them. Is his judgment automatically right? No. What causes his judgment to be wrong? The lack of sufficient evidence, or his evasion of the evidence, or his inclusion of considerations other than the facts of the case. How, then, is he to arrive at the right judgment? By basing it exclusively on the factual evidence and by considering all the relevant evidence available. But isn’t this a description of “objectivity”? Yes, “objective judgment” is one of the wider categories to which the concept “justice” belongs. What distinguishes “justice” from other instances of objective judgment? When one evaluates the nature or actions of inanimate objects, the criterion of judgment is determined by the particular purpose for which one evaluates them. But how does one determine a criterion for evaluating the character and actions of men, in view of the fact that men possess the faculty of volition? What science can provide an objective criterion of evaluation in regard to volitional matters? Ethics. Now, do I need a concept to designate the act of judging a man’s character and/or actions exclusively on the basis of all the factual evidence available, and of evaluating it by means of an objective moral criterion? Yes. That concept is “justice.”

[Ibid., 67.]

Since a word is a symbol for a concept, it has no meaning apart from the content of the concept it symbolizes. And since a concept is an integration of units, it has no content or meaning apart from its units.

The meaning of a concept consists of the units—the existents—which it integrates, including all the characteristics of these units.

Observe that concepts mean existents, not arbitrarily selected portions of existents. There is no basis whatever—neither metaphysical nor epistemological, neither in the nature of reality nor of a conceptual consciousness—for a division of the characteristics of a concept’s units into two groups, one of which is excluded from the concept’s meaning.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 132.]

What, then, is the meaning of the concept “man”? “Man” means a certain type of entity, a rational animal, including all the characteristics of this entity (anatomical, physiological, psychological, etc., as well as the relations of these characteristics to those of other entities)—all the characteristics already known, and all those ever to be discovered. Whatever is true of the entity, is meant by the concept.

It follows that there are no grounds on which to distinguish “analytic” from “synthetic” propositions. Whether one states that “A man is a rational animal,” or that “A man has only two eyes”—in both cases, the predicated characteristics are true of man and are, therefore, included in the concept “man.” The meaning of the first statement is: “A certain type of entity, including all its characteristics (among which are rationality and animality) is: a rational animal.” The meaning of the second is: “A certain type of entity, including all its characteristics (among which is the possession of only two eyes) has: only two eyes.” Each of these statements is an instance of the Law of Identity; each is a “tautology”; to deny either is to contradict the meaning of the concept “man,” and thus to endorse a self-contradiction.

A similar type of analysis is applicable to every true statement. Every truth about a given existent(s) reduces, in basic pattern, to: “X is: one or more of the things which it is.” The predicate in such a case states some characteristic(s) of the subject; but since it is a characteristic of the subject, the concept(s) designating the subject in fact includes the predicate from the outset.

[Ibid., 135.]

See also ANALYTIC-SYNTHETIC DICHOTOMY; CONCEPTS; UNIT; WORDS.

Measurement. Measurement is the identification of a relationship —a quantitative relationship established by means of a standard that serves as a unit. Entities (and their actions) are measured by their attributes (length, weight, velocity, etc.) and the standard of measurement is a concretely specified unit representing the appropriate attribute. Thus, one measures length in inches, feet and miles—weight in pounds —velocity by means of a given distance traversed in a given time, etc.

It is important to note that while the choice of a given standard is optional, the mathematical rules of using it are not. It makes no difference whether one measures length in terms of feet or meters; the standard provides only the form of notation, not the substance nor the result of the process of measuring. The facts established by measurement will be the same, regardless of the particular standard used; the standard can neither alter nor affect them. The requirements of a standard of measurement are: that it represent the appropriate attribute, that it be easily perceivable by man and that, once chosen, it remain immutable and absolute whenever used. (Please remember this; we will have reason to recall it.)

Now what is the purpose of measurement? Observe that measurement consists of relating an easily perceivable unit to larger or smaller quantities, then to infinitely larger or infinitely smaller quantities, which are not directly perceivable to man. (The word “infinitely” is used here as a mathematical, not a metaphysical, term.) The purpose of measurement is to expand the range of man’s consciousness, of his knowledge, beyond the perceptual level: beyond the direct power of his senses and the immediate concretes of any given moment. Man can perceive the length of one foot directly; he cannot perceive ten miles. By establishing the relationship of feet to miles, he can grasp and know any distance on earth; by establishing the relationship of miles to light-years, he can know the distances of galaxies.

The process of measurement is a process of integrating an unlimited scale of knowledge to man’s limited perceptual experience—a process of making the universe knowable by bringing it within the range of man’s consciousness, by establishing its relationship to man. It is not an accident that man’s earliest attempts at measurement (the evidence of which survives to this day) consisted of relating things to himself—as, for instance, taking the length of his foot as a standard of length, or adopting the decimal system, which is supposed to have its origin in man’s ten fingers as units of counting.

It is here that Protagoras’ old dictum may be given a new meaning, the opposite of the one he intended: “Man is the measure of all things.” Man is the measure, epistemologically—not metaphysically. In regard to human knowledge, man has to be the measure, since he has to bring all things into the realm of the humanly knowable. But, far from leading to subjectivism, the methods which he has to employ require the most rigorous mathematical precision, the most rigorous compliance with objective rules and facts—if the end product is to be knowledge.

[ITOE, 8.]

Observe the multiple role of measurements in the process of concept-formation, in both of its two essential parts: differentiation and integration. Concepts cannot be formed at random. All concepts are formed by first differentiating two or more existents from other existents. All conceptual differentiations are made in terms of commensurable characteristics (i.e., characteristics possessing a common unit of measurement). No concept could be formed, for instance, by attempting to distinguish long objects from green objects. Incommensurable characteristics cannot be integrated into one unit.

Tables, for instance, are first differentiated from chairs, beds and other objects by means of the characteristic of shape, which is an attribute possessed by all the objects involved. Then, their particular kind of shape is set as the distinguishing characteristic of tables—i.e., a certain category of geometrical measurements of shape is specified. Then, within that category, the particular measurements of individual table-shapes are omitted.

Please note the fact that a given shape represents a certain category or set of geometrical measurements. Shape is an attribute; differences of shape—whether cubes, spheres, cones or any complex combinations —are a matter of differing measurements; any shape can be reduced to or expressed by a set of figures in terms of linear measurement. When, in the process of concept-formation, man observes that shape is a commensurable characteristic of certain objects, he does not have to measure all the shapes involved nor even to know how to measure them; he merely has to observe the element of similarity.

Similarity is grasped perceptually; in observing it, man is not and does not have to be aware of the fact that it involves a matter of measurement. It is the task of philosophy and of science to identify that fact.

As to the actual process of measuring shapes, a vast part of higher mathematics, from geometry on up, is devoted to the task of discovering methods by which various shapes can be measured-complex methods which consist of reducing the problem to the terms of a simple, primitive method, the only one available to man in this field: linear measurement. (Integral calculus, used to measure the area of circles, is just one example.)

[Ibid., 16.]

There is no exact method of measuring the intensity of all psychological processes, but—as in the case of forming concepts of colors—conceptualization does not require the knowledge of exact measurements. Degrees of intensity can be and are measured approximately, on a comparative scale. For instance, the intensity of the emotion of joy in response to certain facts varies according to the importance of these facts in one’s hierarchy of values; it varies in such cases as buying a new suit, or getting a raise in pay, or marrying the person one loves. The intensity of a process of thought and of the intellectual effort required varies according to the scope of its content; it varies when one grasps the concept “table” or the concept “justice,” when one grasps that 2 + 2 = 4 or that e = mc2.

[Ibid., 40.]

Observe that the attacks on the conceptual level of man’s consciousness, i.e., on reason, come from the same ideological quarters as the attacks on measurement. When discussing man’s consciousness, particularly his emotions, some persons use the word “measurement” as a pejorative term—as if an attempt to apply it to the phenomena of consciousness were a gross, insulting, “materialistic” impropriety. The question “Can you measure love?” is an example and a symptom of that attitude.

As in many other issues, the two allegedly opposite camps are merely two variants growing out of the same basic premises. The old-fashioned mystics proclaim that you cannot measure love in pounds, inches or dollars. They are aided and abetted by the neo-mystics who—punch-drunk with undigested concepts of measurement, proclaiming measurement to be the sole tool of science—proceed to measure knee-jerks, statistical questionnaires, and the learning time of rats, as indices to the human psyche.

Both camps fail to observe that measurement requires an appropriate standard, and that in the physical sciences—which one camp passionately hates, and the other passionately envies—one does not measure length in pounds, or weight in inches.

Measurement is the identification of a relationship in numerical terms —and the complexity of the science of measurement indicates the complexity of the relationships which exist in the universe and which man has barely begun to investigate. They exist, even if the appropriate standards and methods of measurement are not always as easily apparent nor the degree of achievable precision as great as in the case of measuring the basic, perceptually given attributes of matter. If anything were actually “immeasurable,” it would bear no relationship of any kind to the rest of the universe, it would not affect nor be affected by anything else in any manner whatever, it would enact no causes and bear no consequences—in short, it would not exist.

The motive of the anti-measurement attitude is obvious: it is the desire to preserve a sanctuary of the indeterminate for the benefit of the irrational—the desire, epistemologically, to escape from the responsibility of cognitive precision and wide-scale integration; and, metaphysically, the desire to escape from the absolutism of existence, of facts, of reality and, above all, of identity.

[Ibid., 49.]

See also IDENTITY; MATHEMATICS; TELEOLOGICAL MEASUREMENT; UNIT.

Mediocrity. “Mediocrity” does not mean an average intelligence; it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters.

[“The Comprachicos,” NL, 213.]

See also GUILD SOCIALISM; INTELLIGENCE; PYRAMID of ABILITY.

Mental Health. Psychology does not regard its subject morally, but medically—i.e., from the aspect of health or malfunction (with cognitive competence as the proper standard of health).

[“The Psychology of ‘Psychologizing,’ ” TO, March 1971, 5.]

See also BEHAVIORISM; EVASION; FREUD; IMAGINATION; NEUROSIS vs. PSYCHOSIS; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; PSYCHOLOGY; SELF-ESTEEM; SUBCONSCIOUS.

Mercy. “Mercy” means an unearned forgiveness.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), question period, Lecture 8.]

See also JUSTICE; MORAL JUDGMENT.

“Meritocracy.” “Meritocracy” is an old anti-concept and one of the most contemptible package deals. By means of nothing more than its last five letters, that word obliterates the difference between mind and force: it equates the men of ability with political rulers, and the power of their creative achievements with political power. There is no difference, the word suggests, between freedom and tyranny: an “aristocracy” is tyranny by a politically established elite, a “democracy” is tyranny by the majority—and when a government protects individual rights, the result is tyranny by talent or “merit” (and since “to merit” means “to deserve,” a free society is ruled by the tyranny of justice).

[“An Untitled Letter,” PWNI, 126; pb 105.]

See also “ANTI-CONCEPTS”; DEMOCRACY; ECONOMIC POWER vs. POLITICAL POWER; FREEDOM; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; JUSTICE; “PACKAGE-DEALING,” FALLACY of; TYRANNY.

Metaphysical. I use the word “metaphysical” to mean: that which pertains to reality, to the nature of things, to existence.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 2; pb 14.]

See also EXISTENCE; METAPHYSICAL VALUE-JUDGMENTS; METAPHYSICAL vs. MAN-MADE; METAPHYSICS.

Metaphysical Value Judgments. The key concept, in the formation of a sense of life, is the term “important.” It is a concept that belongs to the realm of values, since it implies an answer to the question: Important—to whom? Yet its meaning is different from that of moral values. “Important” does not necessarily mean “good.” It means “a quality, character or standing such as to entitle to attention or consideration” (The American College Dictionary). What, in a fundamental sense, is entitled to one’s attention or consideration? Reality.

“Important”—in its essential meaning, as distinguished from its more limited and superficial uses—is a metaphysical term. It pertains to that aspect of metaphysics which serves as a bridge between metaphysics and ethics: to a fundamental view of man’s nature. That view involves the answers to such questions as whether the universe is knowable or not, whether man has the power of choice or not, whether he can achieve his goals in life or not. The answers to such questions are “metaphysical value-judgments,” since they form the base of ethics.

It is only those values which he regards or grows to regard as “important,” those which represent his implicit view of reality, that remain in a man’s subconscious and form his sense of life.

“It is important to understand things”—“It is important to obey my parents”—“It is important to act on my own”—“It is important to please other people”—“It is important to fight for what I want”—“It is important not to make enemies”—“My life is important”—“Who am I to stick my neck out?” Man is a being of self-made soul—and it is of such conclusions that the stuff of his soul is made. (By “soul” I mean “consciousness.”)

[“Philosophy and Sense of Life,” RM, 34; pb 28.]

Is the universe intelligible to man, or unintelligible and unknowable? Can man find happiness on earth, or is he doomed to frustration and despair? Does man have the power of choice, the power to choose his goals and to achieve them, the power to direct the course of his life—or is he the helpless plaything of forces beyond his control, which determine his fate? Is man, by nature, to be valued as good, or to be despised as evil? These are metaphysical questions, but the answers to them determine the kind of ethics men will accept and practice; the answers are the link between metaphysics and ethics. And although metaphysics as such is not a normative science, the answers to this category of questions assume, in man’s mind, the function of metaphysical value-judgments, since they form the foundation of all of his moral values.

Consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly, man knows that he needs a comprehensive view of existence to integrate his values, to choose his goals, to plan his future, to maintain the unity and coherence of his life—and that his metaphysical value-judgments are involved in every moment of his life, in his every choice, decision and action.

[“The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” RM, 21; pb 19.]

See also ART; BENEVOLENT UNIVERSE PREMISE; MALEVOLENT UNIVERSE PREMISE; METAPHYSICS; MORALITY; PHILOSOPHY; SENSE of LIFE; SUBCONSCIOUS.

Metaphysical vs. Man-Made. Any natural phenomenon, i.e., any event which occurs without human participation, is the metaphysically given, and could not have occurred differently or failed to occur; any phenomenon involving human action is the man-made, and could have been different. For example, a flood occurring in an uninhabited land, is the metaphysically given; a dam built to contain the flood water, is the man-made; if the builders miscalculate and the dam breaks, the disaster is metaphysical in its origin, but intensified by man in its consequences. To correct the situation, men must obey nature by studying the causes and potentialities of the flood, then command nature by building better flood controls.

[“The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 33; pb 27.]

Things of human origin (whether physical or psychological) may be designated as “man-made facts”—as distinguished from the metaphysically given facts. A skyscraper is a man-made fact, a mountain is a metaphysically given fact. One can alter a skyscraper or blow it up (just as one can alter or blow up a mountain), but so long as it exists, one cannot pretend that it is not there or that it is not what it is.

[Ibid., 37; pb 31.]

Nature, i.e., the universe as a whole, cannot be created or annihilated ... it cannot come into or go out of existence. Whether its basic constituent elements are atoms, or subatomic particles, or some yet undiscovered forms of energy, it is not ruled by a consciousness or by will or by chance, but by the law of identity. All the countless forms, motions, combinations and dissolutions of elements within the universe—from a floating speck of dust to the formation of a galaxy to the emergence of life—are caused and determined by the identities of the elements involved. Nature is the metaphysically given—i.e., the nature of nature is outside the power of any volition.

[Ibid., 30; pb 25.]

Man’s faculty of volition as such is not a contradiction of nature, but it opens the way for a host of contradictions—when and if men do not grasp the crucial difference between the metaphysically given and any object, institution, procedure, or rule of conduct made by man.

It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary. Man is not omniscient or infallible: he can make innocent errors through lack of knowledge, or he can lie, cheat and fake. The man-made may be a product of genius, perceptiveness, ingenuity—or it may be a product of stupidity, deception, malice, evil. One man may be right and everyone else wrong, or vice versa (or any numerical division in between). Nature does not give man any automatic guarantee of the truth of his judgments (and this is a metaphysically given fact, which must be accepted). Who, then, is to judge? Each man, to the best of his ability and honesty. What is his standard of judgment? The metaphysically given.

The metaphysically given cannot be true or false, it simply is—and man determines the truth or falsehood of his judgments by whether they correspond to or contradict the facts of reality. The metaphysically given cannot be right or wrong—it is the standard of right or wrong, by which a (rational) man judges his goals, his values, his choices. The metaphysically given is, was, will be, and had to be. Nothing made by man had to be: it was made by choice.

[Ibid., 32: pb 27.]

A man-made product did not have to exist, but, once made, it does exist. A man’s actions did not have to be performed, but, once performed, they are facts of reality. The same is true of a man’s character: he did not have to make the choices he made, but, once he has formed his character, it is a fact, and it is his personal identity. (Man’s volition gives him great, but not unlimited, latitude to change his character; if he does, the change becomes a fact.)

[Ibid., 37; pb 31.]

[One must] distinguish metaphysical facts from man-made facts—i.e., facts which are inherent in the identities of that which exists, from facts which depend upon the exercise of human volition. Because man has free will, no human choice—and no phenomenon which is a product of human choice—is metaphysically necessary. In regard to any man-made fact, it is valid to claim that man has chosen thus, but it was not inherent in the nature of existence for him to have done so; he could have chosen otherwise. For instance, the U.S. did not have to consist of 50 states; men could have subdivided the larger ones, or consolidated the smaller ones, etc.

Choice, however, is not chance. Volition is not an exception to the Law of Causality; it is a type of causation.... Further, metaphysical facts are unalterable by man, and limit the alternatives open to his choice. Man can rearrange the materials that exist in reality, but he cannot violate their identity; he cannot escape the laws of nature. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 149.]

In regard to nature, “to accept what I cannot change” means to accept the metaphysically given; “to change what I can” means to strive to rearrange the given by acquiring knowledge—as science and technology (e.g., medicine) are doing; “to know the difference” means to know that one cannot rebel against nature and, when no action is possible, one must accept nature serenely.... What one must accept is the fact that the minds of other men are not in one’s power, as one’s own mind is not in theirs; one must accept their right to make their own choices, and one must agree or disagree, accept or reject, join or oppose them, as one’s mind dictates. The only means of “changing” men is the same as the means of “changing” nature: knowledge—which, in regard to men, is to be used as a process of persuasion, when and if their minds are active; when they are not, one must leave them to the consequences of their own errors....

To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.

[“The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 39; pb 32.]

See also ABSOLUTES; CHARACTER; CREATION; FREE WILL; IDENTITY; MORAL JUDGMENT; NATURE; NECESSITY; PHYSICAL FORCE; UNIVERSE.

Metaphysics. Are you in a universe which is ruled by natural laws and, therefore, is stable, firm, absolute—and knowable? Or are you in an incomprehensible chaos, a realm of inexplicable miracles, an unpredictable, unknowable flux, which your mind is impotent to grasp? Are the things you see around you real—or are they only an illusion? Do they exist independent of any observer—or are they created by the observer? Are they the object or the subject of man’s consciousness? Are they what they are—or can they be changed by a mere act of your consciousness, such as a wish?

The nature of your actions—and of your ambition—will be different, according to which set of answers you come to accept. These answers are the province of metaphysics—the study of existence as such or, in Aristotle’s words, of “being qua being”—the basic branch of philosophy.

[“Philosophy: Who Needs It,” PWNI, 3; pb 2.]

The branch of philosophy that studies existence is metaphysics. Metaphysics identifies the nature of the universe as a whole. It tells men what kind of world they live in, and whether there is a supernatural dimension beyond it. It tells men whether they live in a world of solid entities, natural laws, absolute facts, or in a world of illusory fragments, unpredictable miracles, and ceaseless flux. It tells men whether the things they perceive by their senses and mind form a comprehensible reality, with which they can deal, or some kind of unreal appearance, which leaves them staring and helpless.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 14; pb 23.]

See also ABSOLUTES; ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; CAUSALITY; CONSCIOUSNESS; EXISTENCE; IDENTITY; METAPHYSICAL VALUE-JUDGMENTS; METAPHYSICAL vs. MAN-MADE; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; SUBJECTIVISM.

Method, Concepts of. A special subcategory of concepts pertaining to the products of consciousness, is reserved for concepts of method. Concepts of method designate systematic courses of action devised by men for the purpose of achieving certain goals. The course of action may be purely psychological (such as a method of using one’s consciousness) or it may involve a combination of psychological and physical actions (such as a method of drilling for oil), according to the goal to be achieved.

Concepts of method are formed by retaining the distinguishing characteristics of the purposive course of action and of its goal, while omitting the particular measurements of both.

For instance, the fundamental concept of method, the one on which all the others depend, is logic. The distinguishing characteristic of logic (the art of non-contradictory identification) indicates the nature of the actions (actions of consciousness required to achieve a correct identification) and their goal (knowledge)-while omitting the length, complexity or specific steps of the process of logical inference, as well as the nature of the particular cognitive problem involved in any given instance of using logic.

Concepts of method represent a large part of man’s conceptual equipment. Epistemology is a science devoted to the discovery of the proper methods of acquiring and validating knowledge. Ethics is a science devoted to the discovery of the proper methods of living one’s life. Medicine is a science devoted to the discovery of the proper methods of curing disease. All the applied sciences (i.e., technology) are sciences devoted to the discovery of methods.

[ITOE, 46.]

See also CONCEPT-FORMATION; CONCEPTS; CONSCIOUSNESS; EPISTEMOLOGY; LOGIC; MATHEMATICS.

Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were an era of mysticism, ruled by blind faith and blind obedience to the dogma that faith is superior to reason.

[“The Left: Old and New,” NL, 83.]

In the history of Western civilization, the period known as the Dark Ages, after the fall of the Roman Empire, was a period when Western Europe existed without any social organization beyond chance local groupings clustered around small villages, large castles, and remnants of various traditions—swept periodically by massive barbarian invasions, warring robber bands, and sundry local looters. It was as close to a state of pure anarchy as men could come. The feudal system grew out of the need for organized protection. The system, in essence, consisted in the peasants swearing allegiance to a lord, who claimed ownership of the land and a percentage of their harvest in exchange for his duty to protect them against military attacks.

This system brought some semblance of order, but no protection and no peace. Disarmed men were left in the total power of an armed ruler, who had his own military gang and who robbed them as ruthlessly as, but more systematically than, any foreign invader. The history of the Middle Ages is a series of internal and external wars: there were various lords struggling to enlarge their domains, foreign lords struggling to subjugate neighboring lands, and bloody, hopeless uprisings of desperate peasants, bloodily suppressed. It was also the longest period of stagnation—intellectually and productively—in Europe’s history.

[“A Nation’s Unity,” ARL, II, 2, 2.]

The medieval period, under the sway of such philosophers as Plotinus and Augustine, was an era dominated by Platonism. During much of this period Aristotle’s philosophy was almost unknown in the West.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 22; pb 30.]

For centuries, nature had been regarded as a realm of miracles manipulated by a personal deity, a realm whose significance lay in the clues it offered to the purposes of its author.

[Ibid., 107; pb 106.]

The dominant moralists had said that man must not seek his ultimate fulfillment on earth; that he must renounce the pleasures of this life, whether as a flesh-mortifying ascetic or as an abstemious toilet, for the sake of God, salvation, and the life to come.... Whatever their concern with the individual soul, the medievals had derogated or failed to discover the individual man. In philosophy, the Platonists had denied his reality; in practice, the feudal system had (by implication) treated the group—the caste, the guild, etc.—as the operative social unit.

[Ibid., 110; pb 108.]

An entirely different view of man dominated the medieval Christian civilization. Man, according to Augustine, is “crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous.” Medieval mystics regarded man as an evil creature whose body is loathsome because it is material, and whose mind is impotent because it is human. Hating man’s body, they said that pleasure is evil, and virtue consists of renunciation. Hating this earth, they said that it is a prison where man is doomed to pain, misery, calamity. Hating life, they said that death and escape into some other dimension is all that man could—and should—hope for.

Man as a helpless and depraved creature, was the basic theme of medieval sculpture until the Gothic period, whether he was shown being pushed into Hell or accepted into Heaven.

[Mary Ann Sures, “Metaphysics in Marble,” TO, Feb. 1969, 14.]

The supernatural doctrines of the Middle Ages, ... kept men huddling on the mud floors of their hovels, in terror that the devil might steal the soup they had worked eighteen hours to earn.

[GS. FNI. 199; pb 160.]

See also ARISTOTLE; DARK AGES; FAITH; HISTORY; INDIVIDUALISM; MIRACLES; MYSTICISM; RELIGION; RENAISSANCE.

Middle Class. A nation’s productive—and moral, and intellectual —top is the middle class. It is a broad reservoir of energy, it is a country’s motor and lifeblood, which feeds the rest. The common denominator of its members, on their various levels of ability, is: independence. The upper classes are merely a nation’s past; the middle class is its future.

[“The Dead End,” ARL. 1, 20, 3.]

The middle class is the heart, the lifeblood, the energy source of a free, industrial economy, i.e., of capitalism; it did not and cannot exist under any other system; it is the product of upward mobility, incompatible with frozen social castes. Do not ask, therefore, for whom the bell of inflation is tolling; it tolls for you. It is not at the destruction of a handful of the rich that inflation is aimed (the rich are mostly in the vanguard of the destroyers), but at the middle class.

[“The Inverted Moral Priorities,” ARL, III, 21, 2.]

See also CAPITALISM; INFLATION.

Military Conscription. See Draft.

Mill, John Stuart. Religious influences are not the only villain behind the censorship legislation; there is another one: the social school of morality, exemplified by John Stuart Mill. Mill rejected the concept of individual rights and replaced it with the notion that the “public good” is the sole justification of individual freedom. (Society, he argued, has the power to enslave or destroy its exceptional men, but it should permit them to be free, because it benefits from their efforts.) Among the many defaults of the conservatives in the past hundred years, the most shameful one, perhaps, is the fact that they accepted John Stuart Mill as a defender of capitalism.

[“Thought Control,” ARL, III, 2, 2.]

The terrible aspect of Mill’s influence is the fact that his followers become unable to consider great values—such as truth, science, morality, art—apart from and without the permission of “the people’s desires.”

[Ibid., 3.]

[Mill’s] On Liberty is the most pernicious piece of collectivism ever adopted by suicidal defenders of liberty.

[“An Untitled Letter,” PWNI, 138; pb 114.]

A weary agnostic on most of the fundamental issues of philosophy, Mill bases his defense of capitalism on the ethics of Utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism is a union of hedonism and Christianity. The first teaches man to love pleasure; the second, to love his neighbor. The union consists in teaching man to love his neighbor’s pleasure. To be exact, the Utilitarians teach that an action is moral if its result is to maximize pleasure among men in general. This theory holds that man’s duty is to serve—according to a purely quantitative standard of value.

He is to serve not the well-being of the nation or of the economic class, but “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” regardless of who comprise it in any given issue. As to one’s own happiness, says Mill, the individual must be “disinterested” and “strictly impartial”; he must remember that he is only one unit out of the dozens, or millions, of men affected by his actions. “All honor to those who can abnegate for themselves the personal enjoyment of life,” says Mill, “when by such renunciation they contribute worthily to increase the amount of happiness in the world....”

Capitalism, Mill acknowledges, is not based on any desire for abnegation or renunciation; it is based on the desire for selfish profit. Nevertheless, he says, the capitalist system ensures that, most of the time, the actual result of individual profit-seeking is the happiness of society as a whole. Hence the individual should be left free of government regulation. He should be left free not as an absolute (there are no absolutes, says Mill), but under the present circumstances—not on the ground of inalienable rights (there are no such rights, Mill holds), but of social utility.

Under capitalism, concluded one American economist of the period with evident moral relief, “the Lord maketh the selfishness of man to work for the material welfare of his kind.” As one commentator observes, the essence of this argument is the claim that capitalism is justified by its ability to convert “man’s baseness” to “noble ends.” “Baseness” here means egoism; “nobility” means altruism. And the justification of individual freedom in terms of its contribution to the welfare of society means collectivism.

Mill (along with Smith, Say, and the rest of the classical economists) was trying to defend an individualist system by accepting the fundamental moral ideas of its opponents. It did not take Mill long to grasp this contradiction in some terms and amend his political views accordingly. He ended his life as a self-proclaimed “qualified socialist.”

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 122; pb 119.]

See also AGNOSTICISM; ALTRUISM; CAPITALISM; COLLECTIVISM; “CONSERVATIVES”; FREE SPEECH; HAPPINESS; HEDONISM; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; PLEASURE and PAIN; “PUBLIC INTEREST,” the; UTILITARIANISM; VALUES.

Mind-Body Dichotomy. See Soul-Body Dichotomy.

Minority Rights. The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

[“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 61.]

The defense of minority rights is acclaimed today, virtually by everyone, as a moral principle of a high order. But this principle, which forbids discrimination, is applied by most of the “liberal” intellectuals in a discriminatory manner: it is applied only to racial or religious minorities. It is not applied to that small, exploited, denounced, defenseless minority which consists of businessmen.

Yet every ugly, brutal aspect of injustice toward racial or religious minorities is being practiced toward businessmen.

[Ibid., 44.]

See also BUSINESSMEN; DEMOCRACY; “ETHNICITY”; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; RACISM.

Miracles. The enemy you seek to defeat is the law of causality: it permits you no miracles.

[GS, FNI, 188; pb 151.]

See also CAUSALITY; GOD; MYSTICISM; RELIGION; SUPERNATURALISM.

Mixed Economy. We are not a capitalist system any longer: we are a mixed economy, i.e., a mixture of capitalism and statism, of freedom and controls. A mixed economy is a country in the process of disintegration, a civil war of pressure-groups looting and devouring one another.

[“The Obliteration of Capitalism,” CUI, 185.]

A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and controls—with no principles, rules, or theories to define either. Since the introduction of controls necessitates and leads to further controls, it is an unstable, explosive mixture which, ultimately, has to repeal the controls or collapse into dictatorship. A mixed economy has no principles to define its policies, its goals, its laws—no principles to limit the power of its government. The only principle of a mixed economy—which, necessarily, has to remain unnamed and unacknowledged—is that no one’s interests are safe, everyone’s interests are on a public auction block, and anything goes for anyone who can get away with it. Such a system—or, more precisely, anti-system—breaks up a country into an ever-growing number of enemy camps, into economic groups fighting one another for self preservation in an indeterminate mixture of defense and offense, as the nature of such a jungle demands. While, politically, a mixed economy preserves the semblance of an organized society with a semblance of law and order, economically it is the equivalent of the chaos that had ruled China for centuries: a chaos of robber gangs looting—and draining—the productive elements of the country.

A mixed economy is rule by pressure groups. It is an amoral, institutionalized civil war of special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another’s expense by an act of government—i.e., by force. In the absence of individual rights, in the absence of any moral or legal principles, a mixed economy’s only hope to preserve its precarious semblance of order, to restrain the savage, desperately rapacious groups it itself has created, and to prevent the legalized plunder from running over into plain, unlegalized looting of all by all—is compromise; compromise on everything and in every realm—material, spiritual, inteuectuat—so that no group would step over the line by demanding too much and topple the whole rotted structure. If the game is to continue, nothing can be permitted to remain firm, solid, absolute, untouchable; everything (and everyone) has to be fluid, flexible, indeterminate, approximate. By what standard are anyone’s actions to be guided? By the expediency of any immediate moment.

The only danger, to a mixed economy, is any not-to-be-compromised value, virtue, or idea. The only threat is any uncompromising person, group, or movement. The only enemy is integrity.

[“The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus,” CUI, 206.]

There can be no compromise between freedom and government controls; to accept “just a few controls” is to surrender the principle of inalienable individual rights and to substitute for it the principle of the government’s unlimited, arbitrary power, thus delivering oneself into gradual enslavement. As an example of this process, observe the present domestic policy of the United States.

[“Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?” VOS, 86; pb 68.]

You have seen, within the span of the last few years, that controls breed more controls, and that the proliferation of controls breeds the proliferation of pressure groups. Today, you see political manipulators setting up new conflicts, such as ethnic minorities against the majority, the young against the old, the old against the middle, women against men, even welfare-recipients against the self-supporting. Openly and cynically, these new groups clamor for “a bigger slice of the pie” (which you have to bake).

[“The Principals and the Principles,” ARL, II, 21, 3.]

In a controlled (or mixed) economy, a legislator’s job consists in sacrificing some men to others. No matter what choice he makes, no choice of this kind can be morally justified (and never has been). Proceeding from an immoral base, no decision of his can be honest or dishonest, just or unjust—these concepts are inapplicable. He becomes, therefore, an easy target for the promptings of any pressure group, any lobbyist, any influence-peddler, any maniputator—he has no standards by which to judge or to resist them. You do not know what hidden powers drive him or what he is doing. Neither does he.

[Ibid., 4.]

If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.

[“The Pull Peddlers,” CUI, 170.]

A mixed economy has to reach the day when it faces a final crossroad: either the private sector regains its freedom and starts rebuilding—or it gives up and lets the absolute state take over the shambles.

[“A Preview,” ARL, 1, 23, 4.]

See also CAPITALISM; COMPROMISE; FREEDOM; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; INTERVENTIONISM (ECONOMIC); LOBBYING; PHYSICAL FORCE; STATISM.

Modern Art. As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 75.]

Decomposition is the postscript to the death of a human body; disintegration is the preface to the death of a human mind. Disintegration is the keynote and goal of modern art—the disintegration of man’s conceptual faculty, and the retrogression of an adult mind to the state of a mewling infant.

To reduce man’s consciousness to the level of sensations, with no capacity to integrate them, is the intention behind the reducing of language to grunts, of literature to “moods,” of painting to smears, of sculpture to slabs, of music to noise.

But there is a philosophically and psychopathologically instructive element in the spectacle of that gutter. It demonstrates—by the negative means of an absence—the relationships of art to philosophy, of reason to man’s survival, of hatred for reason to hatred for existence. After centuries of the philosophers’ war against reason, they have succeeded —by the method of vivisection—in producing exponents of what man is like when deprived of his rational faculty, and these in turn are giving us images of what existence is like to a being with an empty skull.

While the alleged advocates of reason oppose “system-building” and haggle apologetically over concrete-bound words or mystically floating abstractions, its enemies seem to know that integration is the psycho-epistemological key to reason, that art is man’s psycho-epistemological conditioner, and that if reason is to be destroyed, it is man’s integrating capacity that has to be destroyed.

It is highly doubtful that the practitioners and admirers of modern art have the intellectual capacity to understand its philosophical meaning; all they need to do is indulge the worst of their subconscious premises. But their leaders do understand the issue consciously: the father of modern art is Immanuel Kant (see his Critique of Judgment).

I do not know which is worse: to practice modern art as a colossal fraud or to do it sincerely.

Those who do not wish to be the passive, silent victims of frauds of this kind, can learn from modern art the practical importance of philosophy, and the consequences of philosophical default. Specifically, it is the destruction of logic that disarmed the victims, and, more specifically, the destruction of definitions. Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.

Works of art—tike everything else in the universe—are entities of a specific nature: the concept requires a definition by their essential characteristics, which distinguish them from all other existing entities. The genus of art works is: man-made objects which present a selective recreation of reality according to the artist’s metaphysical value-judgments, by means of a specific material medium. The species are the works of the various branches of art, defined by the particular media which they employ and which indicate their relation to the various elements of man’s cognitive faculty.

Man’s need of precise definitions rests on the Law of Identity: A is A, a thing is itself. A work of art is a specific entity which possesses a specific nature. If it does not, it is not a work of art. If it is merely a material object, it belongs to some category of material objects—and if it does not belong to any particular category, it belongs to the one reserved for such phenomena: junk.

“Something made by an artist” is not a definition of art. A beard and a vacant stare are not the defining characteristics of an artist.

“Something in a frame hung on a wall” is not a definition of painting.

“Something with a number of pages in a binding” is not a definition of literature.

“Something piled together” is not a definition of sculpture.

“Something made of sounds produced by anything” is not a definition of music.

“Something glued on a flat surface” is not a definition of any art. There is no art that uses glue as a medium. Blades of grass glued on a sheet of paper to represent grass might be good occupational therapy for retarded children—though I doubt it—but it is not art.

“Because I felt like it” is not a definition or validation of anything.

There is no place for whim in any human activity—if it is to be regarded as human. There is no place for the unknowable, the unintelligible, the undefinable, the non-objective in any human product. This side of an insane asylum, the actions of a human being are motivated by a conscious purpose; when they are not, they are of no interest to anyone outside a psychotherapist’s office. And when the practitioners of modern art declare that they don’t know what they are doing or what makes them do it, we should take their word for it and give them no further consideration.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 76.]

As an example of an entire field of activity based on nothing but the Argument from Intimidation, I give you modern art—where, in order to prove that they do possess the special insight possessed only by the mystic “elite,” the populace are trying to surpass one another in loud exclamations on the splendor of some bare (but smudged) piece of canvas.

[“The Argument from Intimidation,” VOS, 193; pb 140.]

Just as modern philosophy is dominated by the attempt to destroy the conceptual level of man’s consciousness and even the perceptual level, reducing man’s awareness to mere sensations—so modern art and literature are dominated by the attempt to disintegrate man’s consciousness and reduce it to mere sensations, to the “enjoyment” of meaningless colors, noises and moods.

The art of any given period or culture is a faithful mirror of that culture’s philosophy. If you see obscene, dismembered monstrosities leering at you from today’s esthetic mirrors—the aborted creations of mediocrity, irrationality and panic—you are seeing the embodied, concretized reality of the philosophical premises that dominate today’s culture. Only in this sense can those manifestations be called “art”—not by the intention or accomplishment of their perpetrators.

[“Basic Principles of Literature,” RM, 79; pb 97.]

The composite picture of man that emerges from the art of our time is the gigantic figure of an aborted embryo whose limbs suggest a vaguely anthropoid shape, who twists his upper extremity in a frantic quest for a light that cannot penetrate its empty sockets, who emits inarticulate sounds resembling snarls and moans, who crawls through a bloody muck, red froth dripping from his jaws, and struggles to throw the froth at his own non-existent face, who pauses periodically and, lifting the stumps of his arms, screams in abysmal terror at the universe at large.

Engendered by generations of anti-rational philosophy, three emotions dominate the sense of life of modern man: fear, guilt and pity (more precisely, self-pity). Fear, as the appropriate emotion of a creature deprived of his means of survival, his mind; guilt, as the appropriate emotion of a creature devoid of moral values; pity, as the means of escape from these two, as the only response such a creature could beg for. A sensitive, discriminating man, who has absorbed that sense of life, but retained some vestige of self-esteem, will avoid so revealing a profession as art. But this does not stop the others.

Fear, guilt and the quest for pity combine to set the trend of art in the same direction, in order to express, justify and rationalize the artists’ own feelings. To justify a chronic fear, one has to portray existence as evil; to escape from guilt and arouse pity, one has to portray man as impotent and innately loathsome. Hence the competition among modern artists to find ever lower levels of depravity and ever higher degrees of mawkishness—a competition to shock the public out of its wits and jerk its tears. Hence the frantic search for misery, the descent from compassionate studies of alcoholism and sexual perversion to dope, incest, psychosis, murder, cannibalism.

[“Bootleg Romanticism,” RM, 122; pb 130.]

See also ARGUMENT from INTIMIDATION; ART; DEFINITIONS; GENUS and SPECIES; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); OBJECTIVITY; PERCEPTION; PHILOSOPHY; REASON; SENSATIONS; SUBJECTIVISM: WHIMS/WHIM-WORSHIP.

Money. Money is the tool of men who have reached a high level of productivity and a long-range control over their lives. Money is not merely a tool of exchange: much more importantly, it is a tool of saving, which permits delayed consumption and buys time for future production. To fulfill this requirement, money has to be some material commodity which is imperishable, rare, homogeneous, easily stored, not subject to wide fluctuations of value, and always in demand among those you trade with. This leads you to the decision to use gold as money. Cold money is a tangible value in itself and a token of wealth actually produced. When you accept a gold coin in payment for your goods, you actually deliver the goods to the buyer; the transaction is as safe as simple harter. When you store your savings in the form of gold coins, they represent the goods which you have actually produced and which have gone to buy time for other producers, who will keep the productive process going, so that you’ll be able to trade your coins for goods any time you wish. time you wish.

[“Egalitarianism and Inflation,” PWNI, 154; pb 127.]

Money cannot function as money, i.e., as a medium of exchange, unless it is backed by actual. unconsumed goods.

[“Hunger and Freedom,” ARL, III, 22, 3.]

So you think that money is the root of all evil? ... Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor—your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions —and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made—before it can be looted or mooched—made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.

[“The Meaning of Money,” FNI, 104; pb 88.]

Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders.

[Ibid., 105; pb 89.]

So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another—their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

[Ibid., 108; pb 91.]

Most people lump together into the same category all men who become rich, refusing to consider the essential question: the source of the riches, the means by which the wealth was acquired.

Money is a tool of exchange; it represents wealth only so long as it can be traded for material goods and services. Wealth does not grow in nature; it has to be produced by men. Nature gives us only the raw materials, but it is man’s mind that has to discover the knowledge of how to use them. It is man’s thinking and labor that transform the materials into food, clothing, shelter or television sets—into all the goods that men require for their survival, comfort and pleasure.

Behind every step of humanity’s long climb from the cave to New York City, there is the man who took that step for the first time—the man who discovered how to make a fire or a wheel or an airplane or an electric light.

When people refuse to consider the source of wealth, what they refuse to recognize is the fact that wealth is the product of man’s intellect, of his creative ability, fully as much as is art, science, philosophy or any other human value.

[“The Money-Making Personality,” TOF, Feb. 1983, 2.]

Money is a great power—because, in a free or even a semi-free society, it is a frozen form of productive energy. And, therefore, the spending of money is a grave responsibility. Contrary to the altruists and the advocates of the so-called “academic freedom,” it is a moral crime to give money to support ideas with which you disagree; it means: ideas which you consider wrong, false, evil. It is a moral crime to give money to support your own destroyers.

[“The Sanction of the Victims,” TOF, April 1982, 7.]

See also CONSUMPTION; CREDIT; GOLD STANDARD; INFLATION; MARKET VALUE; OBJECTIVE THEORY of VALUES; PHYSICAL FORCE; PRODUCTION; PURCHASING POWER; SANCTION of the VICTIM; SAVINGS; SELFISHNESS; TRADER PRINCIPLE.

Monopoly. The alleged purpose of the Antitrust laws was to protect competition; that purpose was based on the socialistic fallacy that a free, unregulated market will inevitably lead to the establishment of coercive monopolies. But, in fact, no coercive monopoly has ever been or ever can be established by means of free trade on a free market. Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action. (For a full demonstration of this fact, I refer you to the works of the best economists.)

[“Antitrust: The Rule of Unreason,” TON, Feb. 1962, 5.]

A “coercive monopoly” is a business concern that can set its prices and production policies independent of the market, with immunity from competition, from the law of supply and demand. An economy dominated by such monopolies would be rigid and stagnant.

The necessary precondition of a coercive monopoly is closed entry—the barring of all competing producers from a given field. This can be accomplished only by an act of government intervention, in the form of special regulations, subsidies, or franchises. Without government assistance, it is impossible for a would-be monopolist to set and maintain his prices and production policies independent of the rest of the economy. For if he attempted to set his prices and production at a level that would yield profits to new entrants significantly above those available in other fields, competitors would be sure to invade his industry.

[Alan Greenspan, “Antitrust,” CUI, 68.]

See also ANTITRUST LAWS; COMPETITION; ECONOMIC POWER us. POLITICAL POWER; FREE MARKET; INTERVENTIONISM (ECO NOMIC).

Moral Cowardice. Moral cowardice is fear of upholding the good because it is good, and fear of opposing the evil because it is evil.

[“Altruism as Appeasement,” TO, Jan. 1966, 5.)

Moral cowardice is the necessary consequence of discarding morality as inconsequential. It is the common symptom of all intellectual appeasers. The image of the brute is the symbol of an appeaser’s belief in the supremacy of evil, which means—not in conscious terms, but in terms of his quaking, cringing, blinding panic—that when his mind judges a thing to be evil, his emotions proclaim its power, and the more evil, the more powerful.

[Ibid., 4.]

See also APPEASEMENT; COMPROMISE; COURAGE and CONFIDENCE; EVIL; MORAL JUDGMENT; MORALITY.

Moral Judgment. One must never fail to pronounce moral judgment.

Nothing can corrupt and disintegrate a culture or a man’s character as thoroughly as does the precept of moral agnosticism, the idea that one must never pass moral judgment on others, that one must be morally tolerant of anything, that the good consists of never distinguishing good from evil.

It is obvious who profits and who loses by such a precept. It is not justice or equal treatment that you grant to men when you abstain equally from praising men’s virtues and from condemning men’s vices. When your impartial attitude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you—whom do you betray and whom do you encourage?

But to pronounce moral judgment is an enormous responsibility. To be a judge, one must possess an unimpeachable character: one need not be omniscient or infallible, and it is not an issue of errors of knowledge; one needs an unbreached integrity, that is, the absence of any indulgence in conscious, willful evil. Just as a judge in a court of law may err, when the evidence is inconclusive, but may not evade the evidence available, nor accept bribes, nor allow any personal feeling, emotion, desire or fear to obstruct his mind’s judgment of the facts of reality—so every rational person must maintain an equally strict and solemn integrity in the courtroom within his own mind, where the responsibility is more awesome than in a public tribunal, because he, the judge, is the only one to know when he has been impeached.

[“How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?” VOS, 89; pb 71.]

If people did not indulge in such abject evasions as the claim that some contemptible liar “means well”—that a mooching bum “can’t help it”—that a juvenile delinquent “needs love”—that a criminal “doesn’t know any better”—that a power-seeking politician is moved by patriotic concern for “the public good”—that communists are merely “agrarian reformers”—the history of the past few decades, or centuries, would have been different.

[Ibid., 93; pb 73.]

The precept: “Judge not, that ye be not judged” ... is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is .a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.

There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.

The moral principle to adopt in this issue, is: “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”

The opposite of moral neutrality is not a blind, arbitrary, self-righteous condemnation of any idea, action or person that does not fit one’s mood, one’s memorized slogans or one’s snap judgment of the moment. Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion. To declare that “everybody is white” or “everybody is black” or “everybody is neither white nor black, but gray,” is not a moral judgment, but an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment.

To judge means: to evaluate a given concrete by reference to an abstract principle or standard. It is not an easy task; it is not a task that can be performed automatically by one’s feelings, “instincts” or hunches. It is a task that requires the most precise, the most exacting, the most ruthlessly objective and rational process of thought. It is fairly easy to grasp abstract moral principles; it can be very difficult to apply them to a given situation, particularly when it involves the moral character of another person. When one pronounces moral judgment, whether in praise or in blame, one must be prepared to answer “Why?” and to prove one’s case—to oneself and to any rational inquirer.

[Ibid., 91; pb 72.]

The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life....

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist.

[GS, FNI, 216; pb 173.]

Morality is the province of philosophical judgment, not ot psychological diagnosis. Moral judgment must be objective, i.e., based on perceivable, demonstrable facts. A man’s moral character must be judged on the basis of his actions, his statements and his conscious convictions—not on the basis of inferences (usually, spurious) about his subconscious.

A man is not to be condemned or excused on the grounds of the state of his subconscious. His psychological problems are his private concern which is not to be paraded in public and not to be made a burden on innocent victims or a hunting ground for poaching psychologizers. Morality demands that one treat and judge men as responsible adults.

This means that one grants a man the respect of assuming that he is conscious of what he says and does, and one judges his statements and actions philosophically, i.e., as what they are—not psychologically, i.e., as leads or clues to some secret, hidden, unconscious meaning. One neither speaks nor listens to people in code.

[“The Psychology of ‘Psychologizing,’ ”TO, March 1971, 5.]

It is not man’s subconscious, but his conscious mind that is subject to his direct control—and to moral judgment. It is a specific individual’s conscious mind that one judges (on the basis of objective evidence) in order to judge his moral character.

... The alternative is not: rash, indiscriminate moralizing or cowardly, evasive moral neutrality—i.e., condemnation without knowledge or the refusal to know, in order not to condemn. These are two interchangeable variants of the same motive: escape from the responsibility of cognition and of moral judgment.

[Ibid., 6.]

See also ABSOLUTES; CHARACTER; COMPROMISE; ERRORS of KNOWLEDGE vs. BREACHES of MORALITY; EVASION; EVIL; JUSTICE; MORALITY; MORAL COWARDICE; “PSYCHOLOGIZING”; RATIONALITY; STANDARD of VALUE; VIRTUE.

Moral.Practical Dichotomy. Your impracticable creed ... [inculcates a] lethal tenet: the belief that the moral and the practical are opposites. Since childhood, you have been running from the terror of a choice you have never dared fully to identify: If the practical, whatever you must practice to exist, whatever works, succeeds, achieves your purpose, whatever brings you food and joy, whatever profits you, is evil— and if the good, the moral, is the impractical, whatever fails, destroys, frustrates, whatever injures you and brings you loss or pain—then your choice is to be moral or to live.

The sole result of that murderous doctrine was to remove morality from life. You grew up to believe that moral laws bear no relation to the job of living, except as an impediment and threat, that man’s existence is an amoral jungle where anything goes and anything works. And in that fog of switching definitions which descends upon a frozen mind, you have forgotten that the evils damned by your creed were the virtues required for living, and you have come to believe that actual evils are the practical means of existence. Forgetting that the impractical “good” was self-sacrifice, you believe that self-esteem is impractical; forgetting that the practical “evil” was production, you believe that robbery is practical.

Swinging like a helpless branch in the wind of an uncharted moral wilderness, you dare not fully to be evil or fully to live. When you are honest, you feel the resentment of a sucker; when you cheat, you feel terror and shame. When you are happy, your joy is diluted by guilt; when you suffer, your pain is augmented by the feeling that pain is your natural state. You pity the men you admire, you believe they are doomed to fail; you envy the men you hate, you believe they are the masters of existence. You feel disarmed when you come up against a scoundrel: you believe that evil is bound to win, since the moral is the impotent, the impractical.

Morality, to you, is a phantom scarecrow made of duty, of boredom, of punishment, of pain, a cross-breed between the first schoolteacher of your past and the tax collector of your present, a scarecrow standing in a barren field, waving a stick to chase away your pleasures—and pleasure, to you, is a liquor-soggy brain, a mindless slut, the stupor of a moron who stakes his cash on some animal’s race, since pleasure cannot be moral.

If you identify your actual belief, you will find a triple damnation—of yourself, of life, of virtue—in the grotesque conclusion you have reached: you believe that morality is a necessary evil.

[GS, FNI, 214; pb 171.]

See also ALTRUISM; “DUTY”; EVIL; GOOD, the; MORALITY; ORIGINAL SIN; PLEASURE and PAIN; RATIONALITY; SACRIFICE; SELFISHNESS; STANDARD of VALUE.

Morality. What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code.

The first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics, is: Why does man need a code of values?

Let me stress this. The first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question is: Does man need values at all—and why?

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 2; pb 13.]

Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man’s survival....

I quote from Galt’s speech: “Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice—and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a vatue—by choice; he has to learn to sustain it —by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues—by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.”

The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics—the standard by which one judges what is good or evit—is man’s life, or: that which is required for man’s survival qua man.

Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.

Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are: thinking and productive work.

[Ibid., 16; pb 23.]

Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man—in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life.

[Ibid., 19; pb 25.]

Life or death is man’s only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.

[“Causality Versus Duty,” PWNI, 118; pb 99.]

The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

[GS, FNI, 150; pb 123.]

Sweep aside those parasites of subsidized classrooms, who live on the profits of the mind of others and proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code of behavior. They, who pose as scientists and claim that man is only an animal, do not grant him inclusion in the law of existence they have granted to the lowest of insects. They recognize that every living species has a way of survival demanded by its nature, they do not claim that a fish can live out of water or that a dog can live without its sense of smell—but man, they claim, the most complex of beings, man can survive in any way whatever, man has no identity, no nature, and there’s no practical reason why he cannot live with his means of survival destroyed, with his mind throttled and placed at the disposal of any orders they might care to issue.

Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man’s instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live.

[Ibid.]

If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man’s only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a “moral commandment” is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.

[Ibid., 156; pb 128.]

You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island—it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today—and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

[Ibid., 156; pb 127.]

A moral code is a system of teleological measurement which grades the choices and actions open to man, according to the degree to which they achieve or frustrate the code’s standard of value. The standard is the end, to which man’s actions are the means.

A moral code is a set of abstract principles; to practice it, an individual must translate it into the appropriate concretes—he must choose the particular goals and values which he is to pursue. This requires that he define his particular hierarchy of values, in the order of their importance, and that he act accordingly.

[ITOE, 42.]

Morality per tains only to the sphere of man’s free will—only to those actions which are open to his choice.

[“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 4.]

A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality.

[GS, FNI, 168; pb 136.]

In spite of all their irrationalities, inconsistencies, hypocrisies and evasions, the majority of men will not act, in major issues, without a sense of being morally right and will not oppose the morality they have accepted. They will break it, they will cheat on it, but they will not oppose it; and when they break it, they take the blame on themselves. The power of morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers—and mankind’s tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code men have accepted destroys them by means of the best within them.

[“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 81; pb 67.]

See Conceptual Index: Ethics.

Motion. They proclaim that there are no entities, that nothing exists but motion, and blank out the fact that motion presupposes the thing which moves, that without the concept of entity, there can be no such concept as “motion.”

[GS, FNI, 191; pb 154.]

Motions are motions of entities; ... a child is aware of motion perceptually, but cannot conceptualize “motion” until he has formed some concepts of that which moves, i.e., of entities.

[ITOE, 18. ]

Concepts of motion are formed by specifying the distinctive nature of the motion and of the entities performing it, and/or of the medium in which it is performed—and omitting the particular measurements of any given instance of such motion and of the entities involved. For instance, the concept “walking” denotes a certain kind of motion performed by living entities possessing legs, and does not apply to the motion of a snake or of an automobile. The concept “swimming” denotes the motion of any living entity propelling itself through water, and does not apply to the motion of a boat. The concept “flying” denotes the motion of any entity propelling itself through the air, whether a bird or an airplane.

[Ibid., 20.]

The concept of “location” arises in the context of entities which are at rest relative to each other. A thing’s location is the place where it is situated. But a moving object is not at any one place—it is in motion. One can locate a moving object only in the sense of specifying the location of the larger fixed region through which it is moving during a given period of time. For instance: “Between 4:00 and 4:05 p.m., the car was moving through New York City.” One can narrow down the time period and, correspondingly, the region; but one cannot narrow down the time to nothing in the contradictory attempt to locate the moving car at a single, fixed position. If it is moving, it is not at a fixed position.

The law of identity does not attempt to freeze reality. Change exists; it is a fact of reality. When a thing is changing, that is what it is doing, that is its identity for that period. What is still is still. What is in process is in process. A is A.

[Harry Binswanger, “Q & A Department: Identity and Motion,” TOF, Dec. 1981, 14.]

See also CHANGE; ENTITY; HIERARCHY of KNOWLEDGE; “STOLEN CONCEPT,” FALLACY of.

Motion Pictures. In motion pictures or television, literature is the ruler and term-setter, with music serving only as an incidental, background accompaniment. Screen and television plays are subcategories of the drama, and in the dramatic arts “the play is the thing.” The play is that which makes it art; the play provides the end, to which all the rest is the means.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 71.]

Visual art is an intrinsic part of films in a much deeper sense than the mere selection of sets and camera angles ... a “motion picture” is literally that, and has to he a stylized visual composition in motion....

Potentially, motion pictures are a great art, but that potential has not as yet been actualized, except in single instances and random moments. An art that requires the synchronization of so many esthetic elements and so many different talents cannot develop in a period of philosophical-cultural disintegration such as the present. Its development requires the creative cooperation of men who are united, not necessarily by their formal philosophical convictions, but by their fundamental view of man, i.e.. by their sense of life.

[Ibid., 72.]

The movies are still in the position of a retarded child: born into a collapsing family, i.e., a deteriorating culture, an art that demanded Romanticism was left to struggle blindly in the midst of a value-desert. It produced a few rare, almost accidental sparks of true greatness, displaying its untouched potential, then was swallowed again in a growing tide of mediocrity.

[Frank O’Connor, review of Lillian Gish’s The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, TO, Nov. 1969, 8.]

Today, the movies have gone all the way back to the pre-Griffith days; or rather, they have accepted, on a broad scale, the error that destroyed D. W. Griffith: the belief that a movie is primarily a director’s art, that content, story, and cast do not matter—i.e., that it is an art concerned only with the “how,” not the “what”—i.e., that it is an art of means, without ends—i.e., that it is the field of trick photographers, not of artists.

[Ibid., 15.]

See also ART: DIRECTOR; LITERATURE; ROMANTICISM; SENSE of LIFE.

Motivation. Motivation is a key-concept in psychology and in fiction. It is a man’s basic premises and values that form his character and move him to action—and in order to understand a man’s character, it is the motivation behind his actions that we must understand. To know “what makes a man tick,” we must ask: “What is he after?”

To re-create the reality of his characters, to make both their nature and their actions intelligible, it is their motivation that a writer has to reveal. He may do it gradually, revealing it bit by bit, building up the evidence as the story progresses, but at the end of the novel the reader must know why the characters did the things they did.

[“Basic Principles of Literature,” RM, 67; pb 88.]

See also ART; FREE WILL; LITERATURE; MOTIVATION by LOVE vs. by FEAR; PSYCHOLOGY; VALUES.

Motivation by Love vs. by Fear. Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not the absence of pain.

[GS, FNI, 166; pb 135.]

You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.

You, who have lost the concept of the difference, you who claim that fear and joy are incentives of equal power—and secretly add that fear is the more “practical”—you do not wish to live, and only fear of death still holds you to the existence you have damned.

[Ibid., 167; pb 135.]

See also MOTIVATION; HAPPINESS; PLEASURE and PAIN; SUFFERING; VALUES; ZERO, REIFICATION of.

Music. Music employs the sounds produced by the periodic vibrations of a sonorous body, and evokes man’s sense-of-life emotions.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 46.]

The fundamental difference between music and the other arts lies in the fact that music is experienced as if it reversed man’s normal psycho-epistemological process.

The other arts create a physical object (i.e., an object perceived by man’s senses, be it a book or a painting) and the psycho-epistemological process goes from the perception of the object to the conceptual grasp of its meaning, to an appraisal in terms of one’s basic values, to a consequent emotion. The pattern is: from perception—to conceptual understanding—to appraisal—to emotion.

The pattern of the process involved in music is: from perception—to emotion—to appraisal—to conceptual understanding.

Music is experienced as if it had the power to reach man’s emotions directly.

[Ibid., 50.]

Psycho-epistemologically, the pattern of the response to music seems to be as follows: one perceives the music, one grasps the suggestion of a certain emotional state and, with one’s sense of life serving as the criterion, one appraises this state as enjoyable or painful, desirable or undesirable, significant or negligible, according to whether it corresponds to or contradicts one’s fundamental feeling about life.

[Ibid., 53.]

It is in terms of his fundamental emotions—i.e., the emotions produced by his own metaphysical value-judgments—that man responds to music.

Music cannot tell a story, it cannot deal with concretes, it cannot convey a specific existential phenomenon, such as a peaceful countryside or a stormy sea. the theme of a composition entitled “Spring Song” is not spring, but the emotions which spring evoked in the composer. Even concepts which, intellectually, belong to a complex level of abstraction, such as “peace,” “revolution,” “religion,” are too specific, too concrete to be expressed in music. All that music can do with such themes is convey the emotions of serenity, or defiance, or exaltation. Liszt’s “St. Francis Walking on the Waters” was inspired by a specific legend, but what it conveys is a passionately dedicated struggle and triumph—by whom and in the name of what, is for each individual listener to supply.

Music communicates emotions, which one grasps, but does not actually feel; what one feels is a suggestion, a kind of distant, dissociated, depersonalized emotion—until and unless it unites with one’s own sense of life. But since the music’s emotional content is not communicated conceptually or evoked existentially, one does feel it in some peculiar, subterranean way.

Music conveys the same categories of emotions to listeners who hold widely divergent views of life. As a rule, men agree on whether a given piece of music is gay or sad or violent or solemn. But even though, in a generalized way, they experience the same emotions in response to the same music, there are radical differences in how they appraise this experience—i. e.. how they feel about these feelings.

[Ibid., 52.]

The formulation of a common vocabulary of music ... would require: a translation of the musical experience, the inner experience, into conceptual terms; an explanation of why certain sounds strike us a certain way; a definition of the axioms of musical perception, from which the appropriate esthetic principles could be derived, which would serve as a base for the objective validation of esthetic judgments....

Until a conceptual vocabulary is discovered and defined, no objectively valid criterion of esthetic judgment is possible in the field of music....

No one, therefore, can claim the objective superiority of his choices over the choices of others. Where no objective proof is available, it’s every man for himself—and only for himself.

The nature of musical perception has not been discovered because the key to the secret of music is physiological—it lies in the nature of the process by which man perceives sounds—and the answer would require the joint effort of a physiologist, a psychologist and a philosopher (an esthetician).

The start of a scientific approach to this problem and the lead to an answer were provided by Helmholtz, the great physiologist of the nineteenth century.

[Ibid., 55.]

From the standpoint of psycho-epistemology, I can offer a hypothesis on the nature of man’s response to music, but I urge the reader to remember that it is only a hypothesis....

One may listen to noise for an hour, a day or a year, and it remains just noise. But musical tones heard in a certain kind of succession produce a different result—the human ear and brain integrate them into a new cognitive experience, into what may be called an auditory entity: a melody. The integration is a physiological process; it is performed unconsciously and automatically. Man is aware of the process only by means of its results.

Helmholtz has demonstrated that the essence of musical perception is mathematical: the consonance or dissonance of harmonies depends on the ratios of the frequencies of their tones. The brain can integrate a ratio of one to two, for instance, but not of eight to nine....

The psycho-epistemological meaning of a given composition lies in the kind of work it demands of a listener’s ear and brain.

A composition may demand the active alertness needed to resolve complex mathematical relationships—or it may deaden the brain by means of monotonous simplicity. It may demand a process of building an integrated sum—or it may break up the process of integration into an arbitrary series of random bits—or it may obliterate the process by a jumble of sounds mathematically-physiologically impossible to integrate, and thus turn into noise.

The listener becomes aware of this process in the form of a sense of efficacy, or of strain, or of boredom, or of frustration. His reaction is cognitive functioning on which he feels at home.

|Ibid., 57.]

Music gives man’s consciousness the same experience as the other arts: a concretization of his sense of life. But the abstraction being concretized is primarily epistemological, rather than metaphysical; the abstraction is man’s consciousness, i.e., his method of cognitive functioning, which he experiences in the concrete form of hearing a specific piece of music. A man’s acceptance or rejection of that music depends on whether it calls upon or clashes with, confirms or contradicts, his mind’s way of working. The metaphysical aspect of the experience is the sense of a world which he is able to grasp, to which his mind’s working is appropriate.

Music is the only phenomenon that permits an adult to experience the process of dealing with pure sense data. Single musical tones are not percepts, but pure sensations; they become percepts only when integrated. Sensations are man’s first contact with reality; when integrated into percepts, they are the given, the self-evident, the not-to-be-doubted. Music offers man the singular opportunity to reenact, on the adult level, the primary process of his method of cognition: the automatic integration of sense data into an intelligible, meaningful entity. To a conceptual consciousness, it is a unique form of rest and reward.

[Ibid., 59.]

See also ART; BALLET; CONCEPT-FORMATION; DANCE; EMOTIONS; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; OPERA and OPERETTA; PERFORMING ARTS; SENSATION; SENSE of LIFE.

Mystical Ethics. The mystic theory of ethics is explicitly based on the premise that the standard of value of man’s ethics is set beyond the grave, by the laws or requirements of another, supernatural dimension, that ethics is impossible for man to practice, that it is unsuited for and opposed to man’s life on earth, and that man must take the blame for it and suffer through the whole of his earthly existence, to atone for the guilt of being unable to practice the impracticable. The Dark Ages and the Middle Ages are the existential monument to this theory of ethics.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 33; pb 34.]

A mystic code of morality demanding self-sacrifice cannot be promulgated or propagated without a supreme ruler that becomes the collector of the sacrificing. Traditionally, there have been two such collectors: either God or society. The collector had to be inaccessible to mankind at large, and his authority had to be revealed only through an elite of special intermediaries, variously called “high priests,” “commissars,” “Gauleiters.” etc.

[“The Stimulus and the Response,” PWNI, 177; pb 146.]

See also GOD; INTRINSIC THEORY of VALUES; MORALITY; RELIGION; SACRIFICE; STANDARD of VALUE; SUPERNATURALISM; VALUES.

Mysticism. What is mysticism? Mysticism is the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one’s senses and one’s reason. Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge, such as “instinct,” “intuition,” “revelation,” or any form of “just knowing.”

Reason is the perception of reality, and rests on a single axiom: the Law of Identity.

Mysticism is the claim to the perception of some other reality—other than the one in which we live—whose definition is only that it is not natural, it is supernatural, and is to be perceived by some form of unnatural or supernatural means.

[“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 75; pb 62.]

The damnation of this earth as a realm where nothing is possible to man but pain, disaster and defeat, a realm inferior to another, “higher,” reality; the damnation of all values, enjoyment, achievement and success on earth as a proof of depravity; the damnation of man’s mind as a source of pride, and the damnation of reason as a “limited,” deceptive, unreliable, impotent faculty, incapable of perceiving the “real” reality and the “true” truth; the split of man in two, setting his consciousness (his soul) against his body, and his moral values against his own interest; the damnation of man’s nature, body and self as evil; the commandment of self-sacrifice, renunciation, suffering, obedience, humility and faith, as the good; the damnation of life and the worship of death, with the promise of rewards beyond the grave—these are the necessary tenets of the [mystic’s] view of existence, as they have been in every variant of [mystical] philosophy throughout the course of mankind’s history.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 14; pb 18.]

To the [mystic], as to an animal, the irreducible primary is the automatic phenomena of his own consciousness.

An animal has no critical faculty; he has no control over the function of his brain and no power to question its content. To an animal, whatever strikes his awareness is an absolute that corresponds to reality—or rather, it is a distinction he is incapable of making: reality, to him, is whatever he senses or feels. And this is the [mystic’s] epistemological ideal, the mode of consciousness he strives to induce in himself. To the [mystic], emotions are tools of cognition, and wishes take precedence over facts. He seeks to escape the risks of a quest for knowledge by obliterating the distinction between consciousness and reality, between the perceiver and the perceived, hoping that an automatic certainty and an infallible knowledge of the universe will be granted to him by the blind, unfocused stare of his eyes turned inward, contemplating the sensations, the feelings, the urgings, the muggy associational twistings projected by the rudderless mechanism of his undirected consciousness. Whatever his mechanism produces is an absolute not to be questioned; and whenever it clashes with reality, it is reality that he ignores.

Since the clash is constant, the [mystic’s] solution is to believe that what he perceives is another, “higher” reality—where his wishes are omnipotent, where contradictions are possible and A is non-A, where his assertions, which are false on earth, become true and acquire the status of a “superior” truth which he perceives by means of a special faculty denied to other, “inferior,” beings. The only validation of his consciousness he can obtain on earth is the belief and the obedience of others, when they accept his “truth” as superior to their own perception of reality.

[Ibid., 12; pb 17.]

A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others. Somewhere in the distant reaches of his childhood, when his own understanding of reality clashed with the assertions of others, with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to so craven a fear of independence that he renounced his rational faculty. At the crossroads of the choice between “I know” and “They say,” he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think. Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others. His surrender took the form of the feeling that he must hide his lack of understanding, that others possess some mysterious knowledge of which he alone is deprived, that reality is whatever they want it to be, through some means forever denied to him.

From then on, afraid to think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings. His feelings become his only guide, his only remnant of personal identity, he clings to them with ferocious possessiveness—and whatever thinking he does is devoted to the struggle of hiding from himself that the nature of his feelings is terror.

When a mystic declares that he feels the existence of a power superior to reason, he feels it all right, but that power is not an omniscient super-spirit of the universe, it is the consciousness of any passer-by to whom he has surrendered his own. A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness of others. “They” are his only key to reality, he feels that he cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting their unaccountable consent. “They” are his only means of perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live. To control the consciousness of others becomes his only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

[GS, FNI, 200; pb 160.)

The motive of all the attacks on man’s rational faculty—from any quarter, in any of the endless variations, under the verbal dust of all the murky volumes—is a single, hidden premise: the desire to exempt consciousness from the law of identity. The hallmark of a mystic is the savagely stubborn refusal to accept the fact that consciousness, like any other existent, possesses identity, that it is a faculty of a specific nature, functioning through specific means. While the advance of civilization has been eliminating one area of magic after another, the last stand of the believers in the miraculous consists of their frantic attempts to regard identity as the disqualifying element of consciousness.

The implicit, but unadmitted premise of the neo-mystics of modern philosophy, is the notion that only an ineffable consciousness can acquire a valid knowledge of reality, that “true” knowledge has to be causeless, i.e., acquired without any means of cognition.

[ITOE, 106.]

Mysticism requires the notion of the unknowable, which is revealed to some and withheld from others; this divides men into those who feel guilt and those who cash in on it. The two groups are interchangeable, according to circumstances. When being judged, a mystic cries: “I couldn’t help it!” When judging others, he declares: “You can’t know, but I can.”

[“The Psychulogy of ‘Psychologizing,’ ”TO, March 1971, 1.]

There is only one state that fulfills the mystic’s longing for infinity, non-causality, non-identity: death. No matter what unintelligible causes he ascribes to his incommunicable feelings, whoever rejects reality rejects existence—and the feelings that move him from then on are hatred for all the values of man’s life, and lust for all the evils that destroy it.

[GS, FNI, 202; pb 162.]

The advocates of mysticism are motivated not by a quest for truth, but by hatred for man’s mind.

[“An Untitled Letter,” PWNI, 123; pb 102.]

For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket—by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners.

[GS, FNI, 190; pb 153.]

I have said that faith and force are corollaries, and that mysticism will always lead to the rule of brutality. The cause of it is contained in the very nature of mysticism. Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion, communication or understanding are possible. Why do we kill wild animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is open to us. And that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind—a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence. And more: no man or mystical elite can hold a whole society subjugated to their arbitrary assertions, edicts and whims, without the use of force. Anyone who resorts to the formula: “It’s so, because I say so,” will have to reach for a gun, sooner or later. Communists, like all materialists, are neo-mystics: it does not matter whether one rejects the mind in favor of revelations or in favor of conditioned reflexes. The basic premise and the results are the same.

[“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 85; pb 70.]

Men have been taught either that knowledge is impossible (skepticism) or that it is available without effort (mysticism). These two positions appear to be antagonists, but are, in fact, two variants on the same theme, two sides of the same fraudulent coin: the attempt to escape the responsibility of rational cognition and the absolutism of reality—the attempt to assert the primacy of consciousness over existence.

Although skepticism and mysticism are ultimately interchangeable, and the dominance of one always leads to the resurgence of the other, they differ in the form of their inner contradiction—the contradiction, in both cases, between their philosophical doctrine and their psychological motivation. Philosophically, the mystic is usually an exponent of the intrinsic (revealed) school of epistemology; the skeptic is usually an advocate of epistemological subjectivism. But, psychologically, the mystic is a subjectivist who uses intrinsicism as a means to claim the primacy of his consciousness over that of others. The skeptic is a disillusioned intrinsicist who, having failed to find automatic supernatural guidance, seeks a substitute in the collective subjectivism of others.

[ITOE, 105.]

Only three brief periods of history were culturally dominated by a philosophy of reason: ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the nineteenth century. These three periods were the source of mankind’s greatest progress in all fields of intellectual achievement—and the eras of greatest political freedom. The rest of human history was dominated by mysticism of one kind or another, that is: by the belief that man’s mind is impotent, that reason is futile or evil or both, and that man must be guided by some irrational “instinct” or feeling or intuition or revelation, by some form of blind, unreasoning faith. All the centuries dominated by mysticism were the eras of political tyranny and slavery, of rule by brute force—from the primitive barbarism of the jungle—to the Pharaohs of Egypt—to the emperors of Rome—to the feudalism of the Dark and Middle Ages—to the absolute monarchies of Europe—to the modern dictatorships of Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and all their lesser carbon copies.

[“The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age,” pamphlet, 5.]

See also AXIOMS; CAUSALITY; CONSCIOUSNESS; DICTATOR; EMOTIONS; EPISTEMOLOGY; GOD; FAITH; KANT, IMMANUEL; KNOWLEDGE; LOGIC; MYSTICS of SPIRIT and of MUSCLE; OBJECTIVITY; PERCEPTION; PHYSICAL FORCE; PROOF; REASON; RELIGION; SECOND-HANDERS; SKEPTICISM; SUPERNATURALISM.

Mystics of Spirit and of Muscle. As products of the split between man’s soul and body, there are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelations, the other to their reflexes. No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter—the enslavement of man’s body, in spirit—the destruction of his mind.

The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive—a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society—a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself. Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. Man’s mind, say the mystics of muscle, must be subordinated to the will of Society. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of muscle, is the pleasure of Society, whose standards are beyond man’s right of judgment and must be obeyed as a primary absolute. The purpose of man’s life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. His reward, say the mystics of spirit, will be given to him beyond the grave. His reward, say the mystics of muscle, will be given on earth—to his great-grandchildren.

Selfishness—say both—is man’s evil. Man’s good—say both—is to give up his personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man’s good is to negate the life he lives. Sacrifice—cry both—is the essence of morality, the highest virtue within man’s reach.

[GS, FNI, 171; pb 138.]

The mystics of spirit declare that they possess an extra sense you lack: this special sixth sense consists of contradicting the whole of the knowledge of your five. The mystics of muscle do not bother to assert any claim to extrasensory perception: they merely declare that your senses are not valid, and that their wisdom consists of perceiving your blindness by some manner of unspecified means. Both kinds demand that you invalidate your own consciousness and surrender yourself into their power. They offer you, as proof of their superior knowledge, the fact that they assert the opposite of everything you know, and as proof of their superior ability to deal with existence, the fact that they lead you to misery, self-sacrifice, starvation, destruction.

They claim that they perceive a mode of being superior to your existence on this earth. The mystics of spirit call it “another dimension,” which consists of denying dimensions. The mystics of muscle call it “the future,” which consists of denying the present.

[Ibid., 184; pb 148.]

What is the nature of that superior world to which they sacrifice the world that exists? The mystics of spirit curse matter, the mystics of muscle curse profit. The first wish men to profit by renouncing the earth, the second wish men to inherit the earth by renouncing all profit. Their non-material, non-profit worlds are realms where rivers run with milk and coffee, where wine spurts from rocks at their command, where pastry drops on them from clouds at the price of opening their mouth. On this material, profit-chasing earth, an enormous investment of virtue —of intelligence, integrity, energy, skill—is required to construct a railroad to carry them the distance of one mile; in their non-material, non-profit world, they travel from planet to planet at the cost of a wish. If an honest person asks them: “How?”—they answer with righteous scorn that a “how” is the concept of vulgar realists; the concept of superior spirits is “Somehow.” On this earth restricted by matter and profit, rewards are achieved by thought; in a world set free of such restrictions rewards are achieved by wishing.

And that is the whole of their shabby secret. The secret of all their esoteric philosophies, of all their dialectics and super-senses, of their evasive eyes and snarling words, the secret for which they destroy civilization, language, industries and lives, the secret for which they pierce their own eyes and eardrums, grind out their senses, blank out their minds, the purpose for which they dissolve the absolutes of reason, logic, matter, existence, reality—is to erect upon that plastic fog a single holy absolute: their Wish.

[Ibid., 185; pb 149.]

For centuries, the mystics of spirit have proclaimed that faith is superior to reason, but have not dared deny the existence of reason. Their heirs and product, the mystics of muscle, have completed their job and achieved their dream: they proclaim that everything is faith, and call it a revolt against believing. As revolt against unproved assertions, they proclaim that nothing can be proved; as revolt against supernatural knowledge, they proclaim that no knowledge is possible; as revolt against the enemies of science, they proclaim that science is superstition; as revolt against the enslavement of the mind, they proclaim that there is no mind.

[Ibid., 196; pb 158.]

See also MYSTICISM.

N

National Rights. A nation, like any other group, is only a number of individuals and can have no rights other than the rights of its individual citizens. A free nation—a nation that recognizes, respects and protects the individual rights of its citizens—has a right to its territorial integrity, its social system and its form of government. The government of such a nation is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of its citizens and has no rights other than the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific, delimited task (the task of protecting them from physical force, derived from their right of self-defense)....

Such a nation has a right to its sovereignty (derived from the rights of its citizens) and a right to demand that its sovereignty be respected by all other nations.

[“Collectivized ‘Rights,’ ”VOS, 138; pb 103.]

Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the nonexistent “rights” of gang rulers. It is not a free nation’s duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it. when and if it so chooses.

[Ibid., 140; pb 104.]

See also COLLECTIVISM; DEMOCRACY; FOREIGN POLICY; FREEDOM; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; SECESSION; SELF-DETERMINATION of NATIONS.

Naturalism. [Today we observe] two broad categories of art: Romanticism, which recognizes the existence of man’s volition—and Naturalism, which denies it.

[“What Is Romanticism?” RM, 81; pb 99.]

[The] basic premises of Romanticism and Naturalism (the volition or anti-volition premise) affect all the other aspects of a literary work, such as the choice of theme and the quality of the style, but it is the nature of the story structure—the attribute of plot or plotlessness—that represents the most important difference between them and serves as the main distinguishing characteristic for classifying a given work in one category or the other.

[Ibid., 83; pb 101.]

Instead of presenting a metaphysical view of man and of existence, the Naturalists presented a journalistic view. In answer to the question: “What is man?”—they said: “This is what the village grocers are, in the south of France, in the year 1887,” or: “This is what the inhabitants of the slums are, in New York, in 1921,” or: “These are the folks next door.”

[“The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age,” RM, 114; pb 124.]

The practitioners of the literary school diametrically opposed to mine —the school of Naturalism—claim that a writer must reproduce what they call “real life,” allegedly “as it is,” exercising no selectivity and no value-judgments. By “reproduce,” they mean “photograph”; by “real life,” they mean whatever given concretes they happen to observe; by “as it is,” they mean “as it is lived by the people around them.” But observe that these Naturalists—or the good writers among them—are extremely selective in regard to two attributes of literature: style and characterization. Without selectivity, it would be impossible to achieve any sort of characterization whatever, neither of an unusual man nor of an average one who is to be offered as statistically typical of a large segment of the population. Therefore, the Naturalists’ opposition to selectivity applies to only one attribute of literature: the content or subject. It is in regard to his choice of subject that a novelist must exercise no choice, they claim.

Why?

The Naturalists have never given an answer to that question—not a rational, logical, noncontradictory answer. Why should a writer photograph his subjects indiscriminately and unselectively? Because they “really” happened? To record what really happened is the job of a reporter or of a historian, not of a novelist. To enlighten readers and educate them? That is the job of science, not of literature, of nonfiction writing, not of fiction. To improve men’s lot by exposing their misery? But that is a value-judgment and a moral purpose and a didactic “message” —all of which are forbidden by the Naturalist doctrine. Besides, to improve anything one must know what constitutes an improvement —and to know that, one must know what is the good and how to achieve it—and to know that, one must have a whole system of value-judgments, a system of ethics, which is anathema to the Naturalists.

Thus, the Naturalists’ position amounts to giving a novelist full esthetic freedom in regard to means, but not in regard to ends. He may exercise choice, creative imagination, value-judgments in regard to how he portrays things, but not in regard to what he portrays—in regard to style or characterization, but not in regard to subject. Man—the subject of literature—must not be viewed or portrayed selectively. Man must be accepted as the given, the unchangeable, the not-to-be-judged, the status quo. But since we observe that men do change, that they differ from one another, that they pursue different values, who, then, is to determine the human status quo? Naturalism’s implicit answer is: everybody except the novelist.

The novelist—according to the Naturalist doctrine—must neither judge nor value. He is not a creator, but only a recording secretary whose master is the rest of mankind. Let others pronounce judgments, make decisions, select goals, fight over values and determine the course, the fate and the soul of man. The novelist is the only outcast and deserter of that battle. His is not to reason why—his is only to trot behind his master, notebook in hand, taking down whatever the master dictates, picking up such pearls or such swinishness as the master may choose to drop.

[“The Goal of My Writing,” RM, 163; pb 164.]

The Naturalists object that a plot is an artificial contrivance, because in “real life” events do not fall into a logical pattern. That claim depends on the observer’s viewpoint, in the literal sense of the word “viewpoint.” A nearsighted man standing two feet away from the wall of a house and staring at it, would declare that the map of the city’s streets is an artificial, invented contrivance. That is not what an airplane pilot would say, flying two thousand feet above the city. The events of men’s lives follow the logic of men’s premises and values—as one can observe if one looks past the range of the immediate moment, past the trivial irrelevancies, repetitions and routines of daily living, and sees the essentials, the turning points, the direction of a man’s life.

[“Basic Principles of Literature,” RM, 60; pb 83.]

The Naturalists object that the events of men’s lives are inconclusive, diffuse and seldom fall into the clear-cut, dramatic situations required by a plot structure. This is predominantly true—and this is the chief esthetic argument against the Naturalist position. Art is a selective recreation of reality, its means are evaluative abstractions, its task is the concretization of metaphysical essentials. To isolate and bring into clear focus, into a single issue or a single scene, the essence of a conflict which, in “real life,” might be atomized and scattered over a lifetime in the form of meaningless clashes, to condense a long, steady drizzle of buckshot into the explosion of a blockbuster—that is the highest, hardest and most demanding function of art. To default on that function is to default on the essence of art and to engage in child’s play along its periphery.

[Ibid., 61; pb 83.]

Although Naturalism is a product of the nineteenth century, its spiritual father, in modern history, was Shakespeare. The premise that man does not possess volition, that his destiny is determined by an innate “tragic flaw,” is fundamental in Shakespeare’s work. But, granted this false premise, his approach is metaphysical, not journalistic. His characters are not drawn from “real life,” they are not copies of observed concretes nor statistical averages: they are grand-scale abstractions of the character traits which a determinist would regard as inherent in human nature: ambition, power-lust, jealousy, greed, etc.

[“What Is Romanticism?” RM, 102; pb 115.]

No matter how concrete-bound their theories forced them to be, the writers of the Naturalist school still had to exercise their power of abstraction to a significant extent: in order to reproduce “real-life” characters, they had to select the characteristics they regarded as essential, differentiating them from the non-essential or accidental. Thus they were led to substitute statistics for values as a criterion of selectivity: that which is statistically prevalent among men, they held, is metaphysically significant and representative of man’s nature; that which is rare or exceptional, is not. (See Chapter 7.)

At first, having rejected the element of plot and even of story, the Naturalists concentrated on the element of characterization—and psychological perceptiveness was the chief value that the best of them had to offer. With the growth of the statistical method, however, that value shrank and vanished: characterization was replaced by indiscriminate recording and buried under a catalogue of trivia, such as minute inventories of a character’s apartment. clothing and meals. Naturalism lost the attempted universality of Shakespeare or Tolstoy, descending from metaphysics to photography with a rapidly shrinking lens directed at the range of the immediate moment—until the final remnants of Naturalism became a superficial, meaningless, “unserious” school that had nothing to say about human existence.

[Ibid., 104; pb 117.]

The obvious question, to which the heirs of statistical Naturalism have no answer, is: if heroes and geniuses are not to be regarded as representative of mankind, by reason of their numerical rarity, why are freaks and monsters to be regarded as representative? Why are the problems of a bearded lady of greater universal significance than the problems of a genius? Why is the soul of a murderer worth studying, but not the soul of a hero?

The answer lies in the basic metaphysical premise of Naturalism, whether its practitioners ever chose it consciously or not: as an outgrowth of modern philosophy, that basic premise is anti-man, anti-mind, anti-life; and, as an outgrowth of the altruist morality, Naturalism is a frantic escape from moral judgment—a long, wailing plea for pity, for tolerance, for the forgiveness of anything.

[“The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age,” RM. 116; pb 125.]

See also ART; CHARACTERIZATION; DETERMINISM; FREE WILL; LITERATURE; PLOT; ROMANTICISM; SENSE of LIFE; STYLIZATION; VALUES.

Nature. What is nature? Nature is existence—the sum of that which is. It is usually called “nature” when we think of it as a system of interconnected, interacting entities governed by law. So “nature” really means the universe of entities acting and interacting in accordance with their identities.

[Leonard Peikoff. “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 2.]

See also ATHEISM; CAUSALITY; EXISTENCE; SUPERNATURALISM; UNIVERSE.

Nazism. See Fascism/Nazism.

Necessity. As far as metaphysical reality is concerned (omitting human actions from consideration, for the moment), there are no “facts which happen to be but could have been otherwise” as against “facts which must be.” There are only: facts which are.... Since things are what they are, since everything that exists possesses a specific identity, nothing in reality can occur causelessly or by chance. The nature of an entity determines what it can do and, in any given set of circumstances, dictates what it will do. The Law of Causality is entailed by the Law of Identity. Entities follow certain laws of action in consequence of their identity, and have no alternative to doing so. Metaphysically, all facts are inherent in the identities of the entities that exist; i.e., all facts are “necessary.” In this sense, to be is to be “necessary.” The concept of “necessity,” in a metaphysical context, is superfluous.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 146.]

A typical package-deal, used by professors of philosophy, runs as follows: to prove the assertion that there is no such thing as “necessity” in the universe, a professor declares that just as this country did not have to have fifty states, there could have been forty-eight or fifty-two-so the solar system did not have to have nine planets, there could have been seven or eleven. It is not sufficient, he declares, to prove that something is, one must also prove that it had to be—and since nothing had to be, nothing is certain and anything goes.

The technique of undercutting man’s mind consists in palming off the man-made as if it were the metaphysically given, then ascribing to nature the concepts that refer only to men’s lack of knowledge, such as “chance” or “contingency,” then reversing the two elements of the package-deal. From the assertion: “Man is unpredictable, therefore nature is unpredictable,” the argument goes to: “Nature possesses volition, man does not—nature is free, man is ruled by unknowable forces—nature is not to be conquered, man is.”

[“The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 34; pb 28.]

See also ANALYTIC-SYNTHETIC DICHOTOMY; CAUSALITY; IDENTITY; FREE WILL; METAPHYSICAL vs. MAN-MADE; “PACKAGE-DEALING,” FALLACY of; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS.

Neurosis vs. Psychosis. A man who has psychological problems is a conscious being; his cognitive faculty is hampered, burdened, slowed down, but not destroyed. A neurotic is not a psychotic. Only a psychotic is presumed to suffer from a total break with reality and to have no control over his actions or the operations of his consciousness (and even this is not always true). A neurotic retains the ability to perceive reality, and to control his consciousness and his actions (this control is merely more difficult for him than for a healthy person). So long as he is not psychotic, this is the control that a man cannot lose and must not abdicate.

[“The Psychology of ‘Psychologizing,’ ” TO, March 1971, 5.]

See also FREE WILL; MENTAL HEALTHY: “PSYCHOLOGIZING”; PSYCHOLOGY; RATIONALITY.

New Left. Old-line Marxists claimed [falsely] that they were champions of reason, that socialism or communism was a scientific social system, that an advanced technology could not function in a capitalist society, but required a scientifically planned and organized human community to bring its maximum benefits to every man, in the form of material comforts and a higher standard of living.... [T]oday we see the spectacle of old Marxists blessing, aiding and abetting the young hoodlums [of the New Left] (who are their products and heirs) who proclaim the superiority of feelings over reason, of faith over knowledge, of leisure over production, of spiritual concerns over material comforts, of primitive nature over technology, of astrology over science, of drugs over consciousness.

[“The Left: Old and New,” NL, 90.]

If concern with poverty and human suffering were the collectivists’ motive, they would have become champions of capitalism long ago; they would have discovered that it is the only political system capable of producing abundance. But they evaded the evidence as long as they could. When the issue became overwhelmingly clear to the whole world, the collectivists were faced with a choice: either turn to the right, in the name of humanity—or to the left, in the name of dictatorial power. They turned to the left—the New Left.

Instead of their old promises that collectivism would create universal abundance and their denunciations of capitalism for creating poverty, they are now denouncing capitalism for creating abundance. Instead of promising comfort and security for everyone, they are now denouncing people for being comfortable and secure.

[“The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” NL, 141.]

Intellectually, the activists of the New Left are the most docile conformists. They have accepted as dogma all the philosophical beliefs of their elders for generations: the notions that faith and feeling are superior to reason, that material concerns are evil, that love is the solution to all problems, that the merging of one’s self with a tribe or a community is the noblest way to live. There is not a single basic principle of today’s Establishment which they do not share. Far from being rebels, they embody the philosophic trend of the past 200 years (or longer): the mysticism-altruism-collectivism axis, which has dominated Western philosophy from Kant to Hegel to James and on down.

[“From a Symposium,” NL, 97.]

See also ALTRUISM; CAPITALISM; CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE; COLLECTIVISM; COMMUNISM; ECOLOGY/ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT; ECONOMIC GROWTH; GUILD SOCIALISM; MYSTICISM; PHYSICAL FORCE; SOCIALISM.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Philosophically, Nietzsche is a mystic and an irrationalist. His metaphysics consists of a somewhat “Byronic” and mystically “malevolent” universe; his epistemology subordinates reason to “will,” or feeling or instinct or blood or innate virtues of character. But, as a poet, he projects at times (not consistently) a magnificent feeling for man’s greatness, expressed in emotional, not intellectual, terms,

[“Introduction to The Fountainhead,” TO, March 1968, 6.]

Nietzsche’s rebellion against altruism consisted of replacing the sacrifice of oneself to others by the sacrifice of others to oneself. He proclaimed that the ideal man is moved, not by reason, but by his “blood,” by his innate instincts, feelings and will to power—that he is predestined by birth to rule others and sacrifice them to himself, while they are predestined by birth to be his victims and slaves—that reason, logic, principles are futile and debilitating, that morality is useless, that the “superman” is “beyond good and evil,” that he is a “beast of prey” whose ultimate standard is nothing but his own whim. Thus Nietzsche’s rejection of the Witch Doctor consisted of elevating Attila into a moral ideal—which meant: a double surrender of morality to the Witch Doctor.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 39; pb 36.]

See also ALTRUISM; BYRONIC VIEW of EXISTENCE; COLLECTIVISM; “INSTINCT”; IRRATIONALISM; MALEVOLENT UNIVERSE PREMISE; PRINCIPLES; REASON; SELFISHNESS; WHIMS/WHIM-WORSHIP.

Nineteenth Century. If you want to prove to yourself the power of ideas and, particularly, of morality—the intellectual history of the nineteenth century would be a good example to study. The greatest, unprecedented, undreamed of events and achievements were taking place before men’s eyes—but men did not see them and did not understand their meaning, as they do not understand it to this day. I am speaking of the industrial revolution, of the United States and of capitalism. For the first time in history, men gained control over physical nature and threw off the control of men over men—that is: men discovered science and political freedom. The creative energy, the abundance, the wealth, the rising standard of living for every level of the population were such that the nineteenth century looks like a fiction-Utopia, like a blinding burst of sunlight, in the drab progression of most of human history. If life on earth is one’s standard of value, then the nineteenth century moved mankind forward more than all the other centuries combined.

Did anyone appreciate it? Does anyone appreciate it now? Has anyone identified the causes of that historical miracle?

They did not and have not. What blinded them? The morality of altruism.

Let me explain this. There are, fundamentally, only two causes of the progress of the nineteenth century—the same two causes which you will find at the root of any happy, benevolent, progressive era in human history. One cause is psychological, the other existential—or: one pertains to man’s consciousness, the other to the physical conditions of his existence. The first is reason, the second is freedom. And when I say “freedom,” I do not mean poetic sloppiness, such as “freedom from want” or “freedom from fear” or “freedom from the necessity of earning a living.” I mean “freedom from compulsion—freedom from rule by physical force.” Which means: political freedom.

[“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 79; pb 65.]

See also AMERICA; CAPITALISM; FREEDOM; HISTORY; PHYSICAL FORCE; WAR.

Nominalism. The “nominalists” ... hold that all our ideas are only images of concretes, and that abstractions are merely “names” which we give to arbitrary groupings of concretes on the basis of vague resemblances.... (There is also the extreme nominalist position, the modern one, which consists of declaring that the problem [of universals] is a meaningless issue, that “reality” is a meaningless term, that we can never know whether our concepts correspond to anything or not, that our knowledge consists of words—and that words are an arbitrary social convention.)

[ITOE, 2.]

Denying that concepts have an objective basis in the facts of reality, nominalists declare that the source of concepts is a subjective human decision: men arbitrarily select certain characteristics to serve as the basis (the “essentials”) for a classification; thereafter, they agree to apply the same term to any concretes that happen to exhibit these “essentials,” no matter how diverse these concretes are in other respects. On this view, the concept (the term) means only those characteristics initially decreed to be “essential.” The other characteristics of the subsumed concretes bear no necessary connection to the “essential” characteristics, and are excluded from the concept’s meaning.

Observe that, while condemning Plato’s mystic view of a concept’s meaning, the nominalists embrace the same view in a skeptic version. Condemning the essence-accident dichotomy as implicitly arbitrary, they institute an explicitly arbitrary equivalent. Condemning Plato’s “intuitive” selection of essences as a disguised subjectivism, they spurn the disguise and adopt subjectivism as their official theory—as though a concealed vice were heinous, but a brazenly flaunted one, rational. Condemning Plato’s supernaturally-determined essences, they declare that essences are socially-determined, thus transferring to the province of human whim what had once been the prerogative of Plato’s divine realm. The nominalists’ “advance” over Plato consisted of secularizing his theory. To secularize an error is still to commit it.

Its form, however, changes. Nominalists do not say that a concept designates only an entity’s “essence,” excluding its “accidents.” Their secularized version is: A concept is only a shorthand tag for the characteristics stated in its definition; a concept and its definition are interchangeable; a concept means only its definition.

It is the Platonic-nominalist approach to concept-formation, expressed in such views as these, that gives rise to the theory of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 129.]

The nominalist view that a concept is merely a shorthand tag for its definition, represents a profound failure to grasp the function of a definition in the process of concept-formation. The penalty for this failure is that the process of definition, in the hands of the nominalists, achieves the exact opposite of its actual purpose. The purpose of a definition is to keep a concept distinct from all others, to keep it connected to a specific group of existents. On the nominalist view, it is precisely this connection that is severed: as soon as a concept is defined, it ceases to designate existents; and designates instead only the defining characteristic.

And further: On a rational view of definitions, a definition organizes and condenses—and thus helps one to retain—a wealth of knowledge about the characteristics of a concept’s units. On the nominalist view, it is precisely this knowledge that is discarded when one defines a concept: as soon as a defining characteristic is chosen, all the other characteristics of the units are banished from the concept, which shrivels to mean merely the definition. For instance, as long as a child’s concept of “man” is retained ostensively, the child knows that man has a head, two eyes, two arms, etc.; on the nominalist view, as soon as the child defines “man,” he discards all this knowledge; thereafter, “man” means to him only: “a thing with rationality and animality.”

On the nominalist view, the process of defining a concept is a process of cutting the concept off from its referents, and of systematically evading what one knows about their characteristics. Definition, the very tool which is designed to promote conceptual integration, becomes an agent of its destruction, a means of disintegration.

[Ibid., 140.]

See also ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; ANALYTlC-SYNTHETIC DICHOTOMY; ARBITRARY; CONCEPT-FORMATION; CONCEPTS; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); LANGUAGE; LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS; LOGICAL POSITIVISM; MEANING (of CONCEPTS); MYSTICISM; SKEPTICISM; WORDS.

Non-Contradiction. See Contradictions.

Non-Existence. Non-existence is not a fact, it is the absence of a fact, it is a derivative concept pertaining to a relationship, i.e., a concept which can be formed or grasped only in relation to some existent that has ceased to exist. (One can arrive at the concept “absence” starting from the concept “presence,” in regard to some particular existent(s); one cannot arrive at the concept “presence” starting from the concept “absence,” with the absence including everything.) Non-existence as such is a zero with no sequence of numbers to follow it, it is the nothing, the total blank.

[ITOE, 77.]

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not “the absence of pain,” intelligence is not “the absence of stupidity,” light is not “the absence of darkness,” an entity is not “the absence of a nonentity.” Building is not done by abstaining from demolition; centuries of sitting and waiting in such abstinence will not raise one single girder for you to abstain from demolishing.... Existence is not a negation of negatives.

[GS, FNI, 166; pb 135.]

See also EXISTENCE; ZERO, REIFICATION of.

Normative Abstractions. There are many special or “cross-filed” chains of abstractions (of interconnected concepts) in man’s mind. Cognitive abstractions are the fundamental chain, on which all the others depend. Such chains are mental integrations, serving a special purpose and formed accordingly by a special criterion. Cognitive abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is essential? (epistemologically essential to distinguish one class of existents from all others). Normative abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is good?

[“Art and Sense of Life,” RM, 45; pb 36.]

Consider the long conceptual chain that starts from simple, ostensive definitions and rises to higher and still higher concepts, forming a hierarchical structure of knowledge so complex that no electronic computer could approach it. It is by means of such chains that man has to acquire and retain his knowledge of reality.

Yet this is the simpler part of his psycho-epistemological task. There is another part which is still more complex.

The other part consists of applying his knowledge—i.e., evaluating the facts of reality, choosing his goals and guiding his actions accordingly. To do that, man needs another chain of concepts, derived from and dependent on the first, yet separate and, in a sense, more complex: a chain of normative abstractions.

While cognitive abstractions identify the facts of reality, normative abstractions evaluate the facts, thus prescribing a choice of values and a course of action. Cognitive abstractions deal with that which is; normative abstractions deal with that which ought to be (in the realms open to man’s choice).

[“The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” RM, 20; pb 18.]

The process of a child’s development consists of acquiring knowledge, which requires the development of his capacity to grasp and deal with an ever-widening range of abstractions. This involves the growth of two interrelated but different chains of abstractions, two hierarchical structures of concepts, which should be integrated, but seldom are: the cognitive and the normative. The first deals with knowledge of the facts of reality—the second, with the evaluation of these facts. The first forms the epistemological foundation of science—the second, of morality and of art.

In today’s culture, the development of a child’s cognitive abstractions is assisted to some minimal extent, even if ineptly, half-heartedly, with many hampering, crippling obstacles (such as anti-rational doctrines and influences which, today, are growing worse). But the development of a child’s normative abstractions is not merely left unaided, it is all but stifled and destroyed. The child whose valuing capacity survives the moral barbarism of his upbringing has to find his own way to preserve and develop his sense of values.

[“Art and Moral Treason,” RM, 140; pb 145.]

See also ABSTRACTION (PROCESS of); ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; CONCEPT-FORMATION; CONCEPTS; GOOD, the; LEARNING; MORALITY; VALUES.

Novel. A novel is a long, fictional story about human beings and the events of their lives. The four essential attributes of a novel are: Theme —Pot—Characterization—Style.

These are attributes, not separable parts. They can be isolated conceptually for purposes of study, but one must always remember that they are interrelated and that a novel is their sum. (If it is a good novel, it is an indivisible sum.)...

A novel is the major literary form—in respect to its scope, its inexhaustible potentiality, its almost unlimited freedom (including the freedom from physical limitations of the kind that restrict a stage play) and, most importantly, in respect to the fact that a novel is a purely literary form of art which does not require the intermediary of the performing arts to achieve its ultimate effect.

[“Basic Principles of Literature,” RM, 57; pb 80.]

A good novel is an indivisible sum: every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.

[Ibid., 74; pb 93.]

Since the theme of a novel is an idea about or pertaining to human existence, it is in terms of its effects on or expression in human actions that that idea has to be presented.

This leads to the crucial attribute of a novel—the plot....

To present a story in terms of action means: to present it in terms of events. A story in which nothing happens is not a story. A story whose events are haphazard and accidental is either an inept conglomeration or, at best. a chronicle. a memoir, a reportorial recording, not a novel.

[Ibid., 59; pb 82.]

See also ART; CHARACTERIZATION; LITERATURE; PLOT; POPULAR LITERATURE; STYLE; THEME (LITERARY); THRILLERS.

Numbers. A “number” is a mental symbol that integrates units into a single larger unit (or subdivides a unit into fractions) with reference to the basic number of “one,” which is the basic mental symbol of “unit.” Thus “5” stands for |||||. (Metaphysically, the referents of ”5” are any five existents of a specified kind; epistemologically, they are represented by a single symbol.)

[ITOE. 84.]

See also CONCEPTS; MATHEMATICS; MEASUREMENT; UNIT; UNIT-ECONOMY.

O

Objective. See Objectivity.

Objective Theory of Values. The intrinsic theory holds that the good resides in some sort of reality, independent of man’s consciousness; the subjectivist theory holds that the good resides in man’s consciousness, independent of reality.

The objective theory holds that the good is neither an attribute of “things in themselves” nor of man’s emotional states, but an evaluation of the facts of reality by man’s consciousness according to a rational standard of value. (Rational, in this context, means: derived from the facts of reality and validated by a process of reason.) The objective theory holds that the good is an aspect of reality in relation to man—and that it must be discovered, not invented, by man. Fundamental to an objective theory of values is the question: Of value to whom and for what? An objective theory does not permit context-dropping or “concept-stealing”; it does not permit the separation of “value” from “purpose,” of the good from beneficiaries, and of man’s actions from reason.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 22.]

The objective theory of values is the only moral theory incompatible with rule by force. Capitalism is the only system based implicitly on an objective theory of values—and the historic tragedy is that this has never been made explicit.

If one knows that the good is objective—i.e., determined by the nature of reality, but to be discovered by man’s mind—one knows that an attempt to achieve the good by physical force is a monstrous contradiction which negates morality at its root by destroying man’s capacity to recognize the good, i.e., his capacity to value. Force invalidates and paralyzes a man’s judgment, demanding that he act against it, thus rendering him morally impotent. A value which one is forced to accept at the price of surrendering one’s mind, is not a value to anyone; the forcibly mindless can neither judge nor choose nor value. An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes. Values cannot exist (cannot be valued) outside the full context of a man’s life, needs, goals, and knowledge.

[Ibid., 23.]

The free market represents the social application of an objective theory of values. Since values are to be discovered by man’s mind, men must be free to discover them—to think, to study, to translate their knowledge into physical form, to offer their products for trade, to judge them, and to choose, be it material goods or ideas, a loaf of bread or a philosophical treatise. Since values are established contextually, every man must judge for himself, in the context of his own knowledge, goals, and interests. Since values are determined by the nature of reality, it is reality that serves as men’s ultimate arbiter: if a man’s judgment is right, the rewards are his; if it is wrong, he is his only victim.

[Ibid.. 24.]

See also CAPITALISM; CONTEXT-DROPPING; FREE MARKET; INTRINSIC THEORY of VALUES; MARKET VALUE; MYSTICAL ETHICS; OBJECTIVITY; PHYSICAL FORCE; REASON; SOCIAL THEORY of ETHICS; “STOLEN CONCEPT,” FALLACY of; SUBJECTIVISM (IN ETHICS); VALUES.

Objectivism. The name I have chosen for my philosophy is Objectivism.

[“Preface,” FNI, ii, pb viii.]

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

[“About the Author,” Appendix to Atlas Shrugged.]

At a sales conference at Random House, preceding the publication of Atlas Shrugged, one of the book salesmen asked me whether I could present the essence of my philosophy while standing on one foot. I did. as follows:

1. Metaphysics: Objective Reality

2. Epistemology: Reason

3. Ethics: Self-interest

4. Politics: Capitalism

If you want this translated into simple language, it would read: 1. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” or “Wishing won’t make it so.” 2. “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.” 3. “Man is an end in himself.” 4. “Give me liberty or give me death.”

If you held these concepts with total consistency, as the base of your convictions, you would have a full philosophical system to guide the course of your life. But to hold them with total consistency—to understand, to define, to prove and to apply them—requires volumes of thought. Which is why philosophy cannot be discussed while standing on one foot—nor while standing on two feet on both sides of every fence. This last is the predominant philosophical position today, particularly in the field of politics.

In the space of a column, I can give only the briefest summary of my position, as a frame-of-reference for all my future columns. My philosophy, Objectivism, holds that:

1. Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.

2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.

3. Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

4. The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

[“Introducing Objectivism,” TON, Aug. 1962, 35.]

I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.

This—the supremacy of reason—was, is and will be the primary concern of my work, and the essence of Objectivism.

[“Brief Summary,” TO, Sept. 1971, 1.]

The only philosophical debt I can acknowledge is to Aristotle. I most emphatically disagree with a great many parts of his philosophy—but his definition of the laws of logic and of the means of human knowledge is so great an achievement that his errors are irrelevant by comparison.

[“About the Author,” Appendix to Atlas Shrugged.]

Objectivism is a philosophical movement; since politics is a branch of philosophy, Objectivism advocates certain political principles—specifically, those of laissez-faire capitalism—as the consequence and the ultimate practical application of its fundamental philosophical principles. It does not regard politics as a separate or primary goal, that is: as a goal that can be achieved without a wider ideological context.

Politics is based on three other philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology and ethics—on a theory of man’s nature and of man’s relationship to existence. It is only on such a base that one can formulate a consistent political theory and achieve it in practice. When, however, men attempt to rush into politics without such a base, the result is that embarrassing conglomeration of impotence, futility, inconsistency and superficiality which is loosely designated today as “conservatism.” Objectivists are not “conservatives.” We are radicals for capitalism; we are fighting for that philosophical base which capitalism did not have and without which it was doomed to perish.

[“Choose Your Issues,” TON. Jan. 1962. 1.]

I regard the spread of Objectivism through today’s culture as an intellectual movement—i.e., a trend among independent individuals who share the same ideas—but not as an organized movement.

[“A Statement of Policy,” TO. June 1968, 7.]

Objectivity. Objectivity is both a metaphysical and an epistemological concept. It pertains to the relationship of consciousness to existence. Metaphysically, it is the recognition of the fact that reality exists independent of any perceiver’s consciousness. Epistemologically, it is the recognition of the fact that a perceiver’s (man’s) consciousness must acquire knowledge of reality by certain means (reason) in accordance with certain rules (logic). This means that although reality is immutable and, in any given context, only one answer is true, the truth is not automatically available to a human consciousness and can be obtained only by a certain mental process which is required of every man who seeks knowledge—that there is no substitute for this process, no escape from the responsibility for it, no shortcuts, no special revelations to privileged observers—and that there can be no such thing as a final “authority” in matters pertaining to human knowledge. Metaphysically, the only authority is reality; epistemologically—one’s own mind. The first is the ultimate arbiter of the second.

The concept of objectivity contains the reason why the question “Who decides what is right or wrong?” is wrong. Nobody “decides.” Nature does not decide—it merely is; man does not decide, in issues of knowledge, he merely observes that which is. When it comes to applying his knowledge, man decides what he chooses to do, according to what he has learned, remembering that the basic principle of rational action in all aspects of human existence, is: “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” This means that man does not create reality and can achieve his values only by making his decisions consonant with the facts of reality.

[“Who Is the Final Authority in Ethics?” TON, Feb. 1965,7.]

Objectivity begins with the realization that man (including his every attribute and faculty, including his consciousness) is an entity of a specific nature who must act accordingly; that there is no escape from the law of identity, neither in the universe with which he deals nor in the working of his own consciousness, and if he is to acquire knowledge of the first, he must discover the proper method of using the second; that there is no room for the arbitrary in any activity of man, least of all in his method of cognition—and just as he has learned to be guided by objective criteria in making his physical tools, so he must be guided by objective criteria in forming his tools of cognition: his concepts.

[ITOE, 110.]

It is axiomatic concepts that identify the precondition of knowledge: the distinction between existence and consciousness, between reality and the awareness of reality, between the object and the subject of cognition. Axiomatic concepts are the foundation of objectivity.

[Ibid.. 76.]

Most people ... think that abstract thinking must be “impersonal”—which means that ideas must hold no personal meaning, value or importance to the thinker. This notion rests on the premise that a personal interest is an agent of distortion. But “personal” does not mean “non-objective”; it depends on the kind of person you are. If your thinking is determined by your emotions, then you will not be able to judge anything, personally or impersonally. But if you are the kind of person who knows that reality is not your enemy, that truth and knowledge are of crucial, personal, selfish importance to you and to your own life—then. the more passionately personal the thinking, the clearer and truer.

[“Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 19; pb 16.]

See also AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS; AXIOMS; CONCEPTS; DEFINITIONS; EPISTEMOLOGY; IDENTITY; KANT, IMMANUEL; KNOWLEDGE; LOGIC; METAPHYSICS; MORALITY; MYSTICISM; “OPEN MIND” and “CLOSED MIND”; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; PROOF; REASON; SUBJECTIVISM; TRUTH.

Obligation. See Responsibility/Obligation.

“Open Mind” and “Closed Mind.” [There is a| dangerous little catch phrase which advises you to keep an “open mind.” This is a very ambiguous term—as demonstrated by a man who once accused a famous politician of having “a wide open mind.” That term is an anti-concept: it is usually taken to mean an objective, unbiased approach to ideas, but it is used as a call for perpetual skepticism, for holding no firm convictions and granting plausibility to anything. A “closed mind” is usually taken to mean the attitude of a man impervious to ideas, arguments, facts and logic, who clings stubbornly to some mixture of unwarranted assumptions, fashionable catch phrases, tribal prejudices —and emotions. But this is not a “closed” mind, it is a passive one. It is a mind that has dispensed with (or never acquired) the practice of thinking or judging, and feels threatened by any request to consider anything.

What objectivity and the study of philosophy require is not an “open mind,” but an active mind—a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them critically. An active mind does not grant equal status to truth and falsehood; it does not remain floating forever in a stagnant vacuum of neutrality and uncertainty; by assuming the responsibility of judgment, it reaches firm convictions and holds to them. Since it is able to prove its convictions, an active mind achieves an unassailable certainty in confrontations with assailants—a certainty untainted by spots of blind faith, approximation, evasion and fear.

[“Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 25; pb 21.]

See also ABSOLUTES; AGNOSTICISM; “ANTI-CONCEPTS”; CERTAINTY; OBJECTIVITY; PROOF; REASON; SKEPTICISM.

Opera and Operetta. In operas and operettas, the esthetic base is music, with the libretto serving only to provide an appropriate emotional context or opportunity for the musical score, and an integrating line for the total performance. (In this respect, there are very few good librettos.)

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 71.]

See also ART; MUSIC; PERFORMING ARTS.

Original Sin. Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.

It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic. God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him—it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.

The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.

A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.

Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a “tendency” to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge—he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil—he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor—he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire—he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy—all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was—that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love —he was not man.

Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man.

[GS, FNI, 168; pb 136.]

See also ATHEISM; CONTRADICTIONS; EVIL; FREE WILL; MAN; MORALITY; MYSTICISM; PRODUCTIVENESS; RATIONALITY; RELIGION; RESPONSIBILITY/OBLIGATlON; SELFISHNESS; SEX; VIRTUE.

Ostensive Definition. With certain significant exceptions, every concept can be defined and communicated in terms of other concepts. The exceptions are concepts referring to sensations, and metaphysical axioms.

Sensations are the primary material of consciousness and, therefore, cannot be communicated by means of the material which is derived from them. The existential causes of sensations can be described and defined in conceptual terms (e.g., the wavelengths of light and the structure of the human eye, which produce the sensations of color), but one cannot communicate what color is like, to a person who is born blind. To define the meaning of the concept “blue,” for instance, one must point to some blue objects to signify, in effect: “I mean this.” Such an identification of a concept is known as an “ostensive definition.”

Ostensive definitions are usually regarded as applicable only to conceptualized sensations. But they are applicable to axioms as well. Since axiomatic concepts are identifications of irreducible primaries, the only way to define one is by means of an ostensive definition—e.g., to define “existence,” one would have to sweep one’s arm around and say: “I mean this.”

[ITOE, 52.]

See also AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS; AXIOMS; DEFINITIONS; IRREDUCIBLE PRIMARIES; PERCEPTION; SELF-EVIDENT; SENSATIONS.

P

Pacifism. The necessary consequence of man’s right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

If some “pacifist” society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it.

[“The Nature of Government,” VOS, 146; pb 108.]

See also ANARCHISM; GOVERNMENT; PEACE MOVEMENTS; PHYSICAL FORCE; RETALIATORY FORCE; SELF-DEFENSE; WAR.

“Package-Dealing,” Fallacy of. “Package-dealing” is the fallacy of failing to discriminate crucial differences. It consists of treating together, as parts of a single conceptual whole or “package,” elements which differ essentially in nature, truth-status, importance or value.

[Leonard Peikoff, editor’s footnote to Ayn Rand’s “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 30; pb 24.]

[Package-dealing employs] the shabby old gimmick of equating opposites by substituting nonessentials for their essential characteristics, obliterating differences.

[“How to Read (and Not to Write),” ARL, 1, 26, 3.]

A disastrous intellectual package-deal, put over on us by the theoreticians of statism, is the equation of economic power with political power. You have heard it expressed in such bromides as: “A hungry man is not free,” or “It makes no difference to a worker whether he takes orders from a businessman or from a bureaucrat.” Most people accept these equivocations—and yet they know that the poorest laborer in America is freer and more secure than the richest commissar in Soviet Russia. What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.

The difference between political power and any other kind of social “power,” between a government and any private organisation, is the fact that a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.

[“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 46.]

A typical package-deal, used by professors of philosophy, runs as follows: to prove the assertion that there is no such thing as “necessity” in the universe, a professor declares that just as this country did not have to have fifty states, there could have been forty-eight or fifty-two—so the solar system did not have to have nine planets, there could have been seven or eleven. It is not sufficient, he declares, to prove that something is, one must also prove that it had to be—and since nothing had to be, nothing is certain and anything goes.

[“The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 34; pb 28.]

See also “ANTI-CONCEPTS”; DEFINITIONS; ECONOMIC POWER vs. POLITICAL POWER; FUNDAMENTALITY, RULE of; NECESSITY; “RAND’S RAZOR”; STATISM.

Painting. Painting [re-creates reality] by means of color on a two-dimensional surface.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 46.]

The so-called visual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture) produce concrete, perceptually available entities and make them convey an abstract, conceptual meaning.

[Ibid., 47.]

The visual arts do not deal with the sensory field of awareness as such, but with the sensory field as perceived by a conceptual consciousness.

[Ibid.]

It is a common experience to observe that a particular painting—foi example, a still life of apples—makes its subject “more real than it is in reality.” The apples seem brighter and firmer, they seem to possess an almost self-assertive character, a kind of heightened reality which neither their real-life models nor any color photograph can match. Yet if one examines them closely, one sees that no real-life apple ever looked like that. What is it, then, that the artist has done? He has created a visual abstraction.

He has performed the process of concept-formation—of isolating and integrating—but in exclusively visual terms. He has isolated the essential, distinguishing characteristics of apples, and integrated them into a single visual unit. He has brought the conceptual method of functioning to the operations of a single sense organ, the organ of sight.

[Ibid. ]

The closer an artist comes to a conceptual method of functioning visually, the greater his work. The greatest of all artists, Vermeer, devoted his paintings to a single theme: light itself. The guiding principle of his compositions is: the contextual nature of our perception of light (and of color). The physical objects in a Vermeer canvas are chosen and placed in such a way that their combined interrelationships feature, lead to and make possible the painting’s brightest patches of light, sometimes blindingly bright, in a manner which no one has been able to render before or since.

(Compare the radiant austerity of Vermeer’s work to the silliness of the dots-and-dashes Impressionists who allegedly intended to paint pure light. He raised perception to the conceptual level; they attempted to disintegrate perception into sense data.)

One might wish (and I do) that Vermeer had chosen better subjects to express his theme, but to him, apparently, the subjects were only the means to his end. What his style projects is a concretized image of an immense, nonvisual abstraction: the psycho-epistemology of a rational mind. It projects clarity, discipline, confidence, purpose, power—a universe open to man. When one feels, looking at a Vermeer painting: “This is my view of life,” the feeling involves much more than mere visual perception.

[Ibid., 48.]

See also ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; ART; BEAUTY; CONCEPTS; CONTEXT; ESTHETICS; MODERN ART; SENSE of LIFE; STYLE; SUBJECT (in ART); VISUAL ARTS.

Parts of Speech. See Grammar.

Patents and Copyrights. Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his mind.

[“Patents and Copyrights,” CUI, 130.]

What the patent and copyright laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mental effort in the production of material values; these laws protect the mind’s contribution in its purest form: the origination of an idea. The subject of patents and copyrights is intellectual property.

An idea as such cannot be protected until it has been given a material form. An invention has to be embodied in a physical model before it can be patented; a story has to be written or printed. But what the patent or copyright protects is not the physical object as such, but the idea which it embodies. By forbidding an unauthorized reproduction of the object, the law declares, in effect, that the physical labor of copying is not the source of the object’s value, that that value is created by the originator of the idea and may not be used without his consent; thus the law establishes the property right of a mind to that which it has brought into existence.

It is important to note, in this connection, that a discovery cannot be patented, only an invention. A scientific or philosophical discovery, which identifies a law of nature, a principle or a fact of reality not previously known, cannot be the exclusive property of the discoverer because: (a) he did not create it, and (b) if he cares to make his discovery public, claiming it to be true, he cannot demand that men continue to pursue or practice falsehoods except by his permission. He ran copyright the book in which he presents his discovery and he can demand that his authorship of the discovery be acknowledged, that no other man appropriate or plagiarize the credit for it—but he cannot copyright theoretical knowledge. Patents and copyrights pertain only to the practical application of knowledge, to the creation of a specific object which did not exist in nature—an object which, in the case of patents, may never have existed without its particular originator; and in the case of copyrights, would never have existed.

The government does not “grant” a patent or copyright, in the sense of a gift, privilege, or favor; the government merely secures it—i.e.. the government certifies the origination of an idea and protects its owner’s exclusive right of use and disposal.

[Ibid.]

Since intellectual property rights cannot be exercised in perpetuity, the question of their time limit is an enormously complex issue.... In the case of copyrights, the most rational solution is Great Britain’s Copyright Act of 1911. which established the copyright of books, paintings, movies, etc. for the lifetime of the author and fifty years thereafter.

[Ibid., 132.]

As an objection to the patent laws, some people cite the fact that two inventors may work independently for years on the same invention, but one will beat the other to the patent office by an hour or a day and will acquire an exclusive monopoly, while the loser’s work will then be totally wasted. This type of objection is based on the error of equating the potential with the actual. The fact that a man might have been first, does not alter the fact that he wasn’t. Since the issue is one of commercial rights, the loser in a case of that kind has to accept the fact that in seeking to trade with others he must face the possibility of a competitor winning the race, which is true of all types of competition.

[Ibid., 133.]

See also CREATION; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; PROPERTY RIGHTS.

Peace Movements. Observe the nature of today’s alleged peace movements. Professing love and concern for the survival of mankind, they keep screaming that the nuclear-weapons race should be stopped, that armed force should be abolished as a means of settling disputes among nations, and that war should be outlawed in the name of humanity. Yet these same peace movements do not oppose dictatorships; the political views of their members range through all shades of the statist spectrum, from welfare statism to socialism to fascism to communism. This means that they are opposed to the use of coercion by one nation against another, but not by the government of a nation against its own citizens; it means that they are opposed to the use of force against armed adversaries, but not against the disarmed.

Consider the plunder, the destruction, the starvation, the brutality, the slave-labor camps, the torture chambers, the wholesale slaughter perpetrated by dictatorships. Yet this is what today’s alleged peace-lovers are willing to advocate or tolerate—in the name of love for humanity.

[“‘The Roots of War,” CUI, 35.]

It is capitalism that today’s peace-lovers oppose and statism that they advocate—in the name of peace.

Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships. By the nature of its basic principles and interests, it is the only system fundamentally opposed to war.

[Ibid., 37.]

It is true that nuclear weapons have made wars too horrible to contemplate. But it makes no difference to a man whether he is killed by a nuclear bomb or a dynamite bomb or an old-fashioned club. Nor does the number of other victims or the scale of the destruction make any difference to him. And there is something obscene in the attitude of those who regard horror as a matter of numbers, who are willing to send a small group of youths to die for the tribe, but scream against the danger to the tribe itself—and more: who are willing to condone the slaughter of defenseless victims, but march in protest against wars between the well-armed....

If nuclear weapons are a dreadful threat and mankind cannot afford war any longer, then mankind cannot afford statism any longer. Let no man of good will take it upon his conscience to advocate the rule of force—outside or inside his own country. Let all those who are actually concerned with peace—those who do love man and do care about his survival—realize that if war is ever to be outlawed, it is the use of force that has to be outlawed.

[Ibid., 42.]

See also CAPITALISM; DICTATORSHIP; FOREIGN POLICY; GENOCIDE; PACIFISM; PHYSICAL FORCE; RETALIATORY FORCE; SELF-DEFENSE; SOVIET RUSSIA; STATISM; WAR.

Perception. The higher organisms possess a much more potent form of consciousness: they possess the faculty of retaining sensations, which is the faculty of perception. A “perception” is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of single stimuli, but of entities, of things. An animal is guided, not merely by immediate sensations, but by percepts. Its actions are not single, discrete responses to single, separate stimuli, but are directed by an integrated awareness of the perceptual reality confronting it. It is able to grasp the perceptual concretes immediately present and it is able to form automatic perceptual associations, but it can go no further.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 10; pb 19.]

Man’s senses are his only direct cognitive contact with reality and, therefore, his only source of information. Without sensory evidence, there can be no concepts; without concepts, there can be no language; without language, there can he no knowledge and no science.

[“Kant Versus Sullivan.” PWNI, 108; pb 90.]

Although, chronologically, man’s consciousness develops in three stages: the stage of sensations, the perceptual, the conceptual—epistemologically, the base of all of man’s knowledge is the perceptual stage.

Sensations, as such, are not retained in man’s memory, nor is man able to experience a pure isolated sensation. As far as can be ascertained, an infant’s sensory experience is an undifferentiated chaos. Discriminated awareness begins on the level of percepts.

A percept is a group of sensations aummatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism. It is in the form of percepts that man grasps the evidence of his senses and apprehends reality. When we speak of “direct perception” or “direct awareness,” we mean the perceptual level. Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident. The knowledge of sensations as components of percepts is not direct, it is acquired by man much later: it is a scientific, conceptual discovery.

[ITOE, 5.]

[Man’s] senses do not provide him with automatic knowledge in separate snatches independent of context, but only with the material of knowledge, which his mind must learn to integrate.... His senses cannot deceive him, ... physical objects cannot act without causes, ... his organs of perception are physical and have no volition, no power to invent or to distort ... the evidence they give him is an absolute, but his mind must learn to understand it, his mind must discover the nature, the causes, the full context of his sensory material, his mind must identify the things that he perceives.

[GS, FNI, 194; pb 156.]

Let the witch doctor who does not choose to accept the validity of sensory perception, try to prove it without using the data he obtained by sensory perception.

[Ibid., 193; pb 155.]

The arguments of those who attack the senses are merely variants of the fallacy of the “stolen concept.”

[ITOE, 4.]

As far as can be ascertained, the perceptual level of a child’s awareness is similar to the awareness of the higher animals: the higher animals are able to perceive entities, motions, attributes, and certain numbers of entities. But what an animal cannot perform is the process of abstraction —of mentally separating attributes, motions or numbers from entities. It has been said that an animal can perceive two oranges or two potatoes, but cannot grasp the concept “two.”

[Ibid., 19.]

The range of man’s perceptual awareness—the number of percepts he can deal with at any one time—is limited. He may be able to visualize four or five units—as, for instance, five trees. He cannot visualize a hundred trees or a distance of ten light-years. It is only his conceptual faculty that makes it possible for him to deal with knowledge of that kind.

[“The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” RM, 20; pb 17.]

See also AXIOMS; CONCEPTS; CONSCIOUSNESS; ENTITY; EPISTEMOLOGY; FREE WILL; HIERARCHY of KNOWLEDGE; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); OSTENSIVE DEFINITION; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; REASON; SELF-EVIDENT; SENSATIONS; “STOLEN CONCEPT,” FALLACY of; UNIT-ECONOMY.

Performing Arts. Let us turn now to the performing arts (acting, playing a musical instrument, singing, dancing).

In these arts, the medium employed is the person of the artist. His task is not to re-create reality, but to implement the re-creation made by one of the primary arts.

This does not mean that the performing arts are secondary in esthetic value or importance, but only that they are an extension of and dependent on the primary arts. Nor does it mean that performers are mere “interpreters”: on the higher levels of his art, a performer contributes a creative element which the primary work could not convey by itself; he becomes a partner, almost a co-creator—if and when he is guided by the principle that he is the means to the end set by the work.

The basic principles which apply to all the other arts, apply to the performing artist as well, particularly stylization, i.e., selectivity: the choice and emphasis of essentials, the structuring of the progressive steps of a performance which lead to an ultimately meaningful sum. The performing artist’s own metaphysical value-judgments are called upon to create and apply the kind of technique his performance requires. For instance, an actor’s view of human grandeur or baseness or courage or timidity will determine how he projects these qualities on the stage. A work intended to be performed leaves a wide latitude of creative choice to the artist who will perform it. In an almost literal sense, he has to embody the soul created by the author of the work: a special kind of creativeness is required to bring that soul into full physical reality.

When the performance and the work (literary or musical) are perfectly integrated in meaning, style and intention, the result is a magnificent esthetic achievement and an unforgettable experience for the audience.

The psycho-epistemological role of the performing arts—their relationship to man’s cognitive faculty—lies in the full concretization of the metaphysical abstractions projected by a work of the primary arts. The distinction of the performing arts lies in their immediacy—in the fact that they translate a work of art into existential action, into a concrete event open to direct awareness.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 64.]

Music and/or literature are the base of the performing arts and of the large-scale combinations of all the arts, such as opera or motion pictures. The base, in this context, means that primary art which provides the metaphysical element and enables the performance to become a concretization of an abstract view of man.

Without this base, a performance may be entertaining, in such fields as vaudeville or the circus, but it has nothing to do with art. The performance of an aerialist, for instance, demands an enormous physical skill —greater, perhaps, and harder to acquire than the skill demanded of a ballet dancer—but what it offers is merely an exhibition of that skill, with no further meaning, i.e., a concrete, not a concretization of anything.

[Ibid., 70.]

See also ART; BALLET; DANCE; ESTHETICS; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); METAPHYSICAL VALUE JUDGMENTS; MUSIC; OPERA and OPERETTA; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY.

Permission (vs. Rights). A right is the sanction of independent action. A right is that which can be exercised without anyone’s permission.

If you exist only because society permits you to exist—you have no right to your own life. A permission can be revoked at any time.

If, before undertaking some action, you must obtain the permission of society—you are not free, whether such permission is granted to you or not. Only a slave acts on permission. A permission is not a right.

Do not make the mistake, at this point, of thinking that a worker is a slave and that he holds his job by his employer’s permission. He does not hold it by permission—but by contract, that is, by a voluntary mutual agreement. A worker can quit his job. A slave cannot.

[“Textbook of Americanism,” pamphlet, 5.]

See also CONTRACTS; INALIENABILITY; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS.

Philosophy. Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man’s relationship to existence. As against the special sciences, which deal only with particular aspects, philosophy deals with those aspects of the universe which pertain to everything that exists. In the realm of cognition, the special sciences are the trees, but philosophy-is the soil which makes the forest possible.

[“Philosophy: Who Needs It,” PWNI, 2; pb 2.]

Philosophy is the science that studies the fundamental aspects of the nature of existence. The task of philosophy is to provide man with a comprehensive view of life. This view serves as a base, a frame of reference, for all his actions, mental or physical, psychological or existential. This view tells him the nature of the universe with which he has to deal (metaphysics); the means by which he is to deal with it, i.e., the means of acquiring knowledge (epistemology); the standards by which he is to choose his goals and values, in regard to his own life and character (ethics)—and in regard to society (politics); the means of concretizing this view is given to him by esthetics.

[“The Chickens’ Homecoming,” NL, 107.]

In order to live, man must act; in order to act, he must make choices; in order to make choices, he must define a code of values; in order to define a code of values, he must know what he is and where he is—i.e., he must know his own nature (including his means of knowledge) and the nature of the universe in which he acts—i.e., he needs metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, which means: philosophy. He cannot escape from this need; his only alternative is whether the philosophy guiding him is to be chosen by his mind or by chance.

[“Philosophy and Sense of Life,” RM, 37; pb 30.]

As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.

[“Philosophy: Who Needs It,” PWNI, 6; pb 5.]

The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently: they are most helplessly in its power.

The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them—from schools, colleges, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television, etc. Who sets the tone of a culture? A small handful of men: the philosophers. Others follow their lead, either by conviction or by default.

[Ibid., 8; pb 6.]

Philosophy is a necessity for a rational being: philosophy is the foundation of science, the organizer of man’s mind, the integrator of his knowledge, the programmer of his subconscious, the selector of his values.

[“From the Horse’s Mouth,” PWNI, 99; pb 82.]

just as a man’s actions are preceded and determined by some form of idea in his mind, so a society’s existential conditions are preceded and determined by the ascendancy of a certain philosophy among those whose job is to deal with ideas. The events of any given period of history are the result of the thinking of the preceding period.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 27; pb 28.]

The power that determines the establishment, the changes, the evolution, and the destruction of social systems is philosophy. The role of chance, accident, or tradition, in this context, is the same as their role in the life of an individual: their power stands in inverse ratio to the power of a culture’s (or an individual’s) philosophical equipment, and grows as philosophy collapses. It is, therefore, by reference to philosophy that the character of a social system has to be defined and evaluated.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 19.]

The present state of the world is not the proof of philosophy’s impotence, but the proof of philosophy’s power. It is philosophy that has brought men to this state—it is only philosophy that can lead them out.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 58; pb 50.]

In philosophy, the fundamentals are metaphysics and epistemology. On the basis of a knowable universe and of a rational faculty’s competence to grasp it, you can define man’s proper ethics, politics and esthetics. (And if you make an error, you retain the means and the frame of reference necessary to correct it.) But what will you accomplish if you advocate honesty in ethics, while telling men that there is no such thing as truth, fact or reality? What will you do if you advocate political freedom on the grounds that you feel it is good, and find yourself confronting an ambitious thug who declares that he feels quite differently?

The layman’s error, in regard to philosophy, is the tendency to accept consequences while ignoring their causes—to take the end result of a long sequence of thought as the given and to regard it as “self-evident” of as an irreducible primary, while negating its preconditions.

[“Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 14; pb 12.]

Philosophy provides man with a comprehensive view of life. In order to evaluate it properly, ask yourself what a given theory, if accepted, would do to a human life, starting with your own.

[Ibid., 19; pb 16.]

Man came into his own in Greece, some two-and-a-half thousand years ago. The birth of philosophy marked his adulthood; not the content of any particular system of philosophy, but deeper: the concept of philosophy—the realization that a comprehensive view of existence is to be reached by man’s mind.

Philosophy is the goal toward which religion was only a helplessly blind groping. The grandeur, the reverence, the exalted purity, the austere dedication to the pursuit of truth, which are commonly associated with religion, should properly belong to the field of philosophy. Aristotle lived up to it and, in part, so did Plato, Aquinas, Spinoza—but how many others? It is earlier than we think.

If you observe that ever since Hume and Kant (mainly Kant, because Hume was merely the Bertrand Russell of his time) philosophy has been striving to prove that man’s mind is impotent, that there’s no such thing as reality and we wouldn’t be able to perceive it if there were—you will realize the magnitude of the treason involved.

[“The Chickens’ Homecoming,” NL, 107.]

The foundation of any culture, the source responsible for all of its manifestations, is its philosophy. What does modern philosophy offer us? Virtually the only point of agreement among today’s leading philosophers is that there is no such thing as philosophy—and that this knowledge constitutes their claim to the title of philosophers. With a hysterical virulence, strange in advocates of skepticism, they insist that there can be no valid philosophical systems (i.e., there can be no integrated, consistent, comprehensive view of existence)—that there are no answers to fundamental questions—there is no such thing as truth—there is no such thing as reason, and the battle is only over what should replace it: “linguistic games” or unbridled feelings?

[“Our Cultural Value-Deprivation,” TO, April 1966, 4.]

If, in the course of philosophical detection, you find yourself, at times, stopped by the indignantly bewildered question: “How could anyone arrive at such nonsense?”—you will begin to understand it when you discover that evil philosophies are systems of rationalization.

[“Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 22; pb 18.]

Even though philosophy is held in a (today) well-earned contempt by the other college departments, it is philosophy that determines the nature and direction of all the other courses, because it is philosophy that formulates the principles of epistemology, i.e., the rules by which men are to acquire knowledge. The influence of the dominant philosophic theories permeates every other department, including the physical sciences.

[“The Comprachicos,” NL, 224.]

Philosophy is the foundation of science; epistemology is the foundation of philosophy. It is with a new approach to epistemology that the rebirth of philosophy has to begin.

[ITOE, 99.]

See also ARISTOTLE; COMMON SENSE; CULTURE; EPISTEMOLOGY; ESTHETICS; HISTORY; IDEOLOGY; INTELLECTUALS; LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS; LOGICAL POSITIVISM; MAN; METAPHYSICS; MILL, JOHN STUART; MORALITY; NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH; OBJECTIVISM; POLITICS; PRAGMATISM; PRINCIPLES; RATIONALISM vs. EMPIRICISM; RATIONALIZATION; REASON; RELIGION; SCIENCE; SELF-EVIDENT.

Photography. A certain type of confusion about the relationship between scientific discoveries and art, leads to a frequently asked question: Is photography an art? The answer is: No. It is a technical, not a creative, skill. Art requires a selective re-creation. A camera cannot perform the basic task of painting: a visual conceptualization, i.e., the creation of a concrete in terms of abstract essentials. The selection of camera angles, lighting or lenses is merely a selection of the means to reproduce various aspects of the given, i.e., of an existing concrete. There is an artistic element in some photographs, which is the result of such selectivity as the photographer can exercise, and some of them can be very beautiful—but the same artistic element (purposeful selectivity) is present in many utilitarian products: in the better kinds of furniture, dress design, automobiles, packaging, etc. The commercial art work in ads (or posters or postage stamps) is frequently done by real artists and has greater esthetic value than many paintings, but utilitarian objects cannot be classified as works of art.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 74.1

See also ART; ESTHETICS.

Physical Force. Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate—do you hear me? no man may start —the use of physical force against others.

To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man’s capacity to live.

Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. When you declare that men are irrational animals and propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own character and can no longer claim the sanction of reason—as no advocate of contradictions can claim it. There can be no “right” to destroy the source of rights, the only means of judging right and wrong: the mind.

To force a man to drop his own mind and to accept your will as a substitute, with a gun in place of a syllogism, with terror in place of proof, and death as the final argument—is to attempt to exist in defiance of reality. Reality demands of man that he act for his own rational interest; your gun demands of him that he act against it. Reality threatens man with death if he does not act on his rational judgment; you threaten him with death if he does. You place him in a world where the price of his life is the surrender of all the virtues required by life—and death by a process of gradual destruction is all that you and your system will achieve, when death is made to be the ruling power, the winning argument in a society of men.

Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum: “Your money or your life,” or a politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: “Your children’s education or your life,” the meaning of that ultimatum is: “Your mind or your life”—and neither is possible to man without the other.

[GS, FNI, 164; pb 133.]

The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is: no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man—or group or society or government—has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The ethical principle involved is simple and clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense. A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man. The principle is: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 31; pb 32.]

Man’s rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.

The precondition of a civilized society is the barring of physical force from social relationships—thus establishing the principle that if men wish to deal with one another, they may do so only by means of reason: by discussion, persuasion and voluntary, uncoerced agreement.

[“The Nature of Government,” VOS, 146; pb 108.]

When men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements.

[“The Comprachicos,” NL., 234.]

A rational mind does not work under compulsion; it does not subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone’s orders, directives, or controls; it does not sacrifice its knowledge, its view of the truth, to anyone’s opinions, threats, wishes, plans, or “welfare.” Such a mind may be hampered by others, it may be silenced, proscribed, imprisoned, or destroyed; it cannot be forced; a gun is not an argument. (An example and symbol of this attitude is Galileo.)

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 17.]

Force is the antonym and negation of thought. Understanding is not produced by a punch in the face; intellectual clarity does not flow from the muzzle of a gun; the weighing of evidence is not mediated by spasms of terror. The mind is a cognitive faculty; it cannot achieve knowledge or conviction apart from or against its perception of reality; it cannot be forced.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 336; pb 309.]

An attempt to achieve the good by physical force is a monstrous contradiction which negates morality at its root by destroying man’s capacity to recognize the good, i.e., his capacity to value. Force invalidates and paralyzes a man’s judgment, demanding that he act against it, thus rendering him morally impotent. A value which one is forced to accept at the price of surrendering one’s mind, is not a value to anyone; the forcibly mindless can neither judge nor choose nor value. An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes. Values cannot exist (cannot be valued) outside the full context of a man’s life, needs, goals. and knowledge.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 23.]

To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.

[“The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNl, 39; pb 32.]

If some men attempt to survive by means of brute force or fraud, by looting, robbing, cheating or enslaving the men who produce, it still remains true that their survival is made possible only by their victims, only by the men who choose to think and to produce the goods which they, the looters, are seizing. Such looters are parasites incapable of survival. who exist by destroying those who are capable, those who are pursuing a course of action proper to man.

The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals. But just as animals would not be able to survive by attempting the method of plants, by rejecting locomotion and waiting for the soil to feed them —so men cannot survive by attempting the method of animals, by rejecting reason and counting on productive men to serve as their prey. Such looters may achieve their goals for the range of a moment, at the price of destruction: the destruction of their victims and their own. As evidence. I offer you any criminal or any dictatorship.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 17.]

One does not and cannot “negotiate” with brutality, nor give it the benefit of the doubt. The moral absolute should be: if and when, in any dispute, one side initiates the use of physical force, that side is wrong— and no consideration or discussion of the issues is necessary or appropriate.

[“Brief Comments,” TO, March 1969, 1.]

When a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law—men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims—then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket.

[“‘The Meaning of Money,” FNI. 109; pb 92.]

There are only two fundamental methods by which men can deal with one another: by reason or by force, by intellectual persuasion or by physical coercion, by directing to an opponent’s brain an argument—or a bullet.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 90; pb 90.]

Those who declare, today, that force is the only way to deal with men (with the unstated footnote that they, the speakers, would be safe in the position of rulers), ought to take a careful look at the history of absolute monarchies—and of modern dictatorships as well. Under the rule of force, it is the rulers who are in greatest danger, who live—and die—in permanent terror. The court intrigues, the plots and counterplots, the coups d’état, the known executions and secret assassinations are a matter of record. So are the purges of Party leaders and their cliques, in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

[“A Nation’s Unity,” ARL, II, 2, 2.]

Altruism gives to the use of force a moral sanction, making it not only an unavoidable practical recourse, but also a positive virtue, an expression of militant righteousness.

A man is morally the property of others—of those others it is his duty to serve—argue Fichte, Hegel, and the rest, explicitly or by implication. As such, a man has no moral right to refuse to make the requisite sacrifices for others. If he attempts it, he is depriving men of what is properly theirs, he is violating men’s rights, their right to his service—and it is, therefore, an assertion of morality if others intervene forcibly and compel him to fulfill his obligations. “Social justice” in this view not only allows but demands the use of force against the non-sacrificial individual.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 90; pb 91.]

The use of physical force—even its retaliatory use—cannot be left at the discretion of individual citizens. Peaceful coexistence is impossible if a man has to live under the constant threat of force to be unleashed against him by any of his neighbors at any moment. Whether his neighbors’ intentions are good or bad, whether their judgment is rational or irrational, whether they are motivated by a sense of justice or by ignorance or by prejudice or by malice—the use of force against one man cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another.

Visualize, for example, what would happen if a man missed his wallet, concluded that he had been robbed, broke into every house in the neighborhood to search it, and shot the first man who gave him a dirty look, taking the look to be a proof of guilt.

The retaliatory use of force requires objective rules of evidence to establish that a crime has been committed and to prove who committed it, as well as objective rules to define punishments and enforcement procedures. Men who attempt to prosecute crimes, without such rules, are a lynch mob. If a society left the retaliatory use of force in the hands of individual citizens, it would degenerate into mob rule, lynch law and an endless series of bloody private feuds or vendettas.

If physical force is to be barred from social relationships, men need an institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective code of rules.

This is the task of a government—of a proper government—its basic task, its only moral justification and the reason why men do need a government.

A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws.

[“The Nature of Government,” VOS, 146; pb 108.]

A unilateral breach of contract involves an indirect use of physical force: it consists, in essence, of one man receiving the material values, goods or services of another, then refusing to pay for them and thus keeping them by force (by mere physical possession), not by right—i.e., keeping them without the consent of their owner. Fraud involves a similarly indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values without their owner’s consent, under false pretenses or false promises. Extortion is another variant of an indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values, not in exchange for values, but by the threat of force, violence or injury.

[Ibid., 150; pb 111.]

See also ALTRUISM; CRIME; DICTATORSHIP; ECONOMIC POWER vs. POLITICAL POWER; FRAUD; FREEDOM; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; JUSTICE; LAW, OBJECTIVE and NON-OBJECTIVE; MORALITY; OBJECTIVE THEORY of VALUES; PRODUCTION; REASON; RETALIATORY FORCE; SELF-DEFENSE; SELFISHNESS; STATISM; WAR.

Pity. Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent.

[“Bootleg Romanticism,” RM, 123; pb 131.]

See also COMPASSION; COMPROMISE; MERCY; MORAL COWARDICE; MORAL JUDGMENT.

Platonic Realism. The “extreme realists” or Platonists,... hold that abstractions exist as real entities or archetypes in another dimension of reality and that the concretes we perceive are merely their imperfect reflections, but the concretes evoke the abstractions in our mind. (According to Plato, they do so by evoking the memory of the archetypes which we had known, before birth, in that other dimension.)

[ITOE, 2.]

The extreme realist (Platonist) and the moderate realist (Aristotelian) schools of thought regard the referents of concepts as intrinsic, i.e., as “universals” inherent in things (either as archetypes or as metaphysical essences), as special existents unrelated to man’s consciousness—to be perceived by man directly, like any other kind of concrete existents, but perceived by some non-sensory or extra-sensory means.

[Ibid., 70.]

The Platonist school begins by accepting the primacy of consciousness, by reversing the relationship of consciousness to existence, by assuming that reality must conform to the content of consciousness, not the other way around—on the premise that the presence of any notion in man’s mind proves the existence of a corresponding referent in reality.

[Ibid., 71.]

The content of true reality, according to Plato, is a set of universals or Forms—in effect, a set of disembodied abstractions representing that which is in common among various groups of particulars in this world. Thus for Plato abstractions are supernatural existents. They are non-material entities in another dimension, independent of man’s mind and of any of their material embodiments. The Forms, Plato tells us repeatedly, are what is really real. The particulars they subsume—the concretes that make up this wortd—are not; they have only a shadowy, dreamlike half-reality.

Momentous conclusions about man are implicit in this metaphysics (and were later made explicit by a long line of Platonists): since individual men are merely particular instances of the universal “man,” they are not ultimately real. What is real about men is only the Form which they share in common and reflect. To common sense, there appear to be many separate, individual men, each independent of the others, each fully real in his own right. To Platonism, this is a deception; all the seemingly individual men are really the same one Form, in various reflections or manifestations. Thus, all men ultimately comprise one unity, and no earthly man is an autonomous entity—just as. if a man were reflected in a multifaceted mirror, the many reflections would not be autonomous entities.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 18; pb 27.]

See also ABSTRACTION (PROCESS of); ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; ARISTOTLE; COLLECTIVISM; CONCEPT FORMATION; CONCEPTS; OBJECTlV!TY; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; RATIONALISM vs. EMPIRICISM; REASON.

Pleasure and Pain. Now in what manner does a human being discover the concept of “value”? By what means does he first become aware of the issue of “good or evil” in its simplest form? By means of the physical sensations of pleasure or pain. Just as sensations are the first step of the development of a human consciousness in the realm of cognition, so they are its first step in the realm of evaluation.

The capacity to experience pleasure or pain is innate in a man’s body; it is part of his nature, part of the kind of entity he is. He has no choice about it, and he has no choice about the standard that determines what will make him experience the physical sensation of pleasure or of pain. What is that standard? His life.

The pleasure-pain mechanism in the body of man—and in the bodies of all the living organisms that possess the faculty of consciousness—serves as an automatic guardian of the organism’s life. The physical sensation of pleasure is a signal indicating that the organism is pursuing the right course of action. The physical sensation of pain is a warning signal of danger, indicating that the organism is pursuing the wrong course of action, that something is impairing the proper function of its body, which requires action to correct it. The best illustration of this can be seen in the rare, freak cases of children who are born without the capacity to experience physical pain; such children do not survive for long; they have no means of discovering what can injure them, no warning signals, and thus a minor cut can develop into a deadly infection, or a major illness can remain undetected until it is too late to fight it.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 8; pb 17.]

The form in which man experiences the reality of his values is pleasure.... A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man’s emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel —unti) the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion.

[“Our Cultural Value-Deprivation,” TO, April 1966, 3.]

See also EMOTIONS; HAPPINESS; HEDONISM; LIFE; MILL, JOHN STUART; STANDARD of VALUE; SENSATIONS; SUBCONSCIOUS; SUFFFRING; UTILITARIANISM; VALUES; WHIMS/WHIM-WORSHIP.

Plot. A plot is a purposeful progression of logically connected events leading to the resolution of a climax.

The word “purposeful” in this definition has two applications: it applies to the author and to the characters of a novel. It demands that the author devise a logical structure of events, a sequence in which every major event is connected with, determined by and proceeds from the preceding events of the story—a sequence in which nothing is irrelevant, arbitrary or accidental, so that the logic of the events leads inevitably to a final resolution.

Such a sequence cannot be constructed unless the main characters of the novel are engaged in the pursuit of some purpose—unless they are motivated by some goals that direct their actions. In real life, only a process of final causation—i.e.. the process of choosing a goal, then taking the steps to achieve it—can give logical continuity, coherence and meaning to a man’s actions. Only men striving to achieve a purpose can move through a meaningful series of events.

Contrary to the prevalent literary doctrines of today, it is realism that demands a plot structure in a novel. All human actions are goal-directed, consciously or subconsciously; purposelessness is contrary to man’s nature: it is a state of neurosis. Therefore, if one is to present man as he is—as he is metaphysically, by his nature, in reality—one has to present him in goal-directed action.

[“Basic Principles of Literature,” RM, 59; pb 82.]

To present a story in terms of action means: to present it in terms of events. A story in which nothing happens is not a story. A story whose events are haphazard and accidental is either an inept conglomeration or, at best, a chronicle, a memoir, a reportorial recording, not a novel.

A chronicle, real or invented, may possess certain values; but these values are primarily informative—historical or sociological or psychological—not primarily esthetic or literary; they are only partly literary.

Since art is a selective re-creation and since events are the building blocks of a novel, a writer who fails to exercise selectivity in regard to events defaults on the most important aspect of his art.

[Ibid.]

Since a plot is the dramatization of goal-directed action, it has to be based on conflict; it may be one character’s inner conflict or a conflict of goals and values between two or more characters. Since goals are not achieved automatically, the dramatization of a purposeful pursuit has to include obstacles; it has to involve a clash, a struggle—an action struggle, but not a purely physical one. Since art is a concretization of values, there are not many errors as bad esthetically—or as dull—as fist fights, chases, escapes and other forms of physical action, divorced from any psychological conflict or intellectual value-meaning. Physical action, as such, is not a plot nor a substitute for a plot—as many bad writers attempt to make it, particularly in today’s television dramas.

This is the other side of the mind-body dichotomy that plagues literature. Ideas or psychological states divorced from action do not constitute a story—and neither does physical action divorced from ideas and values.

[Ibid., 65; pb 86.]

To isolate and bring into clear focus, into a single issue or a single scene, the essence of a conflict which, in “real life,” might be atomized and scattered over a lifetime in the form of meaningless clashes, to condense a long, steady drizzle of buckshot into the explosion of a blockbuster—that is the highest, hardest and most demanding function of art.

[Ibid., 61; pb 84.]

The plot of a novel serves the same function as the steel skeleton of a skyscraper: it determines the use, placement and distribution of all the other elements. Matters such as number of characters, background, descriptions, conversations, introspective passages, etc. have to be determined by what the plot can carry, i.e., have to be integrated with the events and contribute to the progression of the story. Just as one cannot pile extraneous weight or ornamentation on a building without regard for the strength of its skeleton, so one cannot burden a novel with irrelevancies without regard for its plot. The penalty, in both cases, is the same: the collapse of the structure.

If the characters of a novel engage in lengthy abstract discussions of their ideas, but their ideas do not affect their actions or the events of the story, it is a bad novel....

In judging a novel, one must take the events as expressing its meaning, because it is the events that present what the story is about. No amount of esoteric discussions on transcendental topics, attached to a novel in which nothing happens except “boy meets girl,” will transform it into anything other than “boy meets girl.”

This leads to a cardinal principle of good fiction: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated—as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.

[Ibid., 62; pb 84.]

See also ART; LITERATURE; MOTIVATION; NATURALISM; NOVEL; PLOT-THEME; ROMANTICISM; THEME (LITERARY); THRILLERS.

Plot-Theme. The link between the theme and the events of a novel is an element which I call the plot-theme. It is the first step of the translation of an abstract theme into a story, without which the construction of a plot would be impossible. A “plot-theme” is the central conflict or “situation” of a story—a conflict in terms of action, corresponding to the theme and complex enough to create a purposeful progression of events.

The theme of a novel is the core of its abstract meaning—the plot-theme is the core of its events.

For example, the theme of Atlas Shrugged is: “The role of the mind in man’s existence.” The plot-theme is: “The men of the mind going on strike against an altruist-collectivist society.”

The theme of Les Miserable, is: “The injustice of’ society toward its lower classes.” The plot-theme is: “The life-long flight of an ex-convict from the pursuit of a ruthless representative of the law.”

The theme of Gone With the Wind is: “The impact of the Civil War on Southern society.” The plot-theme is: “The romantic conflict of a woman who loves a man representing the old order, and is loved by another man, representing the new.”

[“Basic Principles of Literature,” RM, 63; pb 85.]

See also PLOT; THEME (LITERARY).

Political Power. See Economic Power vs. Political Power.

Politics. The answers given by ethics determine how man should treat other men, and this determines the fourth branch of philosophy: politics, which defines the principles of a proper social system. As an example of philosophy’s function, political philosophy will not tell you how much rationed gas you should be given and on which day of the week—it will tell you whether the government has the right to impose any rationing on anything.

[“Philosophy: Who Needs It,” PWNI, 4; pb 4.]

The basic and crucial political issue of our age is: capitalism versus socialism, or freedom versus statism. For decades, this issue has been silenced, suppressed, evaded, and hidden under the foggy, undefined rubber-terms of “conservatism” and “liberalism” which had lost their original meaning and could be stretched to mean all things to all men.

[“ ‘Extremism,’ or The Art of Smearing,” CUI, 178.]

It is political philosophy that sets the goals and determines the course of a country’s practical politics. But political philosophy means: abstract theory to identify, explain and evaluate the trend of events, to discover their causes, project their consequences, define the problems and offer the solutions.

[“The Chickens’ Homecoming,” NL, 109.]

Politics is based on three other philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology and ethics—on a theory of man’s nature and of man’s relationship to existence. It is only on such a base that one can formulate a consistent political theory and achieve it in practice. When, however, men attempt to rush into politics without such a base, the result is that embarrassing conglomeration of impotence, futility, inconsistency and superficiality which is loosely designated today as “conservatism.” Objectivists are not “conservatives.” We are radicals for capitalism; we are fighting for that philosophical base which capitalism did not have and without which it was doomed to perish.

[“Choose Your Issues,” TON, Jan. 1962, 1.]

The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is: no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man—or group or society or government—has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 31; pb 32.]

See: Conceptual Index: Politics.

Pollution. The word “pollution” implies health hazards, such as smog or dirty waters.

[“The Left: Old and New,” NL, 87.]

As far as the issue of actual pollution is concerned, it is primarily a scientific, not a political, problem. In regard to the political principle involved: if a man creates a physical danger or harm to others, which extends beyond the line of his own property, such as unsanitary conditions or even loud noise, and if this is proved, the law can and does hold him responsible. If the condition is collective, such as in an overcrowded city, appropriate and objective laws can be defined, protecting the rights of all those involved—as was done in the case of oil rights, air-space rights, etc. But such laws cannot demand the impossible, must not be aimed at a single scapegoat, i.e., the industrialists, and must take into consideration the whole context of the problem, i.e., the absolute necessity of the continued existence of industry—if the preservation of human life is the standard.

It has been reported in the press many times that the issue of pollution is to be the next big crusade of the New Left activists, after the war in Vietnam peters out. And just as peace was not their goal or motive in that crusade, so clean air is not their goal or motive in this one.

[Ibid., 89.]

See also ECOLOGY/ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT; ECONOMIC GROWTH; LAW, OBJECTIVE AND NON-OBJECTIVE; NEW LEFT; TECHNOLOGY.

Potylogism. Polylogism is the doctrine that there is not one correct logic, one correct method of reasoning necessarily binding on all men, but that there are many logics, each valid for some men and invalid for the others. The polylogist divides men into groups, and holds that each group has by nature (or creates for itself by choice) its own distinctive method of inference based on its own distinctive logical laws, so that the inferences that are entirely logical for one group are entirely illogical for the others....

On the polylogist view, there is no common or universal logic to serve as the objective standard and arbiter when men disagree. There is no way for members of opposing groups, with opposing views, to resolve their disputes; it is useless to appeal to facts or to evidence for this purpose, since the minds which engage in the process of reasoning obey different rules of thinking.

In the Nazi version of polylogism, ... there is Aryan logic, British logic, Jewish logic, etc., and these give rise respectively to Aryan truth, British truth, Jewish truth, etc.... The movement that first launched the doctrine of polylogism in a culturally influential form [is] Marxism. Aware of the fact that communism cannot be defended by reason, the Marxists proceeded to turn the fallacy of ad hominem into a formal philosophic doctrine, claiming that logic varies with men’s economic class, and that objections to communist doctrine may be dismissed as expressions of “bourgeois logic.” Thus, vilification of an opponent replaces analysis of his argument.... Kant [is] the real father of polylogism, the first among the major philosophers officially to sever logic from reality. ... In terms of fundamentals, Nazi polylogism, like Nazi subjectivism, is simply a pluralizing and racializing of the Kantian view.

Actually, polylogism is not a theory of logic—it is a denial of logic. The polylogist invests “logic” with the character of a mystic revelation, and turns logic into its antithesis: instead of being the means of validating objectively men’s claims to knowledge, logic becomes a subjective device to be used to “justify” anything anyone wishes.

[Leonard Peikoff, “Nazi Politics,” TO, Feb. 1971, 12.]

See also COMMUNISM; FASCISM/NAZISM; KANT, IMMANUEL; LOGIC; OBJECTIVITY; RACISM.

Popular Literature. Popular literature is fiction that does not deal with abstract problems; it takes moral principles as the given, accepting certain generalized, common-sense ideas and values as its base. (Common-sense values and conventional values are not the same thing; the first can be justified rationally, the second cannot. Even though the second may include some of the first, they are justified, not on the ground of reason, but on the ground of social conformity.)

Popular fiction does not raise or answer abstract t questions; it assumes that man knows what he needs to know in order to live, and it proceeds to show his adventures in living (which is one of the reasons for its popularity among all types of readers, including the problem-laden intellectuals). The distinctive characteristic of popular fiction is the absence of an explicitly ideational element, of the intent to convey intellectual information (or misinformation).

[“What Is Romanticism?” RM, 95; pb 110.]

See also LITERATURE; ROMANTICISM; THRILLERS.

Possible. “X is possible” means: in the present context of knowledge, there is some, but not much, evidence in favor of X and nothing known that contradicts X.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 6.]

When you say “maybe,” you are saying there is at least some evidence, some reason to suspect X. This is a claim that must be justified. There are many fantasies that are outrightly impossible, because they contradict already known facts. And there are other fantasies that are mere arbitrary inventions; even if you cannot specify facts which contradict these inventions, you have absolutely no basis to hypothesize them.

[Ibid.]

It is possible, the skeptic argument declares, for man to be in error; therefore, it is possible that every individual is in error on every question. This argument is a non sequitur; it is an equivocation on the term “possible.”

What is possible to a species under some circumstances, is not necessarily possible to every individual member of that species under every set of circumstances. Thus, it is possible for a human being to run the mile in less than four minutes; and it is possible for a human being to be pregnant. I cannot, however, go over to a crippled gentleman in his wheelchair and say: “Perhaps you’ll give birth to a son next week, after you’ve run the mile to the hospital in 3.9 minutes—after all, you’re human, and it is possible for human beings to do these things.”

The same principle applies to the possibility of error.

[Leonard Peikoff, “ ‘Maybe You’re Wrong,’ ” TOF, April 1981, 10.]

See also AGNOSTICISM; ARBITRARY; CERTAINTY; CHANCE; CONTEXT; KNOWLEDGE; SKEPTICISM.

Poverty. If concern for human poverty and suffering were one’s primary motive, one would seek to discover their cause. One would not fail to ask: Why did some nations develop, while others did not? Why have some nations achieved material abundance, while others have remained stagnant in subhuman misery? History and, specifically, the unprecedented prosperity-explosion of the nineteenth century, would give an immediate answer: capitalism is the only system that enables men to produce abundance—and the key to capitalism is individual freedom.

[“Requiem for Man,” CUI, 308.]

Poverty is not a mortgage on the labor of others—misfortune is not a mortgage on achievement—failure is not a mortgage on success—sutfering is not a claim check, and its relief is not the goal of existence—man is not a sacrificial animal on anyone’s altar nor for anyone’s cause —life is not one huge hospital.

[“Apollo 11,” TO, Sept. 1969, 13.]

See also ALTRUISM; CAPITALISM; CHARITY; FREEDOM; NINETEENTH CENTURY; SACRIFICE; SELFISHNESS.

Pragmatism. [The Pragmatists] declared that philosophy must be practical and that practicality consists of dispensing with all absolute principles and standards—that there is no such thing as objective reality or permanent truth—that truth is that which works, and its validity can be judged only by its consequences -that no facts can be known with certainty in advance, and anything may be tried by rule-of-thumb—that reality is not firm, but fluid and “indeterminate,” that there is no such thing as a distinction between an external world and a consciousness (between the perceived and the perceiver), there is only an undifferentiated package-deal labeled “experience,” and whatever one wishes to be true, is true. whatever one wishes to exist, does exist, provided it works or makes one feel better.

A later school of more Kantian Pragmatists amended this philosophy as follows. If there is no such thing as an objective reality, men’s metaphysical choice is whether the selfish, dictatorial whims of an individual or the democratic whims of a collective are to shape that plastic goo which the ignorant call “reality,” therefore this school decided that objectivity consists of collective subjectivism—that knowledge is to be gained by means of public polls among special elites of “competent investigators” who can “predict and control” reatity—that whatever people wish to he true, is true, whatever people wish to exist, does exist, and anyone who holds any firm convictions of his own is an arbitrary, mystic dogmatist, since reality is indeterminate and people determine its actual nature.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 35; pb 34.]

In the whirling Heraclitean flux which is the pragmatist’s universe, there are no absolutes. There are no facts, no fixed laws of logic, no certainty, no objectivity.

There are no facts, only provisional “hypotheses” which for the moment facilitate human action. There are no fixed laws of logic, only mutable “conventions,” without any basis in reality. (Aristotle’s logic, Dewey remarks, worked so well for earlier cultures that it is now overdue for a replacement.) There is no certainty—the very quest for it, says Dewey, is a fundamental aberration, a “perversion.” There is no objectivity—the object is created by the thought and action of the subject.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 130; pb 126.]

Epistemologically, their dogmatic agnosticism holds, as an absolute, that a principle is false because it is a principle—that conceptual integration (i.e., thinking) is impractical or “simplistic”—that an idea which is clear and simple is necessarily “extreme and unworkable.” Along with Kant, their philosophic forefather, the pragmatists claim, in effect: “If you perceive it, it cannot be real,” and: “If you conceive of it, it cannot be true.”

What, then, is left to man? The sensation, the wish, the whim, the range and the concrete of the moment. Since no solution to any problem is possible, anyone’s suggestion, guess or edict is as valid as anyone else’s —provided it is narrow enough.

To give you an example: if a building were threatened with collapse and you declared that the crumbling foundation has to be rebuilt, a pragmatist would answer that your solution is too abstract, extreme, unprovable, and that immediate priority must be given to the need of putting ornaments on the balcony railings, because it would make the tenants feel better.

There was a time when a man would not utter arguments of this sort, for fear of being rightly considered a fool. Today, Pragmatism has not merely given him permission to do it and liberated him from the necessity of thought, but has elevated his mental default into an intellectual virtue, has given him the right to dismiss thinkers (or construction engineers) as naive, and has endowed him with that typically modern quality: the arrogance of the concrete-bound, who takes pride in not seeing the forest fire, or the forest, or the trees, while he is studying one inch of bark on a rotted tree stump.

[“How to Read (and Not to Write),” ARI., I, 26, 5.]

The two points central to the pragmatist ethics are: a formal rejection of all fixed standards—and an unquestioning absorption of the prevailing standards. The same two points constitute the pragmatist approach to politics, which, developed most influentially by Dewey, became the philosophy of the Progressive movement in this country (and of most of its liberal descendants down to the present day).

[Leonard Peikoff, “Pragmatism Versus America,” ARL, III, 17, I.]

By itself, as a distinctive theory, the pragmatist ethics is contentless. It urges men to pursue “practicality,” but refrains from specifying any “rigid” set of values that could serve to define the concept. As a result, pragmatists—despite their repudiation of all systems of morality—are compelled, if they are to implement their ethical approach at all, to rely on value codes formulated by other, non-pragmatist moralists. As a rule the pragmatist appropriates these codes without acknowledging them; he accepts them by a process of osmosis, eclectically absorbing the cultural deposits left by the moral theories of his predecessors—and protesting all the while the futility of these theories.

The dominant, virtually the only, moral code advocated by modern intellectuals in Europe and in America is some variant of altruism. This, accordingly, is what most American pragmatists routinely preach....

In politics, also, pragmatism presents itself as opposed to “rigidity,” to “dogma,” to “extremes” of any kind (whether capitalist or socialist); it avows that it is relativist, “moderate,” “experimental.” As in ethics, however, so here: the pragmatist is compelled to employ some kind of standard to evaluate the results of his social experiments, a standard which, given his own self-imposed default, he necessarily absorbs from other, non-pragmatist trend-setters.... When Dewey wrote, the political principle imported from Germany and proliferating in all directions, was collectivism.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 131; pb 128.]

Pragmatism is the only twentieth-century philosophy to gain broad, national acceptance in the United States.

[Ibid., 138; pb 134.]

The American people were led to embrace the pragmatist philosophy not because of its actual, theoretical content (of which they were and remain largely ignorant), but because of the method by which that content was presented to them. In its terminology and promises, pragmatism is a philosophy calculated to appeal specifically to an American audience....

The pragmatists present themselves as the exponents of a distinctively “American” approach, which consists in enshrining the basic premises of [German philosophy] while rejecting every fundamental idea, from metaphysics to politics, on which this country was founded. Most important of all, the Americans wanted ideas to be good for something on earth, to have tangible, practical significance; and, insistently, the pragmatists stress “practicality,” which, according to their teachings, consists in action divorced from thought and reality.

The pragmatists stress the “cash value” of ideas. But the Americans did not know the “cash value” of the pragmatist ideas they were buying. They did not know that pragmatism could not deliver on its promise of this-worldly success because, at root, it is a philosophy which does not believe in this, or any, world.

When the Americans flocked to pragmatism, they believed that they were joining a battle to advance their essential view of reality and of life. They did not know that they were being marched in the opposite direction, that the battle had been calculated for a diametrically opposite purpose, or that the enemy they were being pushed to destroy was: themselves.

[Ibid., 136; pb 132.]

See also ABSOLUTES; ALTRUISM; AMERICA; ANTI-CONCEPTUAL MENTALITY; CERTAINTY; COMPROMISE; EDUCATION; KANT, IMMANUEL; MORAL-PRACTICAL DICHOTOMY; MORALITY: OBJECTIVITY; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; PRINCIPLES; THEORY-PRACTICE DICHOTOMY; TRUTH; WHIMS/ WHIM-WORSHIP.

Prestige. The desire for the unearned has two aspects: the unearned in matter and the unearned in spirit. (By “spirit” I mean: man’s consciousness.) These two aspects are necessarily interrelated, but a man’s desire may be focused predominantly on one or the other. The desire for the unearned in spirit is the more destructive of the two and the more corrupt. It is a desire for unearned greatness; it is expressed (but not defined) by the foggy murk of the term “prestige.” ...

Unearned greatness is so unreal, so neurotic a concept that the wretch who seeks it cannot identify it even to himself: to identify it, is to make it impossible. He needs the irrational, undefinable slogans of altruism and collectivism to give a semiplausible form to his nameless urge and anchor it to reality—to support his own self-deception more than to deceive his victims.

[“The Monument Builders,” VOS, 115; pb 88.]

See also ALTRUISM; COLLECTIVISM; SECOND-HANDERS.

Pride. Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned—that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character—that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind—that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining—that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made sou!—[hat to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice—that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itsetf—and that the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul’s shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others.

[GS, FNI. 160: pb 130.]

The virtue of Pride can best be described by the term: “moral ambitiousness.” It means that one must earn the right to hold oneself as one’s own highest value by achieving one’s own moral perfection—which one achieves by never accepting any code of irrational virtues impossible to practice and by never failing to practice the virtues one knows to he rationa!—by never accepting an unearned guilt and never earning any, or, if one has earned it, never leaving it uncorrected—by never resigning oneself passively to any flaws in one’s character—by never placing any concern, wish, fear or mood of the moment above the reality of one’s own self-esteem. And, above all, it means one’s rejection of the role of a sacrificial animal, the rejection of any doctrine that preaches self-immolation as a moral virtue or duty.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 22; pb 27.]

See also AMBITION; ARISTOTLE; CHARACTER; EMOTIONS; FREE WILL; HONOR; RATIONALITY; SACRIFICE; SELF-ESTEEM; SELFISHNESS; VIRTUE.

Primacy of Existence vs. Primacy of Consciousness. The basic metaphysical issue that lies at the root of any system of philosophy [is] the primary of existence or the primacy of consciousness.

The primacy of existence (of reality) is the axiom that existence exists, i.e., that the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness), that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity. The epistemological corollary is the axiom that consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists—and that man gains knowledge of reality by looking outward. The rejection of these axioms represents a reversal: the primacy of consciousness—the notion that the universe has no independent existence, that it is the product of a consciousness (either human or divine or both). The epistemological corollary is the notion that man gains knowledge of reality by looking inward (either at his own consciousness or at the revelations it receives from another, superior consciousness).

The source of this reversal is the inability or unwillingness fully to grasp the difference between one’s inner state and the outer world, i.e., between the perceiver and the perceived (thus blending consciousness and existence into one indeterminate package-deal). This crucial distinction is not given to man automatically; it has to be learned. It is implicit in any awareness, but it has to be grasped conceptually and held as an absolute.

[“The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 29; pb 24.]

Observe that the philosophical system based on the axiom of the primacy of existence (i.e., on recognizing the absolutism of reality) led to the recognition of man’s identity and rights. But the philosophical systems based on the primacy of consciousness (i.e., on the seemingly megalomaniacal notion that nature is whatever man wants it to be) lead to the view that man possesses no identity, that he is infinitely flexible, malleable, usable and disposable. Ask yourself why.

[Ibid., 34; pb 28.]

They want to cheat the axiom of existence and consciousness, they want their consciousness to be an instrument not of perceiving but of creating existence, and existence to be not the object but the subject of their consciousness—they want to be that God they created in their image and likeness, who creates a universe out of a void by means of an arbitrary whim. But reality is not to be cheated. What they achieve is the opposite of their desire. They want an omnipotent power over existence; instead, they lose the power of their consciousness. By refusing to know, they condemn themselves to the horror of a perpetual unknown.

[GS, FNI, 187; pb 151.]

It is important to observe the interrelation of these three axioms [existence, consciousness, and identity]. Existence is the first axiom. The universe exists independent of consciousness. Man is able to adapt his background to his own requirements, but “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” (Francis Bacon). There is no mental process that can change the laws of nature or erase facts. The function of consciousness is not to create reality, but to apprehend it. “Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.”

The philosophic source of this viewpoint and its major advocate in the history of philosophy is Aristotle. Its opponents are all the other major traditions, including Platonism, Christianity, and German idealism. Directly or indirectly, these traditions uphold the notion that consciousness is the creator of reality. The essence of this notion is the denial of the axiom that existence exists.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 329; pb 303.]

See also ABSOLUTES; AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS; AXIOMS; CONSCIOUSNESS; CREATION; EVASION; EXISTENCE; GOD; IDENTITY; IMAGINATION; KANT, IMMANUEL; METAPHYSICS; MYSTICISM; NATURE; OBJECTIVITY, PHILOSOPHY; PLATONIC REALISM; PRAGMATISM; PRIOR CERTAINTY of CONSCIOUSNESS; SUBJECTIVISM; UNIVERSE.

Principles. A principle is “a fundamental, primary, or general truth, on which other truths depend.” Thus a principle is an abstraction which subsumes a great number of concretes. It is only by means of principles that one can set one’s long-range goals and evaluate the concrete alternatives of any given moment. It is only principles that enable a man to plan his future and to achieve it.

The present state of our culture may be gauged by the extent to which principles have vanished from public discussion, reducing our cultural atmosphere to the sordid, petty senselessness of a bickering family that haggles over trivial concretes, while betraying all its major values, selling out its future for some spurious advantage of the moment.

To make it more grotesque, that haggling is accompanied by an aura of hysterical self-righteousness, in the form of belligerent assertions that one must compromise with anybody on anything (except on the tenet that one must compromise) and by panicky appeals to “practicality.”

But there is nothing as impractical as a so-called “practical” man. His view of practicality can best be illustrated as follows: if you want to drive from New York to Los Angeles, it is “impractical” and “idealistic” to consult a map and to select the best way to get there; you will get there much faster if you just start out driving at random, turning (or cutting) any corner, taking any road in any direction, following nothing but the mood and the weather of the moment.

The fact is, of course, that by this method you will never get there at all. But while most people do recognize this fact in regard to the course of a journey, they are not so perceptive in regard to the course of their lite and of their country.

[“The Anatomy of Compromise,” CUI, 144.]

Concrete problems cannot even be grasped, let alone judged or solved, without reference to abstract principles.

[“Credibility and Polarization,” ARL, I, 1, 3.]

You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational convictions—or a grab-bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often than not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew....

You might say, as many people do, that it is not easy always to act on abstract principles. No, it is not easy. But how much harder is it, to have to act on them without knowing what they are?

[“Philosophy: Who Needs It,” PWNI, 6; pb 5.]

Consider a few rules about the working of principles in practice and about the relationship of principles to goals....

1. In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins.

2. In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins.

3. When opposite basic principles are clearly and openly defined, it works to the advantage of the rational side; when they are not clearly defined, but are hidden or evaded, it works to the advantage of the irrational side.

[“The Anatomy of Compromise,” CUI, 145.]

When men abandon principles (i.e., their conceptual faculty), two of the major results are: individually, the inability to project the future; socially, the impossibility of communication.

[“Credibility and Polarization,” ARL, I, 1, 3.]

Only fundamental principles, rationally validated, dearly understood and voluntarily accepted, can create a desirable kind of unity among men.

[Ibid., 4.]

See also ANTI-CONCEPTUAL MENTALITY; COMPROMISE; CONCEPTS; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); PHILOSOPHY; PRAGMATISM; REASON; TRUTH.

Prior Certainty of Consciousness. Descartes began with the basic epistemological premise of every Witch Doctor (a premise he shared explicitly with Augustine): “the prior certainty of consciousness,” the belief that the existence of an external world is not self-evident, but must be proved by deduction from the contents of one’s consciousness —which means: the concept of consciousness as some faculty other than the faculty of perception—which means: the indiscriminate contents of one’s consciousness as the irreducible primary and absolute, to which reality has to conform. What followed was the grotesquely tragic spectacle of philosophers struggling to prove the existence of an external world by staring, with the Witch Doctor’s blind, inward stare, at the random twists of their conceptions—then of perceptions—then of sensations.

When the medieval Witch Doctor had merely ordered men to doubt the validity of their mind, the philosophers’ rebellion against him consisted of proclaiming that they doubted whether man was conscious at all and whether anything existed for him to be conscious of.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 28; pb 28.]

See also AXIOMS; CONSCIOUSNESS; EXISTENCE; IRREDUCIBLE PRIMARIES; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; SENSATIONS.

Production. Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 17.]

Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions —and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made—before it can be looted or mooched—made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.

[“The Meaning of Money,” FNI, 105; pb 89.]

Whether it’s a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one’s own eyes—which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification—which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before.

[“The Nature of an Artist,” FNI, 140; pb 115.]

Every type of productive work involves a combination of mental and physical effort: of thought and of physical action to translate that thought into a material form. The proportion of these two elements varies in different types of work. At the lowest end of the scale, the mental effort required to perform unskilled manual labor is minimal. At the other end, what the patent and copyright laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mental effort in the production of material values.

[“Patents and Copyrights,” CUI, 130.]

The root of production is man’s mind; the mind is an attribute of the individual and it does not work under orders, controls and compulsion, as centuries of stagnation have demonstrated. Progress cannot be planned by government, and it cannot be restricted or retarded; it can only be stopped, as every statist government has demonstrated.

[“The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” NL, 140.]

See also CONSUMPTION; CREATION; CREATORS; ECONOMIC GOOD; ECONOMIC GROWTH; MONEY; PHYSICAL FORCE; PRODUCTIVENESS; PYRAMID OF ABILITY; REASON; STATISM.

Productiveness. The virtue of Productiveness is the recognition of the fact that productive work is the process by which man’s mind sustains his life, the process that sets man free of the necessity to adjust himself to his background, as all animals do, and gives him the power to adjust his background to himself. Productive work is the road of man’s unlimited achievement and calls upon the highest attributes of his character: his creative ability, his ambitiousness, his self-assertive-ness, his refusal to bear uncontested disasters, his dedication to the goal of reshaping the earth in the image of his values. “Productive work” does not mean the unfocused performance of the motions of some job. It means the consciously chosen pursuit of a productive career, in any line of rational endeavor, great or modest, on any level of ability. It is not the degree of a man’s ability nor the scale of his work that is ethically relevant here, but the fullest and most purposeful use of his mind.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 21; pb 26.]

Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to tive—that productive work is the process by which man’s consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one’s purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one’s values—that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others—that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human—that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind’s full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay—that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live—that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road—that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up—that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.

[GS, FNI, 159; pb 130.]

Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man’s life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work—pride is the result.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 20; pb 25.]

See also AMBITION; CAREER; COMPETITION; CREATORS; LIFE; MORALITY; PRODUCTION; PURPOSE; PRIDE; RATIONALITY; REASON; VIRTUE.

Proof. “Proof,” in the full sense, is the process of deriving a conclusion step by step from the evidence of the senses, each step being taken in accordance with the laws of logic.

[Leonard Peikoff, “Introduction to Logic” lecture series (1974), Lecture 1.]

“You cannot prove that you exist or that you’re conscious,” they chatter, blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge: the existence of something to know, of a consciousness able to know it, and of a knowledge that has learned to distinguish between such concepts as the proved and the unproved.

When a savage who has not learned to speak declares that existence must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of non-existence —when he declares that your consciousness must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of unconsciousness—he is asking you to step into a void outside of existence and consciousness to give him proof of both—he is asking you to become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero.

[GS, FNI, 192; pb 154.]

An axiomatic concept is the identification of a primary fact of reality, which cannot be analyzed, i.e., reduced to other facts or broken into component parts. It is implicit in all facts and in all knowledge. It is the fundamentally given and directly perceived or experienced, which requires no proof or explanation, but on which all proofs and explanations rest.

The first and primary axiomatic concepts are “existence,” “identity” (which is a corollary of “existence”) and “consciousness.” One can study what exists and how consciousness functions; but one cannot analyze (or “prove”) existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to “prove” them is self-contradictory: it is an attempt to “prove” existence by means of non-existence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness.)

[ITOE, 73.]

See also AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS; AXIOMS; COROLLARIES; IRREDUCIBLE PRIMARIES; LOGIC; OBJECTIVITY; PERCEPTION; REASON; SELF-EVIDENT; VALIDATION.

Property Rights. The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.

[“Man’s Rights,” VOS, 125; pb 94.]

Any material element or resource which, in order to become of use or value to men, requires the application of human knowledge and effort, should be private property—by the right of those who apply the knowledge and effort.

[“The Property Status of Airwaves,” CUI, 122.]

Just as man can’t exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reaiity—to think, to work and to keep the results—which means: the right of property. The modern mystics of muscle who offer you the fraudulent alternative of “human rights” versus “property rights,” as if one could exist without the other, are making a last, grotesque attempt to revive the doctrine of soul versus body. Only a ghost can exist without material property; only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort. The doctrine that “human rights are superior to “property rights” simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others; since the competent have nothing to gain from the incompetent, it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle. Whoever regards this as human and right, has no right to the title of “human.”

The source of property rights is the law of causality. All property and all forms of wealth are produced by man’s mind and labor. As you cannot have effects without causes, so you cannot have wealth without its source: without intelligence. You cannot force intelligence to work: those who’re able to think, will not work under compulsion; those who will, won’t produce much more than the price of the whip needed to keep them enslaved. You cannot obtain the products of a mind except on the owner’s terms, by trade and by volitional consent. Any other policy of men toward man’s property is the policy of criminals, no matter what their numbers. Criminals are savages who play it short-range and starve when their prey runs out—just as you’re starving today, you who believed that crime could be “practical” if your government decreed that robbery was legal and resistance to robbery illegal.

[GS, FNI, 230; pb 182.]

Man has to work and produce in order to support his life. He has to support his life by his own effort and by the guidance of his own mind. If he cannot dispose of the product of his effort, he cannot dispose of his effort; if he cannot dispose of his effort, he cannot dispose of his life. Without property rights, no other rights can be practiced.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 18.]

If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.

Any alleged “right” of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.

No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as “the right to enslave.”

A right does not include the material implementation of that right by other men; it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one’s own effort....

The right to property means that a man has the right to take the economic actions necessary to earn property, to use it and to dispose of it; it does not mean that others must provide him with property.

The right of free speech means that a man has the right to express his ideas without danger of suppression, interference or punitive action by the government. It does not mean that others must provide him with a lecture hall, a radio station or a printing press through which to express his ideas.

Any undertaking that involves more than one man, requires the voluntary consent of every participant. Every one of them has the right to make his own decision, but none has the right to force his decision on the others.

There is no such thing as “a right to a job”—there is only the right of free trade, that is: a man’s right to take a job if another man chooses to hire him. There is no “right to a home,” only the right of free trade: the right to build a home or to buy it. There are no “rights to a ‘fair’ wage or a ‘fair’ price” if no one chooses to pay it, to hire a man or to buy his product. There are no “rights of consumers” to milk, shoes, movies or champagne if no producers choose to manufacture such items (there is only the right to manufacture them oneself). There are no “rights” of special groups, there are no “rights of farmers, of workers, of businessmen, of employees, of employers, of the old, of the young, of the unborn.” There are only the Rights of Man—rights possessed by every individual man and by all men as individuals.

Property rights and the right of free trade are man’s only “economic rights” (they are, in fact, political rights)—and there can be no such thing as “an economic bill of rights.” But observe that the advocates of the latter have all but destroyed the former.

[“Man’s Rights,” VOS, 129; pb 96.]

It is only on the basis of property rights that the sphere and application of individual rights can be defined in any given social situation. Without property rights, there is no way to solve or to avoid a hopeless chaos of clashing views, interests, demands, desires, and whims.

[“The Cashing-in: The Student ‘Rebellion,’ ” CUI, 259.]

The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial. It is the institution of private property that protects and implements the right to disagree—and thus keeps the road open to man’s most valuable attribute (valuable personally, socially, and objectively): the creative mind.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 19.]

The institution of private property, in the full, legal meaning of the term, was brought into existence only by capitalism. In the pre-capitalist eras, private property existed de facto, but not de jure, i.e., by custom and sufferance, not by right or by law. In law and in principle, all property belonged to the head of the tribe, the king, and was held only by his permission, which could be revoked at any time, at his pleasure. (The king could and did expropriate the estates of recalcitrant noblemen throughout the course of Europe’s history.)

[Ibid., 13.]

See also CAPITALISM; CAUSALITY; COMMUNISM; CONTRACTS; FASCISM/NAZISM; FREE SPEECH; FREEDOM; HUMAN RIGHTS and PROPERTY RIGHTS; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; PATENTS and COPYRIGHTS; PRODUCTION; SOCIALISM; STATISM.

Propositions. Since concepts, in the field of cognition, perform a function similar to that of numbers in the field of mathematics, the function of a proposition is similar to that of an equation: it applies conceptual abstractions to a specific problem.

A proposition, however, can perform this function only if the concepts of which it is composed have precisely defined meanings. If, in the field of mathematics, numbers had no fixed, firm values, if they were mere approximations determined by the mood of their users—so that “5,” for instance, could mean five in some calculations, but six-and-a-half or four-and-three-quarters in others, according to the users’ “convenience”—there would be no such thing as the science of mathematics.

[ITOE, 100.]

See also CONCEPTS; DEFINITIONS; GRAMMAR; INDUCTION and DEDUCTION; LANGUAGE; MEANING (of CONCEPTS); NUMBERS; THOUGHT/THINKING.

Psycho-Epistemology. Psycho-epistemology is the study of man’s cognitive processes from the aspect of the interaction between the conscious mind and the automatic functions of the subconscious.

[“The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” RM, 20; pb 18.]

“Psycho-epistemology,” a term coined by Ayn Rand, pertains not to the content of a man’s ideas, but to his method of awareness, i.e., the method by which his mind habitually deals with its content.”

[Leonard Peikoff, editor’s footnote to Ayn Rand’s “The Missing Link,” PWNI, 47; pb 39.]

The subconscious is an integrating mechanism. Man’s conscious mind observes and establishes connections among his experiences; the subconscious integrates the connections and makes them become automatic. For example, the skill of walking is acquired, after many faltering attempts, by the automatization of countless connections controlling muscular movements; once he learns to walk, a child needs no conscious awareness of such problems as posture, balance, length of step, etc.—the mere decision to walk brings the integrated total into his control.

A mind’s cognitive development involves a continual process of automatization. For example, you cannot perceive a table as an infant perceives it—as a mysterious object with four legs. You perceive it as a table, i.e., a man-made piece of furniture, serving a certain purpose belonging to a human habitation, etc.; you cannot separate these attributes from your sight of the table, you experience it as a single, indivisible percept—yet all you see is a four-legged object; the rest is an automatized integration of a vast amount of conceptual knowledge which, at one time, you had to learn bit by bit. The same is true of everything you perceive or experience; as an adult, you cannot perceive or experience in a vacuum, you do it in a certain automatized context— and the efficiency of your mental operations depends on the kind of context your subconscious has automatized.

“Learning to speak is a process of automatizing the use (i.e., the meaning and the application) of concepts. And more: all learning involves a process of automatizing, i.e., of first acquiring knowledge by fully conscious, focused attention and observation, then of establishing mental connections which make that knowledge automatic (instantly available as a context), thus freeing man’s mind to pursue further, more complex knowledge.” (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.)

The process of forming, integrating and using concepts is not an automatic, but a volitional process—i.e., a process which uses both new and automatized material, but which is directed volitionally. It is not an innate, but an acquired skill; it has to be learned—it is the most crucially important part of learning—and all of man’s other capacities depend on how well or how badly he learns it.

This skill does not pertain to the particular content of a man’s knowledge at any given age, but to the method by which he acquires and organizes knowledge—the method by which his mind deals with its content. The method programs his subconscious computer, determining how efficiently, lamely or disastrously his cognitive processes will function. The programming of a man’s subconscious consists of the kind of cognitive habits he acquires; these habits constitute his psycho-epistemology.

It is a child’s early experiences, observations and subverbal conclusions that determine this programming. Thereafter, the interaction of content and method establishes a certain reciprocity: the method of acquiring knowledge affects its content, which affects the further development of the method, and so on.

[“The Comprachicos.” NI., 192.]

Most people know nothing about psycho-epistemology. They take their habitual method of thought for granted, leaving it unidentified and unquestioned. Yet this kind of ignorance can be disastrous.... Men can automatize wrong methods of thought without even knowing it. In order to achieve intellectual control, therefore, in order to enjoy the full power over your mind that volition makes possible, you must identify your psycho-epistemological methods, and correct those, if any, which are not consonant with your adult knowledge.

This is a crucial discovery of Miss Rand’s—the discovery of psycho-epistemology, and of its roots, forms, and errors. Without such knowledge, men would be left at the mercy of unidentified mental habits that they hardly even suspected—habits that perhaps derived unknowingly from childhood errors that they long since had consciously renounced. Psycho-epistemology represents a whole science, a new branch of psychology.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 6.]

Men’s epistemology—or, more precisely, their psycho-epistemology, their method of awareness—is the most fundamental standard by which they can be classified. Few men are consistent in that respect: most men keep switching from one level of awareness to another, according to the circumstances or the issues involved, ranging from moments of full rationality to an almost somnambulistic stupor. But the battle of human history is fought and determined by those who are predominantly consistent, those who, for good or evil, are committed to and motivated by their chosen psycho-epistemology and its corollary view of existence.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 18; pb 21.]

While the alleged advocates of reason oppose “system-building” and haggle apologetically over concrete-bound words or mystically floating abstractions, its enemies seem to know that integration is the psycho-epistemological key to reason, that art is man’s psycho-epistemological conditioner, and that if reason is to be destroyed, it is man’s integrating capacity that has to be destroyed.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 77.]

See also ANTI-CONCEPTUAL MENTALITY; AUTOMATIZATION; CONSCIOUSNESS; EPISTEMOLOGY; FREE WILL; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); LEARNING; PSYCHOLOGY; RATIONALITY; STYLE; SUBCONSCIOUS.

“Psychologizing.” Just as reasoning, to an irrational person, becomes rationalizing, and moral judgment becomes moralizing, so psychological theories become psychologizing. The common denominator is the corruption of a cognitive process to serve an ulterior motive.

Psychologizing consists in condemning or excusing specific individuals on the grounds of their psychological problems, real or invented, in the absence of or contrary to factual evidence.

[“The Psychology of ‘Psychologizing,’ ” TO, March 1971, 2.]

While the racket of the philosophizing mystics rested on the claim that man is unable to know the external world, the racket of the psychologizing mystics rests on the claim that man is unable to know his own motivation.

[Ibid., 4.]

Armed with a smattering, not of knowledge, but of undigested slogans, they rush, unsolicited, to diagnose the problems of their friends and acquaintances. Pretentiousness and presumptuousness are the psychologizer’s invariable characteristics: he not merely invades the privacy of his victims’ minds, he claims to understand their minds better than they do, to know more than they do about their own motives. With reckless irresponsibility, which an old-fashioned mystic oracle would hesitate to match, he ascribes to his victims any motivation that suits his purpose, ignoring their denials. Since he is dealing with the great “unknowable” —which used to be life after death or extrasensory perception, but is now man’s subconscious—all rules of evidence, logic and proof are suspended, and anything goes (which is what attracts him to his racket).

[Ibid., 2.]

A man’s moral character must be judged on the basis of his actions, his statements and his conscious convictions—not on the basis of inferences (usually, spurious) about his subconscious.

A man is not to be condemned or excused on the grounds of the state of his subconscious.

[Ibid., 5.]

See also ARGUMENT from INTIMIDATION; CHARACTER; MORAL JUDGMENT; MYSTICISM; PSYCHOLOGY; RATIONALIZATION; SUBCONSCIOUS.

Psychology. The task of evaluating the processes of man’s subconscious is the province of psychology. Psychology does not regard its subject morally, but medically—i.e., from the aspect of health or malfunction (with cognitive competence as the proper standard of health).

[“The Psychology of ‘Psychologizing,’ ” TO, March 1971, 5.]

As a science, psychology is barely making its first steps. It is still in the anteroom of science, in the stage of observing and gathering material from which a future science will come. This stage may be compared to the pre-Socratic period in philosophy; psychology has not yet found a Plato, let alone an Aristotle, to organize its material, systematize its problems and define its fundamental principles.

[Ibid., 2.]

In psychology, one school holds that man, by nature, is a helpless, guilt-ridden, instinct-driven automaton—white another school objects that this is not true, because there is no scientific evidence to prove that man is conscious.

[“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 86; pb 71.]

Psychology departments have a sprinkling of Freudians, but are dominated by Behaviorism, whose leader is B. F. Skinner. (Here the controversy is between the claim that man is moved by innate ideas, and the claim that he has no ideas at all.)

[“Fairness Doctrine for Education,” PWNI, 235; pb 192.]

See Conceptual Index: Psychology.

“Public Interest,” the. Since there is no such entity as “the public,” since the public is merely a number of individuals, any claimed or implied conflict of “the public interest” with private interests means that the interests of some men are to be sacrificed to the interests and wishes of others. Since the concept is so conveniently undefinable, its use rests only on any given gang’s ability to proclaim that “The public, c‘est moi” —and to maintain the claim at the point of a gun.

[“The Monument Builders,” VOS, 116; pb 88.]

So long as a concept such as “the public interest” (or the “social” or “national” or “international” interest) is regarded as a valid principle to guide legislation—lobbies and pressure groups will necessarily continue to exist. Since there is no such entity as “the public,” since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that “the public interest” supersedes private interests and rights, can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.

If so, then all men and all private groups have to fight to the death for the privilege of being regarded as “the public.” The government’s policy has to swing like an erratic pendulum from group to group, hitting some and favoring others, at the whim of any given moment—and so grotesque a profession as lobbying (selling “influence”) becomes a full-time job. If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.

Since there is no rational justification for the sacrifice of some men to others, there is no objective criterion by which such a sacrifice can be guided in practice. All “public interest” legislation (and any distribution of money taken by force from some men for the unearned benefit of others) comes down ultimately to the grant of an undefined, undefinable, non-objective, arbitrary power to some government officials.

The worst aspect of it is not that such a power can be used dishonestly, but that it cannot be used honestly. The wisest man in the world, with the purest integrity, cannot find a criterion for the just, equitable, rational application of an unjust, inequitable, irrational principle.

[“The Pull Peddlers,” CUI, 170.]

There is no such thing as “the public interest” except as the sum of the interests of individual men. And the basic, common interest of all men—all rational men—is freedom. Freedom is the first requirement of “the public interest”—not what men do when they are free, but that they are free. All their achievements rest on that foundation—and cannot exist without it.

The principles of a free, non-coercive social system are the only form of “the public interest.”

[“The Fascist New Frontier,” pamphlet, 13.]

I could say to you that you do not serve the public good—that nobody’s good can be achieved at the price of human sacrifices—that when you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction. I could say to you that you will and can achieve nothing but universal devastation —as any looter must, when he runs out of victims. I could say it, but I won’t. It is not your particular policy that I challenge, but your moral premise. If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and I were asked to immolate myself for the sake of creatures who wanted to survive at the price of my blood, if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own—I would refuse, I would reject it as the most contemptible evil, I would fight it with every power I possess, I would fight the whole of mankind, if one minute were all I could last before I were murdered, I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being’s right to exist. Let there be no misunderstanding about me. If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!

[“The Moral Meaning of Capitalism,” FNI, 116; pb 98.]

See also CAPITALISM; COLLECTIVISM; “COMMON GOOD”; FREEDOM; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; LOBBYING; MIXED ECONOMY; SACRIFICE; SOCIETY; WELFARE STATE.

Public Property. When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind.

[GS, FNI, 208; pb 166.]

Since “public property” is a collectivist fiction, since the public as a whole can neither use nor dispose of its “property,” that “property” will always be taken over by some political “elite,” by a small clique which will then rule the public—a public of literal, dispossessed proletarians.

[“The Property Status of Airwaves,” CUI, 128.]

See also COLLECTIVISM; GOVERNMENT; PROPERTY RIGHTS.

Purchasing Power. Purchasing power is an attribute of producers, not of consumers. Purchasing power is a consequence of production: it is the power of possessing goods which one can trade for other goods. A “purchase” is an exchange of goods (or services) for goods (or services). Any other form of transferring goods from one person to another may belong to many different categories of transactions, but it is not a purchase. It may be a gift, a loan, an inheritance, a handout, a fraud, a theft, a robbery, a burglary, an expropriation. In regard to services, however (omitting temporary or occasional acts of friendship, in which the payment is the friend’s value), there is only one alternative to trading: unpaid services, i.e., slavery.

[“Hunger and Freedom,” ARL, III, 22, 3.]

See also CAPITALISM; CONSUMPTION; CREDIT; ECONOMIC POWER vs. POLITICAL POWER; FREE MARKET; INFLATION; MONEY; PRODUCTION; TRADER PRINCIPLE.

Purpose. The three cardinal values of the Objectivist ethics—the three values which, together, are the means to and the realization of one’s ultimate value, one’s own life—are: Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem, with their three corresponding virtues: Rationality, Productiveness, Pride.

Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man’s life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work—pride is the result.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 19; pb 25.]

A central purpose serves to integrate all the other concerns of a man’s life. It establishes the hierarchy, the relative importance, of his values, it saves him from pointless inner conflicts, it permits him to enjoy life on a wide scale and to carry that enjoyment into any area open to his mind; whereas a man without a purpose is lost in chaos. He does not know what his values are. He does not know how to judge. He cannot tell what is or is not important to him, and, therefore, he drifts helplessly at the mercy of any chance stimulus or any whim of the moment. He can enjoy nothing. He spends his life searching for some value which he will never find....

The man without a purpose is a man who drifts at the mercy of random feelings or unidentified urges and is capable of any evil, because he is totally out of control of his own life. In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose—a productive purpose....

The man who has no purpose, but has to act, acts to destroy others. That is not the same thing as a productive or creative purpose.

[“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 6.]

See also CAREER; PRIDE; PRODUCTIVENESS; RATIONALITY; REASON; STANDARD of VALUE; ULTIMATE VALUE; VALUES.

Pursuit of Happiness, Right to. The Right to the Pursuit of Happiness means man’s right to live for himself, to choose what constitutes his own private, personal, individual happiness and to work for its achievement, so long as he respects the same right in others. It means that man cannot be forced to devote his life to the happiness of another man nor of any number of other men. It means that the collective cannot decide what is to be the purpose of a man’s existence nor prescribe his choice of happiness.

[“Textbook of Americanism,” pamphlet, 5.]

Observe, in this context, the intellectual precision of the Founding Fathers: they spoke of the right to the pursuit of happiness—not of the right to happiness. It means that a man has the right to take the actions he deems necessary to achieve his happiness; it does not mean that others must make him happy.

[“Man’s Rights,” VOS, 129; pb 97.]

See also FOUNDING FATHERS; HAPPINESS; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; SELFISHNESS.

Pyramid of Ability. When you live in a rational society, where men are free to trade, you receive an incalculable bonus: the material value of your work is determined not only by your effort, but by the effort of the best productive minds who exist in the world around you.

When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing.

The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics’ Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.

[GS, FNI, 233; pb 185.]

In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the “competition” between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of “exploitation” for which you have damned the strong.

[Ibid., 234; pb 186.]

See also CAPITALISM; COMPETITION; CREATORS; FREE MARKET; INVESTMENT; MEDIOCRITY; PRODUCTION; PRODUCTIVENESS; TECHNOLOGY.

Q

Quotas. The notion of racial quotas is so obviously an expression of racism that no lengthy discussion is necessary. If a young man is barred from a school or a job because the quota for his particular race has been filled, he is barred by reason of his race. Telling him that those admitted are his “representatives,” is adding insult to injury. To demand such quotas in the name of fighting racial discrimination, is an obscene mockery.

[“Representation Without Authorization,” ARI,. I. 21, 2.]

The quota doctrine assumes that all members of a given physiological group are identical and interchangeable—not merely in the eyes of other people, but in their own eyes and minds. Assuming a total merging of the self with the group, the doctrine holds that it makes no difference to a man whether he or his “representative” is admitted to a school, gets a job. or makes a decision.

[Ibid., 3.]

The inversion of all standards—the propagation of racism as antiracist, of injustice as just, of immorality as moral, and the reasoning behind it, which is worse than the offenses—is flagrantly evident in the policy of preferential treatment for minorities (i.e., racial quotas) in employment and education.

[“Moral Inflation,” ARL, III, 14, 1.]

No man, neither Negro nor white, has any claim to the property of another man. A man’s rights are not violated by a private individual’s refusal to deal with him. Racism is an evil, irrational and morally contemptible doctrine—but doctrines cannot be forbidden or prescribed by law. Just as we have to protect a communist’s freedom of speech, even though his doctrines are evil, so we have to protect a racist’s right to the use and disposal of his own property. Private racism is not a legal, but a moral issue—and can be fought only by private means, such as economic boycott or social ostracism.

[“Racism,” VOS, 184; pb 134.]

See also “ETHNICITY”; PROPERTY RIGHTS: RACISM: TRIBALISM.

R

Racism. Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic tineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.

Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.

[“Racism.” VOS, 172; pb 126.]

A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.

[Ibid., 174; pb 127.]

Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge—for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment—and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem).

[Ibid.]

Today, racism is regarded as a crime if practiced by a majority—but as an inalienable right if practiced by a minority. The notion that one’s culture is superior to all others solely because it represents the traditions of one’s ancestors, is regarded as chauvinism if claimed by a majority— but as “ethnic” pride if claimed by a minority. Resistance to change and progress is regarded as reactionary if demonstrated by a majority—but retrogression to a Balkan village, to an Indian tepee or to the jungle is hailed if demonstrated by a minority.

[“The Age of Envy,” NL, 167.]

See also ANTI-CONCEPTUAL MENTALITY; COLLECTIVISM; DETERMINISM; “ETHNICITY”; FASCISM/NAZISM; FREE WILL; INDIVIDUALISM; POLYLOGISM; REASON; SELF-ESTEEM; SOVIET RUSSIA; TRIBALISM.

1“Rand’s Razor.” The requirements of cognition determine the objective criteria of conceptualization. They can be summed up best in the form of an epistemological “razor”: concepts are not to be multiplied beyond necessity—the corollary of which is: nor are they to be integrated in disregard of necessity.

[ITOE, 96.]

The requirements of cognition forbid the arbitrary grouping of existents, both in regard to isolation and to integration. They forbid the random coining of special concepts to designate any and every group of existents with any possible combination of characteristics. For example, there is no concept to designate “Beautiful blondes with blue eyes, 5’5” tall and 24 years old.” Such entities or groupings are identified descriptively. If such a special concept existed, it would lead to senseless duplication of cognitive effort (and to conceptual chaos): everything of significance discovered about that group would apply to all other young women as well. There would be no cognitive justification for such a concept—unless some essential characteristic were discovered, distinguishing such blondes from all other women and requiring special study, in which case a special concept would become necessary....

In the process of determining conceptual classification, neither the essential similarities nor the essential differences among existents may be ignored, evaded or omitted once they have been observed. Just as the requirements of cognition forbid the arbitrary subdivision of concepts, so they forbid the arbitrary integration of concepts into a wider concept by means of obliterating their essential differences—which is an error (or falsification) proceeding from definitions by non-essentials. (This is the method involved in the obliteration of valid concepts by means of “anti-concepts.”)

[ITOE, 94.]

See also “ANTI-CONCEPTS”; CONCEPT-FORMATION; CONCEPTS; DEFINITIONS; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); INVALID CONCEPTS; OBJECTIVITY; “PACKAGE-DEALlNG,” FALLACY of; UNIT-ECONOMY.

Rationality. Rationality is man’s basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues. Man’s basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. Irrationality is the rejection of man’s means of survival and, therefore, a commitment to a course of blind destruction; that which is anti-mind, is anti-life.

The virtue of Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action. It means one’s total commitment to a state of full, conscious awareness, to the maintenance of a full mental focus in all issues, in all choices, in all of one’s waking hours. It means a commitment to the fullest perception of reality within one’s power and to the constant, active expansion of one’s perception, i.e., of one’s knowledge. It means a commitment to the reality of one’s own existence, i.e., to the principle that all of one’s goals, values and actions take place in reality and, therefore, that one must never place any value or consideration whatsoever above one’s perception of reality. It means a commitment to the principle that all of one’s convictions, values, goals, desires and actions must be based on, derived from, chosen and validated by a process of thought—as precise and scrupulous a process of thought, directed by as ruthlessly strict an application of logic, as one’s fullest capacity permits. It means one’s acceptance of the responsibility of forming one’s own judgments and of living by the work of one’s own mind (which is the virtue of Independence). It means that one must never sacrifice one’s convictions to the opinions or wishes of others (which is the virtue of Integrity)—that one must never attempt to fake reality in any manner (which is the virtue of Honesty)—that one must never seek or grant the unearned and undeserved, neither in matter nor in spirit (which is the virtue of Justice). It means that one must never desire effects without causes, and that one must never enact a cause without assuming full responsibility for its effects—that one must never act like a zombie, i.e., without knowing one’s own purposes and motives—that one must never make any decisions, form any convictions or seek any values out of context, i.e., apart from or against the total, integrated sum of one’s knowledge—and, above all, that one must never seek to get away with contradictions. It means the rejection of any form of mysticism, i.e., any claim to some nonsensory, nonrational, nondefinable, supernatural source of knowledge. It means a commitment to reason, not in sporadic fits or on selected issues or in special emergencies, but as a permanent way of life.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 20; pb 25.]

Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking—that the mind is one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide of action—that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise—that a concession to the irrational invalidates one’s consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality—that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind—that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existenc and, properly, annihilates one’s consciousness.

[GS, FNI, 157; pb 128.]

To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.

[Ibid.. 156; pb 127.]

A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest—but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

[Ibid., 155: pb 126.]

See also ABSOLUTES; EXISTENCE; EVASION; EVIL; FOCUS; HONESTY; INDEPENDENCE; INTEGRITY; JUSTICE; LOGIC; MORALITY; MYSTICISM; PRIDE; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; PRODUCTIVENESS; REASON; THOUGHT/THINKING: VIRTUE.

Rationalism vs. Empiricism. [Philosophers came to be divided] into two camps: those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge of the world by deducing it exclusively from concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the perception of physical facts (the Rationalists)—and those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts (the Empiricists). To put it more simply: those who joined the [mystics] by abandoning reatity—and those who clung to reality, by abandoning their mind.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 31; pb 30.]

See also CONCEPTS; EPISTEMOLOGY; INDUCTION and DEDUCTION; KANT, IMMANUEL; KNOWLEDGE; LOGIC; PERCEPTION; PHILOSOPHY; REASON.

Rationalization. Since an emotion is experienced as an immediate primary, but is, in fact, a complex, derivative sum, it permits men to practice one of the ugliest of psychological phenomena: rationalization. Rationalization is a cover-up, a process of providing one’s emotions with a false identity, of giving them spurious explanations and justifications —in order to hide one’s motives, not just from others, but primarily from oneself. The price of nationalizing is the hampering, the distortion and, ultimately, the destruction of one’s cognitive faculty. Rationalization is a process not of perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one’s emotions.

Philosophical catch phrases are handy means of rationalization. They are quoted, repeated and perpetuated in order to justify feelings which men are unwilling to admit.

“Nobody can be certain of anything” is a rationalization for a feeling of envy and hatred toward those who are certain. “It may be true for you, but it’s not true for me” is a rationalization for one’s inability and unwillingness to prove the validity of one’s contentions. “Nobody is perfect in this world” is a rationalization for the desire to continue indulging in one’s imperfections, i.e., the desire to escape morality. “Nobody can help anything he does” is a rationalization for the escape from moral responsibility. “It may have been true yesterday, but it’s not true today” is a rationalization for the desire to get away with contradictions. “Logic has nothing to do with reality” is a crude rationalization for a desire to subordinate reality to one’s whims.

“I can’t prove it, but I feel that it’s true” is more than a rationalization: it is a description of the process of rationalizing. Men do not accept a catch phrase by a process of thought, they seize upon a catch phrase—any catch phrase—because it fits their emotions. Such men do not judge the truth of a statement by its correspondence to reality—they judge reality by its correspondence to their feelings.

If, in the course of philosophical detection, you find yourself, at times, stopped by the indignantly bewildered question: “How could anyone arrive at such nonsense?”—you will begin to understand it when you discover that evil philosophies are systems of rationalization.

[“Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 21; pb 18.]

When a theory achieves nothing but the opposite of its alleged goals, yet its advocates remain undeterred, you may be certain that it is not a conviction or an “ideal.” but a rationalization.

[Ibid.. 24; pb 20.]

See also EMOTIONS; LOGIC; MORAL JUDGMENT; MORALITY; OBJECTIVITY; PHILOSOPHY; PROOF; RATIONALITY; SUBCONSCIOUS.

Reality. See Existence.

Reason. Reason is the faculty that identities and integrates the material provided by man’s senses.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 13; pb 20.]

Reason integrates man’s perceptions by means of forming abstractions or conceptions, thus raising man’s knowledge from the perceptual level, which he shares with animals, to the conceptual level, which he alone can reach. The method which reason employs in this process is logic —and logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.

[“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 75; pb 62.]

Reason is man’s only means of grasping reality and of acquiring knowledge—and, therefore, the rejection of reason means that men should act regardless of and/or in contradiction to the facts of reality.

[“The Left: Old and New,” NL, 84.]

The senses, concepts, logic: these are the elements of man’s rational faculty—its start, its form, its method. In essence, “follow reason” means: base knowledge on observation; form concepts according to the actual (measurable) relationships among concretes; use concepts according to the rules of logic (ultimately, the Law of Identity). Since each of these elements is based on the facts of reality, the conclusions reached by a process of reason are objective.

The alternative to reason is some form of mysticism or skepticism.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 332; pb 305.]

[Reason] is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 13; pb 20.]

Man’s essential characteristic is his rational faculty. Man’s mind is his basic means of survival—his only means of gaining knowledge....

In order to sustain its life, every living species has to follow a certain course of action required by its nature. ‘I’he action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort. Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 16.]

To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Setf-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living.

[GS, FNI, 156; pb 128.]

Reason is man’s tool of knowledge, the faculty that enables him to perceive the facts of reality. To act rationally means to act in accordance with the facts of reality. Emotions are not tools of cognition. What you feel tells you nothing about the facts; it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts. Emotions are the result of your value judgments; they are caused by your basic premises, which you may hold consciously or subconsciously, which may be right or wrong.

[“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 6.]

There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man’s reason and his emotions—provided he observes their proper relationship. A rational man knows—or makes it a point to discover—the source of his emotions, the basic premises from which they come; if his premises are wrong, he corrects them. He never acts on emotions for which he cannot account, the meaning of which he does not understand. In appraising a situation, he knows why he reacts as he does and whether he is right. He has no inner conflicts, his mind and his emotions are integrated, his consciousness is in perfect harmony. His emotions are not his enemies, they are his means of enjoying life. But they are not his guide; the guide is his mind. This relationship cannot be reversed, however. If a man takes his emotions as the cause and his mind as their passive effect, if he is guided by his emotions and uses his mind only to rationalize or justify them somehow—then he is acting immorally, he is condemning himself to misery, failure, defeat, and he will achieve nothing but destruction—his own and that of others.

[Ibid.]

I have said that faith and force are corollaries, and that mysticism will always lead to the rule of brutality. The cause of it is contained in the very nature of mysticism. Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion, communication or understanding are possible. Why do we kill wild animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is open to us. And that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind—a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence.

[“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 85; pb 70.]

Man’s mind is his basic means of survival—and of self-protection. Reason is the most selfish human faculty: it has to be used in and by a man’s own mind, and its product—truth—makes him inflexible, intransigent, impervious to the power of any pack or any ruler. Deprived of the ability to reason, man becomes a docile, pliant, impotent chunk of clay, to be shaped into any subhuman form and used for any purpose by anyone who wants to bother.

There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine that attacked (or “limited”) reason, which did not also preach submission to the power of some authority. Philosophically, most men do not understand the issue to this day; but psycho-epistemologically, they have sensed it since prehistoric times. Observe the nature of mankind’s earliest legends—such as the fall of Lucifer, “the light-bearer,” for the sin of defying authority; or the story of Prometheus, who taught men the practical arts of survival. Power-seekers have always known that if men are to be made submissive, the obstacle is not their feelings, their wishes or their “instincts,” but their minds; if men are to be ruled, then the enemy is reason.

[“The Comprachicos,” NL, 227.]

Only three brief periods of history were culturally dominated by a philosophy of reason: ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the nineteenth century. These three periods were the source of mankind’s greatest progress in all fields of intellectual achievement—and the eras of greatest political freedom.

[“The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age,” pamphlet, 5.]

Western civilization was the child and product of reason—via ancient Greece. In all other civilizations, reason has always been the menial servant—the handmaiden—of mysticism. You may observe the results. It is only Western culture that has ever been dominated—imperfectly, incompletely, precariously and at rare intervals—but still, dominated by reason. You may observe the results of that.

The conflict of reason versus mysticism is the issue of life or death—of freedom or slavery—of progress or stagnant brutality. Or, to put it another way, it is the conflict of consciousness versus unconsciousness.

[“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 75; pb 62.]

If you rebel against reason, if you succumb to the old bromides of the Witch Doctors, such as: “Reason is the enemy of the artist” or “The cold hand of reason dissects and destroys the joyous spontaneity of man’s creative imagination”—I suggest that you take note of the following fact: by rejecting reason and surrendering to the unhampered sway of their unleashed emotions (and whims), the apostles of irrationality, the existentialists, the Zen Buddhists, the non-objective artists, have not achieved a free, joyous, triumphant sense of life, but a sense of doom, nausea and screaming, cosmic terror. Then read the stories of O. Henry or listen to the music of Viennese operettas and remember that these were the products of the spirit of the nineteenth century—a century ruled by the “cold, dissecting” hand of reason. And then ask yourself: which psycho-epistemology is appropriate to man, which is consonant with the facts of reality and with man’s nature?

[“The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age,” RM, 119; pb 128.]

I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.

This—the supremacy of reason—was, is and will be the primary concern of my work, and the essence of Objectivism. (For a definition of reason, see Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.) Reason in epistemology leads to egoism in ethics, which leads to capitalism in politics.

[“Brief Summary,” TO, Sept. 1971, I.]

See also ART; AXIOMS; CAPITALISM; CONCEPTS; EMOTIONS; EPISTEMOLOGY; FREE WILL; HISTORY; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; KANT, IMMANUEL; KNOWLEDGE; LOGIC; MAN; MORALITY; OBJECTIVISM; OBJECTIVITY; PERCEPTION; PHISICAL FORCE; PRODUCTION; RATIONALISM vs. EMPIRICISM; SELF-ESTEEM; SELFISHNESS; THOUGHT/THINKING.

“Redistribution” of Wealth. If a man proposes to redistribute wealth, he means explicitly and necessarily that the wealth is his to distribute. If he proposes it in the name of the government, then the wealth belongs to the government; if in the name of society, then it belongs to society. No one, to my knowledge, did or could define a difference between that proposal and the basic principle of communism.

[“The Dead End,” ARL, 1,20,2.]

Observe that any social movement which begins by “redistributing” income, ends up by distributing sacrifices.

[“The Fascist New Frontier,” pamphlet, 5.]

Whoever claims the “right” to “redistribute” the wealth produced by others is claiming the “right” to treat human beings as chattel.

[“The Monument Builders,” VOS, 120; pb 91.]

See also COLLECTIVISM; COMMUNISM; MONEY; PROPERTY RIGHTS; SACRIFICE.

Reification of the Zero See Zero, Reification of.

Religion, PLAYBOY: Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life?

RAND: Qua religion, no—in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very—how should I say it?—dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith.

[“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 10.]

Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the nonideal, or virtue to vice. And it is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used.

[Ibid.]

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call [man’s] Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge—he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil—he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor—he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire—he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy—all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was—that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love —he was not man.

Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man.

No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say, against his pain—and they point at the torture rack to which they’ve tied him, the rack with two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body.

[GS, FNI, 169; pb 137.]

The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive—a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence.... Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God.... Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith.... The purpose of man’s life ... is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.

[Ibid., 171; pb 139.]

The kind of sense of life that produced the [papal] encyclical “Populorum Progressio” ... was not produced by the sense of life of any one person, but by the sense of life of an institution.

The dominant chord of the encyclical’s sense of life is hatted for man’s mind-hence hatred for man—hence hatred for life and for this earth—hence hatred for man’s enjoyment of his life on earth—and hence, as a last and least consequence, hatred for the only social system that makes all these values possible in practice: capitalism.

[“Requiem for Man,” CUI, 304.]

The encyclical is the voice of the Dark Ages, rising again in today’s intellectual vacuum, like a cold wind whistling through the empty streets of an abandoned civilization.

Unable to resolve a lethal contradiction, the conflict between individualism and altruism, the West is giving up. When men give up reason and freedom, the vacuum is filled by faith and force.

No social system can stand for long without a moral base. Project a magnificent skyscraper being built on quicksands: while men are struggling upward to add the hundredth and two-hundredth stories, the tenth and twentieth are vanishing, sucked under by the muck. That is the history of capitalism, of its swaying, tottering attempt to stand erect on the foundation of the altruist morality.

It’s either-or. If capitalism’s befuddled, guilt-ridden apologists do not know it, two fully consistent representatives of altruism do know it: Catholicism and communism.

Their rapprochement, therefore, is not astonishing. Their differences pertain only to the supernatural, but here, in reality, on earth, they have three cardinal elements in common: the same morality, altruism—the same goal, global rule by force—the same enemy, man’s mind.

There is a precedent for their strategy. In the German election of 1933, the communists supported the Nazis, on the premise that they could fight each other for power later, but must first destroy their common enemy, capitalism. Today, Catholicism and communism may well cooperate, on the premise that they will fight each other for power later, but must first destroy their common enemy, the individual, by forcing mankind to unite to form one neck ready for one leash.

[Ibid., 316.]

Is there any difference between the encyclical’s philosophy and communism? I am perfectly willing, on this matter, to take the word of an eminent Catholic authority. Under the headline: “Encyclical Termed Rebuff to Marxism,” The New York Times of March 31, 1967, reports: “The Rev. John Courtney Murray, the prominent Jesuit theologian, described Pope Paul’s newest encyclical yesterday as ‘the church’s definitive answer to Marxism.’ ... ‘The Marxists have proposed one way, and in pursuing their program they rely on man alone,’ Father Murray said. ‘Now Pope Paul VI has issued a detailed plan to accomplish the same goal on the basis of true humanism—humanism that recognizes man’s religious nature.’ ”

Amen.

So much for those American “conservatives” who claim that religion is the base of capitalism—and who believe that they can have capitalism and eat it, too, as the moral cannibalism of the altruist ethics demands.

And so much for those modern “liberals” who pride themselves on being the champions of reason, science, and progress—and who smear the advocates of capitalism as superstitious, reactionary representatives of a dark past. Move over, comrades, and make room for your latest fellow-travelers, who had always belonged on your side—then take a look, if you dare, at the kind of past they represent.

[Ibid., 314.]

[There is one] possibly misleading sentence... in Roark’s speech: “From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.”

This could be misinterpreted to mean an endorsement of religion or religious ideas. I remember hesitating over that sentence, when I wrote it, and deciding that Roark’s and my atheism, as well as the overall spirit of the book, were so clearly established that no one would misunderstand it, particularly since I said that religious abstractions are the product of man’s mind, not of supernatural revelation.

But an issue of this sort should not be left to implications. What I was referring to was not religion as such, but a special category of abstractions, the most exalted one, which, for centuries, had been the near-monopoly of religion: ethics—not the particular content of religious ethics, but the abstraction “ethics,” the realm of values, man’s code of good and evil, with the emotional connotations of height, uplift, nobility, reverence, grandeur, which pertain to the realm of man’s values, but which religion has arrogated to itself....

Religion’s monopoly in the field of ethics has made it extremely difficult to communicate the emotional meaning and connotations of a rational view of life. Just as religion has pre-empted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man’s reach. “Exaltation” is usually taken to mean an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. “Worship” means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man. “Reverence” means the emotion of a sacred respect, to be experienced on one’s knees. “Sacred” means superior to and not-to-be-touched-by any concerns of man or of this earth. Etc.

But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions. What, then, is their source or referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man’s dedication to a moral ideal. Yet apart from the man-degrading aspects introduced by religion, that emotional realm is left unidentified, without concepts, words or recognition.

It is this highest level of man’s emotions that has to be redeemed from the murk of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.

[“Introduction to The Fountainhead” TO, March 1968, 4.]

Philosophy is the goal toward which religion was only a helplessly blind groping. The grandeur, the reverence, the exalted purity, the austere dedication to the pursuit of truth, which are commonly associated with religion, should properly belong to the field of philosophy.

[“The Chickens’ Homecoming,” NL, 108.]

The ideology that opposes man’s enjoyment of his life on earth and holds sex as such to be evil—the same ideology that is the source and cause of anti-obscenity censorship [is]: religion.

For a discussion of the profound, metaphysical reasons of religion’s antagonism to sex, I refer you to my article “Of Living Death” (The Objectivist, September-November 1968), which deals with the papal encyclical on contraception, “Of Human Life.” Today, most people who profess to be religious, particularly in this country, do not share that condemnation of sex—but it is an ancient tradition which survives, consciously or subconsciously, even in the minds of many irreligious persons, because it is a logical consequence implicit in the basic causes and motives of any form of mysticism.

[“Thought Control.” ARL, III. 1,3.]

Since religion is a primitive form of philosophy—an attempt to offer a comprehensive view of reality—many of its myths are distorted, dramatized allegories based on some element of truth, some actual, if profoundly elusive, aspect of man’s existence.

[“Philosophy and Sense of Life,” RM, 31; pb 25.]

In mankind’s history, art began as an adjunct (and, often, a monopoly) of religion. Religion was the primitive form of philosophy: it provided man with a comprehensive view of existence. Observe that the art of those primitive cultures was a concretization of their religion’s metaphysical and ethical abstractions.

[“The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” RM, 23; pb 20.]

It has often been noted that a proof of God would be fatal to religion: a God susceptible of proof would have to be finite and limited; He would be one entity among others within the universe, not a mystic omnipotence transcending science and reality. What nourishes the spirit of religion is not proof, but faith, i.e., the undercutting of man’s mind.

[Leonard Peikoff, “ ‘Maybe You’re Wrong,’ ” TOF, April 1981, 12.]

See also ABORTION; AGNOSTICISM; ALTRUISM; ART; ATHEISM; BIRTH CONTROL; COMMUNISM; “CONSERVATIVES”; DARK AGES; FAITH; GOD; MAN; MAN-WORSHIP; MORALITY; MYSTICISM; ORIGINAL SIN; PHILOSOPHY; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; REASON; SACRED; SACRIFICE; SEX; SOUL-BODY DICHOTOMY; SUPERNATURALISM.

Renaissance. The Renaissance was specifically the rebirth of reason, the liberation of man’s mind, the triumph of rationality over mysticism —a faltering, incomplete, but impassioned triumph that led to the birth of science, of individualism, of freedom.

[“The Left: Old and New,” NL, 83.]

The Renaissance—the rebirth of man’s mind—btasted the rule of the [mystics] sky-high, setting the earth free of [their] power. The liberation was not total, nor was it immediate: the convulsions lasted for centuries, but the cultural influence of mysticism—of avowed mysticism—was broken. Men could no longer be told to reject their mind as an impotent tool, when the proof of its potency was so magnificently evident that the lowest perceptual-level mentality was not able fully to evade it: men were seeing the achievements of science.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 21; pb 24.]

The Renaissance represented a rebirth of the Aristotelian spirit. The results of that spirit are written across the next two centuries, which men describe, properly, as the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment. The results include the rise of modern science; the rise of an individualist political philosophy (the work of John Locke and others); the consequent spread of freedom across the civilized world; and the birth of the freest country in history, the United States of America. The great corollary of these results, the product of men who were armed with the knowledge of the scientists and who were free at last to act, was the Industrial Revolution, which turned poverty into abundance and transformed the face of the West. The Aristotelianism released by Aquinas and the Renaissance was sweeping away the dogmas and the shackles of the past. Reason, freedom, and production were replacing faith, force, and poverty. The age-old foundations of statisrn were being challenged and undercut.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 22; pb 31.]

The Renaissance was the great rebirth intellectually, but not politically. Still seeking order and unity, men attempted to solve the problem of feudal tyranny by replacing many small tyrants with a single big one. ‘I’his was the birth of modern absolute monarchies.

[“A Nation’s Unity,” ARL, 11, 2, 2.]

The Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a conscious rebellion against the anti-human, otherworldly values of medieval Christendom. In its metaphysics and epistemology, the Renaissance was essentially Aristotelian. Every aspect of the period, from science to literature to art, reflected the Aristotelian view that man is a worthy being, capable of understanding the universe, and that the universe is worthy of man’s interest and study. Mysticism, which had saturated every aspect of medieval life and culture, lost its stranglehold on man’s mind. A rebirth of reason and of concern with this earth, was the base of all the achievements of the Renaissance.

In terms of its morality, the Renaissance was split in two: it was part-Aristotelian, part-Christian. As Aristotelians, the men of the Renaissance displayed the virtues of intelligence and pride, and pursued the value of happiness on earth. As Christians, they upheld the virtues of humility, renunciation and self-sacrifice, and the value of rewards in Heaven. Thus the existentially brilliant era of the Renaissance was marred, spiritually, by a profound moral conflict.

That conflict appeared, in different degrees, in virtually all of the Renaissance art. For the most part, sculpture did reflect an affirmative view of man. Although the subject matter was largely Christian, scalp-tors abandoned the stylistic features of medieval art. They testored weight, three-dimensionality and natural proportions to the human body. They reintroduced free-standing figures. They were keenly aware of human anatomy, and created images of potentially active bodies, or of bodies engaged in energetic movement. And, equally significant, the naked body was featured in the representation of both Christian and pagan subjects.

The statues present men who have intelligence, courage. determination and strength of character; but they do not convey a sense of happiness. The moral conflict tinged the Renaissance view of life, and in the faces of the statues there is a touch of sadness or uncertainty of tragedy, an expression of longing for an ideal never fully reached.

[Mary Ann Sures, “Metaphysics in Marble,” TO. March 1969. 11.]

See also ARISTOTLE; ART; DARK AGES; ENLIGHTENMENT, AGE of; FREEDOM; HISTORY; HUMILITY; MIDDLE AGES; MYSTICISM; REASON; RELIGION; TYRANNY.

Representative Government. The theory of representative government rests on the principle that man is a rational being, i.e., that he is able to perceive the facts of reality, to evaluate them, to form rational judgments, to make his own choices, and to bear responsibility for the course of his life.

Politically, this principle is implemented by a man’s right to choose his own agents, i.e., those whom he authorizes to represent him in the government of his country. To represent him, in this context, means to represent his views in terms of political principles. Thus the government of a free country derives its “just powers from the consent of the governed.” (For the basis of this discussion, see “Man’s Rights” and “The Nature of Government” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.)

As a corroboration of the link between man’s rational faculty and a representative form of government, observe that those who are demonstrably (or physiologically) incapable of rational judgment cannot exercise the right to vote. (Voting is a derivative, not a fundamental, right; it is derived from the right to life, as a political implementation of the requirements of a rational being’s survival.) Children do not vote, because they have not acquired the knowledge necessary to form a rational judgment on political issues; neither do the feeble-minded or the insane, who have lost or never developed their rational faculty. (The possession of a rational faculty does not guarantee that a man will use it, only that he is able to use it and is, therefore, responsible for his actions.)

[“Representation Without Authorization,” ARL, I, 21, 1.]

See also CONSTITUTION; DEMOCRACY; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; POLITICS; REPUBLIC; VOTING.

Republic. The American system is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic. A democracy, if you attach meaning to terms, is a system of unlimited majority rule ... a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights.... The American system is a constitutionally limited republic, restricted to the protection of individual rights. In such a system, majority rule is applicable only to lesser details, such as the selection of certain personnel. But the majority has no say over the basic principles governing the government. It has no power to ask for or gain the infringement of individual rights.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 9.]

See also AMERICA; COLLECTIVISM; CONSTITUTION; DEMOCRACY; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; POLITICS; REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT; VOTING.

Responsibility/Obligation. In reality and in the Objectivist ethics, there is no such thing as “duty.” There is only choice and the full, clear recognition of a principle obscured by the notion of “duty”: the Law of Causality.

The proper approach to ethics, the start from a metaphysically clean slate, untainted by any touch of Kantianism, can best be illustrated by the following story. In answer to a man who was telling her that she’s got to do something or other, a wise old Negro woman said: “Mister, there’s nothing I’ve got to do except die.”

Life or death is man’s only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.

Reality confronts man with a great many “musts,” but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is: “You must, if—” and the “if” stands for man’s choice: “—if you want to achieve a certain goal.” You must eat, if you want to survive. You must work, if you want to eat. You must think, if you want to work. You must look at reality, if you want to think—if you want to know what to do—if you want to know what goals to choose—if you want to know how to achieve them.

In order to make the choices required to achieve his goals, a man needs the constant, automatized awareness of the principle which the anti-concept “duty” has all but obliterated in his mind: the principle of causality—specifically, of Aristotelian final causation (which, in fact, applies only to a conscious being), i.e., the process by which an end determines the means, i.e., the process of choosing a goal and taking the actions necessary to achieve it.

In a rational ethics, it is causality—not “duty”—that serves as the guiding principle in considering, evaluating and choosing one’s actions, particularly those necessary to achieve a long-range goal. Following this principle, a man does not act without knowing the purpose of his action. In choosing a goal, he considers the means required to achieve it, he weighs the value of the goal against the difficulties of the means and against the full, hierarchical context of all his other values and goals. He does not demand the impossible of himself, and he does not decide too easily which things are impossible. He never drops the context of the knowledge available to him, and never evades reality, realizing fully that his goal will not be granted to him by any power other than his own action, and, should he evade, it is not some Kantian authority that he would be cheating, but himself....

A disciple of causation is profoundly dedicated to his values, knowing that he is able to achieve them. He is incapable of desiring contradictions, of relying on a “somehow,” of rebelling against reality. He knows that in all such cases, it is not some Kantian authority that he would be defying and injuring, but himsetf—and that the penalty would be not some mystic brand of “immorality,” but the frustration of his own desires and the destruction of his values....

Accepting no mystic “duties” or unchosen obligations, he is the man who honors scrupulously the obligations which he chooses. The obligation to keep one’s promises is one of the most important elements in proper human relationships, the element that leads to mutual confidence and makes cooperation possible among men....

The acceptance of full responsibility for one’s own choices and actions (and their consequences) is such a demanding moral discipline that many men seek to escape it by surrendering to what they believe is the easy, automatic, unthinking safety of a morality of “duty.” They learn better, often when it is too late.

The disciple of causation faces life without inexplicable chains, unchosen burdens, impossible demands or supernatural threats. His metaphysical attitude and guiding moral principle can best be summed up by an old Spanish proverb: “God said: ‘Take what you want and pay for it.’ ” But to know one’s own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.

[“Causality Versus Duty,” PWNI, 118; pb 98.]

See also CONTRACTS; “DUTY”; FREE WILL; KANT, IMMANUEL; LIFE; MORALITY; RATIONALITY; SELFISHNESS; VALUES.

Retaliatory Force. The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is: no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man—or group or society or government—has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The ethical principle involved is simple and clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense. A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man. The principle is: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 31; pb 32.]

It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own. He uses force to seize a value; I use it only to destroy destruction.

[GS, FNI, 166; pb 135.]

The principle of using force only in retaliation against those who initiate its use, is the principle of subordinating might to right.

[“Philosophy: Who Needs It,” PWNI, 13; pb 10.]

See also ANARCHISM; CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; JUSTICE; PACIFISM; PEACE MOVEMENTS; PHYSICAL FORCE; SELF-DEFENSE; WAR.

Retroactive Law. Retroactive (or ex post facto) law—i.e., a law that punishes a man for an action which was not legally defined as a crime at the time he committed it—is rejected by and contrary to the entire tradition of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. It is a form of persecution practiced only in dictatorships and forbidden by every civilized code of law. It is specifically forbidden by the United States Constitution. It is not supposed to exist in the United States and it is not applied to anyone —except to businessmen. A case in which a man cannot know until he is convicted whether the action he took in the past was legal or illegal, is certainly a case of retroactive law.

[“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUl, 50.]

See also ANTITRUST LAWS; BUSINESSMEN; CONSTITUTION; GOVERNMENT; LAW, OBJECTIVE AND NON-OBJECTIVE.

Revolution vs. Putsch. The New Left does not portend a revolution, as its press agents claim, but a Putsch. A revolution is the climax of a long philosophical development and expresses a nation’s profound discontent; a Putsch is a minority’s seizure of power. The goal of a revolution is to overthrow tyranny; the goal of a Putsch is to establish it.

Tyranny is any political system (whether absolute monarchy or fascism or communism) that does not recognize individual rights (which necessarily include property rights). The overthrow of a political system by force is justified only when it is directed against tyranny: it is an act of self-defense against those who rule by force. For example, the American Revolution. The resort to force, not in defense, but in violation, of individual rights, can have no moral justification; it is not a revolution, but gang warfare.

[“From a Symposium,” NL, 96.]

See also AMERICA; DICTATORSHIP; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; NEW LEFT; PHYSICAL FORCE; STATISM.

“Rewriting Reality.” Unable to determine what they can or cannot change, some men attempt to “rewrite reality,” i.e., to alter the nature of the metaphysically given. Some dream of a universe in which man experiences nothing but happiness—no pain, no frustration, no illness—and wonder why they lose the desire to improve their life on earth. Some feel that they would be brave, honest, ambitious in a world where everyone automatically shared these virtues—but not in the world as it is. Some dread the thought of eventual death—and never undertake the task of living.

[“The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 36; pb 30.]

By the “metaphysically given,” we mean any fact inherent in reality as such, apart from human action (whether mental or physical)—as against “man-made facts,” i.e., objects, institutions, practices, or rules of conduct that are of human origin....

As soon as you say about a metaphysically given fact: “it is”—just that much—the whole Objectivist metaphysics is implicit. If the fact is, it is what it is (the law of identity); it is what it is independent of consciousness, of anyone’s or everyone’s desires, hopes, fears (the primacy of existence); and it is lawful, inherent in the identities of the relevant entities (the law of causality). Given the circumstances involved, such a fact is necessary; it had to be; any alternative would have entailed a contradiction. In short, once you say about a metaphysical fact: “it is,” that means that, within the relevant circumstances, it is immutable, inexorable, inescapable, absolute. “Absolute” in this context means necessitated by the nature of existence and, therefore, unchangeable by human (or any other) agency....

The attempt to alter the nature of the metaphysically given is described by Ayn Rand as the fallacy of “rewriting reality.” Those who commit it regard metaphysical facts as non-absolute and, therefore, feel free to imagine an alternative to them. In effect, they regard the universe as though it were merely a first draft of reality, which anyone may decide at will to rewrite.

A common example is provided by those who condemn life on earth because man is capable of failure, frustration, pain, and who yearn instead for a world in which man knows nothing but happiness. But if the possibility of failure exists, it necessarily exists (it is inherent in the fact that achieving a value depends on a specific course of action, and that man is neither omniscient nor omnipotent in regard to such action). Anyone who holds the full context—who keeps in mind the identity of all the relevant entities—would be unable even to imagine an alternative to the facts as they are; the contradictions involved in such a projection would obliterate it. The rewriters, however, do not keep identity in mind; they specialize in out-of-context pining for a “heaven” that is the antonym of the metaphysically given.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 6.]

See also ABSOLUTES; AXIOMS; CAUSALITY; EXISTENCE; IDENTITY; METAPHYSICAL vs. MAN-MADE.

Right to Life. See Life, Right to.

Rightists vs. Leftists. Since, today, there are no clear definitions of political terms, I use the word “rightist” to denote the views of those who are predominantly in favor of individual freedom and capitalism —and the word “leftist” to denote the views of those who are predominantly in favor of government controls and socialism. As to the middle or “center,” I take it to mean “zero,” i.e., no dominant position, i.e., a pendulum swinging from side to side, moment by moment.

[“The Disfranchisement of the Right,” ARL., I, 6, 1.]

See also CAPITALISM; COLLECTIVISM; “CONSERVATIVES” vs. “LIBERALS”; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; INDIVIDUALISM; POLITICS; SOCIALISM; STATISM.

Rights. See Individual Rights.

Rights of the Accused. The rights of the accused are not a primary—they are a consequence derived from a man’s inalienable, individual rights. A consequence cannot survive the destruction of its cause. What good will it do you to be protected in the rare emergency of a false arrest, if you are treated as the rightless subject of an unlimited government in your daily life?

[“Moral Inflation,” ARL, 111, 13, 4.]

See also CRIME; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; STATISM.

Romanticism. Romanticism is a category of art based on the recognition of the principle that man possesses the faculty of volition.

[“What Is Romanticism?” RM, 81; pb 99.]

Romanticism is the conceptual school of art. It deals, not with the random trivia of the day, but with the timeless, fundamental, universal problems and values of human existence. It does not record or photograph; it creates and projects. It is concerned—in the words of Aristotle —not with things as they are, but with things as they might be and ought to be.

[“Introduction to The Fountainhead,” TO, March 1968, 1.]

What the Romanticists brought to art was the primacy of values, an element that had been missing in the stale, arid, third- and fourth-hand (and rate) repetitions of the Classicists’ formula-copying. Values (and value-judgments) are the source of emotions; a great deal of emotional intensity was projected in the work of the Romanticists and in the reactions of their audiences, as well as a great deal of color, imagination, originality, excitement and all the other consequences of a value-oriented view of life. This emotional element was the most easily perceivable characteristic of the new movement and it was taken as its defining characteristic, without deeper inquiry.

Such issues as the fact that the primacy of values in human life is not an irreducible primary, that it rests on man’s faculty of volition, and, therefore, that the Romanticists, philosophically, were the champions of volition (which is the root of values) and not of emotions (which are merely the consequences)—were issues to be defined by philosophers, who defaulted in regard to esthetics as they did in regard to every other crucial aspect of the nineteenth century.

The still deeper issue, the fact that the faculty of reason is the faculty of volition, was not known at the time, and the various theories of free will were for the most part of an anti-rational character, thus reinforcing the association of volition with mysticism.

[“What Is Romanticism?” RM, 88; pb 104.]

In recent times, some literary historians have discarded, as inadequate, the definition of Romanticism as an emotion-oriented school and have attempted to redefine it, but without success. Following the rule of fundamentality, it is as a volition-oriented school that Romanticism must be defined—and it is in terms of this essential characteristic that the nature and history of Romantic literature can be traced and understood.

[Ibid., 90; pb 106.)

If man possesses volition, then the crucial aspect of his life is his choice of values—if he chooses values, then he must act to gain and/or keep them—if so, then he must set his goals and engage in purposeful action to achieve them. The literary form expressing the essence of such action is the plot. (A plot is a purposeful progression of logically connected events leading to the resolution of a climax.)

The faculty of volition operates in regard to the two fundamental aspects of man’s life: consciousness and existence, i.e., his psychological action and his existential action, i.e., the formation of his own character and the course of action he pursues in the physical world. Therefore, in a literary work, both the characterizations and the events are to be created by the author, according to his view of the role of values in human psychology and existence (and according to the code of values he holds to be right). His characters are abstract projections, not reproductions of concretes; they are invented conceptually, not copied reportorially from the particular individuals he might have observed. The specific characters of particular individuals are merely the evidence of their particular value-choices and have no wider metaphysical significance (except as material for the study of the general principles of human psychology); they do not exhaust man’s characterological potential.

[Ibid., 82; pb 100.]

The Romanticists did not present a hero as a statistical average, but as an abstraction of man’s best and highest potentiality, applicable to and achievable by all men, in various degrees, according to their individual choices.

[“The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age,” RM, 117; pb 126.]

Philosophically, Romanticism is a crusade to glorify man’s existence; psychologically, it is experienced simply as the desire to make life interesting.

[“What Is Romanticism?” RM, 95; pb 109.]

Romanticism demands mastery of the primary element of fiction: the art of storytelling—which requires three cardinal qualities: ingenuity, imagination, a sense of drama. All this (and more) goes into the construction of an original plot integrated to theme and characterization. Naturalism discards these elements and demands nothing but characterization, in as shapeless a narrative, as “uncontrived” (i.e., purposeless) a progression of events (if any) as a given author pleases.

The value of a Romanticist’s work has to be created by its author; he owes no allegiance to men (only to man), only to the metaphysical nature of reality and to his own values. The value of a Naturalist’s work depends on the specific characters, choices and actions of the men he reproduces—and he is judged by the fidelity with which he reproduces them.

The value of a Romanticist’s story lies in what might happen; the value of a Naturalist’s story lies in that it did happen.

[Ibid., 105; pb 117.]

The major source and demonstration of moral values available to a child is Romantic art (particularly Romantic literature). What Romantic art offers him is not moral rules, not an explicit didactic message, but the image of a moral person—i.e., the concretized abstraction of a moral ideal. It offers a concrete, directly perceivable answer to the very abstract question which a child senses, but cannot yet conceptualize: What kind of person is moral and what kind of life does he lead?

It is not abstract principles that a child learns from Romantic art, but the precondition and the incentive for the later understanding of such principles: the emotional experience of admiration for man’s highest potential, the experience of looking up to a hero—a view of life motivated and dominated by values, a life in which man’s choices are practicable, effective and crucially important—that is, a moral sense of life.

[“Art and Moral Treason,” RM, 142; pb 146.]

Romantic art is the fuel and the spark plug of a man’s soul; its task is to set a soul on fire and never let it go out.

[Ibid., 150; pb 152.]

It is only the superficiality of the Naturalists that classifies Romanticism as “an escape”; this is true only in the very superficial sense of contemplating a glamorous vision as a relief from the gray burden of “real-life” problems. But in the deeper, metaphysical-moral-psychological sense, it is Naturalism that represents an escape—an escape from choice, from values, from moral responsibility—and it is Romanticism that trains and equips man for the battles he has to face in reality.

[“Bootleg Romanticism,” RM, 134; pb 139.]

The (implicit) standards of Romanticism are so demanding that in spite of the abundance of Romantic writers at the time of its dominance, this school has produced very few pure, consistent Romanticists of the top rank. Among novelists, the greatest are Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky, and, as single novels (whose authors were not always consistent in the rest of their works), I would name Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Among playwrights, the greatest are Friedrich Schiller and Edmond Rostand.

The distinguishing characteristic of this top rank (apart from their purely literary genius) is their full commitment to the premise of volition in both of its fundamental areas: in regard to consciousness and to existence, in regard to man’s character and to his actions in the physical world. Maintaining a perfect integration of these two aspects, unmatched in the brilliant ingenuity of their plot structures, these writers are enormously concerned with man’s soul (i.e., his consciousness). They are moralists in the most profound sense of the word; their concern is not merely with values, but specifically with moral values and with the power of moral values in shaping human character. Their characters are “larger than life,” i.e., they are abstract projections in terms of essentials (not always successful projections, as we shall discuss later). In their stories, one will never find action for action’s sake, unrelated to moral values. The events of their plots are shaped, determined and motivated by the characters’ values (or treason to values), by their struggle in pursuit of spiritual goals and by profound value-conflicts. Their themes are fundamental, universal, timeless issues of man’s existence—and they are the only consistent creators of the rarest attribute of literature: the perfect integration of theme and plot, which they achieve with superlative virtuosity.

If philosophical significance is the criterion of what is to be taken seriously, then these are the most serious writers in world literature.

[“What Is Romanticism?” RM, 91; ph 107.]

It must be noted that philosophers contributed to the confusion surrounding the term “Romanticism.” They attached the name “Romantic” to certain philosophers (such as Schelling and Schopenhauer) who were avowed mystics advocating the supremacy of emotions, instincts or will over reason. This movement in philosophy had no significant relation to Romanticism in esthetics, and the two movements must not be confused.

[“What Is Romanticism?” RM, 90; pb 106.]

The archenemy and destroyer of Romanticism was the altruist morality.

Since Romanticism’s essential characteristic is the projection of values, particularly moral values, altruism introduced an insolvable conflict into Romantic literature from the start. The altruist morality cannot be practiced (except in the form of self-destruction) and, therefore, cannot be projected or dramatized convincingly in terms of man’s life on earth (particularly in the realm of psychological motivation). With altruism as the criterion of value and virtue, it is impossible to create an image of man at his best—“as he might be and ought to be.” The major flaw that runs through the history of Romantic literature is the failure to present a convincing hero, i.e., a convincing image of a virtuous man.

[lbid., 100; pb 113.]

With the resurgence of mysticism and collectivism, in the later part of the nineteenth century, the Romantic novel and the Romantic movement vanished gradually from the cultural scene.

[“The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age,” RM, 114; pb 124.]

See also ALTRUISM; ARISTOTLE; ART; CLASSICISM; EMOTIONS; FREE WILL; FUNDAMENTALlTY, RULE of; LITERATURE; METAPHYSICAL VALUE JUDGMENTS: MORALITY; NATURALISM: PLOT; POPULAR LITERATURE; REASON: THRILLERS; VALUES.

S

Sacred. I will ask you to project the look on a child’s face when he grasps the answer to some problem he has been striving to understand. It is a radiant look of joy, of liberation, almost of triumph, which is unself-conscious, yet self-assertive, and its radiance seems to spread in two directions: outward, as an illumination of the world—inward, as the first spark of what is to become the fire of an earned pride. If you have seen this look, or experienced it, you know that if there is such a concept as “sacred”—meaning: the best, the highest possible to man—this look is the sacred, the not-to-be-betrayed, the not-to-be-sacrificed for anything or anyone.

[“Requiem for Man,” CUI, 303.]

[I use] the word “sanctity” not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of “supreme value.”

[WTL, “Foreword,” v.]

See also MYSTICISM; PRIDE; RELIGION; UNDERSTANDING; VALUES.

Sacrifice. “Sacrifice” is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue. Thus, altruism gauges a man’s virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less “selfish,” than help to those one loves). The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one.

This applies to all choices, including one’s actions toward other men. It requires that one possess a defined hierarchy of rational values (values chosen and validated by a rational standard). Without such a hierarchy, neither rational conduct nor considered value judgments nor moral choices are possible.

[“The Ethics of Emergencies,” VOS, 48; pb 44.]

“Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. “Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. “Sacrifice” is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.

If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor’s child and let your own die, it is.

If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself—that is the virtue of sacrifice in full.

If you renounce all personal desires and dedicate your life to those you love, you do not achieve full virtue: you still retain a value of your own, which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers, it is an act of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men you hate—that is the greatest of the virtues you can practice.

A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values. If you wish to achieve full virtue, you must seek no gratitude in return for your sacrifice, no praise, no love, no admiration, no self-esteem, not even the pride of being virtuous; the faintest trace of any gain dilutes your virtue. If you pursue a course of action that does not taint your life by any joy, that brings you no value in matter, no value in spirit, no gain, no profit, no reward—if you achieve this state of total zero, you have achieved the ideal of moral perfection.

You are told that moral perfection is impossible to man—and, by this standard, it is. You cannot achieve it so long as you live, but the value of your life and of your person is gauged by how closely you succeed in approaching that ideal zero which is death.

If you start, however, as a passionless blank, as a vegetable seeking to be eaten, with no values to reject and no wishes to renounce, you will not win the crown of sacrifice. It is not a sacrifice to renounce the unwanted. It is not a sacrifice to give your life for others, if death is your personal desire. To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you—you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body. It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture.

Do not remind me that it pertains only to this life on earth. I am concerned with no other. Neither are you.

If you wish to save the last of your dignity, do not call your best actions a “sacrifice”: that term brands you as immoral. If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty. If a man dies fighting for his own freedom, it is not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a slave; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of man who’s willing. If a man refuses to sell his convictions, it is not a sacrifice, unless he is the sort of man who has no convictions.

Sacrifice could be proper only for those who have nothing to sacrifice —no values, no standards, no judgment—those whose desires are irrational whims, blindly conceived and lightly surrendered. For a man of moral stature, whose desires are born of rational values, sacrifice is the surrender of the right to the wrong, of the good to the evil.

The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immorat—a morality that declares its own bankruptcy by confessing that it can’t impart to men any personal stake in virtues or values, and that their souls are sewers of depravity, which they must be taught to sacrifice. By its own confession, it is impotent to teach men to be good and can only subject them to constant punishment.

[GS, FNI, 172; pb 139.]

Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one’s selfish interests. If a man who is passionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a “sacrifice” for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies.

Any action that a man undertakes for the benefit of those he loves is not a sacrifice if, in the hierarchy of his values, in the total context of the choices open to him, it achieves that which is of greatest personal (and rational) importance to him. In the above example, his wife’s survival is of greater value to the husband than anything else that his money could buy, it is of greatest importance to his own happiness and, therefore, his action is not a sacrifice.

But suppose he let her die in order to spend his money on saving the lives of ten other women, none of whom meant anything to him—as the ethics of altruism would require. That would be a sacrifice. Here the difference between Objectivism and altruism can be seen most clearly: if sacrifice is the moral principle of action, then that husband should sacrifice his wife for the sake of ten other women. What distinguishes the wife from the ten others? Nothing but her value to the husband who has to make the choice—nothing but the fact that his happiness requires her survival.

The Objectivist ethics would tell him: your highest moral purpose is the achievement of your own happiness, your money is yours, use it to save your wife, that is your moral right and your rational, moral choice.

[“The Ethics of Emergencies,” VOS, 49; pb 45.]

If the frustration of any desire constitutes a sacrifice, then a man who owns an automobile and is robbed of it, is being sacrificed, but so is the man who wants or “aspires to” an automobile which the owner refuses to give him—and these two “sacrifices” have equal ethical status. If so, then man’s only choice is to rob or be robbed, to destroy or be destroyed, to sacrifice others to any desire of his own or to sacrifice himself to any desire of others; then man’s only ethical alternative is to be a sadist or a masochist.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 27; pb 30.]

The failure to give to a man what had never belonged to him can hardly be described as “sacrificing his interests.”

[“The ‘Conflicts’ of Men’s Interests,” VOS, 67; pb 56.]

It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

[“The Soul of a Collectivist,” FNI, 84; pb 73.]

See also ALTRUISM; “DUTY”; INTEGRITY; KANT, IMMANUEL; MORALITY; MYSTICISM; PRIDE; SELFISHNESS; SELFLESSNESS; STANDARD of VALUE; STATISM; ULTIMATE VALUE; VALUES.

Sanction. To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it.

[“The Argument from Intimidation,” VOS, 198; pb 143.]

One must speak up in situations where silence can objectively be taken to mean agreement with or sanction of evil. When one deals with irrational persons, where argument is futile, a mere “I don’t agree with you” is sufficient to negate any implication of moral sanction. When one deals with better people, a full statement of one’s views may be morally required. But in no case and in no situation may one permit one’s own values to be attacked or denounced, and keep silent.

[“How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?” VOS, 92; pb 73.]

To combat petty larceny as a crucial danger, at a time when murder is being committed, is to sanction the murder.

[“Antitrust: The Rule of Unreason,” TON, Feb. 1962, 8.]

To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.

The moral principle to adopt in this issue, is: “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”

[“How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?” VOS, 91; pb 72.]

A forced compliance is not a sanction. All of us are forced to comply with many laws that violate our rights, but so long as we advocate the repeal of such laws, our compliance does not constitute a sanction. Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.

“The Wreckage of the Consensus,” CUI, 235.]

See also APPEASEMENT; EVIL; MORAL COWARDICE; MORAL JUDGMENT; MORALITY; PHYSICAL FORCE; SANCTION of the VICTIM; SOVIET RUSSIA.

Sanction of the Victim. The “sanction of the victim” is the willingness of the good to suffer at the hands of the evil, to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the “sin” of creating values.

[Leonard Peikoff. “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 8.]

Then I saw what was wrong with the world, I saw what destroyed men and nations, and where the battle for life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality—and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it. Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a slavery they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my self-immolation to provide them with the means of their plan—so throughout the world and throughout men’s history, in every version and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collectivized countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for their own values—the impotence of death. I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win—and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was “No.”

[GS, FNI, 206; pb 165.]

Every kind of ethnic group is enormously sensitive to any slight. If one made a derogatory remark about the Kurds of Iran, dozens of voices would leap to their defense. But no one speaks out for businessmen, when they are attacked and insulted by everyone as a matter of routine. What causes this overwhelming injustice? The businessmen’s own policies: their betrayal of their own values, their appeasement of enemies, their compromises—all of which add up to an air of moral cowardice. Add to it the fact that businessmen are creating and supporting their own destroyers.

The sources and centers of today’s philosophical corruption are the universities.... It is the businessmen’s money that supports American universities—not merely in the form of taxes and government handouts, but much worse: in the form of voluntary, private contributions, donations, endowments, etc. In preparation for this lecture, I tried to do some research on the nature and amounts of such contributions. I had to give it up: it is too complex and too vast a field for the efforts of one person. To untangle it now would require a major research project and, probably, years of work. All I can say is only that millions and millions and millions of dollars are being donated to universities by big business enterprises every year, and that the donors have no idea of what their money is being spent on or whom it is supporting. What is certain is only the fact that some of the worst anti-business, anti-capitalisrn propaganda has been financed by businessmen in such projects.

Money is a great power—because, in a free or even a semi-free society, it is a frozen form of productive energy. And, therefore, the spending of money is a grave responsibility. Contrary to the altruists and the advocates of the so-called “academic freedom,” it is a moral crime to give money to support ideas with which you disagree; it means: ideas which you consider wrong, false, evil. It is a moral crime to give money to support your own destroyers. Yet that is what businessmen are doing with such reckless irresponsibility.

[“The Sanction of the Victims,” TOF, April 1982, 6.]

See also APPEASEMENT; BUSINESSMEN; COLLECTIVISM; COMPROMISE; EVIL; GOOD, the; MONEY; MORAL COWARDICE; MORALITY; SANCTION; SOVIET RUSSIA.

Savings. Agriculture is the first step toward civilization, because it requires a significant advance in men’s conceptual development: it requires that they grasp two cardinal concepts which the perceptual, concrete-bound mentality of the hunters could not grasp fully: time and savings. Once you grasp these, you have grasped the three essentials of human survival: time-savings-production. You have grasped the fact that production is not a matter confined to the immediate moment, but a continuous process, and that production is fueled by previous production. The concept of “stock seed” unites the three essentials and applies not merely to agriculture, but much, much more widely: to all forms of productive work. Anything above the level of a savage’s precarious, hand-to-mouth existence requires savings. Savings buy time.

[“Egalitarianism and Inflation,” PWNI, 153; pb 126.]

Deferred consumption (i.e., savings) on a gigantic scale is required to keep industrial production going. Savings pay for machines which enable men to produce in a day an amount of goods they would not be able to produce by hand in a year (if at all). This enables the workers in turn to defer consumption and to save some of their income for their future needs or goals. The hallmark of an industrial society is its members’ distance from a hand-to-mouth mode of living; the greater this distance, the greater men’s progress.

The major part of this country’s stock seed is not the fortunes of the rich (who are a small minority), but the savings of the middle class—i.e., of responsible men who have the ability to grasp the concept “future” and to deposit one dollar (or more) into a bank account. A man of this type saves money for his own future, but the bank invests his money in productive enterprises; thus, the goods he did not consume today, are available to him when he needs them tomorrow—and, in the meantime, these goods serve as fuel for the country’s productive process.

[“The Inverted Moral Priorities,” ARL, III, 21, I.]

Consumption is the final, not the efficient, cause of production. The efficient cause is savings, which can be said to represent the opposite of consumption: they represent unconsumed goods. Consumption is the end of production, and a dead end, as far as the productive process is concerned. The worker who produces so little that he consumes everything he earns, carries his own weight economically, but contributes nothing to future production. The worker who has a modest savings account, and the millionaire who invests a fortune (and all the men in between), are those who finance the future.

[“Egalitarianism and Inflation,” PWNI, 160; pb 132.]

See also CONSUMPTION; CREDIT; FINAL CAUSATI0N; GOLD STANDARD; INFLATION; INTEREST (on LOANS); INVESTMENT; MIDDLE CLASS; MONEY; PRODUCTION.

Science. Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical (particularly epistemological) base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 50; pb 44.]

It is not the special sciences that teach man to think; it is philosophy that lays down the epistemological criteria of all special sciences.

[ITOE, 104.1

The disintegration of philosophy in the nineteenth century and its collapse in the twentieth have led to a similar, though much slower and less obvious, process in the course of modern science.

‘T’oday’s frantic development in the field of technology has a quality reminiscent of the days preceding the economic crash of 1929: riding on the momentum of the past, on the unacknowledged remnants of an Aristotelian epistemology, it is a hectic, feverish expansion, heedless of the fact that its theoretical account is long since overdrawn—that in the field of scientific theory, unable to integrate or interpret their own data, scientists are abetting the resurgence of a primitive mysticism. In the humanities, however, the crash is past, the depression has set in, and the collapse of science is all but complete.

The clearest evidence of it may be seen in such comparatively young sciences as psychology and political economy. In psychology, one may observe the attempt to study human behavior without reference to the fact that man is conscious. In political economy, one may observe the attempt to study and to devise social systems without reference to man.

It is philosophy that defines and establishes the epistemological criteria to guide human knowledge in general and specific sciences in particular.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 11.]

See also ARISTOTLE; BEHAVIORISM; EPISTEMOLOGY; LOGIC; MYSTICISM; PHILOSOPHY; REASON; TECHNOLOGY; TRIBAL, PREMISE (in ECONOMICS).

Sculpture. Sculpture [re-creates reality] by means of a three-dimensional form made of a solid material.... Sculpture [deals] with the combined fields of sight and touch....

The so-called visual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture) produce concrete, perceptually available entities and make them convey an abstract. conceptual meaning.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 46.]

Compared to painting, sculpture is more limited a form of art. It expresses an artist’s view of existence through his treatment of the human figure, but it is confined to the human figure. (For a discussion of sculpture’s means, I will refer you to “Metaphysics in Marble” by Mary Ann Sures, The Objectivist, February-March 1969.)

Dealing with two senses, sight and touch, sculpture is restricted by the necessity to present a three-dimensional shape as man does not perceive it: without color. Visually, sculpture offers shape as an abstraction; but touch is a somewhat concrete-bound sense and confines sculpture to concrete entities. Of these, only the figure of man can project a metaphysical meaning. There is little that one can express in the statue of an animal or of an inanimate object.

Psycho-epistemologically, it is the requirements of the sense of touch that make the texture of a human body a crucial element in sculpture, and virtually a hallmark of great sculptors. Observe the manner in which the softness, the smoothness, the pliant resiliency of the skin is conveyed by rigid marble in such statues as the Venus de Milo or Michelangelo’s Pietà.

It is worth noting that sculpture is almost a dead art. Its great day was in ancient Greece which, philosophically, was a man-centered civilization. A Renaissance is always possible, but the future of sculpture depends to a large extent on the future of architecture. The two arts are closely allied; one of the problems of sculpture lies in the fact that one of its most effective functions is to serve as architectural ornament.

[Ibid., 49.]

The history of sculpture is a history of man’s view of man—of his body and spirit, i.e., of his metaphysical nature. Every culture, from the most primitive to the most civilized, has held an estimate of man and has wanted to see the objectified reality of that estimate. Man has been the predominant subject of sculpture, whether he was judged to be an object of pride or of shame, a hero or a sinner.

A metaphysical view of man is projected by the manner in which the sculptor presents the human figure. In the process of shaping clay or wood or stone into the form of a body, the sculptor reveals his answer to three questions: Is man a being of free will or is he a helpless puppet of fate?—Is he good or evil?—Can he achieve happiness or is he doomed to misery?—and then mounts his answer on a pedestal and puts it in a tomb or in a temple or over the portal of a church or in a living room in New York City.

[Mary Ann Sures, “Metaphysics in Marble,” TO, Feb. 1969, 10.]

Philosophy is the sculptor of man’s soul. And sculpture is philosophy in stone.

[Ibid., March 1969, 16.]

See also ANCIENT GREECE; ART; DETERMINISM; ESTHETICS; FREE WILL; MAN; METAPHYSICS; PAINTING; PHILOSOPHY; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; VISUAL ARTS.

Secession. Some people ask whether local groups or provinces have the right to secede from the country of which they are a part. The answer is: on ethnic grounds, no. Ethnicity is not a valid consideration, morally or politically, and does not endow anyone with any special rights. As to other than ethnic grounds, remember that rights belong only to individuals and that there is no such thing as “group rights.” If a province wants to secede from a dictatorship, or even from a mixed economy, in order to establish a free country—it has the right to do so. But if a local gang, ethnic or otherwise, wants to secede in order to establish its own government controls, it does not have that right. No group has the right to violate the rights of the individuals who happen to live in the same locality. A wish—individuat or collective—is not a right.

[“Global Balkanization,” pamphlet, 14.]

See also DICTATORSHIP; “ETHNICITY”; FREEDOM; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; NATIONAL RIGHTS; SELF-DETERMINATION of NATIONS.

Second-Handers. Isn’t that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he’s honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he’s great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison.... They’re second-handers....

They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people. They don’t ask: “Is this true?” They ask: “Is this what others think is true?” Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull. What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egoists. You don’t think through another’s brain and you don’t work through another’s hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life. Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation—anchored to nothing. That’s the emptiness I couldn’t understand in people. That’s what stopped me whenever I faced a committee. Men without an ego. Opinion without a rational process. Motion without brakes or motor. Power without responsibility. The second-hander acts, but the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person. It’s everywhere and nowhere and you can’t reason with him. He’s not open to reason.

[“The Nature of the Second-Hander,” FNI, 78; pb 69.]

After centuries of being pounded with the doctrine that altruism is the ultimate ideal, men have accepted it in the only way it could be accepted. By seeking self-esteem through others. By living second-hand. And it has opened the way for every kind of horror. It has become the dreadful form of selfishness which a truly selfish man couldn’t have conceived. And now, to cure a world perishing from selflessness, we’re asked to destroy the self. Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You’ve wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he’s ever held a truly personal desire, he’d find the answer. He’d see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He’s not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander’s delusion—prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can’t say about a single thing: “This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me.”

[Ibid., 79; pb 70.]

[In Galt’s speech, below, Miss Rand discusses the second-hand nature of the psychology of mystics.]

A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others. Somewhere in the distant reaches of his childhood, when his own understanding of reality clashed with the assertions of others, with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to so craven a fear of independence that he renounced his rational faculty. At the crossroads of the choice between “I know” and “They say,” he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think. Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others. His surrender took the form of the feeling that he must hide his lack of understanding, that others possess some mysterious knowledge of which he alone is deprived, that reality is whatever they want it to be, through some means forever denied to him.

From then on, afraid to think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings. His feelings become his only guide, his only remnant of personal identity, he clings to them with ferocious possessiveness—and whatever thinking he does is devoted to the struggle of hiding from himself that the nature of his feelings is terror.

When a mystic declares that he feels the existence of a power superior to reason, he feels it all right, but that power is not an omniscient super-spirit of the universe, it is the consciousness of any passer-by to whom he has surrendered his own. A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness of others. “They” are his only key to reality, he feels that he cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting their unaccountable consent. “They” are his only means of perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live. To control the consciousness of others becomes his only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

[GS, FNI, 200; pb 160.]

A [second-hander] is one who regards the consciousness of other men as superior to his own and to the facts of reality. It is to a [second-hander] that the moral appraisal of himself by others is a primary concern which supersedes truth, facts, reason, logic. The disapproval of others is so shatteringly terrifying to him that nothing can withstand its impact within his consciousness; thus he would deny the evidence of his own eyes and invalidate his own consciousness for the sake of any stray charlatan’s moral sanction. It is only a [second-hander] who could conceive of such absurdity as hoping to win an intellectual argument by hinting: “But people won’t like you!”

[“The Argument from Intimidation,” VOS, 195; pb 141.]

Notice how they’ll accept anything except a man who stands alone. They recognize him at once.... There’s a special, insidious kind of hatred for him. They forgive criminals. They admire dictators. Crime and violence are a tie. A form of mutual dependence. They need ties. They’ve got to force their miserable little personalities on every single person they meet. The independent man kills them—because they don’t exist within him and that’s the only form of existence they know. Notice the malignant kind of resentment against any idea that propounds independence. Notice the malice toward an independent man.

[“The Nature of the Second-Hander,” FNI. 79; pb 69.]

It is fear that drives them to seek the warmth, the protection, the “safety” of a herd. When they speak of merging their selves into a “greater whole,” it is their fear that they hope to drown in the undemanding waves of unfastidious human bodies. And what they hope to fish out of that pool is the momentary illusion of an unearned personal significance.

[“Apollo and Dionysus,” NL, 80.]

Men were taught to regard second-handers—tyrants, emperors, dictators—as exponents of egoism. By this fraud they were made to destroy the ego, themselves and others. The purpose of the fraud was to destroy the creators. Or to harness them. Which is a synonym.

From the beginning of history, the two antagonists have stood face to face: the creator and the second-hander. When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander responded. He invented altruism.

The creator—denied, opposed, persecuted, exploited—went on, moved forward and carried all humanity along on his energy. The second-hander contributed nothing to the process except the impediments. The contest has another name: the individual against the collective.

[“The Soul of an Individualist,” FNI, 97; pb 83.]

See also ALTRUISM; COLLECTIVISM; COMPETITION; CREATORS; DICTATOR; EMOTIONS; FAITH; INDEPENDENCE; INDIVIDUALISM; LONELINESS; MYSTICISM; PSYCHOLOGY; REASON: SELF: SELF-ESTEEM; SELFISHNESS; SELFLESSNESS.

Self. A man’s self is his mind—the faculty that perceives reality, forms judgments, chooses values.

[“Selfishness Without a Self,” PWNI, 60; pb 50.]

The self you have betrayed is your mind; self-esteem is reliance on one’s power to think. The ego you seek, that essential “you” which you cannot express or define, is not your emotions or inarticulate dreams, but your intellect, that judge of your supreme tribunal whom you’ve impeached in order to drift at the mercy of any stray shyster you describe as your “feeling.”

[(;S, FNI, 222: pb 177.]

Your self is your mind; renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow.

[Ibid., 176; pb 142.]

The most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth.

[Ibid.]

See also REASON; SELF-ESTEEM; SELF-INTEREST; SELFISHNESS; SELFLESSNESS; THOUGHT/THINKING; VALUES.

Self-Defense. The necessary consequence of man’s right to life is his right to self--defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

If some “pacifist” society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it.

[“The Nature of Government,” VOS, 146; pb 108.]

The individual does possess the right of self-defense and that is the right which he delegates to the government, for the purpose of an orderly, legally defined enforcement.

[“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 46.]

A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force.

[GS, FNI, 231; pb 183.]

Just as an individual has the right of self-defense, so has a free country if attacked. But this does not give its government the right to draft men into military service—which is the most blatantly statist violation of a man’s right to his own life.

[“The Roots of War,” CUI, 40.]

See also DRAFT; FOREIGN POLICY; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; LIFE, RIGHT to; PACIFISM; RETALIATORY FORCE; WAR.

Self Determination of Nations. The right of “the self-determination of nations” applies only to free societies or to societies seeking to establish freedom; it does not apply to dictatorships. Just as an individual’s right of free action does not include the “right” to commit crimes (that is, to violate the rights of others), so the right of a nation to determine its own form of government does not include the right to establish a slave society (that is, to legalize the enslavement of some men by others). There is no such thing as “the right to enslave.” A nation can do it, just as a man can become a criminal—but neither can do it by right.

It does not matter, in this context, whether a nation was enslaved by force, like Soviet Russia, or by vote, like Nazi Germany. Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual). Whether a slave society was conquered or chose to be enslaved, it can claim no national rights and no recognition of such “rights” by civilized countries—just as a mob of gangsters cannot demand a recognition of its “rights” and a legal equality with an industrial concern or a university, on the ground that the gangsters chose by unanimous vote to engage in that particular kind of group activity.

Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the non-existent “rights” of gang rulers. It is not a free nation’s duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses.

[“Collectivized ‘Rights,’ ” VOS, 139; pb 104.]

A nation that violates the rights of its own citizens cannot claim any rights whatsoever. In the issue of rights, as in all moral issues, there can be no double standard. A nation ruled by brute physical force is not a nation, but a horde—whether it is led by Attila, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Khrushchev or Castro. What rights could Attila claim and on what grounds?

[Ibid., 139; pb 103.]

See also “COLLECTIVE RIGHTS”; DEMOCRACY; DICTATORSHIP; FOREIGN POLICY; FREEDOM; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; NATIONAL RIGHTS; SACRIFICE; SECESSION; STATISM.

Self-Esteem. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason-Purpose-Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge-Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living.

[GS, FNI, 156; pb 128.]

By a feeling he has not learned to identify, but has derived from his first awareness of existence, from his discovery that he has to make choices, man knows that his desperate need of self-esteem is a matter of life or death. As a being of volitional consciousness, he knows that he must know his own value in order to maintain his own life. He knows that he has to be right; to be wrong in action means danger to his life; to be wrong in person, to be evil, means to be unfit for existence.

Every act of man’s life has to be willed; the mere act of obtaining or eating his food implies that the person he preserves is worthy of being preserved; every pleasure he seeks to enjoy implies that the person who seeks it is worthy of finding enjoyment. He has no choice about his need of self-esteem, his only choice is the standard by which to gauge it. And he makes his fatal error when he switches this gauge protecting his life into the service of his own destruction, when he chooses a standard contradicting existence and sets his self-esteem against reality.

[Ibid., 220; pb 176.]

No value is higher than self-esteem, but you’ve invested it in counterfeit securities—and now your morality has caught you in a trap where you are forced to protect your self-esteem by fighting for the creed of self-destruction. The grim joke is on you: that need of self-esteem, which you’re unable to explain or to define, belongs to my morality, not yours; it’s the objective token of my code, it is my proof within your own soul.

[lbid., 220; pb 175.]

Self-esteem is reliance on one’s power to think. It cannot be replaced by one’s power to deceive. The self-confidence of a scientist and the self-confidence of a con man are not interchangeable states, and do not come from the same psychological universe. The success of a man who deals with reality augments his self-confidence. The success of a con man augments his panic.

[“The Age of Envy,” NL, 181.]

The man of authentic self-confidence is the man who relies on the judgment of his own mind. Such a man is not malleable; he may be mistaken, he may be fooled in a given instance, but he is inflexible in regard to the absolutism of reality, i.e., in seeking and demanding truth....

There is only one source of authentic self-confidence: reason.

[Ibid., 182.]

The attack k on “selfishness” is an attack on man’s self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other.

[“Introduction,” VOS, xv; pb xi.]

Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.

[“Philosophy: Who Needs It,” PWNI, 12; pb 10.]

To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self esteeni, is capable of love—because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 29; pb 32.]

See also ALTRUISM; FREE WILL; HUMILITY; LOVE; MENTAL HEALTH; PRIDE; PSYCHOLOGY; REASON; SACRIFICE; SELF; SELFISHNESS; SEX; VALUES.

Self-Evident. Nothing is self-evident except the material of sensory perception.

[“Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 15; pb 13.]

When we speak of “direct perception” or “direct awareness,” we mean the perceptual level. Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident. The knowledge of sensations as components of percepts is not direct, it is acquired by man much later: it is a scientific, conceplual discovery.

[ITOE, 5.]

See also AXIOMS; COROLLARIES; OSTENSIVE DEFINITION; PERCEPTION; PROOF; SENSATIONS; VALIDATION.

Self-Interest. Just as man cannot survive by any random means, but must discover and practice the principles which his survival requires, so man’s self-interest cannot be determined by blind desires or random whims, but must be discovered and achieved by the guidance of rational principles. This is why the Objectivist ethics is a morality of rational self-interest—or of rational selfishness.

[“Introduction,” VOS, xiv; pb x.]

When one speaks of man’s right to exist for his own sake, for his own rational self-interest, most people assume automatically that this means his right to sacrifice others. Such an assumption is a confession of their own belief that to injure, enslave, rob or murder others is in man’s self-interest—which he must selflessly renounce. The idea that man’s self-interest can be served only by a non-sacrificial relationship with others has never occurred to those humanitarian apostles of unselfishness, who proclaim their desire to achieve the brotherhood of men. And it will not occur to them, or to anyone, so long as the concept “rational” is omitted from the context of “values,” “desires,” “self-interest” and ethics.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 28; pb 30.]

The term “interests” is a wide abstraction that covers the entire field of ethics. It includes the issues of: man’s values, his desires, his goals and their actual achievement in reality. A man’s “interests” depend on the kind of goals he chooses to pursue, his choice of goals depends on his desires, his desires depend on his values—and, for a rational man, his values depend on the judgment of his mind.

Desires (or feelings or emotions or wishes or whims) are not tools of cognition; they are not a valid standard of value, nor a valid criterion of man’s interests. The mere fact that a man desires something does not constitute a proof that the object of his desire is good, nor that its achievement is actually to his interest.

To claim that a man’s interests are sacrificed whenever a desire of his is frustrated—is to hold a subjectivist view of man’s values and interests. Which means: to believe that it is proper, moral and possible for man to achieve his goals, regardless of whether they contradict the facts of reality or not. Which means: to hold an irrational or mystical view of existence. Which means: to deserve no further consideration.

[“The ‘Conflicts’ of Men’s Interests,” VOS, 57; pb 50.]

See also EMOTIONS; GOOD, the; LIFE; MORALITY; OBJECTIVISM; PRINCIPLES; RATIONALITY; SACRIFICE; SELFISHNESS; SELFLESSNESS; VALUES.

Selfishness. The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness—which means: the values required for man’s survival qua man—which means: the values required for human survival—not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the “aspirations,” the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices, have never discovered an industrial society and can conceive of no self-interest but that of grabbing the loot of the moment.

The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interests of men do not clash—that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 28; pb 31.]

The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual “package-deal,” which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.

Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests.

This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.

[“Introduction,” VOS, ix; pb vii.]

There is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery. The evil of a robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interests, but in what he regards as to his own interest; not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value; not in the fact that he wants to live, but in the fact that he wants to live on a subhuman level (see “The Objectivist Ethics”).

If it is true that what I mean by “selfishness” is not what is meant conventionally, then this is one of the worst indictments of altruism: it means that altruism permits no concept of a self-respecting, self-supporting man—a man who supports his life by his own effort and neither sacrifices himself nor others. It means that altruism permits no view of men except as sacrificial animals and profiteers-on-sacrifice, as victims and parasites—that it permits no concept of a benevolent co-existence among men—that it permits no concept of justice.

[Ibid., xii; pb ix.]

To redeem both man and morality, it is the concept of “selfishness” that one has to redeem.

The first step is to assert man’s right to a moral existence—that is: to recognize his need of a moral code to guide the course and the fulfillment of his own life....

The reasons why man needs a moral code will tell you that the purpose of morality is to define man’s proper values and interests, that concern with his own interests is the essence of a moral existence, and that man must be the beneficiary of his own moral actions.

Since all values have to be gained and/or kept by men’s actions, any breach between actor and beneficiary necessitates an injustice: the sacrifice of some men to others, of the actors to the nonactors, of the moral to the immoral. Nothing could ever justify such a breach, and no one ever has.

The choice of the beneficiary of moral values is merely a preliminary or introductory issue in the field of morality. It is not a substitute for morality nor a criterion of moral value, as altruism has made it. Neither is it a moral primary: it has to be derived from and validated by the fundamental premises of a moral system.

The Objectivist ethics holds that the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action and that man must act for his own rational self-interest. But his right to do so is derived from his nature as man and from the function of moral values in human life—and, therefore, is applicable only in the context of a rational, objectively demonstrated and validated code of moral principles which define and determine his actual self-interest. It is not a license “to do as he pleases” and it is not applicable to the altruists’ image of a “selfish” brute nor to any man motivated by irrational emotions, feelings, urges, wishes or whims.

This is said as a warning against the kind of “Nietzschean egoists” who, in fact, are a product of the altruist morality and represent the other side of the altruist coin: the men who believe that any action, regardless of its nature, is good if it is intended for one’s own benefit. Just as the satisfaction of the irrational desires of others is not a criterion of moral value, neither is the satisfaction of one’s own irrational desires. Morality is not a contest of whims ...

A similar type of error is committed by the man who declares that since man must be guided by his own independent judgment, any action he chooses to take is moral if he chooses it. One’s own independent judgment is the means by which one must choose one’s actions, but it is not a moral criterion nor a moral validation: only reference to a demonstrable principle can validate one’s choices.

Just as man cannot survive by any random means, but must discover and practice the principles which his survival requires, so man’s self-interest cannot be determined by blind desires or random whims, but must be discovered and achieved by the guidance of rational principles. This is why the Objectivist ethics is a morality of rational self-interest—or of rational selfishness.

Since selfishness is “concern with one’s own interests,” the Objectivist ethics uses that concept in its exact and purest sense. It is not a concept that one can surrender to man’s enemies, nor to the unthinking misconceptions, distortions, prejudices and fears of the ignorant and the irrational. The attack on “selfishness” is an attack on man’s self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other.

[Ibid., xiii; pb ix.]

Do you ask what moral obligation I owe to my fellow men? None—except the obligation I owe to myself, to material objects and to all of existence: rationality. I deal with men as my nature and theirs demands: by means of reason. I seek or desire nothing from them except such relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice. It is only with their mind that I can deal and only for my own self-interest, when they see that my interest coincides with theirs. When they don’t, I enter no relationship; I let dissenters go their way and I do not swerve from mine. I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs.

[GS, FNI, 163; pb 133.]

Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egoist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self.

Here the basic reversal is most deadly. The issue has been perverted and man has been left no alternative—and no freedom. As poles of good and evil, he was offered two conceptions: egoism and altruism. Egoism was held to mean the sacrifice of others to self. Altruism—the sacrifice of self to others. This tied man irrevocably to other men and left him nothing but a choice of pain: his own pain borne for the sake of others or pain inflicted upon others for the sake of self. When it was added that man must find joy in self-immolation, the trap was closed. Man was forced to accept masochism as his ideal—under the threat that sadism was his only alternative. This was the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on mankind.

This was the device by which dependence and suffering were perpetuated as fundamentals of life.

The choice is not self-sacrifice or domination. The choice is independence or dependence. The code of the creator or the code of the second-hander. This is the basic issue. It rests upon the alternative of life or death. The code of the creator is built on the needs of the reasoning mind which allows man to survive. The code of the second-hander is built on the needs of a mind incapable of survival. All that which proceeds from man’s independent ego is good. All that which proceeds from man’s dependence upon men is evil.

The egoist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He does not exist for any other man—and he asks no other man to exist for him. This is the only form of brotherhood and mutual respect possible between men.

[“The Soul of an Individualist,” FNI, 94; pb 81.]

The moral purpose of a man’s life is the achievement of his own happiness. This does not mean that he is indifferent to all men, that human life is of no value to him and that he has no reason to help others in an emergency. But it does mean that he does not subordinate his life to the welfare of others, that he does not sacrifice himself to their needs, that the relief of their suffering is not his primary concern, that any help he gives is an exception, not a rule, an act of generosity, not of moral duty, that it is marginal and incidental—as disasters are marginal and incidental in the course of human existence—and that values, not disasters, are the goal, the first concern and the motive power of his life.

[“The Ethics of Emergencies,” VOS, 55; pb 49.]

Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character. Only a brute or an altruist would claim that the appreciation of another person’s virtues is an act of selflessness, that as far as one’s own selfish interest and pleasure are concerned, it makes no difference whether one deals with a genius or a fool, whether one meets a hero or a thug, whether one marries an ideal woman or a slut. In spiritual issues, a trader is a man who does not seek to be loved for his weaknesses or flaws, only for his virtues, and who does not grant his love to the weaknesses or the flaws of others, only to their virtues.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 29; pb 31.]

The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man’s first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men. This includes the whole sphere of his creative faculty, his thinking, his work. But it does not include the sphere of the gangster, the altruist and the dictator.

A man thinks and works alone. A man cannot rob, exploit or rule—alone. Robbery, exploitation and ruling presuppose victims. They imply dependence. They are the province of the second-hander.

Rulers of men are not egoists. They create nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of others. Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving. They are as dependent as the beggar, the social worker and the bandit. The form of dependence does not matter.

[“The Soul of an Individualist,” FNI, 96; pb 82.]

See also ALTRUISM; AMORALISM; CAPITALISM; CHARITY; COLLECTIVISM; CREATORS; “DUTY”; EMOTIONS; GOOD, the; HAPPINESS; INDEPENDENCE; INDIVIDUALISM; LIFE; LOVE; MAN; MORALITY; NIETZSCHE,FRIEDRICH; “PACKAGE-DEALING,”FALLACY of; PRIDE; PRODUCTIVENESS; RATIONALITY; REASON; RESPONSIBILITY/ OBLIGATION; SACRIFICE; SECOND-HANDERS; SELF; SELF-ESTEEM; SELF-INTEREST; SELFLESSNESS; STANDARD OF VALUE; TRADER PRINCIPLE; VALUES; VIRTUE; WHIMS/WHIM-WORSHIP.

Selflessness. Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egoist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self.

[“The Soul of an Individualist,” FNI, 94; pb 81.]

[Peter Keating is] paying the price and wondering for what sin and telling himself that he’s been too selfish. In what act or thought of his has there ever been a self? What was his aim in life? Greatness—in other people’s eyes. Fame, admiration, envy—all that which comes from others. Others dictated his convictions, which he did not hold, but he was satisfied that others believed he held them. Others were his motive power and his prime concern. He didn’t want to be great, but to be thought great. He didn’t want to build, but to be admired as a builder. He borrowed from others in order to make an impression on others. There’s your actual selflessness. It’s his ego that he’s betrayed and given up. But everybody calls him selfish....

Isn’t that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he’s honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he’s great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison.

[“The Nature of the Second-Hander,” FNI, 78; pb 68.]

When you are in love, it means that the person you love is of great personal, selfish importance to you and to your life. If you were selfless, it would have to mean that you derive no personal pleasure or happiness from the company and the existence of the person you love, and that you are motivated only by self-sacrificial pity for that person’s need of you. I don’t have to point out to you that no one would be flattered by, nor would accept, a concept of that kind. Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person.

[“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 7.]

See also ALTRUISM; LOVE; SECOND-HANDERS; SELF: SELFISHNESS; SELF-ESTEEM.

Self-Sacrifice. See Altruism; Sacrifice; Selflessness.

Sensations. The lower of the conscious species possess only the faculty of sensation, which is sufficient to direct their actions and provide for their needs. A sensation is produced by the automatic reaction of a sense organ to a stimulus from the outside world; it lasts for the duration of the immediate moment, as long as the stimulus lasts and no longer. Sensations are an automatic response, an automatic form of knowledge, which a consciousness can neither seek nor evade. An organism that possesses only the faculty of sensation is guided by the pleasure-pain mechanism of its body....

The higher organisms possess a much more potent form of consciousness: they possess the faculty of retaining sensations, which is the faculty of perception. A “perception” is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of single stimuli, but of entities, of things. An animal is guided, not merely by immediate sensations, but by percepts. Its actions are not single, discrete responses to single, separate stimuli, but are directed by an integrated awareness of the peyreptual reality confronting it.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 9; pb 18.]

Although, chronologically, man’s consciousness develops in three stages: the stage of sensations, the perceptual, the conceptual—epistemologically, the base of all of man’s knowledge is the perceptual stage.

Sensations, as such, are not retained in man’s memory, nor is man able to experience a pure isolated sensation. As far as can be ascertained, an infant’s sensory experience is an undifferentiated chaos. Discriminated awareness begins on the level of percepts....

Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident. The knowledge of sensations as components of percepts is not direct, it is acquired by man much later: it is a scientific, conceptual discovery ...

(It may be supposed that the concept “existent” is implicit even on the level of sensations—if and to the extent that a consciousness is able to discriminate on that level. A sensation is a sensation of something, as distinguished from the nothing of the preceding and succeeding moments. A sensation does not tell man what exists, but only that it exists.)

[ITOF,5.]

Sensations are the primary material of consciousness and, therefore, cannot be communicated by means of the material which is derived from them. The existential causes of sensations can be described and defined in conceptual terms (e.g., the wavelengths of light and the structure of the human eye, which produce the sensations of color), but one cannot communicate what color is like, to a person who is born blind. To define the meaning of the concept “blue,” for instance, one must point to some blue objects to signify, in effect: “I mean this.” Such an identification of a concept is known as an “ostensive definition.”

[Ibid.. 53.1

See also CONCEPTS; ENTITY; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); OSTENSIVE DEFINITION; PERCEPTION; PLEASURE AND PAIN.

Sense of Life. A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. It sets the nature of a man’s emotional responses and the essence of his character.

Long before he is old enough to grasp such a concept as metaphysics, man makes choices, forms value-judgments, experiences emotions and acquires a certain implicit view of life. Every choice and value-judgment implies some estimate of himself and of the world around him—most particularly, of his capacity to deal with the world. He may draw conscious conclusions, which may be true or false; or he may remain mentally passive and merely react to events (i.e.. merely feel). Whatever the case may be, his subconscious mechanism sums up his psychological activities, integrating his conclusions, reactions or evasions into an emotional sum that establishes a habitual pattern and becomes his automatic response to the world around him. What began as a series of single, discreet conclusions (or evasions) about his own particular problems, becomes a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics with the compelling motivational power of a constant, basic emotion—an emotion which is part of all his other emotions and underlies all his experiences. This is a sense of life.

[“Philosophy and Sense of Life,” RM, 31; pb 25.]

If one saw, in real life, a beautiful woman wearing an exquisite evening gown, with a cold sore on her lips, the blemish would mean nothing but a minor affliction, and one would ignore it.

But a painting of such a woman would be a corrupt, obscenely vicious attack on man, on beauty, on all values—and one would experience a feeling of immense disgust and indignation at the artist. (There are also those who would feel something like approval and who would belong to the same moral category as the artist.)

The emotional response to that painting would be instantaneous, much faster than the viewer’s mind could identify all the reasons involved. The psychological mechanism which produces that response (and which produced the painting) is a man’s sense of life.

(A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence.)

It is the artist’s sense of life that controls and integrates his work, directing the innumerable choices he has to make, from the choice of subject to the strbtlest details of style. It is the viewer’s or reader’s sense of life that responds to a work of art by a complex, yet automatic reaction of acceptance and approval, or rejection and condemnation.

This does not mean that a sense of life is a valid criterion of esthetic merit, either for the artist or the viewer. A sense of life is not infallible. But a sense of life is the source of art, the psychological mechanism which enables man to create a realm such as art.

The emotion involved in art is not an emotion in the ordinary meaning of the term. It is experienced more as a “sense” or a “feel,” but it has two characteristics pertaining to emotions: it is automatically immediate and it has an intense, profoundly personal (yet undefined) value-meaning to the individual experiencing it. The value involved is life, and the words naming the emotion are: “This is what life means to me.”

Regardless of the nature or content of an artist’s metaphysical views, what an art work expresses, fundamentally, under all of its lesser aspects is: “This is life as I see it.” ‘The essential meaning of a viewer’s or reader’s response, under all of its lesser elements, is: “This is (or is not) life as I see it.”

[“Art and Sense of Life,” RM, 43; pb 34.]

A sense of life is formed by a process of emotional generalization which may be described as a subconscious counterpart of a process of abstraction, since it is a method of classifying and integrating. But it is a process of emotional abstraction: it consists of classifying things according to the emotions they invoke—i.e., of tying together, by association or connotation, all those things which have the power to make an individual experience the same (or a similar) emotion. For instance: a new neighborhood, a discovery, adventure, struggle, triumph—or: the folks next door, a memorized recitation, a family picnic, a known routine, comfort. On a more adult level: a heroic man, the skyline of New York, a sunlit landscape, pure colors, ecstatic music—or: a humble man, an old village, a foggy landscape, muddy colors, folk music.... The subverbal, subconscious criterion of selection that forms his emotional abstractions is: “That which is important to me” or: “The kind of universe which is right for me, in which I would feel at home.”, . . .

It is only those values which he regards or grows to regard as “important,” those which represent his implicit view of reality, that remain in a man’s subconscious and form his sense of life.

“It is important to understand things”—“tt is important to obey my parents”—“It is important to act on my own”—“It is important to please other people”—“It is important to fight for what I want”—“It is important not to make enemies”—“My life is important”—“Who am I to stick my neck out?” Man is a being of self-made soul—and it is of such conclusions that the stuff of his soul is made. (By “soul” I mean “consciousness.”)

The integrated sum of a man’s basic values is his sense of life.

[“Philosophy and Sense of Life,” RM, 33; pb 27.]

A given person’s sense of life is hard to identify conceptually, because it is hard to isolate: it is involved in everything about that person, in his every thought, emotion, action, in his every response, in his every choice and value, in his every spontaneous gesture, in his manner of moving, talking, smiling, in the total of his personality. It is that which makes him a “personality.”

Introspectively, one’s own sense of life is experienced as an absolute and an irreducible primary—as that which one never questions, because the thought of questioning it never arises. Extrospectively, the sense of life of another person strikes one as an immediate, yet undefinable, impression—on very short acquaintance—an impression which often feels like certainty, yet is exasperatingly elusive, if one attempts to verify it.

This leads many people to regard a sense of life as the province of some sort of special intuition, as a matter perceivable only by some special, non-rational insight. The exact opposite is true: a sense of life is not an irreducible primary, but a very complex sum; it can be felt, but it cannot be understood, by an automatic reaction; to be understood, it has to be analyzed, identified and verified conceptually. That automatic impression—of oneself or of others—is only a lead; left untranslated, it can be a very deceptive lead. But if and when that intangible impression is supported by and unites with the conscious judgment of one’s mind, the result is the most exultant form of certainty one can ever experience : it is the integration of mind and values.

There are two aspects of man’s existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art.

[Ibid., 39; pb 31.]

A culture, like an individual, has a sense of life or, rather, the equivalent of a sense of life—an emotional atmosphere created by its dominant philosophy, by its view of man and of existence. This emotional atmosphere represents a culture’s dominant values and serves as the leitmotif of a given age, setting its trends and its style.

Thus Western civilization had an Age of Reason and an Age of Enlightenment. In those periods, the quest for reason and enlightenment was the dominant intellectual drive and created a corresponding emotional atmosphere that fostered these values.

Today, we live in the Age of Envy.

[“The Age of Envy,” NL, 152.]

A nation’s sense of life is formed by every individual child’s early impressions of the world around him: of the ideas he is taught (which he may or may not accept) and of the way of acting he observes and evaluates (which he may evaluate correctly or not). And although there are exceptions at both ends of the psychological spectrum—men whose sense of life is better (truer philosophically) or worse than that of their fettow-citizens—the majority develop the essentials of the same subconscious philosophy. This is the source of what we observe as “national characteristics.” ...

Just as an individual’s sense of life can be better or worse than his conscious convictions, so can a nation’s. And just as an individual who has never translated his sense of life into conscious convictions is in terrible danger—no matter how good his subconscious vatues—so is a nation.

This is the position of America today.

If America is to be saved from destruction—specincatiy, from dictatorship—she will be saved by her sense of life.

[“Don’t Let It Go,” PWNI, 251; pb 206.]

A sense of life is not a substitute for explicit knowledge. Values which one cannot identify, but merely senses implicitly, are not in one’s control. One cannot tell what they depend on or require, what course of action is needed to gain and/or keep them. One can lose or betray them without knowing it.

[Ibid., 256; pb 210.]

See also AMERICA; ART; ARTISTIC CREATION; BENEVOLENT UNIVERSE PREMISE; EMOTIONS; ENLIGHTENMENT, AGE OF; ENVY/ HATRED of the GOOD for BEING the GOOD; ESTHETIC ABSTRACTIONS; ESTHETIC JUDGMENT; LOVE; MALEVOLENT UNIVERSE PREMISE; METAPHYSICAL VALUE-JUDGMENTS; METAPHYSICS; PHILOSOPHY; SEX; SUBCONSCIOUS.

Service. The concept of “service” has been turned into a collectivist “package-deal” by means of a crude equivocation and a cruder evasion. In the language of economics, the word “service” means work offered for trade on a free market, to be paid for by those who choose to buy it. In a free society, men deal with one another by voluntary, uncoerced exchange, by mutual consent to mutual profit, each man pursuing his own rational self-interest, none sacrificing himself or others; and all values—whether goods or services—are traded, not given away.

This is the opposite of what the word “service” means in the language of altruist ethics: to an altruist, “service” means unrewarded, self-sacrificial, unilateral giving, while receiving nothing in return. It is this sort of selfless “service” to “society” that collectivists demand of all men.

[“How Not to Fight Against Socialized Medicine,” TON, March 1963, 12.]

See also ALTRUISM; CAPITALISM; COLLECTIVISM; “PACKAGE-DEALING,” FALLACY of; SACRIFICE; SELFISHNESS; TRADER PRINCIPLE.

Sex. Sex is a physical capacity, but its exercise is determined by man’s mind—by his choice of values, held consciously or subconsciously. To a rational man, sex is an expression of self-esteem—a celebration of himself and of existence. To the man who lacks self-esteem, sex is an attempt to fake it, to acquire its momentary illusion.

Romantic love, in the full sense of the term, is an emotion possible only to the man (or woman) of unbreached self-esteem: it is his response to his own highest values in the person of another—an integrated response of mind and body, of love and sexual desire. Such a man (or woman) is incapable of experiencing a sexual desire divorced from spiritual values.

[“Of Living Death,” TO, Oct. 1968, 2.]

Just as an idea unexpressed in physical action is contemptible hypocrisy, so is platonic love—and just as physical action unguided by an idea is a fool’s self-fraud, so is sex when cut off from one’s code of values.... Only the man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love.

[“The Meaning of Sex,” FNI, 120; pb 100.]

The man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures—which can’t be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man’s sense of his own value ...

The men who think that wealth comes from material resources and has no intellectual root or meaning, are the men who think—for the same reason—that sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of one’s mind, choice or code of values. They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you—just about in some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails of its own volition. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he’s taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment—just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity!—an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence $of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience—or to fake—a sense of self-esteem.... Love is our response to our highest values—and can be nothing else.

[Ibid., 118; pb 99.]

The doctrine that man’s sexual capacity belongs to a lower or animal part of his nature ... is the necessary consequence of the doctrine that man is not an integrated entity, but a being torn apart by two opposite, $antagonistic, irreconcilable elements; his body, which is of this earth, and his soul, which is of another, supernatural realm. According to that doctrine, man’s sexual capacity—regardless of how it is exercised or motivated, not merely its abuses, not unfastidious indulgence or promiscuity, but the capacity as such—is sinful or depraved.

[“Of Living Death,” TO, Sept. 1968, 1.]

Sex is one of the most important aspects of man’s life and, therefore, must never be approached lightly or casually. A sexual relationship is proper only on the ground of the highest values one can find in a human being. Sex must not be anything other than a response to values. And that is why I consider promiscuity immoral. Not because sex is evil, but because sex is too good and too important....

[Sex should) involve ... a very serious relationship. Whether that relationship should or should not become a marriage is a question which depends on the circumstances and the context of the two persons’ lives. I consider marriage a very important institution, but it is important when and if two people have found the person with whom they wish to spend the rest of their lives—question of which no man or woman can be automatically certain. When one is certain that one’s choice is final, then marriage is, of course, a desirable state. But this does not mean that any relationship based on less than total certainty is improper. I think the question of an affair or a marriage depends on the knowledge and the position of the two persons involved and should be left up to them. Either is moral, provided only that both parties take the relationship seriously and that it is based on values.

[“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 8.]

See also ABORTION; BIRTH CONTROL; EMOTIONS; FEMININITY; FREUD; LOVE; MARRIAGE; PHILOSOPHY; RELIGION; SELF-ESTEEM; SELFISHNESS; SENSE of LIFE; SOUL-BODY DICHOTOMY; VALUES.

Similarity. The element of similarity is crucially involved in the formation of every concept; similarity, in this context, is the relationship between two or more existents which possess the same characteristic(s), but in different measure or degree....

Similarity is grasped perceptually; in observing it, man is not and does not have to be aware of the fact that it involves a matter of measurement. It is the task of philosophy and of science to identify that fact.

[ITOE, 15.]

See also CONCEPT-FORMATlON; MEASUREMENT; PERCEPTION.

Singing. See Performing Arts.

Skepticism. “We know that we know nothing,” they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are claiming knowledge—“There are no absolutes,” they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute—“You cannot prove that you exist or that you’re conscious,” they chatter, blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge: the existence of something to know, of a consciousness able to know it, and of a knowledge that has learned to distinguish between such concepts as the proved and the unproved.

[GS, FNI, 192; pb 154.]

In the history of philosophy—with some very rare exceptions—epistemological theories have ... taught either that knowledge is impossible (skepticism) or that it is available without effort (mysticism). These two positions appear to be antagonists, but are, in fact, two variants on the same theme, two sides of the same fraudulent coin: the attempt to escape the responsibility of rational cognition and the absolutism of reality—the attempt to assert the primacy of consciousness over existence....

The mystic is usually an exponent of the intrinsic (revealed) school of epistemology; the skeptic is usually an advocate of epistemological subjectivism.

[ITOE, 105.]

The crusading skepticism of the modern era; the mounting attack on absolutes, certainty, reason itself; the insistence that firm convictions are a disease and that compromise in any dispute is men’s only recourse—all this, in significant part, is an outgrowth of Descartes’ basic approach to philosophy. To reclaim the self-confidence of man’s mind, the first modern to refute is Kant (see Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology); the second is Descartes.

Observe that Descartes starts his system by using “error” and its synonyms or derivatives as “stolen concepts.”

Men have been wrong, and therefore, he implies, they can never know what is right. But if they cannot, how did they ever discover that they were wrong? How can one form such concepts as “mistake” or “error” while wholly ignorant of what is correct? “Error” signifies a departure from truth; the concept of “error” logically presupposes that one has already grasped some truth. If truth were unknowable, as Descartes implies, the idea of a departure from it would be meaningless.

The same point applies to concepts denoting specific forms of error. If we cannot ever be certain that an argument is logically valid, if validity is unknowable, then the concept of “invalid” reasoning is impossible to reach or apply. If we cannot ever know that a man is sane, then the concept of “insanity” is impossible to form or define. If we cannot recognize the state of being awake, then we cannot recognize or conceptualize a state of not being awake (such as dreaming). If man cannot grasp X, then “non-X” stands for nothing.

Fallibility does not make knowledge impossible. Knowledge is what makes possible the discovery of fallibility.

(Leonard Peikoff, “ ‘Maybe You’re Wrong,’ ” TOF, April 1981, 8.]

It is possible, the skeptic argument declares, for man to be in error; therefore, it is possible that every individual is in error on every question. This argument is a non sequitur; it is an equivocation on the term “possible.”

What is possible to a species under some circumstances, is not necessarily possible to every individual member of that species under every set of circumstances. Thus, it is possible for a human being to run the mile in less than four minutes; and it is possible for a human being to be pregnant. I cannot, however, go over to a crippled gentleman in his wheelchair and say: “Perhaps you’ll give birth to a son next week, after you’ve run the mile to the hospital in 3.9 minutes—after all, you’re human, and it is possible for human beings to do these things.”

The same principle applies to the possibility of error—or of truth. If someone maintains that New York City is made of mushroom soup, he cannot defend his idea by saying: “It is possible for human beings to reach the truth. I am human, so maybe this is the truth.” No matter what is possible under some conditions, a man cannot be “possibly” right when he is blatantly wrong. By the same token, no skeptic can declare that you are possibly wrong, when you are blatantly right. “It is possible for- man...” does not justify “It is possible that you . . .” The latter claim depends on the individual involved, and on the conditions.

“Maybe you’re wrong” is an accusation that must be supported by specific evidence. It cannot be uttered without context, grounds, or basis, i.e., arbitrarily.

[Ibid., 10.]

Doubting without a basis is the equivalent of—is indeed a form of—asserting without a basis. Both procedures, being arbitrary, are disqualified by the very nature of human cognition. In reason, certainty must precede doubt, just as a grasp of truth must precede the detection of error. To establish a claim to knowledge, what one must do is to prove an idea positively, on the basis of the full context of evidence available; i.e., a man must prove that he is right. It is not incumbent on anyone—nor is it possible—to prove that he is not wrong, when no evidence of error has been offered.

[Ibid., 12.]

See also ABSOLUTES; AGNOSTICISM; ARBITRARY; AXIOMS; CERTAINTY; CONTEXT; EPISTEMOLOGY; FALSEHOOD; KANT, IMMANUEL; MYSTICISM; “OPEN MIND” and “CLOSED MIND”; PERCEPTION; POSSIBLE; PROOF; REASON; SELF-EVIDENT; “STOLEN CONCEPT,” FALLACY of; SUBJECTIVISM; TRUTH.

Social System. A social system is a set of moral-political-economic principles embodied in a society’s laws, institutions, and government, which determine the relationships, the terms of association, among the men living in a given geographical area. It is obvious that these terms and relationships depend on an identification of man’s nature, that they would be different if they pertain to a society of rational beings or to a colony of ants. It is obvious that they will be radically different if men deal with one another as free, independent individuals, on the premise that every man is an end in himself—or as members of a pack, each regarding the others as the means to his ends and to the ends of “the pack as a whole.”

There are only two fundamental questions (or two aspects of the same question) that determine the nature of any social system: Does a social system recognize individual rights?—and: Does a social system ban physical force from human relationships? The answer to the second question is the practical implementation of the answer to the first.

. [“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 18.]

A social system is a code of laws which men observe in order to live together. Such a code must have a basic principle, a starting point, or it cannot be devised. The starting point is the question: Is the power of society limited or unlimited?

Individualism answers: The power of society is limited by the inalienable, individual rights of man. Society may make only such laws as do not violate these rights.

Collectivism answers: The power of society is unlimited. Society may make any laws it wishes, and force them upon anyone in any manner it wishes.

[“Textbook of Americanism,” pamphlet, 3.]

See also CAPITALISM; COLLECTIVISM; GOVERNMENT; IDEOLOGY; INDIVIDUALISM; MORALITY; POLITICS; SOCIETY.

Social Theory of Ethics. The social theory of ethics substitutes “society” for God—and although it claims that its chief concern is life on earth, it is not the life of man, not the life of an individual, but the life of a disembodied entity, the collective, which, in relation to every individual, consists of everybody except himself. As far as the individual is concerned, his ethical duty is to be the selfless, voiceless, rightless slave of any need, claim or demand asserted by others. The motto “dog eat dog”—which is not applicable to capitalism nor to dogs—is applicable to the social theory of ethics. The existential monuments to this theory are Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 33; pb 34.]

The avowed mystics held the arbitrary, unaccountable “will of God” as the standard of the good and as the validation of their ethics. The neomystics replaced it with “the good of society,” thus collapsing into the circularity of a definition such as “the standard of the good is that which is good for society.” This meant, in logic—and, today, in worldwide practice—that “society” stands above any principles of ethics, since it is the source, standard and criterion of ethics, since “the good” is whatever it wills, whatever it happens to assert as its own welfare and pleasure. This meant that “society” may do anything it pleases, since “the good” is whatever it chooses to do because it chooses to do it. And—since there is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men—this meant that some men (the majority or any gang that claims to be its spokesman) are ethically entitled to pursue any whims (or any atrocities) they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in the service of that gang’s desires.

[Ibid., 3; pb 14.]

See also GOD; GOOD, the; INDIVIDUALISM; INTRINSIC THEORY of VALUES: MORALITY; MYSTICAL ETHICS; OBJECTIVE THEORY of VALUES; SOCIETY; STANDARD of VALUE; STATISM; VALUES.

Socialism. Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 48; pb 43.]

The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights; under socialism, the right to property (which is the right of use and disposal) is vested in “society as a whole,” i.e., in the collective, with production and distribution controlled by the state, i.e., by the government.

Socialism may be established by force, as in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—or by vote, as in Nazi (National Socialist) Germany. The degree of socialization may be total, as in Russia—or partial, as in England. Theoretically, the differences are superficial; practically, they are only a matter of time. The basic principle, in all cases, is the same.

The alleged goals of socialism were: the abolition of poverty, the achievement of general prosperity, progress, peace and human brotherhood. The results have been a terrifying failure—terrifying, that is, if one’s motive is men’s welfare.

Instead of prosperity, socialism has brought economic paralysis and/ or collapse to every country that tried it. The degree of socialization has been the degree of disaster. The consequences have varied accordingly.

[“The Monument Builders,” VOS, 112; pb 86.]

There is no difference between the principles, policies and practical results of socialism—and those of any historical or prehistorical tyranny. Socialism is merely democratic absolute monarchy—that is, a system of absolutism without a fixed head, open to seizure of power by all comers, by any ruthless climber, opportunist, adventurer, demagogue or thug.

When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.” No human rights can exist without property rights. Since material goods are produced by the mind and effort of individual men, and are needed to sustain their lives, if the producer does not own the result of his effort, he does not own his life. To deny property rights means to turn men into property owned by the state. Whoever claims the “right” to “redistribute” the wealth produced by others is claiming the “right” to treat human beings as chattel.

[Ibid.. 120;pb91.]

When one observes the nightmare of the desperate efforts made by hundreds of thousands of people struggling to escape from the socialized countries of Europe, to escape over barbed-wire fences, under machine-gun fire—one can no longer believe that socialism, in any of its forms, is motivated by benevolence and by the desire to achieve men’s welfare.

No man of authentic benevolence could evade or ignore so great a horror on so vast a scale.

Socialism is not a movement of the people. It is a movement of the intellectuals, originated, led and controlled by the intellectuals, carried by them out of their stuffy ivory towers into those bloody fields of practice where they unite with their allies and executors: the thugs.

[Ihid.. 115; pb 87.]

The socialists had a certain kind of logic on their side: if the collective sacrifice of all to all is the moral ideal, then they wanted to establish this ideal in practice, here and on this earth. The arguments that socialism would not and could not work, did not stop them: neither has altruism ever worked, but this has not caused men to stop and question it. Only reason can ask such questions—and reason, they were told on all sides, has nothing to do with morality, morality lies outside the realm of reason, no rational morality can ever be defined.

The fallacies and contradictions in the economic theories of socialism were exposed and refuted time and time again, in the Nineteenth Century as well as today. This did not and does not stop anyone: it is not an issue of economics, but of morality. The intellectuals and the so-called idealists were determined to make socialism work. How? By that magic means of all irrationalists: somehow.

[“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 82: pb 68.]

There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism—by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.

[“Foreign Policy Drains U.S. of Main Weapon,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 9. 1962 G2.]

Both “socialism” and “fascism” involve the issue of property rights. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Observe the difference in those two theories: socialism negates private property rights altogether, and advocates “the vesting of ownershiP and control” in the community as a whole, i.e., in the state; fascism leaves ownership in the hands of private individuals, but transfers control of the property to the government.

Ownership without control is a contradiction in terms: it means “property,” without the right to use it or to dispose of it. It means that the citizens retain the responsibility of holding property, without any of its advantages, while the government acquires all the advantages without any of the responsibility.

In this respect, socialism is the more honest of the two theories. I sav “more honest,” not “better”—because, in practice, there is no difference between them: both come from the same collectivist-statist principle, both negate individual rights and subordinate the individual to the collective, both deliver the livelihood and the lives of the citizens into the power of an omnipotent government—and the differences between them are only a matter of time, degree, and superficial detail, such as the choice of slogans by which the rulers delude their enslaved subjects.

[“The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus,” CUI, 202.]

The Nazis defended their policies, and the country did not rebel; it accepted the Nazi argument. Selfish individuals may be unhappy, the Nazis said, but what we have established in Germany is the ideal system, socialism. In its Nazi usage this term is not restricted to a theory of economics; it is to be understood in a fundamental sense. “Socialism” for the Nazis denotes the principle of collectivism as such and its corollary, statism—in every field of human action, including but not limited to economics.

“To be a socialist,” says Goebbels, “is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.”

By this definition, the Nazis practiced what they preached. They practiced it at home and then abroad. No one can claim that they did not sacrifice enough individuals.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 10; pb 19.]

See also ALTRUISM; CAPITALISM; COLLECTIVISM; DICTATORSHIP; ECONOMIC POWER vs. POLITICAL POWER; EGALITARIANISM; FASCISM and COMMUNISM/SOCIALISM; GUILD SOCIALISM; HUMAN RIGHTS and PROPERTY RIGHTS; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; “LIBERALS”; NEW LEFT; POVERTY; PROPERTY RIGHTS; “PUBLIC PROPERTY”; “REDISTRIBUTION” of WEALTH; SOCIETY; SOVIET RUSSIA; STATISM; TRIBALISM; TYRANNY.

Society. Society is a large number of men who live together in the same country, and who deal with one another.

[“Textbook of Americanism,” pamphlet, 9.]

Modern collectivists ... see society as a super-organism, as some supernatural entity apart from and superior to the sum of its individual members.

[“Collectivized ‘Rights,’ ” VOS, 138; pb 103.]

A great deal may be learned about society by studying man; but this process cannot be reversed: nothing can be learned about man by studying society—by studying the inter-relationships of entities one has never identified or defined.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 15.]

See also COLLECTIVISM; INDIVIDUALISM.

Soul-Body Dichotomy. They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth—and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.

They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost—yet such is their image of man’s nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists.

Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore? It was man’s mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and of a soul moved by mystic revelations—he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone.

[GS, FNI, 170; pb 138.]

You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness. Renounce your consciousness and you become a brute. Renounce your body and you become a fake. Renounce the material world and you surrender it to evil.

[Ibid., 175; pb 142. ]

As products of the split between man’s soul and body, there are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelations, the other to their reflexes. No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter—the enslavement of man’s body, in spirit—the destruction of his mind.

[Ibid., 171; pb 138.]

The New Intellectual ... will discard ... the soul-body dichotomy. He will discard its irrational conflicts and contradictions, such as: mind versus heart, thought versus action, reality versus desire, the practical versus the moral. He will be an integrated man, that is: a thinker who is a man of action. He will know that ideas divorced from consequent action are fraudulent, and that action divorced from ideas is suicidal. He will know that the conceptual level of psycho-epistemology—the volitional level of reason and thought—is the basic necessity of man’s survival and his greatest moral virtue. He will know that men need philosophy for the purpose of living on earth.

[“For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 59; pb 51.]

See also ANALYTIC-SYNTHETIC DICHOTOMY; CONSCIOUSNESS; EMOTIONS; EXISTENCE; HUMAN RIGHTS and PROPERTY RIGHTS; LIFE; MAN; MORAL-PRACTICAL DICHOTOMY; MYSTICS of SPIRIT and of MUSCLE; RATIONALISM vs. EMPIRICISM; RELIGION; REASON; THEORY-PRACTICE DICHOTOMY.

Soviet Russia. The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights; under socialism, the right to property (which is the right of use and disposal) is vested in “society as a whole,” i.e., in the collective, with production and distribution controlled by the state, i.e., by the government.

Socialism may be established by force, as in the Union of Soviet Socialist Repubtics—or by vote, as in Nazi (National Socialist) Germany. The degree of socialization may be total, as in Russia—or partial, as in England. Theoretically, the differences are superficial; practically, they are only a matter of time. The basic principle, in all cases, is the same.

The alleged goals of socialism were: the abolition of poverty, the achievement of general prosperity, progress, peace and human brotherhood. The results have been a terrifying failure—terrifying, that is, if one’s motive is men’s welfare.

Instead of prosperity, socialism has brought economic paralysis and/ or collapse to every country that tried it. The degree of socialization has been the degree of disaster. the consequences have varied accordingly.

In more fully socialized countries, famine was the start, the insignia announcing socialist rule—as in Soviet Russia, as in Red China, as in Cuba. In those countries, socialism reduced the people to the unspeakable poverty of the pre-industrial ages, to literal starvation, and has kept them on a stagnant level of misery.

No, it is not “just temporary,” as socialism’s apologists have been saying—for half a century. After forty-five years of government planning, Russia is still unable to solve the problem of feeding her population.

As far as superior productivity and speed of economic progress are concerned, the question of any comparisons between capitalism and socialism has been answered once and for all—for any honest person—by the present difference between West and East Berlin.

Instead of peace, socialism has introduced a new kind of gruesome lunacy into international relations—the “cold war,” which is a state of chronic war with undeclared periods of peace between wantonly sudden invasions—with Russia seizing one-third of the globe, with socialist tribes and nations at one another’s throats, with socialist India invading Goa, and communist China invading socialist India.

An eloquent sign of the moral corruption of our age is the callous complacency with which most of the socialists and their sympathizers, the “liberals,” regard the atrocities perpetrated in socialistic countries and accept rule by terror as a way of life—while posturing as advocates of “human brotherhood.” ...

In the name of “humanity,” they condone and accept the following: the abolition of all freedom and all rights, the expropriation of all property, executions without trial, torture chambers, slave-labor camps, the mass slaughter of countless millions in Soviet Russia—and the bloody horror of East Berlin, including the bullet-riddled bodies of fleeing children.

When one observes the nightmare of the desperate efforts made by hundreds of thousands of people struggling to escape from the socialized countries of Europe, to escape over barbed-wire fences, under machine-gun fire—one can no longer believe that socialism, in any of its forms, is motivated by benevolence and by the desire to achieve men’s welfare.

No man of authentic benevolence could evade or ignore so great a horror on so vast a scale.

[“The Monument Builders,” VOS, 112; pb 86.]

The collectivization of Soviet agriculture was achieved by means of a government-planned famine—planned and carried out deliberately to force peasants into collective farms; Soviet Russia’s enemies claim that fifteen million peasants died in that famine; the Soviet government admits the death of seven million.

At the end of World War II, Soviet Russia’s enemies claimed that thirty million people were doing forced labor in Soviet concentration camps (and were dying of planned malnutrition, human lives being cheaper than food); Soviet Russia’s apologists admit to the figure of twelve million people.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 34.]

When you hear the liberals mumble that Russia is not really socialistic, or that it was all Stalin’s fault, or that socialism never had a real chance in England, or that what they advocate is something that’s different somehow—you know that you are hearing the voices of men who haven’t a leg to stand on, men who are reduced to some vague hope that “somehow, my gang would have done it better.”

The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia is the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced. If service and self-sacrifice are a moral ideal, and if the “selfishness” of human nature prevents men from leaping into sacrificial furnaces, there is no reason—no reason that a mystic moralist could name—why a dictator should not push them in at the point of bayonets—for their own good, or the good of humanity, or the good of posterity, or the good of the latest bureaucrat’s latest five-year plan. There is no reason that they can name to oppose any atrocity. The value of a man’s life? His right to exist? His right to pursue his own happiness? These are concepts that belong to individualism and capitatism—to the antithesis of the altruist morality.

[“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 84; pb 69.]

Half a century ago, the Soviet rulers commanded their subjects to be patient, bear privations, and make sacrifices for the sake of “industrializing” the country, promising that this was only temporary, that industrialization would bring them abundance, and Soviet progress would surpass the capitalistic West.

Today, Soviet Russia is still unable to feed her people—while the rulers scramble to copy, borrow, or steal the technological achievements of the West. Industrialization is not a static goal; it is a dynamic process with a rapid rate of obsolescence. So the wretched serfs of a planned tribal economy, who starved while waiting for electric generators and tractors, are now starving while waiting for atomic power and interplanetary travel. Thus, in a “people’s state,” the progress of science is a threat to the people, and every advance is taken out of the people’s shrinking hides.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 29.]

Under the inept government of the Czars and with the most primitive methods of agriculture, Russia was a major grain exporter. The unusually fertile soil of the Ukraine alone was (and is) capable of feeding the entire world. Whatever natural conditions are required for growing wheat, Russia had (and has) them in overabundance. That Russia should now be on a list of hungry, wheat-begging importers, is the most damning indictment of a collectivist economy that reality can offer us.

[“Hunger and Freedom,” ARL, III, 22, 4.]

Early in 1960, Anatoly Marchenko, a twenty-two-year-old laborer in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, happened to be present when a brawl erupted among some workers in a hostel. Every person found on the scene—innocent or guilty—was arrested and sent to a Siberian prison camp. Marchenko was one of them. He escaped from the camp and fled toward the Iranian border. Fifty yards from it, he was captured. While Western “humanitarians” were loudly applauding the “new liberalism” of the Khrushchev regime, Anatoly Marchenko was convicted of high treason and sentenced to six years in Russia’s concentration camps.

My Testimony is Marchenko’s report on those years. “When I was locked up in Vladimir Prison I was often seized by despair,” he writes in his preface. “Hunger, illness, and above all helplessness, the sheer impossibility of struggling against evil, provoked me to the point where I was ready to hurl myself upon my jailers with the sole aim of being killed. Or to put an end to myself in some other way. Or to maim myself as I had seen others do.

“One thing alone prevented me, one thing alone gave me the strength to live through that nightmare: the hope that I would eventually come out and tell the whole world what I had seen and experienced. I promised myself that for the sake of this aim I would suffer and endure everything. And I gave my word on this to my comrades who were doomed to spend many more years behind bars and barbed wire.” ...

Marchenko’s account of his life in Vladimir [prison] is so horrifying that it becomes, at times, almost impossible to continue reading. Anyone who doubts the nature of the Soviet system should read every word....

For more than fifty years, the West’s liberal intellectuals have proclaimed their love for mankind, while being bored by the rivers of blood pouring out of the Soviet Union. Professing their compassion for human suffering, they have none for the victims in Russia. Unable or unwilling to give up their faith in collectivism, they evade the existence of Soviet atrocities, of terror, secret police and concentration camps—and publish glowing tributes to Soviet technology, production and art. Posturing as hurnanitarians, they man the barricades to fight the “injustice,” “exploitation,” “repression,” and “persecution” they claim to find in America: as to the full reality of such things in Russia, they keep silent.

If anyone has any doubts about the moral meaning of the liberals’ position, let him read—and reread—every detail of Marchenko’s experiences. Let him remember that these horrors are not accidental in the Soviet Union and are not a matter of a particular dictator’s character. They are inherent in the system. They are the inevitable products of a fully collectivist society.

If anyone has any doubts about the evil of establishing cultural exchange programs or of building “trade-bridges” to the Soviet Union or of buying the products of slave labor, let him remember how Marchenko felt when he stood in front of a shop window in Moscow, after his release. “That television set has cost my friends our sweat, our health, roasting in the cooler and long hours during roll-call in the rain and snow. Look closely at that polished surface: can you not see reflected in it the close-shaven head, the yellow, emaciated face, and the black cotton tunic of a convict? Maybe it’s a former friend of yours?”

[Susan Ludel, review of Anatoly Marchenko’s My Testimony, TO, July 1970, 10.]

I would advocate that which the Soviet Union fears above all else: economic boycott. I would advocate a blockade of Cuba and an economic boycott of Soviet Russia; and you would see both those regimes collapse without the loss of a single American life.

[“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 13. ]

It is immoral for the U.S. (and for all free or semi-free countries) to engage in any undertaking with Soviet Russia as a partner. It is particularly immoral if the undertaking is intellectual or cultural. Such a partnership necessarily implies and proclaims the acceptance of Soviet Russia as a peaceful, well-meaning, civilized country.

[“Comments on the Moscow Olympics,” The Intellectual Activist, Feb. 1, 1980, p. 1.]

There is only one form of protest open to the men of goodwill in the semi-free world: do not sanction the Soviet jailers of [the dissidents]—do not help them to pretend that they are the morally acceptable leaders of a civilized country. Do not patronize or support the evil pretense of the so-called “cultural exchanges”—any Soviet-government-sponsored scientists, professors, writers, artists, musicians, dancers (who are either vicious bootlickers or doomed, tortured victims). Do not patronize, support or deal with any Soviet supporters and apologists in this country: they are the guiltiest men of all.

[“The ‘Inexplicable Personal Alchemy,’ ” NL, 125.]

See also ALTRUISM; AMERICA; COLLECTIVISM; COMMUNISM; COMPROMISE; DICTATORSHIP; FASCISM and COMMUNISM/SOCIALISM; FOREIGN POLICY; INDIVIDUALISM; “LIBERALS”; PROPERTY RIGHTS; SACRIFICE; SANCTION; SOCIALLSM; STATISM: TYRANNY; UNITED NATIONS.

Space. “Space,” like “time,” is a relational concept. It does not designate an entity, but a relationship, which exists only within the universe. The universe is not in space any more than it is in time. To be “in a position” means to have a certain relationship to the boundary of some container. E.g.. you are in New York: there is a point of the earth’s surface on which you stand—that’s your spatial position: your relation to this point. All it means to say “There is space between two objects” is that they occupy different positions. In this case, you are focusing on two relationships—the relationship of one entity to its container and of another to its container—simultaneously.

The universe, therefore, cannot be anywhere. Can the universe be in Boston? Can it be in the Milky Way? Places are in the universe, not the other way around.

Is the universe then unlimited in size? No. Everything which exists is finite, including the universe. What then, you ask, is outside the universe, if it is finite? This question is invalid. The phrase “outside the universe” has no referent. The universe is everything. “Outside the universe” stands for “that which is where everything isn’t.” There is no such place. There isn’t even nothing “out there”; there is no “out there.”

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976). Lecture 2.]

See also ENTITY; EXISTENCE; METAPHYSICS; TIME; UNIVERSE.

Standard of Measurement. See Measurement.

Standard of Value. The Objectivist ethics holds man’s life as the standard of value—and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual man.

The difference between “standard” and “purpose” in this context is as follows: a “standard” is an abstract principle that serves as a measurement or gauge to guide a man’s choices in the achievement of a concrete, specific purpose. “That which is required for the survival of man qua man” is an abstract principle that applies to every individual man. The task of applying this principle to a concrete, specific purpose—the purpose of living a life proper to a rational being—belongs to every individual man, and the life he has to live is his own,

Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man—in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 19; pb 25.]

The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics—the standard by which one judges what is good or evil—is man’s life, or: that which is required for man’s survival qua man.

Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.

[Ibid., 16; pb 23.]

“Man’s survival qua man” means the terms, methods, conditions and goals required for the survival of a rational being through the whole of his lifespan—in all those aspects of existence which are open to his choice.

[Ibid., 18; pb 24.]

See also ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; LIFE; MAN; MORALITY; OBJECTIVISM; RATIONALITY; REASON; TELEOLOGICAL MEASUREMENT; ULTIMATE VALUE; VALUES; VIRTUE.

States’ Rights. The constitutional concept of “states’ rights” pertains to the division of power between local and national authorities, and serves to protect the states from the Federal government; it does not grant to a state government an unlimited, arbitrary power over its citizens or the privilege of abrogating the citizens’ individual rights.

[“Racism,” VOS, 180; pb 131.]

[George Wallace] is not a defender of individual rights, but merely of states’ rights—which is far, far from being the same thing. When he denounces “Big Government,” it is not the unlimited, arbitrary power of the state that he is denouncing, but merely its centralization—and he seeks to place the same unlimited, arbitrary power in the hands of many little governments. The break-up of a big gang into a number of warring small gangs is not a return to a constitutional system nor to individual rights nor to law and order.

[“The Presidential Candidates, 1968,” TO, June 1968, 5.]

See also “COLLECTIVE RIGHTS”; “CONSERVATIVES”; CONSTITUTION; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS.

Statism. The political expression of altruism is collectivism or statism, which holds that man’s life and work belong to the state—to society, to the group, the gang, the race, the nation—and that the state may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.

[“Introducing Objectivism,” TON, Aug. 1962, 35.]

A statist system—whether of a communist, fascist, Nazi, socialist or “welfare” type—is based on the ... government’s unlimited power, which means: on the rule of brute force. The differences among statist systems are only a matter of time and degree; the principle is the same. Under statism, the government is not a policeman, but a legalized criminal that holds the power to use physical force in any manner and for any purpose it pleases against legally disarmed, defenseless victims.

Nothing can ever justify so monstrously evil a theory. Nothing can justify the horror, the brutality, the plunder, the destruction, the starvation, the slave-labor camps, the torture chambers, the wholesale slaughter of statist dictatorships.

[“War and Peace,” TON, Oct. 1962, 44.]

Government control of a country’s economy—any kind or degree of such control, by any group, for any purpose whatsoever—rests on the basic principle of statism, the principle that man’s life belongs to the state.

[“Conservatism: An Obituary,” CUI. 192.]

A statist is a man who believes that some men have the right to force, coerce, enslave, rob, and murder others. To be put into practice, this belief has to be implemented by the political doctrine that the government—the state—has the right to initiate the use of physical force against its citizens. How often force is to be used, against whom, to what extent, for what purpose and for whose benefit, are irrelevant questions. The basic principle and the ultimate results of all statist doctrines are the same: dictatorship and destruction. The rest is only a matter of time.

[“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business. CUI, 47.]

If the term “statism” designates concentration of power in the state at the expense of individual liberty, then Nazism in politics was a form of statism. In principle, it did not represent a new approach to government: it was a continuation of the political absolutism—the absolute monarchies, the oligarchies, the theocracies, the random tyrannies—which has characterized most of human history.

In degree, however, the total state does differ from its predecessors: it represents statism pressed to its limits, in theory and in practice. devouring the last remnants of the individual.

[Leonard Peikoff. OP. 6: pb 16.]

The ideological root of statism (or collectivism) is the tribal premise of primordial savages who, unable to conceive of individual rights, believed that the tribe is a supreme, omnipotent ruler, that it owns the lives of its members and may sacrifice them whenever it pleases to whatever it deems to be its own “good.” Unable to conceive of any social principles, save the rule of brute force, they believed that the tribe’s wishes are limited only by its physical power and that other tribes are its natural prey, to be conquered, looted, enslaved, or annihilated. The history of all primitive peoples is a succession of tribal wars and intertribal slaughter. That this savage ideology now rules nations armed with nuclear weapons, should give pause to anyone concerned with mankind’s survival.

Statism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war. It leaves men no choice but to fight to seize political power—to rob or be robbed, to kill or be killed. When brute force is the only criterion of social conduct, and unresisting surrender to destruction is the only alternative, even the lowest of men, even an animal—even a cornered rat—will fight. There can be no peace within an enslaved nation.

[“The Roots of War,” CUI, 36.]

The degree of statism in a country’s political system, is the degree to which it breaks up the country into rival gangs and sets men against one another. When individual rights are abrogated, there is no way to determine who is entitled to what; there is no way to determine the justice of anyone’s claims, desires, or interests. The criterion, therefore, reverts to the tribal concept of: one’s wishes are limited only by the power of one’s gang.

[Ibid.]

Statism—in fact and in principle—is nothing more than gang rule. A dictatorship is a gang devoted to looting the effort of the productive citizens of its own country. When a statist ruler exhausts his own country’s economy, he attacks his neighbors. It is his only means of postponing internal collapse and prolonging his rule. A country that violates the rights of its own citizens, will not respect the rights of its neighbors. Those who do not recognize individual rights, will not recognize the rights of nations: a nation is only a number of individuals.

Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.

Observe that the major wars of history were started by the more controlled economies of the time against the freer ones. For instance, World War I was started by monarchist Germany and Czarist Russia, who dragged in their freer allies. World War II was started by the alliance of Nazi Germany with Soviet Russia and their joint attack on Poland.

Observe that in World War II, both Germany and Russia seized and dismantled entire factories in conquered countries, to ship them home —white the freest of the mixed economies, the semi-capitalistic United States, sent billions worth of lend-lease equipment, including enthe factories, to its allies.

Germany and Russia needed war; the United States did not and gained nothing. (In fact, the United States lost, economically, even though it won the war: it was left with an enormous national debt, augmented by the grotesquely futile policy of supporting former allies and enemies to this day.) Yet it is capitalism that today’s peace-lovers oppose and statism that they advocate—in the name of peace.

[Ibid., 37.]

The human characteristic required by statism is docility, which is the product of hopelessness and intellectual stagnation. Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate.

[“Tax-Credits for Education,” ARL, I, 12, 1.]

The first choice—and the only one that matters—is: freedom or dictatorship, capitalism or statism.

That is the choice which today’s political leaders are determined to evade. The “liberals” are trying to put statism over by steahh—statism of a semi-socialist, semi-fascist kind—without letting the country realize what road they are taking to what ultimate goal. And while such a policy is reprehensible, there is something more reprehensible still: the policy of the “conservatives,” who are trying to defend freedom by stealth.

[“Conservatism: An Obituary,” CUI. 193.]

The statists’ epistemological method consists of endless debates about single, concrete, out-of-context, range-of-the-moment issues, never allowing them to be integrated into a sum, never referring to basic principles or ultimate consequences—and thus inducing a state of intellectual disintegration in their followers. The purpose of that verbal fog is to conceal the evasion of two fundamentals: (a) that production and prosperity are the product of men’s intelligence, and (b) that government power is the power of coercion by physical force.

Once these two facts are acknowledged, the conclusion to be drawn is inevitable: that intelligence does not work under coercion, that man’s mind will not function at the point of a gun.

[“Let Us Alone!” CUI. 141.]

See also ALTRUISM; CAPITALISM; COLLECTIVISM; COMMUNISM; “CONSERVATIVES”; DICTATORSHIP; FASCISM/NAZISM; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; INDIVIDUALISM; INTERVENTIONISM (ECONOMIC); “LIBERALS”; PHYSICAL FORCE; TRIBALISM; TYRANNY; WAR; WELFARE STATE.

“Stolen Concept,” Fallacy of. The “stolen concept” fallacy, first identified by Ayn Rand, is the fallacy of using a concept while denying the validity of its genetic roots, i.e., of an earlier concept(s) on which it logically depends.

[Leonard Peikoff, editor’s footnote to Ayn Rand’s “Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 26; pb 22.]

As they feed on stolen wealth in body, so they feed on stolen concepts in mind, and proclaim that honesty consists of refusing to know that one is stealing. As they use effects while denying causes, so they use our concepts while denying the roots and the existence of the concepts they are using.

[GS, FNI, 191; pb 154.]

When modern philosophers declare that axioms are a matter of arbitrary choice, and proceed to choose complex, derivative concepts as the alleged axioms of their alleged reasoning, one can observe that their statements imply and depend on “existence,” “consciousness,” “identity,” which they profess to negate, but which are smuggled into their arguments in the form of unacknowledged. “stolen” concepts.

[ITOE, 79.]

They proclaim that there are no entities, that nothing exists but motion, and blank out the fact that motion presupposes the thing which moves, that without the concept of entity, there can be no such concept as “motion.”

... They proclaim that there is no law of identity, that nothing exists but change, and blank out the fact that change presupposes the concepts of what changes, from what and to what, that without the law of identity no such concept as “change” is possible.

... “You cannot prove that you exist or that you’re conscious,” they chatter, blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge: the existence of something to know, of a consciousness able to know it, and of a knowledge that has learned to distinguish between such concepts as the proved and the unproved.

[GS, FNI, 191; pb 154.]

The arguments of those who attack the senses are merely variants of the fallacy of the “stolen concept.”

[ITOE, 4.]

Observe that Descartes starts his system by using “error” and its synonyms or derivatives as “stolen concepts.”

Men have been wrong, and therefore, he implies, they can never know what is right. But if they cannot, how did they ever discover that they were wrong? How can one form such concepts as “mistake” or “error” while wholly ignorant of what is correct? “Error” signifies a departure from truth; the concept of “error” logically presupposes that one has already grasped some truth. If truth were unknowable, as Descartes implies, the idea of a departure from it would be meaningless.

The same point applies to concepts denoting specific forms of error. If we cannot ever be certain that an argument is logically valid, if validity is unknowable, then the concept of “invalid” reasoning is impossible to reach or apply. If we cannot ever know that a man is sane, then the concept of “insanity” is impossible to form or define. If we cannot recognize the state of being awake, then we cannot recognize or conceptualize a state of not being awake (such as dreaming). If man cannot grasp X, then “non-X” stands for nothing.

[Leonard Peikoff, “ ‘Maybe You’re Wrong,’ ” TOF, April 1981, 9.]

Particularly since Kant, the philosophical technique of concept stealing, of attempting to negate reason by means of reason, has become a general bromide, a gimmick worn transparently thin.

[ITOE, 81.]

See also AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS; AXIOMS; CONCEPTS; HIERARCHY of KNOWLEDGE; INVALID CONCEPTS; KANT, IMMANUEL; LOGIC; PERCEPTION; TRUTH.

Style. “Style” is a particular, distinctive or characteristic mode of execution.

[“Art and Sense of Life,” RM, 51; pb 40.]

Two distinct, but interrelated, elements of a work of art are the crucial means of projecting its sense of life: the subject and the style—what an artist chooses to present and how he presents it.

The subject of an art work expresses a view of man’s existence, while the style expresses a view of man’s consciousness. The subject reveals an artist’s metaphysics, the style reveals his psycho-epistemology....

The theme of an art work is the link uniting its subject and its style. “Style” is a particular, distinctive or characteristic mode of execution. An artist’s style is the product of his own psycho-epistemology—and, by implication, a projection of his view of man’s consciousness, of its efficacy or impotence, of its proper method and level of functioning.

Predominantly (though not exclusively), a man whose normal mental state is a state of full focus, will create and respond to a style of radiant clarity and ruthless precision—a style that projects sharp outlines, cleanliness, purpose, an intransigent commitment to full awareness and clear-cut identity—a level of awareness appropriate to a universe where A is A, where everything is open to man’s consciousness and demands its constant functioning.

A man who is moved by the fog of his feelings and spends most of his time out of focus will create and respond to a style of blurred, “mysterious” murk, where outlines dissolve and entities flow into one another, where words connote anything and denote nothing, where colors float without objects, and objects float without weight—a level of awareness appropriate to a universe where A can be any non-A one chooses, where nothing can be known with certainty and nothing much is demanded of one’s consciousness.

Style is the most complex element of art, the most revealing and, often, the most baffling psychologically. The terrible inner conflicts from which artists suffer as much as (or, perhaps, more than) other men are magnified in their work. As an example: Salvador Dali, whose style projects the luminous clarity of a rational psycho-epistemology, while most (though not all) of his subjects project an irrational and revoltingly evil metaphysics. A similar, but less offensive, conflict may be seen in the paintings of Vermeer, who combines a brilliant clarity of style with the bleak metaphysics of Naturalism. At the other extreme of the stylistic continuum, observe the deliberate blurring and visual distortions of the so-called “painterly” school, from Rembrandt on down—down to the rebellion against consciousness, expressed by a phenomenon such as Cubism which seeks specifically to disintegrate man’s consciousness by painting objects as man does not perceive them (from several perspectives at once).

A writer’s style may project a blend of reason and passionate emotion (Victor Hugo)—or a chaos of floating abstractions, of emotions cut off from reality (Thomas Wolfe)—or the dry, bare, concrete-bound, humor-tinged raucousness of an intelligent reporter (Sinclair Lewis)—or the disciplined, perceptive, lucid, yet muted understatement of a represser (John O’Hara)—or the carefully superficial, over-detailed precision of an amoralist (Flaubert)—or the mannered artificiality of a second-hander (several moderns not worthy of mention).

Style conveys what may be called a “psycho-epistemological sense of life,” i.e., an expression of that level of mental functioning on which the artist feels most at home. This is the reason why style is crucially important in art—both to the artist and to the reader or viewer—and why its importance is experienced as a profoundly personal matter. To the artist, it is an expression, to the reader or viewer a confirmation, of his own consciousness—which means: of his efficacy—which means: of his self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem).

[Ibid., 50; pb 40.]

Style is not an end in itself, it is only a means to an end—the means of telling a story. The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.

The typical literary product of such writers—and of their imitators, who possess no style—are so-called “mood-studies,” popular among today’s literati, which are little pieces conveying nothing but a certain mood. Such pieces are not an art-form, they are merely finger-exercises that never develop into art.

[“Basic Principles of Literature,” RM, 78; pb 96.]

See also ART; FOCUS; IDENTITY; METAPHYSICS; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; SENSE of LIFE; STYLIZATION; SUBJECT (in ART).

Stylization. “Stylized” means condensed to essential characteristics, which are chosen according to an artist’s view of man.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 67.]

An artist does not fake reality—he stylizes it. He selects those aspects of existence which he regards as metaphysically significant—and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting the insignificant and accidental, he presents his view of existence. His concepts are not divorced from the facts of reality—they are concepts which integrate the facts and his metaphysical evaluation of the facts.

[“Art and Sense of Life,” RM, 46; pb 36.]

The dance is the silent partner of music and participates in a division of labor: music presents a stylized version of man’s consciousness in action—the dance presents a stylized version of man’s body in action.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 66.]

See also ART; DANCE; METAPHYSICAL VALUE-JUDGMENTS; PAINTING; STYLE.

Subconscious. Your subconscious is like a computer—more complex a computer than men can build—and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don’t reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance—and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted. But one way or the other, your computer gives you print-outs, daily and hourly, in the form of emotions—which are lightning-like estimates of the things around you, calculated according to your values. If you programmed your computer by conscious thinking, you know the nature of your values and emotions. If you didn’t, you don’t.

Many people, particularly today, claim that man cannot live by logic alone, that there’s the emotional element of his nature to consider, and that they rely on the guidance of their emotions. Well, ... the joke is on ... them: man’s values and emotions are determined by his fundamental view of life. The ultimate programmer of his subconscious is philosophy —the science which, according to the emotionalists, is impotent to affect or penetrate the murky mysteries of their feelings.

The quality of a computer’s output is determined by the quality of its input. If your subconscious is programmed by chance, its output will have a corresponding character. You have probably heard the computer operators’ eloquent term “gigo”—which means: “Garbage in, garbage out.” The same formula applies to the relationship between a man’s thinking and his emotions.

A man who is run by emotions is like a man who is run by a computer whose print-outs he cannot read. He does not know whether its programming is true or false, right or wrong, whether it’s set to lead him to success or destruction, whether it serves his goals or those of some evil, unknowable power. He is blind on two fronts: blind to the world around him and to his own inner world, unable to grasp reality or his own motives, and he is in chronic terror of both. Emotions are not tools of cognition. The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently: they are most helplessly in its power.

[“Philosophy: Who Needs It,” PWNI, 7; pb 5.]

The subconscious is an integrating mechanism. Man’s conscious mind observes and establishes connections among his experiences; the subconscious integrates the connections and makes them become automatic. For example, the skill of walking is acquired, after many faltering attempts, by the automatization of countless connections controlling muscular movements; once he learns to walk, a child needs no conscious awareness of such problems as posture, balance, length of step, etc.—the mere decision to walk brings the integrated total into his control.

A mind’s cognitive development involves a continual process of automatization. For example, you cannot perceive a table as an infant perceives it—as a mysterious object with four legs. You perceive it as a table, i.e., a man-made piece of furniture, serving a certain purpose belonging to a human habitation, etc.; you cannot separate these attributes from your sight of the table, you experience it as a single, indivisible percept—yet all you see is a four-legged object; the rest is an automatized integration of a vast amount of conceptual knowledge which, at one time, you had to learn bit by bit. The same is true of everything you perceive or experience; as an adult, you cannot perceive or experience in a vacuum, you do it in a certain automatized context— and the efficiency of your mental operations depends on the kind of context your subconscious has automatized.

“Learning to speak is a process of automatizing the use (i.e., the meaning and the application) of concepts. And more: all learning involves a process of automatizing, i.e., of first acquiring knowledge by fully conscious, focused attention and observation, then of establishing mental connections which make that knowledge automatic (instantly available as a context), thus freeing man’s mind to pursue further, more complex knowledge.” (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.)

The process of forming, integrating and using concepts is not an automatic, but a volitional process—i.e., a process which uses both new and automatized material, but which is directed volitionally. It is not an innate, but an acquired skill; it has to be learned—it is the most crucially important part of learning—and all of man’s other capacities depend on how well or how badly he learns it.

This skill does not pertain to the particular content of a man’s knowledge at any given age, but to the method by which he acquires and organizes knowledge—the method by which his mind deals with its content. The method programs his subconscious computer, determining how efficiently, lamely or disastrously his cognitive processes will function. The programming of a man’s subconscious consists of the kind of cognitive habits he acquires; these habits constitute his psycho-epistemology.

It is a child’s early experiences, observations and subverbal conclusions that determine this programming. Thereafter, the interaction of content and method establishes a certain reciprocity: the method of acquiring knowledge affects its content, which affects the further development of the method, and so on.

[“The Comprachicos,” NL, 192.]

Man’s values control his subconscious emotional mechanism that functions like a computer adding up his desires, his experiences, his fulfillments and frustrations—like a sensitive guardian watching and constantly assessing his relationship to reality. The key question which this computer is programmed to answer, is: What is possible to me?...

Man’s emotional mechanism works as the barometer of the efficacy or impotence of his actions.

[“Our Cultural Value-Deprivation,” TO, April 1966, 3.]

[Objectivism rejects the Freudian) theory of a dynamic unconscious—i.e., the unconscious as a mystic entity, with a will and purpose of its own unknown to the conscious mind, like an inborn demon that continually raises Hell. Strictly speaking, Objectivism does not subscribe to the idea of an unconscious at all. We use the term “subconscious” instead—and that is simply a name for the content of your mind that you are not focused on at any given moment. It is simply a repository for past information or conclusions that you were once conscious of in some form, but that are now stored beneath the threshold of consciousness. There is nothing in the subconscious besides what you acquired by conscious means. The subconscious does perform automatically certain important integrations (sometimes these are correct, sometimes not), but the conscious mind is always able to know what these are (and to correct them, if necessary). The subconscious has no purposes or values of its own, and it does not engage in diabolical manipulations behind the scenes. In that sense, it is certainly not “dynamic.”

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), question period, Lecture 12.]

See also AUTOMATIZATION; CONSCIOUSNESS; CONTEXT; EMOTIONS; FREE WILL; FREUD; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); INTROSPECTION; LOGIC; PHILOSOPHY; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLO(;Y; “PSYCHOLOGIZING”; PSYCHOLOGY; SENSE of LIFE; VALUES.

Subject (in Art). Two distinct, but interrelated, elements of a work of art are the crucial means of projecting its sense of life: the subject and the style—what an artist chooses to present and how he presents it.

The subject of an art work expresses a view of man’s existence, while the style expresses a view of man’s consciousness. The subject reveals an artist’s metaphysics, the style reveals his psycho-epistemology.

The choice of subject declares what aspects of existence the artist regards as important—as worthy of being re-created and contemplated. He may choose to present heroic figures, as exponents of man’s nature —or he may choose statistical composites of the average, the undistinguished, the mediocre—or he may choose crawling specimens of depravity. He may present the triumph of heroes, in fact or in spirit (Victor Hugo), or their struggle (Michelangelo), or their defeat (Shakespeare). He may present the folks next door: next door to palaces (Tolstoy), or to drugstores (Sinclair Lewis), or to kitchens (Vermeer), or to sewers (Zola). He may present monsters as objects of moral denunciation (Dostoevsky), or as objects of terror (Goya)—or he may demand sympathy for his monsters, and thus crawl outside the limits of the realm of values, including esthetic ones.

Whatever the case may be, it is the subject (qualified by the theme) that projects an art work’s view of man’s place in the universe.

[“Art and Sense of Life,” RM, 50; pb 40.]

The subject is not the only attribute of art, but it is the fundamental one, it is the end to which all the others are the means. In most esthetic theories, however, the end—the subject—is omitted from consideration. and only the means are regarded as esthetically relevant. Such theories set up a false dic hotomy and claim that a slob portrayed by the technical means of a genius is preferable to a goddess portrayed by the technique of an amateur. I hold that both are esthetically offensive; but while the second is merely esthetic incompetence, the first is an esthetic crime.

There is no dichotomy, no necessary conflict between ends and means. The end does not justify the means—neither in ethics nor in esthetics. And neither do the means justify the end: there is no esthetic justification for the spectacle of Remhrandt’s great artistic skill employed to portray a side of beef.

That particular painting may be taken as a symbol of everything I am opposed to in art and in literature. At the age of seven, I could not understand why anyone would wish to paint or to admire pictures of dead fish, garbage cans or fat peasant women with triple chins. Today, I understand the psychological causes of such esthetic phenomena—and the more I understand, the more I oppose them.

In art. and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other.

That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art.

Misery, disease, disaster, evil, all the negatives of human existence, are proper subjects of study in life, for the purpose of understanding and correcting them—but are not proper subjects of contemplation for contemplation’s sake. In art, and in literature, these negatives are worth re-creating only in relation to some positive, as a foil, as a contrast, as a means of stressing the positive—but not as an end in themselves.

[“The Goal of My Writing,” RM, 166; pb 166.]

See also ART; LITERATURE; METAPHYSICS; PAINTING; PSYCHO EPISTEMOLOGY; SCULPTURE; SENSE OF LIFE; STYLE.

Subjectivism.

In Metaphysics and Epistemology

Subjectivism is the belief that reality is not a firm absolute, but a fluid, plastic, indeterminate realm which can be altered, in whole or in part, by the consciousness of the perceiver—i.e., by his feelings, wishes or whims. It is the doctrine which holds that man—an entity of a specific nature, dealing with a universe of a specific nature—can, somehow, live, act and achieve his goals apart from and/or in contradiction to the facts of reality, i.e., apart from and/or in contradiction to his own nature and the nature of the universe. (This is the “mixed,” moderate or middle-of-the-road version of subjectivism. Pure or “extreme” subjectivism does not recognize the concept of identity, i.e., the fact that man or the universe or anything possesses a specific nature.)

[“Who Is the Final Authority in Ethics?” TON, Feb. 1965, 7.]

The subjective means the arbitrary, the irrational, the blindly emotional.

[“Art and Moral Treason,” RM, 148; pb 150.]

In metaphysics, “subjectivism” is the view that reality (the “object”) is dependent on human consciousness (the “subject”). In epistemology, as a result, subjectivists hold that a man need not concern himself with the facts of reality; instead, to arrive at knowledge or truth, he need merely turn his attention inward, consulting the appropriate contents of consciousness, the ones with the power to make reality conform to their dictates. According to the most widespread form of subjectivism, the elements which possess this power are feelings.

In essence, subjectivism is the doctrine that feelings are the creator of facts, and therefore men’s primary tool of cognition. If men feel it, declares the subjectivist, that makes it so.

The alternative to subjectivism is the advocacy of objectivity—an attitude which rests on the view that reality exists independent of human consciousness; that the role of the subject is not to create the object, but to perceive it; and that knowledge of reality can be acquired only by directing one’s attention outward to the facts.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 58; pb 62.]

The subjectivist denies that there is any such thing as “the truth” on a given question, the truth which corresponds to the facts. On his view, truth varies from consciousness to consciousness as the processes or contents of consciousness vary; the same statement may be true for one consciousness (or one type of consciousness) and false for another. The virtually infallible sign of the subjectivist is his refusal to say, of a statement he accepts: “It is true”; instead, he says: “It is true—for me (or for us).” There is no truth, only truth relative to an individual or a group —truth for me. for you, for him, for her, for us, for them.

[Leonard Peikoff, “Nazism and Subjectivism,” TO, Jan. 1971,9.]

Your teachers, the mystics of both schools, have reversed causality in their consciousness, then strive to reverse it in existence. They take their emotions as a cause, and their mind as a passive effect. They make their emotions their tool for perceiving reality. They hold their desires as an irreducible primary, as a fact superseding all facts. An honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of his desire. He says: “It is, therefore I want it.” They say: “I want it, therefore it is.”

They want to cheat the axiom of existence and consciousness, they want their consciousness to be an instrument not of perceiving but of creating existence, and existence to be not the object but the subject of their consciousness—they want to be that God they created in their image and likeness, who creates a universe out of a void by means of an arbitrary whim. But reality is not to be cheated. What they achieve is the opposite of their desire. They want an omnipotent power over existence ; instead, they lose the power of their consciousness. By refusing to know, they condemn themselves to the horror of a perpetual unknown.

[GS, FNI, 187; pb 150.]

There are two different kinds of subjectivism, distinguished by their answers to the question: whose consciousness creates reality? Kant rejected the older of these two, which was the view that each man’s feelings create a private universe for him. Instead, Kant ushered in the era of social subjectivism—the view that it is not the consciousness of individuals, but of groups, that creates reality. In Kant’s system, mankind as a whole is the decisive group; what creates the phenomenal world is not the idiosyncrasies of particular individuals, but the mental structure common to all men.

Later philosophers accepted Kant’s fundamental approach, but carried it a step further. If, many claimed, the mind’s structure is a brute given, which cannot be explained—as Kant had said—then there is no reason why all men should have the same mental structure. There is no reason why mankind should not be splintered into competing groups, each defined by its own distinctive type of consciousness, each vying with the others to capture and control reality.

The first world movement thus to pluralize the Kantian position was Marxism, which propounded a social subjectivism in terms of competing economic classes. On this issue, as on many others, the Nazis follow the Marxists, but substitute race for class.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 59; ph 63.]

In Ethics

Today, as in the past, most philosophers agree that the ultimate standard of ethics is whim (they call it “arbitrary postulate” or “subjective choice” or “emotional commitment”)—and the battle is only over the question of whose whim: one’s own or society’s or the dictator’s or God’s. Whatever else they may disagree about, today’s moralists agree that ethics is a subjective issue and that the three things barred from its field are: reason—mind—reatity.

If you wonder why the world is now collapsing to a lower and ever lower rung of hell, this is the reason.

If you want to save civilization, it is this premise of modern ethics—and of all ethical history—that you must challenge.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 4; pb 15.]

There are, in essence, three schools of thought on the nature of the good: the intrinsic, the subjective, and the objective.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 21.]

The subjectivist theory holds that the good bears no relation to the facts of reality, that it is the product of a man’s consciousness, created by his feelings, desires, “intuitions,” or whims, and that it is merely an “arbitrary postulate” or an “emotional commitment.”

The intrinsic theory holds that the good resides in some sort of reality, independent of man’s consciousness; the subjectivist theory holds that the good resides in man’s consciousness, independent of reality.

[Ibid.]

Ethical subjectivism, which holds that a desire or a whim is an irreducible moral primary, that every man is entitled to any desire he might feel like asserting, that all desires have equal moral validity, and that the only way men can get along together is by giving in to anything and “compromising” with anyone. It is not hard to see who would profit and who would lose by such a doctrine.

[“Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?” VOS, 86; pb 69.]

The subjectivist theory of ethics is, strictly speaking, not a theory, but a negation of ethics. And more: it is a negation of reality, a negation not merely of man’s existence, but of all existence. Only the concept of a fluid, plastic, indeterminate, Heraclitean universe could permit anyone to think or to preach that man needs no objective principles of action—that reality gives him a blank check on values—that anything he cares to pick as the good or the evil, will do—that a man’s whim is a valid moral standard, and that the only question is how to get away with it. The existential monument to this theory is the present state of our culture.

[“‘The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 34; ph 34.]

In Esthetics

A work of art is a specific entity which possesses a specific nature. If it does not, it is not a work of art. If it is merely a material object, it belongs to some category of material objects—and if it does not belong to any particular category, it belongs to the one reserved for such phenomena : junk.

“Something made by an artist” is not a definition of art. A heard and a vacant stare are not the defining characteristics of an artist.

“Something in a frame hung on a wall” is not a definition of painting.

“Something with a number of pages in a binding” is not a definition of literature.

“Something piled together” is not a definition of sculpture.

“Something made of sounds produced by anything” is not a definition of music.

“Something glued on a flat surface” is not a definition of any art. There is no art that uses glue as a medium. Blades of grass glued on a sheet of paper to represent grass might he good occupational therapy for retarded children—though I doubt it—but it is not art.

“Because I felt like it” is not a definition or validation of anything.

There is no place for whim in any human activity—if it is to be regarded as human. There is no place for the unknowable, the unintelligible, the undefinable, the non-objective in any human product.

[“Art and Cognition,” RM. pb 78.]

See also AMORALISM; ANARCHISM; ARBITRARY; ART; AXIOMS; CAUSALITY; CONSCIOUSNESS; EXISTENCE; GOD; IDENTITY; EMOTIONS; INTRINSIC THEORY of VALUES; KANT, IMMANUEL; “LIBERTARIANS”; MODERN ART; MORALITY; OBJECTIVE THEORY of VALUES; OBJECTIVISM; OBJECTIVITY; PRAGMATISM; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; PRIOR CERTAINTY of CONSCIOUSNESS; REASON; SKEPTICISM; WHIMS/WHIM-WORSHIP.

Subjectivism (Psychological). Do not confuse [amoralism] with psychological subjectivism. A psychological subjectivist is unable fully to identify his values or to prove their objective validity, but he may be profoundly consistent and loyal to them in practice (though with terrible psycho-epistemological difficulty). The amoralist does not hold subjective values; he does not hold any values.

[“Selfishness Without a Self,” PWNI, 57; pb 47.]

See also AMORALISM; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; PSYCHOLOGY.

Suffering. Suffering as such is not a value; only man’s fight against suffering, is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his fight to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. But to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim—is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values.

[GS, FNI, 226; pb 180.]

See also ALTRUISM; BENEVOLENT UNIVERSE PREMISE; COMPASSION; EMOTIONS; HAPPINESS; MALEVOLENT UNIVERSE PREMISE; MERCY; PLEASURE and PAIN; VIRTUE.

Supernaturalism. What is meant by “the supernatural”? Supposedly, a realm that transcends nature. What is nature? Nature is existence —the sum of that which is. It is usually called “nature” when we think of it as a system of interconnected, interacting entities governed by law. So “nature” really means the universe of entities acting and interacting in accordance with their identities. What, then, is “super-nature”? Something beyond the universe, beyond entities, beyond identity. It would have to be: a form of existence beyond existence—a kind of entity beyond anything man knows about entities—a something which contradicts everything man knows about the identity of that which is. In short, a contradiction of every metaphysical essential.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 2.]

They claim that they perceive a mode of being superior to your existence on this earth. The mystics of spirit call it “another dimension,” which consists of denying dimensions. The mystics of muscle call it “the future,” which consists of denying the present. To exist is to possess identity. What identity are they able to give to their superior realm? They keep telling you what it is not, but never tell you what it is. All their identifications consist of negating: God is that which no human mind can know, they say—and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge—God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.

[GS, FNI, 184; pb 148.]

There is no way to prove a “super-existence” by inference from existence ; supernaturalism can be accepted only on faith.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 2.]

See also ATHEISM; CAUSALITY; DEFINITIONS; EXISTENCE; FAITH; GOD; IDENTITY; METAPHYSICS; MIRACLES; MYSTICISM; NATURE; REASON.

T

Tabula Rasa. Since man has no automatic knowledge, he can have no automatic values; since he has no innate ideas, he can have no innate value judgments.

Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but, at birth, both are “tabula rasa.” It is man’s cognitive faculty, his mind, that determines the content of both.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 23; pb 28.]

At birth, a child’s mind is tabula rasa; he has the potential of awareness—the mechanism of a human consciousness—but no content. Speaking metaphorically, he has a camera with an extremely sensitive, unexposed film (his conscious mind), and an extremely complex computer waiting to be programmed (his subconscious). Both are blank. He knows nothing of the external world. He faces an immense chaos which he must learn to perceive by means of the complex mechanism which he must learn to operate.

If, in any two years of adult life, men could learn as much as an infant learns in his first two years, they would have the capacity of genius. To focus his eyes (which is not an innate, but an acquired skill), to perceive the things around him by integrating his sensations into percepts (which is not an innate, but an acquired skill), to coordinate his muscles for the task of crawling, then standing upright, then walking—and, ultimately, to grasp the process of concept-formation and learn to speak—these are some of an infant’s tasks and achievements whose magnitude is not equaled by most men in the rest of their lives.

[“‘The Comprachicos,” NL, 190.]

No one is born with any kind of “talent” and, therefore, every skill has to be acquired. Writers are made, not born. To be exact, writers are self-made.

[“Foreword,” WTL, v.]

See also ARISTOTLE; CONSCIOUSNESS; HIERARCHY of KNOWLEDGE; “INSTINCT”; PERCEPTION; RATIONALISM vs. EMPIRICISM; VALUES.

Tactfulness. Do not confuse appeasement with tactfulness or generosity. Appeasement is not consideration for the feelings of others, it is consideration for and compliance with the unjust, irrational and evil feelings of others. It is a policy of exempting the emotions of others from moral judgment, and of willingness to sacrifice innocent, virtuous victims to the evil malice of such emotions.

Tactfulness is consideration extended only to rational feelings. A tactful man does not stress his success or happiness in the presence of those who have suffered failure, loss or unhappiness; not because he suspects them of envy, but because he realizes that the contrast can revive and sharpen their pain. He does not stress his virtues in anyone’s presence: he takes for granted that they are recognized.

[“The Age of Envy,” NL, 160.]

See also APPEASEMENT; COMPROMISE; JUSTICE.

Taxation. In a fully free society, taxation—or, to be exact, payment for governmental services—would be voLuntary. Since the proper services of a government—the police, the armed forces, the law courts—are demonstrably needed by individual citizens and affect their interests directly, the citizens would (and should) be willing to pay for such services, as they pay for insurance.

The question of how to implement the principle of voluntary government financing—how to determine the best means of applying it in practice—is a very complex one and belongs to the field of the philosophy of law. The task of political philosophy is only to establish the nature of the principle and to demonstrate that it is practicable. The choice of a specific method of implementation is more than premature today—since the principle will be practicable only in a fully free society, a society whose government has been constitutionally reduced to its proper, basic functions.

[“Government Financing in a Free Society,” VOS, 157; pb 116.]

Any program of voluntary government financing has to be regarded as a goal for a distant future.

What the advocates of a fully free society have to know, at present, is only the principle by which that goal can be achieved.

The principle of voluntary government financing rests on the following premises: that the government is not the owner of the citizens’ income and, therefore, cannot hold a blank check on that income—that the nature of the proper governmental services must be constitutionally defined and delimited, leaving the government no power to enlarge the scope of its services at its own arbitrary discretion. Consequently, the principle of voluntary government financing regards the government as the servant, not the ruler, of the citizens—as an agent who must be paid for his services, not as a benefactor whose services are gratuitous, who dispenses something for nothing.

[Ibid., 160; pb 118.]

In view of what they hear from the experts, the people cannot be blamed for their ignorance and their helpless confusion. If an average housewife struggles with her incomprehensibly shrinking budget and sees a tycoon in a resplendent limousine, she might well think that just one of his diamond cuff links would solve all her problems. She has no way of knowing that if all the personal luxuries of all the tycoons were expropriated, it would not feed her family—and millions of other, similar families—for one week; and that the entire country would starve on the first morning of the week to follow.... How would she know it, if all the voices she hears are telling her that we must soak the rich?

No one tells her that higher taxes imposed on the rich (and the semi-rich) will not come out of their consumption expenditures, but out of their investment capital (i.e., their savings); that such taxes will mean less investment, i.e., less production, fewer jobs, higher prices for scarcer goods; and that by the time the rich have to lower their standard of living, hers will be gone, along with her savings and her husband’s job—and no power in the world (no economic power) will be able to revive the dead industries (there will be no such power left).

[“The Inverted Moral Priorities,” ARL,, III, 21, 3.]

See also CAPITALISM; DEFICIT FINANCING; FREEDOM; GOVERN MENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; INFLATION; INVESTMENT; PHYSICAL FORCE; PROPERTY RIGHTS; “REDISTRIBUTION” of WEALTH; SAVINGS.

Technology. Technology is an applied science, i.e., it translates the discoveries of theoretical science into practical application to man’s life. As such, technology is not the first step in the development of a given body of knowledge, but the last; it is not the most difficult step, but it is the ultimate step, the implicit purpose, of man’s quest for knowledge.

[“Apollo 11,” TO, Sept. 1969, 9.]

Nothing can raise a country’s productivity except technology, and technology is the final product of a complex of sciences (including philosophy), each of them kept alive and moving by the achievements of a few independent minds.

[“The Moratorium on Brains,” ARL, I, 3, 5.]

The enemies of the Industrial Revolution—its displaced persons—were of the kind that had fought human progress for centuries, by every means available. In the Middle Ages, their weapon was the fear of God. In the nineteenth century, they still invoked the fear of God—for instance, they opposed the use of anesthesia on the grounds that it defies God’s will, since God intended men to suffer. When this weapon wore out, they invoked the will of the collective, the group, the tribe. But since this weapon has collapsed in their hands, they are now reduced, like cornered animals, to baring their teeth and their souls, and to proclaiming that man has no right to exist—by the divine will of inanimate matter.

The demand to “restrict” technology is the demand to restrict man’s mind. It is nature—i.e., reality—that makes both these goals impossible to achieve. Technology can be destroyed, and the mind can be paralyzed, but neither can be restricted. Whenever and wherever such restrictions are attempted, it is the mind—not the state—that withers away.

[“The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” NL, 145.]

If you consider, not merely the length, but the kind of life men have to lead in the undeveloped parts of the world—“the quality of life,” to borrow, with full meaning, the ecologists’ meaningless catch phrase—if you consider the squalor, the misery, the helplessness, the fear, the unspeakably hard labor, the festering diseases, the plagues, the starvation, you will begin to appreciate the role of technology in man’s existence.

Make no mistake about it: it is technology and progress that the nature-lovers are out to destroy. To quote again from the Newsweek survey: “What worries ecologists is that people now upset about the environment may ultimately look to technology to solve everything ...” This is repeated over and over again; technological solutions, they claim, will merely create new problems.

[Ibid., 138.]

Whom and what are [the ecological crusaders] attacking? It is not the luxuries of the “idle rich,” but the availability of “luxuries” to the broad masses of people. They are denouncing the fact that automobiles, air conditioners and television sets are no longer toys of the rich, but are within the means of an average American worker—a beneficence that does not exist and is not fully believed anywhere else on earth.

What do they regard as the proper life for working people? A life of unrelieved drudgery, of endless, gray toil, with no rest, no travel, no pleasure—above all, no pleasure. Those drugged, fornicating hedonists do not know that man cannot live by toil alone, that pleasure is a necessity, and that television has brought more enjoyment into more lives than all the public parks and settlement houses combined.

What do they regard as luxury? Anything above the “bare necessities” of physical survival—with the explanation that men would not have to labor so hard if it were not for the “artificial needs” created by “commercialism” and “materialism.” In reality, the opposite is true: the less the return on your labor, the harder the labor. It is much easier to acquire an automobile in New York City than a meal in the jungle. Without machines and technology, the task of mere survival is a terrible, mind-and-body-wrecking ordeal. In “nature,” the struggle for food, clothing and shelter consumes all of a man’s energy and spirit; it is a losing struggle—the winner is any flood, earthquake or swarm of locusts. (Consider the 500,000 bodies left in the wake of a single flood in Pakistan; they had been men who lived without technology.) To work only for bare necessities is a luxury that mankind cannot afford.

[Ibid., 148.]

See also ECOLOGY/ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT; ECONOMIC GROWTH; NEW LEFT; POLLUTION; SCIENCE; SOUL-BODY DICHOTOMY.

Teleological Measurement. In regard to the concepts pertaining to evaluation (“value,” “emotion,” “feeling,” “desire,” etc.), the hierarchy involved is of a different kind and requires an entir;ely different type of measurement. It is a type applicable only to the psychological process of evaluation, and may be designated as “teleological measurement. ”

Measurement is the identification of a relationship—a quantitative relationship established by means of a standard that serves as a unit. Teleological measurement deals, not with cardinal, but with ordinal numbers—and the standard serves to establish a graded relationship of means to end.

For instance, a moral code is a system of teleological measurement which grades the choices and actions open to man, according to the degree to which they achieve or frustrate the code’s standard of value. The standard is the end, to which man’s actions are the means.

A moral code is a set of abstract principles; to practice it, an individual must translate it into the appropriate concretes—he must choose the particular goals and values which he is to pursue. This requires that he define his particular hierarchy of values, in the order of their importance, and that he act accordingly. Thus all his actions have to be guided by a process of teleological measurement. (The degree of uncertainty and contradictions in a man’s hierarchy of values is the degree to which he will be unable to perform such measurements and will fail in his attempts at value calculations or at purposeful action.)

Teleological measurement has to be performed in and against an enormous context: it consists of establishing the relationship of a given choice to all the other possible choices and to one’s hierarchy of values.

The simplest example of this process, which all men practice (with various degrees of precision and success), may be seen in the realm of material values—in the (implicit) principles that guide a man’s spending of money. On any level of income, a man’s money is a limited quantity; in spending it, he weighs the value of his purchase against the value of every other purchase open to him for the same amount of money, he weighs it against the hierarchy of all his other goals, desires and needs, then makes the purchase or not accordingly.

The same kind of measurement guides man’s actions in the wider realm of moral or spiritual values. (By “spiritual” I mean “pertaining to consciousness.” I say “wider” because it is man’s hierarchy of values in this realm that determines his hierarchy of values in the material or economic realm.) But the currency or medium of exchange is different. In the spiritual realm, the currency—which exists in limited quantity and must be teleologically measured in the pursuit of any value—is time, i.e., one’s life.

[ITOE, 42.]

See also CONSCIOUSNESS; LIFE; MEASUREMENT; MONEY; MORALITY; PRINCIPLES; STANDARD of VALUE; ULTIMATE VALUE; VALUES.

Teleology. See Goal-Directed Action.

Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday. In spite of its religious form (giving thanks to God for a good harvest), its essential, secular meaning is a celebration of successful production. It is a producers’ holiday. The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production. Abundance is (or was and ought to be) America’s pride—just as it is the pride of American parents that their children need never know starvation.

[“Cashing in on Hunger,” ARI,, III. 23, 1.]

See also AMERICA; CHRISTMAS; PRODUCTION; RELIGION.

Theme (Literary). The four essential attributes of a novel are: Theme—Plot—Characterization—Style.

These are attributes, not separable parts. They can be isolated conceptually for purposes of study, but one must always remember that they are interrelated and that a novel is their sum. (If it is a good novel, it is an indivisible sum.)

[“Basic Principles of Literature,” RM, 57; pb 80.]

A theme is the summation of a novel’s abstract meaning. For instance, the theme of Atlas Shrugged is: “The role of the mind in man’s existence.” The theme of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is: “The injustice of society toward its lower classes.” The theme of Gone With the Wind is: “The impact of the Civil War on Southern society.”

A theme may be specifically philosophical or it may be a narrower generalization. It may present a certain moral-philosophical position or a purely historical view, such as the portrayal of a certain society in a certain era. There are no rules or restrictions on the choice of a theme, provided it is communicable in the form of a novel. But if a novel has no discernible theme-if its events add up to nothing—it is a bad novel; its flaw is lack of integration.

Louis H. Sullivan’s famous principle of architecture, “Form follows function,” can be translated into: “Form follows purpose.” The theme of a novel defines its purpose. The theme sets the writer’s standard of selection, directing the innumerable choices he has to make and serving as the integrator of the novel.

Since a novel is a re-cr-eatiorr of reality, its theme has to be dramatized, i.e., presented in terms of action. Life is a process of action. The entire content of man’s consciousness-thoughr, knowledge, ideas, values—has only one ultimate form of expression: in his actions; and only one ultimate purpose: to guide his actions. Since the theme of a novel is an idea about or pertaining to human existence, it is in terms of its effects on or expression in human actions that that idea has to be presented.

[Ibid., 58; pb 81.]

A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated—as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.

The link between the theme and the events of a novel is an element which I call the plot-theme. It is the first step of the translation of an abstract theme into a story, without which the construction of a plot would be impossible. A “plot-theme” is the central conflict or “situation” of a story—a conflict in terms of action, corresponding to the theme and complex enough to create a purposeful progression of events.

The theme of a novel is the core of its abstract meaning—the plot-theme is the core of its events.

[Ibid., 63; pb 85.]

The theme of a novel can he conveyed only through the events of the plot, the events of the plot depend on the characterization of the men who enact them—and the characterization cannot be achieved except through the events of the plot, and the plot cannot be constructed without a theme.

This is the kind of integration required by the nature of a novel. And this is why a good novel is an indivisible sum: every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.

[Ibid., 74; pb 93.]

Those who may be interested in the chronological development of my thinking ... may observe the progression from a political theme in We the Living to a metaphysical theme in Atlas Shrugged.

[“Preface,” FNI, ii; pb viii.]

[We the Living] was published in 1936 and reissued in 1959. Its theme is: the individual against the state; the supreme value of a human life and the evil of the totalitarian state that claims the right to sacrifice it.

[FNI. 69; pb 60.]

[Anthem] was first published in England in 1938. Its theme is: the meaning of man’s ego.

[Ibid., 73; pb 64.]

[The Fountainhead] was published in 1943. Its theme is: individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul; the psychological motivations and the basic premises that produce the character of an individualist or a collectivist.

[Ibid., 77; ph 68.]

[Atlas Shrugged] was published in 1957. Its theme is: the role of the mind in man’s existence—and, as corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest.

[Ibid., 103; pb 88.]

See also ART; CHARACTERIZATION; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); LITERATURE; PLOT; PLOT THEME; SOUL-BODY DICHOTOMY; STYLE; SUBJECT (IN ART).

Theory-Practice Dichotomy. [Consider the catch phrase:] “This may be good in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice.” What is a theory? It is a set of abstract principles purporting to be either a correct description of reality or a set of guidelines for man’s actions. Correspondence to reality is the standard of value by which one estimates a theory. If a theory is inapplicable to reality, by what standard can it be estimated as “good”? If one were to accept that notion, it would mean: a. that the activity of man’s mind is unrelated to reality; b. that the purpose of thinking is neither to acquire knowledge nor to guide man’s actions. (The purpose of that catch phrase is to invalidate man’s conceptual faculty.)

[“Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 17; pb 14.]

See also PLATONIC REALISM; PRAGMATISM; PRINCIPLES; RATIONALISM vs. EMPIRICISM; SOUL-BODY DICHOTOMY.

Thought/Thinking. The process of thinking ... is the process of defining identity and discovering causal connections.

[GS, FNI, 189; pb 152.]

The faculty that works by means of concepts, is: reason. The process is thinking.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 12; pb 20.]

All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identify it as a solid object; he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

[GS, FNI, 153; pb 125.]

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call “free will” is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

[Ibid., 155; pb 127.]

Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one’s consciousness is volitional.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 13; pb 20.]

Psychologically, the choice “to think or not” is the choice “to focus or not.” Existentially, the choice “to focus or not” is the choice “to be conscious or not.” Metaphysically, the choice “to be conscious or not” is the choice of life or death.

[Ibid., 13; pb 21.]

Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think-not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment-on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict “It is.” Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say “It is,” you are refusing to say “I am.” By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: ‘Who am I to know?’—he is declaring: “Who am I to live?”

This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.

[GS, FNI, 155; pb 127.]

If devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

[Ibid.]

Thinking is a delicate, difficult process, which man cannot perform unless knowledge is his goal, logic is his method, and the judgment of his mind is his guiding absolute. Thought requires selfishness, the fundamental selfishness of a rational faculty that places nothing above the integrity of its own function.

A man cannot think if he places something-anything-above his perception of reality. He cannot follow the evidence unswervingly or uphold his conclusions intransigently, while regarding compliance with other men as his moral imperative, self-abasement as his highest virtue, and sacrifice as his primary duty. He cannot use his brain while surrendering his sovereignty over it, i.e., while accepting his neighbors as its owner and term-setter.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 334; pb 308.]

The concept “thought” is formed by retaining the distinguishing characteristics of the psychological action (a purposefully directed process of cognition) and by omitting the particular contents as well as the degree of the intellectual effort’s intensity.

[ITOE, 41.]

The intensity of a process of thought and of the intellectual effort required varies according to the scope of its content; it varies when one grasps the concept “table” or the concept “justice,” when one grasps that 2 + 2 = 4 or that e = mc².

[[bid., 40.]

See also CAUSALITY; CONCEPT-FORMATION; CONCEPTS; CREATION ; EVASION; FOCUS; FREE WILL; IDENTITY; IMAGINATION; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); IRRATIONALITY; LOGIC; RATIONALITY; REASON ; SELFISHNESS; UNDERSTANDING; VIRTUE.

Thrillers. “Thrillers” are detective, spy or adventure stories. Their basic characteristic is conflict, which means: a clash of goals, which means: purposeful action in pursuit of values. Thrillers are the product, the popular offshoot, of the Romantic school of art that sees man, not as a helpless pawn of fate, but as a being who possesses volition, whose life is directed by his own value-choices. Romanticism is a value-oriented, morality-centered movement: its material is not journalistic minutiae, but the abstract, the essential, the universal principles of man’s nature -and its basic literary commandment is to portray man “as he might be and ought to be.”

Thrillers are a simplified, elementary version of Romantic literature. They are not concerned with a delineation of values, but, taking certain fundamental values for granted, they are concerned with only one aspect of a moral being’s existence: the battle of good against evil in terms of purposeful action-a dramatized abstraction of the basic pattern of: choice, goal, conflict, danger, struggle, victory.

Thrillers are the kindergarten arithmetic, of which the higher mathematics is the greatest novels of world literature. Thrillers deal only with the skeleton-the plot structure—to which serious Romantic literature adds the Hesh, the blood, the mind. The plots in the novels of Victor Hugo or Dostoevsky are pure thriller-plots, unequaled and unsurpassed by the writers of thrillers....

Thrillers are the last refuge of the qualities that have vanished from modern literature: life, color, imagination; they are like a mirror still holding a distant reflection of man.

[“Bootleg Romanticism,” RM, 124; pb 132.]

Nobody takes thrillers literally, nor cares about their specific events, nor harbors any frustrated desire to become a secret agent or a private eye. Thrillers are taken symbolically; they dramatize one of man’s widest and most crucial abstractions: the abstraction of moral conflict.

What people seek in thrillers is the spectacle of man’s efficacy: of his ability to fight for his values and to achieve them. What they see is a condensed, simplified pattern, reduced to its essentials: a man fighting for a vital goal—overcoming one obstacle after another-facing terrible dangers and risks-persisting through an excruciating struggle-and winning.

[Ibid., 133; pb 138.]

What men find in the spectacle of the ultimate triumph of the good is the inspiration to fight for one’s own values in the moral conflicts of one’s own life.

[Ibid., 134; pb 139.]

See also LITERATURE; POPULAR LITERATURE; ROMANTICISM; VALUES.

Time. Time is a measurement of motion; as such, it is a type of relationship. Time applies only within the universe, when you define a standard-such as the motion of the earth around the sun. If you take that as a unit, you can say: “This person has a certain relationship to that motion; he has existed for three revolutions; he is three years old.” But when you get to the universe as a whole, obviously no standard is applicable. You cannot get outside the universe. The universe is eternal in the literal sense: non-temporal, out of time.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), question period, Lecture 2.]

See also EXISTENCE; MEASUREMENT; MOTION; SPACE; UNIVERSE.

Trader Principle. The symbol of all relationships among [rational] men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does not ask to be paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for his flaws. A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his soul as alms. Just as he does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit-his love, his friendship, his esteem-except in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure, which he receives from men he can respect. The mystic parasites who have, throughout the ages, reviled the traders and held them in contempt, while honoring the beggars and the looters, have known the secret motive of their sneers: a trader is the entity they dread-a man of justice.

[GS, FNI, 163; pb 133.]

There is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.

The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material. It is the principle of justice.

A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. He does not treat men as masters or slaves, but as independent equals. He deals with men by means of a free, voluntary, unforced, uncoerced exchange-an exchange which benefits both parties by their own independent judgment. A trader does not expect to be paid for his defaults, only for his achievements. He does not switch to others the burden of his failures, and he does not mortgage his life into bondage to the failures of others.

In spiritual issues-(by “spiritual” I mean: “pertaining to man’s consciousness”) —the currency or medium of exchange is different, but the principle is the same. Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character. Only a brute or an altruist would claim that the appreciation of another person’s virtues is an act of selflessness, that as far as one’s own selfish interest and pleasure are concerned, it makes no difference whether one deals with a genius or a fool, whether one meets a hero or a thug, whether one marries an ideal woman or a slut. In spiritual issues, a trader is a man who does not seek to be loved for his weaknesses or flaws, only for his virtues, and who does not grant his love to the weaknesses or the flaws of others, only to their virtues

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 28; pb 31.]

The trader and the warrior have been fundamental antagonists throughout history. Trade does not flourish on battlefields, factories do not produce under bombardments, profits do not grow on rubble. Capitalism is a society of traders—for which it has been denounced by every would-be gunman who regards trade as “selfish” and conquest as “noble.”

[“The Roots of War,” CUI, 38.]

See also ALTRUISM CAPITALISM; ECONOMIC POWER vs. POLITICAL POWER; FREE MARKET ; FREEDOM; JUSTICE; LOVE; MARKET VALUE; PHYSICAL. FORCE; PURCHASING POWER; SELFISHNESS; SERVICE; SOUL-BODY DICHOTOMY; VALUES; WAR.

Tradition. The “neo-conservatives” are now trying to tell us that America was the product of “faith in revealed truths” and of uncritical respect for the traditions of the past (!).

It is certainly irrational to use the “new” as a standard of value, to believe that an idea or a policy is good merely because it is new. But it is much more preposterously irrational to use the “old” as a standard of value, to claim that an idea or a policy is good merely because it is ancient. The “liberals” are constantly asserting that they represent the future, that they are “new,” “progressive,” “forward-looking,” etc.-and they denounce the “conservatives” as old-fashioned representatives of a dead past. The “conservatives” concede it, and thus help the “liberals” to propagate one of today’s most grotesque inversions: collectivism, the ancient, frozen, status society, is offered to us in the name of progress—while capitalism, the only free, dynamic, creative society ever devised, is defended in the name of stagnation .

The plea to preserve “Tradition” as such, can appeal only to those who have given up or to those who never intended to achieve anything in life. It is a plea that appeals to the worst elements in men and rejects the best: it appeals to fear, sloth, cowardice, conformity, self-doubt-and rejects creativeness, originality, courage, independence, self-reliance. It is an outrageous plea to address to human beings anywhere, but particularly outrageous here, in America, the country based on the principle that man must stand on his own feet, live by his own judgment, and move constantly forward as a productive, creative innovator.

The argument that we must respect “tradition” as such, respect it merely because it is a “tradition,” means that we must accept the values other men have chosen, merely because other men have chosen them-with the necessary implication of: who are we to change them? The affront to a man’s self-esteem, in such an argument, and the profound contempt for man’s nature are obvious.

[“Conservatism: An Obituary,” CUI, 198.]

America was created by men who broke with all political traditions and who originated a system unprecedented in history, relying on nothing but the “unaided” power of their own intellect.

[ibid.]

See also AMERICA; ANTI-CONCEPTUAL MENTALITY; “CONSERVATIVES ”; CULTURE; “ETHNICITY”; FAITH; HISTORY; INDIVIDUALISM; TRIBALISM.

Tribal Premise (in Economics). The basic premise of crude, primitive tribal collectivism [is] the notion that wealth belongs to the tribe or to society as a whole, and that every individual has the “right” to “participate” in it.

[Review of Shirley Scheibla’s Poverty Is Where the Money Is, TO, Aug. 1969, 11.]

The tribal premise underlies today’s political economy. That premise is shared by the enemies and the champions of capitalism alike; it provides the former with a certain inner consistency, and disarms the latter by a subtle, yet devastating aura of moral hypocrisy—as witness, their attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of “the common good” or “service to the consumer” or “the best allocation of resources.” (Whose resources?)

If capitalism is to be understood, it is this tribal premise that has to be checked-and challenged.

Mankind is not an entity, an organism, or a coral bush. The entity involved in production and trade is man. It is with the study of man-not of the loose aggregate known as a “community”—that any science of the humanities has to begin.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 14.]

Political economists-including the advocates of capitalism-defined their science as the study of the management or direction or organization or manipulation of a “community’s” or a nation’s “resources.” The nature of these “resources” was not defined; their communal ownership was taken for granted-and the goal of political economy was assumed to be the study of how to utilize these “resources” for “the common good.”

The fact that the principal “resource” involved was man himself, that he was an entity of a specific nature with specific capacities and requirements, was given the most superficial attention, if any. Man was regarded simply as one of the factors of production, along with land, forests, or mines-as one of the less significant factors, since more study was devoted to the influence and quality of these others than to his role or quality.

Political economy was, in effect, a science starting in midstream: it observed that men were producing and trading, it took for granted that they had always done so and always would-it accepted this fact as the given, requiring no further consideration-and it addressed itself to the problem of how to devise the best way for the “community” to dispose of human effort.

[ibid., 12.]

A great deal may be learned about society by studying man; but this process cannot be reversed: nothing can be learned about man by studying society-by studying the inter-relationships of entities one has never identified or defined. Yet that is the methodology adopted by most political economists. Their attitude, in effect, amounts to the unstated, implicit postulate: “Man is that which fits economic equations.” Since he obviously does not, this leads to the curious fact that in spite of the practical nature of their science, political economists are oddly unable to relate their abstractions to the concretes of actual existence.

[Ibid., 15.]

See also CAPITALISM; COLLECTIVISM; “COMMON GOOD”; INDIVIDUALISM ; MAN; PRODUCTION; “REDISTRIBUTION” of WEALTH; SERVICE; TRIBALISM.

Tribalism. Tribalism (which is the best name to give to all the group manifestations of the anti-conceptual mentality) is a dominant element in Europe, as a reciprocally reinforcing cause and result of Europe’s long history of caste systems, of national and local (provincial) chauvinism, of rule by brute force and endless, bloody wars. As an example, observe the Balkan nations, which are perennially bent upon exterminating one another over minuscule differences of tradition or language. Tribalism had no place in the United States-until recent decades. It could not take root here, its imported seedlings were withering away and turning to slag in the melting pot whose fire was fed by two inexhaustible sources of energy: individual rights and objective law; these two were the only protection man needed.

[“The Missing Link,” PWNI, 51; pb 42.]

What are the nature and the causes of modern tribalism? Philosophically, tribalism is the product of irrationalism and collectivism. It is a logical consequence of modern philosophy. If men accept the notion that reason is not valid, what is to guide them and how are they to live? Obviously, they will seek to join some group-any group-which claims the ability to lead them and to provide some sort of knowledge acquired by some sort of unspecified means. If men accept the notion that the individual is helpless, intellectually and morally, that he has no mind and no rights, that he is nothing, but the group is all, and his only moral significance lies in selfless service to the group-they will be pulled obediently to join a group. But which group? Well, if you believe that you have no mind and no moral value, you cannot have the confidence to make choices-so the only thing for you to do is to join an unchosen group, the group into which you were born, the group to which you were predestined to belong by the sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient power of your body chemistry.

This, of course, is racism. But if your group is small enough, it will not be called “racism”: it will be called “ethnicity.”

[“Global Balkanization,” pamphlet, 5.]

A symptom of the tribal mentality’s self-arrested, perceptual level of development may be observed in the tribalists’ position on language.

Language is a conceptual tool—a code of visual-auditory symbols that denote concepts. To a person who understands the function of language, it makes no difference what sounds are chosen to name things, provided these sounds refer to clearly defined aspects of reality. But to a tribalist, language is a mystic heritage, a string of sounds handed down from his ancestors and memorized, not understood. To him, the importance lies in the perceptual concrete, the souud of a word, not its meaning. He would kill and die for the privilege of printing on every postage stamp the word “postage” for the English-speaking and the word “postes” for the French-speaking citizens of his bilingual Canada. Since most of the ethnic languages are not full languages, but merely dialects or local corruptions of a country’s language, the distinctions which the tribalists fight for are not even as big as that.

But, of course, it is not for their language that the tribalists are fighting : they are fighting to protect their level of awareness, their mental passivity, their obedience to the tribe, and their desire to ignore the existence of outsiders.

[Ibid., 8.]

It is obvious why the morality of altruism is a tribal phenomenon. Prehistorical men were physically unable to survive without clinging to a tribe for leadership and protection against other tribes. The cause of altruism’s perpetuation into civilized eras is not physical, but psycho-epistemological : the men of self-arrested, perceptual mentality are unable to survive without tribal leadership and “protection” against reality. The doctrine of self-sacrifice does not offend them: they have no sense of self or of personal value-they do not know what it is that they are asked to sacrifice-they have no firsthand inkling of such things as intellectual integrity, love of truth, personally chosen values, or a passionate dedication to an idea. When they hear injunctions against “selfishness,” they believe that what they must renounce is the brute, mindless whim-worship of a tribal lone wolf. But their leaders—the theoreticians of altruism-know better. Immanuel Kant knew it; John Dewey knew it; B. F. Skinner knows it; John Rawls knows it. Observe that it is not the mindless brute, but reason, intelligence, ability, merit, self-confidence, self-esteem that they are out to destroy.

Today, we are seeing a ghastly spectacle: a magnificent scientific civilization dominated by the morality of prehistorical savagery.

[“Selfishness Without a Self,” PWNI, 61; pb 50.]

See also ALTRUISM; AMERICA; AMORALISM; ANTI-CONCEPTUAL MENTALITY; COLLECTIVISM; “ETHNICITY”; INDIVIDUALISM; IRRATIONALISM; KANT, IMMANUEL; LANGUAGE; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; RACISM; REASON; SELF; SELF-ESTEEM; SELFISHNESS; STATISM.

Truth. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

[GS, FNI, 154; pb 126.]

Truth is the product of the recognition (i.e., identification) of the facts of reality. Man identifies and integrates the facts of reality by means of concepts. He retains concepts in his mind by means of definitions. He organizes concepts into propositions-and the truth or falsehood of his propositions rests, not only on their relation to the facts he asserts, but also on the truth or falsehood of the definitions of the concepts he uses to assert them, which rests on the truth or falsehood of his designations of essential characteristics.

[ITOE, 63.]

The truth or falsehood of all of man’s conclusions, inferences, thought and knowledge rests on the truth or falsehood of his definitions.

[Ibid., 65.]

Every truth about a given existent(s) reduces, in basic pattern, to: “X is: one or more of the things which it is.” The predicate in such a case states some characteristic(s) of the subject; but since it is a characteristic of the subject, the concept(s) designating the subject in fact includes the predicate from the outset. If one wishes to use the term “tautology” in this context, then all truths are “tautological.” (And, by the same reasoning, all falsehoods are self-contradictions.)

When making a statement about an existent, one has, ultimately, only two alternatives: “X (which means X, the existent, including all its characteristics) is what it is”—or: “X is not what it is.” The choice between truth and falsehood is the choice between “tautology” (in the sense explained) and self-contradiction.

In the realm of propositions, there is only one basic epistemological distinction: truth vs. falsehood, and only one fundamental issue: By what method is truth discovered and validated? To plant a dichotomy at the base of human knowledge-to claim that there are opposite methods of validation and opposite types of truth [as do the advocates of the “analytic-synthetic” dichotomy] is a procedure without grounds or justification.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 136.]

The existence of human volition cannot be used to justify the theory that there is a dichotomy of propositions or of truths. Propositions about metaphysical facts, and propositions about man-made facts, do not have different characteristics qua propositions. They differ merely in their subject matter, but then so do the propositions of astronomy and of immunology. Truths about metaphysical and about man-made facts are learned and validated by the same process: by observation; and, qua truths, both are equally necessary. Some facts are not necessary, but all truths are.

Truth is the identification of a fact of reality. Whether the fact in question is metaphysical or man-made, the fact determines the truth: if the fact exists, there is no alternative in regard to what is true. For instance, the fact that the U.S. has 50 states was not metaphysically necessary-but as long as this is men’s choice, the proposition that “The U.S. has 50 states” is necessarily true. A true proposition must describe the facts as they are. In this sense, a “necessary truth” is a redundancy, and a “contingent truth” a self-contradiction.

[Ibid., 150.]

[Consider the catch phrase:] “It may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.” What is the meaning of the concept “truth”? Truth is the recognition of reality. (This is known as the correspondence theory of truth.) The same thing cannot be true and untrue at the same time and in the same respect. That catch phrase, therefore, means: a. that the Law of Identity is invalid; b. that there is no objectively perceivable reality, only some indeterminate flux which is nothing in particular, i.e., that there is no reality (in which case, there can be no such thing as truth); or c. that the two debaters perceive two different universes (in which case, no debate is possible). (The purpose of the catch phrase is the destruction of objectivity.)

[“Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 16; pb 14.]

See also ANALYTIC-SYNTHETIC DICHOTOMY; CONCEPTS; CONTRADICTIONS; DEFINITIONS; EXISTENCE; FALSEHOOD; HONESTY; IDENTITY; LOGIC; METAPHYSICAL vs. MAN-MADE; NECESSITY; OBJECTIVITY; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; PROPOSITIONS; REASON.

Tyranny. Tyranny is any political system (whether absolute monarchy or fascism or communism) that does not recognize individual rights (which necessarily include property rights). The overthrow of a political system by force is justified only when it is directed against tyranny: it is an act of self-defense against those who rule by force. For example, the American Revolution.

[“From a Symposium,” NL, 96.]

See also DICTATORSHIP; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; PHYSICAL FORCE; POLITICS; PROPERTY RIGHTS; STATISM.

U

Ultimate Value. An ultimate value is that final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means-and it sets the standard by which all lesser goals are evaluated. An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.

Without an ultimate goal or end, there can be no lesser goals or means: a series of means going off into an infinite progression toward a nonexistent end is a metaphysical and epistemological impossibility. It is only an ultimate goal, an end in itself, that makes the existence of values possible. Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action. Epistemologically, the concept of “value” is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of “life.” To speak of “value” as apart from “life” is worse than a contradiction in terms. “It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible.”

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 7; pb 17.]

The maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not two separate issues. To hold one’s own life as one’s ultimate value, and one’s own happiness as one’s highest purpose are two aspects of the same achievement. Existentially, the activity of pursuing rational goals is the activity of maintaining one’s life; psychologically, its result, reward and concomitant is an emotional state of happiness. It is by experiencing happiness that one lives one’s life, in any hour, year or the whole of it. And when one experiences the kind of pure happiness that is an end in itself-the kind that makes one think: “This is worth living for”—what one is greeting and affirming in emotional terms is the metaphysical fact that life is an end in itself.

[Ibid., 25; pb 29.]

See also EMOTIONS; GOAL-DIRECTED ACTION; HAPPINESS; HIERARCHY of KNOWLEDGE; LIFE; METAPHYSICAL; STANDARD of VALUE; “STOLEN CONCEPT,” FALLACY of; VALUES.

Understanding. To understand means to focus on the content of a given subject (as against the sensory-visual or auditory-form in which it is communicated), to isolate its essentials, to establish its relationship to the previously known, and to integrate it with the appropriate categories of other subjects. Integration is the essential part of understanding.

The predominance of memorizing is proper only in the first few years of a child’s education, while he is observing and gathering perceptual material. From the time he reaches the conceptual level (i.e., from the time he learns to speak), his education requires a progressively larger scale of understanding and progressively smaller amounts of memorizing.

[“The Comprachicos,” NI 208.]

See also CONCEPTS; EDUCATION; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); KNOWLEDGE; LEARNING; PERCEPTION; REASON.

Unemployment. See Unions.

Unions. The artificially high wages forced on the economy by compulsory unionism imposed economic hardships on other groups-particularly on non-union workers and on unskilled labor, which was being squeezed gradually out of the market. Today’s widespread unemployment is the result of organized labor’s privileges and of allied measures, such as minimum wage laws. For years, the unions supported these measures and sundry welfare legislation, apparently in the belief that the costs would be paid by taxes imposed on the rich. The growth of inflation has shown that the major victim of government spending and of taxation is the middle class. Organized labor is part of the middle class-and the actual value of labor’s forced “social gains” is now being wiped out.

[“A Preview,” ARL, 1, 23, 2.]

Organized labor has been much more sensitive to the danger of government power and much more aware of ideological issues. Its spokesmen have fought the government in proper, morally confident terms whenever they saw a threat to their rights. (To name a few examples of such occasions: the attempt at labor conscription in World War II, the issue of U.S. contributions to the Soviet-dominated International Labor Organization, President Kennedy’s attempt to impose guidelines in the steel crisis of 1962.) Labor’s concern was aroused only in defense of its rights; still, whoever defends his own rights defends the rights of all. But labor was pursuing a contradictory policy, which could not be maintained for long. In many issues-notably in its support of welfare-state legislation - labor violated the rights of others and fertilized the growth of the government’s power. And, today, labor is in line to become the next major victim of advancing statism.

It was business, not labor, that initiated the policy of government intervention in the economy (as long ago as the nineteenth century)— and business was the first victim. Labor adopted the same policy and will meet the same fate. He who lives by a legalized sword, will perish by a legalized sword.

[“The Moratorium on Brains, ARL, I, 3, 2.]

See also CAPITALISM; FREE MARKET; INFLATION; MIDDLE CLASS; MONEY: POVERTY.

Unit. The ability to regard entities as units is man’s distinctive method of cognition, which other living species are unable to follow.

A unit is an existent regarded as a separate member of a group of two or more similar members. (Two stones are two units; so are two square feet of ground, if regarded as distinct parts of a continuous stretch of ground.) Note that the concept “unit” involves an act of consciousness (a selective focus, a certain way of regarding things), but that it is not an arbitrary creation of consciousness: it is a method of identification or classification according to the attributes which a consciousness observes in reality. This method permits any number of classifications and cross-classifications : one may classify things according to their shape or color or weight or size or atomic structure; but the criterion of classification is not invented, it is perceived in reality. Thus the concept “unit” is a bridge between metaphysics and epistemology: units do not exist qua units, what exists are things, but units are things viewed by a consciousness in certain existing relationships.

[ITOE, 7.]

With the grasp of the (implicit) concept “unit,” man reaches the conceptual level of cognition which consists of two interrelated fields: the conceptual and the mathematical. The process of concept-formation is, in large part, a mathematical process.

[Ibid., 8.]

A “number” is a mental symbol that integrates units into a single larger unit (or subdivides a unit into fractions) with reference to the basic number of “one,” which is the basic mental symbol of “unit.” Thus “5” stands for | | | | | . (Metaphysically, the referents of ”5” are any five existents of a specified kind; epistemologically, they are represented by a single symbol.)

[Ibid., 84.]

See also CONCEPT-FORMATION; CONCEPTS; EPISTEMOLOGY; IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); MEASUREMENT; METAPHYSICS; NUMBER; UNIT-ECONOMY; WORDS.

Unit-Economy. Since consciousness is a specific faculty, it has a specific nature or identity and, therefore, its range is limited: it cannot perceive everything at once; since awareness, on all its levels, requires an active process, it cannot do everything at once. Whether the units with which one deals are percepts or concepts, the range of what man can hold in the focus of his conscious awareness at any given moment, is limited. The essence, therefore, of man’s incomparable cognitive power is the ability to reduce a vast amount of information to a minimal number of units-which is the task performed by his conceptual faculty. And the principle of unit-economy is one of that faculty’s essential guiding principles.

[ITOE, 83.]

In any given moment, concepts enable man to hold in the focus of his conscious awareness much more than his purely perceptual capacity would permit. The range of man’s perceptual awareness-the number of percepts he can deal with at any one time-is limited. He may be able to visualize four or five units-as, for instance, five trees. He cannot visualize a hundred trees or a distance of ten light-years. It is only his conceptual faculty that makes it possible for him to deal with knowledge of that kind.

[“The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” RM, 19; pb 17. ]

Conceptualization is a method of expanding man’s consciousness by reducing the number of its content’s units-a systematic means to an unlimited integration of cognitive data.

A concept substitutes one symbol (one word) for the enormity of the perceptual aggregate of the concretes it subsumes. In order to perform its unit-reducing function, the symbol has to become automatized in a man’s consciousness, i.e., the enormous sum of its referents must be instantly (implicitly) available to his conscious mind whenever he uses that concept, without the need of perceptual visualization or mental summarizing-in the same manner as the concept “5” does not require that he visualize five sticks every time he uses it.

For example, if a man has fully grasped the concept “justice,” he does not need to recite to himself a long treatise on its meaning, while he listens to the evidence in a court case. The mere sentence “I must be just” holds that meaning in his mind automatically, and leaves his conscious attention free to grasp the evidence and to evaluate it according to a complex set of principles. (And, in case of doubt, the conscious recall of the precise meaning of “justice” provides him with the guidelines he needs.)

It is the principle of unit-economy that necessitates the definition of concepts in terms of essential characteristics. If, when in doubt, a man recalls a concept’s definition, the essential characteristic(s) will give him an instantaneous grasp of the concept’s meaning, i.e., of the nature of its referents.

[ITOE., 85.]

See also AUTOMATIZATION; CONSCIOUSNESS; DEFINITIONS; IDENTITY; MEANING (of CONCEPTS); PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; “RAND’S RAZOR”; WORDS.

United Nations. Psychologically, the U.N. has contributed a great deal to the gray swamp of demoralization—of cynicism, bitterness, hopelessness, fear and nameless guilt-which is swallowing the Western world. But the communist world has gained a moral sanction, a stamp of civilized respectability from the Western world-it has gained the West’s assistance in deceiving its victims-it has gained the status and prestige of an equal partner, thus establishing the notion that the difference between human rights and mass slaughter is merely a difference of political opinion.

The declared goal of the communist countries is the conquest of the world. What they stand to gain from a collaboration with the (relatively) free countries is the latter’s material, financial, scientific, and intellectual resources; the free countries have nothing to gain from the communist countries. Therefore, the only form of common policy or compromise possible between two such parties is the policy of property owners who make piecemeal concessions to an armed thug in exchange for his promise not to rob them.

The U.N. has delivered a larger part of the globe’s surface and population into the power of Soviet Russia than Russia could ever hope to conquer by armed force. The treatment accorded to Katanga versus the treatment accorded to Hungary, is a sufficient example of U.N. policies. An institution allegedly formed for the purpose of using the united might of the world to stop an aggressor, has become means of using the united might of the world to force the surrender of one helpless country after another into the aggressor’s power.

Who, but a concrete-bound epistemological savage, could have expected any other results from such an “experiment in collaboration”? What would you expect from a crime-fighting committee whose board of directors included the leading gangsters of the community?

[“The Anatomy of Compromise,” CUI, 148.]

When an institution reaches the degree of corruption, brazen cynicism and dishonor demonstrated by the U.N. in its shameful history, to discuss it at length is to imply that its members and supporters may possibly be making an innocent error about its nature-which is no longer possible. There is no margin for error about a monstrosity that was created for the alleged purpose of preventing wars by uniting the world against any aggressor, but proceeded to unite it against any victim of aggression. The expulsion of a charter member, the Republic of China —an action forbidden by the U.N.’s own Charter—was a “moment of truth,” a naked display of the United Nations’ soul.

What was Red China’s qualification for membership in the U.N.? ‘The fact that her government seized power by force, and has maintained it for twenty-two years by terror. What disqualified Nationalist China? The fact that she was a friend of the United States.

[“The Shanghai Gesture,” ARL, I, 14, 1.]

See also COMMUNISM; COMPROMISE; FOREIGN POLICY; SANCTION; SOVIET RUSSIA; WAR.

Universe. The universe is the total of that which exists-not merely the earth or the stars or the galaxies, but everything. Obviously then there can be no such thing as the “cause” of the universe....

Is the universe then unlimited in size? No. Everything which exists is finite, including the universe. What then, you ask, is outside the universe, if it is finite? This question is invalid. The phrase “outside the universe” has no referent. The universe is everything. “Outside the universe” stands for “that which is where everything isn’t.” There is no such place. There isn’t even nothing “out there”: there is no “out there.”

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 2.]

To grasp the axiom that existence exists, means to grasp the fact that nature, i.e., the universe as a whole, cannot be created or annihilated, that it cannot come into or go out of existence. Whether its basic constituent elements are atoms, or subatomic particles, or some yet undiscovered forms of energy, it is not ruled by a consciousness or by will or by chance, but by the Law of Identity. All the countless forms, motions, combinations and dissolutions of elements within the universe-from a floating speck of dust to the formation of a galaxy to the emergence of life-are caused and determined by the identities of the elements involved. Nature is the metaphysically given—i.e., the nature of nature is outside the power of any volition.

[“The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 30; pb 25.]

See also CAUSALITY; EXISTENCE; IDENTITY; INFINITY; METAPHYSICAL vs. MAN-MADE; METAPHYSICS; NATURE; SPACE; TIME.

U.S.S.R. See Soviet Russia.

Utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is a union of hedonism and Christianity. The first teaches man to love pleasure; the second, to love his neighbor. The union consists in teaching man to love his neighbor’s pleasure. To be exact, the Utilitarians teach that an action is moral if its result is to maximize pleasure among men in general. This theory holds that man’s duty is to serve-according to a purely quantitative standard of value. He is to serve not the well-being of the nation or of the economic class, but “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” regardless of who comprise it in any given issue. As to one’s own happiness, says [John Stuart] Mill, the individual must he “disinterested” and “strictly impartial”; he must remember that he is only one unit out of the dozens, or millions, of men affected by his actions. “All honor to those who can abnegate for themselves the personal enjoyment of life,” says Mill, “when by such renunciation they contribute worthily to increase the amount of happiness in the world.”

[Leonard Peikoft, OP, 122; pb 119.]

“The greatest good for the greatest number” is one of the most vicious slogans ever foisted on humanity.

This slogan has no concrete, specific meaning. There is no way to interpret it benevolently, but a great many ways in which it can be used to justify the most vicious actions.

What is the definition of “the good” in this slogan? None, except: whatever is good for the greatest number. Who, in any particular issue, decides what is good fot the greatest number? Why, the greatest number.

If you consider this moral, you would have to approve of the following examples, which are exact applications of this slogan in practice: fifty-one percent of humanity enslaving the other forty-nine; nine hungry cannibals eating the tenth one; a lynching mob murdering a man whom they consider dangerous to the community.

There were seventy million Germans in Germany and six hundred thousand Jews. The greatest number (the Germans) supported the Nazi government which told them that their greatest good would be served by exterminating the smaller number (the Jews) and grabbing their property. This was the horror achieved in practice by a vicious slogan accepted in theory.

But, you might say, the majority in all these examples did not achieve any real good for itself either? No. It didn’t. Because “the good” is not determined by counting numbers and is not achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone.

[“Textbook of Americanism,” pamphlet, 10.]

See also ALTRUISM; COLLECTIVISM; GOOD, the; HAPPINESS; HEDONISM; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; MILL, JOHN STUART; MORALITY; PLEASURE and PAIN; SACRIFICE; SELFISHNESS.

V

Validation. “Validation” in the broad sense includes any process of relating mental contents to the facts of reality. Direct perception, the method of validating axioms, is one such process. “Proof” designates another type of validation. Proof is the process of deriving a conclusion logically from antecedent knowledge.

[Leonard Peikoff, “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), question period, Lecture 3.]

See also AXIOMS; COROLLARIES; EPISTEMOLOGY; INDUCTION and DEDUCTION; LOGIC; OBJECTIVITY; PROOF; SELF-EVIDENT.

Values. To challenge the basic premise of any discipline, one must begin at the beginning. In ethics, one must begin by asking: What are values? Why does man need them?

“Value” is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept “value” is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.

I quote from Galt’s speech: “There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence-and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.”

To make this point fully clear, try to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed. Such an entity would not be able to have any values; it would have nothing to gain or to lose; it could not regard anything as for or against it, as serving or threatening its welfare, as fulfilling or frustrating its interests. It could have no interests and no goals.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 5; pb 15.]

“Value” is that which one acts to gain and keep, “virtue” is the action by which one gains and keeps it. “Value” presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? “Value” presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.

[GS, FNI, 147; pb 121.]

It is only an ultimate goal, an end in itself, that makes the existence of values possible. Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action. Epistemologically, the concept of “value” is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of “life.” To speak of “value” as apart from “life” is worse than a contradiction in terms. “It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible.”

In answer to those philosophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between “is” and “ought.”

Now in what manner does a human being discover the concept of “value”? By what means does he first become aware of the issue of “good or evil” in its simplest form? By means of the physical sensations of Pleasure or pain. Just as sensations are the first step of the development of a human consciousness in the realm of cognition, so they are its first step in the realm of evaluation.

The capacity to experience pleasure or pain is innate in a man’s body; it is part of his nature, part of the kind of entity he is. He has no choice about it, and he has no choice about the standard that determines what will make him experience the physical sensation of pleasure or of pain. What is that standard? His life.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 7; pb 17.)

Since a value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep, and the amount of possible action is limited by the duration of one’s lifespan, it is a part of one’s life that one invests in everything one values. The years, months, days or hours of thought, of interest, of action devoted to a value are the currency with which one pays for the enjoyment one receives from it.

[ITOE, 44.]

Material objects as such have neither value nor disvalue; they acquire value.-significance only in regard to a living being-particularly, in regard to serving or hindering man’s goals.

[“From the Horse’s Mouth,” PWNI, 96; pb 79.]

Values are the motivating power of man’s actions and a necessity of his survival, psychologically as well as physically.

Man’s values control his subconscious emotional mechanism that functions like a computer adding up his desires, his experiences, his fulfillments and frustrations-like a sensitive guardian watching and constantly assessing his relationship to reality. The key question which this computer is programmed to answer, is: What is possible to me?

There is a certain similarity between the issue of sensory perception and the issue of values....

If severe and prolonged enough, the absence of a norrnal, active flow of sensory stimuli may disintegrate the complex organization and the interdependent functions of man’s consciousness.

Man’s emotional mechanism works as the barometer of the efficacy or impotence of his actions. If severe and prolonged enough, the absence of a normal, active flow of value-experiences may disintegrate and paralyze man’s consciousness-by telling him that no action is possible.

The form in which man experiences the reality of his values is pleasure.

[“Our Cultural Value-Deprivation,” TO, April 1966, 3.]

The objective theory of values is the only moral theory incompatible with rule by force. Capitalism is the only system based implicitly on an objective theory of values-and the historic tragedy is that this has never been made explicit.

If one knows that the good is objective—i.e., determined by the nature of reality, but to be discovered by man’s mind-one knows that an attempt to achieve the good by physical force is a monstrous contradiction which negates morality at its root by destroying man’s capacity to recognize the good, i.e., his capacity to value. Force invalidates and paralyzes a man’s judgment, demanding that he act against it, thus rendering him morally impotent. A value which one is forced to accept at the price of surrendering one’s mind, is not a value to anyone; the forcibly mindless can neither judge nor choose nor value. An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes. Values cannot exist (cannot be valued) outside the full context of a man’s life, needs, goals, and knowledge.

[“What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 23.]

See also AMBITION; CHARACTER; CYNICISM; “DUTY”; EMOTIONS; ENVY/HATRED of the GOOD for BEING the GOOD; EVIL; GOAL-DIRECTED ACTION; GOOD, the; HAPPINESS; “INSTINCT”; INTRINSIC THEORY of VALUES; “IS”-“OUGHT’ DICHOTOMY; LIFE; LOVE; MAN; MARKET VALUE; MORALITY; MOTIVATION; MOTIVATION by LOVE us. by FEAR; NORMATIVE ABSTRACTIONS; OBJECTIVE THEORY of VALUES; PHYSICAL FORCE; PLEASURE and PAIN; PURPOSE; ROMANTICISM; SECOND-HANDERS; SELF-INTEREST; SELFISHNESS; SEX; STANDARD of VALUE; ”STOLEN CONCEPT,“ FALLACY of; SUBCONSCIOUS; SUBJECTIVISM; TELEOLOCICAL MEASUREMENT; TRADER PRINCIPLE; ULTIMATE VALUE; VIRTUE.

Virtue. “Value” is that which one acts to gain and keep, “virtue” is the action by which one gains and keeps it.

[GS, FNI, 147; pb 121.]

Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality—not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.

[Ibid., 224; pb 178.]

My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists-and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason-Purpose-Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve-Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.

[Ibid., 156; pb 128.]

Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue-and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.

[Ibid., 161; pb 131.]

See also CHARACTER; CHARITY; “DUTY”; EVIL; FREE WILL; HAPPINESS; HONESTY; HONOR; INDEPENDENCE; INTEGRITY; JUS-VALUES.

Visual Arts. The so-called visual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture) produce concrete, perceptually available entities and make them convey an abstract, conceptual meaning....

The visual arts do not deal with the sensory field of awareness as such, but with the sensory field as perceived by a conceptual consciousness.

The sensory-perceptual awareness of an adult does not consist of mere sense data (as it did in his infancy), but of automatized integrations that combine sense data with a vast context of conceptual knowledge. The visual arts refine and direct the sensory elements of these integrations. By means of selectivity, of emphasis and omission, these arts lead man’s sight to the conceptual context intended by the artist. They teach man to see more precisely and to find deeper meaning in the field of his vision.

It is a common experience to observe that a particular painting-for example, a still life of apples-makes its subject “more real than it is in reality.” The apples seem brighter and firmer, they seem to possess an almost self-assertive character, a kind of heightened reality which neither their real-life models nor any color photograph can match. Yet if one examines them closely, one sees that no real-life apple ever looked like that. What is it, then, that the artist has done? He has created a visual abstraction.

He has performed the process of concept-formation-of isolating and integrating—but in exclusively visual terms. He has isolated the essential, distinguishing characteristics of apples, and integrated them into a single visual unit. He has brought the conc-eptual method of functioning to the operations of a single sense organ, the organ of sight.

[“Art and Cognition.” RM, pb 47.]

See also ABSTRACTION (PROCESS of); ART; ARTISTIC CREATION; CONCEPTS; DECORATIVE ARTS; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); PAINTING; PERCEPTION; PHOTOGRAPHY; SCULPTURE; STYLIZATION.

Volition. See Free Will.

Volitional. “Volitional” means selected from two or more alternatives that were possible under the circumstances, the difference being made by the individual’s decision, which could have been otherwise.

[Leonard Peikoff. “The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976). Lecture 3.]

See also FREE WILL.

Voting. The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system-and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters’ power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.

[“The Lessons of Vietnam,” ARL, III, 24, 3.]

A majority vote is not an epistemological validation of an idea. Voting is merely a proper political device-within a strictly, constitutionally delimited sphere of action-for choosing the practical means of implementing a society’s basic principles. But those principles are not determined by vote.

[“Who Is the Final Authority in Ethics?” TON, Feb. 1965, 8.]

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority.

[“Collectivized ‘Rights,’ VOS, 140; pb 104.]

The citizens of a free nation may disagree about the specific legal procedures or methods of implementing their rights (which is a complex problem, the province of political science and of the philosophy of law), but they agree on the basic principle to be implemented: the principle of individual rights. When a country’s constitution places individual rights outside the reach of public authorities, the sphere of political power is severely delimited—and thus the citizens may, safely and properly, agree to abide by the decisions of a majority vote in this delimited sphere. The lives and property of minorities or dissenters are not at stake, are not subject to vote and are not endangered by any majority decision; no man or group holds a blank check on power over others.

[Ibid., 138; pb 103.]

See also CONSTITUTION; DEMOCRACY; ECONOMIC POWER vs. POLITICAL POWER; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT; REPUBLIC; STATISM; TYRANNY.

W

War. Wars are the second greatest evil that human societies can perpetrate. (The first is dictatorship, the enslavement of their own citizens, which is the cause of wars.)

[“The Wreckage of the Consensus,” CUI, 224.]

Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships. By the nature of its basic principles and interests, it is the only system fundamentally opposed to war.

Men who are free to produce, have no incentive to loot; they have nothing to gain from war and a great deal to lose. Ideologically, the principle of individual rights does not permit a man to seek his own livelihood at the point of a gun, inside or outside his country. Economically, wars cost money; in a free economy, where wealth is privately owned, the costs of war come out of the income of private citizens—there is no overblown public treasury to hide that fact-and a citizen cannot hope to recoup his own financial losses (such as taxes or business dislocations or property destruction) by winning the war. Thus his own economic interests are on the side of peace.

In a statist economy, where wealth is “publicly owned,” a citizen has no economic interests to protect by preserving peace-he is only a drop in the common bucket—while war gives him the (fallacious) hope of larger handouts from his master. Ideologically, he is trained to regard men as sacrificial animals; he is one himself; he can have no concept of why foreigners should not be sacrificed on the same public altar for the benefit of the same state.

The trader and the warrior have been fundamental antagonists throughout history. Trade does not flourish on battlefields, factories do not produce under bombardments, profits do not grow on rubble. Capitalism is a society of traders—for which it has been denounced by every would-be gunman who regards trade as “selfish” and conquest as “noble.”

Let those who are actually concerned with peace observe that capitalism gave mankind the longest period of peace in history-a period during which there were no wars involving the entire civilized world-from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

[“The Roots of War,” CUl, 38.]

Statism-in fact and in principle-is nothing more than gang rule. A dictatorship is a gang devoted to looting the effort of the productive citizens of its own country. When a statist ruler exhausts his own country’s economy, he attacks his neighbors. It is his only means of postponing internal collapse and prolonging his rule. A country that violates the rights of its own citizens, will not respect the rights of its neighbors. Those who do not recognize individual rights, will not recognize the rights of nations: a nation is only a number of individuals.

Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.

Observe that the major wars of history were started by the more controlled economies of the time against the freer ones. For instance, World War I was started by monarchist Germany and Czarist Russia, who dragged in their freer allies. World War II was started by the alliance of Nazi Germany with Soviet Russia and their joint attack on Poland.

Observe that in World War II, both Germany and Russia seized and dismantled entire factories in conquered countries, to ship them home —while the freest of the mixed economies, the semi-capitalistic United States, sent billions worth of lend-lease equipment, including entire factories, to its allies.

Germany and Russia needed war; the United States did not and gained nothing. (In fact, the United States lost, economically, even though it won the war: it was left with an enormous national debt, augmented by the grotesquely futile policy of supporting former allies and enemies to this day.) Yet it is capitalism that today’s peace-lovers oppose and statism that they advocate—in the name of peace.

[Ibid., 37.]

If men want to oppose war, it is stalism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged “good” can justify it-there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations.

[Ibid., 42.]

Just as, in domestic affairs, all the evils caused by statism and government controls were blamed on capitalism and the free market—so, in foreign affairs, all the evils of statist policies were blamed on and ascribed to capitalism. Such myths as “capitalistic imperialism,” “war-profiteering,” or the notion that capitalism has to win “markets” by military conquest are examples of the superficiality or the unscrupulousness of statist commentators and historians.

The essence of capitalism’s foreign policy is free trade—i.e., the abolition of trade barriers, of protective tariffs, of special privileges-the opening of the world’s trade routes to free international exchange and competition among the private citizens of all countries dealing directly with one another. During the nineteenth century, it was free trade that liberated the world, undercutting and wrecking the remnants of feudalism and the statist tyranny of absolute monarchies.

[Ibid., 38.]

Capitalism wins and holds its markets by free competition, at home and abroad. A market conquered by war can be of value (temporarily) only to those advocates of a mixed economy who seek to close it to international competition, impose restrictive regulations, and thus acquire special privileges by force.

[Ibid., 39.]

Remember that private citizens-whether rich or poor, whether businessmen or workers-have no power to start a war. That power is the exclusive prerogative of a government. Which type of government is more likely to plunge a country into war: a government of limited powers, bound by constitutional restrictions-or an unlimited government, open to the pressure of any group with warlike interests or ideologies, a government able to command armies to march at the whim of a single chief executive?

[Ibid., 40.]

It is true that nuclear weapons have made wars too horrible to contemplate. But it makes no difference to a man whether he is killed by a nuclear bomb or a dynamite bomb or an old-fashioned club. Nor does the number of other victims or the scale of the destruction make any difference to him.

[Ibid., 42.]

If nuclear weapons are a dreadful threat and mankind cannot afford war any longer, then mankind cannot afford statism any longer. Let no man of good will take it upon his conscience to advocate the rule of force-outside or inside his own country. Let all those who are actually concerned with peace—those who do love man and do care about his survival-realize that if war is ever to be outlawed, it is the use of force that has to be outlawed.

[Ibid., 43.]

See also CAPITALISM; DICTATORSHIP; DRAFT; FOREIGN POLICY; FREEDOM; GENOCIDE; NINETEENTH CENTURY; PEACE MOVEMENTS; PHSICAL FORCE; SOVIET RUSSIA; STATISM; TRADER PRINCIPLE; TRIBALISM; UNITED NATIONS.

Welfare State. Since the things man needs for survival have to be produced, and nature does not guarantee the success of any human endeavor, there is not and cannot be any such thing as a guaranteed economic security. The employer who gives you a job, has no guarantee that his business will remain in existence, that his customers will continue to buy his products or services. The customers have no guarantee that they will always be able and willing to trade with him, no guarantee of what their needs, choices and incomes will be in the future. If you retire to a self-sustaining farm, you have no guarantee to protect you from what a Hood or a hurricane might do to your land and your crops. If you surrender everything to the government and give it total power to plan the whole economy, this will not guarantee your economic security, but it will guarantee the descent of the entire nation to a level of miserable poverty-as the practical results of every totalitarian economy, communist or fascist, have demonstrated.

Morally, the promise of an impossible “right” to economic security is an infamous attempt to abrogate the concept of rights. It can and does mean only one thing: a promise to enslave the men who produce, for the benefit of those who don’t. “If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.” (“Man’s Rights” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.) There can be no such thing as the right to enslave, i.e., the right to destroy rights.

[“A Preview,” ARL, I, 22, 2.]

It is true that the welfare-statists are not socialists, that they never advocated or intended the socialization of private property, that they want to “preserve” private property-with government control of its use and disposal. But that is the fundamental characteristic of fascism.

[“The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus,” CUI, 211.]

The gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state). Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes....

The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the “hidden” confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.

[Alan Greenspan. “Gold and Economic Freedom,” CUI, 100.]

Morally and economically, the welfare state creates an ever accelerating downward pull. Morally, the chance to satisfy demands by force spreads the demands wider and wider, with less and less pretense at justification. Economically, the forced demands of one group create hardships for all others, thus producing an inextricable mixture of actual victims and plain parasites. Since need, not achievement, is held as the criterion of rewards, the government necessarily keeps sacrificing the more productive groups to the less productive, gradually chaining the top level of the economy, then the next level, then the next. (How else are unachieved rewards to be provided?)

There are two kinds of need involved in this process: the need of the group making demands, which is openly proclaimed and serves as cover for another need, which is never mentioned-the need of the power-seekers, who require a group of dependent favor-recipients in order to rise to power. Altruism feeds the first need, statism feeds the second, Pragmatism blinds everyone-including victims and prufiteers-not merely to the deadly nature of the process, but even to the fact that a process is going on.

[“A Preview,” ARL, 1,23, 1.]

[A] real turning point came when the welfare statists switched from economics to physiology: they began to seek a new power base in deliberately fostered racism, the racism of minority groups, then in the hatreds and inferiority complexes uf women, of “the young,” etc. The significant aspect of this switch was the severing of economic rewards from productive work. Physiology replaced the conditions of employment as the basis of social claims. The demands were no longer for “just compensation,” but just for compensation, with no work required.

So long as the power-seekers clung to the basic premises of the welfare state, holding need as the criterion of rewards, logic forced them, step by step, to champion the interests of the less and less productive groups, until they reached the ultimate dead end of turning from the role of champions of “honest toil” to the role of champions of open parasitism, parasitism on principle, parasitism as a “right” (with their famous slogan turning into: “Who does not toil, shall eat those who do”).

[Ibid., 2.]

In business, the rise of the welfare state froze the status quo, perpetuating the power of the big corporations of the pre-income-tax era, placing them beyond the competition of the tax-strangled newcorners. A similar process took place in the welfare state of the intellect. The results, in both fields, are the same.

[“The Establishing of an Establishment,” PWNI, 207; pb 170.]

See also ALTRUISM; CHARITY; COMPASSION; FASCISM and COMMUNISM /SOCIALISM; GOLD STANDARD; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; INFLATION; INTERVENTIONISM (ECONOMIC); LOBBYING; MINORITY RIGHTS; PITY; POVERTY; PRAGMATISM; PRINCIPLES; PROPERTY RIGHTS; RACISM; “REDISTRIBUTION” of WEALTH; SACRIFICE; SELFISHNESS; STATISM; TAXATION.

Whims/Whim-Worship. A “whim” is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.

[“The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 3; pb 14.]

Automatic omniscience [is what] a whim-worshiper ascribes to his emotions.

[“Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 23; pb 19.]

What does it mean, to act on whim? It means that a man acts like a zombie, without any knowledge of what he deals with, what he wants to accomplish, or what motivates him. It means that a man acts in a state of temporary insanity. Is this what you call juicy or colorful? I think the only juice that can come out of such a situation is blood. To act against the facts of reality can result only in destruction.

[“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 6.]

What is the nature of that superior world to which they sacrifice the world that exists? The mystics of spirit curse matter, the mystics of muscle curse profit. The first wish men to profit by renouncing the earth, the second wish men to inherit the earth by renouncing all profit. Their non-material, non-profit worlds are realms where rivers run with milk and coffee, where wine spurts from rocks at their command, where pastry drops on them from clouds at the price of opening their mouth. On this material, profit-chasing earth, an enormous investment of virtue —of intelligence, integrity, energy, skill-is required to construct a railroad to carry them the distance of one mile; in their non-material, non-profit world, they travel from planet to planet at the cost of a wish. If an honest person asks them: “How?”—they answer with righteous scorn that a “how” is the concept of vulgar realists; the concept of superior spirits is “Somehow.” On this earth restricted by matter and profit, rewards are achieved by thought; in a world set free of such restrictions, rewards are achieved by wishing.

And that is the whole of their shabby secret. The secret of all their esoteric philosophies, of all their dialectics and super-senses, of their evasive eyes and snarling words, the secret for which they destroy civilization, language, industries and lives, the secret for which they pierce their own eyes and eardrums, grind out their senses, blank out their minds, the purpose for which they dissolve the absolutes of reason, logic, matter, existence, reality-is to erect upon that plastic fog a single holy absolute: their Wish.

[GS, FNI, 185; pb 149.]

See also AMORALISM; EMOTIONS; FINAL CAUSATION; HEDONISM; IRRATIONALITY; MYSTICISM; RATIONALITY; SUBJECTIVISM.

“Window Dressing.” The non-philosophical attitude of most rightists, who surrendered the intellect to the leftists ... permitted the intellectuals to play the game of “window dressing,” i.e., to preach political tolerance or impartiality and to practice it, on suitable occasions, by featuring the weakest, most befuddled champion of capitalism as a representative of the right. (Which led people to the conclusion: “If this is the best that can be said for the right, then the leftist position must be true.”)

[“The Disfranchisemem of the Right,” ARL, 1, 6, 1.]

See also CAPlTALISM; “CONSERVATIVES”; “CONSERVATIVES” vs. “LIBERALS”; RIGHTISTS vs. LEFTISTS.

Words. In order to be used as a single unit, the enormous sum integrated by a concept has to be given the form of a single, specific, perceptual concrete, which will differentiate it from all other concretes and from all other concepts. This is the function performed by language. Language is a code of visual-auditory symbols that serves the psycho-epistemological function of converting concepts into the mental equivalent of concretes. Language is the exclusive domain and tool of concepts. Every word we use (with the exception of proper names) is a symbol that denotes a concept, i.e., that stands for an unlimited number of concretes of a certain kind.

ITOE, 11.]

The first words a child learns are words denoting visual objects, and he retains his first concepts visually. Observe that the visual form he gives them is reduced to those essentials which distinguish the particular kind of entities from all others—for instance, the universal type of a child’s drawing of man in the form of an oval for the torso, a circle for the head, four sticks for extremities, etc. Such drawings are a visual record of the process of abstraction and concept-formation in a mind’s transition from the perceptual level to the full vocabulary of the concepmal level.

There is evidence to suppose that written language originated in the form of drawings-as the pictographic writing of the Oriental peoples seems to indicate. With the growth of man’s knowledge and of his power of abstraction, a pictorial representation of concepts could no longer be adequate to his conceptual range, and was replaced by a fully symbolic code.

[Ibid., 15.]

The process of forming a concept is not complete until its constituent units have been integrated into a single mental unit by means of a specific word. The first concepts a child forms are concepts of perceptual entities; the first words he learns are words designating them. Even though a child does not have to perform the feat of genius performed by some mind or minds in the prehistorical infancy of the human race: the invention of language-every child has to perform independently the feat of grasping the nature of language, the process of symbolizing concepts by means of words.

Even though a child does not (and need not) originate and form every concept on his own, by observing every aspect of reality confronting him, he has to perform the process of differentiating and integrating perceptual concretes, in order to grasp the meaning of words. If a child’s brain is physically damaged and unable to perform that process, he does not learn to speak.

Learning to speak does not consist of memorizing sounds—that is the process by which a parrot learns to “speak.” Learning consists of grasping meanings, i.e., of grasping the referents of words, the kinds of existents that words denote in reality. In this respect, the learning of words is an invaluable accelerator of a child’s cognitive development, but it is not a substitute for the process of concept-formation; nothing is.

[Ibid., 24.]

Words transform concepts into (mental) entities; definitions provide them with identity. (Words without definitions are not language but inarticulate sounds.)

[Ibid., 12.]

It is often said that definitions state the meaning of words. This is true, but it is not exact. A word is merely a visual-auditory symbol used to represent a concept : a word has no meaning other than that of the concept it symbolizes, and the meaning of a concept consists of its units. It is not words, but concepts that man defines—by specifying their referents.

[Ibid., 52.]

See also COMMUNICATION; CONCEPT-FORMATION; CONCEPTS; DEFINITIONS; GRAMMAR; LANGUAGE; LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS; MEANING (of CONCEPTS); NOMINALISM; PERCEPTION; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; UNIT; UNIT-ECONOMY.

X

Xenophobia. See Anti-Conceptual Mentality.

Z

Zero, Reification of. A vulgar variant of concept stealing, prevalent among avowed mystics and irrationalists, is a fallacy I call the Reification of the Zero. It consists of regarding “nothing” as a thing, as a special, different kind of existent. (For example, see Existentialism.) This fallacy breeds such symptoms as the notion that presence and absence, or being and non-being, are metaphysical forces of equal power, and that being is the absence of non-being. E.g., “Nothingness is prior to being.” (Sartre)—“Human finitude is the presence of the not in the being of man.” (William Barrett)—“Nothing is more real than nothing.” (Samuel Beckett)—“Das Nichts nichtet” or “Nothing noughts.” (Heidegger). “Consciousness, then, is not a stuff, but a negation. The subject is not a thing, but a non-thing. ‘The subject carves its own world out of Being by means of negative determinations. Sartre describes consciousness as a ‘noughting nought’ (néant néantisant). It is a form of being other than its own: a mode ‘which has yet to be what it is, that is to say, which is what it is, that is to say, which is what it is not and which is not what it is.’ ” (Hector Hawton, The Feast of Unreason, London: Watts & Co., 1952, p. 162.)

(The motive? “Genuine utterances about the nothing must always remain unusual. It cannot be made common. It dissolves when it is placed in the cheap acid of mere logical acumen.” Heidegger.)

[ITOE, 80.]

See also AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS; AXIOMS; EXISTENCE; IDENTITY; NON-EXISTENCE; “STOLEN CONCEPT, FALLACY of.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Editor’s Preface

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Z

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Part One: - Philosophy

Chapter 1 - Introducing Objectivism

Chapter 2 - Review of Randall’s Aristotle

Chapter 3 - To Young Scientists

Chapter 4 - Who Is the Final Authority in Ethics?

Chapter 5 - The Psychology of Psychologizing

Chapter 6 - Altruism as Appeasement

Chapter 7 - The Question of Scholarships

Chapter 8 - Of Living Death

Chapter 9 - Religion Versus America

Part Two: - Culture

Chapter 10 - The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age

Chapter 11 - Our Cultural Value-Deprivation

Chapter 12 - Global Balkanization

Chapter 13 - How to Read (and Not to Write)

Chapter 14 - The Lessons of Vietnam

Chapter 15 - The Sanction of the Victims

Chapter 16 - Through Your Most Grievous Fault

Chapter 17 - Apollo 11

Chapter 18 - Epitaph for a Culture

Chapter 19 - Assault from the Ivory Tower: The Professors’ War Against America

Chapter 20 - The American School: Why Johnny Can’t Think

Part Three: - Politics

Chapter 21 - Representation Without Authorization

Chapter 22 - To Dream the Noncommercial Dream

Chapter 23 - Tax Credits for Education

Chapter 24 - Antitrust: The Rule of Unreason

Chapter 25 - The Pull Peddlers

Chapter 26 - About a Woman President

Chapter 27 - The Inverted Moral Priorities

Chapter 28 - Hunger and Freedom

Chapter 29 - How Not to Fight Against Socialized Medicine

Chapter 30 - Medicine: The Death of a Profession

Chapter 31 - Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty

EPILOGUE

AYN RAND ON:

Objectivism: “A book salesman asked me whether I could present the essence of my philosophy while standing on one foot. I did, as follows: 1. Metaphysics: Objective Reality. 2. Epistemology: Reason. 3. Ethics: Self-interest. 4. Politics: Capitalism.” (Introducing Objectivism)

The Vietnam War: “It was a shameful war ... because it served no national interest, because we had nothing to gain from it, because the lives and heroism of thousands of American soldiers were sacrificed in pure compliance with the ethics of altruism, selflessly and senselessly.” (The Lessons of Vietnam)

The Death of Marilyn Monroe: “Anyone who ever felt resentment against the good for being good and has given voice to it, is the murderer of Marilyn Monroe.” (Through Your Most Grievous Fault)

Apollo 11: “For once, if only for seven minutes, the worst among those who saw the lift-off had to feel—not ‘How small is man by the side of the Grand Canyon!’—but ‘How great is man and how safe is nature when he conquers it!’ ” (Apollo 11)

DR. LEONARD PEIKOFF worked closely with Ayn Rand for many years and was designated by her as heir to her estate. He has taught philosophy at Hunter College, Long Island University, and New York University, and he lectures on Ayn Rand’s philosophy throughout the country. Dr. Peikoff is the author of The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America (Mentor), and the editor of The Early Ayn Rand (Signet).

MERIDIAN
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ. England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada,
M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

Published by Meridian, an imprint of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. The Voice of Reason previously appeared in an NAL BOOKS edition.

First Meridian Printing, June, 1990

Copyright © 1989 by Estate of Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rand, Ayn.
The voice of reason ; essays in objectivist thought / Ayn Rand ;
with an introduction by Leonard Peikoff ; and additional essays by
Leonard Peikoff and Peter Schwartz.
p. cm.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN BOOKS USA INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

Permission requests for college or textbook use should be addressed to the Estate of Ayn Rand, Box 177, Murray Hill Station, New York, N.Y. 10157.

Information about other books by Ayn Rand and her philosophy, Objectivism, may be obtained by writing to OBJECTIVISM, Box 177, Murray Hill Station, New York, New York, 10157 USA.

eISBN : 978-1-101-13726-0

http://us.penguingroup.com

Introduction

This is the final collection of Ayn Rand’s articles and speeches that I plan to publish. It may be regarded as the best of the non-anthologized Ayn Rand. None of the pieces (with one exception) has appeared before in book form.

Some of these twenty-six pieces are brief comments addressed to readers of her newspaper column in the Los Angeles Times or of her own magazines. Others are longer articles from her magazines, or lectures delivered to various kinds of audiences. The material spans a period of twenty years, from 1961, when she gave the first of her annual talks at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston, to 1981, when she gave what was to be her last talk, to a businessmen’s group in New Orleans.

I have also included six essays written after Miss Rand’s death in 1982: five are the Ford Hall Forum talks I have been giving in her stead in recent years. The sixth is an article by Peter Schwartz, editor of The Intellectual Activist, a publication that covers current events from an Objectivist viewpoint.

The contents of this book vary widely in scope and subject matter. As the subtitle indicates, however, all are “essays in Objectivist thought.” That is, all take as their frame of reference Ayn Rand’s unique philosophy of Objectivism. Objectivism upholds capitalism in politics, on the basis of egoism in ethics, on the basis of reason in epistemology. Everything in this book, accordingly, is an application of this last tenet, which is the root and essence of Objectivism. If one accepts reason—in its full, philosophical definition and implications—all the rest follows. Thus the title of the present collection.

The culture of our time, a legacy of two centuries of Kantian-ism, is shaped by the opposite ideas; it is a product of mysticism, altruism, collectivism. All around us we see rebels against the Enlightenment, who openly avow their disdain for the mind—in favor of brain-drowning drugs or obedience to the State or cults urging “back to nature” or “back to the Bible.” In this kind of era, there is only one true rebel: the man or woman who challenges the root of the evil sweeping the world, i.e., the radical who champions reason.

Reason is man’s faculty of integrating sensory data into concepts, and thereby of expanding incalculably the power of his consciousness. Such integration is man’s distinctive method of cognition and the source of all his achievements: it is his only means of understanding and dealing with the facts of reality. The mind, in other words, is a practical attribute, the most practical one we possess. Reason is man’s basic means of survival.

A faculty so vital cannot be compromised or sabotaged with impunity. It cannot perform its life-sustaining function if it is treated as an occasional indulgence alternating with bouts of divine revelation or the equivalent. It must be identified as the essential principle of human existence, then upheld as an absolute.

Human virtue, in the Objectivist approach, consists not in faith or social conformity or arbitrary emotion, but in thought, objectivity, rationality, the relentless exercise of one’s intelligence in the task of achieving the values, spiritual and material, which human life requires. Thus Ayn Rand’s ethics of rational self-interest. If such rationality is to be possible, however, the individual must be treated as a sovereign agent and left unmolested by physical force; he must be left free to think and then to act on his own best judgment. Thus Ayn Rand’s defense of the original American system of government, the system founded on the recognition of man’s inalienable individual rights.

Ayn Rand came to the United States from Soviet Russia in 1926, at the age of twenty-one. The founding principles of the United States, she thought, made it the greatest country in history and the exact opposite of Russia, which she hated. In many ways the United States lived up to her expectations. She found here the freedom to write and speak; she became famous as a champion of individualism; she met her husband, Frank O‘Connor, whom she loved for fifty years. Intellectually, however, the United States was a disappointment. When she arrived, the intellectuals were on the threshold of what is now called the Red Decade. They were increasingly skeptical about the efficacy of reason, and they were, to her, astonishingly anti-American. At first, she could hardly believe that in the bastion of capitalism (as she had imagined it to be), she was hearing everywhere the same fundamental ideas that she had heard in Russia, the very ideas from which she had run for her life.

She had no choice but to fight the trend. She had seen what it led to, including the expropriation of her father’s business under Lenin and, later, the death of her family under Stalin. She proceeded with every fiber of her being to fight for man’s mind and his liberty, and all the major intellectual groups reacted by denouncing her: the liberals attacked her as a reactionary; the conservatives, as a radical; the Communists, as a pro-capitalist; the Church, as an atheist (which she was). By her own choice and conviction, she was miles outside the intellectual mainstream—she was fighting to reverse that mainstream—and there was no influential group anywhere to act as her ally.

No group perhaps, but the American people, from whom she received an outpouring of admiration. I have read her fan mail through the years, from soldiers and physicians and dancers and CEO’s and truck drivers and countless solemn teenagers and even some professors and priests—all struggling to thank her for the vision of man and life presented in her novels, a vision that gave them the courage to carry on their own lives at a moment when they desperately needed it. I have seen her being mobbed by students feeling the same response at dozens of college campuses, from Harvard, Yale and Princeton on down. I have seen the lines of people waiting in the sometimes bitter Boston cold for ten hours or more until the doors to the lecture hall would open and her Ford Hall speech begin. Ayn Rand offered people something they could not get elsewhere, and in return they gave her love, awe, wealth. From the intellectuals, however, she evoked for the most part the opposite: hatred.

There were a few distinguished exceptions, among the most prominent of which was the Ford Hall Forum, a Boston organization that annually invites a series of nationally known speakers to discuss current issues and then submit to questioning from an audience. Like the rest of our intellectual establishment, the Forum professes to be fair; it claims to be open to all viewpoints. Unlike most of our colleges and media, however, the Forum is not an exercise in hypocrisy; it is fair. It actually says to real dissenters on fundamental issues: “Come and tell us what you think. We will not necessarily agree, but we will listen.” I have observed few other examples of such fairness in the thirty-five years I have lived in this country. The Boston Globe a few years ago described the Forum as “fiercely independent, so far uncorrupted and radical,” and added that it “has never allowed itself to be co-opted, diluted, or rendered ‘cautious’ and uncontroversial.” The Forum’s treatment of Ayn Rand proves that this tribute is not rhetoric, but simple truth.

When Miss Rand was first invited to speak in 1961, she was reluctant to accept. She did not know the Forum’s distinguished history, and expected a group of unruly antagonists; but she went anyway, with misgivings—and she loved it. The audience that evening did not agree with her, but they listened, then peppered her with intelligent questions, the kind she always enjoyed answering. “The Forum,” she told me later, “sponsors many speakers with whom I disagree totally. But it is honest. Since it is open to new ideas, it truly is an intellectual organization and it deserves to be supported.” Accordingly, she agreed to return year after year, and her admirers came to expect it; they started to gather every April in Boston from all over the country (and then the world). The New York Times once described these gatherings as the “Objectivist Easter.” I accept the term, since the word “Easter” comes from Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, and means, symbolically, the festival celebrating the rebirth of light after the darkness of winter.

I want to thank the Ford Hall Forum for making these Easter gatherings—and along with them, ten of the longest chapters in this book—possible. (Many of Miss Rand’s other Ford Hall talks have been reprinted in other anthologies of hers.) In particular, I want to salute the guiding spirit of the Forum, Frances Smith. Her sense of intellectual honor and rigor, her scrupulous objectivity, her authentic enthusiasm for ideas and for philosophy—all this, in our age, is a rare value, for which the citizens of Boston should be (and I think are) deeply grateful.

Now let me explain the structure and contents of the present anthology.

Part I, Philosophy, consists of pieces that elaborate on the Objectivist philosophy. It includes a brief overview of the Objectivist viewpoint (Chapter 1), an indication of its kinship with the ideas of Aristotle (Chapter 2), and several important new discussions of ethics. These focus on the need of objectivity in ethics (Chapters 3 and 4), on the crucial distinction between psychological diagnosis and moral judgment (Chapter 5), and on the non-objective nature of the ethics of altruism (Chapters 6 and 7). Part I concludes with a denunciation of religion, which Objectivism regards as the rejection of reason (Chapters 8 and 9).

Part II, Culture, begins with a discussion of the bankruptcy of today’s intellectuals (Chapter 10), then turns to some of this bankruptcy’s most ominous manifestations: today’s cultural vacuum (Chapter 11), and the worldwide “ethnic” upsurge (Chapter 12). There follows a more specific consideration of the flaws of three groups: liberal pragmatists (Chapter 13), conservatives (Chapter 14), and businessmen, whom Miss Rand regards as being the unwitting financiers of their own destroyers, the universities (Chapter 15). Two eloquent cultural events are then analyzed. One is tragic: the death of Marilyn Monroe (Chapter 16); the other is exultant: the flight of Apollo 11 (Chapter 17). This last piece, one of Ayn Rand’s personal favorites, is her eyewitness account of the moon rocket’s lift-off; it conveys the sensory reality, the emotional resonance, and the deepest philosophical cause of an historic event; it is the kind of reportage possible only to a great thinker who is at the same time a literary artist. The end of the Apollo program is the subject of Chapter 18. Part 11 ends with a pair of my lectures on the American educational system. One documents the anti-Americanism rampant in our universities (Chapter 19); the other, the anti-conceptual methodology that is wrecking our grade schools (Chapter 20).

Part III, Politics, considers a number of political issues from the standpoint of an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism. It includes attacks on the quota system (Chapter 21), public TV (Chapter 22), antitrust legislation (Chapter 24), foreign aid (Chapter 25), and socialized medicine (Chapters 29 and 30). It also offers a practical proposal to break up the government’s monopoly in the field of education (Chapter 23); a discussion of the role of wealth in an industrial economy (Chapter 27); an identification of the cause of world hunger (Chapter 28); and an explanation of Ayn Rand’s view that a rational woman would not desire to serve as president of the United States (Chapter 26). Part III concludes with a penetrating analysis by Peter Schwartz of the political movement known as Libertarianism. Ayn Rand was always opposed to Libertarianism, regarding it as the opposite of her philosophy. The Schwartz piece explains why.

The epilogue to this book—“My Thirty Years With Ayn Rand: An Intellectual Memoir”—is my report on the mental processes of a genius. Until a full-scale, authorized biography of Miss Rand is completed (which will be years from now), this lecture is my answer to the question: “What was Ayn Rand really like?”

Now a few words about editorial matters. I have begun each chapter with a sentence or two indicating the original source of the article or lecture. Aside from minor copy editing, mainly involving the removal of some commas, Miss Rand’s pieces are reproduced unchanged. Occasionally I have inserted into her text, using brackets, an historical explanation or an unavoidable change in wording. (Please note that brackets within a quotation or parentheses are Miss Rand‘s, and represent her own interpolations.) As a rule, I have followed Miss Rand’s practice of leaving footnote references in brackets within the text itself, except in a few cases where this would be cumbersome; in such cases, references are numbered and collected at the end of the chapter.

I want to thank a dedicated assistant, Diane LeMont, for her cheerfulness under pressure, and for her patient, meticulous work in helping to prepare the manuscript.

The selection I have made for the present volume is, to a real extent, arbitrary. There are many excellent articles by Ayn Rand and her associates that I have been forced by space limitations to omit. If you would like to receive information about the complete back issues of the relevant periodicals—The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist, The Ayn Rand Letter, The Objectivist Forum, and The Intellectual Activist—as well as information about the Objectivist movement today, please write to Objectivism VR, Box 177, Murray Hill Station, New York, NY 10157. I regret that owing to the thousands of inquiries we receive, personal replies to such letters are not possible. But in due course inquirers will receive literature from several sources indicating the direction to pursue if they wish to investigate Ayn Rand’s ideas further.

—LEONARD PEIKOFF
South Laguna, California
February 1988

Part One:

Philosophy

1

Introducing Objectivism

by Ayn Rand

This is the first of Ayn Rand’s newspaper columns. It appeared in the Los Angeles Times on June 17, 1962.

At a sales conference at Random House, preceding the publication of Atlas Shrugged, one of the book salesmen asked me whether I could present the essence of my philosophy while standing on one foot. I did, as follows:

1. Metaphysics: Objective Reality

2. Epistemology: Reason

3. Ethics: Self-interest

4. Politics: Capitalism

If you want this translated into simple language, it would read: 1. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” or “Wishing won’t make it so.” 2. “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.” 3. “Man is an end in himself.” 4. “Give me liberty or give me death.”

If you held these concepts with total consistency, as the base of your convictions, you would have a full philosophical system to guide the course of your life. But to hold them with total consistency—to understand, to define, to prove, and to apply them—requires volumes of thought. Which is why philosophy cannot be discussed while standing on one foot—nor while standing on two feet on both sides of every fence. This last is the predominant philosophical position today, particularly in the field of politics.

In the space of a column, I can give only the briefest summary of my position, as a frame of reference for all my future columns. My philosophy, Objectivism, holds that:

1. Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes, or fears.

2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.

3. Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

4. The ideal political—economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

Capitalism was the system originated in the United States. Its success, its progress, its achievements are unprecedented in human history. America’s political philosophy was based on man’s right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness, which means: on man’s right to exist for his own sake. That was America’s implicit moral code, but it had not been formulated explicitly. This was the flaw in her intellectual armor, which is now destroying her. America and capitalism are perishing for lack of a moral base.

The destroyer is the morality of altruism.

Altruism holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only moral justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty. The political expression of altruism is collectivism or statism, which holds that man’s life and work belong to the state—to society, to the group, the gang, the race, the nation—and that the state may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.

“From her start, America was torn by the clash of her political system with the altruist morality. Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax ; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror, and sacrificial furnaces.” [For the New Intellectual]

You may observe the practical results of altruism and statism all around us in today’s world—such as the slave-labor camps of Soviet Russia, where twenty-one million political prisoners work on the construction of government projects and die of planned malnutrition, human life being cheaper than food—or the gas chambers and mass slaughter of Nazi Germany—or the terror and starvation of Red China—or the hysteria of Cuba where the government offers men for sale—or the wall of East Berlin, where human beings leap from roofs or crawl through sewers in order to escape, while guards shoot at fleeing children.

Observe these atrocities, then ask yourself whether any of it would be possible if men had not accepted the idea that man is a sacrificial animal to be immolated for the sake of the “public good.” Read the speeches of those countries’ political leaders and ask yourself what arguments would be left to them if the word “sacrifice” were regarded not as a moral ideal, but as the anti-human evil which it is.

And then, listen to the speeches of our present [Kennedy] Administration—and ask yourself the same question.

2

Review of Randall’s Aristotle

by Ayn Rand

John Herman Randall’s book on Aristotle was published by Columbia University Press in 1960. This review appeared in The Objectivist Newsletter, May 1963.

If there is a philosophical Atlas who carries the whole of Western civilization on his shoulders, it is Aristotle. He has been opposed, misinterpreted, misrepresented, and—like an axiom—used by his enemies in the very act of denying him. Whatever intellectual progress men have achieved rests on his achievements.

Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history’s brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind. The Aristotelian revival of the thirteenth century brought men to the Renaissance. The intellectual counterrevolution turned them back toward the cave of his antipode: Plato.

There is only one fundamental issue in philosophy: the cognitive efficacy of man’s mind. The conflict of Aristotle versus Plato is the conflict of reason versus mysticism. It was Plato who formulated most of philosophy’s basic questions—and doubts. It was Aristotle who laid the foundation for most of the answers. Thereafter, the record of their duel is the record of man’s long struggle to deny and surrender or to uphold and assert the validity of his particular mode of consciousness.

Today, philosophy has sunk below the level of Aristotle versus Plato, down to the primitive gropings of Parmenides versus Heraclitus, whose disciples were unable to reconcile the concept of intellectual certainty with the phenomenon of change: the Eleatics, who claimed that change is illogical, that in any clash between mind and reality, reality is dispensable and, therefore, change is an illusion—versus the Heraclitean Sophists, who claimed that mind is dispensable, that knowledge is an illusion and nothing exists but change. Or: consciousness without existence versus existence without consciousness. Or: blind dogmatism versus cynical subjectivism. Or: Rationalism versus Empiricism.

Aristotle was the first man who integrated the facts of identity and change, thus solving that ancient dichotomy. Or rather, he laid the foundation and indicated the method by which a full solution could be reached. In order to resurrect that dichotomy thereafter, it was necessary to ignore and evade his works. Ever since the Renaissance, the dichotomy kept being resurrected, in one form or another, always aimed at one crucial target: the concept of identity—always leading to some alleged demonstration of the deceptiveness, the limitations, the ultimate impotence of reason.

It took several centuries of misrepresenting Aristotle to turn him into a straw man, to declare the straw man invalidated, and to release such a torrent of irrationality that it is now sweeping philosophy away and carrying us back past the pre-Socratics, past Western civilization, into the prehistorical swamps of the Orient, via Existentialism and Zen Buddhism.

Today, Aristotle is the forgotten man of philosophy. Slick young men go about droning the wearisome sophistries of the fifth century B.C., to the effect that man can know nothing, while unshaven young men go about chanting that they do know by means of their whole body from the neck down.

It is in this context that one must evaluate the significance of an unusual book appearing on such a scene—Aristotle by John Herman Randall, Jr.

Let me hasten to state that the above remarks are mine, not Professor Randall’s. He does not condemn modern philosophy as it deserves—he seems to share some of its errors. But the theme of his book is the crucial relevance and importance of Aristotle to the philosophical problems of our age. And his book is an attempt to bring Aristotle’s theories back into the light of day—of our day—from under the shambles of misrepresentation by medieval mystics and by modern Platonists.

“Indeed,” he writes, “[Aristotle‘s] may well be the most passionate mind in history: it shines through every page, almost every line. His crabbed documents exhibit, not ’cold thought,‘ but the passionate search for passionless truth. For him, there is no ’mean,‘ no moderation, in intellectual excellence. The ’theoretical life’ is not for him the life of quiet ‘contemplation,’ serene and unemotional, but the life of nous, of theoria, of intelligence, burning, immoderate, without bounds or limits.”

Indicating that the early scientists had discarded Aristotle in rebellion against his religious interpreters, Professor Randall points out that their scientific achievements had, in fact, an unacknowledged Aristotelian base and were carrying out the implications of Aristotle’s theories.

Blaming the epistemological chaos of modern science on the influence of Newton’s mechanistic philosophy of nature, he writes:

It is fascinating to speculate how, had it been possible in the seventeenth century to reconstruct rather than abandon Aristotle, we might have been saved several centuries of gross confusion and error.... Where we are often still groping, Aristotle is frequently clear, suggestive, and fruitful. This holds true of many of his analyses: his doctrine of natural teleology; his view of natural necessity as not simple and mechanical but hypothetical; his conception of the infinite as potential, not actual; his notion of a finite universe; his doctrine of natural place; his conception of time as not absolute, but rather a dimension, a system of measurement ; his conception that place is a coordinate system, and hence relative. On countless problems, from the standpoint of our present theory, Aristotle was right, where the nineteenth-century Newtonian physicists were wrong.

Objecting to “the structureless world of Hume in which ‘anything may be followed by anything,’ ” Professor Randall writes:

To such a view, which he found maintained by the Megarians, Aristotle answers, No! Every process involves the operation of determinate powers. There is nothing that can become anything else whatsoever. A thing can become only what it has the specific power to become, only what it already is, in a sense, potentially. And a thing can be understood only as that kind of thing that has that kind of a specific power; while the process can be understood only as the operation, the actualization, the functioning of the powers of its subject or bearer.

To read a concise, lucid presentation of Aristotle’s system, written by a distinguished modern philosopher—written in terms of basic principles and broad fundamentals, as against the senseless “teasing” of trivia by today’s alleged thinkers—is so rare a value that it is sufficient to establish the importance of Professor Randall’s book, in spite of its flaws.

Its flaws, unfortunately, are numerous. Professor Randall describes his book as “a philosopher’s delineation of Aristotle.” Since there are many contradictory elements and many obscure passages in Aristotle’s own works (including, in some cases, the question of their authenticity), it is a philosopher’s privilege (within demonstrable limits) to decide which strands of a badly torn fabric he chooses to present as significantly “Aristotelian.” But nothing—particularly not Aristotle—is infinite and indeterminate. And while Professor Randall tries to separate his presentation from his interpretation, he does not always succeed. Some of his interpretations are questionable; some are stretched beyond the limit of the permissible.

For instance, he describes Aristotle’s approach to knowledge as follows: “Knowing is for him an obvious fact.... The real question, as he sees it, is, ‘In what kind of a world is knowing possible?’ What does the fact of knowing imply about our world?” This is a form of “the prior certainty of consciousness”—the notion that one can first possess knowledge and then proceed to discover what that knowledge is of, thus making the world a derivative of consciousness—a Cartesian approach which would have been inconceivable to Aristotle and which Professor Randall himself is combating throughout his book.

Most of the book’s flaws come from the same root: from Professor Randall’s inability or unwillingness to break with modern premises, methods, and terminology. The perceptiveness he brings to his consideration of Aristotle’s ideas seems to vanish whenever he attempts to equate Aristotle with modern trends. To claim, as he does, that: “In modern terms, Aristotle can be viewed as a behaviorist, an operationalist, and a con textualist” (and, later, as a “functionalist” and a “relativist”), is either inexcusable or so loosely generalized as to rob those terms of any meaning.

Granted that those terms have no specific definitions and are used, like most of today’s philosophical language, in the manner of “mobiles” which connote rather than denote—even so, their accepted “connotations” are so anti-Aristotelian that one is forced, at times, to wonder whether Professor Randall is trying to put something over on the moderns or on Aristotle. There are passages in the book to support either hypothesis.

On the one hand, Professor Randall writes: “That we can know things as they are, that such knowledge is possible, is the fact that Aristotle is trying to explain, and not, like Kant and his followers, trying to deny and explain away.” And: “Indeed, any construing of the fact of ‘knowledge,’ whether Kantian, Hegelian, Deweyan, Positivistic, or any other, seems to be consistent and fruitful, and to avoid the impasses of barren self-contradiction, and insoluble and meaningless problems, only when it proceeds from the Aristotelian approach, and pushes Aristotle’s own analyses further ... only, that is, in the measure that it is conducted upon an Aristotelian basis.” (Though one wonders what exactly would be left of Kant, Hegel, Dewey, or the Positivists if they were stripped of their non-Aristotelian elements.)

On the other hand, Professor Randall seems to turn Aristotle into some foggy combination of a linguistic analyst and a Heraclitean, as if language and reality could be understood as two separate, unconnected dimensions—in such passages as: “When [Aristotle] goes on to examine what is involved in ‘being’ anything ... he is led to formulate two sets of distinctions: the one set appropriate to understanding any ’thing’ or ousia as a subject of discourse, the other set appropriate to understanding any ‘thing’ or ousia as the outcome of a process, as the operation or functioning of powers, and ultimately as sheer functioning, activity.”

It is true that Aristotle holds the answer to Professor Randall’s “structuralism-functionalism” dichotomy and that his answer is vitally important today. But his answer eliminates that dichotomy altogether—and one cannot solve it by classifying him as a “functionalist” who believed that things are “sheer process.”

The best parts of Professor Randall’s book are Chapters VIII, IX, and XI, particularly this last. In discussing the importance of Aristotle’s biological theory and “the biological motivation of Aristotle’s thought,” he brings out an aspect of Aristotle which has been featured too seldom in recent discussions and which is much more profound than the question of Aristotle’s “functionalism”: the central place given to living entities, to the phenomenon of life, in Aristotle’s philosophy.

For Aristotle, life is not an inexplicable, supernatural mystery, but a fact of nature. And consciousness is a natural attribute of certain living entities, their natural power, their specific mode of action—not an unaccountable element in a mechanistic universe, to be explained away somehow in terms of inanimate matter, nor a mystic miracle incompatible with physical reality, to be attributed to some occult source in another dimension. For Aristotle, “living” and “knowing” are facts of reality; man’s mind is neither unnatural nor supernatural, but natural—and this is the root of Aristotle’s greatness, of the immeasurable distance that separates him from other thinkers.

Life—and its highest form, man’s life—is the central fact in Aristotle’s view of reality. The best way to describe it is to say that Aristotle’s philosophy is “biocentric.”

This is the source of Aristotle’s intense concern with the study of living entities, the source of the enormously “pro-life” attitude that dominates his thinking. In some oddly undefined manner, Professor Randall seems to share it. This, in spite of all his contradictions, seems to be his real bond with Aristotle.

“Life is the end of living bodies,” writes Professor Randall, “since they exist for the sake of living.” And: “No kind of thing, no species is subordinated to the purposes and interests of any other kind. In biological theory, the end served by the structure of any specific kind of living thing is the good—ultimately, the ‘survival’—of that kind of thing.” And, discussing the ends and conclusions of natural processes: “Only in human life are these ends and conclusions consciously intended, only in men are purposes found. For Aristotle, even God has no purpose, only man!”

The blackest patch in this often illuminating book is Chapter XII, which deals with ethics and politics. Its contradictions are apparent even without reference to Aristotle’s text. It is astonishing to read the assertion: “Aristotle’s ethics and politics are actually his supreme achievement.” They are not, even in their original form—let alone in Professor Randall’s version, which transforms them into the ethics of pragmatism.

It is shocking to read the assertion that Aristotle is an advocate of the “welfare state.” Whatever flaws there are in Aristotle’s political theory—and there are many—he does not deserve that kind of indignity.

Professor Randall, who stresses that knowledge must rest on empirical evidence, should take cognizance of the empirical fact that throughout history the influence of Aristotle’s philosophy (particularly of his epistemology) has led in the direction of individual freedom, of man’s liberation from the power of the state—that Aristotle (via John Locke) was the philosophical father of the Constitution of the United States and thus of capitalism—that it is Plato and Hegel, not Aristotle, who have been the philosophical ancestors of all totalitarian and welfare states, whether Bismarck‘s, Lenin’s, or Hitler’s.

An “Aristotelian statist” is a contradiction in terms—and this, perhaps, is a clue to the conflict that mars the value of Professor Randall’s book.

But if read critically, this book is of great value in the study of Aristotle’s philosophy. It is a concise and comprehensive presentation which many people need and look for, but cannot find today. It is of particular value to college students: by providing a frame of reference, a clear summary of the whole, it will help them to grasp the meaning of the issues through the fog of the fragmentary, unintelligible manner in which most courses on Aristotle are taught today.

Above all, this book is important culturally, as a step in the right direction, as a recognition of the fact that the great physician needed by our dying science of philosophy is Aristotle—that if we are to emerge from the intellectual shambles of the present, we can do it only by means of an Aristotelian approach.

“Clearly,” writes Professor Randall, “Aristotle did not say everything; though without what he first said, all words would be meaningless, and when it is forgotten they usually are.”

3

To Young Scientists

by Ayn Rand

These remarks were delivered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in March 1962. They were addressed to “the students who are to be America‘s future scientists.” Reprinted from an edited version in The Objectivist Newsletter, October 1962.

We are living in an age when every social group is struggling frantically to destroy itself—and doing it faster than any of its rivals or enemies could hope for—when every man is his own most dangerous enemy, and the whole of mankind is rolling, at supersonic speed, back to the Dark Ages, with a nuclear bomb in one hand and a rabbit’s foot in the other.

The most terrible paradox of our age is the fact that the destruction of man’s mind, of reason, of logic, of knowledge, of civilization, is being accomplished in the name and with the sanction of science.

It took centuries and volumes of writing to bring our culture to its present state of bankruptcy—and volumes would have to be written to expose, counteract, and avert the disaster of a total intellectual collapse. But of all the deadly theories by means of which you are now being destroyed, I would like to warn you about one of the deadliest and most crucial: the alleged dichotomy of science and ethics.

You have heard that theory so often and from so many authorities that most of you now take it for granted, as an axiom, as the one absolute taught to you by those who proclaim that there are no absolutes. It is the doctrine that man’s science and ethics—or his knowledge and values, or his body and soul—are two separate, antagonistic aspects of his existence, and that man is caught between them, as a precarious, permanent traitor to their conflicting demands.

Science, they tell you, is the province of reason—but ethics, they say, is the province of a higher power, which man’s impotent, fallible intellect must not be so presumptuous as to challenge. What power? Why, feelings.

Before you accept that doctrine, identify concretely and specifically what it means. (Remember that ethics is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions, the choices and actions that determine the purpose and course of his life.) It means that you, as scientists, are competent to discover new knowledge—but not competent to judge for what purpose that knowledge is to be used. Your judgment is to be ,disqualified, if, when, and because it is rational—while human purposes are to be determined by the representatives of nonreason. You are to create the means—but they are to choose the ends. You are to work and think and strain all the power, energy and ingenuity of your mind to its utmost logical best, and produce great achievements—but those “superior” others will dispose of your achievements, by the grace and guidance of their feelings. Your mind is to be the tool and servant of their whims. You are to create the H-bomb—but a blustering Russian anthropoid will decide when he feels like dropping it and on whom. Yours is not to reason why—yours is just to do and provide the ammunition for others to die.

From Plato’s Republic onward, all statist-collectivists have looked longingly up at an anthill as at a social ideal to be reached. An anthill is a society of interdependent insects, where each particular kind or class is physiologically able to perform only one specific function: some are milch cows, some are toil ers, a few are rulers. Collectivist planners have dreamed for a long time of creating an ideal society by means of eugenics—by breeding men into various castes physiologically able to perform only one specific function. Your place, in such a society, would be that of toiling milch-brains, of human computers who would produce anything on demand and would be biologically incapable of questioning the orders of the anthropoid who’d throw them their food rations.

Does your self-esteem accept such a prospect?

No, I am not saying that that dream will ever be achieved physiologically. But I am saying that it has already been achieved politically and intellectually: politically, among your so-called colleagues in Soviet Russia—intellectually, in the mind of any man who accepts the science-ethics dichotomy.

I believe that many of you were attracted to the field of science precisely by reason of that dichotomy: in order to escape from the hysterical mystic-subjectivist-emotionalist shambles to which philosophers have reduced the field of ethics—and in order to find a clean, intelligible, rational, objective realm of activity.

You have not found it—not because it doesn’t exist, but because it cannot be found without the help of a clean, intelligible, rational, objective philosophy, part of which is ethics. It cannot be found until you realize that man cannot exist as half-scientist, half-brute—that all the aspects of his existence are, can be, and should be subject to the study and the judgment of his intellect—and that of all human disciplines, it is ethics, the discipline which sets his goals, that should be elevated into a science.

No man and no class of men can live without a code of ethics. But if there are degrees of urgency, I would say that it is you, the scientists, who need it most urgently. The nature of your power and of your responsibility is too obvious to need restatement. You can read it in every newspaper headline. It is obvious why you should know—before you start out—to what purpose and service you choose to devote the power of your mind.

If you do not care to know—well, I would like to say that there is a character in Atlas Shrugged who was dedicated to you as a warning, with the sincere hope that it would not be necessary. His name is Dr. Robert Stadler.

Many things have happened [in recent months] to demonstrate the ultimate consequences of the science—ethics dichotomy.

If a professional soldier were to accept a job with Murder, Inc. and claim that he is merely practicing his trade, that it is not his responsibility to know who is using his services or for what purpose—he would be greeted by a storm of indignation and regarded as a moral psychopath. Yet at his bloodiest worst, he could not perpetrate a fraction of the horrors achieved by any haughty ascetic of science who merely places a slip of paper with some mathematical computations into the hands of Khrushchev or Mao Tse-tung or any of their imitators in America, and, having read no newspapers since 1914, declares himself to be “above the battle.”

It is thus that the world reached the nightmare spectacle which surpasses any horror story of science fiction: two Soviet capsules circling in “outer space,” as the alleged triumph of an advanced science—while here on earth, a young boy lies bleeding to death and screaming for help, at the foot of the wall in East Berlin, shot for attempting to escape and left there by the prehistorical monsters from twenty thousand centuries deep: the Soviet rulers.

No, this is not the worst evil on today’s earth; there is one still worse: the conscience of those Western scientists who are still willing to associate on civilized terms with those colleagues of theirs who champion unilateral disarmament.

If you are now starting on a career in science, you do not have to share the guilt of those men, but you do have to reclaim the field and the honor of science.

There is only one way to do it: by accepting the moral principle that one does not surrender one’s mind into blind servitude to thugs, and one does not accept the job of munitions maker for Attila’s conquest of the world; not for any Attila, actual or potential, foreign or domestic.

There is only one way to implement that principle. Throughout history, with only a few exceptions, governments have claimed the “right” to rule men by means of physical force, that is: by terror and destruction. When the potential of terror and destruction reaches today’s scale, it should convince every human being that if mankind is to survive, Attila’s concept of government must be discarded, along with the alleged “right” of any men to impose their ideas or wishes on others by initiating the use of physical force. This means that men must establish a free, noncoercive society, where the government is only a policeman protecting individual rights, where force is used only in retaliation and self-defense, where no gang can seize the legalized power to unleash a reign of terror. Such a society does not have to be invented: it had existed, though not fully. Its name is capitalism.

Needless to say, capitalism does not force individuals or nations into the collectivist slave pen of a world government. The so-called One World is merely “one neck ready for one leash.” Capitalism leaves men free for self-defense, but gives no one the political means to initiate force or war.

This—not physical but political disarmament, the renunciation of legalized brute force as a way of life—is the only means of saving the world from nuclear destruction.

4

Who Is the Final Authority in Ethics?

by Ayn Rand

Written in answer to a reader’s question, this article appeared in the “Intellectual Ammunition Department” of The Objectivist Newsletter, February 1965.

There are certain questions that must be questioned—that is, challenged at their root—because they consist of smuggling a false premise into the mind of a careless listener. “Who created the universe?” is one such question. “Do you still beat your wife?” is another. And so is the question above.

It comes up in many different ways, directly and indirectly. It is usually asked in some formulation such as: “Who decides what is right or wrong?”

Students of Objectivism are not likely to ask this question, but they may hear it from others and fail to understand its nature. I was astonished, however, to find it addressed to this department, in the following form: “Is it intellectual plagiarism to accept and even to use philosophical principles and values discovered by someone else?”

It may not appear to be the same question, but it is—in the sense that it comes from the same fundamental error.

The nature of the error will become apparent if one applies that question to the physical sciences: “Who decides what is right or wrong in electronics?” Or: “Is it scientific plagiarism to accept and even to use medical principles and therapeutic techniques discovered by someone else?”

It is obvious that the root of such questions is a certain kind of conceptual vacuum: the absence of the concept of objectivity in the questioner’s mind.

Objectivity is both a metaphysical and an epistemological concept. It pertains to the relationship of consciousness to existence. Metaphysically, it is the recognition of the fact that reality exists independent of any perceiver’s consciousness. Epistemologically, it is the recognition of the fact that a perceiver’s (man’s) consciousness must acquire knowledge of reality by certain means (reason) in accordance with certain rules (logic). This means that although reality is immutable and, in any given context, only one answer is true, the truth is not automatically available to a human consciousness and can be obtained only by a certain mental process which is required of every man who seeks knowledge—that there is no substitute for this process, no escape from the responsibility for it, no shortcuts, no special revelations to privileged observers—and that there can be no such thing as a final “authority” in matters pertaining to human knowledge. Metaphysically, the only authority is reality; epistemologically—one’s own mind. The first is the ultimate arbiter of the second.

The concept of objectivity contains the reason why the question, “Who decides what is right or wrong?” is wrong. Nobody “decides.” Nature does not decide—it merely is; man does not decide, in issues of knowledge, he merely observes that which is. When it comes to applying his knowledge, man decides what he chooses to do, according to what he has learned, remembering that the basic principle of rational action in all aspects of human existence, is: “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” This means that man does not create reality and can achieve his values only by making his decisions consonant with the facts of reality.

Who “decides” what is the right way to make an automobile, to cure an illness or to live one’s life? Any man who cares to acquire the appropriate knowledge and to judge, at and for his own risk and sake. What is his criterion of judgment? Reason. What is his ultimate frame of reference? Reality. If he errs or evades, who penalizes him? Reality.

It took centuries (and the influence of Aristotle) for men to acquire a precarious hold on the concept of objectivity in regard to the physical sciences. How precarious that hold actually is, can be observed in the fact that most men are incapable of extending that concept to all human knowledge including the so-called humanities, the sciences dealing with man. In regard to the humanities, consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly, most people revert to the epistemology of prehistorical savages, i.e., to subjectivism.

Subjectivism is the belief that reality is not a firm absolute, but a fluid, plastic, indeterminate realm which can be altered, in whole or in part, by the consciousness of the perceiver—i.e., by his feelings, wishes or whims. It is the doctrine which holds that man—an entity of a specific nature, dealing with a universe of a specific nature—can, somehow, live, act, and achieve his goals apart from and/or in contradiction to the facts of reality, i.e., apart from and/or in contradiction to his own nature and the nature of the universe. (This is the “mixed,” moderate or middle-of-the-road version of subjectivism. Pure or “extreme” subjectivism does not recognize the concept of identity, i.e., the fact that man or the universe or anything possesses a specific nature.)

Morality has been the monopoly of mystics, i.e., of subjectiv ists, for centuries—a monopoly reinforced and reaffirmed by the neo-mystics of modern philosophy. The clash between the two dominant schools of ethics, the mystical and the social, is only a clash between personal subjectivism and social subjectivism: one substitutes the supernatural for the objective, the other substitutes the collective for the objective. Both are savagely united against the introduction of objectivity into the realm of ethics.

Most men, therefore, find it particularly difficult to regard ethics as a science and to grasp the concept of a rational, objective ethics that leaves no room for anyone’s arbitrary “decision.”

Subjectivism is the smuggled premise at the root of both variants of the question under discussion. Superficially, the two variants may appear to come from opposite motives. Actually, they are two sides of the same subjectivist coin.

The man who asks: “Who decides what is right or wrong?” is obviously a subjectivist who believes that reality is ruled by human whims and who seeks to escape from the responsibility of independent judgment by one of two means: either by cynicism or by blind faith, either by negating the validity of all moral standards or by looking for an “authority” to obey.

But the man who asks: “Is it intellectual plagiarism to accept and even to use philosophical principles and values discovered by someone else?” is not a sovereign consciousness seeking independence from others, as he wants to make himself appear. He has no better grasp of objectivity than the first man; he is a subjectivist who sees reality as a contest of whims and wants it to be ruled by his whims—which he proposes to accomplish by discarding as false everything discovered by others. His primary concern, in regard to philosophical principles, is not: “Is it true or false?” but: “Who discovered it?”

On such a premise, he would have to make fire by rubbing sticks together (if he discovers that much), since he is not Edison and cannot accept electric light. He would have to maintain that the earth is flat, since Columbus beat him to the demonstration of its shape. He would have to advocate statism, since he is not Adam Smith. And he would have to discard the laws of logic, since he is obviously not Aristotle.

The division of labor in the pursuit of knowledge—the fact that men can transmit knowledge and learn from one another’s discoveries—is one of man’s great advantages over all other living species. Only a subjectivist, who equates facts with arbitrary assertions, could imagine that to “learn” means to “accept on faith”—as this questioner seems to imply.

It is also possible that the motive of such a mentality is the wish not to discard the ideas of others, but to appropriate them. “Plagiarism” is a concept that pertains, not to the acceptance, but to the authorship of an idea. Needless to say, to accept someone’s idea and then to pose as its originator is plagiarism of the lowest order. But this has nothing to do with a legitimate, rational process of learning. The truth of an idea and its authorship are two separate issues, which are not difficult to keep apart.

This particular variant of the question was worth noting only as an extreme example of subjectivism—of the degree to which ideas have no reality and no connection to reality in a subjectivist’s mind. It is an illustration of the extent to which the concept of objectivity is still alien to a great many men, and of the extent to which mankind needs it.

Observe that most modern collectivists—the alleged advocates of human brotherhood, benevolence, and cooperation—are committed to subjectivism in the humanities. Yet reason—and, therefore, objectivity—is the only common bond among men, the only means of communication, the only universal frame of reference and criterion of justice. No understanding, communication, or cooperation is possible to men on the basis of unintelligible feelings and subjective “urges”; nothing is possible but a contest of whims resolved by the rule of brute force.

In politics, the subjectivist question of “Who ‘decides’?” comes up in many forms. It leads many alleged champions of freedom to the notion that “the will of the people” or of the majority is the ultimate sanction of a free society, which is a contradiction in terms, since such a sanction represents the doctrine of unlimited majority rule.

The answer, here as in all other moral-intellectual problems, is that nobody “decides.” Reason and reality are the only valid criteria of political theories. Who determines which theory is true? Any man who can prove it.

Theories, ideas, discoveries are not created collectively; they are the products of individual men. In politics, as in every other field of human endeavor, a group can only accept or reject a product (or a theory); it cannot, qua group, participate in its creation. The participants are those who choose that particular field of activity, each to the extent of his ability and ambition. And when men are free, irrational theories can win only temporarily and only through the errors or the default of the thinkers, i.e., of those who do seek the truth.

In politics, as in every other field, the men who do not care to think are merely ballast: they accept, by default, whatever the intellectual leaders of the moment have to offer. To the extent to which men do think, they follow the man who offers the best (i.e., the most rational) idea. This does not happen instantaneously or automatically or in every specific case and detail, but this is the way knowledge spreads among men, and this has been the pattern of mankind’s progress. The best proof of the power of ideas—the power of reason for men of all levels of intelligence—is the fact that no dictatorship was ever able to last without establishing censorship.

The number of its adherents is irrelevant to the truth or falsehood of an idea. A majority is as fallible as a minority or as an individual man. A majority vote is not an epistemological validation of an idea. Voting is merely a proper political device—within a strictly, constitutionally delimited sphere of action—for choosing the practical means of implementing a society’s basic principles. But those principles are not determined by vote. By whom, then, are they determined? By the facts of reality—as identified by those thinkers who chose the field of political philosophy. This was the pattern of the greatest political achievement in history: the American Revolution.

In this connection, it is important to note the epistemological significance of a free society. In a free society, the pursuit of truth is protected by the free access of any individual to any field of endeavor he may choose to enter. (A free access does not mean a guarantee of success, or of financial support, or of anyone’s acceptance and agreement—it means the absence of any forced restrictions or legal barriers.) This prevents the formation of any coercive “elite” in any profession—it prevents the legalized enforcement of a “monopoly on truth” by any gang of power seekers—it protects the free market place of ideas—it keeps all doors open to man’s inquiring mind.

Who “decides”? In politics, in ethics, in art, in science, in philosophy—in the entire realm of human knowledge—it is reality that sets the terms, through the work of those men who are able to identify its terms and to translate them into objective principles.

5

The Psychology of Psychologizing

by Ayn Rand

This article was published in The Objectivist, March 1971.

In certain passages of Atlas Shrugged, I touched briefly on issues which I wanted to discuss theoretically at a later date and at greater length.

One such passage is the scene in which Hank Rearden, struggling to understand his wife’s behavior, wonders whether the motive of her constant, spiteful sarcasm is “not a desire to make him suffer, but a confession of her own pain, a defense for the pride of an unloved wife, a secret plea—so that the subtle, the hinted, the evasive in her manner, the thing begging to be understood, was not the open malice, but the hidden love.”

Struggling to be just, he gives her the benefit of the doubt and suppresses the warning of his own mind. “He felt a dim anger, like a voice he tried to choke, a voice crying in revulsion: Why should I deal with her rotten, twisted lying?—why should I accept torture for the sake of pity?—why is it I who should have to take the hopeless burden of trying to spare a feeling she won’t admit, a feeling I can’t know or understand or try to guess?—if she loves me, why doesn’t the damn coward say so and let us both face it in the open?”

Rearden was the innocent victim of a widespread game that has many variants and ramifications, none of them innocent, a game that could be called a racket. It consists, in essence, of substituting psychology for philosophy.

Today, many people use psychology as a new form of mysticism: as a substitute for reason, cognition and objectivity, as an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment, both in the role of the judge and the judged.

Mysticism requires the notion of the unknowable, which is revealed to some and withheld from others; this divides men into those who feel guilt and those who cash in on it. The two groups are interchangeable, according to circumstances. When being judged, a mystic cries: “I couldn’t help it!” When judging others, he declares: “You can’t know, but I can.” Modern psychology offers him both opportunities.

Once, the power superseding and defeating man’s mind was taken to be predetermined fate, supernatural will, original sin, etc.; now it is one’s own subconscious. But it is still the same old game: the notion that the wishes, the feelings, the beliefs—and, today, the malfunction—of a human consciousness can absolve a man from the responsibility of cognition.

Just as reasoning, to an irrational person, becomes rationalizing, and moral judgment becomes moralizing, so psychological theories become psychologizing. The common denominator is the corruption of a cognitive process to serve an ulterior motive.

Psychologizing consists in condemning or excusing specific individuals on the grounds of their psychological problems, real or invented, in the absence of or contrary to factual evidence.

As a science, psychology is barely making its first steps. It is still in the anteroom of science, in the stage of observing and gathering material from which a future science will come. This stage may be compared to the pre-Socratic period in philosophy; psychology has not yet found a Plato, let alone an Aristotle, to organize its material, systematize its problems, and define its fundamental principles.

A conscientious psychotherapist, of almost any school, knows that the task of diagnosing a particular individual’s problems is extremely complex and difficult. The same symptom may indicate different things in different men, according to the total context and interaction of their various premises. A long period of special inquiry is required to arrive even at a valid hypothesis.

This does not stop the amateur psychologizers. Armed with a smattering not of knowledge, but of undigested slogans, they rush, unsolicited, to diagnose the problems of their friends and acquaintances. Pretentiousness and presumptuousness are the psychologizer’s invariable characteristics: he not merely invades the privacy of his victims’ minds, he claims to understand their minds better than they do, to know more than they do about their own motives. With reckless irresponsibility, which an old-fashioned mystic oracle would hesitate to match, he ascribes to his victims any motivation that suits his purpose, ignoring their denials. Since he is dealing with the great “unknowable”—which used to be life after death or extrasensory perception, but is now man’s subconscious—all rules of evidence, logic, and proof are suspended, and anything goes (which is what attracts him to his racket).

The harm he does to his victims is incalculable. People who have psychological problems are confused and suggestible; unable to understand their own inner state, they often feel that any explanation is better than none (which is a very grave error). Thus the psychologizer succeeds in implanting new doubts in their minds, augmenting their sense of guilt and fear, and aggravating their problems.

The unearned status of an “authority,” the chance to air arbitrary pronouncements and frighten people or manipulate them, are some of the psychologizer’s lesser motives. His basic motive is worse. Observe that he seldom discovers any virtuous or positive elements hidden in his victims’ subconscious; what he claims to discover are vices, weaknesses, flaws. What he seeks is a chance to condemn—to pronounce a negative moral judgment, not on the grounds of objective evidence, but on the grounds of some intangible, unprovable processes in a man’s subconscious untranslated into action. This means: a chance to subvert morality.

The basic motive of most psychologizers is hostility. Caused by a profound self-doubt, self-condemnation, and fear, hostility is a type of projection that directs toward other people the hatred which the hostile person feels toward himself. Blaming the evil of others for his own shortcomings, he feels a chronic need to justify himself by demonstrating their evil, by seeking it, by hunting for it—and by inventing it. The discovery of actual evil in a specific individual is a painful experience for a moral person. But observe the almost triumphant glee with which a psychologizer discovers some ineffable evil in some bewildered victim.

The psychologizer’s subversion of morality has another, corollary aspect: by assuming the role of a kind of moral Grand Inquisitor responsible for the psychological purity of others, he deludes himself into the belief that he is demonstrating his devotion to morality and can thus escape the necessity of applying moral principles to his own actions.

This is his link to another, more obvious, and, today, more fashionable type of psychologizer who represents the other side of the same coin: the humanitarian cynic. The cynic turns psychology into a new, “scientific” version of determinism and—by means of unintelligible jargon derived from fantastically arbitrary theories—declares that man is ruled by the blind forces of his subconscious, which he can neither know nor control, that he can’t help it, that nobody can help what he does, that nobody should be judged or condemned, that morality is a superstition and anything goes.

This type has many subvariants, ranging from the crude cynic, who claims that innately all men are swine, to the compassionate cynic, who claims that anything must be forgiven and that the substitute for morality is love.

Observe that both types of psychologizers, the Inquisitor and the cynic, switch roles according to circumstances. When the Inquisitor is called to account for some action of his own, he cries: “I couldn’t help it!” When the humanitarian cynic confronts an unforgiving, moral man, he vents as virulent a stream of denunciations, hostility, and hatred as any Inquisitor—forgetting that the moral man, presumably, can’t help it.

The common denominator remains constant: escape from cognition and, therefore, from morality.

Psychologizing is not confined to amateurs acting in private. Some professional psychologists have set the example in public. As an instance of the Inquisitor type of psychologizing, there was the group of psychiatrists who libeled Senator Barry Goldwater [in 1964], permitting themselves the outrageous impertinence of diagnosing a man they had never met. (Parenthetically, Senator Goldwater exhibited a magnificent moral courage in challenging them and subjecting himself to their filthy malice in the ordeal of a trial, which he won. The Supreme Court, properly, upheld the verdict.) [Goldwater v. Ginzburg et al. 396 U.S. 1049]

As an example of the cynic type of psychologizing, there are the psychologists who rush to the defense of any murderer (such as Sirhan Sirhan), claiming that he could not help it, that the blame rests on society or environment or his parents or poverty or war, etc.

These notions are picked up by amateurs, by psychologizing commentators who offer them as excuses for the atrocities committed by “political” activists, bombers, college-campus thugs, etc. The notion that poverty is the psychological root of all evil is a typical piece of psychologizing, whose proponents ignore the fact that the worst atrocities are committed by the children of the well-to-do.

As examples of eclectic mixtures, there are the psychologizing biographies of historical figures that interpret the motives of men who died centuries ago—by means of a crude, vulgarized version of the latest psychological theories, which are false to begin with. And there are the countless psychologizing movies that explain a murderer’s actions by showing that his domineering mother did not kiss him good night at the age of six—or account for a girl’s frigidity by revealing that she once broke a doll representing her father.

Then there is the renowned playwright who was asked in a television interview why his plays always had unhappy endings, and who answered: “I don’t know. Ask my psychiatrist.”

While the racket of the philosophizing mystics rested on the claim that man is unable to know the external world, the racket of the psychologizing mystics rests on the claim that man is unable to know his own motivation. The ultimate goal is the same: the undercutting of man’s mind.

Psychologizers do not confine themselves to any one school of psychology. They snatch parts of any and all psychological theories as they see fit. They sneak along on the fringes of any movement. They exist even among alleged students of Objectivism.

The psychologizers’ victims are not always innocent or unwilling. The “liberation” from the responsibility of knowing one’s own motives is tempting to many people. Many are eager to switch the burden of judging their own moral stature to the shoulders of anyone willing to carry it. Men who do not accept the judgment of others as a substitute for their own in regard to the external world, turn into abject secondhanders in regard to their inner state. They would not go to a quack for a medical diagnosis of their physical health, but they entrust their mental health to any psychologizer who comes along. The innocent part of their reasons is their failure of introspection and the painful chaos of their psychological conflicts; the non-innocent part is fear of moral responsibility.

Both the psychologizers and their victims ignore the nature of consciousness and of morality.

An individual’s consciousness, as such, is inaccessible to others ; it can be perceived only by means of its outward manifestations. It is only when mental processes reach some form of expression in action that they become perceivable (by inference) and can be judged. At this point, there is a line of demarcation, a division of labor, between two different sciences.

The task of evaluating the processes of man’s subconscious is the province of psychology. Psychology does not regard its subject morally, but medically—i.e., from the aspect of health or malfunction (with cognitive competence as the proper standard of health).

The task of judging man’s ideas and actions is the province of philosophy.

Philosophy is concerned with man as a conscious being; it is for conscious beings that it prescribes certain principles of action, i.e., a moral code.

A man who has psychological problems is a conscious being; his cognitive faculty is hampered, burdened, slowed down, but not destroyed. A neurotic is not a psychotic. Only a psychotic is presumed to suffer from a total break with reality and to have no control over his actions or the operations of his consciousness (and even this is not always true). A neurotic retains the ability to perceive reality, and to control his consciousness and his actions (this control is merely more difficult for him than for a healthy person). So long as he is not psychotic, this is the control that a man cannot lose and must not abdicate.

Morality is the province of philosophical judgment, not of psychological diagnosis. Moral judgment must be objective, i.e., based on perceivable, demonstrable facts. A man’s moral character must be judged on the basis of his actions, his statements, and his conscious convictions—not on the basis of inferences (usually spurious) about his subconscious.

A man is not to be condemned or excused on the grounds of the state of his subconscious. His psychological problems are his private concern which is not to be paraded in public and not to be made a burden on innocent victims or a hunting ground for poaching psychologizers. Morality demands that one treat and judge men as responsible adults.

This means that one grants a man the respect of assuming that he is conscious of what he says and does, and one judges his statements and actions philosophically, i.e., as what they are—not psychologically, i.e., as leads or clues to some secret, hidden, unconscious meaning. One neither speaks nor listens to people in code.

If a man’s consciousness is hampered by malfunction, it is the task of a psychologist to help him correct it—just as it is the task of a doctor to help correct the malfunction of a man’s body. It is not the task of an astronaut-trainer or a choreographer to adjust the techniques of space flying or of ballet dancing to the requirements of the physically handicapped. It is not the task of philosophy to adjust the principles of proper action (i.e., of morality) to the requirements of the psychologically handicapped—nor to allow psychologizers to transform such handicaps into a moral issue, one way or the other.

It is not man’s subconscious, but his conscious mind that is subject to his direct control—and to moral judgment. It is a specific individual’s conscious mind that one judges (on the basis of objective evidence) in order to judge his moral character.

Every kind of psychologizing involves the false dichotomy whose extremes are represented by the Inquisitor and the cynic. The alternative is not: rash, indiscriminate moralizing or cowardly, evasive moral neutrality—i.e., condemnation without knowledge or the refusal to know in order not to condemn. These are two interchangeable variants of the same motive: escape from the responsibility of cognition and of moral judgment.

In dealing with people, one necessarily draws conclusions about their characters, which involves their psychology, since every character judgment refers to a man’s consciousness. But it is a man’s subconscious and his psychopathology that have to be left alone, particularly in moral evaluations.

A layman needs some knowledge of medicine in order to know how to take care of his own body—and when to call a doctor. The same principle applies to psychology: a layman needs some knowledge of psychology in order to understand the nature of a human consciousness; but theoretical knowledge does not qualify him for the extremely specialized job of diagnosing the psy chopathological problems of specific individuals. Even self-diagnosis is often dangerous: there is such a phenomenon as psychological hypochondriacs, who ascribe to themselves every problem they hear or read about.

Allowing for exceptions in special cases, it is not advisable to discuss one’s psychological problems with one’s friends. Such discussions can lead to disastrously erroneous conclusions (since two amateurs are no better than one, and sometimes worse) —and they introduce a kind of medical element that undercuts the basis of friendship. Friendship presupposes two firm, independent, reliable, and responsible personalities. (This does not mean that one has to lie, put on an act and hide from one’s friends the fact that one has problems; it means simply that one does not turn a friend into a therapist.)

The above applies to psychological discussions between two honest persons. The opportunities such discussions offer to the dishonest are obvious: they are an invitation for every type of psychologizer to pounce upon. The Inquisitor will use them to frighten and manipulate a victim. The cynic will use them to attract attention to himself, to evoke pity, to wheedle special privileges. The old lady who talks about her operation is a well-known bore; she is nothing compared to the youngish lady who talks on and on and on about her psychological problems, with a lameness of imagination that prevents them from being good fiction.

Psychological problems as such are not a disgrace; it is what a person does about them that frequently is.

Since a man’s psychological problems hamper his cognitive judgment (particularly the problems created by a faulty psycho-epistemology), it is his responsibility to delimit his problems as much as possible, to think with scrupulous precision and clarity before taking an action, and never to act blindly on the spur of an emotion (it is emotions that distort cognition in all types of psychological problems). In regard to other men, it is his responsibility to preserve the principle of objectivity, i.e., to be consistent and intelligible in his behavior, and not to throw his neurosis at others, expecting them to untangle it, which none of them can or should do.

This brings us to the lowest type of psychologizing, exemplified by Lillian Rearden.

Though her behavior was a calculated racket, the same policy is practiced by many people, in many different forms, to varying extents, moved by various mixtures of cunning, inertia, and irresponsibility. The common denominator is the conscious flouting of objectivity—in the form of the self-admitted inability and/or unwillingness to explain one’s own actions. The pattern goes as follows: “Why did you do this?” “I don’t know.” “What were you after?” “I don’t know.” “Since I can’t understand you, what do you expect me to do?” “I don’t know.”

This policy rests on the notion that the content of one’s consciousness need not be processed.

It is only a newborn infant that could regard itself as the helplessly passive spectator of the chaotic sensations which are the content of its consciousness (but a newborn infant would not, because its consciousness is intensely busy processing its sensations). From the day of his birth, man’s development and growth to maturity consists in his mastery of the skill of processing his sensory-perceptual material, of organizing it into concepts, of integrating concepts, of identifying his feelings, of discovering their relation to the facts of reality. This processing has to be performed by a man’s own mind. No one can perform it for him. If he fails to perform it, he is mentally defective. It is only on the assumption that he has performed it that one treats him as a conscious being.

The evil of today’s psychologizing culture—fostered particularly by Progressive education—is the notion that no such processing is necessary.

The result is the stupor and lethargy of those who are neither infants nor adults, but miserable sleepwalkers unwilling to wake up. Anything can enter the spongy mess inside their skulls, nothing can come out of it. The signals it emits are chance regurgitations of any chance splatter.

They have abdicated the responsibility for their own mental processes, yet they continue to act, to speak, to deal with people—and to expect some sort of response. This means that they throw upon others the burden of the task on which they defaulted, and expect others to understand the unintelligible.

The number of people they victimize, the extent of the torture they impose on merciful, conscientious men who struggle to understand them, the despair of those whom they drive to the notion that life is incomprehensible and irrational, cannot be computed.

It should not be necessary to say it, but today it is: anyone who wants to be understood, has to make damn sure that he has made himself intelligible.

This is the moral principle that Hank Rearden glimpsed and should have acted upon at once.

It is only with a person’s conscious mind that one can deal, and it is only with his conscious mind that one can be concerned. The unprocessed chaos inside his brain, his unidentified feelings, his unnamed urges, his unformulated wishes, his unadmitted fears, his unknown motives, and the entire cesspool he has made of his stagnant subconscious are of no interest, significance, or concern to anyone outside a therapist’s office.

The visible image of an “unprocessed” mentality is offered by non-objective art. Its practitioners announce that they have failed to digest their perceptual data, that they have failed to reach the conceptual or fully conscious level of development, and that they offer you the raw material of their subconscious, whose mystery is for you to interpret.

There is no great mystery about it.

The mind is a processing organ; so is the stomach. If a stomach fails in its function, it throws up; its unprocessed material is vomit.

So is the unprocessed material emitted by a mind.

6

Altruism as Appeasement

by Ayn Rand

This article was published in The Objectivist, January 1966.

In March 1962, on the occasion of giving a lecture at M.I.T., I met a young student who was earnestly, intelligently concerned with opposing the trend to collectivism. I asked him his views on why so many of today’s young intellectuals were becoming “liberals.” He could not give me a full answer. But a few weeks later, he wrote me a remarkable letter.

He explained that he had given a great deal of thought to my question and had reached certain conclusions. The majority of college students, he wrote, do not choose to think; they accept the status quo, conform to the prescribed code of values, and evade the responsibility of independent thought. “In adopting this attitude, they are encouraged by teachers who inspire imitation, rather than creation.”

But there are a few who are not willing to renounce their rational faculty. “They are the intellectuals—and they are the outsiders. Their willingness to think makes them shine forth as a threat to the stagnant security of the levelers in which they are immersed. They are teased and rejected by their school-mates. An immense amount of faith in oneself and a rational philosophical basis are required to set oneself against all that society has ever taught.... The man who preaches individual integrity, pride, and self-esteem is today virtually nonexistent. Far more common is the man who, driven by the young adult’s driving need for acceptance, has compromised. And here is the key—[the result of] the compromise is the liberal.

“The man who sets himself against society by seeking to be rational is almost certain to succumb to the extent of accepting a strong guilt complex. He is declared ‘guilty’ by his rejection of the omnipresent ’equality in mediocrity’ doctrine of today.... So the intellectual, to atone for a false guilt, becomes today’s liberal. He proclaims loudly the brotherhood of all men. He seeks to serve his escapist brothers by guaranteeing them their desire for social security. He sanctions their mediocrity, he works for their welfare, above all he essentially seeks their approval—to atone for the guilt that they have thrust upon him in the guise of an absolute moral system which is not open to question.”

This young man deserves credit for an extraordinary psychological perceptiveness. But the situation he describes is not new; it is as old as altruism; nor is it confined to “liberals.”

Shortly after receiving that letter, I met a distinguished historian, a man of great intellect and scholarship, an advocate of capitalism, who was then in his late seventies. I had been puzzled by the fact that in his many works, the rigorous logic of his arguments was inexplicably contradicted and undercut by his acceptance of “the common good” as the criterion of morality—and I asked him his reasons. “Oh, one must say that to the masses,” he answered, “otherwise, they won’t accept capitalism.”

Between these two extremes of age—from college years to the culmination of a lifetime’s struggle—lies a silent psychological horror story. It is the story of men who spend their lives apologizing for their own intelligence.

The following pattern does not enmesh all men of superior mental endowment; some manage to escape it; but in our anti-rational culture, it strangles too many of them.

By the time he reaches college, a bright, sensitive, precociously observant youth has acquired the sense of being trapped in a nightmare universe where he is resented not for his flaws, but for his greatest attribute: his intelligence. It is merely a sense, not a firm conviction; no teenager can draw such a conclusion with certainty or fully believe so enormous an evil. He senses only that he is “different,” in some way which he cannot define—that he does not get along with people, for some reason which he cannot name—that he wants to understand things and issues, big issues, about which no one else seems to care.

His first year in college is, usually, his psychological killer. He had expected college to be a citadel of the intellect where he would find answers, knowledge, meaning, and, above all, some companions to share his interest in ideas. He finds none of it. One or two teachers may live up to his hope (though they are growing rarer year by year). But as to intellectual companionship, he finds the same gang he had met in kindergarten, in playgrounds, and in vacant lots: a leering, screeching, aggressively mindless gang playing the same games, with a latinized jargon replacing the mud pies and baseball bats.

There are many wrong decisions he can make at this cross-roads, but the deadliest—psychologically, intellectually, and morally—is the attempt to join the gang at the price of selling his soul to uninterested buyers. It is an attempt to apologize for his intellectual concerns and to escape from the loneliness of a thinker by professing that his thinking is dedicated to some social-altruistic goal. It is an attempt that amounts to the wordless equivalent of the plea: “I’m not an outsider! I’m your friend! Please forgive me for using my mind—I’m using it only in order to serve you!”

Whatever remnants of personal value he may preserve after a deal of that kind, self-esteem is not one of them.

Such decisions are seldom, if ever, made consciously. They are made gradually, by subconscious emotional motivation and semiconscious rationalization. Altruism offers an arsenal of such rationalizations: if an unformed adolescent can tell himself that his cowardice is humanitarian love, that his subservience is unselfishness, that his moral treason is spiritual nobility, he is hooked. By the time he is old enough to know better, the erosion of his self-esteem is such that he dares not face or reexamine the issue.

Some degree of social metaphysics [secondhandedness] is almost always involved in the psychology of such a man, but it is hard to tell whether it led to or resulted from his surrender. In either case, his basic motivation is different and, in a certain sense, worse. Basically, a social metaphysician is motivated by the desire to escape the responsibility of independent thought, and he surrenders the mind he is afraid to use, preferring to follow the judgments of others. But an intellectual appeaser surrenders morality, the realm of values, in order to be permitted to use his mind. The degree of self-abasement is greater; the implicit view of values—as irrelevant to the mind—is disastrous; the implicit view of the mind—as functioning by permission of the mindless—is unspeakable. (Nor does the appeaser often care to speak about it.)

There are as many variants of the consequences as there are men who commit this particular type of moral treason. But certain scars of psychological deformity can be observed in most of them as their common symptoms.

Humanitarian love is what the altruist-appeaser never achieves. Instead, his salient characteristic is a mixture of bitter contempt and intense, profound hatred for mankind, a hatred impervious to reason. He regards men as evil by nature, he complains about their congenital stupidity, mediocrity, depravity—yet slams his mind ferociously shut to any argument that challenges his estimate. His view of the people at large is a nightmare image—the image of a mindless brute endowed with some inexplicably omnipotent power—and he lives in terror of that image, yet resists any attempt to revise it.

If questioned, he can give no grounds for his view. Intellectually, he admits that the average man is not a murderous brute ready to attack him at any moment; emotionally, he keeps feeling the brute’s presence behind every corner.

An accomplished young scientist once told me that he was not afraid of gangsters, but waiters and gas-station attendants filled him with terror, even though he could not say what it was he expected them to do to him. An elderly, extremely successful businessman told me that he divided people into three classes according to their intelligence: the above average, the average, and the below average; he did not mind the first two classes, but those of below average intelligence threw him into uncontrollable panic. He had spent his life expecting a bloody uprising of brutes who would seize, loot, wreck, and slaughter everything in sight; no, he was not a “conservative”; he was a “liberal.”

There is an element of truth in that image of the brute: not factual truth, but psychological truth, not about people at large, but about the man who fears them. The brute is the frozen embodiment of mankind as projected by the emotions of an adolescent appeaser. The brute’s omnipotent power to perpetrate some unimaginable horror is merely an adult’s rationalization; physical violence is not what he fears. But his terror is real: a monster that had the power to make him surrender his mind is, indeed, a terrifying evil. And the deepest, the unconfessed source of his terror lies in the fact that the surrender was not demanded or extorted—that the monster was the victim’s own creation.

This is the reason why the appeaser has a vested interest in maintaining his belief in the brute’s existence: even a life of terror, with the excuse that he could not help it, is preferable to facing the full enormity of the fact that he was not robbed of self-esteem, but threw it away—and that his chronic sense of guilt does not come from the spurious sin of possessing intelligence, but from the actual crime of having betrayed it.

A corollary symptom, in most intellectual appeasers, is the “elite” premise—the dogmatic, unshakable belief that “the masses don’t think,” that men are impervious to reason, that thinking is the exclusive prerogative of a small, “chosen” minority.

In the field of politics, this leads the more aggressive type of appeasers, the “liberals,” to the belief in rule by physical force, to the doctrine that people are unfit for freedom and should be ruled—“for their own good”—by a dictatorship of the “elite.” Hence the craving of such “liberals” for governmental recognition, and their extreme susceptibility to bribes by any strong-arm government, foreign or domestic, in the form of minor jobs, loud titles, official honors or simply dinner invitations. Hence the tolerant sympathy of such “liberals” for the regimes of Soviet Russia or Red China, and their appalling indifference to the wholesale atrocities of those countries.

The more timorous type of appeasers, the “conservatives,” take a different line: they share the notion of an intellectual “elite” and, therefore, they discard intellectuality as numerically unimportant, and they concentrate on cajoling the brute (“the masses”) with baby talk—with vapid slogans, flattering bromides, folksy speeches in two-syllable words, on the explicit premise that reason does not work, that the brute must be won through appeals to his emotions and must, somehow, be fooled or cheated into taking the right road.

Both groups believe that dictatorships are “practical”—the “liberals” boldly and openly, the “conservatives” fearfully. Behind the ineffectual, half-hearted, apologetic attempts of the “conservatives” to defend freedom, lies the often confessed belief that the struggle is futile, that free enterprise is doomed. Why? The unconfessed answer is: Because men are brutes.

Moral cowardice is the necessary consequence of discarding morality as inconsequential. It is the common symptom of all intellectual appeasers. The image of the brute is the symbol of an appeaser’s belief in the supremacy of evil, which means—not in conscious terms, but in terms of his quaking, cringing blinding panic—that when his mind judges a thing to be evil, his emotions proclaim its power, and the more evil, the more powerful.

To an appeaser, the self-assertive confidence of the good is a reproach, a threat to his precarious pseudo-self-esteem, a disturbing phenomenon from a universe whose existence he cannot permit himself to acknowledge—and his emotional response is a nameless resentment. The self-assertive confidence of the evil is a metaphysical confirmation, the sign of a universe in which he feels at home—and his emotional response is bitterness, but obedience. Some dictators—who boastfully stress their reign of terror, such as Hitler and Stalin—count on this kind of psychology. There are people on whom it works.

Moral cowardice is fear of upholding the good because it is good, and fear of opposing the evil because it is evil. The next step leads to opposing the good in order to appease the evil, and rushing out to seek the evil’s favor. But since no mind can fully hide this policy from itself, and no form of pseudo-self-esteem can disguise it for long, the next step is to pounce upon every possible or impossible chance to blacken the nature of the good and to whitewash the nature of the evil.

Such is the relationship of mind to values—and such is the fate of those who sought to preserve their intellect by dispensing with morality.

The appeaser’s inner state is revealed in the field of esthetics. His sense of life dominates modern art and literature: the cult of depravity—the monotonous projection of cosmic terror, guilt, impotence, misery, doom—the compulsive preoccupation with the study of homicidal maniacs, a preoccupation resembling the mentality of a superstitious savage who fashions a voodoo doll in the belief that to reproduce is to master.

This does not mean that all the practitioners of modern art or modern politics are men who betrayed their own intelligence: most of them had nothing to betray. But it does mean that such practices would not have spread without the sanction of the intellectual traitors—and that they brought their own nightmare universe into reality by creating a cultural bandwagon for pretentious mediocrities and worse.

Not all of the intellectual appeasers reach the public arena. A great many of them perish on the way, torn by their inner conflicts, paralyzed by an insufficient capacity to evade, peter ing out in hopeless lethargy after a brilliantly promising start. A great many others drag themselves on, by an excruciating psychological effort, functioning at a small fraction of their potential. The cost of this type of appeasement—in frustrated, hampered, crippled, or stillborn talent—can never be computed.

An appeaser’s professional success or failure, as well as the degree of his precarious psychological adjustment, depends on the slowness or speed of a process common to all appeasers: the erosion of his sense of values. The renunciation of values—the acceptance of an irrational morality—was the specific form of his surrender. The pretense at any belief in altruism vanishes from his mind in a very few years, and there is nothing left to replace it: his independent capacity to value has been repressed—and his fear of the brute makes the pursuit of values seem hopelessly impractical. What sets in, thereafter, is the dry rot of cynicism—like a kind of premature senility of the spirit—a thin coating of belligerent amorality over a swamp of lifeless resignation. The result is a muted, impoverished, extinguished personality, the impersonal personality of a man with an ever shrinking range of concern, with nothing to seek, to achieve, to admire or oppose, and—since self-assertion is the assertion of one’s values—with no self to assert. One of the bitter penalties of the appeasers is that even the most brilliant of them turn out, as persons, to be conventional, empty, dull.

If their initial crime was the desire to be “one of the boys,” this is the way in which they do succeed.

Their ultimate penalty is still worse. A wrong premise does not merely fail, it achieves its own opposite. After years of intellectual faking, diluting, corner-cutting—in order to smuggle his ideas past an imaginary censor, in order to placate irrationality, stupidity, dishonesty, prejudice, malice, or vulgarity—the appeaser’s own mind assumes the standards of those he professes to despise. A mind cannot maintain a double standard of judgment indefinitely (if at all). Any man who is willing to speak or write “down,” i.e., to think down—who distorts his own ideas in order to accommodate the mindless, who subordinates truth to fear—becomes eventually indistinguishable from the hacks who cater to an alleged “public taste.” He joins the hordes who believe that the mind is impotent, that reason is futile, that ideas are only means of fooling the masses (i.e., that ideas are important to the unthinking, but the thinkers know better)—the vast, stagnant underworld of anti-intellectuality. Such is the dead end of the road he has chosen to take, he who had started out as a self-sacrificial priest of the intellect.

Hatred for reason is hatred for intelligence; today’s culture is saturated with both. It is the ultimate product of generations of appeasers, past and present—of men who, fearing an imaginary brute, upheld and perpetuated the irrational, inhuman, brutalizing morality of altruism.

No, men are not brutes; neither are they all independent thinkers. The majority of men are not intellectual initiators or originators; they accept what the culture offers them. It is not that they don’t think; it is that they don’t sustain their thinking consistently, as a way of life, and that their abstract range is limited. To what extent they are stunted by the anti-rational influences of our cultural traditions, is hard to say; what is known, however, is that the majority of men use only a small part of their potential intellectual capacity.

The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser’s intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture’s dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.

No, the average man is not morally innocent. But the best proof of his non-brutality, of his helpless, confused, inarticulate longing for truth, for an intelligible, rational world—and of his response to it, when given a chance he cannot create on his own—is the fact that no dictatorship has ever lasted without establishing censorship.

No, it is not the intelligent man’s moral obligation to serve as the leader or teacher of his less endowed brothers. His foremost moral obligation is to preserve the integrity of his mind and of his self-esteem—which means: to be proud of his intelligence—regardless of their approval or disapproval. No matter how hard this might be in a corrupt age like ours, he has, in fact, no alternative. It is his only chance at a world where intelligence can function, which means: a world where he—and, incidentally, they—can survive.

7

The Question of Scholarships

by Ayn Rand

This article was published in The Objectivist, June 1966.

Many students of Objectivism are troubled by a certain kind of moral dilemma confronting them in today’s society. [I am] frequently asked the questions: “Is it morally proper to accept scholarships, private or public?” and: “Is it morally proper for an advocate of capitalism to accept a government research grant or a government job?”

I shall hasten to answer: “Yes”—then proceed to explain and qualify it. There are many confusions on these issues, created by the influence and implications of the altruist morality.

1. There is nothing wrong in accepting private scholarships. The fact that a man has no claim on others (i.e., that it is not their moral duty to help him and that he cannot demand their help as his right) does not preclude or prohibit good will among men and does not make it immoral to offer or to accept voluntary, non-sacrificial assistance.

It is altruism that has corrupted and perverted human benevolence by regarding the giver as an object of immolation and the receiver as a helplessly miserable object of pity who holds a mortgage on the lives of others—a doctrine which is extremely offensive to both parties, leaving men no choice but the roles of sacrificial victim or moral cannibal. A man of self-esteem can neither offer help nor accept it on such terms.

As a consequence, when people need help, the best of them (those who need it through no fault of their own) often prefer to starve rather than accept assistance—while the worst of them (the professional parasites) run riot and cash in on it to the full. (For instance, the student “activists” who, not satisfied with free education, demand ownership of the university as well.)

To view the question in its proper perspective, one must begin by rejecting altruism’s terms and all of its ugly emotional aftertaste—then take a fresh look at human relationships. It is morally proper to accept help, when it is offered not as a moral duty, but as an act of good will and generosity, when the giver can afford it (i.e., when it does not involve self-sacrifice on his part), and when it is offered in response to the receiver’s virtues, not in response to his flaws, weaknesses, or moral failures, and not on the ground of his need as such.

Scholarships are one of the clearest categories of this proper kind of help. They are offered to assist ability, to reward intelligence, to encourage the pursuit of knowledge, to further achievement—not to support incompetence.

If a brilliant child’s parents cannot send him through college (or if he has no parents), it is not a moral default on their part or his. It is not the fault of “society,” of course, and he cannot demand the right to be educated at someone else’s expense; he must be prepared to work his way through school, if necessary. But this is the proper area for voluntary assistance. If some private person or organization offers to help him, in recognition of his ability, and thus to save him years of struggle—he has the moral right to accept.

The value of scholarships is that they offer an ambitious youth a gift of time when he needs it most: at the beginning.

(The fact that in today’s moral atmosphere, those who give or distribute scholarships are often guilty of injustices and of altruistic motives, does not alter the principle involved. It represents their failure to live up to the principle; their integrity is not the recipient’s responsibility and does not affect his right to accept the scholarship in good faith.)

2. A different principle and different considerations are involved in the case of public (i.e., governmental) scholarships. The right to accept them rests on the right of the victims to the property (or some part of it) which was taken from them by force.

The recipient of a public scholarship is morally justified only so long as he regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism. Those who advocate public scholarships have no right to them; those who oppose them have. If this sounds like a paradox, the fault lies in the moral contradictions of welfare statism, not in its victims.

Since there is no such thing as the right of some men to vote away the rights of others, and no such thing as the right of the government to seize the property of some men for the unearned benefit of others—the advocates and supporters of the welfare state are morally guilty of robbing their opponents, and the fact that the robbery is legalized makes it morally worse, not better. The victims do not have to add self-inflicted martyrdom to the injury done to them by others; they do not have to let the looters profit doubly, by letting them distribute the money exclusively to the parasites who clamored for it. Whenever the welfare-state laws offer them some small restitution, the victims should take it.

It does not matter, in this context, whether a given individual has or has not paid an amount of taxes equal to the amount of the scholarship he accepts. First, the sum of his individual losses cannot be computed; this is part of the welfare-state philosophy, which treats everyone’s income as public property. Second, if he has reached college age, he has undoubtedly paid—in hidden taxes—much more than the amount of the scholarship. Or, if his parents cannot afford to pay for his education, consider what taxes they have paid, directly or indirectly, during the twenty years of his life—and you will see that a scholarship is too pitifully small even to be called a restitution.

Third—and most important—the young people of today are not responsible for the immoral state of the world into which they were born. Those who accept the welfare-statist ideology assume their share of the guilt when they do so. But the anti-collectivists are innocent victims who face an impossible situation: it is welfare statism that has almost destroyed the possibility of working one’s way through college. It was difficult but possible some decades ago; today, it has become a process of close-to-inhuman torture. There are virtually no part-time jobs that pay enough to support oneself while going to school; the alternative is to hold a full-time job and to attend classes at night—which takes eight years of unrelenting twelve-to-sixteen-hour days, for a four-year college course. If those responsible for such conditions offer the victim a scholarship, his right to take it is incontestable—and it is too pitifully small an amount even to register on the scales of justice, when one considers all the other, the nonmaterial, nonamendable injuries he has suffered.

The same moral principles and considerations apply to the issue of accepting social security, unemployment insurance, or other payments of that kind. It is obvious, in such cases, that a man receives his own money which was taken from him by force, directly and specifically, without his consent, against his own choice. Those who advocated such laws are morally guilty, since they assumed the “right” to force employers and unwilling coworkers. But the victims, who opposed such laws, have a clear right to any refund of their own money—and they would not advance the cause of freedom if they left their money, unclaimed, for the benefit of the welfare-state administration.

3. The same moral principles and considerations apply to the issue of government research grants.

The growth of the welfare state is approaching the stage where virtually the only money available for scientific research will be government money. (The disastrous effects of this situation and the disgraceful state of government-sponsored science are apparent already, but that is a different subject. We are concerned here only with the moral dilemma of scientists.) Taxation is destroying private resources, while government money is flooding and taking over the field of research.

In these conditions, a scientist is morally justified in accepting government grants—so long as he opposes all forms of welfare statism. As in the case of scholarship recipients, a scientist does not have to add self-martyrdom to the injustices he suffers. And he does not have to surrender science to the Dr. Floyd Ferrises [this refers to a villain in Atlas Shrugged who is a government scientist].

Government research grants, for the most part, have no strings attached, i.e., no controls over the scientist’s intellectual and professional freedom (at least, not yet). When and if the government attempts to control the scientific and/or political views of the recipients of grants, that will be the time for men of integrity to quit. At present, they are still free to work—but, more than any other professional group, they should be on guard against the gradual, insidious growth of pressures to conform and of tacit control-by-intimidation, which are implicit in such conditions.

4. The same moral principles and considerations apply to the issue of taking government jobs.

The growth of government institutions has destroyed an incalculable number of private jobs and opportunities for private employment. This is more apparent in some professions (as, for instance, teaching) than in others, but the octopus of the “public sector” is choking and draining the “private sector” in virtually every line of work. Since men have to work for a living, the opponents of the welfare state do not have to condemn themselves to the self-martyrdom of a self-restricted labor market—particularly when so many private employers are in the vanguard of the advocates and profiteers of welfare statism.

There is, of course, a limitation on the moral right to take a government job: one must not accept any job that demands ideological services, i.e., any job that requires the use of one’s mind to compose propaganda material in support of welfare statism—or any job in a regulatory administrative agency enforcing improper, non-objective laws. The principle here is as follows: it is proper to take the kind of work which is not wrong per se, except that the government should not be doing it, such as medical services; it is improper to take the kind of work that nobody should be doing, such as is done by the F.T.C., the F.C.C., etc.

But the same limitation applies to a man’s choice of private employment: a man is not responsible for the moral or political views of his employers, but he cannot accept a job in an undertaking which he considers immoral, or in which his work consists specifically of violating his own convictions, i.e., of propagating ideas he regards as false or evil.

5. The moral principle involved in all the above issues consists, in essence, of defining as clearly as possible the nature and limits of one’s own responsibility, i.e., the nature of what is or is not in one’s power.

The issue is primarily ideological, not financial. Minimizing the financial injury inflicted on you by the welfare-state laws, does not constitute support of welfare statism (since the purpose of such laws is to injure you) and is not morally reprehensible. Initiating, advocating, or expanding such laws is.

In a free society, it is immoral to denounce or oppose that from which one derives benefits—since one’s associations are voluntary. In a controlled or mixed economy, opposition becomes obligatory—since one is acting under force, and the offer of benefits is intended as a bribe.

So long as financial considerations do not alter or affect your convictions, so long as you fight against welfare statism (and only so long as you fight it) and are prepared to give up any of its momentary benefits in exchange for repeal and freedom—so long as you do not sell your soul (or your vote)—you are morally in the clear. The essence of the issue lies in your own mind and attitude.

It is a hard problem, and there are many situations so ambiguous and so complex that no one can determine what is the right course of action. That is one of the evils of welfare statism: its fundamental irrationality and immorality force men into contradictions where no course of action is right.

The ultimate danger in all these issues is psychological: the danger of letting yourself be bribed, the danger of a gradual, imperceptible, subconscious deterioration leading to compromise, evasion, resignation, submission. In today’s circumstances, a man is morally in the clear only so long as he remains intellectually incorruptible. Ultimately, these problems are a test—a hard test—of your own integrity. You are its only guardian. Act accordingly.

8

Of Living Death

by Ayn Rand

This lecture on the July 29, 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae was delivered at the Ford Hall Forum on December 8, 1968. Because The Objectivist was behind schedule at the time, the lecture was published in the issues dated September-November 1968.

Those who wish to observe the role of philosophy in human existence may see it dramatized on a grand (and gruesome) scale in the conflict splitting the Catholic church today.

Observe, in that conflict, men’s fear of identifying or challenging philosophical fundamentals: both sides are willing to fight in silent confusion, to stake their beliefs, their careers, their reputations on the outcome of a battle over the effects of an unnamed cause. One side is composed predominantly of men who dare not name the cause; the other, of men who dare not discover it.

Both sides claim to be puzzled and disappointed by what they regard as a contradiction in the two recent encyclicals of Pope Paul VI. The so-called conservatives (speaking in religious, not political, terms) were dismayed by the encyclical Populorum Progressio (On the Development of Peoples)—which advocated global statism—while the so-called liberals hailed it as a progressive document. Now the conservatives are hailing the encyclical Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life)—which forbids the use of contraceptives—while the liberals are dismayed by it. Both sides seem to find the two documents inconsistent. But the inconsistency is theirs, not the pontiff’s. The two encyclicals are strictly, flawlessly consistent in respect to their basic philosophy and ultimate goal: both come from the same view of man’s nature and are aimed at establishing the same conditions for his life on earth. The first of these two encyclicals forbade ambition, the second forbids enjoyment; the first enslaved man to the physical needs of others, the second enslaves him to the physical capacities of his own body; the first damned achievement, the second damns love.

The doctrine that man’s sexual capacity belongs to a lower or animal part of his nature has had a long history in the Catholic church. It is the necessary consequence of the doctrine that man is not an integrated entity, but a being torn apart by two opposite, antagonistic, irreconcilable elements: his body, which is of this earth, and his soul, which is of another, supernatural realm. According to that doctrine, man’s sexual capacity—regardless of how it is exercised or motivated, not merely its abuses, not unfastidious indulgence or promiscuity, but the capacity as such—is sinful or depraved.

For centuries, the dominant teaching of the church held that sexuality is evil, that only the need to avoid the extinction of the human species grants sex the status of a necessary evil and, therefore, only procreation can redeem or excuse it. In modern times, many Catholic writers have denied that such is the church’s view. But what is its view? They did not answer.

Let us see if we can find the answer in the encyclical Humanae Vitae.

Dealing with the subject of birth control, the encyclical prohibits all forms of contraception (except the so-called “rhythm method”). The prohibition is total, rigid, unequivocal. It is enunciated as a moral absolute.

Bear in mind what this subject entails. Try to hold an image of horror spread across space and time—across the entire globe and through all the centuries—the image of parents chained, like beasts of burden, to the physical needs of a growing brood of children—young parents aging prematurely while fighting a losing battle against starvation—the skeletal hordes of unwanted children born without a chance to live—the unwed mothers slaughtered in the unsanitary dens of incompetent abortionists—the silent terror hanging, for every couple, over every moment of love. If one holds this image while hearing that this nightmare is not to be stopped, the first question one will ask is: Why? In the name of humanity, one will assume that some inconceivable, but crucially important reason must motivate any human being who would seek to let that carnage go on uncontested.

So the first thing one will look for in the encyclical, is that reason, an answer to that Why?

“The problem of birth,” the encyclical declares, “like every other problem regarding human life, is to be considered ... in the light of an integral vision of man and of his vocation, not only his natural and earthly, but also his supernatural and eternal, vocation.” [Paragraph 7]

And:

A reciprocal act of love, which jeopardizes the responsibility to transmit life which God the Creator, according to particular laws, inserted therein, is in contradiction with the design constitutive of marriage, and with the will of the author of life. To use this divine gift, destroying, even if only partially, its meaning and its purpose, is to contradict the nature both of man and of woman and of their most intimate relationship, and therefore it is to contradict also the plan of God and His will. [13]

And this is all. In the entire encyclical, this is the only reason given (but repeated over and over again) why men should transform their highest experience of happiness—their love—into a source of lifelong agony. Do so—the encyclical commands—because it is God’s will.

I, who do not believe in God, wonder why those who do would ascribe to him such a sadistic design, when God is supposed to be the archetype of mercy, kindness, and benevolence. What earthly goal is served by that doctrine? The answer runs like a hidden thread through the encyclical’s labyrinthian convolutions, repetitions, and exhortations.

In the darker corners of that labyrinth, one finds some snatches of argument, in alleged support of the mystic axiom, but these arguments are embarrassingly transparent equivocations. For instance:

... to make use of the gift of conjugal love while respecting the laws of the generative process means to acknowledge oneself not to be the arbiter of the sources of human life, but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator. In fact, just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, with particular reason, he has no such dominion over his creative faculties as such, because of their intrinsic ordination toward raising up life, of which God is the principle. [13]

What is meant here by the words “man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general”? The obvious meaning is that man cannot change the metaphysical nature of his body; which is true. But man has the power of choice in regard to the actions of his body—specifically, in regard to “his creative faculties,” and the responsibility for the use of these particular faculties is most crucially his. “To acknowledge oneself not to be the arbiter of the sources of human life” is to evade and to default on that responsibility. Here again, the same equivocation or package deal is involved. Does man have the power to determine the nature of his procreative faculty? No. But granted that nature, is he the arbiter of bringing a new human life into existence? He most certainly is, and he (with his mate) is the sole arbiter of that decision—and the consequences of that decision affect and determine the entire course of his life.

This is a clue to that paragraph’s intention: if man believed that so crucial a choice as procreation is not in his control, what would it do to his control over his life, his goals, his future?

The passive obedience and helpless surrender to the physical functions of one’s body, the necessity to let procreation be the inevitable result of the sexual act, is the natural fate of animals, not of men. In spite of its concern with man’s higher aspirations, with his soul, with the sanctity of married love—it is to the level of animals that the encyclical seeks to reduce man’s sex life, in fact, in reality, on earth. What does this indicate about the encyclical’s view of sex?

Anticipating certain obvious objections, the encyclical declares:

Now, some may ask: In the present case, is it not reasonable in many circumstances to have recourse to artificial birth control if, thereby, we secure the harmony and peace of the family, and better conditions for the education of children already born? To this question it is necessary to reply with clarity: The church is the first to praise and recommend the intervention of intelligence in a function which so closely associates the rational creature with his Creator; but she affirms that this must be one with respect for the order established by God. [16]

To what does this subordinate man’s intelligence? If intelligence is forbidden to consider the fundamental problems of man’s existence, forbidden to alleviate his suffering, what does this indicate about the encyclical’s view of man—and of reason?

History can answer this particular question. History has seen a period of approximately ten centuries, known as the Dark and Middle Ages, when philosophy was regarded as “the handmaiden of theology,” and reason as the humble subordinate of faith. The results speak for themselves.

It must not be forgotten that the Catholic church has fought the advance of science since the Renaissance: from Galileo’s astronomy, to the dissection of corpses, which was the start of modern medicine, to the discovery of anesthesia in the nineteenth century, the greatest single discovery in respect to the incalculable amount of terrible suffering it has spared mankind. The Catholic church has fought medical progress by means of the same argument: that the application of knowledge to the relief of human suffering is an attempt to contradict God’s design. Specifically in regard to anesthesia during childbirth, the argument claimed that since God intended woman to suffer while giving birth, man has no right to intervene. (!)

The encyclical does not recommend unlimited procreation. It does not object to all means of birth control—only to those it calls “artificial” (i.e., scientific). It does not object to man “contradicting God’s will” nor to man being “the arbiter of the sources of human life,” provided he uses the means it endorses: abstinence.

Discussing the issue of “responsible parenthood,” the encyclical states: “In relation to physical, economic, psychological and social conditions, responsible parenthood is exercised, either by the deliberate and generous decision to raise a numerous family, or by the decision, made for grave motives and with due respect for the moral law, to avoid for the time being, or even for an indeterminate period, a new birth.” [10] To avoid—by what means? By abstaining from sexual intercourse.

The lines preceding that passage are: “In relation to the tendencies of instinct or passion, responsible parenthood means the necessary dominion which reason and will must exercise over them.” [10] How a man is to force his reason to obey an irrational injunction and what it would do to him psychologically, is not mentioned.

Further on, under the heading “Mastery of Self,” the encyclical declares:

To dominate instinct by means of one’s reason and free will undoubtedly requires ascetic practices ... Yet this discipline which is proper to the purity of married couples, far from harming conjugal love, rather confers on it a higher human value. It demands continual effort yet, thanks to its beneficent influence, husband and wife fully develop their personalities, being enriched with spiritual values.... Such discipline ... helps both parties to drive out selfishness, the enemy of true love: and deepens their sense of responsibility. [21]

If you can bear that style of expression being used to discuss such matters—which I find close to unbearable—and if you focus on the meaning, you will observe that the “discipline,” the “continual effort,” the “beneficent influence,” the “higher human value” refer to the torture of sexual frustration.

No, the encyclical does not say that sex as such is evil; it merely says that sexual abstinence in marriage is “a higher human value.” What does this indicate about the encyclical’s view of sex—and of marriage?

Its view of marriage is fairly explicit. “[Conjugal] love is first of all fully human, that is to say, of the senses and of the spirit at the same time. It is not, then, a simple transport of instinct and sentiment, but also, and principally, an act of the free will, intended to endure and to grow by means of the joys and sorrows of daily life, in such a way that husband and wife become one only heart and one only soul, and together attain their human perfection.

“Then this love is total; that is to say, it is a very special form of personal friendship, in which husband and wife generously share everything, without undue reservations or selfish calculations.” [9]

To classify the unique emotion of romantic love as a form of friendship is to obliterate it: the two emotional categories are mutually exclusive. The feeling of friendship is asexual; it can be experienced toward a member of one’s own sex.

There are many other indications of this kind scattered through the encyclical. For instance: “These acts, by which husband and wife are united in chaste intimacy and by means of which human life is transmitted, are, as the council recalled, ‘noble and worthy.’ ” [11] It is not chastity that one seeks in sex, and to describe it this way is to emasculate the meaning of marriage.

There are constant references to a married couple’s duties, which have to be considered in the context of the sexual act—“duties toward God, toward themselves, toward the family and toward society.” [10] If there is any one concept which, when associated with sex, would render a man impotent, it is the concept of “duty.”

To understand the full meaning of the encyclical’s view of sex, I shall ask you to identify the common denominator—the common intention—of the following quotations:

[The church‘s] teaching, often set forth by the Magisterium, is founded upon the inseparable connection, willed by God and unable to be broken by man on his own initiative, between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning. Indeed, by its intimate structure, the conjugal act, while most closely uniting husband and wife, capacitates them for the generation of new lives. [12]

“[The conjugal acts] do not cease to be lawful if, for causes independent of the will of husband and wife, they are foreseen to be infecund.” [11, emphasis added.]

The church forbids: “every action which, either in anticipation of the conjugal act or its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible.” [14]

The church does not object to “an impediment to procreation” which might result from the medical treatment of a disease, “provided such impediment is not, for whatever motive, directly willed.” [15, emphasis added.]

And finally, the church “teaches that each and every marriage act (‘quilibet matrimonii usus,’) must remain open to the transmission of life.” [11]

What is the common denominator of these statements? It is not merely the tenet that sex as such is evil, but deeper: it is the commandment by means of which sex will become evil, the commandment which, if accepted, will divorce sex from love, will castrate man spiritually and will turn sex into a meaningless physical indulgence. That commandment is: man must not regard sex as an end in itself, but only as a means to an end.

Procreation and “God’s design” are not the major concern of that doctrine; they are merely primitive rationalizations to which man’s self-esteem is to be sacrificed. If it were otherwise, why the stressed insistence on forbidding man to impede procreation by his conscious will and choice? Why the tolerance of the conjugal acts of couples who are infecund by nature rather than by choice? What is so evil about that choice? There is only one answer: that choice rests on a couple’s conviction that the justification of sex is their own enjoyment. And this is the view which the church’s doctrine is intent on forbidding at any price.

That such is the doctrine’s intention, is supported by the church’s stand on the so-called “rhythm method” of birth control, which the encyclical approves and recommends.

The church is coherent with herself when she considers recourse to the infecund periods to be licit, while at the same time condemning, as being always illicit, the use of means directly contrary to fecundation, even if such use is inspired by reasons which may appear honest and serious.... It is true that, in the one and the other case, the married couple are concordant in the positive will of avoiding children for plausible reasons, seeking the certainty that offspring will not arrive; but it is also true that only in the former case are they able to renounce the use of marriage in the fecund periods when, for just motives, procreation is not desirable, while making use of it during infecund periods to manifest their affection and to safeguard their mutual fidelity. By so doing, they give proof of a truly and integrally honest love. [16]

On the face of it, this does not make any kind of sense at all—and the church has often been accused of hypocrisy or compromise because it permits this very unreliable method of birth control while forbidding all others. But examine that statement from the aspect of its intention, and you will see that the church is indeed “coherent with herself,” i.e., consistent.

What is the psychological difference between the “rhythm method” and other means of contraception? The difference lies in the fact that, using the “rhythm method,” a couple cannot regard sexual enjoyment as a right and as an end in itself. With the help of some hypocrisy, they merely sneak and snatch some personal pleasure, while keeping the marriage act “open to the transmission of life,” thus acknowledging that childbirth is the only moral justification of sex and that only by the grace of the calendar are they unable to comply.

This acknowledgment is the meaning of the encyclical’s peculiar implication that “to renounce the use of marriage in the fecund periods” is, somehow, a virtue (a renunciation which proper methods of birth control would not require). What else but this acknowledgment can be the meaning of the otherwise unintelligible statement that by the use of the “rhythm method” a couple “give proof of a truly and integrally honest love”?

There is a widespread popular notion to the effect that the Catholic church’s motive in opposing birth control is the desire to enlarge the Catholic population of the world. This may be superficially true of some people’s motives, but it is not the full truth. If it were, the Catholic church would forbid the “rhythm method” along with all other forms of contraception. And, more important, the Catholic church would not fight for anti-birth-control legislation all over the world: if numerical superiority were its motive, it would forbid birth control to its own followers and let it be available to other religious groups.

The motive of the church’s doctrine on this issue is, philosophically, much deeper than that and much worse; the goal is not metaphysical or political or biological, but psychological: if man is forbidden to regard sexual enjoyment as an end in itself, he will not regard love or his own happiness as an end in itself; if so, then he will not regard his own life as an end in itself; if so, then he will not attain self-esteem.

It is not against the gross, animal, physicalistic theories or uses of sex that the encyclical is directed, but against the spiritual meaning of sex in man’s life. (By “spiritual” I mean pertaining to man’s consciousness.) It is not directed against casual, mindless promiscuity, but against romantic love.

To make this clear, let me indicate, in brief essentials, a rational view of the role of sex in man’s existence.

Sex is a physical capacity, but its exercise is determined by man’s mind—by his choice of values, held consciously or subconsciously. To a rational man, sex is an expression of self-esteem—a celebration of himself and of existence. To the man who lacks self-esteem, sex is an attempt to fake it, to acquire its momentary illusion.

Romantic love, in the full sense of the term, is an emotion possible only to the man (or woman) of unbreached self-esteem: it is his response to his own highest values in the person of another—an integrated response of mind and body, of love and sexual desire. Such a man (or woman) is incapable of experiencing a sexual desire divorced from spiritual values.

I quote from Atlas Shrugged: “The men who think that wealth comes from material resources and has no intellectual root or meaning, are the men who think—for the same reason—that sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of one’s mind, choice or code of values.... But, in fact, a man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions.... Sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which [man] cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment—just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity!—an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire.... Love is our response to our highest values—and can be nothing else.... Only the man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love.”

In other words, sexual promiscuity is to be condemned not because sex as such is evil, but because it is good—too good and too important to be treated casually.

In comparison to the moral and psychological importance of sexual happiness, the issue of procreation is insignificant and irrelevant, except as a deadly threat—and God bless the inventors of the Pill!

The capacity to procreate is merely a potential which man is not obligated to actualize. The choice to have children or not is morally optional. Nature endows man with a variety of potentials—and it is his mind that must decide which capacities he chooses to exercise, according to his own hierarchy of rational goals and values. The mere fact that man has the capacity to kill does not mean that it is his duty to become a murderer; in the same way, the mere fact that man has the capacity to procreate does not mean that it is his duty to commit spiritual suicide by making procreation his primary goal and turning himself into a stud-farm animal.

It is only animals that have to adapt themselves to their physical background and to the biological functions of their bodies. Man adapts his physical background and the use of his biological faculties to himself—to his own needs and values. That is his distinction from all other living species.

To an animal, the rearing of its young is a matter of temporary cycles. To man, it is a lifelong responsibility—a grave responsibility that must not be undertaken causelessly, thoughtlessly, or accidentally.

In regard to the moral aspects of birth control, the primary right involved is not the “right” of an unborn child, or of the family, or of society, or of God. The primary right is one which—in today’s public clamor on the subject—few, if any, voices have had the courage to uphold: the right of man and woman to their own life and happiness—the right not to be regarded as the means to any end.

Man is an end in himself. Romantic love—the profound, exalted, lifelong passion that unites his mind and body in the sexual act—is the living testimony to that principle.

This is what the encyclical seeks to destroy; or, more precisely, to obliterate, as if it does not and cannot exist.

Observe the encyclical’s contemptuous references to sexual desire as “instinct” or “passion,” as if “passion” were a pejorative term. Observe the false dichotomy offered; man’s choice is either mindless, “instinctual” copulation—or marriage, an institution presented not as a union of passionate love, but as a relationship of “chaste intimacy,” of “special personal friendship,” of “discipline proper to purity,” of unselfish duty, of alternating bouts with frustration and pregnancy, and of such unspeakable, Grade-B-movie-folks-next-door kind of boredom that any semi-living man would have to run, in self-preservation, to the nearest whorehouse.

No, I am not exaggerating. I have reserved—as my last piece of evidence on the question of the encyclical’s view of sex—the paragraph in which the coils and veils of euphemistic equivocation got torn, somehow, and the naked truth shows through.

It reads as follows:

Upright men can even better convince themselves of the solid grounds on which the teaching of the church in this field is based, if they care to reflect upon the consequences of methods of artificial birth control. Let them consider, first of all, how wide and easy a road would thus be opened up toward conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality. Not much experience is needed in order to know human weakness, and to understand that men—especially the young, who are so vulnerable on this point—have need of encouragement to be faithful to the moral law, so that they must not be offered some easy means of eluding its observance. It is also to be feared that the man, growing used to the employment of anticonceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion. [17]

I cannot conceive of a rational woman who does not want to be precisely an instrument of her husband’s selfish enjoyment. I cannot conceive of what would have to be the mental state of a woman who could desire or accept the position of having a husband who does not derive any selfish enjoyment from sleeping with her. I cannot conceive of anyone, male or female, capable of believing that sexual enjoyment would destroy a husband’s love and respect for his wife—but regarding her as a brood mare and himself as a stud, would cause him to love and respect her.

Actually, this is too evil to discuss much further.

But we must also take note of the first part of that paragraph. It states that “artificial” contraception would open “a wide and easy road toward conjugal infidelity.” Such is the encyclical’s actual view of marriage: that marital fidelity rests on nothing better than fear of pregnancy. Well, “not much experience is needed in order to know” that that fear has never been much of a deterrent to anyone.

Now observe the inhuman cruelty of that paragraph’s reference to the young. Admitting that the young are “vulnerable on this point,” and declaring that they need “encouragement to be faithful to the moral law,” the encyclical forbids them the use of contraceptives, thus making it cold-bloodedly clear that its idea of moral encouragement consists of terror—the sheer, stark terror of young people caught between their first experience of love and the primitive brutality of the moral code of their elders. Surely the authors of the encyclical cannot be ignorant of the fact that it is not the young chasers or the teenage sluts who would be the victims of a ban on contraceptives, but the innocent young who risk their lives in the quest for love—the girl who finds herself pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend, or the boy who is trapped into a premature, unwanted marriage. To ignore the agony of such victims—the countless suicides, the deaths at the hands of quack abortionists, the drained lives wasted under the double burden of a spurious “dishonor” and of an unwanted child—to ignore all that in the name of “the moral law” is to make a mockery of morality.

Another, and truly incredible mockery, leers at us from that same paragraph 17. As a warning against the use of contraceptives, the encyclical states:

Let it be considered also that a dangerous weapon would thus be placed in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies.... Who will stop rulers from favoring, from even imposing upon their peoples, if they were to consider it necessary, the method of contraception which they judge to be most efficacious? In such a way men, wishing to avoid individual, family or social difficulties encountered in the observance of the divine law, would reach the point of placing at the mercy of the intervention of public authorities the most personal and most reserved sector of conjugal intimacy.

No public authorities have attempted—and no private groups have urged them to attempt—to force contraception on Catholics. But when one remembers that it is the Catholic church that has initiated anti-birth-control legislation the world over and thus has placed “at the mercy of the intervention of public authorities the most personal and most reserved sector of conjugal intimacy”—that statement becomes outrageous. Were it not for the politeness one should preserve toward the papal office, one would call that statement a brazen effrontery.

This leads us to the encyclical’s stand on the issue of abortion, and to another example of inhuman cruelty. Compare the coiling sentimentality of the encyclical’s style when it speaks of “conjugal love” to the clear, brusque, military tone of the following: “We must once again declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun, and, above all, directly willed and procured abortion, even if for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as licit means of regulating birth.” [14, emphasis added.]

After extolling the virtue and sanctity of motherhood, as a woman’s highest duty, as her “eternal vocation,” the encyclical attaches a special risk of death to the performance of that duty—an unnecessary death, in the presence of doctors forbidden to save her, as if a woman were only a screaming huddle of infected flesh who must not be permitted to imagine that she has the right to live.

And this policy is advocated by the encyclical’s supporters in the name of their concern for “the sanctity of life” and for “rights”—the rights of the embryo. (!)

I suppose that only the psychological mechanism of projection can make it possible for such advocates to accuse their opponents of being “anti-life.”

Observe that the men who uphold such a concept as “the rights of an embryo,” are the men who deny, negate, and violate the rights of a living human being.

An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not yet living (or the unborn).

Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body? The Catholic church is responsible for this country’s disgracefully barbarian anti-abortion laws, which should be repealed and abolished.

The intensity of the importance that the Catholic church attaches to its doctrine on sex may be gauged by the enormity of the indifference to human suffering expressed in the encyclical. Its authors cannot be ignorant of the fact that man has to earn his living by his own effort, and that there is no couple on earth—on any level of income, in any country, civilized or not—who would be able to support the number of children they would produce if they obeyed the encyclical to the letter.

If we assume the richest couple and include time off for the periods of “purity,” it will still be true that the physical and psychological strain of their “vocation” would be so great that nothing much would be left of them, particularly of the mother, by the time they reached the age of forty.

Consider the position of an average American couple. What would be their life, if they succeeded in raising, say, twelve children, by working from morning till night, by running a desperate race with the periodic trips to maternity wards, with rent bills, grocery bills, clothing bills, pediatricians’ bills, strained-vegetables bills, school book bills, measles, mumps, whooping cough, Christmas trees, movies, ice cream cones, summer camps, party dresses, dates, draft cards, hospitals, colleges—with every salary raise of the industrious, hardworking father mortgaged and swallowed before it is received—what would they have gained at the end of their life except the hope that they might be able to pay their cemetery bills, in advance?

Now consider the position of the majority of mankind, who are barely able to subsist on a level of prehistorical poverty. No strain, no backbreaking effort of the ablest, most conscientious father can enable him properly to feed one child—let alone an open-end progression. The unspeakable misery of stunted, disease-eaten, chronically undernourished children, who die in droves before the age of ten, is a matter of public record. Pope Paul VI—who closes his encyclical by mentioning his title as earthly representative of “the God of holiness and mercy”—cannot be ignorant of these facts; yet he is able to ignore them.

The encyclical brushes this issue aside in a singularly irresponsible manner:

We are well aware of the serious difficulties experienced by public authorities in this regard, especially in the developing countries. To their legitimate preoccupations we devoted our encyclical letter Populorum Progressio.... The only possible solution to this question is one which envisages the social and economic progress both of individuals and of the whole of human society, and which respects and promotes true human values.

Neither can one, without grave injustice, consider Divine Providence to be responsible for what depends, instead, on a lack of wisdom in government, on an insufficient sense of social justice, on selfish monopolization or again on blameworthy indolence in confronting the efforts and the sacrifices necessary to insure the raising of living standards of a people and of all its sons. [23]

The encyclical Populorum Progressio advocated the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a totalitarian, socialist-fascist, global state—in which the right to “the minimum essential for life” is to be the ruling principle and “all other rights whatsoever, including those of property and of free commerce, are to be subordinated to this principle.” (For a discussion of that encyclical, see my article “Requiem for Man” in [Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal].)

If, today, a struggling, desperate man, somewhere in Peru or China or Egypt or Nigeria, accepted the commandments of the present encyclical and strove to be moral, but saw his horde of children dying of hunger around him, the only practical advice the encyclical would give him is: Wait for the establishment of a collectivist world state. What, in God’s name, is he to do in the meantime?

Philosophically, however, the reference to the earlier encyclical, Populorum Progressio, is extremely significant: it is as if Pope Paul VI were pointing to the bridge between the two documents and to their common base.

The global state advocated in Populorum Progressio is a nightmare utopia where all are enslaved to the physical needs of all; its inhabitants are selfless robots, programmed by the tenets of altruism, without personal ambition, without mind, pride, or self-esteem. But self-esteem is a stubborn enemy of all utopias of that kind, and it is doubtful whether mere economic enslavement would destroy it wholly in men’s souls. What Populorum Progressio was intended to achieve from without, in regard to the physical conditions of man’s existence, Humanae Vitae is intended to achieve from within, in regard to the devastation of man’s consciousness.

“Don’t allow men to be happy,” said Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead. “Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient.... Happy men are free men. So kill their joy in living.... Make them feel that the mere fact of a personal desire is evil.... Unhappy men will come to you. They’ll need you. They’ll come for consolation, for support, for escape. Nature allows no vacuum. Empty man’s soul—and the space is yours to fill.”

Deprived of ambition, yet sentenced to endless toil; deprived of rewards, yet ordered to produce; deprived of sexual enjoyment, yet commanded to procreate; deprived of the right to live, yet forbidden to die—condemned to this state of living death, the graduates of the encyclical Humanae Vitae will be ready to move into the world of Populorum Progressio; they will have no other place to go.

“If some man like Hugh Akston,” said Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged, “had told me, when I started, that by accepting the mystics’ theory of sex I was accepting the looters’ theory of economics, I would have laughed in his face. I would not laugh at him now.”

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that in the subconscious hierarchy of motives of the men who wrote these two encyclicals, the second, Humanae Vitae, was merely the spiritual means to the first, Populorum Progressio, which was the material end. The motives, I believe, were the reverse: Populorum Progressio was merely the material means to Humanae Vitae, which was the spiritual end.

“... with our predecessor Pope John XXIII,” says Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae, “we repeat: no solution to these difficulties is acceptable ‘which does violence to man’s essential dignity’ and is based only ’on an utterly materialistic conception of man himself and of his life.‘ ” [23, emphasis added.] They mean it—though not exactly in the way they would have us believe.

In terms of reality, nothing could be more materialistic than an existence devoted to feeding the whole world and procreating to the limit of one’s capacity. But when they say “materialistic,” they mean pertaining to man’s mind and to this earth; by “spiritual,” they mean whatever is anti-man, anti-mind, anti-life, and, above all, anti-possibility of human happiness on earth.

The ultimate goal of these encyclicals’ doctrine is not the material advantages to be gained by the rulers of a global slave state; the ultimate goal is the spiritual emasculation and degradation of man, the extinction of his love of life, which Humanae Vitae is intended to accomplish, and Populorum Progressio merely to embody and perpetuate.

The means of destroying man’s spirit is unearned guilt.

What I said in “Requiem for Man” about the motives of Populorum Progressio applies as fully to Humanae Vitae, with only a minor paraphrase pertaining to its subject. “But, you say, the encyclical’s ideal will not work? It is not intended to work. It is not intended to [achieve human chastity or sexual virtue]; it is intended to induce guilt. It is not intended to be accepted and practiced; it is intended to be accepted and broken—broken by man’s ‘selfish’ desire to [love], which will thus be turned into a shameful weakness. Men who accept as an ideal an irrational goal which they cannot achieve, never lift their heads thereafter—and never discover that their bowed heads were the only goal to be achieved.”

I said, in that article, that Populorum Progressio was produced by the sense of life not of an individual, but of an institution—whose driving power and dominant obsession is the desire to break man’s spirit. Today, I say it, with clearer evidence, about the encyclical Humanae Vitae.

This is the fundamental issue which neither side of the present conflict is willing fully to identify.

The conservatives or traditionalists of the Catholic church seem to know, no matter what rationalizations they propound, that such is the meaning and intention of their doctrine. The liberals seem to be more innocent, at least in this issue, and struggle not to have to face it. But they are the supporters of global statism and, in opposing Humanae Vitae, they are merely fighting the right battle for the wrong reasons. If they win, their social views will still lead them to the same ultimate results.

The rebellion of the victims, the Catholic laymen, has a touch of healthy self-assertiveness; however, if they defy the encyclical and continue to practice birth control, but regard it as a matter of their own weakness and guilt, the encyclical will have won: this is precisely what it was intended to accomplish.

The American bishops of the Catholic church, allegedly struggling to find a compromise, issued a pastoral letter declaring that contraception is an objective evil, but individuals are not necessarily guilty or sinful if they practice it—which amounts to a total abdication from the realm of morality and can lead men only to a deeper sense of guilt.

Such is the tragic futility of attempting to fight the existential consequences of a philosophical issue, without facing and challenging the philosophy that produced them.

This issue is not confined to the Catholic church, and it is deeper than the problem of contraception; it is a moral crisis approaching a climax. The core of the issue is Western civilization’s view of man and of his life. The essence of that view depends on the answer to two interrelated questions: Is man (man the individual) an end in himself?—and: Does man have the right to be happy on this earth?

Throughout its history, the West has been torn by a profound ambivalence on these questions: all of its achievements came from those periods when men acted as if the answer were “Yes”—but, with exceedingly rare exceptions, their spokesmen, the philosophers, kept proclaiming a thunderous “No,” in countless forms.

Neither an individual nor an entire civilization can exist indefinitely with an unresolved conflict of that kind. Our age is paying the penalty for it. And it is our age that will have to resolve it.

9

Religion Versus America

by Leonard Peikoff

This lecture was delivered at the Ford Hall Forum on April 20, 1986, and published in The Objectivist Forum, June 1986.

Aspecter is haunting America—the specter of religion. This, borrowing Karl Marx’s literary style, is my theme tonight.

Where do I see religion? The outstanding political fact of the 1980s is the rise of the New Right, and its penetration of the Republican party under President Reagan. The bulk of the New Right consists of Protestant Fundamentalists, typified by the Moral Majority. These men are frequently allied on basic issues with other religiously oriented groups, including conservative Catholics of the William F. Buckley ilk and neoconservative Jewish intellectuals of the Commentary magazine variety.

All these groups observed the behavior of the New Left awhile back and concluded, understandably enough, that the country was perishing. They saw the liberals’ idealization of drugged hippies and nihilistic yippies; they saw the proliferation of pornography, of sexual perversion, of noisy Lib and Power gangs running to the Democrats to demand ever more outrageous handouts and quotas; they heard the routine leftist deprecation of the United States and the routine counsel to appease Soviet Russia—and they concluded, with good reason, that what the country was perishing from was a lack of values, of ethical absolutes, of morality.

Values, the Left retorted, are subjective; no lifestyle (and no country) is better or worse than any other; there is no absolute right or wrong anymore—unless, the liberals added, you believe in some outmoded ideology like religion. Precisely, the New Rightists reply; that is our whole point. There are absolute truths and absolute values, they say, which are the key to the salvation of our great country; but there is only one source of such values: not man or this earth or the human brain, but the Deity as revealed in scripture. The choice we face, they conclude, is the skepticism, decadence, and statism of the Democrats, or morality, absolutes, Americanism, and their only possible base: religion—old-time, Judeo-Christian religion.

“Religious America is awakening, perhaps just in time for our country’s sake,” said Mr. Reagan in 1980. “In a struggle against totalitarian tyranny, traditional values based on religious morality are among our greatest strengths.”¹

“Religious views,” says Congressman Jack Kemp, “lie at the heart of our political system. The ‘inalienable rights’ to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are based on the belief that each individual is created by God and has a special value in His eyes.... Without a common belief in the one God who created us, there could be no freedom and no recourse if a majority were to seek to abrogate the rights of the minority.”²

Or, as Education Secretary William Bennett sums up this viewpoint: “Our values as a free people and the central values of the Judeo-Christian tradition are flesh of the flesh and blood of the blood.”³

Politicians in America have characteristically given lip service to the platitudes of piety. But the New Right is different. These men seem to mean their religiosity, and they are dedicated to implementing their religious creeds politically; they seek to make these creeds the governing factor in the realm of our personal relations, our art and literature, our clinics and hospitals, and the education of our youth. Whatever else you say about him, Mr. Reagan has delivered handsomely on one of his campaign promises: he has given the adherents of religion a prominence in setting the national agenda that they have not had in this country for generations.

This defines our subject for tonight. It is the new Republican inspiration and the deeper questions it raises. Is the New Right the answer to the New Left? What is the relation between the Judeo-Christian tradition and the principles of Americanism? Are Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, as their admirers declare, leading us to a new era of freedom and capitalism—or to something else?

In discussing these issues, I am not going to say much about the New Right as such; its specific beliefs are widely known. Instead, I want to examine the movement within a broader, philosophical context. I want to ask: what is religion? and then: how does it function in the life of a nation, any nation, past or present? These, to be sure, are very abstract questions, but they are inescapable. Only when we have considered them can we go on to judge the relation between a particular religion, such as Christianity, and a particular nation, such as America.

Let us begin with a definition. What is religion as such? What is the essence common to all its varieties, Western and Oriental, which distinguishes it from other cultural phenomena?

Religion involves a certain kind of outlook on the world and a consequent way of life. In other words, the term “religion” denotes a type (actually, a precursor) of philosophy. As such, a religion must include a view of knowledge (which is the subject matter of the branch of philosophy called epistemology) and a view of reality (metaphysics). Then, on this foundation, a religion builds a code of values (ethics). So the question becomes: what type of philosophy constitutes a religion?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “religion” as “a particular system of faith and worship,” and goes on, in part: “Recognition on the part of man of some higher unseen power as having control of his destiny, and as being entitled to obedience, reverence, and worship.”

The fundamental concept here is “faith.” “Faith” in this context means belief in the absence of evidence. This is the essential that distinguishes religion from science. A scientist may believe in entities which he cannot observe, such as atoms or electrons, but he can do so only if he proves their existence logically, by inference from the things he does observe. A religious man, however, believes in “some higher unseen power” which he cannot observe and cannot logically prove. As the whole history of philosophy demonstrates, no study of the natural universe can warrant jumping outside it to a supernatural entity. The five arguments for God offered by the greatest of all religious thinkers, Thomas Aquinas, are widely recognized by philosophers to be logically defective; they have each been refuted many times, and they are the best arguments that have ever been offered on this subject.

Many philosophers indeed now go further: they point out that God not only is an article of faith, but that this is essential to religion. A God susceptible of proof, they argue, would actually wreck religion. A God open to human logic, to scientific study, to rational understanding, would have to be definable, delimited, finite, amenable to human concepts, obedient to scientific law, and thus incapable of miracles. Such a thing would be merely one object among others within the natural world; it would be merely another datum for the scientist, like some new kind of galaxy or cosmic ray, not a transcendent power running the universe and demanding man’s worship. What religion rests on is a true God, i.e., a God not of reason, but of faith.

If you want to concretize the idea of faith, I suggest that you visit, of all places, the campuses of the Ivy League, where, according to The New York Times, a religious revival is now occurring. Will you find students eagerly discussing proofs or struggling to reinterpret the ancient myths of the Bible into some kind of consistency with the teachings of science? On the contrary. The students, like their parents, are insisting that the Bible be accepted as literal truth, whether it makes logical sense or not. “Students today are more reconciled to authority,” one campus religious official notes. “There is less need for students to sit on their own mountaintop”—i.e., to exercise their own independent minds and judgment. Why not? They are content simply to believe. At Columbia University, for instance, a new student group gathers regularly not to analyze, but “to sing, worship, and speak in tongues.” “People are coming back to religion in a way that some of us once went to the counterculture,” says a chaplain at Columbia.⁴ This is absolutely true. And note what they are coming back to: not reason or logic, but faith.

“Faith” names the method of religion, the essence of its epistemology; and, as the Oxford English Dictionary states, the belief in “some higher unseen power” is the basic content of religion, its distinctive view of reality, its metaphysics. This higher power is not always conceived as a personal God; some religions construe it as an impersonal dimension of some kind. The common denominator is the belief in the supernatural—in some entity, attribute, or force transcending and controlling this world in which we live.

According to religion, this supernatural power is the essence of the universe and the source of all value. It constitutes the realm of true reality and of absolute perfection. By contrast, the world around us is viewed as only semi-real and as inherently imperfect, even corrupt, in any event metaphysically unimportant. According to most religions, this life is a mere episode in the soul’s journey to its ultimate fulfillment, which involves leaving behind earthly things in order to unite with Deity. As a pamphlet issued by a Catholic study group expresses this point: Man “cannot achieve perfection or true happiness in this life here on earth. He can only achieve this in the eternity of the next life after death.... Therefore ... what a person has or lacks in terms of worldly possessions, privileges or advantages is not important.”⁵ In New Delhi a few months ago, expressing this viewpoint, Pope John Paul II urged on the Indians a life of “asceticism and renunciation.” In Quebec some time earlier, he decried “the fascination the modern world feels for productivity, profit, efficiency, speed, and records of physical strength.” Too many men, he explained in Luxembourg, “consciously organize their way of life merely on the basis of the realities of this world without any heed for God and His wishes.”⁶

This brings us to religious ethics, the essence of which also involves faith, faith in God’s commandments. Virtue, in this view, consists of obedience. Virtue is not a matter of achieving your desires, whatever they may be, but of seeking to carry out God’s; it is not the pursuit of egoistic goals, whether rational or not, but the willingness to renounce your own goals in the service of the Lord. What religion counsels is the ethics of self-transcendence, self-abnegation, self-sacrifice.

What single attitude most stands in the way of this ethics, according to religious writers? The sin of pride. Why is pride a sin? Because man, in this view, is a metaphysically defective creature. His intellect is helpless in the crucial questions of life. His will has no real power over his existence, which is ultimately controlled by God. His body lusts after all the temptations of the flesh. In short, man is weak, ugly, and low, a typical product of the low, unreal world in which he lives. Your proper attitude toward yourself, therefore, as to this world, should be a negative one. For earthly creatures such as you and I, “Know thyself” means “Know thy worthlessness”; simple honesty entails humility, self-castigation, even self-disgust.

Religion means orienting one’s existence around faith, God, and a life of service—and correspondingly of downgrading or condemning four key elements: reason, nature, the self, and man. Religion cannot be equated with values or morality or even philosophy as such; it represents a specific approach to philosophic issues, including a specific code of morality.

What effect does this approach have on human life? We do not have to answer by theoretical deduction, because Western history has been a succession of religious and unreligious periods. The modern world, including America, is a product of two of these periods: of Greco-Roman civilization and of medieval Christianity. So, to enable us to understand America, let us first look at the historical evidence from these two periods; let us look at their stand on religion and at the practical consequences of this stand. Then we will have no trouble grasping the base and essence of the United States.

Ancient Greece was not a religious civilization, not on any of the counts I mentioned. The gods of Mount Olympus were like a race of elder brothers to man, mischievous brothers with rather limited powers; they were closer to Steven Spielberg’s ExtraTerrestrial visitor than to anything we would call “God.” They did not create the universe or shape its laws or leave any message of revelations or demand a life of sacrifice. Nor were they taken very seriously by the leading voices of the culture, such as Plato and Aristotle. From start to finish, the Greek thinkers recognized no sacred texts, no infallible priesthood, no intellectual authority beyond the human mind; they allowed no room for faith. Epistemologically, most were staunch individualists who expected each man to grasp the truth by his own powers of sensory observation and logical thought. For details, I refer you to Aristotle, the preeminent representative of the Greek spirit.

Metaphysically, as a result, Greece was a secular culture. Men generally dismissed or downplayed the supernatural; their energies were devoted to the joys and challenges of life. There was a shadowy belief in immortality, but the dominant attitude to it was summed up by Homer, who has Achilles declare that he would rather be a slave on earth than “bear sway among all the dead that be departed.”

The Greek ethics followed from this base. All the Greek thinkers agreed that virtue is egoistic. The purpose of morality, in their view, is to enable a man to achieve his own fulfillment, his own happiness, by means of a proper development of his natural faculties—above all, of his cognitive faculty, his intellect. And as to the Greek estimate of man—look at the statues of the Greek gods, made in the image of human strength, human grace, human beauty; and read Aristotle’s account of the virtue—yes, the virtue—of pride.

I must note here that in many ways Plato was an exception to the general irreligion of the Greeks. But his ideas were not dominant until much later. When Plato’s spirit did take over, the Greek approach had already died out. What replaced it was the era of Christianity.

Intellectually speaking, the period of the Middle Ages was the exact opposite of classical Greece. Its leading philosophic spokesman, Augustine, held that faith was the basis of man’s entire mental life. “I do not know in order to believe,” he said, “I believe in order to know.” In other words, reason is nothing but a handmaiden of revelation; it is a mere adjunct of faith, whose task is to clarify, as far as possible, the dogmas of religion. What if a dogma cannot be clarified? So much the better, answered an earlier Church father, Tertullian. The truly religious man, he said, delights in thwarting his reason; that shows his commitment to faith. Thus Tertullian’s famous answer, when asked about the dogma of God’s self-sacrifice on the cross: “Credo quia absurdum” (“I believe it because it is absurd”).

As to the realm of physical nature, the medievals characteristically regarded it as a semi-real haze, a transitory stage in the divine plan, and a troublesome one at that, a delusion and a snare—a delusion because men mistake it for reality, a snare because they are tempted by its lures to jeopardize their immortal souls. What tempts them is the prospect of earthly pleasure.

What kind of life, then, does the immortal soul require on earth? Self-denial, asceticism, the resolute shunning of this temptation. But isn’t it unfair to ask men to throw away their whole enjoyment of life? Augustine’s answer is: what else befits creatures befouled by original sin, creatures who are, as he put it, “crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous”?

What were the practical results—in the ancient world, then in the medieval—of these two opposite approaches to life?

Greece created philosophy, logic, science, mathematics, and a magnificent, man-glorifying art; it gave us the base of modern civilization in every field; it taught the West how to think. In addition, through its admirers in ancient Rome, which built on the Greek intellectual base, Greece indirectly gave us the rule of law and the first idea of man’s rights (this idea was originated by the pagan Stoics). Politically, the ancients never conceived a society of full-fledged individual liberty; no nation achieved that before the United States. But the ancients did lay certain theoretical bases for the concept of liberty; and in practice, both in some of the Greek city-states and in republican Rome, large numbers of men at various times were at least relatively free. They were incomparably more free than their counterparts ever had been in the religious cultures of ancient Egypt and its equivalents.

What were the practical results of the medieval approach? The Dark Ages were dark on principle. Augustine fought against secular philosophy, science, art; he regarded all of it as an abomination to be swept aside; he cursed science in particular as “the lust of the eyes.” Unlike many Americans today, who drive to church in their Cadillac or tape their favorite reverend on the VCR so as not to interrupt their tennis practice, the medievals took religion seriously. They proceeded to create a society that was antimaterialistic and anti-intellectual. I do not have to remind you of the lives of the saints, who were the heroes of the period, including the men who ate only sheep’s gall and ashes, quenched their thirst with laundry water, and slept with a rock for their pillow. These were men resolutely defying nature, the body, sex, pleasure, all the snares of this life—and they were canonized for it, as, by the essence of religion, they should have been. The economic and social results of this kind of value code were inevitable: mass stagnation and abject poverty, ignorance and mass illiteracy, waves of insanity that swept whole towns, a life expectancy in the teens. “Woe unto ye who laugh now,” the Sermon on the Mount had said. Well, they were pretty safe on this count. They had precious little to laugh about.

What about freedom in this era? Study the existence of the feudal serf tied for life to his plot of ground, his noble overlord, and the all-encompassing decrees of the Church. Or, if you want an example closer to home, jump several centuries forward to the American Puritans, who were a medieval remnant transplanted to a virgin continent, and who proceeded to establish a theocratic dictatorship in colonial Massachusetts. Such a dictatorship, they declared, was necessitated by the very nature of their religion. You are owned by God, they explained to any potential dissenter; therefore, you are a servant who must act as your Creator, through his spokesmen, decrees. Besides, they said, you are innately depraved, so a dictatorship of the elect is necessary to ride herd on your vicious impulses. And, they said, you don’t really own your property either; wealth, like all values, is a gift from Heaven temporarily held in trust, to be controlled, like all else, by the elect. And if all this makes you unhappy, they ended up, so what? You’re not supposed to pursue happiness in this life anyway.

There can be no philosophic breach between thought and action. The consequence of the epistemology of religion is the politics of tyranny. If you cannot reach the truth by your own mental powers, but must offer obedient faith to a cognitive authority, then you are not your own intellectual master; in such a case, you cannot guide your behavior by your own judgment, either, but must be submissive in action as well. This is the reason why, historically—as Ayn Rand has pointed out—faith and force are always corollaries; each requires the other.

The early Christians did contribute some good ideas to the world, ideas that proved important to the cause of future freedom. I must, so to speak, give the angels their due. In particular, the idea that man has value as an individual—that the individual soul is precious—is essentially a Christian legacy to the West; its first appearance was in the form of the idea that every man, despite original sin, is made in the image of God (as against the pre-Christian notion that a certain group or nation has a monopoly on human value, while the rest of mankind are properly slaves or mere barbarians). But notice a crucial point: this Christian idea, by itself, was historically impotent. It did nothing to unshackle the serfs or stay the Inquisition or turn the Puritan elders into Thomas Jeffersons. Only when the religious approach lost its power—only when the idea of individual value was able to break free from its Christian context and become integrated into a rational, secular philosophy—only then did this kind of idea bear practical fruit.

What—or who—ended the Middle Ages? My answer is: Thomas Aquinas, who introduced Aristotle, and thereby reason, into medieval culture. In the thirteenth century, for the first time in a millennium, Aquinas reasserted in the West the basic pagan approach. Reason, he said in opposition to Augustine, does not rest on faith; it is a self-contained, natural faculty, which works on sense experience. Its essential task is not to clarify revelation, but rather, as Aristotle had said, to gain knowledge of this world. Men, Aquinas declared forthrightly, must use and obey reason; whatever one can prove by reason and logic, he said, is true. Aquinas himself thought that he could prove the existence of God, and he thought that faith is valuable as a supplement to reason. But this did not alter the nature of his revolution. His was the charter of liberty, the moral and philosophical sanction, which the West had desperately needed. His message to mankind, after the long ordeal of faith, was in effect: “It is all right. You don’t have to stifle your mind anymore. You can think.”

The result, in historical short order, was the revolt against the authority of the Church, the feudal breakup, the Renaissance. Renaissance means “rebirth,” the rebirth of reason and of man’s concern with this world. Once again, as in the pagan era, we see secular philosophy, natural science, man-glorifying art, and the pursuit of earthly happiness. It was a gradual, tortuous change, with each century becoming more worldly than the preceding, from Aquinas to the Renaissance to the Age of Reason to the climax and end of this development: the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. This was the age in which America’s founding fathers were educated and in which they created the United States.

The Enlightenment represented the triumph (for a short while anyway) of the pagan Greek, and specifically of the Aristotelian, spirit. Its basic principle was respect for man’s intellect and, correspondingly, the wholesale dismissal of faith and revelation. Reason the Only Oracle of Man, said Ethan Allen of Vermont, who spoke for his age in demanding unfettered free thought and in ridiculing the primitive contradictions of the Bible. “While we are under the tyranny of Priests,” he declared in 1784, “... it ever will be their interest, to invalidate the law of nature and reason, in order to establish systems incompatible therewith.”⁷

Elihu Palmer, another American of the Enlightenment, was even more outspoken. According to Christianity, he writes, God “is supposed to be a fierce, revengeful tyrant, delighting in cruelty, punishing his creatures for the very sins which he causes them to commit; and creating numberless millions of immortal souls, that could never have offended him, for the express purpose of tormenting them to all eternity.” The purpose of this kind of notion, he says elsewhere, “the grand object of all civil and religious tyrants ... has been to suppress all the elevated operations of the mind, to kill the energy of thought, and through this channel to subjugate the whole earth for their own special emolument.” “It has hitherto been deemed a crime to think,” he observes, but at last men have a chance—because they have finally escaped from the “long and doleful night” of Christian rule, and have grasped instead “the unlimited power of human reason”—“reason, which is the glory of our nature.”⁸

Allen and Palmer are extreme representatives of the Enlightenment spirit, granted; but they are representatives. Theirs is the attitude which was new in the modern world, and which, in a less inflammatory form, was shared by all the founding fathers as their basic, revolutionary premise. Thomas Jefferson states the attitude more sedately, with less willful provocation to religion, but it is the same essential attitude. “Fix reason firmly in her seat,” he advises a nephew, “and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”⁹ Observe the philosophic priorities in this advice: man’s mind comes first; God is a derivative, if you can prove him. The absolute, which must guide the human mind, is the principle of reason; every other idea must meet this test. It is in this approach—in this fundamental rejection of faith—that the irreligion of the Enlightenment lies.

The consequence of this approach was the age’s rejection of all the other religious priorities. In metaphysics: this world once again was regarded as real, as important, and as a realm not of miracles, but of impersonal, natural law. In ethics: success in this life became the dominant motive; the veneration of asceticism was swept aside in favor of each man’s pursuit of happiness—his own happiness on earth, to be achieved by his own effort, by self-reliance and self-respect leading to self-made prosperity. But can man really achieve fulfillment on earth? Yes, the Enlightenment answered; man has the means, the potent faculty of intellect, necessary to achieve his goals and values. Man may not yet be perfect, people said, but he is perfectible; he must be so, because he is the rational animal.

Such were the watchwords of the period: not faith, God, service, but reason, nature, happiness, man.

Many of the founding fathers, of course, continued to believe in God and to do so sincerely, but it was a vestigial belief, a leftover from the past which no longer shaped the essence of their thinking. God, so to speak, had been kicked upstairs. He was regarded now as an aloof spectator who neither responds to prayer nor offers revelations nor demands immolation. This sort of viewpoint, known as deism, cannot, properly speaking, be classified as a religion. It is a stage in the atrophy of religion; it is the step between Christianity and outright atheism.

This is why the religious men of the Enlightenment were scandalized and even panicked by the deist atmosphere. Here is the Rev. Peter Clark of Salem, Mass. in 1739: “The former Strictness in Religion, that ... Zeal for the Order and Ordinances of the Gospel, which was so much the Glory of our Fathers, is very much abated, yea disrelished by too many: and a Spirit of Licentiousness, and Neutrality in Religion ... so opposite to the Ways of God’s People, do exceedingly prevail in the midst of us.”¹⁰ And here, fifty years later, is the Rev. Charles Backus of Springfield, Mass. The threat to divine religion, he says, is the “indifference which prevails” and the “ridicule.” Mankind, he warns, is in “great danger of being laughed out of religion.”¹¹ This was true; these preachers were not alarmists; their description of the Enlightenment atmosphere is correct.

This was the intellectual context of the American Revolution. Point for point, the founding fathers’ argument for liberty was the exact counterpart of the Puritans’ argument for dictatorship—but in reverse, moving from the opposite starting point to the opposite conclusion. Man, the founding fathers said in essence (with a large assist from Locke and others), is the rational being; no authority, human or otherwise, can demand blind obedience from such a being—not in the realm of thought or, therefore, in the realm of action, either. By his very nature, they said, man must be left free to exercise his reason and then to act accordingly, i.e., by the guidance of his best rational judgment. Because this world is of vital importance, they added, the motive of man’s action should be the pursuit of happiness. Because the individual, not a supernatural power, is the creator of wealth, a man should have the right to private property, the right to keep and use or trade his own product. And because man is basically good, they held, there is no need to leash him; there is nothing to fear in setting free a rational animal.

This, in substance, was the American argument for man’s inalienable rights. It was the argument that reason demands freedom. And this is why the nation of individual liberty, which is what the United States was, could not have been founded in any philosophically different century. It required what the Enlightenment offered: a rational, secular context.

When you look for the source of an historic idea, you must consider philosophic essentials, not the superficial statements or errors that people may offer you. Even the most well-meaning men can misidentify the intellectual roots of their own attitudes. Regrettably, this is what the founding fathers did in one crucial respect. All men, said Jefferson, are endowed “by their Creator” with certain unalienable rights, a statement that formally ties individual rights to the belief in God. Despite Jefferson’s eminence, however, his statement (along with its counterparts in Locke and others) is intellectually unwarranted. The principle of individual rights does not derive from or depend on the idea of God as man’s creator. It derives from the very nature of man, whatever his source or origin; it derives from the requirements of man’s mind and his survival. In fact, as I have argued, the concept of rights is ultimately incompatible with the idea of the supernatural. This is true not only logically, but also historically. Through all the centuries of the Dark and Middle Ages, there was plenty of belief in a Creator; but it was only when religion began to fade that the idea of God as the author of individual rights emerged as an historical, nation-shaping force. What then deserves the credit for the new development—the age-old belief or the new philosophy? What is the real intellectual root and protector of human liberty—God or reason?

My answer is now evident. America does rest on a code of values and morality—in this, the New Right is correct. But, by all the evidence of philosophy and history, it does not rest on the values or ideas of religion. It rests on their opposite.

You are probably wondering here: “What about Communism? Isn’t it a logical, scientific, atheistic philosophy, and yet doesn’t it lead straight to totalitarianism?” The short answer to this is: Communism is not an expression of logic or science, but the exact opposite. Despite all its anti-religious posturings, Communism is nothing but a modern derivative of religion: it agrees with the essence of religion on every key issue, then merely gives that essence a new outward veneer or cover-up.

The Communists reject Aristotelian logic and Western science in favor of a “dialectic” process; reality, they claim, is a stream of contradictions which is beyond the power of “bourgeois” reason to understand. They deny the very existence of man’s mind, claiming that human words and actions reflect nothing but the alogical, predetermined churnings of blind matter. They do reject God, but they replace him with a secular stand-in, Society or the State, which they treat not as an aggregate of individuals, but as an unperceivable, omnipotent, supernatural organism, a “higher unseen power” transcending and dwarfing all individuals. Man, they say, is a mere social cog atom, whose duty is to revere this power and to sacrifice every thing in its behalf. Above all, they say, no such cog has the right to think for himself; every man must accept the decrees of Society’s leaders, he must accept them because that is the voice of Society, whether he understands it or not. Fully as much as Tertullian, Communism demands faith from its followers and subjects, “faith” in the literal, religious sense of the term. On every count, the conclusion is the same: Communism is not a new, rational philosophy; it is a tired, slavishly imitative heir of religion.

This is why, so far, Communism has been unable to win out in the West. Unlike the Russians, we have not been steeped enough in religion—in faith, sacrifice, humility and, therefore, in servility. We are still too rational, too this-worldly, and too individualistic to submit to naked tyranny. We are still being protected by the fading remnants of our Enlightenment heritage.

But we will not be so for long if the New Right has its way.

Philosophically, the New Right holds the same fundamental ideas as the New Left—its religious zeal is merely a variant of irrationalism and the demand for self-sacrifice—and therefore it has to lead to the same result in practice: dictatorship. Nor is this merely my theoretical deduction. The New Rightists themselves announce it openly. While claiming to be the defenders of Americanism, their distinctive political agenda is pure statism.

The outstanding example of this fact is their insistence that the state prohibit abortion even in the first trimester of pregnancy. A woman, in this view, has no right to her own body or even, the most consistent New Rightists add, to her own life; instead, she should be made to sacrifice at the behest of the state, to sacrifice her desires, her life goals, and even her existence in the name of a mass of protoplasm which is at most a potential human being, not an actual one. “Abortion,” says Paul Weyrich, Executive Director of the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, “is wrong in all cases. I believe that if you have to choose between new life and existing life, you should choose new life. The person who has had an opportunity to live at least has been given that gift by God and should make way for a new life on earth.”¹²

Another example: men and women, the New Right tells us, should not be free to conduct their sexual or romantic lives in private, in accordance with their own choice and values; the law should prohibit any sexual practices condemned by religion. And: children, we are told, should be indoctrinated with state-mandated religion at school. For instance, biology texts should be rewritten under government tutelage to present the Book of Genesis as a scientific theory on a par with or even superior to the theory of evolution. And, of course, the ritual of prayer must be forced down the children’s throats. Is this not, contrary to the Constitution, a state establishment of religion, and of a controversial, intellectual viewpoint? Not at all, says Jack Kemp. “If a prayer is said aloud,” he explains, “it need be no more than a general acknowledgment of the existence, power, authority, and love of God, the Creator.”¹³ That’s all—nothing controversial or indoctrinating about that!

And: when the students finally do leave school, after all the indoctrination, can they then be trusted to deal with intellectual matters responsibly? No, says the New Right. Adults should not be free to write, to publish, or to read, according to their own judgment; literature should be censored by the state according to a religious standard of what is fitting as against obscene.

Is this a movement in behalf of Americanism and individual rights? Is it a movement consistent with the principles of the Constitution?

“The Constitution established freedom for religion,” says Mr. Kemp, “not from it”—a sentiment which is shared by President Reagan and by the whole New Right.¹⁴ What then becomes of intellectual freedom? Are meetings such as this evening’s deprived of Constitutional protection, since the viewpoint I am propounding certainly does not come under “freedom for religion” ? And what happens when one religious sect concludes that the statements of another are subversive of true religion? Who decides which, if either, should be struck down by the standard of “freedom for religion, not from it”? Can you predict the fate of free thought, and of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” if Mr. Kemp and associates ever get their hands fully on the courts and the Congress?

What we are seeing is the medievalism of the Puritans all over again, but without their excuse of ignorance. We are seeing it on the part of modern Americans, who live not before the founding fathers’ heroic experiment in liberty, but after it.

The New Right is not the voice of Americanism. It is the voice of thought control attempting to take over in this country and pervert and undo the actual American revolution.

But, you may say, aren’t the New Rightists at least champions of property rights and capitalism, as against the economic statism of the liberals? They are not. Capitalism is the separation of state and economics, a condition that none of our current politicians or pressure groups even dreams of advocating. The New Right, like all the rest on the political scene today, accepts the welfare-state mixed economy created by the New Deal and its heirs; our conservatives now merely haggle on the system’s fringes about a particular regulation or handout they happen to dislike. In this matter, the New Right is moved solely by the power of tradition. These men do not want to achieve any change of basic course, but merely to slow down the march to socialism by freezing the economic status quo. And even in regard to this highly limited goal, they are disarmed and useless.

If you want to know why, I refer you to the published first drafts of the [1986] pastoral letter of the U.S. Catholic bishops, men who are much more consistent and philosophical than anyone in the New Right. The bishops recommend a giant step in the direction of socialism. They ask for a vast new government presence in our economic life, overseeing a vast new redistribution of wealth in order to aid the poor, at home and abroad. They ask for it on a single basic ground: consistency with the teachings of Christianity.

Some of you may wonder here: “But if the bishops are concerned with the poor, why don’t they praise and recommend capitalism, the great historical engine of productivity, which makes everyone richer?” If you think about it, however, you will see that, valid as this point may be, the bishops cannot accept it.

Can they praise the profit motive—while extolling selflessness? Can they commend the passion to own material property—while declaring that worldly possessions are not important? Can they urge men to practice the virtues of productiveness and long-range planning—while upholding as the human model the lilies of the field? Can they celebrate the self-assertive risk taking of the entrepreneur—while teaching that the meek shall inherit the earth? Can they glorify and liberate the creative ingenuity of the human mind, which is the real source of material wealth—while elevating faith above reason? The answers are obvious. Regardless of the unthinking pretenses of the New Right, no religion, by its nature, can appeal to or admire the capitalist system; not if the religion is true to itself. Nor can any religion liberate man’s power to create new wealth. If, therefore, the faithful are concerned about poverty—as the Bible demands they be—they have no alternative but to counsel a redistribution of whatever wealth already happens to have been produced. The goods, they have to say, are here. How did they get here? God, they reply, has seen to that; now let men make sure that His largesse is distributed fairly. Or, as the bishops put it: “The goods of this earth are common property and ... men and women are summoned to faithful stewardship rather than to selfish appropriation or exploitation of what was destined for all.”¹⁵

For further details on this point, I refer you to the bishops’ letter; given their premises, their argument is unanswerable. If, as the New Right claims, there is scriptural warrant for state control of men’s sexual activities, then there is surely much more such warrant for state control of men’s economic activities. The idea of the Bible (or the “Protestant ethic”) as the base of capitalism is ludicrous, both logically and historically.

Economically, as in all other respects, the New Right is leading us, admittedly or not, to the same end as its liberal opponents. By virtue of the movement’s essential premises, it is supporting and abetting the triumph of statism in this country—and, therefore, of Communism in the world at large. When a free nation betrays its own heritage, it has no heart left, no conviction by means of which to stand up to foreign aggressors.

There was a flaw in the intellectual foundations of America from the start: the attempt to combine the Enlightenment approach in politics with the Judeo-Christian ethics. For a while, the latter element was on the defensive, muted by the eighteenth-century spirit, so that America could gain a foothold, grow to maturity, and become great. But only for a while. Thanks to Immanuel Kant, as I have discussed in my book The Ominous Parallels, the base of religion—faith and self-sacrifice--was reestablished at the turn of the nineteenth century. Thereafter, all of modern philosophy embraced collectivism, in the form of socialism, Fascism, Communism, welfare statism. By now, the distinctive ideas at the base of America have been largely forgotten or swept aside. They will not be brought back by an appeal to religion.

What then is the solution? It is not atheism as such—and I say this even though as an Objectivist I am an atheist. “Atheism” is a negative; it means not believing in God—which leaves wide open what you do believe in. It is futile to crusade merely for a negative; the Communists, too, call themselves atheists. Nor is the answer “secular humanism,” about which we often hear today. This term is used so loosely that it is practically contentless; it is compatible with a wide range of conflicting viewpoints, including, again, Communism. To combat the doctrines that are destroying our country, out-of-context terms and ideas such as these are useless. What we need is an integrated, consistent philosophy in every branch, and especially in the two most important ones: epistemology and ethics. We need a philosophy of reason and of rational self-interest, a philosophy that would once again release the power of man’s mind and the energy inherent in his pursuit of happiness. Nothing less will save America or individual rights.

There are many good people in the world who accept religion, and many of them hold some good ideas on social questions. I do not dispute that. But their religion is not the solution to our problem; it is the problem. Do I say therefore that there should only be “freedom for atheism”? No, I am not Mr. Kemp. Of course, religions must be left free; no philosophic viewpoint, right or wrong, should be interfered with by the state. I do say, however, that it is time for patriots to take a stand—to name publicly what America does depend on, and why that is not Judaism or Christianity.

There are men today who advocate freedom and who recognize what ideas lie at its base, but who then counsel “practicality.” It is too late, they say, to educate people philosophically; we must appeal to what they already believe; we must pretend to endorse religion on strategic grounds, even if privately we don’t.

This is a counsel of intellectual dishonesty and of utter impracticality. It is too late indeed, far too late for a strategy of deception which by its nature has to backfire and always has, because it consists of affirming and supporting the very ideas that have to be uprooted and replaced. It is time to tell people the unvarnished truth: to stand up for man’s mind and this earth, and against any version of mysticism or religion. It is time to tell people: “You must choose between unreason and America. You cannot have both. Take your pick.”

If there is to be any chance for the future, this is the only chance there is.

NOTES

1 Quoted in Conservative Digest, Sept. 1980.

2 From a symposium on “Sex and God in American Politics,” Policy Review, Summer 1984.

3 Quoted in The New York Times, Aug. 8, 1985.

4 The New York Times, Dec. 25, 1985 & Jan. 5, 1986.

5 “What the Catholic Church Teaches About Socialism, Communism, and Marxism.” The Catholic Study Council, Washington, DC.

6 The New York Times, Feb. 2, 1986, Sept. 11, 1984, & May 17, 1985.

7 From Reason the Only Oracle of Man (Bennington: 1784), p. 457.

8 The Examiners Examined: Being a Defence of the Age of Reason (New York: 1794), pp. 9-10. An Enquiry Relative to the Moral and Political Improvement of the Human Species (London: 1826), p. 35. Principles of Nature (New York: 1801), from Ch. I and Ch. XXII.

9 Writings, Ed. by A. E. Bergh (Washington, DC: 1903), vol. 6, p. 258.

10 A Sermon Preach‘d ... May 30th, 1739 (Boston: 1739), p. 40.

11 A Sermon Preached in long-Meadow at the Publick Fast (Springfield: 1788).

12 From “Sex and God in American Politics,” op. cit.

13 Ibid.

14 “Jack Kemp at Liberty Baptist,” Policy Review, Spring 1984.

15 Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy (First Draft); in Origins, NC documentary service, vol. 14, no. 22/23, Nov. 15, 1984, p. 344.

Part Two:

Culture

10

The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age

by Ayn Rand

This is the first of Ayn Rand’s lectures at the Ford Hall Forum. It was delivered on March 26, 1961.

I am speaking here today on the assumption that I am addressing an audience consisting predominantly of “liberals” —that is: of my antagonists. Therefore, I must begin by explaining why I chose to do it.

The briefest explanation is to tell you that in the 1930s I envied the “liberals” for the fact that their leaders entered political campaigns armed not with worn-out bromides, but with intellectual arguments. I disagreed with everything they said, but I would have fought to the death for the method by which they said it: for an intellectual approach to political problems.

Today, I have no cause to envy the “liberals” any longer.

For many decades, the “liberals” had been the representatives of the intellect in America, if not in the content of their ideas, then at least in form, method, and professed epistemology. They claimed that their views were based on reason, logic, science; and even though they were glorifying collectivism, they projected a manner of confident, distinguished intellectuality—while most of the so-called “conservatives,” allegedly devoted to the defense of individualism and capitalism, went about apologetically projecting such a cracker-barrel sort of folksiness that Li‘l Abner would have found it embarrassing; the monument to which may still be seen in the corridors of the New York Stock Exchange, in a costly display of statistical charts and models proudly entitled: THE PEOPLE’S CAPITALISM.

Today, the two camps are moving closer and merging. Just as the Republican and Democratic parties are becoming indistinguishable, so are their respective intellectual spokesmen. And while the “conservatives” are lumbering toward the Middle Ages, in quest of a philosophical base for their views—the “liberals,” always the avant-garde, have outdistanced them and are now galloping, on the same quest, toward India of the fifth century B.C., the original source of Zen Buddhism.

What social or political group today is the home of those who are and still wish to be the men of the intellect? None. The intellectuals—in the strict, literal sense of the word, as distinguished from the mystics and the neo-mysties—are now homeless refugees, left behind by a silent collapse they have not had the courage to identify. They are the displaced persons of our culture, who are afraid to discover that they have been displaced by the monster whom they themselves had released: by the primordial proponents of brute force.

As an advocate of reason, freedom, individualism, and capitalism, I seek to address myself to the men of the intellect—wherever such may still be found—and I believe that more of them may be found among the former “liberals” than among the present “conservatives.” I may be wrong; I am willing to find out.

The terms “liberal” and “conservative” are two of the emptiest sounds in today’s political vocabulary: they have become rubber words that can be stretched to fit any meaning anyone cares to give them—words that can be used safely by any speaker who wants to be misunderstood in the greatest number of ways by the greatest number of people. Yet at the same time, everyone seems to understand these two words in some foggy, sub-verbal manner, as if they were the code signals of a dark, secret guilt, hiding an issue no one cares to face.

When an entire culture is guilty of evasion on so enormous a scale, the first thing to do, if one does not choose to be an evader, is to identify the issue that people are afraid to see. What is it that the terms “liberal” and “conservative” have now come to hide?

Well, observe a curious sequence in our intellectual trends. In the popular, political usage of today, the term “liberal” is generally understood to mean an advocate of greater government control over the country’s economy, or, loosely, an advocate of socialism—while the term “conservative” is generally understood to mean an opponent of government controls, or an advocate of capitalism. But this was not the original, historical meaning of the two terms, or their use in the nineteenth century. Originally, the term “liberal” meant an advocate of individual rights, of political freedom, of laissez-faire capitalism, and an opponent of the authoritarian state—while the term “conservative” meant an advocate of the state’s authority, of tradition, of the established political order, of the status quo, and an opponent of individual rights. It has been observed many times that the term “liberal” today means the opposite of its nineteenth-century meaning. This would not have been too disastrous intellectually if the two terms had been merely reversed and had exchanged their original meanings. But what is significant—ominously significant—is the fact that certain groups are now attempting to switch the term “conservative” back to its nineteenth-century meaning, to palm it off on the public by imperceptible degrees, never bringing the issue fully into the open, hoping that people will gradually come to believe that a “conservative” is an advocate of authority, but of traditional authority. If semantic corruption becomes accepted on that wide a scale, if the political switch pulled on us becomes a choice between twentieth-century statist “liberals” and nineteenth-century statist “conservatives,” what political system will be silently obliterated by that switch? What political system is being destroyed by stealth, without letting people discover that it is being destroyed? Capitalism.

It is the very scale and virulence of the evasion that should make every rational person pause and consider the issue. Those who do, will discover that the historical, political, and economic case for capitalism has never been refuted—and that the only way the statists can hope to win is by never allowing it to be discussed.

This is the issue hidden under the foggy sloppiness of today’s political terms. Most people are not consciously aware of it; what they do sense, however, is that they haven’t a leg to stand on as far as their political views are concerned, whether they’re “liberals” or “conservatives”—that they have no philosophical base, no moral justification, no principles to uphold, no policy to offer.

Observe the intellectual disintegration of today’s political discussions, the shrinking of issues and debates to the level of single, isolated, superficial concretes, with no context, with no reference to any fundamental principles, no mention of basic issues, no proofs, no arguments, nothing but arbitrary assertions of “for” or “against.” As an example, observe the level on which the last presidential campaign was fought [Kennedy vs. Nixon in 1960]. Did the candidates discuss foreign policy? No—just the fate of Quemoy and Matsu [two islands between China and Taiwan]. Did they discuss socialized medicine? No—just the cost and the procedure of medical aid to the aged. Did they discuss government control of education? No—just who should pay the teachers’ salaries: the federal government or the states.

What most people are evading today is the realization that under the lip service they are paying to an anti-totalitarian crusade, they have accepted all the basic premises of a totalitarian philosophy—and the rest is only a matter of time and degree. They do not know how they came to accept it—and most of them do not want to accept it—but they see no alternative and they are too frightened, too bitterly discouraged to seek it.

Whose job is it to offer an alternative? Who provides a country with ideas, with knowledge, with political theories? The intellectuals. But it is the intellectuals who have brought us to this state—and are now deserting under fire; that is, giving up the task of intellectual leadership at a time when they are needed most.

When intellectual disintegration reaches such absurd extremes as, on one side, the claim of some “conservatives” that the United States of America was the product of tradition worship, and, on the other side, the use of a political designation such as “a totalitarian liberal”—it is time to stop and to realize that there are no intellectual sides any longer, no philosophical camps and no political theories, nothing but an undifferentiated mob of trembling statists who haggle only over how fast or how slowly we are to collapse into a totalitarian dictatorship, whose gang will do the dictating, and who will be sacrificed to whom.

It is the “non-totalitarian liberals” and the “non-traditional conservatives” that I seek to address. Both are homeless refugees today, because neither had a firm philosophical foundation under his political home. Those homes were jerry-built astride a deadly fissure; the fissure has opened wide and has swallowed all the cheap little platform planks. Let them go—and let us start rebuilding the foundations.

The fissure had many philosophical names: soul versus body—mind versus heart—liberty versus equality—the practical versus the moral. But all of these false dichotomies are merely secondary consequences derived by the mystics from one real, basic issue: reason versus mysticism—or, in political terms, reason and freedom versus faith and force.

Let me define my terms: reason is the faculty which perceives, identifies, and integrates the material provided by man’s senses; mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, supernatural means of knowledge.

Only three brief periods of history were culturally dominated by a philosophy of reason: ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the nineteenth century. These three periods were the source of mankind’s greatest progress in all fields of intellectual achievement—and the eras of greatest political freedom. The rest of human history was dominated by mysticism of one kind or another; that is, by the belief that man’s mind is impotent, that reason is futile or evil or both, and that man must be guided by some irrational “instinct” or feeling or intuition or revelation, by some form of blind, unreasoning faith. All the centuries dominated by mysticism were the eras of political tyranny and slavery, of rule by brute force—from the primitive barbarism of the jungle—to the pharaohs of Egypt—to the emperors of Rome—to the feudalism of the Dark and Middle Ages—to the absolute monarchies of Europe—to the modern dictatorships of Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and all their lesser carbon copies.

The Industrial Revolution, the United States of America, and the politico-economic system of capitalism were the product and result of the intellectual liberation achieved by the Renaissance and of a predominantly Aristotelian philosophical influence, which lasted, in spite of a Platonist counterrevolution, through the centuries known as the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment. With so illustrious a start, how did the United States descend to its present level of intellectual bankruptcy?

I want to recommend to your attention a very interesting book, which provides the material, the historical evidence, for the answer to that question. I hasten to state that the conclusions I have drawn are my own, not the author‘s, that I disagree with the author’s viewpoint and I believe that he would probably disagree with mine. But the book is a remarkable, scholarly, well-documented record of the history of America’s intellectual life. One may disagree with a writer’s interpretation of the facts, but first one must know the facts—and in this respect, the book is of enormous value. This book is The Decline of American Liberalism by Professor Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.

Professor Ekirch himself is a “liberal”—though not of the totalitarian variety. He offers no solution for the present state of liberalism and no explanation of its decline. His thesis is only that liberalism is declining and that our culture is moving toward “an increasingly illiberal future.”

Let me give you Professor Ekirch’s definition of liberalism:

Perhaps it is best if we think of liberalism not as a well-defined political or economic system, but as a collection of ideas or principles which go to make up an attitude or ‘habit of mind.’ But within this liberal climate of opinion, however broadly or narrowly it may be defined, it is necessary to include the concept of limited representative government and the widest possible freedom of the individual—both intellectually and economically.

Professor Ekirch is an historian and has given an accurate description. But what a philosopher would observe is that that description holds a clue to the disaster which has wrecked Western civilization and its intellectuals. Observe that the “liberals”—in the nineteenth century as well as today—held “a collection of ideas or principles” which had never been translated into a “well-defined political or economic system.” This means that they held certain values and goals, with no knowledge of how to implement them in reality, with no understanding of what practical actions would achieve or defeat their goals. With so vulnerable an intellectual equipment, could they be a match for the primordial forces of totalitarian mysticism? They could not and were not. It is they, the intellectuals, who betrayed their own liberal ideals, defeated their own goals, paved the way for their own destroyers—and did not know it, until it was too late.

They did not know that the political and economic system they had never defined—the only system that could achieve a limited representative government, as well as the intellectual and economic freedom of the individual—the ideal system—was laissez-faire capitalism.

The guilt of the intellectuals, in the nineteenth century, was that they never discovered capitalism—and they have not discovered it to this day.

If you want to know the philosophical and psychological causes of the intellectuals’ treason against capitalism, I will refer you to the title essay of my book For the New Intellectual. In the brief space of today’s discussion, I have to confine myself to a mere indication of the nature and the consequences of that treason.

The fundamental principle of capitalism is the separation of State and Economics—that is: the liberation of men’s economic activities, of production and trade, from any form of intervention, coercion, compulsion, regulation, or control by the government. This is the essence of capitalism, which is implicit in its theory and in the operation of a free market—but this is not the way most of its advocates saw it, and it is not the way it was translated into practice. The term “laissez-faire capitalism,” which one has to use today in order to be understood, is actually a redundancy: only an economy of total “laissez faire” is capitalism; anything else is a “mixed economy,” that is, a mixture, in varying degrees, of freedom and controls, of voluntary choice and government compulsion, of individualism and collectivism.

A full, perfect system of capitalism has never yet existed in history. Various degrees of government intervention and control remained in all the mixed, semi-free economies of the nineteenth century, undercutting, hampering, distorting, and ultimately destroying the operations of a free market. But during the nineteenth century, mankind came close to economic freedom, for the first and only time in history. Observe the results. Observe also that the degree of a country’s freedom from government control was the degree of its progress. America was the freest and achieved the most.

When two opposite principles are operating in any issue, the scientific approach to their evaluation is to study their respective performances, trace their consequences in full, precise detail, and then pronounce judgment on their respective merits. In the case of a mixed economy, the first duty of any thinker or scholar is to study the historical record and to discover which developments were caused by the free enterprise of private individuals, by free production and trade in a free market—and which developments were caused by government intervention into the economy. It might shock you to hear that no such study has ever been made. To my knowledge, no book dealing with this issue is available. If one wants to study this question, one has to gather information from random passages and references in books on other subjects, or from the unstated implications of known but unanalyzed facts.

Those who undertake such a study will discover that all the economic evils popularly ascribed to capitalism were caused, necessitated, and made possible not by private enterprise, not by free trade on a free market, but by government intervention into the economy, by government controls, favors, subsidies, franchises, and special privileges.

The villains were not the private businessmen who made fortunes by productive ability and free trade, but the bureaucrats and their friends, the men who made fortunes by political pull and government favor. Yet it is the private businessmen, the victims, who took the blame, while the bureaucrats and their intellectual spokesmen used their own guilt as an argument for the extension of their power. Those of you who have read Atlas Shrugged will recognize the difference between a businessman such as Hank Rearden, the representative of capitalism, and a businessman such as Orren Boyle, the typical product of a mixed economy. If you want an historical example, consider the career of James Jerome Hill, who built the Great Northern Railroad without a penny of federal help, who was responsible, practically single-handedly, for the development of the entire American Northwest, and who was persecuted by the government all his life, under the Sherman Act, for allegedly being a monopolist. Consider it, then compare it to the career of the famous California businessmen known as “The Big Four,” who built the Central Pacific Railroad on federal subsidies, causing disastrous consequences and dislocations in the country’s economy, and who held a thirty-year monopoly on railroad transportation in California, by means of special privileges granted by the state legislature which made it legally impossible for any competing railroad to exist in the state.

The difference between these two types of business career has never been identified in the generally accepted view of capitalism. By imperceptible degrees—first, through the default of capitalism’s alleged defenders, then through the deliberate misrepresentations and falsifications of its enemies—the gradual rewriting of our economic history has brought us to the stage where people believe that all the economic evils of the last two centuries were caused by the free-enterprise element, the so-called “private sector,” of our mixed economy, while the economic progress of these two centuries was the result of the government’s actions and interventions. People are now told that America’s spectacular industrial achievements, unmatched in any period of history or in any part of the globe, were due not to the productive genius of free men, but to the special privileges handed to them by a paternalistic government. The fact that much more autocratic governments, with much wider privilege-dispensing powers and policies, did not achieve the same results anywhere else on earth is blanked out by the proponents of this theory.

The only counterpart of this theory’s grotesque inversion and monstrous injustice is the mystics’ doctrine that man must give credit to God for all his virtues, but must place the blame for all his sins upon himself. Incidentally, the philosophical motive and purpose in both these instances is the same.

If you want a contemporary demonstration of the respective merits and performances of a free economy and of a controlled economy—a demonstration that comes as close to an historical laboratory experiment as one could hope to see—take a look at the condition of West Germany and of East Germany.

No politico-economic system in history had proved its value so eloquently or had benefited mankind so greatly as capitalism—and none has ever been attacked so savagely and blindly. Why did the majority of the intellectuals turn against capitalism from the start? Why did their victims, the businessmen, bear their attacks in silence? The cause of it is that primordial evil which, to this day, men are afraid to challenge: the morality of altruism.

Altruism has been men’s ruling moral code through most of mankind’s history. It has had many forms and variations, but its essence has always remained the same: altruism holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue, and value.

The philosophical conflict which, since the Renaissance, has been tearing Western civilization and which has reached its ultimate climax in our age is the conflict between capitalism and the altruist morality. Capitalism and altruism are philosophical opposites; they cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society.

The moral code which is implicit in capitalism had never been formulated explicitly. The basic premise of that code is that man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others, that man must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself, and that men must deal with one another as traders, by voluntary choice to mutual benefit. This, in essence, is the moral premise on which the United States of America was based: the principle of man’s right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness.

This is what the philosophers and the intellectuals of the nineteenth century did not and could not choose to identify, so long as they remained committed to the mystics’ morality of altruism. If the good, the virtuous, the morally ideal is suffering and self-sacrifice—then, by that standard, capitalism had to be damned as evil. Capitalism does not tell men to suffer, but to pursue enjoyment and achievement, here, on earth—capitalism does not tell men to serve and sacrifice, but to produce and profit—capitalism does not preach passivity, humility, resignation, but independence, self-confidence, self-reliance—and, above all, capitalism does not permit anyone to expect or demand, to give or to take the unearned. In all human relationships—private or public, spiritual or material, social or political or economic or moral—capitalism requires that men be guided by a principle which is the antithesis of altruism: the principle of justice.

So long as the intellectuals of the nineteenth century held altruism as their moral code, they had to evade the actual nature and meaning of capitalism—and thus come gradually to lose and to betray all of their initial goals and ideals.

There were two crucial errors—or evasions—in the liberals’ view of capitalism, from which all the rest of their debacle proceeded. One was their attitude toward the businessman; the other, their attitude toward the use of physical force.

Since wealth, throughout all the centuries of stagnation preceding the birth of capitalism, had been gained by conquest, by physical force, by political power, the intellectuals took it as their axiom that wealth can be acquired only by force—and refused to break up their mental package deal, to differentiate between a businessman and a feudal baron.

I quote from my book For the New Intellectual: “Evading the difference between production and looting, they called the businessman a robber. Evading the difference between freedom and compulsion, they called him a slave driver. Evading the difference between reward and terror, they called him an exploiter. Evading the difference between paychecks and guns, they called him an autocrat. Evading the difference between trade and force, they called him a tyrant. The most crucial issue they had to evade was the difference between the earned and the unearned.”

The intellectuals refused to identify the fact that the source of industrial wealth is man’s mind, that the fortunes made in a free economy are the product of intelligence, of ability. This led them to the modern version of the ancient soul-body dichotomy: to the contradiction of upholding the freedom of the mind, while denying it to the most active exponents of creative intelligence, the businessmen—the contradiction of promising to liberate man’s mind by enslaving his body. It led them to regard the businessman as a “vulgar materialist” or a brute or a Babbitt [this is a reference to Sinclair Lewis’s novel], as some sort of inferior species born to serve them—and to regard themselves as some sort of elite born to rule him, to control his life, and dispose of his product. The shabby monument to this premise was the idea of divorcing production from distribution, of assuming the right to distribute that which one has not produced. The only way to implement an idea of that kind, the next step in their moral descent, was the intellectuals’ alliance with the thug, with the advocate of rule by brute force: the totalitarian collectivist.

The intellectuals’ second error—their attitude toward the use of force—is a corollary of the first. So long as they refused to identify the nature of free trade and of a social system based on voluntary, uncoerced, unforced, non-sacrificial relationships among men, so long as the moral cannibalism of the altruist code permitted them to believe that it is virtuous and right to sacrifice some men for the sake of others—the intellectuals had to embrace the political creed of collectivism, the dream of establishing a perfect altruist society at the point of a gun. They projected a society where all would be sacrificed to that conveniently undefinable idol “the public good,” with themselves in the role of judges of what that “good” might be and of who would be “the public” at any given moment—an ideal society to be achieved by means of physical force; that is, by means of the political power of the state, by means of a totalitarian dictatorship.

The rest is history—the shameful, sordid, ugly history of the intellectual development of the last hundred and fifty years.

In the realm of political theory, the switch from the liberalism of the nineteenth century to the collectivism of the twentieth was accomplished when people began to accept the Marxist view of the nature of government—the view that a government is and has to be the agent of the economic interests of some class or another, and that the sole political issue is: which class will seize control of the government to force its own interests on all other groups or classes. Thus capitalism came to be regarded as an economic system in which government coercion is used for the benefit of the businessmen, the employers, or the rich in general. This served as a justification for the “liberals,” the socialists, or any other collectivists when they proposed to use government coercion for the benefit of the workers, the employees, or the poor in general. And thus the existence, the possibility, the historical record, and even the theory of a noncoercive society were wiped out of people’s minds and out of public discussion.

In the early years of American capitalism, the government’s intervention into the country’s economy was minimal; the government’s role was predominantly confined to its proper function: that of a policeman and arbiter charged with the task of protecting the individual citizen’s rights and property. (The most notorious exception to that rule existed only in the agrarian, non-industrial, non-capitalist states of the South, where the state governments upheld the institution of slavery.) The attempts to obtain special economic privileges from the government were begun by businessmen, not by workers, but by businessmen who shared the intellectuals’ view of the state as an instrument of “positive” power, serving “the public good,” and who invoked it to claim that the public good demanded canals or railroads or subsidies or protective tariffs. It is not the great industrialists of America, not men like J. J. Hill, who ran to government for special favors, but random adventurers with political pull or, later, those pretentious types, indoctrinated by the intellectuals, who dreamed of statism as a “manifest destiny.”

It was not the businessmen or the industrialists or the workers or the labor unions that began the revolt against freedom, the demand for greater and greater government power and, ultimately, for the return to an absolute, totalitarian state; it was the intellectuals. For a detailed history of the steps by which the intellectuals of Germany led it toward totalitarianism, culminating in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship, I will refer you to a brilliant book entitled Omnipotent Government by Professor Ludwig von Mises. For a detailed history of the intellectuals’ role in America, I will refer you to The Decline of American Liberalism by Professor Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., which I mentioned earlier.

Professor Ekirch shares many of the errors of the “liberals.” He seems to regard capitalism as a system of government coercion for the benefit of the rich; he seems to ascribe America’s progress to government intervention into the economy; he does not question the government’s right to initiate the use of physical force for an alleged “good purpose”; he certainly does not challenge the morality of altruism. But he is too honest and conscientious an observer not to be disturbed by certain symptoms of the totalitarian spirit in the history of the “liberals”—and he offers the evidence, without identifying its full, philosophical implications.

For example, he offers the following quotation from The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly, a book published in 1909, which attacked the theory of laissez faire and had an enormous influence on the so-called progressives of the time—on Theo- dore Roosevelt, among others:

The Promise of American Life is to be fulfilled—not merely by a maximum amount of economic freedom, but by a certain measure of discipline; not merely by the abundant satisfaction of individual desires, but by a large measure of individual subordination and self-denial.... The automatic fulfillment of the American national Promise is to be abandoned, if at all, precisely because the traditional American confidence in individual freedom has resulted in a morally and socially undesirable distribution of wealth.

If you doubt the role of altruism in the destruction of capitalism, you may observe it in that quotation. And if you doubt the hatred of collectivists for the men of ability, observe it in the following passage from the same book by Croly: “The national government must step in and discriminate; but it must discriminate, not on behalf of liberty and the special individual, but on behalf of equality and the average man.”

If you have been ascribing the policy of imperialism to the “selfish” individualistic ideology of capitalism and to its “greed” for conquests, here is a quotation from Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations by R. E. Osgood: “The spirit of imperialism was an exaltation of duty above rights, of collective welfare above individual self-interest, the heroic values as opposed to materialism, action instead of logic, the natural impulse rather than the pallid intellect.”

If you have accepted the Marxist doctrine that capitalism leads to wars, read Professor Ekirch’s account of how Woodrow Wilson, the “liberal” reformer, pushed the United States into World War I. “He seemed to feel that the United States had a mission to spread its institutions—which he conceived as liberal and democratic—to the more benighted areas of the world.” It was not the “selfish capitalists,” or the “tycoons of big business,” or the “greedy munitions-makers” who helped Wilson to whip up a reluctant, peace-loving nation into the hysteria of a military crusade—it was the altruistic “liberals” of the magazine The New Republic edited by that same Herbert Croly. What sort of arguments did they use? Here is a sample from Croly: “The American nation needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure.”

If you still wonder about the singular recklessness with which alleged humanitarians treat such issues as force, violence, expropriation, enslavement, bloodshed—perhaps the following passage from Professor Ekirch’s book will give you some clue to their motives: “Stuart Chase rushed into print late in 1932 with a popular work on economics entitled A New Deal. ‘Why,’ Chase asked with real envy at the close of the book, ‘should Russia have all the fun of remaking a world?’ ”

Apparently, Mr. Stuart Chase objects to the “tyranny of words,” but not to the tyranny of men.

The record speaks for itself. Starting out as advocates of limited representative government, the “liberals” end as champions of unlimited, totalitarian dictatorship. Starting out as defenders of individual rights, they end as apologists for the bloody slaughterhouse of Soviet Russia. Starting out as apostles of human welfare, who beg for a few temporary controls to relieve the emergency of people’s poverty, they end with J. K. Galbraith, who demands controls for the sake of controls and a permanent cut of everybody’s income, not because people are too poor, but because they are too affluent. Starting out as brave champions of freedom, they end crawling on their stomachs to Moscow, with Bertrand Russell, pleading: “Give me slavery, but please don’t give me death.” Starting out as advocates of reason, confident of man’s power to achieve well-being and fulfillment on earth, they end hunched in the darkest corners of the oldest cellar, muttering that reason is impotent, and fumbling through musty pages for the occult guidance of Zen Buddhism.

Such is the end result of the altruist morality.

Now I will ask you to consider the following. The intellectual trend that has brought us to this state—the mysticism-collectivism-altruism axis—has been gaining momentum since the nineteenth century, has been winning victory after victory, and is, at present, our dominant cultural power. If truth and reality were on its side, if it represented the right philosophy for men to live by, one would expect to see a gradual improvement in the state of the world with every successive victory, one would expect an atmosphere of growing confidence, liberation, energy, vitality, and joy of living. Is this what we have seen in the past decades? Is this what we see around us today? Today, in the moment of their almost total triumph, the voices of the mystic-collectivist-altruist axis are rising in a single wail of despair, proclaiming that existence on earth is evil, that futility is the essence of life, that disaster is man’s metaphysical destiny, that man is a miserable failure depraved by nature and unfit to exist. This was not the way that the reason-individualism-capitalism axis greeted its triumphs in the nineteenth century—and this was not the view of man or the sense of life that it brought to mankind.

I quote from my book For the New Intellectual: “The professional businessman and the professional intellectual came into existence together, as brothers born of the Industrial Revolution. Both are the sons of capitalism—and if they perish, they will perish together. The tragic irony will be that they will have destroyed each other; and the major share of the guilt will belong to the intellectual.”

Those of you who may still be “liberals,” in the original sense of that word, and who may have abandoned everything except loyalty to reason—now is the time to check your premises. If you do, you will find that the ideal society had once been almost within men’s reach. It was the intellectuals who destroyed it—and who committed suicide in the process—but the future belongs to a new type of intellectual, a new radical: the fighter for capitalism.

11

Our Cultural Value-Deprivation

by Ayn Rand

This lecture was delivered at the Ford Hall Forum on April 10, 1966, and published in The Objectivist, April 1966.

In the years 1951 to 1954, a group of scientists at McGill University conducted a series of experiments that attracted a great deal of attention, led to many further inquiries, and became famous under the general title of “sensory deprivation.”

The experiments consisted of observing the behavior of a man in conditions of isolation which eliminated or significantly reduced the sensations of sight, hearing, and touch. The subject was placed in a small, semi-sound-proofed cubicle, he wore translucent goggles which admitted only a diffuse light, he wore heavy gloves and cardboard cuffs over his hands, and he lay in bed for two to three days, with a minimum of motion.

The results varied from subject to subject, but certain general observations could be made: the subjects found it exceedingly difficult or impossible to concentrate, to maintain a systematic process of thought; they lost their sense of time, they felt disoriented, dissociated from reality, unable to tell the difference between sleeping and waking; many subjects experienced hallucinations. Most of them spoke of feeling as if they were losing control of their consciousness. These effects disappeared shortly after the termination of the experiments.

The scientists pursuing these inquiries state emphatically that no theoretical conclusions can yet be drawn from these and other, similar experiments, because they involve too many variables, as well as undefined differences in the psychological character of the subjects, which led to significant differences in their reactions. But certain general indications can be observed: the experiments seem to indicate that man’s consciousness requires constant activity, a constant stream of changing sensory stimuli, and that monotony or insufficient stimulation impairs its efficiency.

Even though man ignores and, to a large extent, shuts out the messages of his senses when he is concentrating on some specific intellectual task—his senses are his contact with reality, that contact is not stagnant, but is maintained by a constant active process, and when that process is slowed down artificially to subnormal levels, his mind slows down as well.

Man’s consciousness is his least known and most abused vital organ. Most people believe that consciousness as such is some sort of indeterminate faculty which has no nature, no specific identity, and, therefore, no requirements, no needs, no rules for being properly or improperly used. The simplest example of this belief is people’s willingness to lie or cheat, to fake reality on the premise that “I’m the only one who’ll know” or “It’s only in my mind”—without any concern for what this does to one’s mind, what complex, untraceable, disastrous impairments it produces, what crippling damage may result.

The loss of control over one’s consciousness is the most terrifying of human experiences: a consciousness that doubts its own efficacy is in a monstrously intolerable state. Yet men abuse, subvert, and starve their consciousness in a manner they would not dream of applying to their hair, toenails, or stomachs. They know that these things have a specific identity and specific requirements, and if one wishes to preserve them, one must comb one’s hair, trim one’s toenails, and refrain from swallowing rat poison. But one’s mind? Aw, it needs nothing and can swallow anything. Or so most people believe. And they go on believing it while they toss in agony on a psychologist’s couch, screaming that their mind keeps them in a state of chronic terror for no reason whatever.

One valuable aspect of the sensory-deprivation experiments is that they call attention to and dramatize a fact which neither laymen nor psychologists are willing fully to accept: the fact that man’s consciousness possesses a specific nature with specific cognitive needs, that it is not infinitely malleable and cannot be twisted, like a piece of putty, to fit any private evasions or any public “conditioning.”

If sensory deprivation has such serious consequences, what are the consequences of “conceptual deprivation”? This is a question untouched by psychologists, so far, since the majority of today’s psychologists do not recognize the significance of the fact that man’s consciousness requires a conceptual mode of functioning—that thinking is the process of cognition appropriate to man. The ravages of “conceptual deprivation” can be observed all around us. Two interacting aspects of this issue must be distinguished: the primary cause is individual, but the contributory cause is social.

The choice to think or not is volitional. If an individual’s choice is predominantly negative, the result is his self-arrested mental development, a self-made cognitive malnutrition, a stagnant, eroded, impoverished, anxiety-ridden inner life. A social environment can neither force a man to think nor prevent him from thinking. But a social environment can offer incentives or impediments; it can make the exercise of one’s rational faculty easier or harder; it can encourage thinking and penalize evasion or vice versa. Today, our social environment is ruled by evasion—by entrenched, institutionalized evasion—while reason is an outcast and almost an outlaw.

The brashly aggressive irrationality and anti-rationality of today’s culture leaves an individual in an intellectual desert. He is deprived of conceptual stimulation and communication; he is unable to understand people or to be understood. He is locked in the equivalent of an experimental cubicle—only that cubicle is the size of a continent—where he is given the sensory stimulation of screeching, screaming, twisting, jostling throngs, but is cut off from ideas: the sounds are unintelligible, the motions incomprehensible, the pressures unpredictable. In such conditions, only the toughest intellectual giants will preserve the unimpaired efficiency of their mind, at the price of an excruciating effort. The rest will give up—usually, in college—and will collapse into hysterical panic (the “activists”) or into sluggish lethargy (the consensus-followers); and some will suffer from conceptual hallucinations (the existentialists).

The subject of “conceptual deprivation” is too vast to cover in one lecture and can merely be indicated. What I want to discuss today is one particular aspect of it: the question of value-deprivation.

A value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Values are the motivating power of man’s actions and a necessity of his survival, psychologically as well as physically.

Man’s values control his subconscious emotional mechanism, which functions like a computer adding up his desires, his experiences, his fulfillments and frustrations—like a sensitive guardian watching and constantly assessing his relationship to reality. The key question which this computer is programmed to answer is: What is possible to me?

There is a certain similarity between the issue of sensory perception and the issue of values. Discussing “The Cognitive Consequences of Early Sensory Deprivation,” Dr. Jerome S. Bruner writes: “One may suggest that one of the prime sources of anxiety is a state in which one’s conception or perception of the environment with which one must deal does not ‘fit’ or predict that environment in a manner that makes action possible.” [Sensory Deprivation, a symposium at Harvard Medical School, edited by Philip Solomon et al., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961.] If severe and prolonged enough, the absence of a normal, active flow of sensory stimuli may disintegrate the complex organization and the interdependent functions of man’s consciousness.

Man’s emotional mechanism works as the barometer of the efficacy or impotence of his actions. If severe and prolonged enough, the absence of a normal, active flow of value experiences may disintegrate and paralyze man’s consciousness—by telling him that no action is possible.

The form in which man experiences the reality of his values is pleasure.

[An essay from The Virtue of Selfishness on “The Psychology of Pleasure” states,] “Pleasure, for man, is not a luxury, but a profound psychological need. Pleasure (in the widest sense of the term) is a metaphysical concomitant of life, the reward and consequence of successful action—just as pain is the insignia of failure, destruction, death.... The state of enjoyment gives [man] a direct experience of his own efficacy, of his competence to deal with the facts of reality, to achieve his values, to live.... As pleasure emotionally entails a sense of efficacy, so pain emotionally entails a sense of impotence. In letting man experience, in his own person, the sense that life is a value and that he is a value, pleasure serves as the emotional fuel of man’s existence.”

Where—in today’s culture—can a man find any values or any meaningful pleasure?

If a man holds a rational, or even semi-rational, view of life, where can he find any confirmation of it, any inspiring or encouraging phenomena?

A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man’s emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel—until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion.

Yes, there are a few giants of spiritual self-sufficiency who can withstand even this. But this is too much to ask or to expect of most people, who are unable to generate and to maintain their own emotional fuel—their love of life—in the midst of a dead planet or a dead culture. And it is not an accident that this is the kind of agony—death by value-strangulation—that a culture dominated by alleged humanitarians imposes on the millions of men who need its help.

A peculiarity of certain types of asphyxiation—such as death from carbon monoxide—is that the victims do not notice it: the fumes leave them no awareness of their need of fresh air. The specific symptom of value-deprivation is a gradual lowering of one’s expectations. We have already absorbed so much of our cultural fumes that we take the constant pressure of irrationality, injustice, corruption and hooligan tactics for granted, as if nothing better could be expected of life. It is only in the privacy of their own mind that men scream in protest at times—and promptly stifle the scream as “unrealistic” or “impractical.” The man to whom values have no reality any longer—the man or the society that regards the pursuit of values, of the good, as impractical—is finished psychologically.

If, subconsciously, incoherently, inarticulately, men are still struggling for a breath of fresh air—where would they find it in today’s cultural atmosphere?

The foundation of any culture, the source responsible for all of its manifestations, is its philosophy. What does modern philosophy offer us? Virtually the only point of agreement among today’s leading philosophers is that there is no such thing as philosophy—and that this knowledge constitutes their claim to the title of philosophers. With a hysterical virulence, strange in advocates of skepticism, they insist that there can be no valid philosophical systems (i.e., there can be no integrated, consistent, comprehensive view of existence)—that there are no answers to fundamental questions—there is no such thing as truth—there is no such thing as reason, and the battle is only over what should replace it: “linguistic games” or unbridled feelings?

An excellent summary of the state of modern philosophy was offered in Time (January 7, 1966).

Philosophy dead? It often seems so. In a world of war and change, of principles armed with bombs and technology searching for principles, the alarming thing is not what philosophers say but what they fail to say. When reason is overturned, blind passions are rampant, and urgent questions mount, men turn for guidance to ... almost anyone except their traditional guide, the philosopher.... Contemporary philosophy looks inward at its own problems rather than outward at men, and philosophizes about philosophy, not about life.

And further:

For both movements [the analytic and the existentialist], a question such as ‘What is truth?’ becomes impossible to answer. The logical positivist would say that a particular statement of fact can be declared true or false by empirical evidence; anything else is meaningless. A language philosopher would content himself with analyzing all the ways the word true can be used. The existentialist would emphasize what is true for a person in a particular situation.

What, then, are modern philosophers busy doing? “Laymen glancing at the June 10, 1965, issue of the Journal of Philosophy will find a brace of learned analysts discussing whether the sentence ‘There are brown things and there are cows’ is best expressed by the formula (∃x) Exw · (∃x) Exy or by (∃x) Bx • (∃x) Cx.”

If, in spite of this, someone might still hope to find something of value in modern philosophy, he will be told off explicitly.

A great many of his colleagues in the U.S. today would agree with Donald Kalish, chairman of the philosophy department at U.C.L.A., who says: “There is no system of philosophy to spin out. There are no ethical truths, there are just clarifications of particular ethical problems. Take advantage of these clarifications and work out your own existence. You are mistaken to think anyone ever had the answers. There are no answers. Be brave and face up to it.”

This means that to look for ethical truths (for moral principles or values) is to be a coward—and that bravery consists of dispensing with ethics, truth, values, and of acting like a drunken driver or like the mobs that riot in the streets of the cities throughout the world.

If men seek guidance, the very motive that draws them to philosophy—the desire to understand—makes them give it up. And along with philosophy a man gives up the ambitious eagerness of his mind, the quest for knowledge, the cleanliness of certainty. He shrinks the range of his vision, lowers his expectations and his eyes, and moves on, watching the small square of his immediate steps, never raising his head again. He had looked for intellectual values; the emotion of contempt and revulsion was all he found.

If anyone attempts to turn from philosophy to religion, he will find the situation still worse. When religious leaders form a new movement under a slogan such as “God is dead,” there is no lower place to go in terms of cynical obfuscation.

“Theologian Calls ‘God-Talk’ Irrelevant,” announces a headline in The New York Times of November 21, 1965. What sort of talk is relevant is not made clear in the accompanying story, which is closer to double-talk than to any other linguistic category—as may be judged from the following quotations: “Even if there once was a God, they say, He is no longer part of human experience, and hence ’God-talk’ is both meaningless and irrelevant in the contemporary situation.” And: “The function of religion is not to overcome the realities of evil, hopelessness, and anguish with an apocalyptic vision, but to equip people to live with these problems and to share them through the religious community.”

Does this mean: not to oppose, not to resist, but to share “evil, hopelessness and anguish”? Your guess is as good as mine.

From a report on a television discussion in Denver, Colorado, I gather that one member of this movement has made its goal and meaning a little clearer. “God,” he said, “is a process of creative social intercourse.”

This, I submit, is obscene. I, who am an atheist, am shocked by so brazen an attempt to rob religion of whatever dignity and philosophical intention it might once have possessed. I am shocked by so cynically enormous a degree of contempt for the intelligence and the sensibility of people, specifically of those intended to be taken in by the switch.

Now, if men give up all abstract speculation and turn to the immediate conditions of their existence—to the realm of politics—what values or moral inspiration will they find?

There is a popular saying that alcohol and gasoline don’t mix. Morality and cynicism are as deadly a mixture. But a political system that mixes freedom and controls will try to mix anything—with the same kind of results on the dark roads of men’s spirit.

On the one hand, we are drenched in the slick, stale, sticky platitudes of altruism, an overripe altruism running amok, pouring money, blood, and slogans about global welfare, which everyone drips and no one hears any longer, since monotony—in moral, as well as sensory, deprivation—deadens perception. On the other hand, we all know and say and read in the same newspapers that all these welfare projects are merely a cynical power game, the game of buying votes with public funds, of paying off “election debts” to pressure groups, and of creating new pressure groups to pay off—since the sole purpose of political power, people tacitly believe, is to keep oneself in power, and the sole recourse of the citizens is to gang up on one another and maneuver for who’ll get sacrificed to whom.

The first makes the second possible: altruism gives people an excuse to put up with it. Altruism serves as the veneer—a fading, cracking, peeling veneer—to hide from themselves the terror of their actual belief: that there are no moral principles, that morality is impotent to affect the course of their existence, that they are blind brutes caught in a charnel house and doomed to destruction.

No one believes the political proclamations of our day; no one opposes them. There is no public policy, no ideology, no goals, no convictions, no moral fire, no crusading spirit—nothing but the quiet panic of clinging to the status quo, with the dread of looking back to check the start of the road, with terror of looking ahead to check its end, and with a leadership whose range of vision is shrinking down to the public poll the day after tomorrow’s television appearance.

Promises? “Don’t remind us of promises, that was yesterday, it’s too late.” Results? “Don’t expect results, it’s too soon.” Costs? “Don’t think in terms of old-fashioned economics—the more we spend, the richer we’ll get.” Principles? “Don’t think in terms of old-fashioned labels—we’ve got a consensus.” The future? “Don’t think.”

Whatever public images President Johnson may project. a moral crusader is not one of them. This lends special significance—and a typical whiff of today’s cultural atmosphere—to a column entitled “President Johnson’s Dreams” by James Reston, in The New York Times (February 25, 1966).

Though his reach may exceed his grasp, it has to be said for him that he is a yearner after great ideals.... He makes the New Deal seem like a grudging handout.... Nothing is beyond his aspirations. Roosevelt’s Vice President, Henry Wallace, was condemned as a visionary because he wanted to give every Hottentot a quart of milk. Humphrey came back talking as if he wanted to send them all to college, and the President’s message in New York was that the Four Freedoms can never be secure in America if they are violated elsewhere in the world. This is not mere speech-making to Lyndon Johnson.... He remains a believer in an unbelieving and cynical world.... He is out to eliminate poverty in America. Without any doubt, he feels he can bring adequate education to the multitude, and his confidence goes beyond the boundaries of the nation. Never mind that the British and the French let him know this week that they were reducing their commitments in the world; he sees a combination of American power and generosity dealing somehow with the problem. Has Malthus become as great a menace as Marx? Are the death rate and the birth rate too high? He has programs for them all ... He looked troubled and sounded harried in New York, and no wonder, for he is bearing all the dreams and lost causes of the century.

Ask yourself: what is the moral and intellectual state of a nation that gives a blank check on its wealth, its work, its efforts, its lives to a “yearner” and “dreamer,” to spend on lost causes?

Can anyone feel morally inspired to live and work for such a purpose?

Can anyone preserve any values by looking at anything today? If a man who earns his living hears constant denunciations of his “selfish greed” and then, as a moral example, is offered the spectacle of the War on Poverty—which fills the newspapers with allegations of political favoritism, intrigues, maneuvering, corruption among its “selfless” administrators—what will happen to his sense of honesty? If a young man struggles sixteen hours a day to work his way through school, and then has to pay taxes to help the dropouts from the dropout programs—what will happen to his ambition? If a man saves for years to build a home, which is then seized by the profiteers of Urban Renewal because their profits are “in the public interest,” but his are not—what will happen to his sense of justice? If a miserable little private holdup man is hauled off to jail, but when the government forces men into a gang big enough to be called a union and they hold up New York City, they get away with it—what will happen to the public’s respect for the law?

Can anyone wish to give his life to defend the rights of South Vietnam—when the rights of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Albania, East Germany, North Korea, Katanga, Cuba, and Hungary were not defended? Can anyone wish to uphold the honor of our treaty obligations in South Vietnam when it was not upheld on the construction site of the wall in Berlin? Can anyone acquire intellectual integrity by observing that it is the collectivists who take a moral stand against the draft, in defense of individual rights—while the so-called “conservatives” insist that young men must be drafted and sent to die in jungle swamps, in order that the South Vietnamese may hold a “democratic” election and vote themselves into communism, if they so choose?

The next time you hear about a crazed gang of juvenile delinquents, don’t look for such explanations as “slum childhood,” “economic underprivilege,” or “parental neglect.” Look at the moral atmosphere of the country, at the example set by their elders and by their public leaders.

Today, the very motive that arouses men’s interest in politics—their sense of responsibility—makes them give it up. And along with politics a man gives up his good will toward people, his benevolence, his openness, his fairness. He withdraws into the small, tight, windowless cellar of his range-of-the-moment concerns, shrinking from any human contact, convinced that the rule of the game is to kill or be killed and that the only action possible to him is to defend himself against every passerby. He had looked for social values; the emotion of contempt and revulsion was all he found.

In the decadent eras of history, in the periods when human hopes and values were collapsing, there was, as a rule, one realm to which men could turn for support, to preserve their image of man, their vision of life’s better possibilities, and their courage. That realm was art.

Let us take a look at the art of our age.

While preparing this discussion, I picked up at random the Sunday Book Review section of The New York Times of March 20, 1966. I shall quote from the three leading reviews of current fiction.

1. “In his new book, it is as if [the author] has taken hold of his flaws, weaknesses, errors, and indulgences, and instead of dealing strictly with them, has made them the subject of his esthetic intention. The scatology has hit the fan. When homosexual camp has become a cliché, he tries to make it new by poking it at the reader from every direction.... There are floating neon images of decay, corruption, putrefaction, illness.” This is not a negative review, but an admiringly reproachful one: the reviewer does not like this particular novel, but he extols the author’s talent and urges him to do better. As he puts it: “Give us this day our daily horror, agreed; but carry through on your promises.”

2. The second review is of the same order: respectfully admiring toward the author, but critical of the particular novel under discussion. “It’s hard, bright, and as cold as a block of ice. Gratuitous evil, upholstered innocence, and insane social arrangements condemn [the author‘s] characters to frightful violence. They must do or be done to. Under sentence, they move inexorably toward futility and destruction.... Three people are murdered during a wave of private crime in the West Indies. One of the murderers earns $100,000. The chief engineer of the bizarre electrochemical derangement of two of the prey collects a lifetime of compensation for a lousy childhood. The victims burn up, get shot or pushed down a thousand-foot ravine. It’s a total dark victory. One can infer positive values only by their absence. The author’s own attitude is as antimoral as a tombstone.”

3. The third review is enthusiastic about a novel which it describes as “remarkable as a rare instance of pornography sublimed to purest art.” The content of the novel is indicated as follows: “The story gradually opens out into a Daedalian maze of perverse relationships—a clandestine society of sinister formality and elegance where the primary bond is mutual complicity in dedication to the pleasures of sadism and masochism. [The heroine] is initiated into this world by her lover, who one day takes her to a secluded mansion where she is trained through the discipline of chains and whip to be totally submissive to the men who are her masters.... During her subsequent progress, she is subjected to every sort of sexual debasement and torture, only to be returned in the penultimate stage of her education to a still more brutal institution, a ’gynaceum’ where she not only endures the cruelest torments but begins to fulfill the sadistic lesbian underside of her own nature.” The theme of this book, according to the reviewer, is: “a perversion of the Christian mystery of exaltation through debasement, of the extremity of suffering transformed into an ultimate victory over the limitations of being.”

If one turns from that muck to the visual arts, one finds the same sewer in somewhat different forms. To the extent that they communicate anything at all, the visual arts are ruled by a single principle: distortion. Distortion of perspective, of space, of shape, of color, and, above all, of the human figure. We are surrounded by images of distorted, dismembered, disintegrated human bodies—such as might be drawn by a retarded five-year-old—and they pursue us everywhere: on subway ads, in fashion magazines, in TV commercials, or suspended on chains over our heads in fashionable concert halls.

There is also the nonrepresentational—or Rorschach—school of art, consisting of blobs, swirls, and smears which are and aren‘t, which are anything you might want them to be provided you stare at them long enough, keeping your eyes and mind out of focus. Provided also you forget that the Rorschach test was devised to detect mental illness.

If one were to look for the purpose of that sort of stuff, the kindest thing to say would be that the purpose is to take in the suckers and provide a field day for pretentious mediocrities. But if one looked deeper, one would find something much worse: the attempt to make you doubt the evidence of your senses and the sanity of your mind.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments. Observe what image of man, of life and of reality modern art infects people with—particularly the young whose first access to a broad view of existence and first source of values lie in the realm of art.

Today, the very motive that draws a man to art—the quest for enjoyment—makes him run from it for his life. He runs to the gray, sunless, meaningless drudgery of his daily routine, with nothing to relieve it, nothing to expect or to enjoy. And he soon stops asking the tortured question: “Is there anything to see tonight? Is there anything to read?” Along with art, he gives up his vision of values and forgets that he had ever hoped to find or to achieve them.

He had looked for inspiration. Contempt and revulsion were not the only emotions he found, but also horror, indignation, and such a degree of boredom and loathing that anything is preferable to it—including the brutalizing emptiness of an existence devoid of any longing for values.

If you wonder what is wrong with people today, consider the fact that no laboratory experiment could ever reproduce so thorough a state of value-deprivation.

The consequences take many forms. Here is some of the evidence.

A survey in The New York Times (March 21, 1966) quotes some observers who estimate that forty to fifty percent of college students are drug addicts, then adds:

Actually, no one knows, even approximately, how many students take drugs. But everyone agrees that the number is rising, that it has been for several years and that no one is quite sure what to do about it....

The drug takers are majoring in the humanities or social sciences, with more in English than any other subject. There are fewer consistent users in the sciences or in the professional schools....

[The drug takers] are vaguely leftist, disenchanted with American policies in Vietnam, agitated because there are Negro ghettos and bored with conventional politics. They do not join the Peace Corps, which, a student at Penn State said, “is for Boy Scouts.”

Their fathers, more often than not, are professional men or white-collar executives. They are not deprived. A California psychiatrist says that the children of television writers in Hollywood use drugs more than any other group....

The LSD users speak of dissolving the ego, meeting the naked self, finding a truly religious experience, and being so terribly honest with themselves that they know that all about them is sham....

Why do they increasingly drop out of school and join the LSD cult, there to contemplate nature, induce periodic insanity, and pursue a philosophy that is a curious mélange of Zen, Aldous Huxley, existentialism, and leftover Orientalism? Dr. John D. Walmer, director of the mental health clinic at Penn State, suggests that “for people who are chronically unhappy drugs bring some relief from a world without purpose.” George H. Gaffney, deputy commissioner of narcotics, says students take drugs because “of the growing disrespect for authority, because some professors just don’t care to set any kind of moral influence and because of the growing beatnik influence.” Dr. Harvey Powleson, director of the psychiatric clinic at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, notes “a connection toward mystical movements in general.” ...

A boy at San Francisco State may have spoken for his generation when he said he smoked marijuana and used LSD “because there is just no reason not to.” He was absolutely sure that this was so.

Who—in today’s culture—would have given him any valid reason to think otherwise?

Here is another aspect of the same phenomenon (The New York Times, December 29, 1964):

The number of adolescent suicides and suicide attempts is a source of alarm to an increasing number of educators, doctors, and parents. Princeton added a second full-time psychiatrist to its health services this fall; other schools are expanding existing services; at Columbia University the number of students seeking professional help has tripled in the last ten years....

Surprisingly, Cornell doctors found that the student-patient who achieved the highest marks was the one most likely to do away with himself. Nonsuicidal students, on the other hand, were often doing poorly in their academic work. The bright students too often demanded far more of themselves than either their professors or the university.

Is it a matter of what the bright students demanded of themselves—or of life? A much more likely explanation is that the better the student, the more of today’s intellectual poison he had absorbed; being intelligent, he saw too clearly what sort of existence awaited him and, being too young to find an antidote, he could not stand the prospect.

When a culture is dedicated to the destruction of values—of all values, of values as such—men’s psychological destruction has to follow.

We hear it said that this is merely a period of transition, confusion, and growth, and that the leaders of today’s intellectual trends are groping for new values. But here is what makes their motives suspect. When the scientists of the Renaissance concluded that certain pseudo-sciences of the Middle Ages were invalid, they did not attempt to take them over and ride on their prestige; the chemists did not call themselves alchemists, the astronomers did not call themselves astrologers. But modern philosophers proclaim themselves to be philosophers while struggling to invalidate the essence of philosophy: the study of the fundamental, universal principles of existence. When men like Auguste Comte or Karl Marx decided to substitute society for God, they had the good grace not to call themselves theologians. When the esthetic innovators of the nineteenth century created a new literary form, they called it a “novel,” not an “anti-poem” —unlike the pretentious mediocrities of today who write “anti-novels.” When decorative artists began to design textiles and linoleums, they did not hang them up in frames on walls or entitle them “a representation of pure emotion.”

The exponents of modern movements do not seek to convert you to their values—they haven’t any—but to destroy yours. Nihilism and destruction are the almost explicit goals of today’s trends—and the horror is that these trends move on, unopposed.

Who is to blame? All those who are afraid to speak. All those who are still able to know better, but who are willing to temporize, to compromise, and thus to sanction an evil of that magnitude. All those intellectual leaders who are afraid to break with today’s culture, while knowing that it has rotted to the core—who are afraid to check, challenge, and reject its basic premises, while knowing that they are seeing the ultimate results—who are afraid to step out of the “mainstream,” while knowing that it is running with blood—who cringe, evade, and back away from the advance of screeching, bearded, drugged barbarians.

Now you may logically want to ask me the question: What is the solution and the antidote? But to this question, I have given an answer—at length—elsewhere. The answer lies outside today’s cultural “mainstream.” Its name is Objectivism.

12

Global Balkanization

by Ayn Rand

This lecture was delivered at the Ford Hall Forum on April 10, 1977.

Have you ever wondered about the process of the collapse of a civilization? Not the cause of the collapse—the ultimate cause is always philosophical—but the process, the specific means by which the accumulated knowledge and achievements of centuries vanish from the earth?

The possibility of the collapse of Western civilization is not easy to imagine or to believe. Most people do not quite believe it—in spite of all the horror movies about the end of the world in a nuclear blast. But of course the world has never been destroyed by a sudden catastrophe. Man-made catastrophes of that size are not sudden; they are the result of a long, slow, gradual process, which can be observed in advance.

Let me remind you—as I have said many times before—that there is no such thing as historical determinism. The world does not have to continue moving toward disaster. But unless men change their philosophical direction—which they still have time to do—the collapse will come. And if you want to know the specific process that will bring it about, that process—the beginning of the end—is visible today.

In The New York Times of January 18, 1976, under the title “Europe’s Restive Tribes,” columnist C. L. Sulzberger is crying out in anxious bewilderment against a phenomenon he cannot understand: “It is distressing to return from Africa and find the cultivated old continent of Europe subsiding into its own form of tribalism just as new African governments make concerted efforts to curb the power of tribes and subordinate them to the greater concept of the nation-state.”

By “tribalism,” Mr. Sulzberger means the separatist movements spreading throughout Europe. “Indeed,” he declares,

it is a peculiar phenomenon of contemporary times that so many lands which had formerly been powerful and important seem obsessed with reducing the remnants of their own strength ... There is no logical reason that a Scotland which was proud to be considered part of the British Empire’s heart when the sun never set on it, from Calcutta to Capetown, is now increasingly eager to disengage from what is left of that grand tradition on an offshore European island. [Emphasis added.]

Oh yes, there is a very logical reason why Great Britain is falling apart, but Mr. Sulzberger does not see it—just as he does not see what was grand about that old tradition. He is the Times’ columnist specializing in European affairs, and, like a conscientious reporter, he is disturbed by something which he senses to be profoundly wrong—but, tending to be a liberal, he is unable to explain it.

He keeps coming back to the subject again and again. On July 3, 1976, in a column entitled “The Split Nationality Syndrome,” he writes: “The present era’s most paradoxical feature is the conflict between movements seeking to unify great geographical blocs into federations or confederations, and movements seeking to disintegrate into still smaller pieces the component nations trying to get together.”

He offers an impressive list of examples. In France there is a Corsican autonomy movement, and similar movements of French Basques, of French Bretons, and of French inhabitants of the Jura belt west of Switzerland. “Britain is now obsessed with what is awkwardly called ‘devolution.’ This means watered-down autonomy and is designed to satisfy Welsh, but above all Scottish, nationalists.” Belgium remains split “by an apparently insoluble language dispute between French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemish.” Spain is facing demands for local independence “in Catalonia and the northern Basque country.... German-speaking inhabitants of Italy’s Alto Adige yearn to leave Rome and submit to Vienna. There is a tiny British-Danish argument ... over the status of the Faroe Islanders.... In Yugoslavia there are continuing disputes between Serbs and Croats ... There is also unresolved ferment among Macedonians ... some of whom, on occasion, revive old dreams of their own state including Greek Salonika and part of Bulgaria.”

Please remember that these tribes and subtribes, which most of the world has never heard of—since they have achieved no distinction to hear about—are struggling to secede from whatever country they are in and to form their own separate, sovereign, independent nations on their two-by-four stretches of the earth’s crust.

I must make one correction. These tribes did achieve a certain kind of distinction: a history of endless, bloody warfare.

Coming back to Mr. Sulzberger: Africa, he points out, is torn apart by tribalism (in spite of the local governments’ efforts), and most of Africa’s recent wars were derived “from tribal causes.” He concludes by observing: “The schizophrenic impulses splitting Europe threaten actually to atomize Africa—and all in the name of progress and unity.”

In a column entitled “Western Schizophrenia” (December 22, 1976), Mr. Sulzberger cries: “The West is not drawing closer together; it is coming apart. This is less complicated but perhaps more distressing in North America than in Europe.” For myself, I will add: and more disgusting.

Mr. Sulzberger continues: “Canada is apparently getting ready to tear itself asunder for emotional if illogical reasons which, on a massive scale, resemble the language dispute that continually splits Belgium ...” He predicts the possibility of a formal separation between French-speaking Quebec and the rest of Canada, and comments sadly and helplessly: “Whatever happens, it is hard to foresee much good for the West ensuing.” Which is certainly true.

Now what are the nature and the causes of modern tribalism?

Philosophically, tribalism is the product of irrationalism and collectivism. It is a logical consequence of modern philosophy. If men accept the notion that reason is not valid, what is to guide them and how are they to live? Obviously, they will seek to join some group—any group—which claims the ability to lead them and to provide some sort of knowledge acquired by some sort of unspecified means. If men accept the notion that the individual is helpless, intellectually and morally, that he has no mind and no rights, that he is nothing, but the group is all, and his only moral significance lies in selfless service to the group—they will be pulled obediently to join a group. But which group? Well, if you believe that you have no mind and no moral value, you cannot have the confidence to make choices—so the only thing for you to do is to join an unchosen group, the group into which you were born, the group to which you were predestined to belong by the sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient power of your body chemistry.

This, of course, is racism. But if your group is small enough, it will not be called “racism”: it will be called “ethnicity.”

For over half a century, modern liberals have been observing the fact that their ideas are achieving the opposite of their professed goals: instead of “liberation,” communism has brought the blood-drenched dictatorship of Soviet Russia—instead of “prosperity,” socialism has brought starvation to China, and Cuba, and India (and Russia)—instead of “brotherhood,” the welfare state has brought the crumbling stagnation and the fierce, “elitist” power struggle of Great Britain, and Sweden, and many other, less obvious victims—instead of “peace,” the spread of international altruism has brought about two world wars, an unceasing procession of local wars, and the suspending of a nuclear bomb over the heads of mankind. Yet this record does not prompt the liberals to check their premises or to glance, for contrast, at the record of the social system the last remnants of which they are so ferociously destroying.

Now we are seeing another demonstration of the fact that their professed goals are not the motive of today’s liberals. We are seeing a special kind of intellectual cover-up—a cover-up so dirty and so low that it makes Watergate look like a childish caper.

Observe that ever since World War II, racism has been regarded as a vicious falsehood and a great evil, which it certainly is. It is not the root of all social evils—the root is collectivism—but, as I have written before (in The Virtue of Selfishness), “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” One would think that Hitler had given a sufficient demonstration of racism’s evil. Yet today’s intellectuals, particularly the liberals, are supporting and propagating the most virulent form of racism on earth: tribalism.

The cover-up that makes it possible lies in a single word: ethnicity.

“Ethnicity” is an anti-concept, used as a disguise for the word “racism”—and it has no clearly definable meaning. But you can get a lead to its meaning if you hunt through a dictionary. The following are the results of my hunt through The Random House College Dictionary (1960), a book intended for young people.

I found no such term as “ethnicity.” But I found “ethnic,” which is defined as follows: “pertaining or peculiar to a population, esp. to a speech group, loosely also to a race.” Under “ethnic group,” the definition given as sociological usage reads: “a group of people, racially or historically related, having a common and distinctive culture, as an Italian or Chinese colony in a large American city.”

I looked up the word “culture.” The definition given as sociological usage reads: “the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings, which is transmitted from one generation to another.” I looked up also the word “tribe.” The definition reads: “1. any aggregate of people united by ties of descent from a common ancestor, community of customs, and traditions, adherence to the same leaders, etc. 2. a local division of a primitive or barbarous people.”

The meaning of the sum of these definitions is fairly clear: the term “ethnicity” stresses the traditional, rather than the physiological characteristics of a group, such as language—but physiology, i.e., race, is involved and mentioned in all but one of these definitions. So the advocacy of “ethnicity,” means racism plus tradition—i.e., racism plus conformity—i.e., racism plus staleness.

The acceptance of the achievements of an individual by other individuals does not represent “ethnicity”: it represents a cultural division of labor in a free market; it represents a conscious, individual choice on the part of all the men involved; the achievements may be scientific or technological or industrial or intellectual or esthetic—and the sum of such accepted achievements constitutes a free, civilized nation’s culture. Tradition has nothing to do with it; tradition is being challenged and blasted daily in a free, civilized society: its citizens accept ideas and products because they are true and/or good—not because they are old or because their ancestors accepted them. In such a society, concretes change, but what remains immutable—by individual conviction, not by tradition—are those philosophical principles which correspond to reality, i.e., which are true.

The “old” and the “ancestral” are the standards of tradition, which supersedes reality, the standards of value of those who accept and practice “ethnicity.” Culture, in the modern sociolo gists’ view, is not a sum of achievements, but of “ways of living ... transmitted from one generation to another.” This means: concrete, specific ways of living. Can you—who are still the children of the United States of America—imagine the utter horror of a way of living that does not change from generation to generation? Yet this is what the advocates of ethnicity are advocating.

Is such a way of living compatible with reason? It is not. Is it compatible with independence or individuality? It is not. Is it compatible with progress? Obviously not. Is it compatible with capitalism? Don’t be funny. What century are we talking about? We are dealing with a phenomenon that is rising out of prehistorical ages.

Atavistic remnants and echoes of those ages have always existed in the backwaters of civilized countries, particularly in Europe, among the old, the tired, the timid, and those who gave up before they started. Such people are the carriers of “ethnicity.” The “ways of living” they transmit from generation to generation consist in: folk songs, folk dances, special ways of cooking food, traditional costumes, and folk festivals. Although the professional “ethnics” would (and did) fight wars over the differences between their songs and those of their neighbors, there are no significant differences between them; all folk art is essentially similar and excruciatingly boring: if you’ve seen one set of people clapping their hands while jumping up and down, you’ve seen them all.

Now observe the nature of those traditional ethnic “achievements”: all of them belong to the perceptual level of man’s consciousness. All of them are ways of dealing with or manipulating the concrete, the immediately given, the directly perceivable. All of them are manifestations of the preconceptual stage of human development.

I quote from one of my articles: “The concrete-bound, anti-conceptual mentality can cope only with men who are bound by the same concretes—by the same kind of ‘finite’ world. To this mentality, it means a world in which men do not have to deal with abstract principles: principles are replaced by memorized rules of behavior, which are accepted uncritically as the given. What is ’finite’ in such a world is not its extension, but the degree of mental effort required of its inhabitants. When they say ‘finite,’ they mean ‘perceptual.’ ” (This is from “The Missing Link” in [Philosophy: Who Needs It]. That article deals with the psycho-epistemological roots of modern tribalism.)

In the same article I said: “John Dewey’s theory of Progressive education (which has dominated the schools for close to half a century), established a method of crippling a child’s conceptual faculty and replacing cognition with ‘social adjustment.’ It was and is a systematic attempt to manufacture tribal mentalities.”

A symptom of the tribal mentality’s self-arrested, perceptual level of development may be observed in the tribalists’ position on language.

Language is a conceptual tool—a code of visual-auditory symbols that denote concepts. To a person who understands the function of language, it makes no difference what sounds are chosen to name things, provided these sounds refer to clearly defined aspects of reality. But to a tribalist, language is a mystic heritage, a string of sounds handed down from his ancestors and memorized, not understood. To him the importance lies in the perceptual concrete, the sound of a word, not its meaning. He would kill and die for the privilege of printing on every postage stamp the word “postage” for the English-speaking and the word “postes” for the French-speaking citizens of his bilingual Canada. Since most of the ethnic languages are not full languages, but merely dialects or local corruptions of a country’s language, the distinctions which the tribalists fight for are not even as big as that.

But, of course, it is not for their language that the tribalists are fighting: they are fighting to protect their level of awareness, their mental passivity, their obedience to the tribe, and their desire to ignore the existence of outsiders.

The learning of another language expands one’s abstract capacity and vision. Personally, I speak four—or rather three-and-a-half—languages: English, French, Russian, and the half is German, which I can read but not speak. I found this knowledge extremely helpful when I began writing: it gave me a wider range and choice of concepts; it showed me four different styles of expression; it made me grasp the nature of languages as such, apart from any set of concretes.

(Speaking of concretes, I would say that every civilized language has its own inimitable power and beauty, but the one I love is English—the language of my choice, not of my birth. English is the most eloquent, the most precise, the most economical, and, therefore, the most powerful. English fits me best—but I would be able to express my identity in any Western language.)

The tribalists clamor that their language preserves their “ethnic identity.” But there is no such thing. Conformity to a racist tradition does not constitute a human identity. Just as racism provides a pseudo-self-esteem for men who have not earned an authentic one, so their hysterical loyalty to their own dialect serves a similar function: it provides a pretense at “collective self-esteem,” an illusion of safety for the confused, frightened, precarious state of a tribalist’s stagnant consciousness.

The proclaimed desire to preserve one’s language and/or its literary works, if any, is a cover-up. In a free, or even semi-free country, no one is forbidden to speak any language he chooses with those who wish to speak it. But he cannot force it on others. A country has to have only one official language if men are to understand one another—and it makes no difference which language it is, since men live by the meaning, not the sound, of words. It is eminently fair that a country’s official language should be the language of the majority. As to literary works, their survival does not depend on political enforcement.

But to the tribalists, language is not a tool of thought and communication. Language to them is a symbol of tribal status and power—the power to force their dialect on all outsiders. This appeals not even to the tribal leaders, but to the sick, touchy vanity of the tribal rank and file.

In this connection, I want to mention a hypothesis of mine, which is only a hypothesis because I have given no special study to the subject of bilingual countries, i.e., countries that have two official languages. But I have observed the fact that bilingual countries tend to be culturally impoverished by comparison to the major countries whose language they share in part. Bilingual countries do not produce many great, first-rate achievements in any intellectual line of endeavor, whether in science, philosophy, literature, or art. Consider the record of Belgium (which is French-speaking in part) as against the record of France—or the record of Switzerland (a trilingual country) as against the record of France, of Germany, of Italy—or the record of Canada as against the record of the United States.

The cause of the poor records may lie in the comparative territorial smallness of those countries—but this does not apply to Canada versus the United States. The cause may lie in the fact that the best, most talented citizens of the bilingual countries tend to emigrate to the major countries—but this still leaves the question: Why do they?

My hypothesis is as follows: the policy of bilingual rule (which spares some citizens the necessity to learn another language) is a concession to, and a perpetuation of, a strong ethnic-tribalist element within a country. It is an element of anti-intellectuality, conformity, and stagnation. The best minds would run from such countries: they would sense, if not know it consciously, that tribalism leaves them no chance.

But quite apart from this particular hypothesis, there can be no doubt that the spread of tribalism is an enormously anti-intellectual evil. If, as I said, some elements of “ethnicity” did remain in the backyards of civilized countries and stayed harmless for centuries, why the sudden epidemic of their rebirth? Irrationalism and collectivism—the philosophical notions of the prehistorical eras—had to be implemented in practice, in political action, before they could engulf the greatest scientific-technological achievements mankind had ever reached. The political cause of tribalism’s rebirth is the mixed economy—the transitional stage of the formerly civilized countries of the West on their way to the political level from which the rest of the world has never emerged: the level of permanent tribal warfare.

As I wrote in my article on “Racism” (in The Virtue of Selfishness): “The growth of racism in a ‘mixed economy’ keeps step with the growth of government controls. A ’mixed economy’ disintegrates a country into an institutionalized civil war of pressure groups, each fighting for legislative favors and special privileges at the expense of one another.”

When a country begins to use such expressions as “seeking a bigger share of the pie,” it is accepting a tenet of pure collectivism: the notion that the goods produced in a country do not belong to the producers, but belong to everybody, and that the government is the distributor. If so, what chance does an individual have of getting a slice of that pie? No chance at all, not even a few crumbs. An individual becomes “fair game” for every sort of organized predator. Thus people are pushed to surrender their independence in exchange for tribal protection.

The government of a mixed economy manufactures pressure groups—and, specifically, manufactures “ethnicity.” The profiteers are those group leaders who discover suddenly that they can exploit the helplessness, the fear, the frustration of their “ethnic” brothers, organize them into a group, present demands to the government—and deliver the vote. The result is political jobs, subsidies, influence, and prestige for the leaders of the ethnic groups.

This does not improve the lot of the group’s rank and file. It makes no difference to the hard-pressed unemployed of any race or color what quota of jobs, college admissions, and Washington appointments were handed out to the political manipulators from their particular race or color. But the ugly farce goes on, with the help and approval of the intellectuals, who write about “minority victories.”

Here is a sample of the goal of such victories. In The New York Times of January 17, 1977, a news story was headlined as follows : “Hispanic Groups Say They Are Inequitably Treated in Support for Arts.” At a hearing on the subject, New York State Senator Robert Garcia declared: “What we are really talking about is dollars and whether we are receiving a fair share of the revenues generated in this state.” The purpose of the demands for state dollars was “to assure the growth of ‘non-mainstream art forms.’ ” This means: art forms which people do not care to see or to support. The recommendations reached at the hearing included the demand that “at least twenty-five percent of the money goes to Hispanic arts.”

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what your tax money is being spent on: the new profiteers of altruism are not the poor, the sick, or the unemployed, but ethnic females swishing their skirts in old Spanish dances which were not too good even when they were new.

This is a typical example of the motives and the vested interests behind the growth, the pushing, and the touting of “ethnicity.”

An interesting article was published in the British magazine Encounter (February 1975). It is entitled “The Universalisation of Ethnicity” and is written by Nathan Glazer, a well-known American sociologist. It is quite revealing of the modern intellectuals’ attitude toward the spread of ethnicity—more revealing in what Mr. Glazer does not say than in what he does.

He observes: “The overwhelming majority of people ... are born into a religion, rather than adopt it, just as they are born into an ethnic group. In this respect both are similar. They are both groups by ‘ascription’ rather than ’achievement.‘ They are groups in which one’s status is immediately given by birth rather than gained by some activities in one’s life.”

This is eminently—and horribly—true. There is a great deal to be said about the horrifying approach of a world dominated by people who prefer “ascription” to “achievement,” and who seek a physiologically determined, automatically given status rather than a status they have to earn. Mr. Glazer does not say it; he merely reports.

He is disturbed by the relationship of “ethnic group” to “caste,” but treats it merely as a problem of definitions. But, of course, castes are inherent in the notion of ethnicity—castes of superiors and inferiors, determined by birth, enforced and perpetuated by law, dividing people into “aristocrats,” “commoners,” etc., down to “untouchables.”

Mr. Glazer makes a true and profoundly important statement: “The United States is perhaps unique among the states of the world in using the term ‘nation’ to refer not to an ethnic group but to all who choose to become Americans.” But he draws no conclusions from it. Yet it is extremely significant that the United States was the archenemy and the destroyer of ethnicity, that it abolished castes and any sort of inherited titles, that it granted no recognition to groups as such, that it recognized only the right of the individual to choose the associations he wished to join. Freedom of association is the opposite of ethnicity.

Mr. Glazer does not raise the question of the original American philosophy and the relationship of its destruction to the rise of ethnicity. The focus of his interest lies elsewhere. He writes: “The Socialist hope for a trans-national class struggle, based on class identification, never came to pass. Instead, it has been replaced by national and ethnic conflicts.” And: “In most countries national interests and ethnic interests seem to dominate over class interests.” Mr. Glazer is baffled by this development. He offers some tentative explanations with which he himself is not satisfied, such as: “The trends of modernisation, even while they do destroy some bases of distinctive culture and distinctive identity, create a need for a new kind of identity related to the old, intimate type of village or tribal association.” A modern, technological society, which includes nuclear bombs and space travel—to be run by villages or by tribal associations?

Mr. Glazer himself tends to dismiss theories of this sort, and admits that he cannot find an explanation. “This is the heart of the darkness. Why didn’t the major lines of conflict within societies become class conflicts rather than ethnic conflicts ? ... In most developing countries Marxism remains the ideology of the students and often of the ruling group—but ethnicity is the focus around which identity and loyalty have been shaped.” Mr. Glazer comes closer to an answer when he observes that ethnicity has “an irrational appeal,” but he takes it no further. He says instead:

It would seem that the rallying cries that mobilise the classes have, in recent decades, had less power than the rallying cries that mobilise the races, tribes, religions, language-users—in short, the Ethnic Groups. Perhaps the epidemic of ethnic conflicts reflects the fact that leaders and organisers believe they can get a more potent response by appealing to ethnicity than they can by appealing to Class Interest.

True, leaders and organizers do believe this—but why? The answer to Mr. Glazer’s questions lies in the fact that Marxism is an intellectual construct; it is false, but it is an abstract theory—and it is too abstract for the tribalists’ concrete-bound, perceptual mentalities. It requires a significantly high level of abstraction to grasp the reality of “an international working class”—a level beyond the power of a consciousness that understands its own village, but has trouble treating the nearest town as fully real. No, the level of men’s intelligence has not deteriorated from natural causes; it has been pushed down, retarded, stultified by modern anti-intellectual education and modern irrationalist philosophy.

Mr. Glazer does not see or is not concerned with any part of this answer. It is obvious that he is disturbed by the spread of ethnicity, but he tries to hope for the best—and this leads him, in conclusion, to a truly unspeakable statement. After proposing some sort of solution in the form of “either guaranteed shares for each group, or guaranteed rights for each individual and each group,” he continues: “The United States in the past seemed to find the approach in terms of ‘guaranteed rights’ more congenial than the approach in terms of guaranteed shares; but recently Americans have begun to take individual rights less seriously, and to take group shares more seriously.” After I recovered from feeling sick at my stomach, I asked myself: What Americans has Mr. Glazer been observing or associating with? I do not know—but his statement is libel against an entire nation. His statement means that Americans are willing to sell their rights for money—for a “share of the pie.”

In his last paragraph Mr. Glazer observes that there was a time when “the problems of Ethnicity, as a source of conflict within nations and between nations, have generally appeared as simply a left-over, an embarrassment from the past. It is my conviction they must now be placed at the very centre of our concern for the human condition.”

He is right to fear such a prospect.

There is no surer way to infect mankind with hatred—brute, blind, virulent hatred—than by splitting it into ethnic groups or tribes. If a man believes that his own character is determined at birth in some unknowh, ineffable way, and that the characters of all strangers are determined in the same way—then no communication, no understanding, no persuasion is possible among them, only mutual fear, suspicion, and hatred. Tribal or ethnic rule has existed, at some time, in every part of the world, and, in some country, in every period of mankind’s history. The record of hatred is always the same. The worst kinds of atrocities were perpetrated during ethnic (including religious) wars. A recent grand-scale example of it was Nazi Germany.

Warfare—permanent warfare—is the hallmark of tribal existence. A tribe—with its rules, dogmas, traditions, and arrested mental development—is not a productive organization. Tribes subsist on the edge of starvation, at the mercy of natural disasters, less successfully than herds of animals. War against other, momentarily luckier tribes, in the hope of looting some meager hoard, is their chronic emergency means of survival. The inculcation of hatred for other tribes is a necessary tool of tribal rulers, who need scapegoats to blame for the misery of their own subjects.

There is no tyranny worse than ethnic rule—since it is an unchosen serfdom one is asked to accept as a value, and since it applies primarily to one’s mind. A man of self-esteem will not accept the notion that the content of his mind is determined by his muscles, i.e., by his own body. But by the bodies of an unspecified string of ancestors? Determinism by the means of production is preferable; it is equally false, but less offensive to human dignity. Marxism is corrupt, but clean compared to the stale, rank, musty odor of ethnicity.

As to the stagnation under tribal rule—take a look at the Balkans. At the start of this century, the Balkans were regarded as the disgrace of Europe. Six or eight tribes, plus a number of subtribes with unpronounceable names, were crowded on the Balkan peninsula, engaging in endless wars among themselves or being conquered by stronger neighbors or practicing violence for the sake of violence over some microscopic language differences. “Balkanization”—the breakup of larger nations into ethnic tribes—was used as a pejorative term by the European intellectuals of the time. Those same intellectuals were pathetically proud when they managed, after World War I, to glue most of the Balkan tribes together into two larger countries: Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. But the tribes never vanished; they have been popping up in minor explosions all along, and a major one is possible at any time.

In the light of tribalism’s historical record, it is ludicrous to compromise with it, to hope for the best or to expect some sort of fair “group shares.” Nothing can be expected from tribalism except brutality and war. But this time, it is not with bows and arrows that the tribes will be armed, but with nuclear bombs.

As a tiny preview of what tribalism would mean in a modern, technological civilization, a story in The New York Times of January 23, I977, reports that the French-speaking Canadians of Quebec had demanded the use of French in all official dealings, including at airports, but “a federal court upheld a ban by the federal Ministry of Transport on the use of French for landings at Montreal’s two international airports. (English is the language accepted at airports in every nation of the world.)”

Let me remind you of the recent terrible collision of two planes in the Canary Islands. Although all the personnel involved spoke English perfectly, the investigations seem to indicate that the collision was caused by linguistic misunderstandings. But what is that to the Canadians of Quebec, or to Idi Amin of Uganda, or to any other ethnic tribalists who might demand that their language be spoken by every plane pilot in the world? Incidentally, that collision took place because the small airport was overcrowded with planes that could not land at a nearby major airport: the major airport had been bombed by ethnic terrorists who were seeking the independence of the Canary Islands from Spain.

How long would the achievements of a technological civilization last under this sort of tribal management?

Some people ask whether local groups or provinces have the right to secede from the country of which they are a part. The answer is: on ethnic grounds, no. Ethnicity is not a valid consideration, morally or politically, and does not endow anyone with any special rights. As to other than ethnic grounds, remember that rights belong only to individuals and that there is no such thing as “group rights.” If a province wants to secede from a dictatorship, or even from a mixed economy, in order to establish a free country—it has the right to do so. But if a local gang, ethnic or otherwise, wants to secede in order to establish its own government controls, it does not have that right. No group has the right to violate the rights of the individuals who happen to live in the same locality. A wish—individual or collective—is not a right.

Is there a way to avoid the rebirth of global tribalism and the approach of another Dark Ages? Yes, there is, but only one way—through the rebirth of the antagonist that has demonstrated its power to relegate ethnicity to a peaceful dump: capitalism.

Observe the paradoxes built up about capitalism. It has been called a system of selfishness (which, in my sense of the term, it is)—yet it is the only system that drew men to unite on a large scale into great countries, and peacefully to cooperate across national boundaries, while all the collectivist, internationalist, One-World systems are splitting the world into Balkanized tribes.

Capitalism has been called a system of greed—yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal, and no tribal gang can conceive of.

Capitalism has been called nationalistic—yet it is the only system that banished ethnicity, and made it possible, in the United States, for men of various, formerly antagonistic nationalities to live together in peace.

Capitalism has been called cruel—yet it brought such hope, progress and general good will that the young people of today, who have not seen it, find it hard to believe.

As to pride, dignity, self-confidence, self-esteem—these are characteristics that mark a man for martyrdom in a tribal society and under any social system except capitalism.

If you want an example of what had once been the spirit of America—a spirit which would be impossible today, but which we must now struggle to bring to a rebirth—I will quote from an old poem that represents the opposite of the abject self-abasement of ethnicity. It is a poem called “The Westerner” by Badger Clark.

He begins with “My fathers sleep on the Eastern plain and each one sleeps alone”—he acknowledges his respect for his forefathers, then says:

But I lean on no dead kin.

My name is mine for fame or scorn,

And the world began when I was born,

And the world is mine to win.

13

How to Read (and Not to Write)

by Ayn Rand

This article was published in The Ayn Rand Letter, September 25, 1972.

“He was doling his sentences out with cautious slowness, balancing himself between word and intonation to hit the right degree of semi-clarity. He wanted her to understand, but he did not want her to understand fully, explicitly, down to the root—since the essence of that modern language, which he had learned to speak expertly, was never to let oneself or others understand anything down to the root.” [Atlas Shrugged.]

Today, this is the dominant method of communication in public speaking and writing, particularly on the subject of politics. A recent editorial in The New York Times is a valuable specimen of that method—an unusually clear example of the art of unclarity.

“The Fourth of July is a good time to remind ourselves that there is urgent necessity for the nation’s intellectual and political leaders to provide moral guidance at a time when so many people feel that the nation has lost its way,” said the Times, concluding an editorial, on July 4, 1972.

This statement is incontrovertibly true, and one would be tempted to say “amen”—but the rest of the editorial is a remarkable example of the reasons why the nation has lost its way (though not in the sense the editorial intended).

The most important issue confronting us today, the editorial declares, is “how to prevent powerful special interests from frustrating the democratic process.” No definitions are given, but the context suggests that “special interests” means pressure groups. This is not exactly a fundamental issue, but this is what the editorial regards as an urgent problem. To solve a problem, one must identify and correct or eliminate its causes; therefore, one would expect the editorial writer to mention what caused the emergence of pressure groups. But he does not. He treats the subject as if pressure groups were facts of nature or irreducible primaries.

It is interesting to wonder what went on in that writer’s mind in the space between two paragraphs—because the editorial continues by attacking those who might name the unnamed causes he did not find it necessary to mention:

That issue is so difficult to solve because all the clear, simple extremes are unworkable. Given modern industrial technologies, this country cannot go back to the highly atomistic, competitive model of the early nineteenth century—even if it were willing to accept the workings of the marketplace as the arbiter of all social values and outcomes. But the experience of totalitarian and democratic societies alike suggests that mere substitution of the power of big government for that of big business and the marketplace is no solution.

As an exercise in intellectual precision, see how many things you can list as wrong in that one little paragraph. I shall indicate some of them (omitting the paragraph’s first sentence, which I shall take up later).

If a euphemism is an inoffensive way of identifying an offensive fact, then “highly atomistic, competitive model” is an anti-euphemism, i.e., an offensive way of identifying an inoffensive (or great and noble) fact—in this case, capitalism. “Competitive” is a definition by nonessentials; “atomistic” is worse. Capitalism involves competition as one of its proper consequences, not as its essential or defining attribute. “Atomistic” is usually intended to imply “scattered, broken up, disintegrated.” Capitalism is the system that made productive cooperation possible among men, on a large scale—a voluntary cooperation that raised everyone’s standard of living—as the nineteenth century has demonstrated. So “atomistic” is an anti-euphemism, standing for “free, independent, individualistic.” If the editorial’s sentence were intended to be fully understood, it would read: “this country cannot go back to the free, individualistic, private-property system of capitalism.”

Now why would “modern industrial technologies” make a return to capitalism impossible? No answer is given. It is fashionable to treat technology as a dark mystery, as a kind of black magic beyond the layman’s power to understand—so the phrase is just thrown in, as an ineffable threat. But observe that modern industrial technology is a product of capitalism and, today, of the private sector of the U.S. economy, which is still the freest economy on earth—observe the abysmal failure of the world’s most controlled economy, Soviet Russia, to approach America’s technological achievements—observe the correlation, in all the mixed economies, between the degree of a country’s freedom and the degree of its technological development—and you will have grounds to suspect that that phrase was thrown in to prevent you from realizing that modern industrial technology (if it is to survive) makes statism, not capitalism, impossible.

The clause “even if it [this country] were willing to accept the workings of the marketplace as the arbiter of all social values and outcomes” is an attack on a straw man. No advocate of capitalism ever held the workings of the marketplace as the arbiter of all social values and outcomes—only of the economic ones, i.e., those pertaining to production and trade. In a free marketplace, these values and outcomes are determined by a free, general, “democratic” vote—by the sales, purchases, and choices of every individual. And—as one indication of the fact that, under capitalism, there are social values outside the power of the marketplace—each individual votes only on those matters which he is qualified to judge: on his own preferences, interests, and needs. The paramount social value he has no power to encroach upon is: the rights of others. He cannot substitute his vote and judgment for theirs; he cannot declare himself to be “the voice of the people” and leave the people disenfranchised.

Is this what our country would be unwilling to accept?

The last sentence of the quoted paragraph resorts to the shabby old gimmick of equating opposites by substituting nonessentials for their essential characteristics. In this case, the defacing acid, obliterating differences, is the attribute of “bigness.” If a reader is to be made to feel that businessmen and dictators are interchangeably equal villains, he must be pushed to forget that a big productive genius, e.g., Henry Ford, Sr., and a big killer, e.g., Stalin, are not the same thing—and that the difference between a totalitarian and a free society does not consist in substituting Stalin for Henry Ford, Sr. (For a discussion of the difference between economic and political power, see “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business” in my book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.)

When the baser kind of politician resorts to that gimmick, he is counting on the ugliest emotion of lesser people—envy—and if they confuse “bigness” with “greatness,” it serves his purpose. But why would a reputable newspaper do it?

The editorial’s next paragraph gives a clue to the answer: “The crucial task facing the United States and other democratic societies is to find workable answers between the extremes—to limit concentrations of corporate power without undermining the efficiency of business; to permit the market to allocate resources insofar as possible—but also to use adequate resources to achieve socially desirable purposes in response to the democratically exercised choices of the society.”

Who is to permit the market to allocate resources? Whose resources? What are “socially desirable purposes”? Who desires them—and at whose expense? Since the greatest, the fundamental, factor (“resource”) of production is human intelligence, is it to be disposed of by the “choices of the society”?

No explicit answers are given. But observe the workings of the unnamed in the above quotation. The two “extremes” are capitalism (i.e., freedom) and totalitarianism (i.e., dictatorship). The “workable answers” are to be sought in the middle, in a combination of these two. Observe the method suggested. Business efficiency must not be undermined (which is an implicit admission that this efficiency depends on freedom)—but government must control the development and limit the growth of business. The market must be kept free “insofar as possible” —but if “society” desires some particular “purpose,” freedom becomes impossible. Which of the two “extremes” is violated and which is given priority in this suggested method?

So it turns out that the editorial writer is advocating the very thing which he falsely ascribed to capitalism: he is suggesting that the marketplace should be made “the arbiter of all social values and outcomes”—not, however, the clean, economic marketplace, but the corrupt, political one. (An intrusion of political power, i.e, of force, into the market is corrupt and corrupting, since it introduces an opportunity for legalized looting.) He is using the word “democratic” in its original meaning, i.e., unlimited majority rule, and he is urging us to accept a social system in which one’s work, one’s property, one’s mind, and one’s life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority at any moment for any purpose.

If this is a society’s system, no power on earth can prevent men from ganging up on one another in self-defense—i.e., from forming pressure groups.

“There is no magic formula for reconciling those aims,” the editorial continues. “Instead, this nation and all others can only seek to diffuse power by such measures as more effectively employing the antitrust laws ...” etc.

After raising so momentous a problem as the attempt to mix freedom and dictatorship (an attempt which has brought us where we are today)—after demonstrating (between the lines) that these two extremes cannot mix and that there is, indeed, no magic formula for reconciling opposites or for having your cake and eating it, too—the editorial proceeds to suggest such remedies as: the miserably false, decrepit notion of persecutions by antitrust laws; a “sense of mission” in regulatory agencies; “new types of regulatory institutions” on the order of “public-interest crusaders” with an “ ‘ombudsman’ role both within and outside government” (i.e., the most vicious of pressure groups: quasi-governmental private groups); the abolition of “the illegal financing of political campaigns by great corporations or labor unions”; etc., etc. (with not a word about how to “diffuse” the other power in that mixture, the power of the government).

This is offered as moral guidance for a nation that has lost its way.

If I were using that editorial for an actual test of reading comprehension, I would give A + to anyone who would discover why the word “moral” is introduced at the conclusion of a piece that does not discuss morality. If you look past the modern verbiage, you will find, smuggled between the lines, the thing which the editorial writer wants you “to understand, but not to understand fully, explicitly, down to the root”: altruism. It is not any practical considerations, not “modern industrial technologies,” or “the workings of the marketplace,” or economics, or politics, or reality, that make it impossible for us to return to capitalism—to freedom, progress, abundance—it is the altruist moral code, which the editorial is struggling to preserve in the form of “socially desirable purposes” that supersede individual rights. The “workable answer” it exhorts us to seek, is how to combine capitalism with the creed of self-sacrifice. Brother, it can’t be done. I have been saying it for years. You may take it now from the horse’s mouth—from an editorial written, apparently, in the horse’s unguarded moment.

It is futile to bemoan this country’s moral decadence or blame politicians for the “credibility gap” if this is the kind of guidance the nation is given by its intellectual leaders. Credibility? It is almost a miracle that the nation has managed to preserve some unconquerable element of decency and common sense, instead of collapsing altogether into a sewer of amoral, anti-intellectual cynicism and skepticism under a cultural barrage of that kind.

Politicians are not the cause of a culture’s trend, only its consequence. They get their notions from the cultural atmosphere, particularly from newspapers, magazines, and TV commentaries; they speak as these media teach them to speak. Who teaches the media?

And now we come down to the root: of all our institutions, it is the universities that are primarily responsible for this country losing its way—and of all the university departments, it is the departments of philosophy.

If you want to see what makes things such as that editorial possible, you will find the hoofprints of Pragmatism in two key sentences: “That issue is so difficult to solve because all the clear, simple extremes are unworkable,” and: “There is no magic formula for reconciling those aims.”

By “clear, simple extremes,” modern intellectuals mean any rational theory, any consistent system, any conceptual integration, any precise definition, any firm principle. Pragmatists do not mean that no such theory, system, or principle has yet been discovered (and that we should look for one), but that none is possible. Epistemologically, their dogmatic agnosticism holds, as an absolute, that a principle is false because it is a principle—that conceptual integration (i.e., thinking) is impractical or “simplistic” —that an idea which is clear and simple is necessarily “extreme and unworkable.” Along with Kant, their philosophic forefather, the pragmatists claim, in effect: “If you perceive it, it cannot be real,” and: “If you conceive of it, it cannot be true.”

What, then, is left to man? The sensation, the wish, the whim, the range, and the concrete of the moment. Since no solution to any problem is possible, anyone’s suggestion, guess, or edict is as valid as anyone else‘s—provided it is narrow enough.

To give you an example: if a building were threatened with collapse and you declared that the crumbling foundation has to be rebuilt, a pragmatist would answer that your solution is too abstract, extreme, unprovable, and that immediate priority must be given to the need of putting ornaments on the balcony railings, because it would make the tenants feel better.

There was a time when a man would not utter arguments of this sort, for fear of being rightly considered a fool. Today, Pragmatism has not merely given him permission to do it and liberated him from the necessity of thought, but has elevated his mental default into an intellectual virtue, has given him the right to dismiss thinkers (or construction engineers) as naive, and has endowed him with that typically modern quality: the arrogance of the concrete-bound, who takes pride in not seeing the forest fire, or the forest, or the trees, while he is studying one inch of bark on a rotted tree stump.

Like all of Kant’s progeny, modern philosophy has a single goal: the defeat of reason. The degree to which such philosophers succeed is the degree to which men and nations lose their way in a deepening night of insolvable problems.

The human products of that philosophy—on all levels of today’s society—are the crude skeptics and another, more offensive breed: the professional “seeker of truth” who hopes to God he’ll never find it.

If you meet one of those (and they are ubiquitous), you will find the answer to his problems—and to the dilemmas of modern philosophy—in another passage from Atlas Shrugged: “Do you cry that you find no answers? By what means did you hope to find them? You reject your tool of perception-your mind—then complain that the universe is a mystery. You discard your key, then wail that all doors are locked against you. You start out in pursuit of the irrational, then damn existence for making no sense.”

14

The Lessons of Vietnam

by Ayn Rand

This article was written in May 1975, a few weeks after the fall of South Vietnam to the Communists. Because The Ayn Rand Letter was behind schedule at the time, the article was published in the issues dated August 26 and September 9, 1974.

The televised scenes of South Vietnam’s sudden collapse at Da Nang seemed oddly familliar to me; they had a faded, distant quality of déjà vu. The scenes of people in hopeless flight, the panic, the despair, the frantic struggle for a foothold on the last plane or ship leaving a doomed land, with everything left behind and nothing ahead—people running into a void outside history, as if squeezed off the face of the earth—I had seen it all before. It took me a moment and a shock of sadness to realize where I had seen it: this was the Russian population fleeing before the advance of the Red Army in the civil war of 1918-21.

The newscaster’s voice said that fleeing South Vietnamese soldiers had seized control of an American rescue ship and had proceeded to rob, rape, and murder refugees, their own countrymen. I felt indignation, disgust, disappointment—and, again, a faint touch of familiarity. The shock was more painful, this time, when I realized that this was an example of the ignominious amorality of the so-called political right.

Let me hasten to say that individual brutes exist.in any army and cannot be taken as representative of an entire people; that the atrocities committed by those particular South Vietnamese would not even be reported if and when committed by the North Vietnamese, since such atrocities represent the official, ideological policy of North Vietnam; that South Vietnam does not represent the political right or the political anything. Granting all this, it is still true that if a group of soldiers attack their own countrymen in the midst of a national disaster, it means that attackers and victims have no values in common, not even the solidarity of primitive tribalism, that they have nothing to uphold or defend militarily, that they do not know what they are fighting for. And, in today’s world, there is no one to tell them.

I was in my early teens during the Russian civil war. I lived in a small town that changed hands many times. (See We the Living; that part of the story is autobiographical.) When it was occupied by the White Army, I almost longed for the return of the Red Army, and vice versa. There was not much difference between them in practice, but there was in theory. The Red Army stood for totalitarian dictatorship and rule by terror. The White Army stood for nothing; repeat: nothing. In answer to the monstrous evil they were fighting, the Whites found nothing better to proclaim than the dustiest, smelliest bromides of the time: we must fight, they said, for Holy Mother Russia, for faith and tradition.

I wondered, even in those years, which is morally worse: evil—or the appeasement of evil, the cowardly evasion that leaves an evil unnamed, unanswered and unchallenged. I was inclined to think that the second is worse, because it makes the first possible. I am certain of it today. But in the years of my adolescence, I did not know how rare a virtue intellectual integrity (i.e., the non-evasion of reality) actually is. So I kept waiting for some person or group among the Whites to come out with a real political manifesto that would explain and proclaim why one must fight against communism and what one might fight for. I knew even then that the “what” was freedom, individual freedom, and (a concept alien to Russia) individual rights.

I knew that man is not a slave of the state; I knew that man’s right to his own life (and, therefore, to freedom) has to be upheld with as great and proud a sense of moral righteousness as any idea could ever deserve; I knew that nothing less would do—and that without such a stand the anti-Reds were doomed. But I thought that this was self-evident, that the whole civilized world knew it, and that there surely existed some minds able to communicate this knowledge to Russia, which was perishing for lack of it. I waited through the years of the civil war. Nothing resembling that manifesto was ever uttered by anyone.

In a passive, indifferent way, the majority of the Russian people were behind the White Army: they were not for the Whites, but merely against the Reds; they feared the Reds’ atrocities. I knew that the Reds’ deepest atrocity was intellectual, that the thing which had to be fought—and defeated—was their ideas. But no one answered them. The country’s passivity turned to hopeless lethargy as people gave up. The Reds had an incentive, the promise of nationwide looting; they had the leadership and the semi-discipline of a criminal gang; they had an allegedly intellectual program and an allegedly moral justification. The Whites had icons. The Reds won.

I learned a great deal in the years since. I learned that the concept of individual rights is far, far from self-evident, that most of the world does not grasp it, that the United States grasped it only for a brief historical moment and is now in the process of losing the memory. I learned that the civilized world is being destroyed by its dominant schools of philosophy—by irrationalism, altruism, collectivism—and, specifically, that altruism is the tear gas that defeats resistance, by reducing men to crying and vomiting.

The hardest thing to learn (the most difficult one to believe) was the fact that the so-called political rightists in this country—the alleged defenders of freedom (i.e., of capitalism)—were as vague, as empty, and as futile as the leaders of the White Army (more shamefully so, since they had a much, much greater knowledge to evade). For years the intellectual posture of America’s political leaders has been a long, pleading, appeasing, self-abasing whine of apology for this country’s greatness—an apology addressed to every advocate or perpetrator of collectivism’s horrors and failures anywhere on earth.

But even American politicians had some sort of stature when compared to their intellectual mentors, those (to me, still incredible) bipeds who—unable to find a moral justification for man’s life and happiness—attempted to defend freedom on the grounds of altruism (of the “public good”), or on the grounds of faith in the supernatural, or on the grounds of brushing the issue aside and proclaiming that morality is irrelevant to economics (i.e., to man’s life and livelihood).

(At a certain point in recent years, I realized with astonishment that the kind of voice and manifesto I had been waiting for was my own. No, this is not a boast; it is an admission of a sort I don’t like to make: a complaint. [I don’t like self-pity.] I did not want, intend, or expect to be the only philosophical defender of man’s rights, in the country of man’s rights. But if I am, I am. And, dear reader, if I am giving you the kind of intellectual ammunition [and inspiration] I had so desperately waited to hear in my youth, I’m glad. I can say that I know how you feel.)

No country could stand for long on the kind of moral erosion that the altruists and amoralists of the right had done their best to aid and abet. The war in Vietnam was the result and dramatization of that erosion. The military collapse of South Vietnam was preceded by the philosophical collapse of the United States some decades earlier.

It was a shameful war—not for the reasons which leftists and sundry friends of North Vietnam are proclaiming, but for the exactly opposite reasons: shameful because it was a war which the U.S. had no selfish reason to fight, because it served no national interest, because we had nothing to gain from it, because the lives and the heroism of thousands of American soldiers (and the billions of American wealth) were sacrificed in pure compliance with the ethics of altruism, i.e., selflessly and senselessly.

In compliance with epistemological irrationalism, it was a war and a non-war at the same time. It was a modern monstrosity called a “no win” war, in which the American forces were not permitted to act, but only to react: they were to “contain” the enemy, but not to beat him.

In compliance with modern politics, the war was allegedly intended to save South Vietnam from communism, but the proclaimed purpose of the war was not to protect freedom or individual rights, it was not to establish capitalism or any particular social system—it was to uphold the South Vietnamese right to “national self-determination,” i.e., the right to vote themselves into any sort of system (including communism, as American propagandists kept proclaiming).

The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system—and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters’ power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny. Outside the context of a free society, who would want to die for the right to vote? Yet that is what the American soldiers were asked to die for—not even for their own vote, but to secure that privilege for the South Vietnamese, who had no other rights and no knowledge of rights or freedom.

Picking up the liberals’ discarded old slogan of World War I days—“the self-determination of nations”—the American conservatives were trying to hide the American system, capitalism, under some sort of collectivistic cover. And it is not capitalism that most of them were (and are) advocating, it was a mixed economy. Who would want to die for a mixed economy?

In compliance with a Hegelian sort of “A is non-A” metaphysics, both sides kept contradicting their professed beliefs. Soviet Russia, who regards men as the property and fodder of the state, did not send soldiers to North Vietnam (she could not trust them to fight, so she sent only military supplies). The United States, whose foundation is the supremacy of man’s right to life, sent soldiers to die in South Vietnam. Soviet Russia, the philosophical apostle of materialism, won the war in Vietnam by spiritual, i.e., moral-intellectual, means: the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong were thoroughly indoctrinated with the notion of the righteousness of their cause. The United States—whose modern leadership scorns materialism and professes to be moved by purely spiritual beliefs (mystical-religious on the right, tribalist and anti-industrial on the left)—abstained from proclaiming any moral principles or any principles whatever, and relied on an abundance of material supplies to fight the war, an abundance of planes, bombs, and guns in the hands of men who had no idea of why they should use them.

The savagely primitive farmers of North Vietnam had an incentive, the promise of looting the richer, industrialized South; they had the leadership and the semi-discipline of a criminal gang; they had an allegedly intellectual program, Marxism, and an allegedly moral justification: altruism, the sacrifice of all to some “higher” cause. The South Vietnamese had nothing but some mixed-economy echoes of the same altruism. The North Vietnamese won.

As a rule, there is an ugly period of gloating among the winners and of bitter buck-passing among the losers following a war. But I do not know of a historical precedent for the spectacle displayed by American intellectuals: an explosion of gloating over America’s “defeat,” of proclaiming America’s “weakness,” of denouncing America’s “guilt,” of glorifying and glamorizing the enemy, of pelting America with insults, accusations, humiliations—like an orgy of spitting at their own country’s face.

When a national catastrophe, such as the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, has no generally known reason and no clearly perceivable cause, one may find leads to some contributory causes by observing who profits from the catastrophe. The intellectuals are the profiteers on the Vietnam war. They are of so miserably small a stature that it would be impossible to suspect them of causing the disaster. They are not lions, but jackals. (The lion who avenged himself for too long a neglect was philosophy, which left the U.S. vulnerable to the jackals.) What are the suspicious paw prints of a scavenger pack?

Observe the double-standard switch of the anti-concept of “isolationism.” The same intellectual groups (and even some of the same aging individuals) who coined that anti-concept in World War II—and used it to denounce any patriotic opponent of America’s self-immolation—the same groups who screamed that it was our duty to save the world (when the enemy was Germany or Italy or fascism) are now rabid isolationists who denounce any U.S. concern with countries fighting for freedom, when the enemy is communism and Soviet Russia.

The catch phrase of these new isolationists is a shabby little equivocation to the effect that “other countries are not ours to lose”—e.g., we did not lose South Vietnam (or China, or Hungary, or Czechoslovakia) because it was not ours to lose—i.e., the fate of other countries is none of our business. This means: other countries are not ours to judge, to deal with, to trade with, or to help. (Unless it is help with no strings attached, i.e., help without moral judgment, political appraisal, or even humanitarian concern about the results—as demanded by Laos, when it threw out a U.S. aid agency, but wanted the U.S. money turned over to the Laotian government.)

The purpose of this new isolationism is to play on the American people’s legitimate weariness, confusion, and anger over Vietnam in the hope of making the U.S. government afraid to become involved in another foreign war of any kind. This would paralyze the U.S. in the conduct of any foreign policy not agreeable to Soviet Russia. The first intended victim of the new isolationism will probably be Israel—if the “antiwar” efforts of the new isolationists succeed. (Israel and Taiwan are the two countries that need and deserve U.S. help—not in the name of international altruism, but by reason of actual U.S. national interests in the Mediterranean and the Pacific.)

To oppose the spread of communism is a worthy goal. But one cannot oppose it in jungle villages while surrendering civilized countries—and one cannot oppose it by hiding from the world the nature and the moral meaning of communism’s only opposite and enemy: capitalism. To use America’s phony involvement in Vietnam as a scarecrow to keep us away from the real, the essential centers of the fight against communism—this is the current gimmick or policy of the neo-isolationists.

Observe the frame-up staged against America’s military power.

One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary. A similar frame-up is now being perpetrated against America’s military power. It is claimed that the U.S. forces were defeated—in a war they had never been allowed to fight. They were defeated, it is claimed, two years after their withdrawal from Vietnam. The ignominious collapse of the South Vietnamese when left on their own is being acclaimed as an American military failure.

There is no doubt that America’s entire involvement in Vietnam is a failure unworthy of a great power. It is a moral failure, a diplomatic failure, a political failure, a philosophical failure—the failure of American politicians and of their intellectual advisers. But to regard it as a military failure is worse than outrageous when you consider the heroic performance of Americans in a war they should never have had to fight. If there are meh or groups with a vested interest in creating an impression of America’s military weakness, use your own judgment as to their nature and goals.

Now observe the moral bankruptcy of the “humanitarians.” After decades of ever louder protestations of compassionate concern with every possible form of suffering—the suffering of the poor, the young, the old, the female, the black, the brown, the Indian, the sick, the weak, the illiterate, the retarded, the criminal, the psychotic—after such a barrage of pleas and threats, of saccharine and blood, that one could be tempted, in protest, to hate babies and kittens, the altruists have suddenly shut up before an unprecedented atrocity of historic scale: the murder of a city, the evacuation of Phnom Penh.

A horde of savages that would make Attila look civilized by comparison has given the world a perfect concretization of three abstractions which civilized men have taken with too foggy a tolerance: collectivism, which regards individual lives as of no value—the rule of force, which implements the whims of the subhuman—ecology as a social principle, which condemns cities, culture, industry, technology, the intellect, and advocates men’s return to “nature,” to the state of grunting subanimals digging the soil with their bare hands.

Since the Khmer Rouge are peasants who feel hatred for cities, the inhabitants of Phnom Penh—its entire population without exceptions—were ordered to march out of the city and to go on marching until they reached uninhabited countryside, where they were to start farming on their own, without knowledge, tools, or seed. This order applied to everyone: young and old, rich and poor, men, women, and children, the well and the ill, even the crippled and, according to a news report, even the hospital patients who had just had their legs amputated. Everyone was ordered to walk. They walked.

This is all we know. There have been no further reports on the fate of that evacuation. After a few shocked remarks, there were no protests from our media or from those liberal altruists who cry over the victims of “relative poverty” in America. The liberals had been minimizing or ridiculing the conservatives’ fear that a “blood bath” would follow a communist victory. If human suffering concerned them at all, one would expect the altruists to scream their heads off against an atrocity which is worse than a blood bath: a mass execution by long-drawn-out torture. But the altruists have shut their traps. So have the altruists of Europe. There has been no significant protest from the hundreds of world organizations devoted to the relief of suffering, including that contemptible citadel of global hypocrisy, the U.N.

The best commentary on Phnom Penh, of those I have read, was “Get Out of Town” by William Safire, a conservative (The New York Times, May 12, 1975).

In all human history nothing has taken place quite like the emptying of Phnom Penh. Sennacherib destroyed Babylon, the Romans sacked Carthage, and Hitler’s bombers leveled Guernica, but in every case the attacker was destroying a particular city, not the idea of a city itself.... A city is civilization; civilization is diversity and creativity, which needs personal freedom; Communism is by its nature anti-city, anti-civilization, anti-freedom. The Khmer Rouge understand this; too many Americans do not.

To go from the horrendous to the grotesque, consider the Mayaguez incident. I hasten to say that were it not for the proper and highly moral action taken by President Ford, the consequences of that incident could have been more horrendous than Phnom Penh. That a small band of those same Cambodian savages dared seize an unarmed American ship was such an affront to America (and to civilization) that the collapse of international law would have followed if President Ford had not acted as he did. [President Ford used air, sea, and ground forces to free the ship.] To borrow Senator Goldwater’s very appropriate phrase, every “half-assed nation” would have felt free to attack the U.S.—which would have meant world rule by terrorist gangs.

We shall never know whether the seizure of the Mayaguez was a deliberate provocation to test what the global communist scum could get away with—or the spontaneous feat of a local gang drunk with power and acting more royalist than their kings. But this does not concern us: in either case, when a foreign country initiates the use of armed force against us, it is our moral obligation to answer by force—as promptly and unequivocally as is necessary to make it clear that the matter is nonnegotiable.

Believe it or not, some American intellectuals (and some politicians) objected to President Ford’s action. Mr. Anthony Lewis went so far as to declare it was America that was “a bully among nations, acting without consultation, without concern for facts or principle.” [The Times, May 19, 1975] His principle (and filthy accusations) rests on the fact that “we allowed less than a day and a half for a response from the untried and isolated government of a shattered country.” After which, he struggles to prove that part of the U.S. bombing of a Cambodian airport “could only have been punitive in purpose.” (I hope so.)

This is international altruism gone wild. It demands that the U.S. give up self-defense in order to make allowances for an “untried government.” (This means, I suppose, that we should wait until that government has gained experience in attacking us.) If those Cambodian brutes were so ignorant as to permit themselves an attack on a U.S. ship, the more reason to use force in answer, in order to teach them caution in the future; force is the only language that totalitarian brutes understand.

An interesting appraisal of the Mayaguez incident was given by C. L. Sulzberger, a liberal, who hailed President Ford’s action in a column entitled “Just What the Doctor Ordered.” [The Times, May 17, 1975] Since Mr. Sulzberger’s columns deal mainly with the reactions of other countries to U.S. foreign policy, his enthusiasm in this instance is significant, revealing, and almost pathetic: it shows the extent of the dismal, gray hopelessness previously conveyed by our international diplomacy. “Small as the incident may later seem in history, a polluting stain is being erased from the previous American image of lassitude, uncertainty, and pessimism. This is a matter of world ideological concern as well as strategic balances because too many democracies are sick.... Now a new vibrancy creeps into the picture.”

Mr. Sulzberger explains:

The internationally renowned ‘American tempo’ and productivity still lag and the work ethic with its emphasis on speed and efficiency—whether prompted by puritanism or by the capitalistic profit motive—has certainly undergone visible and withering change. In this uncertain age American flabbiness is ... harmful to the United States.

In the absence of American leadership, Mr. Sulzberger concludes, many Western countries were left adrift. “Now Gerald Ford seems to have put an end to that sad phase. Abruptly he has shown Americans and the world that he knows how to get where he wishes to go. Hopefully, he also possesses a good sense of direction.”

Nobody respects an altruist, neither in private life nor in international affairs. An altruist is a person who keeps sacrificing himself and his values, which means: sacrificing his friends to his enemies, his allies to his antagonists, his interests to any cry for help, his strength to anyone’s weakness, his convictions to anyone’s wishes, the truth to any lie, the good to any evil. How would you tell an altruist’s treacherously unpredictable policy from that of a cowardly milquetoast? And what difference would it make to his victims? A man practicing such a policy would be mistrusted and despised by everyone, including the profiteers on his “generosity”—yet this is the policy which the U.S. has come as close to practicing as any nation ever could. And if foreign countries are now cheering the sight of a giant, the U.S., standing up to a flea, Cambodia, it is the (momentary) defeat of altruism that they are cheering unknowingly, it is America’s liberation from altruism’s flabbiness, it is America’s declaration to all the fleas of the world that the world is not to perish as a meal for fleas.

The American people’s reaction to the Mayaguez incident was a great—and tragic—demonstration of America’s sense of life. Great, because when the news broke out, the letters and wires received at the White House ran—ten to one—in support of President Ford’s intention to use military force against Cambodia. The American people—battered by disillusionment over a senseless war and by vicious pro-enemy, antiwar propaganda—could have had an excuse to fear and oppose the potential risk of another war in the same geographical area. But they did not. They understood the principle involved; they were willing to fight, but not to accept an affront. (Which, incidentally, is the only way to avoid a war, but not many leaders said so.) This grasp of principles, when the chips are down, this proudly rebellious independence in the face of lies and threats, is what defeats the calculations of the manipulators, foreign or domestic, who attempt to con the American people.

The tragedy lies in the fact that these American characteristics can come into play only when the chips are down. A sense of life cannot foresee or prevent a catastrophe; it cannot save people from moving toward a disaster by single, gradual steps. Foresight and prevention are the task of conscious thought and knowledge, i.e., of political philosophy. In regard to a nation, they are the task of the intellectuals.

Just as Russia collapsed through the philosophical bankruptcy of its anticommunists, so did China—so did every rebellion against communist rule, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in Poiand—so did, does, and will every attempt to hold out a mixed economy (and/or socialism!) as an alternative to communism worth fighting and dying for. The greatest intellectual crime today is that of the alleged “rightists” in this country: with reason, reality, and (potentially) an overwhelming majority of the American people on their side, they are afraid to assume the responsibility of a moral crusade for America’s values—i.e., for capitalism (with everything this necessitates). Observe the extent to which the tear gas of altruism is making them squirm. But unless men are brave enough to ventilate this country’s moral atmosphere, they have no chance. For a nation, as for a man, a Declaration of Independence implies a declaration of self-esteem. Neither can stand without the other.

Much as I admire President Ford’s conduct in the Mayaguez incident, there are many aspects of his policies with which I do not agree. The relevant one here is his appeal to leave Vietnam behind us and to avoid “recriminations” over that war. The lessons of Vietnam, he claims, have been learned. Have they?

What—and who—got us into that war? Why? For what reason and purpose? How did a war advocated and begun by the liberals (mainly by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson) become the conservatives’ war? Isn’t a moral obscenity such as a “no win” war unconstitutional—as a violation of the soldiers’ right to life—since it turns soldiers into cannon fodder?

These are just a few of the questions to which the country has no clear answers. The Vietnam war is one of the most disastrous foreign-policy failures in U.S. history. We spent two years investigating everything connected with seven burglars sent by a bunch of politicians to bug the headquarters of another bunch of politicians. What was that compared to the enormity of Vietnam? We kept hearing, and are still hearing, that Watergate represented a threat to our rights, our freedom, our social system, and our Constitution. What was Vietnam?

Shouldn’t there be an investigation of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, wider, deeper, and more thorough than the investigation of Watergate—with nationally televised Congressional hear ings, with dozens of famous witnesses, with daily headlines, editorials, debates, etc.? The purpose? To discover the causes in order to avoid the recurrence (or the continuation) of the policies that led to Vietnam.

Such an investigation would not be likely to uncover any crimes other than intellectual ones—but try to imagine the magnitude of those! Intellectual crimes cannot—and need not—be punished by law: the only punishment required is exposure. But who would conduct such an inquiry? Who would be able to ask the right questions, and integrate the answers, and point out the contradictions, and hammer at the evasions, and bring out the fundamental issues? Obviously, this is not a task for politicians, it is a task for theoretical thinkers, for intellectuals, for philosophers. But today they are the men who were responsible for the kind of thinking that was responsible for our involvement in Vietnam.

This is the reason why no such investigation can or will be held today. And this is the all-inclusive lesson to be learned from Vietnam.

15

The Sanction of the Victims

by Ayn Rand

This is Ayn Rand’s last piece of writing. She delivered the lecture in New Orleans on November 21, 1981, before an audience of businessmen attending seminars sponsored by the National Committee for Monetary Reform. She was planning to give it again at the Ford Hall Forum ; I delivered it there in her stead on April 25, 1982, some six weeks after her death. It was published in The Objectivist Forum, April 1982.

Since the subject of these seminars is investment, I must start by stating that I am not an economist and have no purely economic advice to give you. But what I am anxious to discuss with you are the preconditions that make it possible for you to gain and to keep the money which you can then invest.

I shall start by asking a question on a borrowed premise: What human occupation is the most useful socially?

The borrowed premise is the concept of social usefulness. It is not part of my philosophy to evaluate things by a social standard. But this is the predominant standard of value today. And sometimes it can be very enlightening to adopt the enemy’s standard. So let us borrow the notion of “social” concern for just a little while—just long enough to answer the question: What human occupation is the most useful socially?

Since man’s basic tool of survival is his mind, the most crucially important occupation is the discovery of knowledge—i.e., the occupation of scientists. But scientists are not concerned with society, with social issues or with other men. Scientists are, essentially, loners; they pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. A great many scientific—and technological—facts were known before the Industrial Revolution, and did not affect human existence. The steam engine, for instance, was known in ancient Greece. But knowledge of that sort remained an exclusive concern that lived and died with scientists—and, for century after century, had no connection to the lives of the rest of mankind.

Now, suppose that a group of men decided to make it their job to bring the results of the achievements of science within the reach of men—to apply scientific knowledge to the improvement of man’s life on earth. Wouldn’t such men be the greatest social benefactors (as they have been since the Industrial Revolution)? Shouldn’t the socially concerned humanitarians, those who hold social usefulness as their highest value, regard such men as heroes?

If I say: No, such men are not regarded as heroes today—they are the most hated, blamed, denounced men in the humanitarians’ society—would you believe me? Or would you think that I’m inventing some sort of irrational fiction? And would you say that something is wrong—terribly wrong—in such a society?

But this isn’t all; there is something much worse. It isn’t merely the fact that these heroic men are the victims of an unspeakable injustice: it is the fact that they are first to perpetrate that injustice against themselves—that they adopt a public “stance” of perpetual apology and universal appeasement, proclaiming themselves guilty of an unspecified evil, begging the forgiveness of every two-bit intellectual, every unskilled laborer, every unemployed politician. No, this is not fiction. That country is the United States of America today. That self-destroying group of men is you, the American businessmen.

When I say “you,” I mean the group as a whole—I accept the tenet that present company is excepted. However, if any of you find a shoe that fits, wear it with my compliments.

Karl Marx predicted that capitalism would commit suicide. The American businessmen are carrying out that prediction. In destroying themselves, they are destroying capitalism, of which they are the symbol and product—and America, which is the greatest and freest example of capitalism mankind has ever reached. There is no outside power that can destroy such men and such a country. Only an inner power can do it: the power of morality. More specifically: the power of a contemptibly evil idea accepted as a moral principle—altruism.

Remember that “altruism” does not mean kindness or consideration for other men. Altruism is a moral theory which preaches that man must sacrifice himself for others, that he must place the interest of others above his own, that he must live for the sake of others.

Altruism is a monstrous notion. It is the morality of cannibals devouring one another. It is a theory of profound hatred for man, for reason, for achievement, for any form of human success or happiness on earth.

Altruism is incompatible with capitalism—and with businessmen. Businessmen are a cheerful, benevolent, optimistic, predominantly American phenomenon. The essence of their job is the constant struggle to improve human life, to satisfy human needs and desires—not to practice resignation, surrender, and worship of suffering. And here is the profound gulf between businessmen and altruism: businessmen do not sacrifice themselves to others—if they did, they would be out of business in a few months or days—they profit, they grow rich, they are rewarded, as they should be. This is what the altruists, the collectivists and other sundry “humanitarians” hate the businessmen for: that they pursue a personal goal and succeed at it. Do not fool yourself by thinking that altruists are motivated by compassion for the suffering: they are motivated by hatred for the successful.

The evidence is all around us, but one small example sticks in my mind as extremely eloquent. In the early 1930s an assistant of Jane Addams, the famous social worker, went on a visit to Soviet Russia and wrote a book about her experience. The sentence I remember is: “How wonderful it was to see everybody equally shabby!” If you think you should try to appease the altruists, this is what you are appeasing.

The great tragedy of capitalism and of America is the fact that most businessmen have accepted the morality of altruism and are trying to live up to it—which means that they are doomed before they start.

Another, contributory evil is the philosophical root of altruism, which is: mysticism—the belief in the supernatural, which preaches contempt for matter, for wealth, well-being, or happiness on earth. The mystics are constantly crying appeals for your pity, your compassion, your help to the less fortunate—yet they are condemning you for all the qualities of character that make you able to help them.

Evil theories have to rely on evil means in order to hold their victims. Altruism and collectivism cannot appeal to human virtues—they have to appeal to human weaknesses. And where there are not enough weaknesses, they have to manufacture them. It is in the nature of altruists and collectivists that the more they need a person or a group, the more they denounce their victims, induce guilt, and struggle never to let the victims discover their own importance and acquire self-esteem. The businessmen are needed most by the so-called “humanitarians” —because the businessmen produce the sustenance the “humanitarians” are unable to produce. Doctors come next in the hierarchy of being needed—and observe the hostility, the denunciations, and the attempts to enslave the doctors in today’s society.

Most businessmen today have accepted the feeling of guilt induced in them by the altruists. They are accused of anything and everything; for instance, the ecologists denounce businessmen’s refusal to sacrifice themselves to the snail darter and the furbish lousewort.

But the businessmen’s actual guilt is their treason against themselves, which is also their treason against their country. The statement that aroused such fury among the collectivists—“What’s good for General Motors is good for the country”—was true. And the reverse is also true: What’s bad for industry is bad for the country.

I am here to ask you a question on my own—not on borrowed—premises: What are you doing to the advocates of capitalism, particularly the young?

Appeasement is a betrayal not only of one’s own values, but of all those who share one’s values. If—for whatever misguided reason—businessmen are indifferent to and ignorant of philosophy, particularly moral and political philosophy, it would be better if they kept silent rather than spread the horrible advertisements that make us cringe with embarrassment. By “us” I mean advocates of capitalism. Mobil Oil ran ads in the New York Times which stated the following (I quote from memory): “Of the expression free, private, responsible enterprise, we strike out ‘free’ and ’private’ as nonessential.” One of the big industries advertises on television that they are full of “people working for people,” and some other big company announces on television that its goal is “ideas that help people.” (I do not know what the ghastly P.R. men who come up with these slogans wanted us to think: that the companies worked “for free,” or that they traded with people rather than with animals?)

The worst of the bunch is some new group in Washington, D.C., called something like “Committee for the American Way,” which puts out a television commercial showing some ugly, commonplace people of all kinds, each proclaiming that he likes a different type of music (“I like rock ’n roll.” “And I like jazz.” “And I like Beethoven” etc.)—ending on a voice declaring: “This is the American way—with every man entitled to have and express his own opinion.”

I, who come from Soviet Russia, can assure you that debates and differences of that kind were and are permitted in Soviet Russia. What about political or philosophical issues? Why didn’t those upholders of the American Way show people disagreeing about nuclear weapons? Or about abortion? Or about “affirmative action”? If that committee stands for the American Way—there is no such Way any longer.

Observe also that in today’s proliferation of pressure groups, the lowest sort of unskilled laborer is regarded as “the public,” and presents claims to society in the name of “the public interest,” and is encouraged to assert his “right” to a livelihood—but the businessmen, the intelligent, the creative, the successful men who make the laborer’s livelihood possible, have no rights, and no (legitimate) interests, are not entitled to their livelihood (their profits), and are not part of “the public.”

Every kind of ethnic group is enormously sensitive to any slight. If one made a derogatory remark about the Kurds of Iran, dozens of voices would leap to their defense. But no one speaks out for businessmen, when they are attacked and insulted by everyone as a matter of routine.

What causes this overwhelming injustice? The businessmen’s own policies: their betrayal of their own values, their appeasement of enemies, their compromises—all of which add up to an air of moral cowardice. Add to it the fact that businessmen are creating and supporting their own destroyers.

The sources and centers of today’s philosophical corruption are the universities. Businessmen are both contemptuous of and superstitiously frightened by the subject of philosophy. There is a vicious circle involved here: businessmen have good ground to despise philosophy as it is taught today, but it is taught that way because businessmen abandoned the intellect to the lowest rungs of the unemployables. All the conditions and ideas necessary to turn men into abjectly helpless serfs of dictatorship, rule the institutes of today’s higher education as a tight monopoly, with very few and rare exceptions. Hatred of reason and worship of blind emotions, hatred of the individual and worship of the collective, hatred of success and worship of self-sacrifice—these are the fundamental notions that dominate today’s universities. These notions condition (and paralyze) the minds of the young.

If you want to discover how a country’s philosophy determines its history, I urge you to read The Ominous Parallels by Leônard Peikoff [Mentor, 1983]. This brilliant book presents the philosophical similarities between the state of America’s culture today and the state of Germany’s culture in the Weimar Republic in the years preceding the rise of Nazism.

It is the businessmen’s money that supports American universities—not merely in the form of taxes and government handouts, but much worse: in the form of voluntary, private contributions, donations, endowments, etc. In preparation for this lecture, I tried to do some research on the nature and amounts of such contributions. I had to give it up: it is too complex and too vast a field for the efforts of one person. To untangle it now would require a major research project and, probably, years of work. All I can say is that millions and millions and millions of dollars are being donated to universities by big business enterprises every year, and that the donors have no idea of what their money is being spent on or whom it is supporting. What is certain is only the fact that some of the worst anti-business, anti-capitalism propaganda has been financed by businessmen in such projects.

Money is a great power—because in a free or even a semi-free society, it is a frozen form of productive energy. And, therefore, the spending of money is a grave responsibility. Contrary to the altruists and the advocates of the so-called “academic freedom,” it is a moral crime to give money to support ideas with which you disagree; it means: ideas which you consider wrong, false, evil. It is a moral crime to give money to support your own destroyers. Yet that is what businessmen are doing with such reckless irresponsibility.

On the faculties of most colleges and universities, the advocates of reason, individualism and capitalism are a very small minority, often represented by a feeble specimen of window dressing. But the valiant minority of authentic fighters is struggling against overwhelming odds and growing, very slowly. The hardships, the injustices, and the persecutions suffered by these young advocates of reason and capitalism are too terrible a story to be told briefly. These are the young people whom businessmen should support. Or, if businessmen are too ignorant of academic issues, they should leave academic matters alone. But to support irrationalists, nihilists, socialists, and communists—who form an impenetrable barrier against the young advocates of capitalism, denying them jobs, recognition, or a mere hearing—is an unforgivable outrage on the part of irresponsible businessmen who imagine that it is morally safe to give money to institutions of higher learning.

The lasting influence of the universities is caused by the fact that most people question the truth or falsehood of philosophical ideas only in their youth, and whatever they learn in college marks them for life. If they are given intellectual poison, as they are today, they carry it into their professions, particularly in the humanities. Observe the lifeless grayness, the boring mediocrity of today’s culture—the empty pretentiousness and mawkish sentimentality of today’s stage, screen, and television writing. There are no serious dramas any longer—and such few as attempt to be serious are of a leftist-collectivist persuasion.

On this subject, I can speak from personal experience. For several years, a distinguished producer in Hollywood has been attempting to make a television mini-series or a movie of my novel Atlas Shrugged. He was stopped on two counts: (1) he could not find a writer able to write a Romantic drama, even though there are many good writers in Hollywood; and (2) he could not raise the money for his project.

Allow me to say, even though I do not like to say it, that if there existed a novel of the same value and popularity as Atlas Shrugged, but written to glorify collectivism (which would be a contradiction in terms), it would have been produced on the screen long ago.

But I do not believe in giving up—and so, in answer to many questions, I chose this occasion to make a very special announcement:

I am writing a nine-hour teleplay for Atlas Shrugged.

I intend to produce the mini-series myself.

There is a strong possibility I will be looking for outside financing to produce the Atlas Shrugged series. [Miss Rand died a few months later, before completing the teleplay.]

In conclusion, let me touch briefly on another question often asked me: What do I think of President Reagan? The best answer to give would be: But I don’t think of him—and the more I see, the less I think. I did not vote for him (or for anyone else) and events seem to justify me. The appalling disgrace of his administration is his connection with the so-called “Moral Majority” and sundry other TV religionists, who are struggling—apparently with his approval—to take us back to the Middle Ages, via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics.

The threat to the future of capitalism is the fact that Reagan might fail so badly that he will become another ghost, like Herbert Hoover, to be invoked as an example of capitalism’s failure for another fifty years.

Observe Reagan’s futile attempts to arouse the country by some sort of inspirational appeal. He is right in thinking that the country needs an inspirational element. But he will not find it in the God-Family-Tradition swamp.

The greatest inspirational leadership this country could ever find rests in the hands of the most typically American group: the businessmen. But they could provide it only if they acquired philosophical self-defense and self-esteem.

Here is what young Americans have to say about it.

I quote from the May 15, 1980 issue of The Intellectual Activist, a newsletter published by Peter Schwartz:

Feminists threaten to publicize the names of psychologists who hold their convention in a state which has not yet endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment. Unionists protest political functions that serve lettuce not approved by Cesar Chavez. Yet businessmen are willing not simply to tolerate denunciations of free enterprise, but to financially sponsor them.

And: I quote from an article by M. Northrup Buechner, “The Root of Terrorism,” in the October 1981 issue of The Objectivist Forum, published by Harry Binswanger:

Imagine the effect if [some] prominent businessmen ... were to defend publicly their right to their own lives. Imagine the earthshaking social reverberations if they were to assert their moral right to their own profits, not because those profits are necessary for economic progress or the elimination of poverty (which are purely collectivist justifications), but because a living being has the right to live and progress and do the best he can for his life for the time he has on this earth.

I recommend both these publications very highly. You may write to The Intellectual Activist at: [Box 582, Murray Hill Station, New York, NY 10156]—and to The Objectivist Forum at: Box 5311, New York, NY 10150. [The Objectivist Forum ceased publication in December 1987.]

As for me, I will close with a quotation which is probably familiar to you—and I will say that the battle for capitalism will be won when we find a president capable of saying it:

“The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.

“But to win it requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.”

16

Through Your Most Grievous Fault

by Ayn Rand

This was one of Ayn Rand’s newspaper columns. It appeared in the Los Angeles Times on August 19, 1962, two weeks after Marilyn Monroe’s death.

The death of Marilyn Monroe shocked people with an impact different from their reaction to the death of any other movie star or public figure. All over the world, people felt a peculiar sense of personal involvement and of protest, like a universal cry of “Oh, no!”

They felt that her death had some special significance, almost like a warning which they could not decipher—and they felt a nameless apprehension, the sense that something terribly wrong was involved.

They were right to feel it.

Marilyn Monroe on the screen was an image of pure, innocent, childlike joy in living. She projected the sense of a person born and reared in some radiant utopia untouched by suffering, unable to conceive of ugliness or evil, facing life with the confidence, the benevolence, and the joyous self-flaunting of a child or a kitten who is happy to display its own attractiveness as the best gift it can offer the world, and who expects to be admired for it, not hurt.

In real life, Marilyn Monroe’s probable suicide—or worse: a death that might have been an accident, suggesting that, to her, the difference did not matter—was a declaration that we live in a world which made it impossible for her kind of spirit, and for the things she represented, to survive.

If there ever was a victim of society, Marilyn Monroe was that victim—of a society that professes dedication to the relief of the suffering, but kills the joyous.

None of the objects of the humanitarians’ tender solicitude, the juvenile delinquents, could have had so sordid and horrifying a childhood as did Marilyn Monroe.

To survive it and to preserve the kind of spirit she projected on the screen—the radiantly benevolent sense of life, which cannot be faked—was an almost inconceivable psychological achievement that required a heroism of the highest order. Whatever scars her past had left were insignificant by comparison.

She preserved her vision of life through a nightmare struggle, fighting her way to the top. What broke her was the discovery, at the top, of as sordid an evil as the one she had left behind—worse, perhaps, because incomprehensible. She had expected to reach the sunlight; she found, instead, a limitless swamp of malice.

It was a malice of a very special kind. If you want to see her groping struggle to understand it, read the magnificent article in [the August 17, 1962) issue of Life magazine. It is not actually an article, it is a verbatim transcript of her own words—and the most tragically revealing document published in many years. It is a cry for help, which came too late to be answered.

“When you’re famous, you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way,” she said. “It stirs up envy, fame does. People you run into feel that, well, who is she—who does she think she is, Marilyn Monroe? They feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you, you know, of any kind of nature—and it won’t hurt your feelings—like it’s happening to your clothing.... I don’t understand why people aren’t a little more generous with each other. I don’t like to say this, but I’m afraid there is a lot of envy in this business.”

“Envy” is the only name she could find for the monstrous thing she faced, but it was much worse than envy: it was the profound hatred of life, of success and of all human values, felt by a certain kind of mediocrity—the kind who feels pleasure on hearing about a stranger’s misfortune. It was hatred of the good for being the good-hatred of ability, of beauty, of honesty, of earnestness, of achievement and, above all, of human joy.

Read the Life article to see how it worked and what it did to her:

An eager child, who was rebuked for her eagerness—“Some times the [foster] families used to worry because I used to laugh so loud and so gay; I guess they felt it was hysterical.”

A spectacularly successful star, whose employers kept repeating: “Remember you’re not a star,” in a determined effort, apparently, not to let her discover her own importance.

A brilliantly talented actress, who was told by the alleged authorities, by Hollywood, by the press, that she could not act.

An actress, dedicated to her art with passionate earnestness—“When I was five—I think that’s when I started wanting to be an actress—I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim—but I loved to play house and it was like you could make your own boundaries”—who went through hell to make her own boundaries, to offer people the sunlit universe of her own vision—“It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting”—but who was ridiculed for her desire to play serious parts.

A woman, the only one, who was able to project the glowingly innocent sexuality of a being from some planet uncorrupted by guilt—who found herself regarded and ballyhooed as a vulgar symbol of obscenity—and who still had the courage to declare: “We are all born sexual creatures, thank God, but it’s a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift.”

A happy child who was offering her achievement to the world, with the pride of an authentic greatness and of a kitten depositing a hunting trophy at your feet—who found herself answered by concerted efforts to negate, to degrade, to ridicule, to insult, to destroy her achievement—who was unable to conceive that it was her best she was punished for, not her worst—who could only sense, in helpless terror, that she was facing some unspeakable kind of evil.

How long do you think a human being could stand it?

That hatred of values has always existed in some people, in any age or culture. But a hundred years ago, they would have been expected to hide it. Today, it is all around us; it is the style and fashion of our century.

Where would a sinking spirit find relief from it?

The evil of a cultural atmosphere is made by all those who share it. Anyone who has ever felt resentment against the good for being the good and has given voice to it, is the murderer of Marilyn Monroe.

17

Apollo 11

by Ayn Rand

This article was published in The Objectivist, September 1969.

“No matter what discomforts and expenses you had to bear to come here,” said a NASA guide to a group of guests, at the conclusion of a tour of the Space Center on Cape Kennedy, on July 15, 1969, “there will be seven minutes tomorrow morning that will make you feel it was worth it.”

It was.

The tour had been arranged for the guests invited by NASA to attend the launching of Apollo 11. As far as I was able to find out, the guests—apart from government officials and foreign dignitaries—were mainly scientists, industrialists, and a few intellectuals who had been selected to represent the American people and culture on this occasion. If this was the standard of selection, I am happy and proud that I was one of these guests.

The NASA tour guide was a slight, stocky, middle-aged man who wore glasses and spoke—through a microphone, at the front of the bus—in the mild, gentle, patient manner of a school-teacher. He reminded me of television’s Mr. Peepers—untit he took off his glasses and I took a closer look at his face: he had unusual, intensely intelligent eyes.

The Space Center is an enormous place that looks like an untouched wilderness cut, incongruously, by a net of clean, new, paved roads: stretches of wild, subtropical growth, an eagle’s nest in a dead tree, an alligator in a stagnant moat—and, scattered at random, in the distance, a few vertical shafts rising from the jungle, slender structures of a shape peculiar to the technology of space, which do not belong to the age of the jungle or even fully to ours.

The discomfort was an inhuman, brain-melting heat. The sky was a sunless spread of glaring white, and the physical objects seemed to glare so that the mere sensation of sight became an effort. We kept plunging into an oven, when the bus stopped and we ran to modern, air-conditioned buildings that looked quietly unobtrusive and militarily efficient, then plunging back into the air-conditioned bus as into a pool. Our guide kept talking and explaining, patiently, courteously, conscientiously, but his heart was not in it, and neither was ours, even though the things he showed us would have been fascinating at any other time. The reason was not the heat; it was as if nothing could register on us, as if we were out of focus, or, rather, focused too intently and irresistibly on the event of the following day.

It was the guide who identified it, when he announced: “And now we’ll show you what you really want to see”—and we were driven to the site of Apollo 11.

The “VIP‘s” tumbled out of the bus like tourists and rushed to photograph one another, with the giant rocket a few hundred yards away in the background. But some just stood and looked.

I felt a kind of awe, but it was a purely theoretical awe; I had to remind myself: “This is it,” in order to experience any emotion. Visually it was just another rocket, the kind you can see in any science-fiction movie or on any toy counter: a tall, slender shape of dead, powdery white against the white glare of the sky and the steel lacing of the service tower. There were sharp black lines encircling the white body at intervals—and our guide explained matter-of-factly that these marked the stages that would be burned off in tomorrow’s firings. This made the meaning of the rocket more real for an instant. But the fact that the lunar module, as he told us, was already installed inside the small, slanted part way on top of the rocket, just under the still smaller, barely visible spacecraft itself, would not become fully real; it seemed too small, too far away from us, and, simultaneously, too close: I could not quite integrate it with the parched stubble of grass under our feet, with its wholesomely usual touches of litter, with the psychedelic colors of the shirts on the tourists snapping pictures.

Tomorrow, our guide explained, we would be sitting on bleachers three miles away; he warned us that the sound of the blast would reach us some seconds later than the sight, and assured us that it would be loud, but not unbearable.

I do not know that guide’s actual work at the Space Center, and I do not know by what imperceptible signs he gave me the impression that he was a man in love with his work. It was only that concluding remark of his, later, at the end of the tour, that confirmed my impression. In a certain way, he set, for me, the tone of the entire occasion: the sense of what lay under the surface of the seemingly commonplace activities.

My husband and I were staying in Titusville, a tiny frontier settlement—the frontier of science—built and inhabited predominantly by the Space Center’s employees. It was just like any small town, perhaps a little newer and cleaner—except that ten miles away, across the bluish spread of the Indian River, one could see the foggy, bluish, rectangular shape of the Space Center’s largest structure, the Vehicle Assembly Building, and, a little farther away, two faint vertical shafts: Apollo 11 and its service tower. No matter what one looked at in that town, one could not really see anything else.

I noticed only that Titusville had many churches, too many, and that they had incredible, modernistic forms. Architectur ally, they reminded me of the more extreme types of Hollywood drive-ins: a huge, cone-shaped roof, with practically no walls to support it—or an erratic conglomeration of triangles, like a coral bush gone wild—or a fairy-tale candy-house, with S-shaped windows dripping at random like gobs of frosting. I may be mistaken about this, but I had the impression that here, on the doorstep of the future, religion felt out of place and this was the way it was trying to be modern.

Since all the motels of Titusville were crowded beyond capacity, we had rented a room in a private home: as their contribution to the great event, many of the local homeowners had volunteered to help their chamber of commerce with the unprecedented flood of visitors. Our room was in the home of an engineer employed at the Space Center. It was a nice, gracious family, and one might have said a typical small-town family, except for one thing: a quality of cheerful openness, directness, almost innocence—the benevolent, unself-consciously self-confident quality of those who live in the clean, strict, reality-oriented atmosphere of science.

On the morning of July 16, we got up at 3 A.M. in order to reach the NASA Guest Center by 6 A.M., a distance that a car traveled normally in ten minutes. (Special buses were to pick up the guests at that Center, for the trip to the launching.) But Titusville was being engulfed by such a flood of cars that even the police traffic department could not predict whether one would be able to move through the streets that morning. We reached the Guest Center long before sunrise, thanks to the courtesy of our hostess, who drove us there through twisting back streets.

On the shore of the Indian River, we saw cars, trucks, trailers filling every foot of space on both sides of the drive, in the vacant lots, on the lawns, on the river’s sloping embankment. There were tents perched at the edge of the water; there were men and children sleeping on the roofs of station wagons, in the twisted positions of exhaustion; I saw a half-naked man asleep in a hammock strung between a car and a tree. These people had come from all over the country to watch the launching across the river, miles away. (We heard later that the same patient, cheerful human flood had spread through all the small communities around Cape Kennedy that night, and that it numbered one million persons.) I could not understand why these people would have such an intense desire to witness just a few brief moments; some hours later, I understood it.

It was still dark as we drove along the river. The sky and the water were a solid spread of dark blue that seemed soft, cold, and empty. But, framed by the motionless black leaves of the trees on the embankment, two things marked off the identity of the sky and the earth: far above in the sky, there was a single, large star; and on earth, far across the river, two enormous sheaves of white light stood shooting motionlessly into the empty darkness from two tiny upright shafts of crystal that looked like glowing icicles; they were Apollo 11 and its service tower.

It was dark when a caravan of buses set out at 7 A.M. on the journey to the Space Center. The light came slowly, beyond the steam-veiled windows, as we moved laboriously through back streets and back roads. No one asked any questions; there was a kind of tense solemnity about that journey, as if we were caught in the backwash of the enormous discipline of an enormous purpose and were now carried along on the power of an invisible authority.

It was full daylight—a broiling, dusty, hazy daylight—when we stepped out of the buses. The launch site looked big and empty like a desert; the bleachers, made of crude, dried planks, seemed small, precariously fragile and irrelevant, like a hasty footnote. Three miles away, the shaft of Apollo 11 looked a dusty white again, like a tired cigarette planted upright.

The worst part of the trip was that last hour and a quarter, which we spent sitting on wooden planks in the sun. There was a crowd of seven thousand people filling the stands, there was the cool, clear, courteous voice of a loudspeaker rasping into sound every few minutes, keeping us informed of the progress of the countdown (and announcing, somewhat dutifully, the arrival of some prominent government personage, which did not seem worth the effort of turning one’s head to see), but all of it seemed unreal. The full reality was only the vast empty space, above and below, and the tired white cigarette in the distance.

The sun was rolling up and straight at our faces, like a white ball wrapped in dirty cotton. But beyond the haze, the sky was clear—which meant that we would be able to see the whole of the launching, including the firing of the second and third stages.

Let me warn you that television does not give any idea of what we saw. Later, I saw that launching again on color television, and it did not resemble the original.

The loudspeaker began counting the minutes when there were only five left. When I heard: “Three-quarters of a minute,” I was up, standing on the wooden bench, and do not remember hearing the rest.

It began with a large patch of bright, yellow-orange flame shooting sideways from under the base of the rocket. It looked like a normal kind of flame and I felt an instant’s shock of anxiety, as if this were a building on fire. In the next instant the flame and the rocket were hidden by such a sweep of dark red fire that the anxiety vanished: this was not part of any normal experience and could not be integrated with anything. The dark red fire parted into two gigantic wings, as if a hydrant were shooting streams of fire outward and up, toward the zenith—and between the two wings, against a pitch-black sky, the rocket rose slowly, so slowly that it seemed to hang still in the air, a pale cylinder with a blinding oval of white light at the bottom, like an upturned candle with its flame directed at the earth. Then I became aware that this was happening in total silence, because I heard the cries of birds winging frantically away from the flames. The rocket was rising faster, slanting a little, its tense white flame leaving a long, thin spiral of bluish smoke behind it. It had risen into the open blue sky, and the dark red fire had turned into enormous billows of brown smoke, when the sound reached us: it was a long, violent crack, not a rolling sound, but specifically a cracking, grinding sound, as if space were breaking apart, but it seemed irrelevant and unimportant, because it was a sound from the past and the rocket was long since speeding safely out of its reach—though it was strange to realize that only a few seconds had passed. I found myself waving to the rocket involuntarily, I heard people applauding and joined them, grasping our common motive; it was impossible to watch passively, one had to express, by some physical action, a feeling that was not triumph, but more: the feeling that that white object’s unobstructed streak of motion was the only thing that mattered in the universe. The rocket was almost above our heads when a sudden flare of yellow-gold fire seemed to envelop it—I felt a stab of anxiety, the thought that something had gone wrong, then heard a burst of applause and realized that this was the firing of the second stage. When the loud, space-cracking sound reached us, the fire had turned into a small puff of white vapor floating away. At the firing of the third stage, the rocket was barely visible; it seemed to be shrinking and descending; there was a brief spark, a white puff of vapor, a distant crack—and when the white puff dissolved, the rocket was gone.

These were the seven minutes.

What did one feel afterward? An abnormal, tense overconcen tration on the commonplace necessities of the immediate moment, such as stumbling over patches of rough gravel, running to find the appropriate guest bus. One had to overconcentrate, because one knew that one did not give a damn about anything, because one had no mind and no motivation left for any immediate action. How do you descend from a state of pure exaltation?

What we had seen, in naked essentials—but in reality, not in a work of art—was the concretized abstraction of man’s greatness.

The meaning of the sight lay in the fact that when those dark red wings of fire flared open, one knew that one was not looking at a normal occurrence, but at a cataclysm which, if unleashed by nature, would have wiped man out of existence—and one knew also that this cataclysm was planned, unleashed, and controlled by man, that this unimaginable power was ruled by his power and, obediently serving his purpose, was making way for a slender, rising craft. One knew that this spectacle was not the product of inanimate nature, like some aurora borealis, or of chance, or of luck, that it was unmistakably human—with “human,” for once, meaning grandeur—that a purpose and a long, sustained, disciplined effort had gone to achieve this series of moments, and that man was succeeding, succeeding, succeeding! For once, if only for seven minutes, the worst among those who saw it had to feel—not “How small is man by the side of the Grand Canyon!”—but “How great is man and how safe is nature when he conquers it!”

That we had seen a demonstration of man at his best, no one could doubt—this was the cause of the event’s attraction and of the stunned, numbed state in which it left us. And no one could doubt that we had seen an achievement of man in his capacity as a rational being—an achievement of reason, of logic, of mathematics, of total dedication to the absolutism of reality. How many people would connect these two facts, I do not know.

The next four days were a period torn out of the world’s usual context, like a breathing spell with a sweep of clean air piercing mankind’s lethargic suffocation. For thirty years or longer, the newspapers had featured nothing but disasters, catastrophes, betrayals, the shrinking stature of men, the sordid mess of a collapsing civilization; their voice had become a long, sustained whine, the megaphone of failure, like the sound of an oriental bazaar where leprous beggars, of spirit or matter, compete for attention by displaying their sores. Now, for once, the newspapers were announcing a human achievement, were reporting on a human triumph, were reminding us that man still exists and functions as man.

Those four days conveyed the sense that we were watching a magnificent work of art—a play dramatizing a single theme: the efficacy of man’s mind. One after another, the crucial, dangerous maneuvers of Apollo 11’s fight were carried out according to plan, with what appeared to be an effortless perfection. They reached us in the form of brief, rasping sounds relayed from space to Houston and from Houston to our television screens, sounds interspersed with computerized figures, translated for us by commentators who, for once, by contagion, lost their usual manner of snide equivocation and spoke with compelling clarity.

The most confirmed evader in the worldwide audience could not escape the fact that these sounds announced events taking place far beyond the earth’s atmosphere—that while he moaned about his loneliness and “alienation” and fear of entering an unknown cocktail party, three men were floating in a fragile capsule in the unknown darkness and loneliness of space, with earth and moon suspended like little tennis balls behind and ahead of them, and with their lives suspended on the microscopic threads connecting numbers on their computer panels in consequence of the invisible connections made well in advance by man’s brain—that the more effortless their performance appeared, the more it proclaimed the magnitude of the effort expended to project it and achieve it—that no feelings, wishes, urges, instincts, or lucky “conditioning,” either in these three men or in all those behind them, from highest thinker to lowliest laborer who touched a bolt of that spacecraft, could have achieved this incomparable feat—that we were watching the embodied concretization of a single faculty of man: his rationality.

There was an aura of triumph about the entire mission of Apollo 11, from the perfect launch to the climax. An assurance of success was growing in the wake of the rocket through the four days of its moon-bound flight. No, not because success was guaranteed—it is never guaranteed to man—but because a progression of evidence was displaying the precondition of success: these men know what they are doing.

No event in contemporary history was as thrilling, here on earth, as three moments of the mission’s climax: the moment when, superimposed over the image of a garishly colored imitation-module standing motionless on the television screen, there flashed the words: “Lunar module has landed”—the moment when the faint, gray shape of the actual module came shivering from the moon to the screen—and the moment when the shining white blob which was Neil Armstrong took his immortal first step. At this last, I felt one instant of unhappy fear, wondering what he would say, because he had it in his power to destroy the meaning and the glory of that moment, as the astronauts of Apollo 8 had done in their time. He did not. He made no reference to God; he did not undercut the rationality of his achievement by paying tribute to the forces of its opposite; he spoke of man. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” So it was.

As to my personal reaction to the entire mission of Apollo 11, I can express it best by paraphrasing a passage from Atlas Shrugged that kept coming back to my mind: “Why did I feel that joyous sense of confidence while watching the mission? In all of its giant course, two aspects pertaining to the inhuman were radiantly absent: the causeless and the purposeless. Every part of the mission was an embodied answer to ‘Why?’ and ‘What for?’ —like the steps of a life-course chosen by the sort of mind I worship. The mission was a moral code enacted in space.”

Now, coming back to earth (as it is at present), I want to answer briefly some questions that will arise in this context. Is it proper for the government to engage in space projects? No, it is not—except insofar as space projects involve military aspects, in which case, and to that extent, it is not merely proper but mandatory. Scientific research as such, however, is not the proper province of the government.

But this is a political issue; it pertains to the money behind the lunar mission or to the method of obtaining that money, and to the project’s administration; it does not affect the nature of the mission as such, it does not alter the fact that this was a superlative technological achievement.

In judging the effectiveness of the various elements involved in any large-scale undertaking of a mixed economy, one must be guided by the question: which elements were the result of coercion and which the result of freedom? It is not coercion, not the physical force or threat of a gun, that created Apollo 11. The scientists, the technologists, the engineers, the astronauts were free men acting of their own choice. The various parts of the spacecraft were produced by private industrial concerns. Of all human activities, science is the field least amenable to force: the facts of reality do not take orders. (This is one of the reasons why science perishes under dictatorships, though technology may survive for a short while.)

It is said that without the “unlimited” resources of the government, such an enormous project would not have been undertaken. No, it would not have been—at this time. But it would have been, when the economy was ready for it. There is a precedent for this situation. The first transcontinental railroad of the United States was built by order of the government, on government subsidies. It was hailed as a great achievement (which, in some respects, it was). But it caused economic dislocations and political evils, for the consequences of which we are paying to this day in many forms.

If the government deserves any credit for the space program, it is only to the extent that it did not act as a government, i.e., did not use coercion in regard to its participants (which it used in regard to its backers, i.e., the taxpayers). And what is relevant in this context (but is not to be taken as a justification or endorsement of a mixed economy) is the fact that of all our government programs, the space program is the cleanest and best: it, at least, has brought the American citizens a return on their forced investment, it has worked for its money, it has earned its keep, which cannot be said about any other program of the government.

There is, however, a shameful element in the ideological motivation (or the publicly alleged motivation) that gave birth to our space program: John F. Kennedy’s notion of a space competition between the United States and Soviet Russia.

A competition presupposes some basic principles held in common by all the competitors, such as the rules of the game in athletics, or the functions of the free market in business. The notion of a competition between the United States and Soviet Russia in any field whatsoever is obscene: they are incommensurable entities, intellectually and morally. What would you think of a competition between a doctor and a murderer to determine who could affect the greatest number of people? Or: a competition between Thomas A. Edison and Al Capone to see who could get rich quicker?

The fundamental significance of Apollo 11’s triumph is not political; it is philosophical; specifically, moral-epistemological.

The lunar landing as such was not a milestone of science, but of technology. Technology is an applied science, i.e., it translates the discoveries of theoretical science into practical application to man’s life. As such, technology is not the first step in the development of a given body of knowledge, but the last; it is not the most difficult step, but it is the ultimate step, the implicit purpose, of man’s quest for knowledge.

The lunar landing was not the greatest achievement of science, but its greatest visible result. The greatest achievements of science are invisible: they take place in a man’s mind; they occur in the form of a connection integrating a broad range of phenomena. The astronaut of an earlier mission who remarked that his spacecraft was driven by Sir Isaac Newton understood this issue. (And if I may be permitted to amend that remark, I would say that Sir Isaac Newton was the copilot of the flight; the pilot was Aristotle.) In this sense, the lunar landing was a first step, a beginning, in regard to the moon, but it was a last step, an end product, in regard to the earth—the end product of a long, intellectual-scientific development.

This does not diminish in any way the intellectual stature, power, or achievement of the technologists and the astronauts; it merely indicates that they were the worthy recipients of an illustrious heritage, who made full use of it by the exercise of their own individual ability. (The fact that man is the only species capable of transmitting knowledge and thus capable of progress, the fact that man can achieve a division of labor, and the fact that large numbers of men are required for a large-scale undertaking, do not mean what some creeps are suggesting: that achievement has become collective.)

I am not implying that all the men who contributed to the flight of Apollo 11 were necessarily rational in every aspect of their lives or convictions. But in their various professional capacities—each to the extent that he did contribute to the mission—they had to act on the principle of strict rationality.

The most inspiring aspect of Apollo 11’s flight was that it made such abstractions as rationality, knowledge, science perceivable in direct, immediate experience. That it involved a landing on another celestial body was like a dramatist’s emphasis on the dimensions of reason’s power: it is not of enormous importance to most people that man lands on the moon, but that man can do it, is.

This was the cause of the world’s response to the flight of Apollo 11.

Frustration is the leitmotif in the lives of most men, particularly today—the frustration of inarticulate desires, with no knowledge of the means to achieve them. In the sight and hearing of a crumbling world, Apollo 11 enacted the story of an audacious purpose, its execution, its triumph, and the means that achieved it—the story and the demonstration of man’s highest potential. Whatever his particular ability or goal, if a man is not to give up his struggle, he needs the reminder that success is possible; if he is not to regard the human species with fear, contempt, or hatred, he needs the spiritual fuel of knowing that man the hero is possible.

This was the meaning and the unidentified motive of the millions of eager, smiling faces that looked up to the flight of Apollo 11 from all over the remnants and ruins of the civilized world. This was the meaning that people sensed, but did not know in conscious terms—and will give up or betray tomorrow. It was the job of their teachers, the intellectuals, to tell them. But it is not what they are being told.

A great event is like an explosion that blasts off pretenses and brings the hidden out to the surface, be it diamonds or muck. The flight of Apollo 11 was “a moment of truth”: it revealed an abyss between the physical sciences and the humanities that has to be measured in terms of interplanetary distances. If the achievements of the physical sciences have to be watched through a telescope, the state of the humanities requires a microscope: there is no historical precedent for the smallness of stature and shabbiness of mind displayed by today’s intellectuals.

In The New York Times of July 21, 1969, there appeared two whole pages devoted to an assortment of reactions to the lunar landing, from all kinds of prominent and semi-prominent people who represent a cross-section of our culture.

It was astonishing to see how many ways people could find to utter variants of the same bromides. Under an overwhelming air of staleness, of pettiness, of musty meanness, the collection revealed the naked essence (and spiritual consequences) of the basic premises ruling today’s culture: irrationalism—altruism—collectivism.

The extent of the hatred for reason was somewhat startling. (And, psychologically, it gave the show away: one does not hate that which one honestly regards as ineffectual.) It was, however, expressed indirectly, in the form of denunciations of technology. (And since technology is the means of bringing the benefits of science to man’s life, judge for yourself the motive and the sincerity of the protestations of concern with human suffering.)

“But the chief reason for assessing the significance of the moon landing negatively, even while the paeans of triumph are sung, is that this tremendous technical achievement represents a defective sense of human values, and of a sense of priorities of our technical culture.” “We are betraying our moral weakness in our very triumphs in technology and economics.” “How can this nation swell and stagger with technological pride when it is so weak, so wicked, so blinded and misdirected in its priorities? While we can send men to the moon or deadly missiles to Moscow or toward Mao, we can’t get foodstuffs across town to starving folks in the teeming ghettos.” “Are things more important than people? I simply do not believe that a program comparable to the moon landing cannot be projected around poverty, the war, crime, and so on.” “If we show the same determination and willingness to commit our resources, we can master the problems of our cities just as we have mastered the challenge of space.” “In this regard, the contemporary triumphs of man’s mind—his ability to translate his dreams of grandeur into awe-some accomplishments—are not to be equated with progress, as defined in terms of man’s primary concern with the welfare of the masses of fellow human beings ... the power of human intelligence which was mobilized to accomplish this feat can also be mobilized to address itself to the ultimate acts of human compassion.” “But, the most wondrous event would be if man could relinquish all the stains and defilements of the untamed mind ...”

There was one entirely consistent person in that collection, Pablo Picasso, whose statement, in full, was: “It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care.” His work has been demonstrating that for years.

The best statement was, surprisingly, that of the playwright Eugene Ionesco, who was perceptive about the nature of his fellow intellectuals. He said, in part:

It’s an extraordinary event of incalculable importance. The sign that it’s so important is that most people aren’t interested in it. They go on discussing riots and strikes and sentimental affairs. The perspectives opened up are enormous, and the absence of interest shows an astonishing lack of goodwill. I have the impression that writers and intellectuals—men of the left—are turning their backs to the event.

This is an honest statement—and the only pathetic (or terrible) thing about it is the fact that the speaker has not observed that “men of the left” are not “most people.”

Now consider the exact, specific meaning of the evil revealed in that collection: it is the moral significance of Apollo 11 that is being ignored; it is the moral stature of the astronauts—and of all the men behind them, and of all achievement—that is being denied. Think of what was required to achieve that mission: think of the unself-pitying effort; the merciless discipline; the courage; the responsibility of relying on one’s judgment; the days, nights and years of unswerving dedication to a goal; the tension of the unbroken maintenance of a full, clear mental focus; and the honesty (honesty means: loyalty to truth, and truth means: the recognition of reality). All these are not regarded as virtues by the altruists and are treated as of no moral significance.

Now perhaps you will grasp the infamous inversion represented by the morality of altruism.

Some people accused me of exaggeration when I said that altruism does not mean mere kindness or generosity, but the sacrifice of the best among men to the worst, the sacrifice of virtues to flaws, of ability to incompetence, of progress to stagnation—and the subordinating of all life and of all values to the claims of anyone’s suffering.

You have seen it enacted in reality.

What else is the meaning of the brazen presumption of those who protest against the mission of Apollo 11, demanding that the money (which is not theirs) be spent, instead, on the relief of poverty?

This is not an old-fashioned protest against mythical tycoons who “exploit” their workers, it is not a protest against the rich, it is not a protest against idle luxury, it is not a plea for some marginal charity, for money that “no one would miss.” It is a protest against science and progress, it is the impertinent demand that man’s mind cease to function, that man’s ability be denied the means to move forward, that achievement stop—because the poor hold a first mortgage on the lives of their betters.

By their own assessment, by demanding that the public support them, these protesters declare that they have not produced enough to support themselves—yet they present a claim on the men whose ability produced so enormous a result as Apollo 11, declaring that it was done at their expense, that the money behind it was taken from them. Led by their spiritual equivalents and spokesmen, they assert a private right to public funds, while denying the public (i.e., the rest of us) the right to any higher, better purpose.

I could remind them that without the technology they damn, there would be no means to support them. I could remind them of the pretechnological centuries when men subsisted in such poverty that they were unable to feed themselves, let alone give assistance to others. I could say that anyone who used one-hundredth of the mental effort used by the smallest of the technicians responsible for Apollo 11 would not be consigned to permanent poverty, not in a free or even semi-free society. I could say it, but I won’t. It is not their practice that I challenge, but their moral premise. Poverty is not a mortgage on the labor of others—misfortune is not a mortgage on achievement—failure is not a mortgage on success—suffering is not a claim check, and its relief is not the goal of existence—man is not a sacrificial animal on anyone’s altar or for anyone’s cause—life is not one huge hospital.

Those who suggest that we substitute a war on poverty for the space program should ask themselves whether the premises and values that form the character of an astronaut would be satisfied by a lifetime of carrying bedpans and teaching the alphabet to the mentally retarded. The answer applies as well to the values and premises of the astronauts’ admirers. Slums are not a substitute for stars.

The question we are constantly hearing today is: why are men able to reach the moon, but unable to solve their social-political problems? This question involves the abyss between the physical sciences and the humanities. The flight of Apollo 11 has made the answer obvious: because, in regard to their social problems, men reject and evade the means that made the lunar landing possible, the only means of solving any problem—reason.

In the field of technology, men cannot permit themselves the kind of mental processes that have been demonstrated by some of the reactions to Apollo II. In technology, there are no gross irrationalities such as the conclusion that since mankind was united by its enthusiasm for the flight, it can be united by anything (as if the ability to unite were a primary, regardless of purpose or cause). There are, in technology, no evasions of such magnitude as the present chorus of slogans to the effect that Apollo 11’s mission should somehow lead men to peace, goodwill, and the realization that mankind is one big family. What family? With one-third of mankind enslaved under an unspeakable rule of brute force, are we to accept the rulers as members of the family, make terms with them, and sanction the terrible fate of the victims? If so, why are the victims to be expelled from the one big human family? The speakers have no answer. But their implicit answer is: We could make it work somehow, if we wanted to!

In technology, men know that all the wishes and prayers in the world will not change the nature of a grain of sand.

It would not have occurred to the builders of the spacecraft to select its materials without the most minute, exhaustive study of their characteristics and properties. But, in the humanities, every sort of scheme or project is proposed and carried out without a moment’s thought or study of the nature of man. No instrument was installed aboard the spacecraft without a thorough knowledge of the conditions its functions required. All kinds of impossible, contradictory demands are imposed on man in the humanities with no concern for the conditions of existence he requires. No one tore apart the circuits of the spacecraft’s electric system and declared: “It will do the job if it wants to!” This is the standard policy in regard to man. No one chose a type of fuel for Apollo 11 because he “felt like it,” or ignored the results of a test because he “didn’t feel like it,” or programmed a computer with a jumble of random, irrelevant nonsense he “didn’t know why.” These are the standard procedures and criteria accepted in the humanities. No one made a decision affecting the spacecraft by hunch, by whim, or by sudden, inexplicable “intuition.” In the humanities, these methods are regarded as superior to reason. No one proposed a new design for the spacecraft, worked out in every detail, except that it had no provision for rockets or for any means of propulsion. It is the standard practice in the humanities to devise and design social systems controlling every aspect of man’s life, except that no provision is made for the fact that man possesses a mind and that his mind is his means of survival. No one suggested that the flight of Apollo 11 be planned according to the rules of astrology, and its course be charted by the rules of numerology. In the humanities, man’s nature is interpreted according to Freud, and his social course is prescribed by Marx.

But—the practitioners of the humanities protest—we cannot treat man as an inanimate object. The truth of the matter is that they treat man as less than an inanimate object, with less concern, less respect for his nature. If they gave to man’s nature a small fraction of the meticulous, rational study that the scientists are now giving to lunar dust, we would be living in a better world. No, the specific procedures for studying man are not the same as for studying inanimate objects—but the epistemological principles are.

Nothing on earth or beyond it is closed to the power of man’s reason. Yes, reason could solve human problems—but nothing else on earth or beyond it can.

This is the fundamental lesson to be learned from the triumph of Apollo 11. Let us hope that some men will learn it. But it will not be learned by most of today’s intellectuals, since the core and motor of all their incredible constructs is the attempt to establish human tyranny as an escape from what they call “the tyranny” of reason and reality.

If the lesson is learned in time, the flight of Apollo 11 will be the first achievement of a great new age; if not, it will be a glorious last—not forever, but for a long, long time to come.

I want to mention one small incident, an indication of why achievement perishes under altruist-collectivist rule. One of the ugliest aspects of altruism is that it penalizes the good for being the good, and success for being success. We have seen that, too, enacted in reality.

It is obvious that one of the reasons motivating the NASA administrators to achieve a lunar landing was the desire to demonstrate the value of the space program and receive financial appropriations to continue the program’s work. This was fully rational and proper for the managers of a government project: there is no honest way of obtaining public funds except by impressing the public with a project’s actual results. But such a motive involves an old-fashioned kind of innocence; it comes from an implicit free-enterprise context, from the premise that rewards are to be earned by achievement, and that achievement is to be rewarded. Apparently, they had not grasped the modern notion, the basic premise of the welfare state: that rewards are divorced from achievement, that one obtains money from the government by giving nothing in return, and the more one gets, the more one should demand.

The response of Congress to Apollo 11 included some prominent voices who declared that NASA’s appropriations should be cut because the lunar mission has succeeded.(!) The purpose of the years of scientific work is completed, they said, and “national priorities” demand that we now pour more money down the sewers of the war on poverty.

If you want to know the process that embitters, corrupts, and destroys the managers of government projects, you are seeing it in action. I hope that the NASA administrators will be able to withstand it.

As far as “national priorities” are concerned, I want to say the following: we do not have to have a mixed economy, we still have a chance to change our course and thus to survive. But if we do continue down the road of a mixed economy, then let them pour all the millions and billions they can into the space program. If the United States is to commit suicide, let it not be for the sake and support of the worst human elements, the parasites-on-principle, at home and abroad. Let it not be its only epitaph that it died paying its enemies for its own destruction. Let some of its lifeblood go to the support of achievement and the progress of science. The American flag on the moon—or on Mars, or on Jupiter—will, at least, be a worthy monument to what had once been a great country.

18

Epitaph for a Culture

by Ayn Rand

This article was published in The Ayn Rand Letter on January 15, 1973, three-and-a-half years after the flight of Apollo 11.

“A sense of loss pervades the space community on the day after [the] Apollo [program]. It is the bewilderment that comes from having achieved ‘the impossible dream’—a frequently used phrase here—and now being left with nothing but memories and a gnawing feeling that all the effort was not really appreciated.”

This is the opening paragraph of a news story in The New York Times (December 21, 1972), sent from Houston on December 20, the day after the splashdown of Apollo 17, which marked the end of the Apollo program. It is an interesting story in that it is written by a good reporter who, by presenting the facts, offers, inadvertently, a profound indictment of today’s culture.

In regard to great events, objectivity is possible to good reporters, but neutrality is not. It is obvious that that reporter feels sympathy for the men of the Apollo program and shares their bewilderment. It is obvious also that he feels admiration for their achievements—and, at a certain point, proceeds to repress it, right there, on paper, before the reader’s eyes.

The story, entitled “Meaning of Apollo: The Future Will Decide,” is an attempt to answer the question: “After eleven years and an expenditure of $25 billion, after nine spaceships have flown to the moon and twelve men have walked its surface, what has it all meant?”

“It may be the greatest achievement of the century.... It may be a major ‘turning point’ in history ... But it may never be possible for the people who willed this glorious adventure to know what they have wrought. Such is the inevitable frustration of those who attempt truly great things.” He is wrong on this point. Those who achieve truly great things know what they have achieved, which makes their social position harder to bear: it is the lack of appreciation that they are unable to understand.

The story quotes one tribute—introducing it as “Perhaps the most satisfying assessment for the four hundred thousand people who toiled on Apollo at its peak ...”—a statement made by, of all people, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: “The twentieth century will be remembered, when all else about it is forgotten, as the century in which man first burst his terrestrial bonds and began the exploration of space.” This seems to be a minority opinion, however, at least as far as the material quoted in the story is concerned.

“The critics of Apollo, and there have been many, believe it was an evasion of earthly responsibility. They usually share the sentiments of the late Max Born, the Nobel laureate who said, ‘Space travel is a triumph of intellect, but a tragic failure of reason.’ They view Apollo as America’s pyramids, a folly of national vanity, or as technology’s Chartres, a symbol of the machine’s new dominion over man and reason.”

Don’t ask me what they mean by the word “reason”—ask Immanuel Kant.

“Even though there are no immediate plans for return trips to the moon or for manned voyages to the planets, who knows how the awareness of such a capability will affect man’s image of himself?”

Some people seem to know—and are struggling frantically to kill that image. The reporter indicates their kind of reaction. The first photographs of the whole earth, he states, which were brought by Apollo 8, made people feel that “the earth was a small and fragile sphere.” I do not personally know anyone who felt that way, but it has certainly been a stressed, pushed, well-press-agented sentiment, then and since.

Whose purpose and motives would it serve? Well, Dr. René Dubos, a microbiologist at the Rockefeller University (and an influential leader of the ecological crusade), says that this sentiment “may be Apollo’s greatest contribution and could lead to a ‘new theology of the earth.’ It was no coincidence,” he says, “that the ecology movement gathered real force at the time of Apollo.”

Two paragraphs later, the story presents the three truest, most perceptive, most philosophical—and, in regard to the essence of today’s culture, most horrifying—paragraphs I have ever read in a newspaper:

Another reason for some confusion over Apollo’s significance could be that, in one sense, the program was out of step with the times. For all its vaunted technology, it was somewhat old-fashioned, a reflection of America past more than of America present.

Apollo was an expression of faith in the value of scientific discovery in a time of reaction against science, even against rationality. Apollo was an act of can-do optimism, of a belief in progress, in a time of reigning pessimism.

Apollo was the work of a dedicated team, pursuing a well-defined goal, in a time of bitter confusion of national purpose. Apollo was, moreover, a success rising above so much failure.

If you want to know the difference between me and many other people, it is this: the moment I grasped that such was the essence of the culture, I would be on the barricades, fighting for man’s highest value: his mind—against the whole world, if necessary (as I am doing). And I would not be able fully to grasp the answer to the question: How can anyone accept such a culture in passive resignation? (Forgive me for talking about myself at this point and in this context: I have no other way to express my appraisal.)

Oddly enough, the story gives a clue to that answer. The very next paragraph is an act of repression displayed in public, the act of a mind slamming the door on a blinding vision, on itself, and on the best within it: “But these are complex contradictions better left to the historians of another time”—which is an impersonal substitute for the sentence: “Who am I to know?”

What is left after such an abdication? Within the two-and-a-half inches of newsprint concluding the story, we are offered the sight of a phenomenon much broader than the problem of that particular reporter: the birth of a hopeless longing in a human mind, of a limp, quiet, wistful aspiration and a static pain—the noninflammable ashes left by the renunciation of something man may not renounce:

Perhaps a better measure of Apollo will come from some future Homer, who will be able to thrill generations with tales of those frail little vessels out on the black sea of space and of those men in strange white suits stepping tentatively among the boulders and craters of the moon.... In those legends of Tranquility Base and Neil A. Armstrong, of the beauty of the earth as seen from space, may lie the inspiration for even greater deeds both in space and on earth.

If that future Homer came today, that reporter would no longer be able to hear him.

I remember wondering, at the age of about ten, why adults admired virtue and heroism in literature, yet never sought to bring them into their own lives. In this respect, I have never grown up. But I felt an enormous sadness, when I began to understand such lives.

[In my article on “Apollo 11,” I wrote:] “For once, if only for seven minutes, the worst among those who saw it had to feel not ‘How small is man by the side of the Grand Canyon!’ but ‘How great is man and how safe is nature when he conquers it!’ That we had seen a demonstration of man at his best, no one could doubt ... And no one could doubt that we had seen an achievement of man in his capacity as a rational being.”

Apparently, Dr. Dubos’s followers and I perceived the same implications in the same event. The difference—the death-or-life difference—ties in our respective estimates of these implications.

I have been saying for years that the goal of modern philosophy is the destruction of reason, and that today’s culture is motivated by hatred of man. Now you can hear it admitted—not in esoteric academic publications, or in the tone of a shocking discovery, but in the matter-of-fact, taken-for-granted, reporto rial voice of a newspaper story.

Referring to that story’s three crucial paragraphs, ask yourself whether men may permit themselves to evade the conclusions that scream from between the lines. If the Apollo program was “out of step with the times,” then what sort of hell is our time, and where are our steps leading us? If Apollo was “somewhat old-fashioned,” then what is the meaning of today’s fashions? If Apollo was “a reflection of America past more than of America present,” then America past was incalculably superior to America present: it had created a better way of living, it knew some truths which we have lost and which, if we value our lives, we should rush to recover.

“Apollo was an expression of faith in the value of scientific discovery” (“faith in science” is a post-Kantian contradiction in terms: “confidence” is the proper word)—while ours is “a time of reaction against science, even against rationality.” If so, then that reaction should have been blasted out of any honest mind by the blast that lifted Apollo II-which was a spectacular proof of the power of science and rationality.

“Apollo was an act of can-do optimism, of a belief in progress” (“can-do” is a timid substitute for “self-confidence”)—while ours is “a time of reigning pessimism.” If so, then self-confident optimism and the conviction that progress is possible to man have been justified and validated more resoundingly than anyone could ask for. And the same event has shown us the precondition of self-confidence, optimism, and progress, like skywriting left in the wake of those rockets: rationality. There is no necessity or justification for men to suffer in stagnant hopelessness. If pessimism is reigning over our time, who enthroned it and isn’t it time to stage a revolution against its reign?

“Apollo was, moreover, a success rising above so much failure.” Is this a reason for being confused over and indifferent to Apollo’s significance? Innocent failure makes an honest mind check its premises, seek further knowledge, and seize upon the sight of a triumphant success as upon a life line—in order to gain courage, inspiration, and a lead to the secret that made it possible.

But all these conclusions presuppose an honest (i.e., rational) mind, an authentic goodwill toward men, an unbreached dedication to the pursuit of truth, and an eager desire to discover the proper way for man to live on earth. What if a person lacks these qualifications? If he does, the result will be the mentality represented by the “critics of Apollo.”

If repeated failures make some men stick blindly to the same course, and damn success as evit—white proclaiming that they are moved by love for mankind—it is their motive that must be questioned.

In various disguises, the motive has been the same throughout history: hatred of man’s mind—and, therefore, of man—and, therefore, of life—and, therefore, of any success, happiness or value man may achieve in life. The motive is hatred of the good for being the good. (See my article “The Age of Envy,” in [The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 2nd ed.].)

The publicly visible symptom of this hatred is the desire to infect man with a metaphysical inferiority complex—to hold up to him a loathsome self-image, to keep him small, to keep him guilty. The invisible part of it is the desire to break man’s spirit. The greatest threat to such a goal is any glimpse of man the hero, which the victims might catch. And nothing could offer mankind so direct, dramatic, and stunning an image of man the hero, on such a globally visible scale, as Apollo’s feat has done.

For ages, it was religion that had done the job of keeping man small—by comparing him to the immensity of alleged supernatural powers. Its secular equivalents implemented the same intention by comparing him to the size of the Grand Canyon. When science enabled man to lift his head, when he began to gain control of the earth, and the Grand Canyon ploy wore out, the haters’ contingents swooped down upon the task of minimizing his achievement by shrinking the stature of the earth—which, they declared, “was a small and fragile sphere.” No, it was no coincidence that “the ecology movement gathered real force at the time of Apollo”—or that Dr. René Dubos is dreaming of a new theology.

Most people do not share the views of Apollo’s critics. The popular reaction to Apollo 11 was a significant demonstration of the breach between the American people and the intellectuals. But in this issue, the people are helpless: they respond to Apollo’s greatness, they admire it, they long for the values it represents—but they are not aware of their reasons in clear, conscious terms. They cannot express, uphold, or fight for what they know only in the form of nameless emotions, and they will give up—as the Times reporter gave up. A culture is made—or destroyed—by its articulate voices.

That reporter could have enlightened people—but he, too, is a victim. He said more, with deeper theoretical perceptiveness, than most newsmen do today. But without the help of philosophy, he was unable to be certain of his own convictions—so he passed the buck to future historians and bowed to the will of “our times.” Who makes our time what it is? Who makes any times or any culture? Philosophers. What did they teach that reporter in college? What are they teaching today?

Suppose you heard a man make the following speech: “I ignore the great achievement I have just witnessed—because the age of achievement is past. This achievement is a feat of science—but science is futile. This achievement is a triumph of rationality—but reason is impotent. This achievement is the product of self-confidence and of man’s capacity for progress—but man is a weak, evil, miserable creature, born to be depraved and helpless. This achievement is the product of a dedicated team, pursuing a well-defined goat—but voluntary cooperation is impossible to men, goals are unattainable, and definitions are superfluous (or arbitrary). This achievement is a glorious success rising above a swamp of failure, but man, by his nature, is doomed to fail—and anyone who says otherwise is a hater of mankind!” If you heard this, you would run—or you would fight. Yet this is the speech which modern philosophy has been making for well over a century—and this is the speech you have been hearing for years, from two-bit intellectuals and fifty-grand-a-year professors, who are in control of today’s culture.

A culture that tolerates such leadership is doomed. That reporter’s story is its appropriate epitaph. If a future historian were to say: “This was the age when men traveled to another celestial body for the first time, but their contemporaries did not acclaim their achievement—some, because they knew it was great; the rest, because greatness did not matter to them any longer—this would be the most damning obituary on the soul of our times.

As to the men of Apollo, this would add another measure of heroism (the status of being an exception) to their heroic achievement—like a salute from a great distance, some sense of which may, perhaps, reach them in their present loneliness: they are used to great distances.

19

Assault from the Ivory Tower: The Professors’ War Against America

by Leonard Peikoff

This lecture was delivered at the Ford Hall Forum on April 24, 1983, and published in The Objectivist Forum, October-December 1983.

Intellectuals around the world generally take a certain pride, whether deserved or not, in their own countries’ achievements and traditions. When they lash out at some group, it is not their nation, but some villain allegedly threatening it, such as the rich, the Jews, or the West. This pattern is true of Canada, from which I originally came, and it is true to my knowledge of England, France, Germany, Russia, China. But it is not true of America. One of the most striking things I observed when I first came here was the disapproval, the resentment, even the hatred of America, of the country as such and of most things American, which is displayed by American intellectuals; it is especially evident among professors in the humanities and social sciences, whom I came to know the best.

Typically these professors regard the American political system, capitalism, as barbaric, anachronistic, selfish. They tell their classes that the American past is a record of brutal injustice, whether to the poor, or to the Third World, or to the fish, or to the ethnic group of the moment. They describe the American people as materialistic, insensitive, racist. They seem to regard most things European or Oriental or even primitive as interesting, cultured, potentially deep, and anything characteristically American—from rugged individualism to moon landings to tap dancing to hamburgers—as junk, as superficial, vulgar, philistine. When the New Left, taught by these same professors, erupted a while back, the student rebels expressed their philosophy by desecrating the American flag—blowing their noses in it, or using it to patch the seat of their pants. I do not know another country in which anti-patriotism has ever on such a scale been the symbol of an ideology.

It happened here because America at root is an ideology. America is the only country in history created not by meaningless warfare or geographical accident, but deliberately, on the basis of certain fundamental ideas. The founding fathers explicitly championed a certain philosophy, which they made the basis of America’s distinctive political institutions and national character, and that philosophy to some extent survives among the citizens to this day. That is why the professors I mentioned can feel at home and at peace anywhere else in the world, but not here: the fundamental ideas of the founding fathers are anathema to today’s intellectuals.

The war against America mentioned in the title of my talk is not a political or anticapitalist war as such; that is merely a result, a last consequence. The war I want to discuss is deeper: it is the assault against the founding philosophy of this country that is now being conducted by our universities. This war is being conducted not only by radicals and by leftists, but also by most of the mainstream, respectable moderates on the faculties. There are exceptions; there are professors still carrying on some traditions from a better era. But these men are not a power in our colleges, merely a remnant of the past that has not yet fully died out.

The basic philosophic credo of the United States was eloquently stated two centuries ago by Elihu Palmer, a spokesman of the revolutionary era. “The strength of the human understanding,” he wrote, “is incalculable, its keenness of discernment would ultimately penetrate into every part of nature, were it permitted to operate with uncontrolled and unqualified freedom.” At last, he says, men have escaped from the mind-destroying ideas of the Middle Ages; they have grasped “the unlimited power of human reason,” “reason, which is the glory of our nature.” Now, he says, men should feel “an unqualified confidence” in their mental powers and energy, and they should proceed to remake the world accordingly.¹

Such was the basic approach of the men who threw off the shackles of a despotic past and built this nation.

Now let me quote, more or less at random, from some modern college teachers. In preparation for this talk, I asked Objectivists around the country to tell me what they are being taught in college on basic issues. I received a flood of eloquent mail and clippings, for which I am very grateful, and I would like to share some of it with you.

First, an excerpt from a textbook on The Craft of Writing prepared by some professors of rhetoric at Berkeley:

“What do Plato’s opinions, or any other writer’s opinions we might choose to study, have to do with learning to write? Everything. Before anything good can come out of writing, the students must at least sense the presuppositions of the writer in his civilization. And the first presupposition is this: we do not really know, surely and indubitably, the answer to any important question. Other cultures know such answers, or think they do, and writing is consequently a very different experience for them. But we, collectively, do not.... It would be very comfortable to be able to act upon the basis of immutable truth, but it is not available to us.”² Note here the statement of pure skepticism: truth or knowledge is not available to us—offered as a flat statement, uncontroversial, even self-evident.

Next I quote from The Washington Post, from a story about a symposium held at Catholic University, dealing with Galileo’s intransigent defense of his beliefs against the Inquisition. At one point, a prominent Harvard astronomer made an offhand comment contrasting Galileo’s attitude toward scientific beliefs with that of modern scientists. “Today in science,” the professor said, “there is no ‘belief as such, only probability.”

A man in the audience, visibly emotional, stood up [the story continues]. “I cannot credit it. I cannot believe you would say” that scientists do not really “believe” in the objects they study.... “Do you really think it’s possible that [astronomical science] is all wrong?” he demanded. “Yes,” said [the astronomer]. “It is possible.”

We cannot, he went on, know that there are atoms or what stars are. The reporter then summarizes the astronomer’s conclusion:

Scientists now cannot fail to remember that absolute reality collapsed just after the turn of the century, with Einstein.... Since then, one simply cannot speak of certainties, of what is real and what is not. “I cannot believe it,” muttered the man in the audience as he sat down.³

He better believe it. This viewpoint is standard today; the latest scientific discoveries, we are told regularly, invalidate everything we thought we once knew, and prove that reality is inaccessible to our minds. If so, one might ask, what is it that scientists are studying? If we can know nothing, how did Einstein arrive at his discoveries and how do we know that they are right? And if certainty is unattainable and inconceivable, how can we decide how close we are to it, which is what a probability estimate is? But it is no use asking such questions, because the cause of modern skepticism is not Einstein or any scientific discoveries.

Now let me tell you about another incident. One Objectivist undergraduate at Columbia University wrote, for a composition course, a research paper presenting the founding fathers’ view of reason. The paper was sympathetic to the founding fathers’ view, though not explicitly so. The teacher several times put question marks beside phrases that bothered her (e.g., beside “facts of reality”) or wrote marginal comments such as “Do you really believe this?” At the end, she summed up: “The paper is very well written.... It’s difficult for me to see how we can write about ‘reason’ without the nineteenth century’s sad discovery in mind—that... [the belief that] reason will help us get better and better meant naivete in many senses. Let’s discuss.” In the discussion, the student told me, the teacher said that the nineteenth century had established the inability of reason to know reality. Freud in particular, she said, had refuted the founding fathers. “He showed that man is really an irrational creature, and that the Enlightenment idea that all our problems can be solved by reason is quite unjustified.”⁴

The founding fathers, as thinkers of the Enlightenment era, championed the power of man’s unaided intellect. It was on this basis, after centuries of European tyranny, that they urged the right to liberty, which was the right of each man to rely in action on his own mind’s judgment. They upheld this right because they believed that the human mind is reliable—that, properly employed, it can reach a knowledge of reality and give the individual the guidance he needs to live. The individual, they held, does not have to submit blindly to any authority, whether church or state, because he has within himself a brilliant and potent cognitive tool to direct him. That tool is the power of reason, the “only oracle” he needs—“oracle” in the sense of a source of absolute, objective truth.

There is no such truth, said the antipode and destroyer of the founding fathers’ legacy. I mean the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant is the basic cause of the modern anti-reason trend. He is the man who, two hundred years ago, launched an unprecedented attack on the power of the human mind, declared that reason is in principle incapable of knowing reality, and thereby put an end to the Enlightenment. Freud was merely one of his many heirs, as are the modern skeptics who distort Einstein’s findings to rationalize their viewpoint, as are the rhetoric professors at Berkeley and all their like-minded colleagues. In countless forms, Kant’s rejection of reason is at the root of our modern colleges.

Question, debate, dispute—the founding fathers urged men—because by this means you will reach answers to your questions and discover how to act. Question, debate, dispute—our Kantianized faculty urges today—not to find the answers, but to discover that there aren’t any, that there is no source of truth and no guide to action, that the Enlightenment viewpoint was merely a comfortable superstition or a naivete. Come to college, they say, and we’ll cure you of that superstition for life. Which, unfortunately, they often do. “On the first day of classes,” a student from Kent State University in Ohio wrote me, “my English professor said the purpose of college is to take a high-school graduate who’s sure of himself and make him confused.”

“Kent fulfills that objective perfectly,” the writer adds, not only in its insistent pro-skepticism propaganda, but also in its very method of presenting the course material. “Its courses are a hodgepodge of random and contradictory information that can’t possibly be integrated into a consistent whole, and one of the first things it teaches its students is not to bother to try. The typical Kent graduate leaves the school feeling bewildered ... vaguely pleased that his bewilderment must mean he came out of college smarter than when he went in, and vaguely displeased that his enlightened confusion hasn’t made him happier than it has.”⁵ This is an exact description of many current graduates, and unfortunately not only in Ohio. That English professor’s statement of the purpose of college was not a wisecrack; it was meant, and practiced, as a serious pedagogical principle. We have reached a variant of the inverted slogans of Orwell’s 1984: the claim to knowledge, we are being taught, betrays ignorance. Knowledge is Ignorance, but Confusion is Enlightenment. That is what you can hope to achieve after tens of thousands of dollars in tuition and four years of study and agonizing term papers—a B.C. degree, Bachelor of Confusion.

If no one can know the truth, you might ask, why are these professors bothering to pursue their subjects at all? Some claim to be attaining probability, by unspecified means. But some are more modern and more frank. Here is another teacher from Columbia, this time from the Graduate School of Business, who offers a course entitled “Individual and Collective Behavior.” According to one of his students, this teacher stated in class “that psychological theories cannot be proved. He added that this was a good thing, since it provided scope for further research.”⁶

Do you follow the reasoning here? If we could prove a psychological theory, that would eliminate a whole area of research; there would be no need to investigate that particular question, because we would already have established the answer. On the other hand, if we can never know, we can go on looking forever, with no ugly barriers, such as knowledge, to stand in the way. But why then look? Why is research good if we never prove anything by it? Obviously, it is an end in itself. One does research in order to get research grants from the government, in order to write papers and get promotions so that other researchers can attack one’s papers and thereby get more grants to finance more research for more studies, forever; with a voluminous literature on the weirdest, most senseless subjects pouring out, which everyone must study and no one can keep up with or integrate, and with everyone agreeing that none of it proves anything—all of it a giant academic con game divorced from cognition, from human life, from reality. Such is the nature of research under the reign of skepticism.

No one, however, can be a consistent skeptic; a man devoid of all knowledge would be like a newborn baby, unable to act or function at all. Despite their viewpoint, therefore, skeptics have to find something to rely on and follow as a guide, and what most of them choose to follow ultimately is: the opinion of others, the group, society.

Kant gave this approach a complex philosophic defense. There are, he says, two realities. There is reality as it is in itself, which is unknowable. And there is the reality we live in and deal with, the physical world, which, he says, mankind itself creates; the physical world, he says, is created by subjective but universal mechanisms inherent in the human mind. An idea that is merely the product of an individual brain, in this view, may or may not be acceptable; but an idea universal to the mind of the species can necessarily be relied on, because that defines reality for us; that is what creates reality, at least our private, subjective, human reality. Under all its complexities and qualifications (and there are mountains of them) this doctrine amounts to saying: the individual’s mind is helpless, but the group, mankind, is cognitively all-powerful. If mankind collectively thinks in terms of a certain idea, that is truth, not the objective, real truth, of course, we can’t know that; but subjective, human truth, which is the only truth we can know.

The founding fathers, being champions of reason, were champions of the individual. Reason, they held, is an attribute of each man alone, by himself; the power of the mind means the power of the individual. With today’s anti-reason trend, however, such individualism simply disappears. In our colleges today, therefore, alongside Kant’s skepticism about true reality, there is also the other element of Kant, the one systematically promoted by Hegel and Marx: the exaltation of the social. The student gets a powerful double message: you can’t know anything, there is no certainty—and: society knows, you must adapt to its beliefs, who are you to question the consensus?

Here is an example of the second from a psychology textbook written by a professor at the University of North Carolina. Let me preface this by saying that philosophers before Kant used to distinguish two sources of knowledge: experience (which led to empirical knowledge) and reason (rational knowledge). These two were conceived, with whatever errors, as capacities of the individual enabling him to reach truth. Now here are the new, Kantian definitions. “Empirical knowledge is the agreement in reports of repeated observations made by two or more persons. Rational knowledge is the agreement in results of problem solving by two or more persons.”⁷ In other words: the genus of knowledge is agreement; the fundamental of knowledge is a social consideration, not the relationship of your mind to reality, but to other men. The individual by himself, on a desert island, cannot learn, he is cut off from the possibility of any knowledge, because he cannot tabulate agreement or disagreement. Empirical observation is not using your eyes, but taking a Gallup poll of others’ reports on their eyes. Rational knowledge is not achieved by your brain grasping a logical argument; it is “agreement in results of problem solving”—and if men happen not to agree, for whatever reason or lack of reason, then there is no rational knowledge. This is nothing less than public ownership of the means of cognition, which, as Ayn Rand observed, is what underlies the notion of public ownership of the means of production.

If you want to see both Kantian elements—skepticism and the worship of the social—come together, consider the field of history today. Here is an excerpt from a course description at the University of Indiana (Bloomington); the course is titled “Freedom and the Historian.”

History is made by the historian. Each generation of historians reinterprets the past in the light of its own historical experience and values.... There can be thus no one definitive history of Alexander and no one historical truth about the fall of the Roman Empire.... There have been as many concepts of history, as many views of historical truth, as there have been cultures.⁸

The skeptical theme here is clear—there is “no one definitive history,” “no one historical truth.” An old-fashioned person, even of a skeptic mentality, would react: “Well, then, let’s close down the field, if we can’t know the truth.” But not the moderns. We can’t know the real truth, they say, but we can know the subjective truth that we ourselves create. “History is made by the historian.” If there is a consensus of historians, therefore, their viewpoint is valid and worth studying, for that time and culture. As in Kant, there are two realities: the real past (unknowable), and the private past each generation creates, its own subjective historical truth. Notice that in this viewpoint the historian is at once helpless and omnipotent: he can know nothing really; but on the other hand he is the creator of history, of the history that we can know, and so he is an unchallengeable authority. If any student disagrees with the fraternity of historians, therefore, he has no chance. On the one side, he hears: “Who are you to know? There are no definitive facts.” On the other, he hears: “History is made by the historian. Who are you to question it?”

Observe what people allow themselves when hiding behind a group. If the author of that course description were to say: “History is made by me,” he would be dismissed as a paranoid personality. But when he says it collectively: “History is made by us, by our guild, by historians,” that is acceptable. This is the Kantian exaltation of the social.

There is a further development of Kant’s approach beckoning here. Why, historians soon began to ask, should the social authority be universal? Why can’t there be many groups of historians, each creating history in accordance with its own mental structure, each version being true for that group though not for the others? Why, in effect, shouldn’t we be democratic and let every collective into the act? The result of this line of thinking is pressure-group history, a pluralization of the Kantian approach, in which every group rewrites the past according to its own predilections, and every group’s views are deemed to be as valid (or invalid) as every other group’s. To be progressive in history today means precisely this: it means to respect the rewriting of all the newest groups, especially if their spokesmen make no sense to you; that shows that you are open-minded, and are not trying to impose your group’s private views on others. To each his own subjectivism.

Is this an exaggeration? A prominent history professor at Stanford University, Carl Degler, recently made a plea for women’s history, explaining that history varies subjectively from men to women. He declared: “The real test of the success of affirmative action for women will come not by counting the number or proportion of women in a department or profession, but by the extent to which men ... are willing to accept the new and peculiar interests of women as legitimate and serious, even when those interests are strikingly novel and perhaps even bizarre when compared with current acceptable work in a given field.”⁹ [Emphasis added.]

I once heard a feminist intellectual on television declare that the central fact of the ages is rape, and that the culmination of the historical process is the discovery of the clitoral orgasm, which has finally freed women from men. This is surely an approach to history which is “strikingly novel and even bizarre,” but we mustn’t be chauvinistic; history is made by historians, and if a certain group begins to push a certain line, and organizes into a new pressure-unit, that line becomes true, true for these people, as true as any other claim in a world where no one can really know anything. This is what I call Kantianized history.

The founding fathers, as men of the Enlightenment, were champions of dispassionate objectivity; any form of subjectivism, or of emotion-driven cognition, was considered reprehensible by them. The opposite is true today. If objectivity is not possible to man, as the Kantians hold, then in the end anything goes, including any kind of emotionalism; and the humanities and social sciences end up, not as academic disciplines teaching facts, but as the preserve of shifting lobbyists disseminating sheer propaganda, which is what is happening increasingly in our colleges.

History is merely one example of it. The field of anthropology offers another eloquent illustration. First we read, a few months ago, about the scandal of Margaret Mead. In her famous 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa, Miss Mead presented an idyllic picture of life in Samoa. The natives, she claimed, were gentle, peaceful, open, devoid of jealousy, free of stress. It was Rousseau over again (the noble savage), and Miss Mead’s implicit moral was: the superiority of primitive culture over competitive, repressed Western society. Now, finally, a true scholar, Derek Freeman, an anthropologist from New Zealand, has set the record straight. After years of study in Samoa, he concluded that the Samoans [I quote The New York Times‘s summary] “have high rates of homicide and assault, and the incidence of rape in Samoa is among the highest in the world.... [The Samoans] live within an authority system that regularly results in psychological disturbances ranging from compulsive behaviors to hysterical illnesses and suicide. They are extremely prone to fits of jealousy.” Etc. Miss Mead’s claims, in sum, “are fundamentally in error and some of them preposterously false.”¹⁰

Judging by what one can gather from the press, anthropologists had known some of this for some time, but few had wanted to challenge Miss Mead publicly. Why not? Aside from a nature-nurture controversy that became involved here, two main reasons were operative, as far as I can make out.

One was the feeling that Miss Mead’s viewpoint—her endorsement of primitive society over Western civilization—is noble, moral, good. The second is a pervasive subjectivism, which makes a potential dissenter feel: “I can’t be sure, anybody can claim to prove or disprove anything, anthropology is whatever anthropologists say, why start a fight with a saint of the field for nothing?”

Now couple this episode with another recent scandal in anthropology. Did you read about the doctoral candidate from Stanford who, while studying in Red China, found that abortions were being forcibly performed on helpless women after the sixth month of pregnancy (when it is a dangerous, bloody practice), and who published this news in a Taiwanese weekly complete with photographs? The Chinese were furious, though the truth of his charges is not debated; and the Stanford Anthropology Department expelled the student from Stanford for unethical conduct—in effect, so far as one can decipher the department’s statements, for blowing the whistle on his host country, an allegedly unforgivable academic sin. As one radio talk-show host in New York, Barry Farber, asked rhetorically: can you imagine the Stanford Anthropology Department expelling a student for doing exactly the same thing in regard to South Africa, i.e., for publishing articles about that regime’s racial crimes? Such a student would have been treated as an academic hero.

The double standard involved in the two cases is appalling. One scholar, Margaret Mead, who condemns the West, becomes a revered figure for decades, even though her factual claims are dead wrong. Another, who prints the uncontested truth about a communist dictatorship, is expelled from his discipline. Is this fairness? Is this objectivity? Or is this the complete politiciza tion of the field? But we must remember: the Kantians declare that there is no objectivity, and that truth is whatever the group wants it to be. In the social sciences today, the teachers do not leave much doubt about what they want it to be.

I must quote one further example of today’s subjectivist trend, simply to indicate to you how brazen it is becoming. A recent issue of The National Law Journal describes a new development in the teaching of law in our universities, a development sponsored by a Harvard law professor, a law professor from SUNY (Buffalo), a sociologist from the University of Pennsylvania, and many others. These men “agree that an objective legal mode of reasoning, distinguishable from the society where it is being applied and the people applying it and capable of yielding an inevitable result, does not exist; that law, by its mask of objectivity, functions chiefly to legitimize social and economic inequities in the eyes of the lower classes as a way of keeping them docile; that because democracy is a good and the law a shell, the goal is to found a government not by law but by people.”¹¹

This statement is a union of Kant and Marx. Let me translate it. “There is no objective legal reasoning; law pretends to be objective, but really it is an instrument of the wealthy to keep the poor docile; law, in effect, is the opiate of the masses”—these are law professors speaking, mind you—“and our goal should be a system run not by law, but by people.” How are the people to govern themselves, if not by reference to an objective code of laws? How are they to settle their disputes and resolve conflicting claims? In this context, there is only one alternative to government by law: government by pressure group, i.e., by every sizable pack or tribe in the land struggling to seize control of the legislature and the courts, and then ramming its arbitrary desires down the throats of the rest, until they rebel and start ramming their desires, etc.—all of it a naked exercise in power politics, of group-eat-group, without the pretense of objectivity or justice.

One of the great achievements of Western civilization was the concept of a society in which men are not left helplessly at the mercy of clashing groups, but can resolve disputes fairly, as individuals, by reference to impersonal principle. This is what used to be called a government of laws and not of men. Today we have the frightening spectacle of law professors telling us that what we need is a government of men and not of laws. If this school needs a name, it should call itself “Lawyers for Gang Warfare.”

You may be wondering whether things are better in the physical sciences today. They are, somewhat, but science, too, depends on philosophy. Modern science arose in an Aristotelian period, a period characterized by respect for reason and objective reality, and it cannot survive the collapse of that philosophy. One sign of this is the skepticism among scientists illustrated by the Harvard astronomer I quoted earlier. But there is another, even more ominous sign. I mean the claims made by an increasing number of physicists that modern physics is growing closer to Oriental mysricism; you may have heard the tributes that these scientists now lavish on works such as the Upanishads and the I Ching. In a rather mild statement, one such scientist wrote recently that there is a “curious connection between the sub-rational and the super-rational. Intuition, sudden flashes of insight, and even mystical experiences seem to play a role in the restructuring of science.” This quote, by the way, is from a textbook written by the Head of the Astrophysics Department at the University of Colorado (Boulder).

I have said that men cannot be consistent skeptics. One way out is to turn for guidance to society. But there is another way: old-fashioned mysticism—the turning not to society, but to the supernatural. Although this method was hardly originated by Kant, here, too, his influence is at work today. Our minds cannot know reality, Kant said, but certain of our feelings—our unprovable, nonconceptual, nonrational feelings—can give us a hint as to its nature. This Kantian suggestion—that the mind is helpless, but feelings may be able to replace it as a cognitive faculty—was taken up in the nineteenth century by a whole school of Romanticists, such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who admired and agreed with the essential ideas of Kant, and proceeded to unleash a flood of overt irrationalism, often including a deep admiration for Oriental mysticism. Today, this particular development has also become widespread in the West; you can see it in everything from art to psychotherapy to diet fads, and it is showing up now even in physics. If scientists do not have a rational philosophy to guide them, they, too, have to sink back ultimately into the common horde.

If you wonder what kind of physics is being produced by these mystical scientists, let me quote one paragraph from the Colorado textbook. The passage occurs in the context of an attack on the concept of reality.

Even more disruptive to our notions of reality is the recognition that it is impossible to describe the entirety of an object at one time. Because of the finite speed of light no object has an instantaneous existence. All extended objects are fuzzy time averages. In order for an object to be totally present at a given instant of time, instantaneous communication would be required. Since that is impossible, all parts of an object exist in the past of every other part. Our present does not exist. One not only needs a clairvoyant to foretell the future but also to foretell the present.

The name of this textbook, by the way, is The Fermenting Universe.¹² I do not say that this book is typical of our college science, not yet. What I do say is this: it is significant, it is frightening, that such a book by an author in such a prestigious position is even possible.

As to the wider meaning of the latest scientific theorizing taken as a whole, I will leave it to an intellectual historian from SUNY (Oswego) to comment. This professor seems to agree with all the skeptical and mystical modern interpretations of science. In a lecture entitled “The Collapse of Absolutes,” he sums up for his students:

What does all this mean? Well, first of all, it means that the universe has become unintelligible.... Secondly, scientists themselves have become humble and admit that science may never be able to observe reality.... Thirdly, the physical world of Einstein has become something that even the most educated layman finds difficult to understand ... He in short finds it incomprehensible and irrational.¹³

In other words, if the college student runs to science as an escape from the humanities and the social sciences, he is learning there, too, that the mind is impotent.

Philosophy sets the standards for every school and department within a university. When philosophy goes bad, corrupt manifestations turn up everywhere. Visit Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, for instance, and audit a course titled “Creativity in Business” offered to MBA candidates. I quote the San Francisco Chronicle:

The students [in this course] learn meditation and chanting, analyze dreams, paint pictures, study I Ching and tarot cards.... The course reading includes I am That by Swami Muktananda ... Precision Nirvana ... Yoga Aphorisms.... One woman who had been a Moonie earlier in her life was fearful after a couple of sessions that she was getting into the same sort of thing, said [the professor]. It’s nothing of the kind, he added, but the heavy emphasis on developing the intuitive side of a student’s mind, where creativity is expressed, can sometimes leave that impression.

There are, this professor teaches his students, two main blocks to creativity. One is fear; the other is: “the endless chattering of the mind.”¹⁴ If mysticism is the fashion among scientists, why not among our future business leaders, too?

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Moonies and the Hare Krishnas have become a problem to the colleges. “Many administrators ... agree that religious cults have found college campuses to be among their more profitable recruiting grounds in recent years.”¹⁵ This is hardly a mystery. The colleges, by means of what they are teaching, are systematically setting the students up to be taken over. The Reverend Moon or his equivalent will be the ultimate profiteer of today’s trends if these are not stopped.

Now let us switch fields and turn to the area of sex education. I suggest you read a text widely used in junior high and high schools, cited by the American Library Association as one of the “Best Books for Young Adults in 1978.” The book claims, to impressionable teenagers, that anything in the realm of sex is acceptable as long as those who do it feel no guilt. Among other practices, the book explicitly endorses transvestism, prostitution, open marriage, sado-masochism, and bestiality. In regard to this latter, however, the book cautions the youngsters to avoid “poor hygiene, injury by the animal or to the animal, or guilt on the part of the human.”¹⁶

If you want still more, turn to art—for instance, poetry—as it is taught today in our colleges. For an eloquent example, read the widely used Norton’s Introduction to Poetry, and see what modern poems are offered to students alongside the recognized classics of the past as equally deserving of study, analysis, respect. One typical entry, which immediately precedes a poem by Blake, is entitled “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane.” The poem begins: “Hard Rock was ‘known not to take no shit / From nobody’ ...” and continues in similar vein throughout. This item can be topped only by the volume’s editor, who discusses the poem reverently, explaining that it has a profound social message: “the despair of the hopeless.”¹⁷ Just as history is what historians say, so art today is supposed to be whatever the art world endorses, and this is the kind of stuff it is endorsing. After all, the modernists shrug, who is to say what’s really good in art? Aren’t Hard Rock’s feelings just as good as Tennyson’s or Milton’s?

Now I want to discuss the cash value of the trends we have been considering. The base of philosophy is metaphysics and epistemology, i.e., a view of reality and of reason. The first major result of this base, its most important practical consequence, is ethics or morality, i.e., a code of values.

The founding fathers held a definite view of morality. Although they were not consistent, their distinctive ethical principle was: a man’s right to the pursuit of happiness, his own happiness, to be achieved by his own thought and effort—which means: not an ethics of self-sacrifice, but of self-reliance and self-fulfillment—in other words, an ethics of egoism, or what Ayn Rand called “the virtue of selfishness.” The founding fathers built this country on a twofold philosophical basis: first, on the championship of reason; then, as a result, on the principle of egoism, in the sense just indicated. The product of this combination was the idea: let us have a political system in which the individual is free to function by his own mind and for his own sake or profit. Such was the grounding of capitalism in America.

Just as our modern colleges have declared war on the first of these ideas (on reason), so they have declared war on the second. Here again they are following Kant. Kant was the greatest champion of self-sacrifice in the history of thought. He held that total selflessness is man’s duty, that suffering is man’s destiny in life, and that any egoistic motive, any quest for personal joy and any form of self-love, is the antonym of morality.

The Dean of Arts and Sciences at Colgate University expressed a similar viewpoint clearly in some convocation remarks he offered in 1981, attacking what he saw as an epidemic of egoism on campus. Egoism, the dean claimed, necessarily means whim-worship. Here is his definition of egoism: “serving the self, or taking care of number one ... mindless hedonism and a concern for me, me now.” Where did he get this definition? Why can’t an egoist be enlightened, rational, long-range? No answer was given. The proper path for us to follow, the dean went on, was indicated by the “socially concerned” students of the sixties, with their “emphasis on duty to others” and on “the ascetic mode.” We may leave aside here the actual moral character of those violent, drug-addicted rebels of the sixties so admired by the dean. The point is the choice he offers: mindless hedonism versus asceticism—note the word—i.e., utter self-abnegation, renunciation, sacrifice. Today’s students, the dean said disapprovingly, attend college for reasons such as “to get a better job and to make more money.” This, he said, is wrong. “It is ... my hope for you that you will recognize that there is life outside the self, that we live in a world that cries out for those with visions of a community founded upon just principles.... and [I] wish that preoccupation with self will give way to concern for others.”¹⁸

Professors sometimes take sides in a controversy, but deans, to my knowledge, never do. When a dean makes an ideological statement, you can be sure that it is a universally accepted bromide on campus.

Our colleges are allegedly open to all ideas, yet on the fundamental issues of philosophy we hear everywhere the same rigid, dogmatic viewpoint, just as though the faculties were living and teaching under government censorship. I visited Columbia’s graduation exercises last year, and the priest who delivered the invocation declared to the assembled graduates: “The age of individual achievement has passed. When you come to Columbia, you are not to be motivated by the desire for money, or personal ambition, or success; you are here to learn to serve. And my prayer for you today is that at the end of your life you will be able to say, ‘Lord, I have been an unworthy servant.’ ” If that priest had come out with a plug for the Communist party, it would have caused a stir; if he had upheld the superiority of Catholicism, ditto. But to state as self-evident the moral code common to both caused not a murmur of protest.

A social psychologist from Harvard, who also regards that code as self-evident, has devised a test to measure a person’s level of moral reasoning. This test is the basis of many of the new courses in morality now being offered in schools around the country. The testers give the student a hypothetical situation and several possible responses to it. He then chooses the response that best fits his own attitude. Here is a typical example. “Your spouse is dying from a rare cancer, and doctors believe a drug recently discovered by the town pharmacist may provide a cure. The pharmacist, however, charges $2,000 for the drug (which costs only $200 to make). You can’t afford the drug and can’t raise the money.”

Before we proceed to the answers, observe what moral lessons a student would absorb from the statement of the problem alone. Morality does not pertain to normal situations, it is not concerned with how to live, he learns, but with how to meet disaster, death, terminal cancer. The obstacle to his values, he learns, is greed, the greed of the pharmacist who is trying to exploit him by charging ten times the cost of the product. There is no mention of any effort the pharmacist might have exerted to discover the drug, no mention of any research or thought or study required of him in order to have discovered an unprecedented cure for cancer, no mention of any other costs he might have incurred, no question of any gratitude to the man who alone has created the power to save the spouse, no mention of any reason why that pharmacist, counter to every principle of self-interest, would overcharge for the drug when he would make more money in the long run by selling it in greater quantity at a lower price, as the whole history of mass production shows. All of this—in an exercise designed to teach moral reasoning—is omitted as irrelevant. Nor is there any explanation of why the student cannot raise money—no reference to banks, or savings, or insurance, or relatives. The case is simple: senseless greed on the part of a callous inventor, and what do you do about it?

Now comes the answer—six choices, and you must pick one; the answers are given in ascending order, the morally lowest first. The lowest is: not to steal the drug (not out of respect for property rights, that doesn’t enter even on the lowest rung of the test, but out of fear of jail). The other five answers all advocate stealing the drug; they differ merely in their reasons. Here are the three most moral reasons, according to the test: “(4) I would steal the drug because I have a duty springing from the marriage vow I took. (5) I would steal the drug because the right to life is higher than the right to property. (6) I would steal the drug because I respect the dignity of human beings.... [I should] act in the best interest of mankind.”¹⁹

Here is an eloquent example of what Ayn Rand has amply demonstrated: the creed of self-sacrifice is not concerned with the “dignity of human beings” or with “the best interest of mankind.” This creed is the destroyer of human dignity and of mankind, because it is incompatible with the requirements of human life. It scorns—and dismisses as irrelevant—thought, effort, work, achievement, property, trade, justice, every value life requires. All of this is to be sacrificed, the altruist claims, to that which has the first right on earth: pain, pain as such, weakness, illness, suffering, regardless of its cause. This is the penalization of success for being success and the rewarding of failure for being failure; it is what Ayn Rand called the hatred of the good for being the good; and it is now being taught to our children, courtesy of a Harvard authority, as an example of high-quality moral reasoning. (As to what will happen to the weak and the sick after the able and productive have been demeaned, expropriated, and throttled, read Atlas Shrugged, or look at Soviet Russia.)

Did Ayn Rand exaggerate in saying that altruists wish to sacrifice thought to pain? Let me quote from Dental Products Report magazine in 1982. I do not know first-hand whether this item is true; I hope not. “Some medical schools in the United States are considering major changes in the traditional curriculum requirements for premed and medical students. Harvard, for example, is considering abolishing requirements for premed science and, instead, requiring courses stressing compassion and understanding in dealing with patients.”²⁰

Did you hear that one? Our doctors may not study much science any longer, but they will be skilled in expressing compassion to the suffering—who will suffer permanently, without any chance of relief, because the doctors will no longer be wasting their time on science or thought. This is a perfect, fiction-like example of an altruistic curriculum change, if ever I heard one.

Now let us sum up the total philosophy advocated by today’s colleges: reality has collapsed; reason is naive; achievement is unnecessary and unreal. I sometimes fantasize the ideal modem curriculum, which would capture explicitly the fundamental ideas of the modern university, and recently I found it. I found three actual courses offered at three different schools, one covering each basic branch of philosophy, the sum indicating the naked essence of the modern trend.

For metaphysics, we go to the University of Delaware (Newark) to take an interdisciplinary honors course titled: “Nothing.” Subtitle: “A study of Nil, Void, Vacuum, Null, Zero, and Other Kinds of Nothingness.” The description: “A lecture course exploring the varieties of nothingness from the vacuum and void of physics and astronomy to political nihilism, to the emptiness of the arts and the soul.”²¹ That is our metaphysical base, our view of reality: nothing.

For epistemology, we move to New York University to take a course titled “Theory of Knowledge.” The description: “Various theories of knowledge are discussed, including the view that they are all inadequate and that, in fact, nobody knows anything. The consequences of skepticism are explored for thought, action, language, and emotional relations.”²²

We end up, for ethics, at Indiana (Bloomington), taking a course titled: “Social Reactions to Handicaps,” the description of which reads, in part: “This course will ... explore some of the different ways in which the handicapped individual and the idea of handicap have been regarded in Western Civilization. Figures from the past such as the fool, the madman, the blind beggar, and the witch ... will be discussed.”²³

There was once a time when college students studied facts, knowledge, and human greatness. Now they study nothingness, ignorance, and the fool, the madman, the blind beggar, and the witch.

If the philosophical message taught by our colleges is clear to you, the political views of the faculties will require very little discussion. Politics is a consequence of philosophy. The precondition of capitalism is egoism, and beneath that: the efficacy of reason. The consequence of unreason and self-sacrifice, by contrast, is this idea: the individual is helpless on his own and has no value anyway, and therefore should merge himself into the group and obey its spokesman, the state. Given today’s basic ideas, in short, the collectivism and statism of the faculties are inevitable—and too obvious to need documentation.

What I do want to mention is the political end result of our current trend. In The Ominous Parallels I argue that the intellectuals are preparing us for a totalitarian dictatorship. This may seem like an exaggeration, so I want to offer one final quote, this one from a philosopher, Richard Rorty, long at Princeton, now at the University of Virginia. Professor Rorty, himself a thorough modern, does not shrink from spelling out the final consequences of the modern skepticism; whatever you think of him, he has the honesty to state his ideas forthrightly. There is no truth, he holds, there is no such subject as philosophy, there are no objective standards by which to evaluate or criticize social and political practices. No matter what is done to the citizens of a country, therefore, they can have no objective grounds on which to protest.

Once, Professor Rorty writes, men could criticize political dictators, at least in their own minds. They could say to the dictator: “ ‘There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you.’ ” Once, he states, we could have said that; but no longer. Now we know that there is no knowledge, no values, no standards. Now we must accept the fact “that we have not once seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognize it when we see it again. This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them.” Professor Rorty, I must add, claims to be disturbed by this result; but he is propagating it vigorously all the same.²⁴

Ladies and gentlemen, higher education today has a remarkable press. We hear over and over about the value of our colleges and universities, their importance to the nation, and our need to contribute financially to their survival and growth. In regard to many professional and scientific schools, this is true. But in regard to the arts, the humanities, the social sciences, the opposite is true. In those areas, with some rare exceptions, our colleges and universities are a national menace, and the better the university, such as Harvard and Berkeley and Columbia, the worse it is. Today’s college faculties are hostile to every idea on which this country was founded, they are corrupting an entire generation of students, and they are leading the United States to slavery and destruction.

What is the solution? The only answer to a corrupt philosophy is a rational philosophy, and the only way to spread a rational philosophy is through the universities. The universities today—not the churches any longer, and not the press or TV—are the main transmitters of philosophy; they are what set the tone and direction of a culture. To those of you of college age, therefore, those who do not subscribe to Kant’s philosophy, I want to say that the moral of my remarks is not: quit college. On the contrary, if you are considering college or are already enrolled in one, I urge you to enter or stay, stay and fight the system, by trying to gain a hearing for some other ideas, some pro-American ideas. The colleges pretend to be open to all viewpoints, even though they are not. The only hope is to make them live up to their pretense. If you give up the colleges, you give up any role in the decisive battle for the world, the intellectual battle.

I am not suggesting that you become a martyr, or enter into arguments with professors who will penalize you for your ideas. Not all of them will, however, and I am speaking within the context and limits of rational self-interest. Within that context, I say: speak up when appropriate, let your voice be heard on campus, try to stick it out and obtain your degree, come back to teach if you can get in the door and if that is the lifework you want; and if you are an alumnus, be careful what kind of academic programs you support financially. In this battle, every word, man, and penny counts.

I wish I could tell you that your college years will be a glorious crusade. Actually, they will probably be a miserable experience. If you are a philosophically pro-American student, you have to expect every kind of smear from many of your professors. If you uphold the power of reason, you will be called a fanatic or a dogmatist. If you uphold the right to happiness, you will be called anti-social or even a fascist. If you admire Ayn Rand, you will be called a cultist. You will experience every kind of injustice, and even hatred, and you will be unbelievably bored most of the time, and often you will be alone and lonely. But if you have the courage to venture out into this kind of nightmare, you will not only be acquiring the diploma necessary for your professional future, you will also be helping to save the world, and we are all in your debt.

The young lady who typed this speech said to me at this point: “It’s pretty depressing. Aren’t you going to end on an inspiring note?” I wish I could think of one. Perhaps, someday, Objectivists will start a better university, which would provide a real alternative to the current scene and offer sanctuary to the kind of young minds now being tortured by the Establishment. But this project, though possible, is still far from being a reality.

To those of you in the college trenches today, therefore, I have only a bleak conclusion to offer. And even if I am an atheist, I know no better way to say it: God bless you, and God help you!

NOTES

1 Principles of Nature (New York: 1801); excerpted in Ideas in America, ed. by G.N. Grob and R. N. Beck (Free Press: 1970). pp. 81-84.

2 W.J. Brandt, R. Beloof, L. Nathan, and C.E. Selph (Prentice Hall: 1969), p. 23.

3 Philip J. Hilts, “Caught Between Faith and Fact,” Sept. 26. 1982, p. Hl.

4 College Composition I, F1101 Y:01, Spring, 1980. In cases such as this, to protect the privacy of students, I am citing only the course number and/or year (when known to me).

5 Fall 1969.

6 B9706, sec. 101, Spring 1982.

7 William S. Ray, The Science of Psychology (Macmillan: 1964), p. 5.

8 Course number H300, cross-listed as History K492, sec. 2856; date unknown.

9 “Women Approach History Differently—and Men Must Understand the Difference,” The Stanford Observer, Oct., 1982, p. 2; reprinted from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 15, 1982. Emphasis added.

10 Edwin McDowell, “New Samoa Book Challenges Margaret Mead’s Conclusions,” Jan. 31, 1983, p. C21.

11 Ben Gerson, “Professors for the Revolution,” Aug. 23, 1982, p. 10.

12 J. McKim Malville (Seabury Press: 1981), pp. 44, 18.

13 Lecture by Thomas Judd; date and course title unknown.

14 Jerry Carroll, “Over-Achievers Swarm to This Exotic Class,” Feb. 17, 1983, p. 46.

15 Lawrence Biemiller, “Campuses Trying to Control Religious Cults,” April 6. 1983.

16 Quoted by Diane Ravitch, “The New Right and the Schools,” American Educator, Fall 1982, p. 13. Professor Ravitch does not give the book’s title.

17 Ed. by J. Paul Hunter, 2nd ed. (Norton: 1981).

18 Founders Day Convocation remarks, Sept. 8, 1981, reprinted in The Colgate Scene, Oct. 1981, pp. 1-2.

19 The wording of the situation and responses is from Christy Hudgins, “Teaching Morality: A Test for the 1970s,” The Minneapolis Star, Mar. 26, 1979, p. 3B. The author of the six-stage morality scale is Lawrence Kohlberg.

20 “Medical Schools May Stress Compassion, Practical Experience,” Not-Dee 1982.

21 Course no. A5 267-80, Spring 1979.

22 Philosophy V83.0083, 1981-82.

23 Course no. H200, cross-listed as Education F200; date unknown.

24 Richard Rorty, “The Fate of Philosophy,” New Republic, Oct. 18, 1982, p. 33.

20

The American School: Why Johnny Can’t Think

by Leonard Peikoff

This lecture was delivered at the Ford Hall Forum on April 15, 1984, and published in The Objectivist Forum, October-December 1984.

We are now a few hours from Income Tax Day in George Orwell’s year—an ominous moment, symbolically, when we feel acutely the weight of an ever growing government, and must begin to wonder what will happen next and how long our liberty can last.

The answer depends on the youth of the country and on the institutions that educate them. The best indicator of our government tomorrow is our schools today. Are our youngsters being brought up to be free, independent, thinking men and women? Or are they being turned into helpless, mindless pawns, who will run into the arms of the first dictator that sounds plausible?

One does not have to be an Objectivist to be alarmed about the state of today’s schools. Virtually everybody is in a panic over them—shocked by continuously falling SAT scores; by college entrants unable to write, spell, paragraph, or reason; by a generation of schoolteachers so bad that even teachers-union president Albert Shanker says of them: “For the most part, you are getting illiterate, incompetent people who cannot go into any other field.”¹

Last November, a new academic achievement test was given to some six hundred sixth-grade students in eight industrialized countries. The American students, chosen to be representative of the nation, finished dead last in mathematics, miles behind the Japanese, and sixth out of eight in science. As to geography, twenty percent of the Americans at one school could not find the U.S. on a world map. The Chicago Tribune reported these findings under the headline: “Study hands world dunce cap to U.S. pupils.”²

A year ago, the National Commission on Excellence in Education described the United States as “a nation at risk,” pointing to what it called “a rising tide of mediocrity [in our schools] that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people.”³ These are extreme words for normally bland government commissioners, but the words are no exaggeration.

To prepare for this evening’s discussion, I did some first-hand research. I spent two weeks in February visiting schools in New York City, both public and private, from kindergarten through teachers college. I deliberately chose schools with good reputations—some of which are the shining models for the rest of the country; and I let the principals guide me to their top teachers. I wanted to see the system not when it was just scraping by, starved for money and full of compromises, but at its best, when it was adequately funded, competently staffed, and proud of its activities. I got an eyeful.

My experience at one school, a famous Progressive institution, will serve to introduce my impression of the whole system. I had said that I was interested in observing how children are taught concepts, and the school obligingly directed me to three classes. The first, for nine and ten-year-olds, was a group discussion of thirteen steps in seal-hunting, from cutting the hole in the ice at the start to sharing the blubber with others at the end. The teacher gave no indication of the purpose of this topic, but he did indicate that the class would later perform a play on seal-hunting and perhaps even computerize the steps. The next class, for thirteen-year-olds, consisted of a mock Washington hearing on the question of whether there should be an import tax on Japanese cars; students played senators, Japanese lobbyists, Lee Iacocca, and so on, and did it quite well; the teacher sat silently, observing. I never learned the name of this course or of the seal-hunting one, but finally I was to observe a meeting described to me as a class in English. At last, I thought, an academic subject. But no. The book being covered was Robert Kennedy’s Thirteen Days, a memoir of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962; a typical topic for discussion was whether a surgical air strike against Cuba would have been better policy than a blockade.

The school, undoubtedly, would defend these classes as exercises in ethnicity or democracy or relevance, but, whatever the defense, the fact is that all these classes were utterly concrete-bound. Seal-hunting was not used to illustrate the rigors of northern life or the method of analyzing a skill into steps or anything at all. The issue of taxing Japanese cars was not related to a study of free trade vs. protectionism, or of the proper function of government, or of the principles of foreign policy, or of any principles. The same applies to the Cuban discussion. In all cases, a narrow concrete was taught, enacted, discussed, argued over in and of itself, i.e., as a concrete, without connection to any wider issue. This is the essence of the approach that, in various forms, is destroying all of our schools: the anti-conceptual approach.

Let me elaborate for a moment on the crucial philosophic point involved here.

Man’s knowledge begins on the perceptual level, with the use of the five senses. This much we share with the animals. But what makes us human is what our mind does with our sense experiences. What makes us human is the conceptual level, which includes our capacity to abstract, to grasp common denominators, to classify, to organize our perceptual field. The conceptual level is based on the perceptual, but there are profound differences between the two—in other words, between perceiving and thinking. Here are some of the differences; this is not an exhaustive list, merely enough to indicate the contrast.

The perceptual level is concerned only with concretes. For example, a man goes for a casual stroll on the beach—tet’s make it a drunken stroll so as to numb the higher faculties and isolate the animal element—and he sees a number of concrete entities: those birds chattering over there, this wave crashing to shore, that boulder rolling downhill. He observes, moves on, sees a bit more, forgets the earlier. On the conceptual level, however, we function very differently; we integrate concretes by means of abstractions, and thereby immensely expand the amount of material we can deal with. The animal or drunk merely looks at a few birds, then forgets them; a functioning man can retain an unlimited number, by integrating them all into the concept “bird,” and can then proceed deliberately to study the nature of birds, their anatomy, habits, and so forth.

The drunk on his walk is aware of a vast multiplicity of things. He lurches past a chaos made of waves, rocks, and countless other entities, and has no ability to make connections among them. On the conceptual level, however, we do not accept such chaos; we turn a multiplicity into a unity by finding the common denominators that run through all the seemingly disconnected concretes; and we thereby make them intelligible. We discover the law of gravity, for example, and grasp that by means of a single principle we can understand the falling boulder, the rising tide, and many other phenomena.

On the perceptual level, no special order is necessary. The drunk can totter from bird to rock to tree in any order he wishes and still see them all. But we cannot do that conceptually; in the realm of thought, a definite progression is required. Since we build knowledge on previous knowledge, we need to know the necessary background, or context, at each stage. For example, we cannot start calculus before we know arithmetic—or argue about tariff protection before we know the nature of government.

Finally, for this brief sketch: on the perceptual level, there is no need of logic, argument, proof; a man sees what he sees, the facts are self-evident, and no further cognitive process is required. But on the conceptual level, we do need proof. We need a method of validating our ideas; we need a guide to let us know what conclusions follow from what data. That guide is logic.

Perception as such, the sheer animal capacity, consists merely in staring at concretes, at a multiplicity of them, in no order, with no context, no proof, no understanding—and all one can know by this means is whatever he is staring at, as long as he is staring. Conception, however—the distinctively human faculty—involves the formation of abstractions that reduce the multiplicity to an intelligible unity. This process requires a definite order, a specific context at each stage, and the methodical use of logic.

Now let us apply the above to the subject of our schools. An education that trains a child’s mind would be one that teaches him to make connections, to generalize, to understand the wider issues and principles involved in any topic. It would achieve this feat by presenting the material to him in a calculated, conceptually proper order, with the necessary context, and with the proof that validates each stage. This would be an education that teaches a child to think.

The complete opposite—the most perverse aberration imaginable—is to take conceptual-level material and present it to the students by the method of perception. This means taking the students through history, literature, science, and the other subjects on the exact model of that casual, unthinking, drunken walk on the beach. The effect is to exile the student to a no-man‘s-land of cognition, which is neither perception nor conception. What it is, in fact, is destruction, the destruction of the minds of the students and of their motivation to learn.

This is literally what our schools are doing today. Let me illustrate by indicating how various subjects are taught, in the best schools, by the best teachers. You can then judge for yourself why Johnny can’t think.

I went to an eighth grade class on Western European history in a highly regarded, non-Progressive school with a university affiliation. The subject that day was: why does human history constantly change? This is an excellent question, which really belongs to the philosophy of history. What factors, the teacher was asking, move history and explain men’s past actions? Here are the answers he listed on the board: competition among classes for land, money, power, or trade routes; disasters and catastrophes (such as wars and plagues); the personality of leaders; innovations, technology, new discoveries (potatoes and coffee were included here); and developments in the rest of the world, which interacts with a given region. At this point, time ran out. But think of what else could qualify as causes in this kind of approach. What about an era’s press or media of communication? Is that a factor in history? What about people’s psychology, including their sexual proclivities? What about their art or their geography? What about the weather?

Do you see the hodgepodge the students are being given? History, they are told, is moved by power struggles and diseases and potatoes and wars and chance personalities. Who can make sense out of such a chaos? Here is a random multiplicity thrown at a youngster without any attempt to conceptualize it—to reduce it to an intelligible unity, to trace the operation of principles. This is perceptual-level history, history as nothing but a torrent of unrelated, disintegrated concretes.

The American Revolution, to take a specific example, was once taught in the schools on the conceptual level. The Revolution’s manifold aspects were identified, then united and explained by a principle: the commitment of the colonists to individual rights and their consequent resolve to throw off the tyrant’s yoke. This was a lesson students could understand and find relevant in today’s world. But now the same event is ascribed to a whole list of alleged causes. The students are given ten (or fifty) causes of the Revolution, including the big land-owners’ desire to preserve their estates, the Southern planters’ desire for a cancellation of their English debts, the Bostonians’ opposition to tea taxes, the Western land speculators’ need to expand past the Appalachians, etc. No one can retain such a list longer than is required to pass the exam; it must be memorized, then regurgitated, then happily and thoroughly forgotten. That is all one can do with unrelated concretes.

If the students were taught by avowed Marxists—if they were told that history reflects the clash between the factors of production and the modes of ownership—it would be dead wrong, but it would still be a principle, an integrating generalization, and it would be much less harmful to the students’ ability to think; they might still be open to argument on the subject. But to teach them an unconceptualized hash is to imply that history is a tale told by an idiot, without wider meaning, or relevance to the present. This approach destroys the possibility of the students thinking or caring at all about the field.

I cannot resist adding that the State Education Department of New York has found a way, believe it or not, to make the teaching of history still worse. You might think that, in history at least, the necessary order of presenting the material is self-evident. Since each era grows out of the preceding, the obvious way to teach events is as they happened, i.e., chronologically. But not according to a new proposal. In order “to put greater emphasis on sociological, political, and economic issues,” a New York State proposal recommends that historical material be organized for the students according to six master topics picked out of the blue from the pop ethos: “ecology, human needs, human rights, cultural interaction, the global system of economic interdependence, and the future.” In this approach, an event from a later period can easily be taught (in connection with one master topic) first, long before the developments from an earlier period that actually led to it. As a more traditional professor from Columbia has noted: “The whole thing would be wildly out of chronological order. The [Russian] purge trials of the 1930s would be taught before the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. It is all fragmented and there is no way that this curriculum relates one part of a historical period to another, which is what you want kids to be able to do.”⁴ But the modern educators don’t seem to care about that. They want “fragments,” i.e., concretes, without context, logic, or any other demands of a conceptual progression.

I do not know what became of this New York proposal. The fact that it was announced to the press and discussed seriously is revealing enough.

Given the way history is now being taught, it is not surprising that huge chunks of it promptly get forgotten by the students or simply are never taken in. The result is many adolescents’ shocking ignorance of the most elementary historical, or current, facts. One man wrote a column recently in The Washington Post recounting his conversations with today’s teenagers. He found high-school graduates who did not know anything about World War II, including what happened at Pearl Harbor, or what country the United States was fighting in the Pacific. “Who won?” one college student asked him. At one point, the writer and a girl who was a junior at the University of Southern California were watching television coverage of Poland after martial law had been imposed; the set showed political prisoners being put into a cage. The girl could not understand it.

“ ‘Why don’t they just leave and come to LA.?’ ” she asked.

“I explained that they were not allowed to leave.”

“ ‘They’re not?’ ” she said. “ ‘Why not?’ ”

“I explained that in totalitarian states citizens usually could not emigrate.”

“ ‘They can’t?’ ” she said. “ ‘Since when? Is that something new?’ ”⁵

Now let us make a big jump—from history to reading. Let us look at the method of teaching reading that is used by most American schools in some form: the Look-Say method (as against Phonics).

The method of Phonics, the old-fashioned approach, first teaches a child the sound of individual letters; then it teaches him to read words by combining these sounds. Each letter thus represents an abstraction subsuming countless instances. Once a child knows that p sounds “puh,” for instance, that becomes a principle; he grasps that every p he meets sounds the same way. When he has learned a few dozen such abstractions, he has acquired the knowledge necessary to decipher virtually any new word he encounters. Thus the gigantic multiplicity of the English vocabulary is reduced to a handful of symbols. This is the conceptual method of learning to read.

Modern educators object to it. Phonics, they say (among many such charges), is unreal. I quote from one such mentality: “There is little value in pronouncing the letter p in isolation; it is almost impossible to do this—a vowel of some sort almost inevitably follows the pronunciation of any consonant.”⁶ This means: when you pronounce the sound of p—“puh”—you have to utter the vowel sound “uh”; so you haven’t isolated the pure consonant; so Phonics is artificial. But why can’t you isolate in your mind, focusing only on the consonant sound, ignoring the accompanying vowel for purposes of analysis—just as men focus on a red table’s color but ignore its shape in order to reach the concept “red”? Why does this writer rule out selective attention and analysis, which are the very essence of human cognition? Because these involve an act of abstraction; they represent a conceptual process, precisely the process that modern educators oppose.

Their favored method, Look-Say, dispenses with abstractions. Look-Say forces a child to learn the sounds of whole words without knowing the sounds of the individual letters or syllables. This makes every word a new concrete to be grasped only by perceptual means, such as trying to remember its distinctive shape on the page, or some special picture the teacher has associated with it. Which amounts to heaping on the student a vast multiplicity of concretes and saying: stare at these and memorize them. (You may not be surprised to discover that this method was invented, as far as I can tell, by an eighteenth-century German professor who was a follower of Rousseau, the passionate opponent of reason.)

There is a colossal Big Lie involved in the Look-Say propaganda. Its advocates crusade against the overuse of memory; they decry Phonics because, they say, it requires a boring memorization of all the sounds of the alphabet. Their solution is to replace such brief, simple memorization with the task of memorizing the sound of every word in the language. In fact, if one wishes to save children from the drudgery of endless memorization, only the teaching of abstractions will do it—in any field.

No one can learn to read by the Look-Say method. It is too anti-human. Our schools today, therefore, are busy teaching a new skill: guessing. They offer the children some memorized shapes and pictures to start, throw in a little Phonics (thanks to immense parental pressure), count on the parents secretly teaching their children something at home about reading—and then, given this stew of haphazard clues, they concentrate their efforts on teaching the children assorted methods of guessing what a given word might be.

Here is a Look-Say expert describing a child’s proper mental processes when trying to determine the last word of the sentence, “They make belts out of plastic.” The child must not, of course, try to sound out the letters. Here is what should go on in his brain instead:

“Well, it isn’t leather, because that begins with l. My mother has a straw belt, but it isn’t straw either. It looks like a root. I’ll divide it between s and t. There couldn’t be more than two syllables because there are only two vowels. Let’s see—p, l, a, s. One vowel and it’s not at the end of the syllable ...” This goes on a while longer, and the child finally comes up with: “Oh, sure, plastic! I’m surprised I didn’t think of that right away because so many things are made of plastic.” The expert comments: “Just described is a child who was not about to carry out a letter-by-letter analysis of plastic if it wasn’t necessary, which is exactly right.”⁷

Can you imagine reading War and Peace by this method? You would die of old age before you reached the third chapter.

I must add that the Look-Say educators demand that children—I quote another devotee—“receive praise for a good guess even though it is not completely accurate. For example, if a child reads ‘I like to eat carrots’ as ’I like to eat cake,‘ praise should be given for supplying a word that makes sense and follows at least some of the phonic cues.”⁸

How would you like to see, at the head of our army, a general with this kind of schooling? He receives a telegram from the president during a crisis ordering him to “reject nuclear option,” proceeds to make a good guess, and reads it as “release nuclear option.” Linguistically, the two are as close as “carrots” and “cake.”

The result of the Look-Say method is a widespread “reading neurosis” among children, a flat inability to read, which never existed in the days of Phonics (and also a bizarre inability to spell). In 1975, for example, 35 percent of fourth-graders, 37 percent of eighth-graders, and 23 percent of twelfth-graders could not read simple printed instructions. The U.S. literacy rate, it has been estimated, is now about equal to that of Burma or Albania, and by all signs is still dropping. Do you see why angry parents are suing school systems for a new crime: educational malpractice?

Now let us look at another aspect of English studies: the teaching of grammar. This subject brings out even more clearly the modern educators’ contempt for concepts.

Grammar is the study of how to combine words—i.e., concepts—into sentences. The basic rules of grammar—such as the need of subject and predicate, or the relation of nouns and verbs—are inherent in the nature of concepts and apply to every language; they define the principles necessary to use concepts intelligibly. Grammar, therefore, is an indispensable subject; it is a science based entirely on facts—and not a very difficult science, either.

Our leading educators, however, see no relation between concepts and facts. The reason they present material from subjects such as history without conceptualizing it, is precisely that they regard concepts as mental constructs without relation to reality. Concepts, they hold, are not a device of cognition, but a mere human convention, a ritual unrelated to knowledge or reality, to be performed according to arbitrary social fiat. It follows that grammar is a set of pointless rules, decreed by society for no objectively defensible reason.

I quote from a book on linguistics written for English teachers by a modern professor: “Because we know that language is arbitrary and changing, a teacher’s attitude toward nonstandard usage should be one of acceptance.... One level of language is not ‘better’ than another; this is why the term nonstaradard is preferable to substandard in describing such usage as ’He don’t do it,‘ ’Was you there?‘ A person who uses terms such as these will probably be penalized in terms of social and educational advancement in our society, however, and it is for this reason that the teacher helps children work toward, and eventually achieve, standard usage, perhaps as a ’second’ language.”⁹ In short, there is no “correct” or “incorrect” any more, not in any aspect of language; there is only the senseless prejudice of society.

I saw the results of this approach in the classroom. I watched an excellent public-school teacher trying to explain the possessive forms of nouns. She gave a clear statement of the rules, with striking examples and frequent repetition; she was dynamic, she was colorful, she was teaching her heart out. But it was futile. This teacher was not a philosopher of language, and she could not combat the idea, implicit in the textbook and in all the years of the students’ earlier schooling, that grammar is purposeless. The students seemed to be impervious to instruction and incapable of attention, even when the teacher would blow a shrieking police whistle to shock them momentarily into silence. To them, the subject was nothing but senseless rules: the apostrophe goes here in this case, there in that one. Here was a whole science reduced to disintegrated concretes that had to be blindly memorized—just like the ten causes of the American Revolution, or the ten shapes of the last Look-Say session.

You might wonder how one teaches composition—the methods of expressing one’s thoughts clearly and eloquently in writing—given today’s philosophy of grammar and of concepts. I will answer by reading excerpts from a recent manifesto.

“We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language—the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style.... The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another.” If so, why does anyone need English teachers?

Who issued this manifesto? Was it some ignorant, hotheaded teenagers drunk on the notion of student power? No. It was the National Council of Teachers of English.¹⁰

If you want a hint as to the basic philosophy operative here, I will mention that the editor of College English, one of the major journals of the profession, objects to “an industrial society [that] will continue to want from us—or someone else—composition, verbal manners, discipline in problem solving, and docile rationality.”¹¹ Note how explicit this is. The climax of his “enemies list” is “rationality.”

Despite today’s subjectivism, some rules of composition are still being taught. Certain of these are valid enough, having been carried over from a better past. But some are horrifying. Here is an exercise in how to write topic sentences. The students are given two possible sentences with which to start a paragraph, then are asked to choose which would make a good opening and which a bad one. Here is one such pair:

1. Cooking is my favorite hobby.

2. It really isn’t hard to stir-fry Chinese vegetables.

The correct answer? Number 1 is bad. It is too abstract. (!) Students should not write about so enormous a subject as an entire hobby. They should focus only on one concrete under it, such as Chinese vegetables.

Here is another pair:

1. There is too much pollution in the world.

2. We have begun to fight pollution in our own neighborhood.

Of course, Number 1 is inadmissible. Students must not think about world problems—that is too vague—only about the dinky concretes in their own backyard.¹²

This sort of exercise has been consciously designed to teach students to be concrete-bound. How are children with such an upbringing ever to deal with or think about problems that transcend Chinese vegetables and their own neighborhood? The implicit answer, absorbed by the students unavoidably, is: “You don’t have to worry about things like that; society or the president will take care of you; all you have to do is adapt.”

Before we leave English, I want to mention what has been happening to the teaching of literature in our schools as a consequence of the attitude toward concepts that we have been discussing. First, there has been the disappearance from the schools of the classics in favor of cheap current novels. The language and themes of the classics are too difficult for today’s students to grasp; one does not teach Shakespeare to savages, or to civilized children being turned into savages. Then, there is the continuous decline even of today’s debased standards. I quote from two English teachers: “Years ago we used to hear that Julius Caesar was too difficult for ninth-graders; now we are told that Lord of the Flies is too hard for the general run of tenth-graders.” Then, there is the final result, now increasingly common: the disappearance of literature of any kind and its replacement by what are called “media classes.” These are classes, in one book’s apt description, that “teach television, newspapers, car-repair magazines, and movies.”¹³

I will pass up all the obvious comments on this frightening descent. I have just one question about it: why should these graduates of TV and car-repair magazines care if the great books of the past are burned by government edict—when they can’t read them anyway?

Turning to the teaching of science in our schools, I want to mention an instructive book written by two professors at Purdue University; titled Creative Sciencing, it tells science teachers how to teach their subject properly. To learn science, the book declares, students must engage in “hands-on science activities.” They must perform a series of concrete “experiments,” such as designing a bug catcher, collecting pictures of objects that begin with a c, going on field trips to the local factory, or finding polluters in the community. (These examples are taken from the book.) There is no necessary order to these activities. The children are encouraged to interact with the classroom materials “in their own way,” as the mood strikes them. They are not to be inhibited by a teacher-imposed structure or by the logic of the subject.¹⁴

You may wonder whether students taught in this manner will ever learn the abstract concepts and principles of science, the natural laws and explanatory theories that have been painstakingly discovered across the centuries—the knowledge that makes us civilized men rather than jungle primitives.

The answer has been given by F. James Rutherford, chief education officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “We’re too serious,” he declared. “We insist on all the abstract stuff. We need to relax and let the children learn their own neighborhood.” This statement was made at a meeting of experts brought together by a large foundation to discover what ails science teaching.¹⁵

Today’s education, I have said, reduces children to the status of animals, without the ability to know or predict the future. Animals, however, can rely on brute instinct to guide them. Children cannot; brought up this way, they soon begin to feel helpless—to feel that everything is changing and that they can count on nothing.

The above is not merely my polemic. The science teachers are working deliberately to create this state of mind. The teachers are openly skeptical themselves, having been given a similar upbringing, and they insist to their students that everything is changing, that factual information is continuously becoming outdated, and that there are things much more important in class—in science class—than truth. It is hard to believe how brazen these people have become. “When preparing performance objectives,” the Creative Sciencing book says, “you may wish to consider the fact that we don’t demand accuracy in art or creative writing, but we have permitted ourselves to require accuracy in science. We may be paying a high price in lost interest, enthusiasm, vitality, and creativity in science because of this requirement of accuracy.”¹⁶

Our students should not have to be concerned about factual accuracy. They need have no idea whether gases expand or contract under pressure, or whether typhus germs cause or cure disease—but this will leave them free to be “vital” and “creative.”

But, you may ask, what if a student comes out in class with a wrong answer to a factual question? You are old-fashioned. There is no such answer, and besides it would be bad for the student’s psychology if there were: “How many times will a student try to respond to a question if continually told that his or her answers are wrong? Wrong answers should be reserved for quiz shows on television.”¹⁷

What then is the point in having a teacher at all?—since there are no wrong answers, and since adults must not be “authoritarian,” and since, as John Dewey has proclaimed, students do not learn by listening or by reading, but only by “doing.” This brings me to an extremely important issue, one that is much wider than science teaching.

My overriding impression of today’s schools, derived from every class I visited, is that teachers no longer teach. They no longer deliver prepared material while the students listen attentively and take notes. Instead, what one encounters everywhere is group-talking, i.e., class participation and class discussion. Most of the teachers I saw were enthusiastic professionals, excellent at what they do. But they conceive their role primarily as bull-session moderators. Some of the teachers obviously had a concealed lesson in mind, which they were bootlegging to the students—in the guise of asking leading questions or making brief, purposeful side comments. But the point is that the lesson had to be bootlegged. The official purpose of the class was for the pupils to speak more or less continuously—at any rate, well over half the time.

I asked one group of high-school students if their teachers ever delivered lectures in class. “Oh no!” they cried incredulously, as though I had come from another planet or a barbaric past. “No one does that anymore.”

All the arguments offered to defend this anti-teaching approach are senseless.

“Students,” I have heard it said, “should develop initiative; they should discover knowledge on their own, not be spoon-fed by the teachers.” Then why should they go to school at all? Schooling is a process in which an expert is paid to impart his superior knowledge to ignorant beginners. How can this involve shelving the expert and leaving the ignorant to shift for themselves? What would you think of a doctor who told a patient to cure himself because the doctor opposed spoon-feeding?

“Students,” I have heard, “should be creative, not merely passive and receptive.” How can they be creative before they know anything? Creativity does not arise in a void; it can develop only after one has mastered the current cognitive context. A creative ignoramus is a contradiction in terms.

“We teach the method of thought,” I have heard, “rather than the content.” This is the most senseless claim of all. Let us leave aside the obvious fact that method cannot exist apart from some content. The more important point here is that thought is precisely what cannot be taught by the discussion approach. If you want to teach thought, you must first put up a sign at the front of the class: “Children should be seen and not heard.” To be exact: they may be heard as an adjunct of the lesson, if the teacher wishes to probe their knowledge, or answer a question of clarification, or assess their motivation to learn, or entertain a brief comment. But the dominant presence and voice must be that of the teacher, the cognitive expert, who should be feeding the material to the class in a highly purposeful fashion, carefully balancing concretes and abstractions, preparing for and then drawing and then interrelating generalizations, identifying the evidence at each point, etc. These are the processes that must first be absorbed year after year by the student in relation to a whole series of different contents. In the end, such training will jell in his mind into a knowledge of how to think—which he can then apply on his own, without any teacher. But he can never even begin to grasp these processes in the chaotic hullabaloo of a perpetual class discussion with equally ignorant peers.

Have you seen the [1984] television debates among the Democrats seeking to be president? Do you regard these spectacles of arbitrary assertion, constant subject-switching, absurd concrete boundedness, and brazen ad homenem as examples of thinking? This is exactly the pattern that is being inculcated as thinking today by the class-discussion method.

An educator with any inkling of the requirements of a conceptual consciousness would never dream of running a school this way. But an educator contemptuous of concepts, and therefore of knowledge, would see no objection to it.

In the class discussions I saw, the students were regularly asked to state their own opinion. They were asked it in regard to issues about which they had no idea how to have an opinion, since they had no knowledge of the relevant facts or principles, and no knowledge of the methods of logical argument. Most of the time the students were honest; they had no opinion, in the sense of a sincere, even if mistaken, conviction on the question at hand. But they knew that they were expected to “express themselves.” Time and again, therefore, I heard the following: “I like (or dislike) X.” “Why?” “Because I do. That’s my opinion.” Whereupon the teacher would nod and say “very interesting” or “good point.” Everybody’s point, it seemed, was good, as good as everybody else‘s, and reasons were simply irrelevant. The conclusion being fostered in the minds of the class was: “It’s all arbitrary; anything goes and no one really knows.” The result is not only the spread of subjectivism, but of a self-righteous subjectivism, which cannot even imagine what objectivity would consist of.

Project a dozen years of this kind of daily processing. One study of American students notes that they “generally offered superficial comments ... and consultants observed that they seemed ‘genuinely puzzled at requests to explain or defend their points of view.’ ”¹⁸ What else could anyone expect?

Now let me quote from a New York Times news story.

“I like [Senator Gary Hart‘s] ideas,” said Darla Doyle, a Tampa homemaker. “He’s a good man. His ideas are fresher than Mondale’s are. I like the way he comes across.”

A reporter asked Mrs. Doyle to identify the ideas that appealed to her. “That’s an unfair question,” she said, asking for a moment to consider her answer. Then she replied, “He wants to talk with Russia.”

The headline of this story is: “Hart’s Fans Can’t Say Why They Are.”¹⁹

According to John Dewey, students are bored by lectures, but motivated to learn by collective “doing.” Not the ones I saw. Virtually every class was in continuous turmoil, created by students waving their hands to speak, dropping books, giggling, calling out remarks, whispering asides, yawning, fidgeting, shifting, shuffling. The dominant emotion was a painful boredom, which is the sign of minds being mercilessly starved and stunted. Perhaps this explains the magic influence of the bell. The instant it rang, everywhere I went, the room was empty, as though helpless victims were running for their lives from a dread plague. And so in a sense they were.

Ladies and gentlemen, our schools are failing in every subject and on a fundamental level. They are failing methodically, as a matter of philosophic principle. The anti-conceptual epistemology that grips them comes from John Dewey and from all his fellow irrationalists, who dominate twentieth-century American culture, such as linguistic analysts, psychoanalysts, and neo-Existentialists. And behind all these, as I argued in The Ominous Parallels, stands a century of German philosophy inaugurated by history’s greatest villain: Immanuel Kant, the first man to dedicate his life and his system to the destruction of reason.

Epistemological corruption is not the only cause of today’s educational fiasco. There are many other contributing factors, such as the teachers unions, and the senseless requirements of the teachers colleges, and the government bureaucracies (local and federal). But epistemology is the basic cause, without reference to which none of the others can be intelligently analyzed or remedied.

Now let me recount for you two last experiences, which bear on the political implications of today’s educational trend.

One occurred at the most prestigious teacher-training institution in the country, Teachers College of Columbia University.

In my first class there, chosen at random, the professor made the following pronouncement to a group of sixty future teachers: “The evil of the West is not primarily its economic exploitation of the Third World, but its ideological exploitation. The crime of the West was to impose upon the communal culture of Africa the concept of the individual.” I thought I had heard everything, but this shocked me. I looked around. The future teachers were dutifully taking it down; there were no objections.

Despite their talk about “self-expression,” today’s educators have to inculcate collectivism. Man’s organ of individuality is his mind; deprived of it, he is nothing, and can do nothing but huddle in a group as his only hope of survival.

The second experience occurred in a class of juniors and seniors at a high school for the academically gifted. The students had just returned from a visit to the United Nations, where they had met with an official of the Russian delegation, and they were eager to discuss their reactions. The class obviously disliked the Russian, feeling that his answers to their questions about life in Russia had been evasions or lies. But soon someone remarked that we Americans are accustomed to believing what our government says, while the Russians naturally believe theirs. “So how do I know?” he concluded. “Maybe everything is a lie.”

“What is truth?” asked one boy, seemingly quite sincere; the class laughed, as though this were obviously unanswerable.

“Neither side is good,” said another student. “Both countries lie all the time. But the issue is the percentage. What we need to know is how much they lie—is it 99 percent for one, for example, and 82 percent for the other?”

After a lot more of this, including some pretty weak arguments in favor of America by a small patriotic faction, one boy summed up the emerging consensus. “We can never know who is lying or telling the truth,” he said. “The only thing we can know is bare fact. For example, we can know that a Korean airliner was shot down by the Russians [in 1983]. But as to the Russians’ story of the cause vs. our story, that is mere opinion.”

To which one girl replied in all seriousness: “But we can’t even know that—none of us saw the plane shot down.”

This class discussion was the climax of my tour. I felt as though I were witnessing the condensed essence of a perceptual-level schooling. “Thought,” these students were saying, “is helpless, principles are nonexistent, truth is unknowable, and there is, therefore, no way to choose between the United States of America and the bloodiest dictatorship in history, not unless we have seen the blood with our own eyes.”

These youngsters represent the future of our country. They are the children of the best and the brightest, who will become the businessmen, the artists, and the political leaders of tomorrow. Does this kind of generation have the strength—the intellectual strength, the strength of conviction—necessary to uphold the American heritage in an era dominated by incipient Big Brothers at home and missile-rattling enemies abroad?

It is not the students’ fault, and they do not fully believe the awful things they say, not yet. The ones I saw, at every school except for Columbia—and here I want to register some positive impressions—were extremely likable. For the most part, they struck me as clean-cut, well-mannered, exuberant, intelligent, innocent. They were not like the typical college student one meets, who is already hardening into a brash cynic or skeptic. These youngsters, despite all their doubts and scars, still seemed eager to discover some answers, albeit sporadically. They were still clinging to vestiges of the idea that man’s mind can understand reality and make sense of the world.

They are still open to reason—if someone would teach it to them.

Nor is it basically the teachers’ fault. The ones I saw were not like the college professors I know, who reek of stale malice and delight in wrecking their students’ minds. The teachers seemed to take their jobs seriously; they genuinely liked their classes and wanted to educate them. But given the direction of their own training, they were unable to do it.

There is a whole generation of children who still want to learn, and a profession much of which wants to help them, to say nothing of a country that devoutly wishes both groups well. Everything anyone would need to save the world is there, it is waiting, and all that is required to activate it is ... what?

Merit pay? First we need a definition of merit, i.e., of the purpose of teaching. More classes in the use of computers? We have enough children who know FORTRAN but not English. Compulsory community service? (A recommendation of the Car negie Commission.) Prayer in the schools? (President Reagan’s idea of a solution.)

All these are the equivalent of sticking Band-Aids on (or in the last two cases knives into) a dying man. The only real solution, which is a precondition of any other reform, is a philosophic change in our culture. We need a philosophy that will teach our colleges—and thereby our schoolteachers, and thus finally our youngsters—an abiding respect, a respect for reason, for man’s mind, for the conceptual level of consciousness. That is why I subscribe to the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Hers is the only such philosophy in America today. It could be the wonder cure that would revive a generation.

The National Committee on Excellence in Education declared, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”²⁰ Intellectually speaking, however, we are under the yoke of a foreign power. We are under the yoke of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and all their disciples. What we need now is another Declaration of Independence—not political independence from England this time, but philosophical independence from Germany.

To achieve it would be a monumental job, which would take many decades. As part of the job, I want to recommend one specific step to improve our schools: close down the teachers colleges.

There is no rational purpose to these institutions (and so they do little but disseminate poisonous ideas). Teaching is not a skill acquired through years of classes; it is not improved by the study of “psychology” or “methodology” or any of the rest of the stuff the schools of education offer. Teaching requires only the obvious: motivation, common sense, experience, a few good books or courses on technique, and, above all, a knowledge of the material being taught. Teachers must be masters of their subject; this—not a degree in education—is what school boards should demand as a condition of employment.

This one change would dramatically improve the schools. If experts in subject matter were setting the terms in the classroom, some significant content would have to reach the students, even given today’s dominant philosophy. In addition, the basket cases who know only the Newspeak of their education professors would be out of a job, which would be another big improvement.

This reform, of course, would be resisted to the end by today’s educational establishment, and could hardly be achieved nationally without a philosophic change in the country. But it gives us a starting point to rally around that pertains specifically to the field of education. If you are a parent or a teacher or merely a concerned taxpayer, you can start the battle for quality in education by demanding loudly—even in today’s corrupt climate—that the teachers your school employs know what they are talking about, and then talk about it.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free . . .” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “it expects what never was and never will be.”²¹

Let us fight to make our schools once again bastions of knowledge. Then no dictator can rise among us by counting, like Big Brother in 1984, on the enshrinement of ignorance.

And then we may once again have a human future ahead of us.

NOTES

1 Quoted in USA Today, Aug. 12, 1983.

2 Dec. 12, 1983.

3 Quoted in The New York Times, Apr. 27, 1983.

4 The New York Times, Apr. 18, 1983; the professor is Hazel Hertzberg.

5 Benjamin J. Stein, “The Cheerful Ignorance of the Young in L.A.,” Oct. 3, 1983.

6 Pose Lamb, Linguistics in Proper Perspective (Charles E. Merrill: 1977, 2nd ed.), p. 29.

7 Dolores Durkin, Strategies for Identifying Words, p. 83; quoted in Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Still Can’t Read (Harper Colophon: 1983), p. 81.

8 Dixie Lee Spiegel, in Reading Teacher, April 1978; quoted in Flesch, op. cit., p. 24.

9 lamb, op. cit., p. 19.

10 From Students’ Right to Their Own Language, Conference on College Composition and Communication, Fall, 1974; quoted in Arn and Charlene Tibbetts, What’s Happening to American English? (Scribner’s: 1978), p. 118.

11 See College English, Feb. 1976, p. 631; quoted in Tibbetts, op, cit., p. 119.

12 Basic English Skills Practice Book, Orange Level (McDougal, Littell), p. 17.

13 Tibbetts, op. cit., pp. 80, 76.

14 Alfred De Vito & Gerald H. Krockover, Creative Sciencing (Little, Brown: 1980), pp. 15, 70, 74, 19.

15 Quoted in The New York Times, Jan, 31, 1984.

16 Op. cit., p. 33.

17 Ibid., p. 38.

18 “Are Your Kids Learning to Think?” Changing Times, Dec. 1983; quoting the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

19 Mar. 9, 1984.

20 Quoted in The New York Times, Apr. 27, 1983.

21 The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, “Freedom and Education,” p. 274.

Part Three:

Politics

21

Representation Without Authorization

by Ayn Rand

This article was published in The Ayn Rand Letter, July 17, 1972.

The theory of representative government rests on the principle that man is a rational being, i.e., that he is able to perceive the facts of reality, to evaluate them, to form rational judgments, to make his own choices, and to bear responsibility for the course of his life.

Politically, this principle is implemented by a man’s right to choose his own agents, i.e., those whom he authorizes to represent him in the government of his country. To represent him, in this context, means to represent his views in terms of political principles. Thus the government of a free country derives its “just powers from the consent of the governed.” (For the basis of this discussion, see “Man’s Rights” and “The Nature of Government” in Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal.)

As a corroboration of the link between man’s rational faculty and a representative form of government, observe that those who are demonstrably (or physiologically) incapable of rational judgment cannot exercise the right to vote. (Voting is a derivative, not a fundamental, right; it is derived from the right to life, as a political implementation of the requirements of a rational being’s survival.) Children do not vote because they have not acquired the knowledge necessary to form a rational judgment on political issues; neither do the feeble-minded or the insane, who have lost or never developed their rational faculty. (The possession of a rational faculty does not guarantee that a man will use it, only that he is able to use it and is, therefore, responsible for his actions.)

The mentally unprepared or incapacitated are unable personally to exercise their rights—e.g., the right to acquire property or to assume contractual obligations—and the protection of their rights is delegated to their parents or to legally appointed guardians, who act in their name. The right to vote, however, is non-transferable. The father of twelve minors does not acquire the right to cast twelve votes in addition to his own; neither does the keeper of an insane asylum.

Philosophically, the theory of representative government is in profound conflict with the dominant schools of modern philosophy, which deny the efficacy or existence of reason and of volition. Dictatorship and determinism are reciprocally reinforcing corollaries: if one seeks to enslave men, one has to destroy their reliance on the validity of their own judgments and choices—if one believes that reason and volition are impotent, one has to accept the rule of force.

Ever since Kant, the dominant method of modern philosophers has been to fight issues not by open intellectual presentation, but by corruption—the corruption into its opposite of any concept which they dared not oppose explicitly. Just as Kant corrupted the concept “reason” to mean a mystic faculty pertaining to another dimension, so his theoretical and practical descendants have been employing his technique on an ever growing scale and shrinking subjects. Thus “freedom,” in today’s jargon, means obedience to a totalitarian ruler—“security” is dependence on the whims of the government—“individuality” is conformity to the life-style of a pack—a Putsch to seize dictatorial power is a “War of Liberation”—the “Right to Life” is the right of the unborn to sacrifice the living—and “love of this earth” consists in making it impossible for men to live on it.

It is fairly easy to corrupt the concept of representative government in a country that has had no experience of it: people are offered the flattering paraphernalia of ballot boxes, but only one party to vote for. It is more difficult in a country whose history began with free elections. For half a century (or longer), the collectivist intellectuals have been corrupting our two major political parties to make them merge into one by making them indistinguishable—while the commentators ignored the country’s discontent and pretended that no opposition existed. But this did not work: instead of merging, both parties are now breaking up into irreconcilable factions. In the meantime, the collectivists have come out with a new corruption of the concept of political representation, more grotesque than the rest of their notions.

It is expressed in the demand that various statistical quotas be imposed on this country, in order to “represent” various kinds of people.

It has never been made clear what the term “represent” means in this context. Represent—where and by whom? At first, the demands were voiced in regard to private or semiprivate activities, but in fields vulnerable to political pressure—e.g., the demands for racial quotas in the student enrollment and on the faculties of schools, or in the employment practices of government-controlled industries, such as television. Then the demands grew louder and more directly political, seeking “representation” in Cabinet posts and even on the Supreme Court. The [1972] rules for the Democratic party’s choice of convention delegates implemented these demands and brought them straight into the field of political elections.

It is, therefore, time to examine the meaning of the quota doctrine.

The notion of racial quotas is so obviously an expression of racism that no lengthy discussion is necessary. If a young man is barred from a school or a job because the quota for his particular race has been filled, he is barred by reason of his race. Telling him that those admitted are his “representatives” is adding insult to injury. To demand such quotas in the name of fighting racial discrimination is an obscene mockery.

But observe that the demands for “representation” by quotas are not confined to minorities and are not made exclusively on the grounds of race. The same demands are presented on behalf of a majority: women—on the grounds of age: the young—and on the grounds of economics: the poor.

Now observe the common denominator of these groups. The basis of their grouping and of the quotas they advocate is not intellectual, but physiological. (In the case of poverty, it is physical: an absence of material means.)

This is the sort of doctrine with which today’s intellectuals, particularly the academic crowd, would feel profoundly at home—most of them emotionally and subconsciously, and a few of them with full, conscious awareness of all the implications.

This doctrine—a product of determinism—assumes that physiology is the determining factor in human life and that the interests of all the members of a given physiological group are identical. Yet it is obvious that an intelligent, efficient career woman has more interests in common with men than with a sloppy housewife who joins Women’s Lib and refuses to cook her husband’s dinner. A successful, self-made black businessman has more interests in common with white businessmen than with a black mugger. A rational young student seeking knowledge has more interests in common with old professors than with drugged young “Jesus freaks.”

The quota doctrine assumes that all members of a given physiological group are identical and interchangeable—not merely in the eyes of other people, but in their own eyes and minds. Assuming a total merging of the self with the group, the doctrine holds that it makes no difference to a man whether he or his “representative” is admitted to a school, gets a job, or makes a decision. This particular notion is widely believed by the student activists, who clamor for participation in running universities and other institutions, declaring: “We want to have a say about the things that affect our lives”—the “say” consisting in casting one vote out of thousands for some little campus politician, while surrendering the only “say” they have the right to demand: the say about their own lives.

It is obvious why the quota doctrine appeals to modern intellectuals: it eliminates the responsibility of thought, judgment, and choice. Just follow your group leaders, it advises, they are physiologically predestined to protect you and take care of you. To most of them, this promises the comfort of lethargy, and to a few—a road to power.

If and to the extent that the quota doctrine is taken seriously, it can lead to the abolition of actual political elections, which would be replaced by a system guaranteeing that every sort of group—except one—will be “represented” in the government. There are already suggestions for labor “representation,” and special demands by groups laying the groundwork for welfare recipients’ “representation,” for “gay representation,” for the “representation” of the fetus, etc. The one kind of group to be excepted and excluded is a group brought together by ideas. There is to be no ideological representation—or differentiation.

(A precedent for this sort of electoral policy is offered by Soviet Russia. Ethnic, or physiological, diversity is welcomed and fostered in Russia [unless some group displeases the authorities]. The Soviet Union is broken up into a number of racially different states, each with its own language, folk songs, commemorative postage stamps, and U.N. representation. This flatters the enslaved and is of no danger to the rulers. But ideological diversity is not to be mentioned or dreamed about, under penalty of death.)

As one more example of the connection between reason and freedom, observe that the quota doctrine relegates people to the status of children or of the mentally incompetent, with appointed guardians in place of genuine representatives. No individual choice, no personal authorization to represent him, is required on the part of the citizen—physiology provides the authorization.

The advantages to the leaders of the pressure-group racket are obvious. As to the followers, they would have to reach that hopeless, brutalized state in which people accept as flattery the assertion that the pharaoh’s pyramids or the palaces of Versailles, of Berchtesgaden, of the Kremlin are erected to “represent” their, the people‘s, glory.

I do not believe that the collectivists can get away with it in America. But any suggestion of the quota doctrine is too much for this country—and, today, we are hearing and seeing more than a suggestion. The introduction of that doctrine into the Democratic party’s rules of delegate selection is not merely a future and potential, but a present and actual, violation of a citizen’s individual rights.

The violation lies in the statistical method of apportioning the quotas. They are apportioned not on the basis of a given organization’s membership, but on the basis of the number of persons of a certain physiological type who live in a given district or in the country at large. Thus fifty percent of a delegation “represents” women (all women), ten percent “represents” blacks (all blacks), etc. This means that an individual woman or an individual black—who has never heard of these delegates, may not agree with their views, may not even be a Democrat—is counted as one of the delegate’s constituents, without voting, consent, or authorization on her or his part.

An individual’s right to choose his own representatives or agents is recognized in the material realm, but, apparently, not in the ideological one. If some stranger sold you the Brooklyn Bridge or the Empire State Building, he would be arrested for fraud, because he had no authorization to act as agent for the owners of the bridge or the building. Yet the quota advocates regard you as a unit of meat and appoint themselves your “representatives” in so vast, complex and controversial a field as political elections.

No organization has the right to speak for or to act in the name of anyone but its own members. No organization may be taken as an agent for an individual without his personal knowledge and consent.

If “taxation without representation is slavery,” then representation without authorization is slavery embellished with fraud.

22

To Dream the Noncommercial Dream

by Ayn Rand

This article was published in The Ayn Rand Letter, January 1, 1973.

Have you ever wondered about the mentality of those who advocate government financing of intellectual and artistic pursuits, in the name of intellectual independence and creative freedom?

Their goal, they claim, is to liberate men’s mind from material concerns or economic pressures. The necessity to earn a living in a free marketplace, they claim, is demeaning and corrupting. In their language, the word “commercial” is a pejorative term, an antonym of “intellectual.” Only the security of government support, they claim, can release the full power of the intellect.

The contradictions in this viewpoint are so obvious that it seems impossible for anyone to miss seeing them. Nothing is less secure than a position of dependence on the arbitrary power of politicians dispensing favors. The fate of thinkers, scientists, and artists whose livelihood depends on the government—any government in any age, at the courts of absolute monarchs or in modern dictatorships or in mixed economies—is too well-known to leave anyone in “idealistic” doubt. So are the fear, the intrigues, the rigid censorship, and the abject bootlicking in which and with which the recipients of governmental favors have to live moment by precarious moment. How can today’s intellectuals fail to know it?

Some of them are motivated by powerlust and long for political careers in the roles of manipulators or “powers behind the thrones.” But these, as a rule, advocate some form of government control over the intellectual professions, in the hope of maneuvering themselves or their cliques into the posts of professional “czars”; they do not plead for economic security and do not talk too much about intellectual freedom. What is the motive of those who do? What prompts the rank and file of the intellectual professions, who are loudly, touchily, belligerently championing such things as the First Amendment, civil liberties, academic freedom, etc., and, simultaneously, are pleading with the government for financial support? What can they hope for?

A significant answer may be found in a very enlightening article which appeared in The New York Times (July 29, 1972): “Another Channel” by Lester Markel, the retired Sunday Editor of the Times.

The article discusses the current troubles of public television: the chronic and growing financial plight of this noncommercial venture. The issue has aroused the intellectuals’ angrily anxious concern ever since President Nixon vetoed a bill appropriating 65 million dollars for public television, which Congress had passed.

“The government has been engaged in an unholy crusade against public television,” the article declares. “[The Administration‘s] attacks aroused neither the general public nor the Congress because of the feeling that public television is a dispensable institution. It isn’t, but it has not shown that it isn’t.”

What makes public television indispensable? Mr. Markel does not say; he merely indicates that its purpose is “to fill the large gaps left by commercial television.” What gaps? “It can reach an audience commercial television considers economically unfeasi ble.” What audience? Mr. Markel states only that it is (either actually or potentially) an “audience of ten or fifteen million listeners” and that they are very “intent.” What does this audience want? “In the cultural and entertainment areas [public television] can do much imaginative and experimental work.”

But it is “the area of public affairs” that Mr. Markel regards as most important. “Genuine democracy depends ultimately on an informed opinion; American opinion is insufficiently or wrongly informed; this means that those whose duty it is to enlighten the citizenry are not doing their jobs.” In the news area, commercial television “shirks the assignment because the undertaking is unprofitable; entertainment pays off, information doesn’t. And public television has failed to fill the gap; it has not provided public affairs programming of consequence and immediacy.”

If “information doesn’t pay off,” it means that the public doesn’t want to listen to it. If so, then what will be accomplished by broadcasts which people do not hear? Will “genuine democracy” be served by the “informed opinion” of ten or fifteen million people, i.e., less than ten percent of a population of two hundred ten million whose taxes have to pay for it? No answer is given, except for the statement (at the end of- the article) that “the size of informed minority can be significantly increased—and that would be a long forward stride in the democratic process.”

“In general, the shortcoming of public television can be attributed to lack of independence, of money, of inspiration and of perspective. The first two lacks can be remedied only if the government, executive and Congress, are pressured into action by public demand.” What public? The ten or fifteen million? Do they represent or are they the public? No answer is given, but, in the context of today’s pressure-group demands, the answer is obvious.

“That demand will not come unless public television supplies the two other ingredients—imagination and balance.” And then, astonishingly, Mr. Markel proceeds to list the present flaws of public television, more correctly and succinctly than its enemies have done.

For the most part, public television caters to the elite and preaches to the converted. In the effort to be different, programs have often been only eccentric or ineffectively experimental; they have been marked by an amateur rather than a professional touch.... Moreover and most seriously, the attacks on the score of bias have been justified in numerous instances; for example, many of the programs of station WNET [in New York City] have had a distinctly leftist coloration.... The sledding for public television has been made harder also because of clashes and power duels in the system, notably between left- and right-wing outfits and over the issue of central versus local power.

All this is eminently true; it has always been true of any government-sponsored “cultural” establishment. It is not a matter of personalities: a man of integrity and impeccable taste will not preserve either in such an establishment. It is not the free market, but government patronage that corrupts. The corruption is inherent in the status of a privileged political elite—i.e., an elite selected by favor and maintained by force. If a member of that elite has no particular convictions, his performance will be bad; if he has, it will be worse. His convictions, his vanity, and his quest for “prestige” will blend inextricably into a driving motive to ram his ideas down the throats of the country and of his disarmed opponents, who are forced to pay for his support. Thus, whether for “idealistic” or for the lowest kinds of motives, the “power duels” among the members of the elite will continue.

As to the quality of their work, a “professional touch” is achieved by the element of objectivity—by objective standards of value, of performance, of taste—which is a necessity for an artist seeking the voluntary support of an audience. Men liberated from that necessity and guided by whims can be nothing but amateurs.

On the basis of his own observations, one would expect Mr. Markel to conclude that public television is a useless, hopeless, and evil institution. But he springs another surprise on his readers.

“If public TV is to have a future,” he declares, “it must evolve a new philosophy and a new approach. It must clear its head and clean its house.” What philosophy, what approach, what is to be cleared or cleaned and in what way, is not indicated, beyond the statement that “the coverage of public affairs must be greatly improved,” and the advice to emulate the B.B.C. And on the basis of these floating platitudes, Mr. Markel comes out with the one paragraph for which all the rest serves merely as verbal window dressing:

“In such ways public TV can win popular support and so achieve both independence and economic relief (the two are linked). As long as it is dependent for funding on Congress, and therefore on politics, public TV will not be free. The only solution is an excise tax, possibly a levy on sets as in Britain.” [Emphasis added.]

Get this straight: public TV is to be liberated from politics by the nonpolitical (!) means of a tax imposed on the people for the exclusive benefit, use, and disposal of the men in public TV.

Even the welfare recipients who stage demonstrations have more decency than that: they, at least, present demands to Congress—they do not seek a direct lien on their neighbors’ pockets.

Congress is a body of representatives chosen by the people; if public TV is public, on whom should its funding—and its control—depend if not on the public’s representatives? Yet it is Congress that Mr. Markel’s proposal seeks to bypass.

Yes, Congress is a fluid, flexible institution, unpredictable in its policies, subject to the fluctuating views of the electorate—as it has to be, in a free country (where its power is limited by a Constitution), or in the sort of “genuine democracy” that liberals of Mr. Markel’s kind are constantly touting. Yes, to depend on the switching moods of momentary majorities is as precarious as to build on quicksand—which is one of the reasons why intellectual pursuits must be kept outside the reach of government power. Yes, “independence and economic relief [i.e., the security of one’s financial means] are linked,” and there can be no independence when the means to achieve one’s goals depend, not on mutual trade, but on unilateral favor—which is one of the reasons why independence is the corollary of a free economy and cannot be achieved anywhere else.

But Mr. Markel wants to eat his cake and have it, too. He advocates public service without public responsibility; a blank check on public funds without public accounting; the “security” of a public income without public control.

Who, in such a setup, would determine the policies of public TV? Who would choose its managers and performers, the recipients of public money? Who would judge the value of its programs—and by what standard? Who would establish what is “imagination” and “balance”? Who would determine what is biased and what is not—what is informative and what is not—what sort of information is needed by the public and what sort is not—what is “imaginative” and what is “eccentric”—and whether a symbolic study of space, time, and sex in the subconscious of a fruit fly is effectively or ineffectively “experimental”?

If, under the vague control of a loose, haphazard, too easily tolerant Congressional supervision, public TV has done as badly as it has—and as Mr. Markel describes—what can lead one to expect that it would turn into an assembly of genius, of great thinkers, unbiased commentators, and brilliantly original artists, if unlimited funds were placed at its disposal, with no supervision, no rules, no strings attached? No group of people has so great a faith in the power of money as those who are socialisti cally inclined.

It is useless to raise moral questions in regard to a moral obscenity such as the proposal to force people to support public TV—which means: to take from people, by force, the money they had to work for, and give it to sundry intellectual connivers in exchange for a nebulous non-product which people cannot use, would not want to use, and would hate if they tried it (but which is allegedly desired by ten million college hippies who do not propose to pay for anything they desire). Consider the issue of pay-TV (for which only those who want it, would pay): the same types of mentalities who oppose pay-TV, for fear that it might eventually deprive the poor of the free commercial programs they now enjoy, do not hesitate to support the imposition of a tax on the television sets of the poor, in order to make them pay for programs they would not see.

In my [article in Philosophy: Who Needs It] on “The Establishing of an Establishment,” which discussed government grants to the social sciences, I wrote: “The origin of an aristocracy is the king’s power to confer on a chosen individual the privilege of receiving an unearned income from the involuntary servitude of the inhabitants of a given district. Now, the same policy is operating in the United States—only the privileges are granted not in perpetuity, but in a lump sum for a limited time, and the involuntary servitude is imposed not on a group of serfs in a specific territory, but on all the citizens of the country.”

I overestimated the moral stature and underestimated the ambition of modern intellectuals. Their goal is not the position of a temporary elite, but the establishment of a full-fledged aristocracy in perpetuity (with the succession determined not by birth, but by self-perpetuating professional guilds)—an aristocracy which, once established, would no longer be subject to public choice, approval, or control, an aristocracy independent of the government, except for the government’s obligation to send out internal revenue agents to collect from the country at large the private tax imposed by the aristocrats.

This is the secret dream of those advocates of “genuine democracy” who regard the free market as insecure and the necessity to earn a living as an impediment, who long for liberation from material concerns, and who are not afraid to exchange the “tyranny” of a private employer for the terrible chains of a government’s control. They do not intend to be under government control; they would be exempt; the government would guarantee their income, collect it, deliver it, and ask no questions; they would achieve liberation from material concerns, by the only means it can ever be attempted: by the slave labor of others.

There is a limit to everything, even to the human capacity for evasion. No man could face others and declare that he intends to force them to support him for no reason whatever, just because he wants it, for his own “selfish” sake. He needs to justify his intention, not merely in their eyes, but, above all, in his own. There is only one doctrine that can pass for a justification: altruism.

Observe that such men are impassioned advocates of altruistic ideals, of collectivism, brother love, social service, and self-sacrificial dedication to the good of others. They are not hypocrites; in their own way, they are “sincere”; they have to be. They need to believe that their work serves others, whether those others like it or not, and that the good of others is their only motivation; they do believe it—passionately, fiercely, militantly—in the sense in which a belief is distinguishable from a conviction: in the form of an emotion impervious to reality.

It makes no difference whether they embraced altruism as a means to their ulterior motives or the motives grew out of their altruistic creed. The two elements are mutually reinforcing, and neither is given a conscious identification in their minds. The same lack of self-esteem that would make a man accept and desire the position of being supported by the forced labor of others, would make him accept, and regard as noble, the doctrine demanding his self-immolation.

In this special sense, the advocates of every vicious, irrational doctrine are “sincere” and believe what they preach, though their belief is somewhat different and deeper than the faith they demand of their victims (if “depth,” in this case, is to be measured by distance from reality). The victims are commanded to believe and to take the blame if they permit their faith to be shaken by facts that contradict it. The leaders are free (up to a point) to face the facts of their own performance, to lie, to cheat, to rob, to kill—so long as they hold, as an inviolate absolute, the belief that they are the vehicles of a higher truth which justifies, somehow, any action they might commit; this grants them the kind of malleable, non-absolute reality which is their basic goal.

For the victims of altruism, doubt is paralyzed by guilt; for the leaders, altruism removes the necessity of doubt, i.e., of thought.

In the case of some liberals’ clamor for public TV, nothing more may be involved than some hack’s desire to see his epic produced at public expense. But that hack’s psychology—his belief—is part of a continuum that leads to Robespierre or Hitler or Stalin.

Let me give you an illustration of such belief. When Khrushchev visited the United States in 1959, he was interviewed on various television news programs, usually through the voice of a translator; but on one occasion his answers were broadcast in Russian (with the English translation following). He was asked about the grounds of his faith in the ultimate triumph of world communism. And suddenly this cynical old brute—this Big Boss, feared by the whole world, known in Russia as “the Butcher of the Ukraine” for the mass slaughter that raised him to prominence—began to recite the credo of dialectic materialism in the exact words and tone in which I had heard it recited at exams, in my college days, by students at the University of Leningrad. He had the same uninflected, monotonous tone of a memorized lesson, the same automatic progression of sounds rather than meaning, the same earnest, dutiful, desperate hope that the sacred formulas would come out correctly. But in the face and eyes of a large television closeup, there was a shade more intensity than in the faces of the poor little college robots, more superstitious awe, and less comprehension: it was the face of a man performing a magic ritual on which his life depends. This man, I thought, believes it; he is compelled to believe it; he does not know what it means—but he knows that if this string of sounds were taken away from him, he would be left to face something more frightening than death.

Such is the nature, the pattern, and the ultimate exponent of those who have faith—and a vested interest—in altruism.

23

Tax Credits for Education

by Ayn Rand

This article was published in The Ayn Rand Letter. March 13, 1972.

Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trend is statism. Philosophically, the goal is the obliteration of reason; psychologically, it is the erosion of ambition.

The political goal presupposes the two others. The human characteristic required by statism is docility, which is the product of hopelessness and intellectual stagnation. Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate.

“Ambition” means the systematic pursuit of achievement and of constant improvement in respect to one’s goal. Like the word “selfishness,” and for the same reasons, the word “ambition” has been perverted to mean only the pursuit of dubious or evil goals, such as the pursuit of power; this left no concept to designate the pursuit of actual values. But “ambition” as such is a neutral concept: the evaluation of a given ambition as moral or immoral depends on the nature of the goal. A great scientist or a great artist is the most passionately ambitious of men. A demagogue seeking political power is ambitious. So is a social climber seeking “prestige.” So is a modest laborer who works conscientiously to acquire a home of his own. The common denominator is the drive to improve the conditions of one’s existence, however broadly or narrowly conceived. (“Improvement” is a moral term and depends on one’s standard of values. An ambition guided by an irrational standard does not, in fact, lead to improvement, but to self-destruction.)

An economic “freeze” is intended to paralyze ambition (and its root: the active mind). A freeze is an order not to act, not to grow, not to improve. It is a demand to sacrifice one’s future. But—since an essential characteristic of life is motion—when men do not move forward, they move back; the demand to stop cannot stop and becomes a demand to sacrifice one’s present.

The Nixon Administration did not even take the trouble to delay or disguise this process. After all the mawkish pleas to “hold the line” against inflation—to forgo, “temporarily,” higher profits or higher wages or a higher standard of living—the Administration is now proposing higher taxes. This means that our standard of living is not to stand still, but to collapse under a huge new tax burden, a so-called “value-added tax” (which is a complex form of national sales tax).

To add insult to injury, this tax is intended to finance not some sudden national emergency, but public education.

Of all the government undertakings, none has failed so disastrously as public education. The scope, the depth, and the evidence of this failure are observable all around us. To name three of its obvious symptoms: drug addiction among the young (which is an attempt to escape the unbearable state of a mind unable to cope with existence)—functional illiteracy (the inability of the average high-school or college graduate to speak English, i.e., to speak or write coherently)—student violence (which means that students have not learned what savages know to some minimal extent: the impracticality and immorality of resorting to physical force).

In the face of such evidence, one would expect the government’s performance in the field of education to be questioned, at the least. Instead, the government is demanding more money—at a time of national economic crisis—to continue spreading the wreckage wider and wider. (Observe, incidentally, the consistency with which moral principles work out in politics: when need, not achievement, is the standard of value, success at a given assignment is penalized, and failure rewarded. For example, NASA’s success in landing a man on the moon was followed by cuts in Congressional appropriations for the space program; the growing failures of the educational establishment are followed by the appropriation of larger and larger sums.)

There is, however, a practical alternative. If the countless individuals who are eager to “do something” in politics, and the countless groups who profess concern over the growth of statism, really wish to accomplish something of value, the coming debate on the new tax to support education offers them a chance. (It is also a chance for any honest politician, of either party, who seeks a worthy issue to crusade for at election time.) It is an opportunity to unite many people of different viewpoints in an ad hoc movement for a specifically defined goal.

The goal is: tax credits for education.

The idea is not entirely new. (I was advocating it ten years ago.) Different versions of it were periodically proposed in Congress, but were defeated in committee. (In 1964, one of the proposal’s notable supporters was Senator Ribicoff.) The evidence of the desperate need for such a program has never been as clear as it is at present.

The essentials of the idea (in my version) are as follows: an individual citizen would be given tax credits for the money he spends on education, whether his own education, his children‘s, or any person’s he wants to put through a bona fide school of his own choice (including primary, secondary, and higher education).

The upper limits of what he may spend on any one person would be equal to what it costs the government to provide a student with a comparable education (if there is a computer big enough to calculate it, including all the costs involved, local, state, and federal, the government loans, scholarships, subsidies, etc.).

If a young person’s parents are too poor to pay for his education or to pay income taxes, and if he cannot find a private sponsor to finance him, the public schools would still be available to him, as they are at present—with the likelihood that these schools would be greatly improved by the relief of the pressure of overcrowding, and by the influence of a broad variety of private schools.

I want to stress that I am not an advocate of public (i.e., government-operated) schools, that I am not an advocate of the income tax, and that I am not an advocate of the government’s “right” to expropriate a citizen’s money or to control his spending through tax incentives. None of these phenomena would exist in a free economy. But we are living in a disastrously mixed economy, which cannot be freed overnight. And in today’s context, the above proposal would be a step in the right direction, a measure to avert an immediate catastrophe.

It would accomplish the following: instead of becoming a crushing new tax burden at a time when the country is staggering under the present one, the costs of education would be borne directly by those who now pay them indirectly—by individual citizens. (The public schools would remain in existence and would be financed out of general tax revenues.) Parents would still have to pay for education, but they would have a choice: either to send their children to free public schools and pay their taxes in full—or to pay tuition to a private school, with money saved from their taxes.

It would give private schools a chance to survive (which they do not have at present). It would bring their tuition fees within the reach of the majority of people (today, only the well-to-do can afford them). It would break up the government’s stranglehold, decentralize education, and open it to competition—as well as to a free marketplace of ideas.

It would eliminate the huge educational bureaucracy of the government (which is now growing with the speed of a terminal cancer) and reduce it to a reasonable size. The amount of money this would save is literally inconceivable to the average citizen. To give just one example: it was estimated that the Job Corps [a federal training program] spent $9,210 to $13,000 per year per enrollee; at some camps, the figure reached $22,000, and even $39,205. At private residential schools giving vocational training, the costs ranged from $2,300 to $2,600 per student per year. (Shirley Scheibla, Poverty Is Where the Money Is, New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1968.)

Let the schoolteachers and college professors remember these figures. Theirs is one of the lowest paid professions today, yet most of them are supporters of the status quo. Let them realize that it is not the poverty of their students, but the enrichment of the bureaucracy, that is responsible for their plight—and what a competitive market would do in regard to the financial value of their services.

At present, the biggest spender of government funds, the largest recipient of tax money in the national budget, is not the Department of Defense, but the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. It is clear why the government must hold a monopoly on national defense. But no one—except a full-fledged communist or fascist—would advocate a government monopoly on education. Yet such a monopoly is what we are, in fact, approaching—and taxation is the main cause of the trend.

Private universities are being ground out of existence between two modern disasters, both products of government policies: the erosion of private contributions (eaten away by taxes), and rising costs (brought about by inflation, which is caused by government spending). State universities with nominal or free tuition are another factor destroying the chances of the private universities’ survival. No private concern can compete with a government institution for any length of time, and the injustice involved is obvious: it is a competition in which one contestant has unlimited funds, part of them taken from the other, and in which one contestant is forced to obey the rules arbitrarily set by the other. If any private schools survive, they will survive in name only (which is the typical policy of a fascist state): they are all but hog-tied by the government already. The current attempts to assist private universities with federal funds will complete the job. If “the power to tax is the power to destroy,” the power to disburse government funds is the power to rule.

Now consider the nature of today’s tax policies in regard to the educational needs of young people.

While millions of dollars are being spent by the government on attempts to educate young people most of whom have no ability and/or no desire to get an education, what happens to the young man who has both? If he is poor, he has to work his way through school—a terrible process that takes eight years or longer for a four-year course, consuming his youth and becoming progressively harder, in view of rising costs and shrinking opportunities of employment. (Scholarships are a drop in the bucket, nor are they always granted fairly.) Yet out of his meager income, he has to pay taxes—not only the hidden ones in the cost of everything he buys, but income taxes as well. Thus while he is allowed no deductions for the costs of his own education, he is paying for the free education of the youths enrolled in government projects.

To seek education in such circumstances requires an unusual strength of character, an unusual independence, ambition, and long-range vision. The young people who do it are, potentially, the best of the nation; they are its future; they do not need help, only a fair chance, which they are denied. Many of them are broken by the struggle and driven to give up. But wherever they go, their taxes still pay for the education and “rehabilitation” efforts which allegedly strive (but fail) to develop in stuporous hippies the qualities of character which they, the victims, had once possessed.

If a young man does not, or cannot afford to, go to college, but goes to work instead, to earn his living, he will soon discover—if he is an actively interested, conscientious, ambitious worker— that he needs education to rise to a better job. The tax laws allow him deductions only if the schooling is demanded by his employer as a condition of keeping his job—not if he seeks special training on his own initiative. What does this do to his self-confidence or his sense of control over his own future? Yet in the government’s job-training programs, the lethargic recipients are not merely given free training, but are paid for attending the courses. It is inequities of this kind that make Mr. Nixon’s exhortations to “self-reliance” sound so ludicrously and cruelly hypocritical.

All over the country, self-respecting and self-supporting young couples are carrying a double financial burden: paying constantly rising taxes for the support of schools to which they cannot in conscience send their own children. The private revival of Montessori schools demonstrates the plight of conscientious young parents on a nationwide scale. Aware of the ravages of Progressive education in public schools, such parents send their children to private schools (or join to build such schools), which few of them can afford. It is a heavy sacrifice for most of them, at a time when they are struggling to achieve some degree of professional and financial security. They are given no tax relief for such expenses, which places private schools outside the reach of the hard-working, respectable lower middle class.

The same injustice is perpetrated against the parents who send their children to parochial schools. As you surely know, I am not an advocate of religion or of religious education, but the double burden of a forced necessity to pay for the support of secular schools is a violation of the parents’ right to religious freedom. The parochial schools are collapsing financially, for the same reasons and under the same pressures as the private universities—and the current controversy over the support of parochial schools illustrates the nature of the issue. On the one hand, it is certainly improper and unconstitutional to use public funds for the support of religious schools. On the other hand, it is unjust that the children of religious taxpayers are denied the special advantages granted to the children of nonreligious ones. You may take it as a general rule: whenever an issue leads to an unresolvable conflict, you will find, at its root, the violation of someone’s rights.

These are only a few of the problems that tax credits for education would solve.

The opposition to such a program would be horrendous and would come from an entrenched pressure group: the educational establishment. But this is the time to raise the question of a “conflict of interests.” Public officials who have connections with private sources of income that involve government matters—as, for instance, with a company seeking government contracts—are regarded as suspect, unless they break the connection. By the same token, a bureaucrat whose source of income is a government job (an unnecessary job, more often than not) should be regarded as suspect when and if he opposes a program that threatens the source of his income.

Some people would oppose the program on the grounds that it will foster the development of different educational theories and methods in the various private schools. The answer to them is that that precisely is one of the program’s goals—that differences, not regimented uniformity, are essential to the progress of a free country—and that equality before the law, not egalitarianism, is one of this country’s fundamental principles.

Let us take the educational establishment at their word and hold them to it: that their goal is to provide education, not to control the intellectual life of this country.

24

Antitrust: The Rule of Unreason

by Ayn Rand

This is one of Ayn Rand’s earliest discussions of the evils of antitrust legislation. It was published in The Objectivist Newsletter, February 1962.

It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific, and stable; it is not the known that breaks men’s spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear.

The American businessmen have had to live in that state for seventy years. They were condemned to it by that judicial version of the doctrine of original sin which presumes men to be guilty with little or no chance to be proved innocent and which is known as the antitrust laws.

No business-hating collectivist could have gotten away with creating so perfect an instrument for the destruction of capitalism and the delivery of businessmen into the total power of the government. It took the so-called “conservatives,” the alleged defenders of capitalism, to create the antitrust laws. And it takes the intellectual superficiality of today’s “conservatives” to continue supporting these laws, in spite of their meaning, record, and results.

The alleged purpose of the antitrust laws was to protect competition; that purpose was based on the socialistic fallacy that a free, unregulated market will inevitably lead to the establishment of coercive monopolies. But, in fact, no coercive monopoly has ever been or ever can be established by means of free trade on a free market. Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action. (For a full demonstration of this fact, I refer you to the works of the best economists.) The antitrust laws were the classic example of a moral inversion prevalent in the history of capitalism: an example of the victims, the businessmen, taking the blame for the evils caused by the government, and the government using its own guilt as a justification for acquiring wider powers, on the pretext of “correcting” the evils.

Since “free competition enforced by law” is a grotesque contradiction in terms, antitrust grew into a haphazard accumulation of non-objective laws so vague, complex, contradictory, and inconsistent that any business practice can now be construed as illegal, and by complying with one law a businessman opens himself to prosecution under several others. No two jurists can agree on the meaning and application of these laws. No one can give an exact definition of what constitutes “restraint of trade” or “intent to monopolize” or any of the other, similar “crimes.” No one can tell what the law forbids or permits one to do. The interpretation is left entirely up to the courts. “The courts in the United States have been engaged ever since 1890 in deciding case by case exactly what the law proscribes. No broad definition can really unlock the meaning of the statute.” [A.D. Neale, The Antitrust Laws of the U.S.A., Cambridge University Press, 1960, p. 13.]

Thus a businessman has no way of knowing in advance whether the action he takes is legal or illegal, whether he is guilty or innocent. Yet he has to act; he has to run his business.

Retroactive law—which means: a law that punishes a man for an action which was not legally defined as a crime at the time he committed it—is a form of persecution practiced only in dictatorships and forbidden by every civilized legal code. It is not supposed to exist in the United States and it is not applied to anyone—except to businessmen. A case in which a man cannot know until he is convicted whether the action he took in the past was legal or illegal is certainly a case of retroactive law.

At first, antitrust was merely a potential club, a “big stick” over businessmen’s heads, but it soon became actual. From their hesitant, sluggish beginnings in a few vaguely semi-plausible cases, antitrust prosecutions accelerated by a progression of logical steps to such judicial decisions as: that established businesses have to share with any newcomer the facilities it had taken them years to create, if the lack of such facilities imposes a real hardship on the would-be competitor (Associated Press case, 1945)—that business concerns have no right to pool their patents and that the penalty for such pools is either the compulsory licensing of their patents to any and all comers or the outright confiscation of the patents; and if a businessman, who is a member of such a pool, sues a competitor who has infringed his patent, the competitor not only wins the case, but collects treble damages from the man whose patent he had infringed (Kobe v. Dempsey Pump Company, 1952)—that if a would-be competitor’s efficiency is so low that he is unable even to pay a royalty on the patents owned by stronger companies, he is entitled to such patents royalty-free (General Electric case, 1948)—that business concerns must not merely make a gift of their patents to any rival, but must also teach him how to use these patents (I.C.I. and duPont case, 1952)—that a business concern must not anticipate increases in the demand for its product and must not be prepared to meet them by expanding its capacity “before others entered the field,” because this might discourage newcomers (ALCOA case, 1945).

Is the basic line clear? Do you observe the nature of the principle that dictated the decisions in these cases?

A. D. Neale identifies it as follows: “There is an element of pure ‘underdoggery’ in the law; an element of throwing the weight of the enforcement authorities into the scale on the side of the weaker parties, which has little to do with the economic control of monopoly.” [p. 461]

I identify it as: the penalizing of ability for being ability, the penalizing of success for being success, and the sacrifice of productive genius to the demands of envious mediocrity.

Who were the profiteers of antitrust? Many businessmen supported it from the start: some innocently, some not. These last were the kind who seek to rise not by free trade and productive ability, but by political favor and pull, which means: not by merit, but by force. They are the typical products of a “mixed economy” and their numbers multiply as the economy grows more “mixed.”

The other group of profiteers was the bureaucrats and the statists. As the trend toward statism grew, the statists found an invaluable instrument for the persecution and the eventual enslavement of businessmen. Observe that the most outrageous antitrust cases date from the 1940s. Power in a statist sense means arbitrary power. An objective law protects a country’s freedom; only a non-objective law can give a statist the chance he seeks: a chance to impose his arbitrary will—his policies, his decisions, his interpretations, his enforcement, his punishment or favor—on disarmed, defenseless victims. He does not have to exercise his power too frequently or too openly; he merely has to have it and let his victims know that he has it; fear will do the rest.

In the light of this, consider the new phase of antitrust enforcement. In February of 1961, in Philadelphia, seven businessmen, representing some of America’s greatest industrial concerns, were sentenced to jail in the “Electrical Conspiracy” case. This case involved twenty-nine companies manufacturing electrical equipment. The charge against them was that they had made secret agreements to fix prices and rig bids. But without such agreements, the larger companies could have set their prices so low that the smaller ones would have been unable to match them and would have gone out of business, whereupon the larger companies would have faced prosecution, under these same antitrust laws, for “intent to monopolize.”

It is evil enough to impose ruinous fines under laws which the victims have no way to comply with, laws which everyone concedes to be non-objective, contradictory, and undefinable. It is obscene, under such laws, to impose jail sentences on men of distinguished achievement, outstanding ability, and unimpeachable moral character, who had spent their lives on so responsible a task as industrial production.

But this, perhaps, is the clue to the purpose of that disgraceful verdict. It created in the public’s mind the impression that industrial production is some sort of sinister underworld activity and that businessmen, by their nature and profession, are to be treated as criminals.

Such was the obvious implication of the disgusting howling that went on in the press. The same humanitarians who rush to the defense of any homicidal dipsomaniac did not hesitate to release all of their repressed hatred and malice on seven silent, defenseless men whose profession was business. That the leftist press would enjoy it is understandable and, at least, consistent. But what is one to think of the alleged “conservative” press? Take a look at the February 17, 1961, issue of Time magazine; with its story about the verdict, Time published photographs of six of the victims—six faces with intelligence and determination as their common characteristic—and under them, the caption: “A drama that U.S. business will long remember to its shame.”

The same humanitarians of the press who clamor that penitentiaries are a useless, vengeful form of cruelty to juvenile switchblade killers questing for “kicks” and that these sensitive victims of society should be “given a chance” and should be sent to garden rest homes for rehabilitation—these same humanitarians have remained silent while a bill is proposed in Congress to the effect that an executive convicted of an antitrust violation may not, thereafter, be given employment by any business concern and is thus to be deprived of the right to earn a living.

No, all this is not the result of a communist conspiracy. It is the result of something much harder to fight: the result of a culture’s cynical, goal-less disintegration, which can benefit no one but the communists and the random little powerlusters of the moment, who fish in muddy waters.

It is futile to wonder about the policies or the intentions of the present [Kennedy] administration. Whether the whole administration or any one of its members is consciously dedicated to the destruction of American business does not matter. What matters is that if any of them are, they have the machinery to accomplish it and no opposition: a culture without goals, values, or political principles can offer no opposition to anything.

Intentionally or not, the purpose achieved by those jail sentences is: intimidation—or, more precisely: terrorization. The antitrust laws give the government the power to prosecute and convict any business concern in the country any time it chooses. The threat of sudden destruction, of unpredictable retaliation for unnamed offenses, is a much more potent means of enslavement than explicit dictatorial laws. It demands more than mere obedience; it leaves men no policy save one: to please the authorities; to please—blindly, uncritically, without standards or principles; to please—in any issue, matter, or circumstance, for fear of an unknowable, unprovable vengeance. Anyone possessing such a stranglehold on businessmen possesses a stranglehold on the wealth and the material resources of the country, which means: a stranglehold on the country.

Businessmen are already helpless and almost silenced. It is only the intellectuals who still have a chance to be heard. That is why I suggest to you the following test: if you hear an alleged “conservative” who quibbles bravely over taxes, budgets, or school aid, but supports the antitrust laws—you may be sure that he is futile as a fighter for capitalism. To combat petty larceny as a crucial danger, at a time when murder is being committed, is to sanction the murder.

What should we do? We should demand a reexamination and revision of the entire issue of antitrust. We should challenge its philosophical, political, economic and moral base. We should have a Civil Liberties Union—for businessmen. The repeal of the antitrust laws should be our ultimate goal; it will require a long intellectual and political struggle, but, in the meantime and as a first step, we should urge that the jail-penalty provisions of these laws be abolished.

Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world. All the other social groups—workers, professional men, scientists, soldiers—exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery and in progressive self-destruction. But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictatorship. Their place is taken by armed thugs: by bureaucrats and commissars. So if you want to fight for freedom, you must begin by fighting for its unrewarded, unrecognized, unacknowledged, yet best representatives—the American businessmen.

25

The Pull Peddlers

by Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand regarded a country’s domestic policy (and the philosophy underlying it) as decisive for its future and as the source of its foreign policy. Accordingly, she wrote relatively little about foreign policy as such. This discussion of foreign aid is one of her few articles on the area, published in The Objectivist Newsletter, September 1962.

America’s foreign policy is so grotesquely irrational that most people believe there must be some sensible purpose behind it. The extent of the irrationality acts as its own protection: like the technique of the “Big Lie,” it makes people assume that so blatant an evil could not possibly be as evil as it appears to them and, therefore, that somebody must understand its meaning, even though they themselves do not.

The sickening generalities and contradictions cited in justification of the foreign aid program fall roughly into two categories which are offered to us simultaneously: the “idealistic” and the “practical,” or mush and fear.

The “idealistic” arguments consist of appeals to altruism and swim out of focus in a fog of floating abstractions about our duty to support the “underdeveloped” nations of the entire globe, who are starving and will perish without our selfless help.

The “practical” arguments consist of appeals to fear and emit a different sort of fog, to the effect that our own selfish interest requires that we go bankrupt buying the favor of the “underdeveloped” nations, who, otherwise, will become a dangerous threat to us.

It is useless to point out to the advocates of our foreign policy that it’s either-or: either the “underdeveloped” nations are so weak that they are doomed without our help, in which case they cannot become a threat to us—or they are so strong that with some other assistance they can develop to the point of endangering us, in which case we should not drain our economic power to help the growth of potential enemies who are that powerful.

It is useless to discuss the contradiction between these two assertions, because neither of them is true. Their proponents are impervious to facts, to logic, and to the mounting evidence that after two decades of global altruism, our foreign policy is achieving the exact opposite of its alleged goals: it is wrecking our economy—it is reducing us internationally to the position of an impotent failure who has nothing but a series of compromises, retreats, defeats, and betrayals on his record—and, instead of bringing progress to the world, it is bringing the bloody chaos of tribal warfare and delivering one helpless nation after another into the power of communism.

When a society insists on pursuing a suicidal course, one may be sure that the alleged reasons and proclaimed slogans are mere rationalizations. The question is only: what is it that these rationalizations are hiding?

Observe that there is no consistent pattern in the erratic chaos of our foreign aid. And although in the long run it leads to the benefit of Soviet Russia, Russia is not its direct, immediate beneficiary. There is no consistent winner, only a consistent loser: the United States.

In the face of such a spectacle, some people give up the attempt to understand; others imagine that some omnipotent conspiracy is destroying America, that the rationalizations are hiding some malevolent, fantastically powerful giant.

The truth is worse than that: the truth is that the rationalizations are hiding nothing—that there is nothing at the bottom of the fog but a nest of scurrying cockroaches.

I submit in evidence an article in the editorial section of The New York Times of July 15, 1962, entitled: “Role of Foreign Lobbies.”

A “non-diplomatic corps” of foreign agents has bloomed in recent years [in Washington].... Lobbying in Congress to obtain—or prevent—the passage of legislation of interest to their foreign clients, seeking to pressure the Administration into adopting certain political or economic policies, or attempting to mold public opinion through a myriad of methods and techniques, this legion of special agents has become an elusive shadow for operating in Washington and the width and the length of the land.

“Lobbying” is the activity of attempting to influence legislation by privately influencing the legislators. It is the result and creation of a “mixed economy”—of government by pressure groups. Its methods range from mere social courtesies and cocktail-party or luncheon “friendships” to favors, threats, bribes, blackmail.

All lobbyists, whether serving foreign or domestic interests, are required—by laws passed in the last three decades—to register with the government. The registrations have been growing at such a rate—with the foreign lobbyists outnumbering the domestic ones—that legislators are beginning to be alarmed. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has announced that it is preparing an investigation of these foreign agents’ activities.

The New York Times article describes foreign lobbying as follows:

The theory behind this whole enterprise is that for a fee or a retainer and often for hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising, publicity and expense money, a foreign Government or a foreign economic or political interest can purchase a favorable legislation in the United States Congress, a friendly policy of the Administration or a positive image in the eyes of the American public opinion, leading in turn to profitable political or economic advantage. [Emphasis added.]

Who are these lobbyists? Men with political pull—with “access” to influential Washington figures—American men hired by foreign interests. The article mentions that most of these men are “Washington lawyers” or “New York public relations firms.”

Russia is one of these foreign interests and is served by registered lobbyists in Washington, but she is merely cashing in on the situation, like the others. The success of her conspiracy in this country is the result, not the cause, of our self-destruction; she is winning by default. The cause is much deeper than that.

The issue of lobbies has attracted attention recently through the struggle of foreign lobbyists to obtain sugar quotas from the American government. “Their efforts,” states the article, “were centered on Representative Harold D. Cooley, Democrat of North Carolina, chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, who at least until this year held almost the complete power in the distribution of quotas. It has never been too clear what criteria Mr. Cooley used in allocating these quotas, and, by the same token, it is impossible to determine what was the actual effect of the lobbyists’ entreaties on him.

“But in offering their services to foreign governments or sugar growers’ associations, these representatives were, in effect, offering for sale their real or alleged friendship with Mr. Cooley.”

This is the core and essence of the issue of lobbying—and of our foreign aid—and of a “mixed economy.”

The trouble is not that “it has never been too clear what criteria Mr. Cooley used in allocating these quotas”—but that it has never been and never can be too clear what criteria he was expected to use by the legislation that granted him these powers. No criteria can ever be defined in this context; such is the nature of non-objective law and of all economic legislation.

So long as a concept such as “the public interest” (or the “social” or “national” or “international” interest) is regarded as a valid principle to guide legislation—lobbies and pressure groups will necessarily continue to exist. Since there is no such entity as “the public,” since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that “the public interest” supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.

If so, then all men and all private groups have to fight to the death for the privilege of being regarded as “the public.” The government’s policy has to swing like an erratic pendulum from group to group, hitting some and favoring others, at the whim of any given moment—and so grotesque a profession as lobbying (selling “influence”) becomes a full-time job. If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a “mixed economy” would bring them into existence.

Since there is no rational justification for the sacrifice of some men to others, there is no objective criterion by which such a sacrifice can be guided in practice. All “public interest” legislation (and any distribution of money taken by force from some men for the unearned benefit of others) comes down ultimately to the grant of an undefined, undefinable, nonobjective, arbitrary power to some government officials.

The worst aspect of it is not that such a power can be used dishonestly, but that it cannot be used honestly. The wisest man in the world, with the purest integrity, cannot find a criterion for the just, equitable, rational application of an unjust, inequitable, irrational principle. The best that an honest official can do is to accept no material bribe for his arbitrary decision; but this does not make his decision and its consequences more just or less calamitous.

A man of clear-cut convictions is impervious to anyone’s influence. But when clear-cut convictions are impossible, personal influences take over. When a man’s mind is trapped in the foggy labyrinth of the non-objective, that has no exits and no solutions, he will welcome any quasi-persuasive, semi-plausible argument. Lacking certainty, he will follow anyone’s facsimile thereof. He is the natural prey of social “manipulators,” of propaganda salesmen, of lobbyists.

When any argument is as inconclusive as any other, the subjective, emotional, or “human” element becomes decisive. A harried legislator may conclude, consciously or subconsciously, that the friendly man who smiled at him at the cocktail party last week was a good person who would not deceive him and whose opinion can be trusted safely. It is by considerations such as these that officials may dispose of your money, your effort, and your future.

Although cases of actual corruption do undoubtedly exist among legislators and government officials, they are not a major motivating factor in today’s situation. It is significant that in such cases as have been publicly exposed, the bribes were almost pathetically small. Men who held the power to dispose of millions of dollars sold their favors for a thousand-dollar rug or a fur coat or a refrigerator.

The truth, most likely, is that they did not regard it as bribery or as a betrayal of their public trust; they did not think that their particular decision could matter one way or another, in the kind of causeless choices they had to make, in the absence of any criteria, in the midst of the general orgy of tossing away an apparently ownerless wealth. Men who would not sell out their country for a million dollars are selling it out for somebody’s smile and a vacation trip to Florida. “It is of such pennies and smiles that the destruction of your country is made.”

The general public is helplessly bewildered. The “intellectuals” do not care to look at our foreign policy too closely. They feel guilt; they sense that their own worn-out ideologies, which they dare not challenge, are the cause of the consequences which they dare not face. The more they evade, the greater their eagerness to grasp at any fashionable straw or rationalization and to uphold it with glassy-eyed aggressiveness. The threadbare cloak of altruism serves to cover it up and to sanction the evasions by a fading aura of moral righteousness. The exhausted cynicism of a bankrupt culture, of a society without values, principles, convictions, or intellectual standards, does the rest: it leaves a vacuum for anyone to take over and use.

The motive power behind the suicidal bleeding of the greatest country in the world is not an altruistic fervor or a collectivist crusade any longer, but the manipulations of little lawyers and public relations men pulling the mental strings of lifeless automatons.

These—the lobbyists in the pay of foreign interests, the men who could not hope to get, in any other circumstances, the money they are getting now—are the real and only profiteers on the global sacrifice, as their ilk has always been at the close of every altruistic movement in history. It is not the “underdeveloped” nations or the “underprivileged” masses or the starving children of jungle villages who benefit from America’s self-immolation—it is only the men who are too small to start such movements and small enough to cash in at the end.

It is not any “lofty ideal” that the altruism-collectivism doctrine accomplishes or can ever accomplish. Its end-of-trail is as follows: “A local railroad had gone bankrupt in North Dakota, abandoning the region to the fate of a blighted area, the local banker had committed suicide, first killing his wife and children—a freight train had been taken off the schedule in Tennessee, leaving a local factory without transportation at a day’s notice, the factory owner’s son had quit college and was now in jail, awaiting execution for a murder committed with a gang of raiders—a way station had been closed in Kansas, and the station agent, who had wanted to be a scientist, had given up his studies and become a dishwasher—that he, James Taggart, might sit in a private barroom and pay for the alcohol pouring down Orren Boyle’s throat, for the waiter who sponged Boyle’s garments when he spilled his drink over his chest, for the carpet burned by the cigarettes of an ex-pimp from Chile who did not want to take the trouble of reaching for an ashtray across a distance of three feet.” [Atlas Shrugged]

26

About a Woman President

by Ayn Rand

This piece, an answer to letters from readers, was published in the issue of The Objectivist dated December 1968, although the piece was actually written in January 1969.

About a year ago, in the issue of January 1968, McCall’s published an article-interview with sixteen prominent women (myself included) who had been asked to answer the question: What would I do if I were president of the United States? The first paragraph of my answer read: “I would not want to be president and would not vote for a woman president. A woman cannot reasonably want to be a commander-in-chief. I prefer to answer the question by outlining what a rational man would do if he were president.”

Thereafter, I received many letters from students of Objectivism, asking me the reasons of that particular paragraph.

I was counting on the readers of my novels to understand my reasons. I grant you, however, that the issue is not self-evident and that it is not easy to conceptualize. For illustrative material, I suggest that you study the basic motivation of the heroines in my novels, particularly Dagny Taggart.

I do not think that a rational woman can want to be president. Observe that I did not say she would be unable to do the job; I said that she could not want it. It is not a matter of her ability, but of her values.

It is not an issue of feminine “inferiority,” intellectually or morally; women are not inferior to men in ability or intelligence; besides, it would not take much to do a better job than some of our recent presidents have done. It is certainly not an issue of the popular notion that women are motivated predominantly by their emotions rather than by reason—which is plain nonsense. It is not an issue of the false dichotomy of marriage versus career, with the corollary notion that “a woman’s place is in the home”; whether married or single, women need and should have careers, for the same reasons as men. Women may properly rise as high as their ability and ambition will carry them; in politics, they may reach the ranks of congresswomen, senators, judges, or any similar rank they choose.

But when it comes to the post of president, do not look at the issue primarily from a somewhat altruistic or social viewpoint—i.e., do not ask: “Could she do the job and would it be good for the country?” Conceivably, she could and it would—but what would it do to her?

The issue is primarily psychological. It involves a woman’s fundamental view of life, of herself and of her basic values. For a woman qua woman, the essence of femininity is hero worship—the desire to look up to man. “To look up” does not mean dependence, obedience, or anything implying inferiority. It means an intense kind of admiration; and admiration is an emotion that can be experienced only by a person of strong character and independent value judgments. A “clinging vine” type of woman is not an admirer, but an exploiter of men. Hero worship is a demanding virtue: a woman has to be worthy of it and of the hero she worships. Intellectually and morally, i.e., as a human being, she has to be his equal; then the object of her worship is specifically his masculinety, not any human virtue she might lack.

This does not mean that a feminine woman feels or projects hero worship for any and every individual man; as human beings, many of them may, in fact, be her inferiors. Her worship is an abstract emotion for the metaphysical concept of masculinity as such—which she experiences fully and concretely only for the man she loves, but which colors her attitude toward all men. This does not mean that there is a romantic or sexual intention in her attitude toward all men; quite the contrary: the higher her view of masculinity, the more severely demanding her standards. It means that she never loses the awareness of her own sexual identity and theirs. It means that a properly feminine woman does not treat men as if she were their pal, sister, mother—or leader.

Now consider the meaning of the presidency: in all his professional relationships, within the entire sphere of his work, the president is the highest authority; he is the “chief executive,” the “commander-in-chief.” Even in a fully free country, with an unbreached constitutional division of powers, a president is the final authority who sets the terms, the goals, the policies of every job in the executive branch of the government. In the performance of his duties, a president does not deal with equals, but only with inferiors (not inferiors as persons, but in respect to the hierarchy of their positions, their work, and their responsibilities).

This, for a rational woman, would be an unbearable situation. (And if she is not rational, she is unfit for the presidency or for any important position, anyway.) To act as the superior, the leader, virtually the ruler of all the men she deals with, would be an excruciating psychological torture. It would require a total depersonalization, an utter selflessness, and an incommunicable loneliness; she would have to suppress (or repress) every personal aspect of her own character and attitude; she could not be herself, i.e., a woman; she would have to function only as a mind, not as a person, i.e., as a thinker devoid of personal values—a dangerously artificial dichotomy which no one could sustain for long. By the nature of her duties and daily activities, she would become the most unfeminine, sexless, metaphysically inappropriate, and rationally revolting figure of all: a matriarch.

This would apply to the reigning queen of an absolute monarchy, but it would not apply to a woman in any field of endeavor other than politics. It does not apply, for instance, to a woman who heads a business concern; even though she is the highest authority within that concern, she deals constantly with men who are not under her orders: with customers, suppliers, competitors; she is not condemned to the solitary confinement of dealing exclusively with men who are her hierarchical inferiors (nor is her power as wide as that of a president).

It is conceivable that in some unusual historical context, in some period of extreme national emergency, it would be proper for a woman temporarily to assume the leadership of a country, in the role of president, if there were no men able to assume it. But what would this imply about the character of the men at that time? (Normally, the best and ablest among men do not necessarily have to seek the presidency, but in an extreme emergency, they would have to—as did the founding fathers.)

There is a historical precedent for the fate of a woman leader in a period of extreme emergency: Joan of Are—the most heroic woman and the most tragic symbol in history. I say “tragic” not merely because she was burned at the stake in reward for having saved her country—although that monstrous physical evil is singularly appropriate, as a fiction-like concretization of the spiritual tragedy of her life. Ask yourself: what power of dedication she must have possessed when she found herself as the only one able to revive the fighting spirit of men who had given up—and what would she personally have felt about it?

For a woman to seek or desire the presidency is, in fact, so terrible a prospect of spiritual self-immolation that the woman who would seek it is psychologically unworthy of the job.

27

The Inverted Moral Priorities

by Ayn Rand

This article was published in the issue of The Ayn Rand Letter dated July 15, 1974, though it was written a few months later than this date.

A widespread ignorance of a crucial economic issue is apparent in most discussions of today’s problems: it is ignorance on the part of the public, evasion on the part of most economists, and crude demagoguery on the part of certain politicians. The issue is the function of wealth in an industrial economy.

Most people seem to believe that wealth is primarily an object of consumption—that the rich spend all or most of their money on personal luxury. Even if this were true, it would be their inalienable right—but it does not happen to be true. The percentage of income which men spend on consumption stands in inverse ratio to the amount of their wealth. The percentage which the rich spend on personal consumption is so small that it is of no significance to a country’s economy. The money of the rich is invested in production; it is an indispensable part of the stock seed that makes production possible.

Even the most primitive forms of production require an investment of time and sustenance (i.e., of unconsumed goods) to enable men to produce. The higher a society’s industrial development, the more expensive the tools required to put men to work (and the greater the productivity of their labor). Some years ago, it took an investment of five thousand dollars per worker to create jobs in industry; I have no exact figures for the present time, but the investment is now much higher. Deferred consumption (i.e., savings) on a gigantic scale is required to keep industrial production going. Savings pay for machines which enable men to produce in a day an amount of goods they would not be able to produce by hand in a year (if at all). This enables the workers in turn to defer consumption and to save some of their income for their future needs or goals. The hallmark of an industrial society is its members’ distance from a hand-to-mouth mode of living; the greater this distance, the greater men’s progress.

The major part of this country’s stock seed is not the fortunes of the rich (who are a small minority), but the savings of the middle class—i.e., of responsible men who have the ability to grasp the concept “future” and to deposit one dollar (or more) into a bank account. A man of this type saves money for his own future, but the bank invests his money in productive enterprises; thus, the goods he did not consume today are available to him when he needs them tomorrow—and, in the meantime, these goods serve as fuel for the country’s productive process.

Except for short periods of unforeseeable emergency, a rational person cannot stand living hand-to-mouth. No matter what his income, he saves some part of it, large or small—because he knows that his life is not confined to the immediate moment, that he has to plan ahead, and that savings are his means of control over his life: savings are his badge of independence and his door to the future—if he is to have a future.

Project fully and concretely what a hand-to-mouth existence would be like. Assume that you have a job which takes care of your immediate physical needs (food, clothing, and shelter), but nothing more: you consume everything you earn. Without the possibility of saving, you would live in a state of chronic terror; terror of losing your job and terror of sudden illness. (Never mind unemployment insurance and Medicaid: insurance is a form of saving, and compulsory savings leave you at the mercy of the government.) Could you look for a better job? No—because you have no reserves to carry you a single day. Could you go to school to learn a new skill? No—because this takes savings. Could you plan to buy a car? No—this takes savings. Could you plan to buy a home of your own? No—this takes an enormous amount of savings over a long period of time. Could you plan an unusual vacation, such as a trip to Europe? No, nor any kind of vacation—a vacation takes savings. Could you go to a movie, a theater, a concert? No—this takes savings. Could you buy a book, a phonograph record, a print for your bare walls? No—these take savings. If you have a family, could you send your children through college? No—this takes a small fortune in savings. If you are single, could you get married? No—you have no way to increase your income. If you are an aspiring young writer or artist, could you hold a job, and skimp and go hungry and deny yourself everything—in order to buy time to write or paint? Forget it.

Would you care to go on living in such conditions? Since you are a person able to read, the answer is: No. Yet this is the state to which today’s intellectual leaders (who are led by the egalitarians) wish to reduce you.

There is an old saying: “Time is money,” which is true enough in an efficient, productive, free society. Today, the urgent thing to realize is that money is time. Money is the goods which you produced, but did not consume; what your deferred consumption buys for you is time to achieve your goals. Bear this in mind when you consider what inflation is doing to your savings.

Let us suppose that you have $1,000 in a savings account. If the [1974] rate of inflation is ten percent (it is actually higher), you lose $100 a year—the government is robbing you of that amount, as surely as if it took the bills out of your pocket. Are you permitted to write that loss off on your tax return? No—the government is pretending that the loss did not occur. But the bank pays you, say, 5 percent interest, i.e., $50 a year—does this make up for half of your loss? No—because the government regards bank interest as “unearned income,” and taxes you on it (the amount of the tax depends on your income bracket). Are there any public voices—in this age of “social conscience” —protesting against so vicious an injustice? No.

“Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.” [Alan Greenspan, “Gold and Economic Freedom,” in my book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal] The major part of this country’s wealth belongs to the middle class. The middle class is the heart, the lifeblood, the energy source of a free, industrial economy, i.e., of capitalism; it did not and cannot exist under any other system; it is the product of upward mobility, incompatible with frozen social castes. Do not ask, therefore, for whom the bell of inflation is tolling; it tolls for you. It is not at the destruction of a handful of the rich that inflation is aimed (the rich are mostly in the vanguard of the destroyers), but at the middle class. It is the middle class that was wiped out in the German inflation, and the cannibalistic society that permitted it to happen got what it deserved: Hitler.

Inflation is a symptom of the terminal stage of that social disease which is a mixed economy. A mixed economy (as I have said many, many times) is an invalid, unstable, unworkable system which leads to one of two endings: either a return to freedom or a collapse into dictatorship. In the face of an approaching disaster, what is the attitude of most of our public leaders? Politics as usual, evasion as usual, moral cowardice as usual.

In view of what they hear from the experts, the people cannot be blamed for their ignorance and their helpless confusion. If an average housewife struggles with her incomprehensibly shrinking budget and sees a tycoon in a resplendent limousine, she might well think that just one of his diamond cuff links would solve all her problems. She has no way of knowing that if all the personal luxuries of all the tycoons were expropriated, it would not feed her family—and millions of other, similar families—for one week; and that the entire country would starve on the first morning of the week to follow. (This is what happened in Chile.) How would she know it if all the voices she hears are telling her that we must soak the rich?

No one tells her that higher taxes imposed on the rich (and the semi-rich) will not come out of their consumption expenditures, but out of their investment capital (i.e., their savings); that such taxes will mean less investment, i.e., less production, fewer jobs, higher prices for scarcer goods; and that by the time the rich have to lower their standard of living, hers will be gone, along with her savings and her husband’s job—and no power in the world (no economic power) will be able to revive the dead industries (there will be no such power left).

Since the men who know it keep silent, they leave the field open to swarms of political demagogues, who cash in on that housewife’s despair and bewilderment. They provide her with a scapegoat, the usual one, the easiest to set up: the businessman. When she hears denunciations of “windfall” profits (or “exorbitant” profits, or “unfair” profits), she does not know how to determine what this means, what the size of profits “should” be—and she does not suspect that the demagogues do not know it, either (because no one can determine it, except the free market). It merely confirms her consumption-oriented view of wealth and suggests that she is the victim of somebody’s “greed”—which nurtures her ugliest emotions. No one tells her that the businessmen’s profits are the only protection of her home, her family, her life—and that if the erosion of profits were to force businessmen out of production altogether, the only alternative would be a “nonprofit” industry run by the government; what this would mean to the people has been demonstrated amply and conclusively in Soviet Russia.

These are the things which the public urgently needs to know today, but is not being told. The better kinds of politicians do not indulge in business-baiting demagoguery, but they do not fight it; they are afraid to fight it; they merely struggle to appease the demagogues. So do most economists and most businessmen. What do they all fear?

The televised summit conference on inflation gave a clue to the answer. It presented a sorry spectacle of this country’s intellectual leadership—and a startling dramatization of the fundamental problem: today’s inverted moral priorities.

The representatives of the men who are of greatest importance to this country’s production and are most needed today—the businessmen—were quiet, earnest, undemanding, and concerned (a little too selflessly) with the state of the economy as a whole.

The representatives of the men next in importance to production—organized labor—were louder and more self-assertive; but, with the exception of a few demagogues, they assumed the responsibility of concern with national problems.

The representatives of the men who contribute nothing—the welfare recipients, the professional consumerists, the nonproducers, the objects of public charity—were the loudest, the most aggressive, the most self-righteously arrogant and hostile. They made demands, displaying the kind of conventional “selfishness” —the greedy, grasping, grabbing kind—which is usually ascribed to a rich magnate in leftist cartoons. They shouted, screamed, hissed accusations and commands in the tone of conquerors delivering ultimatums to their cowed, vanquished serfs. Their message, in effect, was that the needs of the nonproducers are a first mortgage on the nation and must be met regardless of what happens to the rest of the country. How? They scorned the necessity to think of an answer. The answer was loudly implicit in their manner: Somehow.

Acting as if need conferred on their clients a special privilege superseding reality—as if the needy had rights denied to the rest of mankind—they flaunted the consumption-oriented, range-of-the-moment, hand-to-mouth mentality that sees economics in terms of hunger, not of production, seeks “fairness” in terms of equalizing the hunger, and stands ready to devour the rest of the country (this country, where—according to their own leaders—poverty is not absolute, but “relative”).

Nobody (with a very few exceptions) answered them or protested at that conference. Why did the reputable politicians, the economists, the businessmen keep silent in the face of outrageous abuse? Why did they allow the deadly, illiterate nonsense to proliferate without opposition? Why did they listen respectfully, apologetically, “compassionately,” and promise more help to egalitarian savages? There is only one power that could paralyze the country’s leaders, a power more potent than the power of money, of professional knowledge, even of political force: the power of morality. This was what the inverted morality of altruism accomplished, this was the kind of moral cowardice, intellectual disintegration, professional dishonesty, and patriotic default it led to in practice, at a time of national emergency.

There is a group of economists who deserved it: the so-called “conservatives” who claim that economics has nothing to do with morality.

28

Hunger and Freedom

by Ayn Rand

This article, a follow-up to “The Inverted Moral Priorities,” was published in the next issue of The Ayn Rand Letter, dated July 29, 1974; again, it was written several months later than this date.

I hope that my [recent articles] have helped you to see the cannibalistic nature of altruism in action and the extent to which it is devouring this country. But you have not yet heard the whole story.

At a time like the present—when this country is threatened with economic collapse under the burden of supporting millions of nonproductive citizens, and the heavier burden of the parasites-on-parasitism: the welfare-state bureaucracy—a new campaign is being sneaked up on us, softly, tentatively, but insistently: a campaign to load us with the responsibility of feeding the whole world.

No, that campaign does not mean it symbolically or allegorically or oratorically, or in the form of aspirational mush—but literally, officially, permanently, by law and by force. (I do not know which is more evil in this context: those who believe that that mush is an idealistic aspiration or those who cash in on it. I am inclined to say: the former.)

An interesting trial balloon was sent up in a column by Anthony Lewis, entitled “The Politics of Hunger” (The New York Times, October 24, 1974). It is particularly interesting (and revealing) in its implications, which the columnist, apparently, did not see and does not consider.

In its own journalistic terms, the column is honestly factual: it presents the problem clearly and offers no solution (except in murky hints). It starts with: “On the current trends of population and food production, according to international experts, by 1985 the poor countries of the world would need 85 million tons of grain a year from outside. In a year of bad harvests, the need could be 100 million tons, or even more.” And: “Before the problem of moving that much food, there are the questions of how to grow it and pay for it. At today’s prices, 100 million tons of cereals would cost something approaching $20 billion. Haiti and Bangladesh and the thirty other food-short countries will not have the foreign exchange to pay for it. Who will?” This, properly, is the first question to ask. (The column does not answer it.)

That is the scale of the issues facing the World Food Conference in Rome starting Nov. 5. Public discussion of the food problem understandably tends to focus on immediate matters, such as the amount of American aid to hold off imminent mass starvation in South Asia. But the conference is meant to take a longer view, and that means dealing with the most fundamental issues of population , resources and the wealth of nations. [Emphasis added.]

It sure does. (No such issues were raised at that conference.)

Mr. Lewis indicates, “State Department officials preparing for the conference seem modestly hopeful of agreed progress in defining the problems”—and lists some of the points they “sketch.” One such point reads: “There must be intensified international efforts to increase food production in the less developed countries, for example by scientific improvements in tropical agriculture.”

“Scientific improvement” means technology. How would they reconcile it with the worldwide assault on science and technology by ecological crusaders, who demand a return to “unspoiled” nature? Those starving populations are certainly living in the midst of “unspoiled,” untouched nature. Which fundamental goal are the world-planners going to pursue: production or ecology? And how will the scientists function in countries where science is banned, reason is a hated enemy, and the crudest mystic superstitions rule the people’s lives, traditions, and rudimentary culture? What self-respecting scientist would want to work in such conditions—and why should he? Neither the column nor, I am sure, the State Department answers any of these questions.

The paragraph continues: “But for the foreseeable future there will be dependence on imports from a handful of surplus countries, primarily the U.S., Canada, Australia, Argentina, and the Common Market.” Ask yourself: What do these countries (with one exception) have in common? Two paragraphs later, Mr. Lewis says that the American delegates expect another conference after the one in Rome, “a negotiating conference among the major grain-exporting countries and the big consistent importers: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan, the Soviet Union, and China.” What do these countries (also with one exception) have in common?

The column offers some vague hints about someone’s proposal to establish world grain reserves, and to agree on “who should contribute how much ... in what would amount to an international system of national reserves.” (?) There is even an indication of what is the immediate, “practical” goal behind that food conference and what sort of deadly game is being played. “Secretary Kissinger is said by his associates to see the food issue now as a crucial example of the new interdependence of nations.”

The game, apparently, is to trick the Arabs into some sort of One-World Economic Order which would enable us to barter our grain for their oil (if they don’t outsmart us). And this is the sort of lofty purpose for which somebody is willing to sell America’s soul, her sovereignty, her freedom, and your standard of living. The alleged justification is global need, compassion, altruism. To pragmatists of this kind, altruism is the window dressing, the bait that lures the victims to slaughter.

(This is an interesting example of today’s alliance between the “practical” men and the intellectuals—an alliance based on mutual contempt, with each side believing that it is using the other. The “practical” men are willing to adopt any currently fashionable ideology in exchange for some material advantage of the moment. The intellectuals are willing to support any “practical” policy that leads toward their own long-range ideological goals. In this case, the “practical” men want oil; the intellectuals want One World.)

Mr. Lewis seems to see a little further than the “practical” diplomats. He seems to take altruism seriously—and he is pressing for the logical consequences of such international schemes. His concluding paragraph states:

All of the thought on reserve mechanisms, hard as it is, only touches the surface of the world food problem. Underneath there is the question of money—the need for the less developed countries to have enough of it so the U.S. and others can go all-out in food production for them. Aid can hardly make a dent in that need. In the long run there must be real transfers of purchasing power, and that in turn raises the whole question of the oil producers and their responsibility as well as ours. [Emphasis added.]

And this in turn raises the whole question of what is purchasing power and whether it can be “transferred.”

In my [article in Philosophy: Who Needs It] on “Egalitarianism and Inflation,” I said that money cannot function as money, i.e., as a medium of exchange, unless it is backed by actual, unconsumed goods. Mr. Lewis’s last paragraph is a nice bit of evidence to support my contention. If money does not have to be backed by goods, why do the less developed countries need it so badly? Why can’t their governments print more paper currency? Why are the U.S. and others unable to go all-out in food production, without receiving any payment for it? Why doesn’t the need—the desperate need—of the consumers endow them with purchasing power?

Obviously, purchasing power is an attribute of producers, not of consumers. Purchasing power is a consequence of production: it is the power of possessing goods which one can trade for other goods. A “purchase” is an exchange of goods (or services) for goods (or services). Any other form of transferring goods from one person to another may belong to many different categories of transactions, but it is not a purchase. It may be a gift, a loan, an inheritance, a handout, a fraud, a theft, a robbery, a burglary, an expropriation. In regard to services, however (omitting temporary or occasional acts of friendship, in which the payment is the friend’s value), there is only one alternative to trading: unpaid services, i.e., slavery.

How can you “transfer purchasing power” to people who are unwilling or unable to produce? You can transfer your goods to them without payment—by means of one of the transactions listed above—but if you then receive from them the goods which you produced, in payment for the goods which you are now producing, this cannot be designated as a “purchase” even by the sloppiest of today’s linguistic usage. And even if we all agreed so to designate it, how long would we be able to continue producing under a system of that kind? How would we accumulate the stock seed of production, i.e., unconsumed goods?

If you are sick (as I am) of hearing such accusations as “Americans represent only 6 percent of the world population, but consume 54 percent of its natural resources,” ask the accusers: “How can 6 percent of the world population feed 94 percent of it?” (This is the ultimate intention of all international-feeding schemes.)

But the real question goes deeper than that. The real question lies in those “most fundamental issues of population, resources, and the wealth of nations” which Mr. Lewis mentioned, but did not discuss. Why are some nations wealthy and others not? Why do some nations produce abundance and others starve? The answer, strangely enough, is contained (implicitly) in Mr. Lewis’s column—and one can see it, without any further research, if one accepts his facts as facts (which they are).

Let us go back to the two groups of countries he lists. The “handful of [grain] surplus countries [are] primarily the U.S., Canada, Australia, Argentina, and the Common Market.” The “big consistent [grain] importers [are] India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan, the Soviet Union, and China.” The surplus countries are semi-free economies, with a century of greater freedom behind them and, in various degrees, some traditional remnants and memories of freedom. (The exception is Argentina, a semi-dictatorship in bad economic shape, but traditionally an agricultural country.) The grain importers, which live under a chronic threat of hunger, are socialist and communist dictatorships. (The exception is Japan, which, however, has never been a free country, and which is geographically unable to develop its agriculture to any significant extent.)

The relevance of two of Mr. Lewis’s “fundamental issues” breaks down in the light of his own lists. “Population” and “resources” do not determine “the wealth of nations.” The countries of Europe’s Common Market are as densely populated as most of the countries on the hunger list. Russia has greater natural resources than the U.S., but they are untouched and unused.

It is the presence of Russia on the hunger list that blasts all modern economic theories out of the realm of serious consideration. Under the inept government of the czars and with the most primitive methods of agriculture, Russia was a major grain exporter. The unusually fertile soil of the Ukraine alone was (and is) capable of feeding the entire world. Whatever natural conditions are required for growing wheat, Russia had (and has) them in overabundance. That Russia should now be on a list of hungry, wheat-begging importers is the most damning indictment of a collectivist economy that reality can offer us.

The simple, metaphysical fact—which no man-made wishes or edicts can alter—is that individual freedom is the precondition of human productivity and, therefore, of abundance, and, therefore, of the wealth of nations. The history of mankind bears witness to this fact—particularly, the prosperity explosion of the nineteenth century (the century dominated by capitalism), as against the millennia of stagnant misery under every variant of “democratically” or autocratically controlled economy.

(If you hear it said that that prosperity was caused by an abundance of natural resources, which are now exhausted, remember that similar allegations and dire warnings were voiced by statists from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and that they were prompted by the same motives. Furthermore, at the turn of this century, there were voices claiming that all possible forms of industrial production had been discovered and we could expect nothing but general decline. This was said before the invention of the electric light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, the telegraph, the movies, radio, television, atomic motors, spaceships, etc.)

The simple, metaphysical fact is that man by nature is not equipped to survive “in nature.” His mind is his basic tool of survival, and his mind creates three life-supporting achievements: science, technology, industrial production. Without these, he cannot wrest sufficient sustenance from nature to fill his immediate, physical needs. In the pre-industrial era, population control was accomplished by starvation: a periodic famine, every twenty years, wiped out the surplus population, which the hand plows and hand looms of Europe were unable to feed. The famines were assisted by periodic wars, which tribal rulers waged in order to loot one another’s precarious sustenance. The famines (and the world wars) stopped with the coming of the Industrial Revolution—and, in the nineteenth century, the population of Europe rose by over three hundred percent.

Today, as freedom vanishes from an ever larger area of the globe, famine is coming back—mass famine killing off the millions of human beings whom controlled economies are unable to feed.

In the face of a spectacle of this kind, what are we to think of those alleged humanitarians who plead with us for help and compassion, screaming that the horror of mass starvation supersedes all selfish political concerns? Does it?

If a self-respecting American industrialist were to declare that he cannot and will not help the starving because his productive capacity is not unlimited and he has no desire to descend to a Haitian’s standard of living—it is easy to imagine the howls of indignation we would hear from today’s intellectuals. Why are they practicing a double standard? Why do they scream that the needs of the hungry supersede our lives, freedom, future, and all values—except their hatred of capitalism? Why do they ask us to sacrifice everything—while they refuse to sacrifice their power lust or their mental lethargy long enough to discover the cure, the only cure, of global starvation?

While you consider these questions, consider also the following facts: contemporary history has demonstrated that the lives of the people, of the broad masses, have not been improved under any collectivist system, but have been reduced to hopeless misery. But there have been profiteers under every such system: the ruling bureaucracy—the parasites-on-parasitism—the wretched handful of pretentious mediocrities who, unable to compete on a free market, extort an unearned “prestige” and a luxurious living from “the sores of the poor and the blood of the rich.”

These are the men who would let mankind starve, but will not relinquish their power—these are the men to whom the world is being sacrificed—these, not the poor brutes of Russia, China, or India who are perishing because the last of their meager earnings has been plundered to support the nuclear armaments of their rulers.

It is to these rulers that we are now asked to sacrifice the last, best hope on earth: the United States of America.

Such is the nature of altruism.

29

How Not to Fight Against Socialized Medicine

by Ayn Rand

In the spring of 1962, some two hundred New Jersey doctors, led by Dr. J. Bruce Henriksen, signed a resolution of protest against the Kennedy Administration’s King-Anderson bill, which was the precursor of President Johnson’s Medicare program. The doctors stated that they would treat the indigent aged without charge, but would not treat anyone whose medical care was financed under the Kennedy plan. The King-Anderson bill was soon afterwards defeated in Congress.

The following is a condensed version of a talk delivered on February 6, 1963 at a meeting of the Ocean County Medical Society of New Jersey, to which Dr. Henriksen and his group belonged. These remarks were published in The Objectivist Newsletter, March 1963.

I am happy to have this opportunity to express my admiration for Dr. Henriksen and the group of doctors who signed his resolution.

Dr. Henriksen and his group took a heroic stand. The storm of vicious denunciations unleashed against them at the time showed that they had delivered a dangerous blow to the welfare-statists. More than any other single factor, it was Dr. Henriksen’s group that demonstrated to the public the real nature of the issue, prevented the passage of the King-Anderson bill and saved this country from socialized medicine—so far.

Their action was an eloquent example of the fact that only a strong, uncompromising stand—a stand of moral self-confidence, on clear-cut, consistent principles—can win.

But there are grave danger signs that the medical profession as a whole—iike every other group today—will ignore that example and pursue the usual modern policy of caution and compromise. Such a policy is worse than futile: it assists and promotes the victory of one’s own enemies. The battle is not over. The King-Anderson bill will be brought up again, and if the doctors are defeated, they will be defeated by their own hand, or rather: by their own mind.

I want, therefore, to make certain suggestions to the medical profession—on the subject of how not to fight against socialized medicine.

The majority of people in this country—and in the world—do not want to adopt socialism; yet it is growing. It is growing because its victims concede its basic moral premises. Without challenging these premises, one cannot win.

The strategy of the Kennedy administration, and of all welfare-statists, consists of attempts to make people accept certain intellectual “package deals,” without letting them identify and differentiate the various elements—and equivocations—involved. The deadliest of such “package deals” is the attempt to make people accept the collectivist-altruist principle of self-immolation under the guise of mere kindness, generosity, or charity. It is done by hammering into people’s minds the idea that need supersedes all rights—that the need of some men is a first mortgage on the lives of others—and that everything should be sacrificed to the undefined, undefinable grab bag known as “the public interest.”

Doctors have no chance to win if they concede that idea and help their enemies to propagate it.

Yet the ideological policy of most spokesmen for the medical profession—such as the A.M.A.—is as permeated by the collectivist-altruist spirit as the pronouncements of the welfare-statists. The doctors’ spokesmen declare, in net effect, that selfless service to their patients is the doctors’ only goal, that concern for the needy is their only motive, and that “the public interest” is the only justification of their battle.

The sole difference is this: the voices of the welfare-statists are brazenly, self-righteously overbearing—while the voices of the doctors’ spokesmen are guiltily, evasively apologetic.

Whom can one expect the people to believe and to follow?

People can always sense guilt, insincerity, hypocrisy. The lack of a morally righteous tone, the absence of moral certainty, have a disastrous effect on an audience—an effect which is not improved by the triviality of the arguments over political minutiae. And the terrible thing is that the doctors’ spokesmen give an impression of guilty evasiveness while the right is on their side. They do it by being afraid to assert their rights.

They are afraid of it because they do not believe that they possess any rights—because they have conceded the enemy’s premises—because they have no moral base, no intellectual guide lines, no ideology, no defense.

Consider, for instance, the outcome of the Canadian doctors’ struggle in Saskatchewan. The doctors had gone on strike [in 1962] against the full-scale socialized medicine instituted by the provincial government. They won the battle—and lost the war; in exchange for a few superficial concessions, they surrendered the principle for which they had been fighting: to permit no socialized medicine in the Western hemisphere.

They surrendered even though the overwhelming sympathy and support of the Canadian people were on their side (except for the intellectuals and the labor unions). They were defeated not by the power of the socialists, but by the gaping holes in their own ideological armor.

They had been fighting, properly, in the name of individual rights, against the enslavement of medicine by totalitarian-statist controls. Then, under the pressure of the usual intellectual lynching, under the hysterical, collectivist charges of “antisocial selfishness and greed,” they made a shocking change in their stand. Declaring, in effect, that their rebellion was not directed against socialized medicine as such, but against the high-handed, arbitrary manner in which the government had put it over, their spokesmen began to argue that the government plan did not represent “the will of the people.” The ideological kiss of death was a statement by Dr. Dalgleish, the strikers’ leader, who declared that if a plebiscite were taken and the people voted for it, the doctors would accept socialized medicine.

Could they deserve to win after that? They could not and did not.

Consider the full meaning of Dr. Dalgleish’s statement. It meant the total repudiation of individual rights and the acceptance of unlimited majority rule, of the collectivist doctrine that the people’s vote may dispose of an individual in any way it pleases. Instead of a battle for the integrity of a doctor’s professional judgment and practice, it became a battle over who should violate his integrity. Instead of a battle against the enslavement of medicine, it became a battle over who should enslave it. Instead of a battle for freedom, it became a battle over a choice of masters. Instead of a moral crusade, it became a petty quarrel over political technicalities.

This led to the ludicrous spectacle of the alleged individualists arguing for democratic mob rule, and the socialists righteously upholding the parliamentary form of government.

Those who doubt the power of ideas should note the fact that the doctors’ surrender took place five days after Dr. Dalgleish’s statement.

The text of the agreement reached between the doctors and the government contained the following horrifying sentence: “The doctors fear that if the government becomes their only source of income they are in danger of becoming servants of the state and not servants of their patients.” [Emphasis added.]

A more abject statement of self-abnegation could not be hoped for or extorted by the most extreme collectivist.

No self-respecting labor union would declare that its members are “servants” of their employers. It took so-called “conservatives” to declare that professional men—and of so responsible, so demanding, so unusually skilled a profession as medicine—are the “servants” of their patients or of anyone who pays them.

The concept of “service” has been turned into a collectivist “package deal” by means of a crude equivocation and a cruder evasion. In the language of economics, the word “service” means work offered for trade on a free market, to be paid for by those who choose to buy it. In a free society, men deal with one another by voluntary, uncoerced exchange, by mutual consent to mutual profit, each man pursuing his own rational self-interest, none sacrificing himself or others; and all values—whether goods or services—are traded, not given away.

This is the opposite of what the word “service” means in the language of altruist ethics: to an altruist, “service” means unrewarded, self-sacrificial, unilateral giving, while receiving nothing in return. It is this sort of selfless “service” to “society” that collectivists demand of all men.

One of the grotesque phenomena of the twentieth century is the fact that the “package deal” of “service” is most vociferously propagated by the “conservatives.” Intellectually bankrupt, possessing no political philosophy, no direction, no goal, but clinging desperately to the ethics of altruism, such “conservatives” rest their case on a cheap equivocation: they proclaim that “service” to others (to one’s customers or clients or patients or “consumers” in general) is the motive power and the moral justification of a free society—and evade the question of whether such “services” are or are not to be paid for.

But if “service” to the “consumers” is our primary goal, why should these masters pay us or grant us any rights? Why shouldn’t they dictate the terms and conditions of our work?

If socialized medicine comes to the United States, it is such “conservatives” that the doctors would have to thank for it, as well as their own spokesmen who recklessly play with an intellectual poison of that kind.

Doctors are not the servants of their patients. No free man is a “servant” of those he deals with. Doctors are traders, like everyone else in a free society—and they should bear that title proudly, considering the crucial importance of the services they offer.

The pursuit of his own productive career is—and, morally, should be—the primary goal of a doctor’s work, as it is the primary goal of any self-respecting, productive man. But there is no clash of interests among rational men in a free society, and there is no clash of interests between doctors and patients. In pursuing his own career, a doctor does have to do his best for the welfare of his patients. This relationship, however, cannot be reversed: one cannot sacrifice the doctor’s interests, desires, and freedom to whatever the patients (or their politicians) might deem to be their own “welfare.”

Many doctors know this, but are afraid to assert their rights, because they dare not challenge the morality of altruism, neither in the public’s mind nor in their own. Others are collectivists at heart, who believe that socialized medicine is morally right and who feel guilty while opposing it. Still others are so cynically embittered that they believe that the whole country consists of fools or parasites eager to get something for nothing—that morality and justice are futile—that ideas are impotent—that the cause of freedom is doomed—and that the doctors’ only chance lies in borrowing the enemy’s arguments and gaining a brief span of borrowed time.

This last is usually regarded as the “practical” attitude for “conservatives.”

But nobody is as naive as a cynic, and nothing is as impractical as the attempt to win by conceding the enemy’s premises. How many defeats and disasters will collectivism’s victims have to witness before they become convinced of it?

In any issue, it is the most consistent of the adversaries who wins. One cannot win on the enemy’s premises, because he is then the more consistent, and all of one’s efforts serve only to propagate his principles.

Most people in this country are not moochers who seek the unearned, not even today. But if all their intellectual leaders and the doctors themselves tell them that doctors are only their “selfless servants,” they will feel justified in expecting and demanding unearned services.

When a politician tells them that they are entitled to the unearned, they are wise enough to suspect his motives; but when the proposed victim, the doctor, says it too, they feel that socialization is safe.

If you are afraid of people’s irrationality, you will not protect yourself by assuring them that their irrational notions are right.

The advocates of “Medicare” admit that their purpose is not help to the needy, the sick, or the aged. Their purpose is to spare people “the embarrassment” of a means test—that is, to establish the principle and precedent that some people are entitled to the unrewarded services of others, not as charity, but as a right.

Can you placate, conciliate, temporize, or compromise with a principle of that kind?

As doctors, what would you say if someone told you that you must not try to cure a deadly disease—you must give it some chance—you must reach a “compromise” with cancer or with coronary thrombosis or with leprosy? You would answer that it is a battle of life or death. The same is true of your political battle.

Would you follow the advice of someone who told you that you must fight tuberculosis by confining the treatment to its symptoms—that you must treat the cough, the high temperature, the loss of weight—but must refuse to consider or to touch its cause, the germs in the patient’s lungs, in order not to antagonize the germs?

Do not adopt such a course in politics. The principle—and the consequences—are the same. It is a battle of life or death.

30

Medicine: The Death of a Profession

by Leonard Peikoff

This lecture was delivered at the Ford Hall Forum on April 14, 1985, more than twenty years after Ayn Rand’s talk to the New Jersey doctors, and was published in The Objectivist Forum, April—June 1985. I wish to acknowledge the invaluable assistance given to me in the preparation of this lecture by my brother, Dr. Michael Peikoff, who is a surgeon in Nevada.

One day, when you are out of town on a business trip, you wake up with a cough, muscle aches, chills, and a high fever. You do not know what it is, you start to panic, but you do know one action to take: you call a doctor. He conducts a physical exam, takes a history, administers lab tests, narrows down the possibilities; within hours, he reaches a diagnosis of pneumonia and prescribes a course of treatment, including antibiotics. Soon you begin to respond, you relax, the crisis is over. Or: you are getting out of your car, you fall and break your leg. It is a disaster, but you remain calm, because you can utter one sentence to your wife: “Call the doctor.” He proceeds to examine your leg for nerve and blood-vessel injury, he takes X rays, reduces the fracture, puts on a cast; the disaster has faded into a mere inconvenience, and you resume your normal life. Or: your child comes home from school with a stabbing pain in the abdomen. There is only one hope: you call the doctor. He performs an appendectomy—the child recovers.

We take all this completely for granted, as though modern drugs, modern hospitals, and modern doctors were facts of nature, which always had been there and which always will be there. Many people today take for granted not only the simpler kinds of medical intervention, but even the wonder cures and wonder treatments that the medical profession has painstakingly devised—like the latest radiation therapy for breast cancer, or the intricate delicacy of modern brain surgery, or such a breathtaking achievement as the artificial-heart implants performed by Dr. William C. DeVries. Most of us expect that the doctors will go on accomplishing such feats routinely, steadily removing pain and thus enhancing the quality of our life, while adding ever more years to its quantity.

America’s medical system is the envy of the globe. The rich from every other country, when they get sick, do not head for Moscow or Stockholm or even London anymore; they come here. And in some way, despite the many public complaints against the medical profession, we all know this fact; we know how good our doctors are, and how much we depend on their knowledge, skill, and dedication. Suppose you had to go on a six-month ocean voyage with no stops in port, with ample provisions and sailors, but with only one additional profession represented on board, and you could decide which it would be. Would you ask for your lawyer to come along? your accountant? your congressman ? Would you dare even to ask for your favorite movie star? Or would you say: “Bring a doctor. What if something happens?” The terror of having no answer to this question is precisely what the medical profession saves us from.

I am not saying that all doctors are perfect—they are not; or that they all have a good bedside manner—they do not; or that the profession is free from flaws—like every other group today, the medical profession has its share of errors, deficiencies, weaknesses. But these are not my subject tonight, and they do not alter two facts: that our doctors, whatever their failings, do give us the highest caliber health care in world history—and that they live a grueling existence in order to do so.

I come from a medical family, and I can tell you what a doctor’s life is like. Most of them study nonstop for years in medical school and then work nonstop until they die. My own father, who was a surgeon, operated daily from 7 A.M. until noon and then made hospital rounds; from 2 to 6 P.M., he held office hours. When he came home for dinner, if he did, the phone never stopped ringing—it was nurses asking instructions, or doctors discussing emergency cases, or patients presenting symptoms. When he got the chance, usually late at night or on Sundays after rounds, he would read medical journals (or write for them), to keep abreast of the latest research. My father was not an exception. This is how most doctors, in any branch of medicine, live, and how they work.

The profession imposes not only killing hours, but also continuous tension: doctors deal all the time with crisis—with accidents, diseases, trauma, disaster, the imminence of death. Even when an ailment is not a mortal threat, the patient often fears that it is, and he must be reassured, nursed through the terror, even counseled psychologically by the physician. The pressure on the doctor never lets up. If he wants to escape even for the space of a single dinner on the town, chances are that he cannot: he will probably get beeped and have to rush to the emergency room just as the entrée is being served.

The doctor not only has to live and work in such a pressure cooker, he has to think all the time—clearly, objectively, scientifically. Medicine is a field that requires a vast body of specialized theoretical knowledge; to apply it properly to particular cases, the doctor must regularly make delicate, excruciatingly complex decisions. Medical treatment is not usually a cut-and-dried affair, involving a simple, self-evident course of action; it requires the balancing of countless variables; it requires clinical judgment. And the doctor must not only exercise such judgment—he must do it fast; typically, he has to act now. He cannot petition the court or his client or any employer for a postponement. He faces daily, hourly, the merciless timetable of nature itself.

What I personally admire most about doctors is the fact that they live this kind of life not out of any desire for altruistic self-sacrifice, but selfishly—which is the only thing that enables them to survive it. They love the field, most of them; they find the work a fascinating challenge in applied science. They are proud men, most of them, with an earned pride in their ability to observe, evaluate, act, cure. And, to their credit, they expect to be rewarded materially for their skill; they want to make a good living, which is the least men can offer them in payment for their achievements. They make that living, as a rule, by standing on their own, not as cogs in some faceless, government-subsidized enterprise, but as entrepreneurs in private practice. The doctors are among the last of the capitalist breed left in this country. They are among the last of the individualists that once populated this great nation.

If I knew nothing about today’s world but the nature of our politicians and the philosophy represented by the medical profession, I would predict an inevitable, catastrophic clash between the two: between the government and the doctors. On purely theoretical grounds, I would predict the destruction of the doctors by the government, which in every field now protects and rewards the exact opposite of thought, effort, and achievement.

This catastrophe is actually taking place. It will affect your future as well as that of the doctors.

To understand what is happening in medicine today, we must go back to the beginning, which in this case is 1965, the year when Medicare and Medicaid were finally pushed through Congress by Lyndon Johnson. Medicare covers most of the medical expenses of those over sixty-five, whatever their income. Medicaid is a supplemental program for the poor of any age.

Those of us who opposed the Johnson plan argued at the time that government intervention in medicine is immoral in principle and would be disastrous in practice. No man, we claimed, has a right to medical care; if he cannot pay for what he needs, then he must depend on voluntary charity. Government financing of medical expenses, we argued, even if it is for only a fraction of the population, necessarily means eventual enslavement of the doctors and, as a result, a profound deterioration in the quality of medical care for everyone, including the aged and the poor.

The proponents of Medicare were unmoved by any arguments. Altruistic service to the needy, they said, is man’s duty. It is degrading, they said, for the elderly to be dependent on private charity; a “means test” is incompatible with human dignity. Besides, they added, the government would not dream of asking for any control over the doctors or over their methods of patient care. All we want the state to do, they said, is pay the bills.

It is now twenty years later. Let us look at what actually happened.

The first result of the new programs should have been self-evident. Suppose we apply the same principle to nutrition. Suppose President Johnson had said: “It is unfair for you to have to pay for your own food and restaurant bills. Men have a right to eat. Washington, therefore, will pick up the tab.” Can you project the results? Can you imagine the eating binges, the sudden mania for dining out, the soaring demand for baked peacock tongues and other gourmet delicacies? Do you see Lutèce and the “21” Club becoming nationally franchised and starting to outdraw McDonald’s? Why not? The eaters do not have to pay for it. And the food industry, including its most sincere members, is ecstatic; now that the money is pouring from Washington into the grocery chains and the restaurants, they can give every customer the kind of luxury treatment once reserved for millionaires. Everybody is happy—except that expenditure on food becomes so great a percentage of our GNP, and the drain on the federal treasury becomes so ominous, that every other industry starts to protest and soon even the bureaucrats begin to panic.

This is what happened to medical spending in the United States. The patients covered by the new programs no longer had to pay much attention to cost—that was the whole purpose of the programs. And the health-care professionals at first were generally delighted. Now, many of them felt, the sky is the limit, and they proceeded to build hospitals, purchase equipment, and administer tests accordingly. Medical expenditures in the U.S. were 4.3% of GNP in 1952; today they are about 11% and still rising. Medicare expenditures doubled from 1974 to 1979, doubled again by 1984, and are expected to double again by 1991, at which time, according to current estimates, the Medicare program will be bankrupt. Something, the government recognized, has to be done; we are going broke because of the insatiable demand for medical care.

The government did not decide to cancel its programs and return to a free market in medicine—when are disastrous government programs ever canceled? Instead, it did what governments always do: it decided to keep the programs but impose rigid controls on them. The first step was a campaign to force hospitals not to spend much on Medicare patients, no matter what the effects on the health of those patients.

We will no longer, officials said, pay hospitals a fee for each service they render a Medicare patient. That method of payment, they said, simply encourages spending. Instead, we will pay according to a new principle, DRGs. DRGs represent the first major assault by the government against the doctors and their patients. It is not yet the strangulation of the medical profession. But it is the official dropping of the noose around their necks.

DRG means “diagnosis-related group.” According to this approach, the government has divided all ailments into 468 possible diagnoses, and has set in advance a fixed, arbitrary fee for each: it will pay a hospital only what it claims is the average cost of the ailment. For example, for a Medicare patient in the Western Mountain region who is admitted to a hospital with a heart attack and finally recovers enough to go home, the government now pays the hospital exactly $5,094—no more and no less. And it pays this amount no matter what the hospital does for the patient, no matter how long his stay or how short, no matter how many services he requires or how few. If the patient costs the hospital more than the government payment, the hospital loses money on him. If he costs less, the hospital makes a profit.

Here is a fictional story now in process of becoming reality around the country. A man suffering from severe chest pains is taken by ambulance to the hospital. He receives certain standard tests, including a cardiogram, then is moved to the Intensive Care Unit, where his vital signs are continuously monitored. His doctor thinks that in this instance a further test, an angiogram, is urgently indicated; this test would outline the arteries of the heart and indicate if one is about to close off, an event that could be fatal. The hospital administrator protests: “An angiogram is expensive. It costs up to $1,000, about 20% of our total fee for this man, and who knows what else he’s still going to cost us? You can’t prove this test is necessary. Let’s wait and see.” The test is not given. Maybe the patient lives, maybe not. Several days later, the administrator comes to the doctor: “You’ve got to get this man out of the ICU. It’s costing almost $800 per day, and he’s been here now for five days. What with everything else, we’ve already spent almost the whole payment we get for him.” The doctor thinks that the patient still desperately needs the specialized nursing available only in the ICU. The administrator overrules him. “There’s an area of judgment here,” he says. “We’ll just have to take a bit of a chance on this case.”

Or: the doctor decides that the patient is an excellent candidate for remedial heart surgery. A bypass operation, he thinks, would probably prolong the man’s life considerably while relieving him of pain. But the man, after all, is elderly and the operation would involve a lengthy hospital stay. “Let’s try a more conservative treatment first,” the administrator says, “let’s give him some medication and wait and see.” Again, maybe the patient lives, maybe not.

Let us say that he lives and is moved to a bed in the regular ward. He still feels very weak, and the doctor does not think he is anywhere near ready to be discharged. But the $5,094 has long since been spent, and the administrator starts to wonder aloud: “Maybe this man could manage somehow at home. In any event, he’s eating us alive—get him out of here.” Maybe the patient will survive at home, maybe not.

Do you see the thrust of the system? If the hospital does relatively little for the patient, it makes money; if it provides an extensive range of services, it loses heavily. The best case from its viewpoint is for the patient to die right after admission: the hospital still gets the full fee. The worst case is for him to survive with complications and require a lengthy stay—which is why some hospitals are refusing to admit patients they fear will linger on too long.

I do not mean to suggest that our hospitals are now callously withholding urgently needed treatment from Medicare patients. Today’s hospitals and doctors do have integrity; most are continuing to do their best for the patient. The point is that they have to do it within the DRG constraints. The issue is not simply: treat the patient or let him die. The issue is: treat him how? At what cost? With what range of services, specialists, and equipment? With what degree of safety or of risk? This is the area where there is enormous room for alternatives in the quality of medical treatment. And this is the area that is now in the process of being slashed across the board for Medicare patients, the very people singled out by the liberals in the 1960s as needing better medical care.

To revert to our nutrition analogy: it is as though the government socialized eating out, paying restaurants only what it computed to be the average cost per meal. There would then be a powerful incentive for restaurants to cut corners in every imaginable way—to serve only the cheapest foods in the smallest amounts in the cheesiest settings. What do you think would happen to the nation’s eaters—and its chefs—under such a setup? How long could the chefs preserve their dedication to preparing haute cuisine, when the restaurant owners, in self-preservation, were forced to fight them at every step and to demand junk food instead?

There is now a new and deadly pressure on the doctors, which continuously threatens the independence and integrity of their medical judgment: the pressure to cave in to arbitrary DRG economies, while blanking out the effects on the patient. In some places, hospitals are offering special financial incentives to the physician whose expenditure per patient averages out to be relatively low. For example, the hospital might subsidize such a doctor’s office rent or purchase new equipment for him. On the other hand, a doctor who insists on quality care for his Medicare patients and thereby drives up costs is likely to incur the hospital’s displeasure. In the extreme case, the doctor risks being denied staff privileges, which means cutting off his major source of livelihood. Thanks to DRGs, a new conflict is in the offing, just starting to take shape: the patient vs. the hospital. To put it another way, the conflict is: doctors vs. hospitals—doctors fighting a rearguard action to maintain standards against hospitals that are forced by the government to become cost-cutting ogres. How would you like to practice a profession in which half your mind is devoted to healing the patient, while the other half is trying to appease a hospital administrator who himself is trying to appease some official in Washington?

Medicare patients are not a small group. Because of their age, they constitute a significant part of most doctors’ practice. Medicare patients now make up about fifty percent of all hospital admissions in the U.S.

The defenders of DRGs answer all criticisms by saying that costs simply must be cut. Even under complete capitalism, they say, doctors could not give unlimited treatment to every patient. This is true, but it ignores two crucial facts. (1) It is because of government programs that medical prices have soared to the point of being out of reach for masses of patients. This was not true in the days of private medicine. The average American a generation ago could afford quality, in medicine as in every other area of life, without courting bankruptcy. (2) Even if a patient could not afford it, at least, in the pre-welfare-state era, he was told the truth: as a rule, he was told about the treatment options available, and it was up to him, in consultation with his doctor, to weigh the possibilities and decide how to cut costs. But under the present system, the hospital not only has to cut services drastically—it is to its interest to conceal this fact from the patient. If he or his family ever learns that the angiogram he is not going to have, or the heart surgery, would make all the difference to the outcome of his case, he would immediately protest, insist on the service, even threaten to launch a malpractice suit. The system is rigged to squeezing every drop of quality out of medical care, so long as the patient does not understand what is happening. The patient does not know medicine; he relies on the doctor’s integrity to tell him what services are available and necessary in his case—yet, increasingly, the hospitals must try to batter down that integrity. They must try to make the doctor keep silent and not tell the patient the full truth.

The Medicare patient is no longer a free man to be accorded dignity and respect, but a puppet on the dole, to be manipulated accordingly—while the doctor is being transformed from a sovereign professional into a mere appendage and accessory, a helpless tool in a government-orchestrated campaign of shoddy quality and deception.

The government’s takeover of medical practice is not confined to public patients; it is starting to extend into the private sector as well. This brings me to the HMOs, which are now mushrooming all over the country.

HMO means “health-maintenance organization.” It could also have been called BBM, for “bargain-basement medicine.” In this setup, a group of doctors, perhaps with their own hospital, offers prepaid, all-inclusive medical care at a cheap rate. For a fixed payment in advance, a payment substantially less than a regular doctor would charge, the patient is guaranteed virtually complete coverage of his medical costs, no matter what they are. The principle here is the same as that of the DRG system: if the patient’s costs exceed his payment, the HMO loses money on him; if not, it makes a profit.

Although HMOs are privately owned, the spread of these organizations is wholly caused by government. There were very few HMOs in the days of private medicine. As part of the government’s campaign to lower the cost of medical care, however, Washington has decided to throw its immense weight behind HMOs, even going so far as to advertise nationally on their behalf and to give them direct financial subsidies.

Hew do HMOs achieve their low rates? In essence, by the DRG method—the method of curtailing services. In this case, however, the cuts in quality are more sweeping, inasmuch as the HMO embraces every aspect of medical care, not merely hospital costs. As a rule, HMO doctors do not have personal patients, nor does the patient have a choice of doctors or even necessarily see the same one twice—that is too expensive. The patient sees whoever is on duty when he shows up; the doctor gives up the luxury of following a case from beginning to end. Nor does the doctor have much time to spend with a given patient—HMOs are generally understaffed to save money; typically, there are long waiting lines of patients. Further, the doctor must obtain prior authorization of any significant expenditure from a highly cost-conscious administrator. The doctor may detect a possible abdominal tumor and request a CAT scan—in effect, an exquisitely detailed, 3-D X ray. But if the administrator says to him: “It costs a lot. I don’t think it’s necessary,” the doctor is helpless. Or he may find that the patient has an aneurysm, a weakening of an artery that is like a time bomb waiting to go off, and he may want to operate to remove it. But the administrator can reply: “These cases often go years without rupturing. Let’s wait awhile.” Like the doctor under DRGs, the HMO doctor ultimately has to obey: he either keeps his costs within the dictated parameters, or he is out of work.

The kind of doctor who is willing or eager to practice medicine under these conditions represents a new breed, new at least in quantity. There is a generation of utterly unambitious young doctors growing up today, especially conspicuous in the HMOs, doctors who are the opposite of the old-fashioned physician in private practice—doctors who want to escape the responsibility of independent thought and judgment, and who are prepared to abandon the prospect of a large income or a private practice in order to achieve this end. These doctors do not mind the forfeit of their professional autonomy to the HMO administrator. They do not object to practicing cut-rate medicine with faceless patients on an assembly-line basis, so long as they themselves can escape blame for any bad results and cover their own tracks. These are the new bureaucratic doctors, the MDs with the mentality, and the fundamental indifference to their job, of the typical post-office clerk.

I hasten to add that there are better doctors in the HMOs (and that some HMOs are better than others). As a rule, however, these better doctors are mercilessly exploited. Being conscientious, they put in longer hours than necessary, trying to make up for the chronic understaffing. They do not give in meekly to arbitrary decrees on cost, but fight the administrator when they feel their own judgment is right. Increasingly, their professional life becomes a series of such fights, which makes them the heavies, hard to get along with and guilty of costing the HMO money—while their lesser colleagues capitulate to the system, do as they are told, and take things easy. Time after time, the better men step in to bail out such colleagues, struggling to correct their errors, clean up their messes, rescue their patients. At a certain point, however, the better doctors get fed up.

An HMO doctor in California, a qualified internist and a highly conscientious woman, told me the following story. “I was looking through a pile of cardiograms one day,” she said, “and I saw one that was clearly abnormal. I knew that the man should be taken by ambulance to the emergency room for retesting and possible hospitalization. Then I thought: it’s late Friday afternoon, and it’s going to take an hour and a half, and I’m not being paid for the extra work, and who will know if I wait until Monday? I was tempted for a minute to drop the whole thing and go home, but then the remnants of my conscience made me get up wearily and telephone the patient. This sort of thing,” she concluded, “happens all the time and not just to me, and often the doctor does simply look the other way.” Do you see what happens under a system in which the doctor is penalized for his virtue or, at the least, is deprived of any incentive, spiritual or material, including pride in his judgment and payment for his work? Would you like your cardiogram to be in a pile on this new breed’s desk? Yours is next—all of ours are.

The debased standards inherent in government medicine are now spreading to the whole of medical practice in the United States. The new medicine is not restricted to Medicare patients or to HMO members; it is soon going to engulf private doctors as well, even when they see their own private, paying patients. There are many reasons for this. The most obvious is the pressure from the health-insurance companies, such as Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Hospitals now are charging higher rates to private patients in order to recoup their losses from Medicare cases. As a result, the private insurance companies are demanding that a DRG-type system be imposed uniformly, on all patients. They want private insurance policies from now on to pay only according to arbitrary, preset rates, just as Medicare does now, which would put the total of medicine in this country—all patients, all doctors, all ailments—into the same category as the heart-attack patient we discussed earlier. His fate would become everyone‘s, and the standards of American medicine would simply collapse.

If this demand of the insurance companies surprises you, remember that there are no truly private health-insurance companies in the U.S. today. What we have in this field is a government-protected, government-regulated cartel. And what the cartel wants is not more freedom, but more money through government favors, including stiffer government controls over medical costs.

The end of the Medicare road is complete socialized medicine.

Now you can see the absurdity of the claim that state payment of medical bills will not affect the freedom of physicians or the quality of patient care. State funding necessarily affects and corrupts every private service. Communism, in fact, is essentially nothing more than state funding. The Soviets pretty much leave doctors and everyone else free to dream or fantasize within their own skulls; all the government does is fund everything, i.e., take over the physical means of every citizen’s existence. The enslavement of the country, and thus the collapse of all standards, follows as a matter of course.

Now let me backtrack to answer an objection. I have been maintaining that the cause of our soaring health-care costs is government funding of medical care. Many observers, however, claim that the cause is the rapid advances in medical technology, such as CAT scanners or the latest, most sophisticated disease-detecting instruments, the magnetic resonance imaging or MRI machines. These people want to limit such technology or even abolish it.

Technology by itself does not drive up costs; it generally reduces costs as it improves the quality of life. The normal pattern, exemplified by the automobile and computer industries, is that a new invention is expensive at first, so that only a few can afford it. But inventors and businessmen persevere, aiming for the profits that come from a mass market. Eventually, they discover cheaper and better methods of production. Gradually, costs come down until the general population can afford to buy. No one is bankrupted, everyone gains.

The source of today’s national bankruptcy in the field of medicine is not technology, but technology injected into the field by government decree, apart from supply and demand. State-of-the-art medical treatment—including new inventions or procedures that are still prohibitively expensive, such as liver transplants and long-term kidney dialyses—is now being financed by the government for the total population in the name of egalitarianism. The result is the unbelievable expenditures, far beyond most people’s capacity to afford, which are made routinely in our hospitals. These expenditures are particularly evident in regard to the terminally ill, who almost always fall under the umbrella of some government-supported insurance program. It has been estimated that 1% of our GNP is now spent on the dying in their last weeks of life. Or: one-half of a man’s lifetime medical expenses occur now in the last six months of his life.

In a free society, you personally would have to make a choice: do you want to defer consumption, cancel vacations, forgo pleasures year after year, so as to extend your life in the ICU by a few months at the end? If you do, no one would interfere under capitalism. You could hoard your cash and then have a glorious spree in the hospital as you die. I would not care to do this. It does not bother me that some billionaire can live months longer than I by using machinery that I cannot begin to afford. I would rather be able to make ends meet, enjoy my life, and die a bit sooner. But in a free society, you are not bound by my decision; each man makes and finances his own choice. The moral principle here is clear-cut: a man has a right to act to sustain his life, but no right to loot others in the process. If he cannot afford some science-fiction cure, he must learn to accept the facts of reality and make the best of it.

In a free society, the few who could afford costly discoveries would, by the normal mechanism, help to bring the costs down. Gradually, more and more of us could afford more and more of the new technology, and there would be no health-cost crisis at all. Everyone would benefit, no one would be crushed. The terminally ill would not be robbing everyone else of his life, as is happening now, thanks to government intervention; the elderly would not be devouring the substance of the young.

You may wonder if I have now covered, at least in essence, the ways in which government is wrecking the practice of medicine. I have barely scratched the surface. For example, I have not even mentioned the formal introduction of the principle of collectivism into medical practice—of committee-medicine as against individual judgment. This is exemplified by the flourishing PROs in our hospitals, the Professional Review Organizations, which act to oversee and strengthen the various DRG controls. PROs are committees of doctors and nurses established by the government to monitor the treatment of Medicare patients, and especially to cut its cost—committees with substantial power to enforce their arbitrary judgments on any dissenting doctor. These committees are the equivalent in the Medicare system of the HMO administrators, and have potentially the same kind of all-encompassing power to forbid hospital stays (along with the associated tests and surgical procedures), even when the admitting doctor thinks they are required.

Nor have I yet mentioned CONs, or Certificates of Need. Since the government regards anything new in the field of medicine as potentially expensive, a hospital today is prohibited from growing in any respect, whether we speak of more beds or new technology, unless the administrator can prove “need” to some official. Since “need” in this context is undefined and unprovable, the operative criterion is not “need” at all, but pull, political pull. Under this program, the government [in 1984] denied Sloan-Kettering, the famous New York cancer hospital, permission to purchase an MRI machine, because another New York hospital already had one. Later, the government backed down in the face of the resulting public uproar. But what about the hospitals that do not enjoy such fame or contacts, and that are inexplicably denied the right to acquire a crucial diagnostic tool? So far, the freeze on them is only partly effective. Doctors are still allowed to purchase new equipment for their own offices, which hospital patients now often use. But the government is fighting to close this loophole; it is on the verge of decreeing that private doctors in their own offices out of their own funds cannot purchase new equipment without a government certificate of “need.” Here again you can see how your care will be affected, even if you are not a Medicare patient. If your doctor or hospital is not allowed to have the equipment, you cannot benefit from it either. It isn’t there. It doesn’t exist.

Nor have I mentioned the hundreds of other government interventions in medicine. In the space of a year, state legislatures alone recently enacted almost three hundred pieces of health-cost containment legislation. One hospital in New York now reports to ninety-nine separate regulatory agencies.

And I have not yet touched on what is perhaps the worst crisis in the field of medicine today, the one most demoralizing to the doctors: the malpractice crisis. This crisis illustrates dramatically, in yet another form, the lethal effects of government intervention in the field of medicine.

Medical malpractice suits have trebled in the past decade. There are now [1985] about sixteen lawsuits for every hundred doctors. In addition, awards to plaintiffs average around $330,000 and are steadily climbing. The effect of this situation on physicians is unspeakable. First, I have been told, there is fear, chronic fear, the terror of the next attorney’s letter in the mail. Then there is the agony of drawn-out legal harassment, including endless depositions and a protracted trial. There is the exhaustion of feeling that one lives in a malevolent universe, in which every patient is a potential enemy. Always, there is the looming specter: a career-destroying verdict. And whatever the verdict, win or lose, there is the fact that all the doctors, innocent and guilty alike, are paying for it. They are paying for the exorbitant awards in the form of unbelievable insurance premiums—over $100,000 per year per physician in some places.

In response to this situation, doctors are forced to engage wholesale in “defensive medicine,” i.e., the performing of unnecessary tests or procedures solely in order to build a legal record and thereby prevent the patient from suing later. For example, I heard about the case of a man falling and bumping his head slightly. Since there was no evidence of any head injury, there was no basis, in the doctor’s judgment, to order an expensive series of skull X rays. But if he does not order it, he takes a chance: if months or even years later, the man should develop mysterious headaches, the doctor might be sued. He might be charged retroactively with negligence, since he omitted a test that might have shown something that might have enabled him to prevent the headaches. So the doctor has no choice; he has to order the tests to protect himself. By a conservative estimate, defensive medicine now accounts for one-third of all health-care costs.

Since the medical profession did not suddenly turn evil or irresponsible in the last several years, we must ask what is the cause of the soaring lawsuits. The most immediately apparent answer lies in the law, which has now lost any pretense at rationality. The standards of liability are corrupt. Negligence, in any rational sense of the term, is no longer the legal standard. Today’s standard demands of the doctor not responsible care, but omniscience and omnipotence.

For example, if a doctor prescribes a drug that is safe by every known test, and years later it is discovered to have side effects undreamed of at the time, the doctor can be sued. Was he negligent? No, merely not omniscient. If he treats a patient with less than the most expensive technology, whether the patient can afford it or not, he can be sued. “You open yourself to a malpractice suit,” says an attorney in the field, “if you even give the appearance of letting financial considerations conflict with good patient care.”¹ Or: if a baby has a birth defect that can be ascribed to the trauma of labor, the obstetrician can be sued for not having done a Caesarian, even though there were no advance indications in favor of one—because, as one obstetrician puts it, people assume “that anything less [than perfection] is due to negligence.”² This last statement actually reveals the operative principle of the law today, not of some crackpot left-wing radical, but of the law: the patient is entitled to have whatever he wishes, regardless of cost or means; it makes no difference what doctors know, or whether the money exists; the patient’s desire is an absolute, the doctor is a mere serf expected to provide all comers with an undefined “perfect care” somehow.

Do you see where this idea comes from? It is the basic principle that underlies and gave birth to Medicare. “You the patient,” Washington said in the 1960s, “need do nothing to earn your medical care or your cures. From now on you need merely wish, and the all-powerful government will do the rest for you.” Well, now we see the result. We see the rise of a generation of patients (and lawyers) who believe it, who expect treatment and cures as a matter of right, simply because they wish it, and who storm into court when their wish is frustrated.

The government not only inculcates such an attitude, but makes it seem financially feasible as well, because Washington has poured so much money into the field of medicine for so long. How else could anyone afford the defensive tests, or the inflated medical prices necessary to help pay for the incredible malpractice awards? They could not have been afforded in a free-market context. In the days of private medicine, there was no malpractice crisis; there was neither the public psychology nor the irresponsible funding that it requires. But now, thanks to government, there is both. And there is also a large enough corps of unscrupulous lawyers who are delighted to cash in on the disaster, lawyers who are eager to extort every penny they can from conscientious, bewildered, and in most cases utterly innocent doctors—while grabbing off huge contingency fees for themselves in the process.

The only solution to the malpractice crisis is a rational definition of “malpractice,” which would restrict the concept severely, to cases of demonstrable negligence or irresponsibility, within the context of objective definitions of these terms, taking into account the knowledge and the money available at the time. But this approach is impossible until the government gets its standards and its cash out of the medical business altogether.

We are all kept alive by the work of man’s mind—the individual minds that still retain the autonomy necessary to think and to judge. In medicine, above all, the mind must be left free. Medical treatment, as I have said, involves countless variables and options that must be taken into account, weighed, and summed up by the doctor’s mind and subconscious. Your life depends on the private, inner essence of the doctor’s function: it depends on the input that enters his brain, and on the processing such input receives from him.

What is being thrust now into the equation? It is not only objective medical facts any longer. Today, in one form or another, the following also has to enter that brain: “The DRG administrator will raise hell if I operate, but the malpractice attorney will have a field day if I don‘t—and my rival down the street, who heads the local PRO, favors a CAT scan in these cases, I can’t afford to antagonize him, but the CON boys disagree and they won’t authorize a CAT scanner for our hospital —and besides the FDA prohibits the drug I should be prescribing, even though it is widely used in Europe, and the IRS might not allow the patient a tax deduction for it, anyhow, and I can’t get a specialist’s advice because the latest Medicare rules prohibit a consultation with this diagnosis, and maybe I shouldn’t even take this patient, he’s so sick—after all, some doctors are manipulating their slate of patients, they accept only the health iest ones, so their average costs are coming in lower than mine, and it looks bad for my staff privileges ...” Would you like your case to be treated this way—by a doctor who takes into account your objective medical needs and the contradictory, unintelligible demands of ninety-nine different government agencies and lawyer squads? If you were a doctor, could you comply with all of it? Could you plan for or work around or deal with the unknowable? But how could you not? Those agencies and squads are real, and they are rapidly gaining total power over you and your mind and your patients.

In this kind of nightmare world, if and when it takes hold fully, thought is helpless; no one can decide by rational means what to do. A doctor either obeys the loudest authority; or he tries to sneak by unnoticed, bootlegging some good health care occasionally; or he gives up and quits the field.

Now you can understand why Objectivism holds that mind and force are opposites—and why innovation always disappears in totalitarian countries—and why doctors and patients alike are going to perish under socialized medicine if its invasion of this nation is not reversed.

Conservatives sometimes observe that government, by freezing medical fees, is destroying the doctors’ financial incentive to practice. This is true enough, but my point is different. With or without incentive, the doctors are being placed in a position where they literally cannot function—where they cannot think, judge, know what to do, or act on their conclusions. Increasingly, for a man who is conscientious, today’s government is making the practice of medicine impossible.

The doctors know it, and many have decided what to do about it. In preparation for this talk, I spoke to or heard from physicians around the country. I wanted to learn their view of the state of their profession. From New York to California, from Minnesota to Florida, the response was almost always the same: “I’m getting out of medicine.” “I can’t take it any more.” “I’m putting every cent I can into my pension plan. In five years, I’ll retire.”

Such is the reward our country is now offering to its doctors, in payment for their life-saving dedication, effort, and achievements.

As to talented newcomers rising to replace the men who quit, I want to point out that medical-school enrollments are dropping. Bright students today, says the president of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, are “discouraged by the perception of growing government regulation of medicine.”³ Note that it is bright students about whom he speaks. The other kind will always be in ample supply.

Any government program has beneficiaries who fight to keep the program going. Who is benefiting from the destruction of the doctors? It is not the poor. A generation ago, the poor in this country received excellent care through private charity, comparatively much better care than they are going to get now under the DRG and HMO approaches. The beneficiary is not the poor, but only one subgroup among them: those who do not want to admit that they are charity cases, those who want to pretend that they are entitled to medical handouts as a matter of right. In other words, the beneficiary is the dishonest poor, who want righteously to collect the unearned and consider it an affront even to have to say “Thank you.” There is a second beneficiary: the new 9-to-5, civil-servant doctor, the kind who once existed only on the fringes of medicine, but who now basks in the limelight of being a physician and healer, because his betters are being frozen out. And there is one more kind of beneficiary: the medical bureaucrats, lobbyists, legislators, and the malpractice lawyers—in short, all the force-wielders now slithering out of their holes, gorging themselves on unearned jobs, money, fame, and/or power, by virtue of having sunk their fangs into the body of the medical profession.

Altruism, as Ayn Rand has demonstrated, does not mean kindness or benevolence; it means that man is a sacrificial animal; it means that some men are to be sacrificed to others. Our country today is a textbook illustration of her point. The competent doctors, along with their self-supporting patients, are being sacrificed—to the parasites, the incompetents, and the brutes. This is how altruism always works. This is how it has to work, by its nature.

The doctors resent today’s situation passionately. Many of them are ready to quit, but not to fight for their field—at least, not to fight in the manner that would be necessary, if they were to have a chance of winning. In part, this is because the doctors are frightened; they sense that if they speak out too loudly, they may be subject to government reprisals. Most of all, however, the doctors feel guilty. Their own professional motivation—the personal, selfish love of their field and of their mind’s ability to function—is noble, but they do not know it.

For ages they have had it pounded into them that it is wrong to have a personal motivation, wrong to enjoy the material rewards of their labor, wrong to assert their own individual rights. They have been told over and over that, no matter what their own private desires, they should want to sacrifice themselves to society. And so they are torn now by a moral conflict and silenced by despair. They do not know what to say if they quit, or how to protest their enslavement. They do not know that selfishness, the rational selfishness they embody and practice, is the essence of virtue. They do not know that they are not servants of their patients, but, to quote Ayn Rand, “traders, like everyone else in a free society—and they should bear that title proudly, considering the crucial importance of the services they offer.” If the doctors could hear just this much and learn to speak out against their jailers, there would still be a chance; but only if they speak out as a matter of solemn justice, upholding a moral principle, the first moral principle: self-preservation.

Thereafter, in practical terms, they—and all of us—could advocate the only solution to today’s crisis: removing its primary cause. This means: closing down Medicare. Reducing Medicare’s budget is not the answer—that will simply tighten the DRG noose. The program itself must be abolished. In principle, the method is simple: phase it out in stages. Let the government continue to pay, on a sliding scale, for those who are already too old to save for their final years, but give clear notice to the younger generations that there is a cutoff age, and that they must begin now to make their own provision for their later medical costs.

Is there still time for such a step? The most I can answer is: in ten years, there won’t be—that is how fast things are moving. In ten years, perhaps even in five, our medical system will have been dismantled. Most of the best doctors will have retired or gone on strike, and the government will be so entrenched in the field that nothing will get rid of it.

If you are my age, you may sneak by with the rest of your lifespan, relying on the remnants of private medicine that still exist. But if you are in your teens, twenties, thirties, then you are too young to count on such a hope. To you in particular, I want to conclude by saying: find out what is going on in this field—don’t take my word for it—and then act, let people know the situation, in whatever way is open to you. Above all, talk to your doctor. If you agree with the Declaration of Independence, tell him that he, too, comes under it; that he, too, is a human being with a right to life; and that you want to help protect his freedom, and his income, on purely selfish grounds.

If you are looking for a crusade, there is none that is more idealistic or more practical. This one is devoted to protecting some of the greatest creators in the history of this country. It is also literally a matter of life and death—your life, and that of anyone you love. Don’t let it go without a fight.

NOTES

1 Arthur R. Chenen, “Prospective Payment Can Put You in Court,” Medical Economics, July 9, 1984.

2 Allan Rosenfield, quoted in Susan Squire, “The Doctors’ Dilemma,” New York, March 18, 1985.

3 James F. Glenn, quoted in “Professional Schools’ Enrollment Off,” The New York Times, Feb. 10, 1985.

31

Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty

by Peter Schwartz

The following is a highly condensed version of an article published in The Intellectual Activist, May—June and December 1985.

The Libertarian movement has acquired an unwarranted reputation. It has come under attack in various quarters for holding the value of liberty as an absolute. It has been condemned by conservatives for elevating liberty above tradition and authority, and by liberals for elevating liberty above equality and humanitarianism.

Both camps are mistaken. Libertarianism deserves only one fundamental criticism: it does not value liberty. If it were ever successful, it would destroy the remnants of freedom that still exist in this country far faster than any of the more explicit enemies of liberty.

Libertarianism has no philosophy. To put this more accurately: it renounces the need for any intellectual basis for its beliefs. The volumes of scholarly material defending Libertarianism are self-admittedly pointless, since the true Libertarian position is that no defense is necessary. Murray Rothbard, widely viewed as the father of the movement, expresses this clearly in presenting his central argument for liberty.

“Should virtuous action (however we define it) be compelled, or should it be left up to the free and voluntary choice of the individual?” he asks. And he answers: “To be virtuous in any meaningful sense, a man’s actions must be free.... The point is more forceful: no action can be virtuous unless it is freely chosen.” Freedom, therefore, is a prerequisite of any virtue, and thus can be validated with no knowledge of virtue at all. Morality, in other words, is irrelevant to the issue of liberty. “Freedom is necessary to, and integral with, the achievement of any of man’s ends,” Rothbard insists. [Last emphasis added.]¹

How can a man identify the requirements of virtue without first knowing what virtue is? Yet Rothbard does not ask why the very concept of virtue is necessary, what it consists of, or how it is justified. Without understanding anything about the nature of virtue, he proceeds to declare that liberty is its sine qua non. His reasoning is an effort to subvert—indeed, to invert—the logical hierarchy of ethics and politics by claiming that one need know nothing about the first in order to establish the principles of the second.

But since the fundamental question of ethics is how to define the good, it is ethics itself which must determine the propriety or impropriety of force. If, for example, the good is—as many believe—a world that heeds God’s will, then it is virtuous to prevent, by force if necessary, the distribution of pornography or the drinking of alcohol or the preaching of atheism. If prayer is a duty one is obliged to perform—if the act of praying is intrinsically good, regardless of one’s knowledge or rational interests—why shouldn’t one be compelled to go through the motions of prayer, if that is supposed to bring greater glory to God? How many “sinners” throughout history have been tortured and killed in order to save their souls and thereby please God? Of what logical relevance is the victim’s lack of consent, if one accepts this concept of the good?

One cannot exhort people to have faith in a being beyond their comprehension, and then insist that freedom—which means the right to act on the judgment of one’s mind—is a prerequisite of virtue. A moral code that urges man to surrender his mind to a higher authority is irreconcilable with the principle that man ought to live his life guided by his own thinking. If obedience is a virtue, freedom of thought and action cannot be a right.

Most secular codes of morality are also in conflict with the principle of freedom. If the good is an egalitarian society, for example, then it is virtuous to expropriate the wealth of the rich and give it to the poor. If the good is that which gives the greatest pleasure to the greatest number, then it is virtuous to kill off some minority of “undesirables,” if the majority so wishes. If the good is the melding of the individual’s “unreal self” into the collective, organic whole of humanity, then it is virtuous to establish a totalitarian state.

The evil of the initiation of force lies in the fact that force is the negation of the mind. It makes the victim act not by the guidance of his independent perception, but by the dictates of a gun. Only if reason is a virtue, therefore, can force be a vice. But to uphold reason as a virtue requires a specific code of morality. It requires a morality the standard of which is man’s life, and which recognizes that human survival depends on human rationality. With that as an ethical base, one can demonstrate that the initiation of physical force is anti-life and thus immoral. In this approach, liberty is indeed a prerequisite of virtue.

But if reason is not a moral value, if virtue is based on dogmatically asserted duties or on subjectively asserted desires, then human understanding of right and wrong is irrelevant—is, in fact, an obstacle—to morality. In this view, there are no grounds for barring force in human relations, and more: force becomes indispensable in obtaining compliance with unprovable moral imperatives. Without reason, no resolution of disagreements can take place, except by resort to fists and bullets.

In defiance of all fact, Libertarianism declares that there is no need for any concept such as individual rights, there is no need for any code of ethics, there is no need for any philosophical ideas at all—other than the Libertarian axiom that no matter how irrational one’s values, “liberty” is the prerequisite of achieving them.

This fatuous reasoning brings even Marxism and Nazism under the Libertarian umbrella. After all, the values of a liberated proletariat or of a purified Aryan race cannot really be achieved—the Libertarian would have to argue—except through uncoerced action. Marxists and Nazis need not repudiate their philosophies—they merely have to call for the factory owners to hand over their property to the state, for the book publishers to accept the views of the Minister of Propaganda, for the Jews to march into the gas chambers ... voluntarily! If the Hitlers and the Stalins want to implant the virtue of absolute submission to the state—Rothbard would tell them—they must persuade the people to submit willingly. In other words, only when political freedom reigns can the goals of barbarians be realized.

There is nothing un-Libertarian about the basic moral tenets of dictatorship. The ethical values—the ends—of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (as of anyone else) are perfectly consistent with Libertarianism; it is only their coercive means that, allegedly, aren’t.

Libertarianism is a version of moral subjectivism. It is the view that all values are equally valid, and therefore equally irrelevant to the issue of political liberty. Consequently, all of ethics must be expunged from Libertarian doctrine. There must be no hint of any position being taken in regard to moral values.

For example, a statement on racial discrimination in the 1978 Libertarian Party platform said: “We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant.”² It was subsequently eliminated for being incompatible with Libertarianism. “Such a moralism simply has no business in a Libertarian platform,” a former state party chairman explains. “Bigotry does not contradict basic Libertarian principle.... To condemn it is to make an ethical value judgment, not a Libertarian political statement.”³

A second section in the platform, on health care, proposed to condemn government restrictions on scientific research, particularly “attempts to suppress recombinant DNA research, which has opened the way for increased supply of medically useful human proteins, such as insulin, and shows promise of revealing the nature of hereditary diseases, the structure of bacteria and viruses, and the nature of the immune response.”⁴ This statement, too, was found to be unacceptable because “scientific research and improvement of medical technology are values that simply have no place in the Libertarian Party platform.... What about those Libertarians who don’t value recombinant DNA research?”⁵

A leading Libertarian writer and speaker, Walter Block, states this antipathy toward moral principles even more baldly. He asks whether Libertarianism “must be honest and truthful,” and whether it ought to involve not just a “disembodied ideology” but some “animating ideal or spirit to give the movement a sense of purpose.” And he answers with an unequivocal no. “There must not be more to our Libertarian movement than its disembodied ideology—its nonaggression principle. Any sort of additional ‘animating ideal’ or ’spirit’ will only needlessly, and unjustly, force true Libertarians to leave; although they may agree with the noninitiation of force, they may not be in tune with this undefined, ineffable ‘spirit.’ ” As to the issue of honesty: “Lying violates no Libertarian principle.... You don’t owe [anyone] the truth unless he’s paid you for it.”⁶

Block is correct: Libertarianism is incompatible with values as such. If no morality is unacceptable to Libertarianism, then no morality can be acceptable, either. There can be no endorsement of scientific progress, or of honesty; there can be no criticism of irrationality. What Block fails to grasp, however, is that once ethics is abandoned, all values become groundless and must be repudiated—including the value of liberty. Libertarianism cannot argue, for instance, that socialized medicine destroys medical care—why is health necessarily a value? It cannot condemn the public school system for making true education impossible—why should education be a value? It cannot claim that price controls destroy an economy’s productivity—why is production or prosperity a value? Does justice demand that the individual be free? What about those Libertarians who believe that justice is heartless and that mercy is morally superior? Is coercion wrong because it interferes with people’s pursuit of happiness? What about those Libertarians who regard happiness as a vice? Is liberty to be upheld because it is allegedly the means of achieving whatever it is one happens to value? What about the Libertarian who preaches a life of suffering and frustration, who considers the renunciation, rather than the achievement, of values to be a virtue?

If Libertarianism were consistent in its avowed rejection of the realm of morality, if it stopped smuggling in implicit value judgments to give its statements a deceptive veneer of coherence, it could say nothing in favor of liberty.

This contempt for ideas extends far beyond the field of ethics. It is not only moral principles that Libertarianism repudiates, but all philosophic ideas. Murray Rothbard claims to hold a philosophy but predictably regards it, too, as inconsequential. He writes:

As a political theory, Libertarianism is a coalition of adherents from all manner of philosophic (or nonphilosophic) positions, including emotivism, hedonism, Kantian a priorism, and many others. My own position grounds Libertarianism on a natural rights theory embedded in a wider system of Aristotelian-Lockean natural law and a realist ontology and metaphysics. But although those of us taking this position believe that only it provides a satisfactory groundwork and basis for individual liberty, this is an argument within the Libertarian camp about the proper basis and grounding of Libertarianism rather than about the doctrine itself. [Emphasis added.]⁷

This reflects Rothbard’s utter scorn for ideas—even his own. If he claims to believe that only an Aristotelian system can “ground” Libertarianism, how can he call the adherents of “emotivism, hedonism, and Kantian a priorism” members of the same camp? If these proponents are presenting false arguments based on false premises, why does he not see this as undercutting his own case for liberty? If an investment adviser tells people to buy gold because he believes that the price will rise and they will get rich, while a devout Hindu, who believes that wealth is evil, tells people to buy gold because he believes the price will plummet and they will become impoverished, the two advisers are not reaching the same conclusion, even though both say: “Buy gold.” And neither are the Aristotelian and the Kantian, even though both may proclaim the words: “Liberty is good.” Only a total disregard for the context and the meaning of concepts could allow anyone to equate the two viewpoints.

Rothbard is saying simultaneously that only one philosophic foundation can justify liberty—and that Libertarianism is comfortable with any foundation, or with no foundation. This can only mean that liberty needs no justification, and that he regards all discussion, including his own copious contributions, about its proper “grounding” as pointless pedanticism.

Imagine a pro-capitalist who joins with socialists in a demonstration against the Reagan Administration. Should he overlook, as a mere detail, the fact that he believes Reagan is too appeasing of Russia and too tolerant of social-welfare spending, while the socialists believe that Reagan is too harsh toward the Soviets and too draconian in his budget cuts? Would any sane person dismiss this disagreement as just an intra-camp argument about “grounding,” but not about the crucial point itself of Reagan’s undesirability? Yet this is exactly the attitude taken by Libertarians toward the question of the desirability of liberty.

In logic, there is no way to comprehend the meaning of the principle of the noninitiation of force without a philosophical foundation. And there is no way to apply the principle in a political context without formulating a code of rights, particularly property rights. Without such a base, liberty could mean anything from socialism, which offers “freedom” from the law of supply and demand, to Zen Buddhism, which offers “freedom” from the law of noncontradiction.

But a code of rights cannot be established except by reference to a code of ethics. Rights pertain to freedom of action in a social context, and one cannot know how man should act as a member of society before knowing how man should act as man. Ethics itself, moreover, is the product of a view of man and of reality. In other words, to arrive at a proper understanding and an objective validation of liberty, philosophy is inescapable. One has to begin with a view of reality as comprehensible, and of man as a rational being who relies upon reason as his sole means of valid knowledge and as his basic tool of survival. One must then identify man’s life as the proper standard of value, and morality as the principles defining the actions necessary to maintain man’s life. Since life is sustained through thought and action, one then concludes that the individual must have the right to think and to act, and to keep the product of that thinking and acting—which means: the right to life, liberty, and property. Because the initiation of force is the means by which a mind is paralyzed, such force is evil. Because force is the means by which one’s rights are violated, it must be outlawed. Thus the conclusion that liberty is a fundamental social good.

Without such a philosophic base, the concept of liberty cannot be defended. At the core of Libertarianism, however, is the denial of this basic connection. Libertarians display nothing but disdain for fundamental ideas. They disparage the very idea of a fundamental idea. Libertarianism wishes to espouse an end product: liberty—while remaining oblivious to its source: philosophy. It sees no logical, ordered structure of ideas, but only a haphazard smorgasbord of notions, and feels entitled to help itself to any one, at any time, in any sequence, as the mood strikes.

What must this imply about the effort to achieve liberty in practice? If liberty poses no threat to the dominant ideas of our culture today, where is the resistance to it emanating from? If the ideal of freedom is so devoid of intellectual content and controversy—if it is compatible with all philosophies and all values—if it is, as Rothbard puts it, “necessary to, and integral with, the achievement of any of man’s ends”—what ideas do people need to be convinced of in order for the ideal of liberty to gain wide acceptance? The Libertarian answer has to be: none.

According to the basic premise of Libertarianism, no ideological education is possible. Can Libertarians persuade people of the truth of some particular philosophy? One philosophy is as good as any other. Can they point out the errors of various philosophies? Even false philosophies are compatible with liberty. Can they show how certain moral values are in conflict with liberty? None are. But if wrong ideas are not the problem, and correct ideas are not the solution, what explains our steady drift toward statism, and what could reverse it?

The answer indicates the next development in Libertarian thinking: its version of the Marxist theory of class struggle.

“American society is divided into a government-oppressed class and a government-privileged class, and is ruled by a power elite,” says the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus.⁸ Therefore,

A Libertarian class analysis is the key theoretical tool, the one indispensable method of unraveling complex strategic and tactical questions. Crucial to any Libertarian theory of social change is the clear moral and political distinction to be made between those who hold state power and those who do not—between those who rule and those who are ruled.... Our Libertarian worldview comes ever more clearly into focus as we draw the line politically between two opposing classes with mutually exclusive relations to the state. Which side are you on? Do you defend the state—or do you side with the people?⁹

There is no intellectual conflict in regard to liberty, this view declares. The people are simply kept in chains by a privileged elite, which has somehow managed to take control of the coercive machinery of the state. Each group is drawn to pursue its innate “class interests.” The masses for some reason are driven to seek freedom; the ruling bureaucrats, power.

What weapons do Libertarians intend to use in this type of battle, since education is pointless? The abandonment of reason necessitates the endorsement of force. In Libertarianism’s pursuit of social change, therefore, it is left with only one recourse: violence.

Libertarians want to transform the present system not by force of argument, but by plain force. And some of them broadcast this openly. “The fact is that no ruling class has ever given up its power voluntarily—and any movement for radical social change which fails to realize this will never achieve its goals,” says Libertarian Vanguard, a “radical” newspaper within the Libertarian movement. America’s “present system cannot be reformed or wished away—extra-parliamentary action is, ultimately, the prospect awaiting us.”¹⁰

The goal of Libertarians is to topple the state’s power elite through armed struggle. The Libertarian battleground is not the halls of academia or the editorial pages of the newspapers, but the streets and the back alleys. The troops Libertarianism seeks are not individuals armed with convincing arguments, but a mindless horde avid to lash out against the “system” and the state with machine guns and hand grenades. The Libertarian Vanguard describes the makeup of this corps:

The revolutionary potential of blacks, Chicanos, women, and gays who have been betrayed by decades of social welfare programs, which have led to nothing but misery, exploitation, and crushing inflation, is the greatest fear of the Corporate State oligarchy.... Slavery, the conquest of the West and the subsequent looting of American Indian and Mexican land rights, the historical subjugation of women, the brutal repression of lesbians and gay men—every single one of these are crimes committed on a scale so massive that it is almost unimaginable; and every single one of these crimes can be traced directly to the actions of the state. In these instances, and in others, what is involved is nothing less than the attempted systematic obliteration of an entire class formation.¹¹

The Libertarian campaign for “liberty” is a war against the state, not against statism. It is not the ideas behind statism that Libertarians attack—there are no such ideas, they believe; the target of their attack is the state itself, even the state as defined and established by America’s founding fathers. It is the state, in any form, that represents a restriction upon their “liberty,” and therefore deserves to be crushed. This is the anarchism inherent in the movement.

“Libertarian principle and the dynamics of social change dictate that we be perpetual state-haters,” says a former vice chairman of the Libertarian Party.¹² Not haters of slavery or of tyranny—but of the state as such.

“We seek the abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” declares the platform of the Libertarian Party.¹³ “We favor international negotiations toward general and complete disarmament down to police levels.”¹⁴

“The U.S. government should unilaterally abandon all nuclear weapons,” says a former editor of the Libertarian Party News. “The desire of some to support the U.S. nuclear buildup is based on the faulty notion that the U.S. government is on ‘our side’—that it will use these weapons to defend our lives and liberty. Yet this is clearly not the case. It uses these weapons ... to defend the state. If Libertarians truly regard the state as their enemy, they cannot support its holding of nuclear weapons.”¹⁵

The goals of achieving liberty and destroying the state are incompatible—yet Libertarians choose the latter. A properly functioning government, one whose purpose is to protect individual rights against attack, is essential to the preservation of liberty; but this is of no concern to Libertarians—all states are the enemy. Libertarians do not believe that by crippling the state they are helping the cause of freedom. The dissolution of the state is an end of itself. To Libertarians, whatever harms the state is categorically good; whatever helps the state is categorically bad—regardless of the effect on human liberty.

For example, when South Vietnam was conquered by North Vietnam in 1975, Murray Rothbard found it an occasion for celebration: “What is inspiring to Libertarians is to actually see the final and swift disintegration of a State.... None of [America‘s] superior might and firepower could in the end prevail against the will and determination of the mass of Vietnamese (and Cambodians) bent against seemingly impossible odds to dislodge dictatorial governments.” The death of a state, he writes,

vindicates once again the insights of the theorists of mass guerrilla warfare ... that after a slow, patient, protracted struggle, in which the guerrilla armies (backed by the populace) whittle and wear down the massively superior firepower of the state armies (generally backed by other, imperialist governments), the final blow occurs in which the state dissolves and disintegrates with remarkable speed.¹⁶

It is immaterial to Rothbard that communism had triumphed and that the freedom of the South Vietnamese people had been reduced from minuscule to nonexistent. All that matters to “perpetual state-haters” is that for one brief moment they experience the exhilaration of seeing a government ground into dust. And the number one target of this hostility is the government not of some totalitarian dictatorship, but of the United States.

America has become “a new worldwide empire which has set itself up as the military guardian of the status quo—and the main enemy of every national liberation movement seeking autonomy,” says the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus. “The national isolation of the American Libertarian movement can only be prolonged by an attempt to deny what is clear, by now, to people all around the globe—the fact that the United States is the main danger to peace and freedom.”¹⁷

Libertarianism thus provides the grotesque spectacle of a movement claiming to support individual liberty-while reviling America as the world’s most immoral nation. When communists issue the same vituperative charge against the U.S., they are at least honest in naming their standard of value.

According to Libertarians, America is far more contemptible than even the Soviet Union. Murray Rothbard writes,

Taking the twentieth century as a whole, the single most war-like, most interventionist, most imperialist government has been the United States.... Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks adopted the theory of “peaceful coexistence” as the basic foreign policy for a communist state. The idea was this: as the first successful communist movement, Soviet Russia would serve as a beacon for and supporter of other communist parties throughout the world. But the Soviet state qua state would devote itself to peaceful relations with all the other countries, and would not attempt to export communism through interstate warfare.... Thus, fortuitously, from a mixture of theoretical and practical grounds of their own, the Soviets arrived early at what Libertarians consider to be the only proper and principled foreign policy.... Increasing conservatism under Stalin and his successors strengthened and reinforced the nonaggressive, “peaceful coexistence” policy. [Emphasis added]¹⁸

The communist guerrilla movement that is trying to overthrow the American-backed government in El Salvador deserves unqualified moral support, says the Libertarian Vanguard:

There can be no moral or political neutrality in a battle of this kind. If we must temporarily join forces with Marxist-Leninists to fight the junta and its U.S. supporters, then so be it.... A victory for the revolution in El Salvador would be a major defeat for U.S. imperiahsm—the main danger to peace and liberty—right in Washington’s own back yard.¹⁹

What emerges from Libertarianism—the alleged advocate of absolute liberty—is a standard leftist worldview. The poor and the weak are oppressed by a Corporate State—America is an imperialist oligarchy—Moscow wants peace and participates in an arms race only in order to keep up with our power-mad Pentagon planners—the Third World is being denied freedom and prosperity by America’s ruling elite—all U.S. foreign policy, from Southeast Asia to Central America, is designed to achieve world domination—class struggle is the key to understanding the state of the world.

The role model for the Libertarian revolution is the New Left of the 1960s—“the first quasi-Libertarian mass movement in a hundred years,” and one which “embodied the Libertarian values of respect for personal sovereignty, freedom, and peace,” according to the Students for a Libertarian Society (SLS), the major Libertarian network on college campuses.²⁰

Why did the New Left fail after its promising start? Because, a former director of SLS explains, it needed “a comprehensive philosophy of social change. Yet the only such philosophy immediately available was that of Marxism-Leninism.... The point is that those seeking a strategy for revolutionary change had nowhere else to go but toward Marxism.”²¹ Isn’t the lesson, then, that radical change requires a philosophical alternative to Marxism? No, he says:

Wherever and whenever there have been masses of people desirous of change—oppressed people, idealists, intellectuals—they have been drawn to Marxism as if by an invisible hand. I do not think that this can be explained fully by assuming that the people involved were statist, authoritarian, or collectivist. The drift to Marxism can be better explained by noting that, in the words of [the leader of the New Left’s major campus organization], “there was—and is—no other coherent, integrative, and explicit philosophy of revolution.”... We can inherit that kind of influence if we construct a new, distinctly Libertarian theory of revolution.²²

In other words, the way that social change takes place is as follows. People somehow conclude that the existing political structure must be overthrown, they decide to make a revolution, they deliver rousing speeches and print up fiery pamphlets, they draw up plans to storm the gates of government—and then, like last-minute shoppers, they look around for the right brand of philosophy to grab off the counter in order to find out what the hell they are doing. And the brand they ultimately grab is not the one that presents the most persuasive explanation of the ideas they should be fighting for, but the one that happens to offer the best advice on how to get past the palace guards. If the New Left had had a Libertarian “model” for destroying the state in 1968, this analysis suggests, it would surely have abandoned Marxism. The future of Libertarianism, then, depends on its occupying more prominent shelf space than does Karl Marx in the supermarket of revolutionism.

The rabid desire, shared both by Libertarianism and the New Left, to bring down the U.S. government stems from a common root. As was true in the 1960s of the Molotov-cocktail thrower blowing up ROTC offices and chanting “Revolution, now!”, the present-day Libertarian is a thorough emotionalist. He wants to act on whatever feelings he happens to feel, no matter how capricious and irrational. He wants no constraints on his behavior. As the Society for Libertarian Life puts it in a statement of principles, all people “have a natural right to do their own thing, providing that they do not physically harm or coercively restrict another individual’s life, liberty or property.” [Emphasis added.]²³

The Libertarian interprets liberty to mean the license to do whatever he feels like doing. Since he dismisses reason and philosophy, he has no way even to define force. To him, the pseudo-definition of “force” is that which interferes with somebody’s desires; to him, any obstacle in the path of people’s whims is undesirable. People ought to be “free” to act on any random impulses they feel. That is Libertarianism.

That is not liberty.

Libertarianism rejects all values and all morality because they are too “restrictive.” Moral values establish standards for human conduct. This is too oppressive for the Libertarian, who cries that he wants to be “free” from all constraints.

If rights are a subjective matter, if the right to which men are inalienably entitled is subjectively to “do their own thing,” then there is no basis for any objective concept of force. And regardless of how vociferously Libertarians proclaim their devotion to some fuzzy notion of noncoercion, they will inevitably endorse the use of force.

An individual who feels an urge to engage in child molestation, for example, is merely doing “his own thing” and should not be hindered by the state. Members of the North American Man/Boy Love Association—which advocates the legalization of sex between underage and adult males—“are among the most brutally state-oppressed individuals in this country,” writes Marc Joffe in Individual Liberty, and support for them is the “acid test” of one’s Libertarian credentials. “Any law which discriminates on the basis of age is unjust and un-Libertarian,” he says.²⁴

Since rights, in this view, are severed from the faculty of reason, children, like adults, are seen as having the right to do whatever they want. “We oppose all legally created or sanctioned discrimination against (or in favor of) children, just as we oppose government discrimination directed at any other artificially defined subcategory of human beings,” says the Libertarian Party platform.²⁵ If a seven-year-old nods assent when asked whether he wants to engage in sex with an adult, that is his “right.” If he wishes to drink liquor, one has a “right” to give it to him. If he wants to leave home and live with some strangers he has just met, he has a perfect “right” to do so. If he decides he wants to use heroin, buy a gun, drive a car, or fly a plane, neither he nor anyone willing to accommodate him should be stopped by law.

Should there be laws against libel and slander? No, say Libertarians; this is unduly restrictive of one’s right to say whatever one feels like saying. “Libel laws were created by people with a vested interest in the status quo. Using libel laws stops the stirring up of controversy, and doesn’t permit change,” says a former vice president of the Cato Institute (a Libertarian policy-research organization). “Libel law is completely invalid,” says the editor of Inquiry magazine. “The freedom to speak means the freedom to speak what others might consider untruth. [Apparently no statements are ever in fact untrue.] The central premise behind libel law is that a person has a right to his own reputation—but you can’t own it or control it because it exists in the minds of others. Libel law is a monstrous threat to free speech.”²⁶ (So false advertising about one’s product—or one’s competitor’s product—is acceptable because the item’s reputation merely “exists in the minds of others.”)

It should be plain why anarchism, far from being a viewpoint on the periphery of Libertarianism, is integral to it. Anarchism follows from amoralism. If people have a right never to be “constrained,” then the state must be an illegitimate entity. If there are no objective standards of judging right and wrong, why shouldn’t a person be entitled to act on his own feelings about what does and does not constitute force? If all views are subjective and no opinion is any less valid than another, by what right, and by what means, can a state establish any objective definition of crime?

If a man’s fundamental goal is to define and validate individual rights objectively, and then to create a structure under which they are protected, he will discover laissez-faire capitalism and limited government. If, on the other hand, his basic concern is to allow people to do whatever they desire and to concoct a social arrangement by which that appears to be possible, then he will unearth Libertarianism and anarchism.

Of course, no social system can make the irrationalism of warring factions work. Dictatorship is the inevitable outcome of anarchism. Existentially, the chaos and destructiveness that anarchism encourages will make people turn to someone who promises order and security; intellectually, the people will have no grounds for resisting any despot who claims that his “private defense agency” is simply offering the marketplace the most “efficient” use of force—force that he feels is entirely “justified.” In fact, there is no essential distinction between dictatorship and Libertarianism. The totalitarian maintains that the state may do whatever it wishes, without any restraints; the Libertarian insists that the individual may do whatever he wishes, without any restraints. Both agree that man is to be ruled by whim, and differ only on whether private whim or government whim takes precedence. They share the same anti-reason theory—and the same anti-freedom practice. (A term coined by author Ernest van den Haag to describe Libertarianism captures this aspect perfectly: anarcho-totalitarianism.)

The militant emotionalism of Libertarianism is succinctly conveyed by Walter Block. The virtue of Libertarianism, he writes,

is that it allows for an amazing diversity.... We’ve seen priests, monogamists, family men as the fellow-Libertarians of the gays, the sado-masochists, the leather-freaks, and those into what they call “rational bestiality.” ... Only Libertarianism could gather together the homosexual motorcycle gang, the acid-dropper fascinated by the price of silver, and the Puerto Rican nationalist immersed in the Austrian school of economics.²⁷

What unites all these creatures is a single premise: that human rationality is a dispensable element in politics and in life.

What Libertarianism entails is not just a trivialization of liberty, but an annihilation of the very concept. Block’s crew is the dead end of the path that begins with the abdication of the mind.

But what is Libertarianism’s goal? If it is anti-philosophy, anti-reason, anti-morality, anti-state, and anti-liberty-what is it for? A movement that is neutral about or indifferent to moral values does not launch a political crusade. Why would anyone who has renounced all values undertake a campaign to bring about radical social change?

The answer is that Libertarianism rests not on neutrality or apathy, but on hostility. The source of Libertarianism—the animating force behind its assaults on philosophy, on ethics, on ideas, on the institution of government, on the United States—is the desire not to neglect values, or even to evade their existence, but to eradicate them.

Walter Block, in Defending the Undefendable, argues that prostitution is no different from any business transaction and should not be viewed as demeaning. “We have to offer something to our prospective partners before they will consent to have sex with us,” he says, such as the arrangement by which

the male is expected to pay for the movies, dinners, flowers, etc., and the female is expected to reciprocate with sexual services. The marriages in which the husband provides the financial elements, and the wife the sexual and housekeeping functions, also conform clearly enough to the [prostitution] model.... All relationships where trade takes place, those which include sex as well as those which do not, are a form of prostitution. Instead of condemning all such relationships because of their similarity to prostitution, prostitution should be viewed as just one kind of interaction in which all human beings participate. Objections should not be raised to any of them—not to marriage, not to friendship, not to prostitution.²⁸

Even pimps elicit moral praise from Block: “The pimp serves the function of bringing together two parties to a transaction at less cost than it would take to bring them together without his good offices.” In doing so, the pimp “is, if anything, more honorable than many other brokers, such as [those in] banking, insurance and the stock market. They rely on restrictive state and federal laws to discourage their competition, whereas the pimp can never use the law to safeguard his position.”²⁹

This is not a demand for the repeal of laws against victimless crimes (laws that should be repealed). It is a blatant call for the repudiation of moral standards. Block is not defending an individual’s right to engage in sordid behavior—he is denouncing the very idea of evaluating any behavior as sordid. He is insisting that pimps are actually honorable men, deserving of more respect than the typical businessman.

Who qualifies for Block’s accolades? Only the dregs of society. They are applauded not in spite of their worthlessness, but because of it. It is because they are commonly regarded as scum that Block wants to elevate them to respectability—in order to debase the very idea of respectability. His “heroic” counter feiter (whose activities “reduce and counteract the great evil of government counterfeiting”)—the policeman who takes bribes for not enforcing certain laws (“the acceptance of money cannot be logically distinguished from the acceptance of a gift, and the mere acceptance of a gift is not illegitimate”)—the habitual litterer (“who treats public property in much the same way that he would treat private property if he were but free to—namely, he leaves garbage around on it[!]” and thus exhibits “courage” and “can serve as a protest against an unjust system” of public streets)—the heroin pusher (who, “by acting so as to lower prices even at considerable personal risk,” actually “saves lives and alleviates the tragedy somewhat”)—all these are paragons of virtue to Block.³⁰ Why? Because they have rejected standards of behavior—not in favor of different or higher standards, but in the name of the annihilation of standards. As these reprobates choose to climb down into the slime, they do not uphold some new ethical criteria by which to claim that their lives are noble; they simply announce that they relish slime.

The “counterculture” of two decades ago was highly praised by Libertarians. In an article aptly titled “In Praise of Decadence,” a former editor of Libertarian Review extols the hippies for demanding that “each person must be his own authority and must ‘do his own thing.’ ”³¹ The fact that they could articulate no alternatives, no philosophies, no arguments, no values to offer in place of the ones they were repudiating is immaterial to the Libertarian. What is significant to him is the repudiation per se.

The concept of “value” is irreconcilable with the Libertarian notion of “liberty.” The existence of any value entails a certain “restraint” upon one’s actions. It declares that X is good, that one ought to attain it, that one should pursue a particular end by using some defined means. It thereby limits man’s behavior by pointing it in a specific direction. This is intolerable to those who want nothing to stand in the way of their whims.

In order for Libertarianism to bloom, therefore, values—not any particular code of values, but values as such—must be eliminated. This can be done either by debasing the good or by glorifying the depraved—by damning limited government or by upholding anarchism—by describing the Grenada invasion as “senseless militarism”³² or by celebrating North Vietnam’s victory over America as reflecting the people’s determination “to dislodge dictatorial governments”³³-by defaming Israel as “ma niacally committed to the dread logic of empire, viz., ... [of] slaughter and genocide”³⁴ or by praising the PLO as leading a “fight for justice and property rights”³⁵—by vilifying the United States as the world’s “main danger to peace and freedom”³⁶ or by hailing the Soviet Union for practicing a “proper and principled foreign policy.”³⁷

By either method, authentic values are sabotaged—and then anything goes.

Rothbard explains why the student rioters of the 1960s, who occupied university buildings and marched around campuses with loaded weapons, were quintessential Libertarians: “Perhaps the whole thing can be summed up by a sign carried by some of the kids at an antiwar march in New York City on April 5. The sign read simply: ‘Death to the State. Power to the People.’ How can you fault a movement having that as a slogan?”³⁸

That sign does indeed reveal the essence of Libertarianism—the hostility, the anti-intellectualism, the utter philosophical void it represents. There is only one term that accurately describes this diseased viewpoint: nihilism. Libertarianism rests upon a pervasive desire to annihilate. There is to be no state, no ethics, no values, no standards, no ideas, no reason, no reality. No state—because it defines the use of force; no ethics—because it identifies proper behavior; no values—because they demand that actions have a purpose; no standards—because they establish right and wrong; no ideas—because they deny primacy to feelings; no reason—because it excludes the irrational; no reality—because it decrees that whims do not work.

Libertarianism starts with the brute observation that people have desires—where they come from and whether they are right or wrong are of no concern—and it offers, as the whole of its message, a single emotional ejaculation: act on those desires without restraint.

Liberty is the protector of man’s values. It does not produce material goods, but it makes all production possible. It is comparable to the locks on doors: they do not create any wealth, but simply allow one to function in peace and to keep what one has already produced. Nobody could agitate for the universal installation of locks and burglar alarms in order to protect people’s goods against theft, and at the same time declare that it does not matter to him whether the homes actually contain any goods or not; or whether material possessions should be valued or condemned; or even whether one’s property really exists or is merely a figment of one’s subjective consciousness.

Yet Libertarians do exactly this with respect to liberty. They want its protective shield, while nullifying everything that it safeguards. They want liberty—the means—while rejecting values—the end. Nothing matters to Libertarians—not even the value of life itself—but somehow the freedom to be a zero is of vital importance. They want to be free to act. To act how? Without purpose or reason. To achieve what? Nothing in particular. But the belligerent pursuit of nothing in particular is in fact the pursuit of ... destruction. It is the quest not for political, but for metaphysical “freedom,” which means: freedom from the demands of existence. Libertarians reject anything that tells them there is something they should not do, that there is something which will not yield to their emotions, that there is something. Reality itself is the limitation they ultimately resent. It is from the universe as such that Libertarians wish to be “liberated.”

There are undoubtedly many Libertarians who would argue that the litany of irrationalities cited above does not represent their views. It is unjust, these “better” Libertarians would maintain, to denounce the entire movement on account of the absurd statements of those who do not typify or understand it.

It is these “better” Libertarians, however, who fail to understand the essence of Libertarianism.

The nature of an ideology is determined not by majority vote—but by logic, by analyzing its essence and its necessary implications. The logic of environmentalism, for example, leads to a society without technology; the logic of feminism leads to an egalitarian society in which men are not permitted to have anything which women do not; the logic of the New Right leads to theocracy—even if various environmentalists, feminists, and conservatives would deny this. And what the logic of Libertarianism inexorably leads to is nihilism, regardless of how many Libertarians protest that this is not their intention.

The full implications of an ideology’s central principle are often evaded by its adherents. Many early supporters of Nazism in Germany, if asked, might very well have voted against the concentration camps. Does this mean that Hitler’s atrocities reflect merely upon a number of sadistic Nazis but not upon Nazism per se? There are many Marxists who condemn the brutality of Soviet Russia, claiming that Moscow has abandoned the teachings of Karl Marx. Does this mean that Marxism itself is absolved of responsibility for such standard communist horrors as the machine-gunning of young children who try to escape across the Berlin wall? Obviously, all that this suggests is that many Nazis and Marxists are blind to the essential nature of their own philosophies.

Just as blind are those who claim that Libertarianism is compatible with laissez-faire capitalism, with morality, with reason, and with the requirements of human life.

The Libertarian movement was created in order to adopt a “united front” approach to liberty, that is, to spread out a broad umbrella under which a motley collection of people, irrespective of their philosophies, could gather in a joint effort to advance freedom. Libertarianism’s one and only function is to bring together people who agree on nothing whatsoever except—ostensibly—the contextless claim that the use of force is evil. Its essence is precisely to bypass all the ideas underlying liberty and to jump directly to the assertion that the use of force is wrong.

But if there is no why, there can be no what. If Libertarianism announces that it need not offer any reason for its belief in liberty, then it cannot even state what it means by the term “liberty.” Everyone from Karl Marx to Ralph Nader can then say that he is fundamentally in favor of liberty, and there is no objective means of disputing him. Why shouldn’t anarchism be regarded as the implementation of genuine freedom? Why not describe libel and counterfeiting as actions fully consistent with individual rights? Why can’t Moscow be said to be pursuing a foreign policy of worldwide liberation? Why not invite Timothy Leary to speak at Libertarian conventions—or label Jesus Christ “a Libertarian mystic”³⁹—or glorify Yassir Arafat as a defender of “justice and property rights”⁴⁰—or view God as “the Ultimate Noninterventionist”?⁴¹ Once any theory is acceptable, any practice must be equally tolerable.

It is thus not just some Libertarians, but Libertarianism itself that is inherently subjectivist and therefore destructive. Imagine a group of physicians forming an umbrella organization in order to promote health in a society infected by disease. But, not wishing to be overly restrictive, they refuse to establish any basic principles. There are many avenues to health, they say; there is no need to take a position on why human health is desirable, or what values and premises the science of medicine presupposes—that could “prejudice” one’s opinion against those who hold opposite premises. We just care about achieving health, they say; we don’t care why people join us. Imagine further that as they go around lecturing on the importance of health, they are accompanied on the podium by Christian Scientists, faith healers, and witch doctors. They too support the value of “healing” —the physicians say—it does not matter why they do so or what they mean by it. After all, that is just a question about “grounding,” not about the doctrine of health itself; so why care whether health is attained by exorcising demons inside one’s body, or by following objective medical principles? It’s all “health.”

Those Libertarians who protest that they do not accept the premise of anarchism or of subjectivism or of nihilism simply refuse to see what is inherent in the fundamental nature and founding purpose of Libertarianism. Someone who agrees with the essence of capitalism—the principle of individual rights—and endorses tariffs or unemployment benefits does not understand capitalism’s logical implications. By the same reasoning, someone who agrees with the essence of Libertarianism—“liberty” as a baseless assertion—and yet opposes unilateral U.S. disarmament or the terrorism of the PLO is likewise contradicting his basic premise.

Libertarianism’s corrupt view of “liberty” also explains its attitude toward Objectivism.

Although Objectivism, unlike the rest of today’s philosophies, advocates laissez-faire capitalism, it is those other philosophies that Libertarians tolerate and only Objectivism that elicits from them widespread hostility. Their policy of promiscuity in intellectual intercourse is suddenly replaced by one of extreme fastidiousness when they encounter Objectivism.

Libertarian writer Peter Breggin complains that the “books and philosophy of Ayn Rand have set back Libertarianism in their unabashed assault on anything that smacks of humanitarianism or humanism. Human beings are loved and hated strictly on the grounds of their ethical adherence to Objectivist principles and are granted no value whatsoever on the basis of their common humanity, their membership in the species.”⁴² Ayn Rand’s “legacy has been a tragic one”—says another Libertarian writer—“a conservatarian millstone around the neck of the Libertarian movement. And that is why I say it’s time to dissociate ourselves from Rand and everything she stood for.”⁴³

So while Libertarians believe that there are many avenues to their notion of liberty, they apparently draw the line at Objectivism—and they are entirely right to do so. Objectivism is incompatible with Libertarianism on every philosophical issue. Objectivism says: live by reason, follow a rational code of morality, practice self-interest as a virtue, establish the principles of limited government to define the appropriate use of retaliatory force. As its name implies, Ayn Rand’s philosophy upholds an objective reality, objective cognition, objective values, and objective law.

Libertarianism’s relationship to Objectivism is not merely that of an enemy, but of a parasite. Without Objectivism there would, ironically, be no Libertarian movement today. It is Objectivism that has offered a moral defense of liberty—which Libertarianism has stolen and mutilated. It is Objectivism that has imbued so many young people with a deep commitment to capitalism—which Libertarianism has seized on and corrupted.

Libertarianism seeks to appropriate some of the fruits of Objectivism while trying to uproot the tree. Its anti-conceptual nature makes it consistently desire effects without causes—politics without ethics, liberty without reason, social change without philosophy. It wants to use the words of Objectivism’s noninitiation-of-force principle, but not the ideas that give them meaning. It wishes to feed off the by-products of Objectivism’s defense of capitalism, while repudiating the nature and roots of that defense.

But the law of causality, like any metaphysical fact, cannot be circumvented. The attempt to do so can result only in that perversion of liberty which is the essence of Libertarianism.

NOTES

1 “Frank S. Meyer: The Fusionist as Libertarian Manque,” Modern Age. Fall 1981, p. 353.

2 From the 1978 Libertarian Party Platform, p. 2.

3 Michael Grossherg, “Let’s Limit the Platform to Libertarianism,” Frontlines, Sept. 1979, p. 4.

4 From the 1982 Libertarian Party Platform, p. 6.

5 Grossberg, op. cit., p. 5.

6 “Letter to the Free Libertarian,” The Libertarian Forum, April 1976, pp. 4, 5.

7 Modern Age, op. cit., p. 355.

8 From “The Ten Points of the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus,” issued July 1979.

9 “Draft Program of the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus, Libertarian Vanguard, Nov.-Dec. 1980, P. 8.

10 Justin Raimondo. ”Why Evers and Rothbard Are Wrong,“ Libertarian Vanguard, Dec. 1982, p. 8.

11 Libertarian Party Radical Caucus, ”Get in the Vanguard, libertarian Vanguard, May 1979, P. 8.

12 Sheldon Richman, “Smash the Onion,” Individual Liberty, Nov. 1981, p. 8.

13 From the 1984 Libertarian Party Platform, p. 3.

14 Ibid., p. 8.

15 Kathleen Jacob Richman, “Nuclear Disarmament: A Survey,” Individual Liberty, Oct. 1982, p. 5.

16 “Death of a State,” Reason, July 1975, p. 31.

17 From “Draft Program,” op. cit., pp. 8, 9.

18 For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, rev. ed. (Collier Books, 1978) pp. 270, 283.

19 Libertarian Party Radical Caucus, “Junta Launches Holocaust,” Libertarian Vanguard, June 1981, p. 5.

20 From “Libertarianism: Challenging the Reign of Political Power” (brochure issued hv Students for a Libertarian Society).

21 Milton Mueller, “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Revolution,” Libertarian Review, Aug. 1978, pp. 14-16.

22 Ibid., p. 17.

23 From “The Libertarian Statement,” issued May 1973.

24 Letter to the editor, Individual Liberty, Sept. 1983; “News in Brief,” Mar. 1983.

25 From the 1984 Libertarian Party Platform, p. 4.

26 David Theroux, Glenn Garvin, quoted in “Libertarians on Libel Law,” Libertarian Vanguard, Oct. 1982, p. 7.

27 “Letter to the Free Libertarian,” op. cit., p. 3.

28 Defending the Undefendable (Fleet Press. 1976), p. 22.

29 Ibid., p. 25.

30 Ibid., pp. 105,215, S, 216, 43.

31 Jeff Riggenbach, “In Praise of Decadence,” Libertarian Review. Feb, 1979, p. 27

32 “Why Are We in Grenada.” Update, Nov. 1983, p. S.

33 “Viewpoints,” Reason, July 1975, p. 3.

34 “Israelis in Lebanon,” Frontlines, July 1982, p. 3.

35 “Defend the Palestinians,” Libertarian Vanguard, Aug. 1982, p. 5.

36 From “Draft Program,” op. cit., p. 9.

37 Rothbard, For a New Liberty, op. cit., p. 283.

38 “The Student Revolution,” The Libertarian, May 1, 1969, p. 3.

39 Letter to the editor, Update, Apr. 1983, p. 3.

40 “Defend the Palestinians,” op. cit., p. 6.

41 “Christian and Libertarian,” Frontlines, Aug. 1980, p. 6.

42 “Why Libertarians Need Humanists,” Frontlines, Nov. 1979, p. 6.

43 Bill Birmingham, “Rand: The Conscience of a Conservatarian,” Update, May 1982. p. 6

EPILOGUE

My Thirty Years With Ayn Rand: An Intellectual Memoir

by Leonard Peikoff

This lecture was delivered at the Ford Hall Forum on April 12, 1987, and published in The Objectivist Forum, June 1987.

Ayn Rand was unique—as a mind and as a person. If I could be granted a wish outside my power, it would be to meet and talk to someone like her again; unfortunately, I do not expect this wish to come true. The root of her uniqueness, which I had abundant opportunity to experience and enjoy in my thirty-year friendship with her, was the nature of her mental processes.

The purpose of this intellectual memoir is not to report on the content of the ideas I learned from Ayn Rand—whoever knows her books knows that already—but on her method of thinking as I observed it, her approach to the whole realm of ideas and therefore of living, her basic way of functioning cognitively in any situation. Method is fundamental; it is that which underlies and shapes content and thus all human achievement, in every field. Ayn Rand’s method of thinking is an eloquent case in point: it is the root of her genius and of her distinctive art and philosophy. The mental processes she used in everyday life, from adolescence on, were the processes that led her, one step at a time, to all of her brilliant insights and to the principles of Objectivism.

Because of the role of method in human life, I have often thought that the greatest humanitarian service I could perform would be to leave the world a record and analysis of Ayn Rand’s mind and how it worked. In the present discussion, I can offer you at least a glimpse of what I was privileged to see. Near the end, I will say something less epistemotogical—about Ayn Rand as a person.

When I met Ayn Rand, in the spring of 1951, I was an ignorant, intelligent seventeen-year-old, an admirer of The Fountainhead, but one who knew nothing about philosophy or how to think. Ayn Rand brought me up intellectually. In the nature of the case, therefore, some of my reminiscences are going to cast me in the role of naive foil exhibiting her brilliance by contrast. This implication does not bother me, however, because alongside my confusions and errors, I claim one offsetting virtue: I did finally learn and come to practice what Ayn Rand taught me.

The strongest first impression I had of Ayn Rand on the fateful evening I met her—fatefut to my life—was her passion for ideas. I have never seen its equal. I came to her California home that evening with a few broad questions suggested to me by The Fountainhead. One pertained to the issue of the moral and the practical, attributes which I had always been told were opposites. The character of Howard Roark, therefore, puzzled me, because he seemed to be both at once. So I asked Ayn Rand to tell me which one she intended him to represent. This was the sort of issue—relating to the nature of ideals and their role in life—which I had tried now and then, without much success, to discuss with family or teachers. Such issues were usually dismissed by the people I knew with a bromide or a shrug, amounting to the declaration: “Who knows and who cares?” Ayn Rand knew and Ayn Rand cared.

From the moment we started talking, she was vibrant, alert, alive. She listened intently to my words, she extracted every drop of meaning and of confusion, and then she answered. She spoke at length, first considering the question as I phrased it, then the deeper implications she saw in it. At each step, she explained what were the facts supporting her viewpoint, what kinds of objections might occur to me later if I pursued the topic, and what was the logical reply to them. She never suggested that I accept what she said on her say-so; on the contrary, she was working diligently to get me to see the truth with my own eyes and mind. The result was a brilliant extemporaneous dissertation on man’s need of morality and therefore on the unity of the moral and the practical—in Roark and in any rational person—along with an eloquent demonstration of the disasters caused by the conventional viewpoint.

I was astonished not only by the originality of her ideas, but even more by her manner. She spoke as though it were urgent that I understand the issue and that she forestall every possible misinterpretation on my part. She was wringing out of herself every ounce of clarity she had. I have seen men lecturing to solemn halls of graduate students, and men running for national office, dealing in the most literal sense with issues of life and death; but I have never seen anyone work as hard as she did to be fully understood, down to the root. Yet she was doing it in a drawing room, in answer to a question from a boy she had just met. Clearly, it was not the boy who primarily inspired her; it was the subject (though she would not have answered as she did if she had doubted my sincerity).

Ayn Rand’s performance that evening opened up the world to me. She made me think for the first time that thinking is important. I said to myself after I left her home: “All of life will be different now. If she exists, everything is possible.”

As long as I knew Ayn Rand, her passion for ideas never abated. As a rule, she wrote in her office daily from noon until 6:30, and she often came out looking exhilarated but utterly spent. But then if I or someone else would drop over and make an intellectual observation or ask a question, she was suddenly, dramatically invigorated, and it might very well be midnight before she realized that she hadn’t yet eaten dinner. A day or even an hour spent on legal contracts, or on business phone calls, or on shopping, or on having her hair done, tired her out thoroughly. But philosophy—ideas—was the stimulant that always brought her back.

She had such a passion for ideas because she thought that ideas are practical—that they are the most practical things in the world. In this regard, her approach was the opposite of that which philosophers call “rationalism.” “Rationalism” amounts to the viewpoint that ideas are detached from reality, unrelated to daily events, and without significance for man’s actual life—that they are nothing but floating abstractions to be manipulated by ivory-tower intellectuals for their own amusement, just as other men manipulate chess pieces. This viewpoint dominates twentieth-century thinkers. When I went to college, I routinely heard philosophical theories being discussed or debated by my professors as a purely academic matter. One professor was a follower of Immanuel Kant, say, another was an opponent of Kant, but they spoke and acted as though nothing separated them but dry, technical differences. After the debate, the two would go off arm in arm, buddies in spirit who had just finished a game or a show and were now returning to the real world. It reminds me of the logical positivist I heard about years ago who gave a lecture on why the word “God” is meaningless, then asked for directions to the nearest synagogue so he could say his prayers. The man was surprised that anyone was surprised by his request. “What has philosophy got to do with living?” he asked indignantly.

After a few weeks of classes with such professors, I would come running to Ayn Rand, chock-full of sophistry and fallacies, and she would spend twelve or even fifteen unbroken hours struggling to straighten out my thinking again. Why did it matter so much to her? Because her own mental practice was the antithesis of rationalism. To continue the same example, I remember asking her once long ago why she was so vehement in denouncing Kant’s theories, particularly the abstract ideas at the base of his system, such as his view that the world we perceive by our senses and mind is not real, but is only a creation of man’s subjective forms of awareness. I knew that Kant was wrong, but I did not understand at the age of twenty why the issue evoked in her so strong an emotion.

She replied, in essence: “When someone says that reality is unreal or that reason is subjective, he is, admittedly or not, attacking every conviction and every value I hold. Everything I love in life—my work, my husband, my kind of music, my freedom, the creativity of man’s mind—all of it rests on my perception of reality; all of it becomes a delusion and an impossibility if reason is impotent. Once you concede Kant’s kind of approach, you unleash the destroyers among men, the creatures who, freed of the need to be rational, will proceed—as in fact they have done since Kant—to expropriate the producers, sacrifice all values, and throw the rest of us into a fascist or communist dictatorship.”

If you went up to an ordinary individual, itemized every object and person he cared for, then said to him seriously: “I intend to smash them all and leave you groveling in the muck,” he would become indignant, even outraged. What set Ayn Rand apart from mankind is the fact that she heard the whole item ization and the intention to smash everything in the simple statement that “reality is unreal.” Most people in our age of pragmatism and skepticism shrug off broad generalizations about reality as mere talk—i.e., as floating abstractions—and react only to relatively narrow utterances. Ayn Rand was the reverse. She reacted much more intensely to philosophical ideas than to narrow concretes. The more abstract an evil formulation, the more territory it covered, and the greater, therefore, the destructive potential she saw in it.

By the same token, if Ayn Rand heard a basic idea that she regarded as true—an idea upholding reality and reason, like many of the principles of Aristotle—she responded with profound respect, admiration, even gratitude. Ideas to her were not a parlor game. They were man’s form of grasping the world, and they were thus an essential of human action and survival. So true ideas were an invaluable asset, and false ones a potential disaster.

Just as Ayn Rand did not detach abstractions from concretes, so she did not allow concretes to remain detached from abstractions. That is, she rejected today’s widespread policy of staring at daily events in a vacuum, then wailing that life is unintelligible. What a man does, she held, is a product of what he thinks. To be understood, therefore, a man’s actions have to be seen in relation to his ideas. Whether she encountered an inspiring novel by Victor Hugo, accordingly, or some horror spawned by Progressive education, or America’s thrilling venture into space, or the latest catastrophe out of Washington, or the seemingly incomprehensible behavior of a friend she had trusted—whatever it was, she was always intent on explaining it by identifying the ideas at its root. Since abstractions, in her philosophy, are man’s means of grasping and dealing with concretes, she actually used them for that purpose. She would not rest content either with floating theories or with unintelligible news items. She always required a crucial unity: theory and reality, or ideas and facts, or concepts and percepts.

Now I think you can see how Ayn Rand arrived at the most revolutionary element in Objectivism, her theory of concepts. I asked her about this once. She told me that she was talking one day to a Thomist and disagreed with the theory of concepts the man was advancing. “Well, then,” Ayn Rand was asked, “where do you think concepts come from?” “Let me introspect a moment and see what my mind does in forming a concept,” she replied, “because I haven’t yet considered this question.” Whereupon, after a few minutes of silence, she came up with her idea of measurement-omission as the essence of abstraction. I was always astounded by this feat of philosophic creativity; it seemed as though she had solved the problem of the ages by a casual glance inward. But now I think I understand it. What I see is that Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts was implicit from the time of her adolescence in her basic mental approach—in her recognition of the fact that concepts are not supernatural or arbitrary, but rather are instruments enabling men to integrate perceptual data. The rest of her theory of concepts is really an elaboration of this fundamental, although of course it takes a genius to discover such an elaboration.

Ayn Rand regarded ideas as important to human life—as the shaper of man’s character, his culture, his history, his future—because she knew what an idea is. She knew that an idea is not a social ritual, but a means of cognition.

If ideas are as crucial as this, then they must be dealt with properly—which brings me to the center of the present discussion: the specific steps of Ayn Rand’s intellectual method. In her own thinking, she always distinguished the “what,” as she called it, from the “how”: what she knew, and how (by what means) she knew it. If you disagreed with her about a particular conclusion, you did not argue the point for long, because the discussion soon changed to method. To her, the “how” was the burning issue in life; it was the thing that gave rise to the “what.” So let us look at some of the distinctive steps of Ayn Rand’s method. The best way to approach this subject briefly is through the issue of principles.

Ayn Rand thought in terms of principles. In the sense I mean it, this is a rare phenomenon. I personally had never encountered or even imagined it before I met her, and most people have no idea of it at all. Let me start here by giving you an example; it is the one on which I first discovered the issue, about a year after I met Ayn Rand.

I had been taking an ethics course in college and was thoroughly confused about the virtue of honesty. I was not tempted to be dishonest myself, but I did not see how to prove the evil of lying. (I speak throughout of lying in order to gain some value from others, as against lying to defend oneself from criminals, which is perfectly moral.) On my own, I rejected the two dominant schools in regard to honesty: the religious school, which holds that lying is absolutely wrong because God forbids it; and the Utilitarian school, which holds that there are no absolutes and that one has to judge each case “on its own merits,” according to the probable consequences of any given lie. I rejected the first of these as mystical, the second as brute expediency. But what could constitute a third interpretation? I had no idea, so I went to Ayn Rand.

She started her answer by asking me to invent the most plausible lie I could think of. I don’t remember the details any longer, but I know that I did proceed to concoct a pretty good con-man scheme for bilking investors out of large sums of money. Ayn Rand then analyzed the example patiently, for thirty or forty minutes, showing me on my own material how one lie would lead necessarily to another, how I would be forced into contradictory lies, how I would gradually become trapped in my own escalating deceptions, and why, therefore, sooner or later, in one form or another, my con-man scheme would have to backfire and lead to the loss of the very things I was seeking to gain by it. If you are interested in the content of her analysis, I have re-created the substance of this lengthy discussion in my next book, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.

The point now, however, lies in what happened next. My immediate reaction to her reply was to amend my initial scheme in order to remove the particular weaknesses she had found in it. So I made up a second con-man scheme, and again she analyzed it patiently, showing that it would lead to the same disastrous results even though most of the details were now different. Whereupon, in all innocence, I started to invent a third scheme (I was only 18). But Ayn Rand by this time was fed up. “Can’t you think in principle?” she asked me.

Let me condense into a few paragraphs what she then explained to me at length. “The essence of a con-man’s lie,” she began, “of any such lie, no matter what the details, is the attempt to gain a value by faking certain facts of reality.”

She went on: “Now can’t you grasp the logical consequences of that kind of policy? Since all facts of reality are interrelated, faking one of them leads the person to fake others; ultimately, he is committed to an all-out war against reality as such. But this is the kind of war no one can win. If life in reality is a man’s purpose, how can he expect to achieve it while struggling at the same time to escape and defeat reality?”

And she concluded: “The con-man’s lies are wrong on principle. To state the principle positively: honesty is a long-range requirement of human self-preservation and is, therefore, a moral obligation.”

This was not merely a new ethical argument to me. It was a whole new form of thought. She was saying, in effect: you do not have to consult some supernatural authority for intellectual guidance, nor try to judge particular cases in a vacuum and on to infinity. Rather, you first abstract the essence of a series of concretes. Then you identify, by an appropriate use of logic, the necessary implications or result of this essence. You thereby reach a fundamental generalization, a principle, which subsumes and enables you to deal with an unlimited number of instances—past, present, and future. The consequence, in this example, is an absolute prohibition against the con-man mentality—a prohibition based not on God, but on perception and thought.

Ayn Rand applied this method not only to lying or to moral issues, but to every fact and question she studied. She applied it in every branch of philosophy, from metaphysics to esthetics. If she saw that the sun rises every day, she did not, like David Hume, consider it a puzzling coincidence. She identified the essence of the event: an entity acting in accordance with its nature; and thereby was able to reach and validate the principle of causality. Or, if she admired the novels of Hugo and the plays of Friedrich Schiller, she did not say merely: “I like their grand-scale protagonists.” She identified the essence of such art: the depiction of man as a being with volition; and thereby was able to reach and validate the principle of Romanticism in art. This kind of method is the root of a whole new approach to thought. It led her a step at a time to a philosophy that is neither mystical nor skeptical, but objective; one that neither bases knowledge on revelation nor succumbs to relativism, but that teaches men to conceptualize logically the data of observation. Such a philosophy enables us to discover absolutes which are not supernatural, but rational and this-worldly.

Ayn Rand started thinking in terms of principles, she told me once, at the age of twelve. To her, it was a normal part of the process of growing up, and she never dropped the method thereafter. Nor, I believe, did she ever entirely comprehend the fact that the approach which was second nature to her was not practiced by other people. Much of the time, she was baffled by or indignant at the people she was doomed to talk to, people like the man we heard about in the early 1950s, who was calling for the nationalization of the steel industry. The man was told by an Objectivist why government seizure of the steel industry was immoral and impractical, and he was impressed by the argument. His comeback was: “Okay, I see that. But what about the coal industry?”

The method of thinking in principle involves many complexities, about which I intend, someday, to write an entire volume. But let me mention here a few further aspects, to give you a fuller picture of Ayn Rand’s approach. You recall that, to reach the principle that honesty is a virtue, we had first to grasp the essence of lying. Let us focus now on this issue, i.e., thinking in essentials, which was an essential part of Ayn Rand’s method of thinking.

The concept of “essential” was originated by Aristotle in connection with his theory of definition. He used the term to name the quality that makes an entity the distinctive kind of thing it is, as against what he called the “accidental” qualities. For example, having a rational faculty is essential to being a man. But having blue eyes rather than green is not; it is a mere detail or accident of a particular case. Ayn Rand’s commitment to essentials grew out of this Aristotelian theory, although she modified the concept significantly and expanded its role in human thought.

For Ayn Rand, thinking in essentials was not restricted to the issue of definitions. It was a method of understanding any complex situation by deliberately setting aside irrelevancies—such as insignificant details, superficial similarities, unimportant differences—and going instead to the heart of the matter, to the aspects which, as we may say, constitute the distinctive core or being of the situation. This is something Ayn Rand herself did brilliantly. I always thought of her, metaphorically, as possessing a special power of vision, which could penetrate beneath the surface data that most people see, just as an X-ray machine penetrates beneath the flesh that meets our eyes to reveal the crucial underlying structures.

This kind of penetration is precisely what was lacking in the man I just mentioned, who could see no connection between the steel and the coal industries. Ayn Rand, by contrast, knew at once that steel in this context is a mere detail. She went to the essence of nationalization: government force unleashed against the minds of productive, thinking men—a practice common to countless cases beyond steel, and one that will have a certain kind of effect no matter where it occurs. This is the kind of mental process that is required if one is to reach a generalization uniting many cases. It is the process that is required if one is to champion capitalism as a matter of principle, rather than, like today’s conservatives, clamoring merely for the removal of some random controls.

In the deepest epistemological sense, Ayn Rand was the opposite of an egalitarian. She did not regard every aspect of a whole as equal in importance to every other. Some aspects, she held, are crucial to a proper understanding; others merely clutter up the cognitive landscape and distract lesser minds from the truth. So the task of the thinker is to distinguish the two, i.e., to analyze and process the data confronting him, not to amass mounds of information without any attempt at mental digestion. She herself always functioned like an intellectual detective, a philosophical Hercule Poirot, reading, watching, listening for the fact, the statement, the perspective that would illuminate a whole, tortuous complexity—the one that would reveal the essence and thereby suddenly make that complexity simple and intelligible. The result was often dramatic. When you were with her, you always felt poised on the brink of some startling new cognitive adventure and discovery.

Here is an example of what I mean. In the 1970s, Ayn Rand and I were watching the Academy Awards on television; it was the evening when a streaker flashed by during the ceremonies. Most people probably dismissed the incident with some remark like: “He’s just a kid” or “It’s a high-spirited prank” or “He wants to get on TV.” But not Ayn Rand. Why, her mind wanted to know, does this “kid” act in this particular fashion? What is the difference between his “prank” and that of college students on a lark who swallow goldfish or stuff themselves into telephone booths? How does his desire to appear on TV differ from that of a typical game-show contestant? In other words, Ayn Rand swept aside from the outset the superficial aspects of the incident and the standard irrelevant comments in order to reach the essence, which had to pertain to this specific action in this distinctive setting.

“Here,” she said to me in effect, “is a nationally acclaimed occasion replete with celebrities, jeweled ball gowns, coveted prizes, and breathless cameras, an occasion offered to the country as the height of excitement, elegance, glamor—and what this creature wants to do is drop his pants in the middle of it all and thrust his bare buttocks into everybody’s face. What then is his motive? Not high spirits or TV coverage, but destruction—the satisfaction of sneering at and undercutting that which the rest of the country looks up to and admires.” In essence, she concluded, the incident was an example of nihilism, which is the desire not to have or enjoy values, but to nullify and eradicate them.

Nor did she stop there. The purpose of using concepts—and the precondition of reaching principles—is the integration of observed facts; in other words, the bringing together in one’s mind of many different examples or fields, such as the steel and the coal industries, for instance. Ayn Rand was expert at this process. For her, grasping the essence of an event was merely the beginning of processing it cognitively. The next step was to identify that essence in other, seemingly very different areas, and thereby discover a common denominator uniting them all.

Having grasped the streaker’s nihilism, therefore, she was eager to point out some different examples of the same attitude. Modern literature, she observed, is distinguished by its creators’ passion not to offer something new and positive, but to wipe out: to eliminate plots, heroes, motivation, even grammar and syntax; this represents the brazen desire to destroy an entire art form along with the great writers of the past by stripping away from literature every one of its cardinal attributes. Just as Progressive education is the desire for education stripped of lessons, reading, facts, teaching, and learning. Just as avant-garde physics is the gleeful cry that there is no order in nature, no law, no predictability, no causality. That streaker, in short, was the very opposite of an isolated phenomenon. He was a microcosm of the principle ruling modern culture, a fleeting representative of that corrupt motivation which Ayn Rand has described so eloquently as “hatred of the good for being the good.” And what accounts for such widespread hatred? she asked at the end. Her answer brings us back to the philosophy we referred to earlier, the one that attacks reason and reality wholesale and thus makes all values impossible: the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

Listening to Ayn Rand that evening, I felt that I was beginning to understand what it means really to understand an event. I went home and proceeded to write the chapter in The Ominous Parallels dealing with Weimar culture, which develops at length Ayn Rand’s analysis of the modern intellectual trend, The point here, however, is not her analysis, but the method that underlies it: observation of facts; the identification of the essential; the integration of data from many disparate fields; then the culminating overview, the grasp of principle.

I use the term “overview” deliberately, because I always felt as though everyone else had their faces pressed up close to an event and were staring at it myopically, while she was standing on a mountaintop, sweeping the world with a single glance, and thus was able to identify the most startling connections, not only between streaking and literature, but also between sex and economics, art and business, William F. Buckley and Edward Kennedy. She was able to unite the kinds of things that other people automatically pigeonhole into separate compartments. Her universe, as a result, was a single whole, with all its parts interrelated and intelligible; it was not the scattered fragments and fiefdoms that are all most people know. To change the image: she was like a ballet dancer of the intellect, leaping from fact to fact and field to field, not by the strength of her legs, but by the power of logic, a power that most men do not seem fully to have discovered yet.

The unity of Ayn Rand’s universe rested on more than I can indicate here. But I want to mention a last aspect of her method, one which is crucial in this regard: thinking in terms of fundamentals.

By “fundamental” I mean that on which everything else in a given context depends, that which is the base or groundwork on which a whole development is built. This concept is necessary because human knowledge, like a skyscraper, has a structure: certain ideas are the ground floor or foundation of cognition, while other ideas, like the upper stories of a building, are dependents, no better or stronger than the foundation on which they rely. Thinking in terms of fundamentals means never accepting a conclusion while ignoring its base; it means knowing and validating the deepest ideas on which one’s conclusion rests.

For instance, in our discussion of honesty, we said that lying is wrong because it is incompatible with the requirements of self-preservation. What base were we counting on? Clearly, a certain ethical theory, the one that upholds self-preservation as man’s proper goal—in contrast to the ethics that advocates self-sacrifice for the sake of others. If you accept this latter theory, our whole argument against lying collapses. Why should a man who is committed to selfless service necessarily tell the truth? What if, as often happens, others want him to lie and claim that it is essential to their happiness?

But this is just the beginning of our quest for fundamentals, because the field of ethics itself rests on the basic branches of philosophy, as you can see in this same example. How did we prove that lying is self-destructive? We said that a policy of lying leads to a war against reality, which no one can win. Well, why can’t anyone? What ideas are we counting on here? Clearly, that there is a reality; that it is what it is independent of our desires; and that our minds are able to know these facts, i.e., to know reality. The issue of lying, in sum, whatever view of it one takes, is merely a consequence. It is a derivative, which rests on a complex philosophic foundation.

Thinking in terms of fundamentals is not an independent aspect of Ayn Rand’s method; it is an inherent part of thinking in principle. If one ignored the issue of fundamentals, his so-called principles would be merely a heap of disconnected, random claims—tike a catalog of divine commandments—and they would be of no help in understanding the world or guiding one’s action. One would not be able to prove or even retain the items in such a heap; they would be nothing but floating abstractions. Only ideas organized into a logical structure can be tied to reality, and only such ideas, therefore, can be of use or value to man; and that means principles based on antecedent principles, going back ultimately to the fundamentals of philosophy.

Ayn Rand’s real intellectual interest was emphatically not politics. Of course, she was a champion of capitalism and freedom. But unlike today’s libertarians and conservatives, she was a thinker; she was not content to preach liberty or private property as though they were self-evident axioms. She wanted to know what they depend on and how they can be proved, all the way back to metaphysics and epistemology. This is why she admired Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas even more than she did Thomas Jefferson, and why, to the amazement of today’s businessmen, she hated Kant and Hegel much more than income taxes. It is also why, starting with an interest in political questions, she was led eventually to formulate an overall system of thought, expressing a complete philosophy of life.

Ayn Rand’s mind had an exalted quality, one shared by only a handful of kindred spirits across the ages. Hers was a mind with the profundity of a true philosopher; a mind that greeted the deepest issues of man’s life with solemn reverence and ruthless logic; a mind that derived its greatest joy and its personal fulfillment from the rational study of fundamentals. In our age of mediocrity and anti-philosophy, this fact doomed her to a certain loneliness. It made her a unique personality, unable to find her equal, just as her product, the philosophy of reason that she called Objectivism, is unique and unequaled.

If you want to know what Ayn Rand was like as a person, I can now answer simply: you already know it, because she was just what she had to be given the nature of her intellectual processes. Ayn Rand the person was an expression and corollary of Ayn Rand the mind.

Ayn Rand herself repudiated any dichotomy between mind and person. Her mind, she held, was the essence of her person: it was her highest value, the source of her other values, and the root of her character traits. Thinking, to her, was not merely an interest or even a passion; it was a lifestyle. When she greeted you, for instance, she often asked not “How are you?” but “How’s your universe?” Her meaning was: “How’s your view of the universe? Have the problems of daily life swamped your philosophical knowledge? Or are you still holding on to the fact that reality is intelligible and that values are possible?” Similarly, when you left, she would say not “Goodbye,” but “Good premises.” In other words: “Don’t count on luck or God for success, but on your own thinking.” If self-esteem means confidence in the power of one’s mind, then the explanation of Ayn Rand’s profound self-esteem is obvious: she earned it—both in virtue of the value she ascribed to the mind, and of the meticulous method by which she used her own.

Another result of this method was that attribute men call “strength of character.” Ayn Rand was immutable. I never saw her adapting her personality to please another individual. She was always the same and always herself, whether she was talking with me alone, or attending a cocktail party of celebrities, or being cheered or booed by a hall full of college students, or being interviewed on national television. She took on the whole world—liberals, conservatives, communists, religionists, Babbitts, and avant-garde alike—but opposition had no power to sway her. She knew too clearly how she had reached her ideas, why they were true, and what their opposites were doing to mankind. Nor, like Howard Roark, could she ever be tempted to betray her convictions. Since she had integrated her principles into a consistent system, she knew that to violate a single one would be to discard the totality. A Texas oil man once offered her up to a million dollars to use in spreading her philosophy, if she would only add a religious element to it to make it more popular. She threw his proposal into the wastebasket. “What would I do with his money,” she asked me indignantly, “if I have to give up my mind in order to get it?”

Dedication to thought and thus to her work was the root of Ayn Rand’s person; it was not, however, her only passion. As a result of this root, she held intense values in every department of life. She loved her husband of fifty years, Frank O‘Connor, a sensitive, intense man, not nearly as intellectual as she but just as independent and deep in his own quiet way. He is the exception to my statement that she never found an equal. Frank did not have her mind; but his dedication to his work as a painter, his extravagant Romanticism, his innocent, sunlit sense of life, and, I may add, the visible joy he took in her work and in her person—all this made it plain that he did share her soul.

As to Ayn Rand’s other values, I have hardly room here even to mention a sample. Some of them are obvious from her writings, such as America, skyscrapers, modern technology, man the hero, the great romantic artists of the nineteenth century, the silent German movies from her childhood that she always tried to find again, Agatha Christie, TV’s Perry Mason—and there were so many more, from her cats to her lion pictures to her Adrian clothes to her vivid, outsize jewelry to her stamp collecting to her favorite candy (Godiva chocolates) and even her favorite color (blue-green). In every aspect of life, she once told me, a man should have favorites; he should define what he likes most and why, and then proceed to get it. She always did just that—from fleeing the Soviet dictatorship for America, to tripping her future husband on a movie set to get him to notice her, to ransacking ancient record shops to unearth some lost treasure, to decorating her apartment with an abundance of blue-green pillows, ashtrays, and even walls.

Ayn Rand was a woman dominated by values, values that were consistent expressions of a single view of life—which is what you might expect of a great thinker who was at once a moralist and an artist. The corollary is that she had strong dislikes in every department, too. You cannot love something without rejecting just as passionately that which you see as the antithesis of your love. Most people do not know their values clearly or hold them consistently; their desires are correspondingly vague, ambivalent, contradictory. To many such people, Ayn Rand’s violent aliveness and assertiveness were shocking, even intimidating. To me, however, they were a tonic. I felt as though other people were drawn in wishy-washy shades of gray, whereas her soul was made of brilliant color.

Unfortunately—and here I turn for a moment to a somber topic—the wishy-washy people often wanted something from Ayn Rand and were drawn to her circle. A few of them wanted simply to advance their careers by cashing in on her fame and following. Others craved the security they found in her approval. Still others had an element of sincerity during their youth, but turned anti-intellectual as they grew older. These people did what they had to do in order to get from Ayn Rand what they wanted.

What they did usually was to give her the appearance of being the philosophical intelligence she desperately wanted to meet. They were glib, articulate, sometimes even brilliant people. They absorbed the surface features of Ayn Rand’s intellectual style and viewpoint as though by osmosis and then mimicked them. Often, because she was so open, they knew what she wanted them to say, and they said it convincingly. Though uninterested in philosophy and even contemptuous of fundamentals, they could put on an expert act to the contrary, most often an act for themselves first of all. Ayn Rand was not the only person to be taken in by it. I knew most of these people well and, to be fair here, I must admit that I was even more deluded about them than she was.

All of these types ended up resenting Ayn Rand, and even hating her. They felt increasingly bored by the realm of ideas, and chafed under the necessity of suppressing their real self in order to keep up the pretense of intellectual passion. Above all, they found Ayn Rand’s commitment to morality intolerable. In her mind, moral principles were requirements of man’s survival proved by reference to the deepest premises of philosophy; they were thus the opposite of a luxury or a social convention; they were life-or-death absolutes. When she saw a moral breach, therefore—such as dishonesty or moral compromise or power lust or selling one’s soul to the Establishment like Peter Keating—she knew what it meant and where it would lead, and she condemned the individual roundly.

To the types of people we are talking about, this was an unbearable reproach. They could accept Objectivism as pure theory for a while, but only as theory. When they were tested by life, they gave in guiltily, one at a time, to the sundry pressures they encountered, and they shrank thereafter from facing her. Usually they ended up artfully concealing their resentment, saying that they still admired, even adored, Ayn Rand and her philosophy, but not, as they put it, her “moralizing” or her “anger.” Her “moralizing” means the fact that she pronounced moral judgments, i.e., applied her philosophy to real life. Her “anger” in this context means that she took her judgments seriously.

Several of these individuals are now publishing their memoirs in the hopes of getting even with Ayn Rand at last—and also of cashing in on her corpse. At this latter goal, regrettably, some of them seem to be succeeding.

Ayn Rand refused to make collective judgments. Each time she unmasked one of these individuals she struggled to learn from her mistake. But then she would be deceived again by some new variant.

Her basic error was that she took herself as the human standard or norm (as in a sense we all must do, since we have no direct contact with any human consciousness but our own). So if she saw all the outward signs of philosophical enthusiasm and activity, she took it to mean that the individual was, in effect, an intellectual equal of hers, who regarded ideas in the same way she did. After a long while, I came to understand this error. I realized how extraordinary her mind really was, and I tried to explain to her her many disappointments with people.

“You are suffering the fate of a genius trapped in a rotten culture,” I would begin. “My distinctive attribute,” she would retort, “is not genius, but intellectual honesty.” “That is part of it,” I would concede, “but after all I am intellectually honest, too, and it doesn’t make me the kind of epochal mind who can write Atlas Shrugged or discover Objectivism.” “One can’t look at oneself that way,” she would answer me. “No one can say: ‘Ah me! the genius of the ages.’ My perspective as a creator has to be not ‘How great I am’ but ’How true this idea is and how clear, if only men were honest enough to face the truth.‘ ” So, for understandable reasons, we reached an impasse. She kept hoping to meet an equal; I knew that she never would. For once, I felt, I had the broad historical perspective, the perspective on her, that in the nature of the case she could not have.

In order to be fully clear at this point, I want to make one more comment about Ayn Rand’s anger. Many times, as I have explained, it was thoroughly justified. But sometimes it was not justified. For instance, Ayn Rand not infrequently became angry at me over some philosophical statement I made that seemed for the moment to ally me with one of the intellectual movements she was fighting. On many such occasions, of course, she remained calm because she understood the cause of my statement : that I still had a great deal to learn. But other times she did not; she did not grasp fully the gulf that separates the historic master, to whom the truth is obvious, from the merely intelligent student. Since her mind immediately integrated a remark to the fundamentals it presupposes, she would project at once, almost automatically, the full, horrendous meaning of what I had uttered, and then she would be shocked at me. Once I explained that I had not understood the issue at all, her anger melted and she became intent on clarifying the truth for me. The anger she felt on such occasions was mistaken, but it was not irrational. Its root was her failure to appreciate her own intellectual uniqueness.

I should add here that I never saw her hold an unadmitted grudge. Her anger never festered unexpressed or turned into devious, brooding hatred. It was an immediate, open storm of indignant protest—then it was over. In this respect, she was the easiest person in the world to know and to deal with.

Did I ever get angry at Ayn Rand’s anger at me? Certainly I did. But my anger did not matter to me and did not last. To me, her temper was an infinitesimal price to pay for the values I was gaining from her. The world, I knew, is full of kindly souls who specialize in loving everybody and forgiving everything; but these souls bored me. I wanted out of life that which Ayn Rand alone, in all her fiery genius, had to offer.

This brings me to my final topic. Whatever Ayn Rand’s anger, her disappointments, her pain, they went down, as she said about Roark, only to a certain point. Beneath it was her self-esteem, her values, and her conviction that happiness, not pain, is what matters. People sometimes ask: “But did she achieve happiness in her own life?” My answer would consist of three images.

One is the memory of a spring day in 1957; we were walking up Madison Avenue toward the office of Random House, which was in the process of bringing out Atlas Shrugged. She was looking at the city she had always loved most, and now, after decades of rejection and bitter poverty, she had seen the top publishers in that city competing for what she knew, triumphantly, was her masterpiece. She turned to me suddenly and said: “Don’t ever give up what you want in life. The struggle is worth it.” I never forgot that. I can still see the look of quiet radiance on her face.

Then I see the image of her one night at a party, perhaps twenty years ago now; she was sitting on a couch with some other guests, looking shy, bored, and miserable. Then her husband, who had been working late, arrived, and she called out “Cubbyhole” (her pet name for him), insisting, as she always did, that he squeeze onto the couch beside her so that they could hold hands. And they smiled at each other, and she relaxed visibly, and he patted her hand and called her “Fluff” (his name for her).

Then I see her as she was turning seventy, on the morning when she, Frank, and I came home from the hospital after her lung surgery. It was still difficult for her to walk, but she wanted to play her “tiddlywink” music, as she always called it—gay, lighthearted, utterly cheerful popular tunes from the turn of the century, which have no counterpart today. And she got up and began to march around the living room to the music, tossing her head, grinning at us, marking the beat by waving her little baton, Frank all the while beaming at her from his easy chair. If ever I want to think of a non-tragic spectacle, I remember that.

Ayn Rand did experience unhappiness in her life. But if you ask me: was she a happy person? I have only one answer to give you. She was.

Ladies and gentlemen: in my judgment, Ayn Rand did live by her philosophy. Whatever her errors, she practiced what she preached, both epistemologically and morally. As a result, she did achieve in her life that which she set out to achieve; she achieved it intellectually, artistically, emotionally. But for you to judge these matters yourself and reach an objective view of Ayn Rand, you must be an unusually philosophical kind of person, because you are living in a Kantian, anti-value culture, and you are going to be offered some very opposite accounts of the facts of her life. So you have to know: what is objectivity? What sort of testimony qualifies as evidence in this context? What do you believe is possible to a man—or a woman? What kind of soul do you think it takes to write Atlas Shrugged? And what do you want to see in a historic figure?

I am not a Kantian. I do not believe that we can know Ayn Rand only as she appeared to somebody or other. But if I were to grant that premise for a split second, if I were to agree that we all construe reality according to our own personal preferences, then I would still draw a fundamental moral distinction between two kinds of preferences: between those of the muckrak ers and those of the hero-worshipers. It is the distinction between the people who, confronted by a genius, are seized with a passion to ferret out flaws, real or imaginary, i.e., to find feet of clay so as to justify their own blighted lives—as against the people who, desperate to feel admiration, want to dismiss any flaw as trivial because nothing matters to them in such a context but the sight of the human greatness that inspires and awes them. In this kind of clash, I am sure, you recognize where I stand.

I knew Ayn Rand longer than anyone now alive. I do not believe that my view of her is subjective. But if I am to go down in history as her apologist or glamorizer, then so be it. I am proud to be cursed as a “cultist,” if the “cult” is unbreached dedication to the mind and to its most illustrious exponents.

According to the Objectivist esthetics, a crucial purpose of art is to depict man as he might be and ought to be, and thereby provide the reader or viewer with the pleasure of contemplating, in concrete, embodied form, his abstract moral ideal. Howard Roark and John Galt provide this kind of inspiration to me, and to many other people I know. What I want to add in closing is that Ayn Rand in person provided it, too. Because of the power of her mind and the purity of her soul, she gave me, when I was with her, what her novels give me: a sense of life as exaltation, the sense of living in a clean, uplifted, benevolent world, in which the good has every chance of winning, and the evil does not have to be taken seriously. I often felt, greeting her, as though I were entering the Atlantis of Atlas Shrugged, where the human ideal is not merely an elusive projection to be reached somehow, but is real, alive, here—seated across the room on the blue-green pillows, smiling delightedly, eager to talk philosophy with me, eyes huge, brilliant, penetrating.

That is the Ayn Rand I knew. And that is why I loved her.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Part One: - Philosophy

Chapter 1 - Introducing Objectivism

Chapter 2 - Review of Randall’s Aristotle

Chapter 3 - To Young Scientists

Chapter 4 - Who Is the Final Authority in Ethics?

Chapter 5 - The Psychology of Psychologizing

Chapter 6 - Altruism as Appeasement

Chapter 7 - The Question of Scholarships

Chapter 8 - Of Living Death

Chapter 9 - Religion Versus America

Part Two: - Culture

Chapter 10 - The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age

Chapter 11 - Our Cultural Value-Deprivation

Chapter 12 - Global Balkanization

Chapter 13 - How to Read (and Not to Write)

Chapter 14 - The Lessons of Vietnam

Chapter 15 - The Sanction of the Victims

Chapter 16 - Through Your Most Grievous Fault

Chapter 17 - Apollo 11

Chapter 18 - Epitaph for a Culture

Chapter 19 - Assault from the Ivory Tower: The Professors’ War Against America

Chapter 20 - The American School: Why Johnny Can’t Think

Part Three: - Politics

Chapter 21 - Representation Without Authorization

Chapter 22 - To Dream the Noncommercial Dream

Chapter 23 - Tax Credits for Education

Chapter 24 - Antitrust: The Rule of Unreason

Chapter 25 - The Pull Peddlers

Chapter 26 - About a Woman President

Chapter 27 - The Inverted Moral Priorities

Chapter 28 - Hunger and Freedom

Chapter 29 - How Not to Fight Against Socialized Medicine

Chapter 30 - Medicine: The Death of a Profession

Chapter 31 - Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty

EPILOGUE

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Foreword

EDITOR’S PREfACE

PART 1 - EARLY PROJECTS

Chapter 1 - THE HOLLYWOOD YEARS

Chapter 2 - WE THE LIVING

Chapter 3 - FIRST PHILOSOPHIC JOURNAL

PART 2 - THE FOUNTAINHEAD

Chapter 4 - THEME AND CHARACTERS

Chapter 5 - RCHITECTURAL RESEARCH

Chapter 6 - PLOT

Chapter 7 - NOTES WHILE WRITING

PART 3 - TRANSITION BETWEEN NOVELS

Chapter 8 - THE MORAL BASIS OF INDIVIDUALISM

Chapter 9 - TOP SECRET

Chapter 10 - COMMUNISM AND HUAC

PART 4 - ATLAS SHRUGGED

Chapter 11 - THE MIND ON STRIKE

Chapter 12 - FINAL PREPARATIONS

Chapter 13 - NOTES WHILE WRITING : 1941-1952

Chapter 14 - NOTES WHILE WRITING GALT’S SPEECH

PART 5 - FINAL YEARS

Chapter 15 - NOTES: 1955—1977

Chapter 16 - TWO POSSIBLE BOOKS

INDEX

“Journals is a treat to read, because it is the raw evidence of Ayn Rand’s continuous growth across fifty years—her growth both as a philosopher and as an artist ...

“We see the steps by which she [created her novels]—we are there when a dramatic event or scene first occurs to her, and we see what she finally does with it and why ... We see how Ayn Rand uses (or deliberately does not use) her knowledge of real people. This last will answer such common questions as: Was Frank Lloyd Wright a model for Roark? Or William Randolph Hearst for Wynand? It will also answer some uncommon questions, such as: What female suggested Lois Cook? What scientist Robert Stadler? And what president Mr. Thompson? ”

-LEONARD PEIKOFF

LEONARD PEIKOFF is universally recognized as the world’s premier Ayn Rand scholar. He worked closely with Rand for thirty years and was designated by her as heir to her estate. He has taught philosophy at Hunter College and New York University. Dr. Peikoff’s books include The Ominous Parallels and Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. He is also co-editor of The Ayn Rand Reader, available in a Plume edition. For further information, you can go to his website, alshow com.

DAVID HARRIMAN has M.S. degrees in both physics and philosophy. He has taught philosophy at California State University, San Bernardino, and is working on a book on the philosophy of physics. He has worked with Leonard Peikoff for several years.

PLUME
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.
Previously published in a Dutton edition.

First Plume Printing, August, 1999

Copyright © The Estate of Ayn Rand, 1997

Foreword copyright © Leonard Peikoff, 1997
Preface copyright © David Harriman, 1997
All rights reserved

The Library of Congress has catalogued the Dutton edition as follows:
Rand, Ayn.
Journals of Ayn Rand / edited by David Harriman ; foreword by Leonard Peikoff.
p. cm.
Includesindex.

eISBN : 978-1-101-13721-5

0-452-27887-2 (pbk.)
1. Rand, Ayn—Diaries. 2. Women novelists, American—20th century—Diaries.
3. Women philosophers—United States—Diaries. I. Harriman, David.
II. Peikoff, Leonard. III. Title.
PS3535.A547Z476 1997
818 5203—dc21
[B] 97-12737
CIP

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN PUTNAM INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

Information about other books by Ayn Rand and her philosophy, Objectivism, may be obtained by writing to OBJECTIVISM, Box 177, Murray Hill Station, New York, New York 10157 USA.

http://us.penguingroup.com

FOREWORD DY LEONARD PEIKOFF

Ayn Rand’s Journals—my name for her notes to herself through the decades—is the bulk of her still unpublished work, arranged chronologically. What remains to be published are two lecture courses on writing, presently being edited, and her old film scripts.

The Journals contains most of AR’s notes for her three main novels—along with some early material, some notes made between The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and some notes from her final decades. The early material includes, among other things, AR’s first philosophic musings on paper in English, written in her twenties. The middle section includes a fascinating transitional statement of her ethics, never finished, and also a vigorous essay on why the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 did not violate the civil rights of the Hollywood Communists. The final section includes the notes for AR’s last projected novel, To Lorne Dieterling.

Some pieces important to this volume have been lost. I refer to eight or ten scenarios for the silent screen, written in the twenties. These stories, several pages apiece, featured strong heroes, a passionate love interest, and non-stop action, often set in exotic locales; they exemplified an extravagant romanticism bubbling over with the excitement of living. I first came upon these scenarios in the eighties, after AR’s death. Had I been able to include them here, they would have brought a sorely needed balance to some other items, such as The Little Street, a bitter novelette from the same period. Mysteriously, these scenarios have disappeared from the Estate warehouse. If they should reappear, I promise to publish them.

Aside from occasional pieces, identified by the editor, the AR material in this book was written for herself, for her own clarity. No one, apart from her husband and a few associates, was ever shown any of this material, nor did AR intend to publish it. Obviously, therefore, nothing in the book may be taken as definitive of her ideas. On the contrary, most of these preliminary formulations were dropped, and a few were even contradicted, in her published works. In several cases, though hardly in all, the editor points out such discrepancies.

“The art of writing,” AR wrote in a November 1944 note, “is the art of doing what you think you’re doing. This is not as simple as it sounds. It implies a very difficult undertaking: the necessity to think. And it implies the requirement to think out three separate, very hard problems: What is it you want to say? How are you going to say it? Have you really said it?” It was to answer these questions that most of the Journals was written. In other words, the notes are nothing more than AR preparing herself to write by thinking aloud on paper—in random snatches, as and when she sought to clarify a point—without outline, structure, continuous theme, or editorial polish.

Despite its unedited character, however, the Journals is a treat to read, because it is the raw evidence of AR’s continuous growth across fifty years—her growth both as a philosopher and as an artist.

One can see her growth as a philosopher in two ways: in her interests and in her ideas, i.e., in regard both to depth and to truth.

AR’s mind moved systematically from politics (as a youth) to ethics (in her thirties and forties) to epistemology and metaphysics (in her fifties and later). This progression is not a mere change of interest, but a true organic development: the earlier stages increasingly exhibit the maturity of what is to come, which in turn always remains faithful in principle to its youthful origins. One great pleasure in reading the book is to see hints of later discoveries mentioned at first casually, even parenthetically. For instance, if you read AR’s first philosophic musings with an eye to Atlas Shrugged, you will observe how much more you can see in her words now, thanks to her, than she herself could see at the time. Her distinctive ideas were present from her start as a thinker; they were implicit in her fundamental approach at least from the age of twelve. It was only a matter of time and logic until she was able to identify them explicitly.

The best evidence of AR’s increasing depth is her unpublished manuscript The Moral Basis of Individualism. It is there that we see her evolution from The Fountainhead’s stress on independence to Atlas Shrugged’s recognition that the basic virtue is rationality, of which independence is but an aspect. We also see her taking the historic step from ethics to the base of philosophy. Traditionally, philosophers started their books on ethics by asking: What is the proper moral code? AR started there, too—until something occurred to her one day in mid-sentence: “Chapter 1 should begin by stating the [moral] axiom. Then define man’s nature. Then ask [these two words are deleted] Or—begin by asking whether a moral code is necessary? Prove that it is—for a rational being. What is the rational? That which is true to facts....” In regard to this passage I am tempted to paraphrase the mystics: To those who understand, no explanation is necessary; to those who do not, read Galt’s speech.

In regard to the content of her ideas, AR also underwent an organic development as, step by step, she gained clarity about the full implications of her fundamental premises.

AR’s first notes reveal an influence of Nietzsche, in the form of droplets of subjectivism, and of the idea that the heroes among men are innately great, as against the inherently corrupt masses, who deserve only bitterness and domination from their superiors. None of this is stated as a connected position, but such ideas do show up here and there.

It is instructive to watch these droplets—every one of them—evaporate without residue, as AR’s own principles emerge into the sunshine of explicit statement; it is a perfect example of science (reason) functioning as a self-corrective. After she comes to define “reason,” subjectivism vanishes; after her analysis of individual rights, “domination” is gone; after she grasps the nature of volition, she says no more about “innate” stature.

By her early thirties, AR had thought herself out of every Nietzschean element. With The Fountainhead, the only trace left is in the characters of Dominique and Wynand, whose bitterness about the world Roark proves to be a cardinal error. After The Fountainhead, Nietzsche is not even an error to be refuted; there is nothing but pure Ayn Rand.

Although AR’s vision of the ideal man remained constant through the decades, her view of his greatest enemy changed when the Nietzschean element was dropped. As a youngster, the first enemy of Man whom she could identify was Communism, the omnipotent State. Then, as she grew beyond politics, the enemy, for a short while, was taken to be the masses of average men as such, regardless of their political organization. One of the unique features of her mature hero-worship, by contrast, is her explicit benevolence towards the honest average man (as represented by Mike in The Fountainhead and Eddie Willers in Atlas Shrugged). By her early thirties, AR had discovered the real enemy of the ideal (which is also the real corrupter of politics and of the masses): the intellectuals of irrationalism. Thus, although AR’s passionate values never changed, the early bitterness toward the commissars or the mob becomes in time the expose of Ellsworth Toohey, and then the damnation of Kant.

One can see AR’s growth as an artist in regard to every facet of writing a novel, with the emphasis on plot and characterization.

In regard to plot, we see the steps by which she learns to create it—we are there when a dramatic event or scene first occurs to her, and we see what she finally does with it and why. We see her continually restructure events so as to achieve an inexorable rise to a necessary but unpredictable climax. We see how several different lines of events (personal/emotional, economic, political, philosophical) are made to rise and climax at once, and how each of these lines helps reshape the others. And we see her carry on the plot struggles until she reaches the desired result: a seamless complexity that will enter the reader’s mind with the simplicity of the inevitable.

In regard to characterization, we see her first concept of the cast (and her earliest names for the leads), then its simultaneous expansion and winnowing out. We see the sharpening focus on a character’s distinctive attributes, and her decisions as to what kinds of actions and relationships will convey these objectively. We learn everything about the heroes and the villains that AR herself needs to know, even though she cannot always use the information in the final book. We are there when eloquent lines of dialogue occur to her, and sometimes see her move them from one mouth to another. And we see how AR uses (or deliberately does not use) her knowledge of real people. This last will answer such common questions as: Was Frank Lloyd Wright a model for Roark? Or William Randolph Hearst for Wynand? It will also answer some uncommon questions, such as: What female suggested Lois Cook? What scientist Robert Stadler? And what President Mr. Thompson?

In reading the Journals, we also see AR’s methodical redefinition of a novel’s theme so as to include the broader integrations she is always making and the concrete applications she is identifying. We see much of her research, from architecture to railroads to steel mills and copper mining, and how she uses it to aid her in the development of plot, character, and theme. And, sometimes—in regard both to fiction and to nonfiction—we see the first draft of a section, followed by her own ruthless critique and revision.

If the primary value of the Journals to us is the evidence it furnishes of AR’s growth, a second value is the evidence that her growth was a product of thinking—in the art of which the Journals may serve as a textbook. The subtitle of this book really ought to be: How to Answer Your Own Questions.

Implicit in the countless examples of fruitful thinking which make up the book are dozens of practical guides to the art of clear thinking. Among other things, one can learn a great deal about the means of properly wording a question, the need for factual data (and at what point enough have been gathered), the roles of induction and deduction, the necessity and method of integration—then, as the final mopping up, the means of formulating a definitive proof of a conclusion.

On first reading (which is all I have done so far), three principles of clear thinking seemed, above all others, to leap out of the pages at me:

1. The need for intellectual honesty. For example, AR was troubled at one point by a seeming contradiction in her views—which she hastened not to evade, but to state forcefully. “[Now I shall consider] the hypothetical case of a monopoly (say, telephone) free to refuse services to an individual or a group of men or a branch of business. In this last case, it is obvious that the inventor’s monopoly has such an absolute right. Does it mean, however, that individualism then degenerates into its opposite in practice, into collectivism? Has the size of an enterprise (made possible by the scope covered by modern inventions) anything to do with it? In other words, does invention such as the telephone give the individual who controls it a collectivist’s power by the sheer size of his business? (No, I think.)...” (Sept. 30, 1944). AR raises, as a matter of course, every objection to her views that occurs to her—and then answers them all. This is one reason why, when she finally endorses a conclusion, she is certain of it.

2. The need for precise formulation, even in private notes. For example: “A possible definition of a right: a ‘right’ is that which it is morally permissible to defend by force. Here I have to be very careful. This might be totally wrong. If carelessly handled, it could be used as justification for the right of a communist to murder an employer who does not give him a job. Again, ’sins of omission’ come in. This is only a hint, a possible clue to be thought out very carefully, from every possible angle and in every possible application. It is no good—unless a total proof of it can be given....” (Oct. 26, 1944).

3. The need for fresh writing. To put this point negatively, there are no clichés in the Journals, no numbing restatements even of AR’s own ideas. On the contrary, the notes are replete with new angles, new connections, new distinctions, new analogies, new wording—even in regard to issues which AR had discussed extensively in print. Most of this new material did not survive the Journals, despite its inherent interest; to her, it was merely steps on the road to clarity, the first birth pangs of the books still to come. My point, however, is that the freshness of the writing is a corollary of the process she is engaged in: not rationalistic deduction nor recitation of the known, but pioneering thought.

As a small example of the latter point, I offer the following note, never used in print, on the question of reason and emotion: “Man cannot, [some people] say, be called a rational being because his actions are not motivated by his mind; his mind is like his Sunday clothes, kept in a dark closet and donned reluctantly on rare occasions; and when donned, it makes him stiff, uncomfortable and unhappy, because it never fit him well in the first place. What man does on weekdays, they say, is to gallop about stark-naked, on all fours, because it reminds him of his mother who gave him a complex, and to whirl around catching his own tail which he hasn’t got but feels he has; that is what he does because it makes him happy. Reason? Reason, they say, is just something he uses in such negligible, incidental matters as earning a living...” (July 30, 1945).

Too many of AR’s professed admirers in print are academics of the scholastic persuasion. The Journals gives us the original, a purely Objectivist mind at work—mostly right, sometimes wrong, but always, from start to finish, reality-oriented.

In terms of cognitive value to the reader, the new material alone in this volume warrants the price. It is new to me also. No matter how clear Objectivism is in my mind, every time I read another Ayn Rand book, it becomes clearer. This book is no exception.

David Harriman has done an excellent editorial job. He has brought order to dozens of large cardboard cartons filled with scattered papers and mementos. He has selected the best of the notes, organized them chronologically, offered explanations when these were available and helpful, and edited the wording, especially for grammar, of the early pages, when AR had not yet fully grasped English. For all this work, I am grateful to David Harriman, as all fans of AR should be.

The final chapter of the Journals shows us AR near the end of her life. There is nothing to publish in regard to her work on mathematics or neurology, but some of her notes on psycho-epistemology have been included—along with every word she wrote for her last projected novel.

To Lorne Dieterling was to be “the story of a woman [a dancer] who is totally motivated by love for values—and how one maintains such a state when alone in an enemy world.” (This formulation is from November 1957, a month after Atlas Shrugged was published.) The two basic “sense of life” music numbers to be danced by the heroine in the novel are the Overture to La Traviata and “Will O’ the Wisp,” one of AR’s favorite “tiddly wink” pieces.

Verdi’s La Traviata Overture, she writes, is to be “the dance of rising, without ever moving from one spot—done by means of her arms and body—ending on ‘Dominique’s statue’ posture, as ’higher than raised arms,‘ as the achieved, as the total surrender to a vision and, simultaneously, ’This is I.‘ (The open, the naked, the ’without armor.‘)” As to “Will O’ the Wisp,” it represents “the triumph—the tap dance and ballet combined—my total sense of life.... (Probably danced in a low-grade dive, with Lome [the hero] present....”

Such was the sense of life not only of a young immigrant in her twenties ho was brimming over with new ideas, but also of a philosopher in her sev enties, who had lived consistently by every one of her ideas. Such was the sense of life of an artist “alone in an enemy world,” who had already endured her greatest disappointments—and created her greatest achievements.

As David Harriman puts it in his eloquent conclusion:

“Ayn Rand has come full circle. She returned at the end to [the] problem [of irrational people] that had concerned her from the beginning.... At this stage, however, she knows the solution ...

“It is fitting, therefore, that her last fiction notes are about a woman like herself, who maintains such a [joyous and lighthearted] view of life to the end, even while those around her do not.”

She did it—how? In essence, by means of these Journals (and their equivalents through the decades). In other words, she did it in part through the knowledge she methodically struggled to gain, but above all through the intransigent will at the root of such a struggle: the will to think, in every issue and all her life long.

Whoever cares to match the price can reach the same result. As the first payment—I say this to those with their lives still ahead of them—I suggest that you read this book.

Leonard Peikoff
Irvine, California
October 1996

EDITOR’S PREfACE

In a note to herself at the age of twenty-three, AR wrote: “From now on—no thought whatever about yourself, only about your work. You are only a writing engine. Don’t stop, until you really and honestly know that you cannot go on.” Throughout her long career, she remained true to this pledge—she was a “writing engine.” With the publication of her journals, we can now see the “writing behind the writing” and appreciate fully the prodigious effort that went into her published work.

AR’s notes, typically handwritten, were spread among the numerous boxes of papers she left behind at her death in 1982. My editing of this material has consisted of selection, organization, line editing, and insertion of explanatory comments.

Selection. This book presents AR’s working journals—i.e., the notes in which she developed her literary and philosophical ideas. Notes of a personal nature will be included in a forthcoming authorized biography.

Approximately three-quarters of the working journals are presented here. I have included the material that I judge to be of interest to serious, philosophical admirers of AR’s novels and ideas. This standard is, in effect, a middle ground between the scholar who wants every note, and the casual fan who might be satisfied with a selection of notes on fiction.

In most cases, I have described specific omissions in the chapter introductions. In general, notes have been omitted for the following reasons:

1. Repetition with other notes. AR sometimes rewrote her notes, often for the purpose of condensing and essentializing. I have included such later material only when it contains provocative new formulations.

2. Repetition with published material. Lengthy notes that merely state what the reader of her published work already knows, such as final outlines for novels, have been omitted.

3. Quotes or paraphrases of other authors. In her research, AR often quoted or paraphrased material she had read. I have usually included these notes only when she adds her own comments.

4. Isolated, usually political, notes that are unrelated to the surrounding philosophiclliterary material. For example, AR’s critique of President Truman’s decision to fire General MacArthur was omitted because the only other notes from the period were on Atlas Shrugged.

5. Cryptic notes. Some material was too cryptic to be intelligible. Since AR typically wrote in complete sentences, such notes are rare.

I have taken this opportunity to publish a few pieces that are not from AR’s journals, but are closely related to her notes and of great interest to her fans. In Chapter 10, for example, I have included AR’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which is followed by her notes on the hearings.

Organization. The journals are presented chronologically, so the reader may follow the development of AR’s ideas. However, for the purpose of grouping together the notes on a particular topic, some departures from chronological order have proved necessary. For example, the presentation of her architectural research for The Fountainhead in a separate chapter required minor violations of the chronology. Also, her notes from 1947 dealing with collectivist propaganda in the movies are presented before the Atlas Shrugged notes, which begin in 1945. But in all such cases, the reason for my order is obvious.

When a note is undated, I have made a guess at the approximate date, and placed it next to related notes written at about that time.

The book divides naturally into five parts. As might be expected, the two longest parts are the notes for The Fountainhead (Part 2) and Atlas Shrugged (Part 4). Part 3 pertains to projects she worked on in the years between these novels. Parts 1 and 5 are relatively short; they present respectively her notes from the years prior to The Fountainhead and from the post-Atlas Shrugged period. Within each part, the reasons for the chapter divisions are either obvious or explained in my introductions.

Line editing. AR wrote her thoughts down as they occurred to her; she did not outline material prior to writing the notes, and she did not edit the wording afterwards.

Even so, not a great deal of line editing was required. I found few grammatical errors, except in the early notes of Part 1, which were written before she had mastered English. Most of my line editing was done to facilitate one’s reading. I broke up paragraphs and sentences that were too long, occasionally supplied grammar that was merely implied, and eliminated the distracting overuse of parentheses, dashes and underlining. (Italics are used here to indicate her underlining; boldface type indicates words that she underlined twice.)

A certain amount of wordiness is endemic to journal writing. It is impossible—even for AR—consistently to find concise formulations while thinking aloud on paper. In many sentences, therefore, I have been able to eliminate words without affecting the meaning. However, I typically made such changes only when the original sentence was difficult to read. My restrained approach to the editing allows the journals to retain the spontaneous, informal character of notes to herself.

It was occasionally necessary to insert my word(s) into a sentence when the formulation was potentially confusing. My insertions are always enclosed in square brackets (not parentheses). When the editing of the book was complete, I double-checked all such changes against the original notes. I am confident that my insertions have not altered her intended meaning.

I have indicated my omission of passages within the notes by ellipsis points in square brackets; ellipsis points without the brackets are hers.

Explanatory comments. In general, I thought it best to leave the reader alone with the journals, and therefore I have kept my interruptions to a minimum. Many of my comments simply introduce the topic. When I could and where it was helpful, I have identified people, ideas or events unfamiliar to the general reader.

Sometimes it was necessary to comment on a philosophical passage that is clearly inconsistent with AR’s mature views. In such cases, I do not attempt to explain the inconsistency; I simply cite the published work where the reader can find her definitive view.

In certain places, I could not resist calling the reader’s attention to a striking aspect of a note. For example, I have identified a few notes in which she discusses a person or idea that later formed the basis for a character in The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged.

The only other comments inserted in the journals are some quotations from the biographical interviews given by AR in the early 1960s. During the interviews, she occasionally made remarks that offer special insight into the notes presented here.

My goal in all these changes has been to present the journals in a form that is easy to read, while intruding on her words as little as possible. I am satisfied with the result.

I wish to thank Leonard Peikoff for giving me access to the journals and for his continual editorial advice. Dr. Peikoff was particularly helpful in making my comments more concise and in suggesting to me additional comments. Thanks also to Catherine Dickerson and Diane LeMont for their careful, accurate typing of journals that were often difficult to read, and to Dina Garmong for translating the Russian passages in the earliest journals.

Finally, I owe a special debt to my wife, Barbara Belli, for her support and love throughout this lengthy project. Thank you, Barbara, for being my emotional fuel.

PART 1

EARLY PROJECTS

1

THE HOLLYWOOD YEARS

AR began her career in America by writing scenarios for the silent screen, work she could do despite having only a rudimentary knowledge of English. A little more than a year after coming to America, at the age of twenty-two, she was living at the Hollywood Studio Club and working as a junior screenwriter for Cecil B. DeMille.

This chapter begins with material found in two composition notebooks dating from the summer of 1927. The books contain two complete scenarios and one fragment. Although these scenarios are not explicitly philosophical, the reader will recognize in them characteristic features of AR. They are romantic adventure stories, which portray man as a heroic being capable of overcoming great obstacles to achieve his goals. It is easy to recognize the author of The Fountainhead when, at the age of twenty-two, she writes: “Life is achievement.... Give yourself an aim, something you want to do, then go after it, breaking through everything, with nothing in mind but your aim, all will, all concentration—and get it.”

It is fascinating to see the seeds of her later work in these stories. In the first scenario, The Skyscraper, the hero is an architect named Howord Kane who—despite being charged with a serious crime and threatened with a lengthy prison sentence—ends by standing triumphantly at the top of his greatest creation, a New York skyscraper. The second scenario ends with the heroine rushing to the rescue of the hero, whom the villains hove left strapped to a torture machine. When AR had a good plot idea, she did not forget it

July-September 1927

[AR begins with notes on a book of short stories about railroad workers (Held for Orders by Frank H. Spearman). Apparently, she considered it as a possible source of ideas for scenarios.]

1. The Switchman’s Story: Shockley

His past. His regeneration through work. His strength and success with the work. His sacrifice to save a friend.

2. The Wiper’s Story: How McGrath Got an Engine

An obscure man proves his worth by doing a very dangerous and difficult thing that no one else could do, and gets his reward—what he wanted.

3. The Roadmaster’s Story: The Spider Water

The tragedy of a good, strong, wonderful worker—dismissed for lack of education.

4. The Striker’s Story: McTerza

Personal courage—in a big fight.

5. The Dispatcher’s Story: The Last Order

The tragedy of a fatal mistake committed [by the dispatcher].

6. The Nightman’s Story: Bullhead

A man’s regeneration through work; a big danger, brought about by his fault, that is [overcome by] a heroic effort.

7. The Master Mechanic’s Story: Delaroo

Friendship in work—and professional sacrifice for a friend.

8. The Operator’s Story: DeMolay Four

A man’s hard, heroic work. Another man’s lazy negligence—and the crime or catastrophe from it.

9. The Trainmaster’s Story: Of the Old Guard

A fight between his conscience and his work.

10. The Yellow Mail Story: Jimmy the Wind

A big enterprise—saved by one man.

[AR notes the following idea for a scenario entitled The Country Doctor.]

A story about a country doctor.

What interesting situation can he be in?

He saves the life of his enemy (or his enemy’s son).

What kind of an enemy can he have? Who could hurt him and how? What can hurt him? To lose his job. His enemy has taken his job away from him.

How could he? The job was in the hands of his enemy. How? Through competition. The enemy opens a hospital and [hires] a new doctor.

Why is the enemy angry? The doctor has done something against his wishes. It must be something good. He helped his son to elope with a girl. How to connect the hospital with the beginning? The job was promised to the doctor and it was his ambition. What can make his position more tragic? His marriage depended on his new job.

He builds his hopes on getting a job in a hospital.

He does not get the job because of his enemy.

He saves the life of his enemy’s son and gets his job.

[The following notes pertain to a story about a builder.]

The strength, energy, heroism of a superintendent.

What can be the energy of the superintendent? What can express it? How can it be shown?

What is the difference between a good and a bad superintendent?

What mistakes can be made? How? How will they be discovered? Can there be a big, fatal mistake? What and how?

What mistakes can be made on the building intentionally, and how? What will be the result of it? How could the superintendent be prevented from noticing it? How does he finally discover it?

Who can be against the construction of a building and why? What can they do? What can threaten a building? What are the difficulties a superintendent meets in his work?

If somebody is against the superintendent, what can they do to hurt him professionally? Who is likely to be against him? Who are the professional enemies he can have? What are the professional tragedies?

Can there be a very dangerous and difficult thing that no one can do—and that one man does? Is there a possibility and an occasion for one-man heroism? Or a professional sacrifice?

What can be the dangerous, tragic consequences of a person’s laziness and negligence?

Is it possible for a man to be in a position in which the good of his work interferes with his own good? How?

We want the story of how a building is constructed and everything that gets in its way—the energy of breaking through obstacles. What can prevent the building? Are there any obstacles possible? Can the building of a certain skyscraper hurt somebody? How and why?

The tremendous energy of that work. What expresses it in the best and strongest way?

The Skyscraper

[DeMille bought a story entitled The Skyscraper, written by Dudley Murphy, and assigned AR to work on the scenario. Many years later, AR recalled:

It was the story that gave me the most trouble. The original involved two tough construction workers who were in love with the same girl. The events consisted of them throwing rivets at each other, or almost falling off the girders; they fight but they are really the best of friends—it was that kind of story. DeMille said that I didn’t have to follow the original, just do a scenario that projected the drama and heroism of constructing a skyscraper.

AR’s first attempt is recognizably based on the original story.]

Strength—energy—work. Steel and sweat.
A story about the building of a skyscraper.
A story about a steel-worker.
The worker saves the building from a fire, risking his own life.
What are the results of it? He rehabilitates himself.
What was his crime? What was he accused of?
He has lost his job. How?
A bum becomes a man, under the influence of the work on a
skyscraper.
[Characters:] Bill MacCann, Dick Saunders, Hetty Brown, Buddy
[O‘Brien].
Bill MacCann comes to New York, a down-and-out bum.
Hetty Brown, his former sweetheart, is now engaged to Dick Saun
ders, a young construction superintendent.
Their meeting, her disappointment, his desire to revenge himself
on Dick.
He goes to work on the skyscraper.
He reforms, becomes a man (his success at work, his friends, his
promotion).
Dick’s friendship with Bill. Hetty in the building. Her gradual love
for Bill.
Dick introduces Bill to Hetty.
The bonus money—for the marriage of Dick and Hetty.
The night of the finish. Bill’s energy. (Dick in Bill’s power. Accident
on top of building?)
Hetty breaks her engagement to Dick. Bill-Hetty.
Bill is fired.
Bill saves the building from the fire.

A bum works on a skyscraper to take his revenge. He becomes a man under the influence of his enemy, the superintendent. He loves the superintendent’s fiancée.

Think from: Bill getting ready to kill Dick and what follows. Dick’s good deed to him—their friendship. Hetty-Bill and Hetty-Bill-Dick.

Expectation. Have something hang over the head of the audience, something to expect; they know the situation is strange and they know something is going to happen, has to happen, so they wait. (Examples: “The Angel of Broadway,” “Senorita.”)

[AR interrupts her work on The Skyscraper to write down another idea. This note was titled “F. a. t. D., ” probably meaning “Friends and the Duel. ”]

A story of two friends in love with the same woman.

What would be the strongest result of it, the most tragic? They fight a duel over her. Why? Because she is the wife of one of them. Then why does the first love her? He loved her before the marriage. Why did the second marry her? He didn’t know of the first love. Why didn’t the first marry her himself? He could not. Why? He has killed her [former] husband in a duel. How did the second meet her? The first had to go away and left her in his care. What was the first’s reaction to the marriage? He loved his friend and he loved her. What was her reaction? She tried to tempt him back.

The story of the building of a skyscraper. The energy of the work makes a man out of a bum. Why has he decided to revenge himself? Because the superintendent was engaged to his girl. What does he do when reformed? He gives up his vengeance against the superintendent. What was the bum, or his guilt? He planned to kill the superintendent. Instead, he defends him. Against what? What can be his danger?

The effort of the building, the construction—all the details of that effort. The types, what they do, what happens to them and so on.

An epic must have a big idea behind it, an idea related to human lives.

Achievement is the aim of life. Life is achievement.

The sense of achievement—breaking through obstacles. Obstacles to the building or to [the man].

Achievement—give yourself an aim, something you want to do, then go after it, breaking through everything, with nothing in mind but your aim, all will, all concentration—and get it.

Bill MacCann, a down-and-out young bum, comes to New York from a far-away small town. He wants to see his former sweetheart, Hetty Brown, whom he had not seen for some years.

Hetty Brown is working in a department store on Broadway. She had not heard from Bill for many years and now she is engaged to another man, Dick Saunders. He is the superintendent of a skyscraper that is being built across the street from the store where she works.

But Hetty has not forgotten her first love. She is very excited when she gets the letter announcing Bill’s coming to New York. She waits for him anxiously.

Bill comes. It is a great shock for Hetty, when she sees the ragged, half-drunken, lazy bum he has become. All her dreams about him are shattered and she tells him that there can be nothing between them and that she is engaged to Dick Saunders.

Bill is furious and leaves her. He does not want to show how unhappy he is. He walks through the streets of the big city, lonely, hungry and homeless, hating everybody and everything around him. He swears to revenge himself on Dick Saunders.

Bill goes to the skyscraper and gets a job as a steelworker, for long ago he had been one in his native town. But he is unaccustomed to work and at the end of the first day is bawled out by the superintendent, Dick Saunders. Buddy O‘Brien, another worker, tries to help Bill out.

Tom Webbs, the steel-foreman, notices Bill’s rage and hatred at Dick Saunders. After the work Webbs takes Bill to a shabby little restaurant, a bootlegger’s joint, where he makes him drunk. While drinking, Bill boasts desperately that he is going to kill Dick Saunders at the first chance he gets. Webbs is very pleased. He is Dick’s enemy and he encourages Bill in his decision. Bill explains that he will do it when he is alone with Dick somewhere on top of the building, where he can kill him and throw his body down, so that everybody will believe it was an accident.

Bill starts work lazily the next day. But in spite of himself, the strength and energy of the work [inspires] him. When the work stops at lunch time, Dick Saunders praises Bill. It is something quite new to the bum and for the first time in his life he feels proud and satisfied with himself.

Just then, Hetty Brown appears from her store across the street, coming to see Dick, as usual. She sees Bill. She is startled, for she did not expect him to be working here. He looks at her mockingly and turns away when she wants to talk to him. Hetty goes to Dick, who has not noticed the little scene.

Bill comes back to work after lunch, with a tell-tale bottle in his pocket. He is half-drunk with jealousy and the drinks he had. From his carelessness, an accident occurs that almost costs the life of Buddy O‘Brien, his new friend. Buddy is saved only by Dick Saunders, who dashes up in time to rescue him. In spite of himself, Bill admires his enemy.

That night, going home, Bill gives his word to Buddy that he will never drink again.

In two weeks’ time, the workers can hardly recognize the young bum. Bill’s whole appearance has changed and his energy makes him one of the best workers. He is enthusiastic about his work. He cannot resist the influence of the skyscraper. Slowly, it makes a man out of him.

From her store window, Hetty watches Bill’s tall, strong figure across the street and wonders whether her love for him is really dead.

When Bill gets his first pay-check, Tom Webbs invites him to the joint. Bill refuses. He is proud of his earned money and he makes a confession to Webbs: on his way to New York he committed his only real crime—he stole a wallet from a passenger on the train. He has not spent all the money. Now he asks Webbs to take it to the police station, for he does not dare to do it himself. Webbs agrees to do it. However, he keeps the wallet to himself.

[The scenario stops here. In the following notes, AR begins another scenario with the same title. I have identified a few paragraphs that were written in Russian; the rest was written in English.]

[In Russian:] The main thing—the building of the skyscraper, no matter what. Plot-line: victory over obstacles. They try to prevent him from building. He sacrifices everything for the sake of the building. How can he sacrifice or lose the woman for the sake of his work? His private life is in conflict with his work.

The story of a Man. “The Man and the Building.”

Francis Gonda. Something in the past of the man. His passion for the building. “The basement” calls for him—down.

The victory of a man over the town, rising above it, to the sky. The spirit of Calumet “K. ” [Calumet “K,” by Samuel Merwin and Henry Webster, was AR’s favorite popular novel. It is the story of a hero’s triumph over all obstacles in the construction of a grain elevator.]

The building rises in the night as a white column, with drops of water rolling like tears on the joyously glistening walls, in the rays of spotlights. On top of the building, a man is standing, his head thrown far back—just a man looking at the sky.

[In Russian:] The basic plot—the building of a skyscraper. The line is man’s strength. How can strength be expressed? The ability to bear calmly an enormous disaster.

[In Russian:] Question of interest: will Francis triumph over the city or not?

“It’s a challenge we have thrown to the city! It’s a war declared! We are going to build the greatest of buildings. We are going to rise higher [than anyone before]!”

Francis Gonda—“The Man Victorious,” the Master Builder.

[A fantasy poster sketch with the words:]

Cecil B. DeMille presents
THE SKYSCRAPER
by Ayn Rand
from a story by Dudley Murphy
with William Boyd and Lena Malena

Francis Gonda. “The Skyscraper.” An epic of construction.

The active power—Francis’ ambition, his passion for building (and his passion for the woman).

[Characters:] Francis Gonda, a steel foreman, a typical worker, the roof dancer, a bank owner, and John [Scott].

[In the scenario that follows, the name of the hero is changed from Francis Gonda to Howard Kane.]

Howard Kane is the hero of New York. He is a young architect, who has won a big competition arranged by a newspaper, and is now building a skyscraper that is expected to be one of the highest and most unusual in the city. He is architect and superintendent of the construction. John Scott, a famous established architect, had hoped to win the competition. Now he is madly jealous of Howard Kane, who had formerly been employed on his buildings, starting as a simple worker at the very bottom.

Howard is not popular among the workers. They resent his restless energy and the severe discipline he has established on the building. Howard’s only friend is Jimmy, a little newsboy who is selling evening papers near the structure and is very proud of “our architect.”

John Scott has one of his faithful men employed on Howard’s building: Tom Riggins, the foreman of a steel-workers gang. Together they have a scheme to ruin Howard’s success. Riggins is working on it. Scott’s construction company is interested in preventing Howard, their brilliant new competitor, from finishing the building.

One summer morning Howard goes to the steel mills outside the city to look over certain steel beams that are to be shipped to his building. As he is riding back on one of the steel-laden trucks, an elegant little roadster driven by a young girl crashes into the truck. Howard helps the girl out of the wreck of her car. She is not hurt and he proposes to drive her home to the city. She arrives at the door of a very fashionable hotel, riding gaily on the steel beams of a heavy truck. She gives Howard her name—Danny Day.

When he returns to his building, Howard sees posters on the roof-cabaret next to his structure, announcing the first appearance of the famous dancer Danny Day, returned from her European tour.

The next evening, working a night shift, he watches from his building as Danny dances on the next roof. She sees him and waves gaily to him.

Among the brilliant crowd that fills the roof-cabaret are John Scott, who is an old admirer of Danny, and Mr. Clark, owner of the newspaper that is building the skyscraper. After the performance, Danny asks Mr. Clark permission to visit his building. A group of guests goes to the structure. Howard is busy on top of it. Danny jumps into the cable loop of a hoist and goes up to him. As they are on a narrow girder, Danny misses a step. Howard has the time to catch her, but her wrap falls down. She remains almost naked in her follies costume. They are alone, a terrific height above the city. He kisses her.

Danny Day is renowned for never having been in love. She does not want to admit that she is now. She goes down, trying to look cold and angry.

Howard leaves his work for the first time the next day, when he goes to see Danny and ask her forgiveness. They go for a ride together. The public cheers when they recognize Howard Kane, the hero of the hour.

Before leaving him, Danny admits that she loves him. He promises to come and see her again that evening.

Meanwhile, in Howard’s absence, John Scott has sneaked into the building. He watches Tom Riggins’ men carrying out his scheme: on a part of the building, they are riveting the steel girders in such a way that they will not be able to stand the pressure of the upper stories and the steel frame can collapse at any moment.

Late that evening Howard is ready to leave the building, when little Jimmy, the newsboy, comes up to see him. A girder gives way under the child’s weight, and he falls a story. He is not seriously hurt. Howard rushes to examine the girder, and he discovers the mistake that has been done on purpose. He sees that a whole part of the skeleton is barely holding together and at any moment the steel giant can crash down on the crowded street below.

The workers are panic-stricken and want to run. Howard orders them to remain and save the building by carefully removing the girders and riveting them again. The workers refuse, for it is very dangerous work. Howard seizes his revolver and orders them to work, threatening to shoot the first man who leaves the building.

They work through the night, Howard’s will alone ruling the terrified, trembling mob of workers.

Danny is waiting for Howard. Time passes; he does not come. She is desperate at the thought of being neglected by a man to whom she has admitted her love. Then John Scott comes to see her. Her pride is so much hurt by Howard that when Scott starts making love to her, she says “yes” to his proposal.

With the first light of the morning, the work on the building finishes. The skyscraper is saved. But several workers are seriously hurt.

Howard Kane is arrested on a charge of criminal negligence and violence. At the trial, Tom Riggins claims that he worked according to Howard’s instructions. Howard is sentenced to ten years in jail.

On a Broadway comer, with tears in his eyes, Jimmy is selling extras with big headlines announcing this news.

Using all his power and influence, Mr. Clark, the building’s owner, succeeds in releasing Howard on bond—just to finish the skyscraper, for no one else can do it.

Howard comes out of jail. New York is indignant at his being allowed to work again. The public hates and despises its former hero. As he walks to his building, the boys on the streets throw stones and mud at him. Everybody laughs at the “convict-builder.”

He comes to the skyscraper. The structure is in a state of perfect dejection. No work has been done without him. He gives orders. The old energy returns to the construction. He tells [the workers] that the steel frame must be finished that night.

While working, Howard sees a party on the next roof. He sees Danny among the guests. He is happy. When he has a moment to spare, he goes to the cabaret. He stands in a comer before approaching Danny. He hears the announcement of Danny Day’s engagement to John Scott—this is their engagement party. Howard approaches the table. Danny did not know that he had been released already. She jumps to her feet, wants to run to him and stops, realizing her position. John Scott and the guests laugh at Howard, the “convict-builder.” Howard does not say a word and returns to his work.

That evening when Howard leaves the building to take a short sleep, for he has to work at night, the workers gather to talk over their indignation. They don’t want to work under a convict. They decide to strike. But Tom Riggins whispers to some of his friends that he will get rid of Howard once and for all.

When Howard is returning to the building, Tom Riggins waits for him on a dark corner and shoots him. Then Riggins returns to work, so that there would be no suspicion of him.

Howard is lying on the sidewalk unconscious. An automobile passes by and stops. Danny is returning home alone and sees Howard. She takes him to her house. She bandages his wound. When he opens his eyes, she tells him that she loves him, that she will break her engagement to John Scott.

But Howard remembers that he has to spend ten years in jail. He does not want to ruin Danny’s life. He struggles with himself. He forces himself to look cold and indifferent, and saying that he does not love her, he leaves Danny and returns to his building.

He appears strong and steady, hiding his suffering from the wound, calmly taking command of the work again. Tom Riggins is terrified. Howard does not pay any attention to him. They work late into the night. The workers are exhausted—Howard is not. At last, their patience ends, they refuse to work for the “damned convict.” They declare they are going to strike and ask for another superintendent. The big mob of workers gathers on the lower floor of the building. They order Howard to give up his job.

Then, alone before the threatening mob, Howard tears open his shirt, tears off the bandage and shows the wound on his breast. He tells them that he is not going to denounce the criminal, that he only asks them to work, to finish the building, for he has sacrificed his whole life for his skyscraper.

The workers are stricken with a respectful awe, when they realize that Howard has been working wounded. They hesitate. Jimmy, who is present, throws himself to the defense of his friend, shouting to the mob that they are a “bunch of yellow guys.” Some workers take Howard’s side. The others refuse.

Then some policemen, attracted by the tumult, appear at the building. They ask Howard what happened. Tom Riggins trembles. The workers are silent. Howard answers calmly that nothing happened.

When the policemen leave, a roar of enthusiasm greets Howard. The workers push away Riggins and his little group. Cheering, they surround Howard Kane, their leader. And the work starts again, with an enthusiasm such as never before.

Under Howard’s direction the building seems to grow, to rise toward the sky. Danny Day is dancing on the cabaret roof. He tries not to look down. He thinks only of his skyscraper now.

Howard Kane’s building is finished. Only the wooden scaffolding that surrounds it still remains to be removed. The proud skyscraper towers over Broadway, before the admiring eyes of the [people below].

Howard must return to jail that evening, for his bond has expired with the completion of his work. Alone in the building, he is taking a last look at it.

Danny Day is going to her wedding, for this is her wedding day. She is riding in an automobile through New York’s streets. She cannot tear her eyes from the automobile’s window. Above the roofs of the small houses, she sees in the distance Howard Kane’s skyscraper. It appears behind every corner, in every opening between the houses. It seems to follow her. She cannot stand it. She gets out of the car and runs. But the skyscraper is still there, before her. She loves the buildings of Broadway. She feels so small and helpless at their feet. She feels for the first time all the majesty of the world’s greatest structures. And she is drawn irresistibly toward Howard’s skyscraper.

She comes to the building and meets Howard. Both cannot hide their love any longer. But they have to part. Howard goes to Mr. Clark to say farewell.

Mr. Clark, however, has another plan. He tells Howard that he is so grateful for his work that he is willing to lose the bond money and he asks him to run away. Howard agrees.

Meanwhile, John Scott calls Tom Riggins. He is furious that the building has been finished on time. He bribes Riggins to set fire to the wooden scaffolding. And Riggins does it.

Howard and Danny are riding away in an automobile. They hear the newsboy shout about the police searching for the escaped Howard Kane. Then suddenly they see a red glow that sets the sky aflame and they see the burning skyscraper. Howard wants to save it. Danny implores him not to give himself up and to run away. But he rushes to his building.

The skyscraper is a blazing tower of flames. The firemen are unable to stop the fire. The water hoses are helpless before the 700-foot-high flaming monster. An immense crowd is gathered before the tremendous spectacle.

Policemen rush to Howard when they see him. But he runs to the building and starts climbing up, through the flames, to the water tower on top. He rises through the fire, climbing, falling, climbing again. It seems that all of New York is watching him breathlessly.

Meanwhile, Tom Riggins is arrested, for he is suspected. He is terrified and announces that John Scott is guilty of the fire, as well as the first catastrophe at the building.

Howard reaches the water tower at the top. He releases the water. The building is saved.

Far below, the crowd is cheering wildly for Howard Kane, the hero. The skyscraper rises in the night like a victorious white column. His clothes, hanging in rags, his body burned and bleeding, Howard Kane is standing on top of his building, his head thrown back—just a man looking at the sky.

[DeMille did produce The Skyscraper in 1928, starring William Boyd and Alan Hale. The movie followed the original story, not AR’s scenario; according to AR, “it was a lousy picture. ”]

[The following notes were written in Russian.]

An epic:

1. Spans an entire epoch.

2. Has a large theme, a grand theme—and an enormous conflict (external or internal).

3. Exhausts and integrates everything related to the theme; it represents the essence, in the best possible form.

4. A concrete story expresses the universal essence; it is not an exceptional occurrence.

5. The story applies to everyone, not just to an individual soul.

How it is expressed:

1. Expresses various main ideals, ideas, and events of a given epoch.

2. A large theme, closely related to the epoch’s character.

3. The most interesting, universal traits and facts are expressed in the most [illegible], interesting, and characteristic story.

4. A concrete story is built in such a way as to express the idea, the universal traits, in the most colorful way.

5. Do not push the hero into the foreground too much, do not express everything only from the hero’s point of view and as being for the hero; implicitly let it be felt that the hero is a means, not the end.

6. The plot [should] express and unite everything, all the concretes. The plot flows from the essence of the theme; one constructs the plot after analyzing the theme, the epoch.

[The following is the second complete scenario. In order not to give away the story, I have omitted one page of plot notes.]

The Siege

Ellen Darrow, her millionaire father Mr. Darrow, and her fiancé Dick Saunders are paying their last visit to Peking. The American Consul, their friend, advises them to leave China as soon as possible, for it is dangerous for foreigners to stay there with all the disorders and insurrections.

Ellen has been noticed by a Chinaman of bad reputation, Jung-Tzan, who had seen her in a restaurant. She has been saved from him by the two Americans, who were present there. Mr. Darrow is very nervous and promises the Consul that they will leave tomorrow.

They return to their hotel to spend the last night there. This hotel is a strong building, reminiscent of a Chinese castle. It is situated in a picturesque but lonely spot among rivers and woods, miles from Peking. The manager is a European and the residents are all Americans and Europeans, a very exclusive crowd of society people. The only Chinaman in the place is the janitor.

That night, when the lights of the hotel go out, a young American, Kenneth Hartley, slips into the building through an open window. He isn’t a resident of the place. He’s just a crook and his aim is the safe in Mr. Darrow’s room.

He is opening the safe when Ellen, in her room upstairs, hears the noise. She rushes downstairs, revolver in hand, and stops Kenneth just as he had opened the safe. Mr. Darrow and Dick Saunders arrive at her call. Kenneth is disarmed. Dick is about to put handcuffs on him, when they hear shots outside and a loud knocking at the door.

The hotel is surrounded by a mob of Chinese bandits led by Jung-Tzan, Ellen’s enemy. The terrified hotel guests are in a mad panic. They don’t know what to do and are too frightened to act. The only man that realizes the position is Kenneth.

In a few moments he organizes the defense of the hotel. All of the doors are strong iron and most of the windows have iron bars and shutters. The residents have quite a big supply of firearms. Kenneth assigns a post to every man in the place.

The Chinese mob attacks the hotel and the attack is forced back by the hotel guests, under Kenneth’s orders. Knowing that they can’t hold for a long time, Jung-Tzan orders his bandits to remain around the building in a regular siege. He had previously cut off all the hotel’s telephone wires. There isn’t a living soul for miles around. He knows that the place is in his power, with all the money, jewels, and women in it.

A few days pass. Kenneth is the supreme chief and dictator of the besieged hotel. He leads the defense and the helpless society people know that their lives are in his hands. There is not much food nor many weapons in the place for a long siege and Kenneth manages it, spending as little as possible.

Dick Saunders is very drunk and jealous, for he notices a growing friendship between Ellen and Kenneth. After one of the Chinese attacks, Kenneth is slightly wounded and Ellen bandages his wound. During that battle Ellen has seen and recognized the Chinese chief, and it adds to the anxiety of Mr. Darrow, her father.

That night, Kenneth is watching over the hotel and surveying the Chinese camp. All seems quiet, when he suddenly sees two Chinamen climbing up the old stone wall towards Ellen’s window. He rushes to Ellen’s room and enters it noiselessly. Ellen is asleep. For a moment he looks at her, forgetting the enemies and everything. Then, mastering himself, he goes to the window and shoots at the Chinamen, just as they are approaching. One is killed; the other—Jung-Tzan—runs away.

Ellen wakes up and runs to Kenneth in terror. Then she realizes that she is in his arms and steps away from him, just as her father and Dick rush in.

The next morning, Kenneth finds a strange letter in his room. It is from Jung-Tzan. The Chinese chief tells Kenneth that he is the only one they fear and offers him a big sum of money for surrendering the place. Kenneth throws the letter away disdainfully, wondering how it got there.

That day, while putting iron bars on the window in Ellen’s room, Kenneth sees Ellen and, forgetting himself, tries to take her in his arms. She tears herself from him. She does not speak to him that day, and tries to be especially tender to her fiancé, Dick Saunders, as though to convince herself that she still loves him. Kenneth is dark and silent, tortured by jealousy.

The hotel guests notice it all. It worries them, and their worry changes to terror when one of them finds Jung-Tzan’s letter in Kenneth’s room. They are afraid that Kenneth will betray them. They call Ellen. They ask her to pretend to love Kenneth, to prevent him from surrendering the hotel. Ellen is indignant. But they all plead with her, asking her sacrifice to save them from a terrible fate. Even Dick Saunders does not object to it.

Ellen agrees at last. She tries to convince herself that her task is more disagreeable to her than she really feels it is.

Meanwhile, as a last hope, Mr. Darrow decides to send the Chinese janitor to Peking, hoping that he might be able to slip through the Chinese lines and inform the American Consul. The janitor is let out through a little side door.

In a short time, Ellen has conquered Kenneth. And when she is in his arms, when she loves him, she is afraid that she is not playing a part. But she does not want to admit it to herself.

Kenneth asks her to marry him right away, for he wants her and they cannot be sure of the future, with the terrible danger hanging over them. Ellen struggles with herself, then agrees.

Mr. Darrow has to agree, too. Kenneth is radiant with happiness and tells them that he is going straight forever.

There is a priest among the hotel residents. Everything is ready for the wedding. The ceremony is about to start when there is a knock at the little door. The janitor returns. He announces that he has informed the Consul and American soldiers are on their way to the hotel: they will be there in a couple of hours.

A roar of enthusiasm greets the news. Dick Saunders stops the wedding, says that Ellen does not have to play the part anymore. Ellen wants to protest, but cannot, for Kenneth is stricken with the discovery of her deception.

And the guests’ attitude toward Kenneth changes. They don’t need him anymore. They are mocking and disdainful. To them, he is the crook again. They even put handcuffs on him, but Ellen takes them off. Kenneth is too stricken to protest or say anything.

Some of the guests run to the roof of the building and fire their last bullets into the air, as a signal to the coming soldiers.

Kenneth is alone in a dark comer when the janitor approaches him. The janitor is laughing triumphantly. He tells Kenneth that he is in Jung-Tzan’s service and the news is a fake, nobody is coming to the rescue, but that Jung-Tzan’s offer to Kenneth is still good and maybe he will accept it, now that he sees how his people have treated him.

Kenneth runs to the cellar; there is no food left and hardly any bullets. He returns to the janitor and tells him to bring Jung-Tzan in secretly through the little side door to discuss his offer.

Jung-Tzan comes. Kenneth says that he will agree to open the doors to him, under two conditions: first, Kenneth will be the master and the Chinese will obey his orders; second, the woman, Ellen Darrow, will belong to him. Jung-Tzan hesitates, but finally agrees.

In the evening, the hotel guests are all dressed in their best evening clothes, waiting for the soldiers, when Kenneth opens the doors and lets the Chinese mob in. It is a terrible scene. At Kenneth’s orders the guests are all made prisoners in a few moments. They are horrified at Kenneth’s betrayal, which seems so hideous. Kenneth orders them all to be locked in the hotel’s cellar and the key brought to him.

Ellen is the only one that is not locked. He takes her to his room. She struggles desperately, but he drags her roughly up the stairs, while the Chinamen laugh.

When they are alone in his room, Kenneth tells her that he brought her here only because he could not trust Jung-Tzan. He explains that this was the only way to save them all. He is going to let them all escape, in two of the Chinese trucks, while he will remain here and keep the Chinese from following them.

Ellen is horrified. She does not want him to remain. She tells him how much she loves him and they have a sincere love scene this time. But Kenneth has to remain to save the others. While the wild Chinese mob is robbing the house, breaking the safes and drinking the remaining wine, Kenneth leads all the prisoners to two trucks, parked in a lonely, dark spot, and they speed away. He remains.

He does all he can to keep the Chinamen from going into the cellar. He drinks with them and tries to amuse them. Then Jung-Tzan suggests that they must prepare tortures for the prisoners. Kenneth tries to keep them at it as long as possible, inventing more and more tortures, but knowing that he is the only one on whom they will be used.

Finally, they grow impatient. He tells them that he has lost the cellar key. They go downstairs, they break the door. The cellar is empty.

They rush to Kenneth. He faces them with a calm [expression].

The hotel guests reach Peking. Mr. Darrow asks for American soldiers to be sent to the hotel immediately. He and Ellen go back to the hotel with them.

Taken by surprise, the Chinese mob in the hotel surrenders immediately. Ellen runs madly through the rooms, searching for Kenneth. She finds him at last, tied to a torture machine, but still alive.

circa February 1928

In 1928, at the age of twenty-three, AR made her first attempt in English to plan a novel. The working title was The Little Street.

Its theme is that humanity—warped by a corrupt philosophy—is destroying the best in man for the sake of enshrining mediocrity. By far AR’s most malevolent story, it provides a sharp contrast to the “benevolent universe” of the earlier scenarios, in which the hero is victorious. Here she is bitterly denouncing a world that seems to have no place for heroism.

Later, AR emphatically rejected the “malevolent universe” premise that evil is powerful and the good helpless. But the premise does dominate The Little Street. What kind of factors may have led her temporarily to accept it?

She grew up in Russia, a man-made model of a malevolent universe (see We the Living). Then, in America, she was astonished to discover that the same anti-life ideas that had destroyed Russia were on the rise here. The result seems to have been periods ofprofound indignation, when AR felt that the whole world was dominated by evil and that she was a metaphysical outcast. It is from this perspective that the story was conceived.

In her mature writings, AR stressed that she advocated rational selfishness, not the whim-worshipping subjectivism of the man who says: “The good is whatever I want. ” She regarded the whim-worshipper with particular contempt, arguing that such a man entirely lacks the virtue of selfishness (see “Selfishness Without a Self” in Philosophy: Who Needs It). But in the following notes, AR is focused on a single question: whether a man is motivated to act for himself or for others—and not on the epistemological issue of whether he acts by reason or whim. Consequently, she praises any expression of egoism, even when it seems to be the pseudo-egoism she would soon begin to denounce.

Furthermore, AR has not yet distinguished clearly between the independent man and the man who seeks power over others (e.g., between a man like Howard Roark and one like Gail Wynand). She writes admiringly of the strong individual who wants to “command, ” rather than “obey. ” Later she recognized that such a choice is a false alternative: “The choice is not self-sacrifice or domination. The choice is independence or dependence. ” The notes for The Little Street were written nearly eight years before she began work on The Fountainhead.

Occasionally, AR describes certain fundamental attitudes or character traits as “innate” “ (e.g., her hero’s innate egoism). These passages contradict her advocacy of free-will; it might appear that AR believed in some form of biological determinism. In fact, even in these early notes, her dominant premise is that men are responsible for the ideas they choose to accept and the actions they choose to take. For example, she cites the ideas that have led to the moral corruption in the world, and her implication throughout is that men can choose to accept these ideas or not. She is inconsistent in this story, because she does not yet see the contradiction between free-will and innate virtues.

All of the above confusions reflect the influence on the early AR of Friedrich Nietzsche, whom she had read and admired, especially for his eloquent expression of a heroic sense of life. There are several references to him in these notes. In due course, however, she discarded all these Nietzschean elements, and defined “heroism ” in rational terms, by reference to her own distinctive philosophy of Objectivism. For her final view of Nietzsche, see the introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Fountainhead and the title essay in For the New Intellectual.

Despite the flawed statements, it is easy to recognize AR as the author of the following notes. Her trademark—the reverence with which she regards man’s life, her intense passion for values—comes through clearly. In its combination of value-passion and moral indignation, The Little Street is similar to AR’s early screenplay Ideal (see The Early Ayn Rand).

The notes also include AR’s earliest formulations on several key topics: her sense of life; the unity of thought and feeling which is experienced by a “clear mind”; the effect of the morality of sacrifice on self-esteem and moral ambition; moral compromise as an unmitigated evil; the motivation ofa soul who insists that the meaning of one’s life is to be found outside oneself.

At the age of twenty-three, AR knew that she was not ready to portray her ideal man. Her goal here is less ambitious; she wants only to project her ideal man’s sense of life. The protagonist, Danny Renahan, is an independent, uncompromising, nineteen-year-old boy with a passionate hunger for life. Some of Danny’s characteristics are based on an actual nineteen-year-old boy, William Edward Hickman, who was the defendant in a highly publicized murder trial that had just taken place in Los Angeles. Hickman was accused of kidnapping and murdering a young girl. He was found guilty and sentenced to death in February of 1928; he was hanged on October 20, 1928.

Judging from the newspaper accounts of the time, Hickman was articulate and arrogant, and seems to have enjoyed shocking people by rejecting conventional views. The public furor against him was unprecedented. For reasons given in the following notes, AR concluded that the intensity of the public’s hatred was primarily “because of the man who committed the crime and not because of the crime he committed. ” The mob hated Hickman for his independence; she chose him as a model for the same reason.

Hickman served as a model for Danny only in strictly limited respects, which AR names in her notes. Danny does commit a crime in the story, but it is nothing like Hickman’s. To guard against any misinterpretation, I quote her own statement regarding the relationship between her hero and Hickman:

[My hero is] very far from him, of course. The outside of Hickman, but not the inside. Much deeper and much more. A Hickman with a purpose. And without the degeneracy. It is more exact to say that the model is not Hickman, but what Hickman suggested to me.

The Little Street is not the only early work ofAR’s in which she chose a criminal to symbolize an independent man. In her first play, The Night of January 16th, the hero commits financial fraud on a grand scale and then attempts to escape by faking his own death. She explains her use of the heroic criminal in the introduction to the play, written in 1968. Her comments are applicable here.

Night of January 16th is not a philosophical, but a sense of life play....

This means that its events are not to be taken literally; they dramatize certain fundamental psychological characteristics, deliberately isolated and emphasized in order to convey a single abstraction: the characters’ attitude toward life. The events serve to feature the motives of the characters’ actions, regardless of the particular forms of the actions—i.e., the motives, not their specific concretization. The events feature the confrontation of two extremes, two opposite ways of facing existence: passionate self-assertiveness, self-confidence, ambition, audacity, independence—versus conventionality, servility, envy, hatred, power-lust.

I do not think, nor did I think when I wrote this play, that a swindler is a heroic character or that a respectable banker is a villain. But for the purpose of dramatizing the conflict of independence versus conformity, a criminal—a social outcast—can be an eloquent symbol. This, incidentally, is the reason of the profound appeal of the “noble crook” in fiction. He is the symbol of the rebel as such, regardless of the kind of society he rebels against, the symbol—for most people—of their vague, undefined, unrealized groping toward a concept, or a shadowy image, of man’s self-esteem.

That a career of crime is not, in fact, the way to implement one’s self-esteem, is irrelevant in sense-of-life terms. A sense of life is concerned mainly with consciousness, not with existence—or rather: with the way a man’s consciousness faces existence. It is concerned with a basic frame of mind, not with rules of conduct.

If this play’s sense of life were to be verbalized, it would say, in effect: ‘Your life, your achievement, your happiness, your person are of paramount importance. Live up to your highest vision of yourself no matter what circumstances you might encounter. An exalted view of self-esteem is a man’s most admirable quality.’ How one is to live up to this vision—how this frame of mind is to be implemented in action and in reality—is a question that a sense of life cannot answer: that is the task of philosophy.

AR did not get far in planning The Little Street. The project was too alien to her deepest premises. The notes are undated, but it seems likely that they were made over a short period when she was feeling particularly bitter toward the world. This was not a novel that she could have written; to her, the purpose of fiction writing is not to denounce that which one despises, but to exalt that which one admires.

The Little Street

The world as it is.

Show it all, calmly and indifferently, like an outsider who does not share humanity’s feelings or prejudices and can see it all “from the side.”

Show all the filth, stupidity, and horror of the world, along with that which is supposed to atone for it. Show how insignificant, petty, and miserable the “good” in the world is, compared to the real horror it masks. Do not paint one side of the world, the polite side, and be silent about the rest; paint a real picture of the whole, good and bad at once, the “good” looking more horrid than the bad when seen together with the things it tolerates. Men see only one part of life at a time, the part they have before their eyes at the moment. Show them the whole.

Show that humanity is petty. That it’s small. That it’s dumb, with the heavy, hopeless stupidity of a man born feeble-minded, who does not understand, because he cannot understand, because he hasn’t the capacity to understand; like a man born blind, who cannot see, because he has no organ for seeing.

Show that the world is monstrously hypocritical. That humanity has no convictions of any kind. That it does not know how to believe anything. That it has never believed consistently and does not know how to be true to any idea or ideal. That all the “high ” words of the world are a monstrous lie. That nobody believes in anything “high” and nobody wants to believe. That one cannot believe one thing and do another, for such a belief isn’t worth a nickel. And that’s what humanity is doing.

Show that humanity is utterly illogical, like an animal that cannot connect together the things it observes. Man realizes and connects much more than an animal, but who can declare that his ability to connect things is perfect? The future, higher type of man will have to perfect just this ability [to achieve] the clear vision. A clear mind sees things and the connections between them. Humanity is stumbling helplessly in a chaos of inconsistent ideas, actions, and feelings that can’t be put together, without even realizing the contradictions between them or their ultimate logical results.

A perfect, clear understanding also means a feeling. It isn’t enough to realize a thing is true. The realization must be so clear that one feels this truth. For men act on feelings, not on thoughts. Every thought should be part of yourself, your body, your nature, and every part of your nature should be a thought. Every feeling—a thought, every thought—a feeling. [This is AR ’s earliest statement regarding the harmony of reason and emotion that follows from a proper integration of mind and body.]

Show the silent terror that is life at present, the silent terror that hangs over us, chokes us, that everybody feels and nobody can define, the nameless thing that is the atmosphere of humanity.

Show that the mob determines life at present and show exactly who and what that mob is. Show the things it breaks, the precious enemies that it ruins. Show that all humanity and each little citizen is an octopus that consciously or unconsciously sucks the blood of the best on earth and strangles life with its cold, sticky tentacles.

Show that the world is nothing but a little street. That this little street is its king and master, its essence and spirit. Show the little street and how it works.

Religion: show what it means when thought out consistently; what it does to man; who needs it; who defends it with all the ferocious despotism of a small, ambitious nature. The great poison of mankind.

Morals (as connected with religion): the real reason for all hypocrisy. The wrecking of man by teaching him ideals that are contrary to his nature; ideals he has to accept as his highest ambition, even though they are organically hateful and repulsive to him. And when he can’t doubt them, he doubts himself. He becomes low, sinful, imperfect in his own eyes; he does not aspire to anything high, when he knows that the high is inaccessible and alien to him. Humanity’s morals and ideals, its ideology, are the greatest of its crimes. (“Unselfishness” first of all.)

Communism, democracy, socialism are the logical results of present-day humanity. The nameless horror of [these systems], both in their logical end and in the unconscious way that they already rule mankind.

Family-life: the glorification of mediocrity. Elevating the “everyday” little man’s existence into the highest ideal for mankind.

Show that humanity has and wants to have: existence instead of life, satisfaction instead of joy, contentment instead of happiness, security instead of power, vanity instead of pride, attachment instead of love, wish instead of will, yearning instead of passion, a glow-worm instead of a fire.

All the “realistic” books have shown the bad side of life and, as good, have shown the good of today. They have denounced that which is accepted as bad and set up as a relief or example that which is accepted as good. I want to show that there is no good at present, that the “good” as it is now understood is worse than the bad, that it is only the result, the skin over a rotten inside that rules and determines it. I want to show that all the conceptions of the “good,” all the high ideals, have to be changed, for now they are nothing but puppets, slaves and accomplices to the horrible [stifling] of life. There are too many things that people just tolerate and don’t talk about. Show them that it can’t be tolerated, for all their life is a rotten swamp, a sewer, a dumping place for more filth than they can ever realize.

Show that the real God behind all their high words and sentiments, the real omnipotent power behind their culture and civilization, is the little street, just a small, filthy, shabby, common little street, such as exist around the center of every town in the world.

Show them the real, one and only horror—the horror of mediocrity.

The Characters

Danny Renahan. The boy.

He is born with the spirit of Argon and the nature of a medieval feudal lord. Imperious. Impatient. Uncompromising. Untamable. Intolerant. Unadaptable. Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob and intensely, almost painfully conscious of it. Restless. High-strung. An extreme “extremist.” A clear, strong, brilliant mind. An egoist, in the best sense of the word.

He is born in a small town, into a poor, very average family. He grows up lonely, hating everybody and being hated by everybody. (?) Very unpopular in school—for his imperious, masterful character. No love-affairs or drinks. Too straightforward and too absolute for the rest of the boys. Dangerous, too. People don’t trust him, instinctively, feeling him to be an “outsider.”

Show his battle with the world. He is too impatient to toil slowly through the years for the things he wants. Too uncompromising to succeed in the way of the popular young men who know how to get along with those in power. Too intolerant to “get along” with anybody. Too passionate not to burn with disgust for life as he sees it and with humiliation at not being above the mob, crushing it under his feet, giving it orders instead of trying to satisfy it, of crawling before it for its good graces. He is unable to understand how he can act and live as an equal with those he knows to be inferior to him, those he despises and has a right to despise. More passionate than strong. Daring and courageous; but without the patient courage that can fight through, slowly, against disgust. A man that can slash with an [ax], but can’t saw patiently. Too brilliant and fiery a nature to be able to handle any “job” and make money. Crushed by a stupid, ignoble poverty. Too restless and innately, unconsciously romantic to “make good” in the way of the model, average, hard-working young man.

As a result, he is perfectly cynical. Stone-hard. Monstrously cruel. Brazenly daring. No respect for anything or anyone.

He is medium height and slender. Has strong, rather irregular features, as though cut by quick, sharp blows. Not a beautiful face at all but fascinating because of its strength. Deep, dark eyes, dark more through their expression than through the color, burning with the intense fire of a strong, restless soul. His gaze is piercing and threatening under two straight, severe eye-brows. Rather frightful eyes, that make people feel uneasy. He has a large mouth, like a wound slashed in his face. The lower lip is thicker than the upper. He has a habit of an ugly grin that twists his mouth so that one comer only is raised and the upper lip curled, as in a snarl, which gives him an expression of disgusted cruelty.

He has a brilliant sense of humor. Rather a cruel, sardonic kind of humor. Being conscious of his superiority to the rest of mankind, he cannot help seeing their absurd, ridiculous, idiotic smallness. He has no respect for anything; therefore he can laugh at everything and approach all things lightly, with an attitude of superior disdain. His mind is brilliant enough to see the ridiculous side of everything. He gets immense enjoyment from shocking people, amusing them with his cynicism, [ridiculing] before their eyes the most sacred, venerated, established ideas. He takes a real delight in opposing people, in fighting and terrifying them. He has no ambition to be a benefactor or a popular hero for mankind. [...] Subconsciously, this is the result of a noble feeling of superiority, which knows that to be loved by the mob is an insult and that to be hated is the highest compliment it can pay you.

He is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness—[resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning or importance of other people. (One instance when it is blessed not to have an organ of understanding.) Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should. He knows himself—and that is enough. Other people have no right, no hold, no interest or influence on him. And this is not affected or chosen—it’s inborn, absolute, it can’t be changed, he has “no organ” to be otherwise. In this respect, he has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel “other people.” (That’s what I meant by thoughts as feelings, as part of your nature.) (It is wisdom to be dumb about certain things.)

[William Edward] Hickman said: “I am like the state: what is good for me is right.” That is this boy’s psychology. (The best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.) The model for the boy is Hickman. Very far from him, of course. The outside of Hickman, but not the inside. Much deeper and much more. A Hickman with a purpose. And without the degeneracy. It is more exact to say that the model is not Hickman, but what Hickman suggested to me.

The boy is a perfectly straight being, unbending and uncompromising. He cannot be a hypocrite. He shows how impossible it is for a genuinely beautiful soul to succeed at present; for in all [aspects of] modern life, one has to be a hypocrite, to bend and tolerate. This boy wanted to command and smash away things and people he didn’t approve of. He could not compromise with that which he despised and knew he had a right to despise. All life is compromising, at present. A man that could not compromise.

At the end, when his last appeal has been refused and the execution awaits him, he throws away all protective hypocrisy and shouts to his jailers and the newspaper reporters what he thinks of the world. It must be the essence, the very heart of the book: his wild, ferocious cry. It must be the strongest speech ever uttered in condemnation of the world. It must strike people like a whip slapping them in the face. It must be scalding in its bloody suffering, like the yell of an animal with an open, torn wound.

He has a wonderful “sense of living.” He realizes that he is living, he appreciates every minute of it, he wants to live every second, he is unable to exist as other men do. He doesn’t take life for granted and live as he happens to be living—just calm, satisfied, normal. For him, life [must be] strong, high emotion; he has to live “on top,” “breathing” life, tense, exalted, active. He cannot spend eight hours each day on work he despises and does not need. He cannot understand men spending their lives on some work and not liking that work, not doing with it what they please. He knows that he wants to live and that the whole damn world hasn’t the right to deprive him of it!

He doesn’t have people’s attitude toward life, that is, the general way of existing calmly day to day and [experiencing] something strong and exalting only once in a while, as an exception. “Everyday life ”does not exist for him. His normal state is to be exalted, all the time; he wants all of his life to be high, supreme, full of meaning.

All this is unconscious in him. He cannot reason it out and explain it. It’s unconscious, because it’s innate, it’s his natural state of mind, it’s organic in him, and he cannot realize it, because he cannot quite understand the common attitude toward life, which is too monstrous for his Superman’s consciousness [to grasp].

He half-consciously realizes that he possesses something sublime, and that he is going to be condemned for possessing it. From this—his tense, wild, ferocious attitude.

Most people lack [the capacity for] reverence and “taking things seriously. ” They do not hold anything to be very serious or profound. There is nothing that is sacred or immensely important to them. There is nothing—no idea, object, work, or person—that can inspire them with a profound, intense, and all-absorbing passion that reaches to the roots of their souls. They do not know how to value or desire. They cannot give themselves entirely to anything. There is nothing absolute about them. They take all things lightly, easily, pleasantly—almost indifferently, in that they can have it or not, they do not claim it as their absolute necessity. Anything strong and intense, passionate and absolute, anything that can’t be taken with a snickering little “sense of humor”—is too big, too hard, too uncomfortable for them. They are too small and weak to feel with all their soul—and they disapprove of such feelings. They are too small and low for a loyal, profound reverence—and they disapprove of all such reverence. They are too small and profane themselves to know what sacredness is—and they disapprove of anything being too sacred.

The boy is just their opposite. He is all passion, will, and uncompro mised absolutes. He takes everything seriously. Life is very serious and sacred to him. And, as Nietzsche said: “The noble soul has reverence for itself.” He has a profound reverence for himself, a determination to keep himself and his life clean, untouched, and beautiful, because they are the most sacred of all sacred things. And when he wants something—he wants it.

The tragedy of a man with the consciousness of a god, among a bunch of snickering, giggling, dirty-story-telling, good-timing, jolly, regular fellows.

All this is quite unconscious in the boy. He does not and cannot recognize it. He is too much of an “outsider” to understand the “inside.” He understands only enough to hate and despise it, as only he can hate and despise.

The boy has a marvelous, fascinating laugh. I must describe it in the beginning of the story, as Danny’s introduction: a clear, ringing laugh, the laugh of an unhesitating, unquestionable joy, the laugh of a sunny soul, the laugh of the real life itself. That laugh must show more than anything else what that boy is and what they are destroying.

The probable story: he is unjustly hurt and deeply insulted by a popular, “respectable” pastor, who is a condensed representative of the “little street.” [The injustice is such] that it damages, if not ruins, his life and career. He murders the pastor, as a revenge. The public is horrified, for the pastor was a very popular, “beloved” figure. The crime takes the aspect of a blow against the church, religion, civilization, humanity, etc. “The greatest crime ever...”

The boy is alone against all of society. He is everybody’s personal, hated enemy. He is caught, tried, and condemned to death. He escapes from jail. He is recognized on the outskirts of the town by a sneaky little man with a shiny old coat, protruding chin, tobacco-stained yellow lips and bad teeth. He is surrounded by a mob and lynched. Torn to pieces, beaten to death on the pavement with the water of the gutter running red.

The story ends with Hetty, the girl who loved him, going to a grocery store on a rainy November evening, sent by her mother to buy some hamburger and ten cents worth of chopped pickles.

And the last cry of the story, as the girl looks at the little street:

“I’m afraid, Mother, I’m afraid!”

Hetty, the girl.

A clear, straight soul. Like the “Prince-Flower.” [AR may be referring to a Grimms’ fairy tale, The Carnation, in which a beautiful girl is turned temporarily into a flower by a prince.] Very sensitive. Lonely. Not a strong, ambitious career woman, but—a woman. Bewildered by life. Unable to adapt herself to things as they are. In the end, left aimless, with nothing to live for and a terror of living—showing how empty a place this world is for one who does not and cannot share its vices and vicious virtues.

She is the only daughter of a stupid, indifferent father and a petty, [pushy], house-wife mother. The household is rather poor—it has too much to be shabby and not enough to have any education or refinement.

She loves the boy with a wilder passion than she can realize. She is usually too calm, restrained and frail to think herself capable of such a primitive, raw feeling, almost beast-like in its overwhelming [intensity]. She is the only one who feels the Super-Being in the boy, feels it, without completely understanding it. She is frightened by him sometimes, but she is always ready to take his side against everybody. She might sometimes think he is wrong, but she always feels he is right. Her antagonism to common life, her infinite longing for something above it, centers on him, as the only relief from it she has ever met. She is not a strong, active, fighting enemy of that life. She does not even fully realize [the nature of] that life, because she is straight, honest, and “outside of it.” But she feels, blindly and instinctively, the horror of that life and she feels the boy is the only one who is so far and so high above it. Without her realizing it, her love for him is her love for life—her religion, hope, ambition, pride, and future—all these things having no particular meaning to her, the intensity of her feeling centered on one thing: him.

The whole of her tragedy is brought out in the last scene. He escapes from jail after being sentenced to death, and comes to her because she is the only person he can trust. But he is [forced to leave] her house; her mother is threatening to call the police and her father is expected to return home any moment and would be sure to denounce the criminal who is loathed by all mankind. In these moments, when she sees herself alone against the world, when she sees herself so little and helpless in facing the monster of humanity, when she sees the octopus that has caught in its sucking [tentacles] the one who is sacred beyond all sacredness to her—then she understands life for the first time. (And so must my readers.)

(The model for the girl: the “Prince-Flower,” qua modem; and myself, qua weak—the idealistic, longing side of me.)

She is medium height, very slim, rather frail. Not beautiful, but exquisite in her own way. Thin features. Brown hair. Gray eyes with long eyelashes. A fascinating smile that makes her look beautiful: a very feminine, delicate, and tempting smile.

The boy is not in love with her. He has never been in love. But he knows that she loves him. And he feels something like love, although it is more physical desire in the last scene when he kisses her wildly; he is feeling the call of life, when he is so near to losing it.

Just as the boy [embodies] the perfect egoism and will to live—the girl [embodies] the perfect love, the kind of overwhelming, intense, absolute passion that is so alien, so out-of-place on the “little street.” To her the so-called love problems have always been utterly impossible to understand. She doesn’t understand any tragedies of marriage, parents’ opposition, social obstacles and such. The love that she knows is something so immense, so dominant, so unquestionable, that she cannot see anything being considered beside it or opposed to it.

As a relief for the whole book, the few moments that she spends with him when he is hiding in her house, when they kiss each other for the first and last time, must be trembling with the intensity, joy, and ecstasy of life. This scene must show what is possible and what is being destroyed by the little street. The stronger the contrast, the better. The reader must feel an actual pain, and the wild desire to yell for something that can’t be explained in words—the life that no one knows.

The Pastor

[An early version of Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead.]

He has everything that “the little street” has and nothing that it should have. A small soul choked with a poisonous ambition to dominate and crush everybody and everything. Not the kind of passion for power that says: “I want to rule because I know that I am superior to others and I must dominate them”; but the kind that says: “I know that I am inferior and therefore I don’t want to let anything superior exist.” This is subconscious, of course, because one of those muddy souls would never admit it to itself. Consciously, it believes that “we are all equal” and defends that equality with all the jealous, greedy zeal of a bulldog that has his teeth sunk into a piece of meat; the dull, despotic zeal of mediocrity that is [concerned with] the equality of those above, which it wants to pull down, and not with those below, which it [allegedly] wants to pull up.

The pastor has no idea out of the ordinary, the common, the established and he does not want any such ideas to exist. He is not a clever hypocrite that despises the mob and only plays up to it to attain his own aim. He is the lowest, most poisonous, most dangerous type—the ambitious mediocrity. He wants to believe that the mob he serves really is the ruler and the lord of the world. He has no aim outside of that mob. He wants to believe that the mob’s ideas are the standards of the universe; that he is absolutely right in his petty, narrow little convictions; that everybody must not only obey these ideas, but actually believe them.

He knows how much of a blood brother he is to the mob. He also knows that there are those who stand far above it, and he wants to drag them down to the level of the mob, where he is the master [because he is] the best, “condensed” representative of that mob. He’s a devastating picture of a dull, diseased ambition that has filled [an otherwise] empty soul. The ambition of a skunk that knows the bad smell is his only strength and therefore makes it the highest principle of life on earth.

His ideas are the means for “equality,” for bringing higher men down to his level. His thinking is muddy enough to [demand] an absolute obedience to these ideas from others, but not from himself. He isn’t above having filthy little love affairs, accepting money when doing so is quite safe although not quite clean, and forgiving in his “friends” the sins for which he would destroy an “enemy” (i.e., an “outsider”).

He is tall and rather flabby, although he gives the impression of being thin. Has a narrow, lined, yellowish face with the proud, austere expression of a saint. He has little, damp, lusty eyes and the thin, dry lips of a cold hypocrite. He has white hands with short, fat fingers and shapeless fingernails that are more wide than long. Likes to wear rings. Has thin, straight hair which is beginning to gray, with a bald spot showing rosy and soft like the flesh of a baby. He has a deep, slow, dignified voice and a hee-hee-ing, indecent, insincere laugh.

He is a very prominent figure. Especially popular among the semi-literate lower classes, the ones that are always ready to fall for religious preaching. To some, he is a beloved and respected “father”; others are rather indifferent themselves, but will not tolerate any disrespect or disbelief of him and are always ready to defend him furiously against anyone doubting his authority. The business magnates and such despise him and feel an instinctive disgust toward him, but they have to tolerate and stay on good terms with him for fear of his dark, “backstage” power.

He hates all successful people. A successful man, in any line, is his personal enemy. He rejoices at every failure and at the fall of every idol.

(The model for the pastor: the pastor of the Ku Klux Klan that I read about. The movie censors. All “reformers.” An endless list of “little street‘ers” that I will note down as they come.)

[Other Characters]

A fat woman that has made her immense fortune by having bad houses [houses of prostitution]. An influential, respectable citizen. Very proudly conscious of her power. Ambitious to get or buy everything she wants. Convinced that there is nothing so high that she cannot get it. She marries a brilliant, aristocratic, divinely handsome young man, Eric “Goldenlocks.” Marries him because she “can afford to have a pretty boy in her bed” if she wants one.

Eric is poor, ambitious, conceited and not very strong. He just sells himself, marrying her for her money, knowing all about her and the source of her fortune. He is tall, with blue eyes, golden hair and all the Siegfried like, fresh, sparkling beauty of a snow-covered Scandinavian mountain peak on a sunny morning. He marries the woman. We see him later, with a heavy, flabby, ghastly white face, red eyelids, shiny nose, sagging double-chin, unkempt hair, muddled, expressionless eyes and the reputation of a chronic drunkard.

He had been in love, before his marriage, with a charming, brilliant girl from an old family, now poor and barely keeping up a decent appearance to support the dignity of their name. His marriage to the woman is a terrible blow to the girl. A middle-aged nouveau riche, a heavy, common brute, had been courting her in his ambition to possess something he felt to be so above him, a woman of the real aristocracy. She marries him now—in despair. We see her later, overdressed in an expensive and tasteless way, having for a lover a cheap, notorious “heartbreaker.” A little detail: before all this, a young college girl—romantic, sensitive, but not very attractive—has committed suicide over her hopeless love for the handsome Eric “Goldenlocks.”

A genius gone wrong. A handsome, brilliant young actor with a fine mind and a beautiful soul. Famous and successful, but gone wrong in that he is genuinely unhappy; his life is empty of desires or interests; he is cynical, tired, disgusted with everything—inside. Outside—he leads a wild life full of vice. He is not clear to himself, there is a continual chaos in his mind, regarding himself and the world. He does not know what he lives for or why he lives. He does not care—in an immense sense. An example of a fine frame that the little street has filled with its rotten content. Instinctively, he does not accept [the little street’s view of life], he revolts against it—but he has no other. And it is too late for another. He shows how empty the little street’s ideals are and what a wreck they make of an exceptional being. For they can’t fill such a soul and they do not permit the [ideals] that could fill it. He is utterly cynical and does not believe in anything. He could not accept the little street’s beliefs; they only killed in him all belief in believing.

The boy of the story shows how the little street wrecks an existing exceptional being. The actor shows how it wrecks such a being before he develops. The boy is an exceptional nature, and he is wrecked physically. The actor isn‘t, but could have been, and he is wrecked spiritually. The boy is a wonderful character, in spite of everything. The actor is not, but shows signs of what he might have been. The boy has his ego, his pride, his strength. The actor hasn’t anything. He does not even respect himself. He is despicable sometimes, and does not care. He is as empty of any high interest or feelings as a human being can be.

A “philosophical” prostitute. A creature that lives for one thing only and does not want to see anything else. Perfectly satisfied and proud of herself. She looks at things straight, realizes her power and is proud. The female representative of the little street—to match with the pastor. Except that she is more honest than the pastor. She sees the world as it is and laughs at all the high words and ideals. She knows their worth. She has no “high ideals.” She is openly rotten and satisfied with it, for the world is rotten and she has a right to say it. She is the voice of the little street when she says: that she is the real queen of life; that “decent” women have to share their men with her and be satisfied with what she leaves; that men’s respect for their “respectable” women isn’t worth a penny; that there is no man too high for her bed; that nothing is higher for men than what she gives them; and so on. She is a filthy creature who spits on all the high ideals of humanity and has a right to do it. For she does not lie. She only looks at things as they are and states the facts that the “decent people” are hypocritical enough to overlook and tolerate.

Things that will have to be shown and have characters to represent them

Sex filth. The real horror (and here I must gather all my strength to show it as strongly as possible) of respectable men having love affairs with the lowest kind of female filth. Show that a great man can’t be great if he associates (and associates in such a way!) with women he himself despises, that he is despicable himself if he does it. Show great men and young, promising boys with the disgraceful slime they make “love” to. All the things which they tolerate, which they allow themselves, thinking that they still have a right to keep their self-respect.

The hypocrisy of what men call love. A dull, lukewarm feeling of domestic-animal attachment and “respect” for their wives, not affected by affairs with “unrespectable” women.

The wives who tolerate their husbands’ unfaithfulness and are unfaithful themselves. Perfectly satisfied with such a marriage.

Mothers who approve of their sons’ vices and even help them in [such a course].

Influential, powerful men and the prostitutes who are their mistresses and who through these men get power over respectable people.

White-slavers.

Associations. The human herds. All the gatherings of average humanity which have but one aim: to ruin all individuals and individuality, to put “we” instead of “I” everywhere, to have a herd of submissive insiders against everyone outside who “does not belong,” everyone who has the courage and conscience to walk alone. The tyranny of number, of the multitude, of the average. Communism already established—unofficially.

Women ’s clubs. The poisonous hypocrisy of a secret revenge given power and influence. The revenge of failed mediocrities that glorify “virtue” because they have no chance to [engage in vice]. Sour old maids—not only physically, but spiritually as well. Women who failed in their private lives given the power to dictate an opinion and exercise an influence over the lives of others. Inferiors, speaking as superiors to society. Wrecks themselves—trying to wreck other lives.

Prominent, “respectable ” citizens. The intimate details of how they [rose]. Unpunished crooks who commit crimes against “society” and then furiously defend the rights of society against others. “Successful” men and what makes their success. The art of boot-licking. Patriots and their ferocious intolerance. Men killed and crippled for “their country.” And who and what is that country? Show the “great” men—in business, politics, art—and how small they are when one looks closely.

Home life. The stupid idealization of it, that tries to make it the highest ideal and aim for everybody. The dull, petty, purposeless existence that it is. The ridiculous smallness of it. Show young, promising people, full of life, and what they become with their “families.” The domestic-animal, eat-drink-and-sleep existence. The chewing-cow-in-the-sun contentment. The heavy, dumb, jail-like monotony of that life, day by day. [Note AR’s rejection of both the “family values” of conservatives and (earlier) the “feminism” advocated by many liberals.]

Narcotic-fiends. Those who buy it—and those who sell it, making fortunes [while remaining] uncaught and unpunished.

I leave these pages empty to be filled with [more descriptions of] those who constitute “humanity” and make up our great civilization, those for whom we are expected to live.

They are the ones who judge the boy when he commits his crime against society.

Facts that I observe and want to remember: good examples of the “little street”

I must remember that I do not want to invent or exaggerate anything in this story. Everything must be taken from life. I do not want it to be my furious protest against humanity—made up in my imagination. It has to be true, just life as it is, which is far worse than I could ever invent. The only thing I can do in the story is to put it all together, to show the whole, to bring things a little closer to each other, allowing people to see the close relation between the “good” and the horror of their lives.

The Hickman Case

The first thing that impresses me about the case is the ferocious rage of the whole society against one man. No matter what the man did, there is always something loathsome in the “virtuous” indignation and mass-hatred of the “majority.” One always feels the stuffy, bloodthirsty emotion of a mob in any great public feeling of a large number of humans. It is repulsive to see all those beings with worse sins and crimes in their own lives, virtuously condemning a criminal, proud and secure in their number, yelling furiously in defense of society.

This is not just the case of a terrible crime. It is not the crime alone that has raised that fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. It is the fact that a crime has been committed by one man, alone; that this man knew it was against all laws of humanity and intended it that way; that he does not want to recognize it as a crime and that he feels superior to all. It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul.

A mob’s feeling of omnipotence is its most jealously guarded possession and therefore a dangerous thing to wound. The mob can forgive any insult or crime except one: [the act of] challenging its ultimate power. It can forgive a criminal who erred, but who is just one of itself, i.e., has the same soul and ideas and bends to the same gods. But to see a man who has freed himself from it entirely, who has nothing in common with it, a man who does not need it and who openly disdains it—this is the one crime a mob can never forgive.

It seems to me that the mob is more jealous to possess a man’s soul than his body. It is the spiritual despotism that is so dear to it. It does not care whether it [physically] possesses a man, as long as the man acknowledges to himself that he belongs to it. It cannot stand to see a man who does not belong and knows it. That tyrannical monster, the mob, feels the helpless fury of impotence in the presence of the one thing beyond its power, that it cannot conquer, the only thing that counts—a man’s own soul and consciousness. And when the mob sees one of these rare, free, clear spirits, over which it has no control—then we have the [spectacle] of a roaring, passionate public hatred.

Worse crimes than this have been committed. Not one has ever raised such furious indignation. Why? Because of the man who committed the crime and not because of the crime he has committed. Because of Hickman’s brazenly challenging attitude.

[It can be seen in] his strange letters, which are a little theatrically melodramatic, but so boastful and self-confident, e.g.: “If you want help against me, ask God, not men,” signed “The Fox.” [It can be seen in] his utter remorselessness; his pride in his criminal career and in things that are considered a “disgrace”; his boasting of more and more crimes and his open joy at shocking people, instead of trying to implore their sympathy; his utter lack of anything that is considered a “virtue”; his strength, as shown in his unprecedented conduct during his trial and sentencing; his calm, superior, indifferent, disdainful countenance, which is like an open challenge to society—shouting to it that it cannot break him; his immense, explicit egoism—a thing the mob never forgives; and his cleverness, which makes the mob feel that a superior mind can exist entirely outside of its established morals.

No: [the reaction to] this case is not moral indignation at a terrible crime. It is the mob’s murderous desire to revenge its hurt vanity against a man who dared to be alone. It is a case of “we” against “him.”

And when we look at the other side of it—there is a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy turned into a purposeless monster. By whom? By what? Is it not by that very society that is now yelling so virtuously in its role of innocent victim? He had a brilliant mind, a romantic, adventurous, impatient soul and a straight, uncompromising, proud character. What had society to offer him? A wretched, insane family as the ideal home, a Y.M.C.A. club as social honor, and a bank-page job as ambition and career. And it is not the petty financial misery of these that I have in mind. They are representative of all that society has to offer: a high social standing and a million-dollar business position is essentially the same Y.M.C.A. club and bank-page job, merely more of the same.

If he had any desires and ambitions—what was the way before him? A long, slow, soul-eating, heart-wrecking toil and struggle; a degrading, ignoble road of silent pain and loud compromises. Succeed? How could he succeed? How do men succeed? By begging successfully for the good graces of the society they must serve. And if he could not serve? If he didn’t know how to beg? It’s a long and tortuous road that an exceptional man must travel in this society. It requires a steel-strength that can overcome disgust, which is a worse enemy than fear, and also a steel-hypocrisy, the patient art of hiding oneself when it is wise not to be seen.

A strong man can eventually trample society under his feet. That boy was not strong enough. But is that his crime? Is it his crime that he was too impatient, fiery and proud to go that slow way? That he was not able to serve, when he felt worthy to rule; to obey, when he wanted to command? That boy could not get along with the men that society forgives and tolerates. He could not get along with the majority. He could not lick boots—and one can’t succeed without licking boots. He was superior and he wanted to live as such—and this is the one thing society does not permit.

He was given [nothing with which] to fill his life. What was he offered to fill his soul? The petty, narrow, inconsistent, hypocritical ideology of present-day humanity. All the criminal, ludicrous, tragic nonsense of Christianity and its morals, virtues, and consequences. Is it any wonder that he didn’t accept it? That it left his soul emptier than it had been before? That boy does not believe in anything. But, oh! men, have you anything to believe in? Can you offer anything to be believed? He is a monster in his cruelty and disrespect of all things. But is there anything to be respected? He does not know what love means. But what is it that is worthy of being loved?

Yes, he is a monster—now. But the worse he is, the worst must be the cause that drove him to this. Isn’t it significant that society was not able to fill the life of an exceptional, intelligent boy, to give him anything to out-balance crime in his eyes? If society is horrified at his crime, it should be horrified at the crime’s ultimate cause: itself. The worse the crime—the greater its guilt. What could society answer, if that boy were to say: “Yes, I’m a monstrous criminal, but what are you?”

This is what I think of the case. I am afraid that I idealize Hickman and that he might not be this at all. In fact, he probably isn’t. But it does not make any difference. If he isn‘t, he could be, and that’s enough. The reaction of society would be the same, if not worse, toward the Hickman I have in mind. This case showed me how society can wreck an exceptional being, and then murder him for being the wreck that it itself has created. This will be the story of the boy in my book.

Facts and details that will be useful to me

The insistent efforts of the newspapers to represent Hickman as a coward, to break down the impression of his strength and daring. Immediately after his arrest the papers were full of articles about his being “yellow,” his “breaking down,” his “hysterical fear,” his “white face,” his appearance of being “a rat instead of a Fox,” and so on, all insisting that even if he seems calm, he really isn‘t, he must be in a deadly terror. This might or might not have been true. Probably not, judging from his later behavior. Perhaps he was pretending to be insane. But the insistent way in which the papers shouted about his being “yellow” seemed to be a mad, furious attempt to degrade him, to take away any heroic appearance he might have had, to make the public think that they had succeeded in breaking him, while they really had not. It was as though it infuriated them to see strength, pride, and courage in this criminal and to see that they could not break him; it seemed to be the mob’s subconscious fury at the sight of such virtues in its enemy. To humiliate, to throw down—that is the mob’s greatest delight. (It’s going to be so in the story, after the boy’s arrest.)

The jury. Average, everyday, rather stupid looking citizens. Shabbily dressed, dried, worn looking little men. Fat, overdressed, very average, “dignified” housewives. How can they decide the fate of that boy? Or anyone’s fate? If a man has to be judged, why can’t he be judged by his superiors, who alone would have a right to do it? Why does he have to be judged by “equals” (and what “equals”!)? (In the story, I must select my jurors very carefully. One or two will have to be prominent characters whom the readers know very well, including all sides of their natures and their own unpunished crimes against society. Several will have to be incidental “background” characters—with enough of them shown to see what “good citizens” they are. The rest will be described by their looks—which is plenty. The whole must make a nice picture of society’s representatives, who sit in judgment over the boy even though they are not worthy to lace his shoes.)

Asa Keyes, the prosecutor. His [lack of] honesty and conviction was clearly demonstrated in the shady, disgraceful case of Amy MacPherson. Shameful charges were directed at him immediately before the Hickman case. A fat, overindulgent-looking man, with an owl-like nose, narrow little eyes, a big, heavy face and double-chin, a grayish-yellow complexion, a balding head with greasy hair, and the booming voice of a bully, giving an impression of a fat seal or a bull-dog. He made an unintelligent speech, full of common platitudes, showing a complete lack of any imagination or originality. He had the nerve to speak in defense of the people, the country, the world and so on! And he had the right to yell about Hickman: “He is rotten, rotten!”

All of this is a good example of my “little street” idea. I kept the clipping of his speech, as a wonderful example of how the little street talks, almost exaggeratedly good, couldn’t be better if I had written it for him.

(In the story, the prosecutor will have to be a rather prominent character, with a shady case on his hands, right before the boy’s case, with all the characteristics of this one—and more!)

The public who attended the trial. Average citizenry in all its full bloom. Women and girls—silly, homely, uninteresting and insignificant, over-rouged, just utterly blank in every way. Old-fashioned little women—shabbily dressed, wrinkled and shriveled. God knows from where and why here. “Fellows” with “their girls.” Men of all ages and of every profession, high and low, mostly low. Newspaper women with the conceited vanity and superior dignity of mediocrity feeling its importance, of workers smaller than their jobs. The common woman with ugly clothes, a fat, soft white face, and religious pins, a “kitchen-sink” type, who looked on everyday and declared that she had been to all the murder trials. The barefooted, robed “hermit” with a white beard, “Prophet Jonas” written in white oil-paint on a band around his head, and a red banner of prayers in his hand, who claimed that he was a messenger from Jesus Christ, sent to attend the trial. The fat, tall woman in brown with a mustache and a suspiciously kind voice and manner. The young man with the horse’s teeth, who was “just curious.” And so on. These are the ones I saw. The list can be prolonged indefinitely. The circus show that the mob enjoys when it has a plaything that is going to be murdered.

Harry Carr and his superb indignation at Hickman. (More about him later. I must have a journalist like that in the story, a composite of Harry Carr, Arthur Brisbane, Adela Rogers St.-Johns and several others with newspaper columns.)

Harry Carr’s friend, the perfect gentleman who suggested that the proper punishment for Hickman is that he be cut to pieces.

Patsy Ruth Miller, the “big star” who “openly expressed her disapproval of the effort to save Hickman,” and who has such a right to express it!

Charlie Chaplin, who came to the door and went away claiming that “one look was enough” and “he didn’t want to be seen here.” Such a clean, decent, virtuous man! [The sarcasm here was in part provoked by Chaplin’s support of communisn.]

The prince of Sweden, the “royal presence,” a chap with protruding jaws and the blank expression of a half-wit.

Richard Barthelmess who sat for hours in a place where he “could watch every expression on Hickman’s face.”

Adela Rogers St.-Johns cleverly noted that Hickman is an extremist, a type that can either be very good or very bad. This is true and the idea of the “extremist” is splendid. We should have more extremists—then life wouldn’t be what it is. But she says that “an extremist is always dangerous” and we all should be just in between, the “golden mean,” the balanced average. This is a wonderful expression of the view exactly opposite from mine. What I want to show in my book is just the horror of that middle: the illogical, inconsistent, weak, tolerant, mediocre, loathsome middle. For if men were extremists they would follow each idea and feeling to its end, they would be faithful to their purposes and to themselves, they would be clear, straight, and absolute in everything. And they wouldn’t tolerate a lot of what is tolerated now. This is just what we need.

She says that Hickman could be either a very great man or a very great criminal. Well, it only shows that he is always great and the one thing impossible to him is pettiness. and mediocrity. For this reason I admire Hickman and every extremist. [Later, AR identifies “extremism” as an “anti-concept”; see “Extremism, or the Art of Smearing” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.]

She says that Hickman was always conscious of himself, always thinking of the effect he produces, always centered on himself. This is one of those things that isn’t worth arguing about; the opinion on egoism is organic in every person and can’t be changed or argued.

So she is afraid of men being too good or too bad? I think of the man who said: “Oh, that their best is so very small! Oh, that their worst is so very small! And oh, how horrid it is to be small!” [This is an approximate quote from Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche. This is what my book is going to say. Extremist beyond all extreme is what we need!

Agnes Christine Johnston said that Hickman is “surprisingly uncivilized.” I congratulate her, although not quite in the way she would expect. Her idea is that civilization is sympathy, i.e., a great sympathetic understanding and co-feeling with others. She is perfectly right; that is just what civilization is. But is that progress, which is the meaning usually associated with the word “civilization”? Isn’t just that “sympathy” in civilization the greatest regress, the greatest danger, downfall and degeneracy of mankind? I know what Nietzsche and I think on this subject.

Johnston says that Hickman has “an ugly soul,” that his mind is developed, but his soul is neglected. Well, “ugly” is a relative expression. She concludes with the responsibility of parents to develop their children’s souls and mentions her “own three little ones.”

(Incidentally, this same Agnes Christine Johnston is the author of a silly play about office-girls’ love, about a homely working girl who becomes beautiful, and so on. The play has the deep, significant title of “Funny Little Thing.” I mention this as an example of the ideology of those who speak so loudly about “civilization.”)

V. M. declared, as though she were dictating a paragraph into my story, that Hickman’s greatest crime is the fact that he willingly [detached] himself from “humanity,” from the one and only thing that counts in the world—humanity and its progress. She claims that for this he should be killed and destroyed without pity. (She said this last part about destroying quite savagely, in a dark, threatening way that sounded so much like that typical, blind mob cruelty.) She says that the main thing in life is to feel that you are contributing to the progress of humanity, or life, or things in general—to feel yourself a part of some vague immense universal progress. She says that she is perfectly satisfied to feel herself a good average human being, and to believe that the other human beings are just as good—or bad—as she is; that the exceptional beings have to use their talent and intelligence to pull the average ones up, because kindness is the greatest thing, the only thing in life; that you are so closely related to other people that you can’t tell where you end and they begin; that those who dare to stand alone always become insane.

I put all this down as a good, clear outline of the little street’s high ideals.

Her claim that Hickman’s greatest crime is his anti-socialness confirmed my idea of the public’s attitude in this case—and explains my involuntary, irresistible sympathy for him, which I cannot help feeling just because of this and in spite of everything else.

Hickman said: “I am like the state: what is good for me is right.” Even if he wasn’t big enough to live by that attitude, he deserves credit for saying it so brilliantly. There is a lot that is purposelessly, senselessly horrible about him. But that does not interest me. I want to remember his actions and characteristics that will be useful for the boy in my story. His limitless daring and his frightful sense of humor, e.g., when he was playing the Victrola while policemen searched his apartment and he offered to help, asking if he could do anything for them. His calm, defiant attitude at the trial. His almost inhuman strength in being able to joke about his death sentence: “The die is cast and the state wins by a neck.” His deliberate smiling when posing for photographs after the sentence. His hard, cynical attitude toward everything, as shown in the little detail that he expressed his feelings after the sentence by saying one obscene word. The fact that he looks like “a bad boy with a very winning grin,” that he makes you like him the whole time you are in his presence, that he has a personality that would have carried him far if he had gone another way. His decision to die like a man and his promise to walk calmly up the death-steps. His playing jazz records and asking for flowers even in the death cell.

[The depravity of] the pastors who try to convert convicted murderers to their religion. Hickman has been baptized into the Catholic faith. So has Ruth Snyder. The horrible idea of “saving” a murderer’s “soul,” adding to the “glory” of their religion by demonstrating its power over fear-crazed convicts. The hypocrisy of “saving a soul,” of turning a man to a religion of charity and forgiveness like Christianity—and then executing him. The mob tyranny I mentioned, shown in the desire to make a new slave, add a new follower to the herd, break an independent man into submission.

The fact that right after his sentence Hickman was given a Bible by the jailer. I don’t know of anything more loathsome, hypocritical, low, and diabolical than giving Bibles to men sentenced to death. It’s one of those things that’s comical in its stupidity and horrid because of this lugubrious, gruesome comedy.

The newsboy I saw on a crowded downtown corner, a heavy, unshaven young fellow, with a [sickly] complexion, fat lips, narrow forehead and spectacles, who was yelling: “They’re gonna hang him!” when the first extras with the sentence appeared. Other adult newsboys, yelling with a bloodthirsty delight: “Hickman to hang! Hickman to hang by the neck!”

The drunken man who murdered his wife for no particular reason, and then regretted it, was Hickman’s cell-mate in jail—and beat Hickman up, thinking himself superior.

The twelve-year-old little girl, who wrote a letter to Hickman, asking him “to get religion so that little girls everywhere would stop being afraid of him.”

Dale Budlong and other prisoners who “don’t want to be mixed” with Hickman, considering themselves so much better.

The woman who wrote a letter to the authorities asking for permission to be present at Hickman’s hanging. A great number of other letters making the same request. (!) (The bloodthirsty, blind, carnivorous beast that is hidden beneath the polished surface of our “civilized,” religious, respectable citizens!)

All the dirty stories about Hickman. In this case they are probably true, but how easily they could have been manufactured to throw dirt at the object of the public’s hatred (which will be the case in my book).

Other examples of the “little street”

Gertrude Stein, when she stupidly said “It’s the little things that count!” This is the perfect expression of that despicable attitude of some people—the glorification of mediocrity, the mediocrity that not only doesn’t make any effort to rise toward something high, but idealizes its own smallness, glorifies it, makes it the highest thing in life, the only thing “that counts.” The purposeful denial of high [ideals], the shameless, insolent sneering of the plebian who says: “I’m small, sure, but that’s the main thing—to be small. You big ones, you don’t mean anything, you don’t count!”

That most repulsive of all things—the pride and vanity of the mediocre.

V. M., when she said: “Original thoughts are dangerous.... If an original thinker is anti-social, the more brilliant he is—the more dangerous he is, and therefore original thinkers are to be condemned!” Doesn’t need any comment.

She speaks also of being useful to posterity, to the whole human race and so on. This gives me the thought that fear of death may govern those who think too much of the “future” and of “humanity.” It is as if they know that their own life will not be enough and they want to have something eternal to believe in outside of it.

Where can I find a man who knows that his own life will be so great and he will fill it with so much, that he doesn’t need any “high ideal” outside of it? Eternity itself doesn’t matter—to exist is glorious enough!

Arthur Brisbane, who does not sympathize with Voronoff’s desire to produce a Superman through heredity. He declares that this is just what humanity doesn’t need; we don’t want Supermen, we want average, equal creatures, for Nature always strives towards equality and balance. He proves [this latter claim] by deep, significant examples such as tall men liking short girls and fat women liking thin men. (And all the results of this poisonous, rotten, sewer-philosophy!)

The thing I heard about Gilbert Roland (too horrid to write down).

The parties at the studios with naked Negro girls dancing.

The way stars make their careers. (The middle-aged woman with pull who can make the careers of young men, or refuse to, telling them sincerely: “I’m sorry, you’re not my type!”)

The different kinds of mind: the abstract and the “social” mind, the latter being considered the most important for success. And what is it but the art of “getting along” with human beings? (Men like Danny Renahan don’t get along.)

I. L. [Ivan Lebedeff, a Russian-born actor whom AR knew in Hollywood], who says that he does things he despises just to lower himself, to feel he is doing something nasty, to get to the level of the mob, and mix into that mob. He is afraid to be above [the mob]; he cannot stand the tragedy of being alone on top, and the horror of what he sees under him and has to live with and tolerate.

I don’t know if it’s quite so in his case, but the idea is very profound—that those who could be above willingly lower themselves, because “the little street” makes it super-humanly hard for a man to remain alone and keep his ideals. Another instance of how the little street works.

The rotten swamp that sucks everything into it. And so it goes: a man has the possibility to be high; he cannot stand it—other men and “society” are too much for him to fight against; he sinks down, to the mob’s level; and thus he becomes one of those who stops some other man who could be high. [...]

Incidents in the story

College-life, the mob-reign par excellence. Danny—the most unpopular figure in college. He doesn’t belong to any clubs, societies, or fraternities. He doesn’t allow any crazy tricks to be played on him when entering college. He doesn’t take part in any sports, that is, any teamwork.

Hetty is expelled from college for her attitude in the “Renahan case.”

Hetty is one of the defense’s star witnesses at the trial; she tries to save Danny.

Hetty implores the Governor to [pardon] Danny. She climbs into his house through a window when he refuses to see her. She pleads with real, human words against the stiff, official, blind answers of the Governor. She falls on her knees: “You can save him! Don’t destroy something you can never create again!” He orders her thrown out and advises her to be careful of the reputation she has already soiled, or he may have to send her to a penitentiary to reform her “unnatural, degenerate tendencies!” [This scene is a precursor of one in We the Living, when Leo is dying of tuberculosis and Kira pleads to Soviet officials to save him.]

Danny’s death. The little man who recognizes him and attracts the mob to him. The mob appears from everywhere, from every dark comer and alley, like swarming cockroaches crawling out of their holes. The big drunken brute who strikes his heavy, nail-soled foot into Danny’s breast, cracking the ribs. The quarter that rolls out of Danny’s pocket into the pool of blood and is picked up by one of the men, who wipes it and takes it. The police find Danny’s body near the sidewalk, a horribly torn mass. Only his beautiful face is left untouched, now immobile, pale, with eyes closed and long shadows of the eyelashes on the white cheeks; a head of marble, with one thin red stream, like a crack in the marble, on his temple; and only his hair moving slightly around the immobile face, moved by the water in the gutter that streams red.

Danny in jail. His perfect indifference to everything—visitors, family, everybody—except Hetty. He does not love her, but he sees, understands, and respects her feeling for him.

The only moment when Danny is afraid of death and wants to live. One night, when he looks out of his cell window and sees nothing but a dark, clear sky and stars, and one luminous spire from a tall building far away; when he does not see the city and it seems to him that he is in some other world, on another planet, where life is clear, pure and luminous like the sky he looks into. And he wants that life, he loves it with all the passion of his life-hungry soul. That is the only moment when he weakens, when he is horrified at the thought: “They are going to kill me! They have no right to kill me!”

This episode will probably end with a guard passing by and seeing Danny’s emotion instead of his usual calm, and snickering something about his being broken and yellow. Danny turns to him and answers with a horrible swear-word, something as obscene and contrasting with his former mood as the reality he faces is filthy and contrasting with the world he saw for a moment. With that one word, all his regrets are gone, he is back again in the life that makes him indifferent to death, he is again the hard, sneering, cynical convict, indifferent and disdainful of everything.

When Danny kills the pastor, he shoots him straight in the face, mad with loathing and the desire to destroy him. He then shoots the rest of the bullets into the body, in his hatred and fury to kill. After that—no regrets, no remorse whatsoever. A clever and calm scheme to escape. He is found and arrested only through the betrayal of a friend.

Danny becomes a criminal while he is scheming his vengeance. In one scene, another criminal dies in his arms while hiding from the police. The young man is unable to get help, preferring to die than to be discovered; he dies from bullet wounds, choking with blood. His beautiful last moments and words. The impression it makes on Danny.

Danny’s “fan mail” in jail. The disgusting letters of hatred and the even more disgusting letters of sympathy. Among the latter: declarations of love from half-witted, hysterical old maids; religious preaching and propaganda; the consolations and sympathy of “good Christians” for a “poor, erring sinner,” and so on. Danny orders the jailers to stop bringing him the mail and to instead “use it in the toilet.”

[The Little Street ends here. The booklet closes with the following personal notes.]

From now on—no thought whatever about yourself, only about your work. You don’t exist. You are only a writing engine. Don’t stop, until you really and honestly know that you cannot go on.

Concentration!

Learn to enjoy action, and effort.

Learn that your work is a certain kind of work and that the state of your mind should be different from that which you have when doing nothing. You can’t write and do something else.

Do you live for action or for rest?

Stop admiring yourself—you are nothing yet.

You must know how to control your moods and your mind. Be absolute master of yourself and your mind. How can you rule anybody or anything, if you can’t rule your own mind?

The secret of life: You must be nothing but will. Know what you want and do it. Know what you are doing and why you are doing it, every minute of the day. All will and all control. Send everything else to hell!

Be a tyrant—no compromises with yourself. Do everything absolutely.

Try to forget yourself—to forget all high ideas, ambitions, supermen and so on. Try to put yourself into the psychology of ordinary people, when you think of stories. Try to be calm, balanced, indifferent, normal, and not enthusiastic, passionate, excited, ecstatic, flaming, tense.

Learn to be calm, for goodness sake!

Look at everything through the eyes of a very skeptical, very prosaic businessman.

Think more of the psychology of your heroes, according to their characters.

Not so straight and crude. The same things can be more complicated and different, as they usually are in life.

2

WE THE LIVING

AR’s working title for We the Living was Airtight. In 1930, at the age of twenty-five, she began making notes for the novel in a bound composition notebook. The notebook, presented below in its entirety, contains descriptions of the characters and the unbearable conditions of life in a totalitarian state.

The remaining notes on the novel are unbound, undated, mostly unnumbered, handwritten pages; some are paper-clipped together, and all are collected in a folder. About one-third of this material is offered here. I have omitted her chapter-by-chapter outline because it does not depart in any significant way from the novel. I have also omitted several pages listing known facts of Russian history in the 1920s. The only other material omitted was too cryptic to be of general interest.

It may be surprising that AR made so few notes for her first novel. There are two main reasons. First no research was required for We the Living, since she already knew the background. Second, AR chose this novel as her first partly because of its relative simplicity. She was not ready to attempt a complex theme or to present her ideal man, but she was ready to write about young people being crushed by a dictatorship.

Since she had little difficulty with the plot, characters, or theme, she did not need to make extensive notes.

Circa 1930

Airtight

The Characters

Kira Argounova

Dominant trait: an intense, passionate hunger for life. Beautifully sensitive to the real meaning and value of life—and crushed under the senseless, morbid, suffocating conditions of a miserable existence. Proud and definite. Unbreakable. One of the very few—and the only one in the book—who, as a person, is not in the least affected by the new conditions; who denies them and does not quite understand their right or reason for existence. She fights them—externally; and the fight is the more tragic because, internally, she is left absolutely untouched and unaffected. A sane, healthy individual thrown into the very depths of abnormal, inhuman conditions.

Independent. Self-assured. Educated in a wealthy family by a mother who let her grow up as she pleased, without any restraints or influences, and with plenty of everything she needed. As a result, she has a calm poise and the full, free strength of her own unusual personality that has not accumulated any useless, alien inhibitions from any outside source. No religion whatsoever. Brilliant mind. Lots of courage and daring. Only her calm exterior poise hides her tempestuous emotional nature. A sort of graceful restraint under which one can feel the storming fire.

Rather cold and indifferent to everything that does not interest her deeply. Absolutely proof against all influences. Always alone and, to most people, aloof. Disliked by women. No girlfriends. No “beaux.” Indifferent to men. Dimly conscious of her tremendous sexual power—if she wanted to use it. Men are attracted to her and afraid. Nothing flirting or “come hither” in her. The more powerful, then, is her attraction for men with whom she condescended to be a woman, and who saw the woman in her: Andrei and Leo.

Honest and straightforward—the honesty of pride and of superiority. Misunderstood. Hurt by it, sometimes, yet used to her loneliness, intelligent enough to realize that it is unavoidable. A strong determination and disdainful pride—and sometimes, beneath it, an indefinable, charming, feminine weakness and helplessness—something of the frightened child, which she is to a great extent. Always feminine in the best sense of that word, that is, graceful, aloof, charming. Never the masculine, “intellectual,” “rough and ready” type of woman [common] in politics, or the alleged “woman of brains.” Capable of being cruel. Sometimes conceited—at the feeling of her power.

Her love for Leo—the concentrated strength of all her will to live. He is, to her, the symbol of everything she wants and the meaning of life as she sees it. Therefore, her indifference to others, the clarity of her mind that leaves her cool to many useless emotions and affections, her straightforwardness—these lead her to an all-absorbing passion, almost unbearable for a human being.

Andrei Taganov

Dominant trait: a born individualist and leader who never discovered it. A great mind and a profound honesty. An iron will and unconquerable strength. A great calm and deliberation—the calm of a man who knows he is master of himself and has learned long ago to have complete self-control. Occasional, very rare flashes of temper that show the real fire in him—a fire, however, that never gets the best of the man.

His father: a factory worker, mixed in politics and sent to Siberia during the Revolution of 1905; died in exile. His mother: died shortly afterwards of poverty and overwork. He, the only son, made his way through the hardest work [with an] iron determination, and a long toil that did not break him, but only taught him patience and hardened him. No school education; self-educated and self-made. Always lonely and aloof, aloof without realizing it. Never a good mixer. Never a popular fellow. In his political career, he advanced through his brilliant ability and unquestionable honesty more than through popularity in the Party, where he is far from being popular. His comrades in the Party are always his political friends, never his personal chums; this is not the result of any deliberate attitude taken by him, but the natural behavior of a man who has devoted his entire life to his political ideals and sees only that.

As to those ideals: they are the result of his early hatred of the existing system of society—not so much hatred, but rather a calm and cool determination of long ago: to do away, someday, somehow, with the inhuman conditions that he went through and in which he started his life. The people whose champion he is stand before his eyes as individuals, as men like himself, whose life is crushed by the senseless power of a society that has no right to a man’s life. In that, and more unconsciously than hers, his tragedy is the same as Kira’s. Both are superior individuals. Both have in their souls the sensitivity, the understanding, the hunger for the real life, as few men see it. Both rise to fight for their rights to that life; and both face the same enemy: society, the state, the mass. She is stronger, in that she realizes the fight and the enemy. He is more tragic, because his fight is unconscious: the fight against society of a man who stands as a champion of the most sociable ideals.

He is a man that would have been a Napoleon—had he been born with less conscience and idealism. He has an iron devotion to his ideals, the devotion of a medieval martyr. Capable of anything, any cruelty, if convinced that his aim needs it. Cruelty for the cause is, to him, a victory over himself; it gives him the feeling of doing his duty against his sentiment.

Yet a profound egoism lies under that devotion to his work, for it is his work and his aim that he is serving. His ideals have not been inspired by sympathy and compassion for the suffering of the masses. It is his suffering and his pride that made him take arms against society. This is subconscious, for it’s not his personal interests that he has in mind, it’s the victory of his idea—and his idea is the uprising of fighters, individuals, strong men of the people crushed under a senseless, ignoble system.

The taste, manners, and tact of an aristocrat—but not conventional manners, just the poise and dignity of a man with inborn good judgment. Instinctive, unconscious understanding of beauty and art; an untrained, but wise esthetic feeling, [which is] dormant, never given much attention or opportu nity. Delicate and sensitive to other people’s feelings—no violent hatred or prejudices against anyone. No religion.

No conceit. One of the few people who is absolutely untouched by flattery, admiration, or any form of other people’s opinion. Not because of a proud disdain, but because of a natural indifference to it. Subconsciously, he knows his superiority and does not need any one’s endorsement. Consciously, he is interested only in doing what he thinks is right; [he wants to be] satisfied in his own eyes. A self-discipline learned long ago.

A man who knows how to take serious things seriously. But with hidden beauty, sympathy, even tenderness, and an intelligent sense of humor.

Sexual matters never interested him. Didn’t have the time. Accustomed to hard work and making the most of his time, all concentrated in one line and aim. Never had an affair. Not because of a moral effort, asceticism, or self-imposed renunciation, but because of a lack of interest and a slight disgust for sex as he saw it around him. Yet a very strong sense of sensuality, unawakened.

Kira is the first woman who ever attracted his attention. His instinctive sense of values and beauty sees in her what very few men see. Therefore, his passion—unexpected, fierce, primitive, letting loose an energy long restrained—overwhelms him with its intensity. He has sense enough not to attempt any struggle, nor to consider it as interfering with his aim and duty. He just surrenders completely to what is for him a newly discovered beauty in life, the life for which he has a profound instinct. It is characteristic that Kira is an aristocrat, a woman of the upper classes, and that, knowing her hatred of his Party, he never resents it.

Leo Kovalensky

[This section was crossed out. While much of the following obviously applies to the Leo in the novel, the character described here is more flawed.]

Dominant trait: a man who should be more than he is. A brilliant, but not profound, mind, and a very poor emotional nature. A mind witty, quick, sharp and clear, but not deepened by any great feeling. Very good-looking—more than that: beautiful. A face with the proud, haughty, aloof expression of a god, a face promising a superior, profound, fascinating man; and the man not keeping the promise. The greatest lack in him is the lack of any strong desire or ambition; therefore, also, the lack of will. Never had any profound love or hatred, never very happy or despondent, no real interest or enthusiasm for anything. No emotional extremes.

He is brilliantly witty. A light, distinguished sense of humor; too much of it leads to his not taking anything very seriously. A love for paradoxes, for witty ridiculing of any high, serious, revered, or established ideas. Elegant, distinguished, aristocratic—mostly in manner and attitude, not in clothes or [conventional] psychology. His aristocratic [style] is personal, not the class-bound [charade] of formal manners and high ancestry. Sophisticated, bored, slightly cynical. No moral feeling. Would not do anything low or ugly, but more from an esthetic than from an ethical feeling. Has a love for beauty, but mostly beauty of form, beauty of the surface, not deeper.

Likes everything new, exotic, extreme, effective, modernistic, eccentric, original, smart. Affects a modem European or American attitude. Has an aristocratic dislike for work and effort. Nothing can rouse him to any serious effort or struggle. Anything hard is distasteful to him. Lack of perseverance; takes everything easy, nonchalantly. No great ambition of any kind—not definite or positive enough for that.

He is very popular. Always the soul of the party, but not as a “good fellow,” rather as a perfectly charming, fascinating man of the world. Always knows how to say and do the right thing at the right time, and is at ease with everyone, everywhere.

His convictions: none. Not even positive about that. Constant only in his indifferent sophistication and skepticism toward everything. Alert and takes great mental interest—in everything new and startling. But no emotional interest.

Religion: hasn’t any. Yet is not a decided atheist. Never made up his mind definitely one way or the other. Can be both, according to the mood or effect of the moment.

His political convictions are not definite. While not being in sympathy with the government, he is not as indignantly opposed to it as most people in his circle. While ridiculing and resenting the conditions of life around him, he is not theoretically opposed to communism; he is not [opposed] to anything modem—part of his sophisticated tolerance.

Temperamentally, he does not like to display any emotions. Although he is not of a very intense nature, yet he does get depressed, occasionally, and cannot always hide it. Also, he does show happiness occasionally, but more seldom. Very brave, disdainful of danger—sometimes; and sometimes loses his nerve.

He had a profound affection for his parents and sister, who died.

In regard to sexual matters, he is not highly virtuous; yet he is not oversexed. Has had affairs. Not vulgar or promiscuous about it, however. He is not too interested in sex, and the occasional interest he has is more physical than emotional. Is tremendously attractive to women. Women spoiled him. He is conceited and self-assured with them. Flirts with every woman he meets—rather, just has a flirting manner, highly flattering to women. Of course, he never means it. It is a habit and light diversion for him.

Conceited, but not concerned about it. Not susceptible to flattery—used to it. Has few real friends and none very close—he is not interested. But a vast number of acquaintances. Cruel, in that he is perfectly indifferent to other people’s feelings.

He is capable of high emotions and beautiful actions, but seldom roused to them. Has the mind to understand high beauty—and could have been more than he is. Has everything to be a great man. Ambition is all he lacks. Conditions around him subconsciously killed all ambition in him, all real appetite for life. In other circumstances, he would have developed into an outstanding and fascinating man. He is too much the aristocrat and not enough the male to stand up under any conditions and fight his way through. Besides, he did not even have anything to fight for; life around him did not offer any stimulant to his ambitions at the time they could have been formed. He is not the type that would bring his own desires and ideas to life; he has to get them from life—and it did not give him any. While he does not oppose the conditions of life around him very much, they break him internally, without his even knowing it, break him by killing his interest in life.

Kira saw in him “what he could have been.” Her romance with him is also her desperate fight to “keep them from getting him.” As to Leo, his love for her was the best thing in his life. It was all of his higher sentiments and better self. The “man that could have been” understood Kira, saw the superior woman in her, and loved her more than he had ever loved anyone. He did not love her better [because] he was not capable of a better love. And as his better self slowly dies in him, so does his love for the only real woman in his life. It never dies completely. Something indefinable, nameless, unconscious, remains. He is not happy when he goes [south] to his new life, leaving Kira behind. In his indifferent hopelessness a dull, secret pain always remains, as the scar of a feeling which he could never entirely forget—and which he had not been big enough to keep. [End of deleted section.]

Antonina Pavlovna

Dominant trait: the condensed low female of all times. Selfish like a dumb, brutal monster. Vain. Conceited. Eager for everything that flatters her ego. But mainly: a loose creature out to satisfy herself. Cheaply fashionable, “feminine,” “modern,” with some pretenses at being “cultured” and “intellectual.” “Misunderstood.” From a middle-class family, but always aspires to more “aristocracy” and “culture” than is her right.

She is oversexed and promiscuous. Vulgar in her sex affairs. She has many of them—some for profit, some for animal desire. The kept mistress of white officers and Bolshevik commissars. Proud of her position and influence. She is always trying to show her power and make that influence felt. Nothing is too small or too filthy for her.

Her “love” for Leo: the vain female desire to “win” him. Also: the animal desire of an oversexed creature for the gorgeous male that he is.

Rita

A plain debauchee. She has no feelings or thoughts left. Nothing but loose, uncontrolled, sordid sexuality. She is from a good family, and was given a good education. Divorced from a red commander. Only the thinnest outside cover of some culture left. A menacing specter, a symbol of what lies in the future for the youth of the coming generation.

More obvious, open and younger than Antonina Pavlovna. Not many “intellectual” pretenses.

Lydia

An average girl, nearing her thirties. Not too attractive nor intelligent. She has wasted her best years, becoming bitter and poisoned.

(Representative of the older half of the younger generation.)

Vava

A common, sheep-like nature. She is rather attractive, and from a wealthy family. Spoiled. Conceited. Marries, has a child soon, and does her best to live in the favor of the government. Becomes a typical, [lifeless] “soviet citizen.”

(The alternative—Rita or Vava.)

The Picture

A terrific machinery crushing the whole country and smothering every bit of life, action, and air.

A picture of the state, and those who are the state, strangling the individual. A picture of the masses showing who and what those masses are, their ideas, and their rise against the unusual and higher man.

How is it done? By conditions of living unbearable to the higher individual. And the theme of the book—what these conditions are and how they work.

The higher and stronger is broken, but not conquered; she falls on the battlefield, still the same individual, untouched: Kira. The one with less resistance is broken and conquered; he disintegrates under an unbearable strain: Leo. And the best of those who believed in the ideal is broken by the realization of what the ideal really means: Andrei.

How It Is Done

1. Economic conditions

Terrific poverty. A general misery. People driven to the point where [obtaining] the most common necessities presents a big problem. The horrible, deadening dullness of the hopeless drudgery, when all higher instincts and aspirations slowly die out, stifled by the dumb, animal struggle for a pitiful existence. And the mental atmosphere furnished by the government: a glorifying of the drudgery. A growing habit of considering all luxury—everything unnecessary and charming—to be absolutely and hopelessly out of reach.

Unemployment. The frightful lack of work. The humiliations, pull, and struggle one must endure to get employment. The unions. The idiotically cruel refusal of even the right to make a living for people with an aristocratic past. The new merchants and the senseless persecution that follows them. The successful new rich and the grotesque irony of their gains, influence, and position in the “red” society—the class of men uglier even than the ideology of the ruling class that allows them to exist. All the pathetic, tragic, and ridiculous efforts to make a living. Divorces to keep a job. The “cutting off” of employees. The eternal fear and uncertainty. Queer new professions and occupations.

Physical discomforts. Hunger. Cold. No living space. Terrible transportation. Disease. Lice. Dirt.

2. Mental conditions

Everything centered around one idea—one propaganda—and that idea fed to the people until they mentally suffocate. Everything that does not belong to this propaganda, all the natural instincts and ideas, everything that makes up the individual life and the beauty of life—is thrown out and trampled. An unbearable propaganda of an unbearable idea that makes the atmosphere choking, airtight, until people get to a state of mental scurvy. The idea itself and the method of propaganda are the very essence of commonplace ideology—intended for and created by the “middle class of the spirit.” (When showing the ideas, always show those who create them and make them possible.) The great “average humanity”; show its spirit and what it does to the ones above the average.

Propaganda:

In Education (schools and universities): students’ meetings, the political life, the arrests and exiles, the spies, the “cleaning” of the students, the exile of the old professors, teaching only propaganda, and in high school—the coming youth and its mental mutilation.

In Art: theaters, books, paintings, movies: censorship and the propaganda idea—the “proletarian art.”

3. Moral conditions

An existence where men turn into cornered animals. The perpetual fear, struggle, poverty, depression, and hopelessness. A general degradation—men turning smaller than they usually appear, life turning into a shabby, petty, cheap routine.

And the youth of the country starting out on their lives.

The youth of the [former] classes faces a hopeless struggle: a long, tiresome, joyless path. Alternatively, they may sink down into real debauchery, all morals let loose by the strain of the unusual times.

The new youth [is characterized by a] loose morality and a superficial, “patriotic” arrogance.

The older generation faces a hopeless old age.

And the real human being—Kira—caught in the swamp and voicing the theme of the story: “But there is a life, a life that I saw, that I was waiting for—and I have a right to it. Who is taking it away from me and why are they doing it?”

[The material in the composition notebook ends here. The remaining notes were made on unbound pages and collected in a folder.]

Collectivism: its spirit, influence, ramifications.

Desperate living conditions: the people’s attitude toward them, and the government’s attitude—glorification.

The new red culture: its hypocrisy, show-offishness, fear, boot-licking, nonsense (museums, schools, etc.).

Propaganda: ever-present, at every step and moment. (Artificial enthusiasm.)

Inefficiency: the stupid bureaucracy, red tape, bad quality in everything (Soviet matches, Soviet soap, etc.).

To Show

Economical

Food: How it’s impossible to get: the cards, rations, speculators, standing in line, cooperatives. The monotonous, unhealthy diet: millet, dried fish, linseed oil. Everyday necessities considered as luxuries: butter, eggs, milk, white bread. Excesses of hunger: fallen horse, acorns, coffee grounds.

Clothes: The impossibility of getting new materials. Every new article of clothing an event (particularly shoes). Endless altering of old clothes. Pathetic “styles”: patent-leather, celluloid jewelry, “batik” handkerchiefs. Worship of imported “foreign” clothes and silk stockings. Pathetic awe at the sight of “dressed” foreigners. Smuggling of stockings and cosmetics. The “Soviet” cosmetics (poisonous lipstick). No formal evening clothes. “Soviet” materials—everybody alike. The terrible inefficiency of everything “Soviet.”

Houses: Crowded to the limit. Encounters with enforced tenants. Frozen water pipes. Lack of wood. Six degrees [Celsius] in the house. “Bourgeoisie” stoves. Linseed oil lamps. Primuses. The house “parliament” and the Uprav dom. Dirt. Lice.

Employment: The pathetic horror of “cuts” of employees. The vile, low, humiliating playing up to the “red” authorities. The time wasted on stupid, hypocritical “social activities.” The “enforced patriotism.” Constant propaganda in connection with any work. Persecution of private traders and the unemployed. Impossibility of finding work. Odd forms of earning a living: street peddlers and their pathetic merchandise.

Political and Cultural

The All-Pervading Propaganda: Its ridiculous, far-fetched connections. Its intentionally vulgar, “popular” style and artificial bravado. Glorifying of the drudgery and the “everyday.” Its main methods: employment—enforced meetings, “social activities,” demonstrations, enforced deductions of pay for “patriotic” enterprises; and schools—enforced study of unscientific “social sciences,” a “red” angle on all activities.

Talk, talk, and talk. Endless, enforced talk without the right to say anything.

The ever-present threat of the G.P.U.: secret arrests, executions, exiles.

Art: Old theater—and next to it the awkward new “proletarian” dramas. Movies: the foreign ones cut, the red ones—(!). Literature (books and magazines): all propaganda, and intentionally vulgar. Art: all “red.” “Ballet of the Toilers.”

The pathetic intelligentsia: the operas, philharmonic concerts, futuristic book covers and china, “modern poets,” theatrical settings, foreign translations, and worship of foreign magazines. The pathetic “parties.”

Morality

Hypocrisy at an unbelievable height. Nepmen and “red fighters” like Victor. [NEP was Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which allowed some “private ” trading. “Nepmen ” was the name for those who grew rich through this policy; they are represented in the novel by the character of Morozov.]

Characters

The individual against society at a time when society is at its worst and makes itself felt most strongly. Therefore, show all the mass manifestations of humanity in general and of the Russian revolution in particular.

Types who represent it:

Kira—cannot be broken.
Andrei—broken physically, broken life.
Leo—broken spiritually.
Pavel—“the best of the worst”; representative of those successful
with the mob.
Victor—same [as Pavel].
Comrade Sonia—the “new woman,” mob womanhood at its most
dangerous.
Dunaev—the best in the old world and its tragedy.
Antonina Pavlovna—the worst.
Nepman—the triumph of the new order.
Stepan—the sailor, the fighting idealist.
Lydia—the dying old world.
Galina Petrovna—the accommodating “intelligent” [woman].
Alexander Dimitrievitch—the dying old world.
Marisha—the new “loose, red youth.”
Sasha—the old fighting student.
Irina—an average girl, caught by events.
Acia—the “new child.”
Maria Petrovna—a frightened “nothing.”
Vava—a “flapper” of the old world.

[AR made the following notes on revising Part 1.]

Chapter I

More of Kira’s reaction—make Kira’s presence felt.

Song of the “Apple”—twice.

Incident of “official business”—? Out.

Chapter II

Their arrival and the station—shorter.

Shorter description of Nevsky.

Read again carefully the talk with relatives. Insert some touch of propaganda—very little.

Chapter III

Revise: Place and date of birth, family position, union membership, occupation. Quicker, short examples and sentences. More of Kira, her spirit of adventure, and not in love only—her hunger for practical beauty, for dreams and reality united. More distinct propaganda on the official’s part. Cut out unnecessary “cruelty” of Kira. Kira’s attitude toward sex and love.

Chapter IV

More of Kira—of her idea of life and of her reaction. A little about the University. More propaganda. Kira—the Viking—the “Song of the Broken Glass” against Soviet reality.

Correct reference to Admiral Kovalensky.

Shorter and sharper—Victor’s visit. His conversation—also in the cab—more pointed and typical—the “artist,” the “advanced, cultured, hard-working young man,” the terrific egotism felt under it.

Synopsize scene in Summer Garden.

Conversation with Leo—more of Leo’s bitterness, masterful arrogance and unhappiness.

Chapter V

Not enough of Kira’s reaction to Leo.

Cut out the “no” sequences—except house meeting. [The “no” sequences have been published in The Early Ayn Rand.] More of propaganda and living conditions. More of Kira’s reaction, her impatience, her thoughts of Leo. The University—a possible beginning; Syerov and talk of “Red Culture.” New meeting with Comrade Sonia. Rewrite scene at home.

This chapter should be the opportunity for “everyday” flashes; propaganda also—the Dunaevs.

Chapter VI

Better beginning. Better description of streets. “Re-touch” meeting with Leo. Out—scene at Dunaevs; move it—modified—to Chapter V. Scene of Dunaev and Kira at market: a little more—and sharper. (Better—about Professor Lesbov—also about his crying over Beauty.) “Re-touch” conversation with Andrei—watch out for naturalness and Andrei’s character, his strength. Emphasize: Leo’s weariness, Andrei’s enthusiasm.

Chapter VII

A little more of Kira’s reaction in scene with soap. Revise theater scene. And the sleigh. More of Andrei’s reaction—stern. Meeting with Sonia and Pavel—?

Chapter VIII

“Re-touch” scene in Communist cell.

Chapter IX

More conversation with Andrei. Show their friendship, their basic understanding, the things on which they differ and in which they’re alike. “Re-touch” ride through streets and walk through snow.

Chapter X

Last—Leo’s warming.

Chapter XI

Kira-Andrei conversation. More about relationship of Kira-Leo, and their love.

Chapter XII

Reconstruct party. More of Victor—“soul of the party.” Better description of Vava’s father. More fear.

Chapter XIII

Cut out “Vorovsky.” [Vorovsky, mentioned in her history notes, was a Soviet envoy in Switzerland who was killed in 1923.] Check on flashes of Leo’s employment-seeking; give them something besides dialogue—a few touches.

Chapter XIV

Better beginning. A little better about the movie. A few more detailed touches to the quick episodes.

[In general:] Better dialogue with Andrei. A more real, personal friendship—not too theoretical. And the theories—clearer.

General misunderstanding and disapproval of Kira—home and Institute.

[The remaining notes are on particular scenes, beginning with the first meeting of Kira and Leo.]

Leo: Insulting and perfectly indifferent about it.

Their understanding—which leads to questions about her experience, then to her final confession.

Kira: Stunned by him, reverent, yet hiding it under a matter-of-fact calm. More reverence than love. A girl full of life, full of vague hopes of which he is the realization.

Leo: Mystery as to his identity and position. Bitterness—a general, philosophic kind of bitterness, with just a hint of bitterness against the Soviets under it. A cynical worldliness and weariness. Cruelty—and completely indifferent to it. Superior conceit—indifference to women’s compliments, a “spoiled by women” attitude.

At first—he is amused, he plays with her. Then—he is interested, impressed—more than he wants to admit—by her straightforward, brave, calm outlook on things.

[The following is for the description of Petrograd in Chapter I, Part 2. In a 1961 interview, AR commented on this description: “It is the one passage that shows (Victor) Hugo’s influence. The style is not mine—it is not the method natural to me. ”]

The whole: give a picture and feeling of Petrograd as a city—not any city, but Petrograd.

Its creation: by a will of man where no city should have been—not born, made.

Nevsky. Kamenostrovsky. The islands. Neva. Palace and fortress. Side streets. Canals. Little parks. Factories. Unrelieved drabness and plainness.

(The feeling of the city without crossing its doors, without entering its houses.)

Petrograd is complete, it does not grow. It is definite.

Its facets are extreme: man-made, deliberate, perfect for what they are. No nature—man.

No folklore or history like that of Moscow or Paris. No legends.

It is not the city of the people, but of the aristocracy and the intellect.

[The following two sentences were crossed out:] Its symbol would not be a church or a fortress, but a palace and a night club. It is the city of a high hat and a narrow liqueur glass.

It is “he,” not “she” like Moscow.

What the revolution did. (Monuments.)

Spring.

[For the climactic scene between Kira and Andrei in Chapter XIII, Part 2.]

She is proud of what she has done.

Nothing he can do to Leo will compare to what she has done to him.

His love was only money for Leo. She laughed at his love.... Highest woman? Only a prostitute—and he is the one who bought her. She thought of Leo [while she was] in his arms. Every kiss she gave him was given for Leo.

She is not ashamed—she is what they have made her. They who have forbidden life to the living.

In him and to him—she has paid.

Has he learned what his own life is? Will the State be a consolation?

Does he know what they are doing? “Airtight.”

I could stand all but my highest reverence . . .

[For Kira’s death scene.]

Earth—snow, going up and down, snow lighting the sky, a haze ahead—and she isn’t sure whether it’s close at her face or miles away. Frightened when she sees a tree—crouches like an animal. Bands of snow rising in the wind as if reaching the low sky in the distance.

Sky—black and gray and patches of blue that could not exist in daytime. Strips of stars that make her uncomfortable. Patches of light from nowhere.

Silence—shadows of sounds. Afraid to stop to listen beyond the sounds of her feet. Long journey—as if there had never been anything else in the world beyond that snow.

Weariness. Pain in her knees as if climbing a stairway. Her cheeks frozen. Pain in her finger-joints, in her back, in her shoulder blades. Legs moving as if not her own. Suddenly she feels well, too well. Sudden break of pain. Cannot stop at any price. Bending—to be less to carry.

Thoughts; She has to get out. Has she any questions to be answered? To be answered there. It won’t get her. She can’t give up. Looking at stars—head thrown back, arms outstretched—isn’t there a place for her in the world? Checking on money in jacket often. Thinks dimly of “Cafe Diggy-Daggy” —repeating it senselessly, nickel plated letters insolent in their simplicity in dull white glass. Doesn’t know what awaits her. Knows only that she has to get out. An instinct chasing her, like that of an animal. Nothing behind her—only that ahead. “You’re a good soldier.”

Growing insane determination: to go on, to get out.

Worries over bills. “Good soldier.”

Finds herself in the snow suddenly. “I must have fainted again.”

Rolls down side of the hill. Gets up slowly—seems like hours.

Crawls up the side of the hill, on her hands and knees. Rises again.

Pink froth at her lips. Throws away the scarf. Throws away the jacket.

Staggering in the snow, her hair in the wind, bloodstains spreading on her gown.

Calling Leo—the Leo that would have been there, where she is going.

What life had been. The Viking. Murmuring the “Song of Broken Glass.”

That which had been promised cannot be denied to her.

Dawn—Beauty in nature, which is more than the beauty of nature, but the beauty of an idea.

A last ecstasy of life. “Life that is a reason unto itself.” That which was possible.

February 2, 1936

[An excerpt from an autobiographical note that AR sent to her publisher.]

I have been asked why I wrote this novel. I think the answer is obvious. I have seen Soviet life as few writers outside Russia have seen it. And while the world at large is deluged to the saturation point with minute accounts of Soviet Russia, including all the latest statistics up to every single tractor produced by the “great experiment,” very little has been said about actual life under communism, about living beings, not slogans and theories. Theories against practice—that’s something too often overlooked in every important question today. With due apologies to good manners, I don’t give a damn about theories. I do give a good deal about human beings. No, not all of them. Only those worthy of the name.

Also, if one takes even the swiftest look at the world today, one cannot help but see the greatest, most urgent conflict of our times: the individual against the collective. That problem interests me above all others in my writing. No country on earth offers such a startling and revealing view of that conflict as Soviet Russia. Hence—We the Living. The plot of my novel is entirely fictitious. The background and circumstances which make the plot possible—are entirely true.

3

FIRST PHILOSOPHIC JOURNAL

AR was twenty-nine when she wrote the following notes in a philosophic journal.

These are the vague beginnings of an amateur philosopher. To be checked with what I learn when I master philosophy—then see how much of it has already been said, and whether I have anything new to say, or anything old to say better than it has already been said.

April 9, 1934

The human race has only two unlimited capacities: for suffering and for lying.

I want to fight religion as the root of all human lying and the only excuse for suffering.

I believe—and I want to gather all the facts to illustrate this—that the worst curse on mankind is the ability to consider ideals as something quite abstract and detached from one’s everyday life. The ability to live and think quite differently, thus eliminating thinking from your actual life. This applied not to deliberate and conscious hypocrites, but to those more dangerous and hopeless ones who, alone with themselves and to themselves, tolerate a complete break between their convictions and their lives, and still believe that they have convictions. To them, either their ideals or their lives are worthless—and usually both.

I hold religion mainly responsible for this. I want to prove that religion breaks a character before it’s formed, in childhood, by teaching a child lies before he knows what a lie is, by breaking him of the habit of thinking before he has begun to think, by making him a hypocrite before he knows any other possible attitude toward life. If a child is taught ideals that he knows are contrary to his own deepest instincts, [ideals] such as unselfishness, meekness, and self-sacrifice, if he is told he is a miserable sinner for not living up to ideals he can never reach and doesn’t want to reach, then his natural reaction is to consider all ideals as out of his reach forever, as something theoretical and quite apart from his own actual life. Thus the beginning of self-hypocrisy, the killing of all desire for a living ideal.

Religion is also the first enemy of the ability to think. That ability is not used by men to one tenth of its possibility, yet before they learn to think they are discouraged by being ordered to take things on faith. Faith is the worst curse of mankind; it is the exact antithesis and enemy of thought. I want to learn why men do not use logical reasoning to govern their lives and [solve] their problems. Is it impossible to them or has it been taught to them as impossible?

I believe this last. And the teacher is the church. Thought and reason are the only weapons of mankind, the only possible bond of understanding among men. Anyone who demands that anything be taken on faith—or relies on any super-mental, super-logical instinct—denies all reason.

Why are men so afraid of pure, logical reasoning? Why do they have a profound, ferocious hatred of it?

Are instincts and emotions necessarily beyond the control of plain thinking? Or were they trained to be? Why is a complete harmony between mind and emotions impossible? Isn’t it merely a matter of strict mental honesty? And who stands at the very bottom of denying such honesty? Isn’t it the church?

I want to be known as the greatest champion of reason and the greatest enemy of religion.

May 9, 1934

In regard to free will: Why is it used as an argument against freedom of the will that it is motivated by a circumstance of the outside world? Is there any such thing as will without the content to which it is applied? Isn’t will a pure abstraction, not an object? Isn’t it a verb rather than a noun, and as such meaningless without that upon which it acts? The will does not have to be without reason, or motivation, in order to be free. One’s act may be motivated by an outside reason, but the choice of that reason is our free will. An example of the determinists: if a man drinks a glass of water, he does it because he is thirsty, therefore his will isn’t free, it’s motivated by his physical condition. But he drinks the glass of water because he needs it and decides that he wants to drink it. If his sweetheart’s life had depended on his not drinking that water, he probably would not have touched it, no matter what his thirst. Or if it were a question of his life or hers, he would have to select and make the decision. In other words, he drinks because he’s thirsty, but it is not the thirst that determines his action, the thirst only motivates it. A motivation is not a reason. (Has that anything to do with the question of free will?)

Doesn’t the “free will” question come under the general question of human reason—and its freedom? If an action is logical—does that mean it is not free? Or is logic considered a restriction? If so—upon what? Is there anything conceivable beyond logic? Does a free action necessarily mean an unreasonable one? And if mind (or reason) depends on the outside world for its contents—is it reason any the less?

Has anyone properly described logic and human reason?

All philosophy is a set of thoughts. Thoughts are [governed] by certain implacable rules. If we deny these rules—which are an integral part of thoughts—we deny the thoughts. If we deny the thoughts—we deny the philosophy. So why bother at all? (In answer to all those who build transcendental, super-reasonable, super-logical philosophic systems.)

Is there—or should there be—such a thing as emotion opposed to reason? Isn’t it merely a form of undeveloped reason, a form of stupidity?

How and why can will be considered apart from the mind? If thinking is free from subconscious influences—why not the will?

And if, as according to [H. L.] Mencken, the question of “freedom of the will” has to be studied on the basis of psychology with all its dark complexes—then what are we actually studying? Will as it is expressed in subnormal cases? Or in normal, average cases? Or in the highest instances of the human [mind]?

Are we studying will as it is actually in the majority of cases—or as it can be essentially, as a human attribute?

Do we judge all human terms as applied to existing humanity or to humanity’s highest possibility?

If we are trying to form a general conception of a “stomach,” do we study a hundred diseased stomachs and form our general conception from them, so that “stomach” as such is something with a number of diseases attached to it—or do we find the healthy stomach first, in order to learn what it is, and then judge the others by comparison?

Is ethics necessarily and basically a social conception? Have there been systems of ethics written primarily on the basis of an individual? Can that be done?

Are ethics at all a matter of history? Does it matter how and where they developed? Is a history of ethics necessary? I believe only a system of ethics is necessary, and it has to stand or fall on its own merits—not on any history or far away beginning. For instance, when discussing the social instinct—does it matter whether it had existed in the early savages? We do not judge the value of an automobile by the first chariot ever used in the history of men. Supposing men were born social (and even that is a question)—does it mean that they have to remain so?

“Social life,” said Kropotkin, “that is, we, not I, is the normal form of life (in man). It is life itself.” Good God Almighty!!!! [Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin (1842-1941) was a Russian socialist who advocated the revolt of the “working class. ”]

This is exactly what I’m going to fight. For the exact opposite is true.

If man started as a social animal—isn’t all progress and civilization directed toward making him an individual? Isn’t that the only possible progress? If men are the highest of animals, isn’t man the next step?

May 15, 1934

In regard to The Revolt of the Masses [by José Ortega y Gasset]: Isn’t it a terrible generalization—that can be interpreted in too many different ways—to say that a “noble” man strives to serve and obey, and the “mass” man to do as he pleases?

If what is meant is the noble man’s servitude to his own standards and ideas—is that to be called servitude? If the standards are his, isn’t he precisely obeying himself and doing what he pleases? No truly noble man is going to obey standards set for him by someone else. That is the action of the mass man. It is the mass man who cannot do as he wishes, because he has no wishes; he has to have his standards—or the nearest to that word that he can come—dictated to him.

This leads me again to a question that is part of the general “free will” question. What exactly is freedom? Surely, freedom does not mean an empty blank. If a man obeys his own ideals—how can that be called servitude? If a man has no ideals at all—why is that called freedom? How can any human quality, such as freedom, be disconnected from its content? Isn’t there a terrible mistake of abstraction here? Isn’t it as Nietzsche said: “Not freedom from what, but freedom for what?”

This leads to another question—my question of the “supreme egoism.” There exists that body of ideas which represents all the so-called intellectual and spiritual values: ethics, philosophy, etc. (This requires a better definition and analysis—which has to be done later.) My “supreme egoism” consists of the right to apply these values to oneself and to live them. For example: if a man is convinced that religion is wrong, he has to be and profess to be an atheist. The vile, dangerous habit of today is to admit, for instance, that religion is valuable to the majority and, therefore, go to church, profess to be religious, etc., in order to gain something by playing down to the masses. As a consequence, the horrible paradox of our time is that intellectual values are left only to the masses, that they become a special, exclusive privilege of the masses, who not only have no right to them, but lack completely even the elementary organ for anything approaching intellectual ideas. It is as if one left sight only as a privilege of the blind. The so-called “selfish” man of today uses “ideas” only as means to attain his own end. But what is that end? What is accomplished if the man attains power and prominence at the cost of playing down to the masses? It is not he that triumphs, it is not his ideas and standards. It is only his physical frame. Essentially, he is only a slave to those masses. [This idea was later to find dramatic expression in the character of Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead.] This explains my meaning when I consider the “selfish,” ambitious man of today as essentially unselfish, or rather selfless. The true selfishness is that which demands the right to its own higher ideas and values. The “supreme egoism” is that which claims things for their essential, not their secondary values.

An example from my own experience, which, at the present time, affects me most, is the fact that few men have the ability or the desire to judge literary work by its essential worth. To most men, that work becomes valuable only after it has been recognized as such by someone else. They themselves do not have any standards of their own (and they do not feel the lack). The same is true of any other field of mental activity: scientific, philosophical, etc. This is the great unselfishness of today. As a matter of fact, unselfishness is merely selflessness. The true, highest selfishness, the exalted egoism, is the right to have one’s own theoretical values and then to apply them to practical reality. Without that self there are no values. Here again—ethics based on self, not on society, the mass, the collective, or any other form of selflessness.

From this—to another question. There have been too many philosophical abstractions, too much intellectual “algebra”—as is illustrated best by that statement from The Revolt of the Masses about the noble man’s servitude. It is an algebraic formula into which [are inserted] too many different arithmetical contents. What we need is an “arithmetic” of the spirit. Algebra—spiritually—is too much of the mob, of the masses, the collective, being too general. The individual is the arithmetical quantity of the spirit. And in things spiritual—or intellectual (which is essentially the same)—it is only the individual and the particular, concrete problem that counts. Algebraic constructions are only a convenience. In practice, they have no use, unless the proper arithmetical content is inserted into the formula. But in the field of philosophy today there is this tendency of considering the algebraic formula as final, and therefore philosophy has no practical significance or application. Returning to what I said at the beginning of these notes, there is no need for theory which cannot be applied in practice. More than that, such theory is not only useless, but dangerous and fatal, for it lies at the bottom of that frightful phenomenon of believing one thing and living another. If by practical reality I mean the actual living of an individual, then there is no need for anything which is not this practical reality, which is not actual living. This is a point which can and will be strongly debated, but it has to be the cornerstone of my philosophy—proving the supremacy of actual living over all other considerations, in fact proving that there are no other considerations. As a result, my “arithmetic” of philosophy has to be philosophy brought up to the realm of actual living. (I say intentionally brought up to it, not down.) This—I expect—will be its vital strength. [We can see the first seeds of AR’s later theory of concepts in her identification of the relation between abstractions and concretes as similar to that between algebra and arithmetic. Her primary concern here is to reject the Platonic rationalism that detaches abstractions from concretes, and affirm the Aristotelian premise that only concretes exist. However, her characterization of abstractions as “collective” and “only a convenience ” conflicts with her mature views. For a full presentation of AR’s theory, see Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.]

That philosophical “algebra” is, to my mind, the greatest crime of metaphysics, if I understand that word correctly. It is the result of that underlying error of human thinking—which forgets the distinction between abstraction and reality, thus denying reality. For abstractions are only a convenience, not a fact, a means, not an end. This—for the basis of philosophy as a science. For science essentially deals with facts. The next step will be to define just what are facts. Which will bring me to human reason as the basis of all facts, scientific or philosophical. More about that later.

(All these things are only for my own use. They are pretty disjointed and not in any logical sequence. But what will [ultimately] come out of this is an arrangement of the whole in a logical system, proceeding from a few axioms in a succession of logical theorems. The axioms will be necessary—even mathematics has them—[because] you can’t build something on nothing. The end result will be my “Mathematics of Philosophy.”)

I have to study: philosophy, higher mathematics, physics, psychology.

As to physics—learn why mind and reason are so decried as impotent when coping with the universe. Isn’t there some huge mistake there?

It may be considered strange, and denying my own supremacy of reason, that I start with a set of ideas, then want to study in order to support them, and not vice versa, i.e., not study and derive my ideas from that. But these ideas, to a great extent, are the result of a subconscious instinct, which is a form of unrealized reason. All instincts are reason, essentially, or reason is instincts made conscious. The “unreasonable” instincts are diseased ones. This—for the study of psychology. For the base of the reconciliation of reason and emotions.

As to psychology—learn whether the base of all psychology is really logic, and psychology as a science is really pathology, the science of how these psychological processes depart from reason. This departure is the disease. What caused it? Isn’t it faulty thinking, thinking not based on logic, [but on] faith, religion?

All consciousness is reason. All reason is logic. Everything that comes between consciousness and logic is a disease. Religion—the greatest disease of mankind.

Some day I’ll find out whether I’m an unusual specimen of humanity in that my instincts and reason are so inseparably one, with the reason ruling the instincts. Am I unusual or merely normal and healthy? Am I trying to impose my own peculiarities as a philosophical system? Am I unusually intelligent or merely unusually honest? I think this last. Unless—honesty is also a form of superior intelligence.

May 16, 1934

A quotation about Russia, which may be useful, from While Rome Burns by Alexander Woollcott [American journalist and writer]:

Then at noon the next day, the neat, bustling, inexcusably cheerful station at Stolyce, Poland. The first cup of good coffee in weeks. Flagrantly trivial newspapers to read. And a great buoyancy of one’s spirit. All returning travelers mention this curious lifting of the sense of oppression-sometimes unnoticed until it does lift, just as you realize how foul the air of a room has been only when you get a whiff from out-of-doors—this exhilarating relief which even one who has hugely enjoyed his stay in the Soviet Union does experience on quitting its territory.... There is nothing mysterious about it. Every man who was ever demobilized remembers this sensation of a recovered freedom. Freedom to sit on a park bench and starve, perhaps. But freedom, brothers, freedom.

The new conception of the State that I want to defend is the State as a means, not an end; a means for the convenience of the higher type of man. The State as the only organization. Within it—all have to remain individuals. The State, not as a slave of the great numbers, but precisely the contrary, as the individual’s defense against great numbers. To free man from the tyranny of numbers.

The fault of liberal democracies: giving full rights to quantity (majorities), they forget the rights of quality, which are much higher rights. Prove that differences of quality not only do exist inexorably, but also should exist. The next step—democracy of superiors only. This is not possible without a very high and powerful sense of honor. This, in turn, is not possible without a set of values from which this honor is to be derived. The new set of values: [my] supreme egoism.

From The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset:

[T]he apparent enthusiasm for the manual worker, for the afflicted and for social justice, serves as a mask to facilitate the refusal of all obligations, such as courtesy, truthfulness and, above all, respect or esteem for superior individuals. I know of quite a few who have entered the ranks of some labor organization or other merely in order to win for themselves the right to despise intelligence and to avoid paying it any tribute. [In regard to] Dictatorship, we have seen only too well how they flatter the mass-man, by trampling on everything that appeared to be above the common level.

May 21, 1934

“Mankind? It is an abstraction. There are, have been, and always will be, men and only men.” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

I would change that to go one step further: man, only man.

Has there ever been a history written from the viewpoint not of a nation’s development through its outstanding individuals, but of these individuals’ desperate fight against their nations, for the sake of the development and advancement for which the nation so noisily and arrogantly takes credit after it has made a martyr of the “developer” and “advancer”? History as a deadly battle of the mass and the individual. A scientific task for me: to trace just how many of mankind’s “geniuses” were recognized and honored in their own time. And since they were not—as most of them weren‘t—is there any ground for the conception of any national cultures, histories and civilizations? If there is any such thing as culture and its growth—isn’t it the culture of great individuals, of geniuses, not of nations or any other conglomerations of human creatures? And isn’t history the fight of mankind against advancement, not for it?

PART 2

THE FOUNTAINHEAD

4

THEME AND CHARACTERS

AR’s working title for The Fountainhead was Second-Hand Lives. She kept most of her notes for the novel in three ring-bound notebooks. The present chapter offers the complete contents of her first notebook, which begins with a discussion of the theme and then gives character descriptions of Howard Roark, Peter Keating, and Ellsworth Toohey.

To avoid confusion, I have used the names of the characters as they appear in the novel. In these early notes, Ellsworth Monkton Toohey was Everett Monkton Flent, Peter Keating was Peter Wilson, and John Eric Snyte was Worthington Snyte. AR changed the names about two years after her first notes.

December 4, 1935

Second-Hand Lives

It is not the works, but the belief which is here decisive and determines the order of rank—to employ once more an old religious formula with a new and deeper meaning—it is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost. The noble soul has reverence for itself.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Beyond Good and Evil

I. The first purpose of the book is a defense of egoism in its real meaning, egoism as a new faith. Therefore—a new definition of egoism and its living example. If egoism is the quality which makes one put oneself above all—well, in what manner? And—above what? If one goes ruthlessly after one’s aim—what is the aim? It is not what one does or how one does it, but why one does it. It is the ultimate result, the last consequence, the essence and sum of sums which determines the quality of egoism.

One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself. Fine! But what is that best? Which leads to the question: are morals, or ethics, or all higher values, a thing outside [oneself], i.e., God’s law or society’s prescription, something related not to a man, but to others around him, an ultimatum forced upon man and essentially selfless and unselfish? Or [are these values] a man’s very own, his sacred, highest right, his best inspiration, his real life and real self?

And further: what is the self? Just the fact that one is born and conscious, just the “I” devoid of all definite content? Or—the “I” that values, selects and knows precisely the qualities which distinguish it from all other “I‘s,” which has reverence for itself for certain definite reasons, not merely because “I-am-what-I-am-and-don’t-know-just-what-I-am.” If one’s physical body is a certain definite body with a certain definite shape and features, not just a body—so one’s spirit is a certain definite spirit with definite features and qualities. A spirit without content is an abstraction that does not exist. If one is proud of one’s body for its beauty, created by certain lines and forms, so one is proud of one’s spirit for its beauty, or that which one considers its beauty. Without that—there can be no pride of spirit. Nor any spirit.

If the higher values of life (such as all ethics, philosophy, esthetics, everything that results from a sense of valuation in the mental life of man) come from within, from man’s own spirit, then they are a right, a privilege and a necessity—not a duty. They are that which constitutes a man’s life, and if he is an egoist in the best sense of the word he will choose these higher values for himself and for himself alone, i.e., for his own sake and satisfaction, not because of a duty to God, fellow-men, the State or any other fool abstraction outside of himself. A man has a code of ethics primarily for his own sake, not for anyone else’s. Consequently, an ethical man is essentially an egoist. A selfless man cannot be ethical.

To explain what may sound like a paradox: if by ethics we understand all sets of values, all standards of conduct and thought (without specifying at present just what standards are to be considered ethical; i.e., taking merely the quality of valuing, without defining how one should value), then a man who does not consider his values as his, but merely as prescribed to him, or who acts virtuously because he has to, not because he wants to—that man can hardly be considered virtuous or ethical. The man to whom virtue, or that which he considers virtue, is a necessity, not a painful duty, is the truly ethical man. As example: if a man dies for his cause, because he hates to do it, but feels that some higher power—God or State—compels him to, he is a poor hero; if a man dies because it is his cause and he wishes no choice but to defend it at any cost—he is a hero.

The question as to what constitutes a standard of values will come later. The primary question is only to establish such a thing as a standard of values and its necessity as part of a man’s own self—without which there is no such thing as self.

Now, then, if a man is a ruthless egoist, just what form does his egoism take? Does he fight, struggle and claim for himself those higher values and his right to follow them? Or—? ?—what? The generally accepted example of pure egoism is a ruthless financier who crushes everything in order to obtain money and power—but can he truly be considered an egoist? What does he do with the money? To what purpose does he use the power? Doesn’t he merely—and this is always the case with the conventional type of egoist—give up all standards of value, those prescribed to him as well as his own, in order to get the money? Doesn’t he play down to the mob in every sense and manner, encouraging its vices, sacrificing his own opinions, serving others, always others, as a slave—to gain his own ends? Well then—what ends?

Who is the true egoist: The man who crushes his own “I” to succeed with others, to fool them, betray them, kill them—but still live as they want him to live and conquer to the extent of a home, a yacht and a full stomach? Or—the man who puts his own “I,” his standard of values, above all things, and conquers to live as he pleases, as he chooses and as he believes? If a dictator, such as Hitler, for instance, has to play down to the mob in order to hold his influence and rule—does he rule? Or does he merely give orders as long as he gives the kind of orders the mob wants to obey? In which case—who rules whom? If [William Randolph] Hearst has a great influence because he always sits on the fence and says only that which is “box-office” —where is the influence? When and where can he say what he wants and succeed in getting it? Isn’t he the greatest of slaves instead of the greatest of powers?

Is power the possibility to force others into doing what you want—or merely in sitting on a high throne, in the full glare of the public light, executing what others want you to do? If a man who is not a Nazi pretends to be one and goes on pretending to the end of his days in order to have a soft job, money and food—is he to be called an egoist? Or isn’t the true egoist the one who starves in exile for the right to believe what he believes?

A true egoist, therefore, places his ego and the claims of his ego in the realm of higher values. He demands these values because he wants them, and is utterly selfish in his demand. If higher values are the meaning of life, if they are life—well then, an egoist demands the highest. The man who sacrifices these values for physical comforts does not demand very much. He is not an egoist—because the ego is absent.

An egoist is a man who lives for himself. In this, I can agree with the worst of Christian moralists. The questions are only: 1) what constitutes living for oneself? and 2) if the first is answered my way, i.e., living for one’s highest values, then isn’t living for oneself the highest type of living, the only real living and the only ethical living possible?

Consequently, my “egoism as a new faith” is a higher meaning and a higher exaltation of the word “I,” of that feeling which makes man say and feel “I.” Which brings me to the second point of the book.

II. The thing which is most “wrong with the world” today is its absolute lack of positive values. [There is a lack] of moral standards (not merely the old-fashioned “Victorian morals,” but of anything approaching morals, anything that values, differentiates and says “yes” or “no”), a lack of honor, a lack of faith (in a philosophical, not a religious meaning, faith as a set of certain principles, as a goal, aim or inspiration, as a life-system). Here again, it is not the absence of a certain type of values that I mean, but the very act and habit of valuing and selecting in one’s mental life. Nothing is considered bad and nothing is considered good. There is no enthusiasm for living, since there is no enthusiasm for any part, mode or form of living.

(Incidentally, this explains the tremendous popularity of communism among people who are not communists at all, particularly the young people. Communism, at least, offers a definite goal, inspiration and ideal, a positive faith. Nothing else in modern life does. The old capitalism has nothing better to offer than the dreary, shop-worn, mildewed ideology of Christianity, outgrown by everyone, and long since past any practical usefulness it might have had, even for the capitalistic system. Furthermore, that same Christianity, with its denial of self and glorification of all men’s brotherhood, is the best possible kindergarten of communism. Communism is at least consistent in its ideology. Capitalism is not; it preaches what communism actually wants to live. Consequently, if there are things in capitalism and democracy worth saving, a new faith is needed, a definite, positive set of new values and a new interpretation of life, which is more opposed, more irreconcilable, more fatal to communism than its bastard weak-sister—Christianity.)

Returning to the immediate purpose of the book: A new set of values is needed to combat this modern dreariness, whether it be communism (which I may not include in the book) or the sterile, hopeless cynicism of the modern age. That new faith is Individualism in all its deepest meaning and implications, such as has never been preached before: individualism of the spirit, of ethics, of philosophy, not merely the good old “rugged individualism” of small shopkeepers. Individualism as a religion and a code, not merely as an economic practice. (What in hell is the kind of “individualism” that allows a man merely to run his own grocery [store] instead of a government cooperative, but sends this same shopkeeper to church on Sunday to pray for “loving his neighbor as himself”?) A revival (or perhaps the first birth) of the word “I” as the holiest of holies and the reason of reasons.

Am I wrong? Well—let’s consider it. What we actually have today is an individualistic (or at least so-called) form of economics with the most perfect communistic ideology that any Soviet could hope to achieve. In our economic life there still is a chance for the private initiative that made all modern technical progress possible—but it is absolutely absent from our spiritual life. Consequently, we have the appalling spectacle, decried by all, of a highly developed technological civilization along with complete spiritual stagnation. We have developed technically—oh yes!—but spiritually we are far below Renaissance Italy. In fact, we have no spiritual life in the grand manner, in the sense it used to be understood.

Is it the fault of machines? Is the twentieth century incapable and unfit for my spiritual exultation? Or—is it only that little word “I,” which, after twenty centuries of Christianity’s efforts, has been erased from human consciousness, and along with it took everything that was human consciousness?

It is not the purpose of the book to prove theoretically, point by point, why the morality of individualism is superior to that of collectivism, why it is, in fact, the only morality worthy of the name. The purpose is only to show how both of them work in real life: to show the ultimate consequences and results of both—brought to their logical conclusions. Perhaps, in doing so, the question will be answered of itself and the proof will be given. It is not a question of individualism versus collectivism; it is a question of egoism [versus] selflessness. The latter [alternative] is the psychological basis of the former, in concrete human forms. The purpose is to prove that the so-called “selfish” man of today is the true collectivist in spirit, the man who has [renounced] his own “I” for the dictates of others, who has accepted society as his absolute ruler in the realm of spiritual values—and paid the price. As a contrast, as the moral, the theme of the book—[I show] a man who is a true egoist, the man who really “lives for himself.”

III. What do I mean by “second-hand lives”?

1. All men who have lost the ability to choose, value and pronounce judgment on all questions of spiritual standards. For there is no true judge outside of one’s “I.” Everything accepted on faith or on someone else’s authority is only a warmed-over spiritual hash.

2. All men who have reversed the process of “end” and “means” and to whom the means have become the end. For instance, if an egoist struggles for power to achieve his ambitions and ideals—well and good. But if, in the struggle, he sacrifices his ideals merely to achieve the power, he is accepting a second-hand substitute, a thing that has no meaning, that brings him no value whatever, but takes his values away instead.

3. All men who, by betraying their egos, actually live for others, not for themselves, live only through others (this is the main point). For instance: if a man struggles for power and achieves it by accepting and championing the ideology of the masses, he himself knows that he has no real power, but he has it only in the eyes of the mob. If a man is a crook and cheats to achieve his ends—he himself knows that he is dishonest, but will struggle and scramble to preserve a respectable appearance and reputation in the eyes of others. If a man wants to be a writer and hires a ghost to do his great epic, then bows and happily accepts popular acclaim—he himself knows that he is a nonentity, but rejoices in being a genius in the eyes of others. All deceits prompted by vanity, all reaping of faked successes, are a second-hand acceptance of something existing only in the minds of our neighbors, not in us, not in our own reality. (Vanity as the most selfless of qualities.) If a man is praised for writing a trashy movie scenario, and glories in the praise, knowing it was trash, he accepts a second-hand achievement in which he himself does not believe. If a man does not create what he likes, but creates that which he knows others will admire—it is second-hand creation.

In other words, when a man shifts the center of his life from his own ego to the opinions of others, when those others become the determining factor in all his higher values, when his ideals are one and his actual existence another, when he cheats himself of all reality to create it in others, when higher values become merely a [possession of others to be used] by him for money or physical gain, while he is cheating himself of those higher values and of all life’s meaning—he is leading a second-hand life.

Consequently—coming back to where I started—the “great selfishness” of the conventional opportunist is merely an immense betrayal of his self.

December 22, 1935

To add to what I have written: The great tragedy and problem of the modern age is the absence of all values. The preachers and moralists yell that capitalistic selfishness is responsible for it, and all those idealistically inclined embrace communism as the cure for this guilt of selfishness. Exactly the opposite is true: the absence of values is caused by the absence of ego. As explained before, no ethics of any sort are possible without a feeling of egoism. Unless a man wants to be honorable and takes pride in being honorable—he is not going to be honorable. If humanity, for twenty dreary centuries, has been battered by Christianity into believing selflessness is a virtue and into considering as ideals things which are inherently impossible to it—all idealism is gone. All ambition toward an ideal, that which makes men wish to attain the highest possible, is gone, since that highest, as preached by Christianity, is unattainable.

If all of life has been brought down to flattering the mob, if those who can please the mob are the only ones to succeed—why should anyone feel any high aspirations and cherish any ideals? The capitalistic world is low, unprincipled and corrupt. But how can it have any incentive toward principles when its ideology has killed the only source of principles—man’s “I”? Christianity has succeeded in eliminating “self” from the world of ethics, by declaring “ethics” and “self” as incompatible. But that self cannot be killed. It has only degenerated into the ugly modern struggle for material success at the cost of all higher values, since these values have been outlawed by the church. Hence—the hopelessness, the colorless drabness, the dreariness and empty brutality of our present day.

The same would happen to humanity under communism—if it could ever succeed and take the place now held by the church. As long as men live, their “self” cannot be killed. But it can be distorted into a monstrosity, as any living organism can if reared in improper conditions and under an unbearable strain.

The consequence? Until man’s “self” regains its proper position, life will be what it is now: flat, gray, empty, lacking all beauty, all fire, all enthusiasm, all meaning, all creative urge. That is the ultimate theme of the book—Howard Roark as the remedy for all modern ills.

The theme, then, goes like this: Howard Roark is what men should be. I show: how and why others are different from him; what forms that difference takes; what reasons create it; what it does to its victims—their successes and their ultimate tragedies. And I show what life [is] to Howard Roark, how he succeeds and what his success means. An illustrated message to the twentieth century—without benefit of Marxism.

Instead of preaching more collectivism, men must realize that it is precisely collectivism, in its logical consequences—a subtle, unnamed, unofficial, but still all-powerful collectivism—that is the cause of mankind’s tragedy. It may not be the economic collectivism for which the communists clamor, but it is a perfect form of ethical collectivism, not theoretical, but actual, living, working. And since collective ethics are claimed to be necessary for collective economy—take a look, gentlemen, we have those ethics already. We have them and we don’t like them; it is not a pretty picture.

Either “man” is the unit and the final sovereign—or else “men” are. And “men” means the mob, the State, the nation, the Soviet—anything one wishes to call it, anything that implies a number of humans, a herd. Man must live for the State, claim the communists. Well, man is living for other men, for the mob, completely and hopelessly, only we don’t say so. I will show what it means to live for others—just exactly what it actually means and how it works. If it’s not pretty—well, then, where’s the mistake? The old Christian—communist denial of “self.” Proper life is possible only when man is allowed (and encouraged, and taught, and practically forced) to live for himself.

(Sideline: “But a communist State will do precisely that!” yell the communists. “It will give each individual a chance!” How? By inoculating them with a “collective ideology”? There it is, your collective ideology, perfect and logical and working.)

If—and no communist has yet gone this far—they claim that man’s higher values will come from his sense of honor before the mob (or his “brothers”), that he will be taught to value popular approval and esteem as reward for his efforts on the State’s behalf, that in this way his egoism will become spiritual instead of materialistic—how are you going to teach a contradiction? If he is to value his pride, his feeling of achievement, his personal glory, as his, how can he put them into the hands of the mob? How can he want to live for himself if all his actual life, his work, his ambition, his relations with others have to be guided and motivated by the “good of the State,” by collective interests and collective gain? How—if he is asked to live for others—is he going to have an incentive for self-respect and for his own higher values? A collective form of life with individualistic ethics and spirituality? That is as impossible as the “rugged individualism” of modern capitalistic society with a collectivist form of ethics and ideals—which is what we have today. The communist utopia of a collectivist state with individual morality would come to the same dreary mess—only it will never come.

To repeat: living for others, i.e., “second-hand living,” is exactly what we have today—in actual reality. And if that’s wrong, if it doesn’t work, if it creates a repulsive, hopeless chaos, then the solution is “living for oneself.” Capitalistic democracy has no ideology. That is what the book has to give it.

Nothing has ever been created except by the will of a creator. Civilization is not a collective process, the work of many men working together. It is the work of many men working alone. Each did what he could and wanted to do. No common cause ever tied them to one another.

All civilization, all progress—ethical, esthetical, philosophical, scientific—has been accomplished not by a cooperation between an originator and his followers, between man and the mob, but by a struggle between man and the mob. The mob has always been against novelty, originality, everything new and forward moving. It was individual men who made the forward step in each case, only to pay for it, often with their lives, because the mob resented it. But the world did move forward, because life belongs to the leaders and the exceptions. The others follow. They don’t want to. They have to. They contribute nothing to progress, except the impediments.

If the best part of life, the mental life, everything above mere material existence, is creation, it presupposes a sense of valuation. How can one create if one does not first estimate—value—one’s materials? (That applies to science, arts, ethics, and all mental endeavor.) How can there be valuing without those who value? A verb does not exist in a vacuum. A verb presupposes a noun. There is no such thing as an action without the one who acts. And who can do the valuing except a man?

A collective valuing would amount to this: one believes what others believe, because others believe it. If we have ten people and each one of them chooses to believe only what the nine others believe—just exactly who establishes the belief, and how? Multiply it by millions, on a world scale, and it’s still the same. The laws of mathematics work the same for dozens, and for hundreds, and for billions. There has to be a cause of causes, a determining factor, a basic initiative. If it is not taken by a man—by whom, then, is it taken? If a man is not the one to weigh, value and decide—who decides?

A “collective” mind does not exist. It is merely the sum of endless numbers of individual minds. If we have an endless number of individual minds who are weak, meek, submissive and impotent—who renounce their creative supremacy for the sake of the “whole” and accept humbly that “whole‘s” verdict—we don’t get a collective super-brain. We get only a weak, meek, submissive and impotent collective mind.

If a man is the ultimate creator, the one who values, then the worst of all crimes is the acceptance of the opinions of others. [The worst men are those who say:] “A thing is good because others say it’s good”; they are the men who lack the ability or the courage to value on their own.

As a ridiculous and petty but clear example of this type: the movie producers and the Hollywood type of mentality. The movies have produced no great work of art, no immortal masterpiece to compare with the masterpieces of other arts. Why? Because the movies are not an art? Rubbish! Because those in charge do not create what they think is good, but what they think others will think is good. Because those in charge have no values of their own (and refuse to have) but accept blindly anything and everything approved by someone else—anyone else.

The movies are the perfect example of collective ideology and of “living for others.” Why did all the other arts reach heights the movies never attained? Why did they prosper and survive in spite of the fact that they did not consider the “box-office,” the mob’s approval? Precisely because they did not consider the mob’s approval. They created—and forced the mob to accept their creations. But the movies “live for others.” And—they do not live at all. Not as an achievement and an end in themselves. Those working in the movies work to make money, not to work in the movies. Fine, if that’s all they want. But what do they get out of the money? What do they get in exchange for giving up the reality of their work and of their lives? They spend their lives at a second-hand task, a task secondary to their real purpose, a task which is only a means to an end. What is the end? Shouldn’t the end be precisely that at which they spend their lives? But—they’re only second-hand people with second-hand lives!

This is an example which is clearer and plainer than any other form of activity. It applies to other professions as well. The principle is the same. The result is the same.

December 26, 1935

An important thing to remember and bring out in the book: while Howard Roark, at first glance, is monstrously selfish and inconsiderate of others—one sees, in the end, his great consideration for the rights of others (when they warrant it) and his ruthlessness only in major issues; while Peter Keating, at first glance, is unusually kind, thoughtful, considerate of others and unselfish—in the end, it is clear that he will sacrifice anyone and everyone to his own small ends, whether he has to or not. In other words, those who show too much concern for others and not for themselves, have no true respect for either. Only the one who respects himself can also respect others (and only as a secondary matter, after himself). No other neighbor-feeling is possible.

While, at first glance, Howard Roark is a stern, austere, gloomy man, who does not laugh readily, who does not crack jokes and enjoy “comedy-relief,” he is [actually] the truly joyous man, full of a profound, exuberant joy of living, an earnest, reverent joy, a living power, a healthy, unquenchable vitality. While, at first glance, Peter Keating is cheerful, optimistic, the “life of the party,” the true “good fellow”—he is [actually] a sad, desolate man, empty, desperate in his emptiness, without life, without joy, hope or aim, a bitter cynic hiding his cynical despair under a superficial, forced gaiety.

The truly joyous man does not laugh too much, because there is little to laugh at in life as it is today. The truly joyous man takes himself very seriously, because there is no joy without self and pride in self. Those who preach and practice “not taking anything seriously” are not the gay, light hearted ones. They are merely the empty-hearted. “Taking seriously” is the very essence of life. If one does not “take oneself seriously,” one can take nothing seriously. And—“the noble soul has reverence for itself.” One does not revere with a giggle.

Above all, bring out the noble, all-pervading, joyous energy that permeates the being of Howard Roark and his whole life and every action, even in his tragedy. And—the dreary hopelessness of Peter Keating.

Cast of Characters

Howard Roark: The noble soul par excellence. The self-sufficient, self-confident man—the end of ends, the reason unto himself, the joy of living personified. Above all—the man who lives for himself, as living for oneself should be understood. And who triumphs completely. A man who is what he should be.

Peter Keating: The exact opposite of Howard Roark, and everything a man should not be. A perfect example of a selfless man who is a ruthless, unprincipled egotist—in the accepted meaning of the word. A tremendous vanity and greed, which lead him to sacrifice all for the sake of a “brilliant career.” A mob man at heart, of the mob and for the mob. His triumph is his disaster. He is left an empty, bitter wreck—his “second-hand life” takes the form of sacrificing all for the sake of a victory that has no meaning and gives him no satisfaction because his means become his end. He shows that a selfless man cannot be ethical. He has no self and, therefore, cannot have any ethics. A man who never could be [man as he should be]. And doesn’t know it.

A great publisher (Gail Wynand): A man who rules the mob only as long as he says what the mob wants him to say. What happens when he tries to say what he wants. A man who could have been. A preacher (?): A man who tries to save the world with an outworn ideology. Show that his ideals are actually in working existence and that they precisely are what the world has to be saved from. A movie producer: A man who has no opinions and no values, save those of others.

An actress (Vesta Dunning): A woman who accepts greatness in other people’s eyes, rather than in her own. A woman who could have been. [Vesta Dunning was cut from the novel after the first draft of Part 1 was written. The main scenes with Vesta have been published in The Early Ayn Rand.]

Dominique Wynand: The woman for a man like Howard Roark. The perfect priestess.

John Eric Snyte: The real ghost-writer-hirer. A man who glories in appropriating the achievements of others.

Ellsworth Monkton Toohey: Noted economist, critic and liberal. “Noted” anything and everything Great “humanitarian” and “man of integrity.” He glorifies all forms of collectivism because he knows that only under such forms will he, as the best representative of the mass, attain prominence and distinction, which is impossible to him on his own (non-existent) merits. The idol-crusher par excellence. Born, organic enemy of all things heroic. He has a positive genius for the commonplace. The worst of all possible rats. A man who never could be—and knows it.

January 15, 1936

One more variation of “second-hand lives”: those who put any secondary considerations before true values. Example: a man who gives a job to a friend, because he is a friend, rather than to the most deserving applicant, even though the latter is what the business requires. A critic who praises the work according to his relations with the author, rather than according to the value of the work. A secondary substitute. A “second-hand” way of living.

This may sound naive. But—is our life ever to have any reality? Are we ever going to live on the level? Or is life always to be something else, something different from what it should be? A real life, simple and sincere, and even naive, is the only life where all the potential grandeur and beauty of human existence can really be found. Are there real reasons for accepting the substitute, that which we have today? No one has shown [today‘s] life, as it really is, with its real meaning and its reasons. I’m going to show it. If it’s not a pretty picture—well, what is the [alternative]?

July 14, 1937

[AR often rewrote sections of her journals, essentializing and condensing the material. As a rule, I have omitted these repetitions. However, I include the following summary of the preceding journals, as an example of her method of rewriting. This summary is presented out of chronological order; it was written a year and a half after the original notes.]

Main points of plan

1. Defense of egoism in its real meaning.

Demand the best for oneself. What is the best? Why? An ethical man is essentially an egoist. The selflessness of sacrificing one’s best for secondary ends, such as money or power, which cannot be used as he wishes. Conventional selfishness—an immense betrayal of one’s very self.

2. The thing most wrong with the world—lack of all values.

Reason for the appeal of communism. Individualism as a complete new faith. The actual spiritual collectivism of our modem life—and the root of all its evils. Egoism and selflessness presented in all their consequences. Howard Roark as the salvation of mankind. (Our achievements in technique—where individualism reigns. Our degeneration in cultural matters—which have always been collective in America.)

The lack of principle in capitalism drives men to communism as the cure. Precisely the opposite is true. The evil is not too much selfishness, but not enough of it; not lack of collectivism, but too much of it. The cure—not the destruction of individualism, but the creation of it. Christianity as the hatred of all ideals. Show clearly what real collectivism would actually mean. (On the basis of what it means already today.)

3. The meaning of “second-hand lives. ”

All those who shift the center of their lives from their own egos to the opinions of others. When those others become the determining factor. When a man cheats himself of all reality in order to create it in others. Types of “second-handedness”: 1) Those who have lost the ability to value for themselves and accept on faith or on someone’s authority the opinions of others. 2) Those who reverse the process of “end” and “means,” and to whom the means become the end. (Like money and power for their own sake.) 3) Those who actually exist only in the eyes of others, not in their own. (A crook who tries to be considered respectable. A writer who hires a ghost. An artist pandering to the box-office. The deceits of vanity—the most selfless, second-hand of all qualities.) 4) Those who put secondary considerations before actual ones (like giving a job to a friend, in preference to a man of real ability).

“Second-handedness” destroys the reality of living. Our life is always not what it appears to be. Our higher values have no existence in reality. Let us be real.

4. The theme condensed.

Howard Roark is what men should be. I show: what he is, how and why others are different from him, what forms that difference takes, what reasons create it, what it does to its victims—their successes and their ultimate tragedies. And I show what life [is] to Howard Roark, what hell he has to go through and why, how he succeeds and what his success means.

5. All progress as the work of individuals.

Not a cooperation between man and mob, but a struggle of man against mob. Life belongs to the leader. The others follow. They don’t want to. They have to. They contribute nothing to progress, except the impediments.

6. The difference in the attitudes of Roark and Keating (sub-issue).

Those who show too much concern for others and not for themselves, have no true respect for either. Only the man who respects himself can also respect others (and only as a secondary matter, after himself). No other neighbor-feeling is possible.

The truly joyous man takes himself very seriously, because there is no joy without self and pride in self. Those who preach and practice “not taking anything seriously” are not the gay, light-hearted ones. They are merely empty-hearted. One does not reverence with a giggle. Above all, bring out the all-pervading feeling of joy in the being of Howard Roark, and the dreary hopelessness of Peter Keating.

Cast

Howard Roark: The man who can be and is.

Gail Wynand: The man who could have been.

Peter Keating: The man who never could be and doesn’t know it. Ellsworth M. Toohey: The man who never could be—and knows it. Dominique Wynand: The woman for a man like Roark. The perfect priestess. A woman who must give herself—and finds nothing to give herself to (until Roark).

The preacher: The man who tries to save the world with what the world should be saved from.

Guy Francon: The real ghost-writer-hirer. [Earlier, this was AR’s description of John Eric Snyte, who instead became the eclectic.]

February 9, 1936

Howard Roark

Tall, slender. Somewhat angular—straight lines, straight angles, hard muscles. Walks swiftly, easily, too easily, slouching a little, a loose kind of ease in motion, as if movement requires no effort whatever, a body to which movement is as natural as immobility, without a definite line to divide them, a light, flowing, lazy ease of motion, an energy so complete that it assumes the ease of laziness. Large, long hands—prominent joints and knuckles and wrist-bones, with hard, prominent veins on the backs of the hands; hands that look neither young or old, but exceedingly strong. His clothes always disheveled, disarranged, loose and suggesting an unknown. No awkwardness, but a certain savage unfitness for clothes. Definitely red, loose, straight hair, always disheveled.

A hard, forbidding face, not in the least attractive according to conventional standards. More liable to be considered homely than handsome. Very prominent cheekbones. A sharp, straight nose. A large mouth—long and narrow, with a thin upper lip and a rather prominent lower one, which gives him the appearance of an eternal, frozen half-smile, an ironic, hard, uncomfortable smile, mocking and contemptuous. Wrinkles or dimples or slightly prominent muscles, all of that and none definitely, around the comers of his mouth. A rather pale face, without color on the cheeks and with freckles over the bridge of the nose and the cheekbones. Dark red eyebrows, straight and thin. Dark gray, steady, expressionless eyes—eyes that refuse to show expression, to be exact. Very long, straight, dark red eyelashes—the only soft, gentle touch of the whole face—a surprising touch in his grim expression. And when he laughs—which happens seldom—his mouth opens wide, with a complete, loose kind of abandon. A low, hard, throaty voice—not rasping, but rather blurred in its tone, though distinct in its sound, with the same soft, lazy fluency as his movements, neither one being soft or lazy.

Attitude toward life. He has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing. He did not acquire it. He did not come to it through any logical deductions. He was born with it. He never questions it because even the possibility of questioning it never occurs to him. It is an axiom to him as much as the fact of his being alive is an axiom. He is a man born with the perfect consciousness of a man. [This passage conflicts with AR’s rejection of innate ideas—see John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged.]

He is not even militant or defiant about his utter selfishness. No more than he could be defiant about the right to breathe and eat. He has the quiet, complete, irrevocable calm of an iron conviction. No dramatics, no hysteria, no sensitiveness about it—because there are no doubts. A quiet, almost indifferent acceptance of an irrevocable fact.

A quick, sharp mind, courageous and not afraid to be hurt, has long since grasped and understood completely that the world is not what he is. Consequently, he can no longer be hurt. The world has no painful surprise for him, since he has accepted long ago just what he can expect from it. Indifference and an infinite, calm contempt is all he feels for the world and for other men who are not like him. He understands men thoroughly. And, understanding them, he dismisses the whole subject. He knows what he wants and he knows the work he wants. That is all he expects of life. Being thoroughly a “reason unto himself,” he does not long for others of his kind, for companionship and understanding.

He also knows that the world will not give him the right to his work easily. He does not expect it to be given. He enters life prepared to find it a struggle. And although he is a warrior above all, he does not consider himself such. The state of strife and battle is natural to him as a synonym of life. He does not think of himself as “Howard Roark, a soldier.” He thinks: “A soldier, because he is Howard Roark.”

Consequently, there is no danger of suffering. He does not suffer, because he does not believe in suffering. Defeat or disappointment are merely a part of the battle. Nothing can really touch him. He is concerned only with what he does. Not how he feels. How he feels is entirely a matter of his own, which cannot be influenced by anything and anyone on the outside. His feeling is a steady, unruffled flame, deep and hidden, a profound joy of living and of knowing his power, a joy that is not even conscious of being joy, because it is so steady, natural and unchangeable. If outside life brings him disappointment—well, it is merely a detail of the battle. He will have to struggle harder—that’s all. The world becomes merely a place to act in. But not to feel in. The feeling—the whole [realm] of emotions—is in his [power] alone. He is a reason unto himself. He cannot feel differently. He was born that way.

His whole attitude toward himself, life and other men is completely clear to him. He does not even have to ponder about it—it is his very nature to be clear, consistent and logical about everything. His main policy in life is to refuse, completely and uncompromisingly, any surrender to the thoughts and desires of others. He wants to be an architect. He knows what he thinks of his work and what and how he will create. He expects others to accept his creation. Not because he needs their acceptance, but merely because they will be the ones to live in and use his buildings. He does not consider his work as concerned with the benefit and convenience of others. They are merely a convenience for his work. He does not build for people. People live for his buildings. He does not expect or wish admiration: he merely expects a humble bow to his superior spirit and its creation—because such is the nature of things and mere justice.

If he cannot get the right to do the work as he wants it done—well, then, he’ll take a fifteen-dollar job as a common worker, and wait and work for his chance. Because the rewards of success as such—money, ease and fame—mean nothing whatever to him; his life has to be real, his life is his work, he will do his work as he wants it done, the only way he can enjoy it—or not at all, and perish in the battle. Because the second-hand consolations most people get out of life have no meaning for him, he will not compromise by building inferior buildings, nor by pretending adherence to the prejudices of those in power to gain their favors and their jobs. He will be himself at any cost—the only thing he really wants of life. And, deep inside of him, he knows that he has the ability to win the right to be himself. Consequently, his life is clear, simple, satisfying and joyous—even if very hard outwardly.

He is in conflict with the world in every possible way—and at complete peace with himself. And his chief difference from the rest of the world is that he was born without the ability to consider others. As a matter of form and necessity on the way, as one meets fellow travelers—yes. As a matter of basic, primary consideration—no. And the whole tone of his life is set by that one idea, one feeling—he is “a reason unto himself.”

If he chooses the harder way, it is not through stupidity, stubbornness or a desire to be a martyr; it is merely because he knows he can make his way in the manner he pleases and will make it, and because he prefers his manner of making it. He has a tremendous, unshatterable conviction that he can and will force men to accept him, not beg and cheat them into it. He will take the place he wants, not receive it from others. Consequently, the profound serenity, joy, grandeur of his entire life and whole being.

His emotions are entirely controlled by his logic. Or rather—they are one and inseparable, with the emotions following the logic. (Show how this is possible.)

His whole philosophy: pride in oneself, confidence in oneself, placing one’s life and fate above all, but only the kind of life one wishes.

Religion—none. Not a speck of it. Born without any “religious brain center.” Does not understand or even conceive of the instinct for bowing and submission. His whole capacity for reverence is centered on himself. Needs no mystical “consolation,” no other life. Thinks too much of this world to expect or desire any other.

Politics—interested only in not being interested in politics. Society as such does not exist for him. Other people do not interest him. He recognizes only the right of the exceptional [man] (and by that he means and knows only himself) to create, and order, and command. The others are to bow. [Here we see a remnant of the Nietzscheanism prominent in The Little Street. For AR’s mature view, see “Man’s Rights ” in the Virtue of Selfishness.]

Ethics—only a code of his own, and only because he wants it. Doesn’t know what the word “duty” means. Plays straight—because he would feel contempt for himself if he were to sneak and lie. Says what he means—whether others like it or not. He is not concerned with their liking it. They will have to accept it. His life and work come above all—nothing and no one can interfere, or even be considered beside it.

Sex—sensuous in the manner of a healthy animal. But not greatly interested in the subject. Can never lose himself in love. Even his great and only love—Dominique Wynand—is not an all-absorbing, selfless passion. It is merely the pride of a possessor. If he could not have her, it would not break him or affect him very deeply. He might suffer—in his own indifferent way, a suffering that can never reach deep enough to obscure life.

His attitude toward Dominique is not: “I love you and I am yours.” It’s: “I love you and you are mine.” It is primarily a feeling of wanting her and getting her, without great concern for the question of whether she wants it. Were it necessary, he could rape her and feel perfectly justified. Needless to say, it is she who worships him, and loves him much more than he loves her. He is the god. He can never become a priest. She has to be the priestess. Until his meeting with Dominique, he has had affairs with women, perfectly cold, emotionless affairs, without the slightest pretense at love. Merely satisfying a physical need and recognized by his mistresses as such.

Ambition—see life. His whole being. Not even recognized by him as ambition. Merely his natural behavior, the only way he could be and act.

His manner is one of profound, inexorable calm. A strong kind of calm. Nothing can really arouse him—at least not outwardly. A slow, deliberate manner of speaking. Precise, unhurried movements. Laughs seldom. Does not joke. When he does—it is merely a quiet, indifferent kind of sarcasm. A man so far above men that nothing can really reach him. Never an emotional outbreak. Never loses control of himself.

And yet—a flaming intensity of feeling for his work and creation. And for life in general. A flame reserved only for himself. No one is ever to see, guess or witness it. And yet—its radiance is ever-present, in his indifferent calm itself, a radiance felt by all. Suffering makes him merely tenser and harder. A great deal of cruelty toward himself. And consequently toward others. Does not recognize suffering as such, or grant it any privileges and considerations. By the same token, he will never inflict unnecessary suffering or cruelty upon others. But when necessary, he will do it without even noticing it, without a shudder or a hint of hesitation.

The book is the story of Howard Roark’s triumph. It has to show what the man is, what he wants and how he gets it. It has to be a triumphant epic of man’s spirit, a hymn glorifying a man’s “I.” It has to show every conceivable hardship and obstacle on his way—and how he triumphs over them, why he has to triumph.

These obstacles, of course, can come from only one source: other men. It is society, with its boggled chaos of selflessness, compromise, servility and lies, that stands in the way of Howard Roark. It is every conceivable form of “second-hand living” that fights him, that tries to crush him as only a mob can crush—and fails in the attempt. To every second-hand creature he stands as a contrast, a reproach and a lesson.

We follow him from graduation as an architect to his ultimate, highest, complete victory. On the way, there are three main obstacles to face him: professional, economical, emotional. Professionally, it is the natural opposition of the mob to genius: total lack of understanding of his ideas, petty jealousies, resentment of the strange and the new, the stubborn stupidity of conservatism, the “social” angle of refusing opportunity to one who so totally lacks the social [ability of] boot-licking. As a consequence, [he endures] economical hardships, years of struggle with obscure jobs, poverty, silent, grim, relentless work. Every economical humiliation that society knows how to inflict. Emotionally, his first love is thwarted and denied—because of his unconventional, uncompromising attitude (Vesta).

February II, 1936

Peter Keating

Medium height, slender, graceful. Too graceful, with the studied, perfect, too soft and fluent grace of a ballet dancer. Carries himself erect, a deliberate erectness that seems a living illustration of the good, conventional “chin up” motto. Very pretty hands, always perfectly groomed. Always well dressed, well groomed and suggesting the manner of a fashion-plate, even in cheap clothes. A long, rather small, oval-shaped head, with a certain classical perfection in the shape of the skull. Long, narrow, pale face and attractive, almost feminine smooth skin, with a delicate, wax-like, transparent and milky texture. Long, thin nose and a very small mouth, delicate, flower-like and pretty, inclined to pout in a “bee-stung” manner, a mouth that would be small and pretty even on a girl. Dark, well-shaped eyes, alive, alert and softly lustrous. Obviously smart eyes, not deep or intelligent, but smart. Well-shaped eyebrows. Rather small, but well-shaped and pale forehead. Very black hair, set in a perfect, natural wave with soft, small ringlets in front. A rather high-pitched voice, softened by a studied, deliberate touch of kindly, velvet smoothness. An unnatural smile, soft, kindly, gentle and too friendly, considered fascinating and charming by all but the most discriminating ones. An unpleasant, insincere laughter, pitched on a high, oily, blurred hiccough sound, inclined to run into giggling.

Attitude toward life. Vanity grown out of all proportions. A vanity expressed in only one manner: to convince others of his superiority. Never a thought given to how he himself feels about things or values them; always—what others will think of him; and an overwhelming, burning anxiety to have them feel envy. All this never thought out or realized; just a blind, compelling instinct. This instinct has trained him to perfection in the ability to seize upon every thought and circumstance as helpful or detrimental to his main end. A lightning-like, instinctive, unreasoning ability to seize upon every possible advantage to his goal, long before his mind points out to him just where and what that advantage may be.

No philosophy of life ever thought out. No feeling of need for one. Never given to much abstract thinking. No such thing as peace with himself, since even the idea of any “self” to consider has never occurred to him. No internal strife to consider for a long time, and when it does come it is too late, since the strife and the realization of its possibility both come at the same time.

Consequently, no convictions of any kind on any subject whatever. A blind, stubborn idea that convictions are useless and unnecessary. Fooled himself long ago, before he could realize that he was fooling himself, into the belief that his superiority lay precisely in his freedom from the bounds of convictions. Only an instinctive, subconscious resentment and impatient annoyance with those he considers to be “idealists,” left in him as a reminder of his unrealized, but subconsciously felt inferiority. This drives him, in self-protection, into a bitter, vicious resentment of men “with ideas.”

His main principle: “don’t take anything seriously.” A cheap cynicism and iconoclastic fury against everything high, noble and exceptional parade under the cloak of a “sense of humor,” “practical common sense,” and “keeping your feet on the ground.” Defending as “reality” all that he wishes reality to be.

February 12, 1936

[Peter Keating has] an invisible habit of belittling, mocking and dragging down everything high. He greatly enjoys “debunking” biographies of famous men and everything that tends to prove that great men were “only human.” Loves to insist that “we’re all brothers under the skin.” Has accepted as a faith, without thought or conviction behind it, the glorification of the so-called “human element”: the equality of men, the average good fellow, kindness, patience, tolerance, good neighborly feelings, love of children, home, family, etc. (Such convictions are not dangerous to his vanity, since they belong to the inferior man.) Doesn’t really mean or believe it, but is convinced that he believes it. Abstractly, of course. His “convictions” and his actions are things quite apart and the incongruity never occurs to him or bothers him.

He is as dishonest with himself as he is with others. His great motto: “If anyone has a car, I want two cars. If anyone has two cars, I want three cars. And I want to be sure they know it.” Has selected architecture merely because he thinks it will give him a great chance at his kind of “success.” No real love or talent for the work. Would have selected street-cleaning or shoe-mending with an equal pleasure, if it promised more advancement.

Attitude toward men. A mob man at heart. Completely gregarious. Has no satisfaction or interest in himself, consequently cannot stand to be alone. Prefers and selects inferior people among whom he can shine. Talks a great deal about the “communal spirit,” but sees to it that he is always the leader of any “commune.” Always plays up to others and revels in his great popularity. Never expresses a definite opinion on any subject, even the weather. Always sits on the fence. Calls it diplomacy. Acts as if each new man he meets is his greatest friend and the most interesting person in the world. Listens with immense interest to everyone else’s troubles. Never remembers a word of it. Always ready and delighted to help others—and says so. Never forgets to mention past favors he has rendered. Loves to take credit for the achievements of those he has helped. Fools himself with believing that he is sincere in his altruism. Doesn’t realize that it is caused by the subconscious instinct that tells him this altruism will help him a great deal in his cause, his vanity, in the opinions of others. But he will never lift a finger if helping another would really cost him anything or if there is no glory in such helping. And he would not hesitate to cut [others‘] throats, even unnecessarily, if he thinks it will help him.

Loves movies and popular plays and vaudeville and, occasionally, magazines of the “Liberty” kind. Loves best-selling novels, particularly the “human interest” ones. Feels genuine respect for anything that has proved popular or has made money, no matter what he himself may have thought about it. Prefers stories about mothers, children, and dogs. Loves animals and declares them superior to men. Donates to orphan asylums and societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals. Shrugs at old classics, particularly those of the heroic type, as being old-fashioned hokum—as opposed to wholesome, “modern” humanness. Loves and enjoys everything that gives him a patronizing feeling of superiority: the weak, the helpless, the meek and sentimental. Dismisses everything high with a contemptuous accusation of “high hat.” Announces for all to hear that he would love nothing better than a home and children, particularly children, but does nothing to satisfy his desire.

His manner is soft, friendly, graceful. Extremely popular. The “soul of the party,” the “regular fellow,” the “dream lover” of many a female. Judiciously mixes seriousness and jokes. Talks in nothing but platitudes. Always has to have friends and “best pals.”

Philosophy—none.

Religion—none to speak of as far as sincerity is concerned. But a great deal of talk about the high principles of Christianity, the simple faith and the inevitable necessity of religion. Makes a show of going to church when advisable. Talks of the “Spirit” and of a “Superior Power” or “Universal Principle.” At heart—a dumb, superstitious fear and a vague admittance of something “Above.” Refuses to believe that there is “nothing after death” and dreads the whole subject.

Politics—interested only as much as it can help him. Joins whatever party is advisable at the moment. Member of every fraternity, club, lodge and order it is possible for him to join.

Ethics—none. No conception of the idea. But a great deal of talk about it in the good, accepted, middle-class manner.

Sex—highly sexed and completely “dual-personality” on the subject. On the one hand—preaches home, love, marriage, purity and respectability. Considers physical sex low and dirty. Proclaims pure, spiritual love as the perfect ideal. Cries over love stories. On the other hand—loves his physical sex and his women. Dissipates wildly but judiciously. Patronizes whorehouses. But is always discreet—very discreet.

Ambition—overwhelming, but in one line only, on the line of his vanity. Always belittles his ambition and all ambitions, but never misses a chance to mention his achievements.

He acts servile with superiors and overbearing with inferiors. Goes out of his way to humiliate those under him, with nothing to gain for himself, except a feeling of superiority.

April 21, 1936

February 22, 1937

Ellsworth Monkton Toohey

The non-creative “second-hand” man par excellence. The critic, expressing and molding the voice of public opinion; the average man condensed, representing the average man’s qualities plus the peculiar qualities which make him the natural leader of average men.

Theme-song: a vicious, ingrown vanity coupled with an insane will to power, a lust for superiority that can be expressed only through others, whom, therefore, he has to dominate; a natural inferiority complex that subconsciously leads to [the desire to] bring everything down into inferiority. A tremendous ego—without content. No reasons for his egotism—“I am I,” that’s all, without concern for what this “I” really is.

Important trait to emphasize as a social implication: this type is the one who, once in a position of power, subconsciously, but with an unerring instinct, surrounds himself with his moral and intellectual equals, works to fill other positions of power with his own kind, closing all doors he can to genuine talent and superiority, since this last would be too great a threat for him. None of it is conscious—just an innate instinct of self-preservation.

Here is the place to emphasize that genuinely superior beings are too individualistic [in social matters], in the sense that they achieve their own positions and are not concerned with the propagation and advancement of their own kind. It is only the inferior men that have collective instincts—because they need them. But since the superior men live in society, they have to organize for their own protection—a kind of class brotherhood of talent—if they are to survive at all. The only kind of “unselfishness” permissible to the great man is unselfishness to the cause of that superior form of living which he represents, and which has to be protected in the persons of other individuals like him. (Social instinct as the weapon and protection of the inferior.)

Toohey’s physical appearance: medium height, rather on the shortish side, skinny, anemic, concave-chested, spindly, slightly bow-legged, ridiculous and offensive in a bathing suit. A glaring lack of vitality—compensated, so he thinks, by his intellectual achievements. Long, narrow face, slightly receding chin, protruding upper teeth, in a sharp, circular, rodent fashion—not too good a set of teeth, nor too clean. Narrow, sharp black eyes, set close together, bright and “intellectual” between slightly puffed, heavy lids. A Hitler-like small black mustache—carefully trimmed. Luxurious hair—black, lustrous and faintly suggesting a wave—thoroughly well groomed, leaving just the faintest doubt between natural carelessness or very deliberate, retouched, marcelled picturesqueness. Not a mane, but somehow suggesting a mane—seeming too large for his light frame, making him vaguely top-heavy—more in impression than in fact. Thin, expressive hands and small feet, with a mincing, uncertain, unsteady, nervous walk.

He has a magnificent voice—a true achievement. Deep, low, well-modulated, clear, precise and expressive. Perhaps a little offensive to some people, because of its smug perfection—but to a very few people. He has made a thorough study of voice-culture, but does not like to mention it—prefers to let people think it is natural. Shrugs deprecatingly when complimented on his voice, but never misses or forgets the compliments.

Went into “intellectualism” in a big way. Two reasons: first, a subconscious revenge for his obvious physical inferiority, a means to a power his body could never give him; second (and primary), a cunning perception that only mental control over others is true control, that if he can rule them mentally he is indeed their total ruler. His vanity is not passive like that of Peter, who is concerned with other people only as mirrors for his vanity; Toohey is very much concerned with other people in the sense of an overwhelming desire to dominate them. This is the lust for power, but it is a “second-hand” power. It is motivated not by some deep conviction of his own to be imposed upon others, who would thus be secondary to him and his conviction, but by subconsciously adopting the convictions of others in order to rule them and thus acquire his own grandeur through the number of people he dominates, deriving his self-satisfaction from them. They are actually the prime factor and he a “second-hand” creature devoid of all personal significance but that given to him by others.

In contrast to Peter, Toohey does believe strongly and earnestly in ideals and convictions, but they must be the ideals he has accepted. He is intolerant, impatient and sarcastic to all intellectual opposition. He believes in “principles,” realizing subconsciously that a strict adherence to a set of principles delivers men into his hands when he is the chief proponent of these principles. He is the loud defender of the “intellect,” of “brain over brawn” or “mind over matter.” Such words as “culture,” “civilization,” “progress,” “the spiritual heritage of centuries,” “ethics,” “esthetics,” and “philosophy” are his favorites, to the point where he has become convinced that he is their living embodiment.

Now as to his convictions. [As a consequence of] his basic lust for power—a “second-hand” power not expressed in any concrete ideal of his own—his convictions are all those which are expedient to his attainment of such power. He has realized ahead of many others the tremendous power of the masses, which, for the first time, are acquiring real significance in all (even the intellectual) aspects of life. In this sense, he is the man of the century, the genius of modern democracy in its worst meaning.

The first cornerstone of his convictions is equality—his greatest passion. This includes the idea that, as two-legged human creatures, all possess certain intrinsic value by the mere fact of having been born in the shape of men, not apes. Any concrete, mental content inside the human shape does not matter. A great brain or a great talent or a magnificent character are of no importance as compared to that intrinsic value all possess as men—whatever that may be. He is never clear on what that may be and rather annoyed when the question is raised. He avoids it by running to meet it and by silencing the issue with a great deal of talk. He talks of the “human spirit,” the “spark of God in all of us,” the “man created in God’s own image,” the “best in the worst of us,” etc.

His talk is on a grand scale, staggering, magnificent, its bromides well-hidden under the latest scientific terms, the whole worked out brilliantly on the formula of saying things that sound profound until one stops to think of what exactly they mean and finds that they mean nothing. Inasmuch as beliefs are important to him only as a means to an end, and that is the extent of his belief in beliefs, he is not bothered by his inconsistencies, by the vagueness and illogic of his convictions. They are efficient and effective to secure the ends he is seeking. They work—and that is all they’re for.

Once the equality of men is established, the advantages to his type are obvious. It discredits the superior type of man whom he hates, dreads and envies. It minimizes, through a metaphysical, “humanitarian” hocus-pocus, the qualities and virtues which the superior type possesses and which he lacks. It denies superiority and subordinates it to that vague “humanness” which he can claim along with everyone else. But, mainly, it assures him of superiority—his brand of it. Deeply and subconsciously he knows that he is a second-rater and a representative of the average. That [knowledge], aided by a certain amount of brains, puts him in the category of “upper-class average”; but he is devoid of all individuality and creative power, which dooms him hopelessly to the average (in other words, he is a plain average man spiritually, but slightly above the mob mentally, in the facile sense of cunning, not wisdom). [Hence] he becomes the true representative, leader and condensation of the average. Once the [men at the top] are removed or discredited, he is the top. As the best representative of the masses, he can attain the prominence, distinction and power [which would be] impossible to him on his own personal merits. In an individualistic society, where men have to stand or fall by what they really are in themselves, where they are valued as single men and by no other standard—he is nothing. In a collective mass society, where quantity stands above quality (another unreal, “second-hand” substitution)—he is everything. Hence his profound urge toward equality and collectivism, or his “social conscience,” as he calls it.

This “social conscience” is an outstanding, dominant trait in him. He has an instinctive interest in everything concerning others. He is the born spiritual meddler, reformer, and “social worker.” Societies, clubs, lodges, organizations of any kind attract him irresistibly. His is not the cruder interest of Peter, who joins for what he can get out of it for himself. Toohey joins to take an active part, for what he can do to others. In everything he joins he soon becomes the leading voice and the influence. He is no rank-and-file member, ever; he is always on the committee or the board of directors. He is not after advancing his own career; he is after molding the lives of others, which is his career. (The monstrosity of “selfless” egotism.) One will always find him on the stationery of “Slum Clearance Leagues,” “Mass Education Leagues,” “Modern Education Leagues,” “Recreation for the Poor Leagues,” “Social Foundation Leagues,” and prize-giving “Art Leagues.”

Toohey is a “humanitarian” and a “radical.” He is a humanitarian because his great love for and eternal preoccupation with humanity gives him the standing and prestige he does not possess as a man; it fills the void [caused by a lack] of all individual creativity, the void in a man who has nothing to offer in himself, only in, through and for others. (A “second-hand” man par excellence. Only those who have nothing in themselves are too concerned with others.) He is a radical because the theory of the triumphant, totalitarian mass is still a new one in the world, particularly in its spiritual implications and sources, which he realizes full-well, but never mentions explicitly. Up to the twentieth century and Soviet Russia, the world [had offered some degree] of recognition for individual achievement, recognition of leaders and exceptions as opposed to the masses; the trend of “liberalism” and the idea of “freedom” was freedom for “a man” and the fight for the individual rights of “a man.” When humanity achieved that freedom after the Industrial Revolution, or came as near to freedom and general equality before the law as it had ever come, one thing became apparent to the deluded idealists who, in fighting for the “rights of man,” included all men, presumed all men to be equal, or at least potentially equal given equal opportunities. Whether under modern capitalism the best men always won (and undoubtedly they often did not) was not as important as the fact that capitalistic democracy showed plainly that there is a best. And that the best [among men] are opposed to the rest of humanity.

The liberals and humanitarians are now faced with a choice: either admit that there are differences among men more profound and irrefutable than those of money or aristocratic birth, and therefore fight for the rights and the freedom of the best among men, rights and freedom which the average men do not want, do not understand and cannot use or protect, and stop the damnable preoccupation with the “poor” as such, the poor who have no distinction beyond their poverty; or—deny these ideals and, keeping only the philosophical zeal for all humanity, bring mankind down to the level of the masses, deny to the few the rights which endanger the masses, benefit the masses by destroying their eternal enemy—the exceptional man, and instead of fighting for the individual rights which have hitherto been known as “human” rights, reverse the process, fight against these rights, for these rights are the enemy, not the liberation of the masses. [By “masses” AR refers here to second-handers who wish to live by exploiting better men. For evidence of her respect for honest men of average ability, see the characters of Mike Donnigan in The Fountainhead and Eddie Willers in Atlas Shrugged.]

Communism, the Soviet variety particularly, is not merely an economic theory. It does not demand economic equality and security in order to set each individual free to rise as he chooses. Communism is, above all, a spiritual theory which denies the individual, not merely as an economic power, but in every respect. It demands spiritual subordination to the mass in every way conceivable—economic, intellectual, artistic; it allows individuals to rise only as servants of the masses, only as mouthpieces for the great average. It places Ellsworth Monkton Toohey at the top of the human pyramid.

Hence, Toohey’s natural “radicalism.” In it, he is subtler, deeper and more consistent than many a modem communist. If some communists come to a spiritual collectivism somewhat reluctantly, as a necessity for achieving economic collectivism, Toohey reverses the process, much more logically. He embraces spiritual collectivism first; economic collectivism is only a means to that ultimate end.

When and if the mob is enthroned as the supreme arbiter of all life, Ellsworth Monkton Toohey will rule the earth. As a voice of the mob, to be sure; but to a “second-hand” man this does not matter. What if he is only the servant spiritually—when there is nothing in his spirit that may wish to rule, no ideals, no convictions, no creative power strictly his own? Spiritual servility is not abhorrent to a man devoid of spirituality, in the only sense in which spirituality exists—in the powerful, self-contained, self-reverent ego. In actual, material life—devoid of all spiritual content, as a collective life must be when the only source of spirt, the ego, is removed—he will be the ruler. He will have no fear of competition from his spiritual superiors, since they will be destroyed, or if any are still born they will have no chance against him, [because they] lack his power of mob appeal when the mob is supreme. And the only danger to his power—the spiritual or mental life of humanity—will be taken care of by an all-pervading propaganda for the ideals that made his rise possible, the ideals of mob supremacy, a smoke-screen to fill the emptiness of the human spirit, a spirit castrated, denied and offered its own denial to satisfy its hunger.

Such is Toohey’s secret dream and Utopia. He knows all the possible approaches to it and his convictions derive from that, have that dream as a motivation. Everything that proceeds from the individual and the exception is bad; everything that proceeds from the masses and the average is good. He takes a great interest in folklore, in anonymous legends and songs, as opposed to individual creations of artists. He proclaims the supremacy of “folk art” over any other art. He adopted the Marxist theory easily and naturally, primarily because it discredits the significance of individuals in history in favor of the economic significance of the masses; also, in subordinating the spiritual to the economic, in proclaiming the dependence of the spirit upon the material, it gives men like Toohey a great weapon against their enemy, the spirit: just take control of humanity’s economics—[which is] concrete and accessible—and you can (hope to) control humanity’s spirit.

In opposing the existing order of society, it is not the big capitalists and their money that Toohey opposes; he opposes the faint conceptions of individualism still existing in that society, and the privileged few as its material symbols. He says that he is fighting Rockefeller and Morgan; he is fighting Beethoven and Shakespeare. He says he is fighting for a comfortable home with a bathroom for every financially disinherited factory hand; he is fighting for a comfortable throne and a halo for every spiritually disinherited Toohey. Hence his great preoccupation with the poor and the lower classes. He is known as a great, unselfish crusader in unselfish causes; his crusade is thoroughly selfish in the [sense of the] perverted selfless selfishness of the “second-hander.”

It is not surprising, therefore, to find him with a reputation of “daring,” “progressiveness” and “originality.” He is all of that, in the sense that the total supremacy of the masses is a new idea in the world and he, as its apostle, may be considered daring or original. In that sense, he is the champion of everything “new,” particularly if it helps in the fight against the individualism of the old. He is a great champion of the Art Moderne. He is the defender and publicizer for Gertrude Stein in literature, the “surrealists” in painting, the cacophony of “new” music, and the factory-made standardized modern house in architecture. He knows, half-subconsciously, that all these phony fakes are easy for anyone and deny the true originality, genius and rarity of great artists.

In his chosen profession as an Art and Architecture Critic, he defends, above all, a standard. He is all for the old academic eclecticism, where it imposes rules, restraints and precedents on individual creation; he started as a rabid defender of eclecticism (“We cannot improve upon the masters of the past, accepted and recognized by whole nations and whole centuries of nations”) until he discovered a new standardization in the factory-made “moderne,” this last move in keeping with his social theories and his general reputation for radicalism. Before the spread of the “moderne,” he was opposed to modem architecture. And he has been opposed and is forever opposed to Howard Roark. Peter Keating is his true disciple and protégé, and Peter switches with Toohey from conservative eclecticism to extreme, mechanical, unoriginal modernism. (When convenient. But still continues with his “classic orders”—when convenient.) In the early stages of modern architecture, Toohey decried it and defended the old—on a typical ground: “Why force individual eccentricity and idiosyncrasy on the will and taste of the people expressed in their preference for conventional homes?” With the growth of the philosophy of mob supremacy and the emergence of modernism in set mass-forms, a modernism as stiff and frozen and unoriginal as the old traditions—he switched to it easily and naturally.

He realized, on that example, that to be the true “voice of the people” he had to become a radical opposed to the majority sentiment at present—for the sake of an ultimate, complete triumph for real majority sentiment. The mob had not yet been taught to openly and consistently worship itself as a mob; it still had vestiges of respect for individualism ground into it by centuries of aristocracy; it is the duty of Toohey to teach the mob exactly what to believe in order to inherit the earth; it is his job to awaken the mob to its own power. He can be—and it is only [an apparent] paradox—an exception and a rebel against present society, which, after all, is not yet collectivized spiritually—in order to establish conditions which will make him the true and complete “voice of society.”

Toohey studies voraciously. He has a magnificent memory for facts and statistics; he is known as a “walking encyclopedia.” This is natural—since he has no creative mind, only a repeating, aping, absorbing “second-handed” one. He has nothing new to create, but can acquire importance by absorbing the works and achievements of others. He is a sponge, not a fresh spring. His passively retentive memory has always made him a good scholar; he was a brilliant pupil in school—the kind who always knew his lessons, had the neatest copy-books, preferred his homework to athletic games (in which he would have no chance), wore glasses, often had head-colds, and his mother had to watch his diet. An intellectual child with a delicate stomach.

Since his scholastic achievements took a great deal of painstaking, meticulous work, he has always resented his quick, brilliant classmates to whom study was no effort. Hence, his great defense of hard work as the key to everything (“perspiration is inspiration”), the conviction that hard work can accomplish anything, that talent does not count for so much, because a hard worker can equal and even beat any of “your geniuses.” He was not so good at mathematics in school, but great at history, literature, psychology, and penmanship. He went to Sunday School, because of a religious lower-middle-class mother (“Christian Science”).

His great asset is the fact that he is by no means dull. He has nothing new to offer, but he is perfect at the old and he can do the conventional better than anyone else—the secret and key to his success. He sells pills of bromides, but he can devise brand new coatings for them—the sure way to popular acclaim. He is genuinely witty—[usually] in a sharp, insidiously sarcastic way. His sarcasm, for which he is famous, is an art: it is subtle, elaborately polite, personal, “deadly” according to those in his frame of mind. Elaborate politeness is another of his specialties. His manners are impeccable. He speaks with a faint touch of the broad “a”—just faint enough to be considered charming and distinguished. “Distinguished” is his favorite adjective to apply to himself.

Sarcasm is his pet weapon—as natural to him as smell to the skunk—as a method of offense and defense. He is magnificently, maliciously catty. He does not fight his opponents by straight argument or logical refutation—he disqualifies them from the game, dismisses them by mockery. Perhaps he has no refutation to offer, but that does not matter for his purpose. He communicates to his audience the feeling of his superiority over his opponents, the impression that he does not answer them because they are not even worth answering. With an intelligent audience this does not work so well, but then he is not after an intelligent audience. With the rest—the vast majority, the pseudo-intellectuals particularly—the trick works like magic. He convinces them and wins them to his point of view by a snappy crack and a superior shrug at the right time.

Individualism, of course, and everything connected with it, is the great butt of his cracks. Everything heroic is dismissed with a: “My dear fellow, this is utter, childish rot. Very pretty, but one must grow up, you know.” He goes in a big way for the “scientific spirit” and uses all the latest scientific terms, all the phony, complicated “isms,” coining a few of his own, when necessary. His pet convenience is vague generalizations, the terms devoid of all concrete reality, the kind that take volumes to interpret and that can be used nicely to muddle up an issue, while giving the appearance of great scientific precision. The inferiority complex thus created in the audience, which is not so glibly familiar with the terms, is also a great help in making converts and winning his point.

“Above all, let us be modern” is his pet slogan—with “modernity” given his own interpretation. With the help of his erudition, it is easy to point out that the whole process of history has been leading in his direction, has been but a prelude to the “modern” ideas which he represents and which are, as he can prove, the goal, culmination and apotheosis of all human progress. There is also the little trick of astounding and confusing his opponents with his stunts of memory: he can quote, without a second’s hesitation, the date of any battle in ancient Greece, of the birth and death of any pharaoh of Egypt or any parliamentary leader of England, along with the date, number of workers and financial damage in dollars and cents of any strike. If his opponent doesn’t know as much—who, ladies and gentlemen of the audience, is obviously the more educated man and obviously in the right?

Naturally, his sympathies are always to the Left. But he does not assume the pose or appearance of a soap-box proletarian. He is friendly to them, but faintly superior. After all, as he likes to refer to himself, he is “a gentleman and a scholar.” He may defend the lower classes, but his consuming vanity will never let him appear as one of them in a society where they are still recognized as the lower classes. As long as things are as they are, he will preserve all the outward symbols of superiority as it is commonly understood around him, and, above all, he will be accepted as a superior in his social intercourse. Hence, his immaculate appearance, his exquisite grooming, not too foppish, only slightly so, not too startling, only quietly, conservatively elegant. He likes to think of his “conservative good taste,” where personal appearance is concerned. The same applies to his voice and to his style of writing—smooth, elegant, well-rounded, just spiced with his exquisite sarcasm.

His manner with people is quiet, so polite, very faintly effeminate—and “brilliant.” He is a “brilliant” conversationalist and storyteller. He is an addition to any party and a favorite with hostesses, particularly intellectual ones. He is never offensive; if he wishes to insult someone with his sarcasm—it is done so exquisitely that the insulted one seems offensive. His manner is friendly in a cool, impersonal, slightly patronizing way. He is never emotional and has never lost his perfect poise. If, sometimes, he chooses to make his voice tremble with intense feeling, it is done artistically, like a gentleman, and one gets the impression of great emotion hidden under a perfect self-control, which creates in his listeners admiration and a conviction of his utter sincerity. His pose is eternal and immutable; it is the same in a drawing room, on a lecture platform, in a bathroom or during sexual intercourse : cool, self-possessed, faintly patronizing.

He loves to address an audience—the larger, the better—and never misses a chance to do so. Is perfectly at home on the speaker’s platform. He loves and devours publicity—the “dignified” kind, but does not talk about this. (“My dear, I never read my clippings—haven’t the faintest idea what they say about me.” He knows every word of every clipping by heart.)

He has an attractive, colorful style, with a great deal of merit in form, if not in content, which makes him easy to read or to hear. Wins great popular success through this. He is adept at coining phrases, epigrams and “mots justes”; he loves to know that he is quoted.

When talking beautifully of the proletariat, he never visualizes himself as one of them. He is the superior benefactor, the teacher and leader, the benevolent father of his flock. [He views himself as] “a shepherd,” along with the conception of others as sheep. Spiritually, he is very much the condensation of the worst features of a pedagogue. He started life as a teacher; he is now a college professor of esthetics, with art and architecture as specialty. The experience of molding the lives and destinies of young pupils gave the impetus to his absorbing desire to mold the lives and destinies of all men. On the side, as a pet hobby, he is a vocational advisor. He thinks of himself and demands to be considered as the final authority on every subject. He is pettily impatient and intolerant of opposition, of any refusal to take his word as the final proof.

Extremely fastidious in his clothes and his living room, although his bedroom and study are inclined to be somewhat dusty and sloppy. His daily routine is timed to the second and unbroken. He cannot be interrupted during his writing, even if it be a long distance phone call from his dying mother. His meals are eaten on time and his calories scientifically counted, his food rations being weighed on apothecaries’ scales. His daily cold shower is timed with a stop watch. The room where he receives visitors is exquisitely simple and modern, its few ornaments consisting of rare and precious art objects and old editions. He is a connoisseur of wines and never orders less than the best, which he cannot afford often. (“What’s not good enough for Morgan is not good enough for me.”) He proclaims the supremacy and “rhythm” of toil, but his hardest physical exertion is to brush his teeth. (“After all, mental labor is the hardest labor.”)

The “friend of humanity” has no friends. A great many admirers and fans, particularly women-fans who write him passionate letters after every lecture or radio-broadcast. But no real “pals.” His cold pose forbids it. He does not feel any lack from it. Loving all humanity as he does, he has never loved a single human being. When approached for help or money, he refuses, but makes the person who asked feel guilty and cruel at having imposed on his better feelings. “My dear, I am refusing for your own good. Believe me, it is harder for me than it is for you. But it is against my principles. It will destroy your feeling of self-reliance.” Intent on saving mankind, he has never helped a man. He does not do favors. When he stuffs choice positions with his protégés, it is done for his own sake and for the sake of his principles, never for the protégé. He prides himself on the epi thets : “impartial,” “fair,” “objective” and “incorruptible.”

The question of sex is a touchy one to him. Here, as in everything else, he craves superiority. He is no great power as a male and he is very conscious that his sexual organs are rather inadequate. He makes up for it by the most exquisite and varied perversions. (“My dear, we must be modern.”) Has a great collection of the most unusual aphrodisiacs (all the “happy boxes” and then some). Loves to think of himself as a great lover and as irresistible to women. (“For the life of me, I don’t see what attracts women to my unprepossessing self, God knows I’m no Apollo, and you’d never think that intellectual appeal counts in sex, would you?”) He has had mistresses—more than one at a time—but never a love affair. Visits whorehouses when necessary. Is very fastidious about his mistresses—they must be, above all, beautiful and feminine. Doesn’t go for intellectual women. His mistresses are seldom the pick of the chorus, but a good second best. He will not be seen with an unattractive woman. Makes a point of this. (He will have nothing but the best.)

Is naturally liberal in his sexual views, contending that the family is a bourgeois institution, but does not go for the subject of sex much. Too physical and consequently unimportant. After all, he is concerned with the purely intellectual aspects of life.

Although raised with religion and having undergone a mild attack of religious hysteria in his adolescence, he is now an agnostic, rather prone to frown on religion. After all, religion is a sort of individual refuge and as such it is dangerous. His insatiable lust for spiritual power would rather focus all emotion on the earthly collective, because the earthly collective—“c‘est moi.”

He is not a member of the Communist Party, because that Party is still considered lower class. (“Besides, I am a man of science, not a politician.”) He is not an open supporter of Soviet Russia. (“After all, I am an impartial observer.”) But his sympathies are with both—fervently, but always “objectively.”

He is a man so completely poisoned spiritually, that his puny physical appearance seems to be a walking testimonial to the spiritual pus filling his blood vessels.

1937

[After writing her character description of Toohey, AR attended two lectures by a prominent British socialist, Harold Laski (1893-1950). During an interview in 1961, she recalled:

Laski was the soul of Ellsworth Toohey in the flesh. After seeing Laski, I just had to remember how he lectured—his mannerisms, the pseudo-intellectual snideness, the whole manner of speaking on important subjects with inappropriate sarcasm as his only weapon, acting as if he were a charming scholar in a drawing room, but you could sense the bared teeth behind the smile, you could feel something evil—and I would know how Toohey would act in any circumstance; it gave me the complete sense of life of that type. Toohey is larger scale than Laski, who was a cheap little snide socialist, but Laski projected Toohey’s essential characteristics . Even his appearance was ideal. I drew a sketch during the lecture, with the narrow cadaverous face and glasses and big ears, and I gave it all to Toohey.

The following notes are from the second of the Laski lectures.]

Extremely well-dressed women (not too young, typically around forty and over) with a vapid and aggressive look—hatred of [the intellect] and insistently trying to acquire it. Only one I saw to be fairly attractive. A good type: a woman nearing fifty, medium height, slender, very well groomed; long, narrow face, mainly nose, pleasantly smiling, upturned lips (smiling too easily, with such a set, rehearsed, partly patronizing pleasantness), no eyes—all you see is the yellow-white lids and you have the uncomfortable feeling that the face has no focus and no opening, a face with no person behind it; a beige coat of smooth brown fur, a Russian-looking, fancy hat of the same cloth and fur; and—most prominent, the first thing you notice—glasses with a heavy black ribbon hanging ostentatiously from the corner of her eye.

Also a great many shabby, old-maid-librarian types of middle-aged women, most unbecomingly dressed; the first thing jumping off from them, hitting you in the face, is the fact that you simply cannot imagine a man [making love to] them.

Also—aggressive house-wife types, with old-fashioned hats and dirty-looking complexions.

Also—a great many homely young girls, poorly dressed, of all degrees of homeliness, amazing variations of it, all of them with flat shoes and very unkempt, uncombed hair. A sad look of defensive aggressiveness, unconvincing assurance, and that awful feeling of “we’re miscarriages physically, but we’re making up for it intellectually.”

Most of the audience are women. Few men comparatively and these better looking than the women, more prosperous, less freaky. Most of the men seem a little sheepish, quite a few seeming like good Babbitts dragged here by their wives—just as they are dragged to the play of their wives’ choice.

Single most unpleasant characterization of this audience—the mouths. There is more meekness and insincerity in the mouth than in any other part of the face. Is that the most expressive and most betraying organ?

Above all impressions—the horrible [spectacle] of intellectual vulgarity. A crowd of this same mental caliber going to a dance hall or saloon is much more attractive, honest and bearable than this phony search for intel lectuality. A pretense of brains should not be allowed to anyone except those who have brains. What horrible, horrible things can be done with the mind, through, with and for half-brains! How much better no brain is than half a brain!

A woman with horrible piano legs sitting right in the front row on the stage, facing the audience, with a short skirt, her legs crossed and lisle stockings ! Well-dressed and flaunting the stockings; also diamonds on her fingers quite [prominently] displayed.

It’s the aggressive, imperious expressions that are awful—on these people who are supposed to stand for equality, freedom, kindness, justice, etc. Isn’t that significant? Think of the implications, beyond the obvious ones.

Here comes Toohey [i.e., Laski]:

He starts with explanations and “advice.” The audience laughs before any point is made.

“The great world”—“The grim reality”—always using important words sarcastically.

“A sovereign state is an anachronism”—“When the pound sterling falls, the heart of the secretary of the U.S. Treasury beats faster.”

Wears glasses. Long neck, sloping shoulders, too narrow chin, wide temples, large ears.

“The white man’s burden has been borne by the black.”

“It would be possible to show—if it weren’t impolite to show ...”

The audience laughs every time he says “simple-minded.”

He looks terribly at ease, a little weary, a little bored—not offensively so, just gracefully so. (He leans limply sidewise against the stand.)

Simplicity and clarity of sentences—yet a few “exquisite” words.

“A stick to beat Mr. Chambers with—and let me say the bigger the stick the more honorable the purpose—” (Note the “witty” asides.)

“The limits of euphemism are infinite.”

“The poor, the lame, the halt ...”

“The government—whose discomfort at public discussion I can wholly understand—”

(The gals on the stage are yawning—the one with the lisle stockings, too.)

“It’s pure accident, it just happened that way”—[in regard to] something he quite definitely means was not an accident.

“I made up my mind twenty-five years ago to be a rank-and-file [member] of the Labour Party.”

March 15, 1937

An agency for writers has on its office wall a huge photograph of a mob (with mob faces) and the big letters: “Don’t forget whom you’re writing for.”(! )

March 27, 1937

A typical instance of the rising power of the masses—the open arrogance of inferiors who no longer try to imitate their superiors, but boldly flaunt their inferiority, their [mediocrity], their “popular appeal.” A state of affairs where quality is no longer of any importance, and where it is coming to be shunned, avoided, even despised. The paradox of the dregs of humanity actually feeling contempt for their betters, because they are better. Quantity alone considered important—quality no longer even considered. The masses triumphant.

Example of this: the head of a “charm school,” a contemptible racket, having been attacked by a “high brow” magazine, states haughtily: “Why should I worry? In all the years they’ve been in existence, they have only a hundred thousand circulation. I have a million customers in a year!”

March 28, 1937

More about Toohey.

He is vociferously rational while doing his best to deny reason. Basically, he is all for the heart above the mind, emotion above thought. [Superficially], he is strictly scientific, rational, materialistic, with only a few lapses into talk about the “soul.” His trick is the same as that of Christian Science. He realizes subconsciously that reason is the enemy of all “heart hokum” and of all spiritual rackets. Consequently, he destroys it by appearing to support it. He defends reason loudly, but [substitutes] for reason his own preposterous brand of pseudo-science. He betrays himself occasionally by his talk about the “pure in heart,” the “universal spirit” and other such mystic-Christian-communistic catch-words.

5

RCHITECTURAL RESEARCH

Before Ayn Rand could work out the plot of The Fountainhead and begin writing, she needed to know more about the profession of architecture. She asked the New York Public Library to recommend a list of books for her research. She read most of them in 1937, making extensive notes in her journal.

More than half of her notes are presented in this chapter. I have included nearly all of the notes in which she comments on her reading, or relates the material to The Fountainhead.

I have omitted many quotes that she copied with little or no comment. I have also omitted passages in which she simply paraphrased factual material, without evaluation. For instance, AR made lengthy notes on Skyscrapers and the Men Who Build Them by W. A. Starrett concerning such topics as: the methods and problems of constructing large buildings; the division of responsibility among architects, engineers, and contractors; the time required to design, contract, and build skyscrapers; the financing of large buildings and the types of building contracts; the typical problems that arise with contractors and labor unions. Also omitted here are some notes on the training of architects, taken from The ABC of Architecture by Matlock Price, and notes on building codes and zoning laws in New York.

AR found aspects of The Fountainhead’s theme and characters everywhere in the actual profession of architecture. Ellsworth Toohey’s manner of combining architectural criticism with collectivist propaganda was taken in part from the writings of Lewis Mumford and Bruno Tout. She identified the second-handedness of Peter Keating in the work and writings of architect Thomas Hastings. As to deeper issues, she even recognized the central importance of the concept “unit” while considering the planned design of cities versus individual buildings. These notes are a record of AR’s unique philosophic perspective on architecture.

March 13, 1936

[AR made the following notes on two great innovators in modern architecture: Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Louis Sullivan (1856- 1924) is widely regarded as the father of modern architecture and particularly of the skyscraper. He seems to have served as the concrete inspiration for the character of Henry Cameron. Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959) is famous for his strikingly original designs, done in a style he referred to as “organic architecture.” In his basic architectural principles and in his fight for modern architecture against tradition, Wright served as a model for Howard Roark.]

Louis Sullivan

Fight against eclecticism and classicism for an original, creative style.

Ousted by inability to conform to the prevailing mode, the majority.

Started as draftsman. Then—partner. Then—independent.

Incident of church “corrected” by cheap architect. Neglect of civilities. Lack of commissions. Smaller firms appreciated him more than large ones.

Lack of social ability to get jobs. Arrogance with customers. Refusal to comply with their tastes.

Frank Lloyd Wright

[AR made the following notes on Wright’s autobiography.]

Apprenticeship in architects’ offices. Originality and insubordination.

Resented by his fellow-beginners. Resentment against his originality, independence, lack of “social” qualities, and boss’ favor, as well as obvious talent. Slander, ridicule, interference with work. Attempts to get him out.

Incident with [Daniel H.] Burnham. Attempt to bribe [Wright] into submission to prevailing styles and commercial success—on the very basis of the originality of his talent.

Opening his own office—big wish.

“American Institute of Architects,” The A.I.A. (Check up on this and on all architectural associations and publications.)

Compromise on a house for money’s sake. Subsequent shame at hearing the house praised.

First building praised, admired—and ridiculed. Requests for more houses like the “compromise” and his attempts to talk clients out of it.

Office taken with another architect—but not as partners.

Incident with Cecil [Corwin]—who quit because of envy for Wright’s superior talent.

Speeches at clubs. Editorial comments. Antagonism of professionals.

Ridicule—and yet notice and inept copying, distorting of his ideas.

Gradual growth and development of his own individual style.

His principles in house building: simplicity, elimination of unnecessary details and trimmings; real fireplaces, flat roofs, abundance of windows, light, spaciousness. Elimination of different materials in favor of one. Flat, parallel planes. Straight, geometrical lines. “Organic” architecture. Antagonism to and ridicule of these houses. Calling them “heresy.” Misunderstanding and confusion of his work with established eclectic styles.

Interior—spaciousness. Eliminating unnecessary walls and doors—“boxes within boxes.”

“Plasticity”—building as a harmonious whole.

Engineers could not help with this structural continuity. Emphasis on the nature and individual qualities of building materials. New materials: steel, glass, concrete.

Reactions of public to these new buildings: Bankers refused to finance them. Mill men refused to work for them. Contractors misunderstood the plans. Some of them went broke. The worst type of contractor appeared on the scene. Interior decorators refused to work for owners—because architect had to okay everything.

Refused steadily to enter a competition. [He held that] the world has gained no building worth having by a competition because:

1. The jury is necessarily a hand-picked average. Some “constituency” must agree upon the “jury.”

2. Therefore the first thing this average jury does is go through all the designs and throw out the best ones and the worst ones. This is necessary in order that the average may average upon something average.

3. Therefore any architectural competition will be an average upon an average in behalf of the average.

4. The net result is a building that is well behind the times before it is built.

Every architect entering a competition does so to win a prize. So he aims at what he conceives to be the common prejudices and predilections of the “jury.” Invariably, the man who does this most accurately wins the competition.

Committee decisions, too, are seldom above mediocre unless the committee is “run” by some strong individual.

One such individual gave the commission for the Unity Temple to Wright.

[Wright:] “Why not, then, build a temple, not to God in that way—more sentimental than sense—but build a temple to man, appropriate to his uses as a meeting place, in which to study man himself for his God’s sake?”

All artistic creation has a philosophy. The first condition of creation.

Hard work on coordinating minor features with the whole. (This coordination of details to the whole—isn’t that the same as plot construction in accordance with your theme?)

Interiors expressed in exteriors—“the living motif of the architecture.”

Hardest of an architect’s trials: to show his work, first time, to anyone not entirely competent, perhaps unsympathetic....

At this moment the creative architect is distinctly at a disadvantage as compared with his obsequious brother of the “styles.” His brother can show his pattern-book of “styles,” speak glibly of St. Marks at Venice and of Capella Palatine, impress the no less craven clients by a brave show of erudite authorities—abash them.

But the architect with the ideal of an organic architecture at stake can talk only principle and sense. His only appeal must be made to the independent thought and judgment of his client. The client, too, must know how to think from generals to particulars. How rare it is to go into court where that quality of mind is on the bench! This architect has learned to dread personal idiosyncrasy—offered him three times out of five as substitute for such intelligence.

Fight to persuade the committee. One dumbbell with stupid criticisms, objections, and doubts is always present and dissenting.

Contractors bid after the plans are approved. Most of them refuse—because it is too new, too much of a risk. Those that do bid charge twice too much. No one really wants it. A contractor is needed to “rescue ideas, to participate in creation.”

Congratulations after the Temple opened.

[Wright] does not believe in ancient traditional church building—because traditional religion itself is dead. (This is important for architecture as a reflection of the architect’s philosophy.)

He gets a commission because the clients saw in his houses “the countenances of principle.”

Lack of general response to his work after a period of intensive labor, day and night.

Architect calls in sculptors and artists. Architect—the master of them all. He sometimes slept “on a pile of shavings” right at the construction works.

A female model posing for sculptors right in a shanty on the building site.

Unions interfering and stopping construction on frequent occasions, on silly pretexts.

Cheap additions, such as a glowing electric sign, that ruin the architect’s idea. [...]

[Wright:] “Equivocal conduct hurts ten times more those who practice it than those it is practiced upon.”

The “eternal triangle”—architect, owner, contractor. Owner often takes contractor’s side against the architect.

Owner decides to build and make changes without consulting architect.

Usually it is necessary to defeat the contractor’s advice to the client.

He had no real organization. “My office is me.”

“I don’t know why houses have so much grief concealed in them, if they try to be anything at all and try to live as themselves. But they do. Like people in this I suppose.”

“The greater the idea, the greater the banker animosity.”

Owner choosing contractor and insisting on him.

The architect has to defend the construction of his building continually.

“Where creative effort is involved there are no trivial circumstances. The most trivial of them may ruin the whole issue. Eternal vigilance is the only condition of creation in architecture.”

Sullivan—ruined by provincial prejudice against his personal habits. “A genius? That term damned him as it was intended to.”

The rarest and most fortunate occurrence in any architect’s life: opportunity, ideal site, and a man who understands.

Dangers of construction: building settling because of too great a weight.

Foreign exhibit of photographs, drawings, models. Lectures. Dinners given in architect’s honor.

Remark about the worthlessness of courthouse in Milwaukee. Storm in the press. Furious enmity. Even attempts at arrest on trumped-up charge. But big lecture and enthusiastic audience nevertheless.

Speaks at Architect’s dinner in New York. Alone and against the majority of speakers. Obvious resentment of others.

[Wright] gets his houses accepted by convincing the client that he (the architect) is right, by explaining the truth clearly.

Other architects try to make Wright out as “difficult,” because he does not “stay in line with them,” even though he has had no troubles with his clients. Work came to him, instead of his going out after work. He “stayed in line” with his principles, not with salesmanship.

“Eclectics haven’t much artist-conscience and what little they have is guilty.”

His ideals: The importance of interior space expressed in the exterior, “inside” and “outside” as one. The use of glass to this end. Open buildings as contrast to the “caves” of ancient architecture. “Freedom” substituted for “fear.” Steel construction and “plasticity” unknown to ancient architecture. A variety of new materials—each to determine the style of the building it is used on. “Organic” ornament to express the meaning of the whole, not merely for looks and trimming effects.

No more buildings of one material to imitate another (such as: steel made to look like masonry, etc.).

Buildings, just as airplanes, steamships and automobiles, should look like what they are, be what they are.

February 23, 1937

Lewis Mumford, Sticks and Stones.

Rather strained attempts to connect architecture with sociology, particularly in explaining the prevalence of certain styles at certain times by economic conditions, à la Marx. (The classic style in America because of its “imperial” atmosphere is in keeping with the “imperial” mood of the rising capitalists.) Good for Toohey.

February 27, 1937

Arthur Woltersdorf, Living Architecture.

The smugness, stodginess, dull commonplaceness of officially recognized architectural authorities, as exemplified in most essays of this book. The only exception—the only architect with something definite and fresh to say—is a pupil of Frank Lloyd Wright and not a member of the American Institute of Architects, as are most of the others. Characteristic of officialdom when it tries to “go modern”: staleness, a reluctant repetition of the truths proclaimed by the real modem [architects], which are too obvious to be disclaimed and are therefore embraced half-heartedly, mechanically, without conviction, consistency or fire, evidencing an amazing ability to make even a new truth sound like a bromide; at the same time, obviously no desire to accept this modernism as a whole, a struggling and pulling to compromise, to incorporate the old traditions with the new or to explain the old lamely with new formulas borrowed from modernism. A magnificent display of reluctance to say anything positive, important, fundamental or vigorous. A great deal of talk about meaningless details, a re-chewing of trivialities, with all great fundamental principles ignored, with no real faith to proclaim, only a great show of cheap erudition and pseudo-importance in detailed knowledge of many nothings.

A great emphasis on “public spirit,” on duty to the community, on being only “servants and expressors of national spirit, general spirit, mood of the people, trend of the times,” etc.

Typical quotation: “The problem is to know the past and still be free to speak in a language that will hold the man in the street, so that he will think and talk about architecture as his wife does about her favorite movie star.”

Incidental question: a librarian writing about library building insists that libraries must be made to look as accessible to the public as possible—to “bring the library nearer to the people.” “Spacious and inviting entrances are placed at grade level, close to the public thoroughfare, with as few steps as possible between the pedestrian and the building.” This may be quite sound in relation to library architecture, but the question it raises, in a more general sense, is this: is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading? Hasn’t that something to do with the attitude behind general education for those better left illiterate?

The advocates of “housing projects” rave about a hideous example of a huge block of buildings all alike, with a series of windows like those in a jail, where your feeling of an individually owned house (“my home is my castle”) is reduced to owning three dots of windows out of a myriad of identical bee-hive cells. (This is to be advocated by Toohey—just right for him.)

Another typical quotation—regarding the expression of “true American” architecture:

In experience and expression each individual will contribute some factor common to all. The sum total of these common experiences and modes of expression is the common denominator, the factor which dominates the race or the community; which distinguishes it and individualizes it. The development and enrichment of this factor is not imitation but worthy progression. [...]

Climate, Geography, Race, Nationalism must impress and inspire the architect in this desired, if not at once forthcoming, expression. The architect cannot stand alone by himself ignoring the workings of these four great influencing factors, stand alone and endeavor merely to express himself, and achieve an art which shall be so generally and widely expressive of fundamentals as to last and become a permanent influence, as permanent and as lasting in effect as the social organism of which he is part. If he is apart from, rather than a part of, the social order neither the artist nor his words will persist.

(Great for Toohey!)

Isn’t the exact opposite true of Frank Lloyd Wright? Doesn’t the genius and the new always come as opposite to the “spirit of the community” and have to fight like hell against it? I grant that the genius will not be known and will not influence the general culture unless he is fairly widely recognized. Isn’t it then a question of forcing that recognition on the community (through the recognition of a few leaders), rather than a question of the genius “expressing” his community—whatever that is? If a genius passes unnoticed, the loss is humanity‘s, more than his. There must have been many great innovators that never influenced culture because they were not recognized in time. So much the worse for culture. Culture is not the supreme arbiter, always right by the mere fact that it took a certain turn and not another. It is largely chance, the result of the eternal fight between man and masses. And if we judge men in their own time and reality, which is all that counts to men, let them be judged by their intrinsic value, not by their relation to a vague accident called “culture.” A work of art is great by what it is, not by how many cheap imitations it has created in its assimilation into a “cultural” movement. (“The vermin of the cultured that feasts on the sweat of every hero”—Friedrich Nietzsche.)

Probably sensing something of the above, [Woltersdorf] says a little later:

Now the artist, especially the architect, not only should reflect the tendencies and right movements of the age (who’s to determine the “right movements?” AR)—he should direct them. He should even inaugurate them. He sometimes does; but his work is ineffectual until the society which he is trying to interpret to itself rises to a plane of right consciousness and recognizes itself and its desires in the ideal which the artist is seeking to advance.

(More for Toohey.)

When will this sort of pap stop? What precisely does society recognize and what are its desires—in the sentence above? This kind of vague metaphysical hooey is at the bottom of all “social-consciousness” theorizing. Why assign profundity and ideals where there are none? Why not say honestly that an architect must lead and make the society “rise to a plane of right consciousness,” without flattering the mob monster by making it, in some vapid, non-descript way, the inspiration and master of its leader?

This book is a good example of what happens to the ideas of geniuses when “adopted” by lesser [men], of how dead, devitalized, dull, common and flat a great idea can become in average, official, “communal” hands.

Darcy Braddell, How to Look at Buildings.

Somewhat similar psychological type to the preceding book, in the sense of a desperate struggling for the old along with reluctant concessions to the new. But a type of mentality and attitude that is less vicious and pompous than the preceding. A mild, esthetic mind trying, at least, to be fair. Not fighting vigorously against modernism and giving it its due, when unavoidable. The [concessions to modernism are] done with obvious reluctance and in terms of the old, applying old standards and appearing to justify it on the basis of the old, while actually trying to justify the old by the principles of the new. Frequent recurrence of such statements as: “Even the modernists can’t escape well-established fundamentals of architecture, which they have to share with the classics,” etc. No viewpoint at all. A thoroughly polite and Milquetoastish sitting on the fence. Plus a yes-man complex, prone to admire indiscriminately every established authority. (Such as the author’s silly admiration for [Christopher] Wren’s towers, and his weak excuses for their ugliness, his even going so far as to call them “original architecture.”)

Not the type to violently oppose a new movement, but certainly not one to encourage or approve it, and certainly not until it is well established; then, perhaps, a little approval, grudgingly, without enthusiasm, in a dull, devitalized manner, strictly formalistic and superficial, not recognizing all the fundamental principles, but carping on details, just as one does about the old eclectic architecture, making a new sort of super-eclecticism, a mixture of eclecticism and modernity.

This is not Toohey’s type, but a good source for Toohey, a good type for the minor, work-a-day “art critic,” a mass of which makes a good background for Toohey and leaves the field open to him.

Typical quotation:

One thing is quite certain, nobody is ever going to make a simpler (in the true meaning of the word) column cap and base than are already provided by the Classic Orders! Yet it is equally certain that their use is being discarded more and more every day because they are not modern. What, then, is going to take their place? The “flight from the orders” argues a flight from a culture we have all been brought up to revere. For the orders are not a worn-out decorative motif, but part of the language of architecture. They represent ordered expressions of thought.

Also typical is his assertion that modern architecture is merely “dress-making,” only dressing a structural skeleton, but having nothing to do with real structure. This is how much he understands about modern architecture—which, above all, is structural, as compared to the “dress-making” of Renaissance and subsequent architecture. [...]

Characteristic of this type is a total lack of basic principle or conviction. Vagueness. A great many contradictions. Details and petty measurements for criticism, instead of a complete, unified system of thought.

March 2, 1937

C. H. Whitaker, Rameses to Rockefeller.

In reference to Louis Sullivan: when the Journal of the American Institute of Architects published Sullivan’s Autobiography of an Idea, many people demanded that the Board of Directors stop its publication. The members of the Board refused “even though some of them were a little fearful.” (This was in 1924.)

About Sullivan:

Your country has passed you by. That was what had happened, and I knew, as you read, what the passing by had meant and how you had been hurt. It was plain then that you had been crucified and lacerated, because you challenged the humbug of the art you loved. In every word that you read, I could feel the weight of the tragedy. But, like the voice of the captain rising above the wreckage, I could also feel the exaltation within you that no tragedy could crush. You had seen! You had beheld! You had known the rightness that has forever belonged to craftsmen. You had heard and accepted the everlasting challenge! Ah, that was a wonderful evening, Louis, and I never told you how I felt about it. I guessed that you guessed that I knew. You must have known.

March 12, 1937

Same book.

Real pearls of wisdom for Toohey:

It is so easy to give credit for the Parthenon to the men whose names have come down to us by the historical method—Pericles, Callicrates, Ictinus, and Phidias, whom Plato called “a wise stone-cutter”—and so easy to forget, by the same very defective historical method, the long procession of building craftsmen who, year by year, played with their changing ideas of form and proportion as succeeding variations passed the ultimate test by which like and dislike were determined.

Had it not been for this great unsung host of stone-carvers and stone hewers, there could have been no Parthenon. It did not spring from any single mind. It was not born of any single concept. Rather was it the fruit of a slowly ripening experience over a century of trial and error. Year after year the builders studied the result of their labor, looked at it, lived with it, and noted what pleased them and what did not....

Thus the historical method of giving credit for a building to some particular person seems ungenerous. No building ever had a single author. One cannot point to a single feature of building, anywhere, and say that it first appeared in this building, or that. The whole historical method, in so far as it applies to credit and authorship, rests only on the concept of society as a struggle for individual glory and reward. It completely denies ... the endless procession of workers and thinkers, each making his humble contribution.

Could anything be sweeter and clearer?

March 28, 1937

Same book.

As a slogan for Toohey’s idea of architecture:

As a beginning—for the builders who shall at last set to work for a society that is resolved to build a civilization—what could be a better mark to aim at than for everyone a fine and spacious room, sun-lighted or sun-shaded, as one might choose!

Fine degree of selective freedom!

This is the best book for all the lying, evasions, and sophistries of Marxism as applied to architecture. Toohey’s exact psychology at work. Always the attempt to give credit to the masses. In Greek architecture—by pulling facts in by the ears, as in the quotation above [i.e., the March 12 entry]. In Gothic—great praise, because it is the anonymous architecture of collective workers. Blaming all the faults of the post-Renaissance architecture on the rise of the individual architect. Phony examples of exploitation as expressed in buildings, such as this explanation of the Parthenon columns: “[T]he temple was meant to advertise certain ideas that would inspire respect and make people pray and go to war without too much murmuring....”

A dishonest, disgraceful, stinking book.

Claude Bragdon, Architecture and Democracy.

An idiotic, unimportant book. The only thing of interest is the author’s combination of communistic leanings and great talk about the “Long Denied” with a silly mysticism that denies reason completely and puts the “heart” above the “brain.” Typical process of subconscious adjustment to purpose.

Use this. Show the process, particularly obvious in the Catholic Church and in Communism, through which all convictions, even on points [that appear to be] far from the main issue, are subconsciously, in individuals, and deliberately, in ideologies, constructed in such a way as to support the main issue somewhere, in its consequences or in its hidden roots. The “style” of ideologies.

A good example of sheer drivel, of putting one’s point across where it does not belong, is Bragdon’s interpretation of Sullivan’s Prudential building:

One feels that here democracy has at last found utterance in beauty; the American spirit speaks, the spirit of the Long Denied. This huge, rectangular bulk is uncompromisingly practical and utilitarian; these rows on rows of windows, regularly spaced and all of the same size, suggest the equality and monotony of obscure, laborious lives; the upspringing shafts of the vertical piers stand for their hopes and aspirations, and the unobtrusive delicate ornament which covers the whole with a garment of fresh beauty is like the very texture of their dreams.

This is the way Toohey criticizes buildings.

A sample of collectivist-mystic balderdash: “Now materialism is the very negation of democracy, which is a government by demos, the over-soul....”

Glorification of the masses as against genius:

But in every field of aesthetic endeavor appears here and there a man or a woman with unclouded vision, who is able to see in the flounderings of untrained amateurs the stirrings of demos from its age-long sleep. These, often forsaking paths more profitable, lend their skilled assistance, not seeking to impose the ancient outworn forms upon the Newness, but by a transfusion of consciousness permitting it to create forms of its own....

His (the architect’s) problem, in other words, is not to interpret democracy in terms of existing idioms, be they classic or romantic, but to experience democracy in his heart and let it create and determine its new forms through him. It is not for him to impose, it is for him to be imposed upon.

If he is at a loss to know where to go and what to do in order to be played upon by these great forces let him direct his attention to the army and the army camps. Here the spirit of democracy is already incarnate. (!!!)

A great truth, not at all in the way the author intended!

June 4, 1937

Alfred C. Bossom, Building to the Skies.

The author praises the pseudo-classic architects of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. He shows his eclecticism, praising the “modern” skyscraper, [while he is] devoid of true architectural convictions, of all inner fire or integrity—“anything goes with the fashion of the moment.” In the list of great American architects of the early skyscrapers—not a word about Sullivan. (Nor about Frank Lloyd Wright.) Yet the author exhibits a plate of a junky building that got first prize in 1921. Typical instance of accommodating mediocrity.

He praises women’s interest in the architecture of the home. (That’s the reason for the monstrosities we have!) Some architects will not work for a woman client, regardless of the fee. (Good for them!)

Relatively simple regulations for American architects as compared to England. (Check on this.)

According to the author, an American architect has to be a walking bureau of business information. He has to advise the client as to what type of building to erect on a certain site or even choose the site; what the prospects of the neighborhood are, how large a building it can sustain and make it pay, etc. (He has to consult the American Telephone Company that always knows all prospects.) Every skyscraper-building office has one or two employees, technical advisers on this point. Author refused to build a bigger building than the location warranted; he felt his reputation would be hurt if he were associated with a beautiful building which turned out to be a commercial failure. (??) (Check up on this by all means. Is this the general attitude ? Where does the creative instinct come in on this?)

Investors sometimes ask an architect to select a site and tell them what to build on it.

Working practice of the author: after the site and the type of building is approved, he “settles all the fundamental problems of the new building himself,” then turns the problem over to his designers who compete for the actual design of the building. (!) (Check up on this! Is it the usual practice? Is the businessman really the boss who hogs the credit, while the creative designer is only a minor employee? Is it usual or is it just a typical instance of second-hand practice? Good for John Eric Snyte.)

Even the smallest firm building skyscrapers employs 20 to 25 draftsmen. A larger firm would have 60 on its permanent staff and double this number during a rush. The head architect travels a great deal on inspections. (Spends ten nights a month in a sleeping car.) A regular [payroll] of about $15,000 a week. Permanent overhead—$250,000 a year.

Preliminary drawings for a small (million-dollar) building take about two months. Every tiny detail is included. Separate sets made for the main sections of the job. In all, there are hundreds of them.

From the moment he starts on his drawings, the architect is in constant touch with structural engineers, contractors, manufacturers and suppliers of materials, and the heads of thirty-two trades that will work under him. Free exchange of opinions and information. Cooperative spirit. Open publicity about everything on job. Drawings and specifications posted in building, so that every worker can read them. Contractors bid for the job. The winner, in turn, opens the bidding for sub-contractors.

A “cost-plus” contract allows the contractor the cost of the building plus a fixed fee for himself (this is apart from the architect’s commission); anything the contractor saves is split between himself and the owner. This helps to save in buying materials, as the contractor is most experienced and acquainted with the market.

Typical and valuable instance of mob-spirit:

[Raymond Hood is] an architect of the modem type who preaches and practices cooperation. He has no use for the architect who “shuts himself up in his office to make a design and then sends it out to a contractor to build or to an engineer to fit up with the plumbing, heating and steel as best he can.” Nor has he any use for the architect who “goes up to a Communion on Mount Sinai and hands the results to the owner, the engineers and the public.” In his view, as in my own, the best designs, at any rate for the building of skyscrapers, come from “a group of minds in which the architect is one link in the chain.”

So speaks the mob. The results—the “Daily News Building” [designed by Hood] and [Bossom‘s] buildings—speak for themselves: they are the ugliest, flattest, most conventional, meaningless, unimaginative and uninspiring buildings in the book.

This type of architect works “by conference,” in which all parties concerned take part, discuss his drawings, make suggestions, etc. (A Hollywood story conference.) The result is a collective creation—“an average on an average.” (This method and these convictions, absolving the architect of all creative responsibility, are good for Peter Keating. Check up on just how much conferring and cooperation is done by an architect such as Frank Lloyd Wright.)

Good touch: workers who steal rides on trains and get tools out of a pawnshop in some town where the architect is working—in order to work again under him. [...]

The author talks a great deal about daring, courage and leaving the way free for new inventions. Yet—he is an eclectic artistically. His “newness” applies only to the technical, scientific side of new methods and materials, not to new esthetic ideas. No daring, courage or novelty in his architectural designs. No talk at all in the book of the artistic problem of skyscrapers. No esthetic convictions.

But a great deal of talk about cooperation. Let’s get together. The skyscraper cannot be the product of one man. It is all collective. A great many attacks on “separatism.” [He is] a second-rater and second-hander, following popular trends, praising engineering and Greek orders in skyscrapers with equal ease, naturally anxious for everyone to share ideas, in order to pick up what he can pick up. (Beware of those too eager for sharing—in wealth or in ideas; they’re the ones who know that they’ll get more than they’ll give in such a pool. Those with much to give do not talk of sharing—they do not need it.)

This author is just right for Peter Keating.

An important side-idea to bring out [regarding] the building of a skyscraper: If led by a strong personality, superior in knowledge and talent to the others, representing the complete authority and final judgment in all matters, with a pyramid of ranks under him, widening toward the bottom—the perfect organization with the proper spirit of cooperation and discipline results, and the created building is a magnificent monument. If cooperation means equality, with everyone’s voice as good as the next fellow’s and all the fingers in the pie—an eclectic mess results. (Check up on how, through what exact steps and means, these two methods work in practice.)

June 10, 1937

Matlock Price, The ABC of Architecture.

The best architectural training is to be had in the Architectural Department of one of the large Universities, or in a Technical School.

“In the University it is possible to begin architectural training in the first year and carry it on, with other and more general studies, through the four years of college.” After this, it is very desirable to take from two to four years post-graduate work, specializing entirely in architecture. (Check up on all this.)

The author also states that many architects consider a year or two of European travel as the best preparation. (Rubbish!)

University program:

First year: history of architecture, drawing, “thorough training in the Classic Orders,” simple problems of architectural design, freehand drawing, a general fine arts course.

Second year: making “measured drawings,” courses in perspective, shades and shadows, simple building construction, more advanced design problems.

The next two years—the same subjects carried still further in more advanced problems.

At the same time courses in higher mathematics.

Post-graduate work—design problems as advanced as the actual profession of architecture itself.

He may, at this stage, compete for a Traveling Scholarship which will pay his expenses for a year or two of special study in Europe, usually at the American Academy in Rome.

If the student intends to become the designer of important public buildings, he should spend a few years at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. (More rubbish!)

Because of their belief in the value of the Beaux Arts training, a group of New York architects who originally studied there, founded the “Society of Beaux Arts Architects” with a working studio, or atelier, where any ambitious architectural student may come and work on problems similar to those of the French Beaux Arts School, under the direction of the Beaux Arts architects themselves, who generously give their time to this work. And every year a “Paris Prize” is awarded, which sends its winner, with all expenses paid, to spend a year in the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.

(Look into this. Sounds perfectly anti-Roark. Try to meet one of them. What prompts such a business?)

The step from draftsman to architect is seldom an easy one. In a small firm a draftsman may be taken into partnership, if his work is valuable; more likely if he can bring with him a “job”—“if through social connections he can develop a client.” With money, he can buy himself into a partnership.

In large offices, where it is more difficult, he may do work in his spare time, working at night or on holidays, if through some personal means he can get a building to design.

Sometimes, if two fellow draftsmen can get work of their own to do, they give up their jobs and set themselves up as architects. If they have no money they must be very economical. [They may set up] a small office, two drafting tables, bought second-hand, and do all their own work. While working on their first “job,” they must do all they can to find another to follow up with.

“Sometimes one plucky fellow alone makes the jump from draftsman to architect in just this way.”

About this particular book: a commonplace, plodding little author, well-meaning, but completely conventional. To wit: the advice about the Beaux Arts School. Equal notice for classical revivals and Frank Lloyd Wright. “Anything goes.” Scholarly and without convictions about it all. Naively funny descriptions of all the jumbled eclectic adaptions of architectural styles in America. Such sentences as “the best French chateau in America,” etc. After listing the English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Italian buildings in this country, he adds quite seriously: “The Floridians have been even more adventuresome in architecture, achieving surprisingly successful adaptations of North African architecture, in stucco houses that are extraordinarily suggestive, in their essentials, of the houses of Tunis or Algiers.” (!)

Note: The peculiar preoccupation of architects such as this author and the previous one with “proportions,” “moldings,” “scholarly faithfulness to Classic examples,” etc. Worrying about every little thing, except the main one—the composition and its meaning as a whole. Isn’t it like the people who worry greatly about fine points of “style” and grammar in literature, without caring what the writing is about? Again, the “how” against the “what.” (Yet, the “what” determines everything else, just as the end determines the means, not vice versa. I do not intend that the end should justify lousy means, either. The “how” should always be worthy of the “what,” but determined by it.)

July 12, 1937

Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture.

He claims that the most beautiful forms are the simplest geometrical forms, the easiest to see. (Danger of over-simplification of modem architecture here.) Thus he considers Classic, Egyptian, Roman and some Renaissance architecture good, but Gothic bad, or at least not pure architecture. (Lack of the true principle of Frank Lloyd Wright here.)

Architecture is the first manifestation of man creating his own universe. [...]

There is one profession and one only, namely architecture, in which progress is not considered necessary, where laziness is enthroned, and in which the reference is always to yesterday....

He claims that the terrible houses of today destroy the family, by being unlivable. Advises modem houses to save family life.

He claims that we must establish definite standards for architecture, in order to elaborate these into perfection. (Danger of a new standardization and new set of rules for all architects to follow—just as in the following of old styles.)

Elementary satisfactions—decoration. Higher satisfactions—mathematics. The Parthenon and the automobile—both products of selection.

We must not assert with too much conviction that the masses give rise to their man. A man is an exceptional phenomenon occurring at long intervals, perhaps by chance, perhaps in accordance with the pulsation of a cosmography not yet understood. [...]

Art is this pure creation of the spirit which shows us, at certain heights, the summit of the creation to which man is capable of attaining. And man is conscious of great happiness when he feels that he is creating.

Advocates planned towns. (What will Roark say about that? Give it some thought.)

Interesting book, but too much emphasis on mass-production houses. Beautiful theories—but in practice, in the illustrations of the man’s work, too much standardization, too much reliance on the principle of “the beauty of modern tools,” not enough of that superior architectural beauty which the author himself advocates.

David Gray, Thomas Hastings, Architect.

The most disgusting book that I have read to date. The perfect picture of everything that stands against Roark. To be used plenty, for Peter Keating and all the others, particularly for John Eric Snyte. The perfect set-up of what has made modem architecture impossible. The perfect crystallization of the conventional architect, at the head of the profession, the kind responsible for Architectural Societies and all that prevents real creative genius and fights not to give it a chance. Smug, arrogant in a vulgar way, vain, self-contented, bitter and nasty toward all who are not like them, attacking genius with a phony, angry contempt, but without reasons or explanations, attacking only with ugly adjectives and curses, but never mentioning any valid grounds. [They] theorize in empty talk, seeming to accept all the best teachings of modem architecture and then distorting them by their own petty, silly, preposterous sophistries.

Only actual quotations can do justice to the picture of such an architect as Hastings:

The man and the artist seemed inexplicably detached one from the other. So to speak, one never met them both at the same time; and meeting the one gave little clue to the nature of the other.

As artist he was single-purposed, concentrated, intense, withdrawn into himself, obeying the mystic guidance of his genius with an almost ruthless energy and devotion. As a man in his human relations his qualities were those of a lovable child, generous, affectionate, sunny-natured. It was his good fortune never to have grown up in a worldly sense. He believed in everybody, was disposed to like everybody, was troubled by no spiritual questionings. He found the world the best of all possible worlds, and that, though he had worked his way through it from bottom to top by his own talent and industry. In this he was truly an amazing example of the preserving grace of simplicity and love.

Sic!!!

Such damning twaddle is presented in the book in the spirit of the greatest compliment. It speaks for itself—for the man and also for those who admired him.

Hastings had a “salon” that gathered for a “business man’s lunch.” “Charming” informality, “humor” and “quaintness.” Just a nice, big show to yell to the world: “See what lovely, regular fellows we are!” A description of Hastings’ entrance into one of these gatherings:

She stopped him with the observation that he never had had an idea except to build his clients a fire house if they ordered a dog kennel. It was their habitual play together and Hastings went on with his part, sputtering protestingly, calling on someone to protect him. As he peered, blinking through his pince-nez and recognized first one friend then another, he gave exclamations of delight and went the rounds with his greetings, pouring out affectionate extravagances, wringing hands, holding Miss Marbury’s and begging her to elope with him.

Lovely? Just a good back-slapper that knew damn well how to get along with his fellow men. It must also be noted that the struggle “from bottom to top” mentioned in the previous quotation was in reality from the security of an established family to his first jobs through the pull and protection of his family’s friends.

Some more about the lunches:

Hastings in this milieu was like a boy out of school: gay, irresponsible, affectionate, charming. His old friends all called him “Tommy” and chaffed him incessantly. It was characteristic of the relation between him and those who were fond of him, and he enjoyed it. At each new and affectionate insult he would rock with laughter and mock indignation.

It is characteristic all right.

Hastings entertaining a guest at lunch:

It was characteristic of him to make much of the stranger and put him at his ease. First he produced a wire puzzle—he was habitually buying such things from street vendors—and challenged her to take off a ring which was apparently irremovable. When she had given it up, he held the thing below the table with an air of mystery and triumphantly produced it in two pieces. Then he told her his story of the father who asked his advice as to whether his son should embrace architecture or dentistry. At this Dunne observed that if Hastings’ father had consulted a good architect, Tommy might now have been a good dentist.

Shaking with laughter, Hastings went on to explain to [his female guest] that no dentist could have the anxieties of an architect; that when he was a beginner he was always afraid that his houses were going to fall down but now when he saw them again he was afraid that they weren’t.

Such wit!

Contrast this—if the mere rapprochement of the two in one thought is not too much of a sacrilege—with the chastity of a Howard Roark. [...]

No early signs of his [aptitude for] architecture, except a “talent for drawing.” At seventeen, he gave up his preparation for college and entered the offices of a firm of furniture makers and interior decorators, as student and draftsman. His first solo assignments were rooms to redecorate. He attended a “Sketch Club,” heard talk of the Paris Ecole des Beaux Arts and decided to go there. Went to Paris at age twenty. He was “affectionate, social, fun-loving, and boyishly exuberant.... Though very young he appeared to escape those sentimental and passionate predilections which blind the mind to work of equal merit but of a different kind.” He liked everything. No ideas of his own, no positive taste, no artistic, creative convictions. The above quotation is also given in the book as a compliment.

He studied at the Ecole for four years. Returning to America, at age 24, he entered the office of McKim, Meade and White as a draftsman. Here he met John M. Carrere, another Ecole man, and their friendship led to the forming of a partnership a year later. Hastings did the designing and Carrere handled the business side. His first big commission, which warranted his going into business for himself, was for a hotel in Florida, given to him by a friend and parishioner of his father. He built the hotel in the Spanish Renaissance style.

Hastings’ opinions:

At any given point in this historic evolution he saw the architect building in the manner which his own period had devised rather than selecting styles from the past. Architecture, therefore, had ever been modem and of its own time.

Fine, but here is the conclusion:

He maintained that as far as modem architecture could have a name and recognized style, it must be Renaissance; for our life and civilization were still motivated by the forces which brought about the Renaissance. Therefore, the modem architect must be logically a Renaissance architect and such he conceived himself to be.

Best example of sophistry I’ve ever heard. [Ralston Holcombe expresses this view in the novel.]

In 1897 (at the age of 37) he won the competition for the construction of the New York Public Library. He wanted to make it more monumental than the original utilitarian plan.

The measure of this determination and tenacity is the fact that he wrung upwards of nine million [dollars] from a not overwilling city government, instead of two and one half million.... Its Renaissance elevation was to him equally logical and essentially modern. As he saw it, the aesthetic treatment lay inevitably in those principles of design and ornament developed since the revival of learning and the arts.... How the self-styled modernist who condemns this work as academic, who denies the heritage of the past and exalts originality above beauty, would have conceived an appropriate monumental repository for the printed record of man’s intellectual achievement is an interesting though perhaps not important speculation.

Here speaks arrogant mediocrity. Note the constant attacks on originality both from Hastings and from his enthusiastic admirer, the author of this book. Such little phrases as “exalting originality above beauty.” Nothing is ever said about originality that is beauty. [...]

During the years of work on the Library, Hastings had more than two hundred other commissions. He specialized in “monumental” works. Built a great deal for Fairs and Expositions. The most important of his works in this period was the New Theater in New York. He also won this in a competition. (Remember what Frank Lloyd Wright said about competitions! This is the best supporting evidence.)

“As he matured and gained authority, the teacher and evangelist in him became more evident.” He went to great lengths in preaching his architectural ideas. He also went heavily for “public service.” In 1910 President Taft appointed him one of the original members of the National Commission of Fine Arts. “This body was to exercise a general supervision of the National Government’s activities in the field of aesthetics and in particular of the architectural development of the National Capital.” (A fine example of what happens when National Governments go in for art.) In this capacity, Hastings had a great deal to do with the building of Washington, D.C. [...]

“He regarded architects who ignored tradition as uneducated, which was usually true, or as actuated by a frivolous and vain desire to be original at any cost.” (Mediocrity going snobbish and on the defensive.) Speaking of a Renaissance architect, he said: “It would have been impossible for him actually to define the style of his own period. That is for us, his successors, to do.” (Fine consciousness in creation!) An architect, he goes on to explain, [should] study the best that he can find in the past and use it to solve his modem problems. (Very creative!)

Hastings at fifty:

In 1922 he was awarded the King’s Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects, bestowed hitherto upon but two Americans, Richard Hunt and Charles McKim. He was a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, President of the Society of Beaux Arts Architects, member of the Architectural League of New York and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He had served seven years as a member of the National Fine Arts Commission. France had awarded him the Legion of Honor. He was continually consulted by the municipal authorities of New York in regard to its architectural projects and executed various public commissions.

Here is the complete picture of society and collectivism at work. Who gave medals and titles to Louis Sullivan or Frank Lloyd Wright? All this was going on in the same years when Sullivan was dying of a broken heart because his country would not recognize him, not even give work to him. If this doesn’t damn society, what can? [...]

Hastings’ views:

How near can we come to determining what is modem architecture, or what is the proper style of architecture for our time? Surely it should not be the deplorable creation of the would-be style-inventor, or that of the illogical architect, living in one age and choosing a style from another.

The important and indisputable fact is not generally realized that from prehistoric times until now each age has built in only one style of architecture. In each successive style there has always been the distinctive spirit of the contemporaneous life from which its roots drew nourishment. But in our time, contrary to all historic precedent there is a confusing variety of styles. Why should we not have one characteristic style, expressing the spirit of our own life? Has the world of art always been in the wrong until today? Does our actual work warrant the conceit of the assumption that we know more about it than has ever been known at any time or by all artists for the last three thousand years? History and the law of development alike demand that we build as we live.

(Note the awful borrowing of modern ideas, only to lead up to such conclusions as he makes.)

He further claims that architecture always follows the political, religious, economic and other cultural developments of history, i.e., it follows the “spirit of the age.” And then:

Therefore, before we can in any way indicate what style properly belongs to our time, we must first realize our historic position and the distinctive characteristics of our civilization. What determining change have we had in the spirit and methods of life since the revival of learning and the Reformation to justify us in abandoning the Renaissance, or in reviving medieval art, Romanesque, Gothic, Byzantine, or any other style?

(What indeed? This passage beats them all!)

Out of these necessities of the times the Renaissance style was evolved, and around no other style have been accumulated such vast stores of knowledge and experience, under the lead of the great masters of Europe. Therefore, whatever we now build, whether church or dwelling, the law of historic development requires that it be Renaissance.

All branches of art have contributed to the embellishment of this style; no other is so thoroughly expressive of the artistic feeling of the age in which we live....

We should study and develop the Renaissance and adapt it in our modem conditions and wants, so that future generations can see that it has truly interpreted our life. We can interest those who come after us only as we thus accept our true historic position and develop what has come to us. Without this we shall be only copyists or be making poor adaptations of what never was really ours.

(What a mental hodge-podge!)

And here comes the best of all: since the most practical solution is always the most beautiful, the gentleman claims that we should not concern ourselves with the practical. Just make it beautiful and it will hold. No need of mathematical calculations: if a pier is beautiful it will automatically be strong enough. Calculations are needed only for verification. (What are you going to do with a mind like that?)

I believe in such calculations for purposes of verification, but in general the piers will be about as safe to build upon when studied by an educated architect as when calculated by engineers.... It is really architecture and well-proportioned masonry versus engineering and iron girders. Each has its use, but they are not interchangeable. Buildings have stood for centuries without a knowledge of modem engineering, solely because their plans were so well studied, so thoroughly artistic and beautiful, that constructive difficulties were avoided....

He is at his most vicious when attacking the skyscraper on every point possible: esthetic, moral, interference with the value of the neighbor’s property, depriving neighbors of light and air, traffic congestion, etc. Everything but the boll weevil. “There is no hope for any continuity of lines and simple regularity in domestic or privately owned buildings, which in any great city ordinarily form a beautiful background of a much needed monotony for its outstanding monuments, all of which together form the physical make-up of a great municipality.” (It must be remembered here that he specialized in monuments.) With all the viciousness of the little man aroused, he runs to Mamma and demands laws against skyscrapers. He was a member of a two-man committee sent to Albany for that purpose. He demands taxation of skyscraper property, if he cannot get direct laws against them. He yelps that he is fighting not for esthetics, but for “justice.” Justice to the little fellow, the small property owner, etc. Here is the anger of a mass-man, who has had his way too long and is furious when a new development, truly original and modem, triumphs in spite of him, and he cannot stop it no matter what he does. When the phony prestige built on cheap imitation and fraudulent loud talk about high art does not work any longer, he reverts to the one recourse of his type—the mass, i.e., the State. “There should be a law against it”—the cry of all cornered collectivists. Incidentally, he holds the cities of Europe as the ideal and would like to see New York resemble them, with all their old-fashioned restrictions on free building. [...]

With badly hidden resentment, he writes of originality in a contemptuous, skeptical way, evading the real question [by turning to] side-issues:

Originality is only a natural and spontaneous effort to solve the practical conditions imposed upon an architect, and it is generally a good test of the merit of his design when it looks as though it has been done before, however different it may be from everything else.... When we consider originality, how often do we give credit where it really belongs? This is a fair question, not only in architecture, but in everything else, and yet, after all, what difference does it make?

He goes on to say that it is often impossible to determine who originated a certain thing or idea. Is this the point? Isn’t it a guilty conscience speaking and rationalizing itself?

He attacks the critics. Demands that only professional architects be allowed to criticize architecture in writing. (And of course he and his pals will see to it that no architect can practice unless he is one of their kind.)

He attacks the engineers. “One danger in bridge-building is the engineer. In two cases out of three an engineer is employed. He sees the quantitative side rather than the qualitative point of view; he is apt to disregard the beauty of design.” (Top of presumption.) Incidentally, if the practical is always beautiful, as he claims, why is it that the engineers do not achieve beauty? Or does this work only one way, his way, and not the other?

To sum it all up, I must not forget the words of the book’s author in his preface: “The circumstance that, alone of the notable practicing architects of his generation, Hastings formulated in writing his philosophy of art, his ideals, convictions, and critical comment would seem to warrant the assumption of this responsibility (to publish the book).” This was written after Sullivan had published his Autobiography of an Idea and Frank Lloyd Wright had published his Autobiography. ! ! !

If I take this book and Wright’s autobiography, there is practically the entire story of “Second-Hand Lives.”

November 22, 1937

[AR obtained a job with Ely Jacques Kahn, a prominent New York architect, for the purpose of learning about the daily activities of the profession. She worked in his office for six months as a filing clerk, typist, and general assistant. Later, she remarked about Kahn: “As a type, he was Guy Francon. He was so much the socially acceptable architect. He was abler than Francon, and he was modern—within careful limits. But his career was strictly dominated by Francon methods. And he had that manner—very elegant and charming. ”]

Notes taken in office.

Frank Lloyd Wright used to advise his lady clients to wear gowns cut in lines and made of materials to harmonize with the houses he had created for them. (Interesting, even if slightly silly.)

Hugh Ferris: “The nature of the architectural forms and spaces which people habitually experience are potent factors in determining the nature of their actions, their emotions and their thoughts.” (I think he’s a phony, but this may be an interesting thought, if not carried too far into preposterousness.)

Swell touch of advance propaganda where it doesn’t belong: Lewis Mumford in The New Republic, July 6, 1927, criticizes the defects of a building by blaming them on the expensiveness of the site.

It is as if even the great powers of industry and finance were not capable of controlling the forces by which they have sprung into being, as if they, too, must submit to the system which they nominally dominate.

Also—the building is “cold and hard”—a perfect symbol of modem business to Mr. Mumford. (!?!) (For Toohey.)

I find it (the building) more interesting because of its finely humanized interior than because of its stupendous bulk against the skyline of the city.

People, as well as cultures, have definite leitmotifs. Toohey’s can be seen very readily here. Follow up its manifestations as it consistently, even if subconsciously, asserts itself. Roark’s theme will be quite different. An important part of the book and the whole idea is this subconscious theme-song in the psychology of men. This base and all the practical results. There are only two fundamental bases: Roark’s and Toohey’s. Show them at work.

Some unknown architect writing a “review” on the Squibb building declares flatly that “the building would have been better with color.” Then, praising the white brick, he wishes for a law to make all New York buildings of white brick—“with colored trimmings.” (Just pass a law to have all buildings done as he likes them! A sample of the “there-oughta-be-a-law” psychology.)

There has been an influx of socialites into the architectural profession. Careers are made solely on family connections. Important work is not given to architects of established fame and great achievement (generally recognized, practical achievement, not even an “arty” fame) because they “do not belong to the 400.” It would be only natural for these people to be eclectics and to defend eclecticism as “culture”—because they have nothing else to offer.

The “society-playboy-architect” [Kenneth Murchison] who has never built anything, but is quite famous. Writes articles and makes great caustic fun of known architects. Specializes in staging the “Beaux-Arts” ball for the Beaux-Arts Society of Architects. (The dirtier and sexier the ball—the more funds for the educational work of the society. Great society!) [Murchison was the model for Athelstan Beasely in the novel.]

November 28, 1937

The following is from Modern Concepts Concerning an Organic Architecture from the Work of Frank Lloyd Wright (a proclamation sent by Wright to Kahn and autographed):

Individuality realized is the supreme attainment of the human soul, the master-master’s work of art. Individuality is sacred. Let us dedicate this republic to multiply and elevate that quality in all art and architecture in all men in all life.

From the first issue of Frank Lloyd Wright’s magazine Taliesin (which perished after the first issue from a lack of subscribers):

We are all possessive and we are all egoistic. Ingloriously so, the present impasse can show. But neither “possessive” nor “egoistic” need be inglorious.

There is probably no suitable economic system not founded upon human egoism.

There is probably no great society where individual possession is not something to be respected and encouraged.

Nor is there a society worth considering where individuality is not the desirable cultural product of human life....

[Wright’s description] of organic architecture: “I got the sense of architecture as a reality no longer consisting in walls but inherent in the space within the walls to be lived in.”

His amendment of Sullivan’s formula: “Form follows function by way of the nature of materials.”

He objects to making “good architecture” a matter of “good taste.” (Interesting point. Not a matter of taste, but of incontrovertible principle—or do I understand it right? It should be so, and for all art, but what really is to be the principle, concretely and definitely and in a “legally” clear definition?)

From the article “Matter” by [Wright] in same issue: his enthusiasm for natural materials as potential weapons to use for his own creation. “And then I wish both mill and gravel heaps endlessly subject to my will.” (There is a Roark emotion.)

Gold and silver, lead and copper, tawny iron ore—all lying in drift to yield themselves up to roaring furnaces and to flow obedient to the hand of the master mind: all to become pawns to human will in the part human imagination plays in the human game we call civilization.... Wood, stone, pottery, glass, pigments, and aggregates, metals, gems cast into the industrious maw of mills, kilns or machines all to be worked to the architect’s desire by human skill in labor. All this to his hand as the pencil in that hand makes marks that dispose of all as he dreams and as he wills.

December 3, 1937

From “Selling Architectural Services Today” by Rion Bercovici, in Architecture, April, 1933:

In order to sell his services today, the architect must be able to talk to business men in their language. He must present his case from the angle of his ability to do work that will sell—merchandise, services, floor space, and anything that is housed. The architect cannot just be a merchant of even the most expert architectural and building counsel: he must be a merchant of auxiliaries to salesmanship in one form or another. To do this successfully he must adjust himself to the rhythm of the times.

(What horrors and crimes aren’t always being excused by this great buck-passing to the “rhythm” or “spirit” of the times?)

Kahn’s insistence on the “crafts”—too much. It is not part of architecture. He believes that: “There is a potential and currently neglected field for architects in industrial designing of fabrics, metals, and so forth.” I’m not sure, but it seems to me that such a “field” would, to Frank Lloyd Wright, be what writing for Hollywood is to a writer.

Such advice to architects as telling a store how they can sell more groceries by changing their lighting. (Practical, perhaps, but is it architecture or window-dressing?)

A 1932 conference between four big architectural organizations discusses plans for training architects and admitting them to practice. A suggestion is made that the organizations themselves make the rules about admission of a young architect to practice. (Sic!—this is the organization to which Frank Lloyd Wright does not belong!)

One of the guys there expresses the hope that they should make “A.I.A. membership synonymous with qualifications for practice.” (! ! !)

Kahn explains that this was done to unify the license requirements in various states. Most states have examinations for licenses. When an architect has been in practice for 15 years, he can take an examination for a National License, which allows him to practice all over the U.S.A. Kahn’s experience with this examination: the examining board was composed of “eminent” professors of architecture who had never put up a building.

The meeting of architectural organizations planned to pattern the licensing of architects on that of the Medical profession. (But medicine is not a creative art. Architecture is. Even at that, the American Medical Association has done much harm along with the good, such as the accusation often heard, possibly true, of keeping important discoveries off the market in order not to lose valuable practice. Wouldn’t the same happen to architecture ? And how safe is the distinction between purely educational tests and esthetic tests for the admittance to practice? What if this becomes an artistic dictatorship? (Check up.)

December 5, 1937

Let us decide once and for all what is a unit and what is to be only a part of the unit, subordinated to it. A building is a unit—all else in it, such as sculpture, murals, ornaments, are parts of the unit and to be subordinated to the will of the architect, as creator of the unit. No talk here of “the freedom of craftsmen” for sculptors and the like.

Also—man is a unit, not society. So that man cannot be considered as only a subordinate part to be ruled by and to fit into the ensemble of society.

(I really believe that a building is a unit, not a city, so that city planning should not control all buildings. Because a house can be the product of one man, but a city cannot. And nothing collective can have the unity and integrity of a “unit.”)

Much of the confusion in “collectivism” and “individualism” could be cleared up if men [knew] what constitutes a unit, what is to be regarded as such.

As to the rules about this—my job of the future.

[AR completed this “job of the future” in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. ]

From: The Life- Work of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright’s principles of architecture (from his “In the Cause of Architecture,” 1908): “Simplicity and Repose are qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.” A building should have as few rooms as possible, taking account of its needs. Openings should be integral features of the structure, and if possible its ornamentation. Eliminate unnecessary details and ornaments. Avoid appliances or fixtures. Avoid too many pictures on walls. Most or all the furniture should be built in as a part of the whole scheme. “There should be as many kinds (styles) of houses as there are kinds (styles) of people and as many differentiations as there are different individuals.” “A building should appear to grow easily from its site....” Follow the color schemes of nature. “Bring out the nature of materials, always let their nature intimately into your scheme.” “Buildings like people should be quiet, sincere, true and then withal as gracious and lovable as may be. Above all, integrity.”

At the beginning of his career, Wright found exceptions to the prevalent eclecticism “chiefly among American men of business with unspoiled instincts and untainted ideals. A man of this type usually has the faculty of judging for himself.”

At the beginning he had great trouble with everyone: workers, mills, financiers and all. Millmen in Chicago refused to work on a drawing bearing Wright’s signature; contractors even cut [the name] out, but millmen recognized the work and refused to “hunt for trouble.” (Incidentally, how about this for standardization? How can one get the “right” standardization? What protection is there within it for new ideas?)

He fought against the cheap imitators of his work, who copied his forms without understanding his principle, who made a new “style” and formula out of his forms.

Lewis Mumford [claims that] architects in America either pursue empty eclectic styles, or turn into engineers, consider utility only, devoid of art.

Wright differs from other modernists in that he wants to humanize the machine, make it serve artistic and human purposes, while the others want to make the machine and machine-principles dominant, eliminating all ornament entirely, all beauty and art, beyond the barest utility.

Mumford, with what seems to be the typical near-sightedness of a “pinkish” critic, has the presumption to ascribe Wright’s lack of recognition in America to his being “regional”; Wright’s buildings, according to Mumford, are suited only to prairie country, but not to all of the U.S. This is as much as Mr. Mumford can see. He goes so far as to say that Wright’s buildings are “not completely successful.” The problem of a new architecture will require, he claims, “the work of a hundred Wrights.”

Typical: one critic in the book praises Wright highly, but claims that he is “personal,” not “universal.” Another one praises him particularly for being “universal.” (Doesn’t it all seem like a lot of rot? What is universal? Is there such a thing? Isn’t it merely something individual copied by a great many people? As such, does it acquire any added value? Should there be any such conception as “universal” at all?)

Note how the “pinks” in art circles stuck to Wright like leeches, how they tried to use his fame and influence to their own ends, misinterpreting him entirely, ascribing to him their own pet sociological implications which he never intended or meant in a quite different way.

For instance, from Pieter Oud [a prominent Dutch architect]:

That which Wright desired, viz., an architecture based on the needs and the possibilities of our own time, satisfying its requirements of general economic feasibility, universal social attainableness, in general of social-aesthetic necessity, and resulting in compactness, austerity and exactness of form, in simplicity and regularity; that which he desired, but from which he continually escaped on the wings of his great visionary faculty, was tried in more actual consistency in cubism.

(Near enough, but how far! If I understand him, this is not at all what Wright preached and wanted and meant.)

H. H. Sullivan says that two great ideas confront each other in the world: the idea of tyranny, appealing to man’s fear, and the idea of freedom, appealing to man’s courage. [He says] we now have mental slavery, even though physical slavery is gone. But the idea of freedom is awakening, freedom of each individual’s own expression. (All this is fine, but what is this freedom and who threatens it? I wouldn’t call it democracy, as Sullivan always called it. Didn’t he really mean individualism?)

Sullivan is opposed to all abstract philosophy (Platonism, Neo-Platonism, German Transcendentalism) as sterilizing life. (Wonder if he means what I would mean by this?)

December 6, 1937

Raymond Hood states that “architecture is the business of manufacturing adequate shelter for human activities” and asserts that this conception imposes only one restriction: “That the product must be adequately practical as a shelter for human activities.”

Hood is a second-hander trying to be strictly “modem” in his terminology—which he stole from Le Corbusier, incidentally. Did he come to this “principle” himself? Did he fight for it? Or didn’t he just appropriate it when the battle had been won by others, by the suffering of others, and then parade it as his own great wisdom and gain prestige as a “foremost architect” thereby?

John Cushman Fistere, “Poets in Steel,” Vanity Fair, December, 1931.

Here’s Toohey in full colors. Listing America’s ten greatest architects, he starts off by being sarcastic about people naming Frank Lloyd Wright as first.

Nevertheless there are many who believe that Mr. Wright is more genius than architect, and who justify their opinion by pointing to his characteristic idiosyncrasies, and to the still more significant fact that he has designed comparatively few buildings to support his manifold theories. Even his most zealous disciples have difficulty in listing his actual achievements: the Larkin factory, “that hotel in Japan,” and the glass and steel apartment house for New York that has never been built. As an architectural theorist, Mr. Wright has no superior; but as an architect he has little to contribute for comparison.

May I be forgiven for copying this! This is Toohey par excellence—god damn him!

Further from same:

Number two on nearly everyone’s list of the ten great skyscraper architects would be Raymond Hood, seemingly less of a genius than Mr. Wright, but perhaps more of an architect. Unfortunately for the purposes of promoting him, Hood has no theories to advocate, is anathema to the intellectuals because he opposed the appointment of Wright to the World’s Fair Architectural Commission, and is happier sticking to [architecture] than he is in making speeches and giving interviews. Hood already has three buildings to his credit to support the claims of his friends that he, and not Wright, is the first architect of the country.

(Nice friends, ain’t they?)

Hood’s most promising trait is his inconsistency.... “I would never build the same building twice”—that is the explanation of Hood.

(“I would also build anything, because I have nothing to say” can be his explanation as well.)

This Hood interests me. I may be wrong, but there’s something sinister about the man. He was broke and ready to give up architecture, when he won the Chicago Tribune competition by going in “partnership” on the design with a prominent architect who had been “invited” to participate in the contest. Hood did the design, and shared the glory with the other man, who got $40,000 out of the $50,000 award. The building was eclectic, Gothic, and none too good. This was after Sullivan, after Wright, when Mr. Hood could have discovered modernism if he had wished to listen, let alone “invent” it. But he goes Gothic “because embroidery was in vogue.”

He prospers on the reputation gained by this contest. He gets big buildings to do. Modem architecture is gaining. The shrewd gentleman realizes it—I imagine he was a very good businessman. He switches to modernism with a bang—the Daily News Building. He is successful and sensational. He likes it. It is now safe to be sensational. He speedily appropriates the language of the modernists—Le Corbusier, Sullivan and all. He is admired for it. He is “the foremost modern architect of America.” He is a prophet—neatly and nicely, with someone else’s prophecy and genius, and with someone else’s struggles and suffering having paved the way for his victory.

It is now embarrassing to know that the words are stolen. He would like to believe himself that he is what he has managed to make himself appear. So he hates the men he has robbed. He fights them. He keeps Wright from the Chicago Fair. He hates Wright for being actually what he, Hood, only appears to be. And—an interesting parallel: Wright refused to participate in the Fair, unless he could have complete say over it; Wright did it because he had an idea of what he wanted done with the Fair and he wished no interference with the idea; he had a truly beautiful and important thing to create. (“Terrible and megalomaniacal,” comments Kahn.) Hood, on the other hand, made no such demand; but, according to Kahn, Hood was the ruler of the exposition. And an ugly mess resulted; Mr. Hood compromised or was incapable of anything better; he had no idea and nothing to create; he merely wanted the honor of bossing other people and being the “ruler” in their eyes, even if he had nothing for which to rule. And, of course, he had to keep Wright out of it; Wright was the only danger to this kind of phony, second-hand supremacy and the one who could steal the thunder from and the spotlight off Mr. Hood. Isn’t that typical and significant? Isn’t that “second-handedness”? (I think I’ve analyzed it correctly. Check up.)

From the “Symposium on Architecture” at the Decorators’ Club:

Kahn mentions that the plans for the Rockefeller Center were originally to be Gothic, because of Mr. Rockefeller’s love for the Gothic [style]. Plans had even been drawn in Gothic. But practical necessity, such as windows and lighting, led to the adoption of a modern design. When I asked him about this personally, Kahn hastily denied that Gothic plans had been drawn. (?) Hood was the guiding hand among the eight or ten architects of Rockefeller Center. (Any wonder he got in? Would Wright draw up Gothic plans and then “talk” Rockefeller out of it? Where is the great integrity and “modern” convictions of Mr. Hood? And Rockefeller Center is a mess, compared to what it could have been. As to its sculpture—I wonder if Hood had a hand in the giving out of that commission?)

As to the whole meeting: a lot of insufferable drivel. A bunch of wealthy idlers in evening clothes listening smugly to a re-hash of things they could read in any book in ten minutes. Two dotards pattering smugly about Classic and Gothic architecture. Kahn—the only one to say a little of something and to say it with conviction. The others—drooling about a “house in Pompeii,” which we are invited to inspect “from a magic carpet,” and about the long nave of a Gothic cathedral symbolizing “the long way of a sinner to redemption” (sic!). The well-fed morons listening contentedly, certain that they are acquiring “culture.” Tickets at $2.20 a head. And Wright could not raise the money to publish his magazine!

December 7, 1937

Samples of phony architectural language (from Kurt Jonas, in the South African Architectural Record):

Here we find, indeed, a four-dimensional composition of space enclosed by solids. Especially the north and north-west aspect of the house shows a dynamic balance of forms, such as it would be hard to surpass. At the same time, it is not lacking in that interpenetration of spaces which brings out the hollow character, full of fluctuating life, which is the expression of architecture as compared with sculpture....

The sphere of architecture is space. We must define space. But we cannot. For space is defined by movement. And movement presupposes time. Therefore we should speak more correctly of spacetime.... Architecture is a four-dimensional art....

[T]his is a contradiction not due to the [average] man’s poor logic, but to the higher logic, the dialectics of all life and art. To emphasize this I started that essay, Towards a Philosophy of Architecture, with the statement: “Modern Architecture is the realization of a contradiction in itself.”

That not all things are so simple as some people believe, that there are inherent contradictions in life and in art, is no fault of mine. It is the task of the writer to show and to express this dialectic state, not to cover it with a torn fig leaf of simplifying logical construction, all for the sake of a mentally lazy layman.

Here is a typical one of Toohey: muddle the issue, appear deep by being unclear, down with logic in the name of a “higher logic”; this is the spirit of Gertrude Stein and others, again denying superiority by denying reason—the sole danger to mediocrity. Remove reason—and what ground is there for greatness or smallness? Aren’t all equal when the scales have been destroyed? [AR made use of the above “phony language”—see Gordon Prescott’s testimony at the Stoddard trial.]

“Modernist” architects build their own homes in the most conventional, old-fashioned way. The exception—Frank Lloyd Wright.

A silly New York Times article (1931) gloats over this, emphasizing that even so-called “modernists” (such as Hood) do not live in “modernistic boxes,” that their homes are as old and eclectic as the homes of the conservative architects; [the article] stresses the fact that the [modernists‘] homes are ancient, reconditioned, part old barns, etc., and goes mushy over ancient cherry-trees, lawns, flowers and birdies and the like. One of the “modernists,” when asked about his home, got sheepish, then admitted that he didn’t build it for himself, but for a client: his wife, who “didn’t like modernism.” Could Wright have done this—wife or no wife? Could he stand living in a house he hated? Could any man with sincere and profound convictions about his art, the art that is his life, live in a house that denies all his ideals? Could I, for the sake of a husband or for Jesus Christ, read nothing but Kathleen Norris? [Kathleen Norris, a novelist, wrote Mother (1911), Saturday’s Child (1914), Sisters (1919), The Sea Gull (1927), etc.]

December 9, 1937

Lewis Mumford: “A critic who deals with the whole field of American culture.” A swell description of Toohey.

[The following note pertains to an item clipped from a newspaper.]

The Beaux-Arts Ball (January 23, 1931 ) where famous architects wore costumes representing one of their buildings. “Human Skyline for Beaux-Arts Ball.”

(Note the little guy with the glasses peering through a hole in his headpiece—the Waldorf-Astoria.)

December II, 1937

Note the difference of approach to their profession between all these successful New York architects and Frank Lloyd Wright. He wouldn’t go on a stag trip to the “Alma Mater” in Paris. He wouldn’t go to a ball dressed as his building. This is the difference between the “common touch” and the ideal, between art as a business and art as a religion. The difference in the men is also in their buildings. It is this feeling I want for Roark—the burning reverence as against the “meal-ticket” architecture.

Note also, for Toohey, the measly trick in the Vanity Fair article quoted previously, of not coming out with a direct statement of the writer’s own opinion, but hiding behind such phrases as: “There are many who believe” and “his friends claim.”

December 22, 1937

A. T. North, “The Passing Show,” Current Architecture, September, 1930.

This gentleman criticizes someone for saying that an architect must have convictions about his style—“as though the architect must have a style conviction just like one has a religious conviction.” (Precisely! That’s what he must have.)

We expect our tailors and modistes to produce equally well any selected pattern or style of garment, our physician to correctly diagnose and prescribe for all ailments, and our attorneys to conduct any manner of litigation—but the exceptioned architect cannot render any and every style equally well because he would be “so lacking in convictions.” Unfortunately, too many architects make a cult of style. Style “conviction” in architecture?—it is amusing.

What logic! Here’s mediocrity speaking.

Ugliness can be produced only by abnormal persons, the normal persons always desire beauty.

Now what is beauty? Who is to decide? By what rules?

December 24, 1937

Pictures of the A.I.A. convention: terribly stodgy, pompous, either “Babbitt” or “Social Register” faces of prominent architects. What a figure Howard Roark will be among them!

December 30, 1937

In December, 1935, Mayor La Guardia announced a list of fifty architects who would get all the big municipal work [in New York City].

The jurors who selected the fifty architects were Phelps Stokes, Ralph Walker, and Kenneth Murchinson. These last two are architects (I don’t know about the first). Murchinson is the life-of-the-party of the architectural profession; he hasn’t built anything to mention—but what power! He is always in the thick of things, particularly in “social activities.”

The men who selected the jury were all presidents of various architectural organizations. Two of these electors were named among the list of fifty. One of the two—Upjohn—spoke utter drivel about Gothic architecture at the meeting I attended. (“The long nave is a symbol of the long road of the sinner to redemption.”) And he was president of the A.I.A.! Such is the power and the glory of organized mediocrity.

January 1, 1938

Notes on a conversation with Kahn:

Plagiarism in architecture: plenty of it. Buildings which are copies of Kahn’s buildings. Copies of his ornament. Case of client who asked him to build a replica of a certain building, and upon going to see the model, Kahn discovered it to be a copy of one of his own buildings, which he showed to the client, much to the latter’s amazement. Case of bank which planned a building; Kahn was asked to submit a sketch, which he did; no further action was taken upon it and Kahn was informed that the plans had been abandoned ; upon returning from Europe some months later, he found his building done and erected, very badly done and unskillfully interpreted from his rough sketch, but still his very building. The bank had taken his sketch and given it to some friend of theirs to build. Nothing done about this. Kahn did not sue or receive any payment for the sketch. Later, some “arty” book on architecture mentioned this particular building as the best building of that year, giving credit to the plagiarist-architect.

A draftsman in an architect’s office is usually called “a designer” and typically does the actual designing of his bosses’ buildings. If a draftsman refused to work in the style ordered, he would be fired immediately.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Modern Architecture.

The preface to this book mentions instances of Wright’s lack of consistency and logic, and quotes the following: “When asked to write The Logic of Modern Architecture, Wright replied: ‘Is the rising sun logical? It is natural and that is better.’ ” (This is sheer drivel. I am afraid that Wright has some of it once in a while. When is logic going to be fully explained and vindicated?) From the same preface: “Whose likes and dislikes are logical? We are now finding that logic, as a convention of human thinking, will not confine within its premises art and life as creative activities.” (Rubbish!)

[Wright] calls the A.I.A. the “Arbitrary Institute of Appearances.”

Arthur T. North [editor]: Contemporary American Architects, by E. J. Kahn.

The abysmal idiot who wrote the preface [A. T. North] displays quite a different spirit and approach to architecture than that in the writings of Frank Lloyd Wright. Thus, in praising Kahn’s work, he has nothing of greater significance to say than the following, which he considers to be important architectural criticism:

Appraisals of buildings to determine their real contribution to architecture must include inquiries as to whether they “work”—fulfill their intended purpose—and are sound financial projects. In both these respects the buildings designed by Mr. Kahn are successful and at the same time he has complied with all legal and economic requirements.

Such inspired writing!

[North writes] of Kahn: “His democratic manner, interested consideration of matters brought to his attention, tolerance for the views and opinions of others, and amiable disposition, cause him to be held in friendly regard and respect.” What a tribute to pay to an architect! This, then, constitutes Mr. North’s idea of a great architect. Certainly, Kahn’s work deserves more serious consideration and more valuable comment. Yet, here is Mr. North as editor of works on modem architects and as publicist of ideas on architecture. What chance would Frank Lloyd Wright or Howard Roark have here, [since they] are not “tolerant of the views and opinions of others”?!

January 9, 1938

Bruno Taut, Modern Architecture.

In building, no personal isolation of the individual actually exists. The process of building, by reason of the participation of innumerable artisans and workmen and the considerable expenditure involved, which again represents labor, is in itself of a collective nature. [...]

The test with regard to the collective attitude of mind of the architect is of particular value in this case, in that he is bound to hold sternly aloof from any favorite constructive ideas, particularly dear to his own personal taste. [...]

The small individual house, built in accordance with the wishes of an individual man or woman, is possibly still more indicative of the general standard of the delirium of individualism.... The construction of a dwelling-house not only shows that a feeling of ownership is a menace to this quality, but even, so it would appear, is in a degree opposed to it. For where the owner-builder is the more disposed to waive his possessive rights in favor of something really good and useful, there will not only disappear the sentimental, romantic delirium, but the houses will come to bear a certain resemblance and suitability, the one to the other.

(What logic!)

Should it not be impossible still to speak of taste, after the Stuttgart exhibition of 1927, for instance, proved that sixteen architects (all of whom differed greatly one from the other, even apart from the fact that they came from five different countries), without concerning themselves about any of the houses not actually of their own design, were yet able to evolve a suburb of a highly uniform character? A suburb in which each of them experimented in the most varied directions, proving that it was their common mental attitude which produced the unity of effect, thus excluding the question of taste. And yet, in view of the illustrations in this volume, many will assuredly contend: “That may be all very well thought out, but it does not happen to be my taste.” To which one can only reply: “Questions of taste are social questions.”

(Note: the Stuttgart exhibition is nothing but a collection of trashy, shoe-box houses, none of which means anything, consequently all of which can be considered to produce an effect of unity, the unity of nothingness.)

The coming world is most clearly expressed in its architecture, no matter from what angle it is regarded. Painting and the plastic arts keep within the calm of the studio, entangled in their problems regarding artistic form. The heroic attempts of a Picasso to set up a general consistent formula on constructive foundations are greatly to be appreciated so far as the standard of painting is concerned; yet his vacillations from Cubism to Classicism, and again from Cubism to Abstractism, must surely be indicative of a certain want of clarity as to how painting was to be linked on to the social whole. [...]

This, then, is Toohey in the flesh speaking. Little can be added to the gentleman’s own words, except to note that he has quite a bit of praise for the awful monstrosities of cast-iron columns used when iron first came into use in architecture. He praises Renaissance architecture, when necessary. He has no conception of what Wright’s fight for modern architecture means, nor its spirit, nor its purpose. All he has grasped is the “down with ornament” idea. Which is, of course, nothing but glorifying mediocrity, making architectural creation of such nature that it is open to anyone; anyone can build this senseless, awkward, common junk; genius or intelligence or taste are no longer necessary; taste particularly is deliberately denied and mocked. Note the remarks about Picasso—an attempt to connect idiotic modem painting to “the social whole,” to set up standards that deny ability, and open art to anyone and everyone. There’s Toohey’s little system.

January 10, 1938

A. T. North, Raymond Hood.

[Hood has little] to say about general principles of architecture. The book [focuses mainly on] explanations of details of his buildings, plus some second-hand statements on form following function, old re-hash of what has been said a million times before, without adding a single new thought. The illustrations of his buildings show a magnificent absence of individuality. There is no such thing as a spirit or style of his own. Anything goes. The buildings could have been done by twelve different men. Appalling lack of imagination. Plenty of Renaissance and Gothic. Modernism à la Germany. When he tries to depart from precedent in decoration and to create patterns of his own, they are horribly Renaissance, awkward and meaningless. A great deal of stealing from Wright and from E. J. Kahn. This is the man claimed by many to be the great American architect.

A glance at his list of “societies” explains it all. Note also that he has worked always with someone else, hardly ever on his own, and if he did work on his own, he produced nothing of importance in those times. He has changed a great many partners. Evidently he didn’t care with whom he worked, or so it appears from the numerous list of collaborators. Whether he was in each case the original designer or not does not matter. I do not trust people with instincts for collaboration.

January 12, 1938

A. T. North, Ralph Adams Cram.

A lovely compliment to Cram & Co. from Mr. North:

In this (their use of Gothic) they have exerted a steadying influence on American ecclesiastical architecture by retaining always its essential Christian character and spirit. At the same time, they have drawn on other sources with equal success. In their design of collegiate buildings they have drawn on many architectural sources [...] with the same facility and discrimination. In all of their work they have applied a serious and scholarly effort that produces an architecture which is appropriate to its purpose and in harmony with the best human attributes.

Observe the art of sounding profound and meaning nothing whatever, such as in the last sentence.

January 17, 1938

Architectural League of New York, 1930:

All the eclecticism in the world. Modern structures, such as the Empire State Building, and some of the oldest junk. The firm of Voorhees, Gmelin and Walker has, in the same issue, a modernistic building (Roerich Museum) and a bank building in New Jersey with Greek pilasters at the entrance. Anything goes with these architects. There is a home by Delano & Aldrich (society boys) which is rather simplified à la modernistic, but with a dome in the center and a Greek portico for an entrance. There is a Sewage Disposal Plant with Greek moldings.

It is almost pathetic to see the way in which the architects feel forced to simplify their facades, yet hang on to the Greek trimmings, porticoes, orders and such—in a slightly simplified form. (As if these were the only forms of which they felt sure and they cling to them desperately, seeing nothing beyond them.)

The above applies only to commercial buildings. In the field of domestic architecture it is still the dark ages. Not one modern building. Not even a touch of modernity on the old monstrosities. The only modern [design] shown is a model home built or projected by House & Garden.

February 15, 1938

N. C. Curtis, Architectural Composition.

A silly book, musty, naive and old-fashioned, smelling of the XIX century, even though it is published in 1935. Written by a professor of architecture. Gives a marvelously clear picture of what the academic mind thinks of architecture and of what it teaches to students. [...]

A lot of drivel on the idea of making a plan attractive in itself, not in what it represents, but in itself, as a picture. This seems hard to believe, even for the old days. (Check up on this.)

Advice to students in learning to make beautiful plans: “Progress will only come through practice; by the study of beautiful plans, chiefly through tracing them.”

Throughout the book, a continuous emphasis on the “monumental,” which seems to be the one type of architecture the author is most interested in—and the one most useless.

Traditional architecture, the great body of the master works of past epochs of architecture, is the store house from which we ought to draw and in most cases to draw all the inspiration that goes to make for the greatness of our contemporary designs. The greatest commentators are no uncertain advocates of this doctrine. Let us hear what M. Gaudet has to say:

“I know that to speak of tradition now passes far behind the times; the present tendency is to scorn tradition. That means to despise long efforts continued through centuries by the industrious generations preceding us; to seek generally to conceal ignorance by affecting to scorn the unknown in order to avoid the effort necessary to know it. Preserve yourselves from this error! Progress is slow and must be sure. Whoever proceeds slowly is sane, and whoever is sane goes far. Do you know what is very strong and original? It is to do very well what others have merely done well. The finest epochs are those in which tradition was most respected, when progress was continually perfecting, when there was evolution and not revolution. Never has there been spontaneous generation in art. Between the Parthenon and the temples preceding it are only shades of difference. Furthermore and especially for studies is tradition precious. To dare to become free from it one must judge it, and to do this it must be known. Tradition is a paternal patrimony; to dissipate it independently, one risks finding himself wandering at random and must at least know how to find himself another shelter.”

This sounds like the despair of a bunch of quacks or witch doctors, who have held power for a long time by reason of their specialized knowledge in a field made mysterious, cluttered with minute details and requiring years of study, such dull and useless study of so much that is inessential, that few would enter it and the witch-doctors, consequently, held sway and ruled all architecture. When the people are leaving them, at last, they rack their brains for some excuse to hold on to their phony position of prestige: we gotta have tradition, and if not, we gotta study it anyway, at least in order to discard it, etc. But please study it, because this is our field, our second-hand claim to prestige and distinction! [...]

This is a magnificent sample of what every thinking person in any line is up against.

Simple and regular type forms of buildings, often of colossal dimensions, have been employed in all ages to embody purely idealistic concepts, or other ideals removed from the merely useful or material. Such are the temples, mausoleums and monuments of antiquity and the great cathedrals and churches of Christian epochs.

Here is an important point of difference. Howard Roark will make all buildings “idealistic,” for every phase of life. Real life on earth, not in heaven, can and must be made beautiful.

Research and careful study of the masterworks of architectural art are most essential factors in training. By strengthening taste, discrimination is thereby made more sure and the novice will have the right to feel that he has climbed many steps when he is able to select the good from the inferior. It is well to remember that in the study of design it is far better to copy something that is really good than to try to create out of a limited imagination. After all imagination is rather largely a matter of memory, if it is not all that. In architecture, it has been said, the sort of originality that consists in the use of old materials is quite satisfactory for all purposes. It was good enough for the Greeks, why not for us?

(Sic!)

In conclusion:

I am only paraphrasing the words of Sir Joshua Reynolds, when he said: “The habit of contemplating and brooding over the ideas of great geniuses, until you find yourself warmed by the contact, is the sure method of an artist-like mind.”

Isn’t there something here to explain why geniuses are so often recognized only after they’re dead? When they are alive, they’re a menace to the second-handers. But when they are dead, their glory can be appropriated safely by these second-handers who then accept the prestige of specialists in that which their own kind would never have acknowledged while the author was there to claim his own glory. (Also: how many of these recognized geniuses are such and how many the creation of the second-handers?)

Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City.

No notes. More of Wright’s ideas. Some beautiful, a great many not clear. More about sociology than about architecture. [He speaks of] architecture as a force shaping society. (Which it isn’t.)

August 15, 1938

From a speech by Charles D. Maginnis, president of the A.I.A., at the Institute’s convention in New Orleans, April, 1938 [published in the May issue of The Architect’s World]:

It is to be remarked that the world of our youth, to the understanding of which our minds were so very painfully adjusted, is in the act of tumbling about our heads and we are largely engaged in testing the validity of the fragments in the expectation of constructing a better one. Inevitably the process is attended by violent conflict of opinion. In the political order, for instance, we had been deeply grounded in the faith that, with all its familiar inefficiencies, the democratic type of society offered the highest exercise and the most lasting satisfaction for the human spirit. We now confront a mounting philosophy based upon its complete denial. More profoundly still we had believed in the cogency of the Divine principle in civilization. A strange new world rejects it as an anemic and disturbing anachronism....

This is terribly important. Here is a man who fights modern architecture and individuality, as later quotes show, an eclectic and a second-hander par excellence. And he is precisely the type that would state and accept as a fact that “the world is tumbling about our heads.” Who told him it was tumbling? What grounds has he to believe so? Only the Red propaganda, which he has accepted promptly and readily because he thinks that that is the way the wind is blowing. He has never had any standards and is, therefore, willing to abandon what he thought to be standards, willing to abandon anything. He is willing to gather the fragments and “build a better world.” Better—with the denial of democratic rights included? This is to be stressed. It is men like Peter Keating who make men like Toohey possible; by denying standards, they are ready to accept any standards handed to them by anyone, or forced upon them. Keating will submit to Toohey as he submitted to everyone and everything else. Toohey is the type who knows how to reap the harvest of the second-handers.

After grudging, half-hearted, bromidic, meaningless compliments to modern architecture, the speaker shows what is really in his heart:

And so, in this attitude of reserve, we may welcome the stimulation of the new movement with all the challenge of its bitter rationality. That there is refreshment in it we have already noted in the clarity, vitality and independence it has brought to all design, even as we remark that, unlike Europe, we have not as yet yielded to its complete implication. Whether it hold the gift of completely alienating the past still remains to be proven. We have not yet seen the convincing evidence and it is always to be remembered that an artistic philosophy must propitiate the eye no less than the reason. This may take a little time. The human spirit has a way of finding its own satisfactions, and logic does not figure too largely in the matter.

(Note the second-hander’s invariable disparagement of logic in favor of “spirit” or “sentiment.”)

It may well be that the modem thesis is over-bold. It comes to one, for instance, that of the new materials with which its philosophy is identified, it is perhaps the single weakness of steel that, with all its thrilling capacities, it cannot make for interesting ruins. It is a point not to be overlooked, for even ruins have their eloquent and venerable importance. Always it has been architecture which has given us testimony of the ages. Someone has said: “show me the buildings of a people, and I will tell you its history.” If we are content to render our own civilization in an architecture dependent upon steel, a reasonably remote posterity can have no visual knowledge of us, which might be a pity. In this there may be hint that the historic principle of structure is not quite discredited and that walls will still be built against which our posterity may bark its shins. For it is worthy of remark that it is the walls and not the space which have so intelligently survived. Perhaps it may not be too hazardous a prediction that the great and significant buildings of the generations will be built in the future, as they have been always built, in terms of articulated and enduring masonry.

(This speaks for itself! The most priceless bit I have yet found.)

6

PLOT

After two years of working on The Fountainhead, AR was clear on the theme and characters, and had learned a great deal about architecture. But she had not yet worked out certain key elements of the plot. In particular, she did not yet have the idea for the climax of the story, i.e., Roark’s dynamiting of Cortlandt Homes and the subsequent trial. Long after the publication of The Fountainhead, she recalled her difficulties:

I had the most impossibly difficult time, and nothing in the story could be set firmly, only tentatively, until I had the climax. And that was a real mind-breaker. I needed an event which was connected with architecture, but which would put Roark in the position of real danger and of antagonizing the whole of society. And, incidentally, I found that dramatizing events of an architect’s career is enormously difficult, because the art itself is physical, it doesn’t deal with people. All the conflicts have to be ideologically tied to the building, but they are not about the building as such. A lawyer or a doctor would be much easier to dramatize. And I remember cursing the profession for that reason....

It was while working in the office of E. J. Kahn that Ayn Rand thought of her dramatic climax. Kahn mentioned to her one morning that the biggest technical problem in architecture was the design of low-rent housing projects. That day, while eating lunch in a nearby cafe, she arrived at the idea of Roark designing and dynamiting Cortlandt Homes. She had solved the most difficult problem in planning the book—she finally had the essential element of the plot. The following notes begin in March of 1938, shortly after this breakthrough, at about the time that she quit her job with Kahn.

Approximately two-thirds of her notes from this last pre-writing period are presented here. I have omitted outlines that are repetitive or that merely describe events as they happen in the published novel.

March 8, 1938

Tentative Plan

Introduction: Roark’s ambition, setting him against society. Graduation, with flashback to school days; work as draftsman, one definite break with boss. 1923

First commission and own office: society reacts-his first tragic failure. 1926

Poverty-work as quarryman.

(Attempt at bribe to Ecole des Beaux Arts.) 1928 [This seems to refer to an attempt to bribe Roark into submission to conventional architectural standards, by offering him some prestigious honor from the Ecole des Beaux Arts.]

Personal—meeting with Dominique.

Back in New York Commission. First critical fury. Beginning of a grudging recognition.

Personal—secret affair with Dominique.

Setbacks: The competition which Peter wins. Personal: Dominique marries Peter. The unfinished building? 1929-32

Dominique-Wynand. Their marriage. 1933

Peter’s zenith and beginning of downfall.

Roark’s rise. 1934

Wynand commissions Roark to build country home.

Roark-Wynand. Roark-Dominique. 1935

Roark-Peter: The housing project. 1936

“Ford” Building.

The crisis. Trial. Dominique-Wynand. 1937

The Wynand Building. 1938

Roark meets Dominique: 1928 (summer). He is 28, she is 25.

Their affair: 1929-30.

Dominique marries Peter: early 1931.

Dominique marries Wynand: 1933.

Wynand engages Roark to build home: 1935.

Crisis: 1937.

Roark-Dominique united: 1938 (he 38, she 35).

Outline of Roark’s architectural career. (Highlights of his important buildings and his worst tragedies.)

Outline of Peter’s career. (Highlights of his buildings and rise. Highlights of his downfall.)

The affair of Roark-Dominique. Their break.

Personal life: Peter-Dominique.

Personal life: Wynand-Dominique.

The change which forces Dominique back to Roark.

The relationship: Roark-Wynand.

The career and life of Toohey.

The climax-Roark’s crime and trial.

The climaxes and points to build to:

Part I: That Roark fails and Peter wins.

Part II: That Roark loses to Toohey. The burden of Peter’s glory.

Part III: That Roark overcomes Toohey. Beginning of Peter’s downfall.

Part IV: That Roark overcomes everyone. Peter’s downfall.

Next points:

Roark’s first women and his personal life up to Dominique—all of first part.

Roark’s women after Dominique’s marriage to Peter.

Toohey’s trick against Roark. (Involve Dominique, Wynand’s editor, the young millionaire, Toohey’s whole technique and his definite

advancement with the Wynand papers.)

Roark’s friends.

Roark’s temptation? Is there or is there not a situation for him? Not.

Roark-Dominique: what finally brings them together?

For Roark-Dominique lawsuit:

What would make Roark sue?

What can Toohey do to bring it about and to make Dominique say it?

What advantage results for Toohey, other than Dominique being fired?

What damage to Roark?

Precisely what makes Toohey want Dominique to be fired?

Toohey’s technique and illustration of his whole character?

1938

To think over.

Trouble for Dominique (early)—?

Wynand’s sadism (luxury for people out of the gutter)—?

Wynand’s one big attempt against Roark. (Roark’s heroic reaction,

Wynand’s turning point toward Roark and all things.)

Roark’s activity about securing jobs.

Roark’s activity about his kind of joy in life. (?) (Greatest part of book to last part and climax.)

Influence of Roark on all who come in contact with him. Roark brings out either the worst or the best in people. (The worst—Toohey. The best—Wynand.) Think this over in connection with every point in the outline of Roark’s career.

In construction: first—philosophy, second—architecture.

Roark-Wynand, Roark-Dominique, Roark-Toohey, Roark-Peter: In these [relations], the things which happen to these people affect Roark or vice versa. But he motivates them and all the major events of their lives.

On what occasions can Roark demonstrate his utter anti-socialness? Opportunities for second-handedness:

professional—obedience to opinions of others, the end becomes the means, existence only in the eyes of others, nepotism;

personal—fear of public opinion, conventions and prejudices, sacrifice of one’s real self to others.

(Try to think out a type and a dramatic occasion for each.)

Roark’s situations come from his peculiar attitude and his disregard of all that would constitute tragedy to average people. As far as the plot and physical body of the novel is concerned, all the main events are motivated by the second-hand psychology (or Roark as its opposite).

The last part of the book is mainly Roark-Wynand. Consequently, the rest is preparation for it which is resolved in the main climax. This is: Dominique, Peter, Toohey. Concentrate on this for first part—building toward last.

(What if Roark is brought to Wynand, not through a house to build, but by the editor, as a rescue, as [Wynand‘s] greatest prey?) [This sentence was crossed out.]

March 31, 1938

Roark and Wynand

What is Wynand’s stage when he meets Roark?

Wynand is at the height of his success—and sick of it. He has married Dominique. His love for her is getting to a stage of mania—the despair of holding on to one thing in which he sees salvation and self-respect. One thing which he really wants—and now he wants her with all the passion of every other “wish he might have had.” His bitterness about his kind of life is growing steadily, but vaguely, obscurely, hidden. He denies it to himself, evades it, hides from it behind Dominique. He has not missed and betrayed everything, he tells himself, he has Dominique. But precisely for that very reason, one serious devotion in his life leads him to feel more strongly that which he has missed; it makes him realize—subconsciously, against his will—everything that he has betrayed.

Consequently, his attitude to Dominique is a feverish mixture of exaggerated joy and involuntary, exaggerated despair. This last is rarer. But there are sudden moments, like explosions, like subterranean grumblings of the earthquake to come, when he is madly bitter, unhappy at her—without reason. These are the first signs of the man breaking up. No one notices it except the editor [Alvah Scarret], who does not like it.

His attitude toward men around him is the same strange mixture, somewhat reversed; his spurts of sadism intensified, sometimes out of all proportion, to the limits of the permissible. He has never been as bitter toward men. He is getting worse, people say. The fact is that he is getting better—and does not know it, and does not want to know it. He now has strange moments of relaxation in his taunting of men, moments of dead calm, a hopeless, weary calm that [suggests] his greatest danger—indifference. Even this pastime no longer interests him. He is beginning to realize—subconsciously, for he would not yet admit it to himself—that even this means nothing, that it proves nothing and redeems nothing. This subconscious conclusion terrifies him, drives him to excesses. But it will take Roark to make him admit the conclusion in so many words. The editor, wise in his own way and in his unerring second-hander’s instinct, sees and recognizes the danger signs. He knows the coming loss to the second-handers’ camp of a great ally who has never really belonged to it. Consequently, Wynand’s excesses worry him less than his occasional terrifying indifference. Once, when Wynand refuses to act true to form, the editor goads him to it desperately.

This is the groundwork for Roark’s entrance into Wynand’s life.

What is Roark at the time?

This is the definite beginning of Roark’s final [triumph]. Not much money as yet, but much fame. Notoriety, rather, of the resentful kind. Complete self-assurance. He knows he has won. His indifference to people can afford now to be tinged with the slightest pity. There is a glow about him—of a great battle won. His calm is a challenge to others. His honesty—arrogance.

How does Roark take Wynand?

He sees through him at once. He sees more than the editor, more than Wynand himself. He is amused, at first; then soon begins to pity him, with a kind pity that respects, not insults. Ends by liking him. (One occasion of Roark’s gesture of faith in Wynand-either before or after Wynand’s attempt against him.)

How does Wynand take Roark?

Wynand is fascinated, at first. Completely and in spite of himself. Or rather, he does not fight against it, does not even analyze it. It is a complete, spontaneous emotion, so rare in him. He surrenders to it simply, naturally, and happily. He knows only that here is a man whom he really likes—which has never happened to Wynand before—a man to whom he likes to talk, simply, directly, sincerely. This after the first few taunts—and quite involuntary, unpremeditated. Then he realizes—with a little frightened start—that he actually respects the man. It is an entirely new feeling for Wynand; he enjoys it with an interested curiosity. So much for the beginning.

April 4, 1938

Then Wynand realizes the trap into which he has fallen—too late. He has one spurt of ferocious hatred against Roark, a last gesture of self-defense. Roark wins—which only makes Wynand like him more. (This may be the point where Wynand suddenly cancels the construction of his country home—for no apparent reason at all, only to take it up again shortly afterwards, knowing that nothing will make him cancel his house or lose Roark.) Perfunctorily, almost as a matter of conscientiousness, Wynand goes through a few “temptations” of Roark—such as offering him huge real estate projects if he surrenders his ideals. It does not work. Not at all. Roark does not even hesitate for a moment, makes no great show of heroism and sacrifice in refusing. He refuses simply and immediately, as a man who does not ever see two, but only one course open to him. He does not even give Wynand the satisfaction of being indignant. If anything, he is slightly amused. He sees through Wynand’s game—the first victim to do so. To the editor’s terror, Wynand—instead of being furious at his defeat—is openly delighted. Openly even to himself. Not to Roark, of course, but openly enough for the editor to see it and for Wynand himself to realize it fully, to admit it to himself. In any future, lesser attempts, Wynand is now anxious for Roark to defeat him. Roark does.

And the great Gail Wynand comes to a point where Roark becomes the most precious thing in his life. Above Dominique, though Wynand does not admit it. Roark becomes his revenge against society, against that mob whom Roark is defying and to whom Wynand has surrendered. Wynand, at this stage, does not yet admit this surrender to himself, but he knows it already subconsciously, hence all his vague anguish, his peculiar spiritual hysteria. The full, conscious knowledge of it will come later, when he is forced to betray Roark.

At the moment, Roark becomes an obsession to him. In the most spiritual sense only, without the slightest possibility of the merest hint of sexual perversion, Wynand is actually in love with Roark. There are no definite events, no concrete speeches in which this is displayed. It is there, nevertheless. It is an instance of Wynand’s masochism, of which he has quite a taint. The torture of loving a man whom in many other ways he hates appeals to him. He hates him for everything that Roark is and he, Wynand, isn’t. He hates him as a challenge to his whole life, as the embodiment of his conscience. He loves him for these very reasons. Unrealized, there is in Wynand’s mind a twisted feeling of atonement in his love for Roark—his worst enemy. He is punishing himself for what he has done—by bowing before what he should have done. The bowing hurts him. He enjoys it for that. By being hurt—at this late date—he thinks he is atoning for the many hurts he has avoided: he is suffering for an ideal—for the first and last time in his life. As a gesture to all the ideals he should have, but did not, suffer for.

He now has two centers in his existence—Dominique as a joy he wished and obtained, Roark as a suffering he chose and accepted. He loses both at the same blow.

How he takes Roark’s love for Dominique is another great point to be considered at length separately.

Another important second-hander: The kind that does not form opinions because others hold them, but because they know instinctively this is what others will hold (e.g., Toohey, the editor). Toohey approves of a book, not because it is already popular, but because he knows unerringly that it will be popular. The barometers of the mob. The deadliest kind of second-handers.

Plan of the Last Part

Roark blows up the housing project.

His arrest. Wynand offers help immediately. (“I know. I understand. I admire. My entire resources at your service in your coming fight. G. W.”) Old lawyer comes out of retirement to take the case. Wynand supplies Roark’s bail.

Fury of indignation in the press all over the country. Roark maintains complete silence—no explanations given. Wynand papers come out alone to defend Roark. (Incident of woman who wants house by Roark.)

Toohey urges his union to strike against the “Ford” building. He does not hope or intend to win. Just a gesture to “finish” Roark. Wynand’s greatest crusade. His insane determination. The editor’s fight with him. Dominique’s threat-promise. (“I will love you if you stand by him. You don’t know what you’ll lose—if you don’t.”)

Utter failure of the Wynand papers. Boycott against them on a grand, general scale. His board of directors and the editor deliver an ultimatum. Wynand surrenders. His papers come out against Roark.

Wynand’s own, silent tragedy. He sees his second-hand power for what it is, fully, clearly and completely. He knows now the failure of his whole life. (Incident with housewife buying newspaper.)

Wynand-Roark. Wynand begs him to escape and jump bail. Roark refuses.

Dominique’s decision to escape with Roark the day before the trial. She tells him that she loves him. Begs him to escape and to continue his work abroad. She will pay Wynand his bail. She is “buying him from the State of New York.” Roark agrees.

Their escape [the night before the trial] to her country home (which he built). Old servants who see them there. Their first night together after many years.

Day of trial. Wynand is in Washington trying to use “pull” to save Roark. Roark does not appear. Alarm sent out for him.

That night. Dominique has arranged for private plane. Drives with Roark to the airfield. Mails letters to Wynand on the way. Fire in the “Ford” building—set by the strikers. Roark sees it on the way [to the airfield], rushes to building in spite of her protests. The situation of the unconnected water tank. Roark rushes up through the flames to save the building. Dominique tries to stop him. She falls down after trying to hold the elevator. Looks up into a battery of cameras.

Roark’s fight against the fire on his way up. He connects the tank and saves the building. Does not even care or notice when he is arrested. [Note the similarity here to her earlier story, The Skyscraper.]

Next morning. Wynand flies back to Washington in private plane. He knows nothing of the events of the night before. Drives to office from landing field. Sees extras in street, pays no attention. Peculiar reception of his office staff. He bawls them out for “missing a scoop.” They run away from him. The editor rushes into his office. “I told you so!” If he means Roark’s escape, Wynand laughs, why, he is delighted. The editor hands him a copy of a rival paper with the picture of Dominique in the mud, on the front page. The whole story of the fire is there, plus the information already gathered by the police about Roark and Dominique spending the night together at her country home. The editor is frantic as to their policy in this crisis. Wynand doesn’t even hear him. Wynand is quiet, gentle, the gentleness of a man who is not alive any more. He asks only where Dominique is, and hearing that she is at home, leaves the office, ignoring the editor’s hysterical questions.

Wynand-Dominique. When he comes home, he learns that she has just returned from the jail hospital (where Roark is) and that she is waiting to see him, Wynand. Their scene. He tries desperately to prevent her from saying one thing which he dreads. He starts by telling her that if she says the story isn’t true, it won’t be true; his great power will make it untrue. He begs her, in other words, to deny it. It’s true, she tells him. She laughs: his great power, what did it do for Roark? Wynand then talks hysterically, as if putting words into her mouth, telling himself what he has not heard from her, but wants to hear: that it is only an affair, he doesn’t mind, he was expecting it sooner or later, they will go abroad and forget it all. There are not reproaches from him, no anger, no thought of giving her up. Only a desperate plea for her not to leave him.

She tells him that she loves Roark. When she says it, she realizes that that is what he had been dreading. She expects an explosion. She defies him. She tells him everything and how much Roark really is to her. There is no explosion from him. No reaction. No words, after his recent outburst of them. He only mutters dully that if she wants a divorce, he’ll let her divorce him. He leaves the room. Her letter and check of the day before arrive.... The editor phones, begging frantically for instructions on their policy. Wynand tells him to do anything he pleases. The editor holds him to that, makes him repeat it. Wynand does not care.

Next morning. After a sleepless night, the full force of the blow has come to Wynand. It is his last outburst of emotion. He goes to Dominique’s room, begs her, threatens her, offers her anything to remain with him; she can have all the lovers she wants, but not that one! She can even leave him, Wynand, if she insists, and go with any other man, but not Roark. Anything, but not Roark! She is kind to Wynand this time; she understands, she is sorry for him. She lets him see that it is hopeless; that she will live or die for Roark. She knows that she and Wynand have both found the same thing in Roark; only it is too late for Wynand....

She is now leaving to go to the trial. (She can’t do that! he objects. He can‘t, she answers, but she can. She is not the Wynand papers.) And before leaving she tells him that there is not much that he can do now, anyway, about their marriage: she hands him a copy of his own paper, where, on the front page, is a statement signed “Gail Wynand,” denouncing Dominique, insulting her, putting all blame on her, announcing to the world that he is going to divorce her. Wynand is unable to speak. Dominique can now feel pity for him. “Don’t, Gail. I understand. I know who wrote it. Don’t blame him too much. He had to. You had to.” She leaves for the trial.

The trial. Roark enters, his head bandaged, his left arm in a sling. He is greeted by cheers, applause and hisses. The public sentiment is now divided about him. The judge threatens to clear the court, “if they don’t remember that it is a courtroom, not a news-reel theater.” The photographers have a swell time photographing Dominique as she enters. She pays no attention. She sees no one but Roark.

The progress of the trial. The prosecution has an army of witnesses. (Perhaps even Dominique—to supply the motive as Roark’s hatred for Peter.) The defense tactics—“no questions.” No cross-examination whatever, not even of Peter, who has some terrible moments on the stand and behaves like a piece of pulp. Peter, however, does not confess the truth and is not asked to.

Wynand does appear in the courtroom—once. Thereafter, the editor prevents it. When the defense’s turn comes, the old lawyer has but one witness to call—Howard Roark. After the first formalities of name, profession, etc., the lawyer asks: “Mr. Roark, what connection did you have with the project known as [Cortlandt Homes]?” Roark answers, very quietly: “I designed it.” [Then comes] the whole story of the contract with Peter. The contract is introduced in evidence. Before Peter can be warned by the prosecution or collect his wits, he has admitted his signature and the truth of the story. The defense rests.

The old lawyer’s closing speech—summation of what Roark is, of his standards, of his value to mankind. No plea for pity. No apology. A quiet defiance. A “This-is-what-he-is-now-dare-to-convict-him,-if you-can” feeling. The jury retires to deliberate.

Jury out all evening and night. Possible scene of Roark, Dominique, old lawyer, some others waiting together for verdict. Roark talks—of everything but the jury and trial. The only time he can be poetic, almost tender(?).

Next morning. The verdict: “Not guilty. ” The judge furious. It comes out that the first ballot was eleven ... guilty to one ... not guilty. The one swung the eleven. (Plant this one man earlier, his reasons, his psychology.) Dominique leaves courtroom as soon as verdict is rendered. She does not approach Roark. “Home and to bed!” the old lawyer orders him. “To the Ford building!” orders Roark.

Ovation of workers at the Ford building. (They have been listening on the radio to the verdict.) Then at Roark’s office: The one “capitalist” on the housing project has announced that he is buying it from the state and will have Roark do it as it was intended. Other commissions—from sensation seekers....

Then Roark comes home. Dominique is waiting for him there. Their one real, complete love scene. She will go away, not to disturb him now when his work needs him; also to “find herself”—adjust herself to her new life. Then she will come back. They will be together forever.

The Wynand papers have been doing beautifully during the trial. Circulation is boosted by a “succes de scandale.” Everyone reads the Wynand papers to see how they “take it.” The editor takes advantage of it. He prints hints, double-meanings, “between-the-lines” allusions, things that will be quoted and discussed and gloated over; he builds up Wynand as a moral, outraged man. He is delighted with and boasts to Wynand (without noticing Wynand’s horror) about the tons of fan mail arriving for Wynand, letters of sympathy and advice from good housewives, proposals of marriage from spinsters who promise not to “treat him that way” and to “make him forget.” And Dominique, whom Wynand had tried so desperately to keep from the mob, whose pictures were never allowed in the press, is now splashed across every front page in the country, including the Wynand papers. (Incident with paper in the gutter.) When a political event occurs that is in line with the Wynand papers’ policy and throws a great deal of sympathy to them, when a noted gossip columnist decides to join the Wynand papers, the editor’s victory is complete. The Wynand papers are back. The editor even goes so far as to say before Wynand that the whole affair was a swell stunt for them, after all.

Wynand takes it all as in a daze, with the greatest indifference possible. He lets it be done. He does not even wince often. Dominique leaves for Europe. Wynand divorces her—in a short, horrible scene in which he repudiates her publicly. It is Wynand’s greatest agony. He goes through it like an automaton. He is led by the editor completely. He has not gathered the pieces of his spirit enough to act for himself.

Peter’s complete downfall. Short scene of his accepting an inferior commission, a home in the “Greek” style (“like his library”).

Toohey’s defeat and new plans, grander than ever.

Very shortly after the divorce, the question of the Wynand Building comes up. The time is considered “just right” in view of “the triumph.” The board of directors is in session to decide on the architectural competition for “the greatest building in the world.” This is Wynand’s last gesture. All that he has gathered of his spirit now goes into this—as a challenge to that new triumph which he hates. He rises. “Gentlemen, there will be no contest. I have chosen the architect who will do the Wynand Building. His name is Howard Roark.” Dead silence. The sole reaction is one choked hiccough from some unimportant little guy. Wynand looks at the stunned faces, pouncing on them ferociously: “Well? Has no one here anything to say? I take it that you approve of my choice, gentlemen?” In the silence, the editor gasps: “You’re mad, Gail!” Wynand whirls on him: “Why? Because he’s sleeping with my wife? Because I hate him more than any man living? And because he alone can give us the greatest building in the world? ... The matter is settled, gentlemen. I wish you a good day.” He leaves the conference room.

Nothing can sway Wynand in this, his last, his only real decision. To the frantic pleas of the editor, he answers only that he does not give a damn any more about “his public” and “his papers.” He has enough to live on. He doesn’t care whether the papers go on or fail. He has no heirs to leave them to. The public will accept it—he doesn’t care; the public won’t accept it—he cares less. But he will have this one thing out of his life, when he has lost all the rest; one thing that he wants.

Roark is informed. He is called to Wynand’s office. He comes. Wynand meets him alone in his office, coldly, formally. There is no allusion to anything but the building. Wynand informs him briefly, generally of the requirements, the kind of building he wants from the angle of utility, its purpose. The rest is up to Roark. He will have an unlimited budget. There will be no orders given by anyone but him. He is to design and build it as he pleases. It is to be the greatest building in the world. He does not even have to submit his design for approval; it is approved in advance. If Roark accepts the job, he will find the contracts ready in the outer office; Wynand has signed them; all Roark has to do is to sign. Roark accepts. He is as calm, as cold, as unsur prised as is Wynand.

Then Wynand says, with a little different note in his voice: “I do not wish ever to see you again. I do not wish to speak to you. You will find my manager ready at any time for any orders you may want to give. I do not have to see you.” His hatred, almost his insult, is apparent. Roark agrees calmly. Then, without looking at him, Wynand says softly what that building had been intended to be and mean, how he had planned for it through the years, the crowning glory, the symbol of his life. He looks at Roark suddenly. He adds: “I have nothing to crown now, nothing to celebrate. I have nothing to go into that building—except what you’ll put into it.” He rises. His greatest moment. The sum and the summit of his life. Everything he has is in the words: “Build it as a monument to that spirit which is yours ... and ... could have been mine.”

About eight months later (less, if possible). Dominique returns from Europe. She has not written to Roark of her return. She goes to his office-he is at the Wynand Building. She goes to building. The steel skeleton is up. She stands looking at it. Then she notices a thing which makes her tremble suddenly and lean against a wall. She looks at the street, at the people around her. She feels suddenly the greatest of all events, the greatest of all triumphs, the victory of all the “great unsung” over all the filth of the pavements and those upon them; she sees all of society in a flash—and what it means; she sees all those whom it has crushed and passed by—and their vindication. She has seen a small, dirty tin plate nailed to the scaffolding of the Wynand Building:

“Howard Roark, Architect”

She goes into the building. She is told that Roark is above, on top of the building. She takes an open freight elevator to go up. As it begins to rise slowly, we rise with her above the pavements, above the shops, the theaters, the houses, the church spires, above all that men do and are. (The writing accelerates here with the growing speed of the elevator as it rises.) She is above everything, with nothing but the sky and the distant ocean rising on the horizon. Then she sees, alone, tall, erect against the sky, Howard Roark on the top of the building, his red hair flying in the wind.

April 25, 1938

I. 1922-1928: Peter Keating (6 years)

From graduation to Roark’s failure. The competition which Peter wins and his definite establishment. This is Peter’s story. II. 1928-1931: Ellsworth M. Toohey (3 years)

From quarry to start of summer resort project. The affair of Roark-Dominique. Dominique marries Peter. Roark-Toohey. This is Toohey’s story. III. 1931-1935: Gail Wynand (4 years)

No relations between Roark-Dominique. Roark’s slow rise. The summer resort project’s “J‘accuse” [in reference to the discovery of the fraudulent investment scheme]. Dominique marries Wynand. Peter’s problems and beginning of downfall (the Exposition). Wynand’s story. IV. 1935-1938: Howard Roark (3 years)

Roark’s commission for the Wynand Country House. Dominique’s regeneration. The housing project. The Ford Building. The trial. The Wynand Building. Roark’s story.

May 15, 1938

Roark and Toohey as the two poles of good and evil.

Everything that happens to the others in the book is according to the principles either of Roark or of Toohey. These principles are illustrated by the actions of the two men. In their relations to these two, and in the influence of these two, the [other] characters play out the drama which illustrates the two life-principles.

The others are: Dominique, Peter, Wynand.

Dominique: The Toohey principles have forced her into a bitter cynicism about all life. She is born above these principles, and not ready as yet for those of Roark, because nothing in life has ever taught her the Roark philosophy. Her story is the struggle against the Toohey principle to win through to Roark.

Wynand: He has lived according to Toohey all his life and has never believed in it. He is only too ready for Roark and knows it the moment he meets him. His story is the conscious struggle against the Roark principle, only to surrender to it in the end.

Peter: Unfit for any principle. The clay with which Toohey builds. He could have, perhaps, achieved a shadow of self-vindication with Roark. He reaches the bottom of waste and tragedy with Toohey.

Roark: integrity, loyalty to yourself.

Toohey: exist for, by and through others.

Roark brings out and encourages every form of truth to self. Toohey destroys every vestige of it, leaving about him a sterile desert.

June 15, 1938

First Draft of Chapter Plan Part I: Peter Keating

I

Spring, 1922. Howard Roark alone in the mountains. His return to the city. The interview with the principal about his being expelled.

II

Same day. Peter Keating at the commencement celebration.

III

Same evening. Peter comes home. Vesta Dunning. Roark’s plan for their life together in New York.

IV

In New York: the new household. Peter’s introduction into Francon’s office. Roark-old master [Henry Cameron]: first meeting, hired.

V

One week later. Roark’s first work for old master. Scene where Roark is fired—and their first real understanding. At home: Vesta-Roark. Peter.

VI

Fall, 1922. Peter’s first accomplishments in the Francon office—professional and personal. The affair: Roark-Vesta.

VII

Winter, 1922-23. Roark’s struggle with old master. Peter’s loves. The beginning of Vesta’s conflict with Roark.

VIII

Winter, 1923-24. Peter has moved out. Peter’s rise with Francon. Old master gives up.

IX

Peter brings Roark to Francon’s office. The clashes. Mike.

X

Winter, 1925. Roark fired. Break with Vesta.

XI

Beaux Arts bribe. Roark in new job.

XII

Peter sees Dominique in Francon’s office.

XIII

Spring, 1926. Roark gets his first commission from the critic [Austen Heller, whom she refers to as “Mencken ” in one cryptic note from this period]. Peters meets Dominique.

XIV

Summer, 1926. Peter’s attempts at romance with Dominique. Critic’s home finished. Public reaction—or lack of it.

XV

Winter, 1926-27. Other commissions for Roark. His struggle. His second mistress [Heddy Adler, who was later cut from the novel]. The competition for the library.

XVI

Summer, 1927. Roark’s struggle.

XVII

Winter, 1928. Roark’s downfall. Staking all on one commission. He refuses his mistress’ proposal. Peter-Dominique, their kiss, her indifference. Peter beginning to dislike her definitely.

XVIII

Spring, 1928. Peter wins the competition. Roark refuses to take commission he was counting on. Roark leaves for Connecticut. The party celebrating Peter’s partnership in Francon’s firm.

[AR made similar outlines for the rest of the book. I have included here only those descriptions in which AR makes a comment of special interest or mentions an event that did not occur in the novel.]

[Part II: Ellsworth Toohey]

V

Toohey—past, present, future. Toohey and the Wynand paper. Dominique-Toohey, Peter-Toohey. [Note added later:] Incident about Roark’s building—“Independent as an insult, isn’t it?” [...]

IX

Summer, 1929. Escape of contractor for Unfinished Symphony. Toohey-Dominique. She prints the libel.

X

Lawsuit and love affair. Roark-Dominique.

XI

Fall, 1929. Roark wins the suit. That night. Next day—Symphony stopped. A few days later—Dominique marries Peter. Her wedding night with Roark. Next morning—she tells him. Their break. [...]

XVI

Fall, 1930. Roark loses [the Stoddard Temple] lawsuit and everything. Sculptor’s [Steven Mallory‘s] suicide—“for Roark’s sake.” Roark goes to live in Unfinished Symphony. Toohey and the Wynand Settlement project. Plans for Peter, and for Dominique to meet Wynand. Temple altered by Peter. Scene of Roark on steps of Temple, at night, in the snow, his hat off, his hands patting the steps. Scene: Roark-Toohey.

Part III: Gail Wynand

III

Roark’s [commission for] the nightclub. Roark living in Symphony. Meeting with young writer. [...]

VIII

Spring, 1931. Young writer’s death. Roark leaves for summer [resort] project. Peter and the Wynand Settlement. Peter-Toohey. [...]

XII

Dominique’s reactions to Roark’s mistresses. Dominique-Wynand.

XIII

Spring, 1933. Opening of summer resort. Great success. Panic of promoters. Roark and mistress at opening. Dominique there alone.

XIV

The flood. Night. Next morning. [AR’s original idea was that Monadnock Valley was subject to periodic flooding, and the promoters had counted on the summer resort being destroyed by a flood. Their plan fails because Roark designs the resort such that it can withstand the floods.] [...]

Part IV: Howard Roark

VI

Peter marries blonde. Scene: Toohey-niece.

VII

Summer. On the construction site. Roark-Dominique. Roark-Wynand encounter. One furious spurt of Wynand’s hatred for Roark. Wynand cancels the construction. [...]

[The events after Roark dynamites Cortlandt Homes are the same as those described in her “Plan for the Last Part” written on April 4.]

June 21, 1938

Chapter III

Francon’s office. Keating arrives for work—a little before 9 a.m. The entrance lobby of the office. The reception clerk. The employment manager. The drafting rooms. The head draftsman. Keating shown his locker, told a few brief instructions, put to work.

Keating tracing blue-prints. First nervousness. Then looking about, loses all fear of the men, knows he is better.

The great activity. Looks at the city. “It comes from here.”

Keating and the drawing. “Francon? No, so-and-so did it.”

The afternoon. Keating sent to Francon. Francon with a slight hangover. His brief talk with Keating about his, Francon‘s, duties. Leaving, Keating sees woman client in reception room.

Cameron’s past.

Roark comes to Cameron’s office. The office (overlooking one of Cameron’s buildings).

The interview. Roark ordered to come to work tomorrow.

Cameron’s reaction.

Roark looking at the streets.

Roark comes home. Vesta doing Joan D‘Arc. Roark-Vesta. His interest. Her reverent enthusiasm. Peter comes home. She changes, does a fool imitation. The dinner she has prepared.

Cameron—the austerity, the devotion, the tragedy.

Francon—big business (show, pompousness, kowtowing to clients, utter indifference to the reality of the work).

June 25, 1938

Chapter I

Roark in the mountains—his body, the earth around him, the complete ecstasy of the complete man, his thoughts on architecture and the material around him (nature as his clay to mold as he pleases). The swim. The fact that he has been expelled.

Roark on his way home: the interreaction of Roark and others around him.

Roark home. Mrs. Keating. First reference to Peter. Mrs. Keating’s quite obvious joy at Roark’s expulsion and her pride in Peter, her “sweetness” and her ferocious ambition, her hatred for Roark (and for every other student at the Institute). She tells Roark of Dean’s call.

Roark on his way up. Incident with Vesta’s closed door and her rebuff to him.

Roark in his room—his drawings. He forgets call. Mrs. Keating reminds him. He goes.

Interview between Roark-Dean. Establish why he’s been expelled. Lay a brief and clear foundation for the two basic opinions on architecture—Roark’s and the eclectics‘. The Dean’s mention of Cameron; Roark’s reaction. Roark’s background—where he came from, that he has worked as building constructor during his way through Institute. No friends, no fraternities. Roark’s utter, shattering indifference. “Your opinion, Mr. Roark, is not the most important thing that counts.” “It is the only thing.”

As Roark leaves, he is distracted by the stone in the Institute building—his thought as to what he would do with it.

[AR elaborates the above in the following notes.]

Rocks like a fortress wall, enclosing everything, a circle, a planet or world of its own. Rocks like a frozen explosion—a struggle, the harmony of conflict, the hard unity not of peaceful balance, but of opposite forces holding one another in check. Sharp angles, like clenched muscles, deep gashes like wounds worn as decorations, a million sparks in the granite, the rock flaming, a hard luster, the polish of heat, as if the air were a liquid, so dry that the stones seem wet with sunrays.

A few tufts of green—a luminous green tumbling in the wind, like green bonfires burning on the fuel of granite. One tree—as a banner, victorious over the rock, rising to proclaim its place in this world of stone. [This last sentence was crossed out.]

The lake—an enclosed canyon, quiet, guarded, mysterious. Cold, obviously cold even in its fire; in spite of it or because of it. Subterranean spring. No bottom. [The preceding three sentences were crossed out.]

A thin silver film cutting, midway, the walls of granite. A luminous bowl—lighting the sky. The sky—clear, blue with nothing, not a single cloud to give it limit or reality—as a mirror for the lake. The rocks continue into the depth and then there is the sky. So that the whole place seems suspended in space, with the sky below and above it, an island floating on nothing, a circle, a coral reef of the sky, anchored only by the two feet of the man on the rock.

The place is wild, untouched, no trace of the existence of men.

His laughter as the meaning of the earth around him, as its song, as the release of its tension. Triumphant, the complete ecstasy. (See Nietzsche about laughter.) [Elsewhere in her notes, AR copied the following from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “O my brethren, I heard a laughter which was no human laughter—and now gnaweth a thirst at me, a longing that is never allayed. My longing for that laughter gnaweth at me: oh, how can I still endure to live! And how could I endure to die at present! ”]

It’s the lines of his body that give meaning to the struggle around him, it’s the struggle known and possible to his muscles, to his veins, to the thin lines beating under his skin.

The township of Stanton began with a dump. Billboards advertising soap and gasoline. A church—carpenter Gothic with spire à la Wren. Streets—all alike and all awful. Consumptive, public, tight little houses, “fancy” architecture with the paint peeling. Garbage can. Diapers on a line. A pampered dog on a cushion. A man’s behind—planting nasturtiums. A woman sprawled, legs spread apart, on a porch. A woman pushing a perambulator and wiping the sweat off with the back of her hand.

Roark amidst it. Everyone looks at his hair. Most people turn away too quickly. Some stare with a blind, nameless, instinctive hatred. All uncomfortable. The alien. What had been joy in him is now arrogance, what had been strength is now a challenge, what had been freedom is a nameless threat. As to him—he sees no one. He walks, as he swam, straight to a given point. For him the street is empty. He could have walked there naked without concern.

Main square—shops about a lawn, a movie theater in competition with the stock theater. Signs in shop windows welcoming the “Class of ‘22,” which is graduating today. He turns off into a side street at the end of which, on a knoll, stands the house of Mrs. Keating over a green ravine.

Roark versus the eclectics. (“Have you thought of clients?” “Yes, I have thought of clients. I do not presume to consider myself the only man of good taste in the world.”) Mention of Cameron.

Lead up to his utter selfishness. Dean mentions that he has no friends, has refused to join fraternities. “Won’t you reconsider? You have worked hard for your education.” (Sketch his past.) “No, I won’t reconsider.” Whom to notify? No one. No parents. No guardians. Who was his father? He has no one now.

“We have decided. I believe, as was stated at this morning’s meeting, that the profession is not for you. You’re giving it up, aren’t you?”

“Oh, no. I’m just beginning.”

“Who’ll give you work?”

“I believe I know someone who will.”

Dean’s anger. “You are dangerous.” End of interview.

(“I haven’t the time to waste on exercises in calligraphy, copying. I’m here to learn. When I’m given a project, its only value to me is to learn to solve it as I would solve a real one. I did them the way I’ll build them.”)

The Eclectics

Artistically

Everything beautiful in architecture has been done already. We cannot improve, we can only try to repeat.

There is something good in every style. We can only choose from the great masters. Who are we to improve upon them? Of course, we must make proper adaptations to meet modern conditions.

That is tradition. We cannot break with tradition. It is our sacred heritage. Nothing worthwhile is invented by one man in architecture. The proper creative process is a long, slow, gradual, collective one, in which each man adds his little bit to what has gone on before. This is the splendid march of civilization. And will always be so. The modernists? A passing mode, a freak fury of exhibitionists trying to attract attention. Look at Cameron.

Sociologically

An architect is not an end in himself. He is only a small part of a social unit. He does not build to please himself. Cooperation is the key word to the modern world and to architecture particularly. Furthermore, the designing and artistic inspiration is only a small part of an architect’s equipment. He must also be a business man and a diplomat. Above all, he must consider the client. The Client, above all. It’s his cash that pays for the luxury of your artistic inspirations, isn’t it? He’s the one to live in the house. Who are you to tell him what he must live in? You’re only an employee, like his secretary, his chauffeur and his cook. You are only to execute his desire, in the best manner you are able and give it the proper artistic form.

Roark

Artistically

Why do you think the Greek style beautiful? Just because your grandfather did and told you so, and his grandfather, and millions before him?

I am a man. I choose a work to do. I must do the very best possible to me. I am the sole judge of that best. If I give up that right of valuing, I might as well give up the right to all thought. If I think, I value. I alone. How do I know who is right among the others? I can only judge of what is right to me, for me.

Times have changed. New means, new materials. We put up awful imitations, we’re uncomfortable, wasteful, dirty. Why?

Architecture—the most important of the arts. Changing the face of nature, man’s background, that against which his whole life is played. In no other art are there set standards. The artist works as he alone pleases. Why not, then, in architecture? [AR’s formulations here are open to a subjectivist interpretation; see The Romantic Manifesto for her defense of the objectivity of esthetic standards.]

Form follows function. Consider the reality of what you’re doing.

Sociologically

The people do not know what they want. There is no such thing as the spirit of a people. [Someone must] tell the people what they want. There are men born to tell and men born to accept. That is cooperation. I do not build for a client. He only [offers] a problem for me to solve. I am glad to have a client so that I may build. Not vice versa. The client is my means, not my end. The building is the end.

7

NOTES WHILE WRITING

AR began writing The Fountainhead on June 26, 1938. She finished four and a half years later, on December 31, 1942. The writing went slowly at first, in part because of the difficulty of the task, and in part because financial troubles caused her to interrupt the work In 1939, she wrote two plays: an adaptation of We the Living (entitled The Unconquered) and a philosophical murder mystery, Think Twice (published in The Early Ayn Rand). In 1941, she took a job as a reader for Paramount Pictures. Her (unpaid) campaign work for Wendell Willkie in the 1940 presidential election was another major interruption. As a result, nearly two-thirds of the novel was still unwritten when she signed a contract with a publisher (Bobbs-Merrill) in December 1941. She had to write at a furious pace to complete the novel by the agreed-upon deadline of January 1, 1943.

The above history is reflected in the present chapter. Whereas Part I involved detailed analyses in her journal, there are comparatively few notes that pertain to specific scenes in the last two-thirds of the novel. By the time these scenes were written, of course, her ideas were clear and she had little need to make notes.

The vast majority of her notes while writing are included here. Some of the material is undated; I have specified the year when it is known. I have omitted a revised outline of Part IV because it describes events as they happen in the published novel; the only other notes omitted were repetitive or cryptic.

July 18, 1938

Chapter II

Francon’s speech (his distinctions).

The audience. Peter in it. Peter’s thoughts about everyone noticing him, he and others. Peter’s qualifications: star student, president of student body (he has always been elected), star of track team, fraternities.

Peter receiving his degree, Paris scholarship, gold medal. Congratulations of the boys and of professors, Petechin among them (referring to his one building), mention of Peter’s graduation project. Francon’s mention of a job.

Peter at the banquet. His talk on architecture. Peter’s thoughts about Roark. Roark’s help. Party of boys planned for later that night.

Peter goes home. Wonders if people notice him or know who he is, determines that he’ll make them know who he is. His and Mrs. Keating’s past.

Peter comes home. Roark and Tony on the porch—Tony’s protestations to Roark—slight encounter between Peter and Tony. Tony doesn’t like Peter, Tony leaves.

Peter-Roark. Peter “wants to speak to him.” Peter’s condolences. The friendly scene. Mrs. Keating rushes down, hearing his voice. She’s been waiting for him; he’s annoyed. Peter is gloating about Francon’s offer and hesitating about the Paris trip. Mrs. Keating settles that. Peter asks what Roark will do. His horror at the mention of Cameron. Peter raises the question of living together—with Mrs. Keating keeping house for them. Roark refuses.

Vesta comes down. Vesta—appearance and status. Her brusqueness and forced nonchalance. Roark insists on knowing what’s the matter with her. She confesses. Roark’s plan for the three of them to move to New York. Peter and Vesta agree. Mrs. Keating’s horrified protests overruled.

Roark goes to pack, Vesta to dream, Peter to his party.

Peter on way to party. Complete intoxication of success. The great things he will do.

What did he graduate in? Oh yes, architecture.

October 16, 1938

Roark: feature one building in each important line, show how he knows the important activities of life—and what he thinks of them.

Friendship: Roark is the only one capable of real friendship—because he is able to look at people in themselves, unselfishly—because he is too selfish, because they are not a part of him in any way. He does not need them basically, does not need their opinion of him, and [therefore he] can value them for their own sake, a relationship of two equals. Roark does not want to impress himself upon others, because he does not need it.

Other people cannot be friends, because in their petty selfishness—in their concern with themselves through others—they can be interested in friends only as those friends concern them. They become tyrants, because they need the slavery of others to inflate them.

[Show] not only what second-handedness (as an abnormal, basic preoccupation with others) does to the person himself, but also to those others, to his relation with them. (Hatred of all who don’t belong. If one isn’t too concerned with others—why want them to “belong”?) You can have real freedom (in every sense, freedom from one another) only when you stop being too concerned with others.

November 8, 1938

For the whole—every stage of the lives motivated by certain principles.

Every detail of how a certain conception of existence works, what it does—and what are the results.

November 10, 1938

It’s terribly bad to be conscious of yourself as others see you, [whether they see you as] good or bad. Take yourself for granted. The consciousness that feels alone—without the weight of other eyes watching—is the only healthy consciousness.

Another aspect of second-handedness: The horror of being nothing; every person one faces is not a person, not a rational, cognizant being, but a blind, deaf agglomeration of bits from everyone else, unthinking and impotent, without the will of decision, so that nothing in that person can be reached, nothing can act or respond. It is the hopelessness of attempting to speak to an animal—there is no language, there is no possibility of a language, there is a barrier that can’t be broken. The silent, universal, omnipresent beast of “other people”—unreachable, irresponsible; vague and intangible, yet more real than the concrete beings who represent it, who are only its fragments.

[The following note was added on February 21, 1940:]

Toohey is the one to capitalize on this. The soil is ready, begging for some seeds, because it is empty. Toohey gives them the seeds. Toohey molds public opinion. And Toohey is the one to do it, not someone better, not the Roark type, because what Toohey preaches is in accord with and in support of the one certainty of the mob: its rightness in being second-hand, its fear of the single, the strong and the definite. Toohey makes this second-handedness, this cowardice and universal “equality,” into a virtue. And he is thus armed to fight the Roark type.

December 12, 1938

For Roark-Dominique: She likes to think of the granite broken by his hands, [when] under his hands.

For Toohey: His great enthusiasm for and preoccupation with books on children and animals, such books as Ferdinand or Tapiola, such movies as Snow White and all of Walt Disney. It would be Toohey who’d find philosophical significance in Donald Duck. Why? It’s not Donald Duck that he’s boosting. It’s philosophy that he’s destroying.

For Roark: Watch and trace the development, the growth of his ideas on architecture and what he does with them, the changes in his work.

[The life of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper publisher, suggested to AR several concretes for the life of Gail Wynand.]

John K. Winkler, W. R. Hearst, An American Phenomenon.

The principles of “circulation getters”:

Be first with the news. Go out and get it. In case of need, make it. Display it strikingly, distribute it swiftly and sell it cheaply. Avoid brain-racking comment upon it. Follow it up until the evening of the day before the public wearies of it. Then get something fresh....

What is news, and to whom? To the circulation-getters, pure and simple, it is what will cause most excitement among the widest public. It is a common denominator of ordinary minds. It is what will capture the crowd....

The most glaring of his faults, it has been said, is that Hearst and the men he placed in charge of his growing enterprises have too often denounced the successful merely because they were successful, and painted rainbows of hope for the unsuccessful merely because they were poor—and numerous....

Hearst loves to astonish. Yet there is something in his enigmatic temperament that keeps him from warm, intimate friendship. The man is Oriental-minded.... The Orient whispers to Hearst in many ways—in his lordly opulent living, his unceasing quest for the beautiful, his curious instinct for watching others squirm, his habit of falling away from a wolfish world and embarking upon long pilgrimages attended by one faithful and obedient courier. [...]

Within two years the twenty-six year old editor, owner and sole proprietor, had converted the Examiner into the greatest feature newspaper in the West—and within five or six years the paper had become by far the greatest money-maker on the Coast. No man ever mastered the root elements of journalism so speedily as the youth fresh from Harvard. From the first, as Roosevelt said, he manifested uncanny ability at cutting across lots and anticipating public opinion. He knew what would please the mass even before the mass began to move toward his bargain counter with its gaudy headlines, juicy morsels and (later) colored supplements, cartoons and comics. [...]

Hearst was very interested in machinery; he always introduced the latest in his newspaper shops, and even did inventing and improving himself.

Camaraderie with his subordinates, fun and excitement in the office, in his early days in San Francisco.

Hearst got the best newspaper talent he could get—and did not spare money to buy it. He paid very high salaries.

Sample of his methods:

Word filtered into San Francisco that the famous Hotel Del Monte at Mon terey, some 200 miles down the coast, was in flames. While the other papers waited for the news to reach them in the leisurely, traditional way, Hearst chartered a special train, filled it with staff writers and sketch artists and rushed south. The following morning the Examiner came out with a fourteen-page extra containing one of the most vivid stories of a disaster that had ever been published in the West.... Most of the headlines and legends had been written by Hearst himself. Three editions were run off to appease the popular demand.

Hearst enters civic problems in his paper:

A new city charter was proposed. The paper fought the charter on the ground that it would entrench the bosses in power. The charter was defeated. Then the Examiner proposed a new charter that would give the people a greater measure of home rule, and carried it. It opened a crusade to force a privately owned water company to lower its rates. It won that, as well as a campaign to force the electric companies to place their wires underground in the suburban district.

Hearst went after local bosses of the Democratic Party and caused their indictments by a grand jury.

One of his woman reporters pretended to faint on the street, was taken to the city receiving hospital and then wrote an expose of it, which caused reforms.

A baby was born in the City Prison Hospital to a drunken prostitute. The child would have become a charity charge had not Hearst stepped in. The birth occurred a few weeks before Christmas. The Examiner started a fund for the baby and called it “The Little Jim Fund.”

The baby died, and Hearst applied the money to build a hospital for crippled children. He personally guaranteed the entire sum, while trying to raise it by appeals in his paper.

One of his reporters jumped off a ferry boat in order to see how much time would be taken to rescue him (he was an expert swimmer). This caused reform of ferry apparatus and drills for life-saving.

Hearst’s bitterest early battle was against the Southern Pacific Railroad, which controlled the state. Hearst got hold of letters written by the Railroad’s attorney and published them, creating a sensational scandal.

Hearst bought the New York Morning Journal in 1895. He was thirty-two years old. He lost a great deal of money before he made this paper pay, but he spent the money heedlessly. He started a battle with Pulitzer’s World. He cut the price of his paper under that of the World. He raided his rivals. He took their best men away from them; he doubled the men’s salaries. At one time he lured the entire staff of the Sunday World: editors, artists, writers. He signed all the best writers and famous names he could get. “Invariably he would go into the composing-room at midnight to help make up the paper, and his gift for striking display and news arrangement was the marvel of his associates.” His greatest concern was to build circulation at any cost. [...]

One night he came into the composing-room and looked over the make-up of the first page. He said the story they were playing as second in importance was really more interesting than the first and suggested that they should remake. “I agree with you,” said the make-up man, “but I am afraid there is no time to reset.” Hearst smiled, pushed the whole form off the table, making a beautiful pile of pied type, then asked: “Now, is there time to reset? ... There is always time to make a thing better.”

Hearst started on what he called the “new journalism.” His slogan was “While others talk the Journal acts” and “What is everybody’s business is the Journal’s business.” He decided to be the champion of the people not only in words but in action. His paper started bringing legal actions and injunctions against corporations and public abuses, e.g., an injunction preventing the Board of Aldermen from granting a gas-franchise, which the Journal found illegal, and others like that. [...]

“A mobile ‘murder squad’ was formed to solve criminal mysteries independently of the police (by the paper). Liberal rewards were offered.” One murder was actually solved by the Journal, when it published reproductions of the oil-cloth in which the body was found, and one of the reporters traced the purchaser of the cloth and exposed the murderer.

Hearst liked features with “women appeal”:

On one occasion the entire third page was given over to “Stories of Love and Romance Gathered From the News of the Day.” Each of the seven columns were headed by heart-shaped illustrations. Soon “Letters From the Lovelorn” blossomed out. [...]

The incident when two editors of Hearst’s escaped to Europe, from overwork, and Hearst sent a reporter after them, found them, took them back and never reproached them for it. “He greeted the deserters politely, without a word of reproof or admonition, just as though he had seen them every day for the past month.”

Hearst helped many people, but always concealed his personal charities.

Hearst started agitating for the Spanish-American War in order to create “live” news. There was a story, unproved, but considered possible: Hearst sent special correspondents to Cuba, one of whom was

Frederic Remington, the eminent artist, who drew notable sketches of Spanish cruelty. After a short time Remington sent this telegram from Havana: “W. R. Hearst, New York Journal, NY: Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return. Remington.” This is the answer Hearst is said to have written: “Remington, Havana: Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war. W. R. Hearst.” [...]

When Hearst opened a paper in Chicago, he had to fight a war with other papers. They all hired thugs to interfere with the distribution and selling of one another’s papers. But this did not discourage Hearst and his paper remained. [...]

Hearst obtained and published letters written by the vice-president of Standard Oil. (He bought the letters from minor employees who stole them and let Hearst take photostats of them.) The letters showed corruption of senators and others. They created a great scandal. It was even rumored that the President asked Hearst whether he had any letters referring to him. “Nothing that I intend to publish at this time,” replied Hearst blandly.

Hearst started publishing magazines in 1903. One of his greatest successes was Good Housekeeping which appealed to women and to advertisers, with its innovation of tests for the products advertised. [...]

One artist who was invited to work for a Hearst magazine answered: “The only enterprise in which I shall ever voluntarily join William Randolph Hearst will be one of self-destruction.”

Hearst went into motion picture production, but had to give up, losing a great deal of money. (His political career, after terrific ballyhoo, was also a failure. He lost the election for governor of New York and the nomination for president.) [...]

He has a special system to check up on all his publications. He keeps a man to read them and to see that they carry out Hearst’s instructions. If they don‘t, they get a note of warning from Hearst. This gives the impression that he personally reads all of them.

Hearst’s executives have a vast respect for and a very appreciable terror of their chief. Hearst derives Machiavellian delight in sitting in the wings and relishing quarrels between the figures on his stage. When he has had his fun, and is convinced the scrap has gone far enough, he takes a hand. Generally, he “suggests” a holiday to one or the other disputant. [...]

Hearst’s belief about journalism:

The important thing for a newspaper to do in making circulation is to get excited when the public gets excited. People will buy any paper which seems to express their feelings in addition to printing the facts....

Why, then [asks Winkler], is he not the uncrowned King of America, a truly great leader? Because the average American citizen distrusts his motives. The average citizen is willing to be amused or entertained by him but has no confidence in Hearst’s intellectual sincerity. That is why he is one of the most melancholy figures of our time. Hearst has a thousand readers to one follower. The readers enjoy his comics, his high-pressure editorials, his provocative pictures, but they have deep distrust of his motives. They no longer follow the shifting winds of his fancy. [...]

Hearst does not allow his papers to have his biography in their “morgue.”

“Newspaper work is the best line of work that I know of,” says Hearst. “If I had my life to live over again, I would be a newspaper man, and merely try to be a better one.”

If he had his life to live over, one wonders if Hearst would tread the same path. Would his motto again be: “Capture the crowd at any cost”? Or would he elect to employ his astonishing talent to ennoble, to spiritualize the crowd? No one can tell.

This book lists (1928): Twenty-seven Hearst newspapers, nine magazines in America and three in England, one book publishing corporation, eight film and news services.

Undated

Watch out for Roark being too heroic and always right too easily. (In particular, in scene with building he saves, Chapter V.)

For Roark-Holcombe. Roark asks him why one must copy the Parthenon. Holcombe answers: “Not the Parthenon. You’re quite right, Saint Peter’s Cathedral.”

For Dominique

Disillusionment—sees through people and everything—and doesn’t like it.

Fierce independence—nothing in such a world will hold her.

Enjoys destruction and deliberate nastiness—her answer to life and the only way to make it interesting.

Has denied herself all desire or enthusiasm—because life can hold her through that and she will not give it such an opportunity.

She has contempt for all ideals—because of the ideals that she has been taught (Christian brotherhood).

For Roark-Dwight

When Roark is broke, before going to Connecticut, he does not hide the fact from Dwight at all; he has no inkling of the idea that he should keep up his prestige for the sake of Dwight, who looks up to him. [Larry Dwight, a minor character that AR cut from the novel, was a draftsman whom Roark met while working for John Eric Snyte.]

Undated

[The following fragment is from an early draft of Part I. It describes Heddy Adler, a mistress of Roark’s who was later cut from the novel. Heddy is reminiscent of Jinx in the short story Good Copy (see The Early Ayn Rand). She represents a type that AR liked, but never found a place for in her novels. ]

She was utterly incapable of two things: of lying and of denying herself a desire; she did not quite grasp the possibility of either process. It was just as plausible to her to push her way through a crowd [to see] a steam shovel as it would have been [to see] a royal coronation; she would have enjoyed either. She had been spoiled and sheltered, accustomed to seeing her every wish granted; she had emerged from it completely sure of herself, neither arrogant nor offensive, but irresistible in the bright, innocent self-assurance of a person who had been spared all contact with pain. She acted as one would act if this were a dream world and life contained nothing to make lightness feel guilty and men were free to give beauty and significance to the insignificant gestures of their every moment. She was completely real in being unreal. [...]

She was not afraid of Roark and she did not question the things she could not understand in him. She had not expected that she would love him, but she never needed reasons or explanations for the unexpected. He was not exactly like other people; she neither approved of it nor condemned it; she took it for granted; she never thought of resenting it, she was too avidly curious; and one universal trait had passed her by entirely; it never occurred to her, upon meeting anything strange and different, that that strangeness and difference were to be taken as some deep personal insult to her. She did not doubt herself; she had no compulsion to doubt others. [...]

Undated

To do:

When Part I is finished—go over it and make separate schedules for the development of Roark, Cameron, Keating, Toohey, Wynand, Dominique, Katie. (Minor: check on Vesta, Heller, Francon, Mrs. Keating.)

Where and how much is given of Roark’s architectural philosophy? How much is necessary?

More important—and watch this for schedule: Roark’s philosophy of life.

How about the mind versus the emotions? How much of that can or should be included? Where? In what form?

Roark’s egotism versus Keating’s egotism? Where to stress and explain this?

Remember: “Form follows function”—in the writing and planning.

(Enough of the glorification of the people as “natural” and “true.” Show what the people are.)

Undated

[Here are the “character development schedules” referred to above. AR names what is shown about the character in each scene.]

Roark

CHAPTER I: In the mountains. Exaltation at thoughts of architecture. Expulsion. Talk with Dean.

Appearance, great love for architecture, modernism, some of his convictions on architecture, independence, self-assurance, cold indifference to people, mention of his past.

CHAPTER II: Scene with Keating.

A touch of gentleness and understanding. The courage of his decision to work for Cameron.

CHAPTER III: First meeting with Cameron.

Quiet assurance. Gets what he wants without saying much. Respect for Cameron.

CHAPTER IV: Scene of Cameron firing him.

The calm that nothing can shake. A glimpse of what awaits him—he accepts it.

CHAPTER V: Meeting with Vesta. Incident at building with Cameron drunk. [These scenes were cut and later published in The Early Ayn Rand.]

A touch of the unconventional with Vesta. Indifferent interest in her. His attitude on the site of a building under construction. His ability and quick decision. Knocking out the contractor. Talks with Cameron—his understanding and devotion to work.

CHAPTER VI: Affair with Vesta. Scene of Cameron having expected commission. Help to Keating on his first project.

His indifference to Vesta, his absorption in his work and ideas, her reaction to him—fear of him, his taking her as an act of cruelty. His terrific work on the commission—and calm in the face of defeat. His ability in helping Keating—and calm contempt.

CHAPTER VII: Cameron gives up.

His calm in the face of a disaster.

CHAPTER VIII: Peter’s offer. Clash with Vesta. In Francon’s office. Mike.

His closed attitude on people and Vesta’s fear of it. His cold indifference to her and snub to Keating. His silent torture in Francon’s office. His love for actual sites of construction. His ability with building work—Mike’s admiration, his response to a person like Mike.

CHAPTER IX: Fired. Looking for job.

First real test of his integrity—he loses job. His calm about looking for work, reactions of people to him, his inability to worry too much, his immovable faith in the future.

CHAPTER X: Job with Snyte. Break with Vesta.

The difference between Vesta’s feeling for life and his. His cold ruthlessness in breaking with her.

CHAPTER XI: The Heller house.

His attitude on work with Snyte—ability to forget. His wonder about the world around him. His direct ruthlessness in taking commission for Heller house.

CHAPTER XII: The building of the Heller house.

His passionate happiness in his first work. Cameron’s prediction. Some of his ideas on architecture.

CHAPTER XIV: Gowan’s Station. Talk with Heller on commissions. Three refused clients. Fargo Store. Sanborn House. Heddy.

His unsocialness—as expressed by Heller. His quiet stubbornness with clients. More of his thoughts on architecture. A touch of the unconventional in meeting with Heddy. His “caste-system” with people. [This last reference is to the following passage, later cut: “He seldom looked at women; there were few whom he could want, as there were few people to whom he could speak. He had an instinctive caste-system of his own; he looked for a mark upon each forehead; a mark clear to him in the lines of a face, unseen by everyone else; without that mark men did not seem to exist for him, nor women; they lost all reality to him and he lost all response. When he found that mark, the stamp of a peculiar freedom that was more than freedom, he looked upon his finds with interest and eagerness.... ”] CHAPTER XV: Idleness. Heddy. Holcombe’s bribe. Help Keating with competition project.

Calm in the face of idleness. Lighter touch with Heddy. Takes no advantage of his connections. Refuses Holcombe—wonders about Holcombe’s reasons. Won’t enter competition.

CHAPTER XVI: Scene with Keating. Refuses bank commission. Leaves for Connecticut.

Contempt for Keating—won’t take money he needs. Torture and almost breakdown from waiting. The great bank commission. Refuses. Ruthlessness toward himself in his decision to work as common laborer.

Keating

CHAPTER I: Reference to him by Mrs. Keating.

His brilliance as a student.

CHAPTER II: Graduation. Talk with Roark. Decision about job.

Brilliance and popularity. His second-hand absorption with his relation to other people and with his superiority to them. Insincerity with people. Touch of sincerity with Roark—his helplessness and lack of assurance. Lets mother influence him, even though he neither loves nor respects her. Mother pushed him into career.

CHAPTER III: First day in Francon’s office.

Lack of assurance—gains it only from comparing himself to others. Clever playing up to Francon—dig at Stengel.

CHAPTER IV: Relations with Francon, takes over Davis’ work, scene with Katie.

Taking Francon into his hands, insincerity and shrewdness in dealing with Davis, sincerity and vagueness with Katie, his own better side which he cannot sustain, confesses to her his real opinion of Francon and his career, exhibits good touch in refusing to meet Toohey.

CHAPTER V: Establishes himself in office, betrays Davis.

Servility and appeal to clients, unprincipled ruthlessness in advancing himself, weakness in avoiding Katie, cheap love affairs, touch of hypocrisy with mother.

CHAPTER VI: Gets rid of Stengel. Hisfirst designing job.

Subtle diplomacy, treachery to Francon in his manner of eliminating Stengel, orgies with Francon. Attitude on his work—only fear, no real ideas or creative impulse. Runs to Roark—accepts his help and resents him.

CHAPTER VII: Steady advance. Proposal to Katie.

Beginning of fourflushing with money and position. Hints about Francon’s daughter. He is greatly satisfied with himself—has lost the sincerity of admitting anything to Katie, doesn’t see it any more, loves Francon and his position, wouldn’t mind meeting Toohey, indifference to work, concentrates on the social side of it. But proposes to Katie—somewhat unexpectedly, as a last flash of his better self.

CHAPTER VIII: Gets Roark into Francon ’s office.

Fourflushing before Roark. Needs Roark, uses him, yet in a way feels superior, enjoys subtly insulting Roark and ordering him about. CHAPTER IX: Does nothing for Roark after Roark is fired.

Drops Roark when he feels he needs him no longer.

CHAPTER X: Strike. Protest meeting. Sees Dominique.

His restlessness and doubts when left alone and idle. Needs Katie. His fear at her absorption in Toohey. Sees Dominique—and decides to follow it up, even though he fears and dislikes her. CHAPTER XI: Holcombe’s party. Meets Dominique. Francon’s hints.

Pursues Dominique, plans to take advantage ofFrancon—even though he doesn’t really like Dominique.

CHAPTER XII: Scene in Roark’s new office.

Resents Roark’s success and advancement over him. Instinctively, not understanding it and bewildered by it. Later—nasty, patronizing remarks about Roark.

CHAPTER XIII: Luncheon with Dominique. Scene when Katie asks him to marry her—and the consequences.

Goes after Dominique without warning her. Realizes he’s planned two futures; decides to let future decide and drifts. His love for Katie asserts itself when he is ready to marry her, has feeling of his own danger, but lets his mother and the considerations of other people—career, Francon, society, church, etc.—stop him. Would have gone through if Katie insisted, but she doesn’t and he lets it go. His uncertainty and reliance upon others.

CHAPTER XV: Campaign against Heyer. The Cosmo-Slotnick competition. Love scene with Dominique.

Ruthlessness in his hounding of Heyer. Weakness on the Cosmo-Slotnick competition, dread of another winner, hysterical vanity, runs to Roark again. Is physically infatuated with Dominique, is terribly disappointed, but still proposes to her.

CHAPTER XVI: Heyer’s death. Wins competition. Scene with Roark. Celebration ofpartnership.

Horrible cruelty to Heyer. Triumph of vanity and “second-handedness” in his attitude on winning competition. Slight hint of conscience in thought of Roark. Attempts to talk Roark into conventional attitude—doesn’t know what prompts him. Attempts to bribe Roark—and screams his hatred of him, realizing Roark’s contempt. Celebration of partnership—“second-hand” satisfaction.

Toohey

CHAPTER IV: Article in New Frontiers—first hint of his philosophy.

CHAPTER VI: Katie’s talk about him—hints on his manner and methods. Small mention—Keating’s fear of him.

CHAPTER VII: “Sermons in Stones”—radicalism, criticism of present economic system, down with individuals, glorifying the masses, glorifying the united and the obedient, attack on modern architecture. Brilliance of style and erudition.

Katie about him: the beginning of her absorption, his indifference to the clippings, and yet... his making speech at Union.

CHAPTER X: His column on the Banner. The situation on the strike, the noble gesture of a public martyr. The speech—stress on organization and the lack of freedom in individual choice. The magnetism of his voice. Katie’s absorption in him frightens Keating.

CHAPTER XI: Dominique on Toohey—the perfect skunk, the monolith, his threat to the world, the testing stone.

CHAPTER XV: Said nothing about the Heller house.

CHAPTER XII: Katie’s fit of terror of him.

CHAPTER XV: On Cosmo-Slotnick competition jury.

Wynand

CHAPTER V: First mention of papers—“gas-station murder.”

CHAPTER VI: Cameron’s mention: “legs, crusade against wealth, rights of the downtrodden, unwed mothers, recipes, utility companies, horoscopes.” Circulation growing.

CHAPTER IX: Francon’s reference to Lili Lansing. The castle, the party (Caesar Borgia) and the photos with children.

CHAPTER X: Wynand on the strike. Reverses principles when it hits him. His real estate operations. His unpredictable inconsistency. The appeals to trashy patriotism. People’s dread of him and his vengeance. Heller’s reference to him. The startling gesture toward Toohey.

CHAPTER XI: Dominique on Wynand—great art lover and perfect sideshow baiter. Decadent.

CHAPTER XII: The slums campaign. Wynand on a world cruise. Alvah Scarret.

February 18, 1940

[AR critiques her first draft of Part I.]

[The Chapter I scene in] Roark’s room: Is it necessary at all? If so—do better, put in more character.

CHAPTER I: Roark planted too soon—too much of him given—too obviously heroic—the author’s sympathy too clear. (?) Don’t like Roark’s outbreak with Dean—can be treated differently. Don’t dialogue thoughts—narrate them (such as the Dean’s and Mrs. Keating’s). Roark changing his drawing—too much detail. (?) In this first chapter—plant Roark: ornament—that his buildings are not modernistic boxes?

CHAPTER II: Change Mrs. Keating’s approach to a subtler and meaner one—like the one she uses later about Katie. Give one speech on Keating’s attitude about architectural convictions. (?) CHAPTER III: Miss Bisbee—unnecessary? Too long about Francon’s office—can be cut. Cameron’s biography should be gone over—some awkward passages. Cameron’s criticism of Roark’s drawings—don’t like it.

CHAPTER IV: Details about Tim Davis—unnecessary. Make it shorter. Roark’s life and his tenement room—can be done better, simpler, there’s a little too obvious an effect there. Cameron giving Roark a raise—too much niceness. (?) Don’t have Cameron dropping his head on his arms.

CHAPTER V: Roark looking for the “stamp” on faces—should be planted earlier and separately and more importantly. Omit incident with faked plans—too much and too detailed. Change it to narrative of Davis simply becoming useless, being crowded out—and never knowing how it was done and Keating remaining his best friend and even giving him a job and boasting of this “good deed.” Don’t like all of incident with Roark fixing building—too long—technically dishonest—and Roark too able. Cameron’s struggle against contractor unnecessary—reserve that for Roark’s future. [AR cut this last scene—it has been reprinted in The Early Ayn Rand.]

CHAPTER VI: First reference to the Wynand papers should be separate and more important. On Vesta’s first resentment [of Roark]—here is the place to put the other side of her character—the “social” one.

The Dunlop incident—couldn’t it be cut? Important psychologically and as example of Keating’s methods—but perhaps too detailed for a mere incident. Keating’s first job of designing—shorter and clearer. Roark’s corrections—all the details or none. Narrative would be better than dialogue. The Cameron sequence from Austen Heller to flashback and back again is bad. Put flashback and [summary] of past year first, then on to Heller and the Wynand papers. This is the place for the first mention of the Wynand papers.

CHAPTER VII: Better last paragraph of office closing sequence—more emphasis for drawing on the wall. In resume of Keating’s rise—stress more (and most) the second-handedness: his worrying about people’s admiration for him and people’s envy, his comparing his achievements with others, his “good deeds”—and boasting of them. Mrs. Keating’s arrival not very well worded. Also—the transition to Katie.

CHAPTER VIII: Cut some of Keating’s cruder insults to Roark. Keating must be much subtler in this. More about Mike—show why Roark likes him and why Roark would like him immediately.

CHAPTER IX: Shorter on Roark’s looking for a job. No need for single incidents; they can all be blended into one narrative—all except Prescott.

CHAPTER X: Lead up into the strike—simpler and more authentic.

CHAPTER XI: Better and clearer summary of Roark’s six months with Snyte.

CHAPTER XII: Cut out Heller’s thoughts on men’s interdependence. Much too early. Leave just the friendship angle—the unselfish devotion. Don’t like Roark’s talk on architecture—give it better build-up, lead into it better, and also better wording and more original thoughts and expressions. Heller’s biography—very last. More pointed and fresher.

CHAPTER XIV: Cut out Heddy entirely. I don’t think that Roark needs another love. Cut out Sanboms—too detailed for this part of the book—not detailed enough in itself. Perhaps cut Fargo Store—another way of covering this period has to be found.

CHAPTER XV: Cut out Heddy. Cut out Holcombe incident—or put in another one like it instead.

CHAPTER XVI: In conversation with Mike—plant that Roark does not want a white-collar job. Control the obvious, pointless exaggerations in the description of the movie furor.

About first part in general:

Do not dialogue thoughts. Control adjectives—cut the weakening ones. Do not use adjectives unless they are different and illuminating. Don’t go into over-detailed analyses of psychology—unless it’s something new and illuminating to say. Don’t give any details whatever—in sentences or thoughts—unless you have something new to say.

Stress the second-handedness whenever possible, particularly in Keating, but a different facet of it each time. Cut out episodes that do not bear on that theme. The book is not about architecture, it’s about Roark against the world and about the workings of that thing in the world which opposes him. Give only enough pure architecture to make the background real. But only as a background. Eliminate bromides or convenient colloquial expressions ready-made, even in places that are mere transitions, such as “and it made film history,” “round of nightclubs,” etc.

Undated

[For the scene by the granite quarry, when Roark and Dominique speak for the first time.]

Estrangement—antagonism.

Her putting him in his place as a worker.

Her directness and defiant wit.

His mockery in his quiet acceptance of the position she is imposing upon him—and when she attempts (faintly) to bring in the personal, it is he who refuses, sticking to the “Yes, Miss Francon” attitude of a respectful worker.

[Roark:] “You want me and I know it and I’ll make it vile, to show you the enormity of your desire, because you’ll want me still. I’m obedient to you now, I’m nothing before you—and it won’t change things. I’ll crush you in spite of it, because of it, when the time comes.”

[Dominique:] “I have you in my power. I’ll torture you. I enjoy it. I want you to know that. I enjoy debasing you, because I’m debasing myself through it, because you’ll conquer me some day—I want it—I hate you and I’ll punish you for it.”

All this on what appears as a discussion of his living conditions and her interest in the workers.

“You’re boasting.” “No, but ... it changes so little.” “In what?” “In your interest in workers. In the future. There are so many unchangeable things.”

February 21, 1940

Toohey [promotes] Keating—because he knows that Keating did not design the Cosmo-Slotnick building.

Toohey writes a profound article on Keating’s work, and tests Keating by asking him if he did mean all those things, knowing quite well that he, Toohey, has made them up. Keating agrees that he did—and Toohey is happy. Keating isn’t quite sure whether he did mean all that or not and is not sure whether Toohey knows it or not, but is very sure that Toohey is pleased. (These touches in Toohey must be very subtle, vague and rare—only as a hint, particularly at first. Most of Toohey must seem to be very authentic, noble and “humanitarian.”)

Toohey builds Keating up in print. Gives him commissions. Organizes the “Youth Club” of the A.G.A. with Keating as head. He controls the architectural profession through Keating. Disgrace to young sculptor on one of the buildings. (When Toohey switches to modernism, “Youth Club” switches with him.) The “youth”—and Keating—want to be “deep,” learn nothing, are glad to have it given to them by Toohey. He drives Keating into complete spiritual dependence upon him. He inflates Keating with false, empty values—knowing they are empty, knowing that Keating will feel the emptiness without understanding it—and will, therefore, be ruined for any values. The emptier he is, the more Keating will need Toohey.

Toohey alone among his associates guesses at Wynand’s real nature—at least to the extent of knowing that Wynand is not a mob-man at heart. Toohey, contrary to the dictates of his usual clever diplomacy, tries very hard to appear as a hero and a “man of integrity” before Wynand. Wynand ignores him completely, never considers him worth breaking. This makes Toohey furious—relegating him to the kind of man he knows himself to be.

February 22, 1940

Part II must show Keating at his height, enjoying himself immensely (his idea of enjoyment, and the essential meaninglessness of it)—and plant the first seeds for his later downfall (mainly through Toohey getting hold of his spirit, because of the emptiness of that spirit).

February 24, 1940

Toohey’s [purpose is] to ruin the strong, the single, the original, the healthy, the joyous—with the weapon of “other people,” of humanitarianism. To excuse all sins in kindness—and thereby to destroy all virtue. To kill happiness—in order to have slaves. No man is dangerous to him-except the happy man. He exists like a maggot—on wounds and sores.

Undated

Toohey’s greatest enemy—independence of spirit.

The first result of [independence] is great creation.

Toohey destroys all independence in people and all great achievement.

For the first: independence causes happiness. Toohey is out to destroy and discredit—philosophically and practically—all happiness. Unhappy people look for a yoke—and they come to him.

For the second: To discredit great achievement, he sets up standards which are easy for the phonies. Hence—Toohey and Gertrude Stein, Walt Disney, and Ferdinand the Bull. [Gertrude Stein seems to have been the model for the character Lois Cook, whose first name was originally Gertrude.]

For the first: Catherine, Peter, Dominique, Dick Sanborn, attempt (later) at Wynand. (Also Vesta.) [This is the last mention of Vesta Dunning in AR’s notes.]

For the second: Roark, sculptor, young writer, Heller, Peter as architect, death notice on Cameron.

The author of Ferdinand the Bull made into a “philosopher” by Toohey, as against the young writer.

February 28, 1940

For Gertrude [Lois Cook]: deliberate sloppiness—as careful as grooming—and for the same purpose.

Toohey’s behavior after the assassination attempt—“theatrical only in too complete an absence of anything theatrical.” Toohey is on his way to some “humanitarian lecture.”

Advance questions for Part II

Change which Roark would not make and which ruined contractor? (?)

What libel could really be dangerous to an architect’s career? (Unsafety of construction.)

March 4, 1940

Part II: Revised Schedule of Chapters

Chapters I and II: written (Roark-Dominique in quarry)

III

October, 1928. Peter—his high standing. (Peter enters office. The newspaper. Story of Toohey’s inheritance. Peter—on not meeting Toohey and no write-up.) The Cosmo-Slotnick building and incident of sculptor— past—and sculptor has just been fired. Peter looking for another one. Review of Cosmo-Slotnick building and note from Toohey. News of attempt at Toohey’s life. The story of the attempt. Peter’s meeting with Toohey. (Toohey knows Peter did not design all of Cosmo-Slotnick building—and is pleased by it.) Peter accepting Toohey’s ideas on his building. Toohey hints about his “committee of architects”—in the future. Toohey and Gertrude’s commission. Toohey about Peter’s romance with Catherine.

IV

Sketches in papers and accounts of Roark’s building for Enright. Peter-Catherine, her first “social worker” job. Peter meets Gertrude—her house. Gertrude’s literary career. Their romance. Toohey’s reference to Roark’s building—“if it were important, I would have remembered it.” Toohey questions Peter most significantly about Roark. Peter is surprised that all the questions are personal about Roark, not architectural at all. The meeting of the “committee of architects.” Peter is president.

V

Dominique’s return to New York. Dominique-Toohey. Meeting of youth group. Peter—her looking for him.

VI

Roark, the Enright Building, Austen Heller. The prospective client. The party. Roark-Dominique. Roark-Toohey. Toohey-Dominique.

VII

Dominique’s article against Roark—Toohey objects. Toohey-Dominique about past relationship of Roark-Peter. Dominique getting important commission for Peter. Interview: Roark-owner. Roark-Dominique—their night together.

VIII

Early winter, 1929. Commission for “Unfinished Symphony.” Reactions to that. Toohey and writer. Dominique-Roark. Dominique helping Peter. Toohey throwing Dominique and Peter together.

IX

Campaign against “Symphony.” Dominique-stockholder. Toohey makes Dominique lose her column. Dominique votes against Symphony. Work stopped (Fall, 1929). [Note that the chapter on Toohey’s background is missing here.]

X

Peter-Catherine. Dominique at “Symphony.” Next day—Dominique marries Peter. Her night with Roark. Next morning—their break. [The main events that AR planned in connection with the “Unfinished Symphony” were later transferred to the Stoddard Temple sequence.]

XI

Winter, 1929-1930. Toohey and old millionaire [Hopton Stoddard]. Roark gets commission for Temple. Roark and sculptor. Life of Peter-Dominique. Roark calls on her. Dominique posing for statue.

XII

Fall, 1930. Temple finished. The scandal. The lawsuit. Cameron’s death. [In the novel, Cameron dies much earlier (towards the end of Part I).]

XIII

Early winter, 1931. Roark loses suit and everything. Goes to live in “Unfinished Symphony.” Temple altered by Peter. The Wynand real estate project. Toohey’s plans for Peter. Dominique is to meet Wynand. Scene of Roark on steps of Temple.

March 1940

Main Questions

1. Unfinished Symphony—example of the triumph of second-handedness.

2. Toohey-Dominique.

3. How Dominique loses her column (possible connection with Wynand).

4. Toohey and the Wynand papers.

5. Dominique-Roark: why she leaves him.

Subordinate Questions

a. Wynand. (Prepare him as a complete scoundrel. The oddness of his villainies. His passion for art.)

b. Toohey-Heller. (The beginnings of the break. The parting of the ways. The two kinds of liberals.)

Heller’s foundation for relationships—Toohey objects. In connection with (b) above.

Dominique at Unfinished Symphony, sees man and his dirty action, sees all of society that will hurt her as this act has hurt her—decides to marry Peter. (Before this—tying at Roark’s feet—in silence, in complete sincerity.) [In connection with] (5).

Toohey, knowing Wynand’s tricks, deliberately builds up a writer of integrity, creates the occasion for a great display of integrity, in order to tempt Wynand to [crush] it—which Wynand does. (In connection with Unfinished Symphony? Heller?) [In connection with] (4) and (a).

Toohey, knowing what Wynand has prohibited, deliberately tells Dominique that it’s prohibited—and she changes her mind to the opposite of what she intended to write and is fired. (Unfinished Symphony and Heller?) [In connection with] (2) and (3).

Toohey has to eliminate the top off the papers—Dominique and the writer whom Wynand ruins. [In connection with] (4).

April 22, 1940

[For Kiki Holcombe’s party, where Dominique discovers that Roark is the architect who designed the Enright House.]

What do I wish to show by the party (besides the meeting of Roark and Dominique)? Second-handedness. What kind? The social kind. Which is?

A desperate desire to make an impression on others. They are not there to see but to be seen. Each wants to dominate the other and will crawl, lick feet, and make a fool of himself for that domination. They cannot talk shop. They cannot raise controversial subjects. Don’t antagonize—above all. You’ve got to please them all. Don’t mention what you’re really interested in; it makes you too important. You gain importance here by being unimportant—in inverse ratio. Others are not interested in you as your own self; you offend them by presuming that they are. Become only a mirror for them, while they’re trying to be a mirror for you. The vicious circle. Toohey as the one to start the circle rolling, because he [provides] a direction compatible with all those people’s hidden aims. They all want importance—they can find it only in others. They want to be invited in order to get work in order to be invited here. (Use people to make money to use to impress people with.) There are no values—that is why they cling so desperately to people.

I show this by (?):

Attitude toward Howard Roark. (“The Enright House is almost as good as the Cosmo-Slotnick Building.” “He will be another Peter Keating.”) They know nothing about his work and are nothing. They are interested in: the cost of the Enright House, how did he get the commission from Enright, is he related to the Roarks of Schetwick? Don’t give a person reality by inquiring into his ideas, i.e., into what he is. Detract from his importance by confining your interest to other people around him: tie him to family, acquaintances, bosses.

The conversations are about facts, not thoughts or opinions. Thoughts and opinions give personality to the one expressing them and require personality to be expressed. Facts are impersonal. They want it kept impersonal, because personality is dangerous. Or—they express opinions that are so bromidic as to be public property and safe. Resentment if anyone takes it out of that class. (On the one hand, things must be impersonal. On the other—utterly personal, that is, they want everybody to agree with them, because what is personal to them is tied irrevocably to others. They have no personality apart from others—so others must not have it either.)

Toohey’s social technique: he insults the person, but includes himself in being insulted, points out a real weakness, but excuses it.

1940

[With one third of the manuscript completed, AR began to submit The Fountainhead to prospective publishers. She wrote a synopsis, apparently intended to be sent with the manuscript, which contains a surprising idea for the climax. There is no evidence that this synopsis was ever sent to a publisher, and no other mention of the idea in AR’s notes. Many years later, she remembered hesitating over her original idea for the climax (the dynamiting of Cortlandt Homes). She was concerned that it might be difficult to make it “plausible objectively” why Roark would be justified in such dynamiting. It may have been this doubt that prompted her to consider—perhaps only for a single day—an alternative climax.]

Toohey has risen to a position of great power in society. He is the undeclared dictator of the intellectual and cultural life of the country. He has “collectivized” all the arts with his various “organizations,” and he allows no prominence to anyone save to mediocrities of his choice, such as Keating, Lois Cook, and others of the same quality. He has to stop Roark. And when events come to a point where he can destroy Roark’s career once more, it is Dominique who comes to Roark’s assistance. She has learned a great deal from her strange marriage to Wynand. Dominique kills Toohey. It is more than a murder—it is the destruction of everything Toohey stood for. Roark takes the murder upon himself—the circumstances are such that either one of them can be accused and Roark forces her to remain silent; she agrees, but only until the outcome of the trial—she will speak if he is convicted.

This, then, is the sensational trial—Roark against society. There is a great deal of public indignation at the murder of a “humanitarian” and a “saint” such as Toohey. Wynand alone tries to stand by Roark—but public clamor forces him to betray Roark, to reverse the policy of his papers and demand Roark’s conviction (see character outline). During the trial, the affair between Roark and Dominique is made public (though not her part in the murder).

Roark is acquitted—through the efforts of Austen Heller and his other loyal followers. Wynand is forced to divorce Dominique—his prestige with his respectable “Ladies’ Club-home-church-family” audience demands it. He betrays and loses the only two human beings who had ever meant anything to him.

All his life, Wynand has dreamed of erecting a “Wynand Building” to house his newspapers, a monument to his achievement. Now, left alone and broken in spirit, his journalistic empire tottering, knowing that this empire will not survive him, Wynand makes one last gesture. He decides to erect the Wynand Building as his swan song. And he gives the commission to Roark. He barely speaks to Roark now, he wants no personal contact, no feeling between them; he gives the assignment to Roark in a short, blunt, business-like interview, in cold, impersonal words. And only when Roark accepts and turns to leave the office, does Wynand add: “Build it as a monument to that spirit which is yours—and could have been mine.”

When Dominique is freed of all ties to Wynand and comes back to Roark, never to leave him again, she finds him at the construction site of the Wynand Building, where the skeleton of Roark’s greatest achievement is beginning to rise into the sky.

[One can guess the reasons why AR quickly rejected the idea of Dominique murdering Toohey. First, the climactic action is taken by a secondary character rather than the hero. Second, such a climax would undercut the novel’s theme by implying that Roark must be saved by a lesser character acting on the “malevolent universe” premise. Since Roark is the ideal, both morally and practically, his victory must result from his premises and his actions.]

December II, 1941

For Toohey-Dominique: “Don’t fool yourself. You’re not a bitch—you’re a saint, which is much worse.” A saint can’t help but turn into a destructive, vicious monster like Dominique in the world as it is-consequently down with the saints, they make the world much too uncomfortable by seeing it too clearly.

For Roark-Dominique: His love for her declared for the first time when she leaves him—after she tells him that she’s married. “I won’t tell you that it’s unselfish love—it’s much greater because it’s selfish, because it’s my need.” Power over another person is clean only when you can be proud of the person that you have in your power—perhaps love is the only place to know and exercise power. “You have much to learn—yourself—I can’t help you.” “Not until you come back, of your own will, completely, forever, and on your knees.”

December 17, 1941

[On this date, AR made her final chapter outline for the second half of Part II (she seems to have written up to Chapter VIII). She had recently contracted with Bobbs-Merrill to complete the novel by January 1, 1943.]

December 31, 1941

For Roark: “The first man entering a fresh, clean world for the first time.”

1942

[The following notes pertain to the description of Gail Wynand’s background in Chapter I, Part III.]

Gail Wynand

Gun—indifference.

His day. (Incident with Toohey and housing development.) Incident to show Wynand’s powers, luxury, arbitrariness and his particular methods of pleasure.

Back to gun—thinks of his life.

First scene—tight figure against wall—fight—show his will to rule—his parents—relationship with father. Left alone at twelve.

1. Incidents to show: will to dominate, impatience with stupidity and being forced to obey stupidity, knowing that he knows best—and showing that he does. Ferocious independence.

2. Incidents to show: disappointment in human integrity and desire “not to be a sucker.” Idealism turned to utter cynicism.

3. Forces his way into a newspaper. His rise. Unscrupulous incident of getting money to buy the newspaper.

4. Development of newspaper empire, stock market speculations, real estate speculations.

5. Wynand at the top—his public reputation, his private life. Incidents to show the constant use of his power. (The secret art gallery.) Back to gun—drops it. Finds [Toohey’s gift]—scene with Toohey.

Incidents:

1. Childhood will to power and fight against stupidity.

1. First fight.

2. Beating by longshoreman and later revenge.

2. Disappointment in human integrity.

1. Columnist (?)

3. Brilliant and unscrupulous methods of rise.

1. Starving while working free in newspaper office.

4. Same—later

5. Typical Wynand attitude now

1. The contest.

2. The reversal of destinies (the suicide).

3. Murder over a woman he didn’t want.

4. Attitude on women.

Gun—indifference.

The bedroom and the apartment and his appearance. (Cynicism.)

His day: breakfast, arrival at office, scene with his type operator, crossed-out copy, talk to coast editor, phone call to Senator, board meeting, housing project, Alvah Scarret about Toohey, lunch at Women’s Club, editorial on prohibition, talk with Toohey—about [gift]. Dinner with mistress.

Back to gun—decides to think of his past.

Fist fight—over looting and gang leadership.

His father and mother.

Delivers newspapers—incident of advice to employer—“You don’t run things around here.”

Bootblack on ferry boat—dreams of future New York—“You don’t run this place.”

Incident in school—“You’re not the only one here.”

Walks through fallen parts of city—stolen book—looting of bookstore.

Scene with beating by longshoreman. (Only time he asks for help.)

Goes to work for Banner—incident of dime.

The woman. (He never needs a lesson twice.)

The idealistic editor (only time he thanks anyone).

Put in charge of paper by political gang—owns paper and destroys gang.

Success through sensationalism. (“It is not my function to help people preserve a self-respect they haven’t got.”)

Newspaper war—incident of ruthlessness.

Rise: real estate, chain of papers, magazines.

(People who want to use him.)

At his height—power. Private art gallery.

After forty-five-fight against integrity. (Power for power’s sake.)

Back to gun, drops it, goes for drink, sees statue, calls Toohey, agrees to meet Dominique.

July 2, 1942

[AR wrote her final chapter outline for Part IV on this date. ]

Undated

[It seems that AR once considered prefacing each part of The Fountainhead with a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche. The first two quotations below were copied into her journal and may have been intended for Parts I and II; the last was placed after the title page to Part IV.]

Vanity is one of the things which are perhaps most difficult for the noble man to understand: he will be tempted to deny it, where another kind of man thinks he sees it self-evidently. The problem for him is to represent to his mind beings who seek to arouse a good opinion of themselves which they do not possess—and consequently also do not “deserve”—and who yet believe in this good opinion afterwards.

Ye preachers of equality, the tyrant-frenzy of impotence crieth thus in you for “equality”: your most secret tyrant-longings disguise themselves thus in virtue words!

But from time to time do ye grant me—one glimpse, grant me but one glimpse only, of something perfect, fully realized, happy, mighty, triumphant, of something that still gives cause for fear! A glimpse of man that justifies the existence of man, a glimpse of an incarnate human happiness that realizes and redeems, for the sake of which one may hold fast to the belief in man!

Undated

[Regarding Roark:]

A whole life lived on a certain principle. The highlights of that life. The quality of that life, proceeding from that principle—with the result of grandeur, heroism, beauty, pride, honor, truth, joy. Not for anyone, but in itself, in the man—and secondarily in those he touches and in his benefit to society—only secondarily and precisely because of the first, because of his disregard for society. (Steel-will, hardness, cruelty—the cruelty turning into his own brand of almost unbearable beauty.)

1942

Possible additions:

In last scene with Katie—on how hard it is to do what one wants—Keating says: “Why did I choose a profession I hated?”

The deliberate destruction of the prime movers by the second-handers—Mallory’s “the genius recognized too well.”

The second-handers [offer] substitutes for competence, such as love, charm, kindness—easy substitutes—and there is no substitute for creation.

We must be ashamed to admit second-hander’s motives—acts of altruism.

On second-handers: [they are] always concerned with people—not facts, ideas, work or production. What would happen to the world without those who think, work and produce? [For the answer, see Atlas Shrugged.]

1942

[For the scene in which Wynand wanders the streets after he has betrayed Roark. ]

Bottle caps. Pawn shop. Subway grating.

Flashback.

Housewives, pushcart, grocery markets—“my masters.”

Power—slavery to those you rule—or—the Toohey kind. The self as thought; they escape from thought; [this escape is turned] into a system and a virtue. I never had any power. The destructive mass.

Shakespeare movie—Tchaikovsky juke box.

Austen Heller and the Globe, whom he despised.

Roark was my own self—the kind of victory I could have had.

He buys paper and reads editorial (to anyone who wished, for the sum of three cents, I have sold Howard Roark).

Hell’s Kitchen—“I never got out—I surrendered to the grocery man and the ferry boat sailors.”

What I had wanted—“The defense rests.”

Skyscrapers. (I’ve betrayed you—I have no right to love the city.)

I deserved it, I unleashed the monster.

A great many Banners—the one with Roark and the heel print.

That I built it—I was the prime mover—I made it possible for the beast—the unforgivable—hatred of own life—no gallantry. (Forgivable for the “little people”—not for him.)

Will go back to Dominique—only pity—the kind of marriage she wanted.

The unforgivable sin.

1942

The worst crime of all on earth—to repeat a borrowed opinion. (We can’t all be geniuses, but independence of judgment is involved in any act or comment.)

The irresponsibility of the second-hander. This is the drooling beast [referred to by the character Steven Mallory]: that the man acts, but his reasons are so scattered that they’re nowhere and he cannot be reasoned with.

Play up to the opinions of people? But most of them have no opinions. The vacuum—until someone (like Toohey) chooses to fill it.

Second-handedness (even its true altruistic form) is so much easier than self-respect. Oneself is the person one can never fool.

Wynand is a great tragedy—the reverse of the famous geniuses—they were creators in their work, second-handers in their personal life. Wynand is reversed—but the same tragic contradiction and inner battle. (Wynand says he’ll achieve his purpose when he wishes.)

When people believe that others are their prime virtue, they have only two alternatives: do what others believe (slavishness) or force their own belief for the good of others.

1942

[The following seems to be for Roark’s speech.]

What is life? Consciousness, thought, valuing, creation—all egotistical conceptions. That is the ego.

What are second-handers? Those who place their basic reality in other people’s eyes. (Keating, Toohey, Wynand, dictators, “devoted” mothers, vain society women, etc.; the destructive envy—Eleanor Roosevelt.) Reflected reality.

Why altruism had to become second-handedness and can be nothing else.

Semshness—not crush others, but independent of others.

Not “egotism” and “altruism” but “selfishness” and “second-handedness.”

Toohey’s words about antonyms—the basic test—that which is of life and that which is of death.

The great reversal—the joke on mankind.

The virtues and the vices—vices are collective.

One cannot eat for others.

Christ and Nietzsche.

What we permit—what the test of virtue should be.

The second-handers against men who rule nature.

1942

Roark’s Speech

“Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered fire ...”

The persecution and exploitation of the Action Man—martyrs of history.

Action Men live for themselves.

Everything we have comes from them—all they ask is to give.

Before one can give, one must create.

Usefulness—but it cannot be reversed.

What do they ask in return?—their freedom, their right to exist for themselves.

Cooperation, but not collectivism. Each for himself. Use the product of others and add that which is new and yours. The first man finding a new world for the first time—the only form of giving.

I refuse to exist for anyone or anything else.

The world is perishing from an orgy of “sacrificing.”

I had to state my terms—here they are. I gave you that building.

You have worshipped slaves and rulers, but fear the independent man above all. “Each man classifies himself.”

In the name of Henry Cameron, Steve Mallory and all the others. “For a man who doesn’t want to be named, but who’s sitting in this courtroom and knows that I’m speaking of him.”

What you do to me does not matter to me.

(I’m an architect and I can read blueprints—I understand yours.)

“The lights are going out all over the world.”

Undated

[The following lengthy paper was written for prospective publishers, probably in 1940.]

Theme of Second-Hand Lives

The theme of this novel is individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but within a man’s soul. It is the conflict of these two principles in their fundamental aspect.

As a consequence, it is also a definition of what constitutes selfishness and a defense of selfishness in its true spiritual sense.

The four men, after whom the four parts of the novel are named, present four different attitudes toward these two basic, irreconcilable principles.

Howard Roark, the hero of the novel, is a man utterly devoid of the collective sense. He is not an enemy of mankind, but much more than that: he is spiritually unconscious of the existence of other men. Basically, life is consciousness; to live means to think; the fundamental process which constitutes life itself is the process of thought; thought is the creator of all values; the practical application of thought is man’s work, his labor, his creative activity—and all labor is a creative activity to some degree. In these two realms—his thought and his labor—Roark is utterly independent of all other men. He faces life as if he were the first man born. Nothing stands between the evidence of his senses and the conclusions his mind draws from them. He does not even reject the conception of: “I must believe this because others believe it”—he goes much beyond rejection: he simply is unable to understand the possibility of such a conception. An entity such as “others” does not exist in the roots of his consciousness. Thus, the aim of his life-and his desires in life—lie within him alone.

He is an architect. He builds as he wishes to build, as he considers right to build. He is true to his own truth—he knows no other. Tradition and custom—what others have done before him or what others wish him to do now—have absolutely no meaning for him. He is a first motive, a prime mover, a creator of values, a creator in the only possible sense of the word. He is the life-giving principle itself, personified in a man. His work is his only reality and his only great passion. His happiness depends on nothing but his own achievement. And he finds, in that achievement, a sensation beyond happiness, a sensation for which the word ecstasy is inadequate, a sensation which is a reason in itself, which justifies all existence: Man at the highest possible to him.

His valuation of himself depends on nothing but the concrete reality of his achievement. He is good if he is convinced that his work is good. What others think of it or of him does not matter. His happiness, his pride, the motive power of his will to live concern no one but himself and depend on no one else. Of course, he needs other men; but that need is secondary, not primary. As an architect, he needs clients; he needs people to live in the buildings he designs; but the difference is this: he needs clients in order to build; he does not build in order to have clients; while creating, he is essentially alone; the creation is the end, people are the means, a secondary means; he does not achieve through other men nor for other men; he achieves through and for himself alone, then offers it to others.

Thus, spiritually he is a paragon of selfishness. And his life presents a strange paradox: outwardly, his life follows the course conventionally considered as that of an unselfish man; he sacrifices everything to his convictions, to the integrity of his work; he is not concerned with wealth, fame, admiration or physical comfort; he lives in poverty; he is a martyr to an ideal. Thus the devotion to an ideal, the noblest feeling possible to man, is also the most selfish.

The second paradox is in Roark’s relations to other men. Basically, he needs nothing from them; so he demands nothing of them. And thus, when he is a friend, he is the only true friend those around him possess. He does not love all men abstractly and indiscriminately. His love, as everything else he experiences, has to have a basis in his own reason. Men have to earn his love. And what he respects and appreciates in men is the same kind of spiritual independence as his own. But when he likes a man, he likes him for that man’s own sake; not for what he, Roark, can get from that man, not for what that man can give him. His love is respect for the other man’s own value—apart from himself, apart from any relation to himself. Thus his attitude towards other men is completely selfless—in the only noble and benevolent meaning of that word. He will not sacrifice himself for others; neither will he sacrifice them for himself. He will not let others enslave him; neither will he enslave them. He does not exist for the sake of others; neither does he expect them to exist for his sake. Having no fundamental need for other men, he can have no motive for bearing ill will towards them; and more than that: he bears towards them the only good will of any real meaning—the recognition of their own independent value. Such is Howard Roark.

The second man of the novel, Peter Keating, is—basically—the utterly selfless man. His spirit is an empty space which other men have to fill. In himself alone, he has nothing to offer—to himself or to the world. He cannot exist, save through others. His consuming ambition is to be great—in other people’s eyes. Thus, at the root of his spirit, others take precedence over his own self. Others establish all his values. Others become the motive power of his will to live. He is an architect. He builds as his clients wish him to build. His work is not an end in itself; it is the means to satisfy other men and to obtain from them in return the one gift he needs so desperately—the gift of their approval and their admiration. He has no convictions of any kind about his work; it is good if others like it; he has never stated to himself a code of right or wrong in relation to his creative activity; to him, right is that which other people consider right, wrong is that which they consider wrong. In his own mind, he does not even ask for the reasons upon which others have based these valuations; to him, the judgment of others is sufficient reason as such. He finds no happiness in his own work; his happiness comes second-hand, through the reaction of others to his work.

He achieves the first great triumph of his career when he wins an important competition with a building which he claims to have designed, but which was actually designed by Roark, though no one knows this save Keating and Roark; Keating is happy in the general admiration, even though he knows that he doesn’t deserve it; he is happy in the fact that millions of men consider him a great architect, even though he himself knows that the achievement they admire is not his. If Roark were given the choice of being great in all eyes save his own or of being great in his own knowledge, with all other men ignorant of his greatness—he would choose the last. Peter Keating chooses the first. Thus, to Keating, all reality is second-hand-through others, by others, for others. Fame, above all else, is his greatest desire; the admiration of others for his person is his greatest need. His life is an eternal concern with what others will think, what others will say, how others will react to him.

Outwardly his life follows a course conventionally considered as that of a selfish man. He is not one to sacrifice for an ideal—he has no ideal. He struggles for fame, admiration, prominence, money. He has no scruples in the struggle and he does not hesitate to sacrifice other men who stand in his way. But, fundamentally, he does all this for the spiritual sake of others—or, rather, for the satisfaction of his own spirit which depends on others so completely. He needs the fame and the admiration in order to have the judgment of others grant him his own value; he needs the money in order to impress others with a tangible evidence of his value; he needs the prominence in order to establish his superiority over others. The quest for superiority is his obsession; it is touched with hysteria; it is the most sensitive spot in his soul. Since he has no objective, independent standard by which to establish his own dignity, his pride and his self-respect, he can establish them only by comparison. He is a success to the extent to which others have failed; he is great to the extent of his ability to surpass others. His selfless greatness consists essentially of the degradation of his brother men.

And this is the paradox in Keating’s relations to men: basically, he is completely dependent upon them; thus he is forced to demand a great deal from them; selfless in spirit, he makes other men his victims, he sacrifices them to his own emptiness, to fill his own void. His success does not depend upon the intrinsic value of his own work; his success is to be obtained through and from other men; thus he has to fight men, to cheat them, to force one man after another from a position he desires; he has nothing to fight with, save his ability to outwit and outmaneuver other men; each man is his natural enemy. The spiritual independence of another man is the greatest threat to him; being only a mirror that reflects others, he expects others to be only a mirror for him. A man unconcerned with the person of Peter Keating is an enemy; for within that man, Peter Keating is dead; and Peter Keating has no life save within other people’s minds. To exist he must force the consciousness of his existence upon them. He spends his life cultivating friendships—and he is no friend to anyone. Spiritually enslaved, he carries the principle of slavery to all those around him. He is a man without a soul, who has never felt the need of a soul. When he begins to understand the truth about himself—it is too late.

Gail Wynand, the third man of the novel, is a man who sold his soul. Independent in spirit, with a potentiality for greatness such as Roark‘s, he chooses deliberately to betray his own self. Fundamentally, he does not need other men in that deep, primary, personal sense in which Keating needs them. But instead of keeping himself apart spiritually, Wynand chooses to seek power over men. His conception of greatness is not in following other men, not in being admired by them, like Keating, but in ruling them.

A man of brilliant intellect, of great daring and imagination, starting life from the abject poverty of a slum childhood, he rises to become a great publisher, head of a journalistic empire. He achieves his success by giving people what they want; nothing is too low or too sensational for his newspapers to exploit; he plays upon men’s worst instincts; he develops an unerring sense of public opinion, and the policy of his newspapers is to follow it faithfully. He does not allow himself the luxury ever to express an editorial judgment of his own; his editorials say what he knows his readers want him to say. The difference between him and Keating on this point is that Keating would have accepted, in his own mind, this judgment of his readers as final and valid; Wynand does not accept it; Wynand despises his readers and all humanity; but Wynand thinks that power over men is his best defense against them. His only relief from men is his love for great art, which he understands and appreciates.

In his innermost consciousness, Wynand is free; but he does not possess Roark’s single-minded consistency; he does not carry his spiritual reality into action; Roark is too selfish to feel the need of imposing himself upon others in any way; Wynand is selfless enough to need power. In acquiring power over others, he loses his own freedom; he has no outlet for his own convictions, no way to translate them into reality. Potentially a prime-mover like Roark, i.e., a man who thinks and feels through his own mind, he denies himself the possibility of an idea to follow. But the need of such an ideal is deep within him. And this need, frustrated, turns into an active hatred of all ideals. Keating does not understand the conception of idealism; Wynand understands it too well. The more successful he becomes in his career, the greater his impulse to destroy in others that which he himself has missed, that which he has sacrificed to them. The only personal pleasure he finds in life is a sadistic delight in breaking the integrity of other men. He will pay any price to force a writer of radical sympathies into becoming a champion of conservatism, or vice versa. The commercial careerist holds no interest for him. It is only men in whom he senses a sincere, profound devotion to their convictions that he chooses for his victims. He wrecks lives on his way, he drives some to suicide. He believes that he is merely proving to himself the triviality of all human idealism. He believes that he is prompted by contempt for human integrity. He cannot allow himself to realize that he is prompted by a great love of integrity, that he tries to destroy it in order to prove to himself that it does not exist, that he has not missed much—knowing only too well that it does exist and that he has missed more than he dares admit to himself.

He has never allowed himself a complete, profound, personal desire of his own. But, at the climax of his life, an overwhelming personal issue forces him to put his power over men to an actual test. He attempts, for once, to sway the public opinion which he thought he controlled. He attempts to use his newspapers to champion an unpopular cause crucially important to him. He finds himself helpless. Public opinion will not follow him. Men are deaf to his commands and to his pleas—men who have never been given cause to respect him. He sees, for the first time, that he has no power over men, but has surrendered himself into their power instead, that he does not rule, but is ruled, that he has been a figure-head sitting on a throne which they had created and which he could occupy only so long as he pleased them, that he is the creation of his own slaves, that he is the puppet and they hold the strings, that his life and his power have been second-hand. And the monster he helped to feed is now unleashed against him: the voice of other men, the pressure of public opinion force him to betray his own cause, to reverse the policy of his papers in obedience to the general desire and against his first and only ideal.

Ellsworth M. Toohey, the fourth man, is a creature of perfection in his own kind, just as Roark is a creature of perfection in his—and the complete antithesis of Roark. Toohey is successful at the evil of which Keating and Wynand are victims. Toohey is the paragon of spiritual “second-handedness.”

Basically, Toohey is non-creative. He has nothing of his own to offer—to himself or to others. His evil lies in [the fact] that he knows it, accepts it and glories in it. He begins where Keating and Wynand ended. Keating sought superiority after his own fashion; he wished for good, even though his conception of good was false; when he discovered the basic lie of his life, when he saw that he had been neither superior nor good—the discovery brought him spiritual ruin. Wynand sought power as a means of independence; when he discovered the true nature of his power—he was ended spiritually. Toohey began by seeing and accepting what these two could not accept; he knew himself to be incapable of intrinsic superiority or independence; he made of this his virtue; he dedicated himself to the destruction of all superiority and all independence. He accepted consciously the negation of all values, of all ideals, of all that is high and noble in man—with a full realization of the meaning of such values. Not in frustrated longing for an ideal, but in cold and deliberate hatred of all integrity. He chose to be consciously evil. He is the great Nihilist of the spirit.

Toohey understands human greatness and the motive-power of human greatness better than any other man in the story. Roark is great, but too unself conscious to analyze or understand it—for a long time. Keating and Wynand seek greatness blindly. Toohey knows its roots. He understands fully the basic antithesis, the two principles fighting within human consciousness—the individual and the collective, the one and the many, the “I” and the “They.” He knows that the source of all greatness, of all that is free, creative, forward-moving, and—ultimately—benevolent to all men is a man’s basic independence of spirit, his integrity of thought untouched, fundamentally, by any concern for others. He knows that the source of all evil and all sorrow, of all frustration and all lies is the collective sense, the intrusion of others into the basic motives of a man. And since he is dedicated to the destruction of greatness, he becomes the enemy of the individual and the great champion of collectivism.

Toohey knows that each man must be judged by what he has achieved through the creative labor of his own mind, not by what he has or has not done for others; that his creation is the greatest gift he can bring to others, such as the creations of all great thinkers, artists, and scientists, creations made possible not because of their brothers, but in spite of the opposition of their brothers, made possible only by the profoundly selfish integrity of the spirit of the great creators. Toohey knows that a man’s achievement is the only measure of his value and of his superiority. And Toohey knows that in such a competition he has no chance at superiority; he is basically sterile; he has no great passion for anything and no great interest in anything save other men. Thus he decides not to attempt to seek superiority, but to do better: to destroy its very conception. He cannot rise. He can pull others down. He cannot reach the heights. He can raze them. Equality becomes his greatest passion.

His life program is simple: to destroy men by tying them to one another; to preach self-sacrifice, self-denial, self-abasement; to preach the spiritual slavery of each man to all other men; to fight the great creator and liberator—Man’s Ego. Toohey is famous as “The Humanitarian.”

Any form of personal happiness is a form of freedom. To destroy men he must destroy their joy in living; to destroy their joy in living he must destroy all that is personally dear and important to them. Such is his first instinct in relation to any human being he meets. He wrecks the life of his niece, Catherine, by destroying the only important thing of her existence—her love for Peter Keating. He destroys Keating by killing such self-respect as Keating did possess. He attempts to destroy Dominique Francon, the heroine of the story (more about her later), by encouraging her perverse desire to resist all desires. He has no personal concern for Keating, Catherine, or Dominique; it is only their inner selves which he wishes to annihilate. Men who are happy live for themselves; Toohey cannot allow men to live for themselves; unhappy men turn to others for consolation, attempt to fill the emptiness of their failure by existing for the sake of others; and this is the state to which Toohey wishes them reduced. “Let all live for all. Let all sacrifice and none profit. Let all suffer and none enjoy. Let progress stop. Let all stagnate. There is equality in stagnation.” Such is Toohey’s secret motto. And it is the more frightening since he truly seeks nothing for himself. He does not wish to subjugate men to his own will. He wishes to subjugate all to the will of all. Which means—to the will of none. Universal slavery—without even the dignity of a master. Slavery to slavery. A great circle and an utter equality. Such is Ellsworth M. Toohey.

His chief weapon is mockery. A great, all-embracing nihilistic ridicule. Allow nothing to remain sacred in a man’s soul. Earnestness towards any conception whatever, the mere conception of earnestness itself, is the base of reverence. Allow nothing to be important to a man’s spirit. Laugh it out of existence. Laughter, not as joy, but as destruction. Fight ideals, not by denial, but by internal corruption. Toohey is wiser than Wynand; Wynand tried to destroy integrity by crude force from without, which merely tore that integrity, intact, out of a man’s soul. Toohey is subtler and deadlier: he makes integrity rot slowly within that soul. He uses a man’s integrity against itself; he makes it become loyalty to principles basically destructive of all integrity. He destroys idealism in men, not by denying it, not by preaching the vanity of all ideals, but in precisely the opposite manner: by professing the great value and glory of idealism in men and then directing their idealism toward objects basically destructive of all ideals. Thus, he holds out unselfishness as the supreme goal of the spirit; thus he holds out brother-love as the sublime virtue. He does not deny the conception of superiority among men, but destroys it by glorifying the worthless as superior. Thus, fully recognizing the genius of Roark, he holds him up to ridicule; fully recognizing the mediocrity of Keating, he hails him as a great architect. An art critic by profession, Toohey manages to reach into every field of creative endeavor; and in every field he enshrines mediocrity—in order to destroy all shrines. Keating in architecture; Lois Cook in literature—a phony “modernist” who writes “words on words,” “words above meaning” and thus destroys both words and meaning; in painting—a creator of the pork-chop-fur-lined-tea-cup school; and so on. Do not fight human achievement in the open. Destroy it from within. Destroy by internal corruption. Destroy the rare, the difficult, the exceptional, the original by substituting standards of achievement open to the abilities of any and all. That, also, is Ellsworth M. Toohey. That he is a Communist in his political convictions is only incidental; he proclaims that he fights Rockefeller and Morgan; he really fights Shakespeare and Beethoven.

Thus the four men of the story are: Howard Roark, who is great and knows it; Peter Keating, who could not be great and does not know it; Gail Wynand, who could have been; and Ellsworth M. Toohey, who could never be and knows it.

A few words about Dominique Francon and about the general course of the story.

Dominique’s basic passion is a fierce love of independence. But it is an independence that turns upon itself—in protest against the world she sees around her. Capable of great desire, she makes it her aim to desire nothing. Actually a saint, in that her subconscious demand is perfection—from herself and from all others—she finds a vicious delight in lowering herself to whatever action she considers most contemptible; since she cannot find perfection, she prefers its opposite extreme to compromise. But such conscious self-degradation is only her manner of a quest for the sublime. Her redemption is in that she never accepts spiritually the vile depths to which she descends; she defies the depths by descending.

It is quite obviously inevitable that she should love Roark and that her love for him should be final, complete and immediate. It is a love too great to be endured in acceptance; she can bear it only by denying, by resisting it, by degrading it, by trying to destroy it. Like most women, and to a greater degree than most, she is a masochist and she wishes for the happiness of suffering at Roark’s hands. Sexually, Roark has a great deal of the sadist, and he finds pleasure in breaking her will and her defiance. Yet he loves her, and this love is the only passion for another human being in his whole life. And her love for him is essentially worship, it becomes her religion, it becomes her reconciliation with life, with humanity and with herself—but not until many years later.

Roark’s life is the simple, single-tracked pursuit of his only goat—architecture. It is the continuous struggle of his own truth against men. He experiences every hardship, every defeat, every agony that men can place in his way. But it leaves him untouched—within. His conflict is with the outside world, not with himself. He never achieves universal recognition—which he never sought. But he wins the freedom to work as he believes, he fights through to the chance of creating great buildings. His buildings—not his love nor his compliance—are his gift to the world. And by ignoring men, he gives them creations of great value. At the end of the story, we leave him at the height of his work and of his power. And in that work, he has found a height of happiness unknown to most men, he has made the world a better place by the fact of making such happiness possible, by the fact of making it exist within his own soul—and the realization of man’s capacity for ecstasy is the only reason for this world’s existence. Or so the author believes.

Keating achieves the kind of success he seeks, early and easily. He wins great popular acclaim. But the emptiness and the uncertainty within him allow him no happiness. He has never known peace with himself. Such joy as he finds in life is only a guilty, unhealthy, unsafe satisfaction. He has not the courage of his own desires—and he passes up the only chance at happiness he had, his sincere love for Catherine. His success goes as it came—through the whim of others. His popularity fades as that of all current fashions; undeserved from the first, his fame dwindles and dies; he is replaced by other popular heroes of the same type. And it is only when people begin to desert him that he begins to question his own soul, to realize dimly what it was that he missed, what it was that he had always envied, feared and resented in Roark. When he understands it, it is too late. We leave him, a man without hope, without future, without past, a man who had lived through others, had brought them nothing but sorrow and left them nothing but bad imitations of every bad building created before him.

Toohey proceeds successfully on his chosen course of destroying all those whose lives touch his. He fails only with three human beings: Roark, Dominique, and Wynand. Roark is the great, consuming hatred of his life, the symbol of all that he must destroy. He is helpless before Roark; he cannot touch Roark spiritually—and he knows it. So he marshals every social weapon he controls—to break Roark’s career. And Toohey holds a great power over society, carefully built up through the years. But he fails. He cannot prevent Roark’s ultimate triumph. In regard to Dominique, Toohey is one of the few who understand her real nature. He goads her on to self-destruction. He helps to bring about her marriage to Wynand—a marriage he hoped would destroy them both. He has a special interest in Wynand: he works slowly, through many years, to obtain editorial control of the Wynand papers, on which he is employed as a special columnist-commentator. He understands Wynand. He knows that Wynand’s bitter cynicism is only a mask for the kind of spirit Toohey dreads; he knows that Wynand is not basically corrupt. He hopes to achieve that corruption through Dominique, whom he considers to be the worst possible influence that Wynand could encounter. He fails in his calculations. At the end of the story, he loses that particular battle by losing his position with the Wynand papers. But another great newspaper signs him up at once. Toohey, like time, marches on.

Wynand’s retribution comes first in the person of Dominique, in that he falls desperately in love with her; desperately—because it is his first complete, sincere and personal emotion. When he marries her, he knows that she does not love him, but he does not know that she loves Roark, that the marriage is only her way of defying and degrading her love for Roark, the bitterest way she could find. She chooses Wynand as the most completely vicious man she knows. She is disappointed in this; she herself brings the first awakening of Wynand’s essential self. His love for her becomes the symbol of everything he has missed in life: an experience completely his own, to be guarded savagely against all other men, those other men whose public property he is.

But it is Roark who is life’s final revenge upon Wynand. When [they] meet, Wynand is 54, Roark is 37. Wynand does not suspect that Dominique had been Roark’s mistress, and his attitude toward Roark has no relation to Dominique. Instead of the usual hatred which men of Roark’s integrity had always aroused in him, Wynand’s reaction is a great, irresistible, unformu lated wave of recognition and admiration. He does not understand or analyze it for a long time. He knows only that he needs Roark in some odd, unaccountable manner. Slowly, through their strange relationship of unspoken understanding, Wynand begins to realize that Roark is the symbol of everything he has betrayed; Roark achieved what he had lacked the courage to achieve; Roark is his own self, as he might have been; Roark is his revenge against society, against that mob whom Roark defies and to whom Wynand has surrendered. And although Roark is an external reproach to him, although the mere fact of Roark’s existence brings him the first spiritual suffering he has ever allowed himself to experience—Roark becomes Wynand’s obsession. Wynand is actually in love with Roark. It is love in every sense but the physical; its base is not in homosexuality; Wynand has never had any tendency in that direction. It is more hero-worship than love, and more religion than hero-worship. Actually, it is Wynand’s tribute to his own unrealized greatness. This love has no relation to his love for Dominique; it is not faithlessness to Dominique; and yet, were he ever asked to choose between the two, Wynand would have chosen Roark. Wynand welcomes the torture of loving a man whom he should hate. He finds a dim, twisted sense of atonement in his love for his worst spiritual enemy. He is punishing himself for what he has done—by bowing before what he should have done. It is his first acceptance of an ideal—and his first suffering for its sake. Roark becomes the most precious thing in his life.

Roark’s attitude toward Wynand is a deep understanding; in a way—respect ; and the only pity he has ever felt for any human being. As to Dominique, she sees the situation, resents it and is frightened by it. To her, there is no other reality and no other concern but Roark. She is jealous of Wynand, of any feeling Roark might have in response to Wynand’s adoration of him. It is a triangle—in which the husband and wife are both in love with the same man.

It is when—through Toohey’s efforts—Roark becomes the center of a sensational scandal and faces a trial involving a possible sentence of life-imprisonment, that Wynand attempts to defend Roark through the influence of his newspapers. Roark is the object of great public indignation. Wynand wants to defend him, more passionately than he would want to defend his own life. But he cannot fight the monster of public opinion. He is forced to make his papers clamor for Roark’s conviction. He is forced to betray his first and only god.

It is Wynand’s final tragedy. He faces the full understanding of his own spiritual degradation and of that illusory power over men for the sake of which he had allowed his degradation. Roark is acquitted. In the circumstances surrounding the trial, Wynand learns the truth about the past of Roark and Dominique, and that they still love each other. He loses them both. He is forced to divorce Dominique. He has nothing left but his newspaper empire, which he now hates—with all its energy, spirit and prestige gone.

Dominique comes back to Roark—completely, finally and voluntarily, understanding through him the meaning of life as he has lived it, as she is prepared to live it for the first time.

This, very generally and very roughly, is the story.

December 13, 1943

[Shortly after The Fountainhead’s publication, Warner Brothers bought the movie rights. The following notes were made as AR began work on the screenplay. ]

General Theme: Man’s integrity.

Plot Theme: Howard Roark, an architect, a man of genius, originality and complete spiritual independence, holds the truth of his convictions above all things in life. He fights against society for his creative freedom, he refuses to compromise in any way, he builds only as he believes, he will not submit to conventions, traditions, popular taste, money or fame. Dominique Francon, the woman he loves, thinks that his fight is hopeless. Afraid that society will hurt and corrupt him, she tries to block his career in order to save him from certain disaster. When the disaster comes and he faces public disgrace, she decides to take her revenge on the man responsible for it, Gail Wynand, a powerful, corrupt newspaper publisher. She marries Wynand, determined to break him. But Roark rises slowly, in spite of every obstacle. When he finally meets Wynand in person, Dominique is terrified to see that the two men love and understand each other. Roark’s integrity reaches Wynand’s better self, Roark is the ideal which Wynand has betrayed in his ambition for power. Without intending it, Roark achieves his own revenge—by becoming Wynand’s best friend. Dominique finds herself suffering in a strange triangle—jealous of her husband’s devotion to the man she loves. When Roark’s life and career are threatened in a final test, when he becomes the victim of public fury and has to stand trial, alone, hated, opposed and denounced by all—Wynand makes a supreme effort toward his own redemption. He stands by Roark and defends him. Wynand loses, defeated and broken by the corrupt machine he himself had created. But Roark wins without his help—wins by the power of his own truth. Roark is acquitted—and Dominique comes to him, free to find happiness with him, realizing that the battle is never hopeless, that nothing can defeat man’s integrity. [Note that the movie’s plot is to focus on Roark, Wynand, and Dominique; Keating and Toohey are not even mentioned.]

Specific theme, as presented in screenplay:

Independence—as against obeying the wishes of others, as against the “social” spirit, which is: Keating, who tried to live by public polls; Wynand, who tried to use the mob; Toohey, who consciously used collectivism for the purpose of gaining power and enslaving mankind.

Therefore, Roark’s speech must summarize the above, give it a statement—the good is not the social, but the individual, not the herd-instinct, but independence; to live for yourself or for others is an issue of the spirit, the choice between one’s own judgment and the surrender of one’s judgment, between integrity and mental prostitution. The form of a society will be the result of this basic issue.

May 3, 1948

[Almost five years later, Warner Brothers began to make the movie. Shortly before the start of principal photography, the director (King Vidor) asked AR to write instructions for the scene in which, after Kiki Holcombe’s party, Dominique comes to Roark’s apartment. Patricia Neal, Vidor said, needed a better understanding of Dominique’s psychology. The instructions helped; AR commented later that this was “the best acted scene in the movie.”]

Notes on Scene in Roark’s Apartment

Dominique’s Psychology

This scene contains the entire progression of Roark’s and Dominique’s love affair in the book. Dominique’s part in the scene gives her a chance to show every aspect of her character.

Dominique’s basic attitude is the violent conflict between her passion for Roark and her despair. The more she admires him, the more certain she is that he will be destroyed. She is so hurt herself that she is driven to hurt him, but her cruelty to him is only an extreme expression of her love. We must be certain that there is never a touch of feminine cattiness, vanity or malice in Dominique’s performance. She defies Roark because she worships him. She defies him for the pleasure of seeing him master her. Her real desire is always to see him win.

The different aspects of Dominique’s character and mood in the scene go in this order: Defiance—bitterness—sex—feminine helplessness.

1. At the beginning of the scene, Dominique is coldly, arrogantly defiant. This is her way of paying Roark for the rape. Her attitude, in effect, is: Well, if you want to break me down, I will break down with a vengeance, I will go all the way—and it won’t do you any good. She is challenging him by overdoing her surrender. To achieve this effect, she must read her lines coldly, arrogantly, with an undertone of bitter mockery. When she speaks of how much she loves him and how much she missed him, her voice must sound as if she were throwing insults in his face, throwing them coldly, contemptuously and deliberately. Then the lines will sound as if they are torn out of her against her will—and this will convey a feeling of passion for him much greater than any sentimental reading could achieve.

2. These are the speeches where Dominique shows all her bitterness against the world—and, in doing it, she shows her own uncompromising idealism and her admiration for Roark. In this bitter form, she pays him the greatest compliments. This is her real declaration of love for him—because here she states the reasons for her love: she loves all the things which the world hates him for. While she speaks about his business and clients, her voice has more emotion than she showed in the preceding moments when she spoke of love. This is where she begins to show despair, but not openly; it is merely in the bitterness and tension of the way she speaks; she must speak as if every word hurt her.

3. Here we see Dominique’s sexual violence. This is the first time when she gives in to Roark physically and voluntarily. Her response, when he seizes her in his arms, is a contradiction of everything she has said. She has spoken coldly about wanting to leave him, but the moment he touches her, her response is one of desperate, irresistible hunger for him. While she is in Roark’s arms, she is her real self, free for a few moments. She is, frankly and openly, a primitive sexy female—in the highest sense of the words. When Roark says, “I had to let you learn to accept it,” her silent answer shows that she has more than accepted it: the way she kisses him has the same quality of open desire as his, it is she who seizes him as he had done it to her before. The purpose of this part of the scene is to explain why Dominique decides to marry Wynand: Her physical hunger for Roark is so great that she knows she will not be able to resist it. She knows she will not escape, but will keep coming back to him in spite of all her convictions—so she has to tie herself in some irrevocable manner to keep herself away from Roark. That is the motivation and purpose of her marriage to Wynand.

4. This is the last and startling transition of Dominique’s attitude in the scene. It is the only time we will see her break down completely—and it must be the breakdown of a strong woman, not of a weepy little girl. Her despair has been growing throughout the scene and now it breaks into the open. Here she is completely feminine, helpless, pleading—but never weak. She has a desperate urgency and sincerity—she does not realize the preposterousness of what she is asking—so that when she speaks about cooking and scrubbing floors, it does not sound homey, but tragic. When she says, “Don’t laugh, I can,” Roark has not given the slightest indication of any desire to laugh. In fact, this is where he listens to her most earnestly, because he knows that this is real despair.

When Roark refuses her and she gets up to reach for her wrap, her manner becomes that of the cold, detached, Madonna-like woman which she is through most of the picture. But the rest of the time, she gives the impression of a person who feels nothing; here, she is a person who has felt too much—she is drained of all emotion, life or hope.

At the very end of the scene, when she is in Roark’s arms again, her desire for him returns, but now it is not enjoyment, it is a tortured, involuntary surrender. She really wants to escape from him—her manner must be the direct transition to the next scene where she goes to Wynand.

Roark’s Psychology

Roark’s attitude throughout the scene is much simpler. There is no conflict in him. He knows what he wants—but he learns in this scene that he cannot have Dominique, at least not for a long time.

At first, his manner is a direct continuation of his attitude in the quarry sequence. It is self-confident, mocking, with an undertone of triumph—because she has surrendered by coming to him, which is what he was waiting for. He listens to her first speeches with the faintest hint of a mocking smile. He is enjoying it. He likes her defiance, because he likes a victory over a strong adversary.

The first change in his attitude comes when she says: “I love you, Roark.” This is more than he expected. He knows that coming from her it is a danger signal.

When she tells him why she is certain that he will be destroyed by the world, he listens calmly. He knows that he won’t be destroyed. He is so sure of himself that he will not argue with her about it. He knows she is wrong and, therefore, he feels confident that he can win her.

His only answer is to sweep all her objections away simply by showing her the greatness of their love for each other. To him, the world can never be a threat and can never stand in the way of his own happiness.

It is only when Dominique falls down on her knees and starts pleading with him that he realizes completely the extent of her despair. Then he understands that he cannot force her into his own attitude toward life, that she will have to learn it herself. He acts toward her on the same principle as he acts in his professional career. He wants a voluntary acceptance, he will not force his ideas on anyone. He raped her only because he knew that she wanted it; but she is not ready for happiness and he cannot force her to be. His action here is quietly heroic. He could have demanded anything he wished of her, and she would have obeyed. Instead, he lets her go. His last speech must be delivered very quietly and with great self-confidence, so great that it needs no obvious emphasis, no raised voice. It is a man speaking with absolute certainty, even when he suffers, and he does suffer here.

Their last embrace is in the nature of a farewell—though not an immediate farewell. This will be their last night together, and Roark knows it, but he does intend to have that last night.

Notes About the Set

It is extremely important that Roark’s room be kept completely in character with him. He is quite poor at this time. He knows that whatever money he got for the Enright House will have to last him for a long time, and he is not the type of man who would waste money on personal luxuries. Also, he is too great an artist ever to want any second-rate junk around him. Therefore, his room must be extremely, startlingly simple. It is not the simplicity of squalid poverty, but the simplicity of deliberate intention. The room must be large, with a feeling of space and with an absolute minimum of furniture. He would want his home to be as functional as his buildings. He would have only the things he needs and nothing else. He would never make attempts at homey comfort or prettifying. Above all, there must not be any pictures on the walls. The walls must be bare. There must be one large window, a couch, a drafting table, a few chairs, a dresser, a wooden filing cabinet for his drawings—and that is all. No curtains, no rugs, no boudoir pillows, no books, no fancy lamps or ash trays and, for the love of God, no vases or knick-knacks. The furniture must be modern and very simple—the kind of good, but inexpensive modem that one finds sometimes in New York. An impression of beauty can be achieved by the proportions and the relations of the objects in the room. The effect of the room must be the same as the effect of Roark’s character: direct, stark, purposeful, austere. Since the love scene is to be played in evening clothes, its effect—against the simplicity of a room that looks ascetic like a monk’s cell—will be most startling.

Suggestions

In the love scene, Roark sits down, not in a chair, but on a couch. The way I would suggest doing it is as follows: They stand near the couch when Roark seizes her in his arms. After his line: “You’d rather not hear it now? But I want you to hear it. I love you,” he kisses her and they lean back and go down together, without breaking the kiss, his mouth not leaving hers.

For the last embrace my suggestion is this: Dominique is wearing a strapless evening gown; when she is about to leave, she reaches for her wrap and puts it on. She has it on when Roark takes her in his arms. Show the embrace in a close-up that includes their heads and shoulders. As he holds her, while she moans that she wants to leave him, the wrap slips off. We do not see her gown, but only her naked arms, back and shoulders; we see Roark’s hand moving slowly from her shoulder down her back.

PART 3

TRANSITION BETWEEN NOVELS

8

THE MORAL BASIS OF INDIVIDUALISM

Shortly after completing The Fountainhead, AR contracted with her publisher, Bobbs-Merrill, to write a short nonfiction book giving a systematic presentation of the novel’s ethics and politics. Her working title was The Moral Basis of Individualism.

AR’s notes for this book provide a fascinating record of her philosophic development during the period between The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. In the course of these notes, she is discovering and clarifying many of the ideas that become essential in John Galt’s speech. Her formulations here should not be interpreted as Objectivism; rather, they ore her notes to herself while she is working out how to present Objectivism as a systematic philosophy.

Her joumal for The Moral Basis of Individualism con be viewed as a progression with three stages. She begins in September of 1943 by writing a “tentative outline,” a foreword and an unworked draft of the first three chapters. She then stops work on the draft and instead begins asking herself questions and thinking aloud on paper. Finally, in the summer of 1945, she critiques her original draft and rewrites part of it before deciding to drop the project.

There seem to be two reasons why she lost interest in writing this book. Years later, she recalled that in the early stages of planning she had concluded that “it was useless to present a morality without a metaphysics and epistemology.” Second, her primary interest was fiction writing In her journal from May 4, 1946 (see Chapter 11), she explains that

the idea of writing a philosophical non-fiction book bored me; in such a book, the purpose would actually be to teach others, to present my ideas to them. In a book of fiction the purpose is to create, for myself, the kind of world I want and to live in it while I am creating it; then, as a secondary consequence, to let others enjoy this world, if, and to the extent that, they can.

August 18, 1943

Tentative Outline

I. The Life Principle

The “nature” of man—the primary matters of his existence—the rational process—the particular qualities of man as creator (the Roark qualities)—the law of his survival (the Active Man). Show how the “action spark” has the same application today as in the primitive jungle. How to define and recognize it.

II. The Death Principle

The only other possible way of survival—through the brains of others. The second-hander, his particular qualities (the Passive Man). (Altruism and Collectivism.)

III. The Moral Law

The exposition of the new moral law—examples to range over the whole field, in history, politics, economics, personal relations. Not serve or hurt others—the basic position and the basic realm is neutral, independent. Express the idea of the “sin of omission.” IV. Individualism and Collectivism

The mind cannot be added. Brute force is the only form of expression possible to a collective—but even force cannot be exercised without reason.

V. Man and Men

The proper relationship of man to men, deduced from the moral law. Traders, not servants. But trade only that which can be traded—hold on to the untradable. Altruism is an absolute evil. (The evil escape which it permits and becomes.) VI. The Moral Society

The proper society deduced from the proper relationship. (The advantages of society to man—but only on the above basis. What is the use of advantages that take his life in exchange, by crossing the basic limit of his rights?)

VII. How It Works

The Capitalist System. Selfishness—and the benefits to others as a secondary consequence. Government as protection of the individual against the collective. (The police protect single men against mobs—not a collective against single evil-doers.)

VIII. The Immoral Society

Duplicate the same process in brief, starting from the altruistic principle and leading to an outline of a consistent collectivist society. (Collectivism as the principle of race prejudice and of every form of injustice.) First—theory, then show examples from practice.

Notes

To start with: Man exists and must survive as man. This is not for those who do not believe in reason and logic. (?) [This last sentence was crossed out.]

The reversal of all moral values when taken from the individual realm into the collective.

Altruism is spiritual cannibalism. If it is so wrong to eat another man’s body—why is it right to feed upon his soul for one’s own survival?

The man who wishes to live for others is merely confirming his inferiority. The infallible test of a man’s value is the degree of his indignation against the idea of compulsion and against the idea of being like others, of being unoriginal. (Look at the others—is that what you are proud of being like? If not, do something about it, don’t hold it as a virtue.)

Man is not his brother’s keeper. (All responsibility must carry with it the authority to enforce it.)

The altruist’s inevitable concern with the inferior—its reasons and results.

The “good of a collective” that demands the sacrifice of an inventor in order to avoid unemployment.

Man cannot give life to himself. But it is up to him to maintain it.

(For “free will”: you cannot change the basic materials—nature, natural law, your own nature—but you are free in the use you make of it; you exercise choice among given materials. Be careful here of the definition of “your own nature”—how much is given to you, how much you can alter. You do not make an automobile nor can you make it perform what it can’t perform, such as flying, but you can drive where you wish.)

It has to begin with pride in self, with that which constitutes man—the reasoning mind. The rights or application of the mind is unlimited, except for the right to deny itself—if a mind denies itself, it cannot enjoy the rights which belong only to it. To deny itself means to deny the mind’s essential [nature as] an individual entity. The mind can conclude anything it wishes—except that [it may] impose its will by force upon other minds.

The root of the desire to abase man—as in the idea of smallness before nature.

Altruism as a weapon of exploitation. The creators are disarmed. They have the genius, the life gift. But the second-handers have virtue.

If it is good to suffer for others, a true altruist has to make others suffer for still others—thus he is doing them good by making them virtuous. If anyone thinks that this sounds fantastic in theory, look at the way it works out just like that in practice and ask yourself why. There is and can be no other explanation. (If it is good to sacrifice oneself for others, then one makes these others vicious by making them accept one’s sacrifice—since the giver is virtuous and the receiver evil. Thus the altruist achieves virtue at the expense of the virtue of others—is this altruism? But it can mean nothing else. Logically, one would have to land in some such silly situation as the Japanese exchange of gifts.)

No relation of man to man is possible without a moral principle. If there is no such principle, brute force is the only recourse and the only form of relationship. But in any relation between men the unstated and accepted principle [of altruism] is that each must sacrifice himself to the other. Each must attempt to achieve not his own advantage but that of the other man. Both know this to be impossible. No definition [of a moral principle] can be made this way—and no deal. So both drop all moral considerations whatever (“business is business, morality has nothing to do with it”) and both attempt to squeeze all they can out of the other, to sacrifice him to oneself—as the only alternative to an impossible self-sacrifice. No decent or fair relation among men is possible on the basis of altruism. Only when one begins with the principle that the other man does not exist for one’s sake, that the other has a legitimate and moral right to his own advantage, only then is a fair relation possible. Never demand of another man that which would constitute his sacrifice to you. Never grant him that which would constitute your sacrifice to him.

Never initiate the use of force against another man. Never let his use of force against you remain unanswered by force.

Love as exception-making. The vicious implications of the idea of “loving everybody.” Not love—but a benevolent neutrality as your basic attitude to your fellow men. The rest must be earned by them. Justice, not mercy.

Remove the idea of altruism from your mind—then look at the collectivists. See these shabby, sordid men of horror for what [they are], without the aura of virtue that idea gave them. What, but that idea, could make men tolerate and accept that horror?

What kind of a person are you? What do you see when you think of “man”—a hero or an Okie? This question is the decisive one—it holds everything. The style of a soul. (If you’re confused, try this. It will tell you everything. Then try to untangle it.) (The worm who wrote to Pat about the Wright brothers—the deliberate belittling of greatness.) We do not attempt to acquire the virtues of heroes—we attempt to give heroes our vices. [“Pat ” refers to Isabel Paterson, author of The God of the Machine and a friend of AR’s in the 1940s.]

[In regard to] the Passive Man—stress obedience and following. The first desire of the Active Man—to do things alone and in his own way. The first desire of the Passive Man—to obey and not to be responsible. [The Active Man wants] neither to impose himself upon others nor to be imposed upon. Best results and most moral method of action—alone, not together. Tests of school children. Hollywood scenarios. Mob actions—lynchings. Cooperation, not collectivism. Government’s only duty—protect individual rights for individuals, not create encroachments for pressure groups. There can be no individual action without productive or economic freedom. There can be no such freedom without property rights. The “body” and “soul” of human rights. Who can rule best—the one or the many? Neither. As little ruling as possible. Then—go to the Capitalist System.

September 4, 1943

The Moral Basis of Individualism

I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.

I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.

It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.

—HOWARD ROARK, The Fountainhead

Foreword

Mankind is committing suicide.

The peculiarity of the present world disaster is that every group of men in every country is the originator of its own destruction. Men are not fighting one another for self-preservation. They are each fighting all for the right to annihilate oneself as fast as possible.

Intellectuals, such as Trotsky, worked to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia; they have been murdered by that dictatorship. Industrialists, such as [Fritz] Thyssen, and church leaders, such as [Martin] Niemoller, worked to bring about the Nazi regime in Germany; they have been exterminated. [The preceding two sentences were crossed out.] American labor union leaders caused the creation of Labor Boards; these are now the instruments through which labor union leaders are being sent to jail. Republicans who decry the New Deal usurpation of power are now advocating the passage of a labor conscription act which would give the New Deal its last, winning step toward total power over this country. Conservatives, anxious to preserve capitalism, are supporting this measure which would turn citizens into serfs—which would be the end of capitalism, for it cannot function through serfs. Leaders of racial minorities are advocating the destruction of the American system of government—which is the only system that ever has or can protect a racial minority. Intellectuals have embraced, en masse and in toto, the doctrine of collectivism—under which the intellectual professions are the least possible and the first to go. Name a group of men and you are naming that group’s murderers.

There must be a reason for a suicidal mania that has infected a whole world, particularly when the suicide is not conscious or willing, when the victims are thrashing about in wild despair, wondering who is destroying them, swatting at everyone in sight, dragging their brothers along as they race down into the abyss and scream that someone is pushing them.

It is generally recognized that mankind has achieved, since its rise from savagery, a miraculous progress in the realm of its material culture—and none whatever in the realm of its ethics. Our homes are superior to the cave of the Neanderthal man, but our morals are no better than his—worse, if anything, for we do not have his excuse of ignorance. There is no act of inhumanity which he perpetrated and which we do not perpetrate, except that he did not possess our exquisite means of perpetrating it and he could never equal our present scale. In a recently published book (The Spirit of Enterprise by Edgar M. Queeny), the author—intent upon a hymn to human progress—spends five pages describing man’s material triumphs. Then he adds: “Our morals have come a long way, too. The mere thought of a feast on a loose piece of human flesh, which to the Bushmen brings mouth-watering longing, is to us horrid and nauseating.” This is all he can offer, without equivocation, for ten thousand years of man’s spiritual growth. And even this claim is open to question, because cannibalism occurred in Soviet Russia in the famines of 1921 and 1933, and God only knows or can bear the sight of what is occurring in Europe now.

Why has man displayed such magnificent capacity for progress in the material realm and yet remained stagnant on the level of savagery in his spiritual stature? This discrepancy has been recognized, decried, deplored, denounced by everyone. It has never been explained. Countless explanations of evil and remedies for it have been offered through the centuries. None of them worked. None of them cured or explained anything.

Yet that which mankind holds as its moral ideal has been known and accepted for centuries. The basic principle of men’s morality has not changed since the beginning of recorded history. Under their superficial differences of symbolism, ritual and metaphysical justification, all great ethical systems from the Orient up, all religions, all human schools of thought have held a single moral axiom: the ideal of selflessness. That which proceeds from love of self is evil, that which proceeds from love of others is good. Self-sacrifice, self-denial and self-renunciation have ever been considered the essence of virtue. In no other matter has mankind held to such total unity, so completely and for so long. Altruism is the doctrine which holds that man must live for others and place others above self. Humanity has proclaimed its moral ideal unanimously. It has never been questioned. It has always been the ideal of altruism. [Later in this chapter, AR notes that the cultures of ancient Greece and capitalist America were at least partial exceptions to this rule.]

This ideal has never been reached. In spite of its statement and restatement, in every land, in every age, in every language, in spite of its professed acceptance by all, mankind’s history has not been a growing record of benevolence, justice and brother-love, but an accelerating progression of horror, cruelty, and shame. Baffled, men have accepted the explanation that man is essentially evil; man is weak and imperfect; he doesn’t want to do good. The noble ideal of altruism is never quite to be achieved, only approximated; man is immoral by nature.

But look back at mankind’s record. Every major horror of history was perpetrated—not by reason of and in the name of that which men held as evil, that is, selfishness—but through, by, for and in the name of an altruistic purpose. The Inquisition. Religious wars. Civil wars. The French Revolution. The German Revolution. The Russian Revolution. No act of selfishness has ever equaled the carnages perpetrated by disciples of altruism. Nor has any egotist ever roused masses of fanatical followers by enjoining them to go out to fight for his personal gain. Every leader gathered men through the slogans of a selfless purpose, through the plea for their self-sacrifice to a high altruistic goal: the salvation of others’ souls, the spread of enlightenment, the common good of their state.

It is said that self-seeking hypocrites used these virtuous sentiments to delude their followers and achieve personal ends. Doubtless, there have been such and a great many of them. But they never caused the bloody terrors caused by the purest “idealists.” The worst butchers were the most sincere. Robespierre asked and wished nothing for himself. Lenin asked and wished nothing for himself. But the record of Attila is that of an amateur compared to theirs. At the apex of every great tragedy of mankind there stands the figure of an incorruptible altruist. Yet, after every disaster men have said: “The ideal was right, but Robespierre was the wrong man to put it into practice,” (or Torquemada, or Cromwell, or Lenin, or Hitler, or Stalin) and have gone on to try it again.

But what is one to think of creatures who are willing, century after century, to bear every form of agony, every kind of martyrdom, for the sake of that which they consider as their moral ideal? Are they creatures devoid of moral instinct? Is not the determination to act according to one’s conception of right, no matter what the price, precisely the attribute of a high moral sense? Men have been robbed, enslaved, tortured, slaughtered in the name of altruism. They have accepted, forgiven, and borne it, because their ideal demanded it of them. The price they have paid in unspeakable suffering should have granted them, at least, a badge of virtue.

But the nature of their ideal has robbed them even of this earned honor.

A true premise, once accepted, leads to a greater truth and a clearer knowledge with each subsequent step deduced from it. A false premise leads to a greater falsehood and a blacker evil, until, followed to its ultimate conclusion, it brings total destruction, as it must. The spiritual tragedy of mankind has now reached this last step. The spectacle of horror which the world presents at this moment has never been equaled and cannot be surpassed. This is the end of the blind alley of men’s thinking. And there is no way out—save all the way back, to the beginning, to the first principle which permitted men to be led into this.

The ideal of altruism has now taken its ultimate toll. We are the witnesses of its climax. We see mankind destroying itself before our eyes. We see the price it is paying. We glance back at its history and we see the price it has paid. But we look on and say: “This noble ideal is beyond human nature, because men are imperfect and evil.”

Isn’t it time to stop and to question that noble ideal instead?

September 6, 1943

Axiom

Moral law is a code of right and wrong. The moral law of man must be based on his nature as man. This is implicit by definition. That which is right and proper to man must be right and proper to man. A moral code not based on man’s nature would have to be stated like this: that which is right and proper to man is that which is improper and impossible to him. Whatever such a statement might be, it is not a statement of morality, but of total evil, by its own terms. It leaves man no choice but to acknowledge himself as evil by nature, in which case no morality is possible to him, or to destroy himself. ([Note added later:] “In order to exist I must be evil. If I do not wish to be evil, I must not exist. Existence is evil.” This is where I’ll discuss the morality of altruism.)

What is man’s nature? The definitive factor must be that which is peculiar to man, that which distinguishes him from all other entities, objects or creatures. The attribute peculiar to man is the rational faculty. It is that which, in all known nature, is possessed only by man. ([Note added later:] Define the rational faculty here. Truth to the facts of the outside world.)

Man exists. He is alive. He is distinguished from all other existing objects and living creatures by the faculty of reason. He is a rational being.

Every species of living creature survives through the exercise of that attribute which is its particular, distinguishing faculty. All its other attributes are adapted to the mode of existence set by the one which is its means of survival. If it were otherwise, if two fundamental attributes of a creature, both essential to its nature and to its survival, were in irreconcilable conflict ([note added later:] nail this down)—the creature would have to perish. The attributes and nature of a bird are set by the determining factor of flight as its means of survival. The attributes and nature of a tiger are set by the determining factor of predatory hunting as its means of survival. That which in art is style, that which in music is leitmotif—the central theme, the basic principle, the determining conception which sets and rules every detail of the whole—is, in living nature, the creature’s means of survival.

Man survives through the exercise of his rational faculty.

That is his sole means of survival.

Man comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force guided by instinct. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle, and no instinct to guide him. He cannot obtain sustenance for his body except through the exercise of his rational faculty. He must plant his food or hunt it. Planting requires a long, consistent process of thought—of observation and logical deduction. Hunting requires weapons; man cannot hunt with his hands, his quarries are his superiors in speed or force, and making weapons requires a process of thought. Man could not survive even as an herbivorous creature by picking fruit and berries at random. He has no instinct to tell him which plants are beneficial to him and which are a deadly poison. He can learn it only by conscious experimentation or by the observation of other living creatures who do not touch poisonous plants—a procedure which, in either case, is a process of thought.

([Note added later:] Here the transition from the material to the spiritual.)

From these simplest primary necessities on through his every other need, his clothes, his shelter, his philosophy, on to his greatest achievements, from the flint and arrowhead to a modern skyscraper, everything man is and everything he has comes from a single attribute—the function of his reasoning mind. The Empire State Building was not erected by instinct.

But it is the nature of the rational faculty that it implies choice and the possibility of error. Instinct is infallible within the limits of its sphere. Nature gives an animal both the means and the method of survival; he cannot do wrong in his method; he does what he must; if he is confronted by a fact outside the provisions of his instinct, he can do nothing and he perishes. (This can be observed in any country road: wild creatures that run from the approach of man or horse do not run from a speeding automobile; instinct has not armed them against an automobile, as it has not armed cows off railroad tracks. The formulation of an abstraction—such as the rule that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time—is not done by instinct.)

([Note added later:] He is given the tool; the nature of the tool sets the method of its use, but man must discover that method. Reason applies to nature—and to himself.)

It is man’s distinction that he is given the means, but not the method of survival. He must discover the method himself. The process of discovery is a long series of steps—of observation, deduction, conclusion. The possibility of error hangs over every step. Nothing guarantees in advance the correctness of his deductions. It is up to him. One error in the process grows with each succeeding step—until, if pursued far enough, it leads to the final proof of error, to destruction. Man’s life ultimately depends upon every conclusion within his brain.

The process of deduction is a succession of answers to questions, on a single basic pattern: “Yes” or “No.” The possibility of differentiating between a “yes” or a “no” is the capacity of choice. Choice is the ultimatum of man’s existence. The process of differentiating is an act of choice. The rational process is a succession of such acts. The first commandment of an animal’s survival is only: “Act or perish.” The act is prescribed. The first commandment of man’s survival carries a fateful responsibility: “Choose right before acting or perish.”

But the responsibility goes deeper than that. It is not only that man survives through the rational faculty which functions through constant choice. It is that he also has the choice of exercising his rational faculty or not. He can make an error in judgment. He can act against his own judgment. He can suspend all judgment. ([Note added later:] Explain what it means to act without judgment.) An animal cannot act against his instinct nor suspend it. He enjoys a safety man can never have—the invariable operation of his means of survival. He cannot act against his own nature. Man can. Man can stop his source of existence. Man can choose not to act as a rational being. Man can choose not to function as a man. His destruction will be the ultimate price—but it will not be the immediate consequence. The rational faculty operates through time. It does not grant man the safety of an immediate retribution for error. The greater man’s knowledge, the more complex the factors involved in any given act—the longer the interval before the consequences of that act become evident to him. At any moment of his existence, man lives with the possibility of acting as an agent of his own destruction.

Just as man must discover the methods that permit him to obtain sustenance from the physical world, so he must discover the methods that permit his means of survival—his rational faculty—to function. Nothing is granted to him automatically, neither the results of the operation of his reason nor even the operation itself. He must discover the rules which that operation requires. He must direct his actions by these rules. He must learn to act in accordance with his nature as a rational being.

Man cannot give life to himself. But its preservation and continuation are up to him. Life is given to him—survival is not.

Man cannot change his nature. But its realization and fulfillment are up to him. Being a man is given to him—remaining a man is not. He is the only creature who can slip beneath his own stature. He is man only so long as he functions in accordance with the nature of a rational being. When he chooses to function otherwise, he is no longer man. There is no proper name for the thing which he then becomes. It is not an animal—it does not possess the animal’s equipment of survival. It cannot survive, but it has that interval of time at its disposal before the consequences of its choice catch up with it, an interval as a prelude to destruction, a process of disintegration like a slow-rotting disease. Thus it exists for a while—a thing of corruption and death.

A flea does not have the responsibility of remaining a flea. It can be nothing else. A tiger does not have the responsibility of remaining a tiger. Man must remain man through his own choice. Nature guarantees him nothing, not even his own nature. Such is the penalty and the honor of being a rational creature. ([Note added later:] Careful here. It may be [asked]: well, if his nature is something relative, arbitrary—how can you base morality on his nature? His nature must be achieved by him. The process here, in effect, is this: man is raw material when he is born; nature tells him: “Go ahead, create yourself. You can become the lord of existence—if you wish—by understanding your own nature and by acting upon it. Or you can destroy yourself. The choice is yours.”)

Such is the origin of man’s moral faculty.

The moral faculty—the ability to distinguish between right and wrong—is implicit in the rational faculty. The act of choice is the act of establishing values: the accepted and the rejected. Yes or no, right or wrong, good or evil. ([Note added later:] Unwarranted jump. A transition is needed.)

A moral code is man’s statement of the principles that permit him to function as man. It is his protection against becoming his own destroyer. It is his code of rules for the preservation of that entity of consciousness which we call his soul or his spirit.

The first, most earnest, most crucial question man asks of himself is: Am I right? An animal cannot conceive of such a question. Man cannot escape it. In one form or another, it rings through his whole life. It sets the leitmotif of his existence—the style of his soul. No matter what he has accepted as his conception of the “good” and no matter how often he betrays it, his desire to remain good has the fierce intensity of a primary instinct. His quest for moral justification has a quality of desperate urgency. Men have died willingly for an ideal. It is said, of such cases, that their moral instinct was stronger than their instinct of self-preservation. ([Note added later:] This is their instinct of self-preservation.) This is not true. The fact is that men—whether they have consciously stated it or not—know that their moral instinct is the first condition of their self-preservation.

All moral systems speak of spiritual death as penalty for immorality. This statement contains all the dangers and possibilities of deception inherent in any half-truth. Man is urged to save his soul at the price of his physical destruction—an unwarranted contraposition. It is true that man destroys his spirit in breaking the principles of morality. But the whole truth is much wider than that. The whole truth is that man cannot preserve his body unless he preserves his soul. His spiritual survival precedes his physical survival-the last is not possible without the first. And if man is placed in a situation where he must choose between spiritual evil or physical death, he chooses the last, because the choice is death in either case; only, in the first case, it is a dreadful form of slow disintegration which no man can choose once he has understood it. The moral man is the one who understands.

([Note added later:] This is where altruism cut man’s soul off from his physical reality.)

But if a moral code is a necessity of man’s survival, what happens when his code is in opposition to his survival? Then man finds himself in a state of perpetual internal war—a civil war against himself. This is the state in which he has lived for centuries. Let us now clear away the wreckage—and the rubbish.

The establishment of values requires a standard. What is the standard by which moral values are to be set? Good and evil? Good—for what? Evil—to whom?

The nature of man sets the standard of his moral code. Man’s survival sets the purpose. A moral code in opposition to man’s nature or survival would mean immediate destruction, if actually adopted.

The axiom of the only morality proper to man is:

Man exists and must survive as man.

All that which furthers his survival is good. All that which obstructs it is evil. The conditions and qualities required by the function of his rational faculty constitute the Life Principle and are, therefore, good. The conditions and qualities that proceed from or result in the obstruction of his rational faculty constitute the Death Principle and are, therefore, evil. [AR later rejected the idea that ethics begins with an axiom. For her proof of man’s life as the standard of moral value, see John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged and “The Objectivist Ethics ” in The Virtue of Selfishness.]

Any morality not based on this axiom would have to claim either that a) man does not exist, or b) he exists, but his survival is not desirable, or c) he can survive as a sub-human creature. The viewpoint of those who might wish to propound any such morality can have no pertinence in any human discussion. ([Marginal note:] Good!)

If one accepts man for what he is—a rational being—any hypothesis one may hold upon his origin or the origin of his rational faculty will not contradict man’s proper moral code. If it is held that man is created by God, endowed with an immortal soul and with reason as an attribute of his soul, it still holds true that man must act in accordance with his nature, the nature God gave him, and that in doing so he will be doing God’s will. If it is held that man is a wholly material creature of unknown origin and that his rational faculty is an attribute of his physical body, a superior manifestation of material energy—it still holds true that man must act in accordance with his nature, of which that rational energy is the free, dominant and determining part. [Later, AR recognizes that an objective ethics is incompatible with an irrational metaphysics. When she rewrites these notes in 1945, this passage is eliminated.]

The only metaphysical viewpoint that cannot accept or be accepted in this discussion is the old doctrine which has a long, disreputable history, as many variations as a skin disease, and can best be identified in its present version by its current title of “dialectic materialism.” It is the doctrine which denies the existence of the rational faculty in man. It holds choice as an illusion and reason as a by-product of physical environment, nutrition and “conditioning,” operating without volition, automatically and unalterably. There is a catch in that doctrine, however. Its proponents claim to have reached it by rational deduction. They urge us to take action upon it, to improve our physical environment in order to improve the by-product, our brain, and they beg us to take such action through a conscious decision of—our rational faculty. It is an embarrassing contradiction which no dialectic materialist has ever explained away. Until it is explained, the doctrine is not worth considering or discussing.

There is an axiom implicit in the act of reading or writing any book-the axiom that a book can be read or written. There is an axiom implicit in any book on morality—the axiom that morality is possible. ([Note added later:] Not necessarily.) There can be no morality without the rational faculty. There can be no rational faculty without the act of free choice. If this is not accepted as self-evident, no conception of morality nor of a book is possible. Animals and imbeciles are neither rational nor moral. This book is for men.

September 18, 1943

Theorem I: The Basic Alternative

[AR here presents independence as the primary virtue in her morality (the “basic alternative” is the choice between independence and dependence). Later, she identifies independence as a derivative, an aspect of the primary virtue of rationality. See John Galt’s speech, where she writes: “Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. ”]

... There is nothing in nature to hinder the function of man’s rational faculty. That function follows a simple pattern: to observe through his own senses, to make the proper deductions through his own reasoning power. Nothing must stand between the material and man’s mind. No intermediary is possible. What can assume the role of such an intermediary? Only other men. The conclusions, the thoughts, the opinions, the wishes or the orders of other men. Man can, if he chooses, accept the ideas of others without examination, repeat what he is told, follow instead of inquiring, shift to others the responsibility of choice, judgment and decision. But whatever he does in such case, it is not an act of reason. The only threat to man’s rational faculty lies in the person of others. ([Note added later:] This point must be illustrated concretely. Tremendously important step—not well stated. Not clear.)

In this thinking, each man must be as the first man facing a new world for the first time.

Nothing can guarantee that he has made the right deductions, and nothing can prove that he has made the wrong ones—except the consequences, observed and examined by his own mind. His own mind remains the ultimate criterion, the court of final appeal. Other men can find a better solution for any given problem and show to him the error he has made. But this error must be demonstrated in rational terms—and the demonstration is not conclusive or valid to him until he has become convinced of its truth by the operation of his own reason. He must examine a theory presented to him by other men exactly as he examines any fact of physical nature, by the same method, through the same act of independent rational judgment. He is as alone in the presence of an idea as in the presence of a jungle. He can make an error; so can any other man; so can any number of other men. The fact that others hold an idea to be true is no proof of its truth. The idea must be examined on its own merits by his own mind. Nothing else is relevant, nothing and nobody. The responsibility of final judgment is still his. The immutable question remains: “Is this true?”—not “Do others believe this to be true?” ([Note added later:] But truth is not “subjective.” Only the responsibility is.)

In the delicate, exacting, infinitely strenuous process of reason, there is one deadly consideration man must escape, a trap which, once closed upon him, stops the process dead: the conception of other men as authority. If, at any point in the process, man makes a step because others tell him to, if he accepts a conclusion based on nothing but the unexamined pronouncement of others, if that alien judgment assumes the role of an unquestioned ruler in his mind—his rational process is ended (in this specific instance).

It does not matter whether the idea he accepted is true or false. The act of substituting the word of others for one’s own judgment is an act of suspending one’s rational faculty—the primary act of man’s self-destruction.

And thus the first condition required for the operation of man’s rational faculty, the demand inherent in its nature, is independence. Man’s independence from all other men. The reasoning mind can accept no outside authority. It cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. Nor to any other man. Nor to any number of other men. The rational faculty demands total independence—in function, in action, in motive.

The man who surrenders this independence destroys his means of survival. He surrenders the responsibility of thought. Then others must carry it and he will live as a parasite on the products of their thinking. But who are the “others”? If every man waits for others to do the thinking he will borrow—no thinking will be done. Then no man can survive.

The man who surrenders this primary independence commits the act of slipping below his nature, into the sub-human. He will survive for a while—as a parasite survives, not as a man. He will be able to satisfy his physical needs—by the grace of those who had the strength to remain men. But nothing will stop the disintegration of his spirit—because he is acting against the nature of man, he is acting on the principle that represents man’s destruction.

If “Man exists and must survive as man” is the axiom of man’s morality, then the first moral principle deduced from it, the first commandment to guide man in his relations with other men, is the principle of independence. Independence of man from men is the Life Principle. Dependence of man upon men is the Death Principle. All that which proceeds from man’s independence is good. All that which proceeds from man’s dependence upon men is evil.

To preserve the independence of his mind is man’s first and highest moral duty. It stands above any other precept. It takes precedence in any conflict.

Man’s first moral duty is to himself. No other man can have a claim upon him [that supersedes this right]. This right is primary. All relations of man to other men are secondary.

Left alone, man has a single alternative: think or perish. When man lives in the society of other men, the working intelligence and productive energy of others give him the possibility of another alternative: think or be supported by the thinking of others. Without effort, ability or responsibility, he has a margin of time at his disposal, a margin which he might believe to include his whole lifespan, when he can survive as a parasite. Most societies man has known have made this form of survival seem easier and more practical [than independence]. ([Note added later:] Be more specific. Illustrate.)

The choice man makes here is the crucial choice; primary in its nature, based on the manner of his survival, on the issue of life or death, this choice will determine all his subsequent behavior, his actions, his motives, his character, the style of his soul. ([Note added later:] Because it is the basic principle.) This choice is the root of good and evil.

We are far removed from the immediate realities of the process through which man obtains his sustenance; a complicated society and the heritage of centuries behind us disguise the primary forms of that process, and have disguised it for man since the beginning of recorded history. So the basic choice assumes a different form in the minds of men. The essence of the choice remains: producer or parasite. The form becomes: independence or dependence.

This is the only real division among men. These are the two irreconcilable antagonists within the human species. Every other distinction—of birth, race, class, position—is artificial and superficial. This one is fundamental—and it is made by voluntary choice. Each man classifies himself.

What makes man choose to be a parasite? A great many motives, of which the common denominator is fear. Independence is a terrifying responsibility. Man has gone to any length and any depravity in trying to circumvent the fact that his survival is in his own hands and that no outside power can offer it to him as a gift. [The motives are] fear of responsibility, fear of effort, fear of his own incompetence, envy of the abler and the better endowed, greed for unearned and undeserved rewards. ([Note added later:] And he has been taught to regard independence as evil.)

The modes of survival of the producer and the parasite are diametrically opposed; so the conditions they require in order to function are opposite; their needs are opposite; their codes of behavior are opposite. [...]

Such are the Active Man and the Passive Man.

The Active Man is the producer, the creator, the individualist, the egotist, the life giver.

The Passive Man is the parasite, the imitator, the borrower, the collectivist, the altruist, the death-carrier.

As we shall demonstrate fully when we examine them both in action and in detail.

September 29, 1943

Theorem II: The Life Giver—the Active Man

Since man’s physical survival depends upon his rational faculty, the realm of his mind precedes and determines every other sphere of his activity. That which is not proper in this realm cannot be proper in any of his actions.

A man’s mind is an attribute of his self, of that entity within him which is his consciousness. That entity can be called spirit. It can be called soul. It remains—no matter what its origin—a man’s self. His “I.” His ego.

If to preserve the independence of his mind is man’s first moral duty, what choice is he to make when his thinking clashes with the thoughts and convictions of others? Such a clash occurs at every step of a man’s life, most particularly when his thinking results in a new, original discovery—as every new discovery must originate in one brain, that is, with one man, and therefore must be apart from or in opposition to whatever convictions men previously held on that subject. What is man’s choice in such a conflict? It is a choice of authority. “I think” or “They tell me.” Whose authority is he to accept? Upon whose authority is he to act? Who must be placed first: his ego or other men?

The independence of man’s mind means precisely the placing of his ego above any and all other men on earth. It means acting upon the authority of his ego above any other authority. It means keeping his ego untouched, uninfluenced, uncorrupted, unsacrificed.

In the realm of man’s mind, the principle of altruism—the placing of others about self—is the one act of evil, the original sin. [Marginal note on the last two paragraphs:] Good!

Man’s virtues are the qualities required for the preservation of his independence. They are personal qualities, unsocial by their nature and antisocial in any conflict of man against man. They are unsocial, because man cannot derive them from other men, cannot receive them as a gift from an outside source, but must generate them from within his own ego. They are profoundly selfish virtues, for they proceed from his ego, pertain to his ego and cannot be sacrificed to any consideration whatsoever. Without these virtues man cannot survive nor remain man.

Integrity—the first, greatest and noblest of all virtues—is a synonym of independence. Integrity is that quality in man which gives him the courage to hold his own convictions against all influences, against the opinions and desires of other men; the courage to remain whole, unbroken, untouched, to remain true to himself. It is generally recognized that a man who is true to himself is a man to be admired. But the sloppy confusion of human thinking has prevented men from understanding their own words or hearing what they are actually saying. “True to himself”—what does that mean? True to his own ego. True to the duty of holding his ego apart from all other men—above them and against them when necessary. A man of integrity cannot place others above self. Here again, the principle of altruism is an act of evil.

The virtue of courage is the strength to face any threat and to fight back. Fight what? Nature, as well as other men when necessary. If, however, one must place others above self—then it is evil to resist them; then one must surrender if a conflict arises. But the man of courage is the one who does not surrender. In an issue of courage, altruism becomes cowardice—an act of evil.

The virtue of honesty is implicit in the function of the rational faculty. Man requires the greatest, the most ruthless honesty of observation and reasoning in order to reach as correct a conclusion as his rational capacity will permit. A man willing to fool himself will collapse—and does—in his first attempt at thought. The incentive to dishonesty comes when man deals with other men. What is the exact procedure of a dishonest action? A man says a thing which he knows to be untrue or commits an act which he knows to be wrong—in order to obtain something from other men or achieve some end that depends upon others. Whether he does it for personal gain or for any other reason, does not alter the procedure. The motive is irrelevant to the nature of the action. The nature of the action is that man acts upon what he believes to be agreeable or desirable to others, not upon his conception of the truth, that he acts to deceive others, they are his first concern, they determine his conduct. This is the placing of others above self. The procedure of dishonesty is the procedure of altruism—and an act of evil.

A sense of honor is a selfish virtue by definition, because it implies the honor of one’s own self. Of one’s ego. A man with a sense of honor will not submit to certain things nor permit them to be done to him—the things which he considers dishonorable. Dishonorable to whom? To him. Will not permit them to be done—by whom? By other men. What, then, does a sense of honor require? The placing of self above others. The principle of altruism applied here would become abjectness and depravity—an act of evil.

The virtue of self-confidence is made clear by the very term. It is not confidence in others, nor reliance upon others, but confidence in one’s own ability, in one’s strength, one’s courage, one’s judgment, one’s vision. Confidence in one’s own ego. When is this virtue called upon? In a conflict with others. Here altruism would mean trust in anyone and everyone above self-the behavior of a Milquetoast of the spirit—an act of evil.

The virtue of strength implies all the same considerations. Strength of character, strength of will, strength of spirit—all attributes of the ego, needed in conflict with others, all making an application of the principle of altruism an act of evil.

The love of freedom is a synonym of independence. Freedom from what? Nothing can take a man’s freedom away from him—except other men. Freedom means freedom from others. A man who places others above self should have no objection to being a slave. In fact, that is the condition he should desire. Here altruism means enslavement—an act of evil.

A sense of justice is an intellectual quality—totally selfish, because it cannot be exercised except through one’s own judgment, one’s own rational faculty. Here man cannot accept the pronouncement of others, as he cannot accept it in any process of reason. A just man acts upon that which he has concluded to be just. If he places others above self in a matter of justice, he is committing the equivalent of joining a lynch mob. Here altruism assumes one of its blackest forms of evil.

The virtue of wisdom implies all the same considerations as above. One cannot be wise except through one’s own brain and acting upon one’s own thoughts. It is not necessary to repeat what altruism would mean here.

All these virtues are contained in, enhanced by, based upon one fundamental virtue—that of self-respect. Self-respect is implied in each of them. A man who does not respect himself can have no integrity, no courage, no honesty, no honor, no strength, no wisdom, no virtue of any kind. Self-respect implies that a man considers himself an entity of value—a purely egotistical consideration.

These virtues are primary. They pertain to the realm of man’s mind and spirit. And in that realm, altruism is either impossible or evil, or both. [...]

September 30, 1944

The relation of the immediate and the long-range in morality. (The impression that “evil pays.”)

After we have defined the good and the evil—what are the proper methods of fighting the evil?

A Peter Keating [type might make the] argument: “Since I have a second-hander’s social talent, why should I not exercise it to the limit and get more than I could by my own ability?” Here comes the question of the proper relation between the primary and the secondary matters, between basic individualism and functioning in a society of exchange.

(Note on a good argument about the position of an unemployed man in a capitalist society: the primitive condition of fighting nature directly is always open to him (Pat’s argument), but the advantages left to him by others, by civilization, more than balance the hazard of having to seek employment through other men. He is asking for a chance created for him by others.)

Think very thoroughly on the relation of theory to practice, covering every possible instance where it looks as if theory does not have any meaning in practice. Is it in any sense true that in a free society a basic right can become meaningless and without application? Analyze cases such as: cameramen blacklisted by Hollywood ([Albert Mannheimer‘s] question); the closed shop disaster to the New York stage (you are not forced to deal with established producers, but in practice it means that you cannot have a producer); the hypothetical case of a monopoly (say, telephone) free to refuse services to an individual or a group of men or a branch of business.

In this last case, it is obvious that the inventor’s monopoly has such an absolute right. Does it mean, however, that individualism then degenerates into its opposite in practice, into collectivism? Has the size of an enterprise (made possible by the scope covered by modern inventions) anything to do with it? In other words, does an invention such as the telephone give the individual who controls it a collectivist’s power by the sheer size of his business? (No, I think.)

Granted that such monopolies would be destroyed by counter-inventions, if man’s ingenuity is left free—what happens to individual victims in the meantime? (Here again, the relation of the immediate and the long-range.) Also, a single individual denied service by one of these gigantic enterprises has no recourse unless there is a collective of men in his position—or else no competitor will start to compete against the monopoly. Is there a principle involved in such a possibility? Is there a possibly legitimate argument that if huge private companies control everything—individualism becomes meaningless in practice? (No, I think.)

Still, the point here seems to be size. Before modern inventions, enterprises were within the personal scope of one man’s control and ability. Modern inventions seem to make enterprises “collective” in scope and nature. (I may be terribly wrong here, but I must analyze this “seeming.”) A man can compete against a hand forge—can he compete against the Radio Corporation of America? The main point is: does he have to compete? Is there or is there not room left for individualism in practice—under the most extreme consequences of “laissez-faire” that can be imagined and legitimately supposed to happen?

This is probably the point at which people now go in for collectivism and statism. Since collectivism is not the solution, but only the complete surrender into the very evil one is opposing—is there a solution? Or is it that civilization must periodically collapse because it always becomes collectivism and stops? And that the moment any economic activity grows beyond the “controllable capacity” of one man—the limit has been reached and we go into the dark ages again? All of these questions are probably nonsense—but an awfully clear statement and definition is needed.

Here is the seeming contradiction: mass production gives inestimable advantages to the individual through the cheapness of products made possible by a “collective” of customers—but then the individual is tied to that collective task. Or is he? It’s individual inventors and producers that make mass production possible. It’s individuals and minorities that support new inventors and teach the masses to appreciate them. Obviously, it starts with prime-movers and followers. But what about the results? Here again, a most careful statement of the relation between individualism and a society of exchange is needed.

Does all this mean that an individual acquires “collective” power through a great invention that becomes a mass industry, and that to compete with him, or to be independent of him, another man needs “collective” power?

And if we say that voluntary collectives (such as unions, closed shops, employers’ agreements) are evil, but cannot be stopped by law—and we rely only on men’s wisdom and proper choice—will it work in practice? Since the majority are second-handers by nature, will they necessarily and always destroy a free system by starting with voluntary collectivism? If the prime movers are clear on the idea that there must be no state interference, but the second-handers are the majority with the political power, then is every civilization only to have a very brief period (such as Greece’s 150 years and America’s 150 years) before the second-handers unavoidably destroy it? Just a brief period of magnificence once in many, many centuries—and then destruction? Is that the inevitable fate of mankind? Is it basic and eternal—a small group of prime-movers feeding the rest and being destroyed by those they feed? (For The Strike.) [The Strike was the working title for Atlas Shrugged; this is the first reference to the novel in her notes.]

Or are second-handers in the majority? That, perhaps, is the heart of the question. Maybe not. Maybe Pat is right—the fault is in men’s thinking, not in man’s nature. (Think, think, think on this point.)

Granted that collectivism and statism are brought about by minorities—as [Ludwig] von Mises proves. What can the minority of prime-movers do about it? Are the collectivists’ methods open and proper to prime-movers? Won’t the majority always follow the collectivists if given a clear choice? (No, I think.) Isn’t it actually true that even among collectivists and statists it is always a prime-mover off the track who does the real damage?—so that the world is destroyed by the Wynands, not the Tooheys? (I think so.) [Here AR is grasping an idea essential to Atlas Shrugged: that evil is impotent—it has no power except that which the good grants it.] But if so—can it ever be stopped? What can stop prime-movers from going off the track for one reason or another? I suppose the answer is: Nothing. There is no automatic fool-proof and error-proof [way]. If there were, there would be no free will. Nothing can ever replace man’s necessity to make a free, conscious choice—the necessity of an effort of reason. All we can do is indicate the right way, the proper principles—and then fight, fight, and fight for them.

That a man knows the right idea is not enough. He must still act upon it. There are, then, two acts of the free will: the will to know the truth and then the will to act upon it. The first does not lead automatically to the second.

October 25, 1944

In answer to the question “If a morality is not based on the common good, what is it then based on?”: on a definition of the moral individual and on that which is good for him. The moral individual is the best and highest possible to man. By what standard? By the essence of man’s nature. The man living in accordance with his nature is the moral man and the “surviving” man—he carries the life force, the life principle, he is the self-renewing “energy” and the fountainhead. What is man’s nature? Man is a reasoning being.

And since morality is a matter of free will, open to all but the insane—the good of the moral man is good for all, i.e., for all those who wish to be moral.

What is good? That which is in accordance with the life principle of man. The independent, the self-reverent, the self-sufficient.

Do I set myself up as an arbitrary elite and formulate a morality for my own kind of elite, at the expense of others? No, because it is not to be enforced upon “others” or anyone. “Others” are free not to accept it and not to subscribe to it; they may have their own kind of collectivism, altruism or whatever they wish. But they are not free to enforce it upon me and my “elite”—they are not free to arrange their collectivism at our expense. The objective dividing line is: no man exists for the sake of another man. There can be no moral justification for a collectivism [forcibly imposed] on one man for the sake of the others. But, the collectivists would say, our survival depends upon enslaving this exceptional individual; haven’t we a right to do it? No. First, it does not and cannot depend upon such enslavement; second, if it did, it would not work just the same, the enslaved creator would not save them; third, if it did, it would still be evil and no such universe is worthy of existence, so that it would be moral to let the collective, the creator, and the world go to hell altogether.

This point—no man exists for the sake of another man—must be established very early in my system. It is one of the main cornerstones—and perhaps even the basic axiom. [For AR’s final view of this issue, see the introduction to The Virtue of Selfishness.]

In relation to my earlier notes on individual competition against big near-monopolies: take notice of Mr. Hazen’s complaint about the impossibility of an independent producer competing with big movie companies because “the big companies won’t loan their stars to independents.” [Joseph Hazen was president of Hal Wallis Productions.] Mr. Hazen wants to compete with ready-made tools to be handed over to him by the competition. He doesn’t want to start at the beginning—he wants to expropriate that which the competition has created (and use it against the competition), he wants to be boosted to an equal level to start competing, he wants to be handed an unearned advantage. Is the way open to him to compete from a clean beginning ? Obviously, yes, in this case. He can and should create his own stars, and all his other tools.

Isn’t the situation the same in every other line of business where men yelp about the impossibility of competing with bigness? Monroe Shakespeare [a businessman in Kalamazoo, Michigan] says that he can’t compete with automobile manufacturers and he wants to expropriate the patents that they created—which is exactly like Mr. Hazen’s stars. What’s to prevent Shakespeare from inventing his own patents? What if he can‘t—why should he demand the property or discoveries of others? And if there are no new patents to be invented in connection with the automobile—why should he go into that business and expect an unfair advantage? Even from the angle of “the common good,” why should society help [establish] him in a branch of business which society doesn’t need, since the existing companies cover it perfectly?

If he has, not a basic patent to offer, but an improvement on the existing ones, which he cannot use without the consent of the original patent’s owners—then he has to sell his idea to these owners. They won’t see it? That’s too bad—but that is the basic condition of an exchange society—the voluntary consent of those involved in a transaction. (Yes, even if a lot of men are blind, stupid and unable to see their own advantage. That is the basic law of an exchange society. It includes the right of fools to make mistakes. Any kind of sin of omission has to be permitted—there’s no way out of that. But no sins of commission.)

But, Shakespeare might say, in such a case the owners of the original patent would dictate terms and take unfair advantage of the new inventor. Not necessarily. Not if he holds out and if what he has is good enough and they want it badly enough. Again—the rule of a free exchange society. (And, as a matter of fact and history, the fools cannot hold a valuable invention down, nor close the road to it by being unable to see it and thus not giving it a chance. They cannot stop the inventor or the invention. It is the history of every great innovation that it [overcame] fools. And it’s the fools who suffered—not the inventor, nor society. Provided the social system is free, and the inventor has a chance to fight. He does not need ready-made encouragements. All he needs is—no barriers. Hands off and out of my way! Don’t help me—but don’t stop me.)

In answer to the argument that “man doesn’t know what is best for him—in this day of specialization a man cannot know what is best for him as well as a doctor can.” First, the primary choice is still with the man—does he wish to call in a doctor and what doctor? If he doesn’t want any, no moral right can force him, even though he might die. He has the right to choose to die. Freedom includes the right to make mistakes. There’s no definition of what’s good for a man—except that which a man chooses as good for himself. He is the final and total judge of that—provided his choice does not include the use of force upon other men. (Incidentally, doctors can be wrong, and so can engineers, and any specialists. There is no [automatically] defined good for everybody. Only the right to choose one’s own good. To suffer through the consequences of one’s own error is a proper part of the existence of a being endowed with free will. But to suffer through the mistake of another which is forced on one for one’s own good is an inexcusable, unnatural evil.) [For AR’s view of the good as objective, see “What is Capitalism? ” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.]

But second, and most important: if the choice here is between a genius subjected to the will of a moron or a moron deprived of the help of a genius—the first is the evil, the second not. Here is a good case of the sins of commission and omission. The first is a positive sin of commission. The second is only a sin of omission—which is not a sin. (This distinction must be covered very thoroughly, completely and unanswerably. It is a cardinal point; it is the root and source of altruism.)

Minor point: if the majority of men cannot know what is good for them, each for himself, how can they know what is good for others by proxy? If they are to be controlled by “specialists,” because they cannot know everything themselves, how and by what standards will they choose the specialists? This is where communism runs into fascism—the rule of a collective by an elite for the sake of the collective.

How many men are incapable of living by independent effort in a system of free enterprise, based on merit? Only a small, subnormal minority are incapable. Thus collectivism is not even the sacrifice of a brilliant minority for the sake of the average majority—but the sacrifice of everybody, of the majority, to the worst and lowest minority: the incompetent and subnormal. Collectivism is not even “the greatest good for the greatest number,” silly and vile as such a formula is. Collectivism is the sacrifice of the greatest number for the greatest good of the vilest and smallest number. And besides, it won’t work—even for the benefit of the morons.

October 26, 1944

A possible definition of a right: a “right” is that which it is morally permissible to defend by force. Here I have to be very careful. This might be totally wrong. If carelessly handled, it could be used as justification for the right of a communist to murder an employer who does not give him a job. Again, “sins of omission” come in. This is only a hint, a possible clue to be thought out very carefully, from every possible angle and in every possible application. It is no good—unless a total proof of it can be given. As a clue to it: it would have to be clearly stated that only that which does not depend primarily upon other men can be considered “a right”—such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But again—the definition of the principle and its application in reality has to be given—“the long-range and the immediate.” Such as: “My happiness depends on my work—what about the man who refuses to give me the job I want?” Here again—the definition of basic individualism in an exchange society. (Clue: Nobody is forced to provide you with the means of exercising a right. But nobody must stop you from exercising it.) [See “Man’s Rights” in The Virtue of Selfishness for AR’s final definition.]

Could it be that virtues (toward other men, socially only) are virtues of omission, while sins are only of commission? There’s something important here. Of course, the real and primary virtues are individual and positive, virtues of commission, such as: integrity, courage, wisdom, honesty, independence. But in the social realm—in relation to others—the virtues are all of omission, that is, hands off. While the sins are of commission—positive violence.

The whole relation of man to society has to be defined, its proper order stated: Man, the entity, first—then his relation to society. Society is only the sum of individuals, therefore the order is natural, logical and proper: individual entity, rights, and morality first, then the secondary matters pertaining to society, to the established entity’s relation with others. If relations are placed first—who is it that’s having relations, whom are we talking about?

In any clash between the individual and the social, the individual must win, the individual has the right and the priority. (But be sure that the individual is strictly individual and clearly defined as such.)

October 28, 1944

The force which a proper government exercises against criminals is not in defense of society, but of an individual. A murderer did not hurt “society”—he killed an individual man. He violated, not a “social” right, but an individual right. Secondarily, the punishment of a murderer benefits society [because] society cannot exist unless individual rights are protected. Here again, the social is secondary, a natural consequence of the individual—and beneficial only in that secondary manner.

This point is extremely important. It is the sloppy fallacy that a policeman protects “society”—that he is there to combat crimes against society—that creates the acceptance of the idea that we can exercise force for the “social” good. There is no “social good” and it can never be defined. Only in serving individual good can we accomplish any social good at all. And the clear, objective standards defining the individual good are inalienable individual rights. Force can be exercised only in the protection of these rights. [Here we see AR’s respect for the rights of every man, genius or not; her individualism has led her away from Nietszche. ]

The policeman is not protecting a community (a collective) against single individual malefactors. He is protecting individuals against the possibility of collective violence. The only protection the individual needs is against the collective, and the only action which a collective can take (as a collective) is violence—physical force. A society based on the prohibition of the exercise of physical force between its members is an anti-collectivist society. (Force is the only specifically “collective” method.)

(Breach of contract comes under the same category. If a man is up against a single man and a contract is broken, the man can deal with the breaker by force. But he cannot [protect himself] if the breaker has a collective of followers under his command. Then the intervention of government—of law to protect contracts—is needed, because this keeps the issue between two men and their rights, allowing no recourse to violence in which the man with the most followers would win. Again, a contract society is an anti-collectivist society.)

November 6, 1944

The art of writing is the art of doing what you think you’re doing.

This is not as simple as it sounds. It implies a very difficult undertaking: the necessity to think. And it implies the requirement to think out three separate, very hard problems: What is it you want to say? How are you going to say it? Have you really said it?

It’s a coldly intellectual process. If your emotions do not proceed from your intellect, you will not be able to apply it, even if you know all the rules. The mental ability of a writer determines the literary level of his output. If you grasp only home problems well, you’ll be only a writer of good homey stories. (But what about Tolstoy?)

February 13, 1945

Note on altruism: in private and voluntary instances of help to another person (and this is only kindness, not altruism) it works well only when the recipient of help is a worthwhile person (essentially an “action” person) who is temporarily in need, purely through accident, not through his own nature. Such a person eventually gets back on his own feet and feels benevolence (or gratitude) toward the one who helped him. But when the recipient is essentially a “passive” person, chronically in need through his own nature, the help of another gets him deeper into parasitism and has vicious results: he hates the benefactor. Therefore, here’s the paradox about “helping another”: one can help only those who don’t actually need it. With the others, help leads only to disaster. Help is proper only in a catastrophe or emergency—such as rescuing a drowning man. It seems right by the very nature of things: a catastrophe is the opposite of the normal; therefore, that which is proper in a catastrophe is the opposite of that proper to a normal, healthy human existence.

Besides, all instances of legitimate help seem to be of a physical nature—rescues in illness or physical disaster. The possibility of spiritual help seems doubtful. Incidental assistance—yes. Real, crucial help—no. But material wealth is the result and consequence of a spiritual effort—work and thought. Why should it be distributed according to a rule (altruism) inapplicable to the primary sphere, to its source, the spiritual life of man?

Proper relation of men—justice. A fair exchange to mutual advantage—not charity. No, not in any way. A man owes his fairest judgment to another man—nothing else. This is a moral law—up to each man, not to be imposed by force or by the state.

March 25, 1945

“Only a man fit for solitude is fit for human association.” He must bring an entity to his relationship with others; otherwise his own vacuum creates a suction, he must feed on the substance of others, he becomes “a second-hander who cannot exist except as a leech on the soul of others.”

June 29, 1945

[AR now critiques her original draft. The foreword is referred to here as the “Introduction ”; “Axiom” is Chapter 1; “Theorem 1: The Basic Alternative” is Chapter 2; “Theorem 2: The Life Giver—the Active Man” is Chapter 3.]

Notes on the written part of The Moral Basis of Individualism Introduction

Excellent in content and general effect. Bad in language—too journalistic and uncertain. Shaky. No unity of style, because no unity of method and approach. Reorganize and rewrite, keeping the same beginning and end. Go easy on and be careful of “journalistic” references—keep them specific and general at once—general primarily, and specific only to the extent needed to drive the idea home, only in the nature of a concrete illustration. (But remember that it must be clear to the contemporary reader, and clear to any reader at any time. When in doubt, aim for the latter.)

In speaking of [altruism in history], cover the point that your statement holds true even if most of the followers of an altruistic leader acted for “selfish” material gain. (Such as—“the real purpose of the Crusades was Oriental trade.”) If [the motives were selfish], why didn’t the leaders recruit men for the purpose of “selfish” looting? And—if an ideal is such a handy cover-up for the lowest “selfish” purposes—isn’t there something wrong with the ideal? Isn’t it because the ideal cannot be defined and is impossible to practice?

Chapter I

To cover more thoroughly the [point that] “reason” is the determining faculty of man: it is obvious that man’s physical survival and progress have been achieved only through his reason. If that is the prime law of the survival of his body—can his soul (or spirit, or consciousness) have a contradictory, opposite prime law of survival? Reason is a faculty of the spirit. Applied to the physical realm it has performed miracles. It has never been applied consistently to the spiritual realm—to ethics, which is the code of spiritual laws—and look at the state of our morality!

If we cannot survive without our rational faculty, our prime laws of conduct must be those required by the rational faculty.

Chapter I should begin by stating the axiom. Then define man’s nature. Then ask [AR interrupts her thought, crossing out the preceding two words]. Or—begin by asking whether a moral code is necessary? Prove that it is-for a rational being. What is the rational? That which is true to facts. To exist one must be true to facts. If one goes contrary to the facts of existence—one perishes, simply by being or making oneself unfit for existence. [Here we see AR grasping the crucial point that ethics begins by asking not “What are the right values? ” but rather “Why are values necessary? ”]

What is the rational? To be right. What is the moral? To be (or do) right. (Why is the same term used?) A code of ethics must be totally, profoundly, completely practical—or else it is a means of self-destruction (as altruism is). It is altruism that has caused the idea that morality is “impractical,” something for which one must suffer, that “virtue is its own reward,” meaning its only reward, and that “idealism” or “theory” are the opposite of reality and practice.

[Regarding the point that man must choose to be man:] This might be the place for the statement that: “Man screams in terror at his own greatness, begging by every possible means to be delivered from it. The greatness is being a free agent.”

Chapter I is not well-organized; it leaps into side-lines, does not follow a straight progression. Reorganize the material and the order of presentation.

When you speak of “reason” and “the rational faculty,” illustrate the concrete application of what you mean once in a while.

Chapter II

An additional point here: if someone says “But so many crucial mental conclusions in a man’s life are made under the influence of other men (or proceed from other men)”—the answer is: “Quite so. For some men. But some other man had to think of it in the first place. Even if it’s only a small improvement on the material left by others—if it is an improvement and a new step, some one man had to think of it.” And as general historical illustration and proof—the greatest achievements and advances were made in individualist societies, when men worked alone—not in collectivist ones, where men were encouraged and forced to work together. Also, the great epoch-making discoveries (such as the Wright brothers’ airplane) were made by single, individual men. Only the minor improvements and variations are made by collectivists (such as the boasted discoveries of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia). There is almost a law here: if a man gets his major impetus from the material (or influence) of others, he is of lesser stature than the man who strikes out the farthest by himself. And the achievement of the first will be less than that of the second.

Point to cover: Edison, born in the jungle, would not have invented the electric light. But he would have invented the torch—or some other equivalent of his achievement—equivalent in the sense of a tremendous step forward in comparison to what was known before. The savage who died in the swamp at that time, having achieved nothing, still exists today—he is every man who has never held a thought of his own. It is not society that made Edison’s achievement possible (nor the social heritage)—it is Edison.

The important point: the thoughts of others (the heritage of civilization) can be of tremendous help to man—but only if weighed, examined and accepted by his own reason. They become a death trap and a menace when accepted merely on the authority of other men.

[Regarding the disintegration of spirit in the parasite:] Clarify this thought. I mean here: if he persists in this action or to the extent to which he persists. He may still act as a rational being in other spheres—but the poison is planted and will continue to grow. And—the more he indulges in the non-rational (the second-hand), the more he acts on the death principle and the faster he comes to one form or another of actual destruction.

[Regarding social relations:] Before you come to “any principle as a guide in his relations to other men,” cover the point of how the morality of reason applies to man alone—even to a man on a desert island. The first commandment is to exercise his reason. Morality is not social (and don’t forget the evils that come from thinking that it is). Only after you have established this, can you come to morality in relation to other men. [Here we see AR’s transition, in regard to the primary virtue, from independence to rationality.]

[Regarding the choice to be a parasite:] This needs the added statement that the degree of a man’s intelligence is not the essential, determining factor here—the exercise of his intelligence is. (And a necessary addition to this is: if you cannot venture independently into difficult intellectual spheres—don’t venture into them. There is no moral obligation to know and solve everything, to have an independent judgment upon everything. There is a moral obligation that such judgments as you do hold must be your own. Let your sphere of concern be as large or as small as you feel capable of handling (and you’re the sole judge here)—but it must be the sphere of your independent rational judgment. There is never an obligation upon man to handle more than his intellect will permit him. If he finds himself in a position where it seems that he has to—he has brought it upon himself, through second-handedness. If a writer steals, because he cannot invent, he had no business being a writer. The test for a person in any field is the question: What do I know about this by myself, without having heard it from others?)

Chapter II is extremely confused. The material is out of sequence and covers too many fields too soon.

Chapter III

Excellent in thought, but not definite in statement and much too soon in sequence. I take virtues for granted, instead of proving that they are virtues. Since it draws parallels between egoism and altruism, it must come later, after both have been stated, defined, and analyzed.

For Chapter I

Man’s sole means of survival is the rational faculty. It is a spiritual faculty through which he controls matter. Yet he has excluded it from his spiritual field—and does his damnedest to find himself excuses to be set free of it. (Man screaming against his own greatness.) He doesn’t want to realize that he himself must be controlled by the same faculty—and by himself. He dreads the responsibility. He wants the license of chaos within himself. What for? (“It’s such a big responsibility really to desire something.”)

June 30, 1945

General Notes

Be very careful to keep in mind that the axiom of your morality is not “Man must survive,” but: “Man must survive as man.” This is the crucial point; otherwise it becomes an issue of any kind of survival, and any criminal moron can claim that he is moral when he murders, because that is his only means of survival. This point, clarified, must cover such cases as when a man chooses to die, rather than compromise with evil. Since man’s status as man is within his own keeping (and he is the only such creature, that is his crucial distinction), the basis of his morality is the preservation of himself as man, not just the preservation of a physical hulk (which, incidentally, cannot be preserved without the preservation of his human spirit).

A possibly helpful point toward a clear definition of what constitutes one’s own judgment and what is merely taken on second-hand authority: an independent rational judgment is one which we know how to apply to the concrete. Every statement or judgment is an abstraction; when we repeat an abstract statement with no clear idea of its concrete application, we are [being] intellectually second-handed; we destroy our connection with reality and our sole means of handling it—the very fact of our consciousness.

It is useless to accept generalities second-hand, i.e., on the authority of others, because generalities are of no value except when and as applied to the concrete, and each man must do that for himself, applying principles to the concrete events of his life. He cannot do it with a principle he has not understood.

Man has a right (and a moral duty) to state the terms of his existence (again, since his nature is in his own keeping). At a certain point, he must tell his brothers: “This is the kind of existence I do not accept.” At that point, he [may] face a firing squad rather than submit to others. Think this point over carefully: it leads to an extremely important fact—that morality is not social, but in certain respects anti-social. Morality is unsocial in essence: it applies to and proceeds from man, not society. But when it involves man’s relation to other men, it becomes anti-social; it is man’s protection against society. (“Rights were not given to man by society nor for society, but against society. They are man’s protection against all other men.”) And, incidentally, only when each man is thus protected can one have a good society. Let society always remain what it is—a consequence, not a determinant, an effect, not a cause, the secondary, not the primary.

July 3, 1945

Nail down—thoroughly, completely, once and for all—the fool idea that good is merely a matter of good will or good intentions. Here’s another abstraction without relation to the concrete—a “floating abstraction.” [AR’s first written use of this expression.] Before you can have “good will,” i.e., before you can want to do good, you must know what is the good. In effect, fools say that all the problems, personal and political, can be solved by finding “men of good will.” But the “good” is never defined. And actually, most of the evil in this world is done by and through “good” intentions. The cause of evil is stupidity, not malice. “Good” is an intellectual concept.

Regarding the golden rule: “Do unto others as you’d want them to do unto you.” This is used in support of altruism. In that way, it would imply that you must give out to charity because you want to be an object of charity yourself. Or—you must sacrifice yourself to others because you want them to sacrifice themselves to you. Actually, the golden rule can work only in application to my morality: you do not sacrifice yourself to others and you do not wish them to sacrifice themselves to you. You may want to be helped in an emergency or a catastrophe—but only in such cases. You consider such cases a calamity—not your normal and proper state of existence. You do not wish to live as an object of charity—and you do not hand charity out to others.

July 5, 1945

General Plan Part I: Morality

1. The nature, necessity, and axiom of morality. (Morality must be practical.)

2. Define the morality of egoism.

3. Define the morality of altruism.

4. Virtues—under both moralities.

5. Human relations (personal, economic, political)—under both moralities.

6. Conclusion—the spiritual wreckage and corruption caused by altruism. The spiritual status of an egoist.

Part II: Politics

The reference of political forms and ideas to morality—and to both systems of morals.

Blast—once and for all—the horrible notion that love is in the nature of a handout, that it’s alms, charity, something undeserved but handed down out of generosity or pity. This idea leads to the impossible precept of loving everybody. If love is undeserved, one can love everybody; then, the less the object deserves it, the nobler is the love, since it makes the one who loves more generous. Therefore, the noblest emotion would be, not to love a Roark, but to love the lowest, vilest, most contemptible moron one could find. This has been actually preached. Yet, in common sense, people do not love that way.

Love is exception-making and it must be deserved. This means [it must be] an exchange—the one who loves gets a personal, selfish happiness out of the virtues or qualities he admires in the object of his love, and love is his payment for them.

It is the idea of love as alms that leads to the idea of parents’ love for their children as a generous sacrifice. But if the parents get no happiness out of their love for their children—their sacrifice is of no use and they’re vicious parents (other things being normal). If they do get personal happiness and their love is authentic, they’d better stop prattling about self-sacrifice.

When society makes claims on the individual—the individual also starts making claims on society (such as “my right to a beautiful street”). Then no untangling [of “rights”] and no justice is possible. The ultimate recourse is brute force. Without individual rights, no peace among men is possible. By herding men into “unity,” one creates total disunity and chaos. Instead of peace, one gets war of all against all, and general hatred.

July 6, 1945

The contradiction in the collectivists’ view of mankind: They hate mankind and believe that men cannot rule themselves for their own good, [because of] malice or stupidity or both. Yet they advocate giving total power to this vicious, incompetent majority. This is where the idea of a Nazi elite comes in—fuhrers ruling others for the others’ own good.

Every collectivist hates mankind because he hates himself.

The collectivists have such a tender concern for the dregs of humanity. What is their attitude toward humanity’s heroes?

July 8, 1945

For morality as non-social: it is most important (and hardest) to be honest with oneself. The person who lies to himself is much more revolting and corrupt than one who lies to others.

Why is the word “virtue” used as a synonym for “strength” or “effi cacy” ? There is here the same connection as between “right” used for “true to facts” and for “morally correct.” Obviously, the conceptions of morals and virtues were [meant] to be practical—not the complete opposite of practice. Altruism made them this last.

There is also the question: practical for whom? If ethics had always been considered as a social matter and based on collectivism—obviously the “good” and the “virtues” were set to profit collectivism, to work for the collective (for society). But collectivism doesn’t work. Therefore, the ethics of collectivism didn’t and couldn’t work. Men had to live as individuals—at least partially—in order to survive at all. Thus ethics and “ideals” became the impractical, the impossible. Thus all beauty, dignity, and inspiration were taken out of men’s actual lives. Men functioned on the conviction that their actual existence and their deepest reality were vicious, depraved, contrary to all ideals. And every attempt to reach the ideal resulted in suffering, horror, and evil.

No, ethics are not set arbitrarily, with some utilitarian purpose in view (as the dialectic materialists may claim at this point); that is, ethics are not relative, set “pragmatically.” No, we cannot have: “bourgeois ethics,” “capitalist ethics,” “collectivist ethics”—for the sake of a class, a state or any other “sake.” Ethics are absolute and objective. They must be based—not on an arbitrarily chosen purpose—but on the very nature of man. And the nature of man is individualistic. And the only ethics that will work are the ethics of individualism.

In ethics, when we ask the question: Practical for whom? Good for whom? we must give a reason for the answer. Good for the collective? Why? No reason can be given. Good for the individual? Why? Here there is a reason and an unanswerable one: because such is man’s nature.

Account for the fact that man is not “a social animal.” Explain the facts [regarding] human affection and loneliness.

Men have always thought—for some reason (think this out)—that morality must be difficult. The morality of egoism is much—oh, much!—more difficult than that of altruism (if difficulty is any relevant criterion at all). But it works.

Altruism works like every cheap [fraud]—by blaming the victim. As a spiritualistic medium tells you that your “vibrations are wrong” if you see nothing in his demonstrations, altruism tells you that it’s you who’re evil if you end up in a sea of blood by following consistently the dogma of altruism.

July 9, 1945

Even though men have been commanded to love their neighbors—they feel no love when facing a neighbor; they feel only an immediate sense of guilt: “I should love this man, but I don’t. I’m no good.” An emotion cannot be achieved by command—only by rational conviction. The acceptance of arbitrary authority is so counter-rational and, therefore, so counter to human nature that men cannot force themselves to make it a conviction. Even though Christ commanded men to love their neighbors and men have accepted the idea that Christ is God-like and, therefore, right—they still cannot experience an emotion on the basis of: “I don’t know any reason for it, but Christ told me so, therefore it must be right.”

Emotion can come only from actual rational conviction.

If men say that their emotions are a chaotic, contradictory mess—well, look at their convictions. They have none—or, to be exact, they have a grab-bag of undigested, unapplied, contradictory generalities, acquired at random, without volition, choice or examination. The state of their emotions is the result. A mess can produce only a mess. If you treat your mind like a garbage can, a recipient for any chance refuse, then your emotions will be garbage—useless, disconnected hunks of a little bit of everything, leading to nothing but decomposition, rot, suffering. Mental activity is the production and emotions are the consumption of your spirit; you have nothing but garbage to consume when you have produced nothing but garbage.

July 13, 1945

The moral man is not necessarily the most intelligent, but the one who independently exercises such intelligence as he has. He is not the man who has, potentially, the greatest brain power (if this can even be measured or determined), but the one who exercises his own brain power independently. Thus, a college professor who makes the intellectual error of collectivism or second-handedness somewhere in his thinking turns out in his theory and practice to be a vicious man (same with criminals, dictators, social reformers). But a plain man concerned only with his own life and his own job, not venturing beyond the limits of his own intellectual capacity, is usually a moral man in every sense. Therefore, the moral faculty is not something independent of the rational faculty, but directly connected with it and proceeding from it. The moral faculty, however, is not dependent upon the amount of intelligence, but upon the proper exercise of intelligence-its exercise according to the rules its nature demands, independently. In other words, the intelligent man is the moral man if he acts as an intelligent man, i.e., in accordance with the nature of his rational faculty. (He has the choice not to act in accordance with his rational faculty. That is why ethical laws are necessary. The laws of any function are implicit in the function. But man must discover and formulate them.)

My greatest personal mistake is ever to allow a word or a moment that “doesn’t count,” i.e., that I do not refer to my own basic principles. Every word, every action, every moment counts.

(This is also the pattern on which everybody makes mistakes [or] becomes irrational—not relating their one action or one conviction to another.)

Why must man’s morality be that of individualism and egoism? Because otherwise the best is sacrificed to the worst. If we establish the virtues which a rational man needs in order to survive, and then say that the goal of his virtuous action must be service to those who do not have such virtues—we place virtues in the service of vice, we penalize virtue and give a reward to vice (or weakness). [In regard] to survival, the altruist formula would read: the man capable of survival must not make his own survival his goal, but the survival of the man incapable of survival. ([Note added later:] If he works for his own survival, he is vicious. He can justify it only by helping the unfit. If he doesn’t do so, he had no right to survive.)

If we refer to happiness or the enjoyment of life, the altruist formula would be: the man capable of achieving enjoyment or the means of enjoyment must not make his own enjoyment the goal—but the enjoyment of the man incapable of achieving it.

If we formulate a moral code, the man who lives up to its every provision is the perfect, ideal moral man. If then we formulate our ideal man and make him a servant of others—it comes to sacrificing or subordinating the perfect to the imperfect, the ideal to the corrupt.

If the ideal moral man is the mark at which we must aim—how can we wish to reach the ideal if, when we reach it, our life shall be sacrificed to our moral inferiors?

(Here the question of natural endowments enters—to be defined and covered.)

A moral code must be the code of man at his best—at his best in every way, including natural endowments, since these are desirable. A moral code is the code of establishing values. Desire (or purpose) establishes values.

Suppose we imagine a man with all the perfect natural attributes: intelligence, strength, talent, health, beauty—every conceivable natural qualification. He is then a perfect entity, an entity perfectly fitted for life. But how will he live? Life is action. He must decide on his own action, set his own purpose. His choice must be guided by the moral law—he must also be morally perfect. (Here again I need a definition of why man needs a moral law. Moral law is a code of good and evil. Whose good and evil? Man’s. What man? The most perfect man conceivable.)

Now if it is asked: but what about the imperfect man, since most of us are imperfect? We can act only on the basis of our degree of perfection, trying to approach perfection; we cannot live on the basis of our flaws. For instance, if we are sick, we must try to get well—we cannot base our life on being sick. If a man is incurable, e.g., blind, he cannot expect the healthy to live by the rules set for his blindness.

[Man‘s] actions and his observance of the moral law are up to him. The purpose of life is happiness—and if we adopt the morality of altruism, then the man most fitted for life has the least right to it (or to its enjoyment, to happiness). The more endowed he is, the less right he has to his own enjoyment. And the less endowed the moron is, the more right he has to enjoy himself and to demand the sacrifice of everyone else. This is the irrational paradox of altruism—and it is vicious, since it is irrational and unnatural. This is the process by which qualities (virtues) desirable in fact become undesirable in morality (and also desirable natural attributes are made undesirable). This is why virtue becomes impractical. Altruism is the morality of death and destruction (and it leads to death and destruction in practice) because it holds as desirable the opposite of the qualities needed for man’s survival, the qualities of life.

The ideal is composed of all the attributes which we consider desirable. Why, then, should the final goal and purpose of the desirable be the undesirable? Why should a genius serve the happiness of the moron? Why—as an example—should a beautiful woman give up her evening gown to an ugly one?

Here enters the differentiation between ideal and moral ideal. The moral code must be the code that is needed by and is fair to the best possible type of man born naturally: the most intelligent, the ablest, the healthiest, the most beautiful. The average, lesser man cannot be sacrificed to this code; the better man doesn’t need his sacrifice. But more than that, the lesser man also can live only by such a code—to the degree of his abilities—and his rewards will be commensurate with this. But if it is said: “What about the man who cannot live by such a code at all?” The answer is: “Then he cannot live at all—because this is the only code by which man can survive.” No man must survive at the expense of another man.

(One of the roots of altruism is [a man‘s] fear of his inferior natural ability.)

July 14, 1945

Man is afraid to consider himself and his happiness the final end—because to achieve happiness is a great effort, a great responsibility, and most men are incapable of it. Or, achieving what they think is their happiness (some form of second-handedness) they feel it’s low and shoddy—and long for something “higher.” In effect, what they feel is: “Is that all? That’s not worth living for. Something must be worth living for—and it’s not in me, since my best happiness is so low and unsatisfying.” This is the pattern of their “instinct” for “something high and noble.”

July 17, 1945

The short-range must not contradict the long-range. The distinction between immediate pleasure and happiness is that a pleasure which is part of your general happiness, a step towards it, is proper—but one which has to be paid for with suffering later is improper. Example: if your long-range happiness depends upon your marriage (by your own choice and definition, i.e., you have accepted it as happiness), then an affair with some chance woman may give you pleasure for the moment, but will destroy the thing you prize more. (In most marriages, the trouble is that the marriage is only a compromise, not happiness, and so is the affair—neither chosen nor accepted fully and consciously.) If you overeat it may give you pleasure for the moment, but destroys your stomach and health the next day. The long-range is your guide and standard for the immediate. What if you have nothing of long-range value to you? Well, you won’t be happy. What if two “compromises” clash—as in the conventional marriage? Choose by your own definition which you prefer. But you can’t expect to have your cake and eat it, too.

July 18, 1945

Since man must establish his own values, accepting a value above himself makes him low and worthless. Allow nothing to stand between you and the world. The worship of something above you (like God) is an escape, a switch of responsibility—to permit you anything.

A code of ethics is man’s statement of his instinct of self-preservation, and it must be based on his conviction of his value.

The first law of ethics: demand the best. (If you demand the worst, you betray the good—and yet ethics are supposed to be a code of good and evil.)

Establish your values—then go after the best.

Nature never gave to a creature instincts contrary to its own survival. All instincts are aimed at survival. If we assume that man has instincts that are contrary to his rational faculty, then nature has given him instincts opposed to his survival. That does not seem likely, unless we assume that he is slated for destruction and extinction (like the lemmings). And—as an “instinct” species—man certainly is on his way out. (Perhaps we are really in the process of evolving from apes to Supermen—and the rational faculty is the dominant characteristic of the better species, the Superman.)

Regarding the argument that “we must live for the whim of the moment”: nature doesn’t function by the whim of the moment. The rational faculty works by observing and discovering immutable laws of nature. And the rational faculty functions through time. If you let one moment contradict your long-range decisions, you’re acting immorally.

Altruism poisons a man’s happiness. When he has achieved something and is happy, he is forced to think: “But I am not serving anyone. Therefore I’m vicious.”

Why are there more neuroses nowadays? Because, as men learn to think more and better, the evil of their original false premises catches up with them and makes it impossible for them to go on. (This is assuming that men have really learned to think more—or have tried to. It is possible that man’s ethics have been the cause of the fact that men have not achieved any intellectual progress. The ethics of altruism, of course, is the cause of men’s failure to achieve happiness or any progress in morality.)

An example of the vicious injustice of applied altruism: a man gives a job to a half-wit, on the basis of pity. He tells himself that he’s done something noble, he’s sacrificed the better service he could have had—for the sake of the inferior creature. Is he the only one whom he’s sacrificed? He’s sacrificed his customers—in effect, society—to the extent of the poorer service his business offers (and if he continues on this policy he’ll have to go out of business). But, above all, he’s sacrificed the better man, the able applicant, who expects and deserves justice—i.e., expects to have his ability recognized. The able man has been rejected for being able—for a virtue. The employer has committed an evil and immoral act. (Virtue includes the ability to recognize and appreciate virtue—this is justice.)

Two crucial questions to formulate—the two most important steps or key points: (1) define the need of morality, and (2) prove why (proceeding from the rational faculty) man’s morality must be that of individualism and egoism (independence).

To exercise conscious rational control is man’s first responsibility, duty and moral commandment. (To assert his will against circumstances—like the man in the snow.)

July 19, 1945

My Outline

1. Man’s morality must be based on his nature.

2. Man’s nature is that of a rational being. The rational faculty is his only means of survival. His physical faculties are of no use to him without the guidance of his mind.

3. The function of the rational faculty is to observe the physical world and draw conclusions about it, thus establishing a certain truth about it. Man must then act on the basis of this truth. The rational faculty operates through a series of acts of choice.

4. The rational faculty is not automatic. Nothing assures man of the correctness of his conclusions in advance. Nothing can prove an error to him—except the consequences, observed by his rational faculty.

5. Even the use of his rational faculty is not automatic. Man can choose not to exercise it—or, rather, not to exercise it in certain acts or in certain spheres of activity. He can choose to act as a robot (or second-hander). It is here that he becomes his own destroyer.

6. Man needs a moral code as a set of rules on what is right or wrong for him as a rational being. The moral faculty is a necessity of the rational faculty.

7. Man observes nature and concludes what is true of it or not. He then has to act upon his knowledge. To act, he has to set himself a purpose. He estimates what is right or wrong for his purpose. The purpose determines the value he places on his acts—as means to an end. (For example: he observes that a seed grows when planted in the ground, but not when thrown on a rock. If his purpose is to grow wheat—it is right to place seeds in the ground; it is wrong to scatter them on rocks.) Now if man has accepted it as his first moral axiom that his survival is good, this becomes the standard of his moral code—“Man must survive as man.” His moral code is a standard for his valuation of himself—he cannot consider himself good if he acts as his own destroyer. He must look at himself as a moral entity to be created by himself.

8. What is the purpose of man’s survival? Happiness. Whose happiness? His own. If man’s survival is made the means to some end—and if at any point this end [conflicted with] his survival, he would have to be motivated by self-destruction. Therefore, the placing of any goal as the standard above his survival is evil. If man is not to survive for his own happiness, but for someone else‘s—then, if the claims of this other interfered with his own happiness, he would have to survive in suffering. Therefore the placing of anyone’s happiness above one’s own is evil.

9. There are, therefore, only two axioms to be accepted as self-evident in my morality: (1) man must survive, and (2) man must be happy. But both of these axioms impty—“as man.” Man’s survival and happiness are not automatically “human.” These two axioms apply only to man as a rational being. When man chooses to act in a sub-human manner, it is no longer proper for him to survive nor to be happy. There is no reason in fact by which he can claim these two rights as natural. He cannot survive at all, if he acts on another basis; if he cannot survive, he cannot have any happiness.

10. The rational faculty is individual. The only threat to its exercise lies in other men. The first demand of the rational faculty is independence.

My three cornerstones: man is an end in himself; no man exists for the sake of another man; each man exists for his own happiness (to be achieved by his own effort).

My chief virtues: self-reverence (the sense of the heroic in man); self-sufficiency (independence, integrity, the capacity of happiness—which is self-contained and self-justifying); worship of the ideal (define your ideal, then live by it, work toward it, find your happiness in it—make your happiness be a response to man at his highest, not at his lowest).

People suffer because they are not appreciated—not because they get no alms. Alms, pity, and charity is precisely what they don’t want. But when their better qualities get no justice or appreciation, they lose faith in themselves, in men and, above all, in ideals. It is at this point that they turn cynical and vicious.

But before you can get appreciated—ask yourself: “For what?” You cannot be appreciated for a potentiality you have not exhibited. Act, before you demand any appreciation from others; give them objective evidence of what it is you want them to like and admire in you; be sure you have objective (rational) standards for your achievements. (This is an example of the fact that the rational is the only bond possible between men, and the only standard in all their relationships.)

July 20, 1945

By proclaiming his willingness to sacrifice himself, man acquires the right to sacrifice others. If it is asked: but is self-sacrifice easy?—it is the easiest thing in the world for the man who has no self. First, he makes a virtue of his one most dreadful deficiency. Second, his desire to destroy others is his most burning desire—once he has dropped his own self-respect. The man who does not respect himself can have no love or respect for others.

In practice, the actual satisfaction of all dictators is to command, humble, humiliate, hurt others (which means precisely to sacrifice others). What enjoyment except this one can a dictator have when he lives in debauched animal luxury and in constant fear, hatred, suspicion of even his closest friends? Not love, but sacrifice of men becomes his only desire in relation to them.

If a man bases his values on brute force—he is saying to himself, in effect: “This method cannot keep me alive, but I can make it work by enslaving those who can keep me alive.” Then he must realize that the method he’s chosen as proper to him is not the one proper to those who must keep him alive. Then his code of values will destroy them—and when they are destroyed, he will perish; thus he has destroyed himself. So he cannot claim that his method and his code of values are based on man’s survival, not even on his own. It is based on man’s destruction—because it is not human and cannot work for man.

If men claim that the rational faculty is an innate gift (which it is, or rather its power is, just as the degree of any physical talent varies from birth) and, therefore, a man cannot be blamed if he is born with a mental capacity insufficient for his survival, and he cannot make it the standard of his survival—the answer is that he has no choice except to exercise his mind to the full extent of his capacity—and let the overflow of the better minds of others help him (which it does, but not at his demand). He cannot impose his need as a standard of value upon his betters, i.e., upon those who have to help him survive. If he has no capacity of survival, then it is precisely his self-interest, his desire to survive, that must make him accept the standards and values of those on whom his survival depends.

A parasite (in the physical world) destroys that upon which it feeds—like a virus that attaches itself to a living cell and kills it. Man has to destroy himself if he lives as a parasite upon the work and souls of other men. Yet altruism has made him just that. No other species exists as a parasite upon itself. Man does. (There is a difference here, though: an animal destroys his food, in the sense of killing another creature. But he does not try to exist by destroying his fangs, horns, or whatever is his tool of survival. A human parasite does just that: he destroys his tool—the human brain. That is why he can be defined as a creature unfit for existence—an embodied death principle—the actual evil.)

A crucial issue exists between the conception of “self-as-is” and “self” as a rational free agent. For instance, it is considered noble to have an “impersonal” attitude toward knowledge. It is implied that a personal attitude would be, not the desire to know the truth, but the desire to gain some advantage. Yet it is only the most personal, independent element of a man—his rational faculty—that is capable of acquiring knowledge. Truth, therefore, is presumed to be somehow detrimental to a man’s interests. By what, then, does he establish his interests?

If men feel: “I’ve got to live such as I am, on the basis of my flaws,” the answer is: “You can’t live on the basis of your flaws. Such as you are, you can live only on the basis of your virtues.” Here the idea of “getting by” enters.

The “individual,” the “subjective,” has always been held to be the irrational. Yet it is only objective reality and the tool that masters it—the rational faculty—that permit man any individuality at all. And for man, objective reality demands individualism.

The “subjective” school says, in effect: “I yam what I yam and that’s all I yam.” The answer is: “Fine. But what are you?” They say: “I am born or conditioned or determined this way—and therefore I can’t be blamed for it, I’m not bad, therefore I’m good—as is and whatever it is.” The answer is: “You are neither good nor bad. You are nothing at all. If you are a ‘determined’ creature—no conceptions of morality, nor even of values, can apply to you. Nature has not given you any values automatically—nor can you define them to yourself or to others. You may try to exist by whatever it is you claim is your code of values. When you come to dealing with the physical world—in order to satisfy your instincts, hunches, or condition ings—you’ll see what will happen to you. You don’t know what you want nor why you want it. How do you expect to get it?” (To want anything, one must have a standard of values.)

Man may be justly proud of his natural endowments (if they are there objectively, i.e., rationally), such as physical beauty, physical strength, a great mind, good health. But all of these are merely his material or his tools; his self-respect must be based, not on these attributes, but on what he does with them. His self-respect must be based on his actions—on that which proceeds from him. His survival depends on the proper kind of action. His appreciation of himself must be on the same principle. Every animal (and even plants) exhibits self-respect or a kind of self-pride—an attitude of considering itself valuable, i.e., good. And it exhibits [this attitude] in direct proportion to its fitness for survival. Man’s fitness for survival lies in his rational faculty. The survival of the fittest—as applied to man? It is the survival of the best mind; the best mind is the most independent; the most independent man is the most moral man. If we understood this correctly—the survival of the fittest does mean of the best. But the best—for man—is not brute force, nor cunning, nor slyness, nor any quality that depends upon the existence (and sacrifice) of other men in order to be exercised.

If a man says: “But I realize that my natural endowments are mediocre—shall I then suffer, be ashamed, have an inferiority complex?” The answer is: “In the basic, crucial sphere, the sphere of morality and action, it is not your endowments that matter, but what you do with them.” It is here that all men are free and equal, regardless of natural gifts. You can be, in your own modest sphere, as good morally as the genius is in his—if you live by the same rules. Find your goal within yourself, in whatever work you are honestly capable of performing. Never make others your prime goal. Demand nothing from others as an unearned gift and grant them nothing unearned. Live by your own rational judgments. Be independent in whatever judgments you hold or actions you undertake, and do not venture beyond your own capacity, into spheres where you’ll have to become a parasite and a second-hander. You’ll be surprised how decent and wonderful a human being you’ll become, and how much honest, legitimate human affection and appreciation you’ll get from others.

As to material rewards, you’ll get what you deserve, what you have produced. The greater rewards received by men of greater ability do not concern you—because they were not taken from you. There is no point and no sense in your hating the man of superior ability because he has more material wealth than you have. It is his ability that produced the wealth. If he had no such ability or if you destroyed him—it still would not make you able to produce that wealth. All you can do is rob him. His ability does not hamper yours, it merely surpasses it. And so do the material rewards. There is no point in your hating a beautiful woman for being more beautiful than you are; if she lost her beauty or if you killed her, it would not make you more beautiful. You’ll say, but men would consider me more beautiful then, without the comparison? Not necessarily. Standards of beauty, like any standards, are set by a certain ideal of perfection, usually personal to each man. You will not be any nearer to perfection by eliminating a rival who was nearer.

No, moral virtue is not its only reward. But it cannot give you rewards you have neither earned nor deserved. Moral virtue will give you just what you deserve—and this is quite a great deal. (Particularly if you choose to make it a great deal and exert the needed effort.) Moral virtue will give you justice. And more than that neither men nor nature can give you.

If men’s desperate rebellion against the objective world, reason, and justice is, at [root], a rebellion against the shortcomings of their own natural endowments, if men scream so much against the “injustice” of being born without some special great talent or desirable faculty—why don’t they exercise such faculties as they have, instead? Most of their unhappiness in this line (with the possible exception of physical beauty) comes from second-handedness. They don’t want to write—they want the fame, money, and prestige of a writer. If they had an actual, personal desire to write, i.e., if they had something to say—without any second-handedness involved, no desire to impress, nor any desire to re-hash some plagiarized ideas—they would have the talent. Men usually have the talent for that which they want to do—if they really want to do it, i.e., if their primary motive is personal, not second-hand.

The pattern of spiritual human relationship under my code of ethics has the form of a sale—value for value received; the pattern under the code of altruism is that of graft—of a bribe.

July 21, 1945

Advice to people on what to do under my ethics: name your action by its actual name, i.e., be conscious at any moment of what it is you’re doing. Above all, be conscious of what you’re doing in the long run, of your overall meaning and goal. People think from moment to moment—they don’t connect—they have not acquired the idea of a whole life. That is why they whine in middle age: “What was it all about?” (They exist in the manner of consciousness of an animal.)

Make a note of the way in which people actually lose all capacity to think when they appoint themselves as thinkers for others, as molders or expressers of “public opinion.” They do make sense in their specific, individual and selfish job. But there is a peculiar, special kind of rottenness that [takes hold] in them the moment they begin to think in or for “the public.”

This applies both to such cases as a reader who has good independent judgment until he becomes an editor—and to such cases as when a man has to defend his views in public. This last may be due either to the innocent fact of being unprepared and not connecting new ideas fast enough—or to the much more vicious fact that a man feels no necessity to have any “wider” convictions (philosophical, social, or political), but feels he must have them as window-dressing, so whatever nonsense he spouts, he spouts only to make a “cultured” impression on the listener. He doesn’t want to believe, he only wants to convince you he believes something. Now this is real second-handedness in operation; abstract convictions, ethics, ideals, philosophies are [regarded as] only a social convention, only a means to an end. That is the real absence of an ego.

How do those people exist? Not too well. Obviously they’re not happy and they’re running from themselves. But can anything be taught to them? Can they be shown their own emptiness? This is hard to answer. I suppose, not until they want to see it. Not until some form of suffering makes them question themselves. The thing that puzzles me is only: how do those people exist at all, without realizing that central emptiness? Isn’t it something they should discover for themselves and at once? The truth is probably that they have some most peculiar, logically twisted substitute or excuse or justification. The thing that bothers me here is: how can people live in inconsistency? The immediate answer would be: because it’s so difficult to be consistent and rational (and besides they have been trained not to be). Therefore, they take inconsistency as a law of existence, they’re bewildered, they can’t untangle things—but they have to go on living, so they let it go at that.

The main difference between me and them is that I try to keep my thinking straight and give my complete, honest, interested attention to any intellectual argument. They either don’t want to try, or are indifferent, or actually resent it when brought face to face with the necessity to think and connect. I try to live consciously, from the basic principle on up to every detail. They live, essentially, by chance. The most important questions are the ones they won’t or can’t face.

July 22, 1945

Knowledge grows from basic premises like a plant from a seed. The seed is like a basic premise in which all the details and consequences of the future plant are contained—and only a certain plant can grow from a certain seed. Once you have accepted a basic premise, you will have to follow and accept all the consequences, because they are in the seed. You have no power to change the nature of the universe, the nature of matter or its laws; and you have no power to change the nature of a logical sequence. But where is your freedom and the field of your free will? In exercising [your reason] to understand [nature] and use it as material to fulfill your purpose. You set the goal and the meaning; the field of choice and possibilities is immense; the only necessity involved is that you use the material as it is and your tool (reason) as it is—that you understand them for what they are before you choose or achieve a purpose.

Do not call it a “limit.” The basic fact of reality is a “limit”—the fact of existence, which presupposes an entity, which means a thing differentiated by certain intrinsic, essential attributes from that which it is not. “To be” implies a “limit”—a distinction from that which is not. If you demanded “freedom” from the natural world—you would demand, in effect, an undifferentiated chaos, the non-existence of entities, actually more than death—the annihilation of the conception of the possibility of living.

We apply reason to the material world, but not to the spiritual, not to ourselves. The material world gives us an objective standard, a starting point, a solid fact, the something from which we have to proceed—since we cannot create something out of nothing, or base something on nothing. There is no such standard in the spiritual world. Yet the rational faculty should be that starting point. And a moral code should be that standard.

In dealing with physical nature each man is an independent judge: he will consider a car good if the car runs—and he will make sure that he sees the car running. But in the spiritual world men are second-handers: they place the quality of judgment within the consciousness of others, being lost and unsure within their own. So we have the paradox that in physical matters the actual value and performance of the product is the standard (people will buy a car if it is a good car), but in spiritual matters (precisely in the realm of greatest, absolute individualism) the collective counting of noses is the standard (a book is good if people buy it). Physical values are thus ethical (based on value-judgments) and personal—but spiritual values are non-moral and “commercial” in the most vulgar sense of the word. Physical values become an end in themselves, moral values a means to an end. (There is here a strange circle. Our rational faculty is the means of obtaining satisfaction from the physical world. But the satisfaction is spiritual, since the physical is only a means to the satisfaction of our desires—and of more than our physical desires.)

The essence of morality is to desire that which is good. But we must define what is good—and that is the purpose of a code of ethics.

This point must cover and account for the fact that some people admit virtue without desiring it—such as Mallory’s “the genius recognized too well—the people who see it and don’t want it”; or “He’s a saint—I don’t like saints.”

Is the cause here the fact that people think of morality as an arbitrarily prescribed code of ethics, the Christian code, and rebel against it? Isn’t the greatest error of all morality the fact that the moral systems prescribed concrete rules, arbitrarily, instead of general principles that would allow men precisely the essence of morality—a free choice between good and evil? Think this over. The key here is the relation of the abstract to the concrete, of the general to the particular—and the need is that of a clear statement of the line dividing the two and of the relationship between the two.

What actually happens when men get lost in abstractions? What is the nature and cause of a “floating abstraction”?

Think over the relation of “survival” to happiness, the exact point in the process of man choosing a goal. And the relation of the material to the spiritual.

Humanitarians claim to hate suffering, and therefore to make it their goal to eliminate it. They take for granted that happiness is automatic, but suffering is not and therefore we must direct our actions at eliminating suffering. But it is precisely happiness (or good or virtue) that is not automatic and must be achieved by effort and purposeful action. Suffering comes automatically from the absence of action. (To be exact, the absence of the right action; if you do nothing at all, or if you make a mistake and do nothing to correct it, that’s when suffering will come automatically as your proper, natural punishment. Everything good—desirable—has to be achieved.)

But you want to act to relieve the suffering of others? Can you? To what extent? And why should you? And at what price? And is that the chief goal of life? Is your goal to run around correcting errors—or to act straight?

Here there enters the question of what it is you love when you love “Man.” Again, a reversal of the abstract and the concrete that destroys the concrete. By loving “Man” as an abstraction in the sense of loving any and all men, you end up by loving the worst of men. By loving “Man” as an ideal, you love actual men and the best among them. What is the difference between “abstract” and “general”? Between “archetype” or “ideal” and “average”? There might be an important key here.

July 23, 1945

The person who believes in determinism (personal or historical) merely confesses the truth about himself: he is not a prime-mover, he does not know what makes him act or how or why—therefore he assumes that others are equally “determined,” floating non-entities pushed around by chance. Having no prime-moving ego within himself, such a person assumes one of two things: either that others are equally uncertain—therefore “something” outside moves us all; or that others know and decide, while he can‘t—so he accepts them as the mover and the standard. Usually it’s both, since the essence of a second-hander’s thinking is that he does not think, therefore none of his premises are too clear and all of them are contradictory. If this were not so, if he were completely consistent with anything, he wouldn’t be a second-hander.

Can purpose determine entity? Purpose presupposes the one (a consciousness) who sets the purpose. And man is that one—the standard, the point of beginning. Think this over. (Plato said function determines virtue. I mean something much more than that.)

July 27, 1945

An animal can have self-respect automatically—“I am good such as I am,” because the capacity of self-destruction is not within him. A man’s self-respect (and instinct of self-preservation) must be conscious (based on a standard of values) because he can be his own destroyer. That is his great innate fear—and one of the causes of his rebellion against reason, against the terrible responsibility which the rational faculty involves.

The tendency of all civilization has been toward division of labor—not collectivization. Toward splitting jobs into separate activities—not toward doing things more and more “together.” All economic progress has come from that. But, it may be said, since each man does only a part of the whole—shouldn’t there be a collective direction and shouldn’t the whole direct the parts? The whole does direct the parts—by the mechanism of supply and demand, which is actually the verdict of the majority upon what kind of work it wishes done. But it is the whole as a number of individual units acting independently, each exercising his judgment for his own good. It is not the artificial arrangement of a “whole” out of units that cannot be added together, a whole that involves the sacrifice of some parts to others and is not, therefore, a whole. Each man should have a say about economic production and consumption? He does. By producing and by buying. In this way, each man decides for himself, and the “whole” is the sum of such decisions. In the collectivist way, each would have to decide for all—which is impossible in practice and vicious in concept, since it is the diametric opposite of human nature.

July 28, 1945

The mental and moral corruption of so-called intellectuals is due to the fact that they are the real class of “exploiters.” Men cannot be enslaved by sheer force alone—it would take too many people, so no parasitical minority could enslave the productive majority. The enslavement has to be done by spiritual means, by making men feel that their slavery is “right.” (This was done by every tyrant in history and by modem dictators.) Therefore it’s the “intellectuals” who become the spearhead, the professional tools and source of any human enslavement. They’re second-handers, collectivists, altruists—and getting paid for nothing. They believe that one can build that mode of living into a system.

Defeat collectivists and altruists by the single method of contempt. Take away their aura of holiness. Look at them for what they are—parasites.

The usual reason [given for] moral corruption is hatred for mankind—a man uses collectivism as an excuse for his own rottenness—“he can’t help it, others are vicious, he’s got to get along.” Thus he switches the responsibility. “Others” are his excuse. But there is no excuse. A man’s estimate of mankind is only a reflection of his estimate of himself. You think man as such is rotten? (Not the majority, but man as such.) It’s only you who are rotten. If you think you’re capable of virtue, but others are not—you’re a human being, therefore man as such can be virtuous. The majority can’t? Why should that concern you? Keep the majority (or anyone) from power, keep society free—and you have nothing to worry about.

July 30, 1945

[AR is here rewriting and expanding on her notes from September 6, 1943. The first few pages have been omitted because the content was not significantly different from the 1943 notes.]

The purpose of a moral code is the preservation of man’s nature, i.e., the preservation of man as man.

Every living thing exercises a form of choice—to the extent of assimilating only those elements which are necessary to its survival, not any and all elements indiscriminately. A plant absorbs particular chemicals out of the soil. An animal hunts particular foods. To live, a living thing must have a code of values: that which is good for it and that which is not. Its survival is the standard, the measure of value. But for a plant or an animal, the standard, the values, the method of survival and the exercise of that method are automatic; no other choice is possible; no conscious choice is necessary.

Man’s method of survival is not automatic. He must establish it by conscious choice based on a rational observation of nature and of himself; he must discover what he is, what he needs, how he must act in order to exist. He must establish his own code of values. Its standard must still be the same: survival. But the values he establishes must be the ones needed by and appropriate to his one and only means of survival—the human means—the rational faculty.

A moral code is man’s statement of the principles that permit him to function as man. It is his protection against becoming his own destroyer. It is a set of values upon which he bases his rules of conduct, the rules of what is right or wrong for him as a rational being. The moral faculty is a part and a necessity of the rational faculty.

The establishment of values requires a standard. The concept of “value” presupposes an entity to whom an object or action is valuable. Moral values constitute a code of good and evil. By what standard are they to be set? Good—for whom? Good—for what?

Man’s nature sets the standard of his moral code. Man’s survival sets the purpose. His proper morality is based on a single axiom:

Man exists and must survive as man.

All that which preserves man’s nature as a rational being is good. All that which destroys it is evil. All the actions based on, proceeding from, in accordance with man’s nature as a rational being are good. All the actions that contradict it are evil. All the forms and conditions of existence that permit man to function as a rational being are good. All the forms and conditions of existence that prevent it are evil.

The actions, conditions, motivations, and qualities required by and for the function of man’s rational faculty are man’s virtues—by sanction of the fact that they constitute man’s life principle, his means of survival, the forms, expressions and essence of his living energy.

It must be carefully noted, at this point, that the word “man” denotes a concrete, specific, existing entity—not “mankind,” which is a collective abstraction. An entity survives by surviving; a “kind” may attempt to survive by slaughtering nine-tenths of the entities composing it.

Before we proceed to analyze in detail the implications contained in the above axiom and the specific code of behavior it demands, we must stop to examine and fully understand the nature of the axiom itself.

It consists of three facts which must be accepted as self-evident: 1) that man exists, 2) that man is a rational being, 3) that man’s survival is desirable.

1) Any conception or discussion of man’s existence is an axiom implying three parts: that man exists, that an objective world exists around him, and that he has the faculty of rational consciousness which enables him to know the external world. [This is AR’s first discussion of the axioms of existence and consciousness; see John Galt’s speech for her definitive formulations.]

These three facts need not and cannot be proved. Any proof rests on them and implies them as axioms. Proof by physical demonstration implies a physical fact (in the external world) demonstrated to an observer (man) who grasps it through a faculty of consciousness which permits him to grasp it (the rational faculty). Proof by rational demonstration implies an entity (man) who possesses a faculty of consciousness (the rational faculty) which permits him to acquire knowledge about facts (in the external world). Proof cannot begin in a vacuum. Existence begins by existing. Proof begins with something that exists proving something about something that exists.

The nature of man and the nature of the world in which he lives are not self-evident. It is the function of man’s mind to give him knowledge of himself and of the world—the knowledge of what he is and of what it is. But that he is and that it is are axioms implicit in the mere fact of consciousness, axioms preceding and permitting the perceptions, conceptions and definitions which constitute his knowledge.

A stupendous amount of writing has been done as an alleged demonstration of the fact that no objective world exists outside of man—or that man does not really exist—or that he exists but has no mind—or that nothing really exists at all. But since all the volumes of such demonstrations simply amount to: “My observations of the world lead me to conclude that it doesn’t exist, that there’s nobody observing it and that there’s no faculty to observe it with,” we can safely take these theories and their authors at their own word—as non-existent.

2) The assertion that man has no rational faculty is a contradiction in terms. An attempt to lift oneself by one’s own bootstraps is the physical counterpart of a man proclaiming as a fact the fact that he has no capacity for grasping facts. ([Note added later:] By means of what does an irrationalist demonstrate that reason doesn’t exist?)

The anti-rationalist doctrine (remember that “anti-rationalist” means “anti-necessity-to-make-sense”) is extremely old, has a long, bloody history and as many variations as skin disease. That doctrine has no intelligible content—but a most intelligible purpose, since the rational faculty is the badge of man’s freedom. That doctrine has always preceded and accompanied the slaughter and enslavement of men. Its current version is known as “dialectic materialism.” It holds that man has no mind. It holds choice as an illusion and reason as a by-product of the physical environment, nutrition, and some sort of a voodoo process named “conditioning,” which makes reason operate without volition, automatically. Translated into human language, this doctrine claims that the operations of reason work on the following pattern: if you had oatmeal for breakfast, you will think that two and two make four; if not, you’ll think it’s six.

A statement such as: “Man’s thinking is conditioned by his background” is merely a confession that the speaker has no conception of what constitutes thinking, and that those to whom the statement might apply are not men whose thinking is conditioned, but men who do not think at all. The appalling collection of miscellaneous garbage which present-day men hold to be their intellectual convictions has no resemblance to or connection with the act of thought. It would be useless to argue that some backgrounds bring some men to a state where they cannot think. The only men who cannot think are those who are or belong in insane asylums. That a great many men do not choose to think is another matter. There are reasons for such a choice, which we shall examine later; the chief reason can be mentioned now—thinking is not done automatically.

The proponents of the doctrine that denies the existence of man’s rational faculty claim to have reached their doctrine by—rational deduction. They urge us to improve our physical environment in order to improve the by-product, our brain, and they urge us to take such action through a conscious decision of—our rational faculty. If a dialectical materialist asks at this point: “But why should I have to make sense?”—the answer is: “You don’t have to. Just remember that you don’t.”

Then there is a school of opinion which describes itself loosely as “naturalistic” or “realistic.” The arguments of this school amount to: Man’s body has many similarities to an animal’s body, therefore man’s consciousness is like that of an animal, therefore man is ruled by instincts, therefore reason is a delusion, therefore the way a rat goes about getting to a piece of cheese in a maze is the way man goes about building the Rheims Cathedral.

By this type of argument one could say that an animal’s body has so many similarities with a plant’s that the animal’s consciousness and manner of living ought to be like a plant‘s, therefore his basic distinction—the power of locomotion—is an illusion, therefore an animal ought to dig his paws into the ground and stay there, because it is unnatural for him to do more.

It is precisely by observing nature that we discover that a living organism endowed with an attribute higher and more complex than the attributes possessed by the organisms below him in nature’s scale shares many functions with these lower organisms. But these functions are modified by his higher attribute and adapted to its function—not the other way around. Plants possess digestive and reproductive organs; animals possess digestive and reproductive organs plus the power of locomotion. An animal’s stomach is not that of a plant; it is not adapted to the needs of an organism attached by roots to the ground, but to the needs of an organism that obtains its food by moving.

Man possesses digestive and reproductive organs, plus the power of locomotion, plus the faculty of reason. The distinction of an animal from a plant is the power of a self-moving body; the distinction of a man from an animal is the power of a self-moving mind. Whatever organs and attributes man may possess, they are modified by and adapted to the needs of a being who survives through the use of his mind. His nature is not to be discovered by what he has in common with lower animals—but by what he has and they haven’t.

If it is biased not to notice similarities between a man and an amoeba—what sort of bias prompts those who do not notice the differences? Man is a rational being, according to the plain, hard, material facts of reality. Those who imagine themselves as harsh realists when they say: “Man is just an animal ruled by his stomach,” had better remember what puts food into a human stomach and what must be preserved if there is to be any food—or any stomach.

Since no road is ever muddy enough but that someone will rush to plump himself into its middle, there are a great many middle-of-the-roaders on this issue, who claim that man has a mind all right, except that he’s not able to use it. Man cannot, they say, be called a rational being because his actions are not motivated by his mind; his mind is like his Sunday clothes, kept in a dark closet and donned reluctantly on rare occasions; and when donned, it makes him stiff, uncomfortable and unhappy, because it never fit him well in the first place. What man does on weekdays, they say, is to gallop about stark-naked, on all fours, because it reminds him of his mother who gave him a complex, and to whirl around catching his own tail which he hasn’t got but feels he has; that is what he does because it makes him happy. Reason? Reason, they say, is just something he uses in such negligible, incidental matters as earning a living. ([Note added later:] There’s no basic contradiction or conflict between the “physical” and the “spiritual.” There are no different sets of rules or principles for them. They’re based on and proceed from the same principle.)

It is pointless to argue with the instinct—feeling—urge—emotion—compulsion-sub-conscious boys and to debate what percentage of man’s nature can be called rational. It is simpler to take them at their word. Even if we suppose that man is not a rational being, but a howling neurosis endowed with one percent of rationality—it still remains true that in order to survive he must take rational actions rationally thought out from rational motives, and that unless he does so, he won’t be there to enjoy his sub-conscious. Let it be but one percent of his nature, his rational faculty is all that matters in him and all that counts. It must still be taken as his dominant trait—because it is his sole lease on life. He can survive only to the extent that he is able to exist in accordance with it. When and if he is unable to do so—he has stated and signed his death warrant. There is no point in discussing the way of life proper to a creature who has no means to keep itself alive.

Your inexplicable emotions? Your great big dark mysterious urges? Your irresistible impulses? Your desires for you don’t know what you don’t know why? Go right ahead and roll in them as in any other gutter. But remember that when you lie on a barren stretch of soil, with a single seed of wheat in your hand, all your emotions, urges, and desires will not make the seed grow. Only your mind will.

3) Every living thing is motivated by the instinct of self-preservation. This is implicit in the mere fact of life. Life is a matter of motion and activity; a living thing not motivated by self-preservation would not and could not preserve itself. But a plant’s or an animal’s method of survival is automatic, i.e., instinctive; therefore its motive is an instinct. Man’s survival is not achieved instinctively; therefore an instinct is inadequate to motivate it. His motive must be conscious.

([Note added later:] Most men actually have no desire to survive—in fact, they act as if they had accepted the opposite premise; their actions are consistent with a hatred of life.)

Man needs a rational decision, an axiom understood and consciously accepted: I wish to survive—my survival is desirable. In accepting this, he has accepted the standard and the first axiom of morality.

In morality man’s life is taken as the supreme value. It is the gauge by which the value of every part, aspect and action of his existence is to be measured.

If anyone now asks: But why do I have to hold my survival as desirable?—The answer is: You don’t have to. It is an axiom, to be accepted as self-evident. If it is not self-evident to you, you have an alternative: admit that your survival is not desirable and get out of the way. There is no middle-ground and no middle choice. The act of evading this issue, making no decision, closing your mind and just floating along, is precisely the act of suspending your rational faculty—of refusing to observe a fact, to identify it and to understand it. It is the primary act of your self-destruction. With that as your first premise, you will not survive—and the span of life you have at your disposal will be a succession of acts leading to your self-annihilation, as the history of mankind and of most private lives has amply demonstrated. You have many choices open to you, but the choice is saying: “I don’t have to decide whether life is desirable, I’ll just live” is not one of them. That choice is not given to you because the life you refer to is a human life, and a human life is not preserved automatically.

A moral code is not a sentimental luxury, nor a pretty dream, nor an arbitrary decree, nor an impractical abstraction. It is the hardest, most practical of all necessities—because without it no practical action nor any kind of life is possible.

But a moral code—like any other rational conception—cannot be forced upon men. It must be accepted. Those who wish to accept what is to follow, are asked to accept as self-evident a single axiom:

Man exists and must survive as man.

August 3, 1945

The “common man” doesn’t understand the gibberish of the “intellectuals” —because the common man relates abstractions to the concrete. It takes a second-hander, a collectivist intellectual, to run amuck among “floating abstractions.”

August 4, 1945

It is the doctrine of altruism that stops men from thinking. They have been battered by altruism and have accepted it before they reach the age of reason and begin to think. Then altruism stops them—because the very nature of thinking is not merely unsocial, but anti-social: it is profoundly selfish, it implies setting oneself apart from and above all others. So men feel (and justly, by their standards of morality) that they are doing something vicious when they attempt to think. (Why is every thinking, independent person called “hard,” “conceited,” “arrogant,” “selfish”?)

August II, 1945 When fools say that technical progress destroys man, that the machine is bad for him, it makes him evil, etc.—the actual fact behind the phenomenon they describe is that man’s moral thinking is centuries behind his scientific or “practical” thinking. He has never discovered the morality that would permit him to use and enjoy the machine properly. He has not discovered that reason is his only weapon and standard for dealing with both physical nature and with himself.

For self-reverence: we must begin with love for the conception of man as a rational entity, free to create himself—and then we must live up to it.

To start his code of ethics, man must recognize himself for what he is: an independent entity. On that basis he can demand his own happiness. (His happiness and all the means to it must be created by himself.)

If, by the altruistic code, a man is evil if he is happy, but good if he makes others happy, then those others are either: 1) evil because they are happy, therefore a man is good by making others evil, or 2) good because they are happy not through their own efforts but through an unearned gift. In this last case they are considered good because they have not acted in accordance with man’s nature, which demands that he produce what he consumes.

Nature demands just one thing of man: “Make sense”—“Use your rational faculty”—“Don’t expect me to be what I am not.”

August 22, 1945

The Rational Faculty

The rational faculty is an attribute of the individual.

There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought.

A thought held by many men is not held “in common.” It is held by each individual man in his own individual mind. If three men think that “Life is desirable,” the idea is not broken up into three separate parts, one held by each man—one man holding the concept of “life,” another the concept of “is,” the third the concept of “desirable”—and the three parts uniting somewhere in the ether to form a complete idea held collectively.

We may multiply to infinity the number of men involved or the complexity of the idea they hold—and the fact remains the same.

An idea, simple or complex, cannot be held in half by two men, working together as a Siamese-twin unit or collective. A man cannot say in reference to his ideas: “I’ve only got the nouns and the adverbs—my brother Joe’s got the verbs and the adjectives—we think kinda like a team.” An idea is not a jig-saw puzzle whose pieces can be scattered among various participants, while a mystical super-entity-the collective—puts the picture together, with none of them seeing or grasping the whole. An idea, an intelligible mental conception, is held in its entirety in the mind of one man. Another man may hold the same idea—in its entirety and in his own mind.

A scientist who has arrived at a complicated scientific theory is not the repository of a collective thought composed of contributions by Aristotle, Roger Bacon and on down; his own mind has grasped, understood and passed judgment upon a great many ideas presented to him by a great many men through the ages, has eliminated some of them, has accepted others, and has reached a conclusion, which constitutes a rational conviction. If his mind has not done that, but merely contains an undigested junk heap of unrelated information, such content is not thought, nor is it related to thought, nor is it related to the process of a human mind, but to the process and content of a dictaphone [a machine, now obsolete, to record dictated material].

Different men may hold knowledge of different facts, which, when put together, lead to new ideas and a wider knowledge. But such putting together can be done only by a rational process in the mind of one man who assimilates the new knowledge supplied to him by others, relates it to the fact that he knows, forms conclusions and produces a new, coherent, intelligible whole. Any of the other men involved may perform the same process. But each has to perform it alone, in his own mind, rationally grasping every step in the process if he is to grasp the whole. If none of the men has performed the process and none has grasped the whole—there is no whole. There is no new idea born. There is no collective brain for it to be born in.

An agreement reached by a group of men, in which separate men have contributed separate parts, is not a collective thought. It is the result of thought, the product, the secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason, the process of observing, considering, passing judgment—had to be performed by each man alone. If one of the men involved corrected his own conclusion because of the convincing evidence presented by another man, he has done so by an independent act of his own reasoning mind; if he has not performed such an act, but has merely agreed, blindly and without judgment—what he has done is not an act of thinking, nor is the final agreement a thought in his mind, nor has he contributed anything to any agreement or thought, nor will that final agreement reached by others do him any good.

Men may share their knowledge, not their thinking. Knowledge is not thinking; it is the result of thinking, the product of the process of thought. The process of thought is one activity—among many others—that cannot be performed collectively.

That which man produces can be shared but not that which made him capable of producing it. A man can chop up a pile of wood and divide among other men the logs he has cut—but not the strength of his arm. A man can perform a rational process and offer to others the conclusions he has reached—but not the power of his brain. All the functions of man’s body and mind are private, personal, individual. They cannot be shared or transferred.

We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No amount of love and self-sacrifice will enable a man to use his lungs to breathe for another man. No quantity of G.P.U. agents will enable a man to think through the brain of another.

Any consultation among men, any exchange of thoughts, is only an exchange of products. Every man involved must perform an independent process of reason before he can accept or reject an idea. No possible effort by the others can give him anything of value without that basic capacity of his own. The product is secondary—the capacity primary. A thought cannot be imparted to a man incapable of thinking. The rational faculty is like a broadcasting station: its product cannot be transmitted to those who lack a receiving set.

The rational faculty can neither be shared nor added. It does not grow by addition. It has a singular, but no plural. Men can unite their physical force, but not their brain power. Two young boys can join their strength to lift a weight, and their combined strength will equal approximately that of an adult man. Two half-wits do not equal one intelligent man. Nor do two intelligent men united produce an entity of double intelligence. The combined physical power of a group of ten average men is ten times that of each member of the group. The combined mental power of a group often average men is exactly that of the most intelligent member of the group—and no higher. The rational faculty has no plural.

Even the addition of men’s physical power is possible only in a few instances of its many applications—such as in lifting weights or in destroying and smashing things. If a group of men were lined up and ordered to run a race together, as a collective, maintaining a united front or unbroken line throughout—their combined speed would not equal the sum of their individual speeds, nor even the speed of the fastest man among them, but that of the slowest. Their collective effort would not lift them to the level of the best, but reduce them to the level of the worst. The lowest common denominator is always just that—the lowest.

If a group of men were ordered to solve an intellectual problem together, as a collective, acting in unison, taking no step without common assent and understanding—their combined effort would not equal the capacity of the best brain among them, but of the dullest. And, as a matter of fact, the actual result—if any—would be somewhere below the result produced by the dullest one working on his own; because, left alone, he would be unhampered.

Thousands of years ago, one man, somewhere in a forgotten jungle, looked at trees and thought of gathering their branches into the shape of a hut for shelter. Others saw his work and copied it. Their descendants inherited the hut. One among them thought of planting posts upright to support horizontal beams. The hut became a house. The post-and-lintel house became the Parthenon. Men discovered the principle of the arch—and the Parthenon became the Pantheon. Men discovered the principle of the flying buttress—and the Pantheon became the Rheims Cathedral. Men learned to make structural steel—and the Rheims Cathedral became the Empire State Building. But all through the process, what men inherited from other men was only the product of their thinking. The moving force in the process—the determining force—was man’s rational faculty that took the product as material, used it and originated the next step.

In each new step, the achievement was not that of the originator’s predecessors; their achievement had been there before; the part of a newly created object which constituted an achievement was not that which had been known before, but that which had not been known; not what the achievement was based on, but what had been added to that base. It was not the inventor of the hut who made the skyscraper possible—he made the hut possible; nor was it the designer of the Parthenon, nor any of the men who left their achievements to their heirs. The skyscraper was made possible by the thought of the man who designed it—to the exact extent to which the thought was new, i.e., his own.

In any period of mankind’s progress, the credit for what is done does not belong to a collective achievement of the past. First, it was not a collective achievement, not the group production of a group working as a group—but an aggregate of single, specific achievements by single, individual men. Second, even if viewed vaguely and inaccurately as a “collective achievement” in the sense of representing a sum, the past achievements in any period are just that: past. They are done, finished, completed—inert. What is done from then on, what is added to them, what is discovered, defined, invented, created for the first time in what constitutes the achievement. The credit belongs to the man who made the new step.

No matter how many steps were taken to reach any stage in the development of any particular human product, no matter how many men perfected single details—each step was the work, the creation and the achievement of some one individual man. Someone had to think of it.

If several men thought of it simultaneously, as when inventors make similar discoveries independently of one another, it still remains true that each had to arrive at his conclusion through a rational process of his own. An argument such as “If Columbus hadn’t discovered America, somebody else would have,” is pointless and meaningless. Yes, somebody else would have—if he had acted as Columbus did, i.e., if he had ventured out on an untried journey guided by an idea of his own, unshared and unsanctioned by the majority of his contemporaries. It is of no importance how many men could have equaled the achievement of Columbus and discovered America. The fact remains that he did and they didn’t.

The usual cry of mediocrities about [what] they could have invented if someone else hadn’t beaten them to it can be answered simply by pointing to the inexhaustible potentialities still open and unexplored in every field of human endeavor. Let them design a new safety-pin before they start whining about how the Wright brothers beat them to [the discovery of the airplane].

It would be pointless to debate whether one man actually thought of making a hut all by himself, or whether the first hut represented a long series of steps invented by many men in succession. The process of achievement remains the same: a single man making a new step, in some cases a small, imperceptible step—in others, a gigantic leap forward. We do not know the authors of mankind’s first achievements because their names have not been recorded. But we do know from recorded history that no achievement, great or small, has ever burst upon mankind spontaneously out of nowhere and nobody—nor, as fools believe, out of everywhere and everybody. It came from some one man.

We can also observe that the development of every particular sphere of man’s creative activity has not been an even, microscopic succession of contributions, like a procession of ants each adding a grain of dust to the common line. In every sphere—art, literature, music, science, invention, philosophy—the line of progress has shot from mountain peak to mountain peak, from one single burst of light to another, from a key name marking a turning point to another key name at the threshold of a new direction. The valleys, the candle drops and the modest footsteps between such points were filled by many men, each elaborating some one detail of the giant’s heritage. The accomplishments of these modest men are not to be despised; they were authentic contributions and they must be given their value—but no more than their value. It is not out of their collected efforts that the basic, crucial, epoch-making achievements have come. It is these great, single achievements that gave them a field in which to work, each to the extent of his own talent.

If anyone wishes to claim that the greater the achievement the more men were required to reach it, the history of every creative profession will prove the exact opposite: the greater, the more primary, the more cardinal the achievement—the fewer men were responsible for it. Only the sphere of polishing, elaborating, pressing seams and ironing wrinkles involved many small contributions by many different men. The design of an in-built ashtray is a contribution to the appearance and comfort of an automobile; it is not the same kind of contribution as that made by the man who designed the internal combustion engine. The automobile is not their collective product on equal terms.

There is no anonymous achievement. There is no collective creation. No step was taken anywhere—no single nail was designed—by a group of men working in unison under the guidance of a majority vote. Every step in the development of a great discovery bears the name of its originator. Behind the most complex of modern inventions we find the names of five or ten men—out of the billions who lived and died during the years when the invention was being perfected. There was no collective achievement involved. There never has been. There never will be. There never can be. There is no collective brain.

March 22, 1946

[Some men] think that being “instinctive” or “spontaneous” is being oneself—that is, if no rational process is involved. But what lies behind one’s “spontaneity”? Isn’t it the thinking one has done? And isn’t rational thinking the most truly personal and independent activity of all? Has Aristotle’s idea—that the rational in us is “God” or “the impersonal”—something to do with this? The rational is God-like, i.e., independent, but it is not impersonal. The truly independent is the truly personal.

This is for “reason and emotions.”

9

TOP SECRET

In 1944, AR was hired as a screenwriter by Hal Wallis, the producer of Casablanca. Wallis had just opened his own production studio, and she was the first screenwriter he hired. Her contract called for her to work for him six months a year for the next five years.

In late 1945, Wallis suggested that AR write an original screenplay about the development of the atomic bomb. Although she was interested in the project, she recalled years later.

I told him I wouldn’t because we would probably disagree politically.... I told him that I couldn’t undertake such a thing unless I had an agreement with him that nothing would be put into the picture that clashed with my political ideas. If he were willing to do that, then I would do the script.

AR wrote a paper for Wallis explaining the essential ideas that her script would contain. The paper, entitled An Analysis of the Proper Approach to a Picture on the Atomic Bomb, is presented below.

Wallis did agree to AR’s approach, and she began her research. She interviewed several of the key men who worked on the bomb, including Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director. AR’s notes from these interviews are presented here, followed by her synopsis of the proposed screenplay.

Regrettably, the movie was never made. When Wallis began the project, he knew that MGM was already working on a movie about the bomb. After AR had completed about one-third of the script, Wallis sold the rights to her work to MGM. But MGM had no interest in her script; apparently, it simply wanted to terminate a rival project So AR stopped work on Top Secret in March 1946 and began full-time work on Atlas Shrugged.

January 2, 1946

An Analysis of the Proper Approach to a Picture on the Atomic Bomb

(Confidential)

An attempt to make a picture on the atomic bomb can be the greatest moral crime in the history of civilization—unless one approaches the subject with the most earnest, most solemn realization of the responsibility involved, to the utmost limit of one’s intelligence and honesty, as one would approach Judgment Day—because that is actually what the subject represents.

The responsibility of making such a picture is greater than that of knowing the secret of the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb is, after all, only a piece of inanimate matter that cannot set itself in use. Whether it’s used and how it’s used will depend on the thinking of men. The motion picture is a most powerful medium of influencing men’s thinking. To use such a medium on such a subject lightly or carelessly is inconceivable.

If there is any reason why this picture cannot be made honestly—it is better not to make it at all. There is no possible reward that can be worth tampering with such a subject and its consequences. Money? All of us are quite rich—and even if we were broke and starving, we could not permit ourselves to make money that way; it would be more honorable to become hold-up men. Prestige? What prestige? One does not achieve prestige through a dishonest thing. We all have names which are respected—and we will dishonor ourselves by earning the contempt of the thinking people and of the plain, honest public. We cannot fool anyone; the tone of a picture that fudges, evades, and compromises is recognized immediately by everyone.

But if greatness, nobility, patriotism, and the salvation of mankind are not mere sentences to spout in public, if we mean any small part of it—this picture could be an opportunity seldom offered to any man. It could be truly an immortal achievement, an event of historic importance and a great act of patriotism.

To do this, we must take our task seriously.

To take it seriously, we must think.

To think, we must begin by realizing fully what this subject involves.

It involves the life or death of mankind.

Unless we understand what this means and how and why, unless we keep this in mind constantly—we will be committing the crime of children who light a fuse, then run and say: “I didn’t explode the thing—I only struck a match—it blew up by itself.” We will have on our conscience millions of charred bodies—those of our children.

This is not a subject for petty politics, cheap generalities, evasions or the “well, it’s a matter of different opinions” attitude. Every man who speaks about this has to be as certain of his opinions as he is of his own life; which means that he has no right to an “opinion,” but must have a conviction. A conviction is a profound certainty reached on rational grounds, after considering every aspect of the question to the best of one’s intelligence. The responsibility is so great and so terrifying that unless we have the courage for it, we’d better leave the subject alone.

The courage needed is the courage of honest and serious thought. In order to be certain that we do not, unwittingly, preach death and horror—we must be very clear in our own minds on what we want to say. If we’re not clear, the picture will run away with us and become one more instrument of world destruction. This will happen without our conscious intention, because the ramifications and implications of this subject are tremendous, because they are of an intellectual and sociological nature, because we cannot escape them and, therefore, this is not a subject to be treated unconsciously.

The analysis that follows is broken into two parts:

I. General considerations.

II. The specific problems of the picture.

Do not be afraid of Part I. It is not intended to be included in the picture. It is merely a preliminary discussion, in the nature of ground-breaking. It is a statement of the issues involved which we must consider before we approach the picture. They are not issues which I want to attach to the subject. They are attached to it. We cannot ignore them—therefore we must give them attention and thought. We cannot say: “But we’re not interested in politics.” We have to be interested, because the subject is political—though not in a narrow sense of the word. A picture on this subject will have political implications, whether we want it or not. Therefore we must face the issues, examine them carefully and make sure that our implications will be of the kind we want.

None of our Part I discussion will get into the picture. It is intended only for ourselves. It is an exposition of the nature of our responsibility. After we have understood and accepted it, we will be ready to discuss the picture itself.

I. General Considerations

Let us begin at the beginning. The first question we have to ask ourselves is: what is the specific danger of the atomic bomb to mankind?

The specific danger is that the bomb constitutes a weapon of total destruction and if it exists at a time when men and nations are bent on a course of destruction, it will wipe out mankind.

Therefore, we cannot permit ourselves to preach anything that will push men further along that course.

What is that course?

Are men at present involved in a world catastrophe and in unprecedented destruction? They are. Have they been going in that direction with steps of progressive violence in the last hundred years? They have.

Everyone—of any political shade of opinion—agrees that the world is in a mess. And the mess is getting worse day by day, not better. Why?

If we want to know the reason, we must observe the growing disintegration of the world in the last hundred years and ask ourselves: What is the idea that has been growing in the world at the same time? What is the social philosophy that has been spreading and gaining ground in the same proportion, in the same era?

It is the idea of Statism.

This is no time and subject for evasion and dishonesty. To be honest, we must be specific. Statism does not mean just Gestapo agents running around shooting women and children. That is the final result of Statism, not the cause; one of its manifestations, not its essence. The essence of Statism is the idea that government must be all-powerful and must control the existence of men.

There are all kinds and forms and variations of this idea, but all the differences are merely trimmings. We hear piles of superficial nonsense about “good” Statism and “bad” Statism, about differences between “Aryan” and “Proletarian,” “for a selfish goal” or “for an unselfish goal,” control “by the rich” or “by the poor”—and all of it is just so much childish tripe. The basic idea—an all-powerful government—is the same in all these theories. And in practice we see that the results are exactly the same under all of them. And not only under the modern versions of Statism, but under all the variations of it that have existed in history.

Now, in our day, the basic issue of the world—the crucial conflict—is between Statism and freedom. Specifically: between an all-powerful government and free enterprise.

During the eighteenth century the trend of men’s thinking was toward free enterprise, and as a result we got the nineteenth century—a period of achievement, progress and prosperity unequaled in history; a period during which there were fewer government controls than at any other time, before or since; and—most important to our subject—the longest period of peace ever recorded (between the times of Napoleon and Bismarck).

But while free enterprise was accomplishing these miracles, the thinking of men, who did not understand the issue, was turning in the opposite direction. The turning point occurred approximately in the middle of the nineteenth century. Stunned by the rush of an unprecedented progress which they’d had no time to digest and analyze, men began to think that they could improve shortcomings by the short-cut of government action. They began advocating and establishing government controls.

For the last hundred years, the world has been going toward Statism, gradually, in one form or another. If Statism were the right principle, this would have made the general condition of mankind progressively better, in corresponding degree. Instead, it has made conditions progressively worse—under every form of Statism and no matter who held the power. We have not seen more general wealth and a rising standard of living throughout the world—but a growing poverty and now literal starvation. Not more freedom—but concentration camps and torture chambers. Not peace—but more wars, each more horrible than the last.

Statism leads men to war because that is its nature. It is based on the principle of force, violence and compulsion. This means, on the principle of destruction. Statism cannot maintain itself because it kills the productive activities of its own subjects; therefore it cannot exist for long without looting some freer, more productive country. This is a fact demonstrated by world history. It is the Statist nations—the controlled nations, the nations of dictatorial government—that have always resorted to violence and caused wars. Statist Sparta against Athens. Statist Carthage against Rome. Statist Spain against England. Statist Napoleon against the whole of Europe. Statists Bismarck of Germany and Napoleon III of France, against each other. Statist Wilhelm II of Germany and Nicholas II of Russia who, between them, plunged the world into the First War.

And now what about this last war? Who started it? The alliance of two dictators—Hitler and Stalin. Now observe a most significant point: the American-British strategy throughout the war was to destroy the production centers of the enemy and knock him out—because America and England were not after loot, they had nothing to gain by war, they were the productive nations and were merely defending themselves. Was that the strategy of Germany and Russia? No. While Germany was overrunning Europe, she was very careful to spare industrial centers, to seize them intact, and promptly loot machinery and entire factories for shipment into Germany. And Russia did precisely the same while occupying Germany—and is still doing it. If we want to know who and what leads the world to war, destruction, bloodshed and horror—isn’t the answer blatantly obvious in practical demonstration? Or are we still going to prattle like high-school boys about “capitalist greed” and “rich munitions-makers”?

So long as Statism had only guns and dynamite with which to enslave men, mankind had a chance against it. After every havoc wrought in history by one dictatorship or another, mankind could still recover, rebuild and start over again. The destruction was partial and limited. But notice that with the improvements in the technology of weapons, each war left behind it more ruin than the one before. Now, with a weapon such as the atomic bomb and with a trend such as Statism in the world, there is no more chance left and our days are literally numbered—unless the trend is reversed.

An atomic bomb is safe only in a free society—because a free society does not function through violence and does not cause wars. Such a weapon would be dangerous in the world at any time. At a time when most of mankind has embraced the faith of Statism—a world suicide is most surely ahead of us, unless men learn a different faith.

The best sociological minds of this country say: “Mankind has just one more generation to exist. This is a final ultimatum to us. Now men must be free—or perish.”

The horror and the responsibility in that statement is the fact that our generation will probably have a chance to muddle through irresponsibly to our normal graves—that we know it instinctively and so refuse to think about it too deeply. But our children will not survive. Nobody who is under twenty now will escape it. And it is we, now, who are going to blast them into bloody vapor—we, who will decide the issue by what we do and think—we, who’ll pass the sentence on them and throw them into a screaming horror—while we ourselves escape. This is what I, for one, will not have on my conscience. And I don’t see how anyone else can wish to have it [on his conscience].

This is not a subject for quibbling or evasions. When we say “men must be free or perish,” let us be specific and honest about what “free” means. It means free from compulsion; it means free from rule by force; it means free from government control of enterprise.

Since the issue of free enterprise versus Statism is so fundamental, since everything we do or say affects it, since every bit of propaganda relates to it—we cannot touch a subject such as the atomic bomb without knowing clearly where we stand. There is no fence to straddle here, no compromises, no neutrality, no appeasement policy possible. [...]

The atomic bomb is now the focus of everybody’s sociological thinking. All people agree that mankind must reconsider its whole direction in a world that contains the atomic bomb. The question is: What direction?

The Statists are already making propaganda capital out of the atomic bomb by yelling that now we must have a bigger and better Statism, a world slave state with a world totalitarian government—for the sake of harmony and peace. Well, this last is true: we must have peace or it will be the end for all of us. But harmony is not achieved by force. Brotherhood is not achieved by compulsion. Peace is not achieved by appeasement.

Harmony, brotherhood and peace can be reached only voluntarily—or not at all. Only free men are peaceful men. When we need peace as desperately as now, we must have freedom.

It is true that mankind must reverse its direction. But its direction has not been toward free enterprise. Its direction has been toward Statism. That is the trend which must be reversed.

The world is still stunned by the atomic bomb and is groping desperately for some understanding of its significance. Therefore anything we say or hint or imply or suggest in a picture on this subject will have tremendous consequences in influencing the thinking of a muddled, confused, bewildered public.

Let us realize and remember that the atomic bomb as an argument can be more powerful and destructive spiritually than it is as a weapon physically.

To sum up, the crux of our responsibility in making the picture is this: (1) It is precisely because of the atomic bomb that the world must return to free enterprise; (2) The atomic bomb is a tremendously potent argument. If we use it as an argument for Statism—we will have blood on our hands. If we use it as an argument for free enterprise—we will make an inestimable contribution toward saving mankind; perhaps, a historic and immortal contribution.

The whole history of the atomic bomb is an eloquent example of, argument for and tribute to free enterprise. It would be monstrous to disregard the lesson, to ignore it or to twist it into the exact opposite. We don’t have to attach artificial propaganda to the picture. We must let the facts speak for themselves. We must only present the truth. But we must present the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

II. The Specific Problems of the Picture

If our picture is to be a tribute to free enterprise, does it mean that we have to enter into a controversy and antagonize a lot of people? Not at all. Since we will treat the subject in a broad, philosophical manner, we will find everybody in agreement with us. We will present the issue in such a way that we will leave no room for argument and nobody will dare disagree with us, except the out-and-out Fascists and Communists.

How do we do that? Very simply. By presenting the issue not in superficial, political terms—but in its deeper, essential terms. We state our theme like this: “Man’s greatest achievements are accomplished through free, voluntary action—and cannot be accomplished under force, compulsion and violence.”

If we stick to this theme intelligently and consistently, who will want to disagree? In order to object, a person would have to admit that he is against freedom and in favor of violence.

Do we touch on any political issue in the narrow sense of contemporary American politics? No. None of that is pertinent. We are not for or against Labor or Capital or Republicans or Democrats. We are presenting only a fundamental issue. If, after seeing our picture, the audience walks out with the conviction that personal freedom is desirable and that the use of force is neither good nor practical, that is all we want to accomplish, and it will be a great accomplishment.

However, we cannot do this by merely tacking on a few cheap speeches about freedom, worded in such a general way that it can mean anything or nothing. Our theme must be explicit, clear-cut and expressed not in speeches, but in action. It must be integrated into the structure of our story.

Do we have to attack our own government and criticize the New Deal? No. (So long as we don’t start glorifying the New Deal, either!) As far as I know without further research, our government seems to have behaved properly in regard to the atomic bomb. All we have to do is show the government’s actions factually, stressing that in this case it acted as a free country’s government should act: it did not use compulsion.

But where we must express our theme full blast is in our treatment of the governments of the countries from which the scientists escaped. This is the heart of the real issue historically—and this is the crux of our theme. We must show how Statism destroys, exiles and paralyzes men of genius—why these men could not work under compulsion—why they could produce what they produced only in a free country. Will anyone object to our showing that dictatorships do things at the point of a gun, by force, by decree, by orders in the name of the State? A person who objects to that, deserves to have every returned soldier spit in his face.

So much for our general approach to the subject. Now let us examine the particular key points.

1. What made the creation of the atomic bomb possible?

This is the most important question our picture has to answer.

In presenting the strictly factual history of the bomb, we will not be able to avoid a slant of unintentional propaganda, one way or the other. The history of the bomb is long and complex. We cannot literally present all the facts. We have to exercise choice in what we select to present, how we present it, what significance we attach to it, what meaning we convey. In order to present the truth, we must be able to distinguish the essential from the inessential. Any record can be falsified by omission of the essential and overstressing of the inessential. This is where we have to be careful.

For instance: it is a fact that Roosevelt gave to the scientists the funds necessary for their experiments. How are we going to treat this point? If we show or imply that that was the crucial factor in the creation of the bomb, we throw at the world the most powerful piece of propaganda for Statism that could be devised. We tell the audience, in effect: “See what a strong government can do? Many people objected to Roosevelt’s arbitrary use of money for secret purposes—yet look what he gave you! The proper way to run the world and achieve the best results is for you common men to shut up, to trust a leader implicitly, to let your government decide for you and plan for you without your knowledge or consent.” This is what our audience will walk out of the theater with.

Do we want to say that?

Do we want to feature the superficial aspects of the case and release on the world a thousand converted Statists with each showing of the picture? Do we want—in presenting the greatest achievement of free enterprise—to make “a picture whose hero will be Roosevelt,” as I have heard suggested?

If not, does it mean that we should falsify Roosevelt’s contribution? Certainly not. We must give him full and exact credit for the part he played. Not less than that—and not more.

Here is the first point where clear and honest thinking is required: if it were true that the atomic bomb was an achievement of strong government—why didn’t Germany achieve it? Hitler’s government was much stronger than ours—if by “strong” we mean strong-arm, total control, dictatorial power, arbitrary use of money and resources. Hitler certainly wanted to find the secret of the atomic bomb—and he tried. He started preparing for war long before we did. He could and did throw the entire resources of his country into his war machine. What good did it do him? He did not get the atomic bomb.

That is a fact. How do we treat it? If we ascribe it to sheer luck, just an accident of fate in our favor—if we say that Hitler could have got the bomb, that he was just on the verge of it, only we beat him to it—we miss the whole significance of the story of the atomic bomb. We are then committing a moral crime by falsifying a historical lesson of tremendous importance.

There is no factual evidence to support the idea that Hitler was about to discover the bomb. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary. But here is what will happen if we accept that idea: we’ll be saying to the audience, in effect: “A totalitarian system is just as good and efficient as ours. Even more so. They can do anything we can. It was quite a feat for us to beat them.”

Is that true?

The fact is that Germany did not, could not and never would have created the atomic bomb; nor Italy; nor Russia.

Is it an accident that since the beginning of the machine age, all the great, basic, epoch-making inventions and discoveries have come from America and England? Mostly from America, secondly from England—and with very few contributions from all the other countries. Why? Anglo-Saxon superiority? No. The inventors were of all races and nationalities. But they all had to work either in America or in England. The other countries then elaborated on the discoveries, worked out some details and variations, made minor improvements; but never produced anything crucially new, never made a discovery that was a turning point in science; nothing to compare with the steam engine, the electric light, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, the telegraph, the motion picture, the radio. For God’s sake, can we ignore that? Are we going to say “sheer accident?” How many accidents of this nature do we need to be convinced? And if, through our own fault, an atomic bomb drops on us in a few years—are we going to say that was an accident, too?

The simple fact is that invention, discovery, science and progress are possible only under a system of free enterprise. If you want to know why and how, in detail, please read Science and the Planned State by John R. Baker, a British scientist. It is a short book, recently published. It presents the whole case, with facts, names, dates, records, reasons and unanswerable proof.

This is the crucial point of our approach to the picture. If we take the greatest invention of man and do not draw from it the lesson it contains—that only free men could have achieved it—we deserve to have an atomic bomb dropped on our heads.

Now let us look at the history of the bomb in detail. If there is a God, it is almost as if He had staged it that way on purpose—to give us an object lesson.

Some of the key figures in the development of the bomb were [Albert] Einstein, [Niels] Bohr and [Enrico] Fermi. They had to flee from Germany, Denmark and Italy. The Statist dictators had these men and had the knowledge of their original discoveries. And it did not do the dictators any good. These scientists laid the foundations of their future achievements in their own countries. But they could not continue to work there. They had to escape to a free country.

Then there is Dr. Lise Meitner who made her first important experiments right in Nazi Germany—and had to escape. Her colleagues who remained behind, Hahn and Strassman, continued the work and got no results. She continued the work in a free country—and got results. There are many, many other refugees from dictatorships among the scientists who contributed to the atomic bomb. The object lesson is eloquent.

How are we going to treat it? Are we going to say that these refugees were victims of racial prejudice? That is not an explanation. Racial prejudice was a symptom, not a cause; a manifestation of Statism, not its basic essence. Racial prejudice as such does not cause exiles and concentration camps; it can’t; it does not rule society; it remains the province of bums and the lunatic fringe. It is only when racial prejudice acquires political power, only when it establishes a system of Statism where man’s individual dignity and individual rights are destroyed, only then can it actually start to shed blood. Without individual rights, there are no minority rights; without minority rights there are no majority rights either. And an individual is the smallest minority on earth.

To say that Einstein and Lise Meitner were thrown out of Germany on account of racial prejudice is the truth—but not the whole truth. It was racial prejudice armed with State power. And what about Fermi and the others? There was no racial prejudice involved in their cases.

The whole truth is that no achievements can be made under a Statist system because: (1) Statists always throttle and destroy the ablest men among their subjects because Statist systems are based on blind obedience; men of ability are dangerous, independent and not easily ruled; (2) Even when a few men of ability survive in a Statist system and are begged or ordered to produce—they cannot produce because they cannot work under orders, controls and compulsion. Nothing new and great can be or ever has been done that way. (See Science and the Planned State. See the whole of history. Try to name one exception.)

That is the point our picture must make. That is the lesson of the atomic bomb. That is the greatest glory of America, its noblest distinction and its highest pride. And if anyone objects to our saying that, he does not deserve the name of a human being.

2. The actual history of the atomic bomb

To tell the whole truth about the atomic bomb means to show the entire process of its creation, at least in highlights and key-points.

This is essential to our theme and to historical accuracy. Furthermore, it has the value of great public interest. The public is eager to know just what the atomic bomb really is and how men made such a discovery. Therefore we must tell our story from the beginning.

The first step was Einstein’s equation on the conversion of matter into energy, which he formulated before the First War. After that, there was a long, progressive series of steps, achieved by single scientists working independently of one another all over the world. Quoting now merely from a newspaper account (this has to be checked by fuller research), the key steps seem to have been: the discovery of the neutron by Sir James Chadwick, in England, in 1932; the splitting of a uranium atom by Lise Meitner, Hahn and Strassman, in Germany, in 1939; the elaboration upon this experiment by Niels Bohr in Denmark and Enrico Fermi in Italy; the meeting of Bohr and Fermi in America in 1939, when the first discussion of the possibility of an atomic bomb was held; Fermi’s proposal to representatives of the Navy; the creation of the atomic bomb project; the two years of work there; the test in New Mexico; the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

That, in a very general outline, is the story we have to tell. What is its significance? To whom does the credit for the atomic bomb belong?

By the time Fermi approached the Navy with his proposal, the basic scientific work was done; scientists had discovered that the atom could be split and knew how to do it; what remained was the practical application, specifically to the purpose of a bomb. Who had given to the world the crucial basic knowledge? The single, voluntary, unplanned, unregulated efforts of individual scientists, each following his own line of research. Was it a “collective” achievement? No. They did not work together under a common plan, nor under directives, nor by majority vote. It was not the achievement of one individual—nor the achievement of an organized group. It was—as all civilization—the sum of free, individual efforts.

I quote from Science and the Planned State: “We may turn to any part of science and we are likely to find the same thing: the fundamental discoveries are commonly made by single workers.”

I quote from Einstein: “I am a horse for single harness, not cut out for tandem or teamwork.”

Now we come to the last stage—the work on the atomic bomb project. That was an organized effort. Organized by whom? By one man or five men—we don’t know the number—but we know that work was done under the absolute guidance of a few top scientists. Was that a collectivist method of working? Well, the members of that “collective” didn’t even know what they were working on. There was no “democracy” about it, no majority vote, no “collective bargaining.” Shall we then consider it an example of Nazi methods—a small, ruling elite and a blindly obedient mass? No. Because none of those men was forced into that project.

What was it then? Why, simply and exactly the same method as that of any large enterprise carried on by a free industrial concern. Any enterprise has to work under a single guidance—so long as it is one specific task. The employee in a private industry has to take orders from the boss, and cannot and must not vote upon the boss’s policy--or you get chaos; but beyond and outside the specific work which the employee has voluntarily undertaken to perform, the boss has no power over him; and within his particular task, an employee must be left free and must exercise his own effort to achieve results. Isn’t that the pattern of free industry? And isn’t that the way the work on the bomb project was done?

A splendid example of cooperation and discipline? Of course. So is any Ford plant. The biggest and most successful examples of large-scale organization have always been American. Because this kind of cooperation is possible only among free men by voluntary agreement.

Is that collectivism? No. Collectivism is compulsion. Compulsion and cooperation are not synonyms. They are opposites. Collectivism is group action by decree—and in matters where no group action is possible. Cooperation is a highly complex division of individual labor. Collectivism is not division, but herd action, in theory—and a gun stuck in your back in practice. You don’t cooperate at the point of a gun. Only free men can cooperate.

This is the crucial difference between the method of free enterprise and the method of Statism. This is why one succeeds and the other fails. This is why the scientists could not work under dictatorships, but could work in America. This is why an organization such as the bomb project could not exist in Germany.

We must keep this clearly in mind in order to show the real historical significance of these events. We must not get into a childish interpretation of secondary matters. We must not give the impression that the secrecy, the military discipline, the walled-in cities were responsible for the achievement. These things were required to protect a secret—not to solve it. They were necessities of wartime and of the fact that the work involved a military weapon. They were not necessities of scientific research. We must keep these two aspects clearly defined and apart.

Now we come to the part played by the government. What was the most significant thing about it? The fact that the government did not attempt to run the bomb project. The government and the Army took orders from the scientists—not vice versa. The government provided the means—and let the scientists do the work as they wished. We must show this clearly.

Otherwise, there is a great danger of the usual superficial interpretation. The audience will make a conclusion such as: “It was a government project, wasn’t it? And it turned out well, didn’t it? So government control is good.” It is by such crude, blanket conclusions and unanalyzed, unwarranted generalizations that all the errors in sociological thinking are made.

The part played by the government in the bomb project is not the part people advocate when they speak of government control. A government project is run by the government. A private industry controlled by government takes orders from the government. This is the exact opposite of what happened on the bomb project. For once, the government literally acted as the servant of the people involved, not the master. The government put itself at the disposal of the scientists and carried out their wishes without questions. This is illustrated nicely in the little incident of General Marshall giving a $250,000 check to one of the scientists, without knowing or asking what it was for.

This behavior of the government is highly commendable and if we present it exactly as it was, it will be the best compliment we can pay to the government in this case, and it should please every official involved. Do you think officials will be offended if we show that they acted as free men toward free men—and not as Gestapo agents or Commissars?

This is a point that must be shown and stressed. It displays the contrast between a free country and a Statist dictatorship. Under a dictatorship, men would be forced into the project, assigned to it by command, frozen in their jobs, prohibited from leaving under penalty of death, and ordered to work. (And therefore no work would be done.) Materials would be confiscated. (And therefore there would be no materials.) The government would decide who does the work, where and how; there would be the usual unholy mess of directives, regulations, red tape, commands—and bloody purges to punish lack of progress, men executed in order to make the survivors work better through terror. (But achievements and creation are not done through terror.) There would be the usual inquisition on who belongs to what race and whose political beliefs are or are not in strict accordance with the official party line. Now are we still going to wonder why no achievements ever come out of dictatorships? Sheer accident?

The atomic bomb was not a creation of government—but of the free cooperation of free men. And it is essential to show its whole history—from the single steps by single scientists—to their exiles and escapes—to their coming together for their last effort under the guidance of the best among them. We must not start the picture with the final stage, something like Roosevelt calling the scientists together and saying: “Boys, make me an atomic bomb.” That’s not the way it was done. If that were the way, Hitler would have done it.

We must not fall into a naive Statism by featuring a government project and saying: “Government did it.” That would be equal in intelligence to a man who comes out of a movie theater, saying: “The theater owner is the one who created that wonderful movie. He provided the theater, didn’t he?”

And while we show the part played by the government, with proper and exact credit—we must also show, with proper and exact credit, the part played by private industry. The tremendous material and technological resources that were required to make the atomic bomb came from and were created by private American industry, by free enterprise—and were not and could not be created anywhere else by any other method. Statist nations could not have manufactured the bomb, even if they had invented it. The atomic bomb was the end product of a huge, complex industrial structure made up of private achievements and ingenuity—a structure which Statism can neither accomplish nor copy. This must be said and shown.

The plants built for the bomb project in Tennessee and in the state of Washington were built by the DuPont Company—“without profit and with a repudiation of all patent rights” (N.Y. Times). This must be shown. Patent rights mean that the DuPont Company had contributed some original inventions. This must be shown.

In our handling of the public names and figures involved, we must maintain the strictest fairness, accuracy and impartiality. If we present Roosevelt in a favorable light, we must also present the DuPonts in a favorable light. Nobody will or can object, so long as what we present is factually true.

In the manner and terms I have here described, the general tone of our picture will be that of a great tribute to America—an epic of the American spirit. We will not do it in any phony flag-waving way (we must never even say it nor make speeches about it); we will merely show the American method and its results. We will dramatize that which is the essence of America.

An abstract, general theme of this nature will give deeper significance to the specific events we present, will lift the picture above the class of a documentary film of the moment into that of a great historical work, and will give it the importance and the dignity which the subject demands.

Our picture will say: “This is what America has done—she is the only one who could have done it—this is how and why she was able to do it.”

If the above exposition does not represent your approach to the picture, I cannot permit myself to take upon my conscience the contribution of a single line to it.

If you agree with this exposition and wish to make the picture on this basis—I shall consider it an honor and a privilege to work on the screenplay.

January, 1946

Theme

The mind against brute force;
therefore—
The mind is that which cannot be forced and will always win against force;
therefore—
Freedom from compulsion;
therefore—
The methods of free enterprise against the methods of the totalitarian state.

Show throughout that what applies to men applies in exactly the same way to states and nations. (Men are the atoms of society. Matter is organized according to the nature of atoms—not atoms according to what one would like to do with matter.)

First part: scientists fight a lonely, losing battle as the world moves toward totalitarianism, the rule of force, the climax of which is Hitler.

Second part: the world, lost in a chaos of brutality, has no recourse but to appeal to scientists (the mind) to save it from unleashed brutality.

January, 1946

[AR prepared the following list of questions for the first of two interviews she conducted with Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who served as scientific director of the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos.]

Questions for J. Robert Oppenheimer

When did he start in Chicago? Summer, 1942.

When in New Mexico? March, 1943.

Who selected the scientists for New Mexico? How were they invited? What was their attitude? Incidents?

How was the work done? To what extent [was it] controlled? To what extent [was it] free? If controlled—by whom? How many free, unexpected discoveries were there? How many men were responsible for crucial, basic points?

Incidents to show progress of the work?

Were there crucial turning points, i.e., milestones of the progress?

What points or events stand out in your mind?

Was there any one specific day or event when they knew they had it?

Was there a specific event when they started manufacturing the actual bombs used?

(Our picture is to be a tribute to the scientist—as a representative of free inquiry and the independent mind.)

Contributions of industries?

Incidents of German work on the atomic [bomb]? What happened to Otto Hahn? [Otto Hahn was a German chemist and physicist who received the Nobel prize in 1944 for splitting the uranium atom (1939). He collaborated with the Nazis in their effort to develop the atomic bomb.]

Did scientists really fear German success and consider it a race—or were they contemptuous of the German efforts?

What does he consider the best in people as demonstrated in connection with this project?

What does he consider the worst?

Any trouble or interference which he cares to mention?

Incidents typical of the men as scientists?

What does he consider his most important contribution to atomic physics—before the project?

How was he picked to be head of Los Alamos—was he chosen or did he volunteer? When and how did he first hear about the project?

January 8, 1946

Notes from interview with J. R. Oppenheimer

No theoretical problem. “Approved for destruction.” Some parts ready two years before.

Scientists—[almost] no one turned him down. (One refused. Two quit the project.)

Project had a bad name at the beginning.

[Obstacles to hiring scientists:]

1. Scientists already employed.

2. Project’s bad name.

3. Remote location.

4. Hated to work for Army.

Town run by Army—commanding officer in charge.

[Oppenheimer was] called by Dr. Arthur Compton in spring of 1942.

Group came to Berkeley in summer of 1942.

Staff of laboratory at maximum of 3,500—scientific staff about 900. In the last three years—scientific work at Los Alamos, production at the other two labs [located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington].

Early part—working out scientific schemes for the other two plants. Group at first meeting being told about work in single teams.

All 900 knew the scientific principles—and others after six months residence were told what they were making.

They kept it secret without rules—merely by making it a principle to keep it secret.

Bohr was not closely associated—brought some slight information—not essential to work.

Fermi contributed enormously.

Scientific high points (prior to project):

Rutherford—discovery of nucleus.
Quantum theory.
[James] Chadwick—discovery of neutron.

Dr. Bush important, “had President’s ear.” [Dr. Vannevar Bush was director of the government’s Office of Scientific Research and Development. ]

Refugee scientists responsible.

Summer of 1942—decision to manufacture bomb was made. Theoretical work was done.

Conant and Bush presented evidence to Roosevelt. [Dr. James B.

Conant was chairman of the National Defense Research Council during World War II.]

January 15, 1946

Questions [for Dr. J. R. Oppenheimer]

Describe typical day.

How was work done? On assignment—or free investigation of assigned problems?

When did he move to live in Los Alamos?

Bodyguard?

Theoretical scientist: Give one incident about himself prior to project. Incidents typical of the men as scientists?

Control of Army?

Hiroshima.

Notes from [Second] Interview with Dr. Oppenheimer

Seminars—free discussions (“give and take”).

Tormented by something he can’t solve.

Memories:

Moral doubts.

Bohr arrives at his house—evening, it is snowing. Went for walk. Talk about German work.

About a year ago—terrible jam on equipment—working 24 hours a day—shop burned down—“evening of extreme [weather conditions]”—snow, inadequate water pressure.

Three or four people at first (March, 1943)—cold—conferences in half-built rooms.

Waiting for news of Nagasaki.

Surprises—came out in conferences—about eight people talking. Trouble about freedom and getting their own personnel and supplies. Trouble with engineers who wanted to start building. First model of bomb had nothing in common with actual bomb.

Scientists ran it—they decided what they needed.

Formal parties—like Englishmen in the Congo.

Hiroshima—Sunday at Los Alamos—brother called and they went for ride—took children to go swimming. Next morning he got phone call at lab—everything all right. On Tuesday night—a colloquium—800 scientists—worried that the next one might not work.

Assembly of first bomb (Trinity). [This was the bomb used for the test in New Mexico.]

Compton left—got scared—in early days.

Bodyguard:

Sentry at house—standing all night. One of two guys had to go out with him.

Driver assigned to Compton.

June 1943—guard assigned—couldn’t [leave] often.

His achievements:

Theory of cosmic ray particles—that neutron particles were cosmic rays—1936.

Typical day:

Talking with individuals about their problems; trying to give them a feeling of confidence; correcting them while making them think they did it themselves.

Conferences: two on technical subjects, one on administration. One meeting a week to describe progress.

General Groves was the only boss over Oppenheimer.

Scientists given choice of problems. Reasons instead of authority.

Free to solve problems.

Scientists like music. Long walks, skiing, horses.

No one ever gave an order at Los Alamos. [AR recalled this part of the interview years later: “I asked him whether the scientists worked under orders. He looked at me in the way that my best characters would have, and said in a morally indignant tone: ‘No one ever gave an order at Los Alamos. ’ ”]

They did things they didn’t want to do—only because they understood the necessity. A great scientist ran the machine shop. People who ran calculating machines and other dull jobs.

After a hundred experiments—“we’re getting something.”

[AR’s meetings with Oppenheimer proved useful later: he became the model for Robert Stadler in Atlas Shrugged. In a 1961 interview, she recalled: “Oppenheimer set the character of Stadler in my mind, which is the reason for the first name of Robert. It’s the type that Oppenheimer projected-that enormous intelligence, somewhat bitter, but very much the gentleman and scholar, and slightly other-worldly. Even his office was what I described for Stadler—that almost ostentatious simplicity. ”]

January 16, 1946

Notes on interview with General [Leslie R.] Groves

Groves—top in his profession (Army engineering)—took chance on disgrace if project failed.

He was told of his appointment first in hall of Congress building—came out of Military committee where he testified—met General Somervell—asked his opinion on taking assignment with General overseas—Somervell told him the Secretary of War had another assignment for him “which might win the war.” Groves [complained about being] given a research job; [at first] he thought it was fantastic and doomed to failure.

Groves didn’t know project would succeed. “I thought we had a 60% chance—and had to take it before anyone else did.”

Groves had to make crucial decisions—often against the advice of his scientific advisors. (In the case of starting Oak Ridge from [Dr. E. 0.] Lawrence’s “speck of light.”) Groves had no organization set up—there was no time—he ran things himself—appointed the right men and almost never changed them.

Groves was “salesman” to get big industries to take the contracts.

They could have refused—but not one of them did. The story of DuPont—the board of directors—the meeting and the papers face down—Chairman speaks—not one paper is turned over (among those who didn’t turn the paper over was Lamont DuPont, who owns 60 million [dollars worth] of DuPont stock). [The papers contained classified information on the Manhattan Project, which the Department of Defense was willing to divulge if necessary.]

Groves says he would like to see stressed “teamwork and American management”—no other country could have done it.

Groves went to Milwaukee to see a contractor; he solved two technical problems for [the contractor] while in a hotel room conference.

One method of doing a certain scientific process had to be abandoned after spending a huge sum.

January 23, 1946

Interview with Dr. Kaynes

[Dr. Kaynes was apparently a scientist who worked with Richard Feynman in the computing group at Los Alamos.]

Conflict of scientists who were in Army. But [they were] free in the laboratory. Never worked under compulsion.

What is the critical mass?

One works with cross-section (cyclotron involved).

Neutron renector—looked for damper—tried to “freeze design.”

At request of Fermi, made calculations to see if the world would blow up.

Dr. Hans Bethe gave talk at colloquium before test; they were terrified when they realized how little they knew.

Dr. Kaynes accepted job knowing nothing about it. Arrived in early 1944. Used first names. Dr. Bethe told him they were making a new element. Told everything. Asked: “What do you want to do?”

Worked with a “screwball”—Richard Feynman.

(Scientists dressed sloppy. Only big shots dressed—Bethe and Oppenheimer, but not Fermi.)

Bohr and son came often. Fermi eventually came and stayed there about a year before test. Chadwick was stationed there (for British) almost from beginning. Lawrence visited. Dr. Bethe. Dr. [George B.]

Kistiakowsky—White Russian.

(Ideal of most professors—university without undergraduates.)

Feynman was Kaynes’ group leader (about age 27). He traveled to Albuquerque to see wife, who was dying of T.B. Beat tom-toms right in laboratory—the more noise, the harder he was thinking. Wife died. No one paid attention to work hours.

One hundred tons of TNT used to test instruments—a few months before atomic test.

Dr. [William George] Penny got word his wife in London was hurt in bombing. Later learned his wife died—intense hatred.

Los Alamos originally planned for 75 scientists, grew gradually.

Polish scientist who could not find his wife in Warsaw.

Columbia—started work with Fermi—men came out all black from carbon. Fermi—scientific. Compton—administration.

(Communists not allowed on project.)

Art Wahl (chemist) discovered plutonium—E. O. Lawrence’s laboratory at Berkeley.

January 25, 1946

Interview with Mrs. Oppenheimer

Test was referred to as “Trinity.” Test was on a Monday—the next Saturday Mrs. Oppenheimer gave a party—evening dress. Mood was one of relief.

After Hiroshima they did not feel like celebrating.

The Oppenheimers were the first family to move to Los Alamos.

[The town] had about 30 people then—a big dormitory for scientists in one of the schoolrooms. The Oppenheimers lived in one of the masters’ houses of the old school. Community life was much friend lier and more harmonious than in other cities—higher mental level.

Dr. Oppenheimer took job only on condition that his essential workers would know the secret.

A great part of their work was spent in meetings and conferences.

At first, scientists were afraid of possible German atomic research, but later learned there was none. Scientists worked in order to save lives and end the war.

Was it in order to beat the Germans to the discovery? “Good God, no!”

January 29, 1946

Interview with Colonel Nichols

[Colonel K. D. Nichols served under General Groves, and had responsibility for the design, construction, and operation of the plants which produced the fissionable material required for the bombs.]

Spies tried not to be promoted.

Nichols, [General George C.] Marshall, and a civilian wandered for a day, choosing the site.

Plans about center of town—useless planning.

Ore refined at other plant [Oak Ridge, Tennessee].

Scientists impatient with engineers.

Main problem: critical size and detonation.

Detonation—crucial—the gamble.

Lawrence [influential in] selecting Oppenheimer.

FBI security men—separate organization. Foreign spy. Feed back answers to Germany. (Phony answers written by scientist.)

Miss Tracey (Compton’s secretary): “I have a husband on Iwo Jima. You don’t have to ask me.”

Better work when they knew what they were doing. “Never saw such a change in a town” (as took place after they knew).

Mrs. Nichols—story of how she heard news that it was a bomb.

Community troubles with scientists who hated restrictions, such as no choice of schools for their children.

January, 1946

Philosophic Notes

Answer to Oppenheimer’s worry:

“Scientists are the representatives of free inquiry. They will protect you—and they will not work for or under compulsion. The atom bomb and the sudden ruling position of the scientist shows that force is not practical. Force needs brains to be applied. Without thought, you cannot even indulge in violence. Brute force is nothing—thought and principles everything.

“The atom bomb is a weapon of defense—it is not good for looting—and dictatorships are looters. The atom bomb is the weapon of a free country.”

For “overall” guidance:

Wars are caused by the anti-rational, pro-force psychology of men. If we do not deal with one another through reason—nothing is left to us but brute force. Whenever anyone advocates the achievement of anything whatever through the use of force or compulsion on men—he is planting the seeds of war.

Have a sequence where somebody wonders what causes war—and scattered, “human” examples of the above psychology.

“What causes wars?” can be a kind of overall theme and unifying line.

“Just as a tiny, invisible atom holds forces that determine the shape of matter—so you, each man, by the ideas you hold, determine the shape of world events.” (“Do not worry about anything except your own ideas and responsibility. It will work.”)

Everything we have comes from someone’s thought.

Scene where mother says “nobody wants war”—and we show all the preaching of violence: worker—“take the property of the rich by force”; industrialist—“make workers work by force”; teacher—“educate people by force”; writer—“make people go to my plays by force”; farmer—“prohibit the sale of milk from other states by force”; dietitian—“make everybody drink orange juice by force.” “Since society is complex—we need force.” (Then show scene at construction site.)

The antagonists: the Nazi ideal—a horde of armed brutes; the free ideal—a scientist, alone at a blackboard. (Sequence about the ancestors of both sides.) England in ruins—“our only defense”—Chadwick. Conclusion from “teamwork” is not “any man is unimportant, only the team counts,” but “every man is important.”

“All human activities are like a chain reaction; somebody has to be the first neutron.”

Don’t forget line (toward end): “It was not an accident.”

Someone (maybe Chadwick) looks at sky and says: “God did give us a means for right to win over might: the mind which can find the secrets of the universe and which cannot work for evil, because it cannot work under compulsion.” (Evil [men] steal the ideas and achievements of free men; it is up to free men to protect themselves and the world from that—by protecting freedom.)

The men that a dictatorship needs most (if it’s real power that it wants) are the first to turn into its bitterest enemies (Fermi, Einstein) —by the very nature of the idea of dictatorship.

January 19, 1946

[The following is AR’s “general outline” of the screenplay.]

We open with an immense shot of the night sky—the stars and planets—the vast mystery of the universe. Camera tilts to include the earth below—a dark spread of hills, wide and desolate under the sky. A single pinpoint of light shows somewhere in the hills; it looks like a feeble, futile competition to the flaming spread of the stars. Camera moves forward slowly, and we begin to distinguish the figure of a man standing in the hills. He seems helpless and small, totally insignificant in the face of the immensity of the universe.

The man is about thirty years old. He is looking up at the sky. His face is weak and bitter. He turns slowly and walks toward the light we have seen; it is the lighted window of a small, modest house somewhere in the hills of California.

Inside the house, a young woman is lying in bed. The man, her husband, comes in. He speaks bitterly of the fact that man is only a worm in the universe—a helpless, insignificant worm—and what is the use of anything? The young wife reproaches him gently—that is no way to talk on the day when their son was born. And we see the new-born child beside her.

The young mother is full of hopes and dreams for her son. She expects him to have a great life in a great new world; the war has just ended, there will never be another war. She asks her husband what important events took place on the day of her son’s birth. The father picks up a newspaper—it is the year 1919. He glances through the pages, briefly naming the big events of the day. Somewhere at the bottom of a page, he finds a small item announcing that Sir Ernest Rutherford, British scientist, has succeeded in smashing an atom of nitrogen. He drops the paper contemptuously; he does not consider this of any importance; scientists, he says, are useless; this is the day of the practical man, the man of action.

There is a photograph of Rutherford in the paper. From it we dissolve to Rutherford himself, in his laboratory in England. He is being interviewed by a couple of reporters—it is not considered a big story—the reporters are not too impressed. Yes, Rutherford says, he can explain his experiments so that the laymen would understand—he is not sure, however, that it would interest many people. He proceeds to explain briefly the nuclear theory of the atom, which he had formulated in 1912, and his present experiment by which he transmuted nitrogen into hydrogen. Of what practical use is that?—asks one of the reporters. A little astonished, Rutherford, the theoretical scientist, answers: “I don’t know.” “Then why are you interested in that kind of research?” Rutherford answers, very quietly: “Only because it is knowledge of the truth.”

We dissolve to the young father saying: “What is the truth? There is no such thing as objective truth.” He is saying it to his son, now ten years old. It is the year 1929. The boy is an earnest, intelligent child; his face shows future strength and character. (For the purpose of this outline only we’ll call him John X—he can be anyone, he is the young generation of today.) The father is reproaching him for his scholarly inclinations—the boy studies too much, reads too much, asks too many questions. The father wants him to go out more, learn more about the world and become useful when he grows up; people who think are useless; the mind is a superstition, truth is a superstition, everything is relative, we mustn’t question anything, we must learn to take orders. The father is a kind of petty-Fascist type, a shiftless failure who wants to run everything and does nothing, who takes out his own incompetence in hatred for the world; he represents the cheap cynicism, the irrationalism, the contempt for moral standards and intellectual principles which characterized his generation all over the world.

Tied into this scene we show, with brief explanations, a scene of Dr. E. O. Lawrence, at the University of California, with his new invention—the cyclotron; and a scene of Dr. Robert J. Van de Graaf, at Princeton, with his new giant electrostatic generator—two important points in the progress of atomic science.

Then, as the father complains about the state of the world—there is nothing to do now, after the stock market crash, no frontiers left to conquer—we go to a plane flying over the desolate wastes of North Canada. Gilbert Labine discovers the black rock on the shore of a lake. We show his expedition through the snow the next year, the discovery that the rock is pitchblende [uranium ore], the establishment of his company.

1932. John X is 13 years old. He shows signs of becoming nervous, restless, bitter—as he studies in secret from his father. He has to smuggle the latest scientific magazines into his room and hide them. In connection with his studies, we show scenes of: the Cockron-Walton experiments, in England, splitting atoms with protons; Sir James Chadwick, in England, discovering the neutron; Prof. Harold Urey, in America, discovering heavy water.

1934. Niels Bohr, in Denmark, formulates his theory of the structure of the [atomic nucleus].

Enrico Fermi, in Italy, invents the technique of bombarding an atom with slow neutrons.

Scene of Fermi’s clash with Fascist officials who hamper his work. (I would like to have information from Fermi about an authentic incident—also the exact date and manner of his escape from Italy.)

John X is now fifteen. There is a violent scene when he tells his father that he wants to become a scientist. Scientists, the father declares, are no good, because they “live in ivory towers.” Man must act, not think. His son must learn to be practical; take, for instance, that fellow who’s growing so powerful in Germany; of course, the father says, I don’t approve of some of his ideas, but nobody will deny that he’s practical, a realist, a smart man with an efficient system who’ll get what he wants. As an illustration of how one goes about being practical, the father seizes the boy’s books and throws them into the fireplace.

As the books burn, we dissolve to a huge pile of books burning in the square of a German city, under swastika flags. And we see the “practical man,” Hitler, in his office, bending over a map of Germany. He tells his assistants that he controls all of it—he boasts about his power—to hell with principles and theories—thinking is a weakness—the brain is evil—action and force are all that counts—a powerful State can accomplish anything—the individual doesn’t matter—the mind doesn’t matter (exact quotations from Mein Kampf to be used here). Camera pans to the window of the office: there is a light in a distant window of the dark city outside. Camera moves toward that window and into the room. It is a modest study. A solitary man sits working at a desk. The desk holds nothing but books, papers, abstract formulas. The man is Einstein.

Scene of Einstein leaving Germany. (I would like to have the date and authentic details from Einstein.)

1936. John X, seventeen, is entering college. He has given in to his father and given up his ambition of becoming a scientist. As a result, he is a listless, frustrated, embittered youth, cynical, without fire or faith, without much interest in anything—like most of the youth of that time. His father, very pleased, accompanies him when he enrolls at the University of California to study whatever it is his father has selected for him. Actually, the father is not interested in any education, but wants him to become a great college athlete. (“The brawn is mightier than the brain.”) As they walk down a hall of the University, they see—through a half-open door—a man at a blackboard in a modest office. The man has his back to us and is writing incomprehensible formulas on the blackboard. From a friend or a minor college official accompanying them, they learn that the man is working on some mysterious studies of the mesotron and cosmic rays. “There!” says the father, “do you want to end up like that?” The boy shakes his head. As they pass the door, we see the sign on it: “J. R. Oppenheimer.”

1939. John X is struggling through college—miserably. The brilliant boy has become a worthless student. He cannot do well the things he hates. He has flunked many examinations and doesn’t care. He is drinking, running around to parties, driving recklessly—without any real joy. When somebody mentions to him the unusual scientific discoveries being made in the world and shows him a scientific magazine—he flings it aside angrily. He is beginning to hate the subject of science, because it is tied to his renunciation of his one real desire.

We go to Germany—to the laboratory of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner. We see the experiment in which uranium atoms are split for the first time. Hahn and Meitner are puzzled by it—they do not understand the significance of their own experiment—the presence of the element barium. They attribute it to some impurity in the material or some mistake on their part.

Lise Meitner is forced to leave Germany. On the train going to the frontier, she is snubbed and pushed around by arrogant Nazi brown-shirts; the Nazi State has damned her on three counts: the old are useless, women are useless, Jews are useless. She sits alone in a comer of the train, her mind intent on the inexplicable experiment; she makes calculations on a piece of paper. A solution occurs to her suddenly; it is a stunning solution—but she must keep quiet about it. At the frontier, Nazis search her luggage: they take from her an old camera, a typewriter, and other such physical objects; nothing of value to the State, they declare, can be taken out of Germany. We see a close-up of Lise Meitner—the broad forehead, the intelligent eyes. What she is taking out is in her mind.

In Denmark, Lise Meitner explains her solution—that the uranium atom was actually split in half—to Dr. Otto Frisch, another refugee scientist. Together, they communicate the discovery to Niels Bohr. Realizing its tremendous importance, Bohr sails for the United States.

Bohr informs Einstein, Fermi, and other scientists in the United States. The experiment is repeated at Columbia—and [there is] a tremendous release of energy, as predicted by Einstein’s formula.

January, 1939. Bohr and Fermi attend a conference on theoretical physics in Washington. Their report creates a sensation among the scientists. Fermi suggests to some of his colleagues the possibility of a military application of the new discovery.

March, 1939. Fermi and Pegram approach representatives of the Navy Department with the suggestion of an atomic bomb.

October, 1939. Fermi and his friends enlist the help of Einstein and Alexander Sachs to approach Roosevelt. Sachs obtains an interview with Roosevelt, reads excerpts from Einstein’s letter. Roosevelt forms first “Advisory Committee on Uranium.”

November, 1939. The committee reports; Roosevelt approves first purchase of materials—for $6,000.

Summer of 1940 (after the fall of France). Einstein gets first news from the underground that Germany is doing some work on atomic research. Sachs urges more effort—by contacts with Roosevelt. The “National Defense Research Committee” is formed, with Dr. Vannevar Bush in charge. Bush makes contracts for uranium research with many University laboratories. He finds Labine and has him reopen his mines, closed by the war, to get uranium ore.

Parallel scenes in Germany, showing the Nazi method: slave labor operating the uranium mines in Czechoslovakia. A department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin is ordered to work on atomic research; the top scientists are kicked out and a good Nazi put in charge.

Spring, 1941. University laboratories report progress—the possibility of isolating U-235 and of producing plutonium.

November, 1941 (just before Pearl Harbor). The government approves $300,000 in contracts. Dr. Conant is put in charge, under Dr. Bush. An American mission (Pegram and Harold Urey) is sent to England to confer with British scientists.

December, 1941 (after Pearl Harbor). Roosevelt tells Dr. Bush to go ahead, he will provide any funds needed. It is decided that British scientists will join in the work in the United States. The project now becomes secret.

1942. John X goes to war—he is assigned to military intelligence and sent to Europe.

Summer, 1942. The Manhattan Project is formed and Gen. Groves is put in charge. (Scenes of Gen. Groves’ nomination for the post as he described them to us.)

Prof. Lawrence solves problem of the electromagnetic method of separating U-235. (I believe this is the experiment described by Beatty, with the pinpoint of light and Gen. Groves called to observe it. If chronologically correct, we use this scene here.)

December, 1942. Fermi succeeds in producing a [nuclear fission] chain reaction in a basement of the University of Chicago.

Parallel scenes: Vain attempts by German scientists to produce a chain reaction. (They made thirteen attempts—without success.)

1943. Gen Groves, in his role of “salesman,” arranges the first industrial contracts to build Oak Ridge. Construction begins on February 2, 1943.

Parallel scenes: The Germans in charge of the heavy water plant in Norway. We show the methods of terror, expropriation and slave labor. Even though this plant was based on the discovery of an American (Urey) and built by Norwegian industrialists, the Nazis believe they can run it successfully through sheer force. Their attitude is, in effect: “You fools do the work, then we’ll take it over by force, because force is all that counts.”

February 28, 1943. The Norwegian plant is blown up—under the leadership of two Norwegian scientists, formerly of this plant.

(If this is technically and historically possible, I would like to have John X connected with this explosion and wounded in subsequent action.)

Spring of 1943. John X, who has been wounded in action and sent back to the United States, recovers and is summoned to the office of his chief. Under the impact of his war experiences, the boy is now a wreck spiritually; he is embittered, disillusioned and firmly convinced that his father was right: nothing matters in the world but brute force. His chief informs him that he will be entrusted with an assignment of extraordinary responsibility: he is to serve as bodyguard to one of the most valuable men on earth. “Who?” asks the boy. “A professor of physics,” is the answer. The boy feels contempt for his assignment—he thinks he is being thrown into the discard because of his wound. Scientists, he remarks bitterly, live in ivory towers; of what importance are they? “You’ll find out,” says the chief.

That evening, John X meets the man he is to guard—Dr. Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer has been placed in charge of the planned Los Alamos laboratory. Together, he and the boy drive to Los Alamos—over the desert and the mud roads—to the future site where there is nothing but an old school-building now. The attitude of the scientist and the bodyguard is one of hidden mutual antagonism. The scientist resents the necessity of being watched. The boy is skeptical about the scientist’s work and importance.

It is from this that the drama of their relationship will come: the gradual understanding—the boy’s growing admiration for the scientist—the boy’s final regeneration and return to spiritual values, as he sees them exemplified in the work at Los Alamos.

The exact sequence of incidents we’ll use to illustrate the next two years (1943-1945) cannot be decided upon until all the research material is in. I should like to use as many real incidents as possible—and invent episodes only where no factual information is available, to illustrate the general trend and progress of the work.

Some key spots, which we have and will use, are:

Incidents illustrating the activities of Oppenheimer and Groves: Oppenheimer persuading scientists to come and work at Los Alamos, overcoming their objections to “the project’s bad name”; Groves “selling” industrialists on undertaking dangerous and almost impossible contracts.

Parallel scenes: In Denmark, the Nazis try to persuade Bohr to work for them. He refuses. Why should they need him? Didn’t they say that an individual is of no importance, only the race matters? They threaten him. He asks them contemptuously: “How are you going to force a mind? How are you going to tear out of it an idea not yet born? You have destroyed millions of human brains. Can you make one single brain work? You wish me to produce for you something you can’t produce—yet you consider yourselves the masters of the world. Isn’t there, perhaps, an error in your theories? One single crucial error?” The Nazis are stopped—they cannot kill him, he is too valuable. [Note the similarity to the scene in Atlas Shrugged when Galt is tortured.] They threaten to torture his son. The underground arranges the escape of Bohr and his son—first by boat to Sweden, then by plane to England. Here we have the incident of Bohr’s head being too large for an oxygen mask—and the great scientist arriving in England barely alive.

Scene of Bohr’s arrival at Los Alamos (as described by Dr. Oppenheimer) —dinner in the stone kitchen of the schoolhouse—the walk through the snow, talking of their problems.

Late in 1943. Oppenheimer needs 190 of the finest precision-tool makers. We show the recruiting of these workers—and the scene of the old man, with sons in the Army, who abandons a better job for the hardships of living and working at Los Alamos. In connection with this, we show a scene where John X asks angrily why so much fuss is made about getting these workers, why aren’t they just drafted and forced to come here, since they’re needed so badly for such an important job? Oppenheimer smiles and explains to him that the precision work needed is so fine a human breath can ruin it. Can you make a man do that kind of work by force?

Parallel scene: A German laboratory where a worker ruins a delicate, valuable piece of equipment. The Gestapo agents are stumped: was it an accident or sabotage? Neither they nor we will ever know.

Incidents to illustrate the magnificent sentence Dr. Oppenheimer said to us: “No one ever gave an order at Los Alamos. ”

Scientists given a choice of problems and allowed complete freedom to work out the solutions as they wished. Men doing difficult and unpleasant work “only because they understood the necessity” (Oppenheimer). “We used reasons instead of authority” (Oppenheimer).

Scene of Gen. Groves getting the heads of the DuPont Company to accept a difficult undertaking. (I presume this was the construction of Hanford.) The DuPont board of directors meeting, with the thirty papers face down on the table. The Chairman speaks, explaining the great importance and secrecy of the undertaking. “Those who wish to know what it is may turn their papers over.” The board accepts [the contract]—and not one paper is turned over.

1944. Scenes of the construction and the work at Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos. Here scientific incidents will have to be integrated, whenever possible, with the human elements of pioneer living conditions and the “melodrama” elements of secrecy, guards, etc. I want to have as many concrete, specific scenes as possible—and reduce the use of an impersonal montage to a minimum, in order to avoid a newsreel effect. Here John X will serve as a legitimate connecting link between the laboratory, the living conditions, and the “secrecy” aspects of the story. He is both a participant and an observer—and the fact that he is a skeptical, slightly hostile observer will help to give conflict, drama and meaning to the incidents.

A few highlights of December, 1944:

The Japanese balloon that landed on a Hanford power line.

The Nobel Prize dinner in honor of Dr. Rabi—the prize being given for his work in atomic science, much to the discomfort of those in charge of keeping that subject and Dr. Rabi’s connection with it secret.

The telephone call to Dr. Oppenheimer at Los Alamos; he comes back into the room smiling happily. His fellow-scientists think he has received some good news about their work, but the news he received is about the birth of his daughter.

Incident of the scientist whose little son asked him for an atomic bomb for Christmas.

1945. Some time early in the year, Dr. Oppenheimer decides that they will be ready to start on the actual construction of the bomb by February 28, 1945. It is he who then proceeds to correlate the enormous amount of knowledge and information gathered in two years of experiments. By February 25th, it looks as if they are as far from the solution as ever. But by February 28th, they do have what they wanted—and the actual manufacture of the bomb can begin.

It is early in 1945 that material from Oak Ridge and Hanford (U-235 and Plutonium) begins to arrive at Los Alamos. This material—after the tremendous amount of work at the two giant factories—arrives in small bottles, under heavy guard.

Spring, 1945. Truman is told the secret of the atomic project right after his inauguration.

Some time in June (or earlier), the bombs are shipped to San Francisco. Incident of yard master who refuses the bomb car priority and sends torpedoes first.

Late June, 1945. Test of tower in New Mexico desert with small ordinary bomb. Lightning strikes tower and explodes the bomb. Better insulation has to be made.

July 12, 1945. The atomic bomb, unassembled, is taken to site of test. The next few days—as described in official reports.

July 16, 1945. The test explosion—as described in official reports.

Same day—the Indianapolis sails from San Francisco for Guam.

Scene where Truman decides that bomb will be used—to save American lives (as described by Truman).

August 5, 1945. On Tinian. Word comes that the first bomb mission is on. Capt. William Parsons, designer of the bomb, supervises its assembling. From Los Alamos, Oppenheimer keeps in touch with Tinian, by teletype.

August 6, 1945. The take-off of the plane—as described in official reports.

The bombing of Hiroshima.

That day (Sunday) at Los Alamos: Oppenheimer waits for word of results, spends day in normal activities, hiding suspense. Next morning—he gets phone call that everything is all right.

Scene where Mrs. Groves is asked to listen to radio—and discovers she is “married to Flash Gordon.”

Tuesday night—colloquium of 800 scientists at Los Alamos. Terrific applause when Oppenheimer enters and makes report.

Night. Oppenheimer and John X walk in the hills around Los Alamos. Oppenheimer tells him that the achievement was not an accident—only free men in voluntary cooperation could have done it—so long as they’re free, men do not have to fear those who preach slavery and violence—because the mind is man’s only real weapon, and the mind will always win against brute force. The boy is looking at the stars—just as his father did 26 years ago. But his face is shining with pride, courage, self-confidence. Now man does not look like a worm in the face of the immensity of the universe—his figure looks heroic, that of a conqueror. The boy’s last line is: “Man can harness the universe—but nobody can harness man. ”

10

COMMUNISM AND HUAC

This chapter begins with on open letter addressed “To All Innocent Fifth Columnists,” which AR wrote in late 1940 or early 1941, when she was encouraging conservative intellectuals to form a national organization advocating individualism. I believe she wanted the letter to be issued by such an organization.

The rest of the material dates from 1947 and deals with Communist propaganda in the movies: it includes AR’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), as well as her notes to herself on whether HUAC had violated the civil rights of Communists.

circa 1940

To All Innocent Fifth Columnists

You who read this represent the greatest danger to America.

No matter what the outcome of the war in Europe may be, Totalitarianism has already won a complete victory in many American minds and conquered all of our intellectual life. You have helped it to win.

Perhaps it is your right to destroy civilization and bring dictatorship to America, but not unless you understand fully what you are doing.

If that is what you want to do, say so openly, at least to your own conscience, and we who believe in freedom will fight you openly.

But the tragedy of today is that you—who are responsible for the coming Totalitarian dictatorship of America—you do not know your own responsibility. You would be the first to deny the active part you’re playing and proclaim your belief in freedom, in civilization, in the American way of life. You are the most dangerous kind of Fifth Columnist—an innocent, subconscious Fifth Columnist. Of such as you is the Kingdom of Hitler and of Stalin.

You do not believe this? Check up on yourself. Take the test we offer you here.

1. Are you the kind who considers ten minutes of his time too valuable to read this and give it some thought?

2. Are you the kind who sits at home and moans over the state of the world—but does nothing about it?

3. Are you the kind who says that the future is predestined by something or other, something he can’t quite name or explain and isn’t very clear about, but the world is doomed to dictatorship and there’s nothing anyone can do about it?

4. Are you the kind who says that he wishes he could do something, he’d be so eager to do something—but what can one man do?

5. Are you the kind who are so devoted to your own career, your family, your home or your children that you will let the most unspeakable horrors be brought about to destroy your career, your family, your home and your children—because you are too busy now to prevent them?

Which one of the above are you? A little of all?

But are you really too busy to think?

Who “determines” the future? You’re very muddled on that, aren’t you? What exactly is “mankind”? Is it a mystical entity with a will of its own? Or is it you, and I, and the sum of all of us together? What force is there to make history—except men, other men just like you? If there are enough men who believe in a better future and are willing to work for it, the future will be what they want it to be. You doubt this? Why then, if the world is doomed to dictatorship, do the dictators spend so much money and effort on propaganda? If history is predestined in their favor, why don’t Hitler and Stalin just ride the wave into the future without any trouble? Doesn’t it seem more probable that history will be what the minds of men want it to be, and the dictators are smart enough to prepare these minds in the way they want them, while we talk of destiny and do nothing?

You say, what can one man do? When the Communists came to power in Russia, they were a handful of eighteen men. Just eighteen. In a country of [170,000,000] population. They were laughed at and no one took them seriously. According to their own prophet, Karl Marx, Russia was the last country in which Communism could be historically possible, because of Russia’s backwardness in industrial development. Yet they succeeded. Because they knew what they wanted and went after it—historical destiny or no historical destiny. Adolf Hitler started the Nazi Party in Germany with seven men. He was laughed at and considered a harmless crank. People said that after the Versailles Treaty Germany could not possibly become a world power again, not for centuries. Yet Hitler succeeded. Because he knew what he wanted and went after it—history or no history. Shall we believe in mystical fates or do something about the future?

If you are one of those who have had a full, busy, successful life and are still hard at work making money—stop for one minute of thought. What are you working for? You have enough to keep you in comfort for the rest of your days. But you are working to insure your children’s future. Well, what are you leaving to your children? The money, home or education you plan to leave them will be worthless or taken away from them. Instead, your legacy will be a Totalitarian America, a world of slavery, of starvation, of concentration camps and of firing squads. The best part of your life is behind you-and it was lived in freedom. But your children will have nothing to face save their existence as slaves. Is that what you want for them? If not, it is still up to you. There is time left to abort it—but not very much time. You take out insurance to protect your children, don’t you? How much money and working effort does that insurance cost you? If you put one-tenth of the money and time into insuring against your children’s future slavery—you would save them and save for them everything else which you intend to leave them and which they’ll never get otherwise.

Don’t delude yourself by minimizing the danger. You see what is going on in Europe and what it’s doing to our own country and to your own private life. What other proof do you need? Don’t say smugly that “it can’t happen here.” Stop and look back for a moment.

The first Totalitarian dictatorship happened in Russia. People said: well, Russia was a dark, backward, primitive nation where anything could happen—but it could not happen in any civilized country.

The next Totalitarian dictatorship happened in Italy—one of the oldest civilized countries of Europe and the mother of European culture. People said: well, the Italians hadn’t had much experience in democratic self-government, but it couldn’t happen anywhere else.

The next Totalitarian dictatorship happened in Germany—the country of philosophers and scientists, with a long record of the highest cultural achievements. People said: well, Germany was accustomed to autocracy, and besides there’s the Prussian character, and the last war, etc.—but it could not happen in any country with a strong democratic tradition.

Could it happen in France? People would have laughed at you had you asked such a question a year ago. Well, it has happened in France—France, the mother of freedom and of democracy, France, the most independent-minded nation on earth.

Well?

What price your smug self-confidence? In the face of the millions of foreign money and foreign agents pouring into our country, in the face of one step after another by which our country is [moving] closer to Totalitarianism—you do nothing except say: “It can’t happen here.” Do you hear the Totalitarians answering you—“Oh, yeah?”

Don’t delude yourself with slogans and meaningless historical generalizations. It can happen here. It can happen anywhere. And a country’s past history has nothing to do with it. Totalitarianism is not a new product of historical evolution. It is older than history. It is the attempt of the worthless and the criminal to seize control of society. That element is always there, in any country. But a healthy society gives it no chance. It is when the majority in a country becomes weak, indifferent and confused that a criminal minority, beautifully organized like all gangs, seizes the power. And once that power is seized it cannot be taken back for generations. Fantastic as it may seem to think of a dictatorship in the United States, it is much easier to establish such a dictatorship than to overthrow it. With modem technique and modern weapons at its disposal, a ruthless minority can hold millions in slavery indefinitely. What can one thousand unorganized, unarmed men do against one man with a machine gun?

And the tragedy of today is that by remaining unorganized and mentally unarmed we are helping to bring that slavery upon ourselves. By being indifferent and confused, we are serving as innocent Fifth Columnists of our own destruction.

There is no personal neutrality in the world today.

Repeat that and scream that to yourself. In all great issues there are only two sides—and no middle. You are alive or you are dead, but you can’t be “neither” or “in between.” You are honest or you are not—and there is no neutral “half-honest.” And so, you are against Totalitarianism—or you are for it. There is no intellectual neutrality.

The Totalitarians do not want your active support. They do not need it. They have their small, compact, well-organized minority and it is sufficient to carry out their aims. All they want from you is your indifference. The Communists and the Nazis have stated repeatedly that the indifference of the majority is their best ally. Just sit at home, pursue your private affairs, shrug about world problems—and you are the most effective Fifth Columnist that can be devised. You’re doing your part as well as if you took orders consciously from Hitler or from Stalin. And so, you’re in it, whether you want to be or not, you’re helping the world towards destruction, while moaning and wondering what makes the world such as it is today. You do.

The Totalitarians have said: “Who is not against us, is for us.” There is no personal neutrality.

And since you are involved, and have to be, what do you prefer? To do what you’re doing and help the Totalitarians? Or to fight them?

But in order to fight, you must understand. You must know exactly what you believe and you must hold to your faith honestly, consistently and all the time. A faith assumed occasionally, like Sunday clothes, is of no value. Communism and Nazism are a faith. Yours must be as strong and clear as theirs. They know what they want. We don’t. But let us see now, before it is too late, whether we have a faith, what it is and how we can fight for it.

First and above all: what is Totalitarianism? We all hear so much about it, but we don’t understand it. What is the most important point, the base, the whole heart of both Communism and Nazism? It is not the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” nor the nationalization of private property, nor the supremacy of the “Aryan” race, nor anti-Semitism. These things are secondary symptoms, surface details, the effects and not the cause. What is the primary cause, common to both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, and all other dictators, past, present and future? One idea—and one only: That the State is superior to the individual. That the Collective holds all rights and the individual has none.

Stop here. This is the crucial point. What you think of this will determine whether you are a mental Fifth Columnist or not. This is the point which allows no compromise. You must choose one or the other. There is no middle. Either you believe that each individual man has value, dignity and certain inalienable rights which cannot be sacrificed for any cause, for any purpose, for any collective, for any number of other men whatsoever. Or else you believe that a number of men—it doesn’t matter what you call it: a collective, a class, a race or a State—hold all rights, and any individual man can be sacrificed if some collective good—it doesn’t matter what you call it: better distribution of wealth, racial purity or the Millennium—demands it. Don’t fool yourself. Be honest about this. Names don’t matter. Only the basic principle matters, and there is no middle choice. Either each man has individual, inalienable rights—or he hasn’t.

Your intentions don’t count. If you are willing to believe that men should be deprived of all rights for a good cause—you are a Totalitarian. Don’t forget, Stalin and Hitler sincerely believe that their causes are good. Stalin thinks that he is helping the downtrodden, and Hitler thinks that he is serving his country as a patriot. They are good causes, both of them, aren’t they? Then what creates the horrors of Russia and of Germany? What is destroying all civilization? Just this one idea—that to a good cause everything can be sacrificed; that individual men have no rights which must be respected; that what one person believes to be good can be put over on the others by force.

And if you—in the privacy of your own mind—believe so strongly in some particular good of yours that you would be willing to deprive men of all rights for the sake of this good, then you are as guilty of all the horrors of today as Hitler and Stalin. These horrors are made possible only by men who have lost all respect for single, individual human beings, who accept the idea that classes, races and nations matter, but single persons do not, that a majority is sacred, but a minority is dirt, that herds count, but Man is nothing.

Where do you stand on this? There is no middle ground.

If you accept the Totalitarian idea, if the words “State” or “Collective” are sacred to you, but the word “Individual” is not—stop right here. You don’t have to read further. What we have to say is not for you—and you are not for us. Let’s part here—but be honest, admit that you are a Totalitarian and go join the Communist Party or the German-American Bund, because they are the logical end of the road you have chosen, and you will end up with one or the other, whether you know it now or not.

But if you are a Humanitarian and a Liberal—in the real, not the prostituted sense of these words—you will say with us that Man, each single, solitary, individual Man, has a sacred value which you respect, and sacred, inalienable rights which nothing must take away from him.

You believe this? You agree with us that this is the heart of true Americanism, the basic principle upon which America was founded and which made it great—the Rights of Man and the Freedom of Man? But do you hear many voices saying this today?

Do you read many books saying this? Do you see many prominent men preaching this? Do you know a single publication devoted to this belief or a single organization representing it? You do not. Instead, you find a flood of words, of books, of preachers, publications, and organizations which, under very clever “Fronts,” work tirelessly to sell you Totalitarianism. All of them are camouflaged under very appealing slogans: they scream to you that they are defenders of “Democracy,” of “Americanism,” of “Civil Liberties,” etc. Everybody and anybody uses these words—and they have no meaning left. They are empty generalities and boob-catchers. There is only one real test that you can apply to all these organizations: ask yourself what is the actual result of their work under the glittering bromides? What are they really selling you, what are they driving at? If you ask this, you will see that they are selling you Collectivism in one form or another.

They preach “Democracy” and then make a little addition—“Economic Democracy” or a “Broader Democracy” or a “True Democracy,” and demand that we turn all property over to the Government; “all property” means also “all rights”; let everybody hold all rights together—and nobody have any right of any kind individually. Is that Democracy or is it Totalitarianism? You know of a prominent woman commentator who wants us all to die for Democracy—and then defines “true ” Democracy as State Socialism [probably a reference to Dorothy Thompson]. You have heard Secretary [Harold] Ickes define a “true ” freedom of the press as the freedom to express the views of the majority. You have read in a highly respectable national monthly the claim that the Bill of Rights, as taught in our schools, is “selfish”; that a “true ” Bill of Rights means not demanding any rights for yourself, but your giving these rights to “others.” God help us, fellow-Americans, are we blind? Do you see what this means? Do you see the implications?

And this is the picture wherever you look. They “oppose” Totalitarianism and they “defend” Democracy—by preaching their own version of Totalitarianism, some form of “collective good,” “collective rights,” “collective will,” etc. And the one thing which is never said, never preached, never upheld in our public life, the one thing all these “defenders of Democracy” hate, denounce and tear down subtly, gradually, systematically—is the principle of Individual Rights, Individual Freedom, Individual Value. That is the principle against which the present great world conspiracy is directed. That is the heart of the whole world question. That is the only opposite of Totalitarianism and our only defense against it. Drop that—and what difference will it make what name you give to the resulting society? It will be Totalitarianism—and all Totalitarianisms are alike, all come to the same methods, the same slavery, the same bloodshed, the same horrors, no matter what noble slogan they start under, as witness Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.

Principles are much more consistent than men. A basic principle, once accepted, has a way of working itself out to its logical conclusion—even against the will and to the great surprise of those who accepted it. Just accept the idea that there are no inalienable individual rights—and firing squads, executions without trial, and a Gestapo or a G.P.U. will follow automatically—no matter who holds the power, no matter how noble and benevolent his intentions. That is a law of history. You can find any number of examples. Can you name one [counter-example]? Can you name one instance where absolute power—in any hands—did not end in absolute horror? And—for God’s sake, fellow-Americans, let’s not be utter morons, let’s give our intelligence a small chance to function and let’s recognize the obvious—what is absolute power? It’s a power which holds all rights and has to respect none. Does it matter whether such a power is held by a self-appointed dictator or by an elected representative body? The power is the same and its results will be the same. Look through all of history. Look at Europe. Don’t forget, they still hold “elections” in Europe. Don’t forget, Hitler was elected.

Now, if you see how completely intellectual Totalitarianism is already in control of our country, if you see that there is no action and no organization to defend the only true anti-Totalitarian principle, the principle of individual rights, you will realize that there is only one thing for us to do: to take such action and to form such an organization. If you are really opposed to Totalitarianism, to all of it, in any shape, form or color—you will join us. We propose to unite all men of good will who believe that Freedom is our most precious possession, that it is greater than any other consideration whatsoever, that no good has ever been accomplished by force, that Freedom must not be sacrificed to any other ideal, and that Freedom is an individual, not a collective entity.

We do not know how many of us there are left in the world. But we think there are many more than the Totalitarians suspect. We are the majority, but we are scattered, unorganized, silenced and helpless. The Totalitarians are an efficient, organized and very noisy minority. They have seized key positions in our intellectual life and they make it appear as if they are the voice of America. They can, if left unchecked, highjack America into dictatorship. Are we going to let them get away with it? They are not the voice of America. We are. But let us be heard.

To be heard, however, we must be organized. This is not a paradox. Individualists have always been reluctant to form any sort of organization. The best, the most independent, the hardest working, the most productive members of society have always lived and worked alone. But the incompetent and the unscrupulous have organized. The world today shows how well they have organized. And so, we shall attempt what has never been attempted before—an organization against organization. That is—an organization to defend us all from the coming compulsory organization which will swallow all of society; an organization to defend our rights, including the right not to belong to any forced organization; an organization, not to impose our ideology upon anyone, but to prevent anyone from imposing his ideology upon us by physical or social violence.

Are you with us?

If you realize that the world is moving toward disaster, but see no effective force to avert it-

If you are eager to join in a great cause and accept a great faith, but find no such cause or faith offered to you anywhere today—

If you are not one of those doomed jellyfish to whom the word “Freedom” means nothing—

If you cannot conceive of yourself living in a society without personal freedom, a society in which you will be told what to do, what to think, what to feel, in which your very life will be only a gift from the Collective, to be revoked at its pleasure at any time—

If you cannot conceive of yourself surrendering your freedom for any collective good whatsoever, and do not believe that any such good can ever be accomplished by such a surrender—

If you believe in your own dignity and your own value, and hold that such a belief is not “selfish,” but is instead your greatest virtue, without which you are worthless both to your fellow-men and to yourself—

If you believe that it is vicious to demand that you should exist solely for the sake of your fellow-men and grant them all and any right over you—

If you believe that it is vicious to demand everyone’s sacrifice for everyone else’s sake, and that such a demand creates nothing but mutual victims, without profiting anyone, neither society nor the individual—

If you believe that men can tell you what you must not do to them, but can never assume the arrogance of telling you what you must do, no matter what their number—

If you believe in majority rule only with protection for minority rights, both being limited by inalienable individual rights—

If you believe that the mere mention of “the good of the majority” is not sufficient ground to justify any possible kind of horror, and that those yelling loudest of “majority good” are not necessarily the friends of mankind—

If you are sick of professional “liberals,” “humanitarians,” “uplifters” and “idealists” who would do you good as they see it, even if it kills you, whose idea of world benevolence is world slavery—

If you are sick, disgusted, disheartened, without faith, without direction, and have lost everything but your courage-

—come and join us.

There is so much at stake—and so little time left.

Let us have an organization as strong, as sure, as enthusiastic as any the Totalitarians could hope to achieve. Let us follow our faith as consistently as they follow theirs. Let us offer the world our philosophy of life. Let us expose all Totalitarian propaganda in any medium and in any form. Let us answer every argument, every promise, every “Party Line” of the Totalitarians. Let us drop all compromise, all cooperation or collaboration with those preaching any brand of Totalitarianism in letter or in spirit, in name or in fact. Let us have nothing to do with “Front” organizations, “Front” agents or “Front” ideas. We do not have to proscribe them by law. We can put them out of existence by social boycott. But this means—no compromise. There is no compromise between life and death. You do not make deals with the black plague. Let us touch nothing tainted with Totalitarianism. Let us tear down the masks, bring them out into the open and—leave them alone. Very strictly alone. No “pro-Soviet” or “pro-Nazi” members of the board in our organization. No “benevolent” Trojan horses. Let us stick together as they do. They silence us, they force us out of public life, they fill key positions with their own men. Let us stick together—and they will be helpless to continue. They have millions of foreign money on their side. We have the truth.

As a first step and a first declaration of what we stand for, we offer you the following principles:

We believe in the value, the dignity and the freedom of Man.

We believe:

• That each man has inalienable rights which cannot be taken from him for any cause whatsoever. These rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

• That the right of life means that man cannot be deprived of his life for the convenience of any number of other men.

• That the right of liberty means freedom of individual decision, individual choice, individual judgment and individual initiative; it means also the right to disagree with others.

• That the right to the pursuit of happiness means man’s freedom to choose what constitutes his own private, personal happiness and to work for its achievement; that such a pursuit is neither evil nor reprehensible, but honorable and good; and that a man’s happiness is not to be prescribed to him by any other man nor by any number of other men.

• That these rights have no meaning unless they are the unconditional, personal, private possession of each man, granted to him by the fact of his birth, held by him independently of all other men, and limited only by the exercise of the same rights by other men.

• That the only just, moral and beneficent form of society is a society based upon the recognition of these inalienable individual rights.

• That the State exists for Man, and not Man for the State.

• That the greatest good for all men can be achieved only through the voluntary cooperation of free individuals for mutual benefit, and not through a compulsory sacrifice of all for all.

• That “voluntary” presupposes an alternative and a choice of opportunities; and thus even a universal agreement of all men on one course of action is neither free nor voluntary if no other course of action is open to them.

• That each man’s independence of spirit and other men’s respect for it have created all civilization, all culture, all human progress and have benefited all mankind.

• That the greatest threat to civilization is the spread of Collectivism, which demands the sacrifice of all individual rights to collective rights and the supremacy of the State over the individual.

• That the general good which such Collectivism professes as its objective can never be achieved at the sacrifice of man’s freedom, and such sacrifice can lead only to general suffering, stagnation and degeneration.

• That such conception of Collectivism is the greatest possible evil—under any name, in any form, for any professed purpose whatsoever.

Such is our definition of Americanism and the American way of life.

The American way of life has always been based upon the Rights of Man, upon individual freedom and upon respect for each individual human personality. Through all its history, this has been the source of America’s greatness. This is the spirit of America which we dedicate ourselves to defend and preserve.

In practical policy we shall be guided by one basic formula: of every law and of every conception we shall demand the maximum freedom for the individual and the minimum power for the government necessary to achieve any given social objective.

If you believe this, join us. If you don‘t—fight us. Either is your privilege, but the only truly immoral act you can commit is to agree with us, to realize that we are right—and then to forget it and do nothing.

There is some excuse, little as it may be, for an open, honest Fifth Columnist. There is none for an innocent, passive, subconscious one. Of all the things we have said here to you, we wish to be wrong on only one—our first sentence. Prove us wrong on that. Join us.

The world is a beautiful place and worth fighting for. But not without Freedom.

1947

[AR wrote the following article for the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. It was published in the November 1947 issue of Plain Talk, a conservative political magazine.]

Screen Guide for Americans

The influence of Communists in Hollywood is due, not to their own power, but to the unthinking carelessness of those who profess to oppose them. Some dangerous Red propaganda has been put over in films produced by innocent men, often by loyal Americans who deplore the spread of Communism throughout the world and wonder why it is spreading.

If you wish to protect your pictures from being used for Communistic purposes, the first thing to do is to drop the delusion that political propaganda consists of political slogans.

Politics is not a separate field in itself. Political ideas do not come out of thin air. They are the result of the moral premises which men have accepted. Whatever people believe to be the good, right and proper human actions—that will determine their political opinions. If men believe that every independent action is vicious, they will vote for every measure to control human beings and to suppress human freedom. If men believe that the American system is unjust, they will support those who wish to destroy it.

The purpose of the Communists in Hollywood is not the production of political movies openly advocating Communism. Their purpose is to corrupt non-political movies—by introducing small, casual bits of propaganda into innocent stories—and to make people absorb the basic premises of Collectivism by indirection and implication.

Few people would take Communism straight. But a constant stream of hints, lines, touches, and suggestions battering the public from the screen will act like the drops of water that split a rock if continued long enough. The rock they are trying to split is Americanism.

We present below a list of the more common devices used to turn non-political pictures into carriers of political propaganda. It is a guide for all those who do not wish to help advance the cause of Communism.

It is intended as a guide, and not as a forced restriction upon anyone. We are unalterably opposed to any political “industry code,” to any group agreement or any manner of forbidding any political opinion to anyone by any form of collective force or pressure. There can be no “group insurance” in the field of ideas. Each man has to do his own thinking. We merely offer this list to the independent judgment and for the voluntary action of every honest man in the motion picture industry.

1. Don’t Take Politics Lightly.

Don’t fool yourself by saying, “I’m not interested in politics,” and then pretending that politics do not exist.

We are living in an age when politics is the most burning question in everybody’s mind. The whole world is torn by a great political issue—freedom or slavery, which means Americanism or Totalitarianism. Half the world is in ruins after a war fought over political ideas. To pretend at such a time that political ideas are not important and that people pay no attention to them is worse than irresponsible.

It is the avowed purpose of the Communists to insert propaganda into movies. Therefore, there are only two possible courses of action open to you, if you want to keep your pictures clean of subversive propaganda:

1. If you have no time or inclination to study political ideas—then do not hire Reds to work on your pictures.

2. If you wish to employ Reds, but intend to keep their politics out of your movies—then study political ideas and learn how to recognize propaganda when you see it.

But to hire Communists on the theory that “they won’t put over any politics on me” and then remain ignorant and indifferent to the subject of politics, while the Reds are trained propaganda experts—is an attitude for which there can be no excuse.

2. Don’t Smear the Free Enterprise System.

Don’t pretend that Americanism and the Free Enterprise System are two things. They are inseparable, like body and soul. The basic principle of inalienable individual rights, which is Americanism, can be translated into practical reality only in the form of the economic system of Free Enterprise. That was the system established by the American Constitution, the system which made America the best and greatest country on earth. You may preach any other form of economics, if you wish. But if you do so, don’t pretend that you are preaching Americanism.

Don’t pretend that you are upholding the Free Enterprise System in some vague, general, undefined way, while preaching the specific ideas that oppose and destroy it.

Don’t attack individual rights, individual freedom, private action, private initiative, and private property. These things are essential parts of the Free Enterprise System, without which it cannot exist.

Don’t preach the superiority of public ownership as such over private ownership. Don’t preach or imply that all publicly owned projects are noble, humanitarian undertakings by grace of the mere fact that they are publicly owned—while preaching, at the same time, that private property or the defense of private property rights is the expression of some sort of vicious greed, of anti-social selfishness or evil.

3. Don’t Smear Industrialists.

Don’t spit into your own face or, worse, pay miserable little rats to do it.

You, as a motion picture producer, are an industrialist. All of us are employees of an industry that gives us a good living. There is an old fable about a pig who filled his belly with acorns, then started digging to undermine the roots of the oak from which the acorns came. Don’t let’s allow that pig to become our symbol.

Throughout American history, the best of American industrialists were men who embodied the highest virtues: productive genius, energy, initiative, independence, courage. Socially (if “social significance” interests you) they were among the greatest of all benefactors, because it is they who created the opportunities for achieving the unprecedented material wealth of the industrial age.

In our own day, all around us, there are countless examples of self-made men who rose from the ranks and achieved great industrial success through their energy, ability and honest productive effort.

Yet all too often industrialists, bankers, and businessmen are presented on the screen as villains, crooks, chiselers or exploiters. One such picture may be taken as non-political or accidental. A constant stream of such pictures becomes pernicious political propaganda: it creates hatred for all businessmen in the mind of the audience, and makes people receptive to the cause of Communism.

While motion pictures have a strict code that forbids us to offend or insult any group or nation—while we dare not present in an unfavorable light the tiniest Balkan kingdom—we permit ourselves to smear and slander American businessmen in the most irresponsibly dishonest manner.

It is true that there are vicious businessmen—just as there are vicious men in any other class or profession. But we have been practicing an outrageous kind of double standard: we do not attack individual representatives of any other group, class or nation, in order not to imply attack on the whole group; yet when we present individual businessmen as monsters, we claim that no reflection on the whole class of businessmen was intended.

It’s got to be one or the other. This sort of double standard can deceive nobody and can serve nobody’s purpose except that of the Communists.

It is the moral—(no, not just political, but moral)—duty of every decent man in the motion picture industry to throw into the ashcan, where it belongs, every story that smears industrialists as such.

4. Don’t Smear Wealth.

In a free society—such as America—wealth is achieved through production, and through the voluntary exchange of one’s goods or services. You cannot hold production as evil—nor can you hold as evil a man’s right to keep the result of his own effort.

Only savages and Communists get rich by force—that is, by looting the property of others. It is a basic American principle that each man is free to work for his own benefit and to go as far as his ability will carry him; and that his property is his—whether he has made one dollar or one million dollars.

If the villain in your story happens to be rich—don’t permit lines of dialogue suggesting that he is the typical representative of a whole social class, the symbol of all the rich. Keep it clear in your mind and in your script that his villainy is due to his own personal character—not to his wealth or class.

If you do not see the difference between wealth honestly produced and wealth looted—you are preaching the ideas of Communism. You are implying that all property and all human labor should belong to the State. And you are inciting men to crime: if all wealth is evil, no matter how acquired, why should a man bother to earn it? He might as well seize it by robbery or expropriation.

It is the proper wish of every decent American to stand on his own feet, earn his own living, and be as good at it as he can—that is, get as rich as he can by honest exchange.

Stop insulting him and stop defaming his proper ambition. Stop giving him—and yourself—a guilt complex by spreading unthinkingly the slogans of Communism. Put an end to that pernicious modern hypocrisy: everybody wants to get rich and almost everybody feels that he must apologize for it.

5. Don’t Smear the Profit Motive.

If you denounce the profit motive, what is it that you wish men to do? Work without reward, like slaves, for the benefit of the State?

An industrialist has to be interested in profit. In a free economy, he can make a profit only if he makes a good product which people are willing to buy. What do you want him to do? Should he sell his product at a loss? If so, how long is he to remain in business? And at whose expense?

Don’t give to your characters—as a sign of villainy, as a damning characteristic—a desire to make money. Nobody wants to, or should, work without payment, and nobody does—except a slave. There is nothing dishonorable about a pursuit of money in a free economy, because money can be earned only by productive effort.

If what you mean, when you denounce it, is a desire to make money dishonestly or immorally—then say so. Make it clear that what you denounce is dishonesty, not money-making. Make it clear that you are denouncing evil-doers, not capitalists. Don’t toss out careless generalities which imply that there is no difference between the two. That is what the Communists want you to imply.

6. Don’t Smear Success.

America was made by the idea that personal achievement and personal success are each man’s proper and moral goal.

There are many forms of success: spiritual, artistic, industrial, financial. All these forms, in any field of honest endeavor, are good, desirable and admirable. Treat them as such.

Don’t permit any disparagement or defamation of personal success. It is the Communists’ intention to make people think that personal success is somehow achieved at the expense of others and that every successful man has hurt somebody by becoming successful.

It is the Communists’ aim to discourage all personal effort and to drive men into a hopeless, dispirited, gray herd of robots who have lost all personal ambition, who are easy to rule, willing to obey and willing to exist in selfless servitude to the State.

America is based on the ideal of man’s dignity and self-respect. Dignity and self-respect are impossible without a sense of personal achievement. When you defame success, you defame human dignity.

America is the land of the self-made man. Say so on the screen.

7. Don’t Glorify Failure.

Failure, in itself, is not admirable. And while every man meets with failure somewhere in his life, the admirable thing is his courage in overcoming it—not in the fact that he failed.

Failure is no disgrace—but it is certainly no brand of virtue or nobility, either.

It is the Communist’s intention to make men accept misery, depravity and degradation as their natural lot in life. This is done by presenting every kind of failure as sympathetic, as a sign of goodness and virtue—while every kind of success is presented as a sign of evil. This implies that only the evil can succeed under our American system—while the good are to be found in the gutter.

Don’t present all the poor as good and all the rich as evil. In judging a man’s character, poverty is no disgrace—but it is no virtue, either; wealth is no virtue—but it is certainly no disgrace.

8. Don’t Glorify Depravity.

Don’t present sympathetic studies of depravity. Go easy on stories about murders, perverts and all the rest of that sordid stuff. If you use such stories, don’t place yourself and the audience on the side of the criminal, don’t create sympathy for him, don’t give him excuses and justifications, don’t imply that he “couldn’t help it.”

If you preach that a depraved person “couldn’t help it,” you are destroying the basis of all morality. You are implying that men cannot be held responsible for their evil acts, because man has no power to choose between good and evil; if so, then all moral precepts are futile, and men must resign themselves to the idea that they are helpless, irresponsible animals. Don’t help to spread such an idea.

When you pick these stories for their purely sensational value, you do not realize that you are dealing with one of the most crucial philosophic issues. These stories represent a profoundly insidious attack on all moral principles and all religious precepts. It is a basic tenet of Marxism that man has no freedom of moral or intellectual choice; that he is only a soulless, witless collection of meat and glands, open to any sort of “conditioning” by anybody. The Communists intend to become the “conditioners.”

There is too much horror and depravity in the world at present. If people see nothing but horror and depravity on the screen, you will merely add to their despair by driving in the impression that nothing better is possible to men or can be expected of life, which is what the Communists want people to think. Communism thrives on despair. Men without hope are easily ruled.

Don’t excuse depravity. Don’t drool over weaklings as conditioned “victims of circumstances” (or of “background” or of “society”), who “couldn’t help it.” You are actually providing an excuse and an alibi for the worst instincts in the weakest members of your audience.

Don’t tell people that man is a helpless, twisted, drooling, sniveling, neurotic weakling. Show the world an American kind of man, for a change.

9. Don’t Deify “The Common Man.”

“The common man” is one of the worst slogans of Communism—and too many of us have fallen for it, without thinking.

It is only in Europe—under social caste systems where men are divided into “aristocrats” and “commoners”—that one can talk about defending the “common man.” What does the word “common” mean in America?

Under the American system, all men are equal under the law. Therefore, if anyone is classified as “common”—he can be called “common” only in regard to his personal qualities. It then means that he has no outstanding abilities, no outstanding virtues, no outstanding intelligence. Is that an object of glorification?

In the Communist doctrine, it is. Communism preaches the reign of mediocrity, the destruction of all individuality and all personal distinction, the turning of men into “masses,” which means an undivided, undifferentiated, impersonal, average, common herd.

In the American doctrine, no man is common. Every man’s personality is unique—and it is respected as such. He may have qualities which he shares with others; but his virtue is not gauged by how much he resembles others—that is the Communist doctrine; his virtue is gauged by his personal distinction, great or small.

In America, no man is scorned or penalized if his ability is small. But neither is he praised, extolled and glorified for the smallness of his ability.

America is the land of the uncommon man. It is the land where man is free to develop his genius—and to get its just rewards. It is the land where each man tries to develop whatever quality he might possess and to rise to whatever degree he can, great or modest. It is not the land where one is taught that one is small and ought to remain small. It is not the land where one glories or is taught to glory in one’s mediocrity.

No self-respecting man in America is or thinks of himself as “little,” no matter how poor he might be. That, precisely, is the difference between an American working man and a European serf.

Don’t ever use any lines about “the common man” or “the little people.” It is not the American idea to be either “common” or “little.”

10. Don’t Glorify the Collective.

This point requires your careful and thoughtful attention.

There is a great difference between free cooperation and forced collectivism. It is the difference between the United States and Soviet Russia. But the Communists are very skillful at hiding the difference and selling you the second under the guise of the first. You might miss it. The audience won’t.

Cooperation is the free association of men who work together by voluntary agreement, each deriving from it his own personal benefit.

Collectivism is the forced herding together of men into a group, with the individual having no choice about it, no personal motive, no personal reward, and subordinating himself blindly to the will of others.

Keep this distinction clearly in mind—in order to judge whether what you are asked to glorify is American cooperation or Soviet collectivism.

Don’t preach that everybody should be and act alike.

Don’t fall for such drivel as “I don’t wanna be dif‘rent—I wanna be just like ever’body else.” You’ve heard this one in endless variations. If ever there was an un-American attitude, this is it. America is the country where every man wants to be different—and most men succeed at it.

If you preach that it is evil to be different—you teach every particular group of men to hate every other group, every minority, every person, for being different from them; thus you lay the foundation for racial hatred.

Don’t preach that all mass action is good, and all individual action is evil. It is true that there are vicious individuals; it is also true that there are vicious groups. Both must be judged by their specific actions—and not treated as an issue of “the one” against “the many,” with the many always right and the one always wrong.

Remember that it is the Communists’ aim to preach the supremacy, the holy virtue of the group—as opposed to the individual. It is not America’s aim. Nor yours.

11. Don’t Smear an Independent Man.

This is part of the same issue as the preceding point.

The Communists’ chief purpose is to destroy every form of independence—independent work, independent action, independent property, independent thought, an independent mind, or an independent man.

Conformity, alikeness, servility, submission and obedience are necessary to establish a Communist slave-state. Don’t help the Communists to teach men to acquire these attitudes.

Don’t fall for the old Communist trick of thinking that an independent man or an individualist is one who crushes and exploits others—such as a dictator. An independent man is one who stands alone and respects the same right of others, who does not rule or serve, who neither sacrifices himself nor others. A dictator—by definition—is the most complete collectivist of all, because he exists by ruling, crushing and exploiting a huge collective of men.

Don’t permit the snide little touches that Communists sneak into scripts—all the lines, hints and implications which suggest that something (a person, an attitude, a motive, an emotion) is evil because it is independent (or private, or personal, or single, or individual).

Don’t preach that everything done for others is good, while everything done for one’s own sake is evil. This damns every form of personal joy and happiness.

Don’t preach that everything “public-spirited” is good, while everything personal and private is evil.

Don’t make every form of loneliness a sin, and every form of the herd spirit a virtue.

Remember that America is the country of the pioneer, the non-conformist, the inventor, the originator, the innovator. Remember that all the great thinkers, artists, scientists were single, individual, independent men who stood alone, and discovered new directions of achievement—alone.

Don’t let yourself be fooled when the Reds tell you that what they want to destroy are men like Hitler or Mussolini. What they want to destroy are men like Shakespeare, Chopin and Edison.

If you doubt this, think of a certain movie, in which a great composer was damned for succumbing, temporarily, to a horrible, vicious, selfish, anti social sin. What was his sin? That he wanted to sit alone in his room and write music! [The movie AR refers to is A Song to Remember; her review of it is presented later in the chapter.]

12. Don’t Use Current Events Carelessly.

A favorite trick of the Communists is to insert into pictures casual lines of dialogue about some important, highly controversial political issue, to insert them as accidental small talk, without any connection to the scene, the plot, or the story.

Don’t permit such lines. Don’t permit snide little slurs at any political party—in a picture which is to be released just before election time.

Don’t allow chance remarks of a partisan nature about any current political events.

If you wish to mention politics on the screen, or take sides in a current controversy—then do so fully and openly. Even those who do not agree with you will respect an honest presentation of the side you’ve chosen. But the seemingly accidental remarks, the casual wisecracks, the cowardly little half-hints are the things that arouse the anger and contempt of all those who uphold the opposite side of the issue. In most of the current issues, that opposite side represents half or more than half of your picture audience.

And it is a sad joke on Hollywood that while we shy away from all controversial subjects on the screen, in order not to antagonize anybody—we arouse more antagonism throughout the country and more resentment against ourselves by one cheap little smear line in the midst of some musical comedy than we ever would by a whole political treatise.

Of all current questions, be most careful about your attitude toward Soviet Russia. You do not have to make pro-Soviet or anti-Soviet pictures, if you do not wish to take a stand. But if you claim that you wish to remain neutral, don’t stick into pictures casual lines favorable to Soviet Russia. Look out for remarks that praise Russia directly or indirectly; or statements to the effect that anyone who is anti-Soviet is pro-Fascist; or references to fictitious Soviet achievements.

Don’t suggest to the audience that the Russian people are free, secure and happy, that life in Russia is just about the same as in any other country—while actually the Russian people live in constant terror under a bloody, monstrous dictatorship. Look out for speeches that support whatever is in the Soviet interests of the moment, whatever is part of the current Communist party line. Don’t permit dialogue such as: “The free, peace-loving nations of the world—America, England, and Russia ...” or, “Free elections, such as in Poland ...” or, “American imperialists ought to get out of China ...”

13. Don’t Smear American Political Institutions.

The Communist Party line takes many turns and makes many changes to meet shifting conditions. But on one objective it has remained fixed: to undermine faith in and ultimately to destroy our American political institutions.

Don’t discredit the Congress of the United States by presenting it as an ineffectual body, devoted to mere talk. If you do that—you imply that representative government is no good, and what we ought to have is a dictator.

Don’t discredit our free elections. If you do that—you imply that elections should be abolished.

Don’t discredit our courts by presenting them as corrupt. If you do that—you lead people to believe that they have no recourse except to violence, since peaceful justice cannot be obtained.

It is true that there have been vicious Congressmen and judges, and politicians who have stolen elections, just as there are vicious men in any profession. But if you present them in a story, be sure to make it clear that you are criticizing particular men—not the system. The American system, as such, is the best ever devised in history. If some men do not live up to it—let us damn these men, not the system which they betray.

Conclusion

These are the things which Communists and their sympathizers try to sneak into pictures intended as non-political-and these are the things you must keep out of your scripts, if your intention is to make non-political movies.

There is, of course, no reason why you should not make pictures on political themes. In fact, it would be most desirable if there were more pictures advocating the political principles of Americanism, seriously, consistently, and dramatically. Serious themes are always good entertainment, if honestly done. But if you attempt such pictures—do not undertake them lightly, carelessly, and with no better equipment than a few trite generalities and safe, benevolent bromides. Be very sure of what you want to say—and say it clearly, specifically, uncompromisingly. Evasions and generalities only help the enemies of Americanism—by giving people the impression that American principles are a collection of weak, inconsistent, meaningless, hypocritical, worn-out old slogans.

There is no obligation on you to make political pictures—if you do not wish to take a strong stand. You are free to confine your work to good, honest, non-political movies. But there is a moral obligation on you to present the political ideas of Americanism strongly and honestly—if you undertake pictures with political themes.

And when you make pictures with political themes and implications—Don’t hire Communists to write, direct or produce them. You cannot expect Communists to remain “neutral” and not to insert their own ideas into their work. Take them at their word, not ours. They have declared openly and repeatedly that their first obligation is to the Communist Party, that their first duty is to spread Party propaganda, and that their work in pictures is only a means to an end, the end being the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. You had better believe them about their own stated intentions. Remember that Hitler, too, stated openly that his aim was world conquest, but nobody believed him or took him seriously until it was too late.

Now a word of warning about the question of free speech. The principle of free speech requires that we do not use police force to forbid the Communists the expression of their ideas—which means that we do not pass laws forbidding them to speak. But the principle of free speech does not require that we furnish the Communists with the means to preach their ideas, and does not imply that we owe them jobs and support to advocate our own destruction at our own expense. The Constitutional guarantee of free speech reads: “Congress shall pass no law ...” It does not require employers to be suckers.

Let the Communists preach what they wish (so long as it remains mere talking) at the expense of those and in the employ of those who share their ideas. Let them create their own motion picture studios, if they can. But let us put an end to their use of our pictures, our studios and our money for the purpose of preaching our exploitation, enslavement and destruction. Freedom of speech does not imply that it is our duty to provide a knife for the murderer who wants to cut our throat.

[AR later remarked: “When the Screen Guide was first printed, the major studios generally ignored it. Then I began hearing of one studio after another ordering dozens of copies from the Motion Picture Alliance. And the attacks on businessmen as villains disappeared; if you watch the old movies, you can see the difference. ”]

1947

[The following was probably also written by ARfor the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.]

The pictures reviewed below are offered as examples of the technique of implications. There are many other pictures which contain scenes, episodes or lines of dialogue favorable, wittingly or unwittingly, to the general cause of collectivism. But there is no point in listing all such pictures, nor in denouncing anyone for past mistakes. Our purpose is not to denounce specific films, but the methods which they represent. With the help of the points given above, anyone who wishes to keep the Red trend off the screen will be able to detect it himself in any particular script or picture.

Most of the people connected with the production of the pictures reviewed below were not Communists nor Communist sympathizers. That is what makes the situation both needless and tragic. Any man has the right to produce any picture he wishes and to preach any ideas he believes. But it is shocking to see the talent, the skill, the technical knowledge and the wealth that went into the making of these pictures, turned to the furthering of a cause which does not represent the convictions of the men involved and which they are the first to repudiate when it is named.

It is the methods by which this is done that we wish to expose to its victims; not as a reproach, but as a warning. If anyone still wishes to permit these practices after he understands their nature—that is his right. And it is ours to denounce him.

Nobody has ever been endangered by being offered poison in a bottle bearing a label with a skull-and-crossbones. Poison is usually offered in a glass of the best wine—or, modem version, in a quart of the milk of human kindness.

The Best Years of Our Lives

Many passages of this picture preach patriotism and sympathy for veterans; this helps the unwary to accept, under the guise of patriotism, the attacks on the free enterprise system which this picture also contains.

1. A returning war hero is denied a seat on a plane, to make room for an offensive businessman who is obviously rich. What is the point of this episode—if not the implication that the vicious, unpatriotic rich are grossly indifferent to war heroes? What impression can this leave with the audience—if not resentment against businessmen? The episode is the more offensive when we remember that it implies a distortion of real facts. It was not the businessmen [during World War II], but the bureaucrats who controlled priorities on air travel. If any plane seats were obtained unfairly, it was not money that bought them, but political pull. And the only instance of this kind that attracted nationwide attention involved soldiers who were thrown off a plane, not to make room for a businessman, but for a dog belonging to an amateur politician of pronounced left-wing tendencies. If the picture episode had no such counterpart in real life, it would be bad enough. But to attach to a businessman the specific offense committed by a prominent business-baiter is an act of cynical, sickening dishonesty.

2. The returned war hero takes a job in a drugstore owned by a national chain, where he is treated unfairly, offensively and antago nistically. What does this imply—if not the idea that businessmen discriminate against veterans? What impression will this give to nerve-wracked young soldiers—if not the idea that they will get no chance in civilian life so long as jobs depend on private business and private employers? There is another distortion of facts here: most of the drug companies give special preference to veterans applying for jobs; and so do most other business concerns. If anyone claims that this sequence in the picture is not to be taken as a reflection upon business—let him answer whether he would make a picture showing a labor union discriminating against veterans, and then claim that it is not to be taken as a reflection upon labor.

3. The picture denounces a banker for being unwilling to give a veteran a loan without collateral, a refusal which is treated as if it were an act of greedy selfishness. This is a demagogue’s conception of economics. Nobody but a moron could really believe that the money involved in a bank loan belongs to the banker; that he refuses loans out of personal heartlessness, and that he ought to hand out the money not on the basis of his depositors’ security but on the basis of the applicant’s need. If some banker took the admonition of this picture seriously, who would suffer most and lose their life-savings but the very people that the Leftists love to cry over—the small depositors, the widows and orphans? [This idea was later dramatized by the character of Eugene Lawson in Atlas Shrugged] This incident is, perhaps, the all-time low in irresponsible demagoguery on the screen. To spread such ideas of economics is to take advantage of the most naive and least educated members of the audience. It can have no result except to arouse the worst instincts—the desire to loot—in some helpless illiterates who might get the idea that the banks are holding out on them.

4. In the drugstore fight episode, an obnoxious character is presented as being anti-Communist, and he soon turns out to be anti-Semitic and anti-Negro as well. It is implied that these two attitudes go together, that anyone who is anti-Soviet is pro-Nazi. When we consider that the majority of people in this country are now most bitterly anti-Soviet, the consequences of what this episode suggests to them are frightful to contemplate.

Americans are often confused about economics, and they may be uncertain on whether this picture is or is not an attack upon the American economic system. So we shall quote from an expert. An Associated Press dispatch of May 12, 1947, from Moscow, states that the Soviet newspaper Culture and Life denounced American movies for spreading propaganda favorable to capitalism and the American way of life. Commentator Yuri Zhukov wrote that American producers were cooperating with the State Department and “monopoly capital” to glut the world market with films “giving a distorted sweetened picture of life in the United States.” Zhukov, however, praised one American film—The Best Years of Our Lives.

He ought to know.

[The Best Years of Our Lives won seven Academy Awards in 1946.]

A Song to Remember

This is a curious and revealing phenomenon—a philosophical picture. It presents, not superficial politics, but the fundamental essence of the philosophy of collectivism. If anyone thinks that collectivists are merely out to destroy some sort of “bloated bankers” or “economic exploiters”—let him see this picture and learn what they are really after.

In order to present a vicious theory, the picture distorted historical events and characters—but this is not astonishing, since a vicious theory cannot be true to facts. The story presents Chopin’s struggle between good and evil, as personified by a young Polish girl on the one side and by George Sand on the other. George Sand, according to the picture, is evil because she provides a beautiful, private retreat where Chopin can live in peace and luxury, because she takes care of his every need, attends to his health, and urges him to forget the world and devote himself exclusively to the work of writing music, which he is desperately eager to do. The young Polish girl, according to the picture, is good because she urges Chopin to drop the work that he loves and go out on a concert tour in order to make money. (Yes, money—strange as this may sound in a story representing an ideology that damns the capitalist system for inducing artists to be commercial.) The girl, in this case, is collecting money “for the people,” for a cause that is identified as national or revolutionary or both, and this is supposed to justify anything and everything; so she demands that Chopin renounce his genius, sacrifice his composing and go out to entertain paying audiences—even though he hates concert playing, is ill with tuberculosis and has been warned by the doctors that the strain of a tour would kill him.

When Chopin locks himself in his room to avoid his nagging friends and to work, the picture treats it as an act of selfishness. When George Sand tells his friends to leave him alone, the picture treats her as a vicious, anti social creature. The Polish girl and a sniveling old music teacher are held up as samples of self-righteous virtue, the virtue being granted to them by the fact that they demand the sacrifice of another man’s life and do not balk at sacrificing the life of a genius to a fund-raising campaign.

After much inner suffering, Chopin escapes from Sand’s “selfishness,” goes on tour, breaks under the strain—and dies. This monstrous self-immolation is presented as an apotheosis of virtue. There is even a final scene where George Sand asks one of the collectivists what they gained by destroying a great life. The answer is that they gained the inspiration given to thousands of humble people. To translate this into specific and modern terms, one would have to suppose that they meant they gained propaganda value—and the audience is supposed to feel: What’s the life of a genius, or of any man for that matter, as compared to “inspiring” the masses?

There you can see collectivism in the raw. There you have it stripped of all the humanitarian trimmings and dialectic contradictions. This is the concrete illustration of the collectivist doctrine which holds that man exists to serve others, that he has no right to any personal aim, motive, desire or life, and that his only proper purpose is to sacrifice himself to the needs of the collective; therefore, a creative artist is a selfish monster, not because he hurts or exploits anybody, but because he wants to be left alone to do his own work; and the creative artist’s proper place is in a gang of fund-moochers or ditch-diggers, if the collective so demands.

Now, this much is true: creative work is a personal, individual, totally independent endeavor; his art means more to the creative artist than any social problem, more than anything or anybody. But who—outside the ideologies of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany—will dare to hold the creative artist as evil?

October 20, 1947

[The following is AR’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee on October 20, 1947, as reported in the Government Printing Office record (“Hearings Regarding Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry”). The Committee’s chairman was J. Parnell Thomas; Robert Stripling was Chief Investigator.]

The Chairman: Raise your right hand, please, Miss Rand. Do you solemnly swear the testimony you are about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

Miss Rand: I do.

The Chairman: Sit down. [...]

Mr. Stripling: Where were you born, Miss Rand?

Miss Rand: In St. Petersburg, Russia.

Mr. Stripling: When did you leave Russia?

Miss Rand: In 1926.

Mr. Stripling: How long have you been employed in Hollywood?

Miss Rand: I have been in pictures on and off since late in 1926, but specifically as a writer this time I have been in Hollywood since late 1943 and am now under contract as a writer.

Mr. Stripling: Have you written various novels?

Miss Rand: I have written two novels. My first one was called We the Living, which was a story about Soviet Russia and was published in 1936. The second one was The Fountainhead, published in 1943.

Mr. Stripling: Was that a best-seller—The Fountainhead?

Miss Rand: Yes; thanks to the American public.

Mr. Stripling: Do you know how many copies were sold?

Miss Rand: The last I heard was 360,000 copies. I think there have been some more since.

Mr. Stripling: You have been employed as a writer in Hollywood?

Miss Rand: Yes; I am under contract at present.

Mr. Stripling: Could you name some of the stories or scripts you have written for Hollywood?

Miss Rand: I have done the script for The Fountainhead, which has not been produced yet, for Warner Brothers, and two adaptations for Hal Wallis Productions, at Paramount, which were not my stories but on which I did the screen plays, which were Love Letters and You Came Along.

Mr. Stripling: Now, Miss Rand, you have heard the testimony of Mr. [Louis B.] Mayer?

Miss Rand: Yes.

Mr. Stripling: You have read the letter I read from Lowell Mellett?

Miss Rand: Yes.

Mr. Stripling: Which says that the picture Song of Russia has no political implications?

Miss Rand: Yes.

Mr. Stripling: Did you at the request of Mr. Smith, the investigator for this committee, view the picture Song of Russia?

Miss Rand: Yes.

Mr. Stripling: Within the past two weeks?

Miss Rand: Yes; on October 13, to be exact.

Mr. Stripling: In Hollywood?

Miss Rand: Yes.

Mr. Stripling: Would you give the committee a breakdown of your summary of the picture relating to either propaganda or an untruthful account or distorted account of conditions in Russia?

Miss Rand: Yes.

First of all I would like to define what we mean by propaganda. We have all been talking about it, but nobody has stated just what they mean. Now, I use the term to mean that Communist propaganda is anything which gives a good impression of communism as a way of life. Anything that sells people the idea that life in Russia is good and that people are free and happy would be Communist propaganda. Am I not correct? I mean, would that be a fair statement to make—that that would be Communist propaganda?

Now, here is what the picture Song of Russia contains. It starts with an American conductor, played by Robert Taylor, giving a concert in America for Russian war relief. He starts playing the American national anthem and the national anthem dissolves into a Russian mob, with the sickle and hammer on a red flag very prominent above their heads. I am sorry, but that made me sick. That is something which I do not see how native Americans permit, and I am only a naturalized American. That was a terrible touch of propaganda. As a writer, I can tell you just exactly what it suggests to the people. It suggests literally and technically that it is quite all right for the American national anthem to dissolve into the Soviet. The term here is more than just technical. It really was symbolically intended, and it worked out that way. The anthem continues, played by a Soviet band. That is the beginning of the picture.

Now we go to the pleasant love story. Mr. Taylor is an American who came there apparently voluntarily to conduct concerts for the Soviets. He meets a little Russian girl from a village who comes to him and begs him to go to her village to direct concerts there. There are no G.P.U. agents and nobody stops her. She just comes to Moscow and meets him. He decides he will go [with her], because he is falling in love. He asks her to show him Moscow. She says she has never seen it. He says, “I will show it to you.”

They see it together. The picture then goes into a scene of Moscow, supposedly. I don’t know where the studio got its shots, but I have never seen anything like it in Russia. First you see Moscow buildings—big, prosperous-looking, clean buildings, with something like swans or sailboats in the foreground. Then you see a Moscow restaurant that just never existed there. When I was in Russia, there was only one such restaurant, which was nowhere as luxurious as that and no one could enter it except commissars and profiteers. Certainly a girl from a village, who in the first place would never have been allowed to come to Moscow without permission, could not afford to enter it, even if she worked for ten years. However, there is a Russian restaurant with a menu such as never existed in Russia even before the revolution. From this restaurant they go on to this tour of Moscow. The streets are clean and prosperous-looking. There are no food lines anywhere. You see shots of the marble subway—the famous Russian subway out of which they make such propaganda capital. There is a marble statue of Stalin thrown in. There is a park where you see happy little children in white blouses running around. I don’t know whose children they are, but they are really happy kiddies. They are not homeless children in rags, such as I have seen in Russia. Then you see an excursion boat, on which the Russian people are smiling, sitting around very cheerfully, dressed in some sort of satin blouses such as they only wear in Russian restaurants here.

Then they attend a luxurious dance. I don’t know where they got the idea of the clothes and the settings that they used at the ball and—

Mr. Stripling: Is that a ballroom scene?

Miss Rand: Yes; the ballroom—where they dance. It was an exaggeration even for this country. I never saw anybody wearing such clothes and dancing to such exotic music when I was there. Of course, it didn’t say whose ballroom it is or how they got there. But there they are—free and dancing very happily.

Incidentally, I understand from correspondents who have left or escaped from Russia later than I did, that the time I last saw it, which was in 1926, was the best time since the Russian revolution. At that time conditions were a little better than they have become since. In my time we were a bunch of ragged, starved, dirty, miserable people who had only two thoughts in our mind. That was our complete terror—afraid to look at one another, afraid to say anything for fear of who is listening and would report us—and where to get the next meal. You have no idea what it means to live in a country where nobody has any concern except food, where all the conversation is about food because everybody is so hungry that that is all they can think about and that is all they can afford to do. They have no idea of politics. They have no idea of any pleasant romances or love—nothing but food and fear.

That is what I saw up to 1926. That is not what the picture shows.

Now, after this tour of Moscow, the hero—the American conductor—goes to the Soviet village. The Russian villages are so miserable and so filthy. They were [that] even before the revolution. What they have become now I am afraid to think. You have all read about the program for the collectivization of the farms in 1933, at which time the Soviet Government admits that three million peasants died of starvation. Other people claim there were seven and a half million, but three million is the figure admitted by the Soviet Government as the figure of people who died of starvation, planned by the government in order to drive people into collective farms. That is a recorded historical fact.

Now, here is life in the Soviet village as presented in Song of Russia. You see the happy peasants. You see they are meeting the hero at the station with bands, with beautiful blouses and shoes, such as they never wore anywhere. You see children with operetta costumes on them and with a brass band which they could never afford. You see the manicured starlets driving tractors and the happy women who come from work singing. You see a peasant at home with a close-up of food for which anyone there would have been murdered. If anybody had such food in Russia in that time he couldn’t remain alive, because he would have been torn apart by neighbors trying to get food. But here is a close-up of it and a line where Robert Taylor comments on the food and the peasant answers, “This is just a simple country table and the food we eat ourselves.”

Then the peasant proceeds to show Taylor how they live. He shows him his wonderful tractor. It is parked somewhere in his private garage. He shows him the grain in his bin, and Taylor says, “That is wonderful grain.” Now, it is never said that the peasant does not own this tractor or this grain because it is a collective farm. He couldn’t have it. It is not his. But the impression he gives to Americans, who wouldn’t know any different, is that certainly it is this peasant’s private property, and that is how he lives, he has his own tractor and his own grain. Then it shows miles and miles of plowed fields.

The Chairman: We will have more order, please.

Miss Rand: Am I speaking too fast?

The Chairman: Go ahead.

Miss Rand: Then—

Mr. Stripling: Miss Rand, may I bring up one point there?

Miss Rand: Surely.

Mr. Stripling: I saw the picture. At this peasant’s village or home, was there a priest or several priests in evidence?

Miss Rand: Oh yes; I am coming to that, too. The priest was in the village scenes, having a position as sort of a constant companion and friend of the peasants, as if religion was a natural and accepted part of that life. Well, now, as a matter of fact, the [policy on] religion in Russia in my time was, and I understand it still is, that for a Communist Party member to have anything to do with religion means expulsion from the Party. He is not allowed to enter a church or take part in any religious ceremony. For a non-Party member it was permitted, but it was so frowned upon that people had to keep it secret if they went to church. If they wanted a church wedding they usually had it privately in their homes, with only a few friends present, in order not to let it be known at their place of employment because, even though it was not forbidden, the chances were that they would be thrown out of a job if it was known that they practiced any kind of religion.

Now, then, to continue with the story, Robert Taylor proposes to the heroine. She accepts him. They have a wedding, which, of course, is a church wedding. It takes place with all the religious pomp. They have a banquet. They have dancers, in something like satin skirts and performing ballets such as you never could possibly see in any village and certainly not in Russia. Later they show a peasants’ meeting place, which is a kind of marble palace with crystal chandeliers. Where they got it or who built it for them I would like to be told. Then later you see that the peasants all have radios. When the heroine plays as a soloist with Robert Taylor’s orchestra, after she marries him, you see a scene where all the peasants are listening on radios, and one of them says, “There are many millions listening to the concert.”

I don’t know whether there are a hundred private individuals in Russia who own radios. And I remember reading in the newspaper at the beginning of the war that every radio was seized by the Government and people were not allowed to own them. The idea that every poor peasant has a radio is certainly preposterous. You also see that they have long-distance telephones. Later in the picture, Taylor has to call his wife in the village by long-distance telephone. Where they got this long-distance phone, I don’t know.

Now, here comes the crucial point of the picture. In the midst of this concert, when the heroine is playing, you see a scene on the border of the U.S.S.R. You have a very lovely modernistic sign saying “U.S.S.R.” I would just like to remind you that that is the border where probably thousands of people have died trying to escape out of this lovely paradise. It shows the U.S.S.R. sign, and there is a border guard standing. He is listening to the concert. Then there is a scene inside a guardhouse where the guards are listening to the same concert, the beautiful Tschaikovsky music, and they are playing chess. Suddenly there is a Nazi attack on them. The poor, sweet Russians were unprepared. Now, realize—and that was a great shock to me—that the border that was being shown was the border of Poland. That was the border of an occupied, enslaved country which Hitler and Stalin destroyed together. That was the border that was being shown to us—just a happy place with people listening to music.

Also realize that when all this sweetness and light was going on in the first part of the picture, with all these happy, free people, there was not a G.P.U. agent among them, with no food lines, no persecution—complete freedom and happiness, with everybody smiling. Incidentally, I have never seen so much smiling in my life, except on the murals of the world’s fair pavilion of the Soviets. If any one of you have seen it, you can appreciate it. It is one of the stock propaganda tricks of the Communists, to show these people smiling. That is all they can show. You have all this, plus the fact that an American conductor had accepted an invitation to come there and conduct a concert, and this took place in 1941 when Stalin was the ally of Hitler. That an American would accept an invitation to that country was shocking to me, with everything being shown as proper and good and all those happy people going around dancing, when Stalin was an ally of Hitler.

Now, then, the heroine decides that she wants to stay in Russia. Taylor would like to take her out of the country, but she says no, her place is here, she has to fight the war. Here is the line, as nearly exact as I could mark it while watching the picture: “I have a great responsibility to my family, to my village, and to the way I have lived.” What way had she lived? This is just a polite way of saying the Communist way of life. She goes on to say that she wants to stay in the country because otherwise “How can I help to build a better and better life for my country?” What is meant by “better and better”? That means she has already helped to build a good way. That is the Soviet Communist way. But now she wants to make it even better.

Taylor’s manager, an American, tells her that she should leave the country, but when she refuses and wants to stay, here is the line he uses: he tells her in an admiring, friendly way that “You are a fool, but a lot of fools like you died on the village green at Lexington.”

Now, I submit that this is blasphemy, because the men at Lexington were not fighting just a foreign invader. They were fighting for freedom and what I mean—and I intend to be exact—is they were fighting for political freedom and individual freedom. They were fighting for the rights of man. To compare them to someone fighting for a slave state, I think is dreadful.

Then, later, the girl or one of the other characters says that “the culture we have been building here will never die.” What culture? The culture of concentration camps.

At the end of the picture one of the Russians asks Taylor and the girl to go back to America, because they can help them there. How? Here is what he says, “You can go back to your country and tell them what you have seen and you will see the truth both in speech and in music.” Now, that is plainly saying that what you have seen is the truth about Russia. That is what is in the picture.

Now, here is what I cannot understand: if the excuse that has been given here is that we had to produce the picture in wartime, just how can it help the war effort? If [the goal] is to deceive the American people, if it is to present to the American people a picture of Russia that is better than it really is, then that sort of an attitude is nothing but the theory of the Nazi elite—that a choice group of intellectual or other leaders will tell the people lies for their own good. I don’t think that is the American way of giving people information. We do not have to deceive the people at any time, in war or peace.

If it was to please the Russians, I don’t see how you can please the Russians by telling them that we are fools. To what extent we have done it, you can see right now. You can see the results right now. If we present a picture like that as our version of what goes on in Russia, what will they think of it? We don’t win anybody’s friendship. We will only win their contempt, and as you know the Russians have been [treating us with contempt].

My whole point about the picture is this: I fully believe Mr. Mayer when he says that he did not make a Communist picture. To do him justice, I can tell you I noticed that there was an effort to cut propaganda out. I believe he tried to cut propaganda out of the picture, but the terrible thing is the carelessness with ideas, not realizing that the mere presentation of that kind of happy existence in a country of slavery and horror is terrible propaganda. You are telling people that it is all right to live in a totalitarian state.

Now, I would like to say that nothing on earth will justify slavery. In war or peace or at any time you cannot justify slavery. You cannot tell people that it is all right to live under it and that everybody there is happy.

If you doubt this, I will just ask you one question. Visualize a picture [set] in Nazi Germany. If anybody laid a plot just based on a pleasant little romance in Germany and played Wagner’s music and said that people are happy there, would you say that that was propaganda or not, when you know what life in Germany was and what kind of concentration camps they had there. You would not dare to put just a happy love story into Germany, and for every one of the same reasons you should not do it about Russia.

Mr. Stripling: That is all I have, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Mr. Wood. [John Stephens Wood was a Democratic congressman from Georgia.]

Mr. Wood: I gather, then, from your analysis of this picture your personal criticism of it is that it overplayed the conditions that existed in Russia at the time the picture was made; is that correct?

Miss Rand: Did you say overplayed?

Mr. Wood: Yes.

Miss Rand: Well, the story portrayed the people—

Mr. Wood: It portrayed the people of Russia in a better economic and social position than they occupied?

Miss Rand: That is right.

Mr. Wood: And it would also leave the impression in the average mind that they were better able to resist the aggression of the German Army than they were in fact able to resist?

Miss Rand: Well, that was not in the picture. So far as the Russian war was concerned, not very much was shown about it.

Mr. Wood: Well, you recall, I presume—it is a matter of history—going back to the middle of the First World War when Russia was also our ally against the same enemy that we were fighting at this time and they were knocked out of the war. When the remnants of their forces turned against us, it prolonged the First World War a considerable time, didn’t it?

Miss Rand: I don’t believe so.

Mr. Wood: You don’t?

Miss Rand: No.

Mr. Wood: Do you think, then, that it was to our advantage or to our disadvantage to keep Russia in this war, at the time this picture was made? Miss Rand: That has absolutely nothing to do with what we are discussing.

Mr. Wood: Well—

Miss Rand: But if you want me to answer, I can answer, but it will take me a long time to say what I think, as to whether we should or should not have had Russia on our side in the war. I can, but how much time will you give me?

Mr. Wood: Well, do you say that it would have prolonged the war, so far as we were concerned, if they had been knocked out of it at that time?

Miss Rand: I can’t answer that yes or no, unless you give me time for a long speech on it.

Mr. Wood: Well, there is a pretty strong probability that we wouldn’t have won at all, isn’t there?

Miss Rand: I don’t know, because on the other hand I think we could have used the lend-lease supplies that we sent there to much better advantage ourselves.

Mr. Wood: Well, at that time—

Miss Rand: I don’t know. It is a question.

Mr. Wood: We were furnishing Russia with all the lend-lease equipment that our industry would stand, weren’t we?

Miss Rand: That is right.

Mr. Wood: And continued to do it?

Miss Rand: I am not sure it was at all wise. Now, if you want to discuss my military views—I am not an authority, but I will try.

Mr. Wood: What do you interpret, then, the picture as having been made for?

Miss Rand: I ask you: what relation could a lie about Russia have with the war effort? I would like to have somebody explain that to me, because I really don’t understand it, why a lie would help anybody or why it would keep Russia in or out of the war. How?

Mr. Wood: You don’t think it would have been of benefit to the American people to have kept them in?

Miss Rand: I don’t believe the American people should ever be told any lies, publicly or privately. I don’t believe that lies are practical. I think the international situation now rather supports me. I don’t think it was necessary to deceive the American people about the nature of Russia.

I could add this: if those who saw it say it was quite all right, and perhaps there are reasons why it was all right to be an ally of Russia, then why weren’t the American people told the real reasons and told that Russia is a dictatorship but there are reasons why we should cooperate with them to destroy Hitler and other dictators? All right, there may be some argument to that. Let us hear it. But of what help can it be to the war effort to tell people that we should associate with Russia and that she is not a dictatorship?

Mr. Wood: Let me see if I understand your position. I understand, from what you say, that because they were a dictatorship we shouldn’t have accepted their help in undertaking to win a war against another dictatorship.

Miss Rand: That is not what I said. I was not in a position to make that decision. If I were, I would tell you what I would do. That is not what we are discussing. We are discussing the fact that our country was an ally of Russia, and the question is: what should we tell the American people about it—the truth or a lie? If we had good reason, if that is what you believe, all right, then why not tell the truth? Say it is a dictatorship, but we want to be associated with it. Say it is worthwhile being associated with the devil, as Churchill said, in order to defeat another devil which is Hitler. There might be some good argument made for that. But why pretend that Russia was not what it was?

Mr. Wood: Well—

Miss Rand: What do you achieve by that?

Mr. Wood: Do you think it would have had as good an effect upon the morale of the American people to preach a doctrine to them that Russia was on the verge of collapse?

Miss Rand: I don’t believe that the morale of anybody can be built up by a lie. If there was nothing good that we could truthfully say about Russia, then it would have been better not to say anything at all.

Mr. Wood: Well—

Miss Rand: You don’t have to come out and denounce Russia during the war; no. You can keep quiet. There is no moral guilt in not saying something if you can’t say it, but there is in saying the opposite of what is true.

Mr. Wood: Thank you. That is all.

The Chairman: Mr. McDowell. [John McDowell was a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania.]

Mr. McDowell: You paint a very dismal picture of Russia. You made a great point about the number of children who were unhappy. Doesn’t anybody smile in Russia any more?

Miss Rand: Well, if you ask me literally, pretty much no.

Mr. McDowell: They don’t smile?

Miss Rand: Not quite that way; no. If they do, it is privately and accidentally. Certainly, it is not social. They don’t smile in approval of their system. Mr. McDowell: Well, all they do is talk about food.

Miss Rand: That is right.

Mr. McDowell: That is a great change from the Russians I have always known, and I have known a lot of them. Don’t they do things at all like Americans? Don’t they walk across town to visit their mother-in-law or somebody?

Miss Rand: Look, it is very hard to explain. It is almost impossible to convey to a free people what it is like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. I can tell you a lot of details. I can never completely convince you, because you are free. It is in a way good that you can’t even conceive of what it is like. Certainly they have friends and mothers-in-law. They try to live a human life, but you understand it is totally inhuman. Try to imagine what it is like if you are in constant terror from morning till night and at night you are waiting for the doorbell to ring, where you are afraid of anything and everybody, living in a country where human life is nothing, less than nothing, and you know it. You don’t know who is going to do what to you because you may have friends who spy on you, and there is no law or rights of any kind.

Mr. McDowell: You came here in 1926, I believe you said. Did you escape from Russia?

Miss Rand: No.

Mr. McDowell: Did you have a passport?

Miss Rand: No. Strangely enough, they gave me a passport to come out here as a visitor.

Mr. McDowell: As a visitor?

Miss Rand: It was at a time when they relaxed their orders a little bit. Quite a few people got out. I had some relatives here and I was permitted to come here for a year. I never went back.

Mr. McDowell: I see.

The Chairman: Mr. Nixon. [Richard Milhous Nixon was a Republican congressman and future U.S. president from California.]

Mr. Nixon: No questions.

The Chairman: All right.

The first witness tomorrow morning will be Adolphe Menjou. (Whereupon, at 4:20 p.m., an adjournment was taken until 10:30 a.m. of the following day.)

[AR planned to testify further on The Best Years of Our Lives, as well as on the wider issues discussed in her Screen Guide. However, she was never given the opportunity. Later, she recalled: “The Best Years of Our Lives was the big hit of the period and the movie I particularly wanted to denounce.... It was much more important to show the serious propaganda about America—not some musical about Soviet Russia that would not fool anybody, and that had failed at the box-office.... But the Congressmen told me that they would not dare come out against a movie about an armless veteran—there would be a public furor against them. ”]

1947

[At some point after her testimony, AR wrote the following notes to herself on whether the Thomas Committee had violated the civil rights of the Hollywood Communists.]

Suggestions Regarding the Congressional Investigation of Communism

The whole conception of civil rights (of free speech, free assembly, free political organization) applies to and belongs in the realm of ideas—that is, a realm which precludes the use of physical violence. These rights are based on and pertain to the peaceful activity of spreading or preaching ideas, of dealing with men by intellectual persuasion. Therefore, one cannot invoke these rights to protect an organization such as the Communist Party, which not merely preaches, but actually engages in acts of violence, murder, sabotage, and spying in the interests of a foreign government. This takes the Communist Party out of the realm of civil law and puts it into the realm of criminal law. And the fact that Communists are directed and financed by a foreign power puts them into the realm of treason and military law.

The Thomas Committee was inquiring, not into a question of opinion, but into a question of fact, the fact being membership in the Communist Party.

The Thomas Committee did not ask anyone whether he believed in Communism, but asked only whether he had joined the Communist Party. Membership in the Communist Party does not consist merely of sharing the ideas of that Party. That Party is a formal, closed, and secret organization. Joining it involves more than a matter of ideas. It involves an agreement to take orders to commit actions—criminal and treasonable actions.

The Communists have been trying to claim that belonging to the Communist Party is the same as belonging to the Republican or Democratic Party. But membership in the Republican or Democratic Party is an open, public matter. It involves no initiation, no acceptance of an applicant by the party, and no card-bearing. It involves nothing but a voluntary and open declaration by a citizen that he wishes to be registered as a Republican or a Democrat for the next primary election. It is a membership which cannot be refused to him and which he is free to abandon any time he chooses. It commits him to nothing but an expression of his ideas at the ballot box, and he is free to change his mind even about that. Thus, it is truly a matter of a citizen’s personal ideas and convictions, nothing more.

Membership in the Communist Party is a formal act of joining a formal organization whose aims, by its own admission, include acts of criminal violence. Congress has no right to inquire into ideas or opinions, but has every right to inquire into criminal activities. Belonging to a secret organization that advocates criminal actions comes into the sphere of the criminal, not the ideological.

It is extremely important to differentiate between the American conception of law and the European-totalitarian concept. Under the American law, there is no such thing as a political crime; a man’s ideas do not constitute a crime, no matter what they are. And precisely by the same principle, a man’s ideas—no matter what they are—cannot serve as a justification for a criminal action and do not give him freedom to commit such actions on the ground that they represent his personal belief.

Under most systems of European law a citizen’s beliefs, if contrary to those of the government in power, are considered to be a crime punishable by law. Consequently, an act of violence or a murder committed for a political motive is treated differently from an act of violence or murder committed for a plain criminal motive. Incidentally, prior to World War I, most European governments treated crimes committed for political motives much more leniently and almost honorably in comparison with the same crimes committed for criminal motives. In America, no man can be sent to jail for holding any sort of ideas. And no man is allowed to demand a consideration of his ideas as a mitigating circumstance when and if he has committed an act of violence.

The entire conception of American law is based on the principle of inalienable individual rights. This principle precludes the right of one citizen to do violence to others—no matter what ideas or convictions he may hold. Therefore, any man may preach or advocate anything he wishes, but if he undertakes acts of violence in pursuit of his beliefs, then he is treated as a common criminal. American law is not asked to share his conviction—his idea that his rights include the right to use force against other men. (As an example: American citizens have freedom of religion; but if some sect attempted to practice human sacrifices, its members would be prosecuted by law—not for their religious beliefs, but for murder; their beliefs would not be considered or recognized as pertinent to the case.)

Therefore, it is totally irrelevant to Congress whether a man enters a criminal conspiracy for criminal reasons or for reasons he considers political or ideological. This is precisely where his ideas do not concern Congress at all and do not enter the question. When Congress investigates the Communist Party, it is investigating a factual matter, a criminal conspiracy, and not a matter of ideas.

If it is asked why the Communist Party may be objectively classified as a criminal conspiracy—the answer lies in the factual record of the Party, which is a record of proven criminal activities, in its own professed aims, methods, and intentions, and in the fact of its secrecy. Congress was not inquiring who believes in Communism. It was inquiring who belongs to an organization that has defined itself, by its own acts and statements, as criminal.

If the Communist Party were a purely national American organization, the above points would be sufficient to give Congress the right to inquire into its activities. But when we add to it the fact that the Communist Party is an organization which owes allegiance to a foreign power, then it becomes not only a matter of crime, but also of treason. A party which is the agent of a foreign power cannot claim the same rights as an American party—just as a foreign subject cannot claim all the rights and privileges of an American citizen, nor a voice in the conduct of America’s internal affairs. An investigation into a man’s or an organization’s allegiance to a foreign power is not an ideological matter, but a military one.

It is extremely important not to let this whole issue be considered as an issue of the freedom of speech. Nobody has interfered with the right of the Hollywood Ten to their freedom of speech; quite the opposite: they raised a howl because they were asked to speak. No legal penalties of any kind were to be imposed on them for their admission of membership in the Communist Party, if they had chosen to admit it. Yet they are screaming that they were asked to incriminate themselves. To incriminate themselves in what manner?

The Communists claim that the Congressional investigation caused them personal and professional damage, by revealing their political ideas to the public when such ideas are unpopular. Freedom of speech means precisely that a citizen has the right to hold and advocate his own ideas, even when they are unpopular, and that no legal penalty (no restraint by force) will be imposed upon him for it. Freedom of speech is the protection of his right to be an unpopular dissenter, if he wishes, without becoming the subject of any violence by any popular majority. But that same freedom of speech grants other citizens the right to agree or disagree with his ideas.

This is exactly why any man’s freedom of speech is no threat or danger to other men: they are free to consider his ideas and not to cooperate with him, if they do not agree. They cannot use force against him, but neither are they forced to assist him in his activities against their own interests, ideas, or convictions.

Now if the Hollywood Ten claim that a public revelation of their Communist ideas damages them because it will cost them their Hollywood jobs—then this means that they are holding these jobs by fraud, that their employers, their co-workers and their public do not know the nature of their ideas and would not want to deal with them if such knowledge were made available. If so, then the Communists, in effect, are asking that the government protect them in the perpetration of a fraud. They are demanding protection for their right to practice deceit upon others. They are saying, in effect: I am cheating those with whom I am dealing and if you reveal this, you will cause me to lose my racket—which is an interference with my freedom of speech and belief.

It is not the duty of Congress to inquire into anyone’s ideas—but neither is it the duty of Congress to protect deceit by withholding from the public any information which may involve someone’s ideas. If, in the course of an inquiry into criminal and treasonable activities, Congress reveals the nature of the political beliefs of certain men—their freedom of speech or belief has not been infringed in any manner. If, as a consequence, their employers—who had been foolish, ignorant, or negligent before—now decide to fire these men, that is the employers’ inalienable right. It is also the inalienable right of the public not to buy the product of these men—in this particular case, not to attend the movies written or directed by the Hollywood Ten. The damage which the Ten claim to have suffered in this case is a private damage, not a legal one, a damage which consists of the refusal of private citizens to deal with a Communist, if they learn that he is a Communist.

And this is another instance where the Communists are attempting to foist a totalitarian conception upon our courts of law, in place of the American conception. They are attempting to claim that there is no difference between private action and government action—that a citizen’s refusal to deal with a Communist is equivalent to a government order forbidding him to be a Communist—that a citizen’s refusal to employ a Communist is equivalent to a policeman’s arresting him—that the disagreement of his fellow-citizens with his views and his consequent unpopularity are equivalent to a concentration camp and a firing squad—that the refusal of his victims to cooperate with their own self-admitted murderer, expropriator, and enslaver is an infringement of his freedom and his rights.

The Constitutional guarantee of free speech reads: “Congress shall pass no law ...” It does not demand that private citizens lend any form of support to those whose ideas they do not share.

The Communists have perverted the issue of free speech into the following sort of claim: Since a man has the right to hold any ideas he wishes, he must not suffer any kind of loss, discomfort, damage, or penalty, legal or private, as a consequence of his ideas. This is the totalitarian conception which recognizes no difference between public, government action and the private actions of private citizens. This is not the American conception of legality, rights, or free speech.

Under the American system, a man has the right to hold any ideas he wishes, without suffering any government restraint for it, without the danger of physical violence, bodily injury, or police seizure. That is all. Should he have to suffer some form of private penalty for his ideas from private citizens who do not agree with him? He most certainly should. That is the only form of protection the rest of the citizens have against him and against the spread of ideas with which they do not agree.

Should the Hollywood Ten suffer unpopularity or loss of jobs as a result of being Communists? They most certainly should—so long as the rest of us, who give them jobs or box-office support, do not wish to be Communists or accessories to the spread of Communism. If it is claimed that we must not refuse them support—what becomes of our right of free speech and belief?

PART 4

ATLAS SHRUGGED

11

THE MIND ON STRIKE

AR organized her journals for Atlas Shrugged by subject Her handwritten notes were put in folders marked “Philosophical,” “Plot,” “Characters,” “Outlines,” “Research Material,” and “Miscellaneous.” Here the notes are presented chronologically without regard for subject, so the reader may see the progression of her thought in developing the novel.

AR originally envisioned Atlas Shrugged as a shorter novel than The Fountainhead. In a 1961 interview, she recalled:

Atlas Shrugged started with the idea of the plot-theme: the mind goes on strike. At first I saw it more as a political and social novel; I remember thinking that it will not present any new philosophical ideas, that the philosophy will be the same as The Fountainhead. It will be individualism, only now I’ll show it in the political-economic realm. The action will tell the philosophic story with a minimum of comment from me; it will show that capitalism and the proper economics rest on the mind.

Then I started working on the philosophic aspect of it, with the assignment to myself to concretize the theme. Why is the mind important? What specifically does the mind do in relationship to human existence? It’s then I began to see that this is going to be a very important and new philosophical novel. There was a great deal more to say than merely what I had said in The Fountainhead.

Most of the notes in this chapter are from her “philosophical” file. We can see the novel growing in scope as she elaborates and concretizes the theme.

Although AR had thought of the plot-theme in late 1943, she did not begin to make notes until January I, 1945, and only began full-time work on the novel in April 1946. The notes in this chapter are largely from this last month -the most prolific monthofjournal-writing in her life. Nearly all of her notes from this month are included here; I omitted only a few pages in which she was rewriting and condensing earlier material.

As with The Fountainhead journal, I have used the names of characters as they appear in the novel. In the course of writing, AR changed the first names of several characters. Dagny’s name was Mamy for a while; Francisco was originally spelled Francesco because AR thought of the character as more typically Italian than Spanish; Rearden’s name was Andrew, then William, before she settled on Hank; Danneskjöld’s name was Hjalmar, then Ivar, then Kay, before it finally became Ragnar.

Atlas Shrugged was a chapter title until 1956 when AR’s husband, Frank O‘Connor, suggested that it be the title of the novel. Her working title throughout was The Strike.

January I, 1945

The Strike

Theme: What happens to the world when the prime movers go on strike.

This means: a picture of the world with its motor cut off. Show: what, how, why. The specific steps and incidents—in terms of persons, their spirits, motives, psychology, and actions—and, secondarily, proceeding from persons, in terms of history, society and the world.

The theme requires showing who are the prime movers and why, how they function; who are their enemies and why, what are the motives behind the hatred for and the enslavement of the prime movers; the nature of the obstacles placed in their way, and the reasons for it.

This last paragraph is contained entirely in The Fountainhead. Roark and Toohey are the complete statement of it. Therefore, this is not the direct theme of The Strike—but it is part of the theme and must be kept in mind, briefly restated in order to have the theme clear and complete.

The first question to decide is on whom the emphasis must be placed—on the prime movers, the parasites, or the world. The answer is: the world. The story must be primarily a picture of the whole.

In this sense, The Strike is to be much more a “social” novel than The Fountainhead. The Fountainhead was about “individualism and collectivism within man’s soul”; it showed the nature and function of the creator and the second-hander. The primary concern there was with Roark and Toohey—showing what they are. The other characters were variations on the theme of the relation of the ego to others—mixtures of the two extremes, the two poles: Roark and Toohey. The story’s primary concern was the characters, the people as such, their natures. Their relations to each other—which is society, men in relation to men—were secondary, an unavoidable, direct consequence of Roark set against Toohey. But it was not the theme.

Now, it is this relation that must be the theme. Therefore, the personal becomes secondary. That is, the personal is necessary only to the extent needed to make the relationships clear. In The Fountainhead I showed that Roark moves the world—that the Keatings feed upon him and hate him for it, while the Tooheys are consciously out to destroy him. But the theme was Roark—not Roark’s relation to the world. Now it will be the relation.

In other words: I must show in what concrete, specific way the world is moved by the creators. [I must show] exactly how the second-handers live on the creators, both in spiritual matters and (most particularly) in concrete physical events. (Concentrate on the concrete, physical events—but don’t forget to keep in mind at all times how the physical proceeds from the spiritual.)

(A new sidelight here: the dreadful desolation of the world, not only in closed factories and ruins, but also in the spiritual emptiness, hopelessness, confusion, dullness, grayness, fear. As keys to that: L. L. and M. K. joining the Catholic Church. Or: the relation of people to me, what they seem to seek from me—think of Marjorie [Hiss], Faith [Hersey], all my girl friends—and even Pat [Isabel Paterson].)

However, for the purpose of this story, I do not start by showing how the second-handers live on the prime movers in actual, everyday reality—nor do I start by showing a normal world. (That comes in only in necessary retrospect, or flashback, or by implication in the events themselves.) I start with the fantastic premise of the prime movers going on strike. This is the heart and center of the novel. A distinction carefully to be observed here: I do not set out to glorify the prime mover (that was The Fountainhead). I set out to show how desperately the world needs prime movers, and how viciously it treats them. And I show it on a hypothetical case—what happens to the world without them.

The difference from The Fountainhead here will be as follows: in The Fountainhead I did not show how desperately the world needed Roark—except by implication. I did show how viciously the world treated him, and why. I showed mainly what he is. It was Roark’s story. This must be the world’s story—in relation to its prime movers. (Almost—the story of a body in relation to its heart—a body dying of anemia.)

I do not show directly what the prime movers do—that’s shown only by implication. I show what happens when they don’t do it. Through that, you see the picture of what they do, their place and their role. (This is an important guide for the construction of the story.)

Now to state the theme consecutively: the world lives by the prime movers, hates them for it, exploits them and always feels that it has not exploited them enough. They have to fight a terrible battle and suffer every possible torture that society can impose—in order to create the things from which society benefits immeasurably and by which alone society can exist. In effect, they must suffer and pay for the privilege of giving gifts to society. They must pay for being society’s benefactors. That is what happens in [practice] and what society demands and expects in theory, by the nature of its altruist-collectivist philosophy.

The course of each great cultural step forward runs like this: a genius makes a great discovery; he is fought, opposed, persecuted, ridiculed, denounced in every way possible; he is made a martyr—he has to pay for his discovery and for his greatness, pay in suffering, poverty, obscurity, insults, and sometimes in actual arrest, jail, and death. Then the common herd slowly begins to understand and appreciate his discovery—usually when he is too old, worn, embittered, and tired to appreciate that which they could offer him in exchange, i.e., money, fame, recognition, gratitude and, above all, freedom to do more. Or [the appreciation of the genius comes] long after he is dead; then the herd appropriates the discovery—physically, in that they get all the practical benefits from it, and spiritually, in that they appropriate even the glory. This is the most important point of the book. The public monuments erected to the great men in city squares (for the pigeons to dirty) are only an empty gesture—a hypocritical concession, a bribe. Just like the acknowledgment of the great men’s achievements in school books—to bore children with. Nobody takes it seriously. Nobody gives it any thought. Nobody takes it into any spiritual account. Children go on being taught and men go on believing that the “collective” is the source of all virtue, greatness, and creation. The achievements of the great men are embezzled by the collective—by becoming “national” or “social” achievements.

This is the subtlest trick of “collectivization.” The very country that opposed and martyred a genius becomes the proud author of his achievement. It starts by using his name as the proof and basis of its glory—and ends up by claiming credit for the achievement. It was not Goethe, Tchaikovsky, or the Wright brothers who were great and achieved things of genius—it was Germany, Russia, and the United States. It was “the spirit of the people,” “the rhythm of the country,” or whatever. The great man was only the robot—he “expressed the aspiration of the people,” he was “the voice of the country,” he was “the symbol of his time,” etc.

The intent in all this is single and obvious: the expropriation of the great man’s credit. After taking his life, his freedom, his happiness, his peace, and his achievement, the collective must also take his glory. The collective wants not only the gift, but the privilege of not having to say “thank you.” The collective hates the man of genius—because he is a man of genius. It wants to torture him and expects him to struggle against [the collective] —in order to bring it the gifts, without disturbing its vanity and inferiority. Then it wants to steal the gifts and the giver’s glory—so that it would not have to admit to its own filthy, petty, twisted mind that it is an inferior, a charity object, a debtor, a beggar.

(Good examples of this: the Wright brothers against the Smithsonian Institution; any country’s boasting of the great artists it martyred, such as France and Victor Hugo; the radio program’s slogan—“In a democracy art belongs to all the people”; the Soviet boast about its miserable North Pole expedition being greater than the achievements of individual enterprise, i.e., greater than the man who first discovered the North Pole, and greater than the Wright brothers who created the airplane; the “Zola” movie—where you see France putting Zola through hell for fighting against the collective France of his time, then hear it said at his funeral that Zola represented “the heart of France.” This is how the genius is made the victim of the collective’s crime and the whitewash for that crime.)

Such is the relationship between the prime mover and the collective. It has been such all through history—and it is sanctioned, demanded, expected, held to be virtuous by mankind’s moral codes and philosophies. It is against this that the prime movers go on strike in my story.

This part has to be kept in mind clearly and covered thoroughly. This is the basis of the whole story. I must decide in what way I present it—but it must be presented. (I’ll have to think over the prologue in this connection.) It is not just that the prime movers go on strike—it’s why they go on strike and against what. The “against what” must be made crystal clear—or the story is pointless.

On the basis of this beginning, the story then proceeds like this: The prime movers say to the world, in effect: “You hate us. You don’t want us. You put every obstacle in our way. Very well—we’ll stop. We won’t fight you or bother you. We’ll merely stop functioning. We’ll stop doing the things you martyr us for. And see how you like it. ”

The complete statement of the strike’s objective is: “We have had enough of your exploitation, persecution, insults, stealing, and expropriation. Go ahead and try to exist without us. We will not come back until you recognize and acknowledge the truth of the matter. Until you admit what we are, give us full credit for what we do, and give us full freedom from your chains, orders, restrictions and encroachments—physical, spiritual, political, and moral. Until you accept a philosophy that will leave us alone to function as we please. Until you take your hands off us—and keep them off. We ask nothing but the freedom to work and live as we please. You will get gifts and benefits from us such as you can never imagine. But you will not get them until you leave us alone. We are doing this in the name of all the great men whom you martyred in the past—and for the sake of all the great men you intend to martyr in the future. In the name of and for the sake of man’s greatness and man’s dignity. Once and for all, we will put an end to the torture of the best by [means of] their best—the penalizing of genius for [being] genius.”

This is the theme of the novel.

The story then shows what happens to the world when its heart stops. This point must be thought out carefully, in every detail, in every aspect. In a general way, what happens is total paralysis. Spiritually and physically. The wheels stop—and thought stops. All life, hope, and joy go with them. All energy, fire, color, imagination, enthusiasm. It is a kind of slow, creeping, progressive “rigor mortis.” Not horror and violence—but slow disintegration. Slow rot. The gray horror of dullness, stupidity, incompetence, inertia. Most particularly inertia.

Show how the world stops entirely. And when it has stopped, when the collective has destroyed itself—the world learns its lesson. The prime movers can come back.

To be thought out in detail: (1) every representative aspect of the prime mover who is martyred or stopped by society; (2) every representative aspect of the different way in which prime movers stop and go on strike—the kind of people they are and how they do it; (3) every representative aspect of the way in which the second-hander cannot function by himself and paralyzes the world. Every aspect of how and why and in what way the world has to stop without the prime movers—and does stop.

Disconnected bits:

John Galt

Dagny Taggart

Francisco d‘Anconia

James Taggart

Eddie Willers

The opening of the story proper with: “Who is John Galt?” The bum in a desolate city street at twilight. The first signs of a city’s disintegration. The “afternoon” uneasiness. The calendar on the tower. Eddie Willers thinking of the great oak stricken by lightning, hollow inside—as he comes to the great building of Taggart Transcontinental. The marvelously efficient offices—and the heart of the building, the office of James Taggart. “Don’t bother me, don’t bother me, don’t bother me,” said James Taggart.

The introduction of Dagny Taggart as she walks through the offices like a gust of fresh wind.

Dagny and Francisco d‘Anconia. “Who is John Gait?”—“Stop using that cheap figure of gutter legend!”

Dagny and the engineer who quits mysteriously.

The girl writer at the book store window: “No, it’s not in that window. It will never be in that window.” [The girl writer is the fishwife in the valley; AR initially planned a larger role for the character.]

The radio talk: “Don’t bother trying to choke it off. It can’t be done. This is John Galt speaking.... How did I do it? You could have had that secret and many, many others.”

About John Galt’s invention: “In the eighteenth century, it could have been the steam engine. In the nineteenth—the automobile. In the twentieth—the airplane. In our day—you’ll never learn.”

John Galt’s answer to the offer of planned power over the world: “Get the hell out of my way.”

The last scene: in the mountains of their valley, looking down at a wrecked road—like the roads left of the Roman Empire. A house with a roof caved in—the skeleton of an automobile with its wheels in the air—and in the distance the stubborn fire fighting the wind. John Galt said: “This is our day. The road is cleared. We’re going back.”

June 26, 1945

The key points which will have to be dramatized (in concrete events, not merely by implication and exposition):

The nature of the prime movers’ martyrdom. That must be shown. (There must be some equivalent of the prologue—some figure such as the composer—either in action or in flashback, but preferably in direct action.) This is needed not only because it is such an important point, never before covered anywhere—but also because it gives meaning to the strike itself. It is the spirit of the strike—and the justification. It is the very thing that made me want to write this novel. Without that point, the story would become merely a recital of the physical aspects of the strike, just plot events of a struggle which could not interest us very much because we are not let in on its essential purpose and motive. It would actually feature the second-handers—what happens to them, not to the strikers. The predominant emotion left by the book would be contempt, hatred, ridicule, gloating over the second-handers and their plight—but no uplift to the spirit of the strikers. The strikers would become only a kind of plot means to expose the parasites.

I must consider very carefully the statements I made in my [earlier] notes to the effect that the world is featured in the story, and the relation of society to its prime movers. There is a fine balance of theme and construction which I must achieve here. It is somewhat the same problem as in The Fountainhead: the second-handers must not be allowed to steal the show, to become the stars of the story. Even though I do not here treat of the nature of prime movers, but of their relation to society—it is still the prime movers who are to be the stars: it is still their story. The balance must be: what happens to the world without the strikers—but also, what happens to the strikers.

The general scheme, then, is: society’s crime against the prime movers—the prime movers go on strike—society collapses—the prime movers come back.

A question to decide here is: whether there should be a concrete act of repentance on the part of society, an act of acknowledgment, the issue understood once and for all—or whether the strikers win merely by default, coming back because their road is cleared. This last is what actually happens historically—but then the implication would be that once the strikers have rebuilt the world, the whole process would begin all over again. The first (the repentance) is difficult to conceive; who is to do the repenting? Are second-handers capable of such an act, of understanding and justice? This must be thought out.

[In my notes of January 1], I have the sentence “the world learns its lesson.” As a possibility, I might have a specific villain in the story who symbolized the parasites and society, who exploits the prime movers—and who repents at the end. It might be James Taggart. Or it might be several men, each representing a key aspect of society and of the parasite.

The theme stated in its simplest form: it is John Galt saying to an inefficient stenographer: “You presumptuous fool! I have no desire to work for you nor to be martyred for that privilege. You think I should and you think you can force me to. All right—try it.”

(A possible lead in thinking out the construction: the story could actually be told in the terms of one life—the personal relationship of one creator to one second-hander. Try to visualize it as that—then translate it into a social picture, by individualizing the separate key aspects of the conflict.)

Keep in mind throughout the story the realistic aspect of the fantastic theme—the actual ways in which prime movers do go on strike, though it is not a conscious, organized strike. By stressing that, keeping it as the foundation of the characters’ psychology, using it consistently for concrete cases, as illustration—I will make the story profoundly real, spiritually real. The plot device of the strike will then become only an exaggeration of that which actually happens, an emphasis for purposes of clarity and eloquence—not pure fantasy.

The two realistic ways in which prime movers go on strike are: (1) what happens to talented and exceptional men under dictatorships; and (2) how sensitive, talented people stop functioning when they are disgusted by the society around them, as at the present time here in America.

This last form of striking always happens when gifted men find themselves in a morally corrupt society. (And such a society is always collectivist, or on its way to collectivism, because morality and individualism are inseparable. The degree of individualism in a society determines the degree of its morality.) In effect, the gifted men find themselves dealing with men and conditions that they do not wish to deal with. So they do one of three things: (1) they do not function at all and become drifting, aimless bums; (2) they function in some field other than their proper one and produce only enough for their own sustenance, refusing to let the world benefit from their surplus energy; or (3) they function in their proper field but produce less than one tenth of their actual capacity—it is a strained, unhappy, forced effort for them—their natural desire and their energy demanding an outlet, in conflict with their disgust against the conditions under which their energy has to function.

Examples to keep in mind: (1) Gus Vollmer, Linda Lynneberg (?); (2) Frank [O‘Connor], Pat’s publisher (Earle Balch), Dr. Kramer and all the doctors who wish to retire if socialized medicine is passed; (3) Pat.

April 6, 1946

Questions to think out

1. The actual plot must contain emotional conflict. There is the danger of having mere action, without emotional content, if I start with the strikers already on strike. Their decision is then undrama tized, behind the scenes—and the story can become passive, like their action of just doing nothing. (Here—show that it is not easy for them to break the ties.)

2. The strikers must have something to do more than just strike. Otherwise, the parasites will carry the story by carrying the action. It still must be the strikers’ story—they must carry and motivate the plot.

For main line (plot)

The main activities of mankind.

The three attitudes [described at the end of the June 26, 1945, notes].

The steps of growth—reverse [to find] steps of disintegration (and destruction). (Stress “purposelessness” in the progressive steps of

TT’s [Taggart Transcontinental‘s] destruction.)

The specific (concrete) form of the final catastrophe. (Specific second-handers, or is it beyond that point? Beyond that point—panic and collapse.)

April 7, 1946

John Galt tells one of those who is unconsciously on strike from bitterness and disillusionment: “You think the world is essentially a mixture of good and evil, and one must compromise with the evil, and you’re sick of that, so you’re giving up the world? Nonsense. Evil, by definition (if we have made the right definition), is the impotent, the impractical, the powerless, that which does not work. So it is no threat to us, it cannot stand in our way—unless we permit it and help it to do so. It cannot poison the world for us—unless we carry the poison and spread it. The parasites cannot exploit us or rule us—unless we voluntarily agree to be exploited and hand them the tools with which to rule us. Let us withdraw the tools.

“We permit it, and we have suffered this long, for one essential reason: the generosity of the creator. It is our nature that we wish to give, prodigally, recklessly, because we know that the source—our creative energy—is inexhaustible. Being self-sufficient, we cannot conceive of dependence, so we are modest in relation to others, we never think that we are indispensable to them or superior, because we do not consider them indispensable or superior to us. We act as equals toward equals—and an exchange between equals is a proper, natural activity. We are glad to give because our creation is a discovery or embodiment of truth, and when others respond to truth we welcome their response, we are happy—not because of the good it does them, not because their approval gives us pleasure or is of any importance to us—but because their response is a victory for truth, and what we welcome is their entrance into our world, into that world which we know to be good and true.

“We see no danger in giving—we think we’re giving to men as rich as we are; we think of it as gifts, not alms. And whenever we come up against an inferior—that he is an inferior is the hardest thing for us to believe; we see the evidence and we think it is a misunderstanding or a temporary misfortune that has affected the man; then we throw ourselves to the rescue, we give, we help, we let him lean on us and bleed us, we carry him—‘why not?’ we say, we are so strong, we have so much to spare. We are incapable of conceiving of the parasite’s mind, so we can never understand him. We are incapable of hatred and malice. We will not accuse him without cause or reason—and we can’t find the cause, since we can’t understand him.

“So we become helpless and bewildered before him. We never accuse him, no matter what he does to us. He yells that we are selfish, cruel, tyrannical by reason of the very abundance and magnificence of our talents. And we almost come to believe this. ”Almost“—because no power on earth can really make us believe this; we are the men of truth, we cannot fall that far into lying; and since our talents, our creative energy, are our sacred possessions, the source of our joy in living, we cannot commit so great a sacrilege against them.

“We allow ourselves to become torn. In a vague, unstated, indefinable way, we begin to feel that we must atone for something, make amends to someone, pay someone for something in some manner. What? We don’t know. We can never know. We refuse to admit to ourselves the truth in a clear statement: that we are being damned for the best within us, and that the creature making the accusation is small, inferior, and truly evil. We are generous, and we do not pronounce such a judgment upon a fellow human being. Hatred and anger are unnatural to us; contempt for a human being is totally unnatural to us, perhaps impossible—because we think and act as if we were dealing with men, and it is not proper to despise men, we are worshippers of man, because we are men and this is the logical implication of our self-reverence. One’s opinion of mankind comes from one’s opinion of oneself, which is the only first-hand knowledge of man one can have. The man who respects himself, will carry the respect to his species, to others. The man who despises himself, with good reason, carries the contempt, the malice, the hatred, the suspicion to all humanity. We, the creators, cannot conceive of this. We are bewildered by the parasite’s malice—we do not even recognize it as malice, because we don’t really know malice.

“But so long as, for any reason, we do not recognize the truth—we are bound to fail and to suffer, in the whole sphere and in all our actions where we have left this truth unrecognized. Our generosity is a good motive? Nothing is good if it motivates lying, falsehood, or evasion. There is no morality except an unbending, absolute recognition of the truth, in relation to everything; an absolute will to find, face, and grasp the truth, to the utmost of our capacity, then to act upon it. Nothing is moral but this cold, ruthless, rational pursuit.

“But we have not faced or recognized the truth about the parasites—so we fail, we’re helpless, we’re disarmed, and they’ve got us. Did they win over us? No, we won the battle for them. They rule the world? No, we handed it over to them. The guilt is ours, but not in the way they think; in the exactly opposite way. The guilt is that we have refused to see the truth about us and about them.

“What makes a man a parasite? Nothing and no one but himself. We do not classify him as an inferior—he classifies himself. He is the only one who can. What is the specific action of doing this? The recognition by a man, stated or unstated in his mind (and I think it is usually stated), that he is the creature and the product of others, dependent upon them for the content of his soul. The negation by a man of his primary human attribute (his essential attribute, the one and only attribute that makes him human): his independent rational judgment. This is all that’s necessary; the rest—all the evils, corruptions, perversions—follow automatically.

“When a man rejects his independent rational judgment he has rejected himself as an entity, as a man, as an end in himself. Whatever happens to him from then on can be nothing but failure and tragedy; he is functioning against his own nature, he is acting against the laws of his own survival. And by the very fact that he is a man (or was born to be and can’t be anything else), some last conscious remnant of [his betrayal] makes him hate himself.

“He does not know why he has this deep conviction of his own inferiority, of his basic worthlessness, of his being essentially contemptible. He runs, by every means possible, from admitting this conviction to himself, but he knows it’s there. He says, in effect, ”I feel it.“ He ascribes every possible cause to it—his feeling of helplessness against the universe of which he knows so little, his fear of others, his envy of them, his knowledge that he’ll never be able to equal their achievements, that he doesn’t possess their talents, or that they’ll surely fail to recognize his own. All of it is evasion, beside the point, and a consequence, not a cause. He despises himself because he has willfully negated his nature as a man.

“Were he actually incapable of being an independent rational entity, there would have been no feeling of hatred, evil, misery in him from this negation; he could have no conception of what he had betrayed and no uneasiness about it; a creature cannot hate itself for being what it is. It cannot exist in perpetual pain; pain is a warning of disorder, of the improper, physically or spiritually. A creature born as a physical freak, incapable of survival, would not survive; and such time as it had, would be spent in constant pain, the warning that something is improper, the sign of the misfit in the most basic, essential sense. Man survives through his mind, i.e., his spirit. If his spirit were doomed, by its essence and nature, to constant pain, to hatred of himself, he would not survive. If it was proper for a parasite to be a parasite, if he was by nature incapable of independent rational judgment, he would be happy in that state, happy on his own terms. He would go on copying the motions and repeating the ideas of others, as his natural function, like a monkey. A monkey does not hate itself, nor those it imitates. The misery of the parasite is the proof he was not intended to be a parasite; he was not doomed to it by the cruelty of nature—he did it to himself.

“What caused him to do it? That does not matter to us too much. Fear—laziness—the desire to escape the responsibility of rationality—the belief in a malevolent universe and, from that, the conviction that if he learns the truth about the universe he will discover the evil and disasters [surrounding] him, therefore he must avoid knowledge of the truth, therefore he must get rid of his means of knowledge, i.e., his reason—the half-digested teachings of others to which he succumbed in childhood before he had begun to think, the whole vicious mess of irrationalism, altruism, and collectivism—all of that can be and is the cause of his pronouncing the verdict of parasite on himself and rejecting his nature as man. These are his reasons, but what concerns us here are the results as they affect us, the results of our relation with the parasite.”

April 10, 1946

“In what manner do we allow the parasite to rule us, and what happens when he does? He rules us by the break we allow him to make within us. We accept him as an equal, i.e., a rational being. Then we are torn by the awful spectacle of the irrational around us. We find ourselves in a world we cannot understand, we are helpless and lost. We have allowed him to create around us the kind of world he lives in, or imagines, or fears: the senseless, malevolent universe. We begin to doubt the power of the human mind, the reality or practicality of truth, the possibility of good or justice. We suspect that we might be living in an insane chaos, but that is a supposition with which we cannot exist or function. Yet we must function, that is the basic law of our nature, and so we are caught in a civil war within ourselves and we become objects of perpetual suffering, made so by that very thing which is our life source, our happiness, the moving force of man’s survival—our spiritual independence and creative energy. And when we suffer within ourselves in this essential, primary way, we cannot function at our best—and we are disarmed. The parasite has us where he wants us: functioning only enough to support him, but not enough to be happy, to be strong, to shake him off and get forever out of his reach.

“We become like the parasite in every respect save our work. That neither he nor any form of suffering nor even our own will can corrupt. That remains untouched. In the sphere of our work we remain ourselves, functioning as we should, true to our nature. But in every other sphere—in our private lives, in our relations with men and the world—we adopt the methods and convictions of the parasite, we are just what he is: torn, uncertain, self-contradictory, vicious, lying, evasive—because we’re doing the same thing, running from the truth, trying to escape from something we don’t want to face. And in such a role, we are, perhaps, more evil than the parasites—if there can be degrees in such a matter. It is then we who poison the world, we who make it evil, we who work for our own destruction. This [applies to] anyone who does not live up to his highest capacity, who betrays his own talent and makes of it his own torture rack. How have we done this? By admitting the parasite into our own soul. By allowing him to be a major concern within us.

“What happens when he rules us? The kind of vicious world you see, in which the best has been turned into a source of evil, in which competence is the source of failure, life energy is the source of destruction, and the capacity for joy is the source of the most terrible suffering. In this kind of corrupted world, the parasite can survive comfortably without reproach, he can enjoy it, he can exploit us and he can rule.

“This is what we have done. Now let us stop it.

“Withdraw the tools. Put yourself apart. Cut every spiritual connection with the parasite, every emotional tie, and every practical cooperation. Cooperation with them on their terms (those of collectivism) is not cooperation, but surrender—the voluntary offer to be beaten. Stop it. Face them for what they are. And let them learn what you are. ”

“Carry to your personal life the same principles on which you function in your creative life. All of you live on the premise of one kind of universe when you work—and of quite a different kind in every part of your existence outside of work.”

The above is the actual secret, key and definition of Roark. He was the embodiment of the perfect man acting consistently on the right moral principle. That moral principle (the mortality of independence) is most eloquently obvious in creative work, and actually in every kind of work; this is proper, since work (creation, production, achievement, purposeful activity) is man’s primary and greatest function. But the same principle applies to all of a man’s life and activities—personal, social, emotional, etc. Roark functioned consistently and consciously on that principle.

The actual case of the genius is often the tragedy of [an internal] civil war: the principles of the creator in his work, the principles of the second-hander in every other aspect of his life. Why? All the reasons Galt states above, plus the fact that no consistent morality of the creator had ever been formulated. This is what has made geniuses so tortured and so tragic, when they should have been the ecstatic representatives of humanity. The world is responsible for torturing them? Yes—but that torture would be easy to bear, if the genius had not brought upon himself the torture within. It is he who does the world’s dirty work against himself. Otherwise, the pain would go only down to a certain point—and the genius would triumph, essentially, even if locked in a jail cell. The world is responsible for the [external] torture of the genius—and as a cause or source of the much greater torture which he imposes on himself by his wrong conception of the world.

Now it is this aspect of genius which I must show—not the pure, consistent genius that Roark is—but the divided victim which most geniuses have been. John Galt is the Roark in the story, but the others are not, and it is against the exploitation by the world, particularly this spiritual exploitation, that Galt teaches them to strike.

Characters needed

John Galt—energy. Activity, competence, initiative, ingenuity, and above all intelligence. Independent rational judgment. The man who conquers nature, the man who imposes his purpose on nature. Therefore, Galt is an inventor, a practical scientist, a man who faces the material world of science as an adventurer faces an unexplored continent, or as a pioneer faced the wilderness—something to use, to conquer, to turn to his own purposes. In relation to the creators—he is the avenger. (He is “the motor of the world.”)

A man who is the most tragic victim of collectivist exploitation. He is the one who finds it so hard to break the ties. Hank Rearden—possibly a great, self-made industrialist, torn by the naivete of his own generosity.

The martyred artist. The composer (Dietrich Gerhardt, who supports his own torturers); the girl-writer. [AR replaced Gerhardt with the somewhat different character of Richard Halley.]

The great man made into a parasite in his private life (or made miserable). A man who thinks he must pay a price for selfishness.

The great man who refuses to function and is destroying himself.

Probably a minor character.

The genius who accepts anything if only he’d be left free to function.

This is Dietrich Gerhardt.

The young girl who supports a whole family (or the honest kind of tough worker like Mike). The industrialist’s secretary. The worker who fights against Taggart and for Rearden. (She understands the issue.)

The philosopher. A kind of Ortega y Gasset—vaguely. A kind of Aristotle if he came back to life today. Or even Thomas Aquinas.

The farmer. A man of action [who opposes] the parasites in the most basic, simplest terms.

Dagny’s employee. The ship owner who sank his ships rather than let them be nationalized (probably an Englishman). (Gerald Hastings) The priest. Father (medieval name), who is the last of the strikers. He withdraws the moral sanction from the world of the parasites. (He represents the last stand for pity.)

The traitor. The man in-between who has both potentialities, could go both ways, tries to see both sides, attempting a compromise. He turns out to be the one most destructive to the side of the creators, the one contributing most to the parasites—which he himself cannot stand, therefore he destroys himself. (He accomplishes James Taggart’s triumph over him.) Stan Winslow. (He is also an example of the two potentialities in the lesser man.)

The man who goes insane on the idea of charity—a kind of “Dostoyevsky.”

The average man. The actual in-between, who goes to the good in a society of producers, to the bad in a society of parasites. He can be an older executive of TT—who, at the end, realizes the horror of his position.

The man who makes a virtue of evil—who claims that his lack of conviction is a virtue, a sign of some sort of breadth of vision: “To have convictions is to wear blinders.” The damn fool confuses a view of the opinions of others with a view of reality.

The mystic of parasitism—another “Mr. Smith” of Washington.

James Taggart’s “best friend,” “pull,” and guide.

James Taggart’s wife (“the Cinderella girl”). She may be an example of the average woman going to pieces without spiritual guidance (and going through hell with J.T.).

The man corroded by envy of genius—because he knows that his miserable little achievement is swamped out by the magnificent achievement of the genius. He knows enough to recognize the difference—yet his conclusion is that the genius must be destroyed to protect him. That means, by his own definition, that the best must be destroyed for the sake of the worst. This is the monstrous kind of second-hander’s selfishness—the primary consideration here being in the others and in measuring one’s value by comparison. He considers his own talent worthless, because the talent of the genius is greater—therefore, to be best, he must destroy the genius; his standard of perfection is not absolute, but relative, he wants to do, not the best possible, but the best others will see. ([Note added later:] No.

The man who does this has no “little” achievement—whatever he has is stolen.)

This [latter] man against Galt in the final climax is a good possibility. His most revealing line: “The genius destroys the individuality of the lesser men.” (?!) (But the god-damn “lesser men” feed on the genius—and that’s why they hate him. This is the fable of the pig and the oak tree.) [In the fable, the pig uproots the oak tree to get the acorns, thus destroying his source of food.]

If the “lesser men” don’t want to imitate or follow the genius—then he can’t destroy their “individuality.” But if they do want to follow, if it’s to their advantage—then what is it that they resent? Obviously—the impression in the eyes of others. They become “followers,” not “great innovators” in the eyes of others. And what “others” does he want to fool? “Lesser men” or “geniuses”? Both, of course, and, above all, himself.

No—not quite. One type simply wants to steal; the other—this type—wants himself and others brought down. (Or are both motives intermixed?) This is the man who has a direct interest in the destruction of genius—steal their achievements, take the credit for your two cents’ worth of “improvement,” and destroy them, so nobody can challenge you. And then look for another victim.

The line-up so far:

The creators:

The parasites:

James Taggart
The industrialist’s wife
The industrialist’s mistress and other friends
A “head of the State”—on the order of Truman [President at the time
of these notes]
Businessmen on the order of Bobbs-Merrill

The in-between:

Eddie Willers (to the good)
Stan Winslow (to the bad)
The man of charity (to the very bad)

The strikers (in order of importance):

John Galt
Francisco d‘Anconia
Ragnar Danneskjöld
The philosopher
The composer
Gerald Hastings (the ship owner)

Have characters (or incidents or both) dramatize a world in which: the best has been turned into a source of evil (Danneskjöld); competence is the source of failure (the young engineer or the girl-writer); life energy is the source of destruction (Francisco d‘Anconia); the capacity for joy is the source of the most terrible suffering (the composer, the girl-writer, the industrialist).

“This is what we have done. Now let us stop it.”

Here, in effect, the pattern is this: when men refuse to live according to the principles of the good, the principles proper to them, the best among them are forced to turn against them, to become a danger, an enemy, a source of evil to them. (Because the good has been declared to be the evil.) In a proper society, Danneskjöld would have been a Columbus, the source of infinite benefit to lesser men; in a society of collectivism, he is forced to become a smuggler. Nothing will make him act against his own nature; he will rather act against mankind and all their laws. Danneskjöld doesn’t even bother to argue about it; he just acts. (This is important.)

April II, 1946

The worst victim: the industrialist (probably steel): self-made, extremely active, extremely generous, extremely naive.

His wife: a decadent society bitch—neither too beautiful, nor too rich, nor too well-born, but some of all of it. She does not need his prestige or money—her sole aim in life is to keep him down spiritually, to snub and ridicule him, destroy his every personal aspiration, humble him so that she may feel her own personal superiority through the sense of crushing a giant.

His sister: a clever, charming, and empty bitch who uses him unmercifully in every way—socially, professionally, financially—under guise of her “understanding.” Her one concern is always to make him feel that she gives him more than she receives, to keep him thinking himself “under obligation”—[she does] this by means of the “spiritual,” as against his gifts which she considers “grossly material.”

His brother: a swindling [failure] who is “ashamed of his brother” and drools that he has no chance because his brother “crushes” him. A socialist.

His mother: an empty old bag who will never let go of the pretense that her son “owes everything to his mother”—who much prefers her younger son, a worthless failure—and who makes the industrialist’s life miserable by constant demands that he “make up to his brother” for his own success.

Assorted poor relatives and friends—who “knew him when”—whose sole theme-song is: “Don’t you go high-hat on us,” and who feel that he’s betrayed “his people” by rising above them. And they use him unmercifully. To not “go high-hat on them” means to turn his soul and pocket-book over to them.

His secretary: his exact parallel on a smaller scale. As competent and honest as he is, and plagued by the same set of parasites with the same motives, though superficially different.

The scene where the [industrialist and his secretary] realize the similarity of their tragedy. This is either the final or one of the important scenes leading to both of them joining the strike.

Disconnected bits:

For Eddie Willers and the last train: “Dagny, in the name of the best within us! ...”

For Dagny’s first meeting with Galt: When she opened her eyes, she saw sunlight, green leaves and a man’s face. She thought: I know what this is. This is the world as I thought it would be when I was sixteen. Now it is beginning—and the rest of it was just somebody’s senseless joke. She smiled, as to a fellow-conspirator, in relief, in deliverance, in radiant mockery of all that she would never have to take seriously again. And the man smiled back, in exactly the same way.

(“We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?” “No, we never had to.”)

Part I—“The End”

Part II—“The Beginning” [AR planned the novel in two parts. There is no reference in her journal to a Part III until September 1952.]

Some names of chapters:

“This is John Galt Speaking”
“In the Name of the Best Within Us” (Last chapter)
“The Calendar” (First chapter)

John Galt (probably in broadcast): “I am the first man of ability who has refused to feel guilty.”

The story of the worker who remembers the factory meeting, about twelve years ago, when a slave-labor measure was [passed], and a young man got up to leave the meeting. He was an unknown young engineer. He stood alone against the hundreds, yet he made them afraid. He said: “I’m going to put an end to this, once and for all.” As he turned to go, someone asked: “How?” He answered: “I’m going to stop the motor of the world.” Then he walked out. No one’s heard of him since. The factory is long since closed. But... “You see, his name was John Galt.”

April 13, 1946

Clues and leads (from “real life”)

Philip H.—the insane malice toward me; the dependence on M., yet his desire to crush her and hold her down. (This for James Taggart and the industrialist’s wife.)

Linda L.—the teachers who refused her a scholarship she had earned and gave it to a less deserving girl “because she needed it more, while Linda could take care of herself.” This is the deliberate, specific rewarding of mediocrity and penalizing of competence. (For the policy of James Taggart and others of his kind.)

The school policy of grading papers according to [effort] and not according to an objective standard. This is the most essentially vicious and corrupt measure ever devised; it is based on the premise of “to each according to his needs” (at whose expense?) and on the denial of an objective reality, which, in effect, amounts to training children for insanity. It is a denial of the simple fact that a man’s need will not grow his food, only a man’s ability will. It is a denial of the fact that results come from causes, that the achievement (or production) of the able man will be in proportion to and the result of his ability and effort, that the equal effort of a man of lesser ability will not [result in equal] achievement regardless of how the lesser one feels about it, that this is a fact of nature—and that the lesser one had better act accordingly, rather than attempt to harness the better man to an equality which is contrary to nature, reality and justice. (To carry out such an attempt the inferior man must accept the principle of slavery, with himself as master and the better man as slave. What is rewarded here? Incompetence. This is pure moral corruption.) This method is the total triumph of the irrational.

Walter [Abbott]—the sensitive, poetic kind of writer who spends his time writing bloody thrillers; he thinks this is all he has a chance at. That is his form of being on strike.

Pat—a person wrecked by a fierce sense of injustice, which she has never analyzed or defined as such. Knowing that she is right and that right must be recognized, yet getting no recognition, she has turned to a violent hatred of the world, to an exaggerated pride, to assuring herself too much that she is not hurt by the world—in order not to admit how badly hurt she is. And this is because she will not examine the exact nature of the reasons and motives of those who have hurt her. Also, she has turned to an insane arbitrariness—“I am right because I’m right”—since she has given up the hope of proving rightness in rational terms and having it understood or recognized. (In her particular case, the acceptance of the irrational has a great deal to do with this and with her failure. But that aspect does not concern me here, except to note an interesting question: did she accept the irrational early, because of observing what seemed to be the failure of the rational in the world, and being afraid to face such a universe—or did she accept the irrational first, through some personal fear or feeling of shortcoming, and this destroyed her whole proper life, which should have been that of a great rational thinker? I believe this last.)

The above arbitrariness has turned to hurting those whom she likes, by some peculiar multiple-inversion, like this: the irrational people have hurt her; the rational are the ones whom she needs and likes, the ones who speak her language and with whom she can deal; but she is fiercely determined to avenge herself; she knows that she cannot reach her enemies, the irrational ones, by her proper weapon, the mind; so she turns upon her friends, upon the rational ones, wreaking upon them the very thing she should hate, the thing which has hurt her—the irrational.

This is a frightening kind of “collective judgment,” of revenge against the world—taking the world as a whole and trying to avenge oneself against its best for what has been done by its worst. It denies the whole conception of individual guilt and individual responsibility. One might say that this is extreme individualism—holding oneself alone against the world as a solid outside unit. But the error here is in considering the world as a “solid unit,” in denying individualism as a basic absolute of man’s nature, in actually considering the world as a collective, with collectivism as the natural law of the universe, and oneself as a noble but doomed outsider, a freak, a kind of Byronic damned, who is damned heroically because he will not accept reality which is evil. (Pat has hinted just that.) This is the same mistake as thinking that an individualist is a man who recognizes only his own rights. An individualist must recognize man as an individualist.

I am not sure I want to use this—it belongs in the novel about the mind. [AR thought of writing a novel showing the primacy of reason over emotions, but it eventually became obvious that this theme was included in Atlas Shrugged.] I might use only the first part, the terrible bitterness created by injustice; not the second part, not the revenge through the irrational.

Frank Lloyd Wright—a man who is a Roark in his professional life, and a Keating in his private life. How does one get to that? Strangely enough, in this case: a lack of self-confidence, personal uncertainty. It seems as if all forms of conceit are sure signs of the exact opposite. Whatever one chooses to express, or achieve, through social means is the denial of that very thing within oneself. If the method is that of the second-hander, this negation is unavoidable. For instance, to make a point of impressing one’s superiority upon others is to attach importance to their recognition of one’s superiority; if one attaches importance to it, one needs it. Why does one need it? Either as confirmation or as proof of one’s own greatness; therefore, one’s own conviction of that greatness is either uncertain or totally lacking. If one merely wished to find the understanding and appreciation of friends, one would not exhibit conceit toward them, nor stress one’s superiority. One can’t wish to have inferiors as friends; nor is the appreciation of inferiors of any sensible value. Therefore, conceit exhibited toward people can only mean a desire to establish superiority by comparison; if so, the primary determinant of superiority is not in oneself, but in others, not in what one can do, but in what they can’t do; therefore, one’s conviction of superiority has no real basis, no objective standards, no proof, no reality.

Apparently, FLW was hurt and frightened early in life by the hostility and stupidity of people toward his work. Then here was where the principle of collectivism entered: if people stood in the way of his work, it was people that he had to conquer to break his way through. Therefore, people became a crucial objective—and an enemy. On the one hand, he became extremely concerned to win them, to impress them, to get their recognition. On the other, since they are the enemy, he became convinced that he must deal with them on their own terms—through deceit, lying, flattery and rudeness, high-pressure, etc. He concluded that the terms applying to his work—honesty, beauty, intelligence, purposeful clarity, courage, directness—all of that could not apply to his dealings with people, since they were the enemies of his work whom he had to defeat. This is granting a crucial or decisive power to others, actually granting them superiority, at least in what he thinks are the regrettable practical matters, by adopting their terms and methods. (If one must deal with the collective—deal on your own terms, not on theirs. You’ve accepted the supremacy of the collective and defeated yourself when you accept their terms.)

Here there is a basic misunderstanding of the nature of individualism and of the rational. First, people do not hold the decisive power over you, no matter what they do or how you have to deal with them. Second, you can’t expect to achieve anything through cheating—you only get what you asked for, a fake something that doesn’t actually exist. (This might explain FLW’s [constant] trouble with clients. Sure, he lies or flatters them into giving him the commission. Then he pays for it by cases such as Aline Barnsdall, or all the abandoned and rushed buildings. Those clients who lasted as a proper source of satisfaction to him were not snared by lies, but by whatever honest argument appealed to the best, the honest or the intelligent within them.)

Most importantly and profoundly, there is again a misunderstanding and fear of the rational. He does not know that his own judgment—exercised to the extreme of his capacity and honesty—is the only criterion of the rational upon which he can act, possible errors included. He does not know that the number of others has nothing to do with the truth of an issue. He sees the majority disagreeing with him about his work. He presumes that they are rational beings, like himself, with rational reasons for their opinions. But nothing on earth will make him change his convictions about his work (and rightly so). Then what happens? He can say one of three things: “to hell with my own convictions”—“to hell with the collective”—or “to hell with reason” (because it is reason that tells him the dilemma is unsolvable, contradictory, and he must take a stand). He says: “To hell with reason” (as most of them do). Note how often he makes cracks at reason-the stuff about the sunrise not being logical—yet how everything about his work is based on reason, on function, on purpose.

In the clash between a man and the collective, the loser is reason (for most men). A man cannot give up himself—and he dreads to give up the collective, because he doesn’t understand it. So he thinks the safe thing is to give up reason; then the dilemma is not irreconcilable—then nothing is irreconcilable, since nothing has to be logical or make any kind of precise sense. (Then the world can dissolve into a kind of haze of overlapping shadows without edges or definitions. And it does.) Actually, of all three choices, giving up reason is the most dreadful and the most fatal. It amounts to giving up all three, and everything: all of life, the whole universe (or the ability to recognize the existence of a universe). The first choice is impossible (to give up oneself). This third choice is monstrous and impossible; but it takes a long time to work out its implications, particularly since no man can actually function on such a choice, since he remains rational to the extent that he exists at all, since he only lapses into the irrational occasionally, when he needs escape—and so it is a poison that works slowly, in a prolonged agony. Only the second choice (to give up the collective) is possible—and moral.

(The above is more [relevant] for my novel about the mind.)

Also, FLW is playing at living in the kind of world he would like—the effective, dramatic world. But he won’t admit to himself that it’s only playing. He wants other men to live up to his buildings—to the kind of existence his buildings are intended for (and which, incidentally, he has never defined). He thinks this is up to other people, or depends on them, or he can force them into it. He doesn’t realize that none of it is real—since it is forced on people through their acceptance of his superiority (and since there is no conscious rational grasp of it in those people, hence no actual reality as far as they’re concerned). Inferiors do not lead a heroic life, nor do they actually contribute anything to the hero. How can they? So his version of the beautiful, dramatic life becomes a show to impress those he despises—the vicious circle of second-handedness. [...]

His desire to be “god” or the representation of some sort of universal force is, of course, the desire to be something more than himself. He does not consider it enough to be a great man. This is also, perhaps, the desire to impose himself upon others in a way that the rational terms of man’s equality will not permit: to be an authority, not by reason of achievement or rational proof, but just to be an authority: “It’s so because I say it’s so.” Again, the dreadful desire for arbitrary power over others. Isn’t the root of that the knowledge or fear that he could not prove or defend all his convictions in rational terms and on rational grounds? (Pat does the same, too.)

All of this leads only to evil, failure, and suffering. While hating people, using and cheating them—he has become completely dependent upon them, constantly begging them for admiration or attention. Trying to make them the means to achieve his world, he ended by living completely in their world, in its worst aspect pretense and deceit. This is an example of the fact that ruling others is still living for and through others, still collectivism. He tried to use the collective—he has become completely dependent upon it.

(The worst part of it is the spectacle of a great man constantly begging others: “Please show me how great a man I am!” It almost amounts to: “Please prove it to me!”)

The girl reader—a horrible creature—homely, sloppy, physically dirty and unfeminine, unintelligent and inefficient—a person with no single grace to recommend her, but with an insidious bitterness and malice toward the world. She declared smugly that of course she is just a product and creature of her background, of her family, of her race, class, etc.—and of whatever “ideas” she has absorbed from others. She admits her own inferiority, pronounces it a virtue; she sneers at the possibility of anyone being better, regarding anyone’s claim to independence as a presumption and a delusion—since she has decided that it is a delusion in her case.

Nellie Berns—when she said it’s right that she should be compelled to pay for her own social security, by force and law; it’s better for her, since she’d never have the character to save or provide for her future voluntarily. This is an admission of weakness and, again, the attaching of one’s own sin to the rest of the world. Like this: I deserve to be pushed into line by means of a whip—therefore it’s all right for others to be whipped, too, whether they deserve it or not. I need to be led on a leash—therefore, let’s put others on a leash, too.

The publicity boy who—being a weak, hysterical, touchy kind of failure, the kind who never really made an effort toward anything—criticizes men like Henry Ford and other industrialists of the great school, calls them stupid, considers their success undeserved and in some way expropriated from him, and feels that men like Ford should be controlled by men like him.

I. L. [Ivan Lebedeff]—[a type] that is rather frightening—[he has] the idea that the man of whom he takes advantage must not only help him, but also pretend that no advantage is being taken in order to spare his feelings. This is a case where a man acts like a parasite, but does not want to pay for it even to the extent of admitting that that’s what he is, and expects the man he exploits to keep up the pretense for his sake. He denies reality—and expects his victim to deny it, too. He wants to do evil—he knows that it’s evil—without paying the price of admitting that it’s evil and of having others know it. This is a “compound second-handedness”: not merely accepting the judgment of others to estimate his own action, but knowing the nature of his action, expecting others to fake their judgment of it, and then feeling free to accept this faked judgment and to be absolved and vindicated by it. This is an extremely important point—it has a place in every variation of second-handedness, in every second-hander’s soul. This is for the priest—it shows how he helps to perpetuate evil, the evil he thinks he’s fighting.

General Direction for Plot

Two main lines to follow for the key events of the plot:

The progressive paralysis of the world, the growing disintegration—each time because independent thinking, initiative, originality, fresh judgment were lacking; each time through the cowardly, senseless, automatic repetition of a routine that no longer applies. (This in connection with TT and those businesses that need it or that it needs. TT is acting here as the blood vessels of the world—and we see what happens when the heart is no longer pumping.)

The progressive disappearance of the prime movers. As the paralysis grows, they vanish, adding to it. This ties in with the first line—in each specific key case there is a prime-mover involved, who is either disregarded, or hampered, or refuses to make the crucial step and leaves the parasites to their natural fate.

John Galt must [embody] that which is lacking in the lives of all the strikers. It is he who specifically (in events essential to and proceeding from his nature) solves their personal stories, fills the lack, gives them the answer.

Here, then, I must decide who are the key strikers of the story and what is their relation to Galt. What they need, what he supplies, in what events this takes shape. (“The man innocent of all sense of guilt.”) Most particularly: what does he give to Dagny?

The climax must be an event that shows the breakdown of the world. It will be the end of TT—but there must be a specific event that finishes off Taggart and all those connected with TT. This event must be based on and tied to the last major striker—the one who held out the longest, whose tie was hardest to break, but broke at last. (It would be best if this were Dagny.) In connection with this, start by asking yourself: which, of all their ties and reasons, is the most excusable and the hardest to break?

(The men who are “mixed” on the problem realize, as the story progresses, that they must take a stand.)

What does Galt do, once he enters the story? Is there no conflict for him? (This should be Dagny.)

April 14, 1946

To think out:

Dagny’s motive. (What makes her tick?)

Galt’s conflict, if any? (In connection with above.)

Representative strikers.

Representative parasites. In what exact way do parasites perish when left on their own? (Representative aspects of this—and from that, the characters needed and the events.)

The genius-envier as a possible connecting link from Galt’s beginning to the climax.

Representative businesses—the key activities of mankind. (And how they are connected with TT.)

For Dagny

Three lines of approach:

Her hunger for her own kind of world. She works so fiercely because she knows she can have her world only by creating it—but she makes mistakes about people. (Her consequent bitterness.)

Her attempt (or desire) to be “the spark of initiative and the bearer of responsibility for a whole collective.”

Her conflict (it must be concrete, emotional, dramatized, personalized).

April 17, 1946

Note: The creators work silently, their contribution unknown and their principles unstated, while the parasites climb to the forefront on stolen achievements (by concentrating on the social, second-hand sphere of activity, and therefore getting the publicity and the credit). [The parasites] preach their principles to the world, thus making these principles the stated or public policy of mankind. Example: the real, competent businessman who [said] that a Peter Keating could not be successful in the business world, that this is not how business success is made; while every parasite screams that Keating is the practical man, that any kind of success is made only by the Keating methods, that his technique is realistic and necessary, and that the world forces us to adopt his method. The question here is: what world? The world of the parasite, the world which he imagines and according to the principles of which he functions. But that world (like the parasite) is a surface sham, an illusion, a mildew on the real world, made possible only by the real world, by its silent, active creators who support the surface mildew and have no time to protest.

Of course, there are more parasites than creators—so the parasites’ creed is the one heard most often and spread most widely. Plus the fact that the creators do not talk at all. The terrible thing here is the influence this creed has on an “in-between,” average young man who starts out in life open-minded, with no particular convictions, and is taught at once that idealism (or any kind of sincerity) is impossible and impractical, that the world belongs to the Peter Keatings and he had better act accordingly. If he’s not strong and independent enough to rebel against this teaching, he goes the way of all parasites—and a potentially decent, average man is turned into another scoundrel, his best potentialities are killed, his worse brought out and encouraged.

[Further,] the creators themselves are left in a kind of bewildered muddle. They cannot accept the idea that the world is made and moved by the Peter Keatings—they know better—but they come to believe, with a kind of helpless, unanalyzed bitterness, that they themselves are freaks or martyrs, that they must go on functioning in a hostile, vicious world unsuited to them. Well, the world they see is vicious, but it’s neither real nor essential nor necessary—it is permitted only by their own inattention, indifference, or lack of understanding of it and of themselves. They can shake it off—like a nightmare—any time they wish, if they understand their own nature, function and place in the world, if they accept their proper morality, declare it to all men and then act upon it. Let them awaken. (This is what John Galt tells them.)

The man who thinks that the world demands corruption is the man who is corrupting the world. And note that he places his prime motive in others; they demand corruption, he claims, and he has no choice but to accept their methods and live on their terms. This is an eloquent demonstration of the viciousness, the moral corruption, brought about by second-handers.

Make a point to stress the fact that creators function in silence—both their work and their creed unknown.

Here, tell the creators that they are really functioning on my morality and are afraid to admit it. It’s time they admitted it. (It’s never been stated for them. But now it’s stated.)

(No great man ever says that success is made through fraud; every small man says that. A man’s idea of what makes success defines the nature of the man.)

The creator’s greatest tie to the world is the fact that he will not surrender the world to the parasites. He realizes that it is his proper function to shape the world to his wishes. And he struggles to do it no matter what obstacles the parasites put in his way. But by tolerating them or compromising by accepting their terms, he succeeds only in creating their world—or in keeping it going.

April 18, 1946

General theme in regard to the creators: the creators cannot work or live against their own principles. They only achieve their own destruction and the destruction of everything dearest and most important to them, including their work. This is their error and the cause of their tragedy. This is what they must stop—by defining, understanding, and accepting their proper principles. (They usually try to pay the price in their private lives. They say, in effect: “I am evil in my selfishness—I’ll pay for it in my [private] life. I’ll accept my suffering—but I’ll go on working and being selfish about my work.”)

If Dagny is the leading figure and carries the story, then the climax must be the destruction of TT (and almost the destruction of John Galt) by her attempt to deal with the parasites.

(Galt’s ultimatum: “Do not function on the collectivist-altruist premise.”)

The question here is: In what specific way and for what excusable reason does she refuse to accept the right philosophy? (Not stupidity, but a legitimate inner conflict.)

In real life, the creators stop functioning in a collectivist society—but they do it either as victims, forced to stop, or in helpless pessimism, simply believing that collectivism is natural, the law of the universe, and that the universe is evil and they are hopeless, doomed rebels against it. Galt makes them go on strike as a conscious, deliberate protest, with full knowledge of their being in the right; [they] thus demonstrate to themselves and to the parasites their function, their power in the world, and the true nature of the universe.

(As a possibility: flashbacks (e.g., Dagny or Eddie reading about it) of what had been, in effect, the strike of the creators in the past, throughout history.)

Two aspects of the theme (to keep integrated):

1. What happens to the world without the creators.

2. Why the creators go on strike (against what). This shows the manner of their exploitation by the world. Here there are two aspects: (1) material exploitation—by stealing and expropriating their achievements (Dagny); (2) spiritual exploitation—by what is done to the creators inside their souls (the industrialist). This last is made possible by the creators accepting the altruist-collectivist philosophy. They must reject this philosophy—and refuse to give to the world. (Then the world sees what happens to it, and whether it can force the gifts it needs out of the givers.)

The actual form of relationship between men is as follows: in an exchange between two men of equal ability (two creators), the exchange is even; in an exchange between a man of greater ability and a man of lesser ability (a creator and an average man), the lesser one actually receives much more than he gives—and it’s all right if he leaves the creator alone; the creator doesn’t rob or sacrifice himself, it’s only that his ability and his contribution are so great.

As an example: a good, able engineer is needed by a railroad to drive a train engine, and if he works to the best of his ability he makes an honest contribution and he earns the salary which the head of the railroad pays him; it’s not charity, it’s his, he’s earned it, he’s produced its equivalent in value. But he has earned it because the genius [who runs] the railroad has created an industry in which the engineer’s native ability can earn much more than it could on its own. The exchange of wages and services between the two men is fair. But the capacity of one has made the capacity of the other greater. If left on his own entirely, the engineer would not produce the equivalent (in comforts or advantages or consumption for himself) of what he produces with the help of the superior capacity of the head genius. (When the head of a company is not a genius, but inferior to his employees, something else happens. In a free society, it will not happen for long. To make it stick, compulsion is necessary. This is the case of James Taggart.)

The relationship works like this: a great, cooperative enterprise of many men is like a pyramid, with the single best brain on top, and then [at lower levels] the ability required is less and the number of men in that category is greater. Even though each man (assuming all work to the best of their ability) earns his living by his own effort and his wages represent his own, legitimate contribution—each has the advantage of all the strata above him, which contribute to the productive capacity of his own energy and raise that capacity (without diminishing their own); each man of lesser ability receives something extra from the men of greater ability above him; while the man at the top (the genius, the originator, the creator) receives nothing extra from all those under him, yet contributes to the whole pyramid (by the nature of his [work]). Now this is the creative over-abundance of the genius, this is the pattern of how he carries mankind, properly and without self-sacrifice, when left free to assume his natural course and function.

(What does the genius want for this? Just “Thank you.”)

As a parallel example: it’s the same process as when a worker makes a hundred pairs of shoes a day with the help of a machine. He gets paid on the basis of having produced a hundred pairs of shoes (the share of the factory owner, inventor, etc., being taken out); but left on his own (without the machine, the management, etc.) he would be able to produce, say, only ten pairs of shoes a day. His productive capacity has been raised by the inventor of the machine. Yet neither of the two men robs the other one; it’s a fair exchange; but the worker gives to the inventor less than the inventor has given to him.

A similar relationship and process takes place in the spiritual or intellectual realm among the better and lesser thinkers of the world. All production comes from and is based on first-hand, independent thought. The man who contributes to the world a new thought (whether in invention, philosophy, art, or in any human activity) has made an invaluable contribution, for which no material returns are ever quite an equivalent. And when men deal through free exchange, no matter what fortune a man makes on his new thought, he has still given to other men more than he has received from them.

In connection with this: my idea about an exchange between a writer and a composer; the fact that each reader of a book (or listener to a symphony) gets the whole of a tremendous value, for very little in return; each gets the whole, without diminishing it (and this is not just a matter of “mass production”—there can be only one book in existence and it can make the rounds of millions of men, and this still holds true). This has to do with the nature of an intellectual creation.

To be exchangeable among men, a creation has to be put into a material shape—and only that material shape is exchangeable (through a material medium of exchange, like money). The spiritual is non-exchangeable. Is it collective? Quite the opposite; it is completely individual, and not subject to exchange. A man who reads my book can get out of it only what he is able to get; I can give him nothing more; and he can give me nothing in exchange; he can give me appreciation and understanding, which are of value to me as a person, but he can give me nothing to help me with that book, or with the next one; my contribution has to be made by me alone, and those who want it, take it, for whatever they can get out of it. I do not write it for them; they do not read it for me. What I can get out of a book spiritually, I get it by writing it. When I give it to others, it’s a gift (but without defrauding or sacrificing myself), it’s the extra, I can get nothing in return spiritually, it can’t be an exchange. (The same pattern applies to me when I listen to a symphony—with me the receiver and the composer the giver.)

I can sell a story when I have put it into a material form, the form of a book. And all I actually sell is the material book—say, for three dollars. The actual content of it, the story, cannot be sold or exchanged.

A composer can sell music sheets of his symphony, or records, or performance rights (in this last case, the orchestra, instruments and players are the material form). He cannot sell the content as such—the music.

An inventor sells the physical machine he has devised (or the right to use his idea by putting it into a physical shape or machine). He cannot sell the idea.

A philosopher or theoretical scientist can only sell the book in which he presents the new knowledge he has discovered. He cannot sell the knowledge.

In economics, the realm of material exchange, collectivists demand that a man give his idea as well as its physical consequences or manifestations, keeping none of it for himself. He can’t get any spiritual payment for his creation—and he is expected to renounce even the physical payment. The physical objects of exchange among men come from someone’s ideas, but all men are expected to share in them equally—which [implies] a complete denial of the source of physical wealth and of the rights of its creators. The creators, then, keep the others going for nothing—receiving neither spiritual nor physical reward. And the parasites get the material benefits for nothing, for the mere fact of being parasites—and enslave the creator, besides.

Since the creator needs the material world in order to embody his idea and in order to exist, he is denied the means of creation and of existence by those who could not have these means and could not exist without him.

But in a society of free exchange, the creator gets his fair material reward (by voluntary exchange)—and the rest of mankind gets his idea as a priceless gift.

The spiritual (the realm of consciousness) is the completely individual—indivisible and unsharable. (I do not divide my book among many men, nor do I give it to all men as a collective, to enjoy together, collectively. It is one single book, and it is given individually to single men—those who want it or can get anything out of it.)

The spiritual can be given indefinitely, without diminishing the creator’s wealth, because its value depends upon each individual recipient, his spirit, and what his spirit can do with the idea. This is individualism again. The recipient has to have the spirit with which to make use of the idea. Still, the idea remains the great gift.

It may be said that a spiritual exchange would be this: I receive all the great inventions, great thinking, great art of the past; in exchange, I create a new philosophy or a new novel. But this is more poetic than exact; there is no direct exchange; there is no way to measure one against the other. [...] I do not give anything to the actual source of the gifts I received—to the great creators of the past, each as an individual. I pay the debt to mankind? Why should mankind collect that debt? “Mankind” as a species is only an abstraction. The men living today are not the great individuals of the past, to whom I may say I am indebted; the men of today did not create these great gifts; mankind did not; the gifts were created by specific men, individuals, not by an abstraction; and the pinkish stenographer who may get a copy of my book from the library (and who may hate it) is not a substitute for Aristotle (nor the proper heir to collect his debts).

Re: Economics. Since the material proceeds from the spiritual, production from ideas, men must conduct their material existence and their productive activities according to the principles of their source—the principles of the spiritual realm, of man’s free, rational thinking. To preserve the effect, one must preserve the cause; to have a river, one must keep free and open the “fountainhead,” the source which produces the water. If one attempts to manage the cause by the rules applicable only to the effect (and actually not applicable [even to the effect]), one stops the cause. If one uses the water in the river as the spring gives it, one has both river and spring. If one attempts to regulate the spring by rules derived from considerations of the river without thought of its source, one loses both spring and river. Another example of the collectivist-altruist reversal of cause and effect, of the primary and the secondary.

James Taggart

He tries to make his able employees feel that they are dependent upon him, that he does them a favor by giving them a job. He loses all his good employees that way (among other reasons). He doesn’t do that with the incompetent ones, whom he prefers and encourages; in fact, he is “a friend of the workers,” he likes to stress his dependence upon them and yelps a lot about “team work.” He tries to crush the individual—and fawns over the collective. He tries “to keep in his place” any man on whom he knows himself to be dependent.

Dagny Taggart

Her error—and the cause of her refusal to join the strike—is over-optimism and over-confidence (particularly this last).

Her over-optimism is in thinking that men are better than they are; she doesn’t really understand them and is generous about it.

Her over-confidence is in thinking that she can do more than an individual actually can; she thinks she can run a railroad (or the world) single-handed, she can make people do what she wants or needs, what is right, by the sheer force of her own talent, not by forcing them, not by enslaving them and giving orders—but by the sheer over-abundance of her own energy; she will show them how, she can teach them and persuade them, she is so able that they’ll catch it from her. (This is still faith in their rationality, in the omnipotence of reason. The mistake? Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.)

On these two points, Dagny is committing an important (but excusable and understandable) error in thinking, the kind of error individualists and creators often make. It is an error proceeding from the best in their nature and from a proper principle, but this principle is misapplied (through lack of understanding of others and of their own relations with others). This is excusable, since it is their nature not to be too concerned with others, therefore not to understand them, particularly when the creators are unsocial by nature, and also could not possibly understand the psychology of a parasite, nor wish to bother wondering about it.

The error is this: it is proper for a creator to be optimistic, in the deepest, most basic sense, since the creator believes in a benevolent universe and functions on that premise. But it is an error to extend that optimism to other specific men. First, it’s not necessary, the creator’s life and the nature of the universe do not require it, his life does not depend on others. Second, man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it’s up to him to decide by his own reasoning mind which he wants to be; the decision will affect only him; it is not (and should not be) the primary concern of any other human being. Therefore, while a creator does and must worship Man (which is reverence for his own highest potentiality), he must not make the mistake of thinking that this means the necessity to worship Mankind (as a collective); these are two entirely different conceptions with diametrically opposed consequences. Man, at his highest potentiality, is realized and fulfilled with each creator himself, and within such other men as he finds around him who live up to that idea. This is all that’s necessary.

Whether the creator is alone, or finds only a handful of others like him, or is among the majority of mankind, is of no importance or consequence whatever; numbers have nothing to do with it; he alone or he and a few others like him are mankind, in the proper sense of being the proof of what man actually is, man at his best, the essential man, man at his highest possibility. (The rational being who acts according to his nature.)

It should not matter to a creator whether anyone or a million or all the men around him fall short of the ideal of Man; let him live up to that ideal himself; this is all the “optimism” about Man that he needs. But this is a hard and subtle thing to realize—and it would be natural for Dagny always to make the mistake of believing others are better than they really are (or will become better, or she will teach them to become better) and to be tied to the world by that hope.

It is proper for a creator to have an unlimited confidence in himself and his ability, to feel certain that he can get anything he wishes out of life, that he can accomplish anything he decides to accomplish, and that it’s up to him to do it. (He feels it because he knows that his reason is a [powerful] tool—so long as he remains in the realm of reason, i.e., reality, and thus does not desire or attempt the impossible, the irrational, the unreal.) But he must be careful to define his proper sphere of desires or accomplishments, and not to undertake that which is contrary to the premise of independence and individualism on which he functions. This means not venturing into second-handedness (which will end in certain failure).

Here is what he must keep clearly in mind: it is true that a creator can accomplish anything he wishes—if he functions according to the nature of man, the universe, and his own proper morality, i.e., if he does not place his wish primarily within others and does not attempt or desire anything that is of a collective nature, anything that concerns others primarily or requires primarily the exercise of the will of others. (This would be an immoral desire or attempt, contrary to his nature as a creator.) If he attempts that, he is out of a creator’s province and in that of the collectivist and the second-hander. Therefore, he must never feel confident that he can do anything whatever to, by or through others. He must not think that he can simply carry others or somehow transfer his energy and his intelligence to them and make them fit for his purposes in that way.

He must face other men as they are (recognizing them as essentially independent entities, by nature, and beyond his primary influence), deal with them only on his own, independent terms, and deal only with such others as he judges can fit his purpose or live up to his standards (by themselves and of their own will, independently of him). He must not deal with the others-and if he does, he must not fool himself about them, nor about his own power to change them.

Now, in Dagny’s case, her desperate desire is to run TT. She sees that there are no men suited to her purpose around her, no men of ability, independence, and competence. She thinks she can run it with incompetents and parasites, either by training them or merely by treating them as robots who will take her orders and function without personal initiative or responsibility, while she, in effect, is the spark of initiative, the bearer of responsibility for a whole collective. This can’t be done. This is her crucial error. This is where she fails.

But both these errors—of over-optimism and over-confidence—are excusable and understandable, because they proceed from a creator’s nature and virtues, because they proceed from strength and courage, not from weakness and fear.

Note (for Dagny or any executive): cooperation is possible only on terms of equality, i.e., between ability and ability (though one man’s ability may be greater than another’s), not between ability and incompetence, nor between intelligence and stupidity. Cooperation must be between equals in kind, who might differ in degree—but it can’t be between opposite kinds. Cooperation is possible only among independent men, by free, voluntary, rational agreement to mutual advantage, each being concerned primarily with his own personal benefit, and being concerned with the benefit of the other only to the extent of not making himself a parasite, not getting something from the other for which he gives nothing in return.

But you wish to do something involving a great number of men, like running a railroad? It can’t be done, except on the above terms of cooperation between rational, independent individuals. If you can’t find them—don’t wish to do it; hold your work to the “non-social” scale (that’s all your work actually is, anyway); you can’t force the ability of others; let the scale of your work develop naturally, without your participation or concern; if it doesn‘t, it means that you’re living in a world where it can’t—a collectivized world.

April 19, 1946

Dagny is an example of the material exploitation of the creator, in the sense that her life in the world, with others, is made miserable—but she is not touched inside. They use her only in the sense of expropriating the material benefits which are the result of her ability, and robbing her of credit for it. She has to give up (in effect, not quite knowing it) all hope of a real world of her own kind, and live alone in her own world, seeing its expression only in her work.

The industrialist is an example of the spiritual exploitation of the creator—exploitation within his soul, by his acceptance of the altruist-collectivist philosophy, therefore his feeling of guilt, therefore his spiritual unhappiness. (This, probably, is also the case of the composer, or some other of the martyred artists.)

The main, concrete dramatization of the methods and forms of how the world exploits the creators must be in the lives of Dagny and the industrialist.

Dagny, who is considered so hard, cold, heartless and domineering, is actually the most emotional, passionate, tender and gay-hearted person of all—but only Galt can bring it out. Her other side is what the world forces on her or deserves from her.

The plot line—the collapse of TT (and of the world).

The emotional line—Dagny’s quest for John Galt.

The philosophical line—Dagny vs. James Taggart (or John Galt vs. James Taggart).

April 20, 1946

The line for Dagny:

A disappointing attempt at a romance at the age of eighteen.

The railroad worker. (?)

Stan Winslow. (?)

[Added later:] Hank Rearden.

John Galt.

She goes on strike as soon as she finds [Galt] in the subway. She quits TT and moves to live with Galt in his garret. (The greatest scientist and the ablest woman in the world are a subway guard and a housewife in a garret.)

James Taggart finds her there. She breaks down once—by coming back to give advice in an emergency, to run the railroad, almost in spite of herself.

James Taggart gets Galt through Dagny (using Galt’s love for her in some way—[perhaps] through threat).

Dagny saves Galt (probably with Francisco d‘Anconia and Ragnar Danneskjöld).

Dagny cries in the subway because she remembers Galt’s lines: “We hold, in the world, the jobs which the world wishes us to hold.” (The world of the parasites doesn’t know or admit that its place for a genius is the job of a subway guard—but that is what the parasite’s philosophy implies—so the strikers are living up to it, by way of a demonstration and a lesson.)

The gradual desertions:

John Galt, Francisco d‘Anconia, and Ragnar Danneskjöld are the charter members of the strike.

Show them in action, withdrawing the creators from society, “stopping the motor of the world”—particularly Galt doing it.

The strikers who have stopped by the time the story opens are (in addition to the three leaders): the philosopher, the missing millionaire, the ship owner.

The strikers who will stop as the story progresses: the composer, the young engineer, the girl writer, the secretary, the industrialist, Dagny Taggart, and last—the priest.

(Also show the incidents when the help of the missing strikers would have saved the situation—but they’re not there; only the James Taggarts are.)

April 23, 1946

Outline: The Strike Part I: The End

[A restatement of the first scene, already given in her January 1945 notes, then:]

Introduction of the issue which is threatening TT. (“Who is John Galt?” said again—the connotations made clearer.)

Introduction of Dagny Taggart. The gush of fresh wind in the offices. (?) Or: The girl in a tan coat on the train.

Gerald Hastings (under an undistinguished British name) working as a bookkeeper in the offices of TT. (Somewhere, here or probably later—the story of Hastings’ scuttled fleet.)

Introduction of Hank Rearden and Rearden Steel. His wife, his mistress, his son, his secretary. He is Dagny’s only real friend—their mutual understanding.

The issue threatening TT ends with a huge loss and discovery that it was brought about deliberately by Francisco d‘Anconia. (D’Anconia Copper of Argentina.)

Dagny’s meeting with d‘Anconia—and whatever revenge or retaliation she attempts. Their “reluctant friendship.” (“Oh well, who is John Galt?” “Stop using that cheap figure of gutter legend!”)

The composer who quits—this in connection with Dagny’s love for his music. (Here we give Dagny’s past—the disappointing romance at eighteen.)

Plant the stories of the philosopher who quit, the missing millionaire who vanished, and Ragnar Danneskjöld, the smuggler. Also the “replacers” of the composer and of the philosopher. Here—the influence of philosophy on people like Mrs. Rearden, her son, etc.—and on “the man of pity.”

Father Amadeus.

Dagny and the girl-writer.

Dagny and the talented engineer who quits.

Dagny’s decision (as a consequence of the d‘Anconia disaster) to get supplies from Ragnar Danneskjöld. James Taggart’s horrified protests. D’Anconia arranges Dagny’s meeting with Danneskjöld—at night, on the coast of Maine. (The friendship of the two men. Danneskjöld’s antagonism to Dagny. “It’s a rotten joke, Francisco.” “We each have our fun in our own way.” Then: “I wanted Miss Taggart to learn a lesson.” “She won’t learn it.” “No—not yet.”)

Dagny and the disappointing attempt of a weakling at a romance with her. The railroad wreck—her night of work—her first affair, with the railroad worker. The bitter morning after.

Dagny and the discovery that her bookkeeper is Gerald Hastings. His refusal of a better job. She saves him from the police.

Dagny and Stan Winslow. Their romance. Their struggle against James Taggart [and the other parasites].

(Throughout—the John Galt legends.)

The girl-writer and the stranger at the window. She quits.

Dagny sees the talented engineer at an employment agency board. But he refuses her job.

Stan Winslow’s romance with a blond dumbbell. Dagny’s break with him.

In connection with trouble on TT, Dagny has to appeal again either to d‘Anconia or Danneskjöld. The man refuses. She flies after him in an airplane. His plane vanishes in the mountains—with no landing field anywhere in sight. When she attempts to follow—the inexplicable crash.

John Galt. (“We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?” “No, we never had to.”) The valley. The new symphony by the composer. The strikers. They refuse her job [offers]. Then she has to leave the valley, promising to keep the secret.

Dagny’s search for John Galt—meeting with d‘Anconia—return to valley, finding it empty—the anger of the millionaire.

Dagny’s resignation—her decision: “I shall live for you—I always have—even if you’re to remain only a vision never to be reached.”

Part II: The Beginning

Another step in the disintegration of TT and the world.

In connection with it, the final tragedy of Hank Rearden and of his secretary. Their scene together when they realize the similarity of their tragedies—and the cause. Then—the man who wishes to see Rearden, the name in the sealed envelope—“It must be a gag.... What does he look like?” “Like something out of a kind of aluminum-copper alloy.”

Hank Rearden quits. The collapse of Rearden Steel. (His secretary quits, too.)

As a consequence, the emergency that threatens TT and the world.

Dagny escapes, in horror, from a banquet where James Taggart and the other parasites discuss the course of action they will take to solve the emergency. She runs into the subway. She sees the subway-guard: John Galt. He looks at her, and walks on without a word. She sits there, sobbing. A bum tries to console her. (The sight of a lady in evening clothes, sobbing in the subway, seems quite natural to him. “Oh well, who is John Galt?”) Towards morning, Galt comes back—“All right, come on.” Their walk in silence, through the streets in early morning, to his home. At the door, he turns and looks at her for the first time. The same smile as on their first meeting: “We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?” “No, we never had to.” They climb the many flights of stairs to his room; she doesn’t remember how she climbed the stairs, she knew only that she was rising; she doesn’t remember whether it was a long climb—it had taken her thirty years to reach this room. Their night together. He tells her about the strike. Dagny quits—and moves in to live with him. The greatest scientist and the ablest woman in the world are a subway guard and a housewife in a garret.

As a result of (or precipitated by) Dagny’s withdrawal—the final emergency which causes the President to announce his world broadcast.

The reason that makes Galt come out in the open.

The chapter called: “This is John Galt Speaking.” The broadcast: Galt’s statement on the cause and purpose of the strike; his demand of complete freedom—the removal of all chains, including the moral ones.

The panic following the broadcast. The government’s attempts to say it was a hoax—but nobody believes this. The proclamation of the strikers, signed: “John Galt, Francisco d‘Anconia, Ragnar Danneskjöld.”

The government attempts to “negotiate” with Galt by secret short-wave broadcasts. His answer—“We do not recognize your right to bargain with us.”

The scene of Galt and the priest meeting in a dinky restaurant at night—with the world collapsing around them.

James Taggart (through some connection with Dagny—possibly her one breakdown of giving him advice to save TT) finds John Galt and betrays him to the government.

Galt’s arrest and the wreck of his laboratory. (“What was in it? You’ll never know.”)

The attempts to bargain with him—the banquet—the broadcast—“Ladies and Gentlemen, John Galt to the world!” His speech: “Get the hell out of my way.”

The torture of Gait—word of the approaching catastrophe—his one moment of temptation when he almost speaks, out of pity and natural ability, to save them—but looks at the blood running out of the wound on his shoulder and keeps silent.

James Taggart—his hysteria at the realization of his complete evil. His scene with the priest. “I have nothing to say, James. I’m on strike.”

Dagny, d‘Anconia and Danneskjöld save John Galt. Her ride with him to the valley—the sight of the collapsing world. (The incident with the armed farmer. (?))

The end of Taggart Transcontinental. James Taggart’s nervous break down. The last train (“The Comet”)—and Eddie Willers’ effort to save it. (“Dagny, in the name of the best within us ... !”)

The strikers, in the mountains of their valley, look down at a wrecked road: the ruin of a house, the skeleton of an automobile—and, in the distance, the stubborn fire fighting the wind. John Galt says: “This is our day. The road is cleared. We’re going back.”

The Progressive Collapse of Taggart Transcontinental

The key steps, each worse than the one before and progressively interconnected, are:

Part I

First stage:

In the first chapter—the trouble.
This leads to the d‘Anconia disaster. (?)
End on botched achievement.

Second stage:

This leads to Dagny’s attempt to deal with Ragnar Danneskjöld.
The train wreck.
The events in connection with Gerald Hastings.
The problems which Dagny fights together with Stan Winslow.
This leads to her following Danneskjöld to the valley.
End on first major disaster—the double-cross.

Part II

Third stage:

In the opening chapter—the serious disaster which will precipitate the collapse. (Here the chain of events must be unbroken and accelerated.) This is the result of Dagny not getting the help she needed from Danneskjöld. (The parasite who gets caught can’t supply what she needed—she knew he wouldn‘t, that’s why she went to Danneskjöld.)

End on parasite’s crash.

Fourth stage:

The trouble at Rearden Steel, caused by the above disaster of TT—and, in turn, when Rearden Steel collapses, TT is in its final emergency (and so is the world).

End on new executive’s looting.

(This leads to President’s broadcast.)

Fifth stage:

The panic and the threatened final collapse of TT and everything, which they try to avert through Galt’s help. (The psychology of looters and animals—“We only have to last through the next five-year plan.”)

The actual crash—which comes while Galt is being tortured.

The consequences of the crash—the state of the world after it.

The disaster of Part II is actually one single development in progressive steps. (Decide what it is that the steps must lead to.)

In Part I, there are three key points: the original trouble—the problems of Dagny and Winstow—the emergency when Dagny needs Danneskjöld’s help.

The pattern of the last emergency must be something like this: if (for a certain expected cause) TT doesn’t deliver the ore to a steel factory, there will be no steel; if so, there will be no trucks; if so, there will be no grain transported to farms; if so, there will be no wheat; if so, the country starves.

An important point: The lesser man thinks he would be president of the company but for the better man. He’s wrong. There wouldn’t be any company. He thinks better men crowd him out of the better jobs—and all he has to do is destroy the better men, then the jobs will be his. But he destroys the jobs when he destroys the better men. They were not made by these jobs—these jobs were made by them. The lesser man can neither create the jobs of the genius nor keep them. (There is an important difference of viewpoint: the creator knows that he makes his own job—the parasite thinks that he can be made by a job prepared for him; the creator knows that wealth is produced by him—the parasite thinks that he is cheated out of his “chance” without the wealth which came out of nowhere. The creator makes his job; the parasite takes over.)

Since the essence of the creator’s power is the ability of independent rational judgment, and since this is precisely what the parasite is incapable of, the key to every disaster in the story—to the whole disintegration of the world—is a situation where independent rational judgment is needed and cannot be provided. (Cannot—in the case of the parasites involved; will not—in the case of the strikers.)

Note on Charity

Charity to an inferior does not include the charity of not considering him an inferior. (This is so by definition.) This is what is demanded by the collectivists now. If the inferior is to be helped on the ground that he is weak and you are strong—let him remember and acknowledge his position (and this is the premise of any voluntary charity).

But charity as a basic, overall principle of morality does lead to this vicious circle: if charity (or mercy, as distinguished from justice) is the conception of giving someone something he has not deserved, out of pure kindness or pity, and if this is considered good (a virtue, a moral imperative), then the collectivists are right and consistent in demanding that the principle be applied to the primary sphere, the spiritual, as it is applied to the material sphere, which is only secondary. If, in the material sphere, you give a man a loaf of bread he has not deserved nor earned, so his only claim to it is his misfortune and your pity; then the equivalent in the spiritual sphere would be the kindness of considering him your equal, a status he has not deserved, ignoring his actual worth as a man and handing to him the moral or spiritual benefits, such as love, respect, consideration, which better men have to earn, handing these to him for the same reasons that you hand him a loaf of bread—because it is a desirable possession and he is too weak to earn it.

The collectivists (and all parasites) now demand this kind of charity: give me the bread, because you’re strong and I’m weak, and also do me the courtesy of pretending that I’m just as strong as you are, don’t hurt my feelings by treating me as if I were weak, hand me an alms of the spirit as you hand me one in physical shape—else you’re cruel, selfish and uncharitable.

This is the ultimate logical conclusion and the ultimate viciousness of charity as an absolute principle.

Help to a deserving friend is not charity—by definition. First, you personally want the friend to succeed or overcome his misfortune, you have a reason for it, you consider him good or worthy or valuable, so you have a personal interest in his succeeding. Second, you consider that there is a just reason why the friend should have help—either because his misfortune is accidental, or greater than he deserved.

Charity implies that its object does not deserve help, but you give it nevertheless, as a bonus; you are not being just, but magnanimous or merciful. When you help a genius in distress, you’re kind, but not charitable. When you help a bum from the gutter whom you loathe—that is charity. You help, not out of compassion for an equal, but out of contempt for an inferior—[you help] because of your contempt. And on this premise (which is the exact definition of charity) the collectivists are right when they demand the worship of inferior [men because] of their inferiority; then you do end by rewarding failure, admiring incompetence, loving vices—and penalizing success, achievement, virtue.

This is what happens whenever one attempts to depart from facts, i.e., to depart from justice (which is to depart from reality). [Regardless of] your motive, the result is still faking reality, evading facts—and the consequences will be those of any lie: corrupt, destructive, and monstrous. There is no good motive for lies. Nor for evading reality. There can’t be, by definition. What is the good in such a conception? There is no good except truth to facts—which means, the rational method as an absolute.

There is the same kind of vicious intellectual sloppiness in the idea of “charity” as there is in the idea of brother-love. From the idea that you must love your brother men as a reward or recognition of merit or of lovable qualities (therefore you should love the men who exhibit these qualities, [because that] is only just)—it has become the idea that you must love, period, without cause or reason, just love everybody and anybody because he is born in human shape—and from that, it has gone “below zero,” into “love a man for his vices, love a man precisely because he shouldn’t be loved.”

From the idea of: “When in doubt about the evidence, be merciful, lean toward giving a man the benefit of the doubt, be a little kinder rather than a little harsher when you are not sure of the exact justice”—it has become: “Be kind, no matter what the evidence, do not even dare to look at the evidence, just be kind”—and then: “Look at the evidence and be kind only to those who deserve the worst punishment; their evil is their claim upon your kindness.”

It’s like this: first, “Love the hero, hate the knave and be kind to the average man, giving him credit for such good as he does possess, and not hating him altogether for such bad as there is in him.” Then: “Love everyone equally and indiscriminately, their personal virtues or vices must have nothing to do with the love you owe them all without questions or reasons.” And then: “Love the knaves, because they’re the unfortunate ones and misfortune is the only claim to love. Hate the heroes—they cannot claim love, since they cannot claim pity or charity. Love is a coin used only for alms, never for exchange or reward. ”

That is your logical altruism and charity. (And the parasites want it because it’s an escape from the responsibility of acquiring virtues to be loved for, an escape from free will.)

From the idea of respecting another man’s rights because he is a human being, and these rights are his by nature and not subject to your grant or sanction, therefore do not ever rob or cheat another man nor obtain anything from him by force without his voluntary consent, nor expect anything from him without earning it by a free, mutual exchange—it has become: “Give him the shirt off your back, if he wants it—he has a right to it, that is how you must respect other men’s rights.” From: “Do not take that which is not yours,” it has become: “Take nothing and give away anything to anyone who wishes to take it. Misery and misfortune are the only claim checks he must present.” (Nothing is yours—everything is everybody else’s.)

God damn it, I must put an end to the idea of misfortune as an all-embracing pass-key and a first mortgage on all life! That’s what I must blast.

The idea behind this damnable worship of misfortune is the denial of free will. Men are not considered responsible for their fortune or misfortune.

Dagny’s and Galt’s attitude should be a profound mistrust of suffering. There is a difference between the way Dagny bears pain inflicted on her by others, bears it defiantly, never allowing it truly inside her, hating the idea of pain, in herself or others—and the way James Taggart, who is a “solid screaming pain” inside, [uses] his suffering to make himself a mortgage on better people.

(This aspect has to do with the final dilemma of the priest.)

James Taggart makes use of the idea of charity—on the receiving end.

On the giving end, it is the priest. But the priest cannot go to the depths of depravity which this idea demands. If there is room for it, I might have to have another character to exemplify that—a man going insane in the attempt to live by the idea of charity, which he has accepted as a basic premise and axiom, accepted intelligently and consistently, i.e., with all its implications. This would be a kind of Dostoyevsky.

Line for the “man of charity”: he starts by loving Galt and hating James Taggart; then, to be charitable, he makes himself love Taggart as much as Galt, love them both equally—hating himself in the process and considering his own suffering as a sign of virtue. Then, to be more consistently charitable, he loves Taggart and hates Galt—at which point he commits one of the worst acts (against the strikers) in the whole story, one of the most irrationally twisted, corrupt, monstrous acts—and he ends up insane (and probably dies in some bloody horror which he has brought about).

Starting from hatred of suffering, and from his motive of pity for and desire to relieve suffering, he ends up by becoming a complete sadist.

The Pattern of the Parasites

The primary attribute of the parasite is his inability or unwillingness to produce.

Since all production rests on original thought and personal effort— these are the two qualities lacking in a parasite: he cannot produce an original thought and he will not exercise any personal effort.

In respect to thinking, there seem to be two different (though related) aspects of it: original thinking and assimilating thinking, i.e., the ability to discover new knowledge and the ability to understand a new thought discovered by someone else (not merely to memorize principles or knowledge, but to assimilate them through full rational understanding). The necessary rational process seems to be similar in both instances—the ability to grasp and connect a rational chain—but it is here, I think, that the degrees of men’s intellectual ability, the degrees of intelligence, become apparent: a great mind is able to make new rational connections, never made before by anyone else, from objective evidence; the lesser mind is able to grasp the connections made by others when these others present their conclusions to him. (He must be able, when an argument is presented to him, to know whether it is correct or not, rationally tenable or not, and accept or reject it accordingly; but he cannot initiate a new chain of reasoning.)

Of course, there are infinite degrees of intellectual ability. A sane but very stupid man will never understand higher mathematics—simply because it would take him too long to absorb all the logical steps and knowledge necessary for such understanding. He has the potential capacity to understand it—if he went step by step and if a better mind guided his understanding all along the way (this is also supposing that he could retain and assimilate that much logic and knowledge). But since such a long effort is not necessary for him, and since no genius is going to help him in that way, it is safe for him just to leave the subject alone and exercise his mind in a smaller sphere, to the extent of his capacity. And if it is true that there is a limit to a man’s capacity for intellectual absorption (this is a matter of which I am not certain), [such that] even if he were to start studying higher mathematics slowly and conscientiously step by step, he would reach a point where he could not hold it all—then the advisable practical conclusion is the same: he must leave this field alone, leave it to those who can handle it, and deal only with such matters as he can handle by the independent rational process of his own mind. If he ventures beyond that, he is venturing into second-handedness.

Here may be the source of a certain kind of collectivist’s resentment against genius. The collectivist makes the following argument: a world geared to the genius is impossible for the lesser man to live in; in theory, it demands of the lesser man a mental effort that he is congenitally incapable of performing—and in practice, the genius hoards all the material wealth produced as reward for his genius, since his genius produced it; so the lesser man has no way to survive, his meager little contribution has no market in competition with the tremendous production of the genius. Therefore, down with the genius, let us all live on a lesser scale, on a more miserable standard, both spiritually and physically—otherwise, we cannot live at all, we’re doomed to destruction, since most of us are only average men and the genius, by the nature of his relation to us, will destroy us. (This is the pattern of what lies behind all the anti-city, anti-machine-civilization, back-to-the-soil, back-to-handicraft movements.)

But this argument is based on a parasite’s view of genius, a parasite who does not understand the nature of genius. By the nature of cooperation among men and the nature of intellectual achievement, the genius always gives to others more than he receives from them; no matter what material wealth he gets from men in exchange for his idea, he has given them more than he receives; he has raised their own capacity to produce wealth. He cannot “hoard the material wealth of the world, leaving nothing to the lesser men.” Being the source of material wealth, he always leaves to others the greater part of the material consequences of his idea, the greater part of the material wealth he has made possible—by increasing their own capacity to produce it, by augmenting their physical and mental ability through the gift (or lesson) of his discovery.

Besides, it is precisely the differences of intelligence that make cooperation among men possible, fair to all and beneficial to all. For example, a genius who makes an abstract scientific discovery turns it over to the lesser, but still brilliant man—the practical inventor—who discovers a way to make a machine based on it; [the inventor] turns it over to the lesser, but still talented man—the businessman—who starts an industry based on the machine; and so on—down to the man of least ability, the unskilled laborer who only turns a crank, or digs a ditch for the factory, or sweeps the factory floors. The least of these men receives more material benefits through this cooperation than he could get if left on his own (or, in corresponding degree, if any of the better abilities above him had been eliminated).

And, of course, the idea that the intellectually strong crushes or exploits the weak is sheer nonsense. By definition, if he is stronger in ability, he does not need the inferior talent or contribution of the weak and has no cause to exploit him. The weak, of course, has every cause to exploit the strong. In any specific profession, the better man will, of course, crowd out the lesser one, e.g., a good engineer will get a job away from a bad one. But the bad one has no business competing with the man of superior ability—nor expecting his rewards. Let the bad one go into some lesser line of endeavor; let him be foreman, instead of company president; or plain worker, instead of foreman—whatever his ability permits in free competition in a free society.

Never mind the instances of injustice, of ability being passed up and second-handers making a success through pull or palaver—in a free society, such instances defeat and eliminate themselves (though not instantaneously); ability will be rewarded, the second-hander will fail—if you leave men alone. But the greater the spread of the principles of second-handedness, parasitism, and collectivism in a society—the more injustices occur and the longer they hold. Make collectivism permanent and the injustices are frozen in place, made permanent. But then society collapses. [...]

April 24, 1946

A man incapable of producing an original thought (or [not in sufficient] degree to affect his practical life or contribute to general knowledge) can still be a moral man and a valuable member of society, if he exercises his own intelligence honestly and to the best of his ability. He can be a good “absorber.” He becomes an excellent—and needed—executor of the ideas of others. He does not become a scientist, but a good engineer; or, he does not become an engineer, but a good mechanic.

And he cannot be considered a second-hander, if he does not indulge in any of the second-hander’s motives or “social” [methods], if he is honest about himself and his work, does not wish or pretend to be an innovator, but understands his own sphere, his own work, likes it and does it well. In this way, he is being perfectly moral, since he does not place his prime concern within others or into any comparison. He says, in effect: “Others may be men of greater ability, but that is not my primary concern; they offer me an idea in exchange for my work; I give them my best honest effort in return; we’re dealing as equals in free exchange to mutual advantage. I like my work in carrying out their ideas—and the work does require a first-hand, independent effort of intelligence on my part. I am happy in my own effort, work, and life. That is all that matters. That somebody is a greater man than I am is none of my concern—except that I appreciate him, I like him for his genius—and, perhaps, I am also a little grateful to him (though not in the primary manner of a dependent).” This is the stand applicable to all good, moral men of average ability.

But the parasite does not take this stand. This is not his attitude nor his method. (The above man is an active man; the parasite is not. The above man is a producer; the parasite is not.)

The parasite discards his status as a human being, his attribute of survival—the independent rational mind. Only those who discard it are incapable of producing, since the independent rational mind is the source of all production. The parasite is not insane nor a congenital idiot; he has his rational mind; he could function as the moral average man above (call him “the executor”); but he doesn’t want to function as an executor—so he does not exercise even such ability as he has. Now what makes the parasite do it?

It is the desire to get more than he deserves, in both the spiritual and the material realm. It may have started only with the material, but now, in this stage of civilization where material abundance is so lavish for all, due to the work of the geniuses of the ages, the desire for more than one deserves has gone mainly into the spiritual realm—and there it is most vicious and deadly (this is not to discount plain grafters and looters, but they are not the real menace today). This is the root of all modern collectivism.

The man who renounces (by statement or by implication) the basic axiom of living by his own independent rational mind has, in effect, announced his desire for more than he deserves and his status as a parasite. (This applies to every philosophy or attitude that is anti-reason.) The axiom [of living by reason] implies most powerfully, without room for escape, that each man stand essentially on his own and get nothing except what he deserves. (Which means: what he earns, what he produces, what qualities he possesses—all of his claims must be based on reality, on objective fact.) The escape from reason is the escape from reality.

Now if a man declares that he wants to discard reality, it means that he wants to acquire something that reality can’t give him; something more than he deserves in hard fact. (To admit this is to admit his own inferiority, to say: “I want to be more than I actually am, because I know I’m small, inferior, rotten,” but this does not bother a parasite. In fact, it is to escape just such a realization that he discards the validity of reason, logic, or any kind of fact, so that he does not have to face or accept this conclusion. He says: “Oh, it may be so—in reason. But reason is an illusion. Reason doesn’t work. Life is not reasonable. Nothing is reasonable. I can say that I am an inferior and consider myself a superior at one and the same time.”)

What does the parasite want? Anything that is of value, spiritually or materially.

Materially—he wants more wealth than his own effort is worth; here we have any bureaucrat or politician, any man who wants to gain through restricting competition, any man who seeks economic advantages through political power, i.e., through force, any man who tries to make a success through pull, through the “human” rather than the business angle, through friendship rather than merit, any Peter Keating, or any man who chooses his profession because of the returns he sees others getting from it, not because of his actual ability or desire to do that work (the man who wants to be a writer, not to write).

Spiritually—the parasite wants an immense, vague, undefined field of advantages, and it is here that his attitude has that peculiar quality of viciousness, corruption, weakness, touchiness, and hysteria. This is the real sphere of the complexes and the neuroses. A Peter Keating is healthy and even active compared to the primarily spiritual parasites. (P.H. is the best example of such a parasite that I know personally.) This type wants a sense of superiority, which he lacks. (Note that he wants, not greatness, but superiority.) Therefore, this sense must be given to him by others, second-hand; but this is impossible—so the parasite is never satisfied, never reaches any kind of happiness, his demands grow, the more others give him the more he demands of them, and, in fact, he hates them for giving (actually hating himself for accepting).

He wants, from others, any reward given to human values or virtues—without possessing these values or virtues. Above all, he wants admiration (without an achievement to admire, without even giving to himself any reason why he should be admired). He wants authority, unearned and causeless; he wants to be obeyed, he wants power and the feeling of influencing others. He wants love and affection—[while] never loving anyone himself. He wants prestige—of the comparative kind, being considered better than others. He wants fame. He wants fawning, kowtowing and the sense of having inferiors around him. He wants, hysterically and forever, to beat somebody at something; not to do something good, but to do something better than somebody else has done it. (This last is indicative of his motive, of the basic cause that made him a parasite.)

He wants, actually, to reverse cause and effect—thinking that the effect will create in him the cause. He doesn’t think that admiration proceeds from achievement—he thinks that achievement can be made to proceed from admiration; only he isn’t really concerned with achievement.

Where would a parasite get the conception of more than he deserves? From observing others, of course. [...] The “material” parasite in modem life is the man who wants to get more than he deserves, by riding on the achievements of others: the hack popular writer who makes a comfortable living by thinly disguised variations on the writings of others; the dress designers who steal from Adrian, etc. (An inferior dress designer isn’t satisfied with the income he can make on “Broadway Shoppe” designs; he wants to get some of the income brought in by Adrian dresses—without possessing Adrian’s ability; the only way to do that is to steal Adrian’s ideas.)

In the spiritual realm, the parasite wants every reward he has seen being given to better men. He would have no conception of admiration, since he never produced anything to admire, if he hadn’t seen the genius being admired for his achievements. He wants the reward, without the reason; the effect, without the cause. He wants the admiration—for nothing. His irrationality makes such a conception or desire possible. (Conception?—that belongs to reason. He doesn’t even have to consider whatever it is that’s going on in his head as a “conception”; nor to state it, nor to define it. Just want it. Just “feel. ”)

What does all this do to the parasite’s relation with other men?

The parasite began by being a second-hander. His first premise was accepted on the second-hander’s basis—the basis of comparison. He said: “I am inferior, because I see others who are better than I am. I must escape from my inferiority—and from those hated men who made me conscious of it, from those better ones.” Then he becomes an irrationalist in order to achieve this [escape]. A man’s estimate of and attitude toward himself will, of course, determine his attitude toward everything else: others, life, the universe.

Having started with the idea that value is established by comparison (or else having started by hating himself for some flaw and considering himself inferior without comparison—the result being the same when he confronts others), the parasite will naturally hate the genius, and any man of ability, virtue, or superiority of any kind. In effect, he will have the insane idea that he can become great simply by eliminating those who are better. Values have no absolute existence for him; they are all relative. He doesn’t want to grow ten bushels of wheat; he will be happy if he grows two, [as long as] everybody else grows only one. (Marcella B. and her “two cars.” [AR is referring to a young woman she met while working at RKO in the early 1930s. When AR asked the woman about her goals, she said: “I’ll tell you what I want. If nobody had an automobile, then I would want to have one automobile. If some people have one, then I want to have two.”]) (Of course, a second-hander can have no absolute values; they have to be relative; his standard and measure is in others, or in his own comparison of himself to others; absolute values require an independent rational judgment.)

The parasite hates competition—because he sees all life as a competition. He knows he can’t hold his own, on his own independent terms (he has none), against the genius; hence his desire for “security,” “controls,” and “collaboration.” Yet, as a non-producer (who has discarded the necessary precondition of a producer: the independent rational mind) he sees all life as a race for a static, given amount of benefits. He doesn’t think that material wealth is created by the energy and intelligence of men—an inexhaustible source; he thinks that there’s just so much material wealth (a static amount) and whoever gets rich takes that much away from him; his “share” is that much smaller. (He doesn’t realize that in a free society of producers each wealthy man adds to the total wealth, that each creates his own new wealth, and also adds to the wealth of others by his ideas and his energy. But to realize this would be to cease being a parasite.)

He thinks the same in the spiritual realm; he sees spiritual values as a static sum total, so anything gained or possessed by another man is taken away from him. If another man is loved, this reduces his chances of being loved. If another man is admired, it reduces his possible share of admiration. If another man has any personal virtue—intelligence, courage, integrity, beauty—his own virtues are thereby diminished or destroyed (as if virtues were something distributed around out of a common grab-bag-and there’s only so much of it to divide). This is the non-producer‘s, the irrationalist’s, the collectivist‘s, the parasite’s view of the world, spiritual and material. (This is the miserable trembling for one’s share of the “common pot”—since everything is common, collective, isn’t it?)

If it is said that what the parasite dreads is competition for a specific goal—such as one particular job, or the love of one particular woman—and what he fears is that the better man will beat him in that specific instance, then it’s still second-handedness. The creator (or any “active” man) attaches no crucial importance to anything that comes from others, from the will of some one other man; he may regret losing a job or losing the woman he loves to someone else, but it is not a crucial tragedy for him, nor the breaking of his life, since it never was his primary concern. He wants a job in his particular line of work, but not necessarily any one specific job. He may love only one woman in his life and he may lose her, and this is a tragedy—but not the end of him, since he did not exist primarily for that woman, nor for any other human being. His primary goal is within himself.

It is said that this is fine for the genius who’s sure of his superiority and chance to win out against others in any competition for a specific object—but what about the lesser men who know they’re doomed to be the losers? The answer is: If such are the facts, there’s nothing they can do about it; hatred and destruction of the genius will not change anything. They must face the facts and accept the lesser rewards, those they’ve deserved; they can have nothing more anyway. If there is no genius (or better man) around, it does not mean that the woman whom the lesser man wants will necessarily want him; she may not want anyone at all—the lesser one will never satisfy her. (Personal love is the nearest one can come to a situation where the gain of one consists of the loss of another—and even then it doesn’t quite hold; in fact, it doesn’t hold at all.)

If the competition is for jobs, the lesser man cannot hold the job which is actually above his capacity—the job which the genius would have taken, if the lesser man had not decided to destroy the genius. Here, in fact, is one of the key pillars of my story: if the lesser man is afraid of the competition of the genius for a top job, and thinks that the job would be his, if it weren’t for the genius, and so all he has to do, in legitimate self-interest and self-preservation, is to destroy the genius—he will learn that the job, created by genius for genius, is not for him. Such a job—created by superior ability and requiring superior ability to be filled, in an advanced civilization which represents the accumulation, the end product, of centuries of thought, effort and genius—cannot be filled by him. (And he ought to know it by his own definition of himself, the genius, and the job.) If he forces his way into it—by compulsion, collectivism, and destruction of the genius—he will not hold the job or get its advantages; he will merely destroy the job—and himself. (This is important—James Taggart.)

From such premises, it’s logical that the parasite’s most frequent and strongest emotion is envy. Envy of ability, of achievement, of virtue, of happiness. This is why the parasite comes to wish ill to everyone, to rejoice in anyone’s misfortune and resent anyone’s happiness. This is why he will hate any success and relish every failure. This is why he will love the incompetent. This is why he will hate the men of ability, try to crush, stop, or destroy them—and why he will surround himself with mediocrities, with his inferiors, why he will help them, encourage them, push them forward. (And since he is a dreadful mediocrity himself, and has quite a sensitive instinct about recognizing his superiors—boy! how low he has to go in order to find inferiors!) Envy is his constant, corroding, consuming emotion—and his strongest motive (perhaps his only motive). Since emotions come from reason, from the premises one has accepted, this is logical and unavoidable: the premise of second-handedness can produce only the most second-hand of all emotions: envy. If that is his dominant principle, that will be his dominant emotion.

Now what is the exact pattern of the parasite’s actions in exploiting the genius?

The simplest and most primitive: if there were only two men in the world and the genius were producing the food needed to exist—the parasite, who produces nothing, would do one of two things: he can descend upon the genius, kill him and seize his food, but then he himself will starve when he’s consumed the food and can’t produce any more; or, he can try to enslave the genius and make him work, taking as much of the genius’ production as he can get away with.

The last is the basic pattern of what has been done to the genius throughout history.

But the genius doesn’t work under compulsion; the nature of his genius is the independence of his mind, so the necessary condition for the exercise of his genius is destroyed when he is enslaved. The greater his genius—the greater his sense of independence, of being an end in himself, and not the means to anyone else’s ends, not anyone’s servant. Whatever altruist-collectivist theory he might have absorbed merely makes him miserable, tortures him and causes a civil war within him. With respect to his work, and to the extent to which he lives in accordance with and by the principles of his genius—he will maintain his independence, fiercely and passionately.

Also, an incompetent ruling a genius, a non-producer trying to control and direct the productive work of a producer, can result only in disaster. The actual performance of men in society is a constant, fierce, undefined struggle between the genius and the parasite. [In order] to function, the genius must have his freedom and his independence—whether by stated, accepted principle, or by unstated default, or by open rebellion against the stated principles of collectivism in society. To the extent of his actual independence, he is able to function. But he is crippled, hobbled, tied, held back constantly by the encroachments and restrictions of the parasites who get their unearned sustenance from him.

How do the parasites do it and what is their long-range policy?

They do it by two means: through actual force—this is political power, the regulated society, collectivism; and by spiritual poisoning—this is the philosophical means to disarm and enslave the genius from within, the corruption by the parasite’s morality of altruism.

(My story must show both methods. Galt leads the revolt against both.)

As parasites, they have no long-range policy. Long-range planning belongs to the producer. The parasite acts on the psychology of the animal or the savage: grab the kill or the bananas of the moment and don’t worry about tomorrow; tomorrow you will start looking for another victim.

The parasites will not face the fact that they are destroying their own providers, their own means of survival. If they think anything at all on the subject, it’s something like this: there will always be some genius around, we can milk one of them dry, destroy him, and then pick on the next one. The geniuses will always come along to be picked—it’s only a question of how much we can get away with. And this has always been true: the geniuses did come along and the parasites got away with as much as the traffic of any particular time would bear. When the parasites went too far, a civilization collapsed into dark ages; then the geniuses were free (by default, by the parasites’ impotence amidst ruins) to rebuild the world, and then the parasites climbed on their shoulders—and it started all over again. (This is what Galt wants to stop once and for all.)

How do [the parasites] act toward any man of ability in practical life? In a way which is as contradictory as their philosophic premise. First, they hate him. Second, they want to get all they can out of him. They want to destroy him and to use him at the same time. They put every possible impediment in his way and want as much production as they can get out of him. They refuse to recognize his rights—but they want him to recognize and accept their right to exploit him. They act on the premise of exploiting the better man—yet refuse to admit that he is better. They act on the premise of exploiting his productive genius—yet refuse to admit that production comes from his genius.

Above all, they want him to think (and they want others to think it and would like to fool themselves into thinking it) that what they get out of him is not charity and alms, but is theirs by right. The theories and methods to achieve this and the rotten trickery involved are infinite—but it all comes down to collectivism and altruism. (They do not mind so much if their exploitation is thought of as loot—this gives them a sense of having bested the genius in some way—but they do not want it to be called charity. This is the touchy vanity of the parasite.)

(This is the attitude of James Taggart toward Dagny, Rearden, the young engineer, and any man of ability he encounters.)

Now-what happens in a world where there is nothing but parasites left? What happens in a world run by parasites? What happens to the parasites when they are left on their own, left to their own devices and methods?

April 25, 1946

Before answering the last question, one more note on the parasites. Is parasitism basically a desire for undeserved material wealth, which then leads to the spiritual parasitism? Is the basic motive material—and the spiritual evil only the means to an end, the justification, a result of and a disguise for it? No. The material proceeds from the spiritual, not vice versa. The material is the expression of the spiritual, the form of the idea, the flesh of the soul. The spiritual intention determines its material expression. Not the other way around.

Therefore, the parasite’s basic motive, premise, and evil is spiritual. It is, of course, self-hatred [caused by] the discarding of his rational faculty and of the kind of life (the only kind possible to man) which the rational faculty implies and demands. The first crime is against his own ego. All the other crimes follow.

What makes a man do that? This is a huge question by itself. It seems that self-reverence (which is the root of self-confidence, which is the root of independence) is a primary axiom for man—the axiom of survival, the life principle. This must be thought out in detail. Here, I trace the course of the parasite from that first crime on. (Nowadays, of course, the reason is the huge pressure of the teachings of altruism. But what is the essential cause here? What was the reason of the primary, original error? Was it fear? If so, what cases that kind of fear?)

If a parasite hates himself, he has to become an irrationalist, in order to survive. Otherwise, he would have to destroy himself, to be consistent.

Once he has [rejected] reason, he has lost or discarded his capacity to produce, his understanding of the source and nature of production, and also his spiritual entity, his self, and the entire realm of his spiritual life. No spiritual life is possible without the mind, without reason; the spiritual is the rational. On the irrationalist premise, there is nothing but a sickening chaos left, since the man is doing constant violence to himself, acting contrary to his nature—and, of course, suffering constant pain, as he would physically if he insisted on acting contrary to the requirements of his body. Also, no spiritual life is possible [to a man who] hates himself; spiritual life has to begin with a strong, proud, happy sense of identity; but that is precisely what the parasite has discarded and is trying to escape. Without the rational faculty, no independence is possible, i.e., no inner existence at all. The parasite is trying to escape from any inner reality; he has discarded the essence of what constitutes life.

But he goes on existing. So he has to find a substitute [for reason]—he thinks that’s possible, just as he thinks it’s possible to exist without self, without identity. (The process without object? The movement without that which moves?) The obvious substitute of the spiritual is the material. The reversal is similar to what he has already done. As a second-hander, he placed others first, above self. Actually, all relations with others are secondary, and a result of one’s entity, one’s attitude toward oneself; but he decided that his entity will be determined by and emerge from that relation. (“My virtue is to be determined by the good I do for others,” etc.) So now he performs another reversal: instead of realizing that man’s material activity and production is the result of his spiritual entity (his thinking, his desires, his purposes) and that the material is meaningless except as the form given to the satisfaction of a primarily spiritual need—he decides that his spiritual happiness will proceed from the material, that the material will give him a spiritual entity. He places the material first.

A simple example of this reversal is the man who wants a big, beautiful, luxurious house—without realizing that the [value] of such a house depends on what he wants to do in it. What if it’s big—but he has nothing to do in the rooms and all that space is wasted? What if it’s beautiful—if he has no standards, understanding, or appreciation of beauty? What if it’s luxurious—when luxury is the lavish satisfaction of desires, and he has no desires? The material is only an answer to a spiritual need, an expression of it, a tool of it. Otherwise—it’s meaningless. Without a purpose in his activity, without standards of judgment, without desires—the man might as well live in a rotting shack (or not live at all). He won’t acquire these spiritual possessions from the house—the house had to come from them, be an answer to them.

(Sex is a very eloquent and complex example of that, too. Think it over in detail sometime.)

The parasite thinks that the material will give him, not only the happiness he lacks, but also the capacity for happiness which he has discarded. And not understanding (or not admitting to himself) the source of material wealth, he thinks that he can acquire wealth second-hand, through others (as he expects to find virtue, happiness, or importance through others). (He is not a second-hander because he wants to be fed by others; he wants to be fed by others because he is a second-hander; the spiritual reversal, or crime, was first.)

From this [reversal], the parasite acquires two qualities: first, an exaggerated greed for material wealth, with no purpose for which to use it, wealth as an end in itself, and not as the means to an end (which is all that material wealth can be); second, the conviction that the way to get wealth is through others, that his activity must be directed toward the human, not the objective, productive aspect. (This is the source of: “A creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. A parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.” [This quote is from Roark’s speech.])

This is why the parasite wants, not to make, but to “take over.” This is why he is concerned not with merit, but with pull; not with actual performance, but with faking a performance for someone else’s eyes. That is why he sees no necessity to produce anything—but only the necessity of convincing someone that he’s gone through the motions, so that he gets paid. That is why he doesn’t think it necessary to do a good job, but only to please the boss; and it doesn’t matter whether he fools the boss into thinking it was a good job—he aims to please the boss through means not connected with the job, such as personal flattery or social charm; he even thinks that the safe way to please the boss is one unrelated to the job, to the actual performance and result; wealth, he thinks, is acquired through these side-means, through any means, except production.

How—in view of this attitude—he manages to escape facing the implication that somebody else produces the wealth he wants to expropriate, by quite different methods, is an interesting question. Of course, he never quite escapes it. Hence his miserable uneasiness and uncertainty. Hence, also, the disgusting, undefined, untenable theories (they are really shouted slogans, not theories) about wealth being a matter of natural resources (forgetting who and what made resources out of matter that was useless per se), about wealth and success being just a matter of luck, and all the variations of determinism. (Under determinism, nothing has to be explained too clearly: other men produce wealth in some unstated manner, because they’re predetermined, or conditioned, that way; he, the parasite, isn’t; he’s predetermined to his method, and it’s all a matter of fate, nothing can be changed, it works that way because it has to work that way, so it’s quite all right.) Besides, irrationalism helps him to avoid the implications and the contradiction. A “contradiction” is a rational conception; an irrationalist doesn’t have to make sense.

Now, then, the parasite concentrates his ambitions and activities on getting material wealth. He may invent all sorts of minor spiritual justifications to cover up his material parasitism, but these are secondary; the parasitical convictions are not accepted in order to permit him to loot; the desire to loot was the result of the original parasitical conviction, the primary spiritual act of second-handedness. And since no “existence through others” is possible, the nearest a parasite can come to it is to exploit others materially, getting physical sustenance or unearned wealth from them, expropriating the results of their work, enslaving them.

[As part of the] proof that the parasite’s primary motive is not material: material wealth never gives him any happiness and he doesn’t know what to do with it if he gets it.

It is not a paradox that the creator, who is not primarily concerned with material wealth, can and does enjoy it when he has it, and the parasite, who places wealth first, goes to pieces with it.

This is why the successful parasites, the Peter Keatings, are completely miserable when they reach success; this is why [so many] celebrities turn to drink, dope, or dissipation at the height of their success; this is [the source of] the vicious talk about success being only a disappointment, and the striving is better than the achievement, and the striving is all there is to do, we must always strive, never succeed, and “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” etc.

Of course, the parasite’s kind of success is the deadliest disaster for him. (Since the goal is improper, its achievement can only be disastrous.) He has hunted wealth as a substitute for his inner entity; he has thought that he would get a spiritual life out of his material possessions, that he would get virtue, happiness, inner satisfaction, all the spiritual values which he lacks. He discovers that he doesn’t get any of it; that he has not escaped from himself nor found a substitute for himself. He has nowhere else to seek and nothing to do. He is in a blind alley. From this point on, the parasite goes to pieces.

This is why those who preach “selflessness” spiritually are so inordinately concerned with material wealth—why the collectivists think that material “security” is the supreme ideal that will solve everything, while the individualist, who defends a system of private property and so-called greed, attaches little importance to material wealth, can do without it and is not afraid of poverty; he is the man who makes wealth and he knows its exact meaning.

Therefore, the “material parasite” and the “spiritual parasite” are interrelated aspects of the same thing, different stages of the same disease (and the two stages are never quite separate—one is merely more pronounced than the other in any particular man at any particular time). The “material parasite” seems somewhat more pleasant, more healthy, than the spiritual one; at least he is active, though in his own disgusting way; he works at being a parasite—like Peter Keating. The spiritual corruption and second-handedness are there, of course, but total disintegration has not yet set in. When Peter Keating succeeds he reaches the stage of P.H. or M.F., who were born with money, and he discovers what they have already discovered—the impotence of material wealth in regard to their problem. Then he goes to pieces, as they did in the first place. Then he turns to their neuroses, their purposeless existence, and their malice toward the whole universe. They are merely advanced stages of his disease.

So there is no essential difference between the two types of parasite, not in what they do if they succeed, nor in their ultimate goal and fate.

There is one more stage for the parasite, the third and final stage, which they do not always reach (some may die before they reach it or succeed in avoiding it all their lives). This is their real hell and their real retribution. It is the stage when a parasite discovers—or is forced to face—the truth about himself.

His whole, twisted, tortuous, miserable performance has been a search for personal value; he wanted personal virtue—but he tried every possible substitute for virtue; he ran from the realization of his own worthlessness or inferiority, and he has spent his life trying to fool himself about that, in every way possible, including the attempted denial of any value, virtue, or objective reality. In his stage of spiritual parasitism, he was still fighting against any realization of the truth—hence his malice, his mysticism, his collectivism, etc. But if and when some event forces him to see the truth—to see himself as he really is—to see and admit to himself, in full, his own evil-that is probably the worst thing a human being can go through. This is Peter Keating after Toohey’s speech. This is James Taggart after the priest’s refusal. In that stage, there’s literally nothing left of the parasite—not even the activity of malice. Then it’s total indifference—the passive—the Nirvana.

I suspect that a parasite who reaches this stage either goes insane, commits suicide, or soon dies from a lack of the will to live. (He doesn’t know that he actually discarded that will long ago in his first act of second-handedness, when he discarded his rational faculty, man’s means of survival; now the ultimate consequences have caught up with him in the only form that was possible, the form he asked for: self-destruction.)

Since success is the worst punishment for a parasite (the success of a man functioning on the principle of destruction has to be destruction), the worst thing the creators could possibly do to the parasites is precisely what John Galt does: let the parasites succeed, turn the world over to them—and let them see what happens.

Of course, the parasite’s greatest wish (in practice) is to exploit and enslave the creator, but the wish is a contradiction in terms: the creator cannot be enslaved, he cannot function that way; what we see in actual life is only his miserable struggle for the scraps of freedom he tears out of the parasites’ hands, and he functions only to the extent of those scraps. So the parasite’s wish, in factual terms, is to destroy the creator. To enslave the creator is to destroy him. (“The purpose of the fraud was to destroy the creators. Or to harness them. Which is a synonym.”)

Therefore, John Galt grants the parasite his wish: he removes the creators. He doesn’t destroy them, of course, but they do not exist as far as the parasite is concerned; they take no part in his world, they contribute nothing, they do not interfere with him or oppose him. He gets what he wanted—a world without creators. Then the horror follows—the destruction of the world—the logical consequences of the parasite’s principle of death; and the parasite’s inner horror must match, if not surpass, the horror of the world’s material collapse. (This is for the last scene with James Taggart and the priest.)

The parasite could exist only so long as he had the creators to lean on, to be fed by, to exploit; in this sense, the creators were responsible for him—by permitting him to do it. This is just like totalitarian economics that can exist only on the energy stolen from the free economies, who thus create their own Frankenstein monsters. This is what John Galt wants the creators to understand and to stop.

This, then, is the meaning of John Galt’s strike. This must be shown clearly, explicitly, and unmistakably (in detail, in more and broader ways than just the disintegration of James Taggart).

Notes

Dietrich Gerhardt-as the composer on the pattern of Shostokovitch (but not of that nature), who, by dealing with his enemies, helps to perpetuate their hold on him, to perpetuate his own slavery and precipitate his own destruction (this last, in symbol, through the destruction of a woman he loves, a singer, or of a talented young composer-protégé).

James Taggart’s hysterical fear of Galt—before he even sees him or hears of him, just fear of someone like Galt, from his own knowledge that such a person must exist, his knowledge that this is what is missing in the world and this is the retribution that will come some day. Taggart’s insane, irrational attempts to avoid that day—and the climax is when he comes face to face with Galt. (That is Galt’s place in his life.) (Taggart hates the expression “Who is John Galt? ”—instinctively, without reason.)

As a possibility: the scene where James Taggart finds Dagny in her garret, scrubbing the floor. (He’s had detectives looking for her.) He finds that he cannot beg, bribe, or force her back—that he has nothing to offer her. He wants something from her—he has nothing to give in return. The position of any parasite—the exploitation made possible only by the generosity of the creator. And Dagny is cured of that. (This scene can show the exact nature of charity.) Dagny tells him that the cleanliness of her floor means more to her than the millions of bushels of wheat in the stomachs of the millions of people who need the train to get the wheat. What do those people intend to do to her with the energy they’ll get from the wheat she gives them?

For the politicians: Do not name their exact political positions. Keep it vague and general—as it deserves. They are nonentities and their titles or jobs do not matter—all that matters, the essence of it, is that they are useless, faceless mediocrities, parasites and exploiters—as exemplifying the kind of government they represent. Therefore, avoid the honorable connotations attached to such a title as “President of the United States” by another era and a different principle of government. All you have is “Head of the State” or “Washington Officials.” The Head of the State is known and referred to throughout as just “Mr. Parker” (or Mr. Smith, or Mr. Johnson, or the most typically undistinguished name you can find). So are the other officials: always Mr. so-and-so, and no first name. The anonymity of mediocrity.

As to Europe—keep it in a gray, ominous, evil fog. Nothing clear about it—only intimations that Europe is finished, there’s only a chaos of impotent collectivism left. If you refer to their forms of government, it’s always only: “The People’s State.” (You do all this by hints about the breakdown of communications—there’s little left of the radio, the telegraph, the mail, the boats, any kind of press, any kind of reliable source of information. People in the story take this for granted, as normal, matter-of-fact, implying that Europe has been like that for a long time.)

April 26, 1946

[In the following notes, the collapse of a society run by parasites is analyzed into five stages. Later, AR refers to this analysis as the “Pattern of Disintegration. ”]

Now to answer [my earlier] question: What happens in a world run by parasites?

Since the parasite’s basic premise is escape from reason, since he has discarded his capacity for independent rational judgment (and dreads the necessity of such rationality), the most evident and all-embracing manifestation of a parasite’s world will be the miserable scrambling to evade personal decisions and personal responsibility.

In every issue—business or personal—the parasites will, primarily, try to stall. They will neither say “yes” nor “no”—on anything. They will evade—in effect, hoping that their inactivity will somehow eliminate the issue. It is not even a conscious decision to wait or temporize—that’s still a decision—but just plain evading, which means giving the issue no thought at all and thus avoiding the necessity of examining it or even of admitting its existence.

The pointless stalling everywhere will be appalling; the kind of shifty-eyed, edgy, uneasy stalling that bursts into inexplicable, resentful, disproportionate anger whenever anyone as much as mentions the issue, let alone asks for a decision. This—everywhere, on any matter, big or little, in business offices and in homes, in professional relations and in love-affairs, in public speeches and drawing-room conversations. Nobody will make a definite statement. Nobody will “commit himself,” since nobody is sure of anything. Everything is said by indirection, circumlocution, vagueness, a kind of tangled ceremonial empty verbosity, in which the only thing that is clear is the absence of anything definite having been stated.

The one unforgivable sin that makes everyone jumpy, venomous, suspicious, makes them consider you a dreadful boor of bad manners, is to say anything definitely. It is a crime to be sure that the sun is shining and say so. The preferred form is: “It seems that the sun is shining,” or “I believe the sun is shining,” or “It is generally conceded that two and two make four.” (The theories about “nothing is absolute,” “nothing is certain,” “nothing is real” are enormously popular.) It is not any particular statement they dread, but the mere fact of a definite statement, and of a man being able to make it-because this implies their own need to make [such statements].

Such a world must be first bewildering, then totally unbearable to an intelligent person—like an insane asylum, which it is. Only, the insane cannot deal with reality because of their inherent incapacity to do it; these people refuse to deal with it by intention, which may be even more dreadful. (And, of course, everyone is extremely pleasant to everyone else, smilingly blank, because anger is a definite emotion, a definite stand.)

When things catch up with the parasite and he can stall no longer, he scrambles to pass the buck and shift the responsibility. The parasite will not make a decision; he will look for someone else to make it, then he will subscribe to it—halfway, cautiously, always leaving himself an out, an “escape clause.” If the decision turns out well, he will take all the credit and be extremely touchy about minimizing the credit for the man who made the decision. If the decision turns out badly, he will be the first to turn upon the decider and tear him to pieces. This kind of double-crossing, patsy-finding, pushing cat’s paws to pull chestnuts out of fires is a general policy, almost expected and taken for granted as normal procedure. Imagine the feelings of an honest, honorable person in the midst of this! And all this is done under that vapid blanket of a fixed, empty, mealy-mouthed smile; everybody suspecting, hating, and fearing everybody else (as they have to, since the double-cross is the general policy), yet always speaking softly and shaking each other’s hands limply. It is not the manner of my kind of brotherly love or benevolence—but the manner of cowards wearing a protective coloration in order not to be hurt: a manner that is automatic, emotionless, lifeless.

Another form of shifting responsibility—when it is not a matter of shifting it to a person—is the scramble for substitutes for thought, for “automatic thinking,” for guaranteed security without rational judgment or procedures decision. This is the miserable reliance on precedent and routine, the copying and imitating of anything that was or seemed to be successful, the judgment by any irrelevant side-issues, rather than by rational examination of the evidence. The devotion to routine is everywhere: “I’m doing it this way because so-and-so did it this way successfully in 1910.” Business procedures have come down to an incredible, senseless mess of wasted motion, inconvenience, inefficiency—just because it was done that way fifty years ago, and circumstances have changed, but nobody’s taken the initiative to notice it and change procedures accordingly.

The “judgment by side-issues” is on the pattern of thinking that a movie is good because its particular locale was popular; or because “the theme is timely.” Opinion polls [are used] as substitutes for judgment and as guides for action, on all issues, on the most preposterously inapplicable occasions.

Also—the desperate worship of authority (what authority and how “authorities” appear is another matter, to be analyzed later). Once somebody is an “authority,” everything he says or does is right, without questions or examination, not because it is right, but because he says or does it. It is never what is said, but who says it. The strict method of judgment by and from personality. To discredit an idea, one must discredit the speaker or his motives (the smear technique). The attempt to discredit an idea by examining it is treason against the code of the parasite, a breach of the general method of the parasite’s world. The examination of an idea can’t be done without independent rational judgment.

The attempts to substitute mechanical devices for judgment (like machines to study audience reactions) are fantastic and extend into the most preposterous spheres. (Like, say, a machine to measure your reactions and tell you whether you really love your wife or not.)

And the first question asked, before any action, is: “Who has done it that way?” The statement: “It’s never been done before” is pronounced everywhere as the final, unanswerable expression of disapproval, the self-evident defeat of the man who made the proposal, the ultimate damnation, in the same way that we would say: “It’s impossible.”

The attempts to agree on everything with everyone are sickening. “Why raise an issue?” “Do you have to be disagreeable?” “Do you have to be difficult?” are the constant phrases. A disagreement, of course, implies the need of taking a stand. It’s easy to think oneself safe, so long as everybody agrees; it must be so, since everybody thinks it is and there are no dissenters; but a dissenter brings up the possibility that it may not be so, and that brings up the possibility that you may have to decide what is so.

The contradictions and inconsistencies—in speeches, ideas, policies and actions—are unbelievable. They’d rather contradict themselves all over the place than face a contradiction; to face it means that one must resolve it, choose, and make a decision. Nobody says today what he said yesterday. Nobody means what he says—nor says what he means—nor knows what he means when he says it. This, of course, makes all personal relations disgusting. But when this is applied to business matters—the disasters follow. (When they discard the rational faculty, they have to live in and for the moment, without connection to the rest of their lives; they break the continuity of an identity—since they have no identity. The power of reason is the identity.)

Nothing and nobody is reliable. There is no way to pin a man down to anything definite, nor to count on him. He has no character—he has no identity, no fixed entity. It is not a world of crooks and dishonesty—crooks have a tangible, definite purpose, robbery, and one could even deal on the basis of that as a solid starting point; it is much worse. It is a world in the exact image of a parasite’s soul—a gray, shapeless fog. A world with a treacherous quicksand under one’s feet—and no defined outlines, no solid shapes, no fixed entities; a heavy, passive, stagnant fog in which something moves, as if trying to form, but dissolves the moment you attempt to focus on or touch it; a world without focus, blurred, not to be reached, never quite in existence. It is something like the spectacle one would see if one’s power of central, focused vision were gone and only one’s marginal side-vision was left; one would then be in the awful [position] of knowing that one can’t function or remain that way, it’s an unbearable state, worse than blindness, because one would have to make constant efforts to see clearly, while knowing that it’s impossible.

There is only clear attribute of the fog—pain. Suffering. It’s not even a specific suffering—how can anything be specific in such a fog?—but a pervading sense of suffering, perhaps more awful for not being defined (if it were defined, one could perhaps combat it). It is as if one heard screams (or sounds approximating screams) among the vague, floating shapes, and whenever these shapes seemed to jell into forms of something for an instant, the forms were those of open wounds. The Hegelian-Marxist process without an object that does the “processing”? There it is.

There is never an event of success, achievement, completion, fulfillment, or happiness in this world. Whenever a definite event emerges from the rotten stagnation, it’s a disaster-a failure, a breakdown, destruction, suffering, disappointment, frustration, misery. This—in business life, in public life, in personal life. (Since the parasite functions on the death principle, the positive events are impossible in his world; only the negative ones, the progressive steps to final destruction, can be achieved in reality, the reality he asked for.)

In this world’s productive life, nothing is ever done successfully, everything is botched, halfway, doesn’t quite come off; but the disasters and failures are clear-cut and definite enough; after each, the productive activity falls a step below the previous level; there is no power of recovery. In personal life, the attempts at happiness are dismal failures—forced, unconvincing, unsatisfying, a pretense at joy rather than real joy—everything is bloodless, in half-tones, in faded, washed-out, blotched pastels—the love affairs, the marriages, the friendships. (Emotions proceed from reason—and where there are no firm rational convictions, there can be no real emotions; their feelings are an exact counterpart of their intellectual state, of the content of their minds.)

The misery of these people is real enough—but not sharp enough to make them stop, scream, rebel and do something about it; that, too, would be a definite emotion. It is more like a chronic state of dull pain, almost as if they had come to take for granted that pain is man’s normal state of existence. Occasionally, it becomes unbearable; one of them breaks. And the specific events or results of their personal relationships are all disastrous, each leaving the relationship worse than it was before.

Now, as to their “authorities.” It is, of course, part of the basic contradiction of the parasite that he must hate the creator and need him at the same time, that he must destroy the creator and seek him out. So the behavior of men in the parasite’s world has both aspects, viciously and ludicrously mixed. First, they try to discard, ignore, hamper, destroy any man of ability and grab his ideas, his property, his position, his prestige. They sense genuine ability, they fear and resent it, and one way of fighting it is the Toohey method of “enshrining mediocrity”: while they sneer at heroes and heroism, they practice a maudlin, sickening kind of half-abject, half-sneering hero-worship of their own kind of celebrities, and they eagerly push their mediocrities onto public altars, blow nonentities into giants—while proclaiming their resentment of and the nonexistence of giants. (And don’t we see that today?) They scramble for the spotlight themselves—and also push their own kind into prominence, into the places of the destroyed or missing creators.

The second stage is when the parasites discover what the positions of the creators entail. There is a period of bewildered hesitation and uncertainty. To be “a great man” means to have to take action, make decisions and bear the responsibility. This the parasite cannot and will not do; he will run from the mere thought of it. So now there comes the period of the ghost-writer, the front and the patsy. The parasites try to keep their “prestige” and positions, but switch the work and the actual responsibility to someone else. (My story opens just before the beginning of this period.) That’s the stage equivalent to the Soviet custom of liquidating factory heads for the failure of a five-year plan, the heads who are placed there for that purpose, who have the responsibility of trying to produce under impossible conditions, who never get credit for success (the Commissar does) and get executed for failure. (This is precisely what James Taggart does with his key employees. There is one concrete, dramatic issue in human terms.)

The parasites are not concerned with the results, i.e., the actual performance or production that their high position demands. They are concerned only (and fiercely, hysterically) with faking a performance—in the eyes of others and in their own eyes. They maneuver themselves into positions and situations where the responsibility for actual results is not theirs—and they have a plausible alibi for it not being theirs, for their right to put the blame on somebody else, for even being the injured party (on the “I work so hard—and here’s what people do to me—I can’t help it” pattern).

This is what the parasite has always done in the world of creators—but then he passed the buck to the creators and was able to ride along safely on their energy, on their performance and production. But now he passes the buck to another parasite—and is aghast to find that it won’t work. The parasite merely repeats the top parasite’s gesture, passing the buck further down. (But there is now no man to stop this chain—to take responsibility and action.)

When this starts with the head of a firm, it spreads on down, in ever widening circles. First, because this is the type of men the parasite would surround himself with, particularly in top positions; he’s fired and rejected the creators long ago, the creators “don’t belong, they’re inharmonious, they’re difficult.” Second, because the lesser employees (who are actually better men—honest average men—working under the orders of their inferiors, bewildered and embittered under the command of presumptuous, pompous phonies) realize what is expected of them and what is the only way to keep the job they need. They see that the bosses neither want nor understand an actual performance, but are scrambling with one another for the better position from which to fake a performance; they realize that if they attempt to do good honest work it would mean being tagged with the responsibility for somebody else’s mistake (and these mistakes are constant, all around them, they see the all-pervading reign of the mindless); so they conclude, in excusable self-preservation, that the safe, practical thing to do is not to work, but to fake a show of working and play the game of passing the buck.

(This is excusable for honest average men because they are not creators or initiators, they cannot go into business, start an enterprise, make a living on their own, and they never pretended they could. And it’s not possible in their collectivized, frozen, regimented world. They are, by nature, only good employees, and they have no other place to go; the situation, methods, and policy are the same in every enterprise run by the parasites. This is the point at which average men are forced to discard their best and exist by means of their worst—in a society of parasites.)

So these lesser employees start passing the buck to still smaller ones, until only the office boy is certain of his proper job and is performing it (he has no one smaller to use as a front). Then, in a crisis, it is the office boy who gets blamed for the company’s ten-million-dollar failure—and it’s all proved, explained, alibied, stated in the press, by everybody down the line, in the language of parasites to parasites, in the disgusting, deliberately inexact double-talk that passes for convincing argument. (But then, nobody is convinced of anything anyway, one way or the other, and nobody argues; the explanation, too, is only a show.)

And don’t we see this today! This is the exploitation of the weak by the strong—when strength is [based] not on the intellect, but on plain force; the parasites hold their jobs by compulsion or fraud, not by merit.

(The pretense of an explanation in this case is only a routine remembered from the world of the creators, performed but no longer understood or taken seriously. This is one example of the sickening way in which remnants of a rational world still persist in this insane asylum, in the shape of meaningless hulks, automatic routines gone through for no particular reason, just because no one took the initiative to stop it. It is the letter without the spirit, something like the maintenance of an airport for which there are no longer any planes (they do that, too). There must be many examples of this in the story—in their business and personal lives.)

The third stage is when nobody wants a position of responsibility any longer. Nobody wants a top job. The desperate competition is for small jobs, the smaller the safer; it is a scramble for anonymity in a world aimed at and geared to anonymity, the world without a person, without identity, without individuality. It has now become dangerous to be important, even important only in show, even to be only an inflated windbag or figurehead. They don’t liquidate “the specialists,” as in Russia, but the public figures; the big-shot figureheads are beginning to be blamed for the accelerating failures and disasters, for the state of the world (even if no specific personal responsibility can be pinned on any one of them). The big shots collectively (didn’t they want that?) are beginning to be tagged with a collective blame, there are cries of: “Something has to be done. ” (Nobody knows what to do—everybody knows that it has to be done.)

There have been a few cases when top parasites got caught in their own stupidities and criminal negligences, when they weren’t able to wriggle out of the responsibility, and were publicly exposed and disgraced, and lost their fortunes, factories, or positions. This has scared the rest of the top parasites. So now there are gaping vacancies in top jobs; the parasites are afraid to take them, the honest average men won’t take them, because they know that the job is hopeless, no honest work can be done in this kind of world, particularly not in any responsible executive position. The rules and regulations, which the parasites erected earlier for their own “protection,” are now such that no one can untangle them or make a step, or know where he stands—and an honest man cannot accept responsibility when he knows he won’t be left free to perform the work for which he is responsible. (Nor will he allow himself to be held responsible for the actions and mistakes of others, whom he can’t control, who control him; a slave or a robot cannot be responsible.)

And, of course, the creators are not there to take these top jobs. (They wouldn‘t, in these conditions, even without a strike—as we see today. It’s strange that Soviet Russia has such trouble getting experts and top executives, isn’t it?) At this point in the story there must be some important desertions of the few remaining creators to the ranks of the strikers—with disastrous results for the parasites left behind, causing the beginning of the parasites’ panic.

The performance of the “authorities” and celebrities begins to be grotesquely ludicrous during this period (which is just a little worse than it is right now). Authorities are picked by mere chance and sheer accident. At first, the parasites were pushing themselves and their friends into celebrity [status]; now they are afraid of it. So the field of fame is open to anyone and everyone, by blind chance; fame without any cause, achievement, or reason (merely because people have to talk about somebody, so somebody’s got to be a celebrity). This is fame by default—and another remnant of a better world, the remnant of the conception of greatness, without content. (Something like the way books become best-sellers now, practically without merit, by sheer accident; something’s got to sell, one is no better and no worse than another, it actually makes no difference, nobody really cares.)

So any adventurer, ambitious empty-headed bitch, or naive second-hander can leap (or stumble accidentally) into the class of celebrity. Then he or she becomes an “authority”—and people grasp avidly at their opinions or advice, for guidance, never questioning what is said or why the celebrity became a celebrity or whether there is any reason to respect his opinion. The chance remark of almost anybody can convince people that almost anybody else is a reliable authority. Nobody questions who made the first remark nor who started the “authority run.” People really don’t want to question that; it is so much safer to believe that you’re dealing with an expert and not to look into his [qualifications] too closely; everybody is eager to rest on somebody else’s assertion and to think that the somebody else knew what he was talking about, since no person knows that in regard to his own talk. The pattern is: “Why, sure, Joe Blow is the greatest expert on economics—John Doakes said so and John must have his reasons—so I don’t have to look into the reasons, it’s perfectly safe to follow the advice of Joe Blow.”

This is another example of evasion—and another distorted remnant of a better world: the realization that there are such things as experts, that they must be individuals, not a nameless collective, since any judgment can proceed only from a mind, and an expert is a man with trained, self-confident judgment, who knows first-hand what he is talking about. That much of a form is left in people’s minds, but an empty form, without content, with no realization of what specifically constitutes an expert on how to recognize him, so that the public attitude is a desperate search for a leader, without any understanding of what he must be or where or how he must lead them. The blind search for a great individual in a world that has discarded the concepts of individualism and greatness. And of the whole crazed herd, the celebrities and authorities are, at this point, the most frightened ones of all.

At this stage, the awful staleness of society is becoming apparent and unbearable to all; this is when they go in for revivals of the past (like the theater now), because nothing new is being produced.

The [fourth] stage is the hysterical compromise, in a growing panic. The parasite begins to see that his principles won’t work—but he can’t abandon them. He needs the creators—and he can’t admit that he needs them. He can’t do the work, but it’s got to be done—so he wants somebody who’ll do it for him. He proceeds in his usual twisted, irrational way—his halfway. He wants creators without having to call them creators or give them the conditions they require in order to function. He wants creators as tools—a contradiction in terms; but he thinks it’s only a matter of finding some who are willing to be tools.

He embarks upon a course compounded of flattery and insults, bribery and threats, incentives and [punishments], all at the same time. He attempts to develop experts and leaders, but to keep them in check, safely harnessed. He fosters a kind of “home-grown substitute for creators,” a kind of “ersatz creators.” He features individuals too much, offers exorbitant rewards (usually material), names movements and public monuments after them—yet sits guard over them, fiercely and jealously, to see that the “leader” has the proper collectivist spirit, the proper humility, no independence, not too much initiative that could flame into a rebellion; in other words, he wants the performance of a creator with the soul of a parasite, a timid, cowardly soul like his own, a soul that won’t demand too much nor develop an actual ego. He wants these alleged creators to function, yet “be kept in their place.” And all the rewards and incentives he offers are of a blatantly collectivist, second-handed nature (money, titles, public honors)—he could not venture to offer personal rewards, such as freedom, choice, actual authority and responsibility.

Under these conditions, one can imagine what kind of leaders he gets. Those who swim to the top now, those boosted into leadership, are the criminal element—the type of Soviet commissars or G.P.U. agents, the real gangster type, without even the saving grace of a neurosis (if that’s a saving grace). These new figures are the reemergence of the savage, the harbingers and symbols of the final retrogression. They have no scruples, principles, or anti-individualist complex; they don’t even have a conception of what any of that means; they don’t mind carrying out the orders of the parasite and they don’t care about his reasons or motives; they know they are not actually carrying out anyone’s orders—they are there to loot. They are beasts of prey in the simplest and lowest sense of the word. They are the savages who have no other conception of existence except to grab what they can, where they can, at and for the moment—the exponents of man without a mind, trying to exist through naked brute force. [This type is represented in the novel by the character of Cuffy Meigs. ]

Their relation to the parasite, who is their official boss and who is now mere window dressing in public top positions of alleged authority, is that of G.P.U. agents to [Communist] Party theoreticians; public strutting and abject fear on the side of the latter, a silent leering contempt on the side of the former; both know who is doing whose dirty work and who is the real boss. (Or, somewhat, the relation of Toohey and Gus Webb.)

And whenever (not often) one of these new leaders turns out to be more naive or a better man than the rest of them, whenever he shows signs of something like real ability, sincerity or popularity, he is promptly liquidated by the parasite. The vicious paradox of the parasite’s position is that he must destroy the man who could possibly save him, the moment that man shows signs of such a possibility—and he must leave the field clear to those who are [his own] real destroyers. In an unstated, unadmitted way, the parasite knows this. This is one of the reasons for his growing hysteria, his panic, and his desperate attempts to escape from any thought, from facing any facts. (There must be a concrete incident and relationship like that for James Taggart and some of his last employees.)

Men like these new leaders, with no force to oppose them, would destroy the world quickly, in any stage, at any time. But when it is attempted to have them run the remnants of an industrial civilization, the end comes that much quicker. So this stage does not last long. It is merely a period of accelerated disintegration and destruction.

The [fifth] and final stage is the abject surrender to the creators—without an honest admission or realization of it. The parasite who admits or realizes anything ceases being a parasite. By now, he is not capable of that, if he ever was. But the surrender is there, and the parasite knows it, and his panic at this stage is sheer running from himself, the screaming panic within. The surrender is in the attempts to find Galt, to beg him for help, then to torture him—torture being the last and only resort of the parasite’s method: brute force, man expected to act without mind, with pain as sole impetus and motivation. This is the climax, the revelation, the parasite showing his trump card, the thing he has been holding in reserve all this time, his claim upon the world-this is the symbol of what he has considered as the source of his right to loot, exploit, rule and devastate the world all these centuries—this is his badge, his banner, his essence: torture.

And this is the realization that even James Taggart cannot escape, nor bear. This is the meaning of the scene with the priest. The end of James Taggart is the end of the parasite.

Consider: since the theme is, in a basic way, that the material comes from the spiritual and the collectivists cannot even feed themselves without the mind—it would be interesting and proper to show the same relationship for sex, as per my note on the “Pattern of the Parasites.”

[AR’s grasp of the relation of sex and economics is evidence of her unique capacity for integration; she was expert at identifying the common essence that unites seemingly different facts or areas. The above integration of sex and economics was not only one of the outstanding philosophic achievements in Atlas Shrugged—it was also crucial to her development of the plot. After completing the novel, she remarked in an interview:

Rearden, as I first saw him, was the abstraction of the martyred industrialist. He had to be the Atlas who carries the world and receives nothing but torture in payment. But I saw him only as this abstraction, and I could not get anywhere with the idea. I could not get the center of any kind of plot until I changed the conception ofRearden.

The [above] note about the issue of sex and its relationship to economics was made before I had thought of the Rearden-Dagny relationship.... Then one day it suddenly struck me what type Rearden should be and that the romance between Rearden and Dagny should be the central plot line. And it’s from that decision that the rest of the plot fell into place quite easily. That seemed to tie the whole story.]

To [work out]:

The specific, detailed parallel between the methods of a totalitarian economy exploiting a free one and the personal methods of a parasite toward the creators. ([Use as models:] P.H., the girl reader, V.J.—in concrete detail of method, motive, and action.)

The pattern of a dictatorship as the detailed performance of a crumbling world trying hysterically to save itself.

The pattern of Galt versus Taggart in basic terms, from the beginning.

The pattern of disintegration (such as happens to TT) as it would take place in businesses I know—the publishing and the movie industries. Discover the abstract progression of what happens and why—then translate it [for TT’s disintegration].

Pick out from “Pattern of the Parasites” the specific points to illustrate in concrete action for James Taggart and his friends.

The supposition of man’s physical descent from monkeys does not necessarily mean that man’s soul, the rational faculty, is only an elaboration of an animal faculty, different from the animal’s consciousness only in degree, not in kind. It is possible that there was a sharp break, that the rational faculty was like a spark, added to the animal who was ready for it—and this would be actually like a soul entering a body. Or it might be that there is a metaphysical mistake in considering animals as pure matter. There is, scientifically, a most profound break between the living and the non-living. Now life may be the spirit; the animals may be the forms of spirit and matter, in which matter predominates; man may be the highest form, the crown and final goal of the universe, the form of spirit and matter in which the spirit predominates and triumphs. (If there’s any value in “feelings” and “hunches”—God! how I feel that this is true!)

If it’s now added that the next step is pure spirit—I would ask, why? Pure spirit, with no connection to matter, is inconceivable to our consciousness; and what, then, is the sense, purpose or function of matter? That division into spirit and matter as antagonists or opposites, that idea of “setting man free from matter,” is untenable, irrational, and vicious (and has led only to man’s agony on earth, to rejection of his joy in living—the highest expression of his spirit). The unity of spirit and matter seems unbreakable; the pattern of the universe, then, would be: matter, as the tool of the spirit, the spirit giving meaning and purpose to matter. [...]

Also to be noted here: the spiritual is the totally individual, since it is a consciousness and a consciousness is an “I.” (Whether it’s God, man, or an animal, a universal consciousness or the faintest flicker of it—it’s an indivisible “I.” This is why the Oriental idea of consciousness dissolving into an impersonal universal spirit is nonsense, irrational, and a contradiction in terms. Once the indivisible unity, integrity, continuity of an “I” is broken, there’s no “consciousness” to speak about.)

Men’s intellectual capacities have always been so unequal that to the thinkers the majority of their brothers have probably always seemed sub human. And some men may still be, for all the evidence of rationality, or lack of it, that they give. We may still be in evolution, as a species, and living side by side with some “missing links.” [...]

We do not know to what extent the majority of men are now rational. (They are certainly far from the perfect rational being, and all the teachings they absorb push them still farther back to the pre-human stage.) But we do know that mankind as a whole and each man as an individual has a chance to survive and succeed only to the degree of their general and individual intelligence. That is all that a rational man can deal with, count on or be concerned with. Let him, without wondering about actual numbers or percentages of intelligence in others, act on the basis of “addressing himself to intelligence” —and he will win. And he will find that he does not have to fear stupidity. (Most men now are rational beings, even if not too smart; they are not pre-humans incapable of rational thinking; they can be dealt with only on the basis of free, rational consent.)

If it’s asked: what about those who are still pre-human, or near enough to it, and incapable of rationality as a method to guide their lives? What if such do exist among us? The answer is: nothing. Their way of living is not ours; in fact, they have no way of living, no method or means of survival—except through imitating us, who have acquired the human method and means. Leave us to our way of living, man’s way—freedom, individual independence-and we’ll carry them along by providing an example and a world of safety and comfort such as they can never quite grasp, let alone achieve.

We do this—but even if we didn‘t, so what? If those creatures incapable of rational existence are sub-human, are we to sacrifice ourselves or be sacrificed to them? Are we to descend to their level? Are we to make them the goal of our existence, and service to them our only purpose? If these pre-humans are incapable of rational thinking and of independence, and therefore they need an enslaved, controlled, regimented, “protective” society in order to survive—we cannot survive in such a society. By definition, we are then two different species. Their requirements are opposite to ours. They’ll perish without us, anyway. But we will not be sacrificed to them. We will live in freedom—whether or not others will or can live that way.

April 27, 1946

Specific Instances of Parasite Methods to Be Dramatized (For James Taggart, and others like him)

Overall: the escape from the necessity to make an independent rational judgment. (The escape from decision, from responsibility.)

The parasite with a two-cent achievement, who wants to destroy all great achievements, so that his will be tops (and even his achievement is not authentic, not original, but a borrowed composite). On a railroad, this would be a man who makes Taggart reject a great improvement, in order to adopt his silly little one. (Or it can be Taggart himself.)

The parasite who thinks that in order to get a top job he only has to destroy the creator holding it. He succeeds—and merely destroys the job. This can be Taggart himself—if he got his position not through inheritance, but special pull (against Dagny), such as government pressure. (His share of inheritance did not entitle him to be president of the company; he forced his way into that.) If not, then it must be a specific, important case of a parasite who thus destroys a business needed by TT. It is also Taggart forcing a competing, rising new railroad company (which is only a branch so far) out of business through political means—then finding that passengers won’t use his substitute, he has merely destroyed the market, and it has cost him more than he could afford (thus weakening TT).

This is also a number of lesser parasites: a critic who forces his way into the place of an honorable one—and finds that people no longer pay attention to reviews. The pseudo-philosopher, who takes the place of the philosopher on strike—and sees his classes shrinking, people losing interest in philosophy, and wonders why it is that he can’t be “an influence,” as the other man was. The no-melody composer, who takes the place of Gerhardt—and wonders why people don’t go to concerts any more, why records of old classics are so popular. The girl-writer’s publishers—who see the public reading fewer and fewer books. The automobile manufacturer who sees the public going back to horse-buggies. (This point is eloquent and important, so it can be used in many typical instances, some in detail, some just indicated, as small “bits.”)

The parasites who try to “protect” themselves by restricting and destroying competition (by stopping others). [Hence, the] unions with their rules for the performance of useless duties, and quotas of admission, to keep their profession limited. Also, James Taggart and other businessmen like him ganging up on a newcomer in their line, to drive him out (and then TT needs the product he was manufacturing—and the whole damn gang can’t deliver it).

James Taggart, in his quest for superiority, goes to great lengths to beat some creator, instead of performing some needed achievement of his own. (This might be the railroad which he destroys.)

In his personal relations, the more Taggart gets, the less satisfied he is and the more he demands.

Taggart gives orders for the sheer sake of being obeyed (sometimes even knowing that the order is preposterous—that is why he wants to force an abler man to obey it), and he causes untold damage to TT that way. Dagny is fighting that constantly.

[Regarding] Taggart’s desire to “influence others”: he gives advice to some helpless person (perhaps a poor girl he’s trying to have a “romance” with), finds that the advice is wrong and detrimental to her—and insists that she carry it out, just because it’s his advice and he wants to see his influence realized. The actual result of his advice means nothing to him. (Here is the parasite’s unreality: the girl asked him to save her, instead he’s destroyed her, but he considers that beside the point; she took his advice, doesn’t that make him great and powerful?)

Taggart’s nagging jealousy and his insistence on beingfirst in the affections of any woman or friend is sickening and becomes unbearable even to the weaklings whom he picks for affection.

Taggart is always surrounded by inferiors—a kind of personal court of fawning moochers. When he brings them into his business (forcing them on TT in the manner of and for exactly the same motive as Caligula and his horse) the results are disastrous. This may be one important incident in the contest between Taggart and Winslow: Taggart forces an offensive mediocrity into the position of Winslow’s boss.

Taggart steals someone’s invention or idea for TT—then tries to destroy the creator, in order to take the credit (like the designers who steal from Adrian).

Taggart is extremely “touchy” about his “feelings.” He believes [subconsciously] that all he has to do is want something and he should get it; if he doesn‘t, then he hates the universe. It never occurs to him that before you can want anything, you must have defined standards, purposes, and reasons; that is, desires proceed from the rational faculty and, therefore, will be (and must be) based on reality. The rational man will not want the impossible, the undefined, the self-contradictory; nor will he merely sit and want something, but will know clearly what he wants and how to get it, and will act to get it. But Taggart’s attitude is a chronic damning of the universe, because he just wants and nothing happens.

Taggart’s hatred for the creators is an all-pervading theme-song in his actions. The immediate objects of it are Dagny, Rearden, Winslow. (And in the background, there is always his dread of John Gait.)

An incident when Taggart, after having eliminated a better competitor, stuns Dagny by declaring (she forces this out of him) that he has no desire to improve TT or to make more money now. He wanted to run three trains a day when his competitor ran two, and he wanted to make two million dollars to the competitor’s one. But now he is perfectly satisfied to run just one train a day and to make just half a million. It’s not the fact that counts, not the actual, objective value—but the relation of beating that other man. (This is toward the end of the story, and Dagny begins to realize the horror of a parasite’s nature; she sees a faint hint of an explanation for what’s wrong with the world—and she begins to hate her brother.)

Taggart is forever engaged in forming “collaborations,” “cooperatives,” “agreements,” gangs and cliques—and forever running to Washington to have laws passed for “protection.” Toward the end, he no longer has any clear sense of what it is that he must be protected from, and his efforts have no practical meaning at all, they are like the convulsions of an animal getting more and more tangled in the thread he has unraveled.

Taggart hates any success or happiness, even of those unrelated to him. Incidents when he double-crosses friends or protégés, just because they seemed happy or had succeeded in something.

Taggart will always sneer and make disparaging remarks whenever anyone is praised in his presence--even if it’s only some professor of botany or some prize-cattle farmer. (He likes all the “debunking” biographies, the news and gossip about “feet of clay.”)

Taggart’s envy—of everything and everyone—is constant, ever-present, and motivates most of his actions.

Taggart loves to talk about and gloat over any misfortune.

Taggart hates Dagny and needs her. He wants to destroy her and to get all he can out of her. One way of doing this is to try to ruin her personal life, make her unhappy, yet permit her to function in business, even hoping that this would make her function better. This is what Taggart does in relation to Stan Winslow.

Taggart’s dependence on the material (like the big, luxurious home) reflects his crazy half-notion that his spiritual greatness will come from that. Yet he is extremely stupid about spending money on luxuries (flat, no imagination) and he gets no pleasure from it.

There must also be one of the parasites who will start poor, make a Peter Keating kind of career, and go to pieces when he reaches the top, when he sees that money does not give him what he wanted.

Examples of parasites who don’t want to make but to “take over.”

Taggart always talks about “striving being better than achievement” and “and man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” etc.

Examples of collectivists that are inordinately concerned with material wealth, and of creators that are calmly indifferent about it—not really indifferent, but self-confident.

Important incident (near the end of the story) showing James Taggart’s abject terror of some of his own gangsters.

April 28, 1946

Note for Galt, while he is being tortured:

He tells them that torture is the only weapon they have—and this is limited by his own will to live. “You can get away with it only so long as I have some desire of my own to remain alive, for the sake of which I will accept your terms. What if I haven’t? What if I tell you that I wish to live in my own kind of world, on my own terms—or not at all? This is how you have exploited and tortured us for centuries. Not through your power—but through ours. Through our own magnificent will to live, which you lack, the will that was great enough to carry on, even through torture and in chains. Now we refuse you that tool—that power of life, and of loving life, within us. The day we understand this—you’re finished. Where are your weapons now? Go ahead. Turn on the electric current.”

(The electric current was invented by one of the creators—and this is the use parasites put it to, when the creators give it to them.)

Even in Dagny’s suffering there is a sense of beauty, strength, and hope. Even in Taggart’s joys there is a sense of guilt, shame, and disgust.

Important: dramatize the connection between joy in living and the rational faculty. The reason is clear: the basic sense of joy in living [arises from] the firm realization and conviction that you have the means to satisfy your desires, to achieve joy. Joy is the emotional reaction to a satisfied desire. Reason “produces” the desire and the means to achieve it; joy is the “consumption” of this production. The parasite, who has discarded reason as impotent in his desire to escape reality, is left with the unadmitted, but implicit, conclusion that he has no means to achieve joy—hence his chronic sense of frustration and misery. This primary joy in living is present and shown in all the strikers, but most eloquently in John Galt and Dagny.

For the “reversed process of expansion”: just as Henry Ford opened the way (created the chance) for scores of new industries, James Taggart kills the chances of any attempted endeavor that comes in contact with his business. Show lesser, but potentially important, inventions that are killed through his rejection, and more important, through his retrenchment of the particular line where they would be useful. Example: somebody suggests lunch cars on trains; somebody else has a gadget that would make quick, compact lunches possible and could have many uses besides those on trains, could grow into a valuable industry; Taggart declares that there’s no reason to give the passengers quick lunches, let them carry lunch boxes, they have no other means of transportation, they’ll ride on floors in boxcars if necessary, why should he give them lunches? The gadget and the unborn industry are killed. (This example is not necessarily the one to use, but this is the pattern.)

In clear connection with that, show the method of Hank Rearden, who expands everything he touches (and gets penalized for it in the parasite’s world), and [perhaps] have flashbacks to the career of Taggart’s great-great-grandfather, founder of TT, who functioned like Henry Ford. Show the spreading creativeness of the creators-and the contracting destructiveness of the parasites.

Show instances of the irrational state of the world in retrogression. Progress proceeds logically and new industries grow when and as they are needed, but there can be no logical retrogression. The economy in the parasite’s world presents all the senselessness of destruction: [the attempt to maintain] difficult, complex industries, while primary necessities are gone. They’re manufacturing—with difficulty and at incredible cost—a few botched tractors a year, when the farmers have no simple plows. They manufacture double-deck observation cars, and have no passenger coaches. There are (botched) television sets for the officials—and no safety pins for the public. It is the spectacle of an erratic, unnatural, irrational shrinking; the signs of the break up, of retrogression. For man, retrogression can only be unnatural; it has to be irrational, because where reason is in control, there is expansion and progress.

Show an instance of penalizing ability: early in the story, Taggart rejects an able employee (the young engineer?) for reasons such as: “He’s too good—too brilliant—which will make it difficult for the other employees—there will be no harmony, no balance—we’ll do better with a lesser, milder man who’ll fit in.” Then show the specific results: what the brilliant one would have done, and what the “milder” one does (and the consequences for TT). (In connection with the Tunnel catastrophe.)

Show an instance of an employee (of medium importance) forced to act on his worst, not his best (toward the end of the second stage)—with results disastrous to TT. This, in a higher, more complex sense, also applies as a main line for Stan Winslow.

Show specific, repeated instances when the honest average men (particularly in the later stages) run to the “thinkers” of the period (the pseudo-philosopher, the pseudo-critic, etc.) for spiritual guidance in their growing bewilderment and despair. What they actually need is the basic, profoundly philosophical advice which the thinkers who are on strike could have given them; the advice they get only pushes them into the general horror.

In each instance of creators working with the parasites, show where and how the creators contribute to their own destruction (like Dietrich Gerhardt). The pattern is that of Soviet Russia stealing foreign ideas and inventions, hiring foreign engineers and experts, repudiating loans and debts. The free enterprises must not deal with anyone except free enterprises, otherwise they are working for their own destruction. This means: you cannot work against your own principles, there is no “middle road” or compromise here; if you do, you’ll pay for it. Principles are absolute. And, applied to the creators on strike: you cannot compromise or work against the basic life principles of the creators.

April 29, 1946

Notes for tomorrow (for detailed thinking out):

A society of parasites is like a body with hemophilia: the slightest cut can be fatal and lead to bleeding to death; the slightest error, failure of routine, or new circumstance can destroy a whole industry (or society)—there is no power of recovery in the body, no thinking mind.

Pat is an example of the penalizing of ability. The conservatives actually reject her for being too good; they prefer [Edgar] Queeny, who is “milder,” i.e., less good. Their purpose is to save capitalism. Their result is to [further] the spread of collectivism.

Earle Balch [Isabel Paterson’s publisher] is an example of the average man who could be good, efficient and productive in a society of creators, but not in a society of parasites. The reasons? Either his disgust, or discouragement, or giving in. Either he’s not good, strong and brave enough to buck a society of parasites, or else he swims with the current and delivers just what the society around him requires. This is an example of how a society of producers brings out the best in the average man by rewarding him for his best—while a society of parasites brings out the worst in him by penalizing his best and rewarding his worst. One rewards him for producing, the other for faking. How long can a society go on in that last way? (This is an important point.)

The average man doesn’t have the strength to do what is right at any cost, against all men. Only the genius can do that. The genius clears the way for the average man. But when the genius goes, the best in the average man goes with him. (John Galt and Stan Winslow?) [This is AR’s last reference to the character of Stan Winslow.]

The general pattern of the crack-up is this: first, the ground is cut from under all men and all professions; i.e., the primary base—the metaphysical, philosophical, moral, political premises—are undercut. These are discovered, formulated, stated and defended by the thinkers, the geniuses, the creators. They are the necessary first premises for all men, before they can even begin to live and work properly as men. These are destroyed—and the thinkers, who could fight the destruction, do nothing about it, they let their work be destroyed, they offer no other [premises] and no resistance. In the place of the thinkers, there appear the Marxists, the Fadimans [Clifton Fadiman was book editor of The New Yorker], and such others. Instead of [reason], individualism, and capitalism men get mysticism, determinism, altruism, and collectivism.

The average man is stopped and destroyed right there. He cannot correct the premises himself—and the genius won’t help him. Therefore, the spiritual life of mankind becomes a hopeless, joyless, purposeless, senseless, cynical muddle of bewilderment and helplessness. From then on, [economic events] follow suit; the material is the expression and consequence of the spiritual. [This continues] until men can no longer maintain their material existence, i.e., can no longer feed themselves. (And the average man becomes the helpless prey of any parasite—only the genius and the proper principles could protect his human rights, his status as a man.)

In the material realm, the crack-up will embrace the whole [society], every activity. It is only a matter of selecting the key points, of illustrating the most important, the most eloquent, the most representative aspects of it (and showing it progressively, in logical sequence, in order of importance).

Here’s what I say to the parasites, in effect: “You miserable little bastards! You can’t conceive of or value our scale of living—but you think you can get its advantages without its essence, by enslaving and destroying us. You think you can enjoy our advantages on your level. All right. Try it.”

When a man destroys a competitor and takes his place, he does not get the place but merely destroys the market. For instance: if a bad writer destroyed all good writers, he would not get their public and market; people would stop reading books. The manufacturer of a bad car, destroying the better manufacturers, would stop people from using cars. (All the parasite can count on is the interim period of disintegration, while people struggle with his bad product, then give up.) This process can be seen now very eloquently in book publishing, the theater and movies. People do not take the trash: they merely stop reading new books, or going to the theaters.

April 30, 1946

Note on the basic theme: The basic process of a man’s life goes like this: his thinking determines his desires, his desires determine his actions. (Thinking, of course, is present all along the line, at every step and stage. His desires are a combination of thought and emotion (the “production” and the “consumption” sides being involved), and all his emotions are determined by his thinking, most particularly by his basic premises.)

So the process is: the right thinking creates the right desires, which create the proper activity. One of the aspects of man’s activity must be material production, in order to feed himself and exist. Feeding himself, the economic activity, is just one of the aspects of the fact that he has to give a physical expression or form to his spiritual aims, desires, and needs. This is the basic pattern, or “circle,” of man’s life on earth: the spirit (thought) through the material activity (production) to the satisfaction of his spiritual desires (emotions). (He must eat in order to think, but he must first think in order to eat.)

The wrong thinking leads to the wrong desires, which lead to the wrong activity—and a wrong activity means that man functions improperly in the material realm of production and cannot even feed himself. A spiritual error (wrong thinking) makes it impossible for him to handle the physical world or to preserve his body.

Now, on the general scale of mankind as a whole, here is how the pattern is repeated: the right philosophy leads to the right ethics, which lead to the right politics, which lead to the right economics. The wrong philosophy creates the wrong ethics, which create the wrong politics, which create the wrong economics (they stop production dead).

Therefore, here is what men must be told: if, through improper thinking due to inadequate mental [capacity], you start down the wrong way—you need the creators, the best minds, to correct your errors and show you the right way. If, through inability to do any basic thinking at all, you find yourselves open to scoundrels and parasites who push you toward destruction—you need the creators to save you and show you the right way. If you are one of the scoundrels, those who consciously devise systems of thought as tools of exploitation, you still need the creators. By the nature of your own systems, you can exist only so long as the creators are still there to be fought and looted. The day of your victory will be the day of your own destruction.

Pattern for James Taggart and TT (following the general “Pattern of Disintegration ”)

First stage. An issue at TT in which James Taggart stalls, then hides behind Dagny and another executive, leaving the two decisions to them (particularly objecting to Dagny’s decision). Taggart’s stalling (and timidity, playing-safe) hampers both lines of endeavor. Dagny wins, the executive fails. Taggart takes credit for Dagny’s achievement, and fires the executive, ruining him. The achievement comes out half-botched, due to the interference.

Second stage. An issue at TT in which James Taggart discovers the responsibility of being a “great man.” He makes an arbitrary decision, then creates a deliberate victim to ruin (“just in case”), and also leans on one of his pet parasites. The new executive, the victim, is in a position where he has to say “yes” to Taggart. But it doesn’t work, the buck passing spreads to the bottom. The issue ends in a real disaster (the first major one). Taggart wriggles out of it, ruining the chosen victim and some very minor employee (almost the equivalent of an office boy).

Third stage. TT can’t get top executives. Lesser disasters are accelerating, like a fabric cracking to pieces. Taggart depends on his suppliers, instead of vice versa. (The dependence on dependents.) An issue at TT in which Taggart’s best friend in a contributing business (one of the top parasites, one of these suppliers) gets caught in criminal negligence, is publicly exposed and ruined. His crash is a bad blow to TT. (Here Taggart runs his business for the sake of his suppliers—like a publisher who would publish “for critics.”)

Fourth stage. Taggart brings in a “criminal type” executive to TT. An issue in which the executive aims at nothing but personal looting (blatantly and cynically double-crossing TT). Taggart knows it—and can’t fire him.

Fifth stage. The issue which destroys TT.

May 3, 1946

Ideas from research:

If possible, tie Galt to transportation work, i.e., transportation science. (Ragnar Danneskjöld owns a plane designed by Galt, handmade in the valley. Its design attracts Dagny’s attention; this is one of the reasons she follows Danneskjöld. The plane could even be called the John Galt. The engine could be one that would be extremely valuable if applied to railroad use.) [This is the first mention of Galt inventing a new type of motor.]

For Dagny’s childhood: she tells Eddie Willers that the rail lines vanishing at the horizon are held in a man’s hand, like reins; they come from one man’s hand. What man? She doesn’t know. No, not her father, not any big man in the office. Someday she wants to meet that man. How will she recognize him? She will.

Use the grass growing between the tracks as a sign of disintegration.

The progressive neglect of maintenance work, the relaxation of vigilance, causes minor defects that lead to major disasters. Here we see James Taggart’s (and all the parasites‘) psychology of living in and for the moment, like a savage or an animal; he is incapable of long-range planning, foresight or continuity, just as he is incapable of integration as a person.

A major flood (like the 1938 one) can be used—only the railroad affected does not recover, and neither do the communities it served. There is no power of recovery in that society.

The examples of following routine and precedent with disastrous results—since every particular problem on a railroad is new and different, to be solved on the basis of the particular, specific case.

[Show] a section of the country killed off when TT closes a branch of their network. Just as new railroads created new sections, brought prosperity to semi-deserted, barren stretches of primitive wilderness—so now we see the reverse process, the failure and shrinking of railroads kills whole sections, creates abandoned ghost-towns, ghost-ranches, ghost-mines, and forces the handful of remaining inhabitants in such areas back into primitive subsistence, poverty, hard [manual] labor—back to savagery, but a desolate savagery, without hope. There are such dying sections (“blighted areas”) when the story opens; they are taken for granted—they have been spreading slowly for years. They are the first creepers of the advancing jungle. But there must also be a specific plot sequence showing the destruction of such a section-through the railroad failures traceable to James Taggart (this will be one of the turning points of TT’s disintegration).

May 4, 1946

Philosophical Notes on the Creative Process

The creative process is, in a way, the reverse of the learning process. It’s the other part of the circle [that goes] from the concrete to the abstract to the concrete. Abstractions are derived from the concrete—and then applied to the concrete in order to achieve one’s own purpose. The process of learning has as its purpose to acquire knowledge. The process of creation is the process of applying one’s knowledge to whatever purpose one wishes to achieve. Knowledge precedes creation; without knowledge of some sort (no matter how general) one can’t choose and set the purpose one wishes to accomplish. So the first, basic purpose (a kind of first sub-purpose) preceding every other specific purpose is the purpose of gaining knowledge. (Before you decide to create, you must know what you want to create and how you must [proceed] in order to create it.)

One may stop at the purpose of acquiring knowledge; theoretical scientists and philosophers do. But it seems to me (I have no clear definitions here as yet) that the complete cycle of a man’s life includes the application of his knowledge to his particular goal. Knowledge per se is the base of all activities; it seems to be only a part of a completed cycle. Yes, the function of the theoretical scientist and the abstract philosopher are more crucially, basically important than that of the applied scientist (inventor) or the practical moralist; these latter men rest their achievements on those of the former (and if one man combines both functions, the one of discovering new knowledge precedes that of applying it). But one cannot quite say that the discovery of new knowledge is more important than the application of existing knowledge; “important” here would imply the question: “Important to whom?” and involves a question of values.

Nor can one say that a theoretical scientist is necessarily a man of greater ability than the applied scientist; both functions require a process of new, original thought. One can say only that for any given step in the discovery of new knowledge and its use, the discovery precedes the use; the correct theory precedes the practical application. And also, one can say that the theoretical scientist or the philosopher perform the most obviously first-hand act of thinking, of rational deduction—drawing, from concrete experience, a new abstraction, the statement of new knowledge, never drawn by any other person before.

Still, it seems to me—no matter what great, original first-hand effort of thought is required in these functions—that theoretical science or abstract philosophy are “unfinished” spheres of human endeavor. (I said “it seems to me”: I may be wrong; this requires more thought and the most careful definitions.) The complete sphere must lead to man. It’s another completed cycle: from man to abstract knowledge to the satisfaction of man’s purposes and desires. Man’s essential nature is that of creator—within the reality of an objective universe; before he can act or create, he must study this universe (this is the process of acquiring knowledge); then, he uses his knowledge to set his purpose and to achieve it (this is the process of creation).

In my own case, I seem to be both a theoretical philosopher and a fiction writer. But it is the last that interests me most; the first is only the means to the last; the absolutely necessary means, but only the means; the fiction story is the end. Without an understanding and statement of the right philosophical principle, I cannot create the right story; but the discovery of the principle interests me only as the discovery of the proper knowledge to be used for my life purpose, and my life purpose is the creation of the kind of world (people and events) that I like, i.e., that represents human perfection. Philosophical knowledge is necessary in order to define human perfection, but I do not care to stop at the definition; I want to use it, to apply it in my work (in my personal life, too—but the core, center and purpose of my personal life, of my whole life, is my work).

This is why, I think, the idea of writing a philosophical non-nction book bored me; in such a book, the purpose would actually be to teach others, to present my ideas to them. In a book of fiction the purpose is to create, for myself, the kind of world I want and to live in it while I am creating it; then, as a secondary consequence, to let others enjoy this world, and to the extent that, they can.

It may be said that the first purpose of a philosophical book is the clarification or statement of your new knowledge to and for yourself; and then, as a secondary step, the offering of your knowledge to others. But here is the difference, as far as I am concerned: I have to acquire and state to myself the new philosophical knowledge or principle I use in order to write a fiction story as its embodiment and illustration; I do not care to write a story with a theme [based on] someone else’s philosophy (because those philosophies are wrong); to this extent, I am an abstract philosopher. I want to present the perfect man and his perfect life—and I must also discover my own philosophical statement and definition of this perfection. But when and if I have discovered such new knowledge, I am not interested in stating it in its abstract, general form, i.e., as knowledge; I am interested in applying it, i.e., in stating it in the concrete form of men and events, in the form of a fiction story. This last is my final purpose, my end; the philosophical knowledge or discovery is only the means to it. (I state the knowledge to myself, anyway; but I choose the final form of it, the expression, in the completed cycle that leads back to man.)

I wonder to what extent I represent a peculiar phenomenon in this respect; I think I represent the proper integration of a complete human being. Anyway, this should be my lead for the character of John Galt; he, too, is a combination of an abstract philosopher and a practical inventor; the thinker and the man of action, together.

Now, back to the process of creation. In learning, we draw an abstraction from concrete objects and events. In creating, we make our own concrete objects and events out of the abstraction; we bring the abstraction down and back to its specific meaning, to the concrete; but the abstraction has helped us to make the kind of concrete we want. It has helped us to create—to re-shape the world as we wish it to be for our purposes.

Example: I draw the abstraction “individualism” from observing men, their life, society, the universe. I translate that abstraction into a concrete figure, a specific man: Roark. [I do this by] a complex process of making abstractions concrete in details, characteristics, attributes, events; in each step and in the total result the essential process is the same: from the concrete to an abstract principle to the kind of concrete reality I want.

Thinking, i.e., the rational process, is involved in both functions: in the activity of acquiring knowledge (getting the abstractions) and in the activity of creating (translating the abstraction back into the concrete).

The same principle (or completed cycle) applies to all of man’s activities, not only the specifically creative ones such as art or invention. (I wonder whether this is the point where there is an indication that every activity of man is creative, in basic principle and essence. This is to be thought out further.) In order to think at all, man must be able to perform this cycle: he must know how to see an abstraction in the concrete and the concrete in an abstraction, and always relate one to the other. He must be able to derive an abstraction from the concrete (either by his own new discovery, or by knowledge presented to him by others but rationally understood and accepted by him), then be able to apply this abstraction both as a guide for his specific actions and as a standard by which to judge the specific ideas or actions of others.

Example: a man who has understood and accepted the abstract principle of unalienable individual rights cannot then go about advocating compulsory labor conscription or nationalization of property. Those who do have not performed either part of the cycle: neither the abstraction nor the translating of the abstraction into the concrete. The cycle is unbreakable; no part of it can be of any use, until and unless the cycle is completed (that is, clear in a man’s mind, in his rational grasp). (A broken electric circuit does not function in the separate parts; it must be unbroken or there is no current; the parts, in this case, are of no use whatever, of no relevance to the matter of having an electric current.) This is the basic pattern and essence of the process of thinking.

Now, in the basic pattern of man’s life as a whole, there might be the indication of a similar cycle: man must think, first and above all, but he must also act. (Keep in mind here that thinking is the base and constant accompaniment or determinant of all action.) By action—in this basic sense—I mean the setting of one’s purpose (that’s the creation of one’s desire) and then the achievement of that purpose (and the satisfaction of that desire). A theoretical scientist (or a philosopher) thinks; his purpose is the gaining of knowledge; when he discovers a new answer, a new step in knowledge, he has achieved his purpose. But the process of gaining knowledge underlies all other activities; so I wonder about the [possibility that] the purely abstract thinker is actually incomplete (since there is no abstract without the concrete, and no concrete (for man) without the abstract).

Incidentally, as an observation: if creative fiction writing is a process of translating an abstraction into the concrete, there are three possible grades of such writing: translating an old abstraction (known theme) through the medium of old fiction means, i.e., through characters, events, or situations used before for that same purpose (this is most of the popular trash); translating an old abstraction through new, original fiction means (this is most of the good literature); or creating a new, original abstraction and translating it through new, original means. This last, as far as I know, is only me—my kind of fiction writing. May God forgive me (metaphor!) if this is mistaken conceit! As near as I can now see it, it isn’t. (A fourth possibility—translating a new abstraction through old means—is impossible; if the abstraction is new, there can be no means used by anyone else before to translate it.)

12

FINAL PREPARATIONS

After the notes presented in Chapter II, AR took a six-week break from writing in her journal. She spent much of the time that spring thinking about the plot while strolling the grounds of her ranch home in California. The present chapter contains the notes she wrote in the summer of 1946, after this break and before beginning to write the novel.

AR had thus worked full-time on Atlas Shrugged for only five months (April through August, 1946) when she completed her outline and was ready to start writing. This is a remarkably short time; the corresponding period for The Fountainhead was two and a half years. There are two main reasons for the difference. First, less research was required—the knowledge of railroads and steel mills needed for Atlas Shrugged was much less extensive than the knowledge of architecture needed for The Fountainhead. Second, she had far less difficulty in working out the plot.

More than 80 percent of her notes from the summer of 1946 are presented here. I have omitted some research notes in which she simply copied factual material from a book, Economic Geography, by R. H. Whitbeck and V. C. Finch. I have also omitted a plot outline of the last part of the novel, which merely summarizes events described in earlier notes. Finally, I have omitted several pages of “Notes on Notes,” in which AR catalogued the contents of her journal.

June 20, 1946

As the story progresses, the parasites are increasingly concerned with and afraid of natural phenomena and disasters. This is extremely significant and logical—they have lost control over nature. They are returning to the state of being helpless before nature. But man cannot exist at the mercy of nature—his basic essence (his “means of survival”) is the fact that he must exist by mastering nature, by controlling it for his purposes.

It was the accumulation of the creators’ work that gave mankind protection from nature. (This point is an illustration of: “The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature.” The creator is concerned with nature and reason—his own will, thinking, actions, and purposes—not with men.) When mankind destroys or rejects the creators, when the parasites are in the saddle (those unable to use their independent rational judgment, therefore unable to deal with facts or nature), nature takes over once more and becomes an enemy, a menace, instead of a servant. And the world of the parasites has no means of defense. When man is free—man is the master and nature is his servant. When men are enslaved—nature becomes the master.

Examples: every variation in natural phenomena and every possible disaster is dreaded, progressively more dreaded throughout the story—and the consequences are worse each time. The creators’ civilization had been making men progressively more independent of variations in natural phenomena, prepared against and able to deal with any eventuality. In agriculture, many variable conditions of nature were corrected artificially (fertilizer, irrigation, etc.) and it would take a major and rare disaster (such as extreme drought) to cause real hardships to men (and mankind was moving slowly to counteract even the major natural disasters). In transportation, men could travel and run trains in almost any weather, short of a flood or tornado. In their cities and buildings, men did not have to be concerned with natural variations at all—only in extreme, freak disasters, and then to a limited degree. And when an unusual disaster did strike—men recovered quickly (and the more quickly the more advanced their civilization). (Examples: the rebuilding of a railroad within a few days after a flood; the rebuilding of San Francisco after the earthquake.)

Now, in the story, men are returning to fear of and dependence on nature. Their food (agriculture) depends more and more upon weather conditions. Show signs of the return to savage superstitions—prayers and rites, instead of rational action, science, and invention—a sign of sheer despair and helplessness. When a major disaster strikes (flood, earthquake, tornado, etc.) there is no recovery; the town or railroad line or factory has to be abandoned (always “temporarily”—but men begin to see that such “temporary” conditions are permanent). Therefore we see the return of the constant, cringing dread of natural disasters.

(In connection with this—the Taggart Bridge.)

This is the process of “the encroaching jungle”—the signs of the return to savagery in material life, since men have returned to the principles of savagery in their spiritual life.

An interesting point to make is the parasite’s misunderstanding of the machine. Unthinking men ([including] any second-hander, parasite or collectivist, since they are the men who have rejected, suspended, or left undiscovered the concept of independent rational judgment) see a machine performing many tasks automatically, with perfect logic, which eliminates the need for the machine’s operator to think (in certain specific respects only). They then imagine that the machine is a mechanical, automatic substitute for thought; that the product of reason is a substitute for its source, that it can be preserved and used without its source, and that all one has to do is take over that product; then the unthinking man will become the equivalent of the thinker. (He will not need the thinker any longer, in fact, he must destroy the thinker in order to seize this substitute, the thinker’s product, the machine, which will then make him as good as the thinker.) That is the crucial mistake of the collectivists. Show that only intelligence can deal with automatic aids to intelligence. (They are only aids, not substitutes.) The greater the intelligence and ingenuity that went into the creation of a machine, the greater is the intelligence required to keep that machine functioning. Destroy the intelligence—and you will not be able to operate or keep the machine. Destroy the source—and you cannot keep its result. Destroy the cause—and you cannot have the effect.

In society as a whole, the machines are not independent entities, finished and cut off from their creators, which will continue functioning by themselves. The machines are products of the creator’s energy, which are kept alive, kept functioning by a continuous flow of that energy (or intelligence); that energy is the spiritual fuel which the machines need in order to work, just as they need physical fuel; cut off the energy (the intelligence, the capacity of independent rational judgment) of the creators—and the machines stop dead; the machines will fall apart and disintegrate in the hands of the parasites, just like a dead body without the energy of life. The machines are extensions of man’s intelligence; they are aids to intelligence; when that which they were created to aid is gone, they are useless. Then they go, too. They cannot function on their own. They are not independent of intelligence.

It is only the presence of creators that permits a fool to use a machine he does not understand and could not make, creators whose intelligence is free to keep the machines (and the whole world) going for everybody. The creators are the eternal motor, the continuously functioning “fountainhead.” When the parasites stop them—everything stops. (And the parasites destroy themselves.)

This is important. Be sure to bring it out.

In relation to the story, this is the basic reason and pattern of TT’s disintegration.

To use any machine—an automobile, a Mixmaster, or a railroad system—one must know how to use it and for what purpose. The machine will not give you the knowledge or the purpose. The machine is a wonderful slave to take orders. But it cannot give you the orders. The collectivist, like the savage, expects the machine to give him orders and set a purpose for him, a purpose for its own function and for his. (Another collectivist reversal.)

James Taggart knows neither how to run a railroad nor for what purpose it should be run. He thinks—“for the public good.” But the purpose of the railroad is not “the public good.” When the railroad (or any machine) stops serving the specific, individual good (or purpose) of any man connected with it (of those who run it and those who use it), it stops having any purpose at all; when there’s no purpose or end, there is no way to determine what means to use to achieve it; there is then no standard of means at all, therefore one can’t know what to do even at short range (the parasite’s range), even at any one given moment (the given moment must be determined by the long-range purpose, by the end, by its relation to the whole). Therefore, the whole system (or machine) stops.

Stress this “purposelessness ” in the progressive steps of TT’s destruction.

A sidelight on the parasite’s methods:

Holding the productive ability of the creator down to the level of the parasite; the holding down of the strongest to the level of the weakest. Such as: union rules to the effect that better workers must not work faster or produce more than incompetent or weaker workers (“unfair competition”); the barber’s union that forbade ambitious barbers to keep their shops open on Sunday—it was “unfair” to the barbers who wished to loaf.

This is an eloquent [illustration] of the fool’s idea of where wealth and production come from (he has no idea—he thinks it’s just there, to be “divided up”). The consequences to society as a whole and to the parasites themselves are obvious. Show specific examples of this and trace the results in concrete steps.

For the plot construction, consider key activities of mankind (all connected with the railroad): food, clothing, shelter—as represented by wheat, cotton, lumber. Connect them with the story of TT.

The three attitudes of the parasites toward the creators are: (1) “We don’t need you at all”; (2) “We need you—therefore you must serve us” (the appeal through weakness and pity); (3) “Never mind any reasons, or who’s right or wrong—we’ll just force you to serve us.” Show concrete illustrations and examples of all three attitudes.

James Taggart alternates between (1) and (2) [in his attitude] toward Dagny (and everyone else). At the end, James Taggart and the rest of the parasites try to resort to (3) in regard to Galt.

Hank Rearden is a constant victim of (1) and (2) from all his relatives and associates throughout the story.

(You may need more, and more specific, examples and incidents of this.)

Actually, the parasite’s attitude is: first, “Help me, because I’m weak and you’re strong, I need you so much”; then second, when he got what he wanted: “Don’t be so damn conceited, I don’t need you at all.” Here, the parasite got the effect and forgot the cause. In regard to his appeal, the parasite is humble and begs for charity—so long as the creator will not permit him anything else. The moment the creator is demoralized and disarmed through the creed of altruism, the parasite turns arrogant and demands help as his rightful due, as the creator’s duty. “Help me because I need you,” then becomes an order, a command—not a plea.

The parasite considers himself defrauded of his personal property—the creator’s help. Thus the creator’s energy and its products are assumed to be the property of the parasite. Virtue—strength, intelligence, competence—has no property rights (to itself), but vice—weakness, stupidity, incompetence—has property rights (to virtue). Altruism does this. This is implicit in altruism, logically and consistently. But it is only the creators who make this possible by their acceptance of altruism. The responsibility here is that of the creators; it is up to them to stop the vicious procedure; they are the cause of their own destruction. (This is for Hank Rearden.)

As to attitude (3)—it comes about when (1) and (2) have destroyed all sense, morality and decency in human relations. Then parasites come to (3)—to the belief in plain force, to the bestial arrogance of the criminal moron (“the drooling beast”). Without the groundwork laid and prepared by (1) and (2), the parasites would not think of (3), or would not dare to think of it. The plain criminal types, who exist in any society at any time, would be of no danger or consequence (certainly not spiritually), since they would be regarded and treated as what they are: the plain criminal, the anti-rational or sub-human.

Keep this firmly in mind as a lead:

By associating with the parasites and a world living on the principles of the parasites, the creators offer themselves up for unspeakable suffering, and achieve, in the net total result, the opposite of that which is their purpose. They suffer in order to be able to do their independent creative work—and only give their enemies the means to torture them and to destroy their work. (Their work survives or is achieved only to the extent to which their principles of independence are followed, actually or by default. And to have these principles followed even to that extent, the creators purchase that possibility by their own suffering.)

This is what the creators must stop. Don’t give your enemies the means to destroy you. Don’t accept the enemy’s terms. You are the power. Deliver an ultimatum to the parasites: take my terms—or nothing. And my terms here mean: individualism, egoism, independence. [This means] the recognition of the primary life principle—the faculty of man’s independent rational judgment; the translation of this into concrete morality—the principle that each man exists only for his own sake (and can claim nothing from others); the translation of this morality into politics—a society of individualism and capitalism. The creators destroy themselves by any acceptance (complete or partial) of the creed of altruism.

June 21, 1946

Civilization (which means everything made by men, not nature—all physical wealth, all ideas and spiritual values) was made by man’s intelligence. It can be used and maintained only by man’s intelligence. (And this applies to any part of it, any product—industry, machines, art, anything.) It has to vanish when intelligence vanishes. But intelligence is an attribute of the individual; it functions individually, it cannot function under compulsion ; it cannot be tied to the decisions of others and, therefore, is destroyed in a collectivist society. That is why collectivism cannot produce or survive.

Besides, the intelligent man does not live for others. The higher the intelligence, the greater the self-sufficiency. (Your need of others can be used as a measure of your intelligence—in inverse ratio.)

As a clue to the net effect: The book could be dedicated “to all those who think that material wealth is produced by material means.”

Minor note: Since the material is an expression of the spiritual, the physical state of the world in the story (their physical assets, capital goods, means of production, tools, machines, buildings, etc.) must be a reflection of men’s spiritual state: incompetent, weak, falling apart, disintegrating, uncertain and senselessly contradictory, maliciously evil, dull, gray, monotonous—above all, decaying.

Re: looting. The primitive form of looting is to seize the end products of the work of others, consume them and then look for another victim. This is the pattern of the plain criminal, the most primitive savage tribes, and the early Asiatic nomadic invasions, such as Attila or Genghis Khan. The modern form is to loot the means of production and try to carry on (which is only a variation of the same thing, actually more stupid, more vicious, and less practical). This is the pattern of Soviet Russia.

What makes it less practical is the fact that grabbing an industry and expecting it to run without intelligence is like grabbing an automobile and expecting it to run without gas. It rests on a savage’s misunderstanding of the nature of production, his ignorance of the fact that intelligence is the energy that keeps the tools going, that tools cannot go by themselves, and that intelligence can neither be taken over nor forced.

If the primitive looter left his victims alive, he at least left them alone to start production again—he took over the product, not the means of production (the chief of which is freedom). The modern collectivist looter takes over the product and the means. He enslaves men. He seizes and stops the source. Therefore, after he has consumed the existing accumulated wealth, no more can be produced, neither for him nor for his victims. This is how he destroys the world and himself.

So the pattern of disintegration in the story must be the increasing consumption of capital assets, without replacements. (Here the last emergency of taking up old rails fits quite well.)

A savage invader also enslaved the conquered population (which is taking over man as the means of production); but then he established a slave society, which could just barely exist, in the most primitive way, without intelligence. You cannot enslave intelligence—only brute, physical force, only muscle power. Actual looters, such as the nomadic tribes, grabbed property and departed. Now the modem collectivist is attempting the impossible; he is not a slave master, in the ancient sense of a slave economy, an economy that produced something by means of slaves; he is actually a perpetual looter, and what he wants to loot, continuously, is the source of production—man’s intelligence. This can’t be done.

The Pattern of the Railroads’ Growth

The basic scientific invention: the steam engine.

The application of this invention to transportation: the designing of a steam locomotive.

The parallel growth of two elements (two lines of endeavor, integrated by one purpose): the entrepreneurs who organize railroads, the inventors who improve the technical equipment.

Main developments here:

1. Enterprise: branching into new territories, laying out new lines, acquiring better equipment, giving better and more service cheaper, planning better organization of the whole system.

2. Invention: scientific progress in an immense number of lines, the four main ones being: track (rails, ties, grade, tunnels, bridges, terminals), motive power (engines: steam, oil, electric, diesel-electric), rolling stock (cars, brakes), signals (telegraph, radio, semaphores, automatic safety devices).

Main purposes: speed, safety, economy, comfort, reliability.

Results: the creation of new territories, the birth of new industries and growth of all industries due to rapid transportation permitting exchange of raw materials for production and exchange of produced goods over vast regions, opening up huge new markets.

The Reverse: The Pattern of Disintegration

As the parasites take over a huge, working system, the first thing to stop is progress. No improvements made, no new lines opened, no new inventions accepted (or made).

Lack of judgment makes Taggart incapable of grasping the needs of the system. Routine makes him keep lines, activities, and procedures no longer necessary; this is a drain on the system and hampers the needed activities.

When the smallest thing goes wrong, he has no idea how to repair it—like a moron operating a dishwasher when he wouldn’t know and couldn’t think of how to wash dishes by hand; if one small screw falls out, he has no idea how to mend it. Taggart is a moron in relation to TT—a moron with an immense, complex machine. His smallest attempt at “mending” only grows into major destruction of the machine.

Lack of judgment makes Taggart adopt new policies (when forced to by obvious trouble) that are disastrous and only aggravate the trouble (by transferring it to other points and problems).

Unnecessary branches are kept going for irrelevant reasons at great expense and effort. Needed branches curtail their services, dislocating needed industries, while the unneeded ones are artificially kept alive for political and other second-hand reasons.

As needed industries are crippled or dying off, the railroad suffers from lack of the materials and products that it needs.

The vicious circle: bad railroad service leads to bad industries, bad industries make the railroad service worse—and all go down together, disintegrating.

In the realm of enterprise, the process is: branches being closed off, the system contracting, the service getting worse and more expensive, the organization falling apart with consequent confusion, inefficiency, hit-and-miss policy, a growing chaos.

In the realm of invention, the process is: as the technical equipment wears out, it is replaced by older, inferior models of the preceding technical stage, going back to easier, more primitive methods (but not for long, since this can’t be done); [there are progressively more] accidents and breakdowns of equipment.

Track: rails deteriorate and replacements are made of inferior steel; ties rot and some are not being treated; grades worn by floods and weather conditions are neglected; tunnels collapse and are closed; bridges collapse and cannot be repaired or replaced; terminals deteriorate—switching causes endless delays, confusion, loss of freight. Motive power: as locomotives wear out, older and weaker ones are put into service, promptly breaking down, too; locomotives are used without necessary repairs, or on a shoe-string, with patched-up “fixing,” just to complete one run—with the result that at the end of the run the locomotive has to be junked, worn out beyond repair (beyond their capacity to repair it, anyway); crucial shortages of fuel—and inferior fuel that ruins the engines.

Rolling stock: the same deterioration and same vain make-shifts as with engines. Cars for special purposes vanish first—such as refrigerator cars, huge special flat cars, then stock cars, tank cars, grain cars, until nothing but a few old standard boxcars and flats are left. Passenger cars get more and more uncomfortable. Diners are eliminated (“economy”), then sleepers (except a few for politicians).

Comforts are eliminated, in reverse order from that in which they came: first air-conditioning goes, then heating, then water (and toilets), then lighting. Brakes are defective and shaky, causing endless accidents.

Signals: breakdowns, mainly (or at least ostensibly) through inefficient personnel. Breaks in telegraph service leave schedules and trains in confusion, and cause traffic snarls. Automatic safety devices are long since gone. Automatic signals are replaced by manual ones—going back to lanterns and flags—and these wreak total havoc in the hands of semi-moronic collectivist “lower labor.” There are dreadful accidents—the kind that could have been prevented by intelligence.

Main direction of the process: railroads become slow, dangerous, expensive, uncomfortable, unreliable.

As they go down to the preceding stage of progress, that stage is not like it was in the past, on the way up, but much worse; it worked then—but it does not work now, quickly leading only to the next stage below. The contradiction between needs and means grow wider, worse and more destructive; a freight delivery of two days worked fine for an industry geared to that; it does not work for an industry that needs goods delivered in two hours; as the industry collapses, it adds to the growing collapse of the railroad.

On the way up, producers were counting on the intelligence of others with whom they had to deal. Now they have to count on stupidity—so they are forced to stop.

Results: the dying off of whole territories, first the distant, outlying, less developed ones, then coming closer and closer. (Here—the parallel to a weak heart. As the heart grows weaker, first the capillaries (the outlying, smaller districts) atrophy; then the paralysis closes in, growing, in contracting circles, closer and closer to the heart and center.) Industries cannot get raw materials and cannot reach a market for their products. Farmers cannot grow raw materials—there is no way to transport them to market. Production becomes hysterically sporadic, like speculation: make so much if you can get the transportation through special (mainly political) pull, take the profit, then run; no planned, continuous, long-range effort is possible. This brings the worst type, the gambler-speculator type, into momentary industrial leadership; and the methods of this type cannot run a working industry. (Here is the pure “money” motive—just quick “money,” not production.)

Insane “deals” are made—so many cars for such-and-such a shipment—for reasons of pull, in total disregard of the needs, rights, and contracts of particular shippers. Rivals destroy each other through “transportation pull” (that is, parasites destroy the few remaining producers) by making senseless deals destroying whole potential trainloads of freight—hurting both the shippers and the railroad. All these “deals” are made for every possible second-hand reason—everything except rational sense and the profit motive. [They give] reasons such as: the public good, help to a needy section, help to a friend, the country ought to take this product even if there’s no demand for it, so let’s condition people by delivering sets of “psychological games” when there is no bread, etc.

The result: the cars used for some such fool freight hold up a perishable harvest, the harvest rots, the farmers (who had counted on the railroad) go out of business, and the railroad (who needed the business of this section) finds itself running empty trains at a loss. As industries shrink or vanish, producers stop counting on railroads altogether. There is less and less transcontinental traffic. Production tries to shrink to a local exchange—going back to water transportation, a few old trucks, covered wagons, horses and buggies. But the remaining industries were not geared to be local and cannot go back to that stage. (Just as our house could not exist without electricity; it would be no good for pre-electric living, particularly when no rebuilding can be done.) And no new industries, on a small, local, more primitive scale, can be born—who’s going to start them?—the parasites are only trying to run with what they looted and it’s falling apart in their hands.

So—in accelerating progression—things stop, industries close, unemployment and crime grow, men have neither products nor work, they don’t know what to do and can’t do it, there is no work for anyone, only the approaching prospect of starvation that becomes obvious to all. There are starvation areas all over the country, epidemics, outbreaks of violence and hysteria (apparently causeless), a growing chaos. The obvious picture? Hunger, disease, rags, ruins. The spiritual picture (as far as the parasites are concerned): all the variations of panic and despair.

Choose from these concrete suggestions the key points to illustrate the specific steps of TT’s collapse. But remember that what you need is the illustration of the working and results of stupidity (of non-judgment)—not all the details of the specific railroad collapse, only enough of these to make the process and its nature clear.

June 22, 1946

Types of creators who work for their own destruction (and that of other creators and the world):

Frank Lloyd Wright: The creator who is overly concerned with others for the sake of their admiration. His achievement is authentic and first-hand, he does not let others into this sphere—but he still wants their admiration, afterwards, and it is an important concern to him. By enjoying his role of benefactor and making this role of importance to himself, he sanctions their right to exploit him, to take, to demand from him.

He puts himself into the role of the exploited, [conceding] that this is his proper role and function; [he assumes the role of] the giver, the superior one who has riches which others don’t have and which they can get only from him, with the added implication that these riches are there to be taken by these inferior others. (Taken only by his voluntary gift? That is what he may say. But the others would be justified in saying that once he establishes the principle that these riches, by their essential nature and purpose, are to be given to them, then they are justified in demanding or seizing them when some creator does not give them in the manner they wish, or does not give enough [and is thus] withholding what is theirs. He has established the principle of service to others and exploitation; the form is then only a secondary matter of detail.)

Prof. Otto Hahn (as a guess at the type I think he is) [Otto Hahn was a German physicist who collaborated with the Nazis; AR did not know Hahn personally, but she had done some research on him for the screenplay Top Secret (see Chapter 9)]: A man of ability who despises the lesser men around him, the stupid or less able—and decides that he must seek power (or associate himself with those who seek power, and support them—such as the Nazis) in order to have his way in a stupid world that will never share his intelligence and can only be dealt with by force. In doing this, he destroys the very people with whom he could deal, whose rareness he deplores—the intelligent ones; they cannot be ruled by force, they are the first ones destroyed in a dictatorship. And all that is left are the stupid ones, the worst among them, the corrupt and evil, those who will take any order, accept any horror and just obey, like unthinking brutes. And only the worst among them would be capable of holding the jobs of rulers in a dictatorship of force, the Gestapo jobs.

So by this kind of reasoning, a man like Hahn would destroy that which he values and needs (intelligence), preserve that which he dreads (corrupt stupidity), and give power (over himself and others) to the worst kind of human element, his own worst enemies. Dr. [J. Robert] Oppenheimer (my guess about him and his motives): A man extremely conceited about his own intelligence (either honestly conceited—or maliciously so, i.e., with enjoyment of the inferiority of others and of his own superiority by comparison). He decides that he is so sure of what is right and that he is capable of deciding it, while others are not, that he must force it on those inferior others, for their own good. In such an attitude, there is the natural impatience of the intelligent man who can’t bear to see things done wrong, when they can be done right and he knows how to do it. But this attitude is applied to a crucial error in thinking—that one man can decide what is right (or good) for another, and that the material (as a value) is absolute per se, so that a comfortable house for a ragged bum is “a good” without further consideration or relation to anything.

Man being a rational creature, the only good possible to him is that which he himself has accepted rationally; his primary evil is to do anything without his own independent rational acceptance and understanding. A bum forced to accept a house he does not understand, and has not built or earned, is committing an evil if he accepts it “because the leader says it’s good,” or if he simply accepts it as an unearned alms; and that house will not do him any good.

But, more importantly, Oppenheimer is committing the same error as Hahn: the forcing of his ideas on those who, by his own definition, are inferior and cannot achieve or know what’s good for them. [This policy] might be viewed as merely futile when applied to them; actually, it’s worse than futile—it’s a positive evil—putting them into a subhuman position, into the class of non-rational beings, whereas they can exist or be happy only on the basis of whatever rationality they possess. They would have to be total morons or insane to be benefited by forced benefaction—but then, of course, it can’t work and they can’t be benefited. This forcing of his ideas on others is monstrously destructive of the best among them, of the intelligent, of those he would define as his equals. (Is a possible reason here the fact that he recognizes no one as his potential equal in this sense? Is it that kind of conceit?)

The intelligent men cannot be forced—only destroyed. So this attitude, again, leads to the destruction of that which he values (and of himself as one among the intelligent), and to the perpetuation of that which he wants to eliminate or correct (stupidity, incompetence, misery).

If he argues like this: “Well, those lesser people work and struggle on their own, but stupidly; let them have the benefit of my superior intelligence and direction; let them be forced to accept my directives whether they agree or not, whether they understand or not; the result will be to their own benefit”—the answer is: To accept or obey blindly is the only original sin for man and the basic source of his destruction. Then a man cannot work well, not even in his small job. Within the specific sphere of his own action, his job, his life, his active concerns, he must understand what he is doing to the best of his own intelligence—or he can’t do it; his degree of understanding determines the quality and success or failure of his performance.

If a very stupid type of unskilled laborer takes a job turning a crank in a factory, without understanding or concern for what the factory is manufacturing or why—that is quite proper and safe; there is no obligation on man to venture beyond the limits of his intelligence; in fact, it is his moral law and the essence of his nature not to touch that which he cannot judge first-hand, not to act without intelligence.

Such a laborer knows his own reasons for taking the job—need of money, ease of the work, or whatever—and that is his proper and only possible motive. To force him against his wishes or understanding into some wonderful atomic factory where his limited skill can be used to best advantage (by the master’s decision) will not do him, the factory, or the master any good. It is forcing him into a subhuman state.

And what about this kind of forcing when applied to a better, more intelligent man of high ability, who can form his own judgments and conclusions? And how does the master here judge human ability—or whom to force, when, into what, how much, and for what purpose?

The basic mistake here is in judging the nature of man—in not understanding what precisely constitutes a rational being, and how this applies to degrees of human intelligence and ability; in not understanding the nature of force and its relation to intelligence; in not understanding the nature and significance of voluntary consent; and in assuming that any material good can be objective, i.e., factually absolute for all men, without considering the most objective and factual part of any “good”—the reaction of the human mind involved. (“The good” is a matter of standards; standards are determined by purpose. Who, then, sets a man’s purpose here? Another creature, a master. By what right? It is the nature of man’s intelligence, of survival by means of rationality, to function through purpose. But he himself must set the purpose.)

This last, of course, is an error or confusion in the conception of “the good.” What is good for man? Nothing except that which he finds of value through the independent judgment of his rational mind. He’s making an error in judgment? Then he must correct it rationally. He can’t judge for himself at all? Then nothing can be good for him at all; [in this case], he is either a moron or insane. And human “good” can be based on nothing except human intelligence. That is man’s basic, determining attribute (his “faculty of survival”). And intelligence is his act of independent rational judgment.

Moral to these men: Concern yourself with virtue, not vice; with intelligence, not stupidity; with strength and ability—not weakness and incompetence.

June 24, 1946

How do these last types of men affect my theme?

Are my “creators” (in the story) complete men or abstractions of a practical human quality? (They are “men of ability.” When they make mistakes, they function on the principles of the parasites. But in the sphere of their work they function on the principles of the creators.)

The parasites in my story are motivated by hatred and exploitation of ability. What is the attitude of the above men [i.e., creators who sometimes function on the principles of parasites] toward ability? (Men of ability are not vicious; parasites are. Men of ability make mistakes; parasites are consciously evil. But it’s the mistakes of the men of ability that are most disastrous and pave the way for the evil of the parasites.)

The two basic qualities of the parasite: (1) method—refusal to exercise his independent rational judgment, substituting for it the judgment of others; and (2) motive—desire to get the unearned (spiritual values which he doesn’t deserve, more material wealth than he can produce).

These men [i.e., the mistaken creators] are not second-handers, but their great, basic error is in considering other men second-handers (or the desire to make them so).

They want others to substitute their (the master’s) judgment for their own.

They want others to admire them, without understanding.

They want unearned material wealth from others (taken away by force) for their own purposes (art, research, etc.) Unable to justify this last, they claim: “But I’m working for your sake”—and this is how they enthrone the principle of the exploitation of creators.

June 25, 1946

The progressive steps of TT’s destruction must be integrated on three lines: the physical failures and contractions of the railroad must be connected with (come from and lead to) the personal relationships of the characters involved (showing the variations of parasitism) and the progression of their “life lines,” their specific, particular fates (such as Dagny moving towards shaking herself free of parasites, James Taggart moving toward spiritual destruction, etc.).

Two possible characters for the parasite’s side:

The “traitor creators”: the desperate, violent young inventor who accepts force out of despair at stupidity, who thinks that this is the only way to deal with the world—and is destroyed early and violently, unable to stand his own mistake; the more subtle and dangerous professor of physics [Robert Stadler] who wants unearned material wealth for his laboratory, fools himself and others into believing that he works “for the common good,” and who supports and makes possible all the brutal police methods of the parasites’ government. The professor invents a deadly weapon—and is violently destroyed by the very machinery and the very principles he has created.

For one of TT’s disasters:

A parallel to [MGM’s plans to] build a $3,000,000 studio in England: Taggart spends a small, badly needed fortune to build a new branch through a territory that has been moving to seize his railroad; his reason—“I’ll outsmart them by playing with them.” He builds the branch—and it is seized, causing great damage to the remaining lines of TT and their operation, [in addition to] the crippling financial loss. (Or should it be a “creator” competitor who does this for Taggart?)

Re: Robert Sherwood writing a biography of Harry Hopkins. This is such a shocking example of a parasite feeding on a parasite (in the intellectual realm) that a parallel must be found and used. [Robert Sherwood was an American playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize for Idiot’s Delight (1936); Harry Hopkins was a politician who served as a special assistant to President Roosevelt during World War II. ]

The looter, the man who wants to grab some material wealth and run, living for the profit of the moment (or the man who is only after money, not production), wants the effect without the cause—that is why he is doomed to fail, is destructive and acting contrary to nature, his action being irrational.

Reason is the ability to understand the connections of fact and to use them by acting accordingly. Man must act through “final causation” (the choosing of his purpose) and must use “efficient causation” to achieve his purpose. The looter sets his purpose at “getting money” and tries to get it without the necessary steps of the cause that produces the effect of “money”—the cause being productive activity. That is why the looter usually fails himself (though not immediately, and the chain of steps and reasons is not always obvious) and why a society built on the principles of looting, a society that leaves man no freedom for anything else, will fail and destroy itself.

The productive man wants material wealth or money as the natural, logical, rational, inevitable result of his productive activity—and that is why he won’t work without the profit motive; consciously or unconsciously he knows that such work is evil, being unnatural and irrational. Even if he were free to function (which he can’t be in a collectivist State without property rights), even if such a situation could be achieved, he would not work without the profit motive—indifferent as he may be to money, his love and interest being in his work, in his creative activity. (Besides, he knows that money, the private ownership of the wealth he has created, is his means to further work.)

The parasite, true to his perverted basic premise and his irrationality, wants the money, with no concern for the productive process, for the work; in fact, with an active hatred for work and those who work—the hatred of dread (and dependence). This is the psychology of the looter-executives in the fourth stage of collapse.

Specific Steps Toward a Railroad’s Destruction

The last one: a crucial branch is closed to get track for the last, main line. Without the industries served by the branch, the main line cannot exist for long. (This is “living off capital.”)

The collapse of TT’s freight train bridge: the last break. Most of the other rival lines are gone by then. (This is the “helplessness before nature.”)

Disorganization (chaos): no fuel where fuel was expected for the

Comet’s last ride. (This is the plain moron’s inability to understand the need of work and action.)

The “transportation pull” deals: Major (and fatal) example of it—“help to a needy section which has an industry the country ought to [support].” At a crucial harvest time (when there is a good harvest after several bad years), Taggart unexpectedly refuses trains and cars to the farming section involved and uses these trains for the “preferred” section. Result—hunger for the country, farmers go bankrupt and quit, banks close, endless industries suffer—and TT, returning to its old branch, finds itself running it at a loss, yet unable (and afraid) to close it—“the section must be revived, this is just temporary.”

Minor examples of the same method—deals on a smaller scale, involving individual shippers, through which the “gambler-speculator” industrialists ruin the few remaining producers. Each time—there is a final loss to TT.

(These are the “second-handers’ motives” in action.) Incident of the death of a section (the first one in the story, as part of the plot): TT closes its branch—one man in the section attempts to organize a pony express—the collective begins to hamper him with rules—John Galt tells him to stop—the section dies. (This illustrates parasite methods and [what happens in] the absence of a creator.) Specific incident of an industry closing because of the railroad’s failure: Loss of crucial, irreplaceable freight in switching yards’ tie-ups and snarls. Later—freight found in some most incongruous place. (Incompetence.)

A major traffic snarl: through break-down of signals or telegraph service. (Incompetence.)

The return to flags and lanterns. (Retrogression.)

The progressive disappearance of: diners, sleepers, air-conditioning, heating, water, lighting. And of: refrigerator cars, stock cars, tank cars. (Retrogression.)

The progressive deterioration of motive power: The use of old locomotives, and locomotives ruined just to make one run. (The parasite’s “range of the moment.”) The looting chicanery to get locomotives from other systems—a barely veiled highjacking called “nationalization,” which the looters claim is “temporary, just for the emergency.” [They pass] some law such as that the remaining locomotives belong to the one who can “prove” the biggest “public good,” a grotesque kind of “priorities.” (The absence of inventors and “living off capital.”)

In connection with this: an incident of a locomotive high-jacked by Dagny (against priorities). Their own locomotive was taken through “priorities” by someone else.

The tunnel collapses—it cannot be repaired and reopened—miserable, shaky, make-shift steps to run the railroad around it by going back to the rusted remains of an older, pre-tunnel era. (The “return of nature.”)

One incident of a disastrous flood in which a line is destroyed and cannot be repaired. The section dies. Memories of how such disasters were repaired in the past. (The “return of nature.”)

One incident of a crucial train run in which a great deal is at stake (in the plot), and the failure of the train destroys it. The failure is due to a cause that seems infinitesimal on the surface (like one loose screw in the rails), but is really huge as an indication of the cause behind it, of the second-handers in charge and the bestial idiocy of their methods. (Incompetence.)

In connection with lumber industry—the untreated ties and the result. (Lack of inventors.)

The “equal rates” introduced by Taggart (“for democracy”) that ruin the more distant farming sections (or a distant but growing and heathy industry that should have had a future). (Second-handers’ motives.)

Incident of Taggart deciding that a competitor is ruining him, that everything would be all right if it weren’t for “unfair competition”—so he ruins the competitor (with political help) and finds that he can’t run the line and that people won’t use it. This one can be connected with the first death of a section. (Second-handers’ envy, and idea that the job creates the man.)

Accidents: one major railroad wreck directly connected to Taggart’s methods, and a few lesser ones (each progressively worse than the one before). Minor accidents and breakdowns—constantly. (This is plain, eloquent, screaming destruction—the direct physical expression of the essence, purpose, and final result of the parasite.) One incident of a new invention taken over and the inventor kicked out. Then the parasites don’t know how to use it and have to abandon it. It can be a young engineer with a new engine as a solution to their power problems. Or it can even be an invention of Galt‘s, possibly an early one—and he has now vanished—and Dagny looks for him, not knowing his name, she merely wants “the man and the brain who could do this.” (This is “the moron with the dishwasher.”)

June 26, 1946

Key Steps (Railroad)

1. Taggart ruins a competitor—and destroys the line.

2. Taggart introduces the “equal rates”—and the consequences.

3. Invention taken over and young inventor kicked out, with the invention then failing.

4. Dagny finding Galt’s early engine in abandoned factory.

5. Factory (needed by TT) closes when irreplaceable freight is lost in switching. Later—freight found in incongruous place.

6. The first death of a section and the young man of the pony express.

7. The crucial train run that fails (due to an infinitesimal reason [that is a consequence] of the parasites’ technique).

8. The looting of one another’s locomotives—and the incident of Dagny’s stolen locomotive.

9. The “transportation pull” deal for “preferred” section that kills off a farming section and a branch of TT.

10. The tunnel collapse—and the return to an old rusted track.

11. The major railroad wreck.

12. Last: branch closed, track ripped for main line—and collapse of bridge.

Key Stages (“Pattern of Disintegration ”)

First stage: Stalling on decisions, evading, routine, destruction of creators. Smaller disasters. Steps 1, 2, and 3.

Second stage: Parasites discover responsibility and are scared. Buck-passing, double-cross, parasites leaning on parasites. First serious disasters; parasites alibi themselves. Consequences of steps 1 and 2. Also—step 4.

Third stage: Nobody wants top positions of responsibility. Disasters become crashes. Some parasites caught. Almost no creators left. Beginning of parasites’ panic. Steps 5, 6, 7, and 8.

Fourth stage: The “ersatz-creators”—the emergence of the criminal type as executive, the looter. Now it is plain, accelerating “living off capital.” Steps 9 and 10.

Fifth stage: Surrender to the creators—the plea to John Galt. Steps 11 and 12.

Incident: the professor, who stole one of Galt’s early inventions (he was Galt’s teacher in college). “Who is John Galt?” has become the professor’s secret torture (his conscience), growing violently, pathologically unbearable to him as the story progresses. Late in Part I, in a scene with Dagny, the professor talks about this slang-sentence, involuntarily betraying more than he cares to. In answer to Dagny’s wonder about the meaning and origin of the phrase, he says that he knew John Galt, but Galt must have died long since. He had a brain such that: “If he had lived, the whole world would be talking of him now.” “But the whole world is talking of him.” This had never occurred to the professor before; he is struck and stunned. “Yes ...” he whispers softly, terrified. “Why? ... What is he doing?”

But as Dagny tries to question him, he drops the subject, telling her that it’s all preposterous, just a coincidence, the name is common enough, it’s a popular piece of slang without significance. He will give her no clue to Galt’s identity or profession. She thinks that this is just another one of those occasions when people claim first-hand knowledge of John Galt.

Note: J.H. as one of the typical parasites. He is mild and friendly to everyone—he admires anything and anyone who makes money (or is popular), indiscriminately, without analysis or understanding or reason-then he acts to destroy the very things and people he wants to use. He feels sad and bewildered about this—but he becomes mean and evil on one point only: any suggestion of the necessity for him to think about it, i.e., for him to assume the responsibility of an independent rational judgment. (His preoccupation with “polls” and “trends.”) He is truly the “moron with a dishwasher,” the savage thrown into civilization—understanding nothing about it, not even that understanding is necessary.

More for the professor: He stole Galt’s invention, early in his career (shortly before Galt vanished) for the following reason: in the growing poverty of the world, there is less and less endowment of science; the professor was passionately devoted to his work, paid little attention to anything else and understood nothing about men, principles or the world; he wanted the government to finance his scientific research work and he had sold himself the idea that he was working for “the common good”; the bureaucrats in charge wanted concrete proof of the practical importance of his work; so he stole Galt’s idea—justifying this to himself by the notion that he stole it “for the common good,” that “science belongs to the people,” that he can do so much for mankind if he gets his laboratory, therefore stealing Galt’s idea is all right, since it will give him the laboratory, etc. He got the laboratory.

Later he is forced by circumstances to invent the deadly weapon which he did not want to invent. Show the gradual disintegration of his conscience and of his work (or its direction) in the course of one collectivist compromise after another.

In the end—he betrays and destroys everything he had lived for, everything for which he made his compromises (he thought of them as “sacrifices”): science, rationality, intelligence. He upholds: brutality, violence, evil, stupidity. (To decide: either circumstances force him to this, i.e., the parasites [force him] through the very power he has given them; or—his own mind and convictions, being totally perverted now, bring him to this and lead him to demand the destruction of John Galt.)

June 27, 1946

Added Points:

The dreadful state of TT’s research laboratory. Routine and second-handedness : the alleged scientists spend their time proving that new things “can’t be done”—this in order to justify their inactivity and keep their jobs, which is all they are concerned with. Dagny’s constant clashes with this, her helpless anger and indignation. (This ties to and leads to her interest in Galt’s old engine.)

James Taggart discontinues the research laboratory. The excuse: “Why look for the new when everybody hasn’t got everything of the old? Let’s stop progress until everybody is equal, then we will all go forward together slowly.”

James Taggart tries to have the whole economy frozen and stopped, so that he will have “security”—a set market, a set amount of traffic, a set routine. (“How can I do anything when things change all the time? I would be a great executive if only people weren’t so unreliable and unpredictable.”) The attempt [to freeze the economy] takes place toward the last third of Part I.

Galt’s Relation to the Other Characters

Here is what Galt represents to them (in specific story terms): For Dagny—the ideal. The answer to her two quests: the man of genius and the man she loves. The first quest is expressed in her search for the inventor of the engine. The second—her growing conviction that she will never be in love (and her relations with Rearden).

For Rearden—the friend. The kind of understanding and appreciation he has always wanted and did not know he wanted (or he thought he had it—he tried to find it in those around him, to get it from his wife, his mother, brother, and sister).

For Francisco d‘Anconia—the aristocrat. The only man who represents a challenge and a stimulant—almost the “proper kind” of audience, worthy of stunning for the sheer joy and color of life.

For Danneskjöld—the anchor. The only man who represents land and roots to a reckless wanderer, like the goal of a struggle, the port at the end of a fierce sea voyage—the only man he can respect.

For the composer—the inspiration and the perfect audience.

For the philosopher—the embodiment of his abstractions.

For Father Amadeus—the source of his conflict. The uneasy realiza tions that Galt is the end of his endeavors, the man of virtue, the perfect man—and that his means do not fit this end, that he is destroying his ideal for the sake of those who are evil.

To James Taggart—the eternal threat. The secret dread. The reproach. His guilt. He has no specific [connection] with Galt—but he has that constant, causeless, unnamed, hysterical fear. And he recognizes it when he hears Galt’s broadcast and when he sees Galt in person for the first time.

To the professor—his conscience. The reproach and reminder. The ghost that haunts him through everything he does, without a moment’s peace. The [man] that says “No” to his whole life.

June 29, 1946

Note on Proper Cooperation (for Dagny’s attitude)

The principle of proper cooperation among men is that no man should be forced to do anything, within the specified province of his job, that he considers wrong [by his own judgment].

The decision here must be his. His superiors must not expect him to obey against his own reason. Of course, they must have the right to decide when they are acting properly or improperly. But if they know they are forcing him (through sheer obedience to an order, not through his rational consent), they are acting improperly (but strictly within their legal rights). His protection—and his proper course, in this last case—is to resign.

Now, this presupposes that in proper cooperation, the specific job of each individual man is clearly and objectively defined. It has to be—and, for success, the definitions must be rationally accepted by all the men involved (rationally accepted—not merely accepted because it’s a majority decision, or the boss’s decision).

Any boss has the legal right to establish the rules for the organization he heads—and his employees have the choice to work for him on his conditions or not. But the rational definition of jobs is crucially necessary for the success of any organization; the boss (if he is good at his job) is the one who has to work out the proper definitions, make them clear to his employees and make it his policy to see that all of them (including himself) act accordingly. The failures, inefficiencies, hard feelings and chicaneries going on in big corporations, particularly the less efficient ones, are probably due to the lack of such definitions, explicitly or implicitly, in the company’s policies.

No work (neither mental nor physical) can be done collectively. All work is done individually. All human energy is individual—generated by and within one man: spiritual energy, mental energy, physical energy. A “collective” piece of work is only the sum of the individual work involved. (And “a collective piece of work” is a sloppy, meaningless corruption; what is meant by it is something like an automobile that comes out of a factory where thousands of men have worked and contributed to the production of the automobile. Well, they didn’t “blend” or “fuse” their work, their minds, bodies, or energies into a collective whole or process; they worked individually as individuals.)

Since all work is done individually, a cooperative work is divided into specific parts, each of which has to be done by an individual; when these parts and the specific individual jobs are not consciously defined by the men involved, inefficiency, friction and trouble follow. An organization is successful to the extent that it functions on such specific division of labor and responsibility, even if unstated and arrived at pragmatically, not consciously and rationally. The extent to which jobs and responsibilities infringe on one another and blend “collectively,” with the decisions and judgment of one man interfering with or being forced on another, determines the degree of the organization’s inefficiency and failure.

(“Division of labor” must also be “division of responsibility.”)

As example of the absence of such clear definitions, with awful results: the motion picture industry. In their stated theory, the movies have no such definitions; they merely hold the producer as omniscient and omnipotent. In practice, they are forced to observe definitions, sort of by default, “bootleg” definitions—and only to that extent do they or can they function successfully.

As example of proper definition on a railroad: it is the president’s job to set the general policy of the road; it is the job of each subordinate to carry out his part of the work toward the accomplishment of that policy. A freight agent has no business deciding what the railroad as a whole should do; his job, specifically, is to see that freight is handled in the best manner possible. An engineer on a train must understand and accept the conditions of his job, which is to run the engine of a train. It is not his job to decide when the train goes, what it carries, what it charges and to whom. His job is only to make it move, on a certain schedule, from a certain point to another certain point.

If he thinks the conditions imposed on him for the operation of the engine are wrong (in strict relation to his job of running it, and only to that), he should not hold the job; he should quit. For instance, if he thinks the rules of stopping, accelerating, watching signals, etc., are wrong—he must not hold this job, because he cannot hold it successfully. If he does not understand the rules and just obeys automatically, he’s no good at the job. If he thinks the rules are wrong, and he is mistaken about it, he still cannot be good at the job by obeying the rules blindly. If he thinks the rules are wrong, and he’s right about it—he shouldn’t keep the job, because the result will be disastrous to him and to the company that enforces the wrong rules. (He is, of course, free to make suggestions to his superiors at any time; but if they disagree and he is convinced that he’s right, he should quit.)

How can an average man know whether he’s right or wrong? By never attempting a job where, in the specific performance of his duties, he has to venture beyond the limit of his own capacity of independent rational judgment, and act without understanding. If he understands a problem, he is sure of whether he’s right or wrong; if he isn’t sure, and can’t arrive at any certainty with the most careful study, he must leave the problem and the job alone.

Within the province of his job, no man should do anything for a reason such as the desire or opinion of another man, or of a number of other men. Certainly not anything that he himself rationally considers wrong. But more than that: if he has no rational grounds for an action, one way or another, still he must not do it if the only reason is the desire or order of another man.

Dagny’s job (if not by title, then in fact—I must check on that, as far as her official position on TT is concerned) is to run the whole railroad. She accepts the interference of James Taggart and government “regulators” as an unavoidable part of her job, an unavoidable evil. She thinks she can work in spite of that interference, or get around it, or compromise with it, and still make the railroad successful. That is her mistake. It can’t be done.

By accepting Taggart’s decisions, which she knows to be wrong, then by helping him to carry out bad ideas well (such as efficiently delivering the “soybean freight,” when it should never have been attempted at all), she only helps him to run the railroad badly and thus contradicts and defeats her own purpose, which is to run it well. She postpones the natural consequences of his bad decisions (which would be disastrous) and thus leaves him free and gives him the means to do more damage to the railroad by even worse decisions.

A bad thing done well is more dangerous and disastrous than a bad thing done badly. An efficient robbery is worse for the victim than an inefficient one. The fool Republicans who help the New Deal to enforce unworkable regulations destroy their own industries—because unworkable regulations inefficiently enforced would give the industries a better chance to function and survive.

This is Dagny’s mistake—based on an imperfect understanding of cooperation with men, of her need of their services in her own aim, and on the difficulty of defining the job of an executive in charge of a huge organization that involves thousands of men. But when she accepts Taggart’s stupidities and tries to make them work (for the sake of the railroad, hoping to get around them or counteract their bad effects), she is doing the equivalent of what I would do if I agreed to put something into a book of mine which I considered bad, but which the publishers, critics or public demanded, and if I justified myself by an argument such as: well, they want it, and after all I have to deal with them, etc. I could not say (like all the damn Republican fools) that I would accomplish my purpose in spite of such compromises: if I consider the outside suggestions bad, that means they are bad for my book and its purpose, therefore by accepting them I defeat my purpose. (Yet this is just what all men mixed by “social” considerations are doing nowadays. And this, in a more complex form, is what Dagny does.)

The pattern of the proper cooperation among men goes like this:

First, the basic premise, without which men cannot deal with one another safely or rationally: that each man lives only for his own sake; therefore, he acts only for his own personal profit, respecting the same right and motive in every other man; therefore, they can act together only if the action is personally profitable to each man involved; and the objective test of that is each man’s own free decision and voluntary consent.

Second, the objective, general purpose of the organization is understood and accepted by all men involved in it—and it is a “selfish” purpose in the same way as the purpose of each man involved.

Example: The purpose of every man working on a railroad should be, generally, to do productive work, which is the proper moral purpose of a human being; more specifically, to do the kind of work he likes or has chosen, and to earn his own living through that work (which means, in effect, to produce and keep the product of one’s own work). No man can expect anything from others as a “sacrifice,” i.e., as a one-sided advantage, a consideration of his own desires with no selfish compensation for or advantage to the other party. (The objective test? Voluntary mutual consent.) No employee can expect ten dollars a day, because he needs it, if his boss can get men willing to do the same work for one dollar. No boss can expect an employee to work for one dollar, if the worker can get ten dollars elsewhere. Any forced freezing, or artificial agreements, or the mere confusion of this principle (“no sacrifice of anyone to anyone”), will not work. It only leads to hatred, injustice, disaster, and destruction.

The relation of a railroad as a whole to the other industries of the country, to its customers and to the whole nation, is the same as that of each man working on it to each other man; here the railroad may be considered as a unit among other units. The purpose of a railroad is to produce a certain commodity (transportation) and to keep the product of its work (profit). Its purpose is not to “serve the nation” nor to “serve its shippers.” You do not run a railroad just because sharecroppers need train rides; their need is none of your concern—unless they can pay their fare, i.e., give you something of value in exchange for what you give to them.

And it is not the purpose of the nation or of the shippers to serve the railroad. Men deal with the railroad only when their mutual interests agree and the exchange is to mutual selfish advantage. The objective test? The voluntary consent of both parties involved—the railroad and the shippers. But if the railroad is considered and run as a “service” (i.e., service to others being its primary purpose, and profits being ignored), then there is nothing but greed, exploitation, inefficiency, failure, and destruction ahead.

This is so by definition: if a railroad is to be run without regard for profit, this means without regard for cost or efficiency; if it serves some project for subnormal charity objects and this service does not pay its cost, someone has to pay for it. The railroad then consumes more than it produces. When all production and all industries are run on such a principle—there is soon nothing left to consume.

Yet the above is precisely what James Taggart tries to do—both in relation to the purpose and policy of TT as a whole (“public service”), and in relation to the duties of employees within the organization (“the strong must serve the weak,” “the interest of any employee must be sacrificed to the interest of the railroad,” “team-work,” etc.). Instead of the growing prosperity that comes from a principle that makes each man profit by cooperating with others, Taggart creates misery and growing poverty by a principle that demands, within, the sacrifice of each man to the organization, and, without, the sacrifice of the organization to other organizations (or collectives, or “the nation”). This is blatantly evident in one simple statement: One system is based on the principle of profit, the other—on the principle of sacrifice; therefore, one will achieve general prosperity, the other—general misery.

This is what Dagny deals with and accepts (if not explicitly, at least implicitly). This is what she hopes to work with and around. That is her mistake and her failure. It can’t be done.

Here, also, is the difference between Dagny and Roark: Roark had no concern for others, and kept them out of his work (and when they did interfere, he took action against them); Dagny has no concern for others and lets them interfere in her work, accepting the interference. The proper concern for others is self-protection-the protection of one’s own principles and inalienable rights, and above all, the protection of oneself against being anybody’s “servant,” the keeping of one’s moral principle of living for one’s own sake.

Regarding Dagny’s determination to function as a creator at all costs: Dagny doesn’t understand the difference between the relation of the creator to nature and to people. In relation to nature, the creator must function to shape the world to his wishes—against every obstacle. In relation to people, he must not allow them (and their rules, stupidity, or force) to come between him and nature—because then he destroys his first function, he makes it impossible, so that he can no longer master nature, but becomes helpless before it, like the parasites.

A creator must function at all costs—but not at the cost of his own principles, not at the cost of his independence, because then he makes it impossible for himself to function; he destroys his base and premise.

Plot Lines for Characters

(To illustrate, dramatize, and integrate their individual progressions)

John Galt

No progression here (as Roark had none). He is what he is from the beginning—integrated (indivisible) and perfect. No change in him, because he has no intellectual contradiction and, therefore, no inner conflict.

His important qualities (to bring out):

Joy in living—the peculiar, deeply natural, serene, all-pervading joy in living which he alone possesses so completely in the story (the other strikers have it in lesser degree, almost as reflections of that which, in him, is the source). His joy is all-pervading in the sense that it underlies all his actions and emotions, it is an intrinsic, inseparable part of his nature (like the color of his hair or eyes). It is present even when he suffers (particularly in the torture scene)—that is when the nature and quality of his joy in living is startling and obvious, it is not resignation or acceptance of suffering, but a denial of it, a triumph over it. (This is extremely important to convey—clearly, unmistakably.) And this quality of his is particularly what is lacking in the parasites and in their whole world, in the world as it has become. (He laughs, as answer to the crucial question of the torture scene.)

(The worship of joy as against the worship of suffering.)

Self-confidence, self-assurance, the clear-cut, direct, positive action, no doubts or hesitations.

The magnificent innocence—the untroubled purity—a pride which is serene, not aggressive—“the first man of ability who refused to feel guilty.”

Dagny Taggart

Progression from enthusiastic activity, joy in working, brilliant self-confidence and belief in the triumph of the right (of intelligence and competence) —to a helpless bewilderment in the face of the parasites’ behavior and motives—to a teeth-clenched determination to go ahead, ignoring them (end of Part I, beginning of Part II)—to a slow realization of the truth, with a slow anger growing with the steps of this realization.

Her full understanding of the issue and of the parasites is retarded because, as her anger grows, she comes to a stage of bitter contempt for them and refuses to think about them any longer. Her attitude becomes: “To hell with all of them—they are not worth considering or examining—I am not interested in them and never have been—so I will live for and think about my only interest: my work. I will deal with them only as I need them for my work, and I will use them for that. I can use them, not vice versa, because I am intelligent and they’re not. They’ll serve my purposes, not I theirs.” And this is true, so long as she does not accept their terms or compromise with their principles anywhere in her work and in her relations with them. When she does—they win and they use her, because they are more consistent in the application of their own principles and because she has placed her intelligence in their service, in the furtherance of their aims and principles, and thus she has turned her great and only weapon—her intelligence—against herself.

Thus, it is she who defeats herself—who makes it possible for her enemies to destroy her, to win. This is the pattern of the creators’ destruction of themselves through cooperation with parasites. You do not cooperate with parasites at any time. When and if you cooperate with a man, you can properly do so only to the degree that he can or is willing to act on the principles and terms of a creator in the particular activity or exchange involved. And no more than that. No further. And the terms of a creator are: “Man as an end in himself,” therefore every action must have a personal, selfish purpose or advantage for every man involved in it, recognized and accepted as such by the others involved in it.

Does this mean that you depend on them, on waiting for their recognition of your rights? No. You don’t have to deal with them; never primarily—only secondarily. So you merely refuse to deal with them, if they do not accept your terms. (Your attitude is: “Take it or leave it.”)

Those who can really be of help in the execution of your interests are only those who share your terms (or only to the extent that they do); they are the only ones capable of being of value to you. The others are of no use to you whatever. But you are of use to them (on your terms). (Their mistake is in thinking that they can make you of use to them—on their terms.) Hold out—and they will accept your terms to the extent to which they can survive at all. But give in, compromise—and you destroy your work, aims, desires, happiness, and life—you help them to last a while on the terms of evil, you postpone the justice of [reality‘s] retribution against them, you serve as their shield—and the end is only total destruction for you and for them.

June 30, 1946

To illustrate the preceding: Dagny’s whole problem is that she cannot find able men to work on the railroad she runs. Her very predicament disproves her idea that she needs others, the stupid or inferior ones, for her purpose, and therefore she must find some way to deal with them, must consider them or compromise with them (she does not really believe it, only wonders about it, is bewildered on this point—but so many others do believe it, particularly the professor). The fact is that she cannot do anything with inferiors—the “cooperation” she wants can be achieved only with men of intelligence (to the extent of intelligence she needs from them).

Cooperation can be done only on a level; if one attempts to do it “down,” one fails. If a person’s attitude is: “My superior intelligence has a great goal or project in mind, but unfortunately I need dumbbells to carry out my orders, so I must adjust myself to them in some way, scale down my ideas, principles and methods”—that person is doomed to fail. If your project requires the services or cooperation of others, your only chance is to find those equal to the particular task it requires of them; adjusting the great project down to those inferior to their proposed part in it does not raise them, but merely destroys the project.

Dagny needs men with whom she can deal on her own terms, the terms of the creator, the terms of intelligence, capacity and independence—or she can do nothing. What, then, is the proper interrelationship of men working on a project, such as the building of a great skyscraper? They cooperate through and are held together by their various capacities—not their inferiorities. The bricklayer has contributed his ability—but the architect has contributed a much greater ability: [he has provided] the opportunity for the exercise of the abilities of the others involved, and this must be acknowledged.

What is the message to all men, implied in this? Live honestly and honorably within the limits and to the limits of your own ability—and give thanks to the men whose greater ability has made such a magnificent world possible for you (but remember that you were not the great man’s goal or motive).

July 1, 1946

Hank Rearden

Progression: He works fiercely, enthusiastically—then feels guilty about it; he attempts to make up in the altruistic sense; he gives in to every accusation of his family. He loves Dagny and considers this his sin, his guilty passion—while his forced love for his wife he thinks to be virtuous, pure, idealistic.

Part II: his slow awakening to the truth—his understanding of the parasites (his family) and their motives—his understanding of his own value and that his sins had been virtues. His realization that his love for Dagny was his best emotion (after he loses her). His anger against his family then becomes implacable, cold, set, merciless—with the same sense of justice which he had earlier turned against himself. [This is AR’s first note on the romance between Rearden and Dagny. ]

James Taggart

Progression: from a smug, yet uneasy, satisfaction with his parasitical “top position”—to bewilderment—to malicious restlessness (with people and in business)—to a growing fear (Part II)—to panic, hysteria, and collapse.

The Professor

Progression: From a righteous (if slightly forced) idealism—to an attempt to drown himself in his work and shut out his uneasiness about the world—to the gradual, growing surrender to the parasites’ authority (spiritually and in his work)—to a growing fear of Galt (Part II)—to the cold viciousness of “self-protection,” accepting anything to justify his fatal mistake—to disaster.

July 4, 1946

Emotional and Personal Relationships Part I

The love affair of Dagny and Rearden: first the mutual understanding—then his efforts to avoid her—the affair—his sense of guilt—her simple, natural acceptance—his growing love for her—her growing restlessness.

Rearden and his wife: the last of his former love for her, now bewildered and forced. Her subtle campaign of torture, to pull him down.

His efforts to atone to her for his love of Dagny.

Rearden and his family: mother, sister and younger brother. The torture by the parasites—his constant “atonement.”

The romance of James Taggart: his former unsatisfactory love life—meeting with Cherryl—the romance and the “Cinderella Girl” campaign—their marriage—Cherryl’s hatred and fear of Dagny—the first indication of what the marriage will be.

Dagny and Eddie Willers: the comradeship.

Dagny and James Taggart: all the stages of exploitation—deceit, cruelty, hatred on his part, bewilderment and contempt on hers.

Dagny and Francisco d‘Anconia: the reluctant friendship.

Taggart and the priest: the spiritual crutch.

Dagny and Gerald Hastings.

Rearden and the parasite whom he builds up (the mines).

Rearden and his secretary.

Taggart’s hatred for Rearden, and dislike for Mrs. Rearden, who despises him.

The priest and the professor: a kind of spiritual cooperation.

The professor’s disintegration: his “forced” idealism at his government laboratory—flashback to how he got laboratory—progression of his work and of his character toward [the support of] totalitarianism.

Part II

Dagny’s break with Rearden (and search for Galt).

Dagny meets Gait—their night together.

Dagny’s ultimatum to Galt.

Dagny joins Galt.

(Dagny and the professor.)

(Dagny and d‘Anconia.)

(Dagny and Eddie Willers.)

(Dagny and Cherryl.)

Scene where Rearden realizes that Dagny is his real love.

Rearden discovers Mrs. Rearden’s affair with James Taggart.

Taggart’s gradual destruction of Cherryl—and scene where she realizes his real nature.

The love affair of Taggart and Mrs. Rearden.

(Scene where Taggart confesses affair to priest, who forgives him.)

Scene where professor realizes that Taggart is his master.

Professor’s attempt to destroy Dagny.

(Scene where professor curses priest.)

Destruction of the professor.

(Scene: the priest and Galt.)

July 6, 1946

Outline Part II: The Beginning

The valley—John Galt.

The “transportation pull” deal—TT gives its last grain cars to a soybean project in the south, instead of to the desperately awaited wheat harvest in Minnesota. The deal is arranged by Cuffy Meigs, TT’s new executive (the looter), who receives huge, secret rake-off from the head of the project, his friend, one of his own kind. (Chester is involved in this and is behind the project. Its announced aim—“teach people to sacrifice,” to live on a lower standard.)

James Taggart, by now, does anything Meigs tells him to. Taggart’s growing fear. Cherryl’s attempts at self-improvement. Dagny breaks with Rearden; she tells him she loves another man—she does not say who. (“It was my fate to love the impossible.”)

Dagny fights desperately, ferociously against the southern deal—but undertakes, personally, to see that the soybean freight is delivered. Here is her crucial mistake—she does it to save the railroad; she contributes to its destruction, instead.

The ride of the soybean freight: the tragic irony of magnificent energy and competence wasted on doing well a worthless and vicious undertaking. (Dagny, her best engineers, Eddie Willers. The weather, the bad track, the last of the rail reserves wasted to fix a useless line.) This is the last run of a train shown in the story—showing a dying system, all the difficulties, impossibilities, inefficiencies involved. The next one—“The Comet”—cannot finish its run.

The disaster resulting from this deal. The collapse of the whole farming district in Minnesota (“the last granary”): the rotting wheat, the bonfires of wheat, the bankrupt farms, the desertions of whole families, trekking away into nowhere, the lines of carts on the roads (like war refugees, but much worse). Rearden loses heavily on the farm machinery—credits he had extended. (He was counting on “help to success,” but help was given to failure.) The famine in the rest of the country.

The famine and desertions of workers at the ex-Rearden mine in Michigan.

Parallel developments: Dagny’s search for Galt (Francisco d‘Anconia, the empty valley).

Rearden and his wife—his realization that Dagny was his real love. His scene with Dagny when he tells her that.

James Taggart crushes Cherryl’s attempts to rise—she understands his real nature.

Cherryl’s drowning plea to Dagny—the attempt to hang on to a living power.

The circumstances (the result of their mutual problems above) that lead to the affair of James Taggart and Mrs. Rearden. Their ghastly night together—the horror of sex as second-handedness, as hatred, malice, and self-contempt.

Taggart confesses the affair to the priest. The priest forgives him, but feels crushingly uneasy afterwards.

The tunnel collapse. The return to old tracks—the pre-tunnel era. The desperate need of new track. Dagny’s worry over the Taggart Bridge.

The professor. Reduction of his laboratory funds. Talk of using his “vibration-ray” against “isolationist” sections. The scene where the professor realizes that Taggart is his master. The professor is demoted—the “determinist” assistant is put in charge of the laboratory.

The rebellion of [Rearden‘s] secretary against her family—her decision to quit and marry.

Rearden discovers Mrs. Rearden’s affair with Taggart. Connected with same event—he sees the real nature of his mother, brother, and sister, and of their attitudes toward him.

Immediately following—the crucial emergency conference: Rearden, Taggart, mine-owner, businessman, bureaucrat. Subject—the new rails for TT. Taggart has raised the rates on the Minnesota line, due to the farm collapse. The mine-owner has raised the price of ore. The bureaucrat does not allow Rearden to raise his prices on rails (“TT can’t afford it”). The squeeze-play in the open. Rearden is given an impossible burden—because he is the strongest; it is made impossible for him to function—because they so desperately need him to function. The crucial line (from Taggart): “You’ll do something.” Now Rearden sees (though not yet in words). He says nothing and walks out of the room.

Rearden in his office—the crushing realization that he will know the truth (which he already knows) at any moment now. His secretary comes in for the promised appointment. She tells him she is quitting—and why. He sees the similarity of their tragedies. He understands everything.... He is ready to leave the office, when she tells him about the man waiting to see him. The name in the sealed envelope. “It must be a gag.... Send him in, I’ll see him. What does he look like?” “Like something made out of a kind of aluminum-copper alloy.”

The news that Rearden has quit. The reaction of Dagny and Taggart— Taggart’s terror. He rushes to Lillian Rearden—to make her beg Rearden to remain.

The scene where Lillian Rearden, his mother, brother, and sister beg Rearden to remain. His immovable coldness—they are dead for him, the sense of justice turned against them. He goes away (to the valley).

The scene with his brother and Rearden’s superintendent. The superintendent quits, with his staff.

The scene in which a lawyer reads Rearden’s deed to the collective: Mrs. Rearden, mother, brother, sister, and the publicity punk. The parasites “with their clothes off”—the naked truth about them. (Mrs. Rearden wishing to sell her share—the predicament of collective ownership.)

The collective hires a friend of Cuffy Meigs as executive. Half the workers have deserted. The executive sells the remaining supplies and crucial machinery, on the side, then vanishes. The collapse of Rearden Steel.

The final emergency to TT—no Rearden rails to come. The small banquet—Dagny, James Taggart, bureaucrat, businessman, Meigs, Mr. Jones. The decision to close the Wisconsin-Michigan ore line. Dagny’s desperate, almost screaming protests. Their arguments about “sharing hardships” and “the government needs a transcontinental line.” They outvote her. She escapes from the room in horror.

Dagny in the subway. John Galt. She sits crying—and the bum who consoles her (“Oh well, who is John Galt?”). Toward morning, Galt comes back—they go to his room—their night together.

Dagny’s challenge to him—his explanation. (“No, there is no conflict—there never can be—as you will learn.”)

The closing of the ore line announced—the riots—the fights for the rails—the general panic.

Dagny-Galt: the “enemy romance.”(?)

The announced president’s broadcast. In radio studio—president, Dagny, Taggart, the professor (perhaps some of the lesser ones, too). The machinery won’t function. Then—John Galt’s voice. (A gasp and a scream in the studio—the gasp from Dagny, the scream from the professor.) John Galt’s broadcast.

Scene in subway with phone booth, afterwards.

The panic—the country falling apart. The professor’s hysteria—scene where he demands that the priest curse Galt—the priest refuses.

Government’s attempts to negotiate with Galt, by short-wave. His refusal. Secret orders to find him.

The scene: Galt and the priest, in the restaurant. The appeal through pity. His refusal.

Dagny comes to Galt’s garret. The appeal through love—his refusal. Then she warns him—he hands her the phone. (“I was waiting to be found—I didn’t know it would be you. But it had to be.”) She notifies the government.

Dagny returns to Galt’s room, with the police, hoping he will be gone. But he is there. The “polite” arrest—the wreck of his laboratory. (“What was in it? You’ll never know.”)

Galt in a luxurious hotel room. The private bargaining: Galt and Mr. Jones—“What are you after?” Galt’s refusal. When Mr. Jones asks is there anything he would like, he answers: yes, he would like to speak to the professor.

The scene: Galt and the professor. “John, I had a good motive!” The boy of eighteen and the sentence about the supremacy of reason. “Why don’t you say something?” “You’ve said it all.” The professor escapes from the room, in total spiritual collapse.

The professor tells the others that they cannot let Galt rule, they must destroy him. Professor is placed under “protective custody.” He escapes.

Scene: Dagny and Rearden. Rearden is on Galt’s side—Dagny confesses to him that she is Galt’s mistress.

Scene: Dagny and Eddie Willers, when he leaves for California (by plane) to “save” the Comet. He realizes that he’s always loved her.

Galt is ordered to dress in evening clothes and driven to a banquet room. The banquet. The appeal through flattery. The miserable and ludicrous mixture of crawling before him and arrogance in the implication of the value of their admiration. His answer, over the radio: “Get the hell out of my way.”

The professor hears the broadcast over his car radio as he speeds toward the laboratory. He realizes that Galt’s refusal is more frightening than his acceptance would have been. The “determinist” and Meigs-types of “guards” will not let the professor into the laboratory. He wants the ray to destroy Galt. (“He’s won! Don’t you understand? He’s won, because he’s refused!”) He screams that Galt is the enemy, because he is the mind. “That’s right,” says one of the guards. “And what are you?” The explosion of the laboratory—the end of the ray and of the professor. (The “thing of screaming pain”—and the greater horror of one spark remaining within it to remember that this had been a great mind.)

The scene is a bare hotel room—Taggart, businessman, bureaucrat, Meigs, Dagny. Galt has been locked back in his room. The “soundless hysteria” : the quiet, brief discussion, which has but one meaning, they all know it—the resort to force (with the unstated knowledge that the mere premise of such an attempt is insane). They avoid Dagny—her presence is restraining them, they don’t want her to understand. But Dagny is cold, silent, emotionless—strangely detached. She understands, and much more than they do (she understands what they will understand in the torture scene). She gets up unexpectedly, without a word, and walks out of the room.

Dagny alone in her office in the TT building (night). The emotionless, methodical burning of her papers. The long-distance call from Eddie Willers—trouble for the Comet. She tells him, quietly, to quit. He can’t. (But he knew she would: “You, too?”)

As she hangs up and proceeds with her burning, an executive rushes in with a report on danger to the Taggart Bridge: a new crack is reported—a storm is rising on the Mississippi—and a crucially awaited heavy freight train is approaching the bridge. Before the man finishes, she leaps to the phone; in the time it takes her to reach her desk, she sees the consequences of the bridge’s collapse and the remedy to save it; she sees Nat Taggart and the whole of Taggart Transcontinental. Then, slowly, with a twisted movement of her arm, she replaces the receiver. “What are we going to do, Miss Taggart? We don’t know what to do!” She thinks: This is it ... I didn’t know it would be so hard.... She answers: “I don‘t, either.”

The torture of Galt. The reaction of the parasites—particularly Taggart. Galt laughs at them, pointing out the contradiction of their predicament. Their concern not to kill him (except Taggart: he is passive here—he is seeing the first hints of what he is to discover). The electric engine breaks down. Galt tells them about holding creators through their joy of living. “Go ahead, turn on the electric current.” The mechanic cannot repair the machine—he asks for Taggart’s instructions. The parasites’ answer—“Do something.” Galt tells him what to do. The mechanic obeys dazedly—the machine works. The mechanic looks at Galt—at the parasites—then drops his tools and runs away in terror. Galt laughs.

Meigs seizes the engine, to operate it. The businessman whines: “Don’t kill him!” Taggart cries suddenly: “Make him scream!” The stunned, embarrassed silence; they all sense what Taggart sees completely in that moment. Taggart falls back against the wall, white-faced; he is done for. Meigs turns on the current. A man rushes in to announce the collapse of the Taggart Bridge. Galt’s moment of involuntary temptation. They stop the torture and rush out, realizing the implications, each to save himself. Taggart has not even heard the news; he is fixed on his discovery.

Taggart and the priest. The confession of total evil and the plea for absolution. “I have nothing to say, James. I’m on strike.”

The rescue of Galt by Dagny. (Brute force against mind and force.) He looks up at her, smiling in that complete deliverance which she knows. He says: “We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?” Tears streaming down her face, smiling, she answers: “No, we never had to.”

The flight of Galt and Dagny to the valley, over a world where the lights are going out.

The last run of the Comet. Eddie Willers—against the world. The stop in the desert. (“Dagny, in the name of the best within us! ...”) The encroaching nature—the return of the jungle. Eddie Willers sobbing on the tracks, under the motionless ray of the headlight that shoots out to get lost in a dead night.

The music of the composer’s “Heroic Symphony” filling the valley and rising out of it to the night sky. Rearden, d‘Anconia, Danneskjöld, Hastings at work—the control of nature, the triumph over nature. Talk about future plans, starting everything from the beginning, in a small, selfish way. “Galt will run the local railroad from New York to Philadelphia.” Galt and Dagny on the rocks above the valley—looking off at the wrecked road and the stubborn fire in the distance. Galt says: “The road is cleared. We’re going back.”

July 7, 1946

Three Main Lines for Part I

I. The gradual disappearance of the creators.

They are pulled out on strike at crucial moments in the story—in connection with TT’s disintegration. Each time, the loss is a specific blow to TT (as in Rearden’s quitting). Preferably, each desertion must cause a specific step lower for TT. The men can be TT’s big executives, or key suppliers, or key shippers (or one of each). Each time, the loss of one man in a business causes failure for all the others in it. (Probably four instances, at the most—but clear-cut, crucial ones.)

Show Dagny seeing her net of rails breaking and falling apart in her hands. If the strikers are the life blood of the world, then TT is the world’s blood system; as the blood goes, the vessels shrink, emptied, and dry off; then the body withers, in growing paralysis. By the time Dagny finds that Galt is a minor employee of hers, she has realized, in despair, that TT is a dying net of vessels without blood. (And Galt is the one who watches the operations of TT and knows when, where, and whom to strike.)

II. Dagny’s quest in connection with Galt’s old engine.

There are two lines of search on her part. First, trying to find someone to understand the importance of the engine, to restore it and make it work. This is futile, except for Rearden (or, every time she has a chance at a good engineer, Taggart ruins it). Second, trying to trace its history and find the man who designed it. Here there is a chance for flashbacks, in strange, half mysterious hints and conversations, a chance for a gradual movement of Dagny toward Galt. And a chance to show all the variations of the parasites’ attitude toward brains and achievement, and toward material property.

III. “What is wrong with the world?”

This is the overall, miserably bewildered question in all the minds, but particularly in Dagny’s (and, next, in Eddie Willers‘). This must be conveyed in small touches, small but tremendously significant in unstated implications. Here there is a chance for such things as: the music, “the cigarette made nowhere” (or some such equivalent, an extremely well-made small gadget that could not have been made in the factories and by the industries which Dagny knows), the girl-writer’s book “published nowhere,” etc. The feeling of “Ergitandal”—just exactly that—first, with the hopeless yearning of an impossible dream—then growing into an ominous reality (ominous in being inexplicably real somewhere)—leading to and climaxed by Dagny in the valley. [What “Ergitandal” refers to is unknown.]

Galt as a TT employee. Either: night watchman for TT’s research laboratory ; or track walker; or switchman on lonely division; or plain laborer in the repair yard, which is connected with the laboratory; or terminal worker in the underground tunnels of the main terminal in New York. (If this last—then their first love scene is in the underground tunnels that vibrate with the motion of the great city above.)

Galt’s reason for being an obscure TT employee: he chose TT for the same reason I did, as the crucial blood system that gives him access to the whole economy of the country; by stopping TT and the key industries connected with it, he can stop the world. But while working on TT, he has fallen in love with Dagny Taggart, long before she meets him (he knows all about her activities and her character, and he has seen her in person many times). That is his conflict. He knows that he is her worst enemy, in her terms, her secret destroyer—but he knows that he must go on. (This is reflected in his attitude toward her in the valley—but we actually learn it much later, when she does, in Part II.)

Bits for Part I

Chapter II: “The Theme.” Dagny on the train—listening to the “Heroic Concerto.” The young porter—his evasive answers. The railroad incident where we learn who she is. When they reach the underground terminal in New York—the sense of exaltation returns to her. As she gets off the train, she is whistling the Concerto. She feels someone looking at her—turns—the younger porter is staring at her tensely.

This music is then used twice again: when Dagny approaches the houses of the valley—and at the very end. (Unless the strikers use it for a code signal.) ([Note added some time later:] “The Concerto of Deliverance.”)

The gold dollar sign placed by Francisco d‘Anconia at the entrance to the valley.

The oil man whose wells are “nationalized” (directly or indirectly) quits and sets fire to the wells. One gusher—the best—cannot be extinguished. It remains flaming for years, to the end of the story. (The constant reflection of the red glow—the reminder, like the calendar.) At the end—this is the stubborn fire which Galt sees in the distance. (“Wyatt’s torch.”)

July 9, 1946

Notes for Part II (Tentative)

Galt and Dagny

He is the lowest kind of track laborer in the underground tunnels of the Taggart Terminal.

They meet when she is called there because the signal-switch system has broken down; there is no one to repair it—and no one takes the initiative on what to do. (This occurs after a sequence where Dagny was in despair over her inability to find intelligence and competence.)

The love affair in the underground tunnels.

She learns that he has loved her for years—and that he is her worst enemy. (She tries to stop him from “getting” someone—perhaps Rearden.)

The scene where Dagny and important leaders (Mr. Jones) are held up in a train stalled in the Taggart Terminal tunnels. They are discussing important collectivist measures to come. She glances out of the window. Galt is standing by the switch, holding a red lantern.

After the broadcast, Dagny returns to her own ofnce—and finds Galt waiting for her. He tells her that she must leave with him—hell is going to break loose now. She wants to remain. Then, he will remain, too; all the others have left; but he will save her—or go down with her. He tells her she can always find him at his job—and leaves.

After the desperate search for him—Dagny comes to Galt’s garret. She begs him to help them, to save TT—the temptation through love. He refuses. She asks him to escape—or she will betray him. He hands her the phone.

July 10, 1946

Notes for Part I: The “Three Main Lines ”

I. The gradual disappearance of the creators.

Galt “gets”:

Railroad men:

Dagny’s Operating (?) Manager (which causes traffic snarl).

Dagny’s Freight Manager (which causes loss of crucial freight).

Dagny’s Traffic Manager (which causes death of section).

Chief Engineer (loss of tunnel and bridge).

Inventor or young engineer (resorting to old engines).

Shippers and suppliers:

Oil man—lack of fuel which [leads to the] end of diesels. (The burning well—near the future dead section.)

Lumber man—lack of ties, cars, terminal buildings.

Utility man (electricity)—New York loses electricity near the end (tie with Taggart surrendering power plant to “the city”).

III. “What is wrong with the world? ”

The music (“Heroic Concerto”).

The book (part of a book, found by Dagny, “published nowhere”).

The flashlight: the small gadget with immense significance. This is a good example of the fact that technical civilization is an end product of intellectual civilization. (Have d‘Anconia make some crack about this, such as: “Who made this flashlight? The idea that a table is a table.”)

The way the key people quit.

The actions of Francisco d‘Anconia.

The incident of Ragnar Danneskjöld’s refusal.

The cigarettes.

July 12, 1946

Here is the state of TT at beginning of Part II:

The system has shrunk to little more than a single transcontinental line—largely useless (because the productive areas on its route have been killed) and unable to pay its own cost.

The desperate need for Rearden Steel rails—the track is hopelessly worn out.

Schedules are hopelessly mixed—nobody now expects a train to be on time. Therefore, people (producers and shippers) are not counting on trains any longer. (Breakdowns of signals, equipment, and lack of supplies.) Trains are expensive, dangerous, uncomfortable, unreliable.

Most of TT’s main shippers are gone.

The Taggart Bridge is in a desperately precarious condition.

Refrigerator cars and tank cars are gone. Sleepers and heating are eliminated at the end of Part I. Air-conditioning is long since gone. (Water and lighting go in Part II.)

Diesels are gone—Old steam locomotives are run with coal—and there is a first return to the use of plain wood (if this is technically feasible).

The Taggart “research laboratory ” is gone.

Possible line:

Dagny is searching desperately for the genius who invented the motor. She is searching also for the mysterious enemy who is destroying TT. When she traps the enemy, to deliver him to those who will destroy him, she discovers that he is the genius who designed the motor, the man she wanted.

July 17, 1946

For Part I

The ending: Either the freight car manufacturer has quit, or Dagny is afraid he will; he is the last good man left in that line and something has just happened to “put the burden on him.” Dagny hurries to stop him. She arrives too late; she sees his plane taking off at the airport. She follows.

Before that: she hurries by train, but this is “the frozen ride,” so she can’t make it. She escapes from the abandoned train, steals or buys someone’s plane, and goes on to the small town of the car manufacturer.

The “frozen ride”: wrong signals, wrong switches, burned-out brakes—every kind of lesser sabotage. It ends with the train being abandoned in the middle of a plain at night. Half an hour or more passes before Dagny finds out that they are abandoned. Nobody else cares. (This is a complete example, “in a teaspoon,” of a frozen, parasite society.)

The “freeze” [Directive 10-289] is applied because Taggart and the other parasites cannot find people to take positions of responsibility, and there is a wave of quitting and pleas for demotion. This happens because of the double-cross.

The “double-cross” is that Taggart’s executive assistant (a deliberately chosen patsy) and a train engineer are blamed for the tunnel catastrophe and convicted of manslaughter.

The tunnel catastrophe: a parasite, who is in charge at a station where a diesel engine breaks down, sends a passenger train into the tunnel with an old steam engine. The tunnel is in bad condition; its ventilation system doesn’t work. The engine cannot quite handle the grade in the tunnel—the passengers begin to choke—a fool panics and pulls the brake-cord—the train cannot get started again. A freight train, loaded with explosives, is speeding through the tunnel (because of the poor ventilation) and smashes into the stalled train. The explosion wrecks the tunnel for good. (After this, Dagny has to organize the “return to pre-tunnel days,” using the old track.)

The oil sequence. A single successful oil man buys a whole section of country. (This is a mountain region, not too far from the valley.) He is using, for shipping, the efficient railroad of Taggart’s competitor. Taggart whines that his branch line would be all right ( it is losing money) if it weren’t for the “destructive” competition. Taggart has a law passed (or a railroad association vote) about “duplication” and “seniority.” His line is the oldest, so he remains and the competitor is forced out. The oil man goes frantic with Taggart’s poor service: endless delays and uncertainty, no cars when needed, lost cars, accidents. (Accidents are always claimed to be “acts of God.” Here someone remarks: “Funny how active God’s getting to be lately,” and is answered: “He always is when man isn’t.”) The oil man loses a great deal of business (and industries are forced to close) because he cannot deliver the oil on time. (Taggart’s poor freight service makes prices rise in the oil town. The workers demand a raise, and the oil man is ordered to grant it, while not being allowed to raise the price of oil. Or—the oil man wants to build his own railroad line, and he is not allowed to, on grounds of “monopoly.”) He quits, setting fire to his wells.

Less than a year later, Taggart has to close his branch line because there is no business in this section; the industries supported by and dependent on the oil-field have closed or moved away. This is the “death of a section”—the small farmers, shop owners, and workers are left behind and find themselves without transportation to the outside world. (These are the people who believe that small private property is all right, but big fortunes should be limited.)

The young man who wants to organize a “pony express.” He is asked: “So you want to make money on the community misfortune?” The community passes rules: special rates on babies’ milk, priorities on food, free rides for the unemployed, etc. That evening, a stranger comes to town. He is present at the town meeting. In the morning, the young man has disappeared with the stranger.

There are earlier references to “dead sections.” The first one we see is when Dagny goes to the abandoned motor factory. (So later, in the above sequence, the readers know what is in store for the inhabitants of the town.)

The iron ore squeeze. Parasite steel manufacturers [accuse] Rearden of “destructive competition” because he owns his own mine. Mrs. Rearden’s pet parasite enlists the help of Taggart—the deal being that the parasite will acquire the mine and give Taggart the ore freight business, instead of shipping it by lake boats (which is much cheaper). Taggart and the others get a law passed that no business can own another business. Rearden has to sell the mine—and Mrs. Rearden pushes him into selling it to the parasite. The parasite has no money (except a government loan for the down payment), so Rearden has to take a time-payment arrangement.

Taggart gets the transportation business from the mine and this destroys the lake shipping. Later, in Part II, close to Rearden’s final awakening, there is an emergency when the parasite is making a mess of the mine and it is running at a loss; Mrs. Rearden urges Rearden to “give the man a hand,” teach him how to run the mine—“since, after all, you’ll lose money if the mine goes bankrupt.” This is when Rearden has a fit of fury, his first one against his wife; he realizes that he is asked to make the man a present of the mine that he, Rearden, created, and also teach the bastard how to use his own stolen property. Rearden refuses. This is one of the important steps to his awakening.

Later, when the wheat section is destroyed, Taggart raises freight rates on the ore (there is no lake shipping available)—the parasite raises the price of ore—yet Rearden is not allowed to raise the price of steel. “You’ll do something.”

An incident in which Dagny tries to stop an important shipper from quitting—and it is too late. While she waits in the anteroom, Galt is in the man’s office. (We don’t know this, of course.) Galt leaves through another door, not through the anteroom. By the time Dagny is admitted into the office, it is too late: the man has decided to quit.

The Francisco d‘Anconia disaster: D’Anconia has made a big deal with Taggart to build a branch line for his new copper mine in Mexico. Taggart builds it, at great expense, because he is appeasing the Mexican government. The Mexican government nationalizes the line and the mine. D‘Anconia loses more than Taggart, but he has made the mine worthless. Dagny realizes that it was done on purpose. (Taggart’s motive was the typical one: not any actual facts that d’Anconia presented, but that d‘Anconia presented them.) (After that, d’Anconia cannot deliver the copper which TT needs. He uses the weakest shipping company he can find, in order to “help” them-the ships sink. Previously, he had used Hastings’ ships.)

Minor possibility: the cigarettes with the dollar sign are used as a code signal among the strikers.

Possibility: Galt, who is getting most of his information through Eddie Willers, learns from him about Dagny’s affair with Rearden. Eddie is the only one who knows of it—he is jealous, [but] doesn’t realize it. He confesses it to Galt—while he, Eddie, is drunk. (“What’s that to me—if Dagny Taggart is sleeping with Hank Rearden?”)

Possibility: Dagny calls on Francisco d‘Anconia and Ragnar Danneskjöld to help her save Galt. They have remained in the city, without Galt’s knowledge or approval, to stand by him and save him when necessary. When Dagny calls d’Anconia (from a pay booth), he tells her that he expected her call. When he comes to meet her, she makes the sign of the dollar with her fingers, smiling, even though she wants to cry.

July 18, 1946

The reason that society does not collapse into civil war and violence in my story (as it would have in historical reality) is that even a civil war is caused by some element of independence in men, some active impulse, no matter how misguided. It is the element of decision which makes men revolt, even if blindly, because they realize that conditions are unbearable, cannot be allowed to go on and something must be done. So they resort to violence, in sheer anger and despair—violence being the only resort against the parasites (since reason is what the parasites have discarded, and since they rely on and advocate violence).

So it is still some kind of creator, a man of action or decision to some extent, who is necessary to lead men into revolt and civil war. This is what happens in history when collectivism, the rule of the parasite, becomes unbearable. (Besides, it is the parasites who resort to force when they need more loot and hope to make men produce for them through terror.) Actually, in history, societies are a mixture—no principle is observed consistently, and individualism is allowed to function by default. This is what holds the creators in society, their hope for that accidental chance. But this is no longer true of modern collectivism, such as Russia or Germany.

(A good sidelight here: there are only two possible incentives for human actions: desire for gain, or fear. But fear does not work, except for a while on the most miserable level of subsistence and then only while there is still the production of free men to loot or copy (and it works only on the worst, i.e., useless, types of men). So, actually, there is but one incentive for men: gain—personal desire.)

In my story, the creators do not try to cooperate with a parasite-ruled society to the point of the unbearable, then revolt, as they do in history. The creators have withdrawn. What is left of humanity without them is capable neither of production nor revolt. Therefore, the end of the world, in my story, is not one of violence, but of slow rot: disintegration, corruption, a dead body falling to pieces (and a society without functioning intelligence is a dead body). It must be the rot of stagnation, of hopeless decay, of the gray, the dull, the trite. (Keep this firmly in mind. Don’t have too much emotional violence in Taggart and his kind; even their crises and tragedies are gray rot.) Without the creators, the world simply stops.

It is merely indicated that the parasites would like to resort to violence, that it is their natural course, their essence, and their last hope. This is shown in the torture scene, in the sequences relating to the professor’s laboratory, and in small, dreadful hints about their intentions, from the Cuffy Meigs types, as well as from “Chester” or “the businessman.” But they have nothing to do violence to—the creators have withdrawn beyond their reach and left the parasites to their fate (instead of fighting them in the open), to show them what that fate will be. And what’s left of humanity is a miserable, shivering herd, not worth terrorizing, because they are already in terror and will obey without violence; in fact, they ask nothing but to obey; but there’s no one there to teach the parasites what orders to give. The remnant herd is not worth ruling—they can produce nothing for the parasites to loot.

All this must be brought out explicitly.

It is the abstract thinkers who go on strike first—since production and all the rest stems from them. Therefore, by the time the story begins, the abstract thinkers are gone already: there are no philosophers and no theoretical scientists. This is shown in the state of the Taggart laboratory, of the professor’s State laboratory, and in the prominence of the “Fadiman type” of “philosopher.” [As noted earlier, Clifton Fadiman was book editor of The New Yorker.]

Note on Galt (in connection with above): Make clear that Galt is that rare phenomenon (perhaps, the rarest)—a philosopher and inventor at once, both a thinker and a man of action. That is why he is the perfect man, the perfectly integrated being. One indication of this—the fact that in college Galt was the star pupil of both the philosopher and the [physics] professor. In fact, Galt was the only student who took such a peculiar (to the college authorities and the time) combination of courses.

August 24, 1946

[AR revised the following chapter outline at some later time. Where the revisions are significant, I present both the original and the revised descriptions. Where the chapter title seems to have been added later, I have marked it with an asterisk.]

Final Chapter Outline Part I: The End

I. The Calendar

“Who is John Galt?” Eddie Willers, Taggart Transcontinental, James Taggart. Trouble on the Colorado line. Taggart’s evasions.

II. The Theme

Dagny Taggart on the train—returning from a survey of the Colorado line. The Fifth Concerto. Her carrying the business and the responsibility. Order for Rearden Metal to rebuild the Colorado line. Her young engineer quits.

III: The Chain

Hank Rearden and Rearden Steel. The mine parasite (Paul Larkin). The bracelet. Rearden and his wife (Lillian), mother, brother (Philip), and sister (Stacey). Larkin’s cautious mention of “How is your Washington man?”

IV: The Top and the Bottom*

[Original:] James Taggart’s move to force out his Colorado competition and get Rearden’s iron ore mine for the parasite. Conference: Taggart, steel parasite (Orren Boyle), mine parasite (Paul Larkin). (Skeptical derision of Rearden Metal—one of the reasons for taking mine away from him: “He’ll waste it.”) Dagny and the parasite who objects to her use of Rearden Metal—her indifference to advice. Dagny and her staff: Eddie Willers, Gerald Hastings, the young playwright. First mention of Nat Taggart. Issue of parasite in charge of Colorado Division.

[Revised:] James Taggart’s move to force out his Colorado competition and get Rearden’s iron ore mine for the parasite. Conference in the dark bar-room : Taggart, steel parasite (Orren Boyle), mine parasite (Paul Larkin), and Wesley Mouch as an obsequious nonentity. (Skeptical derision of Rearden Metal—one of the reasons for taking mine away from him: “He’ll waste it.”) Dagny: her frustrated romanticism, her sense of life, how she became vice-president. Issue with Taggart about Mexican line, with story of line, San Sebastian, and Francisco d‘Anconia. First mention of Nat Taggart. Eddie Willers and his dinner with the worker.

V: The Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog*

Francisco d‘Anconia arrives in New York—[there is a] newspaper scandal about him and some woman. Taggart getting ready for meeting of Board. News that Mexican line was nationalized that morning. The Board meeting—Taggart takes credit for cutting the rolling stock. The Association meeting—Taggart gets vote against competitor (partly on the strength of the Mexican loss). Dagny objects, but even competitor himself accepts it. Dagny and Rearden: plans to hurry [the construction of the] line. [Added later:] Dagny-Ellis Wyatt.

VI: The Climax of the d’Anconias

Dagny and Francisco d‘Anconia. (The Mexican government has found his copper mines to be worthless.) (Dagny’s anger at d’Anconia’s “Who is John Galt?”) [Note that there is no mention yet of a past romance between Dagny and Francisco.]

VII: The Non-Commercial*

Mrs. Rearden’s party: Dagny, James Taggart, Rearden, his family—their interrelationships. D‘Anconia is also present. Dagny and Mrs. Rearden: the bracelet. Rearden’s antagonism to Dagny and defense of his wife. Rearden’s attitude toward women. The cultural phonies (professor of philosophy, musician, writer). The first Galt legend—Atlantis. Rearden’s sexual attitude toward his wife—scene in her bedroom.

VIII: The Materialists*

The law which forces Rearden to sell his mine to the parasite. He accepts this, feeling guilty about his lack of social concern (and, besides, he is too busy with Rearden Metal, his drive and enthusiasm are in that). Dagny and Rearden work together on the new Colorado line. Decision on bridge of Rearden Metal. Incident of Rearden’s guilty desire for Dagny. Their heroic effort—the public opposition. (Dr. Stadler comes out against Rearden Metal, through his parasite assistant.) The second Galt legend—“the fountain of youth.”

IX: The John Galt Line*

The triumphant ride of the first freight train over the new Colorado line. Dagny, Rearden, and Ellis Wyatt at their ecstatic celebration. (“To the world as it seems right now!”) Dagny’s and Rearden’s night together (in Wyatt’s lonely guest house, in the mountains).

X: The Sacred and the Profane*

Dagny and Rearden escape for a vacation together. They drive to the abandoned motor factory. They find Galt’s engine.

XI: Wyatt’s Torch

The history of the motor, ending on professor in diner advising her to give up the quest. What awaits them on their return: Taggart has given in to the union’s demand of no extra speed on the new line. Steel parasites and others concerned have passed a law to force Rearden to sell Rearden Metal “equally.” (No pipe-line for Wyatt, no steel for Taggart Bridge, no girders for the coal man.) Dagny hurries to Ellis Wyatt—too late—she sees the flaming oil fields.

XII: “Why Do You Think You Think? ”*

Dagny and Rearden: their secret affair. His sense of guilt, her simple acceptance. (His guilt undermines him in his fight against the parasites, makes him accept them.) Dr. Stadler and Dr. Ferris: the book.

XIII: The Aristocracy of Pull*

[Original:] Loss of priceless freight needed by Rearden for coal man’s order. Dagny and Ragnar Danneskjöld: his refusal [to help her]. When she comes back, coal man quits. (Night of Dagny alone in the office—the shadow of a man outside.)

[Revised:] Taggart marries Cherryl. Rearden and Danagger make illegal deal. The d‘Anconia copper stock crash. (Dagny learns that cigarette is “made nowhere.”)

XIV: By Your Guilt*

[Original:] Taggart agrees to get rid of Colorado Division parasite, but Dagny’s choice for the position quits; the parasite stays. Taggart marries Cherryl. (Taggart and the priest.) Mrs. Rearden learns of Rearden’s infidelity—her enjoyment of it, which Rearden cannot understand. The subtle torture that follows. (Dagny and the young engineer at the employment board.) (The young playwright and Stacey Rearden’s peculiar attitude toward his struggle and career.)

[Revised:] Eddie tells the TT worker about the importance of the coal man. Mrs. Rearden learns of Rearden’s infidelity—her enjoyment of it, which Rearden cannot understand. The subtle torture that follows. Rearden and Dr. Ferris: the attempted blackmail. Danagger quits. Rearden and Francisco : the furnace.

XV: The Sanction of the Victim*

[Original:] The N.Y. utility man—caught between the failures of the oil and coal [industries], and the failures of TT. Dagny comes to see him—too late—he quits. (She waits in anteroom while Galt is in the office.) Taggart is forced to close Colorado line. The death of a section. The young man who quits.

[Revised:] Rearden’s trial and victory—“the moral sanction.” Rearden and Francisco: the loss of d‘Anconia copper at sea.

XVI: Account Overdrawn*

[This chapter is added in the revised version:] Taggart is forced to close Colorado line. The death of a section. Lillian discovers Rearden’s mistress is Dagny.

XVII: Miracle Metal*

[Original:] The buck passing spreads. The rush of people toward demotion and obscurity. The law freezing the economy. Dagny quits and goes to mountain cabin. (Last Galt legend—the factory.)

[Revised:] The law freezing the economy. Dagny quits and goes to mountain cabin. Rearden forced to give away patent [for Rearden Metal].

XVIII: The Moratorium on Brains*

[Original:] Rearden forced to give away patent [for Rearden Metal]. Taggart closes his research laboratory. Taggart overrides Dagny’s policies and orders, particularly in regard to locomotives. Eddie Willers and the worker: scene in which Eddie mentions Dagny’s hide-out. The tunnel catastrophe.

[Revised:] Taggart closes his research laboratory. (“We can save money since we have no fear of competition.”) Taggart overrides Dagny’s policies and orders, particularly in regard to locomotives. The young man who temporarily replaces Dagny—his idea that his aim is to please Taggart, not to do a good job. Eddie Willers and the worker: scene in which Eddie mentions Dagny’s hide-out. The tunnel catastrophe.

XIX: By Our Love*

Dagny in the country—her restlessness. Dagny and Francisco d‘An conia. News of catastrophe over the radio. Dagny goes back. Some parasites have quit. Taggart was considering quitting, but stays when Dagny returns. Dagny’s intention to rebuild the line to “pre-tunnel” days. Her appeal to Rearden for all the rails he can deliver. [In the revised version, the last sentence is crossed out and the following is added:] Dagny-Rearden-Francisco scene. Dagny hurries after young scientist. Eddie tells worker where she has gone and about her affair with Rearden.

XX

[Original: ] Rearden goes to the West Coast to arrange for temporary transportation. Dagny joins him later. The opening night of the playwright’s play; Rearden goes with Dagny to the theater. Mrs. Rearden [sees them and] guesses the truth. Sensation of play; the playwright leaves “with some man.” That night, after the show, the violent scene between Rearden and his wife. Her ultimatum. He promises to let her know when she returns.

[This chapter was eliminated in the revised outline.]

XXI

[Original:] The next morning, the young playwright asks Dagny for his job back, “after a month’s vacation.” Dagny gets wire from car manufacturer—he can’t fill her order. She has to hurry to him at once. At last moment, she gets wire from Rearden, asking her to come as soon as possible. While she is packing, Eddie Willers sees Rearden’s dressing-gown in her apartment and guesses the truth. She leaves. Scene of Eddie Willers and the worker in the restaurant, in which Eddie betrays the purpose of Dagny’s trip and her affair with Rearden.

[This chapter was eliminated in the revised outline.]

XX: The Sign of the Dollar*

[Original:] The “frozen train ride.” Dagny and the young playwright. Their walk at night down the track to a telephone. Dagny gives orders to save the train, gets a plane, flies to car manufacturer’s town, sees his plane leaving, follows him. The mountains. The crash.

[Revised:] The “frozen train ride.” Dagny and Owen Kellogg. Their walk at night down the track to a telephone. Dagny gives orders to save the train, gets a plane, flies to young scientist’s town, sees his plane leaving, follows him. The mountains. The crash. Her last thought, before she crashed, was burning in her mind, as her mockery of life, as her cry of defiance, the words she hated—the words of hopelessness, of despair, and of a plea for help: “Oh, hell! Who is John Galt?”

Part II: The Beginning

I: Atlantis

The valley—John Galt.

II

Rearden’s decision about Dagny. His looking for her. (His loans to a farm-tool company for the Minnesota harvest.) [Added later:] Dr. Stadler and the unveiling of Project X. The open rise of the brute.

III

Dagny’s return to New York. Taggart has hired Cuffy Meigs. The freight cars have gone to southern “soybean project.” Dagny’s break with Rearden—she tells him she loves another man. [Added later:] He tells her that he loves her. Dagny and Lillian; Dagny’s broadcast.

IV

The disaster resulting from the “transportation pull deal.” The collapse of the farming district of Minnesota. Rearden’s heavy losses on his credits. Mrs. Rearden’s attempt to make him help mine parasite—his first anger at her.

V

Taggart’s married life—he crushes Cherryl’s efforts to rise. Cherryl’s “drowning plea” to Dagny. ([Added later:] Cherryl’s suicide.) [The next two sentences were crossed out:] Rearden realizes that Dagny is his real love—he tells her so. Dagny’s search for Galt; Francisco d‘Anconia, the empty valley.

VI

[Original:] The affair: Taggart and Mrs. Rearden. Taggart confesses it to the priest. The priest forgives him. The rebellion of Rearden’s secretary against her family—her decision to quit and marry.

[Revised:] The affair: Taggart and Mrs. Rearden. Francisco saves Rearden in a situation where Rearden sees, at last, who is on whose side. The “wet nurse.” [This is the only reference to the “wet nurse ” in AR ’s journals, and it was added to the outline years later. After completing the novel, AR described the “wet nurse” as “an exception in my writing career, a character that started without my intention and wrote himself. ”]

VII: Atlas Shrugged*

The scheming of Taggart and the mine parasite to save themselves. Rearden discovers Mrs. Rearden’s affair with Taggart. He sees the real nature of his family. The emergency conference: Rearden, Taggart, mine parasite, Wesley Mouch. The rise in TT’s freight rates for ore and in the price of ore; Rearden is not allowed to raise prices, yet rails for TT are expected of him. The squeeze play. “You’ll do something.” Rearden walks out of office—the scene with his secretary in his office—he sees the similarity of their tragedy. “A man waiting to see him.”

VIII

News that Rearden has quit. His wife begs him to stay—his implacable coldness. He goes away (to the valley). Scene where lawyer reads Rearden’s deed to “the collective”—their panic. Rearden’s brother and factory superintendent. Superintendent quits—and half the workers are gone. “The collective” hires a friend of Cuffy Meigs, who promptly loots the place. The collapse of Rearden Steel.

IX

The final emergency of TT—the decision to close the Michigan line, against Dagny’s violent protest. When Dagny returns to the office, she is called to the terminal tunnels—the breakdown of the signal system. John Galt. Dagny escapes, sits sobbing in the terminal waiting room. (The bum who consoles her: “Oh well, who is John Galt?”) Hours later, she returns to the tunnels. Galt was expecting her to return. The affair underground. Then he tells her of his past love. She breaks with him, declaring that they are enemies. (She learns that Galt is both the ideal, the man she wanted-and her worst enemy; that he loves her—and that he is destroying her railroad.)

X

The closing of the ore line is announced: the riots, the general panic. The announced broadcast of Mr. Thompson.

XI: This Is John Galt Speaking

The broadcast (Mr. Thompson, Dagny, James Taggart, and others in the studio). John Galt’s speech.

XII

When Dagny returns to her office, Galt is waiting for her there. He offers her a last chance—she refuses. He tells her he will stand by and gives her his address. The panic—the country is falling apart. The government attempts to negotiate with Galt by radio—he refuses. The search for him. (“We do not recognize your right to negotiate”—or—desperate blind appeals into space, and no answer.)

XIII

Galt and the priest in the restaurant. The appeal through pity. Dagny comes to his garret. The appeal through love. He refuses. She warns him-he hands her the phone. When she comes back with officials, he is still there. [Later, the preceding two sentences were crossed out and replaced by the sentence:] The officials had followed Dagny—they come in. The search and destruction of his laboratory. His “polite” arrest.

XIV

Galt in a luxurious hotel room. The attempted bargaining by Mr. Thompson—he refuses. Dr. Stadler. Dagny and Rearden: she tells him that she loves Galt and that she betrayed him. The banquet: the appeal through flattery. “Get the hell out of my way.”

XV

Dr. Stadler and the explosion of Project X, collapse of the Taggart Bridge. The scene in a bare hotel room: Taggart, the mine parasite, Wesley Mouch, Cuffy Meigs, Dagny. The “quiet hysteria.” Dagny understands and walks out. She goes to her office, starts destroying papers. (Call from Eddie Willers; she tells him to give up, but he can’t.) A man rushes in with news about Taggart Bridge. Her moment of temptation—then: “We don’t know what to do!” and her answer: “I don’t either.” She leaves the office, calls Francisco d‘Anconia, meets him and Ragnar Danneskjöld on a street corner.

XVI: The Generator

The torture of Galt. The broken generator—the escape of the mechanic. A man rushes in [and announces that] the Taggart Bridge has collapsed. Galt’s single moment of temptation—but he keeps silent. They all escape, leaving him tied.

XVII

Taggart and the priest. The confession of total evil. “I have nothing to say, James. I’m on strike.” The rescue of Galt by Dagny, d‘Anconia, and Danneskjöld. (Brute force against mind and force.) “We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?” “No, we never had to.”

XVIII: In the Name of the Best Within Us

The flight to the valley—Galt, Dagny, d‘Anconia, Danneskjöld, New York City without electrical power. The sight of a world in ruins. Eddie Willers and the last ride of the Comet. The music of the Concerto filling the valley. The strikers talk of future plans—a new beginning. (Rearden says: “John will run the railroad from New York to Philadelphia.”) Galt and Dagny on the rocks above the valley, looking at the wrecked road and the stubborn fire of Wyatt’s torch in the distance. Galt says: “The road is cleared. We are going back.” The sign of the dollar.

[The above outline contains AR’s last references to the priest. Years after completing the novel, she explained the meaning of the character and why she decided to eliminate him.

I wanted to illustrate the evil of the morality of forgiveness. Also, I wanted to illustrate that the power of religion consists of the power of morality, the power of setting values and ideals, and that is what holds people to religion—and that this is what belongs to philosophy, not to religion. As a type, I wanted [the priest] to be my most glamorized projection of a Thomist philosopher, of a man who thought he could combine reason with religion. Through his relationship with James Taggart I wanted to show the way in which he realized that he was sanctioning evil. And the drama of him refusing to sanction Taggart at the end appealed to me very much.

But it did not take me very long to realize that it would be an impossible confusion. Since all the other strikers in the story can be taken literally, [since] they are all representatives of rational, valuable professions, to include a priest among them would be to sanction religion.]

August 26, 1946

Questions

Trouble for stalled locomotive, for Dagny to correct?

Who would be in charge of the tunnel and the bridge?

What would be the specific position of the young engineer who quits?

What is the usual period of time before the placing of a new steel alloy on the market and the actual orders for it, particularly by railroads? Is there any special procedure about this?

Specific troubles that would cripple ore mines?

What would happen (to track and equipment) in a case such as Taggart taking over Colorado competitor?

Problems of rebuilding new Colorado line?

The wage rates (in connection with Colorado line issue)?

Possible cause of freight snarl and loss of freight?

Vital item which could have been lost?

Who appoints division heads and similar regional executives?

Ask details about automatic signal systems?

If branch line is closed, how soon after decision do trains stop running?

Would “pre-tunnel days” rails be rotted by time of the story? (What is the time element for such rails?)

Are telephones on poles? Whom would Dagny call?

Time element for [the order] of Rearden rails?

Breakdown of N.Y. terminal signal system?

The kind of generator for torture scene? And what goes wrong with it?

What goes wrong with locomotive on the Comet’s last ride?

What would be Dagny’s official title at TT? Also—Taggart’s title?

Sizes and duties of division, districts, and regions?

1946

[AR prepared the following questions for an interview with Lee Lyles, assistant to the president of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway system. ]

Who are the key men, the spark-plugs, of a railroad company?

What are the actual, concrete, specific duties and problems of a railroad president?

Who actually owns a railroad and appoints president?

What would be specific duties and problems of “Vice-President in charge of Operations ”?

What would be Galt’s job at TT? (Lowest job in terminal tunnels.)

Who makes decision about building a new line or re-building an old one? How far in advance of starting?

Who orders rails? How far in advance of need are orders placed?

How long does it take to get them? In what quantity are they usually ordered? In the case of a new metal or experimental rail, who makes the decision to use it?

How long does it take to get rolling stock and locomotives? (Passenger cars—6 months; freight cars—3 months.)

Would saving the locomotives and rolling stock be of any financial consequence in the case of the nationalized Mexican line? Yes. What is the most important position for an engineer? (Superintendent of Transportation, Mechanical man.)

Who appoints division heads and other regional executives? (If it’s Dagny, would Taggart interfere?)

Who are the main shippers? Agriculture—etc., auto-parts for assembly line, oil, ore.

If branch line is closed, how soon after decision do trains stop running? Any specific points about a railroad’s deterioration? What would crack first? When brains are gone, where would the result show first, and how?

How much in advance would freight cars be promised to “soybean project”? When would they be sent there? When would they have been sent to Minnesota farmers?

Details and chief causes of bridge deterioration and collapse? How many years at the least?

Do railroads own their own electric power plant—such as for N.Y. terminal?

August 28, 1946

Extra Touches

Possible lesser incident (for destruction of main transcontinental line): a big shipper, who is a parasite (inherited), goes bankrupt through parasites’ methods, and his failure is a bad blow to TT. His father was one of TT’s most important and reliable shippers, one of their mainstays. (This can be lumber, cotton, or some other basic commodity.)

Possibility—the “crucial train run,” which fails for reasons of parasites’ technique, may precede and motivate either Wyatt’s quitting or the closing of the oil line.

Don’t forget to stress (near the middle of Part I) that Dagny begins to suspect the existence of an enemy who is destroying TT. Dagny and the “feeling of Ergitandal.”

Have brief, eloquent (“condensed”) flashbacks or references to Galt’s past, giving picture of his life and of his essential character. (Mainly in Part II—possibly some, without naming him, in Part I.)

August 31, 1946

Notes for Railroad Business

James Taggart: President—head of Executive Department under alleged authority of Board of Directors (which is really concerned with corporate, not railroad matters).

One of [Taggart‘s] chief-assistants, or vice-presidents, is the Public Relations man (extra-parasite) (“not to do, but to give the impression of doing”).

Dagny Taggart: Vice-President in charge of Operating Department. (Traffic involves selling the service; operating involves producing the service.)

Three main jobs of railroads: Maintenance of way, maintenance of equipment, transportation.

Divisions, districts, and regions have the same three departments.

Philosophical Points

The people in the story are functioning, in their human moments, on old premises and principles, i.e., on the principles left over from the creators’ world, the principles of the strikers—to the extent to which they exist and function as human beings at all. They do not realize it, of course. Their avowed principles are those of collectivism and altruism. But whenever they have to act upon, or rely upon, or appeal to, decency or sense—they are implying the principles of the creators. This has a desperate quality—particularly when someone points it out to them; they are counting on the ideas they have denounced and discarded. (Example: any appeal to honesty, honor, integrity, rational sense—or personal profit. Along these lines: Francisco d‘Anconia pointing out the mistake of assuming that he wishes to make money.)

Unions and trade-associations are not directed against employers or the public but against the best among their own members. (Stress this explicitly—in the railroad association’s vote against Taggart’s better competitor; in the steel association’s actions against Rearden and his patent; in the union’s policy regarding the new oil line and its speed.) This is one of the most obvious demonstrations of the fact that collectivism does not aim at any kind of “justice” or “fair play” or protection of the weak [man] against any actual infringement of his rights by the strong—but simply at stopping the strong for the sake of the weak—stopping ability for the sake of incompetence—not just robbing the production of the able, but stopping him from producing—not raising the weak in any way whatever, but simply forcing the strong down to the level of the moron. (Of course, if you do that, you destroy the world—weak and strong both. And the weak do not profit by this—not even for the moment.)

Regarding controlled economies: Man will not produce if all the essential elements involved are not under his rational control, i.e., if they are not understandable to him, and, therefore, predictable, so that he can set his purpose and plan of action, his end and means, accordingly. Nature is under his control—“other men” are not. If his productive activity has to depend upon the arbitrary decision or whim of some human agency, against whom he has no recourse and no choice (such as the government)—he will not produce.

This is why men can deal with a private utility company; they have an objective, mutual element to count upon—private profit, for both; both have something the other needs. But if electric power were nationalized, its best users, the biggest industrialists (and particularly new ventures that need electricity), would stop. A great industrialist is not going to venture into a huge undertaking when the ground can be cut from under him at any moment—when the sole source of electric power, which he needs, can be cut off arbitrarily by some punk bureaucrat. Never mind the fact that the bureaucrat won’t cut it off, in most likely practice; the fact that he can is enough; he knows it and the industrialist knows it—and the bureaucrat has the power of blackmail, the power to demand anything he wishes, without the necessity of making a threat. Yes, second-rate businessmen, of the second-hand kind, would accept such an arrangement and even love it; they’d get special advantages or rates for themselves, they’d be glad to pay off the bureaucrat, they’d consider him their tool. But a real industrialist will not do it. He knows who holds the power in such a set-up.

Also: man will not produce if the essential motivation to consider is not his own profit. In a free economy, no one can ask him to work at a loss; this is only the economic aspect of a much more important fact—nobody can ask him to work for his own detriment or to struggle toward his own suffering or pain. In a collectivist economy, he must do just that; he must work without reward—and, when the collective wishes, toward his own destruction. The motivation is not profit—but self-sacrifice.

Rearden realizes that his mistake (about himself and his view of life) was due to the “strike” of the philosopher.

Scene of “common man” crying: “Why are they doing this to us? We thought our leaders knew what they were doing!”—and someone answering: “Those abstract, theoretical philosophers, whom you have always considered useless, are the only ones who can give men that knowledge.”

The prevalence of “Oriental” philosophies in the parasites’ world: These are the kind of ideas the parasites would love (and even originate). Show the despair these ideas create in them and in their world. “Nothing is anything”—“We can’t be sure of anything”—“Why do you think you think? ”—“Obey, since you can’t think”—“Feel, don’t think”—“Act spontaneously, don’t think”—“ ‘Immediate’ perception, not thinking or reason”—“The present moment, not any long-range view”—“You are nothing anyway, so why worry about anything?” —“You are low and vile anyway, so why worry about virtue?”—“Sacrifice and suffering are a Universal Law”—“The individual is an illusion” —“Total annihilation (Nirvana) is the supreme ideal.”

(Show the influence of this on: Taggart’s wife, Mrs. Rearden, Stacey, Rearden’s brother, the secretary, Eddie Willers, Taggart and his parasite friends. Also show how the professor comes to this [philosophy].)

The arrogance of the “common man”: he expects “to be convinced,” with no mental effort on his own part. When confronted with the most lucid and explicit speech, idea, statement, or book—he simply declares that “he is not convinced,” and this saves him from the necessity of taking a stand, of pronouncing an independent rational judgment. It saves him even from recognizing that the argument is unanswerable, so he must do something about it; he tells himself that since he’s “not convinced,” there must be something wrong with the argument, it’s not absolute, he doesn’t have to do anything about it. (So, of course, he will never let himself be convinced. Actually, he simply does not think at all and does not give the argument any sort of rational consideration.)

He wants mental food to be pre-digested and automatic. Also—he is firmly convinced that the main job of the thinkers (perhaps, the only job) is to convince him, to educate him. If asked how one could go about educating him (or making him understand anything), his answer would be: “I don’t know. That’s your job. You’ve got to educate me—both give me the right ideas and invent a way to convince me that they are the right ideas. I’m the aim of all society and all existence, ain’t I? You’re the strong, intellectually—I’ m the weak. Your moral duty and only goal in life is to help me. Well, help me.” (This is the “Adrian attitude.”)

An extremely important point of the parasite’s philosophy: the desire to exploit the creators and also make them take the blame for the moral evil of such a situation.

This is more prevalent and more vicious than I suspected. I have mentioned one aspect of it: the parasite’s demand that the creator, whom he exploits, must not admit that it’s exploitation; to protect the parasite’s feelings, the creator must fake reality. There are others. The parasite who accepts an unearned favor tries invariably to fake things so as to make it look as if it’s his benefactor who is accepting favors. This is always the case when a person moves into someone’s house, starts doing housework, then yells that the host exploits him (Monica). The parasite cannot accept a favor as a favor—simply and gratefully, as would happen between equals. The parasite resents the favor because he knows his own motive; it is not a plain favor, or a single incident, or a temporary condition—but his permanent way of living, which he knows to be exploitation. He does not help his host as a return courtesy; he does it to fool himself in his own mind, and to reverse the tables—to claim that the host is indebted to him.

The desire here is not to return a courtesy, but to make the benefactor evil or guilty; the motive is not gratitude, but malice. And it is not even a desire to gain self-respect, except most indirectly and viciously: not through raising himself, but through debasing the host.

In a wider, philosophical sense, this vicious reversal is shown in all the collectivist patter about the great men and geniuses being only the product (or voices, or plagiarizers) of the people (or the nation, or the era, or the race, or humanity). This makes the “common men” the creators or source of everything (in some manner which is never stated, explained, or defined), while the genius is only their creature, their mouthpiece—the robot directed by their power, fed by their “spirit.” Now, in fact, the exact opposite is true: the “common men” move and live on the ideas, discoveries, and mental energy of the creators, the originators, the geniuses.

(Perhaps the parasites, the collectivists, are conscious of this—perhaps they actually know and recognize the theme of my story—and those vicious theories of reversal are their answer, their protection. Perhaps John Galt’s accusation—and the awakening of the strikers—is what they dread most.)

This parasites’ psychology leads to the attitude which I must blast above all: “It is not only your duty to serve the world, but also to suffer for doing it, to be tortured by those you serve, for the privilege of serving them. ”

This is what the parasite offers to the creator as the sublime virtue. “Virtue is all you’ll have, since you’re a hero, aren’t you? I’ll have everything else.”

Translated into the parasite’s morality, this is what it amounts to: “I need you, because you’re my superior. For that same reason, I hate you. If I can have the satisfaction of torturing you for the advantages you give me, I’ll have both satisfactions, the spiritual and the material; I’ll be happy—and you’ll be truly altruistic. You’ll let me exploit you—and absolve me of the moral blame. Evil must be paid for by suffering—so you’ll pay for my sin. You’ll do the suffering. In permitting me to hate you and torture you, you will save me from the painful knowledge of your greatness and my smallness, of your virtue and my depravity. You will feed both my body and my spirit—at the expense of yours. I am incapable of your kind of happiness and I cannot bear the sight of it, since it is a reproach to me—so you will renounce it for my sake. You are a creature of joy—and I, a creature of suffering. So you will choose suffering—for the sake of letting me have my kind of joy, the joy of seeing you in agony. That is the true self-sacrifice to an inferior. That is real pity. That is altruism.”

This is most important and requires special handling, in dramatized events, not just in implication. (Probably for Galt and “the man of pity.”)

Note on style: Nothing must be over-detailed; I want it extreme, simplified, stylized, impressionistic—in main, abstract outlines only—like the drawing of a skyline in forms, without details. (Remember the picture of a stylized sky with long, straight bands of clouds.)

13

NOTES WHILE WRITING : 1941-1952

AR began writing Atlas Shrugged on September 2, 1946. This chapter presents the notes she made while writing the novel up to John Galt’s speech.

I have included about two-thirds of the material from this period. Most of the omitted notes simply outline events in individual chapters, describing what the reader of the novel already knows. I hove also omitted repetitive notes and some research on a book, This Fascinating Railroad Business, by Robert S. Henry,

January 18, 1947

Note for last chapter (philosophical conclusion): The strikers have won, not because the parasites have learned anything or because the parasites have collapsed physically, but because the last of the strikers (Rearden and Dagny) have learned the lesson that Galt wanted to teach the best brains of the world—the lesson of not supporting their own destroyers, and of the creators’ nature, function, and proper code. From now on, the exploitation of the best by the worst will never again be permitted by the best.

January 20, 1947

An important point to stress: blast the fool idea that material production is some sort of low activity, the result of a base “materialistic” impulse—as opposed to the “spiritual realm” (whatever they think that is), which consists of some sort of vague, passive contemplation of something or other. Show that material production is the result of and comes from the highest and noblest aspect of man, from his creative mind, from his independent rational judgment—which is his highest attribute and the sole base of his morality. To exercise one’s own independent rational judgment is the essence of man’s morality, his highest action, his sole moral commandment that embraces all his virtues. Material production comes from that—it requires the noblest moral action (independent thought) as its source. It is the result of the highest morality, of the noblest courage, of the best within man. (Remember this for the last chapter.)

Never mind the weak little second-handers, of all degrees and variations, who coast on the thinking of the few geniuses, who make a great busy show of a “grossly materialistic” pursuit of money, who manage to amass fortunes through the “human,” rather than the creative angle, through the Peter Keating—second-hander‘s—politician’s method of using and exploiting men, not originating ideas. They are only the scum on the surface, the free riders on the flow of the genius’s energy. Who originates the ideas, methods, discoveries which they exploit? They are not the representatives of the essence of material production. They are not its sources. The genius is.

Material production is the result of the highest spiritual quality and activity. That the second-handers ride on it, push themselves to the forefront and often grab all the profit, is due to the geniuses permitting it, [which in turn is due to] the acceptance of the moral theory of altruism and the blindness of the geniuses to their own nature and function, to the actual principles of their own existence.

And, in degree, in regard to each particular man involved in material production, he succeeds only to the extent to which he functions on the principles of the creators, on his independent rational judgment; to the extent to which he uses the “social” method and functions on the principles of a second-hander, he fails. (In a free society, he fails personally. As society begins to get collectivized (controlled), he has a chance of succeeding in the narrow sense of keeping his graft, loot or profit—but then, and to the extent of his success in this, he destroys society and the whole economy. Material production is not the product of the second-hander and cannot be kept going on his methods and principles.)

Show that the real sources, the spark-plugs of material production (the inventors and industrialists), are creators in the same sense, with the same heroic virtues, of the same high spiritual order, as the men usually thought of as creators—the artists. Show that any original rational idea, in any sphere of man’s activity, is an act of creation. Vindicate the industrialist—the author of material production (John Galt, Hank Rearden, Dagny Taggart).

Of course, that cheap snobbery about material production is based on a deeper philosophical error—on the vicious idea of “matter as sin” and spirit as its antagonist. And it’s logical that if one accepts that idea (which represents the debasement of man and of the earth), then one considers the activity of preserving man’s survival (material production) as low and evil. To be high, one must then starve to death—that’s “liberating the spirit.”

Tie this to the clear exposition of the fact (as clear as you can make it) that the material is only the expression of the spiritual; that it can be neither created nor used without the spiritual (thought); that it has no meaning without the spiritual, that it is only the means to a spiritual end—and, therefore, any new achievement in the realm of material production is an act of high spirituality, a great triumph and expression of man’s spirit. And show that those who despise “the material” are those who despise man and whose basic premises are aimed at man’s destruction.

For anyone who gets confused by the spectacle of second-handers “placing the material first”—show that these second-handers are not the creators, but the destroyers of material production. Show that to conquer, control, and create in the material realm requires the highest kind of spiritual activity and the highest type of “spiritual” man.

And, to go to the roots of the whole vicious error, blast the separation of man into “body” and “soul,” the opposition of “matter” and “spirit.” Man is an indivisible entity, possessing both elements—but not to be split into them, since they can be considered separately only for purposes of discussion, not in actual fact. In actual fact, man is an indivisible, integrated entity—and his place is here, on earth. His “spirit” is his mind—his control over the earth.

Incidentally, note that the good industrialists (such as I’ve met) are high types of men—whereas the artists (allegedly the “spiritual” men) are neurotic or depraved weaklings. The material producers deal in, with and through reason (they have to)—and look at the successes they have achieved. The alleged “men of the spirit” deal in emotionalism and mysticism, in the irrational (by having accepted the irrational or “inspirational” premise)—and look at the sickening state and centuries-long stagnation of men’s spiritual life (their philosophies, their morality, their state of misery, futility, and confusion). The industrialists are moral because they function on the basis of reason. The artists are the depraved types. (There’s the tie of reason and morality.)

January 22, 1947

In connection with above: d‘Anconia’s dollar sign is a symbol of this, and also of the sanctity of the profit motive, of the morality of egoism.

For the banker (Mulligan?): he quit because of the squeeze; he was ordered (by law) to give unsound credit to some group of the needy (investment as charity, not on the ground of production, but on the ground of need)—and then he would be blamed as a vicious capitalist for the collapse of the bank, for the wiping out of the savings of “the little people, widows and orphans, etc.”

1947

Dagny and [Dan] Conway

His acceptance and resigned indifference.

Her indignation—this is worse than Taggart’s attitude.

He thinks the decision was right, but on the basis of such morality he has no desire to go on. He says “it’s right,” but there is no life left in him.

His reasons: The world is in a terrible state and if men can’t get together, how will they solve it? The majority’s got to decide, it’s the only fair way, he had agreed to abide by the decision of the majority, they had a right to do it, but ...

He could fight nature, but he can’t fight this. (She knew that it wasn’t James Taggart who had beaten him.)

Her attitude: “Such a wrong cannot be right.” “One cannot be penalized for ability.” “We can’t live in that kind of a world.”

It is his honorable attitude, “keeping his word,” that makes the outrage possible for the parasites.

This is the good average man up against the morality of altruism. And this is a “real life” example of going on strike.

February 11, 1947

[The following are AR’s first notes on the romantic relationship between Dagny and Francisco.]

Their relationship—like two people on a desert island. Sex as their celebration of life. The complete innocence. They are both incapable of the conception that joy is sin. They exhaust each other—“Isn’t it wonderful that our bodies can give us so much pleasure?” His ingenuity at it. She never wore anything but slacks and plain dresses, but she had never been so feminine.

He comes to meet her secretly in New York that winter, once in a while.

The complete secrecy of their affair. Nobody suspects it, not even Eddie. Dagny’s reason for the secrecy—her hatred for people’s view of sex. Furious indignation that anyone should dare presume to lay down rules about it for her. Contempt for those who consider it sin—no desire to fight them ([or even] grant them the right to discourse about it), only to keep away, not even to brush against them, because she senses something monstrously unclean about them.

February 15, 1947

Note: Creators never act with pain as their motive. This is illustrated by Dagny and Rearden. This is the principle behind the parasite’s accusation that people like Dagny and Rearden “have no feelings.” They feel—and much more profoundly than any lesser person or whining parasite (the parasites neither think nor feel)—but they are not run by their feelings, and they are not afraid of pain. Nothing they do is ever motivated by a desire to avoid pain or to be protected against it; they act on the motive of happiness, on the desire to get what they want, at any cost, even if pain is part of the cost.

They suffer more than any parasite could ever bear or imagine (except that it’s a different form of suffering, it’s clean, it doesn’t go all the way down nor damn the universe), but they know how to stand pain, and they don’t care too much about it, they don’t actually give it any thought, they don’t include it in their calculations or consideration of cost, they just meet it when it comes, stand it, brush it aside and then go on—and they win. They win over all pain, to the happiness which they want and which they are.

The parasites are motivated by pain. They are the motors and the embodiments of pain. The parasites, in effect, say to the creators as an accusation, as a statement of damning sin and guilt: “But you don’t suffer—you’re not unhappy—you’ve never been unhappy.”

This is the difference between considering suffering an accident, a temporary exception—and suffering as a basic principle, a major concern, a main motive, suffering as the norm and the nature of the universe.

March 8, 1947

The progression of a man’s mental (and psychological) development. (The progression of a man’s consciousness.)

1. He acquires factual knowledge of objects around him, of events, and therefore concludes that a universe exists and that he exists (through the evidence given to him by his senses, grasped and put in order by his reasoning mind). Here he gets the materials to grasp two things: objective reality and himself, consciousness and self-consciousness.

2. He discovers that he has the capacity of choice. First, he grasps objects, entities—then that these entities act, i.e., move or change. (It may seem to be almost simultaneous, but actually he must grasp “entity” before he can grasp “acting entity.”) The same [applies to] himself: first he gains self-consciousness, then he learns that this self can act (or must act) and that he must do it through choice. (Such as: if he is hungry, he must ask for food, or cry for it, or go and get it, but he must do something, choose what to do, and choose to do it.) Why does he get the conception of the necessity to act? That is his nature as man—he must preserve his life through his own action and that action is not automatic; he must preserve his life through conscious choice.

The basis of his choice will be self-preservation; this will form his first standard of values, and give him his first conception of such things as “value” and “a standard of value.” This is his first conception of “good” and “evil.” His physical entity will give him the first evidence and the start toward it—through physical pain and pleasure. He feels pain when he is hungry; he has no choice about this; but he discovers that he must exercise choice if he wants the pain to stop—he must get food; the food isn’t given to him automatically. If he finds pleasure in eating, he learns that he must choose to act in order to get that pleasure, and choose right.

This is the basic pattern, and as he grows and discovers other fields of activity, the same holds true: he learns that he must choose and act on his choice; he forms desires according to the standards of value he has established (his own pleasure, satisfaction or happiness—this grows in complexity as his mind, experience, and knowledge grow) and he acts to [satisfy] these desires according to these values.

His first desires are given to him by nature; they are the ones that he needs directly for his body, such as food, warmth, etc. Only these desires are provided by nature and they teach him the concept of desire. Everything else from then on proceeds from his mind, from the standards and conclusions accepted by his mind and it goes to satisfy his mind—for example, his first toys. (Perhaps sex is the one field that unites the needs of mind and body, with the mind determining the desire and the body providing the means of expressing it. But the sex act itself is only that—an expression. The essence is mental, or spiritual.)

Essentially, and most basically, his standard of value will always be pleasure or pain, ie., happiness or suffering, and these, essentially, are: that which contributes to the preservation or the destruction of his life. (This applies to his most complex, abstract desires later on.)

(Note: “life” and “self-preservation” are actually synonyms, in the sense that the last is implied in the first. Life is a process, an activity, which the living thing must perform—that is what makes it a living thing. Man must do it consciously—the essence and tool of his life is his mind.)

This stage, then, is the discovery of choice and values, i.e., of free will and morality.

3. Now that he knows that he can choose (and must choose), can have desires and can achieve them—he is ready to start forming his conscious convictions about the universe, about himself and about what he intends to do. (These convictions, or basic principles, are already implied in the above process. But now he must state them.)

These three steps are the essence of the process. But now man must remain convinced consciously of the validity of what he’s learned in that process. It implies: free will, self-confidence (confidence in one’s own judgment), self-respect (the conviction that the preservation of his life and the achievement of his happiness are values, are good), and a benevolent universe in which he can achieve happiness (if he remains realistic, that is, true to reality observed by his reason). If his desires are derived from and based on reality correctly observed—they will be achievable in this universe. All his desires come from reality, but the wrong ones are due to his mistakes in judgment; if he realizes the mistake, a contradiction or an inherent impossibility, he will not continue to desire these objects; he won’t damn the universe for not giving him the irrational or impossible.

Here it must be noted that his self-respect starts as a general axiom, but specifically must be achieved by him. This is in accordance with the nature of man: that part where value is possible, the field of choice, the field of morality, is open to him. First, he must value himself as a man; then his self-respect must be based on living up to the standards of value, the morality, proper to man.

Another interesting point to be noted here: man is given his entity as clay to be shaped, he is given his body, his tool (the mind) and the mechanism of consciousness (emotions, subconscious, memory) through which his mind will work. But the rest depends on him. His spirit, that is, his own essential character, must be created by him. (In this sense, it is almost as if he were born as an abstraction, with the essence and rules of that abstraction (man) to serve as his guide and standard—but he must make himself concrete by his own effort, he must create himself.) Specifically, he is born as an entity: man. But his field of action and emotion is open to his choice. He must survive, preserve himself and achieve happiness through choice, and the choice must be made by his reason, i.e., by his reason learning about and judging objective reality (both the world around him and himself). So he must have a code of values by which he must choose (he cannot choose without values, and he cannot have values where no choice is involved or possible).

The basic standard by which he establishes his code of values is man’s survival and happiness. This means man’s survival as man, i.e., in a way proper to man, which is the only way he can actually survive or be happy; mere physical, animal survival, at the price of his standards, will give him misery. Happiness, essentially, is the emotion naturally accompanying man’s proper survival.

Thus man develops his moral code—with the Ideal Man, man at his highest possibility, as the final goal of the code. Then he will base his self-respect, his valuation of himself, on how well he lives up to that code.

And that is how he creates his spiritual entity, his character—by the convictions he’s made. If they’re honest, but mistaken convictions (or, rather, limited), he will be an average good man. If they’re honest and correct—he will be a great man. His reason is the tool and the creator of his character. (Here, the degree of his intelligence might affect his stature as a man. But not his moral value—that, in proportion to his abilities, is the same for all men.)

But now is where the danger starts. The above are the basic, essentially needed convictions. If he loses any one of them, he’s done for—he ceases acting according to his nature as a man, he starts going against himself, which means, toward self-destruction. He must not lose the conviction of free will—if he does, he loses the capacity to desire, i.e., to choose a purpose, to act purposefully as a man must. He must not lose self-confidence—if he does, he becomes incapable of thought, judgment or action. He must not lose self-respect—if he does, he becomes incapable of morality, of the desire to be good, because he has lost the only possible base of man’s proper morality: self-preservation in the most essential sense of the word. (Here, altruism helps to ruin him.) He must not lose the conviction of a benevolent universe—if he does, none of the rest will make any sense.

And above all, above absolutely all, he must not lose the commitment to reason—because if he does, everything crashes. If he does, he is a screaming pain in the midst of terror and chaos. His essence, as a being, is his consciousness—not his body, because the body without consciousness is just inanimate matter. Whether he has a soul or is a material being with the attribute of consciousness, in either case his distinctive, essential attribute is consciousness, not matter. And his consciousness is his reason. When he renounces that, he has renounced himself, his essence, his nature—and the result can be nothing but horror and self-destruction.

Of course, he cannot renounce reason completely. If he did, he would have to go insane or simply perish. The tricky secret (and key) of man’s nature is that he can be nothing except reasonable, but he cannot be reasonable automatically, i.e., unconsciously. He has to be reasonable by a conscious decision or effort of his reason (and that effort has to be exercised continuously throughout his life—in general, as basic conviction, and specifically, as applied to each concrete instance, moment, event or action of his life).

This is the turning point, the decisive point in a man’s spiritual development. This is the point where most men fail. Yes, this mistake is always open to man’s correction in later life, since he remains essentially rational, but is merely acting against his nature, therefore he can retrace his steps and go back to the proper conviction. But the correction becomes harder and harder each year, because the further he goes along the road of irrationalism, the more harm he has done to himself and his thinking capacity, the more suffering he has endured, and the more painful and frightening an attitude of honest rationality becomes to him. (He is then afraid of having to damn himself factually, irrevocably, of having to pronounce himself evil without evasions or loopholes.)

The joke of it is that his only essential evil is the irrationalist attitude, and that no crime which he has committed in the past and which he is afraid to consciously acknowledge is as evil as his persisting in irrationalism. It’s irrationalism that made his original guilt possible—the guilt and the crime were the consequence of it, but the irrationalism was the root and the cause, the only basic evil.

The manner in which man remains “irrationally rational” is that he gets caught in his emotional mechanism. His emotions proceed from his reason, i.e., from his convictions (and these convictions were made consciously at some time, but may have been forgotten or deliberately evaded), and they proceed logically, following all the implications of his convictions. ([The process is] subconscious and automatic. The conscious is the field of free choice, the subconscious is automatic; but it is the conscious that determines the content of the subconscious, the premises which a man has accepted.) So the irrationalist is at the mercy of his emotions, with all the errors, contradictions, conflicts, evil that are contained in them, since they come logically (consistently) from mistaken premises.

But the irrationalist holds his emotions (or “instincts,” “hunches,” “revelations,” “extra-sensory perceptions,” etc.) above his reason; he fights his reason with them. And of course, he’s done for. Whatever he does, he will achieve nothing but suffering, in one form or another, he will always be frustrated and fail in whatever it is specifically that he thinks he wants in his own twisted, self-contradictory manner. His whole trend will be toward suffering and self-destruction, since he is acting against himself, against his own nature.

He will survive, achieve his purposes and achieve happiness only to the extent to which he continues to act rationally, even against his own stated and accepted premise of irrationalism (and he must remain rational to some extent or cease to exist altogether). To the extent to which he indulges in the irrational, he is working toward his own misery and moving toward his own destruction. That is the contradiction and civil war within him.

The net, total result is still basic misery—because one cannot be part-rational or unintentionally, unconsciously rational. Here is an issue that demands perfection. No basic or long-range happiness is possible except to a man who is totally, completely, absolutely, consciously committed to reason.

What most irrationalists do consciously is, of course, to “limit” reason; they don’t deny it outright, or at least not often, even in their conscious convictions and statements. But that “limit” or “part-time” is enough to do the damage of basic and complete misery for them (with just a few moments of joy as guilty, uncertain points of relief from the chronic misery). You cannot be “part-insane,” just as you cannot be part-pregnant, or part-cancerous, or part-honest, or part-dead. These are examples of absolutes.

Without going into greater detail now, I must mention only that the real cause of a man going into irrationalism (and then on to mysticism, altruism, the malevolent universe, second-handedness and all the other spiritual diseases) is always an act of self-condemnation, that is, of judging oneself evil by one’s own standard of values. The accusation of others will not do it, it might make a man hate others or the universe, but not himself—and that is not so disastrous or dangerous to his future. The teachings or values of others will be only details or contributing factors, but not decisive. The decisive act of catastrophe is a man’s self-condemnation, i.e., his realization that he has done something which he himself has defined as evil by his own standards of value; therefore he then considers himself as evil.

How can he do that at all, since no man will do that which he actually and completely believes to be evil? He can do it only by suspending his reason, his conscious rational judgment, at the time of and for the issue when he commits the action which he later judges as evil. This is the essence of the only evil act man can really do—that act of shutting off his conscious rational judgment, which is not automatic. (This is a point which I must state in greater detail—but that’s the heart of the problem of man’s morality.)

After this act of original, initial evil, a man [may] proceed to perpetuate that evil, to become an irrationalist—in order not to face his own judgment on himself, since no man can pronounce himself absolutely and irrevocably evil, and continue to exist. Is the way to morality and self-respect open to him? Yes—always—so long as he is alive and sane. But the only way is return to a conscious [policy] of rationality, to his own essence and nature as man, to himself.

March 22, 1947

Note (be sure and use this): the parasites’ conception of equality is actually not “to make even,” but “to get even with”—that is, to get even with a man for the fact of his ability.

March 29, 1947

Make use of: “Clearance,” “Right of Way,” “Stop, Look, Listen” signs.

Note that men must run to destruction if they ignore the danger signals along the way. One of the obvious danger signals of a civilization’s collapse is the falling off of production, of wealth, a falling standard of living, a growing poverty (since the material does come from the spiritual and is its expression). But men ignore that because, in their spiritual confusion and growing depravity, they begin to take poverty, discomfort and self-denial as signs of virtue, as signs of strength or courage or future success (as England is blabbering now). This is quite logical—since the morality of altruism is the morality of death and has to lead to self-destruction.

April 29, 1947

The tunnels of TT are like the catacombs of the early Christians in Rome—the power of the spirit hiding from the world that is destroying it while being fed by it, the power of the trains and of the mind that made them, the power of John Galt who has to hide as the lowest, most despised kind of worker there. And the sign of the dollar is like the sign of the cross—the secret symbol of the heroes and martyrs.

May 31, 1947

The strikers’ oath: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I shall never live for the sake of another man or ask another man to live for mine.”

1947

Notes for Rewrite of [ “The Climax of the d ‘Anconias”] Main Problems:

Dagny-Francisco romance—its actual nature and meaning, the build-up to it, the four years when she is his mistress. The nature of her feeling for him, what he means to her—and of his feeling for her.

Francisco’s genius and purposefulness—incidents to show what he was and where he is going—show him as the kind of man who could not become a playboy—show his religious zeal for d‘Anconia Copper—show his worship of purpose and his contempt for drifters. (Particularly, show the period when he is manager of the New York office of d’Anconia Copper, at [age] 20-23. He is as swift and efficient at a business desk as he was at ballgames or tennis. He drives his business as he drove a car.)

Francisco would despise the conventional, the established, the safe, the routine—and look for the new, the difficult, the different, the unusual.

He would despise repeating and memorizing—he would want to think, discover, create. He wants the created, not the repeated—he would write an essay on his own ideas, rather than a report on somebody else’s thinking, such as an analysis of some classic. It is the accepted, ready-made, arbitrary standards that he won’t accept. He’ll make his own standards.

With all his wealth, he is not interested in ready-made playthings such as gadgets, cars, etc. He wants to make things. He wants the self made, not the ready-made.

The two main lines for Dagny-Francisco past:

For Francisco: A brilliant, ambitious, violently active, impatient, religiously purposeful, self-willed boy—who could not become a drifter.

For Dagny: What he represents in her life is the entity of pure joy—the joy of ability.

[There are few notes on Francisco’s character. The explanation seems to be given in a comment that AR made in 1961: “Francisco, more than anyone else, seems to have been Minerva in my mind—he came in ready made. ”]

1947

[AR made the following notes for the party scene in which Francisco introduces himself to Rearden.]

For Rearden-Francisco:

The essential issue of the strike.

Francisco’s approach—the key questions.

Rearden’s failure.

The essential issue is: you support the parasites, you make it possible for them to destroy you and the world, you are responsible for their actions because you grant them a virtue they don’t possess, you don’t realize your own importance and their impotence, you act on their terms, not being completely clear about your own.

Rearden’s failure is: his generosity, he wants to protect lesser people, he grants them virtue—his over-confidence, he thinks he can win and produce under any and all conditions—his vitality, he wants to live, work, function, ignoring everything around him, thus not seeing that he is his own destroyer. [...]

Possibility: Dagny sees Francisco as the personification of the kind of gaiety the party could have been. He sees her as truly feminine—what the others can’t see. (What she wants Rearden to see. Rearden does, of course.)

July 1, 1947

For Galt’s speech: “What is the objective test of whether a man is a parasite or not, who determines that? Each man himself. If you think that it is proper (or possible) to work under compulsion, to take orders from others, and you feel you would be willing to do it—you are a parasite. If you think that there are no achievements, no distinctions, no ability or genius among men, that one man’s work is as good as another‘s, that all men are interchangeable—you are a parasite who knows nothing about the nature of work. (And you have merely described yourself—and classified yourself thereby.)”

July 3, 1947

Note on Rearden

Incident when his mother wants Rearden to give Philip a job at the mills. Rearden refuses with implacable, icy anger—his mills come first, he will never do this for his family. That is precisely what they hate him for. His attitude is that he would give Philip a job only if he deserved it; the fact that Philip is a relative has nothing to do with it. His mother’s attitude is that that is what makes him cruel and heartless: if he loved his brother, he’d give him a job the brother didn’t deserve, that is what she would consider true affection, generosity and brotherhood. If the brother deserves the job, there is no virtue in giving it to him—that’s just selfishness. Virtue is to give the undeserved.

For Chapter VIII: The Materialists

While Dagny and Rearden battle alone against tremendous public opposition, staking everything they own on their judgment, with rational truth as their only motive—the “writer” (who has talked about the artist’s pure, “non-commercial” search for truth, about the artist’s spiritual concerns and scorn for the material) is having fits of panic over the future public reception of his latest book, is grabbing every opinion and adjusting the book accordingly, is wondering whether he should make his thesis and ending the exact opposite of what they are now—which would go over better?—and is sniveling about the thousand dollar authentic Mandarin coat now selling for a bathrobe, which he wants.

1947

[AR made the following notes on the scene in which Dagny speaks to Dr. Stadler about the State Science Institute’s condemnation of Rearden Metal. ]

Dr. Stadler

The great mind—and the great conceit; not showoffishness, but the actual conviction that practically everyone else is some sort of vicious, helpless animal. His attitude is: “I could teach them to live so much better than they do.... Persuade them? How can I? They have no mind and are not open to reason. There’s nothing anyone can do except force them. That’s all they understand.” (“But I know that I’m right—and I’ve seen so much stupidity in my life!”)

His contempt for industrialists—“Oh, yes, the men who make gadgets and are interested in nothing but the dollar.” Contempt for applied science and material production. Yet—he wants unlimited funds and multi-million-dollar cyclotrons. His cynicism: “Oh, no, you can’t expect industrialists to support science.” (“Who is supporting you now?” “Society.”)

He is completely indifferent to the “practical” side of the [State Science] Institute. He is very satisfied with his “abstract” isolation. Dr. Ferris “takes care” of everything—and he prizes Ferris for this reason. (He thinks Ferris is his servant—he doesn’t know that it’s the other way around.) The Institute was established for Dr. Stadler, on his endorsement and agreement, on the glory of his name. But it is Dr. Ferris who established it, who “put it through” the legislature. Ferris is the “Washington man” of the Institute. (“Washington” leaves Dr. Stadler strictly alone—and kowtows to him as to an idol. So he doesn’t think that politicians are “difficult” or “a problem.” Does he like dealing with them at all? “Oh, dear me, no—but what can one do in this world? One has to accept some sort of ugliness.” (He [prefers] politicians to businessmen.)

He is uneasy with Dagny—he wants to enjoy her visit, to be the brilliant man to an appreciative audience, as he used to be with her—but he can’t. There are a few sharp little touches of annoyance, impatience, evasion in his manner. [...]

August 12, 1947

Philosophical Note

If man forms his own character through the basic premises he accepts (his character being the result and consequence of the premises), does this mean that he has no permanent character at all, no fixed entity, since it is subject to and open to constant change? No. Here is the permanence of man’s entity: those of his basic premises which are true cannot change (since premises come from convictions about observed reality); it is only the mistaken premises which are open to change, are constantly challenged by reality and should be changed. The “fluidity” or impermanence of his character corresponds to the number of mistaken premises he holds; to the extent of such mistakes, he lacks “entity” or is not a complete, perfect, integrated entity, therefore, does not actually exist completely. His permanence, his full reality, his existence depend upon his right premises. The perfect man would hold nothing but the right premises.

This process is the key to the secret of man’s character and of the incompleteness of his existence. This is the process of man creating himself, becoming man—the illustration of: “Being a man is given to him, remaining a man is not.” (“Everything is something.” Everything that exists must be an entity. Physical objects are set as entities by nature. Only man has to create himself; his body is only the means; his essential entity is his soul—and that he must create himself. There is the god-like aspect of man. What is his starting point, his tool for creating himself? The rational mind. All the rest is only a development of it, a matter of remaining true to his rational mind.)

When I say that a man holds a true premise, I mean that he holds it with complete rational conviction, as far as his knowledge goes. Therefore, such a premise cannot be changed in his mind; further knowledge would only amplify it—it cannot contradict or destroy it. The case of a man who had a right premise, then dropped it because of some erroneous new conclusion, is not relevant here: such a case merely means that the man did not hold or understand the right premise, or any part of it, in the first place. My statement here applies only to actual, full, rational conviction about a basic premise—not to a psychological illusion of conviction, nor to any sort of “faith,” nor to any partially, provisionally accepted hypothesis.

An important point here: the “acting on the most likely hypothesis” rule applies to and is proper only in relation to the specific and the concrete, such as any one person, event or course of action, but not to basic premises. In regard to basic premises, no halfway is possible; anything short of absolute conviction is worthless, is no conviction at all. (In connection with this, I must define the nature and content of basic premises.)

Note for Rearden

Both Lillian and Stacey want Rearden to succumb to an affair with a mistress. Their motives and attitudes are basically identical, both being expressions of the parasite, but they are two different variations of the same theme, about equally vicious.

Lillian wants to see Rearden’s strict moral purity broken, so that she can torture him through his own guilt, so that she can feel the satisfaction of seeing a great man degraded, and so that she can assume moral superiority over him, thus becoming the representative of morality. Therefore, Lillian’s game includes an over-stressed, over-grim recognition of morality—in order to hold Rearden through his guilt at having betrayed the moral code.

Stacey wants to see Rearden abandoning morality so that she and he can be united like gangsters or criminal conspirators against the moral world, a kind of relationship expressed by a wise wink at each other. She wants him to become immoral in her way, to hold morality as a convenient hypocrisy with which to fool others, but to acknowledge that he and she know better, are wiser than that—in fact, are rotters and satisfied with it. This, in effect, would also hold him through guilt—the guilt of being self-confessedly and boastfully evil. Thus Stacey’s scheme includes morality only as the thing to defy; she and Rearden would be bound together, not within and by morality, but against it.

Of the two women, Lillian is smarter: she knows that Rearden is essentially great and pure, that his essence cannot be changed, that she can merely make him suffer through his recognition of his own sin. Stacey thinks that sensual indulgence can actually turn Rearden into a rotter, become his essence and make him pleased with, not tortured by, depravity, in the same way that she is.

It is important to stress and make clear how wrong both women are: on their malevolent, parasite’s premise, they can expect a man’s happiness (as represented by sex, its highest expression) to become the means of his degradation, of evil, of torture and of their acquiring power over him. The truth is that happiness (in the real sense of the word) cannot do this and cannot be used in this way. It is and does the opposite: it is both the means and the expression of man’s elevation, of his good, his joy, his freedom, and his independence.

That is what Rearden learns from his affair with Dagny. Any suffering involved for him in that affair (and only superficially, never tragically or essentially) came only from the fact of his own error about the nature of the relationship and his right to it; it came only from his own ignorance and mistake —not from anything done by Lillain or Stacey. Only he made his suffering possible—they, the parasites, could not make him suffer—and he set himself free of the suffering, when he understood the truth.

This is a very important point—an important illustration of the theme, of the fact that any evil done to a good man is done only because, and to the extent to which, he permits it. (Rearden permitted it by accepting the parasite’s view of morality, happiness, and sex.)

Regarding Rearden and Lillian: In their sex life, she held her impotence as virtue, his desire as vice. This is impotence held as superior to life energy.

1947

[AR prepared the following list of questions prior to visiting three steel companies. Short answers to some of the questions were added after her interviews. ]

Questions Re: Steel

Regarding Rearden Metal: What qualities would be most valuable in a new metal alloy, besides: tougher, cheaper and longer lasting than steel? Heat resisting.

What would Dagny have to see besides “Rearden’s formula and the tests he showed her”?

General description of Rearden Steel mills. Watch for characteristic details.

What sort of tests and research would be done to achieve Rearden

Metal (in a general way)?

“Today, the first heat of the first order of Rearden Metal had been poured.” (Do they call it heat? Yes. Do they call it order? Yes.) Do they pour alloys—is the procedure approximately the same as for making steel, or is it entirely, basically different—and how much leeway do I have on this? Yes, [they pour alloys.]

Difference between mill, foundry and scrap business? (Who manufactures what?) (Mill: sheet steel and plate steel.)

Could the bracelet be made from that poured metal that same day? Yes.

Would Rearden Ore be referred to as a “mining company”? “Rearden’s started rolling the rails.” Yes. “The first shipment of rail will get to the site in a few weeks, the last in six months.” (?) (Time element of order okay.)

Is it machine tools they need and lack to make Diesels?

The time schedule for the Rearden rails order: seven months for the whole order—first delivery in two months, second in another two months, last in three months after that. Dagny has him cut last five months to three. (?) (About 300 miles for line up to Wyatt Oil, more for whole line, though not all of track is being replaced.)

What is the proper extra price per ton that Rearden would charge for the rush? (10%) What is the price of the best ton of rail now? What would be a steep extra for rush? What has been the increase in cost of steel rail per each decade?

What is the longest credit Rearden would give Dagny on the rail order?

What kind of crane would load rails on flat cars? Would it have a jaw that snaps open and drops the rails? Or a hook, with the rails tied in bunches by chains? Or are rails loaded singly? Overhead crane, rails are tied with chains.

September, 1947

[AR made the following notes on an interview with Carleton B. Tibbets, CEO of Los Angeles Steel Casting Company.]

The key men in a steel mill are: general manager; superintendent; rolling superintendent. (Superintendent coordinates the melting department.)

U.S. Steel employs 15,000 men in the largest plant; 300,000 men in all their plants.

Rearden’s plant would employ about 5,000 to 6,000. Plant would disintegrate in about a month after Rearden leaves.

Example of destructive inefficiency: somebody taps steel too soon, which is known as “taps a cold heat.” Examples of looting: selling cranes, selling rolling equipment. Example of inefficient management: steel is insufficiently purified; this causes “progressive fracture” —steel breaks.

Oil Pipe Line:

Would be ordered from steel mills up to size of 12 inches. If larger, it has to be ordered from a special foundry. Wyatt’s pipe line would be ready in about six months normally, one or two years in present circumstances.

Suggestions for Rearden Metal:

Main interest of steel makers at present is heat-resisting steel. Have Rearden metal be able to stand temperatures up to 3000° (this is almost the melting point of steel). Present limit is 1800°. Have metal hold its strength and ductility at the same time. This type of metal would revolutionize the manufacture of internal-combustion engines. Elements to use in Rearden metal: molybdenum or vanadium. Both are rare elements, particularly vanadium. It can be obtained from only one company in this country. Molybdenum is now used in the amount of .4 to .6 percent of steel mixture, or 8 to 12 pounds per ton of steel. Vanadium is now used in the amount of .2 percent of steel mixture, or 4 pounds per ton of steel.

Main customers of steel mills are railroads, oil companies, building industries, and a huge number of manufacturing companies such as agricultural implements, automobiles, etc.

October, 1947

Notes on Visit to Kaiser Steel Plant

Site of steel mill [in Fontana, California]: 13,000 acres or about ³/₄ square mile.

Plant was completed in 13 months. First coke ovens were in operation in six months.

Cost of plant: $123,000,000 in wartime. Present value or normal cost: $35,000,000 to $40,000,000.

Geneva plant built in wartime by government. Cost $200,000,000.

U.S. Steel bought it from the Government for $40,000,000 (about 20 percent of original value). Defense Corporation’s return on all its war plants which were sold averages about 17 percent.

Price of steel in East is $50-$55 per ton. Eastern steel costs about $15 per ton more in the West, the difference being the cost of transportation. The Kaiser Company owns an iron ore mine and a limestone quarry in California. It leases a coal mine in Utah and operates it.

Miscellaneous Information:

Blast furnaces are usually named after women. The one at Kaiser’s is named “Bess” after Mrs. Kaiser and is referred to by the workers as “Old Bess.”

The big pipe around the belly of the blast furnace is referred to by the workers as the “Bustle” pipe.

Possible Technical Trouble:

Gas explosions—caused by combustible gases, air or oxygen in a confined space and high enough temperature to set it off.

Heat going through the floor of the furnace—this is known as a “breakout.” It can happen either to the blast or open-hearth furnaces. It is usually caused by closing the tap-hole improperly.

Possibilities for Inefficient Management:

Buying strip coal instead of coking coal—the blast furnace will go cold.

Foreman stops charging coke for six hours—furnace will freeze up.

Foreman feeds nothing but limestone for a whole turn—furnace will become lime-set.

Possibilities for Looting:

Selling raw materials; selling pig iron and scrap; selling turning rolls from rolling mills; selling spare tuyeres on blast furnace.

The Essential Staff of a Steel Mill:

About 12 percent of the total employees (Kaiser Plant employs 3300 people). The essential jobs are: vice-president in charge of operations; general superintendent; assistant superintendent; department superintendents; department assistant superintendents ; general foreman; turn foreman; blower; open hearth melter. There are about 100 men in Metallurgical Department.

October-November, 1947

[AR made brief notes in a memo book while on a train trip from California to New York and back to Cheyenne, Wyoming. On this trip, she interviewed employees of the New York Central Railroad and visited facilities of Inland Steel.]

Trip to New York

The hood of a black car looks like a mirror and reflects objects ahead and the sky.

The effect of rocks at sunset—a dark gray, flat silhouette of rocks against shadows of mountains which are dark gray and barely suggested.

The mountains. The approach to a small town. The train and sparks at night. The fireflies.

The mountains in Wyoming. A base of rock, rising from a green slope, with brush, pines and a smooth green cover that looks like moss rising up on the rock. The moss and brush vanish gradually, and the pines go on struggling up, in thinning strands, till only a few drops of single trees are left, going up. At the top, there is a naked rock, with snow in the crevices. The snow looks as if a handful had been thrown violently into a crevice and had splattered up the sides, in single rays.

The mountain peaks look very close, as if rising a very short distance from the road—until one sees the tiny size of the pine trees near the top.

A small town is seen in the distance, rising from the plain, as a solid line of bushy green trees, with roof tops among them—and, rising above trees and roofs, a few round, silver water-tanks that look like huge pearls. The water tanks compete in height with the church spires. The water tanks win.

A train moving at night looks like a solid streak of lighted glass—the band of the windows—and a streak of sparks flying above them in the opposite direction.

The fireflies rise from the grass at dusk like slow sparks, moving at floating angles, just a bit slower than sparks of fire, and paler—they have a cold, white, metallic sparkle.

New York skyscrapers look like solid structures of lighted glass, in the evening, when all the windows are lighted. As it gets later, the buildings assume black shapes again, with only a few lighted windows scattered among them, and an occasional row of vertical lights, like a row of buttons—the lights of a stairwell.

New York skyscrapers in the fog look as if the closest ones can be seen in every detail, but behind a thin blue smoke; in the next row, the details are blurred, simplified to essentials; farther on, the buildings are simplified to mere shapes; and beyond that, they become blue shadows, in faint silhouettes.

A plain and town, seen from the height, with the unusual effect of long, straight, thick bands of clouds low in the sky above them, at twilight, so that it looks as if part of the sky were a lake beyond the town, and the clouds were the strip of the other shore.

Trip back

The steel mills. When a heat is being poured, the smoke is semitransparent, like waves of heat, and the outlines of smokestacks behind it look as if they were shimmering.

There is red smoke, orange-yellow smoke, blue smoke—and thick, rich, satin-lustrous coils of smoke rising out of smokestacks, that look like mother-of-pearl.

There is a great abundance of power lines in steel mills, long, many-stranded bands of wire.

The silhouette of the steel mills in Lorain, Ohio, standing against the sky.

The rust colored water of the river at the steel mills in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

The odor of sulfur and the constant metallic clatter, like the sound of grinding wheels.

The approach to Pittsburgh (on the way east): From the parkways, to the old, vertical houses on steep hillsides, to the slums, with narrow, cobblestone streets—then the sudden view of the river and the blurred silhouettes of skyscrapers—the rise to the triumphant goal and spirit of the place, of the great effort that made it. Pennsylvania—green mountains, some plains, many hills. Ohio-hills and some plains. (The Patrick Henry University should be on a bluff over Lake Erie.)

Indiana—flat plains, dull.

Illinois—flat plains.

Wisconsin—hills in the eastern part, more plains in the west. Wisconsin has a great many pines; also some birch trees. The road goes up and down, more than in curves. The road going up a hill rises straight up, almost vertically, before the driver, then lowers as one approaches, almost as if folding over and lying down like a bridge being lowered before you.

Minnesota—hills in the eastern part, flat, dull plains in the west. South Dakota—flat plains and terribly dull up to the Missouri. Desert-like hills and plains west of the Missouri. The hills gather, tighten and grow as one approaches the Black Hills region. Here—rock and pines. The view from near the Wild Cat Cave—a huge spread of mountains, green and filled with pines. The pines look small as weeds. The mountains are slashed in places, in straight, vertical cuts, as if cut to show the layers of rock under the smooth green cloth covering them.

The view of a lake at sunset: straight, thin, black shafts of trees with a spread of gold beyond and above them—the sky and the water of the same glowing yellow color.

(For Galt and Dagny: When he carries her to the town in the valley, he does not hold her in the impersonal, wholesome manner of a man carrying a wounded woman. It is an embrace—even though nothing in his manner suggests it and his face shows no emotion. It is merely the fact that his whole body is aware of holding hers.) A line of telephone poles at each side of a straight road going off into the distance: the poles grow shorter and the spaces between them narrower, until they become like a picket fence in the distance. Clouds at sunset, covering the sun: only the edges of the clouds are like bright fire—against a clear blue sky, with the clouds faintly grayer, deeper blue; the edges are like a net of thin neon tubes—or like a map of winding rivers (or a map of railroads) traced in silver fire.

November, 1947

[AR prepared the following questions for her interviews with personnel of the New York Central Railroad.]

How long would it take to lay rails through the Colorado section? How long from Cheyenne to El Paso?

How much would the San Sebastian Line cost (300 miles)?

Key men of railroad company? Of Operating Department?

Day of operating vice-president?

Who assigns freight cars?

Who supervises the construction of a new line?

November 22, 1947

[The following notes are from an interview with A. H. Wright, vice-president of operation and maintenance for the New York Central Railroad. Describing this interview later, AR remarked: “[Mr. Wright] was seventy years old and retiring, and I remember thinking how shocked he would be if he knew that he would become a thirty-four-year-old woman in my novel. ”]

[Previous jobs :]

Yard clerk during the day, filling in as brakeman at night.

Trained crews and examined men on operating rules in office of train master.

Assistant train master in largest freight yard (Syracuse, N.Y.).

Train master on another division.

Assistant superintendent, then superintendent of N.Y. water and marine operations.

Assistant general manager of eastern lines.

General manager.

Key men:

Division superintendents: operating costs and service to the public.

General manager: coordinates work of division superintendents.

Engineer of maintenance of ways: maintenance of tracks, buildings and bridges.

General superintendent of motive power and rolling stock.

Signal engineer: construction and maintenance of all signals.

Day: Requests for expenditures and additional help, and matters of discipline of employees. (Half of time on line, the rest in office.)

Coal—very crucial. (Burn 600 cars of coal a day.)

[Railroad] ties good for 20 years.

Rails good for 10-12 years.

Rails are moved from high speed track to yard track.

Steel bridges—keep them painted to avoid corrosion—members replaced when corroded or obsolete (in regard to weight of locomotives and trains). Abutments must be watched.

Lay rails: 6-8 months.

Main line—automatic signals.

Side lines—manual signals.

If they went back to manual system, could operate only 10% of present traffic.

Radio communication between engineering and yard masters, between engineers and signal men, between front and rear of train. American Association of Railroads can give arbitrary orders for cars. Five miles of side-track to reach a mine: $300,000. (San Sebastian Line should be about $50,000,000.)

[The following notes are from an interview with K. A. Borntrager, manager of freight traffic for the New York Central Railroad.]

A union proposal to put an engineer and fireman in each unit of a Diesel.

130,000 employees working for New York Central Railroad, about 1—3% are appointive positions. This small group are the brains.

About 5,000 men are under Mr. Borntrager; only about 100-150 are appointive.

Car Service Department: 300 people, only six to eight appointive positions. If these men were gone, there would be chaos in two or three weeks.

Somebody has to coordinate all the machine records—unless somebody can do it, a machine economy cannot function.

For construction:

Cannot get drilling steel, explosives. Steel came—they put in wooden stringers for missing pieces. They have rocks to blast—heavy equipment wears out very fast, many replacements are needed—they have no drills—equipment wore out—they have to resort to chipping, hand-work. The brains saved money, now it will cost much more. Have rails, but have no specialists to build frogs and switches.

(Unions are always trying to encroach on appointive positions—constant, silent battle. [Management] has the right to appoint the station agents (freight and passenger); unions claim that positions are not big enough, an ordinary man from the ranks could do it on seniority basis. Mr. Borntrager would run a railroad better if he could appoint twice as many people. Would like to take young man and raise him from position to position (from the ranks), but he cannot do it.)

Signals are very intricate mechanisms; couldn’t get copper—so they use steel wire; signals fail. Spend a horrible amount of money—and get a makeshift thing when you get through.

November 25, 1947

Notes on Visit to Inland Steel [In Chicago, IL]

Railroad rails are shipped in gondolas. They are picked up by an overhead crane (magnetic), six to ten at a time, and deposited on cars inside a building. Walls of building can be open.

Process of rail making (approximately): Iron from blast furnace (“caste”)—steel from open hearth furnace ( “heat”)—steel is poured into ingot molds—ingots go to blooming mill and are rolled into billets (for rails and structural shapes) or slabs (for sheet, plate, etc.). Final shape of rails is done by three sets of rolls (mills). (The shape is the rolls themselves.)

Steel heat: the metal is white, not red or orange. It has no suggestion of flame, only of a blinding white liquid. There is a violent red glow in the rising smoke—a shower of white sparks—and bits of metal that fall on the floor and start flaming. When the ladle is full, you see nothing but black and white, a blinding white liquid boiling and running over, spilling with a kind of wasteful, arrogant prodigality. The white rivulets on the side of the ladle turn to a glowing brown, then to black metal, like icicles, and start crumbling off. The slag in the slag-ladle on the side starts crusting over in thick, uneven, brown ridges, like the earth’s crust. Small flames appear in the cracks. As the crust thickens, two or three craters appear, with white liquid metal boiling slowly.

A steel mill rolls steel; a foundry casts it (in sand molds).

Coke ovens. The coke is pushed out like slices of toast. It crumbles like red-hot walls, in layers and in sudden cracks.

From Mr. Fred Gillies (general manager): The attempted embargo on freight cars for deliveries to steel plants—by the government. Excuse—they do not empty cars fast enough. Reason—bureaucrats want freight cars to ship coal to Europe. (Stopping the country’s production for the sake of looting.)

A plant was built by the government during the war, at a cost of 25 million dollars. Twice the capacity that was ever needed or used (six open hearth furnaces—only three were used). Company that wanted to buy another such plant was refused permission by government (anti-trust law), so they did not bid on this one. No one has bid on plant. It is now used by the government as a warehouse for war surplus—clothes, candy, etc. (!)

Diesel freight engine with four motor units weighs 464 tons.

Tractive force when starting—220,000 pounds.

Average load of boxcars—27 tons. (Weight of boxcar—20 tons.)

One-hundred-car trains would weigh about 5,000 tons.

Bridge: 1,650 feet—38,000 tons of steel.

December 19, 1947

Have instance of rotten, inherited capitalist who wants to be nationalized—with payment, of course. He doesn’t want the responsibility of running his business, he wants to make a profit on the government paying him off at more than the business is worth, and he uses political pull to get that.

The kind of knowledge, judgment and intellectual initiative which is needed for production (the article on oil in the Texaco magazine)—and the bureaucrats’ method of evasion, double-talk, avoidance of the responsibility of the clear-cut and the specific. Show how and why production cannot be achieved by such method.

January 5, 1948

Notes for Labor Rules

Unions forbid their members to run more than a certain number of miles per month. Why? To keep jobs for more men than is necessary? To whose advantage is that, except the union bosses who get extra dues? At whose expense is this done? At the expense of the abler men of the union, who have no right to advance, no right to work as long and make as much as they otherwise would have.

If we suppose that all the members are equally able—still, some are extraneous and should go into other work. This system only has the effect of collective, organized mediocrity—it provides that no man in the profession is going to work harder than the others, so that all will be kept at a certain level of effort and income—I suppose on the assumption that it makes them less subject to the dangers of change of job with the growth of progress and the need of fewer men in their profession. This is organized stoppage of progress—as is any case where effort and ability are artificially stopped or limited. Also—this keeps the better, abler, more ambitious men out of the profession.

Does this really protect them in their jobs, even the mediocre men? Or does it create artificial dangers of protracted unemployment? And, of course, it holds their living standard down, by stopping general progress. Actually, industrial progress which cuts jobs in one old line, creates more of them in several new lines. The readjustment or transition should not be difficult or involve periods of unemployment—in a free economy (because it is gradual). [Union policies are] instances of the savage or animal “range of the moment” psychology in an industrial civilization that functions on the long range principle of the intellect.

Unions are organized against the better members of their own profession.

(For pay rates of railroad labor, see This Fascinating Railroad Business [by Robert S. Henry], pp. 405—407.)

For Labor Troubles (Chapter XI)

Pat Logan and other good engineers do not get any advantage out of the John Galt Line—the higher speed only reduces their working time and they have to loaf the rest of the month, while unemployed engineers from the closing railroads flock to get part of this work, part of the new, fast runs.

The unions immediately raise the costs of the operation of the John Galt Line, when the economy of operation is so desperately needed.

With the shortage of engines and cars—they demand to limit the length of trains, thus requiring more engines and cars, without making full use of the ones available.

Management and inventors do everything in their power to exercise their genius to raise the productivity of employees. The employees do everything in their power to hamper and prevent this—yet demand raised pay.

Union’s demand for engineer and conductor for the “guest” line in case of emergency when train is routed over tracks of another line.

Demand for extra men on each Diesel unit.

Extra day’s pay for breaking a train in half and taking the two sections over a hill individually—in mountainous country.

Union’s excuse for limiting train length—the caboose jerks ! ! In the case of passenger train—the “poor conductor” has too much work! !

(See the “Railway Progress” article for quotes of union leaders’ attitude toward “those locomotive giants” and for examples of paying employees twice for work not done.)

The added expense cuts the slim profits of the stockholders who need their own money desperately—show this concretely, as one of the results of what happens when the John Galt Line does not pay. (This leads to the ruin of the Colorado stockholders—the first pressure is on Ellis Wyatt.) (Ted Nielsen—no Diesels.)

The “limitation of ability”: Rearden is forbidden to produce more than Orren Boyle is able to produce. The reason: “Rearden is destroying Boyle’s market and chance at a livelihood.” (Same principle—Pat Logan and the bums who cannot run a big train, but Logan’s opportunity to run more trains is stopped.)

At the same time—the “Fair Share Law”: Rearden has to supply everybody, while he is not allowed to produce. Here—the rise of Mouch, who shrugs when the contradiction is pointed out to him: “Everything is a contradiction—we act on the expediency of the moment.” Mouch wants Rearden to fail, so that all business can be nationalized.

January 17, 1948

The judge on strike in the valley: “I was supposed to be the guardian of justice. But the laws they asked me to enforce made of me the executor of the vilest injustice ever perpetrated on earth.”

The legend of Prometheus who took the fire back, until men called off their vultures. (It is probably Francisco who tells [Dagny] this.)

January 30, 1948

For Chapter IX: The John Galt Line

The reaction of the public as it watches the progress of the John Galt Line: those who sympathize and admire; those who are honestly neutral and watch with a growing sense of sympathy, not knowing its real reason and not knowing anything about the business or technical part of it; those who hate it and want it to fail, in interested malice, like Orren Boyle, or in the pointless malice of the men of destruction, like James Taggart, Bertram Scudder, Philip Rearden; but the most vicious ones (?), the truly evil, are those who watch with cautious interest, the safe-players and middle-of the-roaders, who want somebody else to take the risks, then get ready to grab the benefits.

James Taggart’s attitude must be shown clearly: when things go well, he is not happy about it, he is insidiously sarcastic; when things go badly, he is scared, but there is a strange undertone of gloating pleasure in him at the same time. This last, without his conscious admission to himself, is his gratification of his real desire—the wish for destruction.

Philip Rearden’s attitude must be shown: he is not involved like Taggart, but his essential attitude is the same. In his case, it is the plain joy of seeing Rearden fail—then he is not the only failure, his great brother can fail, too, the great brother isn’t as great as he thinks, etc.

February 8, 1948

Note for Galt’s Speech

The whole issue in the world is between the men who want to work under compulsion and the men who don’t. Well, those of us who don’t work as slaves leave the rest of you free to do it; go right ahead, organize any kind of slavery for yourselves among yourselves. But don’t try to impose it on us and don’t expect us to accept it. We don’t need you. We don’t seek to force you—we rest on the principle of voluntary relations among men. But you—by your very premise—admit that you need us, since you find it necessary to use force against us. Well, it can’t be done.

And as for those who wish to rule, who think they don’t want to work under compulsion, but want to exercise compulsion upon others to make them work—the same applies to them. If they think work can be done under compulsion, they know nothing about the nature of work. If they find it necessary to use compulsion on others, it means that they need something from those others. Well—we refuse it to them. They think they want to force their inferiors. What about us—the men of ability, their equals or superiors? Do they think they can force us? And as to those they think are inferiors, what is the standard when force is involved? If they believe that they cannot deal with a man’s intelligence, because he hasn’t any, force will not give it to him. If, by their own definition, they are the men of intelligence, what do they need from the stupid ones and what do they fear?

Chapter IX: The John Galt Line The Ride

The sense of movement—and the achievement it represents. Dagny’s feeling—the sense of achievement and triumph.

The overall mood—the real kind of joy. (“It is so easy—and so right!”)

The philosophical meaning—life is motion, the essence of man’s life is the achievement of a purpose he has chosen, and any purpose of man can be achieved only through his reason.

Dagny thinks of Nat Taggart and the initials on the first train ever to cross the continent. This is the first new Taggart Line or venture in many generations.

The people gathered to watch the train (on hills, on city station platforms) —as in the old days.

The guard of honor along the way.

Dagny and Rearden: The physical sensation is the same as that of the ride: the ride is physical, but its only meaning is spiritual, the physical sensation of pleasure in the flying speed through space is given only by the spiritual knowledge of what made it possible, of one’s achievement. The feeling of: “I am flying here—and I made it.”

Dagny feels tense—and easy in tension, like the work of Pat Logan. She feels suspended over life as the engine is over the rails.

Dagny and Rearden in the motor units. Dagny thinks of the intelligence these motors represent—again, the physical as the shape of the spiritual. The feeling of: “Don’t let it go!” She wonders why she feels that this is threatened.

The flight across the bridge.

The arrival at Wyatt station.

1948

[The following notes were made for the scene in which James Taggart and Cherryl Brooks meet for the first time. The scene immediately follows the success of the John Galt Line, and conveys Taggart’s attitude toward this success.]

For: James Taggart and Cherryl Brooks

Show that Taggart’s attitude is a total dead-end, the hatred of that which he himself needs for survival, the hatred of his own gain or advantage—the real paradox. This has to be the advance notice of his final scene, of the full revelation that the parasite functions on the principle of death.

Cherryl’s attitude in this scene is trust and naive admiration; she feels encouraged, uplifted that a man like Taggart finds her of interest or value; she thinks he sees something good in her. Taggart’s attitude toward her is contempt—contempt for a person so low as to admire him; yet he wants the admiration—and he knows that it can come only from someone who is low; he would fear any better sort of person. That is why he hates Cherryl’s later attempt to rise.

The paradox is that he wants her admiration to be sincere—that is what attracts him to Cherryl—he would not want the flattery and pretense of a designing gold-digger, and he would recognize that as a lie. He wants the good (sincerity) from and for an evil (from stupidity, for his rottenness)—and there is the “moral blackmail” or exploitation of the good against itself: he wants the advantage of a real virtue (sincerity) for the satisfaction of his rottenness, he wants good in the service of evil, he wants to use and hurt Cherryl by means of nothing but her own virtue, not by means of any of her bad qualities (hurt her—because it is deceit and fraud that he is putting over on her). He wants the satisfaction of a real admiration for virtues which he does not possess—he wants a spiritual reward, unearned—he wants the spiritual, moral “something for nothing”—and the “something” in this case has to be real, while nothing about him is.

That is why their relationship leads to tragedy. Good cannot come from evil; Cherryl’s [admiration comes] not from stupidity, but from ignorance, so Taggart’s scheme could not work; she had to begin to see the truth. Her horror is the discovery that he has a desire to keep her low, to have her rotten, not to let her improve or rise—that he loved her, not for her value, but for her rottenness, that that is what he saw and sought in her. She sees the horror of “love as an answer to evil,” instead of “love as an answer to value”—which is the whole essence of man’s need of love. In their marriage, what pleased him was her inferiority, which made him superior and magnanimous by comparison. He lost his interest in her when she lost her inferiority. She realizes that he wanted his “love” for her to be alms—he did not want her to deserve it, to earn it. (There’s another perverted “balance” —real “disinterested,” “rewardless” altruism—he wanted something unearned from her, and he wanted her to get something unearned from him. The reality of something earned, of a real virtue or a real value and “spiritual payment or exchange,” was intolerable to him, it smashed his whole fraudulent structure of emotions and relationships. And here is an example of Taggart’s “death principle”—he cannot tolerate any value; but the basis of life is search for and achievement of values.)

In contrast to the relationship of Dagny and Rearden, James Taggart’s [feeling for] Cherryl is not love as an answer to and reward for value, but the ghastly perversion which is love as alms—love as a “looking down”—love, not for value, but for its absence—the essential pattern of any unearned love, such as “love of humanity,” love as pity, as mercy, as anything but justice. (Love as justice is essentially admiration—and nothing else.)

In their subsequent meetings, James Taggart takes pleasure in stressing his unhappiness, in whining—because he knows that Cherryl cares and feels concern. She is the first person who has ever really cared about what he feels, who doesn’t want to see him suffer—so he enjoys making her suffer when he whines and complains. His motive here is an ugly, twisted mixture of sadism and, at the same time, appeal for her pity. His own feeling for her is based, in a sense, on pity—since he looks down upon her; yet, at the same time, he wants her to feel pity for him, for his suffering—which means, in effect, to look down upon him.

July 5, 1948

Have an example (later) of how Taggart uses his “Washington” power—what it consists of. Some ghastly little bureaucrat has the crucial power to decide some tremendous issue (the power is his accidentally, not intentionally, through the sheer complex stupidity of the laws and the set-up) —and he decides it in Taggart’s favor for some such consideration as a thousand dollars and a dinner at a nightclub with “important people.” The results of his decision involve billions [of dollars] of other people’s wealth, are disastrous to Rearden and to the economy of the whole country. (This may be used with regard to the moratorium on brains.)

October 18, 1948

[The following deals with Rearden’s anniversary party.]

Main Point of Party Scene

The guilt of the creators is that they don’t claim moral value, moral superiority, and moral sanction.

One of the causes of it—generosity: the reluctance to rub it in, to remind the weaker ones of their weakness; the belief that the weaker ones know it anyway and are grateful; the benevolence of over-abundance, the pleasure of helping others to enjoy life; the belief that the weaker ones do enjoy life and are on the moral standard of loving life, ability and greatness; the living power of strength, which respects living human beings and leaps in to eliminate suffering anywhere, almost automatically.

The result—the creators are the ones who suffer, who permit the parasites to become their torturers, who make it possible for the parasites to destroy everything sacred to the creators, to hamper the creators’ work and function, to block the creators’ way, to destroy all the things the creators live for, to spread and commit evil, and finally to destroy the creators themselves. This is the “penalizing of virtue” and the “torture of the best by means of the best within them.” The parasites have no weapon—except the creator’s own moral virtue turned against him. May God damn every man who uses another man’s virtue to his detriment, as a means of harming the victim.

The proper course—not to support or tolerate any man who is not on the creators’ moral standard. To define that standard and then follow it ruthlessly, with total consistency, in every aspect of one’s life. To make no allowances and permit oneself no pity. To give nothing unearned to anyone, in any form—not physical and most particularly not spiritual. Neither financial alms nor undeserved affection. Self-interest must be present in one’s every action.

(If Rearden has no selfish interest in Lillian, he must leave her; never mind what she feels or why. If Rearden does not approve of Philip’s way of living, he must not support him. Even if Philip were struggling to work, Rearden must not give him loans or help, unless it is on a real business basis, that is, unless Rearden can actually get a profit from the loan. Then it would help them both. Not otherwise. Not if Rearden does it only for Philip’s sake. This is the crime of selflessness. And here is the outline of the “trader principle.”)

Since the basis of the creators’ morality is the principle of living, they commit the greatest moral sin possible to them when they become “their own executioners,” i.e., when they furnish the means for their destroyers to destroy them.

The creators must understand the basic difference between themselves and the parasites: the creators are on the life principle, the parasites are on the principle of death. The creators’ final, overall purpose is the continuation of human life (one’s own, and, as secondary consequence, all human life, since there is no conflict or contradiction here); the parasite’s final, overall purpose is destruction and death (not a “pitiful, inept attempt to live,” which would deserve the stronger man’s help—but actually the intention to destroy oneself and others, to destroy everything that constitutes life, every form of pleasure and happiness first of all, and, as close second, every form of virtue, value, competence, greatness).

When the bastards preach that “virtue suffers in this world,” they do mean it, though not in the way it sounds. In their world, virtue does suffer and is meant to suffer—the real virtue, the virtue of competence; while their phony altruist virtue, of course, fails and suffers in relation to physical success—and this gives them ground for damning this earth, for considering it evil. So the result is that the truly virtuous, competent man is made to feel guilty, to feel that his success is evil, to suffer spiritually and morally—while the altruist makes a glory of his own failure and appropriates moral satisfaction (which he can’t enjoy, just the same).

[The following dialogue between a businessman and Francisco was cut from an early draft of the party scene. ]

“I mean, is it necessary to hurt anybody’s feelings? There’s some truth to whatever it is you said. On the other hand, there’s some truth to what Jim Taggart says. Jim’s got a pretty decent record of public spirit and service. What I say is, do we have to go to extremes?”

“To extremes of what?”

“Of anything.”

“No, we don’t have to. They’ll come to us.”

“Who?”

“The extremes.”

He walked off, leaving the businessman staring after him.

October 30, 1948

To think over:

Ragnar Danneskjöld—doesn’t he impede plot? Is he useless to plot—or can he be integrated better?

Direct line from beginning to—destruction of Ellis Wyatt—destruction of Ken Danagger—destruction of Rearden.

Will the “rations on Rearden Metal” and the “Miracle Metal” law clash—as repetitions? [Added later:] No.

Will the closing of the John Galt Line clash with the closing of the Minnesota Line? [Added later:] No.

Make economic outline of story line. (Plot key points of destruction—key figures vanishing and the effect it has.)

Decide on new role for Ragnar Danneskjöld. [Note added the next day:] The Robin Hood who robs the humanitarians and gives to the rich.

January 11, 1949

Key Points of Personal Story Part I

Dagny-Rearden romance. His discovery of the nature of sex, the relation between body and spirit.

Rearden-Lillian (and Rearden-parasites): his helplessness without a sense of moral sanction, his vulnerability when he accepts any part of the parasites’ code.

The rise of Wesley Mouch.

Francisco’s speech on “money is the root of all good.” (Rearden-Francisco)

The finding of Galt’s engine—Dagny’s quest—Hugh Akston in the diner and the dollar-sign cigarette.

Dagny sees the flaming oil fields as Wyatt quits.

Dagny waits in anteroom while “some man” is in Ken Danagger’s office. Danagger quits—his talk about excursion trip around Manhattan Island.

The actions of Ragnar Danneskjöld.

Colorado division parasite (later responsible for tunnel catastrophe) getting position as result of minor Taggart-Boyle-Mouch deal-after good superintendent quits.

Another major loss by d‘Anconia Copper.

Lillian Rearden learns of Rearden’s infidelity—the subtle torture that follows.

Francisco learns of Dagny-Rearden romance.

Dagny quits [because of] “moratorium on brains” and escapes to the country.

Dr. Stadler and Dr. Floyd Ferris.

Rearden and “Miracle Metal. ”

The scene with [Rearden and] Francisco at night—saving the furnace.

Dan Conway (when Dagny needs him).

Rearden-Ragnar Danneskjöld.

Eddie Willers and the worker: Eddie mentions Dagny’s hide-out.

Dagny-Francisco in the country, news of tunnel catastrophe. (Tie reasons for rush of train to the parasites—their “deals” and their inability to take the initiative on anything, their evasion of responsibility and following of routine.)

Rearden-Francisco: the slap in the face.

Dagny’s last attempts to save TT—news of car manufacturer quitting—she has to go after him.

Rearden-Mrs. Rearden when she discovers his affair with Dagny.

Dagny packing; Eddie sees Rearden’s dressing-gown.

Eddie and the worker: Eddie betrays the purpose of Dagny’s trip and her affair with Rearden.

The “frozen train ride”—Dagny and Owen Kellogg—her flight after car manufacturer—the crash.

Part II

The valley. Dagny and Galt. Dagny and Hugh Akston, Richard Halley, Midas Mulligan, the judge, and all the others.

Dagny’s break with Rearden.

Dagny’s search for Gait—the empty valley. (?)

The blackmail of Rearden by the bureaucrats—Dagny discovers it.

The affair: James Taggart-Lillian Rearden. Cherryl’s suicide.

Francisco loses the last of the d‘Anconia fortune.

Rearden-parasites, Rearden-family. He quits.

Dagny-John Galt in the terminal tunnels.

The broadcast—Gait’s speech.

The temptation of Galt: through love—Dagny. She betrays him, his arrest. Further temptations: through pity—(Eddie Willers?); through fear—Dr. Stadler; through “ambition”—Mr. Thompson; through vanity—the banquet.

Dagny quits—joins Francisco on street comer, then Ragnar

Danneskjöld; plan to save Galt.

The torture of Galt. Taggart’s realization.

The collapse of the Taggart Bridge. (And the death of Dr. Stadler.)

The rescue of Galt, the flight over New York as the lights go out, the world in ruins.

Eddie Willers and the last ride of The Comet.

The valley—the rebirth—“We’re going back.”

Key Points of Destruction (Economic outline) Part I

Destruction of Ellis Wyatt. (No transportation. Dagny limited on trains and speed. Rearden limited on production—and ordered to “give a fair share to everybody.” No pipe line for Wyatt—and no other railroad.)

Destruction of Ken Danagger. (No oil for his power plants. No Rearden Metal girders.)

Destruction of N.Y. utility man—no coal, oil, or copper wires. Another d‘Anconia disaster.

Death of Colorado and closing of John Galt Line.

The moratorium on brains (“Miracle Metal” and Slave Labor law).

Total controls and enslavement of ability. (Rearden Metal is taken over because “Rearden was not able to supply everybody’s need.”) The tunnel catastrophe.

Car manufacturer quits.

(Show, each time before a key figure quits, that the burden of impossible conditions is switched to him.)

Part II

Freights cars sent to “soybean project” (Cuffy Meigs and Wesley Mouch). “Transportation pull.”

[Added later:] Project X.

Destruction of Minnesota farmers; Rearden’s losses.

The end of d‘Anconia Copper (indirectly caused by Rearden?).

Destruction of Rearden. (Rearden is asked to sell steel as cheaply as

Boyle does—and Boyle has government subsidy. The squeeze—and he quits.)

(After Rearden quits—“temporary nationalization” of everything, for “emergency.”)

Decision to close Michigan Line—panic—riots.

The broadcast—John Galt’s speech. (Here—proof of why “planning” won’t work with “good” men—good men don’t work that way.)

Galt’s arrest and torture—and liberation.

The collapse of the Taggart Bridge.

The end of New York.

The last ride of The Comet.

The valley—and the rebirth.

Additional Notes

Things to integrate into the main story:

The romance and marriage of Taggart and shop girl (later, her suicide).

The progression of Dr. Stadler toward the destruction of the mind. (And the climax of Dr. Stadler’s course.)

Ragnar Danneskjöld (“I do not accept your morality, nor loan you parts of mine.”)

The rise of Wesley Mouch—then of Cuffy Meigs.

More participation of Francisco d‘Anconia in the events of destruction. The absence of Hugh Akston and its effect on the despair of good men like Eddie Willers—the gray, stagnant, flameless mood of people—the confusion and hopelessness. (Specific illustration.)

January 13, 1949

From Chapter XI: Rearden cannot deal successfully with the parasites—he is disarmed by his guilt. He thinks: “They’re evil—but so am I. Who am I to cast the first stone? ... Don’t think of it. Just work. Work harder. Don’t look around you.” (If he were certain of their total, inexcusable evil—and of his own righteousness—he would have smashed them, or died in the attempt; and he would have won.)

February 21, 1949

Dagny-Rearden Vacation

They stop at small hotels or sleep in the woods. They talk little. But they drive in silence and can talk to each other in the middle of a train of thought—“gloating” about the John Galt Line, or plans for the future. They are enjoying, “assimilating” their achievement—and “getting charged” for new journeys (“because joy is one’s fuel”). Rearden’s self-centered enjoyment: the way he carries her across a stream, the way he breaks a branch out of their path, the way he makes a fire. The emphasis is not on the views they see, but on their seeing it. The point is their active estimate of value; if a tourist sees something without a judgment of value and an emotional reaction of his own—what’s the point of gazing at things? People are willing to be mirrors or blotters; but not Rearden—he is a ray of light, bringing things into sight and meaning. His manner of comment is always what can be done—or what one can learn from what has been done—always the active, purposeful reaction.

They sleep together in a ravine, under the remnant of a trestle. She thinks that this is an underground honeymoon, and wonders why it has to be “underground.” No, it is not an accident of his being a married man, of his having first chosen the wrong woman—she senses dimly some connection between their secret wandering and the desolation of the country around them.

The slovenly auto court landlady—who sneers at them because she knows that they enjoy sex (that they are held together by nothing but pleasure) and because they have a good, expensive car. The denunciation of sex, of pleasure, of self-indulgence—and of the rich and the industrialists at the same time. Both have a common root.

Dagny realizes (in indifferent wonder) that she and Rearden are expected to feel guilty. People look at them as at enemies.

March 10, 1949

History of the “Twentieth Century Motor Corporation ”

The purpose of every step of this history is to show the futility of men possessing material means, if they do not have the mind to know how to use them.

(This is the answer to the whining attitude of: “If I only had the money, or the factory, or the movie studio, etc.” or “It isn’t fair that one guy inherits a factory—nobody gave me a factory ... etc.”)

The parasites (the second-handers incapable of independent judgment, of new rational connections) own an inexhaustible means of wealth in the Motor Company—Galt’s motor—but they do not know what to do with it, and so it doesn’t do them any good. With the means—property and equipment—of the best motor company in existence, the parasites can achieve nothing but ruin. This answers the fools who think that they’d do wonders if only somebody would hand them the tools of achievement. It is not the tools that achieve. And the man with the mind capable of using the tools will earn his own tools.

While showing the above, in the history of the motor company, show also the kind of motives, morals, ideas, and human characters who make the “something-for-nothing, give-me-a-chance” attitude (and actions) possible.

Also: show the savage, “range-of-the-moment” irresponsiblity of those who think that making money is a matter of speculation, of putting something over on somebody, of exchange without production—the parasites who think that wealth is a matter of grabbing a material possession and palming it off on somebody fast, not realizing that the profit they thus make (on the re-sale of the factory, for instance) is made possible only by someone being a producer. When there are no producers, the material wealth is worthless. The “short-range” savage may think: what the hell, he got away with it—but did he? And can we have a society geared to giving a chance to these parasites? Will such a society remain productive long? (In a free economy, the Reardens sweep these types out, just as productive citizens eliminate criminals who are then only “marginal”; a controlled economy eliminates the Reardens and breeds the “short-range” savages or speculators of the moment.)

(A proper trader is one who performs a real service of distribution of goods, a service needed by the producers of the goods. Such a trader takes intelligent risks [based on] his knowledge and long-range judgment. A speculator functions on the confusion or trouble of the moment, without plan. No, they cannot be differentiated by any law. The objective reality of their performance, in a free economy, builds up the first and destroys the second. The trader creates his own function where his services are needed, where no one else is doing this particular job. A speculator functions when proper exchange and proper traders are restricted by force. As example: a blockade-runner is a trader; a black-marketeer who pays off the bureaucrats, who is their representative or partner, is a speculator.)

March 25, 1949

Notes Regarding the Welfare State

(For the scene with Dagny and the old worker from the Twentieth Century Motor Corporation, and for the general theme.)

Under capitalism, the motive and basic principle throughout the whole system is the positive good, and human ability. A worker works so that he himself will make a profit, the boss will make a profit, and the customers who have earned the price of the product will buy it. The motive throughout is reward (satisfaction), an earned reward, and the standard of value is ability.

Under a collectivist system, the basic principle is suffering and incompetence. A worker works to contribute something to the collective—not for his own profit, reward, or satisfaction. His boss is not supposed to make a profit. The customer is not supposed to be the man who has earned the price of the product, but the incompetent or disabled who needs it. The purpose of the whole society is to work for and be inspired by the incompetent and the disabled. If the goods produced are supposed to be a value—then it is suffering and incompetence (the “death qualities”) which are rewarded, not success and ability, not the “life qualities.” It’s not only that the “life qualities” are penalized; it’s that the “death qualities” are made the inspiration, goal, and motivation of the whole society.

Also, every man in such a society is a beggar, whether he earns or doesn’t earn his “share.” A worker simply gives his effort—as alms to society. Whatever he gets in return is alms given to him by society (by other workers), since he has no claim or right to a reward; he does not sell his product, he gives it. It is not even supposed to be his to give; he has no property rights to his product or to himself, and therefore the payment he receives is not his in the proper sense of a salary earned, it is a gift, a charity from society. (His production gives him no right, but his need does. He may demand that others take care of him, but he may not take care of himself. Failure, misery, incompetence are to his advantage and give him a claim; effort and ability give him nothing.)

Re: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. ” In a normal human being, need and ability are exactly balanced. A normal man has the capacity to produce everything he needs—if he does not copy or borrow his desires from others, but stays within the bounds of his own mind, i.e., if he is not a second-hander who defines his needs or desires by envying (or wishing to impress) the men of greater ability who can produce more than he can—and if he lives in a free, capitalistic economy. (Besides, in a free, capitalistic economy the better minds help him to produce more than his own ability could produce if he were left entirely to his own devices.)

The only instance when a man’s needs exceed his ability to satisfy them is the state of illness—the sick, disabled, or insane; i.e., the abnormal.

Can society be geared to and ruled by the standards of the abnormal? Should normal men exist for the sake of the abnormal? Should the abnormal be the goal, inspiration and first concern of the normal? Can healthy men live on the regime of a hospital?

(Children, of course, cannot satisfy their needs either. But that is what constitutes being a child, what distinguishes a child from an adult. Childhood is growth into, preparation for, adulthood—for the state of independence, i.e., a state in which one can satisfy one’s needs. Should society be geared to and ruled by the standards of the incomplete, the unformed, the not-yet-fully-human?)

A system which penalizes honesty and rewards dishonesty is vicious. This is what happens in the “needs” society. Assuming that the goods produced are a value (and they are, since everybody’s goal is to produce them), and assuming that all the citizens have accepted the “needs” principle as their moral code—then an honest man, trying to be an altruist-collectivist, will have to minimize his needs, demand as little as possible from society and thus be penalized, i.e., get less value; whereas a dishonest man, preaching but not practicing the general moral creed, will exaggerate his needs in every way he can, demand as much as possible from society and thus be rewarded, getting greater value the more he was able to cheat (since every “selfish” demand is cheating, i.e., is breaking the altruist principle). The better you observe this moral code, the more you suffer; the greater your break of the code, the more you are rewarded.

Now, if the person himself is not allowed to present his demands and define his own needs—who does it? The vote of the collective? By what standard does the collective then decide and define it? What is a “need”—beyond a cave, a bearskin and a bone to chew? And can even these be determined by others? What kind of bone, for instance?

A man with no right to demand any payment and no right to define his own needs is in a lower position than a slave or a charity ward in a poor-house, and certainly lower than an animal.

In a capitalist system, a man is not asked to sacrifice himself or penalize himself. It is honesty that brings rewards—the honest exercise of one’s best ability, the honest production of valuable goods. Production has to be honest—when there are no controls or force involved to help one man to defraud others, no way to gain anything except through demonstrated ability, voluntarily accepted by others as a value. The man fully living up to the principle of personal ambition, personal responsibility, and independence is the man who wins, who gets the most value. There is no foothold or loophole for the dishonest. The man who cheats, who doesn’t produce or tries to be a parasite in any manner, is defeated by the system itself.

Note for Dagny and the old worker (who tells her about the beginning of the strike): He tells her about the terrible state of working in the “needs” system—when you hate your own effort, when you lose your self-respect by the constant pressure of the incentive to do less and less, the incentive not to do your best. You begin to hate all your brothers [because you] worry which one of them is going to develop new needs that will become your responsibility, your burden. You begin to hate them for every pleasure they may enjoy, you begin to meddle into their private lives, because if they break a leg it’s you who’ll suffer, who’ll have to work and pay for it; you begin to meddle into their sex lives, because if they produce more babies, it’s you who’ll have to carry the burden. You can plan nothing, count on nothing, you have no future, since you don’t know when or where someone’s need will claim your whole effort, regardless of what plans or ambition you may have had for your own future.

And since you do not approve of their desires or needs, you lose the incentive to work; you cannot work if the concrete result or aim of your effort is repugnant to you. And you have the nasty doubt of whether those brothers of yours will take care of you, in case you need something; you begin to suspect them and to hate them for this, too. Dependence breeds hatred—and you’re doubly dependent on them: in your aim and in your needs, in both your production and your consumption.

(If this cannot be told by the same worker, have Dagny meet some other ex-worker, who tells her this, earlier.) (I think this last, another worker, will be better—somewhere along her quest for the motor, but not in Chapter XI.)

More for above point: How can you judge the needs of your brothers and approve or disapprove? By what standard? You would have to take the attitude that you approve without standards, merely because this is what they want. But by your common moral code, they have no moral right to want or ask anything, they cannot define their needs either. Who does it, then? The elite super mind, of course. The dictator of the collective who is “the voice of the people,” who “exists only to serve and knows what is good for them.” This illustrates the real motive and appeal of collectivism. This is the secret ambition of all the collectivist professors.

Altruism seeks to patch the wounds of the sick by cutting off pieces of the bodies of the healthy.

April 26, 1949

Emotional Main Line:

Rearden hears Franciso’s speech on “money is the root of all good.” The next step of their friendship—but then Francisco tells of another [impending] crash of d‘Anconia Copper.

On the evening of Ken Danagger quitting: Rearden and Francisco-the furnace.

Rearden comes to Francisco—the mutual loneliness. Rearden tells him about ordering his copper—Francisco’s moment of tragedy, when he leaps to the phone, but he doesn’t call.

Rearden learns of sinking ship, loss of copper.

Dagny and Francisco in the country, when she has quit.

Blackmail of Rearden—[he gives in] for Dagny’s sake.

Dagny-Francisco-Rearden. Francisco comes to Dagny’s apartment, to stop her—Rearden enters with key—Francisco learns the truth—Rearden slaps his face. After Francisco leaves, Dagny tells Rearden the truth. Their love scene—he does not say it, but we know that he knows he loves her.

Questions

Integrate ending—after tunnel catastrophe. After whom does Dagny fly? (Would like something better than car manufacturer, more important to plot, main character rather than bit, if possible.)

Last Dagny-Rearden scene of this part?

How does Lillian discover truth?

The death of Colorado-specific events to cause it, and to bring about closing of the John Galt Line.

Tunnel catastrophe—integrate the parasites’ actions to main line of parasites’ activity.

Ken Danagger quits—specific hints leading up to it.

Ragnar Danneskjöld-?

April 27, 1949

The main line of this whole part should be centered on Dagny-Rearden-Francisco. The events of economic ruin should be subordinated to their personal conflict, should be merely indicated, not presented in detail. From now on, the steps of destruction are accelerated, and also the signs of the strike, the steps of the clarification of the strikers’ purpose, motive, and philosophy.

May 7, 1949

Stress the reason of everybody’s fudging and cowardice: people know that they now have to exist by favor, not by independent work and merit. Therefore, they must not offend anyone or criticize anything, they must not make enemies, they must try to make friends of everybody, they can’t tell on whose favor they may have to depend or when, they can’t tell at whose mercy they may be in the future. They do know one thing: that they are now in a world of arbitrary power and undefined values, that reason, justice, merit are gone—and therefore it is dangerous to be moral, it is useless to be honest, it is more important to have “friends” than to have virtue; this is a world where morality is being penalized.

May 10, 1949

For Galt’s speech:

“So you want to know who is John Galt? I am the first man of ability who refused to feel guilty about it. I am the first man who would not do penance for my virtues nor allow them to be used as the tools of my own destruction. I am the first man who would not suffer martyrdom at the hands of those who were kept alive by my energy, yet who wished me to bear punishment for the privilege of saving their lives. I am the first man who did not accept—neither in weakness nor in generosity—the miserable little enticement of affection offered by liars and beggars in exchange for my lifeblood. I am the first man who told them that I did not need them—and until they learned to deal with me as traders, giving value for value, they would have to exist without me, as I would exist without them; then I would let them learn whose is the need and whose the power—and if mankind’s survival is the standard, whose terms would set the way to survive.”

May 14, 1949

For Francisco’s Speech on Money

Another proof of the noble nature of money is that people are able to keep it only so long as they keep their virtues—and no longer. When men become corrupt, when they compromise, when they lose their self-respect and their courage—swarms of looters rise at once to seize their wealth, and the men are unable to defend it. When their money is unearned, when they do not have the proud, virtuous knowledge of their right to it—they are unable to hold it.

A man without self-respect cannot defend himself. A man without respect for his wealth cannot defend his wealth. But respect is an emotion which cannot be given or received as alms, which cannot be unearned and causeless. Respect is an emotion possible only to the trader—an emotion as ruthlessly just as the laws of gaining a profit. To respect his wealth, a man must know that he has earned it. To respect himself, a man must know that he has the capacity to earn and that he has translated this capacity into reality by producing a [value]. This is where the root of human virtues is tied to the root of human wealth.

May 16, 1949

For Dagny-Lillian

Lillian makes a crack about Dagny being successful in business because she doesn’t care for “power over men,” because she is sexless, men are not attracted to her. Then Lillian wants the bracelet back—Dagny refuses.

Lillian says: “Do you know what your wearing that bracelet should mean?”

Dagny answers that it should mean that she is sleeping with Rearden—sex as admiration, as an answer to one’s highest values.

“Then any woman should want to sleep with my husband?”

“Any woman who values herself highly enough.”

“Then what do you feel for me as his wife?”

“I am answering your exact words, Mrs. Rearden: the most profound respect. You are, of course, the only one to judge whether that respect is rightly yours.” [This last sentence was crossed out.]

May 19, 1949

Note on Morality

Man exists for his own happiness, and the definition of happiness proper to a human being is: a man’s happiness must be based on his moral values. It must be the highest expression of his moral values possible to him.

This is the difference between my morality and hedonism. The standard is not: “that is good which gives me pleasure, just because it gives me pleasure” (which is the standard of the dipsomaniac or the sex-chaser)—but “that is good which is the expression of my moral values, and that gives me pleasure.” Since the proper moral code is based on man’s nature and his survival, and since joy is the expression of his survival, this form of happiness can have no contradiction in it, it is both “short range” and “long range” (as all of man’s life has to be), and it leads to the furtherance of his life, not to his destruction.

The form of happiness which involves “a price” to be paid for it afterwards (“a price,” not in the sense of the means and effort to achieve it, but in the sense of a consequence which is evil to him by his own standards, such as the hangover the morning after a drunken orgy) is an improper form of happiness by that very fact, a sign that the man who finds enjoyment in it holds a destructive premise that must be corrected.

A man must, above all, be proud of his happiness, of the things in which he finds enjoyment and of the nature of his enjoyment. This is the difference between James Taggart and the strikers. The strikers find their joy in self-exaltation, in achievement. James Taggart finds his joy in evil—in cruelty, fraud, degradation of others to his own level. (For example, he takes pleasure in the fact that people are disgraced by paying homage to him, and he enjoys bringing them to this degradation.) His happiness is based on that which, by his own standards, is evil; his happiness requires evil. Man’s proper happiness must not depend upon or be derived from anything which is evil, low, contemptible, undesirable by his own standards.

The evil man is not the one who mistakenly believes that bad things are good and acts accordingly; this is only an error of knowledge, not a sin, not a moral flaw. The evil man is the one who loves evil for being evil. (The poor fool who indulges in sex while semi-believing that it is evil according to his church morality, is not wholly bad because he does not really believe that sex is evil. But this does destroy his self-respect and creates all kinds of miserable conflicts for him. The evil man is the one who, knowing that sex is good, takes pleasure in forbidding it and thus causing men to suffer.)

Man does exist for happiness; he has the right to seek that which makes him happy. But he is a being of free will, therefore a being who cannot exist without a moral standard (a standard of values). If he attempts to drop his own essence—reason—and to seek happiness in the irrational and the contradictory, if he evades his responsibility for his own emotions, if he lets his emotions rule him without thought as to where these emotions came from, permitting himself to be determined by his own feelings, which means by his own stale thinking, by his arrested reason—that is where he destroys himself and is unable to achieve any sort of happiness.

This is the key to the pattern of how men “suspend” their reason.

Another aspect: a man’s happiness must not include any evil as its essential element. This is the point which disqualifies the alleged happiness of an altruist. His happiness depends, by definition, on somebody else’s suffering ; he considers this suffering an evil, since he finds it so important to relieve and eliminate it, since he makes that the paramount aim of his life. Therefore, his happiness is based on an evil, and requires that evil to exist. In a world of happy men, he could not be happy (which, of course, is one of the reasons why collectivists achieve horrors).

If it is said that suffering exists in the world anyway, permanently and essentially, therefore it’s noble to combat it—then that is the malevolent universe. Man does not exist for suffering. Suffering is an accidental, “marginal” part of his existence, which he must fight in order to be free to exist in happiness; [a part] which he must overcome as quickly as possible—and not spend his life seeking, thus making it the aim of his life. The suffering which threatens men from physical nature is negligible compared to the suffering he brings upon himself and others. If man functioned properly in the field open to him and determined by him—the field of his choice, his free will, his thinking and actions—he would eliminate most, and perhaps even all, of the suffering caused by the accidents of his physical nature.

The essence of suffering is destruction. By acting on the premises of self-destruction, man brings about suffering, his own and that of others. And he acts on a premise of self-destruction when he places others above self. He acts against his own nature and theirs. The suffering of others cannot be made one’s concern. It is not within our power of action. It is not within the function of our nature.

Help to others can, at best, be only an incidental activity and then only on a “trader‘s” basis—such as help to a loved one, where one has a specific, selfish, personal reason for wishing to help. Just as one cannot conduct one’s own life on the basis of trying to avoid pain and holding that to be a final goal, just as one must live for one’s happiness and fight one’s suffering as an incidental on the way, so one cannot live for the relief of the suffering of others, as a goal—only this last is infinitely more improper.

And neither can one live for the happiness of others—because that involves one’s own suffering as an essential, since one’s happiness is not automatic, but has to be achieved by one’s own effort, and that effort is the chief duty of one’s life (essentially, the sole duty). One’s own happiness is within one’s own power, and one’s whole nature is tied to the necessity of achieving it; the happiness of others is not. This is the point involving and illustrating man’s essential independence.

Note in regard to Christian morality: The Christian moralists would accept the first paragraph of my statement here—but then, of course, the difference lies in the definition of the moral code involved. And that is where they would not accept the second part of my statement—the fact that one’s happiness must not include evil as its essential part. The Christian morality includes the most vicious evil as the most essential part of the happiness it advocates: self-sacrifice. This leads to all the vicious paradoxes of “be happy because you’re not happy,” “find happiness in suffering,” etc.

There is no conflict and no sacrifice necessary when a man functions on his proper moral standards. Giving up a party in order to write a novel is not a sacrifice, but plain common sense, an acknowledgment of the impossibility of “having your cake and eating it, too” or of doing two things at the same time. A rational man does not desire the impossible—and, therefore, feels no pain in not having it, and commits no sacrifice. The sense of sacrifice is possible only to the emotion-ruled man, who wants or feels without thinking. The happiness of man’s proper morality does not require his own suffering.

The essential test of any moral code or teaching is the presence or absence of the paradox. A paradox cannot exist. It is only the result and sign of man’s errors in thinking. If one accepts a paradox as an essential part of one’s moral code—right there is the sign that one has accepted a code untrue to reality, that one is in the realm of the irrational, and, therefore, one has accepted destruction as a principle, and as a goal of one’s conduct. (Besides, a code based on a paradox cannot be practiced; so this leads to the “lip-service morality” of preaching what one cannot practice.) Destruction is the result of a departure from reality. Man’s destruction is a result of his suspending his means of survival and his tie with reality—his reason. By accepting any sort of paradox, he destroys reality in his own eyes, he destroys his control over reality, his means of knowledge, he destroys his mind—and his destruction can be the only result.

A point requiring a great deal of detailed consideration is that the paradox is the chief symptom and the chief weapon of all the destroyers of man.

May 29, 1949

For “Money is the root of all good ”

“So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever looked at the root of money?”

The root of money—production. The root of production—the mind.

Money is the material form of a spiritual achievement.

To make money requires the highest spiritual values. (America is the first nation that ever spoke of “making” money.)

Money is the tool of a society of free men—men as equals—money as the guarantee that the product of your effort will be exchanged for the product of the effort of others, that you are dealing with producers—not with parasites or looters. Money is the symbol of your dealing with men whom you can trust.

Money is the tool of freedom—it gives you choice of everything being produced.

Money is the tool of your values—the means to exercise your values.

Money will buy happiness—if you understand both money and happiness. Money is your tool of achievement and enjoyment. It will give you the enjoyment that you create; but it will not buy you the second-hand kind of enjoyment, the source of which is in others. Money is your passkey to the services of other men—your means of dealing with them, not through force, fear, or suffering, but through the good—through offering them a value, a means to the achievement of their desires, in exchange for what you want from them.

But money will not become a tool of evil. Money destroys those who attempt to [make it such a tool].

Money destroys those who defy its root. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool. It will not buy the admiration and respect of men who understand these terms—for the man who doesn’t deserve them. It stands as the best guard of man’s virtues—the virtues needed for “making” money. Money always remains an effect—and refuses to become a cause. It will not give the parasite what he wants most—its own source—the unearned, undeserved virtues of the man who makes money.

Money is the hardest test of a man—took at the heirs who are wrecked by it. No man may be smaller than his money. Money is the barometer of a man’s character—if he claims to despise it, he’s making it dishonestly; if he is proud of it, he’s earned it and deserves it. [This paragraph was added later.]

In the hands of the producer, money is the means of security. In the hands of the looter, money is the agent of his destruction (as in the case of the criminal). Whenever a society establishes criminals-by-right, whenever the looter is permitted to rob legally—his money is the attraction for other looters, who will get it from him as he got it, achieving nothing but general destruction and slaughter.

Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue.

Whenever money is in the wrong hands, in the hands of those who have not earned it, in the hands of grafters and looters (whenever one can get richer by dishonesty than by honesty)—it is the sure sign that that society is evil, that it is corrupt and in the process of destruction.

[Note added later: Paper money—a check on an account which the bureaucrat does not own.

Money is the symbol of virtue. It cannot be made by nor will it stay in unclean hands. The highest virtues are required to make money—or to keep it. Men without courage, without pride, without the highest moral sense of and for their money (the men who apologize for their money)—are not able to keep it. They are the natural prey of looters.

Now, in the first real country of money in history—the country of production and achievement—men have come to regard money as the savages did. Throughout history, money was made by the producers and seized by the looters. Men have continued, in every different form, to exploit and despise the producers and exalt the looters. Now the one country of money is proclaiming the looter’s standards; its men of honor are the looter, the moocher and the beggar. Unless and until it accepts money as its highest, noblest standard—it is doomed to the destruction it is asking for and deserves.

Tears, whips and guns—or dollars. Take your choice, there is no other.

(When money ceases to be the tool—then men become the tools of the looters.)

(“You damn money and you all want it. So you damn yourselves.”)

(“When you denounce money, it’s always the heir-parasite or the crook that you denounce. What about the man who made the money? You denounce the parasite of the unearned—and, as cure, you wish everybody to become parasites of the unearned.”)

Outline of Money Speech

The nature of money:

The root of money—production, mind, virtue.

The money in your wallet as a symbol of trust—not of moochers and looters.

Definition of money—guardian of rights, independence, freedom, benevolence, brotherhood, integrity; the tool of your values.

Money as a scourge of the “reversers of cause and effect.” The things which money won’t do: buy happiness, intelligence, etc.

The heirs of great fortunes.

What happens when you acquire money by contemptible means—this is the root of the hatred of money. (The lovers of money are willing to work for it. Run from the haters.)

Sociology:

The apologizing rich won’t stay rich for long.

The looters-by-law: the rule of brutality. (The society of death.)

Money as a barometer of a society’s virtue.

The destruction of gold—paper money.

The consequences—the demoralization of men.

Answers to all the smears against money: made by the strong at the expense of the weak—your neighbors don’t pay you a just reward—charity, instead of competence.

The denunciations of the parasite and the criminal, the silence about the producer—what you are really after.

The industrialist and the scientist—the real benefactor.

History:

The history of glorifying looters and despising producers (and the source of the quote about the evil of money).

America—the country of money. The self-made man. “To make money.”

The rise of the looters’ standards here. The warning.

August 28, 1949

Note Regarding Art vs. Entertainment

The idea that “art” and “entertainment” are opposites—that art is serious and dull, while entertainment is empty and stupid, but enjoyable—is the result of the non-human, altruistic morality. That which is good must be unpleasant. That which is enjoyable is sinful. Pleasure is an indulgence of a low order, to be apologized for. The serious is the performance of a duty, unpleasant and, therefore, uplifting. If a work of art examines life seriously, it must necessarily be unpleasant and unexciting, because such is the nature of life for man. An entertaining, enjoyable play cannot possibly be true to the deeper essence of life, it must be superficial, since life is not to be enjoyed. (Why can’t a man like Graham Greene, for instance, write an “art” story which is also entertaining? Because his philosophical premises are false to life and could not be expressed in action, in plot, which means: in reality.)

Such is the credo of all the modern intellectuals who divide literature into “art” and “entertainment.” This school of thought will have two kinds of representatives in practice, both equally disgusting: the intellectual who will be bored by the best kind of plot story because “if it has suspense, it can’t be serious”; and the intellectual who will reject any element of seriousness in a story as “high-brow,” declaring ostentatiously: “Me—I don’t believe in ‘messages,’ I’m for entertainment” and hold that the burlesque theater is the highest form of art. These [two types] are, basically, the “saint” (of altruism) and the cynic who takes pride in wishing “to go to hell,” to be daringly evil.

Why does this school of thought always fail at the box office? Why doesn’t the public agree with these intellectuals? Because the public has not been corrupted by any serious acceptance of the essence of the altruist morality; the public thinks of altruism as some sort of innocent form of good will and charity to one’s fellow men. The public does not believe that enjoyment is evil. The public has never accepted the depravity of “if I enjoy this, it’s no good” and “if I enjoy anything, I’m no good.”

Incidentally, the intellectual does not enjoy anything; the dutiful form of boredom he [feels for] his chosen “art” works is certainly not enjoyment, but a kind of masochistic satisfaction in liking it because he’s supposed to like it, a form of quest for self-esteem on the pattern of: “There, I’m virtuous if I approve of this dull mess I’m supposed to like; I can’t really like it, but my trying to is my step toward virtue.” (Contrast the public enthusiasm for a hit play in the old days with the “sophisticated,” “we-don‘t-go-to-extremes” attitude of “smart” New Yorkers today.)

Test: do you enjoy a book or play for its own sake?—or do you “enjoy” it as a means to an end, the end being that self-conscious sense of acquiring some virtue from it? Joy is an end in itself. My pattern of enjoyment is: I’m good, and if this thing has given me enjoyment, then it is good. Their pattern is: I’m no good and if this thing has made me better, then it is good.

My pattern holds joy as its own end, man’s end. Their pattern holds joy and man as a means to an end—the end being God or the supernatural, since they hold that man exists “for God” (or for others, or for the universe, or for anything but himself). Any man’s enjoyment is based on his standard of values. I can enjoy an entertaining story because my standard of values holds man as a noble being and joy as his proper aim in life. They cannot enjoy an entertaining story because their standard of values holds man as depraved and joy as evil; therefore, they get to the paradox of enjoying only the unenjoyable. There’s another example of the use of the paradox. Man cannot escape from joy, as the altruists and mystics want him to; he can only pervert it into horror and sadomasochism.

This is an illustration of the morality of altruism in practice. So they preach that joy is evil? Well, they do achieve this much: their disciples lose the capacity of enjoyment altogether. And since joy is the means, the advancer and protector of life, the joyless creatures are ready for destruction; they have, in fact, destroyed themselves and their capacity for life. There’s altruism and its ultimate goal—destruction.

October 4, 1949

For Rearden and Dagny

He told her that: he feels contempt for her; she is a bitch, as vile an animal as he is; he wants no pretense about love, devotion, or respect, no shred of honor to hide behind; he will have her at the price of his self-respect.

Show him learning the opposite: that his admiration and respect for her are the source of his sexual desire; that his desire is for the possession of the highest woman he knows and is the expression of his greatest self-respect; that he loves her, i.e., she is the most important and precious person to him, as a person, not only as “a lay”; that instead of abasement, their affair gives him a feeling of elevation, it raises his self-respect, not destroys it; that he feels love, respect, devotion, admiration for her, all the real moral emotions, the ones expressing recognition of value.

His other sensual capacities: love of good clothes, good cars, good furniture (as in his office), good jewelry for Dagny, other “self-indulgent” luxuries for both of them, the jade vase in his office.

Jealousy of the other man in her life.

(So far, I have shown: that he makes her wear the bracelet of Rearden Metal; that he wants to leave his “official” life and go away with her and is happy with her; their understanding and respect for each other; that he turns against Lillian when she indirectly calls Dagny a gutter bitch; that he turns against Mayor Bascom when he insults Dagny; that he takes pleasure in Dagny’s greatness, that that arouses his sexual desire; that he takes pleasure in the thought of Dagny and another man, which is an unconscious acknowledgment that sex, as such, is great and beautiful, not evil and degrading.)

The incident of the ruby pendant: he learns that enjoyment of material luxury is an expression of spiritual values—the pendant would be meaningless to him on another woman (it would be meaningless on the most beautiful naked woman, if she were only a beautiful body); it would be meaningless if he had not earned it, if it had been given to him or if he had inherited it. It is not only that he wants her to have the pendant—he wants her to have it as a gift from him. Would it mean the same to him if she just happened to have the pendant? No. Would he enjoy giving it to some woman who craved it desperately, but who meant nothing to him? Hell, no.

He looks at her as a painting, but he wants the “painting,” and all it implies, in real life: the hopeless yearning versus the man of reality and action.

Tie their scene to his groping for the moral issue—to the nature of mistaken morality, of wrong moral values. And tie his feeling for her to his feeling for his work.

He tells Dagny he would like her to be his kept woman; she laughs, saying that she’d like it for a month or two, but asks: would he like her, just as she is, if she were nothing but a kept woman? “You couldn’t be!” “No, I couldn’t. But if I were, would you like it?” “I’d be bored to death.” He stops short, understanding the implications.

Rearden’s problem about sex is: he was bitterly disillusioned in his early experiences, and he resented the fact that he felt a violent physical desire that seemed to be independent of and in contradiction to his rational will and spiritual code of values. He concluded that sex is purely physical, and as such he hated it—it was a surrender of his will, a degrading necessity that held such an immense power over him, created such a violent desire, yet had no spiritual meaning.

He learns that the capacity of sex is physical, a mechanism for the use and expression of his spirit, the means of expressing in physical form one’s greatest celebration of life, of joy, of one’s highest self-exaltation and one’s highest moral values in regard to man—that is, in regard to himself and the woman of his choice. He learns that sex is the means and form of translating spiritual admiration for a human being into physical action—just as productive activity is the translation of spiritual values into physical form, just as all life is a process of conceiving a spiritual purpose, based on one’s spiritual code of values, then giving it a material form—which is the proper, moral, and complete cycle for man’s existence, for the relation of man’s spirit to physical matter. The spirit sets the purpose and uses matter as its tool, as material; the spirit gives form to matter. Just as pure “spirituality,” divorced from physical action, is evil hypocrisy—so is the materialism which attempts to have matter give man purpose, value, and satisfaction. Just as “Platonic love” is evil hypocrisy—so is purely physical sex, which is an evil destruction of one’s values.

He thinks that his guilt is that while admiring Dagny as the highest woman, he wants to degrade her by making her a tool for the satisfaction of his physical need. He thinks it’s evil that his response to the highest is sexual desire. He learns that that is precisely the high, moral quality of his desire for her. His desire is a response to his highest values. He learns that evil consists of the attitude of other men who are attracted, not by the highest, but by the lowest they know—by a mere body, with no regard for a woman’s character, or by a woman they consciously despise, this giving them a sense of their own elevation by contrast; the rotten self-fraud of men with an inferiority complex, men who try to acquire self-esteem by triumph over a woman they have estimated as worthless.

The wrap of blue fox, and the roadside restaurant in winter.

The conversation about the “kept woman”: the realization that they are much more capable of enjoying this than the drunken “playboy” at the next table. Dagny remembers the “reversal” at her first ball. He remembers her words at his party.

The flowers.

The cup carved of chalcedony.

The crystal glasses—and the way he holds the glass when she serves him the drink.

In contrast to his love of luxury: the way he enjoys nature, a sensual enjoyment, his body stretched on the ground in slacks and short-sleeved shirt. It is, of course, not a contrast, but the same thing—spiritual enjoyment of material nature.

Rearden as the man who is the master of physical nature, whose spirit is the master of matter—in factory, countryside, or luxury.

The evening when, on his way to her apartment, he feels loathing for the whole world, the shrinking feeling that he doesn’t want to touch anything : he has no sexual desire, no trace of it; then the sight of her against the city brings back his feeling of the world, the world in which he wants to act and work, and with that his sexual desire returns. It is an act of celebration—and he feels consciously that it is a great achievement of hers, a value, not a degrading sin, when he feels her experiencing pleasure and knows that she is capable of it, that she is celebrating life as he is.

The incident when he has an affair with her in her office—the deliberate contrast and “impropriety” of it.

His “sadistic” touches of this kind.

The way he runs his fingertips down the skin of her arm—here an example of the fact that he never indulges in the physical as such, i.e., merely as contact—the purely physical in this sense is meaningless to both of them—it is not the contact that arouses pleasure in them, it is the contact when it is an expression of their spiritual attitude toward each other at that particular moment. (Such as: their first affair as result of the train ride and the triumph which it represents; the way he takes her the next morning; their first scene in her apartment, the broken shoulder-strap.)

October 6, 1949

Philosophy of Sex and Morality

Note: The reason why people consider sexual desire insulting to a woman is, in the deepest sense, the fact that to most people sex is an evil, low, degrading aspect of man’s life. Since most people, in their philosophical premises, have damned themselves and life on earth, their sex desires and actions are an expression of evil (this is clearest in the case of desire for a woman consciously estimated as one’s inferior). On such a premise, sexual desire is insulting to the woman who is the object of it. Conventionally, the man is supposed to redeem this insult by the so-called higher, spiritual implications of marriage; but, if marriage is not involved, sexual desire is supposed to be insulting.

The twisted element of truth here is that sex has to have a high spiritual base and source, and that without this it is an evil perversion. But the actual relation of sex and spirit is not the way they believe: they believe that sex is evil as such, and that the spiritual aspects of marriage serve to redeem or excuse it, or make it a pardonable weakness which has no tie with and is opposed to the spiritual elements of the relationship. They do not suspect the essential, unbreakable tie between sex and spirit—which is the tie between body and soul.

On the right philosophical premise about sex, on my premise, it is a great compliment to a woman if a man wants her. It is an expression of his highest values, not of his contempt. In this sense, a husband would feel honored if another man wanted his wife; he would not let the other man have her—his exclusive possession is the material form of her love for him—but he would feel that the other man’s desire was a natural and proper expression of the man’s admiration for his wife, for the values which she represents and which he saw in her.

It is on the above ground that Galt feels no jealousy and no resentment of Francisco and Rearden in Dagny’s past. His reaction when he hears about Dagny’s affair with Rearden is simple, non-malicious envy—merely the shock of learning that another man has what he himself so desperately wants. It is also the shock of the possibility, which he has kept in mind all these years, that Dagny may love another man and he, Galt, may never have her, not even after she joins the strike. But it is not the conventional fury against the thought that another man degrades Dagny by possessing her.

Note how dreadful the general attitude on sex is: since all [the accepted] philosophies damn man, his life, and the earth—men’s attitude on sex is a degrading, ugly, corrupting evil, in all the many variations. And this is another proof that sex is the expression of one’s entire philosophy and attitude toward life. Since most people’s philosophy is a hodgepodge of contradictory bits, so is their attitude on sex. But man cannot exist without a basic philosophy, from which all his actions, emotions and desires will come.

The cheap little schools of “free love” attempt to glorify sex on a silly sort of materialistic basis—simply glorifying physical joy, considering themselves “vital as animals.” They are unable to discover a moral, spiritual premise to justify sex—so they try to enjoy it without any morality, and, of course, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t bring them any sort of spiritual happiness, and not even much satisfaction.

This is the same mistake as that of the materialists who—in protest against mystical morality—declare that existence on earth has nothing to do with and requires no morality. This attitude merely drives people back to church, to mystical morality—and people drag themselves back to it regretfully, reluctantly, knowing that it is unsatisfactory, that it cannot work—but knowing also that they cannot exist without some form of morality, some code of values. This is another example of the vicious cutting of man in two—and setting his spirit against his body.

My most important job is the formulation of a rational morality of and for man, of and for his life, of and for this earth.

(No wonder the advocates of religion are so insistent that “there can be no morality without religion.” They seem to know their danger point. There’s my main job.)

The basic issue, of course, is the standard of values. Good and evil—why? By what standard? Their standard is an arbitrary, “revealed,” unprov able “categorical imperative”—as they jolly well have to admit—and it rests on their conception of God, and is then translated into indefensible nonsense in regard to conduct on this earth. (For instance, why should charity please God as the highest virtue? Why should He be that unjust?) The standard supposedly is in another dimension, opposite and contradictory in nature to ours—yet we are supposed to live by it on earth, in this dimension. A rational morality starts with a standard of values (of good and evil) based on man, his life, and the earth; it starts with the fact that values are possible and necessary only to a being of free will who has to function through choice and purpose.

If any school of morality considers morality a social, not an individual, matter—i.e., a code for the relation of man to man, and not for man’s own conduct in regard to himself—then, of course, it will necessarily be a collectivist [theory] and it will not work. This is true of any religious morality or of any attempt at a “social” morality, like communism.

Both above schools of “morality” have this in common: that they begin by placing the standard of their code of values outside of man: God is the standard in one case, “society” in the other. But since man is the entity, the unit under discussion for whom the code of morality is being proposed, the proper standard of values has to begin with him.

Most blatantly obvious, in theory and in observable practice, is the fact that man’s moral code has to apply primarily to his own private conduct in relation to himself and his life—and that only on the basis of the right code toward himself will he or can he observe any sort of moral code toward others. Conventionally, it is thought that a man on a desert island needs no moral code. That is where he would need it the most. The proper code, of course, is: rational control of himself and his actions, a rational view of reality (identifying facts for what they are, to the best of his knowledge and capacity, being true to truth), the rational choice of his purpose and the action to achieve it.

Conventionally, both the religious and the social schools of morality make it appear that moral behavior is an obligation which man owes to others, but not to himself—that he has no selfish interest in morality—in fact, that his selfish interests are actually opposed to his moral code, but he must observe it as a sacrifice for and to others. Thus he is a sacrificial animal to God or to society—sacrifice, suffering, renunciation of happiness on earth are made [the essence] of his moral code. He must live for God, or society, or humanity, or the poor, or whatever; he is always taken as a means to some end—but he is never taken as an end in himself.

But we can see all around us that the men who are immoral toward others are first of all and more profoundly immoral toward themselves. The criminal or fraud or con-man is the irresponsible man who exists without a purpose, wastes his life and hurts himself more than he harms others. The liar is not “honest with himself, but dishonest with others”—he does not fake reality for others, while having a clear, honest grasp of it for himself; he is the one who fakes reality for himself, in his own mind, much more dreadfully and disastrously than he can ever fake it for others; he is the man who has renounced the rational identification of facts, the “being true to truth”—he is the neurotic full of complexes and in dread of ever facing reality.

Incidentally, if morality were merely a social matter, a code for the relation of man to man, then a plausible case could be made for taking “society” (or the collective) as the basis of moral values, for letting “society” choose the terms of the code, for the precept that “the good is whatever is good for society,” or for the idea that society itself needs no moral code—that the majority may do anything it pleases, since it physically can do it—that whatever the majority decrees, that is moral.

A good example here as to why a society or a man needs a moral code is the difference between what a man can do or may do. A man can cut his own throat—but he may not do it, if his purpose is to live. Society can become collectivist and destroy itself—but it may not do it, if its purpose is to exist, or prosper, or achieve happiness for any of its members. (Here again—the relation of morality and purpose is clear.)

Incidentally, it is debatable whether a majority can do anything it pleases, even in the crudest physical terms. Those who think it, think simply of a wild mob overrunning an individual or a small, opposing minority—simply in terms of physical numbers and physical force. But even this is not true: one man with a machine gun can defeat a mob. This is an example of “force” versus “mind and force.” Man cannot do anything by sheer physical force—his muscles have to be guided by his mind, his mind has to set the purpose of his actions—and right there is the illustration of why a majority is actually helpless as such, if its physical numbers are the only criterion of its strength. If it’s asked: but what about a numerical majority with a vicious leader or with a vicious idea?—then the answer is: on those terms, the question of the mind is involved, and then the man with the right idea will win, regardless of numbers; he will win, even if his following is much smaller than that of the evil leader—and he will also win even in the minds of the enemy’s following, to the extent of their intelligence.

Note for Francisco and Rearden

It is Francisco who tells Rearden what people’s attitude on sex is: the quest for self-esteem, when sex should be an expression of self-esteem.

This is the scene when, after their unfinished conversation at the mills, Rearden comes to Francisco’s suite at the Wayne-Falkland. Rearden asks how a man of Francisco’s intelligence can find any sort of satisfaction in the life of a playboy, in running after countless cheap women who have nothing but beauty. Francisco tells him that he has never touched any of those women—why the women keep up the pretense—and that he has loved only one woman in his life and still loves her.

October 26, 1949

“Being True-to-Truth ”

Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.

The essence of consciousness is identification. Our senses give us information about physical reality. Our mind grasps it, organizes it, identifies it, establishes conceptions—ideas. Our ideas about reality establish our emotions, desires, purposes, motives. The “spiritual” duty of our mind is to identify our ideas and all their consequences, all the functions and aspects of our consciousness as strictly as we identify the facts of physical reality. Here, too, our first and foremost (and probably only) duty is: non-contradictory identification. This establishes our moral character as a person—this is probably the whole essence of morality. (“A broken person is one who dares not admit to himself the nature of what he is doing.”)

Since existence cannot be contradictory, this rule of consciousness is the rule of morality—the life-serving principle. A contradiction, being impossible, has to lead to destruction—therefore, a philosophy containing paradoxes (particularly the intentional, conscious acceptance of paradoxes) has to have destruction as its ultimate result. (This is an important clue for the distinction between the “life” and “death” philosophies.)

To think over in this connection: the example of the certainty of a sleep-walker. Define the exact relation of how to set your abstractions in such a way that the concrete action follows automatically and correctly. This is both for general thinking and particularly for the process of writing.

November 5, 1949

For Speech on Money

There are only two possible societies: where men work for reward or where men work from fear—the incentive of joy or the incentive of suffering. These are basic, because man has, essentially, only the two sensations: pleasure and pain. Now, which of these two societies do you want?

If man is to work, not for his own pleasure, but for the pleasure of others, then others have to take care of him, of providing his pleasure. Then man in relation to his brothers is simultaneously a sucker and a beggar. Is that what you consider good? Is that the rule of a moral society? That—as against a society where the relationship of men is that of self-respecting, self-supporting, responsible equals.

Money is the tool of intelligence and of freedom. It requires judgment, in order to be produced and to be spent. When a man pays you in money, he leaves to you the choice of how to spend it. You are the judge of what you want to get in exchange for your effort. What would you prefer—that your employer decide what you should have and what he will give you?

The men who hate their work “because they have to work for money” are immoral. The fault is theirs—they are the kind who hate work or the kind who want others to support them in a work for which those others get nothing.

December 13, 1949

Main Points of Galt’s Cause

Man exists for his own happiness; he is an end in himself and does not exist for the sake of others.

If any man is asked to sacrifice himself for others, it means that he has something of value, some virtue, which they lack. Therefore, it means that the worthless is given a claim of priority over the valuable, the unvirtuous over the virtuous, the miserable over the happy. It means—whatever the standard of values, since it is only a value that can be sacrinced—that the good must be sacrificed to the evil.

Men of virtue, do you value your virtues as little as that? Are you willing to make them serve, feed and preserve those who are evil? Are you willing to support your own enemies? You are your own destroyers.

If the inferiors base their entire claim on the fact that they need the superior—then how can they enforce their claim and their exploitation, unless it’s the superior who permits it, accepts it, and works for his own destruction? It is the superior who makes possible his own torture, enslavement, exploitation, and ruin.

If they need you, while you do not need them—it is you who must dictate the terms. (There is no question of sacrifice between equals, or between any two men who have something to offer to each other; there is only a trade—a just, honorable exchange. Whenever sacrifice is [demanded], it means that one party wants something from the other but has nothing to offer in return.)

The great, primary error of the superior men has been the fact that they have accepted the morality of their own exploiters.

What morality is and why it is the cardinal need of man’s existence: man is a being of free will, he has to survive by conscious choice and effort, he has to choose his purpose and the means to achieve it. The choice of the means depends on the purpose, and the choice of the purpose depends on his code of values. A being of free will cannot choose, act, or exist without a standard of values. His standard must be himself-man’s nature. His basic, primary, essential purpose must be to live. He can live only in the manner proper to his nature—proper to man. He must understand his nature, define it—and that will give him his standard of values.

Man’s essence and sole means of survival is his mind—his capacity to think—his rational [faculty]. Any departure from it or denial of it is a destruction of his consciousness. A morality or standard of values not based on his reason is impossible for him to practice and can lead only to his destruction. He cannot live against and in contradiction to his consciousness. He cannot be good, if the “good” is that which is contrary to his nature, that which is impossible to him. Nor can he exist if he accepts himself as essentially evil: then his life, too, is evil—and he can have no desire to struggle for the continuation of the evil existence of an evil being. It is thus that he is set against himself.

The cardinal crime in morality has been the placing of the standard of values outside and beyond man. This was done by chopping man into two contradictory parts, set to war against each other: body and soul. Then the standard of values was placed in the alleged realm of this alleged soul, as an enemy of the realm of his body. This left man’s existence on earth without any morality; man had no code of values for this earth; in fact, to exist at all, he had to be immoral.

Man’s consciousness is not material—but neither is it an element opposed to matter. It is the element by which man controls matter—but the two are part of one entity and one universe—man cannot change matter, he can control it only by understanding it and shaping it to his purpose. (The distinction between “entity” and “action”—between noun and verb. The essence of being.)

Man’s soul or spirit is his consciousness—here, now, on earth. The ruling element, the control, the free-will element of his consciousness is his reason. The rest—his emotions, his memory, his desires, his instincts—all are determined by his thinking, by the kind of conclusions he has made and the kind of premises he has accepted.

The man of spirit is the man of the mind. He is the man who is not the slave, but the ruler of matter. He is the man who makes it possible for mankind to survive. He is the creative man.

The morality of the mind—to be true to truth. The great courage, integrity and responsibility that it requires. The only cardinal sin is the denial or suspension of one’s reason—the refusal to face reality, identify it and make rational connections. No man can go against his own mind—and that is why he cannot submit to force. The greatest field where this morality is needed and expressed is the field of material production.

All material production is an achievement of the spirit—of the mind. Every human creation has to start in the mind and be given form in matter—whether it’s a work of art or a commercial gadget. Every spiritual value of man has to be expressed in material form or action. What is a virtue, if man does not practice it or act upon it? The great courage and virtue of the producers.

The hatred for the producers is the hatred for man, for life and for this earth. Those who despise material producers are motivated by the desire for man’s destruction. They are the men of death.

The desire for the unearned in matter is only a consequence and an expression of a deeper, more vicious aim: the desire for the unearned in spirit. Those who want to seize the material wealth produced by others actually want the virtues of the producers, and they want to obtain them unearned and undeserved: unearned respect, unearned love, unearned admiration. They hope to obtain it by reversing man’s standard of values, by regarding all the virtues of life and of this earth as sins, and their opposites—the qualities based on and leading to death—as virtues.

The victims—the producers, the men of this earth—have accepted this monstrously evil reversal for too long. It has always been supported by force—the brute force of the organized destroyers—but the producers have submitted and obeyed, because they were disarmed morally; they had accepted the destroyers’ morality and never found their own.

The power of the “moral sanction.” It is not enough to be neutral about one’s productive talent; one must hold it as one’s highest, proudest virtue.

The free enterprise system—the system based on the morality of the producers—is now being destroyed because the producers have never [identified] their proper morality.

America versus India: which country [represents] the triumph of spirit over matter?

The present struggle is a conspiracy against the mind, a conspiracy against ability.

The men of production must set themselves free of the guilt which has been attached to them for centuries. Do not accept the destroyers’ morality. Do not submit to force. You do not need your exploiters. They need you. Let them try to get along without you. Do not give them that which they cannot force out of you, which they cannot obtain without your consent: your living power—the power of your love for life—your mind. Put an end to the use of your virtues for your own torture—and of your love of life as a tool of destruction and death. We are on strike against the morality of death. We are fighting for the morality of man, of life and of this earth.

December 19, 1949

[AR seems to have prepared the following for a conversation with Earl Reynolds, an employee of Kaiser Steel. She notes down some of his answers. ]

Questions Regarding Furnace Accident

1. The exact nature, cause, appearance and progression of accident? “Charge hangs up” in a blast furnace (can be from wrong ore).

2. The exact action needed to prevent disaster and the danger to the rescuers?

3. When alarm rings—who is supposed to answer it? Who should have taken care of accident, instead of Rearden?

4. Would coke ovens be operated late in the evening—about 8 p.m.? Yes. Do you call it a “door”? Yes.

5. Is it “structural shapes” that Danagger would get for his coal mines? If so, how much? Or is there a more essential thing which he could get direct from Rearden?

6. Is 500 tons of Rearden Metal (equivalent to 1,000 tons of steel) about right for the “quota”?

7. For Mr. Ward’s harvesters: how many would a modest sized plant put out in a year? How much steel would he need? 2,000-3,000 harvesters at about 1-2 tons per unit.

8. Is it “Purchasing Manager” of steel mills? Is line correct: “We’ll make it up on volume”? Tonnage.

January 28, 1950

Notes for Rearden’s Trial

The overall point: the sanction of the victim.

The looters try (e.g., through Bertram Scudder) to use the trial to discredit Rearden in the eyes of the public, to destroy his popularity, which is due to Rearden Metal. The looters are worried over the fact that the public, in gloomy silence, realizes the value and the productivity of the industrialists—as exemplified in the history of Rearden Metal.

The looters have tried to counteract it by a barrage of screaming about “greed, selfishness, the profit motive.” It has not worked. The public attitude is a glum, impassive silence. People say obediently: “Yeah, Rearden was after nothing but his own proiit”—but there is no condemnation in it, no anger or indignation; they say it without conviction—they have begun to doubt that that’s evil—they have no conviction about anything, neither in approval nor disapproval—they feel nothing but a gray, hopeless apathy. This worries the looters. They try—by means of the trial—to whip up hatred for the industrialists, for the rich, to make men like Rearden the goats and blame the national emergency on them—“they prevent the national plans from working, they break the regulations and thus stand in the way of the prosperity that the plans would certainly have given us otherwise.”

It does not work. Rearden’s attitude blows it up completely. They want Rearden’s admission that the “planning” and the controls are good, but that he selfishly ignored them. They want him to apologize for his action. He doesn’t. They wanted an industrialist’s endorsement of the public value of controls. They wanted it to be a debate over the “public good.” If he claimed that his action was for the “public good”—they would have had him, because nobody would believe it. They would have had the moral sanction. This is what he doesn’t do.

Dagny says: “Hank, that we should have come to do business like criminals!” He answers: “The real evil is our accepting it as being criminal. Ask yourself why plain highwaymen and robbers have never been a grave problem to mankind, but legal looters have made the whole of human history into a tragedy and a procession of horrors.”

[AR copied the following quote from Will Cuppy, critic and humorist for the New York Herald Tribune:] “If the insects do win and set up a government, how will they manage, without us to raise crops for them? Do they intend to exterminate mankind or will they let a few of us remain in some minor capacity, such as planting apple trees for the Codling Moth and cotton for the Boll Weevil?”

For Rearden: He is asked to contribute Rearden Metal for a slum playground. He asks: “What is more important—to give the slum a playground or to give Ellis Wyatt his pipeline?”

February 16, 1950

Notes for Government Encroachments on Railroads

Regulations are imposed in the name of safety “for passengers and employees.” First, the miserable condition of the equipment—which is due to lack of money, rising costs and wages, no permission to raise rates, low profits—causes accidents. Then, the accidents are used as an excuse for “safety” controls.

The purpose of controls is to eliminate the necessity of judgment (!) and to eliminate the competition, for the parasites, of the men capable of judgment. (The “freezing” of judgment. This is for “the moratorium on brains.”)

For the tunnel catastrophe: Government Board reinstates employees (with back pay!) who have been discharged for serious infractions of basic safety rules. (See p. 9 of Union Pacific Pamphlet.) Here—the pull of the labor leader who keeps “his men,” in exchange for control of union’s votes, etc.

April 24, 1950

[AR made the following notes for the scene in which the parasites discuss Directive 10-289.]

Elements for Parasites’ Scene

Stress the fact that the parasites lean on need, weakness, incompetence as the base and justification for all of their schemes. Show the “death principle” in practical application. [...]

Above all—show the hatred of ability and of the mind. The conspiracy against ability. The attempt to eliminate the necessity of judgment. The “freezing” of judgment. The attempt to substitute a mechanical security, an automatic routine, for the risk and responsibility of exercising one’s own judgment. The attempt to seize “the motions” of the able, to copy them, and to forbid the able to advance, forbid them to make any new “motions” which would destroy the “security” of the aping robots.

The directive is known as “Directive No. 289.” It requires Mr. Thompson to declare a state of total emergency—in the name of “total stability.”

In the scene: Mr. Thompson, Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, Mr. Weatherby, James Taggart, Orren Boyle, Dr. Ferris, and the labor leader (Fred Kinnan).

Main points of “Moratorium on Brains ”:

1. Everybody is attached to their jobs—cannot quit or be fired. (Freedom from worry.)

2. The industrialists are forbidden to quit—if they do, their property will be nationalized. (Freedom from risk.)

3. No more inventions and new products for the duration of the emergency. (Freedom from speculation.)

4. All patents and copyrights are taken over—to be used equally by everybody “for the public good.” Patents and copyrights are to be signed over to the nation “voluntarily” as a patriotic emergency gift. (Freedom from greed.)

5. Everybody is to produce the same amount as in the “basic year”—no more and no less. Over- or under-production is to be fined. (Freedom from exploitation.)

6. Everybody has to spend as much as they did in the “basic year.” (Freedom from privation.)

7. All wages, prices, dividends and interest rates are frozen as in the “basic year.” (Freedom from future.)

Their main cry is to “end instability”—to “achieve security.”

This will end “wasteful competition”—“we’ll close all research departments, we won’t have to worry about new inventions upsetting the market, we won’t have to waste money just to keep up with over-ambitious competitors.”

Their attitude is, in effect: things are getting worse and worse, to hell with progress if we can only remain as we are; we can exist now, but we won’t be able to if things continue going down, so let’s hold still. They are rolling down the slope of an abyss—and want to [stop] themselves by hanging on to a branch on the way.

Wesley Mouch acts like a cornered rat—his sole recourse is to get angry, with the petulant anger of an offended tyrant, as if the country’s troubles are an affront to him and people better do something, since he’s angry. He’s become used to the fact that people seeking favors are afraid of his anger—and he’s beginning to feel that his anger is the solution to everything, his anger is omnipotent, all he has to do is get angry. But the basic element in his anger is a rat’s fear. He keeps screaming “I’ve got to have wider powers! ... I’ve got to have power!” like an injured party, as if the guilt for everything is on those who haven’t given him the power. Wesley Mouch is the zero at the meeting point of opposing forces. (He is resentful of Mr. Thompson—he knows that Thompson has the power to kick him out, but won’t because Mouch has balanced the forces skillfully and Thompson is too dumb and too busy to break through the mesh.)

The white obelisk monument in the window. When they decide to pass the “emergency directive,” Taggart rises and pulls the blinds down over the white obelisk.

This is the scene of “nothing is anything—there are no absolutes—there are no principles—we must act pragmatically on the emergency of the moment.” Men without mind or morals running amuck on power—since what logic, morality or justice is possible under the unlimited rule of the “public good”?

The overall mood of the scene: fear. Fear of the public, of their own victims. “Can we get away with it?” This is where we see the power of the moral sanction—which these bastards know and dread, without acknowledging it in so many words. The public could have thrown them all off like tics—by moral means, by refusing to accept their actions as just. It is the victims who are making their own destruction possible.

July 16, 1950

Note for Tunnel Catastrophe

The disaster is made possible by the illusion of the old morality, on which people rely, even though it is not there any longer, they count on it after they have destroyed it. The old morality, which created discipline and confidence among the employees of a railroad, was the principle of rationality and of self-interest based on reason and rights: every man knew that the purpose of the railroad and of everyone connected with it was to run trains well, that this was in their common interest, that every man could expect a good performance from every other man, and that objective truth was the criterion and standard of justice.

If anyone tried to be a vicious exception and to pass the buck, he would be exposed and penalized, because the principle of objective truth was the standard, and the objective fate of the railroad enforced this standard upon the owners. Therefore, trusting this principle, everyone still trusts his superiors and carries out their orders; and the passengers do not even imagine that the railroad employees can have any motive other than to move them safely; they take this motive and safety for granted—with no thought of what it is based on.

But now, the purpose of the railroad is not the objective success of an objective performance—as it is not the purpose of the whole society and of its present economic system. Now, one lives, not by the objective result of one’s effort, but by means of and at the expense of other men. Therefore, every man on the railroad has only one interest: to gain an advantage over others, to protect the appearance of his performance in the eyes of authority, to be judged right, not to be right, and this at the expense of others. Therefore, every man has to fear and distrust all the others. Their interests now clash: one man’s loss is another man’s gain. The fate of the passengers means nothing to the railroad men, since it is not by the fate of the passengers, not by the performance of the train, that they are to be judged (and rewarded).

This is how, functioning on the dead hulk of a morality which they have destroyed, counting upon it when they have made it impossible, men come to the spectacle of a great physical machinery (the railroad)—built for safety [on the basis of] a moral principle (individualism)—becoming the tool of a dreadful destruction, instead. This is what the material shell will do, when its soul has been destroyed. This is all the good that the seizure of material wealth, without the mind, will do for the looters.

July 18, 1950

[AR continues her notes on the Taggart Tunnel catastrophe.]

The passengers “who weren’t guilty”:

The last one must be the most vicious insult to businessmen, applying unmistakably to Ellis Wyatt.

The man who said: “Why should Rearden be the only one permitted to manufacture Rearden Metal?”

The man who said that man exists for the good of society and has no other right or justification for existence.

The man who said that majority will is law—“society can do anything it pleases.”

The man who said that an individual’s conscience doesn’t matter; an individual has no right to any conscience, it’s just a luxury for prosperous times, not for emergencies—“In an emergency, society hasn’t time to bother about individual consciences.”

The man who said that there is no individual achievement, that individual effort does not count nor matter, that everything is done collectively.

The man who said that men are vicious morons unfit for freedom, that their natural instincts, if left alone, are to lie and murder—therefore, lies and murder are the only proper means to rule them and keep them in order.

The man who said that rewards and persuasion do not work, but punishments and fear do.

The man who saw no difference between the power of money and the power of a gun.

The man who believed that it is proper and moral to use compulsion “for a good purpose,” who believed that he had the right to use force upon others for the sake of his own idea of a “good purpose,” which did not even have to be an idea, only a “feeling,” not even knowledge, only a “good intention.”

The man who said that “poverty is so horrible that I don’t care if we use force, compulsion or murder so long as it’s for the poor.”

The man who said that the able must be penalized in favor of the parasite.

The man who said: “Me? I’ll find a way to get along under any political system.”

The man who said that there is no mind, there is no logic and men do not live by reason.

The man who said that there are no principles, no rights, no morality, no absolutes—and the practical way to live is to act on the expediency of the moment.

The man who “could not take sides” because he had to think of his children.

The man who was against Directive [10-289], but would not “be quoted” publicly.

The man who wanted controls to stifle a competitor.

The man who wanted the government to guarantee him a job.

The man who wrote sniveling little obscenities about the evil of businessmen.

The man who belonged to “The Friends of Progress” because it was fashionable.

July 19, 1950

For the passengers:

Main philosophic points:

Collectivism. (School teacher: “Unlimited majority rule.”)

Anti-ability. (Professor of sociology: “There is no individual achievement and there are no great men.” Humanitarian: “The able must be penalized.”)

The malevolent universe. (Newspaper publisher: “Men are vicious and must be ruled by force.”)

Power lust. (Journalist: “It is all right to use force for a good purpose.”)

Anti-reason. (Professor of philosophy: “There is no mind or logic” and “There are no principles, rights, morality or absolutes.”) Materialism. (Professor of economics: “The mind doesn’t count, it’s only a matter of seizing the machinery.”)

Anti-business.

Personal types:

The rotter who “can get along under any system.”

The man who “has to think of his children.”

The man who wanted to control a business competitor.

The worker who wanted a guaranteed job.

July 31, 1950

Note on Morality

Figure out (define the principle and the standard of moral guilt) who is more evil: Lillian or Ferris? Ferris or Toohey?

Lillian has two elements of truth in her: knowledge of Rearden’s greatness and evaluation of it as great. Then she acts against both.

Ferris has only one element of truth: knowledge of Rearden’s greatness. He does not evaluate this greatness as valuable or important. He acts against only one element of truth in him.

Toohey knows many more elements of truth than Lillian or Ferris, and acts against all of them.

Yet I have the impression that Lillian is more vicious than Toohey, and Ferris is more vicious than Lillian. Why?

There are two aspects involved here: one, the element of truth in a person, in the sense of correct perception; in this sense, Toohey is the best of the three. The second aspect is the acting against one’s own knowledge of the good, the doing of evil consciously; in this sense, Toohey is morally the guiltiest of the three.

Obviously, the issue here is between faults of knowledge and moral faults. By knowledge here I mean knowledge of fundamentals that would affect a person’s essential character, such as Lillian’s reaction to Rearden. I do not mean plain factual information or errors of information or lack of factual knowledge, such as is acquired in schools; I mean a fundamental perception. Define this and get at the principle and standard of evaluation involved here. It is important.

In connection with it: the capacity for enjoyment is a virtue, the result of truth, of right premises. Toohey, Lillian, Ferris, Taggart, and Mouch are all incapable of any sort of enjoyment. They have no terms in which they could actually enjoy anything. Toohey’s power lust gives him no enjoyment—neither does Lillian’s sense of power nor her malice—neither does Taggart’s pleasure in any failure of Dagny’s or Rearden’s. Orren Boyle is, perhaps, capable of some enjoyment, in the momentary form of some crude orgy. The others cannot even do that. Why? It is not merely a matter of intelligence; Orren Boyle is dumber than the others, but Mouch is even dumber than Boyle—yet Mouch is totally devoid of any capacity for or sense of enjoyment. Define the exact principle involved here.

Note: this line of thought started with the idea that a former friend who admires me will act more viciously toward me, if he goes bad, than would a person indifferent toward me in the first place, one who sees no special value in me. This is an example of the inability of eliminating a truth once a person has seen it—and with the growth of an evil trait, this truth can take a terrible form, become corrupted into a greater evil, in action, than if the person had never seen it in the first place. This is an example to analyze carefully in relation to the difference between truth (or virtue) as a trait of character (as the created personality), and the truth or virtue of an action (as a moral or immoral action, particularly in relation to the essence of immorality: the doing of conscious evil).

The reason why people who start out with many virtues and a few flaws grow progressively worse, with the flaws winning, is the fact that an evil cannot remain stationary: it must either be eliminated entirely or it will grow (like “a few” controls in a free economy). The question I ask myself here is: but what, then, happens to the virtues, which I consider indestructible (in the sense that a truth, once perceived, cannot be eliminated and replaced by an error)? Define this.

The difference between an error of knowledge and a moral error is that in the first case, a man does not suspend his consciousness (his reason), he is exercising it fully and he merely lacks all the necessary information; in the second case, he acts against his reason, he does not want to know and, therefore, he is guilty of the basic, cardinal sin (which, perhaps, is the one essential sin that embraces and contains all the others): the sin of suspending his consciousness, which amounts to suspending life or destroying the essence of life. In the first case, a man remains open to new knowledge, open to the possibility of correcting his error. In the second case, the man has closed the door to knowledge, therefore closed it to correction, and therefore his error (and his evil) will grow worse and worse.

August 27, 1950

[The following is from an early draft of the scene in which Francisco finds Dagny in her country home, after she has quit.]

[Francisco:] “If you had left TT then [twelve years ago], what would have become of it?”

[Dagny:] “Some botched form of existence, if any. Someone else would have been willing to bear the torture in order to keep it running.”

“Why were you willing to bear that torture?”

“Because I loved the railroad, I loved my work—and the torture was the price I had to pay for it.”

“Dagny, suffering is evil. One must never make terms with suffering. One must not accept it as normal. Suffering is the call to action, the call to fight it and destroy it—not to bear it.

“Why should love be tied to pain, as its permanent price? Why should the virtue of your ability, your competence, your intelligence, your great, living fire, be paid for by pain? Isn’t there some terrible evil in that, which you have accepted? The one evil, the root and source, which we must fight? The immor talization of pain? The damning of life as a chronic state of suffering?

“Dagny, by the nature and essence of existence, no paradox can exist. Pain is destruction—the sign of the evil, the wrong, the improper, the contradictory. Pain cannot be the natural accompaniment of talent, of creative work, of living activity. The essence of man’s life—creative action—cannot be the cause which has pain as its effect. If this is what you see around you, throughout man’s existence—then what sort of code are men acting on? Who caused that? Whose idea are you acting on and what sort of an idea is it? Do you realize that that is pure, naked evil—the idea of death? Virtue cannot and may not be tied to pain. When it is, then it is evil that we are serving....

“Have you ever wondered why the peddlers of the cannibal morality lay such a stress on imperfection? They are careful to make men think that the mere desire for perfection is evil, that it is a sin, the sin of pride. Why? Because this holds the whole secret of their moral code. It is the code of destruction—which cannot be practiced fully, or mankind would perish. But in that ghastly agony of the just-about, the approximation, through which they have dragged mankind for centuries, lies the only advantage they hope to achieve. If the man of virtue does not expect perfection, he will put up with undeserved pain. If the evil man does not expect perfection, he will escape the full punishment which he deserves, he will get the unearned, he will get—in spirit and in matter, in moral honor and in physical wealth—the rewards of the man of virtue, while that man of virtue will bear the evil-doer’s punishment. That is the whole heart of the ‘morality of imperfection.’

“That is what we’ve borne for centuries. Dagny! That’s the evil we have to end, once and for all. No part of our virtue, no work or product of it, must go into the service of evil. No part of it must be left unrewarded and unpaid for. No moment of our suffering must be spent for the sake of providing unearned joy to the looters. One hour of undeserved pain which we accept is an hour given to the looters, the hour when we make evil possible—the only hour that makes it possible—the act of feeding and supporting evil. That is what we have to refuse them. Nothing unrewarded and undeserved, neither in matter nor in spirit, neither in escaped punishment nor in uncollected reward. The code of the traders, Dagny. The code of justice.”

[AR commented later on the problems she faced in writing some of the philosophical scenes with Francisco: “It was enormously difficult to decide how much could be given away and where—and what should be saved for Galt’s speech. ” The above passages were probably cut because Francisco comes too close to identifying death as the standard of the parasites’ moral code—a point that AR had to save for Galt.]

January 5, 1951

Notes for Part II

As illustration of “Laws are made to be broken”—the state of the country now is such that one cannot survive (or get rich, which is the same) except as a criminal: by breaking the looters’ laws, by paying for pull, by paying for the right to exist. The “death principle” is now almost blatantly obvious; you have to pay for the right to live—existence is now a crime.

Make use of Danneskjöld’s gold given to Rearden. If possible, have it become the only money left to Rearden, his only means of escape.

Make issue of the copper shortage (in connection with or leading up to the final, total crash of d‘Anconia Copper).

Make issue of Danneskjöld’s blockade against the production of Rearden Metal by the looters.

To consider (as a possibility): the importance of California (or the West Coast) to the final disintegration and to Project X (the rule of brute force)—this was why Mouch wanted Kip Chalmers to control California. This could also be why parasites have to hold the main line of TT, rather than the Minnesota Line—thus sacrificing production to political power. They would rather have more semi-starving people to loot than to have more production—they cannot permit production.

March 20, 1951

Note for Galt’s Speech

“Live and let live is our moral code. The code of our enemies, the code of evil, is the code of death. It will work out to its logical conclusion and it will destroy them; but we will not save them, will not give life to their evil, will not make it work. Thus, toward them, our code is: live and let die. Anyone who desires be an irrationalist—let him perish by his own ideas, but do not help him to destroy the world and yourself. You cannot hold mercy above morality. To make terms with that which you consider evil, to be an accomplice of evil, to betray your own moral standards, in the name of ‘mercy’—and to hold this as moral—is the lowest corruption ever devised by men.”

March 21, 1951

Key economic events for Part II:

“Unification” of railroads.

“Unification” of steel.

Crash of d‘Anconia Copper.

“Soybean project”—freight cars—collapse of Minnesota.

Closing of Minnesota Line.

End of Rearden Steel.

Collapse of Taggart Bridge (which is end of TT and of New York).

This is the rule of the brute—the economics of gangsters, the mixture of production and guns, the “expediency of the moment,” the plain, crude attempt to seize whatever’s still available, with no pretense of any plan or thought of the future.

March 24, 1951

Chapter I: Atlantis

Dagny-John Galt.

The music of Halley’s Fifth Concerto.

The sign of the dollar.

The car coming to meet them—Hugh Akston, Midas Mulligan. (“You’re in the arms of the inventor of the motor.”)

Ellis Wyatt passing them on the street.

Galt’s house—the famous surgeon—the breakfast.

Quentin Daniels.

The industries of the valley.

The restaurant and the shop.

The Mulligan Bank.

The power plant (Galt’s motor). (Mind and body.)

The grocery store and general store.

Dwight Sanders undertakes to fix her plane.

The dinner at Mulligan’s house: Galt, Akston, Mulligan, Richard Halley, Ellis Wyatt, Ken Danagger, Quentin Daniels, Judge Narragansett, Dr. Hendricks. Her feeling about heaven and meeting all the great men. Galt’s explanation: “We’re on strike.”

Galt drives her back to his house. She asks, on the way: “What do you call this place?” “I call it Mulligan’s Valley. The others call it Galt’s Gulch.” “I’d call it—” but she doesn’t finish.

He takes her into his guest bedroom. Hands her the gun. “Have you forgotten that you wanted to shoot me on sight?” (The contradiction in her premises, which she will have to resolve.)

She notices the inscriptions on the wall: “You’ll get over it—Ellis Wyatt.” “It will be all right by morning—Ken Danagger.” “It’s worth it—Roger Holt.” She asks him about it, he explains and adds: “This is the room you were never intended to see.... Good night, Miss Taggart.”

Chapter II: The Utopia of Greed

The next morning: Galt is called out, she is fixing breakfast, when the blond stranger rushes in. “Oh, have you joined us?” “No, I’m a scab.” Galt comes in, introduces them—Ragnar Danneskjöld. Explanation about her account.

She becomes Galt’s paid cook and servant—for a month.

The arrival of Owen Kellogg. He tells her about the Comet’s trip, he has arranged a job for Jeff Allen with the Taggart man at Laurel, she is thought to be lost in plane crash, he has spoken on the phone to Rearden. She asks Galt to let Rearden know—he answers: No, there is no communication with the outside world for a month.

Francisco’s arrival. The scene between them.

The progression of the Galt-Dagny romance. The scene where she has to make her choice. He tells her about the universal longing for the ideal: “It’s real. It’s possible. Here it is—and it’s yours—but at the price of dropping every delusion of mankind’s vicious past, every error of the centuries of self-immolation, including the willingness to suffer unnecessary pain and to endure injustice.” Her reasons: her last hope for the power of rationality and of man’s self-interest, which will make her win over the looters. He tells her she will have to discover whether those men really want reason or life.

He flies her out of the valley. “Don’t look for me. You won’t find me until you really want me—with no contradictions and for what I really am. And when you’ll want me, I’ll be the easiest man to find.”

July 6, 1951

For Mulligan’s Dinner

1. Richard Halley (new symphony)

2. Judge Narragansett (book on the philosophy of law)

3. Dr. Hendricks (medical research—disinfectant)

4. Ellis Wyatt (shale-oil research)

5. Ken Dannager (mine prospecting)

6. Midas Mulligan

7. Hugh Akston (book on the philosophy of reason—“the single absolute”)

Quentin Daniels
John Galt (his laboratory is in N.Y.)
Dagny Taggart

“Gentlemen—Taggart Transcontinental.”

Mulligan’s house—selection, not accumulation.

“We don’t make assertions”—Akston.

Daniels on the floor—Gait apart, on the arm of Akston’s chair—Akston’s gesture—the abnormality of it all being so natural.

Galt: “We’re on strike.” The only group of men that has never struck before—who can’t get along without whom—the penalizing of ability—the penalizing of virtue for being virtue—the torture of the best by means of the best within them.

1. Akston: he quit in protest against intellectuals who teach that there is no intellect; he did not want to make that possible for them; let them try to exist without the intellect.

2. Mulligan: he quit because, when he saw money handed to need, he saw the bright faces and eyes of men like young Rearden being tied and bleeding on altars at the feet of Lee Hunsacker.

3. Judge Narragansett: he quit because he could not accept the opposite of the function he had chosen: he could not accept the position of ajudge dispensing injustice—the vilest injustice conceivable to his judicial mind.

4. Richard Halley: he quit because he would not be a martyr to those whom he benefited. He had been willing to accept anything and give them anything; if they had said: “Sorry to be so late—thank you for waiting,” he would have asked nothing else. But it was the smug cannibals who claimed that it was his duty to accept the torture inflicted on him by their stupidity, for their sake—the cannibals who make a virtue of spiritual impotence, just as they make a virtue of material impotence—the cannibals who demanded the unearned in spirit, just as they demand it in money—that made him quit.

5. Dr. Hendricks: “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation?”—the kind of skill and devotion required—he quit because he could not let that be at the mercy, command and disposal of men whose sole qualification and right to rule him rest on their cowardly, evasive brutality. In all the discussions of socialized medicine, men discussed everything, except the wishes, will, and choice of the doctors. Men considered nothing but the “welfare” of the patients. Well, let them cure themselves and exist without him.

6. Ellis Wyatt: he quit because he knew that it was his blood—his carcass—they needed in order to survive.

7. Ken Danagger: he quit because he did not need them.

8. Quentin Daniels: he quit because he could not deal with unreason. The scientist who deals with unreason is the guiltiest man of all.

9. Galt: he abandoned the motor, because he knew that it would do men no good without a mind able to understand it.

The history of the valley: first, just Mulligan’s private retreat, then Judge Narragansett joined him, then Richard Halley. The others stayed outside, [living by] their rule: do not work in your true profession, do not exercise your ability, do not give men the use of your mind. Their assignment outside: to watch men of ability, to approach them when they’re ready and to pull them out. They all went on working at their professions, but sharing nothing with men, giving nothing. The yearly vacation—one month to rest and to live in a human world, in society as it should be.

Then, particularly since the destruction of Colorado, they began to join Mulligan and settle in the valley, because they had to hide. They converted their wealth into gold or machines. The valley is not a state, not an organization of any kind; it is a voluntary association held together by nothing but every man’s self-interest. Mulligan owns the valley and leases the land to the others. Judge Narragansett is the arbiter, in case of disagreements; there haven’t been many. (This code of principles is the Constitution of the United States, without the contradictions: the code of inalienable individual rights.)

The valley is now almost self-supporting, so that most of them can live there full-time and earn their living (Dr. Akston, Owen Kellogg, the young porter). Mulligan takes care of dealing with the outside world for the purchase of goods that they cannot produce in the valley; he has a special agent for that (Ragnar Danneskjöld). Soon they will all have to live in the valley exclusively—because the world is falling apart so fast that the outside will be starving; but they will be able to support themselves here. (The frozen trains, etc., are not part of the strike—they’re the natural response of whatever rational element is left in people, the same kind of protest, the natural, inevitable break-up.)

[The strikers] had started with no time limit in view, but now they think that they will see, and soon, the day of their triumph and their return. When? When the road is clear, when the looters have collapsed. Let the looters collapse without the mind—let them get out of the way—then Galt will call off the strike and they will return to the world.

They speak of their professions which they are still pursuing, each naming his particular work.

Galt points to the roads of the valley—“the most expensive roads in the world.” The men who could do only physical labor or road-building are now starving for lack of jobs which they cannot originate—while the men who could have provided jobs, factories, automobiles, radios, if they were free and their time were released, have, instead, been building roads. “We can survive without them. They can’t survive without us.”

June 30, 1951

Notes on Emotions

All emotions are [responses to] judgments of value.

The fundamental division is: pleasure and pain. This applies to physical sensations and to emotions; the emotional equivalent of pleasure and pain is joy and sorrow.

Classification of Emotions

I. Emotions toward oneself

Positive: Self-respect, pride, confidence, assurance

Negative: Self-contempt, shame, guilt, self-doubt

II. Emotions toward objective reality (toward events)

Positive: Joy, hope (?), interest (?)

Negative: Sorrow, fear, disappointment, frustration, boredom (?)

III. Emotions toward other people

Positive: Admiration, respect, affection, love

Negative: Contempt, anger, hatred (Fear—? Fear is felt toward an event or an action of the person, not toward the person)

The single emotion toward an objective to be reached-desire.

Compassion—don’t know where to classify. (?)

Analyze which are primary, which are combined emotions—and define the kind of valuations that are involved in the primary emotions. This could be a basic chart for the specific provisions of a code of ethics.

Question to analyze: since all valuations pertain to a realm of choice and are acts of choice, perhaps emotions can be felt only toward actions, not toward static entities. This may clarify the exact connection between one’s emotions and one’s actions. Emotions toward people are toward the entity of a person—but they come from one’s estimate of that person’s actions. We feel the emotion toward that quality of a person’s character which was responsible for the action. The same applies to emotions toward oneself. Emotions toward objective reality are all estimates of events, past, present or future, which [are] means of actions. The emotion of desire (to reach an objective) is toward action. (The one exception seems to be esthetic pleasure—which is admiration for an attribute of a static entity: physical beauty.)

December II, 1951

Elements of Chapter II

Three main lines: Galt-Dagny, Francisco-Galt, and Dagny-the valley.

Scenes:

1. Dagny-Richard Halley.

2. Dagny-Kay Ludlow, after the theater performance.

3. Galt’s lectures.

4. Dagny-young mother.

Dagny—plan of railroad.

5. Dr. Akston, his three pupils, and Dagny.

(Akston on emotions as the philosophical “summary” of a man. The essence of being: identification—the joke on the body and soul preachers—the “bottling up” of the soul in a jail—why his three pupils have accomplished everything.) [This paragraph is crossed out.]

6. “From where have you watched me all these years?” “What is your job in the world? Don’t tell me that you’re a second-assistant bookkeeper!” “No, I’m not.”

The “sensual” pleasure of cooking for Galt, the relationship of being his servant. (“You could hold me here.” “I know it.”)

7. Rearden’s plane.

8. Scene where Francisco guesses Galt-Dagny romance. (Francisco asks Dagny to move to his house; Galt refuses.) (Scene where Francisco passes by Galt’s house.) [The last sentence was crossed out.]

9. Scene where Dagny decides to go back.

January 4, 1952

Scenes for Chapter II (Tentative)

Scene where Dagny decides to go back (two days before last, June 28): here the dialogue between Dagny and Galt is about love, but never directly. It is their declaration that they love each other—they both understand, but nothing is said openly. In her mind, interspersed with the things she says aloud, are the lines of her speech of dedication: “You whom I have always loved and never found ...” He tells her that the ideal is here, it’s real, it’s possible, but...

(Write the two themes in counterpoint, so that his words underscore and answer the words in her mind—so that the whole is clear and is a declaration of love, but only as a whole, not in what either of them says aloud.)

Scene where Francisco discovers Galt-Dagny romance (toward end of month). “And you said that I was the one who took the hardest beating! ... I should have known it. I should have known it twelve years ago, before you ever saw her. I have stated it myself. You were everything that he was seeking, everything he told us to live for or die, if necessary.”

[Added later:] Galt had said to Francisco, in sending him to Dagny: “If you want your chance, take it. You’ve earned it.” Francisco says: “Take it. You’ve earned it—and it wasn’t chance.”

Here, too, the counterpoint dialogue. Nothing is said openly—everything is said through their mutual understanding. Francisco’s attitude: I understand, I approve, it’s as it ought and had to be. Galt’s attitude: I’d give anything not to hurt you—anything but this, because this, as you know, is beyond sacrifice. Dagny’s attitude: It’s true, but I’ll only hurt him as I’ve hurt you, and my price for it is that I’m hurting myself right now as much as both of you have suffered—but it is a price that I have to pay. Yet, through this, simultaneously, she feels “the sense of enormous rightness” and a sense of joy—for all three of them, for being alive. (It’s Galt who expresses this last, who gives voice for all three of them to the sense of joy, to their sense of existence.)

Scene of the “non-sacrifice. ” Elements for it: Francisco tells Dagny about Galt sending him to her in the country. Galt refuses to let Dagny move to Francisco’s house. Dagny is set free of the fear of sacrifice—she sees what ugliness this would have been if they had acted on the moral standards of the outside world.

[Note on the writer who was a fishwife in the valley:] Galt tells Dagny that the girl is in love with him—and mentions the contemptible paradox of the outside world’s attitude toward unrequited love: men hold love to be a supreme virtue, yet a woman who loves a man without answer is supposed to be ridiculous, she is supposed to hide her feeling as some sort of disgrace or shame, in order to protect her “pride,” or else she makes a claim and a burden upon the man out of her unrequited feeling and pursues him, half as a begger, half as a sheriff. But here, love is [held to be] what it actually is by its nature: a recognition of values and the greatest tribute one human being can give another, gratefully to be accepted, whether one returns it or not.

Scene of Rearden’s plane. This comes after some scene where Dagny is violently happy about her relationship with Gait—after some clear indication of his love for her and of her happiness with him. The plane serves as the climax or last incident of the contest among the three men in her mind. It is Galt who wins—the scene must end on some indication of this.

Scene of Dr. Akston, his three pupils, and Dagny. (For philosophical theme—“emotions as the philosophical summary of a man.”) [This last sentence was crossed out.] For personal theme—Akston’s reminiscences about Galt, Francisco, and Danneskjöld in college. This will show us what sort of men they were and how they faced their future. Francisco—the richest heir in the world; Danneskjöld—the European aristocrat, without money, but with the sternest tradition of honor and nobility; Galt—a wholly self-made man, out of nowhere, penniless, family-less, tie-less, son of a factory worker in Ohio, left his home at the age of twelve and has been on his own ever since. (Akston refers to him as “Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, who was born ready and whole out of Jupiter’s brain.”) Akston mentions their choice of physics and philosophy as their major subjects—and their reasons: the union of mind and body.

(This might be the place to state their attitude on religion—the atheism of all four of them. “Do you believe in God, Miss Taggart?” “God, no!” “That’s about all that one needs to say on the subject. We are here concerned with reason. It is a big enough job—enough for the life of any man.”)

Show Akston’s love for his three pupils, his paternal devotion to them—past and present. For present, such touches as: “Don’t sit on the ground, Francisco. It’s getting chilly. You’ve always been careless about taking chances.” Akston calls Dagny “Miss Taggart”—then, after a specific reference to the three men as his sons (and after some hint of the Dagny-Galt relationship), he suddenly addresses her as “Dagny” and she sees him looking at Galt. This is Akston’s acceptance of Dagny as his daughter—as Galt’s wife.

Scene of temptation. The night when Galt and Dagny almost surrender to an unendurable desire for each other. She sees the look and the torture of desire in his face. (“Do you wish to hold me here?” “More than anything else in the world.” “You could hold me.” “I know it.” Then: “It’s your acceptance of this place that I wish. What good would it do me to have your physical presence without any meaning? That is the sort of fraud on reality which people cheat themselves by. I’m incapable of it.”) He is first to leave—to go to his bedroom. She lies in bed, tortured, unable to sleep. She wonders whether Galt is tortured in the same manner. She hears no sound, sees no light in his room. Then she hears the sound of a step and the click of a cigarette lighter. (Then—she hears the steps outside and hears Francisco speaking to Galt. She learns that Galt had been sitting on the sill of his open window, smoking a cigarette. Francisco is on his way home from Richard Halley’s house. They speak for a few moments, then Francisco walks on. She realizes that Francisco has no suspicion of any attraction between her and Galt—and now Francisco can be certain that they do not sleep with each other.) [This last parenthetical passage was crossed out.]

Scene of Galt telling her about his first sight of her. This must come in some context such as the one at the power house, so that when she asks: “When did you see me for the first time?”—the question actually is: how long have you been in love with me? He tells her that he saw her ten years ago, one night, on the underground platform of the Taggart Terminal. She was wearing an evening dress, a light, flowing, ice-blue gown, like the tunic of a Greek goddess, with the short hair and imperious profile of an American girl. She had a fur cape, half sliding off her body, he saw her naked back, shoulders and profile, it looked for an instant as if the cape would slide further and she would stand naked. She looked preposterously out of place on a railroad platform—it was not of a railroad that he was thinking, and yet it was, she did belong here, she was the real spirit and meaning of it, luxury and competence combined, energy and its reward. She did not seem to be aware of her clothes, she was giving orders to three men, her voice clear, swift, confident, she was intent on nothing but her work. He came close enough to hear two sentences: “Who said so?” asked one of the men. “I did,” she answered evenly. That was all. That was enough. He knew that this was Dagny Taggart—and he knew, then, that he was in love with her. She wonders which one among the streams of passengers that she ignored had been Galt—she wonders how close she had then come and had missed. “Why didn’t you speak to me, then or later?” she asks. He says: “Do you remember what you were doing in the terminal that night?” She remembers vaguely that she had been called from a party she was attending, because the new terminal manager had caused some mess—the old one had quit a week earlier. He says: “It was I who made him quit.”

Before that night, Galt had heard about Dagny from Francisco, but very little: Francisco had told him that she was one of them, that she was the sole hope and future of Taggart Transcontinental, but that TT would be hard to destroy, because she would be their most dangerous enemy, she would be very hard to win for their strike, she had too much endurance and devotion to her work. Francisco had spoken briefly, dryly, non-commitally, as if merely reporting on a future striker. Galt knew that they had been childhood friends, that was all. After Galt had seen her, he began to question Francisco about her whenever he could. He noticed that Francisco was eager to talk about her, in spite of himself. He realized what Francisco’s past with her had been, that she had been Francisco’s mistress, that Francisco had given her up for the strike and was still desperately in love with her. But Galt never let him guess the nature and reason of his own interest in her. It sounded merely as if he were questioning Francisco about an important future striker. The scene ends on Dagny wondering whether Galt intends to sacrifice his own love for the sake of Francisco.

Smaller, preliminary scenes: (1) Scene where Dagny asks Galt from where he had been watching her and what job he holds in the world; he refuses to answer both questions. (2) Dagny and Francisco in his house. (The two silver goblets—he’s never used them; they’re all he wants to save, everything else will go, in a few months.) His design of a copper smelter, his talk about his first d‘Anconia Copper mine, here, in the valley; instead of the doubled production he had dreamed about, he might produce only a single pound of copper at the end of his life, but he will be richer than with all the tons produced by his ancestors, because that pound will be wholly his, with no part of it feeding the looters. (The start of d’Anconia Copper—and of the world—has to be in the U.S.) In this scene, there is a touch of possibility of her love for Francisco. (3) Scenes of Dagny and the valley: Galt’s lectures; Dagny-Richard Halley; Dagny-Kay Ludlow; Dagny-young mother. (4) Dagny and the plan for the railroad (then—“what for?”) (5) Scene where they discuss Dagny’s departure: Dagny, Galt, Francisco, Mulligan, Akston. Here they beg Galt to remain in the valley, he has no further reason to stay outside; but he says that he has not yet decided, he might stay outside—for “the one thing he wants for himself” (though not in any collaboration or compromise with the looters—nor with the “scabs,” this is not for Dagny, but for him).

Think over: whether to indicate the economic future of the world when the strikers return—and Judge Narragansett’s proposed amendment to the Constitution.

January 5, 1952

Decisions to Make for Key Scenes

[The answers to these questions seem to have been added later.]

1. Scene of Galt telling Dagny about the past: Where does scene take place? In his house. What form of temptation leads to her questions ? He finds her asleep, waiting for him.

2. Rearden’s plane: In what context? What precedes and follows her sight of the plane?

3. Temptation scene: What leads to it? (Combine with 1.)

4. “Non-sacrifice”: In what context? In context of: “If you want your chance, take it.” Where does scene take place?

5. Francisco’s discovery: Where does scene take place? In his house. What gives him his final clue? Galt’s decision to go back to job.

Tentative order of scenes (Chapter II):

1. Scene of Galt telling Dagny how he saw her for the first time. (Preceded by her question about how he watched her and what is his job in the outside world.) (He finds her asleep. The story is followed by the temptation scene.)

2. Dagny-Francisco, in his house.

3. Dagny-the valley (Galt’s lectures, Richard Halley, Kay Ludlow, young mother).

4. Dagny—plan of railroad. (“I won’t ask you—you’ll tell me when you’ve decided.”)

5. Dr. Akston and his three pupils.

6. Rearden’s plane.

7. Scene of “no-sacrifice.”

8. Discussion of Dagny’s departure. (Talk of danger to Galt, of break-down and Taggart bridge, makes her decide to go back.)

9. Francisco discovers Galt-Dagny romance. (They walk home together and stop at Francisco’s house. Question of Galt going back to his job. The two silver goblets. “Take it. You’ve earned it.”)

10. The flight by plane, and their parting.

January 6, 1952

Note on Paradoxes

The essential paradox, which is the root of all philosophical errors, is as follows: to substitute for an abstraction one of the concrete applications of that abstraction, and at the same time make that concrete contradict and invalidate the abstraction. Example: when a man decides that thought is not valid, that he will not think, but will instead obey the orders of a dictator, it is an act and decision of thought; he substitutes specific “political thought” for the general abstraction of “thought,” declares thought to be invalid and holds this as a justification for the thinking which led him to decide to stop thinking about politics and to obey political orders.

June 7, 1952

For Taggart and Cherryl

Taggart’s desire for the unearned spiritually—he does not want Cherryl to rise, he wants his “love” for her to be alms and he wants her admiration for him to be sincere, but unearned; her torture under an impossible paradox. Her horror when she realizes that his love was in answer to flaws, rather than in answer to values (the exact opposite of the Rearden-Dagny romance). Taggart’s hold on her through her pity; he stops her doubts by means of his whining and her generosity—until she sees the truth. She thinks that suffering is still a sign of the good in him, of his struggling for something—until she realizes what the nature of his suffering is: his frustrated desire for destruction. (Her struggle with “culture”—her boredom with the Eubank kind of art, her bewilderment at the revivals of classics, Taggart’s anger at her questions about it. Here—parallel to the last-stage economic looting.)

June 9, 1952

Taggart and Cherryl

Taggart wishes to celebrate the deal which has given a loan to the People’s State of Chile in exchange for the promise that the d‘Anconia Copper mines will be nationalized on September 2, then turned over on “operation lease” to an “international group” consisting of Orren Boyle, an equivalent of Cuffy Meigs, and others of that sort. No word has been said publicly about Dagny’s broadcast, but Bertram Scudder has been made the goat: his program is abolished. He has to keep silent if he doesn’t want to be framed and jailed or [punished as] the authorities please.

Taggart’s sudden realization that nothing gives him pleasure. Taggart and Cherryl, their “formal” dinner. Her poise and silence, his attempts to get her sanction.

Flashback to highlights of their marriage and of her growing realization.

Her bewilderment about their wedding party—and her determination to understand, and to be worthy of him.

Her attempts at self-improvement, and his vicious attitude toward it.

She begins to suspect his position on the railroad (faith versus truth); she decides to investigate. The evasiveness of the railroad officials; the common workers tell her the truth; Eddie Willers tells her the whole truth.

Taggart’s fury about her “ingratitude,” then his play for pity and “understanding”—her tortured fairness and patience. (Her disappointment in “culture”—his incomprehensible anger about it.)

Now, at dinner, his attempt at “celebration” fails—he talks about “causeless” love—she will not grant him sanction. (“What I feel is fear.” “Of me?” “No, not exactly. Not of what you can do, but of what you are.”)

Cherryl goes to see Dagny. Cherryl’s apology and despair; Dagny cannot fully reassure her.

Lillian comes to see Taggart about stopping the divorce. He can’t help her, but they both share the enjoyment over Francisco’s coming ruin and over Rearden’s crushing burdens. This is the celebration Taggart wanted. Their affair.

Cherryl comes home to find that Taggart is in the bedroom with some woman. Cherryl does not walk in, she hides in her own study and waits, then comes out and confronts Taggart when he is alone. His vicious admissions, his boast that the woman was Lillian Rearden, his laughter when Cherryl offers to give him a divorce—her horror at the full realization of the meaning of his love, the love “in answer to flaws.” She almost names the death principle—he slaps her.

She runs out of the house, wanders through the streets, the city—as her symbol of greatness, but now she is in total terror that she has no way of knowing the good from the evil. (The traffic lights.) Her suicide—she leaps into the river.

August 26, 1952

Note for Galt’s Speech

[In regard to] the “death principle” and James Taggart: Taggart wanted Cherryl to be vicious—and moral—at the same time. This means that he wants good people to “weaken” occasionally and thus give him both the benefit of their virtue and the license for his evil. It is their “weaknesses,” their evil, that would make it possible for him to exploit their virtues. (Example: Rearden’s sex guilt and the gift certificate.) It is the “middle-of-the-road” morality—the theory that “there’s something bad in the best of us”—that is the most immoral theory possible, because it is the only theory that makes it possible for evil to exist. Pure evil is impotent, it is destruction and nonexistence; it is only by feeding on and penalizing virtue that evil can act and have power in the world.

October I, 1952

[Part III, Chapter V:] “Their Brothers’ Keepers ”

1. The complete chaos, the blind, random chance, the arbitrary senselessness, the total lack of logic and reason in production—and the steady, inexhaustible logic in the progression of destruction. (Men are still achieving their ideas—hold the premises of destruction and you’ll get it.)

2. The futile and horrible rushing to save the needy at the expense of the able—the last of the country’s wealth is going to support the incompetent in the emergency of the moment. The incompetent perish and the wealth goes down the drain with them, while the competent, who could have survived, are immolated the minute before, i.e., their chance of survival is destroyed to let the incompetent last that one minute longer—the range of the moment, which keeps getting shorter and shorter. The revolting obscenity of acting on the cult of need, of taking need as claim and motive. The “brothers’ keepers” see themselves being eaten alive, with the “brothers” making their work impossible and making more demands at the same time—the final, naked insolence of the cannibalistic parasite who yells that “you’re morally evil because I starve, look at my misery, it is your moral failure and sin—do something!—how do I know what?—it’s your problem and responsibility, you’ve got the mind, I haven‘t, you’re my keeper, I have the right of misery, incompetence and helplessness!” (Give examples of this along the whole range—both public and private, both for industries and for personal, family relations.)

3. The grotesque preposterousness of the “world planners”—such as the “soybean project,” the power-hungry incompetents, each with a plan of his own to rule the economy of the nation, each getting a little bit of his plan into action, at a devastating cost. Here we have soybeans, TV sets, etc. manufactured for the pleasure of the masters and the planners—while the country is starving. Here material goods follow the pattern of the men who are still left—the senseless and non-essential goods are manufactured, the essential ones vanish. The motives here are an almost inextricable mixture of corruption and humanitarianism—some projects are undertaken for pure Cuffy Meigs-like looting, others for a Eugene Lawson-like vicious hysteria of giving away and saving the needy of the immediate split-second. (Show that the motive makes no difference.)

14

NOTES WHILE WRITING GALT’S SPEECH

In a 1961 interview, AR recalled her thoughts as she approached writing John Galt’s speech: “I knew it was going to be the hardest chapter in the book.... / underestimated. / thought, with a feeling of dread, that it would take at least three months. Well, it took two years.” AR began her outline on July 29, 1953; she finished the speech on October 13, 1955,

Her difficulty was not primarily with philosophical content By 1953, she was clear on nearly all of the ideas. The only fundamental that she discovered during the writing was the relationship of the concept “value” to the concept “life.” The other problems of content were in formulating the ideas with the total precision she demanded.

It was the literary requirements of the speech—it had to be a dramatic, emotion-charged statement serving as the strikers’ ultimatum to the world—that gave AR the most difficulty, particularly in regard to the order of presentation. She explained in a 1961 interview:

I started by making an outline of the issues to be covered. First as a general listing of material, then in approximate order of presentation. But I couldn’t stick to that outline; it had to be redone many times. I originally began the theoretical presentation with metaphysics, starting with existence exists, going from metaphysics to epistemology, then planning to go to morality. After writing quite a few pages, I had to stop because I knew it was absolutely wrong. That is the logical order in non-fiction, but you can’t do it in fiction. The speech had to start by presenting the morality, which is the real theme of the book, and where Galt would have to begin his explanation to the world. So I had to rewrite the whole thing.

The brief notes presented here ore apparently all that she kept from her two years of work on Galt’s speech; regrettably, the early draft and revised outlines that she refers to ore not among her notes.

July 29, 1953

Main Subjects of Galt’s Speech

Metaphysics: Existence exists—A is A.

Epistemology: Reason—thinking is volitional, not automatic.

Morality: The need of morality for a being of free will. The Morality of Life: Life as the standard of value—thinking as the only basic virtue, from which all others proceed—non-thinking as the only basic vice—the recognition of reality or the non-recognition. Force. Mysticism. The morality of death: all the forms of the attempt to fake reality; destruction as the only result. Basic premises. Emotions and reason.

Economics: The unearned. The gift of inventors.

Politics: Rights.

Outline of Galt’s Speech (Philosophical Content)

Metaphysics

Existence exists. A is A.

Epistemology

Mind and body. The nature of reason—the evidence of the senses, integrated by his mind according to the rules of logic. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. The nature of abstractions. Thinking is volitional—it is not an automatic process. The root of “free will”—you have no choice about what reality is, but you have the choice of knowing what it is or not. The mind is man’s tool of survival. Life is given to you, survival is not. To survive, you must think; you must discover the means and methods of survival proper to man; you have no arbitrary freedom about it—you cannot survive “at random,” you must learn what is necessary for your survival as man.

Morality

The need of morality for a being of free will—a being who must survive by means of choice—a rational being who must think and must choose to think. The process of reason is: Yes or No? Right or Wrong? This is the process of thinking and of every action a man takes as a result of his thinking. Truth (perception of reality) is the standard of value for his thinking. He needs a standard of value to guide the actions he’ll take as a result of his knowledge, to estimate the choices he’ll make: his existence as man is his standard of value—as man, because he can exist in no other way, yet he has to maintain his status as man and his existence by his own will and choice.

The Morality of Life

Thinking as the only basic virtue, from which all others proceed; non-thinking as the only basic vice. The recognition of reality or the non-recognition; existence or non-existence; life or non-life; entity or zero. The responsibility of saying “It is.” Joy and pain as the barometer of life or death. The function of pain in one’s body—the pain in one’s spirit. Emotions proceed from reason. Emotions as the summary of a man’s philosophy. Emotions are based on your estimates, and your estimates on your basic premises, on your moral code.

Joy is the purpose of the Life Morality. When man’s life is the standard and reason the judge, no contradictions are possible, no “destructive” joy, no “hangovers”—and no desire “to have your cake and eat it, too,” no desire for the irrational. Life is the value, pursuit of happiness is the goal; man exists for his own sake and for his own happiness. The same code applies to all men: there is no clash of interests if no man expects another to live for him, if no man expects the unearned. There is no sacrifice in human relationships—only the pattern of traders. Men trade value for value, in matter and in spirit.

The virtues of the Life Morality: thinking—therefore rationality, the refusal to go against your own consciousness and judgment, the refusal to fake reality; independence—the refusal to submit to the authority of others, to place another’s judgment above your own; honesty—which is only another name for rationality, the loyalty to reality, the “being true to truth”; purposefulness (productiveness)—the choice of your life purpose and the achievement of it; happiness—which is possible only as the result of virtue, as the full integration of your reason and action; self-esteem—which means pride, self-value—which means the conscious practice of your moral code, the living up to your values, the creation of your own character. (Errors of knowledge versus moral errors; in the realm of morality, nothing counts but perfection.) (Man’s need of an ideal.)

The vices of the Life Morality: non-thinking-which means the evasion of knowledge, the placing of anything whatever above your own mind, any form of mysticism, of faith, or denial of reality; dependence—the placing of others above yourself in any manner whatever, either as authority or as love; aimlessness—the non-integrated life; pain—the submission to it or acceptance of it; humility—the acceptance of one’s moral imperfection, the willingness to be imperfect, which means: the indifference to moral values and to yourself, i.e., self-abnegation; the initiation of force—as the destruction of the mind, as the method contrary to man’s form of survival, as the anti-man and anti-life.

The Morality of Death

Such moralities place the standard of value outside of man and of reality, e.g., God, the hereafter, the needs of the soul as opposed to the body. By definition, they are impossible to man; the “good” is the opposite of life. The result is such evils as the opposition of soul and body, of theory and practice, of the moral and the practical. All of it is a rebellion against reality. You cannot fake reality. The desire for a non-stable reality is the desire for non-existence (A is A).

The morality of sacrifice: the sacrificing of virtue to vice, of the good to the evil, of value to non-value, of a positive to a negative, of achievement to need, of ability to inability—the lack, the flaw, the absence, the zero as the consistent standard and the ultimate goal. Life is a sin, under this morality, because everything required by life is a sin. Joy is a sin, pain is a virtue. The death principle throughout it all. The creed of the unearned.

The worship of emotions—but emotions are only your “stale thinking.” The demand for unearned love—they do not expect causeless fear, but they do demand causeless love.

The “strong” and the “weak”—so you expect men to survive while being irrational?

The conspiracy against life, ability and the mind. The paradox of the defenders of freedom resting their case on mysticism, while the destroyers of the mind claim to represent reason—the paradox of all absolutes being mystical or non-existent; the absolute of reason is denied by all. Which is the triumph of spirit over matter: India or New York?

Politics

Man’s rights—inherent in the need of his survival as man. No initiation of force. No sacrifice of man to man. No compulsion. No subordination of one man’s mind to that of another. Voluntary transactions. The trader principle. The proper function of government—retaliation by force against those who initiate force, and nothing else.

Economics

Man’s right to his own property, to the product of his labor, rests on the law of cause and effect. You cannot have the result, if you destroy the source. You cannot have the product of a man’s mind, except on his terms. How free enterprise worked—the benefit given to others by inventors and innovators, the inestimable benefit of an idea. The relationship of the “weak” and the “strong”: the strong (intellectually strong, which is the only strength possible in a free, non-force economy) raise the value of the weak’s time by delegating to them the tasks already known and thus being free to pursue new discoveries. Proper mutual trade to mutual advantage. The interests of the mind are one, no matter what the degree of intelligence, provided nobody seeks the unearned.

The address to the men of the mind: do not accept the morality of your own destroyers. It is you who have made them possible. Set your own terms and code. Put an end to the use of your virtues for your own torture. Learn to understand the nature of your enemies: they do seek death and universal destruction. Yours is the code of Life. Fight for it. There is no other.

July 30, 1953

[The following seems to be a revision of the above outline, beginning with morality.]

Outline of Galt’s Speech

You have achieved your moral ideal. It is your morality that has destroyed the world.

What is morality? Man—reason—need of a code—man’s only choice: to think or not to think—the essence of thinking: A is A—the standard of value: man’s survival as man, life as the value. It is on a desert island that you would need morality most.

What is your morality? The morality of death—the anti-man, anti-mind, anti-existence. Mysticism and force—mind and body. Whatever your code, reason is your common enemy. The conspiracy against the mind. We have withdrawn. (I have merely done by design what has been done throughout history by default.) Now look at your morality and your world.

The Morality of Death. The standard of value outside of man; original sin; life as guilt, the mind as guilt, every virtue needed to support life as guilt, the moral versus the practical, joy as guilt. Sacrifice: the total immorality of its meaning—the zero as the consistent standard of value.

The consequences of the contradiction (personal): the botched, half-living creatures scared to think—all the consequences of the morality of death—the worship of emotions—“wishes” versus reality. Man’s need of self-esteem: his chronic fear, his knowledge that he is his own destroyer—all his virtues are called vices, all his vices are called virtues—the dread that evil is practical (since life is evil).

The creed of the unearned: the real purpose of all mystics: the unearned in spirit; the rebellion against a stable reality, against the absolute of reality; the anti-cause-and-effect; the desire to reverse cause and effect. But the escape from reality, in any form whatever, is the desire for non-existence.

The consequences of the contradiction (social): the defenders of freedom are now mystics, and the destroyers of the mind claim to represent reason; the idea that morality and absolutes must be mystical; the attitude toward “desires” and man’s psychology which savages had toward physical nature. The constant oppositions: mind and body, the moral and the practical, theory and practice, reason and emotions, security and freedom, yourself and others, selfishness and charity, private interests and public interests, the “having and eating your cake” principle. A “social” or mystical morality is self-defeating by definition, it has to make man immoral—but try to consider all those concepts with reason as the standard and you’ll see that there are no contradictions where no element of mysticism, of the irrational, has been introduced.

The constant demands for the impossible: the desire to have men survive while being irrational. “Public welfare”: who is the public?—failure as [conferring] the right to the title of “public.”

The destruction of America: the country of reason; what has been done to it? America’s self-sacrifice to the vilest savages—which is the triumph of spirit over matter: India or New York?—why America could not survive on the morality of altruism.

The Morality of Life: Life as the standard—thinking as the only basic virtue—joy as the purpose—man existing for his own sake and for the pursuit of his own happiness—no duty, no temptation—evil as non-practical-the pattern of traders—justice, not mercy—no sacrifice, no initiation of force, no obedience to force.

Politics: Man’s rights. The proper function of government regarding force.

Economics: Property (the profit-motive, the dollar-sign). How free enterprise worked: the spiritual benefit given by the inventors. The separation of State and economics.

(I have merely done by design what has been done throughout history by default. What I have done, too, is merely an act of identification. The extent to which you have lived and found joy is the extent to which you have acted on my morality.)

The address to the men of the mind: To the best within you. Do not accept the morality of your own destroyers. Set your own terms.

Yours is the code of life. Fight for it. There is no other. When Life is once more the value—then, we’ll return. The strikers’ oath.

September 28, 1953

When we say that nobody actually believes in God, it is true, if by “belief” we mean the equivalent of a rational conviction. But the trick, the psychological “gimmick,” of mystics is the fact that they do not “believe” in reality, either. What we mean by a rational conviction has no equivalent in their consciousness. No, they do not “believe” in God in the same way as they “believe” in food, money or their material existence—but their material existence has no full reality for them, either—and that is some special state of consciousness, that is the root of the faking, the pretense, the going through an act, the unreality which I sense about most people and which I hate more than anything else, that is the form of their Death Premise, as if they do not merely wish to destroy existence, but have never even permitted existence to exist.

January 9, 1954

The Morality of Death

Metaphysics: the worship of the zero; the rebellion against a stable reality, against absolutes, which is the wish for non-existence. Epistemology: the “sixth sense,” the definitions by means of the negative, the modern mystics and relativists, the “stolen concepts,” the worship of emotions, the mixture of existence and consciousness, the anti-cause-and-effect, the creed of the unearned.

Morality: mind and body; the placing of the standard of value outside of man; original sin; life, mind and joy as guilt; the opposition of the moral and the practical; sacrifice: the total immorality of its meaning, the zero as the standard of value. (It is evil to produce, it is good to mooch.)

The purpose of that morality: the sacrifice of the good to the evil, the conspiracy against ability and the mind—what the strikers are on strike against. (You need us? It is the generosity of the good that makes the evil possible.)

The Consequences of the Morality of Death

Personal:

Man’s need of self-esteem: life or death. Their sense of guilt and fear: the knowledge of their non-thinking. Fear—because they have abandoned their tool of survival. Guilt—because they know that they have done it volitionally. They are their own destroyers. (Their search for “themselves”—the self is the mind.)

They have given up reason—then complain that the universe is a mystery.

The conflict of the practical and the moral.

The fear that evil is practical—since life is evil.

(“It’s only logic.” The fortune-teller and the fortune-maker.)

Social:

The defenders of freedom are mystics, while its enemies claim to represent reason.

The contradictions between: soul and body, mind and heart, the moral and the practical, yourself and others, security and freedom, public interest and private interest, human rights and property rights.

The principle of expropriation throughout society—every man is rewarded in proportion to his flaws, and penalized in proportion to his virtues.

The evil of the “middle-of-the-roaders ”: they place their best in the service of their worst, and destroy their best in the same way as they destroy the best men in society. (The cost of their compromises: the death of their children as result of their government subsidy.)

What the men of the mind had given them—the pyramid of ability.

What they must do: stand on the judgment of your mind—you don’t know much?—don’t discard that which you know. Reason is an absolute.

Errors of knowledge versus moral errors. Perfection. (“Benefit of the doubt.”)

Traders—help to others on the basis of values, not flaws, not need.

The single axiom: the evil of force. Good men will not work under compulsion. The obscenity of using force “for their own good.”

“Some of you will never know who is John Galt.”

The moments when they do know who is John Galt.

The damnation of Stadler. (The man who places his mind in the service of evil, while he is able to know better, but does not care.)

Undated

[The following note critiques the Kantian idea that “things in themselves” are unknowable. AR cut this topic from Galt’s speech. Later, she covered it in the title essay of For the New Intellectual.]

Notes for [Galt‘s] Speech

Metaphysics: “Things in Themselves ”

Walk into any college classroom and you will hear your professors teaching your children that knowledge is impossible to man and that his consciousness has no validity whatever. A savage does not know the nature of his means of perception; your teachers go him one better: they know and they disqualify man’s consciousness on the ground that its means are specific and knowable.

You can know nothing, they tell you, because you perceive only that which your senses can perceive; your sight is made possible by light rays, your hearing is made possible by sound waves—therefore, your knowledge is not valid, since your consciousness works through these means and no others, since it is itself and can be nothing else, since it cannot step outside itself to verify its knowledge. Your knowledge is not valid, they tell you, because your perceptions are not causeless. You cannot know, they tell you, whether the things you perceive are real, because you have no consciousness other than your own and do not know what some other sort of consciousness might see. No matter how much you learn, they tell you, you will always be limited by the fact that you can learn only that which you can learn; you will never be able to know that unlimited zero—the things defined as “not that which you can know” seen by a consciousness defined as “not yours.”

You listen to them and you blank out the fact that this argument denies the validity of any form of consciousness whatever: if you were the omniscient God of their invention, you would still know only that which your means of knowledge perceived, whatever such means would be, unless—and this is the core of their mystic inventions—God were not “limited” by being an entity and his means of perception were causeless. God’s knowledge would be valid, they tell you, because it would be unaccountable, God would know everything, because he would know it by means of nothing, while you can know nothing, because you know it by means of something. You are blind, they tell you, because you have eyes, and deaf, because you have ears; true sight and true hearing would have neither.

You are blind, they tell you, because you can never know “things in themselves” or “things as they are,” which means: “things as they are not perceived by you,” things as they are apart from your consciousness and apart from any consciousness. By this concept, reality is that which no one perceives, the moment it is perceived it ceases to be real—existence is outside the bounds of any consciousness, to know it you must know it without consciousness, the moment you’re conscious, it ceases to exist, the moment you’re conscious, you are unconscious. Knowledge is impossible to you, they tell you, because the moment you are A, you’re no longer able to be non-A, the moment you are an entity, you are no longer able to be a zero—and the zero is the only thing that’s certain, omniscient, omnipotent and real.

Do you wonder what is left of a young mind after an intellectual training of this sort? Do you wonder why your childen leave college as neurotic nonentities, ready for any witch doctor to knock over?

Since, in fact, no consciousness can hold on to a zero, there is a specific purpose in all of this mystical claptrap: the nearest thing to “causeless knowledge” is an irrational wish—and your teachers’ revolt against causal perception is the desire to place above reality and reason those nameless wishes of theirs which they know to be contrary to both.

The closest approach, in practice, to the theory of “things in themselves” is as follows: if you steal your neighbor’s wallet, your action in itself and as it is is a crime; but since you wanted his wallet and held your wish as superior to reason, you blank out the nature of your action and continue to regard yourself as honest, by telling yourself and others that there’s no such thing as objective reality and you would not be able to know it if there were.

Undated

[The following are some topics covered in an early draft of Galt’s speech. AR identifies the number of handwritten pages on each topic.]

The Epistemology of Evil

Definition of two kinds of mystics: 1 page.

Their “sixth sense”: 1 page.

Identifications by means of the zero: 2 pages.

Their “superior” world and “somehow”: 1 page.

Their secret—the wish: 1 page.

Escape from the law of identity: 3 pages.

Reversing existence and consciousness; mechanics of “the wish”: 6 pages.

Escape from the law of causality: 5 pages.

Who pays for the orgy?—under both mystics: 8 pages.

Modem mystics; the blank-out (“motion” and “change”—the industrialist and the law of identity—“proof” of existence—axioms—montage of examples): 9 pages.

The savage and the baby (sensory perception): 7 pages.

The modem attack on the senses—“things in themselves”: 8 pages.

Summary: the destruction of knowledge (“faith” and “the collective”): 5 pages.

Return to pre-language and blank-outs about the mind: 5 pages.

The present economic “grabbing” and blank-outs: 5 pages.

Power lust: 9 pages.

The mystic psychology of a dictator: 19 pages.

The conspiracy against life and man: 9 pages.

Undated

[The following passages were cut from Galt’s speech. AR put them in a folder marked: “Discards from Atlas Shrugged (which I like). ”]

You have heard it said that this is a time of moral crisis. You have mouthed the words yourself. You have wailed against evil and at each of its triumphs you have cried for more victims as your token of virtue. Listen, you, the symbol of whose morality is a sacrificial oven, you who feel bored by what you profess to be good, and tempted by what you profess to be evil, you who claim that virtue is its own reward and spend your life running from such rewarding, you who resent and despise those you hold to be saints, and envy those you hold to be sinners, you who proclaim that one must die for virtue, but dread having to live for it—listen—I am the first man who has ever loved virtue with the whole of my mind and being, the man who never sought another love, knowing that no other love is possible, and thus the man who rose to put an end to your obscenity of sacrificing good to evil.

Only the man who is morally fit to live on a desert island is morally fit to live in society—the man who knows that man’s life depends on production and production depends on man’s mind, that he must live by his own effort and think through his own brain, that if he chooses to live by means of force or fraud, by mooching, extorting or plundering the products of the minds of others, he is choosing to abandon his human status—to exist as something other than a man, yet to let his life depend on those who choose the existence of rational beings; he is trying to switch to them the death which would have been his on that island, he is living by the mind of his victims, by the virtue of those whom he destroys—he is choosing death as his standard of value, and he will reach it through an agony as sure as, but more ugly than, starvation on a desert island. Yet your code of morality was designed to foster this breed of the subhuman, to destroy the men who think and to turn the earth into that desert island. You have succeeded.

If you preach that man must hold the pursuit of his own happiness as evil and must seek self-sacrifice as his moral goal, you are asking that he twist himself into a monstrosity that takes pleasure in his own pain and finds pain in his own pleasure, that enjoys his suffering and despises his joy, that strives for his own frustration, that holds desires only to renounce them, fights battles only to lose, seeks wounds as victories and sores as medals, [like] a machine set in reverse, with its gauges switched from life to death, with death as its goal and its standard of value—a monstrosity that fights against itself and crashes in a final, bloody heap, leaving a trail of destruction behind it.

That as a moral ideal? That as a code of love for man?

The mystics, who preach self-sacrifice, who preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value, who claim that they despise the body and worship the spirit—do not grant to man’s spirit the importance they grant to his body. They know that if a human body were to reject the function of maintaining its existence, it would cease to live and would turn into a mass of corruption, carrying the poison of death to those who did not avoid its contact. Yet they do not expect a life-rejecting human spirit to become an agent of infection—and they let it loose upon the world as the death-carrier which it has been through all the ages. Do you preach that the purpose of morality is to curb man’s instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality.

Do you think they are taking you back to the dark ages? They are taking you back to darker ages than any your history has known. Their goal is the era of the pre-human. Consider what feat of intelligence was performed by the nameless genius who was first to identify the fact that man possesses a mind. Consider what tremendous mental power was spent on the invention of language, what span of centuries had to be traveled from the first inarticulate sounds that named immediate objects to the words that conveyed abstractions. The greatest achievement in communication was not the wireless telegraphy nor transatlantic radio, but the feat of the genius who grasped and taught to others the concept of identifying reality in words of objective meaning. These are the achievements which your teachers now seek to negate and to destroy, by refusing to identify them and pretending that neither mind nor words have ever been discovered. Their goal is to take you back, not to the age of pre-science, but the age of pre-language.

A man of self-confidence knows the nature of knowledge; he knows that existence exists, that reality cannot be faked, that a mind cannot be forced. He knows that nothing can be accomplished by ruling a herd one has reduced to the level of morons and liars. He is unable to fool himself about the loathsome spectacle of men who have to act under compulsion; he is unable to regard the role of a ruler as anything but personal infamy. It takes a mystic to reach so low a stage of self-deception as to derive any value or pleasure from the extorted motions faked by others—extorted by and faked under the threat of a gun.

You accept the morality of selflessness—but observe that you are unable to live except by taking yourself as the standard of value—a depraved, irrational, contradictory self, blindly seeking its own pleasure, struggling by corrupted means to comply with the law of existence. You profess to damn matter, but you lie and cheat to get rich; you profess to value chastity, but seek pleasure from whores; you profess to hold an altruist as your moral ideal, yet make no move to reach his rank, though it is in your power—but the man of ambition, of selfish achievement, is the man you envy, and you scramble to obtain his rank without earning it, though you profess to consider him immoral.

You believe that your heart is superior to reason, that man must live by his feelings, not his mind—as if hatred, fear and envy were not feelings, as if a man of unbridled emotions would become a paragon of virtue—as if the dope fiend who robs a store, the woman who murders in a fit of jealous rage, the sadist who indulges his craving for torture were exponents of coldly impersonal logic, while the surgeon who performs a brain operation were a man directed by his feelings.

You believe that security is superior to freedom—as if a livelihood earned by your effort voluntarily traded for the effort of others, with your body and property protected from seizure, were a state of precarious uncertainty—but the state of being bound, gagged and fed by the mercy of an arbitrary ruler, who possesses the power to cut off your food, to rob, to torture, to murder you at whim, were a state of peaceful security.

A mystical morality makes it impossible for you to pass moral judgment. You cannot judge by an incomprehensible standard, be it God or society or anything outside reason. When you are told: “Do not try to understand what is good, believe it,” you become unable to estimate any value, action, person or event, or to make any firm choice.

If you cannot judge, you will not think. The aim of every action, mental or physical, is to achieve a value, to further your life. Why think, if you cannot reach any conclusion, if you cannot appraise the value of any choice? Every thought implies a value judgment. If you cannot value, you cannot think. You may know that giving poison to a man will kill him, but why consider it, if you cannot know whether it is right or wrong to kill him?

If you cannot think, you will act on the spur of the emotions of the moment. The creed of expediency is the worship of emotions. Emotions, in fact, are the summary of your philosophical premises—and destruction will follow from the contradictions in your premises if you act blindly on your emotions. All emotions are appraisals, inexorably based on the rule of “What’s in it for me?” but you have no way of judging what should be in it for you, what is your self-interest—and your destruction follows from such blind choices.

Your morality disarms you and protects itself from your mind by making a virtue of imperfection: humility is a virtue, pride is a sin. It gives you a blank check on evil and forces you to give a blank check to others. If you cannot be proud of yourself, you cannot condemn any depravity. The man who is unable to praise himself is unable to blame anything on anyone.

You create your character or destroy it by the same means which create or destroy all your values: by the act of thinking or non-thinking. Your self is your mind, and its constant choice is the act of self-affirmation or self-denial, of perceiving or refusing to perceive, the act of being or non-being by which your mind, like a pilot-light within you, goes on or off. This act is your primary choice, it is your will, the only will you have, your only choice, from which all other choices proceed.

Just as you possess a pair of legs, but must learn to use them, and the ability to walk becomes automatic, but the decision to walk does not, and you will not walk without a decision to cross the room, the street or the world—so you possess a brain, but must learn to use it, and the ability to think becomes automatic, but the decision to think does not.

It is not values that you have to renounce, but only your fakes and pretenses: the prestige which you don’t possess, the respect which no one grants you, the love which you do not feel, the faith which you don’t believe. Get out of your snarl of deceit which has deceived no one but yourself. Get out of the dank prison of your emotions into the hard, clean sunlight of the mind. And if, in exchange for your scrap heap of borrowed slogans and undigested commandments, you are able to reach by the work of your mind no more than the first-hand conviction that water is wet and fire is hot, you will still be incomparably richer than you were and you will know the meaning of self-esteem.

Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.

You believe you got away with your evasions? Look again and check the addition that sums up your soul and your life. You had cheated in business, but you see no connection between that and the fact that your wife has deserted you? You had paid off a bureaucrat to destroy your competitor, but you see no connection between that and the fact that your market has vanished and your business has crashed? You extorted high wages by means of directives, but you see no connection between that and the fact that you’re now condemned to jobless starvation? You had preached ideas you hated, in exchange for the favor of men you despised, but you see no connection between that and the fact that you’ve now become an alcoholic? You had prospered on government subsidies, but you see no connection between that and the fact that your son has been killed in a war to bring prosperity to the natives of some jungle People’s State? You had set every part of you to betray every other, you believed that your career bears no relation to your sex life, that your politics bear no relation to the choice of your friends, that your values bear no relation to your pleasures, and your heart bears no relation to your brain—you had chopped yourself into pieces which you struggled never to connect—but you see no reason why your life is in ruins and why you’ve lost the desire to live?

Like the criminal who plays it short range, who believes that he gets away with the unearned and does not see why his loot disappears into the pockets of any blackmailer and any criminal more ruthless than himself—so you believed that you could exist as half-producer, half-thief, and did not see what parasites you paid in exchange for your little snatch of the unearned. Every time you cheated the honest, it is the dishonest you had to pay off. Every time you resorted to force—passing a law—to destroy your superiors, it is to your inferiors that you handed the weapon by which they destroyed you in your turn. Whether you were a businessman or a worker, your blank-out consisted of believing that you were fighting and looting each other—and what you did not dare to identify was that you were looting the better men of your own profession, that any kind of collectivist action is intended to milk the better members of the collective—and as you destroyed your abler competitor or your abler fellow-worker, ten incompetents were ready to pounce upon you and to drain you dry in turn. So you’re reaping a profit you did not deserve and wonder why bureaucrats are devouring your profit. So you’ve gained security where the boss cannot fire you and no other newcomer can compete for your job—and you wonder why your wages are buying less and less, and why you live in terror of your union leaders, whose whim can condemn you to starve.

You believed that compromise was practical, that you could not succeed on merit, that some shortcuts were needed to help you to rise, that your sins were assisting your virtues. But there is no compromise between good and evil, between reason and force, between production and looting. Your vices have devoured your virtues, your intelligence was spent on protecting your evasions, your ability on paying for your frauds, your energy on enriching the parasites who bled you—while you were gaining a penny of graft in exchange for a dollar of your own honest profit.

When you established the right of the unearned and accepted need, the zero, as a claim, you did not see—you blindest of fools, the businessman or laborer of the compromise economy—that any man on any level who continued working, was losing in proportion to his effort and his work, and that those who gained, were gaining in proportion to their having accomplished nothing. You had connived to destroy your superior and had hoped to step into his shoes, but you did not step into his fortune, you stepped into his place under the social squeezer which you had set in motion—and when you are squeezed dry in your turn, you will find that the ultimate winner is the looter who made no compromise with working, but stuck to the absolute of robbery and murder, the “practical” hero of the short-cut, who will perish on the carcass of the last compromiser.

Mind and Body

Man is an entity of mind and body, an indivisible union of two elements: of consciousness and matter. Matter is that which one perceives, consciousness is that which perceives it; your fundamental act of perception is an indivisible whole consisting of both; to deny, to [separate] or to equate them is to contradict the nature of your perception, to contradict the axiom of existence, to contradict your basic definitions and to invalidate whatever concepts you might attempt to hold thereafter.

Your consciousness is that which you know—and are alone to know-by direct perception. It is that indivisible unit where knowledge and being are one, it is your “I,” it is the self which distinguishes you from all else in the universe. No consciousness can perceive another consciousness, only the results of its actions in material form, since only matter is an object of perception, and consciousness is the subject, perceivable by its nature only to itself. To perceive the consciousness, the “I,” of another would mean to become that other “I”—a contradiction in terms; to speak of souls perceiving one another is a denial of your “I,” of perception, of consciousness, of matter. The “I” is the irreducible unit of life.

Just as life is the integrating element which organizes matter into a living cell, the element which distinguishes an organism from the unstructured mass of inorganic matter—so consciousness, an attribute of life, directs the actions of the organism to use, to shape, to realign matter for the purpose of maintaining its existence.

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, the life-keeper of your body. Your body is a machine, your consciousness—your mind—is its driver; and that which you call your emotions is the union of the two, the product of the integrating mechanism by which your mind controls your body.

Man has wrested existence from the mystic demons, but not consciousness—material reality, but not his mind. Men still look at consciousness as savages looked at material nature. Men have progressed in material production, but have not progressed in spirit—because the first was the province of reason, but the second is still the province of faith and emotions. There has been no moral progress, because the tool of all progress-the mind—was banished from morality.

PART 5

FINAL YEARS

15

NOTES: 1955—1977

This chapter presents a miscellany of notes written from 1955 to 1977. AR’s notes for two books, also made during this period, are saved for the last chapter.

The following material begins with notes on psychology written in the same year that AR completed Galt’s speech. These notes are unrelated to the speech; AR kept them in a separate folder. They contain the build-up to and her first discussion of “psycho-epistemology,” a concept she originated; she later defined it as “the study of man’s cognitive processes from the aspect of the interaction between the conscious and the automatic functions of the subconscious” (see The Romantic Manifesto). She begins by referring to a man’s conscious premises and subconscious processes as the “super-structure” and the “sub-basement” of the mind, without giving explicit definitions of these terms. Later, she writes: “Super-structure is the realm of philosophy, of premises, ideas, convictions, etc.—that is, the content of a person’s mind; sub-basement is the realm of psychology—the method by which a mind acquires and handles its content.”

Almost a third of AR’s notes on psychology are presented here—those in which AR is writing as a philosopher about the foundations of psychology. The rest of the material, which I have omitted, pertains to topics outside the realm of philosophy, such as particular neuroses. Her motive in writing the latter notes was to understand the people she knew, many of whom baffled her. However, she was not interested in psychology as a subject, and never made a systematic study of it. So the omitted notes are of less interest.

The rest of the material in this chapter is from the post-Atlas Shrugged period, when AR was writing prolifically on philosophy. Considering the complexity of the issues she dealt with in this period, it may be surprising that she made so few notes. But she found non-fiction writing much easier than fiction. Typically, she wrote from brief outlines, which are omitted here because they merely list the main ideas in the published articles.

May 13, 1955

[In her 1955 notes on psychology, AR used the term “rationalist” to refer to “an exponent of reason. ” Since this term is associated with the rationalist-empiricist dichotomy in philosophy, which she rejected, I have eliminated it in favor of “rational man. ”]

Psychological “Epistemology”

The three metaphysical fundamentals with which a human consciousness has to deal are: existence, consciousness—and the consciousness of other people.

The crucial decision that a man makes is: in which category does he place the consciousness of others—in external existence or in his own consciousness? The first is the proper process of a rational man. The second means that the consciousness of others becomes a factor in the mind’s process of judgment; it becomes, not an external fact, but an x factor by means of which facts are to be judged; not that which the mind perceives, but that by means of which it does the perceiving. This is the root of the “epistemological” corruption of a human consciousness.

Example: A rational man thinks: “Two plus two equals four.” A second-hander thinks: “Two plus two plus x equals four—maybe, the x permitting.” The x stands for the unknown and unknowable decision of the consciousness of others.

Question to investigate: These three fundamentals are probably the three premises which determine a man’s psychological “epistemology.” Is there a special method of thinking that a man will employ according to the premises he has formed about these three fundamentals? And, as sub-category: in relation to his own consciousness, is there a crucial premise formed by a man about his thinking and his emotions? Is this premise another determining factor in the thinking method that a man will employ? [...]

Next assignment: Define more fully and specifically what we know so far about methods of thinking.

What is the exact role of the conscious mind (of the “spark”) as driver and as spectator of the material provided by the subconscious?

What is the exact nature of the subconscious as the repository of stored knowledge—and as the automatic creator of emotions?

What is the exact role of emotions in a process of thinking? (Are they selectors, integrators, blockers—or all of these, according to one’s premises?)

What is the exact nature of the process of integration?

What is the nature of the state which a man takes as certainty? How does he know that he knows? (Or is certainty possible only to a rational man? If so, what takes its place in a corrupted consciousness?)

Is the question of “certainty” related to the question of “values”? My lead here is the fact that when I attempt to calculate a chess game my mind gives up on a very violent feeling of “What’s the use?” [...] (Later question: Does [a man] become immoral (non-valuing) because he has formed the premise of a fluid reality—or does he form the premise of a fluid reality because he has rejected his value-setting power? I suspect that it is the first. I also suspect that one’s concepts of reality and of values are inseparable corollaries. This, I think, is the point at which the independent mind and the sovereign value-setter are united.)

In relation to emotions: The two fundamentals are pleasure and pain. In psychological motives they become: love or fear (love for values, ambition for pleasure, i.e., happiness—or—fear of pain, escape from pain). (This leads to: activity or passivity, achievement of the positive or escape from the negative.) An important moral lead is the question: Is a man motivated by fear in any part of his psychology? He is immoral to the extent of his fear motivations—immoral in the primary sense of morality: fear leads to the refusal to think, to perceive reality. (Fear as an “epistemological” factor.)

May 25, 1955

The first two metaphysical fundamentals which a human consciousness has to grasp and deal with are: existence and consciousness. Within each of these two, there are two fundamentals which a man grasps with his earliest concepts: existence is divided into facts (reality) and people (other people’s views of reality)—consciousness is divided into mind and emotions (thinking and feeling).

If a man is unable to integrate these four concepts (reality, people, thinking, feeling) in a proper, rational manner, if he finds himself torn by conflicts among these four—then what he sacrifices and what he chooses to preserve determines his basic character, his metaphysics and his epistemology. [...]

The proper pattern of a rational man in regard to the four fundamentals is as follows: Mind above emotions (but not in the sense of emotional suppression, only in the sense of knowing that the mind is the source of emotions)—and reality [above people] (a single, indivisible reality to be perceived and judged by one’s own mind). The specific distinction of a rational man is the fact that the consciousness of others as an epistemological factor does not exist for him, that he holds no such concept, that a conflict such as his view of reality versus the view of others has never occurred to him epistemologically and has never been an issue within his own processes of thought. A rational man regards others and their views as [external] facts of existence, to be judged by his mind—and not as an inner fact, to be part of his judgment. A man of unbreached consciousness is one who has never allowed the opinions of others to become an epistemological issue, that is, to shake his confidence in the validity of his own perceptions and of his own rational judgment.

May 27, 1955

Assignment: The next and most urgent step in this inquiry should be a full, exact and objective definition of:

1. What these four fundamentals are, what realm they cover, in what form they exist within a consciousness, by what objective signs one can detect them.

2. The exact influence of the sub-basement on the super-structure.

3. The manner in which sub-basement premises are formed (since they are not formed as a conscious, philosophical conviction).

May 28, 1955

The Four Fundamentals and the Issue of Values

The crucial error of the man who chooses “emotions above mind” in the sub-basement consists of acquiring an “epistemology” that makes emotions part of his thinking process in the specific role of a judge of values and, later, almost the judge of truth and facts (or the meaning of facts) and, therefore, the judge of certainty in any given thought process. While to a rational man the answer to a problem is a factual identification or explanation of reality—to a sub-basement emotionalist the answer to a problem is the achievement of a happy or positive emotion.

The formula for this crucial difference is as follows:

An emotionalist’s identification of values is: “The good is that which will make me happy. ”

A rational man’s identification of values is: “I will be made happy by that which is good. ”

Thereafter, the rational man will be incapable of emotional response without knowing the nature of that to which he is responding. In complex situations, he might need time to identify all the elements of his particular emotional response (since an emotional sum is calculated by the subconscious much faster than a conscious process of thought could do it), but the identification will always be available to him, open to his conscious mind, and his emotions will always correspond to his conscious standard of values. He might be mistaken in any given situation about his conscious identification of the facts involved—but he will never be off his standard of values, there will never be a contradiction between his emotional response and his conscious, rational, stated standard of values. He will never be in love with a person whom he consciously despises, nor be resentful of a person whom he consciously admires.

The emotionalist will be open to all the above kind of conflicts. Only the strength of his rational super-structure will guarantee whether he responds to the right values or not, according to his conscious standard or not. He will experience an emotion ahead of his full rational knowledge of that to which he is responding. He will do so by means of a “package deal”: since emotions are sums, he will respond to his first, vague, generalized perception of an object or to some particular “highlight” of an object. He will respond to the total of an object, person or event—without breaking it up into its parts or attributes. In his “emotional epistemology,” he will be in a position similar to that of a child who perceives entities, but has not yet learned to identify them by means of their attributes.

When his emotional response clashes with his later, rational identification of a given object, the emotionalist is left in an insoluble conflict: (1) He does not know how to untangle the emotional from the rational in his own mental processes; (2) He feels a tremendous reluctance against analyzing his emotions or their object, against breaking up the “package deal”; such an analysis is contrary to his basic metaphysics and his basic concept of himself; he feels as if he were doing violence to himself and his universe; (3) Even if he succeeds, by a painful, forced process of “old-fashioned will power,” in analyzing the object of his emotions, the conclusion made by his mind lacks full conviction to him, lacks the fire and certainty of conviction—because the emotion, not the facts, is his final judge of the value of reality, which does mean: his final judge of reality.

The emotionalist is the man who says that “the cold hand of reason destroys emotions.” To a rational man, such a statement is incomprehensible.

Sub-basement premises remain in an adult consciousness in the form of “psychological epistemology ”—in the method of thinking (“front seat” or “back seat,” directed or contemplative), in the place which emotions occupy in a process of thought (reason as the active director, emotions as the passive result—or—emotions as the active judge, reason as the passive result) and in the nature of the emotional response (specifically particularized—or—vague and generalized).

Sub-basement premises are the methods of functioning of a consciousness —they are specifically the field of psychology (as distinguished from philosophy)—they are the workings of a soul’s mechanism, not the content of its ideas.

Sub-basement premises are not premises in the sense in which we use the concept philosophically. A rational adult with an emotionalist premise in his sub-basement does not hold somewhere deep in his subconscious the conviction that “emotions are superior to reason.” What he holds is an epistemological method which, if translated into a philosophical premise, would amount to “emotions are superior to reason.” He did not choose it in terms of a conscious conviction; he chose it in terms of an-inner method of reacting which, by the time he is old enough to identify it, has become automatic, appears to be an irreducible primary and is extremely difficult for his own consciousness to identify.

The same is true of the other crucial sub-basement fundamental: reality versus people. There may be other fundamentals pertaining to the sub-basement, which will need to be identified. At present, I am tracing only the influence of the two metaphysical fundamentals with which I started these notes: existence and consciousness. It remains to be seen (to be examined separately) whether these two cover the whole sub-basement or not. What I am certain of at present is:

1. I have found the key to the pattern of how metaphysical fundamentals are translated into psychological fundamentals.

2. What we called “sub-basement premises” are methods of functioning or what we called “psychological epistemology.”

3. What we called “super-structure” is the realm of philosophy, of premises, ideas, convictions, etc.—that is, the content of a person’s mind; “sub-basement” is the realm of psychology—the method by which a mind acquires and handles its content. But since the method was determined by implied (if not conscious) philosophical ideas formed by a person’s mind—it is philosophical ideas that can correct the method, provided the psychologist is able to identify them for the patient.

4. The role of psychology is “the science of epistemological retraining.” A patient needs, not just a correct philosophy, but a new method of thinking and feeling. A psychologist must first communicate the essentials of a correct philosophy, then start the patient on a course of “epistemological retraining”—as soon as the psychologist has grasped the specific nature of the patient’s errors (from the patient’s conscious and subconscious premises). This eliminates the need of constant analyzing of particular, concrete troubles, confusions and relapses. (This answers my own particular bewilderment at the fact that our best and most intelligent converts were not always able to derive from our philosophical abstractions the concrete applications which, to me, seemed self-evident.)

(Note to Nathan [Nathaniel Branden, psychologist and associate of AR’s until 1968]: I know that the above is very vague and generalized, but my stomach (and brain) is screaming that this is the right track. The “epistemological” methods that we have discovered so far (such as “back-seat driving,” etc.) are not the whole story—but I am sure that the role of psychology is to discover, identify and then be able to cure all the essential “epistemological” errors possible to a human consciousness. We will know that we have discovered them all when we are able to explain every basic aberration of a human consciousness. In the past, we have been identifying and detecting specific, individual bad premises in a patient’s mind, some of them fundamental, others fairly superficial, with no general plan of procedure, no systematic view of a cure. What I am glimpsing now is at least the first key to establishing the mileposts of a systematic road to analysis and cure; the mileposts themselves are still to be identified; this is only the first of them.)

1955

[In the following note, AR is discussing those who refuse to judge right and wrong because of their fear of opposing others.]

Isn’t this the “Rose Wohl issue”? [An unknown reference.] She said she did not want to think that others were so wrong. I thought she meant that she would find it horrifying to live among evil creatures and, therefore, prefers not to know that they are evil; I took her motive to be: (a) a kind of good will, which makes her resist the necessity of hating and loathing others, a mistaken form of desire for a benevolent universe, which she thinks she can achieve by evasion; (b) a practical sort of cowardice, which makes her resist the idea that she might be living among monsters and in constant danger, and makes her prefer not to know it, on some grounds such as “what you don’t know won’t hurt you”—again on the principle of plain (“wholesome”?!) evasion, such as the evasion of a man who refuses to see a doctor in order not to find out whether he has a deadly disease.

What I see now is that she meant she does not dare think that others are wrong, she does not dare oppose them even in her own mind; they would punish her for holding such an opinion; it is dangerous not only to act against them, but even to think against them. (!!!) This amounts to a voluntary brain-washing as a basic policy of life. (Good God!)

This issue is the reason why of any depravity, the one I’ve always loathed most is the slogan “If you can’t beat them, join them.” But again, I thought of it in semi-rational terms, i.e., I thought it meant the advice to fake the terms of others in action and beat them at their own game. But here I think I had a “stomach-sense” of the truth, because this slogan made me much more indignant and horrified than any rational interpretation warranted; I sensed something much more evil in it. Now I see that it means the surrender of one’s consciousness, in the sense of: “If you can’t beat them, don’t think”—it is meant to apply, not to action, but to thought, not to the realm of existence, but to the realm of consciousness, not in the sense of accepting values you do not really believe for the sake of some “practical” advantage, but in a sense unspeakably worse: in the sense of discarding your capacity to agree and replacing it by uncritical obedience—thus making obedience take metaphysical and epistemological primacy over acceptance or rejection, truth or falsehood, which means: over one’s judgment.

Undated

Memory-Storing Epistemology

The “emotional” epistemology of the “perceptual” level [mentality] works as follows: instead of storing conceptual conclusions and evaluations in his subconscious, a man stores concrete memories plus an emotional estimate. Example: instead of conceptual conclusions in the form of political principles, he stores specific memories of concrete events of his own experience, with the memory that these things or events were “bad” (“painful”). Thereafter, when he has to consider any new political event, his epistemology works as follows: first, a strong negative emotion—then, the emotion, acting as selector, revives or brings out of his subconscious a lightning-like montage of memories of other political events, all of them painful—then his conclusion is that the new event is and/or will be painful, hopeless, and generally negative.

Any specific judgment that he utters, in such cases, is completely accidental or irrelevant: it is dictated, not by a rational conclusion, but by random or chance association and is, in fact, intended by him only as an approximation (though not consciously). Any conceptual conclusions, principles, or sentences he may have accumulated through the years on that particular subject are stored as loose concretes along with his memories of events, almost as accidental, undifferentiated rubble or barnacles clinging to the events. In effect, the ideas are also stored as concrete facts, as memories of something he has heard, read, or thought, not as ideas or concepts. Therefore, he does not exercise any selectivity or discrimination when he utters a comment.

His comment is approximate, because it is intended to stand for the total montage, the “gestalt,” that his emotion brings out of his subconscious. The only thing he really intends to communicate, his actual judgment, is: “This is painful.” Translated into words, his judgment would be: “This is painful, because of all the similar events I remember as painful.” Thus his memories serve as the proof or the validation of his judgment, performing, in his consciousness, the function performed by logical, conceptual evidence in a rational consciousness. This is the process by which emotion takes precedence over logic; in fact, it does not take precedence—it substitutes for logic. (Logic is a conceptual tool—it cannot operate by means of percepts, it cannot deal with unanalyzed, undifferentiated, “irreducible” concretes.)

This method, of course, is as near to a perceptual level of epistemology as a conceptual, human consciousness can come. It consists of treating memories as percepts, as “package-deal” irreducible primaries, and of forming value judgments by a primitive, animal-like standard of “pleasurable” or “painful,” these two standing for “good” or “bad,” without any further analysis or understanding, without any knowledge of why something is good or bad, why something was pleasurable or painful. This is exactly what an animal’s “pleasure-pain mechanism” would do. In the case of an animal, this mechanism works as an immediate response to immediate concretes and is assisted by memory. An animal’s memory is purely associational, and thus an animal can be trained by a repetition of pleasurable or painful experiences, of rewards or punishments (the repetition makes the animal memorize or associate).

In the case of a man, this method becomes the issue of “stale thinking.” When a man claims that he cannot separate his emotion from his perception of the event to which he is responding, that he feels as if the two come simultaneously (which means that he evaluates something before he has grasped what it is, yet he is epistemologically unable to take time to perceive the event fully), his consciousness, in fact, is reacting to past events, to memories called out of his subconscious by his first glimpse of some accidental resemblance or association between the present perception and the events of his past. (It is in this sense that he does not actually perceive the present event and cannot identify it or think about it; and it is somewhat inaccurate to call his memories “stale thinking”—they are not his old conclusions or conscious value-estimates, they are merely unanalyzed “gestalts” of concrete events and automatic emotional reactions.)

A man whose epistemology functions in this manner, by accidental associations of “pleasure” or “pain,” has no way of knowing whether his judgment (his emotional response) is or is not relevant to the present event or the facts confronting him or the immediate reality with which he is dealing, but which he has not actually perceived. He has no way of knowing whether his judgment (his substitute for judgment) is right or wrong, true or false, nor why.

The terrible consequence of this method for a human consciousness is the fact that it does make a full perception of reality impossible, that it does make a man epistemologically unable to take time to perceive. Since man needs a system of symbols to deal with the enormous complexity of his experiences, since he has to condense and simplify every new event by means of its essentials, since he cannot treat every new event as if it were an undifferentiated, unprecedented first in a baby’s blank consciousness, but must integrate (or at least relate) it to the context of his past knowledge, this method substitutes an emotion for the perception and selection of an essential.

Thus, a rational man, considering a specific political event, will call on his conceptual knowledge to identify the event by means of its essence. He will observe, for instance, that a given law establishes government controls and he will estimate it as evil, by means of his previously reached conviction that government controls are evil. He will not need to examine every concrete detail of the law or ponder over all its future consequences; his conceptual grasp of the essential element involved will contain and cover all those concretes.

But a man with an “emotional-perceptual” epistemology is helpless and lost before the complexity of the same law. His only method of condensing the meaning of that law is his emotion, backed by the context of his memories, which are loosely stored by resemblance, similarity, or chance association. He has no way of determining what is essential in that law, and thus his emotion becomes the essential—and, without examining or analyzing that law (which he cannot begin to do and would not know how), he concludes that the law is “bad” or “good” according to whatever aspect of it has the strongest emotional meaning for him, the strongest emotional associations or connotations. This is the reason why such men jump to conclusions rashly, on the mere hint of some isolated aspect of an issue, and miss the most important, essential, or relevant points, regardless of their intelligence and perceptiveness. This is why such men are always context-dropping; this is why they see the whole issue only when some advocate of reason points it out, and then they wonder: “Why didn’t I think of this before? Why didn’t I see it by myself?” This is how that epistemology can paralyze and negate the best mind.

Notes for cure: The difficulty in correcting this epistemology is the fact that a man’s emotion has become his only selector. Without it, he would feel totally lost in a maze of incomprehensible complexities (which no mind could hold), he wouldn’t know where to begin, he would literally feel something resembling the disintegration of his consciousness. (His emotional “yes” or “no” is the only integrator of his consciousness, that is: of his memories.) Therefore, one cannot simply forbid him to use his emotion as selector, one cannot remove it without providing him with a substitute. So the first step to take is as follows: while building up his conceptual files by a constant process of verbalizing and defining, teach him to analyze his emotional selector when he catches it in action. Thus, if he feels that politics is “bad,” make him ask himself: “Why do I feel this?” and name as many reasons as he can find. The reasons do not have to be exhaustive immediately; the purpose is to train him to the process of identifying the causes of his emotions—and, gradually, he will learn to discover deeper and deeper reasons, to remove more “onion skins,” and ultimately to reduce his emotional premises down to their philosophical, primary base. (Do not rush this process—let him do it—don’t let him memorize formulas and dogmas which he does not fully understand.)

[AR’s notes on psychology end here.]

1959

[Several years later, AR noted some ideas for short stories.]

A “horror story” about mechanics in charge of an H-bomb. The crime of the concrete-bound people—or of those who think only “down to a certain point.”

A savage with a computer, who perishes because he does not know how to operate it. This is the relationship of man to the automatic integrations of his consciousness, i.e., to his emotions. (Add the fact that the computer is operating constantly and that the savage thinks it’s a deity he must obey.)

“The Inside Story.” A dramatization of an inner conflict, with different actors presenting different, clashing premises—and the existential result.

May 27, 1959

The Inside Story

Tom.

The well-groomed man (social metaphysics). (“What would people say?”) [“Social metaphysics ” refers to the neurosis resulting from automatized second-handedness, i.e., the type of psycho-epistemology that is focused primarily on the views of others, not on reality.]

The shabby man (malevolent universe). (“It’s too dangerous!”)

The temperamental man (whim-worship). (“But I want it!”)

The fat man (anti-effort). (“Why bother?”)

The joker (death premise). (Laughter at values.)

The wife: Edna.

The doctor: Dr. Clark.

The temperamental man on the phone—screaming irrational denials. (“She knows, but can’t prove it.”)

Tom on the phone—assuring her of his love. (Her advice to him.)

The well-groomed man on the phone—“What would people say?” (Her ultimatum.)

The shabby man on the phone—the slap in the face—Edna walks out.

The panic over Dr. Clark.

Fight—the joker dominating—the knife—the windows are closed—the scream—the phone ringing.

Last scene—(three pages).

Undated

[This series of philosophic notes was paper-clipped together.]

Values set the psycho-epistemological rhythm (or tempo) of cognition. They make one hold a given percept or concept in mind long enough to integrate; integration is what makes a thing or issue “real.”

Thus non-attention or non-retention is a matter of lack of values. And values have to be connected to action.

An “out of focus” state may be a state of rushing past everything (psycho-epistemologically), while focus requires slowness. (?)

Think this over; it has many implications. (Such as the relationship of mental action to existential action.)

The reification of “forces” of nature is the rebellion against (or ignorance of) the law of identity: it separates entities from actions, implying that actions are not caused by the nature of the entities that act, but are caused by some outside power. For example: “Death takes a holiday” implies that death is not inherent in the nature of living entities. Or: “Spring brings flowers”—implying that the growth of flowers is not inherent in nature. This is an example of the inability to grasp that existence exists.

The process of reifying abstractions is proper only in the moral realm, i.e., only in regard to human character. Here, it is not a metaphor, a fantasy, or contradiction of reality—it is possible in fact, it is a model.

The “determinism” to look for in human psychology is logic. The logic of a man’s basic premises determines his motivation and actions. (This is in regard to [the view] that the science of psychology cannot exist unless man is subject to determinism.)

Possible article: “The Vested Interest in Self-Abasement.”

Fear of unearned flaws and/or the desire to indulge real flaws.

The desire to be “safe” rather than happy.

Fear of one’s own emotions—and lack of knowledge of their source and meaning.

The “plausibility” of the notion of original sin.

In algebra, the relation of x (the unknown) to the other (known) elements of an equation determines its nature because x is the only variable, while the other elements are fixed and stable. This is the relationship of consciousness to existence: the content of consciousness is variable; the facts of existence are constant. Only on this basis can consciousness determine the nature of any given fact or problem that it is investigating.

February, 1960

For Yale lecture (random philosophical notes)

Religion is “canned philosophy”: you don’t have to know what’s in it or how it’s cooked, no effort is required of you, just swallow it—and if it poisons you, it was your own fault, the cooks will tell you, you didn’t have enough “faith.”

The phenomenon of “wanting to have your cake and eat it, too”—the primacy of consciousness—is a luxury of a high civilization, of parasites who “feel safe.” There are no whim-worshippers on a desert island. (?) (The “primacy of consciousness” is the primacy of wishes.)

The “stolen concept.”

Attila and the Witch Doctor. [AR’s analysis of these two archetypes—the man of force and the man of faith—is presented in For the New Intellectual.]

The contradiction of wanting “democracy,” “collective living and cooperation,” the “will of the people,” etc.—and the abolition of reason. Reason is the only means of collective communication.

The worship of suffering. (Observe that the whim-worshippers are always malevolent universers.)

The new obscurantism: if it’s knowledge, it’s untrue—if it’s an absolute, it’s wrong (if it’s indeterminate, it’s true).

The meaning of the “anti-system-building premise”: anti-integration. (Philosophers as “garage mechanics.”) (Non-objective law.) (Treating symptoms and [attacking] anyone who looks for a cause.)

Epistemological advice: do not take the blame for “failure to understand” [the stuff you are taught], the others do not understand it, either. Do not think: “It can’t mean what it seems to mean;” it does mean just that (the technique of the “Big Lie”).

Reason as “perception of reality”—the “new intellectual.”

The symptoms of today’s decadence: “I feel” and “It seems to me.”

(The strangeness of my position in addressing a modem audience is the fact that I have to speak of what everybody knows, and be shocking and new, for that very reason—that I am not addressing ignorance, but evasion—that I am not answering a desire to know, but a desire not to know—that the prevalent premises are “don’t dare identify what I am struggling so hard not to admit” and “don’t dare say that anything you say can make a difference, which means: that knowledge matters.” Well, that is what I am going to say. I am here to identify what you all know by the modern method of knowledge: by feeling.) [This paragraph was crossed out.]

Is the H-bomb to be [launched] by “faith”?

Do you want to know the H-bomb as it “really is”?—as a “thing in itself”? Do you want to grasp it by “direct perception,” without the effort of the “cold hand of reason”? Or to grasp it “with your whole person”?

1960

[The following passages were cut from the title essay in For the New Intellectual.]

The abdication of philosophy is all but complete. To understand the extent of the collapse, one must remember that the task of integrating abstractions into wider abstractions, of integrating knowledge into theories and principles, of integrating theories and principles to their practical applications, of maintaining a constant unifying process between broad concepts and their concrete, perceptual roots, thus achieving and preserving a non-contradictory sum and frame of reference—is not an automatic task nor an easy one; it requires the highest, most demanding level of conceptual psycho-epistemology. It is the specific task of philosophy, which cannot be performed by any other profession. Philosophers, by the proper requirement of their task, are the guardians of man’s knowledge and of his capacity to know.

Every society of men—from the most primitive tribe of savages to present-day America—has a certain cultural atmosphere which is determined by the kind of ideas that underlie the actions, the mode of living, within that society. Whether the majority actually believes these ideas or merely accepts them by default, no society and no men can exist without certain basic ideas to direct their actions, so long as they do have to act, that is: to deal with reality, with physical nature and with one another. Most men accept their ideas, not because they have judged them to be true, but merely because they believe that these ideas seem to be accepted by others. The unstated premise behind such acceptance is the desire to escape the responsibility of independent judgment and to “play it safe” by means of the evader’s basic formula of: “Who am I to know? Others know best.”

It never occurs to such evaders that most of those others accept their ideas in precisely the same manner, with no more thought, judgment or knowledge than their own. When men attempt to evade the responsibility of thinking, they become the victims of an enormous self-made hoax, each man believing that his neighbor knows that the ideas they share are true, even if he himself does not know it, and the neighbor believing that his neighbor knows it, even if he doesn‘t, and so forth. Where, then, do these ideas come from? Who sets the terms and the direction of a culture? The answer is: any man who cares to.

For good or evil, whether such a man is a profound thinker or an ambitious demagogue, an idealistic hero or a corrupt, man-hating destroyer—those who choose to deal with ideas determine the course of human history. Those who formulate men’s thinking determine their fate. The makers of trends, the creators of cultures, the actual leaders of mankind are the philosophers.

If you study history, you will be shocked to discover how few—how very few—of these philosophers were profound thinkers or idealistic heroes. But this should not be astonishing: when men attempt to escape the responsibility of thinking, it is not the thinker or the hero that they will attract to the role of their intellectual leader.

The old slogan of con men “You can’t cheat an honest man” is nowhere as applicable as in the field of the intellect. An honest mind may make errors, but will not be taken in. The trickiest sophistries of the con men of philosophy are impotent against a mind honestly concerned with the pursuit of knowledge. Such a mind will accept nothing until his own independent, rational judgment has weighed it and found it to be true. But the pretentious, half-conscious zombie, who wants to be intellectual without effort and who mouths fashionable formulas, with no idea of their meaning, source, or implications, feeling safe in the belief that some omniscient, infallible authority somewhere has proved them to be true and saved him the bother—is sure to be the victim of those whose purpose is to destroy the mind he has abandoned. An intellectual leader such as Aristotle does not seek blind believers and formula-reciters; a leader such as Immanuel Kant does.

There is one paragraph of Hume‘s, a single short paragraph, which has been working like a paralysis-ray on the brains of ethical theorists up to the present time, and which I should like to quote:

In every system of morality which I have hitherto met with I have always remarked that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but it is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought or ought not expresses some new relation or affirmation, it is necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others that are entirely different from it. [Quoted from A Treatise of Human Nature.]

This, in terms of modem philosophy, is the issue of the “is” versus the “ought.” It purports to mean that ethical propositions cannot be derived from factual propositions—or that knowledge of that which is cannot logically give man any knowledge of what he ought to do. And wider: it means that knowledge of reality is irrelevant to the actions of a living entity and that any relation between the two is “inconceivable.”

May 21, 1961

[AR made the following notes while attending a conference on “Methods in Philosophy and the Sciences ” at The New School in New York City.]

[Speaker: Noam Chomsky, “Some Observations on Linguistic Structure. ”]

Noam Chomsky (an expert social-metaphysical-elite witch doctor):

“Studies” should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

Simple trees [i.e., diagrams used in modern symbolic logic]: is the manner of presentation always in mid-stream, assuming previous knowledge?

Pure Rube Goldberg. [Goldberg was an American cartoonist who drew absurdly complex mechanical devices.]

How many trees would I need to build in order to understand Atlas Shrugged—and in how many volumes?

Is Chomsky trying to systematize all conceptual relationships in language?

[Speaker: Paul Ziff, “About Grammaticalness. ”]

Paul Ziff (a social-metaphysical hatchet-man):

“If a sentence is ungrammatical, then native speakers balk.” [This] as a test and criterion of grammaticalness!!! (Stolen concept!!)

“[There are] 7029 or possibly 7023 grammatical categories.”(!!!)

What is the method?

[Speaker: Nelson Goodman, “Commentary. ” This talk addresses the goal of linguistic analysis.]

Nelson Goodman (a nervous, old-fashioned professor):

The whole damn thing is an attempt to escape from or by-pass the issue of context and integration.

[Speaker: Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, “Mechanical Recognition of Sentence Structure. ”]

Yehoshua Bar-Hillel (a conscientious scholar):

I think the hierarchical structure of concepts is what they need for their problem—if I understand him at all.

All this is obviously a substitute for epistemology—or an attempt to fill the vacuum left by the destruction of epistemology; linguistic analysis had to lead to this.

[Bar-Hillel concludes that] it is impossible, by present knowledge, to arrive at a unique interpretation of syntactic structures for use in computers. His reasons: readers use “context” (“they are not tabula rasa”). “The hope for a complete automatization of syntactic analysis is close to utopian.” They had the hope of substituting “redundancy” for context.

He seems to be good.

[Speaker: Hans Herzberger, “Kernalization. ”]

Hans Herzberger (a voodoo or medieval witch-doctor):

To “kernalize” a sentence is to break it into simpler “kernal” sentences.

Arbitrary BS.

A batch of undefined terms related to nothing—practically a total divorce of thought and language from reality.

The time it would take to do all that would eliminate the need for a computer—it would take less time to solve the problem by one’s own nonmechanical thinking.

May 20, 1962

[AR attended the same conference the next year.]

[Speaker: George Simpson, “Explanation of the Evolution of Life as a Sequence of Unique Events. ”]

Prof Simpson:

There are no laws in evolution (or in biology); everything is unique. After stating that no explanation is possible, since everything is unique, he states that we all have an “intuitive, instinctive feeling” that explanation and prediction are connected “in some way.”

After all the modern BS, he goes right back to abstraction, via such things as “anterior and consequent configuration.”

[Speaker: Colin Pittendrigh, “Evolution and the Explanation of Organization. ”]

Prof. Pittendrigh:

“Organization in biology is end-directed.”

“It can trap the improbable and make it common.” This is a sample of the approach, of the method of speaking.

“Organization is strongly history-dependent.”(!!)

There could have been more than two ways of respiration—but only two exist, the “possibilities” being limited by “history.” Good God, by what standard? What do they mean by possibility of other ways?

[Speaker: Ernest Nagel, “Commentary. ”]

Regarding syllogisms: you will not draw any conclusion unless the necessary terms were “smuggled into” the premises. Example: You can’t deduce the age of the captain from the position of the ship. (Good God!!!)

“Whether something is explicable or not depends on the assumptions which you are making.” (Boy, oh boy!)

All of this is an escape from—or ignorance of—abstractions. God, what is left of epistemology?!

They all substitute metaphors for concepts—like savages.

None of them know what they are talking about and all of them are going through the motions. Anyone can set the terms and the direction.

Undated

Note for “Self-Esteem” “ (and Morality)

The “able to live” and the “worthy to live” issue can be called “Darwinism” as applied to man: only the man who has made himself able to live is worthy to live—which means: the man fit to survive, can survive—which means: the intellectual (and moral) “survival of the fittest.” But observe the meaning of this, as against the “Spencerian” kind of Darwinism: (a) other species survive by “destruction” of lesser species (incidentally, not by the destruction of their own species, there is no such thing as “dog-eat-dog”)—man survives by production (not by fighting over the given in nature); (b) the human “survival of the fittest” benefits every human being (the “pyramid of ability”), except the parasites.

All altruist societies create the metaphysical contradiction of: the man fit to survive finds himself unable to survive—because of conditions geared to the non-thinking parasite and because of the principle of penalizing virtue for being virtue. (This is the [key] for explaining the altruist’s package-deal about “compassion” and concern for the “unfit”—the unable or the unwilling?—their real concern is: “Let me survive out of focus at your expense.”)

Undated

[AR made the following notes while planning an article on “The Unsacrificed Self ”]

Issues

The sacrifice of material goods is only the last, and superficial, result of altruism. The basic demand of altruism is the sacrifice of one’s mind.

To sacrifice material goods means to sacrifice one’s values—which means, to sacrifice one’s judgment—which means, to sacrifice one’s mind. (Give clear examples.)

(Power-lust is the attribute of the irrationalist. A rational man wants to know the truth, to perceive reality, and has no vested interest in the subversion or submission of another man’s mind.)

The basic motive of altruism: parasitic survival or the destruction of the mind? Both—since it is the same issue. Existentially, it is not so much parasitic survival (and, sometimes, not at all) as the “sense of life,” “pseudo-self-esteem” kind of search for metaphysical-epistemological vindication or “pseudo-efficacy”—for the reassurance that if one can destroy man’s reason, one can get away with surviving by one’s corrupt, irrational psycho-epistemology. It is the constant urge to get away with irrationality—in order to escape the anxiety of knowing that one is unfit to exist. In this sense—the “non-venal” lust for power (“obedience for the sake of obedience”).

The dominance of anti-mind in world religions: Lucifer, Adam, Prometheus, Phaethon, Icarus, the Tower of Babel. Pride as a sin is always the pride of the mind, that is, reason. (Which means: the absolutism of one’s own rational judgment, the reliance on one’s own “unaided” intellect.) Superficially, people think that pride is some sort of moral conceit, the boast “I am good,” usually unearned. But it does not pertain to morality—it pertains to epistemology, as intended by the altruists. For mystic altruists—it is “the pride of the mind”; for collectivist-altruists-it is “the pride (or the evil) of independence.” (Observe how the second brings out the intention of the first, by bringing the issue down to earth. This is an instance of the mystics of muscle being the product and heirs of the mystics of spirit.)

The need of all power-lusters for a “higher authority” to sanction their doctrines, either God or Society—the ultimate reason is that no man could get away with demanding the sacrifice of your mind to his; he has to be the spokesman of a “higher power.”

“Under altruism, no moral calculations are possible. ” All altruistic-collectivist systems are guilty of the “fallacy of the stolen concept” in regard to individualism: they intend to preserve the values of individualism while destroying their base.

(America’s subordination to the “underdeveloped nations” in the U.N. is the national counterpart of what altruism demands of the individual: the sacrifice of the power of judgment.)

Non-objectivity-as revolt against the independent mind. The “tyranny of reality.”

People do not want total irrationality or dependence. What they want is much worse: an independent mind who, in case of conflict, accepts their judgment above his own. (This is impossible, therefore the result is neurotics with switching metaphysics; also—the men who reserve their independence for their professions, but surrender their mind in everything else. Examples: Einstein, Frank Lloyd Wright.)

The ultimate political-social result and expression of the sacrifice of the mind: unlimited majority rule, “democracy,” numbers (or the collective) as the standard of morality and truth. (Current examples: Kennedy, the Saskatchewan doctors.)

The “frozen absolute” attitude toward altruism-collectivism: “What will you do about the poor?”

Altruism is destructive of the mind of the giver and also of the receiver. (“It’s for your own good”—white lies, etc. Example: the universal tragedy of “self-sacrificial” parents.)

November 4, 1964

[AR was interviewed by the New York Times on the day after the 1964 Goldwater-Johnson presidential election.]

Told on the Phone to the N.Y. Times

“I am not a ‘conservative,’ but an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism. I think that this campaign was conducted very badly, that this is the end of old-fashioned, anti-intellectual ”conservatism‘—and that the advocates of capitalism have to start from scratch, not in practical politics, but as a cultural-philosophical movement, to lay an intellectual foundation for future political movements. It is earlier than you think. The status quo of today is a mixed economy with a fascist, rather than socialist, trend—and [Lyndon] Johnson is the conservative in the exact sense of that word. Today, the advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, which Sen. [Barry] Goldwater is not, are and have to be radical innovators.“

February 20, 1966

Possible Themes for Articles

“The Short-Range View of Reason”: The people who claim that “man cannot live by reason alone” are concrete-bound, range-of-the-moment non-thinkers who have no idea of principles, wide integrations, fundamental issues, philosophy—and, therefore, who use their mind only moment by moment, on immediate, concrete problems. They have no inkling of a phenomenon such as a sense of life and no idea of the way in which mind determines emotions. These are the people who say that reason can deal only with the means to achieve values, but not with the ends—that the choice of values is subjective, mystical or arbitrary—that morality is not the province of reason, and there can be no rational morality. (If a man like [Ludwig von Mises] advocates this last, it is a sign of some enormous repression (or second-handedness) in the realm of values—since he is certainly not concrete-bound in his professional psycho-epistemology; if anything, he is “rationalistic” (Kantian) and inclined to floating abstractions. This is an interesting psychological lead.)

“Sense of Life and the Primacy of Consciousness ”: Man needs a state of psychological integration—of inner unity and, therefore, full certainty. Uncertainty is a dangerous state for man existentially, and unsupportable psychologically. The truly unbearable uncertainty is uncertainty about the validity of one’s own consciousness. And since man never learned how to live with a volitional consciousness, how to possess certainty and knowledge without infallibility and omniscience—his most urgent need is the validation of his own consciousness. Therefore, in the absence of a rational epistemology (which is the only solution to this problem) man takes his consciousness as an absolute (uncritically) and fakes reality to fit it—in order not to face the horror of an impotent consciousness; hence, Platonism and other such philosophies. (This is the distorted element of truth in such systems—or the psycho-epistemological need which makes them possible. A great deal of conscious evil and faking for evil motives is involved in the authors of such philosophies, as, for instance, in Hume or Kant.)

March 6, 1966

Themes for Articles

Psychological selfishness: the kind of selfishness that consists of constant focusing on: “What does it show about me?” (Which implies psycho-epistemological passivity, determinism, the taking of emotions as causeless primaries, emotion-motivation, whim-worship, the primacy of consciousness.) The “games” of double-meaning dialogue, focused on “beating” somebody—the focus on “impressing” somebody or “proving” something about oneself, rather than on facts and reality. In regard to art: the focusing, not on whether one enjoys a given work of art, but on: “What will it prove about me if I enjoy it or not?” (The paradox: enormous and irrational concern with one’s moral status—by a person who has given up values and moral sovereignty.) The irrationality of altruism on this issue: the advice to “come out of yourself” and “concern yourself with the ‘wider’ world,” which is equated with “concern with others”—as if the objective meant the collective, as if “others” had a stake in reality, but one did not, as if the withdrawal from reality into one’s own feelings were actually to one’s own interest.

(This is actually the issue of “self-doubt-centeredness.”) [AR regarded the term “self-centered” as a pejorative, meaning, roughly, “neurotically concerned with one’s own worth, ” i.e., “centered on self-doubt. ” In her view, the virtue of selfishness requires that one be “reality-centered. ”]

The issue of men’s unidentified best: The reversal of the idea that men pretend to be good in public, but are monsters in private (like Peyton Place). The exact opposite is true: men (I suspect, predominantly) repress and hide their best (their values, their honest or profound thoughts, their serious concerns), and put on an act of cautious, empty superficiality (and, often, moral treason) in public. The “lynching” spirit: the worst in men is encouraged by a mob feeling (and I doubt whether the best ever is—such instances as “public” courage are not courage).

(The springboard for this article: The fact that men use the right epistemology in the physical sciences, to the extent that they do succeed, but have never identified it.)

1966-1967

[The following passages were cut from Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.

The first is from the conclusion to Chapter 5, “Definitions. ”]

It is as if man were still screaming in terror before the mystery of his own consciousness, unable to grasp the fact that human cognition is not to be achieved automatically, neither by passive absorption nor by active distortion of perceptual data, and that knowledge can be acquired only by a specific method whose terms are set irrevocably by the nature of man’s consciousness and of reality, and are not open to man’s choice, only to his discovery and practice—a rigorous method, to be practiced volitionally, whose reward is objective knowledge.

[From Chapter 6, “Axiomatic Concepts ”:]

The disintegration of a human consciousness means the attempted descent to an animal’s perceptual level of awareness, but with this difference: an animal, being unable to question reality, is unable to fake it and acts, moment by moment, in accordance with such facts as his limited awareness entitles him to perceive. Man, possessing the power to expand his consciousness, does not possess the power to shrink it; he cannot escape the integrating power of his brain and restrict himself to snatches of moment-by-moment awareness. If he rejects the task of conscious integration, his sub conscious does the job for him, and the result is not cognitive integration, but a blind, nightmare mixture of the part-grasped, part-evaded, part-felt, part-wished and whole terror, the state of a creature unfit to perceive reality on any level of awareness, and unable to survive—samples of which may be observed in any psychiatrist’s office or in the ranks of any irrationalist movement.

[From Chapter 7, “The Cognitive Role of Concepts”:]

The growth of language follows the growth of knowledge, guided by the principle of unit-economy. Every new branch of science creates a vocabulary of its own (which should be, but today is not, translatable without contradiction into the general language). The advent of every new industry creates new words, i.e., new concepts. (If Plato’s theory of universals needed any modern refutations, test it by asking yourself whether the archetypes of “monkey wrench,” “spark plug” and “television” had to wait two and a half thousand years in another dimension to be finally recalled by man.)

[After crossing out the above, AR wrote:]

The growth of language follows the growth of knowledge and the expansion of human activities. It is a vast, anonymous process, with many variations (in the optional area), many changes, false starts and short-lived attempts. Yet certain basic principles can be observed, demonstrating, not the arbitrary character, but the objectivity of that process.

In secular practice (i.e., omitting the concepts of mysticism, which have no referents), a word survives and gains general usage only when and if it designates an actual category of existents that need conceptual designation—with the principle of unit-economy determining that need. Slang is a major source of new words in the general language. Many slang terms are coined every year, by one group or another; some of them become fashionable, enjoy a brief, artificial popularity of random mouthing (intended to designate the fact that one is in with the right group, rather than any category of existents) and vanish, like the stale debris of some noisy party. But a few slang expressions survive and become part of formal language—the apt, incisive ones that designate some aspect of reality for which no formal term had previously existed (such as the verb “to kid” or the nouns “bum” or “stuffed shirt”).

[From Chapter 8, “Consciousness and Identity”:]

Such knowledge as mankind has acquired and such progress as it has made were achieved in spite of and in a constant struggle against its dominant theories of epistemology. Cognitive objectivity has existed in the world as a kind of unofficial, unrecognized underground, in isolated instances and sporadic snatches, fed by such partial leads as could be found in Aristotle’s far from perfect system. Objectivity has never had a full statement, a consistent theory or a firm epistemological foundation; and, even though it represented the implicit method practiced in every scientific achievement, particularly in the spectacular progress of the physical sciences, it was not identified nor acknowledged by its practitioners, which is an eloquent illustration of the ultimate futility of practice without theory, of man’s helplessness when he lacks an explicit statement of his merely implicit knowledge. Those who sought cognitive objectivity were helplessly vulnerable to the theoretical onslaughts of both mystics and skeptics—they had no answer to the flood of equivocations, merely sensing that something was very wrong in those arguments, but unable to discover why—and they lost the battle again and again, as they have lost it today, when we witness the spectacle of nuclear missiles on one hand and, on the other, a unanimous chorus proclaiming that knowledge is impossible to man (and, presumably, that a process of cognition based on conceptual “family resemblances” [a reference to Wittgenstein] will determine when those missiles are to be used).

May, 1968

[The following was cut from AR’s introduction to the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of The Fountainhead.]

I have been asked whether I have learned anything from the history of The Fountainhead and its readers. I have—and it was not an attractive discovery. I learned, at least in part, what makes those stillborn men extinguish the unrepeatable fact of being alive.

Without apology to Dostoevsky, this part of my discussion may be entitled “Notes from the Underground.”

It took me some time to identify and confirm the nature of that particular underground. I shall list the key points of the evidence, as I observed it.

Of the twelve publishers who rejected The Fountainhead, the most shocking rejection, to me, was by a house whose editor told me that their editorial board had evaluated my novel as: “a work of almost genius ‘genius’ in the power of its expression—’almost’ in the sense of its enormous bitterness,” but that they rejected it because they were certain it would not sell. (Incidentally, what they took for “bitterness” was the unforgiving tone of moral indignation.) The phenomenon of men acting on wrong standards of value did not puzzle me; but the phenomenon of men rejecting that which they regarded as a value by their own standards and judgment was, to me, psychologically inconceivable. I felt that I was sensing some profound evil which I would have to learn to identify someday.

After the publication of The Fountainhead, I met a woman, by chance, in a beauty parlor. She heard my name and she approached me to tell me how much she admired my novel. She was not gushing; she spoke quietly, intently and, to the best of my judgment, sincerely. It was the sincerity that made me take notice when she complimented me on my courage and added, with the faintest note of despair in her voice, referring to the spirit of my book: “Many of us feel that way, but we don’t have the courage to say it. We’re afraid.” “Afraid of what?” I asked. She could not answer; she merely sighed and spread her hands out in a gesture of hopelessness, as if she were thinking of something intangible, too vast to identify. I tried to question her, but got no further clue. I truly did not know what she was talking about. I never saw her again. But the incident remained in my mind because I felt it was a clue to something either evil or very, very wrong, which I had to understand.

A brilliant young man [Leonard Peikoff] whom I met when he was seventeen (and who since has become one of my best friends), asked me, on our first meeting: “Is Howard Roark moral or is he practical? He seems to be both—yet I have always been told that it’s one or the other.” This choice was deeply disturbing to him, because he took moral issues seriously and because the same people urged him—at different times—to choose alternate sides of this dichotomy. It did not take me long to convince him that this was a false dichotomy, caused by the irrationality and impracticality of the mystic-altruist ethics, and that this was one example of why man needs a rational code of ethics. But I wondered—as I had wondered often, before and since—about the psychological state of those who maintain that dichotomy. What are moral values divorced from practice? And what is it that one chooses to practice, if it is divorced from moral values? [This paragraph was crossed out.]

In the early days of The Fountainhead’s history, when its success was still uncertain, I noticed the peculiar attitude of an editor of my acquaintance: his conviction that my novel was a great value and his emotional commitment to it were unquestionable, he had demonstrated it, in action, on many occasions—and yet, whenever I consulted him on any action to be taken on its behalf, his answers were vague, almost forced and singularly half-hearted. Then, one day, I asked him: “Tell me, you believe that The Fountainhead is great and, precisely for that reason, you believe that it is doomed, don’t you?” He answered in a low, unhappy voice: “Yes.”

The instances of men who paid me extravagant, unsolicited compliments at private gatherings, but never stated it in print or on public occasions, are too numerous to count. I do not mean the usual sort of gushers. Those men were prominent literary or professional figures who had no reason to flatter me; in many cases, they did not even say it to me, but to others, without knowing that I would ever hear about it. If such were their views, they had no reason to be afraid of expressing them publicly. Yet they kept silent.

The final clue was provided by a very perceptive friend of mine. He said he had observed a strange quality in many people’s enthusiasm for The Fountainhead: it was a furtive, secretive, subjective quality, almost like the reluctant confession of a guilty love. “They talk as an unhappily married man would talk about his secret mistress,” he said. “Their marriage is to the Establishment, to conventional values and the ‘accepted’ intellectual positions. But The Fountainhead is their passion.”

What I felt was something like a cold shudder.

What I grasped was that this was deeper and worse than simple cowardice or conformity. For whatever complexity of reasons—whether out of fear, or bewilderment, or discouragement, or repression, or years of conditioning by altruism’s vicious dichotomy between the moral and the practical, with the consequent feeling that the good is impractical, and the practical has no place for values—those men were consigning their values, the things they loved or admired or enjoyed, to the airless dungeon of subjectivism, as private fantasies or fragile, private treasures unfit for the sunlight of reality.

circa 1977

[The following daily schedule was undated. It was written after AR stopped writing The Ayn Rand Letter in February 1976, and before the death of her husband in November 1979.]

Tentative Schedule

Get up at 7:30 a.m.

7:30 a.m.-8:30 a.m.: Wake up and dress.

8:30 a.m.-1 p.m.: Main work (and Frank’s breakfast).

1 p.m.-2 p.m.: Lunch, house cleaning, order groceries.

2 p.m.-3 p.m.: Mail.

3 p.m.-4 p.m.: Algebra.

4 p.m.-5 p.m.: Reading lesson.

5 p.m.-6 p.m.: Reading.

6 p.m.-8 p.m.: Cooking, dinner, wash dishes.

8 p.m.-11 p.m. : Reading.

11 p.m.-1 a.m.: TV.

1 a.m.: Go to bed.

At present, main work should be “Philosophic Revolution Plan.” The reading period from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. should be given to order—cleaning up the organization of the house. The period after dinner should be elastic—including dates or talks with Frank. Once a week (Monday) should include attending to hair and wardrobe, or shopping (also—health). Sunday should be totally free—“whim-worshipping.” Saturday—should have secretary for mail.

Overall assignments: Time scheduie—“pleasure epistemology”—learning to read—algebra—diet.

Elements of action:

Business (literary contracts, lectures).

Contacts (social dates, contacts for possible magazine).

Correspondence (fan-mail, personal) and bills.

Clothes (shopping, mending).

Order (papers, files, drawers, closets—house in general).

Health (dentist, etc.).

Meals.

Elements of creative action:

Reading.

Time to think about psychology.

Time to think about myself and specific plan.

16

TWO POSSIBLE BOOKS

In the decade after Atlas Shrugged, AR made notes for a non-fiction book on Objectivism and for a novel entitled To Lome Dieterling. She did not get for in planning either book; the notes here represent in total a few days of work on each, spread over a period of years—what AR referred to as “work in small glances.”

June 8, 1958

Objectivism

A Philosophy for Living on Earth

Preface

I apologize for the subtitle of this book: it is the intellectual corruption of our age that made it necessary. If men were taught how to speak, it would be obvious that the word “living” refers to man; that man lives on earth; that “philosophy,” being the science of the nature of existence, is concerned with discovering the knowledge man requires for living; and, therefore, that the only words necessary are: “A philosophy.”

But since “philosophy” is the one concept which, today, has been all but destroyed, there are reasons why modern men cannot achieve a state of conceptual precision prior to acquiring the knowledge here to be presented. The purpose of this book is to make its subtitle redundant.

June 19, 1958

“Cosmology” has to be thrown out ofphilosophy. When this is done, the conflict between “rationalism” and “empiricism” will be wiped out--or, rather, the error that permitted the nonsense of such a conflict will be wiped out.

What, apparently, has never been challenged and what I took as a self-evident challenge (which it isn’t) is Thales’ approach to philosophy, namely: the idea that philosophy has to discover the nature of the universe in cosmo-logical terms. If Thales thought that everything is water, and the other pre-Socratics fought over whether it’s water and earth and fire, etc., then the empiricists were right in declaring that they would go by the evidence of observation, not by “rational” deduction—only then, of course, the whole issue and all its terms are [thoroughly confused]. The crux of the error here is in the word “nature.” I took Thales’ attempt to mean only the first attempt at, or groping toward, a unified view of knowledge and reality, i.e., an epistemological, not a metaphysical, attempt to establish the fact that things have natures.

Now I think that he meant, and all subsequent philosophers took it to mean, a metaphysical attempt to establish the literal nature of reality and to prove by philosophical means that everything is literally and physically made of water or that water is a kind of universal “stuff.” If so, then philosophy is worse than a useless science, because it usurps the domain of physics and proposes to solve the problems of physics by some non-scientific, and therefore mystical, means. On this kind of view of philosophy, it is logical that philosophy has dangled on the strings of physics ever since the Renaissance and that every new discovery of physics has blasted philosophy sky-high, such as, for instance, the discovery of the nature of color giving a traumatic shock to philosophers, from which they have not yet recovered. [AR is referring to the discovery that our perception of color depends on the nature of the light and the human visual system as well as on nature of the object, which led many philosophers to conclude that perception is subjective.]

In fact, this kind of view merely means: rationalizing from an arrested state of knowledge. Thus, if in Thales’ time the whole extent of physical knowledge consisted of distinguishing water from air and fire, he took this knowledge to be a final omniscience and decided on its basis that water was the primary metaphysical element. On this premise, every new step in physics has to mean a new metaphysics. The subsequent nonsense was not that empiricists rejected Thales’ approach, but that they took him (and Plato) to be “rationalists,” i.e., men who derived knowledge by deduction from some sort of “innate ideas,” and therefore the empiricists declared themselves to be anti-rationalists. They did not realize that the Thales-Plato school was merely a case of “arrested empiricists,” that is, men who “rationalized” on the ground of taking partial knowledge as omniscience.

Aristotle established the right metaphysics by establishing the law of identity—which was all that was necessary (plus the identification of the fact that only concretes exist). But he destroyed his metaphysics by his cosmology—by the whole nonsense of the “moving spheres,” “the immovable mover,” teleology, etc.

The real crux of this issue is that philosophy is primarily epistemology—the science of the means, the rules, and the methods of human knowledge. Epistemology is the base of all other sciences and one necessary for man because man is a being of volitional consciousness—a being who has to discover, not only the content of his knowledge, but also the means by which he is to acquire knowledge. Observe that all philosophers (except Aristotle) have been projecting their epistemologies into their metaphysics (or that their metaphysics were merely epistemological and psychological confessions). All the fantastic irrationalities of philosophical metaphysics have been the result of epistemological errors, fallacies or corruptions. “Existence exists” (or identity plus causality) is all there is to metaphysics. All the rest is epistemology.

Paraphrasing myself: Philosophy tell us only that things have natures, but what these natures are is the job of specific sciences. The rest of philosophy’s task is to tell us the rules by which to discover the specific natures.

June 20, 1958

The philosophy which I now will have to present is, in essence, the “rules of thinking” which children should be taught in the proper society (which the Wet Nurse needed). It is fundamental epistemology—plus psychological “epistemology.” All the evils of philosophy have always been achieved via epistemology—by means of the “How do you know that you know?” Consider the fact that the first and greatest destroyer, Plato, did it by means of the issue of “universals vs. particulars.” Mankind as a whole seems to be caught in the trap of the nature of its own epistemology: men cannot think until they have acquired the power of abstractions and language, but having done so, they do not know how they got there and are vulnerable to any attack on their means of knowledge. Like the discovery of “A is A,” their epistemology is implicit in their thinking, but unidentified. This will be the main part of my job: my theory of universals—the hierarchical nature of concepts—the “stolen concept” fallacy—the “context-dropping” and the “blank-out” (the refusal to identify)—the “Rand’s razor” (“state your irreducible primaries”)—the rules of induction (and definitions)—the “integration into the total sum of your knowledge”—the proof that “that which is empirically impossible is also logically impossible (or false)”—etc.

This will be the issue of “teaching the world my particular kind of epistemology” (which I took to be self-evident and known). This is also why I always thought of philosophy as a static, “finite” base, like logic, i.e., as a closed discipline which has to be learned in order then to proceed to live, with “life” beginning above this base. This, probably, is the root of what Leonard [Peikoff] had in mind when he called the present state of the world “the age of pre-reason.” It will help me to think of my job as “Philosophy for Hank Rearden. ”

Notes for “Objectivism ”

[Most of the remaining notes for the book deal with AR’s theory of concepts, which she later published in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.]

A unit is a concrete entity considered apart from the other entities which are subsumed under the same abstraction.

Thus, an inch is a concrete entity of the abstraction “length ” and is a unit of measurement for any other length which is conceptualized by means of its relationships to the chosen unit; thus a yard is so many inches, a mile is so many yards, etc.

Number is the abstraction of the process of abstraction. It stands for the relationship of an entity to other entities, all of which have to be absolute and immutable in their defining characteristic, in that which permits them to be regarded as units subsumed under a single concept. Number is the concept that identifies the transition from “entity to ”unit, “ the mental transformation of a concrete, perceptual entity into the material to be integrated by a concept. Mathematics is the pattern (the blue print) of the conceptual level of man’s consciousness—the abstract pattern of the process of concept-formation, in the sense that it isolates and identifies the process which man’s mind has to perform in regard to every abstraction, every concept it reaches, regardless of the concretes involved—that is: the abstraction of ”number“ stands for any concrete entities regarded as ”units“ to be integrated into a concept which then becomes a new, single unit. (The concept ”ten“ is a single unit denoting a certain number of ”ones“; the abstraction ”man“ is a single unit denoting ”n number“ of concrete men, that is: denoting a mathematical series to be extended into infinity, to subsume any number of men.)

(Next step: The relationship of every concept to the “open-ended” mathematical series.)

“Measurement” is the establishment of a relationship—the relationship between a concrete unit, which serves as the standard of measure, and other concretes belonging to the same abstraction (length, weight, etc.). A “concept” is also the establishment of a relationship—the relationship between a concrete unit and other concretes belonging to the same abstraction; the standard of measure here is the defining characteristic.

Fallacies:

“Stolen Concept” (connected with “irreducible primaries”).

“Context-dropping.”

“Reification of the Zero.”

“Stepping into Limbo.”

“Non-differentiation between Existence and Consciousness.”

(A “unit” is the concept of identity. If you take “a group” as a start and proceed to define a “unit” by breaking up the group—you have committed the fallacy of the “stolen concept”: you have already accepted the group as a unit.)

Regarding “context-dropping ”: a variant or corollary fallacy is the idea that considering a thing in context is a “relativistic ” premise, thus: if values are selected by man, they are “relative” to man. This is an example of the “whose whim” fallacy: either values are intrinsic (arbitrarily set by the whim of God or nature)—or they are subjective (“relative” to or set by the whim of man); the concept of objectivism (of an immutable nature of things) is missing. The reasoning behind it goes like this: if a thing has to be considered in a context, then it is not an absolute, then anything goes. The error is: the substitution of infinity for a given, known context. Example: [a philosophy professor] claiming that the airplane invalidates the absolutism of the law of gravitation.

April 9, 1959

Notes for Epistemology (Re: Mathematics of Consciousness)

The basic and most universal concepts in the functioning of a human consciousness are: existence—identity—entity—unit.

The first two pertain to metaphysics, the second two to epistemology.

To grasp existence is to grasp that existence is identity—that a thing is what it is.

To grasp that is to grasp the concept of entity—a thing.

To continue the process of consciousness is to transform the concept of entity into the concept of a unit, thus: a “unit” is an entity which is independent of any other entity of its own kind—or, a unit is any part of an entity considered independently of the rest of its own kind, such as an inch of string considered as an independent length of string while it is part of a ten-inch string. This is the start of the process of measurement.

All measurement is integration, by means of a basic unit, that is: the bringing of a vast or complex whole into conceptual form by relating it mathematically to a basic unit. Example: a mile is so many feet.

All abstractions (all concepts) are the identifications of a basic unit of measurement, with the specific measurements of the particular concretes omitted. For example, length is the abstraction of spatial extension, which omits the specific spatial extension of any given entity, but defines the kind of unit by means of which this entity is to be measured in regard to its attribute of spatial extension.

The unit of measurement for all concepts pertaining to consciousness is their content. Since consciousness is a “representation” or “reflection” (a more exact term is here needed) of existence, the concepts pertaining to consciousness are ultimately reducible to the existents which they “reflect” or “represent.” Examples: a “thought” is differentiated from another thought by means of its subject (of what the thought is about); an “emotion” is differentiated from another emotion by means of the value judgment it represents, and a value judgment is a thought (a thought dealing with the realm of action in existence).

In establishing a unit of measurement one has to observe two rules: the unit has to be a tool of both division and integration, it must give one the conceptual possibility of breaking an entity into such units and of integrating it back again, as well as integrating it with other entities of the same kind into groups or sums. Example: if an “inch” is taken as the unit to measure length, one must be able to break up a longer string into inches, then add them up to get a concept of the string in terms of an integrated sum of inches. (This requires a great deal more careful thinking and more precise definitions. But this is a lead to the process of forming concepts or abstractions.) [...]

My hypothesis is that all consciousness is a mathematical process (or, rather, the function of any consciousness is a mathematical process). To prove this I would have to identify the basic principles common to perception and mathematics. (By perception I mean here the total process of human awareness, from sensations to perceptions to conceptions.) I would have to identify the wider abstractions underlying the processes of concept-formation and of mathematics. And I would have to integrate them with neurology on the one hand (with the physiological part of the integration of sensations into perceptions)—and with metaphysics on the other.

If my hypothesis is true, then algebra might give me the clue to the objective rules of induction—to a kind of “Organon of Induction.” [Aristotle’s works on logic are called the “Organon, ” Greekfor “instrument. ”]

June 18, 1959

(Hurried notes, which require hours and hours of further thinking.)

Arithmetical numbers are taken as entities in any arithmetical calculation, which means: an arithmetical calculation is an action by which the relationship of certain entities leads to the discovery of a final entity, which is the goal and the stop of the action. A series of arithmetical equations involving action is incomplete until it has reached the stopping point of a specific arithmetical entity, e.g., a number.

But the numbers themselves are composites. The only primary entity here is the unit—the concept of one (1). Every other number is an abstraction which replaces a certain repetition of ones by a single concept meant to stand for that repetition (111 1 means 4).

This is the epistemological method of the first level of abstractions—that is, the abstractions (or conceptions) derived directly from perceptions and constituting “ostensive definitions,” e.g., the abstractions of immediately perceived objects, such as: chair, table, man, red, green, color, living being, etc. (Note the mixture of levels, such as “red” and “color.”) [AR seems to be correcting herself here—“color” and “living being” are not

“first-level” abstractions.] (Perceptions here mean that which a human consciousness automatically integrates out of sensations.) The next (and volitional) level are the abstractions from abstractions—which is the epistemological method of algebra (the discovery of unknown quantities by means of their relationship to the known quantities).

December 15, 1960

Notes,for “Objectivism”

Re: fallacies. The two most important fallacies which I must define thoroughly are, in effect, extensions of two of the fallacies defined by Aristotle: “context-dropping” is really the wider (and more modem) name for Aristotle’s “ignoratio elenchi”; and “the stolen concept” is the other side, the reverse, of “petitio principii.” If this last is “begging the question” or “assuming that which you are attempting to prove,” then “the stolen concept” is “begging the answer” or “assuming that which you are attempting to disprove.” (Many instances of “the stolen concept” are, in fact, instances of “petitio principii,” such as [Bertrand] Russell’s attempt to derive the concept “unit” from [the concept] “group,” which, throughout the whole reasoning, presupposes knowledge of the concept “unit.” But such instances are merely fraudulent attempts to prove something; the most important part of “the stolen concept” is its application to the fraudulent attempts to disprove something, particularly to disprove basic axioms. This is the worst of the fallacies in modern philosophy.)

[The notes for Objectivism: A Philosophy for Living on Earth end here.]

[During an interview in 1961, AR remarked:

I don’t know whether I will ever write fiction again. The difficulty is that Atlas Shrugged was the climax and completion of the goal I had set for myself at the age of nine. It expressed everything that I wanted of fiction writing. Above everything else, it presented my ideal man fully. I can never surpass Galt. More than that, I now have four variants: Roark, Galt, Rearden, and Francisco. There is no point in multiplying them. What worries me about my future in fiction is that the motor of my interest—the presentation of the ideal man and the ideal way of life—is gone. It’s completed, fulfilled....

If and when I see an aspect of my sense of life that I have not covered, then I will write another novel. One can’t exhaust the sense of life; it is not like philosophical problems.

At the time, AR had already made a few notes for To Lorne Dieterling. In Atlas Shrugged, the focus was on the whole of society, and the philosophic issues were dealt with explicitly. In To Lorne Dieterling, the focus is on the heroine, Hella, and her sense of life.]

November 30, 1957

First notes for: To Lorne Dieterling.

Basic theme: The story of a woman who is totally motivated by love for values—and how one maintains such a state when alone in an enemy world.

Next step of theme: The whole issue of values and of happiness. The role of values in human psychology, in the relationships among men and in the events of their lives. What it means to “live for one’s own sake”—shown not on a social-political scale, but in men’s personal lives.

As a consequence, show the manner in which men betray their values, and show the results. Select, for the characters of the story, the key versions of men’s attitudes toward values.

The hidden, basic issue here will be: effort or non-effort, or happiness versus non-effort. The issue “to think or not to think” takes actual form, existentially and psychologically, as the issue: “To value or to conform. ” It is not the independent thinker as such that people actually resent, but the independent value—which means: the person who feels intensely about his values. (This point will require long, detailed analysis here.)

The set-up of characters, at present:

Hella: the fully rational valuer.

Lome Dieterling: the repressor (a rational man who goes off the rails on the question of action—who, starting with the absolute that he will not let people stop him, finds himself placing action above ideas).

The “practical man.”

The “glamorizer.”

The “idealist.”

Gloria Thornton: the “energy without effort” type.

The above are pro-life people. Hella and Lorne are rational; the rest are the better types of social-metaphysicians.

On the “below-zero” side are the pro-death people—the actual haters of life and values.

The “Uncle Ed” type: the power-luster, who wants power for the sake of power; actually, he is after nothing at all.

The sneerer: the professional cynic, whose sole motive is to sneer at everything; specifically, at any kind of values (the New Yorker magazine type).

The humanitarian: the type whose motive is to penalize values for being values, to make men feel guilty about their intelligence, or ability, or beauty, or success, or wealth.

The story must show: that the death-premisers are actually after nothing, that they achieve nothing but a senseless, meaningless vacuum, that their horror is their mediocrity; and that they are the value-setters of a society of social-metaphysicians. (The rational men do not “take care” of other men; the thinkers require thinking men. It is only the most profoundly dependent social-metaphysicians, the power-lusters, who will undertake to “think for others.” As a consequence, the value-betrayers in the story—the men who gave up values for the sake of “safety,” on the ground that “others know best”—find, in the end, that their treason and all of their torture were for no better purpose than to have the world obey “Uncle Ed‘s” opinion on cigarettes. Or, as another example: the girl who renounces the man she loves, because of her mother’s objections—finds that her mother’s ultimate purpose was to stay in bed an hour later than usual “on whim.”)

The story must also show: that the value-betrayers end up by achieving the exact opposite of the goals they sought to achieve by social-metaphysical means.

Here there are two separate aspects to consider: Whether these men have some semi-rationally selected goal and believe (emotionally) that social-metaphysics is the means—or whether in their very selection of goals, they chose the socially prescribed, chose it uncritically, as a self-evident, irreducible primary. (I believe it is more this second. As an example: the “practical man” who chooses wealth and material success without any thought of “why?” or “what for?,” simply on some such feeling as “it’s good to be successful, everybody wants to be successful, how can that be doubted?”—which amounts to the feeling: “one is supposed to be successful.” Another example: the woman who has children without ever questioning whether she wants to have them—simply on the feeling that “one is supposed to have children.”)

The “practical man” goes bankrupt.

The “glamorizer” is viciously betrayed by his “best friend” (or wife) and suffers a terrible tragedy.

The “idealist” becomes the particular “cat’s paw” of the villains in their attempted destruction of ideals.

Gloria Thomton—whose “ego-value” was her competence in the achievement of any values prescribed by society, who obeyed, adjusted and conformed in the expectation that “others” (or “reality”) would reward her with happiness—finds herself empty, exhausted, enjoying nothing and reaching a state of chronic panic.

Examples of value-betraying (these are random examples of the things I hate most):

The man who, in middle-life, finds the woman he could be truly in love with, and passes her up because “it would upset his whole life.”

In the same category as above: the man who avoids any serious emotional commitment, who runs from anything that he could feel strongly about—for reasons such as: “I would be afraid to lose it” or: “It would hurt me too much to lose it,” etc.—the man who deliberately chooses the second-rate and second-best, the man who seeks dullness and mediocrity.

The man who says: “I don’t want to be happy, I just want to be contented—happiness is too demanding, exaltation is too difficult to bear.”

The man who says: “Don’t take anything too seriously,” and, later and more accurately: “I don’t take myself seriously.”

The man who says: “There is no black and white. All men are gray.” (With the result that he then proceeds to a mawkish, hysterical defense of any depravity as “not wholly black”—and to a malicious resentment against any man who is wholly white, and more: against any claim that any man can be wholly white.)

The man who excuses (and sanctions and accepts) another man’s evil action by claiming that the actor’s motives or intentions were good.

The man who believes that ideals are “too good for this earth.” His variants are: “If it’s good, it’s doomed,” or: “If it’s successful, it can’t be good,” or: “If I want it, it’s impossible.”

Any believer in any sort of compromise.

Any man who believes that mankind is essentially, metaphysically evil—and proceeds to make terms with the evil. (Any “appeaser.”)

Key points of the original “unrequited love ” story:

Hella’s dedication to the “curse” of always seeing things “as they ought to be.” (“The Archer” prologue.)

The Hella-Lorne romance—and breach.

Hella learning of Lome’s engagement to Gloria at Gloria’s birthday party; Lome following Hella to her home and their scene. (“It is only my pain—and I can take care of it.”)

Hella’s work on her book—the excruciating loneliness—the discovery of “her own world,” her “dates” with Lorne “as they should have been.”

The publication of the book—the general fury against her—the torture scene. (“This is our wedding-night, even if such is the only form of it that I can have.”)

The walk through the woods. (“To keep moving, just to keep moving ... just to take the next step ...”) The collapse—the enraptured rededica tion. (“No, I don’t regret it....”—the “all right, even this” answer to every past torture.) Lome joins her. (“I have not asked you to forgive me.” “To forgive you? For what?”)

[On January 1, 1963, AR attached the following comment to these notes:]

The above notes are totally wrong for this story. The approach in them is too broad and transforms the story into a wide-scale, social novel (by presenting the stories of all the other types, of all the variants). This turns it into a novel about men ’s attitude toward values—and not the story of one valuer. These notes may be used only as source material for the lesser characters of the supporting cast. This is not the right statement of the theme. [After twelve years of work on Atlas Shrugged, AR, it seems, had automatized the approach to a wide-scale, social novel.]

February 10, 1959

New statement of theme: the art of psychological survival in a malevolent world; the art of spiritual self-sufficiency.

To think over: the principles (and definitions) of how one knows what depends on oneself, and how one reacts to existential events which are not wholly dependent on oneself; what one aims to achieve as rewards; the preservation of action and goals in the world without dependence on others (without the torture of hope) and without subjectivism.

Hella as a dancer (projecting her view of man and of his relationship to existence, the stylized and benevolent universe).

The real essence of the story is to be the universe of my “tiddlywink” music, of the “Traviata Overture” and “Simple Confession,” of my sense of life. [“Tiddlywink” music was AR’s name for her favorite lighthearted popular tunes from the turn of the century.]

Use the incident of Good Copy as a psychological key. [The “incident” occurred when Good Copy was read in a 1958 fiction-writing seminar given by AR. Some of the students regarded the story as philosophically superficial or meaningless because it was lighthearted and cheerful; AR explained that such a criticism was based on the malevolent universe premise (see The Early Ayn Rand).]

Lorne as the man who sacrifices values for the sake of “living on earth”—for the sake of action, motivated by a passionate pro-life premise, an unbreached (“Narcissus”-like) self-esteem, but thrown off by the wrong premise of taking action as a primary.

The “above zero ” types of value-betrayers:

The idealist-aspirer: the subjectivist who holds his values only as a private dream, only in his own consciousness, and betrays Hella because he comes to feel resentment against the possibility of values being achieved in reality. Starting with a “Who am I to act?” attitude, he ends up with the premise (or feeling) that “if it is in reality, it is not a value.”

The “Byronic” idealist who builds pain into his “despair-universe” and ends up with the premise that “if no pain is involved, it is not a value nor an ideal; if it’s cheerful, it’s vulgar, superficial and inconsequential.” He ends up as a real “pain-worshipper.”

The “glamorizer” who dares not admit to himself the existence of pain or evil in the world, who goes on pretending to himself that everything is good, because he wants the good so desperately—and ends up by letting the good perish rather than discover that evil is evil.

The “below-zero ” types who set the values to which all the “value-betrayers” surrender:

The cynic who hates values for being values, and whose sole pleasure is in destruction.

The Babbitt: the human “ballast” who has no values and doesn’t give a damn.

The “Uncle Ed” type: the power-luster, who wants power for the sake of power; actually, he is after nothing at all.

The “top-average ” type: the presumptuous mediocrity who wants the unearned.

Temporary Outline

Lorne’s note—Hella on her way to the hotel—the flashback:

Hella’s love for Lome—his conflict between Hella and Gloria—Hella’s conflict with the world (her “curse” of “seeing things as they ought to be”).

Love scene between Hella and Lome—his best “passion for life.”

The missed date—Gloria’s party—the announcement of Gloria’s engagement to Lorne. Hella’s walk home—Lome follows her, their scene. (“It is only my pain—and I can take care of it.”)

Hella’s struggle—the senseless dance-engagements-her excruciating loneliness—Lome’s marriage.

Hella’s practice and saving for her debut—the discovery of “her own world,” her “dates” with Lorne “as they should have been.”

Lorne’s struggle with his precarious empire—the deterioration of his relationship with Gloria and of their marriage.

Hella dancing in the dive. The stranger, who is Lorne’s uncle—their friendship.

Hella’s debut—total disaster, except for the presence of Lome and of the uncle.

The uncle’s death—the conditions of his will.

Lorne’s trap—his conversation with the lawyer, his decision.

Back to the present: the scene in the hotel room (which is the “torture scene”).

Lorne’s final choice (probably in court, in connection with the will)—his reunion with Hella, their unobstructed future.

February 11, 1959

Approximate text of the note:

Hella,

I have to see you. It is crucially urgent. If you ever loved me, you’ll come. There is nothing to fear. No one will know. I will be waiting for you at the Hotel—room 503 tonight, 10:30.

Lome

December 25, 1959

To Lorne Dieterling

The music to be used (dance numbers):

La Traviata Overture [by Giuseppe Verdi]—theme song, build the whole novel on it, in scale. First time—for the first meeting of Hella and Lome. Then—for walk through the forest.

“Will o’ the Wisp”—for dance in the dive.

“Reconciliation Polka.”

“Marionetta at Midnight.”

“Eva Overture” [by Franz Lehar] or “Simple Confession.”

“Anima.”

Possibly use “In the Shadows” and “Polichinelle” (from “La Source”).

March 21, 1963

The story of Atlas who did not go on strike. (The issue of “pronouncing moral judgment,” of not sanctioning evil. Or: “how to lead a rational life in an irrational society.”)

What would happen if a few key people or cultural leaders maintained a “moral tone”—instead of today’s scared, social-metaphysical, cowardly surrender to any immoral assertiveness (which is the policy of letting evil set the moral terms). Why are people more afraid of me than of communism? Is it that they know I demand immediate, moral-epistemological action from them, and a long-range stand—while communism is a threat they can evade and make unreal in their own minds? Is it the issue of their guilt and lack of self-esteem, which makes physical terror or disaster more “acceptable” to them than psycho-epistemological terror, than the immediate threat to their (pseudo) self-esteem?

(On re-reading the above:) I think it’s obvious that the issue here is: Does one want a world and a life geared to one’s best—or to one’s worst? Today’s people prefer to protect their own vices and weaknesses rather than fight for their virtues. This makes one point obvious: the “gray” people are the guiltiest and rottenest of all; they make evil possible. There is no such thing as a “mixed” moral position—it is only the evil that can profit by and win in a “mixed psychology” (or “mixed morality”)—just as in a “mixed economy.”

What causes that? Lack of self-esteem and, therefore, of self-confidence. What is the cause of that lack? Lack of moral knowledge—but only in part; more fundamentally, it is the indulgence of emotions at the expense of reason: a basic, volitional psycho-epistemological issue which does not depend on the content of one’s knowledge.

January 2, 1964

To Lorne Dieterling

Theme: Loyalty to values, as a sense of life.

My earlier notes are all wrong. The approach I projected is too intellectual—too explicit. The novel has to deal with the generalized terms of a “sense of life”—i.e., with emotional metaphysics. The nature of the assignment (and the trick) is to concretize the story, while keeping it abstract.

This is why Hella has to be a dancer. Convey the meaning of music and dancing as the esthetic expression of a “sense of life.”

Key points of the story:

Hella’s love for Lome.

His engagement party to Gloria—and the scene between Hella and Lome on her way home.

Her “private universe.”

His betrayal of her (and of his values).

Her career disaster.

Her walk—and her triumph.

Tentative Outline

[The first part of the outline, through the deterioration of Lorne’s marriage to Gloria, has been omitted here because it is the same as earlier.]

Gloria and the “playboy.” Lome’s request. The “playboy‘s” murder. Hella as witness (or suspected witness).

The scene between Gloria and Lorne: her demand. Hella receives Lome’s note.

Back to the present: the scene in the hotel room.

Hella’s dismissal from the University (a kind of “trial scene”). Her debut—dancing for a single man in the audience. Her walk home—Lome follows her, their final reunion.

April 28, 1965

To Lorne Dieterling (“Sense of Life ”)

Emotional abstractions. An emotional abstraction consists of all those things which have the power to make one experience a certain emotion. For instance: a heroic man, the New York skyline, flying in a plane, a sunlit “stylized” landscape, ecstatic music, an achievement of which one is proud. (These same things will give an emotion of terror and guilt to a man with the wrong premises; all except the last, which is impossible to him.) An opposite example: a humble or depraved man, an old village or ruins, “walking on the moors,” a desolate landscape, folk songs or atonal music, the failure of someone else’s achievement or ambition.

(The root and common denominator in all these things is self-esteem or lack of it; pro-man or anti-man; pro-life or anti-life.)

January 1, 1966

To Lorne Dieterling

The two basic “sense of life” music numbers are: “Will o’ the Wisp” (as the triumph, the achieved sense of life) and “La Traviata Overture” (as the way there).

To be used as dance numbers:

“La Traviata Overture ”: the first dance described—the dance of rising, without ever moving from one spot—done by means of her arms and body—ending on “Dominique’s statue” posture, as “higher than raised arms,” as the achieved, as the total surrender to a vision and, simultaneously, “This is I.” (The open, the naked, the “without armor.”) (Possibly, her first meeting with him.)

“Will o’ the Wisp ”: the triumph—the tap dance and ballet combined—my total sense of life. (Probably, danced in a low-grade dive, with Lome present. Possibly, projected as a dance, with him, much earlier, as his sense of life, too; thus, a crucial turning point in his realization of the way he is going, the wrong distance he has traveled.)

“Destiny Valse”: done at the worst time of her break with him—danced alone, projecting his presence.

January 2, 1966

To Lorne Dieterling

Hella Maris

Lome Dieterling

Gloria Thornton

Aurelius Taylor (the professor, the spiritual “intellectual”)

Bruce Beasely (the businessman, the plain brute)

Frieda Baker (the flat-foot dancer)

The traitor

The playboy

The town—Athens, Maine.

The notes end here.

This story has obvious features in common with AR’s early fiction. The protagonist is a woman, as was almost always the case prior to The Fountainhead. Further, the heroine’s romantic love is unrequited, as in The Husband I Bought (see The Early Ayn Rand). And, as in The Little Street or the screenplay Ideal, the protagonist faces an “enemy world” in which most people betray their values.

So AR has come full circle. She returned at the end to a problem that had concerned her from the beginning: how does one maintain a view of life as it could be and ought to be, while living in a culture that is predominantly hostile to rational values? At this stage, however, she knows the solution, and serenity has replaced her earlier bitterness. Despite the tragic aspects of To Lome Dieterling, the novel was to have an uplifting theme. AR’s purpose was to show that Hella, as a profoundly independent person, can be affected “only down to a certain point. ” Though she suffers as a result of the moral treason of others, she is ultimately able to preserve the exalted sense of life that is so eloquently expressed in AR’s favorite music.

AR regarded philosophy as a means to the achievement of a unique goal: the lighthearted, joyous state of existence that she had envisioned—and experienced-from the time of her youth. It is fitting, therefore, that her lastfiction notes are about a woman like herself, who maintains such a view of life to the end, even while those around her do not.

INDEX

ABC of Architecture, The (Price)

Abbott, Walter

Absolutes

Abstraction

in creative process

Adler, Heddy (character)

Airtight, as working title for We the Living

Akston, Hugh (character)

Altruism,

as a means of exploiting producers

as incompatible with life and virtue

history of

hypocrisy of

meaning of

motive of

See also Charity; Egoism.

“Analysis of the Proper Approach to a Picture on the Atomic Bomb,”

Aquinas, Thomas

Architect’s World, The

Architectural Composition (Curtis)

Architecture

Architecture and Democracy (Bragdon)

Architectural research

Argounova, Kira (character)

Aristotle

Art, entertainment vs.

Atlas Shrugged (Rand)

“Atlantis,” notes for scenes in

characters, list of; see also specific characters

plot

outline by chapter

research for

theme

Atomic bomb,

as argument for free enterprise

danger of

development and history of

See also Top Secret.

Autobiography of an Idea (Sullivan)

Axioms

of morality

See also Consciousness; Existence.

Baker, John R.

Balch, Earle

Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua

“Benevolent universe” premise

See also Evil, as impotent.

“Best Years of Our Lives, The”

Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche)

Bohr, Niels

Borntrager, K. A.

Bossom, Alfred C,

Braddell, Darcy

Bragdon, Claude

Branden, Nathaniel

Brisbane, Arthur

Building to the Skies (Bossum)

Calumet K (Merwin and Webster)

Cameron, Henry (character)

Sullivan as model for

Capitalism

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (Rand)

Carr, Harry

Causality, reversal of

Certainty

Character

Charity

See also Altruism.

Chomsky, Noam

Chopin, Frederic

Christianity

See also Religion.

Civil rights

See also Rights.

Civil war

Collectivism

See also Communism; Individualism.

Color, perception of

Communism

conditions of life under

See also Collectivism; Statism; Totalitarianism.

Communist Party

see also House Un-American Activities Committee.

Compromise

consequences of

Compton, Arthur

Concepts. See Abstraction.

Consciousness,

alleged “primacy” of

assault on the validity of

axiom of

concepts of

identification as essence of

relation to matter

Contemporary American Architects (Kahn)

Context-dropping, fallacy of

Conway, Dan (character)

Cook, Lois (character)

Cooperation

Cosmology

Courage

Creative process

Creators

exploitation of

generosity of

guilt of

happiness as motive of

principles of

silence of

strike of

“who work for their own

destruction,“

See also Sanction of the Victim.

Country Doctor, The (idea for scenario)

Cuppy, Will

Current Architecture

Curtis, N.C.

D‘Anconia, Francisco (character) ,

Danagger, Ken (character)

Daniels, Quentin (character)

Danneskjold, Ragnar (character)

Darrow, Ellen (character)

Day, Danny (character)

DeMille, Cecil B.

Democracy

Determinism

See also Free will.

Dieterling, Lorne (character)

Disappearing City, The (Wright)

Dollar sign

Dunning, Vesta (character)

Early Ayn Rand, The (Peikoff, ed.)

Eclecticism, in architecture

Economic Geography (Whitbeck and Finch)

Economics

as the exchange of material values

regulation of

See also Capitalism; Monopolies; Profit motive; Welfare State.

Egoism

Einstein, Albert

Emotional abstractions

Emotionalism

Emotions,

as caused by thoughts

classification of

See also Psychology.

Entity, concept of

Epistemology

in Galt’s speech

Evil,

as impotent

degrees of

epistemology of

Existence, axiom of

“Extremism,”

Fadiman, Clifton

Faith

Family life

Feelings. See Emotions.

Feminism

Fermi, Enrico

Feynman, Richard P.

Fistere, John Cushman

For the New Intellectual (Rand)

passages cut from

Force,

as anti-mind

evil of initiating

Fountainhead, The (Rand)

architectural research for

character descriptions;

see also specific characters

“character development schedules,”

climax

material cut from introduction to 25th anniversary edition of

notes for movie

notes on Chapter

outlines by chapter

“Plan of the Last Part,”

revisions of Part

synopsis for publisher

“tentative plan,”

theme

Francon, Dominique (character)

Francon, Guy (character)

Free speech

Free will

Friendship

Galt, John (character)

motor of

relation to other characters

speech of

torture of

Gerhardt, Dietrich (character)

Gillies, Fred

Girl writer (character)

God, belief in

See also Religion.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von

Golden rule

Gonda, Francis (character)

Good and Evil. See Evil; Values.

Good Copy (Rand)

Good will

Goodman, Nelson

Government, proper role of

Gray, David

Groves, Leslie R.

Hahn, Otto

Halley, Richard (character)

Happiness

See also Joy.

Hartley, Kenneth (character)

Hastings, Gerald (character)

Hazen, Joseph

Hastings, Thomas

Hearst, William Randolph

Held for Orders (Spearman)

Hella (character)

Heller, Austen (character)

Hendricks, Thomas (character)

Hetty (character in The Little Street)

Henry, Robert S.

Herzberger, Hans

Hetty (character)

Hickman, William Edward

Holcombe, Ralston (character)

Hollywood

The Best Years of Our Lives

communism and

early work in

HUAC and

Motion Picture Alliance

Screen Guide for Americans *

Song of Russia

A Song to Remember

Hitler, Adolf

Honesty

Honor

Hood, Raymond

Hopkins, Harry

House Un-American Activities Committee

How to Look at Buildings (Braddell)

Hugo, Victor

Hume, David

Ickes, Harold

Ideal (Rand)

Ideals. See Values.

Identity, law of

Independence

Individualism

Industrialists

Inside Story, The (short story idea)

Instincts

See also Determinism.

Integrity

Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (Rand)

Irrationality

John X (character)1

Johnston, Agnes Christine

Jonas, Kurt

Journal of the American Institute of Architects

Joy

See also Happiness.

Justice

vs. altruism

See also Moral judgment.

Kahn, Ely Jacques

Kane, Howard (character)

Kant, Immanuel

Kaynes, Dr.

Keating, Peter (character)

Keyes, Asa

Kovalensky, Leo (character)

Kropotkin, Petr Alaseevich

Labine, Gilbert

Labor unions

“La Traviata Overture” (Verdi)

Language

growth of

Laski, Harold.

Lawrence, Ernest O.

Lawson, Eugene (character)

Lebedeff, Ivan

Le Corbusier

Life- Work of Frank Lloyd Wright, The

Literature, types of

Little Street, The

character descriptions

plot

theme

Living Architecture (Woltersdorf)

Logic

Logical fallacies

Love

Lyles, Lee

Machines, as aids to intelligence

Maginnis, Charles D.

“Malevolent universe” premise

See also “Benevolent universe” premise.

Man,

as a rational animal

progression of mental development

vs. mankind

Mannheimer, Albert

Materialism

Mathematics, relation to abstraction

McDowell, John

Measurement

Meigs, Cuffy (character)

Meitner, Lise

Mencken, H. L.

Metaphysics

“Methods in Philosophy and the Sciences” (conference)

Mind-body dichotomy

Mind-body integration

Mises, Ludwig von

Mob-spirit

Modern Architecture (Taut)

Modern Architecture (Wright)

Money, Francisco’s speech on

Monopolies

Moral Basis of Individualism, The

Chapter

Chapter

Chapter

critique of first draft

foreword

outlines

Morality,

religious and social schools of

need of

of death

See also Values; Egoism; Virtue.

Moral judgment

“Moratorium on brains,”

Motion Picture Alliance (organization)

Mouch, Wesley (character)

Mulligan, Midas (character)

Mumford, Lewis

Murchinson, Kenneth

Murphy, Dudley

Nagel, Ernest

Narragansett, Judge (character)

New Republic, The

New York Times

Nichols, K. D.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Night of January 16th (Rand)

Nixon, Richard

Norris, Kathleen

North, Arthur T.

Number, concept of

Objectivism: A Philosophy for Living on Earth

Objectivity

Oppenheimer, J. Robert

Oppenheimer, Mrs. J. R.

Ortega y Gasset, Jose

Oud, Pieter

Paradox, as assault on reason

Parasites

attitude toward creators

“authorities” of

basic motive

desire for the unearned

dramatization of

fear of nature

misery of

stages in collapse of

See also Second-handedness.

Pastor (character)

Paterson, Isabel

Peikoff, Leonard

Petrograd

Philosophy,

as basic cause of history

as primarily epistemology

collapse of

Oriental

Physics

Pittendrich, Colin

Plain Talk

Plato

“Poets in Steel” (Vanity Fair, Fistere)

Politics, in Galt’s speech

Power-lust

Prescott, Gordon (character)

Price, Matlock

Priest (character)

“Prince-Flower,”

Productiveness

Profit motive

Psycho-epistemology

perceptual level type

Psychology

Pyramid of ability

Queeny, Edgar M.

Railroads

See also Taggart Transcontinental.

Ralph Adams Cram (North)

Rameses to Rockefeller (Whitaker)

Rand’s razor

Rationalist-empiricist dichotomy

Rationality, as primary virtue

Raymond Hood (North)

Rearden, Hank (character)

Rearden, Lillian (character)

Rearden, Stacey (character)

Reason

and emotion

as faculty of individual

as man’s basic tool of survival

vs. faith

vs. force

Religion

See also Christianity.

Renahan, Danny (character)

Reverence

Revolt of the Masses, The (Ortega y Gasset)

Reynolds, Earl

Rights, individual

Roark, Howard (character)

speech of

Dagny Taggart compared with

Romantic Manifesto, The (Rand)

Roosevelt, Eleanor

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano

Russell, Bertrand

Rutherford, Ernest

Sacrifice

St.-Johns, Adela Rogers

Sanction of the victim

Scenarios

Siege, The

Skyscraper, The

Top Secret

Schedule, daily

Science and the Planned State (Baker)

“Screen Guide for Americans,”

Second-Hand Lives, as working title for The Fountainhead

Second-handedness,

dramatization of

examples of

meaning of

of parasites

opposed to cognition

See also Altruism; Parasites.

Self-doubt

Self-esteem

Selfishness. See Egoism.

Selflessness. See Second-handedness.

Sense of life

Sex

Sherwood, Robert

Siege, The (scenario)

Simpson, George

Skyscraper, The (scenario)

Skyscrapers and the Men Who Build Them (W. A. Starrett)

Snyte, John Eric (character)

Social metaphysics, defined

See also Second-handedness.

Song of Russia

Song to Remember, A

South African Architectural Record

Soviet Russia, conditions of life in

Spearman, Frank H.

Spirit of Enterprise, The (Queeny)

Stadler, Robert (character)

Starrett, W. A.

Statism

See also Collectivism; Totalitarianism.

Steel mills, research on

Stein, Gertrude

Sticks and Stones (Mumford)

Stolen concept, fallacy of

Strike, The, as working title for Atlas Shrugged

Stripling, Robert

Style, literary

Subjectivism

Sullivan, H. H.

Sullivan, Louis

as model for Henry Cameron

“Survival of the Fittest,”

Taganov, Andrei (character)

Taggart, Cherryl

Taggart, Dagny

Taggart, James

Taggart Transcontinental

Taggart Tunnel catastrophe

Taut, Bruno

Thales

Theory-practice dichotomy

“Things in themselves,”

This Fascinating Railroad Business (Henry)

Thomas Hastings, Architecture (Gray)

Thomas, J. Parnell

Thompson, Dorothy

Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche)

Tibbets, Carleton B.

“Tiddlywink” music

“To All Innocent Fifth Columnists,”

To Lorne Dieterling

characters, list of

plot

theme

Toohey, Ellsworth Monkton (character) ,

Top Secret

“Analysis of Proper Approach,”

general outline of

research interviews for

theme of

Totalitarianism

Towards a New Architecture (Le Corbusier)

Trader principle

Trader, speculator vs.

Truman, Harry S

“Twentieth Century Motor Company,”

Unions

Unit, concept of

“Unsacrificed Self, The” (planned article)

Values,

as objective

as presupposing a valuer

betrayal of

man’s life as the standard of

people’s lack of

reason as the source of

See also Morality; Virtue.

Virtue of Selfishness. The (Rand)

Virtue

See also Independence; Morality; Productiveness; Rationality.

Wallis, Hal

War, basic cause of

Wealth. See Money.

Welfare state

We the Living (Rand)

characters; see also specific characters

conditions in Soviet Russia

motive for writing

revisions to Part

scenes

Wet Nurse (character)

While Rome Burns (Woollcott)

Whim-worship

See also Subjectivism.

Whitaker. H.

Willers, Eddie (character)

“Will of the Wisp” (song)

Winkler, John

Winslow, Stan (character)

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Woltersdorf, Arthur

Wood, John S.

Woollcott, Alexander

Wren, Christopher

W. R. Hearst, An American Phenomenon (Winkler)

Wright, A. H.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

Writing, art of

Wyatt, Ellis (character)

Wynand, Gail (character)

Yale lecture, notes for

Zhukov, Yuri

Ziff, Paul

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Foreword

EDITOR’S PREfACE

PART 1 - EARLY PROJECTS

Chapter 1 - THE HOLLYWOOD YEARS

Chapter 2 - WE THE LIVING

Chapter 3 - FIRST PHILOSOPHIC JOURNAL

PART 2 - THE FOUNTAINHEAD

Chapter 4 - THEME AND CHARACTERS

Chapter 5 - RCHITECTURAL RESEARCH

Chapter 6 - PLOT

Chapter 7 - NOTES WHILE WRITING

PART 3 - TRANSITION BETWEEN NOVELS

Chapter 8 - THE MORAL BASIS OF INDIVIDUALISM

Chapter 9 - TOP SECRET

Chapter 10 - COMMUNISM AND HUAC

PART 4 - ATLAS SHRUGGED

Chapter 11 - THE MIND ON STRIKE

Chapter 12 - FINAL PREPARATIONS

Chapter 13 - NOTES WHILE WRITING : 1941-1952

Chapter 14 - NOTES WHILE WRITING GALT’S SPEECH

PART 5 - FINAL YEARS

Chapter 15 - NOTES: 1955—1977

Chapter 16 - TWO POSSIBLE BOOKS

INDEX

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

EDITOR’S PREFACE

PART ONE - The Fountainhead

Roark vs. Keating

The Quarry Sequence

The Stoddard Trial

PART TWO - Ethics

1. Selfishness

2. Anti-Altruism

3. Man, the Rational Animal

PART THREE - Atlas Shrugged

Rearden’s Anniversary Party

The John Galt Line

The Abandoned Factory

Directive 10-289

The Tunnel Disaster

Atlantis

PART FOUR - Basic Philosophy

1. Reason and Reality

2. Mind and Body

3. Theory of Concepts

PART FIVE - Early Novels and Politics

1. The Individual vs. the State

2. Capitalism vs. Collectivism

PART SIX - Romanticism and the Benevolent Universe

1. Romanticism

2. The Benevolent Universe

RECOMMENDED READINGS

AYN RAND is the author of Atlas Shrugged, philosophically the most challenging best-seller of its time. Her first novel, We the Living, was published in 1936, followed by Anthem. With the publication of The Fountainhead in 1943, she achieved a spectacular and enduring success. Rand’s unique philosophy, Objectivism, has gained a worldwide audience. The fundamentals of her philosophy are set forth in such books as Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and The Romantic Manifesto. Ayn Rand died in 1982.

LEONARD PEIKOFF is universally recognized as the preeminent Rand scholar writing today. He worked closely with her for thirty years and was designated by Rand as her intellectual heir and as heir to her estate. He has taught philosophy at Hunter College, Long Island University, and New York University, and lectures on Rand’s philosophy throughout the country. Peikoff is the author of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, and hosts the national radio talk show “Philosophy: Who Needs It?”

GARY HULL, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Claremont, has taught philosophy at California State University, Fullerton, Whittier College, and is currently an adjunct professor at Duke University. He has lectured on Ayn Rand’s philosophy throughout the country and teaches an annual seminar on Objectivism for the Ayn Rand Institute.

PLUME

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. · Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Printing, January, 1999

Copyright © The Estate of Ayn Rand, 1999

Introduction copyright © Leonard Peikoff, 1999

Preface copyright © Gary Hull, 1999

Editors’ notes copyright © Gary Hull and Leonard Peikoff. 1999

All rights reserved

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Excerpts from The Fountainhead reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster. Copyright 1943 by The Bobbs-Merrill Company; copyright renewed © 1970 by Ayn Rand.

REGISTERED TRADEMARK-MARCA REGISTRADA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN PUBLICATION DATA

Rand, Ayn.

The Ayn Rand reader / edited by Gary Hull and Leonard Peikoff. p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-13725-3

I. Hull, Gary. II. Peikoff, Leonard. III. Title.

PS3535.A547A’.52—dc21 98-26698

Set in Transitional 521

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Included are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014

http://us.penguingroup.com

INTRODUCTION

by Leonard Peikoff

AYN RAND’S body of work, including posthumous collections, now extends to twenty-two volumes. Her best-known and most philosophical novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, number respectively 727 and 1,168 pages (in hardcover). This abundance of material poses a problem for many time-pressed readers. They do not know where to plunge in or how to select a representative sample. The present book is designed to meet these needs.

The readers I have in mind probably read relatively little fiction or philosophy. But they have noticed that AR is known virtually everywhere—and that everyone seems to have an impassioned opinion about her. They have heard her books being extolled and denounced with equal intensity—often in quite unexpected quarters. Naturally enough, they are intrigued by the controversy.

Here is a chance for such individuals to explore her works briefly and reach a judgment of their own.

Although I hope it will be of value to previous readers of AR, this anthology is intended as an entrée for those who know little or nothing about her. Each of her four novels and every branch of philosophy are represented within its pages, even if only in brief excerpts. Whoever finishes the book, therefore, can say in all conscience that he knows the essence of AR—and that he knows it by means of actually having read her.

AR’s philosophic ideas permeate each of her novels. In broad tendency, however, her early novels are devoted to social-political issues; The Fountainhead to ethical issues; and Atlas Shrugged, her magnum opus, to the fundamental branches of philosophy. This progression is the key to the present book’s organization (see the Editor’s Preface below).

Although the material has been organized in a definite structure, browsers who wish merely to dip in at random can profit from doing so. Those who wish to explore further will find that the selections are not only representative; they have been picked deliberately from a wide range of primary sources, and thereby suggest a fairly complete range of options for future reading.

As a mini-orientation for new readers, let me offer here a thumb-nail sketch of AR’s Objectivist philosophy.

Metaphysics: The universe exists objectively, independent of consciousness. Its fundamental law is the law of identity, A is A.

Epistemology: Reason is man’s only means of knowledge, both of facts and of values. “Reason” is the faculty of identifying and integrating, in conceptual form, the material provided by man’s senses.

Ethics: The only scientific ethics is the ethics of rational self-interest, which holds that Man’s Life is the standard of moral value and that rationality is the primary virtue. Each man, therefore, should live by his own mind and for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor others to himself.

Politics: The only social system consistent with the requirements of Man’s Life is laissez-faire capitalism, the complete separation of state and economics. The proper function of government is to protect each individual’s inalienable rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

Esthetics: “Art” is the re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments-and the greatest school in art history is Romanticism, whose art presents things not as they are, but as they might be and ought to be.

To put the above in negative terms, AR rejects, among many other kindred isms, every form of supernaturalism, subjectivism, mysticism, skepticism, altruism, relativism, collectivism, statism, and (in art) both Naturalism and “modernism.”

As you may be starting to see, AR cannot be identified by using the conventional categories. She is neither a liberal nor a conservative. She admires Aristotle, but denies that “moderation” is the definition of virtue. She regards Libertarians as worse than Communists. She is a moralist who rejects religion, an individualist who dismisses Spencer, an egoist who denounces Nietzsche—and a philosopher who writes thrillers. How is all this possible? Read on and find out for yourself.

The Ayn Rand Reader represents the work of two editors. Gary Hull, a longtime teacher of Objectivism, had the painful job of making the preliminary selections; he also devised the book’s structure and wrote the first draft of most of the editorial notes. As Executor of the Estate of AR, I myself then implemented a layer of suggestions, along with many editorial revisions.

Arnold Dolin, Associate Publisher of Dutton/Signet, had been urging me for years to prepare this kind of book. Unfortunately, the demands of other commitments always made it impossible. It is thanks to the labor of Dr. Hull that this anthology has finally become a reality. His work (which includes all the proofreading) was really the time-consuming part of the project.

I hope that The Ayn Rand Reader serves its purpose, and introduces AR to many readers who would otherwise be denied the pleasure and knowledge she has to offer.

Leonard Peikoff
Irvine, California
January 1998

EDITOR’S PREFACE

by Gary Hull

TO INTRODUCE new readers to the novels and philosophy of Ayn Rand, this anthology presents alternating fiction and nonfiction sections. Excerpts from a novel are followed by nonfiction passages elaborating on its theme.

I have chosen relatively self-contained excerpts from AR’s four novels: The Fountainhead (in Part One), Atlas Shrugged (Part Three), We the Living, and Anthem (Part Five). These selections at least suggest the novels’ themes, plots, and literary style, along with some leading characters.

Although The Fountainhead was published in 1943, seven years after We the Living, I have placed it at the beginning because the hero—Howard Roark—is the best known of AR’s characters, and is her first fully developed depiction of the moral ideal. This led naturally to a nonfiction section on AR’s ethics (Part Two), including her explanation of why man needs morality, her defense of selfishness, and her view of man’s nature.

Next comes Atlas Shrugged, followed by a section on basic philosophy (Part Four). This section covers such issues as the axioms of Objectivism and the mind-body question, along with some more technical material on AR’s view of concepts.

This left me with AR’s early, directly political novels—followed by a section on her social-political convictions (Part Five). I have concluded with a section presenting both her theory of art—and, as a final overview, her benevolent-universe viewpoint (Part Six).

Given AR’s voluminous writings, I have had to be extremely selective. For instance, if I had more space, I would have included all of John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged—the briefest statement of her philosophy available. Other omissions include selections from her plays, early short stories, journals, and letters, as well as her views on education, psychology, economics and law, music and history, and on many vital current social issues. I hope that the bibliography of AR’s complete works will serve as a resource for further reading.

The editor’s notes provide, where necessary, minimal background information to orient a new reader. In a number of cases, a passage was deleted from an excerpt because, out of context, it would have confused or distracted a reader. Such deletions are indicated by ellipses in square brackets. Occasional explanatory words have been inserted in brackets. I have, of course, made no changes in AR’s own words.

For twelve years of intellectual, financial, and emotional support I extend my sincerest appreciation to the Ayn Rand Institute. Lara Piper worked diligently to prepare the manuscript for the printer. Most of all, I want to thank Leonard Peikoff for the wonderful opportunity to work on this project, and for the insightful guidance he offered me throughout.

PART ONE

The Fountainhead

EDITOR’S NOTE: The theme of The Fountainhead (published in 1943) is individualism versus collectivism, not in politics but in man’s soul. In this excerpt, the first three chapters of the novel, we meet Ayn Rand’s ideal man: the intransigent individualist Howard Roark. We also meet his antithesis, the man without a self, Peter Keating. This introduces the novel’s basic conflict: independence versus dependence.

Roark vs. Keating

HOWARD ROARK laughed.

He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable, the stone—flowing. The stone had the stillness of one brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion. The stone glowed, wet with sunrays.

The lake below was only a thin steel ring that cut the rocks in half. The rocks went on into the depth, unchanged. They began and ended in the sky. So that the world seemed suspended in space, an island floating on nothing, anchored to the feet of the man on the cliff.

His body leaned back against the sky. It was a body of long straight lines and angles, each curve broken into planes. He stood, rigid, his hands hanging at his sides, palms out. He felt his shoulder blades drawn tight together, the curve of his neck, and the weight of the blood in his hands. He felt the wind behind him, in the hollow of his spine. The wind waved his hair against the sky. His hair was neither blond nor red, but the exact color of ripe orange rind.

He laughed at the thing which had happened to him that morning and at the things which now lay ahead.

He knew that the days ahead would be difficult. There were questions to be faced and a plan of action to be prepared. He knew that he should think about it. He knew also that he would not think, because everything was clear to him already, because the plan had been set long ago, and because he wanted to laugh.

He tried to consider it. But he forgot. He was looking at the granite.

He did not laugh as his eyes stopped in awareness of the earth around him. His face was like a law of nature—a thing one could not question, alter or implore. It had high cheekbones over gaunt, hollow cheeks; gray eyes, cold and steady; a contemptuous mouth shut tight, the mouth of an executioner or a saint.

He looked at the granite. To be cut, he thought, and made into walls. He looked at a tree. To be split and made into rafters. He looked at a streak of rust on the stone and thought of iron ore under the ground. To be melted and to emerge as girders against the sky.

These rocks, he thought, are here for me; waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them.

Then he shook his head, because he remembered that morning and that there were many things to be done. He stepped to the edge, raised his arms, and dived down into the sky below.

He cut straight across the lake to the shore ahead. He reached the rocks where he had left his clothes. He looked regretfully about him. For three years, ever since he had lived in Stanton, he had come here for his only relaxation, to swim, to rest, to think, to be alone and alive, whenever he could find one hour to spare, which had not been often. In his new freedom the first thing he wanted to do was to come here, because he knew that he was coming for the last time. That morning he had been expelled from the Architectural School of the Stanton Institute of Technology.

He pulled his clothes on: old denim trousers, sandals, a shirt with short sleeves and most of its buttons missing. He swung down a narrow trail among the boulders, to a path running through a green slope, to the road below.

He walked swiftly, with a loose, lazy expertness of motion. He walked down the long road, in the sun. Far ahead Stanton lay sprawled on the coast of Massachusetts, a little town as a setting for the gem of its existence—the great institute rising on a hill beyond.

The township of Stanton began with a dump. A gray mound of refuse rose in the grass. It smoked faintly. Tin cans glittered in the sun. The road led past the first houses to a church. The church was a Gothic monument of shingles painted pigeon blue. It had stout wooden buttresses supporting nothing. It had stained-glass windows with heavy traceries of imitation stone. It opened the way into long streets edged by tight, exhibitionist lawns. Behind the lawns stood wooden piles tortured out of all shape: twisted into gables, turrets, dormers; bulging with porches; crushed under huge, sloping roofs. White curtains floated at the windows. A garbage can stood at a side door, flowing over. An old Pekinese sat upon a cushion on a door step, its mouth drooling. A line of diapers fluttered in the wind between the columns of a porch.

People turned to look at Howard Roark as he passed. Some remained staring after him with sudden resentment. They could give no reason for it: it was an instinct his presence awakened in most people. Howard Roark saw no one. For him, the streets were empty. He could have walked there naked without concern.

He crossed the heart of Stanton, a broad green edged by shop windows. The windows displayed new placards announcing: WELCOME TO THE CLASS OF ‘22! GOOD LUCK, CLASS OF ’22! The Class of ’22 of the Stanton Institute of Technology was holding its commencement exercises that afternoon.

Roark swung into a side street, where at the end of a long row, on a knoll over a green ravine, stood the house of Mrs. Keating. He had boarded at that house for three years.

Mrs. Keating was out on the porch. She was feeding a couple of canaries in a cage suspended over the railing. Her pudgy little hand stopped in mid-air when she saw him. She watched him with curiosity. She tried to pull her mouth into a proper expression of sympathy; she succeeded only in betraying that the process was an effort.

He was crossing the porch without noticing her. She stopped him.

“Mr. Roark!”

“Yes?”

“Mr. Roark, I’m so sorry about—” she hesitated demurely, “—about what happened this morning.”

“What?” he asked.

“Your being expelled from the Institute. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I only want you to know that I feel for you.”

He stood looking at her. She knew that he did not see her. No, she thought, it was not that exactly. He always looked straight at people and his damnable eyes never missed a thing, it was only that he made people feel as if they did not exist. He just stood looking. He would not answer.

“But what I say,” she continued, “is that if one suffers in this world, it’s on account of error. Of course, you’ll have to give up the architect profession now, won’t you? But then a young man can always earn a decent living clerking or selling or something.”

He turned to go.

“Oh, Mr. Roark!” she called.

“Yes?”

“The Dean phoned for you while you were out.”

For once, she expected some emotion from him; and an emotion would be the equivalent of seeing him broken. She did not know what it was about him that had always made her want to see him broken.

“Yes?” he asked.

“The Dean,” she repeated uncertainly, trying to recapture her effect. “The Dean himself through his secretary.”

“Well?”

“She said to tell you that the Dean wanted to see you immediately the moment you got back.”

“Thank you.”

“What do you suppose he can want now?”

“I don’t know.”

He had said: “I don’t know.” She had heard distinctly: “I don’t give a damn.” She stared at him incredulously.

“By the way,” she said, “Petey is graduating today.” She said it without apparent relevance.

“Today? Oh, yes.”

“It’s a great day for me. When I think of how I skimped and slaved to put my boy through school. Not that I’m complaining. I’m not one to complain. Petey’s a brilliant boy.”

She stood drawn up. Her stout little body was corseted so tightly under the starched folds of her cotton dress that it seemed to squeeze the fat out to her wrists and ankles.

“But of course,” she went on rapidly, with the eagerness of her favorite subject, “I’m not one to boast. Some mothers are lucky and others just aren’t. We’re all in our rightful place. You just watch Petey from now on. I’m not one to want my boy to kill himself with work and I’ll thank the Lord for any small success that comes his way. But if that boy isn’t the greatest architect of this U.S.A., his mother will want to know the reason why!”

He moved to go.

“But what am I doing, gabbing with you like that!” she said brightly. “You’ve got to hurry and change and run along. The Dean’s waiting for you.”

She stood looking after him through the screen door, watching his gaunt figure move across the rigid neatness of her parlor. He always made her uncomfortable in the house, with a vague feeling of apprehension, as if she were waiting to see him swing out suddenly and smash her coffee tables, her Chinese vases, her framed photographs. He had never shown any inclination to do so. She kept expecting it, without knowing why.

Roark went up the stairs to his room. It was a large, bare room, made luminous by the clean glow of whitewash. Mrs. Keating had never had the feeling that Roark really lived there. He had not added a single object to the bare necessities of furniture which she had provided; no pictures, no pennants, no cheering human touch. He had brought nothing to the room but his clothes and his drawings; there were few clothes and too many drawings; they were stacked high in one corner; sometimes she thought that the drawings lived there, not the man.

Roark walked now to these drawings; they were the first things to be packed. He lifted one of them, then the next, then another. He stood looking at the broad sheets.

They were sketches of buildings such as had never stood on the face of the earth. They were as the first houses built by the first man born, who had never heard of others building before him. There was nothing to be said of them, except that each structure was inevitably what it had to be. It was not as if the draftsman had sat over them, pondering laboriously, piecing together doors, windows and columns, as his whim dictated and as the books prescribed. It was as if the buildings had sprung from the earth and from some living force, complete, unalterably right. The hand that had made the sharp pencil lines still had much to learn. But not a line seemed superfluous, not a needed plane was missing. The structures were austere and simple, until one looked at them and realized what work, what complexity of method, what tension of thought had achieved the simplicity. No laws had dictated a single detail. The buildings were not Classical, they were not Gothic, they were not Renaissance. They were only Howard Roark.

He stopped, looking at a sketch. It was one that had never satisfied him. He had designed it as an exercise he had given himself, apart from his schoolwork; he did that often when he found some particular site and stopped before it to think of what building it should bear. He had spent nights staring at this sketch, wondering what he had missed. Glancing at it now, unprepared, he saw the mistake he had made.

He flung the sketch down on the table, he bent over it, he slashed lines straight through his neat drawing. He stopped once in a while and stood looking at it, his fingertips pressed to the paper; as if his hands held the building. His hands had long fingers, hard veins, prominent joints and wristbones.

An hour later he heard a knock at his door.

“Come in!” he snapped, without stopping.

“Mr. Roark!” gasped Mrs. Keating, staring at him from the threshold. “What on earth are you doing?”

He turned and looked at her, trying to remember who she was.

“How about the Dean?” she moaned. “The Dean that’s waiting for you?”

“Oh,” said Roark. “Oh, yes. I forgot.”

“You ... forgot?”

“Yes.” There was a note of wonder in his voice, astonished by her astonishment.

“Well, all I can say,” she choked, “is that it serves you right! It just serves you right. And with the commencement beginning at four-thirty, how do you expect him to have time to see you?”

“I’ll go at once, Mrs. Keating.” ,

It was not her curiosity alone that prompted her to action; it was a secret fear that the sentence of the Board might be revoked. He went to the bathroom at the end of the hall; she watched him washing his hands, throwing his loose, straight hair back into a semblance of order. He came out again, he was on his way to the stairs before she realized that he was leaving.

“Mr. Roark!” she gasped, pointing at his clothes. “You’re not going like this?”

“Why not?”

“But it’s your Dean!”

“Not any more, Mrs. Keating.”

She thought, aghast, that he said it as if he were actually happy.

The Stanton Institute of Technology stood on a hill, its crenelated walls raised as a crown over the city stretched below. It looked like a medieval fortress, with a Gothic cathedral grafted to its belly. The fortress was eminently suited to its purpose, with stout, brick walls, a few slits wide enough for sentries, ramparts behind which defending archers could hide, and corner turrets from which boiling oil could be poured upon the attacker—should such an emergency arise in an institute of learning. The cathedral rose over it in lace splendor, a fragile defense against two great enemies: light and air.

The Dean’s office looked like a chapel, a pool of dreamy twilight fed by one tall window of stained glass. The twilight flowed in through the garments of stiff saints, their arms contorted at the elbows. A red spot of light and a purple one rested respectively upon two genuine gargoyles squatting at the corners of a fireplace that had never been used. A green spot stood in the center of a picture of the Parthenon, suspended over the fireplace.

When Roark entered the office, the outlines of the Dean’s figure swam dimly behind his desk, which was carved like a confessional. He was a short, plumpish gentleman whose spreading flesh was held in check by an indomitable dignity.

“Ah, yes, Roark,” he smiled. “Do sit down, please.”

Roark sat down. The Dean entwined his fingers on his stomach and waited for the plea he expected. No plea came. The Dean cleared his throat.

“It will be unnecessary for me to express my regret at the unfortunate event of this morning,” he began, “since I take it for granted that you have always known my sincere interest in your welfare.”

“Quite unnecessary,” said Roark.

The Dean looked at him dubiously, but continued:

“Needless to say, I did not vote against you. I abstained entirely. But you may be glad to know that you had quite a determined little group of defenders at the meeting. Small, but determined. Your professor of structural engineering acted quite the crusader on your behalf. So did your professor of mathematics. Unfortunately, those who felt it their duty to vote for your expulsion quite outnumbered the others. Professor Peterkin, your critic of design, made an issue of the matter. He went so far as to threaten us with his resignation unless you were expelled. You must realize that you have given Professor Peterkin great provocation.”

“I do,” said Roark.

“That, you see, was the trouble. I am speaking of your attitude towards the subject of architectural design. You have never given it the attention it deserves. And yet, you have been excellent in all the engineering sciences. Of course, no one denies the importance of structural engineering to a future architect, but why go to extremes? Why neglect what may be termed the artistic and inspirational side of your profession and concentrate on all those dry, technical, mathematical subjects? You intended to become an architect, not a civil engineer.”

“Isn’t this superfluous?” Roark asked. “It’s past. There’s no point in discussing my choice of subjects now.”

“I am endeavoring to be helpful, Roark. You must be fair about this. You cannot say that you were not given many warnings before this happened.”

“I was.”

The Dean moved in his chair. Roark made him uncomfortable. Roark’s eyes were fixed on him politely. The Dean thought, there’s nothing wrong with the way he’s looking at me, in fact it’s quite correct, most properly attentive; only, it’s as if I were not here.

“Every problem you were given,” the Dean went on, “every project you had to design—what did you do with it? Every one of them done in that—well, I cannot call it a style—in that incredible manner of yours. It is contrary to every principle we have tried to teach you, contrary to all established precedents and traditions of Art. You may think you are what is called a modernist, but it isn’t even that. It is . . . it is sheer insanity, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind.”

“When you were given projects that left the choice of style up to you and you turned in one of your wild stunts—well, frankly, your teachers passed you because they did not know what to make of it. But, when you were given an exercise in the historical styles, a Tudor chapel or a French opera house to design—and you turned in something that looked like a lot of boxes piled together without rhyme or reason—would you say it was an answer to an assignment or plain insubordination?”

“It was insubordination,” said Roark.

“We wanted to give you a chance—in view of your brilliant record in all other subjects. But when you turn in this—” the Dean slammed his fist down on a sheet spread before him—“this as a Renaissance villa for your final project of the year—really, my boy, it was too much!”

The sheet bore a drawing—a house of glass and concrete. In the corner there was a sharp, angular signature: Howard Roark.

“How do you expect us to pass you after this?”

“I don’t.”

“You left us no choice in the matter. Naturally, you would feel bitterness toward us at this moment, but . . .”

“I feel nothing of the kind,” said Roark quietly “I owe you an apology. I don’t usually let things happen to me. I made a mistake this time. I shouldn’t have waited for you to throw me out. I should have left long ago.”

“Now, now, don’t get discouraged. This is not the right attitude to take. Particularly in view of what I am going to tell you.”

The Dean smiled and leaned forward confidentially, enjoying the overture to a good deed.

“Here is the real purpose of our interview. I was anxious to let you know as soon as possible. I did not wish to leave you disheartened. Oh, I did, personally, take a chance with the President’s temper when I mentioned this to him, but . . . Mind you, he did not commit himself, but . . . Here is how things stand: now that you realize how serious it is, if you take a year off, to rest, to think it over—shall we say to grow up?—there might be a chance of our taking you back. Mind you, I cannot promise anything—this is strictly unofficial—it would be most unusual, but in view of the circumstances and of your brilliant record, there might be a very good chance.”

Roark smiled. It was not a happy smile, it was not a grateful one. It was a simple, easy smile and it was amused.

“I don’t think you understood me,” said Roark. “What made you suppose that I want to come back?”

“Eh?”

“I won’t be back. I have nothing further to learn here.”

“I don’t understand you,” said the Dean stiffly.

“Is there any point in explaining? It’s of no interest to you any longer.”

“You will kindly explain yourself.”

“If you wish. I want to be an architect, not an archeologist. I see no purpose in doing Renaissance villas. Why learn to design them, when I’ll never build them?”

“My dear boy, the great style of the Renaissance is far from dead. Houses of that style are being erected every day.”

“They are. And they will be. But not by me.”

“Come, come, now, this is childish.”

“I came here to learn about building. When I was given a project, its only value to me was to learn to solve it as I would solve a real one in the future. I did them the way I’ll build them. I’ve learned all I could learn here—in the structural sciences of which you don’t approve. One more year of drawing Italian post cards would give me nothing.”

An hour ago the Dean had wished that this interview would proceed as calmly as possible. Now he wished that Roark would display some emotion; it seemed unnatural for him to be so quietly natural in the circumstances.

“Do you mean to tell me that you’re thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?”

“Yes.”

“My dear fellow, who will let you?”

“That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”

“Look here, this is serious. I am sorry that I haven’t had a long, earnest talk with you much earlier . . . I know, I know, I know, don’t interrupt me, you’ve seen a modernistic building or two, and it gave you ideas. But do you realize what a passing fancy that whole so-called modern movement is? You must learn to understand—and it has been proved by all authorities—that everything beautiful in architecture has been done already. There is a treasure mine in every style of the past. We can only choose from the great masters. Who are we to improve upon them? We can only attempt, respectfully, to repeat.”

“Why?” asked Howard Roark.

No, thought the Dean, no, he hasn’t said anything else; it’s a perfectly innocent word; he’s not threatening me.

“But it’s self-evident!” said the Dean.

“Look,” said Roark evenly, and pointed at the window. “Can you see the campus and the town? Do you see how many men are walking and living down there? Well, I don’t give a damn what any or all of them think about architecture—or about anything else, for that matter. Why should I consider what their grandfathers thought of it?”

“That is our sacred tradition.”

“Why?”.

“For heaven’s sake, can’t you stop being so naïve about it?”

“But I don’t understand. Why do you want me to think that this is great architecture?” He pointed to the picture of the Parthenon.

“That,” said the Dean, “is the Parthenon.”

“So it is.”

“I haven’t the time to waste on silly questions.”

“All right, then.” Roark got up, he took a long ruler from the desk, he walked to the picture. “Shall I tell you what’s rotten about it?”

“It’s the Parthenon!” said the Dean.

“Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon!”

The ruler struck the glass over the picture.

“Look,” said Roark. “The famous flutings on the famous columns—what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood—when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?”

The Dean sat watching him curiously. Something puzzled him, not in the words, but in Roark’s manner of saying them.

“Rules?” said Roark. “Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn’t borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn’t borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it.”

“But all the proper forms of expression have been discovered long ago.”

“Expression—of what? The Parthenon did not serve the same purpose as its wooden ancestor. An airline terminal does not serve the same purpose as the Parthenon. Every form has its own meaning. Every man creates his meaning and form and goal. Why is it so important—what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right—so long as it’s not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic—and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else? There must be some reason. I don’t know. I’ve never known it. I’d like to understand.”

“For heaven’s sake,” said the Dean. “Sit down.... That’s better.... Would you mind very much putting that ruler down? ... Thank you.... Now listen to me. No one has ever denied the importance of modern technique to an architect. We must learn to adapt the beauty of the past to the needs of the present. The voice of the past is the voice of the people. Nothing has ever been invented by one man in architecture. The proper creative process is a slow, gradual, anonymous, collective one, in which each man collaborates with all the others and subordinates himself to the standards of the majority.”

“But you see,” said Roark quietly, “I have, let’s say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.”

“How old are you?” asked the Dean.

“Twenty-two,” said Roark.

“Quite excusable,” said the Dean; he seemed relieved. “You’ll outgrow all that.” He smiled. “The old standards have lived for thousands of years and nobody has been able to improve upon them. What are your modernists? A transient mode, exhibitionists trying to attract attention. Have you observed the course of their careers? Can you name one who has achieved any permanent distinction? Look at Henry Cameron. A great man, a leading architect twenty years ago. What is he today? Lucky if he gets—once a year—a garage to remodel. A bum and a drunkard, who . . .”

“We won’t discuss Henry Cameron.”

“Oh? Is he a friend of yours?”

“No. But I’ve seen his buildings.”

“And you found them . . .”

“I said we won’t discuss Henry Cameron.”

“Very well. You must realize that I am allowing you a great deal of . . . shall we say, latitude? I am not accustomed to hold a discussion with a student who behaves in your manner. However, I am anxious to forestall, if possible, what appears to be a tragedy, the spectacle of a young man of your obvious mental gifts setting out deliberately to make a mess of his life.”

The Dean wondered why he had promised the professor of mathematics to do all he could for this boy. Merely because the professor had said: “This,” and pointed to Roark’s project, “is a great man.” A great man, thought the Dean, or a criminal. The Dean winced. He did not approve of either.

He thought of what he had heard about Roark’s past. Roark’s father had been a steel puddler somewhere in Ohio and had died long ago. The boy’s entrance papers showed no record of nearest relatives. When asked about it, Roark had said indifferently: “I don’t think I have any relatives. I may have. I don’t know.” He had seemed astonished that he should be expected to have any interest in the matter. He had not made or sought a single friend on the campus. He had refused to join a fraternity. He had worked his way through high school and through the three years here at the Institute. He had worked as a common laborer in the building trades since childhood. He had done plastering, plumbing, steel work, anything he could get, going from one small town to another, working his way east, to the great cities. The Dean had seen him, last summer, on his vacation, catching rivets on a skyscraper in construction in Boston; his long body relaxed under greasy overalls, only his eyes intent, and his right arm swinging forward, once in a while, expertly, without effort, to catch the flying ball of fire at the last moment, when it seemed that the hot rivet would miss the bucket and strike him in the face.

“Look here, Roark,” said the Dean gently. “You have worked hard for your education. You had only one year left to go. There is something important to consider, particularly for a boy in your position. There’s the practical side of an architect’s career to think about. An architect is not an end in himself. He is only a small part of a great social whole. Co-operation is the key word to our modern world and to the profession of architecture in particular. Have you thought of your potential clients?”

“Yes,” said Roark.

“The Client,” said the Dean. “The Client. Think of that above all. He’s the one to live in the house you build. Your only purpose is to serve him. You must aspire to give the proper artistic expression to his wishes. Isn’t that all one can say on the subject?”

“Well, I could say that I must aspire to build for my client the most comfortable, the most logical, the most beautiful house that can be built. I could say that I must try to sell him the best I have and also teach him to know the best. I could say it, but I won’t. Because I don’t intend to build in order to serve or help anyone. I don’t intend to build in order to have clients. I intend to have clients in order to build.”

“How do you propose to force your ideas on them?”

“I don’t propose to force or be forced. Those who want me will come to me.”

Then the Dean understood what had puzzled him in Roark’s manner.

“You know,” he said, “you would sound much more convincing if you spoke as if you cared whether I agreed with you or not.”

“That’s true,” said Roark. “I don’t care whether you agree with me or not.” He said it so simply that it did not sound offensive, it sounded like the statement of a fact which he noticed, puzzled, for the first time.

“You don’t care what others think—which might be understandable. But you don’t care even to make them think as you do?”

“No.”

“But that’s . . . that’s monstrous.”

“Is it? Probably. I couldn’t say.”

“I’m glad of this interview,” said the Dean, suddenly, too loudly. “It has relieved my conscience. I believe, as others stated at the meeting, that the profession of architecture is not for you. I have tried to help you. Now I agree with the Board. You are a man not to be encouraged. You are dangerous.”

“To whom?” asked Roark.

But the Dean rose, indicating that the interview was over.

Roark left the room. He walked slowly through the long halls, down the stairs, out to the lawn below. He had met many men such as the Dean; he had never understood them. He knew only that there was some important difference between his actions and theirs. It had ceased to disturb him long ago. But he always looked for a central theme in buildings and he looked for a central impulse in men. He knew the source of his actions; he could not discover theirs. He did not care. He had never learned the process of thinking about other people. But he wondered, at times, what made them such as they were. He wondered again, thinking of the Dean. There was an important secret involved somewhere in that question, he thought. There was a principle which he must discover.

But he stopped. He saw the sunlight of late afternoon, held still in the moment before it was to fade, on the gray limestone of a stringcourse running along the brick wall of the Institute building. He forgot men, the Dean and the principle behind the Dean, which he wanted to discover. He thought only of how lovely the stone looked in the fragile light and of what he could have done with that stone.

He thought of a broad sheet of paper, and he saw, rising on the paper, bare walls of gray limestone with long bands of glass, admitting the glow of the sky into the classrooms. In the corner of the sheet stood a sharp, angular signature—HOWARD ROARK.

“. . . ARCHITECTURE, my friends, is a great Art based on two cosmic principles: Beauty and Utility. In a broader sense, these are but part of the three eternal entities: Truth, Love and Beauty. Truth—to the traditions of our Art, Love—for our fellow men whom we are to serve, Beauty—ah, Beauty is a compelling goddess to all artists, be it in the shape of a lovely woman or a building.... Hm.... Yes.... In conclusion, I should like to say to you, who are about to embark upon your careers in architecture, that you are now the custodians of a sacred heritage.... Hm.... Yes.... So, go forth into the world, armed with the three eternal entities—armed with courage and vision, loyal to the standards this great school has represented for many years. May you all serve faithfully, neither as slaves to the past nor as those parvenus who preach originality for its own sake, which attitude is only ignorant vanity. May you all have many rich, active years before you and leave, as you depart from this world, your mark on the sands of time!”

Guy Francon ended with a flourish, raising his right arm in a sweeping salute; informal, but with an air, that gay, swaggering air which Guy Francon could always permit himself. The huge hall before him came to life in applause and approval.

A sea of faces, young, perspiring and eager, had been raised solemnly—for forty-five minutes—to the platform where Guy Francon had held forth as the speaker at the commencement exercises of the Stanton Institute of Technology, Guy Francon who had brought his own person from New York for the occasion; Guy Francon, of the illustrious firm of Francon & Heyer, vice-president of the Architects’ Guild of America, member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, member of the National Fine Arts Commission, Secretary of the Arts and Crafts League of New York, chairman of the Society for Architectural Enlightenment of the U.S.A.; Guy Francon, knight of the Legion of Honor of France, decorated by the governments of Great Britain, Belgium, Monaco and Siam; Guy Francon, Stanton’s greatest alumnus, who had designed the famous Frink National Bank Building of New York City, on the top of which, twenty-five floors above the pavements, there burned in a miniature replica of the Hadrian Mausoleum a wind-blown torch made of glass and the best General Electric bulbs.

Guy Francon descended from the platform, fully conscious of his timing and movements. He was of medium height and not too heavy, with just an unfortunate tendency to stoutness. Nobody, he knew, would give him his real age, which was fifty-one. His face bore not a wrinkle nor a single straight line; it was an artful composition in globes, circles, arcs and ellipses, with bright little eyes twinkling wittily. His clothes displayed an artist’s infinite attention to details. He wished, as he descended the steps, that this were a co-educational school.

The hall before him, he thought, was a splendid specimen of architecture, made a bit stuffy today by the crowd and by the neglected problem of ventilation. But it boasted green marble dadoes, Corinthian columns of cast iron painted gold, and garlands of gilded fruit on the walls; the pineapples particularly, thought Guy Francon, had stood the test of years very well. It is, thought Guy Francon, touching; it was I who built this annex and this very hall, twenty years ago; and here I am.

The hall was packed with bodies and faces, so tightly that one could not distinguish at a glance which faces belonged to which bodies. It was like a soft, shivering aspic made of mixed arms, shoulders, chests and stomachs. One of the heads, pale, dark haired and beautiful, belonged to Peter Keating.

He sat, well in front, trying to keep his eyes on the platform, because he knew that many people were looking at him and would look at him later. He did not glance back, but the consciousness of those centered glances never left him. His eyes were dark, alert, intelligent. His mouth, a small upturned crescent faultlessly traced, was gentle and generous, and warm with the faint promise of a smile. His head had a certain classical perfection in the shape of the skull, in the natural wave of black ringlets about finely hollowed temples. He held his head in the manner of one who takes his beauty for granted, but knows that others do not. He was Peter Keating, star student of Stanton, president of the student body, captain of the track team, member of the most important fraternity, voted the most popular man on the campus.

The crowd was there, thought Peter Keating, to see him graduate, and he tried to estimate the capacity of the hall. They knew of his scholastic record and no one would beat his record today. Oh, well, there was Shlinker. Shlinker had given him stiff competition, but he had beaten Shlinker this last year. He had worked like a dog, because he had wanted to beat Shlinker. He had no rivals today.... Then he felt suddenly as if something had fallen down, inside his throat, to his stomach, something cold and empty, a blank hole rolling down and leaving that feeling on its way: not a thought, just the hint of a question asking him whether he was really as great as this day would proclaim him to be. He looked for Shlinker in the crowd; he saw his yellow face and gold-rimmed glasses. He stared at Shlinker warmly, in relief, in reassurance, in gratitude. It was obvious that Shlinker could never hope to equal his own appearance or ability; he had nothing to doubt; he would always beat Shlinker and all the Shlinkers of the world; he would let no one achieve what he could not achieve. Let them all watch him. He would give them good reason to stare. He felt the hot breaths about him and the expectation, like a tonic. It was wonderful, thought Peter Keating, to be alive.

His head was beginning to reel a little. It was a pleasant feeling. The feeling carried him, unresisting and unremembering, to the platform in front of all those faces. He stood—slender, trim, athletic—and let the deluge break upon his head. He gathered from its roar that he had graduated with honors, that the Architects’ Guild of America had presented him with a gold medal and that he had been awarded the Prix de Paris by the Society for Architectural Enlightenment of the U.S.A.—a four-year scholarship at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.

Then he was shaking hands, scratching the perspiration off his face with the end of a rolled parchment, nodding, smiling, suffocating in his black gown and hoping that people would not notice his mother sobbing with her arms about him. The President of the Institute shook his hand, booming: “Stanton will be proud of you, my boy.” The Dean shook his hand, repeating: “. . . a glorious future . . . a glorious future . . . a glorious future . . .” Professor Peterkin shook his hand, and patted his shoulder, saying: ”. . . and you’ll find it absolutely essential; for example, I had the experience when I built the Peabody Post Office . . .” Keating did not listen to the rest, because he had heard the story of the Peabody Post Office many times. It was the only structure anyone had ever known Professor Peterkin to have erected, before he sacrificed his practice to the responsibilities of teaching. A great deal was said about Keating’s final project—a Palace of Fine Arts. For the life of him, Keating could not remember at the moment what that project was.

Through all this, his eyes held the vision of Guy Francon shaking his hand, and his ears held the sounds of Francon’s mellow voice: “. . . as I have told you, it is still open, my boy. Of course, now that you have this scholarship . . . you will have to decide . . . a Beaux-Arts diploma is very important to a young man . . . but I should be delighted to have you in our office....”

The banquet of the Class of ’22 was long and solemn. Keating listened to the speeches with interest; when he heard the endless sentences about “young men as the hope of American Architecture” and “the future opening its golden gates,” he knew that he was the hope and his was the future, and it was pleasant to hear this confirmation from so many eminent lips. He looked at the gray-haired orators and thought of how much younger he would be when he reached their positions, theirs and beyond them.

Then he thought suddenly of Howard Roark. He was surprised to find that the flash of that name in his memory gave him a sharp little twinge of pleasure, before he could know why. Then he remembered: Howard Roark had been expelled this morning. He reproached himself silently; he made a determined effort to feel sorry. But the secret glow came back, whenever he thought of that expulsion. The event proved conclusively that he had been a fool to imagine Roark a dangerous rival; at one time, he had worried about Roark more than about Shlinker, even though Roark was two years younger and one class below him. If he had ever entertained any doubts on their respective gifts, hadn’t this day settled it all? And, he remembered, Roark had been very nice to him, helping him whenever he was stuck on a problem . . . not stuck, really, just did not have the time to think it out, a plan or something. Christ! how Roark could untangle a plan, like pulling a string and it was open . . . well, what if he could? What did it get him? He was done for now. And knowing this, Peter Keating experienced at last a satisfying pang of sympathy for Howard Roark.

When Keating was called upon to speak, he rose confidently. He could not show that he was terrified. He had nothing to say about architecture. But he spoke, his head high, as an equal among equals, just subtly diffident, so that no great name present could take offense. He remembered saying: “Architecture is a great art . . . with our eyes to the future and the reverence of the past in our hearts . . . of all the crafts, the most important one sociologically . . . and, as the man who is an inspiration to us all has said today, the three eternal entities are: Truth, Love and Beauty. . . .”

Then, in the corridors outside, in the noisy confusion of leave-taking, a boy had thrown an arm about Keating’s shoulders and whispered: “Run on home and get out of the soup-and-fish, Pete, and it’s Boston for us tonight, just our own gang; I’ll pick you up in an hour.” Ted Shlinker had urged: “Of course you’re coming, Pete. No fun without you. And, by the way, congratulations and all that sort of thing. No hard feelings. May the best man win.” Keating had thrown his arm about Shlinker’s shoulders; Keating’s eyes had glowed with an insistent kind of warmth, as if Shlinker were his most precious friend; Keating’s eyes glowed like that on everybody. He had said: “Thanks, Ted, old man. I really do feel awful about the A.G.A. medal—I think you were the one for it, but you never can tell what possesses those old fogies.” And now Keating was on his way home through the soft darkness, wondering how to get away from his mother for the night.

His mother, he thought, had done a great deal for him. As she pointed out frequently, she was a lady and had graduated from high school; yet she had worked hard, had taken boarders into their home, a concession unprecedented in her family.

His father had owned a stationery store in Stanton. Changing times had ended the business and a hernia had ended Peter Keating, Sr., twelve years ago. Louisa Keating had been left with the home that stood at the end of a respectable street, an annuity from an insurance kept up accurately—she had seen to that—and her son. The annuity was a modest one, but with the help of the boarders and of a tenacious purpose Mrs. Keating had managed. In the summers her son helped, clerking in hotels or posing for hat advertisements. Her son, Mrs. Keating had decided, would assume his rightful place in the world, and she had clung to this as softly, as inexorably as a leech.... It’s funny, Keating remembered, at one time he had wanted to be an artist. It was his mother who had chosen a better field in which to exercise his talent for drawing. “Architecture,” she had said, “is such a respectable profession. Besides, you meet the best people in it.” She had pushed him into his career, he had never known when or how. It’s funny, thought Keating, he had not remembered that youthful ambition of his for years. It’s funny that it should hurt him now—to remember. Well, this was the night to remember it—and to forget it forever.

Architects, he thought, always made brilliant careers. And once on top, did they ever fail? Suddenly, he recalled Henry Cameron; builder of skyscrapers twenty years ago; old drunkard with offices on some wa-terfront today. Keating shuddered and walked faster.

He wondered, as he walked, whether people were looking at him. He watched the rectangles of lighted windows; when a curtain fluttered and a head leaned out, he tried to guess whether it had leaned to watch his passing; if it hadn’t, some day it would; some day, they all would.

Howard Roark was sitting on the porch steps when Keating approached the house. He was leaning back against the steps, propped up on his elbows, his long legs stretched out. A morning-glory climbed over the porch pillars, as a curtain between the house and the light of a lamppost on the corner.

It was strange to see an electric globe in the air of a spring night. It made the street darker and softer; it hung alone, like a gap, and left nothing to be seen but a few branches heavy with leaves, standing still at the gap’s edges. The small hint became immense, as if the darkness held nothing but a flood of leaves. The mechanical ball of glass made the leaves seem more living; it took away their color and gave the promise that in daylight they would be a brighter green than had ever existed; it took away one’s sight and left a new sense instead, neither smell nor touch, yet both, a sense of spring and space.

Keating stopped when he recognized the preposterous orange hair in the darkness of the porch. It was the one person whom he had wanted to see tonight. He was glad to find Roark alone, and a little afraid of it.

“Congratulations, Peter,” said Roark.

“Oh ... Oh, thanks....” Keating was surprised to find that he felt more pleasure than from any other compliment he had received today. He was timidly glad that Roark approved, and he called himself inwardly a fool for it. “... I mean . . . do you know or . . .” He added sharply: “Has Mother been telling you?”

“She has.”

“She shouldn’t have!”

“Why not?”

“Look, Howard, you know that I’m terribly sorry about your being . . .”

Roark threw his head back and looked up at him.

“Forget it,” said Roark.

“I ... there’s something I want to speak to you about, Howard, to ask your advice. Mind if I sit down?”

“What is it?”

Keating sat down on the steps beside him. There was no part that he could ever play in Roark’s presence. Besides, he did not feel like playing a part now. He heard a leaf rustling in its fall to the earth; it was a thin, glassy, spring sound.

He knew, for the moment, that he felt affection for Roark; an affection that held pain, astonishment and helplessness.

“You won’t think,” said Keating gently, in complete sincerity, “that it’s awful of me to be asking about my business, when you’ve just been . . . ?”

“I said forget about that. What is it?”

“You know,” said Keating honestly and unexpectedly even to himself, “I’ve often thought that you’re crazy. But I know that you know many things about it—architecture, I mean—which those fools never knew. And I know that you love it as they never will.”

“Well?”

“Well, I don’t know why I should come to you, but—Howard, I’ve never said it before, but you see, I’d rather have your opinion on things than the Dean‘s—I’d probably follow the Dean’s, but it’s just that yours means more to me myself, I don’t know why. I don’t know why I’m saying this, either.”

Roark turned over on his side, looked at him, and laughed. It was a young, kind, friendly laughter, a thing so rare to hear from Roark that Keating felt as if someone had taken his hand in reassurance; and he forgot that he had a party in Boston waiting for him.

“Come on,” said Roark, “you’re not being afraid of me, are you? What do you want to ask about?”

“It’s about my scholarship. The Paris prize I got.”

“Yes?”

“It’s for four years. But, on the other hand, Guy Francon offered me a job with him some time ago. Today he said it’s still open. And I don’t know which to take.”

Roark looked at him; Roark’s fingers moved in slow rotation, beating against the steps.

“If you want my advice, Peter,” he said at last, “you’ve made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don’t you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?”

“You see, that’s what I admire about you, Howard. You always know.”

“Drop the compliments.”

“But I mean it. How do you always manage to decide?”

“How can you let others decide for you?”

“But you see, I’m not sure, Howard. I’m never sure of myself. I don’t know whether I’m as good as they all tell me I am. I wouldn’t admit that to anyone but you. I think it’s because you’re always so sure that I . . .”

“Petey!” Mrs. Keating’s voice exploded behind them. “Petey, sweetheart! What are you doing there?”

She stood in the doorway, in her best dress of burgundy taffeta, happy and angry.

“And here I’ve been sitting all alone, waiting for you! What on earth are you doing on those filthy steps in your dress suit? Get up this minute! Come on in the house, boys. I’ve got hot chocolate and cookies ready for you.”

“But, Mother. I wanted to speak to Howard about something important,” said Keating. But he rose to his feet.

She seemed not to have heard. She walked into the house. Keating followed.

Roark looked after them, shrugged, rose and went in also.

Mrs. Keating settled down in an armchair, her stiff skirt crackling.

“Well?” she asked. “What were you two discussing out there?”

Keating fingered an ash tray, picked up a matchbox and dropped it, then, ignoring her, turned to Roark.

“Look, Howard, drop the pose,” he said, his voice high. “Shall I junk the scholarship and go to work, or let Francon wait and grab the Beaux-Arts to impress the yokels? What do you think?”

Something was gone. The one moment was lost.

“Now, Petey, let me get this straight . . .” began Mrs. Keating.

“Oh, wait a minute, Mother! ... Howard, I’ve got to weigh it carefully. It isn’t everyone who can get a scholarship like that. You’re pretty good when you rate that. A course at the Beaux-Arts—you know how important that is.”

“I don’t,” said Roark.

“Oh, hell, I know your crazy ideas, but I’m speaking practically, for a man in my position. Ideals aside for a moment, it certainly is . . .”

“You don’t want my advice,” said Roark.

“Of course I do! I’m asking you!”

But Keating could never be the same when he had an audience, any audience. Something was gone. He did not know it, but he felt that Roark knew; Roark’s eyes made him uncomfortable and that made him angry.

“I want to practice architecture,” snapped Keating, “not talk about it! Gives you a great prestige—the old Ecole. Puts you above the rank and file of the ex-plumbers who think they can build. On the other hand, an opening with Francon—Guy Francon himself offering it!”

Roark turned away.

“How many boys will match that?” Keating went on blindly. “A year from now they’ll be boasting they’re working for Smith or Jones if they find work at all. While I’ll be with Francon & Heyer!”

“You’re quite right, Peter,” said Mrs. Keating, rising. “On a question like that you don’t want to consult your mother. It’s too important. I’ll leave you to settle it with Mr. Roark.”

He looked at his mother. He did not want to hear what she thought of this; he knew that his only chance to decide was to make the decision before he heard her; she had stopped, looking at him, ready to turn and leave the room; he knew it was not a pose—she would leave if he wished it; he wanted her to go; he wanted it desperately. He said:

“Why, Mother, how can you say that? Of course I want your opinion. What . . . what do you think?”

She ignored the raw irritation in his voice. She smiled.

“Petey, I never think anything. It’s up to you. It’s always been up to you.”

“Well . . .” he began hesitantly, watching her, “if I go to the Beaux-Arts . . .”

“Fine,” said Mrs. Keating, “go to the Beaux-Arts. It’s a grand place. A whole ocean away from your home. Of course, if you go, Mr. Francon will take somebody else. People will talk about that. Everybody knows that Mr. Francon picks out the best boy from Stanton every year for his office. I wonder how it’ll look if some other boy gets the job? But I guess that doesn’t matter.”

“What . . . what will people say?”

“Nothing much, I guess. Only that the other boy was the best man of his class. I guess he’ll take Shlinker.”

“No!” he gulped furiously. “Not Shlinker!”

“Yes,” she said sweetly. “Shlinker.”

“But . . .”

“But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.”

“And you think that Francon . . .”

“Why should I think of Mr. Francon? It’s nothing to me.”

“Mother, you want me to take the job with Francon?”

“I don’t want anything, Petey. You’re the boss.”

He wondered whether he really liked his mother. But she was his mother and this fact was recognized by everybody as meaning automatically that he loved her, and so he took for granted that whatever he felt for her was love. He did not know whether there was any reason why he should respect her judgment. She was his mother; this was supposed to take the place of reasons.

“Yes, of course, Mother. . . . But . . . Yes, I know, but . . . Howard?”

It was a plea for help. Roark was there, on a davenport in the corner, half lying, sprawled limply like a kitten. It had often astonished Keating; he had seen Roark moving with the soundless tension, the control, the precision of a cat; he had seen him relaxed, like a cat, in shapeless ease, as if his body held no single solid bone. Roark glanced up at him. He said:

“Peter, you know how I feel about either one of your opportunities. Take your choice of the lesser evil. What will you learn at the Beaux-Arts? Only more Renaissance palaces and operetta settings. They’ll kill everything you might have in you. You do good work, once in a while, when somebody lets you. If you really want to learn, go to work. Francon is a bastard and a fool, but you will be building. It will prepare you for going on your own that much sooner.”

“Even Mr. Roark can talk sense sometimes,” said Mrs. Keating, “even if he does talk like a truck driver.”

“Do you really think that I do good work?” Keating looked at him, as if his eyes still held the reflection of that one sentence—and nothing else mattered.

“Occasionally,” said Roark. “Not often.”

“Now that it’s all settled . . .” began Mrs. Keating.

“I ... I’ll have to think it over, Mother.”

“Now that it’s all settled, how about the hot chocolate? I’ll have it out to you in a jiffy!”

She smiled at her son, an innocent smile that declared her obedience and gratitude, and she rustled out of the room.

Keating paced nervously, stopped, lighted a cigarette, stood spitting the smoke out in short jerks, then looked at Roark.

“What are you going to do now, Howard?”

“I?”

“Very thoughtless of me, I know, going on like that about myself. Mother means well, but she drives me crazy. . . . Well, to hell with that. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to New York.”

“Oh, swell. To get a job?”

“To get a job.”

“In . . . in architecture?”

“In architecture, Peter.”

“That’s grand. I’m glad. Got any definite prospects?”

“I’m going to work for Henry Cameron.”

“Oh, no, Howard!”

Roark smiled slowly, the corners of his mouth sharp, and said nothing.

“Oh, no, Howard!”

“Yes.”

“But he’s nothing, nobody any more! Oh, I know he has a name, but he’s done for! He never gets any important buildings, hasn’t had any for years! They say he’s got a dump for an office. What kind of future will you get out of him? What will you learn?”

“Not much. Only how to build.”

“For God’s sake, you can’t go on like that, deliberately ruining yourself! I thought . . . well, yes, I thought you’d learned something today!”

“I have.”

“Look, Howard, if it’s because you think that no one else will have you now, no one better, why, I’ll help you. I’ll work old Francon and I’ll get connections and . . .”

“Thank you, Peter. But it won’t be necessary. It’s settled.”

“What did he say?”

“Who?”

“Cameron.”

“I’ve never met him.”

Then a horn screamed outside. Keating remembered, started off to change his clothes, collided with his mother at the door and knocked a cup off her loaded tray.

“Petey!”

“Never mind, Mother!” He seized her elbows. “I’m in a hurry, sweetheart. A little party with the boys—now, now, don’t say anything—I won’t be late and—look! We’ll celebrate my going with Francon & Heyer!”

He kissed her impulsively, with the gay exuberance that made him irresistible at times, and flew out of the room, up the stairs. Mrs. Keating shook her head, flustered, reproving and happy.

In his room, while flinging his clothes in all directions, Keating thought suddenly of a wire he would send to New York. That particular subject had not been in his mind all day, but it came to him with a sense of desperate urgency; he wanted to send that wire now, at once. He scribbled it down on a piece of paper:

“Katie dearest coming New York job Francon love ever

“Peter”

That night Keating raced toward Boston, wedged in between two boys, the wind and the road whistling past him. And he thought that the world was opening to him now, like the darkness fleeing before the bobbing headlights. He was free. He was ready. In a few years—so very soon, for time did not exist in the speed of that car—his name would ring like a horn, ripping people out of sleep. He was ready to do great things, magnificent things, things unsurpassed in ... in ... oh, hell ... in architecture.

PETER KEATING looked at the streets of New York. The people, he observed, were extremely well dressed.

He had stopped for a moment before the building on Fifth Avenue, where the office of Francon & Heyer and his first day of work awaited him. He looked at the men who hurried past. Smart, he thought, smart as hell. He glanced regretfully at his own clothes. He had a great deal to learn in New York.

When he could delay it no longer, he turned to the door. It was a miniature Doric portico, every inch of it scaled down to the exact proportions decreed by the artists who had worn flowing Grecian tunics; between the marble perfection of the columns a revolving door sparkled with nickel-plate, reflecting the streaks of automobiles flying past. Keating walked through the revolving door, through the lustrous marble lobby, to an elevator of gilt and red lacquer that brought him, thirty floors later, to a mahogany door. He saw a slender brass plate with delicate letters:

FRANCON & HEYER, ARCHITECTS.

The reception room of the office of Francon & Heyer, Architects, looked like a cool, intimate ballroom in a Colonial mansion. The silver white walls were paneled with flat pilasters; the pilasters were fluted and curved into Ionic snails; they supported little pediments broken in the middle to make room for half a Grecian urn plastered against the wall. Etchings of Greek temples adorned the panels, too small to be distinguished, but presenting the unmistakable columns, pediments and crumbling stone.

Quite incongruously, Keating felt as if a conveyor belt was under his feet, from the moment he crossed the threshold. It carried him to the reception clerk who sat at a telephone switchboard behind the white balustrade of a Florentine balcony. It transferred him to the threshold of a huge drafting room. He saw long, flat tables, a forest of twisted rods descending from the ceiling to end in green-shaded lamps, enormous blueprint files, towers of yellow drawers, papers, tin boxes, sample bricks, pots of glue and calendars from construction companies, most of them bearing pictures of naked women. The chief draftsman snapped at Keating, without quite seeing him. He was bored and crackling with purpose simultaneously. He jerked his thumb in the direction of a locker room, thrust his chin out toward the door of a locker, and stood, rocking from heels to toes, while Keating pulled a pearl-gray smock over his stiff, uncertain body. Francon had insisted on that smock. The conveyor belt stopped at a table in a corner of the drafting room, where Keating found himself with a set of plans to expand, the scraggy back of the chief draftsman retreating from him in the unmistakable manner of having forgotten his existence.

Keating bent over his task at once, his eyes fixed, his throat rigid. He saw nothing but the pearly shimmer of the paper before him. The steady lines he drew surprised him, for he felt certain that his hand was jerking an inch back and forth across the sheet. He followed the lines, not knowing where they led or why. He knew only that the plan was someone’s tremendous achievement which he could neither question nor equal. He wondered why he had ever thought of himself as a potential architect.

Much later, he noticed the wrinkles of a gray smock sticking to a pair of shoulder blades over the next table. He glanced about him, cautiously at first, then with curiosity, then with pleasure, then with contempt. When he reached this last, Peter Keating became himself again and felt love for mankind. He noticed sallow cheeks, a funny nose, a wart on a receding chin, a stomach squashed against the edge of a table. He loved these sights. What these could do, he could do better. He smiled. Peter Keating needed his fellow men.

When he glanced at his plans again, he noticed the flaws glaring at him from the masterpiece. It was the floor of a private residence, and he noted the twisted hallways that sliced great hunks of space for no apparent reason, the long, rectangular sausages of rooms doomed to darkness. Jesus, he thought, they’d have flunked me for this in the first term. After which, he proceeded with his work swiftly, easily, expertly—and happily.

Before lunchtime. Keating had made friends in the room, not any definite friends, but a vague soil spread and ready from which friendship would spring. He had smiled at his neighbors and winked in understanding over nothing at all. He had used each trip to the water cooler to caress those he passed with the soft, cheering glow of his eyes, the brilliant eyes that seemed to pick each man in turn out of the room, out of the universe, as the most important specimen of humanity and as Keating’s dearest friend. There goes—there seemed to be left in his wake—a smart boy and a hell of a good fellow.

Keating noticed that a tall blond youth at the next table was doing the elevation of an office building. Keating leaned with chummy respect against the boy’s shoulder and looked at the laurel garlands entwined about fluted columns three floors high.

“Pretty good for the old man,”said Keating with admiration.

“Who?” asked the boy.

“Why, Francon,” said Keating.

“Francon hell,” said the boy placidly. “He hasn’t designed a dog-house in eight years.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, at a glass door behind them. “Him.”

“What?” asked Keating, turning.

“Him,” said the boy. “Stengel. He does all these things.”

Behind the glass door Keating saw a pair of bony shoulders above the edge of a desk, a small, triangular head bent intently, and two blank pools of light in the round frames of glasses.

It was late in the afternoon when a presence seemed to have passed beyond the closed door, and Keating learned from the rustle of whispers around him that Guy Francon had arrived and had risen to his office on the floor above. Half an hour later the glass door opened and Stengel came out, a huge piece of cardboard dangling between his fingers.

“Hey, you,” he said, his glasses stopping on Keating’s face. “You doing the plans for this?” He swung the cardboard forward. “Take this up to the boss for the okay. Try to listen to what he’ll say and try to look intelligent. Neither of which matters anyway.”

He was short and his arms seemed to hang down to his ankles; arms swinging like ropes in the long sleeves, with big, efficient hands. Keating’s eyes froze, darkening, for one-tenth of a second, gathered in a tight stare at the blank lenses. Then Keating smiled and said pleasantly:

“Yes, sir.”

He carried the cardboard on the tips of his ten fingers, up the crimson-plushed stairway to Guy Francon’s office. The cardboard displayed a water-color perspective of a gray granite mansion with three tiers of dormers, five balconies, four bays, twelve columns, one flag-pole and two lions at the entrance. In the corner, neatly printed by hand, stood: “Residence of Mr. and Mrs. James S. Whattles. Francon & Heyer, Architects.” Keating whistled softly: James S. Whattles was the multimillionaire manufacturer of shaving lotions.

Guy Francon’s office was polished. No, thought Keating, not polished, but shellacked; no, not shellacked, but liquid with mirrors melted and poured over every object. He saw splinters of his own reflection let loose like a swarm of butterflies, following him across the room, on the Chippendale cabinets, on the Jacobean chairs, on the Louis XV mantelpiece. He had time to note a genuine Roman statue in a comer, sepia photographs of the Parthenon, of Rheims Cathedral, of Versailles and of the Frink National Bank Building with the eternal torch.

He saw his own legs approaching him in the side of the massive mahogany desk. Guy Francon sat behind the desk. Guy Francon’s face was yellow and his cheeks sagged. He looked at Keating for an instant as if he had never seen him before, then remembered and smiled expansively.

“Well, well, well, Kittredge, my boy, here we are, all set and at home! So glad to see you. Sit down, boy, sit down, what have you got there? Well, there’s no hurry, no hurry at all. Sit down. How do you like it here?”

“I’m afraid, sir, that I’m a little too happy,” said Keating, with an expression of frank, boyish helplessness. “I thought I could be busi-nesslike on my first job, but starting in a place like this . . . I guess it knocked me out a little.... I’ll get over it, sir,” he promised.

“Of course,” said Guy Francon. “It might be a bit overwhelming for a boy, just a bit. But don’t you worry. I’m sure you’ll make good.”

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

“Of course you will. What’s this they sent me?” Francon extended his hand to the drawing, but his fingers came to rest limply on his forehead instead. “It’s so annoying, this headache.... No, no, nothing serious—” he smiled at Keating’s prompt concern—“just a little mal de tête. One works so hard.”

“Is there anything I can get for you, sir?”

“No, no, thank you. It’s not anything you can get for me, it’s if only you could take something away from me.” He winked. “The champagne. Entre nous, that champagne of theirs wasn’t worth a damn last night. I’ve never cared for champagne anyway. Let me tell you, Kittredge, it’s very important to know about wines, for instance when you’ll take a client out to dinner and will want to be sure of the proper thing to order. Now I’ll tell you a professional secret. Take quail, for instance. Now most people would order Burgundy with it. What do you do? You call for Clos Vougeot 1904. See? Adds that certain touch. Correct, but original. One must always be original.... Who sent you up, by the way?”

“Mr. Stengel, sir.”

“Oh, Stengel.” The tone in which he pronounced the name clicked like a shutter in Keating’s mind: it was a permission to be stored away for future use. “Too grand to bring his own stuff up, eh? Mind you, he’s a great designer, the best designer in New York City, but he’s just getting to be a bit too grand lately. He thinks he’s the only one doing any work around here, just because he smudges at a board all day long. You’ll learn, my boy, when you’ve been in the business longer, that the real work of an office is done beyond its walls. Take last night, for instance. Banquet of the Clarion Real Estate Association. Two hundred guests—dinner and champagne—oh, yes, champagne!” He wrinkled his nose fastidiously, in self-mockery. “A few words to say informally in a little after-dinner speech—you know, nothing blatant, no vulgar sales tatk—only a few well-chosen thoughts on the responsibility of realtors to society, on the importance of selecting architects who are competent, respected and well established. You know, a few bright little slogans that will stick in the mind.”

“Yes, sir, like ‘Choose the builder of your home as carefully as you choose the bride to inhabit it.’ ”

“Not bad. Not bad at all, Kittredge. Mind if I jot it down?”

“My name is Keating, sir,” said Keating firmly. “You are very welcome to the idea. I’m happy if it appeals to you.”

“Keating, of course! Why, of course, Keating,” said Francon with a disarming smile. “Dear me, one meets so many people. How did you say it? Choose the builder . . . it was very well put.”

He made Keating repeat it and wrote it down on a pad, picking a pencil from an array before him, new, many-colored pencils, sharpened to a professional needle point, ready, unused.

Then he pushed the pad aside, sighed, patted the smooth waves of his hair and said wearily:

“Well, all right, I suppose I’ll have to look at the thing.”

Keating extended the drawing respectfully. Francon leaned back, held the cardboard out at arm’s length and looked at it. He closed his left eye, then his right eye, then moved the cardboard an inch farther. Keating expected wildly to see him turn the drawing upside down. But Francon just held it and Keating knew suddenly that he had long since stopped seeing it. Francon was studying it for his, Keating’s, benefit; and then Keating felt light, light as air, and he saw the road to his future, clear and open.

“Hm . . . yes,” Francon was saying, rubbing his chin with the tips of two soft fingers. “Hm ... yes . . .”

He turned to Keating.

“Not bad,” said Francon. “Not bad at all.... Well . . . perhaps ... it would have been more distinguished, you know, but ... well, the drawing is done so neatly.... What do you think, Keating?”

Keating thought that four of the windows faced four mammoth granite columns. But he looked at Francon’s fingers playing with a petunia-mauve necktie, and decided not to mention it. He said instead:

“If I may make a suggestion, sir, it seems to me that the cartouches between the fourth and fifth floors are somewhat too modest for so imposing a building. It would appear that an ornamented stringcourse would be so much more appropriate.”

“That’s it. I was just going to say it. An ornamented stringcourse.... But . . . but look, it would mean diminishing the fenestration, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Keating, a faint coating of diffidence over the tone he had used in discussions with his classmates, “but windows are less important than the dignity of a building’s façade.”

“That’s right. Dignity. We must give our clients dignity above all. Yes, definitely, an ornamented stringcourse.... Only . . . look, I’ve approved the preliminary drawings, and Stengel has had this done up so neatly.”

“Mr. Stengel will be delighted to change it if you advise him to.”

Francon’s eyes held Keating’s for a moment. Then Francon’s lashes dropped and he picked a piece of lint off his sleeve.

“Of course, of course . . .” he said vaguely. “But . . . do you think the stringcourse is really important?”

“I think,” said Keating slowly, “it is more important to make changes you find necessary than to okay every drawing just as Mr. Stengel designed it.”

Because Francon said nothing, but only looked straight at him, because Francon’s eyes were focused and his hands limp, Keating knew that he had taken a terrible chance and won; he became frightened by the chance after he knew he had won.

They looked silently across the desk, and both saw that they were two men who could understand each other.

“We’ll have an ornamented stringcourse,” said Francon with calm, genuine authority. “Leave this here. Tell Stengel that I want to see him.”

He had turned to go. Francon stopped him. Francon’s voice was gay and warm:

“Oh, Keating, by the way, may I make a suggestion? Just between us, no offense intended, but a burgundy necktie would be so much better than blue with your gray smock, don’t you think so?”

“Yes, sir,” said Keating easily. “Thank you. You’ll see it tomorrow.”

He walked out and closed the door softly.

On his way back through the reception room, Keating saw a distinguished, gray-haired gentleman escorting a lady to the door. The gentleman wore no hat and obviously belonged to the office; the lady wore a mink cape, and was obviously a client.

The gentleman was not bowing to the ground, he was not unrolling a carpet, he was not waving a fan over her head; he was only holding the door for her. It merely seemed to Keating that the gentleman was doing all of that.

The Frink National Bank Building rose over Lower Manhattan, and its long shadow moved, as the sun traveled over the sky, like a huge clock hand across grimy tenements, from the Aquarium to Manhattan Bridge. When the sun was gone, the torch of Hadrian’s Mausoleum flared up in its stead, and made glowing red smears on the glass of windows for miles around, on the top stories of buildings high enough to reflect it. The Frink National Bank Building displayed the entire history of Roman art in well-chosen specimens; for a long time it had been considered the best building of the city, because no other structure could boast a single Classical item which it did not possess.

It offered so many columns, pediments, friezes, tripods, gladiators, urns and volutes that it looked as if it had not been built of white marble, but squeezed out of a pastry tube. It was, however, built of white marble. No one knew that but the owners who had paid for it. It was now of a streaked, blotched, leprous color, neither brown nor green but the worst tones of both, the color of slow rot, the color of smoke, gas fumes and acids eating into a delicate stone intended for clean air and open country. The Frink National Bank Building, however, was a great success. It had been so great a success that it was the last structure Guy Francon ever designed; its prestige spared him the bother from then on.

Three blocks east of the Frink National Bank stood the Dana Building. It was some stories lower and without any prestige whatever. Its lines were hard and simple, revealing, emphasizing the harmony of the steel skeleton within, as a body reveals the perfection of its bones. It had no other ornament to offer. It displayed nothing but the precision of its sharp angles, the modeling of its planes, the long streaks of its windows like streams of ice running down from the roof to the pavements. New Yorkers seldom looked at the Dana Building. Sometimes, a rare country visitor would come upon it unexpectedly in the moonlight and stop and wonder from what dream that vision had come. But such visitors were rare. The tenants of the Dana Building said that they would not exchange it for any structure on earth; they appreciated the light, the air, the beautiful logic of the plan in their halls and offices. But the tenants of the Dana Building were not numerous; no prominent man wished his business to be located in a building that looked “like a warehouse.”

The Dana Building had been designed by Henry Cameron.

In the eighteen-eighties, the architects of New York fought one another for second place in their profession. No one aspired to the first. The first was held by Henry Cameron. Henry Cameron was hard to get in those days. He had a waiting list two years in advance; he designed personally every structure that left his office. He chose what he wished to build. When he built, a client kept his mouth shut. He demanded of all people the one thing he had never granted anybody: obedience. He went through the years of his fame like a projectile flying to a goal no one could guess. People called him crazy. But they took what he gave them, whether they understood it or not, because it was a building “by Henry Cameron.”

At first, his buildings were merely a little different, not enough to frighten anyone. He made startling experiments, once in a while, but people expected it and one did not argue with Henry Cameron. Something was growing in him with each new building, struggling, taking shape, rising dangerously to an explosion. The explosion came with the birth of the skyscraper. When structures began to rise not in tier on ponderous tier of masonry, but as arrows of steel shooting upward without weight or limit, Henry Cameron was among the first to understand this new miracle and to give it form. He was among the first and the few who accepted the truth that a tall building must look tall. While architects cursed, wondering how to make a twenty-story building look like an old brick mansion, while they used every horizontal device available in order to cheat it of its height, shrink it down to tradition, hide the shame of its steel, make it small, safe and ancient—Henry Cameron designed skyscrapers in straight, vertical lines, flaunting their steel and height. While architects drew friezes and pediments, Henry Cameron decided that the skyscraper must not copy the Greeks. Henry Cameron decided that no building must copy any other.

He was thirty-nine years old then, short, stocky, unkempt; he worked like a dog, missed his sleep and meals, drank seldom but then brutally, called his clients unprintable names, laughed at hatred and fanned it deliberately, behaved like a feudal lord and a longshoreman, and lived in a passionate tension that stung men in any room he entered, a fire neither they nor he could endure much longer. It was the year 1892.

The Columbian Exposition of Chicago opened in the year 1893.

The Rome of two thousand years ago rose on the shores of Lake Michigan, a Rome improved by pieces of France, Spain, Athens and every style that followed it. It was a “Dream City” of columns, triumphal arches, blue lagoons, crystal fountains and popcorn. Its architects competed on who could steal best, from the oldest source and from the most sources at once. It spread before the eyes of a new country every structural crime ever committed in all the old ones. It was white as a plague, and it spread as such.

People came, looked, were astounded, and carried away with them, to the cities of America, the seeds of what they had seen. The seeds sprouted into weeds; into shingled post offices with Doric porticos, brick mansions with iron pediments, lofts made of twelve Parthenons piled on top of one another. The weeds grew and choked everything else.

Henry Cameron had refused to work for the Columbian Exposition, and had called it names that were unprintable, but repeatable, though not in mixed company. They were repeated. It was repeated also that he had thrown an inkstand at the face of a distinguished banker who had asked him to design a railroad station in the shape of the temple of Diana at Ephesus. The banker never came back. There were others who never came back.

just as he reached the goal of long, struggling years, just as he gave shape to the truth he had sought—the last barrier fell closed before him. A young country had watched him on his way, had wondered, had begun to accept the new grandeur of his work. A country flung two thousand years back in an orgy of Classicism could find no place for him and no use.

It was not necessary to design buildings any longer, only to photograph them; the architect with the best library was the best architect. Imitators copied imitations. To sanction it there was Culture; there were twenty centuries unrolling in moldering ruins; there was the great Exposition; there was every European post card in every family album.

Henry Cameron had nothing to offer against this; nothing but a faith he held merely because it was his own. He had nobody to quote and nothing of importance to say. He said only that the form of a building must follow its function; that the structure of a building is the key to its beauty; that new methods of construction demand new forms; that he wished to build as he wished and for that reason only. But people could not listen to him when they were discussing Vitru-vius, Michelangelo and Sir Christopher Wren.

Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake: he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost.

People said he never knew that he had lost. If he did, he never let them see it. As his clients became rarer, his manner to them grew more overbearing. The less the prestige of his name, the more arrogant the sound of his voice pronouncing it. He had had an astute business manager, a mild, self-effacing little man of iron who, in the days of his glory, faced quietly the storms of Cameron’s temper and brought him clients; Cameron insulted the clients, but the little man made them accept it and come back. The little man died.

Cameron had never known how to face people. They did not matter to him, as his own life did not matter, as nothing mattered but buildings. He had never learned to give explanations, only orders. He had never been liked. He had been feared. No one feared him any longer.

He was allowed to live. He lived to loathe the streets of the city he had dreamed of rebuilding. He lived to sit at the desk in his empty office, motionless, idle, waiting. He lived to read in a well-meaning newspaper account a reference to “the late Henry Cameron.” He lived to begin drinking, quietly, steadily, terribly, for days and nights at a time; and to hear those who had driven him to it say, when his name was mentioned for a commission: “Cameron? I should say not. He drinks like a fish. That’s why he never gets any work.” He lived to move from the offices that occupied three floors of a famous building to one floor on a less expensive street, then to a suite farther downtown, then to three rooms facing an air shaft, near the Battery. He chose these rooms because, by pressing his face to the window of his office, he could see, over a brick wall, the top of the Dana Building.

Howard Roark looked at the Dana Building beyond the windows, stopping at each landing, as he mounted the six flights of stairs to Henry Cameron’s office; the elevator was out of order. The stairs had been painted a dirty file-green a long time ago; a little of the paint remained to grate under shoe soles in crumbling patches. Roark went up swiftly, as if he had an appointment, a folder of his drawings under his arm, his eyes on the Dana Building. He collided once with a man descending the stairs; this had happened to him often in the last two days; he had walked through the streets of the city, his head thrown back, noticing nothing but the buildings of New York.

In the dark cubbyhole of Cameron’s anteroom stood a desk with a telephone and a typewriter. A gray-haired skeleton of a man sat at the desk, in his shirt sleeves, with a pair of limp suspenders over his shoulders. He was typing specifications intently, with two fingers and incredible speed. The light from a feeble bulb made a pool of yellow on his back, where the damp shirt stuck to his shoulder blades.

The man raised his head slowly, when Roark entered. He looked at Roark, said nothing and waited, his old eyes weary, unquestioning, incurious.

“I should like to see Mr. Cameron,” said Roark.

“Yeah?” said the man, without challenge, offense or meaning. “About what?”

“About a job.”

“What job?”

“Drafting.”

The man sat looking at him blankly. It was a request that had not confronted him for a long time. He rose at last, without a word, shuffled to a door behind him and went in.

He left the door half open. Roark heard him drawling:

“Mr. Cameron, there’s a fellow outside says he’s looking for a job here.”

Then a voice answered, a strong, clear voice that held no tones of age:

“Why, the damn fool! Throw him out . . . Wait! Send him in!”

The old man returned, held the door open and jerked his head at it silently. Roark went in. The door closed behind him.

Henry Cameron sat at his desk at the end of a long, bare room. He sat bent forward, his forearms on the desk, his two hands closed before him. His hair and his beard were coal black, with coarse threads of white. The muscles of his short, thick neck bulged like ropes. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbows; the bare arms were hard, heavy and brown. The flesh of his broad face was rigid, as if it had aged by compression. The eyes were dark, young, living.

Roark stood on the threshold and they looked at each other across the long room.

The light from the air shaft was gray, and the dust on the drafting table, on the few green files, looked like fuzzy crystals deposited by the light. But on the wall, between the windows, Roark saw a picture. It was the only picture in the room. It was the drawing of a skyscraper that had never been erected.

Roark’s eyes moved first and they moved to the drawing. He walked across the office, stopped before it and stood looking at it. Cameron’s eyes followed him, a heavy glance, like a long, thin needle held fast at one end, describing a slow circle, its point piercing Roark’s body, keeping it pinned firmly. Cameron looked at the orange hair, at the hand hanging by his side, its palm to the drawing, the fingers bent slightly, forgotten not in a gesture but in the overture to a gesture of asking or seizing something.

“Well?” said Cameron at last. “Did you come to see me or did you come to look at pictures?”

Roark turned to him.

“Both,” said Roark.

He walked to the desk. People had always lost their sense of existence in Roark’s presence; but Cameron felt suddenly that he had never been as real as in the awareness of the eyes now looking at him.

“What do you want?” snapped Cameron.

“I should like to work for you,” said Roark quietly. The voice said: “I should like to work for you.” The tone of the voice said: “I’m going to work for you.”

“Are you?” said Cameron, not realizing that he answered the un-pronounced sentence. “What’s the matter? None of the bigger and better fellows will have you?”

“I have not applied to anyone else.”

“Why not? Do you think this is the easiest place to begin? Think anybody can walk in here without trouble? Do you know who I am?”

“Yes. That’s why I’m here.”

“Who sent you?”

“No one.”

“Why the hell should you pick me?”

“I think you know that.”

“What infernal impudence made you presume that I’d want you? Have you decided that I’m so hard up that I’d throw the gates open for any punk who’d do me the honor? ‘Old Cameron,’ you’ve said to yourself, ‘is a has-been, a drunken . . .’ come on, you’ve said it! ... ‘a drunken failure who can’t be particular!’ Is that it? ... Come on, answer me! Answer me, damn you! What are you staring at? Is that it? Go on! Deny it!”

“It’s not necessary.”

“Where have you worked before?”

“I’m just beginning.”

“What have you done?”

“I’ve had three years at Stanton.”

“Oh? The gentleman was too lazy to finish?”

“I have been expelled.”

“Great!” Cameron slapped the desk with his fist and laughed. “Splendid! You’re not good enough for the lice nest at Stanton, but you’ll work for Henry Cameron! You’ve decided this is the place for refuse! What did they kick you out for? Drink? Women? What?”

“These,” said Roark, and extended his drawings.

Cameron looked at the first one, then at the next, then at every one of them to the bottom. Roark heard the paper rustling as Cameron slipped one sheet behind another. Then Cameron raised his head.

“Sit down.”

Roark obeyed. Cameron stared at him, his thick fingers drumming against the pile of drawings.

“So you think they’re good?” said Cameron. “Well, they’re awful. It’s unspeakable. It’s a crime. Look,” he shoved a drawing at Roark’s face, “look at that. What in Christ’s name was your idea? What possessed you to indent that plan here? Did you just want to make it pretty, because you had to patch something together? Who do you think you are? Guy Francon, God help you? ... Look at this building, you fool! You get an idea like this and you don’t know what to do with it! You stumble on a magnificent thing and you have to ruin it! Do you know how much you’ve got to learn?”

“Yes. That’s why I’m here.”

“And look at that one! I wish I’d done that at your age! But why did you have to botch it? Do you know what I’d do with that? Look, to hell with your stairways and to hell with your furnace room! When you lay the foundations . . .”

He spoke furiously for a long time. He cursed. He did not find one sketch to satisfy him. But Roark noticed that he spoke as of buildings that were in construction.

He broke off abruptly, pushed the drawings aside, and put his fist over them. He asked:

“When did you decide to become an architect?”

“When I was ten years old.”

“Men don’t know what they want so early in life, if ever. You’re lying.”

“Am I?”

“Don’t stare at me like that! Can’t you look at something else? Why did you decide to be an architect?”

“I didn’t know it then. But it’s because I’ve never believed in God.”

“Come on, talk sense.”

“Because I love this earth. That’s all I love. I don’t like the shape of things on this earth. I want to change them.”

“For whom?”

“For myself.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“When did you hear all that?”

“I didn’t.”

“Men don’t talk like that at twenty-two. You’re abnormal.”

“Probably.”

“I didn’t mean it as a compliment.”

“I didn’t either.”

“Got any family?”

“No.”

“Worked through school?”

“Yes.”

“At what?”

“In the building trades.”

“How much money have you got left?”

“Seventeen dollars and thirty cents.”

“When did you come to New York?”

“Yesterday.”

Cameron looked at the white pile under his fist.

“God damn you,” said Cameron softly.

“God damn you!” roared Cameron suddenly, leaning forward. “I didn’t ask you to come here! I don’t need any draftsmen! There’s nothing here to draft! I don’t have enough work to keep myself and my men out of the Bowery Mission! I don’t want any fool visionaries starving around here! I don’t want the responsibility. I didn’t ask for it. I never thought I’d see it again. I’m through with it. I was through with that many years ago. I’m perfectly happy with the drooling dolts I’ve got here, who never had anything and never will have and it makes no difference what becomes of them. That’s all I want. Why did you have to come here? You’re setting out to ruin yourself, you know that, don’t you? And I’ll help you to do it. I don’t want to see you. I don’t like you. I don’t like your face. You look like an insufferable egotist. You’re impertinent. You’re too sure of yourself. Twenty years ago I’d have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure. You’re coming to work here tomorrow at nine o’clock sharp.”

“Yes,” said Roark, rising.

“Fifteen dollars a week. That’s all I can pay you.”

“Yes.”

“You’re a damn fool. You should have gone to someone else. I’ll kill you if you go to anyone else. What’s your name?”

“Howard Roark.”

“If you’re late, I’ll fire you.”

“Yes.”

Roark extended his hand for the drawings.

“Leave these here!” bellowed Cameron. “Now get out!”

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following excerpt (150 pages later) depicts the first meeting between Howard Roark and the lovely Dominique Francon—and its consequences. Dominique worships greatness, but believes that Roark is doomed in a world ruled by mediocrity.

Roark, rejected by the world, has closed his practice to work in a granite quarry. The quarry happens to be owned by Dominique’s father, the architect Guy Francon. Dominique is spending the summer alone in her father’s mansion a few miles from the quarry.

The Quarry Sequence

BECAUSE THE sun was too hot that morning, and she knew it would be hotter at the granite quarry, because she wanted to see no one and knew she would face a gang of workers, Dominique walked to the quarry. The thought of seeing it on that blazing day was revolting; she enjoyed the prospect.

When she came out of the woods to the edge of the great stone bowl, she felt as if she were thrust into an execution chamber filled with scalding steam. The heat did not come from the sun, but from that broken cut in the earth, from the reflectors of flat ridges. Her shoulders, her head, her back, exposed to the sky, seemed cool while she felt the hot breath of the stone rising up her legs, to her chin, to her nostrils. The air shimmered below, sparks of fire shot through the granite; she thought the stone was stirring, melting, running in white trickles of lava. Drills and hammers cracked the still weight of the air. It was obscene to see men on the shelves of the furnace. They did not look like workers, they looked like a chain gang serving an unspeakable penance for some unspeakable crime. She could not turn away.

She stood, as an insult to the place below. Her dress—the color of water, a pale green-blue, too simple and expensive, its pleats exact like edges of glass—her thin heels planted wide apart on the boulders, the smooth helmet of her hair, the exaggerated fragility of her body against the sky—flaunted the fastidious coolness of the gardens and drawing rooms from which she came.

She looked down. Her eyes stopped on the orange hair of a man who raised his head and looked at her.

She stood very still, because her first perception was not of sight, but of touch: the consciousness, not of a visual presence, but of a slap in the face. She held one hand awkwardly away from her body, the fingers spread wide on the air, as against a wall. She knew that she could not move until he permitted her to.

She saw his mouth and the silent contempt in the shape of his mouth; the planes of his gaunt, hollow cheeks; the cold, pure brilliance of the eyes that had no trace of pity. She knew it was the most beautiful face she would ever see, because it was the abstraction of strength made visible. She felt a convulsion of anger, of protest, of resistance—and of pleasure. He stood looking up at her; it was not a glance, but an act of ownership. She thought she must let her face give him the answer he deserved. But she was looking, instead, at the stone dust on his burned arms, the wet shirt clinging to his ribs, the lines of his long legs. She was thinking of those statues of men she had always sought; she was wondering what he would look like naked. She saw him looking at her as if he knew that. She thought she had found an aim in life—a sudden, sweeping hatred for that man.

She was first to move. She turned and walked away from him. She saw the superintendent of the quarry on the path ahead, and she waved. The superintendent rushed forward to meet her. “Why, Miss Francon!” he cried. “Why, how do you do, Miss Francon!”

She hoped the words were heard by the man below. For the first time in her life, she was glad of being Miss Francon, glad of her father’s position and possessions, which she had always despised. She thought suddenly that the man below was only a common worker, owned by the owner of this place, and she was almost the owner of this place.

The superintendent stood before her respectfully. She smiled and said:

“I suppose I’ll inherit the quarry some day, so I thought I should show some interest in it once in a while.”

The superintendent preceded her down the path, displayed his domain to her, explained the work. She followed him far to the other side of the quarry; she descended to the dusty green dell of the work sheds; she inspected the bewildering machinery. She allowed a convincingly sufficient time to elapse. Then she walked back, alone, down the edge of the granite bowl.

She saw him from a distance as she approached. He was working.

She saw one strand of red hair that fell over his face and swayed with the trembling of the drill. She thought—hopefully—that the vibrations of the drill hurt him, hurt his body, everything inside his body.

When she was on the rocks above him, he raised his head and looked at her; she had not caught him noticing her approach; he looked up as if he expected her to be there, as if he knew she would be back. She saw the hint of a smile, more insulting than words. He sustained the insolence of looking straight at her, he would not move, he would not grant the concession of turning away—of acknowledging that he had no right to look at her in such manner. He had not merely taken that right, he was saying silently that she had given it to him.

She turned sharply and walked on, down the rocky slope, away from the quarry.

It was not his eyes, not his mouth that she remembered, but his hands. The meaning of that day seemed held in a single picture she had noted: the simple instant of his one hand resting against granite. She saw it again: his fingertips pressed to the stone, his long fingers continuing the straight lines of the tendons that spread in a fan from his wrist to his knuckles. She thought of him, but the vision present through all her thoughts was the picture of that hand on the granite. It frightened her; she could not understand it.

He’s only a common worker, she thought, a hired man doing a convict’s labor. She thought of that, sitting before the glass shelf of her dressing table. She looked at the crystal objects spread before her; they were like sculptures in ice-they proclaimed her own cold, luxurious fragility; and she thought of his strained body, of his clothes drenched in dust and sweat, of his hands. She stressed the contrast, because it degraded her. She leaned back, closing her eyes. She thought of the many distinguished men whom she had refused. She thought of the quarry worker. She thought of being broken—not by a man she admired, but by a man she loathed. She let her head fall down on her arm; the thought left her weak with pleasure.

For two days she made herself believe that she would escape from this place; she found old travel folders in her trunk, studied them, chose the resort, the hotel and the particular room in that hotel, selected the train she would take, the boat and the number of the state-room. She found a vicious amusement in doing that, because she knew she would not take this trip she wanted; she would go back to the quarry.

She went back to the quarry three days later. She stopped over the ledge where he worked and she stood watching him openly. When he raised his head, she did not turn away. Her glance told him she knew the meaning of her action, but did not respect him enough to conceal it. His glance told her only that he had expected her to come. He bent over his drill and went on with his work. She waited. She wanted him to look up. She knew that he knew it. He would not look again.

She stood, watching his hands, waiting for the moments when he touched stone. She forgot the drill and the dynamite. She liked to think of the granite being broken by his hands.

She heard the superintendent calling her name, hurrying to her up the path. She turned to him when he approached.

“I like to watch the men working,” she explained.

“Yes, quite a picture, isn’t it?” the superintendent agreed. “There’s the train starting over there with another load.”

She was not watching the train. She saw the man below looking at her, she saw the insolent hint of amusement tell her that he knew she did not want him to look at her now. She turned her head away. The superintendent’s eyes traveled over the pit and stopped on the man below them.

“Hey, you down there!” he shouted. “Are you paid to work or to gape?”

The man bent silently over his drill. Dominique laughed aloud.

The superintendent said: “It’s a tough crew we got down here, Miss Francon ... Some of ’em even with jail records.”

“Has that man a jail record?” she asked, pointing down.

“Well, I couldn’t say. Wouldn’t know them all by sight.”

She hoped he had. She wondered whether they whipped convicts nowadays. She hoped they did. At the thought of it, she felt a sinking gasp such as she had felt in childhood, in dreams of falling down a long stairway; but she felt the sinking in her stomach.

She turned brusquely and left the quarry.

She came back many days later. She saw him, unexpectedly, on a flat stretch of stone before her, by the side of the path. She stopped short. She did not want to come too close. It was strange to see him before her, without the defense and excuse of distance.

He stood looking straight at her. Their understanding was too offensively intimate, because they had never said a word to each other. She destroyed it by speaking to him.

“Why do you always stare at me?” she asked sharply.

She thought with relief that words were the best means of estrangement. She had denied everything they both knew by naming it. For a moment, he stood silently, looking at her. She felt terror at the thought that he would not answer, that he would let his silence tell her too clearly why no answer was necessary. But he answered. He said:

“For the same reason you’ve been staring at me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“If you didn’t, you’d be much more astonished and much less angry, Miss Francon.”

“So you know my name?”

“You’ve been advertising it loudly enough.”

“You’d better not be insolent. I can have you fired at a moment’s notice, you know”

He turned his head, looking for someone among the men below. He asked: “Shall I call the superintendent?”

She smiled contemptuously.

“No, of course not. It would be too simple. But since you know who I am, it would be better if you stopped looking at me when I come here. It might be misunderstood.”

“I don’t think so.”

She turned away. She had to control her voice. She looked over the stone ledges. She asked: “Do you find it very hard to work here?”

“Yes. Terribly.”

“Do you get tired?”

“Inhumanly.”

“How does that feel?”

“I can hardly walk when the day’s ended. I can’t move my arms at night. When I lie in bed, I can count every muscle in my body to the number of separate, different pains.”

She knew suddenly that he was not telling her about himself; he was speaking of her, he was saying the things she wanted to hear and telling her that he knew why she wanted to hear these particular sentences.

She felt anger, a satisfying anger because it was cold and certain. She felt also a desire to let her skin touch his; to let the length of her bare arm press against the length of his; just that; the desire went no further.

She was asking calmly:

“You don’t belong here, do you? You don’t talk like a worker. What were you before?”

“An electrician. A plumber. A plasterer. Many things.”

“Why are you working here?”

“For the money you’re paying me, Miss Francon.”

She shrugged. She turned and walked away from him up the path. She knew that he was looking after her. She did not glance back. She continued on her way through the quarry, and she left it as soon as she could, but she did not go back down the path where she would have to see him again.

DOMINIQUE awakened each morning to the prospect of a day made significant by the existence of a goal to be reached: the goal of making it a day on which she would not go to the quarry.

She had lost the freedom she loved. She knew that a continuous struggle against the compulsion of a single desire was compulsion also, but it was the form she preferred to accept. It was the only manner in which she could let him motivate her life. She found a dark satisfaction in pain—because that pain came from him.

She went to call on her distant neighbors, a wealthy, gracious family who had bored her in New York; she had visited no one all summer. They were astonished and delighted to see her. She sat among a group of distinguished people at the edge of a swimming pool. She watched the air of fastidious elegance around her. She watched the deference of these people’s manner when they spoke to her. She glanced at her own reflection in the pool: she looked more delicately austere than any among them.

And she thought, with a vicious thrill,_of what these people would do if they read her mind in this moment; if they knew that she was thinking of a man in a quarry, thinking of his body with a sharp intimacy as one does not think of another’s body but only of one’s own. She smiled; the cold purity of her face prevented them from seeing the nature of that smile. She came back again to visit these people—for the same of such thoughts in the presence of their respect for her.

One evening, a guest offered to drive her back to her house. He was an eminent young poet. He was pale and slender; he had a soft, sensitive mouth, and eyes hurt by the whole universe. She had not noticed the wistful attention with which he had watched her for a long time. As they drove through the twilight she saw him leaning hesitantly closer to her. She heard his voice whispering the pleading, incoherent things she had heard from many men. He stopped the car. She felt his lips pressed to her shoulder.

She jerked away from him. She sat still for an instant, because she would have to brush against him if she moved and she could not bear to touch him. Then she flung the door open, she leaped out, she slammed the door behind her as if the crash of sound could wipe him out of existence, and she ran blindly. She stopped running after a while, and she walked on shivering, walked down the dark road until she saw the roof line of her own house.

She stopped, looking about her with her first coherent thought of astonishment. Such incidents had happened to her often in the past; only then she had been amused; she had felt no revulsion; she had felt nothing.

She walked slowly across the lawn, to the house. On the stairs to her room she stopped. She thought of the man in the quarry. She thought, in clear, formed words, that the man in the quarry wanted her. She had known it before; she had known it with his first glance at her. But she had never stated the knowledge to herself.

She laughed. She looked about her, at the silent splendor of her house. The house made the words preposterous. She knew that would never happen to her. And she knew the kind of suffering she could impose on him.

For days she walked with satisfaction through the rooms of her house. It was her defense. She heard the explosions of blasting from the quarry and smiled.

But she felt too certain and the house was too safe. She felt a desire to underscore the safety by challenging it.

She chose the marble slab in front of the fireplace in her bedroom. She wanted it broken. She knelt, hammer in hand, and tried to smash the marble. She pounded it, her thin arm sweeping high over her head, crashing down with ferocious helplessness. She felt the pain in the bones of her arms, in her shoulder sockets. She succeeded in making a long scratch across the marble.

She went to the quarry. She saw him from a distance and walked straight to him.

“Hello,” she said casually.

He stopped the drill. He leaned against a stone shelf. He answered:

“Hello.”

“I have been thinking of you,” she said softly, and stopped, then added, her voice flowing on in the same tone of compelling invitation, “because there’s a bit of a dirty job to be done at my house. Would you like to make some extra money?”

“Certainly, Miss Francon.”

“Will you come to my house tonight? The way to the servants’ entrance is off Ridgewood Road. There’s a marble piece at a fireplace that’s broken and has to be replaced. I want you to take it out and order a new one made for me.”

She expected anger and refusal. He asked:

“What time shall I come?”

“At seven o’clock. What are you paid here?”

“Sixty-two cents an hour.”

“I’m sure you’re worth that. I’m quite willing to pay you at the same rate. Do you know how to find my house?”

“No, Miss Francon.”

“Just ask anyone in the village to direct you.”

“Yes, Miss Francon.”

She walked away, disappointed. She felt that their secret understanding was lost; he had spoken as if it were a simple job which she could have offered to any other workman. Then she felt the sinking gasp inside, that feeling of shame and pleasure which he always gave her: she realized that their understanding had been more intimate and flagrant than ever—in his natural acceptance of an unnatural offer; he had shown her how much he knew—by his lack of astonishment.

She asked her old caretaker and his wife to remain in the house that evening. Their diffident presence completed the picture of a feudal mansion. She heard the bell of the servants’ entrance at seven o’clock. The old woman escorted him to the great front hall where Dominique stood on the landing of a broad stairway.

She watched him approaching, looking up at her. She held the pose long enough to let him suspect that it was a deliberate pose deliberately planned; she broke it at the exact moment before he could become certain of it. She said: “Good evening.” Her voice was austerely quiet.

He did not answer, but inclined his head and walked on up the stairs toward her. He wore his work clothes and he carried a bag of tools. His movements had a swift, relaxed kind of energy that did not belong here, in her house, on the polished steps, between the delicate, rigid banisters. She had expected him to seem incongruous in her house; but it was the house that seemed incongruous around him.

She moved one hand, indicating the door of her bedroom. He followed obediently. He did not seem to notice the room when he entered. He entered it as if it were a workshop. He walked straight to the fireplace.

“There it is,” she said, one finger pointing to the marble slab.

He said nothing. He knelt, took a thin metal wedge from his bag, held its point against the scratch on the slab, took a hammer and struck one blow. The marble split in a long, deep cut.

He glanced up at her. It was the look she dreaded, a look of laughter that could not be answered, because the laughter could not be seen, only felt. He said:

“Now it’s broken and has to be replaced.”

She asked calmly:

“Would you know what kind of marble this is and where to order another piece like it?”

“Yes, Miss Francon.”

“Go ahead, then. Take it out.”

“Yes, Miss Francon.”

She stood watching him. It was strange to feel a senseless necessity to watch the mechanical process of the work as if her eyes were helping it. Then she knew that she was afraid to look at the room around them. She made herself raise her head.

She saw the shelf of her dressing table, its glass edge like a narrow green satin ribbon in the semidarkness, and the crystal containers; she saw a pair of white bedroom slippers, a pale blue towel on the floor by a mirror, a pair of stockings thrown over the arm of a chair; she saw the white satin cover of her bed. His shirt had damp stains and gray patches of stone dust; the dust made streaks on the skin of his arms. She felt as if each object in the room had been touched by him, as if the air were a heavy pool of water into which they had been plunged together, and the water that touched him carried the touch to her, to every object in the room. She wanted him to look up. He worked, without raising his head.

She approached him and stood silently over him. She had never stood so close to him before. She looked down at the smooth skin on the back of his neck; she could distinguish single threads of his hair. She glanced down at the tip of her sandal. It was there, on the floor, an inch away from his body; she needed but one movement, a very slight movement of her foot, to touch him. She made a step back.

He moved his head, but not to look up, only to pick another tool from the bag, and bent over his work again.

She laughed aloud. He stopped and glanced at her.

“Yes?” he asked.

Her face was grave, her voice gentle when she answered:

“Oh, I’m sorry. You might have thought that I was laughing at you. But I wasn’t, of course.”

She added:

“I didn’t want to disturb you. I’m sure you’re anxious to finish and get out of here. I mean, of course, because you must be tired. But then, on the other hand, I’m paying you by the hour, so it’s quite all right if you stretch your time a little, if you want to make more out of it. There must be things you’d like to talk about.”

“Oh, yes, Miss Francon.”

“Well?”

“I think this is an atrocious fireplace.”

“Really? This house was designed by my father.”

“Yes, of course, Miss Francon.”

“There’s no point in your discussing the work of an architect.”

“None at all.”

“Surely we could choose some other subject.”

“Yes, Miss Francon.”

She moved away from him. She sat down on the bed, leaning back on straight arms, her legs crossed and pressed close together in a long, straight line. Her body, sagging limply from her shoulders, contradicted the inflexible precision of the legs; the cold austerity of her face contradicted the pose of her body.

He glanced at her occasionally, as he worked. He was speaking obediently. He was saying:

“I shall make certain to get a piece of marble of precisely the same quality, Miss Francon. It is very important to distinguish between the various kinds of marble. Generally speaking, there are three kinds. The white marbles, which are derived from the recrystallization of limestone, the onyx marbles which are chemical deposits of calcium carbonate, and the green marbles which consist mainly of hydrous magnesium silicate or serpentine. This last must not be considered as true marble. True marble is a metamorphic form of limestone, produced by heat and pressure. Pressure is a powerful factor. It leads to consequences which, once started, cannot be controlled.”

“What consequences?” she asked, leaning forward.

“The recrystallization of the particles of limestone and the infiltration of foreign elements from the surrounding soil. These constitute the colored streaks which are to be found in most marbles. Pink marble is caused by the presence of manganese oxides, gray marble is due to carbonaceous matter, yellow marble is attributed to a hydrous oxide of iron. This piece here is, of course, white marble. There are a great many varieties of white marble. You should be very careful, Miss Francon ...”

She sat leaning forward, gathered into a dim black huddle; the lamp light fell on one hand she had dropped limply on her knees, palm up, the fingers half-closed, a thin edge of fire outlining each finger, the dark cloth of her dress making the hand too naked and brilliant.

“... to make certain that I order a new piece of precisely the same quality. It would not be advisable, for instance, to substitute a piece of white Georgia marble which is not as fine-grained as the white marble of Alabama. This is Alabama marble. Very high grade. Very expensive.”

He saw her hand close and drop down, out of the light. He continued his work in silence.

When he had finished, he rose, asking:

“Where shall I put the stone?”

“Leave it there. I’ll have it removed.”

“I’ll order a new piece cut to measure and delivered to you C.O.D. Do you wish me to set it?”

“Yes, certainly. I’ll let you know when it comes. How much do I owe you?” She glanced at a clock on her bedside table. “Let me see, you’ve been here three quarters of an hour. That’s forty-eight cents.” She reached for her bag, she took out the dollar bill, she handed it to him. “Keep the change,” she said.

She hoped he would throw it back in her face. He slipped the bill into his pocket. He said:

“Thank you, Miss Francon.”

He saw the edge of her long black sleeve trembling over her closed fingers.

“Good night,” she said, her voice hollow in anger.

He bowed: “Good night, Miss Francon.”

He turned and walked down the stairs, out of the house.

She stopped thinking of him. She thought of the piece of marble he had ordered. She waited for it to come, with the feverish intensity of a sudden mania; she counted the days; she watched the rare trucks on the road beyond the lawn.

She told herself fiercely that she merely wanted the marble to come; just that; nothing else, no hidden reasons; no reasons at all. It was a last, hysterical aftermath; she was free of everything else. The stone would come and that would be the end.

When the stone came, she barely glanced at it. The delivery truck had not left the grounds, when she was at her desk, writing a note on a piece of exquisite stationery. She wrote:

“The marble is here. I want it set tonight.”

She sent her caretaker with the note to the quarry. She ordered it delivered to: “I don’t know his name. The redheaded workman who was here.”

The caretaker came back and brought her a scrap torn from a brown paper bag, bearing in pencil:

“You’ll have it set tonight.”

She waited, in the suffocating emptiness of impatience, at the window of her bedroom. The servants’ entrance bell rang at seven o’clock. There was a knock at her door. “Come in,” she snapped—to hide the strange sound of her own voice. The door opened and the caretaker’s wife entered, motioning for someone to follow. The person who followed was a short, squat, middle-aged Italian with bow legs, a gold hoop in one ear and a frayed hat held respectfully in both hands.

“The man sent from the quarry, Miss Francon,” said the caretaker’s wife.

Dominique asked, her voice not a scream and not a question:

“Who are you?”

“Pasquale Orsini,” the man answered obediently, bewildered.

“What do you want?”

“Well, I ... Well, Red down at the quarry said fireplace gotta be fixed, he said you wanta I fix her.”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” she said, rising. “I forgot. Go ahead.”

She had to get out of the room. She had to run, not to be seen by anyone, not to be seen by herself if she could escape it.

She stopped somewhere in the garden and stood trembling, pressing her fists against her eyes. It was anger. It was a pure, single emotion that swept everything clean; everything but the terror under the anger; terror, because she knew that she could not go near the quarry now and that she would go.

It was early evening, many days later, when she went to the quarry. She returned on horseback from a long ride through the country, and she saw the shadows lengthening on the lawn; she knew that she could not live through another night. She had to get there before the workers left. She wheeled about. She rode to the quarry, flying, the wind cutting her cheeks.

He was not there when she reached the quarry. She knew at once that he was not there, even though the workers were just leaving and a great many of them were filing down the paths from the stone bowl. She stood, her lips tight, and she looked for him. But she knew that he had left.

She rode into the woods. She flew at random between walls of leaves that melted ahead in the gathering twilight. She stopped, broke a long, thin branch off a tree, tore the leaves off, and went on, using the flexible stick as a whip, lashing her horse to fly faster. She felt as if the speed would hasten the evening on, force the hours ahead to pass more quickly, let her leap across time to catch the coming morning before it came. And then she saw him walking alone on the path before her.

She tore ahead. She caught up with him and stopped sharply, the jolt throwing her forward then back like the release of a spring. He stopped.

They said nothing. They looked at each other. She thought that every silent instant passing was a betrayal; this wordless encounter was too eloquent, this recognition that no greeting was necessary.

She asked, her voice flat:

“Why didn’t you come to set the marble?”

“I didn’t think it would make any difference to you who came. Or did it, Miss Francon?”

She felt the words not as sounds, but as a blow flat against her mouth. The branch she held went up and slashed across his face. She started off in the sweep of the same motion.

Dominique sat at the dressing table in her bedroom. It was very late. There was no sound in the vast, empty house around her. The french windows of the bedroom were open on a terrace and there was no sound of leaves in the dark garden beyond.

The blankets on her bed were turned down, waiting for her, the pillow white against the tall, black windows. She thought she would try to sleep. She had not seen him for three days. She ran her hands over her head, the curves of her palms pressing against the smooth planes of hair. She pressed her fingertips, wet with perfume, to the hollows of her temples, and held them there for a moment; she felt relief in the cold, contracting bite of the liquid on her skin. A spilled drop of perfume remained on the glass of the dressing table, a drop sparkling like a gem and as expensive.

She did not hear the sound of steps in the garden. She heard them only when they rose up the stairs to the terrace. She sat up, frowning. She looked at the french windows.

He came in. He wore his work clothes, the dirty shirt with rolled sleeves, the trousers smeared with stone dust. He stood looking at her. There was no laughing understanding in his face. His face was drawn, austere in cruelty, ascetic in passion, the cheeks sunken, the lips pulled down, set tight. She jumped to her feet, she stood, her arms thrown back, her fingers spread apart. He did not move. She saw a vein of his neck rise, beating, and fall down again.

Then he walked to her. He held her as if his flesh had cut through hers and she felt the bones of his arms on the bones of her ribs, her legs jerked tight against his, his mouth on hers.

She did not know whether the jolt of terror shook her first and she thrust her elbows at his throat, twisting her body to escape, or whether she lay still in his arms, in the first instant, in the shock of feeling his skin against hers, the thing she had thought about, had expected, had never known to be like this, could not have known, because this was not part of living, but a thing one could not bear longer than a second.

She tried to tear herself away from him. The effort broke against his arms that had not felt it. Her fists beat against his shoulders, against his face. He moved one hand, took her two wrists, pinned them behind her, under his arm, wrenching her shoulder blades. She twisted her head back. She felt his lips on her breast. She tore herself free.

She fell back against the dressing table, she stood crouching, her hands clasping the edge behind her, her eyes wide, colorless, shapeless in terror. He was laughing. There was the movement of laughter on his face, but no sound. Perhaps he had released her intentionally. He stood, his legs apart, his arms hanging at his sides, letting her be more sharply aware of his body across the space between them than she had been in his arms. She looked at the door behind him, he saw the first hint of movement, no more than a thought of leaping toward that door. He extended his arm, not touching her, and fell back. Her shoulders moved faintly, rising. He took a step forward and her shoulders fell. She huddled lower, closer to the table. He let her wait. Then he approached. He lifted her without effort. She let her teeth sink into his hand and felt blood on the tip of her tongue. He pulled her head back and he forced her mouth open against his.

She fought like an animal. But she made no sound. She did not call for help. She heard the echoes of her blows in a gasp of his breath, and she knew that it was a gasp of pleasure. She reached for the lamp on the dressing table. He knocked the lamp out of her hand. The crystal burst to pieces in the darkness.

He had thrown her down on the bed and she felt the blood beating in her throat, in her eyes, the hatred, the helpless terror in her blood. She felt the hatred and his hands; his hands moving over her body, the hands that broke granite. She fought in a last convulsion. Then the sudden pain shot up, through her body, to her throat, and she screamed. Then she lay still.

It was an act that could be performed in tenderness, as a seal of love, or in contempt, as a symbol of humiliation and conquest. It could be the act of a lover or the act of a soldier violating an enemy woman. He did it as an act of scorn. Not as love, but as defilement. And this made her lie still and submit. One gesture of tenderness from him—and she would have remained cold, untouched by the thing done to her body. But the act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted. Then she felt him shaking with the agony of a pleasure unbearable even to him, she knew that she had given that to him, that it came from her, from her body, and she bit her lips and she knew what he had wanted her to know.

He lay still across the bed, away from her, his head hanging back over the edge. She heard the slow, ending gasps of his breath. She lay on her back, as he had left her, not moving, her mouth open. She felt empty, light and flat.

She saw him get up. She saw his silhouette against the window. He went out, without a word or a glance at her. She noticed that, but it did not matter. She listened blankly to the sound of his steps moving away in the garden.

She lay still for a long time. Then she moved her tongue in her open mouth. She heard a sound that came from somewhere within her, and it was the dry, short, sickening sound of a sob, but she was not crying, her eyes were held paralyzed, dry and open. The sound became motion, a jolt running down her throat to her stomach. It flung her up, she stood awkwardly, bent over, her forearms pressed to her stomach. She heard the small table by the bed rattling in the darkness, and she looked at it, in empty astonishment that a table should move without reason. Then she understood that she was shaking. She was not frightened; it seemed foolish to shake like that, in short, separate jerks, like soundless hiccoughs. She thought she must take a bath. The need was unbearable, as if she had felt it for a long time. Nothing mattered, if only she would take a bath. She dragged her feet slowly to the door of her bathroom.

She turned the light on in the bathroom. She saw herself in a tall mirror. She saw the purple bruises left on her body by his mouth. She heard a moan muffled in her throat, not very loud. It was not the sight, but the sudden flash of knowledge. She knew that she would not take a bath. She knew that she wanted to keep the feeling of his body, the traces of his body on hers, knowing also what such a desire implied. She fell on her knees, clasping the edge of the bathtub. She could not make herself crawl over that edge. Her hands slipped, she lay still on the floor. The tiles were hard and cold under her body. She lay there till morning.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In this section, Roark is on trial—having been sued by Hopton Stoddard, a client who had hired him to build a “Temple of the Human Spirit.” Everyone considers the Temple blasphemous.

Ellsworth Toohey—critic, “humanitarian,” archenemy of Roark—foreseeing that Roark’s revolutionary manner of building would antagonize people, had manipulated Stoddard into giving the commission to Roark and then into suing him.

In the newspaper column “Sacrilege,” which instigated the lawsuit, Toohey had written: “Instead of being austerely enclosed, this alleged temple is wide open, like a western saloon [...] Man’s proper posture in a house of God is on his knees. Nobody in his right mind would kneel within Mr. Roark’s temple. The place forbids it. The emotions it suggests are of a different nature: arrogance, audacity, defiance, self-exaltation. It is not a house of God, but the cell of a megalomaniac.”

The Stoddard Trial

THE CASE of Hopton Stoddard versus Howard Roark opened in February of 1931.

The courtroom was so full that mass reactions could be expressed only by a slow motion running across the spread of heads, a sluggish wave like the ripple under the tight-packed skin of a sea lion.

The crowd, brown and streaked with subdued color, looked like a fruitcake of all the arts, with the cream of the A.G.A. rich and heavy on top. There were distinguished men and well-dressed, tight-lipped women; each woman seemed to feel an exclusive proprietorship of the art practiced by her escort, a monopoly guarded by resentful glances at the others. Almost everybody knew almost everybody else. The room had the atmosphere of a convention, an opening night and a family picnic. There was a feeling of “our bunch,” “our boys,” “our show.” [...]

Beyond the windows the sky was white and flat like frosted glass. The light seemed to come from the banks of snow on roofs and ledges, an unnatural light that made everything in the room look naked.

The judge sat hunched on his high bench as if he were roosting. He had a small face, wizened into virtue. He kept his hands upright in front of his chest, the fingertips pressed together. Hopton Stoddard was not present. He was represented by his attorney, a handsome gentleman, tall and grave as an ambassador.

Roark sat alone at the defense table. The crowd had stared at him and given up angrily, finding no satisfaction. He did not look crushed and he did not look defiant. He looked impersonal and calm. He was not like a public figure in a public place; he was like a man alone in his own room, listening to the radio. He took no notes; there were no papers on the table before him, only a large brown envelope. The crowd would have forgiven anything, except a man who could remain normal under the vibrations of its enormous collective sneer. Some of them had come prepared to pity him; all of them hated him after the first few minutes.

The plaintiff’s attorney stated his case in a simple opening address; it was true, he admitted, that Hopton Stoddard had given Roark full freedom to design and build the Temple; the point was, however, that Mr. Stoddard had clearly specified and expected a temple; the building in question could not be considered a temple by any known standards; as the plaintiff proposed to prove with the help of the best authorities in the field.

Roark waived his privilege to make an opening statement to the jury.

Ellsworth Monkton Toohey was the first witness called by the plaintiff. He sat on the edge of the witness chair and leaned back, resting on the end of his spine: he lifted one leg and placed it horizontally across the other. He looked amused—but managed to suggest that his amusement was a well-bred protection against looking bored.

The attorney went through a long list of questions about Mr. Toohey’s professional qualifications, including the number of copies sold of his book Sermons in Stone. Then he read aloud Toohey’s column “Sacrilege” and asked him to state whether he had written it. Toohey replied that he had. There followed a list of questions in erudite terms on the architectural merits of the Temple. Toohey proved that it had none. There followed an historical review. Toohey, speaking easily and casually, gave a brief sketch of all known civilizations and of their outstanding religious monuments—from the Incas to the Phoenicians to the Easter Islanders—including, whenever possible, the dates when these monuments were begun and the dates when they were completed, the number of workers employed in the construction and the approximate cost in modern American dollars. The audience listened punch-drunk.

Toohey proved that the Stoddard Temple contradicted every brick, stone and precept of history. “I have endeavored to show,” he said in conclusion, “that the two essentials of the conception of a temple are a sense of awe and a sense of man’s humility. We have noted the gigantic proportions of religious edifices, the soaring lines, the horrible grotesques of monster-like gods, or, later, gargoyles. All of it tends to impress upon man his essential insignificance, to crush him by sheer magnitude, to imbue him with that sacred terror which leads to the meekness of virtue. The Stoddard Temple is a brazen denial of our entire past, an insolent ‘No’ flung in the face of history. I may venture a guess as to the reason why this case has aroused such public interest. All of us have recognized instinctively that it involves a moral issue much.beyond its legal aspects. This building is a monument to a profound hatred of humanity. It is one man’s ego,defying the most sacred impulses of all mankind, of every man on the street, of every man in this courtroom!”

This was not a witness in court, but Ellsworth Toohey addressing a meeting—and the reaction was inevitable: the audience burst into applause. The judge struck his gavel and made a threat to have the courtroom cleared. Order was restored, but not to the faces of the crowd: the faces remained lecherously self-righteous. It was pleasant to be singled out and brought into the case as an injured party. Three-fourths of them had never seen the Stoddard Temple.

“Thank you, Mr. Toohey,” said the attorney, faintly suggesting a bow. Then he turned to Roark and said with delicate courtesy: “Your witness.”

“No questions,” said Roark.

Ellsworth Toohey raised one eyebrow and left the stand regretfully.

“Mr. Peter Keating!” called the attorney.

Peter Keating’s face looked attractive and fresh, as if he had had a good night’s sleep. He mounted the witness stand with a collegiate sort of gusto, swinging his shoulders and arms unnecessarily. He took the oath and answered the first questions gaily. His pose in the witness chair was strange: his torso slumped to one side with swaggering ease, an elbow on the chair’s arm; but his feet were planted awkwardly straight, and his knees were pressed tight together. He never looked at Roark. [...]

“Now, Mr. Keating, you attended the Stanton Institute of Technology at the same period as Mr. Roark?”

“Yes.”

“What can you tell us about Mr. Roark’s record there?”

“He was expelled.”

“He was expelled because he was unable to live up to the Institute’s high standard of requirements?”

“Yes. Yes, that was it.”

The judge glanced at Roark. A lawyer would have objected to this testimony as irrelevant. Roark made no objection.

“At that time, did you think that he showed any talent for the profession of architecture?”

“No.”

“Will you please speak a little louder, Mr. Keating?”

“I didn’t ... think he had any talent.”

Queer things were happening to Keating’s verbal punctuation: some words came out crisply, as if he dropped an exclamation point after each; others ran together, as if he would not stop to let himself hear them. He did not look at the attorney. He kept his eyes on the audience. At times, he looked like a boy out on a lark, a boy who has just drawn a mustache on the face of a beautiful girl on a subway toothpaste ad. Then he looked as if he were begging the crowd for support—as if he were on trial before them.

“At one time you employed Mr. Roark in your office?”

“Yes.”

“And you found yourself forced to fire him?”

“Yes ... we did.”

“For incompetence?”

“Yes.”

“What can you tell us about Mr. Roark’s subsequent career?”

“Well, you know, ‘career’ is a relative term. In volume of achievement any draftsman in our office has done more than Mr. Roark. We don’t call one or two buildings a career. We put up that many every month or so.”

“Will you give us your professional opinion of his work?”

“Well, I think it’s immature. Very startling, even quite interesting at times, but essentially—adolescent.”

“Then Mr. Roark cannot be called a full-fledged architect?”

“Not in the sense in which we speak of Mr. Ralston Holcombe, Mr. Guy Francon, Mr. Gordon Prescott—no. But, of course, I want to be fair. I think Mr. Roark had definite potentialities, particularly in problems of pure engineering. He could have made something of himself. I’ve tried to talk to him about it—I’ve tried to help him—I honestly did. But it was like talking to one of his pet pieces of reinforced concrete. I knew that he’d come to something like this. I wasn’t surprised when I heard that a client had had to sue him at last.”

“What can you tell us about Mr. Roark’s attitude toward clients?”

“Well, that’s the point. That’s the whole point. He didn’t care what the clients thought or wished, what anyone in the world thought or wished. He didn’t even understand how other architects could care. He wouldn’t even give you that, not even understanding, not even enough to ... respect you a little just the same. I don’t see what’s so wrong with trying to please people. I don’t see what’s wrong with wanting to be friendly and liked and popular. Why is that a crime? Why should anyone sneer at you for that, sneer all the time, all the time, day and night, not giving you a moment’s peace, like the Chinese water torture, you know where they drop water on your skull drop by drop?”

People in the audience began to realize that Peter Keating was drunk. The attorney frowned; the testimony had been rehearsed; but it was getting off the rails.

“Well, now, Mr. Keating, perhaps you’d better tell us about Mr. Roark’s views on architecture.”

“I’ll tell you, if you want to know. He thinks you should take your shoes off and kneel, when you speak of architecture. That’s what he thinks. Now why should you? Why? It’s a business like any other, isn’t it? What’s so damn sacred about it? Why do we have to be all keyed up? We’re only human. We want to make a living. Why can’t things be simple and easy? Why do we have to be some sort of God-damn heroes?”

“Now, now, Mr. Keating, I think we’re straying slightly from the subject. We’re ...”

“No, we’re not. I know what I’m talking about. You do, too. They all do. Every one of them here. I’m talking about the Temple. Don’t you see? Why pick a fiend to build a temple? Only a very human sort of man should be chosen to do that. A man who understands ... and forgives. A man who forgives ... That’s what you go to church for—to be ... forgiven ...”

“Yes, Mr. Keating, but speaking of Mr. Roark ...”

“Well, what about Mr. Roark? He’s no architect. He’s no good. Why should I be afraid to say that he’s no good? Why are you all afraid of him?”

“Mr. Keating, if you’re not well and wish to be dismissed ... ?”

Keating looked at him, as if awakening. He tried to control himself. After a while he said, his voice flat, resigned:

“No. I’m all right. I’ll tell you anything you want. What is it you want me to say?”

“Will you tell us—in professional terms—your opinion of the structure known as the Stoddard Temple?”

“Yes. Sure. The Stoddard Temple ... The Stoddard Temple has an improperly articulated plan, which leads to spatial confusion. There is no balance of masses. It lacks a sense of symmetry. Its proportions are inept.” He spoke in a monotone. His neck was stiff; he was making an effort not to let it drop forward. “It’s out of scale. It contradicts the elementary principles of composition. The total effect is that of ...”

“Louder please, Mr. Keating.”

“The total effect is that of crudeness and architectural illiteracy. It shows ... it shows no sense of structure, no instinct for beauty, no creative imagination, no ...” he closed his eves, “... artistic integrity ...”

“Thank you, Mr. Keating. That is all.”

The attorney turned to Roark and said nervously:

“Your witness.”

“No questions,” said Roark.

This concluded the first day of the trial. [...]

In the next two days a succession of witnesses testified for the plaintiff. Every examination began with questions that brought out the professional achievements of the witness. The attorney gave them leads like an expert press agent. Austen Heller remarked that architects must have fought for the privilege of being called to the witness stand, since it was the grandest spree of publicity in a usually silent profession.

None of the witnesses looked at Roark. He looked at them. He listened to the testimony. He said: “No questions,” to each one.

Ralston Holcombe on the stand, with flowing tie and gold-headed cane, had the appearance of a Grand Duke or a beer-garden composer. His testimony was long and scholarly, but it came down to:

“It’s all nonsense. It’s all a lot of childish nonsense. I can’t say that I feel much sympathy for Mr. Hopton Stoddard. He should have known better. It is a scientific fact that the architectural style of the Renaissance is the only one appropriate to our age. If our best people, like Mr. Stoddard, refuse to recognize this, what can you expect from all sorts of parvenus, would-be architects and the rabble in general? It has been proved that Renaissance is the only permissible style for all churches, temples and cathedrals. What about Sir Christopher Wren? Just laugh that off. And remember the greatest religious monument of all time—St. Peter’s in Rome. Are you going to improve upon St. Peter’s? And if Mr. Stoddard did not specifically insist on Renaissance, he got just exactly what he deserved. It serves him jolly well right.”

Gordon L. Prescott wore a turtle-neck sweater under a plaid coat, tweed trousers and heavy golf shoes.

“The correlation of the transcendental to the purely spatial in the building under discussion is entirely screwy,” he said. “If we take the horizontal as the one-dimensional, the vertical as the two-dimensional, the diagonal as the three-dimensional, and the interpenetration of spaces as the fourth-dimensional-architecture being a fourth-dimensional art—we can see quite simply that this building is homa-loidal, or—in the language of the layman—flat. The flowing life which comes from the sense of order in chaos, or, if you prefer, from unity in diversity, as well as vice versa, which is the realization of the contradiction inherent in architecture, is here absolutely absent. I am really trying to express myself as clearly as I can, but it is impossible to present a dialectic state by covering it up with an old fig leaf of logic just for the sake of the mentally lazy layman.”

John Erik Snyte testified modestly and unobtrusively that he had employed Roark in his office, that Roark had been an unreliable, disloyal and unscrupulous employee, and that Roark had started his career by stealing a client from him.

On the fourth day of the trial the plaintiff’s attorney called his last witness.

“Miss Dominique Francon,” he announced solemnly. [...]

The attorney had reserved Dominique for his climax, partly because he expected a great deal from her, and partly because he was worried; she was the only unrehearsed witness; she had refused to be coached. She had never mentioned the Stoddard Temple in her column ; but he had looked up her earlier writings on Roark; and Ellsworth Toohey had advised him to call her.

Dominique stood for a moment on the elevation of the witness stand, looking slowly over the crowd. Her beauty was startling but too impersonal, as if it did not belong to her; it seemed present in the room as a separate entity. People thought of a vision that had not quite appeared, of a victim on a scaffold, of a person standing at night at the rail of an ocean liner.

“What is your name?”

“Dominique Francon.”

“And your occupation, Miss Francon?”

“Newspaper woman.”

“You are the author of the brilliant column ‘Your House’ appearing in the New York Banner?”

“I am the author of ‘Your House.’ ”

“Your father is Guy Francon, the eminent architect?”

“Yes. My father was asked to come here to testify. He refused. He said he did not care for a building such as the Stoddard Temple, but he did not think that we were behaving like gentlemen.”

“Well, now, Miss Francon, shall we confine our answers to our questions? We are indeed fortunate to have you with us, since you are our only woman witness, and women have always had the purest sense of religious faith. Being, in addition, an outstanding authority on architecture, you are eminently qualified to give us what I shall call, with all deference, the feminine angle on this case. Will you tell us in your own words what you think of the Stoddard Temple?”

“I think that Mr. Stoddard has made a mistake. There would have been no doubt about the justice of his case if he had sued, not for alteration costs, but for demolition costs.”

The attorney looked relieved. “Will you explain your reasons, Miss Francon?”

“You have heard them from every witness at this trial.”

“Then I take it that you agree with the preceding testimony?”

“Completely. Even more completely than the persons who testified. They were very convincing witnesses.”

“Will you ... clarify that, Miss Francon? Just what do you mean?”

“What Mr. Toohey said: that this temple is a threat to all of us.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Mr. Toohey understood the issue so well. Shall I clarify it—in my own words?”

“By all means.”

“Howard Roark built a temple to the human spirit. He saw man as strong, proud, clean, wise and fearless. He saw man as a heroic being. And he built a temple to that. A temple is a place where man is to experience exaltation. He thought that exaltation comes from the consciousness of being guiltless, of seeing the truth and achieving it, of living up to one’s highest possibility, of knowing no shame and having no cause for shame, of being able to stand naked in full sunlight. He thought that exaltation means joy and that joy is man’s birthright. He thought that a place built as a setting for man is a sacred place. That is what Howard Roark thought of man and of exaltation. But Ellsworth Toohey said that this temple was a monument to a profound hatred of humanity. Ellsworth Toohey said that the essence of exaltation was to be scared out of your wits, to fall down and to grovel. Ellsworth Toohey said that man’s highest act was to realize his own worthlessness and to beg forgiveness. Ellsworth Toohey said it was depraved not to take for granted that man is something which needs to be forgiven. Ellsworth Toohey saw that this building was of man and of the earth—and Ellsworth Toohey said that this building had its belly in the mud. To glorify man, said Ellsworth Toohey, was to glorify the gross pleasure of the flesh, for the realm of the spirit is beyond the grasp of man. To enter that realm, said Ellsworth Toohey, man must come as a beggar, on his knees. Ellsworth Toohey is a lover of mankind.”

“Miss Francon, we are not really discussing Mr. Toohey, so if you will confine yourself to ...”

“I do not condemn Ellsworth Toohey. I condemn Howard Roark. A building, they say, must be part of its site. In what kind of world did Roark build his temple? For what kind of men? Look around you. Can you see a shrine becoming sacred by serving as a setting for Mr. Hopton Stoddard? For Mr. Ralston Holcombe? For Mr. Peter Keating? When you look at them all, do you hate Ellsworth Toohey—or do you damn Howard Roark for the unspeakable indignity which he did commit? Ellsworth Toohey is right, that temple is a sacrilege, though not in the sense he meant. I think Mr. Toohey knows that, however. When you see a man casting pearls without getting even a pork chop in return—it is not against the swine that you feel indignation. It is against the man who valued his pearls so little that he was willing to fling them into the muck and to let them become the occasion for a whole concert of grunting, transcribed by the court stenographer.”

“Miss Francon, I hardly think that this line of testimony is relevant or admissible ...”

“The witness must be allowed to testify,” the judge declared unexpectedly. He had been bored and he liked to watch Dominique’s figure. Besides, he knew that the audience was enjoying it, in the sheer excitement of scandal, even though their sympathies were with Hopton Stoddard.

“Your Honor, some misunderstanding seems to have occurred,” said the attorney. “Miss Francon, for whom are you testifying? For Mr. Roark or Mr. Stoddard?”

“For Mr. Stoddard, of course. I am stating the reasons why Mr. Stoddard should win this case. I have sworn to tell the truth.”

“Proceed,” said the judge.

“All the witnesses have told the truth. But not the whole truth. I am merely filling in the omissions. They spoke of a threat and of hatred. They were right. The Stoddard Temple is a threat to many things. If it were allowed to exist, nobody would dare to look at himself in the mirror. And that is a cruel thing to do to men. Ask anything of men. Ask them to achieve wealth, fame, love, brutality, murder, self-sacrifice. But don’t ask them to achieve self-respect. They will hate your soul. Well, they know best. They must have their reasons. They won’t say, of course, that they hate you. They will say that you hate them. It’s near enough, I suppose. They know the emotion involved. Such are men as they are. So what is the use of being a martyr to the impossible? What is the use of building for a world that does not exist?”

“Your Honor, I don’t see what possible bearing this can have on...”

“I am proving your case for you. I am proving why you must go with Ellsworth Toohey as you will anyway. The Stoddard Temple must be destroyed. Not to save men from it, but to save it from men. What’s the difference, however? Mr. Stoddard wins. I am in full agreement with everything that’s being done here, except for one point. I didn’t think we should be allowed to get away with that point. Let us destroy, but don’t let us pretend that we are committing an act of virtue. Let us say that we are moles and we object to mountain peaks. Or, perhaps, that we are lemmings, the animals who cannot help swimming out to self-destruction. I realize fully that at this moment I am as futile as Howard Roark. This is my Stoddard Temple—my first and my last.” She inclined her head to the judge. “That is all, Your Honor.”

“Your witness,” the attorney snapped to Roark.

“No questions,” said Roark.

Dominique left the stand.

The attorney bowed to the bench and said: “The plaintiff rests.”

The judge turned to Roark and made a vague gesture, inviting him to proceed.

Roark got up and walked to the bench, the brown envelope in hand. He took out of the envelope ten photographs of the Stoddard Temple and laid them on the judge’s desk. He said:

“The defense rests.”

PART TWO

Ethics

EDITOR’S NOTE: AR’s purpose in her novels was the projection of an ideal man. “The portrayal of a moral ideal,” she wrote, is “my ultimate literary goal [...] to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in [the] novel are only the means” (“The Goal of My Writing,” Romantic Manifesto, 1975, p. 162).

To create a hero such as Howard Roark, she had to identify in detail her view of moral perfection. “Since my purpose,” she said, “is the presentation of an ideal man [...] I had to define and present a rational code of ethics” (Introduction to The Fountainhead, 50th anniversary edition, 1993, p. vii).

In this section devoted to ethics, we begin with Roark’s speech at the climax of The Fountainhead. Roark had agreed to design Cortlandt, a government housing project, on definite terms—but a breach of contract by the government left him without legal recourse. His response was to dynamite the building while it was still under construction. Roark’s courtroom speech, a moral defense of his actions, is an early statement of AR’s ethics.

1. Selfishness

From Roark’s Speech

“THOUSANDS OF years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. He was considered an evildoer who had dealt with a demon mankind dreaded. But thereafter men had fire to keep them warm, to cook their food, to light their caves. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had lifted darkness off the earth. Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he had taught his brothers to build. He was considered a transgressor who ventured into forbidden territory. But thereafter, men could travel past any horizon. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had opened the roads of the world.

“That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning. Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures—because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer—because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that that one paid for his courage.

“Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received—hatred. The great creators—the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors—stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.

“No creator was prompted by a desire to serve his brothers, for his brothers rejected the gift he offered and that gift destroyed the slothful routine of their lives. His truth was his only motive. His own truth, and his own work to achieve it in his own way. A symphony, a book, an engine, a philosophy, an airplane or a building—that was his goal and his life. Not those who heard, read, operated, believed, flew or inhabited the thing he had created. The creation, not its users. The creation, not the benefits others derived from it. The creation which gave form to his truth. He held his truth above all things and against all men.

“His vision, his strength, his courage came from his own spirit. A man’s spirit, however, is his self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego.

“The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power—that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover. The creator served nothing and no one. He had lived for himself.

“And only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement.

“Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons—a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.

“But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred.

“We inherit the products of the thought of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make a cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane. But all through the process what we receive from others is only the end product of their thinking. The moving force is the creative faculty which takes this product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator. Men learn from one another. But all learning is only the exchange of material. No man can give another the capacity to think. Yet that capacity is our only means of survival.

“Nothing is given to man on earth. Everything he needs has to be produced. And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways—by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows. The creator faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary.

“The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.

“The creator lives for his work. He needs no other men. His primary goal is within himself. The parasite lives second-hand. He needs others. Others become his prime motive.

“The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary.

“The basic need of the second-hander is to secure his ties with men in order to be fed. He places relations first. He declares that man exists in order to serve others. He preaches altruism.

“Altruism is the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self.

“No man can live for another. He cannot share his spirit just as he cannot share his body. But the second-hander has used altruism as a weapon of exploitation and reversed the base of mankind’s moral principles. Men have been taught every precept that destroys the creator. Men have been taught dependence as a virtue.

“The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption. It is impossible in concept. The nearest approach to it in reality—the man who lives to serve others—is the slave. If physical slavery is repulsive, how much more repulsive is the concept of servility of the spirit? The conquered slave has a vestige of honor. He has the merit of having resisted and of considering his condition evil. But the man who enslaves himself voluntarily in the name of love is the basest of creatures. He degrades the dignity of man and he degrades the conception of love. But this is the essence of altruism.

“Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. Creation comes before distribution—or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement.

“Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the suffering of others. But suffering is a disease. Should one come upon it, one tries to give relief and assistance. To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then man must wish to see others suffer—in order that he may be virtuous. Such is the nature of altruism. The creator is not concerned with disease, but with life. Yet the work of the creators has eliminated one form of disease after another, in man’s body and spirit, and brought more relief from suffering than any altruist could ever conceive.

“Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.

“Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egotist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge, or act. These are functions of the self.

“Here the basic reversal is most deadly. The issue has been perverted and man has been left no alternative—and no freedom. As poles of good and evil, he was offered two conceptions: egotism and altruism. Egotism was held to mean the sacrifice of others to self. Altruism—the sacrifice of self to others. This tied man irrevocably to other men and left him nothing but a choice of pain: his own pain borne for the sake of others or pain inflicted upon others for the sake of self. When it was added that man must find joy in self-immolation, the trap was closed. Man was forced to accept masochism as his ideal—under the threat that sadism was his only alternative. This was the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on mankind.

“This was the device by which dependence and suffering were perpetuated as fundamentals of life.

“The choice is not self-sacrifice or domination. The choice is independence or dependence. The code of the creator or the code of the second-hander. This is the basic issue. It rests upon the alternative of life or death. The code of the creator is built on the needs of the reasoning mind which allows man to survive. The code of the second-hander is built on the needs of a mind incapable of survival. All that which proceeds from man’s independent ego is good. All that which proceeds from man’s dependence upon men is evil.

“The egotist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He does not exist for any other man—and he asks no other man to exist for him. This is the only form of brotherhood and mutual respect possible between men.

“Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man’s independence, initiative and personal love for his work determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn’t done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.

“In all proper relationships there is no sacrifice of anyone to anyone. An architect needs clients, but he does not subordinate his work to their wishes. They need him, but they do not order a house just to give him a commission. Men exchange their work by free, mutual consent to mutual advantage when their personal interests agree and they both desire the exchange. If they do not desire it, they are not forced to deal with each other. They seek further. This is the only possible form of relationship between equals. Anything else is a relation of slave to master, or victim to executioner.

“No work is ever done collectively, by a majority decision. Every creative job is achieved under the guidance of a single individual thought. An architect requires a great many men to erect his building. But he does not ask them to vote on his design. They work together by free agreement and each is free in his proper function. An architect uses steel, glass, concrete, produced by others. But the materials remain just so much steel, glass and concrete until he touches them. What he does with them is his individual product and his individual property. This is the only pattern for proper co-operation among men.

“The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man’s first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men. This includes the whole sphere of his creative faculty, his thinking, his work. But it does not include the sphere of the gangster, the altruist and the dictator.

“A man thinks and works alone. A man cannot rob, exploit or rule—alone. Robbery, exploitation and ruling presuppose victims. They imply dependence. They are the province of the second-hander.

“Rulers of men are not egotists. They create nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of others. Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving. They are as dependent as the beggar, the social worker and the bandit. The form of dependence does not matter.

“But men were taught to regard second-handers—tyrants, emperors, dictators—as exponents of egotism. By this fraud they were made to destroy the ego, themselves and others. The purpose of the fraud was to destroy the creators. Or to harness them. Which is a synonym.

“From the beginning of history, the two antagonists have stood face to face: the creator and the second-hander. When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander responded. He invented altruism.

“The creator—denied, opposed, persecuted, exploited—went on, moved forward and carried all humanity along on his energy. The second-hander contributed nothing to the process except the impediments. The contest has another name: the individual against the collective.

“The ‘common good’ of a collective—a race, a class, a state—was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism? Does the fault lie in men’s hypocrisy or in the nature of the principle? The most dreadful butchers were the most sincere. They believed in the perfect society reached through the guillotine and the firing squad. Nobody questioned their right to murder since they were murdering for an altruistic purpose. It was accepted that man must be sacrificed for other men. Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with declarations of love for mankind and ends with a sea of blood. It goes on and will go on so long as men believe that an action is good if it is unselfish. That permits the altruist to act and forces his victims to bear it. The leaders of collectivist movements ask nothing for themselves. But observe the results.

“The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is—Hands off!

“Now observe the results of a society built on the principle of individualism. This, our country. The noblest country in the history of men. The country of greatest achievement, greatest prosperity, greatest freedom. This country was not based on selfless service, sacrifice, renunciation or any precept of altruism. It was based on a man’s right to the pursuit of happiness. His own happiness. Not anyone else’s. A private, personal, selfish motive. Look at the results. Look into your own conscience.

“It is an ancient conflict. Men have come close to the truth, but it was destroyed each time and one civilization fell after another. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

“Now, in our age, collectivism, the rule of the second-hander and second-rater, the ancient monster, has broken loose and is running amuck. It has brought men to a level of intellectual indecency never equaled on earth. It has reached a scale of horror without precedent. It has poisoned every mind. It has swallowed most of Europe. It is engulfing our country.

“I am an architect. I know what is to come by the principle on which it is built. We are approaching a world in which I cannot permit myself to live.

“Now you know why I dynamited Cortlandt.

“I designed Cortlandt. I gave it to you. I destroyed it.

“I destroyed it because I did not choose to let it exist. It was a double monster. In form and in implication. I had to blast both. The form was mutilated by two second-handers who assumed the right to improve upon that which they had not made and could not equal. They were permitted to do it by the general implication that the altruistic purpose of the building superseded all rights and that I had no claim to stand against it.

“I agreed to design Cortlandt for the purpose of seeing it erected as I designed it and for no other reason. That was the price I set for my work. I was not paid.

“I do not blame Peter Keating. He was helpless. He had a contract with his employers. It was ignored. He had a promise that the structure he offered would be built as designed. The promise was broken. The love of a man for the integrity of his work and his right to preserve it are now considered a vague intangible and an unessential. You have heard the prosecutor say that. Why was the building disfigured? For no reason. Such acts never have any reason, unless it’s the vanity of some second-handers who feel they have a right to anyone’s property, spiritual or material. Who permitted them to do it? No particular man among the dozens in authority. No one cared to permit it or to stop it. No one was responsible. No one can be held to account. Such is the nature of all collective action.

“I did not receive the payment I asked. But the owners of Cortlandt got what they needed from me. They wanted a scheme devised to build a structure as cheaply as possible. They found no one else who could do it to their satisfaction. I could and did. They took the benefit of my work and made me contribute it as a gift. But I am not an altruist. I do not contribute gifts of this nature.

“It is said that I have destroyed the home of the destitute. It is forgotten that but for me the destitute could not have had this particular home. Those who were concerned with the poor had to come to me, who have never been concerned, in order to help the poor. It is believed that the poverty of the future tenants gave them a right to my work. That their need constituted a claim on my life. That it was my duty to contribute anything demanded of me. This is the second-hander’s credo now swallowing the world.

“I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.

“I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.

“It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.

“I wished to come here and say that the integrity of a man’s creative work is of greater importance than any charitable endeavor. Those of you who do not understand this are the men who’re destroying the world.

“I wished to come here and state my terms. I do not care to exist on any others.

“I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society. To my country, I wish to give the ten years which I will spend in jail if my country exists no longer. I will spend them in memory and in gratitude for what my country has been. It will be my act of loyalty, my refusal to live or work in what has taken its place.

“My act of loyalty to every creator who ever lived and was made to suffer by the force responsible for the Cortlandt I dynamited. To every tortured hour of loneliness, denial, frustration, abuse he was made to spend—and to the battles he won. To every creator whose name is known—and to every creator who lived, struggled and perished unrecognized before he could achieve. To every creator who was destroyed in body or in spirit. To Henry Cameron. To Steven Mallory. To a man who doesn’t want to be named, but who is sitting in this courtroom and knows that I am speaking of him.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This excerpt from The Virtue of Selfishness explains why AR called her ethics “selfishness.”

Why “Selfishness”?

THE TITLE of this book may evoke the kind of question that I hear once in a while: “Why do you use the word ‘selfishness’ to denote virtuous qualities of character, when that word antagonizes so many people to whom it does not mean the things you mean?”

To those who ask it, my answer is: “For the reason that makes you afraid of it.”

But there are others, who would not ask that question, sensing the moral cowardice it implies, yet who are unable to formulate my actual reason or to identify the profound moral issue involved. It is to them that I will give a more explicit answer.

It is not a mere semantic issue nor a matter of arbitrary choice. The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual “package-deal,” which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.

Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests.

This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.

The ethics of altruism has created the image of the brute, as its answer, in order to make men accept two inhuman tenets: (a) that any concern with one’s own interests is evil, regardless of what these interests might be, and (b) that the brute’s activities are in fact to one’s own interest (which altruism enjoins man to renounce for the sake of his neighbors).

For a view of the nature of altruism, its consequences and the enormity of the moral corruption it perpetrates, I shall refer you to Atlas Shrugged—or to any of today’s newspaper headlines. What concerns us here is altruism’s default in the field of ethical theory.

There are two moral questions which altruism lumps together into one “package-deal”: ( I ) What are values? (2) Who should be the beneficiary of values? Altruism substitutes the second for the first; it evades the task of defining a code of moral values, thus leaving man, in fact, without moral guidance.

Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one’s own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value—and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.

Hence the appalling immorality, the chronic injustice, the grotesque double standards, the insoluble conflicts and contradictions that have characterized human relationships and human societies throughout history, under all the variants of the altruist ethics.

Observe the indecency of what passes for moral judgments today. An industrialist who produces a fortune, and a gangster who robs a bank are regarded as equally immoral, since they both sought wealth for their own “selfish” benefit. A young man who gives up his career in order to support his parents and never rises beyond the rank of grocery clerk is regarded as morally superior to the young man who endures an excruciating struggle and achieves his personal ambition. A dictator is regarded as moral, since the unspeakable atrocities he committed were intended to benefit “the people,” not himself.

Observe what this beneficiary-criterion of morality does to a man’s life. The first thing he learns is that morality is his enemy; he has nothing to gain from it, he can only lose; self-inflicted loss, self-inflicted pain and the gray, debilitating pall of an incomprehensible duty is all that he can expect. He may hope that others might occasionally sacrifice themselves for his benefit, as he grudgingly sacrifices himself for theirs, but he knows that the relationship will bring mutual resentment, not pleasure—and that, morally, their pursuit of values will be like an exchange of unwanted, unchosen Christmas presents, which neither is morally permitted to buy for himself. Apart from such times as he manages to perform some act of self-sacrifice, he possesses no moral significance: morality takes no cognizance of him and has nothing to say to him for guidance in the crucial issues of his life; it is only his own personal, private, “selfish” life and, as such, it is regarded either as evil or, at best, amoral.

Since nature does not provide man with an automatic form of survival, since he has to support his life by his own effort, the doctrine that concern with one’s own interests is evil means that man’s desire to live is evil—that man’s life, as such, is evil. No doctrine could be more evil than that.

Yet that is the meaning of altruism, implicit in such examples as the equation of an industrialist with a robber. There is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery. The evil of a robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interests, but in what he regards as to his own interest; not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value; not in the fact that he wants to live, but in the fact that he wants to live on a subhuman level (see “The Objectivist Ethics”).

If it is true that what I mean by “selfishness” is not what is meant conventionally, then this is one of the worst indictments of altruism: it means that altruism permits no concept of a self-respecting, self-supporting man—a man who supports his life by his own effort and neither sacrifices himself nor others. It means that altruism permits no view of men except as sacrificial animals and profiteers-on-sacrifice, as victims and parasites—that it permits no concept of a benevolent co-existence among men—that it permits no concept of justice.

If you wonder about the reasons behind the ugly mixture of cynicism and guilt in which most men spend their lives, these are the reasons: cynicism, because they neither practice nor accept the altruist morality—guilt, because they dare not reject it.

To rebel against so devastating an evil, one has to rebel against its basic premise. To redeem both man and morality, it is the concept of “selfishness” that one has to redeem.

The first step is to assert man’s right to a moral existence—that is: to recognize his need of a moral code to guide the course and the fulfillment of his own life.

For a brief outline of the nature and the validation of a rational morality, see my lecture on “The Objectivist Ethics” which follows. The reasons why man needs a moral code will tell you that the purpose of morality is to define man’s proper values and interests, that concern with his own interests is the essence of a moral existence, and that man must be the beneficiary of his own moral actions.

Since all values have to be gained and/or kept by men’s actions, any breach between actor and beneficiary necessitates an injustice: the sacrifice of some men to others, of the actors to the nonactors, of the moral to the immoral. Nothing could ever justify such a breach, and no one ever has.

The choice of the beneficiary of moral values is merely a preliminary or introductory issue in the field of morality. It is not a substitute for morality nor a criterion of moral value, as altruism has made it. Neither is it a moral primary: it has to be derived from and validated by the fundamental premises of a moral system.

The Objectivist ethics holds that the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action and that man must act for his own rational self-interest. But his right to do so is derived from his nature as man and from the function of moral values in human life—and, therefore, is applicable only in the context of a rational, objectively demonstrated and validated code of moral principles which define and determine his actual self-interest. It is not a license “to do as he pleases” and it is not applicable to the altruists’ image of a “selfish” brute nor to any man motivated by irrational emotions, feelings, urges, wishes or whims.

This is said as a warning against the kind of “Nietzschean egoists” who, in fact, are a product of the altruist morality and represent the other side of the altruist coin: the men who believe that any action, regardless of its nature, is good if it is intended for one’s own benefit. Just as the satisfaction of the irrational desires of others is not a criterion of moral value, neither is the satisfaction of one’s own irrational desires. Morality is not a contest of whims.

A similar type of error is committed by the man who declares that since man must be guided by his own independent judgment, any action he chooses to take is moral if he chooses it. One’s own independent judgment is the means by which one must choose one’s actions, but it is not a moral criterion nor a moral validation: only reference to a demonstrable principle can validate one’s choices.

Just as man cannot survive by any random means, but must discover and practice the principles which his survival requires, so man’s self-interest cannot be determined by blind desires or random whims, but must be discovered and achieved by the guidance of rational principles. This is why the Objectivist ethics is a morality of rational self-interest—or of rational selfishness.

Since selfishness is “concern with one’s own interests,” the Objectivist ethics uses that concept in its exact and purest sense. It is not a concept that one can surrender to man’s enemies, nor to the unthinking misconceptions, distortions, prejudices and fears of the ignorant and the irrational. The attack on “selfishness” is an attack on man’s self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other....

EDITOR’S NOTE: These selections from “The Objectivist Ethics,” a talk given at the University of Wisconsin in 1961, discuss the fundamental issue of ethics: why man needs values at all—and, therefore, how ethics is grounded in the facts of reality.

The Objectivist Ethics

SINCE I am to speak on the Objectivist Ethics, I shall begin by quoting its best representative—John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged:

“Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code.... You went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good?—by what standard?

“You wanted to know John Galt’s identity. I am the man who has asked that question.

“Yes, this is an age of moral crisis.... Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality ... but to discover it.”

What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code.

The first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics, is: Why does man need a code of values?

Let me stress this. The first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question is: Does man need values at all—and why?

Is the concept of value, of “good or evil” an arbitrary human invention, unrelated to, underived from and unsupported by any facts of reality—or is it based on a metaphysical fact, on an unalterable condition of man’s existence? (I use the word “metaphysical” to mean: that which pertains to reality, to the nature of things, to existence.) Does an arbitrary human convention, a mere custom, decree that man must guide his actions by a set of principles—or is there a fact of reality that demands it? Is ethics the province of whims: of personal emotions, social edicts and mystic revelations—or is it the province of reason? Is ethics a subjective luxury—or an objective necessity?

In the sorry record of the history of mankind’s ethics—with a few rare, and unsuccessful, exceptions—moralists have regarded ethics as the province of whims, that is: of the irrational. Some of them did so explicitly, by intention—others implicitly, by default. A “whim” is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.

No philosopher has given a rational, objectively demonstrable, scientific answer to the question of why man needs a code of values. So long as that question remained unanswered, no rational, scientific, objective code of ethics could be discovered or defined. The greatest of all philosophers, Aristotle, did not regard ethics as an exact science; he based his ethical system on observations of what the noble and wise men of his time chose to do, leaving unanswered the questions of: why they chose to do it and why he evaluated them as noble and wise.

Most philosophers took the existence of ethics for granted, as the given, as a historical fact, and were not concerned with discovering its metaphysical cause or objective validation. Many of them attempted to break the traditional monopoly of mysticism in the field of ethics and, allegedly, to define a rational, scientific, nonreligious morality. But their attempts consisted of trying to justify them on social grounds, merely substituting society for God.

The avowed mystics held the arbitrary, unaccountable “will of God” as the standard of the good and as the validation of their ethics. The neomystics replaced it with “the good of society,” thus collapsing into the circularity of a definition such as “the standard of the good is that which is good for society.” This meant, in logic—and, today, in worldwide practice—that “society” stands above any principles of ethics, since it is the source, standard and criterion of ethics, since “the good” is whatever it wills, whatever it happens to assert as its own welfare and pleasure. This meant that “society” may do anything it pleases, since “the good” is whatever it chooses to do because it chooses to do it. And—since there is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men—this meant that some men (the majority or any gang that claims to be its spokesman) are ethically entitled to pursue any whims (or any atrocities) they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in the service of that gang’s desires.

This could hardly be called rational, yet most philosophers have now decided to declare that reason has failed, that ethics is outside the power of reason, that no rational ethics can ever be defined, and that in the field of ethics—in the choice of his values, of his actions, of his pursuits, of his life’s goats—man must be guided by something other than reason. By what? Faith—instinct—intuition—revelation—feeling—taste—urge—wish—whim. Today, as in the past, most philosophers agree that the ultimate standard of ethics is whim (they call it “arbitrary postulate” or “subjective choice” or “emotional commitment”) —and the battle is only over the question of whose whim: one’s own or society’s or the dictator’s or God’s. Whatever else they may disagree about, today’s moralists agree that ethics is a subjective issue and that the three things barred from its field are: reason—mind—reality.

If you wonder why the world is now collapsing to a lower and ever lower rung of hell, this is the reason.

If you want to save civilization, it is this premise of modern ethics—and of all ethical history—that you must challenge.

To challenge the basic premise of any discipline, one must begin at the beginning. In ethics, one must begin by asking: What are values? Why does man need them?

“Value” is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept “value” is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.

I quote from Galt’s speech: “There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.”

To make this point fully clear, try to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed. Such an entity would not be able to have any values; it would have nothing to gain or to lose; it could not regard anything as for or against it, as serving or threatening its welfare, as fulfilling or frustrating its interests. It could have no interests and no goals.

Only a living entity can have goals or can originate them. And it is only a living organism that has the capacity for self-generated, goal-directed action. On the physical level, the functions of all living organisms, from the simplest to the most complex—from the nutritive function in the single cell of an amoeba to the blood circulation in the body of a man—are actions generated by the organism itself and directed to a single goal: the maintenance of the organism’s life.¹

An organism’s life depends on two factors: the material or fuel which it needs from the outside, from its physical background, and the action of its own body, the action of using that fuel properly. What standard determines what is proper in this context? The standard is the organism’s life, or: that which is required for the organism’s survival.

No choice is open to an organism in this issue: that which is required for its survival is determined by its nature, by the kind of entity it is. Many variations, many forms of adaptation to its background are possible to an organism, including the possibility of existing for a while in a crippled, disabled or diseased condition, but the fundamental alternative of its existence remains the same: if an organism fails in the basic functions required by its nature—if an amoeba’s protoplasm stops assimilating food, or if a man’s heart stops beating—the organism dies. In a fundamental sense, stillness is the antithesis of life. Life can be kept in existence only by a constant process of self-sustaining action. The goal of that action, the ultimate value which, to be kept, must be gained through its every moment, is the organism’s life.

An ultimate value is that final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means—and it sets the standard by which all lesser goals are evaluated. An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.

Without an ultimate goal or end, there can be no lesser goals or means: a series of means going off into an infinite progression toward a nonexistent end is a metaphysical and epistemological impossibility. It is only an ultimate goal, an end in itself, that makes the existence of values possible. Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action. Epistemologically, the concept of “value” is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of “life.” To speak of “value” as apart from “life” is worse than a contradiction in terms. “It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible.”

In answer to those philosophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between “is” and “ought.” [...]

Man has no automatic code of survival. He has no automatic course of action, no automatic set of values. His senses do not tell him automatically what is good for him or evil, what will benefit his life or endanger it, what goals he should pursue and what means will achieve them, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. His own consciousness has to discover the answers to all these questions—but his consciousness will not function automatically. Man, the highest living species on this earth—the being whose consciousness has a limitless capacity for gaining knowledge—man is the only living entity born without any guarantee of remaining conscious at all. Man’s particular distinction from all other living species is the fact that his consciousness is volitional.

Just as the automatic values directing the functions of a plant’s body are sufficient for its survival, but are not sufficient for an animal’s —so the automatic values provided by the sensory-perceptual mechanism of its consciousness are sufficient to guide an animal, but are not sufficient for man. Man’s actions and survival require the guidance of conceptual values derived from conceptual knowledge. But conceptual knowledge cannot be acquired automatically.

A “concept” is a mental integration of two or more perceptual concretes, which are isolated by a process of abstraction and united by means of a specific definition. Every word of man’s language, with the exception of proper names, denotes a concept, an abstraction that stands for an unlimited number of concretes of a specific kind. It is by organizing his perceptual material into concepts, and his concepts into wider and still wider concepts that man is able to grasp and retain, to identify and integrate an unlimited amount of knowledge, a knowledge extending beyond the immediate perceptions of any given, immediate moment. Man’s sense organs function automatically; man’s brain integrates his sense data into percepts automatically; but the process of integrating percepts into concepts—the process of abstraction and of concept-formation-is not automatic.

The process of concept-formation does not consist merely of grasping a few simple abstractions, such as “chair,” “table,” “hot,” “cold,” and of learning to speak. It consists of a method of using one’s consciousness, best designated by the term “conceptualizing.” It is not a passive state of registering random impressions. It is an actively sustained process of identifying one’s impressions in conceptual terms, of integrating every event and every observation into a conceptual context, of grasping relationships, differences, similarities in one’s perceptual material and of abstracting them into new concepts, of drawing inferences, of making deductions, of reaching conclusions, of asking new questions and discovering new answers and expanding one’s knowledge into an ever-growing sum. The faculty that directs this process, the faculty that works by means of concepts, is: reason. The process is thinking.

Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. It is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one’s consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality—or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make.

When man unfocuses his mind, he may be said to be conscious in a subhuman sense of the word, since he experiences sensations and perceptions. But in the sense of the word applicable to man—in the sense of a consciousness which is aware of reality and able to deal with it, a consciousness able to direct the actions and provide for the survival of a human being—an unfocused mind is not conscious.

Psychologically, the choice “to think or not” is the choice “to focus or not.” Existentially, the choice “to focus or not” is the choice “to be conscious or not.” Metaphysically, the choice “to be conscious or not” is the choice of life or death.

Consciousness—for those living organisms which possess it—is the basic means of survival. For man, the basic means of survival is reason. Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts. A sensation of hunger will tell him that he needs food (if he has learned to identify it as “hunger”), but it will not tell him how to obtain his food and it will not tell him what food is good for him or poisonous. He cannot provide for his simplest physical needs without a process of thought. He needs a process of thought to discover how to plant and grow his food or how to make weapons for hunting. His percepts might lead him to a cave, if one is available—but to build the simplest shelter, he needs a process of thought. No percepts and no “instincts” will tell him how to light a fire, how to weave cloth, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to make an airplane, how to perform an appendectomy, how to produce an electric light bulb or an electronic tube or a cyclotron or a box of matches. Yet his life depends on such knowledge—and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it.

But man’s responsibility goes still further: a process of thought is not automatic nor “instinctive” nor involuntary—nor infalliable. Man has to initiate it, to sustain it and to bear responsibility for its results. He has to discover how to tell what is true or false and how to correct his own errors; he has to discover how to validate his concepts, his conclusions, his knowledge; he has to discover the rules of thought, the laws of logic, to direct his thinking. Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of the efficacy of his mental effort.

Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced by him—by his own choice, by his own effort, by his own mind.

A being who does not know automatically what is true or false, cannot know automatically what is right or wrong, what is good for him or evil. Yet he needs that knowledge in order to live. He is not exempt from the laws of reality, he is a specific organism of a specific nature that requires specific actions to sustain his life. He cannot achieve his survival by arbitrary means nor by random motions nor by blind urges nor by chance nor by whim. That which his survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every “is” implies an “ought.” Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

What, then, are the right goals for man to pursue? What are the values his survival requires? That is the question to be answered by the science of ethics. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why man needs a code of ethics.

Now you can assess the meaning of the doctrines which tell you that ethics is the province of the irrational, that reason cannot guide man’s life, that his goals and values should be chosen by vote or by whim—that ethics has nothing to do with reality, with existence, with one’s practical actions and concerns—or that the goal of ethics is beyond the grave, that the dead need ethics, not the living.

Ethics is not a mystic fantasy—nor a social convention—nor a dispensable, subjective luxury, to be switched or discarded in any emergency. Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man’s survival—not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life.

I quote from Galt’s speech: “Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice—and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a value—by choice; he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues—by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.”

The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics—the standard by which one judges what is good or evil—is man’s life, or: that which is required for man’s survival qua man.

Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.

Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are: thinking and productive work. [...]

[T]he Objectivist ethics is the morality of life—as against the three major schools of ethical theory, the mystic, the social, the subjective, which have brought the world to its present state and which represent the morality of death.

These three schools differ only in their method of approach, not in their content. In content, they are merely variants of altruism, the ethical theory which regards man as a sacrificial animal, which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value. The differences occur only over the question of who is to be sacrificed to whom. Altruism holds death as its ultimate goal and standard of value—and it is logical that renunciation, resignation, self-denial, and every other form of suffering, including self-destruction, are the virtues it advocates. And, logically, these are the only things that the practitioners of altruism have achieved and are achieving now.

Observe that these three schools of ethical theory are anti-life, not merely in content, but also in their method of approach.

The mystic theory of ethics is explicitly based on the premise that the standard of value of man’s ethics is set beyond the grave, by the laws or requirements of another, supernatural dimension, that ethics is impossible for man to practice, that it is unsuited for and opposed to man’s life on earth, and that man must take the blame for it and suffer through the whole of his earthly existence, to atone for the guilt of being unable to practice the impracticable. The Dark Ages and the Middle Ages are the existential monument to this theory of ethics.

The social theory of ethics substitutes “society” for God—and although it claims that its chief concern is life on earth, it is not the life of man, not the life of an individual, but the life of a disembodied entity, the collective, which, in relation to every individual, consists of everybody except himself. As far as the individual is concerned, his ethical duty is to be the selfless, voiceless, rightless slave of any need, claim or demand asserted by others. The motto “dog eat dog”—which is not applicable to capitalism nor to dogs—is applicable to the social theory of ethics. The existential monuments to this theory are Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

The subjectivist theory of ethics is, strictly speaking, not a theory, but a negation of ethics. And more: it is a negation of reality, a negation not merely of man’s existence, but of all existence. Only the concept of a fluid, plastic, indeterminate, Heraclitean universe could permit anyone to think or to preach that man needs no objective principles of action—that reality gives him a blank check on values—that anything he cares to pick as the good or the evil, will do—that a man’s whim is a valid moral standard, and that the only question is how to get away with it. The existential monument to this theory is the present state of our culture.

It is not men’s immorality that is responsible for the collapse now threatening to destroy the civilized world, but the kind of moralities men have been asked to practice. The responsibility belongs to the philosophers of altruism. They have no cause to be shocked by the spectacle of their own success, and no right to damn human nature: men have obeyed them and have brought their moral ideals into full reality.

It is philosophy that sets men’s goals and determines their course; it is only philosophy that can save them now. Today, the world is facing a choice: if civilization is to survive, it is the altruist morality that men have to reject.

I will close with the words of John Galt, which I address, as he did, to all the moralists of altruism, past or present:

“You have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours.”

2. Anti-Altruism

This selection from Atlas Shrugged (published in 1957) is a more detailed discussion, by the novel’s hero, John Galt, of the meaning and consequences of altruism.

From Galt’s Speech

“WHOEVER IS now within reach of my voice, whoever is man the victim, not man the killer, I am speaking at the deathbed of your mind, at the brink of that darkness in which you’re drowning, and if there still remains within you the power to struggle to hold on to those fading sparks which had been yourself—use it now. The word that has destroyed you is ‘sacrifice.’ Use the last of your strength to understand its meaning. You’re still alive. You have a chance.

“ ‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. ‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. ‘Sacrifice’ is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.

“If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve a career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and gave it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor’s child and let your own die, it is.

“If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself—that is the virtue of sacrifice in full.

“If you renounce all personal desire and dedicate your life to those you love, you do not achieve full virtue: you still retain a value of your own, which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers, it is an act of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men you hate—that is the greatest of the virtues you can practice.

“A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values. If you wish to achieve full virtue, you must seek no gratitude in return for your sacrifice, no praise, no love, no admiration, no self-esteem, not even the pride of being virtuous; the faintest trace of any gain dilutes your virtue. If you pursue a course of action that does not taint your life by any joy, that brings you no value in matter, no value in spirit, no gain, no profit, no reward—if you achieve this state of total zero, you have achieved the ideal of moral perfection.

“You are told that moral perfection is impossible to man—and, by this standard, it is. You cannot achieve it so long as you live, but the value of your life and of your persons is gauged by how closely you succeed in approaching that ideal zero which is death.

“If you start, however, as a passionless blank, as a vegetable seeking to be eaten, with no values to reject and no wishes to renounce, you will not win the crown of sacrifice. It is not a sacrifice to renounce the unwanted. It is not a sacrifice to give your life for others, if death is your personal desire. To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you—you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body. It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture.

“Do not remind me that it pertains only to this life on earth. I am concerned with no other. Neither are you.

“If you wish to save the last of your dignity, do not call your best actions a ‘sacrifice’: that term brands you as immoral. If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty. If a man dies fighting for his own freedom, it is not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a slave; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of man who’s willing. If a man refuses to sell his convictions, it is not a sacrifice, unless he is the sort of man who has no convictions.

“Sacrifice could be proper only for those who have nothing to sacrifice—no values, no standards, no judgment—those whose desires are irrational whims, blindly conceived and lightly surrendered. For a man of moral stature, whose desires are born of rational values, sacrifice is the surrender of the right to the wrong, of the good to the evil.

“The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral—a morality that declares its own bankruptcy by confessing that it can’t impart to men any personal stake in virtues or value, and that their souls are sewers of depravity, which they must be taught to sacrifice. By his own confession, it is impotent to teach men to be good and can only subject them to constant punishment.

“Are you thinking, in some foggy stupor, that it’s only material values that your morality requires you to sacrifice? And what do you think are material values? Matter has no value except as a means for the satisfaction of human desires. Matter is only a tool of human values. To what service are you asked to give the material tools your virtue has produced? To the service of that which you regard as evil: to a principle you do not share, to a person you do not respect, to the achievement of a purpose opposed to your own—else your gift is not a sacrifice.

“Your morality tells you to renounce the material world and to divorce your values from matter. A man whose values are given no expression in material form, whose existence is unrelated to his ideals, whose actions contradict his convictions, is a cheap little hypocrite—yet that is the man who obeys your morality and divorces his values from matter. The man who loves one woman, but sleeps with another—the man who admires the talent of a worker, but hires another—the man who considers one cause to be just, but donates his money to the support of another—the man who holds high standards of craftsmanship, but devotes his effort to the production of trash—these are the men who have renounced matter, the men who believe that the values of their spirit cannot be brought into material reality.

“Do you say it is the spirit that such men have renounced? Yes, of course. You cannot have one without the other. You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness. Renounce your consciousness and you become a brute. Renounce your body and you become a fake. Renounce the material world and you surrender it to evil.

“And that is precisely the goal of your morality, the duty that your code demands of you. Give to that which you do not enjoy, serve that which you do not admire, submit to that which you consider evil—surrender the world to the values of others, deny, reject, renounce your self. Your self is your mind: renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow.

“It is your mind that they want you to surrender—all those who preach the creed of sacrifice, whatever their tags or their motives, whether they demand it for the sake of your soul or of your body, whether they promise you another life in heaven or a full stomach on this earth. Those who start by saying: ‘It is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of others’—end up by saying: ‘It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must sacrifice them to the convictions of others.’

“This much is true: the most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth. You are asked to sacrifice your intellectual integrity, your logic, your reason, your standard of truth—in favor of becoming a prostitute whose standard is the greatest good for the greatest number.

“If you search your code for guidance, for an answer to the question: ‘What is the good?’—the only answer you will find is ‘The good of others.’ The good is whatever others wish, whatever you feel they feel they wish, or whatever you feel they ought to feel. ‘The good of others’ is a magic formula that transforms anything into gold, a formula to be recited as a guarantee of moral glory and as a fumigator for any action, even the slaughter of a continent. Your standard of virtue is not an object, not an act, not a principle, but an intention. You need no proof, no reasons, no success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others—all you need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the ‘non-good for me.’

“Your code—which boasts that it upholds eternal, absolute, objective moral values and scorns the conditional, the relative and the subjective—your code hands out, as its version of the absolute, the following rule of moral conduct: If you wish it, it’s evil; if others wish it, it’s good; if the motive of your action is your welfare, don’t do it; if the motive is the welfare of others, then anything goes.

“As this double-jointed, double-standard morality splits you in half, so it splits mankind into two enemy camps: one is you, the other is all the rest of humanity. You are the only outcast who has no right to wish to live. You are the only servant, the rest are the masters, you are the only giver, the rest are the takers, you are the eternal debtor, the rest are the creditors never to be paid off. You must not question their right to your sacrifice, or the nature of their wishes and their needs: their right is conferred upon them by a negative, by the fact that they are ‘non-you.’

“For those of you who might ask questions, your code provides a consolation prize and booby-trap: it is for your own happiness, it says, that you must serve the happiness of others, the only way to achieve your jov is to give it up to others, the only way to achieve your prosperity is to surrender your wealth to others, the only way to protect your life is to protect all men except yourself—and if you find no joy in this procedure, it is your own fault and the proof of your evil; if you were good, you would find your happiness in providing a banquet for others, and your dignity in existing on such crumbs as they might care to toss you.

“You who have no standard of self-esteem, accept the guilt and dare not ask the questions. But you know the unadmitted answer, refusing to acknowledge what you see, what hidden premise moves your world. You know it, not in honest statement, but as a dark uneasiness within you, while you flounder between guilty cheating and grudgingly practicing a principle too vicious to name.

“I, who do not accept the unearned, neither in values nor in guilt, am here to ask the questions you evaded. Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your own? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? If the sensation of eating a cake is a value, why is it an immoral indulgence in your stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the stomach of others? Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it? Does virtue consist of serving vice? Is the moral purpose of those who are good, self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil?

“The answer you evade, the monstrous answer is: No, the takers are not evil, provided they did not earn the value you gave them. It is not immoral for them to accept it, provided they are unable to produce it, unable to deserve it, unable to give you any value in return. It is not immoral for them to enjoy it, provided they do not obtain it by right.

“Such is the secret core of your creed, the other half of your double standard: it is immoral to live by your own effort, but moral to live by the effort of others—it is immoral to consume your own product, but moral to consume the products of others—it is immoral to earn, but moral to mooch—it is the parasites who are the moral justification for the existence of the producers, but the existence of the parasites is an end in itself—it is evil to profit by achievement, but good to profit by sacrifice—it is evil to create your own happiness, but good to enjoy it at the price of the blood of others.

“Your code divides mankind into two castes and commands them to live by opposite rules: those who may desire anything and those who may desire nothing, the chosen and the damned, the riders and the carriers, the eaters and the eaten. What standard determines your caste? What passkey admits you to the moral elite? The passkey is lack of value.

“Whatever the value involved, it is your lack of it that gives you a claim upon those who don’t lack it. It is your need that gives you a claim to rewards. If you are able to satisfy your need, your ability annuls your right to satisfy it. But a need you are unable to satisfy gives you first right to the lives of mankind.

“If you succeed, any man who fails is your master; if you fail, any man who succeeds is your serf. Whether your failure is just or not whether your wishes are rational or not, whether your misfortune is undeserved or the result of your vices, it is misfortune that gives you a right to rewards. It is pain, regardless of its nature or cause, pain as a primary absolute, that gives you a mortgage on all of existence.

“If you heal your pain by your own effort, you receive no moral credit: your code regards it scornfully as an act of self-interest. Whatever value you seek to acquire, be it wealth or food or love or rights, if you acquire it by means of your virtue, your code does not regard it as a moral acquisition: you occasion no loss to anyone, it is a trade, not alms; a payment, not a sacrifice. The deserved belongs in the selfish, commercial realm of mutual profit; it is only the undeserved that calls for that moral transaction which consists of profit to one at the price of disaster to the other. To demand rewards for your virtue is selfish and immoral; it is your lack of virtue that transforms your demand into a moral right.

“A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness—nonexistence—as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defeat: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, .the flaw—the zero.

“Who provides the account to pay these claims? Those who are cursed for being non-zeros, each to the extent of his distance from that ideal. Since all values are the product of virtues, the degree of your virtue is used as the measure of your penalty; the degree of your faults is used as the measure of your gain. Your code declares that the rational man must sacrifice himself to the irrational, the independent man to parasites, the honest man to the dishonest, the man of justice to the unjust, the productive man to thieving loafers, the man of integrity to compromising knaves, the man of self-esteem to sniveling neurotics. Do you wonder at the meanness of soul in those you see around you? The man who achieves these virtues will not accept your moral code; the man who accepts your moral code will not achieve these virtues.

“Under a morality of sacrifice, the first value you sacrifice is morality ; the next is self-esteem. When need is the standard, every man is both victim and parasite. As a victim, he must labor to fill the needs of others, leaving himself in the position of a parasite whose needs must be filled by others. He cannot approach his fellow men except in one of two disgraceful roles: he is both a beggar and a sucker.

“You fear the man who has a dollar less than you, that dollar is rightfully his, he makes you feel like a moral defrauder. You hate the man who has a dollar more than you, that dollar is rightfully yours, he makes you feel that you are morally defrauded. The man below is a source of your guilt, the man above is a source of your frustrations. You do not know what to surrender or demand, when to give and when to grab, what pleasure in life is rightfully yours and what debt is still unpaid to others—you struggle to evade, as ‘theory,’ the knowledge that by the moral standard you’ve accepted you are guilty every moment of your life, there is no mouthful of food you swallow that is not needed by someone somewhere on earth—and you give up the problem in blind resentment, you conclude that moral perfection is not to be achieved or desired, that you will muddle through by snatching as snatch can and by avoiding the eyes of the young, of those who look at you as if self-esteem were possible and they expected you to have it. Guilt is all that you retain within your soul—and so does every other man, as he goes past, avoiding your eyes. Do you wonder why your morality has not achieved brotherhood on earth or the good will of man to man?

“The justification of sacrifice, that your morality propounds, is more corrupt than the corruption it purports to justify. The motive of your sacrifice, it tells you, should be love-the love you ought to feel for every man. A morality that professes the belief that the values of the spirit are more precious than matter, a morality that teaches you to scorn a whore who gives her body indiscriminately to all men—this same morality demands that you surrender your soul to promiscuous love for all comers.

“As there can be no causeless wealth, so there can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards. To love is to value. The man who tells you that it is possible to value without values, to love those whom you appraise as worthless, is the man who tells you that it is possible to grow rich by consuming without producing and that paper money is as valuable as gold.

“Observe that he does not expect you to feel a causeless fear. When his kind get into power, they are expert at contriving means of terror, at giving you ample cause to feel the fear by which they desire to rule you. But when it comes to love, the highest of emotions, you permit them to shriek at you accusingly that you are a moral delinquent if you’re incapable of feeling causeless love. When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.

“Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. Your morality demands that you divorce your love from values and hand it down to any vagrant, not as response to his worth, but as response to his need, not as reward, but as alms, not as a payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices. Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral judgment; that true love transcends, forgives and survives every manner of evil in its object, and the greater the love the greater the depravity it permits to the loved. To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, it tells you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love to those who don’t deserve it, and the less they deserve it, the more love you owe them—the more loathsome the object, the nobler your love—the more unfastidious your love, the greater the virtue—and if you can bring your soul to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection.

“Such is your morality of sacrifice and such are the twin ideals it offers: to refashion the life of your body in the image of a human stockyard, and the life of your spirit in the image of a dump.

“Such was your goal—and you’ve reached it. Why do you now moan complaints about man’s impotence and the futility of human aspirations? Because you were unable to prosper by seeking destruction? Because you were unable to find joy by worshipping pain? Because you were unable to live by holding death as your standard of value?

“The degree of your ability to live was the degree to which you broke your moral code, yet you believe that those who preach it are friends of humanity, you damn yourself and dare not question their motives or their goals. Take a look at them now, when you face your last choice—and if you choose to perish, do so with full knowledge of how cheaply so small an enemy has claimed your life....

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following essay was written in 1974 for The Ayn Rand Letter, a biweekly journal published between 1971 and 1976. The essay shows the connection between altruism and America’s moral decay, one symptom of which is the introduction of affirmative action” programs. The ”National Day of Humiliation“ was a 1973 Senate resolution, passed without opposition, calling for America to ”humble [itself] before almighty God.”

Moral Inflation

HERE ARE some of the things that men had to evade in order to think up a moral atrocity such as a “National Day of Humiliation.”

Self-abasement is the antithesis of morality. If a man has acted immorally, but regrets it and wants to atone for it, it is not self-abasement that prompts him, but some remnant of love for moral values—and it is not self-abasement that he expresses, but a longing to regain his self-esteem. Humility is not a recognition of one’s failings, but a rejection of morality. “I am no good” is a statement that may be uttered only in the past tense. To say: “I am no good” is to declare: “—and I never intend to be any better.”

One can feel nothing but mistrust, disgust and contempt for a man who spits in his own face. To drag others along into the same degradation and spit in the face of one’s own country, is as base an affront to morality as can be imagined. Yet this has been the policy of American intellectuals for many decades. That it is now adopted by a Senator and approved “with no debate or opposition” by the U.S. Senate, is a measure of the extent to which moral proclamations and moral principles are not taken seriously by today’s public leaders.

One may disapprove of one’s country’s policies, one may disagree with most or with all of its citizens, one may seek to change, reform or improve particular laws, conditions or trends; and if one finds an entire country so evil that it deserves damnation, one must leave it. But to stay here and to damn this country—this country!—on such phony, trashy allegations as “acquiescence [?] to corruption and waste [!!]” is to step out of any moral bounds.

What effect did the sponsors of that resolution expect it to have on the American people?

There still are people in this country who lost loved ones in World War I. There are more people who carry the unhealed wounds of World War II, of Korea, of Vietnam. There are the disabled, the crippled, the mangled of those wars’ battlefields. No one has ever told them why they had to fight nor what their sacrifices accomplished; it was certainly not “to make the world safe for democracy”—look at that world now. The American people have borne it all, trusting their leaders, hoping that someone knew the purpose of that ghastly devastation. The United States gained nothing from those wars, except the growing burden of paying reparations to the whole world—the kind of burden that used to be imposed on a defeated nation.

People have borne patiently the unending drain of their wealth, their effort, their standard of living—first, to help the unemployed of the New Deal era, then the war allies, then the former enemies, and now the unemployables of the entire globe. People have seen and read enough to know the subhuman squalor of human existence in other countries and the atrocities to which men submit. In their innocent, foolishly overgenerous benevolence, the American people have been willing to help, knowing that theirs is the greatest country on this ravaged earth, a blessed oasis in a desert of bloody savagery.

Then to hear a proclamation of their country’s self-abasement-in this day of raucously chauvinistic boasting, when every racist tribe in every backyard of the globe, from Albania to Uganda, is proclaiming the uniquely sanctified value of the non-achievements of its non-culture—to hear that they, the American people, have not done enough and that their reward is a “National Day of Humiliation,” is more than human beings should be asked to bear or understand. If, under a leadership of this kind, people are losing respect for morality and crumbling into cynicism, bitterness, helpless anger, or blind hatred—can one blame them?

Yet the altruist morality dictates such policies to the nation’s leaders. Even though altruism declares that “it is more blessed to give than to receive,” it does not work that way in practice. The givers are never blessed; the more they give, the more is demanded of them; complaints, reproaches and insults are the only response they get for practicing altruism’s virtues (or for their actual virtues). Altruism cannot permit a recognition of virtue; it cannot permit self-esteem or moral innocence. Guilt is altruism’s stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuation. If the giver is not kept under a torrent of degrading, demeaning accusations, he might take a look around and put an end to the self-sacrificing.

Altruists are concerned only with those who suffer—not with those who provide relief from suffering, not even enough to care whether they are able to survive. When no actual suffering can be found, the altruists are compelled to invent or manufacture it. Observe their admission that, compared to the rest of the world, people do not suffer from real poverty in this country—they suffer from relative poverty (i.e., from envy). Observe that with the inflation of altruism into a government policy—with public cash and legislative favors pouring upon the pressure groups of newly minted sufferers—the proper, basic functions of the government are crumbling, corroded by neglect and “lack of funds” (!). Yet these are the functions required for the survival of the givers, who carry all the rest on their shoulders and are the greatest victims of altruistic exploitation: the middle class.

These basic functions are: the police, the law courts, the military. (These represent the only moral justification for the existence of a government: the protection of individual rights, i.e., the protection of individual citizens from the initiators of physical force.) What is the state of these governmental functions today?

Observe the conditions of an average American’s existence. He has lost the most rudimentary form of protection: the safety of city streets. He is in danger on his way to work in the morning, and on his way home; he is in danger if he steps out of the house after dark; his family are in danger if they go shopping, visiting, or walking in a public park. They dare not ride the subway, yet they are threatened with the loss of their safest transportation: their car. Criminal attacks are a daily occurrence, any time, any place: purse-snatching, mugging, burglary, rape, murder. The police are helpless: they have been brought close to impotence by impossible rules, which protect the “rights” of the criminals. The policemen struggle on as best they can, but they admit bitterly that there is little they can do: they risk their lives to arrest a thug, but the courts set him free.

The average man cannot seek redress in court, whether in criminal or civil matters: he cannot afford it. The cost, the length of time required, and the unpredictable outcome of non-objective laws, have made him give up the hope of appealing to justice, whether he suffers from a neighbor’s petty chiseling or from some major violation of his rights. He has grown stoically—or cynically—indifferent: he knows (or senses) that the main violator is the government, that no muggers can deprive him of the sums which the government seizes at income-tax time.

The moral inflation leaves him unprotected against the financial inflation: he works harder and harder (often in the form of “moonlighting”), but his real income is shrinking, he is not rising in the world, he is not getting anywhere, he is running on a hopeless treadmill. Try to tell his wife—in the midst of her desperate struggle to provide the family with decent meals, which they can’t afford—that she must bear “humiliation” for the sin of “waste”!

Just as these people sense that today’s leadership does not regard them as worth protecting, so they sense that their country, too, is regarded as not worth defending. The military services have survived, so far—in the midst of an unrelenting campaign of attacks, vilifications, and demands that the defense budget be cut (even though welfare projects, not defense, consume the largest share of the national budget).

To add insult to the American people’s injury, The New York Times published an editorial (May 25, 1972), entitled “Retreat on Rights,” which said: “The Supreme Court decisions permitting criminal convictions by less than unanimous juries and narrowing witnesses’ immunity against self-incrimination are disquieting in their practical effects but, even more, as portents of things to come.

“In the United States and other free countries, the drift of history in this century has been toward strengthening the power of government and diminishing the liberties of the individual. One of the few countervailing pressures has been the libertarian tendency of the Supreme Court to construe the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment broadly in behalf of accused individuals, racial and religious minorities, the impoverished and ignorant, and political radicals and dissenters. The Court’s new majority bloc made up mostly of Nixon appointees may be bringing that tendency to an end.” After discussing the possible consequences of the Supreme Court decision—such as: “Prosecutors will find it easier to get convictions in cases which now end in hung juries”—the editorial urges the country to hope that the effects will not prove “destructive of individual rights.”

This means that we must fight the world’s drift toward statism by protecting the individual rights of criminals.

(Don’t remind me that an accused person is not necessarily a criminal and that he must be protected against unjust accusations. The rights of the accused are not a primary—they are a consequence derived from a man’s inalienable, individual rights. A consequence cannot survive the destruction of its cause. What good will it do you to be protected in the rare emergency of a false arrest, if you are treated as the rightless subject of an unlimited government in your daily life?)

A mawkish sentimentality toward criminals, coupled with a brutal cruelty toward innocent citizens, is not a new phenomenon. In my review of The Language of Dissent by Lowell B. Mason (The Objectivist Newsletter, August 1963), I wrote: “Mr. Mason makes a profoundly important observation: whenever a country’s criminal laws are more lenient than its civil laws, it means that the country is accepting the basic principle of statism and is moving toward a totalitarian state. (Such a trend means that crimes against individuals are regarded as negligible, while the collectivist concept of ‘Crimes against the State’ becomes paramount and supersedes all rights.) In Soviet Russia, he points out, criminals were treated ‘with tolerance and circumspection. On the other hand, those accused of violating the state’s political and economic commands were sentenced to death or exiled to Siberia without any semblance of trial as we know the word here in America.’ ”

Now observe the odd assortment of individuals whose rights and liberties are singled out by the Times editorial for special protection. “Racial and religious minorities,” as well as “political radicals and dissenters,” should find it offensive to be lumped with “the impoverished and ignorant” and the (probably) criminal. The obvious question is: What about the rights and liberties of the honest, the educated, the self-supporting, the majority? The answer is that the assortment is dictated by and represents a confession of altruism’s essence: it is only suffering, weakness, failure, default—real or imaginary, spiritual or material or numerical or moral—that entitle men to rights, liberties and public concern; happiness, strength, success, virtue do not.

In a cultural atmosphere of this sort, who can find any inspiration or desire to preserve his moral integrity? The signs of moral deterioration are all around us. But, to the great credit of this country, most people, so far, have not given up.

The ideologues of altruism have miscalculated in regard to this country. Materially, they have obtained more than they could hope to extort from any other, poorer nation. Spiritually, they have failed: they mistook generosity for guilt; the guilt-infection did not take hold. Men who live on an earned income are not likely to accept an unearned guilt.

Since the inflation of altruism has not breached the American people’s basic self-esteem, the altruists are now trying to revive the grotesque, anti-moral absurdity of original sin—i.e., of prenatal guilt—in a secular form. Having failed to induce personal guilt, they are struggling to induce racial guitt—by proclaiming that people must suffer and pay for the (alleged) sins of their fathers.

This prehistorical notion requires more than the destruction of morality. It requires the obliteration of all the concepts which centuries of growing civilization struggled to identify: reason, individualism, personal integrity (and person), volition, choice, responsibility, language, understanding, and human communication.

The inversion of all standards—the propagation of racism as antiracist, of injustice as just, of immorality as moral, and the reasoning behind it, which is worse than the offenses—is flagrantly evident in the policy of preferential treatment for minorities (i.e., racial quotas) in employment and education. (See my essay on “Racism” in The Virtue of Selfishness.) If there is a quicker way to destroy people than by preaching brotherly love while spreading blind, inter-racial hatred, you name it.

The most eloquent example of that policy is the DeFunis case.

In 1971, Marco DeFunis, Jr., a Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude graduate of the University of Washington in Seattle, was denied admission to the University’s Law School. The school accepted 275 out of 1600 applicants (for an eventual class of 150). They were chosen mainly on the basis of special tests which purported to give a student’s “Predicted First Year Average,” estimating his ability to succeed in law school—and, in part, on the basis of various other considerations. Four racial minority groups—Black, Chicano, American Indian, and Filipino—were singled out for preferential treatment; their applications were processed separately and differently from all the others. I quote from Justice Douglas’s opinion in a subsequent Supreme Court decision: “Thirty-seven minority applicants were admitted under this procedure. Of these, 36 had Predicted First Year Averages below DeFunis’ 76.23, and 30 had averages below 74.5, and thus would ordinarily have been summarily rejected by the Chairman.... What places this case in a special category is the fact that the school did not choose one set of criteria but two, and then determined which to apply to a given applicant on the basis of his race.”

DeFunis sued the University of Washington, claiming that he was a victim of “reverse discrimination,” that his constitutional rights had been violated and he had been denied the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.” The Washington trial court upheld his claim and ordered the school to admit him. The school complied, but appealed. The Washington Supreme Court reversed the decision. DeFunis took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, obtaining a stay which permitted him to attend the Law School until the final disposition of his case.

The case aroused intense public controversy. Various groups and organizations filed friend-of-the-court briefs, supporting DeFunis or opposing him—a greater number of briefs than in any other case in recent history. It was clear to both sides that a crucially important moral issue was at stake. The Court announced its decision on April 23, 1974. By that time, DeFunis was completing his last term at the Law School, and the school had agreed to let him graduate, regardless of the Court’s decision. This permitted the Supreme Court to avoid judgment on the issue.

It was the Court’s conservative majority that took advantage of a legal technicality and—in a brief, unsigned opinion—declared the case to be moot, since DeFunis’s rights were not affected any longer. The four liberal Justices dissented, objecting to the avoidance of the constitutional issues. Justice Douglas wrote a separate, dissenting opinion of an extremely confusing, inconclusive nature. The moral question was left unanswered.

What is of special significance to this country’s public morale and morality, is the kind of argumentation that this case brought forth in advance of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

The brief of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League, filed in support of DeFunis, states: “If the Constitution prohibits exclusion of blacks and other minorities on racial grounds, it cannot permit the exclusion of whites on racial grounds.... discrimination on the basis of race is illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, inherently wrong and destructive of democratic society.... A racial quota is a device for establishing a status, a caste, determining superiority or inferiority for a class measured by race without regard to individual merit.”

This, of course, is unanswerable. The advocates of racial quotas do not attempt to answer it; they ignore it, or worse: they declare that their goal is to end racial discrimination eventually by means of practicing it temporarily. (This is borrowed from the methodology of Marxism, which claims that we can bring the state to wither away eventually by means of establishing a totalitarian dictatorship temporarily. In neither case are we given any indication of how such a trick is to be accomplished.)

An article eloquently entitled “Discriminating to end discrimination” (The New York Times Magazine, April 14, 1974) presents a good cross section of arguments offered by both sides of the issue. “Advocates of affirmative action [i.e., of preferential treatment] like to compare the racial situation in America to two runners, one of whom has had his legs shackled for 200 years.... Removing the shackles doesn’t make the two instantly equal in ability to compete. The previously shackled runner has to be given some advantage in order to compete effectively until he gets his legs into condition.” (How? By shackling the fast runner, lowering the standards, and slowing down everyone’s running? No answer is given. But it must be mentioned that many intelligent blacks regard this type of argument as a racist insult, which it is.)

The article quotes a woman attorney for some anti-DeFunis groups, who said: “It is now well understood, however, that our society cannot be completely color-blind in the short term if we are to have a color-blind society in the long term.” She “argues that a racial classification can only be presumed unconstitutional if it disadvantages a group subject to a history of discrimination or held down by special disabilities. She contends that the 14th Amendment was meant to help powerless, oppressed minorities, and that the white majority needs no such help.” (This is altruism superseding and rewriting the Constitution: if you have no special disabilities, you have no rights and no protection of the laws.)

The University of Washington, according to the article, “concedes that some white students may be excluded from law school because of the affirmative-action program, but it maintains that its program is ‘necessary’ to achieve an ‘overriding purpose’—i.e., to increase the number of minority lawyers in the state and the nation.... And, the university notes, had it not been for the nation’s history of racial discrimination, white students would have had far more students to compete with than they do now.”

This type of argument, which modern intellectuals permit themselves to use with growing frequency, is a measure of their growing distance from reality: it consists in changing one factor of a complex situation and assuming that all the rest would remain unchanged. In fact, if racial discrimination hampered the intellectual development of black students, the absence of such discrimination would not have brought more competition to white students, but less: it would have created more universities to satisfy a greater demand (assuming a free economy) .

But if projected potentialities are to be equated with actuality, if “might have been” is to be the equivalent of “was,” then I submit the following argument: If my grandfather had come to this country and if he had gone into the oil business, he would have given stiff competition to Nelson A. Rockefeller’s grandfather and, therefore, Mr. Rockefeller would not be as rich as he is today and, therefore, I demand my constitutional right to half of Mr. Rockefeller’s money.

Absurd? Not by today’s standards. The grossness of such absurdity did not prevent the broadcast of an editorial which declared: “WCBS Radio endorses the argument of the University of Washington Law School—had it not been for the nation’s history of racial discrimination, white students would have far more students to compete with than they do today. Affirmative-action programs that give preference to qualified minorities over more qualified whites may seem unjust, but that injustice pales beside the monstrosities of two centuries of segregation.” (May 1, 1974.)

Dr. Alvin Lashinsky, Vice President of the Jewish Rights Council, who broadcast a reply to that editorial, sounded like a welcome voice of sanity: “We utterly condemn what appears to us to be a call by WCBS for retribution—to have children pay for acts their grandfathers committed, and for innocents of other minorities to also suffer only because their skin is white.... Excellence of our professions has always been achieved by high standards and the only way to give minorities self-respect is by improving the ability of the poorly qualified through remedial education beforehand, otherwise the finished product may be a poorly qualified physician or lawyer or a poorly skilled surgeon or even a semi-literate clerk or secretary. Does anyone, WCBS or the minorities, really want this?” (May 3, 1974.)

The answer is: Yes—as far as the ideologues of altruism are concerned—that is precisely what they want. They do not want to lift the poorly qualified, but to tear down the competent; they do not want to help the weak, but to destroy the strong. How many of them would admit such motives, even to themselves, I do not know. Observe that the WCBS editorial did not dare openly to demand the rejection of the qualified in favor of the unqualified; it fudged, it spoke of “qualified minorities” versus “more qualified whites,” making it a matter of degree—which does not make the injustice any the less vicious.

While the altruists proclaim that the financially or racially handicapped are their chief concern, none of them noticed the fact that DeFunis was doubly handicapped. The admission requirements at the University of Washington Law School (as at most universities) are highly arbitrary: apart from scholastic achievement, the committee considers such factors as “recommendations” from prominent persons or groups (i.e., pull) and a student’s “extra-curricular and community activities” (i.e., altruism). “Community activities” are a luxury which DeFunis could not have afforded: his “extra-curricular activity” consisted in working his way through college. And if the persecution suffered by a student’s ancestors is grounds for giving him special advantages, DeFunis belongs to the racial minority that suffered the longest, most horrendous record of persecution in history: he is Jewish. So much for the sincerity of the altruists’ motives.

Now consider the moral import of their arguments. Observe that the common denominator of their claims is the total absence of the concept of a person. An individual and a group are regarded as interchangeable—and it is instructive to observe the switching. A group can be “shackled for 200 years,” an individual cannot—but it is individuals who collect reparations, not the group as a whole. A group, the white majority, must pay for their ancestors’ racial discrimination, it is alleged—but it is white individuals who pay, by being denied job and education opportunities, not the group as a whole. It is, allegedly, an “overriding purpose” to increase the number of minority lawyers in the nation—but minority lawyers are individuals, and what is being “overriden”? The rights of other individuals, who are white.

The crass indifference of all such tribal profiteers to the reality of an individual human life, is their most vicious and shocking characteristic. An individual human life is a brief and fragile period of time. If the goal of “reverse discrimination” is a color-blind society in some indeterminate future, what good will it do to DeFunis (and to thousands like him), who is denied a professional education in the brief, irreplaceable years of his youth and finds his plans, his future, his life-course wrecked? Who has the right to do this to him? For the sake of what? For the alleged future benefit of society, i.e., of a large majority of people? But it is for the sake of a minority that he has been sacrificed.

There is no such thing as a collective guilt. A country may be held responsible for the actions of its government and it may be guilty of an evil (such as starting a war)—but then it is a public, not a private, matter and the entire country has to bear the burden of paying reparations for it. The notion of random individuals paying for the sins of an entire country, is an unspeakable modern atrocity.

This country has no guilt to atone for in regard to its black citizens. Certainly, slavery was an enormous evil. But a country that fought a civil war to abolish slavery, has atoned for it on such a scale that to talk about racial quotas in addition, is grotesque. However, it is not for injustices committed by the government that the modern racists are demanding reparations, but for racial prejudice—i.e., for the personal views of private citizens. How can an individual be held responsible for the views of others, whom he has no power to control, who may be his intellectual enemies, whose views may be the opposite of his own? What can make him responsible for them? The answer we hear is: The fact that his skin is of the same color as theirs. If this is not an obliteration of morality, of intellectual integrity, of individual rights, of the freedom of man’s mind (and, incidentally, of the First Amendment), you take it from here; I can’t—it turns my stomach.

What I am able to discuss is the ancient notion of paying for the sins of one’s fathers, and the effect of this notion on morality. Suppose a man leads a decent, responsible life financially: he works hard, lives within his means, plans his future accordingly, and always pays his debts; then, suddenly, he is confronted with a demand that he pay a debt of his father’s, contracted before he was born—and he is given to understand that other demands will be sprung on him, for the debts of his grandfather, his great-grandfather, etc. Would he accept it? Would he remain decent, conscientious and hard-working? Or would he blow his savings on one drunken orgy, then drift at the whim of the moment, mooching and chiseling as best he can?

The same is true in the realm of morality. Morality is inseparable from personal choice and personal responsibility. If a man lives conscientiously according to a set of moral principles, then hears that his moral rectitude does not depend on his actions, but on the actions of his ancestors, he will not remain moral for long. He will let himself slide into that cynical, senseless, hopeless gray bog which is today’s culture, where floating shapes scowl at him menacingly and hoarse voices screech about “affirmative action.”

No, men are not evil by nature—and when evil ideas take over a culture, two factors are responsible: the absence of good ideas, and force. Just as financial inflation is caused by the government, so is moral inflation. The government is destroying the people’s morality by many forms of injustice, which include such things as forcing racial quotas on schools and business concerns. As the Times Magazine article explains in regard to the DeFunis case: “H.E.W [Department of Health, Education and Welfare] was leaning hard on the university for alleged noncompliance with affirmative action in campus hiring. The university, like 2,500 other institutions of higher learning in the United States, holds Government grants and contracts and thus is required by Federal law to institute ‘goals and timetables’ for hiring more women and minorities on its faculty.” (So much for the notion of the government granting subsidies to education without strings attached, i.e., without affecting the schools’ intellectual freedom.)

The next time you hear a politician deplore the moral decline of this country, remember (and, perhaps, remind him) that if one wants to preserve a nation’s morality, one must set up conditions of existence in which moral behavior is rewarded, not punished—and that this cannot be done on an altruist basis: after centuries of moral inflation, the balloon of altruism has burst.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This passage comes from an anthology of essays published under the title The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. (A new, expanded and revised edition, retitled Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution will be published in 1999.) The excerpt identifies the fundamental motive that drives the moralists of altruism.

The Age of Envy

A CULTURE, like an individual, has a sense of life or, rather, the equivalent of a sense of life—an emotional atmosphere created by its dominant philosophy, by its view of man and of existence. This emotional atmosphere represents a culture’s dominant values and serves as the leitmotif of a given age, setting its trends and its style.

Thus Western civilization had an Age of Reason and an Age of Enlightenment. In those periods, the quest for reason and enlightenment was the dominant intellectual drive and created a corresponding emotional atmosphere that fostered these values.

Today, we live in the Age of Envy.

“Envy” is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.

Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves. Mankind has lived with it, has observed its manifestations and, to various extents, has been ravaged by it for countless centuries, yet has failed to grasp its meaning and to rebel against its exponents.

Today, that emotion is the leitmotif, the sense of life of our culture. It is all around us, we are drowning in it, it is almost explicitly confessed by its more brazen exponents—yet men continue to evade its existence and are peculiarly afraid to name it, as primitive people were once afraid to pronounce the name of the devil.

That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good.

This hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the good with which one does not agree. For instance, if a child resents some conventional type of obedient boy who is constantly held up to him as an ideal to emulate, this is not hatred of the good: the child does not regard that boy as good, and his resentment is the product of a clash between his values and those of his elders (though he is too young to grasp the issue in such terms). Similarly, if an adult does not regard altruism as good and resents the adulation bestowed upon some “humanitarian,” this is a clash between his values and those of others, not hatred of the good.

Hatred of the good for being the good means hatred of that which one regards as good by one’s own (conscious or subconscious) judgment. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable.

If a child wants to get good grades in school, but is unable or unwilling to achieve them and begins. to hate the children who do, that is hatred of the good. If a man regards intelligence as a value, but is troubled by self-doubt and begins to hate the men he judges to be intelligent, that is hatred of the good.

The nature of the particular values a man chooses to hold is not the primary factor in this issue (although irrational values may contribute a great deal to the formation of that emotion). The primary factor and distinguishing characteristic is an emotional mechanism set in reverse: a response of hatred, not toward human vices, but toward human virtues.

To be exact, the emotional mechanism is not set in reverse, but is set one way: its exponents do not experience love for evil men; their emotional range is limited to hatred or indifference. It is impossible to experience love, which is a response to values, when one’s automatized response to values is hatred.

In any specific instance, this type of hatred is heavily enmeshed in rationalizations. The most common one is: “I don’t hate him for his intelligence, but for his conceit!” More often than not, if one asks the speaker to name the evidence of the victim’s conceit, he exhausts such generalities as: “He’s insolent ... he’s stubborn ... he’s selfish,” and ends up with some indeterminate accusation which amounts to: “He’s intelligent and he knows it.” Well, why shouldn’t he know it? Blank out. Should he hide it? Blank out. From whom should he hide it? The implicit, but never stated, answer is: “From people like me.”

Yet such haters accept and even seem to admire the spectacle of conceit put on for their benefit by a man who shows off, boasting about his own alleged virtues or achievements, blatantly confessing a lack of self-confidence. This, of course, is a clue to the nature of the hatred. The haters seem unable to differentiate conceptually between “conceit” and a deserved pride, yet they seem to know the difference “instinctively,” i.e., by means of their automatized sense of life.

Since very few men have fully consistent characters, it is often hard to tell, in a specific instance, whether a given man is hated for his virtues or for his actual flaws. In regard to one’s own feelings, only a rigorously conscientious habit of introspection can enable one to be certain of the nature and causes of one’s emotional responses. But introspection is the mental process most fiercely avoided by the haters, which permits them a virtually unlimited choice of rationalizations. In regard to judging the emotional responses of others, it is extremely difficult to tell their reasons in a specific case, particularly if it involves complex personal relationships. It is, therefore, in the broad, impersonal field of responses to strangers, to casual acquaintances, to public figures or to events that have no direct bearing on the haters’ own lives that one can observe the hatred of the good in a pure, unmistakable form.

Its clearest manifestation is the attitude of a person who characteristically resents someone’s success, happiness, achievement or good fortune—and experiences pleasure at someone’s failure, unhappiness or misfortune. This is pure, “nonvenal” hatred of the good for being the good: the hater has nothing to lose or gain in such instances, no practical value at stake, no existential motive, no knowledge except the fact that a human being has succeeded or failed. The expressions of this response are brief, casual, as a rule involuntary. But if you have seen it, you have seen the naked face of evil.

Do not confuse this response with that of a person who resents someone’s unearned success, or feels pleased by someone’s deserved failure. These responses are caused by a sense of justice, which is an entirely different phenomenon, and its emotional manifestations are different: in such cases, a person expresses indignation, not hatred—or relief, not malicious gloating.

Superficially, the motive of those who hate the good is taken to be envy. A dictionary definition of envy is: “1. a sense of discontent or jealousy with regard to another’s advantages, success, possessions, etc. 2. desire for an advantage possessed by another” (The Random House Dictionary, 1968). The same dictionary adds the following elucidation: “To envy is to feel resentful because someone else possesses or has achieved what one wishes oneself to possess or to have achieved.”

This covers a great many emotional responses, which come from different motives. In a certain sense, the second definition is the opposite of the first, and the more innocent of the two.

For example, if a poor man experiences a moment’s envy of another man’s wealth, the feeling may mean nothing more than a momentary concretization of his desire for wealth; the feeling is not directed against that particular rich person and is concerned with the wealth, not the person. The feeling, in effect, may amount to: “I wish I had an income (or a house, or a car, or an overcoat) like his.” The result of this feeling may be an added incentive for the man to improve his financial condition.

The feeling is less innocent, if it involves personal resentment and amounts to: “I want to put on a front, like this man.” The result is a second-hander who lives beyond his means, struggling to “keep up with the Joneses.”

The feeling is still less innocent, if it amounts to: “I want this man’s car (or overcoat, or diamond shirt studs, or industrial establishment).” The result is a criminal.

But these are still human beings, in various stages of immorality, compared to the inhuman object whose feeling is: “I hate this man because he is wealthy and I am not.”

Envy is part of this creature’s feeling, but only the superficial, semirespectable part; it is like the tip of an iceberg showing nothing worse than ice, but with the submerged part consisting of a compost of rotting living matter. The envy, in this case, is semirespectable because it seems to imply a desire for material possessions, which is a human being’s desire. But, deep down, the creature has no such desire: it does not want to be rich, it wants the human being to be poor.

This is particularly clear in the much more virulent cases of hatred, masked as envy, for those who possess personal values or virtues: hatred for a man (or a woman) because he (or she) is beautiful or intelligent or successful or honest or happy. In these cases, the creature has no desire and makes no effort to improve its appearance, to develop or to use its intelligence, to struggle for success, to practice honesty, to be happy (nothing can make it happy). It knows that the disfigurement or the mental collapse or the failure or the immorality or the misery of its victim would not endow it with his or her value. It does not desire the value: it desires the value’s destruction.

“They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence ...” (Atlas Shrugged).

What endows such a creature with a quality of abysmal evil is the fact that it has an awareness of values and is able to recognize them in people. If it were merely amoral, it would be indifferent; it would be unable to distinguish virtues from flaws. But it does distinguish them—and the essential characteristic of its corruption is the fact that its mind’s recognition of a value is transmitted to its emotional mechanism as hatred, not as love, desire or admiration.

Consider the full meaning of this attitude. Values are that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Values are a necessity of man’s survival, and wider: of any living organism’s survival. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action, and the successful pursuit of values is a precondition of remaining alive. Since nature does not provide man with an automatic knowledge of the code of values he requires, there are differences in the codes which men accept and the goals they pursue. But consider the abstraction “value,” apart from the particular content of any given code, and ask yourself: What is the nature of a creature in which the sight of a value arouses hatred and the desire to destroy? In the most profound sense of the term, such a creature is a killer, not a physical, but a metaphysical one—it is not an enemy of your values, but of all values, it is an enemy of anything that enables men to survive, it is an enemy of life as such and of everything living.

A community of values—of some sort of values—is a necessity of any successful relationship among living beings. If you were training an animal, you would not hurt it every time it obeyed you. If you were bringing up a child, you would not punish him whenever he acted properly. What relationship can you have with the hating creatures, and what element do they introduce into social relationships? If you struggle for existence and find that your success brings you, not approval and appreciation, but hatred, if you strive to be moral and find that your virtue brings you, not the love, but the hatred of your fellow-men, what becomes of your own benevolence? Will you be able to generate or to maintain a feeling of good will toward your fellow-men?

The greatest danger in this issue is men’s inability—or worse: unwillingness—fully to identify it.

Evil as the hating creatures are, there is something still more evil: those who try to appease them.

It is understandable that men might seek to hide their vices from the eyes of people whose judgment they respect. But there are men who hide their virtues from the eyes of monsters. There are men who apologize for their own achievements, deride their own values, debase their own character—for the sake of pleasing those they know to be stupid, corrupt, malicious, evil. An obsequious pandering to the vanity of some alleged superior, such as a king, for the sake of some practical advantage, is bad enough. But pandering to the vanity of one’s inferiors—inferior specifically in regard to the value involved—is so shameful an act of treason to one’s values that nothing can be left thereafter of the person who commits it, neither intellectually nor morally, and nothing ever is.

If men attempt to play up to those they admire, and fake virtues they do not possess, it is futile, but understandable, if not justifiable. But to fake vices, weaknesses, flaws, disabilities? To shrink one’s soul and stature? To play down—or write down, or speak down, or think down?

Observe just one social consequence of this policy: such appeasers do not hesitate to join some cause or other appealing for mercy; they never raise their voices in the name of justice.

Cowardice is so ignoble an inner state that men struggle to overcome it, in the face of real dangers. The appeaser chooses a state of cowardice where no danger exists. To live in fear is so unworthy a condition that men have died on barricades, defying the tyranny of the mighty. The appeaser chooses to live in chronic fear of the impotent.

Men have died in torture chambers, on the stake, in concentration camps, in front of firing squads, rather than renounce their convictions. The appeaser renounces his under the pressure of a frown on any vacant face. Men have refused to sell their souls in exchange for fame, fortune, power, even their own lives. The appeaser does not sell his soul: he gives it away for free, getting nothing in return.

The appeaser’s usual rationalization is: “I don’t want to be disliked.” By whom? By people he dislikes, despises and condemns.

Let me give you some examples. An intellectual who was recruiting members for Mensa—an international society allegedly restricted to intelligent men, which selects members on the dubious basis of I.Q. tests—was quoted in an interview as follows: “Intelligence is not especially admired by people. Outside Mensa you had to be very careful not to win an argument and lose a friend. Inside Mensa we can be ourselves and that is a great relief” (The New York Times, September 11, 1966). A friend, therefore, is more important than the truth. What kind of friend? The kind that resents you for being right.

A professor, the head of a department in a large university, had a favorite graduate student who wanted to be a teacher. The professor had tested him as an instructor and regarded him as exceptionally intelligent. In a private conversation with the young man’s parents, the professor praised him highly and declared: “There is only one danger in his future: he is such a good teacher that the rest of the faculty will resent him.” When the young man got his Ph.D., the professor did not offer him a job, even though he had the power to do so.

The notion that an intelligent girl should hide her intelligence in order to be popular with men and find a husband, is widespread and well-known. Of what value would such a husband be to her? Blank out.

In an old movie dealing with college life, a boy asks a girl to help him get good grades by means of an actually criminal scheme (it involves the theft of a test from the professor’s office). When she refuses, the boy asks scornfully: “Are you some sort of moralist?” “Oh, no, no,” she answers hastily and apologetically, “it’s just my small-town upbringing, I guess.”

Do not confuse appeasement with tactfulness or generosity. Appeasement is not consideration for the feelings of others, it is consideration for and compliance with the unjust, irrational and evil feelings of others. It is a policy of exempting the emotions of others from moral judgment, and of willingness to sacrifice innocent, virtuous victims to the evil malice of such emotions.

Tactfulness is consideration extended only to rational feelings. A tactful man does not stress his success or happiness in the presence of those who have suffered failure, loss or unhappiness; not because he suspects them of envy, but because he realizes that the contrast can revive and sharpen their pain. He does not stress his virtues in anyone’s presence: he takes for granted that they are recognized. As a rule, a man of achievement does not flaunt his achievements, neither among equals nor inferiors nor superiors; he does not evaluate himself—or others—by a comparative standard. His attitude is not: “I am better than you,” but: “I am good.”

If, however, he encounters an envious hater who gets huffy, trying to ignore, deny or insult his achievements, he asserts them proudly. In answer to the hater’s stock question: “Who do you think you are?”—he tells him.

It is the pretentious mediocrity—the show-off, the boaster, the snooty posturer—who seeks, not virtue or value, but superiority. A comparative standard is his only guide, which means that he has no standards and that he has a vested interest in reducing others to inferiority. Decent people, properly, resent a show-off, but the haters and enviers do not: they recognize him as a soul mate.

Offensive boasting or self-abasing appeasement is a false alternative. As in all human relationships, the guidelines of proper conduct are: objectivity and justice. But this is not what men are taught or were taught in the past.

“Use your head—but don’t let anyone know it. Set your goals high—but don’t admit it. Be honest—but don’t uphold it. Be successful—but hide it. Be great—but act small. Be happy—but God help you if you are!” Such are the moral injunctions we gather from the cultural atmosphere in which we grow up—as men did in the past, throughout history.

The appeasement of evi!—of an unknowable, undefinable, inexplicable evil—has been the undertow of mankind’s cultural stream all through the ages. In primitive cultures (and even in ancient Greece) the appeasement took the form of the belief that the gods resent human happiness or success, because these are the prerogatives of the gods to which men must not aspire. Hence the superstitious fear of acknowledging one’s good fortune—as, for instance, the ritual of parents wailing that their newborn son is puny, ugly, worthless, for fear that a demon would harm him if they admitted their happy pride in his health and looks. Observe the contradiction: Why attempt to deceive an omnipotent demon who would be able to judge the infant’s value for himself? The intention of the ritual, therefore, is not: “Don’t let him know that the infant is good,” but: “Don’t let him know that you know it and that you’re happy!”

Men create gods—and demons—in their own likeness; mystic fantasies, as a rule, are invented to explain some phenomenon for which men find no explanation. The notion of gods who are so malicious that they wish men to live in chronic misery, would not be conceived or believed unless men sensed all around them the presence of some inexplicable malevolence directed specifically at their personal happiness.

Are the haters of the good that numerous? No. The actual haters are a small, depraved minority in any age or culture. The spread and perpetuation of this evil are accomplished by those who profiteer on it.

The profiteers are men with a vested interest in mankind’s psychological devastation, who burrow their way into positions of moral-intellectual leadership. They provide the haters with unlimited means of rationalization, dissimulation, excuse and camouflage, including ways of passing vices off as virtues. They slander, confuse and disarm the victims. Their vested interest is power-lust. Their stock-in-trade is any system of thought or of belief aimed at keeping men small.

Observe the nature of some of mankind’s oldest legends.

Why were the men of Babel punished? Because they attempted to build a tower to the sky.

Why did Phaëthon perish? Because he attempted to drive the chariot of the sun.

Why was Icarus smashed? Because he attempted to fly.

Why was Arachne transformed into a spider? Because she challenged a goddess to a competition in the art of weaving—and won it.

“Do not aspire—do not venture—do not rise—ambition is self-destruction,” drones this ancient chorus through the ages—through all the ages, changing its lyrics, but not its tune—all the way to the Hollywood movies in which the boy who goes to seek a career in the big city becomes a wealthy, but miserable scoundrel, while the small-town boy who stays put wins the girl next door, who wins over the glamorous temptress.

There is and was abundant evidence to show that the curse of an overwhelming majority of men is passivity, lethargy and fear, not ambition and audacity. But men’s well-being is not the motive of that chorus.

Toward the end of World War II, newspapers reported the following: when Russian troops moved west and occupied foreign towns, the Soviet authorities automatically executed any person who had a bank account of $100 or a high-school education; the rest of the inhabitants submitted. This is a physical dramatization of the spiritual policy of mankind’s moral-intellectual leaders: destroy the tops, the rest will give up and obey.

Just as a political dictator needs specially indoctrinated thugs to enforce his orders, so his intellectual road-pavers need them to maintain their power. Their thugs are the haters of the good; the special indoctrination is the morality of altruism.

It is obvious—historically, philosophically and psychologically—that altruism is an inexhaustible source of rationalizations for the most evil motives, the most inhuman actions, the most loathsome emotions. It is not difficult to grasp the meaning of the tenet that the good is an object of sacrifice—and to understand what a blanket damnation of anything living is represented by an undefined accusation of “selfishness.”

But here is a significant phenomenon to observe: the haters and enviers—who are the most vociferous shock troops of altruism—seem to be subconsciously impervious to the altruist criterion of the good. The touchy vanity of these haters—which flares up at any suggestion of their inferiority to a man of virtue—is not aroused by any saint or hero of altruism, whose moral superiority they profess to acknowledge. Nobody envies Albert Schweitzer. Whom do they envy? The man of intelligence, of ability, of achievement, of independence.

If anyone ever believed (or tried to believe) that the motive of altruism is compassion, that its goal is the relief of human suffering and the elimination of poverty, the state of today’s culture now deprives him of any foothold on self-deception. Today, altruism is running amuck, shedding its tattered rationalizations and displaying its soul.

Altruists are no longer concerned with material wealth, not even with its “redistribution,” only with its destruction—but even this is merely a means to an end. Their savage fury is aimed at the destruction of intelligence—of ability, ambition, thought, purpose, justice; the destruction of morality, any sort of morality; the destruction of values qua values.

The last fig leaf of academic pretentiousness is the tag used to disguise this movement: egalitarianism. It does not disguise, but reveals.

Egalitarianism means the belief in the equality of all men. If the word “equality” is to be taken in any serious or rational sense, the crusade for this belief is dated bv about a century or more: the United States of America has made it an anachronism—by establishing a system based on the principle of individual rights. “Equality,” in a human context, is a political term: it means equality before the law, the equality of fundamental, inalienable rights which every man possesses by virtue of his birth as a human being, and which may not be infringed or abrogated by man-made institutions, such as titles of nobility or the division of men into castes established by law, with special privileges granted to some and denied to others. The rise of capitalism swept away all castes, including the institutions of aristocracy and of slavery or serfdom.

But this is not the meaning that the altruists ascribe to the word “equality.”

They turn the word into an anti-concept: they use it to mean, not political, but metaphysical equality—the equality of personal attributes and virtues, regardless of natural endowment or individual choice, performance and character. It is not man-made institutions, but nature, i.e., reality, that they propose to fight—by means of man-made institutions.

Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the “unfairness” of nature and of volition, and to establish universal equality in fact—in defiance of facts. Since the Law of Identity is impervious to human manipulation, it is the Law of Causality that they struggle to abrogate. Since personal attributes or virtues cannot be “redistributed,” they seek to deprive men of their consequences—of the rewards, the benefits, the achievements created by personal attributes and virtues.

It is not equality before the law that they seek, but inequality; the establishment of an inverted social pyramid, with a new aristocracy on top—the aristocracy of non-value....

3. Man, the Rational Animal

A theory of ethics rests on a view of man’s nature. The first two selections, written in 1969 about the Apollo 11 mission (and its antithesis, Woodstock), capture AR’s distinctive view.

The first of these, from the anthology The Voice of Reason, conveys her positive vision of man; the second, from Return of the Primitive, offers her analysis of man’s greatest enemy.

Apollo 11

“NO MATTER what discomforts and expenses you had to bear to come here,” said a NASA guide to a group of guests, at the conclusion of a tour of the Space Center on Cape Kennedy, on July 15, 1969, “there will be seven minutes tomorrow morning that will make you feel it was worth it.”

It was.

The tour had been arranged for the guests invited by NASA to attend the launching of Apollo 11. As far as I was able to find out, the guests—apart from government officials and foreign dignitaries—were mainly scientists, industrialists, and a few intellectuals who had been selected to represent the American people and culture on this occasion. If this was the standard of selection, I am happy and proud that I was one of these guests.

The NASA tour guide was a slight, stocky, middle-aged man who wore glasses and spoke—through a microphone, at the front of the bus—in the mild, gentle, patient manner of a schoolteacher. He reminded me of television’s Mr. Peepers—until he took off his glasses and I took a closer look at his face: he had unusual, intensely intelligent eyes.

The Space Center is an enormous place that looks like an untouched wilderness cut, incongruously, by a net of clean, new, paved roads: stretches of wild, subtropical growth, an eagle’s nest in a dead tree, an alligator in a stagnant moat—and, scattered at random, in the distance, a few vertical shafts rising from the jungle, slender structures of a shape peculiar to the technology of space, which do not belong to the age of the jungle or even fully to ours.

The discomfort was an inhuman, brain-melting heat. The sky was a sunless spread of glaring white, and the physical objects seemed to glare so that the mere sensation of sight became an effort. We kept plunging into an oven, when the bus stopped and we ran to modern, air-conditioned buildings that looked quietly unobtrusive and militarily efficient, then plunging back into the air-conditioned bus as into a pool. Our guide kept talking and explaining, patiently, courteously, conscientiously, but his heart was not in it, and neither was ours, even though the things he showed us would have been fascinating at any other time. The reason was not the heat; it was as if nothing could register on us, as if we were out of focus, or, rather, focused too intently and irresistibly on the event of the following day.

It was the guide who identified it, when he announced: “And now we’ll show you what you really want to see”—and we were driven to the site of Apollo 11.

The “VIP’s” tumbled out of the bus like tourists and rushed to photograph one another, with the giant rocket a few hundred yards away in the background. But some just stood and looked.

I felt a kind of awe, but it was a purely theoretical awe; I had to remind myself: “This is it,” in order to experience any emotion. Visually it was just another rocket, the kind you can see in any science-fiction movie or on any toy counter: a tall, slender shape of dead, powdery white against the white glare of the sky and the steel lacing of the service tower. There were sharp black lines encircling the white body at intervals—and our guide explained matter-of-factly that these marked the stages that would be burned off in tomorrow’s firings. This made the meaning of the rocket more real for an instant. But the fact that the lunar module, as he told us, was already installed inside the small, slanted part way on top of the rocket, just under the still smaller, barely visible spacecraft itself, would not become fully real; it seemed too small, too far away from us, and, simultaneously, too close: I could not quite integrate it with the parched stubble of grass under our feet, with its wholesomely usual touches of litter, with the psychedelic colors of the shirts on the tourists snapping pictures.

Tomorrow, our guide explained, we would be sitting on bleachers three miles away; he warned us that the sound of the blast would reach us some seconds later than the sight, and assured us that it would be loud, but not unbearable.

I do not know that guide’s actual work at the Space Center, and I do not know by what imperceptible signs he gave me the impression that he was a man in love with his work. It was only that concluding remark of his, later, at the end of the tour, that confirmed my impression. In a certain way, he set, for me, the tone of the entire occasion: the sense of what lay under the surface of the seemingly commonplace activities.

My husband and I were staying in Titusville, a tiny frontier settlement—the frontier of science—built and inhabited predominantly by the Space Center’s employees. It was just like any small town, perhaps a little newer and cleaner—except that ten miles away, across the bluish spread of the Indian River, one could see the foggy, bluish, rectangular shape of the Space Center’s largest structure, the Vehicle Assembly Building, and, a little farther away, two faint vertical shafts: Apollo 11 and its service tower. No matter what one looked at in that town, one could not really see anything else.

I noticed only that Titusville had many churches, too many, and that they had incredible, modernistic forms. Architecturally, they reminded me of the more extreme types of Hollywood drive-ins: a huge, cone-shaped roof, with practically no walls to support it—or an erratic conglomeration of triangles, like a coral bush gone wild—or a fairy-tale candy-house, with S-shaped windows dripping at random like gobs of frosting. I may be mistaken about this, but I had the impression that here, on the doorstep of the future, religion felt out of place and this was the way it was trying to be modern.

Since all the motels of Titusville were crowded beyond capacity, we had rented a room in a private home: as their contribution to the great event, many of the local homeowners had volunteered to help their chamber of commerce with the unprecedented flood of visitors. Our room was in the home of an engineer employed at the Space Center. It was a nice, gracious family, and one might have said a typical small-town family, except for one thing: a quality of cheerful openness, directness, almost innocence—the benevolent, unselfconsciously self-confident quality of those who live in the clean, strict, reality-oriented atmosphere of science.

On the morning of July 16, we got up at 3 A.M. in order to reach the NASA Guest Center by 6 A.M., a distance that a car traveled normally in ten minutes. (Special buses were to pick up the guests at that Center, for the trip to the launching.) But Titusville was being engulfed by such a flood of cars that even the police traffic department could not predict whether one would be able to move through the streets that morning. We reached the Guest Center long before sunrise, thanks to the courtesy of our hostess, who drove us there through twisting back streets.

On the shore of the Indian River, we saw cars, trucks, trailers filling every foot of space on both sides of the drive, in the vacant lots, on the lawns, on the river’s sloping embankment. There were tents perched at the edge of the water; there were men and children sleeping on the roofs of station wagons, in the twisted positions of exhaustion; I saw a half-naked man asleep in a hammock strung between a car and a tree. These people had come from all over the country to watch the launching across the river, miles away. (We heard later that the same patient, cheerful human flood had spread through all the small communities around Cape Kennedy that night, and that it numbered one million persons.) I could not understand why these people would have such an intense desire to witness just a few brief moments; some hours later, I understood it.

It was still dark as we drove along the river. The sky and the water were a solid spread of dark blue that seemed soft, cold, and empty. But, framed by the motionless black leaves of the trees on the embankment, two things marked off the identity of the sky and the earth: far above in the sky, there was a single, large star; and on earth, far across the river, two enormous sheaves of white light stood shooting motionlessly into the empty darkness from two tiny upright shafts of crystal that looked like glowing icicles; they were Apollo 11 and its service tower.

It was dark when a caravan of buses set out at 7 A.M. on the journey to the Space Center. The light came slowly, beyond the steam-veiled windows, as we moved laboriously through back streets and back roads. No one asked any questions; there was a kind of tense solemnity about that journey, as if we were caught in the backwash of the enormous discipline of an enormous purpose and were now carried along on the power of an invisible authority.

It was full daylight—a broiling, dusty, hazy daylight—when we stepped out of the buses. The launch site looked big and empty like a desert; the bleachers, made of crude, dried planks, seemed small, precariously fragile and irrelevant, like a hasty footnote. Three miles away, the shaft of Apollo 11 looked a dusty white again, like a tired cigarette planted upright.

The worst part of the trip was that last hour and a quarter, which we spent sitting on wooden planks in the sun. There was a crowd of seven thousand people filling the stands, there was the cool, clear, courteous voice of a loudspeaker rasping into sound every few minutes, keeping us informed of the progress of the countdown (and announcing, somewhat dutifully, the arrival of some prominent government personage, which did not seem worth the effort of turning one’s head to see), but all of it seemed unreal. The full reality was only the vast empty space, above and below, and the tired white cigarette in the distance.

The sun was rolling up and straight at our faces, like a white ball wrapped in dirty cotton. But beyond the haze, the sky was clear—which meant that we would be able to see the whole of the launching, including the firing of the second and third stages.

Let me warn you that television does not give any idea of what we saw. Later, I saw that launching again on color television, and it did not resemble the original.

The loudspeaker began counting the minutes when there were only five left. When I heard: “Three-quarters of a minute,” I was up, standing on the wooden bench, and do not remember hearing the rest.

It began with a large patch of bright, yellow-orange flame shooting sideways from under the base of the rocket. It looked like a normal kind of flame and I felt an instant’s shock of anxiety, as if this were a building on fire. In the next instant the flame and the rocket were hidden by such a sweep of dark red fire that the anxiety vanished: this was not part of any normal experience and could not be integrated with anything. The dark red fire parted into two gigantic wings, as if a hydrant were shooting streams of fire outward and up, toward the zenith—and between the two wings, against a pitch-black sky, the rocket rose slowly, so slowly that it seemed to hang still in the air, a pale cylinder with a blinding oval of white light at the bottom, like an upturned candle with its flame directed at the earth. Then I became aware that this was happening in total silence, because I heard the cries of birds winging frantically away from the flames. The rocket was rising faster, slanting a little, its tense white flame leaving a long, thin spiral of bluish smoke behind it. It had risen into the open blue sky, and the dark red fire had turned into enormous billows of brown smoke, when the sound reached us: it was a long, violent crack, not a rolling sound, but specifically a cracking, grinding sound, as if space were breaking apart, but it seemed irrelevant and unimportant, because it was a sound from the past and the rocket was long since speeding safely out of its reach—though it was strange to realize that only a few seconds had passed. I found myself waving to the rocket involuntarily, I heard people applauding and joined them, grasping our common motive; it was impossible to watch passively, one had to express, by some physical action, a feeling that was not triumph, but more: the feeling that that white object’s unobstructed streak of motion was the only thing that mattered in the universe. The rocket was almost above our heads when a sudden flare of yellow-gold fire seemed to envelop it—I felt a stab of anxiety, the thought that something had gone wrong, then heard a burst of applause and realized that this was the firing of the second stage. When the loud, space-cracking sound reached us, the fire had turned into a small puff of white vapor floating away. At the firing of the third stage, the rocket was barely visible; it seemed to be shrinking and descending; there was a brief spark, a white puff of vapor, a distant crack—and when the white puff dissolved, the rocket was gone.

These were the seven minutes.

What did one feel afterward? An abnormal, tense overconcentration on the commonplace necessities of the immediate moment, such as stumbling over patches of rough gravel, running to find the appropriate guest bus. One had to overconcentrate, because one knew that one did not give a damn about anything, because one had no mind and no motivation left for any immediate action. How do you descend from a state of pure exaltation?

What we had seen, in naked essentials—but in reality, not in a work of art—was the concretized abstraction of man’s greatness.

The meaning of the sight lay in the fact that when those dark red wings of fire flared open, one knew that one was not looking at a normal occurrence, but at a cataclysm which, if unleashed by nature, would have wiped man out of existence—and one knew also that this cataclysm was planned, unleashed, and controlled by man, that this unimaginable power was ruled by his power and, obediently serving his purpose, was making way for a slender, rising craft. One knew that this spectacle was not the product of inanimate nature, like some aurora borealis, or of chance, or of luck, that it was unmistakably human—with “human,” for once, meaning grandeur—that a purpose and a long, sustained, disciplined effort had gone to achieve this series of moments, and that man was succeeding, succeeding, succeeding! For once, if only for seven minutes, the worst among those who saw it had to feel—not “How small is man by the side of the Grand Canyon!”—but “How great is man and how safe is nature when he conquers it!”

That we had seen a demonstration of man at his best, no one could doubt—this was the cause of the event’s attraction and of the stunned, numbed state in which it left us. And no one could doubt that we had seen an achievement of man in his capacity as a rational being—an achievement of reason, of logic, of mathematics, of total dedication to the absolutism of reality. How many people would connect these two facts, I do not know.

The next four days were a period torn out of the world’s usual context, like a breathing spell with a sweep of clean air piercing mankind’s lethargic suffocation. For thirty years or longer, the newspapers had featured nothing but disasters, catastrophes, betrayals, the shrinking stature of men, the sordid mess of a collapsing civilization; their voice had become a long, sustained whine, the megaphone of failure, like the sound of an oriental bazaar where leprous beggars, of spirit or matter, compete for attention by displaying their sores. Now, for once, the newspapers were announcing a human achievement, were reporting on a human triumph, were reminding us that man still exists and functions as man.

Those four days conveyed the sense that we were watching a magnificent work of art—a play dramatizing a single theme: the efficacy of man’s mind. One after another, the crucial, dangerous maneuvers of Apollo 11’s fight were carried out according to plan, with what appeared to be an effortless perfection. They reached us in the form of brief, rasping sounds relayed from space to Houston and from Houston to our television screens, sounds interspersed with computerized figures, translated for us by commentators who, for once, by contagion, lost their usual manner of snide equivocation and spoke with compelling clarity.

The most confirmed evader in the worldwide audience could not escape the fact that these sounds announced events taking place far beyond the earth’s atmosphere—that while he moaned about his loneliness and “alienation” and fear of entering an unknown cocktail party, three men were floating in a fragile capsule in the unknown darkness and loneliness of space, with earth and moon suspended like little tennis balls behind and ahead of them, and with their lives suspended on the microscopic threads connecting numbers on their computer panels in consequence of the invisible connections made well in advance by man’s brain—that the more effortless their performance appeared, the more it proclaimed the magnitude of the effort expended to project it and achieve it—that no feelings, wishes, urges, instincts, or lucky “conditioning,” either in these three men or in all those behind them, from highest thinker to lowliest laborer who touched a bolt of that spacecraft, could have achieved this incomparable feat—that we were watching the embodied concretization of a single faculty of man: his rationality.

There was an aura of triumph about the entire mission of Apollo 11, from the perfect launch to the climax. An assurance of success was growing in the wake of the rocket through the four days of its moon-bound flight. No, not because success was guaranteed—it is never guaranteed to man—but because a progression of evidence was displaying the precondition of success: these men know what’they are doing.

No event in contemporary history was as thrilling, here on earth, as three moments of the mission’s climax: the moment when, superimposed over the image of a garishly colored imitation-module standing motionless on the television screen, there flashed the words: “Lunar module has landed”—the moment when the faint, gray shape of the actual module came shivering from the moon to the screen—and the moment when the shining white blob which was Neil Armstrong took his immortal first step. At this last, I felt one instant of unhappy fear, wondering what he would say, because he had it in his power to destroy the meaning and the glory of that moment, as the astronauts of Apollo 8 had done in their time. He did not. He made no reference to God; he did not undercut the rationality of his achievement by paying tribute to the forces of its opposite; he spoke of man. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” So it was.

As to my personal reaction to the entire mission of Apollo 11, I can express it best by paraphrasing a passage from Atlas Shrugged that kept coming back to my mind: “Why did I feel that joyous sense of confidence while watching the mission? In all of its giant course, two aspects pertaining to the inhuman were radiantly absent: the causeless and the purposeless. Every part of the mission was an embodied answer to ‘Why?’ and ‘What for?’—like the steps of a life-course chosen by the sort of mind I worship. The mission was a moral code enacted in space.”

Now, coming back to earth (as it is at present), I want to answer briefly some questions that will arise in this context. Is it proper for the government to engage in space projects? No, it is not—except insofar as space projects involve military aspects, in which case, and to that extent, it is not merely proper but mandatory. Scientific research as such, however, is not the proper province of the government.

But this is a political issue; it pertains to the money behind the lunar mission or to the method of obtaining that money, and to the project’s administration; it does not affect the nature of the mission as such, it does not alter the fact that this was a superlative technological achievement.

In judging the effectiveness of the various elements involved in any large-scale undertaking of a mixed economy, one must be guided by the question: which elements were the result of coercion and which the result of freedom? It is not coercion, not the physical force or threat of a gun, that created Apollo 11. The scientists, the technologists, the engineers, the astronauts were free men acting of their own choice. The various parts of the spacecraft were produced by private industrial concerns. Of all human activities, science is the field least amenable to force: the facts of reality do not take orders. (This is one of the reasons why science perishes under dictatorships, though technology may survive for a short while.)

It is said that without the “unlimited” resources of the government, such an enormous project would not have been undertaken. No, it would not have been—at this time. But it would have been, when the economy was ready for it. There is a precedent for this situation. The first transcontinental railroad of the United States was built by order of the government, on government subsidies. It was hailed as a great achievement (which, in some respects, it was). But it caused economic dislocations and political evils, for the consequences of which we are paying to this day in many forms.

If the government deserves any credit for the space program, it is only to the extent that it did not act as a government, i.e., did not use coercion in regard to its participants (which it used in regard to its backers, i.e., the taxpayers). And what is relevant in this context (but is not to be taken as a justification or endorsement of a mixed economy) is the fact that of all our government programs, the space program is the cleanest and best: it, at least, has brought the American citizens a return on their forced investment, it has worked for its money, it has earned its keep, which cannot be said about any other program of the government.

There is, however, a shameful element in the ideological motivation (or the publicly alleged motivation) that gave birth to our space program: John F Kennedy’s notion of a space competition between the United States and Soviet Russia.

A competition presupposes some basic principles held in common by all the competitors, such as the rules of the game in athletics, or the functions of the free market in business. The notion of a competition between the United States and Soviet Russia in any field whatsoever is obscene: they are incommensurable entities, intellectually and morally. What would you think of a competition between a doctor and a murderer to determine who could affect the greatest number of people? Or: a competition between Thomas A. Edison and Al Capone to see who could get rich quicker?

The fundamental significance of Apollo 11’s triumph is not political; it is philosophical; specifically, moral-epistemological.

The lunar landing as such was not a milestone of science, but of technology. Technology is an applied science, i.e., it translates the discoveries of theoretical science into practical application to man’s life. As such, technology is not the first step in the development of a given body of knowledge, but the last; it is not the most difficult step, but it is the ultimate step, the implicit purpose, of man’s quest for knowledge.

The lunar landing was not the greatest achievement of science, but its greatest visible result. The greatest achievements of science are invisible: they take place in a man’s mind; they occur in the form of a connection integrating a broad range of phenomena. The astronaut of an earlier mission who remarked that his spacecraft was driven by Sir Isaac Newton understood this issue. (And if I may be permitted to amend that remark, I would say that Sir Isaac Newton was the copilot of the flight; the pilot was Aristotle.) In this sense, the lunar landing was a first step, a beginning, in regard to the moon, but it was a last step, an end product, in regard to the earth—the end product of a long, intellectual-scientific development.

This does not diminish in any way the intellectual stature, power, or achievement of the technologists and the astronauts; it merely indicates that they were the worthy recipients of an illustrious heritage, who made full use of it by the exercise of their own individual ability. (The fact that man is the only species capable of transmitting knowledge and thus capable of progress, the fact that man can achieve a division of labor, and the fact that large numbers of men are required for a large-scale undertaking, do not mean what some creeps are suggesting: that achievement has become collective.)

I am not implying that all the men who contributed to the flight of Apollo 11 were necessarily rational in every aspect of their lives or convictions. But in their various professional capacities—each to the extent that he did contribute to the mission—they had to act on the principle of strict rationality.

The most inspiring aspect of Apollo 11’s flight was that it made such abstractions as rationality, knowledge, science perceivable in direct, immediate experience. That it involved a landing on another celestial body was like a dramatist’s emphasis on the dimensions of reason’s power: it is not of enormous importance to most people that man lands on the moon, but that man can do it, is.

This was the cause of the world’s response to the flight of Apollo 11.

Frustration is the leitmotif in the lives of most men, particularly today—the frustration of inarticulate desires, with no knowledge of the means to achieve them. In the sight and hearing of a crumbling world, Apollo 11 enacted the story of an audacious purpose, its execution, its triumph, and the means that achieved it—the story and the demonstration of man’s highest potential. Whatever his particular ability or goal, if a man is not to give up his struggle, he needs the reminder that success is possible; if he is not to regard the human species with fear, contempt, or hatred, he needs the spiritual fuel of knowing that man the hero is possible.

This was the meaning and the unidentified motive of the millions of eager, smiling faces that looked up to the flight of Apollo 11 from all over the remnants and ruins of the civilized world. This was the meaning that people sensed, but did not know in conscious terms—and will give up or betray tomorrow. It was the job of their teachers, the intellectuals, to tell them. But it is not what they are being told.

A great event is like an explosion that blasts off pretenses and brings the hidden out to the surface, be it diamonds or muck. The flight of Apollo 11 was “a moment of truth”: it revealed an abyss between the physical sciences and the humanities that has to be measured in terms of interplanetary distances. If the achievements of the physical sciences have to be watched through a telescope, the state of the humanities requires a microscope: there is no historical precedent for the smallness of stature and shabbiness of mind displayed by today’s intellectuals.

In The New York Times of July 21, 1969, there appeared two whole pages devoted to an assortment of reactions to the lunar landing, from all kinds of prominent and semi-prominent people who represent a cross-section of our culture.

It was astonishing to see how many ways people could find to utter variants of the same bromides. Under an overwhelming air of staleness, of pettiness, of musty meanness, the collection revealed the naked essence (and spiritual consequences) of the basic premises ruling today’s culture: irrationalism-altruism-collectivism.

The extent of the hatred for reason was somewhat startling. (And, psychologically, it gave the show away: one does not hate that which one honestly regards as ineffectual.) It was, however, expressed indirectly, in the form of denunciations of technology. (And since technology is the means of bringing the benefits of science to man’s life, judge for yourself the motive and the sincerity of the protestations of concern with human suffering.)

“But the chief reason for assessing the significance of the moon landing negatively, even while the paeans of triumph are sung, is that this tremendous technical achievement represents a defective sense of human values, and of a sense of priorities of our technical culture.” “We are betraying our moral weakness in our very triumphs in technology and economics.” “How can this nation swell and stagger with technological pride when it is so weak, so wicked, so blinded and misdirected in its priorities? While we can send men to the moon or deadly missiles to Moscow or toward Mao, we can’t get foodstuffs across town to starving folks in the teeming ghettos.” “Are things more important than people? I simply do not believe that a program comparable to the moon landing cannot be projected around poverty, the war, crime, and so on.” “If we show the same determination and willingness to commit our resources, we can master the problems of our cities just as we have mastered the challenge of space.” “In this regard, the contemporary triumphs of man’s mind—his ability to translate his dreams of grandeur into awesome accomplishments—are not to be equated with progress, as defined in terms of man’s primary concern with the welfare of the masses of fellow human beings ... the power of human intelligence which was mobilized to accomplish this feat can also be mobilized to address itself to the ultimate acts of human compassion.” “But, the most wondrous event would be if man could relinquish all the stains and defilements of the untamed mind....”

There was one entirely consistent person in that collection, Pablo Picasso, whose statement, in full, was: “It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care.” His work has been demonstrating that for years.

The best statement was, surprisingly, that of the playwright Eugene lonesco, who was perceptive about the nature of his fellow intellectuals. He said, in part:

It’s an extraordinary event of incalculable importance. The sign that it’s so important is that most people aren’t interested in it. They go on discussing riots and strikes and sentimental affairs. The perspectives opened up are enormous, and the absence of interest shows an astonishing lack of goodwill. I have the impression that writers and intellectuals—men of the left—are turning their backs to the event.

This is an honest statement—and the only pathetic (or terrible) thing about it is the fact that the speaker has not observed that “men of the left” are not “most people.”

Now consider the exact, specific meaning of the evil revealed in that collection: it is the moral significance of Apollo 11 that is being ignored; it is the moral stature of the astronauts—and of all the men behind them, and of all achievement—that is being denied. Think of what was required to achieve that mission: think of the unself-pitying effort; the merciless discipline; the courage; the responsibility of relying on one’s judgment; the days, nights and years of unswerving dedication to a goal; the tension of the unbroken maintenance of a full, clear mental focus; and the honesty (honesty means: loyalty to truth, and truth means: the recognition of reality). All these are not regarded as virtues by the altruists and are treated as of no moral significance.

Now perhaps you will grasp the infamous inversion represented by the morality of altruism.

Some people accused me of exaggeration when I said that altruism does not mean mere kindness or generosity, but the sacrifice of the best among men to the worst, the sacrifice of virtues to flaws, of ability to incompetence, of progress to stagnation—and the subordinating of all life and of all values to the claims of anyone’s suffering.

You have seen it enacted in reality.

What else is the meaning of the brazen presumption of those who protest against the mission of Apollo 11, demanding that the money (which is not theirs) be spent, instead, on the relief of poverty?

This is not an old-fashioned protest against mythical tycoons who “exploit” their workers, it is not a protest against the rich, it is not a protest against idle luxury, it is not a plea for some marginal charity, for money that “no one would miss.” It is a protest against science and progress, it is the impertinent demand that man’s mind cease to function, that man’s ability be denied the means to move forward, that achievement stop—because the poor hold a first mortgage on the lives of their betters.

By their own assessment, by demanding that the public support them, these protesters declare that they have not produced enough to support themselves—yet they present a claim on the men whose ability produced so enormous a result as Apollo 11, declaring that it was done at their expense, that the money behind it was taken from them. Led by their spiritual equivalents and spokesmen, they assert a private right to public funds, while denying the public (i.e., the rest of us) the right to any higher, better purpose.

I could remind them that without the technology they damn, there would be no means to support them. I could remind them of the pretechnological centuries when men subsisted in such poverty that they were unable to feed themselves, let alone give assistance to others. I could say that anyone who used one-hundredth of the mental effort used by the smallest of the technicians responsible for Apollo 11 would not be consigned to permanent poverty, not in a free or even semi-free society. I could say it, but I won’t. It is not their practice that I challenge, but their moral premise. Poverty is not a mortgage on the labor of others—misfortune is not a mortgage on achievement—failure is not a mortgage on success—suffering is not a claim check, and its relief is not the goal of existence—man is not a sacrificial animal on anyone’s altar or for anyone’s cause—life is not one huge hospital.

Those who suggest that we substitute a war on poverty for the space program should ask themselves whether the premises and values that form the character of an astronaut would be satisfied by a lifetime of carrying bedpans and teaching the alphabet to the mentally retarded. The answer applies as well to the values and premises of the astronauts’ admirers. Slums are not a substitute for stars. [...]

As far as “national priorities” are concerned, I want to say the following: we do not have to have a mixed economy, we still have a chance to change our course and thus to survive. But if we do continue down the road of a mixed economy, then let them pour all the millions and billions they can into the space program. If the United States is to commit suicide, let it not be for the sake and support of the worst human elements, the parasites-on-principle, at home and abroad. Let it not be its only epitaph that it died paying its enemies for its own destruction. Let some of its lifeblood go to the support of achievement and the progress of science. The American flag on the moon—or on Mars, or on Jupiter—will, at least, be a worthy monument to what had once been a great country.

Apollo and Dionysus

ON JULY 16, 1969, one million people, from all over the country, converged on Cape Kennedy, Florida, to witness the launching of Apollo 11 that carried astronauts to the moon.

On August 15, 300,000 people, from all over the country, converged on Bethel, New York, near the town of Woodstock, to witness a rock music festival.

These two events were news, not philosophical theory. These were facts of our actual existence, the kinds of facts—according to both modern philosophers and practical businessmen—that philosophy has nothing to do with.

But if one cares to understand the meaning of these two events—to grasp their roots and their consequences—one will understand the power of philosophy and learn to recognize the specific forms in which philosophical abstractions appear in our actual existence.

The issue in this case is the alleged dichotomy of reason versus emotion.

This dichotomy has been presented in many variants in the history of philosophy, but its most colorfully eloquent statement was given by Friedrich Nietzsche. In The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche claims that he observed two opposite elements in Greek tragedies, which he saw as metaphysical principles inherent in the nature of reality; he named them after two Greek gods: Apollo, the god of light, and Dionysus, the god of wine. Apollo, in Nietzsche’s metaphysics, is the symbol of beauty, order, wisdom, efficacy (though Nietzsche equivocates about this last)—i.e., the symbol of reason. Dionysus is the symbol of drunkenness or, rather, Nietzsche cites drunkenness as his identification of what Dionysus stands for: wild, primeval feelings, orgiastic joy, the dark, the savage, the unintelligible element in man—i.e. the symbol of emotion.

Apollo, according to Nietzsche, is a necessary element, but an unreliable and thus inferior guide to existence, that gives man a superficial view of reality: the illusion of an orderly universe. Dionysus is the free, unfettered spirit that offers man—by means of a mysterious intuition induced by wine and drugs—a more profound vision of a different kind of reality, and is thus the superior. And—indicating that Nietzsche knew clearly what he was talking about, even though he chose to express it in a safely, drunkenly Dionysian manner—Apollo represents the principle of individuality, while Dionysus leads man “into complete self-forgetfulness” and into merging with the “Oneness” of nature. (Those who, at a superficial reading, take Nietzsche to be an advocate of individualism, please note.)

This much is true: reason is the faculty of an individual, to be exercised individually; and it is only dark, irrational emotions, obliterating his mind, that can enable a man to melt, merge and dissolve into a mob or a tribe. We may accept Nietzsche’s symbols, but not his estimate of their respective values, nor the metaphysical necessity of a reason-emotion dichotomy.

It is not true that reason and emotion are irreconcilable antagonists or that emotions are a wild, unknowable, ineffable element in men. But this is what emotions become for those who do not care to know what they feel, and who attempt to subordinate reason to their emotions. For every variant of such attempts—as well as for their consequences—the image of Dionysus is an appropriate symbol.

Symbolic figures are a valuable adjunct to philosophy: they help men to integrate and bear in mind the essential meaning of complex issues. Apollo and Dionysus represent the fundamental conflict of our age. And for those who may regard them as floating abstractions, reality has offered two perfect, fiction-like dramatizations of these abstract symbols: at Cape Kennedy and at Woodstock. They were perfect in every respect demanded of serious fiction: they concretized the essentials of the two principles involved, in action, in a pure, extreme, isolated form. The fact that the spacecraft was called “Apollo” is merely a coincidence, but a helpful coincidence.

If you want to know fully what the conflict of reason versus irrational emotion means—in fact, in reality, on earth—keep these two events in mind: it means Apollo 11 versus the Woodstock festival. Remember also that you are asked to make a choice between these two—and that the whole weight of today’s culture is being used to push you to the side of and into Woodstock’s mud. [...]

One of the paradoxes of our age is the fact that the intellectuals, the politicians and all the sundry voices that choke, like asthma, the throat of our communications media have never gasped and stuttered so loudly about their devotion to the public good and about the people’s will as the supreme criterion of value—and never have they been so grossly indifferent to the people. The reason, obviously, is that collectivist slogans serve as a rationalization for those who intend, not to follow the people, but to rule it. There is, however, a deeper reason: the most profound breach in this country is not between the rich and the poor, but between the people and the intellectuals. In their view of life, the American people are predominantly Apollonian; the “mainstream” intellectuals are Dionysian.

This means: the people are reality-oriented, common-sense-oriented, technology-oriented (the intellectuals call this “materialistic” and “middle-class”); the intellectuals are emotion-oriented and seek, in panic, an escape from a reality they are unable to deal with, and from a technological civilization that ignores their feelings.

The flight of Apollo 11 brought this out into the open. With rare exceptions, the intellectuals resented its triumph. A two-page survey of their reactions, published by The New York Times on July 21, was an almost unanimous spread of denigrations and denunciations. (See my article “Apollo 11.”) What they denounced was “technology”; what they resented was achievement and its source: reason. The same attitude—with rare exceptions—was displayed by the popular commentators, who are not the makers, but the products and the weather vanes of the prevailing intellectual trends.

Walter Cronkite of CBS was a notable exception. But Eric Sevareid of CBS was typical of the trend. On July 15, the eve of the launching, he broadcast from Cape Kennedy a commentary that was reprinted in Variety (July 23, 1969). “In Washington and elsewhere,” he said, “the doubts concern future flights, their number, their cost and their benefits, as if the success of Apollo 11 were already assured. We are a people who hate failure. It’s un-American. It is a fair guess that failure of Apollo 11 would not curtail future space programs but re-energize them.”

Please consider these two sentences: “We are a people who hate failure. It’s un-American.” (In the context of the rest, this was not intended as a compliment, though it should have been; it was intended as sarcasm.) Who doesn’t hate failure? Should one love it? Is there a nation on earth that doesn’t hate it? Surely, one would have to say that failure is un-British or un-French or un-Chinese. I can think of only one nation to whom this would not apply: failure is not un-Russian (in a sense which is deeper than politics).

But what Mr. Sevareid had in mind was not failure. It was the American dedication to success that he was deriding. It is true that no other nation as a whole is as successful as America, which is America’s greatest virtue. But success is never automatically immediate; passive resignation is not a typical American trait; Americans seldom give up. It is this precondition of success—the “try, try again” precept—that Mr. Sevareid was undercutting.

He went on to say that if Apollo 11 succeeded, “the pressure to divert these great sums of money to inner space, terra firma and inner man will steadily grow.” He went on to discuss the views of men who believe “that this adventure, however majestic its drama, is only one more act of escape, that it is man once again running away from himself and his real needs, that we are approaching the bright side of the moon with the dark side of ourselves.... We know that the human brain will soon know more about the composition of the moon than it knows about the human brain ... [and] why human beings do what they do.”

This last sentence is true, and one would think that the inescapable conclusion is that man should use his brain to study human nature by the same rational methods he has used so successfully to study inanimate matter. But not according to Mr. Sevareid; he reached a different conclusion: “It is possible that the divine spark in man will consume him in flames, that the big brain will prove our ultimate flaw, like the dinosaur’s big body, that the metal plaque Armstrong and Aldrin expect to place on the moon will become man’s epitaph.”

On July 20, while Apollo 11 was approaching the moon, and the world was waiting breathlessly, Mr. Sevareid found it appropriate to broadcast the following remark: no matter how great this event, he said, nothing much has changed, “man still puts his pants on, one leg at a time, he still argues with his wife,” etc. Well, each to his own hierarchy of values and of importance.

On the same day, David Brinkley of NBC observed that since men can now see and hear everything directly on television, by sensory-perceptual means (as he stressed), commentators are no longer needed at all. This implies that perceived events will somehow provide men automatically with the appropriate conceptual conclusions. The truth is that the more men perceive, the more they need the help of commentators, but of commentators who are able to provide a conceptual analysis.

According to a fan letter I received from Canada, the U.S. TV-commentaries during Apollo 11’s flight were mild compared to those on Canadian television. “We listened to an appalling panel of ‘experts’ disparage the project as a ‘mere technological cleverness by a stupid, pretentious speck of dust in the cosmos.’ ... They were also very concerned about the ‘inflated American ego’ if the voyage succeeded. One almost got the impression that they would be greatly relieved if the mission failed!”

What is the actual motive behind this attitude—the unadmitted, subconscious motive? An intelligent American newsman, Harry Reasoner of CBS, named it inadvertently; I had the impression that he did not realize the importance of his own statement. Many voices, at the time, were declaring that the success of Apollo 11 would destroy the poetic-romantic glamor of the moon, its fascinating mystery, its appeal to lovers and to human imagination. Harry Reasoner summed it up by saying simply, quietly, a little sadly, that if the moon is found to be made of green cheese, it will be a blow to science; but if it isn’t, it will be a blow to “those of us whose life is not so well organized.”

And this is the whole shabby secret: to some men, the sight of an achievement is a reproach, a reminder that their own lives are irrational and that there is no loophole, no escape from reason and reality. Their resentment is the cornered Dionysian element baring its teeth.

What Harry Reasoner’s statement implied was the fact that only the vanguard of the Dionysian cohorts is made up of wild, rampaging irrationalists, openly proclaiming their hatred of reason, dripping wine and blood. The bulk of Dionysus’ strength, his grass-roots following, consists of sedate little souls who never commit any major crime against reason, who merely indulge their petty irrational whims once in a while, covertly—and, overtly, seek a “balance of power,” a compromise between whims and reality. But reason is an absolute: in order to betray it, one does not have to dance naked in the streets with vine leaves in one’s hair; one betrays it merely by sneaking down the back stairs. Then, someday, one finds oneself unable to grasp why one feels no joy at the scientific discoveries that prolong human life or why the naked dancers are prancing all over one’s own body....

EDITOR’S NOTE: How can one live by reason, students often asked, when most people are unreasonable? Here, in part, from The Virtue of Selfishness is AR’s answer, written in 1962.

How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?

I WILL confine my answer to a single, fundamental aspect of this question. I will name only one principle, the opposite of the idea which is so prevalent today and which is responsible for the spread of evil in the world. That principle is: One must never fail to pronounce moral judgment.

Nothing can corrupt and disintegrate a culture or a man’s character as thoroughly as does the precept of moral agnosticism, the idea that one must never pass moral judgment on others, that one must be morally tolerant of anything, that the good consists of never distinguishing good from evil.

It is obvious who profits and who loses by such a precept. It is not justice or equal treatment that you grant to men when you abstain equally from praising men’s virtues and from condemning men’s vices. When your impartial attitude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you—whom do you betray and whom do you encourage?

But to pronounce moral judgment is an enormous responsibility. To be a judge, one must possess an unimpeachable character; one need not be omniscient or infallible, and it is not an issue of errors of knowledge; one needs an unbreached integrity, that is, the absence of any indulgence in conscious, willful evil. Just as a judge in a court of law may err, when the evidence is inconclusive, but may not evade the evidence available, nor accept bribes, nor allow any personal feeling, emotion, desire or fear to obstruct his mind’s judgment of the facts of reality—so every rational person must maintain an equally strict and solemn integrity in the courtroom within his own mind, where the responsibility is more awesome than in a public tribunal, because he, the judge, is the only one to know when he has been impeached.

There is, however, a court of appeal from one’s judgments: objective reality. A judge puts himself on trial every time he pronounces a verdict. It is only in today’s reign of amoral cynicism, subjectivism and hooliganism that men may imagine themselves free to utter any sort of irrational judgment and to suffer no consequences. But, in fact, a man is to be judged by the judgments he pronounces. The things which he condemns or extols exist in objective reality and are open to the independent appraisal of others. It is his own moral character and standards that he reveals, when he blames or praises. If he condemns America and extols Soviet Russia—or if he attacks businessmen and defends juvenile delinquents—or if he denounces a great work of art and praises trash—it is the nature of his own soul that he confesses.

It is their fear of this responsibility that prompts most people to adopt an attitude of indiscriminate moral neutrality. It is the fear best expressed in the precept: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” But that precept, in fact, is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.

There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.

The moral principle to adopt in this issue, is: “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”

The opposite of moral neutrality is not a blind, arbitrary, self-righteous condemnation of any idea, action or person that does not fit one’s mood, one’s memorized slogans or one’s snap judgment of the moment. Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion. To declare that “everybody is white” or “everybody is black” or “everybody is neither white nor black, but gray,” is not a moral judgment, but an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment.

To judge means: to evaluate a given concrete by reference to an abstract principle or standard. It is not an easy task; it is not a task that can be performed automatically by one’s feelings, “instincts” or hunches. It is a task that requires the most precise, the most exacting, the most ruthlessly objective and rational process of thought. It is fairly easy to grasp abstract moral principles; it can be very difficult to apply them to a given situation, particularly when it involves the moral character of another person. When one pronounces moral judgment, whether in praise or in blame, one must be prepared to answer “Why?” and to prove one’s case—to oneself and to any rational inquirer.

The policy of always pronouncing moral judgment does not mean that one must regard oneself as a missionary charged with the responsibility of “saving everyone’s soul”—nor that one must give unsolicited moral appraisals to all those one meets. It means: (a) that one must know clearly, in full, verbally identified form, one’s own moral evaluation of every person, issue and event with which one deals, and act accordingly; (b) that one must make one’s moral evaluation known to others, when it is rationally appropriate to do so.

This last means that one need not launch into unprovoked moral denunciations or debates, but that one must speak up in situations where silence can objectively be taken to mean agreement with or sanction of evil. When one deals with irrational persons, where argument is futile, a mere “I don’t agree with you” is sufficient to negate any implication of moral sanction. When one deals with better people, a full statement of one’s views may be morally required. But in no case and in no situation may one permit one’s own values to be attacked or denounced, and keep silent.

Moral values are the motive power of a man’s actions. By pronouncing moral judgment, one protects the clarity of one’s own perception and the rationality of the course one chooses to pursue. It makes a difference whether one thinks that one is dealing with human errors of knowledge or with human evil.

Observe how many people evade, rationalize and drive their minds into a state of blind stupor, in dread of discovering that those they deal with—their “loved ones” or friends or business associates or political rulers—are not merely mistaken, but evil. Observe that this dread leads them to sanction, to help and to spread the very evil whose existence they fear to acknowledge.

If people did not indulge in such abject evasions as the claim that some contemptible liar “means well”—that a mooching bum “can’t help it”—that a juvenile delinquent “needs love”—that a criminal “doesn’t know any better”—that a power-seeking politician is moved by patriotic concern for “the public good”—that communists are merely “agrarian reformers”—the history of the past few decades, or centuries, would have been different.

Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible “noble purpose,” but to plain, naked human evil.

Observe also that moral neutrality necessitates a progressive sympathy for vice and a progressive antagonism to virtue. A man who struggles not to acknowledge that evil is evil, finds it increasingly dangerous to acknowledge that the good is the good. To him, a person of virtue is a threat that can topple all of his evasions—particularly when an issue of justice is involved, which demands that he take sides. It is then that such formulas as “Nobody is ever fully right or fully wrong” and “Who am I to judge?” take their lethal effect. The man who begins by saying: “There is some good in the worst of us,” goes on to say: “There is some bad in the best of us”—then: “There’s got to be some bad in the best of us”—and then: “It’s the best of us who make life difficult—why don’t they keep silent?—who are they to judge?”

And then, on some gray, middle-aged morning, such a man realizes suddenly that he has betrayed all the values he had loved in his distant spring, and wonders how it happened, and slams his mind shut to the answer, by telling himself hastily that the fear he had felt in his worst, most shameful moments was right and that values have no chance in this world.

An irrational society is a society of moral cowards—of men paralyzed by the loss of moral standards, principles and goals. But since men have to act, so long as they live, such a society is ready to be taken over by anyone willing to set its direction. The initiative can come from only two types of men: either from the man who is willing to assume the responsibility of asserting rational values—or from the thug who is not troubled by questions of responsibility.

No matter how hard the struggle, there is only one choice that a rational man can make in the face of such an alternative.

PART THREE

Atlas Shrugged

EDITOR’s NOTE: The theme of Atlas Shrugged is the role of man’s mind—and specifically of the men of ability—in human existence. “I set out to show,” said AR, “how desperately the world needs prime movers, and how viciously it treats them. And I show it on a hypothetical case—what happens to the world without them” (Journals of Ayn Rand, 1997, p. 392). This is the plot-theme of the novel: what happens when the world’s thinkers and producers go on strike against the rule of the mindless.

The first excerpt (from Chapter VI) presents the anniversary party of a leading steel industrialist, Hank Rearden, who is the greatest victim of the world’s mistreatment. Rearden has just created—after ten years of excruciating effort—an invaluable new type of metal. Out of the first heat, he had ordered a special bracelet for his wife, Lillian.

Dagny Taggart, the novel’s heroine, is the operating vice president of Taggart Transcontinental Railroad; her brother James is its president. Dagny has been working closely with Rearden to build a new railroad with track made of Rearden Metal. Francisco d’Anconia, a copper baron, is—by all appearances at this point—a worthless playboy who is wasting his great potential along with a huge inherited fortune.

Rearden’s Anniversary Party

REARDEN PRESSED his forehead to the mirror and tried not to think.

That was the only way he could go through with it, he told himself. He concentrated on the relief of the mirror’s cooling touch, wondering how one went about forcing one’s mind into blankness, particularly after a lifetime lived on the axiom that the constant, clearest, most ruthless function of his rational faculty was his foremost duty. He wondered why no effort had ever seemed beyond his capacity, yet now he could not scrape up the strength to stick a few black pearl studs into his starched white shirt front.

This was his wedding anniversary and he had known for three months that the party would take place tonight, as Lillian wished. He had promised it to her, safe in the knowledge that the party was a long way off and that he would attend to it, when the time came, as he attended to every duty on his overloaded schedule. Then, during three months of eighteen-hour workdays, he had forgotten it happily—until half an hour ago, when, long past dinner time, his secretary had entered his office and said firmly, “Your party, Mr. Rearden.” He had cried, “Good God!” leaping to his feet; he had hurried home, rushed up the stairs, started tearing his clothes off and gone through the routine of dressing, conscious only of the need to hurry, not of the purpose. When the full realization of the purpose struck him like a sudden blow, he stopped.

“You don’t care for anything but business.” He had heard it all his life, pronounced as a verdict of damnation. He had always known that business was regarded as some sort of secret, shameful cult, which one did not impose on innocent laymen, that people thought of it as of an ugly necessity, to be performed but never mentioned, that to talk shop was an offense against higher sensibilities, that just as one washed machine grease off one’s hands before coming home, so one was supposed to wash the stain of business off one’s mind before entering a drawing room. He had never held that creed, but he had accepted it as natural that his family should hold it. He took it for granted—wordlessly, in the manner of a feeling absorbed in childhood, left unquestioned and unnamed—that he had dedicated himself, like the martyr of some dark religion, to the service of a faith which was his passionate love, but which made him an outcast among men, whose sympathy he was not to expect.

He had accepted the tenet that it was his duty to give his wife some form of existence unrelated to business. But he had never found the capacity to do it or even to experience a sense of guilt. He could neither force himself to change nor blame her if she chose to condemn him.

He had given Lillian none of his time for months—no, he thought, for years; for the eight years of their marriage. He had no interest to spare for her interests, not even enough to learn just what they were. She had a large circle of friends, and he had heard it said that their names represented the heart of the country’s culture, but he had never had time to meet them or even to acknowledge their fame by knowing what achievements had earned it. He knew only that he often saw their names on the magazine covers on newsstands. If Lillian resented his attitude, he thought, she was right. If her manner toward him was objectionable, he deserved it. If his family called him heartless, it was true.

He had never spared himself in any issue. When a problem came up at the mills, his first concern was to discover what error he had made; he did not search for anyone’s fault but his own; it was of himself that he demanded perfection. He would grant himself no mercy now; he took the blame. But at the mills, it prompted him to action in an immediate impulse to correct the error; now, it had no effect.... Just a few more minutes, he thought, standing against the mirror, his eyes closed.

He could not stop the thing in his mind that went on throwing words at him; it was like trying to plug a broken hydrant with his bare hands. Stinging jets, part words, part pictures, kept shooting at his brain.... Hours of it, he thought, hours to spend watching the eyes of the guests getting heavy with boredom if they were sober or glazing into an imbecile stare if they weren‘t, and pretend that he noticed neither, and strain to think of something to say to them, when he had nothing to say—while he needed hours of inquiry to find a successor for the superintendent of his rolling mills who had resigned suddenly, without explanation—he had to do it at once—men of that sort were so hard to find—and if anything happened to break the flow of the rolling mills—it was the Taggart rail that was being rolled.... He remembered the silent reproach, the look of accusation, long-bearing patience and scorn, which he always saw in the eyes of his family when they caught some evidence of his passion for his business—and the futility of his silence, of his hope that they would not think Rearden Steel meant as much to him as it did—like a drunkard pretending indifference to liquor, among people who watch him with the scornful amusement of their full knowledge of his shameful weakness.... “I heard you last night coming home at two in the morning, where were you?” his mother saying to him at the dinner table, and Lillian answering, “Why, at the mills, of course,” as another wife would say, “At the corner saloon.” ... Or Lillian asking him, the hint of a wise half-smile on her face, “What were you doing in New York yesterday?” “It was a banquet with the boys.” “Business?” “Yes.” “Of course”—and Lillian turning away, nothing more, except the shameful realization that he had almost hoped she would think he had attended some sort of obscene stag party.... An ore carrier had gone down in a storm on Lake Michigan, with thousands of tons of Rearden ore—those boats were falling apart—if he didn’t take it upon himself to help them obtain the replacements they needed, the owners of the line would go bankrupt, and there was no other line left in operation on Lake Michigan.... “That nook?” said Lillian, pointing to an arrangement of settees and coffee tables in their drawing room. “Why, no, Henry, it’s not new, but I suppose I should feel flattered that three weeks is all it took you to notice it. It’s my own adaptation of the morning room of a famous French palace—but things like that can’t possibly interest you, darling, there’s no stock market quotation on them, none whatever.” ... The order for copper, which he had placed six months ago, had not been delivered, the promised date had been postponed three times—“We can’t help it, Mr. Rearden”—he had to find another company to deal with, the supply of copper was becoming increasingly uncertain.... Philip [Rearden’s brother] did not smile, when he looked up in the midst of a speech he was making to some friend of their mother’s, about some organization he had joined, but there was something that suggested a smile of superiority in the loose muscles of his face when he said, “No, you wouldn’t care for this, it’s not business, Henry, not business at all, it’s a strictly non-commercial endeavor.” ... That contractor in Detroit, with the job of rebuilding a large factory, was considering structural shapes of Rearden Metal—he should fly to Detroit and speak to him in person—he should have done it a week ago—he could have done it tonight.... “You’re not listening,” said his mother at the breakfast table, when his mind wandered to the current coal price index, while she was telling him about the dream she’d had last night. “You’ve never listened to a living soul. You’re not interested in anything but yourself. You don’t give a damn about people, not about a single human creature on God’s earth.” ... The typed pages lying on the desk in his office were a report on the tests of an airplane motor made of Rearden Metal—perhaps of all things on earth, the one he wanted most at this moment was to read it—it had lain on his desk, untouched, for three days, he had had no time for it—why didn’t he do it now and—

He shook his head violently, opening his eyes, stepping back from the mirror.

He tried to reach for the shirt studs. He saw his hand reaching, instead, for the pile of mail on his dresser. It was mail picked as urgent, it had to be read tonight, but he had had no time to read it in the office. His secretary had stuffed it into his pocket on his way out. He had thrown it there while undressing.

A newspaper clipping fluttered down to the floor. It was an editorial which his secretary had marked with an angry slash in red pencil. It was entitled “Equalization of Opportunity.” He had to read it: there had been too much talk about this issue in the last three months, ominously too much.

He read it, with the sound of voices and forced laughter coming from downstairs, reminding him that the guests were arriving, that the party had started and that he would face the bitter, reproachful glances of his family when he came down.

The editorial said that at a time of dwindling production, shrinking markets and vanishing opportunities to make a living, it was unfair to let one man hoard several business enterprises, while others had none; it was destructive to let a few corner all the resources, leaving others no chance; competition was essential to society, and it was society’s duty to see that no competitor ever rose beyond the range of anybody who wanted to compete with him. The editorial predicted the passage of a bill which had been proposed, a bill forbidding any person or corporation to own more than one business concern.

Wesley Mouch, his Washington man, had told Rearden not to worry; the fight would be stiff, he had said, but the bill would be defeated. Rearden understood nothing about that kind of fight. He left it to Mouch and his staff. He could barely find time to skim through their reports from Washington and to sign the checks which Mouch requested for the battle.

Rearden did not believe that the bill would pass. He was incapable of believing it. Having dealt with the clean reality of metals, technology, production all his life, he had acquired the conviction that one had to concern oneself with the rational, not the insane—that one had to seek that which was right, because the right answer always won—that the senseless, the wrong, the monstrously unjust could not work, could not succeed, could do nothing but defeat itself. A battle against a thing such as that bill seemed preposterous and faintly embarrassing to him, as if he were suddenly asked to compete with a man who calculated steel mixtures by the formulas of numerology.

He had told himself that the issue was dangerous. But the loudest screaming of the most hysterical editorial roused no emotion in him—while a variation of a decimal point in a laboratory report on a test of Rearden Metal made him leap to his feet in eagerness or apprehension. He had no energy to spare for anything else.

He crumpled the editorial and threw it into the wastebasket. He felt the leaden approach of that exhaustion which he never felt at his job, the exhaustion that seemed to wait for him and catch him the moment he turned to other concerns. He felt as if he were incapable of any desire except a desperate longing for sleep.

He told himself that he had to attend the party—that his family had the right to demand it of him—that he had to learn to like their kind of pleasure, for their sake, not his own.

He wondered why this was a motive that had no power to impel him. Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically. What was happening to him?—he wondered. The impossible conflict of feeling reluctance to do that which was right—wasn’t it the basic formula of moral corruption? To recognize one’s guilt, yet feel nothing but the coldest, most profound indifference—wasn’t it a betrayal of that which had been the motor of his life-course and of his pride?

He gave himself no time to seek an answer. He finished dressing, quickly, pitilessly.

Holding himself erect, his tall figure moving with the unstressed, unhurried confidence of habitual authority, the white of a fine handkerchief in the breast pocket of his black dinner jacket, he walked slowly down the stairs to the drawing room, looking—to the satisfaction of the dowagers who watched him—like the perfect figure of a great industrialist.

He saw Lillian at the foot of the stairs. The patrician lines of a lemon-yellow Empire evening gown stressed her graceful body, and she stood like a person proudly in control of her proper background. He smiled; he liked to see her happy; it gave some reasonable justification to the party.

He approached her—and stopped. She had always shown good taste in her use of jewelry, never wearing too much of it. But tonight she wore an ostentatious display: a diamond necklace, earrings, rings and brooches. Her arms looked conspicuously bare by contrast. On her right wrist, as sole ornament, she wore the bracelet of Rearden Metal. The glittering gems made it look like an ugly piece of dime-store jewelry.

When he moved his glance from her wrist to her face, he found her looking at him. Her eyes were narrowed and he could not define their expression; it was a look that seemed both veiled and purposeful, the look of something hidden that flaunted its security from detection.

He wanted to tear the bracelet off her wrist. Instead, in obedience to her voice gaily pronouncing an introduction, he bowed to the dowager who stood beside her, his face expressionless.

“Man? What is man? He’s just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur,” said Dr. Pritchett to a group of guests across the room.

Dr. Pritchett picked a canape off a crystal dish, held it speared between two straight fingers and deposited it whole into his mouth.

“Man’s metaphysical pretensions,” he said, “are preposterous. A miserable bit of protoplasm, full of ugly little concepts and mean little emotions—and it imagines itself important! Really, you know, that is the root of all the troubles in the world.”

“But which concepts are not ugly or mean, Professor?” asked an earnest matron whose husband owned an automobile factory.

“None,” said Dr. Pritchett. “None within the range of man’s capacity:”

A young man asked hesitantly, “But if we haven’t any good concepts, how do we know that the ones we’ve got are ugly? I mean, by what standard?”

“There aren’t any standards.”

This silenced his audience.

“The philosophers of the past were superficial,” Dr. Pritchett went on. “It remained for our century to redefine the purpose of philosophy. The purpose of philosophy is not to help men find the meaning of life, but to prove to them that there isn’t any.”

An attractive young woman, whose father owned a coal mine, asked indignantly, “Who can tell us that?”

“I am trying to,” said Dr. Pritchett. For the last three years, he had been head of the Department of Philosophy at the Patrick Henry University.

Lillian Rearden approached, her jewels glittering under the lights. The expression on her face was held to the soft hint of a smile, set and faintly suggested, like the waves of her hair.

“It is this insistence of man upon meaning that makes him so difficult,” said Dr. Pritchett. “Once he realizes that he is of no importance whatever in the vast scheme of the universe, that no possible significance can be attached to his activities, that it does not matter whether he lives or dies, he will become much more... tractable.”

He shrugged and reached for another canape. A businessman said uneasily, “What I asked you about, Professor, was what you thought about the Equalization of Opportunity Bill.”

“Oh, that?” said Dr. Pritchett. “But I believe I made it clear that I am in favor of it, because I am in favor of a free economy. A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be forced to compete. Therefore, we must control men in order to force them to be free.”

“But, look... isn’t that sort of a contradiction?”

“Not in the higher philosophical sense. You must learn to see beyond the static definitions of old-fashioned thinking. Nothing is static in the universe. Everything is fluid.”

“But it stands to reason that if—”

“Reason, my dear fellow, is the most naive of all superstitions. That, at least, has been generally conceded in our age.”

“But I don’t quite understand how we can—”

“You suffer from the popular delusion of believing that things can be understood. You do not grasp the fact that the universe is a solid contradiction.”

“A contradiction of what?” asked the matron.

“Of itself.”

“How ... how’s that?”

“My dear madam, the duty of thinkers is not to explain, but to demonstrate that nothing can be explained.”

“Yes, of course... only ...”

“The purpose of philosophy is not to seek knowledge, but to prove that knowledge is impossible to man.”

“But when we prove it,” asked the young woman, “what’s going to be left?”

“Instinct,” said Dr. Pritchett reverently.

At the other end of the room, a group was listening to Balph Eubank. He sat upright on the edge of an armchair, in order to counteract the appearance of his face and figure, which had a tendency to spread if relaxed.

“The literature of the past,” said Balph Eubank, “was a shallow fraud. It whitewashed life in order to please the money tycoons whom it served. Morality, free will, achievement, happy endings, and man as some sort of heroic being—all that stuff is laughable to us. Our age has given depth to literature for the first time, by exposing the real essence of life.”

A very young girl in a white evening gown asked timidly, “What is the real essence of life, Mr. Eubank?”

“Suffering,” said Balph Eubank. “Defeat and suffering.”

“But ... but why? People are happy... sometimes ... aren’t they?”

“That is a delusion of those whose emotions are superficial.”

The girl blushed. A wealthy woman who had inherited an oil refinery, asked guiltily, “What should we do to raise the people’s literary taste, Mr. Eubank?”

“That is a great social problem,” said Balph Eubank. He was described as the literary leader of the age, but had never written a book that sold more than three thousand copies. “Personally, I believe that an Equalization of Opportunity Bill applying to literature would be the solution.”

“Oh, do you approve of that Bill for industry? I’m not sure I know what to think of it.”

“Certainly, I approve of it. Our culture has sunk into a bog of materialism. Men have lost all spiritual values in their pursuit of material production and technological trickery. They’re too comfortable. They will return to a nobler life if we teach them to bear privations. So we ought to place a limit upon their material greed.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” said the woman apologetically.

“But how are you going to work an Equalization of Opportunity Bill for literature, Ralph?” asked Mort Liddy. “That’s a new one on me.”

“My name is Balph,” said Eubank angrily. “And it’s a new one on you because it’s my own idea.”

“Okay, okay, I’m not quarreling, am I? I’m just asking.” Mort Liddy smiled. He spent most of his time smiling nervously. He was a composer who wrote old-fashioned scores for motion pictures, and modern symphonies for sparse audiences.

“It would work very simply,” said Balph Eubank. “There should be a law limiting the sale of any book to ten thousand copies. This would throw the literary market open to new talent, fresh ideas and non-commercial writing. If people were forbidden to buy a million copies of the same piece of trash, they would be forced to buy better books.”

“You’ve got something there,” said Mort Liddy. “But wouldn’t it be kinda tough on the writers’ bank accounts?”

“So much the better. Only those whose motive is not moneymaking should be allowed to write.”

“But, Mr. Eubank,” asked the young girl in the white dress, “what if more than ten thousand people want to buy a certain book?”

“Ten thousand readers is enough for any book.”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean, what if they want it?”

“That is irrelevant.”

“But if a book has a good story which—”

“Plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature,” said Balph Eubank contemptuously.

Dr. Pritchett, on his way across the room to the bar, stopped to say, “Quite so. Just as logic is a primitive vulgarity in philosophy.”

“Just as melody is a primitive vulgarity in music,” said Mort Liddy.

“What’s all this noise?” asked Lillian Rearden, glittering to a stop beside them.

“Lillian, my angel,” Balph Eubank drawled, “did I tell you that I’m dedicating my new novel to you?”

“Why, thank you, darling.”

“What is the name of your new novel?” asked the wealthy woman.

“The Heart Is a Milkman.”

“What is it about?”

“Frustration.”

“But, Mr. Eubank,” asked the young girl in the white dress, blushing desperately, “if everything is frustration, what is there to live for?”

“Brother-love,” said Balph Eubank grimly.

Bertram Scudder stood slouched against the bar. His long, thin face looked as if it had shrunk inward, with the exception of his mouth and eyeballs, which were left to protrude as three soft globes. He was the editor of a magazine called The Future and he had written an article on Hank Rearden, entitled “The Octopus.”

Bertram Scudder picked up his empty glass and shoved it silently toward the bartender, to be refilled. He took a gulp from his fresh drink, noticed the empty glass in front of Philip Rearden, who stood beside him, and jerked his thumb in a silent command to the bartender. He ignored the empty glass in front of Betty Pope, who stood at Philip’s other side.

“Look, bud,” said Bertram Scudder, his eyeballs focused approximately in the direction of Philip, “whether you like it or not, the Equalization of Opportunity Bill represents a great step forward.”

“What made you think that I did not like it, Mr. Scudder?” Philip asked humbly.

“Well, it’s going to pinch, isn’t it? The long arm of society is going to trim a little off the hors d’oeuvres bill around here.” He waved his hand at the bar.

“Why do you assume that I object to that?”

“You don’t?” Bertram Scudder asked without curiosity.

“I don’t!” said Philip hotly. “I have always placed the public good above any personal consideration. I have contributed my time and money to Friends of Global Progress in their crusade for the Equalization of Opportunity Bill. I think it is perfectly unfair that one man should get all the breaks and leave none to others.”

Bertram Scudder considered him speculatively, but without particular interest. “Well, that’s quite unusually nice of you,” he said.

“Some people do take moral issues seriously, Mr. Scudder,” said Philip, with a gentle stress of pride in his voice.

“What’s he talking about, Philip?” asked Betty Pope. “We don’t know anybody who owns more than one business, do we?”

“Oh, pipe down!” said Bertram Scudder, his voice bored.

“I don’t see why there’s so much fuss about that Equalization of Opportunity Bill,” said Betty Pope aggressively, in the tone of an expert on economics. “I don’t see why businessmen object to it. It’s to their own advantage. If everybody else is poor, they won’t have any market for their goods. But if they stop being selfish and share the goods they’ve hoarded—they’ll have a chance to work hard and produce some more.”

“I do not see why industrialists should be considered at all,” said Scudder. “When the masses are destitute and yet there are goods available, it’s idiotic to expect people to be stopped by some scrap of paper called a property deed. Property rights are a superstition. One holds property only by the courtesy of those who do not seize it. The people can seize it at any moment. If they can, why shouldn’t they?”

“They should,” said Claude Slagenhop. “They need it. Need is the only consideration. If people are in need, we’ve got to seize things first and talk about it afterwards.”

Claude Slagenhop had approached and managed to squeeze himself between Philip and Scudder, shoving Scudder aside imperceptibly. Slagenhop was not tall or heavy, but he had a square, compact bulk, and a broken nose. He was the president of Friends of Global Progress.

“Hunger won’t wait,” said Claude Slagenhop. “Ideas are just hot air. An empty belly is a solid fact. I’ve said in all my speeches that it’s not necessary to talk too much. Society is suffering for lack of business opportunities at the moment, so we’ve got the right to seize such opportunities as exist. Right is whatever’s good for society.”

“He didn’t dig that ore single-handed, did he?” cried Philip suddenly, his voice shrill. “He had to employ hundreds of workers. They did it. Why does he think he’s so good?”

The two men looked at him, Scudder lifting an eyebrow, Slagenhop without expression.

“Oh, dear me!” said Betty Pope, remembering.

Hank Rearden stood at a window in a dim recess at the end of the drawing room. He hoped no one would notice him for a few minutes. He had just escaped from a middle-aged woman who had been telling him about her psychic experiences. He stood, looking out. Far in the distance, the red glow of Rearden Steel moved in the sky. He watched it for a moment’s relief.

He turned to look at the drawing room. He had never liked his house; it had been Lillian’s choice. But tonight, the shifting colors of the evening dresses drowned out the appearance of the room and gave it an air of brilliant gaiety. He liked to see people being gay, even though he did not understand this particular manner of enjoyment.

He looked at the flowers, at the sparks of light on the crystal glasses, at the naked arms and shoulders of women. There was a cold wind outside, sweeping empty stretches of land. He saw the thin branches of a tree being twisted, like arms waving in an appeal for help. The tree stood against the glow of the mills.

He could not name his sudden emotion. He had no words to state its cause, its quality, its meaning. Some part of it was joy, but it was solemn like the act of baring one’s head—he did not know to whom.

When he stepped back into the crowd, he was smiling. But the smile vanished abruptly; he saw the entrance of a new guest: it was Dagny Taggart.

Lillian moved forward to meet her, studying her with curiosity. They had met before, on infrequent occasions, and she found it strange to see Dagny Taggart wearing an evening gown. It was a black dress with a bodice that fell as a cape over one arm and shoulder, leaving the other bare; the naked shoulder was the gown’s only ornament. Seeing her in the suits she wore, one never thought of Dagny Taggart’s body. The black dress seemed excessively revealing—because it was astonishing to discover that the lines of her shoulder were fragile and beautiful, and that the diamond band on the wrist of her naked arm gave her the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained.

“Miss Taggart, it is such a wonderful surprise to see you here,” said Lillian Rearden, the muscles of her face performing the motions of a smile. “I had not really dared to hope that an invitation from me would take you away from your ever so much weightier concerns. Do permit me to feel flattered.”

James Taggart had entered with his sister. Lillian smiled at him, in the manner of a hasty postscript, as if noticing him for the first time.

“Hello, James. That’s your penalty for being popular—one tends to lose sight of you in the surprise of seeing your sister.”

“No one can match you in popularity, Lillian,” he answered, smiling thinly, “nor ever lose sight of you.”

“Me? Oh, but I am quite resigned to taking second place in the shadow of my husband. I am humbly aware that the wife of a great man has to be contented with reflected glory—don’t you think so, Miss Taggart?”

“No,” said Dagny, “I don’t.”

“Is this a compliment or a reproach, Miss Taggart? But do forgive me if I confess I’m helpless. Whom may I present to you? I’m afraid I have nothing but writers and artists to offer, and they wouldn’t interest you, I’m sure.”

“I’d like to find Hank and say hello to him.”

“But of course. James, do you remember you said you wanted to meet Balph Eubank?—oh yes, he’s here—I’ll tell him that I heard you rave about his last novel at Mrs. Whitcomb’s dinner!”

Walking across the room, Dagny wondered why she had said that she wanted to find Hank Rearden, what had prevented her from admitting that she had seen him the moment she entered.

Rearden stood at the other end of the long room, looking at her. He watched her as she approached, but he did not step forward to meet her.

“Hello, Hank.”

“Good evening.”

He bowed, courteously, impersonally, the movement of his body matching the distinguished formality of his clothes. He did not smile.

“Thank you for inviting me tonight,” she said gaily.

“I cannot claim that I knew you were coming.”

“Oh? Then I’m glad that Mrs. Rearden thought of me. I wanted to make an exception.”

“An exception?”

“I don’t go to parties very often.”

“I am pleased that you chose this occasion as the exception.” He did not add “Miss Taggart,” but it sounded as if he had.

The formality of his manner was so unexpected that she was unable to adjust to it. “I wanted to celebrate,” she said.

“To celebrate my wedding anniversary?”

“Oh, is it your wedding anniversary? I didn’t know. My congratulations, Hank.”

“What did you wish to celebrate?”

“I thought I’d permit myself a rest. A celebration of my own—in your honor and mine.”

“For what reason?”

She was thinking of the new track on the rocky grades of the Colorado mountains, growing slowly toward the distant goal of the Wyatt oil fields. She was seeing the greenish-blue glow of the rails on the frozen ground, among the dried weeds, the naked boulders, the rotting shanties of half-starved settlements.

“In honor of the first sixty miles of Rearden Metal track,” she answered.

“I appreciate it.” The tone of his voice was the one that would have been proper if he had said, “I’ve never heard of it.”

She found nothing else to say. She felt as if she were speaking to a stranger.

“Why, Miss Taggart!” a cheerful voice broke their silence. “Now this is what I mean when I say that Hank Rearden can achieve any miracle!”

A businessman whom they knew had approached, smiling at her in delighted astonishment. The three of them had often held emergency conferences about freight rates and steel deliveries. Now he looked at her, his face an open comment on the change in her appearance, the change, she thought, which Rearden had not noticed.

She laughed, answering the man’s greeting, giving herself no time to recognize the unexpected stab of disappointment, the unadmitted thought that she wished she had seen this look on Rearden’s face, instead. She exchanged a few sentences with the man. When she glanced around, Rearden was gone.

“So that is your famous sister?” said Balph Eubank to James Taggart, looking at Dagny across the room.

“I was not aware that my sister was famous,” said Taggart, a faint bite in his voice.

“But, my good man, she’s an unusual phenomenon in the field of economics, so you must expect people to talk about her. Your sister is a symptom of the illness of our century. A decadent product of the machine age. Machines have destroyed man’s humanity, taken him away from the soil, robbed him of his natural arts, killed his soul and turned him into an insensitive robot. There’s an example of it—a woman who runs a railroad, instead of practicing the beautiful craft of the handloom and bearing children.”

Rearden moved among the guests, trying not to be trapped into conversation. He looked at the room; he saw no one he wished to approach.

“Say, Hank Rearden, you’re not such a bad fellow at all when seen close up in the lion’s own den. You ought to give us a press conference once in a while, you’d win us over.”

Rearden turned and looked at the speaker incredulously. It was a young newspaperman of the seedier sort, who worked on a radical tabloid. The offensive familiarity of his manner seemed to imply that he chose to be rude to Rearden because he knew that Rearden should never have permitted himself to associate with a man of his kind.

Rearden would not have allowed him inside the mills; but the man was Lillian’s guest; he controlled himself; he asked dryly, “What do you want?”

“You’re not so bad. You’ve got talent. Technological talent. But, of course, I don’t agree with you about Rearden Metal.”

“I haven’t asked you to agree.”

“Well, Bertram Scudder said that your policy—” the man started belligerently, pointing toward the bar, but stopped, as if he had slid farther than he intended.

Rearden looked at the untidy figure slouched against the bar. Lillian had introduced them, but he had paid no attention to the name. He turned sharply and walked off, in a manner that forbade the young bum to tag him.

Lillian glanced up at his face, when Rearden approached her in the midst of a group, and, without a word, stepped aside where they could not be heard.

“Is that Scudder of The Future?” he asked, pointing.

“Why, yes.”

He looked at her silently, unable to begin to believe it, unable to find the lead of a thought with which to begin to understand. Her eyes were watching him.

“How could you invite him here?” he asked.

“Now, Henry, don’t let’s be ridiculous. You don’t want to be narrow-minded, do you? You must learn to tolerate the opinions of others and respect their right of free speech.”

“In my house?”

“Oh, don’t be stuffy!”

He did not speak, because his consciousness was held, not by coherent statements, but by two pictures that seemed to glare at him insistently. He saw the article, “The Octopus,” by Bertram Scudder, which was not an expression of ideas, but a bucket of slime emptied in public—an article that did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one, but poured a stream of sneers and adjectives in which nothing was clear except the filthy malice of denouncing without considering proof necessary, And he saw the lines of Lillian’s profile, the proud purity which he had sought in marrying her.

When he noticed her again, he realized that the vision of her profile was in his own mind, because she was turned to him fullface, watching him. In the sudden instant of returning to reality, he thought that what he saw in her eyes was enjoyment. But in the next instant he reminded himself that he was sane and that this was not possible.

“It’s the first time you’ve invited that ...” he used an obscene word with unemotional precision, “to my house. It’s the last.”

“How dare you use such—”

“Don’t argue, Lillian. If you do, I’ll throw him out right now.”

He gave her a moment to answer, to object, to scream at him if she wished. She remained silent, not looking at him, only her smooth cheeks seemed faintly drawn inward, as if deflated.

Moving blindly away through the coils of lights, voices and perfume, he felt a cold touch of dread. He knew that he should think of Lillian and find the answer to the riddle of her character, because this was a revelation which he could not ignore; but he did not think of her—and he felt the dread because he knew that the answer had ceased to matter to him long ago.

The flood of weariness was starting to rise again. He felt as if he could almost see it in thickening waves; it was not within him, but outside, spreading through the room. For an instant, he felt as if he were alone, lost in a gray desert, needing help and knowing that no help would come.

He stopped short. In the lighted doorway, the length of the room between them, he saw the tall, arrogant figure of a man who had paused for a moment before entering. He had never met the man, but of all the notorious faces that cluttered the pages of newspapers, this was the one he despised. It was Francisco d’Anconia.

Rearden had never given much thought to men like Bertram Scudder. But with every hour of his life, with the strain and the pride of every moment when his muscles or his mind had ached from effort, with every step he had taken to rise out of the mines of Minnesota and to turn his effort into gold, with all of his profound respect for money and for its meaning, he despised the squanderer who did not know how to deserve the great gift of inherited wealth. There, he thought, was the most contemptible representative of the species.

He saw Francisco d’Anconia enter, bow to Lillian, then walk into the crowd as if he owned the room which he had never entered before. Heads turned to watch him, as if he pulled them on strings in his wake.

Approaching Lillian once more, Rearden said without anger, the contempt becoming amusement in his voice, “I didn’t know you knew that one.”

“I’ve met him at a few parties.”

“Is he one of your friends, too?”

“Certainly not!” The sharp resentment was genuine.

“Then why did you invite him?”

“Well, you can’t give a party—not a party that counts—while he’s in this country, without inviting him. It’s a nuisance if he comes, and a social black mark if he doesn’t.”

Rearden laughed. She was off guard; she did not usually admit things of this kind. “Look,” he said wearily, “I don’t want to spoil your party. But keep that man away from me. Don’t come around with introductions. I don’t want to meet him. I don’t know how you’ll work that, but you’re an expert hostess, so work it.”

Dagny stood still when she saw Francisco approaching. He bowed to her as he passed by. He did not stop, but she knew that he had stopped the moment in his mind. She saw him smile faintly in deliberate emphasis of what he understood and did not choose to acknowledge. She turned away. She hoped to avoid him for the rest of the evening.

Balph Eubank had joined the group around Dr. Pritchett, and was saying sullenly, “... no, you cannot expect people to understand the higher reaches of philosophy. Culture should be taken out of the hands of the dollar-chasers. We need a national subsidy for literature. It is disgraceful that artists are treated like peddlers and that art works have to be sold like soap.”

“You mean, your complaint is that they don’t sell like soap?” asked Francisco d’Anconia.

They had not noticed him approach; the conversation stopped, as if slashed off; most of them had never met him, but they all recognized him at once.

“I meant—” Balph Eubank started angrily and closed his mouth; he saw the eager interest on the faces of his audience, but it was not interest in philosophy any longer.

“Why, hello, Professor!” said Francisco, bowing to Dr. Pritchett.

There was no pleasure in Dr. Pritchett’s face when he answered the greeting and performed a few introductions.

“We were just discussing a most interesting subject,” said the earnest matron. “Dr. Pritchett was telling us that nothing is anything.”

“He should, undoubtedly, know more than anyone else about that,” Francisco answered gravely.

“I wouldn’t have supposed that you knew Dr. Pritchett so well, Senor d’Anconia,” she said, and wondered why the professor looked displeased by her remark.

“I am an alumnus of the great school that employs Dr. Pritchett at present, the Patrick Henry University. But I studied under one of his predecessors—Hugh Akston.”

“Hugh Akston!” the attractive young woman gasped. “But you couldn’t have, Senor d’Anconia! You’re not old enough. I thought he was one of those great names of... of the last century.”

“Perhaps in spirit, madame. Not in fact.”

“But I thought he died years ago.”

“Why, no. He’s still alive.”

“Then why don’t we ever hear about him any more?”

“He retired, nine years ago.”

“Isn’t it odd? When a politician or a movie star retires, we read front page stories about it. But when a philosopher retires, people do not even notice it.”

“They do, eventually.”

A young man said, astonished, “I thought Hugh Akston was one of those classics that nobody studied any more, except in histories of philosophy. I read an article recently which referred to him as the last of the great advocates of reason.”

“Just what did Hugh Akston teach?” asked the earnest matron.

Francisco answered, “He taught that everything is something.”

“Your loyalty to your teacher is laudable, Señor d’Anconia,” said Dr. Pritchett dryly. “May we take it that you are an example of the practical results of his teaching?”

“I am.”

James Taggart had approached the group and was waiting to be noticed.

“Hello, Francisco.”

“Good evening, James.”

“What a wonderful coincidence, seeing you here! I’ve been very anxious to speak to you.”

“That’s new. You haven’t always been.”

“Now you’re joking, just like in the old days.” Taggart was moving slowly, as if casually, away from the group, hoping to draw Francisco after him. “You know that there’s not a person in this room who wouldn’t love to talk to you.”

“Really? I’d be inclined to suspect the opposite.” Francisco had followed obediently, but stopped within hearing distance of the others.

“I have tried in every possible way to get in touch with you,” said Taggart, “but ... but circumstances didn’t permit me to succeed.”

“Are you trying to hide from me the fact that I refused to see you?”

“Well... that is ... I mean, why did you refuse?”

“I couldn’t imagine what you wanted to speak to me about.”

“The San Sebastián Mines, of course!” Taggart’s voice rose a little.

“Why, what about them?”

“But ... Now, look, Francisco, this is serious. It’s a disaster, an unprecedented disaster—and nobody can make any sense out of it. I don’t know what to think. I don’t understand it at all. I have a right to know.”

“A right? Aren’t you being old-fashioned, James? But what is it you want to know?”

“Well, first of all, that nationalization [by Mexico]—what are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?!”

“But surely you don’t want me to do anything about it. My mines and your railroad were seized by the will of the people. You wouldn’t want me to oppose the will of the people, would you?”

“Francisco, this is not a laughing matter!”

“I never thought it was.”

“I’m entitled to an explanation! You owe your stockholders an account of the whole disgraceful affair! Why did you pick a worthless mine? Why did you waste all those millions? What sort of rotten swindle was it?”

Francisco stood looking at him in polite astonishment. “Why, James,” he said, “I thought you would approve of it.”

“Approve?!”

“I thought you would consider the San Sebastián Mines as the practical realization of an ideal of the highest moral order. Remembering that you and I have disagreed so often in the past, I thought you would be gratified to see me acting in accordance with your principles.”

“What are you talking about?”

Francisco shook his head regretfully. “I don’t know why you should call my behavior rotten. I thought you would recognize it as an honest effort to practice what the whole world is preaching. Doesn’t everyone believe that it is evil to be selfish? I was totally selfless in regard to the San Sebastián project. Isn’t it evil to pursue a personal interest? I had no personal interest in it whatever. Isn’t it evil to work for profit? I did not work for profit—I took a loss. Doesn’t everyone agree that the purpose and justification of an industrial enterprise are not production, but the livelihood of its employees? The San Sebastián Mines were the most eminently successful venture in industrial history: they produced no copper, but they provided a livelihood for thousands of men who could not have achieved in a lifetime, the equivalent of what they got for one day’s work, which they could not do. Isn’t it generally agreed that an owner is a parasite and an exploiter, that it is the employees who do all the work and make the product possible? I did not exploit anyone. I did not burden the San Sebastián Mines with my useless presence; I left them in the hands of the men who count. I did not pass judgment on the value of that property. I turned it over to a mining specialist. He was not a very good specialist, but he needed the job very badly. Isn’t it generally conceded that when you hire a man for a job, it is his need that counts, not his ability? Doesn’t everyone believe that in order to get the goods, all you have to do is need them? I haven’t carried out every moral precept of our age. I expected gratitude and a citation of honor. I do not understand why I am being damned.”

In the silence of those who had listened, the sole comment was the shrill, sudden giggle of Betty Pope: she had understood nothing, but she saw the look of helpless fury on James Taggart’s face.

People were looking at Taggart, expecting an answer. They were indifferent to the issue, they were merely amused by the spectacle of someone’s embarrassment. Taggart achieved a patronizing smile.

“You don’t expect me to take this seriously?” he asked.

“There was a time,” Francisco answered, “when I did not believe that anyone could take it seriously. I was wrong.”

“This is outrageous!” Taggart’s voice started to rise. “It’s perfectly outrageous to treat your public responsibilities with such thoughtless levity!” He turned to hurry away.

Francisco shrugged, spreading his hands. “You see? I didn’t think you wanted to speak to me.”

Rearden stood alone, far at the other end of the room. Philip noticed him, approached and waved to Lillian, calling her over.

“Lillian, I don’t think that Henry is having a good time,” he said, smiling; one could not tell whether the mockery of his smile was directed at Lillian or at Rearden. “Can’t we do something about it?”

“Oh, nonsense!” said Rearden.

“I wish I knew what to do about it, Philip,” said Lillian. “I’ve always wished Henry would learn to relax. He’s so grimly serious about everything. He’s such a rigid Puritan. I’ve always wanted to see him drunk, just once. But I’ve given up. What would you suggest?”

“Oh, I don’t know! But he shouldn’t be standing around all by himself.”

“Drop it,” said Rearden. While thinking dimly that he did not want to hurt their feelings, he could not prevent himself from adding, “You don’t know how hard I’ve tried to be left standing all by myself.”

“There—you see?” Lillian smiled at Philip. “To enjoy life and people is not so simple as pouring a ton of steel. Intellectual pursuits are not learned in the market place.”

Philip chuckled. “It’s not intellectual pursuits I’m worried about. How sure are you about that Puritan stuff, Lillian? If I were you, I wouldn’t leave him free to look around. There are too many beautiful women here tonight.”

“Henry entertaining thoughts of infidelity? You flatter him, Philip. You overestimate his courage.” She smiled at Rearden, coldly, for a brief, stressed moment, then moved away.

Rearden looked at his brother. “What in hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Oh, stop playing the Puritan! Can’t you take a joke?”

Moving aimlessly through the crowd, Dagny wondered why she had accepted the invitation to this party. The answer astonished her: it was because she had wanted to see Hank Rearden. Watching him in the crowd, she realized the contrast for the first time. The faces of the others looked like aggregates of interchangeable features, every face oozing to blend into the anonymity of resembling all, and all looking as if they were melting. Rearden’s face, with the sharp planes, the pale blue eyes, the ash-blond hair, had the firmness of ice; the uncompromising clarity of its lines made it look, among the others, as if he were moving through a fog, hit by a ray of light.

Her eyes kept returning to him involuntarily. She never caught him glancing in her direction. She could not believe that he was avoiding her intentionally; there could be no possible reason for it; yet she felt certain that he was. She wanted to approach him and convince herself that she was mistaken. Something stopped her; she could not understand her own reluctance.

Rearden bore patiently a conversation with his mother and two ladies whom she wished him to entertain with stories of his youth and his struggle. He complied, telling himself that she was proud of him in her own way. But he felt as if something in her manner kept suggesting that she had nursed him through his struggle and that she was the source of his success. He was glad when she let him go. Then he escaped once more to the recess of the window.

He stood there for a while, leaning on a sense of privacy as if it were a physical support.

“Mr. Rearden,” said a strangely quiet voice beside him, “permit me to introduce myself. My name is d’Anconia.”

Rearden turned, startled; d’Anconia’s manner and voice had a quality he had seldom encountered before: a tone of authentic respect.

“How do you do,” he answered. His voice was brusque and dry; but he had answered.

“I have observed that Mrs. Rearden has been trying to avoid the necessity of presenting me to you, and I can guess the reason. Would you prefer that I leave your house?”

The action of naming an issue instead of evading it, was so unlike the usual behavior of all the men he knew, it was such a sudden, startling relief, that Rearden remained silent for a moment, studying d’Anconia’s face. Francisco had said it very simply, neither as a reproach nor a plea, but in a manner which, strangely, acknowledged Rearden’s dignity and his own.

“No,” said Rearden, “Whatever else you guessed, I did not say that.”

“Thank you. In that case, you will allow me to speak to you.”

“Why should you wish to speak to me?”

“My motives cannot interest you at present.”

“Mine is not the sort of conversation that could interest you at all.”

“You are mistaken about one of us, Mr. Rearden, or both. I came to this party solely in order to meet you.”

There had been a faint tone of amusement in Rearden’s voice; now it hardened into a hint of contempt. “You started by playing it straight. Stick to it.”

“I am.”

“What did you want to meet me for? In order to make me lose money?”

Francisco looked straight at him. “Yes—eventually.”

“What is it, this time? A gold mine?”

Francisco shook his head slowly; the conscious deliberation of the movement gave it an air that was almost sadness. “No,” he said, “I don’t want to sell you anything. As a matter of fact, I did not attempt to sell the copper mine to James Taggart, either. He came to me for it. You won’t.”

Rearden chuckled. “If you understand that much, we have at least a sensible basis for conversation. Proceed on that. If you don’t have some fancy investment in mind, what did you want to meet me for?”

“In order to become acquainted with you.”

“That’s not an answer. It’s just another way of saying the same thing.”

“Not quite, Mr. Rearden.”

“Unless you mean—in order to gain my confidence?”

“No. I don’t like people who speak or think in terms of gaining anybody’s confidence. If one’s actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others, only their rational perception. The person who craves a moral blank check of that kind, has dishonest intentions, whether he admits it to himself or not.”

Rearden’s startled glance at him was like the involuntary thrust of a hand grasping for support in a desperate need. The glance betrayed how much he wanted to find the sort of man he thought he was seeing. Then Rearden lowered his eyes, almost closing them, slowly, shutting out the vision and the need. His face was hard; it had an expression of severity, an inner severity directed at himself; it looked austere and lonely.

“All right,” he said tonelessly. “What do you want, if it’s not my confidence?”

“I want to learn to understand you.”

“What for?”

“For a reason of my own which need not concern you at present.”

“What do you want to understand about me?”

Francisco looked silently out at the darkness. The fire of the mills was dying down. There was only a faint tinge of red left on the edge of the earth, just enough to outline the scraps of clouds ripped by the tortured battle of the storm in the sky. Dim shapes kept sweeping through space and vanishing, shapes which were branches, but looked as if they were the fury of the wind made visible.

“It’s a terrible night for any animal caught unprotected on that plain,” said Francisco d’Anconia. “This is when one should appreciate the meaning of being a man.”

Rearden did not answer for a moment; then he said, as if in answer to himself, a tone of wonder in his voice, “Funny ...”

“What?”

“You told me what I was thinking just a while ago ...”

“You were?”

“... only I didn’t have the words for it.”

“Shall I tell you the rest of the words?”

“Go ahead.”

“You stood here and watched the storm with the greatest pride one can ever feel—because you are able to have summer flowers and half-naked women in your house on a night like this, in demonstration of your victory over that storm. And if it weren’t for you, most of those who are here would be left helpless at the mercy of that wind in the middle of some such plain.”

“How did you know that?”

In time with his question, Rearden realized that it was not his thoughts this man had named, but his most hidden, most personal emotion; and that he, who would never confess his emotions to anyone, had confessed it in his question. He saw the faintest flicker in Francisco’s eyes, as of a smile or a check mark.

“What would you know about a pride of that kind?” Rearden asked sharply, as if the contempt of the second question could erase the confidence of the first.

“That is what I felt once, when I was young.”

Rearden looked at him. There was neither mockery nor self-pity in Francisco’s face; the fine, sculptured planes and the clear, blue eyes held a quiet composure, the face was open, offered to any blow, unflinching.

“Why do you want to talk about it?” Rearden asked, prompted by a moment’s reluctant compassion.

“Let us say—by way of gratitude, Mr. Rearden.”

“Gratitude to me?”

“If you will accept it.”

Rearden’s voice hardened. “I haven’t asked for gratitude. I don’t need it.”

“I have not said you needed it. But of all those whom you are saving from the storm tonight, I am the only one who will offer it.”

After a moment’s silence, Rearden asked, his voice low with a sound which was almost a threat, “What are you trying to do?”

“I am calling your attention to the nature of those for whom you are working.”

“It would take a man who’s never done an honest day’s work in his life, to think or say that.” The contempt in Rearden’s voice had a note of relief; he had been disarmed by a doubt of his judgment on the character of his adversary; now he felt certain once more. “You wouldn’t understand it if I told you that the man who works, works for himself, even if he does carry the whole wretched bunch of you along. Now I’ll guess what you’re thinking: go ahead, say that it’s evil, that I’m selfish, conceited, heartless, cruel. I am. I don’t want any part of that tripe about working for others. I’m not.”

For the first time, he saw the look of a personal reaction in Francisco’s eyes, the look of something eager and young. “The only thing that’s wrong in what you said,” Francisco answered, “is that you permit anyone to call it evil.” In Rearden’s pause of incredulous silence, he pointed at the crowd in the drawing room. “Why are you willing to carry them?”

“Because they’re a bunch of miserable children who struggle to remain alive, desperately and very badly, while I—I don’t even notice the burden.”

“Why don’t you tell them that?”

“What?”

“That you’re working for your own sake, not theirs.”

“They know it.”

“Oh yes, they know it. Every single one of them here knows it. But they don’t think you do. And the aim of all their efforts is to keep you from knowing it.”

“Why should I care what they think?”

“Because it’s a battle in which one must make one’s stand clear.”

“A battle? What battle? I hold the whip hand. I don’t fight the disarmed.”

“Are they? They have a weapon against you. It’s their only weapon, but it’s a terrible one. Ask yourself what it is, some time.”

“Where do you see any evidence of it?”

“In the unforgivable fact that you’re as unhappy as you are.”

Rearden could accept any form of reproach, abuse, damnation anyone chose to throw at him: the only human reaction which he would not accept was pity. The stab of a coldly rebellious anger brought him back to the full context of the moment. He spoke, fighting not to acknowledge the nature of the emotion rising within him. “What sort of effrontery are you indulging in? What’s your motive?”

“Let us say—to give you the words you need, for the time when you’ll need them.”

“Why should you want to speak to me on such a subject?”

“In the hope that you will remember it.”

What he felt, thought Rearden, was anger at the incomprehensible fact that he had allowed himself to enjoy this conversation. He felt a dim sense of betrayal, the hint of an unknown danger. “Do you expect me to forget what you are?” he asked, knowing that this was what he had forgotten.

“I do not expect you to think of me at all.”

Under his anger, the emotion which Rearden would not acknowledge remained unstated and unthought; he knew it only as a hint of pain. Had he faced it, he would have known that he still heard Francisco’s voice saying, “I am the only one who will offer it... if you will accept it ....” He heard the words and the strangely solemn inflection of the quiet voice and an inexplicable answer of his own, something within him that wanted to cry yes, to accept, to tell this man that he accepted, that he needed it—though there was no name for what he needed, it was not gratitude, and he knew that it was not gratitude this man had meant.

Aloud, he said, “I didn’t seek to talk to you. But you’ve asked for it and you’re going to hear it. To me, there’s only one form of human depravity—the man without a purpose.”

“That is true.”

“I can forgive all those others, they’re not vicious, they’re merely helpless. But you—you’re the kind who can’t be forgiven.”

“It is against the sin of forgiveness that I wanted to warn you.”

“You had the greatest chance in life. What have you done with it? If you have the mind to understand all the things you said, how can you speak to me at all? How can you face anyone after the sort of irresponsible destruction you’ve perpetrated in that Mexican business?”

“It is your right to condemn me for it, if you wish.”

Dagny stood by the corner of the window recess, listening. They did not notice her. She had seen them together and she had approached, drawn by an impulse she could not explain or resist; it seemed crucially important that she know what these two men said to each other.

She had heard their last few sentences. She had never thought it possible that she would see Francisco taking a beating. He could smash any adversary in any form of encounter. Yet he stood, offering no defense. She knew that it was not indifference; she knew his face well enough to see the effort his calm cost him—she saw the faint line of a muscle pulled tight across his cheek.

“Of all those who live by the ability of others,” said Rearden, “you’re the one real parasite.”

“I have given you grounds to think so.”

“Then what right have you to talk about the meaning of being a man? You’re the one who has betrayed it.”

“I am sorry if I have offended you by what you may rightly consider as a presumption.”

Francisco bowed and turned to go. Rearden said involuntarily, not knowing that the question negated his anger, that it was a plea to stop this man and hold him, “What did you want to learn to understand about me?”

Francisco turned. The expression of his face had not changed; it was still a look of gravely courteous respect. “I have learned it,” he answered.

Rearden stood watching him as he walked off into the crowd. The figures of a butler, with a crystal dish, and of Dr. Pritchett, stooping to choose another canape, hid Francisco from sight. Rearden glanced out at the darkness; nothing could be seen there but the wind.

Dagny stepped forward, when he came out of the recess; she smiled, openly inviting conversation. He stopped. It seemed to her that he had stopped reluctantly. She spoke hastily, to break the silence. “Hank, why do you have so many intellectuals of the looter persuasion here? I wouldn’t have them in my house.”

This was not what she had wanted to say to him. But she did not know what she wanted to say; never before had she felt herself left wordless in his presence.

She saw his eyes narrowing, like a door being closed. “I see no reason why one should not invite them to a party,” he answered coldly.

“Oh, I didn’t mean to criticize your choice of guests. But... Well, I’ve been trying not to learn which one of them is Bertram Scudder. If I do, I’ll slap his face.” She tried to sound casual. “I don’t want to create a scene, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to control myself. I couldn’t believe it when somebody told me that Mrs. Rearden had invited him.”

“I invited him.”

“But ...” Then her voice dropped. “Why?”

“I don’t attach any importance to occasions of this kind.”

“I’m sorry, Hank. 1 didn’t know you were so tolerant. I’m not.”

He said nothing.

“I know you don’t like parties. Neither do I. But sometimes I wonder ... perhaps we’re the only ones who were meant to be able to enjoy them.”

“I am afraid I have no talent for it.”

“Not for this. But do you think any of these people are enjoying it? They’re just straining to be more senseless and aimless than usual. To be light and unimportant... You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“It’s just a thought that disturbs me once in a while.... I thought it about my first ball.... I keep thinking that parties are intended to be celebrations, and celebrations should be only for those who have something to celebrate.”

“I have never thought of it.”

She could not adapt her words to the rigid formality of his manner; she could not quite believe it. They had always been at ease together, in his office. Now he was like a man in a strait jacket.

“Hank, look at it. If you didn’t know any of these people, wouldn’t it seem beautiful? The lights and the clothes and all the imagination that went to make it possible ...” She was looking at the room. She did not notice that he had not followed her glance. He was looking down at the shadows on her naked shoulder, the soft, blue shadows made by the light that fell through the strands of her hair. “Why have we left it all to fools? It should have been ours.”

“In what manner?”

“I don’t know... I’ve always expected parties to be exciting and brilliant, like some rare drink.” She laughed; there was a note of sadness in it. “But I don’t drink, either. That’s just another symbol that doesn’t mean what it was intended to mean.” He was silent. She added, “Perhaps there’s something that we have missed.”

“I am not aware of it.”

In a flash of sudden, desolate emptiness, she was glad that he had not understood or responded, feeling dimly that she had revealed too much, yet not knowing what she had revealed. She shrugged, the movement running through the curve of her shoulder like a faint convulsion. “It’s just an old illusion of mine,” she said indifferently. “Just a mood that comes once every year or two. Let me see the latest steel price index and I’ll forget all about it.”

She did not know that his eyes were following her, as she walked away from him.

She moved slowly through the room, looking at no one. She noticed a small group huddled by the unlighted fireplace. The room was not cold, but they sat as if they drew comfort from the thought of a non-existent fire.

“I do not know why, but I am growing to be afraid of the dark. No, not now, only when I am alone. What frightens me is night. Night as such.”

The speaker was an elderly spinster with an air of breeding and hopelessness. The three women and two men of the group were well dressed, the skin of their faces was smoothly well tended, but they had a manner of anxious caution that kept their voices one tone lower than normal and blurred the differences of their ages, giving them all the same gray look of being spent. It was the look one saw in groups of respectable people everywhere. Dagny stopped and listened.

“But my dear,” one of them asked, “why should it frighten you?”

“I don’t know,” said the spinster. “I am not afraid of prowlers or robberies or anything of the sort. But I stay awake all night. I fall asleep only when I see the sky turning pale. It is very odd. Every evening, when it grows dark, I get the feeling that this time it is final, that daylight will not return.”

“My cousin who lives on the coast of Maine wrote me the same thing,” said one of the women.

“Last night,” said the spinster, “I stayed awake because of the shooting. There were guns going off all night, way out at sea. There were no flashes. There was nothing. Just those detonations, at long intervals, somewhere in the fog over the Atlantic.”

“I read something about it in the paper this morning. Coast Guard target practice.”

“Why, no,” the spinster said indifferently. “Everybody down on the shore knows what it was. It was Ragnar Danneskjöld. It was the Coast Guard trying to catch him.”

“Ragnar Danneskjöld in Delaware Bay?” a woman gasped.

“Oh, yes. They say it is not the first time.”

“Did they catch him?”

“No.”

“Nobody can catch him,” said one of the men.

“The People’s State of Norway has offered a million-dollar reward for his head.”

“That’s an awful lot of money to pay for a pirate’s head.”

“But how are we going to have any order or security or planning in the world, with a pirate running loose all over the seven seas?”

“Do you know what it was that he seized last night?” said the spinster. “The big ship with the relief supplies we were sending to the People’s State of France.”

“How does he dispose of the goods he seizes?”

“Ah, that—nobody knows.”

“I met a sailor once, from a ship he’d attacked, who’d seen him in person. He said that Ragnar Danneskjöld has the purest gold hair and the most frightening face on earth, a face with no sign of any feeling. If there ever was a man born without a heart, he’s it—the sailor said.”

“A nephew of mine saw Ragnar Danneskjöld’s ship one night, off the coast of Scotland. He wrote me that he couldn’t believe his eyes. It was a better ship than any in the navy of the People’s State of England.”

“They say he hides in one of those Norwegian fjords where neither God nor man will ever find him. That’s where the Vikings used to hide in the Middle Ages.”

“There’s a reward on his head offered by the People’s State of Portugal, too. And by the People’s State of Turkey.”

“They say it’s a national scandal in Norway. He comes from one of their best families. The family lost its money generations ago, but the name is of the noblest. The ruins of their castle are still in existence. His father is a bishop. His father has disowned him and excommunicated him. But it had no effect.”

“Did you know that Ragnar Danneskjöld went to school in this country? Sure. The Patrick Henry University.”

“Not really?”

“Oh yes. You can look it up.”

“What bothers me is ... You know, I don’t like it. I don’t like it that he’s now appearing right here, in our own waters. I thought things like that could happen only in the wastelands. Only in Europe. But a big-scale outlaw of that kind operating in Delaware in our day and age!”

“He’s been seen off Nantucket, too. And at Bar Harbor. The newspapers have been asked not to write about it.”

“Why?”

“They don’t want people to know that the navy can’t cope with him.”

“I don’t like it. It feels funny. It’s like something out of the Dark Ages.”

Dagny glanced up. She saw Francisco d’Anconia standing a few steps away. He was looking at her with a kind of stressed curiosity; his eyes were mocking.

“It’s a strange world we’re living in,” said the spinster, her voice low.

“I read an article,” said one of the women tonelessly. “It said that times of trouble are good for us. It is good that people are growing poorer. To accept privations is a moral virtue.”

“I suppose so,” said another, without conviction.

“We must not worry. I heard a speech that said it is useless to worry or to blame anyone. Nobody can help what he does, that is the way things made him. There is nothing we can do about anything. We must learn to bear it.”

“What’s the use anyway? What is man’s fate? Hasn’t it always been to hope, but never to achieve? The wise man is the one who does not attempt to hope.”

“That is the right attitude to take.”

“I don’t know... I don’t know what is right any more... How can we ever know?”

“Oh well, who is John Galt?” [This was a popular expression denoting futility.]

Dagny turned brusquely and started away from them. One of the women followed her.

“But I do know it,” said the woman, in the soft, mysterious tone of sharing a secret.

“You know what?”

“I know who is John Galt.”

“Who?” Dagny asked tensely, stopping.

“I know a man who knew John Galt in person. This man is an old friend of a great-aunt of mine. He was there and he saw it happen. Do you know the legend of Atlantis, Miss Taggart?”

“What?”

“Atlantis.”

“Why ... vaguely.”

“The Isles of the Blessed. That is what the Greeks called it, thousands of years ago. They said Atlantis was a place where hero-spirits lived in a happiness unknown to the rest of the earth. A place which only the spirits of heroes could enter, and they reached it without dying, because they carried the secret of life within them. Atlantis was lost to mankind, even then. But the Greeks knew that it had existed. They tried to find it. Some of them said it was underground, hidden in the heart of the earth. But most of them said it was an island. A radiant island in the Western Ocean. Perhaps what they were thinking of was America. They never found it. For centuries afterward, men said it was only a legend. They did not believe it, but they never stopped looking for it, because they knew that that was what they had to find.”

“Well, what about John Galt?”

“He found it.”

Dagny’s interest was gone. “Who was he?”

“John Galt was a millionaire, a man of inestimable wealth. He was sailing his yacht one night, in mid-Atlantic, fighting the worst storm ever wreaked upon the world, when he found it. He saw it in the depth, where it had sunk to escape the reach of men. He saw the towers of Atlantis shining on the bottom of the ocean. It was a sight of such kind that when one had seen it, one could no longer wish to look at the rest of the earth. John Galt sank his ship and went down with his entire crew. They all chose to do it. My friend was the only one who survived.”

“How interesting.”

“My friend saw it with his own eyes,” said the woman, offended. “It happened many years ago. But John Galt’s family hushed up the story.”

“And what happened to his fortune? I don’t recall ever hearing of a Gait fortune.”

“It went down with him.” She added belligerently, “You don’t have to believe it.”

“Miss Taggart doesn‘t,” said Francisco d’Anconia. “I do.”

They turned. He had followed them and he stood looking at them with the insolence of exaggerated earnestness.

“Have you ever had faith in anything, Senor d’Anconia?” the woman asked angrily.

“No, madame.”

He chuckled at her brusque departure. Dagny asked coldly, “What’s the joke?”

“The joke’s on that fool woman. She doesn’t know that she was telling you the truth.”

“Do you expect me to believe that?”

“No.”

“Then what do you find so amusing?”

“Oh, a great many things here. Don’t you?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s one of the things I find amusing.”

“Francisco, will you leave me alone?”

“But I have. Didn’t you notice that you were first to speak to me tonight?”

“Why do you keep watching me?”

“Curiosity.”

“About what?”

“Your reaction to the things which you don’t find amusing.”

“Why should you care about my reaction to anything?”

“That is my own way of having a good time, which, incidentally, you are not having, are you, Dagny? Besides, you’re the only woman worth watching here.”

She stood defiantly still, because the way he looked at her demanded an angry escape. She stood as she always did, straight and taut, her head lifted impatiently. It was the unfeminine pose of an executive. But her naked shoulder betrayed the fragility of the body under the black dress, and the pose made her most truly a woman. The proud strength became a challenge to someone’s superior strength, and the fragility a reminder that the challenge could be broken. She was not conscious of it. She had met no one able to see it.

He said, looking down at her body, “Dagny, what a magnificent waste!”

She had to turn and escape. She felt herself blushing, for the first time in years: blushing because she knew suddenly that the sentence named what she had felt all evening.

She ran, trying not to think. The music stopped her. It was a sudden blast from the radio. She noticed Mort Liddy, who had turned it on, waving his arms to a group of friends, yelling, “That’s it! That’s it! I want you to hear it!”

The great burst of sound was the opening chords of Halley’s Fourth Concerto. It rose in tortured triumph, speaking its denial of pain, its hymn to a distant vision. Then the notes broke. It was as if a handful of mud and pebbles had been flung at the music, and what followed was the sound of the rolling and the dripping. It was Halley’s Concerto swung into a popular tune. It was Halley’s melody torn apart, its holes stuffed with hiccoughs. The great statement of joy had become the giggling of a barroom. Yet it was still the remnant of Halley’s melody that gave it form; it was the melody that supported it like a spinal cord.

“Pretty good?” Mort Liddy was smiling at his friends, boastfully and nervously. “Pretty good, eh? Best movie score of the year. Got me a prize. Got me a long-term contract. Yeah, this was my score for Heaven’s in Your Backyard.”

Dagny stood, staring at the room, as if one sense could replace another, as if sight could wipe out sound. She moved her head in a slow circle, trying to find an anchor somewhere. She saw Francisco leaning against a column, his arms crossed; he was looking straight at her; he was laughing.

Don’t shake like this, she thought. Get out of here. This was the approach of an anger she could not control. She thought: Say nothing. Walk steadily. Get out.

She had started walking, cautiously, very slowly. She heard Lillian’s words and stopped. Lillian had said it many times this evening, in answer to the same question, but it was the first time that Dagny heard it.

“This?” Lillian was saying, extending her arm with the metal bracelet for the inspection of two smartly groomed women. “Why, no, it’s not from a hardware store, it’s a very special gift from my husband. Oh, yes, of course it’s hideous. But don’t you see? It’s supposed to be priceless. Of course, I’d exchange it for a common diamond bracelet any time, but somehow nobody will offer me one for it, even though it is so very, very valuable. Why? My dear, it’s the first thing ever made of Rearden Metal.”

Dagny did not see the room. She did not hear the music. She felt the pressure of dead stillness against her eardrums. She did not know the moment that preceded, or the moments that were to follow. She did not know those involved, neither herself, nor Lillian, nor Rearden, nor the meaning of her own action. It was a single instant, blasted out of context. She had heard. She was looking at the bracelet of green-blue metal.

She felt the movement of something being torn off her wrist, and she heard her own voice saying in the great stillness, very calmly, a voice cold as a skeleton, naked of emotion, “If you are not the coward that I think you are, you will exchange it.”

On the palm of her hand, she was extending her diamond bracelet to Lillian.

“You’re not serious, Miss Taggart?” said a woman’s voice.

It was not Lillian’s voice. Lillian’s eyes were looking straight at her. She saw them. Lillian knew that she was serious.

“Give me that bracelet,” said Dagny, lifting her palm higher, the diamond band glittering across it.

“This is horrible!” cried some woman. It was strange that the cry stood out so sharply. Then Dagny realized that there were people standing around them and that they all stood in silence. She was hearing sounds now, even the music; it was Halley’s mangled Concerto, somewhere far away.

She saw Rearden’s face. It looked as if something within him were mangled, like the music; she did not know by what. He was watching them.

Lillian’s mouth moved into an upturned crescent. It resembled a smile. She snapped the metal bracelet open, dropped it on Dagny’s palm and took the diamond band.

“Thank you, Miss Taggart,” she said.

Dagny’s fingers closed about the metal. She felt that; she felt nothing else.

Lillian turned, because Rearden had approached her. He took the diamond bracelet from her hand. He clasped it on her wrist, raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.

He did not look at Dagny.

Lillian laughed, gaily, easily, attractively, bringing the room back to its normal mood.

“You may have it back, Miss Taggart, when you change your mind,” she said.

Dagny had turned away. She felt calm and free. The pressure was gone. The need to get out had vanished.

She clasped the metal bracelet on her wrist. She liked the feel of the weight against her skin. Inexplicably, she felt a touch of feminine vanity, the kind she had never experienced before: the desire to be seen wearing this particular ornament.

From a distance, she heard snatches of indignant voices: “The most offensive gesture I’ve ever seen.... It was vicious.... I’m glad Lillian took her up on it.... Serves her right, if she feels like throwing a few thousand dollars away....”

For the rest of the evening, Rearden remained by the side of his wife. He shared her conversations, he laughed with her friends, he was suddenly the devoted, attentive, admiring husband.

He was crossing the room, carrying a tray of drinks requested by someone in Lillian’s group—an unbecoming act of informality which nobody had ever seen him perform—when Dagny approached him. She stopped and looked up at him, as if they were alone in his office. She stood like an executive, her head lifted. He looked down at her. In the line of his glance, from the fingertips of her one hand to her face, her body was naked but for his metal bracelet.

“I’m sorry, Hank,” she said, “but I had to do it.”

His eyes remained expressionless. Yet she was suddenly certain that she knew what he felt: he wanted to slap her face.

“It was not necessary,” he answered coldly, and walked on.

It was very late when Rearden entered his wife’s bedroom. She was still awake. A lamp burned on her bedside table.

She lay in bed, propped up on pillows of pale green linen. Her bed-jacket was pale green satin, worn with the untouched perfection of a window model; its lustrous folds looked as if the crinkle of tissue paper still lingered among them. The light, shaded to a tone of apple blossoms, fell on a table that held a book, a glass of fruit juice, and toilet accessories of silver glittering like instruments in a surgeon’s case. Her arms had a tinge of porcelain. There was a touch of pale pink lipstick on her mouth. She showed no sign of exhaustion after the party—no sign of life to be exhausted. The place was a decorator’s display of a lady groomed for sleep, not to be disturbed.

He still wore his dress clothes; his tie was loose, and a strand of hair hung over his face. She glanced at him without astonishment, as if she knew what the last hour in his room had done to him.

He looked at her silently. He had not entered her room for a long time. He stood, wishing he had not entered it now.

“Isn’t it customary to talk, Henry?”

“If you wish.”

“I wish you’d send one of your brilliant experts from the mills to take a look at our furnace. Do you know that it went out during the party and Simons had a terrible time getting it started again?... Mrs. Weston says that our best achievement is our cook—she loved the hors d‘oeuvres.... Balph Eubank said a very funny thing about you, he said you’re a crusader with a factory’s chimney smoke for a plume.... I’m glad you don’t like Francisco d’Anconia. I can’t stand him.”

He did not care to explain his presence, or to disguise defeat, or to admit it by leaving. Suddenly, it did not matter to him what she guessed or felt. He walked to the window and stood, looking out.

Why had she married him?—he thought. It was a question he had not asked himself on their wedding day, eight years ago. Since then, in tortured loneliness, he had asked it many times. He had found no answer.

It was not for position, he thought, or for money. She came from an old family that had both. Her family’s name was not among the most distinguished and their fortune was modest, but both were sufficient to let her be included in the top circles of New York’s society, where he had met her. Nine years ago, he had appeared in New York like an explosion, in the glare of the success of Rearden Steel, a success that had been thought impossible by the city’s experts. It was his indifference that made him spectacular. He did not know that he was expected to attempt to buy his way into society and that they anticipated the pleasure of rejecting him. He had no time to notice their disappointment.

He attended, reluctantly, a few social occasions to which he was invited by men who sought his favor. He did not know, but they knew, that his courteous politeness was condescension toward the people who had expected to snub him, the people who had said that the age of achievement was past.

It was Lillian’s austerity that attracted him—the conflict between her austerity and her behavior. He had never liked anyone or expected to be liked. He found himself held by the spectacle of a woman who was obviously pursuing him but with obvious reluctance, as if against her own will, as if fighting a desire she resented. It was she who planned that they should meet, then faced him coldly, as if not caring that he knew it. She spoke little; she had an air of mystery that seemed to tell him he would never break through her proud detachment, and an air of amusement, mocking her own desire and his.

He had not known many women. He had moved toward his goal, sweeping aside everything that did not pertain to it in the world and in himself. His dedication to his work was like one of the fires he dealt with, a fire that burned every lesser element, every impurity out of the white stream of a single metal. He was incapable of halfway concerns. But there were times when he felt a sudden access of desire, so violent that it could not be given to a casual encounter. He had surrendered to it, on a few rare occasions through the years, with women he had thought he liked. He had been left feeling an angry emptiness—because he had sought an act of triumph, though he had not known of what nature, but the response he received was only a woman’s acceptance of a casual pleasure, and he knew too clearly that what he had won had no meaning. He was left, not with a sense of attainment, but with a sense of his own degradation. He grew to hate his desire. He fought it. He came to believe the doctrine that this desire was wholly physical, a desire, not of consciousness, but of matter, and he rebelled against the thought that his flesh could be free to choose and that its choice was impervious to the will of his mind. He had spent his life in mines and mills, shaping matter to his wishes by the power of his brain—and he found it intolerable that he should be unable to control the matter of his own body. He fought it. He had won his every battle against inanimate nature; but this was a battle he lost.

It was the difficulty of the conquest that made him want Lillian. She seemed to be a woman who expected and deserved a pedestal; this made him want to drag her down to his bed. To drag her down, were the words in his mind; they gave him a dark pleasure, the sense of a victory worth winning.

He could not understand why—he thought it was an obscene conflict, the sigh of some secret depravity within him—why he felt, at the same time, a profound pride at the thought of granting to a woman the title of his wife. The feeling was solemn and shining; it was almost as if he felt that he wished to honor a woman by the act of possessing her. Lillian seemed to fit the image he had not known he held, had not known he wished to find; he saw the grace, the pride, the purity; the rest was in himself; he did not know that he was looking at a reflection.

He remembered the day when Lillian came from New York to his office, of her own sudden choice, and asked him to take her through his mills. He heard a soft, low, breathless tone—the tone of admiration—growing in her voice, as she questioned him about his work and looked at the place around her. He looked at her graceful figure moving against the bursts of furnace flame, and at the light swift steps of her high heels stumbling through drifts of slag, as she walked resolutely by his side. The look in her eyes, when she watched a heat of steel being poured, was like his own feeling for it made visible to him. When her eyes moved up to his face, he saw the same look, but intensified to a degree that seemed to make her helpless and silent. It was at dinner, that evening, that he asked her to marry him.

It took him some time after his marriage before he admitted to himself that this was torture. He still remembered the night when he admitted it, when he told himself—the veins of his wrists pulled tight as he stood by the bed, looking down at Lillian—that he deserved the torture and that he would endure it. Lillian was not looking at him; she was adjusting her hair. “May I go to sleep now?” she asked.

She had never objected; she had never refused him anything; she submitted whenever he wished. She submitted in the manner of complying with the rule that it was, at times, her duty to become an inanimate object turned over to her husband’s use.

She did not censure him. She made it clear that she took it for granted that men had degrading instincts which constituted the secret, ugly part of marriage. She was condescendingly tolerant. She smiled, in amused distaste, at the intensity of what he experienced. “It’s the most undignified pastime I know of,” she said to him once, “but I have never entertained the illusion that men are superior to animals.”

His desire for her had died in the first week of their marriage. What remained was only a need which he was unable to destroy. He had never entered a whorehouse; he thought, at times, that the self-loathing he would experience there could be no worse than what he felt when he was driven to enter his wife’s bedroom.

He would often find her reading a book. She would put it aside, with a white ribbon to mark the pages. When he lay exhausted, his eyes closed, still breathing in gasps, she would turn on the light, pick up the book and continue her reading.

He told himself that he deserved the torture, because he had wished never to touch her again and was unable to maintain his decision. He despised himself for that. He despised a need which now held no shred of joy or meaning, which had become the mere need of a woman’s body, an anonymous body that belonged to a woman whom he had to forget while he held it. He became convinced that the need was depravity.

He did not condemn Lillian. He felt a dreary, indifferent respect for her. His hatred of his own desire had made him accept the doctrine that women were pure and that a pure woman was one incapable of physical pleasure.

Through the quiet agony of the years of his marriage, there had been one thought which he would not permit himself to consider: the thought of infidelity. He had given his word. He intended to keep it. It was not loyalty to Lillian; it was not the person of Lillian that he wished to protect from dishonor—but the person of his wife.

He thought of that now, standing at the window. He had not wanted to enter her room. He had fought against it. He had fought, more fiercely, against knowing the particular reason why he would not be able to withstand it tonight. Then, seeing her, he had known suddenly that he would not touch her. The reason which had driven him here tonight was the reason which made it impossible for him.

He stood still, feeling free of desire, feeling the bleak relief of indifference to his body, to this room, even to his presence here. He had turned away from her, not to see her lacquered chastity. What he thought he should feel was respect; what he felt was revulsion.

“... but Dr. Pritchett said that our culture is dying because our universities have to depend on the alms of the meat packers, the steel puddlers and the purveyors of breakfast cereals.”

Why had she married him?—he thought. That bright, crisp voice was not talking at random. She knew why he had come here. She knew what it would do to him to see her pick up a silver buffer and go on talking gaily, polishing her fingernails. She was talking about the party. But she did not mention Bertram Scudder—or Dagny Taggart.

What had she sought in marrying him? He felt the presence of some cold, driving purpose within her—but found nothing to condemn. She had never tried to use him. She made no demands on him. She found no satisfaction in the prestige of industrial power—she spurned it—she preferred her own circle of friends. She was not after money—she spent little—she was indifferent to the kind of extravagance he could have afforded. He had no right to accuse her, he thought, or ever to break the bond. She was a woman of honor in their marriage. She wanted nothing material from him.

He turned and looked at her wearily.

“Next time you give a party,” he said, “stick to your own crowd. Don’t invite what you think are my friends. I don’t care to meet them socially.”

She laughed, startled and pleased. “I don’t blame you, darling,” she said.

He walked out, adding nothing else.

What did she want from him?—he thought. What was she after? In the universe as he knew it, there was no answer.

EDITOR’S NOTE: About a hundred pages later, we witness the first run of the John Galt Line, Dagny Taggart’s new railroad, which services the wells of oil baron Ellis Wyatt. The rail and a new bridge, both made of Rearden Metal, have been widely denounced by social critics as unsafe; the critics predict a disastrous crash when the train reaches the bridge.

The John Galt Line

REARDEN WAS in New York on the day when Dagny telephoned him from her office. “Hank, I’m going to have a press conference tomorrow.”

He laughed aloud. “No!”

“Yes.” Her voice sounded earnest, but, dangerously, a bit too earnest. “The newspapers have suddenly discovered me and are asking questions. I’m going to answer them.”

“Have a good time.”

“I will. Are you going to be in town tomorrow? I’d like to have you in on it.”

“Okay. I wouldn’t want to miss it.”

The reporters who came to the press conference in the office of the John Galt Line were young men who had been trained to think that their job consisted of concealing from the world the nature of its events. It was their daily duty to serve as audience for some public figure who made utterances about the public good, in phrases carefully chosen to convey no meaning. It was their daily job to sling words together in any combination they pleased, so long as the words did not fall into a sequence saying something specific. They could not understand the interview now being given to them.

Dagny Taggart sat behind her desk in an office that looked like a slum basement. She wore a dark blue suit with a white blouse, beautifully tailored, suggesting an air of formal, almost military elegance. She sat straight, and her manner was severely dignified, just a shade too dignified.

Rearden sat in a corner of the room, sprawled across a broken armchair, his long legs thrown over one of its arms, his body leaning against the other. His manner was pleasantly informal, just a bit too informal.

In the clear, monotonous voice of a military report, consulting no papers, looking straight at the men, Dagny recited the technological facts about the John Galt Line, giving exact figures on the nature of the rail, the capacity of the bridge, the method of construction, the costs. Then, in the dry tone of a banker, she explained the financial prospects of the Line and named the large profits she expected to make. “That is all,” she said.

“All?” said one of the reporters. “Aren’t you going to give us a message for the public?”

“That was my message.”

“But hell—I mean, aren’t you going to defend yourself?”

“Against what?”

“Don’t you want to tell us something to justify your Line?”

“I have.”

A man with a mouth shaped as a permanent sneer asked, “Well, what I want to know, as Bertram Scudder stated, is what protection do we have against your Line being no good?”

“Don’t ride on it.”

Another asked, “Aren’t you going to tell us your motive for building that Line?”

“I have told you: the profit which I expect to make.”

“Oh, Miss Taggart, don’t say that!” cried a young boy. He was new, he was still honest about his job, and he felt that he liked Dagny Taggart, without knowing why. “That’s the wrong thing to say. That’s what they’re all saying about you.”

“Are they?”

“I’m sure you didn’t mean it the way it sounds and ... and I’m sure you’ll want to clarify it.”

“Why, yes, if you wish me to. The average profit of railroads has been two per cent of the capital invested. An industry that does so much and keeps so little, should consider itself immoral. As I have explained, the cost of the John Galt Line in relation to the traffic which it will carry makes me expect a profit of not less than fifteen per cent on our investment. Of course, any industrial profit above four per cent is considered usury nowadays. I shall, nevertheless, do my best to make the John Galt Line earn a profit of twenty per cent for me, if possible. That was my motive for building the Line. Have I made myself clear now?”

The boy was looking at her helplessly. “You don’t mean, to earn a profit for you, Miss Taggart? You mean, for the small stockholders, of course?” he prompted hopefully.

“Why, no. I happen to be one of the largest stockholders of Taggart Transcontinental, so my share of the profits will be one of the largest. Now, Mr. Rearden is in a much more fortunate position, because he has no stockholders to share with—or would you rather make your own statement, Mr. Rearden?”

“Yes, gladly,” said Rearden. “Inasmuch as the formula of Rearden Metal is my own personal secret, and in view of the fact that the Metal costs much less to produce than you boys can imagine, I expect to skin the public to the tune of a profit of twenty-five per cent in the next few years.”

“What do you mean, skin the public, Mr. Rearden?” asked the boy. “If it’s true, as I’ve read in your ads, that your Metal will last three times longer than any other and at half the price, wouldn’t the public be getting a bargain?”

“Oh, have you noticed that?” said Rearden.

“Do the two of you realize you’re talking for publication?” asked the man with the sneer.

“But, Mr. Hopkins,” said Dagny, in polite astonishment, “is there any reason why we would talk to you, if it weren’t for publication?”

“Do you want us to quote all the things you said?”

“I hope I may trust you to be sure and quote them. Would you oblige me by taking this down verbatim?” She paused to see their pencils ready, then dictated: “Miss Taggart says—quote—I expect to make a pile of money on the John Galt Line. I will have earned it. Close quote. Thank you so much.”

“Any questions, gentlemen?” asked Rearden.

There were no questions. “Now I must tell you about the opening of the John Galt Line,” said Dagny. “The first train will depart from the station of Taggart Transcontinental in Cheyenne, Wyoming, at four P.M. on July twenty-second. It will be a freight special, consisting of eighty cars. It will be driven by an eight-thousand-horsepower, four-unit Diesel locomotive—which I’m leasing from Taggart Transcontinental for the occasion. It will run non-stop to Wyatt Junction, Colorado, traveling at an average speed of one hundred miles per hour. I beg your pardon?” she asked, hearing the long, low sound of a whistle.

“What did you say, Miss Taggart?”

“I said, one hundred miles per hour—grades, curves and all.”

“But shouldn’t you cut the speed below normal rather than ... Miss Taggart, don’t you have any consideration whatever for public opinion?”

“But I do. If it weren’t for public opinion, an average speed of sixtyfive miles per hour would have been quite sufficient.”

“Who’s going to run that train?”

“I had quite a bit of trouble about that. All the Taggart engineers volunteered to do it. So did the firemen, the brakemen and the conductors. We had to draw lots for every job on the train’s crew. The engineer will be Pat Logan, of the Taggart Comet, the fireman—Ray McKim. I shall ride in the cab of the engine with them.”

“Not really!”

“Please do attend the opening. It’s on July twenty-second. The press is most eagerly invited. Contrary to my usual policy, I have become a publicity hound. Really. I should like to have spotlights, radio microphones and television cameras. I suggest that you plant a few cameras around the bridge. The collapse of the bridge would give you some interesting shots.”

“Miss Taggart,” asked Rearden, “why didn’t you mention that I’m going to ride in that engine, too?”

She looked at him across the room, and for a moment they were alone, holding each other’s glance.

“Yes, of course, Mr. Rearden,” she answered.

She did not see him again until they looked at each other across the platform of the Taggart station in Cheyenne, on July 22.

She did not look for anyone when she stepped out on the platform: she felt as if her senses had merged, so that she could not distinguish the sky, the sun or the sounds of an enormous crowd, but perceived only a sensation of shock and light.

Yet he was the first person she saw, and she could not tell for how long a time he was also the only one. He stood by the engine of the John Galt train, talking to somebody outside the field of her consciousness. He was dressed in gray slacks and shirt, he looked like an expert mechanic, but he was stared at by the faces around him, because he was Hank Rearden of Rearden Steel. High above him, she saw the letters TT on the silver front of the engine. The lines of the engine slanted back, aimed at space.

There was distance and a crowd between them, but his eyes moved to her the moment she came out. They looked at each other and she knew that he felt as she did. This was not to be a solemn venture upon which their future depended, but simply their day of enjoyment. Their work was done. For the moment, there was no future. They had earned the present.

Only if one feels immensely important, she had told him, can one feel truly light. Whatever the train’s run would mean to others, for the two of them their own persons were this day’s sole meaning. Whatever it was that others sought in life, their right to what they now felt was all the two of them wished to find. It was as if, across the platform, they said it to each other.

Then she turned away from him.

She noticed that she, too, was being stared at, that there were people around her, that she was laughing and answering questions.

She had not expected such a large crowd. They filled the platform, the tracks, the square beyond the station; they were on the roofs of the boxcars on the sidings, at the windows of every house in sight. Something had drawn them here, something in the air which, at the last moment, had made James Taggart want to attend the opening of the John Galt Line. She had forbidden it. “If you come, Jim,” she had said, “I’ll have you thrown out of your own Taggart station. This is one event you’re not going to see.” Then she had chosen Eddie Willers to represent Taggart Transcontinental at the opening.

She looked at the crowd and she felt, simultaneously, astonishment that they should stare at her, when this event was so personally her own that no communication about it was possible, and a sense of fitness that they should be here, that they should want to see it, because the sight of an achievement was the greatest gift a human being could offer to others.

She felt no anger toward anyone on earth. The things she had endured had now receded into some outer fog, like pain that still exists, but has no power to hurt. Those things could not stand in the face of this moment’s reality, the meaning of this day was as brilliantly, violently clear as the splashes of sun on the silver of the engine, all men had to perceive it now, no one could doubt it and she had no one to hate.

Eddie Willers was watching her. He stood on the platform, surrounded by Taggart executives, division heads, civic leaders, and the various local officials who had been outargued, bribed or threatened, to obtain permits to run a train through town zones at a hundred miles an hour. For once, for this day and event, his title of Vice-President was real to him and he carried it well. But while he spoke to those around him, his eyes kept following Dagny through the crowd. She was dressed in blue slacks and shirt, she was unconscious of official duties, she had left them to him, the train was now her sole concern, as if she were only a member of its crew.

She saw him, she approached, and she shook his hand; her smile was like a summation of all the things they did not have to say. “Well, Eddie, you’re Taggart Transcontinental now.”

“Yes,” he said solemnly, his voice low [...]

He watched from a distance while the train’s crew was lined up in front of the engine, to face a firing squad of cameras. Dagny and Rearden were smiling, as if posing for snapshots of a summer vacation. Pat Logan, the engineer, a short, sinewy man with graying hair and a contemptuously inscrutable face, posed in a manner of amused indifference. Ray McKim, the fireman, a husky young giant, grinned with an air of embarrassment and superiority together. The rest of the crew looked as if they were about to wink at the cameras. A photographer said, laughing, “Can’t you people look doomed, please? I know that’s what the editor wants.”

Dagny and Rearden were answering questions for the press. There was no mockery in their answers now, no bitterness. They were enjoying it. They spoke as if the questions were asked in good faith. Irresistibly, at some point which no one noticed, this became true.

“What do you expect to happen on this run?” a reporter asked one of the brakemen. “Do you think you’ll get there?”

“I think we’ll get there,” said the brakeman, “and so do you, brother.”

“Mr. Logan, do you have any children? Did you take out any extra insurance? I’m just thinking of the bridge, you know.”

“Don’t cross that bridge till I come to it,” Pat Logan answered contemptuously.

“Mr. Rearden, how do you know that your rail will hold?”

“The man who taught people to make a printing press,” said Rearden, “how did he know it?”

“Tell me, Miss Taggart, what’s going to support a seven-thousand-ton train on a three-thousand-ton bridge?”

“My judgment,” she answered.

The men of the press, who despised their own profession, did not know why they were enjoying it today. One of them, a young man with years of notorious success behind him and a cynical look of twice his age, said suddenly, “I know what I’d like to be: I wish I could be a man who covers news!”

The hands of the clock on the station building stood at 3:45. The crew started off toward the caboose at the distant end of the train. The movement and noise of the crowd were subsiding. Without conscious intention, people were beginning to stand still.

The dispatcher had received word from every local operator along the line of rail that wound through the mountains to the Wyatt oil fields three hundred miles away. He came out of the station building and, looking at Dagny, gave the signal for clear track ahead. Standing by the engine, Dagny raised her hand, repeating his gesture in sign of an order received and understood.

The long line of boxcars stretched off into the distance, in spaced, rectangular links, like a spinal cord. When the conductor’s arm swept through the air, far at the end, she moved her arm in answering signal.

Rearden, Logan and McKim stood silently, as if at attention, letting her be first to get aboard. As she started up the rungs on the side of the engine, a reporter thought of a question he had not asked.

“Miss Taggart,” he called after her, “who is John Galt?”

She turned, hanging onto a metal bar with one hand, suspended for an instant above the heads of the crowd.

“We are!” she answered.

Logan followed her into the cab, then McKim; Rearden went last, then the door of the engine was shut, with the tight finality of sealed metal.

The lights, hanging on a signal bridge against the sky, were green. There were green lights between the tracks, low over the ground, dropping off into the distance where the rails turned and a green light stood at the curve, against leaves of a summer green that looked as if they, too, were lights.

Two men held a white silk ribbon stretched across the track in front of the engine. They were the superintendent of the Colorado Division and Nealy’s chief engineer, who had remained on the job.

Eddie Willers was to cut the ribbon they held and thus to open the new line.

The photographers posed him carefully, scissors in hand, his back to the engine. He would repeat the ceremony two or three times, they explained, to give them a choice of shots; they had a fresh bolt of ribbon ready. He was about to comply, then stopped. “No,” he said suddenly. “It’s not going to be a phony.”

In a voice of quiet authority, the voice of a vice-president, he ordered, pointing at the cameras, “Stand back—way back. Take one shot when I cut it, then get out of the way, fast.”

They obeyed, moving hastily farther down the track. There was only one minute left. Eddie turned his back to the cameras and stood between the rails, facing the engine. He held the scissors ready over the white ribbon. He took his hat off and tossed it aside. He was looking up at the engine. A faint wind stirred his blond hair. The engine was a great silver shield bearing the emblem of Nat Taggart.

Eddie Willers raised his hand as the hand of the station clock reached the instant of four.

“Open her up, Pat!” he called.

In the moment when the engine started forward, he cut the white ribbon and leaped out of the way.

From the side track, he saw the window of the cab go by and Dagny waving to him in an answering salute. Then the engine was gone, and he stood looking across at the crowded platform that kept appearing and vanishing as the freight cars clicked past him.

The green-blue rails ran to meet them, like two jets shot out of a single point beyond the curve of the earth. The crossties melted, as they approached, into a smooth stream rolling down under the wheels. A blurred streak clung to the side of the engine, low over the ground. Trees and telegraph poles sprang into sight abruptly and went by as if jerked back. The green plains stretched past, in a leisurely flow. At the edge of the sky, a long wave of mountains reversed the movement and seemed to follow the train.

She felt no wheels under the floor. The motion was a smooth flight on a sustained impulse, as if the engine hung above the rails, riding a current. She felt no speed. It seemed strange that the green lights of the signals kept coming at them and past, every few seconds. She knew that the signal lights were spaced two miles apart.

The needle on the speedometer in front of Pat Logan stood at one hundred.

She sat in the fireman’s chair and glanced across at Logan once in a while. He sat slumped forward a little, relaxed, one hand resting lightly on the throttle as if by chance; but his eyes were fixed on the track ahead. He had the ease of an expert, so confident that it seemed casual, but it was the ease of a tremendous concentration, the concentration on one’s task that has the ruthlessness of an absolute. Ray McKim sat on a bench behind them. Rearden stood in the middle of the cab.

He stood, hands in pockets, feet apart, braced against the motion, looking ahead. There was nothing he could now care to see by the side of the track: he was looking at the rail.

Ownership—she thought, glancing back at him—weren’t there those who knew nothing of its nature and doubted its reality? No, it was not made of papers, seals, grants and permissions. There it was—in his eyes.

The sound filling the cab seemed part of the space they were crossing. It held the low drone of the motors—the sharper clicking of the many parts that rang in varied cries of metat—and the high, thin chimes of trembling glass panes.

Things streaked past—a water tank, a tree, a shanty, a grain silo. They had a windshield-wiper motion: they were rising, describing a curve and dropping back. The telegraph wires ran a race with the train, rising and falling from pole to pole, in an even rhythm, like the cardiograph record of a steady heartbeat written across the sky.

She looked ahead, at the haze that melted rail and distance, a haze that could rip apart at any moment to some shape of disaster. She wondered why she felt safer than she had ever felt in a car behind the engine, safer here, where it seemed as if, should an obstacle rise, her breast and the glass shield would be first to smash against it. She smiled, grasping the answer: it was the security of being first, with full sight and full knowledge of one’s course—not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead. It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust, but to know.

The glass sheets of the cab’s windows made the spread of the fields seem vaster: the earth looked as open to movement as it was to sight. Yet nothing was distant and nothing was out of reach. She had barely grasped the sparkle of a lake ahead—and in the next instant she was beside it, then past.

It was a strange foreshortening between sight and touch, she thought, between wish and fulfillment, between—the words clicked sharply in her mind after a startled stop—between spirit and body. First, the vision—then the physical shape to express it. First, the thought—then the purposeful motion down the straight line of a single track to a chosen goal. Could one have any meaning without the other? Wasn’t it evil to wish without moving—or to move without aim? Whose malevolence was it that crept through the world, struggling to break the two apart and set them against each other?

She shook her head. She did not want to think or to wonder why the world behind her was as it was. She did not care. She was flying away from it, at the rate of a hundred miles an hour. She leaned to the open window by her side, and felt the wind of the speed blowing her hair off her forehead. She lay back, conscious of nothing but the pleasure it gave her.

Yet her mind kept racing. Broken bits of thought flew past her attention, like the telegraph poles by the track. Physical pleasure?—she thought. This is a train made of steel ... running on rails of Rearden Metal ... moved by the energy of burning oil and electric generators ... it’s a physical sensation of physical movement through space ... but is that the cause and the meaning of what I now feel? ... Do they call it a low, animal joy—this feeling that I would not care if the rail did break to bits under us now—it won’t—but! I wouldn’t care, because I have experienced this? A low, physical, material, degrading pleasure of the body?

She smiled, her eyes closed, the wind streaming through her hair.

She opened her eyes and saw that Rearden stood looking down at her. It was the same glance with which he had looked at the rail. She felt her power of volition knocked out by some single, dull blow that made her unable to move. She held his eyes, lying back in her chair, the wind pressing the thin cloth of her shirt to her body.

He looked away, and she turned again to the sight of the earth tearing open before them.

She did not want to think, but the sound of thought went on, like the drone of the motors under the sounds of the engine. She looked at the cab around her. The fine steel mesh of the ceiling, she thought, and the row of rivets in the corner, holding sheets of steel sealed together—who made them? The brute force of men’s muscles ? Who made it possible for four dials and three levers in front of Pat Logan to hold the incredible power of the sixteen motors behind them and deliver it to the effortless control of one man’s hand?

These things and the capacity from which they came—was this the pursuit men regarded as evil? Was this what they called an ignoble concern with the physical world? Was this the state of being enslaved by matter? Was this the surrender of man’s spirit to his body?

She shook her head, as if she wished she could toss the subject out of the window and let it get shattered somewhere along the track. She looked at the sun on the summer fields. She did not have to think, because these questions were only details of a truth she knew and had always known. Let them go past like the telegraph poles. The thing she knew was like the wires flying above in an unbroken line. The words for it, and for this journey, and for her feeling, and for the whole of man’s earth, were: It’s so simple and so right!

She looked out at the country. She had been aware for some time of the human figures that flashed with an odd regularity at the side of the track. But they went by so fast that she could not grasp their meaning until, like the squares of a movie film, brief flashes blended into a whole and she understood it. She had had the track guarded since its completion, but she had not hired the human chain she saw strung out along the right-of-way. A solitary figure stood at every mile post. Some were young schoolboys, others were so old that the silhouettes of their bodies looked bent against the sky. All of them were armed, with anything they had found, from costly rifles to ancient muskets. All of them wore railroad caps. They were the sons of Taggart employees, and old railroad men who had retired after a full lifetime of Taggart service. They had come, unsummoned, to guard this train. As the engine went past him, every man in his turn stood erect, at attention, and raised his gun in a military salute.

When she grasped it, she burst out laughing, suddenly, with the abruptness of a cry. She laughed, shaking, like a child; it sounded like sobs of deliverance. Pat Logan nodded to her with a faint smile; he had noted the guard of honor long ago. She leaned to the open window, and her arm swept in wide curves of triumph, waving to the men by the track.

On the crest of a distant hill, she saw a crowd of people, their arms swinging against the sky. The gray houses of a village were scattered through a valley below, as if dropped there once and forgotten; the roof lines slanted, sagging, and the years had washed away the color of the walls. Perhaps generations had lived there, with nothing to mark the passage of their days but the movement of the sun from east to west. Now, these men had climbed the hill to see a silver-headed comet cut through their plains like the sound of a bugle through a long weight of silence.

As houses began to come more frequently, closer to the track, she saw people at the windows, on the porches, on distant roofs. She saw crowds blocking the roads at grade crossings. The roads went sweeping past like the spokes of a fan, and she could not distinguish human figures, only their arms greeting the train like branches waving in the wind of its speed. They stood under the swinging red lights of warning signals, under the signs saying: “Stop. Look. Listen.”

The station past which they flew, as they went through a town at a hundred miles an hour, was a swaying sculpture of people from platform to roof. She caught the flicker of waving arms, of hats tossed in the air, of something flung against the side of the engine, which was a bunch of flowers.

As the miles clicked past them, the towns went by, with the stations at which they did not stop, with the crowds of people who had come only to see, to cheer and to hope. She saw garlands of flowers under the sooted eaves of old station buildings, and bunting of red-white-and-blue on the time-eaten walls. It was like the pictures she had seen—and envied—in schoolbook histories of railroads, from the era when people gathered to greet the first run of a train. It was like the age when Nat Taggart moved across the country, and the stops along his way were marked by men eager for the sight of achievement. That age, she had thought, was gone; generations had passed, with no event to greet anywhere, with nothing to see but the cracks lengthening year by year on the walls built by Nat Taggart. Yet men came again, as they had come in his time, drawn by the same response.

She glanced at Rearden. He stood against the wall, unaware of the crowds, indifferent to admiration. He was watching the performance of track and train with an expert’s intensity of professional interest, his bearing suggested that he would kick aside, as irrelevant, any thought such as “They like it,” when the thought ringing in his mind was “It works!”

His tall figure in the single gray of slacks and shirt looked as if his body were stripped for action. The slacks stressed the long lines of his legs, the light, firm posture of standing without effort or being ready to swing forward at an instant’s notice; the short sleeves stressed the gaunt strength of his arms; the open shirt bared the tight skin of his chest.

She turned away, realizing suddenly that she had been glancing back at him too often. But this day had no ties to past or future—her thoughts were cut off from implications—she saw no further meaning, only the immediate intensity of the feeling that she was imprisoned with him, sealed together in the same cube of air, the closeness of his presence underscoring her awareness of this day, as his rails underscored the flight of the train.

She turned deliberately and glanced back. He was looking at her. He did not turn away, but held her glance, coldly and with full intention. She smiled defiantly, not letting herself know the full meaning of her smile, knowing only that it was the sharpest blow she could strike at this inflexible face. She felt a sudden desire to see him trembling, to tear a cry out of him. She turned her head away, slowly, feeling a reckless amusement, wondering why she found it difficult to breathe.

She sat leaning back in her chair, looking ahead, knowing that he was as aware of her as she was of him. She found pleasure in the special self-consciousness it gave her. When she crossed her legs, when she leaned on her arm against the window sill, when she brushed her hair off her forehead—every movement of her body was underscored by a feeling the unadmitted words for which were: Is he seeing it?

The towns had been left behind. The track was rising through a country growing more grimly reluctant to permit approach. The rails kept vanishing behind curves, and the ridges of hills kept moving closer, as if the plains were being folded into pleats. The flat stone shelves of Colorado were advancing to the edge of the track—and the distant reaches of the sky were shrinking into waves of bluish mountains.

Far ahead, they saw a mist of smoke over factory chimneys—then the web of a power station and the lone needle of a steel structure. They were approaching Denver.

She glanced at Pat Logan. He was leaning forward a little farther. She saw a slight tightening in the fingers of his hand and in his eyes. He knew, as she did, the danger of crossing the city at the speed they were traveling.

It was a succession of minutes, but it hit them as a single whole. First, they saw the lone shapes, which were factories, rolling across their windowpanes—then the shapes fused into the blur of streets—then a delta of rails spread out before them, like the mouth of a funnel sucking them into the Taggart station, with nothing to protect them but the small green beads of light scattered over the ground—from the height of the cab, they saw boxcars on sidings streak past as flat ribbons of roof tops—the black hole of the train-shed flew at their faces—they hurtled through an explosion of sound, the beating of wheels against the glass panes of a vault, and the screams of cheering from a mass that swayed like a liquid in the darkness among steel columns—they flew toward a glowing arch and the green lights hanging in the open sky beyond, the green lights that were like the door-knobs of space, throwing door after door open before them. Then, vanishing behind them, went the streets clotted with traffic, the open windows bulging with human figures, the screaming sirens, and—from the top of a distant skyscraper—a cloud of paper snowflakes shimmering on the air, flung by someone who saw the passage of a silver bullet across a city stopped still to watch it.

Then they were out again, on a rocky grade—and with shocking suddenness, the mountains were before them, as if the city had flung them straight at a granite wall, and a thin ledge had caught them in time. They were clinging to the side of the vertical cliff, with the earth rolling down, dropping away, and giant tiers of twisted boulders streaming up and shutting out the sun, leaving them to speed through a bluish twilight, with no sight of soil or sky.

The curves of rail became coiling circles among walls that advanced to grind them off their sides. But the track cut through at times and the mountains parted, flaring open like two wings at the tip of the raH—one wing green, made of vertical needles, with whole pines serving as the pile of a solid carpet—the other reddish-brown, made of naked rock.

She looked down through the open window and saw the silver side of the engine hanging over empty space. Far below, the thin thread of a stream went falling from ledge to ledge, and the ferns that drooped to the water were the shimmering tops of birch trees. She saw the engine’s tail of boxcars winding along the face of a granite drop—and miles of contorted stone below, she saw the coils of green-blue rail unwinding behind the train.

A wall of rock shot upward in their path, filling the windshield, darkening the cab, so close that it seemed as if the remnant of time could not let them escape it. But she heard the screech of wheels on curve, the light came bursting back—and she saw an open stretch of rail on a narrow shelf. The shelf ended in space. The nose of the engine was aimed straight at the sky. There was nothing to stop them but two strips of green-blue metal strung in a curve along the shelf.

To take the pounding violence of sixteen motors, she thought, the thrust of seven thousand tons of steel and freight, to withstand it, grip it and swing it around a curve, was the impossible feat performed by two strips of metal no wider than her arm. What made it possible? What power had given to an unseen arrangement of molecules the power on which their lives depended and the lives of all the men who waited for the eighty boxcars? She saw a man’s face and hands in the glow of a laboratory oven, over the white liquid of a sample of metal.

She felt the sweep of an emotion which she could not contain, as of something bursting upward. She turned to the door of the motor units, she threw it open to a screaming jet of sound and escaped into the pounding of the engine’s heart.

For a moment, it was as if she were reduced to a single sense, the sense of hearing, and what remained of her hearing was only a long rising, falling, rising scream. She stood in a swaying, sealed chamber of metal, looking at the giant generators. She had wanted to see them, because the sense of triumph within her was bound to them, to her love for them, to the reason of the life-work she had chosen. In the abnormal clarity of a violent emotion, she felt as if she were about to grasp something she had never known and had to know. She laughed aloud, but heard no sound of it; nothing could be heard through the continuous explosion. “The John Gait Line!” she shouted, for the amusement of feeling her voice swept away from her lips.

She moved slowly along the length of the motor units, down a narrow passage between the engines and the wall. She felt the immodesty of an intruder, as if she had slipped inside a living creature, under its silver skin, and were watching its life beating in gray metal cylinders, in twisted coils, in sealed tubes, in the convulsive whirl of blades in wire cages. The enormous complexity of the shape above her was drained by invisible channels, and the violence raging within it was led to fragile needles on glass dials, to green and red beads winking on panels, to tall, thin cabinets stenciled “High Voltage.”

Why had she always felt that joyous sense of confidence when looking at machines?—she thought. In these giant shapes, two aspects pertaining to the inhuman were radiantly absent: the causeless and the purposeless. Every part of the motors was an embodied answer to “Why?” and “What for?”—hke the steps of a life-course chosen by the sort of mind she worshipped. The motors were a moral code cast in steel.

They are alive, she thought, because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power—of the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its purpose, to give it form. For an instant, it seemed to her that the motors were transparent and she was seeing the net of their nervous system. It was a net of connections, more intricate, more crucial than all of their wires and circuits: the rational connections made by that human mind which had fashioned any one part of them for the first time.

They are alive, she thought, but their soul operates them by remote control. Their soul is in every man who has the capacity to equal this achievement. Should the soul vanish from the earth, the motors would stop, because that is the power which keeps them going—not the oil under the floor under her feet, the oil that would then become primeval ooze again—not the steel cylinders that would become stains of rust on the walls of the caves of shivering savages—the power of a living mind—the power of thought and choice and purpose.

She was making her way back toward the cab, feeling that she wanted to laugh, to kneel or to lift her arms, wishing she were able to release the thing she felt, knowing that it had no form of expression.

She stopped. She saw Rearden standing by the steps of the door to the cab. He was looking at her as if he knew why she had escaped and what she felt. They stood still, their bodies becoming a glance that met across a narrow passage. The beating within her was one with the beating of the motors—and she felt as if both came from him; the pounding rhythm wiped out her will. They went back to the cab, silently, knowing that there had been a moment which was not to be mentioned between them.

The cliffs ahead were a bright, liquid gold. Strips of shadow were lengthening in the valleys below. The sun was descending to the peaks in the west. They were going west and up, toward the sun.

The sky had deepened to the greenish-blue of the rails, when they saw smokestacks in a distant valley. It was one of Colorado’s new towns, the towns that had grown like a radiation from the Wyatt oil fields. She saw the angular lines of modern houses, flat roofs, great sheets of windows. It was too far to distinguish people. In the moment when she thought that they would not be watching the train at that distance, a rocket shot out from among the buildings, rose high above the town and broke as a fountain of gold stars against the darkening sky. Men whom she could not see, were seeing the streak of the train on the side of the mountain, and were sending a salute, a lonely plume of fire in the dusk, the symbol of celebration or of a call for help.

Beyond the next turn, in a sudden view of distance, she saw two dots of electric light, white and red, low in the sky. They were not airplanes—she saw the cones of metal girders supporting them—and in the moment when she knew that they were the derricks of Wyatt Oil, she saw that the track was sweeping downward, that the earth flared open, as if the mountains were flung apart—and at the bottom, at the foot of the Wyatt hill, across the dark crack of a canyon, she saw the bridge of Rearden Metal.

They were flying down, she forgot the careful grading, the great curves of the gradual descent, she felt as if the train were plunging downward, head first, she watched the bridge growing to meet them—a small, square tunnel of metal lace work, a few beams criss-crossed through the air, green-blue and glowing, struck by a long ray of sunset light from some crack in the barrier of mountains. There were people by the bridge, the dark splash of a crowd, but they rolled off the edge of her consciousness. She heard the rising, accelerating sound of the whee!s—and some theme of music, heard to the rhythm of wheels, kept tugging at her mind, growing louder—it burst suddenly within the cab, but she knew that it was only in her mind: the Fifth Concerto by Richard Ha!!ey—she thought: did he write it for this? had he known a feeling such as this?—they were going faster, they had left the ground, she thought, flung off by the mountains as by a springboard, they were now sailing through space—it’s not a fair test, she thought, we’re not going to touch that bridge—she saw Rearden’s face above her, she held his eyes and her head leaned back, so that her face lay still on the air under his face—they heard a ringing blast of metal, they heard a drum roll under their feet, the diagonals of the bridge went smearing across the windows with the sound of a metal rod being run along the pickets of a fence—then the windows were too suddenly clear, the sweep of their downward plunge was carrying them up a hill, the derricks of Wyatt Oil were reeling before them—Pat Logan turned, glancing up at Rearden with the hint of a smile—and Rearden said, “That’s that.”

The sign on the edge of a roof read: Wyatt Junction. She stared, feeling that there was something odd about it, until she grasped what it was: the sign did not move. The sharpest jolt of the journey was the realization that the engine stood still.

She heard voices somewhere, she looked down and saw that there were people on the platform. Then the door of the cab was flung open, she knew that she had to be first to descend, and she stepped to the edge. For the flash of an instant, she felt the slenderness of her own body, the lightness of standing full-figure in a current of open air. She gripped the metal bars and started down the ladder. She was halfway down when she felt the palms of a man’s hands slam tight against her ribs and waistline, she was torn off the steps, swung through the air and deposited on the ground. She could not believe that the young boy laughing in her face was Ellis Wyatt. The tense, scornful face she remembered, now had the purity, the eagerness, the joyous benevolence of a child in the kind of world for which he had been intended.

She was leaning against his shoulder, feeling unsteady on the motionless ground, with his arm about her, she was laughing, she was listening to the things he said, she was answering, “But didn’t you know we would?”

In a moment, she saw the faces around them. They were the bond-holders of the John Galt Line, the men who were Nielsen Motors, Hammond Cars, Stockton Foundry and all the others. She shook their hands, and there were no speeches; she stood against Ellis Wyatt, sagging a little, brushing her hair away from her eyes, leaving smudges of soot on her forehead. She shook the hands of the men of the train’s crew, without words, with the seal of the grins on their faces. There were flash bulbs exploding around them, and men waving to them from the riggings of the oil wells on the slopes of the mountains. Above her head, above the heads of the crowd, the letters TT on a silver shield were hit by the last ray of a sinking sun.

Ellis Wyatt had taken charge. He was leading her somewhere, the sweep of his arm cutting a path for them through the crowd, when one of the men with the cameras broke through to her side. “Miss Taggart,” he called, “will you give us a message for the public?” Ellis Wyatt pointed at the long string of freight cars. “She has.”

Then she was sitting in the back seat of an open car, driving up the curves of a mountain road. The man beside her was Rearden, the driver was Ellis Wyatt.

They stopped at a house that stood on the edge of a cliff, with no other habitation anywhere in sight, with the whole of the oil fields spread on the slopes below.

“Why, of course you’re staying at my house overnight, both of you,” said Ellis Wyatt, as they went in. “Where did you expect to stay?”

She laughed. “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought of it at all.”

“The nearest town is an hour’s drive away. That’s where your crew has gone: your boys at the division point are giving a party in their honor. So is the whole town. But I told Ted Nielsen and the others that we’d have no banquets for you and no oratory. Unless you’d like it?”

“God, no!” she said. “Thanks, Ellis.”

It was dark when they sat at the dinner table in a room that had large windows and a few pieces of costly furniture. The dinner was served by a silent figure in a white jacket, the only other inhabitant of the house, an elderly Indian with a stony face and a courteous manner. A few points of fire were scattered through the room, running over and out beyond the windows: the candles on the table, the lights on the derricks, and the stars:

“Do you think that you have your hands full now?” Ellis Wyatt was saying. “Just give me a year and I’ll give you something to keep you busy. Two tank trains a day, Dagny? It’s going to be four or six or as many as you wish me to fill.” His hand swept over the lights on the mountains. “This? It’s nothing, compared to what I’ve got coming.” He pointed west. “The Buena Esperanza Pass. Five miles from here. Everybody’s wondering what I’m doing with it. Oil shale. How many years ago was it that they gave up trying to get oil from shale, because it was too expensive? Well, wait till you see the process I’ve developed. It will be the cheapest oil ever to splash in their faces, and an unlimited supply of it, an untapped supply that will make the biggest oil pool look like a mud puddle. Did I order a pipe line? Hank, you and I will have to build pipe lines in all directions to ... Oh, I beg your pardon. I don’t believe I introduced myself when I spoke to you at the station. I haven’t even told you my name.”

Rearden grinned. “I’ve guessed it by now.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t like to be careless, but I was too excited.”

“What were you excited about?” asked Dagny, her eyes narrowed in mockery.

Wyatt held her glance for a moment; his answer had a tone of solemn intensity strangely conveyed by a smiling voice. “About the most beautiful slap in the face I ever got and deserved.”

“Do you mean, for our first meeting?”

“I mean, for our first meeting.”

“Don’t. You were right.”

“I was. About everything but you. Dagny, to find an exception after years of ... Oh, to hell with them! Do you want me to turn on the radio and hear what they’re saying about the two of you tonight?”

“No.”

“Good. I don’t want to hear them. Let them swallow their own speeches. They’re all climbing on the band wagon now. We’re the band.” He glanced at Rearden. “What are you smiling at?”

“I’ve always been curious to see what you’re like.”

“I’ve never had a chance to be what I’m like—except tonight.”

“Do you live here alone, like this, miles away from everything?”

Wyatt pointed at the window. “I’m a couple of steps away from—everything.”

“What about people?”

“I have guest rooms for the kind of people who come to see me on business. I want as many miles as possible between myself and all the other kinds.” He leaned forward to refill their wine glasses. “Hank, why don’t you move to Colorado? To hell with New York and the Eastern Seaboard! This is the capital of the Renaissance. The Second Renaissance—not of oil paintings and cathedrals—but of oil derricks, power plants, and motors made of Rearden Metal. They had the Stone Age and the Iron Age and now they’re going to call it the Rearden Metal Age—because there’s no limit to what your Metal has made possible.”

“I’m going to buy a few square miles of Pennsylvania,” said Rearden. “The ones around my mills. It would have been cheaper to build a branch here, as I wanted, but you know why I can’t, and to hell with them! I’ll beat them anyway. I’m going to expand the mills—and if she can give me three-day freight service to Colorado, I’ll give you a race for who’s going to be the capital of the Renaissance!”

“Give me a year,” said Dagny, “of running trains on the John Galt Line, give me time to pull the Taggart system together—and I’ll give you three-day freight service across the continent, on a Rearden Metal track from ocean to ocean!”

“Who was it that said he needed a fulcrum?” said Ellis Wyatt. “Give me an unobstructed right-of-way and I’ll show them how to move the earth!”

She wondered what it was that she liked about the sound of Wyatt’s laughter. Their voices, even her own, had a tone she had never heard before. When they rose from the table, she was astonished to notice that the candles were the only illumination of the room: she had felt as if she were sitting in a violent light.

Ellis Wyatt picked up his glass, looked at their faces and said, “To the world as it seems to be right now!”

He emptied the glass with a single movement.

She heard the crash of the glass against the wall in the same instant that she saw a circling current—from the curve of his body to the sweep of his arm to the terrible violence of his hand that flung the glass across the room. It was not the conventional gesture meant as celebration, it was the gesture of a rebellious anger, the vicious gesture which is movement substituted for a scream of pain.

“Ellis,” she whispered, “what’s the matter?”

He turned to look at her. With the same violent suddenness, his eyes were clear, his face was calm; what frightened her was seeing him smile gently. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Never mind. We’ll try to think that it will last.”

The earth below was streaked with moonlight, when Wyatt led them up an outside stairway to the second floor of the house, to the open gallery at the doors of the guest rooms. He wished them good night and they heard his steps descending the stairs. The moonlight seemed to drain sound as it drained color. The steps rolled into a distant past, and when they died, the silence had the quality of a solitude that had lasted for a long time, as if no person were left anywhere in reach.

She did not turn to the door of her room. He did not move. At the level of their feet, there was nothing but a thin railing and a spread of space. Angular tiers descended below, with shadows repeating the steel tracery of derricks, criss-crossing sharp, black lines on patches of glowing rock. A few lights, white and red, trembled in the clear air, like drops of rain caught on the edges of steel girders. Far in the distance, three small drops were green, strung in a line along the Taggart track. Beyond them, at the end of space, at the foot of a white curve, hung a webbed rectangle which was the bridge.

She felt a rhythm without sound or movement, a sense of beating tension, as if the wheels of the John Galt Line were still speeding on. Slowly, in answer and in resistance to an unspoken summons, she turned and looked at him.

The look she saw on his face made her know for the first time that she had known this would be the end of the journey. That look was not as men are taught to represent it, it was not a matter of loose muscles, hanging lips and mindless hunger. The lines of his face were pulled tight, giving it a peculiar purity, a sharp precision of form, making it clean and young. His mouth was taut, the lips faintly drawn inward, stressing the outline of its shape. Only his eyes were blurred, their lower lids swollen and raised, their glance intent with that which resembled hatred and pain.

The shock became numbness spreading through her body—she felt a tight pressure in her throat and her stomach—she was conscious of nothing but a silent convulsion that made her unable to breathe. But what she felt, without words for it, was: Yes, Hank, yes—now—because it is part of the same battle, in some way that I can’t name ... because it is our being, against theirs ... our great capacity, for which they torture us, the capacity of happiness ... Now, like this, without words or questions ... because we want it ...

It was like an act of hatred, like the cutting blow of a lash encircling her body: she felt his arms around her, she felt her legs pulled forward against him and her chest bent back under the pressure of his, his mouth on hers.

Her hand moved from his shoulders to his waist to his legs, releasing the unconfessed desire of her every meeting with him. When she tore her mouth away from him, she was laughing soundlessly, in triumph, as if saying: Hank Rearden—the austere, unapproachable Hank Rearden of the monklike office, the business conferences, the harsh bargains—do you remember them now?—I’m thinking of it, for the pleasure of knowing that I’ve brought you to this. He was not smiling, his face was tight, it was the face of an enemy, he jerked her head and caught her mouth again, as if he were inflicting a wound.

She felt him trembling and she thought that this was the kind of cry she had wanted to tear from him—this surrender through the shreds of his tortured resistance. Yet she knew, at the same time, that the triumph was his, that her laughter was her tribute to him, that her defiance was submission, that the purpose of all of her violent strength was only to make his victory the greater—he was holding her body against his, as if stressing his wish to let her know that she was now only a tool for the satisfaction of his desire—and his victory, she knew, was her wish to let him reduce her to that. Whatever I am, she thought, whatever pride of person I may hold, the pride of my courage, of my work, of my mind and my freedom—that is what I offer you for the pleasure of your body, that is what I want you to use in your service—and that you want it to serve you is the greatest reward I can have.

There were lights burning in the two rooms behind them. He took her wrist and threw her inside his room, making the gesture tell her that he needed no sign of consent or resistance. He locked the door, watching her face. Standing straight, holding his glance, she extended her arm to the lamp on the table and turned out the light. He approached. He turned the light on again, with a single, contemptuous jerk of his wrist. She saw him smile for the first time, a slow, mocking, sensual smile that stressed the purpose of his action.

He was holding her half-stretched across the bed, he was tearing her clothes off, while her face was pressed against him, her mouth moving down the line of his neck, down his shoulder. She knew that every gesture of her desire for him struck him like a blow, that there was some shudder of incredulous anger within him—yet that no gesture would satisfy his greed for every evidence of her desire.

He stood looking down at her naked body, he leaned over, she heard his voice—it was more a statement of contemptuous triumph than a question: “You want it?” Her answer was more a gasp than a word, her eyes closed, her mouth open: “Yes.”

She knew that what she felt with the skin of her arms was the cloth of his shirt, she knew that the lips she felt on her mouth were his, but in the rest of her there was no distinction between his being and her own, as there was no division between body and spirit. Through all the steps of the years behind them, the steps down a course chosen in the courage of a single loyalty: their love of existence—chosen in the knowledge that nothing will be given, that one must make one’s own desire and every shape of its fulfiltment—through the steps of shaping metal, rails and motors—they had moved by the power of the thought that one remakes the earth for one’s enjoyment, that man’s spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one’s chosen goal. The course led them to the moment when, in answer to the highest of one’s values, in an admiration not to be expressed by any other form of tribute, one’s spirit makes one’s body become the tribute, recasting it—as proof, as sanction, as reward—into a single sensation of such intensity of joy that no other sanction of one’s existence is necessary. He heard the moan of her breath; she felt the shudder of his body, in the same instant.

She looked at the glowing bands on the skin of her arm, spaced like bracelets from her wrist to her shoulder. They were strips of sunlight from the Venetian blinds on the window of an unfamiliar room. She saw a bruise above her elbow, with dark beads that had been blood. Her arm lay on the blanket that covered her body. She was aware of her legs and hips, but the rest of her body was only a sense of lightness, as if it were stretched restfully across the air in a place that looked like a cage made of sunrays.

Turning to look at him, she thought: From his aloofness, from his manner of glass-enclosed formality, from his pride in never being made to feel anything—to this, to Hank Rearden in bed beside her, after hours of a violence which they could not name now, not in words or in daylight—but which was in their eyes, as they looked at each other, which they wanted to name, to stress, to throw at each other’s face.

He saw the face of a young girl, her lips suggesting a smile, as if her natural state of relaxation were a state of radiance, a lock of hair falling across her cheek to the curve of a naked shoulder, her eyes looking at him as if she were ready to accept anything he might wish to say, as she had been ready to accept anything he had wished to do.

He reached over and moved the lock of hair from her cheek, cautiously, as if it were fragile. He held it back with his fingertips and looked at her face. Then his fingers closed suddenly in her hair and he raised the lock to his lips. The way he pressed his mouth to it was tenderness, but the way his fingers held it was despair.

He dropped back on the pillow and lay still, his eyes closed. His face seemed young, at peace. Seeing it for a moment without the reins of tension, she realized suddenly the extent of the unhappiness he had borne; but it’s past now, she thought, it’s over.

He got up, not looking at her. His face was blank and closed again. He picked up his clothes from the floor and proceeded to dress, standing in the middle of the room, half-turned away from her. He acted, not as if she wasn’t present, but as if it did not matter that she was. His movements, as he buttoned his shirt, as he buckled the belt of his slacks, had the rapid precision of performing a duty.

She lay back on the pillow, watching him, enjoying the sight of his figure in motion. She liked the gray slacks and shirt—the expert mechanic of the John Galt Line, she thought, in the stripes of sunlight and shadow, like a convict behind bars. But they were not bars any longer, they were the cracks of a wall which the John Galt Line had broken, the advance notice of what awaited them outside, beyond the Venetian blinds—she thought of the trip back, on the new rail, with the first train from Wyatt Junction—the trip back to her office in the Taggart Building and to all the things now open for her to win—but she was free to let it wait, she did not want to think of it, she was thinking of the first touch of his mouth on hers—she was free to feel it, to hold a moment when nothing else was of any concern—she smiled defiantly at the strips of sky beyond the blinds.

“I want you to know this.”

He stood by the bed, dressed, looking down at her. His voice had pronounced it evenly, with great clarity and no inflection. She looked up at him obediently. He said:

“What I feel for you is contempt. But it’s nothing, compared to the contempt I feel for myself. I don’t love you. I’ve never loved anyone. I wanted you from the first moment I saw you. I wanted you as one wants a whore—for the same reason and purpose. I spent two years damning myself, because I thought you were above a desire of this kind. You’re not. You’re as vile an animal as I am. I should loathe my discovering it. I don’t. Yesterday, I would have killed anyone who’d tell me that you were capable of doing what I’ve had you do. Today, I would give my life not to let it be otherwise, not to have you be anything but the bitch you are. All the greatness that I saw in you—I would not take it in exchange for the obscenity of your talent at an animal’s sensation of pleasure. We were two great beings, you and I, proud of our strength, weren’t we? Well, this is all that’s left of us—and I want no self-deception about it.”

He spoke slowly; as if lashing himself with his words. There was no sound of emotion in his voice, only the lifeless pull of effort; it was not the tone of a man’s willingness to speak, but the ugly, tortured sound of duty.

“I held it as my honor that I would never need anyone. I need you. It had been my pride that,I had always acted on my convictions. I’ve given in to a desire which I despise. It is a desire that has reduced my mind, my will, my being, my power to exist into an abject dependence upon you—not even upon the Dagny Taggart whom I admired—but upon your body, your hands, your mouth and the few seconds of a convulsion of your muscles. I had never broken my word. Now I’ve broken any oath I gave for life. I had never committed an act that had to be hidden. Now I am to lie, to sneak, to hide. Whatever I wanted, I was free to proclaim it aloud and achieve it in the sight of the whole world. Now my only desire is one I loathe to name even to myself. But it is my only desire. I’m going to have you—I’d give up everything I own for it, the mills, the Metal, the achievement of my whole life. I’m going to have you at the price of more than myself: at the price of my self-esteem—and I want you to know it. I want no pretense, no evasion, no silent indulgence, with the nature of our actions left unnamed. I want no pretense about love, value, loyalty or respect. I want no shred of honor left to us, to hide behind. I’ve never begged for mercy. I’ve chosen to do this—and I’ll take all the consequences, including the full recognition of my choice. It’s depravity—and I accept it as such—and there is no height of virtue that I wouldn’t give up for it. Now if you wish to slap my face, go ahead. I wish you would.”

She had listened, sitting up straight, holding the blanket clutched at her throat to cover her body. At first, he had seen her eyes growing dark with incredulous shock. Then it seemed to him that she was listening with greater attentiveness, but seeing more than his face, even though her eyes were fixed on his. She looked as if she were studying intently some revelation that had never confronted her before. He felt as if some ray of light were growing stronger on his face, because he saw its reflection on hers, as she watched him—he saw the shock vanishing, then the wonder—he saw her face being smoothed into a strange serenity that seemed quiet and glittering at once.

When he stopped, she burst out laughing.

The shock to him was that he heard no anger in her laughter. She laughed simply, easily, in joyous amusement, in release, not as one laughs at the solution of a problem, but at the discovery that no problem had ever existed.

She threw the blanket off with a stressed, deliberate sweep of her arm. She stood up. She saw her clothes on the floor and kicked them aside. She stood facing him, naked. She said:

“I want you, Hank. I’m much more of an animal than you think. I wanted you from the first moment I saw you—and the only thing I’m ashamed of is that I did not know it. I did not know why, for two years, the brightest moments I found were the ones in your office, where I could lift my head to look up at you. I did not know the nature of what I felt in your presence, nor the reason. I know it now. That is all I want, Hank. I want you in my bed—and you are free of me for all the rest of your time. There’s nothing you’ll have to pretend—don’t think of me, don’t feel, don’t care—I do not want your mind, your will, your being or your soul, so long as it’s to me that you will come for that lowest one of your desires. I am an animal who wants nothing but the sensation of pleasure which you despise—but I want it from you. You’d give up any height of virtue for it, while I—I haven’t any to give up. There’s none I seek or wish to reach. I am so low that I would exchange the greatest sight of beauty in the world for the sight of your figure in the cab of a railroad engine. And seeing it, I would not be able to see it indifferently. You don’t have to fear that you’re not dependent upon me. It’s I who will depend on any whim of yours. You’ll have me any time you wish, anywhere, on any terms. Did you call it the obscenity of my talent? It’s such that it gives you a safer hold on me than on any other property you own. You may dispose of me as you please—I’m not afraid to admit it—I have nothing to protect from you and nothing to reserve. You think that this is a threat to your achievement, but it is not to mine. I will sit at my desk, and work, and when the things around me get hard to bear, I will think that for my reward I will be in your bed that night. Did you call it depravity? I am much more depraved than you are: you hold it as your guilt, and I—as my pride. I’m more proud of it than of anything I’ve done, more proud than of building the Line. If I’m asked to name my proudest attainment, I will say: I have slept with Hank Rearden. I had earned it.”

When he threw her down on the bed, their bodies met like the two sounds that broke against each other in the air of the room: the sound of his tortured moan and of her laughter.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Shortly after the successful run of the John Galt Line, Rearden and Dagny, while on vacation, happen across a revolutionary discovery—left inside an abandoned factory in a blighted part of the country.

The Abandoned Factory

THE EARTH went flowing under the hood of the car. Uncoiling from among the curves of Wisconsin’s hills, the highway was the only evidence of human labor, a precarious bridge stretched across a sea of brush, weeds and trees. The sea rolled softly, in sprays of yellow and orange, with a few red jets shooting up on the hillsides, with pools of remnant green in the hollows, under a pure blue sky. Among the colors of a picture post card, the car’s hood looked like the work of a jeweler, with the sun sparkling on its chromium steel, and its black enamel reflecting the sky.

Dagny leaned against the corner of the side window, her legs stretched forward; she liked the wide, comfortable space of the car’s seat and the warmth of the sun on her shoulders; she thought that the countryside was beautiful.

“What I’d like to see,” said Rearden, “is a billboard.”

She laughed: he had answered her silent thought. “Selling what and to whom? We haven’t seen a car or a house for an hour.”

“That’s what I don’t like about it.” He bent forward a little, his hands on the wheel; he was frowning. “Look at that road.”

The long strip of concrete was bleached to the powdery gray of bones left on a desert, as if sun and snows had eaten away the traces of tires, oil and carbon, the lustrous polish of motion. Green weeds rose from the angular cracks of the concrete. No one had used the road or repaired it for many years; but the cracks were few.

“It’s a good road,” said Rearden. “It was built to last. The man who built it must have had a good reason for expecting it to carry a heavy traffic in the years ahead.”

“Yes...”

“I don’t like the looks of this.”

“I don’t either.” Then she smiled. “But think how often we’ve heard people complain that billboards ruin the appearance of the countryside. Well, there’s the unruined countryside for them to admire.” She added, “They’re the people I hate.”

She did not want to feel the uneasiness which she felt like a thin crack under her enjoyment of this day. She had felt that uneasiness at times, in the last three weeks, at the sight of the country streaming past the wedge of the car’s hood. She smiled: it was the hood that had been the immovable point in her field of vision, while the earth had gone by, it was the hood that had been the center, the focus, the security in a blurred, dissolving world ... the hood before her and Rearden’s hands on the wheel by her side ... she smiled, thinking that she was satisfied to let this be the shape of her world.

After the first week of their wandering, when they had driven at random, at the mercy of unknown crossroads, he had said to her one morning as they started out, “Dagny, does resting have to be purposeless?” She had laughed, answering, “No. What factory do you want to see?” He had smiled—at the guilt he did not have to assume, at the explanations he did not have to give—and he had answered. “It’s an abandoned ore mine around Saginaw Bay, that I’ve heard about. They say it’s exhausted.”

They had driven across Michigan to the ore mine. They had walked through the ledges of an empty pit, with the remnants of a crane like a skeleton bending above them against the sky, and someone’s rusted lunchbox clattering away from under their feet. She had felt a stab of uneasiness, sharper than sadness—but Rearden had said cheerfully “Exhausted, hell! I’ll show them how many tons and dollars I can draw out of this place!” On their way back to the car, he had said, “If I could find the right man, I’d buy that mine for him tomorrow morning and set him up to work it.”

The next day, when they were driving west and south, toward the plains of Illinois, he had said suddenly, after a long silence. “No, I’ll have to wait till they junk the Bill. The man who could work that mine, wouldn’t need me to teach him. The man who’d need me, wouldn’t be worth a damn.”

They could speak of their work, as they always had, with full confidence in being understood. But they never spoke of each other. He acted as if their passionate intimacy were a nameless physical fact, not to be identified in the communication between two minds. Each night, it was as if she lay in the arms of a stranger who let her see every shudder of sensation that ran through his body, but would never permit her to know whether the shocks reached any answering tremor within him. She lay naked at his side, but on her wrist there was the bracelet of Rearden Metal.

She knew that he hated the ordeal of signing the “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” on the registers of squalid roadside hotels. There were evenings when she noticed the faint contraction of anger in the tightness of his mouth, as he signed the expected names of the expected fraud, anger at those who made fraud necessary. She noticed, indifferently, the air of knowing slyness in the manner of the hotel clerks, which seemed to suggest that guests and clerks alike were accomplices in a shameful guilt: the guilt of seeking pleasure. But she knew that it did not matter to him when they were alone, when he held her against him for a moment and she saw his eyes look alive and guiltless.

They drove through small towns, through obscure side roads, through the kind of places they had not seen for years. She felt uneasiness at the sight of the towns. Days passed before she realized what it was that she missed most: a glimpse of fresh paint. The houses stood like men in unpressed suits, who had lost the desire to stand straight: the cornices were like sagging shoulders, the crooked porch steps like torn hem lines, the broken windows like patches, mended with clapboard. The people in the streets stared at the new car, not as one stares at a rare sight, but as if the glittering black shape were an impossible vision from another world. There were few vehicles in the streets and too many of them were horsedrawn. She had forgotten the literal shape and usage of horsepower; she did not like to see its return.

She did not laugh, that day at the grade crossing, when Rearden chuckled, pointing, and she saw the train of a small local railroad come tottering from behind a hill, drawn by an ancient locomotive that coughed black smoke through a tall stack.

“Oh God, Hank, it’s not funny!”

“I know,” he said.

They were seventy miles and an hour away from it, when she said, “Hank, do you see the Taggart Comet being pulled across the continent by a coal-burner of that kind?”

“What’s the matter with you? Pull yourself together.”

“I’m sorry ... It’s just that I keep thinking it won’t be any use, all my new track and all your new furnaces, if we don’t find someone able to produce Diesel engines. If we don’t find him fast.”

“Ted Nielsen of Colorado is your man.”

“Yes, if he finds a way to open his new plant. He’s sunk more money than he should into the bonds of the John Gait Line.”

“That’s turned out to be a pretty profitable investment, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, but it’s held him up. Now he’s ready to go ahead, but he can’t find the tools. There are no machine tools to buy, not anywhere, not at any price. He’s getting nothing but promises and delays. He’s combing the country, looking for old junk to reclaim from closed factories. If he doesn’t start soon—”

“He will. Who’s going to stop him now?”

“Hank,” she said suddenly, “could we go to a place I’d like to see?”

“Sure. Anywhere. Which place?”

“It’s in Wisconsin. There used to be a great motor company there, in my father’s time. We had a branch line serving it, but we closed the hne—about seven years ago—when they closed the factory. I think it’s one of those blighted areas now. Maybe there’s still some machinery left there that Ted Nielsen could use. It might have been overlooked—the place is forgotten and there’s no transportation to it at all.”

“I’ll find it. What was the name of the factory?”

“The Twentieth Century Motor Company.”

“Oh, of course! That was one of the best motor firms in my youth, perhaps the best. I seem to remember that there was something odd about the way it went out of business ... can’t recall what it was.”

It took them three days of inquiries, but they found the bleached, abandoned road—and now they were driving through the yellow leaves that glittered like a sea of gold coins, to the Twentieth Century Motor Company.

“Hank, what if anything happens to Ted Nielsen?” she asked suddenly, as they drove in silence.

“Why should anything happen to him?”

“I don’t know, but ... well, there was Dwight Sanders. He vanished. United Locomotives is done for now. And the other plants are in no condition to produce Diesels. I’ve stopped listening to promises. And ... and of what use is a railroad without motive power?”

“Of what use is anything, for that matter, without it?”

The leaves sparkled, swaying in the wind. They spread for miles, from grass to brush to trees, with the motion and all the colors of fire; they seemed to celebrate an accomplished purpose, burning in unchecked, untouched abundance.

Rearden smiled. “There’s something to be said for the wilderness. I’m beginning to like it. New country that nobody’s discovered.” She nodded gaily. “It’s good soil—look at the way things grow. I’d clear that brush and I’d build a—”

And then they stopped smiling. The corpse they saw in the weeds by the roadside was a rusty cylinder with bits of glass—the remnant of a gas-station pump.

It was the only thing left visible. The few charred posts, the slab of concrete and the sparkle of glass dust—which had been a gas station—were swallowed in the brush, not to be noticed except by a careful glance, not to be seen at all in another year.

They looked away. They drove on, not wanting to know what else lay hidden under the miles of weeds. They felt the same wonder like a weight in the silence between them: wonder as to how much the weeds had swallowed and how fast.

The road ended abruptly behind the turn of a hill. What remained was a few chunks of concrete sticking out of a long, pitted stretch of tar and mud. The concrete had been smashed by someone and carted away; even weeds could not grow in the strip of earth left behind. On the crest of a distant hill, a single telegraph pole stood slanted against the sky, like a cross over a vast grave.

It took them three hours and a punctured tire to crawl in low gear through trackless soil, through gullies, then down ruts left by cart wheels—to reach the settlement that lay in the valley beyond the hill with the telegraph pole.

A few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had once been an industrial town. Everything that could move, had moved away; but some human beings had remained. The empty structures were vertical rubble; they had been eaten, not by time, but by men: boards torn out at random, missing patches of roofs, holes left in gutted cellars. It looked as if blind hands had seized whatever fitted the need of the moment, with no concept of remaining in existence the next morning. The inhabited houses were scattered at random among the ruins; the smoke of their chimneys was the only movement visible in town. A shell of concrete, which had been a schoolhouse, stood on the outskirts; it looked like a skull, with the empty sockets of glassless windows, with a few strands of hair still clinging to it, in the shape of broken wires.

Beyond the town, on a distant hill, stood the factory of the Twentieth Century Motor Company. Its walls, roof lines and smokestacks looked trim, impregnable like a fortress. It would have seemed intact but for a silver water tank: the water tank was tipped sidewise.

They saw no trace of a road to the factory in the tangled miles of trees and hillsides. They drove to the door of the first house in sight that showed a feeble signal of rising smoke. The door was open. An old woman came shuffling out at the sound of the motor. She was bent and swollen, barefooted, dressed in a garment of flour sacking. She looked at the car without astonishment, without curiosity; it was the blank stare of a being who had lost the capacity to feel anything but exhaustion.

“Can you tell me the way to the factory?” asked Rearden.

The woman did not answer at once; she looked as if she would be unable to speak English. “What factory?” she asked.

Rearden pointed. “That one.”

“It’s closed.”

“I know it’s closed. But is there any way to get there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is there any sort of road?”

“There’s roads in the woods.”

“Any for a car to drive through?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, which would be the best road to take?”

“I don’t know.”

Through the open door, they could see the interior of her house. There was a useless gas stove, its oven stuffed with rags, serving as a chest of drawers. There was a stove built of stones in a corner, with a few logs burning under an old kettle, and long streaks of soot rising up the wall. A white object lay propped against the legs of a table: it was a porcelain washbowl, torn from the wall of some bathroom, filled with wilted cabbages. A tallow candle stood in a bottle on the table. There was no paint left on the floor; its boards were scrubbed to a soggy gray that looked like the visual expression of the pain in the bones of the person who had bent and scrubbed and lost the battle against the grime now soaked into the grain of the boards.

A brood of ragged children had gathered at the door behind the woman, silently, one by one. They stared at the car, not with the bright curiosity of children, but with the tension of savages ready to vanish at the first sign of danger.

“How many miles is it to the factory?” asked Rearden.

“Ten miles,” said the woman, and added, “Maybe five.”

“How far is the next town?”

“There ain’t anv next town.”

“There are other towns somewhere. I mean, how far?”

“Yeah. Somewhere.”

In the vacant space by the side of the house, they saw faded rags hanging on a clothesline, which was a piece of telegraph wire. Three chickens pecked among the beds of a scraggly vegetable garden; a fourth sat roosting on a bar which was a length of plumber’s pipe. Two pigs waddled in a stretch of mud and refuse; the stepping stones laid across the muck were pieces of the highway’s concrete.

They heard a screeching sound in the distance and saw a man drawing water from a public well by means of a rope pulley. They watched him as he came slowly down the street. He carried two buckets that seemed too heavy for his thin arms. One could not tell his age. He approached and stopped, looking at the car. His eyes darted at the strangers, then away, suspicious and furtive.

Rearden took out a ten-dollar bill and extended it to him, asking; “Would you please tell us the way to the factory?”

The man stared at the money with sullen indifference, not moving, not lifting a hand for it, still clutching the two buckets. If one were ever to see a man devoid of greed, thought Dagny, there he was.

“We don’t need no money around here,” he said.

“Don’t you work for a living?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what do you use for money?”

The man put the buckets down, as if it had just occurred to him that he did not have to stand straining under their weight. “We don’t use no money,” he said. “We just trade things amongst us.”

“How do you trade with people from other towns?”

“We don’t go to no other towns.”

“You don’t seem to have it easy here.”

“What’s that to you?”

“Nothing. Just curiosity. Why do you people stay here?”

“My old man use to have a grocery store here. Only the factory closed.”

“Why didn’t you move?”

“Where to?”

“Anywhere.”

“What for?”

Dagny was staring at the two buckets: they were square tins with rope handles; they had been oil cans.

“Listen,” said Rearden, “can you tell us whether there’s a road to the factory?”

“There’s plenty of roads.”

“Is there one that a car can take?”

“I guess so.”

“Which one?”

The man weighed the problem earnestly for some moments. “Well, now if you turn to the left by the schoolhouse,” he said, “and go on till you come to the crooked oak, there’s a road up there that’s fine when it don’t rain for a couple of weeks.”

“When did it rain last?”

“Yesterday.”

“Is there another road?”

“Well, you could go through Hanson’s pasture and across the woods and then there’s a good, solid road there, all the way down to the creek.”

“Is there a bridge across the creek?”

“No.”

“What are the other roads?”

“Well, if it’s a car road that you want, there’s one the other side of Miller’s patch, it’s paved, it’s the best road for a car, you just turn to the right by the schoolhouse and—”

“But that road doesn’t go to the factory, does it?”

“No, not to the factory.”

“All right,” said Rearden. “Guess we’ll find our own way.”

He had pressed the starter, when a rock came smashing into the windshield. The glass was shatterproof, but a sunburst of cracks spread across it. They saw a ragged little hoodlum vanishing behind a corner with a scream of laughter, and they heard the shrill laughter of children answering him from behind some windows or crevices.

Rearden suppressed a swear word. The man looked vapidly across the street, frowning a little. The old woman looked on, without reaction. She had stood there silently, watching, without interest or purpose, like a chemical compound on a photographic plate, absorbing visual shapes because they were there to be absorbed, but unable ever to form any estimate of the objects of her vision.

Dagny had been studying her for some minutes. The swollen shapelessness of the woman’s body did not look like the product of age and neglect: it looked as if she was pregnant. This seemed impossible, but glancing closer Dagny saw that her dust-colored hair was not gray and that there were few wrinkles on her face; it was only the vacant eyes, the stooped shoulders, the shuffling movements that gave her the stamp of senility.

Dagny leaned out and asked, “How old are you?”

The woman looked at her, not in resentment, but merely as one looks at a pointless question. “Thirty-seven,” she answered.

They had driven five former blocks away, when Dagny spoke.

“Hank,” she said in terror, “that woman is only two years older than I!”

“Yes.”

“God, how did they ever come to such a state?”

He shrugged. “Who is John Galt?”

The last thing they saw, as they left the town, was a billboard. A design was still visible on its peeling strips, imprinted in the dead gray that had once been color. It advertised a washing machine.

In a distant field, beyond the town, they saw the figure of a man moving slowly, contorted by the ugliness of a physical effort beyond the proper use of a human body: he was pushing a plow by hand.

They reached the factory of the Twentieth Century Motor Company two miles and two hours later. They knew, as they climbed the hill, that their quest was useless. A rusted padlock hung on the door of the main entrance, but the huge windows were shattered and the place was open to anyone, to the woodchucks, the rabbits and the dried leaves that lay in drifts inside.

The factory had been gutted long ago. The great pieces of machinery had been moved out by some civilized means—the neat holes of their bases still remained in the concrete of the floor. The rest had gone to random looters. There was nothing left, except refuse which the neediest tramp had found worthless, piles of twisted, rusted scraps, of boards, plaster and glass splinters—and the steel stairways, built to last and lasting, rising in trim spirals to the roof.

They stopped in the great hall where a ray of light fell diagonally from a gap in the ceiling, and the echoes of their steps rang around them, dying far away in rows of empty rooms. A bird darted from among the steel rafters and went in a hissing streak of wings out into the sky.

“We’d better look through it, just in case,” said Dagny. “You take the shops and I’ll take the annexes. Let’s do it as fast as possible.”

“I don’t like to let you wander around alone. I don’t know how safe they are, any of those floors or stairways.”

“Oh, nonsense! I can find my way around a factory—or in a wrecking crew. Let’s get it over with. I want to get out of here.”

When she walked through the silent yards—where steel bridges still hung overhead, tracing lines of geometrical perfection across the sky—her only wish was not to see any of it, but she forced herself to look. It was like having to perform an autopsy on the body of one’s love. She moved her glance as an automatic searchlight, her teeth clamped tight together. She walked rapidly—there was no necessity to pause anywhere.

It was in a room of what had been the laboratory that she stopped. It was a coil of wire that made her stop. The coil protruded from a pile of junk. She had never seen that particular arrangement of wires, yet it seemed familiar, as if it touched the hint of some memory, faint and very distant. She reached for the coil, but could not move it: it seemed to be part of some object buried in the pile.

The room looked as if it had been an experimental laboratory—if she was right in judging the purpose of the torn remnants she saw on the walls: a great many electrical outlets, bits of heavy cable, lead conduits, glass tubing, built-in cabinets without shelves or doors. There was a great deal of glass, rubber, plastic and metal in the junk pile, and dark gray splinters of slate that had been a blackboard. Scraps of paper rustled dryly all over the floor. There were also remnants of things which had not been brought here by the owner of that room: popcorn wrappers, a whiskey bottle, a confession magazine.

She attempted to extricate the coil from the scrap pile. It would not move; it was part of some large object. She knelt and began to dig through the junk.

She had cut her hands, she was covered with dust by the time she stood up to look at the object she had cleared. It was the broken remnant of the model of a motor. Most of its parts were missing, but enough was left to convey some idea of its former shape and purpose.

She had never seen a motor of this kind or anything resembling it. She could not understand the peculiar design of its parts or the functions they were intended to perform.

She examined the tarnished tubes and odd-shaped connections. She tried to guess their purpose, her mind going over every type of motor she knew and every possible kind of work its parts could perform. None fitted the model. It looked like an electric motor, but she could not tell what fuel it was intended to burn. It was not designed for steam, or oil, or anything she could name.

Her sudden gasp was not a sound, but a jolt that threw her at the junk pile. She was on her hands and knees, crawling over the wreckage, seizing every piece of paper in sight, flinging it away, searching further. Her hands were shaking.

She found part of what she hoped had remained in existence. It was a thin sheaf of typewritten pages clamped together—the remnant of a manuscript. Its beginning and end were gone; the bits of paper left under the clamp showed the thick number of pages it had once contained. The paper was yellowed and dry. The manuscript had been a description of the motor.

From the empty enclosure of the plant’s powerhouse, Rearden heard her voice screaming, “Hank!” It sounded like a scream of terror.

He ran in the direction of the voice. He found her standing in the middle of a room, her hands bleeding, her stockings torn, her suit smeared with dust, a bunch of papers clutched in her hand.

“Hank, what does this look like?” she asked, pointing at an odd piece of wreckage at her feet; her voice had the intense, obsessed tone of a person stunned by a shock, cut off from reality. “What does it look like?”

“Are you hurt? What happened?”

“No! ... Oh, never mind, don’t look at me! I’m all right. Look at this. Do you know what that is?”

“What did you do to yourself?”

“I had to dig it out of there. I’m all right.”

“You’re shaking.”

“You will, too, in a moment. Hank! Look at it. Just look and tell me what you think it is.”

He glanced down, then looked attentively—then he was sitting on the floor, studying the object intently. “It’s a queer way to put a motor together,” he said, frowning.

“Read this,” she said, extending the pages.

He read, looked up and said, “Good God!”

She was sitting on the floor beside him, and for a moment they could say nothing else.

“It was the coil,” she said. She felt as if her mind were racing, she could not keep up with all the things which a sudden blast had opened to her vision, and her words came hurtling against one another. “It was the coil that I noticed first—because I had seen drawings like it, not quite, but something like it, years ago, when I was in school—it was in an old book, it was given up as impossible long, long ago—but I liked to read everything I could find about railroad motors. That book said that there was a time when men were thinking of it—they worked on it, they spent years on experiments, but they couldn’t solve it and they gave it up. It was forgotten for generations. I didn’t think that any living scientist ever thought of it now. But someone did. Someone has solved it, now, today! ... Hank, do you understand? Those men, long ago, tried to invent a motor that would draw static electricity from the atmosphere, convert it and create its own power as it went along. They couldn’t do it. They gave it up.” She pointed at the broken shape. “But there it is.”

He nodded. He was not smiling. He sat looking at the remnant, intent on some thought of his own; it did not seem to be a happy thought.

“Hank! Don’t you understand what this means? It’s the greatest revolution in power motors since the internal-combustion engine—greater than that! It wipes everything out—and makes everything possible. To hell with Dwight Sanders and all of them! Who’ll want to look at a Diesel? Who’ll want to worry about oil, coal or refueling stations? Do you see what I see? A brand-new locomotive half the size of a single Diesel unit, and with ten times the power. A self-generator, working on a few drops of fuel, with no limits to its energy. The cleanest, swiftest, cheapest means of motion ever devised. Do you see what this will do to our transportation systems and to the country—in about one year?”

There was no spark of excitement in his face. He said slowly, “Who designed it? Why was it left here?”

“We’ll find out.”

He weighed the pages in his hand reflectively. “Dagny,” he asked, “if you don’t find the man who made it, will you be able to reconstruct that motor from what is left?”

She took a long moment, then the word fell with a sinking sound: “No.”

“Nobody will. He had it all right. It worked—judging by what he writes here. It is the greatest thing I’ve ever laid eyes on. It was. We can’t make it work again. To supply what’s missing would take a mind as great as his.”

“I’ll find him—if I have to drop every other thing I’m doing.”

“—and if he’s still alive.”

She heard the unstated guess in the tone of his voice. “Why do you say it like that?”

“I don’t think he is. If he were, would he leave an invention of this kind to rot on a junk pile? Would he abandon an achievement of this size? If he were still alive, you would have had the locomotives with the self-generators years ago. And you wouldn’t have had to look for him, because the whole world would know his name by now.”

“I don’t think this model was made so very long ago.”

He looked at the paper of the manuscript and at the rusty tarnish of the motor. “About ten years ago, I’d guess. Maybe a little longer.”

“We’ve got to find him or somebody who knew him. This is more important—”

“—than anything owned or manufactured by anyone today. I don’t think we’ll find him. And if we don’t, nobody will be able to repeat his performance. Nobody will rebuild his motor. There’s not enough of it left. It’s only a lead, an invaluable lead, but it would take the sort of mind that’s born once in a century, to complete it. Do you see our present-day motor designers attempting it?”

“No.”

“There’s not a first-rate designer left. There hasn’t been a new idea in motors for years. That’s one profession that seems to be dying—or dead.”

“Hank, do you know what that motor would have meant, if built?”

He chuckled briefly. “I’d say: about ten years added to the life of every person in this country—if you consider how many things it would have made easier and cheaper to produce, how many hours of human labor it would have released for other work, and how much more anyone’s work would have brought him. Locomotives? What about automobiles and ships and airplanes with a motor of this kind? And tractors. And power plants. All hooked to an unlimited supply of energy, with no fuel to pay for, except a few pennies’ worth to keep the converter going. That motor could have set the whole country in motion and on fire. It would have brought an electric light bulb into every hole, even into the homes of those people we saw down in the valley.”

“It would have? It will. I’m going to find the man who made it.”

“We’ll try.”

He rose abruptly, but stopped to glance down at the broken remnant and said, with a chuckle that was not gay, “There was the motor for the John Galt Line.”

Then he spoke in the brusque manner of an executive. “First, we’ll try to see if we can find their personnel office here. We’ll look for their records, if there’s any left. We want the names of their research staff and their engineers. I don’t know who owns this place now, and I suspect that the owners will be hard to find, or they wouldn’t have let it come to this. Then we’ll go over every room in the laboratory. Later, we’ll get a few engineers to fly here and comb the rest of the place.”

They started out, but she stopped for a moment on the threshold. “Hank, that motor was the most valuable thing inside this factory,” she said, her voice low. “It was more valuable than the whole factory and everything it ever contained. Yet it was passed up and left in the refuse. It was the one thing nobody found worth the trouble of taking.”

“That’s what frightens me about this,” he answered.

The personnel office did not take them long. They found it by the sign which was left on the door, but it was the only thing left. There was no furniture inside, no papers, nothing but the splinters of smashed windows.

They went back to the room of the motor. Crawling on hands and knees, they examined every scrap of the junk that littered the floor. There was little to find. They put aside the papers that seemed to contain laboratory notes, but none referred to the motor, and there were no pages of the manuscript among them. The popcorn wrappers and the whiskey bottle testified to the kind of invading hordes that had rolled through the room, like waves washing the remnants of destruction away to unknown bottoms.

They put aside a few bits of metal that could have belonged to the motor, but these were too small to be of value. The motor looked as if parts of it had been ripped off, perhaps by someone who thought he could put them to some customary use. What had remained was too unfamiliar to interest anybody.

On aching knees, her palms spread flat upon the gritty floor, she felt the anger trembling within her, the hurting, helpless anger that answers the sight of desecration. She wondered whether someone’s diapers hung on a clothesline made of the motor’s missing wires—whether its wheels had become a rope pulley over a communal well—whether its cylinder was now a pot containing geraniums on the window sill of the sweetheart of the man with the whiskey bottle.

There was a remnant of light on the hill, but a blue haze was moving in upon the valleys, and the red and gold of the leaves was spreading to the sky in strips of sunset.

It was dark when they finished. She rose and leaned against the empty frame of the window for a touch of cool air on her forehead. The sky was dark blue. “It could have set the whole country in motion and on fire.” She looked down at the motor. She looked out at the country. She moaned suddenly, hit by a single long shudder, and dropped her head on her arm, standing pressed to the frame of the window.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

She did not answer.

He looked out. Far below, in the valley, in the gathering night, there trembled a few pale smears which were the lights of tallow candles.

“God have mercy on us, ma’am!” said the clerk of the Hall of Records. “Nobody knows who owns that factory now. I guess nobody will ever know it.”

The clerk sat at a desk in a ground-floor office, where dust lay undisturbed on the files and few visitors ever called. He looked at the shining automobile parked outside his window, in the muddy square that had once been the center of a prosperous county seat; he looked with a faint, wistful wonder at his two unknown visitors.

“Why?” asked Dagny.

He pointed helplessly at the mass of papers he had taken out of the files. “The court will have to decide who owns it, which I don’t think any court can do. If a court ever gets to it. I don’t think it will.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Well, it was sold out—the Twentieth Century, I mean. The Twentieth Century Motor Company. It was sold twice, at the same time and to two different sets of owners. That was sort of a big scandal at the time, two years ago, and now it’s just”—he pointed—“just a bunch of paper lying around, waiting for a court hearing. I don’t see how any judge will be able to untangle any property rights out of it—or any right at all.”

“Would you tell me please just what happened?”

“Well, the last legal owner of the factory was The People’s Mortgage Company, of Rome, Wisconsin. That’s the town the other side of the factory, thirty miles north. That Mortgage Company was a sort of noisy outfit that did a lot of advertising about easy credit. Mark Yonts was the head of it. Nobody knew where he came from and nobody knows where he’s gone to now, but what they discovered, the morning after The People’s Mortgage Company collapsed, was that Mark Yonts had sold the Twentieth Century Motor factory to a bunch of suckers from South Dakota, and that he’d also given it as collateral for a loan from a bank in Illinois. And when they took a look at the factory, they discovered that he’d moved all the machinery out and sold it piece-meal, God only knows where and to whom. So it seems like everybody owns the place—and nobody. That’s how it stands now—the South Dakotans and the bank and the attorney for the creditors of The People’s Mortgage Company all suing one another, all claiming this factory, and nobody having the right to move a wheel in it, except that there’s no wheels left to move.”

“Did Mark Yonts operate the factory before he sold it?”

“Lord, no, ma’am! He wasn’t the kind that ever operates anything. He didn’t want to make money, only to get it. Guess he got it, too—more than anyone could have made out of that factory.”

He wondered why the blond, hard-faced man, who sat with the woman in front of his desk, looked grimly out the window at their car, at a large object wrapped in canvas, roped tightly under the raised cover of the car’s luggage compartment.

“What happened to the factory records?”

“Which do you mean, ma’am?”

“Their production records. Their work records. Their ... personnel files.”

“Oh, there’s nothing left of that now. There’s been a lot of looting going on. All the mixed owners grabbed what furniture or things they could haul out of there, even if the sheriff did put a padlock on the door. The papers and stuff like that—I guess it was all taken by the scavengers from Starnesville, that’s the place down in the valley, where they’re having it pretty tough these days. They burned the stuff for kindling, most likely.”

“Is there anyone left here who used to work in the factory?” asked Rearden.

“No, sir. Not around here. They all lived down in Starnesville.”

“All of them?” whispered Dagny; she was thinking of the ruins. “The ... engineers, too?”

“Yes, ma’am. That was the factory town. They’ve all gone, long ago.”

“Do you happen to remember the names of any men who worked there?”

“No, ma’am.”

“What owner was the last to operate the factory?” asked Rearden.

“I couldn’t say, sir. There’s been so much trouble up there and the place has changed hands so many times, since old Jed Starnes died. He’s the man who built the factory. He made this whole part of the country, I guess. He died twelve years ago.”

“Can you give us the names of all the owners since?”

“No, sir. We had a fire in the old courthouse, about three years ago, and all the old records are gone. I don’t know where you could trace them now.”

“You don’t know how this Mark Yonts happened to acquire the factory?”

“Yes, I know that. He bought it from Mayor Bascom of Rome. How Mayor Bascom happened to own it, I don’t know.”

“Where is Mayor Bascom now?”

“Still there, in Rome.”

“Thank you very much,” said Rearden, rising. “We’ll call on him.”

They were at the door when the clerk asked, “What is it you’re looking for, sir?”

“We’re looking for a friend of ours,” said Rearden. “A friend we’ve lost, who used to work in that factory.”

Mayor Bascom of Rome, Wisconsin, leaned back in his chair; his chest and stomach formed a pear-shaped outline under his soiled shirt. The air was a mixture of sun and dust, pressing heavily upon the porch of his house. He waved his arm, the ring on his finger flashing a large topaz of poor quality.

“No use, no use, lady, absolutely no use,” he said. “Would be just a waste of your time, trying to question the folks around here. There’s no factory people left, and nobody that would remember much about them. So many families have moved away that what’s left here is plain no good, if I do say so myself, plain no good, just being Mayor of a bunch of trash.”

He had offered chairs to his two visitors, but he did not mind it if the lady preferred to stand at the porch railing. He leaned back, studying her long-lined figure; high-class merchandise, he thought; but then, the man with her was obviously rich.

Dagny stood looking at the streets of Rome. There were houses, sidewalks, lampposts, even a sign advertising soft drinks; but they looked as if it were now only a matter of inches and hours before the town would reach the stage of Starnesville.

“Naw; there’s no factory records left,” said Mayor Bascom. “If that’s what you want to find, lady, give it up. It’s like chasing leaves in a storm now. Just like leaves in a storm. Who cares about papers? At a time like this, what people save is good, solid, material objects. One’s got to be practical.”

Through the dusty windowpanes, they could see the living room of his house: there were Persian rugs on a buckled wooden floor, a portable bar with chomium strips against a wall stained by the seepage of last year’s rains, an expensive radio with an old kerosene lamp placed on top of it.

“Sure, it’s me that sold the factory to Mark Yonts. Mark was a nice fellow, a nice, lively, energetic fellow. Sure, he did trim a few corners, but who doesn’t? Of course, he went a bit too far. That, I didn’t expect. I thought he was smart enough to stay within the law—whatever’s left of it nowadays.”

Mayor Bascom smiled, looking at them in a manner of placid frankness. His eyes were shrewd without intelligence, his smile good-natured without kindness.

“I don’t think you folks are detectives,” he said, “but even if you were, it wouldn’t matter to me. I didn’t get any rake-off from Mark, he didn’t let me in on any of his deals, I haven’t any idea where he’s gone to now.” He sighed. “I liked that fellow. Wish he’d stayed around. Never mind the Sunday sermons. He had to live, didn’t he? He was no worse than anybody, only smarter. Some get caught at it and some don’t—that’s the only difference.... Nope, I didn’t know what he was going to do with it, when he bought that factory. Sure, he paid me quite a bit more than the old booby trap was worth. Sure, he was doing me a favor when he bought it. Nope, I didn’t put any pressure on him to make him buy it. Wasn’t necessary. I’d done him a few favors before. There’s plenty of laws that’s sort of made of rubber, and a mayor’s in a position to stretch them a bit for a friend. Well, what the hell? That’s the only way anybody ever gets rich in this world”—he glanced at the luxurious black car—“as you ought to know.”

“You were telling us about the factory,” said Rearden, trying to control himself.

“What I can’t stand,” said Mayor Bascom, “is people who talk about principles. No principle ever filled anybody’s milk bottle. The only thing that counts in life is solid, material assets. It’s no time for theories, when everything is falling to pieces around us. Well, me—I don’t aim to go under. Let them keep their ideas and I’ll take the factory. I don’t want ideas, I just want my three square meals a day.”

“Why did you buy that factory?”

“Why does anybody buy any business? To squeeze whatever can be squeezed out of it. I know a good chance when I see it. It was a bankruptcy sale and nobody much who’d want to bid on the old mess. So I got the place for peanuts. Didn’t have to hold it long, either—Mark took it off my hands in two-three months. Sure, it was a smart deal, if I say so myself. No big business tycoon could have done any better with it.”

“Was the factory operating when you took it over?”

“Naw It was shut down.”

“Did you attempt to reopen it?”

“Not me. I’m a practical person.”

“Can you recall the names of any men who worked there?”

“No. Never met ’em.”

“Did you move anything out of the factory?”

“Well, I’ll tell you. I took a look around—and what I liked was old Jed’s desk. Old Jed Starnes. He was a real big shot in his time. Wonderful desk, solid mahogany. So I carted it home. And some executive, don’t know who he was, had a stall shower in his bathroom, the like of which I never saw. A glass door with a mermaid cut in the glass, real art work, and hot stuff, too, hotter than any oil painting. So I had that shower lifted and moved here. What the hell, I owned it, didn’t I? I was entitled to get something valuable out of that factory.”

“Whose bankruptcy sale was it, when you bought the factory?”

“Oh, that was the big crash of the Community National Bank in Madison. Boy, was that a crash! It just about finished the whole state of Wisconsin—sure finished this part of it. Some say it was this motor factory that broke the bank, but others say it was only the last drop in a leaking bucket, because the Community National had bum investments all over three or four states. Eugene Lawson was the head of it. The banker with a heart, they called him. He was quite famous in these parts two-three years ago.”

“Did Lawson operate the factory?”

“No. He merely lent an awful lot of money on it, more than he could ever hope to get back out of the old dump. When the factory busted, that was the last straw for Gene Lawson. The bank busted three months later.” He sighed. “It hit the folks pretty hard around here. They all had their life savings in the Community National.”

Mayor Bascom looked regretfully past his porch railing at his town. He jerked his thumb at a figure across the street: it was a white-haired charwoman, moving painfully on her knees, scrubbing the steps of a house.

“See that woman, for instance? They used to be solid, respectable folks. Her husband owned the dry-goods store. He worked all his life to provide for her in her old age, and he did, too, by the time he died—only the money was in the Community National Bank.”

“Who operated the factory when it failed?”

“Oh, that was some quicky corporation called Amalgamated Service, Inc. Just a puff-ball. Came up out of nothing and went back to it.”

“Where are its members?”

“Where are the pieces of a puff-ball when it bursts? Try and trace them all over the United States. Try it.”

“Where is Eugene Lawson?”

“Oh, him? He’s done all right. He’s got a job in Washington—in the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources.”

Rearden rose too fast, thrown to his feet by a jolt of anger, then said, controlling himself, “Thank you for the information.”

“You’re welcome, friend, you’re welcome,” said Mayor Bascom placidly. “I don’t know what it is you’re after, but take my word for it, give it up. There’s nothing more to be had out of that factory.”

“I told you that we are looking for a friend of ours.”

“Well, have it your way. Must be a pretty good friend, if you’ll go to so much trouble to find him, you and the charming lady who is not your wife.”

Dagny saw Rearden’s face go white, so that even his lips became a sculptured feature, indistinguishable against his skin. “Keep your dirty—” he began, but she stepped between them.

“Why do you think that I am not his wife?” she asked calmly.

Mayor Bascom looked astonished by Rearden’s reaction; he had made the remark without malice, merely like a fellow cheat displaying his shrewdness to his partners in guilt.

“Lady, I’ve seen a lot in my lifetime,” he said good-naturedly. “Married people don’t look as if they have a bedroom on their minds when they look at each other. In this world, either you’re virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.”

“I’ve asked him a question,” she said to Rearden in time to silence him. “He’s given me an instructive explanation.”

“If you want a tip, lady,” said Mayor Bascom, “get yourself a wedding ring from the dime store and wear it. It’s not sure fire, but it helps.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Good-bye.”

The stern, stressed calm of her manner was a command that made Rearden follow her back to their car in silence.

They were miles beyond the town when he said, not looking at her, his voice desperate and low, “Dagny, Dagny, Dagny ... I’m sorry!”

“I’m not.”

Moments later, when she saw the look of control returning to his face, she said, “Don’t ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.”

“That particular truth was none of his business.”

“His particular estimate of it was none of your concern or mine.”

He said through his teeth not as an answer, but as if the single thought battering his brain turned into sounds against his will, “I couldn’t protect you from that unspeakable httle—”

“I didn’t need protection.”

He remained silent, not looking at her.

“Hank, when you’re able to keep down the anger, tomorrow or next week, give some thought to that man’s explanation and see if you recognize any part of it.”

He jerked his head to glance at her, but said nothing.

When he spoke, a long time later, it was only to say in a tired, even voice, “We can’t call New York and have our engineers come here to search the factory. We can’t meet them here. We can’t let it be known that we found the motor together.... I had forgotten all that ... up there ... in the laboratory.”

“Let me call Eddie, when we find a telephone. I’ll have him send two engineers from the Taggart staff. I’m here alone, on my vacation, for all they’ll know or have to know.”

They drove two hundred miles before they found a long-distance telephone line. When she called Eddie Willers, he gasped, hearing her voice.

“Dagny! For God’s sake, where are you?”

“In Wisconsin. Why?”

“I didn’t know where to reach you. You’d better come back at once. As fast as you can.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing—yet. But there are things going on, which ... You’d better stop them now, if you can. If anybody can.”

“What things?”

“Haven’t you been reading the newspapers?”

“No.”

“I can’t tell you over the phone. I can’t give you all the details. Dagny, you’ll think I’m insane, but I think they’re planning to kill Colorado.”

“I’ll come back at once,” she said.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This scene, from the middle of the novel, is a meeting of Washingfon bureaucrats and businessmen who survive on government favors. The participants have come together, in the midst of a national economic crisis, to formulate what they describe as “socially necessary” legislation.

Wesley Mouch is chief regulator of the economy as a whole. Eugene Lawson works under him. Clem Weatherby is the bureaucrat in charge of the railroads. Floyd Ferris runs the State Science Institute. James Taggart is president of Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, and Orren Boyle-Hank Rearden’s chief competitor—is president of Associated Steel.

Directive 10-289

“BUT CAN we get away with it?” asked Wesley Mouch. His voice was high with anger and thin with fear.

Nobody answered him. James Taggart sat on the edge of an armchair not moving, looking up at him from under his forehead. Orren Boyle gave a vicious tap against an ashtray, shaking the ash off his cigar. Dr. Floyd Ferris smiled. Mr. Weatherby folded his lips and hands. Fred Kinnan, head of the Amalgamated Labor of America, stopped pacing the office, sat down on the window sill and crossed his arms. Eugene Lawson, who had sat hunched downward, absentmindedly rearranging a display of flowers on a low glass table, raised his torso resentfully and glanced up. Mouch sat at his desk, with his fist on a sheet of paper.

It was Eugene Lawson who answered. “That’s not, it seems to me, the way to put it. We must not let vulgar difficulties obstruct our feeling that it’s a noble plan motivated solely by the public welfare. It’s for the good of the people. The people need it. Need comes first, so we don’t have to consider anything else.”

Nobody objected or picked it up; they looked as if Lawson had merely made it harder to continue the discussion. But a small man who sat unobtrusively in the best armchair of the room, apart from the others, content to be ignored and fully aware that none of them could be unconscious of his presence, glanced at Lawson, then at Mouch, and said with brisk cheerfulness, “That’s the line, Wesley. Tone it down and dress it up and get your press boys to chant it—and you won’t have to worry.”

“Yes, Mr. Thompson,” said Mouch glumly.

Mr. Thompson, the Head of the State, was a man who possessed the quality of never being noticed. In any group of three, his person became indistinguishable, and when seen alone it seemed to evoke a group of its own, composed of the countless persons he resembled. The country had no clear image of what he looked like: his photographs had appeared on the covers of magazines as frequently as those of his predecessors in office, but people could never be quite certain which photographs were his and which were pictures of “a mail clerk” or “a white-collar worker,” accompanying articles about the daily life of the undifferentiated—except that Mr. Thompson’s collars were usually wilted. He had broad shoulders and a slight body. He had stringy hair, a wide mouth and an elastic age range that made him look like a harassed forty or an unusually vigorous sixty. Holding enormous official powers, he schemed ceaselessly to expand them, because it was expected of him by those who had pushed him into office. He had the cunning of the unintelligent and the frantic energy of the lazy. The sole secret of his rise in life was the fact that he was a product of chance and knew it and aspired to nothing else.

“It’s obvious that measures have to be taken. Drastic measures,” said James Taggart, speaking, not to Mr. Thompson, but to Wesley Mouch. “We can’t let things go the way they’re going much longer.” His voice was belligerent and shaky.

“Take it easy, Jim,” said Orren Boyle.

“Something’s got to be done and done fast!”

“Don’t look at me,” snapped Wesley Mouch. “I can’t help it. I can’t help it if people refuse to co-operate. I’m tied. I need wider powers.”

Mouch had summoned them all to Washington, as his friends and personal advisers, for a private, unofficial conference on the national crisis. But, watching him, they were unable to decide whether his manner was overbearing or whining, whether he was threatening them or pleading for their help.

“Fact is,” said Mr. Weatherby primly, in a statistical tone of voice, “that in the twelve-month period ending on the first of this year, the rate of business failures has doubled, as compared with the preceding twelve-month period. Since the first of this year, it has trebled.”

“Be sure they think it’s their own fault,” said Dr. Ferris casually.

“Huh?” said Wesley Mouch, his eyes darting to Ferris.

“Whatever you do, don’t apologize,” said Dr. Ferris. “Make them feel guilty.”

“I’m not apologizing!” snapped Mouch. “I’m not to blame. I need wider powers.”

“But it is their own fault,” said Eugene Lawson, turning aggressively to Dr. Ferris. “It’s their lack of social spirit. They refuse to recognize that production is not a private choice, but a public duty. They have no right to fail, no matter what conditions happen to come up. They’ve got to go on producing. It’s a social imperative. A man’s work is not a personal matter, it’s a social matter. There’s no such thing as a personal matter—or a personal life. That’s what we’ve got to force them to learn.”

“Gene Lawson knows what I’m talking about,” said Dr. Ferris, with a slight smile, “even though he hasn’t the faintest idea that he does.”

“What do you think you mean?” asked Lawson, his voice rising.

“Skip it,” ordered Wesley Mouch.

“I don’t care what you decide to do, Wesley,” said Mr. Thompson, “and I don’t care if the businessmen squawk about it. Just be sure you’ve got the press with you. Be damn sure about that.”

“I’ve got ’em,” said Mouch.

“One editor who’d open his trap at the wrong time could do us more harm than ten disgruntled millionaires.”

“That’s true, Mr. Thompson,” said Dr. Ferris. “But can you name one editor who knows it?”

“Guess not,” said Thompson; he sounded pleased.

“Whatever type of men we’re counting on and planning for,” said Dr. Ferris, “there’s a certain old-fashioned quotation which we may safely forget: the one about counting on the wise and the honest. We don’t have to consider them. They’re out of date.”

James Taggart glanced at the window. There were patches of blue in the sky above the spacious streets of Washington, the faint blue of mid-April, and a few beams breaking through the clouds. A monument stood shining in the distance, hit by a ray of sun: it was a tall, white obelisk, erected to the memory of the man Dr. Ferris was quoting, the man in whose honor this city had been named. James Taggart looked away.

“I don’t like the professor’s remarks,” said Lawson loudly and sullenly.

“Keep still,” said Wesley Mouch. “Dr. Ferris is not talking theory, but practice.”

“Well, if you want to talk practice,” said Fred Kinnan, “then let me tell you that we can’t worry about businessmen at a time like this. What we’ve got to think about is jobs. More jobs for the people. In my unions, every man who’s working is feeding five who aren’t, not counting his own pack of starving relatives. If you want my advice—oh, I know you won’t go for it, but it’s just a thought—issue a directive making it compulsory to add, say, one-third more men to every payroll in the country.”

“Good God!” yelled Taggart. “Are you crazy? We can barely meet our payrolls as it is! There’s not enough work for the men we’ve got now! One-third more? We wouldn’t have any use for them whatever!”

“Who cares whether you’d have any use for them?” said Fred Kinnan. “They need jobs. That’s what comes first—need—doesn’t It?—not your profits.”

“It’s not a question of profits!” yelled Taggart hastily. “I haven’t said anything about profits. I haven’t given you any grounds to insult me. It’s just a question of where in hell we’d get the money to pay your men—when half our trains are running empty and there’s not enough freight to fill a trolley car.” His voice slowed down suddenly to a tone of cautious thoughtfulness: “However, we do understand the plight of the working men, and—it’s just a thought—we could, perhaps, take on a certain extra number, if we were permitted to double our freight rates, which—”

“Have you lost your mind?” yelled Orren Boyle. “I’m going broke on the rates you’re charging now, I shudder every time a damn boxcar pulls in or out of the mills, they’re bleeding me to death, I can’t afford it—and you want to double it?”

“It is not essential whether you can afford it or not,” said Taggart coldly. “You have to be prepared to make some sacrifices. The public needs railroads. Need comes first—above your profits.”

“What profits?” yelled Orren Boyle. “When did I ever make any profits? Nobody can accuse me of running a profit-making business! Just look at my balance sheet—and then look at the books of a certain competitor of mine, who’s got all the customers, all the raw materials, all the technical advantages and a monopoly on secret formulas—then tell me who’s the profiteer! ... But, of course, the public does need railroads, and perhaps I could manage to absorb a certain raise in rates, if were to get—it’s just a thought—if I were to get a subsidy to carry me over the next year or two, until I catch my stride and—”

“What? Again?” yelled Mr. Weatherby, losing his primness. “How many loans have you got from us and how many extensions, suspensions and moratoriums? You haven’t repaid a penny—and with all of you boys going broke and the tax receipts crashing, where do you expect us to get the money to hand you a subsidy?”

“There are people who aren’t broke,” said Boyle slowly. “You boys have no excuse for permitting all that need and misery to spread through the country—so long as there are people who aren’t broke.”

“I can’t help it!” yelled Wesley Mouch. “I can’t do anything about it! I need wider powers!”

They could not tell what had prompted Mr. Thompson to attend this particular conference. He had said little, but had listened with interest. It seemed as if there was something which he had wanted to learn, and now he looked as if he had learned it. He stood up and smiled cheerfully.

“Go ahead, Wesley,” he said. “Go ahead with Number 10-289. You won’t have any trouble at all.”

They had all risen to their feet, in gloomily reluctant deference. Wesley Mouch glanced down at his sheet of paper, then said in a petulant tone of voice. “If you want me to go ahead, you’ll have to declare a state of total emergency.”

“I’ll declare it any time you’re ready.”

“There are certain difficulties, which—”

“I’ll leave it to you. Work it out any way you wish. It’s your job. Let me see the rough draft, tomorrow or next day, but don’t bother me about the details. I’ve got a speech to make on the radio in half an hour.”

“The chief difficulty is that I’m not sure whether the law actually grants us the power to put into effect certain provisions of Directive Number 10-289. I fear they might be open to challenge.”

“Oh, hell, we’ve passed so many emergency laws that if you hunt through them, you’re sure to dig up something that will cover it.”

Mr. Thompson turned to the others with a smile of good fellowship. “I’ll leave you boys to iron out the wrinkles,” he said. “I appreciate your coming to Washington to help us out. Glad to have seen you.”

They waited until the door closed after him, then resumed their seats; they did not look at one another.

They had not heard the text of Directive No. 10-289, but they knew what it would contain. They had known it for a long time, in that special manner which consisted of keeping secrets from oneself and leaving knowledge translated into words. And, by the same method, they now wished it were possible for them not to hear the words of the directive. It was to avoid moments such as this that all the complex twistings of their minds had been devised.

They wished the directive to go into effect. They wished it could be put into effect without words, so that they would not have to know that what they were doing was what it was. Nobody had ever announced that Directive No. 10-289 was the final goal of his efforts. Yet, for generations past, men had worked to make it possible, and for months past, every provision of it had been prepared for by countless speeches, articles, sermons, editorials—by purposeful voices that screamed with anger if anyone named their purpose.

“The picture now is this,” said Wesley Mouch. “The economic condition of the country was better than the year before last than it was last year, and last year it was better than it is at present. It’s obvious that we would not be able to survive another year of the same progression. Therefore, our sole objective must now be to hold the line. To stand still in order to catch our stride. To achieve total stability. Freedom has been given a chance and has failed. Therefore, more stringent controls are necessary. Since men are unable and unwilling to solve their problems voluntarily, they must be forced to do it.” He paused, picked up the sheet of paper, then added in a less formal tone of voice, “Hell, what it comes down to is that we can manage to exist as and where we are, but we can’t afford to move! So we’ve got to stand still. We’ve got to stand still. We’ve got to make those bastards stand still!”

His head drawn into his shoulders, he was looking at them with the anger of a man declaring that the country’s troubles were a personal affront to him. So many men seeking favors had been afraid of him that he now acted as if his anger were a solution to everything, as if his anger were omnipotent, as if all he had to do was to get angry. Yet, facing him, the men who sat in a silent semicircle before his desk were uncertain whether the presence of fear in the room was their own emotion or whether the hunched figure behind the desk generated the panic of a cornered rat.

Wesley Mouch had a long, square face and a flat-topped skull, made more so by a brush haircut. His lower lip was a petulant bulb and the pale, brownish pupils of his eyes looked like the yolks of eggs smeared under the not fully translucent whites. His facial muscles moved abruptly, and the movement vanished, having conveyed no expression. No one had ever seen him smile.

Wesley Mouch came from a family that had known neither poverty nor wealth nor distinction for many generations; it had clung, however, to a tradition of its own: that of being college-bred and, therefore, of despising men who were in business. The family’s diplomas had always hung on the wall in the manner of a reproach to the world, because the diplomas had not automatically produced the material equivalents of their attested spiritual value. Among the family’s numerous relatives, there was one rich uncle. He had married his money and, in his widowed old age, he had picked Wesley as his favorite from among his many nephews and nieces, because Wesley was the least distinguished of the lot and therefore, thought Uncle Julius, the safest. Uncle Julius did not care for people who were brilliant. He did not care for the trouble of managing his money, either; so he turned the job over to Wesley. By the time Wesley graduated from college, there was no money to manage. Uncle Julius blamed it on Wesley’s cunning and cried that Wesley was an unscrupulous schemer. But there had been no scheme about it; Wesley could not have said just where the money had gone. In high school, Wesley Mouch had been one of the worst students and had passionately envied those who were the best. College taught him that he did not have to envy them at all. After graduation, he took a job in the advertising department of a company that manufactured a bogus corn-cure. The cure sold well and he rose to be the head of his department. He left it to take charge of the advertising of a hair-restorer, then of a patented brassière, then of a new soap, then of a soft drink—and then he became advertising vice-president of an automobile concern. He tried to sell automobiles as if they were a bogus corn-cure. They did not sell. He blamed it on the insufficiency of his advertising budget. It was the president of the automobile concern who recommended him to Rearden. It was Rearden who introduced him to Washington—Rearden, who knew no standard by which to judge the activities of his Washington man. It was James Taggart who gave him a start in the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources—in exchange for double-crossing Rearden in order to help Orren Boyle in exchange for destroying Dan Conway. From then on, people helped Wesley Mouch to advance, for the same reason as that which had prompted Uncle Julius: they were people who believed that mediocrity was safe. The men who now sat in front of his desk had been taught that the law of causality was a superstition and that one had to deal with the situation of the moment without considering its cause. By the situation of the moment, they had concluded that Wesley Mouch was a man of superlative skill and cunning, since millions aspired to power, but he was the one who had achieved it. It was not within their method of thinking to know that Wesley Mouch was the zero at the meeting point of forces unleashed in destruction against one another.

“This is just a rough draft of Directive Number 10-289,” said Wesley Mouch, “which Gene, Clem and I have dashed off just to give you the general idea. We want to hear your opinions, suggestions and so forth—you being the representatives of labor, industry, transportation and the professions.”

Fred Kinnan got off the window sill and sat down on the arm of a chair. Orren Boyle spit out the butt of his cigar. James Taggart looked down at his own hands. Dr. Ferris was the only one who seemed to be at ease.

“In the name of the general welfare,” read Wesley Mouch, “to protect the people’s security, to achieve full equality and total stability, it is decreed for the duration of the national emergency that—

“Point One. All workers, wage earners and employees of any kind whatsoever shall henceforth be attached to their jobs and shall not leave nor be dismissed nor change employment, under penalty of a term in jail. The penalty shall be determined by the Unification Board, such Board to be appointed by the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources. All persons reaching the age of twenty-one shall report to the Unification Board, which shall assign them to where, in its opinion, their services will best serve the interests of the nation.

“Point Two. All industrial, commercial, manufacturing and business establishments of any nature whatsoever shall henceforth remain in operation, and the owners of such establishments shall not quit nor leave nor retire, nor close, sell or transfer their business, under penalty of the nationalization of their establishment and of any and all of their property.

“Point Three. All patents and copyrights, pertaining to any devices, inventions, formulas, processes and works of any nature whatsoever, shall be turned over to the nation as a patriotic emergency gift by means of Gift Certificates to be signed voluntarily by the owners of all such patents and copyrights. The Unification Board shall then license the use of such patents and copyrights to all applicants, equally and without discrimination, for the purpose of eliminating monopolistic practices, discarding obsolete products and making the best available to the whole nation. No trademarks, brand names or copyrighted titles shall be used. Every formerly patented product shall be known by a new name and sold by all manufacturers under the same name, such name to be selected by the Unification Board. All private trademarks and brand names are hereby abolished.

“Point Four. No new devices, inventions, products, or goods of any nature whatsoever, not now on the market, shall be produced, invented, manufactured or sold after the date of this directive. The Office of Patents and Copyrights is hereby suspended.

“Point Five. Every establishment, concern, corporation or person engaged in production of any nature whatsoever shall henceforth produce the same amount of goods per year as it, they or he produced during the Basic Year, no more and no less. The year to be known as the Basic or Yardstick Year is to be the year ending on the date of this directive. Over or under production shall be fined, such fines to be determined by the Unification Board.

“Point Six. Every person of any age, sex, class or income, shall henceforth spend the same amount of money on the purchase of goods per year as he or she spent during the Basic Year, no more and no less. Over or under purchasing shall be fined, such fines to be determined by the Unification Board.

“Point Seven. All wages, prices, salaries, dividends, profits, interest rates and forms of income of any nature whatsoever, shall be frozen at their present figures, as of the date of this directive.

“Point Eight. All cases arising from and rules not specifically provided for in this directive, shall be settled and determined by the Unification Board, whose decisions will be final.”

There was, even within the four men who had listened, a remnant of human dignity, which made them sit still and feel sick for the length of one minute.

James Taggart spoke first. His voice was low, but it had the trembling intensity of an involuntary scream: “Well, why not? Why should they have it, if we don’t? Why should they stand above us? If we are to perish, let’s make sure that we all perish together. Let’s make sure that we leave them no chance to survive!”

“That’s a damn funny thing to say about a very practical plan that will benefit everybody,” said Orren Boyle shrilly, looking at Taggart in frightened astonishment.

Dr. Ferris chuckled.

Taggart’s eyes seemed to focus, and he said, his voice louder, “Yes, of course. It’s a very practical plan. It’s necessary, practical and just. It will solve everybody’s problems. It will give everybody a chance to feel safe. A chance to rest.”

“It will give security to the people,” said Eugene Lawson, his mouth slithering into a smile. “Security—that’s what the people want. If they want it, why shouldn’t they have it? Just because a handful of rich will object?”

“It’s not the rich who’ll object,” said Dr. Ferris lazily. “The rich drool for security more than any other sort of animal—haven’t you discovered that yet?”

“Well, who’ll object?” snapped Lawson.

Dr. Ferris smiled pointedly, and did not answer.

Lawson looked away. “To hell with them! Why should we worry about them? We’ve got to run the world for the sake of the little people. It’s intelligence that’s caused all the troubles of humanity. Man’s mind is the root of all evil. This is the day of the heart. It’s the weak, the meek, the sick and the humble that must be the only objects of our concern.” His lower lip was twisting in soft, lecherous motions. “Those who’re big are here to serve those who aren’t. If they refuse to do their moral duty, we’ve got to force them. There once was an Age of Reason, but we’ve progressed beyond it. This is the Age of Love.”

“Shut up!” screamed James Taggart.

They all stared at him. “For Christ’s sake, Jim, what’s the matter?” said Orren Boyle, shaking.

“Nothing,” said Taggart, “nothing ... Wesley, keep him still, will you?”

Mouch said uncomfortably, “But I fail to see—”

“Just keep him still. We don’t have to listen to him, do we?”

“Why, no, but—”

“Then let’s go on.”

“What is this?” demanded Lawson. “I resent it. I most emphatically—” But he saw no support in the faces around him and stopped, his mouth sagging into an expression of pouting hatred.

“Let’s go on,” said Taggart feverishly.

“What’s the matter with you?” asked Orren Boyle, trying not to know what was the matter with himself and why he felt frightened.

“Genius is a superstition, Jim,” said Dr. Ferris slowly, with an odd kind of emphasis, as if knowing that he was naming the unnamed in all their minds. “There’s no such thing as the intellect. A man’s brain is a social product. A sum of influences that he’s picked up from those around him. Nobody invents anything, he merely reflects what’s floating in the social atmosphere. A genius is an intellectual scavenger and a greedy hoarder of the ideas which rightfully belong to society, from which he stole them. All thought is theft. If we do away with private fortunes, we’ll have a fairer distribution of wealth. If we do away with genius, we’ll have a fairer distribution of ideas.”

“Are we here to talk business or are we here to kid one another?” asked Fred Kinnan.

They turned to him. He was a muscular man with large features, but his face had the astonishing property of finely drawn lines that raised the corners of his mouth into the permanent hint of a wise, sardonic grin. He sat on the arm of the chair, hands in pockets, looking at Mouch with the smiling glance of a hardened policeman at a shoplifter.

“All I’ve got to say is that you’d better staff that Unification Board with my men,” he said. “Better make sure of it, brother—or I’ll blast your Point One to hell.”

“I intend, of course, to have a representative of labor on that Board,” said Mouch dryly, “as well as a representative of industry, of the professions and of every cross-section of—”

“No cross-sections,” said Fred Kinnan evenly. “Just representatives of labor. Period.”

“What the hell!” yelled Orren Boyle. “That’s stacking the cards, isn’t it?”

“Sure,” said Fred Kinnan.

“But that will give you a stranglehold on every business in the country!”

“What do you think I’m after?”

“That’s unfair!” yelled Boyle. “I won’t stand for it! You have no right! You—”

“Right?” said Kinnan innocently. “Are we talking about rights?”

“But, I mean, after all, there are certain fundamental property rights which—”

“Listen, pal, you want Point Three, don’t you?”

“Well, I—”

“Then you’d better keep your trap shut about property rights from now on. Keep it shut tight.”

“Mr. Kinnan,” said Dr. Ferris, “you must not make the old-fashioned mistake of drawing wide generalizations. Our policy has to be flexible. There are no absolute principles which—”

“Save it for Jim Taggart, Doc,” said Fred Kinnan. “I know what I’m talking about. That’s because I never went to college.”

“I object,” said Boyle, “to your dictatorial method of—”

Kinnan turned his back on him and said, “Listen, Wesley, my boys won’t like Point One. If I get to run things. I’ll make them swallow it. If not, not. Just make up your mind.”

“Well—” said Mouch, and stopped.

“For Christ’s sake, Wesley, what about us?” yelled Taggart.

“You’ll come to me,” said Kinnan, “when you’ll need a deal to fix the Board. But I’ll run that Board. Me and Wesley.”

“Do you think the country will stand for it?” yelled Taggart.

“Stop kidding yourself,” said Kinnan. “The country? If there aren’t any principles any more—and I guess the doc is right, because there sure aren’t—if there aren’t any rules to this game and it’s only a question of who robs whom—then I’ve got more votes than the bunch of you, there are more workers than employers, and don’t you forget it, boys!”

“That’s a funny attitude to take,” said Taggart haughtily, “about a measure which, after all, is not designed for the selfish benefit of workers or employers, but for the general welfare of the public.”

“Okay,” said Kinnan amiably, “let’s talk your lingo. Who is the public? If you go by quality—then it ain’t you, Jim, and it ain’t Orrie Boyle. If you go by quantity—then it sure is me, because quantity is what I’ve got behind me.” His smile disappeared, and with a sudden, bitter look of weariness he added, “Only I’m not going to say that I’m working for the welfare of my public, because I know I’m not. I know that I’m delivering the poor bastards into slavery, and that’s all there is to it. And they know it, too. But they know that I’ll have to throw them a crumb once in a while, if I want to keep my racket, while with the rest of you they wouldn’t have a chance in hell. So that’s why, if they’ve got to be under a whip, they’d rather I held it, not you—you drooling, tear-jerking, mealy-mouthed bastards of the public welfare! Do you think that outside of your college-bred pansies there’s one village idiot whom you’re fooling? I’m a racketeer—but I know it and my boys know it, and they know that I’ll pay off. Not out of the kindness of my heart, either, and not a cent more than I can get away with, but at least they can count on that much. Sure, it makes me sick sometimes, it makes me sick right now, but it’s not me who’s built this kind of world—you did—so I’m playing the game as you’ve set it up and I’m going to play it for as long as it lasts—which isn’t going to be long for any of us!”

He stood up. No one answered him. He let his eyes move slowly from face to face and stop on Wesley Mouch.

“Do I get the Board, Wesley?” he asked casually.

“The selection of the specific personnel is only a technical detail,” said Mouch pleasantly. “Suppose we discuss it later, you and I?”

Everybody in the room knew that this meant the answer Yes.

“Okay, pal,” said Kinnan. He went back to the window, sat down on the sill and lighted a cigarette.

For some unadmitted reason, the others were looking at Dr. Ferris, as if seeking guidance.

“Don’t be disturbed by oratory,” said Dr. Ferris smoothly. “Mr. Kinnan is a fine speaker, but he has no sense of practical reality. He is unable to think dialectically.”

There was another silence, then James Taggart spoke up suddenly. “I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. He’ll have to hold things still. Everything will have to remain as it is. Just as it is. Nobody will be permitted to change anything. Except—” He turned sharply to Wesley Mouch. “Wesley, under Point Four, we’ll have to close all research departments, experimental laboratories, scientific foundations and all the rest of the institutions of that kind. They’ll have to be forbidden.”

“Yes, that’s right,” said Mouch. “I hadn’t thought of that. We’ll have to stick in a couple of lines about that.” He hunted around for a pencil and made a few scrawls on the margin of his paper.

“It will end wasteful competition,” said James Taggart. “We’ll stop scrambling to beat one another to the untried and the unknown. We won’t have to worry about new inventions upsetting the market. We won’t have to pour money down the drain in useless experiments just to keep up with overambitious competitors.”

“Yes,” said Orren Boyle. “Nobody should be allowed to waste money on the new until everybody has plenty of the old. Close all those damn research laboratories—and the sooner, the better.”

“Yes,” said Wesley Mouch. “We’ll close them. All of them.”

“The State Science Institute, too?” asked Fred Kinnan.

“Oh, no!” said Mouch. “That’s different. That’s government. Besides, it’s a non-profit institution. And it will be sufficient to take care of all scientific progress.”

“Quite sufficient,” said Dr. Ferris.

“And what will become of all the engineers, professors and such, when you close all those laboratories?” asked Fred Kinnan. “What are they going to do for a living, with all the other jobs and businesses frozen?”

“Oh,” said Wesley Mouch. He scratched his head. He turned to Mr. Weatherby. “Do we put them on relief, Clem?”

“No,” said Mr. Weatherby. “What for? There’s not enough of them to raise a squawk. Not enough to matter.”

“I suppose,” said Mouch, turning to Dr. Ferris, “that you’ll be able to absorb some of them, Floyd?”

“Some,” said Dr. Ferris slowly, as if relishing every syllable of his answer. “Those who prove co-operative.”

“What about the rest?” said Fred Kinnan.

“They’ll have to wait till the Unification Board finds some use for them,” said Wesley Mouch.

“What will they eat while they’re waiting?”

Mouch shrugged. “There’s got to be some victims in times of national emergency. It can’t be helped.”

“We have the right to do it!” cried Taggart suddenly, in defiance to the stillness of the room. “We need it. We need it, don’t we?” There was no answer. “We have the right to protect our livelihood!” Nobody opposed him, but he went on with a shrill, pleading, insistence. “We’ll be safe for the first time in centuries. Everybody will know his place and job, and everybody else’s place and job—and we won’t be at the mercy of every stray crank with a new idea. Nobody will push us out of business or steal our markets or undersell us or make us obsolete. Nobody will come to us offering some damn new gadget and putting us on the spot to decide whether we’ll lose our shirt if we buy it, or whether we’ll lose our shirt if we don’t but somebody else does! We won’t have to decide. Nobody will be permitted to decide anything. It will be decided once and for all.” His glance moved pleadingly from face to face. “There’s been enough invented already—enough for everybody’s comfort—why should they be allowed to go on inventing? Why should we permit them to blast the ground from under our feet every few steps? Why should we be kept on the go in eternal uncertainty? Just because of a few restless, ambitious adventurers? Should we sacrifice the contentment of the whole of mankind to the greed of a few non-conformists? We don’t need them. We don’t need them at all. I wish we’d get rid of that hero worship! Heroes? They’ve done nothing but harm, all through history. They’ve kept mankind running a wild race, with no breathing spell, no rest, no ease, no security. Running to catch up with them ... always, without end ... Just as we catch up, they’re years ahead? ... They leave us no chance ... They’ve never left us a chance? ...” His eyes were moving restlessly; he glanced at the window, but looked hastily away: he did not want to see the white obelisk in the distance. “We’re through with them. We’ve won. This is our age. Our world. We’re going to have security—for the first time in centuries—for the first time since the beginning of the industrial revolution!”

“Well, this, I guess,” said Fred Kinnan, “is the anti-industrial revolution.”

“That’s a damn funny thing for you to say!” snapped Wesley Mouch. “We can’t be permitted to say that to the public.”

“Don’t worry, brother. I won’t say it to the public.”

“It’s a total fallacy,” said Dr. Ferris. “It’s a statement prompted by ignorance. Every expert has conceded long ago that a planned economy achieves the maximum of productive efficiency and that centralization leads to super-industrialization.”

“Centralization destroys the blight of monopoly,” said Boyle.

“How’s that again?” drawled Kinnan.

Boyle did not catch the tone of mockery, and answered earnestly, “It destroys the blight of monopoly. It leads to the democratization of industry. It makes everything available to everybody. Now, for instance, at a time like this, when there’s such a desperate shortage of iron ore, is there any sense in my wasting money, labor and national resources on making old-fashioned steel, when there exists a much better metal that I could be making? A metal that everybody wants, but nobody can get. Now is that good economics or sound social efficiency or democratic justice? Why shouldn’t I be allowed to manufacture that metal and why shouldn’t the people get it when they need it? Just because of the private monopoly of one selfish individual? Should be sacrifice our rights to his personal interests?”

“Skip it, brother,” said Fred Kinnan. “I’ve read it all in the same newspapers you did.”

“I don’t like your attitude,” said Boyle, in a sudden tone of righteousness, with a look which, in a barroom, would have signified a prelude to a fist fight. He sat up straight, buttressed by the columns of paragraphs on yellow-tinged paper, which he was seeing in his mind:

“At a time of crucial public need, are we to waste social effort on the manufacture of obsolete products? Are we to let the many remain in want while the few withhold from us the better products and methods available? Are we to be stopped by the superstition of patent rights?”

“Is it not obvious that private industry is unable to cope with the present economic crisis? How long, for instance, are we going to put up with the disgraceful shortage of Rearden Metal? There is a crying public demand for it, which Rearden has failed to supply.”

“When are we going to put an end to economic injustice and special privileges? Why should Rearden be the only one permitted to manufacture Rearden Metal?”

“I don’t like your attitude,” said Orren Boyle. “So long as we respect the rights of the workers, we’ll want you to respect the rights of the industrialists.”

“Which rights of which industrialists?” drawled Kinnan.

“I’m inclined to think,” said Dr. Ferris hastily, “that Point Two, perhaps, is the most essential one of all at present. We must put an end to that peculiar business of industrialists retiring and vanishing. We must stop them. It’s playing havoc with our entire economy.”

“Why are they doing it?” asked Taggart nervously. “Where are they all going?”

“Nobody knows,” said Dr. Ferris. “We’ve been unable to find any information or explanation. But it must be stopped. In times of crisis, economic service to the nation is just as much of a duty as military service. Anyone who abandons it should be regarded as a deserter. I have recommended that we introduce the death penalty for those men, but Wesley wouldn’t agree to it.”

“Take it easy, boy,” said Fred Kinnan in an odd, slow voice. He sat suddenly and perfectly still, his arms crossed, looking at Ferris in a manner that made it suddenly real to the room that Ferris had proposed murder. “Don’t let me hear you talk about any death penalties in industry.”

Dr. Ferris shrugged.

“We don’t have to go to extremes,” said Mouch hastily. “We don’t want to frighten people. We want to have them on our side. Our top problem is, will they ... will they accept it at all?”

“They will,” said Dr. Ferris.

“I’m a little worried,” said Eugene Lawson, “about Points Three and Four. Taking over the patents is fine. Nobody’s going to defend industrialists. But I’m worried about taking over the copyrights. That’s going to antagonize the intellectuals. It’s dangerous. It’s a spiritual issue. Doesn’t Point Four mean that no new books are to be written or published from now on?”

“Yes,” said Mouch, “it does. But we can’t make an exception for the book-publishing business. It’s an industry like any other. When we say ‘no new products,’ it’s got to mean ‘no new products.’ ”

“But this is a matter of the spirit,” said Lawson; his voice had a tone, not of rational respect, but of superstitious awe.

“We’re not interfering with anybody’s spirit. But when you print a book on paper, it becomes a material commodity—and if we grant an exception to one commodity, we won’t be able to hold the others in line and we won’t be able to make anything stick.”

“Yes, that’s true. But—”

“Don’t be a chump, Gene,” said Dr. Ferris. “You don’t want some recalcitrant hacks to come out with treatises that will wreck our entire program, do you? If you breathe the word censorship’ now, they’ll all scream bloody murder. They’re not ready for it—as yet. But if you leave the spirit alone and make it a simple material issue—not a matter of ideas, but just a matter of paper, ink and printing presses—you accomplish your purpose much more smoothly. You’ll make sure that nothing dangerous gets printed or heard—and nobody is going to fight over a material issue.”

“Yes, but ... but I don’t think the writers will like it.”

“Are you sure?” asked Wesley Mouch, with a glance that was almost a smile. ”Don’t forget that under Point Five, the publishers will have to publish as many books as they did in the Basic Year. Since there will be no new ones, they will have to reprint—and the public will have to buy—some of the old ones. There are many very worthy books that have never had a fair chance.”

“Oh,” said Lawson; he remembered that he had seen Mouch lunching with Balph Eubank two weeks ago. Then he shook his head and frowned. “Still, I’m worried. The intellectuals are our friends. We don’t want to lose them. They can make an awful lot of trouble.”

“They won’t,” said Fred Kinnan. “Your kind of intellectuals are the first to scream when it’s safe—and the first to shut their traps at the first sign of danger. They spend years spitting at the man who feeds them—and they lick the hand of the man who slaps their drooling faces. Didn’t they deliver every country of Europe, one after another, to committees of goons, just like this one here? Didn’t they scream their heads off to shut out every burglar alarm and to break every padlock open for the goons? Have you heard a peep out of them since? Didn’t they scream that they were the friends of labor? Do you hear them raising their voices about the chain gangs, the slave camps, the fourteen-hour workday and the mortality from scurvy in the People’s States of Europe? No, but you do hear them telling the whip-beaten wretches that starvation is prosperity, that slavery is freedom, that torture chambers are brother-love and that if the wretches don’t understand it, then it’s their own fault that they suffer, and it’s the mangled corpses in the jail cellars who’re to blame for all their troubles, not the benevolent leaders! Intellectuals? You might have to worry about any other breed of men, but not about the modern intellectuals: they’ll swallow anything. I don’t feel so safe about the lousiest wharf rat in the longshoremen’s union: he’s liable to remember suddenly that he is a man—and then I won’t be able to keep him in line. But the intellectuals? That’s the one thing they’ve forgotten along ago. I guess it’s the one thing that all their education was aimed to make them forget. Do anything you please to the intellectuals. They’ll take it.”

“For once,” said Dr. Ferris, “I agree with Mr. Kinnan. I agree with his facts, if not with his feelings. You don’t have to worry about the intellectuals, Wesley. Just put a few of them on the government payroll and send them out to preach precisely the sort of thing Mr. Kinnan mentioned: that the blame rests on the victims. Give them moderately comfortable salaries and extremely loud titles—and they’ll forget their copyrights and do a better job for you than whole squads of enforcement officers.”

“Yes,” said Mouch. “I know.”

“The danger that I’m worried about will come from a different quarter,” said Dr. Ferris thoughtfully. “You might run into quite a bit of trouble on that ‘voluntary Gift Certificate’ business, Wesley.”

“I know,” said Mouch glumly. “That’s the point I wanted Thompson to help us out on. But I guess he can’t. We don’t actually have the legal power to seize the patents. Oh, there’s plenty of clauses in dozens of laws that can be stretched to cover it—almost, but not quite. Any tycoon who’d want to make a test case would have a very good chance to beat us. And we have to preserve a semblance of legality—or the populace won’t take it.”

“Precisely,” said Dr. Ferris. “It’s extremely important to get those patents turned over to us voluntarily. Even if we had a law permitting outright nationalization, it would be much better to get them as a gift. We want to leave the people the illusion that they’re still preserving their private property rights. And most of them will play along. They’ll sign the Gift Certificates. Just raise a lot of noise about its being a patriotic duty and that anyone who refuses is a prince of greed, and they’ll sign. But—” He stopped.

“I know,” said Mouch; he was growing visibly more nervous. “There will be, I think, a few old-fashioned bastards here and there who’ll refuse to sign—but they won’t be prominent enough to make a noise, nobody will hear about it, their own communities and friends will turn against them for their being selfish, so it won’t give us any trouble. We’ll just take the patents over, anyway—and those guys won’t have the nerve or the money to start a test case. But—” He stopped.

James Taggart leaned back in his chair, watching them; he was beginning to enjoy the conversation.

“Yes,” said Dr. Ferris, “I’m thinking of it, too. I’m thinking of a certain tycoon who is in a position to blast us to pieces. Whether we’ll recover the pieces or not, is hard to tell. God knows what is liable to happen at a hysterical time like the present and in a situation as delicate as this. Anything can throw everything off balance. Blow up the whole works. And if there’s anyone who wants to do it, he does. He does and can. He knows the real issue, he knows the things which must not be said—and he is not afraid to say them. He knows the one dangerous, fatally dangerous weapon. He is our deadliest adversary.”

“Who?” asked Lawson.

Dr. Ferris hesitated, shrugged and answered, “The guiltless man.”

Lawson stared blankly. “What do you mean and whom are you talking about?”

James Taggart smiled.

“I mean that there is no way to disarm any man,” said Dr. Ferris, “except through guilt. Through that which he himself has accepted as guilt. If a man has ever stolen a dime, you can impose on him the punishment intended for a bank robber and he will take it. He’ll bear any form of misery, he’ll feel that he deserves no better. If there’s not enough guilt in the world, we must create it. If we teach a man that it’s evil to look at spring flowers and he believes us and then does it—we’ll be able to do whatever we please with him. He won’t defend himself. He won’t feel he’s worth it. He won’t fight. But save us from the man who lives up to his own standards. Save us from the man of clean conscience. He’s the man who’ll beat us.”

“Are you talking about Henry Rearden?” asked Taggart, his voice peculiarly clear.

The one name they had not wanted to pronounce struck them into an instant’s silence.

“What if I were?” asked Dr. Ferris cautiously.

“Oh, nothing,” said Taggart. “Only, if you were, I would tell you that I can deliver Henry Rearden. He’ll sign.”

By the rules of their unspoken language, they all knew—from the tone of his voice—that he was not bluffing.

“God, Jim! No!” gasped Wesley Mouch.

“Yes,” said Taggart. “I was stunned, too, when I learned—what I learned. I didn’t expect that. Anything but that.”

“I am glad to hear it,” said Mouch cautiously. “It’s a constructive piece of information. It might be very valuable indeed.”

“Valuable—yes,” said Taggart pleasantly. “When do you plan to put the directive into effect?”

“Oh, we have to move fast. We don’t want any news of it to leak out. I expect you all to keep this most strictly confidential. I’d say that we’ll be ready to spring it on them in a couple of weeks.”

“Don’t you think it would be advisable—before all prices are frozen—to adjust the matter of the railroad rates? I was thinking of a raise. A small but most essentially needed raise.”

“We’ll discuss it, you and I,” said Mouch amiably. “It might be arranged.” He turned to the others; Boyle’s face was sagging. “There are many details still to be worked out, but I’m sure that our program won’t encounter any major difficulties.” He was assuming the tone and manner of a public address; he sounded brisk and almost cheerful. “Rough spots are to be expected. If one thing doesn’t work, we’ll try another. Trial-and-error is the only pragmatic rule of action. We’ll just keep on trying. If any hardships come up, remember that it’s only temporary. Only for the duration of the national emergency.”

“Say,” asked Kinnan, “how is the emergency to end if everything is to stand still?”

“Don’t be theoretical,” said Mouch impatiently. “We’ve got to deal with the situation of the moment. Don’t bother about minor details, so long as the broad outlines of our policy are clear. We’ll have the power. We’ll be able to solve any problem and answer any question.”

Fred Kinnan chuckled. “Who is John Galt?”

“Don’t say that!” cried Taggart.

“I have a question to ask about Point Seven,” said Kinnan. “It says that all wages, prices, salaries, dividends, profits and so forth will be frozen on the date of the directive. Taxes, too?”

“Oh no!” cried Mouch. “How can we tell what funds we’ll need in the future?” Kinnan seemed to be smiling. “Well?” snapped Mouch. “What about it?”

“Nothing,” said Kinnan. “I just asked.”

Mouch leaned back in his chair. “I must say to all of you that I appreciate your coming here and giving us the benefit of your opinions. It has been very helpful.” He leaned forward to look at his desk calendar and sat over it for a moment, toying with his pencil. Then the pencil came down, struck a date and drew a circle around it. “Directive 10-289 will go into effect on the morning of May first.”

All nodded approval. None looked at his neighbor.

James Taggart rose, walked to the window and pulled the blind down over the white obelisk.

EDITOR’S NOTE: By the novel’s midpoint, the economy is in a state of collapse. Dagny Taggart has quit as operating vice president of Taggart Transcontinental, and has been replaced by Clifton Locey, a man whose sole motive is to avoid responsibility. The Unification Board, created by Directive 10-289, is the government agency that now has total power over employment.

Thematically, this chapter answers the question “Philosophy: who needs it?”

The Tunnel Disaster

KIP CHALMERS swore as the train lurched and spilled his cocktail over the table top. He slumped forward, his elbow in the puddle, and said:

“God damn these railroads! What’s the matter with their track? You’d think with all the money they’ve got they’d disgorge a little, so we wouldn’t have to bump like farmers on a hay cart!”

His three companions did not take the trouble to answer. It was late, and they remained in the lounge merely because an effort was needed to retire to their compartments. The lights of the lounge looked like feeble portholes in a fog of cigarette smoke dank with the odor of alcohol. It was a private car, which Chalmers had demanded and obtained for his journey; it was attached to the end of the Comet and it swung like the tail of a nervous animal as the Comet coiled through the curves of the mountains.

“I’m going to campaign for the nationalization of the railroads,” said Kip Chalmers, glaring defiantly at a small, gray man who looked at him without interest. “That’s going to be my platform plank. I’ve got to have a platform plank. I don’t like Jim Taggart. He looks like a soft-boiled clam. To hell with the railroads! It’s time we took them over.”

“Go to bed,” said the man, “if you expect to look like anything human at the big rally tomorrow.”

“Do you think we’ll make it?”

“You’ve got to make it.”

“I know I’ve got to. But I don’t think we’ll get there on time. This goddamn snail of a super-special is hours late.”

“You’ve got to be there, Kip,” said the man ominously, in that stubborn monotone of the unthinking which asserts an end without concern for the means.

“God damn you, don’t you suppose I know it?”

Kip Chalmers had curly blond hair and a shapeless mouth. He came from a semi-wealthy, semi-distinguished family, but he sneered at wealth and distinction in a manner which implied that only a top-rank aristocrat could permit himself such a degree of cynical indifference. He had graduated from a college which specialized in breeding that kind of aristocracy. The college had taught him that the purpose of ideas is to fool those who are stupid enough to think. He had made his way in Washington with the grace of a cat-burglar, climbing from bureau to bureau as from ledge to ledge of a crumbling structure. He was ranked as semi-powerful, but his manner made laymen mistake him for nothing less than Wesley Mouch.

For reasons of his own particular strategy, Kip Chalmers had decided to enter popular politics and to run for election as Legislator from California, though he knew nothing about that state except the movie industry and the beach clubs. His campaign manager had done the preliminary work, and Chalmers was now on his way to face his future constituents for the first time at an overpublicized rally in San Francisco tomorrow night. The manager had wanted him to start a day earlier, but Chalmers had stayed in Washington to attend a cocktail party and had taken the last train possible. He had shown no concern about the rally until this evening, when he noticed that the Comet was running six hours late.

His three companions did not mind his mood: they liked his liquor. Lester Tuck, his campaign manager, was a small, aging man with a face that looked as if it had once been punched in and had never rebounded. He was an attorney who, some generations earlier, would have represented shoplifters and people who stage accidents on the premises of rich corporations; now he found that he could do better by representing men like Kip Chalmers.

Laura Bradford was Chalmers’ current mistress; he liked her because his predecessor had been Wesley Mouch. She was a movie actress who had forced her way from competent featured player to incompetent star, not by means of sleeping with studio executives, but by taking the long-distance short cut of sleeping with bureaucrats. She talked economics, instead of glamour, for press interviews, in the belligerently righteous style of a third-rate tabloid; her economics consisted of the assertion that “we’ve got to help the poor.”

Gilbert Keith-Worthing was Chalmers’ guest, for no reason that either of them could discover. He was a British novelist of world fame, who had been popular thirty years ago; since then, nobody bothered to read what he wrote, but everybody accepted him as a walking classic. He had been considered profound for uttering such things as: “Freedom? Do let’s stop talking about freedom. Freedom is impossible. Man can never be free of hunger, of cold, of disease, of physical accidents. He can never be free of the tyranny of nature. So why should he object to the tyranny of a political dictatorship?” When all of Europe put into practice the ideas which he had preached, he came to live in America. Through the years, his style of writing and his body had grown flabby. At seventy, he was an obese old man with retouched hair and a manner of scornful cynicism retouched by quotations from the yogis about the futility of all human endeavor. Kip Chalmers had invited him, because it seemed to look distinguished. Gilbert Keith-Worthing had come along, because he had no particular place to go.

“God damn these railroad people!” said Kip Chalmers. “They’re doing it on purpose. They want to ruin my campaign. I can’t miss that rally! For Christ’s sake, Lester, do something!”

“I’ve tried,” said Lester Tuck. At the train’s last stop, he had tried, by long-distance telephone, to find air transportation to complete their journey; but there were no commercial flights scheduled for the next two days.

“If they don’t get me there on time, I’ll have their scalps and their railroad! Can’t we tell that damn conductor to hurry?”

“You’ve told him three times.”

“I’ll get him fired. He’s given me nothing but a lot of alibis about all their messy technical troubles. I expect transportation, not alibis. They can’t treat me like one of their day-coach passengers. I expect them to get me where I want to go when I want it. Don’t they know that I’m on this train?”

“They know it by now,” said Laura Bradford. “Shut up, Kip. You bore me.”

Chalmers refilled his glass. The car was rocking and the glassware tinkled faintly on the shelves of the bar. The patches of starlit sky in the windows kept swaying jerkily, and it seemed as if the stars were tinkling against one another. They could see nothing beyond the glass bay of the observation window at the end of the car, except the small halos of red and green lanterns marking the rear of the train, and a brief stretch of rail running away from them into the darkness. A wall of rock was racing the train, and the stars dipped occasionally into a sudden break that outlined, high above them, the peaks of the mountains of Colorado.

“Mountains ...” said Gilbert Keith-Worthing, with satisfaction. “It is a spectacle of this kind that makes one feel the insignificance of man. What is this presumptuous little bit of rail, which crude materialists are so proud of building—compared to that eternal grandeur? No more than the basting thread of a seamstress on the hem of the garment of nature. If a single one of those granite giants chose to crumble, it would annihilate this train.”

“Why should it choose to crumble?” asked Laura Bradford, without any particular interest.

“I think this damn train is going slower,” said Kip Chalmers. “Those bastards are slowing down, in spite of what I told them!”

“Well ... it’s the mountains, you know ...” said Lester Tuck.

“Mountains be damned! Lester, what day is this? With all those damn changes of time, I can’t tell which—”

“It’s May twenty-seventh,” sighed Lester Tuck.

“It’s May twenty-eighth,” said Gilbert Keith-Worthing, glancing at his watch. “It is now twelve minutes past midnight.”

“Jesus!” cried Chalmers. “Then the rally is today?”

“Yep,” said Lester Tuck.

“We won’t make it! We—”

The train gave a sharper lurch, knocking the glass out of his hand. The thin sound of its crash against the floor mixed with the screech of the wheel-flanges tearing against the rail of a sharp curve.

“I say,” asked Gilbert Keith-Worthing nervously, “are your railroads safe?”

“Hell, yes!” said Kip Chalmers. “We’ve got so many rules, regulations and controls that those bastards wouldn’t dare not to be safe!... Lester, how far are we now? What’s the next stop?”

“There won’t be any stop till Salt Lake City.”

“I mean, what’s the next station?”

Lester Tuck produced a soiled map, which he had been consulting every few minutes since nightfall. “Winston,” he said. “Winston, Colorado.”

Kip Chalmers reached for another glass.

“Tinky Holloway said that Wesley said that if you don’t win this election, you’re through,” said Laura Bradford. She sat sprawled in her chair, looking past Chalmers, studying her own face in a mirror on the wall of the lounge; she was bored and it amused her to needle his impotent anger.

“Oh, he did, did he?”

“Uh-huh. Wesley doesn’t want what’s-his-name—whoever’s running against you—to get into the Legislature. If you don’t win, Wesley will be sore as hell. Tinky said—”

“Damn that bastard! He’d better watch his own neck!”

“Oh, I don’t know. Wesley likes him very much.” She added, “Tinky Holloway wouldn’t allow some miserable train to make him miss an important meeting. They wouldn’t dare to hold him up.”

Kip Chalmers sat staring at his glass. “I’m going to have the government seize all the railroads,” he said, his voice low.

“Really,” said Gilbert Keith-Worthing, “I don’t see why you haven’t done it long ago. This is the only country on earth backward enough to permit private ownership of railroads.”

“Well, we’re catching up with you,” said Kip Chalmers.

“Your country is so incredibly naive. It’s such an anachronism. All that talk about liberty and human rights—I haven’t heard it since the days of my great-grandfather. It’s nothing but a verbal luxury of the rich. After all, it doesn’t make any difference to the poor whether their livelihood is at the mercy of an industrialist or a bureaucrat.”

“The day of the industrialists is over. This is the day of—”

The jolt felt as if the air within the car smashed them forward while the floor stopped under their feet. Kip Chalmers was flung down to the carpet. Gilbert Keith-Worthing was thrown across the table top, the lights were blasted out. Glasses crashed off the shelves, the steel of the walls screamed as if about to rip open, while a long, distant thud went like a convulsion through the wheels of the train.

When he raised his head, Chalmers saw that the car stood intact and still; he heard the moans of his companions and the first shriek of Laura Bradford’s hysterics. He crawled along the floor to the doorway, wrenched it open, and tumbled down the steps. Far ahead, on the side of a curve, he saw moving flashlights and a red glow at a spot where the engine had no place to be. He stumbled through the darkness, bumping into half-clothed figures that waved the futile little flares of matches. Somewhere along the line, he saw a man with a flashlight and seized his arm. It was the conductor.

“What happened?” gasped Chalmers.

“Split rail,” the conductor answered impassively. “The engine went off the track.”

“Off ... ?”

“On it’s side.”

“Anybody ... killed?”

“No. The engineer’s all right. The fireman is hurt.”

“Split rail? What do you mean, split rail?”

The conductor’s face had an odd look: it was grim, accusing and closed. “Rail wears out, Mr. Chalmers,” he answered with a strange kind of emphasis. “Particularly on curves.”

“Didn’t you know that it was worn out?”

“We knew.”

“Well, why didn’t you have it replaced?”

“It was going to be replaced. But Mr. Locey cancelled that.”

“Who is Mr. Locey?”

“The man who is not our Operating Vice-President.”

Chalmers wondered why the conductor seemed to look at him as if something about the catastrophe were his fault. “Well ... well, aren’t you going to put the engine back on the track?”

“That engine’s never going to be put back on any track, from the looks of it.”

“But ... it’s got to move us!”

“It can’t.”

Beyond the few moving flares and the dulled sounds of screams, Chalmers sensed suddenly, not wanting to look at it, the black immensity of the mountains, the silence of hundreds of uninhabited miles, and the precarious strip of a ledge hanging between a wall of rock and an abyss. He gripped the conductor’s arm tighter.

“But ... but what are we going to do?”

“The engineer’s gone to call Winston.”

“Call? How?”

“There’s a phone couple of miles down the track.”

“Will they get us out of here?”

“They will.”

“But ...” Then his mind made a connection with the past and the future, and his voice rose to a scream for the first time: “How long will we have to wait?”

“I don’t know,” said the conductor. He threw Chalmers’ hand off his arm, and walked away.

The night operator at Winston Station listened to the phone message, dropped the receiver and raced up the stairs to shake the station agent out of bed. The station agent was a husky, surly drifter who had been assigned to the job ten days ago, by order of the new division superintendent. He stumbled dazedly to his feet, but he was knocked awake when the operator’s words reached his brain.

“What?” he gasped. “Jesus! The Comet? ... Well, don’t stand there shaking! Call Silver Springs!”

The night dispatcher of the Division Headquarters at Silver Springs listened to the message, then telephoned Dave Mitchum, the new superintendent of the Colorado Division.

“The Comet?” gasped Mitchum, his hand pressing the telephone receiver to his ear, his feet hitting the floor and throwing him upright, out of bed, “The engine done for? The Diesel?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh God! Oh, God Almighty! What are we going to do?” Then, remembering his position, he added, “Well, send out the wrecking train.”

“I have.”

“Call the operator at Sherwood to hold all traffic.”

“I have.”

“What have you got on the sheet?”

“The Army Freight Special, westbound. But it’s not due for about four hours. It’s running late.”

“I’ll be right down.... Wait, listen, get Bill, Sandy and Clarence down by the time I get there. There’s going to be hell to pay!”

Dave Mitchum had always complained about injustice, because, he said, he had always had bad luck. He explained it by speaking darkly about the conspiracy of the big fellows, who would never give him a chance, though he did not explain just whom he meant by “the big fellows.” Seniority of service was his favorite topic of complaint and sole standard of value; he had been in the railroad business longer than many men who had advanced beyond him; this, he said, was proof of the social system’s injustice—though he never explained just what he meant by “the social system.” He had worked for many railroads, but had not stayed long with any one of them. His employers had had no specific misdeeds to charge against him, but had simply eased him out, because he said, “Nobody told me to!” too often. He did not know that he owed his present job to a deal between James Taggart and Wesley Mouch: when Taggart traded to Mouch the secret of his sister’s private life, in exchange for a raise in rates, Mouch made him throw in an extra favor, by their customary rules of bargaining, which consisted of squeezing all one could out of any given trade. The extra was a job for Dave Mitchum, who was the brother-in-law of Claude Slagenhop, who was the president of the Friends of Global Progress, who were regarded by Mouch as a valuable influence on public opinion. James Taggart pushed the responsibility of finding a job for Mitchum onto Clifton Locey. Locey pushed Mitchum into the first job that came up—superintendent of the Colorado Division—when the man holding it quit without notice. The man quit when the extra Diesel engine of Winston Station was given to Chick Morrison’s Special.

“What are we going to do?” cried Dave Mitchum, rushing, half-dressed and groggy with sleep, into his office, where the chief dispatcher, the trainmaster and the road foreman of engines were waiting for him.

The three men did not answer. They were middle-aged men with years of railroad service behind them. A month ago, they were beginning to learn that things had changed and that it was dangerous to speak.

“What in hell are we going to do?”

“One thing is certain,” said Bill Brent, the chief dispatcher. “We can’t send a train into the tunnel with a coal-burning engine.”

Dave Mitchum’s eyes grew sullen: he knew that this was the one thought on all their minds; he wished Brent had not named it.

“Well, where do we get a Diesel?” he asked angrily.

“We don’t,” said the road foreman.

“But we can’t keep the Comet waiting on a siding all night!”

“Looks like we’ll have to,” said the trainmaster. “What’s the use of talking about it, Dave? You know that there is no Diesel anywhere on the division.”

“But Christ Almighty, how do they expect us to move trains without engines?”

“Miss Taggart didn’t,” said the road foreman. “Mr. Locey does.”

“Bill,” asked Mitchum, in the tone of pleading for a favor, “isn’t there anything transcontinental that’s due tonight, with any sort of a Diesel?”

“The first one to come,” said Bill Brent implacably, “will be Number 236, the fast freight from San Francisco, which is due at Winston at seven-eighteen A.M.” He added, “That’s the Diesel closest to us at this moment. I’ve checked.”

“What about the Army Special?”

“Better not think about it, Dave. That one has priority over everything on the line, including the Comet, by order of the Army. They’re running late as it is—journal boxes caught fire twice. They’re carrying munitions for the West Coast arsenals. Better pray that nothing stops them on your division. If you think we’ll catch hell for holding the Comet, it’s nothing to what we’ll catch if we try to stop that Special.”

They remained silent. The windows were open to the summer night and they could hear the ringing of the telephone in the dispatcher’s office downstairs. The signal lights winked over the deserted yards that had once been a busy division point.

Mitchum looked toward the roundhouse, where the black silhouettes of a few steam engines stood outlined in a dim light.

“The tunnel—” he said and stopped.

“—is eight miles long,” said the trainmaster, with a harsh emphasis.

“I was only thinking,” snapped Mitchum.

“Better not think of it,” said Brent softly.

“I haven’t said anything!”

“What was that talk you had with Dick Horton before he quit?” the road foreman asked too innocently, as if the subject were irrelevant. “Wasn’t it something about the ventilation system of the tunnel being on the bum? Didn’t he say that the tunnel was hardly safe nowadays even for Diesel engines?”

“Why do you bring that up?” snapped Mitchum. “I haven’t said anything!” Dick Horton, the division chief engineer, had quit three days after Mitchum’s arrival.

“I thought I’d just mention it,” the road foreman answered innocently.

“Look, Dave,” said Bill Brent, knowing that Mitchum would stall for another hour rather than formulate a decision, “you know that there’s only one thing to do: hold the Comet at Winston till morning, wait for Number 236, have her Diesel take the Comet through the tunnel, then let the Comet finish her run with the best coal-burner we can give her on the other side.”

“But how late will that make her?”

Brent shrugged. “Twelve hours—eighteen hours—who knows?”

“Eighteen hours—for the Comet? Christ, that’s never happened before! ”

“None of what’s been happening to us has ever happened before,” said Brent, with an astonishing sound of weariness in his brisk, competent voice.

“But they’ll blame us for it in New York! They’ll put all the blame on us!”

Brent shrugged. A month ago, he would have considered such an injustice inconceivable; today, he knew better.

“I guess ...” said Mitchum miserably, “I guess there’s nothing else that we can do.”

“There isn’t, Dave.”

“Oh God! Why did this have to happen to us?”

“Who is John Galt?”

It was half-past two when the Comet, pulled by an old switch engine, jerked to a stop on a siding of Winston Station. Kip Chalmers glanced out with incredulous anger at the few shanties on a desolate mountainside and at the ancient hovel of a station.

“Now what? What in hell are they stopping here for?” he cried, and rang for the conductor.

With the return of motion and safety, his terror had turned into rage. He felt almost as if he had been cheated by having been made to experience an unnecessary fear. His companions were still clinging to the tables of the lounge; they felt too shaken to sleep.

“How long?” the conductor said impassively, in answer to his question. “Till morning, Mr. Chalmers.”

Chalmers stared at him, stupefied. “We’re going to stand here till morning?”

“Yes, Mr. Chalmers.”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“But I have a rally in San Francisco in the evening!”

The conductor did not answer.

“Why? Why do we have to stand? Why in hell? What happened?”

Slowly, patiently, with contemptuous politeness, the conductor gave him an exact account of the situation. But years ago, in grammar school, in high school, in college, Kip Chalmers had been taught that man does not and need not live by reason.

“Damn your tunnel!” he screamed. “Do you think I’m going to let you hold me up because of some miserable tunnel? Do you want to wreck vital national plans on account of a tunnel? Tell your engineer that I must be in San Francisco by evening and that he’s got to get me there!”

“How?”

“That’s your job, not mine!”

“There is no way to do it.”

“Then find a way, God damn you!”

The conductor did not answer.

“Do you think I’ll let your miserable technological problems interfere with crucial social issues? Do you know who I am? Tell that engineer to start moving, if he values his job!”

“The engineer has his orders.”

“Orders be damned! I give the orders these days! Tell him to start at once!”

“Perhaps you’d better speak to the station agent, Mr. Chalmers. I have no authority to answer you as I’d like to,” said the conductor, and walked out.

Chalmers leaped to his feet. “Say, Kip ...” said Lester Tuck uneasily, “maybe it’s true ... maybe they can’t do it.”

“They can if they have to!” snapped Chalmers, marching resolutely to the door.

Years ago, in college, he had been taught that the only effective means to impel men to action was fear.

In the dilapidated office of Winston Station, he confronted a sleepy man with slack, worn features, and a frightened young boy who sat at the operator’s desk. They listened, in silent stupor, to a stream of profanity such as they had never heard from any section gang.

“—and it’s not my problem how you get the train through the tunnel, that’s for you to figure out!” Chalmers concluded. “But if you don’t get me an engine and don’t start that train, you can kiss good-bye to your jobs, your work permits and this whole goddamn railroad!”

The station agent had never heard of Kip Chalmers and did not know the nature of his position. But he knew that this was the day when unknown men in undefined positions held unlimited power—the power of life or death.

“It’s not up to us, Mr. Chalmers,” he said pleadingly. “We don’t issue the orders out here. The order came from Silver Springs. Suppose you telephone Mr. Mitchum and—”

“Who’s Mr. Mitchum?”

“He’s the division superintendent at Silver Springs. Suppose you send him a message to—”

“I should bother with a division superintendent! I’ll send a message to Jim Taggart—that’s what I’m going to do!”

Before the station agent had time to recover, Chalmers whirled to the boy, ordering, “You—take this down and send it at once!”

It was a message which, a month ago, the station agent would not have accepted from any passenger; the rules forbade it; but he was not certain about any rules any longer:

Mr. James Taggart, New York City. Am held up on the Comet at Winston, Colorado, by the incompetence of your men, who refuse to give me an engine. Have meeting in San Francisco in the evening of top-level national importance. If you don’t move my train at once, I’ll let you guess the consequences.

Kip Chalmers.

After the boy had transmitted the words onto the wires that stretched from pole to pole across a continent as guardians of the Taggart track—after Kip Chalmers had returned to his car to wait for an answer—the station agent telephoned Dave Mitchum, who was his friend, and read to him the text of the message. He heard Mitchum groan in answer.

“I thought I’d tell you, Dave. I never heard of the guy before, but maybe he’s somebody important.”

“I don’t know!” moaned Mitchum. “Kip Chalmers? You see his name in the newspapers all the time, right in with all the top-level boys. I don’t know what he is, but if he’s from Washington, we can’t take any chances. Oh Christ, what are we going to do?”

We can’t take any chances—thought the Taggart operator in New York, and transmitted the message by telephone to James Taggart’s home. It was close to six A.M. in New York, and James Taggart was awakened out of the fitful sleep of a restless night. He listened to the telephone, his face sagging. He felt the same fear as the station agent of Winston, and for the same reason.

He called the home of Clifton Locey. All the rage which he could not pour upon Kip Chalmers, was poured over the telephone wire upon Clifton Locey. “Do something!” screamed Taggart. “I don’t care what you do, it’s your job, not mine, but see to it that that train gets through! What in hell is going on? I never heard of the Comet being held up! Is that how you run your department? It’s a fine thing when important passengers have to start sending messages to me! At least, when my sister ran the place, I wasn’t awakened in the middle of the night over every spike that broke in Iowa—Colorado, I mean!”

“I’m so sorry, Jim,” said Clifton Locey smoothly, in a tone that balanced apology, reassurance and the right degree of patronizing confidence. “It’s just a misunderstanding. It’s somebody’s stupid mistake. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. I was, as a matter of fact, in bed, but I’ll attend to it at once.”

Clifton Locey was not in bed; he had just returned from a round of night clubs, in the company of a young lady. He asked her to wait and hurried to the offices of Taggart Transcontinental. None of the night staff who saw him there could say why he chose to appear in person, but neither could they say that it had been unnecessary. He rushed in and out of several offices, was seen by many people and gave an impression of great activity. The only physical result of it was an order that went over the wires to Dave Mitchum, superintendent of the Colorado Division:

“Give an engine to Mr. Chalmers at once. Send the Comet through safely and without unnecessary delay. If you are unable to perform your duties, I shall hold you responsible before the Unification Board. Clifton Locey.”

Then, calling his girl friend to join him, Clifton Locey drove to a country roadhouse—to make certain that no one would be able to find him in the next few hours.

The dispatcher at Silver Springs was baffled by the order that he handed to Dave Mitchum, but Dave Mitchum understood. He knew that no railroad order would ever speak in such terms as giving an engine to a passenger; he knew that the thing was a show piece, he guessed what sort of show was being staged, and he felt a cold sweat at the realization of who was being framed as the goat of the show.

“What’s the matter, Dave?” asked the trainmaster.

Mitchum did not answer. He seized the telephone, his hands shaking as he begged for a connection to the Taggart operator in New York. He looked like an animal in a trap.

He begged the New York operator to get him Mr. Clifton Locey’s home. The operator tried. There was no answer. He begged the operator to keep on trying and to try every number he could think of, where Mr. Locey might be found. The operator promised and Mitchum hung up, but knew that it was useless to wait or to speak to anyone in Mr. Locey’s department.

“What’s the matter, Dave?”

Mitchum handed him the order—and saw by the look on the trainmaster’s face that the trap was as bad as he had suspected.

He called the Region Headquarters of Taggart Transcontinental at Omaha, Nebraska, and begged to speak to the general manager of the region. There was a brief silence on the wire, then the voice of the Omaha operator told him that the general manager had resigned and vanished three days ago—“over a little trouble with Mr. Locey,” the voice added.

He asked to speak to the assistant general manager in charge of his particular district; but the assistant was out of town for the week end and could not be reached.

“Get me somebody else!” Mitchum screamed. “Anybody, of any district! For Christ’s sake, get me somebody who’ll tell me what to do!”

The man who came on the wire was the assistant general manager of the Iowa-Minnesota District.

“What?” he interrupted at Mitchum’s first words. “At Winston, Colorado? Why in hell are you calling me? ... No, don’t tell me what happened, I don’t want to know it! ... No, I said! No! You’re not going to frame me into having to explain afterwards why I did or didn’t do anything about whatever it is. It’s not my problem! ... Speak to some region executive, don’t pick on me, what do I have to do with Colorado? ... Oh hell, I don’t know, get the chief engineer, speak to him!”

The chief engineer of the Central Region answered impatiently, “Yes? What? What is it?”—and Mitchum rushed desperately to explain. When the chief engineer heard that there was no Diesel, he snapped, “Then hold the train, of course!” When he heard about Mr. Chalmers, he said, his voice suddenly subdued, “Hm ... Kip Chalmers? Of Washington? ... Well, I don’t know. That would be a matter for Mr. Locey to decide.” When Mitchum said, “Mr. Locey ordered me to arrange it, but—” the chief engineer snapped in great relief, “Then do exactly as Mr. Locey says!” and hung up.

Dave Mitchum replaced the telephone receiver cautiously. He did not scream any longer. Instead, he tiptoed to a chair, almost as if he were sneaking. He sat looking at Mr. Locey’s order for a long time.

Then he snatched a glance about the room. The dispatcher was busy at his telephone. The trainmaster and the road foreman were there, but they pretended that they were not waiting. He wished Bill Brent, the chief dispatcher, would go home; Bill Brent stood in a corner, watching him.

Brent was a short, thin man with broad shoulders; he was forty, but looked younger; he had the pale face of an office worker and the hard, lean features of a cowboy. He was the best dispatcher on the system.

Mitchum rose abruptly and walked upstairs to his office, clutching Locey’s order in his hand.

Dave Mitchum was not good at understanding problems of engineering and transportation, but he understood men like Clifton Locey. He understood the kind of game the New York executives were playing and what they were now doing to him. The order did not tell him to give Mr. Chalmers a coal-burning engine—just “an engine.” If the time came to answer questions, wouldn’t Mr. Locey gasp in shocked indignation that he had expected a division superintendent to know that only a Diesel engine could be meant in that order? The order stated that he was to send the Comet through “safely”—wasn’t a division superintendent expected to know what was safe?—“and without unnecessary delay.” What was an unnecessary delay? If the possibility of a major disaster was involved, wouldn’t a delay of a week or a month be considered necessary?

The New York executives did not care, thought Mitchum; they did not care whether Mr. Chalmers reached his meeting on time, or whether an unprecedented catastrophe struck their rails; they cared only about making sure that they would not be blamed for either. If he held the train, they would make him the scapegoat to appease the anger of Mr. Chalmers; if he sent the train through and it did not reach the western portal of the tunnel, they would put the blame on his incompetence; they would claim that he had acted against their orders, in either case. What would he be able to prove? To whom? One could prove nothing to a tribunal that had no stated policy, no defined procedure, no rules of evidence, no binding principles—a tribunal, such as the Unification Board, that pronounced men guilty or innocent as it saw fit, with no standard of guilt or innocence.

Dave Mitchum knew nothing about the philosophy of law; but he knew that when a court is not bound by any rules, it is not bound by any facts, and then a hearing is not an issue of justice, but an issue of men, and your fate depends not on what you have or have not done, but on whom you do or do not know. He asked himself what chance he would have at such a hearing against Mr. James Taggart, Mr. Clifton Locey, Mr. Kip Chalmers and their powerful friends.

Dave Mitchum had spent his life slipping around the necessity of ever making a decision; he had done it by waiting to be told and never being certain of anything. All that he now allowed into his brain was a long, indignant whine against injustice. Fate, he thought, had singled him out for an unfair amount of bad luck: he was being framed by his superiors on the only good job he had ever held. He had never been taught to understand that the manner in which he obtained this job, and the frame-up, were inextricable parts of a single whole.

As he looked at Locey’s order, he thought that he could hold the Comet, attach Mr. Chalmers’ car to an engine and send it into the tunnel, alone. But he shook his head before the thought was fully formed: he knew that this would force Mr. Chalmers to recognize the nature of the risk: Mr. Chalmers would refuse; he would continue to demand a safe and non-existent engine. And more: this could mean that he, Mitchum, would have to assume responsibility, admit full knowledge of the danger, stand in the open and identify the exact nature of the situation—the one act which the policy of his superiors was based on evading, the one key to their game.

Dave Mitchum was not the man to rebel against his background or to question the moral code of those in charge. The choice he made was not to challenge, but to follow the policy of his superiors. Bill Brent could have beaten him in any contest of technology, but here was an endeavor at which he could beat Bill Brent without effort. There had once been a society where men needed the particular talents of Bill Brent, if they wished to survive; what they needed now was the talent of Dave Mitchum.

Dave Mitchum sat down at his secretary’s typewriter and, by means of two fingers, carefully typed out an order to the trainmaster and another to the road foreman. The first instructed the trainmaster to summon a locomotive crew at once, for a purpose described only as “an emergency”; the second instructed the road foreman to “send the best engine available to Winston, to stand by for emergency assistance.”

He put carbon copies of the orders into his own pocket, then opened the door, yelled for the night dispatcher to come up and handed him the two orders for the two men downstairs. The night dispatcher was a conscientious young boy who trusted his superiors and knew that discipline was the first rule of the railroad business. He was astonished that Mitchum should wish to send written orders down one flight of stairs, but he asked no questions.

Mitchum waited nervously. After a while, he saw the figure of the road foreman walking across the yards toward the roundhouse. He felt relieved: the two men had not come up to confront him in person; they had understood and they would play the game as he was playing it.

The road foreman walked across the yards, looking down at the ground. He was thinking of his wife, his two children and the house which he had spent a lifetime to own. He knew what his superiors were doing and he wondered whether he should refuse to obey them. He had never been afraid of losing his job; with the confidence of a competent man, he had known that if he quarreled with one employer, he would always be able to find another. Now, he was afraid; he had no right to quit or to seek a job; if he defied an employer, he would be delivered into the unanswerable power of a single Board, and if the Board ruled against him, it would mean being sentenced to the slow death of starvation: it would mean being barred from any employment. He knew that the Board would rule against him; he knew that the key to the dark, capricious mystery of the Board’s contradictory decisions was the secret power of pull. What chance would he have against Mr. Chalmers? There had been a time when the self-interest of his employers had demanded that he exercise his utmost ability. Now, ability was not wanted any longer. There had been a time when he had been required to do his best and rewarded accordingly. Now, he could expect nothing but punishment, if he tried to follow his conscience. There had been a time when he had been expected to think. Now, they did not want him to think, only to obey. They did not want him to have a conscience any longer. Then why should he raise his voice? For whose sake? He thought of the passengers—the three hundred passengers aboard the Comet. He thought of his children. He had a son in high school and a daughter, nineteen, of whom he was fiercely, painfully proud, because she was recognized as the most beautiful girl in town. He asked himself whether he could deliver his children to the fate of the children of the unemployed, as he had seen them in the blighted areas, in the settlements around closed factories and along the tracks of discontinued railroads. He saw, in astonished horror, that the choice which he now had to make was between the lives of his children and the lives of the passengers on the Comet. A conflict of this kind had never been possible before. It was by protecting the safety of the passengers that he had earned the security of his children; he had served one by serving the other; there had been no clash of interests, no call for victims. Now, if he wanted to save the passengers, he had to do it at the price of his children. He remembered dimly the sermons he had heard about the beauty of self-immolation, about the virtue of sacrificing to others that which was one’s dearest. He knew nothing about the philosophy of ethics; but he knew suddenly—not in words, but in the form of a dark, angry, savage pain—that if this was virtue, then he wanted no part of it.

He walked into the roundhouse and ordered a large, ancient coal-burning locomotive to be made ready for the run to Winston.

The trainmaster reached for the telephone in the dispatcher’s office, to summon an engine crew, as ordered. But his hand stopped, holding the receiver. It struck him suddenly that he was summoning men to their death, and that of the twenty lives listed on the sheet before him, two would be ended by his choice. He felt a physical sensation of cold, nothing more; he felt no concern, only a puzzled, indifferent astonishment. It had never been his job to call men out to die; his job had been to call them out to earn their living. It was strange, he thought; and it was strange that his hand had stopped; what made it stop was like something he would have felt twenty years ago—no, he thought, strange, only one month ago, not longer.

He was forty-eight years old. He had no family, no friends, no ties to any living being in the world. Whatever capacity for devotion he had possessed, the capacity which others scatter among many random concerns, he had given it whole to the person of his young brother—the brother, his junior by twenty-five years, whom he had brought up. He had sent him through a technological college, and he had known, as had all the teachers, that the boy had the mark of genius on the forehead of his grim, young face. With the same single-tracked devotion as his brother’s, the boy had cared for nothing but his studies, not for sports or parties or girls, only for the vision of the things he was going to create as an inventor. He had graduated from college and had gone, on a salary unusual for his age, into the research laboratory of a great electrical concern in Massachusetts.

This was now May 28, thought the trainmaster. It was on May 1 that Directive 10-289 had been issued. It was on the evening of May 1 that he had been informed that his brother had committed suicide.

The trainmaster had heard it said that the directive was necessary to save the country. He could not know whether this was true or not; he had no way of knowing what was necessary to save a country. But driven by some feeling which he could not express, he had walked into the office of the editor of the local newspaper and demanded that they publish the story of his brother’s death. “People have to know it,” had been all he could give as his reason. He had been unable to explain that the bruised connections of his mind had formed the wordless conclusion that if this was done by the will of the people, then the people had to know it; he could not believe that they would do it, if they knew. The editor had refused; he had stated that it would be bad for the country’s morale.

The trainmaster knew nothing about political philosophy; but he knew that that had been the moment when he lost all concern for the life or death of any human being or of the country.

He thought, holding the telephone receiver, that maybe he should warn the men whom he was about to call. They trusted him; it would never occur to them that he could knowingly send them to their death. But he shook his head: this was only an old thought, last year’s thought, a remnant of the time when he had trusted them, too. It did not matter now. His brain worked slowly, as if he were dragging his thoughts through a vacuum where no emotion responded to spur them on; he thought that there would be trouble if he warned anyone, there would be some sort of fight and it was he who had to make some great effort to start it. He had forgotten what it was that one started this sort of fight for. Truth? Justice? Brother-love? He did not want to make an effort. He was very tired. If he warned all the men on his list, he thought, there would be no one to run that engine, so he would save two lives and also three hundred lives aboard the Comet. But nothing responded to the figures in his mind; “lives” was just a word, it had no meaning.

He raised the telephone receiver to his ear, he called two numbers, he summoned an engineer and a fireman to report for duty at once.

Engine Number 306 had left for Winston, when Dave Mitchum came downstairs. “Get a track motor car ready for me,” he ordered, “I’m going to run up to Fairmount.” Fairmount was a small station, twenty miles east on the line. The men nodded, asking no questions. Bill Brent was not among them. Mitchum walked into Brent’s office. Brent was there, sitting silently at his desk; he seemed to be waiting.

“I’m going to Fairmount,” said Mitchum; his voice was aggressively too casual, as if implying that no answer was necessary. “They had a Diesel there couple of weeks ago ... you know, emergency repairs or something.... I’m going down to see if we could use it.”

He paused, but Brent said nothing.

“The way things stack up,” said Mitchum, not looking at him, “we can’t hold that train till morning. We’ve got to take a chance, one way or another. Now I think maybe this Diesel will do it, but that’s the last one we can try for. So if you don’t hear from me in half an hour, sign the order and send the Comet through with Number 306 to pull her.”

Whatever Brent had thought, he could not believe it when he heard it. He did not answer at once; then he said, very quietly, “No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“I won’t do it.”

“What do you mean, you won’t? It’s an order!”

“I won’t do it.” Brent’s voice had the firmness of certainty unclouded by any emotion.

“Are you refusing to obey an order?”

“I am.”

“But you have no right to refuse! And I’m not going to argue about it, either. It’s what I’ve decided, it’s my responsibility and I’m not asking for your opinion. Your job is to take my orders.”

“Will you give me that order in writing?”

“Why, God damn you, are you hinting that you don’t trust me? Are you ...?”

“Why do you have to go to Fairmount, Dave? Why can’t you telephone them about the Diesel, if you think that they have one?”

“You’re not going to tell me how to do my job! You’re not going to sit there and question me! You’re going to keep your trap shut and do as you’re told or I’ll give you a chance to talk—to the Unification Board!”

It was hard to decipher emotions on Brent’s cowboy face, but Mitchum saw something that resembled a look of incredulous horror; only it was horror at some sight of his own, not at the words, and it had no quality of fear, not the kind of fear Mitchum had hoped for.

Brent knew that tomorrow morning the issue would be his word against Mitchum’s; Mitchum would deny having given the order; Mitchum would show written proof that Engine Number 306 had been sent to Winston only “to stand by,” and would produce witnesses that he had gone to Fairmount in search of a Diesel; Mitchum would claim that the fatal order had been issued by and on the sole responsibility of Bill Brent, the chief dispatcher. It would not be much of a case, not a case that could bear close study, but it would be enough for the Unification Board, whose policy was consistent only in not permitting anything to be studied closely. Brent knew that he could play the same game and pass the frame-up on to another victim, he knew that he had the brains to work it out—except that he would rather be dead than do it.

It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror. It was the realization that there was no one whom he could call to expose this thing and stop it—no superior anywhere on the line, from Colorado to Omaha to New York. They were in on it, all of them, they were doing the same, they had given Mitchum the lead and the method. It was Dave Mitchum who now belonged on this railroad and he, Bill Brent, who did not.

As Bill Brent had learned to see, by a single glance at a few numbers on a sheet of paper, the entire trackage of a division—so he was now able to see the whole of his own life and the full price of the decision he was making. He had not fallen in love until he was past his youth; he had been thirty-six when he had found the woman he wanted. He had been engaged to her for the last four years; he had had to wait, because he had a mother to support and a widowed sister with three children. He had never been afraid of burdens, because he had known his ability to carry them, and he had never assumed an obligation unless he was certain that he could fulfill it. He had waited, he had saved his money, and now he had reached the time when he felt himself free to be happy. He was to be married in a few weeks, this coming June. He thought of it, as he sat at his desk, looking at Dave Mitchum, but the thought aroused no hesitation, only regret and a distant sadness—distant, because he knew that he could not let it be part of this moment.

Bill Brent knew nothing about epistemology; but he knew that man must live by his own rational perception of reality, that he cannot act against it or escape it or find a substitute for it—and that there is no other way for him to live.

He rose to his feet. “It’s true that so long as I hold this job, I cannot refuse to obey you,” he said. “But I can, if I quit. So I’m quitting.”

“You’re what?”

“I’m quitting, as of this moment.”

“But you have no right to quit, you goddamn bastard! Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that I’ll have you thrown in jail for it?”

“If you want to send the sheriff for me in the morning, I’ll be at home. I won’t try to escape. There’s no place to go.”

Dave Mitchum was six-foot-two and had the build of a bruiser, but he stood shaking with fury and terror over the delicate figure of Bill Brent. “You can’t quit! There’s a law against it! I’ve got a law! You can’t walk out on me! I won’t let you out! I won’t let you leave this building tonight!”

Brent walked to the door. “Will you repeat that order you gave me, in front of the others? No? Then I will.”

As he pulled the door open, Mitchum’s fist shot out, smashed into his face and knocked him down.

The trainmaster and the road foreman stood in the open doorway.

“He quit!” screamed Mitchum. “The yellow bastard quit at a time like this! He’s a law-breaker and a coward!”

In the slow effort of rising from the floor, through the haze of blood running into his eyes, Bill Brent looked up at the two men. He saw that they understood, but he saw the closed faces of men who did not want to understand, did not want to interfere and hated him for putting them on the spot in the name of justice. He said nothing, rose to his feet and walked out of the building.

Mitchum avoided looking at the others. “Hey, you,” he called, jerking his head at the night dispatcher across the room. “Come here. You’ve got to take over at once.”

With the door closed, he repeated to the boy the story of the Diesel at Fairmount, as he had given it to Brent, and the order to send the Comet through with Engine Number 306, if the boy did not hear from him in half an hour. The boy was in no condition to think, to speak or to understand anything: he kept seeing the blood on the face of Bill Brent, who had been his idol. “Yes, sir,” he answered numbly.

Dave Mitchum departed for Fairmount, announcing to every yard-man, switchman and wiper in sight, as he boarded the track motor car, that he was going in search of a Diesel for the Comet.

The night dispatcher sat at his desk, watching the clock and the telephone, praying that the telephone would ring and let him hear from Mr. Mitchum. But the half-hour went by in silence, and when there were only three minutes left, the boy felt a terror he could not explain, except that he did not want to send that order.

He turned to the trainmaster and the road foreman, asking hesitantly, “Mr. Mitchum gave me an order before he left, but I wonder whether I ought to send it, because I ... I don’t think it’s right. He said—”

The trainmaster turned away; he felt no pity: the boy was about the same age as his brother had been.

The road foreman snapped, “Do just as Mr. Mitchum told you. You’re not supposed to think,” and walked out of the room.

The responsibility that James Taggart and Clifton Locey had evaded now rested on the shoulders of a trembling, bewildered boy. He hesitated, then he buttressed his courage with the thought that one did not doubt the good faith and the competence of railroad executives. He did not know that his vision of a railroad and its executives was that of a century ago.

With the conscientious precision of a railroad man, in the moment when the hand of the clock ended the half-hour, he signed his name to the order instructing the Comet to proceed with Engine Number 306, and transmitted the order to Winston Station.

The station agent at Winston shuddered when he looked at the order, but he was not the man to defy authority. He told himself that the tunnel was not, perhaps, as dangerous as he thought. He told himself that the best policy, these days, was not to think.

When he handed their copies of the order to the conductor and the engineer of the Comet, the conductor glanced slowly about the room, from face to face, folded the slip of paper, put it into his pocket and walked out without a word.

The engineer stood looking at the paper for a moment, then threw it down and said, “I’m not going to do it. And if it’s come to where this railroad hands out orders like this one, I’m not going to work for it, either. Just list me as having quit.”

“But you can’t quit!” cried the station agent. “They’ll arrest you for it!”

“If they find me,” said the engineer, and walked out of the station into the vast darkness of the mountain night.

The engineer from Silver Springs, who had brought in Number 306, was sitting in a corner of the room. He chuckled and said, “He’s yellow.”

The station agent turned to him. “Will you do it, Joe? Will you take the Comet?”

Joe Scott was drunk. There had been a time when a railroad man, reporting for duty with any sign of intoxication, would have been regarded as a doctor arriving for work with sores of smallpox on his face. But Joe Scott was a privileged person. Three months ago, he had been fired for an infraction of safety rules, which had caused a major wreck; two weeks ago, he had been reinstated in his job by order of the Unification Board. He was a friend of Fred Kinnan; he protected Kinnan’s interests in his union, not against the employers, but against the membership.

“Sure,” said Joe Scott. “I’ll take the Comet. I’ll get her through, if I go fast enough.”

The fireman of Number 306 had remained in the cab of his engine. He looked up uneasily, when they came to switch his engine to the head end of the Comet; he looked up at the red and green lights of the tunnel, hanging in the distance above twenty miles of curves. But he was a placid, amicable fellow, who made a good fireman with no hope of ever rising to engineer; his husky muscles were his only asset. He felt certain that his superiors knew what they were doing, so he did not venture any questions.

The conductor stood by the rear end of the Comet. He looked at the lights of the tunnel, then at the long chain of the Comet’s windows. A few windows were lighted, but most of them showed only the feeble blue glow of night lamps edging the lowered blinds. He thought that he should rouse the passengers and warn them. There had been a time when he had placed the safety of the passengers above his own, not by reason of love for his fellow men, but because that responsibility was part of his job, which he accepted and felt pride in fulfilling. Now, he felt a contemptuous indifference and no desire to save them. They had asked for and accepted Directive 10-289, he thought, they went on living and daily turning away in evasion from the kind of verdicts that the Unification Board was passing on defenseless victims—why shouldn’t he now turn away from them? If he saved their lives, not one of them would come forward to defend him when the Unification Board would convict him for disobeying orders, for creating a panic, for delaying Mr. Chalmers. He had no desire to be a martyr for the sake of allowing people safely to indulge in their own irresponsible evil.

When the moment came, he raised his lantern and signaled the engineer to start.

“See?” said Kip Chalmers triumphantly to Lester Tuck, as the wheels under their feet shuddered forward. “Fear is the only practical means to deal with people.”

The conductor stepped onto the vestibule of the last car. No one saw him as he went down the steps of the other side, slipped off the train and vanished into the darkness of the mountains.

A switchman stood ready to throw the switch that would send the Comet from the siding onto the main track. He looked at the Comet as it came slowly toward him. It was only a blazing white globe with a beam stretching high above his head, and a jerky thunder trembling through the rail under his feet. He knew that the switch should not be thrown. He thought of the night, ten years ago, when he had risked his life in a flood to save a train from a washout. But he knew that times had changed. In the moment when he thew the switch and saw the headlight jerk sidewise, he knew that he would now hate his job for the rest of his life.

The Comet uncoiled from the siding into a thin, straight line, and went on into the mountains, with the beam of the headlight like an extended arm pointing the way, and the lighted glass curve of the observation lounge ending it off.

Some of the passengers aboard the Comet were awake. As the train started its coiling ascent, they saw the small cluster of Winston’s lights at the bottom of the darkness beyond their windows, then the same darkness, but with red and green lights by the hole of a tunnel on the upper edge of the windowpanes. The lights of Winston kept growing smaller, each time they appeared; the black hole of the tunnel kept growing larger. A black veil went streaking past the windows at times, dimming the lights: it was the heavy smoke from the coal-burning engine.

As the tunnel came closer, they saw, at the edge of the sky far to the south, in a void of space and rock, a spot of living fire twisting in the wind. They did not know what it was and did not care to learn.

It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.

The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that individual effort is futile, that an individual conscience is a useless luxury, that there is no individual mind or character or achievement, that everything is achieved collectively, and that it’s masses that count, not men.

The man in Roomette 7, Car No. 2, was a journalist who wrote that it is proper and moral to use compulsion “for a good cause,” who believed that he had the right to unleash physical force upon others—to wreck lives, throttle ambitions, strangle desires, violate convictions, to imprison, to despoil, to murder—for the sake of whatever he chose to consider as his own idea of “a good cause,” which did not even have to be an idea, since he had never defined what he regarded as the good, but had merely stated that he went by “a feeling”—a feeling unrestrained by any knowledge, since he considered emotion superior to knowledge and relied solely on his own “good intentions” and on the power of a gun.

The woman in Roomette 10, Car No. 3, was an elderly school teacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards, by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil, that a majority may do anything it pleases, that they must not assert their own personalities, but must do as others were doing.

The man in Drawing Room B, Car No. 4, was a newspaper publisher who believed that men are evil by nature and unfit for freedom, that their basic interests, if left unchecked, are to lie, to rob and to murder one another—and, therefore, men must be ruled by means of lies, robbery and murder, which must be made the exclusive privilege of the rulers, for the purpose of forcing men to work, teaching them to be moral and keeping them within the bounds of order and justice.

The man in Bedroom H, Car No. 5, was a businessman who had acquired his business, an ore mine, with the help of a government loan, under the Equalization of Opportunity Bill.

The man in Drawing Room A, Car No. 6, was a financier who had made a fortune by buying “frozen” railroad bonds and getting his friends in Washington to “defreeze” them.

The man in Seat 5, Car No. 7, was a worker who believed that he had “a right” to a job, whether his employer wanted him or not.

The woman in Roomette 6, Car No. 8, was a lecturer who believed that, as a consumer, she had “a right” to transportation, whether the railroad people wished to provide it or not.

The man in Roomette 2, Car No. 9, was a professor of economics who advocated the abolition of private property, explaining that intelligence plays no part in industrial production, that man’s mind is conditioned by material tools, that anybody can run a factory or a railroad and it’s only a matter of seizing the machinery.

The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, “I don’t care, it’s only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children.”

The man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels.

The woman in Roomette 9, Car No. 12, was a housewife who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing, to.control giant industries, of which she had no knowledge.

The man in Bedroom F, Car No. 13, was a lawyer who had said, “Me? I’ll find a way to get along under any political system.”

The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 14, was a professor of philosophy who taught that there is no mind—how do you know that the tunnel is dangerous?—no reality—how can you prove that the tunnel exists?—no logic—why do you claim that trains cannot move without motive power?—no principles—why should you be bound by the law of cause-and-effect ?—no rights—why shouldn’t you attach men to their jobs by force?—no morality—what’s moral about running a railroad?—no absolutes—what difference does it make to you whether you live or die, anyway? He taught that we know nothing—why oppose the orders of your superiors?—that we can never be certain of anything—how do you know you’re right?—that we must act on the expediency of the moment—you don’t want to risk your job, do you?

The man in Drawing Room B, Car No. 15, was an heir who had inherited his fortune, and who had kept repeating, “Why should Rearden be the only one permitted to manufacture Rearden Metal?”

The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 16, was a humanitarian who had said, “The men of ability? I do not care what or if they are made to suffer. They must be penalized in order to support the incompetent. Frankly, I do not care whether this is just or not. I take pride in not caring to grant any justice to the able, where mercy to the needy is concerned.”

These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas. As the train went into the tunnel, the flame of Wyatt’s Torch was the last thing they saw on earth.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Here is one more scene from Atlas Shrugged—the very opening of Part III, set in Atlantis, a capitalist oasis hidden from the world in the mountains of Colorado. Dagny, flying alone in Colorado in pursuit of a mysterious stranger, has just crash-landed in a deserted meadow.

Atlantis

WHEN SHE opened her eyes, she saw sunlight, green leaves and a man’s face. She thought: I know what this is. This was the world as she had expected to see it at sixteen—and now she had reached it—and it seemed so simple, so unastonishing, that the thing she felt was like a blessing pronounced upon the universe by means of three words: But of course.

She was looking up at the face of a man who knelt by her side, and she knew that in all the years behind her, this was what she would have given her life to see: a face that bore no mark of pain or fear or guilt. The shape of his mouth was pride, and more: it was as if he took pride in being proud. The angular planes of his cheeks made her think of arrogance, of tension, of scorn—yet the face had none of these qualities, it had their final sum: a look of serene determination and of certainty, and the look of a ruthless innocence which would not seek forgiveness or grant it. It was a face that had nothing to hide or to escape, a face with no fear of being seen or of seeing, so that the first thing she grasped about him was the intense perceptiveness of his eyes—he looked as if his faculty of sight were his best-loved tool and its exercise were a limitless, joyous adventure, as if his eyes imparted a superlative value to himself and to the world—to himself for his ability to see, to the world for being a place so eagerly worth seeing. It seemed to her for a moment that she was in the presence of a being who was pure consciousness—yet she had never been so aware of a man’s body. The light cloth of his shirt seemed to stress, rather than hide, the structure of his figure, his skin was suntanned, his body had the hardness, the gaunt, tensile strength, the clean precision of a foundry casting, he looked as if he were poured out of metal, but some dimmed, soft-lustered metal, like an aluminum-copper alloy, the color of his skin blending with the chestnut-brown of his hair, the loose strands of the hair shading from brown to gold in the sun, and his eyes completing the colors, as the one part of the casting left undimmed and hardly lustrous: his eyes were the deep, dark green of light glinting on metal. He was looking down at her with the faint trace of a smile, it was not a look of discovery, but of familiar contemplation—as if he, too, were seeing the long-expected and the never-doubted.

This was her world, she thought, this was the way men were meant to be and to face their existence—and all the rest of it, all the years of ugliness and struggle were only someone’s senseless joke. She smiled at him, as at a fellow conspirator, in relief, in deliverance, in radiant mockery of all the things she would never have to consider important again. He smiled in answer, it was the same smile as her own, as if he felt what she felt and knew what she meant.

“We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?” she whispered.

“No, we never had to.”

And then, her consciousness returning fully, she realized that this man was a total stranger.

She tried to draw away from him, but it was only a faint movement of her head on the grass she felt under her hair. She tried to rise. A shot of pain across her back threw her down again.

“Don’t move, Miss Taggart. You’re hurt.”

“You know me?” Her voice was impersonal and hard.

“I’ve known you for many years.”

“Have I known you?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“What is your name?”

“John Galt.”

She looked at him, not moving.

“Why are you frightened?” he asked.

“Because I believe it.”

PART FOUR

Basic Philosophy

EDITOR’S NOTE: To create Atlas Shrugged, AR had to go beyond ethics; she had to originate a new system of philosophy, identifying the nature of man’s means of knowledge and of the universe he seeks to know. “Without an understanding and statement of the right philosophical principle,” she said in a 1946 note to herself, “I cannot create the right story; but the discovery of the principle interests me only as the discovery of the proper knowledge to be used for my life purpose ...” (Journals of Ayn Rand, 1997, p. 479).

The first selection, from John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged, identifies the axioms of Objectivism, as against its two opposites: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle.

1. Reason and Reality

Axioms of Objectivism

“EXISTENCE EXISTS—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.

“If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.

“Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.

“To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors—the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of,his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

“Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.

“Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders’ attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.

“Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason; his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.

“All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identify it as a solid object; he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking: to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

“Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

“The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answer is: Yours. No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth—and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.

“You who speak of a ‘moral instinct’ as if it were some separate endowment opposed to reason—man’s reason is his moral faculty. A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False?—Right or Wrong? Is a seed to be planted in soil in order to grow—right or wrong? Is a man’s wound to be disinfected in order to save his life—right or wrong? Does the nature of atmospheric electricity permit it to be converted into kinetic power—right or wrong? It is the answers to such questions that gave you everything you have—and the answers came from a man’s mind, a mind of intransigent devotion to that which is right.

“A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest—but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

“That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call ‘free will’ is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

“Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think—not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment—on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict ‘It is.’ Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say ‘It is,’ you are refusing to say ‘I am.’ By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: ‘Who am I to know?’—he is declaring: ‘Who am I to live?’

“This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero. [...]

“ ‘We know that we know nothing,’ they [skeptics] chatter, blanking out the fact that they are claiming knowledge—‘There are not absolutes,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute—‘You cannot prove that you exist or that you’re conscious,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge: the existence of something to know, of a consciousness able to know it, and of a knowledge that has learned to distinguish between such concepts as the proved and the unproved.

“When a savage who has not learned to speak declares that existence must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of non-existence—when he declares that your consciousness must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of unconsciousness—he is asking you to step into a void outside of existence and consciousness to give him proof of both—he is asking you to become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero.

“When he declares that an axiom is a matter of arbitrary choice and he doesn’t choose to accept the axiom that he exists, he blanks out the fact that he has accepted it by uttering that sentence, that the only way to reject it is to shut one’s mouth, expound no theories and die.

“An axiom is a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others, whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it. Let the caveman who does not choose to accept the axiom of identity, try to present his theory without using the concept of identity or any concept derived from it—let the anthropoid who does not choose to accept the existence of nouns, try to devise a language without nouns; adjectives or verbs—iet the witch-doctor who does not choose to accept the validity of sensory perception, try to prove it without using the data he obtained by sensory perception—let the head-hunter who does not choose to accept the validity of logic, try to prove it without using logic—let the pigmy who proclaims that a skyscraper needs no foundation after it reaches its fiftieth story, yank the base from under his building, not yours—let the cannibal who snarls that the freedom of man’s mind was needed to create an industrial civilization, but is not needed to maintain it, be given an arrowhead and bearskin, not a university chair of economics.

“Do you think they are taking you back to dark ages? They are taking you back to darker ages than any your history has known. Their goal is not the era of pre-science, but the era of pre-language. Their purpose is to deprive you of the concept on which man’s mind, his life and his culture depend: the concept of an objective reality. Identify the development of a human consciousness—and you will know the purpose of their creed.

“A savage is a being who has not grasped that A is A and that reality is real. He has arrested his mind at the level of a baby’s, at the state when a consciousness acquires its initial sensory perception and has not learned to distinguish solid objects. It is to a baby that the world appears as a blur of motion, without things that move—and the birth of his mind is the day when he grasps that the streak that keeps flickering past him is his mother and the whirl beyond her is a curtain, that the two are solid entities and neither can turn into the other, that they are what they are, that they exist. The day when he grasps that matter has no volition is the day when he grasps that he has—and this is his birth as a human being. The day when he grasps that the reflection he sees in a mirror is not a delusion, that it is real, but it is not himself, that the mirage he sees in a desert is not a delusion, that the air and the light rays that cause it are real, but it is not a city, it is a city’s reflection—the day when he grasps that he is not a passive recipient of the sensations of any given moment, that his senses do not provide him with automatic knowledge in separate snatches independent of context, but only with the material of knowledge, which his mind must learn to integrate—the day when he grasps that his senses cannot deceive him, that physical objects cannot act without causes, that his organs of perception are physical and have no volition, no power to invent or to distort, that the evidence they give him is an absolute, but his mind must learn to understand it, his mind must discover the nature, the causes, the full context of his sensory material, his mind must identify the things that he perceives—that is the day of his birth as a thinker and scientist.

“We are the men who reach that day; you are the men who choose to reach it partly; a savage is a man who never does.

“To a savage, the world is a place of unintelligible miracles where anything is possible to inanimate matter and nothing is possible to him. His world is not the unknown, but that irrational horror: the unknowable. He believes that physical objects are endowed with a mysterious volition, moved by causeless, unpredictable whims, while he is a helpless pawn at the mercy of forces beyond his control. He believes that nature is ruled by demons who possess an omnipotent power and that reality is their fluid plaything, where they can turn his bowl of meal into a snake and his wife into a beetle at any moment, where the A he has never discovered can be any non-A they choose, where the only knowledge he possesses is that he must not attempt to know. He can count on nothing, he can only wish, and he spends his life on wishing, on begging his demons to grant him his wishes by the arbitrary power of their will, giving them credit when they do, taking the blame when they don’t, offering them sacrifices in token of his gratitude and sacrifices in token of his guilt, crawling on his belly in fear and worship of sun and moon and wind and rain and of any thug who announces himself as their spokesman, provided his words are unintelligible and his mask sufficiently frightening—he wishes, begs and crawls, and dies, leaving you, as a record of his view of existence, the distorted monstrosities of his idols, part-man, part-animal, part-spider, the embodiments of the world of non-A.

“His is the intellectual state of your modern teachers and his is the world to which they want to bring you.

“If you wonder by what means they propose to do it, walk into any college classroom and you will hear your professors teaching your children that man can be certain of nothing, that his consciousness has no validity whatever, that he can learn no facts and no laws of existence, that he’s incapable of knowing an objective reality. What, then, is his standard of knowledge and truth? Whatever others believe, is their answer. There is no knowledge, they teach, there’s only faith: your belief that you exist is an act of faith, no more valid than another’s faith in his right to kill you; the axioms of science are an act of faith, no more valid than a mystic’s faith in revelations; the belief that electric light can be produced by a generator is an act of faith, no more valid than the belief that it can be produced by a rabbit’s foot kissed under a stepladder on the first of the moon—truth is whatever people want it to be, and people are everyone except yourself; reality is whatever people choose to say it is, there are no objective facts, there are only people’s arbitrary wishes—a man who seeks knowledge in a laboratory by means of test tubes and logic is an old-fashioned, superstitious fool; a true scientist is a man who goes around taking public polls—and if it weren’t for the selfish greed of the manufacturers of steel girders, who have a vested interest in obstructing the progress of science, you would learn that New York City does not exist, because a poll of the entire population of the world would tell you by a landslide majority that their beliefs forbid its existence.

“For centuries, the mystics of spirit have proclaimed that faith is superior to reason, but have not dared deny the existence of reason. Their heirs and product, the mystics of muscle, have completed their job and achieved their dream: they proclaim that everything is faith, and call it a revolt against believing. As revolt against unproved assertions, they proclaim that nothing can be proved; as revolt against supernatural knowledge, they proclaim that no knowledge is possible; as revolt against the enemies of science, they proclaim that science is superstition; as revolt against the enslavement of the mind, they proclaim that there is no mind.

“If you surrender your power to perceive, if you accept the switch of your standard from the objective to the collective and wait for mankind to tell you what to think, you will find another switch taking place before the eyes you have renounced: you will find that your teachers become the rulers of the collective, and if you then refuse to obey them, protesting that they are not the whole of mankind, they will answer: ‘By what means do you know that we are not? Are, brother? Where did you get that old-fashioned term?’

“If you doubt that such is their purpose, observe with what passionate consistency the mystics of muscle are striving to make you forget that a concept such as ‘Mind’ has ever existed. Observe the twists of undefined verbiage, the words with rubber meanings, the terms left floating in midstream, by means of which they try to get around the recognition of the concept of ‘thinking.’ Your consciousness, they tell you, consists of ‘reflexes,’ ‘reactions,’ ‘experiences,’ ‘urges,’ and ‘drives’—and refuse to identify the means by which they acquired that knowledge, to identify the act they are performing when they tell it or the act you are performing when you listen. Words have the power to ‘condition’ you, they say and refuse to identify the reason why words have the power to change your-blank-out. A student reading a book understands it through a process of-blank-out. A scientist working on an invention is engaged in the activity of—blank-out. A psychologist helping a neurotic to solve a problem and untangle a conflict, does it by means of-blank-out. An industrialist—blank-out—there is no such person. A factory is a ‘natural resource,’ like a tree, a rock or a mud puddle....

EDITOR’S NOTE: AR’s view of reason and of its fundamental role in man’s life are indicated in the following excerpt, taken from an introductory talk given at Yale in 1960. The complete talk is published in Philosophy: Who Needs It.

Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World

... Now THERE is one word—a single word—which can blast the morality of altruism out of existence and which it cannot withstand—the word: “Why?” Why must man live for the sake of others? Why must he be a sacrificial animal? Why is that the good? There is no earthly reason for it—and, ladies and gentlemen, in the whole history of philosophy no earthly reason has ever been given.

It is only mysticism that can permit moralists to get away with it. It was mysticism, the unearthly, the supernatural, the irrational that has always been called upon to justify it—or, to be exact, to escape the necessity of justification. One does not justify the irrational, one just takes it on faith. What most moralists—and few of their victims—realize is that reason and altruism are incompatible. And this is the basic contradiction of Western civilization: reason versus altruism. This is the conflict that had to explode sooner or later.

The real conflict, of course, is reason versus mysticism. But if it weren’t for the altruist morality, mysticism would have died when it did die—at the Renaissance—leaving no vampire to haunt Western culture. A “vampire” is supposed to be a dead creature that comes out of its grave only at night—onty in the darkness—and drains the blood of the living. The description applied to altruism, is exact.

Western civilization was the child and product of reason—via ancient Greece. In all other civilizations, reason has always been the menial servant—the handmaiden—of mysticism. You may observe the results. It is only Western culture that has ever been dominated—imperfectly, incompletely, precariously and at rare intervals—but still, dominated by reason. You may observe the results of that.

The conflict of reason versus mysticism is the issue of life or death—of freedom or slavery—of progress or stagnant brutality. Or, to put it another way, it is the conflict of consciousness versus unconsciousness.

Let us define our terms. What is reason? Reason is the faculty which perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. Reason integrates man’s perceptions by means of forming abstractions or conceptions, thus raising man’s knowledge from the perceptual level, which he shares with animals, to the conceptual level, which he alone can reach. The method which reason employs in this process is logic—and logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.

What is mysticism? Mysticism is the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one’s senses and one’s reason. Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge, such as “instinct,” “intuition,” “revelation,” or any form of “just knowing.”

Reason is the perception of reality, and rests on a single axiom: the Law of Identity.

Mysticism is the claim to the perception of some other reality—other than the one in which we live—whose definition is only that it is not natural, it is supernatural, and is to be perceived by some form of unnatural or supernatural means.

You realize, of course, that epistemology—the theory of knowledge—is the most complex branch of philosophy, which cannot be covered exhaustively in a single lecture. So I will not attempt to cover it. I will say only that those who wish a fuller discussion will find it in Atlas Shrugged. For the purposes of tonight’s discussion, the definitions I have given you contain the essence of the issue, regardless of whose theory, argument or philosophy you choose to accept.

I will repeat: Reason is the faculty which perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. Mysticism is the claim to a non-sensory means of knowledge.

In Western civilization, the period ruled by mysticism is known as the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages. I will assume that you know the nature of that period and the state of human existence in those ages. The Renaissance broke the rule of the mystics. “Renaissance” means “rebirth.” Few people today will care to remind you that it was a rebirth of reason—of man’s mind.

In the light of what followed—most particularly, in the light of the industrial revolution—nobody can now take faith, or religion, or revelation, or any form of mysticism as his basic and exclusive guide to existence, not in the way it was taken in the Middle Ages. This does not mean that the Renaissance has automatically converted everybody to rationality; far from it. It means only that so long as a single automobile, a single skyscraper or a single copy of Aristotle’s Logic remains in existence, nobody will be able to arouse men’s hope, eagerness and joyous enthusiasm by telling them to ditch their mind and rely on mystic faith. This is why I said that mysticism, as a cultural power, is dead. Observe that in the attempts at a mystic revival today, it is not an appeal to life, hope and joy that the mystics are making, but an appeal to fear, doom and despair. “Give up, your mind is impotent; life is only a foxhole,” is not a motto that can revive a culture.

Now, if you ask me to name the man most responsible for the present state of the world, the man whose influence has almost succeeded in destroying the achievements of the Renaissance—I will name Immanuel Kant. He was the philosopher who saved the morality of altruism, and who knew that what it had to be saved from was—reason.

This is not a mere hypothesis. It is a known historical fact that Kant’s interest and purpose in philosophy was to save the morality of altruism, which could not survive without a mystic base. His metaphysics and his epistemology were devised for that purpose. He did not, of course, announce himself as a mystic—few of them have, since the Renaissance. He announced himself as a champion of reason—of “pure” reason.

There are two ways to destroy the power of a concept: one, by an open attack in open discussion—the other, by subversion, from the inside; that is: by subverting the meaning of the concept, setting up a straw man and then refuting it. Kant did the second. He did not attack reason—he merely constructed such a version of what is reason that it made mysticism look like plain, rational common sense by comparison. He did not deny the validity of reason—he merely claimed that reason is “limited,” that it leads us to impossible contradictions, that everything we perceive is an illusion and that we can never perceive reality or “things as they are.” He claimed, in effect, that the things we perceive are not real, because we perceive them.

A “straw man” is an odd metaphor to apply to such an enormous, cumbersome, ponderous construction as Kant’s system of epistemology. Nevertheless, a straw man is what it was—and the doubts, the uncertainty, the skepticism that followed, skepticism about man’s ability ever to know anything, were not, in fact, applicable to human consciousness, because it was not a human consciousness that Kant’s robot represented. But philosophers accepted it as such. And while they cried that reason had been invalidated, they did not notice that reason had been pushed off the philosophical scene altogether and that the faculty they were arguing about was not reason.

No, Kant did not destroy reason; he merely did as thorough a job of undercutting as anyone could ever do.

If you trace the roots of all our current philosophies—such as Pragmatism, Logical Positivism, and all the rest of the neomystics who announce happily that you cannot prove that you exist—you will find that they all grew out of Kant.

As to Kant’s version of the altruist morality, he claimed that it was derived from “pure reason,” not from revelation—except that it rested on a special instinct for duty, a “categorical imperative” which one “just knows.” His version of morality makes the Christian one sound like a healthy, cheerful, benevolent code of selfishness. Christianity merely told man to love his neighbor as himself; that’s not exactly rational—but at least it does not forbid man to love himself. What Kant propounded was full, total, abject selflessness: he held that an action is moral only if you perform it out of a sense of duty and derive no benefit from it of any kind, neither material nor spiritual; if you derive any benefit, your action is not moral any longer. This is the ultimate form of demanding that man turn himself into a “shmoo”—the mystic little animal of the Li’l Abner comic strip, that went around seeking to be eaten by somebody.

It is Kant’s version of altruism that is generally accepted today, not practiced—who can practice it?—but guiltily accepted. It is Kant’s version of altruism that people, who have never heard of Kant, profess when they equate self-interest with evil. It is Kant’s version of altruism that’s working whenever people are afraid to admit the pursuit of any personal pleasure or gain or motive—whenever men are afraid to confess that they are seeking their own happiness—whenever businessmen are afraid to say that they are making profits—whenever the victims of an advancing dictatorship are afraid to assert their “selfish” rights.

The ultimate monument to Kant and to the whole altruist morality is Soviet Russia.

If you want to prove to yourself the power of ideas and, particularly, of morality—the intellectual history of the nineteenth century would be a good example to study. The greatest, unprecedented, un-dreamed of events and achievements were taking place before men’s eyes—but men did not see them and did not understand their meaning, as they do not understand it to this day. I am speaking of the industrial revolution, of the United States and of capitalism. For the first time in history, men gained control over physical nature and threw off the control of men over men—that is: men discovered science and political freedom. The creative energy, the abundance, the wealth, the rising standard of living for every level of the population were such that the nineteenth century looks like a fiction-Utopia, like a blinding burst of sunlight, in the drab progression of most of human history. If life on earth is one’s standard of value, then the nineteenth century moved mankind forward more than all the other centuries combined.

Did anyone appreciate it? Does anyone appreciate it now? Has anyone identified the causes of that historical miracle?

They did not and have not. What blinded them? The morality of altruism.

Let me explain this. There are, fundamentally, only two causes of the progress of the nineteenth century—the same two causes which you will find at the root of any happy, benevolent, progressive era in human history. One cause is psychological, the other existential—or: one pertains to man’s consciousness, the other to the physical conditions of his existence. The first is reason, the second is freedom. And when I say “freedom,” I do not mean poetic sloppiness, such as “freedom from want” or “freedom from fear” or “freedom from the necessity of earning a living.” I mean “freedom from compulson —freedom from rule by physical force.” Which means: political freedom.

These two—reason and freedom—are corollaries, and their relationship is reciprocal: when men are rational, freedom wins; when men are free, reason wins.

Their antagonists are: faith and force. These, also, are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tryanny. Look at the Middle Ages—and look at the political systems of today.

The nineteenth century was the ultimate product and expression of the intellectual trend of the Renaissance and the Age of Reason, which means: of a predominantly Aristotelian philosophy And, for the first time in history, it created a new economic system, the necessary corollary of political freedom, a system of free trade on a free market: capitalism.

No, it was not a full, perfect, unregulated, totally laissez-faire capitalism—as it should have been. Various degrees of government interference and control still remained, even in America—and this is what led to the eventual destruction of capitalism. But the extent to which certain countries were free was the exact extent of their economic progress. America, the freest, achieved the most.

Never mind the low wages and the harsh living conditions of the early years of capitalism. They were all that the national economies of the time could afford. Capitalism did not create poverty—it inherited it. Compared to the centuries of precapitalist starvation, the living conditions of the poor in the early years of capitalism were the first chance the poor had ever had to survive. As proof—the enormous growth of the European population during the nineteenth century, a growth of over 300 percent, as compared to the previous growth of something like 3 percent per century. [...]

I have said that faith and force are corollaries, and that mysticism will always lead to the rule of brutality. The cause of it is contained in the very nature of mysticism. Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion, communication or understanding are possible. Why do we kill wild animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is open to us. And that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind—a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence. And more: no man or mystical elite can hold a whole society subjugated to their arbitrary assertions, edicts and whims, without the use of force. Anyone who resorts to the formula: “It’s so, because I say so,” will have to reach for a gun, sooner or later. Communists, like all materialists, are neo-mystics: it does not matter whether one rejects the mind in favor of revelations or in favor of conditioned reflexes. The basic premise and the results are the same.

Such is the nature of the evil which modem intellectuals have helped to let loose in the world—and such is the nature of their guilt.

Now take a look at the state of the world. The signs and symptoms of the Dark Ages are rising again all over the earth. Slave labor, executions without trial, torture chambers, concentration camps, mass slaughter—all the things which the capitalism of the nineteenth century had abolished in the civilized world, are now brought back by the rule of the neo-mystics.

Look at the state of our intellectual life. In philosophy, the climax of the Kantian version of reason has brought us to the point where alleged philosophers, forgetting the existence of dictionaries and grammar primers, run around studying such questions as: “What do we mean when we say ‘The cat is on the mat’?”—while other philosophers proclaim that nouns are an illusion, but such terms as “if-then,” “but” and “or” have profound philosophical significance—while still others toy with the idea of an “index of prohibited words” and desire to place on it such words as—I quote—“entity—essence—mind—matter—reality—thing.”

In psychology, one school holds that man, by nature, is a helpless, guilt-ridden, instinct-driven automaton—while another school objects that this is not true, because there is no scientific evidence to prove that man is conscious.

In literature, man is presented as a mindless cripple, inhabiting garbage cans. In art, people announce that they do not paint objects, they paint emotions. In youth movements—if that’s what it can be called—young men attract attention by openly announcing that they are “beat.”

The spirit of it all, both the cause of it and the final climax, is contained in a quotation which I am going to read to you. I will preface it by saying that in Atlas Shrugged I stated that the world is being destroyed by mysticism and altruism, which are anti-man, anti-mind and anti-life. You have undoubtedly heard me being accused of exaggeration. I shall now read to you an excerpt from the paper of a professor, published by an alumni faculty seminar of a prominent university.

“Perhaps in the future reason will cease to be important. Perhaps for guidance in time of trouble, people will turn not to human thought, but to the human capacity for suffering. Not the universities with their thinkers, but the places and people in distress, the inmates of asylums and concentration camps, the helpless decision makers in bureaucracy and the helpless soldiers in foxholes—these will be the ones to lighten man’s way, to refashion his knowledge of disaster into something creative. We may be entering a new age. Our heroes may not be intellectual giants like Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein, but victims like Anne Frank, who will show us a greater miracle than thought. They will teach us how to endure—how to create good in the midst of evil and how to nurture love in the presence of death. Should this happen, however, the university will still have its place. Even the intellectual man can be an example of creative suffering.”

Observe that we are not to question “the helpless decision makers in bureaucracy”—we are not to discover that they are the cause of the concentration camps, of the foxholes and of victims like Anne Frank—we are not to help such victims, we are merely to feel suffering and to learn to suffer some more—we can’t help it, the helpless bureaucrats can’t help it, nobody can help it—the inmates of asylums will guide us, not intellectual giants—suffering is the supreme value, not reason.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is cultural bankruptcy.

Since “challenge” is your slogan, I will say that if you are looking for a challenge, you are facing the greatest one in history. A moral revolution is the most difficult, the most demanding, the most radical form of rebellion, but that is the task to be done today, if you choose to accept it. When I say “radical,” I mean it in its literal and reputable sense: fundamental. Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are winning only by default. But in order to fight them to the finish and with full rectitude, it is the altruist morality that you have to reject....

2. Mind and Body

Contrary to Plato and Kant, AR’s view of reason is emphatically not otherworldly. Her heroes are men of thought—and of action based on it. They are dryly logical—and intensely passionate; idealistic and practical. In short, they represent the harmony or integration of mind and body. This contradicts and nullifies the age-old belief in a soul-body dichotomy. It denies both “spiritualism” and “materialism.”

This excerpt, from the essay “For the New Intellectual,” identifies the influence of the mind-body dichotomy throughout history—and the rational alternative to such an approach. (Attila represents the materialist; the Witch Doctor, the spiritualist; the Producer, the union of mind and body.)

Attila and the Witch Doctor

... HISTORICALLY, THE professional intellectual is a very recent phenomenon: he dates only from the industrial revolution. There are no professional intellectuals in primitive, savage societies, there are only witch doctors. There were no professional intellectuals in the Middle Ages, there were only monks in monasteries. In the post-Renaissance era, prior to the birth of capitalism, the men of the intellect—the philosophers, the teachers, the writers, the early scientists—were men without a profession, that is: without a socially recognized position, without a market, without a means of earning a livelihood. Intellectual pursuits had to depend on the accident of inherited wealth or on the favor and financial support of some wealthy protector. And wealth was not earned on an open market, either; wealth was acquired by conquest, by force, by political power, or by the favor of those who held political power. Tradesmen were more vulnerably and precariously dependent on favor than the intellectuals.

The professional businessman and the professional intellectual came into existence together, as brothers born of the industrial revolution. Both are the sons of capitalism—and if they perish, they will perish together. The tragic irony will be that they will have destroyed each other; and the major share of the guilt will belong to the intellectual.

With very rare and brief exceptions, pre-capitalist societies had no place for the creative power of man’s mind, neither in the creation of ideas nor in the creation of wealth. Reason and its practical expression—free trade—were forbidden as a sin and a crime, or were tolerated, usually as ignoble activities, under the control of authorities who could revoke the tolerance at whim. Such societies were ruled by faith and its practical expression: force. There were no makers of knowledge and no makers of wealth; there were only witch doctors and tribal chiefs. These two figures dominate every anti-rational period of history, whether one calls them tribal chief and witch doctor—or absolute monarch and religious leader—or dictator and logical positivist.

“The tragic joke of human history”—I am quoting John Gait in Atlas Shrugged—“is that on any of the altars men erected, it was always man whom they immolated and the animal whom they enshrined. It was always the animal’s attributes, not man’s, that humanity worshipped: the idol of instinct and the idol of force—the mystics and the kings—the mystics, who longed for an irresponsible consciousness and ruled by means of the claim that their dark emotions were superior to reason, that knowledge came in blind, causeless fits, blindly to be followed, not doubted—and the kings, who ruled by means of claws and muscles, with conquest as their method and looting as their aim, with a club or a gun as sole sanction of their power. The defenders of man’s soul were concerned with his feelings, and the defenders of man’s body were concerned with his stomach—but both were united against his mind.”

These two figures—the man of faith and the man of force—are philosophical archetypes, psychological symbols and historical reality. As philosophical archetypes, they embody two variants of a certain view of man and of existence. As psychological symbols, they represent the basic motivation of a great many men who exist in any era, culture or society. As historical reality, they are the actual rulers of most of mankind’s societies, who rise to power whenever men abandon reason.

The essential characteristics of these two remain the same in all ages: Attila, the man who rules by brute force, acts on the range of the moment, is concerned with nothing but the physical reality immediately before him, respects nothing but man’s muscles, and regards a fist, a club or a gun as the only answer to any problem—and the Witch Doctor, the man who dreads physical reality, dreads the necessity of practical action, and escapes into his emotions, into visions of some mystic realm where his wishes enjoy a supernatural power unlimited by the absolute of nature.

Superficially, these two may appear to be opposites, but observe what they have in common: a consciousness held down to the perceptual method of functioning, an awareness that does not choose to extend beyond the automatic, the immediate, the given, the involuntary, which means: an animal’s “epistemology” or as near to it as a human consciousness can come.

Man’s consciousness shares with animals the first two stages of its development: sensations and perceptions; but it is the third state, conceptions, that makes him man. Sensations are integrated into perceptions automatically, by the brain of a man or of an animal. But to integrate perceptions into conceptions by a process of abstraction, is a feat that man alone has the power to perform—and he has to perform it by choice. The process of abstraction, and of concept-formation is a process of reason, of thought; it is not automatic nor instinctive nor involuntary nor infallible. Man has to initiate it, to sustain it and to bear responsibility for its results. The pre-conceptual level of consciousness is nonvolitional; volition begins with the first syllogism. Man has the choice to think or to evade—to maintain a state of full awareness or to drift from moment to moment, in a semiconscious daze, at the mercy of whatever associational whims the unfocused mechanism of his consciousness produces.

But the living organisms that possess the faculty of consciousness need to exercise it in order to survive. An animal’s consciousness functions automatically; an animal perceives what it is able to perceive and survives accordingly, no further than the perceptual level permits and no better. Man cannot survive on the perceptual level of his consciousness; his senses do not provide him with an automatic guidance, they do not give him the knowledge he needs, only the material of knowledge, which his mind has to integrate. Man is the only living species who has to perceive reality—which means: to be conscious —by choice. But he shares with other species the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. For an animal, the question of survival is primarily physical; for man, primarily epistemological.

Man’s unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself. If a drought strikes them, animals perish—man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish—man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them animals perish—man writes the Constitution of the United States. But one does not obtain food, safety or freedom—by instinct.

It is against this faculty, the faculty of reason, that Attila and the Witch Doctor rebel. The key to both their souls is their longing for the effortless, irresponsible, automatic consciousness of an animal. Both dread the necessity, the risk and the responsibility of rational cognition. Both dread the fact that “nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” Both seek to exist, not by conquering nature, but by adjusting to the given, the immediate, the known. There is only one means of survival for those who do not choose to conquer nature: to conquer those who do.

The physical conquest of men is Attila’s method of survival. He regards men as others regard fruit trees or farm animals: as objects in nature, his for the seizing. But while a good farmer knows, at least, that fruit trees and animals have a specific nature and require a specific kind of handling, the perceptual mentality of Attila does not extend to so abstract a level: men, to him, are a natural phenomenon and an irreducible primary, as all natural phenomena are irreducible primaries to an animal. Attila feels no need to understand, to explain, nor even to wonder, how men manage to produce the things he covets—“somehow” is a fully satisfactory answer inside his skull, which refuses to consider such questions as “how?” and “why?” or such concepts as identity and causality. All he needs, his “urges” tell him, is bigger muscles, bigger clubs or a bigger gang than theirs in order to seize their bodies and their products, after which their bodies will obey his commands and will provide him, somehow, with the satisfaction of any whim. He approaches men as a beast of prey, and the consequences of his actions or the possibility of exhausting his victims never enters his consciousness, which does not choose to extend beyond the given moment. His view of the universe does not include the power of production. The power of destruction, of brute force, is, to him, metaphysically omnipotent.

An Attila never thinks of creating, only of taking over. Whether he conquers a neighboring tribe or overruns a continent, material looting is his only goal and it ends with the act of seizure: he has no other purpose, no plan, no system to impose on the conquered, no values. His pleasures are closer to the level of sensations than of perceptions: food, drink, palatial shelter, rich clothing, indiscriminate sex, contests of physical prowess, gambling—all those activities which do not demand or involve the use of the conceptual level of consciousness. He does not originate his pleasures: he desires and pursues whatever those around him seem to find desirable. Even in the realm of desires, he does not create, he merely takes over.

But a human being cannot live his life moment by moment; a human consciousness preserves a certain continuity and demands a certain degree of integration, whether a man seeks it or not. A human being needs a frame of reference, a comprehensive view of existence, no matter how rudimentary, and, since his consciousness is volitional, a sense of being right, a moral justification of his actions, which means: a philosophical code of values. Who, then, provides Attila with values? The Witch Doctor.

If Attila’s method of survival is the conquest of those who conquer nature, the Witch Doctor’s method of survival is safer, he believes, and spares him the risks of physical conflict. His method is the conquest of those who conquer those who conquer nature. It is not men’s bodies that he seeks to rule, but men’s souls.

To Attila, as to an animal, the phenomena of nature are an irreducible primary. To the Witch Doctor, as to an animal, the irreducible primary is the automatic phenomena of his own consciousness.

An animal has no critical faculty; he has no control over the function of his brain and no power to question its content. To an animal, whatever strikes his awareness is an absolute that corresponds to reality—or rather, it is a distinction he is incapable of making: reality, to him, is whatever he senses or feels. And this is the Witch Doctor’s epistemological ideal, the mode of consciousness he strives to induce in himself. To the Witch Doctor, emotions are tools of cognition, and wishes take precedence over facts. He seeks to escape the risks of a quest for knowledge by obliterating the distinction between consciousness and reality, between the perceiver and the perceived, hoping that an automatic certainty and an infallible knowledge of the universe will be granted to him by the blind, unfocused stare of his eyes turned inward, contemplating the sensations, the feelings, the urgings, the muggy associational twistings projected by the rudderless mechanism of his undirected consciousness. Whatever his mechanism produces is an absolute not to be questioned; and whenever it clashes with reality, it is reality that he ignores.

Since the clash is constant, the Witch Doctor’s solution is to believe that what he perceives is another, “higher” reality—where his wishes are omnipotent, where contradictions are possible and A is non-A, where his assertions, which are false on earth, become true and acquire the status of a “superior” truth which he perceives by means of a special faculty denied to other, “inferior,” beings. The only validation of his consciousness he can obtain on earth is the belief and the obedience of others, when they accept his “truth” as superior to their own perception of reality. While Attila extorts their obedience by means of a club, the Witch Doctor obtains it by means of a much more powerful weapon: he pre-empts the field of morality.

There is no way to turn morality into a weapon of enslavement except by divorcing it from man’s reason and from the goals of his own existence. There is no way to degrade man’s life on earth except by the lethal opposition of the moral and the practical. Morality is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions; when it is set to oppose his own life and mind, it makes him turn against himself and blindly act as the tool of his own destruction. There is no way to make a human being accept the role of a sacrificial animal except by destroying his self-esteem. There is no way to destroy his self-esteem except by making him reject his own consciousness. There is no way to make him reject his own consciousness except by convincing him of its impotence.

The damnation of this earth as a realm where nothing is possible to man but pain, disaster and defeat, a realm inferior to another, “higher,” reality; the damnation of all values, enjoyment, achievement and success on earth as a proof of depravity; the damnation of man’s mind as a source of pride, and the damnation of reason as a “limited,” deceptive, unreliable, impotent faculty, incapable of perceiving the “real” reality and the “true” truth; the split of man in two, setting his consciousness (his soul) against his body, and his moral values against his own interest; the damnation of man’s nature, body and self as evil; the commandment of self-sacrifice, renunciation, suffering, obedience, humility and faith, as the good; the damnation of life and the worship of death, with the promise of rewards beyond the grave—these are the necessary tenets of the Witch Doctor’s view of existence, as they have been in every variant of Witch Doctor philosophy throughout the course of mankind’s history.

The secret of the Witch Doctor’s power lies in the fact that man needs an integrated view of life, a philosophy, whether he is aware of his need or not—and whenever, through ignorance, cowardice or mental sloth, men choose not to be aware of it, their chronic sense of guilt, uncertainty and terror makes them feel that the Witch Doctor’s philosophy is true.

The first to feel it is Attila.

The man who lives by brute force, at the whim and mercy of the moment, lives on a narrow island suspended in a fog of the unknown, where invisible threats and unpredictable disasters can descend upon him any morning. He is willing to surrender his consciousness to the man who offers him protection against those intangible questions which he does not wish to consider, yet dreads.

Attila’s fear of reality is as great as the Witch Doctor’s. Both hold their consciousness on a subhuman level and method of functioning: Attila’s brain is a jumble of concretes unintegrated by abstractions; the Witch Doctor’s brain is a miasma of floating abstractions unrelated to concretes. Both are guided and motivated—ultimately—not by thoughts, but by feelings and whims. Both cling to their whims as to their only certainty. Both feel secretly inadequate to the task of dealing with existence.

Thus they come to need each other. Attila feels that the Witch Doctor can give him what he lacks: a long-range view, an insurance against the dark unknown of tomorrow or next week or next year, a code of moral values to sanction his actions and to disarm his victims. The Witch Doctor feels that Attila can give him the material means of survival, can protect him from physical reality, can spare him the necessity of practical action, and can enforce his mystic edicts on any recalcitrant who may choose to challenge his authority. Both of them are incomplete parts of a human being, who seek completion in each other: the man of muscle and the man of feelings, seeking to exist without mind.

Since no man can fully escape the conceptual level of consciousness, it is not the case that Attila and the Witch Doctor cannot or do not think; they can and do—but thinking, to them, is not a means of perceiving reality, it is a means of justifying their escape from the necessity of rational perception. Reason, to them, is a means of defeating their victims, a menial servant charged with the task of rationalizing the metaphysical validity and power of their whims. Just as a bank robber will spend years of planning, ingenuity and effort in order to prove to himself that he can exist without effort, so both Attila and the Witch Doctor will go to any length of cunning, calculation and thought in order to demonstrate the impotence of thought and preserve the image of a pliable universe where miracles are possible and whims are efficacious. The power of ideas has no reality for either of them, and neither cares to learn that the proof of that power lies in his own chronic sense of guilt and terror.

Thus Attila and the Witch Doctor form an alliance and divide their respective domains. Attila rules the realm of men’s physical existence—the Witch Doctor rules the realm of men’s consciousness. Attila herds men into armies—the Witch Doctor sets the armies’ goals. Attila conquers empires—the Witch Doctor writes their laws. Attila loots and plunders—the Witch Doctor exhorts the victims to surpass their selfish concern with material property. Attila slaughters—the Witch Doctor proclaims to the survivors that scourges are a retribution for their sins. Attila rules by means of fear, by keeping men under a constant threat of destruction—the Witch Doctor rules by means of guilt, by keeping men convinced of their innate depravity, impotence and insignificance. Attila turns men’s life on earth into a living hell—the Witch Doctor tells them that it could not be otherwise.

But the alliance of the two rulers is precarious: it is based on mutual fear and mutual contempt. Attila is an extrovert, resentful of any concern with consciousness—the Witch Doctor is an introvert, resentful of any concern with physical existence. Attila professes scorn for values, ideals, principles, theories, abstractions—the Witch Doctor professes scorn for material property, for wealth, for man’s body, for this earth. Attila considers the Witch Doctor impractical—the Witch Doctor considers Attila immoral. But, secretly, each of them believes that the other possesses a mysterious faculty he lacks, that the other is the true master of reality, the true exponent of the power to deal with existence. In terms, not of thought, but of chronic anxiety, it is the Witch Doctor who believes that brute force rules the world—and it is Attila who believes in the supernatural; his name for it is “fate” or “luck.”

Against whom is this alliance formed? Against those men whose existence and character both Attila and the Witch Doctor refuse to admit into their view of the universe: the men who produce. In any age or society, there are men who think and work, who discover how to deal with existence, how to produce the intellectual and the material values it requires. These are the men whose effort is the only means of survival for the parasites of all varieties: the Attilas, the Witch Doctors and the human ballast. The ballast consists of those who go through life in a state of unfocused stupor, merely repeating the words and the motions they learned from others. But the men from whom they learn, the men who are first to discover any scrap of new knowledge, are the men who deal with reality, with the task of conquering nature, and who, to that extent, assume the responsibility of cognition: of exercising their rational faculty.

A producer is any man who works and knows what he is doing. He may function on a fully human, conceptual level of awareness only some part of his time, but, to that extent, he is the Atlas who supports the existence of mankind; he may spend the rest of his time in an unthinking daze, like the others, and, to that extent, he is the exploited, drained, tortured, self-destroying victim of their schemes.

Men’s epistemology—or, more precisely, their psycho-epistemology, their method of awareness—is the most fundamental standard by which they can be classified. Few men are consistent in that respect; most men keep switching from one level of awareness to another, according to the circumstances or the issues involved, ranging from moments of full rationality to an almost somnambulistic stupor. But the battle of human history is fought and determined by those who are predominantly consistent, those who, for good or evil, are committed to and motivated by their chosen psycho-epistemology and its corollary view of existence—with echoes responding to them, in support or opposition, in the switching, flickering souls of the others.

A man’s method of using his consciousness determines his method of survival. The three contestants are Attila, the Witch Doctor and the Producer—or the man of force, the man of feelings, the man of reason—or the brute, the mystic, the thinker. The rest of mankind calls it expedient to be tossed by the current of events from one of those roles to another, not choosing to identify the fact that those three are the source which determines the current’s direction.

The producers, so far, have been the forgotten men of history. With the exception of a few brief periods, the producers have not been the leaders or the term-setters of men’s societies, although the degree of their influence and freedom was the degree of a society’s welfare and progress. Most societies have been ruled by Attila and the Witch Doctor. The cause is not some innate tendency to evil in human nature, but the fact that reason is a volitional faculty which man has to choose to discover, employ and preserve. Irrationality is a state of default, the state of an unachieved human stature. When men do not choose to reach the conceptual level, their consciousness has no recourse but to its automatic, perceptual, semi-animal functions. If a missing link between the human and the animal species is to be found, Attila and the Witch Doctor are that missing link—the profiteers on men’s default. [. . .]

The victim of the [nineteenth-century] intellectuals’ most infamous injustice was the businessman.

Having accepted the premises, the moral values and the position of Witch Doctors, the intellectuals were unwilling to differentiate between the businessman and Attila, between the producer of wealth and the looter. Like the Witch Doctor, they scorned and dreaded the realm of material reality, feeling secretly inadequate to deal with it. Like the Witch Doctor’s, their secret vision (almost their feared and envied ideal) of a practical, successful man, a true master of reality, was Attila; like the Witch Doctor, they believed that force, fraud, lies, plunder, expropriation, enslavement, murder were practical. So they did not inquire into the source of wealth or ever ask what made it possible (they had been taught that causality is an illusion and that only the immediate moment is real). They took it as their axiom, as an irreducible primary, that wealth can be acquired only by force—and that a fortune as such is the proof of plunder, with no further distinctions or inquiries necessary.

With their eyes still fixed on the Middle Ages, they were maintaining this in the midst of a period when a greater amount of wealth than had ever before existed in the world was being brought into existence all around them. If the men who produced that wealth were thieves, from whom had they stolen it? Under all the shameful twists of their evasions, the intellectuals’ answer was: from those who had not produced it. They were refusing to acknowledge the industrial revolution (they are still refusing today). They were refusing to admit into their universe what neither Attila nor the Witch Doctor can afford to admit: the existence of man, the Producer.

Evading the difference between production and looting, they called the businessman a robber. Evading the difference between freedom and compulsion, they called him a slave driver. Evading the difference between reward and terror, they called him an exploiter. Evading the difference between pay checks and guns, they called him an autocrat. Evading the difference between trade and force, they called him a tyrant. The most crucial issue they had to evade was the difference between the earned and the unearned.

Ignoring the existence of the faculty they were betraying, the faculty of discrimination, the intellect, they refused to identify the fact that industrial wealth was the product of man’s mind: that an incalculable amount of intellectual power, of creative intelligence, of disciplined energy, of human genius had gone into the creation of industrial fortunes. They could not afford to identify it, because they could not afford to admit the fact that the intellect is a practical faculty, a guide to man’s successful existence on earth, and that its task is the study of reality (as well as the production of wealth), not the contemplation of unintelligible feelings nor a special monopoly on the “unknowable.”

The Witch Doctor’s morality of altruism—the morality that damns all those who achieve success or enjoyment on earth—provided the intellectuals with the means to make a virtue of evasion. It gave them a weapon that disarmed their victims; it gave them an automatic substitute for self-esteem, and a chance at an unearned moral stature. They proclaimed themselves to be the defenders of the poor against the rich, righteously evading the fact that the rich were not Attilas any longer—and the defenders of the weak against the strong, righteously evading the fact that the strength involved was not the strength of brute muscles any longer, but the strength of man’s mind.

But while the intellectuals regarded the businessman as Attila, the businessman would not behave as they, from the position of Witch Doctors, expected Attila to behave: he was impervious to their power. The businessman was as bewildered by events as the rest of mankind, he had no time to grasp his own historical role, he had no moral weapons, no voice, no defense, and—knowing no morality but the altruist code, yet knowing also that he was functioning against it, that self-sacrifice was not his role—he was helplessly vulnerable to the intellectuals’ attack. He would have welcomed eagerly the guidance of Aristotle, but had no use for Immanuel Kant. That which today is called “common sense” is the remnant of an Aristotelian influence, and that was the businessman’s only form of philosophy. The businessman asked for proof and expected things to make sense—an expectation that kicked the intellectuals into the category of the unemployed. They had nothing to offer to a man who did not buy any shares of any version of the “noumenal” world.

To understand the course the intellectuals chose to take, it is important to remember the Witch Doctor’s psycho-epistemology and his relationship to Attila: the Witch Doctor expects Attila to be his protector against reality, against the necessity of rational cognition, and, at the same time, he expects to rule his own protector, who needs an unintelligible mystic sanction as a narcotic to relieve his chronic guilt. They derive their mutual security, not from any form of strength, but from the fact that each has a hold on the other’s secret weakness. It is not the security of two traders, who count on the values they offer each other, but the security of two blackmailers, who count on each other’s fear.

The Witch Doctor feels like a metaphysical outcast in a capitalist society—as if he were pushed into some limbo outside of any universe he cares to recognize. He has no means to deal with innocence; he can get no hold on a man who does not seek to live in guilt, on a businessman who is confident of his ability to earn his living—who takes pride in his work and in the value of his product—who drives himself with inexhaustible energy and limitless ambition to do better and still better and ever better—who is willing to bear penalties for his mistakes and expects rewards for his achievements—who looks at the universe with the fearless eagerness of a child, knowing it to be intelligible—who demands straight lines, clear terms, precise definitions—who stands in full sunlight and has no use for the murky fog of the hidden, the secret, the unnamed, the furtively evocative, for any code of signals from the psycho-epistemology of guilt.

What the businessman offered to the intellectuals was the spiritual counterpart of his own activity, that which the Witch Doctor dreads most: the freedom of the market place of ideas.

To live by the work of one’s mind, to offer men the products of one’s thinking, to provide them with new knowledge, to stand on nothing but the merit of one’s ideas and to rely on nothing but objective truth, in a market open to any man who is willing to think and has to judge, accept or reject on his own—is a task that only a man on the conceptual level of psycho-epistemology can welcome or fulfill. It is not the place for a Witch Doctor nor for any mystic “elite.”

A Witch Doctor has to live by the favor of a protector, by a special dispensation, by a reserved monopoly, by exclusion, by suppression, by censorship.

Having accepted the philosophy and the psycho-epistemology of the Witch Doctor, the intellectuals had to cut the ground from under their own feet and turn against their own historical distinction: against the first chance men had ever had to make a professional living by means of the intellect. When the intellectuals rebelled against the “commercialism” of a capitalist society, what they were specifically rebelling against was the open market of ideas, where feelings were not accepted and ideas were expected to demonstrate their validity, where the risks were great, injustices were possible and no protector existed but objective reality.

Just as Attila, since the Renaissance, was looking for a Witch Doctor of his own, so the intellectuals, since the industrial revolution, were looking for an Attila of their own. The altruist morality brought them together and gave them the weapon they needed. The field where they found each other was Socialism.

It was not the businessmen or the industrialists or the workers or the labor unions or the remnants of the feudal aristocracy that began the revolt against freedom and the demand for the return of the absolute state: it was the intellectuals. It was the alleged guardians of reason who brought mankind back to the rule of brute force.

Growing throughout the nineteenth century, originated in and directed from intellectual salons, sidewalk cafés, basement beer joints and university classrooms, the industrial counter-revolution united the Witch Doctors and the Attila-ists. They demanded the right to enforce ideas at the point of a gun, that is: through the power of government, and compel the submission of others to the views and wishes of those who would gain control of the government’s machinery. They extolled the State as the “Form of the Good,” with man as its abject servant, and they proposed as many variants of the socialist state as there had been of the altruist morality. But, in both cases, the variations merely played with the surface, while the cannibal essence remained the same: socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.

It is only the Attila-ist, pragmatist, positivist, anti-conceptual mentality—which grants no validity to abstractions, no meaning to principles and no power to ideas—that can still wonder why a theoretical doctrine of that kind had to lead in practice to the torrent of blood and brute, non-human horror of such socialist societies as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Only the Attila-ist mentality can still claim that nobody can prove that these had to be the necessary results—or still try to blame it on the “imperfection” of human nature or on the evil of some specific gang who “betrayed a noble ideal,” and still promise that its own gang would do it better and make it work—or still mumble in a quavering voice that the motive was love of humanity.

The pretenses have worn thin, the evasions do not work any longer; the intellectuals are aware of their guilt, but are still struggling to evade its cause and to pass it on to the universe at large, to man’s metaphysically predestined impotence.

Guilt and fear are the disintegrators of a man’s consciousness or of a society’s culture. Today, America’s culture is being splintered into disintegration by the three injunctions which permeate our intellectual atmosphere and which are typical of guilt: don’t look—don’t judge—don’t be certain.

The psycho-epistemological meaning and implementation of these three are: don’t integrate—don’t evaluate—give up.

The last stand of Attila-ism, both in philosophy and in science, is the concerted assertion of all the neo-mystics that integration is impossible and unscientific. The escape from the conceptual level of consciousness, the progressive contraction of man’s vision down to Attila’s range, has now reached its ultimate climax. Withdrawing from reality and responsibility, the neo-mystics proclaim that no entities exist, only relationships, and that one may study relationships without anything to relate, and, simultaneously, that every datum is single and discrete, and no datum can ever be related to any other data—that context is irrelevant, that anything may be proved or disproved in midair and midstream, and the narrower the subject of study, the better—that myopia is the hallmark of a thinker or a scientist.

System-building-the integration of knowledge into a coherent sum and a consistent view of reality—is denounced by all the Attila-ists as irrational, mystical and unscientific. This is Attila’s perennial way of surrendering to the Witch Doctor—and it explains why so many scientists are turning to God or to such flights of mysticism of their own as would make even an old-fashioned Witch Doctor blush. No consciousness can accept disintegration as a normal and permanent state. Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical (particularly epistemological) base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go.

The abdication of philosophy is all but complete. Today’s philosophers, qua Witch Doctors, declare that nobody can define what is philosophy or what is its specific task, but this need not prevent anyone from practicing it as a profession. Qua Attila-ists, they declare that the use of wide abstractions or concepts is the prerogative of the layman or of the ignorant or of the man in the street—white a philosopher is one who, knowing all the difficulties involved in the problem of abstractions, deals with nothing but concretes.

The injunction “don’t judge” is the ultimate climax of the altruist morality which, today, can be seen in its naked essence. When men plead for forgiveness, for the nameless, cosmic forgiveness of an unconfessed evil, when they react with instantaneous compassion to any guilt, to the perpetrators of any atrocity, while turning away indifferently from the bleeding bodies of the victims and the innocent—one may see the actual purpose, motive and psychological appeal of the altruist code. When these same compassionate men turn with snarling hatred upon anyone who pronounces moral judgments, when they scream that the only evil is the determination to fight against evil—one may see the kind of moral blank check that the altruist morality hands out.

Perhaps the most craven attitude of all is the one expressed by the injunction “don’t be certain.” As stated explicitly by many intellectuals, it is the suggestion that if nobody is certain of anything, if nobody holds any firm convictions, if everybody is willing to give in to everybody else, no dictator will rise among us and we will escape the destruction sweeping the rest of the world. This is the secret voice of the Witch Doctor confessing that he sees a dictator, an Attila, as a man of confident strength and uncompromising conviction. Nothing but a psycho-epistemological panic can blind such intellectuals to the fact that a dictator, like any thug, runs from the first sign of confident resistance; that he can rise only in a society of precisely such uncertain, compliant, shaking compromisers as they advocate, a society that invites a thug to take over; and that the task of resisting an Attila can be accomplished only by men of intransigent conviction and moral certainty—not by chickens hiding their heads in the sand (“ostrich” is too big and dignified a metaphor for this instance).

And, paving the way for Attila, the intellectuals are still repeating, not by conviction any longer, but by rote, that the growth of government power is not an abridgment of freedom—that the demand of one group for an unearned share of another group’s income is not socialism—that the destruction of property rights will not affect any other rights—that man’s mind, intelligence, creative ability are a “national resource” (like mines, forests, waterfalls, buffalo reserves and national parks) to be taken over, subsidized and disposed of by the government—that businessmen are selfish autocrats because they are struggling to preserve freedom, while the “liberals” are the true champions of liberty because they are fighting for more government controls—that the fact that we are sliding down a road which has destroyed every other country, does not prove that it will destroy ours—that dictatorship is not dictatorship if nobody calls it by that abstract name—and that none of us can help it, anyway.

Nobody believes any of it any longer, yet nobody opposes it. To oppose anything, one needs a firm set of principles, which means: a philosophy.

If America perishes, it will perish by intellectual default. There is no diabolical conspiracy to destroy it: no conspiracy could be big enough and strong enough. Such cafeteria-socialist conspiracies as do undoubtedly exist are groups of scared, neurotic mediocrities who find themselves pushed into national leadership because nobody else steps forward; they are like pickpockets who merely intended to snatch a welfare-regulation or two and who suddenly find that their victim is unconscious, that they are alone in an enormous mansion of fabulous wealth, with all the doors open and a seasoned burglar’s job on their hands; watch them now screaming that they didn’t mean it, that they had never advocated the nationalization of a country’s economy. As to the communist conspirators in the service of Soviet Russia, they are the best illustration of victory by default: their successes are handed to them by the concessions of their victims. There is no national movement for socialism or dictatorship in America, no “man on horseback” or popular demagogue, nothing but fumbling compromisers and frightened opportunists. Yet we are moving toward full, totalitarian socialism, with worn, cynical voices telling us that such is the irresistible trend of history. History, fate and malevolent conspiracy are easier to believe than the actual truth: that we are moved by nothing but the sluggish inertia of unfocused minds. [...]

The New Intellectual will be the man who lives up to the exact meaning of his title: a man who is guided by his intellect—not a zombie guided by feelings, instincts, urges, wishes, whims or revelations. Ending the rule of Attila and the Witch Doctor, he will discard the basic premise that made them possible: the soul-body dichotomy. He will discard its irrational conflicts and contradictions, such as: mind versus heart, thought versus action, reality versus desire, the practical versus the moral. He will be an integrated man, that is: a thinker who is a man of action. He will know that ideas divorced from consequent action are fraudulent, and that action divorced from ideas is suicidal. He will know that the conceptual level of psycho-epistemology—the volitional level of reason and thought—is the basic necessity of man’s survival and his greatest moral virtue. He will know that men need philosophy for the purpose of living on earth.

The New Intellectual will be a reunion of the twins who should never have been separated: the intellectual and the businessman. He can come from among the best—that is: the most rational—men who may still exist in both camps. In place of an involuntary Witch Doctor and a reluctant Attila, the reunion will produce two new types: the practical thinker and the philosophical businessman....

EDITOR’S NOTE: A brief statement in Atlas Shrugged, by Francisco d’Anconia to Hank Rearden, indicates how one’s view of the mind-body relationship applies to one’s view of sex.

The Meaning of Sex

... “DO YOU remember what I said about money and about the men who seek to reverse the law of cause and effect? The men who try to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind? Well, the man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures—which can’t be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man’s sense of his own value.” [. . .]

The men who think that wealth comes from material resources and has no intellectual root or meaning, are the men who think—for the same reason—that sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of one’s mind, choice or code of values. They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you—just about in some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails of its own volition. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he’s taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment—just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity!—an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience—or to fake—a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer—because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut. [. . .]

But the man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises—because she will reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective reality in which he is a fraud, she will give him a momentary illusion of his own value and a momentary escape from the moral code that damns him. Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives—and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy. One proceeds from the other. Love is our response to our highest values—and can be nothing else. Let a man corrupt his values and his view of existence, let him profess that love is not self-enjoyment but self-denial, that virtue consists, not of pride, but of pity or pain or weakness or sacrifice, that the noblest love is born , not of admiration, but of charity, not in response to values, but in response to flaws—and he will have cut himself in two. His body will not obey him, it will not respond, it will make him impotent toward the woman he professes to love and draw him to the lowest type of whore he can find. His body will always follow the ultimate logic of his deepest convictions; if he believes that flaws are values, he has damned existence as evil and only the evil will attract him. He has damned himself and he will feel that depravity is all he is worthy of enjoying. He has equated virtue with pain and he will feel that vice is the only realm of pleasure. Then he will scream that his body has vicious desires of its own which his mind cannot conquer, that sex is sin, that true love is a pure emotion of the spirit. And then he will wonder why love brings him nothing but boredom, and sex—nothing but shame. [...]

[Y]ou’d never accept any part of their vicious creed. You wouldn’t be able to force it upon yourself. If you tried to damn sex as evil, you’d still find yourself, against your will, acting on the proper moral premise. You’d be attracted to the highest woman you met. You’d always want a heroine. You’d be incapable of self-contempt. You’d be unable to believe that existence is evil and that you’re a helpless creature caught in an impossible universe. You’re the man who’s spent his life shaping matter to the purpose of his mind. You’re the man who would know that just as an idea unexpressed in physical action is contemptible hypocrisy, so is platonic love—and just as physical action unguided by an idea is a fool’s self-fraud, so is sex when cut off from one’s code of values. It’s the same issue, and you would know it. Your inviolate sense of self-esteem would know it. You would be incapable of desire for a woman you despised. Only the man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love. But observe that most people are creatures cut in half who keep swinging desperately to one side or to the other. One kind of half is the man who despises money, factories, skyscrapers and his own body. He holds undefined emotions about non-conceivable subjects as the meaning of life and as his claim to virtue. And he cries with despair, because he can feel nothing for the woman he respects, but finds himself in bondage to an irresistible passion for a slut from the gutter. He is the man whom people call an idealist. The other kind of half is the man whom people call practical, the man who despises principles, abstractions, art, philosophy and his own mind. He regards the acquisition of material objects as the only goal of existence—and he laughs at the need to consider their purpose or their source. He expects them to give him pleasure—and he wonders why the more he gets, the less he feels. He is the man who spends his time chasing women. Observe the triple fraud which he perpetrates upon himself. He will not acknowledge his need of self-esteem, since he scoffs at such a concept as moral values; yet he feels the profound self-contempt which comes from believing that he is a piece of meat. He will not acknowledge, but he knows that sex is the physical expression of a tribute to personal values. So he tries, by going through the motions of the effect, to acquire that which should have been the cause. He tries to gain a sense of his own value from the women who surrender to him—and he forgets that the women he picks have neither character nor judgment nor standard of value. He tells himself that all he’s after is physical pleasure—but observe that he tires of his women in a week or a night, that he despises professional whores and that he loves to imagine he is seducing virtuous girls who make a great exception for his sake. It is the feeling of achievement that he seeks and never finds. What glory can there be in the conquest of a mindless body? . . .

EDITOR’S NOTE: A speech given by AR in the late 1960s, “Of Living Death” (published in The Voice of Reason), identifies the connection between the Catholic Church’s basic philosophy and its view of sex.

Of Living Death

THOSE WHO wish to observe the role of philosophy in human existence may see it dramatized on a grand (and gruesome) scale in the conflict splitting the Catholic church today.

Observe, in that conflict, men’s fear of identifying or challenging philosophical fundamentals: both sides are willing to fight in silent confusion, to stake their beliefs, their careers, their reputations on the outcome of a battle over the effects of an unnamed cause. One side is composed predominantly of men who dare not name the cause; the other, of men who dare not discover it.

Both sides claim to be puzzled and disappointed by what they regard as a contradiction in the two recent encyclicals of Pope Paul VI. The so-called conservatives (speaking in religious, not political, terms) were dismayed by the encyclical Populorum Progressio (On the Development of Peoples)—which advocated global statism—while the so-called liberals hailed it as a progressive document. Now the conservatives are hailing the encyclical Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life)—which forbids the use of contraceptives—while the liberals are dismayed by it. Both sides seem to find the two documents inconsistent. But the inconsistency is theirs, not the pontiff’s. The two encyclicals are strictly, flawlessly consistent in respect to their basic philosophy and ultimate goal: both come from the same view of man’s nature and are aimed at establishing the same conditions for his life on earth. The first of these two encyclicals forbade ambition, the second forbids enjoyment; the first enslaved man to the physical needs of others, the second enslaves him to the physical capacities of his own body; the first damned achievement, the second damns love.

The doctrine that man’s sexual capacity belongs to a lower or animal part of his nature has had a long history in the Catholic church. It is the necessary consequence of the doctrine that man is not an integrated entity, but a being torn apart by two opposite, antagonistic, irreconcilable elements: his body, which is of this earth, and his soul, which is of another, supernatural realm. According to that doctrine, man’s sexual capacity—regardless of how it is exercised or motivated, not merely its abuses, not unfastidious indulgence or promiscuity, but the capacity as such—is sinful or depraved.

For centuries, the dominant teaching of the church held that sexuality is evil, that only the need to avoid the extinction of the human species grants sex the status of a necessary evil and, therefore, only procreation can redeem or excuse it. In modern times, many Catholic writers have denied that such is the church’s view. But what is its view? They did not answer.

Let us see if we can find the answer in the encyclical Humanae Vitae.

Dealing with the subject of birth control, the encyclical prohibits all forms of contraception (except the so-called “rhythm method”). The prohibition is total, rigid, unequivocal. It is enunciated as a moral absolute.

Bear in mind what this subject entails. Try to hold an image of horror spread across space and time—across the entire globe and through all the centuries—the image of parents chained, like beasts of burden, to the physical needs of a growing brood of children—young parents aging prematurely while fighting a losing battle against starvation—the skeletal hordes of unwanted children born without a chance to live—the unwed mothers slaughtered in the unsanitary dens of incompetent abortionists—the silent terror hanging, for every couple, over every moment of love. If one holds this image while hearing that this nightmare is not to be stopped, the first question one will ask is: Why? In the name of humanity, one will assume that some inconceivable, but crucially important reason must motivate any human being who would seek to let that carnage go on uncontested.

So the first thing one will look for in the encyclical, is that reason, an answer to that Why?

“The problem of birth,” the encyclical declares, “like every other problem regarding human life, is to be considered ... in the light of an integral vision of man and of his vocation, not only his natural and earthly, but also his supernatural and eternal, vocation.” [Paragraph 7]

And:

A reciprocal act of love, which jeopardizes the responsibility to transmit life which God the Creator, according to particular laws, inserted therein, is in contradiction with the design constitutive of marriage, and with the will of the author of life. To use this divine gift, destroying, even if only partially, its meaning and its purpose, is to contradict the nature both of man and of woman and of their most intimate relationship, and therefore it is to contradict also the plan of God and His will. [13]

And this is all. In the entire encyclical, this is the only reason given (but repeated over and over again) why men should transform their highest experience of happiness—their love—into a source of lifelong agony. Do so—the encyclical commands—because it is God’s will.

I, who do not believe in God, wonder why those who do would ascribe to him such a sadistic design, when God is supposed to be the archetype of mercy, kindness, and benevolence. What earthly goal is served by that doctrine? The answer runs like a hidden thread through the encyclical’s labyrinthian convolutions, repetitions, and exhortations.

In the darker corners of that labyrinth, one finds some snatches of argument, in alleged support of the mystic axiom, but these arguments are embarrassingly transparent equivocations. For instance:

... to make use of the gift of conjugal love while respecting the laws of the generative process means to acknowledge oneself not to be the arbiter of the sources of human life, but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator. In fact, just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, with particular reason, he has no such dominion over his creative faculties as such, because of their intrinsic ordination toward raising up life, of which God is the principle. [13]

What is meant here by the words “man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general”? The obvious meaning is that man cannot change the metaphysical nature of his body; which is true. But man has the power of choice in regard to the actions of his body—specifically, in regard to “his creative faculties,” and the responsibility for the use of these particular faculties is most crucially his. “To acknowledge oneself not to be the arbiter of the sources of human life” is to evade and to default on that responsibility. Here again, the same equivocation or package deal is involved. Does man have the power to determine the nature of his procreative faculty? No. But granted that nature, is he the arbiter of bringing a new human life into existence? He most certainly is, and he (with his mate) is the sole arbiter of that decision—and the consequences of that decision affect and determine the entire course of his life.

This is a clue to that paragraph’s intention: if man believed that so crucial a choice as procreation is not in his control, what would it do to his control over his life, his goals, his future?

The passive obedience and helpless surrender to the physical functions of one’s body, the necessity to let procreation be the inevitable result of the sexual act, is the natural fate of animals, not of men. In spite of its concern with man’s higher aspirations, with his soul, with the sanctity of married love—it is to the level of animals that the encyclical seeks to reduce man’s sex life, in fact, in reality, on earth. What does this indicate about the encyclical’s view of sex?

Anticipating certain obvious objections, the encyclical declares:

Now, some may ask: In the present case, is it not reasonable in many circumstances to have recourse to artificial birth control if, thereby, we secure the harmony and peace of the family, and better conditions for the education of children already born? To this question it is necessary to reply with clarity: The church is the first to praise and recommend the intervention of intelligence in a function which so closely associates the rational creature with his Creator; but she affirms that this must be one with respect for the order established by God. [16]

To what does this subordinate man’s intelligence? If intelligence is forbidden to consider the fundamental problems of man’s existence, forbidden to alleviate his suffering, what does this indicate about the encyclical’s view of man—and of reason?

History can answer this particular question. History has seen a period of approximately ten centuries, known as the Dark and Middle Ages, when philosophy was regarded as “the handmaiden of theology,” and reason as the humble subordinate of faith. The results speak for themselves.

It must not be forgotten that the Catholic church has fought the advance of science since the Renaissance: from Galileo’s astronomy, to the dissection of corpses, which was the start of modern medicine, to the discovery of anesthesia in the nineteenth century, the greatest single discovery in respect to the incalculable amount of terrible suffering it has spared mankind. The Catholic church has fought medical progress by means of the same argument: that the application of knowledge to the relief of human suffering is an attempt to contradict God’s design. Specifically in regard to anesthesia during childbirth, the argument claimed that since God intended woman to suffer while giving birth, man has no right to intervene. (!)

The encyclical does not recommend unlimited procreation. It does not object to all means of birth control—only to those it calls “artificial” (i.e., scientific). It does not object to man “contradicting God’s will” nor to man being “the arbiter of the sources of human life,” provided he uses the means it endorses: abstinence.

Discussing the issue of “responsible parenthood,” the encyclical states: “In relation to physical, economic, psychological and social conditions, responsible parenthood is exercised, either by the deliberate and generous decision to raise a numerous family, or by the decision, made for grave motives and with due respect for the moral law, to avoid for the time being, or even for an indeterminate period, a new birth.” [10] To avoid—by what means? By abstaining from sexual intercourse.

The lines preceding that passage are: “In relation to the tendencies of instinct or passion, responsible parenthood means the necessary dominion which reason and will must exercise over them.” [10] How a man is to force his reason to obey an irrational injunction and what it would do to him psychologically, is not mentioned.

Further on, under the heading “Mastery of Self,” the encyclical declares:

To dominate instinct by means of one’s reason and free will undoubtedly requires ascetic practices.... Yet this discipline which is proper to the purity of married couples, far from harming conjugal love, rather confers on it a higher human value. It demands continual effort yet, thanks to its beneficent influence, husband and wife fully develop their personalities, being enriched with spiritual values. . . . Such discipline . . . helps both parties to drive out selfishness, the enemy of true love; and deepens their sense of responsibility. [21]

If you can bear that style of expression being used to discuss such matters—which I find close to unbearable—and if you focus on the meaning, you will observe that the “discipline,” the “continual effort,” the “beneficent influence,” the “higher human value” refer to the torture of sexual frustration.

No, the encyclical does not say that sex as such is evil; it merely says that sexual abstinence in marriage is “a higher human value.” What does this indicate about the encyclical’s view of sex—and of marriage?

Its view of marriage is fairly explicit. “[Conjugal] love is first of all fully human, that is to say, of the senses and of the spirit at the same time. It is not, then, a simple transport of instinct and sentiment, but also, and principally, an act of the free will, intended to endure and to grow by means of the joys and sorrows of daily life, in such a way that husband and wife become one only heart and one only soul, and together attain their human perfection.

“Then this love is total; that is to say, it is a very special form of personal friendship, in which husband and wife generously share everything, without undue reservations or selfish calculations.” [9]

To classify the unique emotion of romantic love as a form of friendship is to obliterate it: the two emotional categories are mutually exclusive. The feeling of friendship is asexual; it can be experienced toward a member of one’s own sex.

There are many other indications of this kind scattered through the encyclical. For instance: “These acts, by which husband and wife are united in chaste intimacy and by means of which human life is transmitted, are, as the council recalled, ‘noble and worthy.’ ” [11] It is not chastity that one seeks in sex, and to describe it this way is to emasculate the meaning of marriage.

There are constant references to a married couple’s duties, which have to be considered in the context of the sexual act—“duties toward God, toward themselves, toward the family and toward society.” [10] If there is any one concept which, when associated with sex, would render a man impotent, it is the concept of “duty.”

To understand the full meaning of the encyclical’s view of sex, I shall ask you to identify the common denominator—the common intention —of the following quotations:

[The church’s] teaching, often set forth by the Magisterium, is founded upon the inseparable connection, willed by God and unable to be broken by man on his own initiative, between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning. Indeed, by its intimate structure, the conjugal act, while most closely uniting husband and wife, capacitates them for the generation of new lives. [12]

“[The conjugal acts] do not cease to be lawful if, for causes independent of the will of husband and wife, they are foreseen to be infecund.” [11, emphasis added.]

The church forbids: “every action which, either in anticipation of the conjugal act or its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible.” [14]

The church does not object to “an impediment to procreation” which might result from the medical treatment of a disease, “provided such impediment is not, for whatever motive, directly willed,” [15, emphasis added.]

And finally, the church “teaches that each and every marriage act (‘quilibet matrimonii usus,’) must remain open to the transmission of life.” [11]

What is the common denominator of these statements? It is not merely the tenet that sex as such is evil, but deeper: it is the commandment by means of which sex will become evil, the commandment which, if accepted, will divorce sex from love, will castrate man spiritually and will turn sex into a meaningless physical indulgence. That commandment is: man must not regard sex as an end in itself, but only as a means to an end.

Procreation and “God’s design” are not the major concern of that doctrine; they are merely primitive rationalizations to which man’s self-esteem is to be sacrificed. If it were otherwise, why the stressed insistence on forbidding man to impede procreation by his conscious will and choice? Why the tolerance of the conjugal acts of couples who are infecund by nature rather than by choice? What is so evil about that choice? There is only one answer: that choice rests on a couple’s conviction that the justification of sex is their own enjoyment. And this is the view which the church’s doctrine is intent on forbidding at any price.

That such is the doctrine’s intention, is supported by the church’s stand on the so-called “rhythm method” of birth control, which the encyclical approves and recommends.

The church is coherent with herself when she considers recourse to the infecund periods to be licit, while at the same time condemning, as being always illicit, the use of means directly contrary to fecundation, even if such use is inspired by reasons which may appear honest and serious.... It is true that, in the one and the other case, the married couple are concordant in the positive will of avoiding children for plausible reasons, seeking the certainty that offspring will not arrive; but it is also true that only in the former case are they able to renounce the use of marriage in the fecund periods when, for just motives, procreation is not desirable, while making use of it during infecund periods to manifest their affection and to safeguard their mutual fidelity. By so doing, they give proof of a truly and integrally honest love. [16]

On the face of it, this does not make any kind of sense at all—and the church has often been accused of hypocrisy or compromise because it permits this very unreliable method of birth control while forbidding all others. But examine that statement from the aspect of its intention, and you will see that the church is indeed “coherent with herself,” i.e., consistent.

What is the psychological difference between the “rhythm method” and other means of contraception? The difference lies in the fact that, using the “rhythm method,” a couple cannot regard sexual enjoyment as a right and as an end in itself. With the help of some hypocrisy, they merely sneak and snatch some personal pleasure, while keeping the marriage act “open to the transmission of life,” thus acknowledging that childbirth is the only moral justification of sex and that only by the grace of the calendar are they unable to comply.

This acknowledgment is the meaning of the encyclical’s peculiar implication that “to renounce the use of marriage in the fecund periods” is, somehow, a virtue (a renunciation which proper methods of birth control would not require). What else but this acknowledgment can be the meaning of the otherwise unintelligible statement that by the use of the “rhythm method” a couple “give proof of a truly and integrally honest love”?

There is a widespread popular notion to the effect that the Catholic church’s motive in opposing birth control is the desire to enlarge the Catholic population of the world. This may be superficially true of some people’s motives, but it is not the full truth. If it were, the Catholic church would forbid the “rhythm method” along with all other forms of contraception. And, more important, the Catholic church would not fight for anti-birth-control legislation all over the world: if numerical superiority were its motive, it would forbid birth control to its own followers and let it be available to other religious groups.

The motive of the church’s doctrine on this issue is, philosophically, much deeper than that and much worse; the goal is not metaphysical or political or biological, but psychological: if man is forbidden to regard sexual enjoyment as an end in itself, he will not regard love or his own happiness as an end in itself; if so, then he will not regard his own life as an end in itself; if so, then he will not attain self-esteem.

It is not against the gross, animal, physicalistic theories or uses of sex that the encyclical is directed, but against the spiritual meaning of sex in man’s life. (By “spiritual” I mean pertaining to man’s consciousness.) It is not directed against casual, mindless promiscuity, but against romantic love.

To make this clear, let me indicate, in brief essentials, a rational view of the role of sex in man’s existence.

Sex is a physical capacity, but its exercise is determined by man’s mind—by his choice of values, held consciously or subconsciously. To a rational man, sex is an expression of self-esteem—a celebration of himself and of existence. To the man who lacks self-esteem, sex is an attempt to fake it, to acquire its momentary illusion.

Romantic love, in the full sense of the term, is an emotion possible only to the man (or woman) of unbreached self-esteem: it is his response to his own highest values in the person of another—an integrated response of mind and body, of love and sexual desire. Such a man (or woman) is incapable of experiencing a sexual desire divorced from spiritual values. [. . .]

In other words, sexual promiscuity is to be condemned not because sex as such is evil, but because it is good—too good and too important to be treated casually.

In comparison to the moral and psychological importance of sexual happiness, the issue of procreation is insignificant and irrelevant, except as a deadly threat—and God bless the inventors of the Pill!

The capacity to procreate is merely a potential which man is not obligated to actualize. The choice to have children or not is morally optional. Nature endows man with a variety of potentials—and it is his mind that must decide which capacities he chooses to exercise, according to his own hierarchy of rational goals and values. The mere fact that man has the capacity to kill does not mean that it is his duty to become a murderer; in the same way, the mere fact that man has the capacity to procreate does not mean that it is his duty to commit spiritual suicide by making procreation his primary goal and turning himself into a stud-farm animal.

It is only animals that have to adapt themselves to their physical background and to the biological functions of their bodies. Man adapts his physical background and the use of his biological faculties to himself—to his own needs and values. That is his distinction from all other living species.

To an animal, the rearing of its young is a matter of temporary cycles. To man, it is a lifelong responsibility—a grave responsibility that must not be undertaken causelessly, thoughtlessly, or accidentally.

In regard to the moral aspects of birth control, the primary right involved is not the “right” of an unborn child, or of the family, or of society, or of God. The primary right is one which—in today’s public clamor on the subject—few, if any, voices have had the courage to uphold: the right of man and woman to their own life and happiness—the right not to be regarded as the means to any end.

Man is an end in himself. Romantic love—the profound, exalted, lifelong passion that unites his mind and body in the sexual act—is the living testimony to that principle.

This is what the encyclical seeks to destroy; or, more precisely, to obliterate, as if it does not and cannot exist.

Observe the encyclical’s contemptuous references to sexual desire as “instinct” or “passion,” as if “passion” were a pejorative term. Observe the false dichotomy offered; man’s choice is either mindless, “instinctual” copulation—or marriage, an institution presented not as a union of passionate love, but as a relationship of “chaste intimacy,” of “special personal friendship,” of “discipline proper to purity,” of unselfish duty, of alternating bouts with frustration and pregnancy, and of such unspeakable, Grade-B-movie-folks-next-door kind of boredom that any semi-living man would have to run, in self-preservation, to the nearest whorehouse.

No, I am not exaggerating. I have reserved—as my last piece of evidence on the question of the encyclical’s view of sex—the paragraph in which the coils and veils of euphemistic equivocation got torn, somehow, and the naked truth shows through.

It reads as follows:

Upright men can even better convince themselves of the solid grounds on which the teaching of the church in this field is based, if they care to reflect upon the consequences of methods of artificial birth control. Let them consider, first of all, how wide and easy a road would thus be opened up toward conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality. Not much experience is needed in order to know human weakness, and to understand that men—especially the young, who are so vulnerable on this point—have need of encouragement to be faithful to the moral law, so that they must not be offered some easy means of eluding its observance. It is also to be feared that the man, growing used to the employment of anticonceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion. [17]

I cannot conceive of a rational woman who does not want to be precisely an instrument of her husband’s selfish enjoyment. I cannot conceive of what would have to be the mental state of a woman who could desire or accept the position of having a husband who does not derive any selfish enjoyment from sleeping with her. I cannot conceive of anyone, male or female, capable of believing that sexual enjoyment would destroy a husband’s love and respect for his wife—but regarding her as a brood mare and himself as a stud, would cause him to love and respect her.

Actually, this is too evil to discuss much further.

But we must also take note of the first part of that paragraph. It states that “artificial” contraception would open “a wide and easy road toward conjugal infidelity.” Such is the encyclical’s actual view of marriage: that marital fidelity rests on nothing better than fear of pregnancy. Well, “not much experience is needed in order to know” that that fear has never been much of a deterrent to anyone.

Now observe the inhuman cruelty of that paragraph’s reference to the young. Admitting that the young are “vulnerable on this point,” and declaring that they need “encouragement to be faithful to the moral law,” the encyclical forbids them the use of contraceptives, thus making it cold-bloodedly clear that its idea of moral encouragement consists of terror—the sheer, stark terror of young people caught between their first experience of love and the primitive brutality of the moral code of their elders. Surely the authors of the encyclical cannot be ignorant of the fact that it is not the young chasers or the teenage sluts who would be the victims of a ban on contraceptives, but the innocent young who risk their lives in the quest for love—the girl who finds herself pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend, or the boy who is trapped into a premature, unwanted marriage. To ignore the agony of such victims—the countless suicides, the deaths at the hands of quack abortionists, the drained lives wasted under the double burden of a spurious “dishonor” and of an unwanted child—to ignore all that in the name of “the moral law” is to make a mockery of morality. [...]

This leads us to the encyclical’s stand on the issue of abortion, and to another example of inhuman cruelty. Compare the coiling sentimentality of the encyclical’s style when it speaks of “conjugal love” to the clear, brusque, military tone of the following: “We must once again declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun, and, above all, directly willed and procured abortion, even if for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as licit means of regulating birth.” [14, emphasis added.]

After extolling the virtue and sanctity of motherhood, as a woman’s highest duty, as her “eternal vocation,” the encyclical attaches a special risk of death to the performance of that duty—an unnecessary death, in the presence of doctors forbidden to save her, as if a woman were only a screaming huddle of infected flesh who must not be permitted to imagine that she has the right to live.

And this policy is advocated by the encyclical’s supporters in the name of their concern for “the sanctity of life” and for “rights”—the rights of the embryo. (!)

I suppose that only the psychological mechanism of projection can make it possible for such advocates to accuse their opponents of being “anti-life.”

Observe that the men who uphold such a concept as “the rights of an embryo,” are the men who deny, negate, and violate the rights of a living human being.

An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not yet living (or the unborn).

Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body? The Catholic church is responsible for this country’s disgracefully barbarian anti-abortion laws, which should be repealed and abolished.

The intensity of the importance that the Catholic church attaches to its doctrine on sex may be gauged by the enormity of the indifference to human suffering expressed in the encyclical. Its authors cannot be ignorant of the fact that man has to earn his living by his own effort, and that there is no couple on earth—on any level of income, in any country, civilized or not—who would be able to support the number of children they would produce if they obeyed the encyclical to the letter.

If we assume the richest couple and include time off for the periods of “purity,” it will still be true that the physical and psychological strain of their “vocation” would be so great that nothing much would be left of them, particularly of the mother, by the time they reached the age of forty.

Consider the position of an average American couple. What would be their life, if they succeeded in raising, say, twelve children, by working from morning till night, by running a desperate race with the periodic trips to maternity wards, with rent bills, grocery bills, clothing bills, pediatricians’ bills, strained-vegetables bills, school book bills, measles, mumps, whooping cough, Christmas trees, movies, ice cream cones, summer camps, party dresses, dates, draft cards, hospitals, colleges—with every salary raise of the industrious, hardworking father mortgaged and swallowed before it is received—what would they have gained at the end of their life except the hope that they might be able to pay their cemetery bills, in advance?

Now consider the position of the majority of mankind, who are barely able to subsist on a level of prehistorical poverty. No strain, no back-breaking effort of the ablest, most conscientious father can enable him properly to feed one child—let alone an open-end progression. The unspeakable misery of stunted, disease-eaten, chronically undernourished children, who die in droves before the age of ten, is a matter of public record. Pope Paul VI—who closes his encyclical by mentioning his title as earthly representative of “the God of holiness and mercy”—cannot be ignorant of these facts; yet he is able to ignore them. [. . .]

The global state advocated in Populorum Progressio is a nightmare utopia where all are enslaved to the physical needs of all; its inhabitants are selfless robots, programmed by the tenets of altruism, without personal ambition, without mind, pride, or self-esteem. But self-esteem is a stubborn enemy of all utopias of that kind, and it is doubtful whether mere economic enslavement would destroy it wholly in men’s souls. What Populorum Progressio was intended to achieve from without, in regard to the physical conditions of man’s existence, Humanae Vitae is intended to achieve from within, in regard to the devastation of man’s consciousness.

“Don’t allow men to be happy,” said Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead. “Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient.... Happy men are free men. So kill their joy in living.... Make them feel that the mere fact of a personal desire is evil.... Unhappy men will come to you. They’ll need you. They’ll come for consolation, for support, for escape. Nature allows no vacuum. Empty man’s soul—and the space is yours to fill.”

Deprived of ambition, yet sentenced to endless toil; deprived of rewards, yet ordered to produce; deprived of sexual enjoyment, yet commanded to procreate; deprived of the right to live, yet forbidden to die—condemned to this state of living death, the graduates of the encyclical Humanae Vitae will be ready to move into the world of Populorum Progressio; they will have no other place to go.

“If some man like Hugh Akston,” said Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged, “had told me, when I started, that by accepting the mystics’ theory of sex I was accepting the looters’ theory of economics, I would have laughed in his face. I would not laugh at him now.”

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that in the subconscious hierarchy of motives of the men who wrote these two encyclicals, the second, Humanae Vitae, was merely the spiritual means to the first, Populorum Progressio, which was the material end. The motives, I believe, were the reverse: Populorum Progressio was merely the material means to Humanae Vitae, which was the spiritual end.

“. . . with our predecessor Pope John XXIII,” says Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae, “we repeat: no solution to these difficulties is acceptable ‘which does violence to man’s essential dignity’ and is based only ‘on an utterly materialistic conception of man himself and of his life.’ ” [23, emphasis added.] They mean it—though not exactly in the way they would have us believe.

In terms of reality, nothing could be more materialistic than an existence devoted to feeding the whole world and procreating to the limit of one’s capacity. But when they say “materialistic,” they mean pertaining to man’s mind and to this earth; by “spiritual,” they mean whatever is anti-man, anti-mind, anti-life, and, above all, anti-possibility of human happiness on earth.

The ultimate goal of these encyclicals’ doctrine is not the material advantages to be gained by the rulers of a global slave state; the ultimate goal is the spiritual emasculation and degradation of man, the extinction of his love of life, which Humanae Vitae is intended to accomplish, and Populorum Progressio merely to embody and perpetuate.

The means of destroying man’s spirit is unearned guilt.

What I said in “Requiem for Man” about the motives of Populorum Progressio applies as fully to Humanae Vitae, with only a minor paraphrase pertaining to its subject. “But, you say, the encyclical’s ideal will not work? It is not intended to work. It is not intended to [achieve human chastity or sexual virtue]; it is intended to induce guilt. It is not intended to be accepted and practiced; it is intended to be accepted and broken—broken by man’s ‘selfish’ desire to [love], which will thus be turned into a shameful weakness. Men who accept as an ideal an irrational goal which they cannot achieve, never lift their heads thereafter—and never discover that their bowed heads were the only goal to be achieved.” [. . .]

This issue is not confined to the Catholic church, and it is deeper than the problem of contraception; it is a moral crisis approaching a climax. The core of the issue is Western civilization’s view of man and of his life. The essence of that view depends on the answer to two interrelated questions: Is man (man the individual) an end in himself? —and: Does man have the right to be happy on this earth?

Throughout its history, the West has been torn by a profound ambivalence on these questions: all of its achievements came from those periods when men acted as if the answer were “Yes”—but, with exceedingly rare exceptions, their spokesmen, the philosophers, kept proclaiming a thunderous “No,” in countless forms.

Neither an individual nor an entire civilization can exist indefinitely with an unresolved conflict of that kind. Our age is paying the penalty for it. And it is our age that will have to resolve it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In a 1964 Playboy interview, AR indicated her views on issues such as the proper relationship between reason and emotion, the connection between career and romance, and the nature of love.

On Emotions, Including Love

... LET’S DEFINE our terms. Reason is man’s tool of knowledge, the faculty that enables him to perceive the facts of reality. To act rationally means to act in accordance with the facts of reality. Emotions are not tools of cognition. What you feel tells you nothing about the facts; it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts. Emotions are the result of your value judgments; they are caused by your basic premises, which you may hold consciously or subconsciously, which may be right or wrong. A whim is an emotion whose cause you neither know nor care to discover. Now what does it mean, to act on whim? It means that a man acts like a zombie, without any knowledge of what he deals with, what he wants to accomplish, or what motivates him. It means that a man acts in a state of temporary insanity. [. . .]

An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man’s value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man’s reason and his emotions—provided he observes their proper relationship. A rational man knows—or makes it a point to discover—the source of his emotions, the basic premises from which they come; if his premises are wrong, he corrects them. He never acts on emotions for which he cannot account, the meaning of which he does not understand. In appraising a situation, he knows why he reacts as he does and whether he is right. He has no inner conflicts, his mind and his emotions are integrated, his consciousness is in perfect harmony. His emotions are not his enemies, they are his means of enjoying life. But they are not his guide; the guide is his mind. This relationship cannot be reversed, however. If a man takes his emotions as the cause and his mind as their passive effect, if he is guided by his emotions and uses his mind only to rationalize or justify them somehow—then he is acting immorally, he is condemning himself to misery, failure, defeat, and he will achieve nothing but destruction—his own and that of others. [. . .]

The only man capable of experiencing a profound romantic love is the man driven by passion for his work—because love is an expression of self-esteem, of the deepest values in a man’s or a woman’s character. One falls in love with the person who shares these values. If a man has no clearly defined values, and no moral character, he is not able to appreciate another person. In this respect, I would like to quote from The Fountainhead, in which the hero utters a line that has often been quoted by readers: “To say ‘I love you’ one must know first how to say the ‘I.’ ” [...]

When you are in love, it means that the person you love is of great personal, selfish importance to you and to your life. If you were selfless, it would have to mean that you derive no personal pleasure or happiness from the company and the existence of the person you love, and that you are motivated only by self-sacrificial pity for that person’s need of you. I don’t have to point out to you that no one would be flattered by, nor would accept, a concept of that kind. Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person....

3. Theory of Concepts

In 1966, AR published her seminal (and most technical) work in philosophy, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Its purpose is to validate reason on the most fundamental level—by identifying the nature, and the basis in reality, of the human mind’s unique form of knowledge: concepts. This book is AR’s answer to the nominalists and the “realists” in philosophy, i.e., to the “problem of universals.”

We have included in the following selections some essentials from her theory of concepts—along with a few excerpts from the seminars she gave on the book when it first came out; the seminars were attended mostly by philosophers unfamiliar with her theory.

Concept-Formation

A CONCEPT is a mental integration of two or more units which are isolated according to a specific characteristic(s) and united by a specific definition.

The units involved may be any aspect of reality: entities, attributes, actions, qualities, relationships, etc.; they may be perceptual concretes or other, earlier-formed concepts. The act of isolation involved is a process of abstraction: i.e., a selective mental focus that takes out or separates a certain aspect of reality from all others (e.g., isolates a certain attibute from the entities possessing it, or a certain action from the entities performing it, etc.). The uniting involved is not a mere sum, but an integration, i.e., a blending of the units into a single, new mental entity which is used thereafter as a single unit of thought (but which can be broken into its component units whenever required).

In order to be used as a single unit, the enormous sum integrated by a concept has to be given the form of a single, specific, perceptual concrete, which will differentiate it from all other concretes and from all other concepts. This is the function performed by language. Language is a code of visual-auditory symbols that serves the psycho-epistemological function of converting concepts into the mental equivalent of concretes. Language is the exclusive domain and tool of concepts. Every word we use (with the exception of proper names) is a symbol that denotes a concept, i.e., that stands for an unlimited number of concretes of a certain kind.

(Proper names are used in order to identify and include particular entities in a conceptual method of cognition. Observe that even proper names, in advanced civilizations, follow the definitional principles of genus and differentia: e.g., John Smith, with “Smith” serving as genus and “John” as differentia—or New York, U.S.A.)

Words transform concepts into (mental) entities; definitions provide them with identity. (Words without definitions are not language but inarticulate sounds.) We shall discuss definitions later and at length.

The above is a general description of the nature of concepts as products of a certain mental process. But the question of epistemology is: what precisely is the nature of that process? To what precisely do concepts refer in reality?

Let us now examine the process of forming the simplest concept, the concept of a single attribute (chronologically, this is not the first concept that a child would grasp; but it is the simplest one epistemologically) —for instance, the concept “length.” If a child considers a match, a pencil and a stick, he observes that length is the attribute they have in common, but their specific lengths differ. The difference is one of measurement. In order to form the concept “length,” the child’s mind retains the attribute and omits its particular measurements. Or, more precisely, if the process were identified in words, it would consist of the following: “Length must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity. I shall identify as ‘length’ that attribute of any existent possessing it which can be quantitatively related to a unit of length, without specifying the quantity.”

The child does not think in such words (he has, as yet, no knowledge of words), but that is the nature of the process which his mind performs wordlessly. And that is the principle which his mind follows, when, having grasped the concept “length” by observing the three objects, he uses it to identify the attribute of length in a piece of string, a ribbon, a belt, a corridor or a street.

The same principle directs the process of forming concepts of entities—for instance, the concept “table.” The child’s mind isolates two or more tables from other objects, by focusing on their distinctive characteristic: their shape. He observes that their shapes vary, but have one characteristic in common: a flat, level surface and support (s). He forms the concept “table” by retaining that characteristic and omitting all particular measurements, not only the measurements of the shape, but of all the other characteristics of tables (many of which he is not aware of at the time).

An adult definition of “table” would be: “A man-made object consisting of a flat, level surface and support(s), intended to support other, smaller objects.” Observe what is specified and what is omitted in this definition: the distinctive characteristic of the shape is specified and retained; the particular geometrical measurements of the shape (whether the surface is square, round, oblong or triangular, etc., the number and shape of supports, etc.) are omitted; the measurements of size or weight are omitted; the fact that it is a material object is specified, but the material of which it is made is omitted, thus omitting the measurements that differentiate one material from another; etc. Observe, however, that the utilitarian requirements of the table set certain limits on the omitted measurements, in the form of “no larger than and no smaller than” required by its purpose. This rules out a ten-foot tall or a two-inch tall table (though the latter may be sub-classified as a toy or a miniature table) and it rules out unsuitable materials, such as non-solids.

Bear firmly in mind that the term “measurements omitted” does not mean, in this context, that measurements are regarded as non-existent; it means that measurements exist, but are not specified. That measurements must exist is an essential part of the process. The principle is: the relevant measurements must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity.

A child is not and does not have to be aware of all these complexities when he forms the concept “table.” He forms it by differentiating tables from all other objects in the context of his knowledge. As his knowledge grows, the definitions of his concepts grow in complexity. (We shall discuss this when we discuss definitions.) But the principle and pattern of concept-formation remain the same.

The first words a child learns are words denoting visual objects, and he retains his first concepts visually. Observe that the visual form he gives them is reduced to those essentials which distinguish the particular kind of entities from all others—for instance, the universal type of a child’s drawing of man in the form of an oval for the torso, a circle for the head, four sticks for extremities, etc. Such drawings are a visual record of the process of abstraction and concept-formation in a mind’s transition from the perceptual level to the full vocabulary of the conceptual level.

There is evidence to suppose that written language originated in the form of drawings—as the pictographic writing of the Oriental peoples seems to indicate. With the growth of man’s knowledge and of his power of abstraction, a pictorial representation of concepts could no longer be adequate to his conceptual range, and was replaced by a fully symbolic code.

A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted.

The element of similarity is crucially involved in the formation of every concept; similarity, in this context, is the relationship between two or more existents which possess the same characteristic(s), but in different measure or degree.

Observe the multiple role of measurements in the process of concept-formation, in both of its two essential parts: differentiation and integration. Concepts cannot be formed at random. All concepts are formed by first differentiating two or more existents from other existents. All conceptual differentiations are made in terms of commensurable characteristics (i.e., characteristics possessing a common unit of measurement). No concept could be formed, for instance, by attempting to distinguish long objects from green objects. Incommensurable characteristics cannot be integrated into one unit.

Tables, for instance, are first differentiated from chairs, beds and other objects by means of the characteristic of shape, which is an attribute possessed by all the objects involved. Then, their particular kind of shape is set as the distinguishing characteristic of tables—i.e., a certain category of geometrical measurements of shape is specified. Then, within that category, the particular measurements of individual table-shapes are omitted.

Please note the fact that a given shape represents a certain category or set of geometrical measurements. Shape is an attribute; differences of shape—whether cubes, spheres, cones or any complex combinations—are a matter of differing measurements; any shape can be reduced to or expressed by a set of figures in terms of linear measurement. When, in the process of concept-formation, man observes that shape is a commensurable characteristic of certain objects, he does not have to measure all the shapes involved nor even to know how to measure them; he merely has to observe the element of similarity.

Similarity is grasped perceptually; in observing it, man is not and does not have to be aware of the fact that it involves a matter of measurement. It is the task of philosophy and of science to identify that fact.

As to the actual process of measuring shapes, a vast part of higher mathematics, from geometry on up, is devoted to the task of discovering methods by which various shapes can be measured—complex methods which consist of reducing the problem to the terms of a simple, primitive method, the only one available to man in this field: linear measurement. (Integral calculus, used to measure the area of circles, is just one example.)

In this respect, concept-formation and applied mathematics have a similar task, just as philosophical epistemology and theoretical mathematics have a similar goal: the goal and task of bringing the universe within the range of man’s knowledge—by identifying relationships to perceptual data.

Another example of implicit measurement can be seen in the process of forming concepts of colors. Man forms such concepts by observing that the various shades of blue are similar, as against the shades of red, and thus differentiating the range of blue from the range of red, of yellow, etc. Centuries passed before science discovered the unit by which colors could actually be measured: the wavelengths of light—a discovery that supported, in terms of mathematical proof, the differentiations that men were and are making in terms of visual similarities. (Any questions about “borderline cases” will be answered later.)

A commensurable characteristic (such as shape in the case of tables, or hue in the case of colors) is an essential element in the process of concept-formation. I shall designate it as the “Conceptual Common Denominator” and define it as “The characteristic(s) reducible to a unit of measurement, by means of which man differentiates two or more existents from other existents possessing it.”

The distinguishing characteristic(s) of a concept represents a specified category of measurements within the “Conceptual Common Denominator” involved.

New concepts can be formed by integrating earlier-formed concepts into wider categories, or by subdividing them into narrower categories (a process which we shall discuss later). But all concepts are ultimately reducible to their base in perceptual entities, which are the base (the given) of man’s cognitive development.

The first concepts man forms are concepts of entities—since entities are the only primary existents. (Attributes cannot exist by themselves, they are merely the characteristics of entities; motions are motions of entities; relationships are relationships among entities.)

In the process of forming concepts of entities, a child’s mind has to focus on a distinguishing characteristic—i.e., on an attribute—in order to isolate one group of entities from all others. He is, therefore, aware of attributes while forming his first concepts, but he is aware of them perceptually, not conceptually. It is only after he has grasped a number of concepts of entities that he can advance to the stage of abstracting attributes from entities and forming separate concepts of attributes. The same is true of concepts of motion: a child is aware of motion perceptually, but cannot conceptualize “motion” until he has formed some concepts of that which moves, i.e., of entities.

(As far as can be ascertained, the perceptual level of a child’s awareness is similar to the awareness of the higher animals: the higher animals are able to perceive entities, motions, attributes, and certain numbers of entities. But what an animal cannot perform is the process of abstraction—of mentally separating attributes, motions or numbers from entities. It has been said that an animal can perceive two oranges or two potatoes, but cannot grasp the concept “two.”)

Concepts of materials are formed by observing the differences in the constituent materials of entities. (Materials exist only in the form of specific entities, such as a nugget of gold, a plank of wood, a drop or an ocean of water.) The concept of “gold,” for instance, is formed by isolating gold objects from all others, then abstracting and retaining the material, the gold, and omitting the measurements of the objects (or of the alloys) in which gold may exist. Thus, the material is the same in all the concrete instances subsumed under the concept, and differs only in quantity.

Concepts of motion are formed by specifying the distinctive nature of the motion and of the entities performing it, and/or of the medium in which it is performed—and omitting the particular measurements of any given instance of such motion and of the entities involved. For instance, the concept “walking” denotes a certain kind of motion performed by living entities possessing legs, and does not apply to the motion of a snake or of an automobile. The concept “swimming” denotes the motion of any living entity propelling itself through water, and does not apply to the motion of a boat. The concept “flying” denotes the motion of any entity propelling itself through the air, whether a bird or an airplane.

Adverbs are concepts of the characteristics of motion (or action); they are formed by specifying a characteristic and omitting the measurements of the motion and of the entities involved—e.g., “rapidly,” which may be applied to “walking” or “swimming” or “speaking,” etc., with the measurement of what is “rapid” left open and depending, in any given case, on the type of motion involved.

Prepositions are concepts of relationships, predominantly of spatial or temporal relationships, among existents; they are formed by specifying the relationship and omitting the measurements of the existents and of the space or time involved—e.g., “on,” “in,” “above,” “after,” etc.

Adjectives are concepts of attributes or of characteristics. Pronouns belong to the category of concepts of entities. Conjunctions are concepts of relationships among thoughts, and belong to the category of concepts of consciousness.

As to concepts of consciousness, we shall discuss them later and at length. (To anticipate questions such as: “Can you measure love?”—I shall permit myself the very philosophical answer: “And how!”)

Now we can answer the question: To what precisely do we refer when we designate three persons as “men”? We refer to the fact that they are living beings who possess the same characteristic distinguishing them from all other living species: a rational faculty—though the specific measurements of their distinguishing characteristic qua men, as well as of all their other characteristics qua living beings, are different. (As living beings of a certain kind, they possess innumerable characteristics in common: the same shape, the same range of size, the same facial features, the same vital organs, the same fingerprints, etc., and all these characteristics differ only in their measurements.)

Two links between the conceptual and the mathematical fields are worth noting at this point, apart from the obvious fact that the concept “unit” is the base and start of both.

I. A concept is not formed by observing every concrete subsumed under it, and does not specify the number of such concretes. A concept is like an arithmetical sequence of specifically defined units, going off in both directions, open at both ends and including all units of that particular kind. For instance, the concept “man” includes all men who live at present, who have ever lived or will ever live. An arithmetical sequence extends into infinity, without implying that infinity actually exists; such extension means only that whatever number of units does exist, it is to be included in the same sequence. The same principle applies to concepts: the concept “man” does not (and need not) specify what number of men will ultimately have existed—it specifies only the characteristics of man, and means that any number of entities possessing these characteristics is to be identified as “men.”

2. The basic principle of concept-formation (which states that the omitted measurements must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity) is the equivalent of the basic principle of algebra, which states that algebraic symbols must be given some numerical value, but may be given any value. In this sense and respect, perceptual awareness is the arithmetic, but conceptual awareness is the algebra of cognition.

The relationship of concepts to their constituent particulars is the same as the relationship of algebraic symbols to numbers. In the equation 2a = a + a, any number may be substituted for the symbol “a” without affecting the truth of the equation. For instance: 2 x 5 = 5 + 5, or: 2 x 5,000,000 = 5,000,000 + 5,000,000. In the same manner, by the same psycho-epistemological method, a concept is used as an algebraic symbol that stands for any of the arithmetical sequence of units it subsumes.

Let those who attempt to invalidate concepts by declaring that they cannot find “manness” in men, try to invalidate algebra by declaring that they cannot find “a-ness” in 5 or in 5,000,000.

[...] Let us note, at this point, the radical difference between Aristotle’s view of concepts and the Objectivist view, particularly in regard to the issue of essential characteristics.

It is Aristotle who first formulated the principles of correct definition. It is Aristotle who identified the fact that only concretes exist. But Aristotle held that definitions refer to metaphysical essences, which exist in concretes as a special element or formative power, and he held that the process of concept-formation depends on a kind of direct intuition by which man’s mind grasps these essences and forms concepts accordingly.

Aristotle regarded “essence” as metaphysical; Objectivism regards it as epistemological.

Objectivism holds that the essence of a concept is that fundamental characteristic(s) of its units on which the greatest number of other characteristics depend, and which distinguishes these units from all other existents within the field of man’s knowledge. Thus the essence of a concept is determined contextually and may be altered with the growth of man’s knowledge. The metaphysical referent of man’s concepts is not a special, separate metaphysical essence, but the total of the facts of reality he has observed, and this total determines which characteristics of a given group of existents he designates as essential. An essential characteristic is factual, in the sense that it does exist, does determine other characteristics and does distinguish a group of existents from all others; it is epistemological in the sense that the classification of “essential characteristic” is a device of man’s method of cognition—a means of classifying, condensing and integrating an ever-growing body of knowledge.

Now refer to the four historical schools of thought on the issue of concepts, which I listed in the foreword to this work—and observe that the dichotomy of “intrinsic or subjective” has played havoc with this issue, as it has with every issue involving the relationship of consciousness to existence.

The extreme realist (Platonist) and the moderate realist (Aristotelian) schools of thought regard the referents of concepts as intrinsic, i.e., as “universals” inherent in things (either as archetypes or as metaphysical essences), as special existents unrelated to man’s consciousness—to be perceived by man directly, like any other kind of concrete existents, but perceived by some non-sensory or extra-sensory means.

The nominalist and the conceptualist schools regard concepts as subjective, i.e., as products of man’s consciousness, unrelated to the facts of reality, as mere “names” or notions arbitrarily assigned to arbitrary groupings of concretes on the ground of vague, inexplicable resemblances.

The extreme realist school attempts, in effect, to preserve the primacy of existence (of reality) by dispensing with consciousness—i.e., by converting concepts. into concrete existents and reducing consciousness to the perceptual level, i.e., to the automatic function of grasping percepts (by supernatural means, since no such percepts exist).

The extreme nominalist (contemporary) school attempts to establish the primacy of consciousness by dispensing with existence (with reality)—i.e., by denying the status of existents even to concretes and converting concepts into conglomerates of fantasy, constructed out of the debris of other, lesser fantasies, such as words without referents or incantations of sounds corresponding to nothing in an unknowable reality.

To compound the chaos: it must be noted that the Platonist school begins by accepting the primacy of consciousness, by reversing the relationship of consciousness to existence, by assuming that reality must conform to the content of consciousness, not the other way around—on the premise that the presence of any notion in man’s mind proves the existence of a corresponding referent in reality. But the Platonist school still retains some vestige of respect for reality, if only in unstated motivation: it distorts reality into a mystical construct in order to extort its sanction and validate subjectivism. The nominalist school begins, with empiricist humility, by negating the power of consciousness to form any valid generalizations about existence—and ends up with a subjectivism that requires no sanction, a consciousness freed from the “tyranny” of reality.

None of these schools regards concepts as objective, i.e., as neither revealed nor invented, but as produced by man’s consciousness in accordance with the facts of reality, as mental integrations of factual data computed by man—as the products of a cognitive method of classification whose processes must be performed by man, but whose content is dictated by reality.

It is as if, philosophically, mankind is still in the stage of transition which characterizes a child in the process of learning to speak—a child who is using his conceptual faculty, but has not developed it sufficiently to be able to examine it self-consciously and discover that what he is using is reason.

Consciousness and Identity

... MAN IS neither infallible nor omniscient; if he were, a discipline such as epistemology—the theory of knowledge—would not be necessary nor possible: his knowledge would be automatic, unquestionable and total. But such is not man’s nature. Man is a being of volitional consciousness: beyond the level of percepts—a level inadequate to the cognitive requirements of his survival—man has to acquire knowledge by his own effort, which he may exercise or not, and by a process of reason, which he may apply correctly or not. Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of his mental efficacy; he is capable of error, of evasion, of psychological distortion. He needs a method of cognition, which he himself has to discover: he must discover how to use his rational faculty, how to validate his conclusions, how to distinguish truth from falsehood, how to set the criteria of what he may accept as knowledge. Two questions are involved in his every conclusion, conviction, decision, choice or claim: What do I know?—and: How do I know it?

It is the task of epistemology to provide the answer to the “How?”—which then enables the special sciences to provide the answers to the “What?”

In the history of philosophy—with some very rare exceptions—epistemological theories have consisted of attempts to escape one or the other of the two fundamental questions which cannot be escaped. Men have been taught either that knowledge is impossible (skepticism) or that it is available without effort (mysticism). These two positions appear to be antagonists, but are, in fact, two variants on the same theme, two sides of the same fraudulent coin: the attempt to escape the responsibility of rational cognition and the absolutism of reality—the attempt to assert the primacy of consciousness over existence.

Although skepticism and mysticism are ultimately interchangeable, and the dominance of one always leads to the resurgence of the other, they differ in the form of their inner contradiction—the contradiction, in both cases, between their philosophical doctrine and their psychological motivation. Philosophically, the mystic is usually an exponent of the intrinsic (revealed) school of epistemology; the skeptic is usually an advocate of epistemological subjectivism. But, psychologically, the mystic is a subjectivist who uses intrinsicism as a means to claim the primacy of his consciousness over that of others. The skeptic is a disillusioned intrinsicist who, having failed to find automatic supernatural guidance, seeks a substitute in the collective subjectivism of others.

The motive of all the attacks on man’s rational faculty—from any quarter, in any of the endless variations, under the verbal dust of all the murky volumes—is a single, hidden premise: the desire to exempt consciousness from the law of identity. The hallmark of a mystic is the savagely stubborn refusal to accept the fact that consciousness, like any other existent, possesses identity, that it is a faculty of a specific nature, functioning through specific means. While the advance of civilization has been eliminating one area of magic after another, the last stand of the believers in the miraculous consists of their frantic attempts to regard identity as the disqualifying element of consciousness.

The implicit, but unadmitted premise of the neo-mystics of modern philosophy, is the notion that only an ineffable consciousness can acquire a valid knowledge of reality, that “true” knowledge has to be causeless, i.e., acquired without any means of cognition.

The entire apparatus of Kant’s system, like a hippopotamus engaged in belly-dancing, goes through its gyrations while resting on a single point: that man’s knowledge is not valid because his consciousness possesses identity. “His argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them.” (For the New Intellectual. )

This is a negation, not only of man’s consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as such, whether man’s, insect’s or God’s. (If one supposed the existence of God, the negation would still apply: either God perceives through no means whatever, in which case he possesses no identity—or he perceives by some divine means and no others, in which case his perception is not valid.) As Berkeley negated existence by claiming that “to be, is to be perceived,” so Kant negates consciousness by implying that to be perceived, is not to be.

What Kant implied through coils of obfuscating verbiage, his more consistent followers declared explicitly. The following was written by a Kantian: “With him [Kant] all is phenomenal [mere appearance] which is relative, and all is relative which is an object to a conscious subject. The conceptions of the understanding as much depend on the constitution of our thinking faculties, as the perceptions of the senses do on the constitution of our intuitive faculties. Both might be different, were our mental constitution changed; both probably are different to beings differently constituted. The real thus becomes identical with the absolute, with the object as it is in itself, out of all relation to a subject; and, as all consciousness is a relation between subject and object, it follows that to attain a knowledge of the real we must go out of consciousness.” (Henry Mansel, “On the Philosophy of Kant,” reprinted in Henry Mansel, Letters, Lectures and Reviews, ed. H. W Chandler, London: John Murray, 1873, p. 171.)

From primordial mysticism to this, its climax, the attack on man’s consciousness and particularly on his conceptual faculty has rested on the unchallenged premise that any knowledge acquired by a process of consciousness is necessarily subjective and cannot correspond to the facts of reality, since it is “processed knowledge.”

Make no mistake about the actual meaning of that premise: it is a revolt, not only against being conscious, but against being alive—since in fact, in reality, on earth, every aspect of being alive involves a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. (This is an example of the fact that the revolt against identity is a revolt against existence. “The desire not to be anything, is the desire not to be.” Atlas Shrugged.)

All knowledge is processed knowledge—whether on the sensory, perceptual or conceptual level. An “unprocessed” knowledge would be a knowledge acquired without means of cognition. Consciousness (as I said in the first sentence of this work) is not a passive state, but an active process. And more: the satisfaction of every need of a living organism requires an act of processing by that organism, be it the need of air, of food or of knowledge.

No one would argue (at least, not yet) that since man’s body has to process the food he eats, no objective rules of proper nutrition can ever be discovered-that “true nutrition” has to consist of absorbing some ineffable substance without the participation of a digestive system, but since man is incapable of “true feeding,” nutrition is a subjective matter open to his whim, and it is merely a social convention that forbids him to eat poisonous mushrooms.

No one would argue that since nature does not tell man automatically what to eat—as it does not tell him automatically how to form concepts—he should abandon the illusion that there is a right or wrong way of eating (or he should revert to the safety of the time when he did not have to “trust” objective evidence, but could rely on dietary laws prescribed by a supernatural power).

No one would argue that man eats bread rather than stones purely as a matter of “convenience.”

It is time to grant to man’s consciousness the same cognitive respect one grants to his body—i.e., the same objectivity.

Objectivity begins with the realization that man (including his every attribute and faculty, including his consciousness) is an entity of a specific nature who must act accordingly; that there is no escape from the law of identity, neither in the universe with which he deals nor in the working of his own consciousness, and if he is to acquire knowledge of the first, he must discover the proper method of using the second; that there is no room for the arbitrary in any activity of man, least of all in his method of cognition—and just as he has learned to be guided by objective criteria in making his physical tools, so he must be guided by objective criteria in forming his tools of cognition : his concepts.

Just as man’s physical existence was liberated when he grasped the principle that “nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed,” so his consciousness will be liberated when he grasps that nature, to be apprehended , must be obeyed—that the rules of cognition must be derived from the nature of existence and the nature, the identity, of his cognitive faculty.

Abstraction from Abstractions

First-Level Concepts

Prof. F: I have a fundamental question about the hierarchy of concepts. On page 22 you say, “The meaning of ‘furniture’ cannot be grasped unless one has first grasped the meaning of its constituent concepts; these are its link to reality.” Now, what about the meaning of “table”: can we say that the meaning of “table” cannot be grasped unless one has first grasped the meaning of “dining table,” “conference table,” “writing table,” and so forth? Are these its constituent concepts? Or is the concept “table” a kind of privileged concept that comes at a kind of absolute bottom in the hierarchy of concepts and has a direct relationship to reality?

Or would you say that where a concept comes is determined by the context of one’s own learning? For instance, might a person form the concept of “furniture” without having formed the concept of “table” before? Might he form the concept of “living being” before he has formed the concept of “animal”?

AR: In a sense, yes. There is a big problem here, however, whether this applies all the way through the conceptual chain—which I would claim cannot be the case. But, on the level we are discussing, there is a certain element of the optional. Because when you first form your concepts, you might conceivably first form in a very loose way the concepts “living entity” versus “inanimate object,” and later subdivide into “man,” “animals,” “plants,” etc. (and “tables,” “rocks,” “houses,” on the other hand). In a loose way, that can be done, but only up to a certain level. Because, suppose you started with the concept “living being.” You would then find that that is too generalized a category, and you would have to say, in effect, “By living beings I mean men, animals, and plants.”

Therefore, understanding what your original semi-concept “living being” meant would depend on what you mean by the constituents, such as “man,” “animal,” and “plant.”

What then is the ultimate determinant here? What I call the “first level” of concepts are existential concretes—that to which you can point as if it were an ostensive definition and say: “I mean this.” Now, you can point to a table. You cannot point to furniture. You have to say, “By furniture I mean ...” and you would have to include all kinds of objects.

Prof. F: Why wouldn’t one have an equal difficulty when one came, let’s say, to the concept of “bird”? Why wouldn’t one have to say, “By bird, I mean eagles, penguins, and hummingbirds”?

AR: Because, in fact, one doesn’t. And that is the difference between subcategories of concepts and first-level concepts. Because, you see, you could not arrive at the differences between eagles, hummingbirds, etc., unless you had first separated birds from other animals.

Even if chronologically you may learn those concepts in different orders, ultimately when you organize your concepts to determine which are basic-level concepts and which are derivatives (in both directions, wider integration or narrower subdivision), the test will be: which objects you perceive directly in reality and can point to, and which you have to differentiate by means of other concepts.

Prof. F: Then you are suggesting that metaphysically there are certain lowest species or infima species: certain concepts that are directly tied to concretes. Whereas, on top of them, we continually build higher-order concepts, which refer, in turn, to the lower.

AR: Yes, if you mean, by “metaphysical,” existential objects—entities which exist qua entities.

Prof. E: I’d like to ask a follow-up question. This is the kind of question I get all the time, which I do not fully know how to answer. I will give the example: “table” is first-level, and then you can go up to “furniture” or down to “living-room table,” etc.

AR: That’s right.

Prof. E: Then I get this kind of question: Is it theoretically possible for someone to start by first conceptualizing living-room tables (he wouldn’t, of course, be able to call it “living-room table” since he wouldn’t yet have the concept “table”) and then “desk,” etc. and have separate concepts for all of what we call subcategories of “table,” and then one day, in effect, grasp in an act of higher integration that they have something uniting them all, and reach the concept “table”?

AR: Theoretically, maybe; existentially, no. By which I mean that in order to do that, if that is how a child starts, he would have to live in a furniture store. He would have to have observed an enormous number of certain kinds of tables so that he isolates them first and then arrives at the overall category, which is “table.”

Here, the process is directed by what is available to the child’s observation when he begins to form the concept.

Prof. E: Would the state of his ability to discriminate also be relevant to defining what is a first-level concept? In other words, he couldn’t perhaps discriminate subtler distinctions before he had the gross category.

AR: Exactly. And he has to have, and this is very essential, a sufficient number of examples of a given category differentiated from other dissimilar entities before he can form a concept.

Prof. E: What do you say about this objection? People say you can’t point to table, all you can point to is living-room table, or dining-room table, etc., and, therefore, how do you distinguish “table” from “furniture” in this respect?

AR: The answer is in the Conceptual Common Denominator. If you point to table and you say “I mean this,” what do you differentiate it from? From chairs, cabinets, beds, etc. You do not mean only a dining-room table but not an end table. What is involved here, in the act of pointing, as in everything about concepts, is: from what are you differentiating it?

Prof. B: Isn’t the issue then what similarities and differences you are able to be aware of? And wouldn’t that be a function of two things: the actual properties of the objects plus the context that you are in?

AR: That’s right.

Prof. B: Take the earlier question of whether you could form the concept of “furniture” before the concept “table.” In order to do that, you would have to perceive the similarities uniting all items of furniture before you perceived the difference between a table and, say, a bed. And the question is: how could that ever come up?

AR: The difficulty here is that the infant or child would have to have a much wider range of perception than is normal to a beginning consciousness. He would have to consider objects outside of the room, objects moving in the street, and then conclude: by “furniture” I mean the objects in this room. Even subverbally, if this is what he observes, he has already made an enormously wide range of observations, which is not likely as a beginning. In logic, there would be objections to that, because how would he differentiate furniture from, let’s say, moving vehicles in the street? How did he get to that wide a range without first observing the immediate differences and similarities around him?

Prof. B: If he looked at a bed and a dresser, let’s, say, he would have to see them as different before he saw them as similar.

AR: That’s right. Also, remember that we use “table” as an example because that is the object most likely to be one of the first perceived by a child in our civilization. But now suppose a child has to grasp the concept “coconut.” In our civilization that would be a much later development. He would probably first grasp “food,” then maybe “apple” and “pear,” until some day he discovers an unusual food—a coconut. But now take a child in a primitive society, in a jungle. He never heard of tables, and he might be bewildered when he first sees a table in the home of the local missionary. But “coconut” might be one of the first concepts he forms because coconuts are all around him.

The overall rule for what is first-level is: those existential concretes which are first available to your consciousness. But they have to be concretes. A first-level concept cannot be one which, in order to indicate what you mean by it, requires other concepts, as is the case with “furniture.” “Furniture” is not a term designating concretes directly. It is a term designating different kinds of concretes which all have to be conceptualized, as against another very broad category, such as moving vehicles, let us say.

In other words, if, after you have acquired a conceptual vocabulary, a given concept cannot be understood by you or communicated by you without reference to other concepts, then it is a higher-level concept, even if maybe somehow you grasped it first (and I question the issue of whether you could grasp it first). But the hierarchy that you will establish eventually when you are in the realm of a developed language, the hierarchy of which concept depends on the other, will not be determined by the accidental order in which you learned them, because that can have a great deal of the optional element and depends on what is available in your immediate surroundings.

It is after you are in the realm of language, when you can organize your concepts and say what you mean by “table,” what you mean by “furniture”—it is at this level, logically and not chronologically, that you can determine which are concepts of the first order and which are derivatives.

Induction

Prof. H: This is a common question relating to induction. Someone is boiling water, and he notices that every time the water gets to a certain temperature, it boils. Now he wants to know: does all water boil at that temperature, or is it only due to some accidental feature about this particular water? How does he determine whether it’s accidental or essential?

AR: By whether you can or cannot establish a causal connection between what you have determined to be the essential characteristic of water and the fact that it boils at a certain temperature.

Prof. H: I suppose what I’m asking is: how do you establish the causal connection?

AR: That’s a scientific question. But, in essence, what you do is this. Let’s say you have to establish the molecular structure of water. How do those molecules act at a certain temperature? And if you see that something happens to the molecules which causes boiling at a certain temperature, you conclude: that’s essential to the nature of water, adding the parenthesis: “within the present context of my knowledge.” You will later discover that water behaves differently at a different altitude. So you never claim water necessarily, as an absolute, will always and everywhere boil at the same temperature. No, you say, “Within my present context, omitting elements of which I have no knowledge at present, water will always boil at a certain temperature, because boiling is a state depending on certain kind of molecular motions, and water’s molecules will always reach that stage at a certain temperature.”

Now, with later development, you might discover that maybe there are differences in certain molecules of water when in an impure state. Or with atomic additions, say, something else happens. But then your context has changed. You don’t say that water has changed. It’s only that your definition of how the essential characteristic of water will function will have to include more: what water will do at sea level, what it will do at higher altitudes, and what it will do under new molecular or atomic influences, or in relation to some scientific phenomenon not yet known to any of us. But the principle there is the same. Does that answer it?

Prof. H: I have to think about it.

AR: Okay, but ask again later, because I don’t want to leave you with semi-answers. And that is the rational procedure: think it over, and if a further question occurs to you, then ask me later. This applies to everybody else as well. If any answer is only partial, the right thing to do is to think it over, because one can’t discuss it and integrate it at the same time. If you see that there is still an area not covered, then ask me later.

Prof. A: How would you answer this common objection to your answer ? In relating the boiling of water to the energy required to break certain molecular bonds, you haven’t actually made any progress in regard to the induction, because you’ve only got the same kind of generalization on the molecular level that you had before on the gross, macroscopic level. You now know, “In a given number of cases, it has always taken a certain amount of energy to break this molecular bond.” But that fact has the same sort of status as the fact you started with: “In a given number of cases, I heated the water to 212 degrees, and it always boiled.” I know the objection is crazy, because in some way you do have more knowledge when you’ve gone down to the molecular level. But I can’t see what the error is.

AR: But you see, you answered it. When you simply boil water, you do not know that it has molecules, nor what happens to those molecules. When you arrive at that later stage of knowledge, you’ve discovered something about water and the conditions of its boiling which you didn’t know before. And, therefore, within your present context, this is a sufficient explanation, even though it’s not the exclusive and final explanation. To reach that you would have to have omniscience. But, if you can say, “It’s in the nature of water that it’s composed of molecules, and something happens to those molecules at a certain temperature, this explains to me why water boils,” that is a causal explanation. It isn’t the same thing as saying, “I don’t know why it boils, but if I heat it, it bubbles up.” That’s all that you knew before. And, therefore, your knowledge is now further advanced.

Prof. A: But it seems that the certainty that you were first trying to attach to the idea that water boils under certain conditions is derivative from the degree of certainty you have concerning the idea that a certain amount of energy disrupts the molecules.

AR: If this is supposed to be on the same level, what would the person raising this objection consider to be a different level?

Prof. A: Yes, that’s exactly the problem.

AR: That’s not the problem. No. That’s the method of ruling his objection out. Because you discover that he has no ground for his conclusion that you’re on the same level. Look at the facts. You observe that water boils. You discover something in the constituent elements of water that causes it. You know more than you did before. But he tells you, “No, you’re at the same place.” Then you ask him, “What place do you want to go to? What do you regard as knowledge?”

Prof. E: And then his answer would be that he wants a mystic apprehension of “necessity,” which he hasn’t yet received. All he has is “contingent” facts.

AR: Yes. And you ask him what does he regard the facts of reality as: a necessity or a contingency? He’ll say, “Of course it’s a contingency, because God made it this way, and he could have made it another.” And you say, “Good-bye.”

Prof. F: But I am not clear why it is a significant step when one goes from the macroscopic phenomenon, boiling, to the molecular level. Why does one then say, “Aha! Now, within our present context of knowledge, we’ve made a satisfactory advance.”

AR: Let’s ask something wider: what is knowledge? And what is study, what is observation? It’s the discovery of properties in the nature of certain objects, existents, entities. All knowledge consists of learning more and more about the nature—the properties and characteristics—of given objects. So first you see only water—just that. Then you observe that it boils at a certain point. Your knowledge is advanced. You know more about water than you did when you only observed it in a lake. Then you discover such a thing as molecules, then you discover the molecular structure of water. Your knowledge about what water is is still greater. Now you observe what happens to those molecules when you apply a certain amount of energy. Your knowledge is still greater. If it isn’t, what do you mean by knowledge?

Prof. F: Both you and your positivist opponents would agree that the knowledge is greater. But they would then raise the question of whether one has to go a further step or not—or why one should have made this step in the first place. Why does the breaking of the macroscopic down into the molecular constitute a significant step, whereas the addition of some other type of knowledge—

AR : Such as?

Prof. F: Such as the knowledge of, say, the shape of the water at present, or the electrical charges involved.

AR: All that is knowledge. The knowledge of anything that can happen to water—what temperature it will freeze at, how it reflects light—any characteristic of a given object of study is knowledge. If you can establish that this characteristic pertains to water, you have learned something new about water.

But if the problem here involves the issue of necessity vs. contingency, then it’s a prescientific problem, a strictly philosophical problem. What do you mean by “necessity”? By “necessity,” we mean that things are a certain way and had to be. I would maintain that the statement “Things are,” when referring to non-man-made occurrences, is the synonym of “They had to be.” Because unless we start with the premise of an arbitrary God who creates nature, what is had to be. We have to drop any mystical premise and keep the full context in mind. Then, aside from human action, what things are is what they had to be.

The alternative of what “had to be” versus what “didn’t have to be” doesn’t apply metaphysically. It applies only to the realm of human action and human choice. For instance, will you wear a gray suit or a blue suit? That’s up to you. You didn’t have to wear either one. Let’s assume you have only one suit. Even then you can’t say you had to wear it. You chose to wear it rather than be naked. Anything pertaining to actions open to human choice raises the question: “Is it necessary or is it volitional?” But in regard to facts which are metaphysical—that is, not created by a human action—there is no such thing as necessity—or, the fact of existence is the necessity.

Prof. A: I think that was exactly my problem. I was assuming that the fact that a certain entity had always done a certain thing had no significance in itself—that it could be otherwise tomorrow. But actually, something would act differently tomorrow only if a new factor entered in.

AR: Yes.

Prof. A: And by going to the molecular level, you tend to exclude any new factor; you have more awareness of the mechanism operating, so you have more knowledge of what is going to affect it and what isn’t; you understand what the process is that’s happening. I was assuming exactly what you were saying, that the fact that the energy required was so-and-so today, might change tomorrow, because of God knows what. So the answer lies in the point that necessity is just identity.

AR: Exactly.

Prof. C: On this issue of boiling water and finding out that it must boil because of understanding its molecular structure: isn’t it related in some way to the issue of unit-economy in concepts? Because in theory-formation one attempts to condense a vast amount of knowledge into a smaller and smaller number of principles. And when one is able to explain the boiling of water in terms of the electrons and protons, not only does one explain boiling as necessary from these few facts, but also one explains a vast number of other characteristics, properties, and set of behaviors for water and a whole scad of other substances.

AR: Oh yes.

Prof. C: So when you go to that level, you have widened your knowledge to a much larger scope by integrating the data to a few simple laws, such as, in this case, the properties of the electrons.

AR: You mean, it is also applicable to more than water, and if you discover how the molecules of water react to heat, you then open the way to discoveries concerning how other elements react to heat, and you learn a great deal about other elements that way.

Prof. C: Right.

AR: Oh, of course.

Prof. C: So the objection of the logical positivist would be valid only if one learned nothing else relating water at the molecular level to other substances. Then one would say one has additional knowledge, but one doesn’t have a more fundamental knowledge.

AR: No, the objection wouldn’t be valid even then. To begin with, the supposition is impossible. Everything that you discover about one kind of subject or element opens the way for the same type of inquiry and discovery about other elements.

But let’s assume for a moment that it had no other applications. Even then, you learn something about water and how to handle it and what you can obtain from it. If you discover that its molecules move in a certain way and that causes boiling, this can lead you to discover other things you can do with water, such as what happens under a deep freeze or what happens with liquid oxygen—which is all derived from the same type of knowledge, from the same category of science.

And don’t forget—it is important here—what the purpose of knowledge is. The purpose is for you to deal with that which you are studying. And if you discover why water boils, you will know something more and will be able to do more things with water than the primitive man who knows only that if he holds it over fire a certain length of time it will boil. By discovering such issues as temperature and molecular structure, you have made yourself infinitely more capable of dealing with water and using it for your purposes than the primitive man who only made the first observation.

PART FIVE

Early Novels and Politics

EDITOR’S NOTE: Although AR is widely known as a champion of individualism and capitalism, political themes were her primary concern only in her early works. Her focus changed in the 1930s when she concluded that politics rests on ethics and, ultimately, on basic philosophy.

Anthem, a novelette published in 1938, is the story of a future collectivist society in which the word “I” has been lost-and of the individual who rediscovers it.

The first excerpt from Anthem presents the young hero on the brink of a scientific invention. The second passage, much later in time, shows the hero offering his invention to the Council of Scholars. The final excerpt is the first three paragraphs of the climactic Chapter Eleven.

1. The Individual vs. the State

Anthem

IT IS A SIN TO WRITE THIS. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. We have broken the laws. The laws say that men may not write unless the Council of Vocations bid them so. May we be forgiven!

But this is not the only sin upon us. We have committed a greater crime, and for this crime there is no name. What punishment awaits us if it be discovered we know not, for no such crime has come in the memory of men and there are no laws to provide for it.

It is dark here. The flame of the candle stands still in the air. Nothing moves in this tunnel save our hand on the paper. We are alone here under the earth. It is a fearful word, alone. The laws say that none among men may be alone, ever and at any time, for this is the great transgression and the root of all evil. But we have broken many laws. And now there is nothing here save our one body, and it is strange to see only two legs stretched on the ground, and on the wall before us the shadow of our one head.

The walls are cracked and water runs upon them in thin threads without sound, black and glistening as blood. We stole the candle from the larder of the Home of the Street Sweepers. We shall be sentenced to ten years in the Palace of Corrective Detention if it be discovered. But this matters not. It matters only that the light is precious and we should not waste it to write when we need it for that work which is our crime. Nothing matters save the work, our secret, our evil, our precious work. Still, we must also write, for—may the Council have mercy on us!—we wish to speak for once to no ears but our own.

Our name is Equality 7-2521, as it is written on the iron bracelet which all men wear on their left wrists with their names upon it. We are twenty-one years old. We are six feet tall, and this is a burden, for there are not many men who are six feet tall. Ever have the Teachers and the Leaders pointed to us and frowned and said: “There is evil in your bones, Equality 7-2521, for your body has grown beyond the bodies of your brothers.” But we cannot change our bones nor our body.

We were born with a curse. It has always driven us to thoughts which are forbidden. It has always given us wishes which men may not wish. We know that we are evil, but there is no will in us and no power to resist it. This is our wonder and our secret fear, that we know and do not resist.

We strive to be like all our brother men, for all men must be alike. Over the portals of the Palace of the World Council, there are words cut in the marble, which we repeat to ourselves whenever we are tempted:

“We are one in all and all in one.
There are no men but only the great WE,
One, indivisible and forever.”

We repeat this to ourselves, but it helps us not.

These words were cut long ago. There is green mould in the grooves of the letters and yellow streaks on the marble, which come from more years than men could count. And these words are the truth for they are written on the Palace of the World Council, and the World Council is the body of all truth. Thus has it been ever since the Great Rebirth, and farther back than that no memory can reach.

But we must never speak of the times before the Great Rebirth, else we are sentenced to three years in the Palace of Corrective Detention. It is only the Old Ones who whisper about it in the evenings, in the Home of the Useless. They whisper many strange things, of the towers which rose to the sky, in those Unmentionable Times, and of the wagons which moved without horses, and of the lights which burned without flame. But those times were evil. And those times passed away, when men saw the Great Truth which is this: that all men are one and that there is no will save the will of all men together.

All men are good and wise. It is only we, Equality 7-2521, we alone who were born with a curse. For we are not like our brothers. And as we look back upon our life, we see that it has ever been thus and that it has brought us step by step to our last, supreme transgression, our crime of crimes hidden here under the ground.

We remember the Home of Infants where we lived till we were five years old, together with all the children of the City who had been born in the same year. The sleeping halls there were white and clean and bare of all things save one hundred beds. We were just like all our brothers then, save for the one transgression: we fought with our brothers. There are few offenses blacker than to fight with our brothers, at any age and for any cause whatsoever. The Council of the Home told us so, and of all the children of that year, we were locked in the cellar most often.

When we were five years old, we were sent to the Home of the Students, where there are ten wards, for our ten years of learning. Men must learn till they reach their fifteenth year. Then they go to work. In the Home of the Students we arose when the big bell rang in the tower and we went to our beds when it rang again. Before we removed our garments, we stood in the great sleeping hall, and we raised our right arms, and we said all together with the three Teachers at the head:

“We are nothing. Mankind is all. By the grace of our brothers are we allowed our lives. We exist through, by and for our brothers who are the State. Amen.”

Then we slept. The sleeping halls were white and clean and bare of all things save one hundred beds.

We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those years in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked upon us.

So we fought against this curse. We tried to forget our lessons, but we always remembered. We tried not to understand what the Teachers taught, but we always understood it before the Teachers had spoken. We looked upon Union 5-3992, who were a pale boy with only half a brain, and we tried to say and do as they did, that we might be like them, like Union 5-3992, but somehow the Teachers knew that we were not. And we were lashed more often than all the other children.

The Teachers were just, for they had been appointed by the Councils, and the Councils are the voice of all justice, for they are the voice of all men. And if sometimes, in the secret darkness of our heart, we regret that which befell us on our fifteenth birthday, we know that it was through our own guilt. We had broken a law, for we had not paid heed to the words of our Teachers. The Teachers had said to us all:

“Dare not choose in your minds the work you would like to do when you leave the Home of the Students. You shall do that which the Council of Vocations shall prescribe for you. For the Council of Vocations knows in its great wisdom where you are needed by your brother men, better than you can know it in your unworthy little minds. And if you are not needed by your brother men, there is no reason for you to burden the earth with your bodies.”

We knew this well, in the years of our childhood, but our curse broke our will. We were guilty and we confess it here: we were guilty of the great Transgression of Preference. We preferred some work and some lessons to the others. We did not listen well to the history of all the Councils elected since the Great Rebirth. But we loved the Science of Things. We wished to know. We wished to know about all the things which make the earth around us. We asked so many questions that the Teachers forbade it.

We think that there are mysteries in the sky and under the water and in the plants which grow. But the Council of Scholars has said that there are no mysteries, and the Council of Scholars knows all things. And we learned much from our Teachers. We learned that the earth is flat and that the sun revolves around it, which causes the day and the night. We learned the names of all the winds which blow over the seas and push the sails of our great ships. We learned how to bleed men to cure them of all ailments.

We loved the Science of Things. And in the darkness, in the secret hour, when we awoke in the night and there were no brothers around us, but only their shapes in the beds and their snores, we closed our eyes, and we held our lips shut, and we stopped our breath, that no shudder might let our brothers see or hear or guess, and we thought that we wished to be sent to the Home of the Scholars when our time would come.

All the great modern inventions come from the Home of the Scholars, such as the newest one, which we found only a hundred years ago, of how to make candles from wax and string; also, how to make glass, which is put in our windows to protect us from the rain. To find these things, the Scholars must study the earth and learn from the rivers, from the sands, from the winds and the rocks. And if we went to the Home of the Scholars, we could learn from these also. We could ask questions of these, for they do not forbid questions.

And questions give us no rest. We know not why our curse makes us seek we know not what, ever and ever. But we cannot resist it. It whispers to us that there are great things on this earth of ours, and that we can know them if we try, and that we must know them. We ask, why must we know, but it has no answer to give us. We must know that we may know.

So we wished to be sent to the Home of the Scholars. We wished it so much that our hands trembled under the blankets in the night, and we bit our arm to stop that other pain which we could not endure. It was evil and we dared not face our brothers in the morning. For men may wish nothing for themselves. And we were punished when the Council of Vocations came to give us our life Mandates which tell those who reach their fifteenth year what their work is to be for the rest of their days.

The Council of Vocations came on the first day of spring, and they sat in the great hall. And we who were fifteen and all the Teachers came into the great hall. And the Council of Vocations sat on a high dais, and they had but two words to speak to each of the Students. They called the Students’ names, and when the Students stepped before them, one after another, the Council said: “Carpenter” or “Doctor” or “Cook” or “Leader.” Then each Student raised their right arm and said: “The will of our brothers be done.”

Now if the Council has said “Carpenter” or “Cook,” the Students so assigned go to work and they do not study any further. But if the Council has said “Leader,” then those Students go into the Home of the Leaders, which is the greatest house in the City, for it has three stories. And there they study for many years, so that they may become candidates and be elected to the City Council and the State Council and the World Council—by a free and general vote of all men. But we wished not to be a Leader, even though it is a great honor. We wished to be a Scholar.

So we waited our turn in the great hall and then we heard the Council of Vocations call our name: “Equality 7-2521.” We walked to the dais, and our legs did not tremble, and we looked up at the Council. There were five members of the Council, three of the male gender and two of the female. Their hair was white and their faces were cracked as the clay of a dry river bed. They were old. They seemed older than the marble of the Temple of the World Council. They sat before us and they did not move. And we saw no breath to stir the folds of their white togas. But we knew that they were alive, for a finger of the hand of the oldest rose, pointed to us, and fell down again. This was the only thing which moved, for the lips of the oldest did not move as they said: “Street Sweeper.”

We felt the cords of our neck grow tight as our head rose higher to look upon the faces of the Council, and we were happy. We knew we had been guilty, but now we had a way to atone for it. We would accept our Life Mandate, and we would work for our brothers, gladly and willingly, and we would erase our sin against them, which they did not know, but we knew. So we were happy, and proud of ourselves and of our victory over ourselves. We raised our right arm and we spoke, and our voice was the clearest, the steadiest voice in the hall that day, and we said:

“The will of our brothers be done.”

And we looked straight into the eyes of the Council, but their eyes were as cold blue glass buttons.

So we went into the Home of the Street Sweepers. It is a grey house on a narrow street. There is a sundial in its courtyard, by which the Council of the Home can tell the hours of the day and when to ring the bell. When the bell rings, we all arise from our beds. The sky is green and cold in our windows to the east. The shadow on the sundial marks off a half-hour while we dress and eat our breakfast in the dining hall, where there are five long tables with twenty clay plates and twenty clay cups on each table. Then we go to work in the streets of the City, with our brooms and our rakes. In five hours, when the sun is high, we return to the Home and we eat our midday meal, for which one-half hour is allowed. Then we go to work again. In five hours, the shadows are blue on the pavements, and the sky is blue with a deep brightness which is not bright. We come back to have our dinner, which lasts one hour. Then the bell rings and we walk in a straight column to one of the City Halls, for the Social Meeting. Other columns of men arrive from the Homes of the different Trades. The candles are lit, and the Councils of the different Homes stand in a pulpit, and they speak to us of our duties and of our brother men. Then visiting Leaders mount the pulpit and they read to us the speeches which were made in the City Council that day, for the City Council represents all men and all men must know. Then we sing hymns, the Hymn of Brotherhood, and the Hymn of Equality, and the Hymn of the Collective Spirit. The sky is a soggy purple when we return to the Home. Then the bell rings and we walk in a straight column to the City Theatre for three hours of Social Recreation. There a play is shown upon the stage, with two great choruses from the Home of the Actors, which speak and answer all together, in two great voices. The plays are about toil and how good it is. Then we walk back to the Home in a straight column. The sky is like a black sieve pierced by silver drops that tremble, ready to burst through. The moths beat against the street lanterns. We go to our beds and we sleep, till the bell rings again. The sleeping halls are white and clean and bare of all things save one hundred beds.

Thus we lived each day of four years, until two springs ago when our crime happened. Thus must all men live until they are forty. At forty, they are worn out. At forty, they are sent to the Home of the Useless, where the Old Ones live. The Old Ones do not work, for the State takes care of them. They sit in the sun in summer and they sit by the fire in winter. They do not speak often, for they are weary. The Old Ones know that they are soon to die. When a miracle happens and some live to be forty-five, they are the Ancient Ones, and children stare at them when passing by the Home of the Useless. Such is to be our life, as that of all our brothers and of the brothers who came before us.

Such would have been our life, had we not committed our crime which changed all things for us. And it was our curse which drove us to our crime. We had been a good Street Sweeper and like all our brother Street Sweepers, save for our cursed wish to know. We looked too long at the stars at night, and at the trees and the earth. And when we cleaned the yard of the Home of the Scholars, we gathered the glass vials, the pieces of metal, the dried bones which they had discarded. We wished to keep these things to study them, but we had no place to hide them. So we carried them to the City Cesspool. And then we made the discovery. [...]

IT IS DARK HERE IN THE FOREST. The leaves rustle over our head, black against the last gold of the sky. The moss is soft and warm. We shall sleep on this moss for many nights, till the beasts of the forest come to tear our body. We have no bed now, save the moss, and no future, save the beasts.

We are old now, yet we were young this morning, when we carried our glass box through the streets of the City to the Home of the Scholars. No men stopped us, for there were none about from the Palace of Corrective Detention, and the others knew nothing. No men stopped us at the gate. We walked through empty passages and into the great hall where the World Council of Scholars sat in solemn meeting.

We saw nothing as we entered, save the sky in the great windows, blue and glowing. Then we saw the Scholars who sat around a long table; they were as shapeless clouds huddled at the rise of the great sky. There were men whose famous names we knew, and others from distant lands whose names we had not heard. We saw a great painting on the wall over their heads, of the twenty illustrious men who had invented the candle.

All the heads of the Council turned to us as we entered. These great and wise of the earth did not know what to think of us, and they looked upon us with wonder and curiosity, as if we were a miracle. It is true that our tunic was torn and stained with brown stains which had been blood. We raised our right arm and we said:

“Our greeting to you, our honored brothers of the World Council of Scholars!”

The Collective 0-0009, the oldest and wisest of the Council, spoke and asked:

“Who are you, our brother? For you do not look like a Scholar.”

“Our name is Equality 7-2521,” we answered, “and we are a Street Sweeper of this City.”

Then it was as if a great wind had stricken the hall, for all the Scholars spoke at once, and they were angry and frightened.

“A Street Sweeper! A Street Sweeper walking in upon the World Council of Scholars! It is not to be believed! It is against all the rules and all the laws!”

But we knew how to stop them.

“Our brothers!” we said. “We matter not, nor our transgression. It is only our brother men who matter. Give no thought to us, for we are nothing, but listen to our words, for we bring you a gift such as has never been brought to men. Listen to us, for we hold the future of mankind in our hands.”

Then they listened.

We placed our glass box upon the table before them. We spoke of it, and of our long quest, and of our tunnel, and of our escape from the Palace of Corrective Detention. Not a hand moved in that hall, as we spoke, nor an eye. Then we put the wires to the box, and they all bent forward and sat still, watching. And we stood still, our eyes upon the wire. And slowly, slowly as a flush of blood, a red flame trembled in the wire. Then the wire glowed.

But terror struck the men of the Council. They leapt to their feet, they ran from the table, and they stood pressed against the wall, huddled together, seeking the warmth of one another’s bodies to give them courage.

We looked upon them and we laughed and said:

“Fear nothing, our brothers. There is a great power in these wires, but this power is tamed. It is yours. We give it to you.”

Still they would not move.

“We give you the power of the sky!” we cried. “We give you the key to the earth! Take it, and let us be one of you, the humblest among you. Let us all work together, and harness this power, and make it ease the toil of men. Let us throw away our candles and our torches. Let us flood our cities with light. Let us bring a new light to men!”

But they looked upon us, and suddenly we were afraid. For their eyes were still, and small, and evil.

“Our brothers!” we cried. “Have you nothing to say to us?”

Then Collective 0-0009 moved forward. They moved to the table and the others followed.

“Yes,” spoke Collective 0-0009, “we have much to say to you.”

The sound of their voice brought silence to the hall and to the beat of our heart.

“Yes,” said Collective 0-0009, “we have much to say to a wretch who have broken all the laws and who boast of their infamy! How dared you think that your mind held greater wisdom than the minds of your brothers? And if the Councils had decreed that you should be a Street Sweeper, how dared you think that you could be of greater use to men than in sweeping the streets?”

“How dared you, gutter cleaner,” spoke Fraternity 9-3452, “to hold yourself as one alone and with the thoughts of the one and not of the many?”

“You shall be burned at the stake,” said Democracy 4-6998.

“No, they shall be lashed,” said Unanimity 7-3304, “till there is nothing left under the lashes.”

“No,” said Collective 0-0009, “we cannot decide upon this, our brothers. No such crime has ever been committed, and it is not for us to judge. Nor for any small Council. We shall deliver this creature to the World Council itself and let their will be done.”

We looked upon them and we pleaded:

“Our brothers! You are right. Let the will of the Council be done upon our body. We do not care. But the light? What will you do with the light?”

Collective 0-0009 looked upon us, and they smiled.

“So you think that you have found a new power,” said Collective 0-0009. “Do all your brothers think that?”

“No,” we answered.

“What is not thought by all men cannot be true,” said Collective 0-0009.

“You have worked on this alone?” asked International 1-5537.

“Yes,” we answered.

“What is not done collectively cannot be good,” said International 1-5537.

“Many men in the Homes of the Scholars have had strange new ideas in the past,” said Solidarity 8-1164, “but when the majority of their brother Scholars voted against them, they abandoned their ideas, as all men must.”

“This box is useless,” said Alliance 6-7349.

“Should it be what they claim of it,” said Harmony 9-2642, “then it would bring ruin to the Department of Candles. The Candle is a great boon to mankind, as approved by all men. Therefore it cannot be destroyed by the whim of one.”

“This would wreck the Plans of the World Council,” said Unanimity 2-9913, “and without the Plans of the World Council the sun cannot rise. It took fifty years to secure the approval of all the Councils for the Candle, and to decide upon the number needed, and to re-fit the Plans so as to make candles instead of torches. This touched upon thousands and thousands of men working in scores of States. We cannot alter the Plans again so soon.”

“And if this should lighten the toil of men,” said Similarity 5-0306, “then it is a great evil, for men have no cause to exist save in toiling for other men.”

Then Collective 0-0009 rose and pointed at our box.

“This thing,” they said, “must be destroyed.”

And all the others cried as one:

“It must be destroyed!”

Then we leapt to the table.

We seized our box, we shoved them aside, and we ran to the window. We turned and we looked at them for the last time, and a rage, such as it is not fit for humans to know, choked our voice in our throat.

“You fools!” we cried. “You fools! You thrice-damned fools!”

We swung our fist through the windowpane, and we leapt out in a ringing rain of glass.

We fell, but we never let the box fall from our hands. Then we ran. We ran blindly, and men and houses streaked past us in a torrent without shape. And the road seemed not to be flat before us, but as if it were leaping up to meet us, and we waited for the earth to rise and strike us in the face. But we ran. We knew not where we were going. We knew only that we must run, run to the end of the world, to the end of our days.

Then we knew suddenly that we were lying on a soft earth and that we had stopped. Trees taller than we had ever seen before stood over us in a great silence. Then we knew. We were in the Uncharted Forest. We had not thought of coming here, but our legs had carried our wisdom, and our legs had brought us to the Uncharted Forest against our will.

Our glass box lay beside us. We crawled to it, we fell upon it, our face in our arms, and we lay still.

We lay thus for a long time. Then we rose, we took our box and walked on into the forest.

It mattered not where we went. We knew that men would not follow us, for they never enter the Uncharted Forest. We had nothing to fear from them. The forest disposes of its own victims. This gave us no fear either. Only we wished to be away, away from the City and from the air that touches upon the air of the City. So we walked on, our box in our arms, our heart empty.

We are doomed. Whatever days are left to us, we shall spend them alone. And we have heard of the corruption to be found in solitude. We have torn ourselves from the truth which is our brother men, and there is no road back for us, and no redemption.

We know these things, but we do not care. We care for nothing on earth. We are tired.

Only the glass box in our arms is like a living heart that gives us strength. We have lied to ourselves. We have not built this box for the good of our brothers. We built it for its own sake. It is above all our brothers to us, and its truth above their truth. Why wonder about this? We have not many days to live. We are walking to the fangs awaiting us somewhere among the great, silent trees. There is not a thing behind us to regret. [...]

I AM. I THINK. I WILL.

My hands... My spirit ... My sky... My forest ... This earth of mine....

What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer.

I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The theme of We the Living, AR’s first novel, published in 1936, is the individual versus the state. Set during the Communist Revolution, the story shows how dictatorship—any dictatorship—suffocates human life.

The following selection, from the middle of the novel, features the heroine, Kira Argounova; Leo Kovalensky, the man she loves; and Andrei Taganov, an officer of the Soviet secret police who loves her.

Kira is studying at the Technological Institute to be a builder; Leo is studying history and philosophy at Petrograd State University. Kira and Leo are both “bourgeois”: her father’s business has been confiscated by the Soviets; his father was an admiral who had fought for the Czar. Andrei, of course, is pure “proletarian.”

We the Living

The Purge

AT FIRST there were whispers.

Students gathered in groups in dark corners and jerked their heads nervously at every approaching newcomer, and in their whispers one heard the words: “The Purge.”

In lines at co-operatives and in tramways people asked: “Have you heard about the Purge?”

In the columns of Pravda there appeared many mentions of the deplorable state of Red colleges and of the coming Purge.

And then, at the end of the winter semester, in the Technological Institute, in the University and in all the institutes of higher education, there appeared a large notice with huge letters in red pencil:

THE PURGE

The notice directed all students to call at the office, receive questionnaires, fill them out promptly, have their Upravdom certify to the truth of the answers and return them to the Purging Committee. The schools of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics were to be cleaned of all socially undesirable persons. Those found socially undesirable were to be expelled, never to be admitted to any college again.

Newspapers roared over the country like trumpets: “Science is a weapon of the class struggle! Proletarian schools are for the Proletariat! We shall not educate our class enemies!”

There were those who were careful not to let these trumpets be heard too loudly across the border.

Kira received her questionnaire at the Institute, and Leo—his at the University. They sat silently at their dinner table, filling out the answers. They did not each much dinner that night. When they signed the questionnaires, they knew they had signed the death warrant of their future; but they did not say it aloud and they did not look at each other.

The main questions were:

Who were your parents?

What was your father’s occupation prior to the year 1917?

What was your father’s occupation from the year 1917 to the year 1921?

What is your father’s occupation now?

What is your mother’s occupation?

What did you do during the civil war?

What did your father do during the civil war?

Are you a Trade Union member?

Are you a member of the All-Union Communist Party?

Any attempt to give a false answer was futile; the answers were to be investigated by the Purging Committee and the G.P.U. A false answer was to be punished by arrest, imprisonment or any penalty up to the supreme one.

Kira’s hand trembled a little when she handed to the Purge Committee the questionnaire that bore the answer:

What was your father’s occupation prior to the year 1917? Owner of the Argounov Textile Factory.

What awaited those who were to be expelled, no one dared to think; no one mentioned it; the questionnaires were turned in and the students waited for a call from the committee, waited silently, nerves tense as wires. In the long corridors of the colleges, where the troubled stream of students clotted into restless clusters, they whispered that one’s “social origin” was most important—that if you were of “bourgeois descent,” you didn’t have a chance—that if your parents had been wealthy, you were still a “class enemy,” even though you were starving—and that you must try, if you could, at the price of your immortal soul, if you had one, to prove your “origin from the workbench or the plough.” There were more leather jackets, and red kerchiefs, and sunflower-seed shells in the college corridors, and jokes about: “My parents? Why, they were a peasant woman and two workers.”

It was spring again, and melting snow drilled the sidewalks, and blue hyacinths were sold on street corners. But those who were young had no thought left for spring and those who still thought were not young any longer.

Kira Argounova, head high, stood before the Purge Committee of the Technological Institute. At the table, among the men of the committee whom she did not know, sat three persons she knew: Comrade Sonia, Pavel Syerov, Andrei Taganov.

It was Pavel Syerov who did most of the questioning. Her questionnaire lay on the table before him. “So, Citizen Argounova, your father was a factory owner?”

“Yes.”

“I see. And your mother? Did she work before the revolution?”

“No.”

“I see. Did you employ servants in your home?”

“Yes.”

“I see.”

Comrade Sonia asked: “And you’ve never joined a Trade Union, Citizen Argounova? Didn’t find it desirable?”

“I have never had the opportunity.”

“I see.”

Andrei Taganov listened. His face did not move. His eyes were cold, steady, impersonal, as if he had never seen Kira before. And suddenly she felt an inexplicable pity for him, for that immobility and what it hid, although he showed not the slightest sign of what it hid.

But when he asked her a question suddenly, even though his voice was hard and his eyes empty, the question was a plea: “But you’ve always been in strict sympathy with the Soviet Government, Citizen Argounova, haven’t you?”

She answered very softly: “Yes.”

Somewhere, around a lamp, late in the night, amid rustling papers, reports and documents, a committee was holding a conference.

“Factory owners were the chief exploiters of the Proletariat.”

“Worse than landowners.”

“Most dangerous of class enemies.”

“We are performing a great service to the cause of the Revolution and no personal feelings are to interfere with our duty.”

“Order from Moscow—children of former factory owners are in the first category to be expelled.”

A voice asked, weighing every word: “Any exceptions to that rule, Comrade Taganov?”

He stood by a window, his hands clasped behind his back. He answered : “None.”

The names of those expelled were typewritten on a long sheet of paper and posted on a blackboard in the office of the Technological Institute.

Kira had expected it. But when she saw the name on the list: “Argounova, Kira,” she closed her eyes and looked again and read the long list carefully, to make sure.

Then she noticed that her brief case was open; she clasped the catch carefully; she looked at the hole in her glove and stuck her finger out, trying to see how far it would go, and twisted an unraveled thread into a little snake and watched it uncoil.

Then she felt that someone was watching her. She turned. Andrei stood alone in a window niche. He was looking at her, but he did not move forward, he did not say a word, he did not incline his head in greeting. She knew what he feared, what he hoped, what he was waiting for. She walked to him, and looked up at him, and extended her hand with the same trusting smile he had known on the same young lips, only the lips trembled a little.

“It’s all right, Andrei. I know you couldn’t help it.”

She had not expected the gratitude, a gratitude like pain, in his low voice when he answered: “I’d give you my place—if I could.”

“Oh, it’s all right.... Well ... I guess I won’t be a builder after all.... I guess I won’t build any aluminum bridges.” She tried to laugh. “It’s all right, because everybody always told me one can’t build a bridge of aluminum anyway.” She noticed that it was harder for him to smile than for her. “And Andrei,” she said softly, knowing that he did not dare to ask it, “this doesn’t mean that we won’t see each other any more, does it?”

He took her hand in both of his. “It doesn’t, Kira, if...”

“Well, then, it doesn’t. Give me your phone number and address, so I can call you, because we ... we won’t meet here ... any more. We’re such good friends that—isn’t it funny?—I’ve never even known your address. All’s for the best. Maybe...maybe we’ll be better friends now.”

When she came home, Leo was sprawled across the bed, and he didn’t get up. He looked at her and laughed. He laughed dryly, monotonously, senselessly.

She stood still, looking at him.

“Thrown out?” he asked, rising on a wavering elbow, his hair falling over his face. “Don’t have to tell me. I know. You’re kicked out. Like a dog. So am I. Like two dogs. Congratulations, Kira Alexandrovna. Hearty proletarian congratulations!”

“Leo, you’ve... you’ve been drinking!”

“Sure. To celebrate. All of us did. Dozens and dozens of us at the University. A toast to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.... Many toasts to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.... Don’t stare at me like that.... It’s a good old custom to drink at births, and weddings, and funerals.... Well, we weren’t born together, Comrade Argounova.... And we’ve never had a wedding, Comrade Argounova.... But we might yet see the other.... We might ... yet ... the other ... Kira....”

She was on her knees by the bed, gathering to her breast a pale face with a contorted wound of a mouth, she was brushing damp hair off his forehead, she was whispering: “Leo ... dearest ... you shouldn’t do that.... Now’s the time you shouldn’t.... We have to think clearly now....” She was whispering without conviction. “It’s not dangerous so long as we don’t give up.... You must take care of yourself, Leo.... You must spare yourself....”

His mouth spat out: “For what?” [...]

Because there was no future, they hung on to the present.

There were days when Leo sat for hours reading a book, and hardly spoke to Kira, and when he spoke his smile held a bitter, endless contempt for himself, for the world, for eternity.

Once, she found him drunk, leaning against the table, staring intently at a broken glass on the floor.

“Leo! Where did you get it?”

“Borrowed it. Borrowed it from our dear neighbor Comrade Marisha. She always has plenty.”

“Leo, why do you?”

“Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I? Who in this whole damn world can tell me why I shouldn’t?”

But there were days when a new calm suddenly cleared his eyes and his smile. He waited for Kira to come home from work and when she entered he drew her hastily into his arms. They could sit through an evening without a word, their presence, a glance, the pressure of a hand drugging them into security, making them forget the coming morning, all the coming mornings.

Arm in arm, they walked through silent, luminous streets in the white nights of spring. The sky was like dull glass glowing with a sunless radiance from somewhere beyond. The could look at each other, at the still, sleepless city, in the strange, milky light. He pressed her arm close to his, and when they were alone on a long street dawn-bright and empty, he bent to kiss her.

Kira’s steps were steady. There were too many questions ahead; but here, beside her, were the things that gave her certainty: his straight, tense body, his long, thin hands, his haughty mouth with the arrogant smile that answered all questions. And, sometimes, she felt pity for those countless nameless ones somewhere around them who, in a feverish quest, were searching for some answer, and in their search crushed others, perhaps even her; but she could not be crushed, for she had the answer. She did not wonder about the future. The future was Leo.

Leo was too pale and he was silent too often. The blue on his temples looked like veins in marble. He coughed, choking. He took cough medicine, which did not help, and refused to see a doctor.

Kira saw Andrei frequently. She had asked Leo if he minded it. “Not at all,” he had answered, “if he’s your friend. Onty—would you mind?—don’t bring him here. I’m not sure I can be polite ... to one of them.”

She did not bring Andrei to the house. She telephoned him on Sundays and smiled cheerfully into the receiver: “Feel like seeing me, Andrei? Two o’clock—Summer Garden—the quay entrance.”

They sat on a bench, with the oak leaves fighting the glare of the sun above their heads, and they talked of philosophy. She smiled sometimes when she realized that Andrei was the only one with whom she could think and talk about thoughts.

They had no reason for meeting each other. Yet they met, and made dates to meet again, and she felt strangely comfortable, and he laughed at her short summer dresses, and his laughter was strangely happy.

Once, he invited her to spend a Sunday in the country. She had stayed in the city all summer; she could not refuse. Leo had found a job for Sunday: breaking the wooden bricks of pavements, with a gang repairing the streets. He did not object to her excursion.

In the country, she found a smooth sea sparkling in the sun; and a golden sand wind-pleated into faint, even waves; and the tall red candles of pines, their convulsed roots naked to the sand and wind, pine cones rolling to meet the sea shells.

Kira and Andrei had a swimming race, which she won. But when they raced down the beach in their bathing suits, sand flying from under their heels, spurting sand and water at the peaceful Sunday tourists, Andrei won. He caught her and they rolled down together, a whirl of legs, arms and mud, into the lunch basket of a matron who shrieked with terror. They disentangled themselves from each other and sat there screaming with laughter. And when the matron struggled to her feet, gathered her lunch and waddled away, grumbling something about “this vulgar modern youth that can’t keep their love-affairs to themselves,” they laughed louder.

They had dinner in a dirty little country restaurant, and Kira spoke English to the waiter who could not understand a word, but bowed low and stuttered and spilled water all over the table in his eagerness to serve the first comrade foreigner in their forgotten corner. When they were leaving, Andrei gave him twice the price of their dinner. The waiter bowed to the ground, convinced that he was dealing with genuine foreigners. Kira could not help looking a little startled. Andrei laughed when they went out: “Why not? Might as well make a waiter happy. I make more money than I can spend on myself anyway.”

In the train, as it clattered into the evening and the smoke of the city, Andrei asked: “Kira, when will I see you again?”

“I’ll call you.”

“No. I want to know now.”

“In a few days.”

“No. I want a definite day.”

“Well, then, Wednesday night?”

“All right.”

“After work, at five-thirty, at the Summer Garden.”

“All right.”

When she came home, she found Leo asleep in a chair, his hands dust-streaked, smears of dust on his damp, flushed face, his dark lashes blond with dust, his body limp with exhaustion.

She washed his face and helped him to undress. He coughed.

The two evenings that followed were long, furious arguments, but Leo surrendered: He promised to visit a doctor on Wednesday. [...]

Kira had had a restless day. Leo had promised to telephone her at the office and tell her the doctor’s diagnosis. He had not called. She telephoned him three times. There was no answer. On her way home, she remembered that it was Wednesday night and that she had a date with Andrei.

She could not keep him waiting indefinitely at a public park gate. She would drop by the Summer Garden and tell him that she couldn’t stay. She reached the Garden on time.

Andrei was not there. She looked up and down the darkening quay. She peered into the trees and shadows of the garden. She waited. Twice, she asked a militia-man what time it was. She waited. She could not understand it.

He did not come.

When she finally went home, she had waited for an hour.

She clutched her hands angrily in her pockets. She could not worry about Andrei when she thought of Leo, and the doctor, and of what she still had to hear. She hurried up the stairs. She darted through Marisha’s room and flung the door open. On the davenport, her white coat trailing to the floor, Vava was clasped in Leo’s arms, their lips locked together.

Kira stood looking at them calmly, an amazed question in her lifted eyebrows.

They jumped up. Leo was not very steady. He had been drinking again. He stood swaying, with his bitter, contemptuous smile.

Vava’s face went a dark, purplish red. She opened her mouth, choking, without a sound. And as no one said a word, she screamed suddenly into the silence: “You think it’s terrible, don’t you? Well, I think so too! It’s terrible, it’s vile! Only I don’t care! I don’t care what I do! I don’t care any more! I’m rotten? Well, I’m not the only one! Only I don’t care! I don’t care! I don’t care!”

She burst into hysterical sobs and rushed out, slamming the door. The two others did not move.

He sneered: “Well, say it.”

She answered slowly: “I have nothing to say.”

“Listen, you might as well get used to it. You might as well get used to it that you can’t have me. Because you can’t have me. You won’t have me. You won’t have me long.”

“Leo, what did the doctor say?”

He laughed: “Plenty.”

“What is it you have?”

“Nothing. Not a thing.”

“Leo!”

“Not a thing—yet. But I’m going to have it. Just a few weeks longer. I’m going to have it.”

“What, Leo?”

He swayed with a grand gesture: “Nothing much. Just—tuberculosis.”

The doctor asked: “Are you his wife?”

Kira hesitated, then answered: “No.”

The doctor said: “I see.” Then, he added: “Well, I suppose you have a right to know it. Citizen Kovalensky is in a very bad condition. We call it incipient tuberculosis. It can still be stopped-now. In a few weeks—it will be too late.”

“In a few weeks—he’ll have—tuberculosis?”

“Tuberculosis is a serious disease, citizen. In Soviet Russia—it is a fatal disease. It is strongly advisable to prevent it. If you let it start—you will not be likely to stop it.”

“What ... does he need?”

“Rest. Plenty of it. Sunshine. Fresh air. Food. Human food. He needs a sanatorium for this coming winter. One more winter in Petrograd would be as certain as a firing squad. You’ll have to send him south.”

She did not answer; but the doctor smiled ironically, for he heard the answer without words and he looked at the patches on her shoes.

“If that young man is dear to you,” he said, “send him south. If you have a human possibility—or an inhuman one—send him south.”

Kira was very calm when she walked home.

When she came in, Leo was standing by the window. He turned slowly. His face was so profoundly, serenely tranquil that he looked younger; he looked as if he had had his first night of rest; he asked quietly: “Where have you been, Kira?”

“At the doctor’s.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to know all that.”

“He told me.”

“Kira, I’m sorry about last night. About that little fool. I hope you didn’t think that I ...”

“Of course, I didn’t. I understand.”

“I think it’s because I was frightened. But I’m not—now. Everything seems so much simpler—when there’s a limit set.... The thing to do now, Kira, is not to talk about it. Don’t let’s think about it. There’s nothing we can do—as the doctor probably told you. We can still be together—for a while. When it becomes contagious—well...”

She was watching him. Such was his manner of accepting his death sentence.

She said, and her voice was hard: “Nonsense, Leo. You’re going south.”

In the first State hospital she visited, the official in charge told her: “A place in a sanatorium in the Crimea? He’s not a member of the Party? And he’s not a member of a Trade Union? And he’s not a State employee? You’re joking, citizen.”

In the second hospital, the official said: “We have hundreds on our waiting list, citizen. Trade Union members. Advanced cases.... No, we cannot even register him.”

In the third hospital, the official refused to see her.

There were lines to wait in, ghastly lines of deformed creatures, of scars, and slings, and crutches, and open sores, and green, mucous patches of eyes, and grunts, and groans, and—over a line of the living—the smell of the morgue.

There were State Medical headquarters to visit, long hours of waiting in dim, damp corridors that smelt of carbolic acid and soiled linen. There were secretaries who forgot appointments, and assistants who said: “So sorry, citizen. Next, please”; there were young executives who were in a hurry, and attendants who groaned: “I tell you he’s gone, it’s after office hours, we gotta close, you can’t sit here all night.”

At the end of the first two weeks she learned, as firmly as if it were some mystic absolute, that if one had consumption one had to be a member of a Trade Union and get a Trade Union despatchment to a Trade Union Sanatorium.

There were officials to be seen, names mentioned, letters of recommendation offered, begging for an exception. There were Trade Union heads to visit, who listened to her plea with startled, ironic glances. Some laughed; some shrugged; some called their secretaries to escort the visitor out; one said he could and he would, but he named a sum she could not earn in a year.

She was firm, erect, and her voice did not tremble, and she was not afraid to beg. It was her mission, her quest, her crusade.

She wondered sometimes why the words: “But he’s going to die,” meant so little to them, and the words: “But he’s not a registered worker,” meant so little to her, and why it seemed so hard to explain.

She made Leo do his share of inquiries. He obeyed without arguing, without complaining, without hope.

She tried everything she could. She asked Victor for help. Victor said with dignity: “My dear cousin, I want you to realize that my Party membership is a sacred trust not to be used for purposes of personal advantage.”

She asked Marisha. Marisha laughed. “With all our sanatoriums stuffed like herring-barrels, and waiting lists till the next generation, and comrade workers rotting alive waiting—and here he’s not even sick yet! You don’t realize reality, Citizen Argounova.”

She could not call on Andrei. Andrei had failed her.

For several days after the date he had missed, she called on Lydia with the same question: “Has Andrei Taganov been here? Have you had any letters for me?”

The first day, Lydia said: “No.” The second day, she giggled and wanted to know what was this, a romance? and she’d tell Leo, and with Leo so handsome! and Kira interrupted patiently: “Oh, stop this rubbish, Lydia! It’s important. Let me know the minute you hear from him, will you?”

Lydia did not hear from him.

One evening, at the Dunaevs’, Kira asked Victor casually if he had seen Andrei Taganov at the Institute. “Sure,” said Victor, “he’s there every day.”

She was hurt. She was angry. She was bewildered. What had she done? For the first time, she questioned her own behavior. Had she acted foolishly that Sunday in the country? She tried to remember every word, every gesture. She could find no fault. He had seemed happier than ever before. After a while, she decided that she must trust their friendship and give him a chance to explain.

She telephoned him. She heard the old landlady’s voice yelling into the house: “Comrade Taganov!” with a positive inflection that implied his presence; there was a long pause; the landlady returned and asked: “Who’s calling him?” and before she had pronounced the last syllable of her name, Kira heard the landlady barking: “He ain’t home!” and slamming her receiver.

Kira slammed hers, too. She decided to forget Andrei Taganov

It took a month, but at the end of a month, she was convinced that the door of the State sanatoriums was locked to Leo and that she could not unlock it.

There were private sanatoriums in the Crimea. Private sanatoriums cost money. She would get the money.

She made an appointment to see Comrade Voronov and asked for an advance on her salary, an advance of six months—just enough to start him off. Comrade Voronov smiled faintly and asked her how she could be certain that she would be working there another month, let alone six.

She called on Doctor Milovsky, Vava’s father, her wealthiest acquaintance, whose bank account had been celebrated by many envious whispers. Doctor Milovsky’s face got very red and his short, pudgy hands waved at Kira hysterically, as if shooing off a ghost: “My dear little girl, why, my dear little girl, what on earth made you think that I was rich or something? Heh-heh. Very funny indeed. A capitalist or something—heh-heh. Why, we’re just existing, from hand to mouth, living by my own toil like proletarians one would say, barely existing, as one would say—that’s it—from hand to mouth.”

She knew her parents had nothing. She asked if they could try to help. Galina Petrovna cried.

She asked Vasili Ivanovitch. He offered her his last possession—Maria Petrovna’s old fur jacket. The price of the jacket would not buy a ticket to the Crimea. She did not take it.

She knew Leo would resent it, but she wrote to his aunt in Berlin. She said in her letter: “I am writing, because I love him so much—to you, because I think you must love him a little.” No answer came.

Through mysterious, stealthy whispers, more mysterious and stealthy than the G.P.U. who watched them sharply, she learned that there was private money to be lent, secretly and on a high percentage, but there was. She learned a name and an address. She went to the booth of a private trader in a market, where a fat man bent down to her nervously across a counter loaded with red kerchiefs and cotton stockings. She whispered a name. She named a sum.

“Business?” he breathed. “Speculation?”

She knew it best to say yes. Well, he told her, it could be arranged. The rates were twenty-five per cent a month. She nodded eagerly. What security did the citizen have to offer? Security? Surely she knew they didn’t lend it on her good looks? Furs or diamonds would do; good furs and any kind of diamonds. She had nothing to offer. The man turned away as if he had never spoken to her in his life.

On her way back to the tramway, through the narrow, muddy passages between the market stalls, she stopped, startled; in a little prosperous-looking booth, behind a counter heavy with fresh bread loaves, smoked hams, yellow circles of butter, she saw a familiar face: a heavy red mouth under a short nose with wide, vertical nostrils. She remembered the train speculator of the Nikolaevsky station, with the fur-lined coat and the smell of carnation oil. He had progressed in life. He was smiling at the customers, from under a fringe of salami.

On her way home, she remembered someone who had said: “I make more money than I can spend on myself.” Did anything really matter now? She would go to the Institute and try to see Andrei.

She changed tramways for the Institute. She saw Andrei. She saw him coming down the corridor and he was looking straight at her, so that her lips moved in a smile of greeting; but he turned abruptly and slammed the door of an auditorium behind him.

She stood frozen to the spot for a long time.

When she came home, Leo was standing in the middle of the room, a crumpled paper in his hand, his face distorted by anger.

“So you would?” he cried. “So you’re meddling in my affairs now? So you’re writing letters? Who asked you to write?”

On the table, she saw an envelope with a German stamp. It was addressed to Leo. “What does she say, Leo?”

“You want to know? You really want to know?”

He threw the letter at her face.

She remembered only the sentence: “There is no reason why you should expect any help from us; the less reason since you are living with a brazen harlot who has the impudence to write to respectable people.”

On the first rainy day of autumn, a delegation from a Club of Textile Women Workers visited the “House of the Peasant.” Comrade Sonia was an honorary member of the delegation. When she saw Kira at the filing cabinet in Comrade Bitiuk’s office, Comrade Sonia roared with laughter: “Well, well, well! A loyal citizen like Comrade Argounova in the Red ‘House of the Peasant’!”

“What’s the matter, comrade?” Comrade Bitiuk inquired nervously, obsequiously. “What’s the matter?”

“A joke,” roared Comrade Sonia, “a good joke!”

Kira shrugged with resignation; she knew what to expect.

When a reduction of staffs came to the “House of the Peasant” and she saw her name among those dismissed as “anti-social element,” she was not surprised. It made no difference now. She spent most of her last salary to buy eggs and milk for Leo, which he would not touch.

In the daytime, Kira was calm, with the calm of an empty face, an empty heart, a mind empty of all thoughts but one. She was not afraid: because she knew that Leo had to go south, and he would go, and she could not doubt it, and so she had nothing to fear.

But there was the night.

She felt his body, ice and moist, close to hers. She heard him coughing. Sometimes in his sleep, his head fell on her shoulder, and he lay there, trusting and helpless as a child, and his breathing was like a moan.

She saw the red bubble on Maria Petrovna’s dying lips, and she heard her screaming: “Kira! I want to live! I want to live!”

She could feel Leo’s breath in hot, panting gasps on her neck.

Then, she was not sure whether it was Maria Petrovna or Leo screaming when it was too late: “Kira! I want to live! I want to live!”

Was she going insane? It was so simple. She just needed money; a life, his life—and money.

“I make more money than I can spend on myself.”

“Kira! I want to live! I want to live!”

She made one last attempt to get money.

She was walking down a street slippery with autumn rain, yellow lights melting on black sidewalks. The doctor had said every week counted; every day counted now. She saw a resplendent limousine stopping in the orange cube of light at a theater entrance. A man stepped out; his fur coat glistened like his automobile fenders. She stood in his path. Her voice was firm and clear:

“Please! I want to speak to you. I need money. I don’t know you. I have nothing to offer you. I know it isn’t being done like this. But you’ll understand, because it’s so important. It’s to save a life.”

The man stopped. He had never heard a plea that was a command. He asked, squinting one eye appraisingly: “How much do you need?”

She told him.

“What?” he gasped. “For one night? Why, your sisters don’t make that in a whole career!”

He could not understand why the strange girl whirled around and ran across the street, straight through the puddles, as if he were going to run after her.

She made one last plea to the State.

It took many weeks of calls, letters, introductions, secretaries and assistants, but she got an appointment with one of Petrograd’s most powerful officials. She was to see him in person, face to face. He could do it. Between him and the power he could use stood only her ability to convince him.

The official sat at his desk. A tall window rose behind him, admitting a narrow shaft of light, creating the atmosphere of a cathedral. Kira stood before him. She looked straight at him; her eyes were not hostile, nor pleading; they were clear, trusting, serene; her voice was very calm, very simple, very young.

“Comrade Commissar, you see, I love him. And he is sick. You know what sickness is? It’s something strange that happens in your body and then you can’t stop it. And then he dies. And now his life—it depends on some words and a piece of paper—and it’s so simple when you just look at it as it is—it’s only something made by us, ourselves, and perhaps we’re right, and perhaps we’re wrong, but the chance we’re taking on it is frightful, isn’t it? They won’t send him to a sanatorium because they didn’t write his name on a piece of paper with many other names and call it a membership in a Trade Union. It’s only ink, you know, and paper, and something we think. You can write it and tear it up, and write it again. But the other—that which happens in one’s body—you can’t stop that. You don’t ask questions about that. Comrade Commissar, I know they are important, those things, money, and the Unions, and those papers, and all. And if one has to sacrifice and suffer for them, I don’t mind. I don’t mind if I have to work every hour of the day. I don’t mind if my dress is old—like this—don’t look at my dress, Comrade Commissar, I know it’s ugly, but I don’t mind. Perhaps, I haven’t always understood you, and all those things, but I can be obedient and learn. Only—only when it comes to life itself, Comrade Commissar, then we have to be serious, don’t we? We can’t let those things take life. One signature of your hand—and he can go to a sanatorium, and he doesn’t have to die. Comrade Commissar, if we just think of things, calmly and simply—as they are—do you know what death is? Do you know that death is—nothing at all, not at all, never again, never, no matter what we do? Don’t you see why he can’t die? I love him. We all have to suffer. We all have things we want, which are taken away from us. It’s all right. But—because we are living beings—there’s something in each of us, something like the very heart of life condensed—and that should not be touched. You understand, don’t you? Well, he is that to me, and you can’t take him from me, because you can’t let me stand here, and look at you, and talk, and breathe, and move, and then tell me you’ll take him—we’re not insane, both of us, are we, Comrade Commissar?”

The Comrade Commissar said: “One hundred thousand workers died in the civil war. Why—in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics—can’t one aristocrat die?”

Kira walked home very slowly and looked at the dark city; she looked at the glistening pavements built for many thousands of old shoes; at the tramways for men to ride in; at the stone cubes into which men crawled at night; at the posters that cried of what men dreamed and of what men ate; and she wondered whether any of those thousands of eyes around her saw what she saw, and why it had been given her to see.

Because:

In a kitchen on the fifth floor, a woman bent over a smoking stove and stirred cabbage in a kettle, and the cabbage smelt, and the woman blinked, and groaned with the pain in her back, and scratched her head with the spoon,

Because:

In a corner saloon, a man leaned against the bar and raised a foaming glass of beer, and the foam spilled over the floor and over his trousers, and he belched and sang a gay song,

Because:

In a white bed, on white sheets stained with yellow, a child slept and sniveled in its sleep, its nose wet,

Because:

On a sack of flour in the basement, a man tore a woman’s pants off, and bit into her throat, and they rolled, moaning, over the sacks of flour and potatoes,

Because:

In the silence of stone walls slowly dripping frozen dampness, a figure knelt before a gilded cross, and raised trembling arms in exaltation, and knocked a pale forehead against a cold stone floor,

Because:

In the roar of machines whirling lightnings of steel and drops of burning grease, men swung vigorous arms, and panted, heaving chests of muscles glistening with sweat, and made soap,

Because:

In a public bath, steam rose from brass pans, and red, gelatinous bodies shook scrubbing themselves with the soap, sighing and grunting, trying to scratch steaming backs, and murky water and soap suds ran down the floor into the drain—

—Leo Kovalensky was sentenced to die.

It was her last chance and she had to take it.

A modest house stood before her, on a modest street that lay deserted in the darkness. An old landlady opened the door and looked at Kira suspiciously: Comrade Taganov did not receive women visitors. But she said nothing and shuffled, leading Kira down a corridor, then stopped, pointed at a door and shuffled away.

Kira knocked.

His voice said: “Come in.”

She entered.

He was sitting at his desk and he was about to rise, but he didn’t. He sat looking at her, and then rose very slowly, so slowly that she wondered how long she stood there, at the door, while he was rising, his eyes never leaving her.

Then, he said: “Good evening, Kira.”

“Good evening, Andrei.”

“Take your coat off.”

She was suddenly frightened, uncomfortable, uncertain; she lost all the bitter, hostile assurance that had brought her here; obediently, she took off her coat and threw her hat on the bed. It was a large, bare room with whitewashed walls, a narrow iron bed, one desk, one chair, one chest of drawers, no pictures, no posters, but books, an ocean of books and papers and newspapers, running over the desk, over the chest, over the floor.

He said: “It’s cold tonight, isn’t it?”

“It’s cold.”

“Sit down.”

She sat by the desk. He sat on the bed, his hands clasping his knees. She wished he would not look at her like that, every second of every long minute. But he said calmly: “How have you been, Kira? You look tired.”

“I am a little tired.”

“How is your job?”

“It isn’t.”

“What?”

“Reduction of staffs.”

“Oh, Kira, I’m sorry. I’ll get you another one.”

“Thanks. But I don’t know whether I need one. How is your job?”

“The G.PU.? I’ve been working hard. Searches, arrests. You still aren’t afraid of me, are you?”

“No.”

“I don’t like searches.”

“Do you like arrests?”

“I don’t mind—when it’s necessary.”

They were silent, and then she said: “Andrei, if I make you uncomfortable —I’ll go.”

“No! Don’t go. Please don’t go.” He tried to laugh. “Make me uncomfortable? What makes you say that? I’m just ... just a little embarrassed ... this room of mine ... it’s in no condition to receive such a guest.”

“Oh, it’s a nice room. Big. Light.”

“You see, I’m home so seldom, and when I am, I just have time to fall in bed, without noticing what’s around me.”

“Oh.”

They were silent.

“How is your family, Kira?”

“They are fine, thank you.”

“I often see your cousin, Victor Dunaev, at the Institute. Do you like him?”

“No.”

“Neither do I.”

They were silent.

“Victor has joined the Party,” said Kira.

“I voted against him. But most of them were eager to admit him.”

“I’m glad you voted against him. He’s the kind of Party man I despise.”

“What kind of Party man don’t you despise, Kira?”

“Your kind, Andrei.”

“Kira ...” It began as a sentence, but stopped on the first word.

She said resolutely: “Andrei, what have I done?”

He looked at her, and frowned, and looked aside, shaking his head slowly: “Nothing.” Then he asked suddenly: “Why did you come here?”

“It’s been such a long time since I saw you last.”

“Two months, day after tomorrow.”

“Unless you saw me at the Institute three weeks ago.”

“I saw you.”

She waited, but he did not explain, and she tried to ignore it, her words almost a plea: “I came because I thought ... because I thought maybe you wanted to see me.”

“I didn’t want to see you.”

She rose to her feet.

“Don’t go, Kira!”

“Andrei, I don’t understand!”

He stood facing her. His voice was flat, harsh as an insult: “I didn’t want you to understand. I didn’t want you to know. But if you want to hear it—you’ll hear it. I never wanted to see you again. Because . . .” His voice was like a dull whip. “Because I love you.”

Her hands fell limply against the wall behind her. He went on: “Don’t say it. I know what you’re going to say. I’ve said it to myself again and again and again. I know every word. But it’s useless. I know I should be ashamed, and I am, but it’s useless. I know that you liked me, and trusted me, because we were friends. It was beautiful and rare, and you have every right to despise me.”

She stood pressed to the wall, not moving.

“When you came in, I thought ‘Send her away.’ But I knew that if you went away, I’d run after you. I thought ‘I won’t say a word.’ But I knew that you’d know it before you left. I love you. I know you’d think kindlier of me if I said that I hate you.”

She said nothing; she cringed against the wall, her eyes wide, her glance holding no pity for him, but a plea for his pity.

“You’re frightened? Do you see why I couldn’t face you? I knew what you felt for me and what you could never feel. I knew what you’d say, how your eyes would look at me. When did it start? I don’t know. I knew only that it must end—because I couldn’t stand it. To see you, and laugh with you, and talk of the future of humanity—and think only of when your hand would touch mine, of your feet in the sand, the little shadow on your throat, your skirt blowing in the wind. To discuss the meaning of life—and wonder if I could see the line of your breast in your open collar!”

She whispered: “Andrei ... don’t....”

It was not an admission of love, it was the confession of a crime: “Why am I telling you all this? I don’t know. I’m not sure I’m really saying it to you. I’ve been crying it to myself so often, for such a long time! You shouldn’t have come here. I’m not your friend. I don’t care if I hurt you. All you are to me is only this: I want you.”

She whispered: “Andrei . . . I didn’t know . . .”

“I didn’t want you to know. I tried to stay away from you, to break it. You don’t know what it’s done to me. There was one search. There was a woman. We arrested her. She rolled on the floor, in her nightgown, at my feet, crying for mercy. I thought of you. I thought of you there, on the floor, in your nightgown, crying for pity as I have been crying to you so many months. I’d take you—and I wouldn’t care if it were the floor, and if those men stood looking. Afterward, perhaps I’d shoot you, and shoot myself—but I wouldn’t care—because it would be afterward. I thought I could arrest you—in the middle of the night—and carry you wherever I wanted—and have you. I could do it, you know. I laughed at the woman and kicked her. My men stared at me—they had never seen me do that. They took the woman to jail—and I found an excuse to run away, to walk home alone—thinking of you.... Don’t look at me like that. You don’t have to be afraid that I’d do it.... I have nothing to offer you. I cannot offer you my life. My life is twenty-eight years of that for which you feel contempt. And you—you’re everything I’ve always expected to hate. But I want you. I’d give everything I have—everything I could ever have—Kira—for something you can’t give me!”

He saw her eyes open wide at a thought he could not guess. She breathed: “What did you say, Andrei?”

“I said, everything I have for something you can’t....”

It was terror in her eyes, a terror of the thought she had seen for a second so very clearly. She whispered, trembling: “Andrei ... I’d better go.... I’d better go now.”

But he was looking at her fixedly, approaching her, asking in a voice suddenly very soft and low: “Or is it something you ... can ... Kira?”

She was not thinking of him; she was not thinking of Leo; she was thinking of Maria Petrovna and of the red bubble on dying lips. She was pressed to the wall, cornered, her ten fingers spread apart on the white plaster. His voice, his hope were driving her on. Her body rose slowly against the wall, to her full height, higher, on tiptoe, her head thrown back, so that her throat was level with his mouth when she threw at him:

“I can! I love you.”

She wondered how strange it was to feel a man’s lips that were not Leo’s.

She was saying: “Yes ... for a long time ... but I didn’t know that you, too ...” and she felt his hands and his mouth, and she wondered whether this was joy or torture to him and how strong his arms were. She hoped it would be quick....

EDITOR’S NOTE: This scene, late in the novel, shows us the type of scum who rise to the top under collectivism. Syerov is a ranking Soviet bureaucrat; Morozov, a private speculator and influence-purchaser The two are engaged in a large-scale scheme to steal supplies from the state. Stepan Timoshenko is a leader in the Red Baltfleet. He is a veteran Communist fighter—once idealistic about the new government, now bitterly disillusioned.

The Profiteers on Collectivism

Pavel Syerov had a drink before he came to his office. He had another drink in the afternoon. He had telephoned Morozov and a voice he knew to be Morozov’s had told him that the Citizen Morozov was not at home. He paced up and down his office and smashed an inkstand. He found a misspelled word in a letter he had dictated, and threw the letter, crumpled into a twisted ball, at his secretary’s face. He telephoned Morozov and got no answer. A woman telephoned him and her soft, lisping voice said sweetly, insistently: “But, Pavlusha darling, you promised me that bracelet!” A speculator brought a bracelet tied in the corner of a dirty handkerchief, and refused to leave it without the full amount in cash. Syerov telephoned Morozov at the Food Trust; a secretary demanded to know who was calling; Syerov slammed the receiver down without answering. He roared at a ragged applicant for a job that he would turn him over to the G.P.U. and ordered his secretary to throw out all those waiting to see him. He left the office an hour earlier than usual and slammed the door behind him.

He walked past Morozov’s house on his way home and hesitated, but saw a militia-man on the corner and did not enter.

At dinner—which had been sent from a communal kitchen two blocks away, and was cold, with grease floating over the cabbage soup—Comrade Sonia said: “Really, Pavel, I’ve got to have a fur coat. I can’t allow myself to catch a cold—you know—for the child’s sake. And no rabbit fur, either. I know you can afford it. Oh, I’m not saying anything about anyone’s little activities, but I’m just keeping my eyes open.”

He threw his napkin into the soup and left the table without eating.

He called Morozov’s house and let the telephone ring for five minutes. There was no answer. He sat on the bed and emptied a bottle of vodka. Comrade Sonia left for a meeting of the Teachers’ Council of an Evening School for Illiterate Women House Workers. He emptied a second bottle.

Then he rose resolutely, swaying a little, pulled his belt tight across his fur jacket and went to Morozov’s house.

He rang three times. There was no answer. He kept his finger on the bell button, leaning indifferently against the wall. He heard no sound behind the door, but he heard steps rising up the stairs and he flung himself into the darkest corner of the landing. The steps died on the floor below and he heard a door opening and closing. He could not let himself be seen waiting there, he remembered dimly. He reached for his notebook and wrote, pressing the notebook to the wall, in the light of a street lamp outside:

MOROZOV, YOU GOD-DAMN BASTARD!

If you don’t come across with what’s due me before tomorrow morning, you’ll eat breakfast at the G.P.U., and you know what that means.

Affectionately,

PAVEL SYEROV.

He folded the note and slipped it under the door.

Fifteen minutes later, Morozov stepped noiselessly out of his bathroom and tiptoed to the lobby. He listened nervously, but heard no sound on the stair-landing. Then he noticed the faint blur of white in the darkness, on the floor.

He picked up the note and read it, bending under the dining-room lamp. His face looked gray.

The telephone rang. He shuddered, frozen to the spot, as if the eyes somewhere behind that ringing bell could see him with the note in his hand. He crammed the note deep into his pocket and answered the telephone, trembling.

It was an old aunt of his and she sniffled into the receiver, asking to borrow some money. He called her an old bitch and hung up.

Through the open bedroom door, Antonina Pavlovna, sitting at her dressing table, brushing her hair, called out in a piercing voice, objecting to the use of such language. He whirled upon her ferociously: “If it weren’t for you and that damn lover of yours . . .”

Antonina Pavlovna shrieked: “He’s not my lover—yet! If he were, do you think I’d be squatting around a sloppy old fool like you?”

They had a quarrel.

Morozov forgot about the note in his pocket.

The European roof garden had a ceiling of glass panes; it looked like a black void staring down, crushing those below more implacably than a steel vault. There were lights; yellow lights that looked dimmed in an oppressive haze which was cigarette smoke, or heat, or the black abyss above. There were white tables and yellow glints in the silverware.

Men sat at the tables. Yellow sparks flashed in their diamond studs and in the beads of moisture on their red, flushed faces. They ate; they bent eagerly over their plates; they chewed hurriedly, incredulously; they were not out on a carefree evening in a gay night spot; they were eating.

In a corner, a yellowish bald head went over a red steak on a white plate; the man cut the steak, smacking his fleshy red lips. Across the table, a red-headed girl of fifteen ate hastily, her head drawn into her shoulders; when she raised her head, she blushed from the tip of her short, freckled nose to her white, freckled neck, and her mouth was twisted as if she were going to scream.

A fierce jet of smoke swayed by a dark window pane; a thin individual, with a long face that betrayed too closely its future appearance as a skull, rocked monotonously on the back legs of his chair, and smoked without interruption, holding a cigarette in long, yellow fingers, spouting smoke out of wide nostrils frozen in a sardonic, unhealthy grin.

Women moved among the tables, with an awkward, embarrassed insolence. A head of soft, golden waves nodded unsteadily under a light, wide eyes in deep blue rings, a young mouth open in a vicious, sneering smile. In the middle of the room, a gaunt, dark woman with knobs on her shoulders, holes under her collar-bones and a skin the color of muddy coffee, was laughing too loudly, opening painted lips like a gash over strong white teeth and very red gums.

The orchestra played “John Gray.” It flung brief, blunt notes out into space, as if tearing them off the strings before they were ripe, hiding the gap of an uncapturable gaiety under a convulsive rhythm.

Waiters glided soundlessly through the crowd and bent over the tables, obsequious and exaggerated, and their flabby jowls conveyed expressions of respect, and mockery, and pity for those guilty, awkward ones who made such an effort to be gay.

Morozov did remember that he had to raise money before morning. He came to the European roof garden, alone. He sat at three different tables, smoked four different cigars and whispered confidentially into five different ears that belonged to corpulent men who did not seem to be in a hurry. At the end of two hours, he had the money in his wallet.

He mopped his forehead with relief, sat alone at a table in a dark corner and ordered cognac.

Stepan Timoshenko leaned so far across a white table cloth that he seemed to be lying on, rather than sitting at, the table. His head was propped on his elbow, his fingers on the nape of his broad neck; he had a glass in his other hand. When the glass was empty, he held it uncertainly in the air, wondering how to refill it with one hand; he solved the problem by dropping the glass with a sonorous crash and lifting the bottle to his lips. The maitre d‘hotel looked at him nervously, sidewise, frowning; he frowned at the jacket with the rabbit fur collar, at the crumpled sailor cap sliding over one ear, at the muddy shoes flung out onto the satin train of a woman at the next table. But the maitre d’hotel had to be cautious; Stepan Timoshenko had been there before; everyone knew that he was a Party member.

A waiter slid unobtrusively up to his table and gathered the broken glass into a dust-pan. Another waiter brought a sparkling clean glass and slipped his fingers gently over Timoshenko’s bottle, whispering: “May I help you, citizen?”

“Go to hell!” said Timoshenko and pushed the glass across the table with the back of his hand. The glass vacillated on the edge and crashed down. “I’ll do as I please!” Timoshenko roared, and heads turned to look at him. “I’ll drink out of a bottle if I please. I’ll drink out of two bottles!”

“But, citizen ...”

“Want me to show you how?” Timoshenko asked, his eyes gleaming ominously.

“No, indeed, citizen,” the waiter said hastily.

“Go to hell,” said Timoshenko with soft persuasion. “I don’t like your snoot. I don’t like any of the snoots around here.” He rose, swaying, roaring: “I don’t like any of the damn snoots around here!”

He staggered among the tables. The maitre d’hotel whispered gently at his elbow: “If you’re not feeling well, citizen ...”

“Out of my way!” bellowed Timoshenko, tripping over a woman’s slippers.

He had almost reached the door, when he stopped suddenly and his face melted into a wide, gentle smile. “Ah,” he said. “A friend of mine. A dear friend of mine!”

He staggered to Morozov, swung a chair high over someone’s head, planted it with a resounding smash at Morozov’s table and sat down.

“I beg your pardon, citizen?” Morozov gasped, rising.

“Sit still, pal,” said Timoshenko and his huge tanned paw pressed Morozov’s shoulder down, like a sledge hammer, so that Morozov fell back on his chair with a thud. “Can’t run away from a friend, Comrade Morozov. We’re friends, you know. Old friends. Well, maybe you don’t know me. Stepan Timoshenko’s the name. Stepan Timoshenko.... Of the Red Baltfleet,” he added as an after-thought.

“Oh,” said Morozov. “Oh.”

“Yep,” said Timoshenko, “an old friend and admirer of yours. And you know what?”

“No,” said Morozov.

“We gotta have a drink together. Like good pals. We gotta have a drink. Waiter!” he roared so loudly that a violinist missed a note of “John Gray.”

“Bring us two bottles!” Timoshenko ordered when a waiter bowed hesitantly over his shoulder. “No! Bring us three bottles!”

“Three bottles of what, citizen?” the waiter asked timidly.

“Of anything,” said Timoshenko. “No! Wait! What’s the most expensive? What is it that the good, fat capitalists guzzle in proper style?”

“Champagne, citizen?”

“Make it champagne and damn quick! Three bottles and two glasses!”

When the waiter brought the champagne, Timoshenko poured it and planted a glass before Morozov. “There!” said Timoshenko with a friendly smile. “Going to drink with me, pal?”

“Yes, co . . . comrade,” said Morozov meekly. “Thank you, comrade.”

“Your health, Comrade Morozov!” said Timoshenko, solemnly, raising his glass. “To Comrade Morozov, citizen of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics!”

They clinked their glasses. Morozov glanced around furtively, helplessly, but no help was coming. He drank, the glass trembling at his lips. Then he smiled ingratiatingly: “This was very nice of you, comrade,” he muttered, rising. “And I appreciate it very much, comrade. Now if you don’t mind. I’ve got to be going and . . .”

“Sit still,” ordered Timoshenko. He refilled his glass and raised it, leaning back, smiling, but his smile did not seem friendly any longer and his dark eyes were looking at Morozov steadily, sardonically. “To the great Citizen Morozov, the man who beat the revolution!” he said and laughed resonantly, and emptied the glass in one gulp, his head thrown back.

“Comrade ...” Morozov muttered through lips he could barely force open, “comrade . . . what do you mean?”

Timoshenko laughed louder and leaned across the table toward Morozov, his elbows crossed, his cap far back on his head, over sticky ringlets of dark hair. The laughter stopped abruptly, as if slashed off. Timoshenko said softly, persuasively, with a smile that frightened Morozov more than the laughter: “Don’t look so scared, Comrade Morozov. You don’t have to be afraid of me. I’m nothing but a beaten wretch, beaten by you, Comrade Morozov, and all I want is to tell you humbly that I know I’m beaten and I hold no grudge. Hell, I hold a profound admiration for you, Comrade Morozov. You’ve taken the greatest revolution the world has ever seen and patched the seat of your pants with it!”

“Comrade,” said Morozov with a blue-lipped determination, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, yes,” said Timoshenko ruefully. “Oh, yes, you do. You know more about it than I do, more than millions of young fools do, that watch us from all over the world with worshipping eyes. You must tell them, Comrade Morozov. You have a lot to tell them.”

“Honestly, comrade, I . . .”

“For instance, you know how you made us do it. I don’t. All I know is that we’ve done it. We made a revolution. We had red banners. The banners said that we made it for the world proletariat. We had fools who thought in their doomed hearts that we made it for all those downtrodden ones who suffer on this earth. But you and me, Comrade Morozov, we have a secret. We know, but we won’t tell. Why tell? The world doesn’t want to hear it. We know that the revolution—it was made for you, Comrade Morozov, and hats off to you!”

“Comrade whoever you are, comrade,” Morozov moaned, “what do you want?”

“Just to tell you it’s yours, Comrade Morozov.”

“What?” Morozov asked, wondering if he was going insane.

“The revolution,” said Timoshenko pleasantly. “The revolution. Do you know what a revolution is? I’ll tell you. We killed. We killed men in the streets, and in the cellars, and aboard our ships.... Aboard our ships . . . I remember . . . There was one boy—an officer—he couldn’t have been more than twenty. He made the sign of the cross—his mother must’ve taught him that. He had blood running out of his mouth. He looked at me. His eyes—they weren’t frightened any more. They were kind of astonished. About something his mother hadn’t taught him. He looked at me. That was the last thing. He looked at me.”

Drops were rolling down Timoshenko’s jowls. He filled a glass and it tottered uncertainly in his hand, trying to find his mouth, and he drank without knowing that he was drinking, his eyes fixed on Morozov’s.

“That’s what we did in the year nineteen-hundred-and-seventeen. Now I’ll tell you what we did it for. We did it so that the Citizen Morozov could get up in the morning and scratch his belly, because the mattress wasn’t soft enough and it made his navel itch. We did it so that he could ride in a big limousine with a down pillow on the seat and a little glass tube for flowers by the window, lilies-of-the-valley, you know. So that he could drink cognac in a place like this. So that he could scramble up, on holidays, to a stand all draped in red bunting and make a speech about the proletariat. We did it, Comrade Morozov, and we take a bow. Don’t glare at me like that, Comrade Morozov, I’m only your humble servant, I’ve done my best for you, and you should reward me with a smile, really, you have a lot to thank me for!”

“Comrade!” Morozov panted. “Let me go!”

“Sit still!” Timoshenko roared. “Pour yourself a glass and drink. Do you hear me? Drink, you bastard! Drink and listen!”

Morozov obeyed; his glass tinkled, shaking, against the bottle.

“You see,” said Timoshenko, as if each word were tearing his throat on its way out, “I don’t mind that we’re beaten. I don’t mind that we’ve taken the greatest of crimes on our shoulders and then let it slip through our fingers. I wouldn’t mind it if we had been beaten by a tall warrior in a steel helmet, a human dragon spitting fire. But we’re beaten by a louse. A big, fat, slow, blond louse. Ever seen lice? The blond ones are the fattest.... It was our own fault. Once, men were ruled with a god’s thunder. Then they were ruled with a sword. Now they’re ruled with a Primus. Once, they were held by reverence. Then they were held by fear. Now they’re held by their stomachs. Men have worn chains on their necks, and on their wrists, and on their ankles. Now they’re enchained by their rectums. Only you don’t hold heroes by their rectums. It was our own fault.”

“Comrade, for God’s sake, comrade, why tell it all to me?”

“We started building a temple. Do we end with a chapel? No! And we don’t even end with an outhouse. We end with a musty kitchen with a second-hand stove! We set fire under a kettle and we brewed and stirred and mixed blood and fire and steel. What are we fishing now out of the brew? A new humanity? Men of granite? Or at least a good and horrible monster? No! Little puny things that wiggle. Little things that can bend both ways, little double-jointed spirits. Little things that don’t even bow humbly to be whipped. No! They take the lash obediently and whip themselves! Ever sat at a social-activity club meeting? Should. Do you good. Learn a lot about the human spirit.”

“Comrade!” Morozov breathed. “What do you want? Is it money you want? I’ll pay. I’ll ...”

Timoshenko laughed so loudly that heads turned and Morozov cringed, trying not to be noticed. “You louse!” Timoshenko roared, laughing. “You fool, near-sighted, demented louse! Who do you think you’re talking to? Comrade Victor Dunaev? Comrade Pavel Syerov? Comrade . . .”

“Comrade!” Morozov roared, so that heads turned to him, but he did not care any longer. “You . . . you . . . you have no right to say that! I have nothing whatever to do with Comrade Syerov! I ...”

“Say,” Timoshenko remarked slowly, “I didn’t say you had. Why the excitement?”

“Well, I thought . . . I . . . you . . .”

“I didn’t say you had,” Timoshenko repeated. “I only said you should have. You and he and Victor Dunaev. And about one million others—with Party cards and stamps affixed. The winners and the conquerors. Those who crawl. That, pal, is the great slogan of the men of the future: those who crawl. Listen, do you know how many millions of eyes are watching us across lands and oceans? They’re not very close and they can’t see very well. They see a big shadow rising. They think it’s a huge beast. They’re too far to see that it’s soft and brownish and fuzzy. You know, fuzzy, a glistening sort of fuzz. They don’t know that it’s made of cockroaches. Little, glossy, brown cockroaches, packed tight, one on the other, into a huge wall. Little cockroaches that keep silent and wiggle their whiskers. But the world is too far to see the whiskers. That’s what’s wrong with the world, Comrade Morozov : they don’t see the whiskers!”

“Comrade! Comrade, what are you talking about?”

“They see a black cloud and they hear thunder. They’ve been told that behind the cloud, blood is running freely, and men fight, and men kill, and men die. Well, what of it? They, those who watch, are not afraid of blood. There’s an honor in blood. But do they know that it’s not blood we’re bathed in, it’s pus? Listen, I’ll give you advice. If you want to keep this land in your tentacles, tell the world that you’re chopping heads off for breakfast and shooting men by the regiment. Let the world think that you’re a huge monster to be feared and respected and fought honorably. But don’t let them know that yours is not an army of heroes, nor even of fiends, but of shriveled bookkeepers with a rupture who’ve learned to be arrogant. Don’t let them know that you’re not to be shot, but to be disinfected. Don’t let them know that you’re not to be fought with cannons, but with carbolic acid!”

Morozov’s napkin was crumpled into a drenched ball in his fist. He wiped his forehead once more. He said, trying to make his voice gentle and soothing, trying to rise imperceptibly: “You’re right, comrade. Those are very fine sentiments. I agree with you absolutely. Now if you’ll allow . . .”

“Sit down!” roared Timoshenko. “Sit down and drink a toast. Drink it or I’ll shoot you like a mongrel. I still carry a gun, you know. Here . . .” he poured and a pale golden trickle ran down the table cloth to the floor. “Drink to the men who took a red banner and wiped their ass with it!”

Morozov drank.

Then he put his hand in his pocket and took out a handkerchief to mop his forehead. A crumpled piece of paper fell to the floor.

It was the swift, ferocious jerk, with which Morozov plunged down for it, that made Timoshenko’s fist dart out and seize Morozov’s hand. “What’s that, pal?” asked Timoshenko.

Morozov’s foot kicked the paper out of reach and it rolled under an empty table. Morozov said indifferently, little damp beads sparkling under his wide nostrils: “Oh, that? Nothing, comrade. Nothing at all. Just some scrap of waste paper.”

“Oh,” said Timoshenko, watching him with eyes that were alarmingly sober. “Oh, just a scrap of waste paper. Well, we’ll let it lie there. We’ll let the janitor throw it in the waste basket.”

“Yes,” Morozov nodded eagerly, “that’s it. In the waste basket. Very well put, comrade.” He giggled, mopping his forehead. “We’ll let the janitor throw it in the waste basket. Would you like another drink, comrade? The bottle’s empty. The next one’s on me. Waiter! Another bottle of the same.”

“Sure,” said Timoshenko without moving. “I’ll have another drink.”

The waiter brought the bottle. Morozov filled the glasses, leaning solicitously over the table. He said, regaining his voice syllable by syllable: “You know, comrade, I think you misunderstood me, but I don’t blame you. I can see your motives and I sympathize thoroughly. There are so many objectionable—er—shall we say dishonorable?—types these days. One has to be careful. We must get better acquainted, comrade. It’s hard to tell at a glance, you know, and particularly in a place like this. I bet you thought I was a—a speculator, or something. Didn’t you? Very funny, isn’t it?”

“Very,” said Timoshenko. “What are you looking down at, Comrade Morozov?”

“Oh!” Morozov giggled, jerking his head up. “I was just looking at my shoes, comrade. They’re sort of tight, you know. Uncomfortable. Guess it’s because I’m on my feet so much, you know, in the office.”

“Uh-huh,” said Timoshenko. “Shouldn’t neglect your feet. Should take a hot bath when you come home, a pan of hot water with a little vinegar. That’s good for sore feet.”

“Oh, indeed? I’m glad you told me. Yes, indeed, thank you very much. I’ll be sure and try it. First thing when I get home.”

“About time you were getting home, isn’t it, Comrade Morozov?”

“Oh! ... well, I guess . . . well, it’s not so late yet and . . .”

“I thought you were in a hurry a little while ago.”

“I . . . well, no, I can’t say that I’m in any particular hurry, and besides, such a pleasant . . .”

“What’s the matter, Comrade Morozov? Anything you don’t want to leave around here?”

“Who, me? I don’t know what that could be, comrade . . . comrade ... what did you say your name was, comrade?”

“Timoshenko. Stepan Timoshenko. It isn’t that little scrap of waste paper down there under the table, by any chance?”

“Oh, that? Why, Comrade Timoshenko, I’d forgotten all about that. What would I want with it?”

“I don’t know,” said Timoshenko slowly.

“That’s just it, Comrade Timoshenko, nothing. Nothing at all. Another drink, Comrade Timoshenko?”

“Thanks.”

“Here you are, comrade.”

“Anything wrong under the table, Comrade Morozov?”

“Why no, Comrade Timoshenko. I was just bending to tie my shoe lace. The shoe lace is unfastened.”

“Where?”

“Well, isn’t that funny? It really isn’t unfastened at all. See? And I thought it was. You know how it is, these Soviet . . . these shoe laces nowadays. Not solid at all. Not dependable.”

“No,” said Timoshenko, “they tear like twine.”

“Yes,” said Morozov, “just like twine. Just, as you would say, like—like twine.... What are you leaning over for, Comrade Timoshenko? You’re not comfortable. Why don’t you move over here like this, you’ll be more . . .”

“No,” said Timoshenko, “I’m just fine here where I am. With a fine view of the table there. I like that table. Nice legs it has. Hasn’t it? Sort of artistic, you know.”

“Quite right, comrade, very artistic. Now on the other hand, comrade, there, on our left, isn’t that a pretty blonde there, by the orchestra? Quite a figure, eh?”

“Yes, indeed, comrade.... It’s nice shoes you have, Comrade Morozov. Patent leather, too. Bet you didn’t get those in a co-operative.”

“No . . . that is . . . to tell you the truth . . . well, you see . . .”

“What I like about them is that bulb. Right there, on the toes. Like a bump on someone’s forehead. And shiny, too. Yep, those foreigners sure know how to make shoes.”

“Speaking of the efficiency of production, comrade, take for instance, in the capitalistic countries . . . in the . . . in the . . .”

“Yes, Comrade Morozov, in the capitalistic countries?”

It was Morozov who leaped for the letter. It was Timoshenko who caught his wrist with fingers like talons, and for one brief moment they were on their hands and knees on the floor, and their eyes met silently like those of two beasts in deadly battle. Then Timoshenko’s other hand seized the letter, and he rose slowly, releasing Morozov, and sat down at the table. He was reading the letter, while Morozov was still on his hands and knees, staring up at him with the eyes of a man awaiting the verdict of a court-martial.

MOROZOV, YOU GOD-DAMN BASTARD!

If you don’t come across with what’s due me before tomorrow morning, you’ll eat breakfast at the G.P.U., and you know what that means,

Affectionately,

PAVEL SYEROV.

Morozov was sitting at the table when Timoshenko raised his head from the letter. Timoshenko laughed as Morozov had never heard a man laugh.

Timoshenko rose slowly, laughing. His stomach shook, and his rabbit fur collar, and the sinews of his bare throat. He swayed a little and he held the letter in both hands. Then his laughter died down slowly, smoothly, like a gramophone record unwinding, to a low, coughing chuckle on a single dry note. He slipped the letter into his pocket and turned slowly, his shoulders stooped, his movements suddenly awkward, humble. He shuffled heavily, uncertainly to the door. At the door, the maitre d’hotel glanced at him sidewise. Timoshenko returned the glance; Timoshenko’s glance was gentle.

Morozov sat at the table, one hand frozen in mid-air in an absurd, twisted position, like the hand of a paralytic. He heard Timoshenko’s chuckles dropping down the stairway; monotonous, disjoined chuckles that sounded like hiccoughs, like barks, like sobs.

He jumped up suddenly. “Oh my God!” he moaned. “Oh, my God!”

He ran, forgetting his hat and coat, down the long stairs, out into the snow. In the broad, white, silent street, Timoshenko was nowhere in sight.

Morozov did not send the money to Pavel Syerov. He did not go to his own office at the Food Trust. He sat all the following morning and all of the afternoon at home, in his room, and drank vodka. Whenever he heard the telephone or the door bell ringing, he crouched, his head in his shoulders, and bit his knuckles. Nothing happened.

At dinner time, Antonina Pavlovna brought the evening paper and threw it to him, snapping: “What the hell’s the matter with you today?”

He glanced through the paper. There were news items on the front page:

In the village Vasilkino, in the Kama region, the peasants, goaded by the counter-revolutionary hoarder element, burned the local Club of Karl Marx. The bodies of the Club president and secretary, Party comrades from Moscow, were found in the charred ruins. A G.PU. squad is on its way to Vasilkino.

In the village Sverskoe, twenty-five peasants were executed last night for the murder of the Village Correspondent, a young comrade from the staff of a Communist Union of Youth newspaper in Samara. The peasants refused to divulge the name of the murderer.

On the last page was a short item:

The body of Stepan Timoshenko, former sailor of the Baltic Fleet, was found early this morning under a bridge, on the ice of Obukhovsky Canal. He had shot himself through the mouth. No papers, save his Party card, were found on the body to explain the reason for his suicide.

Morozov wiped his forehead, as if a noose had been slipped off his throat, and drank two glasses of vodka.

When the telephone rang, he swaggered boldly to take the receiver, and Antonina Pavlovna wondered why he was chuckling.

“Morozov?” a muffled voice whispered over the wire.

“That you, Pavlusha?” Morozov asked. “Listen, pal, I’m awfully sorry, but I have the money and . . .”

“Forget the money,” Syerov hissed. “It’s all right. Listen . . . did I leave you a note yesterday?”

“Why, yes, but I guess I deserved it and . . .”

“Have you destroyed it?”

“Why?”

“Nothing. Only you understand what it could . . . Have you destroyed it?”

Morozov looked at the evening paper, grinned and said: “Sure. I have. Forget about it, pal.”

He held the paper in his hand all evening long.

“The fool!” he muttered under his breath, so that Antonina Pavlovna looked at him inquisitively, chin forward. “The damn fool! He lost it. Wandered about all night, God knows where, the drunken fool. He lost it!”

Morozov did not know that Stepan Timoshenko had come home from the European roof garden and sat at a rickety table in his unheated garret and written painstakingly a letter on a piece of brown wrapping paper, in the light of a dying candle in a green bottle; that he had folded the letter carefully and slipped it into an old envelope and slipped another scrap of paper, wrinkled and creased, into the envelope, and written Andrei Taganov’s address on it; that he had sealed the letter and had gone, steadily, unhurriedly, down the creaking stairs into the street.

The letter on the brown wrapping paper said:

DEAR FRIEND ANDREI,

I promised to say good-bye and here it is. It’s not quite what I promised, but I guess you’ll forgive me. I’m sick of seeing what I see and I can’t stand to see it any longer. To you—as my only legacy—I’m leaving the letter you will find enclosed. It’s a hard legacy, I know. I only hope that you won’t follow me—too soon.

Your friend,

STEPAN TIMOSHENKO.

2. Capitalism vs. Collectivism

In her defense of individualism, AR is neither a “conservative” nor a “libertarian.” Rejecting both movements, she describes herself as a “radical for capitalism.” In other words, she identifies and defends the intellectual roots of capitalism on the deepest level—as the following, from her 1965 essay “What Is Capitalism?” (published in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal), demonstrates.

What Is Capitalism?

. . . MANKIND IS not an entity, an organism, or a coral bush. The entity involved in production and trade is man. It is with the study of man—not of the loose aggregate known as a “community”—that any science of the humanities has to begin.

This issue represents one of the epistemological differences between the humanities and the physical sciences, one of the causes of the former’s well-earned inferiority complex in regard to the latter. A physical science would not permit itself (not yet, at least) to ignore or bypass the nature of its subject. Such an attempt would mean: a science of astronomy that gazed at the sky, but refused to study individual stars, planets, and satellites—or a science of medicine that studied disease, without any knowledge or criterion of health, and took, as its basic subject of study, a hospital as a whole, never focusing on individual patients.

A great deal may be learned about society by studying man; but this process cannot be reversed: nothing can be learned about man by studying society—by studying the inter-relationships of entities one has never identified or defined. Yet that is the methodology adopted by most political economists. Their attitude, in effect, amounts to the unstated, implicit postulate: “Man is that which fits economic equations.” Since he obviously does not, this leads to the curious fact that in spite of the practical nature of their science, political economists are oddly unable to relate their abstractions to the concretes of actual existence.

It leads also to a baffling sort of double standard or double perspective in their way of viewing men and events: if they observe a shoemaker, they find no difficulty in concluding that he is working in order to make a living; but as political economists, on the tribal premise, they declare that his purpose (and duty) is to provide society with shoes. If they observe a panhandler on a street corner, they identify him as a bum; in political economy, he becomes “a sovereign consumer.” If they hear the communist doctrine that all property should belong to the state, they reject it emphatically and feel, sincerely, that they would fight communism to the death; but in political economy, they speak of the government’s duty to effect “a fair redistribution of wealth,” and they speak of businessmen as the best, most efficient trustees of the nation’s “natural resources.”

This is what a basic premise (and philosophical negligence) will do; this is what the tribal premise has done.

To reject that premise and begin at the beginning—in one’s approach to political economy and to the evaluation of various social systems—one must begin by identifying man’s nature, i.e., those essential characteristics which distinguish him from all other living species.

Man’s essential characteristic is his rational faculty. Man’s mind is his basic means of survival—his only means of gaining knowledge. [...]

A process of thought is an enormously complex process of identification and integration, which only an individual mind can perform. There is no such thing as a collective brain. Men can learn from one another, but learning requires a process of thought on the part of every individual student. Men can cooperate in the discovery of new knowledge, but such cooperation requires the independent exercise of his rational faculty by every individual scientist. Man is the only living species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; but such transmission requires a process of thought on the part of the individual recipients. As witness, the breakdowns of civilization, the dark ages in the history of mankind’s progress, when the accumulated knowledge of centuries vanished from the lives of men who were unable, unwilling, or forbidden to think.

In order to sustain its life, every living species has to follow a certain course of action required by its nature. The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort. Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival.

If some men do not choose to think, they can survive only by imitating and repeating a routine of work discovered by others—but those others had to discover it, or none would have survived. If some men do not choose to think or to work, they can survive (temporarily) only by looting the goods produced by others—but those others had to produce them, or none would have survived. Regardless of what choice is made, in this issue, by any man or by any number of men, regardless of what blind, irrational, or evil course they may choose to pursue—the fact remains that reason is man’s means of survival and that men prosper or fail, survive or perish in proportion to the degree of their rationality.

Since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are properties of the individual, since the choice to exercise his rational faculty or not depends on the individual, man’s survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don’t. Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man’s mind.

A rational mind does not work under compulsion; it does not subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone’s orders, directives, or controls; it does not sacrifice its knowledge, its view of the truth, to anyone’s opinions, threats, wishes, plans, or “welfare.” Such a mind may be hampered by others, it may be silenced, proscribed, imprisoned, or destroyed; it cannot be forced; a gun is not an argument. (An example and symbol of this attitude is Galileo.)

It is from the work and the inviolate integrity of such minds—from the intransigent innovators—that all of mankind’s knowledge and achievements have come. (See The Fountainhead.) It is to such minds that mankind owes its survival. (See Atlas Shrugged.)

The same principle applies to all men, on every level of ability and ambition. To the extent that a man is guided by his rational judgment, he acts in accordance with the requirements of his nature and, to that extent, succeeds in achieving a human form of survival and well-being; to the extent that he acts irrationally, he acts as his own destroyer.

The social recognition of man’s rational nature—of the connection between his survival and his use of reason—is the concept of individual rights.

I shall remind you that “rights” are a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context, that they are derived from man’s nature as a rational being and represent a necessary condition of his particular mode of survival. I shall remind you also that the right to life is the source of all rights, including the right to property.

In regard to political economy, this last requires special emphasis: man has to work and produce in order to support his life. He has to support his life by his own effort and by the guidance of his own mind. If he cannot dispose of the product of his effort, he cannot dispose of his effort; if he cannot dispose of his effort, he cannot dispose of his life. Without property rights, no other rights can be practiced.

Now, bearing these facts in mind, consider the question of what social system is appropriate to man.

A social system is a set of moral-political-economic principles embodied in a society’s laws, institutions, and government, which determine the relationships, the terms of association, among the men living in a given geographical area. It is obvious that these terms and relationships depend on an identification of man’s nature, that they would be different if they pertain to a society of rational beings or to a colony of ants. It is obvious that they will be radically different if men deal with one another as free, independent individuals, on the premise that every man is an end in himself—or as members of a pack, each regarding the others as the means to his ends and to the ends of “the pack as a whole.”

There are only two fundamental questions (or two aspects of the same question) that determine the nature of any social system: Does a social system recognize individual rights?—and: Does a social system ban physical force from human relationships? The answer to the second question is the practical implementation of the answer to the first.

Is man a sovereign individual who owns his person, his mind, his life, his work and its products—or is he the property of the tribe (the state, the society, the collective) that may dispose of him in any way it pleases, that may dictate his convictions, prescribe the course of his life, control his work and expropriate his products? Does man have the right to exist for his own sake—or is he born in bondage, as an indentured servant who must keep buying his life by serving the tribe but can never acquire it free and clear?

This is the first question to answer. The rest is consequences and practical implementations. The basic issue is only: Is man free?

In mankind’s history, capitalism is the only system that answers: Yes.

Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.

The recognition of individual rights entails the banishment of physical force from human relationships: basically, rights can be violated only by means of force. In a capitalist society, no man or group may initiate the use of physical force against others. The only function of the government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man’s rights, i.e., the task of protecting him from physical force; the government acts as the agent of man’s right of self-defense, and may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use; thus the government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of force under objective control.

It is the basic, metaphysical fact of man’s nature—the connection between his survival and his use of reason—that capitalism recognizes and protects.

In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions, and interests dictate. They can deal with one another only in terms of and by means of reason, i.e., by means of discussion, persuasion, and contractual agreement, by voluntary choice to mutual benefit. The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial. It is the institution of private property that protects and implements the right to disagree—and thus keeps the road open to man’s most valuable attribute (valuable personally, socially, and objectively): the creative mind.

This is the cardinal difference between capitalism and collectivism.

The power that determines the establishment, the changes, the evolution, and the destruction of social systems is philosophy. The role of chance, accident, or tradition, in this context, is the same as their role in the life of an individual: their power stands in inverse ratio to the power of a culture’s (or an individual’s) philosophical equipment, and grows as philosophy collapses. It is, therefore, by reference to philosophy that the character of a social system has to be defined and evaluated. Corresponding to the four branches of philosophy, the four keystones of capitalism are: metaphysically, the requirements of man’s nature and survival—epistemologically, reason—ethically, individual rights—politically, freedom.

This, in substance, is the base of the proper approach to political economy and to an understanding of capitalism—not the tribal premise inherited from prehistorical traditions.

The “practical” justification of capitalism does not lie in the collectivist claim that it effects “the best allocation of national resources.” Man is not a “national resource” and neither is his mind—and without the creative power of man’s intelligence, raw materials remain just so many useless raw materials.

The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve “the common good.” It is true that capitalism does—if that catch-phrase has any meaning—but this is merely a secondary consequence. The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature, that it protects man’s survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice.

Every social system is based, explicitly or implicitly, on some theory of ethics. The tribal notion of “the common good” has served as the moral justification of most social systems—and of all tyrannies—in history. The degree of a society’s enslavement or freedom corresponded to the degree to which that tribal slogan was invoked or ignored.

“The common good” (or “the public interest”) is an undefined and undefinable concept: there is no such entity as “the tribe” or “the public”; the tribe (or the public or society) is only a number of individual men. Nothing can be good for the tribe as such; “good” and “value” pertain only to a living organism—to an individual living organism—not to a disembodied aggregate of relationships.

“The common good” is a meaningless concept, unless taken literally, in which case its only possible meaning is: the sum of the good of all the individual men involved. But in that case, the concept is meaningless as a moral criterion: it leaves open the question of what is the good of individual men and how does one determine it?

It is not, however, in its literal meaning that that concept is generally used. It is accepted precisely for its elastic, undefinable, mystical character which serves, not as a moral guide, but as an escape from morality. Since the good is not applicable to the disembodied, it becomes a moral blank check for those who attempt to embody it.

When “the common good” of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals. It is tacitly assumed, in such cases, that “the common good” means “the good of the majority” as against the minority or the individual. Observe the significant fact that that assumption is tacit: even the most collectivized mentalities seem to sense the impossibility of justifying it morally. But “the good of the majority,” too, is only a pretense and a delusion: since, in fact, the violation of an individual’s rights means the abrogation of all rights, it delivers the helpless majority into the power of any gang that proclaims itself to be “the voice of society” and proceeds to rule by means of physical force, until deposed by another gang employing the same means.

If one begins by defining the good of individual men, one will accept as proper only a society in which that good is achieved and achievable. But if one begins by accepting “the common good” as an axiom and regarding individual good as its possible but not necessary consequence (not necessary in any particular case), one ends up with such a gruesome absurdity as Soviet Russia, a country professedly dedicated to “the common good,” where, with the exception of a minuscule clique of rulers, the entire population has existed in subhuman misery for over two generations.

What makes the victims and, worse, the observers accept this and other similar historical atrocities, and still cling to the myth of “the common good”? The answer lies in philosophy—in philosophical theories on the nature of moral values.

There are, in essence, three schools of thought on the nature of the good: the intrinsic, the subjective, and the objective. The intrinsic theory holds that the good is inherent in certain things or actions as such, regardless of their context and consequences, regardless of any benefit or injury they may cause to the actors and subjects involved. It is a theory that divorces the concept of “good” from beneficiaries, and the concept of “value” from valuer and purpose—claiming that the good is good in, by, and of itself.

The subjectivist theory holds that the good bears no relation to the facts of reality, that it is the product of a man’s consciousness, created by his feelings, desires, “intuitions,” or whims, and that it is merely an “arbitrary postulate” or an “emotional commitment.”

The intrinsic theory holds that the good resides in some sort of reality, independent of man’s consciousness; the subjectivist theory holds that the good resides in man’s consciousness, independent of reality.

The objective theory holds that the good is neither an attribute of “things in themselves” nor of man’s emotional states, but an evaluation of the facts of reality by man’s consciousness according to a rational standard of value. (Rational, in this context, means: derived from the facts of reality and validated by a process of reason.) The objective theory holds that the good is an aspect of reality in relation to man—and that it must be discovered, not invented, by man. Fundamental to an objective theory of values is the question: Of value to whom and for what? An objective theory does not permit context-dropping or “concept-stealing”; it does not permit the separation of “value” from “purpose,” of the good from beneficiaries, and of man’s actions from reason.

Of all the social systems in mankind’s history, capitalism is the only system based on an objective theory of values.

The intrinsic theory and the subjectivist theory (or a mixture of both) are the necessary base of every dictatorship, tyranny, or variant of the absolute state. Whether they are held consciously or subconsciously—in the explicit form of a philosopher’s treatise or in the implicit chaos of its echoes in an average man’s feelings—these theories make it possible for a man to believe that the good is independent of man’s mind and can be achieved by physical force.

If a man believes that the good is intrinsic in certain actions, he will not hesitate to force others to perform them. If he believes that the human benefit or injury caused by such actions is of no significance, he will regard a sea of blood as of no significance. If he believes that the beneficiaries of such actions are irrelevant (or interchangeable), he will regard wholesale slaughter as his moral duty in the service of a “higher” good. It is the intrinsic theory of values that produces a Robespierre, a Lenin, a Stalin, or a Hitler. It is not an accident that Eichmann was a Kantian.

If a man believes that the good is a matter of arbitrary, subjective choice, the issue of good or evil becomes, for him, an issue of: my feelings or theirs? No bridge, understanding, or communication is possible to him. Reason is the only means of communication among men, and an objectively perceivable reality is their only common frame of reference; when these are invalidated (i.e., held to be irrelevant) in the field of morality, force becomes men’s only way of dealing with one another. If the subjectivist wants to pursue some social ideal of his own, he feels morally entitled to force men “for their own good,” since he feels that he is right and that there is nothing to oppose him but their misguided feelings.

Thus, in practice, the proponents of the intrinsic and the subjectivist schools meet and blend. (They blend in terms of their psycho-epistemology as well: by what means do the moralists of the intrinsic school discover their transcendental “good,” if not by means of special, non-rational intuitions and revelations, i.e., by means of their feelings?) It is doubtful whether anyone can hold either of these theories as an actual, if mistaken, conviction. But both serve as a rationalization of power-lust and of rule by brute force, unleashing the potential dictator and disarming his victims.

The objective theory of values is the only moral theory incompatible with rule by force. Capitalism is the only system based implicitly on an objective theory of values—and the historic tragedy is that this has never been made explicit.

If one knows that the good is objective—i.e., determined by the nature of reality, but to be discovered by man’s mind—one knows that an attempt to achieve the good by physical force is a monstrous contradiction which negates morality at its root by destroying man’s capacity to recognize the good, i.e., his capacity to value. Force invalidates and paralyzes a man’s judgment, demanding that he act against it, thus rendering him morally impotent. A value which one is forced to accept at the price of surrendering one’s mind, is not a value to anyone; the forcibly mindless can neither judge nor choose nor value. An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes. Values cannot exist (cannot be valued) outside the full context of a man’s life, needs, goals, and knowledge.

The objective view of values permeates the entire structure of a capitalist society.

The recognition of individual rights implies the recognition of the fact that the good is not an ineffable abstraction in some supernatural dimension, but a value pertaining to reality, to this earth, to the lives of individual human beings (note the right to the pursuit of happiness). It implies that the good cannot be divorced from beneficiaries, that men are not to be regarded as interchangeable, and that no man or tribe may attempt to achieve the good of some at the price of the immolation of others.

The free market represents the social application of an objective theory of values. Since values are to be discovered by man’s mind, men must be free to discover them—to think, to study, to translate their knowledge into physical form, to offer their products for trade, to judge them, and to choose, be it material goods or ideas, a loaf of bread or a philosophical treatise. Since values are established contextually, every man must judge for himself, in the context of his own knowledge, goals, and interests. Since values are determined by the nature of reality, it is reality that serves as men’s ultimate arbiter: if a man’s judgment is right, the rewards are his; if it is wrong, he is his only victim.

It is in regard to a free market that the distinction between an intrinsic, subjective, and objective view of values is particularly important to understand. The market value of a product is not an intrinsic value, not a “value in itself” hanging in a vacuum. A free market never loses sight of the question: Of value to whom? And, within the broad field of objectivity, the market value of a product does not reflect its philosophically objective value, but only its socially objective value.

By “philosophically objective,” I mean a value estimated from the standpoint of the best possible to man, i.e., by the criterion of the most rational mind possessing the greatest knowledge, in a given category, in a given period, and in a defined context (nothing can be estimated in an undefined context). For instance, it can be rationally proved that the airplane is objectively of immeasurably greater value to man (to man at his best) than the bicycle—and that the works of Victor Hugo are objectively of immeasurably greater value than true-confession magazines. But if a given man’s intellectual potential can barely manage to enjoy true confessions, there is no reason why his meager earnings, the product of his effort, should be spent on books he cannot read—or on subsidizing the airplane industry, if his own transportation needs do not extend beyond the range of a bicycle. (Nor is there any reason why the rest of mankind should be held down to the level of his literary taste, his engineering capacity, and his income. Values are not determined by fiat nor by majority vote.)

Just as the number of its adherents is not a proof of an idea’s truth or falsehood, of an art work’s merit or demerit, of a product’s efficacy or inefficacy—so the free-market value of goods or services does not necessarily represent their philosophically objective value, but only their socially objective value, i.e., the sum of the individual judgments of all the men involved in trade at a given time, the sum of what they valued, each in the context of his own life.

Thus, a manufacturer of lipstick may well make a greater fortune than a manufacturer of microscopes—even though it can be rationally demonstrated that microscopes are scientifically more valuable than lipstick. But—valuable to whom?

A microscope is of no value to a little stenographer struggling to make a living; a lipstick is; a lipstick, to her, may mean the difference between self-confidence and self-doubt, between glamour and drudgery.

This does not mean, however, that the values ruling a free market are subjective. If the stenographer spends all her money on cosmetics and has none left to pay for the use of a microscope (for a visit to the doctor) when she needs it, she learns a better method of budgeting her income; the free market serves as her teacher: she has no way to penalize others for her mistakes. If she budgets rationally, the microscope is always available to serve her own specific needs and no more, as far as she is concerned: she is not taxed to support an entire hospital, a research laboratory, or a space ship’s journey to the moon. Within her own productive power, she does pay a part of the cost of scientific achievements, when and as she needs them. She has no “social duty,” her own life is her only responsibility—and the only thing that a capitalist system requires of her is the thing that nature requires: rationality, i.e., that she live and act to the best of her own judgment.

Within every category of goods and services offered on a free market, it is the purveyor of the best product at the cheapest price who wins the greatest financial rewards in that field—not automatically nor immediately nor by fiat, but by virtue of the free market, which teaches every participant to look for the objective best within the category of his own competence, and penalizes those who act on irrational considerations.

Now observe that a free market does not level men down to some common denominator—that the intellectual criteria of the majority do not rule a free market or a free society—and that the exceptional men, the innovators, the intellectual giants, are not held down by the majority. In fact, it is the members of this exceptional minority who lift the whole of a free society to the level of their own achievements, while rising further and ever further.

A free market is a continuous process that cannot be held still, an upward process that demands the best (the most rational) of every man and rewards him accordingly. While the majority have barely assimilated the value of the automobile, the creative minority introduces the airplane. The majority learn by demonstration, the minority is free to demonstrate. The “philosophically objective” value of a new product serves as the teacher for those who are willing to exercise their rational faculty, each to the extent of his ability. Those who are unwilling remain unrewarded—as well as those who aspire to more than their ability produces. The stagnant, the irrational, the subjectivist have no power to stop their betters.

(The small minority of adults who are unable rather than unwilling to work, have to rely on voluntary charity; misfortune is not a claim to slave labor; there is no such thing as the right to consume, control, and destroy those without whom one would be unable to survive. As to depressions and mass unemployment, they are not caused by the free market, but by government interference into the economy.)

The mental parasites—the imitators who attempt to cater to what they think is the public’s known taste—are constantly being beaten by the innovators whose products raise the public’s knowledge and taste to ever higher levels. It is in this sense that the free market is ruled, not by the consumers, but by the producers. The most successful ones are those who discover new fields of production, fields which had not been known to exist.

A given product may not be appreciated at once, particularly if it is too radical an innovation; but, barring irrelevant accidents, it wins in the long run. It is in this sense that the free market is not ruled by the intellectual criteria of the majority, which prevail only at and for any given moment; the free market is ruled by those who are able to see and plan long-range-and the better the mind, the longer the range.

The economic value of a man’s work is determined, on a free market, by a single principle: by the voluntary consent of those who are willing to trade him their work or products in return. This is the moral meaning of the law of supply and demand; it represents the total rejection of two vicious doctrines: the tribal premise and altruism. It represents the recognition of the fact that man is not the property nor the servant of the tribe, that a man works in order to support his own life-as, by his nature, he must—that he has to be guided by his own rational self-interest, and if he wants to trade with others, he cannot expect sacrificial victims, i.e., he cannot expect to receive values without trading commensurate values in return. The sole criterion of what is commensurate, in this context, is the free, voluntary, uncoerced judgment of the traders.

The tribal mentalities attack this principle from two seemingly opposite sides: they claim that the free market is “unfair” both to the genius and to the average man. The first objection is usually expressed by a question such as: “Why should Elvis Presley make more money than Einstein?” The answer is: Because men work in order to support and enjoy their own lives—and if many men find value in Elvis Presley, they are entitled to spend their money on their own pleasure. Presley’s fortune is not taken from those who do not care for his work (I am one of them) nor from Einstein—nor does he stand in Einstein’s way—nor does Einstein lack proper recognition and support in a free society, on an appropriate intellectual level.

As to the second objection, the claim that a man of average ability suffers an “unfair” disadvantage on a free market—

Look past the range of the moment, you who cry that you fear to compete with men of superior intelligence, that their mind is a threat to your livelihood, that the strong leave no chance to the weak in a market of voluntary trade.... When you live in a rational society, where men are free to trade, you receive an incalculable bonus: the material value of your work is determined not only by your effort, but by the effort of the best productive minds who exist in the world around you....

The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of yours life by raising the productivity of your time.... Every man is free to rise as far as he’s able or willing, but it’s only the degree to which he thinks that determines the degree to which he’ll rise. Physical labor as such can extend no further than the range of the moment. The man who does no more than physical labor, consumes the material value-equivalent of his own contribution to the process of production, and leaves no further value, neither for himself nor others. But the man who produces an idea in any field of rational endeavor—the man who discovers new knowledge—is the permanent benefactor of humanity. . . . It is only the value of an idea that can be shared with unlimited numbers of men, making all sharers richer at no one’s sacrifice or loss, raising the productive capacity of whatever labor they perform....

In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the “competition” between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of “exploitation” for which you have damned the strong. (Atlas Shrugged)

And such is the relationship of capitalism to man’s mind and to man’s survival.

The magnificent progress achieved by capitalism in a brief span of time—the spectacular improvement in the conditions of man’s existence on earth—is a matter of historical record. It is not to be hidden, evaded, or explained away by all the propaganda of capitalism’s enemies. But what needs special emphasis is the fact that this progress was achieved by non-sacrificial means.

Progress cannot be achieved by forced privations, by squeezing a “social surplus” out of starving victims. Progress can come only out of individual surplus, i.e., from the work, the energy, the creative over-abundance of those men whose ability produces more than their personal consumption requires, those who are intellectually and financially able to seek the new, to improve on the known, to move forward. In a capitalist society, where such men are free to function and to take their own risks, progress is not a matter of sacrificing to some distant future, it is part of the living present, it is the normal and natural, it is achieved as and while men live—and enjoy—their lives....

EDITOR’S NOTE: The defining principle of capitalism, individual rights, is explained more fully in the following excerpts, from AR’s 1963 essay “Man’s Rights” (also published in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal).

Man’s Rights

IF ONE wishes to advocate a free society—that is, capitalism—one must realize that its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights. If one wishes to uphold individual rights, one must realize that capitalism is the only system that can uphold and protect them. And if one wishes to gauge the relationship of freedom to the goals of today’s intellectuals, one may gauge it by the fact that the concept of individual rights is evaded, distorted, perverted and seldom discussed, most conspicuously seldom by the so-called “conservatives.”

“Rights” are a moral concept—the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others—the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context—the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

Every political system is based on some code of ethics. The dominant ethics of mankind’s history were variants of the altruist-collectivist doctrine which subordinated the individual to some higher authority, either mystical or social. Consequently, most political systems were variants of the same statist tyranny, differing only in degree, not in basic principle, limited only by the accidents of tradition, of chaos, of bloody strife and periodic collapse. Under all such systems, morality was a code applicable to the individual, but not to society. Society was placed outside the moral law, as its embodiment or source or exclusive interpreter—and the inculcation of self-sacrificial devotion to social duty was regarded as the main purpose of ethics in man’s earthly existence.

Since there is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men, this meant, in practice, that the rulers of society were exempt from moral law; subject only to the traditional rituals, they held total power and exacted blind obedience—on the implicit principle of: “The good is that which is good for society (or for the tribe, the race, the nation), and the ruler’s edicts are its voice on earth.”

This was true of all statist systems, under all variants of the altruist-collectivist ethics, mystical or social. “The Divine Right of Kings” summarizes the political theory of the first—” Vox populi, vox dei” of the second. As witness: the theocracy of Egypt, with the Pharaoh as an embodied god—the unlimited majority rule or democracy of Athens—the welfare state run by the Emperors of Rome—the Inquisition of the late Middle Ages—the absolute monarchy of France—the welfare state of Bismarck’s Prussia—the gas chambers of Nazi Germany—the slaughterhouse of the Soviet Union.

All these political systems were expressions of the altruist-collectivist ethics—and their common characteristic is the fact that society stood above the moral law, as an omnipotent, sovereign whim worshipper. Thus, politically, all these systems were variants of an amoral society.

The most profoundly revolutionary achievement of the United States of America was the subordination of society to moral law.

The principle of man’s individual rights represented the extension of morality into the social system—as a limitation on the power of the state, as man’s protection against the brute force of the collective, as the subordination of might to right. The United States was the first moral society in history.

All previous systems had regarded man as a sacrificial means to the ends of others, and society as an end in itself. The United States regarded man as an end in himself, and society as a means to the peaceful, orderly, voluntary co-existence of individuals. All previous systems had held that man’s life belongs to society, that society can dispose of him in any way it pleases, and that any freedom he enjoys is his only by favor, by the permission of society, which may be revoked at any time. The United States held that man’s life is his by right (which means: by moral principle and by his nature), that a right is the property of an individual, that society as such has no rights, and that the only moral purpose of a government is the protection of individual rights.

A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.)

The concept of a “right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.

Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive —of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.

The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.

The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day. In accordance with the two theories of ethics, the mystical or the social, some men assert that rights are a gift of God—others, that rights are a gift of society. But, in fact, the source of rights is man’s nature.

The Declaration of Independence stated that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Whether one believes that man is the product of a Creator or of nature, the issue of man’s opinion does not alter the fact that he is an entity of a specific kind—a rational being—that he cannot function successfully under coercion, and that rights are a necessary condition of his particular mode of survival.

“The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational.” (Atlas Shrugged)

To violate man’s right means to compel him to act against his own judgment, or to expropriate his values. Basically, there is only one way to do it: by the use of physical force. There are two potential violators of man’s rights: the criminals and the government. The great achievement of the United States was to draw a distinction between these two—by forbidding to the second the legalized version of the activities of the first.

The Declaration of Independence laid down the principle that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.” This provided the only valid justification of a government and defined its only proper purpose: to protect man’s rights by protecting him from physical violence.

Thus the government’s function was changed from the role of ruler to the role of servant. The government was set to protect man from criminals—and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed against private citizens, but against the government—as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power.

The result was the pattern of a civilized society which—for the brief span of some hundred and fifty years—America came close to achieving. A civilized society is one in which physical force is banned from human relationships—in which the government, acting as a policeman, may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.

This was the essential meaning and intent of America’s political philosophy, implicit in the principle of individual rights. But it was not formulated explicitly, nor fully accepted nor consistently practiced.

America’s inner contradiction was the altruist-collectivist ethics. Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights. One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal.

It was the concept of individual rights that had given birth to a free society. It was with the destruction of individual rights that the destruction of freedom had to begin.

A collectivist tyranny dare not enslave a country by an outright confiscation of its values, material or moral. It has to be done by a process of internal corruption. Just as in the material realm the plundering of a country’s wealth is accomplished by inflating the currency—so today one may witness the process of inflation being applied to the realm of rights. The process entails such a growth of newly promulgated “rights” that people do not notice the fact that the meaning of the concept is being reversed. Just as bad money drives out good money, so these “printing-press rights” negate authentic rights.

Consider the curious fact that never has there been such a proliferation, all over the world, of two contradictory phenomena: of alleged new “rights” and of slave-labor camps.

The “gimmick” was the switch of the concept of rights from the political to the economic realm.

The Democratic Party platform of 1960 summarizes the switch boldly and explicitly. It declares that a Democratic Administration “will reaffirm the economic bill of rights which Franklin Roosevelt wrote into our national conscience sixteen years ago.”

Bear clearly in mind the meaning of the concept of “rights” when you read the list which that platform offers:

“1. The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.

”2. The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.

“3. The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.

”4. The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair and competition and domination by monopolies at home and abroad.

“5. The right of every family to a decent home.

”6. The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.

“7. The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accidents and unemployment.

”8. The right to a good education.”

A single question added to each of the above eight clauses would make the issue clear: At whose expense?

Jobs, food, clothing, recreation (!), homes, medical care, education, etc., do not grow in nature. These are man-made values—goods and services produced by men. Who is to provide them?

If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.

Any alleged “right” of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.

No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as “the right to enslave.”

A right does not include the material implementation of that right by other men; it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one’s own effort.

Observe, in this context, the intellectual precision of the Founding Fathers: they spoke of the right to the pursuit of happiness—not of the right to happiness. It means that a man has the right to take the actions he deems necessary to achieve his happiness; it does not mean that others must make him happy.

The right to life means that a man has the right to support his life by his own work (on any economic level, as high as his ability will carry him); it does not mean that others must provide him with the necessities of life.

The right to property means that a man has the right to take the economic actions necessary to earn property, to use it and to dispose of it; it does not mean that others must provide him with property.

The right of free speech means that a man has the right to express his ideas without danger of suppression, interference or punitive action by the government. It does not mean that others must provide him with a lecture hall, a radio station or a printing press through which to express his ideas.

Any undertaking that involves more than one man, requires the voluntary consent of every participant. Every one of them has the right to make his own decision, but none has the right to force his decision on the others.

There is no such thing as “a right to a job”—there is only the right of free trade, that is: a man’s right to take a job if another man chooses to hire him. There is no “right to a home,” only the right of free trade: the right to build a home or to buy it. There are no “rights to a ‘fair’ wage or a ‘fair’ price” if no one chooses to pay it, to hire a man or to buy his product. There are no “rights of consumers” to milk, shoes, movies or champagne if no producers choose to manufacture such items (there is only the right to manufacture them oneself). There are no “rights” of special groups, there are no “rights of farmers, of workers, of businessmen, of employees, of employers, of the old, of the young, of the unborn.” There are only the Rights of Man—rights possessed by every individual man and by all men as individuals.

Property rights and the right of free trade are man’s only “economic rights” (they are, in fact, political rights)—and there can be no such thing as “an economic bill of rights.” But observe that the advocates of the latter have all but destroyed the former.

Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man’s freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men. Private citizens are not a threat to one another’s rights or freedom. A private citizen who resorts to physical force and violates the rights of others is a criminal—and men have legal protection against him.

Criminals are a small minority in any age or country. And the harm they have done to mankind is infinitesimal when compared to the horrors—the bloodshed, the wars, the persecutions, the confiscations, the famines, the enslavements, the wholesale destructions—perpetrated by mankind’s governments. Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights, a government is man’s deadliest enemy. It is not as protection against private actions, but against governmental actions that the Bill of Rights was written. . . .

EDITOR’S NOTE: This selection, written in the early 1960s and published in The Virtue of Selfishness, is AR’s answer to the notion of “group rights.”

Collectivized “Rights”

RIGHTS ARE a moral principle defining proper social relationships. Just as a man needs a moral code in order to survive (in order to act, to choose the right goals and to achieve them), so a society (a group of men) needs moral principles in order to organize a social system consonant with man’s nature and with the requirements of his survival.

Just as a man can evade reality and act on the blind whim of any given moment, but can achieve nothing save progressive self-destruction—so a society can evade reality and establish a system ruled by the blind whims of its members or its leader, by the majority gang of any given moment, by the current demagogue or by a permanent dictator. But such a society can achieve nothing save the rule of brute force and a state of progressive self-destruction.

What subjectivism is in the realm of ethics, collectivism is in the realm of politics. Just as the notion that “Anything I do is right because I chose to do it,” is not a moral principle, but a negation of morality—so the notion that “Anything society does is right because society chose to do it,” is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles and the banishment of morality from social issues.

When “might” is opposed to “right,” the concept of “might” can have only one meaning: the power of brute, physical force—which, in fact, is not a “power” but the most hopeless state of impotence; it is merely the “power” to destroy; it is the “power” of a stampede of animals running amuck.

Yet that is the goal of most of today’s intellectuals. At the root of all their conceptual switches, there lies another, more fundamental one: the switch of the concept of rights from the individual to the collective—which means: the replacement of “The Rights of Man” by “The Rights of Mob.”

Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression “individual rights” is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today’s intellectual chaos). But the expression “collective rights” is a contradiction in terms.

Any group or “collective,” large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the right of its individual members. In a free society, the “rights” of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary, individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking. Every legitimate group undertaking is based on the participants’ right of free association and free trade. (By “legitimate,” I mean: noncriminal and freely formed, that is, a group which no one was forced to join.)

For instance, the right of an industrial concern to engage in business is derived from the right of its owners to invest their money in a productive venture—from their right to hire employees—from the right of the employees to sell their services—from the right of all those involved to produce and to sell their products—from the right of the customers to buy (or not to buy) those products. Every link of this complex chain of contractual relationships rests on individual rights, individual choices, individual agreements. Every agreement is delimited, specified and subject to certain conditions, that is, dependent upon a mutual trade to mutual benefit.

This is true of all legitimate groups or associations in a free society: partnerships, business concerns, professional association, labor unions (voluntary ones), political parties, etc. It applies also to all agency agreements: the right of one man to act for or represent another or others is derived from the rights of those he represents and is delegated to him by their voluntary choice, for a specific, delimited purpose—as in the case of a lawyer, a business representative, a labor union delegate, etc.

A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations.

Any group that does not recognize this principle is not an association, but a gang or a mob.

Any doctrine of group activities that does not recognize individual rights is a doctrine of mob rule or legalized lynching.

The notion of “collective rights” (the notion that rights belong to groups, not to individuals) means that “rights” belong to some men, but not to others—that some men have the “right” to dispose of others in any manner they please—and that the criterion of such privileged position consists of numerical superiority.

Nothing can ever justify or validate such a doctrine—and no one ever has. Like the altruist morality from which it is derived, this doctrine rests on mysticism: either on the old-fashioned mysticism of faith in supernatural edicts, like “The Divine Right of Kings”—or on the social mystique of modern collectivists who see society as a super-organism, as some supernatural entity apart from and superior to the sum of its individual members.

The amorality of that collectivist mystique is particularly obvious today in the issue of national rights.

A nation, like any other group, is only a number of individuals and can have no rights other than the rights of its individual citizens. A free nation—a nation that recognizes, respects and protects the individual rights of its citizens—has a right to its territorial integrity, its social system and its form of government. The government of such a nation is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of its citizens and has no rights other than the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific, delimited task (the task of protecting them from physical force, derived from their right of self-defense).

The citizens of a free nation may disagree about the specific legal procedures or methods of implementing their rights (which is a complex problem, the province of political science and of the philosophy of law), but they agree on the basic principle to be implemented: the principle of individual rights. When a country’s constitution places individual rights outside the reach of public authorities, the sphere of political power is severely delimited—and thus the citizens may, safely and properly, agree to abide by the decisions of a majority vote in this delimited sphere. The lives and property of minorities or dissenters are not at stake, are not subject to vote and are not endangered by any majority decision; no man or group holds a blank check on power over others.

Such a nation has a right to its sovereignty (derived from the rights of its citizens) and a right to demand that its sovereignty be respected by all other nations.

But this right cannot be claimed by dictatorships, by savage tribes or by any form of absolutist tyranny. A nation that violates the rights of its own citizens cannot claim any rights whatsoever. In the issue of rights, as in all moral issues, there can be no double standard. A nation ruled by brute physical force is not a nation, but a horde—whether it is led by Attila, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Khrushchev or Castro. What rights could Attila claim and on what grounds?

This applies to all forms of tribal savagery, ancient or modern, primitive or “industrialized.” Neither geography nor race nor tradition nor previous state of development can confer on some human beings the “right” to violate the rights of others.

The right of “the self-determination of nations” applies only to free societies or to societies seeking to establish freedom; it does not apply to dictatorships. Just as an individual’s right of free action does not include the “right” to commit crimes (that is, to violate the rights of others), so the right of a nation to determine its own form of government does not include the right to establish a slave society (that is, to legalize the enslavement of some men by others). There is no such thing as “the right to enslave. A nation can do it, just as a man can become a criminal—but neither can do it by right.

It does not matter, in this context, whether a nation was enslaved by force, like Soviet Russia, or by vote, like Nazi Germany. Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual). Whether a slave society was conquered or chose to be enslaved, it can claim no national rights and no recognition of such “rights” by civilized countries—just as a mob of gangsters cannot demand a recognition of its “rights” and a legal equality with an industrial concern or a university, on the ground that the gangsters chose by unanimous vote to engage in that particular kind of group activity.

Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the non-existent “rights” of gang rulers. It is not a free nation’s duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses.

This right, however, is conditional. Just as the suppression of crimes does not give a policeman the right to engage in criminal activities, so the invasion and destruction of a dictatorship does not give the invader the right to establish another variant of a slave society in the conquered country.

A slave country has no national rights, but the individual rights of its citizens remain valid, even if unrecognized, and the conqueror has no right to violate them. Therefore, the invasion of an enslaved country is morally justified only when and if the conquerors establish a free social system, that is, a system based on the recognition of individual rights.

Since there is no fully free country today, since the so-called “Free World” consists of various “mixed economies,” it might be asked whether every country on earth is morally open to invasion by every other. The answer is: No. There is a difference between a country that recognizes the principle of individual rights, but does not implement it fully in practice, and a country that denies and flouts it explicitly. All “mixed economies” are in a precarious state of transition which, ultimately, has to turn to freedom or collapse into dictatorship. There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule—executions without trial or with a mock trial, for political offenses—the nationalization or expropriation of private property—and censorship. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw.

Observe, on this particular issue, the shameful end-of-trail and the intellectual disintegration of modern “liberals.”

Internationalism had always been one of the “liberals’ ” basic tenets. They regarded nationalism as a major social evil, as a product of capitalism and as the cause of wars. They opposed any form of national self-interest; they refused to differentiate between rational patriotism and blind, racist chauvinism, denouncing both as “fascist.” They advocated the dissolution of national boundaries and the merging of all nations into “One World.” Next to property rights, “national rights” were the special target of their attacks.

Today, it is “national rights” that they invoke as their last, feeble, fading hold on some sort of moral justification for the results of their theories—for the brood of little statist dictatorships spreading, like a skin disease, over the surface of the globe, in the form of so-called “newly emerging nations,” semi-socialist, semi-communist, semi-fascist, and wholly committed only to the use of brute force.

It is the “national right” of such countries to choose their own form of government (any form they please) that the “liberals” offer as a moral validation and ask us to respect. It is the “national right” of Cuba to its form of government, they claim, that we must not violate or interfere with. Having all but destroyed the legitimate national rights of free countries, it is for dictatorships that the “liberals” now claim the sanction of “national rights.”

And worse: it is not mere nationalism that the “liberals” champion, but racism—primordial tribal racism.

Observe the double standard: while, in the civilized countries of the West, the “liberals” are still advocating internationalism and global self-sacrifice-the savage tribes of Asia and Africa are granted the sovereign “right” to slaughter one another in racial warfare. Mankind is reverting to a preindustrial, prehistorical view of society: to racial collectivism.

Such is the logical result and climax of the “liberals’ ” moral collapse which began when, as a prelude to the collectivization of property, they accepted the collectivization of rights.

Their own confession of guilt lies in their terminology. Why do they use the word “rights” to denote the things they are advocating? Why don’t they preach what they practice? Why don’t they name it openly and attempt to justify it, if they can?

The answer is obvious.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In a pamphlet from the 1940s, “Textbook of Americanism,” AR indicates why procapitalists should shun Utilitarianism.

On Utilitarianism

“THE GREATEST good for the greatest number” is one of the most vicious slogans ever foisted on humanity.

This slogan has no concrete, specific meaning. There is no way to interpret it benevolently, but a great many ways in which it can be used to justify the most vicious actions.

What is the definition of “the good” in this slogan? None, except: whatever is good for the greatest number. Who, in any particular issue, decides what is good for the greatest number? Why, the greatest number.

If you consider this moral, you would have to approve of the following examples, which are exact applications of this slogan in practice: fifty-one percent of humanity enslaving the other forty-nine; nine hungry cannibals eating the tenth one; a lynching mob murdering a man whom they consider dangerous to the community.

There were seventy million Germans in Germany and six hundred thousand Jews. The greatest number (the Germans) supported the Nazi govemment which told them that their greatest good would be served by exterminating the smaller number (the Jews) and grabbing their property. This was the horror achieved in practice by a vicious slogan accepted in theory.

But, you might say, the majority in all these examples did not achieve any real good for itself either? No. It didn’t. Because “the good” is not determined by counting numbers and is not achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone.

The unthinking believe that this slogan implies something vaguely noble and virtuous, that it tells men to sacrifice themselves for the greatest number of others. If so, should the greatest number of men wish to be virtuous and sacrifice themselves to the smallest number who would be vicious and accept it? No? Well, then should the smallest number be virtuous and sacrifice themselves to the greatest number who would be vicious?

The unthinking assume that every man who mouths this slogan places himself unselfishly with the smaller number to be sacrificed to the greatest number of others. Why should he? There is nothing in the slogan to make him do this. He is much more likely to try to get in with the greatest number, and start sacrificing others. What the slogan actually tells him is that he has no choice, except to rob or be robbed, to crush or get crushed.

The depravity of this slogan lies in the implication that “the good” of a majority must be achieved through the suffering of a minority; that the benefit of one man depends upon the sacrifice of another.

If we accept the Collectivist doctrine that man exists only for the sake of others, then it is true that every pleasure he enjoys (or every bite of food) is evil and immoral if two other men want it. But on this basis men cannot eat, breathe or love (all of that is selfish, and what if two other men want your wife?), men cannot live together at all, and can do nothing except end up by exterminating one another.

Only on the basis of individual rights can any good—private or public—be defined and achieved. Only when each man is free to exist for his own sake—neither sacrificing others to himself nor being sacrificed to others—only then is every man free to work for the greatest good he can achieve for himself by his own choice and by his own effort. And the sum total of such individual efforts is the only kind of general, social good possible.

Do not think that the opposite of “the greatest good for the greatest number” is “the greatest good for the smallest number.” The opposite is: the greatest good he can achieve by his own free effort, to every man living.

If you are an Individualist and wish to preserve the American way of life, the greatest contribution you can make is to discard, once and for all, from your thinking, from your speeches, and from your sympathy, the empty slogan of “the greatest good for the greatest number.” Reject any argument, oppose any proposal that has nothing but this slogan to justify it. It is a booby-trap. It is a precept of pure Collectivism. You cannot accept it and call yourself an Individualist. Make your choice. It is one or the other.

PART SIX

Romanticism and the Benevolent Universe

1. Romanticism

EDITOR’S NOTE: AR was often asked whether she was primarily a novelist or a philosopher. She gave her answer—and in the process indicated her view of art—in a 1963 speech at Lewis and Clark College, “The Goal of My Writing” (published in The Romantic Manifesto).

The Goal of My Writing

THE MOTIVE and purpose of my writing is the projection of an ideal man. The portrayal of a moral ideal, as my ultimate literary goal, as an end in itself—to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means.

Let me stress this: my purpose is not the philosophical enlightenment of my readers, it is not the beneficial influence which my novels may have on people, it is not the fact that my novels may help a reader’s intellectual development. All these matters are important, but they are secondary considerations, they are merely consequences and effects, not first causes or prime movers. My purpose, first cause and prime mover is the portrayal of Howard Roark or John Galt or Hank Rearden or Francisco d’Anconia as an end in himself—not as a means to any further end. Which, incidentally, is the greatest value I could ever offer a reader.

This is why I feel a very mixed emotion—part patience, part amusement and, at times, an empty kind of weariness—when I am asked whether I am primarily a novelist or a philosopher (as if these two were antonyms), whether my stories are propaganda vehicles for ideas, whether politics or the advocacy of capitalism is my chief purpose. All such questions are so enormously irrelevant, so far beside the point, so much not my way of coming at things.

My way is much simpler and, simultaneously, much more complex than that, speaking from two different aspects. The simple truth is that I approach literature as a child does: I write—and read—for the sake of the story. The complexity lies in the task of translating that attitude into adult terms.

The specific concretes, the forms of one’s values, change with one’s growth and development. The abstraction “values”. does not. An adult’s values involve the entire sphere of human activity, including philosophy—most particularly philosophy. But the basic principle—the function and meaning of values in man’s life and in literature—remains the same.

My basic test for any story is: Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life? Is this story an experience worth living through for its own sake? Is the pleasure of contemplating these characters an end in itself?

It’s as simple as that. But that simplicity involves the total of man’s existence.

It involves such questions as: What kind of men do I want to see in real life—and why? What kind of events, that is, human actions, do I want to see taking place—and why? What kind of experience do I want to live through, that is, what are my goals—and why?

It is obvious to what field of human knowledge all these questions belong: to the field of ethics. What is the good? What are the right actions for man to take? What are man’s proper values?

Since my purpose is the presentation of an ideal man, I had to define and present the conditions which make him possible and which his existence requires. Since man’s character is the product of his premises, I had to define and present the kind of premises and values that create the character of an ideal man and motivate his actions; which means that I had to define and present a rational code of ethics. Since man acts among and deals with other men, I had to present the kind of social system that makes it possible for ideal men to exist and to function—a free, productive, rational system, which demands and rewards the best in every man, great or average, and which is, obviously, laissez-faire capitalism.

But neither politics nor ethics nor philosophy are ends in themselves, neither in life nor in literature. Only Man is an end in himself.

Now observe that the practitioners of the literary school diametrically opposed to mine—the school of Naturalism—claim that a writer must reproduce what they call “real life,” allegedly “as it is,” exercising no selectivity and no value-judgments. By “reproduce,” they mean “photograph”; by “real life,” they mean whatever given concretes they happen to observe; by “as it is,” they mean “as it is lived by the people around them.” But observe that these Naturalists—or the good writers among them—are extremely selective in regard to two attributes of literature: style and characterization. Without selectivity, it would be impossible to achieve any sort of characterization whatever, neither of an unusual man nor of an average one who is to be offered as statistically typical of a large segment of the population. Therefore, the Naturalists’ opposition to selectivity applies to only one attribute of literature: the content or subject. It is in regard to his choice of subject that a novelist must exercise no choice, they claim.

Why?

The Naturalists have never given an answer to that question—not a rational, logical, noncontradictory answer. Why should a writer photograph his subjects indiscriminately and unselectively? Because they “really” happened? To record what really happened is the job of a reporter or of a historian, not of a novelist. To enlighten readers and educate them? That is the job of science, not of literature, of nonfiction writing, not of fiction. To improve men’s lot by exposing their misery? But that is a value-judgment and a moral purpose and a didactic “message” —all of which are forbidden by the Naturalist doctrine. Besides, to improve anything one must know what constitutes an improvement—and to know that, one must know what is the good and how to achieve it—and to know that, one must have a whole system of value-judgments, a system of ethics, which is anathema to the Naturalists.

Thus, the Naturalists’ position amounts to giving a novelist full esthetic freedom in regard to means, but not in regard to ends. He may exercise choice, creative imagination, value-judgments in regard to how he portrays things, but not in regard to what he portrays—in regard to style or characterization, but not in regard to subject. Man—the subject of literature—must not be viewed or portrayed selectively. Man must be accepted as the given, the unchangeable, the not-to-be-judged, the status quo. But since we observe that men do change, that they differ from one another, that they pursue different values, who, then, is to determine the human status quo? Naturalism’s implicit answer is: everybody except the novelist.

The novelist—according to the Naturalist doctrine—must neither judge nor value. He is not a creator, but only a recording secretary whose master is the rest of mankind. Let others pronounce judgments, make decisions, select goals, fight over values and determine the course, the fate and the soul of man. The novelist is the only outcast and deserter of that battle. His is not to reason why—his is only to trot behind his master, notebook in hand, taking down whatever the master dictates, picking up such pearls or such swinishness as the master may choose to drop.

As far as I am concerned, I have too much self-esteem for a job of that kind.

I see the novelist as a combination of prospector and jeweler. The novelist must discover the potential, the gold mine, of man’s soul, must extract the gold and then fashion as magnificent a crown as his ability and vision permit.

Just as men of ambition for material values do not rummage through city dumps, but venture out into lonely mountains in search of gold—so men of ambition for intellectual values do not sit in their backyards, but venture out in quest of the noblest, the purest, the costliest elements. I would not enjoy the spectacle of Benvenuto Cellini making mud-pies.

It is the selectivity in regard to subject—the most severely, rigorously, ruthlessly exercised selectivity—that I hold as the primary, the essential, the cardinal aspect of art. In literature, this means: the story—which means: the plot and the characters—which means: the kind of men and events that a writer chooses to portray.

The subject is not the only attribute of art, but it is the fundamental one, it is the end to which all the others are the means. In most esthetic theories, however, the end—the subject—is omitted from consideration, and only the means are regarded as esthetically relevant. Such theories set up a false dichotomy and claim that a slob portrayed by the technical means of a genius is preferable to a goddess portrayed by the technique of an amateur. I hold that both are esthetically offensive; but while the second is merely esthetic incompetence, the first is an esthetic crime.

There is no dichotomy, no necessary conflict between ends and means. The end does not justify the means—neither in ethics nor in esthetics. And neither do the means justify the end: there is no esthetic justification for the spectacle of Rembrandt’s great artistic skill employed to portray a side of beef.

That particular painting may be taken as a symbol of everything I am opposed to in art and in literature. At the age of seven, I could not understand why anyone should wish to paint or to admire pictures of dead fish, garbage cans or fat peasant women with triple chins. Today, I understand the psychological causes of such esthetic phenomena—and the more I understand, the more I oppose them.

In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other.

That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art.

Misery, disease, disaster, evil, all the negatives of human existence, are proper subjects of study in life, for the purpose of understanding and correcting them—but are not proper subjects of contemplation for contemplation’s sake. In art, and in literature, these negatives are worth re-creating only in relation to some positive, as a foil, as a contrast, as a means of stressing the positive—but not as an end in themselves.

The “compassionate” studies of depravity which pass for literature today are the dead end and the tombstone of Naturalism. If their perpetrators still claim the justification that these things are “true” (most of them aren’t)—the answer is that this sort of truth belongs in psychological case histories, not in literature. The picture of an infected ruptured appendix may be of great value in a medical textbook—but it does not belong in an art gallery. And an infected soul is a much more repulsive spectacle.

That one should wish to enjoy the contemplation of values, of the good—of man’s greatness, intelligence, ability, virtue, heroism—is self-explanatory. It is the contemplation of the evil that requires explanation and justification; and the same goes for the contemplation of the mediocre, the undistinguished, the commonplace, the meaningless, the mindless.

At the age of seven, I refused to read the children’s equivalent of Naturalistic literature—the stories about the children of the folks next door. They bored me to death. I was not interested in such people in real life; I saw no reason to find them interesting in fiction.

This is still my position today; the only difference is that today I know its full philosophical justification.

As far as literary schools are concerned, I would call myself a Romantic Realist.

Consider the significance of the fact that the Naturalists call Romantic art an “escape.” Ask yourself what sort of metaphysics—what view of life—that designation confesses. An escape—from what? If the projection of value-goals-the projection of an improvement on the given, the known, the immediately available—is an “escape,” then medicine is an “escape” from disease, agriculture is an “escape” from hunger, knowledge is an “escape” from ignorance, ambition is an “escape” from sloth, and life is an “escape” from death. If so, then a hard-core realist is a vermin-eaten brute who sits motionless in a mud puddle, contemplates a pigsty and whines that “such is life.” If that is realism, then I am an escapist. So was Aristotle. So was Christopher Columbus.

There is a passage in The Fountainhead that deals with this issue: the passage in which Howard Roark explains to Steven Mallory why he chose him to do a statue for the Stoddard Temple. In writing that passage, I was consciously and deliberately stating the essential goal of my own work—as a kind of small, personal manifesto: “I think you’re the best sculptor we’ve got. I think it, because your figures are not what men are, but what men could be—and should be. Because you’ve gone beyond the probable and made us see what is possible, but possible only through you. Because your figures are more devoid of contempt for humanity than any work I’ve ever seen. Because you have a magnificent respect for the human being. Because your figures are the heroic in man.”

Today, more than twenty years later, I would want to change—or, rather, to clarify—only two small points. First, the words “more devoid of contempt for humanity” are not too exact grammatically; what I wanted to convey was “untouched” by contempt for humanity, while the work of others was touched by it to some extent. Second, the words “possible only through you” should not be taken to mean that Mallory’s figures were impossible metaphysically, in reality; I meant that they were possible only because he had shown the way to make them possible.

“Your figures are not what men are, but what men could be—and should be.”

This line will make it clear whose great philosophical principle I had accepted and was following and had been groping for, long before I heard the name “Aristotle.” It was Aristotle who said that fiction is of greater philosophical importance than history, because history represents things only as they are, while fiction represents them “as they might be and ought to be.”

Why must fiction represent things “as they might be and ought to be”?

My answer is contained in one statement of Atlas Shrugged—and in the implications of that statement: “As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.”

Just as man’s physical survival depends on his own effort, so does his psychological survival. Man faces two corollary, interdependent fields of action in which a constant exercise of choice and a constant creative process are demanded of him: the world around him and his own soul (by “soul,” I mean his consciousness). Just as he has to produce the material values he needs to sustain his life, so he has to acquire the values of character that enable him to sustain it and that make his life worth living. He is born without the knowledge of either. He has to discover both—and translate them into reality—and survive by shaping the world and himself in the image of his values.

Growing from a common root, which is philosophy, man’s knowledge branches out in two directions. One branch studies the physical world or the phenomena pertaining to man’s physical existence; the other studies man or the phenomena pertaining to his consciousness. The first leads to abstract science, which leads to applied science or engineering, which leads to technology—to the actual production of material values. The second leads to art.

Art is the technology of the soul.

Art is the product of three philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics. Metaphysics and epistemology are the abstract base of ethics. Ethics is the applied science that defines a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions which determine the course of his life; ethics is the engineering that provides the principles and blueprints. Art creates the final product. It builds the model.

Let me stress this analogy: art does not teach—it shows, it displays the full, concretized reality of the final goal. Teaching is the task of ethics. Teaching is not the purpose of an art work, any more than it is the purpose of an airplane. Just as one can learn a great deal from an airplane by studying it or taking it apart, so one can learn a great deal from an art work—about the nature of man, of his soul, of his existence. But these are merely fringe benefits. The primary purpose of an airplane is not to teach man how to fly, but to give him the actual experience of flying. So is the primary purpose of an art work.

Although the representation of things “as they might be and ought to be” helps man to achieve these things in real life, this is only a secondary value. The primary value is that it gives him the experience of living in a world where things are as they ought to be. This experience is of crucial importance to him: it is his psychological life line.

Since man’s ambition is unlimited, since his pursuit and achievement of values is a lifelong process—and the higher the values, the harder the struggle—man needs a moment, an hour or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully achieved. It is like a moment of rest, a moment to gain fuel to move farther. Art gives him that fuel. Art gives him the experience of seeing the full, immediate, concrete reality of his distant goals.

The importance of that experience is not in what he learns from it, but in that he experiences it. The fuel is not a theoretical principle, not a didactic “message,” but the life-giving fact of experiencing a moment of metaphysical joy—a moment of love for existence.

A given individual may choose to move forward, to translate the meaning of that experience into the actual course of his own life; or he may fail to live up to it and spend the rest of his life betraying it. But whatever the case may be, the art work remains intact, an entity complete in itself, an achieved, realized, immovable fact of reality—like a beacon raised over the dark crossroads of the world, saying: “This is possible.”

No matter what its consequences, that experience is not a way station one passes, but a stop, a value in itself. It is an experience about which one can say: “I am glad to have reached this in my life.” There are not many experiences of that kind to be found in the modem world.

I have read a great many novels of which nothing remains in my mind but the dry rustle of scraps long since swept away. But the novels of Victor Hugo, and a very few others, were an unrepeatable experience to me, a beacon whose every brilliant spark is as alive as ever.

This aspect of art is difficult to communicate—it demands a great deal of the viewer or reader—but I believe that many of you will understand me introspectively.

There is a scene in The Fountainhead which is a direct expression of this issue. I was, in a sense, both characters in that scene, but it was written primarily from the aspect of myself as the consumer, rather than the producer, of art; it was based on my own desperate longing for the sight of human achievement. I regarded the emotional meaning of that scene as entirely personal, almost subjective—and I did not expect it to be shared by anyone. But that scene proved to be the one most widely understood and most frequently mentioned by the readers of The Fountainhead.

It is the opening scene of Part IV, between Howard Roark and the boy on the bicycle.

The boy thought that “man’s work should be a higher step, an improvement on nature, not a degradation. He did not want to despise men; he wanted to love and admire them. But he dreaded the sight of the first house, poolroom and movie poster he would encounter on his way.... He had always wanted to write music, and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought.... Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music.... Don’t work for my happiness, my brothers—show me yours—show me that it is possible—show me your achievement—and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.”

This is the meaning of art in man’s life.

It is from this perspective that I will now ask you to consider the meaning of Naturalism—the doctrine which proposes to confine men to the sight of slums, poolrooms, movie posters and on down, much farther down.

It is the Romantic or value-oriented vision of life that the Naturalists regard as “superficial”—and it is the vision which extends as far as the bottom of a garbage can that they regard as “profound.”

It is rationality, purpose and values that they regard as naive—while sophistication, they claim, consists of discarding one’s mind, rejecting goals, renouncing values and writing four-letter words on fences and sidewalks.

Scaling a mountain, they claim, is easy—but rolling in the gutter is a noteworthy achievement.

Those who seek the sight of beauty and greatness are motivated by fear, they claim—they who are the embodiments of chronic terror—while it takes courage to fish in cesspools.

Man’s soul—they proclaim with self-righteous pride—is a sewer.

Well, they ought to know.

It is a significant commentary on the present state of our culture that I have become the object of hatred, smears, denunciations, because I am famous as virtually the only novelist who has declared that her soul is not a sewer, and neither are the souls of her characters, and neither is the soul of man.

The motive and purpose of my writing can best be summed up by saying that if a dedication page were to precede the total of my work, it would read: To the glory of Man.

And if anyone should ask me what it is that I have said to the glory of Man, I will answer only by paraphrasing Howard Roark. I will hold up a copy of Atlas Shrugged and say: “The explanation rests.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This excerpt from a 1969 essay, “What is Romanticism?” (published in The Romantic Manifesto), offers a fuller statement of AR’s view of art—and of its antithesis: naturalism.

What Is Romanticism?

ROMANTICISM IS a category of art based on the recognition of the principle that man possesses the faculty of volition.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man and of existence. In forming a view of man’s nature, a fundamental question one must answer is whether man possesses the faculty of volition—because one’s conclusions and evaluations in regard to all the characteristics, requirements and actions of man depend on the answer.

Their opposite answers to this question constitute the respective basic premises of two broad categories of art: Romanticism, which recognizes the existence of man’s volition—and Naturalism, which denies it.

In the field of literature, the logical consequences of these basic premises (whether held consciously or subconsciously) determine the form of the key elements of a literary work.

1. If man possesses volition, then the crucial aspect of his life is his choice of values—if he chooses values, then he must act to gain and/or keep them—if so, then he must set his goals and engage in purposeful action to achieve them. The literary form expressing the essence of such action is the plot. (A plot is a purposeful progression of logically connected events leading to the resolution of a climax.)

The faculty of volition operates in regard to the two fundamental aspects of man’s life: consciousness and existence, i.e., his psychological action and his existential action, i.e., the formation of his own character and the course of action he pursues in the physical world. Therefore, in a literary work, both the characterizations and the events are to be created by the author, according to his view of the role of values in human psychology and existence (and according to the code of values he holds to be right). His characters are abstract projections, not reproductions of concretes; they are invented conceptually, not copied reportorially from the particular individuals he might have observed. The specific characters of particular individuals are merely the evidence of their particular value-choices and have no wider metaphysical significance (except as material for the study of the general principles of human psychology); they do not exhaust man’s characterological potential.

2. If man does not possess volition, then his life and his character are determined by forces beyond his control—if so, then the choice of values is impossible to him—if so, then such values as he appears to hold are only an illusion, predetermined by the forces he has no power to resist—if so, then he is impotent to achieve his goals or to engage in purposeful action—and if he attempts the illusion of such action, he will be defeated by those forces, and his failure (or occasional success) will have no relation to his actions. The literary form expressing the essence of this view is plotlessness (since there can be no purposeful progression of events, no logical continuity, no resolution, no climax).

If man’s character and the course of his life are the product of unknown (or unknowable) forces, then, in a literary work, both the characterizations and the events are not to be invented by the author, but are to be copied from such particular characters and events as he has observed. Since he denies the existence of any effective motivational principle in human psychology, he cannot create his characters conceptually. He can only observe the people he meets, as he observes inanimate objects, and reproduce them—in the implicit hope that some clue to the unknown forces controlling human destiny may be discovered in such reproductions.

These basic premises of Romanticism and Naturalism (the volition or anti-volition premise) affect all the other aspects of a literary work, such as the choice of theme and the quality of the style, but it is the nature of the story structure—the attribute of plot or plotlessness— that represents the most important difference between them and serves as the main distinguishing characteristic for classifying a given work in one category or the other.

This is not to say that a writer identifies and applies all the consequences of his basic premise by a conscious process of thought. Art is the product of a man’s subconscious integrations, of his sense of life, to a larger extent than of his conscious philosophical convictions. Even the choice of the basic premise may be subconscious—since artists, like any other men, seldom translate their sense of life into conscious terms. And, since an artist’s sense of life may be as full of contradictions as that of any other man, these contradictions become apparent in his work; the dividing line between Romanticism and Naturalism is not always maintained consistently in every aspect of every given work of art (particularly since one of these basic premises is false). But if one surveys the field of art and studies the works produced, one will observe that the degree of consistency in the consequences of these two basic premises is a remarkably eloquent demonstration of the power of metaphysical premises in the realm of art.

With very rare (and partial) exceptions, Romanticism is non-existent in today’s literature. This is not astonishing when one considers the crushing weight of the philosophical wreckage under which generations of men have been brought up—a wreckage dominated by the doctrines of irrationalism and determinism. In their formative years, young people could not find much evidence on which to develop a rational, benevolent, value-oriented sense of life, neither in philosophical theory nor in its cultural echoes nor in the daily practice of the passively deteriorating society around them.

But observe the psychological symptoms of an unrecognized, unidentified issue: the virulently intense antagonism of today’s esthetic spokesmen to any manifestation of the Romantic premise in art. It is particularly the attribute of plot in literature that arouses an impassioned hostility among them—a hositility with deeply personal overtones, too violent for a mere issue of literary canons. If plot were a negligible and inappropriate element of literature, as they claim it to be, why the hysterical hatred in their denunciations? This type of reaction pertains to metaphysical issues, i.e., to issues that threaten the foundations of a person’s entire view of life (if that view is irrational). What they sense in a plot structure is the implicit premise of volition (and, therefore, of moral values). The same reaction, for the same subconscious reason, is evoked by such elements as heroes or happy endings or the triumph of virtue, or, in the visual arts, beauty. Physical beauty is not a moral or volitional issue—but the choice to paint a beautiful human being rather than an ugly one, implies the existence of volition: of choice, standards, values.

The destruction of Romanticism in esthetics—like the destruction of individualism in ethics or of capitalism in politics—was made possible by philosophical default. It is one more demonstration of the principle that that which is not known explicitly is not in man’s conscious control. In all three cases, the nature of the fundamental values involved had never been defined explicitly, the issues were fought in terms of non-essentials, and the values were destroyed by men who did not know what they were losing or why.

This was the predominant pattern of issues in the field of esthetics, which, throughout history, has been a virtual monopoly of mysticism. The definition of Romanticism given here is mine—it is not a generally known or accepted one. There is no generally accepted definition of Romanticism (nor of any key element in art, nor of art itself).

Romanticism is a product of the nineteenth century—a (largely subconscious) result of two great influences: Aristotelianism, which liberated man by validating the power of his mind—and capitalism, which gave man’s mind the freedom to translate ideas into practice (the second of these influences was itself the result of the first). But while the practical consequences of Aristotelianism were reaching men’s daily existence, its theoretical influence was long since gone: philosophy, since the Renaissance, had been retrogressing overwhelmingly to the mysticism of Plato. Thus the historically unprecedented events of the nineteenth century—the Industrial Revolution, the child-prodigy speed in the growth of science, the skyrocketing standard of living, the liberated torrent of human energy—were left without intellectual direction or evaluation. The nineteenth century was guided, not by an Aristotelian philosophy, but by an Aristotelian sense of life. (And, like a brilliantly violent adolescent who fails to translate his sense of life into conscious terms, it burned itself out, choked by the blind confusions of its own overpowering energy.)

Whatever their conscious convictions, the artists of that century’s great new school—the Romanticists—picked their sense of life out of the cultural atmosphere: it was an atmosphere of men intoxicated by the discovery of freedom, with all the ancient strongholds of tyranny—of church, state, monarchy, feudalism—crumbling around them, with unlimited roads opening in all directions and no barriers set to their newly unleashed energy. It was an atmosphere best expressed by that century’s naive, exuberant and tragically blind belief that human progress, from here on, was to be irresistible and automatic.

Esthetically, the Romanticists were the great rebels and innovators of the nineteenth century. But, in their conscious convictions, they were for the most part anti-Aristotelian and leaning toward a kind of wild, freewheeling mysticism. They did not see their own rebellion in fundamental terms; they were rebelling—in the name of the individual artist’s freedom—not against determinism, but, much more superficially, against the esthetic “Establishment” of the time: against Classicism.

Classicism (an example of a much deeper superficiality) was a school that had devised a set of arbitrary, concretely detailed rules purporting to represent the final and absolute criteria of esthetic value. In literature, these rules consisted of specific edicts, loosely derived from the Greek (and French) tragedies, which prescribed every formal aspect of a play (such as the unity of time, place and action) down to the number of acts and the number of verses permitted to a character in every act. Some of that stuff was based on Aristotle’s esthetics and can serve as an example of what happens when concrete-bound mentalities, seeking to by-pass the responsibility of thought, attempt to transform abstract principles into concrete prescriptions and to replace creation with imitation. (For an example of Classicism that survived well into the twentieth century, I refer you to the architectural dogmas represented by Howard Roark’s antagonists in The Fountainhead.)

Even though the Classicists had no answer to why their rules were to be accepted as valid (except the usual appeal to tradition, to scholarship and to the prestige of antiquity), this school was regarded as the representative of reason. (!)

Such were the roots of one of the grimmest ironies in cultural history: the early attempts to define the nature of Romanticism declared it to be an esthetic school based on the primacy of emotions—as against the champions of the primacy of reason, which were the Classicists (and, later, the Naturalists). In various forms, this definition has persisted to our day. It is an example of the intellectually disastrous consequences of definitions by non-essentials-and an example of the penalty one pays for a non-philosophical approach to cultural phenomena.

One can observe the misapprehended element of truth that gave rise to that early classification. What the Romanticists brought to art was the primacy of values, an element that had been missing in the stale, arid, third- and fourth-hand (and rate) repetitions of the Classicists’ formula-copying. Values (and value-judgments) are the source of emotions; a great deal of emotional intensity was projected in the work of the Romanticists and in the reactions of their audiences, as well as a great deal of color, imagination, originality, excitement and all the other consequences of a value-oriented view of life. This emotional element was the most easily perceivable characteristic of the new movement and it was taken as its defining characteristic, without deeper inquiry.

Such issues as the fact that the primacy of values in human life is not an irreducible primary, that it rests on man’s faculty of volition, and, therefore, that the Romanticists, philosophically, were the champions of volition (which is the root of values) and not of emotions (which are merely the consequences)—were issues to be defined by philosophers, who defaulted in regard to esthetics as they did in regard to every other crucial aspect of the nineteenth century.

The still deeper issue, the fact that the faculty of reason is the faculty of volition, was not known at the time, and the various theories of free will were for the most part of an anti-rational character, thus reinforcing the association of volition with mysticism.

The Romanticists saw their cause primarily as a battle for their right to individuality and—unable to grasp the deepest metaphysical justification of their cause, unable to identify their values in terms of reason—they fought for individuality in terms of feelings, surrendering the banner of reason to their enemies.

There were other, lesser consequences of this fundamental error, all of them symptoms of the intellectual confusion of the age. Groping blindly for a metaphysically oriented, grand-scale, exalted way of life, the Romanticists predominantly, were enemies of capitalism, which they regarded as a prosaic, materialistic, “petty bourgeois” system—never realizing that it was the only system that could make freedom, individuality and the pursuit of values possible in practice. Some of them chose to be advocates of socialism; some turned for inspiration to the Middle Ages and became shameless glamorizers of that nightmare era; some ended up where most champions of the non-rational end up: in religion. All of it served to accelerate Romanticism’s growing break with reality.

When, in the later half of the nineteenth century, Naturalism rose to prominence and, assuming the mantle of reason and reality, proclaimed the artists’ duty to portray “things as they are”—Romanticism did not have much of an opposition to offer.

It must be noted that philosophers contributed to the confusion surrounding the term “Romanticism.” They attached the name “Romantic” to certain philosophers (such as Schelling and Schopenhauer) who were avowed mystics advocating the supremacy of emotions, instincts or will over reason. This movement in philosophy had no significant relation to Romanticism in esthetics, and the two movements must not be confused. The common nomenclature, however, is significant in one respect: it indicates the depth of the confusion on the subject of volition. The “Romantic” philosophers’ theories were a viciously malevolent, existence-hating attempt to uphold volition in the name of whim worship, while the esthetic Romanticists were groping blindly to uphold volition in the name of man’s life and values here, on earth. In terms of essentials, the brilliant sunlight of Victor Hugo’s universe is the diametrical opposite of the venomous muck of Schopenhauer’s. It was only philosophical package-dealing that could throw them in the same category. But the issue demonstrates the profound importance of the subject of volition, and the grotesque distortions it assumes when men are unable to grasp its nature. This issue may also serve as an illustration of the importance of establishing that volition is a function of man’s rational faculty.

In recent times, some literary historians have discarded, as inadequate, the definition of Romanticism as an emotion-oriented school and have attempted to redefine it, but without success. Following the rule of fundamentality, it is as a volition-oriented school that Romanticism must be defined—and it is in terms of this essential characteristic that the nature and history of Romantic literature can be traced and understood.

The (implicit) standards of Romanticism are so demanding that in spite of the abundance of Romantic writers at the time of its dominance, this school has produced very few pure, consistent Romanticists of the top rank. Among novelists, the greatest are Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky, and, as single novels (whose authors were not always consistent in the rest of their works), I would name Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Among play-wrights, the greatest are Friedrich Schiller and Edmond Rostand.

The distinguishing characteristic of this top rank (apart from their purely literary genius) is their full commitment to the premise of volition in both of its fundamental areas: in regard to consciousness and to existence, in regard to man’s character and to his actions in the physical world. Maintaining a perfect integration of these two aspects, unmatched in the brilliant ingenuity of their plot structures, these writers are enormously concerned with man’s soul (i.e., his consciousness). They are moralists in the most profound sense of the word; their concern is not merely with values, but specifically with moral values and with the power of moral values in shaping human character. Their characters are “larger than life,” i.e., they are abstract projections in terms of essentials (not always successful projections, as we shall discuss later). In their stories, one will never find action for action’s sake, unrelated to moral values. The events of their plots are shaped, determined and motivated by the characters’ values (or treason to values), by their struggle in pursuit of spiritual goals and by profound value-conflicts. Their themes are fundamental, universal, timeless issues of man’s existence—and they are the only consistent creators of the rarest attribute of literature: the perfect integration of theme and plot, which they achieve with superlative virtuosity.

If philosophical significance is the criterion of what is to be taken seriously, then these are the most serious writers in world literature.

The second rank of Romanticists (who are still writers of considerable merit, but of lesser stature) indicates the direction of Romanticism’s future decline. This rank is represented by such writers as Walter Scott and Alexander Dumas. The distinguishing characteristic of their work is the emphasis on action, without spiritual goals or significant moral values. Their stories have well-built, imaginative, suspenseful plot structures, but the values pursued by their characters and motivating the action are of a primitive, superficial, emphatically non-metaphysical order: loyalty to a king, the reclaiming of a heritage, personal revenge, etc. The conflicts and story lines are predominantly external. The characters are abstractions, they are not Naturalistic copies, but they are abstractions of loosely generalized virtues or vices, and characterization is minimal. In time, they become a writer’s own self-made bromides, such as “a brave knight,” “a noble lady,” “a vicious courtier”—so that they are neither created nor drawn from life, but picked from a kind of ready-to-wear collection of stock characters of Romanticism. The absence of any metaphysical meaning (apart from the affirmation of volition implicit in a plot structure) is evident in the fact that these novels have plots, but no abstract themes—with the story’s central conflict serving as the theme, usually in the form of some actual or fictionalized historical event.

Going farther down, one can observe the breakup of Romanticism, the contradictions that proceed from a premise held subconsciously. On this level, there emerges a class of writers whose basic premise, in effect, is that man possesses volition in regard to existence, but not to consciousness, i.e., in regard to his physical actions, but not in regard to his own character. The distinguishing characteristic of this class is: stories of unusual events enacted by conventional characters. The stories are abstract projections, involving actions one does not observe in “real life,” the characters are commonplace concretes. The stories are Romantic, the characters Naturalistic. Such novels seldom have plots (since value-conflicts are not their motivational principle), but they do have a form resembling a plot: a coherent, imaginative, often suspenseful story held together by some one central goal or undertaking of the characters.

The contradictions in such a combination of elements are obvious; they lead to a total breach between action and characterization, leaving the action unmotivated and the characters unintelligible. The reader is left to feel: “These people couldn’t do these things!”

With its emphasis on sheer physical action and neglect of human psychology, this class of novels stands on the borderline between serious and popular literature. No top-rank novelists belong to this category; the better-known ones are writers of science fiction, such as H. G. Wells or Jules Verne. (Occasionally, a good writer of the Naturalistic school, with a repressed element of Romanticism, attempts a novel on an abstract theme that requires a Romantic approach; the result falls into this category. For example, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here.) It is obvious why the novels of this category are enormously unconvincing. And, no matter how skillfully or suspensefully their action is presented, they always have an unsatisfying, uninspiring quality.

On the other side of the same dichotomy, there are Romanticists whose basic premise, in effect, is that man possesses volition in regard to consciousness, but not to existence, i.e., in regard to his own character and choice of values, but not in regard to the possibility of achieving his goals in the physical world. The distinguishing characteristics of such writers are grand-scale themes and characters, no plots and an overwhelming sense of tragedy, the sense of a “malevolent universe.” The chief exponents of this category were poets. The leading one is Byron, whose name has been attached to this particular, “Byronic,” view of existence: its essence is the belief that man must lead a heroic life and fight for his values even though he is doomed to defeat by a malevolent fate over which he has no control.

Today, the same view is advocated philosophically by the existentialists, but without the grand-scale element and with Romanticism replaced by a kind of sub-Naturalism.

Philosophically, Romanticism is a crusade to glorify man’s existence; psychologically, it is experienced simply as the desire to make life interesting.

This desire is the root and motor of Romantic imagination. Its greatest example, in popular literature, is O. Henry, whose unique characteristic is the pyrotechnical virtuosity of an inexhaustible imagination projecting the gaiety of a benevolent, almost childlike sense of life. More than any other writer, O. Henry represents the spirit of youth—specifically, the cardinal element of youth: the expectation of finding something wonderfully unexpected around all of life’s corners.

In the field of popular literature, Romanticism’s virtues and potential flaws may be seen in a simplified, more obvious form.

Popular literature is fiction that does not deal with abstract problems; it takes moral principles as the given, accepting certain generalized, common-sense ideas and values as its base. (Common-sense values and conventional values are not the same thing; the first can be justified rationally, the second cannot. Even though the second may include some of the first, they are justified, not on the ground of reason, but on the ground of social conformity.)

Popular fiction does not raise or answer abstract questions; it assumes that man knows what he needs to know in order to live, and it proceeds to show his adventures in living (which is one of the reasons for its popularity among all types of readers, including the problem-laden intellectuals). The distinctive characteristic of popular fiction is the absence of an explicitly ideational element, of the intent to convey intellectual information (or misinformation).

Detective, adventure, science-fiction novels and Westerns belong, for the most part, to the category of popular fiction. The best writers of this category come close to the Scott-Dumas group: their emphasis is on action, but their heroes and villains are abstract projections, and a loosely generalized view of moral values, of a struggle between good and evil, motivates the action. (As contemporary examples of the best in this class: Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming, Donald Hamilton.)

When we go below the top level of popular fiction, we descend into a kind of no man’s land where literary principles are barely applicable (particularly if we include the field of movies and television). Here, the distinctive characteristics of Romanticism become almost indistinguishable. On this level, writing is not the product of subconscious premises: it is a mixture of elements picked by random imitation rather than by sense-of-life creation.

A certain characteristic is typical of this level: it is not merely the use of conventional, Naturalistic characters to enact Romantic events, but worse: the use of characters who are romanticized embodiments of conventional values. Such embodiments represent canned values, empty stereotypes that serve as an automatic substitute for value-judgments. This method lacks the essential attribute of Romanticism: the independent, creative projection of an individual writer’s values—and it lacks the reportorial honesty of the (better) Naturalists: it does not present concrete men “as they are,” it presents human pretensions (a collective role-playing or an indiscriminate collective daydream) and palms this off as reality.

Most of the “slick-magazine” fiction popular before World War II belongs to this class, with its endless variations on the Cinderella theme, the motherhood theme, the costume-drama theme, or the common-man-with-a-heart-of-gold theme. (For example, Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst, Barry Benefield.) This type of fiction has no plots, only more or less cohesive stories, and no discernible characterizations: the characters are false journalistically, and meaningless metaphysically. (It is an open question whether this group belongs to the category of Romanticism; it is usually regarded as Romantic simply because it is far removed from anything perceivable in reality concretely or abstractly.)

As far as their fiction aspects are concerned, movies and television, by their nature, are media suited exclusively to Romanticism (to abstractions, essentials and drama). Unfortunately, both media came too late: the great day of Romanticism was gone, and only its sunset rays reached a few exceptional movies. (Fritz Lang’s Siegfried is the best among them.) For a while, the movie field was dominated by the equivalent of the slick-magazine Romanticism, with a still less discriminating level of taste and imagination, and an incommunicable vulgarity of spirit.

Partly in reaction against this debasement of values, but mainly in consequence of the general philosophical-cultural disintegration of our time (with its anti-value trend), Romanticism vanished from the movies and never reached television (except in the form of a few detective series, which are now gone also). What remains is the occasional appearance of cowardly pieces, whose authors apologize for their Romantic attempts, by means of comedy—or mongrel pieces, whose authors beg not to be mistaken for advocates of human values (or human greatness), by means of coyly, militantly commonplace characters who enact world-shaking events and perform fantastic feats, particularly in the realm of science. The nature of this type of scenario can best be encapsulated by a line of dialogue on the order of: “Sorry, baby, I can’t take you to the pizza joint tonight, I’ve got to go back to the lab and split the atom.”

The next, and final, level of disintegration is the attempt to eliminate Romanticism from Romantic fiction—i.e., to dispense with the element of values, morality and volition. This used to be called the “hard-boiled” school of detective fiction; today, it is plugged as “realistic.” This school makes no distinction between heroes and villains (or detectives and criminals, or victims and executioners) and presents, in effect, two mobs of gangsters fighting savagely and incomprehensibly (no motivation is offered) for the same territory, neither side being able to do otherwise.

This is the dead end where, arriving by different roads, Romanticism and Naturalism meet, blend and vanish: deterministically helpless, compulsively evil characters go through a series of inexplicably exaggerated events and engage in purposeful conflicts without purpose.

Beyond this point, the field of literature, both “serious” and popular, is taken over by a genre compared to which Romanticism and Naturalism are clean, civilized and innocently rational: the Horror Story. The modern ancestor of this phenomenon is Edgar Allan Poe; its archetype or purest esthetic expression is Boris Karloff movies.

Popular literature, more honest in this respect, presents its horrors in the form of physical monstrosities. In “serious” literature, the horrors become psychological and bear less resemblance to anything human; this is the literary cult of depravity.

The Horror Story, in either variant, represents the metaphysical projection of a single human emotion: blind, stark, primitive terror. Those who live in such terror seem to find a momentary sense of relief or control in the process of reproducing that which they fear—as savages find a sense of mastery over their enemies by reproducing them in the form of dolls. Strictly speaking, this is not a metaphysical, but a purely psychological projection; such writers are not presenting their view of life; they are not looking at life; what they are saying is that they feel as if life consisted of werewolves, Draculas and Frankenstein monsters. In its basic motivation, this school belongs to psychopathology more than to esthetics.

Historically, neither Romanticism nor Naturalism could survive the collapse of philosophy. There are individual exceptions, but I am speaking of these schools as broad, active, creative movements. Since art is the expression and product of philosophy, it is the first to mirror the vacuum at the base of a culture and the first to crumble.

This general cause had special consequences affecting Romanticism, which hastened its decline and collapse. There were also special consequences affecting Naturalism, which were of a different character and their destructive potential worked at a slower rate.

The archenemy and destroyer of Romanticism was the altruist morality.

Since Romanticism’s essential characteristic is the projection of values, particularly moral values, altruism introduced an insolvable conflict into Romantic literature from the start. The altruist morality cannot be practiced (except in the form of self-destruction) and, therefore, cannot be projected or dramatized convincingly in terms of man’s life on earth (particularly in the realm of psychological motivation). With altruism as the criterion of value and virtue, it is impossible to create an image of man at his best—“as he might be and ought to be.” The major flaw that runs through the history of Romantic literature is the failure to present a convincing hero, i.e., a convincing image of a virtuous man.

It is the abstract intention—the grandeur of the author’s view of man—that one admires in the characters of Victor Hugo, not their actual characterizations. The greatest Romanticist never succeeded in projecting an ideal man or any convincing major characters of a positive nature. His most ambitious attempt, Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, remains a giant abstraction that never integrates into a person, in spite of isolated touches of profound psychological perceptiveness on the part of the author. In the same novel, Marius, the young man who is supposed to be Hugo’s autobiographical projection, acquires a certain stature only by means of what the author says about him, not by means of what he shows. As far as characterization is concerned, Marius is not a person, but the suggestion of a person squeezed into a straitjacket of cultural bromides. The best-drawn and most interesting characters in Hugo’s novels are the semi-villains (his benevolent sense of life made him unable to create a real villain): Javert in Les Misérables, Josiana in The Man Who Laughs, Claude Frollo in Notre-Dame de Paris.

Dostoevsky (whose sense of life was the diametrical opposite of Hugo’s) was a passionate moralist whose blind quest for values was expressed only in the fiercely merciless condemnation with which he presented evil characters; no one has equaled him in the psychological depth of his images of human evil. But he was totally incapable of creating a positive or virtuous character; such attempts as he made were crudely inept (for example, Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov). It is significant that according to Dostoevsky’s preliminary notes for The Possessed, his original intention was to create Stavrogin as an ideal man—an embodiment of the Russian-Christian-altruist soul. As the notes progressed, that intention changed gradually, in logically inexorable steps dictated by Dostoevsky’s artistic integrity. In the final result, in the actual novel, Stavrogin is one of Dostoevsky’s most repulsively evil characters.

In Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis, the best-drawn, most colorful character, who dominates the novel, is Petronius, the symbol of Roman decadence—while Vinicius, the author’s hero, the symbol of the rise of Christianity, is a cardboard figure.

This phenomenon—the fascinating villain or colorful rogue, who steals the story and the drama from the anemic hero—is prevalent in the history of Romantic literature, serious or popular, from top to bottom. It is as if, under the dead crust of the altruist code officially adopted by mankind, an illicit, subterranean fire were boiling chaotically and erupting once in a while; forbidden to the hero, the fire of self-assertiveness burst forth from the apologetic ashes of a “villain.”

The highest function of Romanticism—the projection of moral values—is an extremely difficult task under any moral code, rational or not, and, in literary history, only the top rank of Romanticists were able to attempt it. Given the added burden of an irrational code, such as altruism, the majority of Romantic writers had to avoid that task—which led to the weakness and neglect of the element of characterization in their writing. In addition, the impossibility of applying altruism to reality, to men’s actual existence, led many Romantic writers to avoid the problem by escaping into history, i.e., by choosing to place their stories in some distant past (such as the Middle Ages). Thus, the emphasis on action, the neglect of human psychology, the lack of convincing motivation were progressively dissociating Romanticism from reality—until the final remnants of Romanticism became a superficial, meaningless, “unserious” school that had nothing to say about human existence.

The disintegration of Naturalism brought it to the same state, for different reasons.

Although Naturalism is a product of the nineteenth century, its spiritual father, in modern history, was Shakespeare. The premise that man does not possess volition, that his destiny is determined by an innate “tragic flaw,” is fundamental in Shakespeare’s work. But, granted this false premise, his approach is metaphysical, not journalistic. His characters are not drawn from “real life,” they are not copies of observed concretes nor statistical averages: they are grand-scale abstractions of the character traits which a determinist would regard as inherent in human nature: ambition, power-lust, jealousy, greed, etc.

Some of the famous Naturalists attempted to maintain Shakespeare’s abstract level, i.e., to present their views of human nature in metaphysical terms (for example, Balzac, Tolstoy). But the majority, following the lead of Emile Zola, rejected metaphysics, as they rejected values, and adopted the method of journalism: the recording of observed concretes.

The contradictions inherent in determinism were obvious in this movement from the start. One does not read fiction except on the implicit premise of volition—i.e., on the premise that some element (some abstraction) of the fiction story is applicable to oneself, that one will learn, discover or contemplate something of value and that this experience will make a difference. If one were to accept the deterministic premise fully and literally—if one were to believe that the characters of a fiction story are as distant and irrelevant to oneself as the unknowable inhabitants of another galaxy and that they cannot affect one’s life in any way whatever, since neither they nor the reader have any power of choice—one would not be able to read beyond the first chapter.

Nor would one be able to write. Psychologically, the whole of the Naturalist movement rode on the premise of volition as on an unidentified, subconscious “stolen concept.” Choosing “society” as the factor that determines man’s fate, most of the Naturalists were social reformers, advocating social changes, claiming that man has no volition, but society, somehow, has. Tolstoy preached resignation and passive obedience to society’s power. In Anna Karenina, the most evil book in serious literature, he attacked man’s desire for happiness and advocated its sacrifice to conformity.

No matter how concrete-bound their theories forced them to be, the writers of the Naturalist school still had to exercise their power of abstraction to a significant extent: in order to reproduce “real-life” characters, they had to select the characteristics they regarded as essential, differentiating them from the non-essential or accidental. Thus they were led to substitute statistics for values as a criterion of selectivity: that which is statistically prevalent among men, they held, is metaphysically significant and representative of man’s nature; that which is rare or exceptional, is not.

At first, having rejected the element of plot and even of story, the Naturalists concentrated on the element of characterization—and psychological perceptiveness was the chief value that the best of them had to offer. With the growth of the statistical method, however, that value shrank and vanished: characterization was replaced by indiscriminate recording and buried under a catalogue of trivia, such as minute inventories of a character’s apartment, clothing and meals. Naturalism lost the attempted universality of Shakespeare or Tolstoy, descending from metaphysics to photography with a rapidly shrinking lens directed at the range of the immediate moment—until the final remnants of Naturalism became a superficial, meaningless, “unserious” school that had nothing to say about human existence. [...]

Such is the esthetic state of our day. But so long as men exist, the need of art will exist, since that need is rooted metaphysically in the nature of man’s consciousness—and it will survive a period when, under the reign of irrationality run amuck, men produce and accept tainted scraps to satisfy that need.

As in the case of an individual, so in the case of a culture: disasters can be accomplished subconsciously, but a cure cannot. A cure in both cases requires conscious knowledge, i.e., a consciously grasped, explicit philosophy.

It is impossible to predict the time of a philosophical Renaissance. One can only define the road to follow, but not its length. What is certain, however, is that every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics—a rational ethics—as a precondition of rebirth. And, perhaps, no aspect needs it more desperately than the realm of art.

When reason and philosophy are reborn, literature will be the first phoenix to rise out of today’s ashes. And, armed with a code of rational values, aware of its own nature, confident of the supreme importance of its mission, Romanticism will have come of age.

2. The Benevolent Universe

EDITOR’S NOTE: Because AR advocated reason and reality in basic philosophy, she advocated rational values—values based on reason and reality —in ethics, politics, and esthetics. By their nature, such values are achievable by men in reality—i.e., they are achievable here and now, in this world and this life.

AR, therefore, had no tolerance for the “tragic view of life” (which many Romantic artists before her had endorsed); she rejected this idea both in life and in art. On the contrary, she believed that happiness, not pain—the achievement of values, not their loss—is and should be the human norm. Thus the key statement by one of the heroes of Atlas Shrugged: “[W]e do not hold the belief that this earth is a realm of misery where man is doomed to destruction. [...] It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life.”

AR called this attitude the benevolent-universe premise. It is the deepest reason why the heroes of her novels characteristically achieve their goals; their setbacks or losses are merely temporary obstacles to be overcome by decisive thought and action.

AR’s 1962 introduction to one of her favorite pieces of fiction—a 1901 novel, Calumet “K”—discusses one key result of the benevolent-universe premise when it is applied to fiction: the portrayal of man as efficacious.

Introduction to Calumet “K”

CALUMET “K” is my favorite novel.

It is not a work of great literature—it is a work of light fiction, written by two collaborators, that appeared originally, in the year 1901, in a popular magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. Its style is straightforward and competent, but undistinguished. It lacks the most important ingredient of good fiction, a plot structure. But it has one element that I have never found in any other novel: the portrait of an efficacious man.

The formal hero of this novel is a grain elevator, called “Calumet ‘K’,” and the novel tells the story of its construction, nothing more. But if you find yourself held in suspense, reading intently, hoping that the structure will be built on time, if you find that two simple, descriptive paragraphs (in the chapter before last) are a gloriously triumphant experience that makes you want to cheer aloud—it will be, like the grain elevator itself, the achievement of Charlie Bannon.

Bannon is the young superintendent in charge of building Calumet “K.” He is described as follows: “He was worn thin as an old knife-blade, he was just at the end of a piece of work that would have entitled any other man to a vacation; but MacBride made no apologies when he assigned him the new task ...” He is sent to the job because no one else is able to do it: it is virtually impossible to complete the elevator by a certain crucial date. The construction is the story of Bannon’s quietly fierce struggle against powerful interests determined to sabotage the work and stop him. Behind the scenes, the fate of countless lives and enormous fortunes rests, not on Bannon’s shoulders, but on his brain.

The essence of the story is Bannon’s ingenuity in solving unexpected problems and smashing through sudden obstacles, his self-confident resourcefulness, his inexhaustible energy, his dedication. He is a man who takes nothing for granted, who thinks long-range, who assumes responsibility as a matter of course, as a way of life, knowing that there is no such thing as “luck” and if things are to be done, he has to do them.

His dominant characteristic is a total commitment to the absolutism of reality. Even though such philosophical abstractions are outside his knowledge and his story, his basic premise is the primacy of existence, not of consciousness—i.e., a mind, focus and passionate concern directed outward (with its inner concomitant: an unbreached self-esteem). This is why his story and his problems matter to me, as no lesser human problems can.

It is not merely that Bannon is a purposeful man; there have been plenty of purposeful men in fiction, pursuing all sorts of goals, most of them dubious. Bannon is specifically an efficacious man: a man able to deal with reality—a man whose characterization features, stresses and dramatizes this particular trait. In this sense, he is an American phenomenon which is not typical of any other culture.

Calumet “K” is a good example of the fact that when fiction, even light fiction, contains some element of truth about human existence, it carries philosophical implications wider than its specific theme. This novel is a remarkable historical-social-psychological document. Today, its subtitle ought to be: This was America.

Calumet “K” captures the atmosphere—the sense of life—of a free country: what it was like, what it demanded of men, and, indirectly, by whom and why it would be hated. The story is neither pro-business nor pro-labor, but pro-individual, i.e., pro-human ability: the enemies Bannon has to fight are a Clique of Wall Street speculators, on the one hand, and a corrupt labor leader, on the other.

The story is an excellent illustration, in miniature, of the working of a free economy; Bannon is pitted against the biggest evil allegedly inherent in capitalism: an attempt to establish a monopoly, a Wall Street conspiracy to corner the wheat market. The story demonstrates that so long as men are free to act, no one will be able to cut off all avenues of action, that an attempted evil creates its own antidotes, but one must be prepared to find them and to enlist men’s legitimate self-interests on one’s side. (In a controlled economy, Bannon would be the first victim, and the Clique would be in charge of a government regulatory agency.)

It is interesting to note that Bannon is not an industrial tycoon, but merely an employee of a building contractor; he is presented, not as a rare exception, but as an average man. I doubt that a man of Bannon’s stature could be average in any society; and, in a free one, he would not remain an employee for long. But he represents, in its purest form, the characteristic which a free society demands of all men, on all levels of ability: competence.

The story demonstrates in many skillfully subtle ways that that characteristic runs through the whole social pyramid. On the lower levels, it depends on the quality of the leadership involved in a large, cooperative undertaking. Bannon’s leadership is the decisive factor in the issue of morale or lethargic indifference on the part of all the workers on the job. His self-confidence, his demanding standards and his strict fairness bring out the best in them: pride in their work, conscientiousness, energy, enthusiasm—qualities they were beginning to lose under his incompetent predecessor. Their potential virtue is like an inert, responsive mechanism that can swing either way; Bannon is the spark plug. They respond when they know that their best will be appreciated.

Bannon’s predecessor, Peterson, is given an interesting characterization: he is presented, stressedly, as a man of brawn versus Bannon, the man of brains. Peterson is not a bad person, he has merely ventured beyond his depth and found himself loaded with a weight beyond his capacity, a weight much greater than that of the timbers and sledge hammers he handles with an easy, show-offish prowess. He is on the verge of turning bad, but a job commensurate with his ability brings him back to the status of a valuable worker. “Nobody can blame me,” was, in effect, Peterson’s first concern in any emergency. “That is irrelevant,” is Bannon’s answer.

On the higher levels of the pyramid, one senses—like a light flashing behind the scenes once in a while—that Bannon’s competence is recognized and appreciated by his bosses. The same recognition greets him whenever he deals with the heads of other companies. If he is resented, at times, it is always by the underlings, never by the big executives. One of my favorite scenes is a small incident in which Bannon presents to a lumber tycoon the solution to a transportation problem the tycoon had regarded as hopeless. The scene goes as follows:

“Sloan made no reply. He had allowed his wrath to boil for a few minutes merely as a luxury. Now he was thinking seriously of the scheme. ‘It sounds like moonshine,’ he said at last, ‘but I don’t know as it is. How are you going to get your barges?’

“ ‘I’ve got one already. It leaves Milwaukee tonight.’

“Sloan looked him over. ‘I wish you were out of a job,’ he said.”

This is the keynote of the incredibly wonderful quality of that world which was America at the turn of the century: a world in which ability mattered.

But, even within the confines of a simple, popular novel, one can see also the ominous touches on the periphery of that world, the seeds of what was to destroy it.

That free, violently joyous torrent of creative energy flooding a continent, was invisible to men: invisible intellectually. Its meaning had no conceptual identification or moral recognition. It was cut off from all the other aspects of men’s existence and from the formal code of values by which they lived their lives. And that code was an ancient, ludicrously incongruous straitjacket, deforming an innocent young giant.

The symptoms of that code may be seen in the novel’s lesser element: in its love story. Bannon’s romance with a young stenographer, the only woman on the construction site, is so timidly, evasively mid-Victorian that the contrast to the rest of the novel is almost unbearable. The spectacle of men who are remaking the face of a continent, yet are supposed to pretend that a fact such as sex does not exist, is what the mystics’ old-world morality imposed on a young country, along with all the rest of their “anti-materialistic” doctrines.

Bannon is quite obviously a represser, who has never taken a first-hand look at anything outside his work. His work is his only happiness; everything else is cut off, as alien territory. But even the extent of his love for his work is not given a fully conscious recognition in his mind, nor does he consciously regard his own competence as a virtue; he simply takes both for granted. He is not anti-intellectual, but un-inteHectual—as a man of action, too busy to conceptualize. In this respect, also, he is the typical representative of American culture—at its best and worst.

The penalty for that particular flaw is indicated in the story—in an ugly little touch that reads as if the authors, who admire Bannon tremendously, felt, nevertheless, obliged to pay lip-service to altruism. The heroine’s attitude toward Bannon changes on the day when she discovers that he has been sending small gifts to a hospitalized worker who was hurt in an accident on the construction site. She confesses to Bannon that: “well, some people think you don’t think very much about the men, and that if anybody’s hurt, or anything happens, you don’t care as long as the work goes on”—and she apologizes to him for having thought so, too.

In other words, the feats of productive energy which he was performing were irrelevant (or even made him an object of suspicion), but the fact that he sent tobacco to a man in a hospital, was required to establish his personal virtue.

Today, we can see what that little cloud of altruism, hovering on the edge of a sunlit sky, has grown into—and what that cultural split has accomplished.

But, as far as Calumet “K” is concerned, these are only its peripheral elements, its sky is still sunlit, brilliantly sunlit—and that is its paramount value.

Culturally, Calumet “K” can serve as a gauge of the distance we have traveled downward. It was written for a wide popular audience, and reflects the dominant sense of life of its time. It was a time when people were capable of admiring productive achievement, when they saw man as strong, confident, cheerfully efficacious—and the universe as a place where victory and fulfillment are possible. Observe the extent to which this novel is “unmodern.” It is entirely devoid of neurotic soul-searching, of bitterness, of cynicism, of that maudlin preoccupation with depravity which is characteristic of today’s novels. What it projects predominantly is a quality of innocence and of magnificent health. If you want to feel frightened—in regard to the nature of today’s dominant sense of life—compare Calumet “K” to any novel from any current issue of the same magazine, The Saturday Evening Post....

EDITOR’S NOTE: This 1960 answer to a fan included in Letters of Ayn Rand is an eloquent summary of the benevolent-universe attitude.

Letter to a Fan

August 29, 1960

Dear Mr. Williams:

Thank you for your letter of August 10. I will tell you frankly that yours is one of the few letters that I liked very much.

I am glad that Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead have helped vou philosophically. I hope that you will understand and accept my philosophy fully, and—if I understand you correctly—that you will never give up the values you had once held.

You ask me about the meaning of the dialogue on page 702 of Atlas Shrugged:

“ ‘We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?’ she whispered. ” ‘No, we never had to.’ ”

Let me begin by saying that this is perhaps the most important point in the whole book, because it is the condensed emotional summation, the keynote or leitmotif, of the view of life presented in Atlas Shrugged.

What Dagny expresses here is the conviction that joy, exaltation, beauty, greatness, heroism, all the supreme, uplifting values of man’s existence on earth, are the meaning of life—not the pain or ugliness he may encounter—that one must live for the sake of such exalted moments as one may be able to achieve or experience, not for the sake of suffering—that happiness matters, but suffering does not—that no matter how much pain one may have to endure, it is never to be taken seriously, that is: never to be taken as the essence and meaning of life—that the essence of life is the achievement of joy, not the escape from pain. The issue she refers to is the basic philosophical issue which John Galt later names explicitly in his speech: that the most fundamental division among men is between those who are pro-man, pro-mind, pro-life—and those who are anti-man, anti-mind, anti-life.

It is the difference between those who think that man’s life is important and that happiness is possible—and those who think that man’s life, by its very nature, is a hopeless, senseless tragedy and that man is a depraved creature doomed to despair and defeat. It is the difference between those whose basic motive is the desire to achieve values, to experience joy—and those whose basic motive is the desire to escape from pain, to experience a momentary relief from their chronic anxiety and guilt.

It is a matter of one’s fundamental, overall attitude toward life—not of any one specific event. So you see that your interpretation was too specific and too narrow; besides, the Looters’ World had never meant anything to Dagny and she had realized its “sham and hypocrisy” long before. What she felt, in that particular moment, was the confirmation of her conviction that an ideal man and an ideal form of existence are possible.

EDITOR’S NOTE: “Don’t Let It Go,” a 1971 essay published in Philosophy: Who Needs It identifies what will happen to America if it does not translate its implicitly benevolent view of life into an explicit, rational philosophy.

Don’t Let It Go

IN ORDER to form a hypothesis about the future of an individual, one must consider three elements: his present course of action, his conscious convictions, and his sense of life. The same elements must be considered in forming a hypothesis about the future of a nation.

A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. It represents an individual’s unidentified philosophy (which can be identified—and corrected, if necessary); it affects his choice of values and his emotional responses, influences his actions, and, frequently, clashes with his conscious convictions, (For a detailed discussion, see “Philosophy and Sense of Life” in my book The Romantic Manifesto.)

A nation, like an individual, has a sense of life, which is expressed not in its formal culture, but in its “life style”—in the kinds of actions and attitudes which people take for granted and believe to be self-evident, but which are produced by complex evaluations involving a fundamental view of man’s nature.

A “nation” is not a mystic or supernatural entity: it is a large number of individuals who live in the same geographical locality under the same political system. A nation’s culture is the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men, which their fellow-citizens have accepted in whole or in part, and which have influenced the nation’s way of life. Since a culture is a complex battleground of different ideas and influences, to speak of a “culture” is to speak only of the dominant ideas, always allowing for the existence of dissenters and exceptions.

(The dominance of certain ideas is not necessarily determined by the number of their adherents: it may be determined by majority acceptance, or by the greater activity and persistence of a given faction, or by default, i.e., the failure of the opposition, or—when a country is free—by a combination of persistence and truth. In any case, ideas and the resultant culture are the product and active concern of a minority. Who constitutes this minority? Whoever chooses to be concerned.)

Similarly, the concept of a nation’s sense of life does not mean that every member of a given nation shares it, but only that a dominant majority shares its essentials in various degrees. In this matter, however, the dominance is numerical: while most men may be indifferent to cultural-ideological trends, no man can escape the process of subconscious integration which forms his sense of life.

A nation’s sense of life is formed by every individual child’s early impressions of the world around him: of the ideas he is taught (which he may or may not accept) and of the way of acting he observes and evaluates (which he may evaluate correctly or not). And although there are exceptions at both ends of the psychological spectrum—men whose sense of life is better (truer philosophically) or worse than that of their fellow-citizens—the majority develop the essentials of the same subconscious philosophy. This is the source of what we observe as “national characteristics.”

A nation’s political trends are the equivalent of a man’s course of action and are determined by its culture. A nation’s culture is the equivalent of a man’s conscious convictions. Just as an individual’s sense of life can clash with his conscious convictions, hampering or defeating his actions, so a nation’s sense of life can clash with its culture, hampering or defeating its political course. Just as an individual’s sense of life can be better or worse than his conscious convictions, so can a nation’s. And just as an individual who has never translated his sense of life into conscious convictions is in terrible danger—no matter how good his subconscious values—so is a nation.

This is the position of America today.

If America is to be saved from destruction—specifically, from dictatorship—she will be saved by her sense of life.

As to the two other elements that determine a nation’s future, one (our political trend) is speeding straight to disaster, the other (culture) is virtually nonexistent. The political trend is pure statism and is moving toward a totalitarian dictatorship at a speed which, in any other country, would have reached that goal long ago. The culture is worse than nonexistent: it is operating below zero, i.e., performing the opposite of its function. A culture provides a nation’s intellectual leadership, its ideas, its education, its moral code. Today, the concerted effort of our cultural “Establishment” is directed at the obliteration of man’s rational faculty. Hysterical voices are proclaiming the impotence of reason, extolling the “superior power” of irrationality, fostering the rule of incoherent emotions, attacking science, glorifying the stupor of drugged hippies, delivering apologies for the use of brute force, urging mankind’s return to a life of rolling in primeval muck, with grunts and groans as means of communication, physical sensations as means of inspiration, and a club as means of argumentation.

This country, with its magnificent scientific and technological power, is left in the vacuum of a pre-intellectual era, like the wandering hordes of the Dark Ages—or in the position of an adolescent before he has fully learned to conceptualize. But an adolescent has his sense of life to guide his choices. So has this country.

What is the specifically American sense of life?

A sense of life is so complex an integration that the best way to identify it is by means of concrete examples and by contrast with the manifestations of a different sense of life.

The emotional keynote of most Europeans is the feeling that man belongs to the State, as a property to be used and disposed of, in compliance with his natural, metaphysically determined fate. A typical European may disapprove of a given State and may rebel, seeking to establish what he regards as a better one, like a slave who might seek a better master to serve—but the idea that he is the sovereign and the government is his servant, has no emotional reality in his consciousness. He regards service to the State as an ultimate moral sanction, as an honor, and if you told him that his life is an end in itself, he would feel insulted or rejected or lost. Generations brought up on statist philosophy and acting accordingly, have implanted this in his mind from the earliest, formative years of his childhood.

A typical American can never fully grasp that kind of feeling. An American is an independent entity. The popular expression of protest against “being pushed around” is emotionally unintelligible to Europeans, who believe that to be pushed around is their natural condition. Emotionally, an American has no concept of service (or of servitude) to anyone. Even if he enlists in the army and hears it called “service to his country,” his feeling is that of a generous aristocrat who chose to do a dangerous task. A European soldier feels that he is doing his duty.

“Isn’t my money as good as the next fellow’s?” used to be a popular American expression. It would not be popular in Europe: a fortune, to be good, must be old and derived by special favor from the State; to a European, money earned by personal effort is vulgar, crude or somehow disreputable.

Americans admire achievement; they know what it takes. Europeans regard achievement with cynical suspicion and envy. Envy is not a widespread emotion in America (not yet); it is an overwhelmingly dominant emotion in Europe.

When Americans feel respect for their public figures, it is the respect of equals; they feel that a government official is a human being, just as they are, who has chosen this particular line of work and has earned a certain distinction. They call celebrities by their first names, they refer to Presidents by their initials (like “F.D.R.” or “J.F.K.”), not in insolence or egalitarian pretentiousness, but in token of affection. The custom of addressing a person as “Herr Doktor Doktor Schmidt” would be impossible in America. In England, the freest country of Europe, the achievement of a scientist, a businessman or a movie star is not regarded as fully real until he has been clunked on the head with the State’s sword and declared to be a knight.

There are practical consequences of these two different attitudes.

An American economist told me the following story. He was sent to England by an American industrial concern, to investigate its European branch: in spite of the latest equipment and techniques, the productivity of the branch in England kept lagging far behind that of the parent-factory in the U.S. He found the cause: a rigidly circumscribed mentality, a kind of psychological caste system, on all the echelons of British labor and management. As he explained it: in America, if a machine breaks down, a worker volunteers to fix it, and usually does; in England, work stops and people wait for the appropriate department to summon the appropriate engineer. It is not a matter of laziness, but of a profoundly ingrained feeling that one must keep one’s place, do one’s prescribed duty, and never venture beyond it. It does not occur to the British worker that he is free to assume responsibility for anything beyond the limits of his particular job. Initiative is an “instinctive” (i.e., automatized) American characteristic; in an American consciousness, it occupies the place which, in a European one, is occupied by obedience.

As to the differences in the social atmosphere, here is an example. An elderly European woman, a research biochemist from Switzerland, on a visit to New York, told me that she wanted to buy some things at the five-and-ten. Since she could barely speak English, I offered to go with her; she hesitated, looking astonished and disturbed, then asked: “But wouldn’t that embarrass you?” I couldn’t understand what she meant: “Embarrass—how?” “Well,” she explained, “you are a famous person, and what if somebody sees you in the five-and-ten?” I laughed. She explained to me that in Switzerland, by unwritten law, there are different stores for different classes of people, and that she, as a professional, has to shop in certain stores, even though her salary is modest, that better goods at lower prices are available in the workingmen’s stores, but she would lose social status if she were seen shopping there. Can you conceive of living in an atmosphere of that kind? (We did go to the five-and-ten.)

A European, on any social level, lives emotionally in a world made by others (he never knows clearly by whom), and seeks or accepts his place in it. The American attitude is best expressed by a line from a poem: “The world began when I was born and the world is mine to win.” (“The Westerner” by Badger Clark.)

Years ago, at a party in Hollywood, I met Eve Curie, a distinguished Frenchwoman, the daughter of Marie Curie. Eve Curie was a best-selling author of non-fiction books and, politically, a liberal; at the time, she was on a lecture tour of the United States. She stressed her astonishment at American audiences. “They are so happy,” she kept repeating, “so happy....” She was saying it without disapproval and without admiration, with only the faintest touch of amusement; but her astonishment was genuine. “People are not like that in Europe.... Everybody is happy in America—except the intellectuals. Oh, the intellectuals are unhappy everywhere.”

This incident has remained in my mind because she had named, unwittingly, the nature of the breach between the American people and the intellectuals. The culture of a worn, crumbling Europe—with its mysticism, its lethargic resignation, its cult of suffering, its notion that misery and impotence are man’s fate on earth, and that unhappiness is the hallmark of a sensitive spirit—of what use could it be to a country like America?

It was a European who discovered America, but it was Americans who were the first nation to discover this earth and man’s proper place in it, and man’s potential for happiness, and the world which is man’s to win. What they failed to discover is the words to name their achievement, the concepts to identify it, the principles to guide it, i.e., the appropriate philosophy and its consequence: an American culture.

America has never had an original culture, i.e., a body of ideas derived from her philosophical (Aristotelian) base and expressing her profound difference from all other countries in history.

American intellectuals were Europe’s passive dependents and poor relatives almost from the beginning. They lived on Europe’s drying crumbs and discarded fashions, including even such hand-me-downs as Freud and Wittgenstein. America’s sole contribution to philosophy—Pragmatism—was a bad recycling of Kantian-Hegelian premises.

America’s best minds went into science, technology, industry—and reached incomparable heights of achievement. Why did they neglect the field of ideas? Because it represented Augean stables of a kind no joyously active man would care to enter. America’s childhood coincided with the rise of Kant’s influence in European philosophy and the consequent disintegration of European culture. America was in the position of an eager, precocious child left in the care of a scruffy, senile, decadent guardian. The child had good reason to play hooky.

An adolescent can ride on his sense of life for a while. But by the time he grows up, he must translate it into conceptual knowledge and conscious convictions, or he will be in deep trouble. A sense of life is not a substitute for explicit knowledge. Values which one cannot identify, but merely senses implicitly, are not in one’s control. One cannot tell what they depend on or require, what course of action is needed to gain and/or keep them. One can lose or betray them without knowing it. For close to a century, this has been America’s tragic predicament. Today, the American people is like a sleepwalking giant torn by profound conflicts. (When I speak of “the American people,” in this context, I mean every group, including scientists and businessmen—except the intellectuals, i.e., those whose professions deal with the humanities. The intellectuals are a country’s guardians.)

Americans are the most reality-oriented people on earth. Their outstanding characteristic is the childhood form of reasoning: common sense. It is their only protection. But common sense is not enough where theoretical knowledge is required: it can make simple, concrete-bound connections—it cannot integrate complex issues, or deal with wide abstractions, or forecast the future.

For example, consider the statist trend in this country. The doctrine of collectivism has never been submitted explicity to the American voters; if it had been, it would have sustained a landslide defeat (as the various socialist parties have demonstrated). But the welfare state was put over on Americans piecemeal, by degrees, under cover of some undefined “Americanism”—culminating in the absurdity of a President’s declaration that America owes its greatness to “the willingness for self-sacrifice.” People sense that something has gone wrong; they cannot grasp what or when. This is the penalty they pay for remaining a silent (and deaf) majority.

Americans are anti-intellectual (with good grounds, in view of current specimens), yet they have a profound respect for knowledge and education (which is being shaken now). They are self-confident, trusting, generous, enormously benevolent and innocent. “... that celebrated American ‘innocence’ [is] a quality which in philosophical terms is simply an ignorance of how questionable a being man really is and which strikes the European as alien ...” declares an existentialist (William Barrett, Irrational Man). The word “questionable” is a euphemism for miserable, guilty, impotent, groveling, evil—which is the European view of man. Europeans do believe in Original Sin, i.e., in man’s innate depravity; Americans do not. Americans see man as a value—as clean, free, creative, rational. But the American view of man has not been expressed or upheld in philosophical terms (not since the time of our first Founding Father, Aristotle; see his description of the “magnanimous man”).

Barrett continues: “Sartre recounts a conversation he had with an American while visiting in this country. The American insisted that all international problems could be solved if men would just get together and be rational; Sartre disagreed and after a while discussion between them became impossible. ‘I believe in the existence of evil,’ says Sartre, ‘and he does not.’ ” This, again, is a euphemism: it is not merely the existence but the power of evil that Europeans believe in. Americans do not believe in the power of evil and do not understand its nature. The first part of their attitude is (philosophically) true, but the second makes them vulnerable. On the day when Americans grasp the cause of evil’s impotence—its mindless, fear-ridden, envy-eaten smallness—they will be free of all the man-hating manipulators of history, foreign and domestic.

So far, America’s protection has been a factor best expressed by a saying attributed to con men: “You can’t cheat an honest man.” The innocence and common sense of the American people have wrecked the plans, the devious notions, the tricky strategies, the ideological traps borrowed by the intellectuals from the European statists, who devised them to fool and rule Europe’s impotent masses. There have never been any “masses” in America: the poorest American is an individual and, subconsciously, an individualist. Marxism, which has conquered our universities, is a dismal failure as far as the people are concerned: Americans cannot be sold on any sort of class war; American workers do not see themselves as a “proletariat,” but are among the proudest of property owners. It is professors and businessmen who advocate cooperation with Soviet Russia—American labor unions do not.

The enormous propaganda effort to make Americans fear fascism but not communism, has failed: Americans hate them both. The terrible hoax of the United Nations has failed. Americans were never enthusiastic about that institution, but they gave it the benefit of the doubt for too long. The current polls, however, indicate that the majority have turned against the U.N. (better late than never).

The latest assault on human life—the ecology crusade—will probably end in defeat for its ideological leadership: Americans will enthusiastically clean their streets, their rivers, their backyards, but when it comes to giving up progress, technology, the automobile, and their standard of living, Americans will prove that the man-haters “ain’t seen nothing yet.”

The sense-of-life emotion which, in Europe, makes people uncertain, malleable and easy to rule, is unknown in America: fundamental guilt. No one, so far, has been able to infect America with that contemptible feeling (and I doubt that anyone ever will). Americans cannot begin to grasp the kind of corruption implied and demanded by that feeling.

But an honest man can cheat himself. His trusting innocence can lead him to swallow sugar-coated poisons—the deadliest of which is altruism. Americans accept it—not for what it is, not as a vicious doctrine of self-immolation—but in the spirit of a strong, confident man’s overgenerous desire to relieve the suffering of others, whose character he does not understand. When such a man awakens to the betrayal of his trust—to the fact that his generosity has brought him within reach of a permanent harness which is about to be slipped on him by his sundry beneficiaries—the consequences are unpredictable.

There are two ways of destroying a country: dictatorship or chaos, i.e., immediate rigor mortis or the longer agony of the collapse of all civilized institutions and the breakup of a nation into roving armed gangs fighting and looting one another, until some one Attila conquers the rest. This means: chaos as a prelude to tyranny—as was the case in Western Europe in the Dark Ages, or in the three hundred years preceding the Romanoff dynasty in Russia, or under the war lords regime in China.

A European is disarmed in the face of a dictatorship: he may hate it, but he feels that he is wrong and, metaphysically, the State is right. An American would rebel to the bottom of his soul. But this is all that his sense of life can do for him: it cannot solve his problems.

Only one thing is certain: a dictatorship cannot take hold in America today. This country, as yet, cannot be ruled—but it can explode. It can blow up into the helpless rage and blind violence of a civil war. It cannot be cowed into submission, passivity, malevolence, resignation. It cannot be “pushed around.” Defiance, not obedience, is the American’s answer to overbearing authority. The nation that ran an underground railroad to help human beings escape from slavery, or began drinking on principle in the face of Prohibition, will not say “Yes, sir,” to the enforcers of ration coupons and cereal prices. Not yet.

If America drags on in her present state for a few more generations (which is unlikely), dictatorship will become possible. A sense of life is not a permanent endowment. The characteristically American one is being eroded daily all around us. Large numbers of Americans have lost it (or have never developed it) and are collapsing to the psychological level of Europe’s worst rabble.

This is prevalent among the two groups that are the main supporters of the statist trend: the very rich and the very poor—the first, because they want to rule; the second, because they want to be ruled. (The leaders of the trend are the intellectuals, who want to do both.) But this country has never had an unearned, hereditary “elite.” America is still the country of self-made men, which means: the country of the middle class—the most productive and exploited group in any modern society.

The academia—jet set coalition is attempting to tame the American character by the deliberate breeding of helplessness and resignation—in those incubators of lethargy known as “Progressive” schools, which are dedicated to the task of crippling a child’s mind by arresting his cognitive development. (See “The Comprachicos” in my book Rise of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution). It appears, however, that the “progressive” rich will be the first victims of their own social theories: it is the children of the well-to-do who emerge from expensive nursery schools and colleges as hippies, and destroy the remnants of their paralyzed brains by means of drugs.

The middle class has created an antidote which is perhaps the most helpful movement of recent years: the spontaneous, unorganized, grass-roots revival of the Montessori system of education—a system aimed at the development of a child’s cognitive, i.e., rational, faculty. But that is a long-range prospect.

At present, even so dismal a figure as President Nixon is a hopeful sign—precisely because he is so dismal. If any other country were in as desperately precarious a state of confusion as ours, a dozen flamboyant Führers would have sprung up overnight to take it over. It is to America’s credit that no such Führer has appeared, and if any did, it is doubtful that he would have a chance.

Can this country achieve a peaceful rebirth in the foreseeable future? By all precedents, it is not likely. But America is an unprecedented phenomenon. In the past, American perseverance became, on occasion, too long-bearing a patience. But when Americans turned, they turned. What may happen to the welfare state is what happened to the Prohibition Amendment.

Is there enough of the American sense of life left in people—under the constant pressure of the cultural-political efforts to obliterate it? It is impossible to tell. But those of us who hold it, must fight for it. We have no alternative: we cannot surrender this country to a zero—to men whose battle cry is mindlessness.

We cannot fight against collectivism, unless we fight against its moral base: altruism. We cannot fight against altruism, unless we fight against its epistemological base: irrationalism. We cannot fight against anything, unless we fight for something—and what we must fight for is the supremacy of reason, and a view of man as a rational being.

These are philosophical issues. The philosophy we need is a conceptual equivalent of America’s sense of life. To propagate it, would require the hardest intellectual battle. But isn’t that a magnificent goal to fight for?

RECOMMENDED READINGS

Ayn Rand’s Novels

We the Living (1936). Set in Soviet Russia, this is Ayn Rand’s first and most autobiographical novel. Its theme is “the individual against the state, the supreme value of a human life and the evil of the totalitarian state that claims the right to sacrifice it.”

Anthem (1938). This novelette depicts a world of the future, a society so collectivized that even the word “I” has vanished from the language. Anthem’s theme is the meaning and glory of man’s ego.

The Fountainhead (1943). The story of an innovator—architect Howard Roark—and his battle against a tradition-worshiping society. Its theme: “individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul; the psychological motivations and the basic premises that produce the character of an individualist or a collectivist.” Ayn Rand presented here for the first time her projection of the ideal man.

Atlas Shrugged (1957). Ayn Rand’s complete philosophy, dramatized in the form of a mystery story “not about the murder of a man’s body, but about the murder—and rebirth—of man’s spirit.” The story is set in a near-future United States whose economy is collapsing due to the inexplicable disappearance of the country’s leading innovators and industrialists—the “Atlases” on whom the world rests. The theme is “the role of the mind in man’s existence—and, as corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest.”

Ayn Rand’s Other Fiction

Night of January l6th (1934). A courtroom play in which the verdict depends on the sense of life of jurors selected from the audience.

The Early Ayn Rand (1984). A collection of stories and plays written by Ayn Rand in the 1920s and 1930s, plus passages cut from The Fountainhead.

Ayn Rand’s Nonfiction

For the New Intellectual (1961). A collection of the key philosophical passages from her novels. The forty-eight-page title essay sweeps over the history of thought, showing how ideas control the course of history and how philosophy has served for the most part as an engine of destruction.

The Virtue of Selfishness ( 1964). Ayn Rand’s revolutionary concept of egoism. Essays on the morality of rational selfishness and the political and social implications of such a moral philosophy. Essays include “The Objectivist Ethics,” “Man’s Rights,” “The Nature of Government,” and “Racism.”

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966). Essays on the theory and history of capitalism demonstrating that it is the only moral economic system, i.e., the only one consistent with individual rights and a free society. Includes: “What is Capitalism?,” “The Roots of War,” “Conservatism: An Obituary,” and “The Anatomy of Compromise.”

Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1967). The Objectivist theory of concepts, with Ayn Rand’s solution to “the problem of universals,” identifying the relationship of abstractions to concretes. Includes an essay by Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy.” The second edition (1990) includes transcripts of Ayn Rand’s workshops on her theory—containing her answers to questions about her theory raised by philosophers and other academics.

The Romantic Manifesto (1969). Ayn Rand’s philosophy of art, with a new analysis of the Romantic school of literature. Essays include “Philosophy and Sense of Life,” “The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” and “What Is Romanticism?”

Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1999) [Formerly titled The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971)]. Ayn Rand’s answer to environmentalism, “progressive” education, and other contemporary antireason movements. The expanded edition includes an introduction and three additional articles by Peter Schwartz on the new tribalist ideologies, including multiculturalism.

Philosophy: Who Needs It (1982). Everybody needs philosophy—that is the theme of this book. It demonstrates that philosophy is essential in each person’s life, and shows how those who do not think philosophically are the helpless victims of ideas they accept passively from others. Essays include “Philosophical Detection,” “Causality Versus Duty,” and “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made.”

The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z (1986). A miniencyclopedia of Objectivism, containing the key passages from the writings of Ayn Rand and her associates on four hundred topics in philosophy and related fields. Edited by Harry Binswanger.

The Voice of Reason (1989). Philosophy and cultural analysis, including “Who Is the Final Authority in Ethics?” Also “Religion Versus America” by Leonard Peikoff, and “Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty” by Peter Schwartz.

The Ayn Rand Column (1991 ). A collection of Ayn Rand’s columns for the Los Angeles Times, and other essays.

Ayn Rand’s Marginalia (1995). Notes Ayn Rand made in the margins of the works of more than twenty authors, including Barry Gold-water, C. S. Lewis, and Ludwig von Mises. Edited by Robert Mayhew.

Letters of Ayn Rand (1995). This collection of more than five hundred letters written by Ayn Rand offers much new information on her life as philosopher, novelist, political activist, and Hollywood screen-writer. Includes letters to fans, friends and family members, celebrities, business leaders, and philosophers. Edited by Michael S. Berliner.

Journals of Ayn Rand (1997). The Journals contains Ayn Rand’s notes for her three main novels—along with such items as her first philosophic musings on paper in English, a vigorous essay on why the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 did not violate the civil rights of the Hollywood Communists, and the notes for Ayn Rand’s last projected novel, To Lorne Dieterling. Edited by David Harriman.

Periodicals Edited by Ayn Rand

(available in three bound volumes)

The Objectivist Newsletter (1962—1965)

The Objectivist (1966-1971)

The Ayn Rand Letter (1971-1976)

Works about Objectivism by Leonard Peikoff

The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America (1982). The Objectivist philosophy of history—through an analysis of the philosophical causes of Nazism, and their parallels in contemporary America.

Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991). This is the definitive, systematic statement of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, based on Dr. Peikoff’s thirty years of philosophical discussions with her. All of the key principles of Objectivism—from metaphysics to art—are presented in a logical, hierarchical structure.

The above recommended reading list is an adaptation of a list compiled by, and is reprinted courtesy of, the Ayn Rand Institute.

1

When applied to physical phenomena, such as the automatic functions of an organism, the term “goal-directed” is not to be taken to mean “purposive” (a concept applicable only to the actions of a consciousness) and is not to imply the existence of any teleological principle operating in insentient nature. I use the term “goal-directed,” in this context, to designate the fact that the automatic functions of living organisms are actions whose nature is such that they result in the preservation of an organism’s life.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

EDITOR’S PREFACE

PART ONE - The Fountainhead

Roark vs. Keating

The Quarry Sequence

The Stoddard Trial

PART TWO - Ethics

1. Selfishness

2. Anti-Altruism

3. Man, the Rational Animal

PART THREE - Atlas Shrugged

Rearden’s Anniversary Party

The John Galt Line

The Abandoned Factory

Directive 10-289

The Tunnel Disaster

Atlantis

PART FOUR - Basic Philosophy

1. Reason and Reality

2. Mind and Body

3. Theory of Concepts

PART FIVE - Early Novels and Politics

1. The Individual vs. the State

2. Capitalism vs. Collectivism

PART SIX - Romanticism and the Benevolent Universe

1. Romanticism

2. The Benevolent Universe

RECOMMENDED READINGS

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Foreword

The Schools

The Cashing-In: The Student “Rebellion”

The Chickens’ Homecoming

The Comprachicos

The Culture

Apollo and Dionysus

The “Inexplicable Personal Alchemy”

The Age of Envy

THE POLITICS

The Left: Old and New

From a Symposium

“Political” Crimes

Racism

Global Balkanization

Gender Tribalism - Peter Schwartz

The Anti-Industrial Revolution

The Philosophy of Privation - Peter Schwartz

Multicultural Nihilism - Peter Schwartz

The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Ayn Rand was the bestselling author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, among other enduring works of fiction. Objectivism, her unique philosophy, has gained a worldwide audience. The fundamentals of her philosophy are set forth in five nonfiction books: Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, For the New Intellectual, The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and The Romantic Manifesto. Ayn Rand died in 1982.

Peter Schwartz has an M.A. in journalism from Syracuse University. He is the founding editor and publisher of The Intellectual Activist magazine and the author of The Battle for Laissez-faire Capitalism. He is the Chairman of the Board of the Ayn Rand Institute and is director of its writing program.

MERIDIAN

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wnghts Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published by Meridian, an imprint of Dutton NAL, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc

Original edition published as The New Left: The Ann-Industrial Revolution by Signet in 1971. “Racism” appeared in The Objectivist Newsletter and later in Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, published by Signet in 1964, and “Global Balkanization” was first published in the book The Voice of Reason.

First Printing, January,

Copyright © Ayn Rand, 1970, 1971 Copyright © The Objectivist, Inc , 1969, 1970, 1971 Copyright © The Objectivist Newsletter, Inc., 1963, 1965 Copyright © The New York Times Company, 1968 Copyright © Peter Schwartz, 1999

All rights reserved

REGISTERED TRADEMARK MARCA REGISTRADA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Rand, Ayn.

[Selections. 1998)

Return of the primitive : the anti-industrial revolution / Ayn

Rand ; edited and with an introduction and additional articles by

Peter Schwartz.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-13727-7

1. New Left—United States 2. Technology and civilization.

I. Schwartz, Peter. II. Title.

HN90.R3R.4—dc21

98-24523 CIP

Set in Times New Roman

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN PUTNAM INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

http://us.penguingroup.com

INTRODUCTION

When the original version of this book was published in 1971, it seemed that the ramparts of civilization were about to be breached. It was the time of the New Left—a time of organized violence, militant emotionalism, and open, pervasive nihilism. It was a time when college campuses were being forcibly shut down by student thugs brandishing “Free Speech” banners. It was a time when corporate buildings and military-recruitment offices were being invaded by guerrillas demanding “Peace Now!” It was a time of psychedelic “flower children” and “people’s armies,” of Timothy Leary and Abbie Hoffman and Charles Manson, of the Theater of the Absurd and the Black Panthers.

Spearheading this mindlessness was a movement that resisted definition. Its enemies were anyone and anything American, its heroes were dictatorial killers like Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro, its goal was indiscriminate destruction—yet its leaders were hailed by cultural commentators as idealistic defenders of the individual against an oppressive state.

American society was under dizzying siege. It was in retreat, uncertain whether to embrace or repel this onslaught—an onslaught launched in the name of a cause no one could name.

Ayn Rand proceeded to name it.

In her essays in this book, she identified its ideological essence. She explained how the “revolutionaries” of that movement were faithful practitioners of every important idea their elders had taught them. She showed that the New Left was the offspring of the Establishment’s philosophers and of their anti-reason, anti-individualism, anti-capitalism doctrines.

Those doctrines were fused, in the 1960s, into an overwhelming hostility toward one distinctively Western target: industrialization. The New Left declared that the West was corrupt and that its influence had to be eliminated through the renunciation of technology. People were exhorted to give up their automobiles and shopping centers, their air conditioners and nuclear power plants.

This was the distinguishing characteristic of the New Left. It brazenly advocated what prior collectivists had been reluctant to acknowledge—even to themselves—as inherent in their philosophy. “The activists of the New Left,” Ayn Rand wrote, “are closer [than those of the Old Left] to revealing the truth of their motives: they do not seek to take over industrial plants, they seek to destroy technology.”

While the New Left did not triumph in its “anti-industrial revolution,” it did pave the way for an ongoing assault on the rational mind and its products. Writing about the New Left’s campus commandos, Ayn Rand said that “even though the student rebellion has not aroused much public sympathy, the most ominous aspect of the situation is the fact that it has not met any ideological opposition,” that it has shown “the road ahead is empty, with no intellectual barricades in sight” and that the “battle is to continue.”

That battle is indeed continuing.

It is being waged today by two cultural movements virulently opposed to the advances—material and intellectual—created by Western civilization. One movement is environmentalism; the other, multiculturalism. Both seek to enshrine a new primitivism.

Primitive, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means: “Of or belonging to the first age, period or stage; pertaining to early times ...” With respect to human development, primitivism is a pre-rational stage. It is a stage in which man lives in fearful awe of a universe he cannot understand. The primitive man does not grasp the law of causality. He does not comprehend the fact that the world is governed by natural laws and that nature can be ruled by any man who discovers those laws. To a primitive, there is only a mysterious supernatural. Sunshine, darkness, rainfall, drought, the clap of thunder, the hooting of a spotted owl—all are inexplicable, portentous, and sacrosanct to him. To this non-conceptual mentality, man is metaphysically subordinate to nature, which is never to be commanded, only meekly obeyed.

This is the state of mind to which the environmentalists want us to revert.

If primitive man regards the world as unknowable, how does he decide what to believe and how to act? Since such knowledge is not innate, where does primitive man turn for guidance? To his tribe. It is membership in a collective that infuses such a person with his sole sense of identity. The tribe’s edicts thus become his unquestioned absolutes, and the tribe’s welfare becomes his fundamental value.

This is the state of mind to which the multiculturalists want us to revert. They hold that the basic unit of existence is the tribe, which they define by the crudest, most primitive, most anti-conceptual criteria (such as skin color). They consequently reject the view that the achievements of Western—i.e., individualistic—civilization represent a way of life superior to that of savage tribalism.

Both environmentalism and multiculturalism wish to destroy the values of a rational, industrial age. Both are scions of the New Left, zealously carrying on its campaign of sacrificing progress to primitivism.

It is for the purpose of analyzing the philosophic progeny of the New Left that this expanded edition of The New Left has been compiled.

I have retained everything from the original edition and added essays of my own on environmentalism, multiculturalism, and feminism. Because multiculturalists have fostered enormous confusion about the nature of racism and of “ethnicity,” I have also added two Ayn Rand articles on these subjects—“Racism” and “Global Balkanization”—even though they have previously been published elsewhere (the first in The Virtue of Selfishness, the second in The Voice of Reason).

The result is a collection of essays identifying, explaining, and evaluating different manifestations of the same anti-industrial revolution.

It is eye-opening to see how much of the New Left’s once-radical agenda not only has been adopted by today’s society, but is no longer even controversial. The trappings of the New Left are gone, but its substance has endured.

For example, in the 1960s there were repeated, charged confrontations between corporations and “back-to-nature” hippies over such matters as pollution and recycling. Now, Earth Day is an annual cultural event—promoted by big business; now, countless products advertise themselves as “ecology friendly” (such as Mc-Donald’s hamburgers, which the company boasts come from no cows that graze at the expense of the planet’s “rain forests”); now, the major villains in children’s cartoon programs are not criminals, but greedy tree-loggers; and now, most states, according to a news report in the New York Times, “require schools to incorporate environmental concepts into virtually every subject in all grade levels.”

In the 1960s, college students forcibly occupied administration buildings, demanding courses in “black studies.” Today, every major university features full departments (and even some designated dormitories and cafeterias) for a variety of ethnic excogitations. Today, instead of violent sit-ins, there has been a quiet coup by “diversity committees,” whose authoritarian thought-police reign on campuses and who banish “politically incorrect” dissenters to the dungeons of re-education seminars.

This devolution has been the result, not of the intellectual persuasiveness of its defenders, but of the intellectual emptiness of its opponents. The anti-industrial revolutionaries have been winning only by default. As Ayn Rand said: “The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other—until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology. That is the way welfare statism came to be accepted in this country.”

It is also the way multiculturalism and environmentalism have come to be accepted. But this insidious process does not have to continue. The absurdities that have become today’s primitivism can, and urgently need to, be challenged. But they cannot be fought by the typically conservative method of arguing that they are good ideas that “unfortunately, go too far.” This battle requires an uncompromising loyalty to rational values—and a repudiation of the new primitivism as fundamentally irrational.

Perhaps this book will help people acquire the intellectual means and the moral conviction to mount such a battle.

- Peter Schwartz
January 1998

Foreword to the First Edition

About a year ago, I received the following letter from a reader whom I have not met:

Dear Miss Rand:

I am a graduate student in sociology at Northern Illinois University and a student of Objectivism....

Actually, what I want to discuss with you is your writings on the New Left. I have read them all and, in my opinion, they offer the best critical analysis that has ever been written on this movement. Your recent articles: “The Left: Old and New”; “Apollo and Dionysus”; and your recent article in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, “The New Left Represents an Intellectual Vacuum,” were superb. I recently reread your article, “The Cashing-In: The Student ‘Rebellion,’ ” published in 1965, and I was struck by how accurate and prophetic your analysis was at that time.

After reading these articles it occurred to me that, if they were all collected together and published (i.e., mass-distributed in paperback by Signet), they could have a tremendous impact on the culture and especially on the college campuses.

It is my fervent hope that you will seriously consider issuing such a book, Miss Rand. Believe me, there are no other analyses of the New Left that measure up to those published by The Objectivist. If the book was issued in paperback by Signet, ... as your other books have [been], it would be on almost every newsstand and in every college bookstore. In fact, most college bookstores devote a section of their space to books dealing with the New Left and campus turmoil. Your book would therefore be displayed prominently. The publication and distribution of such a book to college students could mark a turning point for the students who read it. It would be a voice of reason for students to turn to. It would give them the intellectual ammunition that they could find nowhere else....

Sincerely,
G.M.B.

As a rule, I do not like practical suggestions from readers. But this was such a good idea so convincingly presented that I showed the letter to my publishers, who agreed with its writer wholeheartedly. Such was the origin of this book—with my thanks to Mr. G. M. B.

The purpose of the book is clearly stated in the letter: this book is intended for college students—for those among them who are seeking “a voice of reason to turn to.” It is intended also for all those who are concerned about college students and about the state of modern education.

I delayed the publication of the book in order to include two articles I was planning at the time, which belong in this collection (“The Anti-Industrial Revolution” and “The Comprachicos”). I have included “The Cashing-In: The Student ‘Rebellion’ ” (originally published in The Objectivist Newsletter) in order to let readers judge for themselves the accuracy of my understanding of the activist movement’s philosophical meaning, goals and sources.

All the other articles in this book, with one exception, appeared originally in my magazine The Objectivist. The date at the end of each article indicates the specific issue. The exception is a brief piece which appeared as part of a symposium in The New York Times Magazine.

—Ayn Rand New York City April 1971

The Schools

The Cashing-In: The Student “Rebellion”

The so-called student “rebellion,” which was started and key-noted at the University of California at Berkeley, has profound significance, but not of the kind that most commentators have ascribed to it. And the nature of the misrepresentations is part of its significance.

The events at Berkeley began, in the fall of 1964, ostensibly as a student protest against the University administration’s order forbidding political activity—specifically, the recruiting, fund-raising and organizing of students for political action off-campus—on a certain strip of ground adjoining the campus, which was owned by the University. Claiming that their rights had been violated, a small group of “rebels” rallied thousands of students of all political views, including many “conservatives,” and assumed the title of the “Free Speech Movement.” The Movement staged “sit-in” protests in the administration building, and committed other acts of physical force, such as assaults on the police and the seizure of a police car for use as a rostrum.

The spirit, style and tactics of the rebellion are best illustrated by one particular incident. The University administration called a mass meeting, which was attended by eighteen thousand students and faculty members, to hear an address on the situation by the University President, Clark Kerr; it had been expressly announced that no student speakers would be allowed to address the meeting. Kerr attempted to end the rebellion by capitulating: he promised to grant most of the rebels’ demands; it looked as if he had won the audience to his side. Whereupon, Mario Savio, the rebel leader, seized the microphone, in an attempt to take over the meeting, ignoring the rules and the fact that the meeting had been adjourned. When he was—properly—dragged off the platform, the leaders of the F.S.M. admitted, openly and jubilantly, that they had almost lost their battle, but had saved it by provoking the administration to an act of “violence” (thus admitting that the victory of their publicly proclaimed goals was not the goal of their battle).

What followed was nationwide publicity, of a peculiar kind. It was a sudden and, seemingly, spontaneous out-pouring of articles, studies, surveys, revealing a strange unanimity of approach in several basic aspects: in ascribing to the F.S.M. the importance of a national movement, unwarranted by the facts—in blurring the facts by means of unintelligible generalities—in granting to the rebels the status of spokesmen for American youth, acclaiming their “idealism” and “commitment” to political action, hailing them as a symptom of the “awakening” of college students from “political apathy.” If ever a “puff-job” was done by a major part of the press, this was it.

In the meantime, what followed at Berkeley was a fierce, three-cornered struggle among the University administration, its Board of Regents and its faculty, a struggle so sketchily reported in the press that its exact nature remains fogbound. One can gather only that the Regents were, apparently, demanding a “tough” policy toward the rebels, that the majority of the faculty were on the rebels’ side and that the administration was caught in the “moderate” middle of the road.

The struggle led to the permanent resignation of the University’s Chancellor (as the rebels had demanded)—the temporary resignation, and later reinstatement, of President Kerr—and, ultimately, an almost complete capitulation to the F.S.M., with the administration granting most of the rebels’ demands. (These included the right to advocate illegal acts and the right to an unrestricted freedom of speech on campus.)

To the astonishment of the naive, this did not end the rebellion: the more demands were granted, the more were made. As the administration intensified its efforts to appease the F.S.M., the F.S.M. intensified its provocations. The unrestricted freedom of speech took the form of a “Filthy Language Movement,” which consisted of students carrying placards with four-letter words, and broadcasting obscenities over the University loudspeakers (which Movement was dismissed with mild reproof by most of the press, as a mere “adolescent prank”).

This, apparently, was too much even for those who sympathized with the rebellion. The F.S.M. began to lose its following—and was, eventually, dissolved. Mario Savio quit the University, declaring that he “could not keep up with the undemocratic procedures that the administration is following” (italics mine)—and departed, reportedly to organize a nationwide revolutionary student movement.

This is a bare summary of the events as they were reported by the press. But some revealing information was provided by volunteers, outside the regular news channels, such as in the letters-to-the-editor columns.

An eloquent account was given in a letter to The New York Times (March 31, 1965) by Alexander Grendon, a biophysicist in the Donner Laboratory, University of California:

The F.S.M. has always applied coercion to insure victory. One-party “democracy,” as in the Communist countries or the lily-white portions of the South, corrects opponents of the party line by punishment. The punishment of the recalcitrant university administration (and more than 20,000 students who avoided participation in the conflict) was to “bring the university to a grinding halt” by physical force.

To capitulate to such corruption of democracy is to teach students that these methods are right. President Kerr capitulated repeatedly....

Kerr agreed the university would not control “advocacy of illegal acts,” an abstraction until illustrated by examples: In a university lecture hall, a self-proclaimed anarchist advises students how to cheat to escape military service; a nationally known Communist uses the university facilities to condemn our Government in vicious terms for its action in Vietnam, while funds to support the Vietcong are illegally solicited; propaganda for the use of marijuana, with instructions where to buy it, is openly distributed on campus.

Even the abstraction “obscenity” is better understood when one hears a speaker, using the university’s amplifying equipment, describe in vulgar words his experiences in group sexual intercourse and homosexuality and recommend these practices, while another suggests students should have the same sexual freedom on campus as dogs....

Clark Kerr’s “negotiation”—a euphemism for surrender—on each deliberate defiance of orderly university processes contributes not to a liberal university but to a lawless one.

David S. Landes, professor of history, Harvard University, made an interesting observation in a letter to The New York Times (December 29, 1964). Stating that the Berkeley revolt represents potentially one of the most serious assaults on academic freedom in America, he wrote:

“In conclusion, I should like to point out the deleterious implications of this dispute for the University of California. I know personally of five or six faculty members who are leaving, not because of lack of sympathy with ‘free speech’ or ‘political action,’ but because, as one put it, who wants to teach at the University of Saigon?”

The clearest account and most perceptive evaluation were offered in an article in the Columbia University Forum (Spring 1965), entitled “What’s Left at Berkeley,” by William Petersen, professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley.

He writes:

The first fact one must know about the Free Speech Movement is that it has little or nothing to do with free speech.... If not free speech, what then is the issue? In fact, preposterous as this may seem, the real issue is the seizure of power....

That a tiny number, a few hundred out of a student body of more than 27,000, was able to disrupt the campus is the consequence of more than vigor and skill in agitation. This miniscule group could not have succeeded in getting so many students into motion without three other, at times unwitting, sources of support: off-campus assistance of various kinds, the University administration and the faculty.

Everyone who has seen the efficient, almost military organization of the agitators’ program has a reasonable basis for believing that skilled personnel and money are being dispatched into the Berkeley battle.... Around the Berkeley community a dozen “ad hoc committees to support” this or that element of the student revolt sprang up spontaneously, as though out of nowhere.

The course followed by the University administration... could hardly have better fostered a rebellious student body if it had been devised to do so. To establish dubious regulations and when they are attacked to defend them by unreasonable argument is bad enough; worse still, the University did not impose on the students any sanctions that did not finally evaporate.... Obedience to norms is developed when it is suitably rewarded, and when noncompliance is suitably punished. That professional educators should need to be reminded of this axiom indicates how deep the roots of the Berkeley crisis lie.

But the most important reason that the extremists won so many supporters among the students was the attitude of the faculty. Perhaps their most notorious capitulation to the F.S.M. was a resolution passed by the Academic Senate on December 8, by which the faculty notified the campus not only that they supported all of the radicals’ demands but also that, in effect, they were willing to fight for them against the Board of Regents, should that become necessary. When that resolution passed by an overwhelming majority—824 to 115 votes—it effectively silenced the anti-F.S.M. student organizations....

The Free Speech Movement is reminiscent of the Communist fronts of the 1930’s, but there are several important differences. The key feature, that a radical core uses legitimate issues ambiguously in order to manipulate a large mass, is identical. The core in this case, however, is not the disciplined Communist party, but a heterogeneous group of radical sects.

Professor Petersen lists the various socialist, Trotskyist, communist and other groups involved. His conclusion is: “The radical leaders on the Berkeley campus, like those in Latin American or Asian universities, are not the less radical for being, in many cases, outside the discipline of a formal political party. They are defined not by whether they pay dues to a party, but by their actions, their vocabulary, their way of thinking. The best term to describe them, in my opinion, is Castroite.” This term, he explains, applies primarily to their choice of tactics, to the fact that “in critical respects all of them imitate the Castro movement....

“At Berkeley, provocative tactics applied not against a dictatorship but against the liberal, divided, and vacillating University administration proved to be enormously effective. Each provocation and subsequent victory led to the next.”

Professor Petersen ends his article on a note of warning: “By my diagnosis ... not only has the patient [the University] not recovered but he is sicker than ever. The fever has gone down temporarily, but the infection is spreading and becoming more virulent.”

Now let us consider the ideology of the rebels, from such indications as were given in the press reports. The general tone of the reports was best expressed by a headline in The New York Times (March 15,1965): “The New Student Left: Movement Represents Serious Activists in Drive for Changes.”

What kind of changes? No specific answer was given in the almost full-page story. Just “changes.”

Some of these activists “who liken their movement to a ‘revolution,’ want to be called radicals. Most of them, however, prefer to be called ‘organizers.’ ”

Organizers—of what? Of “deprived people.” For what? No answer. Just “organizers.”

“Most express contempt for any specific labels, and they don’t mind being called cynics.... The great majority of those questioned said they were as skeptical of Communism as they were of any other form of political control.... ‘You might say we’re a-Communist,’ said one of them, ‘just as you might say we’re amoral and a-almost everything else.’ ”

There are exceptions, however. A girl from the University of California, one of the leaders of the Berkeley revolt, is quoted as saying: “At present the socialist world, even with all its problems, is moving closer than any other countries toward the sort of society I think should exist. In the Soviet Union, it has almost been achieved.”

Another student, from the City College of New York, is quoted as concurring: “ ‘The Soviet Union and the whole Socialist bloc are on the right track,’ he said.”

In view of the fact that most of the young activists were active in the civil rights movement, and that the Berkeley rebels had started by hiding behind the issue of civil rights (attempting, unsuccessfully, to smear all opposition as of “racist” origin), it is interesting to read that: “There is little talk among the activists about racial integration. Some of them consider the subject passé. They declare that integration will be almost as evil as segregation if it results in a complacent, middle-class interracial society.”

The central theme and basic ideology of all the activists is: anti-ideology. They are militantly opposed to all “labels,” definitions and theories; they proclaim the supremacy of the immediate moment and commitment to action—to subjectively, emotionally motivated action. Their anti-intellectual attitude runs like a stressed leitmotif through all the press reports.

“The Berkeley mutineers did not seem political in the sense of those student rebels in the Turbulent Thirties,” declares an article in The New York Times Magazine (Feb. 14, 1965), “they are too suspicious of all adult institutions to embrace wholeheartedly even those ideologies with a stake in smashing the system. An anarchist or I.W.W. strain seems as pronounced as any Marxist doctrine. ‘Theirs is a sort of political existentialism,’ says Paul Jacobs, a research associate at the university’s Center for the Study of Law and Society, who is one of the F.S.M.’s applauders. ‘All the old labels are out....’ ”

And: “The proudly immoderate zealots of the F.S.M. pursue an activist creed—that only commitment can strip life of its emptiness, its absence of meaning in a great ‘knowledge factory’ like Berkeley.”

An article in The Saturday Evening Post (May 8, 1965), discussing the various youth groups of the left, quotes a leader of Students for a Democratic Society:

“We began by rejecting the old sectarian left and its ancient quarrels, and with a contempt for American society, which we saw as depraved. We are interested in direct action and specific issues. We do not spend endless hours debating the nature of Soviet Russia or whether Yugoslavia is a degenerate workers’ state.” And: “With sit-ins we saw for the first time the chance for direct participation in meaningful social revolution.”

“In their off-picket-line hours,” states the same article, “the P.L. [Progressive Labor] youngsters hang out at the experimental theaters and coffee shops of Manhattan’s East Village. Their taste in reading runs more to Sartre than to Marx.”

With an interesting touch of unanimity, a survey in Newsweek (March 22, 1965) quotes a young man on the other side of the continent: “ ‘These students don’t read Marx,’ said one Berkeley Free Student Movement leader, ‘they read Camus.’ ”

“If they are rebels,” the survey continues, “they are rebels without an ideology, and without long-range revolutionary programs. They rally over issues, not philosophies, and seem unable to formulate or sustain a systematized political theory of society, either from the left or right.”

“Today’s student seeks to find himself through what he does, not what he thinks,” the survey declares explicitly—and quotes some adult authorities in sympathetic confirmation. “ ‘What you have now, as in the 30’s,’ says New York Post editor James A. Wechsler, ‘are groups of activists who really want to function in life.’ But not ideologically. ‘We used to sit around and debate Marxism, but students now are working for civil-rights and peace.’ ” Richard Unsworth, chaplain at Dartmouth, is quoted as saying: “In the world of today’s campus ‘the avenue now is doing and then reflecting on your doing, instead of reflecting, then deciding, and then doing, the way it was a few years ago.’ ” Paul Goodman, described as writer, educator and “one of the students’ current heroes,” is quoted as hailing the Berkeley movement because: “The leaders of the insurrection, he says, ‘didn’t play it cool, they took risks, they were willing to be confused, they didn’t know whether it all would be a success or a failure. Now they don’t want to be cool any more, they want to take over.’ ” (Italics mine. The same tribute could be paid to any drunken driver.)

The theme of “taking over” is repeated again and again. The immediate target, apparently, is the takeover of the universities. The New York Times Magazine article quotes one of the F.S.M. leaders: “Our idea is that the university is composed of faculty, students, books and ideas. In a literal sense, the administration is merely there to make sure the sidewalks are kept clean. It should be the servant of the faculty and the students.”

The climax of this particular line was a news-story in The New York Times (March 29, 1965) under the heading: “Collegians adopt a ‘Bill of Rights.’ ”

“A group of Eastern college students declared here [in Philadelphia] this weekend that college administrators should be no more than housekeepers in the educational community.

“The modern college or university, they said, should be run by the students and the professors; administrators would be ‘maintenance, clerical and safety personnel whose purpose is to enforce the will of faculty and students.’ ”

A manifesto to this effect was adopted at a meeting held at the University of Pennsylvania and attended by 200 youths “from 39 colleges in the Philadelphia and New York areas, Harvard, Yale, the University of California at Berkeley, and from schools in the Midwest.”

“A recurring theme in the meeting was that colleges and universities had become servants of the ‘financial, industrial, and military establishment,’ and that students and faculty were being ‘sold down the river’ by administrators.

“Among the provisions of the manifesto were declarations of freedom to join, organize or hold meetings of any organization ... abolition of tuition fees; control of law enforcement by the students and faculty; an end to the Reserve Officer Training Corps; abolition of loyalty oaths; student-faculty control over curriculum....”

The method used to adopt that manifesto is illuminating: “About 200 students attended the meeting, 45 remaining until the end when the ‘Student Bill of Rights’ was adopted.” So much for “democratic procedures” and for the activists’ right to the title of spokesmen for American youth.

What significance is ascribed to the student rebellion by all these reports and by the authorities they choose to quote? Moral courage is not a characteristic of today’s culture, but in no other contemporary issue has moral cowardice been revealed to such a naked, ugly extent. Not only do most of the commentators lack an independent evaluation of the events, not only do they take their cue from the rebels, but of all the rebels’ complaints, it is the most superficial, irrelevant and, therefore, the safest, that they choose to support and to accept as the cause of the rebellion: the complaint that the universities have grown “too big.”

As if they had mushroomed overnight, the “bigness” of the universities is suddenly decried by the consensus as a national problem and blamed for the “unrest” of the students, whose motives are hailed as youthful “idealism.” In today’s culture, it has always been safe to attack “bigness.” And since the meaningless issue of mere size has long served as a means of evading real issues, on all sides of all political fences, a new catch phrase has been added to the list of “Big Business,” “Big Labor,” “Big Government,” etc.: “Big University.”

For a more sophisticated audience, the socialist magazine The New Leader (Dec. 21, 1964) offers a Marxist-Freudian appraisal, ascribing the rebellion primarily to “alienation” (quoting Savio: “Somehow people are being separated off from something”) and to “generational revolt” (“Spontaneously the natural idiom of the student political protest was that of sexual protest against the forbidding university administrator who ruled in loco parentis”).

But the prize for expressing the moral-intellectual essence of today’s culture should go to Governor Brown of California. Remember that the University of California is a state institution, that its Regents are appointed by the Governor and that he, therefore, was the ultimate target of the revolt, including all its manifestations, from physical violence to filthy language.

“Have we made our society safe for students with ideas?” said Governor Brown at a campus dinner. (The New York Times, May 22, 1965.) “We have not. Students have changed but the structure of the university and its attitudes towards its students have not kept pace with that change.

“Therefore, some students felt they had the right to go outside the law to force the change. But in so doing, they displayed the height of idealistic hypocrisy. [Italics mine.] On the one hand, they held up the Federal Constitution, demanding their rights of political advocacy. But at the same time, they threw away the principle of due process in favor of direct action.

“In doing so, they were as wrong as the university. This, then, is the great challenge that faces us, the challenge of change.”

Consider the fact that Governor Brown is generally regarded as a powerful chief executive and, by California Republicans, as a formidable opponent. Consider the fact that “according to the California Public Opinion Poll, 74 percent of the people disapprove of the student protest movement in Berkeley.” (The New Leader, April 12, 1965.) Then observe that Governor Brown did not dare denounce a movement led or manipulated by a group of 45 students—and that he felt obliged to qualify the term “hypocrisy” by the adjective “idealistic,” thus creating one of the weirdest combinations in today’s vocabulary of evasion.

Now observe that in all that mass of comments, appraisals and interpretations (including the ponderous survey in Newsweek which offered statistics on every imaginable aspect of college life) not one word was said about the content of modern education, about the nature of the ideas that are being inculcated by today’s universities. Every possible question was raised and considered, except: What are the students taught to think? This, apparently, was what no one dared discuss.

This is what we shall now proceed to discuss.

If a dramatist had the power to convert philosophical ideas into real, flesh-and-blood people and attempted to create the walking embodiments of modern philosophy—the result would be the Berkeley rebels.

These “activists” are so fully, literally, loyally, devastatingly the products of modern philosophy that someone should cry to all the university administrations and faculties: “Brothers, you asked for it!”

Mankind could not expect to remain unscathed after decades of exposure to the radiation of intellectual fission-debris, such as: “Reason is impotent to know things as they are—reality is unknowable—certainty is impossible—knowledge is mere probability—truth is that which works—mind is a superstition—logic is a social convention—ethics is a matter of subjective commitment to an arbitrary postulate”—and the consequent mutations are those contorted young creatures who scream, in chronic terror, that they know nothing and want to rule everything.

If that dramatist were writing a movie, he could justifiably entitle it “Mario Savio, Son of Immanuel Kant.”

With rare and academically neglected exceptions, the philosophical “mainstream” that seeps into every classroom, subject and brain in today’s universities, is: epistemological agnosticism, avowed irrationalism, ethical subjectivism. Our age is witnessing the ultimate climax, the cashing-in on a long process of destruction, at the end of the road laid out by Kant.

Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach. In the name of reason, Pragmatism established a range-of-the-moment view as an enlightened perspective on life, context-dropping as a rule of epistemology, expediency as a principle of morality, and collective subjectivism as a substitute for metaphysics. Logical Positivism carried it further and, in the name of reason, elevated the immemorial psycho-epistemology of shyster lawyers to the status of a scientific epistemological system—by proclaiming that knowledge consists of linguistic manipulations. Taking this seriously, Linguistic Analysis declared that the task of philosophy is, not to identify universal principles, but to tell people what they mean when they speak, which they are otherwise unable to know (which last, by that time, was true—in philosophical circles). This was the final stroke of philosophy breaking its moorings and floating off, like a lighter-than-air balloon, losing any semblance of connection to reality, any relevance to the problems of man’s existence.

No matter how cautiously the proponents of such theories skirted any reference to the relationship between theory and practice, no matter how coyly they struggled to treat philosophy as a parlor or classroom game—the fact remained that young people went to college for the purpose of acquiring theoretical knowledge to guide them in practical action. Philosophy teachers evaded questions about the application of their ideas to reality, by such means as declaring that “reality is a meaningless term,” or by asserting that philosophy has no purpose other than the amusement of manufacturing arbitrary “constructs,” or by urging students to temper every theory with “common sense” - the common sense they had spent countless hours trying to invalidate.

As a result, a student came out of a modern university with the following sediment left in his brain by his four to eight years of study: existence is an uncharted, unknowable jungle, fear and uncertainty are man’s permanent state, skepticism is the mark of maturity, cynicism is the mark of realism and, above all, the hallmark of an intellectual is the denial of the intellect.

When and if academic commentators gave any thought to the practical results of their theories, they were predominantly united in claiming that uncertainty and skepticism are socially valuable traits which would lead to tolerance of differences, flexibility, social “adjustment” and willingness to compromise. Some went so far as to maintain explicitly that intellectual certainty is the mark of a dictatorial mentality, and that chronic doubt—the absence of firm convictions, the lack of absolutes—is the guarantee of a peaceful, “democratic” society.

They miscalculated.

It has been said that Kant’s dichotomy led to two lines of Kantian philosophers, both accepting his basic premises, but choosing opposite sides: those who chose reason, abandoning reality—and those who chose reality, abandoning reason. The first delivered the world to the second.

The collector of the Kantian rationalizers’ efforts—the receiver of the bankrupt shambles of sophistry, casuistry, sterility and abysmal triviality to which they had reduced philosophy—was Existentialism.

Existentialism, in essence, consists of pointing to modern philosophy and declaring: “Since this is reason, to hell with it!”

In spite of the fact that the pragmatists-positivists-analysts had obliterated reason, the existentialists accepted them as reason’s advocates, held them up to the world as examples of rationality and proceeded to reject reason altogether, proclaiming its impotence, rebelling against its “failure,” calling for a return to reality, to the problems of human existence, to values, to action—to subjective values and mindless action. In the name of reality, they proclaimed the moral supremacy of “instincts,” urges, feelings—and the cognitive powers of stomachs, muscles, kidneys, hearts, blood. It was a rebellion of headless bodies.

The battle is not over. The philosophy departments of today’s universities are the battleground of a struggle which, in fact, is only a family quarrel between the analysts and the existentialists. Their progeny are the activists of the student rebellion.

If these activists choose the policy of “doing and then reflecting on your doing”—hasn’t Pragmatism taught them that truth is to be judged by consequences? If they “seem unable to formulate or sustain a systematized political theory of society,” yet shriek with moral righteousness that they propose to achieve their social goals by physical force—hasn’t Logical Positivism taught them that ethical propositions have no cognitive meaning and are merely a report on one’s feelings or the equivalent of emotional ejaculations? If they are savagely blind to everything but the immediate moment—hasn’t Logical Positivism taught them that nothing else can be claimed with certainty to exist? And while the Linguistic Analysts are busy demonstrating that “The cat is on the mat” does not mean that “the mat” is an attribute of “the cat,” nor that “on-the-mat” is the genus to which “the cat” belongs, nor yet that “the-cat” equals “on-the-mat”—is it any wonder that students storm the Berkeley campus with placards inscribed “Strike now, analyze later”? (This slogan is quoted by Professor Petersen in the Columbia University Forum.)

On June 14, CBS televised a jumbled, incoherent, unintelligible—and for these very reasons, authentic and significant—documentary entitled “The Berkeley Story.” There is method in every kind of madness—and for those acquainted with modern philosophy, that documentary was like a display of sideshow mirrors throwing off twisted reflections and random echoes of the carnage perpetrated in the academic torture-chambers of the mind.

“Our generation has no ideology,” declared the first boy interviewed, in the tone of defiance and hatred once reserved for saying: “Down with Wall Street!”—clearly projecting that the enemy now is not the “Robber Barons,” but the mind. The older generation, he explained scornfully, had “a neat little pill” to solve everything, but the pill didn’t work and they merely “got their hearts busted.” “We don’t believe in pills,” he said.

“We’ve learned that there are no absolute rules,” said a young girl, hastily and defensively, as if uttering an axiom—and proceeded to explain inarticulately, with the help of gestures pointing inward, that “we make rules for ourselves” and that what is right for her may not be right for others.

A girl described her classes as “words, words, words, paper, paper, paper”—and quietly, in a tone of authentic despair, said that she stopped at times to wonder: “What am I doing here? I’m not learning anything.”

An intense young girl who talked volubly, never quite finishing a sentence nor making a point, was denouncing society in general, trying to say that since people are social products, society has done a bad job. In the middle of a sentence, she stopped and threw in, as a casual aside: “Whatever way I turn out, I still am a product,” then went on. She said it with the simple earnestness of a conscientious child acknowledging a self-evident fact of nature. It was not an act: the poor little creature meant it.

The helpless bewilderment on the face of Harry Reasoner, the commentator, when he tried to sum up what he had presented, was an eloquent indication of why the press is unable properly to handle the student rebellion. “Now—immediacy—any situation must be solved now,” he said incredulously, describing the rebels’ attitude, neither praising nor blaming, in the faintly astonished, faintly helpless tone of a man unable to believe that he is seeing savages running loose on the campus of one of America’s great universities.

Such are the products of modern philosophy. They are the type of students who are too intelligent not to see the logical consequences of the theories they have been taught—but not intelligent nor independent enough to see through the theories and reject them.

So they scream their defiance against “The System,” not realizing that they are its most consistently docile pupils, that theirs is a rebellion against the status quo by its archetypes, against the intellectual “Establishment” by its robots who have swallowed every shopworn premise of the “liberals” of the 1930’s, including the catchphrases of altruism, the dedication to “deprived people,” to such a safely conventional cause as “the war on poverty.” A rebellion that brandishes banners inscribed with bromides is not a very convincing nor very inspiring sight.

As in any movement, there is obviously a mixture of motives involved: there are the little shysters of the intellect who have found a gold mine in modern philosophy, who delight in arguing for argument’s sake and stumping opponents by means of ready-to-wear paradoxes—there are the little role-players who fancy themselves as heroes and enjoy defiance for the sake of defiance—there are the nihilists who, moved by a profound hatred, seek nothing but destruction for the sake of destruction—there are the hopeless dependents who seek to “belong” to any crowd that would have them—and there are the plain hooligans who are always there, on the fringes of any mob action that smells of trouble. Whatever the combination of motives, neurosis is stamped in capital letters across the whole movement, since there is no such thing as rejecting reason through an innocent error of knowledge. But whether the theories of modern philosophy serve merely as a screen, a defense-mechanism, a rationalization of neurosis or are, in part, its cause—the fact remains that modern philosophy has destroyed the best in these students and fostered the worst.

Young people do seek a comprehensive view of life, i.e., a philosophy, they do seek meaning, purpose, ideals—and most of them take what they get. It is in their teens and early twenties that most people seek philosophical answers and set their premises, for good or evil, for the rest of their lives. Some never reach that stage; some never give up the quest; but the majority are open to the voice of philosophy for a few brief years. These last are the permanent, if not innocent, victims of modern philosophy.

They are not independent thinkers nor intellectual originators; they are unable to answer or withstand the flood of modern sophistries. So some of them give up, after one or two unintelligible courses, convinced that thinking is a waste of time—and turn into lethargic cynics or stultified Babbitts by the time they reach twenty-five. Others accept what they hear; they accept it blindly and literally; these are today’s activists. And no matter what tangle of motives now moves them, every teacher of modern philosophy should cringe in their presence, if he is still open to the realization that it is by means of the best within them, by means of their twisted, precarious groping for ideas, that he has turned them into grotesque little monstrosities.

Now what happens to the better minds in modern universities, to the students of above average intelligence who are actually eager to learn? What they find and have to endure is a long, slow process of psycho-epistemological torture.

Directly or indirectly, the influence of philosophy sets the epistemological standards and methods of teaching for all departments, in the physical sciences as well as in the humanities. The consequence, today, is a chaos of subjective whims setting the criteria of logic, of communication, demonstration, evidence, proof, which differ from class to class, from teacher to teacher. I am not speaking of a difference in viewpoint or content, but of the absence of basic epistemological principles and the consequent difference in the method of functioning required of a student’s mind. It is as if each course were given in a different language, each requiring that one think exclusively in that language, none providing a dictionary. The result—to the extent that one would attempt to comply—is intellectual disintegration.

Add to this: the opposition to “system-building,” i.e., to the integration of knowledge, with the result that the material taught in one class contradicts the material taught in the others, each subject hanging in a vacuum and to be accepted out of context, while any questions on how to integrate it are rejected, discredited and discouraged.

Add to this: the arbitrary, senseless, haphazard conglomeration of most curricula, the absence of any hierarchical structure of knowledge, any order, continuity or rationale—the jumble of courses on out-of-context minutiae and out-of-focus surveys—the all-pervading unintelligibility—the arrogantly self-confessed irrationality—and, consequently, the necessity to memorize, rather than learn, to recite, rather than understand, to hold in one’s mind a cacophony of undefined jargon long enough to pass the next exam.

Add to this: the professors who refuse to answer questions—the professors who answer by evasion and ridicule—the professors who turn their classes into bull-sessions on the premise that “we’re here to mull things over together” -the professors who do lecture, but, in the name of “anti-dogmatism,” take no stand, express no viewpoint and leave the students in a maze of contradictions with no lead to a solution- the professors who do take a stand and invite the students’ comments, then penalize dissenters by means of lower grades (particularly in political courses).

Add to this: the moral cowardice of most university administrations, the policy of permanent moral neutrality, of compromising on anything, of evading any conflict at any price—and the students’ knowledge that the worst classroom injustice will remain uncorrected, that no appeal is practicable and no justice is to be found anywhere.

Yes, of course, there are exceptions—there are competent educators, brilliant minds and rational men on the university staffs—but they are swallowed in the rampaging “mainstream” of irrationality and, too often, defeated by the hopeless pessimism of bitter, long-repressed frustration.

And further: most professors and administrators are much more competent and rational as individuals than they are in their collective performance. Most of them realize and, privately, complain about the evils of today’s educational world. But each of them feels individually impotent before the enormity of the problem. So they blame it on some nameless, disembodied, almost mystical power, which they designate as “The System”—and too many of them take it to be a political system, specifically capitalism. They do not realize that there is only one human discipline which enables men to deal with large-scale problems, which has the power to integrate and unify human activities—and that that discipline is philosophy, which they have set. instead, to the task of disintegrating and destroying their work.

What does all this do to the best minds among the students? Most of them endure their college years with the teeth-clenched determination of serving out a jail sentence. The psychological scars they acquire in the process are incalculable. But they struggle as best they can to preserve their capacity to think, sensing dimly that the essence of the torture is an assault on their mind. And what they feel toward their schools ranges from mistrust to resentment to contempt to hatred—intertwined with a sense of exhaustion and excruciating boredom.

To various extents and various degrees of conscious awareness, these feelings are shared by the entire pyramid of the student body, from intellectual top to bottom. This is the reason why the handful of Berkeley rebels was able to attract thousands of students who did not realize, at first, the nature of what they were joining and who withdrew when it became apparent. Those students were moved by a desperate, incoherent frustration, by a need to protest, not knowing fully against what, by a blind desire to strike out at the university somehow.

I asked a small group of intelligent students at one of New York’s best universities—who were ideologically opposed to the rebels—whether they would fight for the university administration, if the rebellion came to their campus. All of them shook their heads, with faint, wise, bitter smiles.

The philosophical impotence of the older generation is the reason why the adult authorities—from the Berkeley administration to the social commentators to the press to Governor Brown—were unable to take a firm stand and had no rational answer to the Berkeley rebellion. Granting the premises of modern philosophy, logic was on the side of the rebels. To answer them would require a total philosophical re-evaluation, down to basic premises—which none of those adults would dare attempt.

Hence the incredible spectacle of brute force, hoodlum tactics and militantly explicit irrationality being brought to a university campus—and being met by the vague, uncertain, apologetic concessions, the stale generalities, the evasive platitudes of the alleged defenders of academic law and order.

In a civilized society, a student’s declaration that he rejects reason and proposes to act outside the bounds of rationality, would be taken as sufficient grounds for immediate expulsion—let alone if he proceeded to engage in mob action and physical violence on a university campus. But modern universities have long since lost the moral right to oppose the first—and are, therefore, impotent against the second.

The student rebellion is an eloquent demonstration of the fact that when men abandon reason, they open the door to physical force as the only alternative and the inevitable consequence.

The rebellion is also one of the clearest refutations of the argument of those intellectuals who claimed that skepticism and chronic doubt would lead to social harmony. “When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.” (Atlas Shrugged)

Who stands to profit by that rebellion? The answer lies in the nature and goals of its leadership.

If the rank-and-file of the college rebels are victims, at least in part, this cannot be said of their leaders. Who are their leaders? Any and all of the statist-collectivist groups that hover, like vultures, over the remnants of capitalism, hoping to pounce on the carcass—and to accelerate the end, whenever possible. Their minimal goal is just “to make trouble”—to undercut, to confuse, to demoralize, to destroy. Their ultimate goal is to take over.

To such leadership, the college rebels are merely cannon-fodder, intended to stick their headless necks out, to fight on campuses, to go to jail, to lose their careers and their future—and eventually, if the leadership succeeds, to fight in the streets and lose their “non-absolute” lives, paving the way for the absolute dictatorship of whoever is the bloodiest among the thugs scrambling for power. Young fools who refuse to look beyond the immediate “now,” have no way of knowing whose long-range goals they are serving.

The communists are involved, among others; but, like the others, they are merely the manipulators, not the cause, of the student rebellion. This is an example of the fact that whenever they win, they win by default—like germs feeding on the sores of a disintegrating body. They did not create the conditions that are destroying American universities—they did not create the hordes of embittered, aimless, neurotic teenagers—but they do know how to attack through the sores which their opponents insist on evading. They are professional ideologists and it is not difficult for them to move into an intellectual vacuum and to hang the cringing advocates of “anti-ideology” by their own contradictions.

For its motley leftist leadership, the student rebellion is a trial balloon, a kind of cultural temperature-taking. It is a test of how much they can get away with and what sort of opposition they will encounter.

For the rest of us, it is a miniature preview—in the microcosm of the academic world—of what is to happen to the country at large, if the present cultural trend remains unchallenged.

The country at large is a mirror of its universities. The practical result of modem philosophy is today’s mixed economy with its moral nihilism, its range-of-the-moment pragmatism, its anti-ideological ideology and its truly shameful recourse to the notion of “Government by Consensus.” (See my article in the May and June 1965 issues of The Objectivist Newsletter.)

Rule by pressure groups is merely the prelude, the social conditioning for mob rule. Once a country has accepted the obliteration of moral principles, of individual rights, of objectivity, of justice, of reason, and has submitted to the rule of legalized brute force—the elimination of the concept “legalized” does not take long to follow. Who is to resist it—and in the name of what?

When numbers are substituted for morality, and no individual can claim a right, but any gang can assert any desire whatever, when compromise is the only policy expected of those in power, and the preservation of the moment’s “stability,” of peace at any price, is their only goal—the winner, necessarily, is whoever presents the most unjust and irrational demands; the system serves as an open invitation to do so. If there were no communists or other thugs in the world, such a system would create them.

The more an official is committed to the policy of compromise, the less able he is to resist anything: to give in, is his “instinctive” response in any emergency, his basic principle of conduct, which makes him an easy mark.

In this connection, the extreme of naive superficiality was reached by those commentators who expressed astonishment that the student rebellion had chosen Berkeley as its first battleground and President Kerr as its first target in spite of his record as a “liberal” and as a renowned mediator and arbitrator. “Ironically, some of the least mature student spokesmen ... tried to depict Mr. Kerr as the illiberal administrator,” said an editorial in The New York Times (March 11, 1965). “This was, of course, absurd in view of Mr. Kerr’s long and courageous battle to uphold academic freedom and students’ rights in the face of those right-wing pressures that abound in California.” Other commentators pictured Mr. Kerr as an innocent victim caught between the conflicting pressures of the “conservatives” on the Board of Regents and the “liberals” on the faculty. But, in fact and in logic, the middle of the road can lead to no other final destination—and it is clear that the rebels chose Clark Kerr as their first target, not in spite of, but because of his record.

Now project what would happen if the technique of the Berkeley rebellion were repeated on a national scale. Contrary to the fanatical belief of its advocates, compromise does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody; it does not lead to general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to be all things to all men, end up by not being anything to anyone. And more: the partial victory of an unjust claim, encourages the claimant to try further; the partial defeat of a just claim, discourages and paralyzes the victim. If a determined, disciplined gang of statists were to make an assault on the crumbling remnants of a mixed economy, boldly and explicitly proclaiming the collectivist tenets which the country had accepted by tacit default—what resistance would they encounter? The dispirited, demoralized, embittered majority would remain lethargically indifferent to any public event. And many would support the gang, at first, moved by a desperate, incoherent frustration, by a need to protest, not knowing fully against what, by a blind desire to strike out somehow at the suffocating hopelessness of the status quo.

Who would feel morally inspired to fight for Johnson’s “consensus”? Who fought for the aimless platitudes of the Kerensky government in Russia—of the Weimar Republic in Germany of the Nationalist government in China?

But no matter how badly demoralized and philosophically disarmed a country might be, it has to reach a certain psychological turning point before it can be pushed from a state of semi-freedom into surrender to full-fledged dictatorship. And this was the main ideological purpose of the student rebellion’s leaders, whoever they were: to condition the country to accept force as the means of settling political controversies.

Observe the ideological precedents which the Berkeley rebels were striving to establish: all of them involved the abrogation of rights and the advocacy of force. These notions have been publicized, yet their meaning has been largely ignored and left unanswered.

1. The main issue was the attempt to make the country accept mass civil disobedience as a proper and valid tool of political action. This attempt has been made repeatedly in connection with the civil rights movement. But there the issue was confused by the fact that the Negroes were the victims of legalized injustice and, therefore, the matter of breaching legality did not become unequivocally clear. The country took it as a fight for justice, not as an assault on the law.

Civil disobedience may be justifiable, in some cases, when and if an individual disobeys a law in order to bring an issue to court, as a test case. Such an action involves respect for legality and a protest directed only at a particular law which the individual seeks an opportunity to prove to be unjust. The same is true of a group of individuals when and if the risks involved are their own.

But there is no justification, in a civilized society, for the kind of mass civil disobedience that involves the violation of the rights of others—regardless of whether the demonstrators’ goal is good or evil. The end does not justify the means. No one’s rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others. Mass disobedience is an assault on the concept of rights: it is a mob’s defiance of legality as such.

The forcible occupation of another man’s property or the obstruction of a public thoroughfare is so blatant a violation of rights that an attempt to justify it becomes an abrogation of morality. An individual has no right to do a “sit-in” in the home or office of a person he disagrees with—and he does not acquire such a right by joining a gang. Rights are not a matter of numbers—and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.

The only power of a mob, as against an individual, is greater muscular strength—i.e., plain, brute physical force. The attempt to solve social problems by means of physical force is what a civilized society is established to prevent. The advocates of mass civil disobedience admit that their purpose is intimidation. A society that tolerates intimidation as a means of settling disputes—the physical intimidation of some men or groups by others—loses its moral right to exist as a social system, and its collapse does not take long to follow.

Politically, mass civil disobedience is appropriate only as a prelude to civil war—as the declaration of a total break with a country’s political institutions. And the degree of today’s intellectual chaos and context-dropping was best illustrated by some “conservative” California official who rushed to declare that he objects to the Berkeley rebellion, but respects civil disobedience as a valid American tradition. “Don’t forget the Boston Tea Party,” he said, forgetting it.

If the meaning of civil disobedience is somewhat obscured in the civil rights movement—and, therefore, the attitude of the country is inconclusive—that meaning becomes blatantly obvious when a sit-in is staged on a university campus. If the universities—the supposed citadels of reason, knowledge, scholarship, civilization—can be made to surrender to the rule of brute force, the rest of the country is cooked.

2. To facilitate the acceptance of force, the Berkeley rebels attempted to establish a special distinction between force and violence: force, they claimed explicitly, is a proper form of social action, but violence is not. Their definition of the terms was as follows: coercion by means of a literal physical contact is “violence” and is reprehensible; any other way of violating rights is merely “force” and is a legitimate, peaceful method of dealing with opponents.

For instance, if the rebels occupy the administration building, that is “force”; if policemen drag them out, that is “violence.” If Savio seizes a microphone he has no right to use, that is “force”; if a policeman drags him away from it, that is “violence.”

Consider the implications of that distinction as a rule of social conduct: if you come home one evening, find a stranger occupying your house and throw him out bodily, he has merely committed a peaceful act of “force,” but you are guilty of “violence” and you are to be punished.

The theoretical purpose of that grotesque absurdity is to establish a moral inversion: to make the initiation of force moral, and resistance to force immoral—and thus to obliterate the right of self-defense. The immediate practical purpose is to foster the activities of the lowest political breed: the provocateurs, who commit acts of force and place the blame on their victims.

3. To justify that fraudulent distinction, the Berkeley rebels attempted to obliterate a legitimate one: the distinction between ideas and actions. They claimed that freedom of speech means freedom of action and that no clear line of demarcation can be drawn between them.

For instance, if they have the right to advocate any political viewpoint—they claimed—they have the right to organize, on campus, any off-campus activities, even those forbidden by law. As Professor Petersen put it, they were claiming the right “to use the University as a sanctuary from which to make illegal raids on the general community.”

The difference between an exchange of ideas and an exchange of blows is self-evident. The line of demarcation between freedom of speech and freedom of action is established by the ban on the initiation of physical force. It is only when that ban is abrogated that such a problem can arise—but when that ban is abrogated, no political freedom of any kind can remain in existence.

At a superficial glance, the rebels’ “package-deal” may seem to imply a sort of anarchistic extension of freedom; but, in fact and in logic, it implies the exact opposite—which is a grim joke on those unthinking youths who joined the rebellion in the name of “free speech.” If the freedom to express ideas were equated with the freedom to commit crimes, it would not take long to demonstrate that no organized society can exist on such terms and, therefore, that the expression of ideas has to be curtailed and some ideas have to be forbidden, just as criminal acts are forbidden. Thus the gullible would be brought to concede that the right of free speech is undefinable and “impracticable.”

4. An indication of such a motive was given by the rebels’ demand for unrestricted freedom of speech on campus—with the consequent “Filthy Language Movement.”

There can be no such thing as the right to an unrestricted freedom of speech (or of action) on someone else’s property. The fact that the university at Berkeley is owned by the state, merely complicates the issue, but does not alter it. The owners of a state university are the voters and taxpayers of that state. The university administration, appointed (directly or indirectly) by an elected official, is, theoretically, the agent of the owners—and has to act as such, so long as state universities exist. (Whether they should exist, is a different question.)

In any undertaking or establishment involving more than one man, it is the owner or owners who set the rules and terms of appropriate conduct; the rest of the participants are free to go elsewhere and seek different terms, if they do not agree. There can be no such thing as the right to act on whim, to be exercised by some participants at the expense of others.

Students who attend a university have the right to expect that they will not be subjected to hearing the kind of obscenities for which the owner of a semi-decent barroom would bounce hoodlums out onto the street. The right to determine what sort of language is permissible, belongs to the administration of a university—fully as much as to the owner of a barroom.

The technique of the rebels, as of all statists, was to take advantage of the principles of a free society in order to undercut them by an alleged demonstration of their “impracticability”—in this case, the “impracticability” of the right of free speech. But, in fact, what they have demonstrated is a point farthest removed from their goals: that no rights of any kind can be exercised without property rights.

It is only on the basis of property rights that the sphere and application of individual rights can be defined in any given social situation. Without property rights, there is no way to solve or to avoid a hopeless chaos of clashing views, interests, demands, desires and whims.

There was no way for the Berkeley administration to answer the rebels except by invoking property rights. It is obvious why neither modern “liberals” nor “conservatives” would care to do so. It is not the contradictions of a free society that the rebels were exposing and cashing-in on, but the contradictions of a mixed economy.

As to the question of what ideological policy should properly be adopted by the administration of a state university, it is a question that has no answer. There are no solutions for the many contradictions inherent in the concept of “public property,” particularly when the property is directly concerned with the dissemination of ideas. This is one of the reasons why the rebels would choose a state university as their first battleground.

A good case could be made for the claim that a state university has no right to forbid the teaching or advocacy of any political viewpoint whatever, as, for instance, of communism, since some of the taxpaying owners may be communists. An equally good case could be made for the claim that a state university has no right to permit the teaching and advocacy of any political viewpoint which (as, for instance, communism) is a direct threat to the property, freedom and lives of the majority of the taxpaying owners. Majority rule is not applicable in the realm of ideas; an individual’s convictions are not subject to a majority vote; but neither an individual nor a minority nor a majority should be forced to support their own destroyers.

On the one hand, a government institution has no right to forbid the expression of any ideas. On the other hand, a government institution has no right to harbor, assist and finance the country’s enemies (as, for instance, the collectors of funds for the Vietcong).

The source of these contradictions does not lie in the principle of individual rights, but in their violation by the collectivist institution of “public property.”

This issue, however, has to be fought in the field of constitutional law, not on campus. As students, the rebels have no greater rights in a state university than in a private one. As taxpayers, they have no greater rights than the millions of other California taxpayers involved. If they object to the policies of the Board of Regents, they have no recourse except at the polls at the next election—if they can persuade a sufficient number of voters. This is a pretty slim chance—and this is a good argument against any type of “public property.” But it is not an issue to be solved by physical force.

What is significant here is the fact that the rebels—who, to put it mildly, are not champions of private property—refused to abide by the kind of majority rule which is inherent in public ownership. That is what they were opposing when they complained that universities have become servants of the “financial, industrial and military establishment.” It is the rights of these particular groups of taxpayers (the right to a voice in the management of state universities) that they were seeking to abrogate.

If anyone needs proof of the fact that the advocates of public ownership are not seeking “democratic” control of property by majority rule, but control by dictatorship—this is one eloquent piece of evidence.

5. As part of the ideological conditioning for that ultimate goal, the rebels attempted to introduce a new variant on an old theme that has been the object of an intense drive by all statist-collectivists for many years past: the obliteration of the difference between private action and government action.

This has always been attempted by means of a “package-deal” ascribing to private citizens the specific violations constitutionally forbidden to the government, and thus destroying individual rights while freeing the government from any restrictions. The most frequent example of this technique consists of accusing private citizens of practicing “censorship” (a concept applicable only to the government) and thus negating their right to disagree. (See my article on “Man’s Rights” in the April 1963 issue of The Objectivist Newsletter.)

The new variant provided by the rebels was their protest against alleged “double jeopardy.” It went as follows: if the students commit illegal acts, they will be punished by the courts and must not, therefore, be penalized by the university for the same offense.

“Double jeopardy” is a concept applicable only to one branch of the government, the judiciary, and only to a specific judiciary action: it means that a man must not be put on trial twice for the same offense.

To equate private judgment and action (or, in this context, a government official’s judgment and action) with a court trial, is worse than absurd. It is an outrageous attempt to obliterate the right to moral judgment and moral action. It is a demand that a lawbreaker suffer no civil consequences of his crime.

If such a notion were accepted, individuals would have no right to evaluate the conduct of others nor to act according to their evaluation. They would have to wait until a court had decreed whether a given man was guilty or innocent—and even after he was pronounced guilty, they would have no right to change their behavior toward him and would have to leave the task of penalizing him exclusively to the government.

For instance, if a bank employee were found guilty of embezzlement and had served his sentence, the bank would have no right to refuse to give him back his former job—since a refusal would constitute “double jeopardy.”

Or: a government official would have no right to watch the legality of the actions of his department’s employees, nor to lay down rules for their strict observance of the law, but would have to wait until a court had found them guilty of law-breaking—and would have to reinstate them in their jobs, after they had served their sentences for influence-peddling or bribe-taking or treason.

The notion of morality as a monopoly of the government (and of a single branch or group within the government) is so blatantly a part of the ideology of a dictatorship that the rebels’ attempt to get away with it is truly shocking.

6. The rebels’ notion that universities should be run by students and faculties was an open, explicit assault on the right attacked implicitly by all their other notions: the right of private property. And of all the various statist-collectivist systems, the one they chose as their goal is, politico-economically, the least practical; intellectually, the least defensible; morally, the most shameful: Guild Socialism.

Guild socialism is a system that abolishes the exercise of individual ability by chaining men into groups according to their line of work, and delivering the work into the group’s power, as its exclusive domain, with the group dictating the rules, standards and practices of how the work is to be done and who shall or shall not do it.

Guild socialism is the concrete-bound, routine-bound mentality of a savage, elevated into a social theory. Just as a tribe of savages seizes a piece of jungle territory and claims it as a monopoly by reason of the fact of being there—so guild socialism grants a monopoly, not on a jungle forest or water hole, but on a factory or a university—not by reason of a man’s ability, achievement or even “public service,” but by reason of the fact that he is there.

Just as savages have no concept of causes or consequences, of past or future, and no concept of efficacy beyond the muscular power of their tribe—so guild socialists, finding themselves in the midst of an industrial civilization, regard its institutions as phenomena of nature and see no reason why the gang should not seize them.

If there is any one proof of a man’s incompetence, it is the stagnant mentality of a worker (or of a professor) who, doing some small, routine job in a vast undertaking, does not care to look beyond the lever of a machine (or the lectern of a classroom), does not choose to know how the machine (or the classroom) got there or what makes his job possible, and proclaims that the management of the undertaking is parasitical and unnecessary. Managerial work—the organization and integration of human effort into purposeful. large-scale, long-range activities—is, in the realm of action, what man’s conceptual faculty is in the realm of cognition. It is beyond the grasp and, therefore, is the first target of the self-arrested, sensory-perceptual mentality.

If there is any one way to confess one’s own mediocrity, it is the willingness to place one’s work in the absolute power of a group, particularly a group of one’s professional colleagues. Of any forms of tyranny, this is the worst; it is directed against a single human attribute: the mind—and against a single enemy: the innovator. The innovator, by definition, is the man who challenges the established practices of his profession. To grant a professional monopoly to any group, is to sacrifice human ability and abolish progress; to advocate such a monopoly, is to confess that one has nothing to sacrifice.

Guild socialism is the rule of, by and for mediocrity. Its cause is a society’s intellectual collapse; its consequence is a quagmire of stagnation; its historical example is the guild system of the Middle Ages (or, in modern times, the fascist system of Italy under Mussolini).

The rebels’ notion that students (along with faculties) should run universities and determine their curricula is a crude absurdity. If an ignorant youth comes to an institution of learning in order to acquire knowledge of a certain science, by what means is he to determine what is relevant and how he should be taught? (In the process of learning, he can judge only whether his teacher’s presentation is clear or unclear, logical or contradictory; he cannot determine the proper course and method of teaching, ahead of any knowledge of the subject.) It is obvious that a student who demands the right to run a university (or to decide who should run it) has no knowledge of the concept of knowledge, that his demand is self-contradictory and disqualifies him automatically. The same is true—with a much heavier burden of moral guilt - of the professor who taught him to make such demands and who supports them.

Would you care to be treated in a hospital where the methods of therapy were determined by a vote of doctors and patients?

Yet the absurdity of these examples is merely more obvious—not more irrational nor more vicious—than the standard collectivist claim that workers should take over the factories created by men whose achievement they can neither grasp nor equal. The basic epistemological-moral premise and pattern are the same: the obliteration of reason obliterates the concept of reality, which obliterates the concept of achievement, which obliterates the concept of the distinction between the earned and the unearned. Then the incompetent can seize factories, the ignorant can seize universities, the brutes can seize scientific research laboratories—and nothing is left in a human society but the power of whim and fist.

What makes guild socialism cruder than (but not different from) most statist-collectivist theories is the fact that it represents the other, the usually unmentioned, side of altruism: it is the voice, not of the givers, but of the receivers. While most altruistic theorists proclaim “the common good” as their justification, advocate self-sacrificial service to the “community” and keep silent about the exact nature or identity of the recipients of sacrifices—guild socialists brazenly declare themselves to be the recipients and present their claims to the community, demanding its services. If they want a monopoly on a given profession, they claim, the rest of the community must give up the right to practice it. If they want a university, they claim, the community must provide it.

And if “selfishness” is taken, by the altruists, to mean the sacrifice of others to self, I challenge them to name an uglier example of it than the pronouncement of the little Berkeley collectivist who declared: “Our idea is that the university is composed of faculty, students, books and ideas. In a literal sense, the administration is merely there to make sure the sidewalks are kept clean. It should be the servant of the faculty and the students.”

What did that little disembodied mystic omit from his idea of a university? Who pays the salaries of the faculty? Who provides the livelihood of the students? Who publishes the books? Who builds the classrooms, the libraries, the dormitories—and the sidewalks? Leave it to a modern “mystic of muscle” to display the kind of contempt for “vulgar material concerns” that an old-fashioned mystic would not quite dare permit himself.

Who—besides the university administration—is to be the voiceless, rightless “servant” and sidewalk-sweeper of the faculty and students? No, not only the men of productive genius who create the material wealth that makes universities possible, not only the “tycoons of big business,” not only the “financial, industrial, and military establishment”—but every taxpayer of the state of California, every man who works for a living, high or low, every human being who earns his sustenance, struggles with his budget, pays for what he gets, and does not permit himself to evade the reality of “vulgar material concerns.”

Such is the soul revealed by the ideology of the Berkeley rebellion. Such is the meaning of the rebels’ demands and of the ideological precedents they were trying to establish.

Observe the complexity, the equivocations, the tricks, the twists, the intellectual acrobatics performed by these avowed advocates of unbridled feelings—and the ideological consistency of these activists who claim to possess no ideology.

The first round of the student rebellion has not gone over too well. In spite of the gratuitous “puff-job” done by the press, the attitude of the public is a mixture of bewilderment, indifference and antagonism. Indifference—because the evasive vagueness of the press reports was self-defeating: people do not understand what it is all about and see no reason to care. Antagonism—because the American public still holds a profound respect for universities (as they might be and ought to be, but are not any longer), and the commentators’ half-laudatory, half-humorous platitudes about the “idealism of youth” have not succeeded in whitewashing the fact that brute physical force was brought to a university campus. That fact has aroused a vague sense of uneasiness in people, a sense of undefined, apprehensive condemnation.

The rebellion’s attempt to invade other campuses did not get very far. There were some disgraceful proclamations of appeasement by some university administrators and commencement orators this spring, but no discernible public sympathy.

There were a few instances of a proper attitude on the part of university administrations—an attitude of firmness, dignity and uncompromising severity—notably at Columbia University. A commencement address by Dr. Meng, president of Hunter College, is also worth noting. Declaring that the violation of the rights of others “is intolerable” in an academic community and that any student or teacher guilty of it deserves “instant expulsion,” he said: “Yesterday’s ivory tower has become today’s fox-hole. The leisure of the theory class is increasingly occupied in the organization of picket lines, teach-ins, think-ins, and stake-outs of one sort or another.” (The New York Times, June 18, 1965.)

But even though the student rebellion has not aroused much public sympathy, the most ominous aspect of the situation is the fact that it has not met any ideological opposition, that the implications of the rebels’ stand have neither been answered nor rejected, that such criticism as it did evoke was, with rare exceptions, evasively superficial.

As a trial balloon, the rebellion has accomplished its leaders’ purpose: it has demonstrated that they may have gone a bit too far, bared their teeth and claws a bit too soon, and antagonized many potential sympathizers, even among the “liberals”—but that the road ahead is empty, with no intellectual barricades in sight.

The battle is to continue. The long-range intentions of the student rebellion have been proclaimed repeatedly by the same activists who proclaim their exclusive dedication to the immediate moment. The remnants of the “Free Speech Movement” at Berkeley have been reorganized into a “Free Student Union,” which is making militant noises in preparation for another assault. No matter how absurd their notions, the rebels’ assaults are directed at the most important philosophical-political issues of our age. These issues cannot be ignored, evaded or bribed away by compromise. When brute force is on the march, compromise is the red carpet. When reason is attacked, common sense is not enough.

Neither a man nor a nation can exist without some form of philosophy. A man has the free will to think or not; if he does not, he takes what he gets. The free will of a nation is its intellectuals; the rest of the country takes what they offer; they set the terms, the values, the course, the goal.

In the absence of intellectual opposition, the rebels’ notions will gradually come to be absorbed into the culture. The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other—until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology. That is the way welfare statism came to be accepted in this country.

What we are witnessing today is an acceleration of the attempts to cash in on the ideological implications of welfare statism and to push beyond it. The college rebels are merely the commandos, charged with the task of establishing ideological beachheads for a full-scale advance of all the statist-collectivist forces against the remnants of capitalism in America; and part of their task is the takeover of the ideological control of America’s universities.

If the collectivists succeed, the terrible historical irony will lie in the fact that what looks like a noisy, reckless, belligerent confidence is, in fact, a hysterical bluff. The acceleration of collectivism’s advance is not the march of winners, but the blind stampede of losers. Collectivism has lost the battle for men’s minds; its advocates know it; their last chance consists of the fact that no one else knows it. If they are to cash in on decades of philosophical corruption, on all the gnawing, scraping, scratching, burrowing to dig a maze of philosophical rat-holes which is about to cave in, it’s now or never.

As a cultural-intellectual power and a moral ideal, collectivism died in World War II. If we are still rolling in its direction, it is only by the inertia of a void and the momentum of disintegration. A social movement that began with the ponderous, brain-cracking, dialectical constructs of Hegel and Marx, and ends up with a horde of morally unwashed children, each stamping his foot and shrieking: “I want it now!”—is through.

All over the world, while mowing down one helpless nation after another, collectivism has been steadily losing the two elements that hold the key to the future: the brains of mankind and its youth. In regard to the first, observe Britain’s “brain drain.” In regard to the second, consider the fact (which was not mentioned in the press comments on the student rebellion) that in a predominant number of American universities, the political views of the faculty are perceptibly more “liberal” than those of the student body. (The same is true of the youth of the country at large—as against the older generation, the 35 to 50 age bracket, who were reared under the New Deal and who hold the country’s leadership, at present.) That is one of the facts which the student rebellion was intended to disguise.

This is not to say that the anti-collectivists represent a numerical majority among college students. The passive supporters of the status quo are always the majority in any group, culture, society or age. But it is not by passive majorities that the trends of a nation are set. Who sets them? Anyone who cares to do so, if he has the intellectual ammunition to win on the battlefield of ideas, which belongs to those who do care. Those who don’t, are merely social ballast by their own choice and predilection.

The fact that the “non-liberals” among college students (and among the youth of the world) can be identified at present only as “anti-collectivists” is the dangerous element and the question mark in today’s situation. They are the young people who are not ready to give up, who want to fight against a swamp of evil, but do not know what is the good. They have rejected the sick, worn platitudes of collectivism—(along with all of its cultural manifestations, including the cult of despair and depravity—the studied mindlessness of jerk-and-moan dancing, singing or acting—the worship of anti-heroes—the experience of looking up to the dissection of a psychotic’s brain, for inspiration, and to the bare feet of an inarticulate brute, for guidance—the stupor of reduction to sensory stimuli—the sense of life of a movie such as Tom Jones)—but they have found, as yet, no direction, no consistent philosophy, no rational values, no long-range goals. Until and unless they do, their incoherent striving for a better future will collapse before the final thrust of the collectivists.

Historically, we are now in a kind of intellectual no-man’s-land—and the future will be determined by those who venture out of the trenches of the status quo. Our direction will depend on whether the venturers are crusaders fighting for a new Renaissance or scavengers pouncing upon the wreckage left of yesterday’s battles. The crusaders are not yet ready; the scavengers are.

That is why—in a deeper sense than the little zombies of college campuses will ever grasp—“Now, now, now!” is the last slogan and cry of the ragged, bearded stragglers who had once been an army rallied by the promise of a scientifically (!) planned society.

The two most accurate characterizations of the student rebellion, given in the press, were: “Political Existentialism” and “Castroite.” Both are concepts pertaining to intellectual bankruptcy: the first stands for the abdication of reason—the second, for that state of hysterical panic which brandishes a fist as its sole recourse.

In preparation for its published survey (March 22, 1965), Newsweek conducted a number of polls among college students at large, on various subjects, one of which was the question of who are the students’ heroes. The editors of Newsweek informed me that my name appeared on the resultant list, and sent an interviewer to question me about my views on the state of modern universities. For reasons best known to themselves, they chose not to publish any part of that interview. What I said (in briefer form) was what I am now saying in this article—with the exception of the concluding remarks which follow and which I want to address most particularly to those college students who chose me as one of their heroes.

Young people are constantly asking what they can do to fight today’s disastrous trends; they are seeking some form of action, and wrecking their hopes in blind alleys, particularly every four years, at election time. Those who do not realize that the battle is ideological, had better give up, because they have no chance. Those who do realize it, should grasp that the student rebellion offers them a chance to train themselves for the kind of battle they will have to fight in the world, when they leave the university; a chance, not only to train themselves, but to win the first rounds of that wider battle.

If they seek an important cause, they have the opportunity to fight the rebels, to fight ideologically, on moral-intellectual grounds—by identifying and exposing the meaning of the rebels’ demands, by naming and answering the basic principles which the rebels dare not admit. The battle consists, above all, of providing the country (or all those within hearing) with ideological answers—a field of action from which the older generation has deserted under fire.

Ideas cannot be fought except by means of better ideas. The battle consists, not of opposing, but of exposing; not of denouncing, but of disproving; not of evading, but of boldly proclaiming a full, consistent and radical alternative.

This does not mean that rational students should enter debates with the rebels or attempt to convert them: one cannot argue with self-confessed irrationalists. The goal of an ideological battle is to enlighten the vast, helpless, bewildered majority in the universities—and in the country at large—or, rather, the minds of those among the majority who are struggling to find answers or those who, having heard nothing but collectivist sophistries for years, have withdrawn in revulsion and given up.

The first goal of such a battle is to wrest from a handful of beatniks the title of “spokesmen for American youth,” which the press is so anxious to grant them. The first step is to make oneself heard, on the campus and outside. There are many civilized ways to do it: protest-meetings, public petitions, speeches, pamphlets, letters-to-editors. It is a much more important issue than picketing the United Nations or parading in support of the House Un-American Activities Committee. And while such futile groups as Young Americans for Freedom are engaged in such undertakings, they are letting the collectivist vanguard speak in their name—in the name of American college students—without any audible sound of protest.

But in order to be heard, one must have something to say. To have that, one must know one’s case. One must know it fully, logically, consistently, all the way down to philosophical fundamentals. One cannot hope to fight nuclear experts with Republican pea-shooters. And the leaders behind the student rebellion are experts at their particular game.

But they are dangerous only to those who stare at the issues out of focus and hope to fight ideas by means of faith, feelings and fund-raising. You would be surprised how quickly the ideologists of collectivism retreat when they encounter a confident, intellectual adversary. Their case rests on appealing to human confusion, ignorance, dishonesty, cowardice, despair. Take the side they dare not touch: appeal to human intelligence.

Collectivism has lost the two crucial weapons that raised it to world power and made all of its victories possible: intellectuality and idealism, or reason and morality. It had to lose precisely at the height of its success, since its claim to both was a fraud: the full, actual reality of socialist-communist-fascist states has demonstrated the brute irrationality of collectivist systems and the inhumanity of altruism as a moral code.

Yet reason and morality are the only weapons that determine the course of history. The collectivists dropped them, because they had no right to carry them. Pick them up; you have.

(July- September 1965)

The Chickens’ Homecoming

A microcosmic version of what is wrong with today’s world, including the cause and the exact mechanics of how it got that way, was enacted at the annual business meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association on December 28, 1969. Like an old-fashioned morality play, the event had an awe-inspiring element of justice: it would be hard to find a group of men who had done more to deserve what they got.

The central debate of the occasion was triggered by some philosophers, described only as “radical,” who demanded that the meeting pass a resolution they had drafted. The resolution condemned the war in Vietnam, in blatantly Marxist terms, declaring that it is “a direct consequence of [America’s] foreign policy whose basic aim is to make and keep a large part of the world safe for American enterprise”; that American foreign aid, “particularly in underdeveloped countries, amounts to the exploitation of the peoples of these countries” and that it “necessitates the suppression of popular rebellions.”

An allegedly conservative group opposed the resolution. According to The New York Times (December 29, 1969): “The academics, including some of the nation’s best-known thinkers, filled the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel with hisses and shouts in debating the issue ...

“While Vietnam was the ostensible subject of debate, the central issue was two conflicting views of the task of philosophy—that the discipline’s job is to train minds and advance thought dispassionately and aloof from politics, and that philosophy should bring its talents to bear on the issues of the day. [This is a correct summary of the state of today’s philosophy; note the nature of the false dichotomy, which we shall discuss later.]

“The debate was symptomatic of the uneasiness of many young students and professors in recent years who contend that philosophy has lost touch with American life, being concerned instead with sterile quibbles over abstractions. [This is generosity on the part of the reporter: it is not over abstractions that today’s philosophers are quibbling.] It is a common saying that philosophy now devotes itself to the problems of philosophy, not the problems of men.”

How did the “dispassionate mind-trainers” oppose the radicals? They did as well, and with the same results, as their former students do in comparable situations, such as the conservatives when opposing the liberals, or the liberals when opposing the socialists, or the socialists when opposing the communists, or college administrators when opposing campus thugs: they steadfastly abstained from mentioning any essentials or referring to any fundamental principles.

First, they tried to resort to a typically modem weapon: evasion. “The opponents [of the resolution] made an early attempt to postpone discussion of the issue indefinitely,” writes The New York Times, “and lost by a vote of 120 to 78.”

“I hope,” declared the leader of the radicals, “that we are not going to construe ourselves as a narrow professional organization. Our duty as people must take priority over our alleged duty as ‘professionals.’ ”

“This can only damage our association,” declared a leader of the opposition. “I plead with you as philosophers to suspend judgment on some of the horrendous things in this resolution.” (Ethics, apparently, is not part of philosophy and, in the face of a horrendous resolution, a philosopher must not attempt to discover the truth or falsehood of its allegations: he must not pass judgment, but suspend it.)

If such tactics are futile even in the realm of practical politics (with fifty years of evidence to demonstrate the failure), what could they be expected to achieve in the realm of philosophy? Just exactly what they did achieve. The opponents of the radicals’ resolution did not win, they did not walk out, they did not resign: they compromised.

The meetine passed an amended resolution that kept the first and last paragraphs of the original virtually intact, but omitted all the rest. It omitted the Marxist evaluation of American foreign policy and condemned the war in Vietnam without reasons or explanations. In other words, it discarded Marxist theory, but accepted its product as if it were a self-evident primary requiring no proof or discussion.

The quality and stature of the amendments may be gauged by the following:

The first paragraph of the original resolution stated that the war in Vietnam constitutes “a moral and political problem.” The amendment changed it to “a moral problem” (in the hope that no one would accuse the A.P.A. of taking a political stand—even though the resolution deals with the war in Vietnam).

The last paragraph of the original resolution read: “Therefore, it is the sense of the American Philosophical Association that we oppose both the Vietnamization of the war and the claim that the United States has any right to negotiate the future of the Vietnamese people, and we advocate instead the total withdrawal from Vietnam of all American forces as fast as the boats and planes can carry them.”

The last paragraph of the amended resolution reads: “It is the sense of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association that we oppose both the policy of bombing villages to compensate for partial withdrawal of U.S. troops and the claim that the U.S. has any right to negotiate the future of the Vietnamese people, and we advocate instead the total withdrawal from Vietnam of all American forces as soon as physically possible.”

Just as politicians feel it safe to take a firm stand in favor of motherhood, so their equivalents in philosophy felt it safe to take a stand against the bombing of villages. The implication, in their resolution, that such bombing is not a military necessity, but a deliberate, senseless atrocity on the part of the U.S. would be clear to a schoolboy, but, apparently, not to modem philosophers. Nor would it occur to them that viewing the war in Vietnam as a moral problem and condemning the U.S., without a word about the nature, methods and atrocities of the enemy, is a moral obscenity—particularly in view of the fact that the U.S. has nothing to gain from that suicidal war and undertook it only in compliance with these same philosophers’ morality of altruism.

Apparently for fear of having succeeded at creating confusion and being misunderstood, the author of the amended resolution wrote a letter to the Editor of The New York Times (February 7, 1970) to correct its report: “The story and headlines present the event as a victory of right-wing over left while, in fact, it was a victory for the moderate left. After all, the Putnam resolution was passed, although with my moderating amendment.” So it was, which made matters much worse for the American Philosophical Association—which is always the case when the moderates deal with moral issues, morality being a realm where no compromise is possible.

(An extra touch of grim justice: the author of the amended resolution had been a graduate philosophy student under one of the leaders of the conservative opposition.)

The original resolution was more honest than the amended one, and more philosophical: it stated its theoretical base. That base (Marxism) is false as hell, but its very falsehood defeats it and works to protect the unwary: when people know the theoretical grounds of any given stand, they are able to check it, to judge and to decide whether they agree or not. To name one’s principles is to open one’s declarations to serious critical appraisal. But the evasion of theory, the enunciation of arbitrary inexplicable pronouncements, is an act of destruction that no Marxist theories could match: it destroys epistemology. It undercuts the principles of rationality, invalidates the processes of a civilized discussion, discards logic and replaces it with the “Sez you—Sez I” method of communication—which the campus activists are using to great advantage.

If you wonder how it came about that the American people were never given a chance to vote on the question of whether they want to adopt socialism, yet virtually the entire program of The Communist Manifesto has been enacted into law in this country—you have seen that process reenacted at a philosophical convention.

To discard a theory, yet accept its product—to discard (or to hide) the Marxist means, but adopt and propagate its end—is contemptible, even for politicians. When philosophers do it, it amounts to a declaration that philosophy is dead and that it died of unemployment.

By way of an autopsy, examine the false dichotomy mentioned earlier, the “two conflicting views of the task of philosophy.” One side holds that the task is “to train minds and advance thought” and that politics is not philosophy’s concern; the other side holds that it is, and that philosophy must deal with “the issues of the day.” What subject is omitted from this dichotomy? Politics— in the full, exact, philosophical meaning of the term.

Politics is the study of the principles governing the proper organization of society; it is based on ethics, the study of the proper values to guide man’s choices and actions. Both ethics and politics, necessarily, have been branches of philosophy from its birth.

Philosophy is the science that studies the fundamental aspects of the nature of existence. The task of philosophy is to provide man with a comprehensive view of life. This view serves as a base, a frame of reference, for all his actions, mental or physical, psychological or existential. This view tells him the nature of the universe with which he has to deal (metaphysics); the means by which he is to deal with it, i.e., the means of acquiring knowledge (epistemology); the standards by which he is to choose his goals and values, in regard to his own life and character (ethics)—and in regard to society (politics); the means of concretizing this view is given to him by esthetics.

It is not a question of whether man chooses to be guided by a comprehensive view: he is not equipped to survive without it. The nature of his consciousness does not permit him an animal’s percept-guided, range-of-the-moment form of existence. No matter how primitive his actions, he needs to project them into the future and to weigh their consequences; this requires a conceptual process, and a conceptual process cannot take place in a vacuum: it requires a context. Man’s choice is not whether he needs a comprehensive view of life, but only whether his view is true or false. If it is false, it leads him to act as his own destroyer.

In the early stages of mankind’s development, that view was provided by religion, i.e., by mystic fantasy. Man’s psycho-epistemological need is the reason why even the most primitively savage tribes always clung to some form of religious belief; the mystic (i.e., anti-reality) nature of their view was the cause of mankind’s incalculably long stagnation.

Man came into his own in Greece, some two-and-a-half thousand years ago. The birth of philosophy marked his adulthood; not the content of any particular system of philosophy, but deeper: the concept of philosophy—the realization that a comprehensive view of existence is to be reached by man’s mind.

Philosophy is the goal toward which religion was only a helplessly blind groping. The grandeur, the reverence, the exalted purity, the austere dedication to the pursuit of truth, which are commonly associated with religion, should properly belong to the field of philosophy. Aristotle lived up to it and, in part, so did Plato, Aquinas, Spinoza but how many others? It is earlier than we think.

If you observe that ever since Hume and Kant (mainly Kant, because Hume was merely the Bertrand Russell of his time) philosophy has been striving to prove that man’s mind is impotent, that there’s no such thing as reality and we wouldn’t be able to perceive it if there were—you will realize the magnitude of the treason involved.

The task of philosophy requires the total best of a mind’s capacity; the responsibility is commensurate. Most men are unable to form a comprehensive view of life: some, because their ability is devoted to other professions; a great many, because they lack the ability. But all need that view and, consciously or subconsciously, directly or indirectly, they accept what philosophy offers them.

The integration of factual data, the maintenance of a full context, the discovery of principles, the establishment of causal connections and thus the implementation of a long-range vision—these are some of the tasks required of a philosopher in every branch of his profession and, today, particularly in politics.

In the space of a single lifetime, two world wars have devastated the entire civilized world; two major dictatorships, in Russia and Germany, have committed such atrocities that most men are unable fully to believe it—and the bloody rise of rule by brute force is spreading around the globe. Something is obviously wrong with mankind’s political ideas, and needs urgent attention. To declare—in such circumstances—that politics is not the concern of philosophy is so unspeakable a default that it can be compared only to the stand of a doctor declaring, in the midst of a bubonic plague epidemic, that health or disease is not the concern of medicine.

It is political philosophy that sets the goals and determines the course of a country’s practical politics. But political philosophy means: abstract theory to identify, explain and evaluate the trend of events, to discover their causes, project their consequences, define the problems and offer the solutions.

Yet for many decades past, there has been no interest in political theory among academic philosophers; there has been no such thing as political philosophy—with the stale exception of Marxism, if one can call it a philosophy.

Bearing this in mind, evaluate the dichotomy displayed at the A.P.A. convention.

If the conservative philosophers assert that their job is “to train minds and advance thought, aloof from politics,” how do they propose to do it? To train minds—in what skill? To advance thought—about what? Apparently, a man’s mind is to be trained to think with no reference to man’s problems and, therefore, with the implicit knowledge that his thinking is of no consequence whatever to the events taking place in the world around him or to his own life, goals and actions. If so, how long will he choose to think, and what will be his view of thought and of reason? (You can see the answer on any campus in the country.)

On the other hand, if the radical philosophers assert that their job is to deal with “the issues of the day,” which day do they mean? Philosophical issues are not of “the day” or even “the year.” Where do “the issues of the day” come from? Who originates them? How do philosophers determine which issue to pick up and on which side?

It is obvious that what the radicals mean by political involvement is not professional, i.e., philosophical participation in politics, but an unthinking, emotional “commitment” to any slogan or issue of the immediate moment. Enjoying, by default, a monopoly on political philosophy, they are anxious to have it regarded as a subject closed to discussion, and they raise issues only in terms of practical politics, with the Marxist frame of reference to be taken for granted, as dogma.

The major part of the guilt, however, belongs to the conservatives: they have accepted the radicals’terms. When they speak of dispassionate aloofness from politics, they mean practical politics, but they discard the wider, philosophical meaning of the term as well. They concede the premise that there is no such thing as political theory and that the realm of politics consists of nothing but random concretes, below the level of philosophy’s concern. Which is all that the radicals want them to concede.

The result, at that convention, was the spectacle of a gruesome battle: the advocates of thought divorced from action versus the advocates of action divorced from thought—men armed with concepts in the form of floating abstractions versus men armed with concrete-bound percepts.

The outcome was a double disgrace: (1) that a philosophical association passed a political resolution and (2) the kind of resolution it passed.

1. No professional organization has the right to take an ideological stand in the name of its members. A man’s ideas, including political convictions, are exclusively his to determine and cannot be delegated to or prescribed by anyone else. It is not a matter of “professional ethics,” but of individual rights. The practice of passing ideological resolutions is a futile and immoral device of pressure-group warfare. For all the very reasons that a philosopher, as a thinking individual, should take a strong stand on political issues, he should not allow it to be taken for him by a collective: he, above all other men, should know that a man’s convictions are not to be determined or prescribed by majority vote. (The same moral principles apply to universities that attempt to pass such resolutions.)

2. If movie stars give out interviews criticizing military tactics, no one takes it seriously. If drugged adolescents scream demands that the war in Vietnam be ended at once, regardless of means, methods, context or consequences, one wonders about the quality of their educators. But when an association of philosophers does both, it is a disgrace.

The nature of our foreign policy is a proper concern of philosophy; the strategy of our military operations is not. The goal of the war in Vietnam is a proper concern of philosophy; the practice or nonpractice of bombing and the choice of targets are not. (If someone squeaks that the bombing of villages is a “moral” issue, let him remember that villages are the enemy’s strongholds in Vietnam—a fact which that shameful resolution neglected to mention.)

There is a great deal that philosophers could do about the war in Vietnam, and their services are desperately needed. The whole country, including our soldiers dying in the jungles, is in a state of bewildered confusion about that war and its purpose. But a philosophical approach would consist of tracing the ideological history of how we got into that war, what influences or interests pushed us in, what errors of our foreign policy were responsible, what basic premises created that policy and how they should be corrected.

If such a study were made, it would remind the country that the war in Vietnam was started by President Kennedy, who is the idol of all the anti-war protesters; that the basic premises of our foreign policy were set by another idol, President Roosevelt, and reinforced by the United Nations and by every peace and One-World group ever since: the premises that we owe a duty to the rest of the world, that we are responsible for the welfare of any nation anywhere on earth, that isolationism is selfish, immoral and impractical in a “shrinking” modern world, etc. Such a study would demonstrate the evil of altruistic “interventionism” or “internationalism,” and would define the proper principles (the premises of national self-interest) that should guide America’s foreign policy.

This is just a brief suggestion of what a philosopher’s task would be in regard to the war in Vietnam, but it is enough to indicate the scale of the alleged conservatives’ evasion.

If——with reason, justice, morality, facts and history on their side—they abdicated their leadership as philosophers and had nothing to offer people but the advice to ignore politics, anyone could take over, and did.

Passive resignation to disaster is not a widespread characteristic among men, particularly not among Americans. If, in a desperate situation, one side declares that nothing can be done and the other offers the possibility of action, men will take the action—even if it is some suicidal attempt, such as that resolution.

It must be remembered that “reason,” “justice,” “morality,” “facts,” “history” are the things that most of those conservative philosophers had been proclaiming to be nonexistent or nonobjective or unknowable or unprovable or belonging to the realm of arbitrary emotional choice. Through decades of promulgating such doctrines as Pragmatism, Logical Positivism, Linguistic Analysis, they refused to consider the fact that these doctrines would disarm and paralyze the best among men, those who take philosophy seriously, and that they would unleash the worst, those who, scorning philosophy, reason, justice, morality, would have no trouble brushing the disarmed out of the way.

This is the prospect they ignored in regard to the future of the country. It is justice that the blow should strike them first. A tiny minority group took over the leading branch of a profession of some 7,000 members and forced it to slap its own face by a resolution proclaiming that philosophy is a farce.

The brothers had asked for it. To what sort of problems had they been giving priority over the problems of politics? Among the papers to be read at that same convention were: “Pronouns and Proper Names”—“Can Grammar Be Thought?”—“Propositions as the Only Realities.”

The only reality, as it usually does, avenged itself at that convention.

(June 1970)

The Comprachicos

I

The comprachicos, or comprapequeños, were a strange and hideous nomadic association, famous in the seventeenth century, forgotten in the eighteenth, unknown today....

Comprachicos, as well as comprapequeños, is a compound Spanish word that means “child-buyers.”

The comprachicos traded in children.

They bought them and sold them.

They did not steal them. The kidnapping of children is a different industry.

And what did they make of these children?

Monsters.

Why monsters?

To laugh.

The people needs laughter; so do the kings. Cities require side-show freaks or clowns; palaces require jesters....

To succeed in producing a freak, one must get hold of him early. A dwarf must be started when he is small....

Hence, an art. There were educators. They took a man and turned him into a miscarriage; they took a face and made a muzzle. They stunted growth; they mangled features. This artificial production of teratological cases had its own rules. It was a whole science. Imagine an inverted orthopedics. Where God had put a straight glance, this art put a squint. Where God had put harmony, they put deformity. Where God had put perfection, they brought back a botched attempt. And, in the eyes of connoisseurs, it is the botched that was perfect....

The practice of degrading man leads one to the practice of deforming him. Deformity completes the task of political suppression....

The comprachicos had a talent, to disfigure, that made them valuable in politics. To disfigure is better than to kill. There was the iron mask, but that is an awkward means. One cannot populate Europe with iron masks; deformed mountebanks, however, run through the streets without appearing implausible; besides, an iron mask can be torn off, a mask of flesh cannot. To mask you forever by means of your own face, nothing can be more ingenious....

The comprachicos did not merely remove a child’s face, they removed his memory. At least, they removed as much of it as they could. The child was not aware of the mutilation he had suffered. This horrible surgery left traces on his face, not in his mind. He could remember at most that one day he had been seized by some men, then had fallen asleep, and later they had cured him. Cured him of what? He did not know. Of the burning by sulphur and the incisions by iron, he remembered nothing. During the operation, the comprachicos made the little patient unconscious by means of a stupefying powder that passed for magic and suppressed pain....

In China, since time immemorial, they have achieved refinement in a special art and industry: the molding of a living man. One takes a child two or three years old, one puts him into a porcelain vase, more or less grotesque in shape, without cover or bottom, so that the head and feet protrude. In the daytime, one keeps this vase standing upright; at night, one lays it down, so that the child can sleep. Thus the child expands without growing, slowly filling the contours of the vase with his compressed flesh and twisted bones. This bottled development continues for several years. At a certain point, it becomes irreparable. When one judges that this has occurred and that the monster is made, one breaks the vase, the child comes out, and one has a man in the shape of a pot. (Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs, translation mine.)

Victor Hugo wrote this in the nineteenth century. His exalted mind could not conceive that so unspeakable a form of inhumanity would ever be possible again. The twentieth century proved him wrong.

The production of monsters—helpless, twisted monsters whose normal development has been stunted—goes on all around us. But the modern heirs of the comprachicos are smarter and subtler than their predecessors: they do not hide, they practice their trade in the open; they do not buy children, the children are delivered to them; they do not use sulphur or iron, they achieve their goal without ever laying a finger on their little victims.

The ancient comprachicos hid the operation, but displayed its results; their heirs have reversed the process: the operation is open, the results are invisible. In the past, this horrible surgery left traces on a child’s face, not in his mind. Today, it leaves traces in his mind, not on his face. In both cases, the child is not aware of the mutilation he has suffered. But today’s comprachicos do not use narcotic powders: they take a child before he is fully aware of reality and never let him develop that awareness. Where nature had put a normal brain, they put mental retardation. To make you unconscious for life by means of your own brain, nothing can be more ingenious.

This is the ingenuity practiced by most of today’s educators. They are the comprachicos of the mind.

They do not place a child into a vase to adjust his body to its contours. They place him into a “Progressive” nursery school to adjust him to society.

The Progressive nursery schools start a child’s education at the age of three. Their view of a child’s needs is militantly anti-cognitive and anti-conceptual. A child of that age, they claim, is too young for cognitive training; his natural desire is not to learn, but to play. The development of his conceptual faculty, they claim, is an unnatural burden that should not be imposed on him; he should be free to act on his spontaneous urges and feelings in order to express his subconscious desires, hostilities and fears. The primary goal of a Progressive nursery school is “social adjustment”; this is to be achieved by means of group activities, in which a child is expected to develop both “self-expression” (in the form of anything he might feel like doing) and conformity to the group.

(For a presentation of the essentials of the Progressive nursery schools’ theories and practice—as contrasted to the rationality of the Montessori nursery schools—I refer you to “The Montessori Method” by Beatrice Hessen in The Objectivist, May-July 1970.)

“Give me a child for the first seven years,” says a famous maxim attributed to the Jesuits, “and you may do what you like with him afterwards.” This is true of most children, with rare, heroically independent exceptions. The first five or six years of a child’s life are crucial to his cognitive development. They determine, not the content of his mind, but its method of functioning, its psycho-epistemology. (Psycho-epistemology is the study of man’s cognitive processes from the aspect of the interaction between man’s conscious mind and the automatic functions of his subconscious.)

At birth, a child’s mind is tabula rasa; he has the potential of awareness—the mechanism of a human consciousness—but no content. Speaking metaphorically, he has a camera with an extremely sensitive, unexposed film (his conscious mind), and an extremely complex computer waiting to be programmed (his subconscious). Both are blank. He knows nothing of the external world. He faces an immense chaos which he must learn to perceive by means of the complex mechanism which he must learn to operate.

If, in any two years of adult life, men could learn as much as an infant learns in his first two years, they would have the capacity of genius. To focus his eyes (which is not an innate, but an acquired skill), to perceive the things around him by integrating his sensations into percepts (which is not an innate, but an acquired skill), to coordinate his muscles for the task of crawling, then standing upright, then walking—and, ultimately, to grasp the process of concept-formation and learn to speak—these are some of an infant’s tasks and achievements whose magnitude is not equaled by most men in the rest of their lives.

These achievements are not conscious and volitional in the adult sense of the terms: an infant is not aware, in advance, of the processes he has to perform in order to acquire these skills, and the processes are largely automatic. But they are acquired skills, nevertheless, and the enormous effort expended by an infant to acquire them can be easily observed. Observe also the intensity, the austere, the unsmiling seriousness with which an infant watches the world around him. (If you ever find, in an adult, that degree of seriousness about reality, you will have found a great man.)

A child’s cognitive development is not completed by the time he is three years old—it is just about to begin in the full, human, conceptual sense of the term. He has merely traveled through the anteroom of cognition and acquired the prerequisites of knowledge, the rudimentary mental tools he needs to begin to learn. His mind is in a state of eager, impatient flux: he is unable to catch up with the impressions bombarding him from all sides; he wants to know everything and at once. After the gigantic effort to acquire his mental tools, he has an overwhelming need to use them.

For him, the world has just begun. It is an intelligible world now; the chaos is in his mind, which he has not yet learned to organize—this is his next, conceptual task. His every experience is a discovery; every impression it leaves in his mind is new. But he is not able to think in such terms: to him, it is the world that’s new. What Columbus felt when he landed in America, what the astronauts felt when they landed on the moon, is what a child feels when he discovers the earth, between the ages of two and seven. (Do you think that Columbus’ first desire was to “adjust” to the natives—or that the astronauts’ first wish was to engage in fantasy play?)

This is a child’s position at about the age of three. The next three or four years determine the brightness or the misery of his future: they program the cognitive functions of his subconscious computer.

The subconscious is an integrating mechanism. Man’s conscious mind observes and establishes connections among his experiences; the subconscious integrates the connections and makes them become automatic. For example, the skill of walking is acquired, after many faltering attempts, by the automatization of countless connections controlling muscular movements; once he learns to walk, a child needs no conscious awareness of such problems as posture, balance, length of step, etc.—the mere decision to walk brings the integrated total into his control.

A mind’s cognitive development involves a continual process of automatization. For example, you cannot perceive a table as an infant perceives it—as a mysterious object with four legs. You perceive it as a table, i.e., a man-made piece of furniture, serving a certain purpose belonging to a human habitation, etc.; you cannot separate these attributes from your sight of the table, you experience it as a single, indivisible percept—yet all you see is a four-legged object; the rest is an automatized integration of a vast amount of conceptual knowledge which, at one time, you had to learn bit by bit. The same is true of everything you perceive or experience; as an adult, you cannot perceive or experience in a vacuum, you do it in a certain automatized context—and the efficiency of your mental operations depends on the kind of context your subconscious has automatized.

“Learning to speak is a process of automatizing the use (i.e., the meaning and the application) of concepts. And more: all learning involves a process of automatizing, i.e., of first acquiring knowledge by fully conscious, focused attention and observation, then of establishing mental connections which make that knowledge automatic (instantly available as a context), thus freeing man’s mind to pursue further, more complex knowledge.” (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.)

The process of forming, integrating and using concepts is not an automatic, but a volitional process—i.e., a process which uses both new and automatized material, but which is directed volitionally. It is not an innate, but an acquired skill; it has to be learned—it is the most crucially important part of learning—and all of man’s other capacities depend on how well or how badly he learns it.

This skill does not pertain to the particular content of a man’s knowledge at any given age, but to the method by which he acquires and organizes knowledge—the method by which his mind deals with its content. The method programs his subconscious computer, determining how efficiently, lamely or disastrously his cognitive processes will function. The programming of a man’s subconscious consists of the kind of cognitive habits he acquires; these habits constitute his psycho-epistemology.

It is a child’s early experiences, observations and subverbal conclusions that determine this programming. Thereafter, the interaction of content and method establishes a certain reciprocity: the method of acquiring knowledge affects its content, which affects the further development of the method, and so on.

In the flux of a child’s countless impressions and momentary conclusions, the crucial ones are those that pertain to the nature of the world around him, and to the efficacy of his mental efforts. The words that would name the essence of the long, wordless process taking place in a child’s mind are two questions: Where am I?—and: Is it worth it?

The child’s answers are not set in words: they are set in the form of certain reactions which become habitual, i.e., automatized. He does not conclude that the universe is “benevolent” and that thinking is important—he develops an eager curiosity about every new experience, and a desire to understand it. Subconsciously, in terms of automatized mental processes, he develops the implicit equivalent of two fundamental premises, which are the cornerstones of his future sense of life, i.e., of his metaphysics and epistemology, long before he is able to grasp such concepts consciously.

Does a child conclude that the world is intelligible, and proceed to expand his understanding by the effort of conceptualizing on an ever-wider scale, with growing success and enjoyment? Or does he conclude that the world is a bewildering chaos, where the fact he grasped today is reversed tomorrow, where the more he sees the more helpless he becomes—and, consequently, does he retreat into the cellar of his own mind, locking its door? Does a child reach the stage of self-consciousness, i.e., does he grasp the distinction between consciousness and existence, between his mind and the outside world, which leads him to understand that the task of the first is to perceive the second, which leads to the development of his critical faculty and of control over his mental operations? Or does he remain in an indeterminate daze, never certain of whether he feels or perceives, of where one ends and the other begins, which leads him to feel trapped between two unintelligible states of flux: the chaos within and without? Does a child learn to identify, to categorize, to integrate his experiences and thus acquire the self-confidence needed to develop a long-range vision? Or does he learn to see nothing but the immediate moment and the feelings it produces, never venturing to look beyond it, never establishing any context but an emotional one, which leads him eventually to a stage where, under the pressure of any strong emotion, his mind disintegrates and reality vanishes?

These are the kinds of issues and answers that program a child’s mind in the first years of his life, as his subconscious automatizes one set of cognitive—psycho-epistemological—habits or the other, or a continuum of degrees of precarious mixtures between the two extremes.

The ultimate result is that by the age of about seven, a child acquires the capacity to develop a vast conceptual context which will accompany and illuminate his every experience, creating an ever-growing chain of automatized connections, expanding the power of his intelligence with every year of his life—or a child shrivels as his mind shrinks, leaving only a nameless anxiety in the vacuum that should have been filled by his growing brain.

Intelligence is the ability to deal with a broad range of abstractions. Whatever a child’s natural endowment, the use of intelligence is an acquired skill. It has to be acquired by a child’s own effort and automatized by his own mind, but adults can help or hinder him in this crucial process. They can place him in an environment that provides him with evidence of a stable, consistent, intelligible world which challenges and rewards his efforts to understand—or in an environment where nothing connects to anything, nothing holds long enough to grasp, nothing is answered, nothing is certain, where the incomprehensible and unpredictable lurks behind every corner and strikes him at any random step. The adults can accelerate or hamper, retard and, perhaps, destroy the development of his conceptual faculty.

Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook indicates the nature and extent of the help that a child needs at the time he enters nursery school. He has learned to identify objects; he has not learned to abstract attributes, i.e., consciously to identify things such as height, weight, color or number. He has barely acquired the ability to speak; he is not yet able to grasp the nature of this, to him, amazing skill, and he needs training in its proper use (i.e., training in conceptualization). It is psycho-epistemological training that Dr. Montessori had in mind (though this is not her term), when she wrote the following about her method:

“The didactic material, in fact, does not offer to the child the ‘content’ of the mind, but the order for that ‘content.’ ... The mind has formed itself by a special exercise of attention, observing, comparing, and classifying.

“The mental attitude acquired by such an exercise leads the child to make ordered observations in his environment, observations which prove as interesting to him as discoveries, and so stimulate him to multiply them indefinitely and to form in his mind a rich ‘content’ of clear ideas.

“Language now comes to fix by means of exact words the ideas which the mind has acquired.... In this way the children are able to ‘find themselves,’ alike in the world of natural things and in the world of objects and of words which surround them, for they have an inner guide which leads them to become active and intelligent explorers instead of wandering wayfarers in an unknown land.” (Maria Montessori, Dr. Montessori Own Handbook, New York, Schocken Books, 1965, pp. 137-138.)

The purposeful, disciplined use of his intelligence is the highest achievement possible to man: it is that which makes him human. The higher the skill, the earlier in life its learning should be started. The same holds true in reverse, for those who seek to stifle a human potential. To succeed in producing the atrophy of intelligence, a state of man-made stupidity, one must get hold of the victim early; a mental dwarf must be started when he is small. This is the art and science practiced by the comprachicos of the mind.

At the age of three, when his mind is almost as plastic as his bones, when his need and desire to know are more intense than they will ever be again, a child is delivered—by a Progressive nursery school—into the midst of a pack of children as helplessly ignorant as himself. He is not merely left without cognitive guidance—he is actively discouraged and prevented from pursuing cognitive tasks. He wants to learn; he is told to play. Why? No answer is given. He is made to understand—by the emotional vibrations permeating the atmosphere of the place, by every crude or subtle means available to the adults whom he cannot understand—that the most important thing in this peculiar world is not to know, but to get along with the pack. Why? No answer is given.

He does not know what to do; he is told to do anything he feels like. He picks up a toy; it is snatched away from him by another child; he is told that he must learn to share. Why? No answer is given. He sits alone in a corner; he is told that he must join the others. Why? No answer is given. He approaches a group, reaches for their toys and is punched in the nose. He cries, in angry bewilderment; the teacher throws her arms around him and gushes that she loves him.

Animals, infants and small children are exceedingly sensitive to emotional vibrations: it is their chief means of cognition. A small child senses whether an adult’s emotions are genuine, and grasps instantly the vibrations of hypocrisy. The teacher’s mechanical crib-side manner—the rigid smile, the cooing tone of voice, the clutching hands, the coldly unfocused, unseeing eyes—add up in a child’s mind to a word he will soon learn: phony. He knows it is a disguise; a disguise hides something; he experiences suspicion—and fear.

A small child is mildly curious about, but not greatly interested in, other children of his own age. In daily association, they merely bewilder him. He is not seeking equals, but cognitive superiors, people who know Observe that young children prefer the company of older children or of adults, that they hero-worship and try to emulate an older brother or sister. A child needs to reach a certain development, a sense of his own identity, before he can enjoy the company of his “peers.” But he is thrown into their midst and told to adjust.

Adjust to what? To anything. To cruelty, to injustice, to blindness, to silliness, to pretentiousness, to snubs, to mockery, to treachery, to lies, to incomprehensible demands, to unwanted favors, to nagging affections, to unprovoked hostilities—and to the overwhelming, overpowering presence of Whim as the ruler of everything. (Why these and nothing better? Because these are the protective devices of helpless, frightened, unformed children who are left without guidance and are ordered to act as a mob. The better kinds of actions require thought.)

A three-year-old delivered into the power of a pack of other three-year-olds is worse off than a fox delivered to a pack of hounds: the fox, at least, is free to run; the three-year-old is expected to court the hounds and seek their love while they tear him to pieces.

After a while, he adjusts. He gets the nature of the game—wordlessly, by repetition, imitation and emotional osmosis, long before he can form the concepts to identify it.

He learns not to question the supremacy of the pack. He discovers that such questions are taboo in some frightening, supernatural way; the answer is an incantation vibrating with the overtones of a damning indictment, suggesting that he is guilty of some innate, incorrigible evil: “Don’t be selfish.” Thus he acquires self-doubt, before he is fully aware of a self.

He learns that regardless of what he does—whether his action is right or wrong, honest or dishonest, sensible or senseless—if the pack disapproves, he is wrong and his desire is frustrated; if the pack approves, then anything goes. Thus the embryo of his concept of morality shrivels before it is born.

He learns that it is no use starting any lengthy project of his own—such as building a castle out of boxes—it will be taken over or destroyed by others. He learns that anything he wants must be grabbed today, since there is no way of telling what the pack will decide tomorrow. Thus his groping sense of time-continuity—of the future’s reality—is stunted, shrinking his awareness and concern to the range of the immediate moment. He is able (and motivated) to perceive the present; he is unable (and unmotivated) to retain the past or to project the future.

But even the present is undercut. Make-believe is a dangerous luxury, which only those who have grasped the distinction between the real and the imaginary can afford. Cut off from reality, which he has not learned fully to grasp, he is plunged into a world of fantasy playing. He may feel a dim uneasiness, at first: to him, it is not imagining, it is lying. But he loses that distinction and gets into the swing. The wilder his fantasies, the warmer the teacher’s approval and concern; his doubts are intangible, the approval is real. He begins to believe his own fantasies. How can he be sure of what is true or not, what is out there and what is only in his mind? Thus he never acquires a firm distinction between existence and consciousness: his precarious hold on reality is shaken, and his cognitive processes subverted.

His desire to know dies slowly; it is not killed—it is diluted and swims away. Why bother facing problems if they can be solved by make-believe? Why struggle to discover the world if you can make it become whatever you wish—by wishing?

His trouble is that the wishing also seems to fade. He has nothing left to guide him, except his feelings, but he is afraid to feel. The teacher prods him to self-expression, but he knows that this is a trap: he is being put on trial before the pack, to see whether he fits or not. He senses that he is constantly expected to feel, but he does not feel anything—only fear, confusion, helplessness and boredom. He senses that these must not be expressed, that there is something wrong with him if he has such feelings—since none of the other children seem to have them. (That they are all going through the same process, is way beyond his capacity to understand.) They seem to be at home—he is the only freak and outcast.

So he learns to hide his feelings, to simulate them, to pretend, to evade—to repress. The stronger his fear, the more aggressive his behavior; the more uncertain his assertions, the louder his voice. From playacting, he progresses easily to the skill of putting on an act. He does so with the dim intention of protecting himself, on the wordless conclusion that the pack will not hurt him if it never discovers what he feels. He has neither the means nor the courage to grasp that it is not his bad feelings, but the good ones, that he wants to protect from the pack: his feelings about anything important to him, about anything he loves—i.e., the first, vague rudiments of his values.

He succeeds so well at hiding his feelings and values from others that he hides them also from himself. His subconscious automatizes his act—he gives it nothing else to automatize. (Years later, in a “crisis of identity,” he will discover that there is nothing behind the act, that his mask is protecting a vacuum.) Thus, his emotional capacity is stunted and, instead of “spontaneity” or emotional freedom, it is the arctic wastes of repression that he acquires.

He cannot know by what imperceptible steps he, too, has become a phony.

Now he is ready to discover that he need not gamble on the unpredictable approval of the intangible, omnipotent power which he cannot name, but senses all around him, which is named the will of the pack. He discovers that there are ways to manipulate its omnipotence. He observes that some of the other children manage to impose their wishes on the pack, but they never say so openly. He observes that the shifting will of the pack is not so mysterious as it seemed at first, that it is swung by a silent contest of wills among those who compete for the role of pack leaders.

How does one fight in such a competition? He cannot say—the answer would take conceptual knowledge—but he learns by doing: by flattering, threatening, cajoling, intimidating, bribing, deceiving the members of the pack. Which tactics does one use, when and on whom? He cannot say—it has to be done by “instinct” (i.e., by the unnamed, but automatized connections in his mind). What does he gain from this struggle? He cannot say. He has long since forgotten why he started it—whether he had some particular wish to achieve, or out of revenge or frustration or aimlessness. He feels dimly that there was nothing else to do.

His own feelings now swing unpredictably, alternating between capricious fits of domination, and stretches of passive, compliant indifference which he can name only as: “What’s the use?” He sees no contradiction between his cynical maneuvering and his unalterable fear of the pack: the first is motivated by and reinforces the second. The will of the pack has been internalized: his unaccountable emotions become his proof of its omnipotence.

The issue, to him, is now metaphvsical. His subconscious is programmed, his fundamentals are set. By means of the wordless integrations in his brain, the faceless, intangible shape of the pack now stands between him and reality, with the will of the pack as the dominant power. He is “adjusted.”

Is this his conscious idea? It is not: he is wholly dominated by his subconscious. Is it a reasoned conviction? It is not: he has not discovered reason. A child needs periods of privacy in order to learn to think. He has had less privacy in that nursery school than a convict in a crowded concentration camp. He has had no privacy even for his bathroom functions, let alone for such an unsocial activity as concept-formation.

He has acquired no incentive, no motive, to develop his intellect. Of what importance can reality be to him if his fate depends on the pack? Of what importance is thought, when the whole of his mental attention and energy are trained to focus on detecting the emotional vibrations of the pack? Reality, to him, is no longer an exciting challenge, but a dark, unknowable threat, which evokes a feeling he did not have when he started: a feeling not of ignorance, but of failure, not of helplessness, but of impotence—a sense of his own malfunctioning mind. The pack is the only realm he knows where he feels at home; he needs its protection and reassurance; the art of human manipulation is the only skill he has acquired.

But humility and hostility are two sides of the same coin. An overwhelming hostility toward all men is his basic emotion, his automatic context for the concept “man.” Every stranger he meets is a potential threat—a member of that mystic entity, “others,” which rules him—an enemy to appease and to deceive.

What became of his potential intelligence? Every precondition of its use has been stunted; every prop supporting his mind has been cut: he has no setf-confidence—no concept of self—no sense of morality—no sense of time-continuity—no ability to project the future—no ability to grasp, to integrate or to apply abstractions—no firm distinction between existence and consciousness—no values, with the mechanism of repression paralyzing his evaluative capacity.

Any one of these mental habits would be sufficient to handicap his mind—let alone the weight of the total, the calculated product of a system devised to cripple his rational faculty.

At the age of five-and-a-half, he is ready to be released into the world: an impotent creature, unable to think, unable to face or deal with reality, a creature who combines brashness and fear, who can recite its memorized lessons, but cannot understand them—a creature deprived of its means of survival, doomed to limp or stumble or crawl through life in search of some nameless relief from a chronic, nameless, incomprehensible pain.

The vase can now be broken—the monster is made. The comprachicos of the mind have performed the basic surgery and mangled the wiring——the connections—in his brain. But their job is not completed; it has merely begun.

II

Is the damage done to a child’s mind by a Progressive nursery school irreparable?

Scientific evidence indicates that it is in at least one respect: the time wasted in delaying a child’s cognitive development cannot be made up. The latest research on the subject shows that a child whose early cognitive training has been neglected will never catch up, in intellectual progress, with a properly trained child of approximately the same intelligence (as far as this last can be estimated). Thus all the graduates of a Progressive nursery school are robbed of their full potential, and their further development is impeded, slowed down, made much harder.

But the Progressive nursery school does not merely neglect the cognitive training that a child needs in his early years: it stifles his normal development. It conditions his mind to an anti-conceptual method of functioning that paralyzes his rational faculty.

Can the damage be corrected or is the child doomed to a lifetime of conceptual impotence?

This is an open question. No firm answer can be given on the present level of knowledge.

We know that a child’s bones are not fully formed at birth: they are soft and plastic up to a certain age, and harden gradually into their final shape. There is a strong likelihood that the same is true of a child’s mind: it is blank and flexible at birth, but its early programming may become indelible at a certain point. The body has its own timetable of development, and so, perhaps, has the mind. If some complex skills are not acquired by a certain age, it may become too late to acquire them. But the mind has a wider range of possibilities, a greater capacity to recover, because its volitional faculty gives it the power to control its operations.

Volition, however, does not mean non-identity; it does not mean that one can misuse one’s mind indefinitely without suffering permanent damage. But it does mean that so long as a child is not insane, he has the power to correct many faults in his mental functioning, and many injuries, whether they are self-inflicted or imposed on him from the outside. The latter are easier to correct than the former.

The evidence indicates that some graduates of the Progressive nursery schools do recover and others do not—and that their recovery depends on the degree of their “nonadjustment,” i.e., the degree to which they rejected the school’s conditioning. By “recovery” I mean the eventual development of a rational psycho-epistemology, i.e., of the ability to deal with reality by means of conceptual knowledge.

It is the little “misfits” who have the best chance to recover—the children who do not conform, the children who endure three years of agonizing misery, loneliness, confusion, abuse by the teachers and by their “peers,” but remain aloof and withdrawn, unable to give in, unable to fake, armed with nothing but the feeling that there is something wrong in that nursery school.

These are the “problem children” who are periodically put through the torture of the teachers’ complaints to their parents, and through the helpless despair of seeing their parents side with the torturers. Some of these children are violently rebellious; others seem outwardly timid and passive, but are outside the reach of any pressure or influence. Whatever their particular forms of bearing the unbearable, what they all have in common is the inability to fit in, i.e., to accept the intellectual authority of the pack. (Not all “misfits” belong to this category; there are children who reject the pack for entirely different reasons, such as frustrated powerlust.)

The nonconformists are heroic little martyrs who are given no credit by anyone—not even by themselves, since they cannot identify the nature of their battle. They do not have the conceptual knowledge or the introspective skill to grasp that they are unable and unwilling to accept anything without understanding it, and that they are holding to the sovereignty of their own judgment against the terrifying pressure of everyone around them.

These children have no means of knowing that what they are fighting for is the integrity of their minds—and that they will come out of those schools with many problems, battered, twisted, frightened, discouraged or embittered, but it is their rational faculty that they will have saved.

The little manipulators, the “adjusted” little pack leaders, will not.

The manipulators have, in effect, sold out: they have accepted the approval of the pack and/or power over the pack as a value, in exchange for surrendering their judgment. To fake reality at an age when one has not learned fully to grasp it—to automatize a technique of deception when one has not yet automatized the technique of perception—is an extremely dangerous thing to do to one’s own mind. It is highly doubtful whether this kind of priority can ever be reversed.

The little manipulators acquire a vested interest in evasion. The longer they practice their policies, the greater their fear of reality and the slimmer their chance of ever recapturing the desire to face it, to know, to understand.

The principle involved is clear on an adult level: when men are caught in the power of an enormous evil—such as under the Soviet or Nazi dictatorship—those who are willing to suffer as helpless victims, rather than make terms with the evil, have a good chance to regain their psychological health; but not those who join the G.P.U. or the S.S.

Even though the major part of the guilt belongs to his teachers, the little manipulator is not entirely innocent. He is too young to understand the immorality of his course, but nature gives him an emotional warning: he does not like himself when he engages in deception, he feels dirty, unworthy, unclean. This protest of a violated consciousness serves the same purpose as physical pain: it is the warning of a dangerous malfunction or injury. No one can force a child to disregard a warning of this kind; if he does, if he chooses to place some value above his own sense of himself, what he gradually kills is his self-esteem. Thereafter, he is left without motivation to correct his psycho-epistemology; he has reason to dread reason, reality and truth; his entire emotional mechanism is automatized to serve as a defense against them.

The majority of the Progressive nursery schools’ graduates represent a mixture of psychological elements, on a continuum between the nonconformist and the manipulator. Their future development depends in large part on the nature of their future education. The nursery schools have taught them the wrong method of mental functioning; now they are expected to begin acquiring mental content, i.e., ideas, by such means as they possess.

The modern educators—the comprachicos of the mind—are prepared for the second stage of their task: to indoctrinate the children with the kinds of ideas that will make their intellectual recovery unlikely, if not impossible—and to do it by the kind of method that continues and reinforces the conditioning begun in the nursery school. The program is devised to stunt the minds of those who managed to survive the first stage with some remnants of their rational capacity, and to cripple those who were fortunate enough not to be sent to a Progressive nursery. In comprachico terms, this program means: to keep tearing the scabs off the wounds left by the original surgery and to keep infecting the wounds until the child’s mind and spirit are broken.

To stunt a mind means to arrest its conceptual development, its power to use abstractions—and to keep it on a concrete-bound, perceptual method of functioning.

John Dewey, the father of modern education (including the Progressive nursery schools), opposed the teaching of theoretical (i.e., conceptual) knowledge, and demanded that it be replaced by concrete, “practical” action, in the form of “class projects” which would develop the students’ social spirit.

“The mere absorbing of facts and truths,” he wrote, “is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.” (John Dewey, The School and Society, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1956, p. 15.)

This much is true: the perception of reality, the learning of facts, the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, are exclusively individual capacities; the mind is an exclusively individual “affair”; there is no such thing as a collective brain. And intellectual integrity——the refusal to sacrifice one’s mind and one’s knowledge of the truth to any social pressures—is a profoundly and properly selfish attitude.

The goal of modern education is to stunt, stifle and destroy the students’ capacity to develop such an attitude, as well as its conceptual and psycho-epistemological preconditions.

There are two different methods of learning: by memorizing and by understanding. The first belongs primarily to the perceptual level of a human consciousness, the second to the conceptual.

The first is achieved by means of repetition and concrete-bound association (a process in which one sensory concrete leads automatically to another, with no regard to content or meaning). The best illustration of this process is a song which was popular some twenty years ago, called “Mairzy Doats.” Try to recall some poem you had to memorize in grade school; you will find that you can recall it only if you recite the sounds automatically, by the “Mairzy Doats” method; if you focus on the meaning, the memory vanishes. This form of learning is shared with man by the higher animals: all animal training consists of making the animal memorize a series of actions by repetition and association.

The second method of learning—by a process of understanding—is possible only to man. To understand means to focus on the content of a given subject (as against the sensory—visual or auditory—form in which it is communicated), to isolate its essentials, to establish its relationship to the previously known, and to integrate it with the appropriate categories of other subjects. Integration is the essential part of understanding.

The predominance of memorizing is proper only in the first few years of a child’s education, while he is observing and gathering perceptual material. From the time he reaches the conceptual level (i.e., from the time he learns to speak), his education requires a progressively larger scale of understanding and progressively smaller amounts of memorizing.

Just as modern educators proclaim the importance of developing a child’s individuality, yet train him to conform to the pack, so they denounce memorization, yet their method of teaching ignores the requirements of conceptual development and confines learning predominantly to a process of memorizing. To grasp what this does to a child’s mind, project what it would do to a child’s body if, at the age of seven, he were not permitted to walk, but were required to crawl and stumble like an infant.

The comprachico technique starts at the base. The child’s great achievement in learning to speak is undercut and all but nullified by the method used to teach him to read. The “Look-Say” method substitutes the concrete-bound memorization of the visual shapes of words for the phonetic method which taught a child to treat letters and sounds as abstractions. The senseless memorizing of such a vast amount of sensory material places an abnormal strain on a child’s mental capacity, a burden that cannot be fully retained, integrated or automatized. The result is a widespread “reading neurosis”—the inability to learn to read—among children, including many of above average intelligence, a neurosis that did not exist prior to the introduction of the “Look-Say” method. (If the enlightenment and welfare of children were the modern educators’ goal, the incidence of that neurosis would have made them check and revise their educational theories; it has not.)

The ultimate result is the half-illiterate college freshmen who are unable to read a book (in the sense of understanding its content, as against looking at its pages) or to write a paper or to spell—or even to speak coherently, which is caused by the inability to organize their thoughts, if any.

When applied to conceptual material, memorizing is the psycho-epistemological destroyer of understanding and of the ability to think. But throughout their grade- and high-school years, memorizing becomes the students’ dominant (and, in some cases, virtually exclusive) method of mental functioning. They have no other way to cope with the schools’ curricula that consist predominantly of random, haphazard, disintegrated (and unintegratable) snatches of various subjects, without context, continuity or systematic progression.

The material taught in one class has no relation to and frequently contradicts the material taught in another. The cure, introduced by the modem educators, is worse than the disease; it consists in the following procedure: a “theme” is picked at random for a given period of time, during which every teacher presents his subject in relation to that theme, without context or earlier preparation. For instance, if the theme is “shoes,” the teacher of physics discusses the machinery required to make shoes, the teacher of chemistry discusses the tanning of leather, the teacher of economics discusses the production and consumption of shoes, the teacher of mathematics gives problems in calculating the costs of shoes, the teacher of English reads stories involving shoes (or the plight of the barefoot), and so on.

This substitutes the accidental concrete of an arbitrarily picked “theme” for the conceptual integration of the content of one discipline with that of another—thus conditioning the students’ minds to the concrete-bound, associational method of functioning, while they are dealing with conceptual material. Knowledge acquired in that manner cannot be retained beyond the next exam, and sometimes not even that long.

The indoctrination of children with a mob spirit—under the category of “social adjustment”—is conducted openly and explicitly. The supremacy of the pack is drilled, pounded and forced into the student’s mind by every means available to the comprachicos of the classroom, including the contemptible policy of grading the students on their social adaptability (under various titles). No better method than this type of grading could be devised to destroy a child’s individuality and turn him into a stale little conformist, to stunt his unformed sense of personal identity and make him blend into an anonymous mob, to penalize the best, the most intelligent and honest children in the class, and to reward the worst, the dull, the lethargic, the dishonest.

Still more evil (because more fundamental) is the “discussion” method of teaching, which is used more frequently in the humanities than in the physical sciences, for obvious reasons. Following this method, the teacher abstains from lecturing and merely presides at a free-for-all or “bull session,” while the students express their “views” on the subject under study, which they do not know and have come to school to learn. What these sessions produce in the minds of the students is an unbearable boredom.

But this is much worse than a mere waste of the students’ time. They are being taught some crucial things, though not the ostensible subject of study. They are being given a lesson in metaphysics and epistemology. They are being taught, by implication, that there is no such thing as a firm, objective reality, which man’s mind must learn to perceive correctly; that reality is an indeterminate flux and can be anything the pack wants it to be; that truth or falsehood is determined by majority vote. And more: that knowledge is unnecessary and irrelevant, since the teacher’s views have no greater validity than the oratory of the dullest and most ignorant student—and, therefore, that reason, thinking, intelligence and education are of no importance or value. To the extent that a student absorbs these notions, what incentive would he have to continue his education and to develop his mind? The answer may be seen today on any college campus.

As to the content of the courses in the grade and high schools, the anti-rational indoctrination is carried on in the form of slanted, distorted material, of mystic-altruist-collectivist slogans, of propaganda for the supremacy of emotions over reason—but this is merely a process of cashing in on the devastation wrought in the children’s psycho-epistemology. Most of the students do graduate as full-fledged little collectivists, reciting the appropriate dogma, but one cannot say that this represents their convictions. The truth is much worse than that: they are incapable of holding any convictions of any kind, and they gravitate to collectivism because that is what they have memorized—and also because one does not turn to reason and independence out of fear, helplessness and self-doubt.

III

No matter what premises a child may form in his grade- and high-school years, the educational system works to multiply his inner conflicts.

The graduates of the Progressive nurseries are caught in the clash between their dazed, unfocused, whim-oriented psycho-epistemology and the demands of reality, with which they are not prepared to deal. They are expected to acquire some sort of formal knowledge, to pass exams, to achieve acceptable grades, i.e., to comply with some minimal factual norms—but, to them, it is a metaphysical betrayal. Facts are what they have been trained to ignore; facts cannot be learned by the kind of mental process they have automatized: by an animal-like method of catching the emotional cues emitted by the pack. The pack is still there, but it cannot help them at examination time—which they have to face in a state they have been taught to regard as evil: alone.

The panic of the conflict between their foggy subjectivism and the rudiments of objectivity left in the schools by a civilized past, leads to a nameless resentment in the minds of such children, to a wordless feeling that they are being unfairly imposed upon—they do not know how or by whom—to a growing hostility without object. The comprachicos, in due time, will offer them an object.

Some of the brighter children—those who are mentally active and do want to learn are caught in a different conflict. Struggling to integrate the chaotic snatches of information taught in their classes, they discover the omissions, the non sequiturs, the contradictions, which are seldom explained or resolved. Their questions are usually ignored or resented or laughed at or evaded by means of explanations that confuse the issue further. A child may give up, in bewilderment, concluding that the pursuit of knowledge is senseless, that education is an enormous pretense of some evil kind which he cannot understand—and thus he is started on the road to anti-intellectuality and mental stagnation. Or a child may conclude that the school will give him nothing, that he must learn on his own—which is the best conclusion to draw in the circumstances, except that it can lead him to a profound contempt for teachers, for other adults and, often, for all men (which is the road to subjectivism).

The “socializing” aspects of the school, the pressure to conform to the pack, are, for him, a special kind of torture. A thinking child cannot conform—thought does not bow to authority. The resentment of the pack toward intelligence and independence is older than Progressive education; it is an ancient evil (among children and adults alike), a product of fear, self-doubt and envy. But Pragmatism, the father of Progressive education, is a Kantian philosophy and uses Kant’s technique of cashing in on human weaknesses and fears.

Instead of teaching children respect for one another’s individuality, achievements and rights, Progressive education gives an official stamp of moral righteousness to the tendency of frightened half-savages to gang up on one another, to form “in-groups” and to persecute the outsider. When, on top of it, the outsider is penalized or reprimanded for his inability to “get along with people,” the rule of mediocrity is elevated into a system. (“Mediocrity” does not mean an average intelligence; it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters.) Progressive education has institutionalized an Establishment of Envy.

The thinking child is not antisocial (he is, in fact, the only type of child fit for social relationships). When he develops his first values and conscious convictions, particularly as he approaches adolescence, he feels an intense desire to share them with a friend who would understand him; if frustrated, he feels an acute sense of loneliness. (Loneliness is specifically the experience of this type of child—or adult; it is the experience of those who have something to offer. The emotion that drives conformists to “belong,” is not loneliness, but fear—the fear of intellectual independence and responsibility. The thinking child seeks equals; the conformist seeks protectors.)

One of the most evil aspects of modern schools is the spectacle of a thinking child trying to “adjust” to the pack, trying to hide his intelligence (and his scholastic grades) and to act like “one of the boys.” He never succeeds, and is left wondering helplessly: “What is wrong with me? What do I lack? What do they want?” He has no way of knowing that his lack consists in thinking of such questions. The questions imply that there are reasons, causes, principles, values—which are the very things the pack mentality dreads, evades and resents. He has no way of knowing that one’s psycho-epistemology cannot be hidden, that it shows in many subtle ways, and that the pack rejects him because they sense his factual (i.e., judging) orientation, his psycho-epistemological self-confidence and lack of fear. (Existentially, such loners lack social self-confidence and, more often than not, are afraid of the pack, but the issue is not existential.)

Gradually, the thinking child gives up the realm of human relationships. He draws the conclusion that he can understand science, but not people, that people are unknowable, that they are outside the province of reason, that some other cognitive means are required, which he lacks. Thus he comes to accept a false dichotomy, best designated as reason versus people, which his teachers are striving to instill and reinforce.

The conformists, in the face of that dichotomy, give up reason; he gives up people. Repressing his need of friendship, he gives up concern with human values, with moral questions, with social issues, with the entire realm of the humanities. Seeking rationality, objectivity and intelligibility—i.e., a realm where he can function—he escapes into the physical sciences or technology or business, i.e., into the professions that deal primarily with matter rather than with man. (This is a major cause of America’s “brain drain,” of the appalling intellectual poverty in the humanities, with the best minds running—for temporary protection—to the physical sciences.)

There is nothing wrong, of course, in choosing a career in the physical professions, if such is one’s rational preference. But it is a tragic error if a young man chooses it as an escape, because the escape is illusory. Since the dichotomy he accepted is false, since repression is not a solution to anything, but merely an impairment of his mental capacity, the psychological price he pays is nameless fear, unearned guilt, self-doubt, neurosis, and, more often than not, indifference, suspicion or hostility toward people. The result, in his case, is the exact opposite of the social harmony the comprachicos of Progressive education had promised to achieve.

There are children who succumb to another, similar dichotomy: values versus people. Prompted by loneliness, unable to know that the pleasure one finds in human companionship is possible only on the grounds of holding the same values, a child may attempt to reverse cause and effect: he places companionship first and tries to adopt the values of others, repressing his own half-formed value-judgments, in the belief that this will bring him friends. The dogma of conformity to the pack encourages and reinforces his moral self-abnegation. Thereafter, he struggles blindly to obtain from people some satisfaction which he cannot define (and which cannot be found), to alleviate a sense of guilt he cannot name, to fill a vacuum he is unable to identify. He alternates between abject compliance with his friends’ wishes, and peremptory demands for affection—he becomes the kind of emotional dependent that no friends of any persuasion could stand for long. The more he fails, the more desperately he clings to his pursuit of people and “love.” But the nameless emotion growing in his subconscious, never to be admitted or identified, is hatred for people. The result, again, is the opposite of the comprachicos’ alleged goal.

No matter what their individual problems or what defenses they choose, all the children—from the “adjusted” to the independent—suffer from a common blight in their grade- and high-school years: boredom. Their reasons vary, but the emotional result is the same. Learning is a conceptual process; an educational method devised to ignore, bypass and contradict the requirements of conceptual development, cannot arouse any interest in learning. The “adjusted” are bored because they are unable actively to absorb knowledge. The independent are bored because they seek knowledge, not games of “class projects” or group “discussions.” The first are unable to digest their lessons; the second are starved.

The comprachicos succeed in either case. The independent children, who resist the conditioning and preserve some part of their rationality, are predominantly shunted, or self-exiled, into the physical sciences and allied professions, away from social, philosophical or humanistic concerns. The social field—and thus society’s future—is left to the “adjusted,” to the stunted, twisted, mutilated minds the comprachicos’ technique was intended to produce.

The average high-school graduate is a jerky, anxious, incoherent youth with a mind like a scarecrow made of sundry patches that cannot be integrated into any shape. He has no concept of knowledge: he does not know when he knows and when he does not know. His chronic fear is of what he is supposed to know, and his pretentious posturing is intended to hide the fact that he hasn’t the faintest idea. He alternates between oracular pronouncements and blankly evasive silence. He assumes the pose of an authority on the latest, journalistic issues in politics (part of his “class projects”) and recites the canned bromides of third-rate editorials as if they were his original discoveries. He does not know how to read or write or consult a dictionary. He is sly and “wise”; he has the cynicism of a decadent adult, and the credulity of a child. He is loud, aggressive, belligerent. His main concern is to prove that he is afraid of nothing—because he is scared to death of everything.

His mind is in a state of whirling confusion. He has never learned to conceptualize, i.e., to identify, to organize, to integrate the content of his mind. In school and out, he has observed and experienced (or, more precisely, been exposed to) many things, and he cannot tell their meaning or import, he does not know what to make of them, sensing dimly that he should make something somehow. He does not know where to begin; he feels chronically behind himself, unable to catch up with his own mental content—as if the task of untangling it were far beyond his capacity.

Since he was prevented from conceptualizing his cognitive material step by step, as he acquired it, the accumulation of unidentified experiences and perceptual impressions is now such that he feels paralyzed. When he tries to think, his mind runs into a blank wall every few steps; his mental processes seem to dissolve in a labyrinth of question marks and blind alleys. His subconscious, like an unattended basement, is cluttered with the irrelevant, the accidental, the misunderstood, the ungrasped, the undefined, the not-fully-remembered; it does not respond to his mental efforts. He gives up.

The secret of his psycho-epistemology-which baffles those who deal with him—lies in the fact that, as an adult, he has to use concepts, but he uses concepts by a child’s perceptual method. He uses them as concretes, as the immediately given—without context, definitions, integrations or specific referents; his only context is the immediate moment. To what, then, do his concepts refer? To a foggy mixture of partial knowledge, memorized responses, habitual associations, his audience’s reactions and his own feelings, which represent the content of his mind at that particular moment. On the next day or occasion, the same concepts will refer to different things, according to the changes in his mood and in the immediate circumstances.

He seems able to understand a discussion or a rational argument, sometimes even on an abstract, theoretical level. He is able to participate, to agree or disagree after what appears to be a critical examination of the issue. But the next time one meets him, the conclusions he reached are gone from his mind, as if the discussion had never occurred even though he remembers it: he remembers the event, i.e., a discussion, not its intellectual content.

It is beside the point to accuse him of hypocrisy or lying (though some part of both is necessarily involved). His problem is much worse than that: he was sincere, he meant what he said in and for that moment. But it ended with that moment. Nothing happens in his mind to an idea he accepts or rejects; there is no processing, no integration, no application to himself, his actions or his concerns; he is unable to use it or even to retain it. Ideas, i.e., abstractions, have no reality to him; abstractions involve the past and the future, as well as the present; nothing is fully real to him except the present. Concepts, in his mind, become percepts—percepts of people uttering sounds; and percepts end when the stimuli vanish. When he uses words, his mental operations are closer to those of a parrot than of a human being. In the strict sense of the word, he has not learned to speak.

But there is one constant in his mental flux. The subconscious is an integrating mechanism; when left without conscious control, it goes on integrating on its own—and, like an automatic blender, his subconscious squeezes its clutter of trash to produce a single basic emotion: fear.

He is not equipped to earn a living in a primitive village, but he finds himself in the midst of the brilliant complexity of an industrial, technological civilization, which he cannot begin to understand. He senses that something is demanded of him—by his parents, by his friends, by people at large, and, since he is a living organism, by his own restless energy—something he is unable to deliver.

He has been trained to react, not to act; to respond, not to initiate; to pursue pleasure, not purpose. He is a playboy without money, taste or the capacity of enjoyment. He is guided by his feelings—he has nothing else. And his feelings are only various shades of panic.

He cannot turn for help to his parents. In most cases, they are unable and/or unwilling to understand him; he distrusts them and he is too inarticulate to explain anything. What he needs is rational guidance; what they offer him is their own brand of irrationality. If they are old-fashioned, they tell him that he is too self-indulgent and it’s about time he came down to earth and assumed some responsibility; for moral guidance, they say, he ought to go to church. If they are modern, they tell him that he takes himself too seriously and ought to have more fun; for moral guidance, they tell him that nobody is ever fully right or fully wrong, and take him to a cocktail party raising funds for some liberal cause.

His parents are the products of the same educational system, but at an earlier stage, at a time when the school conditioning was furtively indirect, and rational influences still existed in the culture—which permitted them to get away with discarding intellectual concerns and playing the fashionable game of undercutting reason, while believing that somebody else would always be there to provide them with a civilized world.

Of any one group involved, it is not the comprachicos who are the guiltiest, it is the parents—particularly the educated ones who could afford to send their children to Progressive nursery schools. Such parents would do anything for their children, except give them a moment’s thought or an hour’s critical inquiry into the nature of the educational institutions to be selected. Prompted chiefly by the desire to get the children off their hands and out of their way, they selected schools as they select clothes—according to the latest fashion.

The comprachicos do not hide their theories and methods; they propagate them openly, in countless books, lectures, magazines and school brochures. Their theme is clear: they attack the intellect and proclaim their hatred of reason—the rest is gush and slush. Anyone who delivers a helpless child into their hands, does so because he shares their motives. Mistakes of this size are not made innocently.

There is, however, an innocent group of parents: the hard-working, uneducated ones who want to give their children a better chance in life and a brighter future than their own. These parents spend a lifetime in poverty, struggling, skimping, saving, working overtime to send their children through school (particularly, through college). They have a profound respect for the educated people, for teachers, for learning. They would not be able to conceive of the comprachico mentality—to imagine an educator who works, not to enlighten, but to cripple their children. Such parents are the victims of as vicious a fraud as any recorded in criminal history.

(This last is one of the reasons to question the motives—and the compassion—of those unemployed busy-bodies who flitter about, protecting consumers from oversized breakfast-cereal boxes. What about the consumers of education?)

If you want to grasp what the comprachicos’ methods have done to the mind of a high-school graduate, remember that the intellect is often compared to the faculty of sight. Try to project what you would feel if your eyesight were damaged in such a way that you were left with nothing but peripheral vision. You would sense vague, unidentifiable shapes floating around you, which would vanish when you tried to focus on them, then would reappear on the periphery and swim and switch and multiply. This is the mental state—and the terror—produced in their students by the comprachicos of Progressive education.

Can such a youth recondition his mental processes? It is possible, but the automatization of a conceptual method of functioning—which, in his nursery-school years, would have been an easy, joyous, natural process——would now require an excruciatingly difficult effort.

As an illustration of the consequences of delaying nature’s timetable, consider the following. In our infancy, all of us had to learn and automatize the skill of integrating into percepts the material provided by our various sense organs. It was a natural, painless process which—as we can infer by observing infants—we were eager to learn. But medical science has recorded cases of children who were born blind and later, in their youth or adulthood, underwent an operation that restored their sight. Such persons are not able to see, i.e., they experience sensations of sight, but cannot perceive objects. For example, they recognize a triangle by touch, but cannot connect it to the sight of a triangle; the sight conveys nothing to them. The ability to see is not innate—it is a skill that has to be acquired. But the material provided by these persons’ other senses is so thoroughly integrated and automatized that they are unable instantly to break it up to add a new element, vision. This integration now requires such a long, difficult process of retraining that few of them choose to undertake it. These few succeed, after a heroically persevering struggle. The rest give up, preferring to stay in their familiar world of touch and sound—to remain sightless for life.

An unusual kind of moral strength and of personal ambition (i.e., of self-esteem) is required to regain one’s sight: a profound love of life, a passionate refusal to remain a cripple, an intense dedication to the task of achieving the best within one’s reach. The reward is commensurate.

The same kind of dedication and as difficult a struggle are required of a modem high-school graduate to regain his rational faculty. The reward is as great—or greater. In the midst of his chronic anxiety, he is still able to experience some moments of freedom, to catch a few glimpses of what life would be like in a joyous state of self-confidence. And one thing he does know for certain: that there is something wrong with him. He has a springboard—a slender, precarious one, but still a springboard—for an incentive to recapture the use of his mind.

The comprachicos destroy that incentive in the third stage of their job: in college.

IV

Most young people retain some hold on their rational faculty—or, at least, some unidentified desire to retain it—until their early twenties, approximately until their post-college years. The symptom of that desire is their quest for a comprehensive view of life.

It is man’s rational faculty that integrates his cognitive material and enables him to understand it; his only means of understanding is conceptual. A consciousness, like any other vital faculty, cannot accept its own impotence without protest. No matter how badly disorganized, a young person’s mind still gropes for answers to fundamental questions, sensing that all of its content hangs precariously in a vacuum.

This is not a matter of “idealism,” but of psycho-epistemological necessity. On the conscious level, the countless alternatives confronting him make a young person aware of the fact that he has to make choices and that he does not know what to choose or how to act. On the subconscious level, his psycho-epistemology has not yet automatized a lethargic resignation to a state of chronic suffering (which is the “solution” of most adults)—and the painful conflicts of his inner contradictions, of his self-doubt, of his impotent confusion, make him search frantically for some form of inner unity and mental order. His quest represents the last convulsions of his cognitive faculty at the approach of atrophy, like a last cry of protest.

For the few brief years of his adolescence, a young person’s future is urgently, though dimly, real to him; he senses that he has to determine it in some unknown way.

A thinking youth has a vague glimmer of the nature of his need. It is expressed in his concern with broad philosophical questions, particularly with moral issues (i.e., with a code of values to guide his actions). An average youth merely feels helpless, and his erratic restlessness is a form of escape from the desperate feeling that “things ought to make sense.”

By the time they are ready for college, both types of youths have been hurt, in and out of school, by countless clashes with the irrationality of their elders and of today’s culture. The thinking youth has been frustrated in his longing to find people who take ideas seriously; but he believes that he will find them in college—in the alleged citadel of reason and wisdom. The average youth feels that things do not make sense to him, but they do to someone somewhere in the world, and someone will make the world intelligible to him someday.

For both of them, college is the last hope. They lose it in their freshman year.

It is generally known in academic circles that, according to surveys, the students’ interest in their studies is greatest in their freshman year and diminishes progressively each year thereafter. The educators deplore it, but do not question the nature of the courses they are giving.

With rare exceptions, which are lost in the academic “mainstream,” college courses in the humanities do not provide the students with knowledge, but with the conviction that it is wrong, naive or futile to seek knowledge. What they provide is not information, but rationalization—the rationalization of the students’ concrete-bound, perceptual, emotion-oriented method of mental functioning. The courses are designed to protect the status quo—not the existential, political or social status quo, but the miserable status quo of the students’ psycho-epistemology, as laid down in the Progressive nursery schools.

The Progressive nurseries pleaded for a delay of the process of education, asserting that cognitive training is premature for a young child—and conditioned his mind to an anti-cognitive method of functioning. The grade and high schools reinforced the conditioning: struggling helplessly with random snatches of knowledge, the student learned to associate a sense of dread, resentment and self-doubt with the process of learning. College completes the job, declaring explicitly—to a receptive audience—that there is nothing to learn, that reality is unknowable, certainty is unattainable, the mind is an instrument of self-deception, and the sole function of reason is to find conclusive proof of its own impotence.

Even though philosophy is held in a (today) well-earned contempt by the other college departments, it is philosophy that determines the nature and direction of all the other courses, because it is philosophy that formulates the principles of epistemology, i.e., the rules by which men are to acquire knowledge. The influence of the dominant philosophic theories permeates every other department, including the physical sciences—and becomes the more dangerous because accepted subconsciously. The philosophic theories of the past two hundred years, since Immanuel Kant, seem to justify the attitude of those who dismiss philosophy as empty, inconsequential verbiage. But this precisely is the danger: surrendering philosophy (i.e., the foundations of knowledge) to the purveyors of empty verbiage is far from inconsequential. It is particularly to philosophy that one must apply the advice of Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead: “Don’t bother to examine a folly, ask yourself only what it accomplishes.”

Consider the progressive stages of modern philosophy, not from the aspect of its philosophic content, but of its psycho-epistemological goals.

When Pragmatism declares that reality is an indeterminate flux which can be anything people want it to be, nobody accepts it literally. But it strikes a note of emotional recognition in the mind of a Progressive nursery graduate, because it seems to justify a feeling he has not been able to explain: the omnipotence of the pack. So he accepts it as true in some indeterminate way—to be used when and as needed. When Pragmatism declares that truth is to be judged by consequences, it justifies his inability to project the future, to plan his course of action long-range, and sanctions his wish to act on the spur of the moment, to try anything once and then discover whether he can get away with it or not.

When Logical Positivism declares that “reality,” “identity,” “existence,” “mind” are meaningless terms, that man can be certain of nothing but the sensory perceptions of the immediate moment—when it declares that the meaning of the proposition: “Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo” is your walk to the library where you read it in a book—the Progressive nursery graduate recognizes it as an exact description of his inner state and as a justification of his concrete-bound, perceptual mentality.

When Linguistic Analysis declares that the ultimate reality is not even percepts, but words, and that words have no specific referents, but mean whatever people want them to mean, the Progressive graduate finds himself happily back at home, in the familiar world of his nursery school. He does not have to struggle to grasp an incomprehensible reality, all he has to do is focus on people and watch for the vibrations of how they use words—and compete with his fellow philosophers in how many different vibrations he is able to discover. And more: armed with the prestige of philosophy, he can now tell people what they mean when they speak, which they are unable to know without his assistance—i.e., he can appoint himself interpreter of the will of the pack. What had once been a little manipulator now grows to the full psycho-epistemological stature of a shyster lawyer.

And more: Linguistic Analysis is vehemently opposed to all the intellectual feats he is unable to perform. It is opposed to any kinds of principles or broad generalizations—i.e., to consistency. It is opposed to basic axioms (as “analytic” and “redundant”)—i.e., to the necessity of any grounds for one’s assertions. It is opposed to the hierarchical structure of concepts (i.e., to the process of abstraction) and regards any word as an isolated primary (i.e., as a perceptually given concrete). It is opposed to “system-building” —i.e., to the integration of knowledge.

The Progressive nursery graduate thus finds all his psycho-epistemological flaws transformed into virtues—and, instead of hiding them as a guilty secret, he can flaunt them as proof of his intellectual superiority. As to the students who did not attend a Progressive nursery, they are now worked over to make them equal his mental status.

It is the claim of Linguistic Analysis that its purpose is not the communication of any particular philosophic content, but the training of a student’s mind. This is true—in the terrible, butchering sense of a comprachico operation. The detailed discussions of inconsequential minutiae—the discourses on trivia picked at random and in midstream, without base, context or conclusion—the shocks of self-doubt at the professor’s sudden revelations of some such fact as the students’ inability to define the word “but,” which, he claims, proves that they do not understand their own statements—the countering of the question: “What is the meaning of philosophy?” with: “Which sense of ‘meaning’ do you mean?” followed by a discourse on twelve possible uses of the word “meaning,” by which time the question is lost—and, above all, the necessity to shrink one’s focus to the range of a flea’s, and to keep it there—will cripple the best of minds, if it attempts to comply.

“Mind-training” pertains to psycho-epistemology; it consists in making a mind automatize certain processes, turning them into permanent habits. What habits does Linguistic Analysis inculcate? Context-dropping, “concept-stealing,” disintegration, purposelessness, the inability to grasp, retain or deal with abstractions. Linguistic Analysis is not a philosophy, it is a method of eliminating the capacity for philosophical thought—it is a course in brain-destruction, a systematic attempt to turn a rational animal into an animal unable to reason.

Why? What is the comprachicos’ motive?

To paraphrase Victor Hugo: “And what did they make of these children?

“Monsters.

“Why monsters?

“To rule.”

Man’s mind is his basic means of survival—and of self-protection. Reason is the most selfish human faculty: it has to be used in and by a man’s own mind, and its product—truth—makes him inflexible, intransigent, impervious to the power of any pack or any ruler. Deprived of the ability to reason, man becomes a docile, pliant, impotent chunk of clay, to be shaped into any subhuman form and used for any purpose by anyone who wants to bother.

There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine that attacked (or “limited”) reason, which did not also preach submission to the power of some authority. Philosophically, most men do not understand the issue to this day; but psycho-epistemologically, they have sensed it since prehistoric times. Observe the nature of mankind’s earliest legends—such as the fall of Lucifer, “the light-bearer,” for the sin of defying authority; or the story of Prometheus, who taught men the practical arts of survival. Power-seekers have always known that if men are to be made submissive, the obstacle is not their feelings, their wishes or their “instincts,” but their minds; if men are to be ruled, then the enemy is reason.

Power-lust is a psycho-epistemological matter. It is not confined to potential dictators or aspiring politicians. It can be experienced, chronically or sporadically, by men in any profession, on any level of intellectual development. It is experienced by shriveled scholars, by noisy playboys, by shabby office managers, by pretentious millionaires, by droning teachers, by cocktail-chasing mothers—by anyone who, having uttered an assertion, confronts the direct glance of a man or a child and hears the words: “But that is not true.” Those who, in such moments, feel the desire, not to persuade, but to force the mind behind the direct eyes, are the legions that make the comprachicos possible.

Not all of the modern teachers are consciously motivated by power-lust, though a great many of them are. Not all of them are consciously aware of the goal of obliterating reason by crippling the minds of their students. Some aspire to nothing but the mean little pleasure of fooling and defeating too intelligently, persistently inquiring a student. Some seek nothing but to hide and evade the holes and contradictions in their own intellectual equipment. Some had never sought anything but a safe, undemanding, respectable position—and would not dream of contradicting the majority of their colleagues or of their textbooks. Some are eaten by envy of the rich, the famous, the successful, the independent. Some believe (or try to believe) the thin veneer of humanitarian rationalizations coating the theories of Kant or John Dewey. And all of them are products of the same educational system in its earlier stages.

The system is self-perpetuating: it leads to many vicious circles. There are promising, intelligent teachers who are driven to despair by the obtuse, lethargic, invincibly unthinking mentalities of their students. The grade- and high-school teachers blame it on parental influences; the college professors blame it on the grade-and high-school teachers. Few, if any, question the content of the courses. After struggling for a few years, these better teachers give up and retire, or become convinced that reason is beyond the grasp of most men, and remain as bitterly indifferent camp followers of the comprachicos’ advance.

But the comprachico leaders past and present—are aware of their own motives. It is impossible to be consumed by a single passion without knowing its nature, no matter what rationalizations one constructs to hide it from oneself. If you want to see hatred, do not look at wars or concentration camps—these are merely its consequences. Look at the writings of Kant, Dewey, Marcuse and their followers to see pure hatred—hatred of reason and of everything it implies: of intelligence, of ability, of achievement, of success, of self-confidence, of self-esteem, of every bright, happy, benevolent aspect of man. This is the atmosphere, the leitmotif, the sense of life permeating today’s educational establishment.

(What brings a human being to the state of a comprachico? Self-loathing. The degree of a man’s hatred for reason is the measure of his hatred for himself.)

A comprachico leader does not aspire to the role of political dictator. He leaves it to his heir: the mindless brute. The comprachicos are not concerned with establishing anything. The obliteration of reason is their single passion and goal. What comes afterward has no reality to them; dimly, they fancy themselves as the masters who will pull the strings behind the ruler’s throne: the brute, they feel, will need them. (That they end up as terrorized bootlickers at the brute’s court and at his mercy, as in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, is merely an instance of reality’s justice.)

Power-lust requires guinea pigs, to develop the techniques of inculcating obedience—and cannon fodder that will obey the orders. College students fill both roles. Psycho-epistemological flattery is the most potent technique to use on a person with a damaged brain. The Progressive nursery graduate’s last link to rationality—the feeling that there is something wrong with him—is cut off in college. There is nothing wrong with him, he is told, his is the healthy, natural state, he is merely unable to function in a “System” that ignores human nature; he is normal, the “System” is abnormal.

The term “System” is left undefined, at first; it may be the educational system, the cultural system, the private family system—anything that a student might blame for his inner misery. This induces a paranoid mood, the feeling that he is an innocent victim persecuted by some dark, mysterious powers—which builds up in him a blind, helpless rage. The theories of determinism—with which he is battered in most of his courses—intensify and justify his mood: if he is miserable, he cannot help it, they tell him, he cannot help anything he feels or does, he is a product of society and society has made a bad job of it. By the time he hears that all his troubles—from poor grades to sexual problems to chronic anxiety—are caused by the political system and that the enemy is capitalism, he accepts it as self-evident.

The methods of teaching are essentially the same as those used in high school, only more so. The curriculum is an embodiment of disintegration—a hodgepodge of random subjects, without continuity, context or purpose. It is like a series of Balkanized kingdoms, offering a survey course of floating abstractions or an overdetailed study of a professor’s favorite minutiae, with the borders closed to the kingdom in the next classroom, with no connections, no bridges, no maps. Maps—i.e., systematization—are forbidden on principle. Cramming and memorizing are the students’ only psycho-epistemological means of getting through. (There are graduates in philosophy who can recite the differences between the early and late Wittgenstein, but have never had a course on Aristotle. There are graduates in psychology who have puttered about with rats in mazes, with knee-jerking reflexes and with statistics, but never got to an actual study of human psychology.)

The “discussion” seminars are part of the technique of flattery: when an ignorant adolescent is asked to air his views on a subject he has not studied, he gets the message that the status of college student has transformed him from an ignoramus into an authority—and that the significance of any opinion lies in the fact that somebody holds it, with no reasons, knowledge or grounds necessary. (This helps to justify the importance of watching for the vibrations of the pack.)

Such “discussions” advance another purpose of the comprachico technique: the breeding of hostility—the encouragement of criticism rather than creativeness. In the absence of any reasoned views, the students develop the knack of blasting each other’s nonsense (which is not difficult in the circumstances) and come to regard the demolition of a bad argument as the equivalent of the construction of a good one. (The example is set by the professors who, in their own publications and debates, are often brilliant at demolishing one another’s irrational theories, but fall flat in attempting to present a new theory of their own.) In the absence of intellectual content, the students resort to personal attacks, practicing with impunity the old fallacy of ad hominem, substituting insults for arguments—with hooligan rudeness and four-letter words accepted as part of their freedom of speech. Thus malice is protected, ideas are not. The unimportance of ideas is further stressed by the demand that the nature of such “discussions” be ignored and the participants remain “good friends”—no matter what offensive exchanges took place—in the name of “intellectual tolerance.”

An eloquent demonstration of today’s general contempt for the power of ideas is offered by the fact that people did not expect an education of this kind to produce any consequences—and are now shocked by the spectacle of college students putting into practice what they have been taught. If, after such a training, the students demand the power to run the universities, why shouldn’t they? They were given that power intellectually and decided to exercise it existentially. They were regarded as qualified arbiters of ideas, without knowledge, preparation or experience—and they decided that they were qualified administrators, without knowledge, preparation or experience.

The students’ demand that their courses be “relevant” to their actual lives has a badly twisted element of validity. The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life—by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past—and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort. All of this is what the colleges have renounced, failed in and defaulted on long ago. What they are teaching today has no relevance to anything—neither to theory nor practice nor reality nor human life.

But—in keeping with their concrete-bound psycho-epistemology—what the students regard as “relevant” are such things as courses in “community action,” air pollution, rat-control and guerrilla warfare. Their criteria for determining a college curriculum are the newspaper headlines of the immediate moment, their hierarchy of concerns is established by tabloid editorials, their notion of reality does not extend beyond the latest TV talk-show. Modem intellectuals used to denounce the influence of comic strips on children; the progress they achieved consists in pushing the children’s interest to the front pages and freezing it there for life.

The conditioning phase of the comprachicos’ task is completed. The students’ development is arrested, their minds are set to respond to slogans, as animals respond to a trainer’s whistle, their brains are embalmed in the syrup of altruism as an automatic substitute for self-esteem—they have nothing left but the terror of chronic anxiety, the blind urge to act, to strike out at whoever caused it, and a boiling hostility against the whole of the universe. They would obey anyone, they need a master, they need to be told what to do. They are ready now to be used as cannon fodder—to attack, to bomb, to burn, to murder, to fight in the streets and die in the gutters. They are a trained pack of miserably impotent freaks, ready to be unleashed against anyone. The comprachicos unleash them against the “System.”

V

In the avalanche of commentaries on the campus riots, a great deal has been said about the students, as if those manifestations of savagery were spontaneous, and about the college administrators, as if their policies of abject appeasement were “repressive” —but very little is said about the faculties. Yet it is the faculty that causes, inspires, manipulates and often stage-manages the riots. In some cases, the majority of the faculty supports the rioters; in others, it is a small comprachico minority that overpowers the faculty majority by spitting in its face. (And if you want to see a negative demonstration of the power of ideas—i.e., a demonstration of what happens to men devoid of philosophical convictions—take a look at the cringing moral cowardice of allegedly civilized scholars in the presence of a handful of faculty hooligans. There have been notable exceptions to this attitude, but not many.)

For several generations, the destruction of reason was carried on under the cover and in the name of reason, which was the Kant-Hegel-James-Dewey method. When every girder of rationality had been undercut, a new philosophy made explicit what had been implicit, and took over the job of providing a rationalization of the students’ psycho-epistemological state: Existentialism.

Existentialism elevates chronic anxiety into the realm of metaphysics. Fear, misery, nausea—it declares—are not an individual’s fault, they are inherent in human nature, they are an intrinsic, predestined part of the “human condition.” Action is the sole alleviation possible to man. What action? Any action. You do not know how to act? Don’t be chicken, courage consists in acting without knowledge. You do not know what goals to choose? There are no standards of choice. Virtue consists in choosing a goal by whim and sticking to it (“committing yourself”) to the grim death. It sounds unreasonable? Reason is man’s enemy—your guts, muscles and blood know best.

For several generations, the destruction of freedom (i.e., of capitalism) was carried on under the cover and in the name of freedom. The genteel intellectual conformists, mass-produced in colleges, proclaimed every collectivist tenet, premise and slogan, while professing their abhorrence of dictatorship. When every girder of capitalism had been undercut, when it had been transformed into a crumbling mixed economy—i.e., a state of civil war among pressure groups fighting politely for the legalized privilege of using physical force—the road was cleared for a philosopher who scrapped the politeness and the legality, making explicit what had been implicit: Herbert Marcuse, the avowed enemy of reason and freedom, the advocate of dictatorship, of mystic “insight,” of retrogression to savagery, of universal enslavement, of rule by brute force.

The student activists are the comprachicos’ most successful products: they went obediently along every step of the way, never challenging the basic premises inculcated in the Progressive nursery schools. They act in packs, with the will of the pack as their only guide. The scramble for power among their pack leaders and among different packs does not make them question their premises: they are incapable of questioning anything. So they cling to the belief that mankind can be united into one happily, harmoniously unanimous pack—by force. Brute, physical force is, to them, a natural form of action. Philosophically, it is clear that when men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements. The activists are the living demonstration of this principle.

The activists’ claim that they have no way of “attracting attention” to their demands and of getting what they want except by force—by violent demonstrations, obstruction and destruction—is a pure throwback to the Progressive nursery school, where a tantrum was the only thing required to achieve their wishes. Their hysterical screaming still carries a touch of pouting astonishment at a world that does not respond to an absolute such as: “I want it!” The three-year-old whim-worshiper becomes the twenty-year-old thug.

The activists are a small minority, but they are confronting a helpless, confused, demoralized majority consisting of those who were unable fully to accept the school conditioning or fully to reject it. Among them, a large group represents the activists’ fellow travelers and prospective converts: the hippies. The hippies froze on the Progressive nursery school level and went no further. They took the Progressive nursery’s metaphysics literally—and are now wandering in search of a world to fit it.

The hippies’ “lifestyle” is an exact concretization of the nursery’s ideal: no thought—no focus—no purpose—no work—no reality save the whim of the moment—the hypnotic monotony of primitive music, with the even beat that deadens the brain and the senses—the brotherhood of the pack, combined with pretensions at expressing individuality, at “doing one’s thing” in the haze and stench of grimy coffeehouses, which “thing” consists in the monotonous repetition of the same jerking contortions with the same long whine of sounds that had been emitted by others for days on end—the inarticulate extolling of emotions above reason, of “spirituality” above matter, of “nature” above technology—and, above all, the quest for love, anyone’s love, any kind of love as the key to finding someone who will take care of them.

Clinging to their nursery ideal, the hippies live down to its essential demand: non-effort. If they are not provided with brightly furnished rooms and toys, they live in dank basements, they sleep on floors, they eat what they find in garbage cans, they breed stomach ulcers and spread venereal diseases—anything rather than confront that implacable enemy of whims: reality.

And out of all those variants of Progressive education’s results, out of that spectacle of human self-degradation, there rises a grim, factual, unanswerable proof of the place of reason in man’s nature and existence, as a silent warning to all the comprachicos and their allies: You can destroy men’s minds, but you will not find a substitute—you can condition men to irrationality, but you cannot make them bear it—you can deprive men of reason, but you cannot make them live with what is left. That proof and warning is: drugs.

The most damning refutation of the theories of all the hippie-activist-Marcusian hordes is the drug-glazed eyes of their members. Men who have found the right way of life do not seek to escape from awareness, to obliterate their consciousness and to drug themselves out of existence. Drug addiction is the confession of an unbearable inner state.

Drugs are not an escape from economic or political problems, they are not an escape from society, but from oneself. They are an escape from the unendurable state of a living being whose consciousness has been crippled, deformed, mutilated, but not eliminated, so that its mangled remnants are screaming that he cannot go on without it.

The phenomenon of an entire generation turning to drugs is such an indictment of today’s culture—of its basic philosophy and its educational establishment—that no further evidence is necessary and no lesser causal explanation is possible.

If they had not been trained to believe that belonging to a pack is a moral and metaphysical necessity, would high-school children risk the physical destruction of their brains in order to belong to a pot-smoking “in-group”?

If they had not been trained to believe that reason is impotent, would college students take “mind-expanding” drugs to seek some “higher” means of cognition?

If they had not been trained to believe that reality is an illusion, would young persons take drugs to reach a “higher” reality that seems to obey their wishes, except that they are smashed on pavements in attempting to fly out of windows?

If a trained pack of commentators, sharing the same beliefs, did not glamorize the obscene epidemic of self-destruction—by means of such estimates as “idealistic,” “revolutionary,” “new life-style,” “new morality,” “drug culture”—would the young have any cover left to hide their own deep-down knowledge that drug addiction is nothing but a public confession of personal impotence?

It is the educational establishment that has created this national disaster. It is philosophy that has created the educational establishment. The anti-rational philosophic trend of the past two hundred years has run its course and reached its climax. To oppose it will require a philosophical revolution or, rather, a rebirth of philosophy. Appeals to “home, church, mother and tradition” will not do; they never did. Ideas can be fought only by means of ideas. The educational establishment has to be fought—from bottom to top, from cause to consequences, from nursery schools to universities, from basic philosophy to campus riots, from without and from within.

This last is addressed to the many intelligent youths who are aware of the state of higher education and refuse to go to college or, having gone, drop out in revulsion. They are playing into the comprachicos’ hands. If the better minds desert the universities, this country will reach a situation in which the incompetent and the second-rate will carry the official badge of the intellect and there will be no place for the first-rate and independent to function or even to hide. To preserve one’s mind intact through a modem college education is a test of courage and endurance, but the battle is worth it and the stakes are the highest possible to man: the survival of reason. The time spent in college is not wasted, if one knows how to use the comprachicos against themselves: one learns in reverse—by subjecting their theories to the most rigorously critical examination and discovering what is false and why, what is true, what are the answers.

As to the drugged contingents of hippies and activists, I should like to address the following to those among them who may still be redeemable, as well as to those who may be tempted to join their hordes.

The modern comprachicos have an advantage over their ancient predecessors: when a victim was mutilated physically, he retained the capacity to discover who had done it. But when a victim is mutilated mentally, he clings to his own destroyers as his masters and his only protectors against the horror of the state which they have created; he remains as their tool and their play-thing—which is part of their racket.

If, in the chaos of your motives, some element is a genuine desire to crusade in a righteous cause and take part in a heroic battle, direct it against the proper enemy. Yes, the world is in a terrible state—but what caused it? Capitalism? Where do you see it, except for some battered remnants that still manage to keep us all alive? Yes, today’s “Establishment” is a rotted structure of mindless hypocrisy—but who and what is the “Establishment”? Who directs it? Not the big businessmen, who mouth the same collectivist slogans as your professors and pour out millions of dollars to support them. Not the so-called “conservatives,” who compete with your professors in attacking reason and in spreading the same collectivist-altruist-mystic notions. Not the Washington politicians, who are the eager dummies of your professorial ventriloquists. Not the communications media, who publicize your cause, praise your ideals and preach your professors’ doctrines.

It is ideas that determine the actions of all those people, and it is the Educational Establishment that determines the ideas of a nation. It is your professors’ ideas that have ruled the world for the past fifty years or longer, with a growing spread of devastation, not improvement—and today, in default of opposition, these ideas are destroying the world, as they destroyed your mind and self-esteem.

You are miserably helpless and want to rebel? Then rebel against the ideas of your teachers. You will never find a harder, nobler or more heroic form of rebellion. You have nothing to lose but your anxiety. You have your mind to win.

In conclusion, I should like to quote—for one of the guiltiest groups, the parents—a passage from Atlas Shrugged, which deals with Rearden’s thoughts after the death of the Wet Nurse:

“He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly—yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think....

“Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival—yet that was what they did to their children.

“Armed with nothing but meaningless phrases, this boy had been thrown to fight for existence, he had hobbled and groped through a brief, doomed effort, he had screamed his indignant, bewildered protest—and had perished in his first attempt to soar on his mangled wings.”

(August-December 1970)

The Culture

Apollo and Dionysus

On July 16, 1969, one million people, from all over the country, converged on Cape Kennedy, Florida, to witness the launching of Apollo 11 that carried astronauts to the moon.

On August 15, 300,000 people, from all over the country, converged on Bethel, New York, near the town of Woodstock, to witness a rock music festival.

These two events were news, not philosophical theory. These were facts of our actual existence, the kinds of facts—according to both modern philosophers and practical businessmen—that philosophy has nothing to do with.

But if one cares to understand the meaning of these two events—to grasp their roots and their consequences—one will understand the power of philosophy and learn to recognize the specific forms in which philosophical abstractions appear in our actual existence.

The issue in this case is the alleged dichotomy of reason versus emotion.

This dichotomy has been presented in many variants in the history of philosophy, but its most colorfully eloquent statement was given by Friedrich Nietzsche. In The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche claims that he observed two opposite elements in Greek tragedies, which he saw as metaphysical principles inherent in the nature of reality; he named them after two Greek gods: Apollo, the god of light, and Dionysus, the god of wine. Apollo, in Nietzsche’s metaphysics, is the symbol of beauty, order, wisdom, efficacy (though Nietzsche equivocates about this last)—i.e., the symbol of reason. Dionysus is the symbol of drunkenness or, rather, Nietzsche cites drunkenness as his identification of what Dionysus stands for: wild, primeval feelings, orgiastic joy, the dark, the savage, the unintelligible element in man—i.e., the symbol of emotion.

Apollo, according to Nietzsche, is a necessary element, but an unreliable and thus inferior guide to existence, that gives man a superficial view of reality: the illusion of an orderly universe. Dionysus is the free, unfettered spirit that offers man—by means of a mysterious intuition induced by wine and drugs—a more profound vision of a different kind of reality, and is thus the superior. And—indicating that Nietzsche knew clearly what he was talking about, even though he chose to express it in a safely, drunkenly Dionysian manner—Apollo represents the principle of individuality, while Dionysus leads man “into complete self-forgetfulness” and into merging with the “Oneness” of nature. (Those who, at a superficial reading, take Nietzsche to be an advocate of individualism, please note.)

This much is true: reason is the faculty of an individual, to be exercised individually; and it is only dark, irrational emotions, obliterating his mind, that can enable a man to melt, merge and dissolve into a mob or a tribe. We may accept Nietzsche’s symbols, but not his estimate of their respective values, nor the metaphysical necessity of a reason-emotion dichotomy.

It is not true that reason and emotion are irreconcilable antagonists or that emotions are a wild, unknowable, ineffable element in men. But this is what emotions become for those who do not care to know what they feel, and who attempt to subordinate reason to their emotions. For every variant of such attempts—as well as for their consequences—the image of Dionysus is an appropriate symbol.

Symbolic figures are a valuable adjunct to philosophy: they help men to integrate and bear in mind the essential meaning of complex issues. Apollo and Dionysus represent the fundamental conflict of our age. And for those who may regard them as floating abstractions, reality has offered two perfect, fiction-like dramatizations of these abstract symbols: at Cape Kennedy and at Woodstock. They were perfect in every respect demanded of serious fiction: they concretized the essentials of the two principles involved, in action, in a pure, extreme, isolated form. The fact that the spacecraft was called “Apollo” is merely a coincidence, but a helpful coincidence.

If you want to know fully what the conflict of reason versus irrational emotion means—in fact, in reality, on earth—keep these two events in mind: it means Apollo 11 versus the Woodstock festival. Remember also that you are asked to make a choice between these two—and that the whole weight of today’s culture is being used to push you to the side of and into Woodstock’s mud.

In my article “Apollo 11” (The Objectivist, September 1969), I discussed the meaning and the greatness of the moon landing. To quote: ”No one could doubt that we had seen an achievement of man in his capacity as a rational being—an achievement of reason, of logic, of mathematics, of total dedication to the absolutism of reality.... The most confirmed evader in the worldwide audience could not escape the fact that ... no feelings, wishes, urges, instincts or lucky ‘conditioning’ ... could have achieved this incomparable feat—that we were watching the embodied concretization of a single faculty of man: his rationality.”

This was the meaning and motive of the overwhelming worldwide response to Apollo 11, whether the cheering crowds knew it consciously or not—and most of them did not. It was the response of people starved for the sight of an achievement, for a vision of man the hero.

This was the motive that drew one million people to Cape Kennedy for the launching. Those people were not a stampeding herd nor a manipulated mob; they did not wreck the Florida communities, they did not devastate the countryside, they did not throw themselves, like whining thugs, at the mercy of their victims; they did not create any victims. They came as responsible individuals able to project the reality of two or three days ahead and to provide for their own needs. There were people of every age, creed, color, educational level and economic status. They lived and slept in tents or in their cars, some of them for several days, in great discomfort and unbearable heat; they did it gamely, cheerfully, gaily; they projected a general feeling of confident goodwill, the bond of a common enthusiasm; they created a public spectacle of responsible privacy—and they departed as they had come, without benefit of press agents.

The best account of the nature of that general feeling was given to me by an intelligent young woman of my acquaintance. She went to see the parade of the astronauts when they came to New York. For a few brief moments, she stood on a street corner and waved to them as they went by. “It was so wonderful,” she told me. “People didn’t want to leave after the parade had passed. They just stood there, talking about it—talking to strangers—smiling. It was so wonderful to feel, for once, that people aren’t vicious, that one doesn’t have to suspect them, that we have something good in common.”

This is the essence of a genuine feeling of human brotherhood: the brotherhood of values. This is the only authentic form of unity among men—and only values can achieve it.

There was virtually no comment in the press on the meaning of the popular response to Apollo 11; the comments, for the most part, were superficial, perfunctory, mainly statistical. There was a brief flurry of nonsense about “unity”—as if it were some mysteriously causeless emotional primary—with suggestions about directing this unity to such inspiring goals as the crusades against poverty, air pollution, wilderness-desecration, even urban transportation. Then the subject was dropped, and the Apollo 11 story was dropped as of no further significance.

One of the paradoxes of our age is the fact that the intellectuals, the politicians and all the sundry voices that choke, like asthma, the throat of our communications media have never gasped and stuttered so loudly about their devotion to the public good and about the people’s will as the supreme criterion of value—and never have they been so grossly indifferent to the people. The reason, obviously, is that collectivist slogans serve as a rationalization for those who intend, not to follow the people, but to rule it. There is, however, a deeper reason: the most profound breach in this country is not between the rich and the poor, but between the people and the intellectuals. In their view of life, the American people are predominantly Apollonian; the “mainstream” intellectuals are Dionysian.

This means: the people are reality-oriented, commonsenseoriented, technology-oriented (the intellectuals call this “materialistic” and “middle-class”); the intellectuals are emotion-oriented and seek, in panic, an escape from a reality they are unable to deal with, and from a technological civilization that ignores their feelings.

The flight of Apollo 11 brought this out into the open. With rare exceptions, the intellectuals resented its triumph. A two-page survey of their reactions, published by The New York Times on July 21, was an almost unanimous spread of denigrations and denunciations. (See my article “Apollo 11.”) What they denounced was “technology”; what they resented was achievement and its source: reason. The same attitude—with rare exceptions—was displayed by the popular commentators, who are not the makers, but the products and the weather vanes of the prevailing intellectual trends.

Walter Cronkite of CBS was a notable exception. But Eric Sevareid of CBS was typical of the trend. On July 15, the eve of the launching, he broadcast from Cape Kennedy a commentary that was reprinted in Variety (July 23, 1969). “In Washington and elsewhere,” he said, “the doubts concern future flights, their number, their cost and their benefits, as if the success of Apollo 11 were already assured. We are a people who hate failure. It’s un-American. It is a fair guess that failure of Apollo 11 would not curtail future space programs but re-energize them.”

Please consider these two sentences: “We are a people who hate failure. It’s un-American.” (In the context of the rest, this was not intended as a compliment, though it should have been; it was intended as sarcasm.) Who doesn’t hate failure? Should one love it? Is there a nation on earth that doesn’t hate it? Surely, one would have to say that failure is un-British or un-French or un-Chinese. I can think of only one nation to whom this would not apply: failure is not un-Russian (in a sense which is deeper than politics).

But what Mr. Sevareid had in mind was not failure. It was the American dedication to success that he was deriding. It is true that no other nation as a whole is as successful as America, which is America’s greatest virtue. But success is never automatically immediate; passive resignation is not a typical American trait; Americans seldom give up. It is this precondition of success—the “try, try again” precept—that Mr. Sevareid was undercutting.

He went on to say that if Apollo 11 succeeded, “the pressure to divert these great sums of money to inner space, terra firma and inner man will steadily grow.” He went on to discuss the views of men who believe “that this adventure, however majestic its drama, is only one more act of escape, that it is man once again running away from himself and his real needs, that we are approaching the bright side of the moon with the dark side of ourselves.... We know that the human brain will soon know more about the composition of the moon than it knows about the human brain ... [and] why human beings do what they do.”

This last sentence is true, and one would think that the inescapable conclusion is that man should use his brain to study human nature by the same rational methods he has used so successfully to study inanimate matter. But not according to Mr. Sevareid ; he reached a different conclusion: “It is possible that the divine spark in man will consume him in flames, that the big brain will prove our ultimate flaw, like the dinosaur’s big body, that the metal plaque Armstrong and Aldrin expect to place on the moon will become man’s epitaph.”

On July 20, while Apollo 11 was approaching the moon, and the world was waiting breathlessly, Mr. Sevareid found it appropriate to broadcast the following remark: no matter how great this event, he said, nothing much has changed, “man still puts his pants on, one leg at a time, he still argues with his wife,” etc. Well, each to his own hierarchy of values and of importance.

On the same day, David Brinkley of NBC observed that since men can now see and hear everything directly on television, by sensory-perceptual means (as he stressed), commentators are no longer needed at all. This implies that perceived events will somehow provide men automatically with the appropriate conceptual conclusions. The truth is that the more men perceive, the more they need the help of commentators, but of commentators who are able to provide a conceptual analysis.

According to a fan letter I received from Canada, the U.S. TVCOMMENTARIES during Apollo 11’s flight were mild compared to those on Canadian television. “We listened to an appalling panel of ‘experts’ disparage the project as a ‘mere technological cleverness by a stupid, pretentious speck of dust in the cosmos.’ ... They were also very concerned about the ‘inflated American ego’ if the voyage succeeded. One almost got the impression that they would be greatly relieved if the mission failed!”

What is the actual motive behind this attitude—the unadmitted, subconscious motive? An intelligent American newsman, Harry Reasoner of CBS, named it inadvertently; I had the impression that he did not realize the importance of his own statement. Many voices, at the time, were declaring that the success of Apollo 11 would destroy the poetic-romantic glamor of the moon, its fascinating mystery, its appeal to lovers and to human imagination. Harry Reasoner summed it up by saying simply, quietly, a little sadly, that if the moon is found to be made of green cheese, it will be a blow to science; but if it isn’t, it will be a blow to “those of us whose life is not so well organized.”

And this is the whole shabby secret: to some men, the sight of an achievement is a reproach, a reminder that their own lives are irrational and that there is no loophole, no escape from reason and reality. Their resentment is the cornered Dionysian element baring its teeth.

What Harry Reasoner’s statement implied was the fact that only the vanguard of the Dionysian cohorts is made up of wild, rampaging irrationalists, openly proclaiming their hatred of reason, dripping wine and blood. The bulk of Dionysus’ strength, his grass-roots following, consists of sedate little souls who never commit any major crime against reason, who merely indulge their petty irrational whims once in a while, covertly—and. overtly, seek a “balance of power,” a compromise between whims and reality. But reason is an absolute: in order to betray it, one does not have to dance naked in the streets with vine leaves in one’s hair; one betrays it merely by sneaking down the back stairs. Then, someday, one finds oneself unable to grasp why one feels no joy at the scientific discoveries that prolong human life or why the naked dancers are prancing all over one’s own body.

Such are the Dionysian followers. But who are the leaders? These are not always obvious or immediately identifiable. For instance, the greatest Dionysian in history was a shriveled little “square,” well past thirty, who never drank or smoked pot, who took a daily walk with such precise, monotonous regularity that the townspeople set their clocks by him; his name was Immanuel Kant.

Kant was the first hippie in history.

But a generalissimo of that kind needs lieutenants and noncommissioned officers: Apollo cannot be defeated by buck privates who are merely the conditioned products of their officers. Nor can the buck privates unleash the Dionysian hordes on the world, out of the zoos, the coffeehouses and the colleges where they are bred. To do that job—and to blindfold the keepers—requires some men of stature, but men with a split face who have worn an Apollonian half-mask on the side turned to the world, thus convincing the unwary that a “compromise” is possible.

This brings us to one of Kant’s noncommissioned officers (he is not the only one, but he is typical), a man who serves as a transmission belt to Dionysus and to Woodstock: Charles A. Lindbergh.

Forty-two years ago, Lindbergh was a hero. His great feat—the solo flight across the Atlantic—had required major virtues, including a significant degree of rationality. As a grim demonstration of the nature of man’s volition—of the fact that neither rationality nor any other virtue is automatically permanent, but requires a constant, volitional practice—I offer in evidence a letter from Lindbergh, commenting on Apollo 11’s coming flight, published in Life magazine, July 4, 1969. It demonstrates what is left of what had once been a hero.

Mr. Lindbergh confesses that he does not know all the motives that prompted him to fly the Atlantic (which proves nothing but a failure of introspection). “But I can say quite definitely that they sprang more from intuition than from rationality, and that the love of flying outweighed practical purposes—important as the latter often were.”

Observe that the choice and love of one’s profession are here regarded as having no connection with rationality or with practical purposes, whatever these might be.

“Then, as the art of flying transposed to a science, I found my interest in airplanes decreasing. Rationally I welcomed the advances that came with self-starters, closed cockpits, radio and automatic pilots. Intuitively I felt revolted by them, for they upset the balance between intellect and senses that had made my profession such a joy.”

A great deal could be identified, in this sort of statement, about the nature of Mr. Lindbergh’s “intuition” and about the motives he finds so mysterious. But I shall let him speak for himself and let you draw your own conclusions.

“And so, as intuition had led me into aviation in the first place, it led me back to an early boyhood interest, the contemplation of life.”

He does not state by what means he intended to contemplate it, since he had rejected reason.

“I found the mechanics of life less interesting than the mystical qualities they manifest. With these conclusions, I began studying supersensory phenomena and, in 1937, flew to India in the hope of gaining insight to yogic practices.”

Some years later, he states, he made expeditions into the wildernesses of Africa, Eurasia and the American continents, which gave him a new perspective, “a perspective that drove into my bones, as well as into my mind, the fact that in instinct rather than in intellect is manifest the cosmic plan of life.”

When he attended the launching of Apollo 8, he was momentarily impressed. “Talking to astronauts and engineers, I felt an almost overwhelming desire to reenter the fields of astronautics—with their scientific committees, laboratories, factories and block-houses, possibly to voyage into space myself. But I know I will not return to them, despite limitless possibilities for invention, exploration and adventure.

“Why not? Decades spent in contact with science and its vehicles have directed my mind and senses to areas beyond their reach. I now see scientific accomplishment as a path, not an end; a path leading to and disappearing in mystery.”

Observe the motive of placing one’s own motives outside the power of reason: it permits one to regard an explanation of that kind as satisfactory, and an epistemological claim of that kind as requiring no further proof.

From the incoherent paragraphs that follow, one can gather only that what Mr. Lindbergh holds against science is the fact that science does not give us omniscience and omnipotence. “Scientific knowledge argues that space vehicles can never attain the speed of light, which makes a puny penetration of the universe within a human lifespan; and that, therefore, cosmic distances will confine our physical explorations to those planets which orbit the sun ... scientifically established principles now seem to limit [man] to the space-territory of the minor star he orbits. We are blocked by lack of time as we were once blocked by lack of air.”

But, he wonders, are we perhaps cracking open the entrance to another era, “one that will surpass the era of science as the era of science surpassed that of religious superstition? Following the paths of science, we become constantly more aware of mysteries beyond scientific reach. In these vaguely apprehended azimuths, I think the great adventures of the future lie—in voyages inconceivable by our 20th Century rationality—beyond the solar system, through distant galaxies, possibly through peripheries untouched by time and space.”

If this does not make sense to you, the fault lies in your “20th Century rationality.” Mr. Lindbergh claims a different means of cognition. “We know that tens of thousands of years ago, man departed from both the hazards and the security of instinct’s natural selection, and that his intellectual reactions have become too powerful to permit him ever to return.... We must find a way to blend with our present erratic tyranny of mind the countless, subtle and still-little-known elements that created the tangible shape of man and his intangible extensions.”

There follows an incoherent paean to “wildness”—not “nature,” but “wildness.” In “wildness”—as opposed to technological progress and civilization—Mr. Lindbergh has found “a direction ... an awareness of values ... and the means of our salvation.”

To help you untangle this, I can only quote Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead: “Don’t bother to examine a folly—ask yourself only what it accomplishes.” Mr. Lindbergh accomplishes the following:

“If we can combine our knowledge of science with the wisdom of wildness, if we can nurture civilization through roots in the primitive, man’s potentialities appear to be unbounded ... he can merge with the miraculous—to which we can attach what better name than ‘God’? And in this merging, as long sensed by intuition but still only vaguely perceived by rationality, experience may travel without need for accompanying life.

“Will we then find life to be only a stage, though an essential one, in a cosmic evolution of which our evolving awareness is beginning to become aware? Will we discover that only without spaceships can we reach the galaxies; that only without cyclotrons can we know the interior of atoms? [Italics his.] To venture beyond the fantastic accomplishments of this physically fantastic age, sensory perception must combine with the extra-sensory, and I suspect that the two will prove to be different faces of each other.”

What are the puny little compromises sought by today’s politicians, compared to a quest for a compromise of this kind?

I have said, in Atlas Shrugged, that mysticism is anti-man, anti-mind, anti-life. I received violent protests from mystics, assuring me that this is not true. Observe that Mr. Lindbergh regards life, spaceships and cyclotrons as equally dispensable, that he talks of “experience” which travels “without need for accompanying life”—and that his intuition promises him achievements greater than those reached by the advocates of life, reason and civilization.

Well, reality has obliged him. He does not have to wait for tens of thousands of years, for evolution, for a reunion with wildness, for intergalactic travel. The goal, the ideal, the salvation and the ecstasy have been achieved -by 300,000 people wallowing in the mud on an excrement-strewn hillside near Woodstock. Their name for the experience of travel unaccompanied by life, to peripheries untouched by time and space, is “LSD trips.”

The “Woodstock Music and Art Fair” did not take place in Woodstock; like everything else about that event, its title was a phony, an attempt to cash in on the artistic reputation of the Woodstock community. The fair took place on an empty thousand-acre pasture leased by the promoters from a local farmer. In response to $200,000 worth of publicity and advertising, 300,000 hippies showed up for the occasion. (These figures are from The New York Times; some sources place the attendance estimate higher.)

According to Newsweek (August 25): “The three-day Woodstock fair was different from the usual pop festival from the outset. It was not just a concert but a tribal gathering, expressing all the ideas of the new generation: communal living away from the cities, getting high, digging arts, clothes and craft exhibits, and listening to the songs of revolution.” The article quotes one of the promoters as declaring: “People will all be going into their own thing. This is not just music, but a conglomeration of everything involved in the new culture.”

So it was.

No living, eating or sanitary facilities were provided; the promoters claimed that they had not expected so large a crowd. Newsweek describes the conditions as follows: “Festival food supplies were almost immediately exhausted ... and water coming from wells dug into the area stopped flowing or came up impure. A heavy rain Friday night turned the amphitheater into a quagmire and the concession area into a mudhole.... Throngs of wet, sick and wounded hippies trekked to impromptu hospital tents suffering from colds, sore throats, broken bones, barbed-wire cuts and nail-puncture wounds. Festival doctors called it a ‘health emergency,’ and 50 additional doctors were flown in from New York City to meet the crisis.”

According to The New York Times (August 18), when the rainstorm came “at least 80,000 young people sat or stood in front of the stage and shouted obscenities at the darkened skies as trash rolled down the muddy hillside with the runoff of the rain. Others took shelter in dripping tents, lean-tos, cars and trucks.... Many boys and girls wandered through the storm nude, red mud clinging to their bodies.”

Drugs were used, sold, shared or given away during the entire festival. Eyewitnesses claim that 99 percent of the crowd smoked marijuana; but heroin, hashish, LSD and other stronger drugs were peddled openly. The nightmare convulsions of so-called “bad trips” were a common occurrence. One young man died, apparently from an overdose of heroin.

The Newsweek report concludes with: “The promoters had hired members of the Hog Farm, a New Mexico hippie commune, to peacefully police the fair. At week’s end near the Hog Farm campsite, a hard core of crazies barked like dogs and freaked out in a bizarre circle dance lit by flashing strobe lights. The songs seemed to sum up what the young Aquarians believed, despite all misadventures, the festival was all about: ‘Now, now, now is all there is. Love is all there is. Love is. Love.’ ”

Who paid for this love-feast? Apparently, the unloved ones: those who know that there is more than the “now” for a human being—and that without it, even the “now” is not possible.

The citizens of Bethel, the nearest community, were the victims, abandoned by their law-enforcing agencies. These victims were neither bums nor millionaires; they were farmers and small businessmen, who worked hard to earn their living. Their stories, reported in The New York Times (August 20), sound like those of the survivors of a foreign invasion.

Richard C. Joyner, the operator of the local post office and general store on Route 17B, “said that the youngsters at the festival had virtually taken over his property—camping on his lawn, making fires on his patio and using the backyard as a latrine....

“Clarence W. Townsend, who runs a 150-acre dairy farm ... was shaken by the ordeal. ‘We had thousands of cars all over our fields,’ he said. ‘There were kids all over the place. They made a human cesspool of our property and drove through the cornfields. There’s not a fence left on the place. They just tore them up and used them for firewood.’ ...

“ ‘My pond is a swamp [said Royden Gabriele, another farmer]. I’ve got no fences and they used my field as a latrine. They picked corn and camped all over the place. They just landed wherever they could.... We pulled 30 of them out of the hay mow smoking pot.... If they come back next year I don’t know what I’ll do,’ Mr. Gabriele said. ‘If I can’t sell, I’ll just burn the place down.’ ”

No love—or thought—was given to these victims by the unsanitary apostles of love (and someday the world will discover that without thought there can be no love). Furthermore, the universal loving was not extended by the promoters of the festival even to one another. “In the aftermath of Woodstock,” writes The New York Times (September 9), “as the euphoria of the ‘three days of peace and music’ dies out, the tales of the problems, the bickering, the power struggles and the diverse philosophies of the four young businessmen are coming out.”

The promoters were four young men, all of them in their twenties ; one of them, the heir to a drugstore products fortune, pledged his fortune to cover the festival’s losses. Inasmuch as the Woodstock hordes broke down the ticket-selling procedure, and half the people got in without paying the $7 admission, the fair was “a financial disaster,” according to the young heir who said (in an earlier story) that his debts might reach $2 million.

Now the four promoters are splitting up and fighting over control of the Woodstock Ventures Corporation.

One of them was described as “a hippie who keeps one foot in the financial world at all times” and as a boy “who eschews shoes, shirts and barbers (but who likes chauffeured Cadillacs and overseas jet travel and plunges in the stock market) ...” All of them, apparently, have connections with “several large Establishment-oriented corporations and Wall Street investment firms [who] are interested in cashing in on the youth market ...”

One of them stated openly: “Maybe the best way to define the Underground Industrial Complex ... is materialistic people of the underground trying to make money off of a generation of underground kids who feel they aren’t materialistic.”

The problems that plagued these promoters “before, during and after the festival reflect the difficulties in merging the ideas of ‘making money off the kids’ and trying to let the kids believe that a rock festival, for example, is, as [one of them] likes to put it, ‘a groovy meeting of the tribes, a part of the revolution.’ ”

If this is disgusting, there is something more disgusting still: the psychology of those hundreds of thousands of “underground kids”—who, in justice, deserve no better.

Under the title “Woodstock: Like It Was,” The New York Times (August 25) published a lengthy interview with six young people who had attended the festival. The interview gives only their first names; five boys: Steve, Lindsey, Bill, Jimmy and Dan; and one girl: Judy. Most of them were college students; the youngest one was “a 16-year-old junior at one of the city’s better private schools.... All were from comfortable middle-class backgrounds.”

I shall quote some of this interview. It is a remarkable psychological document.

“Q. Why did you want to go [to the festival]?

“Lindsey. It was the music. I wanted to go because of the music. That was the only reason.

“Judy. They had the most fantastic line-up of stars that I’ve ever heard about, more than any place I’ve ever heard of, better than Newport.

“Q. Did you have any idea where you’d sleep or what there would be to eat?

“Judy. Well, we drove down in a caravan of two cars—there were four girls and two guys- -but we were supposed to meet 20 or 30 other people who were driving down from New Hampshire and they were supposed to bring a tent, but we never met each other. We just scattered.

“Q. What about food?

“Judy. We brought a bag of carrots. And some soda.

“Q. Did you expect to be able to buy more there?

“Judy. We never really thought about it.”

When they were asked what they felt at the scene, Judy answered : “I just had a feeling that, wow, there are so many of us, we really have power. I’d always felt like such a minority. But I thought, wow, we’re a majority—it felt like that. I felt, here’s the answer to anyone who calls us deviates.

“Q. Was that before you heard any music?

“Judy. I never made it to the concert. I never heard any music at all.

“Q. The whole weekend?

“Judy. Yeh. The whole weekend.”

Further: “All the participants stressed a sense of what they called ‘community.’ ...

“Steve. Everyone came there to be together—not that everyone would cease to be an individual—but everyone came there to be able to express their life style....

“Q. Was there a lot of sharing?

“A voice. Everything was shared....

“Bill. I was sitting in a group of people and it was hot and the sun was beating down. All of a sudden you’d have a box of Cocoa Puffs hit you in the side. They’d say, ‘Take a handful and pass it on.’ And like Saturday afternoon we were sitting there and this watermelon came by with three mouthfuls taken out of it. You were supposed to take a bite and pass it on. Because some guy three rows over said, ‘Give those people some watermelon.’ ”

Further: “All the panel participants carried some kind of drug to the festival—mostly marijuana.... Not infrequently drugs were given away by young people eager to share. What couldn’t be had free could be bought from dealers roaming freely through the crowd.... Most of the participants regarded the drugs as an essential part of the scene ...

“Q. How much of the time were you people up there stoned [i.e., deeply drugged]?

“Lindsey. About 102 percent....

“Q. Could you have had the festival without the drugs?

“Steve. I’m sure there were people there you would have had trouble with if there had not been drugs there.”

One of the boys remarked that some of the older ones were using cocaine.

“Q. The older ones? How old?

“Judy. About 24 or 26.”

When they were asked what they wanted to be in the future, they answered as follows:

“Jimmy. All my life I’ve had just about everything I want. And I have to have whatever I want for the rest of my life, except from now on I have to begin to think of how to provide it for myself. And I don’t want to work because I can’t have everything and do everything I want if I have to stay in the same place from 9 to 5.

“Judy. I’m going to try everything at least once. I lived on a communal farm for a month on the Cape. And, well, I liked it and I really enjoyed staying there and I’ve always wanted to go back and try this thing again, grow tomatoes and things.

“Q. Do you want a family?

“Judy. One child. Just, you know, to procreate. But I don’t want a family because I don’t want to get into that much responsibility. I want to be able to move. I want to be able to leave at any time. I don’t want that much restriction.”

Further: “Q. Was sex an important part of the scene [at Woodstock] ?

“Dan. It was just a part. I don’t know if it was an important part or not.

“Steve. In any society of 500,000 people over the course of three days you’re going to have sex—let’s face it.

“Jimmy.... They were no more free or less free in Woodstock than they are any other place.

“Dan. There was some society to what people did. I mean, they waited until night.

“Q. You mean there were certain standards of decorum?

“Dan. I think there were, yes. People still have some reservations. Some. Not as many.”

Had enough?

Has it ever occurred to you that it is not an accident, but the psychological mechanism of projection that has made people of this kind choose to call their opponents “pigs”?

These are the young people whom the press is hailing as a “new culture” and as a movement of great moral significance—the same press and the same intellectuals who dismissed or denounced Apollo 11 as “mere technology.”

Of the publications I have read, Newsweek was the most fastidious in regard to Woodstock: it offered no praise. The New York Times started by denouncing the festival in an editorial entitled “Nightmare in the Catskills” (August 18), but reversed itself the next day and published an editorial with a softened tone.

Time magazine went whole hog: it published an essay under the title “The Message of History’s Biggest Happening” (August 29). This included such statements as: “As the moment when the special culture of U.S. youth of the ’60s openly displayed its strength, appeal and power, it may well rank as one of the significant political and sociological events of the age.” And: “The spontaneous community of youth that was created at Bethel was the stuff of which legends are made ...”

Life magazine straddled the fence. It published a special edition devoted to the Woodstock festival; the best skill that technology has created in the field of color photography was used to fill that issue with beautiful pictures of scummy young savages. And only toward the end of the two laudatory articles did the writer strike a note of alarm: “The great stoned rock show had worked a countermiracle, trading on the freedom to get stoned, transforming it into a force that tamed the crowd and extracted its compliance. Not that anyone minded, of course—the freedom to get stoned was all the freedom they wanted.... In the cold acid light, the spoiled field took on the aspect of an Orwellian concentration camp stocked with drugs and music and staffed with charming police. The [loud]speaker’s coaxing voice only enriched the nightmare ... I fear it will grow groovier in memory, when the market in madness leads on to shows we’d rather not see.”

I found one brief letter to the editor of The New York Times (September 3), as a lone voice of cognitive and moral sanity. It said, in part: “Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of this event, if we are forced to regard the festival as symbolic, is the awful mindless conformity of external appearance and behavior, and the manifest desperation of this lonely herd of pilgrims doing what Dharma demands—the lack of personal will or spirit...”

These publications demonstrate that the hippies are right in one respect: the culture of today’s Establishment is done for, it is rotted through and through—and rebelling against it is like rebelling against a dead horse.

The hippies are wrong, however, when they fancy themselves to be rebels. They are the distilled essence of the Establishment’s culture, they are the embodiment of its soul, they are the personified ideal of generations of crypto-Dionysians now leaping into the open.

Among the various types of today’s younger generation, the hippies are the most docile conformists. Unable to generate a thought of their own, they have accepted the philosophical beliefs of their elders as unchallengeable dogma—as, in earlier generations, the weakest among the young conformed to the fundamentalist view of the Bible.

The hippies were taught by their parents, their neighbors, their tabloids and their college professors that faith, instinct and emotion are superior to reason—and they obeyed. They were taught that material concerns are evil, that the State or the Lord will provide, that the Lilies of the Field do not toil—and they obeyed. They were taught that love, indiscriminate love, for one’s fellow-men is the highest virtue—and they obeyed. They were taught that the merging of one’s self with a herd, a tribe or a community is the noblest way for men to live—and they obeyed.

There isn’t a single basic principle of the Establishment which they do not share—there isn’t a belief which they have not accepted.

When they discovered that this philosophy did not work—because, in fact, it cannot work—the hippies had neither the wit nor the courage to challenge it; they found, instead, an outlet for their impotent frustration by accusing their elders of hypocrisy—as if hypocrisy were the only obstacle to the realization of their ideals. And—left blindly, helplessly lobotomized in the face of an inexplicable reality that is not amenable to their feelings—they have no recourse but to the shouting of obscenities at anything that frustrates their whims, at men or at a rainy sky, indiscriminately, with no concept of the difference.

It is typical of today’s culture that these exponents of seething, raging hostility are taken as advocates of love.

Avowed anti-materialists whose only manifestation of rebellion and of individualism takes the material form of the clothes they choose to wear, are a pretty ridiculous spectacle. Of any type of nonconformity, this is the easiest to practice, and the safest.

But even in this issue, there is a special psychological component : observe the hippies’ choice of clothing. It is not intended to make them look attractive, but to make them look grotesque. It is not intended to evoke admiration, but to evoke mockery and pity. One does not make oneself look like a caricature unless one intends one’s appearance to plead: Please don’t take me seriously.

And there is a kind of malicious wink, a contemptuous sneer, in the public voices acclaiming the hippies as heroes.

This is what I would call “the court-jester premise.” The jester at the court of an absolute monarch was permitted to say anything and to insult anyone, even his master, because the jester had assumed the role of a fool, had abdicated any claim to personal dignity and was using self-abasement as his protection.

The hippies are a desperate herd looking for a master, to be taken over by anyone; anyone who would tell them how to live, without demanding the effort of thinking. Theirs is the mentality ready for a Führer.

The hippies are the living demonstration of what it means to give up reason and to rely on one’s primeval “instincts,” “urges,” “intuitions”—and whims. With such tools, they are unable to grasp even what is needed to satisfy their wishes—for example, the wish to have a festival. Where would they be without the charity of the local “squares” who fed them? Where would they be without the fifty doctors, rushed from New York to save their lives—without the automobiles that brought them to the festival—without the soda pop and beer they substituted for water—without the helicopter that brought the entertainers—without all the achievements of the technological civilization they denounce? Left to their own devices, they literally didn’t know enough to come in out of the rain.

Their hysterical incantations of worship of the “now” were sincere : the immediate moment is all that exists for the perceptual-level, concrete-bound, animal-like mentality; to grasp “tomorrow” is an enormous abstraction, an intellectual feat open only to the conceptual (i.e., the rational) level of consciousness.

Hence their state of stagnant, resigned passivity: if no one comes to help them, they will sit in the mud. If a box of Cocoa Puffs hits them in the side, they’ll eat it; if a communally chewed watermelon comes by, they’ll chew it; if a marijuana cigarette is stuck into their mouth, they’ll smoke it. If not, not. How can one act, when the next day or hour is an impenetrable black hole in one’s mind?

And how can one desire or feel? The obvious truth is that these Dionysian desire-worshipers do not really desire anything. The little parasite who declared: “I have to have whatever I want for the rest of my life,” did not know what he wanted; observe the “whatever” in his statement. Neither did the girl who announced that she would “try everything at least once.” All of them are looking desperately for somebody who will provide them with something they will be able to enjoy or to desire. Desires, too, are a product of the conceptual faculty.

But there is one emotion which the hippies do experience intensely : chronic fear. If you have seen any of them on television, you have seen it leaping at you from the screen. Fear is their brand, their hallmark; fear is the special vibration by which they claim to recognize one another.

I have mentioned the nature of the bond uniting the admirers of Apollo 11: the brotherhood of values. The hippies, too, have a brotherhood, but of a different kind: it is the brotherhood of fear.

It is fear that drives them to seek the warmth, the protection, the “safety” of a herd. When they speak of merging their selves into a “greater whole,” it is their fear that they hope to drown in the undemanding waves of unfastidious human bodies. And what they hope to fish out of that pool is the momentary illusion of an unearned personal significance.

But all discussions or arguments about the hippies are almost superfluous in the face of one overwhelming fact: most of the hippies are drug addicts.

Is there any doubt that drug addiction is an escape from an unbearable inner state, from a reality one cannot deal with, from an atrophying mind one can never fully destroy? If Apollonian reason were unnatural to man, and Dionysian “intuition” brought him closer to nature and truth, the apostles of irrationality would not have to resort to drugs. Happy, self-confident men do not seek to get “stoned.”

Drug addiction is the attempt to obliterate one’s consciousness, the quest for a deliberately induced insanity. As such, it is so obscene an evil that any doubt about the moral character of its practitioners is itself an obscenity.

Such is the nature of the conflict of Apollo versus Dionysus.

You have all heard the old bromide to the effect that man has his eyes on the stars and his feet in the mud. It is usually taken to mean that man’s reason and his physical senses are the element pulling him down to the mud, while his mystical, supra-rational emotions are the element that lifts him to the stars.

This is the grimmest inversion of many in the course of mankind’s history. But, last summer, reality offered you a literal dramatization of the truth: it is man’s irrational emotions that bring him down to the mud; it is man’s reason that lifts him to the stars.

(December 1969-January 1970)

The “Inexplicable Personal Alchemy”

The following news story by Henry Kamm appeared in The New York Times on October 13, 1968, under the title “For Three Minutes I Felt Free.”

MOSCOW—For three days last week, the “Prague spring” seemed to have come to one dingy street in Moscow. From morning into evening dissidents from the Soviet way of life openly put their radical views to milling, informal groups, while police blocked the streets to traffic.

The disaffected intellectuals spoke not only under the eyes of the K.G.B. (secret police), but they knew that many of those with whom they debated were either regular members of the security apparatus or were doing part time service for it.

If they had gathered for a similar protest at another time and place, they would have been arrested as surely as were the five dissidents for whom they had come to do vigil, in front of the courthouse on the dingy street.

Inside, the five—Larisa Daniel, Pavel Litvinov, Vadim Delone, Konstantin Babitsky, Vladimir Dremlyuga—were standing trial for having, for a few minutes around noon on Aug. 25 on Red Square, openly spoken their minds about the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

So did Natalya Gorbanevskaya, a poet, who was spared trial because she has two young children, and Viktor Fainberg, an art critic, who lost four teeth during the arrest and consequently appeared to be not presentable even to the limited public admitted to political trials. He was sent to a mental hospital instead.

But for three of the defendants the Government revived the old Czarist penalty for radical political agitators exile. And the other two were sentenced to prison camps.

Litvinov, a 30-year-old physicist whose grandfather was Maxim Litvinov, Stalin’s Foreign Minister, was sentenced to five years of exile in a remote area of Russia, as yet not announced. Mrs. Daniel, wife of Yuli Daniel, the imprisoned writer, was banished for four years to a similar spot. Babitsky, 40-year-old language scholar, received three years in exile.

Dremlyuga, 28, unemployed, was given the maximum jail term of three years. Delone, 23, a student and poet, got a two-and-a-half-year prison term and was ordered to serve four months of a previous suspended sentence.

The ironic circumstance that only when some dissidents are standing trial for having sought to awaken the conscience of this politically inert nation can other dissidents gather publicly, and that their audience is only those of proven immunity to radical thoughts, shows the hard limit to the infinitesimal scope of Soviet dissidence.

The average citizen had no idea that five men and two women had denounced their country’s aggression and were being tried consequently on a charge of obstructing pedestrian traffic on the empty vastness of Red Square.

The only ones who knew were those who had been sent to the dingy street to pose as ordinary Communist youths or workers. Their mission was to observe and photograph the few who, through an inexplicable personal alchemy, have thrown off the leading conformity of the only society they have known and are condemned to be its outcasts.

But dissidents cannot change. As Larisa Daniel said outside another courthouse, during an earlier trial, “I cannot do otherwise.”

They know that they are known only by those who hate them for raising their voices in protest and by those who love them because they are so few and draw together for company. Two of the principal figures in the street demonstrations—they have no leaders—only shrugged their shoulders when asked last week whether any but their own small number was aware of what they were doing.

But Vladimir Dremlyuga, denounced in court as a provincial Don Juan, replied to the judge who asked him Wednesday whether he thought what he had done on Red Square was right, “Would I go to jail for something I think is not right?”

The small band is becoming increasingly outspoken not because Soviet society has become more tolerant of dissent. What one senses in talking with them is an increasing sense of anguish that the small measure of liberty that appeared like a faint light at the end of the tunnel in the era of former Premier Nikita Khrushchev, earlier in the decade, is being snuffed out. Their courage is born of despair.

They are aware that among scientists particularly there may be chafing at the restrictiveness of life. But they say that most scientists are far removed from political thought and the passion that alone can create freedom.

They know that some poets enjoy a name for dissent outside this country, but if they really want to earn that name, why aren’t they here, the radicals ask.

They are not politically naive, although a few have the other-worldly nobility of thought and passion of Don Quixote. Both share the earthly and real passion of Vadim Delone, who, without bravado, told the judge before sentencing :

“For three minutes on Red Square I felt free. I am glad to take your three years for that.”a

This news story is such a remarkable example of journalism at its best that I wanted my readers to see it and to consider its wider implications.

It is written by a reporter who knew how to observe essentials and what questions to raise. It is a simple, straightforward, factual account, but its very simplicity and its heartbreaking perceptiveness give it the qualities, not of a news story, but of a work of art: beauty, grandeur, a desperate honesty and a quietly unstressed cry for help—a cry addressed to no one in particular, carried between the lines from the frozen cobblestones of Moscow’s twilight to the universe at large.

In the many years since I left that country, this is the first news story about Russia that “got me.” It made me feel the kind of personal identification and directly immediate, personal pain that I have not felt about events in Russia for a long time. It is an odd feeling: it is poignancy, wistfulness, helplessness and, above all, sadness—just pure, still sadness. The words in my mind, when I read that story, were: There, but for the grace of the United States of America, go I.

I do not mean that I would have been one of the accused in that Soviet courtroom: I knew enough, in my college days, to know that it was useless to attempt political protests in Soviet Russia. But that knowledge broke down, involuntarily, many times; so I would probably have been one of those protesters in the street who engaged in the terrible futility of debating with the secret police. I know how they felt and what would make them do it.

There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days—the conviction that ideas matter. In one’s youth that conviction is experienced as a self-evident absolute, and one is unable fully to believe that there are people who do not share it. That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one’s mind matters. And the radiance of that certainty, in the process of growing up, is the best aspect of youth.

Its consequence is the inability to believe in the power or the triumph of evil. No matter what corruption one observes in one’s immediate background, one is unable to accept it as normal, permanent or metaphysically right. One feels: “This injustice (or terror or falsehood or frustration or pain or agony) is the exception in life, not the rule.” One feels certain that somewhere on earth—even if not anywhere in one’s surroundings or within one’s reach—a proper, human way of life is possible to human beings, and justice matters. It takes years, if ever, to accept the notion that one lives among the not-fully-human; it is impossible to accept that notion in one’s youth. And if justice matters, then one fights for it: one speaks out—in the unnamed certainty that someone, somewhere will understand.

It is not the particular content of a young person’s ideas that is of primary importance in this issue, but his attitude toward ideas as such. The best way to describe it would be to say that he takes ideas seriously—except that “serious” is too unserious a word in this context: he takes ideas with the most profound, solemn and passionate earnestness. (Granted this attitude, his mind is always open to correct his ideas, if they are wrong or false; but nothing on earth can take precedence for him over the truth of an idea.)

This is the “inexplicable personal alchemy” that puzzled Henry Kamm: an independent mind dedicated to the supremacy of ideas, i.e., of truth.

Young persons who hold that conviction, do not have to “throw off the leading conformity of the only society they have known.” They do not conform in the first place: they judge and evaluate; if they accept any part of the prevalent social trends, it is through intellectual agreement (which may be mistaken), not through conformity. They do not need to know different types of society in order to discover the evils, falsehoods or contradictions of the one in which they live: intellectual honesty is the only tool required.

Men who possess this “personal alchemy” are exceedingly rare; they are a small minority in any country or culture. In Soviet Russia, they are tragic martyrs.

It is very likely that many of those young protesters were socialists or “idealistic communists”—like the doomed Czechoslovakian rebels whose subjugation they were protesting. (This was not true in my case and time, I had never been attracted to or fooled by any form of collectivism, but it is likely to be the case of young people some forty years later.) It is likely that those young protesters took Soviet propaganda seriously: brought up on slogans extolling (undefined) freedom, justice, brotherhood and condemning military aggression, they were able to observe the absence of all those social values in Russia and to recognize the invasion of Czechoslovakia as the most brutal type of military aggression. Thus, if they took ideas seriously, they rebelled in the name of the very ideas they had been taught.

(This, incidentally, is the ultimate penalty of all dictators [and all liars]: their nemesis is those who believe them. A dictatorship has to promulgate some sort of distant goals and moral ideals in order to justify its rule and the people’s immolation; the extent to which it succeeds in convincing its victims, is the extent of its own danger; sooner or later, its contradictions are thrown in its face by the best of its subjects: the ablest, the most intelligent, the most honest. Thus a dictatorship is forced to destroy and to keep on destroying the best of its “human resources.” And be it fifty years or five centuries later, ambitious thugs and lethargic drones are all a dictatorship will have left to exploit and rule; the rest will die young, physically or spiritually.)

The dedication to ideas leads, in practice, to an almost involuntary goodwill toward men—or rather to something deeper and more important, which is the root of goodwill: respect. It leads to the attitude, in individual encounters, of treating men as rational beings, on the unstated premise that a man is innocent until proved guilty, that he is not evil until he has proved himself to be; “evil,” in terms of this attitude, means closed to the power of ideas, i.e., of reason.

This is what would make the young dissenters debate political issues with the agents of the secret police. Wordlessly, the unnamed, unidentified feeling “These are human beings” would take precedence over the knowledge that these are human monsters. If named, the driving motive of the dissenters would be an appeal which, to them, is irresistible: “But don’t you see? It’s true!”—and they would speak, regardless of circumstances, regardless of danger, regardless of their audience, so long as the audience had a human form, they would speak in desperate innocence, knowing that a life-or-death imperative compels them to speak, not knowing fully why.

And, facing a firing squad, if necessary, they would still feel it, with no time to learn why and to discover that they are moved by the noblest form of metaphysical self-preservation: the refusal to commit spiritual suicide by abnegating one’s own mind and to survive as a lobotomized automaton.

While her husband was being tried and sentenced to a prison camp, Larisa Daniel said, supporting him: “I cannot do otherwise.” As a human being, she could not.

Replying to a judge “who asked him whether he thought what he had done on Red Square was right,” Vladimir Dremlyuga said: “Would I go to jail for something I think is not right?” Observe that this is an appeal to reason, an answer that springs spontaneously from the implicit premise that the “right” matters, that a logically and morally incontrovertible answer would matter to a judge who is a human being. I doubt that, at the age of 28, Dremlyuga would be able to conceive of the psychological depravity he was dealing with—of the fact that the very purity and rightness of his answer would evoke in the judge’s mind, not a sense of justice, but a response of guilty, vindictive hatred.

Now consider the words of Vadim Delone when he said quietly (“without bravado”) to a judge about to sentence him to three years in prison: “For three minutes on Red Square I felt free. I am glad to take your three years for that.”

This, I submit, is one of the noblest and most revealing statements ever recorded. It is revealing psycho-epistemologically, as an indication of the kind of soul that would make it.

Delone seemed to be aware of the nature of his judges and of the social system they represented. Whom, then, was he addressing?

Observe, in this connection, that these young dissenters had “sought to awaken the conscience of this politically inert nation” —a nation resigned to slavery, indifferent to good or evil—yet they were not “politically naive” and two of their supporters in the street demonstrations “only shrugged their shoulders when asked ... whether any but their own small number was aware of what they were doing.”

Consciously or not, in the mind of any rebel in Soviet Russia, particularly of the young, there is only one court of final appeal against the injustice, the brutality, the sadistic horror of the inhuman social system in which they are trapped: abroad.

The meaning of that word for a Soviet citizen is incommunicable to anyone who has not lived in that country: if you project what you would feel for a combination of Atlantis, the Promised Land and the most glorious civilization on another planet, as imagined by a benevolent kind of science fiction, you will have a pale approximation. “Abroad,” to a Soviet Russian, is as distant, shining and unattainable as these; yet to any Russian who lifts his head for a moment from the Soviet muck, the concept “abroad” is a psychological necessity, a lifeline and soul preserver.

That concept is made of brilliant bits sneaked, smuggled or floating in through the dense gray fog of the country’s physical and spiritual barbed-wire walls: in foreign movies, magazines, radio broadcasts, or even the clothing and the confident posture of foreign visitors. These bits are so un-Soviet and so alive that they blend in one’s mind into a vision of freedom, abundance, unimaginable technological efficacy, inconceivable achievements and, above all, a sense of joyous, fearless, benevolent gaiety. And if European countries, in this vision, are shining planets, America is the sun.

It is not that one hopes for material help or liberation to come from “abroad”; it is that such a place exists. The mere knowledge that a nobler way of life is possible somewhere, redeems the human race in one’s mind. And when, in moments of despair or final extremity, one cries out in protest, that cry is not consciously addressed to anyone, only to whatever justice might exist in the universe at large; but, subconsciously, the universe at large is “abroad.”

And what is “abroad,” in fact? What is America today?

According to the dominant voices of her press, America, too, has a vanguard of young rebels, dissenters and fighters for freedom. Marching down the aisle of a theater, they shout their protest to the world: “I cannot travel without a passport! ... I am not allowed to smoke marijuana! ... I am not allowed to take my clothes off!” (The New York Times, October 15, 1968.)

These self-made puppets in search of a master, dangling and jerking hysterically at the end of strings no one wants to pick up, begging and demanding to be taken care of—these exhibitionists who have nothing to exhibit, who combine the methods of a thug with the candied platitudes of a small-town evangelist, whose “creative self-expression” is as stale as their unwashed bodies, with drugs eating away their brains, obscenities as the (appropriate) voice of their souls, and an all-consuming hatred as their only visible emotion—are the embodied symbols and protégés of the Establishment they are going through the motions of defying. There is a level of cowardice lower than that of a conformist: the “fashionable non-conformist.”

Akin, in spirit, to any other product of decomposition, these are the products of a decadent culture, who crawl out of the wreckage left on college campuses by generations practicing the cult of irrationality. With one eye on the gallery of their applauding teachers, they rebel against the “System” of their groggy elders in the name of such controversial issues as “Love” and “Poverty,” they demand the freedom to batter down doors and chase speakers away from university lecterns, the freedom to burn the manuscripts of professors, the freedom to bash in the skulls of their opponents—and, openly proclaiming their intention to kill, they win the apologies of judges, college presidents and newspaper editors, who call them “youthful idealists,” they are tailed by television crews, they fight on the barricades of coffeehouses and discotheques, they lay siege to Hollywood and storm the Bastille of the jet set’s cocktail parties.

While, under dictatorships, young men are giving their lives for the freedom of the mind, it is against the mind—against the “tyranny” of reason and reality—that young thugs are rebelling in America. It is the mind—the power of ideas—that Western culture is now rigged to destroy, offering the power of dope, guns and gangs as a substitute.

There is a level of intellectual corruption lower than that of adolescent hoodlums: their aging, sanctimonious apologists who gush that the hoodlums are moved by compassion. “Compassion?” “Justice?” “Brotherhood?” “Concern for suffering?” “The liberation of the oppressed?” If any of these were their actual motives, where were those crusaders in October of last year? Why aren’t they staging a demonstration in front of the Soviet Embassy ?

If anyone wonders at the moral credibility gap of today—at the heavy, gray dullness of our cultural atmosphere, with its sickening mixture of boredom and blood, at the lethargic cynicism, the skeptical indifference, the moral limpness, and the contempt of the country at large for all those prostituted slogans (as well as its desperately blind quest and need of morality)—this Grand Guignol of altruism is the reason.

Who can take any values seriously if he is offered, for moral inspiration, a choice between two images of youth: an unshaved, barefooted Harvard graduate, throwing bottles and bombs at policemen—or a prim, sun-helmeted, frustrated little autocrat of the Peace Corps, spoon-feeding babies in a jungle clinic?

No, these are not representative of America’s youth—they are, in fact, a very small minority with a very loud group of unpaid p.r. [agents] on university faculties and among the press—but where are its representatives? Where are America’s young fighters for ideas, the rebels against conformity to the gutter—the young men of “inexplicable personal alchemy,” the independent minds dedicated to the supremacy of truth?

With very rare exceptions, they are perishing in silence, unknown and unnoticed. Consciously or subconsciously, philosophically and psychologically, it is against them that the cult of irrationality—i.e., our entire academic and cultural Establishment—is directed.

They perish gradually, giving up, extinguishing their minds before they have a chance to grasp the nature of the evil they are facing. In lonely agony, they go from confident eagerness to bewilderment to indignation to resignation—to obscurity. And while their elders putter about, conserving redwood forests and building sanctuaries for mallard ducks, nobody notices those youths as they drop out of sight one by one, like sparks vanishing in limitless black space; nobody builds sanctuaries for the best of the human species.

So will the young Russian rebels perish spiritually—if they survive their jail terms physically. How long can a man preserve his sacred fire if he knows that jail is the reward for loyalty to reason? No longer than he can preserve it if he is taught that that loyalty is irrelevant—as he is taught both in the East and in the West. There are exceptions who will hold out, no matter what the circumstances. But these are exceptions that mankind has no right to expect.

When I read that news story about the Russian rebels, I thought of what I would have felt, in my youth and in their place: if I knew that someone had escaped from the Soviet hell, it is him (or her) that I would have expected to speak for me. Today, since I did escape and have acquired a public voice, I felt that I had to speak for them—in the name of justice—even if few will hear me in the empty vastness of a decadent culture.

I do not know what effect my one voice can have in a matter of this kind. But I am addressing myself to the best within any man, Objectivist or not, who has preserved some sense of humanity, justice and compassion, and is still able to care and to give a damn.

There is only one form of protest open to the men of goodwill in the semi-free world: do not sanction the Soviet jailers of those young people—do not help them to pretend that they are the morally acceptable leaders of a civilized country. Do not patronize or support the evil pretense of the so-called “cultural exchanges” —any Soviet-government-sponsored scientists, professors, writers, artists, musicians, dancers (who are either vicious bootlickers or doomed, tortured victims). Do not patronize, support or deal with any Soviet supporters and apologists in this country: they are the guiltiest men of all. Speak out on any scale open to you, public or private, in protest and in defense of those young victims.

In a somewhat inadequate editorial (October 13, 1968), The New York Times said that the sentences of the young rebels “could have been—and probably would have been—much harsher had there not been such widespread admiration for these Soviet opponents of Soviet aggression, and so much world concern about their fate.”

If the protest of the men of goodwill were wide enough and sustained enough, it might possibly save the condemned.

And one can never tell in what way or form some feedback from such a protest might reach the lonely children in Red Square.

(January 1969)

The Age of Envy

A culture, like an individual, has a sense of life or, rather, the equivalent of a sense of life—an emotional atmosphere created by its dominant philosophy, by its view of man and of existence. This emotional atmosphere represents a culture’s dominant values and serves as the leitmotif of a given age, setting its trends and its style.

Thus Western civilization had an Age of Reason and an Age of Enlightenment. In those periods, the quest for reason and enlightenment was the dominant intellectual drive and created a corresponding emotional atmosphere that fostered these values.

Today, we live in the Age of Envy.

“Envy” is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.

Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves. Mankind has lived with it, has observed its manifestations and, to various extents, has been ravaged by it for countless centuries, yet has failed to grasp its meaning and to rebel against its exponents.

Today, that emotion is the leitmotif, the sense of life of our culture. It is all around us, we are drowning in it, it is almost explicitly confessed by its more brazen exponents—yet men continue to evade its existence and are peculiarly afraid to name it, as primitive people were once afraid to pronounce the name of the devil.

That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good.

This hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the good with which one does not agree. For instance, if a child resents some conventional type of obedient boy who is constantly held up to him as an ideal to emulate, this is not hatred of the good: the child does not regard that boy as good, and his resentment is the product of a clash between his values and those of his elders (though he is too young to grasp the issue in such terms). Similarly, if an adult does not regard altruism as good and resents the adulation bestowed upon some “humanitarian,” this is a clash between his values and those of others, not hatred of the good.

Hatred of the good for being the good means hatred of that which one regards as good by one’s own (conscious or subconscious) judgment. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable.

If a child wants to get good grades in school, but is unable or unwilling to achieve them and begins to hate the children who do, that is hatred of the good. If a man regards intelligence as a value, but is troubled by self-doubt and begins to hate the men he judges to be intelligent, that is hatred of the good.

The nature of the particular values a man chooses to hold is not the primary factor in this issue (although irrational values may contribute a great deal to the formation of that emotion). The primary factor and distinguishing characteristic is an emotional mechanism set in reverse: a response of hatred, not toward human vices, but toward human virtues.

To be exact, the emotional mechanism is not set in reverse, but is set one way: its exponents do not experience love for evil men; their emotional range is limited to hatred or indifference. It is impossible to experience love, which is a response to values, when one’s automatized response to values is hatred.

In any specific instance, this type of hatred is heavily enmeshed in rationalizations. The most common one is: “I don’t hate him for his intelligence, but for his conceit!” More often than not, if one asks the speaker to name the evidence of the victim’s conceit, he exhausts such generalities as: “He’s insolent ... he’s stubborn ... he’s selfish,” and ends up with some indeterminate accusation which amounts to: “He’s intelligent and he knows it.” Well, why shouldn’t he know it? Blank out. Should he hide it? Blank out. From whom should he hide it? The implicit, but never stated, answer is: “From people like me.”

Yet such haters accept and even seem to admire the spectacle of conceit put on for their benefit by a man who shows off, boasting about his own alleged virtues or achievements, blatantly confessing a lack of self-confidence. This, of course, is a clue to the nature of the hatred. The haters seem unable to differentiate conceptually between “conceit” and a deserved pride, yet they seem to know the difference “instinctively,” i.e., by means of their automatized sense of life.

Since very few men have fully consistent characters, it is often hard to tell, in a specific instance, whether a given man is hated for his virtues or for his actual flaws. In regard to one’s own feelings, only a rigorously conscientious habit of introspection can enable one to be certain of the nature and causes of one’s emotional responses. But introspection is the mental process most fiercely avoided by the haters, which permits them a virtually unlimited choice of rationalizations. In regard to judging the emotional responses of others, it is extremely difficult to tell their reasons in a specific case, particularly if it involves complex personal relationships. It is, therefore, in the broad, impersonal field of responses to strangers, to casual acquaintances, to public figures or to events that have no direct bearing on the haters’ own lives that one can observe the hatred of the good in a pure, unmistakable form.

Its clearest manifestation is the attitude of a person who characteristically resents someone’s success, happiness, achievement or good fortune—and experiences pleasure at someone’s failure, unhappiness or misfortune. This is pure, “nonvenal” hatred of the good for being the good: the hater has nothing to lose or gain in such instances, no practical value at stake, no existential motive, no knowledge except the fact that a human being has succeeded or failed. The expressions of this response are brief, casual, as a rule involuntary. But if you have seen it, you have seen the naked face of evil.

Do not confuse this response with that of a person who resents someone’s unearned success, or feels pleased by someone’s deserved failure. These responses are caused by a sense of justice, which is an entirely different phenomenon, and its emotional manifestations are different: in such cases, a person expresses indignation, not hatred—or relief, not malicious gloating.

Superficially, the motive of those who hate the good is taken to be envy. A dictionary definition of envy is: “l. a sense of discontent or jealousy with regard to another’s advantages, success, possessions, etc. 2. desire for an advantage possessed by another.” (The Random House Dictionary, 1968.) The same dictionary adds the following elucidation: “To envy is to feel resentful because someone else possesses or has achieved what one wishes oneself to possess or to have achieved.”

This covers a great many emotional responses, which come from different motives. In a certain sense, the second definition is the opposite of the first, and the more innocent of the two.

For example, if a poor man experiences a moment’s envy of another man’s wealth, the feeling may mean nothing more than a momentary concretization of his desire for wealth; the feeling is not directed against that particular rich person and is concerned with the wealth, not the person. The feeling, in effect, may amount to: “I wish I had an income (or a house, or a car, or an overcoat) like his.” The result of this feeling may be an added incentive for the man to improve his financial condition.

The feeling is less innocent, if it involves personal resentment and amounts to: “I want to put on a front, like this man.” The result is a second-hander who lives beyond his means, struggling to “keep up with the Joneses.”

The feeling is still less innocent, if it amounts to: “I want this man’s car (or overcoat, or diamond shirt studs, or industrial establishment).” The result is a criminal.

But these are still human beings, in various stages of immorality, compared to the inhuman object whose feeling is: “I hate this man because he is wealthy and I am not.”

Envy is part of this creature’s feeling, but only the superficial, semirespectable part; it is like the tip of an iceberg showing nothing worse than ice, but with the submerged part consisting of a compost of rotting living matter. The envy, in this case, is semirespectable because it seems to imply a desire for material possessions, which is a human being’s desire. But, deep down, the creature has no such desire: it does not want to be rich, it wants the human being to be poor.

This is particularly clear in the much more virulent cases of hatred, masked as envy, for those who possess personal values or virtues: hatred for a man (or a woman) because he (or she) is beautiful or intelligent or successful or honest or happy. In these cases, the creature has no desire and makes no effort to improve its appearance, to develop or to use its intelligence, to struggle for success, to practice honesty, to be happy (nothing can make it happy). It knows that the disfigurement or the mental collapse or the failure or the immorality or the misery of its victim would not endow it with his or her value. It does not desire the value: it desires the value destruction.

“They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence ...” (Atlas Shrugged.)

What endows such a creature with a quality of abysmal evil is the fact that it has an awareness of values and is able to recognize them in people. If it were merely amoral, it would be indifferent; it would be unable to distinguish virtues from flaws. But it does distinguish them—and the essential characteristic of its corruption is the fact that its mind’s recognition of a value is transmitted to its emotional mechanism as hatred, not as love, desire or admiration.

Consider the full meaning of this attitude. Values are that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Values are a necessity of man’s survival, and wider: of any living organism’s survival. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action, and the successful pursuit of values is a precondition of remaining alive. Since nature does not provide man with an automatic knowledge of the code of values he requires, there are differences in the codes which men accept and the goals they pursue. But consider the abstraction “value,” apart from the particular content of any given code, and ask yourself: What is the nature of a creature in which the sight of a value arouses hatred and the desire to destroy ? In the most profound sense of the term, such a creature is a killer, not a physical, but a metaphysical one—it is not an enemy of your values, but of all values, it is an enemy of anything that enables men to survive, it is an enemy of life as such and of everything living.

A community of values—of some sort of values—is a necessity of any successful relationship among living beings. If you were training an animal, you would not hurt it every time it obeyed you. If you were bringing up a child, you would not punish him whenever he acted properly. What relationship can you have with the hating creatures, and what element do they introduce into social relationships? If you struggle for existence and find that your success brings you, not approval and appreciation, but hatred, if you strive to be moral and find that your virtue brings you, not the love, but the hatred of your fellow-men, what becomes of your own benevolence? Will you be able to generate or to maintain a feeling of good will toward your fellow-men?

The greatest danger in this issue is men’s inability—or worse: unwillingness—fully to identify it.

Evil as the hating creatures are, there is something still more evil: those who try to appease them.

It is understandable that men might seek to hide their vices from the eyes of people whose judgment they respect. But there are men who hide their virtues from the eyes of monsters. There are men who apologize for their own achievements, deride their own values, debase their own character—for the sake of pleasing those they know to be stupid, corrupt, malicious, evil. An obsequious pandering to the vanity of some alleged superior, such as a king, for the sake of some practical advantage, is bad enough. But pandering to the vanity of one’s inferiors—inferior specifically in regard to the value involved—is so shameful an act of treason to one’s values that nothing can be left thereafter of the person who commits it, neither intellectually nor morally, and nothing ever is.

If men attempt to play up to those they admire, and fake virtues they do not possess, it is futile, but understandable, if not justifiable. But to fake vices, weaknesses, flaws, disabilities? To shrink one’s soul and stature? To play down- or write down, or speak down, or think down?

Observe just one social consequence of this policy: such appeasers do not hesitate to join some cause or other appealing for mercy; they never raise their voices in the name of justice.

Cowardice is so ignoble an inner state that men struggle to overcome it, in the face of real dangers. The appeaser chooses a state of cowardice where no danger exists. To live in fear is so unworthy a condition that men have died on barricades, defying the tyranny of the mighty. The appeaser chooses to live in chronic fear of the impotent. Men have died in torture chambers, on the stake, in concentration camps, in front of firing squads, rather than renounce their convictions. The appeaser renounces his under the pressure of a frown on any vacant face. Men have refused to sell their souls in exchange for fame, fortune, power, even their own lives. The appeaser does not sell his soul: he gives it away for free, getting nothing in return.

The appeaser’s usual rationalization is: “I don’t want to be disliked.” By whom? By people he dislikes, despises and condemns.

Let me give you some examples. An intellectual who was recruiting members for Mensa—an international society allegedly restricted to intelligent men, which selects members on the dubious basis of I.Q. tests—was quoted in an interview as follows: “Intelligence is not especially admired by people. Outside Mensa you had to be very careful not to win an argument and lose a friend. Inside Mensa we can be ourselves and that is a great relief.” (The New York Times, September 11, 1966.) A friend, therefore, is more important than the truth. What kind of friend? The kind that resents you for being right.

A professor, the head of a department in a large university, had a favorite graduate student who wanted to be a teacher. The professor had tested him as an instructor and regarded him as exceptionally intelligent. In a private conversation with the young man’s parents, the professor praised him highly and declared: “There is only one danger in his future: he is such a good teacher that the rest of the faculty will resent him.” When the young man got his Ph.D., the professor did not offer him a job, even though he had the power to do so.

The notion that an intelligent girl should hide her intelligence in order to be popular with men and find a husband, is widespread and well-known. Of what value would such a husband be to her? Blank out.

In an old movie dealing with college life, a boy asks a girl to help him get good grades by means of an actually criminal scheme (it involves the theft of a test from the professor’s office). When she refuses, the boy asks scornfully: “Are you some sort of moralist?” “Oh, no, no,” she answers hastily and apologetically, “it’s just my small-town upbringing, I guess.”

Do not confuse appeasement with tactfulness or generosity. Appeasement is not consideration for the feelings of others, it is consideration for and compliance with the unjust, irrational and evil feelings of others. It is a policy of exempting the emotions of others from moral judgment, and of willingness to sacrifice innocent, virtuous victims to the evil malice of such emotions.

Tactfulness is consideration extended only to rational feelings. A tactful man does not stress his success or happiness in the presence of those who have suffered failure, loss or unhappiness; not because he suspects them of envy, but because he realizes that the contrast can revive and sharpen their pain. He does not stress his virtues in anyone’s presence: he takes for granted that they are recognized. As a rule, a man of achievement does not flaunt his achievements, neither among equals nor inferiors nor superiors; he does not evaluate himself—or others—by a comparative standard. His attitude is not: “I am better than you,” but: “I am good.”

If, however, he encounters an envious hater who gets huffy, trying to ignore, deny or insult his achievements, he asserts them proudly. In answer to the hater’s stock question: “Who do you think you are?”—he tells him.

It is the pretentious mediocrity—the show-off, the boaster, the snooty posturer—who seeks, not virtue or value, but superiority. A comparative standard is his only guide, which means that he has no standards and that he has a vested interest in reducing others to inferiority. Decent people, properly, resent a show-off, but the haters and enviers do not: they recognize him as a soul mate.

Offensive boasting or self-abasing appeasement is a false alternative. As in all human relationships, the guidelines of proper conduct are: objectivity and justice. But this is not what men are taught or were taught in the past.

“Use your head—but don’t let anyone know it. Set your goals high—but don’t admit it. Be honest—but don’t uphold it. Be successful—but hide it. Be great—but act small. Be happy—but God help you if you are!” Such are the moral injunctions we gather from the cultural atmosphere in which we grow up—as men did in the past, throughout history.

The appeasement of evil—of an unknowable, undefinable, inexplicable evil—has been the undertow of mankind’s cultural stream all through the ages. In primitive cultures (and even in ancient Greece) the appeasement took the form of the belief that the gods resent human happiness or success, because these are the prerogatives of the gods to which men must not aspire. Hence the superstitious fear of acknowledging one’s good fortune—as, for instance, the ritual of parents wailing that their newborn son is puny, ugly, worthless, for fear that a demon would harm him if they admitted their happy pride in his health and looks. Observe the contradiction: Why attempt to deceive an omnipotent demon who would be able to judge the infant’s value for himself? The intention of the ritual, therefore, is not: “Don’t let him know that the infant is good,” but: “Don’t let him know that you know it and that you’re happy!”

Men create gods—and demons—in their own likeness; mystic fantasies, as a rule, are invented to explain some phenomenon for which men find no explanation. The notion of gods who are so malicious that they wish men to live in chronic misery, would not be conceived or believed unless men sensed all around them the presence of some inexplicable malevolence directed specifically at their personal happiness.

Are the haters of the good that numerous? No. The actual haters are a small, depraved minority in any age or culture. The spread and perpetuation of this evil are accomplished by those who profiteer on it.

The profiteers are men with a vested interest in mankind’s psychological devastation, who burrow their way into positions of moral-intellectual leadership. They provide the haters with unlimited means of rationalization, dissimulation, excuse and camouflage, including ways of passing vices off as virtues. They slander, confuse and disarm the victims. Their vested interest is power-lust. Their stock-in-trade is any system of thought or of belief aimed at keeping men small.

Observe the nature of some of mankind’s oldest legends.

Why were the men of Babel punished? Because they attempted to build a tower to the sky.

Why did Phaëthon perish? Because he attempted to drive the chariot of the sun.

Why was Icarus smashed? Because he attempted to fly.

Why was Arachne transformed into a spider? Because she challenged a goddess to a competition in the art of weaving—and won it.

“Do not aspire—do not venture- -do not rise—ambition is self-destruction,” drones this ancient chorus through the ages—through all the ages, changing its lyrics, but not its tune—all the way to the Hollywood movies in which the boy who goes to seek a career in the big city becomes a wealthy, but miserable scoundrel, while the small-town boy who stays put wins the girl next door, who wins over the glamorous temptress.

There is and was abundant evidence to show that the curse of an overwhelming majority of men is passivity, lethargy and fear, not ambition and audacity. But men’s well-being is not the motive of that chorus.

Toward the end of World War II, newspapers reported the following : when Russian troops moved west and occupied foreign towns, the Soviet authorities automatically executed any person who had a bank account of $100 or a high-school education; the rest of the inhabitants submitted. This is a physical dramatization of the spiritual policy of mankind’s moral-intellectual leaders: destroy the tops, the rest will give up and obey.

Just as a political dictator needs specially indoctrinated thugs to enforce his orders, so his intellectual road-pavers need them to maintain their power. Their thugs are the haters of the good; the special indoctrination is the morality of altruism.

It is obvious—historically, philosophically and psychologically—that altruism is an inexhaustible source of rationalizations for the most evil motives, the most inhuman actions, the most loathsome emotions. It is not difficult to grasp the meaning of the tenet that the good is an object of sacrifice—and to understand what a blanket damnation of anything living is represented by an undefined accusation of “selfishness.”

But here is a significant phenomenon to observe: the haters and enviers—who are the most vociferous shock troops of altruism—seem to be subconsciously impervious to the altruist criterion of the good. The touchy vanity of these haters—which flares up at any suggestion of their inferiority to a man of virtue—is not aroused by any saint or hero of altruism, whose moral superiority they profess to acknowledge. Nobody envies Albert Schweitzer. Whom do they envy? The man of intelligence, of ability, of achievement, of independence.

If anyone ever believed (or tried to believe) that the motive of altruism is compassion, that its goal is the relief of human suffering and the elimination of poverty, the state of today’s culture now deprives him of any foothold on self-deception. Today, altruism is running amuck, shedding its tattered rationalizations and displaying its soul.

Altruists are no longer concerned with material wealth, not even with its “redistribution,” only with its destruction—but even this is merely a means to an end. Their savage fury is aimed at the destruction of intelligence—of ability, ambition, thought, purpose, justice; the destruction of morality, any sort of morality; the destruction of values qua values.

The last fig leaf of academic pretentiousness is the tag used to disguise this movement: egalitarianism. It does not disguise, but reveals.

Egalitarianism means the belief in the equality of all men. If the word “equality” is to be taken in any serious or rational sense, the crusade for this belief is dated by about a century or more: the United States of America has made it an anachronism—by establishing a system based on the principle of individual rights. “Equality,” in a human context, is a political term: it means equality before the law, the equality of fundamental, inalienable rights which every man possesses by virtue of his birth as a human being, and which may not be infringed or abrogated by man-made institutions, such as titles of nobility or the division of men into castes established by law, with special privileges granted to some and denied to others. The rise of capitalism swept away all castes, including the institutions of aristocracy and of slavery or serfdom.

But this is not the meaning that the altruists ascribe to the word “equality.”

They turn the word into an anti-concept: they use it to mean, not political, but metaphysical equality—the equality of personal attributes and virtues, regardless of natural endowment or individual choice, performance and character. It is not man-made institutions, but nature, i.e., reality, that they propose to fight—by means of man-made institutions.

Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the “unfairness” of nature and of volition, and to establish universal equality in fact—in defiance of facts. Since the Law of Identity is impervious to human manipulation, it.is the Law of Causality that they struggle to abrogate. Since personal attributes or virtues cannot be “redistributed,” they seek to deprive men of their consequences—of the rewards, the benefits, the achievements created by personal attributes and virtues.

It is not equality before the law that they seek, but inequality: the establishment of an inverted social pyramid, with a new aristocracy on top-—the aristocracy of non- value.

Observe the nature of the various methods used to accomplish this goal.

Since equal pay for unequal performance is too obvious an injustice, the egalitarians solve the problem by forbidding unequal performance. (See the policy of many labor unions.)

Since some men are able to rise faster than others, the egalitarians forbid the concept of “merit” and substitute the concept of “seniority” as the basis of promotions. (See the state of modern railroads.)

Since the expropriation of wealth is a somewhat discredited policy, the egalitarians place limits on the use of wealth and keep shrinking them, thus making wealth inoperative. It is “unfair,” they cry, that only the rich can obtain the best medical care—or the best education—or the best housing—or any commodity in short supply, which should be rationed, not competed for—etc., etc. (See any newspaper editorial.)

Since some women are beautiful and others are not, the egalitarians are fighting to forbid beauty contests and television commercials using glamorous models. (See Women’s Lib.)

Since some students are more intelligent and study more conscientiously than others, the egalitarians abolish the system of grades based on the objective value of a student’s scholastic achievement, and substitute for it a system of grading “on a curve” based on a comparative standard: a set number of grades, ranging from A’s to failures, is given to each class, regardless of the students’ individual performances, with the “distribution” of grades calculated on the relative basis of the collective performance of the class as a whole. Thus a student may get an A or an F for the same work, according to whether he happens to be in a class of morons or of child prodigies. No better way could be devised to endow a young man with a vested interest in the inferiority of others and with fear and hatred of their superiority. (See the state of modern education.)

Observe the fact that all these methods do not provide the inferiors with any part of the virtues of their superiors, but merely frustrate and paralyze the virtues. What, then, is the common denominator and basic premise of these methods? Hatred of the good for being the good.

But most of these examples are merely the older and quieter manifestations of a premise which, once introduced into a culture, grows geometrically, pushing the haters forward and creating new haters where none had existed before. Look at today’s stampede.

Pressure-group warfare is an inexorable result of a mixed economy and follows the course of its philosophical progression: it starts with economic groups and leads to an explosion of anti-intellectual, anti-ideological gang warfare. Anything and everything may serve as a rallying point for a new pressure group today, provided it is someone’s weakness.

Weakness of any sort—intellectual, moral, financial or numerical—is today’s standard of value, criterion of rights and claim to privileges. The demand for an institutionalized inequality is voiced openly and belligerently, and the right to a double standard is proclaimed self-righteously.

Since numerical superiority has a certain value, at least in practical politics, the same collectivists who once upheld the vicious doctrine of unlimited majority rule, now deny to the majority—in any given issue- the special privileges they grant to any group that claims to be a minority.

Racism is an evil and primitive form of collectivism. Today, racism is regarded as a crime if practiced by a majority—but as an inalienable right if practiced by a minority. The notion that one’s culture is superior to all others solely because it represents the traditions of one’s ancestors, is regarded as chauvinism if claimed by a majority—but as “ethnic” pride if claimed by a minority. Resistance to change and progress is regarded as reactionary if demonstrated by a majority—but retrogression to a Balkan village, to an Indian tepee or to the jungle is hailed if demonstrated by a minority.

“Tolerance” and “understanding” are regarded as unilateral virtues. In relation to any given minority, we are told, it is the duty of all others, i.e., of the majority, to tolerate and understand the minority’s values and customs——while the minority proclaims that its soul is beyond the outsiders’ comprehension, that no common ties or bridges exist, that it does not propose to grasp one syllable of the majority’s values, customs or culture, and will continue hurling racist epithets (or worse) at the majority’s faces.

Nobody can pretend any longer that the goal of such policies is the elimination of racism—particularly when one observes that the real victims are the better members of these privileged minorities. The self-respecting small home owners and shop owners are the unprotected and undefended victims of every race riot. The minority’s members are expected by their egalitarian leaders to remain a passive herd crying for help (which is a precondition of the power to control a pressure group). Those who ignore the threats and struggle to rise through individual effort and achievement are denounced as traitors. Traitors—to what? To a physiological (racial) collective—to the incompetence or unwillingness or lethargy or malingering of others. If the exceptional men are black, they are attacked as “Uncle Toms.” But the status of privileged minority is not confined to the blacks, it extends to all racial minorities—on one condition—and some of the most offensive herds are white.

That condition—the deeper issue involved, of greater importance to the egalitarians than mere numerical weakness—is the primitive nature of a given minority’s traditions, i.e., its cultural weakness.

It is primitive cultures that we are asked to study, to appreciate and to respect—any sort of culture except our own. A piece of pottery copied from generation to generation is held up to us as an achievement—a plastic cup is not. A bearskin is an achievement—synthetic fiber is not. An oxcart is an achievement—an airplane is not. A potion of herbs and snake oil is an achievement—open-heart surgery is not. Stonehenge is an achievement—the Empire State Building is not. Black magic is an achievement—Aristotle’s Organon is not. And if there is a more repulsive spectacle than a television broadcast presenting, as news, any two-bit group of pretentious, self-conscious adolescents, out of old vaudeville, performing some Slavonic folk dance on a street corner, in the shadow of New York’s skyscrapers—I have not discovered it yet.

Why is Western civilization admonished to admire primitive cultures? Because they are not admirable. Why is a primitive man exhorted to ignore Western achievements? Because they are. Why is the self-expression of a retarded adolescent to be nurtured and acclaimed? Because he has nothing to express. Why is the self-expression of a genius to be impeded and ignored? Because he has.

“It is to the Mohammedans, the Buddhists, and the cannibals—to the underdeveloped, the undeveloped, and the not-to-be-developed cultures—that the Capitalist United States of America is asked to apologize for her skyscrapers, her automobiles, her plumbing, and her smiling, confident, untortured, un-skinned-alive, un-eaten young men! ... It is not for her flaws that the United States of America is hated, but for her virtues—not for her weaknesses, but for her achievements—not for her failures, but for her success—her magnificent, shining, life-giving success.” (“The Obliteration of Capitalism,” The Objectivist Newsletter, October 1965.)

If there were such a thing as a passion for equality (not equality de jure, but de facto), it would be obvious to its exponents that there are only two ways to achieve it: either by raising all men to the mountaintop—or by razing the mountains. The first method is impossible because it is the faculty of volition that determines a man’s stature and actions; but the nearest approach to it was demonstrated by the United States and capitalism, which protected the freedom, the rewards and the incentives for every individual’s achievement, each to the extent of his ability and ambition, thus raising the intellectual, moral and economic state of the whole society. The second method is impossible because, if mankind were leveled down to the common denominator of its least competent members, it would not be able to survive (and its best would not choose to survive on such terms). Yet it is the second method that the altruist-egalitarians are pursuing. The greater the evidence of their policy’s consequences, i.e., the greater the spread of misery, of injustice, of vicious inequality throughout the world, the more frantic their pursuit—which is one demonstration of the fact that there is no such thing as a benevolent passion for equality and that the claim to it is only a rationalization to cover a passionate hatred of the good for being the good.

To understand the meaning and motives of egalitarianism, project it into the field of medicine. Suppose a doctor is called to help a man with a broken leg and, instead of setting it, proceeds to break the legs of ten other men, explaining that this would make the patient feel better; when all these men become crippled for life, the doctor advocates the passage of a law compelling everyone to walk on crutches—in order to make the cripples feel better and equalize the “unfairness” of nature.

If this is unspeakable, how does it acquire an aura of morality—or even the benefit of a moral doubt—when practiced in regard to man’s mind? Yet this kind of motivation—hatred of the healthy for being healthy, i.e., of the good for being the good—is the ruling spirit of today’s culture.

Observe some random symptoms cracking open all around us, like the skin lesions of a hidden disease.

Egalitarian educators defeated a plan to establish a Montessori day-care center for disadvantaged children, because they “feared that the Montessori-trained disadvantaged children would enter public kindergarten or the first grade with an advantage over the other children.” What was these educators’ motive: the desire to lift the children of the poor—or to bring everyone down?

A noted economist proposed the establishment of a tax on personal ability, suggesting that “a modest first step might be a special tax on persons with high academic scores.” What would this do to the talented, purposeful young people who are barely able to make a living while working their way through school? Would they be able to pay a tax for the privilege of using their intelligence ? Who—rich or poor—would want to use his intelligence in such conditions? Is it love that would condemn the best of men to a lifetime of hiding their intelligence as a guilty secret?

Was compassion the motive of the noted social worker who, years ago, wrote about her visit to Soviet Russia: “It was wonderful to see that everybody in the streets was equally shabby”? Is compassion the motive of those who denounce the United States for the existence of slums in cities—yet keep silent about or sympathize with the Soviet system, which has turned an entire country into a gigantic slum, with the exception of a small elite of rulers on top, and a vast, bloody sewer of forced labor camps below?

Ask yourself what were the motives in the following example. A professor asked his class which of two projected systems they would prefer: a system of unequal salaries—or a system paying everyone the same salary, but which would be lower than the lowest one paid under the unequal system. With the exception of one student, the entire class voted for the system of equal salaries (which was also the professor’s preference).

In politics, observe the sanctimonious smugness of any ward heeler who recites the ritualistic formula about defending the interests of “the poor, the black and the young.” Why these? Because they are (presumably) weak. Who are the other kinds of citizens and what about their interests? Blank out. The implication he conveys is not that the opposite kinds are “the rich, the white and the old” (the “hard-hats” are not rich, the “Uncle Toms” are black, and the old are the heroes of Medicare). The implication is that there is only one kind of opposite, regardless of age, sex, creed, color or economic status: the competent.

At the turn of the century, when the notions of socialism were gaining adherents, it was believed that the competent should be enslaved in order to raise the rest of mankind to their level and equalize material benefits. Even though such a belief is evil, its adherents were better than today’s egalitarians—as a man who kills for the sake of robbery is better than a man who kills for kicks. Today, socialism’s record has demonstrated the impracticality of enslaving man’s mind—and has brought deeply buried motives out into the open. Today’s advocates of “equality” do not pretend that they wish to improve the lot of the poor; they do not wish to exploit the competent, but to destroy them.

If anyone doubted the possibility of such motives, the ecological crusade should remove all doubts.

When men’s greatest benefactor, technology, is denounced as an enemy of mankind—when the U.S. is damned, not for the alleged exploitation of the masses, but explicitly for their material prosperity—when the villain is no longer the Wall Street tycoon, but the American worker—when his crime is held to be his pay-check, and his greed consists in owning a television set—when the current pejorative is not “the rich,” but “the middle class” (which means the best, the most competent, the most ambitious, the most productive group in any society, the group of self-made men)—when the plight of the poor is held to be, not poverty, but relative poverty (i.e., envy)—when the great emancipator, the automobile, is attacked as a public menace, and highways are decried as a violation of the wilderness—when bleary-eyed, limp-limbed young hobos of both sexes chant about the evil of labor-saving devices, and demand that human life be devoted to the grubby hand-planting of truck gardens, and to garbage disposal—when alleged scientists stretch, fake or suppress scientific evidence in order to panic the ignorant about the interplanetary perils augured by some such omen as the presence of mercury in tuna fish—when their leading philosopher proclaims that work is an outdated prejudice, that fornication should replace ambition, and that mankind’s standard of living should be brought down—when sundry hordes block the construction of electric generators and are about to plunge New York City into the catastrophe of an overloaded power system’s failure—it is time to grasp that we are not dealing with man-lovers, but with killers.

A cultural movement often produces caricatures of itself that emphasize its essence. The hippies are one such caricature. These ecological crusaders—who would pollute any stream by stepping into it—are the physical embodiments of the spirit of today’s culture. Much more can be said about their motives, but for the moment observe the intention of the physical appearance they choose to assume. The purpose of flaunting deliberate ugliness and bodily dirt is to offend others (while simultaneously playing for pity)—to defy, to affront, to bait those who hold values, any values.

But the hippies were not enough. They were surpassed by the caricature to end all caricatures: Women’s Lib.

Just as the egalitarians ride on the historical prestige of those who fought for political equality, and struggle to achieve the opposite—so their special sorority, Women’s Lib, rides on the historical prestige of women who fought for individual rights against government power, and struggles to get special privileges by means of government power.

Screaming that it is out to fight prejudice against women, this movement is providing evidence on a grand public scale—on any street corner and television screen—to support the worst prejudices of the bitterest misogynist.

As a group, American women are the most privileged females on earth: they control the wealth of the United States—through inheritance from fathers and husbands who work themselves into an early grave, struggling to provide every comfort and luxury for the bridge-playing, cocktail-party-chasing cohorts, who give them very little in return. Women’s Lib proclaims that they should give still less, and exhorts its members to refuse to cook their husbands’ meals—with its placards commanding: “Starve a rat today!” (Where would the cat’s food come from, after the rat is starved? Blank out.)

The notion that a woman’s place is in the home—the Kinder-Küche-Kirche axis—is an ancient, primitive evil, supported and perpetuated by women as much as, or more than, by men. The aggressive, embittered, self-righteous and envious housewife is the greatest enemy of the career woman. Women’s Lib pounces upon this aggressiveness, bitterness, self-righteousness, envy—and directs it toward men. (It gives the lie, however, to one masculine prejudice: women are thought to be catty, but no cat and very few men could experience the degree of malicious hostility that these women are now displaying.)

There is no place on earth where so many opportunities are open to career women as in the United States, or where so many women have achieved successful careers. Women’s Lib proclaims that success should not have to be achieved, but should be guaranteed as a right. Women, it claims, should be pushed by law into any job, club, saloon or executive position they choose—and let the employer prove in court that he failed to promote a woman because she is a slob and not because she is a woman.

There are men who fear and resent intelligent, ambitious women. Women’s Lib proposes to eliminate such feelings by asserting that intelligence and ability do not matter, only gender does.

Some men believe that women are irrational, illogical, incompetent, emotion-driven and unreliable. Women’s Lib sets out to disprove it by the spectacle of sloppy, bedraggled, unfocused females stomping down the streets and chanting brief slogans, over and over again, with the stuporous monotony of a jungle ritual and the sulkiness of a badly spoiled child.

Denouncing masculine oppression, Women’s Lib screams protests against the policy of regarding women as “sex objects”—through speakers who, too obviously, are in no such danger.

Proclaiming women’s independence from and equality with men, Women’s Lib demands liberation from the consequences of whatever sex life a woman might choose, such consequences to be borne by others: it demands free abortions and free day-nurseries. To be paid for - by whom? By men.

The sex views professed by Women’s Lib are so hideous that they cannot be discussed—at least, not by me. To regard man as an enemy - to regard woman as a combination matriarch and stevedore—to surpass the futile sordidness of a class war by instituting a sex war—to drag sex into politics and around the floor of smoke-filled back rooms, as a tool of the pressure-group jockeying for power—to proclaim spiritual sisterhood with lesbians, and to swear eternal hostility to men—is so repulsive a set of premises from so loathsome a sense of life that an accurate commentary would require the kind of language I do not like to see in print.

(I regard myself as surpassed by Women’s Lib in one respect: I did not know that it was possible to blow up the character of Comrade Sonia to such gigantic proportions.)

Is there something worse than the women of the Lib movement? Yes. The men who support it. The fact that there are such men is a clue to that grotesque phenomenon.

Every other pressure group has some semi-plausible complaint or pretense at a complaint, as an excuse for existing. Women’s Lib has none. But it has a common denominator with the others, the indispensable element of a modern pressure group: a claim based on weakness. It is because men are metaphysically the dominant sex and are regarded (though for the wrong reasons) as the stronger that a thing such as Women’s Lib could gain plausibility and sympathy among today’s intellectuals. It represents a rebellion against masculine strength, against strength as such, by those who neither attempt nor intend to develop it—and thus it is the clearest giveaway of what all the other rebellions are after.

To the credit of the majority of American women, the Lib movement did not go over too well. But neither did the college activists nor the hippies nor the nature-lovers. Yet these are the loudest voices we hear in public and these are the snarling figures we see on television screens, displaying their sores and brandishing their fists. These are the commandos of the haters’ army, who crawl out of the sewer of centuries and shake themselves in public, splattering muck over the passers-by, over the streets, the plate-glass windows and the clean white sheets of newspapers, where the drippings are scrambled into a long, steady whine that strives to induce guilt and to receive “compassion” in return.

The passers-by are the rest of us, who have to live, breathe and work in this atmosphere.

No, the majority of people are not haters of the good. The majority are disgusted by all those pathological manifestations. But a chronic experience of disgust in looking at the state of one’s society is not conducive to respect, mutual confidence or good will among men. A chronic spectacle of grotesque posturing, unintelligible proclamations, incomprehensible demands, inexplicable contradictions, sordid ugliness, unopposed brutality, cynical injustice—the spectacle of aggressive malice being answered by maudlin, sentimental appeasement—will erode the morale and the morality of all but the most exceptional men.

The process of erosion starts with bewilderment and goes on to discouragement, to frustration, to bitterness, to fear, inwardly to withdrawal into a fog of subjectivity, outwardly to mistrust of all men—then to the gradual paralysis of the quest for values, to hopelessness, and to a blind hatred of everything and everyone, resembling the behavior of the actual haters who manipulated it all.

The manipulators are the intellectuals, i.e., those who disseminate ideas and whose professional work lies in the field of the humanities. The majority of people, guided by nothing but common sense and naive, unidentified feelings, are still groping blindly for the guidance of reason. They do not know that their guides, the intellectuals, have long since abandoned reason in favor of feelings which they, the victims, can neither grasp nor believe. The clearest example of the psychological abyss between the people and the intellectuals was their respective reactions to Apollo 11.

The intellectuals themselves are part-victims, part-killers. Who, then, are the killers? The small—frighteningly small—minority who, by the grace of default, have monopolized the field of philosophy and, by the grace of Immanuel Kant, have dedicated it to the propagation of hatred of the good for being the good.

But this type of hatred is ancient. Modem philosophy is merely its munitions-maker and rationalizer, not its cause. What is the cause? The answer lies in the nature of man’s consciousness.

Man cannot deal with reality on the merely perceptual level of awareness; his survival requires a conceptual method of mental functioning—but the conceptual level of awareness is volitional. Man may choose to function conceptually or not. Most men stumble through the transition from the predominantly perceptual functioning of childhood to the conceptual functioning of adulthood with various degrees of success, and settle on some precarious mixture of both methods. The hater of the good is the man who did not make this transition. He is a case of arrested psycho-epistemological development.

The hater’s mental functioning remains on the level of childhood. Nothing is fully real to him except the concrete, the perceptually given, i.e., the immediate moment without past or future. He has learned to speak, but has never grasped the process of conceptualization. Concepts, to him, are merely some sort of code signals employed by other people for some inexplicable reason, signals that have no relation to reality or to himself. He treats concepts as if they were percepts, and their meaning changes with any change of circumstances. Whatever he learns or happens to retain is treated, in his mind, as if it had always been there, as if it were an item of direct awareness, with no memory of how he acquired it—as a random store of unprocessed material that comes and goes at the mercy of chance.

This is the crucial difference between his mentality and that of a child: a normal child is intensely active in seeking knowledge. The hater stands still; he does not seek knowledge—he “exposes himself” to “experience,” hoping, in effect, that it will push something into his mind; if nothing happens, he feels with self-righteous rancor that there is nothing he can do about it. Mental action, i.e., mental effort—any sort of processing, identifying, organizing, integrating, critical evaluation or control of his mental content—is an alien realm which he spends his twisted lifetime struggling to escape. His is as stagnant a mentality as a human being can sustain on the edge of the borderline separating passivity from psychosis.

A mind that seeks to escape effort and to function automatically, is left at the mercy of the inner phenomenon over which it has no direct control: emotions. Psycho-epistemologically (any conscious assertions to the contrary notwithstanding), a hater regards his emotions as irreducible and irresistible, as a power he cannot question or disobey. But emotions come from automatized value-judgments, which come from abstract, metaphysical premises. The hater has no lasting value-judgments, only the random urges of a given moment. His emotions, therefore, are not great passions to which he sacrifices his intellect, they are not overpowering demons, but smutty little imps, transient, superficial and incredibly banal. He is moved, not by desires, but by whims.

How does a human being descend to such a state? There are different psychological reasons, but—in pattern—the process of self-stultification is initiated by the child who lies too often and gets away with it. In his early, formative years, when he needs to learn the mental processes required to grasp the great unknown surrounding him, reality, he learns the opposite. He learns, in effect, that he can get whatever he wants not by observing facts, but by inventing them and by cheating, begging, threatening (throwing tantrums), i.e., by manipulating the adults. He concludes implicitly that reality is his enemy, since he has to fake it—to lie—in order to obtain what he wants, that the truth would defeat him and that he’d better not be concerned with it. Reality does not obey him, it frustrates his wishes, it is impervious to his feelings, it does not respond to him as the adults do; but, he feels, it is a negligible enemy, since he has the power to defeat it by means of nothing but his own imagination, which commands the mysteriously omnipotent adults who can do what he is unable to do: circumvent reality somehow and satisfy his whims.

Gradually, these subconscious conclusions are automatized in his mind, in the form of a habitual, ambivalent feeling: a sneaky sense of triumph—and a sense of inferiority, since he is helpless when left on his own. He counteracts it by telling himself that he is superior, since he can deceive anyone; and, seeking reassurance, he multiplies the practice of deception. Wordlessly, as an implicit premise, he acquires the belief that his means of survival is his ability to manipulate others. At a certain stage of his development, he acquires the only authentic and permanent emotion he will ever be able to experience: fear.

As he grows up, the fear grows proportionately. He becomes aware of his impotence in the face of a reality as unknown to him as it was in his childhood, only now it is a dark, menacing, demanding unknown that confronts him with problems he cannot handle (but others, somehow, can). He is able to grasp the given, the immediately present, but that is not enough: he is unable to integrate it to anything. He is trapped between two gaping black holes he has never learned to consider: yesterday and tomorrow. He has no way of knowing what (deserved) dangers will spring at him suddenly from behind or are lying in wait for him ahead (he senses only that they are. deserved). He senses that there is something wrong with him, with his mind, some terrible defect which must be hidden from everyone, above all from himself, at any price. He is torn by the conflict of two contradictory desires which he dares not identify: the retarded child’s desire to be led, protected, told what to do—and the manipulator’s desire to seek reassurance by reasserting his power of command over others.

At this stage, two different roads are open to such persons. Most of them seek the safety of stagnation and vanish into some venomous obscurity where - as slatternly housewives or incompetent clerks—they contribute to the misery of anyone they deal with, curse existence, damn mankind, and chortle with glee when they hear of someone’s failure or misfortune.

But those of a more ambitious and pretentious kind take a different road. A man of this type decides to brazen it out—and cashes in on his childhood scorn of conceptualization. Language, to him, is merely some arbitrary code of signals which he can manipulate without having to confront reality. It was by means of language that he used to control others—it is by means of language that he will now attempt to control them. Such, in pattern, is the birth of the intellectual who believes that ideas are tools of deception.

Psychologists have observed a phenomenon called “the idiot-savant,” a man who has the mentality of a moron, but, for some as yet undiscovered reason, is able to perform a prodigy’s feats of arithmetical calculation. The hater of the good becomes a similar phenomenon: “the idiot-philosopher,” a man who is unable to grasp the relation of ideas to reality, but devotes his life to the manufacture, propagation and manipulation of ideas—as a means of sustaining his pseudo-self-esteem.

The ideas of such philosophers (and of their followers) are singularly, startlingly unrelated to reality—like a structure of playing cards made of fog, to be dissolved by the breath of a single fact. Whatever their coiling complexity and variations, these ideas have a single, immutable goal: to dig an abyss between man’s mind and reality, and thus to invalidate reality’s agent in human affairs, man’s reason—and a single method: the playing on human weaknesses, doubts and fears, as the fledgling hater played on them in his childhood.

On the basis of his works, I offer Immanuel Kant in evidence, as the archetype of this species: a system as consistently evil as his cannot be constructed innocently.

If one wonders about the paradox presented by this type of intellectual a man who seeks a shortcut to escape mental effort, then devotes his life to excruciating mental contortions—one may observe a similar paradox on the material level of existence. It is the case of a man who believes that “only suckers work” and seeks a shortcut to wealth by becoming a bank robber, then spends his life in and out of jails, devoting his brief snatches of freedom to the excruciating work of devising ingenious schemes for his next bank robbery.

The explanation lies in the fact that the mental contexts required to produce wealth or to stage a robbery are different, and so are the mental processes involved. The production of wealth requires the personal responsibility of dealing with reality; robbery requires only the outwitting of a few guards or policemen. The formulation of philosophical ideas requires the personal responsibility of observing, judging and integrating the facts of reality on an enormous scale; the faking of ideas requires only the outwitting of careless, frightened or ignorant men. Both the bank robber and the “idiot-philosopher” are psychological parasites. The basic cause in both cases is the same: a mental development arrested by a concrete-bound quest for the unearned. The basic motivation is the same: an overwhelming terror of reality and the desire to escape it.

Man’s need of self-esteem is the hater’s nemesis. Self-esteem is reliance on one’s power to think. It cannot be replaced by one’s power to deceive. The self-confidence of a scientist and the self-confidence of a con man are not interchangeable states, and do not come from the same psychological universe. The success of a man who deals with reality augments his self-confidence. The success of a con man augments his panic.

The intellectual con man has only one defense against panic: the momentary relief he finds by succeeding at further and further frauds. To preserve his illusion of superiority becomes his overriding obsession. Superiority—in what? He does not know. He does not function conceptually. He judges people, events and actions “instinctively,” i.e., not by what they are, but by what they make him feel. Putting something over on people makes him feel superior—he has long since forgotten (and has never fully known) why.

He has developed a special kind of “instinct” for appraising people: he can “smell” the presence of weaknesses in people, of pretentiousness, uncertainty, self-doubt and fear—particularly fear (not fear of him, but of their common enemy: reality). Such people make him feel like “a big shot,” and his act is successful among them. But when he meets the better type of man, he goes to pieces: what he feels is terror. It is by means of his own terror that he recognizes authentic self-confidence.

The man of authentic self-confidence is the man who relies on the judgment of his own mind. Such a man is not malleable; he may be mistaken, he may be fooled in a given instance, but he is inflexible in regard to the absolutism of reality, i.e., in seeking and demanding truth. The manipulator feels impotent and in mortal danger; his terror of the man is not personal, but metaphysical: he feels stripped of his means of survival.

There is only one source of authentic self-confidence: reason. Hence the intellectual con man’s impassioned hatred of reason and of all its manifestations and consequences: of intelligence, of certainty, of ambition, of success, of achievement, of virtue, of happiness, of pride. All these are phenomena from a universe that would destroy him. Like a creature from the ooze at the bottom of the ocean, he senses a breath of air, which he cannot breathe.

Such is the cause and such is the pattern of development whose end product is hatred of the good for being the good.

At this final stage, moved by nothing but his feelings, the hater cannot tell what makes him act, he is aware only of the hatred and of an overwhelming compulsion to destroy. He does not know what long-since-forgotten whims he is paying for now, he does not know what goal he is trying to achieve—he has no goals, no desires, no whims any longer, his quest for pleasure has petered out—he has nothing to gain or to seek, his hatred is aimless and wholly nonvenal, all he knows is that he must destroy—destroy the bright, the sparkling, the smiling, the clean, destroy “the light bulb look” on a child’s face—destroy, in order to preserve in the universe the possibility that some potential whim will succeed, even when he has no whim in sight and none to pursue any longer.

To explain the nature of his feeling, he snatches rationalizations at random, as he had snatched them all his life. “This man,” he cries, “is arrogant and selfish! ... He defies the gods or the will of God! ... He is intransigent, intractable, inflexible! ... He defies the will of the people! He endangers the common good! He is a threat to his fellow-men, whom he robs, despoils and exploits! ... He is cold, unfeeling, unloving! ... He is immoral: he does not forgive! ... He has invented morality to make us feel guilty! ... He is the cause of all the misery on earth! ... We are poor, because he’s rich ... we are weak, because he’s strong ... we suffer, because he’s happy ... We couldn’t help it, couldn’t help it, couldn’t help it! No one can blame us, all men are equal! Who does he think he is?” The frenzy deflects the knowledge of the answer: he is a man.

The desire to escape that answer is the motive that attracts so many haters to the intellectual professions today—as they were attracted to philosophy or to its primitive precursor, religion, through all the ages. There have always been men of arrested mental development who, dreading reality, found psychological protection in the art of incapacitating the minds of others.

It takes many years for a man (and many, many centuries for mankind) to grasp the fact that, in order to live, man needs a comprehensive view of existence, which he relies on, consciously or not. But the formulation of such a view is the most difficult of human endeavors—and (with a few exceptions, to whom mankind owes its lives) rats rushed in where lions feared to tread. While other men were busy struggling to live, the haters were busy undercutting their means of survival—in the primitive jungle, in ancient Greece or in the United States of America.

Today, while America’s best minds go into the physical professions—where reality is harder (but not impossible) to fake—the realm of philosophy, abandoned like a vacant lot, has become overgrown with Kantian weeds and overrun with Kantian squatters. Weeds, if unchecked, will grow faster than other plants and will consume the nourishment of flowers, of trees, of orchards, of farms, then will sprout through the cracks of the cement at the foundation of impregnable skyscrapers which is the spectacle we are seeing today.

The haters are in control of our culture and in the open. They have dropped the pretense of such covers as God, The People, The Future or even Love. They proclaim pure hatred of the good—of man, of reason, of values, of existence—in classrooms, in drawing rooms, in public halls, in theaters, in books, in paintings, in the streets, by land, by sea, by air and through the gutter.

Their G.H.Q. is in the field of education, which they control. “Progressive” schools are manufacturing haters wholesale. The hordes they have produced are roaming the land, proclaiming the rule of the “Now” which is the confession of an arrested, perceptual mentality that cannot project the future, cannot hold a theory, a purpose or a value, can do nothing but hate and destroy. This is the invasion of Western civilization by psycho-epistemological barbarians. They howl and brandish the tag of “Liberation.” According to their philosophical chieftain, what they demand is liberation from reality. It is as simple and open as that.

What does this do to normal men? At a time when they need it most, they are left without a remnant of philosophical guidance. If they struggle to make sense out of what they see, they encounter so much irrationality, such a chaos of inexplicable evil, that they begin to believe that reality in fact is the nightmare constructed by the hater’s imagination. Some of them give up, some join the hordes, some take the blame for their failure to understand, some continue to struggle day by day with no thought of past or future. One cannot fight when one does not understand—and when the voices of craven appeasers keep striving to whitewash the nature of the enemy.

As long as men believe that they are facing “misguided idealists” —or “rebellious youth”—or “a counter-culture”—or “a new morality”—or the transition period of a changing world, or an irresistible historical process, or even an invincibly powerful monster—confusion undercuts their will to resist, and intellectual self-defense is impossible. It is imperative to grasp that this is not the time for temporizing, compromising and self-deception. It is necessary fully to understand the nature of the enemy and his mentality.

There is no giant behind the devastation of the world—only a shriveled creature with the wizened face of a child who is out to blow up the kitchen because he cannot steal his cookies and eat them, too. “Take a look at [him] now, when you face your last choice—and if you choose to perish, do so with full knowledge of how cheaply how small an enemy has claimed your life.” (Atlas Shrugged. )

What is the weapon one needs to fight such an enemy? For once, it is 1 who will say that love is the answer—love in the actual meaning of the word, which is the opposite of the meaning they give it- love as a response to values, love of the good for being the good. If you hold on to the vision of any value you love—your mind, your work, your wife or husband, or your child—and remember that that is what the enemy is after, your shudder of rebellion will give you the moral fire, the courage and the intransigence needed in this battle. What fuel can support one’s fire? Love for man at his highest potential.

(July-August 1971)

THE POLITICS

The Left: Old and New

If you happened to see Sign of the Pagan, a very bad movie recently shown on television, dealing with Attila’s invasion of Europe, you may have noticed that Attila kept an astrologer by his side, as his only adviser, and consulted him before undertaking every bloody new campaign. You may have felt a touch of superiority (which Western man took fifteen centuries to earn), best expressed by the sentence: “It can’t happen now.” You may have regarded the reliance on astrology as crude, primitive or amusing, but quite appropriate to Attila; besides, he had nothing but clubs and swords to devastate the world with.

Would you find it amusing if you saw the same Attila balancing a nuclear bomb in the palm of his hand and consulting the astrologer on whether to toss it?

Well, you can see it or, rather, you can hear it being announced in advance and welcomed, not in the scriptures of the Huns, but in a magazine regarded as safely reputable, read by respectable commuters of the somewhat conservative type—not in A.D. 450, but in Time magazine on December 19, 1969.

A piece entitled “The Next Decade: A Search for Goals” begins by invoking the sanction of astrology, as justification for its prophecies about the coming decade. The present motion of the planet Neptune, it seems, is a “sign of idealism and spiritual values,” which will work “a profound change” in people’s ways of thinking and acting.

“Just possibly,” declares—no, not Attila’s adviser, but Time magazine, “the astrologers may be proved right.... In the long run, this decade and the next may well constitute an historical era of transition, like that which followed the Middle Ages and preceded the Renaissance.

“The veneration of rationality was the special myth of modern man. The world view created by the enthronement of reason included a universal belief in individualism and competition; now that myth is dying. Faith in science and technology has given way to fear of their consequences ... The cultural revolution of the ‘60s that emphasized Dionysian rather than Apollonian virtues will continue into the ’70s.”

Nothing but astrology could justify a statement of this kind. It is embarrassing to have to comment on it. But for the benefit of the very young, I will point out a few things that should be almost self-evident.

The Middle Ages were an era of mysticism, ruled by blind faith and blind obedience to the dogma that faith is superior to reason. The Renaissance was specifically the rebirth of reason, the liberation of man’s mind, the triumph of rationality over mysticism—a faltering, incomplete, but impassioned triumph that led to the birth of science, of individualism, of freedom.

I have no way of knowing whether Time’s statement came from ignorance or worse. I know only that when I advocate the supremacy of reason, I do not equate it with a historical period exemplifying its opposite. But this is an Apollonian, not a Dionysian, virtue.

There is one element of truth in that quotation and it is interesting to find such an admission in such a context: the fact that reason leads to (and is the foundation of) individualism and competition, i.e., capitalism. Capitalism’s enemies know it. Its alleged friends are still twisting themselves into double-jointed pretzels in the struggle to evade that knowledge.

Let me also remind you that reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses—i.e., that reason is man’s only means of grasping reality and of acquiring knowledge—and, therefore, the rejection of reason means that men should act regardless of and/or in contradiction to the facts of reality.

One of these facts is the existence of nuclear weapons. If men discard “the myth of rationality,” by what means will they decide whether to use these weapons, when, where and against whom? They will have nothing but their Dionysian “instincts” and their astrologers to guide them. Attila was a piker compared to a prospect of this kind.

This does not seem to deter the Time prophet, who speaks of the fear engendered by the “consequences” of “science and technology.” Nuclear weapons are his ideological brothers’ main reproach against science and their main instrument of intellectual terrorization. But if this, in fact, were their fear and their motive, they would have become passionate advocates of reason overnight: they would have known that a hydrogen bomb cannot descend on a city of its own volition—and they would have known that for this reason, among many others, mankind cannot afford irrationality any longer. But that is not their fear or their motive.

“It is possible,” Time goes on, “that the hippie may have pioneered—in spirit, at least—the way men will live and think [?] in the next decade.... Individualism may continue to wane as men seek personal identity in group identity.... Marshall McLuhan predicts confidently: ‘We are going through a tribal cycle once again, but this time we are wide awake.’ ”

How one manages to be “wide awake” when one has rejected reason, and how one can describe as “wide awake” the specifically out-of-focus, zombie-like state of trance characteristic of and necessitated by a tribal mentality, Time does not explain. It is only Apollonians, not Dionysians, that require explanations.

“While industrial technology will provide a dazzling variety of innovative gadgets, from phonovision to computers for the home, possession will be less of an ideal. When goods are needed, says Buckminster Fuller [a bright young man of 75], more and more will be rented rather than bought. ‘Ownership,’ says Fuller, ‘is obsolete.’ ”

Another youthful authority, the Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, predicted, according to Time, that “the U.S. will become a ‘late sensate society’ ... By this he meant the glorification of pleasure over Puritan duty, of leisure over work.” Mr. Sorokin, a thoroughly Russian mystic-altruist, was born in 1889. The youngest of these rebels and trend-setters for youth is Marshall McLuhan, aged 59. I suppose when one writes under the aegis of astrology, one cannot be too choosy about the sort of authorities one quotes. But the hippies should observe who molded their docile minds and plastic souls, and how much novelty or originality is contained in the moth-eaten notions they spout.

“Education for enrichment or amusement,” Time marches on, “rather than for professional skills will become a lifetime process . . . In fact, says Marshall McLuhan, older people will have to go back to school to learn basic skills. The young, he says, are not interested in the mundane knowledge it takes to run a technological civilization; the old will have to learn it if they are to keep their world running.” Why should they want to? What if they shrug? No answer is given.

Time is not indifferent, however, to the continuation of that world. “All this [the Dionysian Utopia of the future],” the article declares, “will depend on the continued expansion of the U.S. economy, which virtually all experts agree will take place.... Business will be operating in a new, probably tougher atmosphere. While profit will still be the prime mover, some of the money once considered the stockholders’ will have to be sacrificed to the needs of society and to pollution control.”

Further on, a faint note of apprehension creeps into the euphoric prophecy: “It may be that the early ’70s will see a period of repressive reaction against the Dionysian tendencies of the young.... It is possible, too, that a decline in the work ethic or a weakening of demand for material goods may disrupt the foundation of a hedonist civilization—the economy.”

After considering this possibility for two paragraphs, Time concludes: “Possible—but not likely, for at least the greater part of the decade.” Observe the length and range of concern of these supposedly responsible social commentators. What is to happen after a decade of that kind? It is only Apollonians who look that far; Dionysians do not and cannot.

As for other predictions: “The most significant trend of the ’70s may well be a religious revival. . . . In reaction against the trend toward secularization [i.e., toward rationality], there may well be a sweeping revival of fundamentalism, particularly in its fervent, Pentecostal variety.... Many people will reject traditional Western religions, finding inspiration and solace in the mystery cults of the East or in eclectic spiritual systems of their own devising.... For many, astrology, numerology and phrenology will become no longer fads but ways of life.”

As to art: “The changed atmosphere will affect the arts as well, which may become ephemeral, instant, faddish and ultimately disposable.” Here the prophet is confessing his estimate of the arts of the present by projecting it into the future. Except for the wrong tense, the estimate is right. “Ephemeral, instant, faddish and ultimately disposable” is a euphemism for: junk that cannot last overnight, is not needed by anyone, has no value but that of clique-press-agentry, and ultimately belongs in the trash can.

In the ugliest form, this is a confirmation of the metaphysical nature of art: Dionysian brutes who reject reason and live on the sensations of the immediate moment have no capacity for a metaphysical view of life and no need of art, beyond the Halloween masks or New Year’s Eve hats that the charwomen of history will sweep up wearily the next morning.

Under the subtitle “Man and Environment,” a lengthy section of the Time article is devoted to the subject of pollution. “Government and business will be forced to spend ever increasing sums possibly $10 billion to $20 billion a year, in Herman Kahn’s estimate—to control pollution of air and water and to prevent the destruction of natural beauty.” (Italics mine.) And: “In the next few years ... it will be widely recognized that like most forms of pollution, defiling of the landscape, whether it be with shopping centers or expressways, is hard to reverse.”

The word “pollution” implies health hazards, such as smog or dirty waters. But these are not the article’s main concern; observe that they are lumped together into one package dealing with such matters as “natural beauty” and that the pollutants threatening us are shopping centers and expressways.

Young men who live under the nightmare threat of the military draft should also observe that the people who propose to spend $10 to $20 billion a year on the preservation of “natural beauty” regard $4 billion a year as too high a price to pay for a volunteer army.

The real motive behind the anti-pollution campaign is stated all but explicitly: “As the decade advances, it will become clear that if the ecological effort is to succeed, much of today’s existing technology will have to be scrapped and something new developed in its place. [”You’ll do something, Mr. Rearden!“] ... Increasingly, it will be seen that any kind of mass transportation, however powered, is more efficient than the family car. [Such as the New York subway, for instance?] ... Planning will have to be a much greater concern.”

And here is the motive behind the motive: “The attitude, central to the modern mind, that all technology is good technology will have to be changed radically. ‘Our society is trained to accept all new technology as progress, or to look upon it as an aspect of fate,’ says George Wald, Harvard’s Nobel-laureate biologist. ‘Should one do everything one can? The usual answer is “Of course”; but the right answer is “Of course not.” ’. . .

“Bertrand de Jouvenal adds: ‘Western man has not lived with his natural environment. He has merely conquered it.’ ”

By the grace of Aristotle, of Galileo, of Pasteur, of Edison and of a long, thin line of often-martyred men stretching back through millennia, Western man has not lived with his natural environment, in the sense intended by that quotation. But the rest of mankind has and does.

An Asian peasant who labors through all of his waking hours, with tools created in Biblical times—a South American aborigine who is devoured by piranha in a jungle stream—an African who is bitten by the tsetse fly—an Arab whose teeth are green with decay in his mouth—these do live with their “natural environment,” but are scarcely able to appreciate its beauty. Try to tell a Chinese mother, whose child is dying of cholera: “Should one do everything one can? Of course not.” Try to tell a Russian housewife, who trudges miles on foot in sub-zero weather in order to spend hours standing in line at a state store dispensing food rations, that America is defiled by shopping centers, expressways and family cars.

It is not possible that the “anti-pollution”—i.e., anti-technology—crusaders are ignorant of man’s condition in the midst of an unconquered nature. It does not seem possible that, knowing it, they would advocate its return. But there it is, out of their own mouth.

The thing that permits men to utter public statements which, if believed, would cause people to run from them as from lepers, is the fact that no one believes it. Most people have been conditioned to regard broad generalizations, abstract ideas, fundamental principles and logical consequences as impotent, irrelevant, invalid or non-existent. “Aw, they don’t mean it,” is the general attitude toward the anti-technologists, “they don’t want to go that far. They just want to clean up the smog and the sewage.” Well, Hitler, too, announced his abstract principles and goals in advance, and evoked a similar reaction from the pragmatists of the time. The Soviets have openly preached world conquest for fifty years and have conquered one-third of the globe’s population—yet some people still do not believe that they mean it.

(As far as the issue of actual pollution is concerned, it is primarily a scientific, not a political, problem. In regard to the political principle involved: if a man creates a physical danger or harm to others, which extends beyond the line of his own property, such as unsanitary conditions or even loud noise, and if this is proved, the law can and does hold him responsible. If the condition is collective, such as in an overcrowded city, appropriate and objective laws can be defined, protecting the rights of all those involved—as was done in the case of oil rights, air-space rights, etc. But such laws cannot demand the impossible, must not be aimed at a single scapegoat, i.e., the industrialists, and must take into consideration the whole context of the problem, i.e., the absolute necessity of the continued existence of industry—if the preservation of human life is the standard.)

It has been reported in the press many times that the issue of pollution is to be the next big crusade of the New Left activists, after the war in Vietnam peters out. And just as peace was not their goal or motive in that crusade, so clean air is not their goal or motive in this one.

There is a significant change in the leftist-liberal ideology of today, a difference between the old left and the new—not in essential goals or fundamental motives, but in their forms—and the Time article is an unusually eloquent demonstration of it.

In a certain sense, the line of the New Left is cruder and more honest—not honest in an honorable sense of the word, but in the sense of a combination of brazenness and despair, prompted by the belief or the hope that one can get away with it, as a drunk (or a drug addict) will blurt out some part of a truth he has spent years evading and repressing. The social veneer of the collectivists is cracking and their psychological motivation is showing through.

The old left had spent years of effort, tons of print, billions of dollars and rivers of blood to maintain an Apollonian mask. Old-line Marxists claimed that they were champions of reason, that socialism or communism was a scientific social system, that an advanced technology could not function in a capitalist society, but required a scientifically planned and organized human community to bring its maximum benefits to every man, in the form of material comforts and a higher standard of living. They predicted that the progress of Soviet technology would surpass that of the United States. They accused capitalist societies of deluding the masses by means of the policy known as “pie in the sky,” i.e., by means of promising spiritual rewards to those suffering from material poverty. Communist propagandists even accused some governments—notably, the old rulers of China and the British in India—of deliberately fostering the drug traffic in order to keep the masses passive, dazed, docile and impotent.

That mask crumbled in the aftermath of World War 11.

In full view of the fate of industry and the standard of living in Soviet Russia, in socialist Britain, in the communist countries of Europe, no one can claim very loudly or very effectively the technological superiority of socialism over capitalism. The old line to the effect that capitalism was necessary to create an industrial civilization, but not to maintain it, is not heard too often these days. The promises of socialist abundance are not very convincing in a world where most of the working youth worship American products and gadgets, and would swim the ocean, if they could, to come to America—and the promises of socialism’s liberation of man’s mind ring hollow in a world made progressively more anxious by the drain of its best brains.

There was a time when the necessity of industrialization was the crusading slogan of Western liberals, which justified anything and whitewashed any atrocity, including the wholesale slaughter in Soviet Russia. We do not hear that slogan any longer. Confronted with the choice of an industrial civilization or collectivism, it is an industrial civilization that the liberals discarded. Confronted with the choice of technology or dictatorship, it is technology that they discarded. Confronted with the choice of reason or whims, it is reason that they discarded.

And so today we see the spectacle of old Marxists blessing, aiding and abetting the young hoodlums (who are their products and heirs) who proclaim the superiority of feelings over reason, of faith over knowledge, of leisure over production, of spiritual concerns over material comforts, of primitive nature over technology, of astrology over science, of drugs over consciousness.

The old-line Marxists used to claim that a single modern factory could produce enough shoes to provide for the whole population of the world and that nothing but capitalism prevented it. When they discovered the facts of reality involved, they declared that going barefoot is superior to wearing shoes.

So much for their concern with poverty and with the improvement of human life on earth.

At a superficial (a very superficial) glance, there might have been, for the morally undiscriminating, some plausibility in the notion of enslaving and sacrificing generations of men for the sake of establishing a permanent state of material abundance for all. But to do it for the sake of preserving “natural beauty”? To replace the union of bloody thugs and ivory-tower intellectuals, which was gruesome enough, with a union of bloody thugs and ladies’ garden clubs?

In form, if not in essence, the old-line Marxists were cleaner.

But the essence—the fundamental principles, the psychological motivation, the ultimate goal—of the leftist-liberals has not changed. The essence is hatred of reason—whether it takes the cover of “the mystics of muscle” or drops the mask and opts for the “spirituality” of the jungle, whether it preaches dialectic materialism or replaces it with doctrines of equal scientific validity: astrology, numerology, phrenology.

The forms may vary, the slogans may change, everything may be dispensable in the Heraclitean-Hegelian-Dionysian flux, but three fundamentals remain untouched: mysticism-altruism-collectivism. And so does their psychological manifestation: the lust for power, i.e., the lust to destroy.

The activists of the New Left are closer to revealing the truth of their motives: they do not seek to take over industrial plants, they seek to destroy technology.

Commentators such as the Time prophet(s) are not necessarily aware of the full philosophical meaning and consequences of their statements: they have been inoculated against ideas by the same Pragmatism in the same colleges as their victims. A typical modern intellectual is not consciously eager to destroy a technological society or the last remnants of capitalism in a mixed economy. He merely swims with the “mainstream” and seeks to create “a tougher atmosphere” for businessmen, never doubting that they will always deliver the goods or anything demanded of them. He slings ideas for a living, as others sling hash.

But that the victims stand for it, that the advocacy of raw nature and astrology is voiced without any noticeable protest—that is the culturally ominous and significant aspect of the Time article. It is an indication of the degree of today’s contempt for the intellect. It is a demonstration of the bankruptcy of the left—and of the vacuum in a culture whose respect for the mind has been destroyed by generations of Kantian-pragmatist-linguistic philosophizing.

As far as the left is concerned, its new line is a grotesque caricature of the old and, therefore, revealing, as caricatures often are. Hatred of reason leads to fear of reality; since fear has always been the intense motivational emotion of the leftists, it is fear that they have always used as their chief psychological tool of propaganda, apparently in the belief that it has as irresistible a power in the consciousness of others as in their own.

With the destruction of capitalism as their unalterable goal, they tried, at first, to engender economic fear—by spreading the notion that capitalism leads to general impoverishment and the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. This line was somewhat successful in Europe, but not in this country, where the factual evidence to the contrary was too obviously clear.

The next leftist line was fear of the atom bomb, accompanied by the suggestion that we should surrender to communism without a fight, in order to avoid universal destruction. Do you remember the slogan: “Better Red than dead”? This did not go over, either—not in this country, nor among any men or animals with a vestige of self-esteem.

If, after the failure of such accusations as: “Capitalism leads you to the poorhouse” and “Capitalism leads you to war,” the New Left is left with nothing better than: “Capitalism defiles the beauty of your countryside,” one may justifiably conclude that, as an intellectual power, the collectivist movement is through.

But the leftists may still have a chance—by default. A society cannot exist for long in an intellectual vacuum. Culturally, we are approaching the stage where anyone can take over, provided his doctrines are sufficiently irrational. A cultural vacuum produces its own variants of fishers in muddy waters—and, on such terms, whoever is the muddiest, wins.

In “The Cashing-In: The Student ‘Rebellion’ ”(The Objectivist Newsletter, July-September 1965), dealing with the rebellion at Berkeley, I wrote: “For its motley leftist leadership, the student rebellion is a trial balloon, a kind of cultural temperature-taking. it is a test of how much they can get away with and what sort of opposition they will encounter.” I wrote also that the main ideological purpose of the rebellion’s leaders was “to condition the country to accept force as the means of settling political controversies.”

Observe the extent of the spread of violence since that time, and the condoning, excusing, endorsement and/or advocacy of violence by the public voices of today.

An article such as the Time prophecy is one of the trial balloons of a similar kind, as are all the hooligan tactics of the New Left: it is part of a test to find out how much they can get away with philosophically, i.e., how far the destruction of reason has gone.

I asked an intelligent young friend of mine how college students could read such an article without protesting. “But they don’t read it,” she answered. “They read only the news sections. At most, they skim through the editorial stuff, barely getting some fuzzy approximation.” This, of course, applies to businessmen as well.

And this is the real danger in articles of that kind: not that the readers will agree—they are not expected to agree—but that their indifference to ideas, to intellectual issues and to long-range thinking will be reaffirmed, reinforced and ultimately turned into mental atrophy.

If Ellsworth Toohey were speaking today, he would say to Peter Keating: “We get them coming and going. Those who believe in astrology will flock to us: we’ll be the only defenders of their guilty weakness. Those who don’t believe in it will be so disgusted, indignant and frustrated that they’ll give up the realm of ideas—and of reason—anyway. Intellectual paralysis, Peter. Whether caused by drugs, or by bitter skepticism, or by unbearable disgust, doesn’t make any difference—so long as they stop thinking and give up, give up, give up ...”

If businessmen are willing to ignore the proclamations of the New Left and to serve as milch cows for brazen, nature-loving hoodlums—they deserve what they will get.

But the young do not deserve it—not those among the young who are suffocating in today’s atmosphere and are groping blindly for some glimmer of rationality. It is they who should fight for their precarious foothold on reason, which is now being systematically undercut.

The first step of the battle is to realize that their enemy is not the screeching Dionysian hippie-puppets, but those exponents of middle-of-the-road respectability who tell them gently, in their classrooms, that words, ideas and philosophy do not matter and that the Attilas do not mean it.

(February 1970)

From a Symposium

The New Left does not portend a revolution, as its press agents claim, but a Putsch. A revolution is the climax of a long philosophical development and expresses a nation’s profound discontent; a Putsch is a minority’s seizure of power. The goal of a revolution is to overthrow tyranny; the goal of a Putsch is to establish it.

Tyranny is any political system (whether absolute monarchy or fascism or communism) that does not recognize individual rights (which necessarily include property rights). The overthrow of a political system by force is justified only when it is directed against tyranny: it is an act of self-defense against those who rule by force. For example, the American Revolution. The resort to force, not in defense, but in violation, of individual rights, can have no moral justification; it is not a revolution, but gang warfare.

No revolution was ever spearheaded by wriggling, chanting drug addicts who are boastfully anti-rational, who have no program to offer, yet propose to take over a nation of 200 million, and who spend their time manufacturing grievances, since they cannot tap any authentic source of popular discontent.

Physically, America is not in a desperate state, but intellectually and culturally she is. The New Left is the product of cultural disintegration; it is bred not in the slums, but in the universities; it is not the vanguard of the future, but the terminal stage of the past.

This article was published in The New York Times Magazine, May 17, 1970, as part of a symposium on the question: “Are We in the Middle of the ‘Second American Revolution’?”

Intellectually, the activists of the New Left are the most docile conformists. They have accepted as dogma all the philosophical beliefs of their elders for generations: the notions that faith and feeling are superior to reason, that material concerns are evil, that love is the solution to all problems, that the merging of one’s self with a tribe or a community is the noblest way to live. There is not a single basic principle of today’s Establishment which they do not share. Far from being rebels, they embody the philosophic trend of the past 200 years (or longer): the mysticism-altruism-collectivism axis, which has dominated Western philosophy from Kant to Hegel to James and on down.

But this philosophic tradition is bankrupt. It crumbled in the aftermath of World War II. Disillusioned in their collectivist ideals, America’s intellectuals gave up the intellect. Their legacy is our present political system, which is not capitalism, but a mixed economy, a precarious mixture of freedom and controls. Injustice, insecurity, confusion, the pressure-group warfare of all against all, the amorality and futility of random, pragmatist, range-of-the-moment policies are the joint products of a mixed economy and of a philosophical vacuum.

There is a profound discontent, but the New Left is not its voice; there is a sense of bitterness, bewilderment and frustrated indignation, a profound anxiety about the intellectual-moral state of this country, a desperate need of philosophical guidance, which the church-and-tradition-bound conservatives were never able to provide and the liberals have given up.

Without opposition, the hoodlums of the New Left are crawling from under the intellectual wreckage. Theirs is the Anti-Industrial Revolution, the revolt of the primordial brute—no, not against capitalism, but against capitalism’s roots—against reason, progress, technology, achievement, reality.

What are the activists after? Nothing. They are not pulled by a goal, but pushed by the panic of mindless terror. Hostility, hatred, destruction for the sake of destruction are their momentary forms of escape. They are a desperate herd looking for a Führer.

They are not seeking any specific political system, since they cannot look beyond the “now.” But the sundry little Führers who manipulate them as cannon-fodder do have a mongrel system in mind: a statist dictatorship with communist slogans and fascist policies. It is their last, frantic attempt to cash in on the intellectual vacuum.

Do they have a chance to succeed? No. But they might plunge the country into a blind, hopeless civil war, with nothing but some other product of anti-rationality, such as George C. Wallace, to oppose them.

Can this be averted? Yes. The most destructive influence on the nation’s morale is not the young thugs, but the cynicism of respectable publications that hail them as “idealists.” Irrationality is not idealistic; drug addiction is not idealistic; the bombing of public places is not idealistic.

What this country needs is a philosophical revolution—a rebellion against the Kantian tradition—in the name of the first of our Founding Fathers: Aristotle. This means a reassertion of the supremacy of reason, with its consequences: individualism, freedom, progress, civilization. What political system would it lead to? An untried one: full, laissez-faire capitalism. But this will take more than a beard and a guitar.

“Political” Crimes

A very dangerous notion is now being smuggled into our cultural atmosphere. It is being introduced in reverse, in a form that looks like the opposite of its actual meaning and logical consequences. The form is sympathy for criminals who claim to be motivated by political goals; the notion is the legal category of “political crimes.”

There can be no such thing as a political crime under the American system of law. Since an individual has the right to hold and to propagate any ideas he chooses (obviously including political ideas), the government may not infringe his right; it may neither penalize nor reward him for his ideas; it may not take any judicial cognizance whatever of his ideology.

By the same principle, the government may not give special leniency to the perpetrator of a crime, on the grounds of the nature of his ideas.

A crime is a violation of the right(s) of other men by force (or fraud). It is only the initiation of physical force against others—i.e., the recourse to violence—that can be classified as a crime in a free society (as distinguished from a civil wrong). Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime—and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.

If one keeps clearly in mind the moral-legal context (and hierarchical derivation) of any given political principle, one will not find any difficulty or contradiction in applying it to specific cases. For instance, American citizens possess the right to freedom of religion; but if some sect adopted primitive beliefs and began to practice human sacrifices, it would be prosecuted for murder. Clearly, this is not an infringement of the sect’s religious freedom; it is the proper application of the principle that all rights are derived from the right to life and that those who violate it cannot claim its protection, i.e., cannot claim the right to violate a right. In exactly the same way, for the same reasons, the unspeakable little drugged monstrosities who resort to violence—and who have progressed, without significant opposition, from campus sit-ins to arson to such an atrocity as mass terrorization and the bombing of public places—should be treated as the criminals they are, and not as political “dissenters.”

Morally, they are worse than the plain criminal: he, at least, does not subvert the realm of ideas; he does not posture as a champion of rights, justice and freedom. Legally, both kinds should be given the same treatment. Ideas end where a gun begins.

The moral bankruptcy of today’s liberal Establishment (including its concomitant: the erosion of the concept of individual rights) is the basic cause of the young thugs’ activities. The granting to these thugs of such titles as “political dissenters” and “idealists” is the major reason of their accelerating growth. The alleged economic justification of their violence the notion that it is caused by poverty—would be inexcusably evil, if the notion were true; but it becomes grotesque in the light of the mounting evidence that the young thugs are predominantly children of the well-to-do.

There is only one doctrine that can permit this to go on: the morality of altruism. I have said that altruism is, in fact, the negation of morality. “Your code hands out, as its version of the absolute, the following rule of moral conduct: ... if the motive of your action is your welfare, don’t do it; if the motive is the welfare of others, then anything goes.” (Atlas Shrugged.) You can now see it demonstrated in practice. If such monstrous actions as bombings are regarded as “idealistic” because the actors profess to be motivated by the “welfare of others”—and the liberal journalists who proclaim this are not hooted out of their profession—then the last vestige of and pretense at morality are gone from today’s culture.

The actual motive of whoever manipulates the opinions of the dazed, scared liberals is fairly obvious: by arousing sympathy for “political” criminals, by staging protests and demanding leniency from the courts allegedly in the name of political freedom the statists are establishing the precedent of political trials. Once the issue of ideology is made part of a court’s consideration, the principle is established: the government is brought into the courtroom as an arbiter of ideas. If the government assumes the power to exonerate a man on the grounds of his political ideas, it has assumed the power to prosecute and condemn him on the same grounds.

It is in Europe, under the despotism of absolute monarchies, that a legal distinction was made between political and non-political crimes. The first category consisted predominantly, not of acts of violence, but of such acts as uttering or publishing ideas that displeased the government. And, in the growing trend toward political freedom, public opinion was on the side of such offenders: they were fighting for individual rights, against the rule of force.

If and when the public opinion of a free country accepts a distinction between political and non-political criminals, it accepts the notion of political crimes, it supports the use of force in violation of rights—and the historical process takes place in reverse: the country crosses the borderline into political despotism.

(May 1970)

Racism

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.

Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.

The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes in order to “protect the family name” (as if the moral stature of one man could be damaged by the actions of another)—the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her maternal great-uncle was a state senator and her third cousin gave a concert at Carnegie Hall (as if the achievements of one man could rub off on the mediocrity of another)—the parents who search genealogical trees in order to evaluate their prospective sons-in-law—the celebrity who starts his autobiography with a detailed account of his family history—all these are samples of racism, the atavistic manifestations of a doctrine whose full expression is the tribal warfare of prehistorical savages, the wholesale slaughter of Nazi Germany, the atrocities of today’s so-called “newly emerging nations.”

The theory that holds “good blood” or “bad blood” as a moral-intellectual criterion, can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice. Brute force is the only avenue of action open to men who regard themselves as mindless aggregates of chemicals.

Modern racists attempt to prove the superiority or inferiority of a given race by the historical achievements of some of its members. The frequent historical spectacle of a great innovator who, in his lifetime, is jeered, denounced, obstructed, persecuted by his countrymen, and then, a few years after his death, is enshrined in a national monument and hailed as a proof of the greatness of the German (or French or Italian or Cambodian) race—is as revolting a spectacle of collectivist expropriation, perpetrated by racists, as any expropriation of material wealth perpetrated by communists.

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements—and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

Even if it were proved—which it is not—that the incidence of men of potentially superior brain power is greater among the members of certain races than among the members of others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual and it would be irrelevant to one’s judgment of him. A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a Negro genius should be treated as an inferior because his race has “produced” some brutes—or the claim of a German brute to the status of a superior because his race has “produced” Goethe, Schiller and Brahms.

These are not two different claims, of course, but two applications of the same basic premise. The question of whether one alleges the superiority or the inferiority of any given race is irrelevant; racism has only one psychological root: the racist’s sense of his own inferiority.

Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge—for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment—and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem).

To ascribe one’s virtues to one’s racial origin, is to confess that one has no knowledge of the process by which virtues are acquired and, most often, that one has failed to acquire them. The overwhelming majority of racists are men who have earned no sense of personal identity, who can claim no individual achievement or distinction, and who seek the illusion of a “tribal self-esteem” by alleging the inferiority of some other tribe. Observe the hysterical intensity of the Southern racists; observe also that racism is much more prevalent among the poor white trash than among their intellectual betters.

Historically, racism has always risen or fallen with the rise or fall of collectivism. Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to “society,” to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force—and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism.

The absolute state is merely an institutionalized form of gang-rule, regardless of which particular gang seizes power. And—since there is no rational justification for such rule, since none has ever been or can ever be offered—the mystique of racism is a crucial element in every variant of the absolute state. The relationship is reciprocal: statism rises out of prehistorical tribal warfare, out of the notion that the men of one tribe are the natural prey for the men of another—and establishes its own internal subcategories of racism, a system of castes determined by a man’s birth, such as inherited titles of nobility or inherited serfdom.

The racism of Nazi Germany—where men had to fill questionnaires about their ancestry for generations back, in order to prove their Aryan descent—has its counterpart in Soviet Russia, where men had to fill similar questionnaires to show that their ancestors had owned no property and thus to prove their proletarian descent. The Soviet ideology rests on the notion that men can be conditioned to communism genetically—that is, that a few generations conditioned by dictatorship will transmit communist ideology to their descendants, who will be communists at birth. The persecution of racial minorities in Soviet Russia, according to the racial descent and whim of any given commissar, is a matter of record; anti-Semitism is particularly prevalent—only the official pogroms are now called “political purges.”

There is only one antidote to racism: the philosophy of individualism and its politico-economic corollary, laissez-faire capitalism.

Individualism regards man—every man—as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful coexistence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights—and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.

It is not a man’s ancestors or relatives or genes or body chemistry that count in a free market, but only one human attribute: productive ability. It is by his own individual ability and ambition that capitalism judges a man and rewards him accordingly.

No political system can establish universal rationality by law (or by force). But capitalism is the only system that functions in a way which rewards rationality and penalizes all forms of irrationality, including racism.

A fully free, capitalist system has not yet existed anywhere. But what is enormously significant is the correlation of racism and political controls in the semifree economies of the nineteenth century. Racial and/or religious persecutions of minorities stood in inverse ratio to the degree of a country’s freedom. Racism was strongest in the more controlled economies, such as Russia and Germany—and weakest in England, the then freest country of Europe.

It is capitalism that gave mankind its first steps toward freedom and a rational way of life. It is capitalism that broke through national and racial barriers, by means of free trade. It is capitalism that abolished serfdom and slavery in all the civilized countries of the world. It is the capitalist North that destroyed the slavery of the agrarian-feudal South in the United States.

Such was the trend of mankind for the brief span of some hundred and fifty years. The spectacular results and achievements of that trend need no restatement here.

The rise of collectivism reversed that trend.

When men began to be indoctrinated once more with the notion that the individual possesses no rights, that supremacy, moral authority and unlimited power belong to the group, and that a man has no significance outside his group—the inevitable consequence was that men began to gravitate toward some group or another, in self-protection, in bewilderment and in subconscious terror. The simplest collective to join, the easiest one to identify—particularly for people of limited intelligence—the least demanding form of “belonging” and of “togetherness” is: race.

It is thus that the theoreticians of collectivism, the “humanitarian” advocates of a “benevolent” absolute state, have led to the rebirth and the new, virulent growth of racism in the twentieth century.

In its great era of capitalism, the United States was the freest country on earth—and the best refutation of racist theories. Men of all races came here, some from obscure, culturally undistinguished countries, and accomplished feats of productive ability which would have remained stillborn in their control-ridden native lands. Men of racial groups that had been slaughtering one another for centuries, learned to live together in harmony and peaceful cooperation. America had been called “the melting pot,” with good reason. But few people realized that America did not melt men into the gray conformity of a collective: she united them by means of protecting their right to individuality.

The major victims of such race prejudice as did exist in America were the Negroes. It was a problem originated and perpetuated by the noncapitalist South, though not confined to its boundaries. The persecution of Negroes in the South was and is truly disgraceful. But in the rest of the country, so long as men were free, even that problem was slowly giving way under the pressure of enlightenment and of the white men’s own economic interests.

Today, that problem is growing worse—and so is every other form of racism. America has become race-conscious in a manner reminiscent of the worst days in the most backward countries of nineteenth-century Europe. The cause is the same: the growth of collectivism and statism.

In spite of the clamor for racial equality, propagated by the “liberals” in the past few decades, the Census Bureau reported recently that “[the Negro’s] economic status relative to whites has not improved for nearly 20 years.” It had been improving in the freer years of our “mixed economy”; it deteriorated with the progressive enlargement of the “liberals’ ” Welfare State.

The growth of racism in a “mixed economy” keeps step with the growth of government controls. A “mixed economy” disintegrates a country into an institutionalized civil war of pressure groups, each fighting for legislative favors and special privileges at the expense of one another.

The existence of such pressure groups and of their political lobbies is openly and cynically acknowledged today. The pretense at any political philosophy, any principles, ideals or long-range goals is fast disappearing from our scene—and it is all but admitted that this country is now floating without direction, at the mercy of a blind, short-range power game played by various statist gangs, each intent on getting hold of a legislative gun for any special advantage of the immediate moment.

In the absence of any coherent political philosophy, every economic group has been acting as its own destroyer, selling out its future for some momentary privilege. The policy of the businessmen has, for some time, been the most suicidal one in this respect. But it has been surpassed by the current policy of the Negro leaders.

So long as the Negro leaders were fighting against government-enforced discrimination- right, justice and morality were on their side. But that is not what they are fighting any longer. The confusions and contradictions surrounding the issue of racism have now reached an incredible climax.

It is time to clarify the principles involved.

The policy of the Southern states toward Negroes was and is a shameful contradiction of this country’s basic principles. Racial discrimination, imposed and enforced by law, is so blatantly inexcusable an infringement of individual rights that the racist statutes of the South should have been declared unconstitutional long ago.

The Southern racists’ claim of “states’ rights” is a contradiction in terms: there can be no such thing as the “right” of some men to violate the rights of others. The constitutional concept of “states’ rights” pertains to the division of power between local and national authorities, and serves to protect the states from the Federal government; it does not grant to a state government an unlimited, arbitrary power over its citizens or the privilege of abrogating the citizens’ individual rights.

It is true that the Federal government has used the racial issue to enlarge its own power and to set a precedent of encroachment upon the legitimate rights of the states, in an unnecessary and unconstitutional manner. But this merely means that both governments are wrong; it does not excuse the policy of the Southern racists.

One of the worst contradictions, in this context, is the stand of many so-called “conservatives” (not confined exclusively to the South) who claim to be defenders of freedom, of capitalism, of property rights, of the Constitution, yet who advocate racism at the same time. They do not seem to possess enough concern with principles to realize that they are cutting the ground from under their own feet. Men who deny individual rights cannot claim, defend or uphold any rights whatsoever. It is such alleged champions of capitalism who are helping to discredit and destroy it.

The “liberals” are guilty of the same contradiction, but in a different form. They advocate the sacrifice of all individual rights to unlimited majority rule—yet posture as defenders of the rights of minorities. But the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

This accumulation of contradictions, of shortsighted pragmatism, of cynical contempt for principles, of outrageous irrationality, has now reached its climax in the new demands of the Negro leaders.

Instead of fighting against racial discrimination, they are demanding that racial discrimination be legalized and enforced. Instead of fighting against racism, they are demanding the establishment of racial quotas. Instead of fighting for “color-blindness” in social and economic issues, they are proclaiming that “color-blindness” is evil and that “color” should be made a primary consideration. Instead of fighting for equal rights, they are demanding special race privileges.

They are demanding that racial quotas be established in regard to employment and that jobs be distributed on a racial basis, in proportion to the percentage of a given race among the local population. For instance, since Negroes constitute 25 percent of the population of New York City, they demand 25 percent of the jobs in a given establishment.

Racial quotas have been one of the worst evils of racist regimes. There were racial quotas in the universities of Czarist Russia, in the population of Russia’s major cities, etc. One of the accusations against the racists in this country is that some schools practice a secret system of racial quotas. It was regarded as a victory for justice when employment questionnaires ceased to inquire about an applicant’s race or religion.

Today, it is not an oppressor, but an oppressed minority group that is demanding the establishment of racial quotas. (!)

This particular demand was too much even for the “liberals.” Many of them denounced it—property—with shocked indignation.

Wrote The New York Times (July 23, 1963): “The demonstrators are following a truly vicious principle in playing the ‘numbers game.’ A demand that 25 percent (or any other percentage) of jobs be given to Negroes (or any other group) is wrong for one basic reason: it calls for a ‘quota system,’ which is in itself discriminatory.... This newspaper has long fought a religious quota in respect to judgeships; we equally oppose a racial quota in respect to jobs from the most elevated to the most menial.”

As if the blatant racism of such a demand were not enough, some Negro leaders went still farther. Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, made the following statement (New York Times, August 1):

“The white leadership must be honest enough to grant that throughout our history there has existed a special privileged class of citizens who received preferred treatment. That class was white. Now we’re saying this: If two men, one Negro and one white, are equally qualified for a job, hire the Negro.”

Consider the implications of that statement. It does not merely demand special privileges on racial grounds—it demands that white men be penalized for the sins of their ancestors. It demands that a white laborer be refused a job because his grandfather may have practiced racial discrimination. But perhaps his grandfather had not practiced it. Or perhaps his grandfather had not even lived in this country. Since these questions are not to be considered, it means that that white laborer is to be charged with collective racial guilt, the guilt consisting merely of the color of his skin.

But that is the principle of the worst Southern racist who charges all Negroes with collective racial guilt for any crime committed by an individual Negro, and who treats them all as inferiors on the ground that their ancestors were savages.

The only comment one can make about demands of that kind, is: “By what right?—By what code?—By what standard?”

That absurdly evil policy is destroying the moral base of the Negroes’ fight. Their case rested on the principle of individual rights. If they demand the violation of the rights of others, they negate and forfeit their own. Then the same answer applies to them as to the Southern racists: there can be no such thing as the “right” of some men to violate the rights of others.

Yet the entire policy of the Negro leaders is now moving in that direction. For instance, the demand for racial quotas in schools, with the proposal that hundreds of children, white and Negro, be forced to attend school in distant neighborhoods—for the purpose of “racial balance.” Again, this is pure racism. As opponents of this demand have pointed out, to assign children to certain schools by reason of their race, is equally evil whether one does it for purposes of segregation or integration. And the mere idea of using children as pawns in a political game should outrage all parents, of any race, creed or color.

The “civil rights” bill, now under consideration in Congress, is another example of a gross infringement of individual rights. It is proper to forbid all discrimination in government-owned facilities and establishments: the government has no right to discriminate against any citizens. And by the very same principle, the government has no right to discriminate for some citizens at the expense of others. It has no right to violate the right of private property by forbidding discrimination in privately owned establishments.

No man, neither Negro nor white, has any claim to the property of another man. A man’s rights are not violated by a private individual’s refusal to deal with him. Racism is an evil, irrational and morally contemptible doctrine—but doctrines cannot be forbidden or prescribed by law. Just as we have to protect a communist’s freedom of speech, even though his doctrines are evil, so we have to protect a racist’s right to the use and disposal of his own property. Private racism is not a legal, but a moral issue—and can be fought only by private means, such as economic boycott or social ostracism.

Needless to say, if that “civil rights” bill is passed, it will be the worst breach of property rights in the sorry record of American history in respect to that subject.b

It is an ironic demonstration of the philosophical insanity and the consequently suicidal trend of our age, that the men who need the protection of individual rights most urgently—the Negroes—are now in the vanguard of the destruction of these rights.

A word of warning: do not become victims of the same racists by succumbing to racism; do not hold against all Negroes the disgraceful irrationality of some of their leaders. No group has any proper intellectual leadership today or any proper representation.

In conclusion, I shall quote from an astonishing editorial in The New York Times of August 4—astonishing because ideas of this nature are not typical of our age:

“But the question must be not whether a group recognizable in color, features or culture has its rights as a group. No, the question is whether any American individual, regardless of color, features or culture, is deprived of his rights as an American. If the individual has all the rights and privileges due him under the laws and the Constitution, we need not worry about groups and masses—those do not, in fact, exist, except as figures of speech.”

(September 1963)

Global Balkanization

Have you ever wondered about the process of the collapse of a civilization? Not the cause of the collapse -the ultimate cause is always philosophical—but the process, the specific means by which the accumulated knowledge and achievements of centuries vanish from the earth?

The possibility of the collapse of Western civilization is not easy to imagine or to believe. Most people do not quite believe it—in spite of all the horror movies about the end of the world in a nuclear blast. But of course the world has never been destroyed by a sudden catastrophe. Man-made catastrophes of that size are not sudden; they are the result of a long, slow, gradual process, which can be observed in advance.

Let me remind you—as I have said many times before—that there is no such thing as historical determinism. The world does not have to continue moving toward disaster. But unless men change their philosophical direction—which they still have time to do—the collapse will come. And if you want to know the specific process that will bring it about, that process—the beginning of the end—is visible today.

In The New York Times of January 18, 1976, under the title “Europe’s Restive Tribes,” columnist C. L. Sulzberger is crying out in anxious bewilderment against a phenomenon he cannot understand: “It is distressing to return from Africa and find the cultivated old continent of Europe subsiding into its own form of tribalism just as new African governments make concerted efforts

This lecture was delivered at the Ford Hall Forum on April 10. 1977.

to curb the power of tribes and subordinate them to the greater concept of the nation-state.,”

By “tribalism,” Mr. Sulzberger means the separatist movements spreading throughout Europe. “Indeed,” he declares,

it is a peculiar phenomenon of contemporary times that so many lands which had formerly been powerful and important seem obsessed with reducing the remnants of their own strength.... There is no logical reason that a Scotland which was proud to be considered part of the British Empire’s heart when the sun never set on it, from Calcutta to Capetown, is now increasingly eager to disengage from what is left of that grand tradition on an offshore European island. [Emphasis added.]

Oh yes, there is a very logical reason why Great Britain is falling apart, but Mr. Sulzberger does not see it—just as he does not see what was grand about that old tradition. He is the Times’ columnist specializing in European affairs, and, like a conscientious reporter, he is disturbed by something which he senses to be profoundly wrong—but, tending to be a liberal, he is unable to explain it.

He keeps coming back to the subject again and again. On July 3, 1976, in a column entitled “The Split Nationality Syndrome,” he writes: “The present era’s most paradoxical feature is the conflict between movements seeking to unify great geographical blocs into federations or confederations, and movements seeking to disintegrate into still smaller pieces the component nations trying to get together.”

He offers an impressive list of examples. In France there is a Corsican autonomy movement, and similar movements of French Basques, of French Bretons, and of French inhabitants of the Jura belt west of Switzerland. “Britain is now obsessed with what is awkwardly called ‘devolution.’ This means watered-down autonomy and is designed to satisfy Welsh, but above all Scottish, nationalists.” Belgium remains split “by an apparently insoluble language dispute between French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemish.” Spain is facing demands for local independence “in Catalonia and the northern Basque country.... German-speaking inhabitants of Italy’s Alto Adige yearn to leave Rome and submit to Vienna. There is a tiny British-Danish argument ... over the status of the Faroe Islanders.... In Yugoslavia there are continuing disputes between Serbs and Croats ... There is also unresolved ferment among Macedonians . . . some of whom, on occasion, revive old dreams of their own state including Greek Salonika and part of Bulgaria.”

Please remember that these tribes and subtribes, which most of the world has never heard of—since they have achieved no distinction to hear about—are struggling to secede from whatever country they are in and to form their own separate, sovereign, independent nations on their two-by-four stretches of the earth’s crust.

I must make one correction. These tribes did achieve a certain kind of distinction: a history of endless, bloody warfare.

Coming back to Mr. Sulzberger: Africa, he points out, is torn apart by tribalism (in spite of the local governments’ efforts), and most of Africa’s recent wars were derived “from tribal causes.” He concludes by observing: “The schizophrenic impulses splitting Europe threaten actually to atomize Africa—and all in the name of progress and unity.”

In a column entitled “Western Schizophrenia” (December 22, 1976), Mr. Sulzberger cries: “The West is not drawing closer together; it is coming apart. This is less complicated but perhaps more distressing in North America than in Europe.” For myself, I will add: and more disgusting.

Mr. Sulzberger continues: “Canada is apparently getting ready to tear itself asunder for emotional if illogical reasons which, on a massive scale, resemble the language dispute that continually splits Belgium ...” He predicts the possibility of a formal separation between French-speaking Quebec and the rest of Canada, and comments sadly and helplessly: “Whatever happens, it is hard to foresee much good for the West ensuing.” Which is certainly true.

Now what are the nature and the causes of modern tribalism?

Philosophically, tribalism is the product of irrationalism and collectivism. It is a logical consequence of modern philosophy. If men accept the notion that reason is not valid, what is to guide them and how are they to live? Obviously, they will seek to join some group—any group—which claims the ability to lead them and to provide some sort of knowledge acquired by some sort of unspecified means. If men accept the notion that the individual is helpless, intellectually and morally, that he has no mind and no rights, that he is nothing, but the group is all, and his only moral significance lies in selfless service to the group—they will be pulled obediently to join a group. But which group? Well, if you believe that you have no mind and no moral value, you cannot have the confidence to make choices—so the only thing for you to do is to join an unchosen group, the group into which you were born, the group to which you were predestined to belong by the sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient power of your body chemistry.

This, of course, is racism. But if your group is small enough, it will not be called “racism”: it will be called “ethnicity.”

For over half a century, modern liberals have been observing the fact that their ideas are achieving the opposite of their professed goals: instead of “liberation,” communism has brought the blood-drenched dictatorship of Soviet Russia—instead of “prosperity,” socialism has brought starvation to China, and Cuba, and India (and Russia)—instead of “brotherhood,” the welfare state has brought the crumbling stagnation and the fierce, “elitist” power struggle of Great Britain, and Sweden, and many other, less obvious victims—instead of “peace,” the spread of international altruism has brought about two world wars, an unceasing procession of local wars, and the suspending of a nuclear bomb over the heads of mankind. Yet this record does not prompt the liberals to check their premises or to glance, for contrast, at the record of the social system the last remnants of which they are so ferociously destroying.

Now we are seeing another demonstration of the fact that their professed goals are not the motive of today’s liberals. We are seeing a special kind of intellectual cover-up—a cover-up so dirty and so low that it makes Watergate look like a childish caper.

Observe that ever since World War 11, racism has been regarded as a vicious falsehood and a great evil, which it certainly is. It is not the root of all social evils——the root is collectivism——but, as I have written before (in The Virtue of Selfishness), “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” One would think that Hitler had given a sufficient demonstration of racism’s evil. Yet today’s intellectuals, particularly the liberals, are supporting and propagating the most virulent form of racism on earth: tribalism.

The cover-up that makes it possible lies in a single word: ethnicity.

“Ethnicity” is an anti-concept, used as a disguise for the word “racism” and it has no clearly definable meaning. But you can get a lead to its meaning if you hunt through a dictionary. The following are the results of my hunt through The Random House College Dictionary (1960), a book intended for young people.

I found no such term as “ethnicity.” But I found “ethnic,” which is defined as follows: “pertaining or peculiar to a population, esp. to a speech group, loosely also to a race.” Under “ethnic group,” the definition given as sociological usage reads: “a group of people, racially or historically related, having a common and distinctive culture, as an Italian or Chinese colony in a large American city.”

I looked up the word “culture.” The definition given as sociological usage reads: “the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings, which is transmitted from one generation to another.” I looked up also the word “tribe.” The definition reads: “1. any aggregate of people united by ties of descent from a common ancestor, community of customs, and traditions, adherence to the same leaders, etc. 2. a local division of a primitive or barbarous people”

The meaning of the sum of these definitions is fairly clear: the term “ethnicity” stresses the traditional, rather than the physiological characteristics of a group, such as language—but physiology, i.e., race, is involved and mentioned in all but one of these definitions. So the advocacy of “ethnicity,” means racism plus tradition i.e., racism plus conformity i.e., racism plus staleness.

The acceptance of the achievements of an individual by other individuals does not represent “ethnicity”: it represents a cultural division of labor in a free market; it represents a conscious, individual choice on the part of all the men involved; the achievements may be scientific or technological or industrial or intellectual or esthetic—and the sum of such accepted achievements constitutes a free, civilized nation’s culture. Tradition has nothing to do with it; tradition is being challenged and blasted daily in a free, civilized society: its citizens accept ideas and products because they are true and/or good—not because they are old or because their ancestors accepted them. In such a society, concretes change, but what remains immutable—by individual conviction, not by tradition—are those philosophical principles which correspond to reality, i.e., which are true.

The “old” and the “ancestral” are the standards of tradition, which supersedes reality, the standards of value of those who accept and practice “ethnicity.” Culture, in the modern sociologists’ view, is not a sum of achievements, but of “ways of living . . . transmitted from one generation to another.” This means: concrete, specific ways of living. Can you—who are still the children of the United States of America—imagine the utter horror of a way of living that does not change from generation to generation? Yet this is what the advocates of ethnicity are advocating.

Is such a way of living compatible with reason? It is not. Is it compatible with independence or individuality? It is not. Is it compatible with progress? Obviously not. Is it compatible with capitalism? Don’t be funny. What century are we talking about? We are dealing with a phenomenon that is rising out of prehistorical ages.

Atavistic remnants and echoes of those ages have always existed in the backwaters of civilized countries, particularly in Europe, among the old, the tired, the timid, and those who gave up before they started. Such people are the carriers of “ethnicity.” The “ways of living” they transmit from generation to generation consist in: folk songs, folk dances, special ways of cooking food, traditional costumes, and folk festivals. Although the professional “ethnics” would (and did) fight wars over the differences between their songs and those of their neighbors, there are no significant differences between them; all folk art is essentially similar and excruciatingly boring: if you’ve seen one set of people clapping their hands while jumping up and down, you’ve seen them all.

Now observe the nature of those traditional ethnic “achievements” : all of them belong to the perceptual level of man’s consciousness. All of them are ways of dealing with or manipulating the concrete, the immediately given, the directly perceivable. All of them are manifestations of the preconceptual stage of human development.

I quote from one of my articles: “The concrete-bound, anti-conceptual mentality can cope only with men who are bound by the same concretes—by the same kind of ‘finite’ world. To this mentality, it means a world in which men do not have to deal with abstract principles: principles are replaced by memorized rules of behavior, which are accepted uncritically as the given. What is ‘finite’ in such a world is not its extension, but the degree of mental effort required of its inhabitants. When they say ‘finite,’ they mean ‘perceptual.’ ” (This is from “The Missing Link” in [Philosophy: Who Needs It]. That article deals with the psycho-epistemological roots of modern tribalism.)

In the same article I said: “John Dewey’s theory of Progressive education (which has dominated the schools for close to half a century), established a method of crippling a child’s conceptual faculty and replacing cognition with ‘social adjustment.’ It was and is a systematic attempt to manufacture tribal mentalities.”

A symptom of the tribal mentality’s self-arrested, perceptual level of development may be observed in the tribalists’ position on language.

Language is a conceptual toot—a code of visual-auditory symbols that denote concepts. To a person who understands the function of language, it makes no difference what sounds are chosen to name things, provided these sounds refer to clearly defined aspects of reality. But to a tribalist, language is a mystic heritage, a string of sounds handed down from his ancestors and memorized, not understood. To him the importance lies in the perceptual concrete, the sound of a word, not its meaning. He would kill and die for the privilege of printing on every postage stamp the word “postage” for the English-speaking and the word “postes” for the French-speaking citizens of his bilingual Canada. Since most of the ethnic languages are not full languages, but merely dialects or local corruptions of a country’s language, the distinctions which the tribalists fight for are not even as big as that.

But, of course, it is not for their language that the tribalists are fighting: they are fighting to protect their level of awareness, their mental passivity, their obedience to the tribe, and their desire to ignore the existence of outsiders.

The learning of another language expands one’s abstract capacity and vision. Personally, I speak four—or rather three-and-a-half—languages: English, French, Russian, and the half is German, which I can read but not speak. I found this knowledge extremely helpful when I began writing: it gave me a wider range and choice of concepts; it showed me four different styles of expression; it made me grasp the nature of languages as such, apart from any set of concretes.

(Speaking of concretes, I would say that every civilized language has its own inimitable power and beauty, but the one I love is English—the language of my choice, not of my birth. English is the most eloquent, the most precise, the most economical, and, therefore, the most powerful. English fits me best—but I would be able to express my identity in any Western language.)

The tribalists clamor that their language preserves their “ethnic identity.” But there is no such thing. Conformity to a racist tradition does not constitute a human identity. Just as racism provides a pseudo-self-esteem for men who have not earned an authentic one, so their hysterical loyalty to their own dialect serves a similar function: it provides a pretense at “collective self-esteem,” an illusion of safety for the confused, frightened, precarious state of a tribalist’s stagnant consciousness.

The proclaimed desire to preserve one’s language and/or its literary works, if any, is a cover-up. In a free, or even semi-free country, no one is forbidden to speak any language he chooses with those who wish to speak it. But he cannot force it on others. A country has to have only one official language if men are to understand one another—and it makes no difference which language it is, since men live by the meaning, not the sound, of words. It is eminently fair that a country’s official language should be the language of the majority. As to literary works, their survival does not depend on political enforcement.

But to the tribalists, language is not a tool of thought and communication. Language to them is a symbol of tribal status and power—the power to force their dialect on all outsiders. This appeals not even to the tribal leaders, but to the sick, touchy vanity of the tribal rank and file.

In this connection, I want to mention a hypothesis of mine, which is only a hypothesis because I have given no special study to the subject of bilingual countries, i.e., countries that have two official languages. But I have observed the fact that bilingual countries tend to be culturally impoverished by comparison to the major countries whose language they share in part. Bilingual countries do not produce many great, first-rate achievements in any intellectual line of endeavor, whether in science, philosophy, literature, or art. Consider the record of Belgium (which is French-speaking in part) as against the record of France—or the record of Switzerland (a trilingual country) as against the record of France, of Germany, of Italy—or the record of Canada as against the record of the United States.

The cause of the poor records may lie in the comparative territorial smallness of those countries—but this does not apply to Canada versus the United States. The cause may lie in the fact that the best, most talented citizens of the bilingual countries tend to emigrate to the major countries—but this still leaves the question: Why do they?

My hypothesis is as follows: the policy of bilingual rule (which spares some citizens the necessity to learn another language) is a concession to, and a perpetuation of, a strong ethnic-tribalist element within a country. It is an element of anti-intellectuality, conformity, and stagnation. The best minds would run from such countries: they would sense, if not know it consciously, that tribalism leaves them no chance.

But quite apart from this particular hypothesis, there can be no doubt that the spread of tribalism is an enormously anti-intellectual evil. If, as I said, some elements of “ethnicity” did remain in the backyards of civilized countries and stayed harmless for centuries, why the sudden epidemic of their rebirth? Irrationalism and collectivism the philosophical notions of the prehistorical eras—had to be implemented in practice, in political action, before they could engulf the greatest scientific-technological achievements mankind had ever reached. The political cause of tribalism’s rebirth is the mixed economy—the transitional stage of the formerly civilized countries of the West on their way to the political level from which the rest of the world has never emerged: the level of permanent tribal warfare.

As I wrote in my article on “Racism” (in The Virtue of Selfishness): “The growth of racism in a ‘mixed economy’ keeps step with the growth of government controls. A ‘mixed economy’ disintegrates a country into an institutionalized civil war of pressure groups, each fighting for legislative favors and special privileges at the expense of one another.”

When a country begins to use such expressions as “seeking a bigger share of the pie,” it is accepting a tenet of pure collectivism : the notion that the goods produced in a country do not belong to the producers, but belong to everybody, and that the government is the distributor. If so, what chance does an individual have of getting a slice of that pie? No chance at all, not even a few crumbs. An individual becomes “fair game” for every sort of organized predator. Thus people are pushed to surrender their independence in exchange for tribal protection.

The government of a mixed economy manufactures pressure groups—and, specifically, manufactures “ethnicity.” The profiteers are those group leaders who discover suddenly that they can exploit the helplessness, the fear, the frustration of their “ethnic” brothers, organize them into a group, present demands to the government—and deliver the vote. The result is political jobs, subsidies, influence, and prestige for the leaders of the ethnic groups.

This does not improve the lot of the group’s rank and file. It makes no difference to the hard-pressed unemployed of any race or color what quota of jobs, college admissions, and Washington appointments were handed out to the political manipulators from their particular race or color. But the ugly farce goes on, with the help and approval of the intellectuals, who write about “minority victories.”

Here is a sample of the goal of such victories. In The New York Times of January 17, 1977, a news story was headlined as follows: “Hispanic Groups Say They Are Inequitably Treated in Support for Arts.” At a hearing on the subject, New York State Senator Robert Garcia declared: “What we are really talking about is dollars and whether we are receiving a fair share of the revenues generated in this state.” The purpose of the demands for state dollars was “to assure the growth of ‘non-mainstream art forms.’ ” This means: art forms which people do not care to see or to support. The recommendations reached at the hearing included the demand that “at least twenty-five percent of the money goes to Hispanic arts.”

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what your tax money is being spent on: the new profiteers of altruism are not the poor, the sick, or the unemployed, but ethnic females swishing their skirts in old Spanish dances which were not too good even when they were new.

This is a typical example of the motives and the vested interests behind the growth, the pushing, and the touting of “ethnicity.”

An interesting article was published in the British magazine Encounter (February 1975). It is entitled “The Universalisation of Ethnicity” and is written by Nathan Glazer, a well-known American sociologist. It is quite revealing of the modern intellectuals’ attitude toward the spread of ethnicity more revealing in what Mr. Glazer does not say than in what he does.

He observes: “The overwhelming majority of people ... are born into a religion, rather than adopt it, just as they are born into an ethnic group. In this respect both are similar. They are both groups by ‘ascription’ rather than ‘achievement.’ They are groups in which one’s status is immediately given by birth rather than gained by some activities in one’s life.”

This is eminently—and horribly—true. There is a great deal to be said about the horrifying approach of a world dominated by people who prefer “ascription” to “achievement,” and who seek a physiologically determined, automatically given status rather than a status they have to earn. Mr. Glazer does not say it; he merely reports.

He is disturbed by the relationship of “ethnic group” to “caste,” but treats it merely as a problem of definitions. But, of course, castes are inherent in the notion of ethnicity—castes of superiors and inferiors, determined by birth, enforced and perpetuated by law, dividing people into “aristocrats,” “commoners,” etc., down to “untouchables.”

Mr. Glazer makes a true and profoundly important statement: “The United States is perhaps unique among the states of the world in using the term ‘nation’ to refer not to an ethnic group but to all who choose to become Americans.” But he draws no conclusions from it. Yet it is extremely significant that the United States was the archenemy and the destroyer of ethnicity, that it abolished castes and any sort of inherited titles, that it granted no recognition to groups as such, that it recognized only the right of the individual to choose the associations he wished to join. Freedom of association is the opposite of ethnicity.

Mr. Glazer does not raise the question of the original American philosophy and the relationship of its destruction to the rise of ethnicity. The focus of his interest lies elsewhere. He writes: “The Socialist hope for a trans-national class struggle, based on class identification, never came to pass. Instead, it has been replaced by national and ethnic conflicts.” And: “In most countries national interests and ethnic interests seem to dominate over class interests.” Mr. Glazer is baffled by this development. He offers some tentative explanations with which he himself is not satisfied, such as: “The trends of modernisation, even while they do destroy some bases of distinctive culture and distinctive identity, create a need for a new kind of identity related to the old, intimate type of village or tribal association.” A modern, technological society, which includes nuclear bombs and space travel—to be run by villages or by tribal associations?

Mr. Glazer himself tends to dismiss theories of this sort, and admits that he cannot find an explanation. “This is the heart of the darkness. Why didn’t the major lines of conflict within societies become class conflicts rather than ethnic conflicts? ... In most developing countries Marxism remains the ideology of the students and often of the ruling group—but ethnicity is the focus around which identity and loyalty have been shaped.” Mr. Glazer comes closer to an answer when he observes that ethnicity has “an irrational appeal,” but he takes it no further. He says instead:

It would seem that the rallying cries that mobilise the classes have, in recent decades, had less power than the rallying cries that mobilise the races, tribes, religions, language-users—in short, the Ethnic Groups. Perhaps the epidemic of ethnic conflicts reflects the fact that leaders and organisers believe they can get a more potent response by appealing to ethnicity than they can by appealing to Class Interest.

True, leaders and organizers do believe this—but why? The answer to Mr. Glazer’s questions lies in the fact that Marxism is an intellectual construct; it is false, but it is an abstract theory—and it is too abstract for the tribalists’ concrete-bound, perceptual mentalities. It requires a significantly high level of abstraction to grasp the reality of “an international working class”—a level beyond the power of a consciousness that understands its own village, but has trouble treating the nearest town as fully real. No, the level of men’s intelligence has not deteriorated from natural causes; it has been pushed down, retarded, stultified by modern anti-intellectual education and modern irrationalist philosophy.

Mr. Glazer does not see or is not concerned with any part of this answer. It is obvious that he is disturbed by the spread of ethnicity, but he tries to hope for the best—and this leads him, in conclusion, to a truly unspeakable statement. After proposing some sort of solution in the form of “either guaranteed shares for each group, or guaranteed rights for each individual and each group,” he continues: “The United States in the past seemed to find the approach in terms of ‘guaranteed rights’ more congenial than the approach in terms of guaranteed shares; but recently Americans have begun to take individual rights less seriously, and to take group shares more seriously.” After I recovered from feeling sick at my stomach, I asked myself: What Americans has Mr. Glazer been observing or associating with? I do not know—but his statement is libel against an entire nation. His statement means that Americans are willing to sell their rights for money—for a “share of the pie.”

In his last paragraph Mr. Glazer observes that there was time when “the problems of Ethnicity, as a source of conflict within nations and between nations, have generally appeared as simply a left-over, an embarrassment from the past. It is my conviction they must now be placed at the very centre of our concern for the human condition.”

He is right to fear such a prospect.

There is no surer way to infect mankind with hatred—brute, blind, virulent hatred—than by splitting it into ethnic groups or tribes. If a man believes that his own character is determined at birth in some unknown, ineffable way, and that the characters of all strangers are determined in the same way—then no communication, no understanding, no persuasion is possible among them, only mutual fear, suspicion, and hatred. Tribal or ethnic rule has existed, at some time, in every part of the world, and, in some country, in every period of mankind’s history. The record of hatred is always the same. The worst kinds of atrocities were perpetrated during ethnic (including religious) wars. A recent grand-scale example of it was Nazi Germany.

Warfare permanent warfare—is the hallmark of tribal existence. A tribe—with its rules, dogmas, traditions, and arrested mental development—is not a productive organization. Tribes subsist on the edge of starvation, at the mercy of natural disasters, less successfully than herds of animals. War against other, momentarily luckier tribes, in the hope of looting some meager hoard, is their chronic emergency means of survival. The inculcation of hatred for other tribes is a necessary tool of tribal rulers, who need scapegoats to blame for the misery of their own subjects.

There is no tyranny worse than ethnic rule—since it is an unchosen serfdom one is asked to accept as a value, and since it applies primarily to one’s mind. A man of self-esteem will not accept the notion that the content of his mind is determined by his muscles, i.e., by his own body. But by the bodies of an unspecified string of ancestors? Determinism by the means of production is preferable; it is equally false, but less offensive to human dignity. Marxism is corrupt, but clean compared to the stale, rank, musty odor of ethnicity.

As to the stagnation under tribal rule—take a look at the Balkans. At the start of this century, the Balkans were regarded as the disgrace of Europe. Six or eight tribes, plus a number of subtribes with unpronounceable names, were crowded on the Balkan peninsula, engaging in endless wars among themselves or being conquered by stronger neighbors or practicing violence for the sake of violence over some microscopic language differences. “Balkanization”—the breakup of larger nations into ethnic tribes—was used as a pejorative term by the European intellectuals of the time. Those same intellectuals were pathetically proud when they managed, after World War I, to glue most of the Balkan tribes together into two larger countries: Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. But the tribes never vanished; they have been popping up in minor explosions all along, and a major one is possible at any time.

In the light of tribalism’s historical record, it is ludicrous to compromise with it, to hope for the best or to expect some sort of fair “group shares.” Nothing can be expected from tribalism except brutality and war. But this time, it is not with bows and arrows that the tribes will be armed, but with nuclear bombs.

As a tiny preview of what tribalism would mean in a modern, technological civilization, a story in The New York Times of January 23, 1977, reports that the French-speaking Canadians of Quebec had demanded the use of French in all official dealings, including at airports, but “a federal court upheld a ban by the federal Ministry of Transport on the use of French for landings at Montreal’s two international airports. (English is the language accepted at airports in every nation of the world.)”

Let me remind you of the recent terrible collision of two planes in the Canary Islands. Although all the personnel involved spoke English perfectly, the investigations seem to indicate that the collision was caused by linguistic misunderstandings. But what is that to the Canadians of Quebec, or to Idi Amin of Uganda, or to any other ethnic tribalists who might demand that their language be spoken by every plane pilot in the world? Incidentally, that collision took place because the small airport was overcrowded with planes that could not land at a nearby major airport: the major airport had been bombed by ethnic terrorists who were seeking the independence of the Canary Islands from Spain.

How long would the achievements of a technological civilization last under this sort of tribal management?

Some people ask whether local groups or provinces have the right to secede from the country of which they are a part. The answer is: on ethnic grounds, no. Ethnicity is not a valid consideration, morally or politically, and does not endow anyone with any special rights. As to other than ethnic grounds, remember that rights belong only to individuals and that there is no such thing as “group rights.” If a province wants to secede from a dictatorship, or even from a mixed economy, in order to establish a free country—it has the right to do so. But if a local gang, ethnic or otherwise, wants to secede in order to establish its own government controls, it does not have that right. No group has the right to violate the rights of the individuals who happen to live in the same locality. A wish—individual or collective—is not a right.

Is there a way to avoid the rebirth of global tribalism and the approach of another Dark Ages? Yes, there is, but only one way—through the rebirth of the antagonist that has demonstrated its power to relegate ethnicity to a peaceful dump: capitalism.

Observe the paradoxes built up about capitalism. It has been called a system of selfishness (which, in my sense of the term, it is)—yet it is the only system that drew men to unite on a large scale into great countries, and peacefully to cooperate across national boundaries, while all the collectivist, internationalist, One-World systems are splitting the world into Balkanized tribes.

Capitalism has been called a system of greed—yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal, and no tribal gang can conceive of.

Capitalism has been called nationalistic—yet it is the only system that banished ethnicity, and made it possible, in the United States, for men of various, formerly antagonistic nationalities to live together in peace.

Capitalism has been called cruel—yet it brought such hope, progress and general good will that the young people of today, who have not seen it, find it hard to believe.

As to pride, dignity, self-confidence, self-esteem—these are characteristics that mark a man for martyrdom in a tribal society and under any social system except capitalism.

If you want an example of what had once been the spirit of America—a spirit which would be impossible today, but which we must now struggle to bring to a rebirth I will quote from an old poem that represents the opposite of the abject self-abasement of ethnicity. It is a poem called “The Westerner” by Badger Clark.

He begins with “My fathers sleep on the Eastern plain and each one sleeps alone”—he acknowledges his respect for his forefathers, then says:

But I lean on no dead kin.
My name is mine for fame or scorn,
And the world began when I was born,
And the world is mine to win.

Gender Tribalism

Peter Schwartz

All forms of collectivism rest on a certain metaphysics. The collectivist tenets—in economics, that production is primarily a social effort; in politics, that the group, not the individual, has rights; in ethics, that the individual must sacrifice his interests to the needs of society; in epistemology, that the judgment of an individual mind is subordinate to the collective consensus—all stem from a deeper premise: that the individual is impotent to cope with reality. The individual, on this premise, cannot sustain his life on his own, and must depend upon the group for survival.

This viewpoint, as applied to women, is what feminism essentially promulgates.

Of all the supposedly demeaning views of women for which feminists condemn our “patriarchal” society, none is remotely as denigrating as that held by feminism itself. It is, today, uniquely feminists who depict women as congenitally helpless, endlessly “victimized” creatures.

It is feminists who declare that, without government aid, women are compelled to accept only 75 percent of what men are paid—that their advancement at work is blocked by a “glass ceiling,” which only the weight of government can shatter—that women cannot be expected to hold full-time jobs unless government provides day-care services for their children—that women cannot get hired for the better jobs or admitted into the better schools, except through “affirmative-action” preferences—that women cannot attain self-esteem as long as Playboy-type material (which, a court rules, has “a negative impact on the individual’s sense of self-worth and acceptance”) is legally permitted to be sold.¹

The message of such feminist stands is that the individual woman cannot succeed in life by her own efforts and on her own merit. She is at the mercy of forces she cannot control, unable to obtain work, education or self-respect without the succor of a (governmental) nursemaid.

This is not merely a journalistic description of what feminists see as an unfortunate condition of women at present. This is, rather, a part of their basic philosophy—a philosophy that holds metaphysical powerlessness to be woman’s normal state.

And it is a state that feminists actively foster. They want women to believe that the way to attain one’s goals is to rely, not on individual merit, but on the power of the group. According to feminism, acquiring the specific abilities necessary for success in some area should be of little concern to women. In fact, they should dismiss the very need for such abilities. What they should count on, instead, is the fact of their gender.

For example, the average woman scores lower on the Medical College Admissions Test (because of deficiencies in her knowledge of science) than the average man. Should women who want to be doctors come to the logical conclusion that they need to study harder? Should women be advised to master science, so that they can be accepted on the same basis as men, irrespective of gender? No, say the feminists; the only conclusion to be drawn is that not enough women are being admitted—so the qualifications must be changed.²

If a woman wants to be, say, a firefighter, the feminists do not encourage her to make sure she measures up to the demanding physical standards. What matters most, she is told, is that there be a representative contingent of her gender at the firehouse. And if she does not meet the standards? She should not have to, feminists retort; women are rightly due their quota of such jobs.

With all their prattle about female “empowerment,” feminists disavow the only legitimate meaning of that term: i.e., the individual woman’s self-created power to make herself into a value, the power to make an employer want to promote her or a school want to enroll her—as a mutually beneficial exchange, based on her objective ability, not as a sacrificial accommodation to her gender. But that would be too independent an approach for the feminists to sanction.

Their implicit message to women is: “You cannot succeed on your own—but you don’t have to; your collective will get you what you want.”

Ironically, when the contemporary feminist movement began, in the 1960s, people believed that its message was the exact opposite. They believed that women were being urged to abandon the traditional “hausfrau” mentality—i.e., the assumption (held by females no less than by males) that women were incapable of dealing with existence outside the confines of the kitchen and the bedroom. People believed that women were being urged to seek their own careers, to reject unchosen duties to others, to assert a moral right to the pursuit of their own happiness, to embrace the real world by becoming airline pilots, neurosurgeons, music composers and CEOs.

But the collectivism at the heart of the movement quickly surfaced, revealing feminism’s true nature. It became clear that women were expected to obtain all these new positions, not by earning them qua individuals, but by demanding them qua females. It became clear that the hausfrau image, far from being rejected, was being endorsed by feminism—in an updated, uglier form.

Whereas the old hausfrau mentality said that women could not perform the more demanding jobs as competently as men, this same mentality now says that women should not be required to. Now, the fact of gender supposedly entitles women to their “fair share” of corporate vice presidencies, irrespective of ability. Now, under this “neo-hausfrauism,” women don’t have to earn any reward—they just have to call upon Momma State to grab it for them. Now, as before, the conclusion for women is: gender determines all.

It is only the perverse influence of modern collectivism that permits such moral debilitation to be termed “liberation.”

In pushing this philosophy, feminism attracts the very worst among women. It draws all those who want to be absolved of responsibility for their lives. Every housewife who feels guilty for having forever given up her pursuit of a career——every mindless scrub nurse who regrets having abandoned her ambition for something more—every bitter woman in a dead-end job or a dead-end life——are all reassured that their plight is not their fault. The individual woman cannot succeed—feminist doctrine proclaims; so she is not to be reproached for her failures.

One type of woman, however, is to be reproached: the woman of true independence. The woman who wants to judge and be judged according to individual merit—who scorns the crutch of “affirmative action,” who succeeds on her own and who is proud of it—is chastised as a traitor to her tribe. She would never have achieved anything—feminists resentfully insist—had it not been for the collective efforts of all women.

Feminism rests upon dependency. It tenaciously recruits—and molds——dependent, self-abnegating women. It inculcates in them a belief in their metaphysical helplessness—and then waits for them to become docile members of the flock.

Feminism wants to enshrine the very mentality from which it claims to “liberate” women. It seeks to re-channel the hausfrau mentality—the desire to be provided for—by simply switching the object of dependence from husbands to the “Sisterhood.”

The leaders of feminism advocate the creed of the social worker. The social worker exists, not to help people escape from trouble, but to persuade them that life inherently is trouble——from which escape is impossible without the help of the social worker. Feminists want to instill a similar state of mind, by convincing the individual woman that she is doomed to frustration and failure—unless she hitches her wagon to the collective caravan of womanhood.

At the root of this malign conception of women lies a premise about free will. Feminists implicitly believe that women have no genuine volition and that their choices in life are not freely made.

Thus, according to feminism, a woman is never to feel guilty, no matter how low she may have sunk. Has she thrown her life away in a loveless marriage, in drug addiction, in prostitution, in violent crime? She could not help it, feminists tell her. Her choices are not the cause of her misery. Society did not allow her to do anything else. It is society, not she, that needs changing. And the only true “choice” a woman can make, therefore, is a collective one: to stand in solidarity with her female comrades.

The heroines of the feminist movement are not the women who achieve productive lives by their own efforts, but those who announce how empty and impossible their lives would have been without the maternalistic aid of a feminist-sensitive state. The woman who has no real self to assert—who pleads to be taken care of by her “sisters”—who preaches loyalty to quotas and subservience to the collective—who declares that the source of her unhappiness is not her own irrational choices in life but a tyrannical culture—it is she who is held up as a model to be emulated.

Because feminism regards volition as a myth, women are consistently portrayed as victims. Since they are not held responsible for any failure to attain some end, every frustrated whim of theirs is taken as a sign of victimization. It is taken as evidence that women are being denied their rightful share of the goods. “Feminist consciousness”—says one author—“is consciousness of victimization. ”³ (Emphasis in original.)

The actual “victimizer” is, of course, reality itself. If a woman wants to be hired for a certain position or to gain entry into a certain school, not because she qualifies for it, but because she belongs to a class whose desires are not being fulfilled—then it is reality that is the barrier. For it is reality that demands objective qualifications. It is reality that presents us with the unbending law of causality, the law which states that a job can be done only by those who can do it. It is objectivity—the need to adhere to the requirements of reality—that is feminism’s real enemy.

But feminists dismiss the very concept of an objective reality, because the volitionless woman cannot survive in such a world. She cannot accommodate herself to a universe that makes such rigid demands upon her. She wants the “flexibility” of the non-objective. She feels ineffectual in an objective reality—so feminism repudiates it for her.

“Feminist analysis”—says a professor at the University of New Mexico Law School—“begins and ends with the principle that objective reality is a myth.”⁴

Thus feminists denounce the “exclusionary” means by which society evaluates doctors, lawyers, soldiers. Why, they ask, should women be judged by objective standards? And if one answers: because reality and reason mandate it—their reply is: Why should women be bound by reality and reason? Why can’t a woman be allowed to construct a more malleable world, a world she feels is more hospitable to her wishes? Why shouldn’t she be judged, for example, by her compassion for the ill, rather than her ability to perform surgery—or by her aptitude for telling stories rather than for logically analyzing legal principles—or by her capacity to bond with her fellow soldiers rather than to run an obstacle course in full military gear?

As the president of City College of New York, complaining about a lack of “diversity” in universities, writes: “Institutions of higher learning in the United States are products of Western society in which masculine values like an orientation toward achievement and objectivity are valued over cooperation, connectedness and subjectivity.”⁵

Why, feminists wonder, should even immutable facts stand in the way of women’s egalitarian desires? For instance, why should women pay more for annuities just because they have longer life expectancies? Why should they pay different medical insurance premiums just because they incur pregnancy-related costs?⁶ Why should females not be members of the Dallas Cowboys and the Vienna Boys Choir? As one feminist organization claims: “There is no such thing as fair and unfair discrimination.”⁷

In this war between women and objectivity—between whims and reality—it is considered “discriminatory” to give priority to the latter combatant.

But since reality per se is not very responsive to political protests, feminists direct their grievances against the party they blame for “inventing” such an unyielding universe: men.

It is men who push the idea of objectivity—feminism argues—as a means of keeping women subjugated. It is men who arbitrarily refuse to indulge a woman’s whims, as they insist that she be judged by merit, not gender. It is men who are to blame for every female who becomes a stewardess rather than a pilot, a cheerleader rather than a quarterback, a secretary rather than a vice president.

Feminists observe that males have somehow managed to succeed in reality. They have somehow been able to acquire the jobs, the wealth, the fame, the happiness. The way for women to do likewise—feminists maintain—is, not to master reality, but to harness its surrogate: the male. How? By acting like the children feminism believes they metaphysically are, and petulantly demanding that their desires be accommodated—by men. By insisting that they be given their “allowances,” in the form of prescribed quotas of jobs, promotions, college admissions, etc.—to be produced and financed by men. (At least, the old hausfrau method of directly latching onto a husband for financial security was a more honest form of dependence.)

This evaluation of women as non-volitional ciphers, and of men as their vile oppressors, is implicit throughout the feminist philosophy. But there is one area in which this view is made virtually explicit: sex.

Sex between a man and a woman is not what it seems, according to feminists—i.e., it is not really voluntary. Law professor Susan Estrich, for instance, writes: “Many feminists would argue that so long as women are powerless relative to men, viewing a ‘yes’ as a sign of true consent is misguided.”⁸

Other feminists contend that a woman cannot be held accountable for her decision to engage in sex. “There could be many reasons why a woman might not resist a man’s advances so that unwanted intercourse could occur without force. The woman ... may be confused. Her socialization may make it difficult for her to resist.”⁹

In other words, women—adult women—are incapable of saying no when they do not want to have sex. They are the passive, deterministic products of their “socialization.” Consequently, feminists say, women cannot be held responsible for having sex, any more than children can.

This idea of women as volitionless doormats obliterates the distinction between the voluntary and the forced. Do women have a rational faculty, by which they choose whether or not to engage in sex? Not according to feminists, who declare that “verbal coercion” constitutes rape. And what is “verbal coercion”? It is “a woman’s consenting to unwanted sexual activity because of a man’s verbal arguments not including verbal threats of force.”¹⁰ (Emphasis added.) So whenever the man utters anything indicating a desire for sex, any subsequent sexual activity, no matter how willing the woman is, may well make him criminally liable.

This is why, in incidents in which men are denounced (sometimes correctly) for “sexual misconduct”—such as the one at the Navy’s 1991 Tailhook convention—no differentiation is made between actions in which the women willingly engage and actions in which they are forced to participate. To the feminist, it is all “coercive.”

On this view, it is not the objective facts that are legally decisive, but the woman’s subjective emotions. Says law professor Catherine MacKinnon: “I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.”¹¹ (Emphasis added.)

Facts are simply brushed aside by feminists. Since women are seen as incapable of exercising volition, the crucial distinction with respect to sex is, not between the woman’s giving and withholding consent, but between her feeling and not feeling “violated” —a feeling on the basis of which men are to be indicted, tried and sentenced.

A study of college students (“Project on Campus Sexual Assault”), sponsored by Ms. magazine in 1985, is widely hailed as an authoritative, scientific survey of the prevalence of rape in American society. It found that over 25 percent of college-age women had been victims of rape or attempted rape. This reinforced the portrait of a patriarchal culture in which women are under constant attack by, and need constant protection from, their natural enemy, the male.

Yet it was only the survey’s distorted definition of rape—based on the view of women as “socialized” puppets, unable to make their own decisions—that led to such a conclusion. For example, according to the questionnaire, if a woman accepts a drink from a man and they then willingly have sex, it may be considered rape, because the man has “impair[ed] the other person’s judgment or control by administering any drug or intoxicant.”¹²

In fact, of those classified by the survey as having been raped, 73 percent indicated that they themselves did not believe that the sexual activity in question constituted rape. And over 40 percent of the “victims” had sex again with their “attackers.”¹³

This neo-hausfrau movement believes that women must be treated like children. They cannot be trusted to give “informed consent,” they cannot be relied upon to know whether they have been raped and they need continuous parental supervision to make sure their needs are being met.

When a march on Washington was organized by the National Organization for Women to publicize “violence against women,” the objects of the protest were, not just rape or battery, but reductions in welfare spending and cutbacks in affirmative action programs. As reported in the New York Times, the feminists “equated what they called ‘political violence’ with physical attacks.”¹⁴ A parent who beats an infant and a parent who withholds meals from an infant are both guilty of physical abuse. Similarly—feminist thinking goes—adult women are “victimized” by a denial of welfare benefits as much as by a real assault.

Just as the essence of rape, according to feminists, is not the act of physically forcing a woman to have sex, so the nature of its evil is not the coercion—but the collective “discrimination” by one class against another.

This primitive, tribalist view is most openly advocated by MacKinnon, who writes: “Sexual violation is both a practice and an index of inequality between the sexes, both a symbol and an act of women’s subordinate social status to men.”¹⁵ Unable to perceive a woman as an individual even with respect to her being the target of an actual rape, MacKinnon sees the crime as being committed against the tribe. It is not that a particular woman has been attacked by a particular man—or even that physical force has been used—but that one collective has been judged “inferior” to another.

Rape should be prosecuted as a “sex equality case,” MacKinnon says. In a rape trial, the central questions about the accused would include: “How does this man treat women sexually? Is he a sex bigot?” If the courts were to adopt this approach, she concludes, “At least rape would be called in law what it is in life: sex discrimination.”¹⁶

But if the essence of rape is “discrimination”—what is the difference between sex and rape? The act of sex is undeniably “discriminatory” —it discriminates by gender. Doesn’t that make it inherently evil?

Whether the claim is that “yes” equals “no,” or that rape equals “inequality”—sex is transformed by feminists into the archetypal act of aggression by men against women. Sex per se becomes rape. And all men become guilty of it.

Rape, says one “acquaintance-rape educator,” “is not some form of psychopathology that afflicts a very small number of men. In fact rape is not that different from what we see as socially acceptable or socially laudable male behavior.”“¹⁷ Rape, says a noted feminist author, is ”a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.“¹⁸ (Emphasis in original.)

What is the source of this enormous hostility toward men, and particularly toward sex between men and women? The act of sex, Ayn Rand writes, is an act of metaphysical assertion: “To a rational man, sex is an expression of self-esteem—a celebration of himself and of existence.... [I]t is his response to his own highest values in the person of another.”¹⁹ (Emphasis in original.) Sex is an affirmation of an individual’s self-worth, of his or her capability to live successfully in reality and to experience the joy of such success.

What assessment of sex, then, follows from an opposite metaphysics? If sex is good because it celebrates the individual’s capacity to master reality and achieve values—how must feminists, who believe that a woman fundamentally lacks that capacity, perceive sex?

To them, sex is a union, not between two partners sharing their highest values, but between two antagonistic forces: a brutal despot—who wantonly denies woman her due by insisting that she earn her place in the world: and a feckless, perpetual victim—who desperately clings to others for her basic identity and for her very survival. On this view, sex for the woman is not a joyous affirmation of her sense of self-value, but an intolerable reinforcement of her sense of helplessness—and of her resentment toward the man for not being helpless.

Sex, according to feminists, is sheer oppression. The woman is being dominated. She is being “taken” by her enemy. Sex is the quintessential “victimization” of woman—the woman who lacks the capacity even to assert her own will in the face of male “verbal coercion.”

Feminist theorist Andrea Dworkin, who depicts sex as “wartime invasion and occupation,” presents this view unabashedly: “Physically, the woman in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied literally: occupied even if there has been no resistance, no force; even if the occupied person said yes please, yes hurry, yes more.” The fact that women may judge sex to be good makes the act all the worse, she says. These “occupied women [are] more base in their collaboration than other collaborators have ever been: experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority, calling intercourse freedom.”²⁰

Dworkin’s is not some “lunatic fringe” viewpoint. Her odious characterization of sex follows logically from the feminist metaphysics. If the individual woman is a powerless, volitionless nonentity, then sex is a combination of callous invasion and abject collaboration. Dworkin is merely being more consistent, and is taking feminist ideas more seriously, than many of her feminist cohorts.

The doctrine of feminism pervades today’s culture. To question and oppose its “politically correct” tenets, especially within academia, requires an independent mind. That is, it requires precisely the faculty whose existence feminism will not acknowledge—and whose force it cannot withstand.

Feminism needs to be repudiated by everyone—man or woman—who recognizes the crucial need to think, and to act, by oneself. If you understand that a human being’s basic identity is self-created, and is not the product of gender—if you grasp the fact of your capacity to achieve your own goals by your own effort—if you indignantly reject the demand that anyone live by the guidance and the power of the collective—then do not permit the ideas of feminism to go unchallenged. Expose, and condemn, the self-effacing dependency that this “liberation” movement cultivates. Above all, let people see that the ideological battle over feminism is not between the female and the male—but between tribalism and independence.

REFERENCES

1 “Canada Court Says Pornography Harms Women,” New York Times, February 2, 1992, p. B7

2 On the Medical College Admission Test—the only standardized test available to medical schools—women attain a mean score 88 percent that of men on the physical sciences section of the test; and 90 percent on the biological sciences. Yet in recent years, according to the Association of Medical Colleges, equal proportions of male and female applicants have been accepted to medical schools. (“Women seem to communicate better in the interview,” says the associate dean of admissions at Harvard Medical School.) See Martin L. Gross, The End of Sanity (Avon Books, 1997) pp. 72-75.

3 Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (Routledge, 1990), p. 15.

4 Ann Scales of the University of New Mexico Law School, quoted by David Brock in The Real Anita Hill (Free Press, 1993) p. 384.

5 Yolanda Moses, quoted in a New York Post editorial, “CUNY Does It Again,” May 26, 1993, p. 18.

6 The Supreme Court has endorsed this view, ruling in 1983 that sex-segregated actuarial tables violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because “under the statute, even a true generalization about a class cannot justify class-based treatment.”

7 An official of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, quoted in The Intellectual Activist, July 29, 1983, p. 3.

8 Quoted by Katie Roiphe in “Date Rape’s Other Victim,” New York Times Magazine, June 13, 1993, p. 30.

9 Charlene L. Muehlenhard and Jennifer L. Schrag, quoted by Norman Podhoretz in “Rape in Feminist Eyes,” Commentary, October 1991, p. 33.

10 Roiphe, op. cit.

11 Quoted by Carol lannone, “Sex and the Feminists,” Commentary, September 1993, p. 31.

12 Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? (Simon & Schuster, 1994), pp. 212—213.

13 Ibid., pp. 213—214.

14 “Thousands in Capital Protest Attacks on Women,” New York Times, April 10, 1995, p. A1.

15 “The Palm Beach Hanging,” New York Times. December 15, 1991, Section 4, p. 15.

16 Ibid.

17 Py Bateman, quoted by Podhoretz, op. cit., p. 30.

18 Ibid. (from Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, Bantam, 1976).

19 Ayn Rand, “Of Living Death,” The Voice of Reason (New American Library, 1998), p. 54.

20 Quoted by Podhoretz, op. cit., p. 31 (from Andrea Dworkin’s book Intercourse, Free Press, 1988).

The Anti-Industrial Revolution

The Philosophy of Privation

Peter Schwartz

The first code of ethics that deliberately and unequivocally divorced man’s actions from his interests was Immanuel Kant’s. It was Kant who declared that man, to be certain that he is acting morally, must not merely ignore his interests—material or spiritual—but must willfully contradict them. It was Kant who created a formal dichotomy between that which constitutes the good and that which fulfills any need of human life.

Kant’s philosophy gradually worked its way into Western culture. Now, some two hundred years later, a political movement has arisen that brazenly endorses this killer creed. It is a movement that seeks to prohibit the pursuit of human values—because of one’s moral “duty” to the non-human. That movement is: environmentalism.

Many people hold a benign view of environmentalism. They regard it as a salutary force, as a sort of global sanitation department. While critical of certain “excesses,” people believe that environmentalism fundamentally seeks to improve man’s life by cleaning up the dirt in his water and the pollutants in his air.

But that is a dangerously superficial assessment. If one examines the conflicts between the interests of man and the “interests” of nature, it becomes clear that the former are invariably sacrificed to the latter by environmentalists. Whenever there is a hydroelectric dam to be built, it is the welfare of the snail darter or the Chinook salmon that is inviolate, and the welfare of man that is dispensable. Whenever there is a choice between cutting down trees for human use and leaving them in place for the spotted owl, it is the bird’s home that environmentalists save and human habitation that goes unbuilt.

Huge tracts of Arctic land are off-limits to productive enterprises, in order not to disturb the caribou and the ice floes. Mosquito- and alligator-infested swamps (euphemistically called wetlands) are deemed sacred, not to be defiled by man-made drainage. (Even land that is actually growing crops can be christened wetlands, if some bureaucrat decides that vegetation typically found in swamps could have grown there had the crops not been planted.) The most beneficial projects, from housing developments to science observatories, are halted if there is any danger—if there is any allegation of danger to some piddling species.

The incalculable damage inflicted on human beings by such prohibitions is immaterial to environmentalists. They have abandoned even the pretext of holding human happiness as their ultimate purpose. In its place, as an open secret that the public is unable to take fully seriously, is the premise that nature must remain unchanged as an end in itself. It is the premise that nature must be protected, not for man, but from man.

Several years ago a controversy arose concerning a new cancer-fighting drug, taxol. It was found in the bark of the Pacific yew tree. The director of the National Cancer Institute described taxol as “the most important new drug we have had in cancer for fifteen years.”¹ But environmentalists insisted that the trees, which are considered scarce and are home to the spotted owl, remain largely untouched.

Al Gore, in his book Earth in the Balance, declares himself incapable of choosing between people and trees: “It seems an easy choice—sacrifice the tree for a human life—until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated.... Suddenly we must confront some tough questions.”²

According to an official of the Oregon Natural Resources Council: “The basic issue in our mind is that the yew [tree] is a finite resource.... Our concern is that there will not be any left the way we are approaching this.”³ Not be any left—for whom? Certainly, his concern was not that the people now dying of cancer would lack trees for their treatment; those were the very people being denied available medicine by the environmentalists. Nor was his concern that future cancer victims would go untreated; for that would imply an endorsement of a crash program to plant new trees—and to cut down every single existing one that was needed for its taxol. Toward whom, then, was this official’s concern directed? Toward no one. Toward no human being, that is. Environmentalism wants to preserve those trees for the sake of the trees. It wants all the people who are suffering from cancer simply to renounce this potential cure. It wants them to accept the inviolability of the yew tree.

Environmentalists view man as the enemy. Their aim is to keep nature pristine, free from the predatory invasions of man. It is not human welfare that sets the standard by which they make their judgments.

For example, author Tom Regan argues that medical research on animals, designed to discover cures for human diseases, should be abolished. He says: “If it means that there are some things we cannot learn, then so be it. We have no basic right not to be harmed by those natural diseases we are heir to.”⁴

David Foreman, founder of the organization Earth First, puts it more bluntly: “Wilderness has a right to exist for its own sake, and for the sake of the diversity of the life forms it shelters; we shouldn’t have to justify the existence of a wilderness area by saying, ‘Well, it protects the watershed, and it’s a nice place to backpack and hunt, and it’s pretty.’ ”⁵

David Graber, a biologist with the National Parks Service, revels in execrating human beings as trespassers upon nature. He describes himself as among those who “value wilderness for its own sake, not for what value it confers upon mankind.... We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value—to me—than another human body, or a billion of them. Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet.... It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”⁶

(And speaking of viruses, they too have “rights.” According to Rutgers ecologist David Ehrenfeld, the world’s remaining supply of the smallpox virus should not be exterminated, since it preys only on human beings.⁷)

Taking this illogic one step further, there are now “ecoterrorists,” who use violence against loggers and other “intruders” upon nature’s domain. A spokesman for the Green Party of Germany says: “We in the Green movement aspire to a cultural model in which the killing of a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of six-year-old children to Asian brothels.”⁸ And according to an activist with Earth First, injuring or even murdering such “forest-killers” is justifiable self-defense: “The holocaust against the environment and its species is the same as any holocaust against humans.”⁹ (Earth First’s apt slogan? “Back to the Pleistocene”—the glacial era of one million years ago; it is no accident that the Unabomber was openly sympathetic to the goals of this group.)

But if “wilderness has a right to exist for its own sake”—then man does not. Man survives only by altering nature to satisfy his own needs. Man cannot survive, as animals do, by automatically adapting to the natural surroundings in which he happens to find himself. Nature’s vast wilderness, if passively accepted, is inimical to his survival. Man must transform the naturally given into a truly human environment. He must produce the values his life requires—he must grow food and build supermarkets, chop down trees and erect condominiums, mine ore and design jet planes, isolate organisms and manufacture vaccines. None of these values exists ready-made in nature. Man brings all of them into being only by transmuting his “natural environment.”

To live as a human being requires that one regard nature as nothing but a means toward one’s ends. Every cart, rowboat and space shuttle man has constructed violates the “right” of land, sea and air to maintain their “natural states.” Every conscious decision to enhance human life—every attempt to rise above the animals—entails the subduing of nature and the repudiation of environmentalist doctrine. Man’s life depends upon his productiveness. In Ayn Rand’s words, it depends on a “process by which man’s consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one’s purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one’s values.”¹⁰

But if man lives only by a process of remaking the earth—what is the implication of the environmentalist demand that he renounce this process?

Environmentalism insists that man give up the value of material comfort and the expectation of material progress. He must distrust modem science and modem technology, since they only distance him from nature. He must forgo nuclear power and genetic engineering, luxury cars and food additives, Styrofoam cups and disposable diapers. He must stifle his inventiveness and shrink his cognitive horizons. His ancient ancestors managed to get by without an agglomeration of artificial gadgets—so must he. The essence of this message is that man should accept the only type of existence in true “harmony” with nature: an existence free of the man-made. Which means: for most, an early death; for the others, a life of backbreaking toil and bare subsistence.

The Worldwatch Institute, an environmentalist think tank, offers a stark concretization of this ideal: “The Eskimo’s scrupulous use of every scrap of seal or walrus in the face of absolute scarcity might serve as a symbol for all in the years ahead. Conspicuous and excessive consumption of energy and food should be discouraged by law and by social pressure, thus reducing demand.”¹¹

All the imprecations against “excessive consumption”—all the exhortations to “recycle,” to “conserve energy,” to “save the earth”—have, as their motivation, a vision of the crudely primitive state of this Eskimo. That is the environmentalist nirvana.

But why do people accept this? Why do the citizens of a modern, industrial society not recoil in horror at the attempt to establish privation as a virtue? Because of two insidious ideas pushed by environmentalists—one metaphysical, the other ethical. The first is that production cannot be “sustained”; the second, that it is unjust to “exploit” nature.

The first idea springs from the old collectivist belief that wealth is created not by the individual, but by the tribe. This belief severs the act of production from the (individual’s) faculty of reason. It was updated by Karl Marx, who maintained that the industrial factories and offices are somehow “just here,” waiting to be coaxed by proletarian sweat and muscle into discharging their riches.

Environmentalists agree with this view of production as a mindless process. Production, they believe, consists in serendipitously finding the goods—in digging into the earth and uncovering what nature generously yields up. The goods are nature’s beneficent gift to us. In the act of production, man is just a bit player, while nature is the star.

But whereas Marx implied that wealth is generated automatically, the environmentalist says it is not. The environmentalist holds that since production is not an act of reason, we cannot assume that the golden eggs will magically continue to appear. Instead, he says, with every scrap of wealth we greedily extract, with every clearing we plow and every bath we run, we “diminish” nature. By persistently trying to improve our environment to suit our ends, we are exceeding nature’s willingness to nurture us. We are not allowing her to “replenish” herself. We are not allowing her to set a “sustainable” pace.

Production, therefore, is a hopeless effort. We are running out, the environmentalists cry. Of what? Of everything. The attempt to maintain our present level of wealth—let alone to increase it—is futile. Nature’s fragile “ecosystem” simply will not allow it. We must resign ourselves to our impoverishment, because the mother lode is being exhausted.

Marx said the goods are here somehow—so society should seize them. Whereas the environmentalists say the goods are here somehow, but will not be here tomorrow—so society should “conserve” them.

It is not their own policies that are lowering our living standards—environmentalists disingenuously declare. The cause, rather, is the built-in limitations of nature. And the only solution is for us to reconcile ourselves to that fact. That is, since nature has only so much to give, we must stop seeking more. This injunction to make do with less is then resignedly accepted by the public because, it believes, there is no alternative.

Now consider the enormity of what is being evaded by the proponents of this metaphysics of scarcity. The Western world enjoys a material abundance at the end of the twentieth century that is orders of magnitude greater than what existed, say, in the tenth. The population is vastly larger, yet there are vastly more goods per person. Why? Certainly, natural resources have not miraculously multiplied. There is no greater quantity now of iron, or rainfall, or sand or petroleum. Rather, man’s mind has been at work. Man has taken iron and made it into tools. He has taken waterfalls and made them into generators of electricity. He has transformed grains of sand into computer chips, and oozing black glop into gasoline. A continuous reshaping of nature has occurred. Man has given value to the raw materials that had always existed but had been worthless—worthless, because they had been part of nature’s environment, not man’s.

This is the essence of production: taking the elements of nature, rearranging their form—and generating prosperity. It is a conceptual, quintessentially human process. Wealth does not exist as a fixed, static quantity. It is the creation of a dynamic, boundless mind. And it has no inherent limitations.

The doomsday stories about running out of some “finite resource” (including those coming from the Malthusian predecessors of today’s environmentalists) are endless; all of them ignore the causal connection between reason and production. For example, in 1908 the U.S. Geological Survey stated that the maximum future supply of crude oil in the U.S. was 22.5 billion barrels; eighty-seven years’ worth of consumption later, there were over 22 billion barrels just in unused, proven reserves. In 1914 the U.S. Bureau of Mines said that future American production of oil could total no more than 5.7 billion barrels; in the following eighty years, over 160 billion barrels were produced. In 1939 the Department of the Interior forecast that our oil supplies would last only another thirteen years; some thirty years later, the rate of production alone had almost tripled.¹²

If one recognizes the intellectual root of production, one realizes the arbitrariness of extrapolating from present reserves to a remote future—even with respect to “non-renewable” resources. Goods are produced by rational men acting according to their knowledge and their evaluations. Proven reserves are merely the quantity of some good that it is currently worthwhile to know is available when needed. But the finitude of a given stockpile is no basis for assuming that, when it is used up, scarcities may ensue. There is simply no rational value in locating now all the sources of raw material for the goods that the market will demand only in some far-off future—just as no one would take pains to identify today the particular store from which he will buy a new television set in ten years when his current one wears out. (As the time approaches—if television has not been replaced by some superior product he will make the effort to find a specific outlet from which to purchase what he needs.)

This is why no “finite resources” have ever disappeared, even though they have been in use for millennia. The value of some mineral is not intrinsic in its sheer existence. Its value is a consequence of the fact that man has recognized how it can be made to fill a human need. Every step of creating this value, from discovering how to mine it to inventing new uses for it, is an act of reason. As more of the known quantity of the good is used up and it becomes scarcer, its value grows, and it then becomes rational to search for more supply—it becomes rational to develop improved means of production—it becomes rational to devise better and cheaper substitutes. All of this prevents a good from simply being forever depleted. (Indeed, in a free market the known reserves often expand over time. For example, between 1950 and 1994 the U.S. reserves of “finite” zinc rose 271 percent; and of “finite” iron ore, 527 percent.¹³)

Only a view of production as mere mechanical motion would make someone believe that what does not exist today will not come into existence tomorrow. That is an unwarranted conclusion, even assuming that the level of knowledge and technology remains unchanged. It is doubly unwarranted given that one cannot know what cognitive advances will be made tomorrow, or what new developments those advances will make feasible on the day after tomorrow.

Knowledge is hierarchical. Earlier knowledge makes possible later knowledge. In a continual expansion of thought, every new idea is the key to countless newer ones. Every new thought is another step up the cognitive ladder, providing a wider, more efficient perspective from which to look out on reality—a perspective not attainable from the lower rung. Physical goods are the material product of those thoughts, and will therefore increase as knowledge increases. As long as man is politically free—free to think, and free to act on his ideas——there will be no shortage of physical goods, any more than there can be of intellectual goods.

The irony is that environmentalists sense the connection between reason and production (which is what makes them try to obscure it). This impels them to argue that we are running out of not only physical goods- -but ideas as well.

The Worldwatch Institute, for example, in discussing “the depletion of physical resources,” states: “[S]cientific advances in the near future will not be made as frequently or as cheaply as in the past. The known conceptual ground has been worked over pretty thoroughly, and subsequent explorers will find rich research veins less exposed and harder to exploit”[!]¹⁴ (One can only be grateful that our genetic engineers and our computer designers—to indicate just two of the many areas that have seen major scientific advances in recent years—were not deterred by such inanity.)

This is a perfectly consistent application of environmentalism. There is no fundamental difference between the act of producing food and the act of producing ideas. The mind is the source of each. To deny its efficacy in the first, therefore, is to deny it in the second.

The contention that a precarious scarcity is our fate—that unless we content ourselves with living in igloos and hunting for walrus, we are endangering the very planet—paves the way for another, more lethal notion.

After arguing that privation is metaphysically inescapable, environmentalists proceed to insist that it is also desirable. That is, having maintained that production is not the work of reason, they go on to denounce it as theft—theft from one’s neighbors, theft from future generations, theft from the earth itself. And this is the second crucial assertion on which their case depends: namely, that production—the “ exploitation” of nature—is morally wrong.

Why, they ask, should you be allowed to extirpate nature’s wealth simply to gratify your desires? Who are you to claim such a right for your own selfish purposes? Who are you to declare that you have rights but that nature does not?

According to environmentalism, there is no moral legitimacy to valuing yourself above the rest of nature. “Ecological egalitarianism,” as one author hails it, “accords nature ethical status at least equal to that of humans.”¹⁵

In other words, first environmentalism proclaims that the Spartan life of the primitive Eskimo is unavoidable—then, that it is one’s moral duty to aspire to it. First you are told that the quest for prosperity is mindless self-destruction—then, that sustaining your measly existence ought not take precedence over some swampland’s divine right to wetness.

Only one code of ethics could make such a viewpoint possible: the code of altruism, the code that brands the pursuit of self-interest as evil. This belief is environmentalism’s most potent weapon. What, after all, is more manifestly selfish than the act of production itself, in which you remake nature to serve your values? At its core, environmentalism is the demand that you surrender your comfort, your well-being, your self. Stop caring about your desire to be happy—it admonishes—and start worrying about how to please the snail darters and the spotted owls.

Altruism is the doctrine that man has no moral right to exist for his own sake. Taken from the Latin alter (or “other”), it is the doctrine that the sole justification for your life is your willingness to sacrifice it to others. Environmentalism is altruism unadulterated and uncamouflaged. In the past, the call for sacrifice was made on behalf of other human beings, such as the poor and the sick. Now, in a faithful extension of the altruist maxim, the term “others” is merely being broadened. Now, we are being urged to sacrifice the human to the non-human.

And if it is evil to live for your own sake, how can you resist such a demand? If self-abnegation is noble, what could be more praiseworthy than to subordinate your existence to that of the bugs, the weeds, and the mud?

The premise of self-sacrifice is embedded in the deceptive meaning now attached to the very term “environment.” Logically, there can be no concept of an “environment” that is not the environment of someone (or something)—any more than there can be “property” that exists independently of the owner of the property. “Environment” is a relational concept. It properly refers to the surroundings of some entity as they relate to that entity.

But that is not how the environmentalist employs the term. He subverts it to denote an “environment” severed from any relationship to man—which then enables him to mislead people into evaluating it apart from any relationship to man.

That is, he initially counts on its correct meaning, so that people accept a need to care about the fate of the “environment”—which they assume in some way is their environment and is linked to their fate. This is why the movement’s focus is pointedly on the “environment,” rather than on the non-relational concept “nature.” But once a confused public has been taken in, environmentalists repackage “environment” to denote something upheld as existing separately from human beings.

Cashing in on the altruist ethics, they condemn as wrong—as selfish—the view that any human value must be a value to man. Just as they want you to believe it is wrong to define “environment” only in relation to man, they want you to believe it is wrong to evaluate it only in relation to man. It is erroneous, they say, to believe that the only “environment” worth protecting is one that is useful to human beings. A vein of iron ore, or a forest, or a sunrise should be regarded as values, they say, not because it benefits man, but because it “benefits” nature. These things have “value” the environmentalist declares—apart from any connection to, or evaluation by, human beings.

According to the tenets of altruism, you should “value” that which holds no significance for your life—because it holds no significance for your life. So while nature’s bogs and bugs may not be of any value to you, the precept of self-sacrifice commands: that is why you should treat them as though they are.

Thus, even the putative treasures of environmentalists—such as parks set aside as enclaves of uncommercialized, unindustrialized nature are not permitted to be used as sources of enjoyment for man.

For example, when Yellowstone Park was devastated by fire in 1988, firefighting efforts were prohibited for weeks. Park officials allowed the fire to rage out of control, because it had begun naturally (through lightning). By the time firefighters were finally permitted to contain the conflagration, well over one million acres had burned, at a cost of 150 million dollars. What was the motive behind this lunacy? “Fire is a benign rather than a malignant force,” explained Yellowstone’s chief naturalist. He and other park officials viewed their primary responsibility during the disaster, not as preventing further damage by nature’s fire, but as safeguarding the grounds against “unnatural” encroachments. As a news report in the New York Times described it: “They said they were trying to protect pristine areas from the destructive effects of bulldozers, fire engines and irrigation pipes.”¹⁶

Yellowstone Park was regarded not as a value to man, but as a “value” to and for its natural self. So why not let it burn down, as long as the flames were part of its “natural” state? The head of the Glacier Institute put the philosophic issue this way: “It comes down to what we expect those lands to be. Is the park primarily for human use or their recreation? Or is the park to be maintained in its original state, letting fires do what they’re going to do?”¹⁷

In other words: is man morally entitled to use nature to benefit himself—or must he become nature’s self-sacrificing menial?

It is obvious which alternative environmentalists choose. Technology—which represents the conquest of nature by the human mind—is therefore an object of fear and hatred. It is routinely denounced by environmentalists. They greet every technological advance—from food preservatives to growth hormones to cloning—with a knee-jerkful of scare stories. Technological achievements are psychological threats to the environmentalist. They stand as testimony to the fact that man is both capable and worthy of living. To the nature-venerator, who cries that man can be neither, this is a terrifying reproach. So he reacts by trying to suppress technology (while rationalizing that he harbors only “practical” concerns about human safety).

Environmentalism is a systematic campaign to make man feel puny. It is a screed against self-esteem. It wants man to proclaim his own insignificance and to tremble before the mountains and the mites.

Today’s man is told by environmentalists that he—like his primitive ancestors—must hold nature in quivering awe. He is to be, not the ruler of nature, but its obedient thrall. That is, he is to worship nature—as a God.

Environmentalism amounts to a modern, secularized form of religion. It is an ideology that instructs man to prostrate himself before a superior, ineffable force. It is an ideology that declares the human mind too feeble to grasp the complexities of an inscrutable world, or “ecosystem.” It is an ideology propelled by the desire to have man subordinate himself to a hallowed power—a power which must be placated and paid homage, if man is to receive the gracious bounty upon which his existence depends.

This mysticism is now openly avowed within the environmentalist movement. For instance, New Left mandarin Tom Hayden taught a course at Santa Monica College on “Environment and Spirituality.” It began with a discussion of the Bible, and ended with the prospects for what he called a new “earth-oriented religion.” Hayden explained: “We need to see nature as having a sacred quality, so we revere it and are in awe of it. That forms a barrier to greed and exploitation and overuse.”¹⁸

The Ecoforestry Institute, in a full-page ad opposing the logging of trees, says about forests: “They have an intrinsic value beyond objective measure. A society that sees them only as a resource to be exploited, as a crop to be marketed, has lost its sense of the sacred. Saving America’s forests is more than an economic or ecological issue. It is a spiritual one as well.”¹⁹ (Emphasis in original.)

This unearthly fusion of religion and environmentalism originated with the New Left. As Paul Ehrlich writes: “It is probably in vain that so many look to science and technology to solve our present ecological crisis. Much more basic changes are needed, perhaps of the type exemplified by the much-despised ‘hippie’ movement—a movement that adopts most of its religious ideas from the non-Christian East. It is a movement wrapped up in Zen Buddhism, physical love and a disdain for material wealth.”²⁰

Predictably, the representatives of environmentalism and of religion are forging overt ties. For example, the late scientist Carl Sagan issued “an appeal for joint commitment in science and religion.” It was a call for transforming environmentalism into a religious crusade. “We are close to committing—many would say we are already committing—what in religious language is sometimes called Crimes against Creation,” he said. Environmentalism “must be recognized from the outset as having a religious as well as scientific dimension.... Thus there is a vital role for both religion and science. We hope this appeal will encourage a spirit of common cause and joint action to help preserve the Earth.”²¹ (This was signed by a number of prominent scientists, including Hans Bethe and Stephen Jay Gould, and by over two hundred religious leaders across the globe—from the dean of the Harvard Divinity School to the Secretary-General of the National Council on Islamic Affairs to the abbot of the Zen Community of New York.)

Even Pope John Paul II has taken up the cause. Contrary to those who regard Christianity as incompatible with environmentalism, the pope sees their fundamental unity. He has declared that world peace is threatened by “a lack of due respect for nature, by the plundering of natural resources and by a progressive decline in the quality of life.... Today, the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness—both individual and collective[!]—are contrary to the order of creation, an order which is characterized by mutual interdependence.... The commitment of believers to a healthy environment for everyone stems from their belief in God the Creator, from their recognition of the effects of original and personal sin, and from the certainty of having been redeemed by Christ.”²²

Both the Church and environmentalism condemn the conception of nature as something to be refashioned by and for man. Both believe that man must repudiate the virtue of productiveness and of pride. Whether the commandment is to make use of nature in service to God or to make use of nature in service to endangered species—man is rendered a servant. Either way, the principle is the same: man must sacrifice his selfish enjoyment of earthly comforts in deference to a “higher” power.

There remains one final issue to be examined in judging environmentalism: its claim to science. In trumpeting the dangers of particular industrial products and activities, environmentalists typically invoke all kinds of empirical evidence. How, then, can their allegations be summarily dismissed? Isn’t the honest opponent of environmentalists obligated to investigate, and refute, all their evidence? How can one ignore the copious research, the clinical studies, the laboratory experiments, the complex computer models--all supposedly proving the dire consequences of various technologies? Isn’t cold, hard science on the side of environmentalism?

The answer is: no—and the very question reflects the environmentalists’ worst perversion of all. Their scientific garb is a masquerade. It is designed to hide the fact that their claims do not rest on scientific evidence, but on the opposite: on a sweeping rejection of the methodology of science. Consider, for example, the environmentalists’ case against Alar.

Alar is a chemical developed in the early 1960s that improves the appearance of apples and delays their ripening. In 1989, it became the target of a campaign to ban it, orchestrated by the Natural Resources Defense Council. The NRDC announced that it had conducted tests revealing that Alar causes cancer in people. The news media heralded the story of a greedy manufacturer foisting his toxic product upon unsuspecting, apple juice—drinking children. Alarmed farmers, grocers, and parents began avoiding apples. The apple-growing industry lost over 200 million dollars. The manufacturer was compelled to remove Alar from the market.

But what was the scientific basis for these claims? The NRDC tests did indeed show that Alar produced tumors in mice—in doses equivalent to what a human being would absorb by eating fourteen tons of apples a day for seventy years. (And mice fed half that amount—the equivalent of seven tons a day for seventy years—produced no tumors at all.)²³

An earlier study of rodents by the Environmental Protection Agency also supposedly showed a link between Alar and cancer. Yet according to the EPA’s own data, the average human exposure to the allegedly carcinogenic chemical was .000047 milligrams per kilogram of body weight (mg/kg); the mice in the EPA study, however, were given doses of 7 mg/kg (for males) and 13 mg/kg (for females)—a level 148,000 to 276,000 times that of human exposure. (And even at that level, none of the rats in the study was stricken with cancer.)²⁴

This is considered sufficient grounds for panicking the public and crippling an industry.

Or consider the pesticide DDT. It was banned in the U.S. in 1972, largely because it was said to be carcinogenic. That conclusion was based on studies that found DDT to cause benign liver tumors in mice (and nothing at all in other experimental animals) —and even then, only at doses 100,000 times higher than what a person would absorb by ingesting DDT through residues in food.²⁵

It is now accepted practice in environmentalist circles to assume that if some quantity of a substance is harmful, then any quantity is. But is there any substance on earth about which this context-dropping claim cannot be made? Everything can become deadly in sufficiently large doses—including water, or air, or organically grown soybeans. If a one-ton piano crashing down on you is fatal, does this imply that a one-ounce feather floating onto your shoulders once a day for eighty-eight years is also a threat? Potatoes contain arsenic; lima beans contain cyanide; nutmeg contains a hallucinogen; broccoli contains a substance that causes cancer in animals.²⁶ Should these be outlawed? None of the environmental “scientists” cares to publicize an obvious fact: the dosage level makes all the difference between safety and danger.

They don’t care to publicize this—because they have an agenda other than the presentation of the truth. Dishonesty, as one of these pseudo-scientists explains, is their best policy: “We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being right.”²⁷

Virtually any claim about some industrial danger is given instant publicity by environmentalists, while evidence of the benefits (or of the falsehood of the allegation of danger) is systematically disregarded. Paul Ehrlich, for example, has made a living out of issuing apocalyptic statements that the world is running out of food. In 1968 he wrote: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.... We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”²⁸ (Emphasis added.)

Yet reality’s repeated debunking of Ehrlich’s predictions (to say nothing of the horrifying totalitarianism of his proposed “solution”) has not diminished his status as an influential prophet. His regularly updated scenarios of doom are still taken seriously by the environmentalists; his well-known book The Population Bomb has gone through more than two dozen printings.

With respect to DDT, the promoters of “eco-hysteria” ignore a study in which people were fed DDT every day for up to twenty-seven months—with no harmful results. They ignore the fact that during the period of heaviest DDT use in the United States, from 1944 to 1972, deaths from liver cancer dropped 30 percent.²⁹

And, most tellingly, they ignore the benefits of DDT (and the consequent harm created by its prohibition). They ignore the fact that before the advent of DDT, malaria was rampant. In Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), for example, there were 2.8 million cases of malaria in 1948. By 1963, because DDT killed the insects bearing the disease, the number had dropped to 17! But in the late 1960s, the spraying was halted due to the growing attacks on DDT; by 1969 the number of malaria cases in Sri Lanka had gone back to 2.5 million. In India, about 75 million cases of malaria occurred in 1951; ten years later (after DDT was introduced) the figure had fallen to 50,000; by 1977, however, it had risen to at least 30 million.³⁰ Today, millions of people a year are dying from malaria as a result of environmentalists’ hostility toward pesticides. (But of course the truth about DDT is unimportant when compared with the need for “being effective.”)

The environmentalist utilizes science, not to discover the facts, but to obfuscate them. After stripping away the veneer of rationality, one will discover that the hallmark of the catastrophe claim is the half-truth and the out-of-context fact.

When environmental “scientists” claim, for instance, that thousands of highly acidic and fishless lakes in the Northeast (the most severe cases of which are in the Adirondacks) are proof of the destructiveness of “acid rain” caused by coal-burning electric utilities—they neglect to mention: that most of the acidic lakes in the Adirondacks were acidified by natural organic acids; or that the average Adirondack lake is more alkaline now than one hundred fifty years ago; or that highly acidic, fishless waters exist naturally in regions with no industrial activity, such as the Rio Negro in the Amazon Basin (a river system the size of the Mississippi River).³¹

When environmental “scientists” claim that man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) have depleted the stratosphere of ozone, leaving us more exposed to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation—they neglect to mention: that during the period when the ozone layer was presumably diminishing, the levels of ultraviolet radiation at the earth’s surface were falling³²; or that, at its peak, the world output of CFCs was 1.1 million tons annually, while 300 million tons of natural chlorine reach the atmosphere each year through the evaporation of seawater alone³³; or that a 5 percent drop in ozone—which is of a magnitude that elicits grim calculations of increased skin cancers—would, according to those very calculations, result in a rise in radiation equivalent to that experienced by someone who merely moves sixty miles closer to the equator (say, from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles).³⁴

When environmental “scientists” claim that overpopulation is exhausting the earth’s capacity to sustain its inhabitants—they neglect to mention: that such conclusive yardsticks as per-capita food production and life expectancy are showing regular increases ³⁵; or that life improves most where industrialization is strongest; or that finding space for a growing population is such a non-problem that if all 5.8 billion earthlings relocated to Texas tomorrow, the resultant population density (22,000 people per square mile) would not be even half the current density of, say, Paris.³⁶

This whole warped approach is the antithesis of science and objectivity. It is not scientific truth that environmentalists seek to discover—it is not reality that they hold as an absolute it is not reason that shapes their conclusions. Reason is only an obstacle to the goals of these “scientists”—and some of them readily admit it.

For instance, author Jonathan Schell discusses the nature of the evidence necessary to form conclusions about environmental matters. He writes that scientists should “disavow the certainty and precision they normally insist on. Above all, we need to learn to act decisively to forestall predicted perils, even while knowing that they may never materialize.... Scientists need to become connoisseurs and philosophers of uncertainty.... The incurable uncertainty of our predicament, far from serving to reassure us, should fill us with unease and goad us to action.”³⁷

Let’s translate this: Despite the lack of rational evidence for some claim of impending doom, we should nonetheless assume that it is true. Certainty and precision may be appropriate in dealing with other issues, but not environmental ones. The knowledge we have about some technology’s vast benefits is to be outweighed by the absence of knowledge we have about its alleged harmful-ness. It does not matter, therefore, that these “philosophers of uncertainty” do not know whether their statements are true. As long as a prediction of theirs can “fill us with unease,” it should be acted on, whether it can be scientifically proved or not.

The aim of the environmentalists’ studies and experiments, then, is not the identification of accurate, scientific knowledge, but the inculcation of a state of hysterical ignorance. Blind emotion, not reason, is to be our guide in coming to conclusions.

I am not a scientist, and I have not thoroughly investigated these issues. I cannot say that I have conclusive proof that CFCs are not threatening the ozone layer or that factory emissions are not changing the earth’s temperature. But what I can say about the environmentalists’ claims is something more fundamental: they warrant no cognitive attention—because they are not attempts at cognition. They are arbitrary vociferations. They do not represent efforts to reach objective truths. Therefore, as utterances issued not to illuminate reality but to distort it, they should not be admitted into the realm of science.

In this respect, the environmentalist methodology is identical to that of the “Scientific Creationists.”

The Creationists’ claims about errors in the theory of evolution are not based on science. The Creationists do not want to discover the facts about the origin of life. They use science merely as a facade, to disguise the fact that the Bible is the source of their beliefs and that their only agenda is a religious one. They do not seek genuine evidence for their position, because they do not accept any necessity for evidence. No facts or arguments will sway them, because their viewpoint does not rest on facts and arguments: it rests on faith. None of their “refutations” of evolution, therefore, qualifies as science.

Once the Creationists’ basic method has been discredited, one need not scrutinize every new assertion they come up with. One need not disprove such assertions—indeed, one should not even try to, since it only legitimizes them—in order to defend the validity of evolution. The only rational response to all Creationist “arguments” is to dismiss them as being outside the realm of the rational. They simply deserve no cognitive respect—including even the respect of identifying them as “true” or “false.”

The statements of environmentalists ought to be accorded the same αscientific status. Just as when you wish to determine the facts about evolution, the pronouncements of Creationists should be irrelevant to your search; so too, if you wish to determine the facts about a particular environmental question, you should do so independently of the declarations made by environmentalists. (Yes, it may turn out that some allegation of theirs happens to be true—by accident, as a parrot’s squawkings may coincidentally parallel some fact of reality. If this occurs, and one ascertains it by rational means, appropriate steps should be taken to alleviate the danger—steps that logically cannot include any renunciation of technological progress.)

If and when there is genuine evidence that something man-made is harmful to human health or damaging to property, the victim is entitled to legal remedies—on the basis of standard laws that have long existed. These are the same kinds of laws that prevent your neighbor from starting a fire or releasing tear gas in his backyard if it will reach yours. If you can show that you were hurt by someone’s actions, your rights should be protected by law. But you must meet one requirement: you must be able to prove your case objectively.

To environmentalists, this requirement is an unacceptable impediment. They do not want to be bound by the strictures of logic and science in their efforts to stifle production. Reason is not the method suited to their ends. They want to “disavow certainty and precision”—and to have government regulators accept their un-proved assertions on faith.

The way to assess environmentalism, therefore, is not as a scientific issue, but as a moral one. In response to all the claims about the harm posed by various technologies, one must ask a basic question: “Harmful—by what standard?” For according to the standard of man’s life here on earth, technology as such is beneficial—wealth as such is beneficial--material progress as such is beneficial. According to a rational standard, no actual threats to human welfare could justify the destruction of that upon which man’s welfare depends—namely, production, technology, and freedom. The solution to any such threats must embrace improved production, better technology, more capitalism.

But environmentalists do not hold such a standard. What they find “harmful” is man’s liberation from a life of primitive toil and bare subsistence. To them, the “harm” lies in the very existence of technology, wealth, and progress; it lies in the fact of industrialization per se. Paul Ehrlich, for instance, declares: “We’ve already had too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure.”³⁸

According to the group Earth First. “If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS. It has the potential to end industrialism, which is the main force behind the environmental crisis.”³⁹

This is why environmentalists show no concern for all the suffering and deaths resulting from the absence of technology. This is why they do not care about their “ideal” Eskimo’s lack of indoor plumbing, central heating, electricity, dentistry, and heart-transplant technology. This is why they are untroubled by the demonstrable evils resulting from all the roads and oil refineries and nuclear plants not built—not built, because of the environmentalist desire to protect nature from man.

This is also why, whatever dangers environmentalists claim to find, their answer is always to denounce progress and to search for “nature-friendly” alternatives. If acid rain is supposedly destroying our lakes, they direct us not to neutralize it easily with some alkaline—but to shut down the factories. If topsoil is supposedly being eroded, they direct us not to invent methods of more efficient farming—but to stop harvesting the crops. If there is too much traffic, they direct us not to build better highways—but to stop making the cars. Whatever the alleged problem, their incessant “solution” is: de-industrialize.

Environmentalists believe that “chemicals” are bad, additives are bad, artificial flavoring is bad, preservatives are bad, synthetic fibers are bad—that “interfering” with the processes of nature is inherently immoral. They ban food additives that supposedly cause cancer—yet are indifferent to the natural presence of the identical substances in foods. They condemn DDT—yet disregard the fact that we ingest 10,000 times more naturally produced pesticides than man-made ones.⁴⁰ They praise societies that wallow in the filth and disease that characterize a non-technological “harmony” with nature—yet condemn those that enjoy the cleanliness and health resulting from modem sewage systems, washing machines, refrigeration, and polio vaccines. Whatever is a product of human design, in other words, is by that fact baneful; whatever is natural is by that fact benign.

This view of the man-made as intrinsically noxious is simply the corollary of the premise that nature is intrinsically good. The environmentalists’ perverse standard of value is: the human is the harmful—and the way to achieve human “welfare” is to do away with the human.

Environmentalism seeks the renunciation of all progress and pleasure. Its goal is not the elimination of air pollution or filthy water—or anything else actually harmful to man. (If there are people animated by such concerns, they should form a new pro-technology /anti-dirt organization; but they should not ally themselves with the Paul Ehrlichs, the David Grabers, and the David Foremans, whose dictatorial aims are only abetted by unthinking “fellow-travelers.”)

Environmentalists do not want to promote human happiness, or even the “happiness” of other species. Those who are callously indifferent to the millions of people who die annually because DDT has been banned will not be moved to moral outrage at the “injustice” of some spotted owl losing its nest. What environmentalists desire is not the welfare of the non-human--but the misery of man.

This is true of all manifestations of altruism. It is not the poor whom altruists wish to lift up (if it were, they would advocate laissez-faire capitalism); it is rather the productive whom they wish to bring down. But when the demand for self-sacrifice takes the form of environmentalism, the desire to destroy becomes more overt. In that form, there is far less pretense of pursuing any human values. There is only the snarling demand for universal deprivation.

The philosophic inspiration for all this is Immanuel Kant. It was Kant, the primary secularizer of religion, whose characteristic approach was to propound a mysticism dressed up as rationality. It is environmentalism that has thoroughly implemented his philosophy.

Kant postulated a “noumenal” world—a non-material world unknowable to man, a world that transcends human perception and human interests, a world that represents “true reality” because it is “unfiltered” by human consciousness. Environmentalism proceeds to postulate an ineffable “ecosystem”—a dimension whose arcane workings are accessible only to those possessing the faculty described by the Ecoforestry Institute as a “sense of the sacred,” a dimension in which it is considered “unnatural” for man to engage in what his life requires—productive activity—a dimension that remains “real” only as long as it is unsullied by human values.

Kant maintained that reason can give us only a distorted picture of reality, that the mind is unreliable and can never be in touch with existence “as it really is.” Environmentalism too maintains that man’s mind is incapable of grasping, and thereby governing, nature, that only if we “disavow certainty and precision” can we apprehend the actual devastation industrialization is sowing, that rational science blinds us to the truth that the squashing of some insect or the trampling of some shrub may bring a fragile planet crashing into oblivion.

And obviously, environmentalism’s exhortations to sacrifice for nature—to surrender our self-interest, not for religion’s promise of bliss in some afterworld nor for Marx’s assurance of prosperity in some indefinable future, but to surrender it as our rewardless obligation to the snail darters and the wetlands, to surrender everything human to anything non-human-what is that, but Kant’s “categorical imperative” to submit to moral duty, for no reason and for no human end, but for the sake of submission as an end in itself?

The method that Kant instituted, and that environmentalism has adopted, consists of a continual inversion of the rational and the irrational. It consists of Kant’s proclamation that whatever man perceives is not real, because he perceives it, and that whatever is of value to man is not moral, because it is a value. And it consists of environmentalism’s final corruption: the declaration that production is destruction—the declaration that whatever wealth we produce makes us poorer, because we have produced it.

Kant used the prestige of reason—to undermine reason and objectivity; environmentalism uses the prestige of science—to undermine science and production. Both insidiously pose as advocates of the rational—Kant, by pretending that it is not really reason that he is negating; environmentalists, by pretending that it is not really production (but only “unsustainable” production) that they are attacking. Both, at root, seek to render human life and happiness impossible.

The single basic truth uttered by environmentalists is about themselves: they want to crush what they regard as the evil of self-interest. Their ideology has taken hold not in spite of its opposition to the requirements of man’s life—but because of it, because it has latched firmly onto the prevailing cultural premise of self-sacrifice. In their campaign for privation, this moral evaluation is their strongest weapon.

It is time to disarm them.

There is only one practical way of fighting environmentalism: by morally defending man. The apologetic attempts to oppose environmentalist laws by showing how much better off the “environment” would be through private, non-bureaucratic efforts, are—like the appeasing attempts to fight the welfare state by arguing that capitalism is more compassionate toward the homeless—doomed to failure. Instead, what needs to be upheld, proudly and unequivocally, is the principle that there is no value in nature apart from that which is of value to man, which means: there is no “environment”—other than the environment of man.

The men who live by that premise—the men who make civilization and progress possible—are choking on the philosophic pollution of environmentalism. They need to be freed from the suffocating clutches of the worshipers of a virgin earth. They need to breathe air—the liberating air of industrialization. They need to be left free to produce—to continue creating the magnificent abundance that has lifted humanity out of the caves and jungles of the pre-industrial era. And who are these individuals? Everyone who understands, and glories in, the fact that man lives by reshaping nature to serve his values.

REFERENCES

1 Dr. Samuel Broder, director of the National Cancer Institute, quoted in “Trees Yield a Cancer Treatment, But Ecological Cost May Be High,” New York Times, May 13, 1991, p. Al.

2 Al Gore, Earth in the Balance (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), pp. 105-106.

3 Wendell Wood, quoted in “Trees Yield a Cancer Treatment, But Ecological Cost May Be High,” New York Times, May 13, 1991, p. A 14.

4 Tom Regan, quoted by David Hardy, in America’s New Extremists: What You Need to Know About the Animal Rights Movement (Washington Legal Foundation, 1990), p. 8.

5 D. Petersen, “The Plowboy Interview,” Mother Earth News, Jan./Feb. 1985, p. 21.

6 David Graber, “Mother Nature as a Hothouse Flower,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, Oct. 22, 1989, pp. 1, 9.

7 Cited by Joel Schwartz in “Apocalypse Now,” Commentary, Aug. 1990, p. 56.

8 Carl Amery, quoted in Trashing the Planet (Regnery Gateway, 1990), by Dixy Lee Ray, p. 169.

9 Darryl Cherney, quoted in “Militant Environmentalists Planning Summer Protests to Save Redwoods,” New York Times, June 19, 1990, p. A 18.

10 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (Signet, 1957), p. 946.

11 Robert Fuller, “Inflation: The Rising Cost of Living on a Small Planet,” Worldwatch Paper no. 34, Jan. 1980 (Worldwatch Institute).

12 “Doomsday and Inflation,” The Intellectual Activist, May 1, 1980, p. 4. Oil data from: US. Crude Oil, Natural Gas, and Natural Gas Liquid Reserves (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 1995); Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (U.S. Dept. of Commerce, 1975); Statistical Abstract of the United States (U.S. Dept. of Commerce, 1996).

13 Mineral Facts and Problems (U.S. Dept. of the Interior, 1956); Mineral Commodity Summaries (U.S. Dept. of the Interior, 1994).

14 Fuller, op. cit.

15 Roderick Frazier Nash, quoted in “The Rights of Nature and the Death of God,” by Joel Schwartz, The Public Interest, Fall 1989, pp. 3-4.

16 “Ethic of Protecting Land Fueled Yellowstone Fires,” New York Times, Sept. 22, 1988, pp. A 1, A24.

17 Ibid.

18 “Chronicle,” New York Times, Aug. 3, 1991, p. 20.

19 Ad by Ecoforestry Institute of the U.S. (Portland, Oregon), New York Times, May 25, 1993, p. A9.

20 Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (Ballantine, 1968), p. 171.

21 Carl Sagan, “Guest Comment: Preserving and Cherishing the Earth—an Appeal for Joint Commitment in Science and Religion,” American Journal of Physics, July 1990, p. 615.

22 Pope John Paul II, “World Day of Peace Message,” 1990 (published by the Vatican, Dec. 1989).

23 Dixy Lee Ray, Trashing the Planet (Regnery Gateway, 1990), pp. 78-79.

24 Eric W. Hagen and James J. Worman, An Endless Series of Hobgoblins (Foundation for Economic Education, 1995), pp. 10-11, 19.

25 Ray, op. cit., p. 73.

26 Elizabeth M. Whelan and Frederick J. Stare, Panic in the Pantry (Prometheus, 1992), pp. 66—76.

27 Stephen Schneider, quoted in “Our Fragile Earth,” by Schell, op. cit.

28 Ehrlich, op. cit., p. xi.

29 Ray, op. cit. pp. 72-73.

30 Ibid., p. 69; also, Julian L. Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton University, 1996), p. 261.

31 Edward C. Krug, “Acid Rain and Acid Lakes: The Real Story” (published in Heritage Foundation Backgrounder), April 19, 1990, p. 13.

32 Michael Sanera and Jane S. Shaw, Facts, Not Fear (Regnery, 1996), pp. 167-168.

33 Ray, op. cit., p. 45.

34 Sanera and Shaw, op. cit., pp. 168 169.

35 Simon, op. cit., pp. 87, 320.

36 Calculations based on data in Encyclopedia Americana, 1996, Vol. 21, p. 430.

37 Jonathan Schell, “Our Fragile Earth,” Discover, Oct. 1987, pp. 47-50.

38 Paul Ehrlich, quoted in “Journalists and Others for Saving the Planet,” by David Brooks, Wall St. Journal, Oct. 5, 1989, p. A28.

39 From an Earth First newsletter, cited by Ray, op. cit., p. 168.

40 Hagen and Worman, op. cit., p. 101.

BIBLIOGRAPLIY

It is difficult for the conscientious reader to find books that treat environmental issues objectively. The following is a list of some titles meeting that standard:

Animal Scam (Regnery Gateway, 1993), Kathleen Marquardt

An Endless Series of Hobgoblins (Foundation for Economic Education, 1995), Eric W. Hagen and James J. Worman

Environmental Overkill (Regnery Gateway, 1994), Dixy Lee Ray

Facts, Not Fear (Regnery, 1996), Michael Sanera and Jane S. Shaw

Panic in the Pantry (Prometheus, 1992), Elizabeth M. Whelan and Frederick J. Stare

Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), Jay H. Lehr, ed.

Science Under Siege (William Morrow, 1996), Michael Fumento

The State of Humanity (Blackwell, 1995), Julian L. Simon, ed.

Toxic Terror (Prometheus, 1993), Elizabeth M. Whelan

Trashing the Planet (Regnery Gateway, 1990), Dixy Lee Ray

The True State of the Planet (Free Press, 1995), Ronald Bailey, ed.

The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton University, 1996), Julian L. Simon

Multicultural Nihilism

Peter Schwartz

In order to rise from the cave, man had to grasp the fact of values. Every step forward entailed the knowledge not only of how to take that step, but of why it was a value—of why it was a step forward. It was not enough for men to learn, for example, how to hunt with knives or spears; they had to evaluate this knowledge and conclude that hunting with weapons was better than hunting with bare hands. Across the entire span of history, man had to comprehend such truths—the truth that planting crops was better than foraging off the land, that indoor plumbing was better than outhouses, that electricity was better than candlelight, that science was better than superstition. Not just “different,” but better—objectively better.

Mankind advanced only because some individuals originated better ways of doing things (and because the rest of society came to see the validity of those innovations). When some exceptional prehistoric man conceived the uses of fire, he understood the advantage of cooked meat over raw meat. His achievement was not regarded as the biased product of a “heat-centrist,” who was insensitive to those who preferred their mastodon uncooked. In order to advance, men had to discern that certain products had value—i.e., that they were worth creating, worth using, and worth defending.

The history of mankind is the history of the creation of values. The recognition that some things further human life and are therefore good, while other things do not and are therefore bad, is what made civilization possible. It is this premise that enabled man to progress from numerology to mathematics, from astrology to astronomy, from alchemy to chemistry—and from the cave to the skyscraper.

It is this progression that today’s dominant intellectuals wish to undo.

Nothing is objectively better than anything else, they assert. Anyone who elevates Western civilization above primitive, voodoo-worshiping tribes—anyone who admires the skyscraper and scorns the cave—is looking at life through a distorting, “Eurocentric” prism.

These intellectuals are the multiculturalists. They argue, not for the obvious proposition that many cultures exist, but for the invidious proposition that all are equal in value. Every culture is “different,” they say—but none is superior. And what is the ultimate goal of this ideology? To reverse the process of civilization, by wrenching man back to a primeval state of existence.

Multiculturalism’s major battleground is the classroom. There, beneath its bromidic protestations about wanting to change the educational curricula only to “broaden” the content and expose students to “different” ways of life, its hostility toward rational values is readily revealed.

In New York City, for example, a local school board decided to comply with the multiculturalists’ dictate to teach students about other cultures. But the board wanted to present such information in the context of the superiority of American ideals. It passed a resolution stating: “We reject the notion that all cultures should be taught in an atmosphere of moral equivalency.”¹

This offended the multiculturalists, who refused to tolerate the upholding of certain values over others. The school chancellor, for one, denounced the board’s stand: “I firmly believe it is possible to gain an appreciation of American culture and values without derogating other cultures.”² (In other words, a teacher must refrain from suggesting any deficiency in a culture that practices, say, slavery or cannibalism-and, further, must persuade the class that such moral neutrality is consistent with “an appreciation of American culture and values.”)

A school board in Florida made a similar attempt to comply with the ostensible aims of multiculturalism. It designed a program to instruct students about other cultures—and simultaneously to “instill an appreciation of our American heritage and culture, such as: our republican form of government, capitalism, a free enterprise system” and “other basic values that are superior to other foreign or historic cultures.” An irate teachers union declared that this violated the spirit of multiculturalism. The union threatened to sue the school board for ignoring a state law that students must be taught to “eliminate personal and national ethnocentrism so that they understand that a specific culture is not intrinsically superior or inferior to another.”³

What multiculturalism seeks is not to broaden, but to shrink our knowledge of the cultures of the world. That is, it seeks to expunge our awareness of the value of an American or Western—or rational—way of life, and the disvalue of its antipodes. Multiculturalism wants to do away with all such discriminations. It wants to erase the distinction between the two opposite ends of the normative scale, i.e., between the primitive and the civilized.

But multiculturalists are not promiscuous valuers, indiscriminately granting equal validity to whatever people choose and asking only for universal tolerance of all choices. They are not blandly indifferent to values. Rather, their charges of “intolerance” and “exclusion” are consistently targeted against one specific category of choices. They regularly criticize Americans for “insensitivity” toward the “Third World,” but never criticize, say, Rwandans for insufficiently appreciating the culture of capitalism. They condemn colleges for teaching that the Great Works of Western minds are better than the scrawlings of random jungle dwellers—but they do not seem to find the reverse view unacceptable.

The discriminations that multiculturalism rejects are those in which a civilized, Western culture is held as superior to a primitive one—i.e., in which the rational is valued while the irrational is not—i.e., in which an actual value is being embraced and a non-value spurned. That is the only “intolerance” they find intolerable. When multiculturalists vilify Christopher Columbus for “corrupting” the Indians, they are attacking the view that the culture Columbus represents is good, that reason and science are better than mysticism and savagery, that life in the advanced, productive Renaissance societies of Europe was objectively superior to life in the barbarous, warring tribes of the New World.

All the “multi-ethnic” assaults on the educational curriculum are variants of this antagonism toward the non-primitive. Multiculturalists recommend, for example, the teaching of “ethnomathematics,” as a way to persuade failing minority students that the most primitive forms of mathematics (such as “African sand drawings”) are as valid as the most advanced.⁴ New York State high schools are now required to teach that the Iroquois Indians (who were paid by England during the Revolutionary War to direct their scalp-taking proclivities exclusively toward the colonies) inspired the American Constitution.⁵ A University of Pennsylvania professor derides American colleges for emphasizing reading and writing, which “are merely technologies of control” and are “martial law made academic”; he demands, instead, a greater focus on the “voices of newly emerging peoples” who challenge “Western hegemonic arrangements of knowledge” and who uphold the ancient oral tradition (as manifested, for example, in “rap music”).⁶

The motive for upholding such blatant non-values is to undercut authentic values. The multiculturalist cannot abide the idea that the mathematics of today is good, while primitive “African sand drawings” are worthless. Who are we to make such assessments? —the multiculturalist snarls. Who are we to laud Columbus, or to regard the modern physician as superior to the tribal medicine man, or to deem the skill of reading and writing more desirable than the capacity to narrate folktales? Who are we to say that the Western is better than the non-Western, the scientific better than the non-scientific, the rational better than the irrational?

Multiculturalism is the debased attempt to obliterate values by claiming that they are indistinguishable from non-values. Multiculturalism is an assault not simply against the evaluation of cultures, but against values as such. It is an assault on the sine qua non of human life—against the identification of something as good.

A prime illustration of this is the notorious “Specific Manifestations of Oppression.” This is a circular distributed by the Office of Student Affairs at Smith College. It declares that “people can be oppressed in many ways and for many reasons because they are perceived to be different.” To name this, “new words tend to be created to express the concepts that the existing language cannot.” ⁷ One such neologism of oppression, cited in the circular, is:

“Ethnocentrism”—which is defined as: “oppression of cultures other than the dominant one in the belief that the dominant way of doing things is the superior way.”⁸

But “dominant” means only “prevailing over others.” What if a culture prevails over others because it is in fact better, and because people comprehend that fact? In America, for instance, the prevailing culture endorses freedom rather than dictatorship, and the laws of science rather than the myths of the occult. Is this “oppressive” to the cultures that deny freedom? Is it “oppressive” to conclude that surgery cures illnesses and should be applauded, while faith healing does not and should be scorned? How have these students come to be so detached from reality that they find it inconceivable that one “way of doing things” may actually be superior to another? Can’t one judge some viewpoints to be right, and therefore to be better than those that are wrong?

To the multiculturalist, however, nothing can give rise to such differentiations. The belief that one idea is better than another—regardless of whether it is based on rational evidence or not—is inherently “oppressive.” To the multiculturalist, to evaluate is to tyrannize.

Here is another example from the Smith College flyer:

“Lookism”—which is defined as: “the construction of a standard for beauty/attractiveness; and oppression through stereotypes and generalizations of both those who do not fit the standard and those who do.”⁹

A stereotype, which is an oversimplified, and hence false, generalization, is precisely what “lookism” is not objecting to. Stereotyping would entail, for example, the belief that all beautiful people are successful and happy. The falsity of some stereotype, however, is not grounds for attacking generalization itself—which “lookism” does. There are many valid generalizations about “beauty,” such as: “Beauty is preferable to ugliness.” And that is exactly the kind of generalization multiculturalism wants to suppress. For that is an evaluation, which follows from the judgment of beauty as something good, which itself follows from the identification of a standard of value. What multiculturalism fundamentally opposes is a standard—any standard—by which some things are recognized as values and others as non-values.

This virulence fully erupts in a third neologism listed in the manifesto:

“Ableism”—which is the “oppression of the differently abled, by the temporarily abled.”¹⁰

This term encompasses all human capacities—physical, intellectual, moral. It reflects the wish to nullify any rational basis for judging, and thus for distinguishing among, human beings. It is a wholesale onslaught against the means by which man achieves his ends, and against the ends themselves.

If it is “oppression” to discriminate between those having a particular ability and those lacking it, then indeed—as multiculturalists demand—sports competitions should not be restricted to the athletically able, nor college diplomas to the alphabetically able. No “discriminatory” standards, then, should ever be applied. Mortgage loans should not be reserved for those with a means of repaying them; driver’s licenses should not be issued only to the sighted; burial plots should not be limited to the dead. Indeed, isn’t the very evaluation of life over death an insensitive prejudice—the prejudice of “lifeism”? Who, after all, is morally entitled to decide that being among the “temporarily existing” is preferable to joining the “differently existing”?

This antipathy to values is why the concept “racism” has come to be perverted by multiculturalism. Objectively, this term refers to the (false) belief that an individual’s character is determined by his racial lineage. Multiculturalists, however, attach to “racism” a very different content. They define “racism,” not as discrimination on the basis of race, but as discrimination per se. They denounce the racist essentially for labeling some people as superior to others; why he does so is immaterial. Discriminating between blacks and whites, according to the multiculturalist, is the same as discriminating between geniuses and fools, heroes and villains, creators and killers. All evaluative distinctions—which means: values as such—are viewed as despotic.

To concretize this, consider the import of an incident at the University of Pennsylvania. An undergraduate member of a “diversity education” committee was concerned about some aspects of the school’s multicultural program. She sent a note to the administration, in which she expressed a “deep regard for the individual and my desire to protect the freedoms of all members of society.”¹¹

This generated an acrimonious response on the part of one university administrator. He returned her note, with her word “individual” underlined and with the following comment from him: “This is a red flag phrase today, which is considered by many to be racist. Arguments that champion the individual over the group ultimately privilege the ‘individuals’ belonging to the largest or dominant group.”¹² (Emphasis added.)

By any rational analysis, racism and individualism entail opposite philosophies. The former evaluates people by the collective attribute of race; the latter, according to each person’s own characteristics. Why, then, would multiculturalism equate the two? Because they both evaluate-i.e., they differentiate some people from others based on some standard. The fact that racism rests on an irrational standard, while individualism rests on a rational one, is meaningless to the multiculturalist. To him, the very use of standards is anathema.

An egalitarian leveler does not raise a drug-besotted bum into a moral ideal. He has no moral ideal. His defense of the non-ambitious and non-productive is mere window-dressing for his real motive: the desire to squash the productive and the ambitious—a desire he pursues by insisting that we not discriminate between the productive and the non-productive, and that a bum and a Bill Gates should therefore enjoy equal comforts in life.

The egalitarian is far worse than, say, the devout religionist who condemns the rich. For the latter is upholding an alternate set of values, albeit an irrational one. He calls for the forswearing of wealth because he believes in the supreme value of a non-material, supernatural dimension. Egalitarianism, however, is a lower species of irrationalism. It is stark nihilism. It reveres no values—it seeks only the destruction of values. It promotes a leveling for the sake of leveling, an eradication of value as an end in itself, or—as Ayn Rand puts it—“a hatred of the good for being the good.”¹³

This is the philosophic mantle multiculturalism has donned. Multiculturalists uphold the primitive not because they believe it to be a superior value—but because it is inferior, because it is a non-value. They want to annihilate what they regard, not as evil—but as good. They do not embrace a standard of value according to which ugliness and disability are esteemed. The multiculturalist esteems nothing. He does not love non-beauty and non-ability; he is moved only by a hatred for the beautiful and the able. He wants to exterminate beauty and ability because they are good, because on some level he does grasp their value—but his only response to value is venomous hostility.

This is what underlies the insidious tenet known as “diversity.” This is what explains the seeming incongruity between multiculturalism’s repudiation of all values and its ardent advocacy, as an unquestioned absolute, of the value of “diversity.”

Why would anyone consider “diversity” a value? While there are many contexts in which it can be desirable, it is never a rational goal in and of itself. One can argue, for example, that diversifying one’s investments is good, so that risk is minimized. But the premise is not that diversity as such is better than non-diversity; it is that diversified investments are better than non-diversified ones (which premise itself rests on the value of investment, of financial security, of wealth, etc.).

But how could “diversity” per se be good, irrespective of what is being diversified? Is unimpaired health, for example, a shortcoming, which should be “diversified” by exposure to disease? Is knowledge to be “balanced” by ignorance? Or sanity by periodic bouts of madness? What, then, is the meaning of the crusade for “diversity”?

Its supporters claim that the purpose of “diversity” is to provide the antidote to policies of “exclusion.” To understand what they actually want “diversified,” and what they want not to be “excluded,” let us look at the notion of racial “diversity.”

Is racial “diversity” being advocated in order to prevent the racist exclusion of minorities from some sphere? Clearly not. For if it were, multiculturalists would become instant champions of merit. If their goal in the workplace, for instance, were to keep employers from discriminating on the basis of skin color, multiculturalists would insist that every employee be judged solely by his qualifications. They would excoriate any company that granted any importance to race. They would not care what percentage of which race was “represented” anywhere. They would unhesitatingly endorse the hiring of a qualified white over a less qualified black. They would regard race as irrelevant. And they would realize that the only way to ensure that it never becomes relevant is to adhere to a rigorous standard of merit.

But multiculturalists do not want race to be irrelevant. Instead, they call for a “diversity” in which race is the salient consideration. They demand that certain quotas of minorities be employed. And if those hired by this method are not sufficiently qualified—well, they say, the need for racial “diversity” is paramount.

But why? For decades the liberals fought to have race ignored. “Color-blindness” was their professed ideal. They denounced those who judged any member of a minority not by his objectively important characteristics, but by the unimportant one of race. Yet now, while they aver that no race is superior to another, they are more obsessed with skin color than any redneck racist. Why?

The answer is: precisely because race is unimportant—i.e., because it is a non-value.

A policy of disregarding race and of evaluating each individual according to his abilities is unacceptable to multiculturalists. A company that eschews all forms of racial discrimination does not elicit praise from them. To the contrary, if it does not actively recruit personnel based on race—if it is “color-blind” and hires only by merit——it elicits antagonism. Such a company is admonished to adopt a “diversity” program and to meet some arbitrary ethnic quota.

But if a workforce has been assembled by ignoring race and by hiring only qualified people, there is just one way to “diversify” it: by using unqualified (or less qualified) people. If the best-qualified individuals available have been hired, then substituting employees of a particular race is like substituting employees of a particular eye color or ear length. It can be done only by hiring the less competent. What is being counteracted and “diversified,” therefore, is the standard of judging workers. That standard—the standard of objective qualifications- is being “balanced” with its opposite. Hiring by ability is being “diversified” with hiring by non-ability.

In the 1970s, liberals began pushing for “affirmative action” for racial minorities. Because blacks were portrayed as lacking—lacking education, lacking jobs, lacking wealth—society was told to sacrifice for their sake by giving them preferential treatment in various areas. It was the sheer fact of their need, not any positive value they possessed, that formed the basis for such treatment.

But even then, the liberals did not explicitly disavow a standard of value. Rather, they claimed that “affirmative action” would enable the “disadvantaged” eventually to meet a rational standard. By getting a preferential boost, the argument went, minorities would acquire the same values that the “advantaged” whites held—i.e., they would gradually attain the same abilities, pass the same tests, perform the same work and thus enjoy the same rewards.

Today’s “diversity” doctrine, however, repudiates even that tenuous link to values. Now, the very premise that ability should be the standard by which workers are judged is condemned as “exclusionary” and “racist.” Now, it is labeled “ableism.” Now, the contention is that blacks should be preferentially hired, not to help them meet a job’s objective standards, but as a means of defying the standards themselves.

Why—the multiculturalist demands—should blacks adopt the standards of whites? Why should grades rather than ethnic heritage determine who graduates? Why is an applicant’s performance on an employment test better grounds for being hired than his “street smarts”? Why is English better than “Ebonics”? Why should the corporate world regard a computer programmer as better than someone who can interpret the messages of ancient tomtom drums? There is no “better,” multiculturalists assert—there is only “diversity.”

It is unquestionably true that to espouse a standard of value is to be “exclusionary”: it is to exclude the non-valuable. Any yardstick debars whatever fails to measure up. To hire according to ability is to reject the incompetent. This, not racial discrimination, is the only type of “exclusion” multiculturalism wants to do away with.

And that requires doing away with standards as such. The “diversity” or “balance” multiculturalists uphold, therefore, is one between a standard of value and a non-standard—between a standard and an anti-standard. Since they, unlike earlier racists, do not regard one race as better than another, they are not offering the characteristic of race as an alternative standard. Race is self-avowedly unimportant to the multiculturalist. It is a non-value, serving only to undercut standards. Those who use it are saying, in effect: “Why restrict employment or college admissions to those who meet a standard of value? Why not entirely transcend standards by ‘diversifying’?”

The only motive for elevating a non-value is to nullify a real value. The exponents of racial “diversity” are not seeking a mixture of races achieved within a context of objective justice and of rational evaluation; justice and rationality are mercilessly anti-egalitarian and anti-“diversity.” Instead, the goal is a “diversity” of justice and injustice, of rationality and irrationality, of judging by ability and judging by race.

The “diversity” dictum, therefore, means that people are to be “evaluated” according to a non-value. It means that the standard of ability is no better than the non-standard of race. It means that people are to be hired not because they are able, nor because they will become able, but because the able must be “diversified” with the non-able. It means that the qualified and the unqualified—those who offer some human value and those who do not—are never to be differentiated. That is the mixture mandated by “diversity.”

Thus, we now have the United States Defense Department issuing an employment policy stating that “in the future special permission will be required for the promotion of all white men without disabilities.” And we have the Federal Aviation Administration giving its supervisors the guideline that “the merit promotion process ... need not be utilized if it will not promote your ‘diversity’ goals.”¹⁴

Promote people because they are disabled—promote them because they have no merit—promote them not for what they possess but for what they lack. Uphold an anti-value, precisely because it negates genuine values. That is the multicultural catechism. Ability must be “diversified” with non-ability, and those who have no value to offer—those who have only disvalues to offer—must not be “excluded.” So if an applicant is rejected on the grounds that he does not meet the standard of ability, he is being wrongly “excluded,” according to multiculturalists; but if someone who does meet that standard is rejected on the grounds that he fails to meet the non-standard of race, he is being rightly dismissed as an obstacle to “diversity.”

This is why “diversity” is invoked always to undercut some value, never to strengthen it. “Diversity” is appealed to, for example, as an argument for schools to devote more attention to the “linguistically challenged”; it is never used to justify more classes for the academically gifted, so that schools might “diversify” upwards rather than downwards. There is never any clamor on campuses to “diversify” the orthodoxy of “political correctness” with viewpoints that categorically oppose, say, feminism or affirmative action. (To say nothing of the deathly silence about “diversifying” the anti-reason, anti-egoism curricula in philosophy departments with the ideas of, say, Objectivism.) Such proposals are nonexistent because “diversity” means: destroying the valuable by incorporating the non-valuable.

Racial minorities are merely convenient pawns in this egalitarian campaign. They have been defined by liberal propaganda as permanent, helpless deficients. They have been unjustly made into proxies for the hopeless and the unable—proxies for the absence of value—which reinforces the multicultural claim that to judge people according to their objective value is inherently to exclude blacks. The multiculturalists want the public to believe that without “diversity” quotas, minorities will fail. (And thus the many capable, independent, successful blacks—who happen to be the greatest victims of “diversity”—hold no interest for the left, which pretends they do not exist.)

The demands of “diversity” now extend well beyond race. From condemning the rules of grammar for being intolerant of “linguistic diversity” to mandating the inclusion of mutes in oratory contests, the multiculturalist declares: do not “discriminate.” Standards, he cries, are “Eurocentric” chains of oppression, while “diversity” is liberation. Liberation from what? From reality’s insistence that value is in fact better than non-value.

This philosophy underlies the strange meaning multiculturalists attach to the term “culture.” The characteristics by which they group people—e.g., race, language, ancestry—are ones that can be important only to the crudest, most primitive, tribal mentality. To any rational individual, these characteristics are insignificant—which, again, is exactly why they are selected. They are perversely designated as defining characteristics of some group because they lack value. And to magnify the perversion, they are said to constitute “cultures.”

A genuine culture represents the ideas and values that a particular group of people has chosen. Whether it is the most advanced, technologically driven civilization, whose achievements are consciously and enthusiastically embraced by members of that society—or the most stagnant, tradition-mired tribe, whose members slavishly follow the choices of their ancestors—a culture is a volitional product. A culture is that which people have chosen and which influences their basic way of life.

But multiculturalism deliberately highlights that which is unchosen and which has virtually no influence on a people’s way of life. It focuses on two aspects of man: on purely physiological traits (such as race and gender) and on random characteristics that are readily interchangeable with one another (such as one’s language being French rather than English, or one’s address being in Serbia rather than in Croatia). The physiological traits are those that no one has any choice over; the others consist of those that no reasonable individual would deem important enough to bother making a choice over. But to the multiculturalist, the less authentic value some attribute has for a group of people, the more it defines a “culture.”

The irrationality of old-fashioned racism pales before that of multiculturalism, which holds that there are separate “cultures” of blacks, of Hispanics, of gays, of the handicapped—characteristics that are distinctive by virtue of their being non-values that are (supposedly) non-chosen. (Which is, incidentally, why today’s left is so insistent that homosexuality is beyond anyone’s choice; there would be no officially sanctioned “gay culture” if that orientation were seen as volitional.)

The multiculturalist designates the unchosen as the core of your identity. Concomitantly, he belittles that which actually shapes your character and values: the volitional—which means, fundamentally: your faculty of thinking. Individual thought is a myth, says the multiculturalist. Your ideas are simply part of your unchosen ethnic makeup. Like every collectivist, the multiculturalist subscribes to a (subjectivist) version of determinism. He believes that each “culture”—i.e., each ethnic tribe—has a unique mental content shared by, and only by, the members of that tribe. He ethnicizes all ideas by dogmatically labeling them as: black principles of science, women’s theories of law, gay musicology, white interpretations of history, etc.

The most glorious cultural accomplishments are cavalierly disvalued by multiculturalism. From the Greeks’ cultivation of reason and happiness, to the Enlightenment’s development of science and individual freedom, to the Industrial Revolution’s mastery of nature through technology and entrepreneurship—across a range of discoveries and inventions providing inestimable value to every rational individual, of any race, color, and gender—the multiculturalist’s scornful response is: “These are the products of white European males, and so are irrelevant to the concerns of non-whites, non-Europeans, and non-males.”

While multiculturalists are obviously collectivists, they are different in one significant respect from other versions of collectivism: they are also modern egalitarians.

Egalitarianism is the doctrine that openly demands a leveling of all men, so that no one may enjoy anything that others lack. Wealth, brains, talent, looks—whatever the value is, no one may benefit from it unless all do so identically. As Ayn Rand describes it, egalitarians seek “not political, but metaphysical equality—the equality of personal attributes and virtues, regardless of natural endowment or individual choice, performance and character.”¹⁵

Multiculturalists zealously endorse this philosophy. They realize that there can be no metaphysical equality based on values. They know there can be an equality only of non-values—an equality obtained by cutting down whoever tries to rise. And they implement this process of leveling in two stages.

First, they demand that the individual surrender his identity to his ethnic tribe. This crushes all legitimate self-value. Then, to eradicate even any sense of pseudo-value men might acquire through tribal membership, they demand that one collective sacrifice itself to another—that any tribe of “haves” immolate itself for the sake of any tribe of “have-nots.”

Thus, if white males constitute a non-egalitarian proportion of corporate CEOs, or if Asians make up a non-egalitarian ratio of university students, their interests must be sacrificed to those of other “cultures.” The non-whites or the non-Asians are the recipients of these benefits, not because they embody any value—but because they don’t, and because the code of diversity allows no discrimination between a value and a non-value. Special preference is given to those “cultures” whose workers do not deserve promotion, or whose students do not deserve admission, because they don’t deserve it. Multiculturalists, in other words, do not claim that any distinctive group represents the good.

This is a major departure from the views of earlier collectivists. Marx, for example, maintained that while the individual was nothing, the proletariat was history’s noble embodiment of the good. Hitler told his followers to obliterate their egos for the sake of the Aryan collective—which, he said, personified the human ideal. The earlier racists in America’s South held whites to be morally and intellectually superior to blacks. All these collectivists held some group as the standard of value.

Multiculturalism, however, is a full-scale renunciation of value. It is the first ideology to overtly weld egalitarianism and collectivism. It is adamantly collectivist—while eschewing the claim that any collective is genuinely better than any other. It believes that the individual has no value—and neither does any group (to which he must subordinate himself).

(This is what led the University of Pennsylvania official to make such a bizarre criticism of individualism. Leaving aside his inability to think in terms of anything other than groups, he recognized that under individualism, the “dominant [i.e., objectively better] group” triumphs, while under collectivism—an egalitarian collectivism—the better is sacrificed to the worse.)

Some may regard it as paradoxical that multiculturalism proclaims this universal equality of all “cultures,” while simultaneously invoking special privileges for certain groups. Some even conclude that the egalitarianism is merely a facade, which enables its proponents to further the interests of the specific groups they favor.

This is a grave error. In fact, the call for “equality” and the call for “preferential treatment” are the same thing.

Egalitarianism wants to level everyone, which means: to drag the best down to the status of the worst. It contends that the hard-working individual is not entitled to a more enjoyable life than that of the irresponsible moocher. Society must treat the two identically. How? By rewarding the parasite and penalizing the producer, until the inequalities are eliminated. Both parties are subject to the same egalitarian principle: namely, that the “haves” ought to be drained until universal equality—i.e., universal “have-not-ism” —is attained. If the rational and the irrational are to be treated alike, this means that the latter must be given objectively “preferential” treatment.

And that is multiculturalism’s goal. It consistently demands that values be “diversified” with non-values. It promotes “preferential treatment” for certain “cultures”—not for those it regards as superior, but for those that do not meet any standard of value, so that they become “equal” to those that do.

This is what makes multiculturalism far more radical, and more consistent, than old-style cultural relativism. The relativists held that each society is entitled to concoct its own standard of value. Despite this false notion, however, they still believed that values, once concocted, are to be pursued and non-values shunned. They held that whatever a culture chooses is “good” for that culture, and should therefore be defended by that culture. Multiculturalists, by contrast, renounce the very idea of “good”—even a subjective notion of it. They preach, not a moral equivalence of everything and everyone, but a militantly amoral equivalence—i.e., a system under which a value is never to be deemed preferable to a non-value.

The nihilistic view of “culture” and “identity”—as defined by unchosen and insignificant attributes—is the means by which multiculturalism fully severs any connection between man and value. The greater its incongruity with authentic, rational values, the more a “culture” is extolled, and the more each individual is urged to efface himself within it. The meaning and the essence of multiculturalism is the worship of anti-values—of that which is patently inimical to human life.

There is no clearer, or more loathsome, illustration of this than the ongoing controversy about a cure for deafness.

Deafness is a terrible curse, particularly when the victim is a child. Deafness imposes upon children a world in which the learning of language—the tool of conceptual thought—is agonizingly difficult. But medicine has recently developed a surgical procedure, called a cochlear implant, to restore hearing in many deaf children. This operation represents an incalculable, life-saving blessing. It is a breakthrough that any parent of a deaf child should passionately embrace.

Yet there is organized opposition to it—among the deaf.

The National Association of the Deaf has denounced the procedure as “invasive surgery on defenseless children.” As described in The New York Times: “Leading advocates of the deaf say it is brutal to open a child’s skull and wind wires through the inner ear, or cochlear, just to rob that child of a birthright of silence.” ¹⁶

The editor of Silent News, a periodical published for the deaf, says: “I think it is wrong for a hearing parent to deny a deaf child his cultural identity and force him to be hearing.”¹⁷

An article in The Atlantic explains the metaphysics of this viewpoint: “Deafness is not a disability. Instead, many deaf people now proclaim, they are a subculture like any other. They are simply a linguistic minority (speaking American Sign Language) and are no more in need of a cure for their condition than are Haitians or Hispanics.”¹⁸

That article is titled: “Deafness as Culture.”

Here is the full flowering, and full evil, of the multiculturalist philosophy. Here is a naked assault on the irreplaceable value of hearing—on the grounds that anti-value requires cultural preservation.

The multiculturalist bristles at the idea that it is better to be able to hear than not. That idea is a manifestation of oppression, he asserts. Hearing and deafness, he says, are merely characteristics of two different “cultures”—and “different” can never imply “better.” So if a hearing person is not considered to be malfunctioning, if he is not a candidate for corrective surgery—why, then, should the deaf person be? Performing this implant, the multiculturalist declares, is discriminatory. It is a repudiation of deaf culture and of what one author hails as “deaf pride.” It is “ableism.” It is, perhaps, “audioism.” After all, why should the capacity to hear be universally valued? Why shouldn’t there be auditory “diversity” among people?

As the editors of Deaf Life magazine explain this: “An implant is the ultimate denial of deafness, the ultimate refusal to let deaf children be Deaf.”¹⁹ This is precisely correct. The implant is a medical denial that deafness is incurable, and a moral denial that deafness is desirable. But the “culturalists” of the deaf prefer to cling to their illness. Deafness, they have been taught, is their cultural birthright. It is what defines their identity, in conservation of which they willingly—enthusiastically—consign innocent children to the horrors of a lifetime of deafness.

And to compound this depravity, the deaf are then urged to take pride in their pathology. In an unspeakable act of corruption, deaf children are exhorted to take pride, not in their ability to overcome their handicap, but in their refusal to overcome it—in their wish to remain stricken—in their desire to venerate deafness —in their enshrinement of disability qua disability—in their grotesque devotion to the multicultural dogma that hearing cannot be superior to deafness.

The goal of multiculturalism is to undermine all values, and all aspiration to values. Not to improve the plight of minorities, or the uneducated or the deaf—but to bring everyone down, majority and minority, intelligent and ignorant, healthy and sick alike, in fervent pursuit of “non-discrimination” between that which sustains human life and that which does not.

But the target of multiculturalism’s nihilism goes beyond evaluation. It extends to the root of evaluation: cognition itself. The multiculturalist attacks not just values, but the means of knowing any value—of knowing anything. On the very same grounds of ethnic egalitarianism, he allows no epistemological discrimination between logic and illogic, between reason and mysticism. Instead, he says, these alternatives represent nothing more than ... “ethnic preferences.”

This is the deeper meaning of multiculturalism’s belief in ethnic determinism. Each “culture” is said to have its unique method of mental functioning. Adopting the basic premise of Marx’s and Hitler’s “polylogism,” multiculturalists interpret a commitment to reason and to objectivity as merely a white male prejudice.

“Nothing that passes through the human mind doesn’t have its origin in sexual, economic and racial differentiae,” says a professor at Duke University. ²⁰ Scientific inquiry is dismissed by feminists as a “male way of knowing,” and Isaac Newton’s epochal work, Principia, is denounced by them as a “rape manual.”²¹ Various “feminist scholarship guidelines,” established by New Jersey for its schools, reveal the current gender-perspective on science: “[M]ind was male. Nature was female, and knowledge was created as an act of aggression—a passive nature had to be interrogated, unclothed, penetrated, and compelled by man to reveal her secrets.”²²

The very pursuit of knowledge is now derided as “logophallocentrism.” Or, as feminist theorist Catherine MacKinnon succinctly, and graphically, puts it: “To know has meant to fuck.”²³

For generations philosophers have taught that logic is impotent and rational man a myth: multiculturalists are simply exploiting the resultant epistemological confusion. The practical goal of their crude “ethnicizing” of thought is the same as that of all attempts to “persuade” the public that reason is unreliable: to sap people’s will to fight irrationality—the irrationality that the “persuaders” then feel free to perpetrate.

Why don’t people rise up in righteous indignation against racial quotas and “ethnomathematics” and the exaltation of deafness in children? Why is such senselessness allowed to persist? Only because people have been intellectually disarmed. They have been told that dismissing multiculturalism as senseless reflects an “ethnocentric” bias toward reason. While most people do not agree with such tripe, they have no answer to it—their philosophers have refused to give them answers—and so they are helpless. They will despair, but they will not fight.

In the face of this intellectual pacifism, multiculturalism is able to mount its distinctive assault on reason. Its stratagem comprises two lines of action which, at first, seem self-contradictory. On the one hand, multiculturalism emphasizes differences, such as racial ones. Indeed it revels in them, zealously dividing people all the way down to sub-sub-sub-ethnicities. On the other hand, it vehemently refuses to acknowledge differences, such as those between the deaf and the hearing, or the qualified and the unqualified. It condemns as “exclusionary” any attempt to focus on human differences.

This apparent anomaly, however, represents a consistent viewpoint. It reflects the multiculturalist’s desire to revert to a preconceptual stage. The differences that he accepts—e.g., those of race and gender—are ones that are known on a purely perceptual level. As long as he can regard such characteristics as narrow, brute facts, he approvingly acknowledges differences among people. What he disparages, however, are conceptual differentiations.

That is, the multiculturalist is quite willing to discriminate perceptually—as an animal does—between the sheer facts of, say, hearing and not hearing a sound. What he opposes is conceptually identifying those two facts—i.e., abstracting what is essential about them, relating them to other relevant knowledge, understanding the causes and consequences of each fact, judging that man’s life is greatly expanded by the ability to hear and, most crucially, making the normative differentiation that hearing is therefore good and deafness bad.

The volitional act of evaluation is possible only to a conceptual mind; to a perceptual mentality, there are just raw, disconnected data. “Different, not better” is the rallying cry of the concrete-bound mind. It is the cry of the multiculturalist, who first ejects conceptualization from human consciousness—and then eliminates evaluation from human life.

The multiculturalist aggressively celebrates perceptual differences among people because they are pivotal to his purpose: dividing mankind into various tribes. To the multiculturalist, each one of the brute differences he observes—black skin/white skin, male bodies/female bodies—constitutes a tribe, or a herd, or a “culture.”

The garden-variety altruist says: “We are all brothers, and each of us is our brother’s keeper”; the multiculturalist adapts this by saying: “We are all primitive tribalists, and each of us is our tribe’s keeper.” He wants people to exult in their tribal differences, in their being black or gay or deaf. This is how the individual is made a slave to his tribe. The black teenager, for example, is told to avoid studying hard at school because that would amount to “thinking white.” The deaf child is told to surrender any chance at hearing, because that would betray his “culture of deafness.” Those who engage in campaigns to find remedies for disabilities—such as actor Christopher Reeve, who suffers from a spinal-injury paralysis—are damned (as “offensive to people who have learned to live with their disabilities”) and pitied (“I feel sorry for [Reeve] because he wants to be cured”) by a growing horde of “disability activists.”²⁴

This is how multiculturalists seek to render the individual nonexistent. They want to establish the tribe as the moral lawgiver—the tribe as the exacter of sacrifices—the tribe as the shaper of one’s identity—the tribe as the primary unit of reality. There are no individuals, multiculturalism insists—there is only the tribal organism, of which each man is an interchangeable, dispensable cell.

All “cultural” differences are to be kept inviolate, according to multiculturalists—which means that tribalism, which they hail as “diversity,” is to be eternally preserved. They want each tribe to wallow mindlessly in the crude characteristics that set it apart from other tribes—without being instructed that some alternative is better. They know that to convey such an evaluation would be to destroy the tribal identity. They know that to hold such an evaluation is to urge the deaf to try to become hearing, the ugly to become attractive, the illiterate to become literate. It is to tell them that their tribal designations should be repudiated, and that each individual ought to pursue his own, rational values.

This is what the multiculturalist rabidly resists. “Don’t tell me about good and bad,” he cries. “I just want to preserve my tribe’s special differences. Why should everyone strive to hear and to be handsome and literate and able—that would be anti-diversity.”

This is unadulterated egalitarianism—upheld as a means of embalming tribal differences. It is egalitarianism, designed to perpetuate a life of stagnation and to ratify the inertia of a consciousness that dreads escaping from collective bondage. It is egalitarianism, sought by those who recoil, in terror, from the prospect of assuming responsibility for questioning tribal customs and for thinking and living independently. It is egalitarianism, cherished by those who have no desire to make their lives any better because they cling to the belief that the very idea of “better” is oppressive.

If, however, each tribe is to be lauded for its distinctive primitiveness, then this calcified mentality feels safe. Then—since those differences are not to be conceptually processed and evaluated, and since the need for “diversity” forbids denying to one group what any others have—all will be granted the “security” of universal, tribal “equality”: the same graduation rates, the same income levels, the same number of cochlear implants.

Because multiculturalism wants to invalidate the rational mind, it denounces conceptual discriminations among people. Whenever one judges that, in a given context, essential differences exist that the elderly are different from the young, that the competent are different from the incompetent, that human beings are different from animals---one is condemned as an “ageist,” an “ableist,” a “speciesist.” There is an unending litany of such egalitarian “anti-concepts”²⁵ to describe virtually any act of cognitive discrimination.

Multiculturalists refuse to distinguish the essential from the non-essential. They refuse to grasp that, say, men and women ought to be treated as essentially different in some contexts—e.g., with respect to romantic love or clothing design—and as essentially similar in other—e.g., with respect to their intellectual capacity or their ability to drive a car. The multiculturalist refuses to understand that the deaf are essentially different from others when it comes to, say, ability to communicate and essentially similar when it comes to, say, possession of political rights.

To a mind frozen on the perceptual level, there are no essential, as against non-essential, characteristics. The stunted multicultural mentality sees only a proliferation of tribal traits and asks only one question: are all tribes being treated identically or are some being “discriminated” against?

Because values are based on facts, this egalitarianism is ultimately not moral, but epistemological. It espouses a certain cognitive approach to reality—an approach that abjures conceptual discriminations between essentially different things. The diversity doctrine, by advocating non-discrimination between value and non-value, is simply an application of this wider anti-conceptual premise. By keeping man’s consciousness on the level of an animal’s, multiculturalism aborts the cognitive means of making such a distinction.

Multiculturalism wants to drag man back to a primitive mode of functioning. It is an ideology intended to make man into a barbarian—mentally and thereby existentially. If fully adopted, this can mean only one thing in practice: full-scale tribal warfare, leading to wholesale extermination that would surpass Hitler’s wildest longings.

When ethnic subjectivism reigns, there can be no other result—and no other purpose. If there are no objective truths and no objective methods for discovering them—if reasons, arguments, and logic are “cultural biases”—then all human interaction reduces ultimately to the wishes, and the weapons, of one tribe versus those of another.

On any matter, then, the only relevant consideration becomes the identities of the tribes involved. If you apply for admission into college, you will be asked: Which tribe are you from and how many of that tribe have already been accepted? If you present the most eloquent arguments in support of your ideas, you will be asked: To which tribe do you belong and which tribes are affected by your beliefs?

Tribalism reduces men to the status of beasts snarling over a piece of meat. It makes it impossible for people to deal with one another rationally, particularly with respect to disagreements and conflicts. If an O.J. Simpson is put on trial, there will be no such thing as objective evidence by which to prove guilt. There will be only the perception that a member of one tribe is being prosecuted by those of another—and only one possible verdict: the tribe regarded as representing the “have-nots” must prevail over the “haves.”

The tenets of law and reason, which are products of a conceptual age, will no longer constrain people. People will act like the pack of animals multiculturalism has taught them to become. If a community decides it does not like a certain jury verdict—or a supermarket’s price of milk—what course of action will it pursue? It will see only that one tribe has been aggrieved by another and will choose violent retribution as its response.

Multiculturalism is the abject repudiation of centuries of civilization. It marks the retrogression to an existence in which individuals no longer seek independently—i.e., conceptually—to identify the true and the good, but rather become a swarm of savages, unthinkingly accepting their chieftains’. edicts and ceaselessly feeding at one another’s throats. Multiculturalism is paving the road that leads, in the end, back to the cave.

America used to be known by a cogent sobriquet: the melting pot. This named the fact that, when coming to America, immigrants of various nationalities, languages, and ancestries would discard their backgrounds and unite in a common embrace of freedom. They did so because they understood that freedom was essential to their lives, while the accidents of their pasts were not. They grasped that the values represented by America, not those of their ethnic heritage, constituted their true culture and bound together all who accepted them. The melting-pot metaphor represented the principle of integration politically, socially, and epistemologically.

Today, this is a “politically incorrect” description of America. Now our schoolchildren are taught that an “ethnic mosaic” is the proper metaphor. Disintegration has become the guiding premise, and tribal balkanization its logical manifestation.

The antidote to this return to primitivism is a return to the “melting pot”—a return to a time in which liberty and progress were unobstructed. To be more precise, the antidote requires a huge leap forward. It requires a commitment to the philosophy of individualism, which, tragically, America never fully had, even at the start. It requires the conviction that, in all moral and political issues, the individual is the primary unit—that man’s defining characteristic is his rational mind—that the objective standard of value is man’s life—and that, of all the cognitive discriminations his life necessitates, the one between value and non-value is the most crucial.

If enough voices were to articulate such a philosophy, the phenomenon of multiculturalism would quickly vanish. Forced to face the bright, unyielding light of reason, it would sink back into the primordial ooze from which it arose.

REFERENCES

1 “Cortines Vows To Stop Board’s ‘America Best’ Plan,” New York Post, June 22, 1994, p. 20.

2 Ibid.

3 “School Board Will Recognize Other Cultures, but as Inferior,” New York Times, May 13, 1994, p. 16.

4 Claudia Zaslavsky, “Integrating Mathematics with the Study of Cultural Traditions” (paper presented at the International Conference of Mathematical Education in Budapest, Hungary, summer 1988).

5 William A. Henry III, In Defense of Elitism (Doubleday, 1994), p. 45.

6 Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education (The Free Press, 1991), pp. 6-7; and “Illiberal Education,” The Atlantic, Mar. 1991, p. 53.

7 John Taylor, “Are You Politically Correct?”, New York magazine, Jan. 21, 1991, p. 34.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid., p. 35.

12 Ibid.

13 Ayn Rand, “The Age of Envy,” Return of the Primitive (Meridian, Revised Edition, 1997), p. 130.

14 Paul Craig Roberts, “The Rise of the New Inequality,” Wall St. Journal, Dec. 6, 1995, p. A20.

15 Rand, op. cit., p. 140.

16 “Pride in a Soundless World: Deaf Oppose a Hearing Aid,” New York Times, May 16, 1993, pp. 1, 22.

17 Ibid.

18 Edward Dolnick, “Deafness as Culture,” The Atlantic magazine, Sept. 1993, p. 37.

19 Ibid., p. 43.

20 Dinesh D’Souza, “Illiberal Education,” The Atlantic magazine, March 1991, p. 63.

21 Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? (Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 66.

22 Taylor, op. cit., p. 38.

23 Hoff Sommers, op. cit.

24 “Eager To Bite the Hands That Would Feed Them,” New York Times, June 1, 1997, pp. 1, 6 (Section 4).

25 See Ayn Rand’s discussion of “anti-concepts” in “ ‘Extremism,’ or the Art of Smearing,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (Signet, 1967), p. 173.

The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Let us begin by translating an abstract idea into concrete, specific terms. A current trend proclaims that technology is man’s enemy and should be restricted or abolished. Let us project what this idea would mean in practice.

Suppose that you are a young man in the year 1975. You are married, have two children and own a modest home in the suburbs of a large city. Let us observe a normal, average day of your life.

You get up at five a.m., because you work in the city and must be at the office at nine. You always had a light breakfast, just toast and coffee. Your electric percolator is gone; electric percolators are not manufactured any longer, they are regarded as an item of self indulgent luxury: they consume electric power, which contributes to the load of power stations, which contributes to air pollution. So you make your coffee in an old-fashioned pot on an electric—no, an oil-burning stove; you used to have an electric one, but they have been forbidden by law. Your electric toaster is gone; you make your toast in the oven; your attention wanders for a moment and you burn the toast. There is no time to make another batch.

When you had a car, it took you three-quarters of an hour to get to the office; but private automobiles have been outlawed and replaced by “mass transportation.” Now it takes you two hours and a half. The community bus can make the trip in a little over an hour, when it is on time; but you never know whether it will be on time, so you allow for half-an-hour’s delay. You trudge ten blocks through the bitter gusts of a cold morning wind to your community bus stop, and you stand waiting. You have no choice—there are no other means of transportation—and you know it; so does the bus company.

When you reach the city, you walk twelve blocks from the bus terminal to the office building. You make it on time. You work till noon, then eat, at your desk, the lunch you have brought from home. There used to be six restaurants in the two blocks around the building; but restaurants are notorious sources of pollution—they create garbage; now there is only one restaurant, and it is not too good, and you have to stand in line. Besides, you save money by packing your own lunch. You pack it in an old shoe-box; there are no metal boxes: the mining of metal has been severely curtailed; there are no plastic bags—a self-indulgent luxury; there are no Thermos bottles. Your sandwich is a little stale and your coffee is cold, but you are used to that.

In the later hours of the afternoon, you begin to watch the clock and to fight against the recurring attacks of your enemy: boredom. You have worked for the company for eight years; for the past three years, you have been office manager; there is no promotion to expect, no further place to go; business expansion has been arrested. You try to fight the boredom by telling yourself that you are an unusually lucky fellow, but it does not help much. You keep saying it because, under the boredom, there is a nagging fear which you don’t want to acknowledge: that the company might go out of business. You know that paper consumes trees, and trees are essential for the preservation of life on earth, and forests must not be sacrificed for the sake of self-indulgent luxuries. The company you work for manufactures paper containers.

By the time you reach the bus terminal again, on your way home, you reproach yourself for being exhausted; you see no reason for it. Your wife—you keep telling yourself—is the real victim. And she is.

Your wife gets up at six a.m.—you have insisted that she sleep until the coal furnace, which you lighted, has warmed the house a little. She has to cook breakfast for your son, aged 5; there are no breakfast cereals to give him, they have been prohibited as not sufficiently nutritious; there is no canned orange juice—cans pollute the countryside. There are no electric refrigerators.

She has to breast-feed your infant daughter, aged six months; there are no plastic bottles, no baby formulas. There are no products such as “Pampers”; your wife washes diapers for hours each day, by hand, as she washes all the family laundry, as she washes the dishes—there are no self-indulgent luxuries such as washing machines or automatic dishwashers or electric irons. There are no vacuum cleaners; she cleans the house by means of a broom.

There are no shopping centers—they despoil the beauty of the countryside. She walks two miles to the nearest grocery store and stands in line for an hour or so. The purchases she lugs home are a little heavy; but she does not complain—the lady columnist in the newspaper has said it is good for her figure.

Since there are no canned foods and no frozen foods, she starts cooking dinner three hours in advance, peeling and slicing by hand every slimy, recalcitrant bit of the vegetables. She does not get fruit very often—refrigerated freight cars have been discontinued.

When you get home, she is trying not to show that she is exhausted. It is pretty difficult to hide, particularly since there are no cosmetics—which are an extra-self-indulgent luxury. By the time you are through with dinner and dishwashing and putting the children to bed and a few other chores, you are both free. But what are you to do with your brief evening? There is no television, no radio, no electric phonograph, no recorded music. There are no drive-in movies. There is a movie theater in a town six miles away—if you catch the community bus in time. You don’t feel like rushing to catch it.

So you stay at home. You find nothing to say to your wife: you don’t want to depress her by discussing the kinds of things that crowd your mind. You know that she is keeping silent for the same reason. Junior did not eat much dinner: he has a sore throat; you remember vaguely that diphtheria had once been virtually eliminated, but epidemics of it have been recurring recently in schools around the country; seventy-three children died of it in a neighboring state. The last time you saw your father, he complained about pains in his chest; you hope desperately that it is not a heart ailment. Your mother died of a heart ailment at the age of fifty-five; the old doctor mentioned a device that could have saved her, but it was a product of a very, very advanced technology, which does not exist any longer: it was called a “pacemaker.”

You look at your wife; the light is dim—electricity is rationed and only one bulb per room is allowed—but you can see the slump of her shoulders and the lines at the corners of her mouth. She is only thirty-two; she was such a beautiful girl when you met her in college. She was studying to be a lawyer; she could have combined a career with the duties of a wife and mother; but she could not combine it with the duties of heavy industry; so she gave it up. In the fifteen hours of this day, she has done the work of a dozen machines. She has had to do it—so that the brown pelican or the white polar bear might not vanish from this earth.

By ten o’clock, you feel a desperate longing for sleep—and cannot summon any other desire. Lying in bed, by the side of your wife who feels as you do, you wonder dimly what it was that the advocates of a return to nature had been saying about the joys of an unrestrained sexuality; you cannot remember it any longer. As you fall asleep, the air is pure above the roof of your house, pure as arctic snow—only you wonder how much longer you will care to breathe it.

This, of course, is fiction.

In real life, there is no such thing as a gradual descent from civilization to savagery. There is a crash—and no recovery, only the long, drawn-out agony of chaos, helplessness and random death, on a mass scale. There is no such thing as retrogressing “a little.” There is no such thing as a “restrained progress.” You are hearing many voices today that object to an “unrestricted technology.” A restricted technology is a contradiction in terms.

What is not fiction, however, are the countless ways in which your life—and any meaning, comfort, safety or happiness you may find in life—depends on technology. The purpose of the far too brief example I gave you was to prompt you to make a similar, personal inventory of what you would lose if technology were abolished and then to give a moment’s silent thanks every time you use one of the labor- and, therefore, time- and, therefore, life-saving devices created for you by technology.

If someone proposed to reduce you to the state I described, you would scream in protest. Why don’t you? It is being proposed loudly, clearly and daily all around you. What is worse, it is being proposed in the name of love for mankind.

There are three major reasons why you, and most people, do not protest. (1) You take technology—and its magnificent contributions to your iife---for granted, almost as if it were a fact of nature, which will always be there. But it is not and will not. (2) As an American, you are likely to be very benevolent and enormously innocent about the nature of evil. You are unable to believe that some people can advocate man’s destruction for the sake of man’s destruction—and when you hear them, you think that they don’t mean it. But they do. (3) Your education—by that same kind of people—has hampered your ability to translate an abstract idea into its actual, practical meaning and, therefore, has made you indifferent to and contemptuous of ideas. This is the real American tragedy.

It is these three premises that you now have to check.

The attack on technology is being put over on you by means of a package deal tied together by strings called “ecology.” Let us examine the arguments of the ecologists; their motives will become clear as we go along.

Under the title “The Ravaged Environment,” a survey of the ecological crusade was published in Newsweek on January 26, 1970. In spite—or, perhaps, because—of its sympathy with that crusade, it is an accurate survey: it captures the movement’s essence, spirit and epistemological style.

The survey begins by declaring that man “has come face to face with a new man-made peril, the poisoning of his natural environment with noxious doses of chemicals, garbage, fumes, noise, sewage, heat, ugliness and urban overcrowding.”

Observe the odd disparity of the things listed as perils: noxious chemicals, along with noise and ugliness. This mixture occurs in all the arguments of the ecologists; we shall discuss its motives later.

The perils—the survey keeps stressing—are not merely local, but global, they affect the whole of the earth and threaten the survival of all living species. What kinds of examples are given and on the grounds of what evidence?

“In the shallow waters of the Pacific Ocean off Los Angeles, sea urchins—a small sea animal—are enjoying a population boom, thanks to the organic materials in sewage being washed out to sea. Normally, the sea urchins’ population levels are tied to the quantity of kelp on the ocean bottoms; the animals die off when they have eaten all the kelp, thus allowing new crops of the seaweed to grow But now that the sewage is available to nourish the sea urchins, the kelp beds have not had a chance to recover. In many places the kelp, for which man has found hundreds of uses (it is an ingredient of salad dressing and beer) has disappeared altogether.

“There is, of course, no way of calculating the exact effects of the loss of kelp on its particular ecosystem.”

An “ecosystem” is defined as “the sum total of all the living and non-living parts that support a chain of life within a selected area.” How do the ecologists select this area? How do they determine its interrelationship with the rest of the globe, and over what period of time? No answer is given.

Another example: “Right now some ecologists are worried about the possible effect on the Eskimo of the great oil race on Alaska’s remote North Slope. Oil spills in the ever-frozen sea, they fear, would be trapped in the narrow space between water and ice, killing first the plankton, then the fish and mollusks that feed on the plankton, then the polar bears, walrus, seals and whales that feed off sea life, and finally threatening the Eskimos who live off these animals.

“The net outcome of the current research, hopefully, will be a better understanding of the potential consequences of man’s tampering with any ecosystem.”

Consider the actual consequences of this particular example. Without any effort on their part, the Eskimos are to receive fortunes in oil royalties, which will enable them to give up their backbreaking struggle for mere subsistence and to discover the comfort of civilized life and labor. If—and it is only an “if”—the ecologists’ fears came true, the Eskimos would have the means to move to a better background. Or are we to assume that the Eskimos prefer their way of life to ours? If so, why are they entitled to a preference, but we are not? Or shall we assume that the Eskimos have inalienable rights, but Thomas Edison does not? Or are the Eskimos to be sacrificed to the polar bears, walruses, seals and whales, which are to be sacrificed to the fish and mollusks, which are to be sacrificed to the plankton? If so, why? But we will come back to these questions later.

“Non-human environments,” the survey declares, “have a remarkable resiliency; as many as 25 or even 50 per cent of a certain fish or rodent population might be lost in a habitat during a plague or disaster, yet the species will recover its original strength within one or two years. It’s man-made interference—or pollution—that can profoundly disturb the ecosystem and its equilibrium.”

Bear this in mind: factories represent pollution—plagues do not.

“The worst fears of land conservationists concern not the accidental spoilage of land by wastes, but its exploitation by man to build mines, roads and cities. In time he may encroach so far on his greenery that he reduces the amount of air he has to breathe.”

Have you ever looked at a map of the globe and compared the size of the area of industrial sites and cities to the size of the area of untouched wilderness and primeval jungles? And what about the greenery cultivated by man? What about the grains, the fruit trees, the flowers that would have vanished long ago without human care and labor? What about the giant irrigation projects that transform deserts into fertile, green lands? No answer.

“Louisiana’s state bird, the brown pelican, has vanished from its shores,” the survey laments, blaming the bird’s extinction on DDT.

The dinosaur and its fellow-creatures vanished from this earth long before there were any industrialists or any men—and environmental “resiliency” never brought them back. But this did not end life on earth. Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of “equilibrium” that guarantees the survival of any particular species—least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.

But love for man is not a characteristic of the ecologists. “Man has always been a messy animal,” the survey declares. “Ancient Romans complained of the sooty smoke that suffused their city, and in the first century Pliny described the destruction of crops from climate changes wrought by the draining of lakes or deflection of rivers.”

Such events did not occur in the period that followed the fall of Rome: the Dark Ages.

Would you regard the following as an expression of love for man? This deals with another alleged pollution created by cities: noise. “Nor can the harried urban inhabitant seek silence indoors. He merely substitutes the clamor of rock music for the beat of the steam hammers, the buzz of the air conditioner for the steady rumble of traffic. The modern kitchen, with its array of washing machines, garbage-disposal units and blenders, often rivals the street corner as a source of unwanted sound.”

Consider the fate of a human being, a woman, who is to become once again a substitute for washing machines, garbage-disposal units and blenders. Consider what human life and suffering were like, indoors and out, prior to the advent of air conditioning. The price you pay for these marvelous advantages is “unwanted sound.” Well, there is no unwanted sound in a cemetery.

Predictions of universal doom are interspersed with complaints of this kind. And nowhere, neither in this survey nor elsewhere, does one find any scientific evidence—no, not to prove, but even to support a valid hypothesis of global danger. But one does find the following.

“... some scientists,” the survey declares, “like to play with the notion that global disaster may result if environmental pollution continues unchecked. According to one scenario, the planet is already well advanced toward a phenomenon called ‘the greenhouse effect.’ Concentrations of carbon dioxide are building up in the atmosphere, it is said, as the world’s vegetation, which feeds on CO₂, is progressively chopped down. Hanging in the atmosphere, it forms a barrier trapping the planet’s heat. As a result, the greenhouse theorists contend, the world is threatened with a rise in average temperature which, if it reached 4 or 5 degrees, could melt the polar ice caps, raise sea level by as much as 300 feet and cause a worldwide flood. Other scientists see an opposite peril: that the polar ice will expand, sending glaciers down to the temperate zone once again. This theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.”

This is what bears the name of “science” today. It is on the basis of this kind of stuff that you are being pushed into a new Dark Age.

Now observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for “harmony with nature” —there is no discussion of man’s needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision—i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears. In that sense, man is the weakest of animals: he is born naked and unarmed, without fangs, claws, horns or “instinctual” knowledge. Physically, he would fall an easy prey, not only to the higher animals, but also to the lowest bacteria: he is the most complex organism and, in a contest of brute force, extremely fragile and vulnerable. His only weapon his basic means of survival—is his mind.

In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production. The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus brought to man. The ecologists are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire.

It is not necessary to remind you of what human existence was like—for centuries and millennia—prior to the Industrial Revolution. That the ecologists ignore or evade it is so terrible a crime against humanity that it serves as their protection: no one believes that anyone can be capable of it. But, in this matter, it is not even necessary to look at history; take a look at the conditions of existence in the undeveloped countries, which means: on most of this earth, with the exception of the blessed island which is Western civilization.

The wisest words I read on the subject of pollution and ecology were spoken by the ambassador of one of those countries. At a United Nations symposium, Oliver Weerasinghe, ambassador from Ceylon, said: “The two-thirds of mankind who live in developing countries do not share the same concern for the environment as the other one-third in more affluent regions. The primary problem for these developing areas is the struggle for the bare necessities of life. It would, therefore, not be realistic to expect governments of these areas to carry out recommendations regarding environmental protection which might impede or restrict economic progress.” (Industry Week, June 29, 1970. Italics mine.)

In Western Europe, in the preindustrial Middle Ages, man’s life expectancy was 30 years. In the nineteenth century, Europe’s population grew by 300 percent—which is the best proof of the fact that for the first time in human history, industry gave the great masses of people a chance to survive.

If it were true that a heavy concentration of industry is destructive to human life, one would find life expectancy declining in the more advanced countries. But it has been rising steadily. Here are the figures on life expectancy in the United States (from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company):

Anyone over 30 years of age today, give a silent “Thank you” to the nearest, grimiest, sootiest smokestacks you can find.

No, of course, factories do not have to be grimy—but this is not an issue when the survival of technology is at stake. And clean air is not the issue nor the goal of the ecologists’ crusade.

The figures on life expectancy in different countries around the globe are as follows (from The New York Times Almanac, 1970):

If you consider, not merely the length, but the kind of life men have to lead in the undeveloped parts of the world—“the quality of life,” to borrow, with full meaning, the ecologists’ meaningless catch phrase—if you consider the squalor, the misery, the helplessness, the fear, the unspeakably hard labor, the festering diseases, the plagues, the starvation, you will begin to appreciate the role of technology in man’s existence.

Make no mistake about it: it is technology and progress that the nature-lovers are out to destroy. To quote again from the Newsweek survey: “What worries ecologists is that people now upset about the environment may ultimately look to technology to solve everything ...” This is repeated over and over again; technological solutions, they claim, will merely create new problems.

“... a number of today’s environmental reformers conclude that mankind’s main hope lies not in technology but in abstinence—fewer births and less gadgetry.... The West Coast has also spawned a fledgling ‘zero GNP growth’ movement. Harvey Wheeler, of Santa Barbara’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, believes the U.S. may reach a point—perhaps in ten years——when ‘the present rate of growth is absolutely disastrous and economic growth may well have to be eliminated altogether.’ ”

And: “Russell Train [one of President Nixon’s advisers] warns that improving the quality of life will entail unpopular cutbacks on luxuries. ‘People have shown no inclination,’ he points out, ‘to give up the products of affluence—TV sets and gadgets.’ ”

You have probably seen on television, as I have, the younger adherents of the ecological crusade, the hippie types who scream, denouncing modern “luxuries,” with special emphasis on the electric toothbrush, which, they claim, contributes to pollution by consuming electricity. Leaving aside the fact that this toothbrush, as any dentist will tell you, is an extremely valuable tool of health care, because it provides gum massage, let us consider its consumption of electricity.

An average household light bulb consumes 100 watts of electricity. This bulb is used approximately 8 to 10 hours a day, which means a daily consumption of 800 to 1000 watt-hours. Compare this figure with the following: a General Electric Cordless Toothbrush consumes 2 watts of electricity when being recharged. Whatever the motives of those hippies’ attacks, concern for air pollution is not one of them.

The immediate—though not the ultimate—motive is made quite clear in the Newsweek survey. “To a man they [the ecologists] maintain that a national population plan must be invoked, primarily through a national land-use plan.” “The battle against pollution must also overcome the jurisdictional lines that carve the planet into separate sovereignties.” The ecologists’ programs cannot be accomplished “without some fairly important modifications of the American tradition of free enterprise and free choice.” The “obstacles to reform [are] man’s traditional notions of growth, sovereignty, individualism and time.” “What is needed, the ecologists suggest, is a rebirth of community spirit, not only among men but among all of nature.” How they intend to impose a “community spirit” on nature, where living species exist by devouring one another, is not indicated.

The immediate goal is obvious: the destruction of the remnants of capitalism in today’s mixed economy, and the establishment of a global dictatorship. This goal does not have to be inferred—many speeches and books on the subject state explicitly that the ecological crusade is a means to that end.

There are two significant aspects in this New Left switch of the collectivists’ line. One is the open break with the intellect, the dropping of the mask of intellectuality worn by the old left, the substitution of birds, bees and beauty—“nature’s beauty”—for the pseudoscientific, super-technological paraphernalia of Marx’s economic determinism. A more ludicrous shrinking of a movement’s stature or a more obvious confession of intellectual bankruptcy could not be invented in fiction.

The other significant aspect is the reason behind this switch: the switch represents an open admission—by Soviet Russia and its facsimiles around the world and its sympathizers of every political sort and shade—that collectivism is an industrial and technological failure; that collectivism cannot produce.

The root of production is man’s mind; the mind is an attribute of the individual and it does not work under orders, controls and compulsion, as centuries of stagnation have demonstrated. Progress cannot be planned by government, and it cannot be restricted or retarded; it can only be stopped, as every statist government has demonstrated. If we are to consider nature, what about the fact that collectivism is incompatible with man’s nature and that the first requirement of man’s mind is freedom? But observe that just as the ancient mystics of spirit regarded the mind as a faculty of divine origin and, therefore, as unnatural, so today’s mystics of muscle, observing that the mind is not possessed by animals, regard it as unnatural.

If concern with poverty and human suffering were the collectivists’ motive, they would have become champions of capitalism long ago; they would have discovered that it is the only political system capable of producing abundance. But they evaded the evidence as long as they could. When the issue became overwhelmingly clear to the whole world, the collectivists were faced with a choice: either turn to the right, in the name of humanity—or to the left, in the name of dictatorial power. They turned to the left—the New Left.

Instead of their old promises that collectivism would create universal abundance and their denunciations of capitalism for creating poverty, they are now denouncing capitalism for creating abundance. Instead of promising comfort and security for everyone, they are now denouncing people for being comfortable and secure. They are still struggling, however, to inculcate guilt and fear; these have always been their psychological tools. Only instead of exhorting you to feel guilty of exploiting the poor, they are now exhorting you to feel guilty of exploiting land, air and water. Instead of threatening you with a bloody rebellion of the disinherited masses, they are now trying—like witch doctors addressing a tribe of savages—to scare you out of your wits with thunderously vague threats of an unknowable, cosmic cataclysm, threats that cannot be checked, verified or proved.

One element, however, has remained unchanged in the collectivists’ technique, the element without which they would have had no chance: altruism—the appeal for self-sacrifice, the denial of man’s right to exist. But observe the shrinking of plausibility with the expansion of the scale: some forty years ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt exhorted this country to sacrifice for the sake of an underprivileged “one-third of a nation”; fifteen years later, the sacrifice was stretched to include the “underprivileged” of the whole globe; today, you are asked to sacrifice for the sake of seaweeds and inanimate matter.

To the credit of the American people, the majority do not take the ecology issue seriously. It is an artificial, PR-manufactured issue, blown up by the bankrupt left who can find no other grounds for attacking capitalism. But the majority, as in so many other issues, remain silent. And this, precisely, is the danger. “The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow.” They are accepted by default.

It is possible, however, that the leftists may have outsmarted themselves, this time. The issue may be stolen from them and dissolved by American common sense, which may take them at their word, accept the semiplausible bait and reject the rest of the ecological package deal.

What is the semiplausible bait? The actual instances of local pollution and dirt, which do exist. City smog and filthy rivers are not good for men (though they are not the kind of danger that the ecological panic-mongers proclaim them to be). This is a scientific, technological problem—not a political one—and it can be solved only by technology. Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.

As far as the role of government is concerned, there are laws—some of them passed in the nineteenth century—prohibiting certain kinds of pollution, such as the dumping of industrial wastes into rivers, These laws have not been enforced. It is the enforcement of such laws that those concerned with the issue may properly demand. Specific laws—forbidding specifically defined and proved harm, physical harm, to persons or property—are the only solution to problems of this kind. But it is not solutions that the leftists are seeking, it is controls.

Observe that industry has been made the scapegoat in this issue, as in all modem issues. But industry is not the only culprit; for instance, the handling of the sewage and garbage disposal problems, which is so frequently here denounced, has been the province of the local governments. Yet the nature-lovers scream that industry should be abolished, or regulated out of existence, and that more power should be given to the government. And as far as the visible dirt is concerned, it is not the industrial tycoons who strew beer cans and soda-pop bottles all over the highways of America.

Since the enormous weight of controls created by the welfare-state theorists has hampered, burdened, corrupted, but not yet destroyed American industry, the collectivists have found—in ecology—a new excuse for the creation of more controls, more corruption, more favor-peddling, more harassment of industry by more irresponsible pressure groups.

The industrialists, as usual, will be the last to protest. In a mixed economy, the industrialists will swallow anything and apologize for anything. Their abject crawling and climbing on the “environmental” bandwagon is consistent with their policy of the past four or five decades, inculcated by Pragmatism: they would rather make a deal with a few more bureaucrats than stand up and face the issue in terms of philosophical-moral principles.

The greatest guilt of modern industrialists is not the fumes of their factory smokestacks, but the pollution of this country’s intellectual life, which they have condoned, assisted and supported.

As to the politicians, they have discovered that the issue of pollution is pay dirt and they have gone all out for it. They see it as a safe, non-controversial, “public-spirited” issue, which can mean anything to anyone. Besides, a politician would not dare oppose it and be smeared from coast to coast as an advocate of smog. All sorts of obscure politicians are leaping into prominence and onto television screens by proposing “ecological” reforms. A wise remark on the subject was made by a politician with whom I seldom agree: Jesse Unruh of California. He said: “Ecology has become the political substitute for the word mother.”

The deeper significance of the ecological crusade lies in the fact that it does expose a profound threat to mankind—though not in the sense its leaders allege. It exposes the ultimate motive of the collectivists—the naked essence of hatred for achievement, which means: hatred for reason, for man, for life.

In today’s drugged orgy of boastfully self-righteous swinish-ness, the masks are coming down and you can hear all but explicit confessions of that hatred.

For example, five years ago, on the occasion of the East Coast’s massive power failure and blackout, Life magazine published the following in its issue of November 19, 1965: “It shouldn’t happen every evening, but a crisis like the lights going out has its good points. In the first place, it deflates human smugness about our miraculous technology, which, at least in the area of power distribution and control, now stands revealed as utterly flawed ... and it is somehow delicious to contemplate the fact that all our beautiful brains and all those wonderful plans and all that marvelous equipment has combined to produce a system that is unreliable.”

Currently, the Newsweek survey criticizes the spectacular progress of the United States, as follows: “The society’s system of rewards favored the man who produced more, who found new ways to exploit nature. There were no riches or prestige for the man who made a deliberate decision to leave well enough alone—in this case, his environment.” Observe that this “system of rewards” is treated as if it were an arbitrary whim of society, not an inexorable fact of nature. Who is to provide the riches—or even the minimum sustenance—for the man who does not choose “to exploit nature”? What is “prestige” to be granted for—for non-production and nonachievement? For holding man’s life cheaper than his physical environment? When man had to “leave well enough alone”—in prehistoric times—his life expectancy was 15 to 20 years.

This phrase, “to leave well enough alone,” captures the essence of the deaf, blind, lethargic, fear-ridden, hatred-eaten human ballast that the men of the mind—the prime movers of human survival and progress—have had to drag along, to feed and to be martyred by, through all the millennia of mankind’s history.

The Industrial Revolution was the great breakthrough that liberated man’s mind from the weight of that ballast. The country made possible by the Industrial Revolution—The United States of America—achieved the magnificence which only free men can achieve, and demonstrated that reason is the means, the base, the precondition of man’s survival.

The enemies of reason—the mystics, the man-haters and life-haters, the seekers of the unearned and the unreal—have been gathering their forces for a counterattack, ever since. It was the corruption of philosophy that gave them a foothold and slowly gave them the power to corrupt the rest.

The enemies of the Industrial Revolution—its displaced persons were of the kind that had fought human progress for centuries, by every means available. In the Middle Ages, their weapon was the fear of God. In the nineteenth century, they still invoked the fear of God—for instance, they opposed the use of anesthesia on the grounds that it defies God’s will, since God intended men to suffer. When this weapon wore out, they invoked the will of the collective, the group, the tribe. But since this weapon has collapsed in their hands, they are now reduced, like cornered animals, to baring their teeth and their souls, and to proclaiming that man has no right to exist—by the divine will of inanimate matter.

The demand to “restrict” technology is the demand to restrict man’s mind. It is nature—i.e., reality—that makes both these goals impossible to achieve. Technology can be destroyed, and the mind can be paralyzed, but neither can be restricted. Whether and wherever such restrictions are attempted, it is the mind—not the state—that withers away.

Technology is applied science. The progress of theoretical science and of technology—i.e., of human knowledge—is moved by such a complex and interconnected sum of the work of individual minds that no computer or committee could predict and prescribe its course. The discoveries in one branch of knowledge lead to unexpected discoveries in another; the achievements in one field open countless roads in all the others. The space exploration program, for instance, has led to invaluable advances in medicine. Who can predict when, where or how a given bit of information will strike an active mind and what it will produce?

To restrict technology would require omniscience—a total knowledge of all the possible effects and consequences of a given development for all the potential innovators of the future. Short of such omniscience, restrictions mean the attempt to regulate the unknown, to limit the unborn, to set rules for the undiscovered.

And more: an active mind will not function by permission. An inventor will not spend years of struggle dedicated to an excruciating work if the fate of his work depends, not on the criterion of demonstrable truth, but on the arbitrary decision of some “authorities.” He will not venture out on a course where roadblocks are established at every turn, in the form of the horrendous necessity to seek, to beg, to plead for the consent of a committee. The history of major inventions, even in semi-free societies, is a shameful record, as far as the collective wisdom of an entrenched professional consensus is concerned.

As to the notion that progress is unnecessary, that we know enough, that we can stop on the present level of technological development and maintain it, without going any farther—ask yourself why mankind’s history is full of the wreckage of civilizations that could not be maintained and vanished along with such knowledge as they had achieved; why men who do not move forward, fall back into the abyss of savagery.

Even a primitive, preindustrial economy, run primarily on muscle power, cannot function successfully through the mere repetition of a routine of motions by passively obedient men who are not permitted to think. How long would a modem factory last if it were operated by mechanics trained to a routine performance, without a single engineer among them? How long would the engineers last without a single scientist? And a scientist—in the proper meaning of the term—is a man whose mind does not stand still.

Machines are an extension of man’s mind, as intimately dependent on it as his body, and they crumble, as his body crumbles, when the mind stops.

A stagnant technology is the equivalent of a stagnant mind. A “restricted” technology is the equivalent of a censored mind.

But—the ecologists claim—men would not have to work or think, the computers would do everything. Try to project a row of computers programmed by a bunch of hippies.

Now observe the grim irony of the fact that the ecological crusaders and their young activist followers are vehement enemies of the status quo—that they denounce middle-class passivity, defy conventional attitudes, clamor for action, scream for “change”—and that they are cringing advocates of the status quo in regard to nature.

In confrontation with nature, their plea is: “Leave well enough alone.” Do not upset the balance of nature—do not disturb the birds, the forests, the swamps, the oceans—do not rock the boat (or even build one)—do not experiment—do not venture out—what was good enough for our anthropoid ancestors is good enough for us—adjust to the winds, the rains, the man-eating tigers, the malarial mosquitoes, the tsetse flies—do not rebel—do not anger the unknowable demons who rule it all.

In their cosmology, man is infinitely malleable, controllable and dispensable, nature is sacrosanct. It is only man—and his work, his achievement, his mind—that can be violated with impunity, while nature is not to be defiled by a single bridge or skyscraper. It is only human beings that they do not hesitate to murder, it is only human schools that they bomb, only human habitations that they burn, only human property that they loot—while they crawl on their bellies in homage to the reptiles of the marshlands, whom they protect from the encroachments of human airfields, and humbly seek the guidance of the stars on how to live on this incomprehensible planet.

They are worse than conservatives—they are “conservationists.” What do they want to conserve? Anything, except man. What do they want to rule? Nothing, except man.

“The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men,” said Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. It was published in 1943. Today, the moral inversion is complete; you can see it demonstrated in action and in explicit confessions.

The obscenity of regarding scientific progress as “aggression” against nature, while advocating universal slavery for man, needs no further demonstration.

But some of those crusaders’ vicious absurdities are worth noting.

Whom and what are they attacking? It is not the luxuries of the “idle rich,” but the availability of “luxuries” to the broad masses of people. They are denouncing the fact that automobiles, air conditioners and television sets are no longer toys of the rich, but are within the means of an average American worker—a beneficence that does not exist and is not fully believed anywhere else on earth.

What do they regard as the proper life for working people? A life of unrelieved drudgery, of endless, gray toil, with no rest, no travel, no pleasure—above all, no pleasure. Those drugged, fornicating hedonists do not know that man cannot live by toil alone, that pleasure is a necessity, and that television has brought more enjoyment into more lives than all the public parks and settlement houses combined.

What do they regard as luxury? Anything above the “bare necessities” of physical survival——with the explanation that men would not have to labor so hard if it were not for the “artificial needs” created by “commercialism” and “materialism.” In reality, the opposite is true: the less the return on your labor, the harder the labor. It is much easier to acquire an automobile in New York City than a meal in the jungle. Without machines and technology, the task of mere survival is a terrible, mind-and-body-wrecking ordeal. In “nature,” the struggle for food, clothing and shelter consumes all of a man’s energy and spirit; it is a losing struggle—the winner is any flood, earthquake or swarm of locusts. (Consider the 500,000 bodies left in the wake of a single flood in Pakistan; they had been men who lived without technology.) To work only for bare necessities is a luxury that mankind cannot afford.

Who is the first target of the ecological crusade? No, not big business. The first victims will be a specific group: those who are young, ambitious and poor. The young people who work their way through college; the young couples who plan their future, budgeting their money and their time; the young men and women who aim at a career; the struggling artists, writers, composers who have to earn a living, while developing their creative talents; any purposeful human being—i.e., the best of mankind. To them, time is the one priceless commodity, most passionately needed. They are the main beneficiaries of electric percolators, frozen foods, washing machines and labor-saving devices. And if the production and, above all, the invention of such devices is retarded or diminished by the ecological crusade, it will be one of the darkest crimes against humanity—particularly because the victims’ agony will be private, their voices will not be heard, and their absence will not be noticed publicly until a generation or two later (by which time, the survivors will not be able to notice anything).

But there is a different group of young people, the avant-garde and cannon fodder of the ecological crusade, the products of “Progressive” education: the purposeless. These are the concrete-bound, mentally stunted youths, who are unable to think or to project the future, who can grasp nothing but the immediate moment. To them, time is an enemy to kill—in order to escape a confrontation with inner emptiness and chronic anxiety. Unable to generate and carry out a goal of their own, they seek and welcome drudgery—the drudgery of mere physical labor, provided, planned and directed by someone else. You saw it demonstrated on their so-called “Earth Day,” when young people who did not take the trouble to wash their own bodies, went out to clean the sidewalks of New York.

These youths have some counterparts among the group they regard as their antagonists: the middle class. I once knew a hard-working housewife whose husband offered to buy her a dishwashing machine, which he could easily afford; she refused it; she would not name her reason, but it was obvious that she dreaded the emptiness of liberated time.

Combine the blank stare of that housewife with the unwashed face and snarling mouth of a hippie—and you will see the soul of the Anti-Industrial Revolution.

These are its followers. The soul of its leaders is worse. What do the leaders hope to gain in practice? I shall answer by quoting a passage from Atlas Shrugged. It was published in 1957—and I must say that I am not happy about having been prophetic on this particular issue.

It is a scene in which Dagny Taggart, at a conference with the country’s economic planners, begins to grasp their motives.

Then she saw the answer; she saw the secret premise behind their words.... These men were moved forward, not by the image of an industrial skyline, but by the vision of that form of existence which the industrialists had swept away—the vision of a fat, unhygienic rajah of India, with vacant eyes staring in indolent stupor out of stagnant layers of flesh, with nothing to do but run precious gems through his fingers and, once in a while, stick a knife into the body of a starved, toil-dazed, germ-eaten creature, as a claim to a few grains of the creature’s rice, then claim it from hundreds of millions of such creatures and thus let the rice grains gather into gems.

She had thought that industrial production was a value not to be questioned by anyone; she had thought that these men’s urge to expropriate the factories of others was their acknowledgment of the factories’ value. She, born of the industrial revolution, had not held as conceivable, had forgotten along with the tales of astrology and alchemy, what these men knew in their secret, furtive souls: ... that so long as men struggle to stay alive, they’ll never produce so little but that the man with the club won’t be able to seize it and leave them still less, provided millions of them are willing to submit—that the harder their work and the less their gain, the more submissive the fiber of their spirit—that men who live by pulling levers at an electric switchboard, are not easily ruled, but men who live by digging the soil with their naked fingers, are—that the feudal baron did not need electronic factories in order to drink his brains away out of jeweled goblets, and neither did the rajahs of the People’s State of India.

(January-February 1971)

a

© 1968 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

b

The bill was passed in 1964, including the sections that violate property rights.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Foreword

The Schools

The Cashing-In: The Student “Rebellion”

The Chickens’ Homecoming

The Comprachicos

The Culture

Apollo and Dionysus

The “Inexplicable Personal Alchemy”

The Age of Envy

THE POLITICS

The Left: Old and New

From a Symposium

“Political” Crimes

Racism

Global Balkanization

Gender Tribalism - Peter Schwartz

The Anti-Industrial Revolution

The Philosophy of Privation - Peter Schwartz

Multicultural Nihilism - Peter Schwartz

The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

EDITOR’S PREFACE

Chapter 1 - Writing and the Subconscious

Chapter 2 - Literature as an Art Form

Chapter 3 - Theme and Plot

Chapter 4 - The Plot-Theme

Chapter 5 - The Climax

Chapter 6 - How to Develop a Plot Ability

Chapter 7 - Characterization

Chapter 8 - Style I: Depictions of Love

Chapter 9 - Style II: Descriptions of Nature and of New York

Chapter 10 - Particular Issues of Style

Chapter 11 - Special Forms of Literature

INDEX

AYN RAND is the author of Atlas Shrugged, philosophically the most challenging bestseller of its time. Her first novel, We the Living, was published in 1936, followed by Anthem. With the publication of The Fountainhead, she achieved a spectacular and enduring success. Rand’s unique philosophy, Objectivism, has gained a worldwide audience. The fundamentals of her philosophy are set forth in such books as Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and The Romantic Manifesto. Journals of Ayn Rand and The Ayn Rand Reader are available in Plume editions. Ayn Rand died in 1982.

LEONARD PEIKOFF is universally recognized as the world’s premier Ayn Rand scholar. He worked closely with her for thirty years and was designated by Rand as the heir to her estate. He has taught philosophy at Hunter College, New York University, and the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. Peikoff is the author of The Ominous Parallels and Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. For further information, go to his website: ALSHOW.com.

TORE BOECKMANN is an editor and publisher living in Norway. He has written on Ayn Rand’s literary esthetics for The Intellectual Activist. His mystery fiction, originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, has been anthologized in several languages.

PLUME

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

(a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

New Delhi - 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,

Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Printing, January 2000

Copyright © Estate of Ayn Rand, 2000

All rights reserved

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data

Rand, Ayn.

The art of fiction: a guide for writers and readers / Ayn Rand; edited by

Tore Boeckmann; introduction by Leonard Peikoff. p. cm.

Includes index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-13723-9

1. Fiction—Authorship. I. Boeckmann, Tore. II. Title.

PN3355.R26 2000

808.3—dc21

99-35588
CIP

Set in Goudy

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by an means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN PUT.NAM INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10014.

http://us.penguingroup.com

INTRODUCTION

This book is an edited version of an informal course of lectures given by Ayn Rand in her own living room in 1958. It was the year after the publication of Atlas Shrugged, and AR was at the peak of her powers as a novelist.

She gave the course, by “popular demand,” to some twenty or so friends and acquaintances. She spoke extemporaneously, with only a few written notes naming the topics she meant to cover. Including questions and discussion, each of the twelve sessions lasted about four hours.

Two kinds of students attended: aspiring young fiction writers, and fiction readers from a variety of professions. These two groups are the audience to whom the present book is addressed.

The goal of the writers was obvious and practical: to learn everything possible about the problems and techniques of their craft. The readers, by contrast, of whom I was one, were there strictly as consumers; we wanted to enhance our enjoyment in reading. We wanted to know from the master what to look for in fiction and where it had come from, i.e., what had gone on behind the scenes, in the creator’s mind, to produce the stories we loved (or hated). We were not content to grasp a book as a finished whole; we wanted to hear AR analyze the pleasures (or misery) a book evoked, and explain by what means its effects had been achieved.

Since AR held that fiction has four essential elements—theme, plot, characterization, and style—the lectures are organized accordingly, with the greatest emphasis on plot and style.

In regard to plot, AR identifies not only its nature and structure, but also its crucial relationships to theme and to a critical category of her own creation: “plot-theme.” To concretize her theory, she analyzes many plots, some invented by her for the course, explaining what makes each good or bad and by what steps the bad ones could be methodically improved.

The tour de force of the book is its discussion of style, which occupies almost one half of the text. AR analyzes lengthy passages (describing love, nature, or New York City) from a variety of authors, often one sentence at a time. By juxtaposing different authors and by rewriting selected sentences, she identifies the essentials of several antithetical literary styles, showing in the process what different wordings do to a scene (and to a reader). Writers such as Victor Hugo, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Wolfe, and Mickey Spillane are covered—as well as AR herself. By rewriting her own sentences, she shows in startling terms how seemingly minor, even trivial, changes can utterly destroy or reverse an artistic effect.

I can only hint here at other fascinating topics between these covers. AR explains how to stock one’s own subconscious and thus create one’s own “inspiration” as a writer. She explains what to do when one is blocked, or, in her words, suffering from “the squirms.” She discusses drama versus melodrama; what makes a character intelligible and a characterization profound; the difference between authors who “tell” and those who “show”; the nature of proper versus sick or vicious humor; how to handle, or as reader evaluate, fantasy, tragedy, flashbacks, exposition, slang, metaphors; and much, much more.

AR was expert at philosophical detection. Although this course focuses on the principles of literature, it identifies—as AR characteristically does—the deepest philosophic issues involved. Those unfamiliar with philosophy will be astonished to discover the extent to which abstract issues—such as the mind-body question, or the free will-determinism controversy, or the advocacy of reason versus of faith—actually influence a writer of fiction, shaping his selection of events, his method of characterization, and even his way of combining words into a sentence.

AR’s book on esthetics, The Romantic Manifesto, was based in part on the same 1958 lecture course. Because the Manifesto deals largely with art in general, however, there is little overlap with the present book. On the contrary, The Art of Fiction serves as an extended concretization of the Objectivist esthetics, and thus as an invaluable supplement to the Manifesto. Most of its content is unavailable in AR’s other books.

Tore Boeckmann has done an outstanding job as editor. I suggested to him an extremely difficult assignment: to give us AR faithfully—the identical points and words—but freed of the awkwardness, the repetitions, the obscurities, and the grammatical lapses inherent in extemporaneous speech. Mr. Boeckmann has delivered superlatively. I have personally checked every sentence of the final manuscript. Now and then, I thought that some nuance within a sentence of AR’s had been unnecessarily cut (these have been reinstated). Not once, however, did the editor omit, enlarge, or misrepresent AR’s thought, not even in the subtlest of cases. Using the original lecture transcripts as his base, Mr. Boeckmann has produced the virtually impossible: AR’s exact ideas and language—in the form of written expression, as against oral. This, I believe, is the only form in which AR herself would have wanted these lectures to be published.

If anyone wishes to check Mr. Boeckmann’s accuracy, the original lectures are still available on cassette from Second Renaissance Books, 143 West Street, New Milford, CT 06776.

When I first read the manuscript, I was astonished to find how much, in the decades since 1958, I had forgotten. I had expected to move nostalgically through familiar material, but I found myself continually arrested by AR’s unique insights and colorful illustrations. I was also moved by passages whose language and passion evoked for me the inimitable personality of AR herself.

You too can now experience the joys of attending a course in AR’s living room. You cannot ask her questions, as I could. But you can soak up her answers.

If you do not know her philosophy of Objectivism, you will probably be shocked by some of AR’s ideas—but I am certain that you will not be bored. And I think that you will profit from the reading.

If you do share AR’s philosophy, I know that you will enjoy this book.

—Leonard Peikoff
Irvine, California
September 1998

EDITOR’S PREFACE

Ayn Rand prepared for each of her lectures on fiction only by making some brief notes on a sheet or two of paper. For instance, the material presented here as Chapter 1 (“Writing and the Subconscious”) was delivered on the basis of the following two sentences in her notes for the first lecture: “Is there an ‘innate literary talent’? The relationship of the conscious and subconscious in fiction writing.”

Given the extemporaneous nature of Ayn Rand’s lectures, the transcript of the tape recordings had to be edited before publication. My editing was aimed at giving the material the economy, smoothness, and precision proper to written prose; it consisted primarily of cutting, reorganizing, and line editing.

In general, I cut discussions of issues that Ayn Rand later covered in The Romantic Manifesto. Most of my other cuts aimed at eliminating the repetitiveness typical of (and proper to) oral communication. Ayn Rand often stated a point several times, in slightly different words, to give her listeners time to absorb the point. In such cases, I selected the statement I judged superior, sometimes combining the best parts of different statements.

In the main, this book follows the structure of Ayn Rand’s course. I did, however, make many minor transpositions within her general structure in order to conjoin related points or achieve a more logical progression of argument. Also, the book’s chapter divisions follow the logic of the material rather than Ayn Rand’s lecture breaks, since she often covered related material across those breaks. (The chapter and subchapter titles are mine.)

A lecture given by Ayn Rand in early 1959, as an addendum to her course, has been incorporated into this book (it forms the bulk of Chapter 4). Also included are some comments on fiction that she made in a 1969 course on nonfiction writing. I am grateful to Robert Mayhew for bringing these to my attention. Finally, when Ayn Rand referred to passages in her own (or Sinclair Lewis’s) novels, I sometimes supplied the relevant quote.

I made only a few editorial insertions. These are marked by square brackets, while parentheses always signal Ayn Rand’s own asides.

The line editing consisted mainly of eliminating unnecessary words, rearranging the order of clauses within sentences, changing the tenses of verbs, etc. I also added words that were clearly implied by the original grammatical context (and necessary for a thought’s completeness); and within that context, I made word changes where this improved the precision or economy of a sentence. I did not, however, freely restate any point in my own words. I am confident that none of my changes has altered Ayn Rand’s intended meaning.

Nevertheless, the reader must bear in mind that the following pages have been edited by someone other than Ayn Rand herself. He must also remember the extemporaneous nature of the raw material.

In Chapter 8, Ayn Rand compares the conscientiously precise style of her own published works with the style of Victor Hugo, her favorite writer. Using a metaphor from painting, she says that “[Hugo‘s] brushstrokes are wider and more ‘impressionistic’ than [hers], whereas while [hers] are wide, someone who approached them with a microscope would see that every strand was put there for a purpose.”

In this sense, the style of the present book may be described as more Hugoesque than Randian. The brushstrokes do represent Ayn Rand’s views, but every strand does not necessarily reflect her purpose.

—Tore Boeckmann

1

Writing and the Subconscious

Suppose you start to write a story and your opening sentence describes a sunrise. To select the words of that sentence alone, you must have absorbed a great deal of knowledge which has become so automatic that your conscious mind need not pause on it.

Language is a tool which you had to learn; you did not know it at birth. When you first learned that a certain object is a table, the word table did not come to your mind automatically; you repeated it many times to get used to it. If you now attempt to learn a foreign language, the English word still leaps into your mind. It takes many repetitions before the foreign word occurs without your being conscious of groping for it.

Before you sit down to write, your language has to be so automatic that you are not conscious of groping for words or forming them into a sentence. Otherwise, you give yourself an impossible handicap.

In your description of a sunrise, you want to convey a certain mood; the sunrise, let us say, is an ominous one. That requires different words than a description of a bright, cheerful sunrise would. Consider how much knowledge goes into your ability to differentiate between the two intentions. What is ominous? What is cheerful? What kind of concepts, words, metaphors will convey each? All that was at one time conscious knowledge. Yet if you had consciously to select your words, including all the elements needed to establish a certain mood—if you had to go through the whole dictionary to decide which word to start with, and the same for the next word, and if you then had to go through all the possibilities of conveying the mood—your whole lifetime would not be enough to compose that one description.

What then do you do when you write a good description, fitting your purposes, within a reasonable amount of time according to your skill? You call on stored knowledge which has become automatic.

Your conscious mind is a very limited “screen of vision”; at any one moment, it can hold only so much. For instance, if you are now concentrating on my words, then you are not thinking about your values, family, or past experiences. Yet the knowledge of these is stored in your mind somewhere. That which you do not hold in your conscious mind at any one moment is your subconscious.

Why can a baby not understand this discussion? He does not have the necessary stored knowledge. The full understanding of any object of consciousness depends on what is already known and stored in the subconscious.

What is colloquially called “inspiration”—namely, that you write without full knowledge of why you write as you do, yet it comes out well—is actually the subconscious summing-up of the premises and intentions you have set yourself. All writers have to rely on inspiration. But you have to know where it comes from, why it happens, and how to make it happen to you.

All writers rely on their subconscious. But you have to know how to work with your own subconscious.

What you will find today is the exact opposite. Most writers cannot account even for why they chose to write a particular story, let alone for the manner in which they wrote it. In effect, they take the attitude of the worst medieval mystics. You have probably heard the mystic formula: “For those who understand, no explanation is necessary; for those who don’t, none is possible.” That is the slogan of religious mystics—and of artistic mystics. The simple meaning of that sentence is: “I don’t know why I’m doing it, and I don’t intend to explain.”

If you do not want to be reduced to such a condition, you have to be conscious of your premises in general, and of your literary premises in particular. You have to train yourself to grasp your premises clearly, not merely as general rules with a few concretes to illustrate them, but with a sufficient number of concretes so that the full meaning of the premises becomes automatic to you. Every premise that you store in your subconscious in this manner—namely, thoroughly understood, thoroughly integrated to the concretes it represents—becomes part of your writing capital. When you then sit down to write, you do not need to calculate everything in a slow, conscious way. Your inspiration comes to the exact extent of the knowledge you have stored.

To describe a sunrise, you must have stored in your mind clear ideas of what you mean by “sunrise,” what elements compose it, what kinds you have seen, what mood you want to project and why, and what kinds of words will project it. If you are clear on all these elements, they will come to you easily. If you are clear on some but not others, it will be harder to write. If you are not clear at all—if you have nothing but “floating abstractions” in your subconscious (by that I mean abstractions which you do not connect to concretes)—you will sit and stare at a blank sheet of paper. Nothing will come out of your mind because you have put nothing into it.

A writer, therefore, has to know how to use his subconscious, how to make his conscious mind use it as a Univac [an early computer]. A Univac is a calculating machine; but someone has to feed it the material and has to set the stops and make the selections if he wants a certain answer. You have to make your conscious mind do exactly that to your subconscious [computer]: you have to know what you are storing there and what kind of answers you are seeking. If you have stored the material properly, it will come to you.

Even so, there is no guarantee that you will work from nine to five at your desk and everything will always come out perfectly (unless you are a hack). What is guaranteed is that you will always be able to express exactly what you intended to express.

You have probably heard that no writer can ever fully express what he wanted to express; that every book is a disappointment to the author because it is only an approximation. Sinclair Lewis, a very good writer, once made such a remark. If you read his books, you will understand why. The themes that he wants to express are clear; the manner in which he expresses them is not always clear, particularly in the realm of emotions. He can express ideas and characterization up to a certain point, but in regard to deeper values, he is an unhappy repressor.

If a writer feels that he was unable fully to express what he wanted to express, it means that he did not know clearly what he wanted to express. He knew it only as a generalized package deal [a conglomeration of logically unrelated elements]; he had his theme defined approximately, but not sufficiently supported with full understanding of all the elements of that theme. That which you know clearly you can find the words for and you will express exactly.

If someone then challenges you and asks, “Why did you describe the sunrise in this way?” you will be able to answer. You will be able to give a conscious reason for every word in your description; but you did not have to know the reasons while writing.

I can give the reason for every word and every punctuation mark in Atlas Shrugged—and there are 645,000 words in it by the printer’s count. I did not have to calculate it all consciously when I was writing. But what I did was follow a conscious intention in relation to the novel’s theme and to every element involved in that theme. I was conscious of my purpose throughout the job—the general purpose of the novel and the particular purpose of every chapter, paragraph, and sentence.

To master the art of writing, you have to be conscious of why you are doing things—but do not edit yourself while writing. Just as you cannot change horses in the middle of a stream, so you cannot change premises in the middle of writing. When you write, you have to rely on your subconscious; you cannot doubt yourself and edit every sentence as it comes out. Write as it comes to you—then (next morning, preferably) turn editor and read over what you have written. If something does not satisfy you, ask yourself then why, and identify the premise you missed.

Trust your subconscious. If it does not deliver the kind of material you want, it will at least give you the evidence of what is wrong.

When you get stuck on a piece of writing, the reason is either that you have not sufficiently concretized the ideas you want to cover or that your purpose in this particular sequence is contradictory—that your conscious mind has given to your subconscious contradictory orders. I call this miserable state, which all writers know, “the squirms.” It consists either of the inability to write anything or of the fact that your writing suddenly comes out badly—it does not flow as you want it to and does not express your intention.

Suppose you start to write a love scene. You write a few lines of dialogue, and suddenly you do not know what to say next. Let us say that it is a tragic love scene which has to end with the two characters renouncing each other. You know that they have to come to the parting, but not how to bring them there. Anything you put down is somehow not what you want; maybe the dialogue seems repetitious, or it is not too meaningful. So you try again, and whatever comes out is still not right. That’s the squirms.

The trouble might lie in any one of the elements involved. It might be that you have not fully defined for yourself the attitude of the characters, or that you are not clear on the nature of the tragedy, or on the nature of love, or on the relationship of this particular scene to the rest of the novel. For each scene of a story, an enormously complex amount of material has to be held in mind; and, again, you cannot do it all consciously. You can hold only the highlights consciously, while relying on your subconscious to supply you with the missing connections and the concretes through which your general intention has to be expressed. If there is a contradiction in any one of those elements, it might stop you. And the difficult thing is that, in the nature of the process, you are stopped without having any clear idea of how to solve the problem.

The solution is always to think over every aspect of the scene and every connection to anything relevant in the rest of the book. Think until your mind almost goes to pieces; think until you are blank with exhaustion. Then, the next day, think again—until finally, one morning, you have the solution. Do enough thinking to give your subconscious ample time to integrate the elements involved. When those elements do integrate, the knowledge of what to do with the scene comes to you, and so do the words to express it. Why? Because you have cleared your subconscious files, your lightning calculator.

This experience is not confined to writers. With any kind of problem, you might think for days and suddenly, seemingly by accident, find the solution. The classic example is Newton and his apple: the apple fell on Newton’s head and gave him the idea of the law of gravitation. As a writer once said: “Lucky accidents usually happen only to those who deserve them”¹—meaning that Newton had worked for a long time on the problem which led him to the law of gravitation; the apple served merely as the last link integrating the conclusions he had already reached.

The same thing happens with a writer’s inspiration or in breaking the squirms.

I have written many scenes which I did not plan in advance, beyond a general definition that “this scene will accomplish such and such a purpose”—yet when I came to them, they wrote themselves. Those scenes were usually the ones on which I was so clear—all the elements, intellectual, emotional, and artistic, were so familiar to me—that once I had set the general purpose, my subconscious did the rest. That is the happiest state a writer can reach and the most wonderful experience. You come to a scene and you feel as if somebody else is dictating it; you do not know what is coming, it is surprising you as it comes, you write almost in a blind trance—and afterward, when you reread it, it is almost perfect. You might need to change a few words, but the essence of the scene is there.

This is the kind of incident which gives rise to the idea that writing is an innate talent or that you write because some inner voice dictates to you. You have probably heard writers maintain that they are vehicles selected by a superior power because they hear this dictation. They will say: “I sit down to write a scene, I don’t know what I’m going to write, and suddenly it comes to me. And it feels as if it’s a voice dictating, so I’m sure it’s the voice of God.” In fact, it does feel that way. But what is the real meaning of this phenomenon?

This is a case of the accident that happens only to those who deserve it.

The writers who tell you that writing is an innate talent—that if you sit down to write, God either moves you or He does not, and if He does not, there is nothing you can do about it—these writers are not necessarily lying. They are merely poor introspectors. They do not know what enables them to write.

This type of writer usually writes himself out after a few years. As a rule, he starts rather young; he shows what is called “unusual promise”; and in a few years you see him repeating the same thing, less brilliantly and originally each time—and soon he finds that he has nothing to write about. That inspiration whose source he did not know has vanished. He does not know how to replenish it.

By imitation more than by understanding, he caught on to the process of writing; he grasped that people can put ideas, feelings, impressions down on paper, and he did so. If he has enough original observations stored in his subconscious, certain literary values might be present in his work for a while (among a lot of meaningless junk). But once he has used up that store of early impressions, he has nothing more to say. He merely grasped the general idea of what writing is, then coasted on his subconscious for a while, never attempting to analyze where his ideas came from, what he was doing, or why. Such a writer is antagonistic to any analysis; he is the type who tells you that “the cold hand of reason” is detrimental to his inspiration. He cannot function by means of reason, he says; if he begins to analyze, he feels, it will stop his inspiration altogether. (Given the way he functions, it would stop him.)

By contrast, if you know where your inspiration really comes from, you will never run out of material. A rational writer can stoke his subconscious just as one puts fuel in a machine. If you keep on storing things in your mind for your future writing and keep integrating your choice of theme to your general knowledge, allowing the scope of your writing to grow as your knowledge widens, then you will always have something to say, and you will find ever better ways to say it. You will not coast downhill after one outbreak of something valuable.

If part of your mind is still thinking, “Yes, but how do I know writing isn’t an innate talent?” chances are that either you will not start writing at all, or you will start, but in perpetual terror. Each time you write something good, you will ask yourself: “But can I do it next time?”

I have heard many famous writers complain that they have literal anxiety attacks before starting a book. It does not matter how successful they are; since they do not fully know what the process of writing consists of—or, incidentally, why a book is or is not successful—they are always at the mercy of this terror: “Yes, ten novels were good, but how do I know that my eleventh one will be good?”

Instead of improving, these writers usually either maintain a precarious level or, more likely, deteriorate over the years. An example is Somerset Maugham. As far as one can gather his views from his writing, he does not believe that writing is a rational process; and his later works are much less interesting than his early ones. Though he has not quite written himself out, the quality has deteriorated.

In order to form your own literary taste and put it under your conscious control, always account for what you do or do not like in your reading—and always give yourself reasons. At first you might identify only the immediate reasons for your estimate of any given paragraph or book. As you practice, you will go deeper and deeper. (Do not memorize your premises. Merely store them in your subconscious; they will be there when you need them.)

It is possible for a writer to hold good literary premises by default, meaning: by imitation or by feeling. Many writers do, and thus cannot identify the reasons for their writing. They say, “I write because it just comes to me,” and they fully believe that they have innate talent or that some mystical power dictates to them. Do not count on this mystical power to give you that talent. If you are tempted to ask, “Why can’t I just rely on instinct?” my answer is that your “instinct” has not worked for you so far. You do not have writing premises; the mere doubt on your part is what indicates it. And even if you do have writing premises, or show what people conventionally call “indications of talent,” you would stay on the same level for a whole career and never rise to writing what you really want.

To acquire literary premises, or to develop those you already have, what you need is conscious knowledge. That is what I offer in this course.

2

Literature as an Art Form

Literature is an art form which uses language as its toot—and language is an objective instrument.

You cannot seriously approach writing without the strict premise that words have objective meanings. If you approach it with the idea “I sort of know what I mean and my words sort of express something,” you have only yourself to blame if people fail to grasp your intended meaning, or get the opposite meaning.

If you are not sure of a word, look it up in a dictionary (preferably an old dictionary, because the modem ones are nonobjective). But important words like value, reason, and morality are defined very loosely even in the better dictionaries. Do not use them in that loose manner; define specifically what you mean by those words, and make your meaning clear by the context in which you use them. This is an important rule of thinking for people generally, and an invaluable one for writers.

The writers who complain that they never express their meaning exactly are guilty among other faults of treating words as approximations, even in their own minds. Most writers today use words loosely; if you sort of get the drift of a paragraph, that is all you can get and all the writer intended. A famous example is Thomas Wolfe, who uses a vast number of words, none of them precisely. To see how not to write, read his descriptive passages. (I will discuss Wolfe in greater detail under Style.)

In regard to precision of language, I think I myself am the best writer today.

An exact writer treats words as he would in a legal document. This does not mean using awkward sentences. It means using words with absolute clarity, while still projecting violent emotion, color—any literary quality—by precise means.

A sentence in Atlas Shrugged that is applicable to all rational people, but particularly to writers, is the one where I say that Dagny “regarded language as a tool of honor, always to be used as if one were under oath—an oath of allegiance to reality.” In regard to words, this should be the motto of every writer.

Since all art is communication, there can be nothing more viciously contradictory than the idea of nonobjective art. Anyone who wants to communicate with others has to rely on an objective reality and on objective language. The “nonobjective” is that which is dependent only on the individual subject, not on any standard of outside reality, and which is therefore incommunicable to others.

When a man announces that he is a nonobjective artist, he is saying that what he is presenting cannot be communicated. Why then does he present it, and why does he claim that it is art?

A nonobjective artist, whether a painter or a writer, is counting on the existence of objective art—and using it in order to destroy it.

Take a nonobjective painter. He creates some blobs of paint and proclaims that they are an expression of his subconscious, that they cannot be defined in any other terms, and that either you understand their meaning or you do not. Then he hangs them in a gallery. What does his work have in common with real art, which by definition represents recognizable physical objects? Only that it is hung on a wall. He has switched the definition of painting to “a piece of canvas in a frame.”

The art world laughed at the first nonobjective paintings—and today such stuff is practically all that is produced. The result is the destruction of art as a meaningful activity. The field has been taken over by a self-appointed elite of mystics who are playing a game to delude those with money enough to buy their products. But their basic purpose is not material; it is to establish an unearned artistic aristocracy. (The same purpose was served by Toohey’s clubs in The Fountainhead.) They want to make the practice of artistic creation available to anyone [regardless of ability], so that they can form their own little caste of specialists and pronounce, subjectively, what is and is not art. Then they can go around fooling each other and those who wish to support them.

In the field of literature, the nonobjective has not yet been accepted fully; but the elements of reason—and, therefore, of real art—are growing rarer and rarer in present-day writing. If the trend is not stopped, literature will follow the path of painting (and of all other aspects of our civilization).

The best-known example of a nonobjective writer is Gertrude Stein, who combines words into sentences without any grammatical structure or meaning. She is still to some extent laughed at, but people are laughing rather respectfully; their implied attitude is: “Well, she’s strange, but her writing is probably deep.” Why is it deep? “Because I, the reader, cannot understand it.” (The subjectivism of the audience of nonobjective art is based on an inferiority complex which takes the form: “If I don’t understand it, it must be profound.”)

A writer who is not laughed at, but taught in universities as something very serious, is James Joyce. He is worse than Gertrude Stein; going all the way to the ultimate in nonobjective writing, he uses words from different languages, makes up some words of his own, and calls that literature.

When communication by means of language is discarded, what is left as the definition of writing? Writing becomes inarticulate sounds printed on paper by means of certain black marks.

No one can be consistently evil. Since evil is destruction, anyone who attempted consistently in his life to follow a bad premise would eliminate himself; he would be dead, or at best insane. A man can hold bad premises only so long as his good ones make them possible, support them—and are destroyed in the process of supporting them. Bad premises, if not eliminated, will grow and destroy the good ones.

I mention this for the following reason. If you are not fully committed to rationality and objectivity, you might not go as far as Stein and Joyce, but your writing will then be a combination of the rational and the irrational. You will not, say, write a book without any knowledge of its meaning; you know in general what you want to communicate, you stick to rationality in a loose way, and you write something that has the semblance of a story. But in selecting the details of that story—the characters, events, and sentences—you rely only on feelings and unidentified premises. These premises might be right or wrong; that which you do not know consciously is not in your control. If questioned, you say: “I know my general theme, but not why I wrote this particular sentence this way. I just felt like it.”

This means that you will be a cross between a writer like me and a writer like Gertrude Stein.

Insofar as the rational elements predominate in your writing, you might “get away with” the flaws in your performance. But you should not want to be a part-rational, part-Gertrude Stein writer.

Do not let your own talent—your good premises—act in support of your bad premises and of the lazy or the irrational in your mind.

If to any extent you hold the premise of nonobjectivity, then by your own choice, you do not belong in literature, or in any human activity, or on this earth.

With the exception of proper names, every word is an abstraction. One way to have words come to you easily—words which express the exact shade of meaning you want—is to know clearly the concretes that belong under your abstractions.

For instance, the word table is an abstraction; it stands for any table you have ever seen or will see. If you try to project what you mean by “table,” you can easily visualize any number of concrete examples. But in regard to abstractions like individualism, freedom, or rationality, most people are unable to name a single concrete. Even knowing one or two is not enough. In order to be completely free with words, you must know countless concretes under your abstractions.

The issue of the relationship of abstractions to concretes is crucial to all creative writing—not only to the composition of a sentence, but to the composition of a whole story and of its every chapter and paragraph.

When you compose a story, you start with an abstraction, then find the concretes which add up to that abstraction. For the reader, the process is reversed: he first perceives the concretes you present and then adds them up to the abstraction with which you started. I call this a “circle.”

For instance, the theme of Atlas Shrugged is “the importance of reason”—a wide abstraction. To leave the reader with that message, I have to show what reason is, how it operates, and why it is important. The sequence on the construction of the John Galt Line is included for that purpose—to concretize the mind’s role in human life. The rest of the novel illustrates the consequences of the mind’s absence. In particular, the chapter on the tunnel catastrophe shows concretely what happens to a world where men do not dare to think or to take the responsibility of judgment. If, at the end of the novel, you are left with the impression “Yes, the mind is important and we should live by reason,” these incidents are the cause. The concretes have summed up in your mind to the abstraction with which I started, and which I had to break down into concretes.

Every chapter and paragraph of Atlas Shrugged is set up on the same principle: What abstraction do I want to convey—and what concretes will convey it?

Young writers often make the following mistake: if they want a strong, independent, rational hero, they state in narrative that “he is strong, independent, and rational”—or they have other characters pay him these compliments in discussion. This does not convey anything. “Strong,” “independent,” and “rational” are abstractions. In order to leave your reader with those abstractions, you have to provide concretes that will make him conclude: “This man is strong, because he did X; independent, because he defied Y; rational, because he thought Z.”

It is on your power to create this kind of circle that your success will rest.

The purpose of all art is the objectification of values. The fundamental motive of a writer—by the implication of the activity, whether he knows it consciously or not—is to objectify his values, his view of what is important in life. A man reads a novel for the same reason: to see a presentation of reality slanted according to a certain code of values (with which he may then agree or disagree).

(Do not be misled by the fact that many artists present depravity and ugliness: those are their values. If an artist thinks that life is depravity, he will do nothing but studies of sewers.)

To objectify values is to make them real by presenting them in concrete form. For instance, to say “I think courage is good” is not to objectify a value. To present a man who acts bravely, is.

Why is it important to objectify values?

Human values are abstractions. Before they can become real to or convince anyone, the concretes have to be given.

In this sense, every writer is a moral philosopher.

3

Theme and Plot

A novel’s theme is the general abstraction in relation to which the events serve as the concretes.

For instance, the theme of Gone With the Wind is: the impact of the Civil War on the South—the destruction of the Southern way of life, which vanished with the wind. The theme of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt is the characterization of an average American small businessman.

A novel’s theme is not the same as its philosophical meaning. I could write (and would like to write) a detective story or a plain action thriller with no philosophical “message” and no long speeches—yet such a story would still implicitly convey all of my philosophy.

Fundamentally, what is important is not the message a writer projects explicitly, but the values and view of life he projects implicitly. Just as every man has a philosophy, whether he knows it consciously or not, so every story has an implicit philosophy. For instance, the theme of Gone With the Wind is historical, not philosophical—yet, if analyzed, the nature of the events and of the style would reveal the author’s philosophy. By what he chooses to present, and by how he presents it, any author expresses his fundamental, metaphysical values—his view of man’s relationship to reality and of what man can and should seek in life.

By contrast, a novel’s theme need not be philosophical; it can be any general subject: a historical period, a human emotion, etc.

In judging a novel’s esthetic value, all that one has to know is the author’s theme and how well he has carried it out. Other things being equal, the wider a novel’s theme, the better it is as a work of art. But whether one agrees with the theme or not is a separate question. If a novel presents a marvelous philosophical message but has no plot, miserable characterization, and a wooden style full of bromides, it is a bad work of art. On the other hand, I consider Quo Vadis, technically, one of the best-constructed novels ever written, yet I do not agree with its message: the rise and glorification of Christian culture.

On the subject of theme, I have one warning: Be sure that your story can be summed up to some theme.

In today’s literature, many books do not have any abstract theme, which means that one cannot tell why they were written. An example is the kind of first novel that relates the writer’s childhood impressions and early struggle with life. If asked why the particular events are included, the author says: “It happened to me.” I warn you against writing such a novel. That something happened to you is of no importance to anyone, not even to you (and you are now hearing it from the archapostle of selfishness). The important thing about you is what you choose to make happen—your values and choices. That which happened by accident—what family you were born into, in what country, and where you went to school—is totally unimportant.

If an author has something of wider importance to say about them, it is valid for him to use his own experiences (preferably not too literally transcribed). But if he can give his readers no reason why they should read his book, except that the events happened to him, it is not a valid book, neither for the readers nor for himself.

Your theme, the abstract summation of your work, should be objectively valid, but otherwise the choice of themes is unlimited. You may write about deep-sea diving or anything you wish, provided you can show in the work why there is objective reason to be interested in it.

The most important element of a novel is plot. A plot is a purposeful progression of events. Such events must be logically connected, each being the outgrowth of the preceding and all leading up to a final climax.

I stress the word events because you can have a purposeful progression of ideas, or of conversations, without action. But a novel is a story about human beings in action. If you do not present your subject matter in terms of physical action, what you are writing is not a novel.

Let me give a few examples of the difference between theme and plot, starting with my own works.

The theme of We the Living is: the individual against the state, and, more specifically, the evil of statism. I present the theme by showing that the totalitarian state destroys the best people: in this case, a girl and the two men who love her. When I say that the story concerns a girl under a dictatorship and the men who love her, I am already talking about the plot.

Incidentally, if one names only the most general meaning of We the Living—the individual against the state—one does not indicate on whose side the author is. It could be a communist story showing the evil of the individual; but then the plot would be different. Or it could be a Naturalistic novel, a presentation of life under a dictatorship with no moral sides taken. The theme, however, would still be: the individual against the state. So when you work on a story of your own, make sure you define your theme clearly. That will help you judge what to include.

The theme of The Fountainhead is: individualism and collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul. I show the effects of each principle on men’s character by presenting the struggle of a creative architect against the society of his time.

To go from the theme to the plot line, you simply ask: By what means did the author present the theme? By this method, you can also identify a story’s plot-theme, the essential line of its events. The plot-theme is the focus of the means of presenting the theme; for the writer, it is the most important element in creating a story. Your work as a novelist starts in earnest when you have chosen your story’s plot-theme.

The theme of Atlas Shrugged is: the crucial value of the human mind. The plot-theme is: the mind on strike. The latter names an action—the central action to which all the other events of the story are related. It, therefore, is the plot-theme.

The theme of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is: the injustice done to the lower classes of society. The plot-theme is: the struggle of an ex-convict to avoid the persecution of the police. This is the central narrative line, to which all the events are related.

The theme of Gone With the Wind is: the disappearance of the Southern way of life. The plot-theme is: the relationship of the heroine, Scarlett, to the two men in her life, Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes. These characters symbolize the historical forces involved. Scarlett is in love with Ashley, who represents the old South, but she can never win him; she is a Southern woman belonging in spirit with Rhett Butler, who represents the destruction of the old traditions and who pursues her throughout the story. This is an example of the skillful integration of plot to theme.

The theme of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street is the presentation of a typical American small town. The plot-theme is the struggle of a girl of more intellectual trends to bring culture to this town—her struggle with the materialistic small-town attitude of everybody around her. I must stress, however, that Main Street (like all of Lewis’s novels) does not have a plot in the sense of a structure of events.

The main distinction between a Romantic and a Naturalistic novel is that a Romantic novel has a plot whereas a Naturalistic novel is plotless. But although it does not have a purposeful progression of events, a good Naturalistic novel still has a series of events which add up to a story. In such a case, when I say “plot-theme,” I mean the central line of those events.

Take Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the novel most typical of the Naturalistic school. It is the story of a married woman who falls in love with another man, leaves her husband, and finds herself hopelessly doomed. Since she is ostracized by society, she has no friends and nothing to do with her time, and eventually she and her lover grow bored with each other. The man, an officer by profession, volunteers for an army assignment in some Balkan war. The implication is that he will be killed; but he wants to go because he cannot stand his solitary confinement with the woman he loves. She commits suicide by jumping under the wheels of a train (in a horribly well-written scene).

The woman is presented as a sympathetic character; her outstanding quality is her eagerness to live. The husband is deliberately presented as a conventional mediocrity without any values or distinction; all the evidence is given as to why the woman’s life with him is boring and meaningless. Yet she dares to break the conventions because she wants to be happy—which the author considers an insufficient reason. There is no life for anyone outside of society, he implies; so, right or wrong, one has to accept social standards. The abstract theme is: the evil of adultery and, more broadly, of the pursuit of happiness. The plot-theme is: A woman leaves her husband and is destroyed for her unconventionality.

The basic philosophical premises which determine whether a writer belongs to the Naturalistic or the Romantic school are the premises of determinism or of free will. If a writer’s basic conviction is that man is a determined creature—that he has no choice, but is the plaything of fate or his background or God or his glands—that writer will be a Naturalist. The Naturalistic school, in essence, presents man as helpless; it has some great writers, but it is an evil school philosophically, and its literary flaw is plotlessness. A plot, being a purposeful progression of events, necessarily presupposes men’s freedom to choose and their ability to achieve a purpose. If a writer believes that men are determined beings, he will not be able to devise a plot.

(A writer is governed by his deepest conviction, rather than by some professed belief. He might claim to be a believer in free will but subconsciously be a determinist, or vice versa. His subconscious premise is what will show in the structure of his writing.)

The Romantic school of literature approaches life on the premise that man has free will, the capacity of choice. The distinguishing mark of this school is a good plot structure.

If man has the capacity of choice, then he can plan the events of his life; he can set himself purposes and achieve them. If so, his life is not a series of accidents. Events do not “just happen” to him; he chooses what he makes happen (and if accidents occur, his purpose is to overcome them). He is the architect of his own life.

If such is your view of man, you will write about events dealing with a man’s purposes and the steps by which he achieves them. That is what constitutes a plot. A plot is “a purposeful progression of events”—not an accidental string of occurrences, but a progression centered on someone’s purpose (usually the hero’s or heroine’s).

Here I call your attention to Aristotle’s concepts of efficient and final causation.

Efficient causation means that an event is determined by an antecedent cause. For instance, if you strike a match to a gasoline tank and it explodes, the striking of the match is the cause and the explosion is the effect. This is what we normally mean by causality as it exists in physical nature.

Final causation means that the end result of a certain chain of causes determines those causes. Aristotle gave this example: A tree is the final cause of the seed from which that tree will grow. From one perspective, the seed is the efficient cause of the tree: first there is the seed, and as a result, the tree grows. But from the perspective of final causation, Aristotle said, the future tree determines the nature of the seed and of the development it has to follow in order to end up as that tree.

This, by the way, is one of my major differences from Aristotle. It is wrong to assume what in philosophy is known as teleology—namely, that a purpose set in advance in nature determines physical phenomena. The concept of the future tree determining the nature of the seed is impossible; it is the kind of concept that leads to mysticism and religion. Most religions have a teleological explanation of the universe: God made the universe, so His purpose determined the nature of the entities in it.

But the concept of final causation, properly delimited, is valid. Final causation applies only to the work of a conscious entity—specifically of a rational one—because only a thinking consciousness can choose a purpose ahead of its existence and then select the means to achieve it.

In the realm of human action, everything has to be directed by final causation. If men allow themselves to be moved by efficient causation—if they act like determined beings, propelled by some immediate cause outside themselves—that is totally improper. (Even then, volition is involved: if a man decides to abandon purpose, that is also a choice, and a bad one.) Proper human action is action by means of final causation.

An obvious example here pertains to writing. As a writer, you must follow the process of final causation: you decide on the theme of your book (your purpose), then select the events and the sentences that will concretize your theme. The reader, by contrast, follows the process of efficient causation: he goes step by step through your book being moved toward the abstraction you intended.

Any purposeful activity follows the same progression. To make an automobile, a man first has to decide what kind of object he is making—an automobile—and then select the elements which, put together, will constitute that automobile. By the process of final causation, he makes nature perform the necessary processes of efficient causation; he puts together certain parts in a certain scientific order to achieve a vehicle which moves.

In nature, there is no final causation; but in man’s action, final causation is the only proper guide.

Observe how this applies to the issue of plot stories versus plotless ones. In a plot story, men and events are pulled forward by a purpose. In a Naturalistic, plotless story, they are pushed from behind, as in physical nature.

Take the novels of Sinclair Lewis again. They are not totally formless: they begin somewhere and end somewhere. But the characters rarely pursue any particular goals. They go through certain events, drawing some conclusions, growing or deteriorating mentally, in a haphazard interaction between themselves and their social background. Their actions do proceed from their characters as the author sees them, but the protagonists do not determine the course of their lives.

There is a fundamental contradiction in the premise of the Naturalistic school. You are interested in reading a Naturalistic story such as Anna Karenina only because of the implied assumption that the characters have choice. If a woman hesitates between leaving her husband for the man she loves and giving up the man she loves for her husband, this is a crucial choice in her life. It can interest you only if you assume she has choice about it and you want to know why she decides the way she does and whether she is right or wrong. If, however, you hold firmly in mind the idea that she cannot choose but has to do whatever fate determines—and that, should you ever be in a comparable situation, your future action is unknowable to you because something other than your choice will determine your decision—the story will have no meaning for you whatever.

If men have no choice, you cannot write a story about them, nor is there any sense in reading one. If they do have choice, there is no sense in reading about unchosen events. What you rationally want to read is a story about men’s choices, right or wrong—about their decisions and what they should have decided—which means: a free-will, Romantic plot story.

Now let us consider in more detail the issue of plot.

If a man is not a determined being but sets his own purpose, then it is he who has to achieve that purpose and devise the means to achieve it. This means that some action is necessary on his part. If his action meets with no obstacles—if a man decides to go to the comer grocery, and he goes, buys his groceries, and comes home—this is a purposeful action, but not a story. Why not? Because there was no struggle involved.

To illustrate the achievement of a purpose, you have to show men overcoming obstacles. This statement pertains strictly to writers. Metaphysically—in reality—one does not need obstacles in order to achieve a purpose. But you as a writer need to dramatize purpose, i.e., you have to isolate the particular meaning that you want your events to illustrate—by presenting it in a stressed action form.

For instance, in The Fountainhead I show the career of a creative, independent architect. It is possible (although not probable) that in real life he would immediately find the right clients and achieve great success without any opposition. But that would be completely wrong artistically. Since my purpose is to show that a man of creative independence will achieve his goal regardless of any opposition, a story in which there is no opposition would not dramatize my message. I have to show the hero in a difficult struggle—and the worse I can make it, the better dramatically. I have to devise the hardest obstacles possible, and those of greatest significance to the hero.

For instance, if the hero has a distant cousin who disapproves of his career, that is not a great obstacle to overcome. But if the woman he loves objects to his career and tempts him to give it up, and he says, “No, I prefer to be an architect,” and thus risks losing her forever, that is real dramatization. Then the hero is in the middle of a clash of two values and has to choose the right one (which he does).

The more struggle a story involves, the better the plot. By showing the kind of conflicts that a man has to resolve and make the right decision about, the author shows which decision is right, or, in the case of characters who make the wrong decision, why the decision is wrong, to what bad consequences it leads.

The essence of plot structure is: struggle—therefore, conflict—therefore, climax. A struggle implies two opposing forces in conflict, and it implies a climax. The climax is the central point of the story, where the conflict is resolved.

“Conflict” here means conflict with other men or conflict within a man, but not conflict against nature or coincidence.

For the purpose of dramatizing a man’s struggle and choice, a conflict within his own mind, which is then expressed and resolved in action, is one of the best devices. By that means, you present clearly and in action the man’s freedom—the fact that his decision is what resolves the conflict.

A man’s struggle against nature, by contrast, is an issue of free will only on his part, not on the part of nature. The blind forces of nature can be only what they are and do only what they do. A conflict against nature is therefore not a dramatic conflict—no choice or suspense is possible on the part of the inanimate adversary. In a fully volitional conflict, both adversaries must have free will; two choices, two sets of values, must be involved.

Coincidence is always bad in writing, and it is disastrous in plot writing. Only lesser plot writers, usually bad mystery novelists, characteristically employ coincidence, though some great writers, like Hugo, are guilty of it at times. But it is to be avoided at all costs. A plot presents free will and a man’s achievement of, or at least struggle for, his purpose—and coincidence is irrelevant to anyone’s choice or purpose. It can happen in life, but it is meaningless. So do not write the kind of stories in which a conflict is suddenly resolved by a natural disaster, such as a flood or an earthquake that conveniently kills the villain at the right moment.

A plot, as I have said, is “a purposeful progression of events.” The word purposeful here has two meanings: not only must the characters be purposeful, but also, in order to have an integrated story, the author must be purposeful. The events of a plot story are always connected to the main goals of the characters and to a growing conflict which directs the events (and which has to be resolved in some decisive manner at the end).

Take Les Misérables. The hero steals a loaf of bread and is sent to prison. He cannot stand it, so he tries to escape; he draws a longer sentence. When he is finally released, he is an outcast. He comes to a town where nobody will lodge him or serve him dinner. Then he sees a house with an open door—the house of the local bishop. This very well-drawn, altruistic bishop invites him to stay, serves him a meal, and treats him with all the deference due an honored guest. The ex-convict notices the bishop’s only valuable possessions: real silverware and two silver candelabra on the mantelpiece. In the middle of the night, the trusted ex-convict steals the silverware and escapes.

Given the man’s enormously embittered state, the reader can understand why he makes this choice. It is an evil choice, but it proceeds from the previous events of the story.

Then he is caught and brought back to the bishop by local policemen who recognize the silverware. They tell the bishop: “We’ve caught this ex-convict and he says that you gave him the silverware.” And the bishop says: “Yes, of course I gave it to him. But, my friend, why did you forget to take the candelabra, which I also gave you?” The police depart, and the bishop tells the ex-convict: “Take this silver. With it I am buying your soul from the devil and giving it to God.”

That is a scene. It is a beautifully dramatic example of turning the other cheek.

The bishop believes that his action will have a good effect; and the hero does reform, though not immediately. But everything he does is always conditioned by what he concluded (or misconcluded) from a previous event; and the actions of the police thereafter are always conditioned by their suspicion of him. The events are determined by the goals that the characters want to accomplish, and each event is necessitated by the preceding one—necessitated not deterministically, but logically. “If A, then B logically had to follow.”

By contrast, the events of a Naturalistic novel do not proceed one from the other, but are largely haphazard. A Naturalist has no principle by which to decide whether to show a family picnic, a day of shopping, a flower show, or a breakfast. The events are intended to present or influence the characters—and that is the author’s standard of selection. The central line is always the development of a given character; and the author stops when he thinks that he has presented the character well enough for the reader to understand him.

The predominance of characterization over action is the Naturalist’s distinguishing premise. Something does happen, but what happens is of less importance than what it reveals about the characters. For instance, Babbitt [a real estate agent] sells a new house, and the reader learns a great deal about his psychology. The event is not much; the meaning is in the characterization.

An event is an action taken in reality. If a character goes to the grocery store, this is an event, but not a very meaningful one—it is a random, Naturalistic event. If a character meets a man on the street and shoots him, this is a potentially meaningful event, if you discover its motivation. If the character took the action because of a previous event which forced him to make a choice, then the action is a plot event.

Closely allied with the issue of plot, as an attribute of it, is the issue of suspense.

If you cannot put down a novel, or if you sit on the edge of your theater seat, that is your emotional reaction to the fact that the story has suspense. Try to recall any story that held you in this manner. You will find that the story is one in which the author lets you in on his purpose.

In a suspenseful story, the events are constructed in such a manner that the reader has reason to wonder about the outcome. If an author tells you what is going to happen, the story will not hold your interest. But neither will you be interested if you do not know at all where the story is going—if it is a jumble of arbitrary events, or even if it has an inner logic which you discover later, but the author never showed you what to expect.

The archetype of a suspense scene is the one in Atlas Shrugged where Rearden enters Dagny’s apartment and meets Francisco. Why must this scene hold the reader’s interest? Because he has long been given grounds to wonder what will happen to all three when the two men discover each other’s relationship to Dagny. I have let him in on what to expect. I have planted that Rearden is anxious to discover the name of Dagny’s past lover, and that Francisco still loves her and hopes she has waited for him. The reader therefore knows that when these three find out the truth, some strong reactions will occur, the nature of which he cannot predict for certain. This is what makes him read the scene with interest.

Suppose, however, that Rearden knew everything about Dagny’s past, and Francisco suspected that Dagny would fall for Rearden; then, the day after the beginning of the Dagny-Rearden romance, Francisco comes to visit her and learns the truth. Would this be interesting or suspenseful? No. Since the reader has been given no reason to attach any importance to the characters’ learning the truth, there is no conflict, no drama, nothing to wonder about.

If you want to hold your readers, give them something to wonder about. I once knew a Hollywood scenario writer who had a graphic expression of her own for this point. When she started work on a story, she said, she always established a “worry line”—a line of problems for the audience to worry about.

To do that, you have to know not only how to build your suspense—how to feed the reader information step by step—but also how to establish the kind of conflict that in reason will interest a reader. Suppose Dagny dyed her hair blond and worried how her brother , James would react. If they were the kind of characters who could worry about such an issue, neither they nor the issue would be interesting. When you set up a line of suspense, ask yourself: Is there any reason why anyone should be interested in this conflict? Are these values important enough to worry about?

To illustrate why plot is important and how it relates to a story’s theme and suspense, I want to project what would happen to some of the issues in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead if they were treated plotlessly.

For instance, the meaning of the Dagny-Rearden romance in Atlas Shrugged is that their shared ideas, values, and struggle is the root of their love. Consider what a non-plot writer would have done with this material. Dagny would come to Rearden’s office, they would start talking, and suddenly he would draw her into his arms and they would kiss. This is realistic, it can happen—but it does not have much dramatic value. The same scene could have happened between any two people, including villains such as James Taggart and Betty Pope.

By contrast, in Atlas Shrugged I bring about Dagny and Rearden’s love scene at the height of their mutual triumph, in connection with the achievement which unites their careers: the opening of the John Galt Line. I make them admit their love during an event which presents in action the ideas and values they have in common. This is an example of presenting an issue in plot terms.

Or take the quarry scene in The Fountainhead, where Dominique meets Roark. She is an extreme hero-worshiper; she has declared that she will never fall in love except with someone great; and she does not want to find a great man because she thinks he would be doomed. If, while researching one of her newspaper columns, she had met Roark as a rising architect, that would not have been dramatic. But it is dramatic for her to meet the ideal man at the bottom, as nothing but a quarry worker. She had feared that the world would crush a hero—and the scene brings her face-to-face with the fact that no matter what the world does to him, a hero is a value, and one she cannot resist.

Now take the scene in Atlas Shrugged where Rearden quits. Throughout the story, a man’s going on strike had involved two elements: the victim’s realization that he is and should stop being a victim, and his conviction that he cannot continue his work under the present setup. Therefore, when I have Rearden quit, two elements are necessary: Rearden’s final realization that he should go on strike, and the final atrocity of the looters which makes him decide that the situation is hopeless. The demand that he work at a loss in order to support his worst enemies, plus the government-engineered assault on his mills, dramatizes the whole issue of the strike, specifically as it applies to Rearden’s life.

Consider how a non-plot writer would make Rearden go on strike. Rearden would be sitting at his desk or walking down a country road, thinking the situation over, and he would decide: “Things are pretty bad. I can’t stand it any longer. I’ll quit.” A decision like this might be perfectly proper in real life, but it makes for a lousy story. Such a decision is a purely psychological development, without any action to show the nature and elements of the decision.

Take Dagny, the last of the strikers. So long as she does not understand the death premise in the villains, she thinks, justifiably, that they will ultimately recognize that she is right. Only when she understands the truth—when, at the banquet, she sees the attitude of James Taggart and his crowd toward John Galt and learns that they are going to torture him—is she ready to quit.

If nothing else had happened, however, this would have been a somewhat unsatisfactory way of making her go on strike. That which had represented her tie to the world—her railroad—would not have been directly involved. To dramatize properly Dagny’s act of going on strike, I had to place her in a situation where she must choose between the strike and her railroad. This was the right moment, therefore, to bring in the issue of the collapsing bridge. Dagny leaps to the telephone, hesitates for a last moment—and then the strike wins.

This moment has emotional appeal because it unites all the issues of Dagny’s life—and does so not merely in her mind, but in action. An event takes place, and she has to make a decision about it.

Think of other Romantic plot novels you have read and name to yourself the meaning of the events. Then project what would happen if the same issues were presented without action—i.e., if the conflicts were resolved merely in someone’s mind, while the outward event was nothing but someone sitting in a room or walking down the street. The result would be plotlessness.

To write a plot story, you have to be clear on what issues you want to present and then think of the events that will present those issues in action. In all the above illustrations, I had to find that which is essential to the issue and then build an event around it.

If Rearden decides to quit while sitting at his desk, the fact that he is sitting at his desk is irrelevant to the issue being resolved. Suppose he is driving his automobile and has a traffic accident which makes him interrupt his thinking long enough to call a garage. He is involved in some action while making his decision about quitting, but the action is totally irrelevant to the decision. Or suppose nothing happens on the day Rearden quits, except that Wesley Mouch telephones him from Washington and is rude; i.e., the last straw is a bureaucrat’s bad manners. This has something to do with the issue of rebelling against the looters, but it is not essential to that issue.

Train your mind to think in essentials, not on issues of literature only, but on all issues. This is important for writing a good plot story, and it is even more important for your own life. You do not want a life which is a badly constructed story—a series of unrelated episodes with no purpose, progression, or climax.

You can have a good life structure, as well as a good plot structure, by one method only: you must know essentials. You must recognize what is the important thing in any issue you deal with.

4

The Plot-Theme

The plot-theme is the central conflict that determines the events of a plot. It is the seed enabling you to develop a whole plot structure.

I have said that both the author and the characters of a novel have to be purposeful. In discussing the issue of plot-theme, I am concerned with the first of these points—with how an author sets himself a plot purpose.

Also, I talk here only about plot, not about theme—about you as dramatist, not you as philosopher. If you have a message, that message determines your plot-theme; if not, you start with the plot-theme. In either case, however, the proper literary work starts when you begin to construct a plot—and on this part of the job, the plot comes above your message. I do not mean that you can ever decide on a plot which contradicts your message—if it does, you must select a different plot. I mean only that the plot must be your sole consideration while you are constructing it.

Therefore, when I talk here about the author’s purpose, I mean the plot purpose.

First I will discuss the nature of conflict.

Anything that a man desires and acts to achieve is a value, at least to him. (Whether the value is rational is a different question.) Therefore, a “conflict of values” does not necessarily mean some vast philosophical abstraction. Do not think that it means at least “communism versus capitalism,” and that nothing less will do.

If you look at a menu in a restaurant and have to decide whether to order ice cream or cake for dessert, that is a conflict of values. If you do not like cake, only ice cream, there is no conflict. But if you like both and are unable to eat both, you must decide which to choose—and there is a momentary conflict until you do.

This is not the kind of conflict on which you can build a story. Since the values involved in a story should be important enough to interest the characters, the author, and the reader, a conflict over a choice of dessert obviously will not do. But the point is that, even in such a small issue, there is a clash of values.

Now observe that stories about criminals usually form good plot structures. Crime stories are the most primitive, and most common, form of suspense dramas. (Today, unfortunately, we have nothing but crime stories if we want to read a plot story.)

The reason is that a criminal by definition has a conflict of values. He wants, let us say, to rob a bank for the loot. At the same time, he does not want to be arrested. He wants both his safety and the product of an action which endangers his safety. Therefore, the moment you introduce a crime into a story, you have a rudimentary, but proper, conflict of serious values.

Project a story in which the lead character is a bank robber who does not care whether he is arrested. He has decided that he will have security in jail, so he does not attempt to hide or escape. The story would be totally static. Or let us say that he robs a bank in a city where there are no policemen, so that nobody intends to do anything about it. No plot would be possible.

To appreciate what makes a good plot situation, you must identify not only a character’s specific purpose, but also all the conflicts that this purpose necessarily engenders. If you say of a criminal, “His purpose is to rob,” that is not yet a conflict. You must remember that his purpose is also to escape.

Consider my short story “Good Copy” [see The Early Ayn Rand]. Laury, the main character, is a small-town reporter. He wants to stir up excitement in order to further his career, so he stages a kidnapping. By doing so, he risks arrest, disgrace, and the loss of his career. This is already a simple conflict.

Next, he falls in love with the girl whom he has kidnapped, and she falls in love with him. This introduces a new clash of values. Laury has done something evil to the girl he loves (or at least he himself would identify it as evil). And the girl has fallen in love with her own kidnapper, which is not the same as falling in love with a man whom she immediately recognizes as a real hero. If a girl falls in love with an apparent criminal and then discovers that in fact he justifies her love, that is a happily resolved conflict, but still a conflict.

Next, when a real criminal enters the scene and steals the girl from Laury, Laury is placed in his top conflict; to save the girl, he must surrender to the police, go to jail, and perhaps ruin his career. His career is now in conflict with his love.

That is a plot-theme.

Consider what would happen to this story if some of its elements were omitted. Suppose Laury kidnapped an adult man—say, a nasty villain. The conflict would be much simpler and less serious. Since Laury does not care about his prisoner, he is in an easier position from the start; and if a real criminal then steals the prisoner from him, he might or might not decide to go to the police. Perhaps he might send in an anonymous tip, but not risk his own arrest. Not too much is at stake.

Or suppose Laury is not a reporter, but a real criminal, and he falls in love with a girl he has kidnapped. It would not then endanger his career if he confesses and is arrested. There is no great clash of values.

When you look for a plot-theme, you must look for a central conflict—and not merely a one-line conflict, but a conflict complex enough to make constructing a story possible.

Suppose you name as your initial plot assignment: A young man fakes a crime to stir up a dead town. That is an action, but not a conflict. There is no clash of values, neither within the man himself nor between him and others. Maybe the dead town is eager to be stirred up.

Or suppose you start with the idea: A young man fakes a crime, which turns into a real crime when a real criminal interferes. That is not much of a conflict, and not much of a story can be built around it. The young man is put in an uncomfortable position, but one he can correct easily. To make possible a progression of events, some other element has to be added, such as the man’s falling in love with the victim of his crime. Then you have a real conflict with many facets.

The best way to see what kind of conflict can serve as a plot-theme is from the inside. So let us start a story from scratch.

Suppose you decide to start and you face a blank. You cannot start from nowhere; you must start with something. So you decide, say, on a background: the Middle Ages.

Again you face a blank, because from here on you can do anything; you can write about any aspect of the Middle Ages. And if something can be anything, it is actually nothing; if you feel, “Now I can write anything,” you will write nothing. Only when you have some specific entity in mind—some germ of a plot—can you make something out of something and begin to build.

Since plot is essentially conflict, you must look for a good conflict. So you decide that since the Middle Ages was a religious period, the best figure for your story is, say, a priest. If this priest merely practices his religion, you have no story. You must put him in a conflict. If he is a medieval priest who takes his religion seriously, the best possible conflict would be a sexual passion—because that is what his religion forbids him. If his values all pertain to another dimension, the worst thing for him would be to acquire a strong value pertaining to this earth—to fall in love.

The next question is: with whom? If he falls in love with a young nun who shares his values, that might be dramatic. But it is much more dramatic if he falls in love with someone who represents the opposite of his values—with a symbol of this earth: a Gypsy dancer.

The next question is: does she love him? If she does, he might be in conflict with his conscience and with society, but at least his love is rewarded. However, if he is tempted to betray his religion for the sake of a guilty passion, it is a more tragic and therefore stronger conflict if the girl does not love him.

The next question is: does she love anyone else? Obviously, it is worse for him if she does.

The next question is: if he attempts to pursue her, will anyone defend her? Yes, there is more conflict if someone will. Who? If the girl’s defender is a stranger to the priest, he poses a mere factual obstruction. But what if her defender is a protégé whom the priest brought up out of charity—the symbol to the priest of his own religious duty properly performed?

Now consider the conflicts of the other characters. The protégé is in a terrible conflict between his love for the girl and his devotion to his benefactor. The girl, being pursued by the priest (who in the Middle Ages would be very powerful), is torn between her love for the other man and a threat to her life.

This is the plot-theme of Notre-Dame de Paris.

I am certain that Victor Hugo did not need this kind of logical analysis. The inexhaustible ingenuity for plot shown in his plays indicates that writing and conflict were nearly synonymous to him. He had such a grasp of the nature of conflict that its projection became automatic.

When a man grasps the nature of conflict, he knows what is dramatic. To him, it may feel as if a plot idea is inspirational: “I just thought of it.” But you have to get to the stage where you have earned this kind of inspiration.

When you compose a story, your mind does not go through the steps I outlined. If you know a plot in advance, you can easily ask the right questions; but when you start from scratch, so many possibilities exist at each turn that you cannot go through them consciously. You have to let your subconscious be the selector—and it can become the selector, throwing you the right, most dramatic situations, only if you know what conflict is and why it is necessary. When you know this, and when you have practiced by laboriously composing a few plots, your imagination begins to work automatically and saves you a lot of the steps.

What I have so far described of Notre-Dame de Paris is not the plot, but the plot-theme. The writer’s job is not finished. But once you have this kind of central conflict, you do not have an “anything” anymore. You have set a limit to the nature of your story, a limit that will be your standard of selection in regard to events.

If you are not clear on your plot-theme, your story will fall apart; it will have no logical continuity. Also, you yourself will not know what to do. You will start to include events because you feel like it, probably on the principle of association. One scene makes you feel something else, so you write another which has nothing to do with your central line. Your story is going nowhere, and you do not know where to go.

Before you construct a story, you must decide on the central conflict, which will then serve as the standard telling you what you have to include in order to fully develop this conflict, and what is superfluous.

Let me give a few more examples of plot-themes.

Suppose you want to write a love story. If two persons are in love, that is not a conflict; you have to make their love clash with some serious value of theirs. Suppose they belong to opposite nations at war. A plot is now possible, but not if they merely sit at home and long for each other; what you need is to put them into an action conflict. Let us say he is an army officer and she a spy for the other side, with a dangerous secret to reveal, and you bring them to a position where he has to either let her escape or shoot her to save his country. This is the kind of conflict that can serve as a plot-theme—it has enough material in it to give you the line for a story (an unoriginal one, but bromides, it is said, became bromides because they were good the first time).

Suppose you want to write a story about unrequited love. If a man is desperately in love with a woman, but she is not in love with him, that is not yet a conflict. But suppose she has to marry him for some outside reason—to get an inheritance, or to be allowed to stay in America—and he agrees to marry her in name only. Conflict, and thus the possibility of a good story, is immediately introduced.

Plot conflict is not conflict merely in a character’s mind or soul, while he sits at home. A plot conflict has to be expressed in action. When you construct a plot, therefore, you must be a “materialist” and concern yourself only with values and issues that can be expressed in physical action.

Not everything is dramatizable by means of plot. For instance, the theme of Anthem is the word I, and the story is built around one idea: What would happen if a man lost the concept I, and how would he regain it? This is not a plot-theme, because it is internal.

In Anthem, there is no plot—no conflict of two or more persons against each other. The hero’s adversary is the collective as such; and the collective has no particular purpose beyond objecting to him escaping. He is not fighting individuals, but the whole system. By contrast, We the Living, my most tightly plotted story, has not only a social message, the evil of a collectivist society, but also a conflict among specific persons. The story is not “Kira [the heroine] against the state”; the villain is actually Andrei, along with such lesser representatives of the communist system as Syerov, Sonia, and Victor. Had it been “Kira against the state,” the story would have been plotless.

Anthem is a psychological fantasy, not a full-scale indictment of collectivism. The collective is brought in only to explain why the hero is in the predicament of not having the concept I. Had I introduced a plot, I would have taken the story away from the main subject, because the issue of what happens in your mind when you lack a certain concept is not an action theme.

In my short story “The Simplest Thing in the World” [see The Romantic Manifesto], the hero sits at a desk, struggles to write something, and decides that he cannot. The story takes place in his mind; it is strictly an illustration of the psychological process of creation. It is as plotless as anything could be.

Let us examine a few more plot-themes.

The oldest and tritest is that of the prostitute with a heart of gold. Why is it so popular? Because a prostitute has cut herself off from all human values. Her profession clashes with any other value she might want—respectability, a career, anything—and the worst clash comes if she falls in love. Then a dramatic story is an immediate possibility.

Usually, the prostitute falls in love, decides to abandon her profession, and then struggles not to let the man find out the truth about her past. This is the pattern of Anna Christie, Anna Lucasta, and many lesser-known stories. The conflict is resolved in one of two ways: the man always finds out the truth, and then he either accepts it and forgives her (a happy ending), or he denounces her and commits suicide, and she jumps out of a window (a tragic ending). This is all that most people have done with this particular conflict.

To see how the conflict can be improved, ask yourself how one can make it harder for the heroine. Suppose her lover knows of her past and has forgiven it, but then she discovers that if he marries her, he will ruin his career. He will never be able to succeed at what he wants if his wife is a former prostitute. He will not give her up, so she has to make him give her up, which she can do only by pretending that she is still a prostitute. She has to hurt him terribly and make him despise her—for his own sake. Now you have Camille, or La Traviata, one of the best, most tragic, and most dramatic plot structures ever devised (which is why that story will live forever and why there are so many bad imitations of it).

Take another trite plot-theme: the woman who sells herself to a man she does not love for the sake of the man whom she does love. Usually, as in the opera Tosca, some villain who knows of her love tells her that if she sleeps with him, he will spare her lover. The heroine makes the sacrifice and then has to hide the fact from her lover. This is a good, but simple, one-line conflict.

Now ask yourself how one can make it harder for the characters. Suppose the woman sells herself, not to a villain who forces her into it, but to a man who really loves her, whom she respects and whose love she takes seriously. He does not want to buy her, and she must hide from him that it is a sale—but she has to sell herself to save the man she really loves, a man who happens to be the particular person the buyer hates most. This is a much more dramatic conflict—and it is the plot-theme of We the Living.

I have asked myself: How can I make the conflict worse for everyone involved? By complicating the conflict, I have made a standard theme original.

The more conflicts involved in the same action situation, and the more serious the values for the participants, the better the dramatic situation and the tighter the plot you can construct from it.

Once an author starts to develop his plot-theme, he has to make the events proceed from that plot-theme. For instance, in Notre-Dame de Paris, the priest has the girl arrested and condemned to death, then offers her escape if she will give herself to him. This is a dramatization in action of the plot-theme conflict. Suppose the priest was not instrumental in having the girl arrested, but merely stood on the sidelines and wanted to help her escape from jail in order to have an affair with her. That would not be a plot structure (and three quarters of the book’s drama would be lost).

In the novel, the hoboes of Paris attempt to rescue the girl from the cathedral of Notre-Dame, which they besiege. One of their leaders is the priest’s young brother, a dissolute, useless playboy, representing the complete opposite of the priest’s ideals, but his only human value on earth besides the girl. In a horrible scene, Quasimodo, the priest’s protégé, seizes this boy by the legs and cracks his skull against the façade of the cathedral.

If there had been no younger brother, the priest’s conflict of values, and his tragedy, would have been lesser. And while the siege of the cathedral would still have had a certain plot value—the suspense of: “Will the heroine escape or not?”—that incident becomes much more dramatic when it involves a dramatic loss to the priest.

Every incident of Notre-Dame de Paris is ruled by the same principle: make it as hard as possible for the characters, and tie the lesser characters’ tragedies to the main line of events. The best example is the story of the girl’s mother, an old recluse whose only desire is to find her daughter, who was stolen by the Gypsies years ago. The woman hates all Gypsies, the heroine in particular. At the end, in the climax, by seizing the girl’s arm, she delays her long enough so that the soldiers pursuing her are able to find her—and in that moment she discovers that the girl is her daughter. Why is it dramatic? Hugo selects the worst conflict possible for both the old woman and the girl: in that moment, nothing worse could have happened to them than to discover each other in such a manner.

This subplot is not involved in or essential to the plot-theme; but Hugo quite properly introduced it, in developing the story, since he could integrate it to the main line of events. By contrast, if the old mother had not served a plot purpose in the climax, she would have been irrelevant to and improper in the story.

At the end, the priest and Quasimodo watch the girl’s execution from the tower of the cathedral. If the priest had leaned forward too far and fallen off the tower, that would have been a disastrous anticlimax; it would have been completely purposeless, and therefore meaningless. But what did Hugo, the dramatist, do? Quasimodo, the devoted protégé, sees the priest gloating over the execution and pushes him over the side of the tower. That is a resolution in action of their conflict of values.

The scene that follows, in which the priest is caught on a water-spout and hangs over the pavement, is magnificently dramatic. It is a physical illustration of the novel’s central conflict, and of its resolution : the girl is being executed on the square below; Quasimodo is standing above, crying; the priest hangs between life and death in sheer horror, and finally crashes to punishment.

This is one of the most satisfying resolutions in literature (speaking only in terms of dramatic values, which one judges by the nature of the conflict the author has set up). Hugo’s skill is such that he does not let the priest die immediately, without knowing the nature of his punishment. The priest lives long enough to know—his soul (and thus the reader’s soul) realizes consciously for a few minutes the spiritual meaning of the whole central conflict.

If you understand the mechanics of what makes this good, you understand the essence of plot construction.

In reading Notre-Dame de Paris, one feels interest, tension, horror. Watch for the means by which these ends are achieved, and, underlying the writing style, you will see the skeleton of the plot structure, which in turn is determined by the plot-theme. Those scenes at the end of the novel hold your attention because they are the logical resolution of the central conflict, the same conflict by which the author has held you up to this point. If the final scenes had come out of nowhere, they would not have held you.

Of course, the author has to be a good stylist to write the scenes properly; but style is a secondary issue. The best style in the world will not save a plotless story. You might say of it: “That’s a lovely way of using words”—but nothing more. The power of the climax of Notre-Dame de Paris comes from the combination of good writing and that which makes the writing good: the magnificent plot structure, magnificently resolved.

Now I want to clarify the difference between drama and melodrama.

A drama involves primarily a conflict of values within a man (as expressed in action); a melodrama involves only conflicts of a man with other men. (These are my own definitions. Dictionaries usually define melodrama as “exaggerated drama,” which is not a proper definition because it leaves open the question of what is or is not exaggerated.)

Conflict with other men is the pattern of detective stories and Westerns, where two sides who have nothing in common are set against each other by their opposition of interests—as when a detective pursues a criminal. There is conflict, and a good plot can be built from it, but all the danger is physical and external. The detective has only one aim: to catch the criminal; and the criminal only one aim: to escape. The sole line of interest is: Who will outsmart whom? There is no real drama, only the drama of action.

But suppose the detective learns that the criminal is his own son. Then he is caught between his love for the son and his duty as a policeman. He has a spiritual conflict, a conflict of values within himself—and the story is lifted from detective fiction into drama.

My heroes in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Roark and Galt, hold no contradictory values; it is through their friends, or the woman they love, that they are put into inner conflicts. The main line of the inner conflict of each concerns his (proper) love for a woman who, having not yet reached his level, is in some way still tied to the conventional world. Through her, the hero is thrown into conflict with a world in which he now has something at stake. In the case of Roark and Dominique, the fault is Dominique’s; she is guilty of holding a mistaken, though not irrational, philosophy. Once she comes to hold the right philosophy, there is no clash, and the hero’s two values, love and career, coincide. (What if the hero fell in love with an irrational woman who never corrected her views? A rational man would not do that, or not for long. When he grasped the woman’s irrationality, he would feel no love.)

This illustrates my premise that evil is impotent. It is only the good that (if mistaken) can hurt the good. As Galt tells Dagny in Atlas Shrugged: “My actual enemies are of no danger to me. You are.”

In The Fountainhead, Roark’s struggle for his career is not yet drama; it is really melodrama. He struggles for his values, and society opposes him in the name of opposite values. But his relationship with Dominique or Wynand or Cameron—his struggle for the souls of those people who are between himself and society—that is drama.

In any properly constructed story of someone’s struggle against society, the elements of drama—of an inner conflict of values—always involve those people who are partly in both camps. The drama comes from the hero’s concern with the fate of those souls who are torn between his world and an alien world.

The physical events of Notre-Dame de Paris are of the kind that today would be called rank melodrama, but they are actually drama since they are motivated by inner spiritual conflicts. For instance, if someone falls from a building, hangs for a moment on a pole over the street, and then crashes to his death, this has a certain physical suspense. Hugo makes the same kind of event spiritual and dramatic, rather than melodramatic. Or take a standard device of melodrama: a girl tied to the railroad tracks, with the train about to run her over. If villains put her there, this is melodrama. But suppose that, for some reason, the man she loves put her there. Even though the physical action is rather crude, I would then classify it as drama.

In Atlas Shrugged, I deliberately use the standard devices of melodrama for a spiritual purpose. To end a part with the heroine crashing in an airplane, leaving the reader in suspense about her fate, is the kind of melodramatic device that would have been used in old movie serials (and that I would have liked even as melodrama, because there is the drama of physical action). But when one adds the spiritual significance—when one knows whom the heroine of Atlas Shrugged is pursuing and why she is in that position—then her crashing in an airplane is drama. The same applies to the last chapter of the novel, where Ragnar Danneskjöld flies through a window in order to rescue Galt. If no spiritual values had been involved beyond a rescue, this would have been melodrama. But when such a physical action is tied to serious, important values, it is drama.

In this sense, I believe with Victor Hugo that the more melodramatic the action in which one can express the drama, the better the story. (By “melodramatic” I here mean physical danger or action.) If you can unite the two—if you can give a relevant and logical physical expression to the spiritual conflict you present—then you have high-class drama.

One could conceivably write a story in which a man struggles against nothing but himself, i.e., in which the only conflict is within the man, and the other characters are passive. The actions he would take in pursuit of one of his values versus the other would create a logical plot progression. He could be torn between two women, one representing sacred love and the other profane; and he could get himself into very dramatic situations where the two women would be not his antagonists, but only his foils, against whom or for whom he takes the actions. Such a story would be marvelous to write. But I have never seen it done, and technically it would be difficult to do.

The usual pattern of drama is a conflict within the hero himself and a conflict against other men. This creates the best, most complex plot structures. For instance, when Rearden in Atlas Shrugged hesitates between quitting his job and continuing the struggle, this is a conflict against outside forces. At the same time, his love for Dagny is in conflict with what he thinks is his duty to his wife. This is an inner conflict which complicates his struggle against the outside world, ultimately causing him to almost lose that struggle.

The important thing here is integration. Suppose Rearden’s romantic conflict had nothing to do with his economic conflict; one issue was private and the other public, and the two never met in the events of the story. Then the inclusion of both conflicts in the same story would be purely coincidental, and the plot would be badly constructed.

To create a plot structure, in sum, you must begin with a conflict; but not every conflict is sufficient for constructing a novel. Many conflicts are “one-incident” conflicts; they are too simple and, therefore, too easily resolved to permit a complex development. They might be good for a short story, but nothing more.

A short story, being of limited length, should properly deal only with a single incident—some one problem set up and resolved, without too many complications. To string out a whole series of incidents in the course of a short story makes for a bad story—a mere synopsis of something that should have been longer.

By contrast, a novel necessarily deals with a series of events. It may be constructed around the events of a single day, but then, by means of flashbacks or otherwise, the events are extended into a complex structure.

A novelette is an in-between form, with length as the attribute which distinguishes it from a novel or a short story. A novelette, like a novel, can have more than a single incident, as Anthem does. Anthem presents a long series of incidents—in an abbreviated, essentialized, almost “impressionistic” form. On the other hand, a single-incident story might require so many details in the telling that it becomes a novelette.

Your central conflict must be complex enough to warrant the development of events on the scale you intend. If you want to write a novel, your plot-theme has to be a much more complicated conflict than what would suffice for a short story.

A plot-theme is a conflict in terms of action, complex enough to create a purposeful progression of events. If you recall that this last is the definition of plot, you will see that the plot-theme serves as the seed from which the tree has to grow. To test whether you have sufficient seed for a good tree, ask yourself: Is this the worst situation in which I can put my hero? If these are his values, is this the worst clash I can engineer between them?

If you have chosen the worst clash possible, and if the values are important, you have a good seed for a good plot structure.

5

The Climax

The climax is that event or development within a story where all the struggles of the characters are resolved. Naturally, it comes near the end; how near depends on the nature of the story. Sometimes the climax is the very last event; usually, however, a few closing events are needed to show the consequences of the resolution.

For instance, the climax of We the Living is the scene where Andrei discovers that Kira is Leo’s mistress, and, as part of the same development, Andrei’s speech to the Party, when he rebels openly. The events which follow are merely the conclusion.

The climax of The Fountainhead is the Cortlandt explosion and Roark’s trial.

The main issues of The Fountainhead were the following: the conflict of Roark against society; the conflict of Roark against Dominique, who believed that the good cannot win on earth—that evil is powerful and will always win; the conflict of Roark against Wynand, who believed that the pursuit of power (the power to rule men by force) is a practical means of serving his own idealistic values; the contrast between Roark and Keating, the originator versus the second-hander who attempts to rise by using other people rather than his own mind; the conflict of Roark against Toohey, the man deliberately committed to an evil philosophy of power.

The explosion of the Cortlandt housing project resolves all of these issues.

The Cortlandt explosion (and aftermath) shows us Roark winning against society. It brings Dominique back to Roark by convincing her that the good does win, regardless of how terrible its struggle against evil is. When Wynand attempts to defend Roark in the Cortlandt case, he comes to realize that his whole life policy is mistaken, that the kind of power he has sought—power over men—can only destroy his values, not serve them. The Cortlandt project is the climax of Keating’s lifelong attempt to rise as a second-hander—and the final act of his hopeless destruction. As to Toohey, he is at the height of his power, he mobilizes all the collective forces of public opinion that he can in the Cortlandt case—and he loses.

This is the pattern of a complex plot climax—a climax in action, not merely in discussion. I had to devise an action that dramatized and resolved all of the above conflicts (and many smaller ones), showing in each case which side wins, which one loses, and why. Not every novel is as complex as The Fountainhead, but if you understand the method by which all its conflicts were integrated in its climax, you will be able to construct climaxes for stories of your own, which might involve fewer issues.

(On a first novel, I do not advise that you try anything as complex as The Fountainhead. But there are no “shoulds” in a literary career. If you feel you can, go right ahead.)

The climax is that stage at which the worst consequences of the plot-theme conflict come into the open and the characters have to make their final choice. You can judge a story’s climax by asking: Has it resolved the central conflict? If not, the story is badly constructed.

If you know the plot-theme of your story, you will know what is the proper climax, and whether or not you are letting your story down. If the central conflict merely peters out—or if it is resolved un-clearly, so that the reader does not really know what final decisions the characters have made—this is an improper ending.

A climax does not have to take place in one day or one scene. There is no rule about its length, which is determined by the nature of the story and by the number of issues which have to be resolved. In a stage play, the climax usually does take place in one scene; in a novel, it can involve several events. But these events have to be part of one sequence. For instance, the Cortlandt explosion and Roark’s trial are several chapters apart; but all the events in this part of the story are intrinsically connected. The explosion sets off the climax, and the other events—such as Toohey’s activity, Wynand’s failure, Roark’s trial and victory—follow from or are involved in this one action.

The term anticlimax refers to a development after the climax that does not follow from it. For instance, it would have been an anticlimax if, after the Cortlandt trial, I had shown Roark and Wynand quarreling about an unpaid commission on some building. Considering the issues that had been resolved between them, such an issue could be of no importance. Its only function would be to destroy the importance of the climax.

Never resolve a smaller issue after the climax. In a story with multiple threads, the problems of the lesser characters, if not involved in the climax, have to be solved before the climax. An example is the subplot of Irina and Sasha in We the Living. It would have been a bad anticlimax had I shown their fate—their being sent to Siberia and their parting—after I had shown Kira shot on the border. Or, in The Fountainhead, the romance of Keating and Katie was important throughout the story, and some conclusion to it had to be reached. But it would have been improper to show their last meeting after Dominique’s ride to Roark at the top of the Wynand building.

It is important, however, that every conflict be resolved before the story ends. An annoying aspect of badly constructed novels is that the author often poses minor problems and then leaves them hanging in the air, as if he has forgotten all about them. (Of course, in really bad novels, even the major issues are not resolved.) In this regard, Chekhov had a good rule, which applies just as much to novels as to plays: “Never hang a gun on the wall in the first act if you don’t intend to have it go off in the third.” This applies to everything in a plot structure. (The breach of this rule is called a “red herring.”)

When you construct a plot, the first event to figure out is always the climax. Suppose you have an idea for the theme and subject of a story but have not yet invented the climax. Then do not start to outline the story from the beginning. If you set up a lot of interesting conflicts and seemingly connected events without knowing where you are going, and then attempt to devise a climax that resolves it all, the process will be an excruciating mental torture (and you will not succeed). Therefore, in planning your story, get to your climax as quickly as possible. First devise an event that dramatizes and resolves the issues of your story, then construct the rest of the plot backward, by asking yourself what events are needed in order to bring your characters to this point.

This is a good example of the process of final causation. In order to judge what incidents to include in your story, you have to know your purpose in the story—i.e., your climax. Only when you know this can you begin to analyze which steps, each serving as the efficient cause of the next, will lead your characters logically to this decisive event.

There is no rule about what element has to be the first germ of a story in your mind. Fortunate writers are sometimes able to devise the climax first; in other words, they get a dramatic idea that constitutes the climax of a story, then work backward to construct the plot (which is sheer pleasure). This is a matter of pure accident. What kind of story you will tell is not an accident; it depends on your premises. But whether you first think of a character and then add the other elements, or of an abstract theme, or of a conflict situation—that is accidental. You are free to start at any point, because no matter where you start, you have to complete the circle and include all the other elements.

The only rule is that you have to know your climax (in dramatized terms) before you start to outline the steps by which to arrive there.

It has been said that Broadway is full of first acts. Many people can come up with an intriguing first act but do not know what to do with the play thereafter. By contrast, a good dramatist starts with the third act. He does not necessarily write the third act, or the climax, first—but he keeps it in mind.

I once asked a woman writer of lending-library fiction about her method of writing, and she answered airily: “Oh, I throw a bunch of characters up in the air and let them come down.” Her stories read like it. This is a horrible example of what not to do.

In the same school are those modern writers who start with some assignment such as “a mood of adolescence” or “my search for the meaning of life in prep school.” When they write, the standard of selection is the mood of the moment. The result is the kind of story where you do not know why one incident was included rather than another, or what is the purpose of it all. Behind such a hodgepodge is always a writer who starts without a defined plan and then writes as his feelings dictate.

The best metaphor for the relationship of an outline to a story is blueprints in relationship to a building. Nobody can start piling up girders or making window trimmings without a blueprint; a blueprint is necessary in order to judge what are the stresses and strains, and what to put where. The same is true of the construction of a story.

If you can carry the outline in your mind, you do not have to write it down, but it is helpful to do so if the story is complex. You might hold a story in your mind in a generalized way and think it is all in order; yet when you put it down on paper, you might discover dull stretches in which nothing in particular happens, or omissions of elements necessary to make later events dramatic.

By writing down the outline, I do not mean writing a synopsis in objective terms that an outsider would understand. I make my outlines as brief as possible, in what I call “headline style.” For instance, the events that finally went into Atlas Shrugged were all present in my outline, but in this form: “[Chapter I] ‘Who is John Galt?’ Eddie Willers, Taggart Transcontinental, James Taggart. Trouble on the Colorado line. Taggart’s evasions.”² When I write an outline, I know more specifically than this what will go under the general headings, but I write down only what I need in order to remember the progression and to get a bird’s-eye view of the structure

There is no rule about how detailed or concise to make your outline. Train yourself to know how much you can carry in your head, and how much you need to write down in order to see the total and keep the structure of your story clear in your mind.

When you come to the actual writing, there is no rule which demands that you have to write from the first chapter onward. If your outline is good and you know where you are going, the order of execution is optional. Some writers write the end first, or any scene which they particularly want to write. This is permissible provided they are skillful enough to hide the seams—i.e., provided they can edit and integrate the total so that it reads as if the writer had started from the beginning.

I myself always start at the beginning. I can make notes on scenes, or on dialogue, in advance, but I cannot do the actual writing out of sequence; I deal with such complex issues that too much in each scene depends on what has been established earlier. If I started to concretize something in the middle while the concretes of the beginning were not firmly set in my mind, I would never be able to integrate the total or to write any scene properly.

There is another reason why I cannot write out of sequence, even on a simple story like Anthem. I am always very aware of what has gone before. One of my methods is to have plants in the course of a story, on which I play later; i.e., I have references in later scenes to something that was established earlier. For instance, at the end of Atlas Shrugged, Eddie Willers is suddenly talking to Dagny [in his imagination], addressing a memory of their childhood that was planted in the first chapter. When I wrote that particular passage in the first chapter, eleven years before I came to the end, I knew that I was planting it for this purpose. I did the same with Halley’s Fifth Concerto: the description of it in the first chapter of Atlas Shrugged is copied verbatim in the last. When the reader comes to it the second time, the same words have acquired a much fuller meaning. In the first chapter, they are a generalized emotional abstraction; by the end, they are a philosophical-emotional summation of the ideas of the story.

Planting those small touches in a scene to cash in on them later is a personal preference of mine. Every good writer does not necessarily do it, and I mention it here only as one reason why I prefer to write from the beginning onward. But that is not an absolute rule.

The only absolute rule is that, whether you write from the beginning or the end or the middle, you must start plotting from the end.

6

How to Develop a Plot Ability

You have heard it said that “art cannot be taught.” There is a sense in which writing cannot be taught; but in a different sense, it can.

To learn sciences like physics or history is simply to absorb facts consciously. Such sciences can be taught since the facts involved can be communicated. Physical skills like typing can also be taught. But to learn to type, more is required than merely listening to a factual lecture: you have to practice. First you learn how to move your fingers and strike the keys—slowly and by conscious effort. Learning to type then consists of automatizing this skill.

At first you have to think of how to crook your fingers, how far to reach for each letter, how to keep in tempo. Then you practice, faster and faster, so that eventually, when you look at a page of copy which you have to type, your fingers do the rest “instinctively.” If an experienced typist were to ask herself, “How do I do it?” she would answer, “I just do it.”

The same is true of dancing, or playing tennis, or any physical skill. First it is learned consciously—and you are in command of the skill when it becomes automatic, so that conscious attention is no longer required.

I pause on this analysis in order to illustrate what kind of automatic “instincts” have to be acquired in the realm of art.

I mentioned earlier the complexity involved in writing a single sentence [see pp. 1-2]. I said that you could not figure out the sentence consciously. You sit down to write, the sentence comes out a certain way, and with editing you can improve it—but you cannot compose the sentence consciously in the way that you can pass an examination in physics by stating the facts as you have learned and understood them.

This is why the process of writing cannot be taught—not because it is a mystical talent, but because so complex an integration is involved that no teacher can supervise the process for you. You can learn all the theory, but unless you practice—unless you actually write—you will not be able to apply the theory.

All that a teacher can do is explain the elements of writing and suggest a method of thinking and practicing that will enable you to write. I cannot give you rules sufficient to make you wake up one day with a talent for plot. But you can acquire such a talent if you know some general rules and the kind of mental exercises that will integrate into a plot ability.

So let me give you a few general rules for conditioning your plot imagination.

Concretize Your Abstractions

One rule that you need both as a human being and as a fiction writer is: Concretize your abstractions.

In your daily life, in thinking, and in reading, you deal constantly with wide abstractions. If you have only a general idea of how to concretize these, they are “floating abstractions.” If you can name one or two concretes under some concept, but no more, it is a semifloating abstraction. You do have some knowledge of how it applies to reality, but your understanding is very limited. For instance, if you are asked what you mean by “independence,” and you say, “A man who thinks for himself,” that is one good concrete. Much more is necessary, however, in order to understand such an abstraction as “independence.”

If you catch yourself using floating or semifloating abstractions, learn to concretize them. Project in ultimate action what any abstraction means.

For instance, it is worthless to say: “Love, well, everybody knows what love is.” To bring it down to earth, you might first say: “Love is a human emotion of appreciation for a value.” This is a good philosophical definition, but it is not yet concrete. To make it concrete, you must project what it means to observe love. Not only: How does it feel? but: How do you know it in other people? A writer has to project his abstractions in specific concretes. That he knows something inwardly is not enough; he has to make the reader know it; and the reader can grasp it only from the outside, by some physical means. Concretize to yourself: If a man and a woman are in love, how do they act? what do they say? what do they seek? why do they seek it? That is the concrete reality, for which “love” is merely a wide abstraction.

You do not have to start concretizing all your concepts systematically. Start with those which interest you most, or proceed at random, whenever you catch yourself using a floating abstraction. Do it whenever your mind is unemployed, on the bus or while brushing your teeth. Train your mind to concretize every abstraction as a general policy. As with typing, it is only at first that you have to do it by conscious, measured steps. Eventually it becomes an automatic mental habit.

(I recommend that you start with those abstractions all writers deal with but few understand fully in concrete terms—i.e., all abstractions which pertain to emotions, values, virtues, and actions. Most intelligent adults think they understand the abstractions that relate to human beings—love, hate, fear, anger, independence or dependence, selfishness or unselfishness—but if they try, they cannot easily reduce them to concrete reality.)

Not to carry floating abstractions in your mind is the first requisite for inventing a plot—because action is concrete and physical. Abstractions do not act.

Once you can relate every abstraction to its concretes, you will know how to translate general themes into action. Any theme that you want to write a story about starts in your mind (once you name it) as an abstraction. To translate that abstraction into a plot, you need a vast number of concretes at your “instinctive” call so that your subconscious can pick the relevant ones.

For instance, to present a conflict between individualism and collectivism, you must have stored away countless concretes under those abstractions—in the personal, political, and philosophical realms. From these stored concretes, your subconscious can then select and integrate events that dramatize your theme. You will not have to figure out by conscious effort: “Roark is an individualist, so of course he wouldn’t do a housing project; but maybe he would—under what conditions? Well, what would an individualist do and what is ‘individualism’?”

I did not go through this latter process; instead, the idea for the climax of The Fountainhead hit me like Newton’s apple. One day, during lunch-I can remember where and in what drugstore—when I was thinking of the climax, the idea for the housing project suddenly flashed into my mind. But “accidents happen only to those who deserve them.” In other words, the idea came to me because I had done an enormous amount of thinking while working on the outline and theme of The Fountainhead (and long before).

This kind of incident is what makes nonintrospective writers say: “Ah, writing is a mystical talent—it just comes to me.” By contrast, since I am a good introspector, I can tell exactly how these things happen. I cannot tell what subconscious connections are made in my mind preceding the moment an idea strikes. But I do know that the subconscious works somewhat like a [computer]. If you feed it the right data and ask the right question, it gives you the answer. You do not have to know how the wires connect inside.

Fill your subconscious with as many concretes as possible under every abstraction you deal with—then forget about them. Your subconscious does not forget. The concretes will be there when, dealing with some complex theme and needing a complex integration, you press the buttons of your [computer]: “I need a climax that resolves issue X, problem Y.” Your thought here is a series of abstractions. If these are fully in your control—if they are not merely floating abstractions without content—your subconscious makes the connections and gives you the answer (sooner or later, depending on the complexity of the problem).

You must be able to work backward and forward from the abstract to the concrete. In other words, you must be able to concretize any abstraction you deal with and, vice versa, to draw the abstraction from any concretes you deal with.

Train yourself to see what any series of concretes—whether people, events, character traits, or whatever—have in common. “I have seen a number of people do X. The premise behind it is Y.” When you think like this, you are abstracting a concept or a general principle from a number of concretes.

If you do not constantly draw abstractions of your own, you lose a lot of good material. For instance, you might observe some characteristic thing that people do which would be good to include in your writing. But if you store it in your subconscious without tying it to anything else, it is lost. It is only a concrete observation and will be of no value to you.

Instead, tie your observations to abstractions. For instance, you observe that someone is aggressive in a nasty way, and that he is also frightened and uncertain. You might conclude that he is putting on a show, that he is a coward who is aggressive as a defense. This is classifying a concrete under an abstraction—and this is the kind of observation that will be valuable to you as a writer.

When you master the relationship of abstractions to concretes, you will know how to translate an abstract theme into action, and how to attach an abstract meaning to an action idea. If you start with a philosophical abstraction, you will be able to translate it into a conflict, a climax, and a plot. Or if you get a plot idea which at first glance has no philosophical meaning, you will be able to discover the meaning and develop the idea into a serious story.

If you have to crank the process by hand because you have not yet mastered the abstract-concrete relationship, it will take forever and seem impossible. Only when your mind is geared to dancing back and forth—and I mean dance, with that kind of ease—between abstractions and concretes will you be able to give the philosophical meaning to an action idea or the action story to a philosophical idea.

Plot action is not mere physical action, and it is not mere spiritual or mental action. Some writers think that if a man takes a trip and comes home, this constitutes plot action (he did something!), just as the writers of bad melodramas think it is plot action if someone is chasing someone and there is five minutes of speeding cars or horses galloping. The counterpart of this error is conflicts within a man’s mind which are not illustrated in physical action.

The arty, modem stream-of-consciousness novels, on the one hand, and bad melodramas on the other, where characters run around hectically, are two versions of the same error. (The latter is action—so why is it so dull? It is dull because it is mere physical action.) Proper plot action is neither spirit alone nor body alone, but the integration of the two, with the physical action expressing the spiritual action involved.

To construct a proper plot, you have to be (at least as a dramatist) on the premise of mind-body integration. If to any extent you hold the premise of a mind-body split, it will hamper your plot ability, because it will lead you to consider dramatic the mere fact that a man experiences something in his own mind, or that he moves around in some mindless physical action.

A story is like a soul-body relationship. Whether you start with the body (the action) or the soul (the abstract theme), you must be able to integrate the two. And the proper integration of idea to action requires a mind that is not confined to thinking merely in terms of physical concretes, or merely in terms of floating abstractions.

Think in Terms of Conflict

A proper plot situation involves a conflict of values. Therefore, the next point—the real fiction writer’s point—is: Learn to think in terms of conflict.

A valuable exercise is the following. When you go to modern movies, watch television shows, or read modern novels, which with rare exceptions are plotless (or have inept plots), try to correct them mentally. If a story begins interestingly but then peters out, see what you could have done with that beginning, how you could have turned that story into a real conflict of important values. You will encounter such wasted opportunities in almost every modern story (although some are no good even for this purpose because they lack any rudiments of a plot).

I am not recommending plagiarism. I recommend this only as a mental exercise, only as training in how to give a purposeful plot structure to some shapeless presentation of undefined events and people. And the lead to doing it is: Think in terms of conflict.

At the start of my career, I had a valuable conversation with Cecil DeMille. It was my first year in Hollywood, I was twenty-two, and I had already developed a strong plot sense; but although I could recognize a good plot story, I had not consciously identified what characteristics made it good. DeMille told me something that clarified the issue for me.

He said that a good story depends on what he called “the situation,” by which he meant a complicated conflict [a plot-theme], and that the best stories are those which can be told in one sentence. In other words, if the essential situation (not the whole story, of course) can be told in one sentence, this makes for a good plot story.

He told me how he happened to buy the story for one of his most successful silent-day pictures, Manslaughter. It was originally a novel, and a friend of his wired him in Hollywood advising him to buy it for the screen. The friend included only one sentence about the story: “A righteous young district attorney has to prosecute the woman he loves, a spoiled heiress, for killing a policeman in an automobile accident.” This is all DeMille knew about the story, and he bought it.

This kind of sentence contains all the elements of a good story—because it gives you the conflict. Once you have this much, you can tell what kind of events you must construct in order to lead the characters to the setup, and what kind of events are its possible consequences. You will not grasp all the events immediately, a great many choices are involved—but you see the possibility of a dramatically constructed progression.

Anyone starting with this kind of idea is safe dramatically. It would take a bad writer to ruin it.

This is what you must aim at. Learn how to construct this type of situation, whether on your own or as you read plotless books or watch plotless television and movies. That will be your first and probably your most important step toward becoming a plot writer.

Tap Your Emotions

When you try to imagine events, ask yourself what kind of thing you would like to see happen.

The preceding leads have been technical; this one is emotional. You must start with the abstract idea of a conflict, but thereafter your own values and your personal imagination will be a reliable dramatic selector. Ask yourself, therefore, what kind of conflicts and events you would find interesting. You will be surprised at how productive this is.

When you ask this question, do not censor yourself or check yourself against your moral code. Simply tap your emotions; you can judge later whether they are right or wrong. Take yourself selfishly as the one who has to enjoy the spectacle of your story’s events. Do not ask what kind of events would make the best propaganda, or what kind your potential audience might like—no, ask what you personally would like to see happen.

That is the best springboard for inventing events.

7

Characterization

Characterization is the presentation of the nature of the people in a story.

Characterization is really the presentation of motives. We understand a person if we understand what makes him act the way he does. To know a person well is to know “what makes him tick,” as opposed to not seeing beyond the superficial actions of the moment.

The main means of characterization are action and dialogue—just as it is only by means of their actions and words that one can observe the characters of other people in real life. There is no way to know the soul (the consciousness) of another except by means of physical manifestations: his actions and words (not his words in the sense of philosophical declarations, but his words in the context of his actions). The same applies to fiction. As part of characterization, a writer can sum up in narrative passages a character’s thoughts or feelings, but merely to do that is not characterization.

The actions that a writer shows must be integrated to his understanding of the characters’ motives—which the reader then grasps by means of these actions. I have talked about the same kind of circle in relation to plot: to project an abstract theme, you must devise the concrete events from which the reader will in turn derive that theme. The same applies to characterization: to project a convincing character, you need to have an idea of the basic premises or motives which move his actions—and by means of these actions, the reader will discover what is at the root of the character.

The reader can then say: “This action is consistent, but that action is not.” He can say it on the grounds of what the actions presented have implied about the character’s motives.

This does not mean that you must present every character in a single key, giving him only one attribute or passion. It means that you must integrate a character. A character comes across as an integrated person when everything he says and does is internally consistent.

I want to emphasize that a character can have enormous conflicts and contradictions—but then these have to be consistent. You must select his actions so that the reader grasps: “This is what’s the trouble with this character.” For instance, there are contradictions in Gail Wynand’s actions throughout The Fountainhead, but these contradictions are integrated to their ultimate root. If a character has contradictory premises, to say “I understand him” means: “I understand the conflict behind his actions.”

When a character “does not jell,” it means that the evidence offered about him is never unified, neither into one whole nor into a comprehensible conflict.

In Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, the hero is supposed to be a medical scientist of unusual stature; yet one is never convinced of his actual devotion to science.

The reader meets him first as a boy: “Cross-legged in the examining-chair in Doc Vickerson’s office, a boy was reading ‘Gray’s Anatomy.’ His name was Martin Arrowsmith.... By sheer brass and obstinacy he had, at fourteen, become the unofficial, also decidedly unpaid, assistant to the Doc.” For a boy of that age to want to work in a doctor’s office is unusual, and it might indicate a budding passion for medicine. But observe the next touch. In the office stands “a skeleton with one gaunt gold tooth. On evenings when the Doc was away, Martin would acquire prestige among [his friends] by leading them into the unutterable darkness and scratching a sulfur match on the skeleton’s jaw.”

I submit that this touch alone destroys the earnestness of the character.

It is quite possible that a devoted crusader of science might in childhood have pulled such a stunt—as a prank of the moment, meaning nothing in particular. But when you draw a character, everything that you say about him acquires significance by the mere fact of being included in your story. Art is selectivity. You cannot re-create every minute detail about anything, neither about an event nor about a person; therefore, that which you choose to include, or to omit, is significant—and you have to watch carefully the implications of what you say or omit. If you introduce a boy as seriously interested in medicine and then show him playing silly, childish pranks, the earnestness of his devotion is immediately undercut.

The subsequent treatment of Arrowsmith follows the same pattern. His devotion to science in his college years is presented almost apologetically, in fragmentary bits (the author’s tone being one of friendly, patronizing amusement). On the other hand, his social relationships and his feelings toward his fraternity are shown in great detail. He is presented as an average boy; apart from the fact that he takes medicine seriously while others take it lightly, he is given no character trait that separates him from others. He’s just one of the boys.

I question the idea that a man with a great passion for science (as Arrowsmith is later shown to have) would be “one of the boys” in college. Any man with a serious central ambition is more of an outsider in his youth than in later years. It is particularly in his youth that he will be misunderstood and resented by others.

The attempt to make Arrowsmith a regular fellow, and to separate his private and social life from his attitude toward science, undercuts his characterization. Except for a few scenes dealing specifically with medicine, the reader at no point feels the presence of any driving force in the man.

Throughout Arrowsmith’s later career, and throughout his romantic life, we see a man who blunders helplessly. His main actions do carry him toward his major love, which is the pursuit of pure science. But there are passages where he says, in effect: “To hell with science. I guess I’ll be a small-town doctor and make money.” Then he is drawn back to science. One might say: Here is a man who is struggling with the decision of whether or not to devote himself to science. But the unanswered question is: Why is he struggling in this manner? Why the doubts? How are they to be reconciled with his strong basic premise?

Arrowsmith’s fumbling helplessness in regard to everything except the laboratory is never integrated to his strengths as a crusading scientist. The two elements simply coexist in the character; they do not logically go together, nor are they in any real conflict. As a result, the characterization is out of focus. At the end of the novel, the reader does not have a clear idea of Arrowsmith’s motive power—of what makes him tick.

By contrast, Leora, Arrowsmith’s wife, is projected clearly. From the moment we first meet her, we know that she is a girl who faces life directly, is rational and brave, goes after what she wants, and states her desires openly. She is a very appealing, and consistent, character; she has a directness and simplicity about her that remains in all of the story’s different circumstances (including some very complicated ones). The reader sees her ever more fully, but she never changes in essence.

Leora’s actions are self-explanatory. From her introduction onward, the reader never has to wonder why she acts as she does. He feels: “It would be like her to do that.” Why does he feel it? Because her every action, decision, and word is consistent with the way she has been introduced.

(The only exception is certain inexcusable lines of dialogue she is given to the effect that “I’m just a simple, ordinary woman.” She is not an ordinary woman, but a true heroine; and I resent, philosophically, this manner of labeling a character. The fact that Leora is not an ambitious creator on her own does not make her “just a little woman.” My guess is that Lewis himself felt that Leora was the opposite of an ordinary woman; that he rather liked her—and had to assure the reader that he was impersonal and “objective,” by the Naturalistic standard. He in effect says: “Don’t think this is anything much.” To a Naturalist, nothing exists that is “anything much.”)

You can project your character only by means of what you say on paper; but behind every line and action, there is much more than what you put in words. No action is taken in a vacuum, and an alert reader is automatically watching for the meaning of every line and action. He is constantly on the lookout: “I’m meeting a new character. What makes him tick?” He is constantly making lightning-like calculations : “What premise does this action come from? What is the motive of a man who does X? The character says Z. Why does he say it?”

In order to show how much is implied between the lines, I have rewritten a scene from The Fountainhead. It is the first scene between two of the major characters, Howard Roark and Peter Keating. Read first the dialogue of the original scene (I have omitted the descriptions), and then the rewritten version of the same scene. Watch for the means of characterization. What do you learn about the two men, and how do you learn it? What impression do you have of them, and what gave you that impression?³

[The scene takes place on the day Roark has been expelled from college and Keating has graduated with high honors.]

“Congratulations, Peter,” said Roark.

“Oh... Oh, thanks ... I mean ... do you know or ... Has mother been telling you?”

“She has.”

“She shouldn’t have!”

“Why not?”

“Look, Howard, you know that I’m terribly sorry about your being ...”

“Forget it.”

“I ... there’s something I want to speak to you about, Howard, to ask your advice. Mind if I sit down?”

“What is it?”

“You won’t think that it’s awful of me to be asking about my business, when you’ve just been ... ?”

“I said forget about that. What is it?”

“You know, I’ve often thought that you’re crazy. But I know that you know many things about it—architecture, I mean—which those fools never knew. And I know that you love it as they never will.” “Well?”

“Well, I don’t know why I should come to you, but—Howard, I’ve never said it before, but you see, I’d rather have your opinion on things than the Dean‘s—I’d probably follow the Dean’s, but it’s just that yours means more to me myself, I don’t know why. I don’t know why I’m saying this, either.”

“Come on, you’re not being afraid of me, are you? What do you want to ask about?”

“It’s about my scholarship. The Paris prize I got.”

“Yes?”

“It’s for four years. But, on the other hand, Guy Francon offered me a job with him some time ago. Today he said it’s still open. And I don’t know which to take.”

“If you want my advice, Peter, you’ve made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don’t you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?”

“You see, that’s what I admire about you, Howard. You always know.”

“Drop the compliments.”

“But I mean it. How do you always manage to decide?”

“How can you let others decide for you?”

Now read the rewritten version of the same scene:

“Congratulations, Peter,” said Roark.

“Oh ... Oh, thanks ... I mean ... do you know or ... Has mother been telling you?”

“She has.”

“She shouldn’t have!”

“Oh well, I didn’t mind it.”

“Look, Howard, you know that I’m terribly sorry about your being expelled.”

“Thank you, Peter.”

“I ... there’s something I want to speak to you about, Howard, to ask your advice. Mind if I sit down?”

“Go right ahead. I’ll be glad to help you, if I can.”

“You won’t think that it’s awful of me to be asking about my business, when you’ve just been expelled?”

“No. But it’s nice of you to say that, Peter. I appreciate it.”

“You know, I’ve often thought that you’re crazy.”

“Why?”

“Well, the kind of ideas you’ve got about architecture—there’s nobody that’s ever agreed with you, nobody of importance, not the Dean, not any of the professors ... and they know their business. They’re always right. I don’t know why I should come to you.”

“Well, there are many different opinions in the world. What did you want to ask me?”

“It’s about my scholarship. The Paris prize I got.”

“Personally, I wouldn’t like it. But I know it’s important to you.”

“It’s for four years. But, on the other hand, Guy Francon offered me a job with him some time ago. Today he said it’s still open. And I don’t know which to take.”

“If you want my advice, Peter, take the job with Guy Francon. I don’t care for his work, but he’s a very prominent architect and you’ll learn how to build.”

“You see, that’s what I admire about you, Howard. You always know how to decide.”

“I try my best.”

“How do you do it?”

“I guess I just do it.”

“But you see, I’m not sure, Howard. I’m never sure of myself. You always are.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. But I guess I’m sure about my work.”

The plot content is the same in the rewritten scene as in the original, but the characters are different. In particular, Roark is changed.

In the original scene, Roark is impervious to Keating’s and the conventional world’s view of his expulsion. “ ‘Has mother been telling you?’ ‘She has.’ ‘She shouldn’t have!’ ‘Why not?’ ” Keating thinks that his own triumph would hurt Roark on the day of Roark’s expulsion. But Roark does not share this comparative standard; and at first he does not even understand it. His “Why not?” indicates the difference between his standards and Keating’s better than any other answer could have done. Even if the reader does not pause to analyze that sentence, it conveys the complete directness of a man who in effect says: “What’s your kind of triumph to me? My standards are different.”

In the rewritten scene, Roark says: “Oh well, I didn’t mind it.” He accepts the comparative standard and agrees (although in a generous manner) that his expulsion is a disaster and Keating’s graduation a triumph.

If you approach writing a scene like this with the idea that your hero is an independent man but you have not identified the issue any more clearly, you might think: “He’s a strong man, so he’ll say: ‘I didn’t mind it.’ ” This is where you have to watch your implications. If he says, “I didn’t mind it,” that implies something specific about his basic premises and motivation. If he says, “Why not?” that implies something entirely different.

In the original scene, Roark is courteous but indifferent. Not only does he reject Keating’s standards, he shows no desire to discuss them; although he will listen if Keating has something to say. When Keating says, “There’s something I want to speak to you about, Howard, to ask your advice. Mind if I sit down?” Roark merely asks, “What is it?” He is courteous to Keating in a manner consistent with their difference of standards.

In the rewritten scene, Roark says: “Go right ahead. I’ll be glad to help you, if I can.” Here he is courteous beyond politeness—he is actually interested. That is a contradiction, because it raises the question: Why, given their opposite standards, is he interested?

In the original scene, Roark at one point shows friendliness. Observe what that friendliness proceeds from. Keating says: “Well, I don’t know why I should come to you, but—Howard, I’ve never said it before, but you see, I’d rather have your opinion on things than the Dean‘s—I’d probably follow the Dean’s, but it’s just that yours means more to me myself, I don’t know why. I don’t know why I’m saying this, either.” This is a speech of profound respect for Roark: Keating acknowledges the superiority of Roark’s standards, and he shows sincerity. Roark can reward that with a moment of friendliness, which amounts to saying: “If this is how you feel, I can talk to you.” Observe also the generous form of his friendliness. He says: “You’re not being afraid of me, are you? ” He knows that Keating is afraid of him, and to make the conversation easier for Keating, he acknowledges this openly.

I have seen young writers influenced by me make their hero a monotone. He speaks only in snappy yeses or noes, never shows anything but a tight grimness, and is always on the fighting premise. This is bad characterization; it is incomplete. The reader necessarily thinks: “A man cannot be this way all the time—nor can any man have only one premise.”

Good characterization is not a matter of giving a character a single attribute or making him monotonous. It is a matter of integrating his every particular aspect to the total, the focus of integration being his basic premises. For instance, Roark is not only the man of integrity, fighting everybody. He can be friendly and charming; he can be generous; he even has a few humorous lines (though I think only two in the whole novel). He has all sorts of facets. But he comes across as a monolith because every facet is consistent with his basic premises.

The above example from the original scene is an illustration of this: Roark can be generous and friendly to Keating, but only in the context of Keating’s acknowledging his, Roark’s, premises.

In the rewritten scene, when Keating says, “You won’t think that it’s awful of me to be asking about my business, when you’ve just been expelled?” Roark answers, “No. But it’s nice of you to say that, Peter. I appreciate it.” Here he shows friendliness in exchange, not for Keating’s tribute to his standards, but for Keating’s condolences on the bad state to which those standards have brought him. Instead of being a generous man extending a helping hand when deserved, he becomes a man accepting charity. In this context, Roark’s friendliness acquires an entirely different meaning.

Again, if you approach a scene like this with the abstract intention “I will show my hero being friendly,” but you have not concretized the nature of that friendliness or integrated it with your hero’s other premises, you might commit a contradiction like the above and then wonder why your character does not come across as you intended.

In the rewritten scene, when Keating says, “You know, I’ve often thought that you’re crazy,” Roark asks, “Why?” This shows concern for Keating’s opinion, and even self-doubt. In some other context where he had a reason to put Keating on the spot, Roark could have asked this question defiantly or sarcastically. But in the context of this scene, he accepts a gratuitous insult by saying, in effect: “Oh, you think I’m crazy. Why? Maybe I am.”

In the original scene, Keating says: “You know, I’ve often thought that you’re crazy. But I know that you know many things about it—architecture, I mean—which those fools never knew, And I know that you

love it as they never will.” This shows what a context can do to a single line: accompanied by such an explanation, the statement “you’re crazy” is a great compliment. But if Keating merely says, “I’ve often thought that you’re crazy,” Roark should stop talking to him then and there—if he is the Roark intended originally.

In the original scene, when Keating finally asks his question, Roark takes his problem seriously and gives him advice, not about a concrete, but about the wider principle involved. “If you want my advice, Peter, you’ve made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work.” Roark gives Keating the benefit of his own convictions, telling him that there is a more serious issue involved than merely the choice of the two possibilities. The line “If you want my advice, Peter, you’ve made a mistake already” is unexpected, arresting, and unconventional; and since Roark backs it up by giving his reasons, the reader not only sees the nature of Roark’s premises, but also a boy who is thinking—and thinking in much wider terms than the particular choice of a job.

In the rewritten scene, Roark does the conventional thing: he gives Keating specific advice. This implies that there is nothing wrong in Keating’s asking for such advice or following another man’s opinion.

(In the book, Roark later gives Keating the same advice, but contemptuously and indifferently, simply to end the conversation. By that time, Keating’s sincerity is gone; he is putting on an act for Roark; and Roark merely dismisses him. This again is an issue of the implications of a context.)

In the original scene, my best touch of characterization is the following exchange. Keating says, “How do you always manage to decide?” and Roark answers, “How can you let others decide for you?” These two lines convey the essence of the two characters. In the rewritten scene, I dropped them.

I want to pause on these lines in order to show how to integrate philosophical propaganda into fiction.

Such an issue as “I always decide for myself” versus “I go by the opinions of others” is extremely wide. If two characters started discussing it out of a clear sky, that would be sheer propaganda. But in the above scene, the two men are stating an abstract issue as it applies to their own problems and to the concrete situation before the reader’s eyes. The abstract discussion is natural in the context, and, therefore, almost unnoticeable.

This is the only way to state abstract principles in fiction. If the concrete illustration is given in the problems and actions of the story, you can afford to have a character state a wide principle. If, however, the action does not support it, that wide principle will stick out like a propaganda poster.

How much philosophy you can present without turning into a propagandist, as opposed to a proper fiction writer, depends on how much of an event the philosophy is covering. In the above scene, it would have been too early for the two boys to make more of a statement than they did, even though the issue stated is independence versus second-handedness, which is the theme of the whole book. Given what is specifically concretized in the scene, one exchange of lines is enough abstract philosophy.

A speech like John Galt’s in Atlas Shrugged would have been too much for Roark’s courtroom speech in The Fountainhead. The events of The Fountainhead do not illustrate as many issues as do the events of Atlas Shrugged.

To judge how long a philosophical speech should be, go by the following standard: How detailed and complex are the events which you have offered to concretize the speech? If the events warrant it, you can make as long a statement as you wish without taking the reader outside the framework of the story.

Now look again at the rewritten scene. I depart blatantly from the original Roark when he says: “Well, there are many different opinions in the world.” This implies a tolerant respect for all differences of opinion, and thus a nonobjective, nonabsolute view of ideas—as contrasted to such absolutism in the original scene that Roark does not even bother to argue about ideas with Keating.

Next, Keating says: “You always know how to decide.” Roark answers : “I try my best.” If you are presenting a man who is independent and who will go on to fight the whole world, and if in one of the first scenes he says, “I try my best,” you give yourself a handicap in characterization that no amount of heroic actions on your hero’s part can overcome. It is a blatant contradiction: a strong man who relies only on his own judgment would never utter such a modest line.

Next, Keating asks: “How do you do it?” Roark answers: “I guess I just do it.” Journalistically, this line can pass almost unnoticed; that is the normal way for men of average premises to speak. But no heroic rebel, particularly not a representative of rationality, will ever say “I guess I just do it” about his own career.

Then Keating says: “But you see, I’m not sure, Howard. I’m never sure of myself. You always are. ” Roark answers: “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. But I guess I’m sure about my work.” This line characterizes Roark as a man who does not hold self-confidence as an absolute virtue; he sees no reason why he should be confident about anything except his work. The result is that he becomes superficial and concrete-bound. He might be principled in regard to his work, but he has no wider idea of principles, no basic philosophical convictions or values. In effect, he becomes like Arrowsmith. As I said, Arrowsmith too has a certain integrity and determination in regard to his work, but the (totally unexplained) difference between his professional attitude and his behavior as a man is so vast that the character does not integrate.

To understand a personality is like peeling off one onion skin after another. First you understand the immediate motive behind his actions. Then you ask: Why this motive? You peel off another skin and go into deeper motivation—until you come to grasp the fundamentals of the personality. The same applies to characterization in fiction.

To allow Roark such a line as “I’m not always sure, but I am about my work” is to say that he has integrity professionally, but not otherwise. That is a one-layer, one-onion-skin explanation: for some un-stated reason, Roark has integrity in regard to architecture. But left open are the wider questions: Why in regard to architecture? and: Why not in regard to other matters?

This brings us to the difference between Naturalism and Romanticism in characterization. The Naturalistic method is to present only one layer of motivation; the Romantic method is to look not only at the immediate onion skin, but as deep as the author can go.

The Naturalist presents merely the immediate reason for a character’s actions; for instance, if a man is unscrupulous about money, it is because he is “greedy.” The Romanticist goes deeper and indicates why a man is greedy, and perhaps even what is the nature of greed.

In The Fountainhead, I show that Roark is motivated by his love for the profession of architecture—but I do not stop there. I go deeper: What is the meaning of a love for a creative profession? And deeper: What does such love rest on? It rests on an independent mind. And deeper: What is the moral meaning of an independent mind?

Similarly, I show that Peter Keating wants prestige, money, and conventional success, but I also go several onion skins deeper. I ask: Why does a man go after money and prestige? Why is Peter Keating so anxious for popular approval? I show that a second-hander has no independent judgment and can derive his self-esteem only from the approval of others. And I go deeper: Why does a man decide to depend on the judgment of others? Ultimately, because of his refusal to think for himself.

I show Roark’s motives and the motives of his enemies; and I show why the two have to clash. Starting from the first layer of the action—the struggle of an architect—I go all the way down to the fundamental, metaphysical issue: the independent mind versus the second-hand mind.

The characterizations in The Fountainhead can be read on as many levels as the reader’s understanding permits. If he is interested only in the immediate motivation and meaning of actions, he can see that Roark is motivated by art and Keating by money. But if he wants to see more, he can also see the meaning of these choices and, deeper, what in human nature is at their root.

In Arrowsmith, by contrast, we learn that Arrowsmith is motivated by love for pure science—period. We learn nothing deeper about his motivation. The same applies to some of his fellow college students, who are motivated differently, by love for money or the desire for an easy practice. All this is motivation; and within the limits of these motives, the characters are well drawn. For instance, the character Angus Duer is the Peter Keating of the story—the smart, unscrupulous young man who is after money and prestige through manipulating people. He is presented clearly and consistently. The author does indicate what moves him. But he indicates merely the first onion skin.

If you are a perceptive but superficial observer and you look at people in real life, you can deduce one or two layers of motivation behind their actions. This is all that Lewis presents. By a “superficial” observer, I do not mean a stupid one (Lewis is by no means stupid). I mean “nonphilosophical.” I mean someone who does not think too abstractly about the nature of man or of human motivation.

In Romantic characterization, the reader is given as much human psychology as a writer’s ambition and ability permit. In Naturalistic characterization, by contrast, great physical detail is given about moving figures without any real psychology.

Observe what Tolstoy does in Anna Karenina. The central conflict is that a woman of stronger life energy leaves her mediocre husband to elope with a young officer. We never learn anything about the psychology of the characters. All we learn is that Anna Karenina has a desire for happiness and is impatient with her conventional husband; that her husband has a helpless, grasping desire to hold her; and that the young lover is sort of dashing and is really in love.

What is the meaning of a woman’s desire for happiness? Does a husband have the right to hold his wife by sheer convention, and what would that mean? If a young officer in nineteenth-century Russia (which was more mid-Victorian than any other European country) would ruin his career in order to elope with a married woman, what would make him do it?

“Sexual passion.” The book gives answers like that.

The subtler details of the psychological relationships, such as who says what at which moment, are very skillfully presented; Tolstoy’s characterizations are full of the kind of minute details one would observe if one watched a family tragedy through a transparent wall. But such details merely give one the first layer of motivation in the persons involved—which is all that Tolstoy presents. The deeper meaning of the motives is never given.

This is why I say that Naturalistic characters have no human psychology. They are human beings who have certain motives—and that’s that. The author goes no deeper than their immediately available motivation, nor do the characters themselves ever question their own souls or the deeper meaning behind their souls.

The reason why a Naturalist approaches characterization this way is his basic philosophical determinism. If one views man as a determined being, one necessarily does not go deeply into what makes him move. He is what he is. If he acts in a certain way, one says: “Well, then he has this kind of passion.” What makes a mind center on such a passion? A Naturalist does not ask this question; it is not relevant to his view of man. He takes men ready-made.

A Naturalist tells you that men act in a certain way, but not why they do so; or (if he is a serious Naturalist) he gives some indication, but a comparatively superficial one. He always stops short of any fundamental “Why?”—of any issue pertaining to all human beings. He never touches the universals of human behavior, because to do so would be contrary to the premise that men are determined. There is no place in the philosophy of determinism for wide, universal abstractions that govern human behavior and among which men have the power to choose.

The Romantic method, by contrast, goes down to fundamental abstractions. This is not to say that every Romanticist does so; but every Romanticist goes as deep as his personal ambition or his subject requires. The essence of the Romantic method is to present the universals motivating human action.

This is true even of Romantic literature that is not too serious. For instance, take Victor Hugo, who is not a serious student of human nature, but more the Romantic dramatist—and take Notre-Dame de Paris, which is the nearest parallel to Anna Karenina. Being the story of a priest’s love for a Gypsy girl, it also has the conflict of guilty passion as a general theme.

Even though Hugo does not give a detailed study of the priest’s psychology, he presents the essentials of the conflict of a man torn between a great religious devotion and a guilty bodily passion for a beautiful woman. By means of his story, he presents not merely the conflict of this priest with this dancer, but the whole soul-body issue, including the meaning of such a conflict; and his characterizations, while not too perceptive, are built on a level consonant with such a purpose.

Hugo presents the abstraction behind the particular conflict of the priest in a way that Tolstoy would never dream of doing. Being on the free-will premise, Hugo knows that a man’s actions are motivated by his choices, and that his choices go deeper than the immediate impulse of the moment. It is not an accident that this man is a priest. Why is he a priest? What basic view of life has made him devote his life to religion? And what conflict in that devotion has made him capable of betraying his religion? Hugo makes characterization an issue of free will all the way down to the roots of a human personality.

Tolstoy, by contrast, spends volumes detailing every movement and emotion and shading of voice of a woman torn between her duty to her husband and her love for another man—and we learn nothing about what in a human psychology would put a woman in such a position. We learn only that this woman happened to be caught in it because “she wanted to live.” Why did she want to live? One does not ask “Why?” Men are what they are.

Characters who represent moral or philosophical issues are usually called “archetypes.” I object to that word in this context, because an “archetype” is supposed to be a walking abstraction without individuality. The art (and difficulty) of Romantic characterization is to present the archetypical—that which is typical of any individualist like Roark or any second-hander like Keating—while at the same time giving enough specific detail so that the character comes across as this particular human being.

People refer to Romantic characterizations as “archetypes” not because the individuality is lacking, but because the abstraction shows, and shows by the author’s intention. The particular details of a personality are given, but they are never accidental or irrelevant; they are related to the wider abstraction and deeper motivation of the type of man presented.

Any reader can tell that The Fountainhead is a book not only about an architect from the 1920s to 1940s, but about any innovator in any period or profession. Why? Because I cover the essence of all the issues involved, starting with the most basic issue: the independent mind versus the second-hand mind. Everything I present relating to the conflict of Roark and Keating can be translated (changing only the professional details) into the struggle between any men representing these human attitudes in any profession at any time.

I present characters—in The Fountainhead and in everything else I have written—by means of that which is essential to men on certain kinds of premises.

Contrast this to the characterization of Arrowsmith, which contains a great deal that is totally accidental. Arrowsmith’s devotion to medicine can, as an abstraction, pertain to other doctors, or to any idealist in any profession. But his feelings toward his fraternity, his troubles in deciding what job to take, his hesitations in regard to women—these do not pertain to the issues of “ambitious doctor” or “struggling idealist,” or to anything else of a thematic nature. They are accidental details of the kind that might be present in any personality, but that have no wider significance.

This is the essence of a Naturalist’s approach to characterization. He presents a character whose universality—i.e., application to other men—is only statistical. For instance, he presents a typical Midwestern young man of a certain period, or a typical ambitious doctor. Then he gives that character accidental traits within the range of the statistical assignment. If these traits are consistent with the particular statistical type, the result is a good contemporary characterization. The reader feels: “Yes, I’ve seen that type of man.” But what comes across from the jumble of accidental details is merely the character’s immediate motivation, plus his temporal and geographical averageness.

Arrowsmith is an extremely intelligent presentation of the atmosphere of medical schools and medical careers of a certain period. When I first read it [in the 1920s], it seemed quite interesting, in the sense that an intelligent newspaper article about contemporary personalities is interesting. Today, Arrowsmith is like last year’s newspaper.

If one were to ask, “How does this story apply to any other profession than medicine, or to medicine in any other period than the one presented?” one could give only the most generalized answer. One could say: “In essence, every idealist, every man of integrity, will face a struggle.” That is all. Beyond the general conception of an idealist’s struggle, everything in the book is devoted to the minute details of Arrowsmith’s profession and period.

There are two ways in which people can regard characters in fiction and recognize them. For instance, one often hears that character X is “just like the folks next door.” This is the slogan of the Naturalistic school: its characters are “like the folks next door.” The people who consider such characters “real” are usually those who do not consider abstract characters real. They are the ones who tell me that I write about men who do not exist.

On the other hand, people who can think in terms of essentials tell me that I write about the kind of men they see all over the place. A number of people have told me the names of architects I never heard of, swearing that I copied Peter Keating from them. You can see why. Since I present the essence of that which creates a second-hander like Keating, they can recognize in him many men who do not have his particular appearance, mannerisms, or personal problems, but who have the same essence.

Now compare the following two scenes from Arrowsmith and The Fountainhead. In both, the author’s assignment is to present the relationship of the novel’s hero—a young student who will later become a brilliant scientist (Arrowsmith) or architect (Roark)—to the particular teacher whom he has selected and from whom he will get the proper training.

Read first the scene from Arrowsmith, which portrays Arrowsmith’s initial meeting with Max Gottlieb, the most brilliant and most unpopular professor at his school.

“Vell? Yes?”

“Oh, Professor Gottlieb, my name is Arrowsmith. I’m a medic freshman, Winnemac B.A. I’d like awfully to take bacteriology this fall instead of next year. I’ve had a lot of chemistry—”

“No. It is not time for you.”

“Honest, I know I could do it now.”

“There are two kinds of students the gods give me. One kind they dump on me like a bushel of potatoes. I do not like potatoes, and the potatoes they do not ever seem to have great affection for me, but I take them and teach them to kill patients. The other kind—they are very few!—they seem for some reason that is not at all clear to me to wish a liddle bit to become scientists, to work with bugs and make mistakes. Those, ah, those, I seize them, I denounce them, I teach them right away the ultimate lesson of science, which is to wait and doubt. Of the potatoes, I demand nothing; of the foolish ones like you, who think I could teach them something, I demand everything. No. You are too young. Come back next year.”

“But honestly, with my chemistry—”

“Have you taken physical chemistry?”

“No, sir, but I did pretty well in organic.”

“Organic chemistry! Puzzle chemistry! Stink chemistry! Drugstore chemistry! Physical chemistry is power, it is exactness, it is life. But organic chemistry—that is a trade for potwashers. No. You are too young. Come back in a year.”

Now read the scene from The Fountainhead, which portrays Roark’s initial meeting with Henry Cameron.

“Well?” said Cameron at last. “Did you come to see me or did you come to look at pictures?”

Roark turned to him.

“Both,” said Roark.

He walked to the desk. People had always lost their sense of existence in Roark’s presence; but Cameron felt suddenly that he had never been as real as in the awareness of the eyes now looking at him.

“What do you want?” snapped Cameron.

“I should like to work for you,” said Roark quietly. The voice said:

“I should like to work for you.” The tone of the voice said: “I’m going to work for you.”

“Are you?” said Cameron, not realizing that he answered the un-pronounced sentence. “What’s the matter? None of the bigger and better fellows will have you?”

“I have not applied to anyone else.”

“Why not? Do you think this is the easiest place to begin? Think anybody can walk in here without trouble? Do you know who I am?”

“Yes. That’s why I’m here.”

“Who sent you?”

“No one.”

“Why the hell should you pick me?”

“I think you know that.”

Roark then shows his drawings to Cameron. Now read the conclusion of the scene:

“God damn you,” said Cameron softly.

“God damn you!” roared Cameron suddenly, leaning forward. “I didn’t ask you to come here! I don’t need any draftsmen! There’s nothing here to draft! I don’t have enough work to keep myself and my men out of the Bowery Mission! I don’t want any fool visionaries starving around here! I don’t want the responsibility. I didn’t ask for it. I never thought I’d see it again. I’m through with it. I was through with that many years ago. I’m perfectly happy with the drooling dolts I’ve got here, who never had anything and never will have and it makes no difference what becomes of them. That’s all I want. Why did you have to come here? You’re setting out to ruin yourself, you know that, don’t you? And I’ll help you to do it. I don’t want to see you. I don’t like you. I don’t like your face. You look like an insufferable egotist. You’re impertinent. You’re too sure of yourself. Twenty years ago I’d have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure. You’re coming to work here tomorrow at nine o’clock sharp.”

“Yes,” said Roark, rising.

“Fifteen dollars a week. That’s all I can pay you.”

“Yes.”

“You’re a damn fool. You should have gone to someone else. I’ll kill you if you go to anyone else. What’s your name?”

“Howard Roark.”

“If you’re late, I’ll fire you.”

“Yes.”

Roark extended his hand for the drawings.

“Leave these here!” bellowed Cameron. “Now get out!”

In this scene, Cameron is speaking about a concrete—his own and Roark’s particular position in the world—but at the same time he is stating and emphasizing a wider issue—their stand against society as individualists and nonconformists. Cameron is saying: “We’re outcasts, we’ll have a terrible battle, I don’t want you to suffer as I did—but you have no choice, because I won’t let you sell yourself by going to anyone else.” This is the essence of the bond between the two men and the key to their fate in the book.

Compare this to the scene from Arrowsmith. Gottlieb too is a nonconformist and a lonely, idealistic fighter, although this is indicated more in the preceding narrative than in the scene itself. What is projected in the scene is Gottlieb’s contempt for the average students (“the potatoes”) and his eagerness to find serious disciples (those who wish “to become scientists”). In other words, he feels strongly about his science and is bitterly opposed to the conventional standards. However, since he is talking in concretes which illustrate merely that one level of abstraction, his speech has a nonphilosophical aura. He likes one type of student and is bitter about the other—period.

Cameron says openly that he and Roark are victims of society and fighters for their art; Gottlieb says nothing that indicates his wider position as a fighter for science. Instead, he focuses on the minutiae of his particular profession, such as the requirements for his course or the issue of organic versus physical chemistry. From a Naturalistic standpoint, these technical details are what makes the scene “real”; from a Romantic standpoint, they clutter it up. Observe that I do not have Cameron say: “I’ll teach you to design corner windows rather than Greek pediments.” But the Naturalist’s approach is precisely the inclusion of such details. “To be real,” he would say, “you’ve got to give the particulars.”

If the scene from Arrowsmith had been longer and fuller, and if it had shown the essence of the two men’s encounter, it could, even by the Romantic standard, have absorbed some of the technical details. The number of concrete details proper to include in a scene depends on its scale. But as the scene stands, one can only infer the essence, since what is shown directly is merely the technical dialogue. This is why I say that the scene is cluttered with details.

Whether a writer draws a character in essentials or in minute detail is determined by the depth of motivation he covers.

A Romantic characterization must not include too many particulars ; it can include only that which is essential to each layer of the onion skins—of the character’s motives.

For instance, the characterization of Cameron in The Fountainhead is very generalized. The reader is not told much about his life, his office, or his clothes. But what do I show about him? Not merely that he is a great man who is misunderstood by society and then drinks himself to death—but also the reasons behind it. Cameron is an independent man who has been broken by [an inimical] society; he is a man who could have been like Roark, but his premises and confidence were not strong enough. I bring everything I say about him down to the basic issue: a man’s mind against the minds of others.

All I present is the essentials. Therefore, while Cameron is Cameron, he also stands for any great man who, after a devoted struggle, is broken by society.

Gottlieb is presented much more intimately by Lewis. For instance, he makes a special kind of delicate European sandwich for Arrowsmith, he uses expressions like “Father Nietzsche” and “Father Schopenhauer,” and he refers to his days as a student in Heidelberg. This is good characterization; one does get the picture of the man, and in great detail—almost as if one had seen his photograph. But what does one learn about his motivation? Only one thing: that he is devoted to science and has contempt for worldly goods and human relationships.

Sinclair Lewis will beat me hollow on the perception of the particular. But the particular is all that the reader gets from him, with merely one or two underlying levels of motivation.

Incidentally, there are instances of crossbreeding in literature, Shakespeare being the best example. He presents his characters by means of their essence—the essence of a dominating father (King Lear), of a doubting intellectual (Hamlet), or of a jealous man (Othello). Yet Shakespeare is a determinist, and a [precursor] of the Naturalistic school; he believes that man is a plaything of fate, carrying within himself some tragic flaw that ultimately destroys him. For instance, Othello is jealous, but it is never explained why; he is simply possessed by jealousy as other men are possessed by greed or love. It’s in his nature, and he is helpless against it. Shakespeare presents human essences on the basis of the kind of determinist philosophy that most of mankind shares, which is one reason for his immortality. He is the grandest literary representative of that philosophy.

The critics who complain that Romantic characters are oversimpli fied “archetypes”—“just heroes and villains”—would say about the Roark-Cameron scene that it portrays merely “gruff old professor” and “idealistic student.” But it is actually the Arrowsmith-Gottlieb scene that portrays such stock characters.

Roark and Cameron are abstractions of profound issues—and the concretes which are shown indicate those issues. By contrast, Lewis presents many more details, but they do not add up to any consistent depth. The result is precisely a wooden archetype like “gruff old professor”—because nobody can retain all the tiny, insignificant details. They vanish from the reader’s mind, and the abstraction that remains represents merely the first onion skin of motivation. The characters are overdetailed and never fully real.

Now observe that nobody would normally speak the way Cameron does, nor would a professor in Gottlieb’s position normally speak as he does merely because he saw something promising in a student. What, then, would make an admirer of Naturalism consider Gottlieb realistic, as opposed to Cameron? The touch of the ludicrous.

When Gottlieb says, “I do not like potatoes, and the potatoes they do not ever seem to have great affection for me, but I take them and teach them to kill patients,” his idea is simply: “They send me too many mediocrities. I don’t like mediocrities.” But his use of a homey, undignified metaphor—“potatoes”—gives him a touch of the ludicrous, the vulgar, the nonheroic. He is made “human”; he is given verbal feet of clay. That is what would make a reader on the Naturalist premise say: “Yes, he’s real. People do talk that way.”

In fact, they do not talk that way. Further, Gottlieb is not supposed to be an average man; he is supposed to be a man of genius. But to a Naturalist, a man cannot be an exception; he has to be a statistical average. Just as, according to the saying, no man can be a hero to his valet, so, according to Naturalism, no character can be a hero to his author. In Naturalistic literature, therefore, if a man is presented as great, he will always have a tragic flaw, a human infirmity, feet of clay. There will always be an undercutting touch—and no undercutting is more deadly, artistically, than humor. Nothing is better calculated to make a great man appear ludicrous than a touch of humor at the wrong time.

On the other side, what a Naturalist would object to in Cameron’s speech is not anything Cameron specifically says, but the fact that his speech is direct, undiluted, purposeful. It is not a method of Naturalism to focus anything sharply.

Let us now ask: Is Arrowsmith a realistic character and Roark an unrealistic one?

Both of the above scenes present a young man with a serious purpose, starting out on a serious career, and I would say that Arrowsmith is ten times more unrealistic and unnatural than Roark. He says: “I’d like awfully to take bacteriology this fall instead of next year,” and “Honest, I know I could do it now.” I submit that no serious, dedicated young man ever talks that way.

An intelligent young man with a purpose is, in his late teens and early twenties, particularly solemn and formal. He might be shy and unable to express himself fully, but then, the shyer and more uncertain he is, the more formal he will be. If such a young man approaches someone he admires in his profession, he does not come across like a college football player, saying: “Oh, gee, honest.” Had Lewis genuinely been watching reality, he would have presented Arrowsmith in any way but this.

Arrowsmith’s stammering embarrassment and nonserious enthusiasm reflects the atmosphere of collegiate dialogue of his period. It represents Lewis’s statistical abstraction of an average college kid; it does not represent anyone’s realistic picture of a serious young man approaching a professor he reveres.

Now consider Roark. He comes to the man he worships and calmly says, “I should like to work for you,” implying: “I’m going to work for you.” No young man, a Naturalist would object, could be that poised and self-assured. My answer is: That depends on what kind of young man one is talking about and what premises he has set himself.

When I say that no serious young man would act like Arrowsmith, am I going by the statistical method? No; I am going by logic. It is in the nature of a serious young mind not to be casual about its concerns.

But if I were to follow the Naturalistic method of studying real people, I would submit as an example Leonard Peikoff, whom I met when he was seventeen and who was very much afraid of meeting me—afraid in the sense of “awed.” He had a long list of philosophical questions he wanted me to answer, but when he came to my house, he asked his companions if they would please go in and let him stay in the car. (I learned this only years later.) When he did come in, he was obviously ill at ease, in the sense not of foolishness, but of tension. So I asked him: “How did you like the drive?”—trying to do a little small talk to help him relax. And it was he, at seventeen, who said: “Well, let’s get down to business.”

That is what I would present if I were a Naturalist—only then it would be Romanticism.

Like everything else in writing, a characterization cannot be created by conscious calculation.

Take the Roark-Keating scene. Suppose you made a list of Roark’s virtues—independent, rational, just, honest—and decided to consult that list each time you came to a line of dialogue. You would not be able to make Roark utter a single line. Nothing would occur to you; and even if something did, you would have to spend a month figuring out: “If Roark says, ‘Why not?’ does that conform to the list? Or if he says, ‘Oh well, I didn’t mind it,’ does that conform?”

In other words, you cannot figure out consciously the kind of implications I explained when I compared the two Roark-Keating scenes—and I mentioned only the crucial points of difference between the scenes. I could spend two full lectures explaining the implications of and motivations behind the lines in those two scenes alone. It is as complex as that.

You cannot create a character from philosophical abstractions alone; you cannot approach characterization merely by telling yourself: “My hero will be independent, just, rational.” The process is indirect—you must know how to use your subconscious. You must know how consciously to prepare it so that it will make the right selections for you.

Your characterizations will never be better than your power of observation. A human mind does not first conceive of floating abstractions and then, by means of them, recognize the concretes; in order properly to grasp an abstraction, you must derive it from concretes. To prepare your subconscious for writing proper characterization, therefore, you must be a good observer and introspector.

You constantly react to people—you approve or disapprove, like or dislike, are encouraged or uneasy. You estimate emotionally everyone you meet. Learn to introspect in the sense of accounting for what in a person causes your reaction. Do not go through life saying: “I don’t like X. Why? How do I know? I just don’t like him.” That will never make you a writer. Instead, if you feel a strong dislike for someone, then, as your artistic assignment, identify what you dislike, and by what means you observed it.

For instance, a man is rude to you, and you do not like it. What in particular is rude? Is it the implication of what the man says? Is it his voice or manner? Why do you dislike it? File this in your subconscious. Another time, you meet a man who is charming. Do not merely say: “I don’t know why, but I like this man. He’s wonderful.” Identify: What is charming about him? How does he convey it? How did you observe it? File this away. By being a constant, conscious valuer of people, you gather the material from which you will draw your future characterizations.

If you have learned a great many abstractions that you have not yet connected to concretes, do the reverse. For instance, if you decide that you favor independence, observe which words or gestures or manners of people convey independence to you. And, conversely, observe what conveys dependence. What conveys honesty? What conveys dishonesty? You can observe these characteristics only by their outward manifestations—by the words, actions, gestures, and subtler mannerisms of people.

When your subconscious is stocked with such well-filed material—when your concretes are filed under the proper abstractions and your abstractions are amply illustrated by concretes—then you can approach an assignment such as “present a characterization of Roark.” And then, if you tell yourself that he is independent, honest, and just, your subconscious will throw at you the kind of concretes that make you feel, while writing a scene: “Yes, Roark would say this, but he would not say that.”

The best, most natural dialogue is usually written as if the writer is listening to dictation. You might get stuck on any particular point and have to question yourself; but normally, dialogue writes itself. You have an idea of the scene, and when you write, the dialogue “just comes” to you—exactly as, in a conversation, your own answers come to you. That is, you speak from your premises, knowledge, and estimate of the situation.

In writing dialogue, you must react on two or more premises. As Roark, you speak from a certain premise; as Keating, you say something else. Your mind must know the connection between certain abstractions and their concrete expressions so well that you can write for three or five or any number of people, constantly switching premises in your mind. You cannot do this by conscious intention. You must reach the stage where the process feels “instinctive”—where, the moment when you speak for Roark, you have a sense of what he would say, and when Keating has to answer, you have a sense of what he would say.

This sudden “feel” of a character is not a mystical talent. In the process of writing, you feel that you “just know” what Roark or Keating would say; but this feeling means only that your understanding of the premises involved has become automatic.

When I wrote the Roark-Keating scene, I did not think consciously of those implications of each line that I explained earlier. But when I write a line inspirationally, I can tell myself why it is in character, and why another line would be out of character. To judge the objective validity of what you write, you must be able afterward to tell yourself why a given line is right for one character (what it conveys) and why something else is right for another character (what it conveys). After the writing, you must be able to do the kind of analysis I did of the Roark-Keating scene.

At first you should do this kind of analysis every time you write something, in order to train yourself in the process. Later, all your rational justifications will be in order and available to your conscious mind, but you will not have to check on them each time. You will know by a lightning-like sum what kind of touch is right, and why it is right.

Also, when you begin writing, write only as much as you are sure of. Do not force your characters into artificial behavior; do not say arbitrarily: “I don’t know what he’d say, so I’ll put in the first line available.” If you do not know what a character would do or say, you simply have to give it some more thought.

When I create a character, I find it helpful to project him visually. This gives me a concrete focus so that the character does not float in my mind as a mere collection of abstract virtues or vices. Seeing his appearance is like having a physical body on which I can hang the abstractions.

That is how Roark was created. I did not base him on any particular human being; but the start of the character in my mind was the image of a redheaded man with long legs and gaunt cheekbones. I formed as clear an image of his figure as I could, and this became the focus for all the abstract characteristics I had to give him. I have done the same for all of my heroes.

In regard to villains and characters who are neither particularly good nor bad, I find it helpful to focus on some acquaintance or public figure—not on the details of this person, but only on the essence. In the case of Toohey, I had in mind four living journalists and writers. I did not think of any one of them in specific detail, nor did I study their writings or lives. But my total impression of them gave me valuable clues to the manifestations of certain basic premises. These figures were the concretes that helped me to hold it all in my mind. This was the preliminary gathering of material.

Then, one day, some acquaintances invited me to a lecture by a liberal at the New School for Social Research. I felt that it would be immoral to go; but they insisted that the lecturer was not leftist, that he was a brilliant speaker, and that they had already bought the tickets, so I went. And there was Toohey in the flesh, in personal appearance and manner. [The speaker was the British Labour Party politician Harold Laski.]

When he spoke, that man projected infinitely more than the specific content of his ideas. It is true that he was not particularly liberal—that is, he was the most vicious liberal I have ever heard in public, but not blatantly so. He was very subtle and gracious, he rambled on a great deal about nothing in particular—and then he made crucial, vicious points once in a while. My foolish acquaintances did not know what was going on, but I did, and I thought: “There is my character.”

I did not read anything about him; I did not care to know much. But what I gained from his appearance and way of speaking was the lightning-like sum of the kind of personality that certain premises would produce. Anytime I would ask myself, for instance, how Toohey would act toward his niece, or what his attitude would be toward young love, I had only to remember the image of that man on the speaker’s pulpit and I would know unerringly what his type would do.

I was using an abstraction, not a concrete. I was not copying a real-life model; from a political lecture, I had no way of knowing what the speaker’s attitude would be toward a niece or young love. He served merely to concretize and anchor certain abstractions in my mind.

Years later, I learned that the speaker’s career was in fact somewhat like Toohey’s: he was always the man behind the scenes, much more influential than anybody knew publicly, pulling the strings behind the governments of several countries. Finally he was proved to be a communist, which he did not announce himself as or blatantly sound like. This demonstrates my “writer’s instinct.” I observed the total impression of the man, I derived my own concretes, and in many instances they were similar to the facts—proving not that I was clairvoyant, but that I had grasped the right abstractions and translated them correctly.

This is the method I recommend (but if it seems too cumbersome, do not treat it as a duty). You do not literally copy a person; you use him as a concretization of something too complex to hold in your mind as a mere philosophical or literary description.

The result is that you have a sense of what your character would do or say without having to figure it all out in advance. You have caught the basic tone, the key, of a personality.

8

Style I: Depictions of Love

When I was writing Atlas Shrugged, I spent a long time planning the scene where Francisco comes to Dagny in the country. Many issues had to be integrated in this very complex scene, and I was exhausted after days of walking and thinking on the road in front of my house in California. One day I told [my husband] Frank that I was tired of planning the scene. He knew about its content, and, not too seriously, he told me: “Oh, that’s simple. All you have to say is: ‘He rushes up the hill, he seizes her in his arms, he kisses her—and she likes it.’ ”

Everything between that sentence and what you read in Atlas Shrugged comes under the department of style.

The swiftness of Francisco’s movements was carrying him toward the hill while he was raising his head to glance up. He saw her above, at the door of the cabin, and stopped. She could not distinguish the expression on his face. He stood still for a long moment, his face raised to her. Then he started up the hill.

She felt—almost as if she had expected it—that this was a scene from their childhood. He was coming toward her, not running, but moving upward with a kind of triumphant, confident eagerness. No, she thought, this was not their childhood—it was the future as she would have seen it then, in the days when she waited for him as for her release from prison. It was a moment’s view of a morning they would have reached, if her vision of life had been fulfilled, if they had both gone the way she had then been so certain of going. Held motionless by wonder, she stood looking at him, taking this moment, not in the name of the present, but as a salute to their past.

When he was close enough and she could distinguish his face, she saw the look of that luminous gaiety which transcends the solemn by proclaiming the great innocence of a man who has earned the right to be light-hearted. He was smiling and whistling some piece of music that seemed to flow like the long, smooth, rising flight of his steps. The melody seemed distantly familiar to her, she felt that it belonged with this moment, yet she felt also that there was something odd about it, something important to grasp, only she could not think of it now.

“Hi, Slug!”

“Hi, Frisco!”

She knew—by the way he looked at her, by an instant’s drop of his eyelids closing his eyes, by the brief pull of his head striving to lean back and resist, by the faint, half-smiling, half-helpless relaxation of his lips, then by the sudden harshness of his arms as he seized her—that it was involuntary, that he had not intended it, and that it was irresistibly right for both of them.

The desperate violence of the way he held her, the hurting pressure of his mouth on hers, the exultant surrender of his body to the touch of hers, were not the form of a moment’s pleasure—she knew that no physical hunger could bring a man to this—she knew that it was the statement she had never heard from him, the greatest confession of love a man could make. No matter what he had done to wreck his life, this was still the Francisco d’Anconia in whose bed she had been so proud of belonging—no matter what betrayals she had met from the world, her vision of life had been true and some indestructible part of it had remained within him—and in answer to it, her body responded to his, her arms and mouth held him, confessing her desire, confessing an acknowledgment she had always given him and always would.

In effect, what takes place in the scene is exactly what Frank said. The difference between his sentence and the final execution depends on the style.

That which can be synopsized in a brief sentence—theme, plot, characterization—is the “what” of a novel or play. Style is the “how”—it is that which cannot be synopsized.

You have probably heard that some story “isn’t much, but it’s the way it’s done.” This remark is warranted when the plot or message is slight, but the style good.

I divide the issue of style into two broad categories: the selection of content and the selection of words.

The “selection of content” is those aspects of an assignment that a writer chooses to communicate. For instance, in describing a room, one writer might give a minute catalogue of its every object. Another writer might select the essentials, that which gives the room its character. A third writer might say something neither exhaustive nor essential, but inconclusive, such as: “It was a narrow room with pale walls and some chairs.”

In the Dagny-Francisco scene, what I really had to present was Frank’s synopsis sentence. But what kind of elements would I include in order to describe how Francisco rushes up the hill, or how he seizes Dagny in his arms, or what she feels? Would I describe the scenery? include dialogue? narrate their thoughts? That is selection of content.

The “selection of words” is what is commonly understood by “style”: a writer’s choice of words and method of constructing sentences. Here you will see, as we study examples, the most startling variations. As with fingerprints, there are as many possible styles as there are men. No matter what the number of people who share the same philosophy, no one need ever be imitative of another’s style. In the selection and order of words, so many possibilities exist that you never have to worry about whether you will achieve an individual style. You will achieve it; but only if you do not aim at it consciously.

Style is the most complex of the elements of writing, and must be left to “instinct.” I have explained why even plot and characterization cannot be created fully by conscious calculation, but depend on subconscious, automatized premises. This is even more true of style.

In style, form follows function. In other words, what determines your style is your purpose—both in the book as a whole and in each paragraph or sentence. But given the number of issues involved in even the simplest story, there is no way to calculate the function and form consciously. Therefore, you have to set your literary premises and then write without self-consciousness. Write as it comes to you, on such premises as you have.

Do not decide to have a “brusque” style, a “dramatic” style, a “sensitive” style, or whatever nonsense you might have heard in literary schools. No such lines can be drawn. Above all, never imitate anyone else’s style. Some writing schools ask students to write a story in the style of Sinclair Lewis, and another one in the style of Thomas Mann, and another one in the stream-of-consciousness style. Nothing could be deadlier: this is a sure way never to acquire a style of your own. A style comes from the combination of all of a writer’s purposes and premises (and not only his literary ones). You cannot borrow another man’s soul, and you cannot borrow his style. You would only be a cheap imitator.

Write as purposefully and clearly as you can, on your own premises, and your style will develop with practice. If you have set yourself some literary premises, the elements of your future style will be apparent in your first attempts. But it is impossible for anyone to have a recognizable style of his own prior to practicing. Given the complexity involved, a style has to become automatic before it can be thoroughly individual and polished.

If, after some years of work, you feel that your way of expression is not right, you have to do more thinking about what you do and do not like in literature. Identify what your style is missing, what category the error belongs to; then identify the right premise, which will enable you to express things more exactly or colorfully.

But never try to force a style. When someone is writing in a phony manner, it is as apparent as a neon sign. It is much better, even if your writing is slightly awkward, to be natural.

I have selected some passages which I consider stylistically typical. They fall into three groups: the first six quotations deal with the subject of love, the next two are descriptions of nature, and the last four are descriptions of New York City. By seeing different writers treat the same subjects, you will be able to better identify their stylistic differences.

Look for what is accomplished in each quotation, and for the means by which it is accomplished. Identify first the “what”—the author’s assignment; and then the “how”—the selection of content and of words.

In the first six quotations, as I said, the author’s assignment is to present love, particularly the intensity of love.

From Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

[The woman in these two different passages is Dagny Taggart, the man is John Galt. The “temple” is a powerhouse containing a motor which runs on atmospheric electricity and which has been invented by Galt.]

She was suddenly aware that they were alone; it was an awareness that stressed the fact, permitting no further implication, yet holding the full meaning of the unnamed in that special stress. They were alone in a silent forest, at the foot of a structure that looked like an ancient temple—and she knew what rite was the proper form of worship to be offered on an altar of that kind. She felt a sudden pressure at the base of her throat, her head leaned back a little, no more than to feel the faint shift of a current against her hair, but it was as if she were lying back in space, against the wind, conscious of nothing but his legs and the shape of his mouth. He stood watching her, his face still but for the faint movement of his eyelids drawing narrow as if against too strong a light. It was like the beat of three instants—this was the first—and in the next, she felt a stab of ferocious triumph at the knowledge that his effort and his struggle were harder to endure than hers—and then he moved his eyes and raised his head to look at the inscription on the temple....

She collapsed, face down, on the bed. It was not the mere fact of physical exhaustion. It was the sudden monomania of a sensation too complete to endure. While the strength of her body was gone, while her mind had lost the faculty of consciousness, a single emotion drew on her remnants of energy, of understanding, of judgment, of control, leaving her nothing to resist it with or to direct it, making her unable to desire, only to feel, reducing her to a mere sensation—a static sensation without start or goal. She kept seeing his figure in her mind—his figure as he had stood at the door of the structure—she felt nothing else, no wish, no hope, no estimate of her feeling, no name for it, no relation to herself—there was no entity such as herself, she was not a person, only a function, the function of seeing him, and the sight was its own meaning and purpose, with no further end to reach.

My method here is to lead the reader to a certain abstraction—that this is a strong, violent love—by giving him a special kind of concretes. I select those touches of Dagny’s experience that are essential to the nature of her feeling. How does the reader know that her feeling is not, say, a light infatuation? The concretes given do not pertain to infatuation.

To project the full reality of the scene, I present not merely what Dagny feels, but also that which she is responding to. Her emotion is not an introspective one; she feels it because she is looking at Galt in a certain place in a certain context. So I present, by means of essentials, a setting that creates a mood consonant with her emotion.

Possibly, a bird flew across the trees in this moment, or a butterfly fluttered somewhere. Dagny might even have been aware of these, on the edge of her consciousness. But to include them would have been disastrous. That would have been to follow the Naturalistic method of including accidental details; whereas I focus only on the essentials of Dagny’s feeling and of the setting.

I always reproduce human awareness as it is experienced in reality, assuming a certain kind of character. (For instance, Dagny is not a woman who would be unaware of the exact nature of what she experiences. I showed that kind of psychology in the passages dealing with James Taggart.) In this moment, when Dagny is fully aware for the first time of her feeling for Galt, she would not think, “I’m madly in love,” or “Love is an important value.” One does not think like that. I project and reproduce that which would be the focus of Dagny’s awareness.

The beginning of the first passage suggests Dagny’s sudden physical awareness of Galt. “She was suddenly aware that they were alone; it was an awareness that stressed the fact, permitting no further implication, yet holding the full meaning of the unnamed in that special stress. They were alone in a silent forest, at the foot of a structure that looked like an ancient temple—and she knew what rite was the proper form of worship to be offered on an altar of that kind.” I suggest sex; it is a deliberate hint, without using the word. This passage follows a description of Galt’s temple, which contains his invention; and I have planted earlier that Dagny regards sex as the expression of achievement and of one’s highest values. The statement “she knew what rite was the proper form of worship to be offered on an altar of that kind” reminds the reader that the sight of a great achievement would lead Dagny to think of sex; my use of words like temple, rite, and altar, which connote religion or high values, reminds him that she considers sex a sacred value. The reader connects it all lightning-like in his mind: “Yes, she would feel that way, because of her attitude toward love and achievement.”

The statement “she knew what rite was the proper form of worship to be offered on an altar of that kind” is literarily much stronger than, say, “she felt that she wanted to sleep with him.” It is stronger because I make the reader draw the conclusion.

The next sentence brings the passage from the abstract down to the immediate moment, giving the sensory reality of Dagny’s experience. Observe the slant: “She felt a sudden pressure at the base of her throat”—obviously a sexual emotion—“her head leaned back a little, no more than to feel the faint shift of a current against her hair”—a purely sensuous description—“but it was as if she were lying back in space, against the wind”—a deliberate stress on sexual connotations—“conscious of nothing but his legs and the shape of his mouth.” Had I said “conscious of nothing but him,” it would have been too generalized (and not worth a cent). What is she conscious of? His legs and his mouth. These concretes emphasize her consciousness of one particular aspect of him, and thus one purpose. (In a more intellectual context, she would perhaps have been more conscious of his eyes.)

In the next sentence, I do the same in regard to him. “He stood watching her, his face still but for the faint movement of his eyelids drawing narrow”—first a physical description—“as if against too strong a light.” Since no strong light is involved in the scene, the implication is: “against too strong a feeling.” That is all I want to suggest; the context does the rest.

A difficult problem in emotional scenes is how to project that which, though made of different elements, would be experienced as one impact. In the next sentence, my technique is almost self-explanatory : “It was like the beat of three instants—this was the first—and in the next, she felt a stab of ferocious triumph at the knowledge that his effort and his struggle were harder to endure than hers—and then he moved his eyes and raised his head to look at the inscription on the temple.” Here I want the reader to think that he experienced the whole sentence as one. But he cannot experience it as one; I have to give the steps. So I start by unifying the steps into one whole—“It was like the beat of three instants”—and then I break it down into the three instants, which add up to the kind of progression that in real life would be experienced as one emotional impact.

In the second passage, I had one of the most difficult assignments: to present a violent emotion. The more violent an emotion, the less one is able to identify what it is made of. One just feels it, as a unity. “I feel something violent, and there are no words for it, and it can’t be broken down into anything.” I had to break the emotion down into the kind of concretes that Dagny would not really be thinking of, but that the reader would sum up into monomania.

I do it partly by means of negatives; I say what it is that Dagny does not have. “A single emotion drew on her remnants of energy, of understanding, of judgment, of control”—by concretizing the elements which are normally present in a consciousness, but which Dagny is now losing, I convey that hers is a violent emotion—“leaving her nothing to resist it with or to direct it.” I remind the reader that Dagny normally would not be at the mercy of a single emotion; but now she is.

Then I project that what she feels is love: “She kept seeing his figure in her mind—his figure as he had stood at the door of the structure—she felt nothing else, no wish, no hope, no estimate of her feeling, no name for it, no relation to herself—there was no entity such as herself, she was not a person, only a function, the function of seeing him. ” To have said that she wanted to sleep with him, or that she realized she loved him, would have been weaker than saying that she is reduced to nothing but seeing his figure in her mind. Such conclusions as “I am in love with him” or “I want to marry him” are abstractions. They are thoughts, and would come later. The actual emotion would be experienced precisely as an extreme awareness of the other person, which is the essence of falling in love.

The conclusion conveys just that: “and the sight was its own meaning and purpose, with no further end to reach. ” This is the extreme state of being in love, where the issue is not sex, or any purpose, but (to put it colloquially) only the awareness that the loved one exists—which then fills the whole world.

I make human epistemology my guide—in the selection of content and of words. I present the material as a human mind would perceive it in reality. All perception is selective. We are not cameras; in any given situation, no one sees everything. We see that which interests us, that which our values require us to focus on. When I write, I substitute my selectivity for the reader’s; I present those highlights I want him to observe and leave him no room to focus on anything else. His awareness will then follow as if the material were actual reality. But he will be observing reality as I observe it—i.e., from my viewpoint, according to my value choice. (He can then decide what he thinks of these values, which is a different, private matter.)

My writing is both highly slanted and objective. It is slanted in that I select the focus; it is objective in that I do not tell the reader what to see or feel. I show it.

If I have an unimportant connecting sentence such as “They walked toward the car,” that is telling, not showing—but then, by virtue of the matter’s unimportance, there is nothing to show. Given the selectivity of human perception, this is how you do in fact experience a transition. If, in the middle of an important conversation, you are walking toward a car, you are aware, barely, of your direction; but that is not where your focus is. I use the same method to choose my content and my words.

I do not present the reader with anything but direct sensory evidence. The author, in my style, never speaks—yet the author is consciously pulling every string. I give the reader nothing but concrete, objective facts—slanted in such a way that he will have only the impression I intend him to have.

From Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo [translated by Ayn Rand]

From that day on, there was in me a man whom I did not know. I tried to use all my remedies, the cloister, the altar, the work, the books. Folly! Oh! science rings so hollow when one beats against it in despair a head full of passion! Do you know, young girl, what I always saw thenceforth between the book and me? You, your shadow, the image of the luminous apparition that had once moved across the space before me. But that image did not have the same color any longer; it was somber, ominous, dark like the black circle that pursues for a long time the sight of the reckless one who has looked fixedly at the sun.

Unable to get rid of it, always hearing your song humming in my head, always seeing your feet dancing on my prayer book, always feeling at night, in dreams, your shape slipping against my flesh, I wanted to see you again, to touch you, to know who you were, to see whether I would find you comparable to the ideal image I had kept of you, to shatter my dream perhaps by means of reality. In any case, I hoped that a new impression would efface the first, and the first had become unbearable to me. I sought you. I saw you again. Disasier! When I had seen you twice, I wished to see you a thousand times, I wished to see you always. Then—how can one stop on that steep descent into hell?—then I did not belong to myself any longer. The other end of the string that the devil had attached to my wings, he had tied it to your foot. I became a vagrant like you. I waited for you in doorways, I looked for you on street comers, I watched you from the top of my tower. Each evening, I returned to myself more charmed, more desperate, more bewitched, more lost! ...

Oh, young girl, have pity on me! You believe that you are unhappy, alas! alas! you do not know what unhappiness is. Oh! to love a woman! to be a priest! to be hated! to love her with all the fury of one’s soul, to feel that for the least of her smiles one would give one’s blood, one’s guts, one’s character, one’s salvation, immortality and eternity, this life and the next; to regret that one is not king, genius, emperor, archangel, God, that one might place a greater slave under her feet; to embrace her night and day with one’s dreams and with one’s thoughts; and to see her enamored of a soldier’s uniform! and to have nothing to offer her but the squalid cassock of a priest that will arouse her fear and her disgust! ... Do you know what it’s like, that agony you are made to endure, through the long nights, by your arteries that boil, by your heart that bursts, by your head that splits, by your teeth that bite your hands; by these relentless tortures that keep turning you without respite, as upon a red-hot grid-iron, upon a thought of love, of jealousy and of despair! Young girl, mercy! relax for a moment! toss a few ashes on that flame! ... Child! torture me with one hand, but caress me with the other! Have pity, young girl! have pity on me!

Hugo’s assignment here is to convey the priest’s intense passion and conflict. He conveys it by means of concretes—the priest does not merely say, “I suffered and I thought of you,” he gives concretes—and the concretes are not irrelevant details; they underscore the essence of the priest’s feelings. So Hugo and I have this in common: we deal in concretes and in essences.

For instance: “I tried to use all my remedies, the cloister, the altar, the work, the books.” The priest does not say, “I tried to fight it,” which would have been a generalization; he states the particular remedies he tried.

“Do you know, young girl, what I always saw thenceforth between the book and me? You, your shadow.” This is a typically Romantic touch. Had he said, “I kept seeing your picture in my mind,” that would not have been as strong as “between the book and me.” One can almost see the girl dancing across a prayer book; the image is extremely colorful, and convincing, because it is specific. It gives one a sense of how he experienced his emotion—of how his concentration was broken by her image—which one would not get from a generality like “I constantly thought of you and nothing helped.”

“Unable to get rid of it, always hearing your song humming in my head, always seeing your feet dancing on my prayer book”—again, concretizations which convey exactly what he experienced—“always feeling at night, in dreams, your shape slipping against my flesh.” In one English-language edition, the translator says “seeing you in my dreams,” which is a bromidic generalization and exactly the kind of sentence that Hugo would not write.

Observe the dramatic simplicity and concretization with which the priest gives his reasons for wanting to see the girl again: “I wanted to see you again, to touch you, to know who you were, to see whether I would find you comparable to the ideal image I had kept of you, to shatter my dream perhaps by means of reality.... I sought you. I saw you again.” Then he describes the consequences, and again he makes them concrete. He does not say: “From then on, I was helplessly committed to my passion.” He says: “I waited for you in doorways, I looked for you on street comers, I watched you from the top of my tower.” Preceding this scene, a great deal has been established about the cathedral of Notre-Dame and its towers. The line “I watched you from the top of my tower” is thus an excellent concretization that evokes the whole context in the reader’s mind: he can see the priest standing on the tower and the girl dancing in the square below.

“Oh! to love a woman! to be a priest! to be hated!” Strong concretes, naming the essence of the conflict. “To feel that for the least of her smiles one would give one’s blood, one’s guts, one’s character, one’s salvation, immortality and eternity, this life and the next.” Had he said, “I would give anything for your favor,” it would have been a floating abstraction. “And to see her enamored of a soldier’s uniform!”—not “of a stupid soldier,” which would have been a weaker statement of the same idea—“and to have nothing to offer her but the squalid cassock of a priest. ” By contrasting the garments, he projects the whole difference between the two lives: his own austere life versus the glamorous (in the girl’s eyes) life of the soldier. This skillful use of two small concretes conveys the essence of the whole situation. “Do you know what it’s like, that agony you are made to endure, through the long nights, by your arteries that boil, by your heart that bursts, by your head that splits, by your teeth that bite your hands.” He does not say: “I was tortured by the thought of you, night and day”; he gives particulars of how he experienced his torture—strong, startling particulars. The line “by your teeth that bite your hands” is a very good touch. The others are all exaggerations—arteries do not literally boil, a heart does not break, his head was not splitting—but one feels that he did bite his hands, and this conveys his agony very convincingly.

The line “torture me with one hand, but caress me with the other!” states the whole issue of the priest’s conflict. It is an impossible thing to ask, but that is what makes it so dramatic an expression of his predicament: what he is asking of the girl is the impossible.

Although the priest does terrible things in the novel, one is never convinced that he is a total villain. Hugo obviously intended him as a villain, but, psychologically and philosophically, he was not sold on the idea. This conflict between Hugo’s conscious convictions and his deepest, subconscious view of life shows in his style.

If Hugo’s full conviction had been that the priest’s passion is evil, the priest’s way of speaking of his passion would have been much less attractive. He would have projected something ugly or sadistic—a perverted or evil feeling. But instead he speaks of his love in so romantic a way—the examples selected are so glowing and beautiful—that the reader necessarily feels sympathy for him (and so does the author).

In this passage, there are no exalted sentences in defense of religion. When the priest mentions religion, it is always in a blasphemous manner. In this particular projection, religion means nothing to him; he wants to put God under the girl’s feet—which is wonderful, but not the way to project an evil passion.

If Hugo’s own viewpoint had been what it ostensibly is—if he had really considered the priest a villain for his conflict—he would have presented the passion less attractively and religion more forcefully. But Hugo’s subconscious is so much on the side of love and of this earth that I say: “May his God help him!”

Throughout the novel, the priest keeps announcing that his passion is “fate.” In fact, earlier in his speech to the girl, he states that he lost the battle against temptation because God did not give to man a power as strong as the devil’s. This is a deterministic premise. But what an author might have his characters say, or even what his own stated philosophy might be, is an issue totally different from what his actual, subconscious premises are—as this speech illustrates.

The speech expresses a violence of emotion that can come only from the possibility of choice. An automaton does not experience violent emotions. In literature written on the determinist premise, emotions of pain can be convincingly portrayed, but never a violent passion for a specific object on earth.

Observe the priest’s self-assertion. He constantly tells how he tried to fight his passion; then, when he felt the desire to see the girl again, he watched and waited for her. He constantly talks about what he did; and he is begging her to have pity on him, by which he means: consent to love him. He is acting on his passion. He has decided that he cannot fight it any longer, so now he will try to win her. And his emotional violence has one purpose: “If I can convince her of the greatness of my love, then maybe I can win her.” This is a man in charge of his own destiny.

If a man in a Naturalistic novel has a passion he cannot resist, there is an enormous tone of whining, amounting to: “Poor little me, I couldn’t help it.” Here, although the priest uses begging terms like have pity on me and mercy, his tone is not one of complaint.

I have already identified the method common to Hugo and me. Let me now point out certain differences between us.

First, Hugo permits more comment from the character himself—and thus from the author—than I would have done. For instance, the priest says: “But that image did not have the same color any longer; it was somber, ominous, dark like the black circle that pursues for a long time the sight of the reckless one who has looked fixedly at the sun. A man talking of a passion might possibly use a metaphor. But here the priest is too literary: he turns an elegant phrase that Hugo himself might have written in narrative. This somewhat detracts from the reality of a man talking desperately and passionately.

Hugo is less concerned than I am with the exact (although slanted) re-creation of reality; he tends to interfere with his own presentation rather than stick to showing. This is more apparent in his narrative passages than in dialogue: in narrative, he often editorializes to the point of it being Hugo speaking. Incidentally, he comes across as the most fascinating speaker: the writing is brilliant; he always has something colorful to say. But he is nonobjective in permitting the presence of the author as a narrator.

Most nineteenth-century novelists did that. They editorialized constantly, even using expressions like “Now, gentle reader, we will let you in on a secret.” This is a method of fiction writing which cannot be justified logically.

In the nineteenth century, writers were on the premise of writing as raconteurs, almost like the medieval troubadours who went around singing sagas. The author projected himself as a charming or witty personality—or an erudite one, like Hugo. But since the author did project himself, you have to read the novels of that time on two levels—which interrupts the reality. You are constantly taken out of the story itself, because you are listening to the narrator, and then you go back into the story.

This was merely a literary fashion, which was dropped—and ought to stay dropped. (Some people attempt to revive it, in a bad manner.) To remind the reader that somebody is telling him the story is to introduce an irrelevant element that destroys the attempt to re-create reality; it is as if a painter were to leave his brush in a comer of the canvas to remind you that he painted it. Fiction is an atheistic universe: you are the God who is creating it, but there must not be any God in your writing.

(If you write in the first person, you incorporate the narrator into the fabric of the story. In effect, the author becomes a character. Dostoevsky often does it; he writes a novel from the viewpoint of some character in a small town who never takes any part in the action, but who is the local chronicler—and that permits him to have editorial asides.)

The other difference between Hugo and me concerns a certain kind of repetition, which goes beyond what is necessary to convey the confusion of a priest confessing a guilty love to a girl. Some things are said over and over, in ways which do not fully add to the preceding.

Hugo’s style consists in projecting above all the emotion involved. As a Romanticist of the first order, he knows that one does not project emotions qua emotions; he knows that emotions come from one’s premises and one’s evaluations of concretes. But he is much less concerned than I am with the intellectual meaning of the emotions he projects, and with the intellectual method of projecting them.

Of the two styles, mine is more masculine, if by “masculine” we mean a tight economy of intellectual content. Even if I write about violent emotions, I weigh every word for its direct meaning, for its connotations, for what it adds to the sentence. Mine is a more controlled presentation; Hugo’s is much freer.

The second of the two passages I quoted from Atlas Shrugged was written inspirationally. It was written as I advise: write as it comes to you, then edit. But when I edit, I consider every word: “Is this word extraneous or necessary? Why do I want to keep it?” That particular passage I went over ten times, and few changes were made. But I could write it that way only because my premises were set to this kind of purposefulness and economy of expression; as a result, my subconscious did not produce much that was extraneous.

On other passages, my subconscious did not function as well—and that meant ten rewrites. I do not even have a manuscript page copied until I have made so many corrections on it that I can no longer use that sheet of paper; I experiment on the same page with ten different ways of wording a sentence. The reason is that I cannot compose a sentence word for word. I can only write it, then weigh it: “Sounds right. Why is it right?” If I can give the answer, it stays. If it is not quite right, why is it not? If I can grasp why, I rewrite it on the new premise. Sometimes I cannot grasp why, but the sentence simply does not sound right. Then I try writing it different ways, until I suddenly see: “Yes, this is what was missing.”

Hugo would not work like this; as is obvious through all of his writing, he does not strive for such minute precision. It is as if his brushstrokes are wider and more “impressionistic” than mine, whereas while mine are wide, someone who approached them with a microscope would see that every strand was put there for a purpose.

Offhand, I will not say which method is better. It is a metaphysical issue. The fact that Hugo is consciously on the Christian-altruist code of values, and subconsciously not at all on it, is one reason why he would not look for extreme rational precision. That would not be part of his view of life, or, therefore, of his writing. Granting him his values and premises, his method is right for him.

In the above passages from Atlas Shrugged and Notre-Dame de Paris, the theme—the emotion of love—was conveyed by means of particulars chosen to represent the essence of that abstraction. This method is the essence of the Romantic approach to style.

The next passage, in contrast, is by Thomas Wolfe.

From Of Time and the River by Thomas Wolfe

Ah, strange and beautiful, the woman thought, how can I longer bear this joy intolerable, the music of this great song unpronounceable, the anguish of this glory unimaginable, which fills my life to bursting and which will not let me speak! ... Oh magic moment that is so perfect, unknown, and inevitable, to stand here at this ship’s great side, here at the huge last edge of evening and return, with this still wonder in my heart and knowing only that somehow we are fulfilled of you, oh time! ... Ah secret and alone, she thought—how lean with hunger, and how fierce with pride, and how burning with impossible desire he bends there at the rail of night—and he is wild and young and foolish and forsaken, and his eyes are starved, his soul is parched with thirst, his heart is famished with a hunger that cannot be fed, and he leans there on the rail and dreams great dreams, and he is mad for love and is athirst for glory, and he is so cruelly mistaken—and so right! ... Oh passionate and proud!—how like the wild, lost soul of youth you are, how like my wild lost father who will not return!

He turned, and saw her then, and so finding her, was lost, and so losing self, was found, and so seeing her, saw for a fading moment only the pleasant image of the woman that perhaps she was, and that life saw. He never knew: he only knew that from that moment his spirit was impaled upon the knife of love. From that moment on he never was again to lose her utterly, never to wholly re-possess unto himself the lonely, wild integrity of youth which had been his. At that instant of their meeting, that proud inviolability of youth was broken, not to be restored. At that moment of their meeting she got into his life by some dark magic, and before he knew it, he had her beating in the pulses of his blood—somehow thereafter—how he never knew—to steal into the conduits of his heart, and to inhabit the lone, inviolable tenement of his one life; so, like love’s great thief, to steal through all the adyts of his soul, and to become a part of all he did and said and was—through this invasion so to touch all loveliness that he might touch, through this strange and subtle stealth of love henceforth to share all that he might feel or make or dream, until there was for him no beauty that she did not share, no music that did not have her being in it, no horror, madness, hatred, sickness of the soul, or grief unutterable, that was not somehow consonant to her single image and her million forms—and no final freedom and release, bought through the incalculable expenditure of blood and anguish and despair, that would not bear upon its brow forever the deep scar, upon its sinews the old mangling chains, of love.

One can gather that, on seeing each other for the first time, these two persons feel something violent for each other; at least the author’s loud words convey that such was his intention. But he has not carried out his intention.

The reason is: floating abstractions. Take the first sentence. “Ah, strange and beautiful, the woman thought.” What is strange and beautiful? Is it life, or love, or the man she sees? “How can I longer bear this joy intolerable, the music of this great song unpronounceable, the anguish of this glory unimaginable, which fills my life to bursting and which will not let me speak!” One does not know the joy of what, the music of what song, what glory; one can only gather that the woman is feeling an emotion of some kind.

Wolfe is trying to convey an emotion directly, primarily by means of adjectives. You can observe here the unsatisfactory result of having adjectives without nouns and specific content—i.e., attributes without entities. One cannot convey the quality of something without conveying what that something is.

It is a bromide among editors that bad writing can be judged by the number of adjectives used. This is not an absolute standard, but it is true that beginners often use too many adjectives. Why? Because it is the easiest and laziest method of describing something. When Wolfe wrote “joy intolerable,” “song unpronounceable,” and “glory unimaginable,” he evidently felt that if he put in three of these adjectives, they would somehow do something. Properly speaking, one would do—or ten, if each said something that contributed to the sentence.

Observe also the archaism of putting the adjective last: “joy intolerable,” “song unpronounceable,” “glory unimaginable.” This is permissible when the content warrants it (there is nothing that one can never do in writing, unless it is irrational). But here the author attempts to substitute form for content: he attempts to convey the importance of the moment by substituting the form of an exalted feeling for the content which he has not conveyed.

In style, form follows function. If you convey the content of a strong emotion, you can use as loud a form as you wish because the content will support it. Similarly, if you wonder whether an adjective is superfluous, remember that you can do anything if your content permits it. But never substitute words for meaning.

Also, the easiest thing on earth is to call something “a song” or to speak about “the music” of something, “music” always connoting strong emotion. “Love is like music” or “architecture is music” or “poetry is music”—you have seen this ad nauseam. If warranted by the content, and if done in an original manner, it is permissible to compare something to music. But do not attempt to convey exaltation simply by saying “the music of this great song.” What song?

Someone once told me that no writer should ever say “indescribable” —if it is not describable, then do not describe it. Here the author spends a whole sentence on “song unpronounceable,” “glory unimaginable.” When an author says, “This is unutterable,” he is confessing inadequacy. It can have no other meaning; unutterable to whom? An author should not intrude his personal writing problems on the reader; the reader is following the events of the story, not the mechanics of the author’s mind.

“Oh magic moment that are so perfect, unknown, and inevitable.” Why is the moment “perfect,” “unknown,” and “inevitable”? There is no reason for these adjectives, except that they vaguely suggest something exalted or important. And what is meant by “somehow we are fulfilled of you, oh time!”? The author gives us the form of a sentence but no actual meaning; he is counting only on the connotations of the words. That is improper by the rules not only of literature, but of plain grammar.

Words are means of communication and must be used for their denotation. One of the beauties of a good literary style, as opposed to a dry synopsis, is that it combines clear denotation with the skillful use of connotation. But one can connote something only in relation to something. One cannot have connotations, which are relationships, without specifying any of the entities bearing these relationships.

“Oh magic moment.” It is permissible, and can be very effective, to use the word oh as an extreme expression of a particular emotion—when justified by the content. Observe that when Hugo used it—“Oh, young girl, have pity on me!”—there was a definite reason for the exclamation; the priest was appealing for pity. Here, by contrast, Wolfe uses the word oh merely to describe an emotion.

Also, never use the word magic in a positive sense. It is a lazy writer’s word. To say that something is “magical” is too easy, just as mysticism is too easy a way out of philosophical problems. Mysticism is not at all easy psychologically, but it is, philosophically. Similarly, the word magic is not easy if you want to achieve a proper effect, but it is very easy literarily: if you do not know how to describe something, you say: “Oh, it’s magical.”

“Ah secret and alone, she thought.” The intention of this description is clear: the young man looks as if he has something secret about him. But to call him a “secret” man is an indefensible foreshortening. I do not mean that the author should have used an overprecise sentence like “The man looked as if he had a secret”; to be overprecise here would be out of the emotional key. And it is difficult to maintain clarity while conveying a strong emotional mood. But it is not proper to convey it by means of bad grammar. An old literary bromide says that when you write about boring people, you, the writer, do not have to be boring. The same applies here: you cannot convey an incoherent emotion by means of incoherent writing.

Incidentally, the one good line up to this point is in the preceding sentence: “to stand here at this ship’s great side, here at the huge last edge of evening and return.” An evening and a return do not literally have an edge, but here one need not be grammatically pedantic. This whole passage is preceded by the description of a ship docking in the evening, and therefore the meaning of “the huge last edge of evening and return” is clear: the vastness of returning home in the evening. Here Wolfe does combine an emotion with a specific, physical description.,

But then he repeats the same trick, very badly: “he bends there at the rail of night.” This is too foreshortened.

Next, the author states one idea three times by means of synonyms: “his eyes are starved, his soul is parched with thirst, his heart is famished with a hunger that cannot be fed.” This is an example of not writing by means of essences. If Wolfe wanted to convey the idea of spiritual hunger, and convey it strongly, his task was to find the strongest expression he could for such a hunger. His dilemma here was that none of these metaphors is strong enough by itself to convey what he wanted. But stating something three times does not make it stronger; it makes it three times weaker.

The last part of this sentence contains some specific meaning, and it is almost good: “he is mad for love and is athirst for glory, and he is so cruelly mistaken—and so right!” Here the author indicates what about the man impresses the woman. With direct simplicity, the sentence conveys her impression of him, her estimate of his future, and her philosophy (her view is that he is right to expect love and glory, but is destined for disappointment—which indicates a malevolent view of the universe on her part). The author says something specific, and he says it once. If, in the preceding, he had given some grounds for the woman’s conclusion by describing the man’s face or expression, this would have been a good sentence.

“Oh passionate and proud!—how like the wild, lost soul of youth you are, how like my wild lost father who will not return!” The reference to the woman’s father spoils the emotional mood of the passage and destroys the preceding description of the young man, which emphasizes his youth, ambition, and future. A hymn to a woman’s first meeting with her beloved cannot end on a family recollection. That is a real anticlimax.

Then the meeting is taken up from the standpoint of the young man. “He turned, and saw her then, and so finding her, was lost, and so losing self, was found.” Again, the author is playing for effect by means of words instead of content. It takes minutes to figure out what the sentence means: “Well, finding her, he was lost. How? Oh, by falling in love. Losing self, he was found. By whom?”

“He never knew: he only knew that from that moment his spirit was impaled upon the knife of love.” This is an extremely ugly image: it connotes meat on a skewer or a soldier in a bad movie falling on a sword through his stomach. Admittedly, the metaphor is philosophical: the author regards love as a knife because it leads to disaster. But to make it so specific that one sees the man’s spirit falling on that knife is inexcusably ugly.

“From that moment on he never was again to lose her utterly, never to wholly re-possess unto himself the lonely, wild integrity of youth which had been his.” Observe the overuse of the word wild. It is bad to “ride” a word—to use it over and over, so that the reader becomes conscious of the repetition. In most books, editors have told me, the author rides some particular expression. Here, Wolfe does it within one page.

The above sentence does at least convey a specific thought: that this is the end of the man’s youthful independence. But then the next sentence expresses exactly the same thought: “At that instant of their meeting, that proud inviolability of youth was broken, not to be restored.” Wolfe should have used one sentence or the other, but not both.

“... henceforth to share all that he might feel or make or dream, until there was for him no beauty that she did not share, no music that did not have her being in it, no horror, madness, hatred, sickness of the soul, or grief unutterable, that was not somehow consonant to her single image and her million forms.” The thought is good: the woman will hereafter be part of every important moment of the man’s life. It is also good that Wolfe tries to specify the moments; here he is writing by means of essential details. But the terrible overwriting destroys the dignity of the thought: “horror, madness, hatred, sickness of the soul, or grief unutterable. ” A writer has to know when to stop.

The best part of this sentence is: “that was not somehow consonant to her single image and her million forms.” Wolfe has communicated not only his meaning, but also its emotional quality. To have said “her personality and its different aspects” would have been a dry synopsis; “her single image and her million forms” is both specific and Romantic. But to reach the meaning of the emotion Wolfe is conveying, the reader has to break through some dreadful verbal weeds.

“—and no final freedom and release, bought through the incalculable expenditure of blood and anguish and despair, that would not bear upon its brow forever the deep scar, upon its sinews the old mangling chains, of love.” Wolfe is trying to suggest some great suffering, but it cannot be done by piling up synonyms. Never use words like blood, anguish, and despair together; one means essentially the same as the others. And if you mean despair, then anguish is too weak a word; if you mean blood, then both anguish and despair are anticlimaxes.

What kind of philosophy comes across in Wolfe’s style? First, a malevolent view of the universe, which he reveals not merely in such particular statements as “he is so cruelly mistaken,” but in the whole tone of “This is torture, but it’s wonderful,” “This is fate, and we’re helpless.” Inherent in his style is an implication of human helplessness in the face of emotion and destiny.

But the main philosophical implication of Wolfe’s style is subjectivism. A man who approached reality objectively would not write this way; he would not, for instance, relate what the two persons saw in each other without giving any indication of the physical means by which they inferred it all. Wolfe, however, does not identify what causes his own emotions, and therefore has no idea how to communicate those emotions to others; all he knows is that certain semipoetic expressions appeal to him, and he tries to communicate emotions by means of these. They are not the proper means.

In this whole passage from Wolfe, there is a very meager selection of content and an enormous overweight of language. The content could be conveyed in two sentences; the rest is extra words. This is not to say that a first meeting between lovers must be described in two sentences. No, you can write four pages on it—if you have something to say.

Thomas Wolfe’s style is the archetype of what I call, borrowing from modem sculpture, the “mobile” style: it is so vague that anyone can interpret it as anything he wishes. This is why his appeal is usually to people under twenty. Wolfe presents an empty mold to be filled by any reader, the general intention being aspiration, undefined idealism, the desire to escape from the commonplace and to find “something better in Life”—none of it given any content. A young reader recognizes the intention and supplies his own concretes—if he does not hold the writer responsible for conveying his own meaning, but is willing to take him merely as a springboard.

I cannot do that. I do not collaborate with what I read in any such manner.

From Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

Sound of mating birds, sound of spring blossoms dropping in the tranquil air, the bark of sleepy dogs at midnight; who is to set them down and make them anything but hackneyed? And as natural, as conventional, as youthfully gauche, as eternally beautiful and authentic as those ancient sounds was the talk of Martin and Leora in that passionate half-hour when each found in the other a part of his own self, always vaguely missed, discovered now with astonished joy. They rattled like hero and heroine of a sticky tale, like sweat-shop operatives, like bouncing rustics, like prince and princess. Their words were silly and inconsequential, heard one by one, yet taken together they were as wise and important as the tides or the sounding wind.

The purpose of this passage, which follows the first meeting of Martin and Leora, is to present the essence of their romance.

“Sound of mating birds, sound of spring blossoms dropping in the tranquil air, the bark of sleepy dogs at midnight; who is to set them down and make them anything but hackneyed?” Here the author openly confesses incompetence, saying in effect: “I have only the hackneyed to say about this, but that’s in the nature of things. Nobody could do otherwise.” Not all Naturalists reveal their writing problems by telling the reader about them (which is improper from any literary standpoint); nevertheless, it is the Naturalist premise that makes Lewis do it. On the Naturalist premise, a writer describes “things as they are,” not things as they ought to be. The method of selection is not a value judgment, but a statistical one. Consequently, when Lewis wants to present a setting or connotation proper to love, he will think only of the hackneyed—which is the statistically average.

“And as natural, as conventional, as youthfully gauche, as eternally beautiful and authentic as those ancient sounds was the talk of Martin and Leora.” Here Lewis confesses the Naturalist premise: “This is hackneyed, but it is natural and authentic.” Natural and authentic to whom? As a Naturalist, he does not ask this question. He describes love from the statistical viewpoint.

His fidelity to what he thinks is reality—meaning: the statistical and the average—is also obvious when he says “youthfully gauche.” The majority of young lovers may be youthfully gauche, but that is not a law of human nature. I submit that any outstanding young people are more romantic and dramatically outspoken than they become later on. Yet the kind of young man or girl who will say, “Oh, gee, darling, you know, I’m kind of smitten,” that is Lewis’s (and Hollywood’s) idea of young love.

Calling this “eternally beautiful” is again a confession of the statistical standard. “This is what most lovers act like; and, of course, love is beautiful; therefore, this is its beautiful form.” The Naturalist does not project the values which ought to be, and so he presents love not in its highest form, but strictly in its statistical form.

The last part of this sentence is good in that it says something specific (and true) about the nature of love: “each found in the other a part of his own self, always vaguely missed, discovered now with astonished joy.” This is specific—and general. It pertains to the essence of love more than do “mating birds” and “spring blossoms.”

The next sentence is the writing of a repressor. “They rattled like hero and heroine of a sticky tale, like sweat-shop operatives, like bouncing rustics, like prince and princess. ” Lewis wants to convey that love is important and that a romance is happening between Martin and Leora, but at the same time he is apologizing to any cynical “realist” who is not in sympathy with romantic feeling. He in effect says: “Romantic scenes might be accused by the sophisticated of being sticky. All right, I’ll admit it, I’ll smile at it myself—so don’t take it too seriously. But still I consider love important.” To make the scene more “true to life,” he then selects the lowest possible forms of couples: “sweat-shop operatives” and “bouncing rustics.” He in effect acknowledges: “By the statistical standard, there are more sweat-shop operatives and bouncing rustics than princes and princesses, so I’ll include them. I am paying my dues to reality. But still Martin and Leora were like a prince and princess, or at least that is how they felt.”

The last sentence is again the confession of a writer’s impotence: “Their words were silly and inconsequential, heard one by one, yet taken together they were as wise and important as the tides or the sounding wind. ” Lovers usually have a kidding romantic code which might be silly objectively, but which has meaning to the two persons subjectively. This phenomenon is one of the hardest things for any writer to communicate on paper, so Lewis solves the problem by saying descriptively: “Yes, the individual words are probably silly, but the sum is important because it expresses intimacy and love.” This is inexcusable literarily. A writer who wants to be true to reality should undertake here to convey the romantic code of lovers. It would be difficult, but it can be done.

Observe that the two Romantics I have presented, and the in-between case of Thomas Wolfe, all made a big to-do (to put it in Sinclair Lewis’s style) about the issue of love; they focused on it in detail. By contrast, Lewis spends pages describing Martin’s school and Leora’s hospital [he is a medical student and she a nurse]; then, when the Naturalist comes to that which makes life important—their first romance—he gives it a short, semisatirical paragraph. This is not an accident. Not all Naturalists are as inhibited as Lewis, who has a quality here of the repressed Romantic, but the essence of their method is always the same.

From Star Money by Kathleen Winsor

They went into his room and took off their clothes, smiling at each other and without self-consciousness. Johnny was undressed first and he lay down on the bed, his hands behind his head, watching her. Shireen turned, stepped out of her petticoat and faced him. Her eyes had turned dark and her face lapsed into sudden serious intensity, as if she wondered how he would find her; but also as if she had lost Shireen Delaney and came toward him only as a woman, a part of time and every woman who ever lived. She sat beside him on the bed, leaning forward, one hand lifting and moving to touch his hair. He reached out and took hold of her and all at once he grinned.

“Chocolate cake with peppermint frosting—that’s you.” His hands touched her breasts lightly. “You’re all the favors wrapped up in one package.”

Shireen gave a sudden triumphant ringing laugh and he pulled her down against him.

This passage is typical of what is known as “magazine writing.” The words are completely inconsequential; the style, lacking any emotional or intellectual significance, is merely one step above a plain synopsis. The particular quality of magazine writing is that almost anything can be said or can happen.

The author does show—I assume, unintentionally—what love means to the woman in the scene. In a moment of passion, all she is thinking about is how the man will find her when she takes off her clothes; and when he finds her to be a chocolate cake, she gives a triumphant ringing laugh. She passed the test. All that love means to this woman is reassurance to her ego—a self-esteem derived from somebody else’s appreciation.

The description here is totally meaningless and unemotional—but then the author apparently remembers that she is writing a love scene and that something important has to be said. So she slings some tired, superficial generalities: “as if she had lost Shireen Delaney and came toward him only as a woman, a part of time and every woman who ever lived.” I think she was trying to say something like “This is love, which would have the same meaning for every woman in every time.” Then, having done her duty by love’s significance, she goes back to the magazine style: “She sat beside him on the bed, leaning forward, one hand lifting and moving to touch his hair. ”

The dialogue is Naturalism (if one can call it anything at all) in that the author is using what she considers realistic slang. She probably thought: “This is how a real he-man talks.” Of course, nobody talks like that, not even in a bad Hollywood movie. (Even magazine fiction is not that ridiculous.)

If you ever attempt to write without full awareness of what you are saying, why you are saying it, and what you are writing about, this will be the result. This is somebody who is writing in a half-dazed state, not projecting the reality or the emotional or intellectual meaning of her subject matter, but merely slinging words together while drawing on the subconscious residue of her impressions of similar scenes from other stories.

From By Love Possessed by James Gould Cozzens

In recollection’s light, first to be noted was the plain fact that, by standards of what was later learned, the feelings affording a young man his state of love, of being in love, were largely factitious. This was not by any means to say that they were false or pretended; but, still, they had not, as the young man himself was likely to imagine, arisen spontaneously. In theory, the feelings resulted when love magically and mysteriously seized on him; in theory, that was what love did. In practice, love did nothing of the kind. He, the truth usually was, seized on love. A young man heard and read of a thing called love. Love was praised everywhere as pure, noble, and beautiful. Love did have to do with the commerce between the sexes; but love as described clearly could not have to do with sex—the physical urges of nature that he knew about. Those had been denounced to him as evil and impure, the associates of what he joined in calling (even if he fairly frequently indulged in them) dirty jokes, dirty thoughts, dirty practices. What those were, must be everything true love wasn’t. Love knew them not. Love, manifestly, was out of this world. Love’s high feelings, at once so exciting and so presentable, could, moreover, be had, apparently, by anyone. A young man would not be long in resolving to have some....

... To the rules of high-mindedness, the flesh is imperfectly amenable. Kisses however chaste, caresses however decent, if the exchange of them is kept up, must have the flesh soon shaping to its natural end, projecting its actual objective. A discipline of mind was required. The witching hour was to be saved intact by a division of consciousness; one part excluding rigidly all that engaged the other part. Held separate, thoughts on the plane of moonlight and roses could proceed regardless of the lower animal. Or, at least, they could so proceed to a point. Due to that blameless neglect of Hope’s to call the halt she (the fair, the chaste, the inexpressive she!) had no need to call; and to her partner in petting’s reluctance to leave, since he was free to remain, there had been awkward occasions when the animal (disregarded by the hour and teased too far) reacted of a sudden, put to the shilly-shally so long imposed its own unpreventable end. Arthur Winner Junior—confusion in the moonlight; dismay among the roses!—was obliged to conceal as well as he could a crisis about which his single shamed consolation was that Hope, anything but knowing, would never know what had happened.

This is not an unselective, unvaluing recording. The author’s value judgments are obvious. Yet it is intended as a Naturalistic recording of “things as they are.”

Observe all the slanted writing. For instance, the author describes as a fact of nature the hero’s attitude toward love. He does not say that this was the attitude of a particular young man—he describes it in generalized terms, as if all young men fall in love only because they have heard about it. “A young man heard and read of a thing called love. Love was praised everywhere as pure, noble, and beautiful.” Since love is praised, according to the author, a young man will be motivated by such praise.

All young men in fact feel nothing, Cozzens implies; they merely tell themselves they feel something because they hear that other people feel it. This amounts to saying that the psychology of all young men is ten times worse than what I presented, in The Fountainhead, in the character of Peter Keating.

“Love as described clearly could not have to do with sex—the physical urges of nature that he knew about. Those had been denounced to him as

evil and impure.” This is a false and awful view of sex—the Christian-mystical view. Cozzens presents the most vicious code of values—man is helpless, sex is a stupid physical urge belonging to his lower animal nature, his “high” feelings are merely a silly romantic illusion—yet he does not state that this is the view of his hero or of the hero’s social group. These value judgments are the ones conventionally held by most people, Cozzens believes, and so he does not consider them estimates. He considers them facts of human nature.

The two elements which constitute style are content (what an author chooses to say) and use of words (the way he says it). Not only is what Cozzens says about man and love horrible; there is something extremely repulsive about the manner in which he says it. If one were to identify the essence of his style in one word, that word would be sneer. Cozzens is sneering—at love, and at man as such.

Observe his repetitions, which are not accidental (nor are they as innocent as those of Thomas Wolfe, who repeated things for poetic or rhythmical purposes). At the beginning, he says: “the feelings affording a young man his state of love, of being in love, were largely factitious.” He uses the phrase “state of love, which is a formal statement of his subject, then adds the colloquial “being in love.” Why? In order to sneer at the reader on the side: “If you’re so stupid that you don’t know what the ‘state of love’ is, I am making fun of that state which you will recognize better as ‘being in love.’ ” (The repetition also adds another element: awkwardness; deliberately planned awkwardness.)

“In theory, the feelings resulted when love magically and mysteriously seized on him; in theory, that was what love did.” The purpose of this repetition is again to imply the stupidity of the reader. Cozzens is saying: “In theory, love does such and such. In theory, that’s what love does. You can’t get a thought the first time, so I’ll tell it to you with a patronizing sneer a second time.”

Cozzens claims that love, in theory, comes magically out of nowhere, and then he says: “In practice, love did nothing of the kind.” Since “theory” here means reason or thought, the implied conclusion is that man is unable to think.

This is a good example of how the alleged opposition between theory and practice is always presented. A foolish and illogical theory is first set up, and then the author triumphantly shows that it does not work in practice. In this passage, Cozzens takes the tritest, most superficial of theories—that love is blind—and proceeds to say that it is not so. His purpose—and the purpose of the whole theory-practice opposition—is to show that man’s mind is impotent to deal with reality or with his own emotions. A man believed one thing about love and, in reality, found something else. The question to ask is: If he believed the kind of nonsense which Cozzens presents, is the fault in man’s mind or in this particular man’s foolishness? But Cozzens does not ask that question. His intention is the undercutting of the mind and the degradation of man.

The next stylistic trait to observe is Cozzens’s stodgy writing style—a satire on the long, involved, awkward sentences of mid-Victorian novels—which he intersperses with deliberately vulgar bromides like “moonlight and roses,” “the lower animal,” and “out of this world.” They are included to remind the reader that “I, the author, am now condescending to speak your language, which would be ‘moonlight and roses’ and ‘out of this world.’ ” The implication is that the reader will not understand such ponderous talk as “manifestly” or “state of love” or “commerce between the sexes,” so the author will let his hair down once in a while with vulgarities which the reader will understand. This deliberate use of ugly, inexpressive bromides in the middle of the awkward archaic style is one reason why the writing is so unattractive. And it is another means for Cozzens to convey his metaphysical sneer.

The style of this quotation will make any sensitive reader uncomfortable. The insult to his intelligence is built into the sentences; it is there in the choice both of what the author says and of the way he says it.

One cannot grasp the author’s meaning at the first reading, not because his style is so subtle and profound, but because it is so involved grammatically. For instance: “Due to that blameless neglect of Hope’s to call the halt she (the fair, the chaste, the inexpressive she!) had no need to call; and to her partner in petting’s reluctance to leave, since he was free to remain, there had been awkward occasions when the animal (disregarded by the hour and teased too far) reacted of a sudden, put to the shilly-shally so long imposed its own unpreventable end.” This is not bad writing in the sense that Cozzens could not do any better; it is good writing by his standard, i.e., it is what he intended, and it probably took hard work, because no one writes like this naturally. If by “art” we mean an intention purposefully carried out, this is high art. What one can quarrel with is the intention.

The intention is the deliberate destruction of the reader’s mental efficacy. The grammatical structures make it impossible for the reader to follow a thought. “Due to that blameless neglect of Hope’s to call the halt she (the fair, the chaste, the inexpressive she!) had no need to call.” By phrasing the sentence differently, the author could have left the reader grammatical time to remember the character of Hope, then said what Hope failed to do—which would have been the logical order. Instead, he interrupts the thought at the most awkward point, between the subject and the verb, she and had. Why? Precisely to throw the reader off for a moment; i.e., not to allow his mind to proceed to a complete thought.

He does the same in the second half of the sentence: “there had been awkward occasions when the animal (disregarded by the hour and teased too far) reacted of a sudden.” For the reader to grasp it, a thought has to progress in a certain time sequence; but here the author again interrupts in the middle of the thought, throwing the reader into an aside and making him scramble mentally to catch the original intention. Cozzens deliberately puts the reader’s mind into an unfocused, nonrational state of wandering all over the map.

One has to watch carefully the between-the-lines implications to know what Cozzens is actually talking about in this sentence. In this respect, he is imitating the special kind of mid-Victorian prissiness which consists of being very bashfully indirect in talking about sex—and the more indirect, the dirtier the implications of what one dares not say openly.

What he is doing is illustrating the theory of love expressed in the first part of the quotation. That is, even though the young man had decided that love has nothing to do with sex, and even though the young couple tried to keep their relationship chaste, things would happen against the young man’s will; and Cozzens does not mean normal intercourse. The style of this—the mere fact that he is not talking about an actual affair, but about something totally unnecessary to mention—makes this passage typical of Cozzens. Writing in the spiritual style of four-letter words, he goes out of his way to make something ugly which is not necessarily ugly at all.

The best-drawn character in anyone’s writing is the author himself. None of the above passages deals with philosophy directly, yet the author’s philosophy is present—in what he chooses to say and in how he says it. In this sense, a fiction writer cannot hide himself. He stands naked spiritually.

You cannot create a style artificially, composing each sentence word by word and then weighing each word: “How does this fit with my official dogma?” A writer’s style comes from his accepted philosophy—accepted in his subconscious.

Just as, in your general behavior as a human being, your premises “will out”—they will come out in many subtle ways, and any conflict you might have will show, particularly in emergencies—so in your writing your premises will out. If your conscious philosophy has sunk into your subconscious and become automatic, that will show in your style. If your conscious philosophy is not fully assimilated—if you have premises contradictory to it in your subconscious—that will show. If you have good premises, that will show. If you have god-awful premises, then, in the passage from Cozzens, you have just seen an example of the result.

If you are not satisfied with what comes out of your subconscious, you can correct it by conscious thinking. But do not censor yourself in the process of writing. That cannot be done successfully. To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be.

Just as man is a being of self-made soul, so a writer is a being of self-made style. Both are made by the same process—by a man’s being fully convinced of certain premises to the point where they become subconscious and automatic.

9

Style II: Descriptions of Nature and of New York

From Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

She sat at the window of the train, her head thrown back, not moving, wishing she would never have to move again.

The telegraph poles went racing past the window, but the train seemed lost in a void, between a brown stretch of prairie and a solid spread of rusty, graying clouds. The twilight was draining the sky without the wound of a sunset; it looked more like the fading of an anemic body in the process of exhausting its last drops of blood and light. The train was going west, as if it, too, were pulled to follow the sinking rays and quietly to vanish from the earth. She sat still, feeling no desire to resist it.

This description illustrates the art of combining denotation and connotation.

My assignment was to describe a sunset seen from the window of a train—a dismal sunset that would match Dagny’s mood in this scene. I give the reader precise information about the sight by means of those details which convey its essence; and I convey the mood by the kind of words and metaphor I select. Unlike Thomas Wolfe, I do not try to convey the mood apart from that which creates the mood. Instead, I carefully select words that both convey the exact physical details and have specific connotations.

For instance, in the phrase “a solid spread of rusty, graying clouds,” the word rusty conveys not only the color, but also something dismal. In the next sentence, the word twilight has connotations of sadness. And the best part of this description is: “The twilight was draining the sky without the wound of a sunset.” Since a sunset would look like a wound across the sky, the metaphor is visually appropriate and helps the reader visualize a sunset; and by saying that the sky was being drained without the wound of a sunset, I convey, by means of a negative, both the exact description and the mood. Then I continue the metaphor in the same style: “it looked more like the fading of an anemic body in the process of exhausting its last drops of blood and light. ” When I say “and light,” I bring the metaphor back to the concrete reality of the sunset and the evening.

Suppose I had started by saying: “It was evening and she sat at the window of a train. The twilight was draining the sky without the wound of a sunset.” That would have been a floating abstraction. I first have to give specific details: there is a brown stretch of prairie, the sky is covered with clouds, they are of a rusty shade so that one would not see the sun setting. Then the metaphor “without the wound of a sunset” becomes convincing. To start with such a metaphor would be vague and unclear, because the question would be: Where did the sunset go?

In the next sentence, the words all have a downbeat, twilight feeling. “The train was going west”—this connotes the sunset and evening—“as if it, too, were pulled”—it is not even going of its own power—“to follow the sinking rays and quietly to vanish from the earth. ” This is a literal description, since the train is going west, but by saying “quietly to vanish from the earth,” I imply more than merely vanishing into the sunset. I imply destruction and hopelessness, and the feeling of “your days are numbered,” which is the emotional key of this chapter.

According to my metaphysical view, nature is of interest to a human being only as his material or setting. I therefore always describe nature as a background for man, never as an end in itself considered separately from the characters or the scene taking place. (This is a point open to debate. If a writer attaches some special value to the description of nature, I would say that he has a wrong premise; but one could not say that, in carrying out his premise, he is guilty of overwriting.)

The above description is written from Dagny’s viewpoint; she is sitting at the window of a train, and this is what she sees. However, observe that I could have written the same description without referring to anyone sitting at a window, since I describe what the place and the sunset actually look like. I do not project Dagny’s emotions into the description.

When we come to the last quotation, from Thomas Wolfe, you will see a different approach. In his description of New York, he does not differentiate between what is being seen and what the character feels.

From Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen

The road from Closter Seven to Hopballehus rises more than five hundred feet and winds through tall pine forest. From time to time this opens and affords a magnificent view over large stretches of land below. Now in the afternoon sun the trunks of the fir trees were burning red, and the landscape far away seemed cool, all blue and pale gold. Boris was able now to believe what the old gardener at the convent had told him when he was a child: that he had once seen, about this time of the year and the day, a herd of unicorns come out of the woods to graze upon the sunny slopes, the white and dappled mares, rosy in the sun, treading daintily and looking around for their young, the old stallion, darker roan, sniffing and pawing the ground. The air here smelled of fir leaves and toadstools, and was so fresh that it made him yawn. And yet, he thought, it was different from the freshness of spring; the courage and gaiety of it were tinged with despair. It was the finale of the symphony.

This is one of the most beautiful descriptions I have read in the Romantic style. (Primarily a writer of fantastic stories, Isak Dinesen is hard to classify; but she is certainly nearer to being a Romanticist than a Naturalist.)

First the author gives a general idea of the setting: it is a winding road rising through pine forest. Then she begins to give particulars: “Now in the afternoon sun the trunks of the fir trees were burning red, and the landscape far away seemed cool, all blue and pale gold.” By means of a few essentials, the reader gets an attractive generalized picture.

The author then does something unusual and difficult. To convey the mood of the landscape and to give the reader a wider, more essential impression of it than she could have done by describing more leaves or branches or grass, she introduces this peculiar device: “Boris was able now to believe what the old gardener at the convent had told him when he was a child: that he had once seen, about this time of the year and the day, a herd of unicorns come out of the woods to graze upon the sunny slopes.” Observe the connotations. That an old gardener at a convent tells something to a child has in itself a fantastic quality; and when he tells him that he has seen unicorns, this impossible fantasy projects the exact eerie quality of the afternoon. “A herd of horses” would not have produced the same effect, because the purpose is to suggest something supernatural, odd, almost decadently frightening, but very attractive. The words “about this time of the year and the day” skillfully show the author’s intention: it is not to indulge in a fantasy for its own sake, but to convey that at this time of year and day, the sunlight on these trees and this slope has the eerie, fantastic quality that could make one expect the supernatural.

As the author goes on to describe the unicorns, they are made specific in an unusually artistic way. The description is almost overdetailed, but by essentials: “the white and dappled mares, rosy in the sun, treading daintily and looking around for their young, the old stallion, darker roan, sniffing and pawing the ground.” Observe how carefully the color scheme is projected: that the mares are “white and dappled” but “rosy in the sun” is another reminder of the late afternoon sunlight. That they are “treading daintily” connotes the steps of elegant racehorses; yet the mares are unicorns, which makes them even more dainty. This amount of detail gives reality to the fantastic; and by so doing, the author conveys the mood of the afternoon.

The next sentence is completely realistic: “The air here smelled of fir leaves and toadstools, and was so fresh that it made him yawn.” It is a brilliant sentence: with great economy of words, the very essentials are selected so that one can almost smell the forest.

“And yet, he thought, it was different from the freshness of spring; the courage and gaiety of it were tinged with despair.” Since the freshness is different from that of spring, one can infer that it is fall. But what would imply, without the author saying it, that this is fall, is all the eerie fantasy that has gone before: the air of something supernatural, in gold, pink, red shades—the air of something decadent. The last sentence sums up the whole effect: “It was the finale of the symphony.”

The author has given a specific description of this hillside and no other—at this time of year and day. To convey the mood, she gives specific images, such as the fir trees, the unicorns, their colors and gestures, and even the perspective, and the smell of the forest. These are concretes, as distinguished from: “It was an eerie, fantastic landscape; beautiful but tragic; lovely but heartbreaking.” Those would be floating abstractions.

From The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

From the train, he looked back once at the skyline of the city as it flashed into sight and was held for some moments beyond the windows. The twilight had washed off the details of the buildings. They rose in thin shafts of a soft, porcelain blue, a color not of real things, but of evening and distance. They rose in bare outlines, like empty molds waiting to be filled. The distance had flattened the city. The single shafts stood immeasurably tall, out of scale to the rest of the earth. They were of their own world, and they held up to the sky the statement of what man had conceived and made possible. They were empty molds. But man had come so far; he could go farther. The city on the edge of the sky held a question—and a promise.

Here I present first a visual description by means of essentials and then the symbolic or philosophical meaning of that description.

The first part of this passage describes the city, the second part conveys the meaning. The two are tied together by the concept of “empty molds,” which is legitimate in both contexts. “They rose in bare outlines, like empty molds waiting to be filled.” This is what buildings do look like at a distance, when the details are not seen. The transition to the philosophical meaning is done in this sentence: “The single shafts stood immeasurably tall, out of scale to the rest of the

earth. They were of their own world”—this could apply both to their size and their meaning—“and they held up to the sky the statement of what man had conceived and made possible. They were empty molds. But man had come so far; he could go farther.” Here, “empty molds” is used strictly in the symbolic sense, to represent a promise.

This passage comes at the end of Part I of The Fountainhead, when Roark has to leave the city to work in the granite quarry. The meaning of the passage is therefore clear: “The city on the edge of the sky held a question—and a promise.” A question since Roark, given his position, cannot be sure of what the future holds; a promise since man (meaning Roark) “could go farther.”

What I am conveying here is the inspirational quality of the sight of the city—inspirational to Roark in the particular context of the novel; and inspirational in a wider sense, since I stress that the city is a symbol of human achievement.

This passage illustrates the method by which you can integrate, yet keep separately clear, a physical description and its philosophical meaning. Observe that the meaning is legitimately derived from the description. After describing tall buildings that rise above and out of scale to the rest of the earth, the conclusion that they represent the shape of human achievement is logically justified. (Again, keep this in mind when we come to the last quotation, from Thomas Wolfe, which follows a different method.)

From Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

[The following analysis of a paragraph from Atlas Shrugged, originally given in connection with this course, was later written out by Ayn Rand herself. It is reprinted here as written (except for minor changes in punctuation).]

Clouds had wrapped the sky and had descended as fog to wrap the streets below, as if the sky were engulfing the city. She could see the whole of Manhattan Island, a long, triangular shape cutting into an invisible ocean. It looked like the prow of a sinking ship; a few tall buildings still rose above it, like funnels, but the rest was disappearing under gray-blue coils, going down slowly into vapor and space. This was how they had gone—she thought—Atlantis, the city that sank into the ocean, and all the other kingdoms that vanished, leaving the same legend in all the languages of men, and the same longing.

This description had four purposes: (1) to give an image of the view from Dagny’s window, namely, an image of what New York looks like on a foggy evening; (2) to suggest the meaning of the events which have been taking place, namely, the city as a symbol of greatness doomed to destruction; (3) to connect New York with the legend of Atlantis; (4) to convey Dagny’s mood. So the description had to be written on four levels: literal, connotative, symbolic, emotional.

The opening sentence of the description sets the key for all four levels: “Clouds had wrapped the sky and had descended as fog to wrap the streets below, as if the sky were engulfing the city.” On the literal level, the sentence is exact: it describes a foggy evening. But had I said something like “There were clouds in the sky, and the streets were full of fog,” the sentence would have achieved nothing more. By casting the sentence into an active form, by wording it as if the clouds were pursuing some goal, I achieve the following: (1) on the literal level, a more graphic image of the view, because the sentence suggests the motion, the progressive thickening of the fog; (2) on the connotative level, it suggests the conflict of two adversaries and the grandeur of the conflict, since the adversaries are sky and city, and it suggests that the city is doomed, since it is being engulfed; (3) on the symbolic level, the word engulfing strikes the keynote for the tie to Atlantis, suggesting the act of sinking and, by connotation, blending the motion of the fog with the motion of waves; (4) on the emotional level, the use of so quiet a verb as to wrap in the context of an ominous, engulfing conflict establishes a mood of quiet, desolate hopelessness.

“She could see the whole of Manhattan Island, a long, triangular shape cutting into an invisible ocean.” This sentence is a literal, realistic description—but by the words “cutting into an invisible ocean,” I prepare the way for the comparison in the next sentence, I mention the word ocean as another link to Atlantis, and the fact that it is an invisible ocean does two things: conveys the density of the actual fog and suggests the symbolic, legendary meaning.

“It looked like the prow of a sinking ship; a few tall buildings still rose above it, like funnels, but the rest was disappearing under gray-blue coils, going down slowly into vapor and space.” Here I allow my purpose to come out into the open, but since it is prepared for, it reads like a legitimate, unforced description of a view. Yet it accomplishes the following: (1) on the literal level, a good description of the view of New York, since it is specific enough to be sensuously real; (2) on the connotative level, “a few tall buildings still rose above it” suggests the heroic, the few lone fighters holding out against that to which all the lesser elements have succumbed; (3) on the symbolic level, the tie between a “sinking” ship and a sinking city is obvious; “disappearing under gray-blue coils” applies equally to coils of fog or to the waves of an ocean; “going down slowly into vapor and space” is my integration of all four levels, slanted just enough to make the reader notice it: the word vapor still ties the sentence to the literal description of the fog, but the thought of “going down slowly into space” cannot actually apply to the view nor to a sinking ship, it applies to the destruction of New York and to Atlantis, that is, to the vanishing of greatness, of the ideal; (4) the emotional mood is obvious.

“This was how they had gone—she thought—Atlantis, the city that sank into the ocean, and all the other kingdoms that vanished, leaving the same legend in all the languages of men, and the same longing.” This is the conclusion of the description, the “cashing-in” sentence; it is not brought in arbitrarily, but sums up the meaning of the elements which the reader has been given in the preceding three sentences, to form, in effect, the following impression in the reader’s mind: “Yes, I see why she would feel that way.”

The above are merely the main considerations that went into the writing of this paragraph. There were many, many other considerations directing the choice and placement of every single word; it would take pages to list them all.

As an example, let us take the last sentence and try to rewrite it. Suppose I changed it to: “This is how Atlantis had gone, she thought.” This would have been jarring and artificial, since it would have picked up Dagny’s thoughts too conveniently and directly on the subject of Atlantis, in the form of a full, pat sentence. The words with which I actually begin the sentence, “This was how they had gone—she thought,” serve as a bridge from the description of the view to introspection, to Dagny’s thoughts—and suggest that the thought of Atlantis came to her suddenly, involuntarily, by emotional association rather than by conscious deliberation.

Suppose I reduced that sentence to a mere mention of Atlantis and of nothing else. This would have left the real meaning of the whole paragraph to implication—a vague, optional implication which the reader would not necessarily notice. By saying “and all the other kingdoms that vanished,” I made my main purpose explicitly clear: that the paragraph refers to that lost ideal which mankind had always been pursuing, struggling for, seeking and never finding.

Suppose I had ended the sentence on “leaving the same legend in all the languages of men.” This would have made it merely a thought of an historical nature, with no emotional meaning for Dagny and no indication of the emotional cause that brought this particular thought to her mind. The interpretation of her emotional reaction would then have been left at the mercy of any particular reader’s subjective inclinations: it could have been sadness, fear, anger, hopelessness, or nothing in particular. By adding the words “and the same longing,” I indicated her specific mood and the essence of her emotional reaction to her present situation in the world: a desperate longing for an ideal that has become unattainable.

Suppose I rewrote the end of the sentence in a different order, thus: “and all the other kingdoms that vanished, leaving the same legend and the same longing in all the languages of men.” This would have placed the emphasis on the universality of the quest for the ideal, on the fact that it is shared by all mankind. But what I wanted to emphasize was the quest for the ideal, not its universality; therefore, the words “and the same longing” had to be featured, had to come last, almost as a painfully reluctant confession and a climax.

No, I do not expect the reader of that paragraph to grasp consciously all the specific considerations listed above. I expect him to get a general impression, an emotional sum—the particular sum I intended. A reader has to be concerned only with the end result; unless he chooses to analyze it, he does not have to know by what means that result was achieved—but it is my job to know.

No, I did not calculate all this by a conscious process of thought while writing that paragraph. I will not attempt here to explain the whole psychological complexity of the process of writing; I will merely indicate its essence: it consists of giving one’s subconscious the right orders in advance, or of setting the right premises. One must hold all the basic elements of the book’s theme, plot, and main characters so firmly in one’s mind that they become automatic and almost “instinctual.” Then, as one approaches the actual writing of any given scene or paragraph, one has a sense or “feel” of what it has to be by the logic of the context—and one’s subconscious makes the right selections to express it. Later, one checks and improves the result by means of conscious editing.

From One Lonely Night by Mickey Spillane

Nobody ever walked across the bridge, not on a night like this. The rain was misty enough to be almost fog-like, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy, yellow lights off in the distance.

Some place over there I had left my car and started walking, burying my head in the collar of my raincoat, with the night pulled in around me like a blanket. I walked and I smoked and I flipped the spent butts ahead of me and watched them arch to the pavement and fizzle out with one last wink. If there was life behind the windows of the buildings on either side of me, I didn’t notice it. The street was mine, all mine. They gave it to me gladly and wondered why I wanted it so nice and all alone.

This is Romantic writing: the author selects the essentials (and does so very well).

For instance, when a man is walking alone in the rain, there are a great many sights around him: wet pavements, streetlights, tin cans, garbage pails. But what is most typical of the setting the author wants to establish? The faces in the cars—“the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by.” Where a lesser writer would have said merely “the faces,” Spillane describes the way they would actually be seen; it is exactly what those faces would look like under the circumstances: “pale ovals of white.” The words “locked behind the steamed-up windows” are very artistic: that would be one’s impression of faces going by in small compartments. Using the word locked rather than some conventional word like visible is an economical way of projecting the exact description. And “the cars that hissed by” conveys what cars sound like on wet pavement.

I have always wanted to throw this particular description in the faces of the critics who attack Spillane, because it reveals real literary talent. Unfortunately, he does not always live up to it; he has some sloppy passages in his writing. But you judge a person’s literary talent as you judge his intelligence: by what he has demonstrated as his best potential. If he can do this, he could bring all of his writing up to the same standard.

In the next paragraph, “burying my head in the collar of my raincoat, with the night pulled in around me like a blanket” is again a colorful description. Spillane names the essentials and gives the reader a feel of what it is like to walk with a raised collar on a foggy night.

The next sentence is the best: “I walked and I smoked and I flipped the spent butts ahead of me and watched them arch to the pavement and fizzle out with one last wink.” This accomplishes two things: it indicates the character of the man walking and it conveys the exact description. The phrase “arch to the pavement” achieves its effect through great economy and precision. Spillane could have said that the butts “fell in an arched line” or merely “fell”; instead, he selects one verb that describes exactly how they fell (it is a slightly manufactured verb, but legitimate in the context). And the “last wink” is his best touch: that one last spark sets the mood of the whole scene.

From this point on, Spillane lets his standard slip.

“If there was life behind the windows of the buildings on either side of me, I didn’t notice it.” Although adequate, this is an easier, less distinguished way of describing something.

What is very bad is the grammatical error of saying “why I wanted it so nice and all alone.” The colloquial style is proper, particularly in a story written in the first person; but it is not proper to use colloquialism in the form of crude grammar.

For instance, the sentence “I walked and I smoked and I flipped the spent butts” is colloquial, yet of high literary quality; it is said simply, in a tone which this type of character would use, but there is great artistic care behind it. By contrast, “why I wanted it so nice and all alone” is not a clear sentence. It is the kind of sentence a writer might get away with by his tone of voice if he is dictating, but it does not work on paper. It is off-focus; one sort of knows what it means, but only sort of; and after the precision and economy of the preceding, it is particularly out of key.

Such carelessness in combination with the better writing is unfortunately characteristic of Spillane. The lesson is: No matter how much talent you have, if you let your focus slip on any sentence or paragraph, it will show in a slacking of your workmanship. So focus equally on every part of your writing, whether it is the key paragraph or the little transition paragraph. Not all of them have to be equally brilliant or significant, but they all have to be written with the same care.

From The Web and the Rock by Thomas Wolfe

That hour, that moment, and that place struck with a peerless coincision upon the very heart of his own youth, the crest and zenith of his own desire. The city had never seemed as beautiful as it looked that night. For the first time he saw that New York was supremely, among the cities of the world, the city of the night. There had been achieved here a loveliness that was astounding and incomparable, a kind of modem beauty, inherent to its place and time, that no other place nor time could match. He realized suddenly that the beauty of other cities of the night—of Paris spread below one from the butte of Sacré Coeur, in its vast, mysterious geography of lights, fumed here and there by drowsy, sensual, and mysterious blossoms of nocturnal radiance; of London with its smoky nimbus of fogged light, which was so peculiarly thrilling because it was so vast, so lost in the illimitable—had each its special quality, so lovely and mysterious, but had yet produced no beauty that could equal this.

The city blazed there in his vision in the frame of night, and for the first time his vision phrased it as it had never done before. It was a cruel city, but it was a lovely one; a savage city, yet it had such tenderness; a bitter, harsh, and violent catacomb of stone and steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with light, and roaring, fighting a constant ceaseless warfare of men and of machinery; and yet it was so sweetly and so delicately pulsed, as full of warmth, of passion, and of love, as it was full of hate.

This is as subjective a description as one could put on paper: it is all estimates, and the reader is never told what the author is estimating.

Imagine that Wolfe is talking about a view not of a city, but of a plain at night. “The plains of New Jersey were incomparable to the plains of Brittany or Normandy.” He could use the same description, with the same adjectives and emotions, since the reader is never told why he is saying any of these things. Wolfe does not offer a single concrete to differentiate New York from anything else.

The author here cannot distinguish between object and subject, between the sight of New York and what that sight makes him feel. He projects his feeling as if it were a description of the city—as if he has said something about New York by saying that New York makes him feel that it is lovely. But this “lovely” is an estimate based on something. He has not told the reader what.

When one examines the particular things he states, there is a whole series of unanswered whys.

“The city had never seemed as beautiful as it looked that night.” He never says why. “For the first time he saw that New York was supremely, among the cities of the world, the city of the night.” He does not say why, or what a city of the night is, as distinguished from a city of the day. ”There had been achieved here a loveliness that was astounding and incomparable“—why?—“a kind of modern beauty, inherent to its place and time, that no other place nor time could match.” What is “modem beauty”? “He realized suddenly that the beauty of other cities of the night”—why are Paris and London cities of the night?—“had each its special quality, so lovely and mysterious.” He does not say what special qualities, or what is lovely and mysterious about them. Instead, he gives the reader two interchangeable generalities about Paris and London: “vast, mysterious geography of lights, fumed here and there by drowsy, sensual, and mysterious blossoms of nocturnal radiance” and “smoky nimbus of fogged light, which was so peculiarly thrilling because it was so vast, so lost in the illimitable.” Is there any specific difference between the two? None.

One can guess from the names of New York, Paris, and London, and from the words “modern beauty,” that Wolfe saw some difference between a city of skyscrapers and cities of older monuments. Had he contrasted the lights and angular structures of skyscrapers to ancient domes and the spires of churches, this would have given meaning to what he is implying. He must have seen something that made him call one city modern and the others not, and also some difference between Paris and London. But he did not identify it even to himself, let alone to the reader. All he focused on was that the three sights made him feel differently.

One cannot convey an emotion as such; one can convey it only through that which produced it, or through a conclusion drawn from the emotion. Here the author does try to project an emotion as such—and what is the result? “Blossoms of nocturnal radiance,” which is neither emotion, thought, nor description, but merely words.

Now observe the words “Paris spread below one from the butte of Sacré Cœur.” Given the absence of any specific description, this reference presupposes that the reader has been to Paris, stood on this elevation, and seen this sight. To expect that kind of knowledge from the reader is to step outside the confines of objectivity; the reader has to learn the concretes of the story from what the author writes. This kind of reference actually implies: “I’m a cosmopolitan traveler and I know the sight, and if you local yokels don’t, that’s your fault.” I doubt that this was Wolfe’s intention, but such is always the implication of any dropping of foreign or scientific allusions which presuppose special knowledge on the reader’s part.

Do not mention any landmark unless you describe it for the benefit of the uninitiated; otherwise, it is merely a label stuck on your luggage to impress your friends. Even if you write about New York, do not merely say “the Empire State Building rising above the skyline.” For the benefit of those who have not seen New York, give a brief description first of the shape of the Empire State Building. If you then want to use the actual name, it will be proper. But it is never proper merely to sling names.

Now observe, in the second paragraph, a peculiar sentence which supports my statement that Wolfe does not distinguish between object and subject: “The city blazed there in his vision in the frame of night, and for the first time his vision phrased it as it had never done before.” A vision cannot phrase anything. Wolfe believes that his vision is providing him with all his estimates—that the mere sight of a city can tell him that the city is cruel and lovely, full of love and of hate. That is not possible.

What is missing here is why and how he saw all of this. He should have given a specific description to make the reader conclude that it is a cruel, savage city, etc.—if this estimate is based on Wolfe’s vision of this particular night. Or, if the estimate is based on memory or on his knowledge of the city, he should similarly have shown why he was drawn to make the estimate at this time and in connection with this view.

The following description is too wide: “a bitter, harsh, and violent catacomb of stone and steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with light. ” To say about something that “it’s stone, steel, and tunneled rock” might be an effective summary if some particulars are given. Left by itself, it is too easy, by which I mean “too generalized.”

The last of this sentence is ridiculous: “it was so sweetly and so delicately pulsed”—if by “pulse” he means the noise or vibrations, what can be sweet or delicate about the pulse of a city?—“as full of warmth, of passion, and of love, as it was full of hate.” This sounds like a bad politician slinging immense generalities with no content.

This whole passage is the archetype of floating abstractions, and of a description which describes nothing.

Naturalistic Description

The essence of Naturalistic description is cataloguing. Take the description of a doctor’s office in the first chapter of Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, particularly the following description of the doctor’s sink:

“The most unsanitary comer was devoted to the cast-iron sink, which was oftener used for washing eggy breakfast plates than for sterilizing instruments. On its ledge were a broken test-tube, a broken fishhook, an unlabeled and forgotten bottle of pills, a nail-bristling heel, a frayed cigar-butt, and a rusty lancet stuck in a potato.”

This catalogue would give one a clear description if one were a mover and had to pack those things. But it does not jell into an overall impression of what kind of place the office was.

In Dodsworth, Lewis has an account of Dodsworth’s impression of an English train:

“And the strangeness of having framed pictures of scenery behind the seats; of having hand straps—the embroidered silk covering so rough to the finger-tips, the leather inside so smooth and cool—beside the doors. And the greater strangeness of admitting that these seats were more comfortable than the flinty Pullman chairs of America.”

These are observant concretes of the kind a returning traveler would tell his friends about. But they are not an artistic description of the essence of an English train compartment.

A Naturalistic writer may sometimes have a good description. Tolstoy, the archetype of a Naturalist, often has very eloquent ones. But to the extent to which they are good, they are done by the Romantic method—i.e., by means of carefully selected, well-observed concretes that capture the essentials of a scene.

Analysis of “A Letter on Style” by Sinclair Lewis

I suspect that no competent and adequately trained writer ever, after his apprenticeship, uses the word “style” in regard to his own work. If he did, he would become so self-conscious that he would be quite unable to write. He may—if I myself am normal he certainly does—consider specific problems of “style.” He may say, “That sentence hasn’t the right swing,” or “That speech is too highfalutin’ for a plain chap like this character,” or “That sentence is banal—got it from that idiotic editorial I was reading yesterday.” The generic concept of “style,” as something apart from, distinguishable from, the matter, the thought, the story, does not come to his mind.

He writes as God lets him. He writes—if he is good enough!—as Tilden plays tennis or as Dempsey fights, which is to say, he throws himself into it with never a moment of the dilettante’s sitting back and watching himself perform.

This whole question of style vs. matter, of elegant style vs. vulgar, of simplicity vs. embroidering, is as metaphysical and vain as the outmoded (and I suspect the word “outmoded” is a signal of “bad style”) discussions of Body and Soul and Mind. Of such metaphysics, we have had enough. Today, east and north of Kansas City, Kansas, we do not writhe in such fantasies. We cannot see that there is any distinction between Soul and Mind. And we believe that we know that with a sick Soul-Mind, we shall have a sick Body; and that with a sick Body, the Mind-Soul cannot be sane. And, still more, we are weary of even such a clarification of that metaphysics. We do not, mostly, talk of Body generically, but say, prosaically, “My liver’s bad and so I feel cross.”

So is it with that outworn conception called “style.”

“Style” is the manner in which a person expresses what he feels. It is dependent on two things: his ability to feel, and his possession, through reading or conversation, of a vocabulary adequate to express his feeling. Without adequate feeling, which is a quality not to be learned in schools, and without vocabulary, which is a treasure less to be derived from exterior instruction than from the inexplicable qualities of memory and good taste, he will have no style.

There is probably more nonsense written regarding the anatomy of “style” than even the anatomies of virtue, sound government, and love. Instruction in “style,” like instruction in every other aspect of education, cannot be given to anyone who does not instinctively know it at the beginning.

This is good style:

John Smith meets James Brown on Main Street, Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and remarks, “Mornin’! Nice day!” It is not merely good style; it is perfect. Were he to say, “Hey, youse,” or were he to say, “My dear neighbor, it refreshes the soul to encounter you this daedal mom, when from yon hill the early sun its beams displays,” he would equally have bad style.

And this is good style: In The Principles and Practice of Medicine by Osler and McCrae, it stands:

“Apart from dysentery of the Shiga type, the amoebic and terminal forms, there is a variety of ulcerative colitis, sometimes of great severity, not uncommon in England and the United States.”

And this to come is also good style, no better than the preceding and no worse, since each of them completely expresses its thought:

A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

That I should write ever as absolutely as Coleridge, as Osler and McCrae, or as Jack Smith at ease with Jim Brown, seems to me improbable. But at least I hope that, like them, I shall ever be so absorbed in what I have to say that I shall, like them, write without for one moment stopping to say, “Is this good style?”⁴

When Lewis says that no competent writer uses the word style in regard to his own work, he means that a writer cannot think of a style when he works. This is proper advice; you must not aim self-consciously at a style while you are expressing a thought. But it does not follow, as Lewis implies, that a writer cannot ever hold in his mind a concept of style—that he cannot ever think of style, or judge his own writing, or hold literary standards.

Lewis says that a writer may “consider specific problems of ‘style.’ ” He may say, “That sentence hasn’t the right swing,” or “That speech is too highfalutin’,” or “That sentence is banal.” Lewis knows that these concretes pertain to style. Why then does he refuse to recognize the general abstraction that unites them? He in effect says: “I just work by rule of thumb. I somehow know when a sentence hasn’t the right swing or when another sentence is banal; but I must not call it ‘style.’ ” Why not?

The antiabstraction premise of his article is typical of a Naturalist. A Naturalist is concerned with concrete details and is reluctant ever to explain a wider “why.” There are, he holds, no wider “whys.” Observe Lewis’s defiant, almost angry tone when he denies the necessity of being concerned with broad abstractions. He clearly had certain valid stylistic habits, which he could identify, but was militantly reluctant to do any further thinking or identification. (His antiabstraction approach is one reason why he was often guilty of sloppy writing, and why he was never fully satisfied with his own work.)

Lewis makes it appear that style is something precious, something too “literary,” and that he is simply throwing out an old-fashioned word—when he is in fact throwing out the whole abstraction of style, and all abstract standards of writing. The author of Babbitt, the arch-satirist of the mediocre and vulgar, talks in this article like a Babbitt.

He says that a writer writes “as God lets him.” He was not religious, so this is a humorous line—but what does it imply? That we do not know where writing comes from. He says that a writer writes “as Tilden plays tennis or as Dempsey fights, which is to say, he throws himself into it with never a moment of the dilettante’s sitting back and watching himself perform.” If you are critical of your own work—not in the process of writing, but before and after—that is not the sign of the dilettante; it is the sign of the professional. Tilden and Dempsey had to do an enormous amount of studying and practice before they could throw themselves into a match without any thought about their technique. The comparison is valid: you have to do all your practice and studying beforehand. But you cannot throw yourself into a ring, or a story, without thinking about it and simply act “as God lets you.” It was not God that made Dempsey a prizefighter.

Lewis says: “ ‘Style’ is the manner in which a person expresses what he feels. It is dependent on two things: his ability to feel, and his possession, through reading or conversation, of a vocabulary adequate to express his feeling.” Observe that he does not mention thinking; to him, feeling is a primary. “Without adequate feeling, which is a quality not to be learned in schools, and without vocabulary, which is a treasure less to be derived from exterior instruction than from the inexplicable qualities of memory and good taste, [a writer] will have no style” (emphasis added). According to Lewis, feelings are inexplicable; so is good taste; so is memory; so is the acquisition of a vocabulary.

“Instruction in ‘style,’ ” Lewis says, “like instruction in every other aspect of education, cannot be given to anyone who does not instinctively know it at the beginning.” Again, he assumes that one’s capacity for any subject is innate and therefore cannot be acquired or taught. If a young writer went by this advice, he would be entering a career as a horse race, on a blind guess: “Do I have talent? Do I have memory? Do I have good taste?”—with none of these things to be explained or acquired.

All the things Lewis takes as inexplicable and irreducible primaries are in fact explicable and acquirable. Your ability to feel is a function of your ability to think, and thinking is volitional and can be learned. Your taste depends on your premises. Memory is a function of valuing; the hardest thing on earth is to remember something that is of no importance to you—for instance, forcing yourself to memorize by automatic rote. And you acquire a vocabulary simply by being convinced of the importance of words, so that you pay attention to their shadings when you read or speak.

When Lewis gives examples of good style, he says that these are good because each sentence completely expresses its thought. This is correct; as I put it, good style is form following function.

Clarity, however, is not the only important attribute of style. What constitutes the heart of any style is the clarity of the thoughts a writer expresses—plus the kind of thoughts he chooses to express. In the lines Lewis quotes from Coleridge, a vastly greater amount of information—of thought, emotion, connotation—is conveyed than in his medical quotation or in the “John Smith meets James Brown” sentence. For a textbook, a legal document, or a synopsis, Lewis’s medical quotation is good style; for fiction, the same style would be miserable—not because it is not clear, but because too little is said. With the same amount of words, a fiction writer can say much more.

A good style is one that conveys the most with the greatest economy of words. In a textbook, the ideal is to communicate one line of thought or set of facts as clearly as possible. For a literary style, much more is necessary. A great literary style is one that combines five or more different meanings in one clear sentence (I do not mean ambiguity but the communication of different issues).

Observe how many issues I cover in any one sentence in Atlas Shrugged, and on how many levels. In this context, I want to repeat an eloquent compliment that Alan Greenspan once gave me: he said that I do with words what Rachmaninoff does with music. Rachmaninoff’s compositions are complex; he combines so many elements in his music that one has to stretch one’s mind to hear them all at once. I always try to do the same in writing. (I am not here comparing degrees of talent, but merely pointing out the principle.)

I never waste a sentence on saying: “John Smith meets James Brown.” That is too easy; it is playing the piano with one finger. Say much more, just as clearly—say it in chords, with a whole orchestration. That is good style.

10

Particular Issues of Style

Narrative versus Dramatization

I use the word narrative in two senses. From the standpoint of form, narrative is that which is not dialogue; everything said by the author, as opposed to the characters, is narrative (including the “he said” and “she said in a trembling voice” between the dialogue lines). From the standpoint of structure, however, narrative is that which is not dramatized.

To dramatize something is to show it as if it were happening before the reader’s eyes, so that he is in the position of an observer at the scene. To narrate, by contrast, is to synopsize: you tell the reader about something which has happened, but you do not let him be a witness. This is a legitimate device; in fact, you could not write a novel without using narrative. If a story were presented exclusively in terms of dramatic action, it would be a play.

A silent action—an escape, say, from a burning building, with no dialogue—is dramatized if it is described in detail. Predominantly, however, the dramatized scenes of a novel are those in which dialogue is reproduced.

Conversely, dialogue usually occurs only in dramatized scenes, but there are exceptions. When you synopsize a conversation in narrative, you can quote a single sentence to feature the essence of the conversation, or to sharpen some salient point. A whole exchange of dialogue—four or more lines—constitutes a dramatized scene. But the quotation, for emphasis, of just one line of dialogue in a narrative passage does not make the passage a dramatization.

When is it proper to narrate and when to dramatize an event? There can be as many variations as there are stories, but the one rule is: Always dramatize important events.

Dramatization serves as the emphasis of your story. The key events should be dramatized. The less important material, such as transitions, can be narrated.

The beginning of the chapter “Account Overdrawn” in Atlas Shrugged is a montage of the progressive economic destruction of the country. In order to make the description colorful, I give semi-dramatization to particular details, but the overall passage is merely a narrative of what happens during that winter to the whole country. Then I come to the meeting where the board of directors decide to close the John Galt Line. That is dramatized. In the preceding months, no event was important enough to focus the story on. But the closing of the John Galt Line is an important point in the story; therefore, I dramatize it—I reproduce the dialogue so that you, the reader, are present at that meeting.

Many nineteenth-century novels, such as Quo Vadis and The Scarlet Letter, are written too much in straight narrative. (This is a minor flaw compared to the literary values of these two works.) One good aspect of the old silent movie of The Scarlet Letter, starring Lillian Gish, was that it dramatized (in most cases quite well) important events that in the novel are merely told about.

You must be careful and skillful when you combine dramatization and narrative.

Sometimes an author presents a scene in detail, the dialogue is reproduced verbatim, and then there is a paragraph saying: “They argued in this manner late into the night, but reached no conclusion.” This is switching from dramatization to narrative, summing up the ending of a scene in narrative form. Sometimes an author begins with detailed dialogue, then switches to narrative, then goes back to the dramatized scene. All of this is legitimate—but be careful of your balance. Be sure to narrate only that which is unimportant. In other words, be sure that your highlights are dramatized.

Do not start a scene in dialogue and then cover something more crucial in narrative. Suppose you reproduce the opening dialogue of a marital quarrel and then you say: “They argued into the night, and finally she declared that she would leave him.” This is bad writing. I do not mean that there is a rule about never narrating a quarrel or a decision; it can be narrated if it is only an incidental development in the progress of the story. But if you stop on a scene at all, if you bring the reader in to witness it, do not cheat him of the scene’s climax.

There is another danger I want to warn you against.

I once read a story by a beginner in which a father comes back from Europe to his wife and little son after a long absence. The narrative says: “The boy was fascinated by the sophisticated, cosmopolitan conversation of his father.” Then the dialogue says: “ ‘The English sure have a wonderful way of cooking beef,’ said the father. ‘Yes,’ said the mother, ‘but on the other hand, I hear that the French restaurants are pretty good.’ ‘Well, I wouldn’t say so,’ answered the father. ‘The French go more for sauces and trimmings, but for real beefsteak, give me English cooking.’ ”

In the same category are the many stories, usually about a poet, where the author spends a lot of time in narrative telling the reader what a genius that poet is—and then he gives some samples which are dreadful.

Never declare in narrative the opposite of what you illustrate in action or dialogue. Whenever you make estimates in narrative-whenever you announce that your character is brave or a genius or good or noble—be sure that the action and dialogue support your estimate. If you say that a man’s conversation is sophisticated—show it. Otherwise, do not make the estimate.

In general, it is inadvisable to make such estimates—and you can never count primarily on your narrative to convey characterization. To show a man of genius, you have to show by his actions and words that that is what he is; to show a brave man, you have to give him some actions displaying courage. But there are instances where it is necessary to summarize something in narrative. If so, be sure that what is dramatized supports your estimate. The principle here is that of assertion versus proof. Do not assert anything which you cannot prove.

Exposition

Exposition is the communication of knowledge which the reader requires in order to understand a scene. At the start of a story, it is the communication of what has happened before the start. You can also have exposition during a story. After a time lapse, for instance, the reader might need to know what has happened in the preceding year.

The one rule about exposition is: Do not let it show. Exposition is like the seams in clothing: in a well-made garment, the seams are not glaring at you; they are skillfully hidden, yet they hold the garment together.

By “Do not let your exposition show,” I mean: Do not devote any action or line merely to explaining something. Make the exposition part of some statement which has a different point—a point necessary for the progress of the scene.

For instance, do not have two characters talk about something that they both know. It is bad exposition to have a businessman say to his partner: “As you well know, our bills are long overdue.” Instead, have him give instructions to his new secretary about a letter to the bank, telling her: “We are in a hurry because our bills are overdue.”

Whenever one character communicates something in dialogue to another, there must be a reason why the second character has to be told the information—a reason related to the action of the scene. The communication should be part of some purpose with which the scene is concerned, and all the necessary information should be conveyed in the discussion of that purpose.

The best example of this in my own work is the scene between James Taggart and Eddie Willers in the first chapter of Atlas Shrugged, where Eddie is urging Taggart to do something about their Colorado branch line and Taggart is evading. If you read that scene, you will be surprised to see how much you are learning—under the guise of their argument—about the overall situation of Taggart Transcontinental.

An example of bad exposition is the kind of old-fashioned play which opens with two servants talking onstage: “ ‘The master is away.’ ‘The pearls are in the safe.’ ‘The mistress is entertaining a suspicious character on the veranda.’ ” Shortly thereafter, the pearls are stolen.

Devoting a line to explaining something is sometimes proper. An example is the exposition right after the names of the various intellectuals at the party at Rearden’s in Atlas Shrugged.

“Bertram Scudder stood slouched against the bar. His long, thin face looked as if it had shrunk inward, with the exception of his mouth and eyeballs, which were left to protrude as three soft globes. He was the editor of a magazine called The Future and he had written an article on Hank Rearden, entitled ‘The Octopus.’ ”

This is a proper use of exposition since it is done in the nature of a parenthesis, without stopping the action.

If you have a complex exposition to give, you will in the beginning be anxious to give it all at once. It will seem to you that you have to tell the reader everything or he will not understand you. Do not be fooled by this; the story will carry if you make just one point clear. A few sentences later, you divulge something else, and so on. Feed one bit of information at a time.

There are no rules about where to feed information or at what tempo; you have to gauge this by the general structure of your story. Some of the information conveyed in the scene between Eddie Willers and James Taggart I could have planted in advance, by having Eddie worry about the Colorado branch line, or stop outside Taggart’s office to discuss something with an underling. But since I could impart all the necessary information in the major scene, it was better to do so than to give the exposition special emphasis. Also, I had already planted enough ominous overtones to convey that something is going on which disturbs Eddie. I would have weakened the drama had I given the reader any inkling of the specifics until he sees them in action, in the form of a conflict.

The ingenuity you can exhibit in regard to exposition is unlimited. You can make an advantage out of a liability: instead of being burdened with your exposition, you can feed it at the points where it fits the narrative or the dialogue and makes the scene more dramatic.

But be careful to be objective. Do not rely on any knowledge which the reader does not yet have. You might deliberately make two characters talk for a while in a mysterious way until you clarify what they are talking about; that is legitimate. But watch for when you have held the mystery—or withheld the information—for too long. Instead of being intriguing, a scene that is bewildering for too long becomes boring.

Flashbacks

A flashback is a scene taken from the past. It is a dramatized exposition.

The story of Dagny and Francisco’s childhood in Atlas Shrugged is an example. Since their relationship in the novel is based on what happened in their childhood, I want the reader to know about this before he meets Francisco as a character. Had I merely summarized their childhood in a paragraph, that would have been exposition. But since I wanted to cover their childhood in detail, I literally had to go back into the past, and that is a flashback.

The only standard for when to use flashbacks is the importance of the information you want to convey. Incidental information you cover in narrative. If the information is important to the story, it is better to go into a detailed flashback.

But do not burden a story with unnecessary flashbacks. If in every other chapter you go into a flashback, you confuse the reader. Some writers have flashbacks within flashbacks: they start with a middle-aged person in the present, then show a flashback from his youth, during which they show a flashback from his childhood, then come back to the youth, then to the present. This can be gotten away with, but it is not advisable.

There is no rule that limits the length of a flashback in proportion to the rest of the story. Suppose that the events of a story span several years and come to a conclusion in one last meeting between two characters. In order to focus that meeting, the author might first establish in a few lines the fact that these characters are about to meet; then, in a long flashback, present everything that happened in the past; and then, coming back to the present and the meeting, describe the conclusion in a final few lines. While reading the flashback, the reader waits for the story to reach the present again, anticipating that something will happen at the promised meeting between the two characters. And since the proper focus has been established from the outset, the final lines come across much more forcefully than they would have done had the story been told in chronological order.

The suspense and heightened interest of such a structure depends on the reader’s unspoken assumption that the writer is rational and has a reason for constructing his story this way. By contrast, a modem writer would start a story as described above and never come back to the present; or he would come back, but then nothing significant would happen.

It is legitimate now and then to remind the reader of the present during a long flashback—but only if you have a reason for it and you advance the story by that means.

The only rule for going into a flashback is to avoid confusing the reader. Mark clearly when you go from the present to the past and when you go back to the present again. The simplest way is to say: “He remembered the time when ...” or “He thought of the days of his childhood.” This is not bromidic, because it is direct. But there are more interesting ways of doing it.

One of my best flashback transitions is the one to Dagny and Francisco’s childhood. She is walking to his hotel, and yet she is thinking that she should be running:

“She wondered why she felt that she wanted to run, that she should be running; no, not down this street; down a green hillside in the blazing sun to the road on the edge of the Hudson, at the foot of the Taggart estate. That was the way she always ran when Eddie yelled, ‘It’s Frisco d’Anconia!’ and they both flew down the hill to the car approaching on the road below.”

Although the reader notices the transition, it comes naturally.

Now consider the scene in Atlas Shrugged where James Taggart spills water on the table before Cherryl starts thinking about the events of the past year.

“ ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ he screamed, smashing his fist down on the table. ‘Where have you been all these years? What sort of world do you think you’re living in?’ His blow had upset his water glass and the water went spreading in dark stains over the lace of the tablecloth.”

I do not have Cherryl go into the past by means of the spilled water, but I use it later to bring her back to the present:

“What do you want of me?—she asked, looking at the whole long torture of her marriage that had not lasted the full span of one year.

“ ‘What do you want of me?’ she asked aloud—and saw that she was sitting at the table in her dining room, looking at Jim, at his feverish face, and at a drying stain of water on the table.”

I planted the spilled water early in the scene in order to mention it later, as a touch pertaining to this particular dining room at this moment. Recognizing it as such, the reader knows that Cherryl is now back at dinner with James, where she was before she started thinking of the past. Had I not used the water, or some equivalent device, it would not have been clear that Cherryl is now back in the present; it might have seemed as if I were describing some other scene of the past year.

A tricky transition is good when it is warranted by the material, so that it appears natural; but avoid artificial tricks that are planted only for the purpose of the transition. For instance, the spilled water in the above scene is legitimate because it serves another purpose: to illustrate James’s bad temper and violence. Had I written a scene between a calm, polite, happy couple, and suddenly, by sheer accident, the man spilled water because I later needed it as a signpost, that would have been artificial.

Transitions

A difficult problem that one usually does not think of until one comes up against it is how to take the action from one point to another—for instance, how to take a person out of a room and down to the street, or have him cross a room to pick up something on the other side. On the stage, those small movements are taken care of unobtrusively by the director, who has to plan them so that they are unobtrusive. In a novel, they are the writer’s responsibility.

When you write a scene, you must preserve the reality of the setting. For instance, you have said that the heroine is by the fireplace to the left of the room and that some document is on a table to the right, and now she has to cross the room and seize the document. If you do not mention that she walks across the room, the reader will notice an inconsistency in the scene. But to mention it might be a bad interruption.

When you do not want to interrupt a scene with a technical reminder like that, “think outside the square.” Do not limit yourself to the dry assignment of saying, like a stage direction: “She crosses to the table.” Instead of saying “She rushed across the room and seized the document,” say something like “Her dress swished with the speed of her steps as she rushed across the room and seized the document.” Then the purpose of the sentence appears to be the description of the movement, which might tie in with the emotional violence of the scene (or whatever the mood is). But you have covered the point of taking the heroine to the other side.

In other words, when you need a “stage indication,” always tie it to some element of the scene—any element other than the dry factual reminder. As with exposition, you bring in a transition when your focus is on something else pertaining to the scene.

Suppose you finish a scene played in a house and you have to take the heroine outside. You need to give the reader some sense of transition, but you do not want to describe the heroine going down the stairs. So start the next paragraph with “The street looked lonely and deserted as she emerged from the house.”

The following is an example from the first chapter of Atlas Shrugged. Dagny, who has fallen asleep on a train, awakens and asks a passenger: “How long have we been standing?” Then:

“The man looked after her, sleepily astonished, because she leaped to her feet and rushed to the door.

“There was a cold wind outside, and an empty stretch of land under an empty sky. She heard weeds rustling in the darkness. Far ahead, she saw the figures of men standing by the engine—and above them, hanging detached in the sky, the red light of a signal.”

She is out already. I did not cover the technicalities of her opening the door and rushing down the steps; I switched viewpoint.

Do not say: “Six months later.” Instead, present your characters swimming at the beach, and at the beginning of the next scene, say: “It was snowing heavily.”

There are other such devices, but the principle is always: Don’t let your seams show. You cover the seams by connecting them to some other pertinent aspect of the scene. Do not, however, make your transitions so indirect that the result is awkward and forced. Then the seams will show more than ever.

Metaphors

The purpose of metaphors, or comparisons, is epistemological. If I describe a spread of snow and I say, “The snow was white like sugar,” the comparison conveys a sensory focus on the whiteness of the snow. It is more colorful than merely saying “The snow was white.” If I describe sugar, I can do it in reverse: “The sugar in the bowl was white like snow.” This conveys a better impression of the sugar than if I merely said: “The sugar was white.”

The operative principle here is that of abstraction. If you describe only one object, in concrete terms, it is difficult to convey a sensuous impression: you tell about the object, but you do not show it. The introduction of another concrete with the same attribute makes the two together give a clear sensuous image—it isolates the attribute by making the reader’s mind form an abstraction. The reader’s lightning-like visualization of the whiteness of snow and the whiteness of sugar makes that whiteness stand out in his mind as if he had seen it.

When you select a comparison, you must consider not only the exact attribute you want to feature, but also the connotations that will be raised in the reader’s mind. For instance, the old bromide “Her lips were like ripe cherries” was not bad when said the first time. Cherries connote something red, sensuous, glistening, and attractive. But suppose I said: “Her lips were like ripe tomatoes.” Tomatoes are also red and shining, but the comparison sounds ridiculous because the connotations are wrong. Ripe tomatoes make you think of something squashy, of the kitchen, of an unappetizing salad. The things connected with the concept of a vegetable are not romantic.

If you want something to sound attractive, be sure to make your comparison glamorous and attractive. If you want to destroy something, do the opposite.

An example of the latter is the undignified comparison in my description of Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead: his ears “flared out in solitary nakedness, like the handles of a bouillon cup.” It would be bad writing to say “His ears stuck out like wings,” because the attribute described is unattractive, but a comparison to wings suggests something soaring and attractive. To bring connotations of something good into a derogatory description is the opposite mistake of comparing the lips of a beautiful woman to ripe tomatoes.

It is by means of the connotations of your comparisons that you can do the best objective slanted writing. By “objective,” I mean that the reader’s mind draws the conclusion—it is not you, the writer, who calls his attention to the fact that a certain person is ugly or undignified. To be objective, you have to show, not tell. You do it by selecting the connotations of your comparisons.

You can do the same with simple adjectives, which have definite connotations or shades of meaning. “The man was tall and slender” is an attractive description, whereas “He was tall, lanky, and gawky” is not. In description by means of comparisons, the field of selection is much wider, but the identical principle applies. You can describe the same quality as attractive or not according to what metaphors you use.

As a smaller matter, do not overload a paragraph with metaphors. Instead of making the description more colorful, this blunts the perception of the reader. He is lost among so many concretes out of different categories that they cease to work on him, and he has no impression left in his mind. It is like showing too many pictures too fast.

Above all, avoid two metaphors to describe the same thing. Sometimes, two clever images might occur to you to describe an object. You have to be ruthless and select the one you think is better. A repetition is always weakening; it has the effect of projecting the author’s doubt, his uncertainty that the first description is good enough.

Descriptions

I describe my characters at their first appearance. Since I want the reader to perceive the scene as if he were there, I indicate as soon as possible what the characters look like.

Sometimes I depart from this deliberately. In Atlas Shrugged, Wesley Mouch is not described in his introductory scene; I give him a few insipid lines and nothing more. The next time he is mentioned, as the new economic dictator of the country, I cash in on the fact that the reader, if he remembers him at all, remembers a total nonentity.

But my heroes and heroines I always describe at their introduction.

I decide how long a description should be by the nature of the buildup—by how much significance the context has prepared the reader to attach to a character.

In Atlas Shrugged, I prepare James Taggart’s description in the following manner. Eddie Willers has been thinking about the oak tree in his childhood and about his shock upon discovering that it was only the shell of its former strength. Then he comes to the Taggart building, and I describe that he feels the same about this building as he used to feel about the oak. And then he walks into the heart of the building, into the office of the president:

“James Taggart sat at his desk. He looked like a man approaching fifty, who had crossed into age from adolescence, without the intermediate stage of youth. He had a small, petulant mouth, and thin hair clinging to a bald forehead. His posture had a limp, decentralized sloppiness, as if in defiance of his tall, slender body, a body with an elegance of line intended for the confident poise of an aristocrat, but transformed into the gawkiness of a lout. The flesh of his face was pale and soft. His eyes were pale and veiled, with a glance that moved slowly, never quite stopping, gliding off and past things in eternal resentment of their existence. He looked obstinate and drained. He was thirty-nine years old.”

I have warned the reader that Eddie Willers is inclined to rely on strength long after it is gone, and that he thinks of the Taggart building as a powerful oak. Then I tell the reader about the gray dust at the heart of this oak.

Because of the buildup, the reader is willing to read the description without impatience. Also, when he meets the president of a big railroad and sees a neurotic nonentity, this has some significance. If the president were a conventional man, one could not pause on a long description. But when an obviously vicious man is in charge of an organization that has just been built up as very impressive, a lengthy description is warranted.

My longest description of a character in any of my novels is that of John Gait at the beginning of Part III of Atlas Shrugged. Having spent two parts of the book hearing about this man—and having just seen the heroine crash in an airplane, pursuing him—the reader is willing to read in detail what he looks like (provided the description makes it worthwhile).

When I introduce minor characters, I usually give them a single line naming something that is characteristic of the type, like “a woman who had large diamond earrings” or “a portly man who wore a green muffler.” By implying that one brief characteristic is all that is noteworthy about the person, I establish his unimportance. These lesser types you must not pause on for long.

I recently reread Ivanhoe, which I had not read since age twelve. It is a marvelous story, but I mention it here because the first thirteen pages of my edition are devoted to a description of four characters, only one of whom is a principal—and it is not even a description of their faces or personalities, but of their clothes, the harnesses of their horses, and the weapons of their retinues. To include thirteen pages of such descriptions, without any action having yet started and without the reader having been given any reason to be interested in the characters, is very unbalanced.

Never pause on descriptions, whether of characters or locales or anything else, unless you have given the reader reason to be interested.

Dialogue

Even when you select dialogue you think is in style with the class, education, and character of a certain person, your own style plays an enormous role.

Sinclair Lewis thinks that a small-town man would say “Mornin’! Nice day!” [see p. 140]. This is Lewis stylizing dialogue in the bad folks-next-door way. If I were to project a small-town man, I would have him say “Good morning” (or perhaps even “Hey, you” if it fitted the particular character and relationship).

You do not make an illiterate ruffian talk in abstract, academic terms. But whether you select the kind of vulgar sentences which represent the essential style of his character, or the narrow, local colloquialisms of his day, depends on your own style. (If you compare the illiterate talk of villains or ruffians in a Romantic and a Naturalistic novel, you will see the difference.)

Even in dialogue, your own style rules your selection. Do not give yourself a blank check of this kind: “I’ll merely reproduce what I think a character like so-and-so would say.” You have to reproduce it in the way your literary premises dictate. Do not attempt to be a Romantic writer, then give your characters Naturalistic dialogue—and, if criticized, say: “Oh, but I heard them talk at Klein’s [department store] just like that.” You have to reproduce the way women talk at Klein’s according to your own style.

I do not mean that you should make all your characters talk in the same way, or talk like yourself. You have to make them talk differently according to their particular characterizations. But the overall style and selectivity of the dialogue must be yours.

Slang

If you are writing in the first person and the narrator is supposed to talk colloquially, it is colorful to use slang (the best example is Mickey Spillane). But do not use slang in straight narrative.

There are, however, slang words which are (or are becoming) part of the language, and in those cases you have to exercise your judgment. The slang words that eventually find general acceptance are those for which there is no legitimate equivalent. Some slang words are created precisely to fill a linguistic need. When no respectable English word will give you the exact shade of meaning you want, it is legitimate to use a slang word, provided it has been in circulation for some time and is generally known.

The slang which changes every year is the kind that is used for some purpose other than the communication of meaning. It is always a local affectation—some college or Midwestern expression which is not needed and is repeated strictly because it is an affectation. This kind vanishes; a year later, nobody knows what the expression means. Do not use such words unless you are writing some journalistic story of the split second and you intend it to be dead within a year.

The use of slang in dialogue depends on the character speaking. For instance, you can use the word swanky in the dialogue of a certain type of person. The word has been used for years and remains in the language. But never use it in narrative, since there is a formal equivalent. (The slang of the split second should not be used even as characterization. It is too perishable and phony.)

Similarly, in regard to swear words and words of insult, you have to judge whether or not a character would speak that kind of language.

Incidentally, there is no word in English to denote a worthless man, except for bastard. Scoundrel, blackguard, and rotter are more British than American; and people never use them; they are antiquated and literary. I think this is one reason why bastard became formal English (it is no longer an obscenity and does not involve illegitimate birth, although that is the root of the word). The language did not have a word to express a negative value judgment on a man.

In Russian, I can think of ten or twelve words on the order of the English bastard; and there is even more polite usage: words that can be used in a drawing room—all of them expressions of contempt for a man’s moral character. This is a significant indication of the opposite metaphysics and morality of the two languages.

The number of words to express human evil is much greater in other languages than in English. For that fact, I give great credit to America.

Obscenities

Do not use obscenities—and never mind all the arguments about “realism.”

Obscenities are language which implies a value judgment of condemnation or contempt, usually in regard to certain parts of the body and sex. Four-letter words all have non-obscene synonyms; they are obscene not by content, but by their intention—the intention being to convey that what is referred to is improper or evil.

Obscene language is based on the metaphysics and morality of the anti-body school of thought. Observe that the more religious a nation is, the more varied and violently obscene is its four-letter-word repertoire. It is said that the Spanish are the most obscene. I do not know Spanish, but I know that Russians have a whole sublanguage—not just single words, but ready-made sentences—all of it concerning sex. (I myself know only a few examples.)

Obscene language is not an objective language which you can use to express your own value judgments. It is a language of prefabricated value judgments consisting of the denunciation of sex and this earth and conveying that these are low or damnable. You do not want to subscribe to this premise.

If you write about slum inhabitants or men in the army, you have a difficult literary problem. Modern writers specialize in conveying that men in the army talk in nothing but four-letter words. That I do not believe, but I have heard men of that sort use obscene words under stress. If you have to establish such an atmosphere, a few “darns” or “damns” will not quite do it. It is not, however, necessary to use prefabricated language for the sake of “realism.”

The trick is to suggest by the context of what is being said that it is abusive or obscene. Do not use the actual terms. Avoid them on the principle by which you would avoid describing horrible operations or ghastly physical illnesses. You may suggest these if you want a description of horror—but you do not go into every detail of the color of an infected wound or the maggots on a dead body.

If you are ever tempted to describe something ghastly, ask yourself what your purpose is. If it is to suggest horror, one or two generalized lines will do. It is sufficient to say that someone stumbles upon a half-decomposed corpse; to describe that corpse in every horrible detail is horror for horror’s sake. All you will achieve is that your book, no matter what the rest of it consists of, will always connote in the reader’s mind that particular touch of horror.

Foreign Words

Do not use foreign words in narrative to show your erudition. Phonies like to stud their conversation with foreign words. If you do that in narrative, you, the author, will sound like a phony.

The same applies to dialogue. If you are characterizing a phony, it is legitimate to have him use foreign words occasionally. I did that with Guy Francon in The Fountainhead. But do not insert foreign words in the dialogue of characters if the story is laid in a foreign country, as many bad television and movie writers do. For instance, a story is laid in Germany; the characters are speaking in English, under the assumption that in fact they are speaking in German; and suddenly they utter words like liebchen in the middle of an English dialogue which is supposed to be German anyway. This has the same effect as the one achieved for Guy Francon, who would suddenly use French words to show that he could speak French—the effect of the author showing off that he knows a few German words or has just looked them up in the dictionary.

Sometimes a foreign character [who is actually supposed to be speaking in English] might mispronounce words or have a slightly Germanic way of sentence construction. Some foreigners have a characteristic way of talking if they do not know English well. It is legitimate to convey that, provided you devise your own means of doing it, instead of merely using a bromidic shorthand as a substitute for characterization, and provided you present the character’s particular grammatical structure, rather than just the mispronunciation.

Journalistic References

By “journalistic references,” I mean the names of living authors, political figures, song hits—any proper names which pertain concretely to a given period. The rule is: Do not use anything of this nature more recent than a hundred years. Anything that has survived for a long time becomes an abstraction, but the fame of the moment is too temporary to include in a story which deals with essentials, not with particular details.

It is all right to use Chopin, but not any contemporary composers, artists, or writers. Even if you are convinced that some contemporary writer is going to be immortal, he will in your story project something too much of the moment. Avoid the names of actual restaurants (which modem Naturalists love to use). You do not want to have your big scene laid in the restaurant that closed last week.

Especially bad are references to political issues. Nothing is as old as yesterday’s newspaper, and the issues that are big today are barely remembered two years later. Avoid names like “McCarthy,” “Hoover,” or “Truman.” They are included in most modern writing; read it five years later—it is more dated than ladies’ fashions.

(If for some reason you do use something of today, explain what it is, rather than rely on the immediate journalistic context in the reader’s mind. That will give the reference a certain feeling of distance and abstraction.)

Every writer, including me, has sometimes been guilty of using journalistic references. In The Fountainhead, I should not have described the devil as “a corner lout sipping a bottle of Coca-Cola,” and I also regret Coty’s powder puffs on Toohey’s dressing gown:

“Ellsworth Toohey sat spread out on a couch, wearing a dressing gown.... The dressing gown was made of silk bearing the trademarked pattern of Coty’s face powder, white puffs on an orange background; it looked daring and gay, supremely elegant through sheer silliness.”

There was in fact that kind of material on the market. Today, I would rather have invented some perfume company that used not a powder puff, but something else.

In my original manuscript of The Fountainhead, I had references to Nazism and communism, and even to Hitler and Stalin. [Novelist and political writer] Isabel Paterson, to whom I showed the abstract speeches before the book was published, said to me: “Do not use those narrow political terms, because the theme of your book is wider than the politics of the moment. Granted that the book is directed against fascism and communism, you are really writing about collectivism—any past, present, or future form of it. Do not narrow your subject down to the particular figures of the moment.”

I had to think this over for two days before I absorbed the idea; I was so used to the other method that it took quite an effort to cut out those journalistic references. But it was one of the most valuable pieces of advice I ever got in regard to writing. Imagine reading The Fountainhead today with references to Hitler and Stalin—it would not be the same novel.

You have to be guided by your theme and by how abstract a level you are writing on. In We the Living, I had a lot of journalistic references: specific dates, the Lenin-Trotsky split, and so forth. But that novel deals specifically with the politics of a certain period, so there such references were legitimate. When you deal with history, you obviously mention the concretes of the period.

In Atlas Shrugged, I hardly mentioned anybody younger than Plato and Aristotle. More recent references were proper in The Fountainhead because the fight for modem architecture occurred in a specific historical period. But Atlas Shrugged is of no period and therefore had to be kept the most abstract.

11

Special Forms of Literature

Humor

Humor is a metaphysical negation. We regard as funny that which contradicts reality: the incongruous and the grotesque.

Take the crudest example of humor: a dignified gentleman in top hat and tails walks down the street, slips on a banana peel, and falls down in a ludicrous position. Why is this supposed to be amusing? Because of the incongruity: if a dignified man falls down over a stupid object like a banana peel, it establishes him as contradictory to and unfit to deal with reality. That is what one laughs at.

In another bromide of two-reel comedies, a man comes home while his wife is entertaining a lover. Hiding the lover in a closet, the wife then tries to keep her husband from opening it: he wants to hang up his coat and she prevents him, etc. Why is this supposed to be funny? Because you (the audience) and the woman know the truth of the situation. You are in control of reality; the husband is not. That is the essence of humor.

Observe that man is the only being who can laugh. There is no such thing as a laughing animal. Only man has a volitional consciousness, and thus a choice between that which he regards as serious and that which he does not. Only man has the power to identify: This is reality—and this is a contradiction of reality. An animal does not have the concept contradiction (or even the concept reality, except by implication); it cannot grasp the issue of being volitionally unfit for reality. But a man can find other men ludicrous if they indulge in contradictions. Why? Because they have the choice of being consistent or not. Their contradictions are sometimes tragic; the smaller ones are funny.

What you find funny depends on what you want to negate. It is proper to laugh at evil (the literary form of which is satire) or at the negligible. But to laugh at the good is vicious. If you laugh at any value that suddenly shows feet of clay, such as in the example of the dignified gentleman slipping on a banana peel, you are laughing at the validity of values as such. On the other hand, if a pompous villain walks down the street—a man whose established attributes are not dignity, hut pretentiousness and stuffiness—you may properly laugh if he falls down because what is then being negated is a pretense, not an actual value.

Observe that some people have a good-natured sense of humor, and others a malicious one. Good-natured, charming humor is never directed at a value, but always at the undesirable or negligible. It has the result of confirming values; if you laugh at the contradictory or pretentious, you are in that act confirming the real or valuable. Malicious humor, by contrast, is always aimed at some value. For instance, when someone laughs at something that is important to you, that is the undercutting of your value.

The best statement of the difference between the two types of humor occurs in Atlas Shrugged when Dagny thinks of the opposite ways in which Francisco and Jim laugh: “Francisco seemed to laugh at things because he saw something much greater. Jim laughed as if he wanted to let nothing remain great.”

In this context, you can see why one of Ellsworth Toohey’s most evil lines in The Fountainhead is his advice that “we must be able to laugh at everything, particularly at ourselves.” The fact that one hears that line so often is the worst symptom of our nonvalue age. When that line is repeated too often in a society, it is a sign of the collapse of all values.

Observe modem magazines when they do profiles on celebrities whom they support or agree with: they always do it in a snide manner of laughing at the very people they are glamorizing. This style was once reserved for enemies; the press would do a ridiculing article only on someone they disagreed with or wanted to denounce. Today, it is the accepted style for those whom they want to glorify. That is a devastating sign of the policy that says: “Permit nothing to have value.”

To say that one does not take something seriously means: “Never mind, it’s not important, it doesn’t matter one way or another.” You can say that only about the things you do not value. If you take nothing seriously, it means that you have no values. If you have no values, then the first value, the base of all the others—namely, your life—has no value for you.

Let me give a few examples of the two types of humor.

Jean Kerr, the author of Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, is a benevolent humorist. She is allegedly complaining about the hard lot of a mother and the difficulty of coping with children. For instance, when her children eat the daisies, that is supposed to be a great evil on their part. But is that in fact what she is saying? No; she is really conveying the adventurousness and imagination of her children—their high spirits, which she has such a “hard” time controlling. At one point, when she describes how impossible it is to talk to one of her boys who is very literal-minded, I fell in love with that boy. She tells him to throw all of his clothes into the washing machine, and their conversation then goes something like the following. He says: “All my clothes?” She says: “Yes.” “My shoes, too?” “Well, no, not your shoes.” “All right, but I’ll put in the belt.” What comes across from their dialogue is an extremely intelligent, rational child. What Jean Kerr is actually laughing at is the kind of mother who would really consider this bad or difficult. She is negating the difficulty of the situation, and she is glorifying the good qualities of her children.

O. Henry is a benevolent humorist, as is Oscar Wilde in many of his plays, particularly The Importance of Being Earnest. Cyrano de Bergerac contains a lot of comedy, all of it aimed at destroying the pretentious or the cowardly. Cyrano laughs at villains, not at values or heroes.

Ernst Lubitsch was the only screen director famous for romantic comedies. Ninotchka, the Greta Garbo picture he directed, is a good example: it is comedy, but also high romance. What is laughed at is the sordid, undesirable aspects of life—and what comes across by means of the humor is the glamour, the romance, and the positive aspects.

In the benevolent type of humor, something good is always involved, as in Ninotchka, where the hero and heroine are quite glamorous. They are not funny—some of their adventures are; or they are acting humorously toward certain things, but not in a way that undercuts their own dignity, value, or self-esteem.

On the other hand, Swift is a humorist of a dubious kind. I read Gulliver’s Travels so long ago that I remember little of it, but I do remember that it is a satire against something—which does not project what the author is for. He satirizes all kinds of social weaknesses, but upholds nothing.

In a more modern style, Dorothy Parker laughs in a nasty, bitter way. She is regarded as a sensitive writer, yet manages to deal humorously with the most heartbreaking subjects possible, like lonely old maids or ugly, undesired women.

Humor as the exclusive ingredient of a story is a dubious form of writing. While some people have acquired great skill at it, such humor is philosophically empty because it is merely destruction in the name of nothing.

In sum, humor is a destructive element. If the humor of a literary work is aimed at the evil or the inconsequential—and if the positive is included—then the humor is benevolent and the work completely proper. If the humor is aimed at the positive, at values, the work might be skillful literarily, but it is to be denounced philosophically. This is true also of satire for the sake of satire. Even if the things satirized are bad and deserve to be destroyed, a work that includes no positive, but only the satirizing of negatives, is also improper philosophically.

Fantasy

Several different forms of literature can be classified as fantasy.

To begin with, there are stories laid in the future, as, for instance, Atlas Shrugged and Anthem, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, and a whole string of older books. Strictly speaking, this type of fiction is not fantasy, but merely the projection of something in time. Its justification is to show the ultimate consequences of some existing trend, or some other application to actual reality. The only rule about it is that it should not be purposeless (which is so general a rule that it applies to all literature). To place something in the future merely for the sake of placing it in the future would be irrational.

Then there is science fiction, which projects future inventions. There are magic stories, which project supernatural powers (fairy tales would be an example). There are ghost and horror stories. And there are stories about the hereafter—about heaven and hell.

All of these forms are rational when they serve some abstract purpose applicable to reality.

Most of Jules Verne’s science fiction presented extensions of the discoveries of his time; for instance, he wrote stories about dirigibles and submarines before these were actually invented. This was merely a literary exaggeration of an existing fact. Since inventions exist, it is legitimate for a writer to project new and greater ones.

The same principle applies to fairy tales. Stories like The Magic Carpet and Cinderella are justified even though the events are metaphysically impossible, because those events are used to project some idea which is rationally applicable to human beings. The author indulges in metaphysical exaggeration, but the meaning of the story is applicable to human life.

The best example of this kind of fantasy is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The literal subject of the story—a man who changes himself physically into a monster—is impossible, but this is only a symbolic device to convey a psychological truth. The story is a study of a man with contradictory premises. By drinking a special medicine, Dr. Jekyll indulges in the fun of turning himself into a monster. At first he is able to control the process, but then he reaches a stage where he cannot control it anymore, where he turns into the monster whether he wants to or not. This is what in fact happens to bad premises: at first they might be hidden or controlled, but if unchecked, they take control of a personality.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a brilliant psychological study projected into a fantastic form. The issue of the story is rationally applicable to human life, and very important.

A similar example is Frankenstein, the story of a man who creates a monster that gets out of his control. The meaning of the story is valid: a man must bear the consequences of his actions and should be careful not to create monsters that destroy him. This is a profound message, which is why the name Frankenstein has become almost a generic word (like Babbitt).

There are some interesting stories which project heaven or hell—for instance, the play Outward Bound. The characters are passengers on a ship who discover that they are in fact all dead and are now going to the Last Judgment. They start as a superficial collection of people—and then the author projects them in sharp, essential relief as they learn that they are soon to meet an examiner who will decide what happens thereafter. It is not a profound play, but its purpose is human characterization. Again, this fantasy has an application to actual human reality.

The movie Here Comes Mr. Jordan [1941] was a fascinating psychological story about a deceased prizefighter whose soul comes back to earth. He is not supposed to be dead—there has been some mistake in heavenly bookkeeping—so he is sent back in the body of a millionaire who has just died. By assuming that millionaire’s existence, he learns a different way of life. Since a rational human issue was involved, the story was very interesting.

What kinds of fantasies are not justified? Those with no intellectual or moral application to human life—for instance, the movies about man-sized ants from another planet invading the earth. “Wouldn’t it be horrible if ants suddenly conquered the earth?” Well, what if they did? If those ants at least symbolized some special evil—if, like animals in a fable, they represented dictators or humanitarians or other human monsters—such a story would be valid. But fantasy for the sake of fantasy is neither valid nor interesting.

In H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, men cannot defeat the Martian invaders, but the germs of the common cold can. Like the rest of Wells’s novels, this one appears to have profound meaning, but it actually does not. That the Martians are killed by cold germs is a nasty satirical touch, suitable at most for a clever short story. All it says is that nature can do what man cannot—and you do not write a whole novel merely to illustrate that one point. Wells tucks his message in at the end to give an allegedly redeeming meaning to what is only fantasy for fantasy’s sake.

I know of no ghost or horror stories that I would classify as valid.

In The Song of Bernadette, the author presents the story of Bernadette of Lourdes [including her divine visions] as if it were fact. The story has no validity for anyone except those who choose to believe it, but it is not a fantasy. It is a religious tract.

One could make the point that all religion is a fantasy. Religion is not, however, fantasy for fantasy’s sake. It has a much more vicious motive: the destruction of human life and the human mind. Religion uses fantastic means to prescribe a code of morality; therefore, it claims a relationship to human life. This raises the issue: Should man be guided by mystical dogma? But speaking in literary, not philosophical, terms, religious stories are distortions of reality for a purpose applicable to human life—although one would certainly be justified in fighting the purpose.

Pulp-magazine thrillers, which often have good plots, are devoid of any value application to reality. An example is a little pocketbook Leonard Peikoff once gave me. I had asked him if he knew of a good plot story, because I am miserably bored by any other kind, and he gave me one called Seven Footprints to Satan. It is the story of a man who becomes the prisoner of an archvillain who pretends that he is Satan and creates horrible evils for the sole purpose of stealing jewelry from museums and amusing himself by playing chess with human beings. The story is exciting in the sense that the writer knows how to keep up his suspense and mystery and when to introduce the unexpected—but the total has no meaning whatever. It lacks even the meaning of a good detective story or Western, which presents, in primitive terms, the conflict of good and evil.

A detective story is applicable to human life since crimes and murders are committed, and it has a crude moral pattern: the good fights the evil and always wins. But in the above type of science fiction or fantasy thriller, the message is not that the good wins in human life, even though the hero might escape. The values involved are meaningless and inapplicable to this earth.

You have probably heard the Romantic school of writing called “escape literature.” The pulp-magazine type of thriller is an escape, but not in the usual sense. It is not merely an escape from the drudgery of one’s existence (which would be a legitimate form of enjoyment); it is an escape from values and from the mind. The only thing that can make a story exciting and hold a reader’s interest is some value at stake. In a thriller of the above kind, which features a fantastic and impossible villain, the escape for the reader consists of dropping all concern with values. He has the advantage of reading about a struggle, yet he can learn from the story no abstraction applicable to himself.

This school of literature tells the reader that there are values, except that they do not apply to his life. “Yes, you can have thrilling purposes and adventures, but they have nothing to do with your life on earth.” Strangely enough, this cheap pulp literature is the expression of a religious metaphysics and morality: values do exist somewhere—on Mars or in another dimension—but not on earth.

This school includes all fantasies and all science fiction or general adventure thrillers which present issues without any possible counterpart in reality—issues without any application, abstract or symbolic, to the reader’s own life. It also includes the lesser costume dramas. The better ones do present some issue that applies to modern life (usually in a very generalized way); but the cheaper historical novels, which consist of nothing but duels and swinging from chandeliers, have no moral beyond the hero winning the girl or the buried gold.

Symbolism

Symbolism is the concretization of an idea in an object or person representing that idea.

An example of symbolic writing is morality plays. Just as fairy tales present the good fairy and the bad fairy, so morality plays present moral abstractions by means of human figures like an embodied Justice or an embodied Virtue. The figures do not represent characteristics [as in Romantic fiction]; they represent the abstractions themselves as a kind of Platonic archetype. This is a crude dramatic form, but legitimate if the symbolism is made clear.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is symbolic insofar as physical shapes represent a psychological conflict, Mr. Hyde being a symbol of psychological evil.

The one absolute in the use of symbolism is that a symbol should be legible; otherwise, the form is a contradiction in terms. This applies also to symbolism within works which are not symbolic as a whole. My use of the dollar sign in Atlas Shrugged is an example: I establish its meaning, and when I later refer to it, I do so on that basis. Similarly, when writers of religious stories use the cross, it is clear what that cross stands for. But when authors introduce all kinds of triangles or sawed-off pyramids, and nobody knows what it means, that is outside the bounds of rational propriety. Or take Kafka, or any such modernist; if nobody knows what the alleged symbol represents, one cannot even call it symbolism.

When, at the end of Part II of Atlas Shrugged, Dagny follows Galt into the sunrise, that is symbolism. It is even a trite symbol, but so appropriate that it was legitimate. Literally, she is following his plane late at night, and by the locale of the action he has to go east (which I carefully planned long in advance). Symbolically, she has been in the dark during all of the story, but now she is about to see the sunrise—and the first light comes from the wings of Galt’s plane.

Using the sunrise, or any form of light, as a symbol of the good or the revelation is a bromide, but it is a bromide of the kind that love is: it is so wide and fundamental that you cannot avoid it. What will make your use of it a bromide or not is whether or not you bring any originality to the subject.

It is not a good method to introduce symbolic sequences into an otherwise realistic story. For instance, some books have dream sequences which are supposed to be symbolic, but which are always completely unclear. This is a bad mixture of methods. It cannot be justified because it destroys the reality of the story. (It is proper, however, in musicals. In musicals, anything goes, the only rule being imagination.)

Tragedy and the Projection of Negatives

The justification for presenting tragic endings in literature is to show, as in We the Living, that the human spirit can survive even the worst of circumstances—that the worst that the chance events of nature or the evil of other people can do will not defeat the proper human spirit. To quote from Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged: “Suffering as such is not a value; only man’s fight against suffering, is.”

Here I speak of philosophical justification, not literary. As far as literary rules go, you can present anything you wish—you can write a story in which everybody is destroyed, the theme then being that man has no chance and destruction is his fate. There are many such stories, some of them well written. But to present suffering for the sake of suffering is totally wrong philosophically; and literarily it makes for a pointless story.

In We the Living, all the good people are defeated. The philosophical justification of the tragedy is the fact that the story denounces the collectivist state and shows, metaphysically, that man cannot be destroyed by it; he can be killed, but not changed or negated. The heroine dies radiantly endorsing life, feeling happiness in her last moment because she has known what life properly should be.

Another proper tragedy is Cyrano de Bergerac, where the hero dies frustrated both as a lover and in his career as a poet. But he maintains his values to the end. The justification for this tragedy is precisely that nothing broke the hero’s spirit—yet the author put every kind of disaster in his way.

Victor Hugo, who usually has unhappy endings, always presents his characters’ suffering somewhat in the way that I do in We the Living. Even if a particular character meets with disaster, the tragedy and pain are never complete; they are not, metaphysically, the final word on man. Hugo never projects the overwhelming horror of pain that one finds in Naturalistic novels—for instance, in the suicide scene in Anna Karenina. (Conversely, enjoyment and happiness never go unchallenged in Naturalistic novels.)

In general, the creation of only the negative is a flaw, both philosophically and literarily.

The best example is Dostoevsky, who was a moralist, but who was never able to project what he considered good. (He attempted it in several novels, without success.) However, in presenting the evils he denounced, he was a master.

This is a flaw in his novels. They are, in a way, incomplete works of fiction. I like them as a spectacle of human intelligence and perceptiveness at work—the spectacle of what Dostoevsky’s mind is able to identify and present. But after one finishes, one has only the satisfaction of having learned something about human nature, not the artistic satisfaction of having lived through an experience which is an end in itself. Reading his novels is anything but an end in itself.

The purpose of Dostoevsky’s novels is more didactic than artistic. The artistic means are superlative; his technique is magnificent. But since art is primarily a presentation of values, Dostoevsky fails because he can project his values only by means of negatives. We know what he is against, but not what he is for; he is not able to project it. (The reason is that he is much too intelligent a man, and too good an artist, to do what he wanted, namely, to project successfully a Christian ideal.)

An example from another field is Goya, the artist who is a master at presenting unspeakable horrors. You might be familiar with the horrible scenes he painted of the Napoleonic Wars in Spain. It is said—and is probably true biographically—that his purpose was to denounce the horror of war. But I would question Goya’s motive, and Dostoevsky’s. An artist, whether he identifies it or not, is, after all, busy projecting his values—and it requires a certain amount of fascination with evil, of holding evil as a value, to devote a whole work exclusively to that. Dostoevsky openly projected such fascination.

I read a novel for one purpose only, and to me no amount of literary skill is of equal importance.

I read a novel for the purpose of seeing the kind of people I would want to see in real life and living through the kind of experience I would want to live through. To those who say that this is a limited use of fiction, my answer is: No—because for any other purpose, nonfiction is better. If I want to learn something, I can learn it from nonfiction. But in the one realm where nonfiction cannot do as well—the realm of values and their concretization in human reality—nothing can take the place of art, and specifically of fiction.

Since that is the primary purpose of art, that is what I personally enjoy most and the only thing that counts.

I would not want to live through a story by Dostoevsky. I admire him very much, but only literarily; I do not enjoy reading his stories. I enjoy Victor Hugo. I do not share his ideas and do not always approve of his tragic endings; nevertheless, he is the writer nearest to creating the kind of people and events I would like to observe or live with.

That is my personal enjoyment of literature, and it is not subjective. By “personal,” I only mean “mine”—and I can defend and prove my standard in every respect.

This course is part of the proof.

INDEX

“A Letter on Style” (Lewis)

Abstractions

and concretes

floating

and values

and metaphors

See also “Circle”; Propaganda versus art

Anna Christie (O’Neill)

Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)

Anna Lucasta (Yordan)

Anthem (Ayn Rand)

Anticlimax

See also Climax

Aristotle

Arrowsmith (Lewis)

characterization in

style of

Art

and literature

nonobjective

Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)

theme of

plot of

style of

Babbitt (Lewis)

By Love Possessed (Cozzens)

Camille (Dumas fils)

Characterization

Chekhov, Anton

“Circle”

See also Abstractions and concretes

Climax

and plot-theme

See also Anticlimax

Coincidence

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Colloquialism

Concretes. See Abstractions and concretes

Conflict

in characterization

See also Plot; Plot-theme; Drama and melodrama

Connotation and denotation

Cozzens, James Gould. See By Love Possessed

Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand)

DeMille, Cecil B.

Denotation. See Connotation and denotation

Descriptions

Detective stories

Determinism. See Naturalism and determinism

Dialogue

Dinesen, Isak. See Seven Gothic Tales

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson)

Dodsworth (Lewis)

Dostoevsky

Drama and melodrama

Dumas, Alexandre, fils. See Camille

Efficient causation

Emotions, as dramatic selector

Exposition

Fairy tales

Fantasy

Final causation

Flashbacks

Foreign words

Fountainhead, The (Ayn Rand)

theme of

plot of

climax of

characterization in

style of

Frankenstein (Shelley)

Free will. See Romanticism and free will

“Good Copy” (Ayn Rand)

Gone With the Wind (Mitchell)

Goya, Francisco de

Greenspan, Alan

Gulliver’s Travels (Swift)

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. See The Scarlet Letter

Henry, O.

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (movie)

How to Think Creatively (Hutchinson)

Hugo, Victor

See also Les Misérables, Notre, Dame de Paris

Humor

Hutchinson, Eliot Dole, quoted

Importance of Being Earnest, The (Wilde)

Inspiration. See Subconscious, role in writing of

Ivanhoe (Scott)

Journalistic references

Joyce, James

Kafka, Franz

Kerr, Jean. See Please Don’t Eat the Daisies

Language, as objective

Laski, Harold

Les Misérables (Hugo)

Lewis, Sinclair

See also “A Letter on Style”; Arrowsmith; Babbitt; Dodsworth; Main Street

Lubitsch, Ernst

Magazine writing

Main Street (Lewis)

Manslaughter (movie)

Maugham, W. Somerset

Melodrama. See Drama and melodrama

Memory as a function of values

Merritt, Abraham. See Seven Footprints to Satan

Metaphors

Mitchell, Margaret. See Gone With the Wind

Narrative

versus dialogue

versus dramatization

Naturalism

and plotlessness

and determinism

and characterization

and style

Negatives

Nineteen Eighty-four (Orwell)

Ninotchka (movie)

Nonobjective art. See Art, nonobjective

Notre-Dame de Paris (Hugo) style of

Novelettes

Novels

Obscenity

O’Connor, Frank (husband of Ayn Rand)

Of Time and the River (Wolfe)

One Lonely Night (Spillane)

O’Neill, Eugene. See Anna Christie

Orwell, George. See Nineteen Eighty-four

Outline

Outward Bound (Vane)

Parker, Dorothy

Paterson, Isabel

Peikoff, Leonard

Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (Kerr)

Plot

and theme

and free will

and conflict

and suspense

See also Coincidence; Plot-theme; Romanticism

Plot-theme

Plotlessness. See Naturalism and plotlessness

Propaganda versus art

Quo Vadis (Sienkiewicz)

Rachmaninoff, Sergei

Romanticism

and plot

and free will

and characterization

and style

Rostand, Edmond. See Cyrano de Bergerac

Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne)

Science fiction

Scott, Sir Walter. See Ivanhoe

Selectivity in art

Seven Footprints to Satan (Merritt)

Seven Gothic Tales (Dinesen)

Shakespeare, William

Shelley, Mary. See Frankenstein

Short stories

Showing versus telling

Sienkiewicz, Henryk. See Quo Vadis

“Simplest Thing in the World, The” (Ayn Rand)

Slang

Song of Bernadette, The (Werfel)

Spillane, Mickey

Squirms

Star Money (Winsor)

Stein, Gertrude

Stevenson, Robert Louis. See Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Style

and selection of content

and selection of words

Subconscious, role in writing of

Suspense

Swift, Jonathan

Symbolism

Teleology. See Final causation

Theme

and plot

Theory-practice dichotomy

Tolstoy, Leo

See also Anna Karenina

Tosca

Tragedy

Transitions

Traviata, La

Values, art as objectification of

Vane, Sutton. See Outward Bound

Verne, Jules

War of the Worlds, The (Wells)

We the Living (Ayn Rand)

Web and the Rock, The (Wolfe)

Wells, H.G.

Werfel, Franz. See The Song of Bernadette

Westerns

Wilde, Oscar

Winsor, Kathleen. See Star Money

Wolfe, Thomas

See also Of Time and the River; The Web and the Rock

Writer’s block. See Squirms

Yordan, Philip. See Anna Lucasta

1

Eliot Dole Hutchinson, How to Think Creatively (New York: Abingdon Press, 1949), p. 91.

2

See David Harriman, ed., Journals of Ayn Rand (New York: Dutton, 1997), pp. 532-40.

3

I have included these two versions here, even though they are already in The Romantic Manifesto (in the essay “Basic Principles of Literature”), because Ayn Rand’s analysis here is fuller.

4

“A Letter on Style” (1932), reprinted in H. E. Maule and M. H. Cane, eds., The Man from Main Street (New York: Random House, 1953).

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

EDITOR’S PREFACE

Chapter 1 - Writing and the Subconscious

Chapter 2 - Literature as an Art Form

Chapter 3 - Theme and Plot

Chapter 4 - The Plot-Theme

Chapter 5 - The Climax

Chapter 6 - How to Develop a Plot Ability

Chapter 7 - Characterization

Chapter 8 - Style I: Depictions of Love

Chapter 9 - Style II: Descriptions of Nature and of New York

Chapter 10 - Particular Issues of Style

Chapter 11 - Special Forms of Literature

INDEX

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

EDITOR’S PREFACE

Chapter 1 - Preliminary Remarks

Chapter 2 - Choosing a Subject and Theme

Chapter 3 - Judging One’s Audience

Chapter 4 - Applying Philosophy Without Preaching It

Chapter 5 - Creating an Outline

Chapter 6 - Writing the Draft: The Primacy of the Subconscious

Chapter 7 - Editing

Chapter 8 - Style

Chapter 9 - Book Reviews and Introductions

Chapter 10 - Writing a Book

Chapter 11 - Selecting a Title

Chapter 12 - Acquiring Ideas for Writing

APPENDIX - Selected Outlines Used by Ayn Rand in Writing Articles

INDEX

AYN RAND is the author of Atlas Shrugged, philosophically the most challenging bestseller of its time. Her first novel, We the Living, was published in 1936, followed by Anthem. With the publication of The Fountainhead, she achieved a spectacular and enduring success. Rand’s unique philosophy, Objectivism, has gained a worldwide audience. The fundamentals of her philosophy are set forth in such books as Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and The Romantic Manifesto. Journals of Ayn Rand, The Ayn Rand Reader, and The Art of Fiction are available in Plume editions. Ayn Rand died in 1982.

ROBERT MAYHEW, Ph.D. is an associate professor of Philosophy at Seton Hall University. He is the editor of Ayn Rand’s Marginalia and has lectured extensively on Rand.

PETER SCHWARTZ is chairman of the board of directors of the Ayn Rand Institute, as well as an instructor of an advanced writing course at the Institute’s Objectivist Graduate Center.

PLUME
Published by Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario,
Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,
Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,
New Delhi—110 017, lndia
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland,
New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,
Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Plume Printing, February 2001

Copyright © Estate of Ayn Rand, 2001 All rights reserved

“The Politics of Fear and Hope” by James Reston from The New York Times, May 6, 1969. Copyright © The New York Times Company, 1969.

REGISTERED TRADEMARK-MARCA REGISTRADA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Rand, Ayn.

The art of nonfiction: a guide for writers and readers / Ayn Rand ; edited by Robert Mayhew ; introduction by Peter Schwartz.

p. cm.

Includes index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-13729-1

1. Authorship. I. Mayhew, Robert. II. Title.

PN147 .R35 2001

808’.02—dc21

00-045666

Kirch

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

http://us.penguingroup.com

INTRODUCTION

To all the practitioners—and to all the discouraged, might-have- been practitioners—of the art of nonfiction writing, the author of this book offers an invaluable service: she de-mysticizes writing.

The process of writing is widely regarded as an impenetrable mystery. Good writing, it is believed, is the product of some inborn ability, which can be neither objectively defined nor systematically learned. Like ardent religionists who insist that the road to truth is open only to those who are visited by divine revelation, many teachers of writing claim that the path to effective prose can be traversed only if one is struck by the inexplicable thunderbolt of inspiration.

Ayn Rand rejects this idea. She maintains that writing is a rational sphere, governed by rationally identifiable principles.

“Writing is no more difficult a skill than any other, such as engineering,” she says. “Like every human activity, it requires practice and knowledge. But there is nothing mystical to it.” Since writing is essentially the act of communicating your thoughts clearly, it can be done competently by virtually everyone: “Any person who can speak English grammatically can learn to write nonfiction.... What you need for nonfiction writing is what you need for life in general: an orderly method of thinking.”

In analyzing the process of writing, her starting point—unlike that of other theorists—is not the content of the writer’s mind, but the source of such content: the facts of reality. On this philosophic issue, Ayn Rand was an unyielding advocate of the Aristotelian view, which she described as the primacy of existence—the view that the universe exists independent of anyone’s awareness of it, that the function of consciousness is to grasp, not to create, reality, and that the absolutism of existence is what ought to shape one’s thoughts (and actions).

This is the premise that underlies her approach to writing. Repudiating the standard, subjectivist perspective, she holds that writing is to be treated as an objective science: “Whenever you have a problem, whether you are writing an article or building a doghouse, do not look inside for the solution. Do not ask: ‘How do I do it? Why don’t I know it?’ Look outside and ask: ‘What is the nature of the thing I want to do?’ ” From this, she proceeds to discuss the nature of writing and its consequent requirements, such as the strict need to delimit one’s subject and theme, or the indispensability of an outline. She provides clear, perceptive principles about the psychological process of writing (such as the different roles played by the conscious mind and the subconscious), along with methodical advice to guide you through the process (from getting ideas, to choosing your subject and theme, to polishing your draft).

The primacy of extrospection over introspection leads to another important principle of writing. Ayn Rand urges writers to direct their attention solely to their work—to what is needed to do it well, to how to solve problems that arise—but not to its supposed meaning for one’s worth as a person: “If you have difficulty with writing, do not conclude that there is something wrong with you. Writing should never be a test of self-esteem.”

Of course, according to the mystical viewpoint, the writer’s self-esteem will always be at issue. If writing is a matter of being zapped with inspiration by a gracious muse, the absence of such inspiration must indicate unworthiness on the writer’s part.

One of the worst consequences of that viewpoint is the mental torture it inflicts upon writers. If the content of your consciousness arises causelessly, independent of reality, then writing is a journey not into the unknown, but into the unknowable. If there are no firm rules by which to proceed—if one must stare passively at an empty page or empty screen, with mind idling, waiting desperately for the muse to hit the accelerator—then writing must be laden with anxiety and guilt. It is tantamount to trying to design a computer with no principles of electronics or mechanics, only the hope of somehow being moved by the right “spirit.”

Since writing should be regarded as a science, Ayn Rand says, the job of the writer is at root no different from that of the scientist. “It would never occur to a scientist to focus partly on his experiment and partly on his self-esteem or future fame. (If it does, he is a neurotic and will probably not be heard from.) He has to focus exclusively on his experiment. Nothing else is relevant. The same applies to writing, only it is harder because it is a purely mental job—there is nothing in reality yet except a blank sheet of paper. This is why so many people fail at it. It is harder to focus on the reality of what you have to produce when there is nothing before you but a blank page.... In practice, you must be more reality-oriented than a scientist, who has the help of the physical problem and the physical objects he is working with.”

This is not just the de-mysticizing, but the de-agonizing of writing. Ayn Rand’s methodology will not make writing problem-free, but something much better: problem-solvable. The conviction that one’s work can be guided by rational principles rescues writers from a sense of helplessness. It saves them from the state of pre-science savages, who felt they were at the mercy of incomprehensible forces. Such a feeling is paralyzing to a writer, who has to know that, in principle, he is in control of his work—that his success depends, not on some inscrutable emanations from his gut, but on identifiable ideas from his brain.

Those who are serious about writing should find this approach enormously rewarding. I know that after reading an early transcript of this material years ago, I found the process of writing much easier and more enjoyable. The approach presented in this book makes writing a definable—and thus readily doable—activity, rather than a debilitating battle. I use much of this material in a writing class I teach at the Objectivist Graduate Center of the Ayn Rand Institute. And the response I typically get from students is something along the lines of: “So there is a definite method by which to write—and it works!”

The transcript I originally saw was merely a verbatim account of Ayn Rand’s extemporaneous remarks. In this book, by contrast, her presentation has been impressively reorganized, with material taken painstakingly from one comer of the transcript and moved to another, where it logically belongs. Robert Mayhew deserves abundant praise for his editing, which has resulted in a much more integrated and readable product.

Those who experience the process of writing as overwhelming and traumatic will, I expect, find this book liberating. During the Renaissance, scientists—armed with the revived Aristotelian confidence in the power of reason—came to realize that the world was theirs to conquer. Writers, armed with Ayn Rand’s de-mysticizing approach to writing, can be similarly unleashed, with the world of words theirs to master.

—Peter Schwartz
Danbury, Connecticut
July 1999

EDITOR’S PREFACE

In 1969, Ayn Rand gave a course on nonfiction writing to well over a dozen friends and associates. At the time, she was editor of The Objectivist magazine (Objectivism is the philosophy she originated); she gave the course to help those who were, or planned to be, contributors.

She did not deliver prepared lectures. Instead, she spoke on a topic (some evenings for over three hours) guided solely by a brief outline. These “lectures” were interspersed with: general discussion; requests for clarification, with her replies; discussion of homework assignments; and question-and-answer periods.

The course was privately recorded. My task was to convert the recording into a book. Let me describe the kinds of editing I did.

Cutting. A great deal of material had to be cut, though I am confident that nothing of importance pertaining to nonfiction writing was omitted. (Prompted by student questions, Ayn Rand occasionally went off on fascinating tangents into philosophy, politics, and art. Much of what she said is of great interest, and such material will no doubt be published in some form eventually; but it does not belong in this book.) In regard to nonfiction writing, I assumed that every passage of hers was worthy of inclusion unless I could make a case for its omission. If, for example, while she was lecturing, a student interjected a question, and her brief reply added nothing to the discussion (because it was repetitive or dealt with a narrow problem of no general interest), I omitted it. Or if the students spent two hours discussing their outlines or writing samples with her, I did not include the entire discussion. However, I always tried to incorporate into the book any important insights or principles that she mentioned during these discussions.

Reorganizing. Ayn Rand did not present this course as a series of lectures corresponding exactly to the chapters of this book. How, then, was her course organized?

When it began, she did not have a complete picture of what material would be covered, or even how many times the class would meet. Nor did she have in mind an exact order of presentation. On the first night, she told the class:

As late as this afternoon, I wasn’t yet sure whether I would be giving a series of classes. Originally, I thought we might cover everything in one evening. Well, that’s where I’m not omniscient: Since then, I made a brief outline of the main topics that I know of (which does not yet include any questions you may have). If we finish everything in ten lectures, we will be doing very well.

In fact, it took them sixteen evenings, meeting usually every other week, to “finish everything.”

Whatever was undecided at the outset, the basic logical structure of the core of the course was clear to Ayn Rand from the start. This core is found in chapters 1—8; this is where she covers the central aspects of nonfiction writing. Here she had a definite structure in mind, and I followed it. No major reorganization was required.

The material in the remaining chapters (9-12) is not part of what she considered the “main topics” of the course. These chapters instead consist of her extensive answers to questions on miscellaneous topics in regard to nonfiction writing—all too good to omit. With one exception, Ayn Rand answered these questions in the order in which they were asked, and so I had to determine the proper order of presentation in a book. I did place “Acquiring Ideas for Writing” (chapter 12) last because she indicated that this issue could best be covered at the end. Since there was no formal conclusion, I ended with the story she herself used to end the course.

Given the extemporaneous nature of her presentation, and the extent of student participation, there were numerous digressions—for example, she would often return to points discussed earlier, or respond to questions or comments on later or tangential issues. Part of my job was to integrate this material into a logical presentation. Thus, within every chapter it was necessary to some extent to shift material around.

Line editing. My aim here was to ensure that the writing was clear and readable. This involved transforming Ayn Rand’s oral presentation into written form, i.e., condensing what she said, eliminating repetitions, and, where necessary, correcting grammar.

Notwithstanding the amount of editing required, it is remarkable how lucid her extemporaneous material is. But there are occasions when the recording is unclear or contains gaps. In most of these cases, no educated guess at a meaning was possible, and so the passage was omitted. In rare cases, it was almost, but not absolutely, certain what her meaning was; here the wording necessary to make the passage fully clear was supplied.

Because of the number of editorial changes I made, it would have distracted the reader had I used the apparatus of brackets and ellipses. Therefore, I use brackets only for text that could not have come from Ayn Rand. For example, if she referred to something she had said three months earlier, I would change it to, say, “as I discussed in [chapter 1].”

My purpose was not to turn Ayn Rand’s remarks into a smooth, finished piece of writing. Rather, it was merely to help in making the course clearer and more readable. I believe I have fulfilled this task, and I am pleased with the results. But this book, I stress, still retains the quality of an extemporaneous presentation. Ayn Rand never intended her unprepared remarks in 1969 to be transformed into a book. In fact, in answer to a student’s question about the nature of a first draft, she said: “When I give these lectures, I speak from an outline, and my subconscious fills in the concretes. If you transcribed a recording of them, that would be like a very rough first draft. But it would not be good enough to publish.” In my judgment, however, it is eminently “good enough” now to read.

If you wish to see or judge the merits of Ayn Rand’s own writing, please consult the works that she did intend for publication.

I wish to thank, most of all, Leonard Peikoff for allowing me to undertake this project, for his superb and extensive editorial guidance during its first stages, and for giving the entire manuscript a final editing. The principles of editing he taught me will continue to be useful well beyond my work on this book. Many thanks to Peter Schwartz as well, for writing the introduction, and for his excellent editorial advice in the last stages of the project. His work on this book has improved every page. I also want to thank the Ayn Rand Institute for its help, which took many forms. Finally, and as always, I wish to thank my wife, Estelle, for solving the many computer problems I encountered while working on this book, and for her many other forms of support.

1

Preliminary Remarks

The first precondition of this course, and of any type of writing, is: do not get a sense of unearned guilt. If you have difficulty with writing, do not conclude that there is something wrong with you. Writing should never be a test of self-esteem. If things are not going as you want, do not see it as proof of an unknowable flaw in your subconscious.

Never take the blame for something you do not know. Be sure, however, to take the blame for writing errors you do know about. That much is open to your conscious mind, and pertains to how carefully you edit.

If you tell yourself you are guilty for not writing brilliant sentences within five minutes, that stops your subconscious and leads to a host of writing problems. Writing is not an index of psychological health. (Overconscientiousness is one reason a person might aspire to something too ambitious, and then blame himself if it does not come easily.) If you do have any guilt, earned or unearned, that is between you and your psychologist. When you sit down to write, however, you must regard yourself as perfect, omniscient, and omnipotent.

Of course, you are not omniscient and omnipotent; no human skill, if at all interesting, can be perfect every time. Properly, therefore, you should feel that you have the capacity to write well, but that it is difficult. And you should not want an easy job—you do not want to be a hack—and therefore you should take all the trouble, and have all the patience, that writing requires. Do not conclude, at the first difficulty, that you are hopeless. This is the sense in which you must feel omniscient and omnipotent: not that everything you write will automatically be perfect, but that you have the capacity to make your work what you want to make it.

This leads to a second point. Contrary to all schools of art and esthetics, writing is something one can learn. There is no mystery about it.

In literature, as in all the fine arts, complex premises must be set early in a person’s mind, so that a beginning adult may not have enough time to set them and thus cannot learn to write. Even these premises can be learned, theoretically, but the person would have to acquire them on his own. So I am inclined to say that fiction writing—and the fine arts in general—cannot be taught. Much of the technical skill involved can be, but not the essence.

However, any person who can speak English grammatically can learn to write nonfiction. Nonfiction writing is not difficult, though it is a technical skill. Its only difficulty pertains to a person’s method of thinking or psycho-epistemology.¹ What you need for nonfiction writing is what you need for life in general: an orderly method of thinking. If you have problems in this regard, they will slow you down (in both realms). But writing is literally only the skill of putting down on paper a clear thought, in clear terms. Everything else, such as drama and “jazziness,” is merely the trimmings.

I once said that the three most important elements of fiction are plot, plot, and plot. The equivalent in nonfiction is: clarity, clarity, and clarity.

Harold Fleming, the author of Ten Thousand Commandments, once showed me a quotation he carried with him, from The Education of Henry Adams: “The result of a year’s work depends more on what is struck out than on what is left in, on the sequence of the main lines of thought, than on their play and variety.” Incidentally, there is not one extra word in this quotation. It is pruned down to the minimum necessary to express the thought. This is a fine way of making the point that clarity comes above all else. The first absolute is: be clear. Drama, jazziness, color—which can be added later—are never as important as clarity.

Nobody can learn to write without practicing, because there are so many subconscious integrations to be automatized. Nobody can write strictly by conscious effort. No matter how much theory you know, you will not be a good writer until you practice. Therefore, do not expect your first articles to be easy. They will be difficult, and as you develop they will become even more difficult, because you will attempt more ambitious themes. But in a different sense writing becomes easier: with each article you write you learn something, so that at the end of the article you are better than you were at the beginning.

How good you become depends on your premises and interests, and on how much time you devote to writing. But the skill can be learned. It is not mysterious and does not have to be torture.

Remember this point, particularly when you feel you will never write again or know what writing is. That sense of helplessness is inherent in struggling with a new thought. But any particular writing problem you might have is solvable (though, as in any introspection, it is not always easy to identify your problem). Writing is no more difficult a skill than any other, such as engineering. Like every human activity, it requires practice and knowledge. But there is nothing mystical to it.

The secret of writing is to be professional about it.

You can be professional before you publish anything—if you approach writing as a job. If you apply to writing the same standards and methods that people regularly apply to other professions, you will take a lot of weight off your subconscious and increase your productive capacity.

If you do not regard writing as a job, self-doubt will necessarily enter your mind, and you will be paralyzed. You will be putting yourself on trial every time you attempt to write. Instead of being an expression of your self-esteem, writing becomes its test. If so, it will be a miracle if you ever connect two sentences.

What does a person do in other professions when he feels self-doubt? If his approach is professional, he retains his knowledge of his own intelligence. He does not doubt his professional abilities, even though he may have difficulties to solve. He also understands that if he wants to advance, he has to expand his knowledge. The “If I don’t get a raise there’s something wrong with me” type of self-doubt is not relevant and does not enter his mind.

This same hard-headed, reality orientation is what you have to assume in regard to writing. I regard the piece of paper as my employer. I have to fill that piece of paper. How I feel—whether it is difficult or not, whether I am stuck or not—is irrelevant. It is as irrelevant as it would be if I were an employee of Hank Rearden [an industrialist in Atlas Shrugged]. He would not tolerate it if I told him, “I can’t work today because I have self-doubt” or “I have a self-esteem crisis.” Yet that is what most people do, in effect, when it comes to writing. I have always taken the professional approach. Of course, I can never guarantee how long some piece will take me, but my assignment is always to fill that page. I know a certain subject has to be stated, and I have the capacity to state it. What the difficulties are is irrelevant. They are my problem, and I will solve it.

My focus in this course is on writing articles, though much of what I say applies to books as well. Among articles, my focus is on the “middle range.”

Nonfiction writing covers a wide range, from theoretical works that deal with broad, abstract principles, to concrete journalistic reporting. Theoretical articles discuss new fundamentals or present a new approach to issues on a fundamental level. (See, for example, Leonard Peikoff’s “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy.”²) The proper medium for these articles is academic journals (except in the case of Objectivist articles, since no academic journal would publish them). Journalistic articles, on the other hand, consist not of theorizing, but of reporting on a given phenomenon or event—describing some concrete event or situation. (See, for example, Henry Kamm’s “For Three Minutes I Felt Free.”³)

The articles I most enjoy writing are in the middle range.

Middle-range articles fall somewhere between theoretical and journalistic articles. They consist of the application of abstractions to concretes, which is what most intellectual magazines contain. Such articles deal neither with philosophical theory nor with concrete reporting. They accept a theoretical proposition and analyze some current event or some aspect of the culture from that viewpoint.

Two examples are Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, and my reply to it, “On Living Death.”⁴ The Pope’s encyclical is middle-range—actually, high middle-range—because he applies basic principles of Catholic philosophy and religion (concerning the sanctity of life, God’s will, and a woman’s duty) to narrower issues, namely love, marriage, and birth control. The idea of God’s will, or the view that man may not interfere with natural processes, is a theoretical subject; but it is applied here to such issues as what man should do in marriage. In my reply, I do not state any new Objectivist theory; I discuss why the Pope’s theories are wrong from the Objectivist viewpoint. I apply my view of human rights, the nature of love, and the nature of marriage to the issues raised in this encyclical. That is writing in the middle range.

If I wrote a critique of Kant, and in the process I defined some new theory,⁵ that would be a theoretical article. But if I simply took an aspect of his philosophy and showed why it is wrong according to Objectivism, that would be middle range.

Theoretical articles, written to present something fundamental and new, are the most valuable. But you should not aim for them. You should not wait to discover something new in order to write.

No matter what you write, however, a knowledge of the principles of writing is invaluable. But what you do not know consciously is not really knowledge. If you do not know certain principles of thinking and writing explicitly, you are helpless to use them. You may practice these principles without knowing it (like the man in Molière’s comedy who did not know he was talking prose); but they are not in your control if you have never conceptualized them.

The present course should help you immensely with this task. This does not mean that inspiration will come to you automatically. But it does mean that you will know how to make it come when you need it.

2

Choosing a Subject and Theme

Whenever you have a problem, whether you are writing an article or building a doghouse, do not look inside for the solution. Do not ask: “How do I do it? Why don’t I know it?” Look outside and ask: “What is the nature of the thing I want to do?”

What is the nature of an article? First observe that you cannot do everything at once. Whatever you are writing—a theoretical work on a revolutionary idea or a small piece about a narrow concrete—you cannot say everything you know about the subject. You must accept this premise fully, so that it becomes part of your subconscious and operates automatically. You can do this by asking yourself whether you always knew everything you know today. Obviously you did not. Knowledge is acquired in steps.

Good teachers recognize that you cannot teach everything at once, which is why a four-year course of study must be divided into semesters, and semesters into individual lectures. But when it comes to writing, people forget this principle and attempt to cram everything they know about the subject into one article. Yet this cannot be done even in a series of books. Since every item of knowledge is connected to every other, and since there is only one reality, if you wanted to present an exhaustive case on any one subject, you would have to write the work of a universal scholar. For example, you would start with an article on the New York theater, and would end up covering science, epistemology, metaphysics, psychology, etc.

All writing is selective in every aspect—not only in its style, but in its most basic content, because you cannot communicate everything.

(However, I prefer the person who tries to write everything in one article—which at least reveals a good intention—to the concrete-bound writer who discusses only the toes of a statue, or to the linguistic analyst who can write only about the ten uses of the word “but.” So if you are overambitious, I sympathize with you; nevertheless, this approach is disastrous.)

You must delimit your subject and theme.

Some people commit the error of trying to present all they know by writing an unanswerable article. This is a mistake on at least two counts. First, it is impossible, because if the theme is important, it would take a book to prove it. In an article, you do not prove your theme, you demonstrate it. These are almost synonymous, but here is the distinction. “Proof” applies mainly to theoretical subjects. But when you write about merely an aspect of a subject, such as a cultural or philosophical issue that is part of a cluster of issues, you do not try to prove some point. That would require a much broader and longer piece. Instead, you demonstrate your point, i.e., present it and indicate its proof (which is not the same as giving the proof). For example, in my article “The ‘Inexplicable Personal Alchemy,’ ”⁶ I do not prove that we should treat the men of reason better—I merely provide the material for such a proof. I demonstrate that the policy of destroying the young because of their virtues is disastrous, and I show its results in two extreme cases: Russia and America. But to actually prove this, I would have to prove the validity and importance of reason. Here, for an Objectivist audience, I take that premise as axiomatic. (The article is still of value to a non-Objectivist. It will not prove the point to him, but if he is interested, it will jolt him into investigating further the issue of reason versus irrationality. And I present my point in such a way that the worst irrationalist would not dare say openly that he is opposed to those Russian protesters and is in favor of the hippies.)

The second reason why trying to write an unanswerable article is a mistake is that the author is assuming his readers do not possess free will. He is assuming he must present, by some undefined means, a case that no one could resist. But clearly such an assumption is false. People can evade the most obvious logical connections. Therefore, if you try to write such an article, you are defeated at the outset, because you are asking the impossible of yourself. As a result, either you will be unable to write (and will not know why), or you will write endlessly, following sidelines, each of which leads to further sidelines. Instead of being unanswerable, you will raise more questions than you answer. (This is an eloquent illustration of the fact that acting on a wrong premise achieves the opposite of your intention.)

If the unanswerable or exhaustive article is impossible, what kind is possible? An article, by its nature, must treat a severely delimited aspect of a subject, not a whole subject.

The standard of measurement here is relative, but I mean a “whole subject” in its most basic sense. For instance, if your subject is political, then the whole subject is politics, with all its key aspects. That would be a proper subject for a book, but not for an article. Even in writing a book, you would have to delimit what politics is: you cannot include too much metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics, even though each is relevant. In a book, you indicate your framework, delimit your subject, and stick to essentials. So, obviously, any large-scale subject cannot be the focus of an article. (Actually, my Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology⁷ does not qualify as an article. It is really a monograph, which is why I had to write it in the form of eight installments—much too long even for a theoretical article. It should have been published originally as a book. This is a good illustration of the form an article should not take.)

Consider my article “On Living Death,”⁸ which deals with birth control. I do not treat the whole issue, only the Objectivist critique of the Catholic position. Further, I do not cover all the relevant Catholic literature, only one papal encyclical. Even though I deal with fundamentals, my subject is only one aspect of a broad issue.

A useful exercise is to look at some good articles and name the broader subject and the particular aspect each treats. You will find that the subject always deals with a partial aspect examined from some viewpoint; it is never a crammed condensation of the whole.

Once you recognize the nature of an article, the next step is to decide on an article of your own. Observe that there are two essential elements of an article: subject and theme. The subject is what the article is about: the issue, event, or person it deals with. (Again, an article must cover only an aspect of a whole.) The theme is what the author wants to say about the subject—what he brings to the subject. If the article is in the middle range, he brings his evaluation of the subject; if it is theoretical, he brings his new idea.

Consider a middle-range approach to the subject of modem theater. You could write many articles on this, and thus write on the same subject but with different themes. For example, one person could write on modem theater as an indication of cultural disintegration, while some modernist might try to show why he thinks it is good, or what its social significance is. There are many potential approaches to the same subject.

As for theoretical works, consider my Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. The subject is epistemology (and more narrowly the nature of concepts), and the theme is my theory of concepts. Or: the subject of my article “The Psycho-epistemology of Art”⁹ is art, and the theme is my definition of the nature, purpose, and source of art. In theoretical articles, the theme is the abstract point the author wants to make. It does not include an evaluation.

The easiest way to identify your subject and theme is to ask yourself why you want to write the article. The more clearly you state your answer, the easier it will be to create your outline and write your article.

The question “Why do I want to write this article?” involves two sub-questions: “What subject do I want to write about?” and “What do I want to say about the subject—i.e., what is my theme?” In answering these questions, you may discover that your reasons are inappropriate. For example, you find that you want to write an article because you are angry at the president. That is not yet a good reason. Writing is not occupational therapy. The next question should be: “Is there a wider reason I feel so angry?” If you have a valid reason, and nobody has yet taken your particular approach to the president, then your article turns from a vague, subjective emotion into a potentially valuable piece.

As an example of selecting a subject and theme, consider again my 1969 article “The ‘Inexplicable Personal Alchemy.’ ”¹⁰ I felt a strong emotion when I read Kamm’s piece about the young Russian rebels. I asked my husband whether he had read it, and he had. His reaction was the same, but without the personal details. He thought it was beautiful and possessed grandeur, and that there was something very tragic about it. That was the first clue that my reaction was not totally subjective, i.e., based on mere personal history.

My next questions were: “Is there a wider meaning to this feeling? Why do I feel such pain?” Immediately I knew the reason: Kamm’s article portrays the destruction of the best of the young. What is so tragic here is that they are idealists in a hopeless situation, and yet they are still trying to fight their destroyers. The next questions I asked were: “Why are they still fighting? Why do I feel their situation is tragic?” I saw that they are fighting on the basis of their virtues, which they are too young to identify. They are doomed, yet it is the best within them that makes them act as they do, without their even knowing fully why.

This was my reaction to the destruction of young people in Russia. So far, it is a narrow subject, of interest in a specialized study of Russia, but not yet appropriate for an American article. But the next connection in my mind was that this phenomenon is not exclusive to Russia. Young people are being destroyed for their virtues and for their devotion to ideas in this country too—in our colleges.

My next thought was that the American hippies are the exact opposite of those young Russians. In Russia, they are fighting and dying for freedom of the mind; here they are parading naked in theaters and destroying universities in the name of freedom from the mind. At this point, I knew I had an article.

I have described this process in slow motion; in reality, it did not take me more than five minutes. The connections fell into place because my subconscious holds a standing order to be on the lookout for article themes.

The subject of my article, therefore, is the destruction of the best among the young. The theme is that this is a terrible crime, and that American hippies and their admiring educators are even guiltier than the brutes in Russia. Note that the form of the article and the amount of commentary were determined by the subject. I had to analyze the meaning of a certain event in Russia—the destruction of young idealists—on the basis of a brief, journalistic description provided in the Times article. Then I had to present the American hippies in the same terms, i.e., by concrete dramatizations. In contrast to my article on the student rebellion,¹¹ this is not a theoretical discussion of what is wrong with the so-called vanguard of American youth. It is a concretized presentation, through highly selective attributes, of the contrast between the Russian and American rebels. Once my subject and theme were clear, everything else fell into place. Had I not defined the theme, but merely started by saying “I feel strongly about Russia, let me write something,” I would have been in trouble.

Now, I could have written a different article on the same Kamm piece, e.g., an article on the evil of communism. Here the subject is the same, but the theme is a denunciation of Russia’s treatment of the young. Or the theme could be a denunciation of Russian censorship. Or the evil of cultural exchanges, and other forms of American cooperation with Russia. I could name many aspects from which good articles could be written, all based on Kamm’s report. There are as many possibilities as there are professions: a historian could focus on the subject from one perspective, a philosopher from another, an economist from yet another.

There are no rules for selecting a theme, provided it is of broad interest. For example, if upon reading Kamm’s piece someone decided to focus his theme on Russian streets (which Kamm mentions) and how unsanitary they are, that would not be valid. It is too narrow. When you see a crime like the destruction of young idealists because of their virtues, you should not focus on puny details. That destroys the significance of the subject by undermining its seriousness, and by not featuring it. Such a theme is irrelevant to, and thus clashes with, the subject. Your subject and theme must be commensurate.

Noteworthy here is a cover from an early issue of The New Yorker. It pictured the wall of a museum, upon which hung a large painting of a very savage caveman. He is running through the jungle carrying a naked woman, who is screaming. He is leering ferociously, and obviously intends to rape her. As he runs through the jungle, he is breaking the branches he encounters, and doves fly off to avoid him. In the museum, in front of this painting, sits a little old lady with an easel, copying the painting. But out of all of this violent subject matter, she chooses to copy only the flight of doves. This is a good visual example of selecting a theme too small for the subject.

You should not select a theme which is too big, either. If you choose a minuscule event and try to build a broad theme around it, you will end up with floating abstractions [i.e., abstractions not connected to reality], since your subject gives you insufficient material for that broad an approach.

Of course, you must first select your subject and then your theme, because anything you choose to write must be about something, and you must establish what that is before you can determine what you want to say about it. In writing fiction, where the equivalent of the subject is the plot, you can start by thinking about the theme—or any other aspect of the novel. But with nonfiction, you must start with the subject. (When you are experienced, the process is automatized, so that you get your subject and theme virtually together and at once. But there are actually two selections.)

Incidentally, there is no such thing as the best theme. It is disastrous to write with the idea that you must make your article “the best possible” on a given subject. Since you are treating only one aspect of a subject, there are as many other aspects—giving rise to as many themes—as there are, say, professions. Just as you cannot say one valid profession is better than another, so you cannot say one aspect of a subject is objectively superior to another.

You can establish a certain hierarchy of fundamentality. For instance, to treat an enduring, philosophical aspect of a subject is more fundamental than to treat a transient, journalistic aspect. But this is a very loose hierarchy, because there can be a bad article with too broad a theme, and a valuable one with an enlightening, albeit narrower, theme.

Your only concern should be rationally justifying your approach, i.e., explaining to yourself, and to anyone who asks, why what you have to say is valuable to the reader. One practical consequence of this principle is that you do not start with a Kantian, or mystical, idea of value—by which you seek the “best” approach in a metaphysical vacuum.

The decisive element here is your own hierarchy of intellectual values: what subject interests you and what you want to say about it. Your standard should be the best approach that you want to take. As long as your value premises are rational, the hierarchy is established by what you find important. Thus, the directive you give yourself should be: do not choose a lesser aspect than the deepest one that interests you and that you can do. For instance, in response to the Kamm piece, it would be improper to decide that while you could write a good article on the Soviet educational system—which interests you—you will instead write an easy article about Soviet mothers, because it requires less time for research. That is not a valid reason. The latter article would not be good, because it would bore you, and therefore would not be interesting or convincing to your readers.

I do not mean that if a theme of interest to you requires a lot of research, you should do it even though you cannot afford the time. If your article requires that much research, then the theme is somewhat outside your present knowledge and interest. It would be too broad a theme for your hierarchy. The point is: take the widest theme you can handle, given your knowledge and interests.

If you find you have nothing new to say about your subject, do not write that article. This is a crucial point that many people, especially beginners, fail to recognize. A young man once showed me an article he had written on capitalism, which was an utter rehash. When I asked him whether this had been said before, he replied that it had. And that was the problem. He wanted to say something in favor of capitalism—but he had nothing new to say about it.

If you have nothing new to say, no matter how brilliantly you can say it, do not do it. An article stands or falls on its subject and theme. Those “brilliant” essays that say nothing (which The New Yorker is full of) are mere finger exercises and a waste of developed style.

“New” here does not mean totally unprecedented. It does not require a fundamental philosophical principle never heard of before. Since an article deals with partial aspects of a subject, the novelty of your theme need not be world-shaking. But your idea must be new in the context of that subject. For example, The Objectivist recently published a good article on government control of the arts. Government controls are not new; but, to my knowledge, nobody had previously demonstrated how wrong it is for the government to go into the arts, and how it succeeded by default. This idea is not new from the point of view of the relationship between government and the economy; but it is with regard to the history of a particular aspect of the American economy, namely the arts.

On a related point, some people think an article, to be new, must do more than “simply” apply some basic principle to a new situation. On this view, since I have written on the student rebellion at Berkeley, ¹² for example, anything I might write on the rebellion at Cornell would be a rehash. But if that were true, you could not write middle-range articles, only theoretical ones. In fact, you can legitimately apply the same principles to different concretes and stress different aspects, and thereby write a hundred articles, none of them a rehash. There is no limit to how many aspects of a subject you can handle without repeating yourself. You could apply the same principles I used in my article on Berkeley to the situation at Comell, and stress, say, the attitude of the moderates or the degree to which force has escalated since Berkeley. These would be original articles. (I would not write such articles, because once I have written on a subject it usually bores me to return to it; but that does not mean it is not a valid article for someone else.) Applying philosophy to reality is not automatic. To show how certain ideas apply to current events takes a new mental effort each time, and is therefore a value to your audience.

In a sense, I have said nothing new since We the Living.¹³ Of course, there are many new ideas in Atlas Shrugged, but you could say, broadly speaking, that the ideas were all implicit in We the Living; after all, I was for selfishness and individual rights in both books. If your standard of the new is too broad, ultimately you would have to say: “Nobody has stated anything new since Aristotle said A is A, because you cannot go beneath the Law of Identity, nor say anything without it. We are all only elaborating on it.” But that is not the proper standard of novelty. (On the other hand, paraphrase is not enough. If someone says, “The government should not impose so many controls,” and in the name of novelty you write, “The government should not impose that great a number of controls,” obviously that would not constitute novelty.)

Judge the novelty of your theme by asking yourself whether you have seen this view expressed before. If you know the subject and have not come across this approach (and you need not know everything written on the subject), then what you have to say is new.

In sum, there are three questions to ask yourself before you write an article: “What do I want to write about?” “What do I want to say about that subject?” and “What is the element of novelty in my theme?”

You should write down these questions and your answers. This is especially important in the beginning, before you have automatized the process of selecting a subject and theme. In writing out your answers, make them objective. If you cannot write something down clearly and objectively, then you do not really know it. Any vagueness or indecision on any fundamental aspect of your article will be disastrous. That which you cannot name you know only approximately.

The great majority of writing problems come from approximations in one’s mind. The subconscious does not work through approximations. It is more absolutist than your conscious mind—though it is a good idea to try to make that absolutist as well, in the sense of being very precise in your conscious decisions.

3

Judging One’s Audience

Once you decide on a subject and theme and determine that your idea is new, ask yourself why someone else should be interested in your article. This will lend objectivity to your selection of a theme. I illustrated this process when I discussed “The ‘Inexplicable Personal Alchemy’ ” (see pp. 11-13). So long as I regarded Kamm’s piece as being of special interest only to me (given my history), that interest was subjective, and I would not be justified in writing an article about it. But once I concluded that every educated layman should be interested in how the best of the young are being destroyed because of their loyalty to reason, my theme became objectively valid.

Judging your audience is a subdivision of the topic covered [in chapter 2]. It applies, however, not only to choosing a subject and theme, but also to making an outline and to your actual writing. I will now cover the relevant principles which you need to understand and automatize.

Judging your audience is a complicated issue. But its very complexity eliminates the need for detailed rules. You cannot estimate your audience with precision, because there are as many different audiences as there are individuals. No two readers will be exactly alike or have the same psycho-epistemology. But you need to know the general category of person involved. Just as there must be no vagueness in your mind about your subject, theme, or outline, so too with respect to your readers. You have to identify, on paper and in objective terms, what type of audience you are addressing.

Actually, you make this kind of judgment constantly in talking to people. For instance, you do not speak to children the way you do to your peers, and you talk to your boss or people more knowledgeable than you in yet another way. You do not change your ideas, or talk up or down, but you are aware of their state of knowledge in comparison with yours. In writing, what you must primarily judge is your readers’ knowledge, because that determines how much you need to explain.

For example, if an Objectivist writes for an Objectivist audience, he need not prove every Objectivist principle he refers to. And if he writes for a general audience, he cannot prove the whole of Objectivism in one article. But in the latter case, he would need to clarify certain principles more than he would in the former.

Consider my one-page article on the Apollo 8 astronauts reading the Bible from space.¹⁴ I could not, in a page, tell the reader why reason is superior to faith, and why I object to the Bible. I took such knowledge for granted. I could do that in an Objectivist publication, and (conceivably) in a liberal publication like The New York Times. But it would have been improper to write it that way for a small-town newspaper in the Bible Belt. Even with the best intentions, the majority of those readers could not understand the article. Their intellectual framework is totally different.

This is how you project the reader’s frame of reference, without which you cannot start an article. You assume some level of knowledge—some context—which you cannot teach your readers, but must take as the base from which you write. That is a requirement of objectivity.

Incidentally, if you write for a young audience, never write down. The only difference your estimate of an audience should make is in how much complexity and abstraction you can convey and how much explanation is necessary.

How do you judge an audience’s knowledge? Assume you are writing for Objectivists. (The principles are the same for any audience.) First identify the necessary context. Say you are writing an article on government interference in the arts. You know that if you start explaining what art and government are, you will never get to the subject. You have to assume the audience knows what they are. What you are telling them about is, say, how the government entered the field of art, the arguments offered in favor of this interference, and the incorrectness of these arguments. You must ask yourself at each step—in stating the theme, making the outline, and writing—what you needed to know to write this article. At one time you did not know by what steps the government entered this field. How did you learn it? You read a great deal about it, for instance, which convinced you that the government entered the field by default, and that its proponents used false arguments. Well, this is what you want to communicate to your audience. If you assume that your readers already know the whole history, then you have not chosen a proper subject and theme. But if they do not know it, then your choice is appropriate.

To be interested in this subject, an Objectivist reader needs to know the general impropriety of government interference. You need not prove this to him. You can assume it as your context, though you must refer to that knowledge when necessary.

Many writers make the mistake of being neutral about their audience’s context. For example, an author knows that his audience holds a certain viewpoint, yet he writes as if the audience were neutral. He ignores the prior context of knowledge he needed in order to begin to write the article and falsely concludes that his audience lacks it too. This can create confusion in the reader’s mind. On the other hand, suppose that because you know Hubert Humphrey was a proponent of government interference in the arts, you decide this fact is self-evident and refer to his bad influence without ever citing his views. That too would be ignoring the nature of your audience’s knowledge. To denounce Humphrey, you must inform your readers of his involvement, since you are enlightening them about the history of this kind of government interference. Do not assume they know his role in it.

For every part of your article, know what your context is and whether your readers have it too. Ask yourself what you can omit and of what you must inform them. This is how you reach an accurate judgment of what you need to tell your readers. Incidentally, it is always safer (at least on the first draft) to overexplain than to under-explain. When in doubt, include the information, because in editing you can always shorten or eliminate the passage.

An important principle here is that man is born tabula rasa. Writers often assume something is self-evident, since they themselves now take it for granted, when in fact it is complex. Nothing is self-evident except the evidence of your senses. Therefore, when you write, assume nothing is self-evident but logic. (Logic is actually not self-evident. but in order to communicate, you must assume a person knows how to make logical connections.) For the rest, since no knowledge exists at birth, you must judge what acquired knowledge is necessary to make your point understandable—and then you must communicate it.

A corollary issue is that when your subject is controversial, you must take cognizance of any prevalent errors. This is not an issue of whether people agree with you or not, but of recognizing that if certain errors are widespread in a culture, your best readers may not know how your views apply to those issues. For example, in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, at the end of each chapter I refer to some current error to indicate how my position applies. In chapter 4, for instance, when I finish my discussion of measurement, I mention psychologists who measure kneejerks rather than deal with psychological principles, and mystics who object to anything important being measurable. Never assume your readers will make such connections automatically, particularly if you are presenting something new. Of course, you cannot cover every implication, but you can indicate the leading ones.

But make sure, in touching on these errors, that you are not misunderstood. In dealing with an issue on which your position is different from the commonly held view, you must have enough space to make your point fully clear. If you do not, it is better to omit the topic entirely. The mistake beginners often make, in writing about a subject which they can present very clearly, is to bring in some controversial issue in passing, perhaps as an example. This only creates confusion. I do not mean that you should not raise such issues—only that you should not do so as a sideline, when you are unable to present your full viewpoint clearly.

Whether you write for an Objectivist publication or for TV Guide, you must judge how much your audience knows. But always address yourself to the best of that audience.

A “type of audience” is an abstraction. Concretely, you will find evaders and people with dreadful psycho-epistemologies in any audience (including an Objectivist one). The cognitive level of your readers does not determine their psycho-epistemology. Children can make a more intelligent, better focused audience than professors. Therefore, do not give any consideration whatever to the possibility of bad psycho-epistemologies. Once you have projected your audience’s level of knowledge, address yourself to the best, most focused mind that you can imagine in that cognitive group.

It is improper to address yourself to a faulty psycho-epistemology. Devising a rational method to address the irrational is a contradiction. If some of your readers are irrational, there are no principles by which to decide what they will choose to hear, what they will not, and what connections they will make. Neither you nor the evader can predict what he will miss and what he will integrate. That is in the nature of irrationality.

So do not psychologize. Do not make allowances for readers’ mental weaknesses. For example, do not tell yourself: “I’m saying something new or antagonistic—how can I prevent their minds from closing? How can I soften the blow?” If you ask such questions, you will only paralyze your own mind by attempting the impossible. You cannot reach a mind that chooses to be closed or is so incapacitated that even if, momentarily, it wanted to integrate properly, it could not. Such a mind lacks the capacity of full focus, and is the proper concern only of a psychotherapist. In all dealings with people, you have to deal with their conscious minds.

In writing, assume full rationality. Assume your audience is at its best and that you have to live up to it. That is, establish your general view of the audience, and then proceed as if you were writing to yourself as a member of that audience—at your best, most perceptive potential. You must project the most cognitively severe mind—and the only mind that you can project completely is your own at its most consistent, clearest level of functioning. In that sense, write as if you are trying to convince yourself.

To achieve objectivity and clarity, ask yourself how you would make something clear to a person as severe as you are. Project the process by which you would convince yourself. Assume you do not know your material and must discover it from the article alone. Be as rigorous as if your article were written by a stranger. If you are not—if there are faults in your thinking—it will be reflected in your writing. (This is one way writing helps your psycho-epistemology, and vice versa. The better your psycho-epistemology, the easier writing will be.)

This process is the opposite of subjectivism; and it is a difficult responsibility, because you might easily think: “If I write for myself, I know what I want to say, and therefore anything I write will be clear to me even from a few shorthand notes.” But what is required in writing is strict objectivity. That is why I said you must write to yourself as if you did not know the subject.

Use your own psychology as a reader to guide yourself as a writer. When questions occur to you, your best reference, if you are objective, is yourself. The ability to switch perspective between that of the writer and that of the reader (of the finished product), is the best training in objectivity. It is also good training in editing—whether your own work or that of others. Switching perspective helps, because there are so many problems in writing, and you may be so overwhelmed by the number of considerations, that you can lose your ability to judge your work. It is helpful in this situation to step back and ask: “How would I judge it if I were reading it?” This clears your mental circuits of all the unresolved complexities of writing, and gives you a fresh perspective as a reader.

For example, if you hesitate about whether to include a particular detail, the ultimate judge should be you as a reader, because there are no absolute rules in such a case applicable to every article. Switch perspective, pretend not to know the subject, and ask yourself whether you would find the detail clarifying. Take your own answer, if it is objective, as your standard. By “objective” I mean that you can give yourself at least one good reason why you prefer to keep the detail or omit it. (“I don’t know why, but I feel like keeping it” does not qualify.) After all, your article is written within the context of your own psycho-epistemology and your own knowledge. Appealing to yourself as a reader produces a consistent, reliable standard of judgment for the whole article. If your article is to be well-integrated, the ultimate judge of what is appropriate and why has to be you.

Connected to the issue of judging an audience is the issue of knowing what you want your audience to do with your article. Or to put it another way: do not have several purposes—and several audiences—in mind simultaneously. Be clear on this issue, because subconsciously it will affect your whole article.

Every general-interest article is written for one purpose: to communicate knowledge to the intelligent layman. You might have a different purpose—say, urging your audience to take some action; but if so, the entire article must be written differently, as a professional article addressed to your colleagues. But you cannot write for your colleagues and for a general lay audience at the same time. If you try to combine the two types of audiences and purposes, you will be giving information to laymen and simultaneously telling your colleagues how to put this information into practice. Your article will contain contradictions in practically every paragraph and will fall apart.

For instance, if you write a general article about the methodology of education, you do it differently than if you were addressing teachers. A lay audience has comparatively little knowledge of the subject, and has merely a general interest in those principles it can apply to its own dealings with education. Members of a general audience would be interested in knowing, for example, how the Objectivist method differs from Dewey’s. Thus you would show that according to the Objectivist method, teachers need to appeal to principles and concretize them with examples, whereas Dewey’s method is concrete-bound and avoids principles and integration. But teachers have a different level of motivation and interest, as well as a higher level of technicality. If you were writing for them, you would have to provide technical details concerning how to achieve certain effects. You would discuss what type of exercises to give the class, what kinds of errors to look for, in what way the remnants of Deweyite education will interfere with the class’s understanding, what to do as an antidote, etc. The “how-to” approach is appropriate for the professional. But that is of no interest to the layman. It is almost the difference between theoretical science for the layman—and applied technology for the professional. The purpose for which you write depends on your audience.

In most of my articles I do have an action-conclusion, but only in very generalized terms. For instance, the purpose of “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business”¹⁵ was to inform the audience about the nature of our antitrust laws. It is a general enlightenment article. So I give some examples, describe their history, and show why they are wrong. In the conclusion I say we should advocate the revision, and eventual repeal, of antitrust—especially the imprisonment provision. But I am not teaching the audience how to fight antitrust; I am merely indicating a positive direction, after having exposed a dreadful negative. Since this is a negative trend which is becoming worse, it is appropriate to indicate (without going into details) that some kind of action is possible. But if I expanded my conclusion and said the reader should gather the members of his community opposed to antitrust and should communicate with me, because I am forming a committee, that would be improper; it would belong in an action-article. If my purpose is the organization of such a committee, then I must write the article differently. I must briefly summarize what is wrong with antitrust (assuming a greater level of knowledge in my audience) and concentrate, not on the history, but on rousing people to action and indicating what they can do. This type of action-article is called a manifesto. Nothing is wrong with a manifesto per se, though you must know when it is appropriate. But do not confuse a manifesto with a general-information article.

General articles are of interest to all readers because they are usually written on a graded principle. A specialist will get much more from such an article than a general reader, but the general reader should get something worthwhile. To each according to his ability—or rather, according to his knowledge. If an article is clear, then each person gets out of it what he objectively brings to it, namely, that which he already understands. And if the article is good, and the reader has an active mind, it might stimulate him to inquire further about the aspects he does not understand or know about. That is not the article’s purpose, but it is a fringe benefit of a good article.

Since many subjects can be treated in more than one way, if you do not clearly identify your audience, you may be strongly tempted to write more than one kind of article simultaneously. Whatever type of article you choose to write, you must decide—at the stage of selecting the subject and theme—who your readers are and thus what you intend to communicate to them.

4

Applying Philosophy Without Preaching It

A problem many young writers suffer from, in various degrees, is the belief that an article should be propaganda—that it should preach one’s philosophy. This is not merely a writing problem, so I will start with the broader philosophical issue involved in this error.

First, you need to grasp that there is no such thing as Objectivism or any other philosophy. Philosophy is the study of the fundamental nature of reality. “Fundamental” refers to a principle or truth which is present in a vast number of concretes. To say something is fundamental means that many other truths depend on it. To say philosophy studies the fundamentals of reality means it studies those facts present in, and those principles applicable to, everything that exists.

Every abstraction, and thus every principle, is manifested in an incalculable number of concretes. It is what the concretes have in common—but it does not exist apart from them. An abstraction is a form of human classification by which man integrates the evidence provided by his senses. Man rises above the perceptual level by integrating his percepts into concepts, his concepts into principles, his principles into sciences, and all of his sciences into a philosophy. Abstractions are objective, i.e., based on reality. But abstractions, including simple concepts of concretes, do not exist as such. What exists is only the material from which a concept is drawn.¹⁶

I have often said that the whole history of philosophy is a duel between Plato and Aristotle, and that this conflict is present in every issue.¹⁷ If you think principles, and therefore philosophy, exist apart from concretes, then you are a Platonist. Plato believed abstractions are archetypes or universals that exist in some other realm, in the form of nonmaterial, supernatural entities. Now the deepest thing Objectivism has in common with Aristotle—and it has many things in common—is this: Aristotle was the first to grasp what most people still do not, namely, that everything that exists is a specific, concrete entity, or an aspect of one, such as an action of an entity, an attribute of an entity, a relationship it bears, etc. But the base of everything is an entity—not an idea or abstraction. An abstraction is the form in which we organize these entities in order to understand them.

To be an Aristotelian all the way down, you must grasp that only concrete events, concrete relationships, concrete problems exist. (If you are not Aristotelian all the way down, it is no moral crime; but it will cause problems, so train yourself to be one.) For example, the same abstract problem may exist in different parts of the world, and involve different people. But in each case, it is a concrete problem. Just as the abstraction “table” involves all the tables that exist—past, present, and future—so the abstract problem “man versus the state” has occurred in practically every society in history. It is the major political problem in the world today, but it is not a floating abstraction. It is an abstraction of relationships between man and a political system, and those relationships exist only in concrete forms. They exist in Russia, in Germany, in the United States—there is man against the state in Russia, in Germany, in America. But the mere fact that they are covered by the same abstraction does not change the fact that they are separate concretes. The abstraction involves particular men, in particular situations, facing particular governments. There is no such thing as “man versus the state” in another, Platonic dimension.

When you are clear on this subject, you will be at home with abstractions. If you are not, the immediate danger is that you will be concrete-bound in your actual life, and indulge in floating abstractions in your philosophical convictions. Until men become fully Aristotelian, they cannot apply their philosophical principles to their own lives and actions. So on the one hand, they may have a complex, ivory-tower philosophy, and on the other, nevertheless act like savages.

Objectivists would not make such a crude mistake, but every mistake can be committed across a continuum of degrees. So although an Objectivist would not profess Objectivism and join the Communist Party, he might nevertheless accept the idea that his professed philosophical convictions exist in one department, and his daily life, judgments, and views in quite another.

The root of this mistake is that often, when a person accepts certain convictions, he does not integrate them thoroughly to the concretes he encounters. One need not think an entire issue over again each time it comes up. A thorough integration permits a person to recognize quickly when certain convictions of his apply to some concrete fact; only in complex situations does he have to do fresh thinking. Nevertheless, no matter how complex or simple it is, you must deal with every issue in your life according to your philosophy, and you cannot hold your philosophy “somewhere,” apart from your daily actions.

If men could live by the range of the moment—by a concrete-bound method—we would not need philosophy. The purpose of philosophy is to guide a man in the course of his life. Unfortunately, many Objectivists have not fully accepted, concretized, and integrated this principle. For example, in the presence of a given event, work of art, person, etc., too many Objectivists ask themselves, “What do I have to feel?” instead of, “What do I feel?” And if they need to judge a situation which I have not discussed before, their approach is, “What should I think?” instead of, “What do I think?” This is the childhood remnant of anyone who to some extent was influenced either by the religion of the culture or, later in college, by Platonism. Both give the impression that the good, the important, the philosophical are like church on Sunday: you use them on special occasions, but they have nothing to do with daily life. If any part of this attitude remains in you, it is important to eliminate it.

Philosophy does not tell you concretely what to feel or think; it tells you what is true and right. If you have to judge something (e.g., a work of art, a government policy, a personal relationship), your philosophy gives you the right principles by which to judge it (if your philosophy is rational). Philosophy provides you with a criterion—but cannot apply it for you. In judging anything or anyone, you must decide whether it or he is good or bad.

Philosophy cannot give you a set of dogmas to be applied automatically. Religion does that—and unsuccessfully. The dogmatic Objectivist desperately tries to reduce principles to concrete rules that can be applied automatically, like a ritual, so as to bypass the responsibility of thinking and of moral analysis. These are “Objectivist” ritualists. They want Objectivism to give them what a religion promises, namely, ten or one hundred commandments, which they can apply without having to think about or judge anything.

Which philosophy is right is a separate inquiry. To discover the right one is the purpose of studying philosophy. But once you have convinced yourself that a given philosophy is right—that it corresponds to reality—you are armed only with a key, which will tell you by what criteria to judge a given event or person or choice—or article. But the concretes must be judged, evaluated, and organized by you.

Now, how does what I have said apply to writing? (I am here concerned primarily with middle-range articles, which apply philosophy to concretes.) Until a writer is fully Aristotelian, he will be unable properly to apply his philosophical principles to writing. When you write a middle-range article, the proper approach is to ask: “What do I think of this subject?” “What do I want to say?” If you doubt whether what you want to say is correct, that is a separate issue and has nothing to do with your article. If you have such doubts, put your article aside and do some additional thinking. But do not approach an article without a clear idea of your own evaluation of the subject. Do not try to muddle through in a state that is partly your own evaluation and partly a ritualistic application of Objectivist “bromides.”

I next want to discuss two errors that tend to be committed by those who are not fully Aristotelian. The first is the idea that the writer should always include propaganda for his philosophy.

Under censorship, writers have always been ingenious about smuggling in propaganda between the lines, so that the authorities miss it. That is appropriate in a dictatorship (though somewhat foolish), but it is wrong in your own articles, particularly if you are an Objectivist. And certainly, when you write for a magazine whose philosophy you share, there is no reason to smuggle in your philosophy or preach it.

For example, someone submitted to The Objectivist a movie review that was chaos. I could not tell whether the author was reviewing a movie or preaching Objectivist morality. The two aspects were totally unintegrated. He would say something about the movie, and then start into a diatribe on the evil of presenting such immoral people. (It was a gangster movie.) The diatribe was not integrated with what he was saying about the movie. The author thought you could not review a movie of that sort without making it a platform for Objectivism. Of course, it was unconvincing in regard to the Objectivist slogans he used, and it was unconvincing as a review. He had two intentions: to say what he wanted about the movie, and to fulfill his “duty” to Objectivism. Well, that was the attitude at the height of the Middle Ages, when nothing was permitted except what led to the greater glory of the Church.

Let the Objectivism in your article come naturally out of your material and your presentation of it. Never make the communication of your philosophy a special assignment—that belongs in theoretical articles only. When you write on philosophical theory, you are preaching Objectivism in the sense that you are demonstrating a new aspect of the philosophy. But in a middle-range article, do not attempt to sell or prove Objectivism. Do not “stick in” your philosophy. Simply use it as your implicit framework. If, for example, an Objectivist were writing on modern art, he would not tell you why reason is good and irrationality bad, nor would he prove that reason is man’s means of survival. His condemnation of modem art would be based on the fact that he expects reason in the arts. For the purpose of the article, he would take this as an axiom, though it certainly is not; it would take a long development to prove that reason is important. But the article, in presenting the irrationality of modem art, would imply in every line that irrationality is evil and ridiculous, and that reason is important and good. The author would apply those aspects of Objectivism that are relevant to art. Such an article is not a propaganda piece. It is written from a philosophical frame of reference which gives it unity and coherence. But its purpose is only to tell you the state of modem art.

In preparation for this topic, I went over some of my articles to find an example of not bringing in Objectivism. I did not find one: I propagandize for Objectivism constantly, in various degrees. But I bring it in, not by proving it, but by tying a given subject to its wider implications. That is because I am a theoretician—and it is something you should not yet emulate. After you have written many articles, it is all right to try tricky integrations; but not until then, because you would get lost in the theme and the side implications.

For example, in my “Brief Comment” on Apollo 8, I could have confined the article to the impropriety of reading the Bible from the spaceship. But I chose to bring in, at the end, a broader cultural issue, i.e., the breach between science and ethics. I knew how to do it, and the article remained integrated. But I could not have done it twenty years ago. Only after finishing Atlas Shrugged did I feel so at home in abstract issues that I could do tricky integrations without confusing the reader. So do not attempt it until you have enough experience.

It is not the duty of an Objectivist writer to smuggle in something to the glory of Objectivism, along the lines of waving the flag or a cross. When you write an article in which you evaluate cultural phenomena rationally, you do more for Objectivism than you could in any other form—even if you never mention reason, man, his means of survival, or any other Objectivist bromides which ritualistic “Objectivists” too often use inappropriately.

The second error sometimes committed by those who are not fully Aristotelian is to believe that writing will somehow reveal evils in the writer’s own subconscious. But this is not so. If, for example, you are an advocate of individualism, and you suddenly observe that you write like a collectivist, that is all right. That has taught you something; you have material you can correct. But to sit in fear, thinking: “I believe in Objectivism with all my soul, but what if the printed page shows me to be a monster?”—is to take a mystical approach, which indicates that you do not understand free will. There is nothing wrong in having “demons.” What is wrong is evading them and doing nothing about them.

Some people think that when they write, they must practice Objectivist “company manners.” Such a person guards his subconscious, because he worries that if he let himself go he might write improperly. Nothing could be better calculated to stop you from writing. In fact, the exact opposite premise is necessary. When you write, you must trust your subconscious, and more: you must allow your subconscious to be the sole authority in the universe. Otherwise you cannot write. This does not mean that man is only the subconscious and that the conscious mind does not count. It is the mind that uses the subconscious. But your subconscious is a programmed computer, and if it is programmed incorrectly, there is no way for you to write if you repress your machine.

In fact, if you have written some bad sentences, or expressed some wrong ideas, the conclusion should be not that your subconscious has demons, but that you did not think through the subject carefully and that your subconscious is fallible. But you are there to correct the mistake. Again, there is nothing wrong in making mistakes. What is wrong is not correcting them.

For a practical illustration and a good exercise, here is an article by James Reston on the present college situation. Try to identify the author’s philosophy and the means by which you know it. You will thereby see how he introduces his philosophy (which is not mine) without preaching it. His method is, for the most part, correct.

“The Politics of Fear and Hope” by James Reston, The New York Times, May 6, 1969

The campus war never seemed more alarming than it does now, but it may be deceptive. It has gone so far and raised so many fears on all sides that, like the Vietnam war, it may have reached its peak and started the process of reappraisal and accommodation.

The experiment with coercion and physical force has been a disappointment to almost everybody who has tried it. The blacks used it at Cornell and made some progress at the start, but are still in deep trouble. The S.D.S. and the administration at Harvard tried to solve their differences by force and it was a stand-off. The resort to violence by both blacks and whites at City College in New York produced a bloody battle and startled everybody with the prospect of a racial massacre. And while the crisis continues, at least many of the leaders on all sides are beginning to wonder.

This includes the President [Nixon], the Attorney General and the more thoughtful legislators, faculty members and student leaders. They have all gone through a new experience. They have all now seen the dangers of confrontation politics, and most of them now seem to be calling for a pause and reconsideration of the current violent trend.

The presidents of Harvard and Cornell, for example, have been off-campus this week trying to deal with the public reaction to their recent crisis. Nathan Pusey of Harvard has been in Washington pleading with the Congress to give the universities another chance to deal with their problems without political interference. President James Perkins of Cornell has been in New York arguing for patience so that he and his faculty and students can try to find new ways of settling their differences, and both think that they now have a good chance, not for a solution, but for a livable compromise.

The case for giving them more time to work out their difficulties without political interference or punitive laws is strong. The university presidents, faculty members and students have learned a lot about themselves and their problems and need time for reflection.

The Cornell situation illustrates the point. The power of disciplining students there rested with the faculty, but in the public mind the responsibility for discipline lay with President Perkins, and this created a fundamental problem.

No matter what the Negro students did at Cornell, neither the faculty nor the students could agree to expel the black militants or their militant white allies, for this would mean not only making the rebels vulnerable to legal penalties, but leaving them vulnerable to the draft and service in Vietnam.

This is what has confused the issue of authority on many campuses. Moderate students, faculty members and administrators clearly do not approve the violent tactics of the white and black militants, but when condemning them and expelling them raises the question of drafting them into a war in Vietnam they oppose, they simply cannot do it.

What the crisis of the last few weeks has done, paradoxically, is to make all the adversaries in the struggle feel trapped in a wholly new and alarming situation which threatens them all. Most students have never been involved in such problems before. A great many faculty members, though they were responsible for student discipline, had never attended a single meeting on such problems or even heard a Negro speak on the issues. But now they have been compelled to put their minds to the problem for the first time. In this sense, the crisis of the last few weeks has been important, and university administrators, faculty and students are just now beginning to think seriously about how to get out of the thicket.

In short, Pusey of Harvard and Perkins of Cornell—to mention only two symbols—are beginning to think about their problems in a different way. Both are obviously in deep trouble. Both are confessing that they should have anticipated their problems better than they did; both have clearly been changed by the struggles of recent days, and both are asking for time.

It is a fair request. Every adversity has its uses and everybody has been through the fire at Harvard, Cornell and City College in the last month, and has begun to think of the consequences of violence for everybody. The militant Negro and S.D.S. students, of course, disagree; they have argued that violence is the answer, but even they are beginning to question and doubt. The crisis, as usual, has produced not only danger but opportunity, and if the reaction of Pusey and Perkins is any guide, we may be turning back toward common sense.

What is Reston’s philosophy, and how do we know that?

Reston believes there are no absolutes. In fact, he does not raise the issue of right and wrong at all. For example, he treats force as merely one method men can resort to. He is neither for nor against violence; he is neutral about it—and everything else. This is strong evidence that his philosophy is pragmatism. He does not pass judgment on either side—he simply says force does not work, and therefore we should return to common sense. The words “common sense” are the mystical talisman of the pragmatist.

According to pragmatism, principles cannot be discovered in advance. The only “principle” is that human beings have to act. But anything is permissible, because we cannot know in advance what is right. So Reston would never say, as an absolute, “Force is wrong and respect for individual rights is right.” He would say, “If force does not work, one should not use it. If rights create a peaceful, prosperous society, then we should protect them—if that is what we want.” That is pragmatism.

Reston says the request for time is fair—that until they came to actual violence, neither the students, nor the faculty members, nor the administrators could know what to do. He does not ask why the administrators needed bloodshed and destruction before they realized they had to face the problem. He says simply that after this experience they are different and will think in a different way. That is pure pragmatism. (As Leonard Peikoff pointed out to me, this is straight from the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, who held that thinking is a “disease.” On Dewey’s view, a person does not have to think unless he has a problem; it is normal and proper not to think, but to function habitually. But when something happens unexpectedly, which he cannot react to normally, he lacks ease. Thus, thinking is a disease caused by a new situation, in which one’s habitual reactions do not “work.”)

The reliance on emotions as a primary is another sign that Reston’s philosophy is pragmatism. He says most students, faculty members, and administrators do not approve of violence; but when it comes to the government drafting the violent demonstrators into war, the students et al. simply cannot allow it. This is not an issue of right or wrong—of principles. Rather, he believes that if they feel they cannot send men to be drafted, that is an irreducible primary to which they must adjust.

Note that all of these points are good examples of how, properly, to introduce an idea as an axiom. Reston never questions the idea that a person cannot know in advance the consequences of his actions—that one must first act, then observe the consequences, and then think. That is his absolute. When you read his article, you know what he is saying, though he never states it explicitly. That is the proper way to present a philosophy, without propagandizing, in a middle-range article.

Nevertheless, Reston’s article is somewhat dishonest (this is inherent in pragmatism) in that he does not state explicitly the conclusion implied throughout his article, and which he names only once, indirectly: “a livable compromise.” My own conclusion would be that the students’ initiation of force is the major evil, which has primacy over every other consideration. I can say that openly. But as a pragmatist, Reston cannot say openly what he implies, namely, that the solution to every problem is compromise. If he said that, as a firm absolute, he would be contradicting pragmatism, which claims there are no absolutes. Furthermore, he and everyone else would see that what he is advocating is immoral.

If you want to know how a pragmatist would properly propagandize, read the works of William James and John Dewey. They wrote theoretical works devoted to proving that you cannot know anything, that abstract principles are not valid, and that we must judge solely according to what “works.” To propagandize improperly, in a middle-range article, a dogmatic pragmatist would out of nowhere bring in theory and start preaching that you cannot know anything. He would explicitly say that since neither the activists nor the administrators can know anything in advance, they could not have avoided their situation, and so should be given more time.

Reston’s article, though, is not propaganda. He is a commentator, writing about current events and merely suggesting a certain viewpoint. Yet notice all that we were able to conclude about his philosophy. So if you wrote a similar article from an Objectivist viewpoint, you would not have to announce: “Because such and such is man’s nature, we must respect individual rights, which can be violated only by force; therefore I am against force.” If you tried to squeeze all of that in, your article would be very ineffective. In a sense, Reston is preaching pragmatism more effectively than James and Dewey—though he could not have done it without them—because the average person reading James and Dewey takes them to mean only that you ought to be practical; he never grasps what pragmatism really preaches.

Now, how would I write on this issue, applying my philosophy properly? In what follows, I do not rewrite the article; I present only a sketch of what I would write if I accepted the same structure and facts as Reston, but not the same interpretation of those facts.

In the first paragraph, Reston says that the situation on campus is alarming, but that there may be hope. I would start by saying the situation is more alarming than ever, because the universities are now giving in to physical force. Then I would discuss Comell, Harvard, and CCNY. But instead of saying there was disappointment on both sides, though some progress was made at Cornell, I would say that at Cornell the activists used force—including guns on campus—and have so far achieved their objective. I would say that at Harvard they used force, and the faculty gave in (on Black Studies and other demands); and, when the university made an attempt at self-defense by calling the police, the moderate students—the majority—suddenly supported the activists. I would then comment that the moderates did not mind the initiation of force, only the retaliation against it. Next I would mention that at CCNY, the violence approached racial warfare, which is significant because the student demands were made in the name of antiracism, and yet led to racial violence. Then I would say that the President, Attorney General, legislators, faculty members, and student leaders seem to object, but it is interesting that they do not know what to do.

At this point I would say Pusey and Perkins, who are both in trouble, are asking for more time. I would point out that they had warnings, and that as the presidents of major universities they should have had some kind of program worked out. Why do they believe that if they could not solve their problems so far, time will help them? Nothing new has happened. Therefore, their behavior indicates that their main purpose is to pretend that the situation is not as bad as it is. They are afraid of the situation, and of political interference or “repression.” So they take no sides, not even the side of self-protection. (If the police offered them protection, they would not accept it.) They would rather go on as they were, pretending they had authority and pretending they were negotiating something. But they do not know what to negotiate, and have no means of arriving at the answer.

Then I would bring in Vietnam. Some of the reluctance on the part of the moderates is due to their opposition to the war in Vietnam, and thus they sympathize with the dissenters, who, if expelled, would be drafted. I would reply that quite apart from whether the draft is moral—and it is not—the real questions are: Does such sympathy justify the use of violence by the students? Shouldn’t the objection to force be placed above sympathy for victims of the draft law? Which is more important?

Next I would say that everyone involved feels trapped—except for the activists, who are getting what they want. Why do all the others feel trapped? Here I can observe what Reston does, but apply it in a different context. They feel trapped because they have no principles to tell them how to get out of this situation. They are being attacked by force, yet they have no knowledge of the appropriate means of dealing with force. They do not know what is right or wrong. They never had to think about this before because the issue never came up, but now reality is forcing them to think. Then I would ask: Does reality force men to think? If Pusey and Perkins feel they are changed, what changed them? Obviously, nothing new has come up. They say that now they will act differently—they are beginning to think of the consequences. But by what means will they judge these?

At this point I would come out in the open: Since we know their philosophy is pragmatism, it is clear that pragmatism does not work. What they need are principles. And I would add that in social issues, the first such principle is the noninitiation of force.

Observe that I do not bring in Objectivist propaganda, I merely raise certain questions and evaluate certain events. Only at the end, when the events have demonstrated it, do I say pragmatism does not work.

If you did write about the same subject in the way Reston does, i.e., evaluating the events, ascribing motives, and prescribing policies, it would be a strong article. And it would sell Objectivism, but only by indirection—which is all a middle-range article should do. Just give your audience the facts from the Objectivist viewpoint, and let their minds do the rest. A rational reader who has never heard of Objectivism will think: “Yes, force should not be used. In fact, no social issue is more important than that. If you resort to force, there can be no discussion, no rights, no principles.” If he draws only that conclusion, his mind will do the rest if he is mentally active. You have given him a lead to further thinking.

To sum up: the purpose of a middle-range article is to evaluate a given concrete from the point of view of your philosophy—i.e., holding your philosophy as a frame of reference and taking it as a given—but not to preach it or prove that it is right. Never try to prove your philosophy as a side issue in an article dealing with some narrow subject. If you feel that there is some aspect of your philosophy which requires proof, then write a theoretical article on it.

5

Creating an Outline

No beginner should write without an outline. If I could enforce this as an absolute, I would. Most writing problems—the psychological barriers, setbacks, discouragements—come from the absence of a proper outline. One reason for the dreadful articles in our media is that they are written without outlines, and thus fall apart structurally.

Good articles (regardless of whether you agree with them) are done from written outlines. Experienced professionals can work from mental outlines (if the article is brief enough), but that is a stage few writers ever reach, and beginners should not try it. If you do, you will only discourage yourself and end up wondering why you cannot write.

If you properly delimit your subject and theme, you have the base for your outline.

An outline is a plan of mental action. All human action requires a plan—an abstract projection. People tend to be aware of this in the physical realm. But because they believe that writing is an innate talent, they think it does not require an objective plan. They think writing is inspirational. Yet trying to write without an outline is even more difficult than attempting some physical action without a plan.

You would be surprised how often you make the equivalent of an outline in your mind for daily activities. You select a goal and the key steps that will take you there, and then you determine the details for each step.

For example, assume you have decided to make a dress and have determined what kind of dress it will be. That is the equivalent of selecting your subject and theme. You then take the measurements and devise a pattern, which is your outline. Then you cut the material, you sew it, and, finally, you embroider it. Now suppose a beginner started cutting and embroidering at the same time, without having chosen the type of dress or the material to be used. He would surely get into trouble. In principle, the process is exactly the same for writing (and for any other job).

The basic pattern of an outline is that of a theorem of Euclidean geometry: state what you are going to demonstrate, demonstrate it, and then announce the conclusion. An outline, however, involves more steps and details. Also, since this basic pattern does not yet tell you how to organize the concretes of your particular subject, there are many options. (For example, you do not have to start an article by announcing, “I am going to prove that...”) But broadly speaking, you should, in your outline, state your subject, set up the logical progression of arguments, and in conclusion state the climax.

In the beginning of an article, but not necessarily in the first paragraph, you must let the reader know what your article is about. (You could call this the introduction.) You need not explicitly name what you are going to prove, because that would produce an anticlimax. But let the reader know where you are taking him. Incidentally, by “introduction,” I mean introductory remarks—a good opening paragraph or so in which you indicate what your subject is. Do not make a special production of this. Introductions as such really pertain to books [see chapter 9]. As a rule, you do not need to write a formal introduction to an article, as some writing courses claim. That is completely artificial.

The “climax” in a nonfiction article is the point at which you demonstrate what you set out to demonstrate. It might require a single paragraph or several pages. There are no rules here. But in preparing the outline, you must keep in mind where you start from (i.e., your subject) and where you want to go (i.e., your theme—the conclusion you want your reader to reach). These two terminal points determine how you will get from one to the other. In good fiction, the climax—which you must know in advance—determines what events you need in order to bring the story to that point. In nonfiction too, your conclusion gives you a lead to the steps needed to bring the reader to the climax.

The guiding question in this process is: What does the reader need to know in order to agree with the conclusion? That determines what to include. Select the essentials of what you need in order to convince the reader—keeping in mind the context of your subject. You are not starting from a tabula rasa. If you were, your reader would not know how to read English, but you could not teach him that while writing on a more advanced subject. When you ask yourself what the reader needs to know, you ask it only in regard to your specific subject, not in regard to his general knowledge.

You must also keep in mind the scale of your article. This might be difficult at first, but with experience it becomes easier to project how much you can cover. In the beginning, the tendency is to try to cover too much. For example, as you begin to write from your outline, you may find that you have used over half the space intended for your article on just the first of ten points. This happens to every writer who attempts ambitious themes, because there is always something to add. You discover that you actually have three articles contained in your outline, instead of one. But with a few properly written articles (i.e., written from a proper outline), the process of gauging the size of your work becomes almost automatic.

I do not mean you can judge, to the last page, the length of your article. But you must have some idea as to whether you are writing a one-page article, a six-page article, or an indeterminate volume. You have to adjust the projection of your theme to a certain size—for example, no smaller than five pages and no bigger than eight. These are not absolute figures, but an approximation. So set yourself a minimum length you can do it in and a maximum over which you must not go. This gives you a standard for judging how detailed to make your article, what points are essential, and what points are dispensable subcategories or sidelines.

It is crucial to state your theme properly to yourself. For example, the theme of “The ‘Inexplicable Personal Alchemy’ ” is: the horrible destruction of the best among the young people in Russia and in America, and the comparison between the two. Stated that way, it entails too many things. My next step was to decide what the key points of the subject are which convey this theme. I then listed all such points, then selected the essential ones and omitted the others. This determined what I would have to say to demonstrate my theme.

The theme is the standard by which you judge whether to include or omit some point. Suppose you are tempted to include an interesting sideline. Ask yourself whether the point is necessary to demonstrate your theme. And conversely, before omitting something, ask yourself whether your case will be fully demonstrated if you omit this point. This is all part of the process of deciding on your outline—deciding what is needed to demonstrate your theme.

The logical order of presentation is also determined by the theme. After you decide on your theme and write down the steps that will convince your reader of it, you will see that there are some options about which steps should precede which. (This is still in the pre-outline stage.) But to discover the overall logical continuity, look for causal connections among the steps of your argument. If you retrace what you had to know to arrive at a conclusion, and then what the reader needs to know to arrive at it, you will see that some of the steps are the logical consequences of earlier ones. The nearest to a rule of logical continuity is: observe the law of causality—i.e., observe which of your points depend on which.

There are no rules about how long or detailed an outline should be. It depends on each individual: you must judge how detailed a plan of action you need for what you have undertaken.

The outline’s level of detail depends on how clear the subject is in your mind, and how complex the article is. I suggest the following test. If in making an outline you feel vaguely that some point is difficult to formulate, though you “kind of” know what you mean, then you need more detail. On the other hand, if you begin to feel bored—if all you need are a few lines on some point but you are writing a volume—then you are being too detailed. As in all mental activity, you are the only judge.

It may help to work in layers. First make a brief outline, then, before you start writing, elaborate on certain points and make something between a first draft and a bare outline. Be honest with yourself. Decide how much of a general map you need to make the content of your article fully clear to you, in essentials and in an orderly form, before you start writing. When in doubt, remember the purpose of the outline. It is your blueprint. Only you can tell to what extent you should expand it and what you can leave to logical implication.

Some people think an outline should be so detailed that it is almost as long as the future article. Nothing could be worse. That is not an outline, but a first draft. A first draft is a long, detailed piece in which you omit the polishing of your sentences and the fancier elaborations; but it is not an outline. If that is what you have written, you have skipped the outline stage. It is easier—except in the consequences—to sit down and write a long outline; it is much harder to make a properly organized and condensed one.

I do not mean that you must write your outline in “headline” style (i.e., without complete sentences). That style is more appropriate to an experienced writer or to someone very familiar with his subject. But it can be deceptive. You may think you have clearly stated what you intend to write, and then find yourself departing from your outline because it was not precise enough. On the other hand, making an overly detailed outline is as bad as writing without one. So I urge beginners to write a brief outline, but in grammatical sentences.

When you make an outline, do not write: “Introduction. Progression. Conclusion.” That is far too abstract and thus useless. You need something many levels less abstract than that. Say you are writing an article critical of the Nixon administration. If you put in your outline: “Introduction of my subject,” that is too broad. Instead write, as Point 1: “Introduction—express general reasons why I am dissatisfied and puzzled by Nixon’s behavior so far.” That is a very generalized statement, which you could not use in an article, but it is specific enough for your own guidance (and it is grammatical). Then list, on a separate piece of paper, the main points you want to cover concerning your dissatisfaction. Assume you are dissatisfied with his stands on Vietnam, welfare, and taxes. Say you decide that the most crucial of these three—i.e., the worst—is his welfare policy. So you list it last, for dramatic progression. (If you list your most important objection first, you will produce an anticlimax.) Thus, you write under Point 2: “Nixon’s tax policy: I shall indicate how this represents a broken campaign promise, and why it is dangerous to pursue the same tax policy as that of the Johnson administration.” These are connected sentences, not headlines. They are just specific enough for you to know what to present fully in that part of the article.

Then under Point 3, write something like: “Nixon’s Vietnam policy: Briefly cover the essence of what was wrong with the Johnson policy. Indicate in what way Nixon seems to be continuing the same policy. Mention what indication he has given that he has no new approach.” This is abstract, but it will delimit what you say about his Vietnam policy. Finally, you come to the climax: his continuation of the welfare state. Write under Point 4: “Welfare: He is reshuffling the various agencies without eliminating the improper services. He is vacillating with his ‘war on poverty’ and his constant welfare-state promises.” You might even include here: “I shall quote, for illustration, certain points.” You proceed to list the facts that show his welfare policy to be dubious. Finally, you come to Point 5, your conclusion. Since it is a critical article, you draw some kind of conclusion in order not to leave your reader hanging. So you might write (if this is what you have proven): “Conclusion: I think we can give him more time; I am not yet sure that his administration will be bad, though I have serious doubts.” Or: “I think he has indicated enough to make me conclude that nothing is to be expected of his administration. He is a variant of Johnson.”

You should have your conclusion in mind from the start (though not necessarily verbatim). Know the point of your article, whether cautious optimism or wary doubts or total pessimism, before you decide to write. Then, as you make your outline, write down your conclusion as explicitly as you can (though not necessarily in detail), so that it is clear to you. That sets up a standing order in your mind, which helps in the actual process of writing. It serves as a reference point whenever you are in doubt during the writing, particularly about side issues or elaborations. It tells you whether a point you are about to include is necessary or not.

The conclusion—the theme—is your best criterion for composing the outline; make it explicit. Some of the greatest troubles here come from mental approximation, when you “sort of” know what you want to say. The fact is you do not know, in the full epistemological sense, until your thought is conceptualized in grammatical form. Until then, you have only the material which you can organize into knowledge. In this sense, an outline is also helpful in formalizing and, therefore, in firming up, your knowledge.

A proper outline is so dependent on the nature of your theme that it is impossible to make many absolute rules about it. A rule such as: “Give three paragraphs to your introduction, ten to the development, and one to the conclusion” is a kind of classicism (which I discuss and condemn in “What is Romanticism?”¹⁸). It is the substitution of concretes for abstractions, and it becomes an artificial straitjacket into which you are forced to fit your material. General principles can be stated and followed, but there are no rules for the application of these principles to the concretes of a given article.

What I have given you so far is positive advice. I next want to mention some common problems to be avoided in making an outline.

The Temptation to Include Sidelines

By “sidelines” I mean (1) issues which are connected to your subject and theme, but are not a necessary part of them, or (2) illustrations or applications from completely new areas. This danger is particularly great with middle-range articles. For example, you are discussing politics arid you see brilliant sidelines in physics or psychology or esthetics, and want to squeeze them in. That can destroy your article.

The wider and more integrated your knowledge, the more you will be tempted to include sidelines. This temptation comes from a good psycho-epistemology, because you should make connections with everything you learn. Writing articles, however, is not learning, but communicating knowledge. For that, you must break up your integrations and judge, as you make your outline, which points are essential and which are merely interesting sidelines. If they are sidelines, omit them (especially if you are a beginner).

The Platonic Approach to Logical Order

There is a dangerous misconception about outlines, namely, that there is only one possible logical order of presentation.

In the sense in which an outline is like a geometric theorem, there is only one order. But when you write an article, you do not confine yourself to three large abstractions, like a syllogism: premise A, premise B, and the conclusion. An article does follow that broad pattern, but under each of these basic divisions there are many details from which you must choose. Only a very simple article with a very simple theme would have only one possible order of presentation. No worthwhile subject is so simple that there is only one logical order—the one order which would determine every paragraph.

Suppose the subject is politics. An author might think there is only one logical order which, if he knew it, would make him discuss elections first, taxes second, and the welfare state third. But then he starts to wonder: “Or is it in reverse? Or maybe the second point is first and the third point second?” Etc. Many people approach this with a Platonic outlook, which holds that there is only one “ideal” order; and too often they conclude that since they do not know what it is, they will write without any order.

The principles behind determining the order of an outline are abstractions subsuming a vast number of concretes. You can establish rules about these principles, but not about the use of concretes. No set of principles can give you the one logical order.

The Concrete-Bound Approach to Logical Order

Many people are concrete-bound in regard to their outline, and this approach affects the structure of their articles. Such writers see an article as a series of separate points. For example, Point 1 may lead logically to Point 2, but Point 2 has no relation to Point 3. Point 3 may be connected to Points 4 and 5, but one does not know why Point 6 is included. Consequently, logical connections might be made from paragraph to paragraph, or from one sequence to another, but the total is not well integrated. When you read the whole article, you are not sure what the author’s theme is—i.e., the article does not seem to be centered on any particular issue.

This is an error not of knowledge or content, but of writing without a proper outline. While a writer should concentrate on the particular sentence or paragraph he is working on, the concrete-bound author has a totally nearsighted view. He loses sight of the article as a whole. He does not keep in mind the continuity of the total, i.e., the relationship between each sequence and all the others.

A well-integrated article requires an outline that is detailed enough to be clear, but not so detailed that it fails to isolate the essentials. The essentials are needed for you to retain that abstract integration during the entire writing process.

Mistaking Relevance for Logical Continuity

Some beginners write the outline as if they were throwing disconnected pieces of thought down on paper. For example, an author decides to write on capitalism. He has a wide context of relevant ideas, and begins to write almost inspirationally. His only sense of continuity is some loose relevance to capitalism. He thinks that somehow all the pieces will integrate into a coherent point. There is nothing wrong with mulling over a subject in this loose way—if you are thinking about it and not yet writing. But never take that process as the equivalent of an outline, because it is the opposite.

I would like to suggest the following exercise. I will present a brief article of mine. Your assignment is to make an outline of it in a form sufficient for you to write from. My purpose is to help you learn how to analyze or reconstruct something already written, so that you can then reverse the procedure and make an outline on your own. (Afterwards, I will provide the outline I used in writing it.)

In my outlines I use a headline style, rather than full grammatical sentences. After much experience, you can use a shorthand too and know its exact meaning. But at the beginning, in order to automatize the outline-article relationship, use full sentences.

As you read the following article, write down its essentials. This enables you to see the overall logical order of the presentation, and to avoid being confused about why one paragraph follows another.

Here is the article:

“Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?”¹⁹

A compromise is an adjustment of conflicting claims by mutual concessions. This means that both parties to a compromise have some valid claim and some value to offer each other. And this means that both parties agree upon some fundamental principle which serves as a base for their deal.

It is only in regard to concretes or particulars, implementing a mutually accepted basic principle, that one may compromise. For instance, one may bargain with a buyer over the price one wants to receive for one’s product, and agree on a sum somewhere between one’s demand and his offer. The mutually accepted basic principle, in such case, is the principle of trade, namely: that the buyer must pay the seller for his product. But if one wanted to be paid and the alleged buyer wanted to obtain one’s product for nothing, no compromise, agreement or discussion would be possible, only the total surrender of one or the other.

There can be no compromise between a property owner and a burglar; offering the burglar a single teaspoon of one’s silverware would not be a compromise, but a total surrender—the recognition of his right to one’s property. What value or concession did the burglar offer in return? And once the principle of unilateral concessions is accepted as the base of a relationship by both parties, it is only a matter of time before the burglar would seize the rest. As an example of this process, observe the present [1962] foreign policy of the United States.

There can be no compromise between freedom and government controls; to accept “just a few controls” is to surrender the principle of inalienable individual rights and to substitute for it the principle of government’s unlimited, arbitrary power, thus delivering oneself into gradual enslavement. As an example of this process, observe the present domestic policy of the United States.

There can be no compromise on basic principles or on fundamental issues. What would you regard as a “compromise” between life and death? Or between truth and falsehood? Or between reason and irrationality?

Today, however, when people speak of “compromise,” what they mean is not a legitimate mutual concession or a trade, but precisely the betrayal of one’s principles—the unilateral surrender to any groundless, irrational claim. The root of that doctrine is ethical subjectivism, which holds that a desire or a whim is an irreducible moral primary, that every man is entitled to any desire he might feel like asserting, that all desires have equal moral validity, and that the only way men can get along together is by giving in to anything and “compromising” with anyone. It is not hard to see who would profit and who would lose by such a doctrine.

The immorality of this doctrine—and the reason why the term “compromise” implies, in today’s general usage, an act of moral treason—lies in the fact that it requires men to accept ethical subjectivism as the basic principle superseding all principles in human relationships and to sacrifice anything as a concession to one another’s whims.

The question “Doesn’t life require compromise?” is usually asked by those who fail to differentiate between a basic principle and some concrete, specific wish. Accepting a lesser job than one had wanted is not a “compromise.” Taking orders from one’s employer on how to do the work for which one is hired, is not a “compromise.” Failing to have a cake after one has eaten it, is not a “compromise.”

Integrity does not consist of loyalty to one’s subjective whims, but of loyalty to rational principles. A “compromise” (in the unprincipled sense of that word) is not a breach of one’s comfort, but a breach of one’s convictions. A “compromise” does not consist of doing something one dislikes, but of doing something one knows to be evil. Accompanying one’s husband or wife to a concert, when one does not care for music, is not a “compromise”; surrendering to his or her irrational demands for social conformity, for pretended religious observance or for generosity toward boorish in-laws, is. Working for an employer who does not share one’s ideas, is not a “compromise”; pretending to share his ideas, is. Accepting a publisher’s suggestions to make changes in one’s manuscript, when one sees the rational validity of his suggestions, is not a “compromise”; making such changes in order to please him or to please “the public,” against one’s own judgment and standards, is.

The excuse, given in all such cases, is that the “compromise” is only temporary and that one will reclaim one’s integrity at some indeterminate future date. But one cannot correct a husband’s or wife’s irrationality by giving in to it and encouraging it to grow. One cannot achieve the victory of one’s ideas by helping propagate their opposite. One cannot offer a literary masterpiece, “when one has become rich and famous,” to a following one has acquired by writing trash. If one found it difficult to maintain one’s loyalty to one’s own convictions at the start, a succession of betrayals—which helped to augment the power of the evil one lacked the courage to fight—will not make it easier at a later date, but will make it virtually impossible.

There can be no compromise on moral principles. “In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.” (Atlas Shrugged.) The next time you are tempted to ask: “Doesn’t life require compromise?” translate that question into its actual meaning : “Doesn’t life require the surrender of that which is true and good to that which is false and evil?” The answer is that that precisely is what life forbids—if one wishes to achieve anything but a stretch of tortured years spent in progressive self-destruction.

Here is the outline I used in writing the article:

Subject: the moral meaning of compromise.

Theme: the evil of compromise.

1. Definition of compromise. Need of basic principle as ground for proper compromise.

2. Impropriety of compromise on basic principles.

3. Modem view: ethical subjectivism. All desires are equally valid.

4. Cause of confusion is failure to differentiate between abstract basic principles and concrete wishes. Examples of what does and does not represent compromise.

5. The metaphysical meaning of compromise on moral principles.

This is not the way a beginner should construct an outline, because it is not detailed enough. But it is easy to follow, and it is necessary for organizing the details. It will be easier on you if you first establish such a broad outline, and then fill in the necessary details. Otherwise, you could miss some of them or put them in the wrong place.

Sometimes an author becomes too abstract because he has not quite decided what details he will use to illustrate something, and so he begins to assert the arbitrary. On the other hand, a writer can add good details but in such a disordered way that they do not integrate into one structure. The broad outline protects against both errors.

Here is how a beginner might expand the outline I used. He could, for example, include the actual definition of “compromise” in Point 1, as well as what underlies it. For instance:

1. Definition of compromise: an adjustment of conflicting claims by mutual concessions.

a. Need of basic principle as ground for proper compromise.

b. Presuppositions of a valid compromise:

i. Both sides have some valid claim and some value to offer.

ii. Both parties agree on an underlying principle.

iii. The subject of the compromise is a concrete, not a principle.

Or you could expand Point 5:

5. The metaphysical meaning of compromise on moral principles. The question “Doesn’t life require compromise?” is the same as “Doesn’t life require the surrender of good to evil?”—which is precisely what life forbids.

[Editor’s note: The appendix contains more of Ayn Rand’s outlines.]

I shall conclude my discussion of outlines with two methodological points.

The most important one is what I call the “crow epistemology.”²⁰ The purpose of an outline is to present your future article in a form you can grasp as a unified whole. This is why I stress that each person should make his outline to suit his own purposes. The exact form of your outline will depend on the subject and theme, and on how detailed or how abstract you need the outline to be in order to hold it all in your mind. So first make it abstract enough so that you can hold the total in your mind, and then, before you start writing, expand it by adding the necessary details. This way, you grasp the connections between the overall structure of your article and the more concrete outline from which you will write.

Never start an article without knowing whether your structure is clear, organized, and properly delimited. If the abstract structure is not clear in your mind, you cannot hold in mind the overall view of your article or decide what belongs in it, so problems will arise. For example, you will be tempted to go into sidelines—and the article will fall apart.

Whenever you have a mental outline that is too narrow and detailed, tell yourself: “This is my subject. This is my material. Now, what exactly am I going to do?” Step back and look at the total. To “step back” means to look at the next level of abstraction. In effect, you condense your material, by essentials, as you ask yourself: “What am I actually doing?” You step back and look more abstractly at the same content—as abstractly as necessary in order to hold the overall view in your mind. When you reach that stage, you are in control.

This is actually the pre-outline stage. You start from scratch with a certain subject and theme, and a lot of material which is not yet organized in your mind. You then make the abstract outline, followed by the more detailed one. If you cannot do it this way, make a detailed outline first and then abstract to the general one. When you have both outlines—an overall view and a detailed skeleton—you can start the actual writing.

The second methodological point is the Aristotelian concept of final causation. Among Aristotle’s four causes, the two that play a constant role in our lives are final causation and efficient causation. The latter operates at the level of inanimate matter: a certain cause is enacted and it has certain effects. Final causation, however, pertains only to consciousness. (Aristotle believed it also applies to nature, but that is a different issue.)

By final causation, Aristotle meant that a purpose is set in advance, and then the steps required to achieve it are determined. This is the process of causation that operates in human consciousness. To do anything, you must know what you want to achieve. For instance, if you decide to drive to Chicago, the roads you select, the amount of gas, etc., will be determined by that goal. But to get there, you will have to start a process of efficient causation, which includes filling the gas tank, starting the car, steering, etc. You will be following the laws of inanimate matter. But the whole process will be a chain of actions you have selected in order to achieve a certain purpose, namely, to get to Chicago.

In no human activity is final causation more important than in creative work, particularly in writing. In order to have a good outline, and later a good article, you must initiate a process of final causation. When in doubt about your outline, that is the test. You set yourself a definite purpose—i.e., you name explicitly your subject and theme—and that determines what material to choose in order to end up with an article that satisfies your purpose. It is final causation that determines what to include both in your outline and in your article.

To sum up, what you need most to make a proper outline are: (1) the concept of an essence—and the ability to distinguish essentials from details; and (2) the concept of causality—and the ability to establish cause-and-effect relations in the presentation of an idea. With these as your most important guidelines, your outline will probably be good.

6

Writing the Draft: The Primacy of the Subconscious

Writing involves both your conscious mind and your subconscious. This is an important psycho-epistemological fact affecting every stage of writing. Without the use of your subconscious, you cannot write (or speak). While complete knowledge of the role of the subconscious does not yet exist, there are helpful principles.

In general, writing problems come from not knowing when to use your conscious mind and when to rely on your subconscious. Of course, we use both elements all the time: a conscious mind cannot function without the storage house of the subconscious, and nobody can write using his subconscious alone (unless he is sleepwalking). But the distinction is that when you prepare an outline and when you edit, you function predominantly by means of your conscious mind. Naturally, you draw on your subconscious knowledge of the subject and on any subconscious integrations that give you inspirational ideas—but your conscious mind directs the process. When it comes to actually writing the draft, however, your subconscious must be in the driver’s seat. Your conscious mind ensures that you are in focus, know what you are writing about, and are driving in the right direction. But for the execution of your purpose, you rely on your subconscious.

You cannot write by a fully conscious process. By “fully conscious” I mean that you make decisions according to your fully focused awareness. If you tried, you could not write a single sentence. If you tried to select every word by conscious decision, it would take years, because you would have to study a thesaurus for each one. Moreover, by the time you selected a couple of words, you would have forgotten what you wanted to say.

As an experiment, make yourself self-conscious and try to tell someone what you did this morning. Focus on what you are saying—on whether you are selecting the right words, the proper sentence structure, etc. You will stutter helplessly and be unable to finish a sentence. The same happens if you write by such overfocused, over-conscious means. To speak or write, you must rely on your subconscious, automatized integrations.

When we speak, it feels as if the words come automatically—as if the words and thoughts come simultaneously. Of course, they do not. If you observe children learning to speak, or yourself learning a foreign language, you discover that language is not innate and automatic, but an acquired skill. It is so well integrated at the adult level, however, that the transition from the thought you want to express to the words you use to express it is automatic.

In writing, you need to establish the same kind of connection between your subconscious and the words you put on paper. Since any subject involves many complexities, the connection will never be quite so automatic or perfect. That is why editing is required. But while you are writing, do not act as an editor at the same time. Do not be self-conscious while writing. When you begin to write your first draft, let the words come automatically. Do not think over your sentences in advance and do not censor yourself.

If you want your overall style to be natural and consistent, do not be artificially stylized in the process of writing. Write directly from your subconscious, as the words come to you. Your writing might be primitive or even ungrammatical, but that can be corrected later.

Your outline sets the direction, and thus the standing orders, for your subconscious. You know your subject and what you want to say about it. But when it comes to how you are going to say it, you must trust your subconscious as it is.

It is a contradiction to think you can do better than your own mind, yet that is what the overcritical approach amounts to. No matter what the state of your subconscious—whether or not you have the requisite writing skill and knowledge of the subject—it is your only tool. So do not demand the impossible of yourself. Do not set a preconceived standard of what to expect from your subcon, scious. You can apply editorial principles consciously, later; but if you do it in the process of writing, it will be torture and you will achieve nothing. When you edit, you can conclude that your subconscious was not functioning well, and even arrive at principles for self-improvement. But while you are writing, you must adopt the premise: my subconscious, right or wrong. You must let your automatic connections function, because you have no others.

The subconscious is not an entity with a mind of its own. It is like a computer and will do what you consciously order it, within the limits of its knowledge and training. In the process of writing, you will discover (if you introspect well) how sensitive your subconscious is and how careful you must be in using it. For instance, your subconscious will reflect exactly what your greatest concern is. If you focus on whether people will like your article, what it will do to your self-esteem, whether it is beautiful, etc., you will not squeeze out a sentence an hour, and will wonder why your thoughts do not flow freely. The reason is that your subconscious is obeying you. If you are concerned with an estimate ahead of the facts, it will obey and will not be interested in writing. It will be busy with self-esteem problems (e.g., whether your writing reveals talent) or editorial problems (e.g., whether you write beautifully). As a result, you will be paralyzed.

When you write, be as conceited as you can be—“conceit” is not the right word, but I want to overstate the point. You must have total self-esteem. Leave your self-doubts behind when you sit down to write—and pick them up again, if you wish, during the process of editing. Sometimes your writing will give you reason to feel some self-doubt afterward (but this should be temporary, if you are disappointed in what you read the next day). But while you are writing, you must be God’s perfect creature (if there were a God). Regard yourself as an absolute, sovereign consciousness. Forget that man is fallible and that you might make mistakes. That is true, but it is for the next day, when you edit.

Trust your subconscious by writing as if everything that comes out of it is right. This is an advance vote of self-confidence. It is not self-delusion, because it is true in this respect: the freer your mind, the more clearly you will see its exact capacity and knowledge on a given issue. If you rely on your subconscious without repression or self-doubt, you will discover the best your subconscious can do. For the purpose of your writing, in fact, there is nothing other than the process of your own creative subconscious, and you must trust it. You cannot do any better spontaneously. You can do better when you edit, but when writing, keep going without looking back.

Your conscious mind while writing should be concerned with your subject. You must focus, with full confidence in your ability to say something important, on the subject and theme—and let your subconscious provide the words to express exactly what you want to say. The decisions concerning what you want to say and in what order have been made beforehand, in your outline—and any doubts you have should be reserved for the outline. But since an outline is very abstract, you cannot know in advance exactly what you will say. That comes only during the process of writing. To perform that process effectively, make your subject clear to yourself as you write—as clear as possible without pausing on every sentence.

This is what it means to trust your subconscious. Give your subconscious the standing order that you are concerned only with your subject and the clearest presentation of it possible, and let that be the absolute directing your writing. If something bothers you on the periphery of your consciousness—some distraction or self-doubt-ignore it; if it is serious, stop writing. But do not attempt to write with half your mind on the subject and the other half on irrelevant problems.

The simplest sentence requires your subconscious connections—and thus a clear knowledge of the subject. To write even a short article, you must know much more than you put on paper. For a book, you must know the equivalent of ten books, so that you can exercise selectivity and be sure about what you say. But if you tell your subconscious: “I sort of know my subject, and while writing I’ll figure out what’s unclear when I come to it,” you will never come to it. Your subconscious will stop, because it will not know what to tell you.

Someone asked me the following question: Should you have all your ideas thought out before you begin the first draft, or can you learn as you are writing? And my answer is that you can sometimes do the second accidentally—but God help you if you attempt to do it deliberately. Do not try to do your thinking and your writing at the same time. A clear outline helps you avoid this problem. While you are writing, it allows you to focus your attention exclusively on conveying your thoughts in an objective, grammatical form.

These are two separate jobs: the job of thinking and the job of expressing your thoughts. And they cannot be done together. If you try, it will take you much longer, and be much more painful, than if you did each one separately—because you are giving your subconscious contradictory orders. You are saying: “I have to express something—but I do not know what.”

It is true that you might start writing with a full understanding of your subject, and some new aspect suddenly occurs to you. You might put down a certain formulation, which then raises a question you never faced before. That is a normal process. And it would be perfectly appropriate to stop writing and think this question over. Or you might even inspirationally get the answer right away. But never start with a question mark in your mind.

In the process of writing, it is crucial not to stop for too long (and preferably not at all). For instance, if you have two hours assigned to writing, write during that time without stopping. (No one besides a hack can write for much more than two hours straight, except when there is unusual inspiration at the end of a work.) If you can write continuously, chances are that your work will require the least editing. But if you pause after every sentence to reread and rewrite it, you will have a lot of trouble in editing. One of the deadliest obstacles to good writing is critical overconscientiousness exercised during the process of writing.

If, as you write something, a better way of saying it spontaneously occurs to you, make the change. That is still a subconscious process: your subconscious gave you preliminary data and then fed you more refined data. But if the change requires a switch to a conscious state, do not do it.

I find the best way to write is not sentence by sentence (more on that error shortly), but sequence by sequence. By “sequence” I mean a subdivision of your outline. Since an outline is broken up into sequences, each point of an outline stands for a certain progression of thought. The best way to write is by such sequences, unless a given point is too lengthy.

Take a look at your outline before you start, and then do not stop yourself—do not edit, and do not look at your outline—until you finish that sequence. For example, suppose the first sequence of your outline, Point 1, is called “Presentation of the General Subject,” and you know what you want to say. Start writing and do not stop until you are ready for Point 2. Then you can look at your outline and see what the second sequence is, etc.

This suggestion is not an absolute. If you find yourself confused or stymied—for example, because you went off on a sideline—then you may need to stop and check your outline. But short of such necessity, for rapid and well-integrated writing do not look at your outline too closely. Train yourself to write from an abstraction. If you constantly consult the same point in your outline, you will find your words stilted; after repeating the generalized sentence from your outline., you will have nothing more to say. The reason is that you have given your subconscious the order to say only what you wrote in your outline.

Your outline sets the direction. Keep that direction firmly in mind, but leave yourself free to express each point fully.

I cannot literally teach you to write. I can provide only a set of shortcuts that are helpful as general principles. These shortcuts will save you from bewilderment and from having to discover them slowly by yourself. To this end, there are a few errors or problems I want to warn you against, all involving the role of the subconscious in writing.

The Squirms

The “squirms” is a term coined by my husband, Frank, for a state of writing which is universal. It describes the following situation: you are writing, and suddenly, on a given sequence or chapter, you find yourself completely paralyzed mentally. This strikes at unexpected moments.

In writing Atlas Shrugged, for example, there were difficult sequences, and I was prepared for trouble; but when I got to them they almost wrote themselves. Then there were sequences which I thought were perfectly clear in my mind, but when I got to them, I found myself stopped for days. I could neither write nor give up the attempt.

My husband called this the squirms simply by watching my behavior. I usually do not discuss my writing troubles during such periods. But Frank can tell, because it is an inner agony. It is probably the worst experience, psychologically, that I know of. But when you solve the squirms, it loses all reality and the final result is worth the effort. That is the only consolation I can give you for one of the worst penalties of writing.

I asked many writers about this problem, and they all experienced it, with the exception of two Hollywood hacks who worked from 9 to 1, produced the same number of pages every day, and never had any trouble. Of course, this lack of squirms showed in their work. But writers of ability all go through the process.

There is a good book by Eliot Hutchinson entitled How to Think Creatively,²¹ in which he discusses the squirms in great detail. He has his own terminology—for example, he calls the point at which this inner conflict ends “the moment of insight”—but it is the same process no matter what you call it. He has some good descriptions of it and some proper advice to give.

Let me describe what the squirms feel like. You find, suddenly, that your subconscious does not function. You know, consciously, what you want to say, but somehow the words do not come. One sign that you are in this state is that suddenly you write like a high school student. Everything comes out in that flat, “the-cat-is-on-the-mat” style, like a dry summary, wooden and artificial. Yet your writing lacks even the virtue of clarity. I do not try to write more than two sentences in that state. If you force yourself, you will have spent a day in agony, only to discover the next morning that you can use nothing of what you wrote.

The squirms make you feel ignorant about writing. During such periods, I literally felt that it was impossible to write. I told myself consciously that I had written before; but emotionally, in that moment, I felt I had lost the very concept of writing. Simultaneously, you feel as if the solution is right there, and that if you tried harder you would break through. It almost makes you feel guilty, because it feels as if there is something you could do if you really wanted to—and you want to desperately, but can do nothing.

Most of Atlas Shrugged was written that way. I had worse squirms on that book than on anything I ever wrote, even though I knew much more about writing than I did when I wrote The Fountainhead or We the Living. In writing Atlas, I discarded five pages for every one that I kept, and it was torture. There were certainly inspirational passages—passages that wrote themselves—but only as a rare reward.

If you write something at all complex, you will experience the squirms in one form or another. The main reason for it is a subconscious contradiction. On the conscious level, in my case, I would create an outline, and my subject and theme would be perfectly clear to me. Only there were so many possibilities of which I was not aware—so many different ways of executing the theme—that my conscious mind in fact had not chosen clearly. Because of the complexity of the theme, I could not select clearly, in advance, from the many possibilities; hence, there were problems for my subconscious.

I had terrible squirms in writing Atlas because of the complexity of the integrations in that novel. I had to proceed slowly, because there was much more to integrate than in The Fountainhead, for instance. If you compare the two novels, especially their themes and sentence structures (i.e., what those sentences have to carry), you will observe that in Atlas I had to do much more. It was a process of constant writing, polishing, and rewriting, until I got all of those intentions into one scene or one page.

Another reason was that the background of Atlas was not familiar to me. Although I had done sufficient research, there was a strain in projecting how a scientist would feel, how Dagny Taggart would feel running a railroad, etc. After all, I was not writing naturalistically from my own experience. Now I had had to do the same kind of research for The Fountainhead, since architecture is not my profession, but that was only one profession. In Atlas, I wrote from the perspective of many different professions, none of them my own (except Hugh Akston’s, in part, and he is a minor character).

Whenever you experience the squirms, some clash of intentions occurs on the subconscious level, as if your inner circuits were tied in knots. You feel paralyzed because your subconscious is struggling with a contradiction, but since it is on the subconscious level, you cannot identify it immediately.

On projects simpler than a novel, the problem could be a contradiction in what you want to say about your subject. Suppose there are two closely related aspects of your subject. Subconsciously you may vacillate between these aspects, thereby short-circuiting your subconscious. It is a problem of uncertainty. Although you think you made a clear decision about what to say, when it comes to elaborating it on paper you are uncertain, and this paralyzes your subconscious.

Another possible source of the squirms is a lack of knowledge. For example, on a given passage, you find you have insufficient knowledge to deal with a particular aspect of your subject. This stops you suddenly; you need an example, say, and cannot come up with one, or you are not sure whether a particular sub-clause is correct or not, etc. Your subconscious is not sure what to do, and so you are stopped dead. A related reason is indecisive thinking about your subject. You decide approximately what you want to say, and in making your outline it seems sufficient. But when you write, you realize suddenly that more thinking is required on a certain point; again, you are stopped.

You cannot discover these problems introspectively when they first occur, because your subconscious functions lightning fast, like a computer. It can grasp what you have not grasped consciously. That is, if you give your subconscious contradictory orders, it does not hold on to that contradiction; rather it instantly identifies the implication of contradictory orders—and shuts down.

Solving the squirms is perhaps the most painful part of writing. You must stop writing when they occur, but continue to work on the problem. To the best of my knowledge of psycho-epistemology, there is no other way out. The worst thing to do is to think that since it is a subconscious problem, you can take a rest, read a book, go to the movies—and let your subconscious resolve the problem. It will not. If you take a break of that kind, you prolong the agony. And the longer you postpone the problem, the less chance you have of solving it.

The problem can be solved, but it must be done consciously. You must sit at your desk and think about it, even when you feel you do not know what to think. For an exercise in free will and will power, this is the hardest thing you can demand of yourself, but it is the only solution.

As you consider the various aspects of the problem—what is the obstacle, what do you want to say, should you try another approach—you think of different ways of solving it, each one ending in a blind alley. But do not get discouraged; as you consider and discard various possibilities, you are actually untangling the knot in your subconscious.

If you have a tendency to feel unearned guilt, you will certainly feel it at the end of such a day. I never feel it, except in a state of squirms. But I know how to localize it. I know consciously that this is a technical, professional problem, and not a reflection on my self-esteem. Therefore, above all, do not take the squirms as an indication of your intelligence or writing talent or self-esteem.

While trying to solve the squirms, you feel as if you are accomplishing nothing. But in fact, while you struggle with the problem, you are eliminating confusions or contradictions in your mind. After three long days of work, for example, you may wake up the next day knowing you have to start the struggle again. You have no clue to the solution when you start on one more possibility, but suddenly you have the right idea. It is like a revelation from another dimension, though you know it is not. (This is one reason so many writers talk about inspiration from God or a spirit that moves the hand.) You become eager to write and it goes beautifully. When your final attempt breaks through and clarifies everything, it is not an accident. It was made possible by those days of torture and false starts. That work was not wasted, even though at the time it felt as if it were.

You untangle the knot in your mind by eliminating wrong possibilities. Thus you have set your subconscious free to integrate, and the sudden “revelation” is the subconscious finally integrating the right elements. As Hutchinson points out in How to Think Creatively, it is like the accident of Newton’s apple. He says that accidents happen to those who deserve them. He explains that if Newton had not worked on the law of gravitation, the apple falling on his head would have accomplished nothing. Newton had the knowledge, but was not yet able to integrate it. The apple falling on his head at the right time permitted the final integration of all that complex material. (I have heard that this apple story is not true. But true or not, it is the best illustration of the creative process; it applies equally to writing and every other creative activity.)

Solving the squirms requires integrating an enormous range of material, which may not happen immediately because of the number of wrong possibilities. Your mind can handle only so much at a time. At the right stage, however, one event can suddenly resolve the problem and reveal what kind of integration is necessary.

(Sometimes a writer has a personal problem unconnected to writing that he puts aside in order to write. He forces his mind away from the problem, yet it is more important to him than he realized. It occupies his subconscious, and therefore he has nothing to write with. If that happens to you, stop and solve the problem. As you gain experience, it will be easy to identify whether the problem is one of writing or a distraction from outside. The real squirms are those involving the writing itself.)

In How to Think Creatively, Hutchinson says he knows of no other solution to this problem than to keep trying and to remember that it is a necessary part of any creative process. He recommends that you maintain the conviction that you can solve the problem. I was startled when I read this, because I had reached the same conclusion through introspection. So far, there is no way known to avoid the squirms. But if you view them as a professional hazard and maintain your calm in the face of them, that is also the best way to foreshorten the torture. The reward, when it comes, is worth it.

If, however, you tell yourself you are no good, then you may not find a solution without the help of a psychologist. You are pouring oil on the fire. So do not doubt yourself.

“White Tennis Shoes”

A related problem is the pseudo-squirms or “white tennis shoes.” Years ago I read an article in The New Yorker by a writer who described what she does in the morning before writing. What she describes is universal. When she sits down she knows she does not want to write. Here is what her subconscious does to “save” her from that difficulty. She thinks of everything she has to do. She needs to call a friend on business, and does so. She thinks of an aunt she has not called for months, and calls her. She thinks of what she has to order from the store, and places the order. She remembers she has not finished yesterday’s paper, so she does. She continues in this way until she runs out of excuses and has to start writing. But suddenly she remembers that last summer (it is now winter) she never cleaned her white tennis shoes. So she cleans them. That is why I refer to this syndrome as the “white tennis shoes.”

Getting into the writing state is difficult, and so you might procrastinate in this way. This is the pseudo-squirms: the normal reluctance to face an abnormal difficulty. This is not a moral, but a psycho-epistemological, issue. A mental switch is hard to make, yet it occurs every time you try to write, until you get used to writing and become severe with yourself. It is difficult to do because of the enormous concentration required. Every person has more than one value, and there are many legitimate things you could do which are easier than writing—maybe not cleaning tennis shoes, but going shopping or cleaning your apartment, for instance. Contrast these kinds of activity with a complete withdrawal from your total context and an intense concentration. The temptation to do something else is always there before you start writing.

In steelmaking, a blast furnace must be heated for weeks before it is hot enough to forge steel. A writer getting himself into the writing mood is like that furnace. Nobody likes to get into that state, though once you are in it you want no other, and would probably snap at anyone who interrupted you. Authentic squirms exist when there is a conflict: you cannot write, but neither can you take your mind off of writing. In such a state you could not think of tennis shoes. If the house were on fire you would not want to deal with it. But in the case of the “white tennis shoes,” you must force yourself by sheer will power immediately to stop procrastinating and begin writing.

Let me mention another possible solution, which I learned from a good Hollywood writer. He told me that if he stops writing at the end of a sequence, it is difficult to pick up the continuity the next day. So when he reaches the end, he writes the beginning of the next sequence and then stops. I find this helpful sometimes, but it is not an absolute. If you come to the end of a sequence and know clearly where you want to go next, it is helpful to establish that beachhead for the next day’s work. But if you have not thought out the next sequence (which is often the case), do not force yourself to go on.

Fatigue

A state between the squirms and the “white tennis shoes” is authentic fatigue. This occurs when you have been working for a long time, and so are too close to the subject and simply need a rest. The mind, like the body, needs rest. If you are struggling and your writing is stale and uninspired, take a break. Go to the movies, watch television, listen to music. Take your mind off the article, and come back to the subject with a fresh outlook.

Learn to distinguish your inner states. Decide whether you are feeling the squirms, or the “white tennis shoes” (where you simply have to exercise will power), or tiredness (when your mind is closed and will power will not do, since you would only be torturing an overloaded computer).

Circular Squirms

The difficulty in writing—both in planning an article and in executing it—is that it requires a strain in one’s thinking, in the form of what might appear to be a contradiction.

Normally, as you acquire knowledge you automatize it. You do not hold all your knowledge in the same form in which you first learned it. Learning to speak is the best example; all other knowledge follows the same pattern. At first you learn words by conscious effort. You are in control of that knowledge when you no longer have to grope for words—when expressing yourself in words is so habitual that you cannot retrace the process by which you learned them. As an adult, you cannot grasp what happens in your mind when a thought is translated into words as you speak. But you can trace that process, as an adult, when you learn a foreign language. In groping for words in a foreign language, you can get an idea of what takes place in your mind when you first learn to speak. From that, you can see the real nature of automatization. First you learn something by focusing on it consciously. You have to grope for the knowledge and then use it consciously. With repetition and the growth of your knowledge, what you learn becomes automatized. It is not innate, though it feels that way. You have, quite properly, forgotten how you learned it, and all that remains is the result—the skill-which permits you to acquire further knowledge without having to stumble over words.

Knowledge is being automatized throughout your life (if you are not a case of arrested development). You are constantly increasing the complexity and scope of your knowledge. To the extent to which you are in command of that knowledge, you automatize it. For the purposes of further knowledge, you need not remember all the syllogisms you had to go through to be convinced of something. Your knowledge comes to feel like a self-evident primary, and you use it as if it were that; but if you are a good introspector, you know that it is not. This makes writing difficult. On the one hand, everything you know has become automatized. On the other hand, when you present your knowledge in writing, you must break up that automatization.

Often, you want to present a complex idea that is clear to you, and yet you cannot find the right words or do not know where to begin. A certain circularity seems to set in: you cannot present Point A without first explaining Point B, but Point B is not clear without Point A. This is natural. When you are in control of your subject, you hold it as an integrated, clear total. This is not subjective, but objective. But the form in which you hold it feels subjective, so when you try to explain it to somebody you do not know where to begin.

The remedy, in part, is to guard against the tendency to accept a conclusion while forgetting the road by which you reached it. If you know, for instance, that capitalism is the best system, you can surely remember that you did not always know it. There may even have been times when you were tempted toward other systems. The view that capitalism is best is a conviction acquired, at the earliest, on the semi-adult level, with full knowledge coming only later. But once you are fully convinced of it, you can operate with that knowledge automatically. If you read about a new law being proposed in Congress, you need not retrace all the reasons that once convinced you of the correctness of capitalism. Your mind automatically refers to your conclusion as a standard, and automatically evaluates some concrete law according to that standard.

But suppose that in the middle of such automatic functioning you suddenly questioned why you think capitalism is best. If such a doubt entered your mind seriously, you could not judge the concretes. The automatic circuits would be broken and you could not tell whether some law is good or bad. You would have to stop your machinery, in effect, and review the arguments that originally convinced you. If you met a liberal, you might find it difficult to show him that capitalism is best. It would be hard to organize your arguments, because you have forgotten the road you took intellectually to acquire this complex knowledge. You have retained, in conscious terms, only the conclusion—which is proper. But it is improper to let the underlying steps vanish from your mind entirely, because quite apart from writing articles or converting liberals, you may encounter new arguments or tricky political situations and find yourself helpless. As a general rule, try to remember at least the essentials of the process by which you arrived at a given conclusion, so that if you have to present that conclusion, you will have a standard for knowing what, in logic, is necessary to defend it.

What you must recall is the logical, not the biographical, process. You need not remember the actual thought process you yourself went through (though that sometimes helps). For an orderly epistemology, what matters is logic. For instance, if somebody told you that capitalism is the most productive system, that would not yet fully convince you. But if he pointed out that it is the only system that protects rights, or if he demonstrated that it is the only moral system, that argument will remain with you. This will enable you to know what is essential for a convincing article.

Remember the logical antecedents—the steps that convinced you of a conclusion, which you today regard as almost self-evident. Keeping track of these steps gives you a lead as to what to include in your article and how to delimit your outline. It will determine what is necessary to prove a certain point, and what are irrelevant details, elaborations, or side issues.

This difficulty particularly affects people who know their subject well. They know “too much,” and thus the selection becomes difficult. When you have layer upon layer of complex integrations, and need to isolate a particular aspect within your specialty, organizing your article and delimiting your theme may be difficult. Whereas if, for instance, you write a spontaneous letter of indignation to your college newspaper—I never did in Soviet Russia, because we had no such newspaper, you can be sure—it may well be convincing. Though you know far less than you will later, within the confines of your knowledge you are making your point properly, since knowledge is contextual. But when you have “too much” knowledge, you can no longer do this so easily.

This does not mean that to write an article you must revise your entire method of thinking. I am merely giving you a lead to a possible cause of trouble. When you find yourself in the circular squirms—when you do not know where to begin because everything seems connected to everything else—take it as a sign of well-integrated, well-automatized knowledge, which may be causing problems because you did not retain the logical steps by which you arrived at it. The solution is to break up the integration into its component parts, in logical order.

If you experience this trouble in the actual writing process, rather than in the outline, remind yourself that the circularity is only an illusion, and proceed. If you cannot decide whether Point A or Point B should be stated first, choose arbitrarily. If one is in fact better, you will discover that when you edit. But in your draft, do not hesitate over this kind of circularity for too long. If it stops you, make a quick decision and go on.

Editing Unwritten Sentences

An article, an outline, or a sentence does not exist until it is on paper. This is an absolute. It may seem obvious, but writers often ignore it and get into trouble. They act as if they can edit a sentence before it comes into existence.

Whenever your writing comes too slowly and you have to drag it out of yourself—sentence by sentence, or word by word—the error is that you believe a sentence exists in your mind or another dimension, and you can improve it before it exists in reality. But it does not exist. By existence, I mean objective reality, i.e., that which can be perceived by a human consciousness. That which exists in your own mind is only a state of consciousness. It is merely in the anteroom to existence for a creative work.

Do not judge your work, edit it, or discuss it until it exists on paper.

The same relationship exists between an embryo and an actual child. Catholics claim an embryo has the right to life, and that this supersedes the mother’s life. This is a ridiculous misapplication of the concept of rights. Rights pertain to a baby which has come into existence, not to a mere potential. In the same way, the most beautiful future sentence, until it appears on paper, is only an embryo. (I have even heard people speak of a writer being “with novel.” It is more than a metaphor.)

A work in progress does not yet exist. If it is a book, some chapters may exist, but the book itself does not. When you are writing an article, some paragraphs or sequences may exist, as you put them down on paper, but the article itself does not. The same principle applies to the building block of any writing: the sentence. A sentence does not exist until it is on paper. So let it be born before you decide that it is deformed or should be destroyed. Fortunately, one difference between writing and childbirth is that whereas you cannot destroy a child when it is bom, a sentence (or entire draft) can be discarded if necessary.

The error of editing sentences before they exist occurs when, as you get a certain thought and begin putting it into words, you interrupt that crucial process and begin to edit. All beginners make that mistake, particularly conscientious ones. They think maybe they can make the sentence a little better.

There is a similar error people make. I know someone who went so far as to write down a sentence with great torture, and then consult a thesaurus, looking up every word to make sure there was not a better one. Then he would go on to the next sentence.

The mistake here is in thinking that a sentence can stand by itself, outside of any context. But remember that Objectivism, above any other philosophy, holds context as the crucial element in cognition and in all value judgments. Just as you cannot have concepts, definitions, or knowledge outside of a context, so you cannot judge a sentence out of context. All writing is contextual. The minimum standard, or unit of judgment, in regard to a sentence is its paragraph. But even that is not final because it depends on all the other paragraphs. Therefore, you cannot fully and finally judge the value of a sentence until you have finished the whole article (or, in a book, the whole chapter).

So do not edit sentences before they are on paper; and for the same reason, do not immediately start editing a sentence once it is on paper. Do not go to a dictionary, or wonder whether you should cut or add something, or whether it needs clarification. You cannot judge that until you see the total.

Over-staring

A corollary danger is too much rereading. In doing the draft, this occurs when you focus too much on a sentence, thereby losing your context and your direction. Then, to try to recover them, you constantly reread the preceding sentences. The result is that by the end of the first day of writing, you have memorized your paragraph. That is a problem all young writers suffer from.

The greatest danger in regard to control over your writing is to memorize your first draft. That sets it in your mind as the final expression of what you want to say. As a result, you lose the capacity to evaluate or edit it, which requires that you be able to take a fresh look at your material. That is why the earliest you should edit your work is the next morning; editing requires a switch to a conscious process, which is a different mental set.

If you over-stare at a passage (as I call it), you delay for an indeterminate period the time when you can properly edit it. You may struggle, by will power, to edit it, but you will be handicapped: you will hear only a memorized recital in your mind and will not be able to say whether it is good, effective, and eloquent. (The only time you should over-stare is when your article or book is in print. That kind of gloating is appropriate and enjoyable, and you can even learn from it.)

If you do over-stare, struggle by whatever means you can to forget your material. Go so far as to pretend that you have forgotten it and try for a fresh look. Sometimes you will have to put the article aside for a week or more. But you will actually gain time that way, because otherwise each time you try to edit, you will become blinder to it, and eventually lose interest.

Pet Sentences

Many writers save pet sentences from passages they have discarded, with the hope of putting them to use in another work. A writer, however, must make a conscious choice to write on a certain subject and theme, and then must program his subconscious for that job. If, on a given sequence, his mind is more concerned about using these brilliant pet sentences or aphorisms, it will not function properly, and he will torture himself. The reason is that he is interfering with his own subconscious and trying to write by a partially conscious process. It is tantamount to giving himself the following impossible order: “I want to present a new theory of economics, with which I must integrate ethics and epistemology—and I also have sentences A, B, and C that must be included.” The subconscious is getting too many orders, and contradictory ones at that. It will simply stop functioning.

Keep in mind that no matter how good your pet sentences are, nothing is brilliant outside of a context. If the context and logical progression of your presentation permit one of those sentences, it will come to you automatically. Your subconscious will not forget it. If it does not come automatically, then it does not belong in the new structure; and you cannot rework a structure merely to feature a particular sentence. So let it go or put it down in a notebook. (It is pleasant to save good sentences even if you cannot use them. After Atlas Shrugged, I had a huge pile of discarded pages with sentences I liked. There were many good formulations, descriptions, and lines of dialogue that I wanted to save for future reference, though I found no use for them in the novel.)

Quotations

A related difficulty involves handling quotations. Writing an article that includes many quotations is a real strain, because it requires a constant switch between a conscious and subconscious progression of thought.

The best way to handle quotations is to decide, while working on your outline, where you will place them. Do not pile up a lot of quotations without a firm decision about where to use them. Otherwise you will constantly strain between writing and looking at those quotations, wondering whether you should use number one here or number three, etc. Even if you do decide in advance, when you come to a quotation you are interrupting yourself—since a switch to the conscious mind is required—and thus will experience a certain amount of strain. But the strain is minimal if the quotation comes when you are ready for it; all you have to do then is copy it and continue.

Incidentally, always copy the quote in your manuscript (unless it is too long) so that it becomes part of your writing. Your mind integrates the quotation, and this gives you a proper springboard from which to continue.

Some writers make the same mistake with quotations that others make with pet sentences. For example, Leonard Peikoff told me that when writing The Ominous Parallels,²² he had a problem quoting Hegel. He had favorite quotations that did not quite fit a particular discussion, but they were so horrible philosophically—and thus so interesting—that he regarded them as gems, and was eager to put them in. The principle is the same as in the case of pet sentences: the requirements of your context come first. Do not sacrifice logical progression for some outside consideration, such as a favorite quote. If you can fit it in, fine—but do not force it.

I had a problem handling numerous quotations in my article “Requiem for Man,”²³ which deals with the papal encyclical Populorum Progressio (On the Development of Peoples). The subject of my article was the encyclical, and thus quotations played a central part. I had to select the quotations that conveyed the encyclical’s point clearly and in essentials, while preserving the continuity of my own presentation. To object convincingly to the encyclical, I needed my own argument running through the quotations. In addition, I had to attemate between making an assertion about the Pope’s view, supported by a quotation, and presenting a quotation, then arguing against it. It was a difficult job of organization, because 1 had to switch so often between writing and selecting quotes.

Here is how I did it. First I broke down the encyclical into its essential points; then with colored pencils I established a code matching each color with a particular subject. I marked each relevant paragraph with the color pertaining to its subject. For example, red stood for economics, blue for politics, green for ethics, etc. Within each category, I selected only the most eloquent and essential quotations. I devised a system whereby each time I needed quotes on a given subject, I decided in advance which were best, and limited my choice to those. For instance, I started with the encyclical’s view of capitalism. I had three or four marked in the appropriate color, looked up only those, made a quick decision, copied the quotation, and continued writing. I did the same for every other issue. That enabled me to integrate the reference material with the rest of my writing.

I prepared all this color coding before I made the final outline. I first made a tentative outline and organized the quotations, then I made a final outline in which I numbered the quotations, which were already categorized. As I proceeded to write, I could make quick selections according to those numbers. It was still difficult, but it was much easier than stopping each time and hunting through the encyclical for an appropriate quotation. So if you need to quote from research material, the principle is: select the best in advance, and confine your choice to those while writing.

You may find, when you reread your first draft, that you want to add or eliminate some quotation(s). This is relatively easy, and it is better to have to do this during editing than to give yourself too wide a choice, which leaves you open to too much hesitation during the writing process itself.

Mulling

The mulling-over period precedes all other stages of writing. It is a process of thinking in which you use your conscious mind to call forth certain ideas from your subconscious. It involves a tentative projection of a given subject and theme. How exactly the process will work depends on your mind, your interest in a given subject, and your familiarity with it. So there can be no rules about this process.

If you have notes, clippings, quotations, etc., that pertain to your theme, it is certainly helpful to look them over during this period, because that helps you integrate your material. But there can be no rules about how often or when precisely to do it. As a general practice, you will find that at a certain stage of this process you need to do some reading on your subject; that may stimulate your mind and help you to clarify your theme. But at another stage, it may be bad for you to read more, because that is when your subconscious needs to integrate the material already there. You have to acquire the right amount of knowledge, and then give your subconscious time to digest and integrate it. (Of course, if you still feel confused, you can always do further thinking and discover more material.)

In the mulling-over process, you—your conscious mind—are playing an instrument: your subconscious; and it is up to you to discover (by introspection) what your subconscious needs at which stage of writing. You must learn to trust the signals your subconscious gives you. If you order yourself to do more reading for a given article, but feel boredom and an enormous reluctance, it is likely that your subconscious already has what you need, and that further research is redundant or irrelevant. By contrast, say you project what you would like to convey in an article and even begin to make an outline, but you keep losing your train of thought, as if encountering patches of fog. Chances are you have not done enough thinking about, or research on, your subject. This is when you should look up more material or go over your notes again.

This is very general advice, because only you will be able to tell what is necessary in each case, which will vary from article to article.

Premature Discussion

As a rule, it is dangerous to discuss your future article with your spouse or friends before you finish your outline. Just as a sentence does not exist before it is on paper, neither does your article (not even as a potential) until you have clarified what you want to say. It does not become firm, even in your own mind, until you have an outline.

Before you make an outline, what exists in your mind is a creative nebula, not a solar system. It is a chaos of matter which might be organized into a solar system. In this, the mulling-over stage, you are vulnerable to any outside suggestions, precisely because you have not made up your mind fully. In order to write, you need more knowledge than you can include in any article, and while you are choosing what to include from that knowledge, you are vulnerable to outside influences.

There is no rule about how long the mulling-over process will last. It depends on your knowledge of the subject. Whether it is one day or several weeks, there is a period during which you are merely playing with the subject freely in your mind, and projecting in a flexible way what to include. This is how you condition your subconscious to that particular subject.

If you discuss your article while in this state, any suggestion seems to acquire a high level of objectivity, because it comes from outside. It is real—somebody has stated it—whereas your own view is still chaotic. The danger comes not from a bad suggestion, but from a good one. If the suggestion is bad, it might delude you temporarily, but eventually you will see through it. But suppose you are groping and somebody gives you a valuable suggestion which, however, comes from outside your own context. You may consciously grasp and agree with it, but you have not integrated it by yourself. Such a premature conclusion will act on your outline and future article in the same way a favorite quotation or sentence does. The outside suggestion becomes an absolute to which you must fit your article, and the result is a badly constructed piece. You will give birth to a crippled baby, with an extra leg or arm.

Let me tell you how I discovered this principle. I wrote a stage adaptation of We the Living, which was produced under the title The Unconquered. It was a flop. The idea of making We the Living into a play was not mine. A producer who had read the book approached me with the idea. He took an option on it, and I wrote the play. (In the end, he could not raise enough money to produce it, but about a year later, an actress became interested, approached me, and arranged for George Abbott to produce it.)

I had a terrible time writing the play, and I disliked every version of it, from the original to the many rewrites. I became acutely aware of the fact that my purpose in writing it did not originate with me. In addition, my reason for writing it was to promote the book and help publicize it. (The novel had been killed totally by the default of the publisher; it went out of print after one edition of 3,000 copies.) So I had a legitimate motive—only it was not a literary motive. My primary goal and interest were not in the play as such.

The play never was—and I came to realize, never could be—good. It grew out of somebody else’s suggestion plus my own irrelevant motive. So, no matter how conscientiously I tried, I could not make it good. The final version was more or less competent, but no better. This taught me never to write anything that was not my own idea. Even if it is a good idea, if it does not come out of my own context, I will be unable to integrate it. It will not be first-handed.

Know when you are free to discuss a project. Before you start preparing an article, it is all right to discuss the subject. An exchange of views may help you clarify your own ideas. Regard it as a general discussion of ideas, not something you are engaging in with an eye to your future article. But when you are preparing to work on your outline and are still in the mulling-over stage, do not discuss the subject or the article. Once you put your outline on paper and it actually exists, then you can discuss it. You have formulated your own integration and thus can judge whether or not you will be able to use an outside suggestion. In short, learn to determine when discussion can be helpful, and when it can be confusing.

There are people who talk for years about the articles or books they intend to write. Editors have a general impression, which is true, that when a writer talks too much about a project, it will never be written. Psycho-epistemologically, the reason is the same as in discussing an outline too soon. If you discuss a project too much before it is clear in your mind, particularly a large project like a book, you only confuse yourself.

In some cases the motives here are dishonest. I have in mind those perennial novel-promisers who like playing the role of novelist without bothering with the difficult job of writing. Psycho-epistemologically, what helps the dishonesty along—or rather, what penalizes it—is that the would-be writer’s act dissipates his ability. He confuses his subconscious by discussions with, and suggestions from, others, and he never gets to the actual writing. So even if he started with a semi-honest, vague intention to write that book, he can no longer do it.

Interruptions

If I get up in the morning and know, for example, that I have a four o’clock appointment, I cannot write that day. It is as if my mind closes down and will not work. If I do try to work, I dawdle, look at the clock, and get dressed for the appointment earlier than necessary, realizing that trying to write is useless. The psycho-epistemological reason is that in order to write, you must concentrate and keep your subconscious open, so that it will formulate the ideas you need. It is difficult to get into that state, and if you know that at a certain time—regardless of your progress—you will be interrupted, that knowledge will stop you completely. Implicitly, your subconscious says: “What’s the use? All this effort for an hour or two. And if it goes well, that’s when I have to cut it off.” Therefore, I accept no daytime appointments unless it is absolutely unavoidable. (When I was writing Atlas Shrugged, I accepted neither day nor evening appointments, with rare exceptions, for roughly thirteen years.)

This, again, is like the blast furnace I mentioned, which must be heated for weeks before it is ready to forge steel. It is a disaster if the furnace goes out. A furnace not in use is still kept burning, because it is a long and expensive process to bring it back to the right temperature. This is a good metaphor for preparing the mind for writing, which takes such an enormous level of concentration that an interruption is like the furnace going cold. If you are interrupted, it takes much longer than the appointment to bring yourself back to work. Not only will you not work the same day, you will most likely lose the next day as well. This happens even to experienced writers who recognize their inner signs.

Do not attempt to write if you have urgent interruptions. If you can, set yourself certain days of the week during which you do nothing but write. Do all your other duties during the other part of the week. Subconsciously, what you need in order to write is that sense of an uninterrupted immediate future. It cannot extend forever, but you must know that at least for today—and preferably for the next few days—you will be free to devote yourself to writing alone.

Similarly, if you have a mixed profession (i.e., a job besides writing), it is better to divide your week into two parts than to attempt to do both jobs on the same day. Some people can manage it, but 1 have never been able to. When I worked at jobs other than writing, I could not write at night, but only on the weekends. Some people, however, are more elastic; a lot depends on your psycho-epistemology. But it is an absolute that you cannot work if you know that an interruption is imminent.

Deadlines

There is no general rule about deadlines. Whether they come from the outside or are self-imposed, they can be helpful or harmful. They are helpful if, for instance, you are writing a book, feel you will never finish, and have attended to none of the practical details—such as approaching a publisher. In such cases, the absence of a deadline can have a bad influence. You could spend the rest of your life adding chapter upon chapter. Writing is dependent on a complexity of psycho-epistemological issues, and the idea of an eternity before you is harmful. A certain pressure is necessary—the pressure of reality: if you are writing something, it is appropriate to finish it. So a deadline does serve a purpose.

However, if you must deliver a certain number of words on a given subject by a certain date, that too can be disastrous. You will either write carelessly, because you lack the time to think, or be completely paralyzed. The tendency is either to become a hack (writing only what comes to you easily) or not to write at all.

The important issue, however, is not outside deadlines, but self-imposed ones. The ideal condition for writing is to set aside time, work as you can, and not panic if a day passes without your producing something new. Nevertheless, you must set deadlines for yourself—not as absolutes, but to avoid concluding subconsciously that there is no time limit on the assignment. Making your project indefinite is demoralizing.

Do not make time a constant pressure. Do not judge your progress by each day; since the production of any written material is irregular, nobody but a hack can be sure how much he will produce in a given day. Otherwise, if you have a great, inspirational day and produce ten pages, you will tend to think: “At this rate, I will finish in a month.” And if the next day is unproductive and you write a single dubious sentence, you might think: “At this rate, it will take me two years.” Both are demoralizing illusions. If you have a bad day, it will add to your discouragement to project your own future at such a dismal pace. On the other hand, if you come to an unwarranted, overly optimistic conclusion, and feel you can write without difficulty forever, that is a temporary illusion. Your next bad day (often the following day, precisely because of this conclusion) you will be crushed, because you based your schedule on this fast, uninterrupted progression.

Do not make any time generalizations in that form. Writing is an unpredictable process; it does not proceed regularly at so many words per minute. You can judge your pace only in larger installments; your standard should be roughly the production of an average week. But there are always unpredictable factors. You may have personal problems, an illness, unavoidable interruptions—so do not set yourself such absolutes as: “I must finish in so many weeks or else I am no good.” The absolute you do have to comply with is: “I will write during all the time that I can (or all the time that I set aside for writing) to the best of my ability.” Only you will know when you did your best—even if you merely produced a paragraph—or when you dawdled all day. With experience, you acquire a special sense of this. Therefore, keep a general deadline in your mind, but without being too specific about the date. Do not put unnecessary pressure on yourself.

Duty

If you make something a duty, you will not be good at it. Creatively, acting on duty is a major barrier and destroyer.

If you write from a sense of duty—say, you do not want to write the article, but some publication needs it, or somebody wants you to do it, or you are doing it for “the cause”—then your motive is not the desire to say things about this subject, but some extraneous consideration. That is the duty premise, and it will cause you nothing but trouble. Usually, writing on a duty premise produces nothing but unnecessary squirms caused by a rebellious subconscious.

Apart from an outside duty, there is such a thing as self-made duty, which is, paradoxically, a passionate desire to write a given piece. It is so strong that you almost paralyze yourself. I experienced that while writing The Fountainhead, and I discovered the solution by accident.

Often, especially after I had gone through the squirms, I would get up in the morning and want desperately to write. But when I sat down, I felt blank. It was neither the squirms nor the “white tennis shoes.” I could not think of anything but writing, and yet I could not write. In such cases, I played solitaire, simply to do something not very purposeful while my mind got used to the idea of writing.

One day, in this state, I picked up the cards. But I did not want to play, I wanted to write. I thought to myself: “Why don’t you try it? This won’t be writing yet, you will merely project what seems to be pressing on your mind.” I left the cards on the table, and thought I would come back to them in a few minutes. I wrote for four hours, uninterrupted, and it was one of my best days of inspirational writing. That taught me something. By an overpassionate desire, I put myself in a state of self-made duty. It was not a duty to the cause, the book, the publisher, etc.; it was simply my own desire to write. But I made a duty out of it because I told myself that I have to write. Such intensity stopped me, and I realized that the cards, left there accidentally, helped me break the duty premise. They were a reminder that I could stop whenever I wanted—that I was writing only for myself. I grasped something very important, which is a solution to most writing problems (though it cannot solve deep squirms). It is what I call the pleasure principle.

When you feel overburdened by the problems I have discussed, one of the best solutions is to ask yourself what you want. You are not writing for the cause, for humanity, for posterity. You are writing because you want to write; and if you do not want to, you do not have to, neither today nor ever. Remind yourself that it is all for your own happiness, and if you truly dislike the activity, do not try it. Writing is too difficult to do with a half-intention.

Most people who try to write, however, really want to. Therefore, the best way out of technical difficulties—the best fuel psychologically—is to remind yourself, explicitly, that writing is for your own pleasure. Never mind your mistakes or who will say what about your work. Remind yourself what you sought in writing, and what great pleasure there is in having your say about life, reality, or whatever subject you choose.

In conclusion, I want to answer a question that may have occurred to you. If writing requires so many principles—so much philosophical knowledge—why are unphilosophical writers able to write (particularly in fiction)? For instance, Mickey Spillane has enormous imagination. His style is flawed, but he writes a novel in two weeks, inspirationally, and sends it to his publisher. He does not edit it, and he does not permit corrections.

Many people above him intellectually nevertheless have difficulties in writing. So how does he do it? The answer is: the same way a somnambulist is able to walk a tightrope, while you cannot. If, early on, you set your writing premises subconsciously and exempt the realm from any psychological or philosophical problems, you will be able to write. That is how writers even with inner conflicts can write, at times brilliantly. The danger, however, is that you are completely at the mercy of your subconscious, and cannot get out of the slightest psycho-epistemological difficulty. This is true of all inspirational writers. They cannot improve, and they soon write themselves out. If the material in their subconscious runs out, there is no way for them to replenish it, and thus they cannot develop. Such writers exempt the process of writing from conscious questions or premises. They rely entirely on the subconscious. The somnambulist on a tightrope moves with absolute certainty, focused only on his particular job. But if you awaken him, he will fall, because he cannot walk the rope consciously.

So if you have not learned how to write automatically, as Spillane does, and cannot put yourself in the state of a somnambulist’s single-tracked assurance, your only alternative is to learn to write by a long, conscious process. After all, you can learn tó walk a tightrope, though it must be done by conscious practice; and when you thus acquire the skill, it is much more reliable and pleasant than a somnambulist-like dependence on your subconscious. In the somnambulist’s state, your writing and inspiration are not fully in your control.

Do not envy the “inspirational” writers. Learn the skill of writing consciously.

7

Editing

There are three major differences between writing and editing. First, in writing you rely on your subconscious with minimum interference from your conscious mind. In editing, you do the opposite: the dominant process involves your conscious mind.

Second, writing, unlike editing, must be highly personal. You go by your emotions, as if you were writing only for yourself. While writing, do not criticize or edit yourself. In editing, however, you must be as objective and impersonal as possible. Try to forget what you have written and read it as if it were by someone else. This is not difficult to do. Anyone who has acted or played charades knows that one can pretend to be another person. So imagine that you have forgotten how the article was written, including all of the emotions, hesitations, and choices involved.

Here is where memorizing your writing impedes you. If you have read your piece too often, you are helpless to edit it. When I wrote We the Living, it took me a week or longer before I could sufficiently forget a particular day’s work and start editing it. I could not get a fresh look because I wrote too slowly and thus memorized everything. By the time I reached Atlas Shrugged, I could edit something the next day. That should be your goal.

You can make a few corrections the day you write, but I am speaking of editing as your main assignment. It is best to edit the next day. If you write steadily, you must reread what you have written in order to continue. And if you try to edit while you know every word, you might catch a few errors, but you will also memorize it more firmly; by the time you finish the sequence or the article, you will not be able to judge anything. If you cannot tell what is good or bad about an article, you have over-stared. So if you cannot be objective the next day, do not start editing. Edit only when you know you are ready.

Third, while writing, you must not question anything or doubt yourself. While editing, however, you are free to question everything, including whether to reconstruct the article totally or even whether to continue with it at all.

Do not, however, start doubting for doubting’s sake. This is a common error; it is part of the mistake of thinking you must write the “perfect” article. If, as you edit your article, it seems good, but you think: “I don’t see any error, but what if I could do better?”—that can paralyze your judgment. The epistemological principle is that the zero does not exist. Just as in science you need some evidence to warrant a hypothesis, so in judging what you have written you should not ask: “I do not know how it could be improved, but what if it could be?” Question everything, but do not raise unwarranted doubts.

In editing, there are two principles you must remember: ( 1 ) no judgment can be made out of context; and (2) you cannot do everything at once. Therefore, the subconscious also plays a part in editing, though you have to know how to use it. I recommend editing in layers, i.e., in several stages, by going over your first draft many times, from different aspects.

Let me explain the overall process of editing (i.e., the procedure for a completed article) and then how to apply it to the kind of editing you may want to do on a given part of an article.

First, reading your article, focus mainly on structure. Ask yourself: Is the logical progression good or confused? Are there repetitions? Is there imbalance, i.e., are some aspects too detailed and others too brief or condensed? (Not all aspects need to be equally detailed; you determine this by your theme and purpose.)

These are the types of questions you should ask during your first layer of editing. The answers will determine whether you should rearrange the article’s structure or let it stand. No matter how carefully you prepare your outline, the actual execution may show that you did not select the best logical order and that some passages should be transposed; for example, certain points may be clearer or more dramatic if they come earlier. So in editing, focus on structure first. There is no use bothering about style or polish if you are going to have to reconstruct the article.

If, while you focus on structure, stylistic or grammatical corrections happen to occur to you spontaneously, then make them. For example, if in some passage you see immediately that there are too many adjectives, or a better adjective occurs to you, make the change. But if you notice that something is wrong stylistically, and the correction does not occur to you immediately, do not work on it during the first reading. Make a mark in the margin and continue focusing on structure.

Incidentally, do not let your outline show in your article. Do not let the reader in on the mechanics of what you are doing. Always let him in on the content, of course, but not on the scaffolding. The mistake here takes the following form. As you finish a sequence, you write, for instance, “So much for aspect A, now we will discuss aspect B.” That is the scaffolding, and you should remove it. These are directions written for yourself; they are what you put in an outline. Your outline indicates that you must cover Point 1, then Point 2, etc., but in the actual writing, if the structure of your article is logical, you need not announce that you have finished Point 1.

Once you are satisfied with the structure, read the article again. In the second reading you should focus on clarity of thought and content. That is, on the first reading, you assume the content is clear. As long as you know what you are writing about, you can judge the structure. But on the second reading, you examine the verbal part of your writing—sentence structure and content—very carefully. Watch for the clarity with which you express your thoughts and whether the words you use objectively reflect what you want to say. Ask yourself explicitly: “Do I really know what I want to say, and have I said it?” Frequently you will answer in the negative. Later I will discuss the errors possible in this category.

Only on the third reading should you focus on style. Again, I will discuss the details later. Here I simply want to point out that you should not worry about saying something in a more interesting way earlier than the third reading. As you acquire experience, ideas for presenting things more colorfully will occur to you all the time—in your original draft and in the first two editings—because your subconscious will have the necessary standing order. But do not force this. Do not consciously focus on style until the final editing.

Do not take “three readings” too literally. There is no rule about how often you need to read your article. You may be able to combine some of the functions of the three readings into two. More likely, you will need many more than three. Do not take the number of readings you need as a reflection on your abilities. If you know a great deal, you might need ten readings fully to accomplish everything. There is only one general principle, which each of you must apply individually: you cannot do everything at once, because too much is involved. You must edit in layers, according to how much your mind can handle at one time. This in turn depends on your experience, and on your knowledge of and interest in the subject.

Here is how I myself discovered the process of editing in layers. I had always edited in that way, but I never understood the principle involved until I wrote for the Los Angeles Times. I had to write a weekly column²⁴ of no more than a thousand words, though I was told a length of 700 to 800 words was preferable. Of course, I first made an outline, then wrote the draft, and then edited it. As I went over it once, I discovered that cuts were always possible; but then I would come to the point where I felt nothing more could be cut. This seemed fine, because I was a bit under a thousand words. But to my amazement, the next time I read the piece I could cut some more, and the next time still more, until I got the word count down to around 750. I did this without straining after anything new, and without cutting content. What impressed me most was that I could not have made all these cuts in the first editing. That made me grasp the extent to which a mind cannot do everything at once.

When you first read your article, you see only the obvious cuts. But after you eliminate them and read it again, in that new context you can see that other changes are necessary. For example, some sentences are too long, or there are two adjectives where only one is needed, or there is an unnecessary subordinate clause that was needed in the first version, but not in the edited one.

Incidentally, because the Los Angeles Times left it up to me, I took pleasure in being as economical as possible without spoiling the content. It became a challenge and a good exercise.

I grasped the principle—that you cannot do everything at once—on merely one aspect of writing: brevity. When you consider all the elements of writing—from your subject and theme, to eloquence of expression—you see that you cannot possibly hope to do everything the first time you edit. If you try, you are asking the impossible of your mind.

Learn the rate of work—the tempo—appropriate to you, and then adjust it according to each job; the principle is that you must concentrate purposefully, since you cannot do something in part focus, but you must not strain. What stops you is demanding the unnatural of your mind. When you feel an inner tension, that may be a sign that you are trying to do too much and need to put the work aside for a while. Later, go back to it with a fresh mind. A mind can do only so much at any one time; be careful not to overwork it.

How do you know when something in your writing is wrong? In my article “Art and Sense of Life,”²⁵ I point out that your subconscious integrates data much faster than you can do so by a conscious process. It integrates all the elements of your article as you read it. Therefore, as you edit, if you leave your subconscious free, you will feel uneasy over an error before you consciously discover the error. You feel something is wrong, but cannot immediately say what it is. Part of the experience you need in editing is to discover the form in which your subconscious tells you that something is wrong. Discover those inner signs, which you alone can recognize. Sometimes merely identifying that there is something wrong enables you to discover the exact nature of the problem. At other times, the discovery can take a long time. It depends on the complexity of the error.

Refusing to engage in doubt for doubting’s sake will help you preserve your natural, subconscious integrations. Self-doubt stifles the authentic subconscious warning that something is wrong. Since you cannot always discover what is wrong immediately, if you introduce too many doubts—e.g.. the fear that there is some error because “it’s poor little me who’s writing, and I don’t know how”—you will constantly feel that something is wrong and will not be able to judge your article properly.

If you approach editing objectively, you have nothing to fear. If there are mistakes in your piece, you or your editor will find them. If you are stuck on a problem and have exhausted your ability to solve it, an objective check is always possible. An editor, or even an intelligent friend, can tell you what is wrong, because he comes to the problem with a fresh mind.

Sometimes when you work too long on a passage, you become unsure about it, so you edit and change it. Then two days later, you restore the original version. I call this over-improving, and it usually occurs because you did not rest enough to be objective about your article. This is a normal part of editing, so do not worry about it.

There are two kinds of changes that are always appropriate to make right away. First, if anything comes to your mind spontaneously—e.g., a better word or a better sentence structure—make the correction, no matter what layer of editing you are doing. Second, make any correction which can be done relatively briefly. For example, on a complex paragraph, you may spend about half an hour. You may think over what is unclear, or try different ways of saying something. This is no longer spontaneous; it requires purposeful thinking. But if you spend two hours on one paragraph, you are on the wrong track. Here, time is proof of something. If you find that you need to think over every adjective or to reformulate a sentence in ten different ways, and the more you try the more confused you become, then put the work aside until you can trust your subconscious to correct the problem.

During this type of self-torture, it may appear that you are being extremely conscientious, because you keep trying, no matter how painful it is. But it is actually self-induigence. You are being stubborn and acting, in effect, as if there were a battle between you and a sentence.

It occurs when you attempt to solve a problem out of context. You are stumped by a particular sentence—but maybe your subconscious is telling you that the whole paragraph is unnecessary. Or your mind simply wants to go on and not bother with this at present. In such cases, do not keep struggling with the sentence word by word, because it will delay you in two ways: first, you will not solve the problem, and second, you will exhaust your mind. You will become tired not only of the sentence, but of the whole article; and consequently you may find yourself unable to work on it productively. You will have exhausted your creative potential, and so will need time to rebuild your enthusiasm. Therefore, in this position, stop, trust your subconscious, and take a wider look at your article.

By taking a wider look I mean: leave the problem passage alone and begin another layer of editing. Read the article from another aspect, and by the time you come to the problem passage again, something might occur to you. If it does not, go on, edit everything else, and leave that passage to the end. If, however, you refuse to leave that passage until you have fully figured out how to redo it, you will legitimately begin to hate writing, because such a process is torture. The problem, however, is neither in the content of your writing nor in your talent, but in your use of the wrong method. Do not attempt anything by forcing your mind. Learn what it requires. Consciously observe what your mind needs in order to work hard, purposefully, and with great concentration—but without strain.

Do not edit word by word. Moreover, do not use a thesaurus. That is sometimes handy at the very end, for a final polish, but not until then. Use the best of what your subconscious can do in the easiest and most purposeful way possible.

My method—edit first for structure, then for clarity of thought and content, then for stylistic trimming—is only a general subdivision. Find whichever method is best for you. Although you must edit for structure first and style last, you may subdivide editing in many different ways, and require more than one reading for each subdivision.

The general process of editing can be applied to a book or article as a whole, as well as to their parts. For instance, in Atlas Shrugged I went over each sequence of a chapter by this three-step method, then the whole chapter, then each of the three major parts of the book, and finally, the whole book. If you do not strain while editing, your subconscious keeps the full context—what you have written and where you are going—constancy present in your mind, thereby enabling you to find many things to smooth out, clarify, or eliminate. Because I was not straining, it was an easy process, and progressively I had less and less to change. But the method I used was always the same, no matter what unit of writing I was editing.

No one can write an article in a day. So as you begin work each day, you should reread the work of the day before. Of course, the desire to edit will be irresistible, and this is appropriate; you want to bring order to your previous day’s work before you proceed. But here I strongly recommend that you focus only on structure and clarity (plus whatever occurs to you spontaneously). Check your previous day’s work only to see that its logical progression is appropriate and that your sentences and paragraphs are clear. If you do more than that, you open yourself up to a further handicap. You bring your previous day’s work to a high polish, you are pleased with it, you feel inspired at seeing how beautiful your work can be—but now you have to start on your raw material of the second day. Instead of being inspired, you feel discouraged.

I went through this process and know it is unavoidable. It is like going from a beautifully polished, civilized city back into the jungle—back to the first draft. But you do not want to go back, and you get angry at yourself. Your subconscious feels: “Well, if I wrote that beautifully, why can’t I do it the first time?” (If you experience that emotion, you are forgetting that it took you at least two days—the first draft and one morning of editing—to arrive at that smoothness; you cannot write that way the first time.) So do not over-polish the preceding day’s work. Do full polishing only after finishing a sequence. If you could leave your whole article in an unfinished stage before starting to polish, then editing would be easier. But I do not recommend this, because the desire to polish each sequence right after it is written is unavoidable.

Now let’s consider some other possible mistakes. There are two errors you need to watch out for, especially during the second layer of editing. The first is the failure to say what you thought you said; the second is ungrammatical writing.

The first is a complex issue, because it involves much more than writing, namely, objectivity. If you are at all subjective in your approach to life—in dealing with people or in expressing yourself—it will show up in your writing to an even greater extent. If you do not know what is required to make your ideas objectively clear, you will certainly have this problem when you write.

I cannot cure you of subjectivity. I can only indicate what it consists of and point out a few principles you can use in judging your work. Most important, try to read your article as if it were written by someone else. To the extent to which you have not formed objective premises about communication, you will find this difficult. Still, you must try your best.

The source of this problem is your need to know much more than the material you use in your article. When you confront that vast amount of information in your subconscious, the danger is that you will think you have made a certain point when you have merely approximated it; the rest of what you need to say is still in your mind. The penalty for subjectivism is the inability to distinguish between what is on paper and what is only in your mind.

As an editor of others, I often come to a sentence or paragraph and fail to understand it, because it can be read in different ways. When I ask the author what he means, he usually gives a brief and clear explanation—except that no part of that explanation is on paper. When I ask why he did not write precisely what he said, the answer is usually that he thought he had. When I point out that he has not, he sees that I am right, though he was incapable of discovering it himself. I cannot cure an error of this kind here. But to identify it is helpful, because you must explicitly ask yourself if what you have said is only an approximation; a lot depends on this.

Proceed as if you are writing a legal contract and as if every word will be held against you. When you write a contract, you must be careful about every adjective and comma. If something is unclear, disaster can follow. You should not even sign contracts for magazine subscriptions without reading the fine print. You must understand to what you are committing yourself. The same principle applies, in a different form, to writing. Look at the job of editing as if it were a review of a contract with reality. You must know that you have said exactly what you mean—no more and no less—and that it cannot be misunderstood.

Never sacrifice clarity. This is why the color of expression and the clarity of thought should be two separate jobs. If you are unsure of the clarity of some thought, never try to hide it by means of a jazzy twist or beautiful metaphor. It will not save your reader from confusion.

By the way, do not confuse clarity and precision. To be precise means to be clear in detail; it involves more than clarity. You can express a thought clearly, but it may not be fully precise. For example, if you say, “Man is good,” that is clear—only one would not know exactly what you mean, because it is too broad an abstraction. If you then specify and say, “I regard man as good when he is rational,” you have made it much more precise. It is an issue of the degree of abstraction.

Clarity applies to any level—to the broadest statement or to the minutest details. Whatever you say, it has to be clear. But precision is the issue that you have to consider when you are dealing with some abstraction and you have to decide whether, in your context, it requires more details (something closer to the concrete). Here again the subject and theme determine the level of abstraction. By the context of your writing, you have to decide when a statement, which may be clear, is nevertheless too broad (and will therefore be read as a floating abstraction).

There is, however, also a problem of over-precision. You may include a lot of unnecessary details, and thus dilute your clarity. This will cause the reader to lose the overall integration or the overall abstraction. Therefore, the issue you have to watch constantly—and have to automatize in your mind—is: when can you make an abstract statement and when do you need more details? Avoid both the error of floating abstractions, where the tie to concrete reality is lost, and the error of concrete-boundedness, where the abstraction is lost.

Here are two reasons why you might be unable to judge the clarity of your writing.

One is the attempt to overcondense. For example, you try to make two or three different points at once by means of imprecise generality. This is not the same as stating a wide abstraction, which subsumes many concretes, but still says one thing (which is what abstractions are for). The mistake I have in mind is taking two or more different points, or distinct aspects of a given point, and forcing them into one sentence. The result is the kind of sentence that drives an editor crazy. It seems to mean something important, but no matter how often he reads it he cannot tell exactly what it means. He has only an approximate sense of the author’s intention. When he asks the author, he finds, say, that there are three distinct thoughts that should have been expressed in three separate sentences. But if you go step by step as your particular thought requires, not only will you be clearer, you might discover that you do not need all of the points that you tried to squeeze into that one sentence.

Another example of the attempt to overcondense is what I call the Germanic method of writing—making one enormous sentence out of what should be three or four.

A second reason you might be unable to judge clarity involves what I have said about automatization. If a thought is thoroughly automatized in your mind, and you do not know how to explain it or how to break it up, you might put it down only approximately. You believe it is objectively there on paper when it is not.

My advice in both of these cases is to proceed more slowly. When you feel you are squeezing a great deal into a short sentence, take that as a sure sign that you need to do the opposite. Write more slowly, perhaps even in more detail than you need. You can always cut later. But first get it fully and clearly on paper.

The second error I said you need to watch for when you edit concerns grammar. The relationship between objectivity and grammar is really a subdivision of the point about judging what one has written.

I regret that one has to discuss this with educated adults, but most Americans do not know English grammar. It is all the more ridiculous coming from someone like me with a Russian accent. I do not mind the other errors in writing so much, but this one is the hardest for me to encounter, to work with, and to correct, because it represents a cultural phenomenon, and you are not responsible for it—the educational system is.

Americans are trained (through the look-say approach to reading and all allied, Dewey-based ideas of education) to be emotional approximators. The nonobjective, ungrammatical way in which people express themselves today is truly frightening. What has been systematically undercut is their capacity for objective communication. Americans tend to express themselves guided by feelings, not by thoughts. According to modem theory, there are no such things as thoughts; and even if there were, they could not guide us.

I am not a grammarian by profession. I do not know the grammatical rules of English by name, only by practice. But whenever I struggle with a sentence and finally get it straight, I bless whoever invented these rules and I know there is a reason behind them. If they were irrational, they would not survive. Sometimes grammarians do attempt irrational, arbitrary rules; but people do not abide by rules that complicate communication rather than clarify it.

One of the most important applications of the Objectivist attitude toward reason is grammar. The ability to think precisely, and thus to write precisely, cannot be achieved without observing grammatical rules.

Grammar has the same purpose as concepts. The rules of grammar are rules for using concepts precisely. Since sentences consist of concepts, the whole secret of grammar is clarity and the avoidance of equivocation. The grammar of all language tells us how to organize our concepts so as to make them communicate a specific, unequivocal meaning. If you compare the number of concepts we have with the vastly greater number of phenomena we deal with and have to describe by means of those concepts, you will grasp the importance of grammatical sentence structure.

If it were not for grammar, we could have words but could not speak sentences. We could merely say, for example, “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” That is the nature of primitive languages. Civilized languages, by contrast, have a grammar precisely because we deal with more than first-level, perceptually based concepts. If you have to deal with the abstract—with abstraction from abstractions²⁶—you must know in what order and by what rules to organize them in order to communicate a specific thought.

We were all bored by grammar in school. Memorizing rules is very dull. But by the time you reach college, you should realize how important those rules are. Therefore, if you know why we should fight for reason, and for the right view of concepts, then let us—on the same grounds—have a crusade for grammar.

Make it a rule to know sentence structure—to know which form communicates a thought and which is open to ten different readings—and you will understand the importance of grammar, not only for writing, but for cognition in general. You have to think grammatically. Do not accept ideas half in words and half with the feeling: “I kinda know what it means.” Formulate what you think, and why, in specific words, even when you are alone. This is why it is advisable, if the thought is too abstract, to make notes. When you make notes, you are obliged to put the thought into an objective form—not for your reader, but for yourself. Always reduce your convictions to a verbal formulation of your own. That is the first step toward grammatical clarity in your thinking, and toward making grammar and precision a habit.

The difficulty here is that most of you today are so used to a subjective shorthand that you lose the distinction between your own inner context and an objective statement. It is permissible to use a mental shorthand in thinking, if it is clear to you. But a stenographer would be of no value if she could not transcribe her shorthand into a document in English. Similarly, when it comes time to write, you must translate your shorthand into objective language.

If you have forgotten your grade school lessons, get a good primer on grammar—preferably an old one—and revive your knowledge.²⁷ You will be surprised how much more important it appears to you now than it did when you were a child. The reason is that today, in reading those dry rules, you know why they were formed and why they are rational.

As to what your attitude toward writing should not be, the best image is “Ike the Genius” in The Fountainhead—the modern play-wright who says he is a creative genius, not a typist.²⁸ Too many people today think: “I’m a creative genius, I’m above grammar.” But nobody who thinks or writes can be above grammar. It is like saying, “I’m a creative genius, I’m above concepts”—which is the attitude of modem artists. If you are “above” grammar, you are “above” concepts; and if you are “above” concepts, you are “above” thought. The fact is that then you are not above, but far below, thought. Therefore, make a religion of grammar.

Apart from a review of grammar by means of a good primer, I would suggest the following. When a sentence of yours seems dubious, ask yourself some simple questions, such as: What is the subject and what is the predicate? Do the kind of grammatical analysis you did in school. You will be surprised at what you discover. For example, you may find that you switched grammatical subjects in mid-sentence. Also ask yourself whether your sentence has more than one meaning. Here you need the full context of your work, which is why I recommend you do this during the second stage of editing. Try to keep in mind the full implications of any generalized statement you make as you read it. Be sure not to state in the form of a general principle something you mean much more narrowly—an error that many beginners make, particularly when they deal with complex subjects.

Here are some examples of the two errors I have discussed, the failure to say what you think you said and ungrammatical writing.

The first two examples come from articles I edited for The Objectivist. One contributor wrote that “the government-sponsored critics want the public to accept modern art, not to understand it, because it cannot be understood in rational terms.” But this implies that one, can understand modern art irrationally. This is an example of an unintended implication. Another contributor wrote: ”Vast sums were spent, motivated by the desire for prestige.” This is what a rushed job can do. Although the author’s intention is clear, the sentence reads as if sums of money were motivated by the desire for prestige. “Sums” is the subject, but sums cannot be motivated.

Another, more philosophical type of error is one I caught in the first editing of my article “What is Romanticism?”²⁹ I originally wrote that the modern literati’s resentment toward plot was “too violent for a mere issue of literary canons.... This type of reaction pertains to metaphysical issues, i.e., to issues that threaten the foundations of a person’s entire view of life.” The problem is that I am talking about today’s literati. But if I left the line this way, I would be making a general statement that was wider than I could possibly intend—namely, that if someone ever feels that the foundations of his metaphysics are threatened, he will necessarily feel a virulent resentment. So what I did was add, in parentheses, “if that view is irrational,” which was all I meant, and all that was necessary.

As another example, consider the error I committed in the original version of Night of January 16th.³⁰ I wanted to make a certain line extra strong, so I had Nancy Lee Faulkner leap up and yell, “It’s a fictitious lie!” Many people read this, but nobody noticed the error until we were in rehearsal in a Hollywood production, and a friend of one of the actors pointed it out to me. I was shocked and grateful—the latter because I never made that mistake again. Originally, I made the mistake because I wanted to indicate that it was a very big lie—but what is a non-fictitious lie? So know what you have actually said, and discover whether it is what you meant to say.

Along the same lines, watch your punctuation. I am afraid that every writer is somewhat at fault here (except for Leonard Peikoff, who is more severe than I am). If you feel you are above grammar, then you will certainly feel you are above punctuation. But punctuation is extremely important. Although there is a great deal of latitude in English, it is a language in which punctuation is particularly crucial. Incidentally, the other two languages I know—Russian and French—are not quite so prone to equivocation or double meaning. English is very condensed and exact (which is why I love it), but these very qualities make possible sentences that can be read in two different ways, according to whether you insert or omit a comma.

There are certain rules of punctuation that are optional, but the overall rule is to aim at clarity. Do not leave punctuation up to the editor or copyreader. Make a point of focusing on it and being firm on where you want a certain mark. For the purpose of clarity, it is advisable to know the purpose of your punctuation—to know what you want to separate from what.

Here is a ridiculous example of bad punctuation, which I came across years ago in The New Yorker, when that magazine collected (in the “Beautiful Clause Department”) quotations from actual letters, articles, and books. This one illustrates the importance of the comma. The sentence, without commas, reads: “Many is the time I’ve driven down this lane with my beloved wife who has since gone to heaven in a buggy.” Now you know what the author meant, but commas would have saved him: “Many is the time I’ve driven down this lane with my beloved wife, who has since gone to heaven, in a buggy.” (Obviously, it is simpler to say “I have driven down this lane many times in a buggy with my beloved wife, who has since gone to heaven.” But assuming the author wanted it his way, only commas could make the thought intelligible.)

I once heard of a politician who committed political suicide when he put up the following campaign billboard: “My opponent has had eight years at the public trough. Now give me a chance.” What he meant was “give me a chance to clean it out” or “give me a chance in office.” When such an error is committed in politics, the intent is usually obvious. The very ludicrousness of the statement saves it from confusion. But when it happens in a philosophical passage, it may not be so obvious. The same kind of double meaning, which is not immediately apparent, can be disastrous in articles that communicate ideas. So watch your grammar and your punctuation.

If you want to express your ideas, particularly ideas based on Objectivism, learn clarity—and that means concepts, grammar, punctuation. I would rather have a simple, primer clarity than the best metaphors in the world. Make clarity a fetish, an absolute, a dogma, a god.

If you do that, everything else will be child’s play.

8

Style

Style is a distinctive, characteristic mode of execution. This definition applies to nonfiction writing as well as to all other creative activities, and it encompasses everything pertaining strictly to the form in which ideas are presented.

Style cannot be done to order. This is an absolute. If, when beginning a sentence, you ask whether it is colorful, you will not finish it. Or you will produce one artificial sentence after two hours of work. Style is the result of subconscious integration. You can know in principle how to bring about stylistic trimmings, but you cannot make them to order. Style, therefore, should not be pursued consciously; so many elements are involved that no mind could attend to and integrate all of them. It must be left to your subconscious.

Style in this respect is somewhat similar to emotions. You cannot order yourself to feel (or not feel) an emotion. You cannot control your emotions directly. You can, however, control them indirectly by identifying their root. Emotions are not primaries; they have subconscious intellectual causes. The same is true of style, which comes from a value-integration and must occur spontaneously.

But your subconscious must be free enough to generate style. When writing, if you try to attend simultaneously to your outline, to the content of what you are saying, and to saying it elegantly, your subconscious will be unable to handle it all at once. When what you want to say is clear, however, then spontaneously you will find a way of saying it with a twist. So do not force yourself.

Colorful writing is important. It makes your thought clearer and more dramatic, and therefore has both an intellectual and emotional appeal to the reader. But there is nothing worse than forced colorful writing, e.g., stretched metaphors that do not quite fit the content. The result of forced color is that the reader will mistrust your content, even if you are otherwise logical and honest. Every reader can sense this. He may not be able to tell you why, but he will know something is phony.

The reason why a mannered, artificial style leads to phoniness is implicit in the definition of style. Style is a distinctive, characteristic mode of execution. Characteristic of whom? Obviously, of the writer, or else it is not an individual style. And distinct from what? Obviously, from that of others. But you cannot, by conscious calculation, write in an individual way that is different from that of everybody else.

A fact has been observed in literary circles which nobody can explain (but then these people explain so little): namely, that occasionally a writer appears who has no training, yet writes brilliantly. In the twenties there was a truck driver, with a commensurate type of education, who wrote quite well. I was not fond of what he wrote, but he was successful. What was good about his writing was that it was completely natural. He wrote the way thoughts came to him. That created an inner conviction in his manner of writing. It sounded authentic and original, because he obviously knew no literary rules. He often departed from convention, but these departures made sense.

On the other hand, a great many failed would-be writers are college-educated (and usually come from English departments). The reason they fail is obvious. Those who went to school in the past few decades were intimidated and stymied. They were given either too many wrong rules, or no rules at all—only mystical implications, such as “either you have it or you don’t.” They spent their time analyzing metaphors and senseless nonessentials. Instead of being helpful, these schools paralyze or discourage their students. But a truck driver may be free, if he has independently accepted certain premises, to express himself authentically and colorfully in his own way. This is one way in which education, particularly in the arts, can destroy rather than help potential talent.

You cannot develop a style consciously. But you can give your subconscious the standing order that you like stylistic color and want it to occur when possible. Be conscious of that desire, because you will not develop your own style if you never think about the subject. Whenever you read someone else’s work, if you see something you like, identify it consciously. Say, “This is an interesting way of saying something; I like this.” Then forget it. Do not memorize it, and certainly do not stock your subconscious with future, unintended acts of plagiarism. You would simply be stealing someone else’s concretes. But each time you identify such a concrete, it is a renewed order to your subconscious that you like colorful writing. If possible, identify also the principle the writer used—and then forget it. Similarly, when you read a passage you regard as bad, identify that, and why you regard it as bad. By making such literary value judgments, you develop the subconscious premises from which your own style will come.

You will find that, unexpectedly, your mind will, for example, throw you the right metaphor. This is why many writers think style is an inspiration, when actually your subconscious is merely delivering after you have given it sufficient material and the permission to do so. Style comes from lightning-like integrations which your subconscious can make when it is free to do so. That is why you must write your first draft as spontaneously as possible, neither aiming at jazzy touches nor censuring yourself for their absence. When you forget about stylistic touches, they will come—sometimes in the first draft, and especially in editing. Instead of saying, “The cat is on the mat” (which is ideal for what it says), you might write, “A ray of moonlight fell from the silver fur of a cat, who sat on . . .” etc.—and you can do much better.

If you practice this kind of premise-setting, you will be surprised how observations that you forgot come out automatically. This is how you train your subconscious to throw you the right words in the - right combinations when you need them, i.e., to suggest a form of expression which corresponds to your values.

As encouragement, let me tell you about my first published work, a pamphlet about the movie actress Pola a Negri.³¹ I was twenty and living in Soviet Russia.

At that time (in the twenties) American movies were beginning to appear in Russia, and they were very popular. Although there were no Russian fan magazines, some people could get American ones from friends and relatives abroad, and they were a treasure to us. A state publishing house for the cinema was publishing a series of monographs on foreign movie stars, and I asked if the house wanted to publish one on Pola Negri. She was a big star, and popular in Russia. I chose her because she was my favorite. They were delighted and commissioned me immediately.

After I submitted my first version of the pamphlet, the editor said I had good material, but that I wrote in a flat, dry manner that read like a synopsis. He asked if I could make it more colorful, but I did not fully understand what he meant. So he gave me a copy of the Max Linder pamphlet in the series—Max Linder was one of the first comedians on the screen, and was famous in Europe—and told me to observe how the author handled the material.

I read the pamphlet and was impressed. The author had done a beautiful job, precisely from the aspect of color. He never said anything in a dry, synopsis style, but neither was every sentence fancy. What he did was dramatize everything. Rather than write, “Max Linder was born in such and such year in Paris,” he would say, “On such and such a spring day, a child was born to Mr. and Mrs. Linder.” (I do not remember the details.) “And by the year so and so, a blackhaired little boy was marching happily to school in such and such district of Paris.” It was much better than this, but that was the method. All I remember today is one sentence—an impressive description characterizing the overall screen image of Linder: “This elegant figure shivering on the screens of the whole world.” Old movies did shiver, and this comedian was an elegant top-hat-and-cane type. From this one image I realized what colorful writing was. The author could have said, “He is an elegant screen comedian.” Instead, he integrated the whole thought into an immediate visual image: an elegant figure shivering on the screens of the whole world. That taught me an important lesson.

The important part of the story is that although I grasped the principle, I could not write that way immediately. I did jazz up my Pola Negri pamphlet a bit: I avoided saying everything in the manner of a direct synopsis. Instead, I came at it a bit indirectly and, when possible, even elaborated from my own imagination. The editor was satisfied, and it was published. But it was not nearly as good as the Max Linder pamphlet.

Until I began writing We the Living (in the early thirties), the Max Linder pamphlet remained in my mind as the goal. I thought that this is what an accomplished writer should do, but I also knew that I could not yet do it. But by the time I began writing We the Living, I suddenly thought, “Why, I am doing it!” Not consistently, but once in a while. By the time I got to Atlas Shrugged, I could almost do it to order.

Developing style involves conditioning your subconscious (which takes years) and, above all, never forcing yourself. I had to wait until I had enough observations and colorful ideas in my subconscious so that the standing orders I gave it could take effect. Only experience will do this, in conjunction with that relaxed permission to your own subconscious to integrate things when and as it can. So do not start aiming at color immediately.

The first thing to remember about style is to forget it. Let it come naturally. You acquire style by practicing. First learn to express your ideas clearly on paper; only then will you notice one day that you are writing in your own style. But do not look at the calendar waiting for that day. When you write, focus only on your subject and the clarity with which you present it.

There are principles that may help you with style, but this long preface was necessary, because I want to stress that you must not memorize everything I am going to say, nor think about it while you are writing.

In every aspect of style, the absolute standard is your subject and theme. They must determine not only the content and the details, but also the particular words and sentences you select to express them. When you write, do not think about how beautiful your words are, or how people will react, or above all, what it supposedly proves about you. Think exclusively of what you want to say. To the extent to which you can focus on your subject, you will write as best you can at your present stage of development.

It is often said that an artist is selfless—that when he paints or writes, he forgets himself and reality, and sees only his work. The same is said of nonfiction writers. Of course, this is a misapplication of terms, because it means that you have no selfish interest in focusing on your subject—that only being unselfish makes you forget all other considerations but your work. Actually, this exclusive focus on your work is the most selfish thing you can do (in the Objectivist sense of “selfish”³²), and you ought to train yourself to do it. If you want to write a good article, it is in your interest to do so. But it is a complicated task, which requires the use of your subconscious; you must forget all your other concerns and remember only what you are writing about.

It would not occur to a scientist to focus partly on his experiment and partly on his self-esteem or future fame. (If it does, he is a neurotic and will probably not be heard from.) He has to focus exclusively on his experiment; nothing else is relevant. The same applies to writing, only it is harder because it is a purely mental job—there is nothing in reality yet except a blank sheet of paper. This is why so many people fail at it. It is harder to focus on the reality of what you have to produce when there is nothing before you but a blank page. You have to originate the subject and theme along with everything that goes into carrying out your intention. In practice, therefore, you must be more reality-oriented than a scientist, who has the help of the physical problem and the physical objects he is working with. Aim at being at least as reality-oriented as a scientist—which in this context means being exclusively focused on your subject.

Focusing on reality means pursuing clarity. The first concern of style is clarity. Remember that approximations will not do. They can occur in your first draft, but they are the first thing to look for in editing. Holding clarity as an absolute is the surest road first to a competent style, and perhaps eventually to a brilliant style of your own.

As I said in “Basic Principles of Literature,”³³ the two main aspects of style—which apply to nonfiction too—are choice of content and choice of words. The first refers to the abstractions or details you choose in order to present a given subject; the second, to the words and sentence structure you choose.

In nonfiction, perhaps the main issue in regard to choice of content is the choice between abstract discourse and concretization. Nonfiction is primarily abstract discourse. It is a presentation of certain views, which means certain principles, which means abstractions. When you write nonfiction, you are communicating knowledge. You are dealing with abstract issues, which you present by means of abstractions, i.e., words and sentences. However, you must remember that only concretes exist—that abstractions are merely a method of classifying concretes. Therefore, if you are writing an abstract essay, the question will necessarily arise: how and when do you tie what you are saying to reality?

To present an abstract principle, you need illustrations. Giving examples (particularly if you are presenting a new theory) ties abstractions to reality—it shows what kinds of concretes illustrate the abstraction you are writing about. This is one form of concretization. But what you do in regard to style is more complex. The color, the metaphors, the unusual verbal gimmicks all involve concretization.

In a nonfiction article, you bring in concretizations or colorful details as a means of integrating your subject in the reader’s mind. Specifically, this helps integrate not only the abstraction you are presenting and the concretes to which it applies in reality, but also mind and emotions. Colorful touches achieve the integration to values. This is what I call “good slanted writing.” By “slanted,” I mean writing which is selective—i.e., ruled by your values—not slanted in the sense of distorting reality. In this way you influence not only the mind of the reader, but also his emotions. You appeal to his values.

This sort of concretization is a kind of bridge between nonfiction and fiction writing. The same principle applies to fiction, only in a much more complex way. In choosing value-oriented concretes, you are acting on the fiction-writing premise. Strictly speaking, nonfiction writing is concerned only with clarity of presentation. When you introduce colorful touches, you do so on the same principle by which a fiction writer writes his whole story. You are, in a limited way, borrowing a certain technique from fiction writing.

To illustrate how this works, I am going to analyze my “Brief Comments” on Apollo 8. I want to show you, from the aspect of style, what considerations made me concretize certain points, and what would happen had I written it differently.

The article starts with a paragraph and a half that is strictly informative, nonfiction writing:

The flight of Apollo 8 was a magnificent technological achievement. Leaving aside the question of whether the government should have a space program (which, apart from military defense purposes, it should not), it was an achievement of human intelligence, of man’s rational faculty. The knowledge and the precision required to plan, calculate, and execute that flight was such a feat that no one will claim it was done by instinct, feeling, or “arbitrary social convention.”

This is pure abstract discussion.

Here is the last sentence of the second paragraph: “That flight was a declaration spectacularly displayed to the whole world: ‘This is what man the rational being can do.’ ” This sentence is a concretization of a definite point. Stylistically, it is drama. I could have said, “The flight was a rational achievement,” but I had already said that. Therefore, for the purpose of informing the reader, my coming back to the issue of man the rational being was not necessary. Then why did I do it? Here is where theme and subject determine style. What did I want to say about the Apollo 8 flight? I was not discussing the flight as such, nor the epistemological issue of reason versus emotion. I was focusing on a certain image of man and man’s achievement.

Why would people feel enthusiastic if Apollo 8 succeeded ? Because of a properly human, “collective” self-esteem—the pride and pleasure of knowing about something that man at his best has done. Therefore the meaning of the whole flight, to the general public, is a certain view of man and the flight’s significance for man. Man is the ultimate purpose—the consumer of any achievement of science. That is what I wanted to communicate. But if I said this in the terms I am using now, I would not communicate much. You would understand me intellectually, but I would not make the point real, because it would still be an abstraction. If I said, “Man ought to be rational, and we are happy when he is,” those are abstract thoughts. But when I switch the reader’s focus to an image of man, I concretize something. I introduce something which is still an abstraction (namely, an image of man), but I connect it to reality, as the subject of the piece requires.

Now how could I do this briefly? There were several considerations. Observe the integration. (This is the fiction method.) I wanted the reader to feel that this achievement was great and triumphant. So I say, “That flight was a declaration spectacularly displayed to the whole world.” I wanted to mention, but only as an aside, that the whole world was watching. Most of all, I wanted to convey the ringing quality, by connotation, of a manifesto: “This is what man, the rational being can do!” I switched from an abstraction to something emotional and concrete.

Here is what follows: “Mankind was in desperate need of that reminder. Consider the sewer of degradation which is today’s culture, and the images of man that it projects.” Now I could have presented the rest of this paragraph in informational, nonfiction terms: “In politics, the dominant trend is statism; in ethics, altruism; in epistemology, irrationalism; in esthetics, blind emotionalism.” This says a lot, and does so economically, but in an abstract, nonfiction style; 1 am merely naming intellectual trends. Observe that what I actually wrote is exactly the same thing, but concretized:

Consider ... the images of man that [our culture] projects: politically, man the rightless slave of the state [instead of simply saying “statism”]; morally, man the congenital incompetent, to whose needs all life is to be sacrificed [I concretize what altruism is]; epistemologically, man the mindless, an irrational creature run by unknowable urges [this is a concretization]; esthetically, man the howling hippie [this is a journalistic concrete].³⁴

This is a method of condensing, and thus reminding the reader of, the meaning of the abstractions covered by a single word (such as “statism,” “altruism,” “irrationalism”). Since the purpose of the article is to tell the reader what the issue of irrationality versus achievement means to a given image of man, I had to make real, in an emotionally arousing way, what sort of images of man are projected today.

In nonfiction terms, I could have concluded this paragraph with: “Therefore the world watched the flight eagerly. It wanted to see a rational achievement.” This is a good sentence, which says something important, but it is good enough for a first draft only. What I write in the article is: “If you consider it, you will see that the special intensity, the eagerness, the enthusiasm, with which the world watched the astronauts’ journey, came from mankind’s hunger for a reassertion of its trampled self-esteem, for a sight of man the hero.” This is concretized, even though abstract. (Mankind’s self-esteem, for instance, is a huge abstraction.) But it is enough to appeal to the emotions and values in the reader. “Mankind’s trampled self-esteem” is a strong metaphor, and the rational reader should feel a certain shudder of indignation at this point—not because I assert it arbitrarily, but because I here prepared the ground for it. I listed how man is predominantly seen today, which confirms the trampling of mankind’s self-esteem; I provided the concretes, so when I use such a strong expression I do not do so arbitrarily. And by the time I say “man the hero” (after “man the incompetent” and “man the hippie”), it has an inspiring quality. That is good nonfiction writing, which borrows the methods of fiction.

The next (one-line) paragraph reads: “It is an outrage and a tragedy that that sight was undercut.” That is an assertion, and merely another attention-arrester. I continue:

When, from the distance of the moon, from the height of the triumph of science, we expected to hear the astronauts’ message and heard, instead, a voice reciting the moldy nonsense which even a slum-corner evangelist would not have chosen as a text—reciting the Bible’s cosmology—I, for one, felt as if the capsule had disintegrated and we were left in the primordial darkness of empty space.

At first (“from the distance of the moon,” etc.) this is merely selective but factual nonfiction writing. I then write, “the moldy nonsense which even a slum-corner evangelist would not have chosen,” in order to concretize my point. I want to invoke, as economically as possible, the questionability of reading the Bible’s cosmology. I want the reader to associate it with the place where it belongs, which (in the twentieth century, at least) is below a street-corner evangelist. Next, instead of drawing some abstract conclusion, I describe my personal emotions. This approach is determined by my theme. This is not an article on the importance of reason versus faith; it is a comment on a given event. Therefore, the Objectivist context—namely, the importance of reason—is taken for granted. I do not prove it or propagandize for it, but take it as an absolute. So it would have been inappropriate at this point to talk about the impropriety of mixing faith and science.

My aim was to communicate the importance, and the disastrous effect, of Bible-reading in the context of the triumph of science. To do this, I did not have to explain that Bible-reading is irrational. I had to describe an emotional response, and the strongest I could think of was the one I experienced. But saying, “I, for one, felt sick” or “I felt indignant” would be arbitrary and would fall flat. So I indicate, in concrete terms, why I felt that way: because we were back in the darkness of primordial space and the capsule had disintegrated. This is metaphorical in the sense that the capsule was still there. But if we had been looking at Apollo 8 as a great achievement, and then this rational being started reading the Bible, then, from the point of view of the meaning of the event, the capsule had disappeared. The value of the intellectual triumph was negated by somebody reciting moldy stuff that nobody takes seriously.

That is what a line and a half accomplished.

The astronauts reading the Bible from space is the subject of my article. The theme is what I think of that act—why it was wrong. So the climax is the paragraph about the Bible-reading. From then on, I am just cashing in on what I have established.

The next paragraph is essentially nonfiction in style:

If you wonder what perpetuates the reign of irrationality on Earth, you have seen a demonstration: it is not done by the worst among men, but by the best—not by the masses of the ignorant, but by the leaders who default on the responsibility of thought—not by witch doctors, but by scientists.

For the most part, this is a straight nonfiction presentation. The point does not call for concretization or an appeal to emotions. The only concretization is “not by witch doctors, but by scientists.” This is appropriate in order to concretize the issue of irrationality versus reason. Everybody knows that a witch doctor is the symbol of savagery ; and what a scientist is has been demonstrated by the whole article up to that point. Therefore, the juxtaposition of the two concretes adds reality to the nonfiction style of the rest of the paragraph.

The next three paragraphs are a further cashing-in, and were not obligatory. I could have stopped the article with “not by witch doctors, but by scientists.” However, I wanted to make a wider point using the same concretes: “No witch doctor’s power to encourage mankind’s darkest superstitions is comparable to the power of an astronaut broadcasting from the moon.”

The next paragraph is a concretization appropriate to the event. It is a conclusion that is pure propaganda, in the good sense of the word. I remind people of what they should have asked themselves long ago about the difference between science and the humanities: “There are two questions that should be asked: Would the astronauts treat the slightest malfunction of the least significant instrument aboard the spacecraft as carelessly and thoughtlessly as they treated the most important issues of philosophy?” You could make the same point by saying that nobody makes airplanes or automobiles as carelessly as they espouse bad philosophy. But when you think of how much depends on the scientific precision of a space flight, then it is irresistible to use this example to point out to people that they do not treat matter as carelessly and thoughtlessly as they treat their own souls. Here is the second question: “And, if not, does not man’s spirit deserve the same disciplined, conscientious, rational attention that they gave to inanimate matter?”

The final paragraph is pure abstraction: “The flight of Apollo 8 was a condensed dramatization of mankind’s tragedy: a demonstration of man’s epistemological double standard in the field of science and of the humanities.” Putting in such touches of philosophy is not something I recommend to beginners, because it is very difficult to do. Do not attempt it until you are more at home with philosophy on the one hand, and with the subject of your article on the other. It is optional in any case. Since I could do it in three lines, it was appropriate. I included it as a lead for the reader; so much nonsense has been written on the dichotomy between science and the humanities, and I had all the material necessary to indicate what is wrong with this false dichotomy. But it is strictly a reminder to my philosophical readers, for whom it is a valuable springboard to future thinking.

What I mean by dramatizing or concretizing should now be clear. There is no rule about when or how often to concretize; in general, do it when you need to tie a certain aspect of your abstract presentation to reality. Do it to appeal to the reader’s emotions (specifically, his sense of value) in an economical way, and to remind him of what specifically is entailed in your presentation.

You need to be careful in judging when this is appropriate. Generally, if you are writing a theoretical article, then stylistically you should include concretizing touches as little as possible. They may be advisable, occasionally, when they grow out of your material, but not as a rule. You do give examples, of course, which is an issue of content. But stylistically, you do not need metaphors or color, because they would detract from the clarity of your presentation.

If you think I am a colorful writer, read Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. There, I do not permit myself any color (except at the conclusion of each chapter, where I tie the material to its cultural influence or consequences). The book is a strict presentation of theory in almost exclusively literal terms: no metaphors, no jazz—only clarity. However, when you write middle-range articles—when you apply abstractions to concretes—you can permit yourself certain elements of color, if they grow out of your material and you do not force anything. Even then, you must not overdo it. In any nonfiction piece, abstract narrative should predominate. You would not write a theoretical article consisting of nothing but examples, and the same applies to these stylistic, concretizing touches. They should be few, and used only when you have a reason for them, not to display your virtuosity or show off your imagination.

Now let me add that these concretizations or dramatic touches are not the only elements of style. Straight narrative itself—the most abstract nonfiction writing—has an element of style, too. It too involves a characteristic, distinctive manner of expression. The driest presentation of even an outline or high school synopsis still contains elements of your particular form of expression, because how you communicate always comes from your individual psycho-epistemology. Since no two of these are exactly alike, everything you write has a certain element of individual style. In the case of a dry synopsis, the variation in the styles of different individuals is minimal; in the case of narrative passages, there are major differences.

To sum up: one of the chief factors distinguishing individual style is when, how, and to what extent a writer concretizes.

The other main subdivision of style is word-choice.

There cannot be a rule that only one choice of words will communicate a given thought. I said earlier that you should not aim at the “perfect” article, because it does not exist. Similarly, do not aim at some “perfect” words for a given thought, if only you could get them. They do not exist. The possibilities are limitless, and there are many options. Clarity and precision are the only absolutes. So be guided by the choice of words that expresses your thought as clearly and precisely as possible.

Concretization or emotional appeal enters the issue of word-choice in the form of the connotation of words.

Clarity depends exclusively on the denotation—the exact meaning—of words. But given a particular thought that you want to express, the specific words you use can make a great difference, because in any language there are subtle distinctions of meaning among certain words. Those distinctions determine the connotations of your words; by means of these connotations you achieve the same purpose that you gain by touches of concretization in the choice of content.

For example, if you describe a woman as slender, the connotation is entirely different than if you describe her as lanky. While there is a little more than connotation involved here, the words “slender” and “lanky” both describe people who are thin. But the former connotes someone graceful and beautiful; the latter, someone gawky and awkward. Almost every adjective has a series of semi-synonyms of this kind, and you need to be careful about which one you select.

I remember a short story in which the author, describing a hero, wrote: “He looked well scrubbed.” She wanted to convey that he was clean-cut, in the serious, intellectual sense. But when you say “well scrubbed,” the immediate connotation is non-intellectual; it suggests someone who spends a lot of time in the bathroom with soap and water. By evoking that image, she achieved an unintended effect. That is what you should watch out for. (Most people choose words almost “instinctively”; this choice is so automatized that, usually, a person simply knows when he has chosen the wrong word.)

Watch out for philosophical implications, too. For example, if someone writes, “He had an instinct for courage,” he may only want to convey, “He is brave.” But the actual, and improper, implication is that courage is an instinct.

You must also watch out for the cultural corruption of words. No word can be inherently controversial, but it can become so by protracted cultural usage. For example, today, if you say that somebody is idealistic, it has the connotation of impractical foolishness. Strictly speaking, the word does not mean that. But if you know the word is used that way, do not use it unless your context makes clear what you mean by it.

It is important to know when to continue using a word despite its being corrupted, and when to drop such a word. The real test is: what does the corruption of the word accomplish? For example, I fight for the word “selfishness,”³⁵ even though the word, as used colloquially, designates both criminals and Peter Keatings, on the one hand, and also productive industrialists and Howard Roarks, on the other.³⁶ Here, there is an attempt to obliterate a legitimate concept—selfishness—and thus we should not give up the word. (The same is true for “capitalism.”)

By contrast, take the word “liberal.” In the nineteenth century, this was a proper term which stood for one who defended rights and limited government—except that it never represented a fully consistent political philosophy. So historically, what started as nineteenth-century liberalism gradually became modern liberalism. (Conservatives used to claim they were the true liberals, but they have given up doing so.) Similarly, some people today use “libertarian” to designate the pro-free enterprise position, but there are some modem liberals who call themselves libertarian as well. This stealing of terms with undefined connotations is so prevalent today that I simply do not use any of these words. This is one reason I prefer “pro-capitalist” to “conservative.” When what is being disguised or destroyed is not exactly what you uphold, then drop the word and use another.

As a rule, the right connotations contribute to clarity. In other words, there is no necessary conflict between the exact denotation of a word, and its particular shading or emotional connotation. Sometimes, however, the two do conflict: a certain word appeals to you because it has the right emotional connotation, but it does not express what you want to say as clearly as another, less emotional, word. In such cases, sacrifice emotional connotation. I have thrown out beautiful passages I loved, because I found, in editing, that they clashed with clarity. If it is a clash between color and clarity, then the color goes. Of course, ultimately the writing then is much more colorful, because the color grows out of, and supports, the material.

I will speak briefly about metaphors. Metaphors, which are comparisons of one thing to another, should manipulate properly the consciousness of your reader. For instance, if you say, “The snow was white as sugar,” it gives you an impression of that snow. It makes it concrete—and thus much clearer and more real—than if you had said, “The snow was white.” Saying that “The sugar was white as snow” does the same thing. The principle is that a metaphor isolates the particular attribute of a given sensory image in order to make the reader fully aware of it. “The snow was white” and “The sugar was white” are merely abstractions. But if you say, “The snow was white as sugar,” you make the reader hold in his mind, for a split second, the two concrete images. He has an image of sugar and one of snow, and he sees what they have in common. It is like reconstructing the process of concept-formation in his mind—of observing what attributes two concretes have in common.

Whenever you read a passage which contains a metaphor you like, monitor what it actually does for you. You will see that, in an automatized way, the metaphor concretizes a given attribute of a sight or event or situation, thus making it real to you.

That is all there is to the issue of metaphors. I make this point because the greatest mystery is made of this subject in literary courses, particularly in English departments.

So much, in a general way, about the positive side of developing a style. On the negative side, there are several “don’ts,” i.e., practices, that I strongly suggest you avoid.

Don’t #1: Don’t say something in a complicated manner when it can be said simply. Sometimes this error is caused by a mistake in thinking, when a writer has not thought something through adequately and therefore cannot say what he wants in a simple manner. But I am speaking strictly about style here, where a writer does understand the content of his passage clearly, but nevertheless puts words together in a complicated way.

Some writers do this deliberately to conceal the fact that they have nothing to say. Nietzsche has a line [in Thus Spake Zarathustra] about poets muddying their waters to make them appear deep. Other writers do it so that people will not understand too clearly what they are saying. The archetype here is Immanuel Kant. Most of today’s newspaper and magazine reporting is a combination of the “muddied waters” approach and a gutter version of Kant. Its authors write so vaguely that they hide the fact that ( 1 ) they have nothing much to say, and (2) what they have to say is so evil that no one would accept it if they said it straight. That is predominantly the way liberals write; they use every euphemism and indirection possible in order not to say that they are advocating dictatorship.

I want to focus here on stylistic errors, however, not on the intention to hide or disguise something.

As an editor, I often correct sentences which, for example, use five words where two would do. That is a purely grammatical issue. In this respect, it is good practice to assume that you have been given an assignment of a certain number of words. You would be surprised what economy this teaches. In fact, you should write this way even if you have 700,000 words to use, as I did in Atlas Shrugged. That novel is very economically written given what it says. I was sharply aware of trying not to use a word or a thought that did not contribute something important. Therefore, whether it is a newspaper column or a long novel, the principle is the same: write economically. In editing, try to see how many sentences can be simplified. See if fewer words will convey the same meaning.

Consider this example of one very abused structure: “It is this issue that contributed to the destruction of the culture.” A simpler way of stating this is: “This issue contributed to the destruction of the culture.” There are contexts in which the more complex form is necessary, because it has a different emphasis—for example, as a conclusion to a certain development. But I often encounter that structure where it is unnecessary, and then it is very awkward.

Here is another example: “Because A, B, and C—D will result.” Do not start a long sentence with the word “because.” The reader does not know at the start that you are talking about D, and so you make him retain too many subsidiary or conditional clauses without his knowing why. Do not overload your reader’s mind. You are entitled to assume that he is conscientious—that he is not skimming quickly to the bottom of your paragraph, but is going at an even pace and is trying to grasp every word and sub-clause as you present it. But if you use a “because” in this way, your reader may have to return to the beginning of the sentence and reread it.

Every rule of this kind has exceptions. In fact, stylistic rules are made to be broken. If you observe them properly, you can sometimes achieve great effects by deliberately breaking them. For example, in one scene in We the Living, there is a sentence which runs for almost an entire page, in which I use a lot of subsidiary “because’s” separated by colons. It was a deliberate fiction device—a montage of dramatic concretes before I came to the conclusion which followed from these concretes: “—Leo Kovalensky was sentenced to die.”

Don’t #2: Don’t use a “seventy-five-cent word” where a two-syllable word will do. Memorizing the more obscure parts of the dictionary is not erudition; and erudition (or the desire to show it) is not part of style. The simpler the words, the better.

I do not have in mind a folksy, artificial way of talking down to the reader, which one finds in today’s political literature. When I say “use simple words,” I mean it in the best sense. The simplest words in a language are the most expressive. So question the meaning of anything you cannot convey in simple words. Of course, a word like “epistemology” is not simple (though it is so in the basic vocabulary of philosophy). You need not avoid words for which there are no synonyms. But to use an example I got from Leonard Peikoff: if you want to say, “He said stubbornly,” do not use, “He asseverated contumaciously.”

The archvillain here is William Buckley, who makes a clown of himself. His trademark is to use words he probably spends half his time looking up in the dictionary. He expects you not to know them, and therefore to feel guilty and inferior. But the real effect is that you lose interest.

Whenever you feel the need to use a word like “contumaciously,” do not. There are plenty of simple synonyms which are more expressive and direct. Whenever your reader fails to understand a word, you destroy the effect of the content on him. Yet the main purpose of style is to communicate content as clearly and powerfully as possible.

As to the origins of such words, some are obsolete, while others come from obscure, erudite sources a la Kant. They might have been used by writers who wanted to appear to be scholars rather than “common men.” They are predominantly archaic, academic remnants; no good writer today uses them. For instance, a good nonfiction writer (whose ideas are atrocious) is Erich Fromm. He writes in simple terms which are valid both for his colleagues and for educated laymen. He is the opposite of Buckley in that respect. This, incidentally, contributes to Fromm’s prominence.

Don’t #3: Don’t use pejorative adjectives, sarcasm, or inappropriate humor.

In a first draft, it is sometimes valuable to express your feelings fully. For example, in a first draft, I have even written “abysmal bastards,” knowing this would not go into the final version. I was indicating that I need to project strong indignation and to prove it.

If moral indignation is justified, then why are such words bad, stylistically? Because they are too easy. Unsupported expressions of emotion (e.g., insulting or pejorative adjectives) are arbitrary stylistically, and, philosophically, constitute emotionalism. They have the same stylistic effect as the kind of quarrel which consists of “Says you, says I”; they always weaken an article. Even if you give reasons for your strong language, understatement is usually more desirable.

When you understate something, the reader is aware of what you are saying; his own mind then supplies the rest, which is what you want. But when you overstate something, you deafen the reader. You do not give him time to come to his own conclusion. It is as if you were shouting at him. Observe that on stage—while there are situations in which nothing can substitute for a scream—in most of the famous dramatic scenes, it is the whispered, simple sentence that gives you chills. When you overstate something, you disarm yourself. A man does not shout when he is sure of his case. When a writer understates what he is saying, what comes across is an overwhelming assurance on his part.

At one point in my article “Requiem for Man,”³⁷ on the anticapitalist papal encyclical Populorum Progressio (“On the Development of Peoples”), I felt like referring to the Pope as “the abysmal bastard” or worse, because I felt almost unbearable indignation. Instead, I communicated what I thought by understatement: “Anyone who evades that image [i.e., of life under the system advocated by the encyclical] ... and declares that human effort is not a sufficient reason for a man to keep his own product—may claim any motive but love of humanity.” There are circumstances in which it is proper to use a blatantly pejorative adjective, but they are the exceptions.

The same point applies to sarcasm, which should be used sparingly. The general principle is to prepare the ground for what you want to treat sarcastically. Make sure it is clear why you are making a sarcastic remark. Without that context, sarcasm amounts stylistically to the argument from intimidation:³⁸ you “persuade” the reader through intimidation, saying, in effect, “I will not take you seriously if you say A, and I dismiss it sarcastically.” But in and of itself, it is of no consequence that you, the author, dismiss something. When you have prepared your ground, however, a touch of sarcasm can be stylistically brilliant.

There are some subjects which one can discuss only sarcastically, e.g., the hippies or modern art. There the subject gives you the necessary ground. It is a caricature in itself, and therefore you cannot evaluate it except in sarcastic terms (though you can discuss its psychological and philosophical roots seriously). For instance, in my article “The ‘Inexplicable Personal Alchemy,’ ” when I move from the Russian rebels to the American rebels, I am sarcastic from the outset. I write: “America, too, has a vanguard of young rebels, dissenters, and fighters for freedom. Marching down the aisle of a theater, they shout their protest to the world: ‘I cannot travel without a passport! ... I am not allowed to smoke marijuana! ... I am not allowed to take my clothes off!’ ” I say that the hippies are “puppets in search of a master” and “exhibitionists who have nothing to exhibit,” etc., which are sarcastic metaphors. Yet there was no other way to describe them.

What I say about sarcasm applies to any kind of humor. Humor must be justified by your content. If you have not let the reader in on what you are laughing at and why, then humor is inappropriate. It becomes a substitute for giving a reason—again, a form of the argument from intimidation; instead of refuting a position, you dismiss it with humor.

There are two broad categories of tone: serious and humorous. Which approach you take depends on your evaluation of your subject—on whether you want to treat it seriously or make fun of it. As a general principle, a theoretical article must be serious. You might include touches of humor, but only as exceptions. As a basic approach, it would be extremely inappropriate to write a theoretical article in a humorous tone, because you would be laughing at your own material. It is only the middle-range article that offers a wider choice here.

In essence, humor is the denial of the importance or metaphysical validity of something. Therefore, the type of humor you use depends on what you are laughing at. If you laugh at something evil, your humor will have a benevolent quality. If you laugh at the good, it will have a malicious quality.

When I say it is proper to laugh at evil, I do not mean all evil. It is improper, under all circumstances, to write humorously about tragic and painful events or issues—about death, cemeteries, torture chambers, concentration camps, executions, etc. This is called “sick humor,” and the designation is correct, because although it is possible to laugh at such things, one should not consider them funny. For example, take comedies about the Nazis. I have a strong aversion to war comedies. War per se is bad enough, but war and dictatorship combined are a fortiori not a subject for comedy. This applies to fiction and nonfiction writing.

Just as you should not treat tragic or painful evil humorously, neither should you treat an important, good subject humorously. If, for example, with the best intentions in the world, you wrote humorously about the heroic element in man, it would not be a good article—the issue is metaphysically important. Usually, if someone makes fun of heroes, it is not because he wants to glorify them, but because he is against heroism.

As an example of appropriate humor in a nonfiction article, take the passage on Hegel in the title essay of For the New Intellectual.³⁹ Describing Hegel’s philosophy, I write that “omniscience about the physical universe ... is to be derived, not from observations of the facts, but from the contemplation of [the] Idea’s triple somersaults inside his, Hegel’s, mind.” The reference to triple somersaults is meant to be light or humorous. I am not denying the seriousness of the subject (the history of philosophy), but I am indicating that I do not take Hegel seriously and that we need not worry about this particular monster.

As a general conclusion about humor, observe that appropriate humor requires a community of basic premises among those whom you expect to laugh. For instance, if we disapprove of Hegel, and I make a crack about him, it will be funny to you only because your basic estimate of him is the same as mine. But it would not be funny to a Hegelian, and you should keep this in mind. If you write an article intended to persuade religious people that religion is wrong, a humorous approach would be totally wrong—your readers do not share your premises, and your humor will fall flat. In writing about ideas you oppose, use humor only when you know it is based on what your audience considers funny.

Don’t #4: Don’t use bromides. Bromides are canned integrations. They were good the first time they were used, which is why they became bromides. When writing a first draft, if you need some color and a bromide occurs to you, but you want to continue writing, it is fine to keep it there as a temporary indication of a thought. But do not let it stay in your final version.

Bromides defeat themselves. In The Fountainhead, Austin Heller said that all the houses offered to him were so alike, so similar to what he had seen before, that he could not see them at all. Something too familiar becomes invisible. Similarly, bromides do not add color—they merely wipe out what you want to stress. If in editing you cannot find a colorful touch of your own, omit the color and use straight narrative. Do not leave in bromides. They give an impression of improper imitation.

There are, of course, exceptions. For example, if you are discussing someone like Hubert Humphrey and want to show that he is imitative or a windbag, then select from his speeches the most bromidic passages, provided they are not accidental. If a politician speaks well but occasionally uses a bromide, and you select those exceptions, that is dishonest; but if you are characterizing someone like Humphrey, you have a choice of riches, because everything he says is either obfuscation or a bromide.

Don’t #5: Do not use unnecessary synonyms. It was commonly held that a writer should never repeat a given word within a certain number of lines. On this view, if you used the same word twice in close proximity, you had to make a change. This is a grave error.

The simplest examples of this error are found in some old novels, where the author wants to indicate that the characters are talking:

“How do you do?” he said.

“Very well, thank you,” she answered.

“I’m glad to hear it,” he asserted.

“Oh, are you?” she uttered.

The result is an awkward collection of artificial synonyms. If you want to say “he said” and “she said,” just say it. Do not look for unnecessary synonyms.

The same error occurs in nonfiction. For instance, if the word “philosophy” comes up too often, you might be tempted to look for synonyms, e.g., “wisdom,” “ideology,” “body of thought,” “world view.” Although it is awkward to use the same word six times in two sentences, the solution is not to substitute a synonym, but to recast the sentence so as not to need to repeat the word. Often you can simply use a pronoun, e.g., “it” instead of “philosophy.” But if the repetition of the word is necessary, and reconstructing the sentence leads to unnecessary complications, then simply repeat the word. This will not jump out at the reader if the context requires it.

It is better to repeat a word, even if doing so is slightly obtrusive, than to substitute an unnatural synonym for the sake of form alone. When you use a synonym, not because you need a different shade of meaning, but strictly to avoid repetition, the result sounds phony. Moreover, when you change words not for content but for form, the reader gets the impression that you are changing the subject, and the result is confusing. This is particularly true in philosophy, where there are no exact synonyms. For example, “philosophy” does not have quite the same meaning as “world view” or “body of thought.” In fact, there are few literal synonyms for any word. A thesaurus usually provides words with not quite identical meanings. In a nonfiction work, particularly on a serious subject, any time you change a word you introduce a slightly different connotation, and the reader will be justified in thinking that you are talking about something else.

I want to turn now to some problem areas in the realm of style: emphasis, transitions, rhythm, and drama.

Emphasis

Sometimes a sentence is awkward, but you cannot figure out why. The principle here is the same as in the rest of writing: when in doubt, refer to your exact meaning. Just as in your article as a whole you refer to your theme as your standard, so in any particular sentence that seems awkward, refer to what precisely you want to say.

The variety of grammatical structures possible in English permits you to put the emphasis where you want it. The same words combined into a grammatical sentence will yield a different emphasis depending on how you arrange them. Therefore, if you have corrected any obvious problems and a sentence still seems awkward, your emphasis is probably misplaced. For instance, I once heard a beautiful line of poetry that went something like this: “Because you smiled at me, I was happy all day.” If it was: “I was happy all day because you smiled at me,” its emphasis, and thus its meaning, would be different. (Both arrangements are grammatically permissible.) In the line from the poem, the emphasis is on the fact that the speaker’s happiness is owed to the smile of his beloved. In the other version, the emphasis is on his happiness; the cause is incidental.

In an article once in Esquire, a number of people (myself included) were asked what the Apollo 11 astronauts should say when they land on the moon. One comedienne suggested: “Miami Beach, it isn’t.”⁴⁰ Now if you said, “It isn’t Miami Beach,” the meaning would be different. It is not simply the somewhat Yiddish word structure, but the misplaced emphasis. In the form the comedienne used, the thought is on Miami Beach—that is what she expects, and her first reaction is: “Well, it isn’t Miami Beach.” Therefore, she is not interested. But the other version—“It isn’t Miami Beach”—has no particular meaning, because it also isn’t New York and it isn’t Paris; so it does not communicate the same thought that was achieved by that odd construction.

For examples of this kind of manipulation of emphasis by means of word placement, read Time magazine. For instance, I remember Time describing some ambitious, energetic man with the words: “No slouch, he.” This is typical of the magazine. The practice is not fully permissible grammatically, though it is clear and achieves a certain emphasis. If you wrote, “He is no slouch,” it would not be as strong. Incidentally, although the style is amusing, Time ruins it by using it constantly. Once you become accustomed to a distortion, it is simply a distortion and it loses emphasis. So use this sort of trick sparingly.

Finally, note that whenever there are several grammatically permissible alternatives, the smoothest will be the one that carries your exact emphasis.

Transitions

There is a great deal of misunderstanding about transitions. Some believe you should always indicate a transition from paragraph to paragraph—but in fact you could not make a worse mistake. If it were true, you would also need a transition from sentence to sentence—but then what would be the transition from a sentence to a transition ? Transitions are not necessary if your sentences follow one another logically. Logic is the link between sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and volumes.

When discussing a certain aspect of your subject, if you proceed to the next paragraph and are still discussing that aspect, that is a logical transition and no special bridge is necessary. A transition is needed only when you switch to a different aspect of your subject. If its connection to the immediate discussion is not clear, you need a transition. But if in a certain discussion each sentence follows from the preceding one, and each paragraph follows from the preceding one, then you can rely on your reader’s own power of integration. You must assume your reader can hold a progression in mind. If your presentation is clear and logical, but your reader cannot keep in mind what you were discussing in paragraph #1, and why #2 and #3 follow, then he cannot read the article anyway, and no transition would help. Do not write on the premise that you must lead the reader by the hand every time you move to a new paragraph.

A paragraph serves the same function as a period. It is a pause, which unobtrusively makes the reader realize that he is coming to the end of something and that the author is starting on some new, though connected, development. The reader has to integrate this quickly and automatically.

As you edit your article, be the reader’s guide. If you introduce a certain idea and in the next five paragraphs discuss various aspects of it, then, when you begin the next sequence, you should perhaps remind your reader of your main idea. (This is not really a transition, but a reminder.) Judge whether a progression is too long for the reader to keep in mind. But aside from these reminders, provide transitions only when there is a specific change of direction or aspect for which the reader cannot immediately see the need.

In fiction writing, transitions must be hidden. But in nonfiction, the more openly and simply you indicate a (necessary) transition, the better, because hidden transitions here are confusing and artificial. For example, suppose you were talking about the politics of a mixed economy and now want to discuss economics. Simply say: “Now let us consider the economics of a mixed economy,” or: “Turning to economics.” Take the reader into your confidence. If your indication is brief and logical, he will know automatically that you are changing aspects, and he will integrate them.

If you fail to include a necessary transition, your reader will begin the new paragraph, pause, read the next sentence, and then return to the preceding paragraph to establish the transition himself. In effect, he thinks: “Oh, I see. He is now discussing economics instead of politics.” Never force your reader to do that.

The simplest and most open transition is best. But suppose you say: “Now that we have discussed the politics of a mixed economy, we will next turn to the economics of a mixed economy.” This kind of repetition is annoying, unnecessary, and confusing. The reader operates on the assumption that everything the author does is for a purpose. If you offer the reader unnecessary recapitulations, he will ask himself what he missed—why this purposeful writer finds it necessary to repeat something. The result is that you momentarily lose the reader.

It is sometimes necessary to number the subdivisions of an issue. For instance, if you are discussing the bad consequences of a mixed economy and want to make sure your reader remembers them all, then number each of the consequences. If you use this method occasionally, it will help to integrate your material. The numbers remind the reader that these points are all part of one development. And if it is a lengthy discussion, by the time the reader finishes with consequence #5, he can easily refer back to the beginning of the sequence and remind himself of the others. But do not abuse this method. If at several places you use a sentence followed by a series of numbers, it becomes too hard to follow.

When you use the numerical method, be sure to indicate clearly when you are beyond your numbered points. Often the content will do this, but sometimes you need a transitional sentence to indicate that you have finished with consequence #5 and are proceeding to the next development. There are many ways of doing it, but the simplest form of this transition is something like: “Such are the consequences of a mixed economy.”

Sometimes the sentence structure itself provides a transition from one development to another. Since this is a complex method, I want to illustrate it from my article “What is Romanticism?” Here are the first two paragraphs:

Romanticism is a category of art based on the recognition of the principle that man possesses the faculty of volition.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man and of existence. In forming a view of man’s nature, a fundamental question one must answer is whether man possesses the faculty of volition—because one’s conclusions and evaluations in regard to all the characteristics, requirements and actions of man depend on the answer.

First, I give a generalized definition of Romanticism. (Of course, I will have to validate that definition.) Moving to a wider abstraction, I next define art. I indicate how an artist presents his fundamental view of man and of existence, and that with respect to man, a fundamental question is whether or not he possesses volition.

This abstract information lays the foundation for what follows. But I must return to how this affects the nature of Romanticism. Here is my next sentence (the third paragraph): “Their opposite answers to this question constitute the respective basic premises of two broad categories of art: Romanticism, which recognizes the existence of man’s volition—and Naturalism, which denies it.” The sentence structure provides the transition, which is in the first part of this sentence.

Observe that I could have omitted this transition and begun the third paragraph with: “There are two broad categories of art,” etc. That would be clear, but there would still be a slight jump. So instead I make a verbal bridge, which I include in the sentence structure in place of a separate transition. Instead of declaring, “There are two categories,” I say, “Their opposite answers to this question”—I have not yet said who “they” are—“constitute the respective basic premises of two broad categories of art,” and then I name them. In this way I form a transition from the generalized abstract discussion, which merely indicated the foundation, to the specific subject of the article. I make the transition to the discussion of Romanticism by tying it verbally, within the same sentence, to the preceding development. That makes for smoother reading. It forms a connection in the reader’s mind, and it indicates why I provided the abstract foundation. It also indicates why I divide art into these two broad categories and what their essentials are. Before I go into any further discussion of the two categories, I indicate that they have opposite answers to a question which is fundamental to any art. Thus, I kill several birds with one sentence.

I call this a sentence-structure transition, in that I do not use a separate statement to indicate that I am going from the abstract to the concrete subject of this article.

It would be awkward, however, to start an article that way. If “Their opposite answers,” etc. were the first sentence, a series of unanswered questions would immediately arise: Why am I putting something in reverse? Why do I start without indicating what the fundamental question is? Why do I want to discuss two broad categories before I have named them?

Stylistically, a smooth flowing presentation depends especially on the inner logic of the progression of thought. If you follow this logic and do not pause too much between sentences, the result (after some editing) will be a smooth, logically connected presentation. A presentation which strikes you as awkward or jumpy, by contrast, is the result of a writer’s uncertainty. Either he is not following the inner logic himself, or he has not fully integrated the progression of thought even in his own mind. Thus he writes at random, or, more frequently, he tries to write by his conscious mind, sentence by deliberate sentence. (This is one bad consequence of attempting to write by a conscious method, without subconscious integration.)

Rhythm

Rhythm is such a tricky problem area that, in effect, I advise you to leave it alone.

In poetry, the rhythm of a sentence is formalized; when you use one type, you know what category it belongs to, so it is not a problem. But the rhythm of a prose sentence is a complex issue. Rhythm, after all, pertains primarily to the realm of music, not concepts. It has to do with the way certain sounds register in our brain. Rhythm is the progression and timing of sounds, and the intervals between them. Therefore, the trouble here is the same as with music: we do not yet have an objective vocabulary of music, and thus we cannot say objectively why a certain combination of sounds affects us in a certain way.⁴¹ At present, it is impossible to define precise principles by which to determine whether or not a given sentence is rhythmical.

Rhythm involves not only psychology, but neurology. It involves the way sensations reach our brain, along with the timing of, and the relationships among, these sensations. This is not a mystical, but a perceptual sense—a sense pertaining to the development of our organ of hearing.

So do not worry about this issue, and do not aim consciously at “good rhythm.” Let it come naturally. As you write, you will develop your own sense of rhythm. Whenever you begin to feel you need an extra word or syllable, you are developing a sense of rhythm, and you would do well to observe it. In this issue, as in music, ultimately it is each man for himself. For the time being, you must rely on your own sense of rhythm. Go by whatever your own ear senses as smooth or awkward. (There is, however, a lot of agreement about what constitutes a good or bad sentence rhythmically.)

There is a correlation between rhythm and emphasis. Whenever your sentence is wrong in emphasis, chances are it will also be awkward in rhythm. It will sound uneven or unfinished somehow. Similarly, there is a correlation between rhythm and precision. A sentence may also sound uneven if it includes unnecessary words—but this is not a guaranteed correlation.

To give you an example of good and bad rhythm, consider a line from my article “What is Romanticism?” I write: “Man cannot live without philosophy, and neither can he write.” I think this is properly rhythmical. But now suppose I had written: “Man cannot live without philosophy, and he cannot write much.” The problem is not simply content (though the content is slightly different in each case, which illustrates the connection between rhythm and precision); the sentence is bad rhythmically. It sounds chopped off—as if it had no business ending on that particular syllable.

When we hear sounds, our integrating mechanism requires a certain balance. Musical sequences are usually divided into equivalent phrase groups. The logic of the structure thus requires that the sequence be fulfilled; if it is not, one feels unsatisfied and somewhat agitated. There is a feeling of something incomplete or unbalanced. An unfinished musical phrase is awful, and the same issue is involved in the rhythm of sentences.

Be sure to avoid rhymes. “Poems” without rhymes are neither prose nor poetry—they are nothing. For the same reason, a rhyme in a prose sentence is out of place, and thus distracts your attention by taking your mind to another medium. Moreover, it sounds artificial. If a rhyme occurs in prose, it can create all kinds of confusion.

If you ever have to choose between rhythm and clarity, sacrifice rhythm. Short of that, always adjust bad rhythm, because it is important to a good style. Generally, this is not difficult. The extra word or syllable can usually be found.

When and if someone defines what constitutes rhythm (and this will take a neurologist, a psychologist, and an esthetician), we will have more exact principles to work with. But it is not necessary to be omniscient on this subject. It is appropriate to go by your own sense of rhythm. If you have not developed one, that is not necessarily a writing flaw. So do not worry much about rhythm.

Like everything else about style, rhythm must never be aimed at consciously. More than any other aspect of style, it must come about naturally, by means of subconscious integration.

Drama

In nonfiction, drama is a way of capturing or holding the reader’s interest. With rare exceptions, drama belongs not in theoretical, but in middle-range articles. It involves an indirect approach which must be brief and which consists of saying something unexpected or intriguing. It usually involves starting out of context, or uttering something a couple of paragraphs earlier than the logical progression requires.

To give an extreme example, suppose a writer begins an article: “You are a murderer whether you know it or not.” That is a dramatic opening, and it is certainly intriguing. It arrests your attention immediately. The author then proceeds to explain that the article is about the welfare state, and that if you ever voted for any welfare measures, you are responsible for an unknown amount of destruction—and maybe even for deaths. He concludes by saying that you are as bad as a murderer if you vote for liberals. The above is an exaggeration, but it illustrates the method by which one achieves drama.

Do not aim at drama consciously (particularly if you are a beginning writer). If you do, the result will be not dramatic but artificial. Let any drama grow out of your material. When you are at home with a straight, logical presentation, then touches of drama might occur to you spontaneously—in which case, they will often be just right and will add a colorful, attention-arresting element to your material. But do not try to force this. Remember, drama is not the essence of nonfiction writing, contrary to what some writing courses teach.

Finally, as in all issues of style, if there is ever a clash between drama and clarity, sacrifice drama.

I want next to compare two different styles. I will present passages from two journalistic articles that treat the same material, and will thereby make the different stylistic elements clear. Observe here the choice of content and the choice of words, and how different basic premises affect the presentations.

Both articles cover the launching of Apollo 11 in 1969, and each passage consists of (1) a description of the crowd in Titusville (the closest town to the launch site, about ten miles away) the night before the launch, and (2) a description of Apollo 11 at night from across the river.

From “Apollo 11” by Ayn Rand⁴²

On the shore of the Indian River, we saw cars, trucks, trailers filling every foot of space on both sides of the drive, in the vacant lots, on the lawns, on the river’s sloping embankment. There were tents perched at the edge of the water; there were men and children sleeping on the roofs of station wagons, in the twisted positions of exhaustion ; I saw a half-naked man asleep in a hammock strung between a car and a tree. These people had come from all over the country to watch the launching across the river, miles away. (We heard later that the same patient, cheerful human flood had spread through all the small communities around Cape Kennedy that night, and that it numbered one million persons.) I could not understand why these people would have such an intense desire to witness just a few brief moments; some hours later I understood it.

It was still dark as we drove along the river. The sky and the water were a solid spread of dark blue that seemed soft, cold, and empty. But, framed by the motionless black leaves of the trees on the embankment, two things marked off the identity of the sky and the earth: far above the sky, there was a single, large star; and on earth, far across the river, two enormous sheaves of white light stood shooting motionlessly into the empty darkness from two tiny upright shafts of crystal that looked liked glowing icicles; they were Apollo 11 and its service tower.

From “Apollo’s Great Leap for the Moon” by Loudon Wainwright⁴³

All along the shoulders of U.S. Highway #1 and packed solid to the river that ran near it were thousands of trailers, camping vans, tents, makeshift shelters of all kinds. People lolled in the grass, infants were sleeping in cradles on the hoods and tops of cars, fathers and sons were setting up telescopes, bands of the young in trunks and bikinis ran everywhere. Clearly visible through the night about 10 miles away was the Apollo 11, bathed in searchlights, a tiny stalk of light in the darkness, and this vast picnic crowd had gathered to see the booster belch out its tremendous power, and hurl likenesses of themselves at the Moon.

By morning there were many more—campsites, beaches, jetties, every place of viewing space was jammed with the watchers, and it was extraordinary indeed to drive past miles of faces staring toward 30 seconds of history.

The main point to observe, stylistically, is showing versus telling.⁴⁴ I am not a reporter by profession, but in my article I operated on a premise that reporters do not use today (if they did, they would be giants of journalism)—namely, to be a literal reporter. I show you the scene, I do not tell you about it. If you want your readers to feel as if they were there, then concretize the event selectively. Stay away from generalities. I tried to reconstruct the event exactly as I saw it, almost deliberately omitting any editorial interference. I gave my editorial viewpoint by means of concretes; whether the reader accepts it or not, he feels he has seen the event. The typical reporter, however, merely tells you about an event.

Observe how this is done. For instance, I write: “On the shore of the Indian River, we saw cars, trucks, trailers filling every foot of space on both sides of the drive, in the vacant lots, on the lawns, on the river’s sloping embankment.” Wainwright writes: “All along the shoulders of U.S. Highway #1 and packed solid to the river that ran near it were thousands of trailers, camping vans, tents, makeshift shelters of all kinds.” His big mistake stylistically is “of all kinds.” It was unnecessary. He lists all the different types of vehicles and where they were placed, as do 1. But I tell you they were in every available foot of space and provide some examples of the kinds of space. I give you enough concretes so that you get the impression that it is a large crowd. I did not make any generalized estimates. It is sufficient to say there were cars, trucks, trailers. The reader can project that those are not the only kinds of vehicles. But when Wainright adds “makeshift shelters of all kinds,” that is improper abstraction. It destroys the reality of the concretes, because you cannot, in reality, see such a thing as “of all kinds.” He destroys the firsthand perception of the scene, giving the reader instead an editorial summation.

Similarly, he writes that “bands of the young in trunks and bikinis ran everywhere.” “Ran everywhere” involves the same mistake. He cannot literally mean everywhere, so it is a sloppy way of saying, “I saw many of them.” Such an exaggerated generality destroys the concrete reality of the sight.

His best line is: “it was extraordinary indeed to drive past miles of faces staring toward 30 seconds of history.” He combines and condenses the concretes by means of a wide abstraction. So even though faces cannot literally stare at history, the expression is appropriate. He makes it original because he combines miles of faces staring in one direction, which gives you a visual concrete, with the fact that it lasted only thirty seconds. He is referring to the blastoff itself, but says that the thirty seconds represent history. This dramatically condenses several complex thoughts into one image.

Since nobody can include literally every detail, what you choose to include becomes very significant. I discuss this issue in “Art and Sense of Life.”⁴⁵ I begin the article with a description of a painting of a beautiful woman who has a cold sore, and use it to make the point that everything in a work of art is significant by reason of its inclusion. The same principle applies to nonfiction writing. You cannot be a verbal photographer who includes everything. Therefore, the total effect is achieved by the kind of concretes you do include, even in a journalistic account. Wainwright and I are both describing the same scene. But I select only relevant details—and in the case of the crowd, only details relevant to one overall image: its purposefulness, and the difficulties people were willing to endure. Take, for instance, the half-naked man in the hammock. It is an uncomfortable position, and reveals his ingenuity and determination.

Wainwright’s worst selection was “bands of the young in trunks and bikinis ran everywhere.” I saw no one in trunks or bikinis, or running around. What Wainwright probably did was combine (through sheer inattention) sights from the night before the launch with what he saw right after it. There was an unbearable traffic jam along the road after the launch, and you did see a lot of trunks and bikinis. It would be appropriate to mention them if you were describing the terrible heat during the day, after the launch. But what you saw the night before was immobility. There was no place to run around, since everything was tightly packed. Even if there were a boy in trunks and a girl in a bikini running for a sandwich or to visit a friend in another car, you should not include this, because it would be a purely accidental, atypical element. Wainwright’s choice of such nonessentials suggests falsely a circus atmosphere. If you are describing a huge crowd that came from everywhere, attracted by a great event, you do not introduce bikinis. If you mention them at all, it should be in some unflattering contrast to what is important. But he picks that as an essential part of the atmosphere.

Everything I select adds up to a total and is purposeful. My mind does not wander to some boy’s trunks or girl’s bikini. But he has no hierarchy of values, and thus no conscious purposefulness. I know what is accidental and what is typical of the crowd. For instance, take the man in the hammock. He might have been the only one, but this was typical of the kind of adjustments to discomfort that people were making. Therefore, I included him as an individual. If I had seen many girls running in bikinis for some reason, whether contributing to the event or distracting from it, 1 would have included that fact. But one girl doing so is an accident. Further, Wainwright does not project the mood of the crowd; if anything, he detracts from it. He uses words like “people lolled” and “they ran everywhere,” so you do not know whether it is a picnic, as he calls it, or something else. His description adds up to nothing.

There are situations in which you want to describe a purposeless crowd. In those cases you do what he did: select random, contradictory bits. But he was trying to describe a purposeful event—a crowd gathered for a specific purpose. The mood of the event was visually perceptible—you could tell people took it seriously. But he does not project that.

A different approach to an event dictates a different way of writing about it. I give the view of Apollo 11 at night a whole paragraph. He makes it one subsidiary sentence. His focus is on the crowd, not on the rocket. I say as much about the people as he does, but they never steal the stage. In my article, the crowd serves to feature the importance of the event. That is how my mind organized the material. This is how basic premises direct your choice of content—of what aspect of the event you present in what manner—and you cannot calculate that consciously.

If you want subtler streaks of style which create a certain impression, observe the following: “There were tents perched at the edge of the water; there were men and children sleeping on the roofs of station wagons, in the twisted positions of exhaustion; I saw a half-naked man asleep in a hammock strung between a car and a tree.” This is a choppy description. “There were” is not very elegant—it is too direct and easy. But I use it to give the reader the feeling (since Frank and I were driving past) of a montage. Again, I appeal to actual visual perception. I did not see a flowing progression, but snatches of typical sights. Therefore, I wanted choppiness in my description. What holds it together is the fact that the concretes are all part of the same scene; they add up to an impression of the size, discomfort, and exhaustion of the crowd. Later, when I say, “the same, patient cheerful flood,” it would have been a bad editorial estimate had I not already given you the concretes. Had I presented a smooth, flowing sentence, that too would have been an editorial summation, whereas I wanted to show what I saw. Always try in such cases to reconstruct for the reader, by means of essentials, what you perceived.

Now consider this line of Wainwright’s: “this vast picnic crowd had gathered to see the booster belch out its tremendous power and hurl likenesses of themselves at the Moon.” It is disgusting. First, notice the choice of words, and keep in mind my discussion of connotation. I would use a word like “belch” only if I wanted to degrade something. While that was not his intention, it is a very inappropriate word here. And “likenesses of themselves” provides a disgusting glimpse of his ideas about human motivation.

Observe also the mixture of time elements. He is describing the night before the launch. The next paragraph begins: “By morning there were many more.” So the preceding sentence about the belching and hurling is, in his mind, part of the night before. That is undercutting. He projects what he saw later and makes it part of the description of the night before, and then returns to the next morning. Therefore, his readers do not know where they are. He is trying to tell you how he imagined, that night, what the crowd was going to see. Not only is this confusing, but nothing could be more anti-climactic and more presumptuous than projecting a great event that is going to happen. He had no business doing it. This approach would be bad enough if it described a small event, because it produces an anticlimax. But considering the grand nature of this event, his presumption is dreadful.

If there is an unprecedented sight of such importance that a million people come from far away and endure terrible discomfort to see it, and the reporter says, “I know what will happen, there will be fire belching and likenesses hurled,” that is presumptuous. He sees no difference between a description of the event and his own imaginary bromides about it. I would not dare do this. Every literary and philosophical premise in me would stop me. If I think the event is big, I let it speak for itself.

Had I been disappointed—which I was not, it was greater than anything I could have imagined—! would say, “I expected a big burst of fire and it fizzled.” One could properly write that about some event that, for example, was oversold by press agents.

Do not project in images what you think an event is going to be like. Always stay behind the event. If you have any values to project (which I did), do it by means of the concretes you select, never by means of your own imaginary constructs.

Here are some more problems with Wainwright’s choice of words. He said, “People lolled in the grass.” Nobody lolled that night. But even if he saw, for instance, somebody sitting in the grass, the verb “lolled” destroys the description. Nobody would loll on a lawn if he had to stay awake all night in dreadful heat. If you saw those people, you would never think of a lightweight verb pertaining to relaxation. Similarly, he should not have used “picnic” as he did. Again, watch the connotations of the words you use.

His worst mistake with respect to word choice comes in his description of Apollo 11 at night: “Clearly visible through the night about 10 miles away was the Apollo 11, bathed in searchlights, a tiny stalk of light in the darkness.” More than anything else, this made me furious. I had gone through the process of working to convey that tremendous visual sight. Then to see somebody with the same problem dismiss it in this way—it was most telling. “Bathed in searchlights” is a bromide. You could say “dripping with light” or “wet with light” (as I once said in The Fountainhead); that says something. But “bathed in light” is a bad choice of words; even if somehow you had to use that bromide, it more appropriately describes something indoors (e.g., “a drawing room bathed in light”). But Wainwright uses an inexact bromide about a sight that had enormous grandeur, instead of struggling to describe accurately those huge lights coming out of the two small figures. I almost felt like a proletarian angry at the idea of a bourgeois who does not earn his income. Wainwright did not work at it—he was inadequate to the task.

Moreover, they were not searchlights, because searchlights move. They were huge batteries of light installed around Apollo 11 and its service tower. This is a good example of the difference between showing and telling. He uses an inappropriate conceptual summation—“searchlights”—instead of giving you the actual sight and letting you conclude that they were searchlights or some other kind of lights. He sums up, rather than showing you what he saw.

Earlier I said that you can improve your ability to write by identifying a bad passage and why it is bad; you thereby learn the abstract principles involved. I hope this comparison clarifies what I meant by that advice.

9

Book Reviews and Introductions

Reviewing books is a valid profession, if practiced properly. Its purpose is twofold: to report on and to evaluate what is published. A reviewer functions as a reporter and scout, since nobody can read everything that is published.

There used to be reviewers who had personal followings, because they were reliable. They had definite viewpoints, and you knew by what standards they praised or panned a book. I observed through the years that as these people lowered their standards and recommended bad books, they lost their followings. Today, no reviewer has a following, because none has any standards. Some openly admit the fact that they follow their feelings, while most evade it. But even the worst irrationalist will not be guided by somebody else’s feelings forever. Therefore, reviewers have no function today, even among people who agree with them. If anyone reads them, it is for the reason I do: to discover what the book is about, ignoring the reviewer’s estimate. That is the best reviewers can do today, and it is a disgrace to the profession.

In The Objectivist, we do not review bad books, because there are enough bad ideas floating around, and it would not be worthwhile to my readers to be told how many bad books are published. Not only would it have no value, but we could not keep up with them.

The special purpose of our book reviews is to help those who agree with Objectivism acquire relevant knowledge. A philosophy provides the basic principles that apply to all of existence, but it does not tell you everything. There are many discoveries and arguments, particularly in the social sciences, which are relevant to philosophy and necessary to know. For example, it is not enough to be for free enterprise on moral grounds. You must also know the historical case for it, and be able to answer the questions being raised about it today.

A corollary purpose is to help worthwhile books against the blockade of liberals on the left and religionists on the right. Little of value is published today. But those books of value that are published may never be heard of, given the present state of reviewing. I dread to think of how many good books have been published but went unknown. Of course, personally, that is my battle. So a secondary purpose of book reviewing in The Objectivist is to let an interested audience know that these worthwhile books exist. Few books are fully on our side; but any book whose virtues, ideologically, outweigh its errors is worth supporting. This does not mean we have to praise every book we review. It means we do not review the books we cannot praise. Since we are not a general information magazine, but one with a certain viewpoint, we are not obligated to review everything that appears.

A magazine with a general cultural viewpoint, however, is so obligated, though such magazines seldom fulfill that obligation. A general reviewer of books should review the whole field of books, and only differentiate between books of greater and lesser importance (by the length of the reviews and, in general, by the attention given the books). This is a legitimate undertaking, though magazines today never do it. But that is their problem and their immorality.

A magazine that undertakes to review the whole field of books requires negative book reviewing. The responsibility for assigning books is the editor’s, not the reviewer’s. For example, the policy of The New York Times is to give left-wing books to sympathetic left-wing reviewers, and right-wing books to left-wing reviewers as well. That is dishonest and nonobjective. But suppose a magazine’s policy were fair, and you received a book to review, which you found was bad. It is appropriate to write a negative review.

There are three basic requirements for a book review: ( 1 ) to indicate the nature of the book; (2) to tell the reader what its value is; and (3) to tell him briefly what its flaws are, if any. (I am speaking now of nonfiction books; I will cover reviews of fiction later. )

Point 1: The nature of the book. Do not give a full synopsis. Do not report every salient point or the exact progression of a book. This is a mistake beginning reviewers often commit. Indicate the nature of the book, but do not recapitulate it. There is an old joke where one intellectual asks another: “Have you read any good book reviews lately?” That used to be the literati’s custom, and you should avoid it.

Always indicate the author’s general theme. You need not describe all of his reasoning or material; merely indicate the overall direction by saying the author claims A, B, and C, and such is the theme of the book. Whether you agree with him or not is a separate issue (which comes under points 2 and 3).

As a reviewer, you must be skillful enough to isolate the book’s essentials, and present only those. State the subject and give some idea of the author’s development of that subject—the highlights and key points. (And even here you need not include everything.) But never include nonessentials while omitting key points, because that constitutes a misrepresentation. This can happen when you are in a hurry: if your space is limited, and you have not prepared a good outline, you might start listing the first points that come to your mind, although they are nonessential. But to be fair, you must include what is essential to the author’s theme.

Always include some quotations that are typical of the author. This is important on two counts: ( 1 ) it gives the reader, firsthand, an idea of the author’s approach, and (2) it gives an idea of his style (which is important, even in nonfiction). In a certain sense, a reader has to take you on faith. You are the middleman, and the more quotations you provide, the better you are as a reporter, because it is by means of these that the reader can judge you as well as the book. He can see whether what you allege about the book is actually supported by the quotations. I frequently read reviews in which the quo- . tations do not fit the reviewer’s evaluation (and often they are much more interesting than what the reviewer tells you). Therefore, whenever you use quotations—and use them appropriately—you provide objective evidence of your own reliability.

The difficulty is finding brief quotations, because a review made up predominantly of quotations ceases to be a review. It becomes a sampling, like a movie trailer, and does not tell the reader what the book is about; he does not know what there is between those quotations. So preserve a balance.

Obviously, your selection of quotations must not be distorted. If you read today’s reviews, you will notice that anything can be supported by ellipses and the out-of-context quotation, which is immoral. If you cannot support a particular contention of yours by means of quotes, do so without them. It can be difficult, especially in nonfiction books, to find a quotation which is brief, yet distinctive enough to indicate the author’s viewpoint and the quality of his writing.

In all writing, the principle of selectivity operates by implication. The reader will necessarily think, to the extent he trusts you, that if you select a quotation, it is representative and fair. Your selection carries weight by the fact of being selected, so be sure it lives up to your purpose—namely, to indicate the essentials of the author’s approach and style. There is no profession immune from the rules of objectivity. If you are not objective in reviewing books, you will lose your following. And every writer should want a following, in the sense of having his readers satisfied rationally and having them trust him.

Suppose you review a book that has many different aspects. If the author is particularly interested in one aspect, but you focus on another which you find more interesting, that is not improper, provided you indicate both the author’s interest and your own. You need not share the author’s main interest in order to write a fair review.

Suppose somebody were reviewing Atlas Shrugged (to take an example from fiction). If he consulted me, I would say the most important aspects to cover are: esthetically, the presentation of man the hero; and philosophically, the book’s ethics and epistemology. But suppose the reviewer, who agrees with the novel’s philosophy, is particularly interested in its political aspects, which he stresses. That would not please me, but I would not consider it dishonest, so long as he indicates that my theme is wider than politics. His approach would be all right, because that aspect is in the book, only it is not as important to me as it is to this reviewer. Such a review is fair, because you cannot expect a reviewer to agree with you on every aspect of your book and to have the same hierarchy of values.

It would be inappropriate, however, if one had a totally different motive. Suppose you are reviewing a book on esthetics, in which the author presents a new theory of art. But you are primarily interested in capitalism, and thus in the single section of the book that discusses the plight of the artist in society. You then take the book as a springboard for presenting something quite different from its actual subject and theme. That would be misleading.

Fairness is always possible. The secret is to identify the facts, and then explicitly identify to yourself and to your readers what you are doing. In that way, you can be perfectly fair to an author, even when you disagree with major aspects of his book.

Point 2: The value of the book. I can state this point briefly. Indicate what is good or informative about the book, i.e., what the reader will learn from it. Here you can follow a simple rule: if you think the book is valuable, ask yourself what you learned from it. Select what is most important, and indicate that to the reader.

Point 3: The flaws of the book. Briefly indicate the book’s philosophical and stylistic flaws. This is especially important in regard to nonfiction books of mixed premises, which are the best an Objectivist can recommend today. There will always be books of mixed premises which are valuable, but their mistakes must be indicated.

If you do not indicate the book’s flaws, you bewilder your reader. It is unfair not to tell the reader the aspects of the book with which you disagree. But do not argue with the author. For example, some inexperienced Objectivist writers believe you should use a book review to spread Objectivism. But the same considerations [discussed in chapter 4] apply here, only more so. When you report on a book, you are not selling your philosophy. You are merely selling the particular values which the reader can find in this book. It is not your job to save the soul of the author. And more importantly, you must not use his book to present your ideas. That is what too many of today’s reviewers do. Whether they do it to show off their intelligence or to proselytize for their own philosophy, it is a mistake.

As a reviewer, you must express your opinion. But be sure to keep your estimate separate from your report on the book. When you find flaws, it is important to indicate them and, if the issue is serious enough, to indicate what the truth is on that issue. But do not begin to argue for the correct view. Merely indicate what the truth is about some error by the author, and give a reference to where the reader can look up the proof of your point, if necessary.

In effect, your policy should be: “This book has values A, B, C, and D, which make the book worthwhile, but it has flaws Y and Z. Here is why I regard them as flaws ...” But be sure you present the author’s ideas correctly. If the author is good on certain points, do not exaggerate them and make him out to be better than he is. Likewise, if there are points which contradict your own viewpoint, do not denounce him and exaggerate his flaws. A review is not a polemic.

A polemical article has its place. One can take a book with a wrong viewpoint and write an article denouncing it and explaining why it is wrong. Even in such an article you must present the author’s viewpoint fairly, so as to avoid attacking a strawman. But that is not a book review—it is a discussion of ideas for which the particular book you are attacking serves as the springboard.

Having examined the three basic requirements of a book review, I next want to mention two errors that reviewers often make.

The first error is to tell the author how he should have written his book. Never do this. You can offer criticisms without telling the author what he should have done. This error takes the form: “If the author had done so and so,” or even: “The author should have done so and so.” That is no longer a report or evaluation, but the attitude of a bad editor. (A good editor never tells an author how to rewrite a book; he merely indicates the flaws he finds.) It is permissible to say, for example, “The author has stated such and such, but he has not touched on these aspects.” That is not the same as saying “The author should have included these aspects.”

This is not merely a semantic issue. The impropriety is not only the form you use, but your intention. Telling an author what he should have done is so inappropriate that any writer should resent it. I resent it every time I encounter it, even if the book is bad, because it is presumptuous and patronizing. A reviewer’s job is to report on a book and evaluate it, not to set himself up as a collaborator and to tell the author or the public how a given book should have been written. He cannot hold as the author’s fault the fact that the author has a different philosophical outlook, even if it is wrong. A reviewer must inform the reader about the author’s viewpoint, not substitute his own. Moreover, to say what a marvelous book you would have written is entirely inappropriate; and a reader’s immediate reaction is: “Why didn’t you write it?” Therefore, avoid telling the author what he should have done. (If you write, “The author claims it is appropriate for the government to interfere; I, however, disagree,” you are not implying the author should have rewritten the line. For you are not saying the author should have accepted your views, or even known of them.)

This leads me to the second error: the failure to keep a strict line between what the author says and what the reviewer says. This problem enters into every review, because you should not entirely isolate the description from the evaluation; you must make parenthetical value judgments as you proceed. The best way to avoid the error is by explicit statement. You say, in effect, “This is the author’s viewpoint ; and now this is me, the reviewer, talking.”

When you are synopsizing the author, you need not constantly remind the reader that you are doing so. But at occasional intervals, when you want to stress that this is something you have gathered from the book, write: “as the author states” or the like. And after every aside in which you have expressed an opinion, indicate your return to the presentation of the author’s views.

In a negative review, you have to tell the reader why the book is bad and what kinds of errors the author commits (e.g., he suppresses or distorts facts, or he draws the wrong conclusions from them). But there too, be sure to keep your views separate from the narrative material. First, present the essentials of the book, and of the author’s viewpoint, as clearly and fairly as possible. Then say, for example, “I think this is a bad book because the author distorts the evidence on such and such facts,” and cite the proof of his misrepresentations. Then say, “From these facts he draws the following conclusion, and here is what is wrong with it.” But at no time should your motive be to show the stupid author how much cleverer you are than he (which is not much of an achievement if the book is that bad). A review is not a contest between you and the author.

Your own philosophy should not be your primary focus. For instance, you write: “The author distorts facts A, B, and C, and he draws the collectivist conclusion X, which is wrong. Free enterprise did not lead to the evils he asserts; the cause was Y.” Here, your own pro-capitalist viewpoint is implied. You can even, when appropriate, state it openly. But always remember that it is not your purpose to use a book to propagandize for capitalism or whatever your views might be. If the assignment is to report on a given book, that is what you should do. If the magazine did not hire you to write a hymn to capitalism, do not write one. (If that was what the editors wanted, they would have asked you for an article, not a review.)

Never use a bad book for some improper or irrelevant purpose, just because your purpose is “good.” The end does not justify the means. This is what left-wing reviewers try to do. They may even know they are being dishonest and slanting their reviews, but they argue: “The author is for capitalism, therefore he is evil; I am doing this for collectivism, therefore I am good and my distortions are justified.” That is the psychology of leftist reviewers, and you must not accept any part of it.

Unfortunately, the opportunity to review good fiction will rarely come up. I wish there were more fiction books to plug, but there are not. There may be in the future, however, so you should know how to handle such a happy contingency.

The three main elements to cover in nonfiction reviewing—the nature of the book, its value, and its flaws—apply also to fiction reviewing, but with certain variations.

In regard to the first point, when you review fiction, indicate the nature and progression of the story, but not its climax or resolution. This is not an absolute. Sometimes the climax illuminates the whole book, so you need to discuss it. But usually it is better to build up the suspense and then, in effect, tell the reader, “If you want to know how it turns out, read the book.” If your review is positive, it serves as a “movie trailer” for the book. A movie trailer selects what will arouse the viewer’s interest, and presents him with a brief montage of the film. The same principle applies to a positive review of fiction. Indicate what the story is about and some of its progression, but do not give away everything. Make the reader interested enough to read the book.

In mystery reviews it is an unwritten law that a reviewer must never give away the solution. In a certain sense, this applies to any serious work of fiction. If you give the reader an exact summary of the book, you destroy the suspense, particularly if it is a book with a good plot.

Always indicate the four main elements of a novel: plot, theme, characterization, and style.⁴⁶ But do not present them one at a time, like a classroom analysis. Skillfully integrate all’ of them. For example, when you present a paragraph about interesting events that start the plot, at the same time indicate what kind of characters enact it. This is not always possible, but it should be your goal.

In regard to the second and third points of book reviewing, concerning evaluation, do not read fiction as if it were merely the means to an ideological end. It will be a long time before anyone attempts what I did in Atlas Shrugged, where reviewers would be semi-justified in thinking the fiction is merely a springboard for presenting a philosophy. That is not the way Atlas was written, but it is a very philosophical book. Therefore, if a reviewer decided that this is primarily a philosophical treatise with the fiction as an excuse, I could not blame him much objectively—though I would hate him personally, because it is not true. While most fiction is not as philosophical, any serious work will have some philosophical meaning.

But if you stress that a book is wonderful ideologically, you commit a first-class offense against the author as a fiction writer. You invert the proper hierarchy of values when you review fiction exclusively or predominantly from the viewpoint of its philosophical value. That it has some valuable ideas must be treated as pure gravy. So review fiction primarily as literature.

The main requirement for a review of fiction pertains to drama and color. If you want to recommend the book, your review must be dramatic and colorful enough to communicate to the reader some of the literary quality of the book, though in smaller scale. This is a matter of careful integration. In this regard, quotations are helpful if they are succinct and representative. They can indicate the drama, color, and style of the author.

Do not praise a book if only a few lines are good. At The Objectivist, a reader once sent me a children’s book, recommending that I review it. She quoted a couple of lines to indicate why she thought it was wonderful. It was a poem about dinosaurs, and the gist of what she quoted was that dinosaurs perished because they did not use their brains. But the book was dreadful. It concentrated mainly on which animals were eating which, and it presented a terrible jungle atmosphere, which is certainly not for six-year-olds (the book’s intended audience). It actually said nothing about the importance of the brain. The mistake this reader made was taking the few lines about the dinosaur’s brain as the meaning of the whole book.

Many people are so glad these days to see one sensible touch that, dropping the context, they forget the rest and decide a book is good. But you should do the opposite: you must be most severe precisely when you think a book contains something valuable. It is fine to enjoy good passages apart from the total context. Nevertheless, in judging an entire book, you must remain objective.

Similarly, with respect to the indication of flaws, do not exaggerate some touch that you dislike into the meaning of the whole. Do not condemn a book simply because some lines may be wrong.

Never overpraise or overcriticize a book. In reviewing both fiction and nonfiction, but especially fiction, you need to preserve a clear view of the total in order to pronounce judgment. You need the full context of the book to judge fairly and objectively its virtues and its flaws (if any), and whether the virtues are more significant than the flaws. Always ask yourself whether you covered all the essentials of the book, or merely took an incomplete view and thus misrepresented it.

Turning now to writing introductions to books, the main rule is to take the word “introduction” seriously. Not all books need introductions; but if you write one, you must convey information to the reader which is relevant to a book, but is not part of it. This applies to writing an introduction to somebody else’s work—whether to a classic or the work of an unknown author—or to a work of your own.

When the book is your own, the one fairly absolute rule is that the introduction must contain material which is not appropriate to the book itself, but which the reader needs to know—for example, acknowledgments.

I wrote introductions to all my collections of essays.⁴⁷ Since they are collections and not written in book form, introductions were necessary. There were two things I had to provide in these introductions: technical explanations, e.g., where the articles came from, or (where applicable) who the other contributors are; and an indication of the intellectual content. I made general remarks about the essays, which served as an integration of the total—an indication to the reader of what the book is about.

Your approach must be somewhat different if you are asked to write an introduction to somebody else’s book. If it is a living author, you do what you would for a book of your own, i.e., include some general remarks about the subject of the book. But here you have more freedom than you would in an introduction to your own book, because the purpose is to state what the author cannot appropriately say himself, namely, why the book is important. This is why an introduction to the work of a living author is written by someone better known professionally than the author. It carries the judgment and prestige of that person, who tells the reader why he should read this book by an unknown author.⁴⁸

If you write an introduction to a classic (e.g., my introduction to Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three⁴⁹), here too you must present a generalized, integrating statement about the nature and importance of the book. Only your position is reversed: instead of relying on the prestige of your name, you must be sure not to push yourself forward too much. Your job is not to do a favor to the classic—it has already succeeded on its own. It is usually advisable, but not mandatory, to include something about the history of the book which may be of interest to a modem reader. But above all, the purpose is to tie the nature and theme of the classic to contemporary culture—to tell a contemporary reader why the book is important to him.

Do not feature yourself when you write an introduction to a classic. This issue never would have occurred to me if not for the fact that modem introductions do just that. There are all kinds of miserable little pipsqueaks who write introductions to classics in a patronizing manner, without saying anything about the book. The introduction serves only as an opportunity to show off the writer’s own supposed erudition. A contemptible instance of this is Edward Albee’s introduction to three plays by Noel Coward.⁵⁰ (Coward was living at the time, but was already a classic.) Albee patronizingly says, in effect, that although there is some value in Coward’s plays, he does not know his job as well as Albee does. Now, if Albee wrote for two centuries, he would not be able to come near the worst play of Noel Coward’s. But it is Albee’s approach that I want you to notice and avoid.

Of course, as in the case of book reviews, when you write an introduction, you have to indicate what aspects of the book you disagree with, if any. Otherwise there is an implicit sanction, which would be improper with respect to your own views. Mention as clearly, briefly, and politely as possible what you disagree with or consider a flaw, but do not start a polemic with the author, and do not tell him how he should have written his book—particularly if he is not around to answer you.

If you disagree with an author more than you agree, do not write the introduction. But if the disagreement is minor, or you agree with more aspects of the book than you disagree, then you mention any disagreements unobtrusively, toward the end. Do not make them the major focus of your introduction.

Remember that “the book’s the thing.” An introduction is supposed to be a service to the reader and to the book. It cannot be an end in itself. So be sure your views are always relevant to and justified by the content of the book. If they are, it is appropriate to express them; do not be inhibited or humble. But it is inappropriate to use an introduction as an occasion to air views which have nothing to do with the book’s content.

10

Writing a Book

A detailed account of how to write a book would itself take a book. Here, I will discuss only how to apply certain principles of article-writing to a book.

The basic principles of the two are the same. The only significant difference is scale. A beginning writer may not know how to apply what he has learned about writing an article to a whole book. So he must step back, abstract, and discover the equivalents. What in an article is a section or sequence, in a book may be a chapter or more; what is a paragraph in an article may be a sequence or even a chapter in a book.

There are no rules about a book’s length. It can range from a monograph to a work of several volumes. Nor are there rules about how to divide a book into various parts, chapters, or sequences. All of this is determined by the nature of the subject. But in general, the purpose of subdividing a book is to aid the reader in absorbing the content, and to achieve clarity of presentation. The need for divisions is based on the fact that a mind cannot absorb everything at once (i.e., the “crow epistemology”). By breaking your material into segments, you direct the order in which the reader’s mind will absorb it.

The same subject can be treated in an article, a book, or a set of books. The difference will be the level of abstraction, i.e., the degree of specificity. For example, I have often presented Objectivism in five minutes,⁵¹ but that is not the same as the presentation in Atlas Shrugged. I do not present a different philosophy; if one followed all the implications of my brief presentation, one would arrive at Atlas (though it would take years). Any subject can be communicated very abstractly or in minute detail, and the length of a work depends on the level one chooses.

In an article, it is difficult to communicate ideas very abstractly. The higher the level of abstraction at which you write, the wider the concepts you deal with. Therefore, the difficulty in presenting something briefly—which you must do in an article—is to state your abstractions in a form clear enough to differentiate your viewpoint from any other. There is always the risk of presenting floating abstractions. (This is one reason I am concerned whenever someone, particularly a non-Objectivist, synopsizes Objectivism.) For instance, if you said Objectivism is a philosophy that stands for the good, that would be worse than a floating abstraction—it is floating smoke—because every philosophy claims this. In a certain sense it is true of Objectivism—only it is so generalized that it could apply to anything, and therefore is worthless as an abstraction.

In regard to a book, however, the danger is the tendency to expand your presentation into an encyclopedia. I said [in chapter 2] that you must delimit your subject when you write an article, despite the temptation to digress. That danger is much greater in a book. Since a book permits more detailed statements of a subject than does an article, a beginner might get the idea that he has the space to say anything—which quickly becomes everything. This kind of expansion is particularly problematic when your theme is broad; the broader your theme, the greater the temptation to include increasingly more subdivisions. The fact that a book does permit a certain latitude—the fact that it is like a complex orchestration with a central theme, the development of which permits a great many sub-themes—can make your book spread into total shapelessness.

Therefore, as important as an outline is for an article, it is a hundred times more important for a book. No book—fictionor nonfiction—can be written properly without an outline. There are fiction writers who claim to write inspirationally, without an outline, and it shows in their books, which are plotless and shapeless. But I know of no nonfiction writer who claims he can write a book that way. This is an absolute: a nonfiction book cannot be written inspirationally, because it is supposed to deal with ideas. It does not even have the excuse—which is only an excuse—that someone might offer for fiction, namely, that it deals with emotions. A nonfiction book is primarily educational; it conveys information. You cannot throw ideas at the reader and hope he will untangle them. You must present them so that the progression is logical and clear.

When you create an outline for a book, first make a general one indicating which parts of your argument will go into each chapter, and in what order. Then, as you come to each chapter, make a more detailed outline, as detailed as you would for an article. If you make the general outline too detailed, you will be unable to hold the total in your mind. But if you do not create the more detailed chapter outlines, you will be unable to determine the specific order of points, or to achieve a clarity of presentation, for each chapter.

In writing a book, integration of the total is very important. One young writer I know made the following mistake: he thought that one integrates a given chapter to the preceding chapter only. Consequently, in spite of a good general outline, he found it difficult to decide what to include in his second chapter. He was relating chapter 2 to chapter 1 alone, as if the integration worked backwards only. He thought that if he kept in mind what he had written in chapter 1, he could determine what would proceed from it in chapter 2 (which in a sense is true). But of course, what should constantly be in a writer’s mind—and what should direct him at every stage—is the book as a whole.

Every aspect of a work has to be integrated into the total, whether paragraphs into a chapter or chapters into a book. The book should be one unified whole when you finish. So integrate each chapter not only with the preceding one, but also with the following ones—i.e., with the total of your book, which is not yet written. Train your subconscious to do this. It can be difficult, which is one reason the outline is so crucial.

Just as a sentence in your mind does not exist until it is on paper, so the unwritten chapters do not exist until they are written. Before then, what exists is only your outline—the abstractions which tell you what you will discuss. But the actual words are not yet there. Therefore, until your final chapters are done, little in your earlier ones has to be considered an absolute. The only absolute while you are writing is your abstract outline. You cannot depart from it (unless some essential omission or addition occurs to you, in which case you stop and redo your outline). But as you present the concrete material within each chapter, an incalculable number of options open up to you. For example, regarding some point of second- or third-rank importance, the question often arises: where should you discuss it—in chapter 2, say, or in chapter 4? While the overall, logical presentation of your subject is set in advance, you may not be able to resolve such narrow issues without the full, final context. The principle, therefore, is to view what you have written as open to correction until you finish the book. Your book must not become an absolute in your mind, in regard to its concrete content, until your final editing.

Often you find certain sequences so good that you know you will keep them; but even this is not an absolute. If you are that pleased with a passage, you will probably turn out to be right. But without becoming a relativist, be a good contextualist: do not set any such absolutes until you finish the whole book. This requires a difficult combination of absolutism about your value judgments and, at the same time, flexibility about your writing. Your premise should be: “This seems right to me within my present context of knowledge, but three-quarters of my book, say, does not yet exist, and therefore I allow for the possibility of making changes.”

Of course, the real absolute is the page proofs or galleys. A lot of editing will be done in galleys; when you see your work in print, it acquires an objectivity which a typewritten manuscript does not possess. A typewritten manuscript is too open to your corrections, and your subconscious knows it. Your mind remembers how many times you made corrections, and how many possibilities there were. Therefore, everything is still somewhat provisional. But when you see what you have written in cold print, set by somebody else, it acquires a more objective finality, and some new corrections or improvements might then strike you.

Regard your book as finished only after you have gone over it as one integrated whole. Keeping in mind all the complicated threads and issues involved, you can then see whether your provisional integrations were correct.

Someone once said that a writer’s most important tool is scissors, by which he meant that a writer should never be afraid to cut his own work when necessary. I have never sympathized with this attitude, because I hold this premise as such an absolute that I do not think one should boast about it. Courage is not required if your purpose is to write a good article or book, and some beautiful passage does not fit into the total context. In such a case, there is no choice involved: of course, you make the cut. Acquire that kind of ruthlessness. Make your central value the total job, not any particular passage.

Here is an example from my own experience. The Fountainhead is a long book with a complex theme. There were numerous sub-themes (which, in a nonfiction book, I call issues of second- or third-rank importance). I determined in my outline what incidents of the plot would dramatize which steps of the major theme. But on many lesser issues or subsidiary illustrations, it was difficult to decide the best place. When I started submitting the book to publishers, I had written part 1 and about a third of part 2. In this material, I had several scenes which were well-written, but repetitive. They dramatized the same issue. Nevertheless, I could not yet decide which of them fit better, and in which part of the book they belonged. I decided I would keep every uncertain scene until I saw the total, at which time I would choose which to save. I knew that the reason I could not decide at the time was that I needed the total context. When I submitted the material to Bobbs-Merrill, I gave Archie Ogden, the editor, an estimated number of words. He pointed out that part 1 then seemed too long. I explained to him my method, and said that in the final version a third of part 1 would be cut. And that is exactly what happened. I even cut an entire, very interesting, character— Vesta Dunning—from part 1. I felt a moment’s sadness and a mild regret, and then felt nothing, because cutting her was necessary: it was that character or the total novel.⁵²

This is what I mean by flexibility. It is not relativism or whim-worship. There are passages you cannot integrate into an unwritten whole, and therefore you should leave them in provisionally.

Writers who believe, consciously or subconsciously, in an “ideal,” Platonic archetype of a book would never use this method, and so would torture themselves needlessly. Such writers believe there is an abstract rule somewhere in infinity that indicates which sequences should remain and which should be cut; but, of course, they fail ever to discover it.

A book is a creative product, and the possibilities are incalculable. If at some point you do not know what choice to make, it simply means all the evidence is not in, and so you postpone the decision without any self-doubt. Every piece of writing involves new problems. Reason and reality are the only absolutes, and the theme and the outline are the sub-absolutes. Everything else is up to you. Many issues are optional, and it is no reflection on you if you sometimes hesitate or are uncertain.

In fact, hesitation is often a good sign in regard to the development of your subconscious writing premises. A child writing a story will not have the choices you do as an adult writing a book. He might write inspirationally and produce, for his context, a good piece of work. But he would not yet know that there are questions over which one can hesitate. So if you hesitate, it may be that your knowledge is broad and you have grasped numerous possibilities. Finally, remember that if there was no indecisiveness, there would be no pleasure in solving a problem, nor in writing anything. Therefore, take the bitter with the sweet (which is a bromide I would kill you for using in writing).

Let us turn to a related point: do not regard your chapters as separate articles. This can be tricky, because in one sense you do need to regard them as separate entities. (In this respect, do not take my nonfiction books as patterns, because most of them are collections of articles. Even so, I did a lot of editing to eliminate repetition and bring the articles into a greater unity. However, we are not discussing anthologies, but nonfiction books written from scratch.)

Your subject and theme are not completely covered in each chapter, only in the whole book. Therefore, you must regard your chapters as steps in an overall progression. The end is the total. The comparison to steps is accurate, because it is by means of dividing your complex subject and theme and covering them in installments that you achieve a progression which is integrated into a total presentation. But the chapters must be steps. Each has to be an entity in its own right—not an independent essay, but a part of your book that has covered a certain distance. At the same time, each chapter must serve as a base for the chapters that follow. It is particularly in your early chapters that you have to plan a great many future ones which will carry you through the total of the book. In that way, each is a means to the next chapter and to the total.

The best illustration of this process (only as a metaphor) is the passage from Atlas Shrugged in which Dagny has quit the railroad for the first time, and is thinking about the aimlessness of her days. She says that the proper progression of a man’s life resembles stations on the way to a final terminal. Man must have an overall purpose—a career—which is in turn broken up into particular purposes. A career consists of certain goals, and each one opens the way for wider goals—for wider achievements. If you are a writer, you do not write one book and then stop; you grow with every book. If you are a properly developing writer, you do not coast on what you have learned, but attempt ever harder subjects. This same principle applies to the book itself. Each chapter is a station reached—a part of your book which has achieved something. But you do not stop at one chapter. It is not an end in itself, but the means to the final terminal, i.e., the completed book.

Do not, however, regard your chapters as one long, uninterrupted lecture; do not begin each chapter by picking up from the last line of the prior one. A book is not a continuous speech. So regard each chapter as a little whole, as an end in itself—not in content, but in form. The breaking of a book into chapters gives the reader a chance to absorb distinct subdivisions of your total presentation. You do not merely give him the chance to rest involved in a blank page, and then continue. You regard a completed chapter as an. end in itself formally; like the book as a whole, it has a beginning, a logical development, and a conclusion—and you start the next chapter, in form, as if it were a new essay. The same principle applies to the structure of a paragraph. You indicate what you are starting with, you lead the thought to a certain conclusion, and, when that conclusion is reached, you start a new paragraph. In content, however, remember that each chapter and paragraph must be a (completed) part of a whole—a way station, not a terminal.

Here are a few suggestions about some lesser aspects of writing books.

Do not constantly repeat yourself for fear that your readers will forget something or go out of focus. For instance, if you depart briefly from your main subject and then return to it, do not say, “As I already discussed ...” Trust your reader to remember and to integrate what you have written. If he does not, reminders will not bring order to his mind. If he is out of focus, your writing will not put him into focus, no matter how good you are. If you write clearly, on a level of knowledge appropriate to your reader, you must count on his focus and his ability to carry the progression in his mind.

There are exceptions to this principle. If you return to a topic only after making some other point at great length, you may need to remind your reader of that topic. If it has been, say, a hundred pages since you last made some point, a reminder may be called for (though you should not re-prove the point). Nevertheless, in general, there is nothing wrong with a reader having to look back; it is not your job to prevent that from happening. In fact, every reader of a nonfiction book will need to do it—with the frequency depending on his level of focus and, even more, on his knowledge of the subject. For example, if you write a book on philosophy, an intelligent layman may need to check back more times than a philosophy major. Of course, you must write so that even the layman will understand it, though he might have to do more thinking, and read more slowly, than the philosophy major.

This point about not repeating yourself is particularly important in bringing out a crucial difference between writing and teaching.

The purpose of teaching is not only to communicate knowledge, but also to instill a rational psycho-epistemology in one’s students. If you analyze what a good teacher is doing, and why his students get so much out of his class, you will find that he is communicating the material in a certain order, which, by implication, trains his class to absorb knowledge rationally. In that process, he must adjust his presentation, to some extent, to the level of a particular class, since some classes are brighter or more attentive than others. Even within a given class, the teacher may repeat certain things to help the slower or less focused students. So a greater latitude is possible to him. Obviously, the best teacher cannot force a student to understand if the student wants to be out of focus, and just sits there doing nothing; the consciousness of one man is never responsible for that of another. But to the degree to which one can help another, that is what good teachers do.

These classroom methods are applicable, to some degree, to writing a textbook, where many subdivisions and repetitions are permissible. But textbooks aside, when you write a nonfiction book, you are not a teacher (except in the metaphorical sense of presenting certain information to your readers). You are a broadcaster, and you aim at the best receiving set for the kind of frequency on which you are broadcasting. But the choice of whether to tune in, and of how good the receiving sets are, is up to the audience. Therefore, you cannot present a subject by hammering it, through repetition, into your readers. If a teacher sees the class attention wandering, he should do something to recapture it. But it is never proper for a writer to adjust his writing in anticipation of such deficiencies on the part of the reader.

Another problem that often occurs—particularly on a first book—is the trap of the first chapter. When a writer starts a book, the first chapter is more of a revelation to him than to any reader—a revelation not in content, but in regard to the power of writing. When you start a book—and particularly your first—yougrow with every chapter. By the time you finish chapter 1, you have learned so much that, as a rule, the beginning of your chapter no longer satisfies you. You now know how to improve it—and by the time you finish redoing it, you will have learned still more.

If you are a beginner, you often feel as if you are going to spend the rest of your life on chapter 1. If whenever you feel you can do better, you thus start rewriting the whole chapter, you would be caught in an infinite regress, because you always learn from the process of writing. If you are not a hack or a one-book author, you improve constantly, to the end of your career. Therefore, you cannot stop each time you write a first chapter—or a tenth, for that matter. Even when you feel as if you can dance with words rather than drag them along painfully and ploddingly, you cannot keep rewriting chapter 1. Otherwise, you will never get to chapter 2.

This temptation is understandable; it is quite proper to stop and edit the whole chapter once or twice. But after that, go on unhesitatingly to chapter 2. Accept the fact that you are growing and that you must stop each chapter when you feel that at present, this is the best you can do, i.e., knowing that you will be able to do better, but not now. So do not limit your development to your first chapter. You must proceed.

Let your subconscious take its course. Do not stand in its way by attempting endless improvements. In the end, you will have plenty of opportunity to adjust the beginning. There will be a stage by about the middle of the book when, because you are much more in control of the writing, you will feel that your first chapters must be terrible. By the time you finish the book, however, you will have acquired perspective (particularly if you do not reread it constantly), and you will discover just how good the first chapters actually are. Editorial improvements will always be necessary, because you have learned so much, but they will be minor.

If the first chapters had really been bad, you would have been stopped by legitimate problems long before you finished.

11

Selecting a Title

When you select a title, ninety percent of your consideration should be appropriateness, five percent clarity (and if it is appropriate it will be clear), and if possible, the other five percent should be drama or intrigue. As always, do not aim at drama directly.

Selecting a title is difficult because it should grow out of an integration of all your material and must apply to the work’s essence. It must come more or less inspirationally—through the same process by which you get colorful touches in writing; it can rarely be arrived at consciously.

If you think I am good at titles, I assure you I am not. I find it difficult to come up with good titles, which is a common complaint of writers. As a rule, but not as an absolute, I let a title grow out of my material. Sometimes I start an article with a provisional working title, and as the material develops, some written phrase strikes me and suggests a better title. At other times, as I am writing and focusing on the subject, something that condenses the essence suddenly occurs to me (which is not a phrase in the work itself).

You may find it useful to hear how I arrived at the titles of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

First, let me tell you about the mistitling of The Fountainhead. This is not the original title, and I still do not particularly like it. The original title was Secondhand Lives. Everyone disliked it, including my agent and all the publishers I heard from. But I wanted that title, because it named a completely new idea featured in the book, i.e., that many people, such as Peter Keating, live by the opinions of others. Then Archie Ogden, my editor at Bobbs-Merrill, said something that changed my mind instantly: “If you use that title, you are featuring Peter Keating.” This horrified me. I had missed that implication entirely.

So now I had to search for a title that would feature Howard Roark. The title I chose next was The Prime Mover. But my publisher objected that most people, seeing the book in a store window, would think it was about movers. He was right, though I would have taken the chance, because I do not care what superficial people might think. Still, the expression “prime mover” is not well known enough to convey the grandeur it would to someone acquainted with philosophy. Only a dedicated Aristotelian could appreciate it.

I next chose Mainspring, but discovered it had already been used. So I took a thesaurus and started looking for words. Finally I found “fountainhead.” What I dislike about it is that the metaphor is a bit too poetic for the nature of the book. Mainspring would have been better, because it suggests engineering.

The most brilliant inspiration for a title of mine is Frank’s suggestion of Atlas Shrugged, which is almost a mystery to me. I do not know how he made that integration, but it is brilliant, because it names in two words the essence of the book. When I asked him how he came up with the title, he could not explain it. It was purely inspirational; titles usually occur that way.

Atlas Shrugged was not my original title for the book, and it was a big regret in my life that I could not use my original title, which was The Strike. As I wrote the book, however, I realized “The Strike” gave away too much. But the drama behind that title was this: I first conceived of the book shortly after the publication of The Fountainhead. This was in the heyday of the New Deal, when strikes were fashionable and they were all by the Left. Today, they are passé—taken for granted. If you see pickets, you take them as part of daily life. We have a completely mixed economy, so each pressure group uses means of that type to gain something. But in those days, it was a collectivist, definitely Leftist phenomenon. At the time, I thought there would be a certain drama in having a novel with that title by me, who after The Fountainhead was well known as a “reactionary.” I was being slightly subjective in that I was counting on the reputation of my previous novel. The change in title is actually a monument to how long it took me to write the book. If the novel had been published within the first five years, The Strike might have been all right. But from the perspective of the ages, it would have been dated, and it would not be a good title even now. But the main consideration was that The Strike gave away too much.

I did not change the title to Atlas Shrugged until about four years after Frank suggested it. I loved The Strike, and have a strong prejudice against titles with a verb in them—in this case, “shrugged.” A title is like a name, and I have always felt a title should contain only nouns, and perhaps adjectives, but not verbs. Yet the appropriateness of this title outweighed my particular dislike, because there can be no rule against using verbs. “Atlas Shrugged” was so right that when Frank told it to me, I felt that this was destined to be the title. I weighed the choice carefully, but each time I considered the issue, its appropriateness and enormous condensation made me conclude that there was no better title for the book. It names everything and gives away nothing.

I even tried the title on Henry Blanke, the producer of the movie The Fountainhead. This was around 1947. He was an intelligent man, though not a particularly profound thinker. I told him I was considering a title for my next novel. He knew nothing about it except that it would deal with industry. I asked: “My husband suggested the following title; how would you take it? What would it suggest to you?” Then I said: “Atlas Shrugged.” He looked as if a lightbulb had appeared over his head, and he said: “Hmm.” Then he shrugged his shoulders and said: “Well, there goes the world.” That was an ideal reaction, and it impressed me very much.

Let me give you some general advice about selecting a title, if you keep in mind that there are no absolute rules here.

When I say a title should be appropriate, I mean, for instance, that if you are writing about a serious subject, your title should not be humorous. Even here, it may sometimes be appropriate to use a humorous title in a bitter or faintly sarcastic way. Above all, however, your title should not be misleading.

The best example of a misleading title is How to Think Creatively. This excellent book is a serious psychological study of the creative process. The title, however, suggests it is a home course on how to become a genius. The book actually contains nothing on how to think creatively; it merely describes some important aspects of the process of creative thinking. (If you were active mentally, you could get from it some valuable leads to help you think creatively, but it is not a technological book; it does not tell you what to do.)

A great many interesting nonfiction books could be handicapped by a title that falsely suggests something academic, statistical, or technical. On the other hand, if you write a technical book for specialists, do not call it, for example, The Coming Spring. So when you do battle with commercial publishers, which is not a happy experience, do not let them put an inappropriate title on your book.

There is a superstition among publishers, which the better ones reject, that a title helps or hinders a book. It does not. They think including something sexy in the title sells the book, but it does not, particularly not today. An intriguing title does not necessarily sell a book, nor does a bad title necessarily hamper it. A book ultimately succeeds by word of mouth, which is based on content. In nonfiction books, particularly those that deal with a journalistic subject which will be dated in five years, the title might be important—not so much to sell the book, but to indicate that it deals with a contemporary issue.

Of course, do not have so ponderous a title that nobody can retain it. For example, do not select the kind of title that John Nelson chose for his article “Some Current Conceptions of Freedom: The ‘Freedom’ of the Hippie and the Yippie.”⁵³ He felt it was in the academic style, and since there is nothing wrong with it ideologically, as editor I did not want to force anything optional on him. But it is a regrettable title; and in fact, people simply call it “The ‘Freedom’ of the Hippie and the Yippie.” He did not have to include ”Some Current Conceptions of Freedom.”

Also avoid deliberately bewildering or ungrammatical titles. Years ago some journal offered a parody on such titles which captured their essence very well. It was: Gently the Swallow. That names the whole modem style. It is a noun and an adverb, and irresistibly you want to ask: “gently what?” The issue here is fidelity to grammar. It is not intriguing or interesting to be deliberately ungrammatical. Titles of that kind merely indicate that the author is muddying his waters.

When choosing a title, do not be so detailed and academic that you call your article .“A Few Observations on the Subject of Epistemology, with Limitations ...” etc. On the other hand, do not be confusing. For instance, if you are writing on a current bill in Congress, do not call it “Of Higher Metaphysics” or “The Higher Reaches of Man.”

Generally, in selecting a title, choose one that feels right to you. This is a sense of life issue. If a title feels right, it will be consistent with your style. Sometimes someone else, e.g., an editor, suggests a title which grates on you, even though it is good. If you get that feeling, the title will surely clash with the overall style of your book, because the psycho-epistemological elements at work here are the same as those at work in your style. They depend on your subconscious, automatic values and integrations.

Let us look at some examples. There is a good book that has two different titles, East Minus West Equals Zero in the American edition, and Are the Russians Ten Feet Tall? in the British.⁵⁴ The former is an excellent title. First, it names the essential subject and theme of the book. It indicates not only what the author discusses—Western aid to the communist East—but also his viewpoint. The form is intriguing: it is original to use a mathematical equation, but not so bewildering that no one understands it. (One minor flaw is that it could be taken as saying East = West, but most people are not so mathematically minded as to immediately translate the formula into figures. They grasp that it is a metaphor.)

But Are the Russians Ten Feet Tall? is a bad title. It is cheap slang, and inappropriately humorous. This expression is usually used in such a form as: “What do you think you are, ten feet tall?” and is meant to deflate somebody’s pretentiousness. But this is a small issue pertaining to human vanity, and thus is not appropriate for so horrible and tragic a subject as Western aid to Soviet Russia, which is certainly not a light or funny subject. (There is a touch of humor in the first title, but it is profoundly sarcastic.)

Now what if the author had titled the book Western Aid to Soviet Economic Development? That names the subject, but it does not indicate the theme. Based on the title, the book could be anti-communist, neutral, or even pro-communist (arguing that Western countries do not give enough aid to Russia). In fact, the title strongly suggests a boring, statistical account, with no evaluation one way or the other. While a title cannot ultimately damage a book’s sales, a neutral title of this kind would be inadvisable.

As practical advice, when you are stuck, try out a title on some intelligent friends who do not know your subject. Ask them what kind of interpretation your title suggests, particularly if it is intriguing and must be interpreted. This might bring out connotations which have never occurred to you. You might find that although they do not understand your title, the interpretations they give you are interesting and not the opposite of your intention. That could be a reason for keeping it.

In conclusion, short of avoiding deliberate obscurity, there really are no rules for selecting a title. There can be as many titles as first names. If you asked me to invent an original name for a baby, I could come up with many combinations of sounds, some attractive, and some awkward and ugly. But there are no rules about how to invent a name, except to make it pronounceable (unlike some Oriental and Balkan names that contain only consonants). A similar standard applies to titles. Make your title grammatical and appropriate to your subject, but not confusing. For the rest, there are no general rules.

12

Acquiring Ideas for Writing

There remains one point to discuss: how to condition yourself to get good ideas for writing in the middle range. It should be clear why I waited until the end to discuss this topic. Implied in much of what I have said so far are the main premises required to get ideas for articles and books.

Let me begin with what to avoid.

There is one great enemy of mental activity: repression. Repression, and any premise of unearned self-doubt, blocks many minds. Self-doubt may be appropriate in your psychological thinking or in your sessions with a psychologist, but not in action, particularly not when you are trying to stimulate your mind for writing. In regard to getting ideas, you must do what I recommended [in chapter 6] for actual writing, namely, trust your subconscious. Let your mind be free to wander around a subject and to judge it. Do not set artificial constraints—such as telling yourself that this morning you will produce ideas for ten articles. Instead, assume that you are able and willing to judge reality—to judge events, people, trends, and news stories—and that although you may have difficulties later in writing a given article, at the beginning you are problem-free. If you do not censor your mind with regard to getting ideas, you can acquire a fertile, creative imagination.

Not every idea you get will be right. Some might even be preposterous. But that is what your critical judgment is for. Just as you can edit your writing, so you can later decide that an idea for an article is not interesting, or too narrow, or too broad, etc. But do not then become self-critical and conclude that your subconscious is bad and does not give you good ideas. Permit yourself to range freely over what you observe and to form ideas. You will discard some of them, but you will find others worth pursuing.

On the positive side, the main point is that to write an interesting article, you must have a theme—i.e., you must have something to say. But there is no way to find something interesting to say unless it comes from a wider premise, wider than the subject you want to discuss. The principle is that you must have some premise of more abstract interest than the particular news item or event you are writing about. And that kind of premise comes from your philosophical convictions.

Since every adult has some philosophy—some conscious convictions on its issues—the question is how to use your philosophy to get ideas for writing. (Of course, if your philosophy is Objectivism, it will help you much more, since it is consistent and can be applied to any aspect of the culture.) You must have an active interest in some aspect of philosophy (not philosophy in the academic sense, but philosophy as it applies to life). Merely to say “I would like to write an article from the Objectivist viewpoint” is to say nothing. It does not yet contain any specific lead or incentive to get you started on writing.

You get ideas according to the standing orders you have established in your mind. For instance, since I am interested in the application of Objectivism to life, and since every aspect of philosophy—from esthetics to epistemology and metaphysics—interests me, almost anything I hear or read is of great interest to me. I do not want merely to discover the right ethics and stop there. If I did, I would not get many ideas for writing. The application of my philosophy to life is a constant standing order to myself, which leads me to observe how various ideas, good and bad, work on the culture. Thus, almost anything I read is material for my writing.

You need to be an intellectual detective. You must look at a certain statement you encounter and work forward and backward: ask yourself what are the implications of that statement and, more important, what are the premises behind it? I love doing that, and I would love to train you to do it. It would save me from feeling, every time I read something terrible, that I should write an article exposing it—which I cannot do, because there are just too many such occasions.

You need not be a professional philosopher. If you want to get good ideas for articles on topics that interest you, and at the same time enlarge your perspective on your own profession, be on the lookout for ideas that pertain to your profession. If you want to be, not a narrow professional, but one with a wider philosophical foundation, consider the interests of your own profession from a broader viewpoint. Your best lead will be any issue that pleases or displeases you.

For instance, take the physical sciences. How can a scientist tie his profession to philosophy? If he wants to write about abortion, for example, he may start from a scientific or medical viewpoint (e.g., by focusing on a test for abnormalities in fetuses) and then branch out into the wider, philosophical issues. With the advance of the physical sciences and the retrogression of the humanities, we are in a dreadful state. A scientist will feel nothing but disgust for the philosophical ideas of his colleagues and the general state of the culture. He should ask himself what makes him disgusted and indignant and why. If he observes a trend he thinks threatens his profession, he should ask himself why he thinks so, and what are its consequences. He would thereby get several ideas for articles every time he reads a newspaper.

This is even truer in the humanities. A rational person in the humanities need not go outside his own profession to feel frustrated indignation. This is a gold mine for articles if, instead of merely suffering or repressing what you feel, you identify your reaction conceptually. If you are disgusted with your profession, do not simply note that it is in a terrible state. Ask: “What is irrational about my colleagues? What about their ideas makes me indignant?” You will find more to write about (unfortunately) than you will ever be able to use. (“Unfortunately,” because the culture is so rich in negatives.) I am not advocating a “John Birch Society” approach, where you start by defining what you are against. But if you want to write in the middle range, you will unfortunately find it easier to start with negative articles. Since such is the state of the culture, that is what a person must do if he wants to lead a philosophical life and apply his philosophy to what he sees around him.

Of course, if you find something good in the culture, and above all in your profession, that should be acknowledged. That will make for a much better theme, because there are so few occasions for it today. Whether it is someone’s new idea or a resolution passed or a policy adopted, if you approve of it, then instead of merely sensing that it is on the right track, identify why you find it good and what implications it has for your profession and for society. Right there, you will get more ideas for articles than you can handle at any one time (not because there are so many good occasions, but because there is so much that can be identified on such issues).

I am not saying everyone must use his profession as a springboard. But if you want to write and do not know where to begin, the most fertile field is your profession. That is your central concern, and any issue corollary to it will interest you much more than if you arbitrarily decide to write about, say, deep-sea diving, which does not interest you. But obviously you have more than professional interests, so if some other issue attracts you—because it is important, and you can demonstrate why—thattoo is a good source of ideas.

Incidentally, the desire for an ever-deeper understanding of your profession is a standing order you must carry throughout life anyway. At no point should you say, “I understand my profession, I am successful, so I no longer have to think about it.” That attitude would be your downfall. We cannot stand still in life. We either move forward or we deteriorate. Therefore, always seek to enlarge your understanding. If you want to be creative in your profession, and not merely a hack—if you want to be young regardless of your age, so that you will be a real “personality,” and not merely a mildly competent practitioner—then you need the same premise that is necessary to get ideas for writing.

Never think you know enough. I do not mean that you must doubt the knowledge you have, but that you need to enlarge it. Nobody is in the position today—and I do not know in what society one would be—of being completely satisfied with everything he can do in his profession, and with the performance of everybody around him. And that does not even take into account one’s personal life. There are always personal matters that need attention, correction, and progress; and even if everything is ideal in your life, the more you know, the more avenues are open to you to go on to more complex, abstract knowledge. I am not advising an eternal treadmill, where you are never allowed to tell yourself that you know enough. Rather, you should be on the premise that you do know enough and that what you know is valid, but that you want to go further. Not only will this active standing order enlarge your professional abilities and interests, it will also give you all the ideas for writing that you can possibly use.

As an example, take the profession of teaching. If you are a competent teacher, you can tell how successfully your students learn. Some learn well, some are bright but slow, and some seem hopeless. Where would that knowledge lead you? If you want to be a good teacher, you would ask yourself: What do I know about young people’s methods of learning? How do I explain the fact that some are fast and others are not? What incentive do the good students have? Have I provided such incentives, or do they bring it to class themselves? Why are the others so bad? Can I stimulate them? Up to what point is it my responsibility? At what point is it theirs? Also, I see in my colleagues’ classes that some teachers are good and others are not. Why do I think so? What mistakes do the bad teachers make? What good premises do the others have?

You could not fully answer all of these questions in a lifetime, yet they are all important. Like all teachers, you know that you do answer these questions, though not explicitly. You make certain observations and decisions, and after a while you discover, for instance, that you can tell by his first words what a student will do or say. But if you were asked how you learned it, you would not know. You would say you can simply tell, which means you have acquired many valuable automatized premises, but never paused on the wider meaning of what you were discovering and applying. That is, you are conscious of the fact that you are improving, but not self-conscious—i.e., you do not monitor yourself.

Make yourself self-conscious in regard to your own progress. You will be surprised how much you will discover and how much you will stimulate your mind. For example, if you do not properly monitor some observations you make about certain students, you may decide, “When I see students yawning, I must be boring them, so I should cut this subject short.” That does not lead you far, though perhaps next time you will know, by “instinct,” how to present the subject more clearly or in a more interesting way. Unfortunately, for most people this is the extent of their development.

The better approach would be to identify the problem and then ask the wider questions: “If I made a mistake and went on too long, why? I thought my class was slow, you might answer, and I did not know what was enough for them, so I overexplained. How can I devise a method of better judging their level of intelligence? Also, I notice that sometimes they are interested and sometimes they are not. Are they on the right premise? What is their motivation? Can I discover, from what interests them, something about the basic philosophy of the majority of my students?”

Every one of these questions requires thinking, though probably not very difficult thinking, because as a teacher you have more observations than you have consciously identified. If you constantly ask yourself wider questions—if instead of asking, “How do I get through my next lesson?” you ask, “What is the principle by which I intend to get through my next lesson?”—you are putting yourself on a philosophical premise; you are deriving wider principles from concrete events. In this way, you will get ideas from every minor incident in class. Some dunce asking stupid questions might be the cause of an important pedagogical discovery. You might discover the wider principle of why he functions as he does: perhaps he was showing off or is a neurotic or is simply stupid and does not belong in your class. Whatever it is, you are learning something from the least inspiring incident. Similarly, if something good happens in class, do not think: “For once I got a marvelous student, but too bad it is only for this semester.” Instead try to identify why you like the student’s intellectual performance, whether there is some way to communicate it to other students, etc. Not only will you function better, but each question is itself enough for an interesting article.

This is how one applies wider abstractions to one’s own life and, therefore, to middle-range articles and books. This, in essence, is how you should condition your mind to be active and to get ideas automatically. Like everything else in the mind that seems automatic, this process must be started consciously. Once you condition your subconscious properly, it throws you ideas unexpectedly. It may feel as if the ideas come to you spontaneously, but to mention once again that good line from How to Think Creatively: accidents happen only to those who deserve them. So give yourself this standing order: “I am interested in certain subjects, and I am on the lookout for any relevant event, trend, statement, or theory—which I then want to understand and evaluate.” Do this, and you will condition your mind in a truly productive way.

Let me conclude this course by telling you about an incident which made a big impression on me. It is particularly relevant to the difference between an active psycho-epistemology and a conforming one. It pertains to the whole issue of how one learns something new.

When I began my first job as a screenwriter, I had some idea of how to write a script. But I did not know the technical terminology. When I arrived at Warner Brothers to work on the movie of The Fountainhead, I asked for a sample script, and was given one. I was also given a secretary to provide me with any help I needed. I never had to ask her a question. I simply looked at the sample and figured out what was meant by “close-up,” “dissolve,” “fade-out,” etc. For example, I observed that “fade-out” referred to the end of a sequence.

Now, fade-out to a few years later. I am working for Hal Wallis at Paramount.

Wallis had bought an original story, which was intelligent and had good dialogue. But, he told me, he was disappointed in the screenwriter (who had also written the story) because although the story was good, the screenplay was a mess. He asked me to take a look at it.

I did, and could not understand the screenplay. It had a close-up where the action did not necessitate one; there was a long shot when only one person was in the room; and so on. None of the technical directions matched the action of the story. I asked the screenwriter how he decided where to use a particular direction. He said he had asked for a sample script to see how it was done—and then he followed it exactly. If the sample opened with a close-up, he opened with a close-up. If two pages later there was a long shot, he marked a long shot two pages later, etc. Ultimately, I had to make a great many changes and rewrite some sequences, and so I received part credit.

This incident impressed me, because on my first job, I too had asked for a sample script. But I looked for the abstract format and knew that I had to fit that abstraction to my own story. He took the format of his sample literally. He was a conformist. He never asked himself why there were certain technical indications at specific points. He never observed that the close-ups, long-shots, and dissolves followed a certain pattern. He was a ritualist, and followed the sample dogmatically, on blind faith.

I do not think this person ever wrote anything else, although he had made a promising start.

Do not think that this writer was the first person to make this mistake. It was the same one that the Classicists made in literature. They thought that the way to make a good play was to look at Greek tragedies, for example, then reduce them to a set of rules: a good play had to have so many acts, so many characters, etc. The essential error here is concrete-bound conformity, based on the premise that someone else understands why a script or play is written a certain way, and therefore the writer does not have to understand. It is the reliance on other people that is responsible for this error.

The psycho-epistemological point to remember is that you must think on your own. In some situations, you may find no particular guidance, philosophical or otherwise, and yet you need to learn something new. To be innovative when you are up against a new problem, you have to approach it abstractly. That is why I stress principles. Never assume that any leads you have from others must be followed to the letter. Never assume that the concretes are absolutes for your instruction. Concretes are merely concretes.

Of course, as I said [in chapter 4], all reality is concrete. There are no such things as abstractions. But abstraction is the human method of classifying, integrating, and identifying concretes. Therefore, whenever you start on a problem, ask yourself whether you are being concrete-bound. Take a step back intellectually. Take a look at what abstraction is applicable. If you examine a given concrete—whether a script, an event, a situation, a news story, or a person—always draw the wider abstraction from the concretes of the case. That is the only way to learn, and the only way to be independent.

My story serves as a good concrete example of a proper abstraction. Use all that you have learned in this course, not as rigid rules, but as abstract principles to be applied by your independent thinking to your particular problems.

Follow my method, not the conformist writer’s—and best premises to you in your future careers as writers.

APPENDIX

Selected Outlines Used by Ayn Rand in Writing Articles

Editor’s Note: During the course, Ayn Rand asked the class to outline several of her articles, with the aim of improving their skill in creating outlines. She then compared the results with the outlines she had used to write the articles. Because of the informal nature of these discussions, I could not include them all in the book. Ayn Rand’s outline for her article “Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?” and her discussion of it are included in chapter 5. But I thought I should include the remaining outlines as an appendix.

“Altruism as Appeasement” (in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought)

Subject: The psychological motives behind the intellectuals’
acceptance of altruism.

Theme: The evil and destructiveness of these motives.

1. Letter from young student about the motives of college liberals. The statement of a distinguished historian. (These set the subject of article.)

2. The psychological pattern of an intelligent boy, from childhood through college, and his subconscious acceptance of altruism in exchange for “permission” to use his mind to be an intellectual.

3. The malevolent universe as the result. Examples: young scientist, elderly businessman. The psychological meaning and source of such views. Corollary symptom: the elite premise.

4. Consequences in politics. The liberal’s sympathy for dictatorships. The conservative’s attempt to appeal to the people through emotions, not reason. The belief of both in the practicality of dictatorships.

5. The enormously evil consequences in ethics. The belief that the more evil a person or party, the more powerful. The attempts to seek the favor of the evil and to blacken the nature of the good.

6. The influence of moral appeasers in the field of modem art.

7. The gradual erosion of a moral appeaser’s sense of values. His ultimate turning into one of the boys and becoming anti-intellectual.

8. The nature and fate of the average man. The proper course for an intellectual to take.

“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business” (in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal)

Subject: Antitrust.

Theme: The moral and political evil of antitrust.

1. Introduction. Convey the moral-psychological mood and meaning of dictatorship. This is the position of businessmen under antitrust laws.

2. The origin of antitrust laws. The present situation, the contradictions and nonobjectivity.

3. Brief examples, showing the trend getting worse.

4. The real meaning: the penalizing of ability.

5. Who profits by antitrust? The incompetent businessman and the power-lusting bureaucrat, whose tool is fear.

6. The General Electric case. Its result: terrorization.

7. Recommendation: Re-examine and eventually abolish antitrust. Businessmen as representatives of freedom.

“Argument from Intimidation” (in The Virtue of Selfishness)

Subject: Identification of a new logical fallacy: the argument
from intimidation.

Theme: The moral evil of that argument.

1. Description and definition of argument from intimidation.

2. Psychological root of argument: reliance on moral self-doubt. Story of the Emperor’s New Clothes as example of the basic pattern.

3. Examples of argument in today’s public and private life.

4. Causes of argument’s success: mysticism and social metaphysics.

5. Examples in college classrooms and in politics.

6. Weapon against argument: moral certainty. Proper and improper use of moral judgment in intellectual issues.

7. Proper attitude: Patrick Henry quote.

“Bootleg Romanticism” (in The Romantic Manifesto; outline refers to the original version of the article in The Objectivist Newsletter [January 1965])

Subject : Humorous detective stories.

Theme: The moral evil of apologetic romanticism.

1. The relationship of art to a culture, generally.

2. The composite picture of man that emerges from today’s art. The psycho-epistemological motives of such art leading to the cult of depravity.

3. A still lower step, morally, is found in cheap thrillers. Description of thrillers as primitive form and remnants of romanticism.

4. The meaning of humor. The two types of moral cowardice.

5. The humorous thrillers are laughing at values and at man the hero. They are apologizing to the gutter school of literature.

6. The popularity of Spillane and Fleming as examples of people’s need of romanticism and of heroes.

7. The gulf between the people and the intellectual elite. Example: The Avengers.

8. Analysis of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

9. The motive and the performance of the producers of the James Bond movies. The immorality of the Maibaum interview.

10. The irrelevance of the naturalistic arguments of the thriller’s enemies.

11. The real psychological meaning of thrillers and their heroes.

Comparison to naturalism. Example: Marty.

12. The moral guilt of producers and public in treating romanticism as bootleg merchandise.

“The ‘Inexpttcabte Personal Alchemy’ ” (in Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution)

Subject: Kamm’s news story about young Russian rebels.

Theme: The psychology of the Russian rebels as contrasted with the young rebels in America.

1. Reasons why the news story impressed me (literarily and personally).

2. The nature of the “personal alchemy.” The conviction that ideas matter. The inability to believe in the power of evil.

3. The young rebels’ nonconformity and probable socialistic “idealism.” (The reason why a dictatorship has to keep destroying the best among its subjects.)

4. The young rebels’ good will as the cause of their arguing with Secret Police. Example: the statements of three of the rebels on trial.

5. The meaning of “abroad” to a young Russian idealist. A symbol of justice.

6. As contrast, what is “abroad” today? The nature and psychology of today’s American young rebels. The young Russians are fighting for the freedom of the mind. The young Americans are rebelling against the tyranny of the mind.

7. The cultural destruction of the American idealists. Both East and West are dedicated culturally and educationally to the destruction of the mind.

8. Practical recommendation: The only way to help Russian rebels is by ostracism of the Soviet government and all of its sympathizers.

“The Psycho-epistemology of Art” (in The Romantic Manifesto)

Subject: Art.

Theme: Definition of the nature, purpose, and source of art.

1. Introduction: The cognitive position of art. Its surrender to mysticism.

2. Art answers a need of man’s consciousness. To understand this, we have to know the nature of concepts, and then the nature of cognitive and normative abstractions.

3. Metaphysical value judgments. The need of metaphysical base—and its difficulty psycho-epistemologically. This is the field of art.

4. Definition of art. The psycho-epistemological function of art. (Illustration: art and religion.)

5. Example of the process: Babbitt.

6. Art and ethics: The need to concretize normative abstractions. Example: Roark.

7. Mention of didactic values and literal transcriptions in art. Romanticism and naturalism.

8. Existential consequences of art. Examples: Greece and the Middle Ages.

9. Introduction of need of further discussion, such as sense of life.

INDEX

abstractions

floating

“America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business” (Rand)

“Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy, The” (Peikoff)

“Apollo’s Great Leap for the Moon” (Wainwright)

“Apollo” (Rand)

argument from intimidation

Aristotle

articles, kinds of

Atlas Shrugged (Rand)

audience

“Basic Principles of Literature” (Rand)

book reviews

book-writing

“Brief Comments [on Apollo 8]”

bromides

causality

final causation

chapters

clarity

classicism

concrete-bound approach

concretization

connotation and denotation

conscious mind See also the subconscious

context

“crow epistemology”

deadlines

“Doesn’t Life Require Compromise” (Rand)

drama

duty

East Minus West Equals Zero

editing

in layers

unwritten sentences

emphasis

English departments

essentials

fatigue

fiction

first draft

For the New Intellectual (Rand)

“For Three MinutesFelt Free” (Kamm)

Fountainhead, The

grammar

guilt

hack writers

How to Think Creatively

humor

“‘Inexplicable Personal Alchemy’ The” (Rand)

inspiration

interruptions

Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (Rand)

introductions

journalism

length of a written work

logical order, logical continuity

metaphors

middle-range writing

mulling

Night of Januaryh (Rand) novelty

O’Connor, Frank

Objectivism

ritualist “Objectivists”

Objectivist, The

objectivity

Ominous Parallels, The (Peikoff)

“On Living Death” (Rand)

outlines

over-staring

page proofs

paragraphs

Peikoff, Leonard

pejorative adjectives

pet sentences

philosophy

Platonism

“Pola Negri” (Rand)

“Politics of Fear and Hope, The” (Reston)

pragmatism

pre-outline stage

premature discussion

proof vs. demonstration

propaganda

psycho-epistemology

“Psycho-epistemology of Art, The” (Rand)

quotations

repression

“Requiem for Man” (Rand)

rhythm

sarcasm

selectivity

self-esteem and self-doubt

selfishness

showing versus telling

sidelines

squirms

circular

pseudo-

standing orders

style

subconscious, the

subject

subjectivism

synonyms

tabula rasa, man’s mind as a

theme

thesaurus

titles

transitions

“unanswerable” article, impossibility of an

We the Living (Rand)

“What Is Romanticism?” (Rand)

“white tennis shoes”

word-choice

1

“‘Psycho-epistemology,’ a term coined by Ayn Rand, pertains not to the content of a man’s ideas, but to his method of awareness, i.e., the method by which his mind habitually deals with its content” (Leonard Peikoff, editor’s footnote in Ayn Rand’s Philosophy: Who Needs It [New York: New American Library, 1982]).

2

Included in Ayn Rand, Incroduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 2nd ed. (New York: New American Library, 1990).

3

The New York Times, October 13, 1968; reprinted alongside Ayn Rand’s “The ‘Inexplicable Personal Alchemy’ ” in Ayn Rand, Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, edited, with additional essays, by Peter Schwartz (New York: Meridian, 1999).

4

Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, edited, with additional essays, by Leonard Peikoff (New York: New American Library, 1989).

5

For example, see Ayn Rand, “Causality Versus Duty,” Philosophy: Who Needs It.

6

Her article was a reaction to Henry Kamm’s 1968 article “For Three Minutes I Felt Free,” which covered some protesters in Soviet Russia. She contrasts young, pro-reason dissidents in Russia with the anti-reason hippies in America.

7

Originally published in installments in The Objectivist (July 1966-February 1967).

8

The Voice of Reason.

9

Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto (New York: New American Library, 1975).

10

In what follows it is important to keep in mind that Ayn Rand was born in Czarist Russia (in 1905) and left Soviet Russia in the twenties.

11

“The Cashing-in: The Student ‘Rebellion,’ ” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1967).

12

“The Cashing-in: The Student ‘Rebellion.’ ”

13

Ayn Rand’s first novel, published by Macmillan in 1936 (rev. ed., Random House, 1959; 60th anniversary ed., Dutton, 1995).

14

“Brief Comments,” The Objectivist, November 1968 (Gaylordsville, CT: Second Renaissance Books, 1990).

15

Capitatism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1967).

16

For a fuller account of Ayn Rand’s theory of concept formation, see her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.

17

For example, see the title essay to Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual. See also the epilogue (“The Duel Between Plato and Aristotle”) to Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Dutton, 1991).

18

The Romantic Manifesto. She writes: “Classicism ... was a [literary] school that had devised a set of arbitrary, concretely detailed rules purporting to represent the final and absolute criteria of esthetic value” (p. 104).

19

Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: New American Library, 1964).

20

This expression, coined by Ayn Rand, is based on an experiment (mentioned in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology; 2nd ed., p. 62) which showed that there was a limit to what a crow could hold in conscious awareness at one time. This limitation applies, mutatis mutandis, to human beings. Ayn Rand writes: “Since consciousness is a specific faculty, it has a specific nature or identity and, therefore, its range is limited: it cannot perceive everything at once; since awareness, on all its levels, requires an active process, it cannot do everything at once. Whether the units with which one deals are percepts or concepts, the range of what man can hold in the focus of his conscious awareness at any given moment, is limited” (p. 63).

21

New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1959.

22

The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America (New York: New American Library, 1982).

23

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

24

See The Ayn Rand Column, edited by Peter Schwartz (Gaylordsville, CT: Second Renaissance Books, 1991; expanded ed., 1998).

25

The Romantic Manifesto.

26

See chapter 3 (“Abstraction from Abstractions”) of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.

27

In her course, Ayn Rand does not recommend any specific primers on grammar. She does, however, recommend a more advanced work, H. W. Fowler’s A Dictianary of Modem English Usage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926; not to be confused with the third edition of Fowler, currently in print, which is quite different).

28

In The Fountainhead, the drama critic Jules Fougler says, “Your typing is atrocious, Ike,” to which Ike replies: “Hell, I’m not a stenographer, I’m a creative artist” (p. 469).

29

The Romantic Manifesto.

30

The definitive edition of this play (first performed in 1934) is Night of January 16th (New York: New American Library, 1985).

31

For an English translation of this pamphlet, see Ayn Rand, Russian Writings on Hollywood, edited by Michael S. Berliner (Marina del Rey, CA: Ayn Rand Institute Press, 1999).

32

See The Virtue of Selfishness, and especially the introduction and the initial essay, “The Objectivist Ethics.”

33

The Romantic Manifesto.

34

Marerial in brackets, except for the first, is Ayn Rand’s.

35

See the introduction to The Virtue of Selfishness.

36

Peter Keating and Howard Roark, both architects, are characters from The Fountainhead, Peter Keating is a dependent, conformist parasite. Howard Roark is the hero—a first-hander, an innovator, and an egoist.

37

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

38

See Ayn Rand, “The Argument from Intimidation,” in The Virtue of Selfishness.

39

Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual (New York: New American Library, 1961 ).

40

William H. Honan, “Le Mot Juste for the Moon,” Esquire, July 1969. The comedienne is Yetta Bronstein (1968 “Jewish Mother” candidate for President). Ayn Rand’s own response was: “What hath man wrought!”

41

See Ayn Rand’s discussion of music in “Art and Cognition,” The Romantic Manifesto.

42

The Voice of Reason.

43

Life, vol. 67, no. 4, July 25, 1969.

44

See the chapters on style in Ayn Rand, The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers, edited by Tore Boeckmann (New York: Plume, 2000), and the relevant discussion in “Basic Principles of Literature,” The Romantic Manifesto.

45

The Romantic Manifesto.

46

For more on these four elements, see The Art of Fiction and “Basic Principles of Literature.”

47

See For the New Intellectual, The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, The Romantic Manifesto, and The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.

48

See, for example, Ayn Rand’s introduction to Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels.

49

Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three, translated by Lowell Bair, introduction by Ayn Rand (New York: Bantam Books, 1962). An abbreviated version of her introduction is reprinted in The Romantic Manifesto.

50

Noël Coward, Three Plays:Private Lives, Blithe Spirit, Hay Fever (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1965).

51

For example, see “Introducing Objectivism,” in The Ayn Rand Column.

52

The draft material on Vesta Dunning has been published in Leonard Peikoff, ed., The Early Ayn Rand: A Selection from Her Unpublished Fiction (New York: New American Library, 1983).

53

The Objectivist, Vol. 8 (August 1969).

54

Werner Keller, East Minus West Equals Zero: Russia’s Debt to the Western World 862-1962 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962), published in Great Britain as Are the Russians Ten Feet Tall? (London: Thames and Hudson, 1961).

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

EDITOR’S PREFACE

Chapter 1 - Preliminary Remarks

Chapter 2 - Choosing a Subject and Theme

Chapter 3 - Judging One’s Audience

Chapter 4 - Applying Philosophy Without Preaching It

Chapter 5 - Creating an Outline

Chapter 6 - Writing the Draft: The Primacy of the Subconscious

Chapter 7 - Editing

Chapter 8 - Style

Chapter 9 - Book Reviews and Introductions

Chapter 10 - Writing a Book

Chapter 11 - Selecting a Title

Chapter 12 - Acquiring Ideas for Writing

APPENDIX - Selected Outlines Used by Ayn Rand in Writing Articles

INDEX